Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [219]
“Excellent work,” he said. Soon after, he dismissed me, and I went back to the Ministry.
In the days that followed, I developed the most overwhelming urge to again sample the Sheer Beauty. I could easily say my wretched bodily and emotional state was akin to withdrawal from addiction. Profuse sweating, itching of the scalp, and the darkest dreams, things far worse than death scuttling in the shadows of sleep. At times, when I passed the bakery on my way to the Ministry, I mistook the smell of their crumb cake for that of the drug. I was in a bad way and growing weaker, more confused as the days wore on.
One night, after working late, completing a desk so full of paperwork the Sanctity of Grace might have pitied me, I went home and climbed into bed. I was shivering convulsively and the sweat poured down my face. The Beauty had a grip on me and was squeezing me like a sponge. Through my delirium, I heard a knock at the door to my apartment.
“Yes?” I called weakly.
“I’ve come to fetch you at the request of the Master, Drachton Below,” said the voice.
I groaned. “Coming,” I said. I rolled out of the bed and eventually managed to get off my knees. Buttoning my shirt and trousers was a chore, what with shaking hands. Out in the carriage, I met, of all people, Chibbins, and the moment I saw him, I feared this meeting with the Master must have something to do with our investigation of the Summer Palace. It soon became clear to me that Chibbins was suffering withdrawal from the Beauty as well. His hands trembled as did mine, and he belched and farted at a furious clip. “Chibbins is ill,” he said.
The Master sat before us in his office at the top of the city. I’d truly thought we were to be done away with, but Below was ecstatic. We greeted each other, with me showing the appropriate deference to our leader and Chibbins mumbling that Chibbins was going to vomit.
“This purple mess you’ve brought back from the Summer Palace, my dear physiognomists, this Sheer Beauty, is a revelation,” said the Master. “I’ve had my scientists ferret out its constituent ingredients, and quite the pharmacopeia it is too—shrubs and buds, bulbs and petals and roots from the wilderness we call the Beyond. How this woman’s ghost devised this elixir is a mystery, but the results of imbibing it are exquisite.”
“It’s addictive,” I said to him. “Since taking it I crave it more every moment.”
“No longer a problem, Cley,” said Below. “I’ve decided to make it liberally available to everyone in the physiognomical and security services.” Here, he opened a drawer in his desk and took out a hypodermic needle, the phial of which was filled with a violet liquid. “That mixture in the pot you brought back was mild slop compared to what my people have done with it. They’ve boiled it down to its active essentials, synthesized them, and suggested a method of delivery a hundred times more potent than sipping from a mug.”
He rose, walked over to Chibbins, who upon the Master’s approach put his two fingers on Below’s stomach and walked them up toward his chin.
The Master laughed and looked over at me, “If it was anyone else, I’d kill them right now,” he said, nodding to Chibbins. “Instead, in return for his asininity, I give him Beauty.” He lifted the hypodermic needle and plunged the tip into Chibbins’s neck, emptying a third of the phial. Before he removed it, the dim physiognomist had gone quiet. Below then walked toward me. Sharing a needle, I knew, was not healthy, and taking that needle in the neck was not a welcome thought, but I willingly bared my neck in order to feel the exquisite madness flowing through me again.
Chibbins, now mustached and elegant in his way and wit, the Master, and I stood at the window, staring down on the lights of the city. Oh, the things I saw, real and unreal, transpire before my eyes. Chibbins was ingenious in his use of metaphor when confabulating, off the cuff, a prose poem about the physiognomical deficiencies of the populace. The