WELCOME TO THE DARKSIDE OF BITCHAMP

Mist lay over Blackwood as if the earth itself were exhaling sorrow. The mortuary sat squat in its hollow, brick ribs caged in ivy, glass sockets dark and cataracted with grime. Wind chimes made from bone—a superstition the townsfolk swore had been there before Mortis ever moved in—clicked dully in the breeze. No birds. No dogs. Even flies kept to the far hedgerow.

It was not always like this. There was a time when medicine smelled of rosemary and soap, when Latin words meant hope and iron instruments kept a righteous shine. In those days, Alaric Mortis wore a neat beard and a steady gaze. He’d take the market road with his wife, Elara, and he’d carry her basket not because the apples were heavy, but because love makes a fool of a man in the gentlest way.

“Alaric,” she’d say, laughing as his fingers crept to her wrist, “the apples are bruising.”

“Then I shall doctor them too,” he’d answer, and she would kiss his cheek and dare the sun to match her warmth.

He was the best anatomist Blackwood had known—his lectures at the old college standing-room only, his pamphlets shipped by coach to scholars in coastal cities whose names sounded like a far tide. He stitched wounds with tenderness and spoke about the body as if it were a cathedral. He would have remained a healer had the fever not come.

It took children first. Then the strong. Then Elara. The fever burned her clean through, left her lucid to the last; he lay with her on the parlor rug, counting breaths. When the priest came, Alaric waved him off. “She doesn’t like incense,” he said, almost gently, and when Elara’s eyes rolled white and fixed, he kept talking to her as if she were simply done listening for the night.

He washed her, combed her hair, cut one lock and tied it with thread. When he finally placed her in the mortuary’s cool chamber, he didn’t go back upstairs.

The next day the butcher’s wife sent broth no one drank. The day after that, the students came and found the lecture hall locked. On the third day, the mortuary shutters were latched from within—iron pins down, cross-brace set. By the fourth, the gossip had curdled into something sour and metallic.

“Grief will make a saint into a sinner,” the blacksmith muttered.

“Or a scholar into a sorcerer,” the priest replied, not entirely disapprovingly.

Beneath the mortuary lay the basement that wasn’t a basement. Alaric had designed it himself: three chambers in a T, floors tiled white as tooth enamel, drains centering each room; shelves crowded with glass; notes pinned with brass tacks; a workbench whose surface had once reflected lamplight like a pond. Copper coils and hand-blown condensers framed a furnace, and to one side, a series of crude batteries—lemon jars and zinc plates feeding a trembling hum into a bundle of wires threaded through a box marked with careful ink: Aetheric Induction Apparatus.

It began with reading. Then with quiet experiments: a frog twitching without thunder, a sparrow’s heart awakened mid-dissection and then stilled again, a piglet whose blood sang blue under a tincture that stained his hands for a week. He drank tea that turned his tongue to ash and he stopped feeling hunger. Outside, the seasons dragged their gray cloaks by and turned them inside out.

One night—even Alaric would later have called it the night—he smoothed the linen over Elara’s shoulders and whispered, “My love, this is the last time I let you be cold.” He opened the box he’d never allowed himself to open: a glass ampoule the color of stormwater, set in a cradle of straw. A label, written in a steady hand from a steadier life: Ethereum.

“Should the soul be matter, we will meet it there,” he had once lectured, chalk scratching on slate. “Should it be ether—well, then, we will need to teach our hands to grasp fog.” He had laughed then. No one laughed now.

He filled a syringe. Oil lamps fluttered. He found the angle at the third rib, left of sternum, beneath the breast. He whispered. He pressed.

At first, nothing. Then a sound like a match struck in very deep air. A glow rose under the bone, a pale coin of light. Elara’s fingers twitched, one after another like keys on a silent piano. Then her eyes opened.

“Elara?” His voice had the tremor of a bell rung lightly.

The eyes were blue as always, yet they held no surface. They were two deep wells with no rope, no bucket, no stars to reflect. Her chest rose on a ragged, guttering inhalation. The sound stripped him. He wept.

“Elara,” he said again, and reached for her cheek. It was warm. It was real.

Her gaze skated off his face as if he were a shadow on the wall. Her mouth moved. No sound. He leaned close enough to smell the mint he’d tucked into her hair weeks ago.

“What do you remember?”

Nothing answered him. Or perhaps something did—an absence that filled the room like a new weather. She sat up, her movements stapled together, and turned her head toward a lamp flame, as a plant leans toward windows. When the flame sputtered, her pupils did not shift.

“Can you see me?” he asked. She did not turn. He took her hand and pressed it to his chest. “Feel. It’s me.”

She pulled her hand back with a small, jerking motion, like a marionette guided by a drunk. She lifted that hand and stared at it, palm creasing, a map she could not read.

“Elara, you loved the winter oranges from Niall’s stall. You hated sweet tea. You said the taste was like drinking a lie.” His laugh broke. “You called the moon an egg the gods forgot to hatch. You—”

Her jaw clicked shut. Silence climbed the walls.

Grief, when it is tired of collapsing, stands up and puts on a clever coat. Alaric straightened. “Memory is a path,” he said, to himself, to the lamps, to the cavern where heaven might be, “and paths can be cleared.”

The next morning he set his pen to paper. Problem: Reanimation succeeded (somatic), cognition absent (mnestic/affective void). Hypothesis: Soul as aggregate of memory; Ethereum provides animus, lacks qualia vector. Solution: Provide memory feed.

Provide—from where?

That night, the mortuary’s chimes clicked like teeth in a cold mouth as the first volunteer arrived.

“Doctor Mortis?” The voice at the door belonged to a man with badly healed ribs and a cough that doubled him each morning. He listened to rumors the way children listened for holidays. “They say you discovered a tonic.”

Alaric held the door. He had shaved. He smiled the way useful men smile. “I have work,” he said, and the word sounded like mercy.

Downstairs, a chair waited. Leather straps lay neatly coiled, not unlike a belt. The man never asked if they were necessary. Men like that have long since learned that questions sometimes close doors and that doors closing can be a kind of death.

“Only a pinch,” Alaric said as he tightened the straps. “Think of it as a blood-donation to science.”

“Will I be paid?”

“Of course,” he lied, and watched the pupils dilate to the promise.

He drew a vial of blood. He added a drop of Ethereum, watched it bloom in the crimson like oil catching light. He bent a filament from his induction coil against the crook of the man’s elbow and let the hum pass into him. The man jerked, moaned low, and then—something Alaric had never seen a living man do—the eyes rolled truly white while still awake.

“What do you see?” he murmured, fascinated. “Say it aloud.”

“I… my mother’s yard,” the man said, voice small as a child’s. “Line of shirts. The blue one with the tear. Smell of soap. Mud under the fence. Dog that bit me. My father laughed, God curse him.”

Memory like smoke, rising. Alaric watched the needle tick. He felt heat under his skin. He felt something open in his head, a velvet door he didn’t know existed. He siphoned the blood. He wrote: Memory can be agitated by current. He did not write: I liked it.

He fed the vial, drop by drop, into Elara’s mouth with a pipette. She swallowed. Her eyes did not change, but when he shifted the lamp, her head moved—late, clumsy, but toward the light.

“Oh,” he whispered. “Oh, my heart.”

A path had been found. It was narrow and wicked. He would walk it barefoot.

The butcher’s cousin came, and then the constable—curiosity draped as duty—and then a pilgrim with sores, and then a seamstress with a bad hip, and then volunteers gave way to the found, the lured, the ones who came for coin, and the few who did not come at all but were brought. The town felt its own ribs and called it winter. Children were not allowed to play past dusk. The priest began mentioning temptations of Prometheus in his sermons.

In the mortuary, Alaric collected bottles that glowed faintly in the dark. He labeled them in his new hand: DOMESTIC, FIRST KISS, PAIN (HAND), LAUGHTER. He tried combinations on Elara. Drop of laughter, drop of pain. Her breath changed. She made sounds, little bird clicks in the throat. He tried a dozen hearts on her lips, trying to find the timbre of the one she had lost.

“Do you know me?” he asked, every dawn that passed for a morning down there. “Say my name.”

Her eyes would drift, and sometimes—sometimes—she would tilt her head like Elara did when somebody told a half-clever joke. He would smile like a man who glimpses a light between trees.

“Again,” he would say, and by again he meant forever.

On poor nights—when Elara knocked over a lamp and flinched not at the heat, when she scraped her hand across the table and watched the blood bead with interest as if it belonged to a stranger—he drank, then he prayed, then he broke entire shelves rearranging the world to keep from rearranging her. On good nights, he sat with her in a chair he dragged to the window and held her not for warmth but for geometry, as if bending her arm around his waist would teach the body angles to remember their old kindness.

And always, the glowing vials. And always, the hum in the wires growing warmer and hungrier.

Outside, a boy with a birthmark on his temple threw pebbles at the mortuary shutters. “Come out, Doctor,” he called with the cruel bravery of a child who doesn’t know what men can do. “Ghost doctor! Corpse kisser!”

Inside, Alaric kissed Elara’s hair and thought, not for the first time, that he would harvest the entire town if it meant one recognitional blink.

“Say my name,” he begged into the hollow of her throat.

She did not.

The night the storm finally came—with thunder carrying nails and lightning dragging chains—he made his last set of notes and underlined the last sentence twice: If the soul is shore, the body must be bridge. Ethereum incomplete; vector must be installed in the living substrate first.

He uncapped a new vial. Its skin of glass breathed cold into his fingertips. He swallowed the idea before it was words. Then he made it words.

“What if I become the bridge?” he said to the room. Elara’s fingers tapped the arm of the chair, aimless metronome. He filled a syringe and set it aside.

At the door above, someone pounded. A voice: “Doctor Mortis! Open by order of the—” The rest was goat-bleat as thunder slammed the heavy door back into its jamb. Rain entered the mortuary, a cold, wet intruder. The sky split vertically, like a seam ripped in a dark garment, and a blade of white light slid through, striking the mortuary’s weathervane dead center.

The roof caught fast. Dry rot drank lightning like liquor. Fire ran the beams as if it had been waiting in the boards all along.

Alaric moved. The way a man moves when the wolf has entered the yard. He grabbed Elara’s shoulders. She did not stand. He lifted her. She weighed as much as their wedding night and also as much as the earth.

“Up,” he said, voice too stern, and then he softened it. “Love, up. We’re going up.”

The stairwell breathed smoke. The flames spoke in flapping consonants. He covered Elara’s face with his sleeve and shouldered her weight. On the fifth step, a joist sighed and then went to its knees. On the seventh, heat blistered paint into bubbles that popped wet against his cheek. On the ninth, his hair crisped. On the twelfth, the ceiling broke open to show him the hungry red ribcage of his house. The thirteenth step was gone.

He pivoted, slipped. Elara slid from his grasp. He caught her, wrenched muscles, swore with all the church Latin he remembered. He retreated, coughing from the soles of his feet upward. His hands shook. The syringe on the tray gleamed like a snake’s eye.

“What if I become the bridge,” he repeated, as if the sentence were a spell that required saying twice to take.

He seized the syringe. He tied off his arm with a rag. He drove the needle with more accuracy than anything he’d ever done sober. The plunger met resistance and then surrendered with a shiver that ran up the barrel into the bones of his hand.

The burn was immediate. But not the burn of fire. This was internal—silver through marrow, mercury in the gears. He opened his mouth. A scream came, long and narrowing until it had the shape of a thread drawn through a needle. He heard a second scream braided into his own and thought, wild with pain, Another is caught in the house! He turned to find the sound. Found no one. Understood the sound belonged to him.

He staggered. The floor breathed once and then lifted, the way an animal’s back lifts before an attack. Beneath the skin of his forearms, something moved. Tendons? No. Lines blacker than ash, branching. Rootlets. Fine as hair. They rose under the flesh and then through it, threading the skin like needles, pushing out in exploration. Where the air seared them, they blackened into something like woody veins.

“God,” he said—astonishment, accusation, plea—and then, quieter, to the one sitting mutely by the lamp, “Elara.”

The roots found purchase: into the table leg, into the cracks of the tile, into the damp of the old mortar. They pulled. He felt the room as if it were inside him—the cool pipe along the north wall, the wheatmeal of dust, the pooled water by the drain. He had become a web that remembered being a man.

Through the new sense came something else—like a whisper in the floor. Not a voice. Voices. A thousand memory-motes, a cloud of dust in a shaft of light. The vials on the shelf chimed, each a letter of an alphabet spelled by pain. Domestic. First Kiss. Pain (Hand). He knew them as colors now. He knew how to pour them. He reached for them not with hands but with a network he had become. He touched LAUGHTER and it rang. He touched PAIN and the world’s teeth ached.

He turned this net toward the chair by the lamp. Elara’s eyes reflected fire and nothing else. He wrapped her in these new roots, not to bind but to deliver, as a river delivers ships. He fed her laughter and pain and domestic light and the memory of winter oranges and the smell of rosemary and soap and the echo of a phrase—egg the gods forgot to hatch—and he let them into her like medicine, like sin, like a love note written in a language no one should have to learn.

Her face changed. Not much. Not enough. But there—a muscle at the corner of the mouth remembering it had once belonged to joy. There—her head turning not toward the lamp but toward him.

“Alaric,” she said—or perhaps the flames said it, or the collapsed stair called his name down the hole it had become. He heard it anyway. He turned all the way toward her and began to cry with his new body in a way the old never had.

The floor above chose that moment to come down.

The room folded. The world narrowed to red and black. Alaric raised his arms—old reflex, useless—and the roots rose with him, webbing in a dome, a crude shelter, catching the worst of the falling timber and the best of the heat. Even so, wood punched his shoulder, and his vision hissed white. He went to the floor and felt the floor accept him the way river mud accepts a fallen branch: not kindly, not cruelly, only with patience.

When the storm moved on, the mortuary was a black less black than the night around it. The roof was gone. The rain came down and the steam rose and the glow of the vials guttered into a final chemical star and went out.

Much later—hours or centuries—the ash shifted. A tendril, glossy and soot-laced, pushed up through a crack. Another followed. The tendrils braided, found grip, split a stone, lifted. A face emerged at floor height. Not human. Not tree. Something between. It breathed. The breath sounded like a bellows patched too many times to hold air without whine.

“Elara,” it said, hoarse and astonished, and then, as if surprised to discover this too, “Alaric.”

Somewhere under the rubble, a hand lay open like a child’s, palm up, fingers slightly curled. A lock of hair tied with thread lodged in the crook. Rainwater turned it darker and darker, then the same color as the mud that swallowed it. The hand did not move.

Above that buried hand, the vines grew.

YOU CAN FIND THE FULL STORY IN

"PORTALS - STORIES"

Copyright © 2024 BitChamp.co - All Rights Reserved.