Whispers in the Bottle

At Kraft's insistence, Lucius still went out and found two Bird-Beak Masks, along with several bags of things that gave off different smells.

He had to admit, the things suited Kraft's tastes. The beaks were made of brass and attached to leather hoods. Two unevenly colored panes of glass served as the eyeholes; some unknown chemical composition had given the lenses a reddish tint.

The breathing holes were in the beak. The design must have been to filter the airflow through the stuffing before it was inhaled.

Time to put that unbeatable memory to work and recall the homemade gas mask tutorial he'd watched ages ago out of sheer boredom.

Oh, right. You had to add activated charcoal. That raised another question: how did you make activated charcoal?

That was completely beyond Kraft's knowledge. It hit a total blind spot, and even the sharpest memory couldn't conjure knowledge out of thin air. He'd have to make do with the methods available in this era.

He watched Lucius stuff the beak like he was making scallion buns.

First came crushed, dried plant tubers. He laid down a layer, covered it with hemp cloth, then added a second layer of fibers that looked a bit like dried daylilies. He repeated the process, using up everything in the bags and filling the whole beak from tip to base.

It was hard to say how well it would work, but there was certainly no shortage of filter material.

Kraft took the hood once it was ready and sniffed it. A powerful blend of scents hit him at once.

The fragrance was almost like incense, mixed with a hint of minty coolness and something as sharp and pungent as chili seeds. He couldn't identify the other, subtler scents.

"Lucius, have you used one of these before?" Kraft pulled it over his head, taking on the classic look of a plague doctor in a black robe and black bird-beak hood.

The Otherworld Soul in him had always loved that mysterious look. Too bad these sorts of handmade pieces were always expensive online, and he'd never had a chance to wear one for a bit of cosplay. Today, he'd finally gotten to live out that dream by chance.

The experience was about what he'd expected. Breathing through a mask stuffed with so much filter material was difficult, like wearing several layers of masks. It was hot and stuffy.

During a plague, doctors had worn masks like these and carried on with their work. No one had ever measured how effective the layers of spices and herbs really were, but at least they offered a measure of psychological comfort.

Yet death, ever-present in those times, had also linked the masks to crows and misfortune. Doctors hadn't bothered to correct that misconception. Perhaps they thought it beneath them, or perhaps people's prejudice, born of their fear of death, was too deeply rooted to shake.

The most recent plague Kraft knew of was the one his grandfather had told him about. It had been more than a decade ago, and the Bird-Beak Masks now existed only in the Medical School's storeroom.

As Lucius stuffed his own mask, he replied, "No, Professor taught me. He takes a keen interest in these. These two masks are part of his collection, too."

"Be a little careful. These masks mean something special to Professor. He said he used them during the plague more than a decade ago." Seeing Kraft wandering around the room in his mask, nearly poking it into the wall, Lucius warned him.

"Ah, sorry." Kraft covered the beak with one hand and steadied himself against the wall. The two red glass panes were poor quality, uneven in thickness and full of tiny particles. Along with his labored breathing, they made him a little dizzy and badly threw off his sense of direction.

"It's fine. They've been so well looked after that you'd never guess how old they are." Lucius put on his own mask, adjusted the beak into place, and picked up the box. "Shall we head to the laboratory, then? It'll be safest there."

"Get us two pairs of leather gloves, too."

Still a little worried about how well the masks would work, Kraft followed Lucius to the so-called "secret" laboratory.

The journey there was another long, winding route. They went from Professor's workroom on the third floor back down to a disused storeroom deep in the back of the first floor.

Unused bookshelves and broken chairs and tables sat there gathering dust and mold. Some architect with a hole in his head had put the cellar entrance in this room.

Like the cellar in Wood's castle, it was hidden beneath a wooden hatch with an iron ring. A flight of steps descended into the pitch-black space below.

Lucius handed the box to Kraft, then led the way with a candlestick. Keeping one hand against the wall, he carefully felt his way down the uneven steps.

The cellar was only a little over two meters deep, and the dozen or so steps were all within the candlelight. Lucius stopped at the last step and held the candlestick into the cellar, illuminating some decayed barrels and wooden crates.

After waiting a while and seeing that the flame remained bright, he waved to Kraft, who was still adjusting the glass over his eyes, signaling that he could come down.

They moved a few empty crates away from the wall, revealing a wooden door with a lock hanging from it.

The secret laboratory didn't seem all that secret after all. It was just that no one normally came here. Even if someone did wander in, they'd be unlikely to notice the marks left by crates being moved around in this disused cellar.

With a click, Lucius unlocked the door. He pocketed the lock and key, while Kraft took a couple of steps back, ready to play it safe if anything went wrong.

As the wooden door, which looked like a monster to Kraft, swung open, the mysterious laboratory came into view without a shred of concealment.

It was maybe a dozen square meters, with a ceiling even lower than the cellar's; he could reach up and touch it. And yet, in this storage-room-sized space, someone had crammed in two tables, a wooden rack, and several small iron cages. If they pulled the stools out from under the tables, there'd barely be any room to move. The only place left to store anything was in the wall cabinets.

Kraft stood in the doorway, one hand on the frame, ready to hold his breath and drag Lucius out at a moment's notice.

Lucius set the candlestick on the table, then opened the wall cabinet with his thick leather-gloved hands. The cabinet had been carved into the stone wall and was divided into three shelves. The bottom two were crammed with ceramic jars, wooden cases, metal boxes, and all sorts of little tools.

The only shelf left empty was the Third Layer. It held a single small glass bottle. Its color was hard to make out through the red lenses. The cylindrical bottle was neat and clear, sealed with a wooden stopper.

Candlelight passed through the bottle's fairly clear glass, casting clean shadows of light on the wall and Kraft's face. The glass was clearly far better than the lenses in the mask.

At the bottom of the bottle was a shallow layer of opaque black liquid, thick and viscous in texture.

Lucius held it up and inspected it for a while. Then he picked up the candlestick again, tilted it slightly, and let melted wax drip onto the bottle's neck. He turned the bottle, sealing it with a ring of wax.

He turned around and pointed the bottle's neck toward Kraft, showing him how well it was sealed.

"That should make it completely safe." He held the bottle beneath his metal beak and mimed sniffing it. "See? There's no need to worry so much."

It did look fine. Kraft went into the room, set the box on the table, took the bottle from Lucius, and brought it close to his lenses.

The liquid sloshed slowly as the bottle moved, with an oily quality to it. Its surface bulged slightly without clinging to the glass. When tilted, it formed tiny droplets like black mercury. It also reminded him of the ferrofluid toys the Otherworld Soul had bought.

Kraft was certain he'd never seen anything like it. He also had no idea how Professor Calman's teacher had extracted it from the human body. Surely he hadn't rendered a corpse for its oil?

Watching the liquid move, he felt his curiosity stir. He wanted to study it. He wanted to find a few mice, or any other lab animals, and try it out on them.

He wanted to see what happened when they came into contact with the black liquid, and what else the "suppression" Professor had mentioned might look like.

It wasn't some shallow layer of material. It was the future of medicine, a black starry sky, an unexplored trench in the deep sea. It awakened humanity's primal urge to investigate, to find out what it was and why.

The black liquid made him feel that it didn't belong in a bottle. It should be used in large quantities, brought into contact with biological tissue, so people could learn more about it.

He felt a little impatient. Now he understood why Lucius was so excited to continue the experiments: he felt the same way. He wanted to draw up a plan and get started immediately.

He wanted to skip the animal testing and verify how it worked inside the human body. He had more detailed, more advanced methods of examination. He could do better than Professor and the others, instead of being limited to counting the heartbeats and breaths of people after they swallowed it and fell asleep.

He even wanted to drink it himself, just like Professor Calman and Lucius. Just a little, enough to experience the feeling firsthand.

That would be more direct and effective than any experiment, and more satisfying to his increasingly urgent desire to investigate, to touch it, to understand it...

"Hmm?"

Kraft made a puzzled sound. He couldn't understand why he'd ever think that way. The safety training he'd received over the years had never faded from his mind. He could still vividly recall countless textbook cases of what not to do.

Why did he genuinely want to take a sip? Even diluted, even after Lucius and Professor had tried it before him, he shouldn't want to try some unknown liquid from some unknown part of the human body.

He quickly retraced how the thought had come about and soon found its source. That curiosity had appeared abruptly when he took the bottle, then grown as he examined it, until it had turned into a desire to try it on animals.

Following that chain of thought, in no time at all, the idea of drinking the liquid himself had been born.

It was persuading him. The most active part of his consciousness had reached a conclusion and slipped the answer into Kraft's mind without any complicated reasoning, giving him no choice and not bothering to explain where it had come from.

It was like one of those baffling long-form science problems from high school, with "easily proven" written boldly beneath it before skipping straight to the final answer. And once his subconscious knew an answer he'd never considered before, it naturally understood everything.

A chill of terror crawled up from his tailbone, along his spine, and spread throughout his body. He couldn't tell whether it came from the eerie answer or from fear of where that answer had come from. Perhaps both.

It was persuading him? Inside his own mind, in his own voice, disguising itself as his own thoughts. What was it... something alive?