Miles to Babylon

IV: The Bildrager Reel, Part III

Amidst the shapeless grains, a room began to appear. Inside was a bed and some sort of boxy machine with a screen at the side, but it was elsewise blurry as tears. Squinting didn't help. Nor could any clue come from listening; the only sound from the bildtrager was the steady grind of timeworn machinery, broken only by Auntie Thea's stifled gasp. Awen quickly saw the reason—some bits of gray she had taken for defects on the film were, in fact, a woman's head and bare arms. She was lying down, most of her under a long, white shroud—with thick straps protruding from beneath.

"Reilow!" Auntie Thea snapped.

"Yes, yes," Reilow said between heavy breaths, as he sped up his turning. "This isn't it; she can look away if she wants to."

She did, but she couldn't; not even as the grains thinned to reveal the woman's savage face, bent into an inhuman scowl as she gnashed her teeth bloody, her screams too easy to imagine as her jaw gaped and her bones buckled against the straps—even as the black scars appeared, crawling down her neck...

"Reilow!" Auntie Thea shouted again, gripping Awen's shoulder.

"Yes, we're almost through," the alchemist panted, wiping a few hairs back from his pallid forehead. A moment later the image swelled into a fuzzy grey blot, before finally fading to black. It was then that Awen remembered to breathe, her heart pounding in reply, and her mind put words to what she had seen: that could have been Lydia.

But it won't, she reminded herself. I healed her, I healed her...

"Here we are," Dr Reilow said as a new image resolved. "This, here, child—and you as well, Thea. Have a good look at this one."

But even a good look showed little, and this picture was far sharper than the one before. It was nearly still, except for the motes that flitted across the film, and revealed nothing but a number of shapeless black blobs that pulsated slowly like malignant, breathing shadows. An eerie glare flickered around the edges, perhaps from something just out of frame. Awen held her hand to her chest—her heart was hammering against her ribs like a prisoner. But why? There was nothing there.

"An Etheroscope scan," Auntie Thea murmured. Her lips must've barely moved. "Of the same patient?"

"Just so," Dr Reilow huffed. "A patient at the Truhart Institute in Mesembria. In the final stages, obviously." He released his hands, letting the crank come to a stop on its own. The black blobs stopped pulsing, and Awen hoped they would disappear; they didn't. But that word, Etheroscope...

"You mean that was... that was her brain?" Those throbbing spots, like dreadful little heartbeats... the idea was so horrifying that it burst from Awen's mouth before she could hold it back. Miss Lamm stifled a giggle, and that was somehow worse.

"If only," Dr Reilow said, turning around. The candlelight made his face all the paler—or maybe he wasn't entirely unaffected. "Arcmorium film reads deeper than that."

Awen turned to Auntie Thea but, if this made any sense to her, she didn't show it. Instead, it was Father Byrnholt who spoke. "Though Mind be ever wayward..." he whispered, leaving Awen to ponder what he meant.

"And here," Reilow said, as the screen changed, "are the scans of one Lydia Blackmoor." The screen changed. But instead of fading to black, the pulsing anomalies simply filled in, leaving a grey expanse behind them broken only by the occasional noise. "See that, Thea? No trace nor trifle of Decay."

"It's gone." Awen could scarce believe it, but there it was.

Reilow scratched his chin. "Gone? Hmm... an attractive notion, that. The Cothe is nothing. One can't make nothing go away. Not unless..."

The way Dr Reilow spoke of nothing reminded Awen of the spectral parasite in the vale... do they know about that, too?

Dr Reilow dabbed at his brow with a handkerchief, then placed his hand back onto the crank. "Remember this," he said, eyes locking onto Awen's for the briefest instant before he began to turn.

Awen almost closed her eyes, convinced she was about to look once more into the sunken black eyes of the nothing-creature of the woods... but at first, it seemed Dr Reilow had turned the reel backwards. The dark nebulae had returned. This time there was only one, still pulsating, tiny white specks swimming hypnotically around it like schools of grey fish. There were other things toward the border of the film, but Awen couldn't tell what they were. They looked like pale imitations of shapes she knew—trees, perhaps, maybe some mountains in the distance. Somehow it all led back to the swirl of the black spot, as if even the film grains themselves were being drawn toward it...

"Enough!" Auntie Thea yelled, lashing forward with an energy Awen would have thought impossible. She yanked the bildtrager's cord from the wall; the machine died with a faint sputtering sound, leaving the ghost of its image burned into Awen's mind like a white sun.