Post by Ladd Russo of the Russo Family on May 1, 2011 23:26:21 GMT -5
Solomon Crost could not honestly say it was the first time in his life that he had awoken in an unfamiliar place with no memory of the night before, but it was the first time in a long time, and he never enjoyed it. That was how a man died, pulling such stunts. Foolish, very foolish. However tempting it was to believe that he had been hit over too heavily with the drink…well, the possibility did not strike him at with quite the right ring. It was not like him to forget his limit. He started coughing, fitfully at first, but soon with more violence, bringing him to the neat room that now held him. A dull roaring sound shook the air, far away. That was a secondary concern, however.
Fire seemed to be blazing against his skin—his eyes stung dryly and his mouth was sullen, sticky. With a feeling of revulsion and deep discomfort he kicked a remnant of sheet from his legs, feeling as though it was goose-feather quilt in the heart of the summer. It flopped wetly; his sweat had drenched it thoroughly, though the water seemed unable to stay long on his frying-pan-searing skin. He dove from the bed and landed easily, needing to get away from the suffocating thing that magnified his heat back against him like a glass.
The first order of business was a window, and despite his thirst he staggered toward it, wedging long fingers under the painted grain of wood and shoving the device open with desperation. A storm, the thing that had been crying in the background since he awoke, now screamed with a ferocious intensity, bringing fingers of wind and rain into the room. Every brush of wet, frigid air was a heavenly torture, a crust of bread for a starving man. Not enough to save but a hint of what could. Solomon tore himself away presently and moved to assault the fire, who was burning far too merrily. With iron implements like ice against his skin he poked up a flaming brand and defenestrated it with no regret. He then repeated the process until the hearth was empty save for coals.
Legs trembling, Solomon went back to the window and leaned as far as he could out of it without following the path of the logs, breathing raggedly. It seemed his fever would be a stubborn one, and that was assuredly what it was. It could not be alcohol, this. A flame had settled inside him, burning a deep, hard knot. Some of the sickly pall of night, which usually he was healthful enough to face, must have invaded. Or maybe a passing demon had brought this upon him, during his journey in a foreign land. Risking night demons and night air had been a habit of his, he had to admit, to the point where he had nearly felt confident to scorn superstition. Whatever this was, it would pass. And maybe he would reconsider late night outings. Maybe no moonless nights, at least. (Of course, here he was, sticking his face into all of that bad air in the depth of a night’s storm, but that was not something to be argued at the moment, unfortunately.) This would pass. Solomon Crost was not one to die of plagues or suffer from failures of constitution—not only did he fail to consider it, he also expressly forbade it.
“A thanks to you, girl,” he said, feeling unable to imbibe any more water, though paradoxically thirsted still. Depressing. It had not helped, but he now recognized the nature of a lost cause. The foreign little maid, the one with a nice turn of cheek and luminous eyes, bowed deeply and left as he prepared to go. His thirst had not lessened, but the heat had, somewhat. It was fading, to his great relief. Few things signified a need to return to one’s homeland than declining health. A shame he had not been able to kill that Morredac. He did not remember much of the night previous, but he knew he had been close to closing the chase—a slender man, Morredac, distinguished by a rather strangely styled but fine suit and his tendency to travel alone, though Solomon had never been able to get description or sight of his face. As the open fields offered little chance of camouflage, Solomon had taken up the Japanese way of hiding in plain sight, dressing the part of a scarecrow and playing its part so that he could follow freely. He had planned to finish the job as evening fell. The fever must have hit him greatly enough for him to seek out shelter; the main man of this establishment did say that he seemed of ill heart when he had entered, with wild eyes, but that he had been otherwise quite normal. Strange that he could not remember it. The coughing came again, tearing at him so harshly that his hand sought out a beam of the wall to keep him standing.
The heat had lessened now, but it was not gone. Perhaps it was not wise of him to travel. Even so, if it was a serious ill that had taken into his nature, then he would want to be back in England where doctors of real skill resided, as opposed to the apothecaries of these lands. India, he thought. He could take a ship from India, or even stay there if his health had so degraded to the point where he felt uncertain of the dubious wonders of maritime travel. Yes, he would head there.
How unfortunate this really was. Not since his childhood had he been set upon by sickness. In the future, he would definitely keep his profession to his own land.
It was not the first statement he had thought that night that would prove untrue.
Trembling now, the burning nearly beyond his mind to acknowledge. This was not fever, this was fire, nothing more or less. Somehow, though he could not see nor sense it, his bones were aflame. Above all, there was an itching. His thighs, his arms, his body—all of it was covered with a rash like sunburn, the simple peeling of dead skin in sheets, torn by scratching he could not resist despite the agony that came with it. Teeth clenched, burning eyes closed, he turned on the shower and pounced into it as if it would put out this sickness once and for all. It had sunken and grown at whim during his travels. Some days he had felt well enough to be better, and others were as bad… as bad as today. No doctor had ever heard of it, those who did not confidently lump it in with common ills he knew it was not. He did not ask long. If they could not help him, then a self-made man would not propose to waste their time as they had wasted his.
Before he had always bemoaned the iciness of the showers, nothing compared to a hearth-heated bath. Now he wished for nothing less than a blizzard, not that he received it. He was mostly silent. While not typically so mute, Solomon was also not in the habit of talking to himself, and especially not in this much pain, except for the occasional explicative, which will be omitted from this text for posterity’s sake.
The washcloth dug into his skin, obeying his harsh, shaky attempts to scrape the layers of dead skin away, to quell the burning.
Whole layers fell down against the porcelain floor of the tub with thin sounds. No matter how much he scrubbed however, it seemed like there was just more deadened, reddened flesh; he could not reach anything fresh and living. It did not bother him (any more than all of this bothered him anyway; perhaps it would be better to say it was no less terrifying than believing oneself to be dying of a fatal disease) until with a particularly powerful dig an entire chunk of his inner forearm fell to the tub’s floor with an unpleasant slap, glistening there like a chunk of meat and pinkening the water that flowed around it. He acknowledged it dimly, but he did not stop. It was as if his mind had disconnected from his actions. He could not. The itching, the heat, was gone from that section of his arm, and in the open air shone what looked to be thick, tightly packed and woven stalks, like wheat, shining with blood and water. With his systematic washing, for he went on as if nothing had happened, other strips of flesh began to fall, as if they had been nothing but a thin, artificial covering—just as suffocating as the clinging blankets had been on the first night of this fever—stripped away easily. Except his flesh beneath… vegetative material like a mat of thin twigs.
He felt intensely sick, could not tell if the pain was increasing or decreasing. It began to fall off on its own now, and it was all he could do to keep his stomach. The fire still pounded in his head, drowning out the sound of water and the lost, creeping pieces of what had been his muscles and skin. He was curled up now, on his unpadded knees, in some sort of shock. For a moment he thought it was tears that burned in his eyes, but he could not be so lucky. It was like some sharp, chemical acid, barely viscous. He did not want to know what. He hardly could think at all.
There was a cracking in his back as he stood, leaving the shower with unsure steps, surprised he even still had feet, and for the first time he made an audible cry of pain, gritted teeth separating at the sharpness of it. More cracks, sharp, deep snapping, and what skin and muscle he had left across his back ripped as his torso stretched whole inches. Eerily, through the pain, he also felt the material adjusting to compensate. It did so in hard, darting motions, like the lowering a gate. He did not understand where he was going, there was no one or where to run to, except perhaps a priest.
He started coughing again as he reached his bedroom, falling heavily to the floor in a half-curled position and taking a small table with him. Somewhere around him flew a bag he was mending and some sewing supplies, along with some alcohol and an important letter. He coughed, feeling as if the fire had suddenly climbed up his throat, and he was suddenly desperately afraid of what he might cough up. Nothing natural at this point; blood would be an unexpected blessing. He could not stop, and did not for a long time. There was still something that felt like a small sun in his head, and even the eventually lessening of his coughing and the heightened pain in his chest—more crackling sounds, like branches being broken—only left him with no distraction for that pain, like a hot iron shoved behind his eyes. Those eyes remained tightly closed. His hands still trembled. No other sign was given, though.
Not for any reason of pride, which he was thoroughly beyond at this point, but instead for some awful, closed-off feeling. His nerves accepted all that was coming in, but the effort it took to twitch even a hand was growing. Shock, maybe, even now, or maybe this was a sickness that ended with the person unable to move a muscle. Sickness, this was not a sickness. He kept expecting some poor girl to open the door behind him, see him on the floor like a half-skinned carcass, but she never came. Later, when he had time to think, he would realize that he had been unusually quiet, for a man having lost a great deal of his body mass. There was no reason anyone would have gone to check.
The acid in his eyes accrued lethally, destroying what little vision he had when he could force his eyes open, open for a dizzied, fuzzed, and reddened glance at the room from his floor-bound view. His face was surely melting. Solomon had little thoughts at the moment that approached coherency; he wanted it to stop in a wrenching, animal way, with little distinction between whether that meant living or dying, or the consequences of either, though deep inside him was the terror and awe that belonged to humankind alone, to be tapped when facing something beyond the natural, and it was a deep horror gnawing along with the heat.
One last glance up, a panicked, groping search for help, retrieved nothing but an empty room. Though in the window, he believed—though it could have been a tree—to have seen the shape of some man peering in, if the man was unusually slender. Then his sight was lost to fire, the acidic, burning pitch in his head searing so violently with the next fit of coughing that he felt something slag-like run down his face. It was a gooey, thick substance, hot but not burning. Somehow he knew it was his eyes. Melted by that fire, dislodged by the coughing. That which was not simply burned away. The hollowness he now felt behind his eyelids, more than anything, was what began to ebb at his consciousness. His world was aflame, but that slackness suddenly threw all of this into something intensely real, beyond denial, and it was more than his mind could take. His consciousness wavered again, as the fire began to burn away his eyelids, and he queasily rolled off the mental brink that would take him away from this.
Memories came to him in fragments, detailed pictures of color and emotions and seconds like a dream, while other minutes and hours were lost in blurs. The thick smell of dampness and molding hay clutched at his throat. He saw himself waking in that same room to the sounds of shrieking and crackling flame. The tall stalks of dried corn swayed in the breeze and tickled his now-cool skin. He saw himself roll up, never so happy for a house-fire, as he had believed it to be the source of the horrifying dream he had experienced. Then the pain had hit him, the fact that he was nearly blind for the darkness in his sight, that everything he did and sensed was disorientingly unfamiliar.
Safe in the cornfield, he nevertheless felt himself grasping his bag and mending kit from the floor of that room, fear replacing agony for a few glorious moments at the sight of flames eating across the doorframe and carpets. Safe in the cornfield, palsied hands guiding a mending needle to pass through his lips, leading a black cord along its merry task in sealing his mouth, he felt the pounding of his feet on the ground as he ran through the countryside, running far longer than necessary, through a forest where not an ounce of moonlight could wedge itself through the branches. Feeling the grainy pull of cord through the needle’s bloodied holes, the pull of each trembling stitch, he knew he had made it to this clearing, some old farm, half-blind. What he did see, he saw better every moment, as clear as day but strange. The colors were too thick, the shadows too dark, and warmer colors had a way of showing more insistently.
He realized that the cold needle in his hand was not a memory, that it was happening now, but once again he was powerless to stop himself. He screamed, a pathetic sound of frustration and fear that stuck against his throat, a throat now filled with the acid that had taken his eyes. Knotting it from the inside, he stared at the needle. A thought occurred to him, one that made him nauseous. He should mind his business, but not when his business interrupted that of others. The image of Morredac’s tall form in a field rather similar this old farm blazed into his mind, and he clenched. A memory, surely, but he was having trouble differentiating right now, and he scanned the area with a sick panic. Nothing, there was nothing. He was almost sure.
The needle in his hand needed more thread.
He awoke crucified, eyes without eyelids opening in weary slits. There was no memory of the night before, or any other nights in between. The brim of a worn purple hat wilted down over half of his vision, cutting off a vista of gray fields and low stone walls. He was neither thirsty nor hungry. He was not tired in a traditional sense. He wanted to shut his eyes again and hide from the reality of this, but that was not the same as exhaustion. Ragged, patched clothes shifted on his bone-thin form as a fitful breeze pulled, a shirt of burlap, some old pants. It was an old post that supported him and a beam nailed perpendicular to hold up his arms. The loops of frayed rope on his wrists were loose, and he pried his way out in a few dozen seconds, body landing easily though his mind stumbled.
At the foot of the post was his bag, the needle and thread gone, thankfully, though later on he would find the former, at least, tucked neatly into his hat. For safekeeping. Slowly, strangely, and of his own intention he lifted two fingers to one of his eyes, memory tight and shuddering in his fist. There was no barrier; it was as an open window. Before he had too far poked into his head, he felt a sear of pain and jerked the offending fingers out. Their tips were slightly blackened with a burn. He resolved to find something reflective—a self-made man knew the pointlessness of hysterics.
He did, eventually—find something reflective, that is—and it must be said that he avoided hysterics for almost two dazed days. Even so, it must be said that all of this did not in any way lessen his disappointment. Among other emotions.
It distinctly occurred to him that he would no longer be able to walk so easily the streets of London, or any streets, for that matter.
He was wrong about that, actually.
His memory tended to blank at strange times. He became used to waking up without knowing the nights or weeks before, and he still fell into the oddest fits of coughing, despite the fact that, to all of his knowledge, he now lacked lungs or the necessary inward bits of a throat.
This is the end of Solomon’s beginning, though not the end of his story. That story is a long one, far too long for typing fingers, and it might cause the readers to suffer some dislike for the fellow, or make them like him more. He does leave this world, in attempt for air a bit more healthy, and his travels take him across the path of far more demons than he would ever have hoped to see, some good, some bad, and all a distinct trouble for a self-made man. Even so, some things are funner left unsaid.
