The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [31]
Sounds trickled in to Beckett’s dreaming ears. There were hundreds of muttering voices; wet, slurping voices that clacked their teeth most vigorously. And there was another sound, a deep rasping noise, metal being drawn along metal, but from very far away.
Bruise-black shapes were all around him now, faces low to the ground and snuffling. Beckett wondered if he was still dreaming, or if all the dreams before had been dreams, but this one was somehow real. He looked up at the yellow leprous light of the moon, and felt it tugging on his eyes. He heard the sound of a door opening, and wood scraping on wood, and the moon seemed suddenly very near.
“Elijah?”
The yellow light filled his vision and for a brief moment their positions were reversed, and it was Beckett that floated high above the moon, where black basalt cities crept across its face like an infection.
“Elijah!”
The moon was gone, and then he was in the City of Brass, empty again like it always was, an island of red-gold metal in a black sea that was really his own room. It was his own room, but he couldn’t see it right, because the venom had done something to his eyes, had changed them so that they saw cities and leeches.
“Elijah!”
Whose voice is that? I should dream alone, Beckett told himself, and then he was choking on black seawater again, buffeted by titanic, stormy waves.
Blink.
Beckett was in his room, lying on the floor, coughing ferociously. His lungs felt bruised, but it felt good to draw in long, shuddering breaths. There was still enough veneine in his system to keep the pain out of his joints. The back of his right hand twitched, but the cramp seemed to have gone.
Skinner was standing over him. “Elijah, are you all right? What’s happening?”
Beckett groaned and tried to get to his feet. “Fine.” His head spun, and he reached out to grab the bed-post. “Nothing, I mean. I’m fine. Nothing’s happening.”
“You sounded like you were choking.” There was a white bird perched on her shoulder, cocking its head back-and-forth in a weirdly mechanical rhythm. He tried to blink the bird away, but it was a stubborn hallucination.
“I’m not.” Beckett touched his forehead, and his invisible fingertips came away bloody. Shit. He went to the mirror over his washbasin. There was a small purple lump above his right eye, and a shallow cut that had leaked blood all down the side of his face. He ran the tap, and cold, brownish water streamed into the basin. He dabbed at his face with a washcloth. “How did you get in?”
“I Knocked.”
“Are you serious? I didn’t know you could do that.”
Skinner shrugged. “The telerhythmia isn’t much good for moving things, but there’s some force behind it. Enough to rattle the pins in a lock, anyway.”
Beckett tried to clean up his face. The cut wasn’t as bad as it looked—cuts on the scalp rarely wore—and he’d taken worse bumps to the head. “What are you doing here?”
She handed him a small, folded piece of parchment. “Mr. Stitch sent me. He wanted you to read this. What does it say?”
Suspiciously, Beckett took the note and unfolded it. “Beckett,” he read. “You need to get out more. Stitch.”
“Hah.” Skinner said.
“Why ‘hah’?”
“Because those were my thoughts exactly. Come on,” she tapped her cane on the floor. “You’re taking me to the theatre.”
“Have you eaten?” Skinner asked quietly, while they were in the coach.
Beckett shrugged. “Not hungry.”
Skinner nodded but said nothing. For a few moments, they listened to the rhythmic creaking of the carriage’s wheels.
“Skinner…” Beckett said, eventually.
“Yes?”
“I don’t.” He shifted uncomfortably. “I haven’t really got a lot of money…”
“It’s all right.” She produced a second envelope. “Two tickets to The Bone-Collector’s Daughter, a new play in the style of Canthi Pantomime by . . . somebody. I don’t remember who.” She handed the envelope to Beckett. “It probably says so on the tickets.”
The coroner extracted and examined them. Using his keen eye