Mr. Stitch Read online

  Mr. Stitch

  Chris Braak

  Chris Braak

  Mr. Stitch

  One

  I cannot but think that the highest act of the created is to become the creator himself. Is not grasping Reason a gift bequeathed to us by solemn Divinity? There are atheists among the scientific minds, this is true. These men consider that all moral law is as nothing before the application of Science. They consider that there should be no field beyond the bounds of man’s intellect, and so engage in an even-handed fashion all of those pursuits deemed heretical by the Church.

  I believe this to be an erroneous conclusion in the first part, and that in the second part it leads to discoveries that are haphazard and ultimately foolishness. The truth is this: it is not simply the case that there is no scientific heresy, but rather that those elements of study which seem by most to be heretical are the ones demanded most by the Divine.

  Science must not be merely faithless, but truly blasphemous, for only in this way can we show that the act of Reason is the truest expression faith.

  — from the journal of Harcourt Wolfram, 1785

  The undercroft of Vie Abbey is considered by most to be no fit place for any sensible person to spend their time. It is a monstrously large labyrinth of catacombs, built on top of a monstrously large system of caves-tunnels hollowed out by the prehistoric antecedents of the River Stark, which spent the early years of prehistory honeycombing the bedrock that is the foundation of the city of Trowth. Certain maps of the catacombs are available, though unreliable; the assorted Abbots of the Church Royal-many of whom had peculiar and salacious appetite-had historically found good reasons to keep certain quarters of the undercroft secret, and likewise to reveal certain portions in order to discredit their predecessors.

  No trustworthy maps of the caves are available, nor is there any information about how many they are, where they lead to, or how deep they go. This made the entire complex a haven for superstitious heretics, who preferred the religiously-charged environment of the undercroft to the more secular mysteries of the Arcadium. Something about practicing heresy right at the heart of the Church Royal was appealing to certain oneiricists and chimeratics.

  And the ectoplasmatists. Elijah Beckett, detective-inspector of the Royal Coroners, found that, in his old age, he detested the ectoplasmatists more than any of the other heretical scientists. At least, he found himself thinking, as he waded through some kind of ankle-high sludge, deep in the undercroft, at least necrologists have laboratories where they need to keep things dry. What is this, anyway? It was an idle thought, and one that he quickly crushed. Survival in the Coroners meant developing a resistance to the disgusting, and after many long years, Beckett found that the most formidable resistance was, “don’t think about it.”

  Beckett shuffled along, carrying a small heat-lamp; it sizzled and sparked and cast flickering shadows with its red light. He didn’t like the noise it made, but there was nothing for it-Second Winter had brought its omnipotent chill all the way through the city and into the undercroft; without a heat source, he’d be dead and frozen in a heartbeat. Frost rimed the stone walls, even where the weight of the earth should have kept the temperature constant.

  His knocker clattered something unintelligible on a nearby wall, and made him pause. He couldn’t understand the code-in fact, he hadn’t been able to interpret the telerhythmia of any of the knockers they’d saddled him with since he lost Skinner-but he was made anxious by the fact that James was trying to communicate with him. Was he warning him? Beckett tried to pry meaning out of the rapid double-rap on the sooty stone wall by his side, but it was useless. Something was down here with him, he knew that much, but whether it was ahead or behind, near or far, the knocker couldn’t tell him.

  Useless, Beckett grumbled. He slipped his revolver back into its holster, and pulled out a flask of veneine-laced brandy. He was finding that he needed more and more veneine to keep the pain at bay but, paradoxically, the hallucinations it caused were coming more easily. He sipped at it, the sharp edge of the veneine satisfying the feeling in the back of his mouth that was both a sense that he was bleeding deep in his throat, and a craving for the drug. He swallowed, and steeled himself against the wave of strangeness that washed over him; the world flickered and distorted, as though he were seeing it briefly through a curved mirror. There was a sense of shallowness then, that the faintly illuminated stones in the undercroft were just painted on top of something deeper, vaster, that the whole world was a tiny, visible island set atop an enormous, incomprehensible abysm…

  The feeling passed, and something flickered in the periphery of his right eye. Since the fades had taken his left, he’d found that his good eye had become unusually sensitive to sudden movement.

  “Shit,” Beckett said, dropping the brandy and clutching at his revolver. The lamp, don’t drop the lamp, he whirled and drew his weapon. Something had come up behind him, a hunched shape; it carried its own lamp like a glowing red eye, but was black with shadow behind the light-its edges shimmered and shifted, as though they couldn’t be bothered to hold to the shape that nature had given them, and Beckett thought suddenly of a face, twisted into a hideous rictus, lolling on a broken neck…

  Beckett fired at once, and the sound of the Feathersmith revolver and its echoes stuttered along stone walls like a rolling thunderclap. The first shot missed, drawing sparks and stone chips from a low arch. The shape was moving, ducking down, its red eye glaring. Beckett drew a bead on it as the sound of the gunshot died down, and the thing’s voice resolved in the darkness.

  “Beckett! Beckett, stop, it’s me!”

  “Valentine?” Beckett put up his gone. “What the hell are you doing down here?” He could see the young man now, as he stepped into the light from Beckett’s own lamp. Valentine Vie-Gorgon was tall, with a lean frame entirely disguised by the huge, heavy winter coat that he wore. Heat washed over them both, as they stood within the range of each other’s lamps.

  “James didn’t tell you I was coming down?”

  “He did. I just…” Beckett looked around for his flask of brandy, now probably lost forever in the sludge at his feet. “I must have mis-heard his signal. I thought…I thought he was talking about another-”

  “DOWN!” Valentine shouted, suddenly shoving Beckett out of the way. He had a silver-plated revolver in his hands and was firing into the dark, the explosions from the revolver deafening them both, the muzzle-flash blinding.

  Beckett held up his hands to shield his eyes as he crashed into the stone wall; it would hurt later, he knew, but for now the veneine helped him feel nothing. Lit up by the brief flashes from Valentine’s gun, he saw a man duck away down a side passage.

  “Stop,” Beckett said. “Stop!” He grabbed Valentine’s arm. “Enough, he’s gone down the side.” The knocker’s code was rattling furiously against the walls, but it was all gibberish to Beckett’s ears. “Come on!”

  Beckett ran, but was outpaced by his partner, whose longer legs and limitless enthusiasm propelled him in a reckless sprint down the tunnel and around the corner, only to suddenly duck and spin away from the aperture as gunshots rebounded off the walls. Valentine dove to the side and pressed his back against the wall just as Beckett, crouched low with the gun held at his hip, fired into the darkness, even before the figure resolved itself.

  Not the figure, he saw, but figures. There were two men in the dark, Beckett saw in the split second before he shot, one that tried to take off farther down the tunnel, and a second that was running towards him. Without thinking, Beckett fired on the nearer shape, only to feel a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach as his bullets splashed harmlessly through it. Wrong one, he realized too late, even as Valentine reappeared, gun blazing, taking potshots at the retr
eating shape.

  Beckett lashed out with his lantern just as his target came in range; red light spilled over the form, revealing it to be made of thick, silvery-gray smoke. The sparking emitters from the lamp touched it, and it became immediately a gout of fire, hot and orange in the dark, before vanishing utterly. The dark tunnels of the undercroft were obscured by red and purple afterimages; Beckett couldn’t see Valentine tearing off through the sludge after the ectoplasmatist, though he had no doubt that it’s what the young coroner was up to. Instead, he stood with his arm in front of his eyes, waiting for his vision to clear.

  Another gunshot, painfully loud after the brief moment of quiet. Beckett looked up, squinting in the dark for the red glimmer of Valentine’s lamp.

  “Got this one,” the young coroner said, as he returned from around another corner.

  “This one?” Beckett asked him.

  “Yeah; didn’t James say? He heard a second one, that’s why he sent me down.”

  “A second…” Beckett blinked again, then looked down at the sludge at his feet. He lowered the lantern slightly, casting its lurid light across the floor of the tunnel…

  …which was covered in thick, silvery-gray smoke in the shape of hands and eyes and faces, that churned and roiled and reached out for him, hands gripping at his wrists, trying to hold lantern and gun at bay, faces crawling thickly up his body, struggling to get into his mouth, clutching at his throat, trying to crush the life out of him…so much, how can there be this much? Beckett thought, as panic struggled inside him. There was a river of that weird emanation, we’ve been wading through it! Ectoplasmaticists made the stuff from their own substance, how could there be this much of it inside a person?

  Valentine cried out, firing his gun in the dark, stumbling, dropping his lamp…

  Oh. Beckett thought, as he saw the sparking red emitters drop to the ground. No.

  The undercroft became an inferno as the ectoplasm that had filled it ignited in a flash of light and heat. Fire washed over the two coroners, stinging at their eyes, singeing hair and clothes, sucking the air from their lungs.

  The fire was gone in a less than a second. Beckett took a deep breath, and looked up at Valentine, who was gingerly touching his face and attempting to ascertain whether he’d just burnt off his eyebrows.

  “All right?”

  “I think so,” Valentine said. “I think it was too fast to cause-”

  A ragged shape leapt on him, emerging from the weird cascade of shadows that the heat lamps had made. Valentine grunted and staggered, the black form clinging to him.

  “Damn it,” Beckett muttered. “Valentine, stand still!”

  Valentine continued to stagger, but managed to take a few drunken steps towards the old coroner, who drew his arm back and struck the ectoplasmatist across the side of the head. The man went limp and slithered to the floor.

  “Oh, ugh, have I got any on me?” Valentine asked, checking his coat.

  Beckett squatted down next to the unconscious ectoplasmatist. “This one was real.” The man was lying face down on the filthy, damp floor of the tunnel, which was now mercifully clear. Beckett rolled the man onto his back and would have gasped, had not thirty years of horrible sights thoroughly inured him to the deformations of human misery. The man was gaunt and starved, with sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, skin as thin as paper and so pale it was nearly transparent. It had a peculiar, waxy quality to it, as though he was really just a skull onto which an oily picture of a face had been hastily painted.

  Ectoplasmatists drew on their own substance to create the sticky white gunk called ectoplasm, but Beckett had never seen anything like this-never a heretic able to create a full body, never one that could fill the floor of the tunnel with the stuff. No wonder the man looked starved; he must have torn out and rarefied all his own flesh to create so much.

  The man opened his eyes, suddenly, and they rolled in their sockets as though there wasn’t enough muscle left to hold them in place. “The asphyx,” he whispered, “will sustain…” his eyes widened in horror then, and his mouth opened and stretched. He began to make a gagging sound, then all at once vomited a thick fountain of white hands and arms and staring eyes, that boiled from his mouth and grappled with the coroners. The man on the ground went rigid and arched his back, as though the ectoplasm had a life of its own, as though it were wrenching itself free of his body, a spirit made manifest and disdainful of the rotting meat that housed it.

  Sticky thick gluey ectoplasm surrounded them, but before it could find purchase, Beckett drew his gun and shot the ectoplasmatist in the head. The ectoplasm continued to slither around his body, trying to crush his lungs, struggling to get control of his arms; fear slivered past Becektt’s veneine haze, as he saw Valentine almost suffocating beneath the cloud of vomited-up emanations. Beckett managed to shoot again, and again, shattering the dead man’s skull, but the weird fluid remained, heavy and congealing on his arms, keeping the red-hot lantern emitters at a distance, closing around his face, struggling to get past his scarf and into his nose and mouth.

  Then, at once, the plasm evaporated, leaving behind no trace except for a persistent greasy feeling that Beckett knew would persist for several days. The old coroner permitted himself a small sigh of relief.

  “Gah,” Valentine said, as he sagged back against the wall. “That…does it usually do that?”

  Beckett looked down at the dead ectoplasmatist. The man’s head was fully destroyed, but little blood or brain matter had splashed from it. There seemed to be little of anything left in the man’s body. “I’ve never seen it last so long after the man died,” Beckett told his companion. “Usually…usually it just disappears.”

  “So…what’s different?”

  The coroner began rifling through the man’s pockets. He found himself weirdly squeamish about coming into contact with the withered body, but ignored the feeling; the veneine had been shaking loose all sorts of new sensations, lately. There was something dry and ragged in the ectoplasmatist’s inside coat pocket; Beckett got a hold of it and drew out a weathered, folded-up quarto.

  “What’s that?” Valentine asked him. He leaned in close to look at it. “Huhm. ‘On the Life Suspire.’ That…what is that?”

  “The ‘life suspire’ is what ectoplasmatists call their goop.” Beckett settled down against the far wall of the tunnel. It was cold, and so he held his lantern close, bathing in the dry heat. “They think that, beneath the Word that made the world, there’s a…I guess a whisper. A secret meaning that only some people can understand. They think it lives inside them, and they can draw it out and use it.”

  Valentine looked around the tunnel. There was no sign of silvery ectoplasm, but that strange feeling of greasiness remained. “That’s heresy. I mean, real heresy.”

  “It’s all real heresy,” Beckett told him, but he understood what the young man meant. Ectoplasmatists were unique among heretical scientists in that they fully embraced the idea that what they were doing was heresy. Necrologists, geometers, even the oneiricists usually acted like the Church Royal had banned their sciences in some fit of drunken power. There was nothing in the heirologue or the grammars that prohibited necrology, really; it was just the Church trying to keep control of people.

  But the ectoplasmatists-they really thought they were tapped into a secret, true religion that the Abbots were trying to hide. That was why ectoplasmatists loved the undercroft so much. They found some perverse satisfaction in practicing their obscenities right beneath the seat of religion in Trowth.

  James was clattering with his telerhythmia on the walls, still garbled nonsense. “It’s all right,” Beckett said loudly, knowing that the knocker’s clairaudience would spirit the words out of the croft to where the man was waiting. “They’re dead. Send down the kirliotypists first, this time. Are you listening?” The rattling stopped. “Send them down first. I want pictures of every inch of this place before anyone touches anything. Then send the trolljrmen down. Have them take th
e bodies to Ghad’s hospital and put them on ice. I don’t want Ennering-Crabtree cutting into them unless I’m there. Understand?” In his bid to end what amounted to three decades of frustration in the Royal Coroners, Beckett had begun ferociously demanding information and documentation. He’d ordered maps commissioned, demanded that local gendarmeries report every murder, theft, and rape that happened in their purviews, insisted that every crime be document, kirliotyped, and filed in the office in Raithower House, whether they were heretical science or not. Since the destruction of Hightower Square, the old coroner had found this information flowing freely. It inundated his office, and threatened to drown the young corporal who’d replaced Beckett’s secretary.

  There was a complex triple-rap against the wall, which Beckett took to mean “Yes.”

  “You,” he said to Valentine. “Come with me.”

  Outside of the undercroft Vie Abbey brooded, dark and substantial, a compact fortress atop a hill, a contrast to the sprawling tangle of buildings, arches, and towers that comprised the Royal Palace at the other end of the city. Trowth spread out between these two illustrious edifices, along the iron-black ribbon of the River Stark. Dry, icy air whipped about Beckett and Valentine, as they made their way past the ten kirliotypists that Beckett had hired, past the two great trolljrmen-largely protected from the cold by their bulk, but their feathered crests still held in close-past James Ennering, the new knocker, as he sat in the coroner’s coach and tried to coordinate everything.

  Beckett took Valentine to a nearby djang-house. It was crowded; during Second Winter, the people of Trowth more easily overcame their natural standoffishness, as the desperate need for any sort of heat or warmth drove them to huddle close, to pack into pubs and shops, even to stand a little nearer each other on the street. Second Winter was an enemy that every man shared in common, and led them to great lengths that they should keep it at bay.