The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [58]
“I don’t understand that, Skinner. There’s a kind of scraping sound, by the window.” No. “You don’t hear it?” No.
Gently, Skinner pushed her hearing towards the copper shutters. The storm set up a kind of turbulence that kept pushing her thoughts around, robbing her of focus and clarity. She bit her lip and concentrated.
There. A faint green sound, that glistened in her mind. Now that she’d found it, she didn’t seem to be able to tune it out. It slithered around all the other sounds in the room, moving beneath and behind them, echoing weirdly on the walls.
“Skinner, I need…shit. Shit, the window, the lock’s opening.” She heard him cock the revolver. “The lock . . . the lock on the window…”
Lightning and thunder split the air, illuminating the city with eerie green light and sending Skinner’s clairaudience spinning away from the window. She could briefly make out Valentine in silhouette, staggering back from the shutters, and the shape of a man standing on the windowsill, shutters swinging behind him.
Exposure to the storm had twisted her hearing beyond recognition, the sounds from the room reached her distorted by whirling Doppler effects and synaesthetic scrambling. Was the man in the window screaming a black, oily scream? The strange echo of the thunder tried to blot her thoughts out. Were rattling heavy hard sounds thunder, gunshots, thunder…? Why can’t… the thunder strangely struck her ears…why can’t I think . . . green light and a strange man standing before a city beneath a storm of madness, and that awful thunder pounding at the inside of her mind…
“Skinner?” Valentine’s voice was quiet and close. A brief flicker of red accompanied it, and was gone.
“What…” she gasped. She was lying on her back on the cot, and immediately bolted upright. “The man, we’ve got…he’s trying to get in…”
Valentine’s hands were firm on her shoulders. “He’s gone. It’s all right, he’s gone.”
“What . . . ?”
“You fainted, Skinner. You’ve been unconscious for an hour.”
“Fainted…what happened? The man?”
“He…it. I think it…I shot it, Skinner. Four times. It didn’t even notice. Like I was shooting smoke. I think it would have killed me if…”
“What? Damn it, Valentine, what happened?”
“The psychestorm. It was struck by lightning. I saw it fall three stories to the courtyard, and then run off towards New Bank.”
Skinner shook her head and began to relax. She began shivering, suddenly, and nausea welled up inside of her. “I… what was…” The shivering got worse, as her body finally found the time to be frightened.
She felt Valentine’s arms wrap around her, and she wanted to smack him. But they were warm and comforting, so she let him get away with it. He was shivering, too.
Nineteen: The Hospital
Skinner was in his dream again, and he could see the white, smooth curve of her hip. He reached out to touch her skin with invisible fingertips, but they weren’t transparent; they were missing, and the fades crept along his fingers as he moved so that his hands were disappearing as they approached her body and his arm sank away into nothing up to his elbow at her hip…
Beckett awoke, to find himself surrounded by white. He was in a white bed, with white curtains, and, for some reason, wearing white pajamas. The pain was gone from his limbs, and the cotton that the veneine packed around his head was absent. He got to his feet, and pulled the curtains aside.
Beyond the white curtains, Beckett saw row after row of white-curtained beds. He heard a voice: a low, muttering voice growled behind the white. Beckett approached, and he could begin to make out words. Another few steps, and he could clearly hear a strange glossolalia whispered in a harsh, tormented tone, obscured by the white curtains which were stirred by a gentle, hidden breeze.
The man said, “. . . and if I walked by icy walls of warring wisdom, cracked by the simple discipline of psychic strangeness, all the stone attractors of that ancient emblem of the world, that screaming tower of melted bronze…”
Beckett snatched the curtain away, to see the man whose voice he heard.