Strange Practice

by Vivian Shaw

  Some of these thoughts must have been too loud to ignore, because Fastitocalon tipped up her chin with a thin, warm finger and looked earnestly at her. “Don’t worry,” he said, and then made a face of his own. “I mean, don’t worry unduly. I don’t think you need be concerned that the universe is going to implode, or be overrun with nameless horrors of polysyllabic description. This situation is … awkward and objectionable, but I don’t believe either Sam or Above is incapable of handling it, should matters get that far.”

  She looked at him steadily, thinking, This is my friend, my father’s friend, whom I have known all my life, and he is on first-name terms with the Devil. “I’m having real trouble thinking of the Adversary and Great Beast that is called Dragon and so on being known as ‘Sam.’”

  Fastitocalon smiled, that odd little unexpected smile that lit his whole face. “Samael. Translates as something like ‘severity of God,’ which has a nice ring to it. He likes being an enormous white snake when he isn’t being the terribly beautiful androgynous wingèd et cetera. I mean, large. Probably thirty feet long, about so big around. Black eyes with red pupils. Not what you’d call subtle.”

  His voice was warm, fond. Greta thought he must have enjoyed working for this Samael, and she wondered again exactly what had happened to drive him up here to live full-time in freezing garrets doing other people’s accounts for them. “Especially when envoys from Above are visiting,” he continued. “Being eyeballed by a thirty-foot-long snow-white snake tends to knock a lot of the insufferable out of angels.”

  She just bet it did. “How does he talk when he’s a snake? Their mouths aren’t built for it.”

  “How does he turn into a snake in the first place? How does Ruthven change from sixty or seventy kilos of bipedal humanoid into a few grams of regrettably adorable bat?” Fastitocalon shrugged. “It’s not a meaningful question. I could go into the metaphysics, but you complain at me when I talk about sums.”

  “I do not,” Greta retorted, and then had to look sheepish. “Okay, maybe I do. Never mind the how, then. Tell me more about Samael.”

  “Other manifestations include a pretty convincing human male of astonishing physical beauty, a cloud of floating eyeballs, and a point of light about as bright as a welding arc. The androgynous wingèd creature is his default setting.”

  “No red socks?”

  “No red socks. Nor has he got a tail or cloven hooves. Or horns. A lot of demons do, you know. Really big curly ones are considered ostentatious, but a neat, well-kept set of horns is quite within the realm of respectability.”

  She was feeling more and more as if this had to be a dream, that her old friend and the bus around them were going to fade out and turn into something else any minute now, but Fastitocalon just nudged her with his elbow and she jerked out of the daze. “This is our stop.”

  Thoughts of Heaven and Hell were driven right out of her mind by the tiresome logistics of arranging for the Mini to be towed to a garage and have them see if the interior was salvageable. It was drizzling again, that thin, icy drizzle that went right down your collar and drained away all enthusiasm or motivation, and her damp hair stuck to her face and neck.

  Fastitocalon was doing that thing where he was really, really difficult to notice at all—not invisible, not missing, just … remarkably easy to ignore. He had his eyes closed and was apparently paying no attention whatsoever to her struggles with the insurance company.

  “Yes,” she told the phone. “Fine. Finally. That works for me. Have them call this number with the report, and leave a message if I can’t pick up. Right. No. Thank you.”

  She hung up and gave the Mini’s front tire a kick on general principles before squinting up at the sky. “If you want to get anything done in this country you’ve got to complain till you’re blue in the mouth, as I believe John Cleese once pointed out. C’mon, my flat’s not palatial but it’s at least warm, I’ll make us a cup of tea …”

  She realized she was having to do all the work in the conversation, and looked sharply at Fastitocalon, or where she knew Fastitocalon to be, even if he wasn’t strictly all the way visible just at the moment. “Fass? What is it?”

  He held up a hand, slipping back to his ordinary greyish self, eyes half-closed; he looked like a man trying very hard to remember something, or to follow the faintest thread of a musical phrase. Despite her immediate instinct to ask him what the hell he was doing, Greta kept quiet, just watching as he turned slowly, searching for something she couldn’t sense. He turned a little farther, and then went still, closing his eyes. When he opened them again, the pupils were little round dots of brilliant orange light, as if the insides of his eyes were on fire, and she took an involuntary step back. The effect was very horrible indeed.

  He blinked, and the orange glow cut off. “Sorry,” he said. “You’ve gone a funny color. Sit down for a minute, will you?”

  It was one thing to know that her old friend wasn’t human—she was fine with that, most of her friends weren’t actually human at all—but every now and then the essential strangeness of him came through and flicked the distant switch in her hindbrain that said run. Greta shivered, once, violently, and then control came back. “I’m all right,” she said. “Just … how about you warn me next time you’re about to do that. What is it? What have you seen?”

  “I know which way he went, after you were gone,” Fastitocalon told her, looking anxious. “It’s faint but distinctive. Look, you get a bus back to Ruthven’s, where it’s safe. I want to follow the trail a little way, see what I can find out.”

  “Balls,” said Greta. “I’m coming, too. He ruined my car, tried to cut my throat, and said a lot of things a well-bred gent ought not to say to a lady. I want to be there when you find him.”

  He sighed, and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I don’t suppose it’s worth trying to convince you it’s too dangerous?”

  “Not in the least,” she said, and took his arm. “Come on, the sooner we find him the sooner you can get in out of this cold weather. The damp’s not good for you.”

  He looked down at her. “You’re impossible,” he said.

  “It’s a human thing,” she told him, and tugged at his arm. “Let’s get a move on.”

  While Greta paced and argued on the phone, Fastitocalon had let his eyes half-close and his other senses calm and then flow outward, smooth as oil over stone, perceiving not simply on this plane of existence but several above it, where he could sense things other than physical objects in space. The trail of the thing that had attacked Greta was old now, cold and overlaid with the trails of hundreds of other living creatures, but it had a peculiar sort of rancid sharpness to it that drew his attention. He had kept very still, listening to Greta’s voice only on a distant, shallow level of awareness, most of his concentration focused on that trail.

  Fastitocalon had, in fact, felt a little of the attack on her itself, through his connection with her mind. It hadn’t been at all clear exactly what was happening, but the sudden spike of vivid terror had been unmistakable. Before he had been able to figure out what, if anything, he could do about it, the terror had passed off into what he had come to think of as Greta’s maintaining mode, and he had known she was, if not safe, then at least not in immediate danger. It had taken him a while to calm down again, nonetheless.

  Now he led her along the attacker’s trail, trying not to think about how visibly shocked she had been to see him looking actually demonic for once. The jab of fear had passed almost immediately, to be replaced with first the truculent expression he remembered from her childhood rebellions and then, somehow terribly, with an almost exact replica of her father’s determined look, as she went back to maintaining. It had been bad enough when he hadn’t known the cause of it; witnessing that shock and knowing it was his own bloody fault was worse. Fastitocalon missed Wilfert Helsing very sharply sometimes. It should be Wilfert watching over her, and not his own self.

  The trail led across Priory Park southwest,
toward Barrington Road, and as they came out onto the street he lost it briefly. Too much had happened since the thing leaving the trail had passed by. He leaned against a lamppost, ignoring Greta’s questions, and slid a little way up the planes again, losing some of his visible presence as he did so, but keeping up a general anti-attention field to limit the effect. Up here there were fewer distractions, and he didn’t have to pay attention to things like buildings and cars; all that was locked on the prime material plane. Here he could see/sense the essence of individual humans, their pneumic signature, what might in a somewhat earlier era have been called their souls. At once the trail of the thing that had attacked Greta sprang back into his awareness, a bright and somehow toxic blue.

  It had come out of the park here, paused, and then continued southward—but not by road. Fastitocalon could see the dim outlines of the buildings and streets, but the blue trail paid no attention to them; it passed below these obstacles.

  He slid back down to the prime material plane, becoming all the way visible again, and this time remembered to keep his eyes shut until the immediate feedback effects had passed. Greta was shaking his arm, saying something; he turned his other senses back on one by one. “… scaring me,” she was saying. “Snap out of it, Fass. Come on, don’t do this to me right now.”

  Fastitocalon drew a deep breath, cold and painful in his chest, and opened his eyes, once he was pretty sure the orange light had passed. He found Greta staring up into his face with a mixture of worry and irritation.

  “This way,” he said. “We can’t follow it precisely, but I have it now, it’s clear again. Sorry.” Beneath their feet an iron manhole cover hid the low rush and chime of water: a storm sewer. “It’s gone underground,” Fastitocalon said, toeing the metal cover. “Into the tunnels. That’s where they hide. That’s where they’ve been hiding, all along.”

  Distracted from all the things she’d been going to say to him with regard to scaring sixteen kinds of hell out of her with his intermittent vanishing act, Greta stared first at the metal circle and then at Fastitocalon, eyes widening. “In the sewers?”

  “In the dark places under the city,” he agreed, pulling Ruthven’s coat tighter around his shoulders. “Sewers, tube tunnels, utility tunnels. Come on, the weather’s not getting any less nasty, and I’ve got its trail again. Let’s see where it’s been.”

  Two hours later, wet and chilled and in an extremely unfriendly frame of mind, Greta stood on the corner of St. Pancras Way and the Camden Road, shifting from one foot to the other and wiggling her toes to try to get the feeling back in them. They had been walking steadily ever since leaving Crouch End, and while it wasn’t so very far a walk, having to stop every so often for Fastitocalon to reorient himself on the trail and do unsettling things he refused to explain to her—“it has to do with planes” was all he’d said—and the general cold, unpleasant louring weather had made it a thoroughly unenjoyable experience.

  Fastitocalon was currently walking in a small circle with his eyes tight shut, an activity that should have drawn more attention than it was, in fact, doing. Even Greta was having trouble seeing him clearly, and she had the advantage of actually knowing he was present; she thought probably he was broadcasting a Don’t Notice Me signal, or a Somebody Else’s Problem field, or something of the kind. Not that she had any idea how he was doing that, not that “how” was an answerable question, or what other magical abilities he had that she’d never been informed of, but—

  “Oh,” he said, and she turned to see him looking for an instant very ill indeed. The orange light in his eyes was back, but this time it seemed less noticeable, or perhaps she was just getting used to it. “There’s more than one.”

  “It met up with friends?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Fastitocalon. The orange was the only color in his face. “No, I rather think they caught up with it. There’s …” He waved his hands in the irritable gesture of someone trying to convey a complex point in a language they don’t speak well. “There’s nuances to the signature. I can feel at least three of them as well as our chap, and they’re all that nasty sort of cyan blue and smell terrible, but … ours fades out and then comes back different. Guttering. It’s … I think they found it, and took it somewhere, and then brought it back changed. It’s very close.”

  Greta shivered, a long involuntary wave that raised the hair on her arms. “It’s close to us? Now? Underneath the street?”

  “No,” he said. “It was underneath … but it’s on the surface now, I’d swear to it, and very nearby. This way.”

  He began to walk west again along the Camden Road, and she could see he was shivering, too. She’d had enough. They should be on their way back to Ruthven’s like sensible people, she told herself. They should stop following the invisible track Fastitocalon said he couldn’t quite see but sensed, especially if the monk was close by. What if he had another of those pigsticker things and decided to poke holes in Fass with it this time? She had seen enough of Varney’s reaction to be pretty sure it would do real harm to him and …

  Greta sighed and hurried after Fastitocalon. All right, fine, she thought. So I’m curious. Curiosity had never done anybody any good—M. R. James had written a couple of pithy illustrations of that particular point—but dammit, she wanted to know what was going on.

  Fastitocalon was moving deceptively quickly. She caught up with him as they passed under the railway bridge, and she noticed with a sinking feeling that he was beginning to wheeze. This really wasn’t good for him. She needed to get him somewhere warm and dry as soon as possible, but one look at his face told her it was a waste of time trying to argue the point for the moment.

  The rain was intensifying as they crossed the canal. Greta had her hood up; she couldn’t hear much over the drumming of raindrops, and she would have put money on it that Fastitocalon couldn’t, either. Nevertheless, as they passed the late Victorian St. Michael’s Church incongruously squashed between the supermarket and an interior design shop, he stopped dead in the middle of the pavement with his head tilted, clearly listening for some faint sound to come again. She looked around. Just wet, cold, miserable London, nothing glowing blue.

  “There,” he said softly, and pointed to St. Michael’s. “Inside. It’s very faint, but it’s there. I think it’s badly hurt.”

  She didn’t have to ask if he was sure. He looked bleak and exhausted, shoulders hunched against the rain, and Greta couldn’t help a miserable cowardly wish that he would say don’t go in there, it’s much too dangerous or maybe let’s go home and leave it to die on its own.

  No. She shook away the thought and the wash of hot shame that went with it. That wasn’t something Fastitocalon would ever say. “Let’s go, then.”

  “I’ll stay out here, if you don’t mind. Churches tend to give me a nasty headache.”

  Greta looked at him despairingly. “Fass, please—”

  “You’ll be fine on your own,” he said. “You can do this.”

  She wasn’t even remotely sure of that. “Fass, what if it’s got the knife?”

  If it had the knife, she realized, cross with herself, he was probably in more danger than she would be. He sighed, and for a moment looked not only ill but old—ancient, heavy with the weight of years, the way some of her barrow-wight patients were weighed down.

  “All right,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I’ll come with you.” But Greta knew even as he said the words that she couldn’t take the offer.

  She made her hands relax from the tight fists they’d curled into, took a deep breath. “God damn it. No. Never mind. You stay here. I won’t be long, I hope.”

  Greta opened the gate, passing through into the churchyard—a narrow strip of space with a few trees offering some shelter from the rain. She could very vividly remember the cold clarity of her terror when the monk had held the knife to her throat; some of that chill rose again in her despite the daylight and the nearby presence of her friend.

 
The door handle itself was cold, shockingly cold under her hand, and slick with rain. She gripped it hard enough to hurt, and pulled the door open on empty silence.

  When nothing glowing blue and screaming flung itself at her, she let out her breath, took another one, and stepped forward into the gloom. It smelled of brass polish and lilies and age, like all churches she’d encountered: that indefinable tang of wood and stone that had been where it was for many centuries, and was not going anywhere for many more. There was nobody in there with her. Fastitocalon had been wrong.

  He wasn’t frequently wrong. Greta’s eyes had adjusted to the gloom, and her ears to the curious echoing deadness of church halls everywhere, and she stood perfectly still, straining both senses to catch what he had caught. At first she thought it was her own breathing, still too fast from fright; then it came again, and the sound curdled disgust in her stomach even as it called out to instincts she had been trained to obey. It was a faint mewling, the sound of something exhausted and in terrible pain.

  She paced slowly up the aisle, wishing she had the little can of pepper spray to hold on to: Even empty, it had felt comforting. That sound came again, closer now. Closer. She was aware of a smell now, overpowering the lilies-and-polish atmosphere of the church: the smell she’d noticed for the first time bending over Varney’s wound, a low, sour reek of herbs and metal, somehow rancid, as if exposure to the air was turning something bad. Underneath that was the unmistakable smell of shit. Of sewers.

  She reached the end of the rows of empty folding seats, and looked around: nothing. Nothing in the nave, anyway. The shadowy aisles were separated from the nave by a series of vast arches reaching up to the clerestory windows, supported by huge stone pillars, each easily wide enough for a man to hide behind.

  She took a step and then another step around the heavy curve of the last pillar. At first she didn’t realize what she was looking at. She thought for one absurd moment that someone had left a heap of mottled-pink rags lying on the floor, and then the heap moved. It moved, and opened its horrible eyes at her, and made that low, mewling sound again, and Greta Helsing only just made it to the rubbish bin by the door in time to lose what was left of her breakfast.