Strange Practice

by Vivian Shaw

  Greta pinched the bridge of her nose. “Fass. Really, listen to yourself. You are not living in a Russian novel, okay? You don’t have consumption and your flat’s on the second floor; it’s not remotely mistakable for a garret. Ruthven is going to go absolutely spare if he hears about this, you know.”

  “Yes, which is why you aren’t going to tell him,” said Fastitocalon. “Please, Greta, be a good girl and just forget the whole thing; it’s hardly important. Nor the first time it’s happened. You should’ve seen me in the 1820s, stuffing bits of rag round the windowpanes to keep out the drafts. That was proper Russian-novel stuff. This is just a capricious landlady.”

  “Maybe if you weren’t old enough to know better and didn’t have COPD and didn’t have any way to cloud men’s minds and fog their understanding of rent increases, I’d say pawning your only winter coat in London in November might be an acceptable course of action.” Greta looked up as the waitress came back. “Same again, and the beef and barley soup and granary roll. Fass?”

  “Hmm? Oh …” He shrugged. “What she’s having? I wish you wouldn’t call it that.”

  “Call what what?” Greta asked as the waitress finally quit staring at Fastitocalon and retreated, order pad in hand.

  “COPD. It sounds like a law enforcement team. In my day we referred to my trouble as chronic bronchitis.”

  “Well, it is. Bronchitis is an obstructive pulmonary disorder. Which reminds me, when did you run out of your meds and why didn’t you tell me you’d run out?”

  He looked down. “A week ago? Some sort of mix-up. They said there weren’t any refills left on that prescription and they’d call you to get you to authorize it. Didn’t they?”

  “Not that I’m aware of,” Greta said, taking out her prescription pad again and writing busily, eyebrows drawn together in a scowl that reminded Fastitocalon once more suddenly and vividly of her father.

  “Anyway, it’s fine,” he said. “I’m quite all right. Er. Lethbridge sent me home, though.”

  Greta finished scribbling and pushed several blue prescription slips across the table, still scowling. “There. That’s three months’ worth. And good for Lethbridge. I might revise my opinion of him if he goes on showing that level of common sense. You’re going to eat something nourishing and then you are going straight home and …”

  She paused and ran a hand through her hair. “You don’t have much heat there, do you?”

  “Oh, of course I do. It’s just that most of it escapes up the holes in the ceiling where they didn’t seal it round the drainpipes and goes to heat my upstairs neighbor’s flat instead.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” said Greta, despairingly. “What else? Have you got to crawl up the steps over broken glass both ways while carrying weights in your teeth?”

  Fastitocalon laughed—and it was a testament to the powers of modern medicine that the laughter didn’t turn into another hacking fit. “Broken glass? Oh, we would’ve killed for broken glass when I was young,” he said in a terrible Yorkshire accent.

  “Luxury,” said Greta, and this time both of them burst out laughing.

  Not so far away at all, in a small room lit with brilliant blue, a naked man-shaped thing knelt, head bowed. Its skin was an angry red that looked dark purple in this light, blotched and shiny with blisters. It was moving very slightly, swaying back and forth with the rhythm of the beating of its heart. Dancing, jumping shadow-shapes played over a concrete floor and metal walls that curved in a low arch overhead. The air stank of ozone: the smell of bright energy, of lightning storms.

  The object before which it knelt was squatting in a cabinet like a malevolent deep-sea creature, alien, tentacular, glowing: filled with moving, flickering blue light. Within a thick glass vessel a glaring blue-white spark danced, far too bright to see clearly, accompanied by a strange atonal humming that was both awful and hypnotic.

  Distantly, over that humming, footsteps approached; distantly the thing registered that it had heard them. They did not matter at the moment, nothing mattered, not when there was the light to look at, the light, the blue light.

  “Every thing that may abide the fire,” said a voice, replacing the footsteps in its awareness, “shall go through the fire, and be made clean; the flame shall burn up their wickedness.”

  Slowly it woke into a higher level of consciousness, swimming upward from dark stillness lit only by that blue. It stood with effort, and where it had knelt there was a mark, a stain of fluids soaked into the concrete floor.

  It turned toward the voice, still dazzled with blue light, unable to see what it was facing: another man-shaped thing, this one clothed in the coarse brown habit of a Benedictine brother, its own shiny pink and white scars concealed from sight. Beneath the hood there was another gleam of blue: twin blue pinpoints of light.

  “In the fire thou shalt be purified, as silver tried in a furnace of earth,” the newcomer said.

  There was a pause before the thing remembered speech and how it worked. “I am … purified,” it said, slowly. Its voice was cracked, uneven, as it gave the ritual reply. “My sins are burned with fire.”

  The hooded monk inclined his head, once: a nod, or a bow. “Behold, thine iniquity is passed from thee, and I will clothe thee with raiment; let the high praises of God be in thy mouth, and the holy sword of the Lord God in thy hand.”

  “Praised be God,” said the thing, completing the ritual, and its knees began to buckle with the unaccustomed strain of standing upright after so long on the ground. The monk caught it easily, lifted it in his arms like a child. There was a soft series of wet little percussions as fresh blisters broke, dragged across the monk’s rough-woven habit, and the thing moaned. Everything was dark, with moving stars.

  “Take comfort,” said the monk, and turned, and bore it away into the darkness. “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see light in the darkness, walk the paths of night without fear. You shall see with new eyes. You have a purpose.”

  Only now did the thing realize that the little bursts and sparks of light all around it were not from the tunnel they were passing through. It blinked, and each blink was agony, and it could not see. The blue light had burned away its sight, ablated tissue and nerve and vein, sunk the sun behind the horizon for ever.

  Then the monk’s words began to make sense. New eyes.

  A new sight with which to see a cleaner world.

  CHAPTER 3

  Ruthven set the kettle on a burner and lit it with a blue pop of gas. “Really, it’s no trouble at all,” he said. “I’ve got so many rooms in this place that never get used. Sir Francis could probably do with some company, anyway; he seems to be a thoroughly melancholy sort.”

  Fastitocalon was leaning in the doorway of the kitchen, resolve crumbling by the minute. Of course he didn’t need the wretched vampire’s charity, he could get on perfectly well by himself, he’d been getting on perfectly well by himself for the past several hundred years, but … it was awfully comfortable in here. Really very comfortable indeed. And he thought that Greta just might have had a point with her insistence that he must not get chilled. He’d argued with her most of the way here on the tube and he was now feeling rather short on arguments.

  “You’re wavering, aren’t you,” Ruthven said, and smiled: wry and sympathetic. His teeth were very white and very even, the upper canines ever so slightly longer than a human’s. “Sit down, for heaven’s sake, and stop arguing with yourself.”

  “I’m not wavering,” Fastitocalon murmured, but he did sit down at the big scrubbed-pine kitchen table, rubbing at his aching chest. “I’m a melancholy sort as well, come to think of it. I might make him worse. What happened, anyway? Greta didn’t actually talk much about the whole episode, except to say that she’d been up all night; she was mostly too busy telling me off.”

  The vampire leaned back against the counter, arms folded. “He was stabbed. By persons unknown, with a weapon unlike any I’ve seen before—which reminds me, where the hell is
Cranswell? He said he’d be here this evening with some useful reference books, but it’s getting on for six o’clock and there’s no sign of him.” A strand of glossy black hair escaped its mooring and drooped over his forehead, and he pushed it away with an irritable little flick. The gesture was theatrical, Fastitocalon reflected, if unconsciously so. Come to think of it, Ruthven did have the exaggerated black-and-white looks of a silent-film actor.

  His attention was wandering: the whine of the boiling kettle recaptured it just as Ruthven was saying something about a temperature of eighty-seven degrees Fahrenheit, which as far as he, Fastitocalon, knew was pretty much febrile-seizure territory for vampires. “Good heavens,” he said, taken aback. “But he’s … recovering?”

  “Yes. Now that the poisonous bit of metal is out of him, he’s improving, but almost as slowly as a human. He ought to have healed within a few hours, at most, from the time it happened; that was in the middle of last night, and he’s still flat on his back.”

  “Did … do … you have any idea why?” Fastitocalon looked up at Ruthven, thinking again how good he’d have been in the earliest of the early films, those big shiny silver eyes rimmed with dramatic makeup. Murnau would have adored him. “I mean, why Varney in particular? I didn’t know he was even still in England. Or alive, for that matter.”

  “I don’t know. They apparently knew where he lived, broke in to his flat to poison everything with garlic, and then attacked him while he was still incapacitated from the fumes. But the particularly odd thing is that they were dressed up, he said, sort of like monks. Long brown robes, hoods. It’s a bit topically relevant, given the whole Ripper business. Greta is sure there’s a connection.”

  Ruthven poured out tea into a mug, a sharp lemony smell filling the kitchen, and then added generous amounts of both honey and brandy. Fastitocalon hadn’t really been listening; he reflected dreamily that he’d never met a sanguivore quite so ineffably domestic, silver-screen looks and all. Ruthven ought to be wearing pearls and a frilly apron. Possibly with little bats on it.

  Slowly Fastitocalon was beginning to suspect himself of being ever so slightly feverish, if the quality of his thought process was anything to go by. Nevertheless, the hot mug was extremely welcome, and he wrapped his hands around it and breathed in the steam gratefully. “Thank you. I, ah, I’ve decided to give up protesting. It would in fact be awfully nice to stay here tonight and not have to deal with balky electric fires and obstreperous upstairs neighbors.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” Ruthven eyed him thoughtfully. “You ought to have some aspirin or something. Where’s Greta gone?”

  “Back to her flat to collect some things. She said she might as well move in for the duration if you’re having houseguests, which struck me as somewhat presumptuous.” He coughed. “I wonder what her poor clinic patients are doing while she’s fussing over me. And Sir Francis, of course, who is actually in need of expert care.”

  “I gather she has friends who can step in to run the place when she can’t be there,” Ruthven said. “I shouldn’t worry about that; she has things well in hand. Come and sit in front of the fire.”

  Fastitocalon had run out of energy to protest, and just nodded and shuffled on after the vampire into the drawing room and let himself be installed in a chair beside a cheerful applewood fire. His chest ached, muscles sore from the exercise of coughing, and the warmth of the fire and the brandy were extraordinarily welcome.

  In fact he was almost asleep when the doorbell rang three times in rapid succession, followed by someone banging on the door with a fist. Ruthven said a forceful word or two and hurried round to see what on earth the matter was, peering through the peephole. Fastitocalon heaved himself out of the chair and followed him, blinking sleepily. Another curse, and Ruthven yanked open the door.

  For the second time in as many nights a desperate figure fell forward into the entrance hall. It had begun to rain, a nasty, icy, slimy sort of rain that got down collars and under hoods and up sleeves, and the newcomer was soaked and shivering.

  Once Ruthven had scanned the street for any sign of danger and then shut and bolted the door, he helped the new arrival to his feet: a tall, young black man with curly hair. “You do know how to make an entrance, Cranswell,” he said. “Are you all right? What happened?”

  The young man looked down at Ruthven, and then at the plastic-wrapped bundle he was still clutching to his chest. “Followed,” he managed through chattering teeth. “Think I lost them but—pull the b-blinds.”

  Ruthven’s brows drew together. He turned back to the drawing room doorway, hurrying across to the windows. “Followed by what?” he said over his shoulder as he drew the curtains one by one. “Did you get a good look at them?”

  “No,” Cranswell admitted, shivering. “Or not clearly. At all. I don’t … even really know what I saw, Ruthven.” His accent was tinged with American, not strong enough to indicate he’d been there recently or that he had originally hailed from that side of the Atlantic, but noticeable. The current uncertainty in his voice didn’t suit him in the least, Fastitocalon thought.

  Ruthven finished with the curtains and came back over to them. “What did you bring? Did you find anything about the weapon?” He glanced at Fastitocalon and sighed, passing a hand over his face. “I’m sorry,” he said. “August Cranswell, may I introduce Frederick Vasse, an old friend of mine. Vasse, this is Cranswell. He’s a junior curator at the British Museum, and my manners have apparently deserted me.”

  “Hi,” Cranswell said, glancing at Fastitocalon for a distracted moment before looking back down at the bundle in his arms, as if to reassure himself it was still there. “I looked through the collection and found a couple of books I really, really, really am not supposed to even have access to, and I kind of … got them out anyway—I can’t believe I did that—and I think maybe I have what you’re looking for, but it’s pretty gruesome.”

  “So was the attack on Varney, I gather.” Ruthven nodded toward the fire. “Sit down and get yourself warm; you’re shaking. Tell me what happened.”

  “I don’t know,” Cranswell said, still hugging the books to his chest. “Like I said, I don’t really know what I saw. I was … in the basement, which is creepy to begin with, especially if you’re alone, and obviously I shouldn’t have been there. I didn’t want anybody to know what I was up to. It took me a while to track down the books I wanted, and the whole time I kept thinking I heard someone coming. Or like … a tapping sound. Like water dripping in a cave. Every time I stopped to listen there was nothing there.”

  Fastitocalon watched him, no longer feeling even slightly dreamy. Cranswell sat down in one of the chairs by the fire and set the books aside, holding out his hands to the flames: long, well-shaped hands, ringless, smooth with the tight skin of youth. “It would have been okay if I just kept hearing stuff,” he went on. “But—I didn’t have more of the lights on than I absolutely needed, and it’s dark down there even with the lights all on, and I saw—just these two pinpoints of light down one of the aisles. Like eyes. Just for a moment, and then they were gone, but I saw them again a moment later from another direction. I … kind of freaked out, and, well. Got out of there in a hurry.”

  Ruthven had been listening to this in silence, and now went over to the sideboard and splashed whiskey into a glass. “Go on,” he said, coming over to press the drink into Cranswell’s hand. “I think we’d better hear the rest of it.”

  Cranswell looked up at him, blinking, and then wrapped his fingers around the glass. The cut-crystal facets glittered as his hand shook. He swallowed half its contents, coughed explosively, and then settled back in the chair looking slightly steadier.

  “I was okay when I left the Museum,” he continued, looking down. “But as I was walking down Drury Lane, I started … seeing little points of light again. Blue light. More than one of them. In pairs, just for a moment. Nobody else seemed to see anything out of the ordinary, I mean, it was dark and raining and everyone w
as in a hurry to get wherever they were going, but nobody else seemed to notice the … eyes.” He shivered, once, hard, like a dog coming out of deep water. “Then I happened to look down a side street where all the lamps were out, and there were lots of them. A whole swarm of little points of light. They were watching me—I don’t just think, I know—and then they moved, they were coming toward me, and—that’s when I ran.”

  He drank off the rest of the whiskey and shut his eyes for a long moment. “But I got you the books you wanted. Sorry I’m late.”

  Fastitocalon watched Ruthven’s face go through a rapid series of expressions, ending up with a kind of fond exasperation. “Never mind that,” he said. “Thank you for bringing them, and I want you to stay here tonight, Cranswell; I don’t know what’s going on, and I don’t like it.”

  Greta’s flat in Crouch End was quite a long way away from both her clinic and Ruthven’s house, and at times like this she often found herself thinking that she’d really rather suck it up and deal with the vagaries of public transportation for the commute instead of driving; she’d spent the past half an hour stuck in traffic on Farringdon Road, and her fingers on the wheel were crossed that her phone wouldn’t ring with urgent summonses to anywhere.

  She had turned the radio off ten minutes earlier after flipping through the stations to see if she could find any useful traffic information, and now turned it on again in search of something other than car horns to listen to.

  “… a second killing today,” someone on the news was saying, her smooth announcer’s voice not quite smooth enough to hide a kind of horrified fascination. “That’s ten murders now in six weeks. Neil, what do we know so far about the latest cases?”

  “Well, Sheri, both seem to point unquestionably to the serial killer popularly known as the Rosary Ripper, from what the Met have released so far. The first victim of the day was found in Whitechapel, as we reported previously, early this morning. The second body was found in Soho just hours ago, and the MO and the signature rosary left at the scene of each crime are consistent with the other cases. Investigations are still under way to locate the source of the rosaries.”