The Black Lung Captain - Chris Wooding [161]
“He’s down there?” she asked.
Plome, who was holding a tuning fork in his hand for some reason, gaped at her. “But … the glamour … You can see the stairs?”
Jez looked at him oddly. “Of course I can. Can’t you?”
Plome looked bewildered. “Oh, my. It’s time I thralled a new daemon to that doorway. This one’s lost its fizz. You shouldn’t have seen anything but an old cupboard.”
Jez was eager to see Crake. She headed down. There were deep scratches on the walls of the stairway, which looked relatively fresh. “Don’t tread on the third step from the bottom!” Plome called after her. Jez stepped over it obediently. She could feel the faint thrum of energy from the wood. Another daemon, she guessed. She wondered if it was any more effective than the last.
The sanctum was a mess. Electric lights buzzed behind their shades, but half the bulbs had died and not been replaced. Chemical apparatuses lay half disassembled. Muddled equations were scrawled on blackboards, overlapping one another. There was a huge brass vat against one wall with a window in the side. It was full of a murky yellow liquid and attached to various machines. A large, riveted metal device like a bathysphere stood in the center of the room. Books lay facedown and open where they’d been thrown.
Crake was sitting at a desk, his back to her. He was scribbling in a notebook, with occasional pauses to consult an enormous hidebound tome. His blond beard and hair had grown out; he looked shaggy and untidy. Bess sat near the desk, dormant. She was wired up to a complex tangle of equipment.
Jez suddenly understood the scratches on the narrow stairway. They must have had quite a time getting her down here.
“Crake,” she said.
He jumped at the sound of her voice, and his pen nib snapped. He stared at the notebook for a moment, then swept it off the desk.
“I can’t make it work, Jez,” he said. He got to his feet and began pacing back and forth, his hand on his forehead. Red-rimmed eyes searched the middle distance restlessly. “I can’t make it work.”
“You can’t make what work?”
“This!” he snapped, gesturing toward Bess. “It’s impossible!”
Jez was shocked by the state of him. He was like a madman, full of frantic energy, waving his arms around, bubbling on the edge of mania. He stank of sweat.
“What were you trying to do?”
“I was trying to get her back! There were rumors, you see. Always rumors among daemonists. They said there was a way to bring someone back from the dead. If you just collected the right raw materials, you could put them in a tank, you could infuse it with the essence, the … the … frequency of your loved ones, which you’d recorded when they were alive. And the body would grow itself! Bones would form and muscles knit and there they’d be, floating in the tank, the way they always were!”
As he spoke, his face was full of mad hope, like a crazed prophet, but then his expression twisted and turned to rage.
“Lies! All lies! There are no records! I’ve searched everywhere, I’ve asked everybody, and no one’s ever done any such thing! I don’t even know where to start, do you understand? It’s so far beyond me I can’t even begin!”
Jez was appalled. That had been his plan? She’d suspected that he’d left the crew to deal with the question of Bess, but this sounded like a far-fetched method of doing so, even to her. She began to worry that he’d taken leave of his reason altogether.
“You were trying to bring her back from the dead?”
“The dead!” he cried, pointing at her. “That was my next thought! After all, you walk around without a pulse. Why not my Bess? But what was I to do? Her body’s gone, Jez! Dust and worms! Am I supposed to murder someone else to provide her with a form? No, I couldn’t. So I tried to find corpses, but when I saw them, couldn’t … I …”
“Wait, you did what?”
“Don’t you dare judge me!” he shouted. “Don’t you dare! I’d do anything to get her back. But not that way. Not some stitched-up post-autopsy puppet of cold meat. I’d be exchanging one abomination for another. That wouldn’t be my Bess. So I looked for another method, but there