Camera Obscura Page 5

  "So you said."

  "I am going to have to run more tests."

  "Naturally."

  "But I can tell you–"

  "Yes?"

  "I have not seen such a thing before."

  She thought of the man's ruined corpse on the floor, of Grimm reaching over, sparking it alive with electricity. "What is it?" she said.

  The scientist fiddled with a pen, opened and closed his mouth. "I don't know," he said, finally. Then, with more defiance – "Yet."

  "Yet," she agreed, smiling.

  "Perhaps–" he said.

  "Yes?"

  "I think the thing inside him may have affected him. The tissue samples are suggestive…" He fell quiet, thinking. "You should be careful," he said.

  "People keep telling me that, recently."

  He smiled, ceding her the point. "The Council wants to see you," he said.

  "Who's there?" she said, and his smile dropped when he said, flatly: "All of them."

  TWELVE

  The Quiet Council

  Stone arches, dim light. The Council convened in what may have once been a wine cellar. The smell still lingered, of old vinegar and smoked cedar wood. The entrance was through the under-morgue. She had to pass the cages to get there. The things in the cages stared at her as she passed. Every time she tried not to look, and failed.

  What do you want to know about the Council? The Quiet Council, the secret council, those lords and ladies of the underworld? Human and machine, revolutionaries after the revolution had come and gone, quietly. Picture them sitting there behind their half-moon desk, looking down at the Lady de Winter as she entered, as she stood before them. Glaring up at them, a wilful child, but useful. Useful, particularly, in this curious matter of the dead man on the Rue Morgue, and of the thing that had been inserted into him and then, so savagely, taken out. A missing thing. A trifle, nothing more. And yet, a cause for some anxiety.

  "Milady de Winter." The Council spoke through the Hoffman automaton. Built by Krupp, rumour had it, and long ago, and based on an obscure Teutonic writer. The voice, full of hisses and scratches, had a thick, heavy accent. "Please to make your report."

  She stood and glared at them for a moment longer. So much anger, so much passion so tightly controlled! A street child, a circus girl, a lady, a killer – the last one first and foremost.

  She gave them her report. The murder in the Rue Morgue, the Gascon, the corpse, the search of the apartment, Tom Thumb, the shadows, Q's warning – she missed nothing and the Council listened with a grave silence, faces hidden behind shadows.

  "And so?" the Hoffman automaton said at last, when she had finished.

  "And so I came here to see what results were–" she began, but Hoffman interrupted her.

  "What results?" the automaton said. "What results indeed, Milady. I see no results."

  A murmur of agreement. She stared up at them, silent. "The nature of the corpse is not your concern. Your only task, child – your only purpose – is to find that which is missing. That which was taken. That which we want."

  Another murmur of agreement spread around, waves on the surface of a pond.

  "Results we want. And you bring none to us."

  She said nothing. They noticed her hand go, perhaps unconsciously, to the butt of her gun. There were some smiles at that. A charming young thing, very spirited. Too attached, perhaps, to her projectile weapon.

  "Where, for instance," the Hoffman automaton said, "are the two women whose apartment it is?"

  "I have not located them yet."

  "You did not try!"

  "I am only one person. I can't do everything."

  "Perhaps you should be replaced, then."

  She shrugged, waited him out, a small smile playing on her lips.

  The Hoffman automaton made a curious sound – a cross between a cough and a spit. She waited for it to readjust its sound.

  "Perhaps you could tell me what I'm looking for," she said.

  "That is not your concern!"

  "Does that mean you don't know?"

  Silence.

  The Council observed her, woman-child, this tall and deadly woman sworn to serve the Republic. Sworn to protect it, and that she does, but the danger from the East is great, greater than they had anticipated.

  And now she was turning the questioning on them.

  "Who is Tom Thumb working for?" she said.

  Silence, full of scratches.

  "And who are the people also looking for this thing, this object borne inside the man all the way across the seas?"

  "Let us see the impression you obtained," the Hoffman automaton said. "The tattoos."

  She stepped up to him, sensing the others shying away, further into the dark. A council of masks, hiding from prying eyes. What were they afraid of?

  "Is it the lizards you are so concerned with?" she said.

  "They are always a concern," the automaton said.

  Was that relief, detected in his words?

  The East. Indochina. What was there? A part of the world distant and filled with mysteries of its own. The Hoffman automaton took the sketch from her and studied it.

  "Imperial assassins," it said.

  What?

  "So she is after it too," it said, the voice low, barely above a murmur.

  Victoria? The lizard queen on her metal green throne?

  "It is as we suspected," another voice said, deep within the shadows.

  "And yet."

  She waited, but there was no more, not for a while. Then, "Proceed with the investigation. Report back to us. Find that which was stolen."

  "I still don't know–" she said, but the automaton cut her off: "You are dismissed."

  She walked off then, leaving the Council to its devices.

  Would she live? She was very good at not dying. They conferred amongst themselves. Perhaps another agent in the field – no, too dangerous. And already it was spreading, the grey–

  THIRTEEN

  The Little Grey Cells

  Back in the under-morgue, she helped herself to the medicine cupboard and cleaned her face. She felt fatigued, knew the long night was not yet over.

  She was not angry at the Council. It was the way they operated, seeing her and others like her as chess pieces and little more, to be moved on the board according to formulae and calculations she could not even imagine. They would keep her in the dark, using the power of her ignorance to bring out that which was hidden even from them. If there was such a thing.

  Viktor was at his lab, muttering to himself, bent over his microscope. She walked over to him. "What am I not being told?" she said.

  He blinked. "That covers a lot of ground," he said.

  "You seemed," she said, and then stopped, putting her thoughts in order. "Almost dismissive, earlier."

  "What do you mean?" But he looked flustered, a fish hooked and watching the ocean disappear away from him.

  "Of the corpse. You said you've never seen anything like it before–"

  "Yes?"

  She smiled at him. He took a step back.

  "I think you were lying."

  He tried to outstare her and failed. "That's absurd," he said, but his hands were fluttering, the fingers working as if independent from the body, and she thought – he wants to tell me. Poor Viktor, all alone in his underground lab, no one to share the excitements of science with… "Have you seen such a thing before?" she said.

  "Well," he said, still being evasive, knowing, she thought, that it wouldn't fool her, "naturally, in my line of work… reanimation of the… as it were… the effects of electricity on the human… such as… scientifically speaking…"

  "Viktor," she said, speaking patiently, as if to a child. "Scientifically speaking–" She smiled at him, trying to make it a nice smile, trying to reassure him. He was a nervous little man, afraid of crowds, torches, pitchforks and milk. "You have, haven't you?"

  He didn't answer. She moved closer to him, towering over him, knowing the effec
t she had on him and using it. "Viktor, Viktor," she said. "My poor little Viktor…"

  "Milady, I…"

  She ruffled his hair. He whimpered. "What are you trying to tell me, Viktor?"

  "The… the tissues… you see, they're –" then, with more force – "I can't," he said. "Council business, Milady. It's Council business!"

  "Out there," she said, "in the dark streets, out there in the night few dare to walk – out there I am the Council, Viktor."

  She looked down at him, then at his workbench. On the tabletop – was it flesh, a fold of skin? Grey and sickly – and moving. She listened back to what he said. "The effects of electricity on the human body," she said.

  He looked up at her, his eyes bright. Dying to tell her, she thought. "I know the effects of electricity on the human body," she said. "It does not make a man walk again, or open his eyes and point with a dead finger. It does the opposite. It kills."

  "My research indicates a high probability of eventual re–" he said but didn't finish. She smiled at him. "Is this it?" she said, pointing at the grey matter.

  "This? Oh, this is just a–"

  "Electricity does not do that to the human body," she said. "Am I correct, Viktor?"

  His fingers, interlacing, releasing, tapping air.

  "But what if the body is no longer human?" she said, and he jumped.

  "More coffee?" she said.

  "Thank you," he said. "I think I've drunk enough."

  "You are tightly wound up," she said. "Perhaps you need a rest. I know a castle–"

  "Please," he said, raising his hands before him like a shield. "No more castles."

  "Yes," she said. "I too find them overrated."

  "It's the draught," he said. "And the heating bill's always enormous."

  "Tell me about that body, Viktor. You have seen such a thing before, haven't you? I know you have. You want to tell me about it, don't you? You don't want me to get hurt, do you, Viktor? You don't–"

  "Please," he said, and she knew he was hers. "Show me," she said.

  He took her to the far side of the cavern. Past the cages again, and turning her eyes away from the figures inside. Viktor's experiments, following from the works of–

  No. She walked past and they came to a large metal door set into the rock. The under-morgue proper. When she put her hand to the door the metal was cold to the touch. Viktor played with a pad by the door and it opened with a faint hiss. Tendrils of fog ebbed out, as if reaching for them.

  "Follow me."

  She did. They went inside. Ice-cold, steel walls, icicles hanging

  like nooses from the ceiling. Inside: rows of metal cabinets pulled open, holding corpses in various stages of decomposition on their trays. Men, one woman, two children. The children looked almost identical, a boy and a girl with chinawhite skin turning grey.

  Viktor looked expectant. Waiting for her to make a connection… It took her a moment but the colour began to dominate her view and she said, "Grey."

  He said, "Yes."

  She came closer, examined the hand of the boy. The grey had spread down his arm, in patches, looking oily, looking… she wasn't sure. She reached to touch it and Viktor's hand held her back. "Don't," he said.

  He went to a table laden with instruments and returned with a prod. When he pressed the little trigger a burst of blue electricity sparked at the end.

  "Watch," he said. There was something almost fond in his voice when he said, "Watch the grey cells."

  She watched.

  He put the end of the stick to the boy's dead hand and pressed the trigger.

  She watched. The electricity singed the skin. She watched the grey shapes on the boy's white skin.

  Nothing at first.

  Then…

  The grey spots, she realised, were slowly moving.

  FOURTEEN

  Post-Mortem

  How to describe it? The grey moved along the boy's frozen corpse as if it were alive. It looked snake-like. It looked reptilian. It looked like mercury and it looked like shadows. That was it, she thought. Like grey shadows, growing on the boy's dead skin, animating it. Shadows bellowing across naked arms and chest, along closed eyes and china face. She said, "What is it?" and her voice was very small in that cold, hushed place.

  Viktor said, "We don't know."

  She said, "Where does it come from?" and he said, "That, Milady, is what the Council hopes you could tell us."

  She stared – and now the boy's left hand was twitching, the fingers closing, slowly, slowly, into a fist, and she took a step back when – there! – his eyes sprang open and the corpse stared at her, cold-blue eyes not seeing, dead eyes animated by a grey shadow that should not have existed, a wrong thing, unnatural and yet–

  "Stop it," she said.

  But Viktor was no longer applying the electricity.

  "The effect lasts for some time independently of the trigger," he said. "The cold slows it down. The main reason we're keeping them in here. You did well, by the way, disposing of the corpse. It would have been… inconvenient if the deceased began to walk down Rue Morgue post-mortem."

  She almost laughed. She felt a little hysterical. In one moment the investigation went from something understood – something within her remit, within the world as it was, as it should be – into something else entirely, something alien and unknown. "When did it start?" she said.

  The little scientist beside her shrugged. "Who knows?" he said. "We began grabbing them as soon as the reports started filtering in. I have no doubt we missed a few."

  "How long?"

  "Two years," he said. "Possibly three."

  "Years?" she said. She had to get some fresh air. The boy was moving now, his entire body shaking, the head moving in a silent no. "Open the door," she said.

  Viktor, too, seemed happier once they were outside, the door safely closed behind them.

  "Is it–" she said, and hesitated.

  "Infectious?"

  She nodded. Viktor said, "Not so far, but…"

  "But what?"

  "It seems to be spreading."

  Moving grey shapes. It was as if, having viewed the corpse (and now she realised, too, that she had come in close contact with the dead man in the Rue Morgue, skin-to-skin, and did the subtle grey shapes leap from one to the other? Were they even now working their way into the fabric of her being, into her cells and bone-marrow, into her bloodstream and brain?) she was now seeing the world in a skewed fashion, the night world of black shades transformed into a half-light place, inhabited by moving grey shapes… She blinked but they would not go away, houses and windows and lamps at strange angles, footsteps in dust and clouds flying low.

  Like the shadows of another world, she thought, and the night felt colder, clammier somehow.

  She had left the catacombs on the left bank of the Seine, exiting through an Employees Only door of a hotel on Rue de la Bûcherie. She felt a sense of urgency now, a need to find the missing women, to begin to answer the questions that were growing, sprouting like grey-capped mushrooms all over her post-mortem investigation.

  Who were the black-clad assailants in Montmartre? Who had killed the man called Yong Li? Were they the same people? It seemed unlikely – unless they already had the object in their possession and wanted to discourage her from pursuing them. She had asked the Council and Hoffman had said, "Imperial assassins."

  But which empire? Was the lizard queen behind the murder? Yet all the threads were leading East, away from these cold European lands…

  Her carriage was waiting for her. A black unmarked vehicle, its mute driver ready with the horses. She could have had a baruchlandau, a horseless carriage, to take her through the narrow streets of Paris. She preferred the horses. Like canaries down in a mine, the horses could warn her of danger before it was there.

  "Pigalle," she told the driver. He nodded, without expression. A large man, with stitch marks on his forehead, around his skull. One arm was shorter than the other. One of Viktor's creatur
es, who only came out at night. The man was dressed in a black cloak and a low-hung hat. Just another shadow in this city of shadows, unremarkable, invisible to all but the few like itself. She settled back in the carriage and felt the streets pass without looking at them, listening to the city as it entered the deep-end of night.