It was a long walk. I don’t think my legs would have held up if I hadn’t used my powers to bolster them, basically wrapping my legs in psychokinetic casts to give them sturdiness and heft. But that wasn’t just because of the distance. No: something spooky was afoot.
Were it not for my perfect wyrm memory, I wouldn’t have been able to find Ward 13. At one point, I found myself staring at a dead end, despite the fact that my memory told me there should have been a corridor there. However, the mystery was solved when I peeked through my wyrmsight. The inexplicable wall coexisted with a thick, vibrant pataphysical weave that crisscrossed the corridor.
On a hunch, I reached for the wall, only for my hand to pass through.
“Whoa…” Andalon said, eyes bulging in shock.
It was an illusion, and I had a pretty darn good idea of who was responsible.
“This has to be Dr. Horosha’s doing,” I muttered.
I stepped on through.
On entering Ward 13, the first thing I noticed among the Ward’s unfinished refurbishment was that, at first glance, the Ward seemed to have far more people than it had had before, or should have ever had, given the pandemic. But, as I watched, I realized that most of the crowd wasn’t actually there. There was just no way that some of them could have been up and about as they were. Standing. Talking.
Breathing.
They’re ghosts, I realized.
On my last visit to the SHG, Andalon (or should I say Ampersandalon?) had used her abilities to give me a glimpse of the other transformees’ ghosts. I hadn’t been able to perceive many of them on my own. Apparently, my transformation had progressed enough that that was no longer an issue.
Either that, or a lot more souls had been uploaded into them.
“No,” Andalon said, floating beside me, “it’s ‘cause you’ve gotten wyrmlier.”
Much to my horror, quite a few of the ghosts were in terrible shape. They looked like corpses drowned at sea that had gotten up and walked onto the beach. The freakish fungal growths erupted from their bodies would have made even cancer blush. Fever-sweat dripped through the ratty hair that matted their deformed, skeletal faces. Black ooze and speckled green dust stained their hospital gowns.
“Fudge…” I mumbled.
They were turning into demons!
“Andalon, why?” I asked. “What’s going on here?”
She shook her head. “I dunno. Maybe they can’t see it?”
Fortunately, the situation wasn’t entirely hopeless; the nascent demons were the least common variety of ghost. The vast majority of the spirits were strikingly ordinary. You wouldn’t have looked twice if you passed them while walking the city’s streets: bowler hats, felt coats, the works. If anything, it was the spirits’ prosaicness that gave them away. Even though it had barely been a week since DAISHU had declared NFP-20 a global pandemic, it felt like an eternity since the world had seemed even half as normal as those ghosts looked.
A faint green haze filled the room, accompanied by the familiar sickly sweet stink of the NFP-20 fungus and its spores. In its own, twisted way, the haze was the best defense against pesky interlopers that a transformee could ever ask for.
If I focused, beneath the haze and the undead conversations, I could hear a strange kind of music.
Andalon smiled at that. She pointed. “Listen! They’re singing!”
That’s right. Back when we were autopsying poor Ileene, Andalon had told me that the wyrms share information—including, presumably, ghosts—by singing. I’d seen the Hell-touch spirits trapped within Ileene’s corrupted, misbegotten transformee spirits. I suppose that was what was happening here, too, only I was seeing more than before.
The wyrmsong was almost beautiful. It was like a slow concerto grosso, but played on pipe organs that wheezed and droned a slow, measured polyphony, eerie and incantatory. Looking and listening, I could trace the sounds back to figures hidden in the sporey haze of Ward 13’s dim light. I caught sight of golden eyes, and distended, snout-capped faces—mouthless and porose. Heads perched on necks stuck out like lampposts above the rest. Only transformees like these, further along in their changes, had joined in the “singing”.
The effect of their song went even deeper, a physical and mental pressure within my head, as if someone was rubbing their thumbs at the backs of my eyeballs. Though it wasn’t a painful sensation, it wasn’t exactly pleasant, either.
Not knowing how to proceed with what I wanted to do—would I just go to the middle of the room and yell, or something?—I maundered through the crowd, doing my best to avoid collisions with the living or the dead. It would have been easier if silent bystanders weren’t spooking the heck of me, flickering in and out of existence at a drop of the hat, like faulty holograms.
At the sound of a man erupting in bourgeois furor, I whipped my head around to find myself face-to-face with a formidable mustache and even more formidable male-pattern baldness. The spirit’s starched collar, black tie, and brown, houndstooth tweed suit made it clear that he meant business. He was pointing—and yelling—at a haunting, therianthropic figure of indeterminate gender, wearing a physician’s gown. It took me a second to realize I was even looking at a transformee. Below the neck, other than the claws, everything seemed normal: white coat covering pale blue scrubs. But the physician’s head was another story. It was like one of those Arrakan votive statues—Sarsapadlaya, really.
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“Sapa-lai-uh?” Andalon mumbled.
The serpent-headed Arrakan god of wisdom and secrets, I thought-explained.
Andalon just stared at me in confusion.
Though the physician’s neck was slightly shorter than mine, their head was much farther along in the changes than anything I’d yet seen. Six glistening, golden orb-like eyes studded an almost draconic muzzle, two to each side. Their whole head was sheathed in dark wyrm scales. Like Lopé and Cassius, the tip of this transformee’s snout was mouthless, with a smattering of symmetrically arranged pores that flexed and twitched with their speech. They squeezing closed one moment, widening the next, producing their wyrmsong’s strange, interwoven music.
For some reason, I couldn’t help but compare it to a clarinet. The snout-pores reminded me of the finger-holes on my clarinet. Covering them or opening them changed the quality of the sound, just like when I played.
“You could be a walking halibut for all I care!” the mustached man yelled.
I couldn’t make heads or tails of the transformee’s music-speech response.
“He’s tellin’ the mushty guy to calm down,” Andalon said, looking up to face me.
You can understand it? I thought.
She nodded.
Well, that was certainly useful.
“You’re the physician here!” the man continued. “You must have a manager! I demand to speak to my accountant immediately! This is a crucial turning point. If my assets are not properly liquidated and re-invested, I’ll be ruined!”
I actually chuckled at that. It reminded me of my own experiences from a couple days before. Suddenly, an aggrieved female nurse in mauve scrubs flickered into existence and punched the tweedy man square in the jaw. He vanished from sight a second later.
“I’m sorry,” the nurse said, addressing troubled onlookers, including me, “He gets like that sometimes.”
I could feel the connection between myself and the transformee. Their music-speech was transmitting their experience of their ghosts to me and everyone else in range.
I guess I now knew how my console felt when I downloaded an update for an app.
Turning away, I moved over to the wall, at the edge of the crowd, looking around as I tried to figure out how to proceed. (Andalon, of course, ended up cutely miming my motions.) It didn’t help that I wasn’t very comfortable with crowds like these.
“Genneth?”
I turned, and—to my relief and my surprise—I found myself face to face with Dr. Horosha. To my wyrmsight, Suisei wasn’t yet a member of Club Wyrm (nor, for that matter, Club Plague-Victim), which made it all the more surprising that he hadn’t joined Club Hazmat Suit. More troublingly, my wyrmsight wasn’t picking up the pataphysical barrier he used to keep the spores at bay. Were his abilities no longer working? I dreaded to think of what would happen if Suisei developed a Type One infection.
We needed him far too much. For one, I doubted the self-help group would continue to stay hidden for very long, especially with the Trenton military now roving Elpeck’s streets.
Dr. Horosha was disheveled, to say the least. The plague was putting an impossible amount of strain on him; it was running him haggard. Some of the buttons on his white coat had come undone, revealing the deep, verdant green scrubs he wore underneath. One button was outright gone, as was his striped necktie. His once sharply combed hair had been reduced to a dark, tangled frizz, and his face sagged from denied exhaustion.
“What are you doing here, Dr. Howle?” He narrowed his tired eyes. “Is something amiss?”
I was going to tell him, but my curiosity got the better of me. Also, I was definitely trying to buy time. I was not looking forward to explaining to all these transformees that they were in the middle of a war with the forces of Hell.
I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Where did your electrostatic barrier go?”
He whispered as well. “Now that I know the others will eventually be able to discern my barrier, I have taken measures to disguise it.”
I frowned. “Of course you have.”
“Thank you for that, by the way,” he said. “Had you not told me about your ability to see pataphysics, I would not have been able to take these preventive measures.”
Sighing, I changed the topic. “What’s going on here with all the ghosts?”
“We made the decision yesterday,” he said. “Anyone who speaks with one of their ghosts should, if possible, manifest them to the rest of us.”
“It took me a while to figure that out,” I said, glancing at Andalon, who smiled at the attention. “How’d you guys manage?”
Suisei smirked. “Cooperation in the face of happy accidents,” he said. He shook his head. “It never ceases to amaze what can be accomplished when trained professionals put their heads together and make a concerted effort to do something as unit.” He looked at one of the singing transformees.
When I saw the green highlights in what remained of the individual’s hair, I realized it was none other than Tira, the receptionist.
“It started with Tira over there. She began to sing…” He sighed. “I had suggested it to her as a way of coping with her loss of the capacity for speech.”
“Good call,” I said.
Suisei shook his head. “Greg begged to disagree. He complained of being pestered by ghosts unknown to him. From there, it was a simple matter of experiment and deduction. From what we have gathered thus far, the ‘wyrmsong’ communicates vast quantities of highly compressed data. The ability of an individual to receive and interpret this data is proportional to how far along they happen to be in their transformation.”
So, yeah, basically what Andalon had told me, just with more detail.
Since Suisei was clearly having a rough time, and since I was still nervous about having to speak to all the transformees, I didn’t bother telling him that I already knew that. Instead, I took the opportunity to tell Suisei what I’d discussed with Andalon about the statocysts we’d found in the autopsy of Ileene’s fetus, explaining it as my own theorizing, of course. In order to continue our conversation, we stepped off to the side, down a hallway branching off from the unfinished Ward’s main corridor.
I didn’t mention Andalon to him yet, though.
“Fascinating,” Suisei said, nodding after I finished my explanation. “That… is a very astute observation, Genneth. I think you might be right: the development and maturation of the statocyst is likely correlated with the ability to receive wyrmsong broadcasts.”
Actually, I thought, wait a minute.
One of the many signs that I was getting less hopeless was that instead of going ahead and not doing the smart thing, I just realized there was a smart thing I could do, and resolved to do it.
I could practice my talk with Suisei!
Take that, Genneth of last week! It was character growth time!