Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (43 page)

"So long as it's just one," Hester said. She ran a gloved hand up one of Charlie's dead interior bulkheads, tracing the rippling patterns of necroluminescence. Her fingers found an indentation, and Cynthia could see her face screw up with disgust through the bubble of the helmet. When she pushed in, her glove vanished to the knuckles. Charlie's flesh made a squelching sound.

 Hester hooked and ripped; mucilaginous strings of meat stretched and rent. She tossed a panel to the deck; it rang like ceramic. Behind, a cavity lined with readouts and conduits lay revealed. Hester, wincing, reached for a small rack of what Cynthia recognized as wireless connectors. She tugged one loose, made a face, and—before Cynthia could decide that she really ought to stop her—slotted it into a jack on her suit.

"Hester—"

"Shush," Hester said. "I spend enough time researching the damned things. A dead one shouldn't bo— oh."

"What?"

"Run."

§

They ran. Suits rustling and rasping, booted feet thudding dully on the decking. Off to the left, something scurried. Cynthia's head snapped around, but Hester put a hand on her arm and pulled.

"Tove," she said.

Normally, you would never see a tove on a boojum, but Charlie's death had strained the fabric of space-time, making inter-dimensional slippage easier, and a dead boojum could not eat its own parasites as was their usual habit. Cynthia thought about the shattered ward-mirror, intended to defend against nastier creatures than toves: doppelkinder, raths, and other predators. It worked because it reflected nothing but the Big Empty—even at dock, those warped enormous mirrors wouldn't reflect on a human scale and thus could not be exploited by doppelkinder, just as they blinded raths. Mirrors were not standard equipment on all ships, but for a hospital ship like Charlie they were an extra line of safety. Charlie broke it dying, she guessed. Fiorenzo had invented the doppelkinder—who didn't hunt boojums and who would never have left Major Ngao's eyes intact—as an alibi.

Then she heard something else, not the scuttling of a tove, but a wetter sound, a bigger sound. She didn't have the strength of will not to glance back, and there, barely illuminated by Charlie's twitchy necroluminescence, she saw human silhouettes, a reaching arm with the remains of an Ambulance Corps uniform, the glare of an eyeball in a half-skinned face.

Hester swung through a hatchway, pulling Cynthia with her, and slammed the emergency plate located behind glass on the other side. A blast door dropped with decapitating force. If the
Charles Dexter Ward
were to be hulled, it was in the interests of crew and ship that pressure doors should guillotine any unfortunate they caught. It was a case of one life for many, and spacers learned not to stand in doorways.

"That won't keep them for long," Hester panted. "But we can stop for a second."

Cynthia tried to slow her breathing, to get more use out of her canned air. "Where in the nine names of Hell did they come from?"

"Charlie opened a door," Hester said.

Cynthia squinted, but that didn't make what Hester was saying make any more sense. "I'm missing some context—"

Hester tapped Charlie's connector, plugged into her opposite forearm jack. "I've got access to his logs, and I think… I think he didn't like Fiorenzo killing his crew, because it's pretty clear from the logs that she was. I think that's why she electrocuted him. But the reanimated crew was killing the living crew, and she doesn't seem to be able to control what she makes. So she lured them into a vacuum bay and sealed the door—"

But vacuum can't kill things that are already dead.

"Charlie let his crew out," Cynthia said.

Hester nodded, the boojum's crawling green and violet necroluminescence rippling across her corneas and the bubble of her suit. "He can open any door I override. And they're probably not very… safe. Anymore."

"No," Cynthia agreed. "Not safe." Her throat hurt. She made herself stop swallowing and worked enough spit into her mouth to say, "We'd better keep moving. We have to find Fiorenzo's device. Before her mistakes find us."

Part Four

"She said she was in the morgue," Cynthia muttered.

"What?" Hester said, distracted by shooting the rotting hand off their lead pursuer.

"Dr. Fiorenzo. She said when it happened, she was in the morgue. And she was the pathologist. If she was going to hide something anywhere, she'd hide it there."

"I imagine you didn't get too many people dropping in for a friendly chat," Hester said. "So where's the morgue from here?"

By the time Cynthia had enough breath to reply—running in a pressure suit was no picnic, and although Fiorenzo's reanimated corpses weren't very fast, they were undistractable and relentless—Hester had found the answer herself. "One up and two over. Okay then."

Cynthia had spent time on a handful of boojums—as passenger, as crew, that last nasty week on the
Richard Trevithick
as a prisoner—and there was no standard system of orientation. Some boojums had no internal signposts at all; unless the captain gave you the schematic, you were dependent on a crew member to guide you around. The
Charles Dexter Ward
was probably the best and most thoughtfully labeled boojum Cynthia had ever seen, and even so it was essentially markers to help you plot your position on a gigantic imaginary three-dimensional graph, onto which Charlie only problematically mapped.

But it was better than nothing.

And it was better than being torn apart by these mindless, malevolent things that Fiorenzo had created out of what had once been men and women. And surely, Cynthia thought, remembering the row of symbols on Major Ngao's uniform, the men and women who deserved it least. She had been appalled by Fiorenzo and afraid of her and a little (admit it, Cynthia) envious, but now she began to be truly angry. Not at the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, but at the wanton destructiveness.

"Up is good," Hester panted beside her. "The ladder'll take them longer."

"I just wish it would stop them," Cynthia said. "Or that anything would." Thus far, though they'd kept ahead of the reanimated, they hadn't managed to lose them—certainly not to stop them.

"Here," Hester said. The ladder was stainless steel dulled with Charlie's slow decomposition; Hester had to override the hatch at the top with Cynthia crammed against her lower legs to avoid the frustrated grabs of the reanimated beneath them.

Hester helped Cynthia through the hatch and they slammed it closed again. Then they took off running—two shambling scientists pursued by more shambling corpses than they could stop to count.

§

The morgue, when they found it, was long and low and cold—and all too obviously the right place. It crawled with the same decayed-looking light as the rest of the Charles Dexter Ward, but here, that light limned empty body bags and open lockers. Cynthia was careful to close and dog the door behind them before they proceeded down the length of the room. Her skin crawled at the idea of locking herself in here, blocking her own route of escape… but what waited outside was worse. They'd managed to leave the reanimated behind, but Cynthia had no confidence that that would last.

They came around a corner to find Doctor Fiorenzo crouched behind an autopsy table, huddling with Professor Wandrei over a gaping hole in the decking. The ragged, ichorous edges framed something that looked like an exposed boojum neural cluster. The former Major Ngao was silently handing Fiorenzo tools. Fiorenzo had a veterinary syringe in her hand, a medieval-looking device with a needle easily four inches long. It was filled with some colorless fluid. Cynthia could make out two more empties on the floor.

Meredith… Cynthia didn't have to get close to see the lines of black stitchery holding the crushed edges of her neck together. Her head lolled to one side, tongue drooping from her slack mouth, and her eyes were half-lidded and beginning to glaze.

Cynthia wondered how Fiorenzo had arranged to have one of the pressure doors catch Meredith, and how long it would be before she got around to Wandrei. And how he could be so blind as not to see that he would be Fiorenzo's next experiment.

Hester raised and aimed her pistol. Wandrei must have glanced up just then, because he made a warning sound.

Fiorenzo rose to her feet and turned. Light shivered along the needle of the syringe as she lowered it to a non-threatening position beside her thigh.

The thing that had been Meredith took a shuffling step closer and Cynthia hid her cringe. For a moment, Cynthia waited, searching for words. Wondering why Hester hadn't pulled the trigger.

"Doctor Feuerwerker—" Wandrei began.

Somehow, Cynthia silenced him with a glance. It must have been scathing; even her eyes felt scorched by it.

Fiorenzo's eyes met Cynthia's. "You're a doctor. A researcher. You should understand!"

"I understand that you're a mass murderer, and you're putting everyone in this sector of space at risk. Your monsters—your victims—aren't far behind us. What are you going to do when Charlie lets them in here?"

"I'm getting close!"

"No, you're not." Cynthia waved a little wildly at Major Ngao. "Maybe you've made him not-dead, but you haven't made him alive. You can't. You can't make Meredith alive and you can't make that poor bastard off the
Calico
alive. You can animate the meat, but that's not the same thing and you know it. This boojum isn't alive. What it is, is wrong."

The
Charles Dexter Ward
shuddered beneath their feet, as if in agreement. Cynthia lurched into Hester, Wandrei and the two dead people went down, and even Fiorenzo had to grab at a safety-bar to keep her feet. Cynthia was reaching for Hester's arm, to lift her sidearm back on target—

Fiorenzo slammed the syringe with which she had been about to inject the
Charles Dexter Ward
through lab coat and trousers and into her own thigh.

Cynthia stared, disbelieving. Fiorenzo straightened, smiling, and was starting to say something when she seized, crashing to the deck as stiff and solid as a bar of iron. Cynthia said over her to Wandrei, "We have to stop this."

"Science, Dr. Feuerwerker," Wandrei began, and Cynthia shouted, "Science schmience!" which startled him into shutting up.

Cynthia was a little startled herself, but she plunged on while she had the initiative, "Fiorenzo's leavings out there aren't science. They're walking nuclear waste. And what she did to Meredith is murder."

"That was an accident," Wandrei said.

Hester made a bitter noise that wasn't a laugh. "Do you really believe that?"

Wandrei didn't answer her. He said, "Dr. Fiorenzo has achieved a remarkable—" and that was when he made the mistake of letting Meredith get too close.

Cynthia and Hester had not stopped to ponder the intentions of their reanimated pursuers, not with Charlie's stuttering necroluminescence all around them and the carnage everywhere they looked. But if they had wondered, any last niggling doubt would have been unequivocally dispelled.

Meredith tore Wandrei to pieces, starting with his mandible.

Hester screamed; so did Wandrei, for a while.
By the Queen of Hearts, is that his endocardium?
Cynthia dragged Hester back, both of them sprayed with Wandrei's blood like stationer graffiti, and said, her voice low and frantic, "We have to find the machine. Now. While the door's still closed and Meredith is… distracted."

Hester's gulp might have been a sob or a hysterical laugh, but she nodded.

They looked around, trying to ignore the gory welter in the center of the room. There wasn't much there beyond dissection tables and refrigeration units. A microscope locked down on a stand, a centrifuge…

"Why would you have so many refrigeration units when the universe's biggest refrigerator is right outside your door?" Cynthia muttered. "One, sure, for samples and emergencies, but…"

They skirted the edges of the room, both keeping an uneasy eye on their roommate, but Meredith seemed to have forgotten about them, which was all to the good. The first refrigerator unit was just that, a nice Tohiro-Nikkonen that now needed very badly to be cleaned out. The second was a jury-rigged something—from the look on Hester's face, she had no more idea than Cynthia did. But next to that, back in the corner where it was awkward to reach, lower and bulkier—"That's it," Hester said. "Has to be."

"Can you figure out how to turn it on?" Cynthia said. She stole a glance at Fiorenzo—still seizing—and Meredith. Still… busy.

"Watch me," Hester said confidently and wiggled into the cramped space. "Or rather, don't watch me. Watch for company." And she passed Cynthia her pistol.

"You got it," Cynthia said, although it wasn't clear that the pistol would be any more use than a wedding bouquet if the reanimated found them and Charlie decided to open the doors.

Pursuant to that thought, she asked, "Can you communicate with him at all? Charlie, I mean?"

"I've tried," Hester said. "I don't know if it's just that I can't or that he doesn't recognize me as crew."

"Rats," Cynthia said. "Because it occurred to me that the best way to get rid of the reanimated would be for Charlie to eat them."

"Oh," said Hester. "Well. That would certainly be tidy. Although I'm not entirely sure that he could. It doesn't look to me as if Fiorenzo's reanimated can actually digest anything."

"Well, there goes that idea," Cynthia said. "But he could still chew on them, couldn't he?"

"If they went to his mouth. But he probably can't just… reabsorb them."

The
Charles Dexter Ward
shuddered again; Hester was knocked against the wall, and Cynthia ended up in a drunken sprawl against the galvanic motor.

"I think," Hester said dryly, "that something isn't quite right."

"Do you think that's what the second dose of serum was for?"

"Probably."

"Do you think without it, he'll die again?" Horrible, to sound so hopeful. Horrible, to be in a situation where that was the optimum outcome.