Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror Read online

  “Two-dimensional representations don’t mean anything to them. Cheshires are the same way.” Hester managed a smile, although it wasn’t a very good one. “That’s why there’s that folk saying about how you can’t fool a cheshire. The most cunning optical illusion ever created won’t even make them twitch.”

  “And doppelkinder are dependent on optical illusions,” Cynthia said, finally catching up to what Hester was trying to say.

  “They don’t eat people’s eyes for the nutritional value.”

  “Right. But if the doppelkinder didn’t kill the Charles Dexter Ward, what did?”

  Hester folded her arms and gave Cynthia a flat obdurate stare. “I think she did.”

  “Fiorenzo?” Cynthia spluttered a little, then caught herself and regrouped. “Not that I don’t believe she would do it in a heartbeat, but why? Why the boojum, I mean? And for the love of little fishy gods, how?”

  Hester’s gaze dropped. “You were supposed to talk me out of it. It’s a crazy idea, and I know it’s because I’m jealous.”

  “Jealous?”

  “If Professor Wandrei had even once shown this kind of interest in my work…” She trailed off, her face twisting.

  “I understand,” Cynthia said and dared to offer Hester’s shoulder a clumsy pat. “But, Hester, I don’t think you’re wrong. I’m pretty sure she killed the crew of that little scavenger ship.” And she told Hester about the uniform.

  “We have to tell Professor Wandrei,” Hester said, taking a step back toward Fiorenzo’s little island of lunatic light.

  This time it was Cynthia who caught hold of Hester’s arm. “Do you really think he doesn’t know?”

  She hated herself a little for the sick expression on Hester’s face, the knowledge that she, Cynthia Feuerwerker, had just opened her mouth and killed something irreplaceable.

  Hester said, barely whispering even though they were still helmet-to-helmet, “What should we do?”

  Cynthia opened her mouth to say, What can we do? and all but physically choked on her own words. Because that was how war crimes happened. That was how you ended up a future-ghost on an Arkhamer ship with the lines of a scowl bitten so deep in your face you never really stopped frowning.

  And Hester was watching her hopefully. Hester, knowing what she’d done, was still willing to believe that Cynthia would do the right thing.

  Cynthia took a deep breath. “If she killed the Charles Dexter Ward, how did she do it? I mean, you and Wandrei said there were only two ways, and she clearly didn’t cut him to pieces, so… ?”

  “She must have rigged some kind of galvanic motor,” Hester said. “If she hooked it up to the UPS—and a hospital ship would have to have one, even a liveship—that would take care of the power requirements…”

  Cynthia got a good look at the wideness of Hester’s eyes before she realized that here in the dark corridor, even with their helmets leaned up together, she shouldn’t have been able to make out the details of her friend’s expression. Hester stepped back slowly, her features revealed more plainly as Cynthia’s shadow no longer fell across her face. Cynthia forced her gaze to the right.

  All along the passageway, bioluminescent runners were crawling with unexpected brilliance. Fiorenzo had reanimated the Charles Dexter Ward.

  “Aw, shitballs,” Hester said.

  Part Three

  Looking away from the light that showed the Charles Dexter Ward was no longer entirely dead was as hard as opening a rusted zipper. But Cynthia did it, and didn’t let herself look back. She pulled Hester a little further down the corridor and said, “Now we really need to know how she killed him. And whether it’ll work a second time.”

  “It should,” Hester said. “Whatever force is animating him, a big enough shock should disrupt it. We just have to find her machine.”

  “I like your use of the word ‘just.’ Something like that—would it be portable or not?” The Charles Dexter Ward’s bioluminescence was continuing to ripple and pulse in an arrhythmic not-quite-pattern that was like nothing Cynthia had ever see a boojum do before. It was already giving her the mother of all headaches, and if it was a reflection of the Charles Dexter Ward’s state of mind, then she couldn’t believe it was a good auspice.

  “One that could kill a boojum? Definitely not.”

  “So wherever she built it, that’s where it is. But how do we find it? It’s a boojum—how do we even look?”

  “Um,” said Hester and tugged Cynthia another few steps away from Fiorenzo’s lab. “The closed stacks have a schematic. Professor Wandrei said not to share it with—”

  “Outsiders,” Cynthia finished wearily, and Hester ducked her head like a reproved child. And of course the Arkhamers had a second, inner archive to which Cynthia had not been given access. It was their secrets that kept them alive and independent. “It’s okay. You don’t have to—”

  “No, at this point it’s only stupid and self-destructive,” Hester said. “Here.”

  Cynthia’s heads-up was filled with a spidery green constellation: the human-scale paths through the Charles Dexter Ward. She had only a moment to appreciate them before her pressure suit ballooned taut and a sudden sharp pressure in her ear canals distracted her. Reflexively, she opened her mouth and closed her eyes—every spacer knew and feared that sensation—but it was just a pressure fluctuation, not a hull breach. She closed her mouth again and blew until her ears popped.

  When she opened her eyes, Hester was looking at her, head swaying in relief. “Good idea, staying suited.”

  Cynthia took a tentative breath and gagged. The reek of putrescence that had poisoned every breath since she stepped through Charlie’s airlock was thick enough to taste now, and she wasted thirty seconds re-checking her perfectly functioning suit seals. “By Dodgson’s blessed camera,” she swore, then belatedly realized she didn’t know how Hester felt about taking sacred names in vain. “I think that took a year off my life.”

  “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 spacetime, making interdimensional 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 some
thing 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 soli
d 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.”