Herringcarp Gothic - Chapter Ten: Dance of the Dead Men     This story continues from Chapter One: Amnesia Chapter Two: Monsters on the Loose Chapter Three: The Black Chapel Chapter Four: The Cabinet of Dr Morningstar Chapter Five: Flesh and Blood Chapter Six: I Am John's Psychosis Chapter Seven: The Romance of Heresy Chapter Eight: Whispers and Screams Chapter Nine: Blood Sacrifice ***     The chamber had moulded plaster scrollwork on the walls and a chequerboard dance floor. Couples glided across the room in a silent gavotte, shifting and spinning to an unheard tune.     And every dancer was a ghost. They flickered in and out, even passing through other couples, as if each was lost in their own personal moment, replaying the same steps over and over again.     Some wore elegant ballgowns and powdered wigs. Others wore peasant frocks or stitched hose or boob-tubes and miniskirts or military uniforms or nothing at all. All danced.     Dr Winkelweald watched them, stood at the edge of the dancefloor as he had at many a party; only this time it wasn't his shyness that prevented him from approaching any of the women who sat on graceful chairs waiting with their dance cards. It was the fact that none of them seemed able to see or hear him, and the fact that he too was a ghost.     He didn't quite remember when he died but he recalled the pain.     "I have to think," he chided himself. "If I lose the capacity to think then I become like these, lost in an endless loop of meaningless moments. I have to think about where I am, what I am."     Is this the afterlife, he wondered? Am I in hell? Were the things I did in life so bad that I deserve damnation?     He tried to catalogue his sins but they were small miserable things, envies and desires and resentments he should have tried harder to avoid. Was that enough to damn him? Did even the smallest stain render him unfit for heaven?     "Theology isn't my forte," he recognised. "I should never have argued it with Dr Morningstar. Of course, he should never have sliced my brain out either. That was definitely worse."     A cascade of memories escaped from whatever dark place they'd been hiding and rippled through Dr Winkelweald's mind: torture in the name of science, abomination for progress, the human brain reduced to a laboratory where choice and feeling were merely electrochemical reactions.     "Well then what about this, Dr Morningstar?" Winkelweald snorted, waving his hands and arms in front of his eyes. "Right now I don't have a physical brain but I'm still thinking and feeling and choosing. What does that say about all your theories, hmm?"     That triggered an existential chain of worry that perhaps he too was merely replaying old actions like the ghosts on the dancefloor, echoing old philosophical musings in a constant loop. Or maybe he was still captive in his sutured, sliced open body, merely living whatever sensory input his surgeon carved into him?     "No. That way lies madness," Winkelweald told himself. "Not that madness isn't everywhere around me. This is still Herringcarp Asylum, I think. I recognise the architecture, but the walls are plastered and painted and it looks more like a great house than a grim institution." The Asylum had once been a stately home, manor and prison of a heretic Marquis.     He walked again between the whirling dancers, trying to avoid them passing through his own insubstantial body. He looked up at the huge candle-filled cut-glass chandeliers above the ballroom. He inspected the silent musicians scraping at their bows and breathing into their pipes.     "Maybe I'm in Purgatory?" Winkelweald considered. "I tried to be a good man. I became a doctor to help people. I wanted to aid those whose minds had betrayed them. That's why I sought to study under Dr Morningstar, to make people well again. Maybe that was enough to make up for all the nasty petty things about me and I'm here waiting to make a last decision that will send me to my final destination?"     The dance ended. The dancers stepped apart and the men held their partners at arms length and bowed to them. The ladies returned a courtesy. Many of their eyes were bleeding.     The couples joined together again and began the gavotte anew.     "Or maybe I'm doomed to be here forever? Maybe I'll gradually become like these poor things on the dance floor? I'll get greyer and duller, my thoughts eroding, my memory unravelling, until one day I'll walk across to one of those ladies on the chairs and hold out my hand to her and we'll take our place in the pageant?"     Winkelweald snorted. His record of ladies accepting him as a dance partner was poor. Maybe that was what was saving him from the dance of the dead?     The bleeding dancers disturbed him. He made his way to the far end of the room, where a twenty-foot long fireplace crackled with burning logs. The light flickered out over the room but it never illuminated the revellers.     A wretched girl in mere rags huddled beside the hearth-grate as if trying to keep warm. She turned to look at him as he approached.     "You can see me?" Winkelweald asked in surprise.     "Oh," the girl replied. "You."     Winkelweald broke out into incredulous laughter.     The girl rose from her huddled crouch and glared at him. "What's so funny? Why are you laughing?"     "I'm sorry," the doctor replied contritely. "It's just, I get that reaction from so many ladies at a dance."     The girl padded towards him and looked him in the face. "Did you murder all of them as well?"     Winkelweald took a step back. "Murder them? Of course not!" He looked at the torn tabard that was the girl's only garment. "Are you... an inmate?"     "You don't know me?" Amnesia asked. "You don't, for example, remember stabbing me to death?"     "No. I wouldn't do that. But if you want to talk about what you think..."     "Don't try to shrink me, buster!"     "Why would I want to reduce you in size?"     "I mean don't try and get into my brain. It's bad enough you got into my pants."     Winkelweald would have moved away from the mad woman except she was the only being in all his timeless wanderings who he had been able to speak with. "I never wore your pants," he promised her. "You, um, don't appear to have any."     Amnesia turned away in frustration, dragging her hands through her tousled knotted hair. "Crap! Damn crap and damn again! You're another one, aren't you?"     "Another what? You're not making any sense." Dr Winkelweald moved towards her again. "Look, I'm a man of science, a physician. Let me help you."     "I know just who and what you are, Ioldabaoth!" Amnesia accused.     Winkelweald looked over his shoulder but the girl was clearly addressing him. "Why would I be the Gnostic principle of flawed godhead?" he puzzled.     Amnesia turned back to him and jabbed a finger towards him. "Okay, we'll talk. But I am not having sex with you!"     Dr Winkelweald didn't know what to say to that one. He contended himself with the first random question that came into his head. "Why aren't you bleeding?"     Amnesia examined her bloodstained tabard. "I dunno. Some ghosts here look like they did before death. Some bear their murder wounds. The worst are the ones who look like they always believed they did. You always seem to look just like you."     "Why do their eyes bleed though? Who believes that of themselves?"     The girl looked up sharply. "Their eyes are bleeding? Here? Now?"     "Don't they always? This room's new to me. Before I was in the upper chambers where... well, it's not nice to tell to a lady, so..."     "Never mind that. The ghosts are starting to weep blood? That mean's he's coming!" She looked around in alarm.     "Who is coming? You're not making any sense!" objected Winkelweald. "Which I guess makes you fit right in here."     Amnesia nodded to concede the point. "We'll talk but not here. Come to the whisper gallery."     "The where?"     "Follow me."     "Why?"     "Because something bad's going to happen here really soon and I don't want to be part of it." The girl led him to a panelled wall and pushed a stud. A doorway Winkelweald hadn't suspected existed before snapped open.     Across the hall the main door burst open. Something that the doctor couldn't see clearly burst into the room and began to shred the dancers.     Amnesia yanked him through the secret panel and latched it shut behind them.     "What was that?" Winkelweald gasped. "I couldn't see it clearly but I felt it."     Amnesia led him from the ballroom suite along a low stone-trimmed tunnel that emerged into a long gallery. There were windows along both sides, looking out onto a dark and rainy night shore.     "These paintings are different every time you come here," Amnesia told him. "I keep trying to figure if there's any meaning to what they show but so far I'm not getting it." She pointed up to Fuselli's Nightmare. "This isn't a good place to bring the kids on a Sunday afternoon."     Winkelweald turned away from a worried perusal of Hieronymus Bosch's Hell. The face in the centre looked too much like his own. "You said you'd explain," he reminded Amnesia.     "I said we'd talk. I can't promise explanations. I don't have many." She turned to regard the young doctor. "So let's start. Who are you, if you're not Ioldabaoth?"     "Jonathan Winkelweald." The ghost held out his hand then realised the absurdity of trying to make contact with another phantasm.     The young woman surprised him by catching his hand and shaking it. The doctor remembered now that she'd manhandled him out of the ballroom.     "I don't remember my real name, I'm afraid. That's why they sent me to Herringcarp Asylum. Here I'm called Amnesia."     "From the Greek Mneme, memory."     "I guess. I was too busy trying not to get raped by wardens or tortured by inquisitors to go into the full linguistic background. Sorry."     Dr Winkelweald winced. "This asylum, it didn't turn out to be what I'd expected. I'd hoped it was more than a prison for the mad. I don't think it's a house of healing at all. "     "It's more than a prison," Amnesia assured him. "Although there's a lot of stuff locked up here. Pain and madness and evil. And it's all coming to a boil."     Winkelweald followed her as she walked down the whispering gallery. Their voices echoed back as they spoke.     "Why did you say I murdered you?" he asked. It was clear that the girl was a ghost. He could see through her.     "Sorry about that. I think it's fairer to say you haven't murdered me yet. Or that someone who looks exactly like you will murder me."     "Why would I do that?" Winkelweald asked before he realised how absurd the question even was.     "You were saving me from a fate worse than death. I don't think you'd realised that this house doesn't let anything or anyone go. You've seen some of the ghost rooms, right?"     "Some of them?"     Amnesia nodded her head. "Stay away from the screaming pit. And the nightmare wheel. And anything with the word 'red' in it."     The doctor shuddered. "Why can I speak with you when I can't communicate with all the other spirits?"     "I dunno. Maybe it's because you murdered me? Or not yet but, you know. Is there any chance do you think that you might end up living in the madness inside a lunatic chained up in an asylum cell?"     Winkelweald considered this. "There's every possibility. This is all insane." A new thought occurred to him. "Dr Morningstar was injecting madness into my mind. What if it's all in there, congealing, evolving? What if everything I'm seeing, even you Amnesia, is all a part of it?"     Amnesia gave him a sharp look. "You know Morningstar? I've met him in other guises. He's not a nice man."     "I concluded similarly when he began to dissect my brain," admitted Winkelweald. That won a little snort from the girl.     Her face changed abruptly at a sound from the other end of the gallery. "We've been here too long," she warned. "We've got to go. Come on!"     The urgency in her voice - maybe the fear - spurred Winkeleald to run with her. She pushed open the large doors at the end of the whispering gallery and ran down a flight of spiral stairs.     "How can you touch things?" Winkelweald asked. "I couldn't get through any of the sealed doors. I thought ghosts would be able to but there was something stopping me. I couldn't interact with objects or structures or even people but I still couldn't wander through walls."     "Don't know. Don't care," Amnesia called back. "Keep moving!"     "Why? What's scaring you?" In Herringcarp Asylum there seemed such a range of possibilities. "Is it that thing that tore up the ghosts in the ballroom?"     "Remember I said red names were bad?"     "Yes."     "Then you don't want to meet the Red Angel."     "I probably don't. But I'd like to know more about him, if that's who we're running from."     "The Red Angel is the sentinel of this place. He's the one who flays the ghosts and breaks them. He's the one who guards the escapes. He's the one who's hunting me down." Amnesia burst through a small door on a stair landing and raced down a dim wattle-daubed tunnel. "And he's got the face of Dr Morningstar."     The tunnel opened up into a space full of people; or ghosts of people. Not full in the sense that the floor was crowded, full in the sense that a great pit had been filled with bodies, piled one atop another, while they were still alive. Now their spectres heaved and screamed and moaned as they had at the moment of their crushing or suffocation.     "We have to swim through here," Amnesia warned Winkelweald. "You can do it if you concentrate. It hurts. When you go through these ghosts you can feel their fear and pain."     Winkelweald peered back down the tunnel. There had to be another way.     "We need to do this," Amnesia urged him. "The Red Angel gets distracted by their suffering. I think he caused it. It'll give us a chance. Please follow me!"     The girl dived into the writhing column of death and vanished into its seething mass. Winkelweald gritted his teeth and plunged after her.     These souls had fought and they had been beaten, he sensed, a terrible war that had never happened now, a holy war that the forces of good had lost. They had been buried alive here, their mass grave specially chosen because it would cause their torment for all time. Their enemy had known what he was doing to them. They had known what the price of their defeat would be.     Winkelweald wept and screamed with them and eventually he staggered out of the charnel pit on the other side.     "The Red Angel is worse than that?" he gasped at Amnesia.     "A hundred times worse. A thousand. I'd live in that pit rather than face him for ten seconds. That's the thing about this place. All the horrors are relative. Ioldoboath understood that."     "Ioldabaoth who looked like me."     "Yes. I think you're what he's missing, actually. A conscience. A dream. He needs to be a dreamer."     Winkelweald trailed after the girl as she plunged down yet another flight of steps, these mere footholds carved in ancient natural rock.     "Where are we going?" he asked.     "I've been here a while now. I don't know how long. Time doesn't work right, but I guess you've found that out yourself. Time and rooms get shifted round in Herringcarp. But there's one place that's always there, a place the Red Angel can't find even though he draws on its power, a place he desperately wants to own."     "And you know it?"     "Yeah, I know it. We're going to the Black Chapel. It's the heart of Herringcarp. Everything else is founded on it."     "Why are we going there?"     "Because somebody has to find it, somebody who can use it. That's you or Morningstar. I'm picking you."     "Why me?"     "Because you only slept with me and killed me. That's the best it gets with guys as far as I can remember."     "Miss Amnesia, I promise you..."     "Don't make me promises. Just... do the right thing."     "I'll try."     Then the walls began to bleed.     "He's here!" Amnesia screamed, and set off at a sprint into the ancient labyrinth.     Winkelweald dared one glance backward. A beautiful naked man with golden skin and feathered wings levitated down the stairs towards them. His physical perfection was marred only by the streams of blood pouring over his sculpted form and splashing onto the ground below.     Winkelweald fled after Amnesia into the interconnected vaulted chambers below.     "Faster!" Amnesia shouted. "He can't follow us into the chapel if he can't see where we go. He's never able to work out how the geography twists."     "But you can?"     "Don't knock it. Keep running."     The Red Angel glided after them. His wings never moved. His smile never changed. His eyes reflected hellfire.     "Not much further!" Amnesia gasped. How could a ghost have a stitch in her side or be short of breath? "One last hallway."     Amnesia and Winkelweald rounded the last corner and found the way to the Black Chapel was blocked.     "No!" gasped Amnesia. "Oh no!"     The Red Angel rounded the corner behind them and had them cornered.     "Get behind me," Winkelweald told the girl. It cost him all his courage to make that useless gesture.     The Red Angel glided towards them, flexing its bloody wings at last.     Amnesia and Winkelweald turned to the obstruction preventing their escape to the Black Chapel.     It was a huge mirror with an ornate frame, and they looked into it.     And their reflections looked back at them. *** Continued with Mirror Images *** Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2010 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2010 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.