The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [59]
There was a terrifying moment of disorientation when Beckett awoke again, as his mind tried to identify his surroundings: not his home, not his cot at the office, not the cell he’d been locked in, where was he? He tried to move his arms, but found he could not, and a kind of strangled panic pushed past the haze of waking. He desperately tried to move, to do something, to find a weapon that he could use, even to lift his arms, to turn his head, but his muscles weren’t responding.
After a moment, his brain accepted the fact that he was in a new place and began, in the meticulous fashion of which Beckett’s mind was eminently capable, to catalogue the details.
There were not many. He was undressed, on a small bed with clean sheets. By his head was a wall with large, square stones and dirty white mortar. At three sides of his bed hung white muslin curtains. Beckett felt very, very heavy, and the pain of his illness had returned. Mercifully, the veneine buzzed warmly in his mind, and kept the sharp, shattered-glass aches in his joints far away.
Slowly, as the last shreds of disorientation were banished, Beckett found that he could move. He began by clenching his hands and fingers, which cracked loudly in the silence, then by flexing his elbows and knees, which also creaked and cracked. There was a stabbing pain in his right knee, but it was brief and vanished quickly.
Beckett’s body shook as he climbed out of bed. He recognized the fatigue in his stomach muscles as being the product of extensive vomiting, and tried to remember when he’d engaged in something like that. Withdrawal had riddled recent memories with holes, but given that, Beckett supposed it fairly likely that he’d been sick repeatedly. The quivering in his arms and legs was familiar, and usually meant he hadn’t had enough to eat.
He managed to find clean clothes—not his—folded up under his bed: a white shirt and a grey suit. Beckett dressed and threw the white curtain aside. He found himself surrounded by beds similarly partitioned to his own, an eerie reflection of his dream. Judging by the silence, the beds were either empty or filled with sleeping men or women. There was a quality, an emptiness, to the silence, though, that suggested the former.
A sound sprang suddenly in the quiet: a low, faint muttering, emanating from one of the beds. Warily, with an unpleasantly strong sense of déjà vu, Beckett approached the mumbling. He had a sudden, irrational fear of being trapped forever in an infinite cycle of white curtains, muttering voices, and sudden jolts into wakefulness.
Beckett pulled the curtain aside, and saw a man sitting on a low, iron-framed bed, his knees pulled up to his chest. The man had a haggard face, with wide, bloodshot eyes. His hair was graying, and some great terror had etched its lines into his face so that fear was stamped perpetually on his brow.
The man was speaking. “. . . did the sun rise over cracked peaks and great glass mountains, far away on the edge of the moon, where black basalt cities crawl slowly in the dark, and red teeth clutch wearily at hollow-eyed men…”
“You’ve seen them?” Beckett asked. His voice was hushed; awe had pressed it to a whisper. “The cities on the moon?”
The man’s strange verbal emission halted. He turned his terrible, red, staring eyes on Beckett, and said nothing.
“Tell me. Tell me if you’ve seen them.” Beckett lunged forward and grabbed the man by his shirt. “The cities on the moon, the towers of brass,” he screamed, “You’ve seen them, haven’t you? Tell me!”
The man worked his jaw, and Beckett could see that his tongue was black. “Are my eyes open?” The man asked. “Is this awake, to see the other side of eyes and dreams, where the world is pulled away by the wild whirling weary ways of wretched infamy…”
Beckett felt a heavy hand on his shoulder, and heard a voice that was impossibly deep, a bass rumble that made his bones shiver. “Dream poisoning.”
The coroner turned, and came to face a great trolljrman, his thin lips curled back over tombstone teeth, black eyes glittering dispassionately. “He