Mr. Stitch

by Chris Braak

  Beckett did not respond to this remark, only patiently waited for Ernst to succumb to the discomfiture that the inspector’s stony silence would produce.

  “Yes.” Ernst said at last. “Well.” He opened the trunk and peered at its contents intently. After a moment, he took a pair of heavy leather gloves and a brass loupe from the narrow shelves in his cramped office, and began rummaging through sticky black goop and dismembered body parts..

  “We shall take this to my workbench,” Ernst announced, as he summoned two more porters. Or, perhaps they were the same porters; the men traditionally wore linen masks over their mouths and noses, to protect themselves from deadly fumes, and were thus unrecognizable.

  Helmetag’s workbench was actually four workbenches, arranged in parallel, occupying a large chunk of one of the modest-sized vaults in the Croft. Bright yellow lamps burned overhead, and a small phlogiston generator powered a large, portable incandescent light. The benches were filled with bits of metal twisted into occult shapes; jars with pickled hands, eyes, organs, tongues, and pig fetuses; long knives with straight blades, serrated blades, curved blades; and a respectable selection of glassware.

  “Now,” Ernst said, “Ahm. Please don’t let…eh…the little fellow touch anything. I know you are curious!” He spoke very loudly to Gorud, as though the therian could not understand Trowthi, but an additional helping of volume might clarify things for him. “Yes! Curious! But you must not touch! All right! Now,” he said to Beckett, as he began to draw chunks of black, ichor-smeared meat from the trunk. “Now, of course, I am engaged in the study of prolonging the vitality of living tissue, yes? I do not…I must make it clear…I do not attempt to reanimate the dead tissue. Yes?” He looked around, as though to satisfy himself that any invisible eavesdroppers had clearly heard his disclaimer. “I will offer my advice, based on my experience, but of course that is not an admission of knowledge a priori, yes?”

  “Yes, yes,” Beckett snapped at him. The speech was a standard part of his conversations with any of his consultants, and he was tired of it. “Just tell me what this is.”

  Ernst tutted reproachfully, sucked his teeth, and began work on the remains. He laid the largest pieces beside each other, and gently flensed the remaining flesh with his long knives, revealing bits of skeleton made from brass. He exposed the flesh to currents from his phlogiston generator, applied certain tinctures that he’d extracted from his menagerie of beakers, and emitted some knowing grunts at the results. After an hour of what looked, to Beckett, like aimless puttering, Ernst explained.

  “This is a quite extraordinary thing,” he said, wiping off his knives and carefully putting them back into arbitrarily chosen positions. “It is a reanimate, yes, that is clear. The flesh has been reactivated with an infusion of ichor, and provided motis vivendum by electricity. But look, do you see these bones? The bones are made of metal, and are hollow, you see? Cables run inside. Ordinarily, in a reanimate--er, that is, I am given to understand, at any rate-current is carried along the outside of the body to envigorate the muscle tissues. But these are a design to allow the current to run inside.”

  “Why would someone do that?”

  Ernst harrumphed, as though speculation on the motivations of necrologists was a pointless exercise. “Who knows? Well, perhaps. I couldn’t say for sure…”

  “Guess, then.”

  Ernst twisted the end of his mustache for a moment. “Let me ask instead. Where did you find this thing? It was not, I suspect, used in a conventional way.”

  “No,” Beckett said, pensively. “No, it wasn’t. It was used to deliver a munition. An explosive…ah.”

  “You see? Perhaps.” Ernst shrugged.

  “Brackets and cables are notable. An internal electrical system would enable the reanimate to pass for human. At a distance, anyway.”

  “It’s unusual. Erm. So I’ve heard,” said Ernst. “Necrologists do not usually try to make humans, but to make things that are more than human. It is a strange thing to make a reanimate that is indistinguishable from a man.”

  “Yes,” Beckett replied. “Yes it is.” The phantom itching in his eye was suddenly abominable again, and he began to rub at it. “All right. Reanimates that can pass for human. There must be a way to recognize them.”

  “Ah, yes,” Ernst replied. “Yes, yes. The blood, you see, is replaced by ichor, which is black. So, tissue that is ordinarily red-tongue, lips, and so forth. Also, the eyes. Ichor does not preserve the eyes, and they will quickly dissolve. Yellowing first of the sclera, unusually large pupils, then weeping of the aqueous humour. I cannot imagine that these…things…should be useful for more than a week, unless some new method has been found to preserve the eyes.”

  “All right, professor,” Beckett said, at length. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  “Yes, of course,” Ernst Helmetag replied. “Yes. Mr. Beckett. This is all not usual, is it? Something is happening now.”

  Beckett did not know what to say to that, so he said nothing.

  Twenty-Four

  “Believe me, I understand where you’re coming from,” Valentine was saying. “Loyalty. Loyalty is a great thing, and I respect that, I really do. But you’ve got to consider you options here.” He was sitting opposite the prisoner, Sergeant Charles Codrington, formerly of the Royal Army Light Supply Division, who pouted in the most distant corner of the dank cell beneath Raithower House, where he was chained up pending his trial. “Which is to say, you haven’t got any options. We’ve got witnesses, evidence that you were dealing in oneiric munitions. You understand that this is heresy, right? You’re getting a trial only because you were in the army, and we can’t execute you on the spot. But the army isn’t going to let you off easy, you know that, right?”

  The Sergeant was one of the two men apprehended on Beckett’s Bluewater raid, and Valentine had been trying to coax information out of him for what seemed like centuries. He refused always, just sat in the back corner of his cell, bloody and bruised from the beating he’d taken at the hands of the gendarmerie. He stared out into the distance, as though Valentine weren’t there at all.

  “So, whatever John is offering you, it’s not really worth anything, because you can’t spend it when you’re dead. Or even when you’re locked in prison for the rest of your life. That’s assuming a best-case scenario, mind you. And whatever protection John’s offering…you have to know he can’t protect you anymore, right? We’ve got you. You’re here. Anonymous John needed a city-wide riot to get himself out of jail last time, how do you think he’s going to get you out? Why do you think he would bother?”

  The man said nothing and Valentine sighed. He thought that Sergeant Codrington’s cellmate, a former grocer’s assistant by the name of Hawkes, was a more promising prospect for obtaining information, but the man had mysteriously choked to death on his dinner the night before. The entire endeavour seemed unlikely to yield results. Valentine was about to renew his persuasive efforts when Beckett returned.

  “No luck, yet?” Beckett asked him.

  “No.”

  Beckett snorted. “Go home. I want to talk to him. Alone.”

  “I’m. Not sure that’s a good idea, Beckett.”

  “I didn’t ask. Go. Now.”

  Valentine did as he was ordered, because he could think of no reasonable excuse not to. Once Valentine had left, Beckett, very slowly and methodically, began to unwrap the scarf from around his face, revealing the hideous bloody rents made by his gradually vanishing flesh. First he exposed the bare orbital bone below his eye, then the black gap where his nose should have been, then the hole in his cheek that revealed his teeth. When he had finished, he let the scarf drop to the ground, and began to gently tug off one of his gloves.

  “You know about the fades, Sergeant?” Beckett asked. The Sergeant said nothing. “I’ve had them for more than forty years, which is, as I understand, a record. They usually kill you in ten.” Beckett removed a key from his pocket and unlocked the cell door. “N
o one’s sure where they come from. They eat your body away, very slowly. Fingertips…” he showed his bare hand, with the bone-white tips of his distal phalanges visible through transparent flesh. “Your nose, ears. Eyes. When the meat turns clear, it dies, and starts to rot away. There’s no way to stop it, or slow it down. Nothing.” Beckett took from his other pocket a small knife, and gently drew a line across his palm, so that livid red blood spilled out from it. “Once you’ve got it, you just start to disappear, until your bones crack and your lungs give out and your heart stops, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.” Beckett knelt down in front of Sergeant Charles Codrington, his palm now bloody. “You’re not afraid to die, I can see that. And you’re not afraid of a lifetime in prison, if the army goes easy on you. But you’re still going to tell me what I want to know, because I know how people catch the fades.” He held his bloody hand close to Codrington’s face. The Sergeant jerked and tried to pull away, but was held fast by heavy chains. “It’s through the blood, Sergeant. And I promise you, you will give me Anonymous John, or you will choke on my poisoned blood. I will give you the fades, and let you loose, so you can spend the next ten years of your life watching your body die. In a decade, when you’re trapped in a wheelchair, and you’re blind and deaf, and you can feel your heart lurch with every second beat, you’re going to wonder what you thought was so great about what Anonymous John had to offer.” He seized Sergeant Codrington’s jaw, smearing blood on his face, forcing the man to look at that black, empty eye socket. “Or, you’re going to tell me what I want to know.”

  The Sergeant talked then, at length, and in detail. Beckett used the information to plan his next raids. Anonymous John had not, historically, been a figure with whom Beckett had had much contact-the gangster was a murderer, yes, a smuggler, and a thief, but only in mundane, ecclesiastically-approved ways. He had never before stepped into the field of scientific heresy, and so there had never been an onus on Beckett to interfere with him. Now, though, that John was trafficking in oneiric munitions, providing daemonomaniacal regeants, and building reanimates, he had become Beckett’s enemy, and Beckett was determined to make him regret it.

  He took his first steps towards that end the day after Armistice ended, when the chilly spring rains rolled in from the bay like a curtain of water, condemning Trowth and its citizenry to two or more months of terminal dampness. Hidden by the iron-gray precipitation that suffused the air, Beckett assembled more than a hundred local gendarmes and twenty-five Lobsterman-as well as a support crew consisting of fifteen trolljrmen and their ambulance tarrasques-and surrounded a complex of warehouses on Front Street, right where the city dropped precipitously into the bay.

  That Anonymous John had been smuggling materiel into the city by way of warehouses such as this was common knowledge-but Trowth’s enormous, sprawling docks, which covered nearly every inch of the available coastline sheltered by its great sea-wall, and even spread almost fully up the length of the Stark, were impossible to police effectively. Moreover, Anonymous John had been using a complex, rotating system of import locations, using one while preparing two more, so that he could rapidly move his entire operation out from beneath the scrutiny of local law enforcement. Only a few men were given the full rotation, and unfortunately for John, Sergeant Codrington had been one of them.

  The Lobstermen went in first, bedecked in blood-slick bone armor, faster and stronger than any ordinary man, and armed with long-pin rifles, whose deadly rounds flew faster than the sound they made. After a few sharp cracks and the whines of flying bullets, shabbily-dressed men swarmed out from the warehouses and into the waiting arms of the gendarmerie. They were shackled and escorted to local prison cells with a minimum of unnecessary violence-a miracle by all accounts, as the gendarmes were as a whole infuriated by what amounted to Anonymous John’s declaration of open war against them. Only a handful of smugglers had arms or jaws or eye sockets broken, and only one, who rather ill-advisedly tried to escape custody while his captors were otherwise occupied, was brought down by two especially enthusiastic men and did not, sadly, survive the onslaught of their nightsticks.

  In all, nearly a hundred smugglers had been captured, and thousands of crowns worth of merchandise. Nothing in the goods reclaimed by Beckett and his men appeared to have heretical uses, however; the smuggled wares appeared to consist primarily of suffragist and explicit literature, an unseemly number of brandy casks from the embargoed nation of Thranc, and close to two tons of Sarpeki wool, undoubtedly smuggled in to avoid excessive tariffs. It would be of shoddy quality, of course, and sold at cut-rates to textile mills up the river, before being sent back down the river to populate Trowth’s high-end clothing boutiques.

  Out of spite, Beckett did not permit any of the smugglers to be remanded to custodies indoors until every single item was accounted for. They were obliged to stand in the chilly, pouring rain for over six hours, until Beckett was satisfied with the inventory, and handed the whole lot over to representatives to the Bureau of Trade, Excises, and Licensure. Though no heretical materials were confiscated, Beckett’s raid was generally considered a great success, and evidence that his and Stitch’s advocacy for a more empowered Coroner’s Division was working precisely the way it was supposed to.

  Twenty-Five

  “Well,” said Valentine, “I did say-”

  “Yes.” Skinner said, a little more forcefully than she might have intended. “Yes you did, I should have listened, your cousin is an unconscionable monster, et cetera and so forth, I would like to move on to the next stage of the conversation, now.”

  “All right, all right.” Silver and porcelain scraped delicately against each other, as Valentine added sugar to his tea. It was late to be drinking tea, but neither of them found themselves predisposed to sleep. “Well, obviously, you can stay here for as long as you like-”

  “I-”

  “I know, I know you don’t want to stay here for long. I’m just saying that you can. I suppose that going back to your family isn’t an option?”

  Skinner thought back on her parents’ tiny house in Lower West Seagirt, her mother surrounded by piles of strangers’ laundry that she would clean and mend while her father slept the days away, recuperating from his night-shift at the mill. The house deathly quiet and suffocatingly hot, its ever-changing topography of laundry making it impossible to navigate. The unconquerable gap between mother and daughter whose spheres of experience were utterly alien to each other.

  “No,” Skinner said, quietly. “Not really.”

  “So. All right, you just need to get your own place. I could rent it for you, that’s fine. I mean, it’s ridiculous that a grown woman should have to do that…’sword, I’m starting to sound like a suffragist.”

  “You could do worse.”

  “Yes, I suppose I could.” Valentine slurped his tea, noisily. “Have you got any money? I’ve got…well, my father has an estate agent who’s been looking at properties down by Arsenal Close, that’s not too bad a neigborhood.”

  Skinner shook her head. “The theater has all the royalties from the play. I spent my last wages from the Coroners months ago.” She clenched her jaw and slowly cracked the knuckles on her right hand, one at a time. “I didn’t realize,” Skinner said, furious at herself but still trying to keep her voice level, “that I was living on Emilia’s sufferance.”

  “Ahm,” Valentine replied, in a way he probably imagined was consoling. “You wouldn’t be the first person to make that mistake. Well, I could give you-” He drowned this sentence in a coughing fit as he saw Sknner’s expression. “No, well. Well there’s got to be a way…I mean, the playhouses have never been afraid of shirking the law before. You know theater-people, they’ll do anything. Surely you could get work…?”

  “No,” Skinner said. “I can’t prove I’ve written anything. Everything was kept so secret. It’s a shame, too; now that Theocles is on the Black List, it would probably sell like gangbusters.”

  “Yes…oh.
Oh!”

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve just devised a plan. A good plan. Oh, this feels nice. Is it always like this?”

  “Is what like what?”

  Valentine began chuckling to himself. “I can’t tell you! I can’t tell you about it yet, it will be a surprise.” He was on his feet at once pacing back and forth, rubbing his hands together. “This is excellent, oh my! I’ve got some leave coming from the Coroners,” Valentine said. “A few weeks, anyway, that I can take. Beckett will hardly miss me. You heard about the raid on Front Street? He’s got a fire under him now. You know how he gets. He’s like a bullet now, he’ll be tearing Anonymous John’s organization apart for weeks. He probably won’t even notice that I’m gone.”

  “Valentine, what are you going to do? You have to tell me.”

  “No! It is a plan both cunning and secret. I will say no more about it!” He stopped pacing. “Now, I shall go check to make sure that Karine is settled in all right.”

  “Oh.”

  “What?”

  Skinner shrugged. “Nothing. Go on. I’ve got to try and get some sleep.”

  “Uhm. Yes. Right, so do I. At the office. Where they have cots.”

  “Yes.”

  Valentine cleared his throat. Then cleared his throat a second time. Then said, “Yes. Well. Good night.”

  “Good night, Valentine.”

  Valentine Vie-Gorgon hesitated only for a moment before discreetly leaving the young lady to her room, exchanging another polite “good night” with Karine, and then leaving his house and stepping into the pouring rain.

  Beckett lay on his back, staring at the disorder of plaster swirls on his ceiling. He could feel the exhaustion, in some distant orbit around his body, separated by vast tracts of empty space and the gentle warmth of the veneine. It never came to claim him, though. He’d been using djang-small, concentrated amounts of the stuff that people drank to wake themselves up in the morning-in order to combat the lassitude that the increasingly large doses of veneine brought on.