The water samples from the first week have by now settled quite clear, each with a layer of spongy-looking silt at the bottom. Those from the second are more brown, and cloudy still. And this week has a grey-blue tint and an almost tangible look to it, as if one could pinch a dollop of it right out of the glass and stand it jiggling on the table. The most recent tests revealed that the salinity has increased so that the water gathered from the now-bottomless cellar is, more or less, seawater.
Only a handful of days adrift and we’ve reached the sea? Impossible, of course; and yet, when all possible explanations are exhausted, isn’t the impossible all that remains? There are thousands of miles of waterfalls, canals, locks, and dams between Marquette and the sea. A fast-moving boat might cover the distance in a week or so, if there was nothing to slow it down, but a drifting house? Besides, even with a lookout constantly on duty, we haven’t sighted land since the night of the flood. If this is a river, it is wider than the Amazon. If it is Lake Superior, than it has somehow become salinated and developed a fierce current, and even then, the complete absence of land makes no sense whatsoever.
The other possibility is that the proverbial mountain has indeed come to Mohammed—that perhaps the sea rose to meet us, swallowing up damns and waterfalls and everything else along the way. Equally impossible, of course: to raise sea level even a foot would take years of rain, decades of melting ice, and Lake Superior itself is more than five hundred feet above sea level. But the water does not lie, though it may make of truth something alien and utterly unrecognizable.
I continue taking samples, and we all continue to struggle against the incipient madness of knowing the end, some end, must be approaching. We can’t simply float on forever. Maybe Roderick is only the first of us to break.
I should not wonder if his mind has been overtaxed by the events of the last fortnight, leading to some violent rupture in his psyche. Perhaps the strict indoctrination of his Jesuit training left him somehow vulnerable to such damage—I cannot say. Healing the mind is beyond my scope. If I can keep him alive long enough to be examined by a doctor of psychiatry, he might yet have some chance of recovering his wits.
Again he wakes. I must tend to him.
***
[Unsigned, undated Ms. presumably penned by Madame Tessier]
There are no spirits here. No ghosts, no echoes, no lingering shades of human longing, love, or rage. Nothing. I’ve tried everything to call them to us. For the first time in my life, it is as if what I can see and touch and hear is all there is. Like a medieval painting that lacks any sense of depth on the canvas, the surface is the sum of this place. I’ve always envied those who cannot hear the dead, always thought I’d relish an escape from the clamor. Now I find that it is lonely beyond bearing.
I am a stowaway on a ship never intended to be a ship, and which seems even more surprised by its predicament with each passing day. I imagine we’re making better time since the cellar dropped out, though the house has definitely lost some stability (and doesn’t “making better time” imply a destination?). If Reliene was still here, she’d be sicker than ever, poor girl. I’d say it was a mercy, whatever happened to her, except that I saw the seminarian when they brought him out of the cellar, and I heard of his dreadful injuries. I cannot believe that mercy could go about in such a cruel guise. Though of course Reliene may simply have drowned; perhaps she’d gone swimming, since there is not much of a current in the cellar, at least not at the surface. But could even someone as bold as she step willingly down into that bottomless dark?
I’ve always thought that it isn’t dying that would be so bad, no matter the pain involved. Dying is an end, and though we might dread it, when it arrives it’s over, and that’s that. The devil is in the knowing. I can’t even think on it without sweating. Knowing that Death is coming. Knowing that there is nothing to be done—no surgeon to do it if there was—for me, that would be the rub. We’re all dying from the moment we slide from the womb—some of us just take longer to finish what we start. Knowing that is part of what we call maturity; it is the awareness of the finite nature of our existence itself that reminds us that we—our bodies, at any rate—are merely temporary, and are therefore precious beyond all measure.
What would horrify me would be seeing that it was too late. Like some soldier, looking down at where the saber just unlaced his gut like a lady’s corset, spilling the tangled contents out in his lap. Looking at that, you’ve got to know that, without question, you’re finished. But you aren’t dead, and that’s what scares me so. Not the death, but the realization of it; reaching for your legs and finding only torn up grass and mud wetted with your life’s blood.
I don’t want to see it coming. But I don’t know how I can do anything else stuck on this damn raft of a house. I can’t begin to guess whether Reliene saw it coming or not. You’d think with all the time I’ve spent dealing with my clients’ dead, I’d be on better terms with Death herself, but She is too alien to ever grow accustomed to. Think of the undertaker who spends day after day up to his elbows in Her handiwork—how he must fear his end.
Yesterday I passed a window someone had left open at the end of the third floor hallway: a great sea bird of some sort was just sitting there on the sill. Ugly as sin, like the unholy mating of a gull and an alligator, or a pelican and a jackal. If I’d had a gun, like the young men on guard at the stairs, I’d have blasted it from feather to fluff. Having that misshapen thing inside—even almost inside—makes me itchy. But what it appears to mean is the real affront—what it might say about just where this infernal current is carrying us.
The gull-thing is only a mocking reminder of what, I think, none of us can understand or entirely accept. At least it’s alive—at least it’s new—rather than being “of the house” as the rest of us are; that means there’s still something out there besides us. That the rest of the world is still out there somewhere—it’s just lost, or we are. Yet, is it our world? Nothing like that sharp beaked, toothy thing has ever appeared in any cataloging of species—perhaps in some medieval bestiary or conjurer’s grimoire, but never in our science.
It is a hell, wherever we are. Perhaps we’re already dead and it just hasn’t sunk in. If so, I‘ll have to re-assess my notion of what about Death is most terrible, not to mention my beliefs about what comes after—what a disappointment that would be. No, I would rather soldier on believing myself and my companions merely doomed in this existence—that something better, or at least different, waits beyond the veil.
***
[Dr. Templesmith’s journal]
-26 May 1863-
There are times, especially in these small hours, when the motion of the house is more noticeable because there are fewer distractions, and every groan of a protesting beam or shifting rafter echoes through the darkened rooms, that I wonder why I write at all. The only answer I can manage is that I do so because I must—because someone must. If we somehow escape this fate—if we return to the world, and this entire experience fades like some bad dream, a mere nagging presence in a cobwebbed mind-corner, then this journal will seem fantastical. If we never reach land, never leave this wretched house—if we all perish and no one remains to tell what happened, then these words (though just as likely never to be seen) may be the only way any of us will survive in any manner or even have existed at all.
I also wonder if perhaps it is possible that I am mad. Could this all be simply an elaborate hallucination of my own fashioning? Could I, at any moment, awaken in some wretched asylum, locked away in a padded room, head shorn, limbs restrained to stop me gouging out my own eyes? Would that be worse?
My patient is lost. I treated his wounds for a week and more, and he seemed to be avoiding infection far better than I’d dared hope. I watched him for the ordinary signs—fever, swelling, the honeyed stench of gangrene—but what I failed to take into account was the bizarre genesis of his injuries. I had, of course, lost all hope of salvaging his sanity—he was simply too badly derange
d. Yet I operated under the assumption that, horrific though they were, his injuries would respond to treatment in an ordinary fashion.
The rash was difficult to even notice at first. I had him bathing in heated saltwater each night to keep the wounds clean and draining. It was after one of these soaks that I first noticed the bumps. A field of blisters covered his inner thigh and spread up and through his pubic hair to sprinkle his belly almost to the naval. The raw flesh of his leg and foot were inflamed, too. Before putting him to bed, I treated the rash with a sulfur ointment, rinsed the leg with fresh water, and bandaged it again.
By morning he had grown worse: his skin was red as a lobster from nipples to knees, and though the bumps had disappeared, the epidermis had scaled over and flaked away like confetti when touched. He sobbed and scratched at it incessantly, snowing dead tissue. Under the dressing, his leg appeared unchanged from the night before. I had Molly scrub the bathtub with lye, and then we soaked him in cold seawater to soothe the itching. After two hours in the water, he seemed to be feeling better. Upon examination, however, it was clear that his condition had not improved.
The blisters had returned, and they covered him like some bumpy swim costume. The rash did not appear especially sensitive, at least not immediately. As the skin dried, however, the bumps once again receded, and the itchiness and flaking returned with a vengeance. Finally, we had to drag him back to the tub to stop him tearing at his skin with his ragged nails.
Only in the water was he comfortable (I suppose that should have warned me), though it certainly did nothing to stop the spread of the rash. By evening his entire body was aflame with tiny, fluid-filled blisters—every part of him, in fact, except the flayed leg and foot, which remained swollen, but lacking an epidermal layer, had no blisters. He’d sunk so low in the tub that only the tip of his nose showed, and frequently he slipped entirely under. Each time, I readied myself to pull him up, but always he resurfaced—at least his long nose did.
Though the rash had thus far spread incrementally, it advanced to the next stage that evening all at once, as if at some silent command. I was reading one of Gough’s many tomes on spiritualism, and I looked up from my book to see Roderick sitting up, grinning, his flesh obscenely red in the lamplight. The water in the tub had gone all pale and cloudy, as if someone had poured a pitcher of milk into it. He glistened unnaturally, and when I saw why, I gasped and stumbled back, nearly falling over my chair.
The blisters had burst, and from the red dot of each deflated lesion, sprouted... something. At first I took them for hairs, and my mind immediately started shuffling through diseases that involve abnormal hair growth. But even as my rational mind was thus occupied, I realized that what I saw was nothing so pedestrian. They were, for want of a better term, cilia. They looked like the ends of tiny worms groping blindly about. As fine as the fuzz on a newborn baby’s cheek, they might easily be mistaken for hairs but for their incessant motion. It was at once horrible and mesmerizing. They glistened wetly, each minute protuberance reflecting the lamplight at different and ever-changing angles—his flesh appeared to swim over his frame. And still that eerie smile, like the rictus of a lipless burn victim.
Naturally, I got him out of the tub and had it drained and cleaned again. I was astonished to see that his injured leg was covered with the same cilial layer, and even more densely. He was sensitive to touch, even on the heels of his feet, so he stood there, naked and dripping (and subcutaneously writhing) throughout the process. He was unresponsive, except for small motions to avoid being touched. He soon began to moan, a chillingly animal sound. I noticed then that the motions of the hair-like structures had slowed, and in some places had stopped entirely. He arched his back and bent and twisted, though he appeared unwilling to actually scratch at himself.
Before we had even gotten the last buckets of seawater upstairs, he practically flew into the tub, nearly knocking Tarquin to the ground. He slid down until he was as fully covered as the water would permit, and continued to moan until we had filled it the rest of the way. This time, not even his nose broke the surface. I waited fifteen seconds, twenty, thirty, almost a minute, before wrenching him up and into the air. He did not gasp. Indeed, he did not take a breath at all. And yet, he was responsive, struggling clumsily to escape my grip and return to the water. Back in the tub, the cilia could be seen to wave much more vigorously than before, and in something like coordinated patterns. I watched him remain submerged for three full minutes without breath.
Had I access to my own library, I would have immediately turned to Lambshead, but as it was, I can do nothing but record my thoughts along with what data I have been able to gather. Impossible as it sounds, I believe that his body, his very skin, has been colonized by something akin to a coral, sponge, or anemone—some liminal organism straddling the line between the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Though each pore would seem to play host to a discrete cilium, it may be that they function in concert to form something greater, something which operates with a single consciousness. The question is whether Roderick as we knew him still lives or if he’s simply become a raft of sorts for this mysterious organism.
***
[Unsigned fragment of letter, presumably penned by Ms. Morden]
I have this recurring dream, Camille. One that I’ve hoped, so far in vain, working would help rid me of. There is a woman in it I must assume to be Reliene, since the dream began the very night of her disappearance.
Somehow I know beyond doubt (the way we do in dreams) that she has been through something truly horrific. In the dream she comes creeping up the cellar stairs. I’m terrified, but everyone else in the house is totally oblivious—they can’t seem to hear or see me. It takes so very long for her to reach the top, and the waiting is so terrible. I can’t help opening the door. Every time I do it, and every time it’s the same ghastly spectacle waiting there.
What could Reliene have done to cost her her very skin? The gruesome sight has branded itself upon my memory, and I thought at first that putting it on a canvas would let me be rid of it. It was sickeningly easy to achieve the perfect flayed red for the exposed muscle tissue. Cobalt and a hint of Venetian Red rendered the blood vessels in painful detail. I paint her not as I see her every night standing in the cellar door, but instead reclining, somehow at ease on the fainting couch in my studio. All from memory and imagination, of course, but having the musculature so lewdly exposed makes it easy to achieve a lifelike posture. I suppose I thought to alter the memory by changing details, somehow making it all less horrific.
I cannot, in truth, be certain that it even is Reliene. If only I could forget the terrible blankness of that face—all expression, identity, and humanity peeled away as easily as one might peel a ripe tangerine. How profoundly naked we are without the soft shell we wear—how utterly terrible is the beauty beneath. Stripped of all our delicate armor we are just us, bone and muscle, skeletons dressed up in so much meat.
Enough. Camille, when we parted you said I was never to contact you again, but I find myself unable to help it. For a distraction from all of this, I reach back sometimes to an August morning in the gardens at home, the buzzing of bees and the green-gold scent of honey and sunshine in our hair. The dancing reflections of the day-lit sky fractured by a thousand thousand oak leaves in your eyes, so like my own that they could be. We shared a womb, Camille—surely we were never meant to be separated by something so petty (I’m sorry, Reliene, but it was). So I write to you, for myself, hoping these letters never find their way to your hands. With all that I am, I wish you anything but this existence.
***
[Water-damaged fragment from Dr. Templesmith’s journal, date unknown]
[MS. torn]thout a microscope. I have sketched them below. As can be seen, the cilia have rooted themselves quite deeply into his flesh. It appears that the base of each of the tiny organisms acts like a vine, creeping beneath the epidermis, attaching itself to blood vessels, muscle tissue, etc. [MS. blotted] vigorous as ivy
roots, [MS. blotted] eerie and beautiful, really.
[MS. blotted] out of this house and back to the world [MS. blotted] furor in the scientific [MS. blotted] I present [MS. blotted] exotic new parasitic organism. [MS. torn]
***
[Dr. Templesmith’s journal]
-26 May 1863-
Looking back, I see that I wrote previously that Roderick had been lost. I was mistaken. He was merely transfigured. Now, however, he is truly gone.
The night after the hatch of the cilia, I returned from fetching an evening snack to find the hallway runner soaked with seawater. As I feared, the tub was empty but for a foot or so of fluid that remained, still sloshing with the echo of his departure. The water trail led down the hall to an open window on what had been the house’s west wall. The sill was soaked, as was the wall below it, but there was no sign of anything unusual in the water two stories below. In the near-dark, however, it was impossible to see more than a dozen feet from the house.
He’d escaped.
Why he’d gone all the way down the hall, though, instead of simply opening one of the tall parlor windows remains unclear. I do know for a fact that the hall window had been open, for I’d noted the cool breeze on my way down to the kitchen. Perhaps he was, for some reason, unable to open the windows in the parlor. The lack of water on the rug near them, however, suggests he hadn’t even tried.
Is it possible he didn’t leave the house on his own? If someone (or something) had come for him from outside, wouldn’t the intruder have been forced to enter through an already open window or door, even if it did happen to be some way from the parlor? If the organisms do indeed share a collective consciousness, might it extend even beyond an individual host? The possibility is nearly more than I can stomach. And yet, strange as he has become, I don’t know whether to pity poor Roderick or envy him the opportunity to see what he will see, learn what he will learn.
Arcane II Page 23
