Beckett lashed out with his lantern just as his target came in range; red light spilled over the form, revealing it to be made of thick, silvery-gray smoke. The sparking emitters from the lamp touched it, and it became immediately a gout of fire, hot and orange in the dark, before vanishing utterly. The dark tunnels of the undercroft were obscured by red and purple afterimages; Beckett couldn’t see Valentine tearing off through the sludge after the ectoplasmatist, though he had no doubt that it’s what the young coroner was up to. Instead, he stood with his arm in front of his eyes, waiting for his vision to clear.
Another gunshot, painfully loud after the brief moment of quiet. Beckett looked up, squinting in the dark for the red glimmer of Valentine’s lamp.
“Got this one,” the young coroner said, as he returned from around another corner.
“This one?” Beckett asked him.
“Yeah; didn’t James say? He heard a second one, that’s why he sent me down.”
“A second…” Beckett blinked again, then looked down at the sludge at his feet. He lowered the lantern slightly, casting its lurid light across the floor of the tunnel…
…which was covered in thick, silvery-gray smoke in the shape of hands and eyes and faces, that churned and roiled and reached out for him, hands gripping at his wrists, trying to hold lantern and gun at bay, faces crawling thickly up his body, struggling to get into his mouth, clutching at his throat, trying to crush the life out of him…so much, how can there be this much? Beckett thought, as panic struggled inside him. There was a river of that weird emanation, we’ve been wading through it! Ectoplasmaticists made the stuff from their own substance, how could there be this much of it inside a person?
Valentine cried out, firing his gun in the dark, stumbling, dropping his lamp…
Oh. Beckett thought, as he saw the sparking red emitters drop to the ground. No.
The undercroft became an inferno as the ectoplasm that had filled it ignited in a flash of light and heat. Fire washed over the two coroners, stinging at their eyes, singeing hair and clothes, sucking the air from their lungs.
The fire was gone in a less than a second. Beckett took a deep breath, and looked up at Valentine, who was gingerly touching his face and attempting to ascertain whether he’d just burnt off his eyebrows.
“All right?”
“I think so,” Valentine said. “I think it was too fast to cause-”
A ragged shape leapt on him, emerging from the weird cascade of shadows that the heat lamps had made. Valentine grunted and staggered, the black form clinging to him.
“Damn it,” Beckett muttered. “Valentine, stand still!”
Valentine continued to stagger, but managed to take a few drunken steps towards the old coroner, who drew his arm back and struck the ectoplasmatist across the side of the head. The man went limp and slithered to the floor.
“Oh, ugh, have I got any on me?” Valentine asked, checking his coat.
Beckett squatted down next to the unconscious ectoplasmatist. “This one was real.” The man was lying face down on the filthy, damp floor of the tunnel, which was now mercifully clear. Beckett rolled the man onto his back and would have gasped, had not thirty years of horrible sights thoroughly inured him to the deformations of human misery. The man was gaunt and starved, with sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, skin as thin as paper and so pale it was nearly transparent. It had a peculiar, waxy quality to it, as though he was really just a skull onto which an oily picture of a face had been hastily painted.
Ectoplasmatists drew on their own substance to create the sticky white gunk called ectoplasm, but Beckett had never seen anything like this-never a heretic able to create a full body, never one that could fill the floor of the tunnel with the stuff. No wonder the man looked starved; he must have torn out and rarefied all his own flesh to create so much.
The man opened his eyes, suddenly, and they rolled in their sockets as though there wasn’t enough muscle left to hold them in place. “The asphyx,” he whispered, “will sustain…” his eyes widened in horror then, and his mouth opened and stretched. He began to make a gagging sound, then all at once vomited a thick fountain of white hands and arms and staring eyes, that boiled from his mouth and grappled with the coroners. The man on the ground went rigid and arched his back, as though the ectoplasm had a life of its own, as though it were wrenching itself free of his body, a spirit made manifest and disdainful of the rotting meat that housed it.
Sticky thick gluey ectoplasm surrounded them, but before it could find purchase, Beckett drew his gun and shot the ectoplasmatist in the head. The ectoplasm continued to slither around his body, trying to crush his lungs, struggling to get control of his arms; fear slivered past Becektt’s veneine haze, as he saw Valentine almost suffocating beneath the cloud of vomited-up emanations. Beckett managed to shoot again, and again, shattering the dead man’s skull, but the weird fluid remained, heavy and congealing on his arms, keeping the red-hot lantern emitters at a distance, closing around his face, struggling to get past his scarf and into his nose and mouth.
Then, at once, the plasm evaporated, leaving behind no trace except for a persistent greasy feeling that Beckett knew would persist for several days. The old coroner permitted himself a small sigh of relief.
“Gah,” Valentine said, as he sagged back against the wall. “That…does it usually do that?”
Beckett looked down at the dead ectoplasmatist. The man’s head was fully destroyed, but little blood or brain matter had splashed from it. There seemed to be little of anything left in the man’s body. “I’ve never seen it last so long after the man died,” Beckett told his companion. “Usually…usually it just disappears.”
“So…what’s different?”
The coroner began rifling through the man’s pockets. He found himself weirdly squeamish about coming into contact with the withered body, but ignored the feeling; the veneine had been shaking loose all sorts of new sensations, lately. There was something dry and ragged in the ectoplasmatist’s inside coat pocket; Beckett got a hold of it and drew out a weathered, folded-up quarto.
“What’s that?” Valentine asked him. He leaned in close to look at it. “Huhm. ‘On the Life Suspire.’ That…what is that?”
“The ‘life suspire’ is what ectoplasmatists call their goop.” Beckett settled down against the far wall of the tunnel. It was cold, and so he held his lantern close, bathing in the dry heat. “They think that, beneath the Word that made the world, there’s a…I guess a whisper. A secret meaning that only some people can understand. They think it lives inside them, and they can draw it out and use it.”
Valentine looked around the tunnel. There was no sign of silvery ectoplasm, but that strange feeling of greasiness remained. “That’s heresy. I mean, real heresy.”
“It’s all real heresy,” Beckett told him, but he understood what the young man meant. Ectoplasmatists were unique among heretical scientists in that they fully embraced the idea that what they were doing was heresy. Necrologists, geometers, even the oneiricists usually acted like the Church Royal had banned their sciences in some fit of drunken power. There was nothing in the heirologue or the grammars that prohibited necrology, really; it was just the Church trying to keep control of people.
But the ectoplasmatists-they really thought they were tapped into a secret, true religion that the Abbots were trying to hide. That was why ectoplasmatists loved the undercroft so much. They found some perverse satisfaction in practicing their obscenities right beneath the seat of religion in Trowth.