“No,” Charles lied, then shuddered and looked away as a face began to form over the man’s shoulder. He could not bear to see their eyes.
“You’re seeing them,” the woman accused. “You’re seeing them now, aren’t you?”
They were pushing through her body, making their faces merge with hers. They made it appear as if she were dead, decaying right before him, her eyes hollowing to deep black sockets, her cheek sliding away as he watched. Charles looked down at his hands.
“It’s just a side effect of the drugs.” The mist was coming across his lap now, curling against his wrists. He resisted the urge to shake it off. “It will go away.”
The woman gave a dubious grunt. “Marie says you scream like you’re being skinned alive.”
A tiny, gray-black face appeared above Charles’s shaking hands. It had no eyes, and its mouth only gaped. It was a skull, but it was a skull warped and twisted into agony.
“Help us,”
it pleaded and reached for him.
“It only happens to me,” Charles assured her. “You won’t see them. Ah!” The skull before him had begun to disintegrate, and he’d made the mistake of closing his eyes. When he opened them, he was sweating, and his doxies were climbing off the bed.
He reached out, trying to pull them back as they retreated through mist so thick now he couldn’t even see the walls. “Please,” he begged. “I’ll pay you double. Triple. Whatever you want. Just stay. Don’t leave me alone with them.
Please
.”
The man was shaking his head. “Ghosts are bad,” he whispered, and he turned away.
“No!” Charles climbed to his feet, stepping over the mist figures, swallowing his revulsion and shivering from the cold that emanated from them. “Please! You don’t know what this is like! Every day! Every day, every moment, unless I am high or fucking! And even that’s starting not to work.” He wiped his cheeks, which had become damp with sweat and tears, and he tried to smile. “Please—just stay with me. One of you. Just stay so I don’t have to go through it alone.
Please
. I beg you. I will give you anything if you stay. Anything.”
But the whores only shook their heads as they retreated into the mist, and then the mist thickened and they were gone. Charles called to them, reaching for them, but they did not come back. Soon he could not even see the end of the bed, and then he could not even see his hand in front of his face.
“No,” he whispered, swallowing against the thickness of his throat. “Please, no.”
The figures formed in earnest now, a horde of wraiths, gaunt-faced and empty-eyed, moaning, reaching, clutching at him until he did not know his own skin from the hands that pressed upon him.
“Help us,”
they pleaded, pulling on him.
“Help us, Father. Help us. Set us free. Help us.”
“I can’t help you,” Charles whispered, knowing they would not listen, but he couldn’t stand it anymore. “I’m not your father—I can’t help you! I don’t know who you are! I can’t help you!”
The gaunt faces turned angry.
“Help us, Father!”
They tugged at him, pulling him down to the bed, their hands pressing on his chest until he thought his ribs would break.
“Help us, help us, help us, help us!”
“I don’t know how!” Charles shouted.
Cold fingers pressed against his eyes, forcing them closed, and Charles saw them all, all the ghosts, and he began to scream.
He woke hours later, cold and shaking and then vomiting. He turned on instinct to the side, and strong hands gripped his hair, aiming his head at a wooden bucket.
“That’s the way,” a gruff voice said, and the hands held him patiently as he emptied his stomach again. When Charles was done, his companion handed him a damp towel, which stank only slightly less than the bed. Charles ran it over his forehead, his mouth, and his neck.
“Thank you,” he murmured and fell back against the mattress. He opened his eyes and smiled weakly when he saw his rescuer was Bimsy. “Sorry, good man. Thank you for looking after me. Again.”
But Bimsy was not smiling, and his face looked grim and hollow in the lamplight. “You screamed like a banshee, Mr. Perry. You drove customers out of every bed and out of the bar. I had to send for an alchemist for my poor Alma.”
Charles realized where this was heading. “I’ll see you’re well paid. I’ll pay for all the business you lost. I’ll pay you double.”
But Bimsy’s eyes were full of fear. “I can’t bear to hear that sound again, lad. You couldn’t give me all the money in the world to make me hear that sound again.”
“Bimsy,” he pleaded, “I have nowhere else to go.”
“Sure as you do,” Bimsy said gruffly. “Fancy man like you could buy your own place if you wanted.”
“Not with my grandfather,” Charles shot back. “Not with my family, as you well know. And you’re the only innkeeper that won’t turn me in for the Indecency Act.”
“Go to an alchemist, then.” Bimsy was grasping now. “That one in Golden Lane. The renegade—did you look into him like I said?”
No, Charles had not. He’d gone as far as the door, seen the tubes and potions and smelled the sulfur, and he’d run straight for a dram. Charles sat up and reached for the old man’s hand. “Bimsy, if you think the sounds I make are frightening, imagine being the one who sees what causes me to make those sounds.”
Bimsy had the decency to look guilty, but he still pulled back. “I can’t help you, Mr. Perry,” he said with some apology, but mostly with fear. “I’m sorry. But you’re no longer welcome at the Randy Sailor.”
Charles wanted to plead. He wanted to get on his knees, to beg, to promise to be Bimsy’s slave if that’s what it took, but he didn’t, because he could see by the man’s face that this battle was already lost. The only victory now would be to leave with some small shred of his dignity, so Charles smiled weakly and leaned back. “Very well,” he said with studied nonchalance. “Just send me your final bill, and I’ll see you’re paid.”
Bimsy winced but nodded. “Go see that alchemist, Mr. Perry. It isn’t natural to scream like that. Not natural at all.”
“An alchemist is a bad idea for someone in my family,” Charles said.
The room seemed to be growing darker. Was that a cloud going past the window? Was it something else?
He reached for his silk jacket, draped carefully over a nearby chair, and fished around for a cigarette before sticking the nub of one between his lips. “I may be a bastard son of the House of Perry and Whitby, but I carry that blood nonetheless. An alchemist would make a feast of me.”
“This one’s different,” Bimsy said. “He’s rogue.”
“That only makes him worse,” Charles pointed out. He searched the pocket again, now for his flint, then pulled it out and held it to the end of his cigarette. He caught a shadow moving in the corner of the room, just starting to creep, and his hand shook.
“This one isn’t like that. He’s after power of a different kind.” Bimsy took the lighter from him and made a spark. “He does sex magic, that one.”
Charles’s eyebrows shot up into his hairline as he inhaled. He let the smoke pool in his lungs, felt the buzz smooth out the edges in his head, and he watched the shadow melt away. He let the smoke out on a sigh. “Sounds kinky.”
Bimsy shrugged. “No worse than anything you already done, I reckon.”
Charles couldn’t argue that one. He smoked for a moment, considering. Sex magic with a rogue alchemist. It still sounded dangerous.
In the corner of the room, the shadow stirred again, and Charles quickly looked away.
“I sent a boy over to ask, and he said he could see you today,” Bimsy pressed. “Said you sounded intriguing.”
The shadows in the other corners were moving too, not yet forming, but they were gaining strength too fast. Within an hour, he’d be in their throes again.
I can’t take much more of this
. He drew on the cigarette again with some intensity.
“I thought you was dead when I first found you today,” Bimsy said. “Lord Whitby’s grandson, dead in my house. I all but felt the noose around my neck, lad.”
Charles tapped his cigarette into the bucket and shook his head. “The ghosts don’t kill me. They won’t.” He didn’t know how he knew this, but he did. Drive him mad, though—
that
, they could do.
Just like dear Dad
. He sighed and turned to Bimsy. “If I go to this alchemist, can I come back here again?”
“If he fixes you, sure enough you can,” Bimsy agreed.
The shadows were moving again, and the mist was rising. It wouldn’t even be an hour before they were back.
“The alchemist said to send you over as soon as you were about,” Bimsy said. “Just think, you could have a cure, go home and rest, and be back with a new pair of bunnies by tomorrow night.”
It would never work like that, Charles knew. If it worked at all, with a rogue alchemist it would never be that easy. But the shadows stalking Charles were taller now, and he could see their faces forming as their thin gray fingers reached around Bimsy’s throat.
Charles tossed his cigarette into the bucket and sat up in the bed. “Hand me my coat, Bimsy.”
He shrugged into the blue silk, wrapping himself in stale beer and smoke and perfume, and headed for the door, ignoring as best he could the icy cold and the weak, plaintive cries that echoed all around him.
* * *
All alchemists had their lairs in Golden Lane.
They practiced all over Etsey, but their sanctuaries were in the capital, in Boone: their laboratories, their dungeons, their cabinets of curiosity, and their vaults they never so much as let their apprentices open. The world’s darkest and most dangerous secrets were likely all tucked within this narrow half mile of street, but no thief dared so much as glance down it. Being
cured
by an alchemist was often enough to get you killed. Stumbling into one of their lairs without their knowledge could bring you a life that made you wish for death.
Charles turned up his collar and huddled against the wind as he maneuvered his way into the narrow, brick-lined street. There were gas lamps flickering in several of the windows, and in one there was even an electric lamp, a luxury not even Charles’s family yet enjoyed. The shops at this end of the alley were of the guild and therefore were of high quality. Each alchemist here had a patron, and the grander the patron, the grander the storefront. Charles’s grandfather kept one of them. Charles had met him once a year from the time he was born until he was thirteen. He still had nightmares about being stuck with needles, his blood dripping into a bowl as the wizened old creature watched it spill away. The alchemist had taken extra when Lord Whitby wasn’t watching, because it was fun to play with the blood of a House heir, not to mention profitable. In fact, Charles had been fairly certain his first hit of drug at a party had been amplified with a by-product of a visit with Old Rooky.
Alchemists were nasty, paranoid creatures, and they loved power. Charles’s blood was nothing but power, though little good it did him. He had no talent for magic. He’d tried, but it had come to nothing, which wasn’t unexpected. He had, as his grandfather loved to remind him, talent for nothing at all.
Except sex. Charles was
fantastically
good at fucking.
Charles stopped at the edge of Golden Lane and looked back to the dock, lighting another cigarette as he watched workers unload the cargo. Yes, Bimsy had known just how to work him, hadn’t he? Sex magic. If Old Rooky had used
that
to test his blood, he wouldn’t have minded so much. Still, Charles worried. Nothing about alchemists had ever been good, in his experience. And if this one was a rogue—well, either he was an even more heartless bastard than the others or he wasn’t any good. Also, fun as sex magic sounded, what good could it possibly do? One way or another, this was almost guaranteed to be a mistake.
But as Charles stood there, hesitating, staring into the foggy shroud of the docks, he watched the gray mist begin to form again. He finished the cigarette, tossed it into a puddle, and continued down the winding lane. Mistake or not, it was the only choice left outside of madness.
He passed the fancy shops, the modest ones, and then the very, very humble, until at last he left the lane altogether, leaving the brick paving to wade through the mucky mud of an even narrower alley to the small, huddled, unmarked dwellings that were the havens of the alchemists operating outside the guild. Charles grimaced and put his handkerchief to his nose to dull the stink as he wound his way to the dark shack at the farthest end of the street. Once there, he lifted his hand and knocked on the door.
“Come in,” said a voice from within.
Charles smoothed his hair behind his ears, cleared his throat, and opened the door.
The room was very small, and it was crowded with books and complicated sets of glass tubing. The shelves were full of pots, jars, and cases whose very appearance made Charles ill at ease. It smelled ten times worse than the alley and the Randy Sailor bedroom put together: there was sulfur, yes, but rot as well, and other unnamable, undesirable pungent scents that tickled the roof of Charles’s mouth and the back of his throat and made him want to gag. He pressed his handkerchief more firmly to his nose, sucked a breath in through his mouth, and waited.
The alchemist sat at the desk in the far corner of the room. He was thin, sallow, and sandy-haired. He had his fingers threaded together, resting them beneath his chin as he ran his narrowed eyes up and down Charles as if he were little more than a laboratory sample.
He was not in any way handsome. Not that it mattered. But given this was allegedly to be “sex magic,” it would have made things a little easier.
Charles lowered his handkerchief and made a slightly awkward bow. “I am Charles Perry. I was told perhaps you could help me.”
The man made no answer, only continued to watch Charles patiently. He looked mildly amused.
Charles shifted uneasily on his feet and reached into his pocket for his purse. “I of course can pay—”
The man sat up, freeing his hands so that one of them could wave Charles’s comment away. “Payment will be discussed at a later time. Before such mundane details are broached, I have several questions I wish to put to you.” He leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Some are necessary for me to begin my work. Others are, I admit, simply to satisfy my own curiosity.”