Camera Obscura by Lavie Tidhar Page A

end.
      "Watch," he said. There was something almost fond in his voice when he said, "Watch the grey cells."
      She watched.
      He put the end of the stick to the boy's dead hand and pressed the trigger.
      She watched. The electricity singed the skin. She watched the grey shapes on the boy's white skin.
      Nothing at first.
      Then…
      The grey spots, she realised, were slowly moving.
     
 

FOURTEEN
    Post-Mortem
     
 
    How to describe it? The grey moved along the boy's frozen corpse as if it were alive. It looked snake-like. It looked reptilian. It looked like mercury and it looked like shadows. That was it, she thought. Like grey shadows, growing on the boy's dead skin, animating it. Shadows bellowing across naked arms and chest, along closed eyes and china face. She said, "What is it?" and her voice was very small in that cold, hushed place.
      Viktor said, "We don't know."
      She said, "Where does it come from?" and he said, "That, Milady, is what the Council hopes you could tell us."
      She stared – and now the boy's left hand was twitching, the fingers closing, slowly, slowly, into a fist, and she took a step back when – there! – his eyes sprang open and the corpse stared at her, cold-blue eyes not seeing, dead eyes animated by a grey shadow that should not have existed, a wrong thing, unnatural and yet–
      "Stop it," she said.
      But Viktor was no longer applying the electricity.
      "The effect lasts for some time independently of the trigger," he said. "The cold slows it down. The main reason we're keeping them in here. You did well, by the way, disposing of the corpse. It would have been… inconvenient if the deceased began to walk down Rue Morgue post-mortem."
      She almost laughed. She felt a little hysterical. In one moment the investigation went from something understood – something within her remit, within the world as it was, as it should be – into something else entirely, something alien and unknown. "When did it start?" she said.
      The little scientist beside her shrugged. "Who knows?" he said. "We began grabbing them as soon as the reports started filtering in. I have no doubt we missed a few."
      "How long?"
      "Two years," he said. "Possibly three."
      " Years ?" she said. She had to get some fresh air. The boy was moving now, his entire body shaking, the head moving in a silent no . "Open the door," she said.
      Viktor, too, seemed happier once they were outside, the door safely closed behind them.
      "Is it–" she said, and hesitated.
      "Infectious?"
      She nodded. Viktor said, "Not so far, but…"
      "But what?"
      "It seems to be spreading."
     
    Moving grey shapes. It was as if, having viewed the corpse (and now she realised, too, that she had come in close contact with the dead man in the Rue Morgue, skin-to-skin, and did the subtle grey shapes leap from one to the other? Were they even now working their way into the fabric of her being, into her cells and bone-marrow, into her bloodstream and brain?) she was now seeing the world in a skewed fashion, the night world of black shades transformed into a half-light place, inhabited by moving grey shapes… She blinked but they would not go away, houses and windows and lamps at strange angles, footsteps in dust and clouds flying low.
      Like the shadows of another world, she thought, and the night felt colder, clammier somehow.
      She had left the catacombs on the left bank of the Seine, exiting through an Employees Only door of a hotel on Rue de la Bûcherie. She felt a sense of urgency now, a need to find the missing women, to begin to answer the questions that were growing, sprouting like grey-capped mushrooms all over her post-mortem investigation.
      Who were the black-clad assailants in Montmartre? Who had killed the man called Yong Li? Were they the same people? It seemed unlikely – unless they already had the object in their possession and wanted to discourage her from