The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [43]
“Got yer lunch, boy,” Uncle Malcolm called to him. “Hungry?”
“No, Uncle Malcolm,” Alan called back automatically. He could hear the panic in his own voice. “Not right now, thanks.”
There was silence from the old man. Then, “Should eat something. Some soup. I’ll leave some in the kitchen.”
Alan said nothing. He was staring at the photograph of the Excelsior, with its huge phlogiston-powered engine in the back. There were two short antennae at either end of the protruding pistons; Alan was now able to recognize them as a kind of stabilizer. They’d create a sub-harmonic that would allow the Excelsior to return to normal space.
Two. He thought. No. Oh, no.
Fifteen: The Dangers of Veneine
Beckett tried to keep his breathing normal as nausea welled up in his stomach, crawling up his throat, choking him, trying to drag itself out and into the air…No. Not again. His body screamed at him. Icy nails had been driven through his elbows and knees and into each vertebra in his lower back. There was a wooshing sound in his ears, a ringing that made it almost impossible to hear.
He coughed a wracking, full-body cough, then rolled over and vomited. His stomach had nothing left to bring up so the waves just wrenched his body into convulsions. His head… something hammered at his head, and he was sure he was bleeding through his eyes.
Pain was blinding while he retched. It cleared for a moment for Beckett to see the brass beneath his palms, hot under cold moonlight, his knees ached…he closed his eyes and tried to scream at himself to stay calm. Crashing waves broke around his ears and he puked up sea water and spiders that crawled away, skittering on five misshapen legs. The cut on his head had opened again, and there were new cuts on his fingers now. Blood rolled down the skin of his face to the end of his nose, and into the crevices between the stones on the floor, dropping away into space, he could see it falling through and thought it might come out the other side of the world.
More pain came in waves and clenched bony fingers into his muscles. He curled up on the floor and tried to take the pressure off of his lower back. Shards of glass in his knees and elbows crunched and slashed his tendons to ribbons and he wanted to scream. He tore at his elbows with his fingers; they’d taken the coat he’d bought off of the coachmen, and Beckett had long since turned his sleeves to rags. A red tumor had grown up inside his elbow, and he saw its long red tendrils snaking down his arm, trying to get to his invisible fingertips.
Teeth bared, he tried to bite it off, but touching it sent sharp needles of pain straight up his arm and through his shoulder; they lanced through his lungs and stabbed at his heart. He choked on bile and tried to vomit again, with a fist clenching in the back of his throat. The fist opened into feathers and he coughed up a black bird whose sharp talons scored the inside of his mouth. The walls of the tower were brass, and he wasn’t alone here, beneath the hot moonlight. Something with wet slimy boneless fingers reached out for him.
Beckett rolled away against the wall of the cell, screaming. The fingers were biting at his eyes now, tiny, toothy, jawless mouths. He grabbed at them and tried to pull the leeches out of his eyelids but they were stuck. Their bodies came off in his hands, but their mouths stayed fixed to the inside of his eyes, chewing and chewing. He screamed, his hands filled with swarms of black leeches.
“Beckett! Word and fuck, Beckett!”
Someone screamed at him, and Beckett was sure it was a voice from the City of Brass whose towers now loomed