Strange Practice

by Vivian Shaw

  As they drew up in front of the Embankment house, reality came back, stacking up the weights again in her mind, in her heart. She was going to have to protect the man who’d fairly recently tried to kill her from the attentions of a very angry vampyre as well as August Cranswell’s enthusiastic questioning, and it was going to …

  She mentally rephrased her analysis from suck to be bloody awful, and then again to present a considerable challenge, and the progression was enough to make her laugh a little at the sheer absurdity of the situation. Ruthven raised an eyebrow at her.

  “Nothing,” she said, swallowing against a sudden unexpected threat of tears following in the wake of the laughter. The image of balancing on a very narrow ledge between deep valleys rose in the back of her mind, and she pushed it away, willing her voice to sound normal. “It’s been a long day, that’s all.”

  “It certainly has.” Ruthven patted her hand. “Come on, I want to get some food into you. You’ve gone the color of good bond paper and these two need their beds.”

  Fastitocalon protested being lumped in with the quondam Gladius Sancti infantry on the invalid list, but he was handily overridden.

  Later that evening, after Ruthven had made dinner for her and Cranswell (no garlic was the only real house rule when it came to food; small amounts of scallions and chives were on the okay list, and it turned out you didn’t need Allium sativum to make quite a passable Bolognese), she told them her interpretation of what she had seen.

  “They’re radiation burns, not chemical, and I can’t think of a thermal burn situation that would result in the pattern I saw. Full-body burn cases from stuff like falling into boiling hot springs exist in the literature, but the pattern doesn’t fit; his aren’t all over, they’re worst on his front, and some parts of his back and legs seem to have been spared.” She looked around the table at their expressions. “Judging by the repeated references he made to blue light I’m going to venture the theory that they’re UV burns, and that they’re due to something like an unshielded welding arc, or extended exposure to a mercury vapor lamp without the outer protective bulb. The pattern is consistent with his having spent a significant amount of time in a kneeling position facing the source, possibly with his hands held together in front of his chest. The burns are worst on his face and neck, his hands and forearms, the front of his lower torso, and the front of his thighs. He said something about a noise, too, as well as the light. A humming or buzzing sound.” She paused, and tucked her hair back. “The real question is what the hell a UV source like that is doing underground, and what has it got to do with their kill-all-demons bit? And not incidentally who they are, and why they are doing whatever it is they’re doing, but mostly I want to know what’s responsible for this.”

  Cranswell was winding up the last strands of spaghetti on his fork, his appetite apparently unaffected by her narrative. “Blue light of God,” he said with his mouth full. “Whatever it is, they’re being exposed to the source on purpose. Maybe for penance. Like hair-shirts or flagellation, you know, mortification of the flesh.”

  “‘O holy UV-B light source, purify me of sin’?” Greta said, looking skeptical. “I don’t think they had those back when this sect got started.”

  “’S like that Ursula Andress movie.” He finished twirling the spaghetti, conveyed it to his mouth, and used the now-denuded fork to gesture. “With Stacy Keach. Something Something of the Cannibal God. Ursula and supporting cast were exploring a primitive volcanic island staffed by cannibals, like you do, and found the locals worshipping a dead guy with a Geiger counter stuck in his chest cause they thought the clicking was the sound of his dead heart still beating. You know. Object taking on talismanic significance. Cargo-cult stuff.”

  “But a lightbulb?” Varney said, interest in the subject apparently overtaking mild revulsion at Cranswell’s table manners. “And these aren’t superstitious cannibal tribes. They’re … well … as Dr. Helsing says, we don’t know who they are. Just that they can spell quite long words in garlic juice on people’s walls.”

  “Religious mania is capable of prompting some pretty messed-up behavior,” Cranswell pointed out. “People do all kinds of stuff because God tells them to. Why shouldn’t God be a lightbulb? He’s already been a whirlwind and a burning bush, just to select two examples completely at random.”

  “Wait,” said Ruthven, holding up a hand, looking into the middle distance with the preoccupied expression of someone tracking down an elusive thread of memory. “Wait. Underground, right. The Underground. There’s all sorts of electrical switchgear and so on to run the systems down there.”

  “I think the transport authority would notice a bunch of crazy monk guys genuflecting to their light fixtures,” Cranswell said. “Like, even in London that’s weird.”

  “Shut up, I’m thinking.” Ruthven’s hand, still lifted, tapped gently at the air as if to jar loose whatever he was trying to remember. “Trains and electrical switchgear … electrical switchgear … I’ve nearly got it.”

  “I had an electric train when I was a kid. The transformer that came with it was this little dinky piece of shit that was always overheati—”

  “That’s it!” Ruthven thumped the table, making them all jump. “Sorry. That’s what reminded me, when you said transformer. I know what the blue light is. I mean, I think it has to be.” He beamed at them in satisfaction. “Nothing else fits all the requirements, the blue light and the humming-hissing sound and the mercury vapor and the ultraviolet radiation and the, well, the talismanic significance, as you so precisely put it.”

  “What fits the requirements?” Greta demanded.

  “Oh, sorry. It’s not a lamp at all, it’s a mercury arc rectifier. Electric railways had them, that’s what made me think of it. They were pretty much the standard up until, oh, the sixties or seventies, when thyristors took over. Pity, though of course solid state was less dangerous and took up less space. Very few of them are still actually working these days; they’re museum pieces, quite apart from the toxicity thing.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” said Varney, enunciating with irritated clarity, and Greta and Cranswell shot him identical grateful looks.

  “Used to have them in carbon arc film projector setups, too; you had to have DC to run the arcs,” Ruthven went on, and then apparently finally realized he’d lost his audience. “Look, I’ll show you.” He took out his phone and did a quick YouTube search. “Here’s the one from the Manx Electric Railway that was still in place up until a few years ago.”

  All three of them crowded in to stare at the little screen; it was playing a video clip of something that was at once wonderful and terrible and profoundly hypnotic.

  Cranswell was looking over Ruthven’s shoulder. “It is a lightbulb. With legs.”

  It did, in fact, resemble one: a giant blue-glowing glass bulb, six angled legs jutting out from its walls just above the base, looking vaguely tentacular. The flickering unsteady glow was brightest in the hollow glass tubes of the legs, each of which bent ninety degrees before giving itself up to a graphite fitting and a coiled, curled wire. In the base of the bulb lay a miniature lake of mercury, on the surface of which danced a glaring brilliant blue-white spark. Far too bright to look at for long, the moving spark seemed to describe strange patterns on the liquid metal: sigils that might make sense if you could only watch long enough to follow them, that—despite the danger—made you want to try.

  When it was over, nobody protested when Ruthven played the video again, turning up the volume so the humming of the thing was clearly audible over the tour guide’s chatter.

  “Good heavens,” said Varney quietly. “I don’t think I can blame them for thinking that thing could have supernatural powers. What are the legs for?”

  “Anodes,” Ruthven said. “It turns AC into DC. For reasons I won’t go into, the mercury vapor only conducts current in one direction. It’s a valve that only lets current pass one way.”

  “I�
��ll take your word for it,” said Greta. “If that’s basically what amounts to a great big unshielded UV lamp, it could probably do the kind of damage I saw. If he’d been exposed to it for … well, quite a while.”

  Ruthven glanced at her, eyebrows raised. She shrugged, not really wanting to examine the thought too closely. “It would have to be hours. Several hours.”

  “Like I said,” Cranswell put in, “doing vigil or penance or what-have-you.”

  Purifying them, Greta thought, and winced. “UV sterilizes,” she said. “It is literally germicidal; it’s actually one of the ways you sterilize things in a lab. Ugh, it does fit, doesn’t it? Burning away the dross.”

  “How does this thing confer on them the … the supernatural powers we have witnessed?” Varney asked impatiently. “Their eyes, how does it make them able to see through objects when their eyes are obviously blinded?”

  Cranswell nodded. “And how does it make ’em glow blue while it’s at it?”

  “That is, I think, where the supernatural aspect comes in.”

  With almost comically coordinated timing, they looked up from Ruthven’s phone to see Fastitocalon leaning in the doorway, looking haggard but focused. “Because, make no mistake, they are supernatural,” he continued. “It takes one to know one.”

  “What are you doing up?” Greta demanded.

  “Providing the demonic viewpoint. No,” he added, lifting a hand, “please don’t start with the lecturing, I’ve had rather more than enough of that for one day, and I’m quite capable of rational discourse.”

  Greta looked mutinous, but just sighed and got up, gathering the plates. “I’ll put on a kettle,” she said. “If we’re going to have a council of war we might as well have a nice cup of tea while we’re doing it.”

  In the tunnels, blackness. No sound save for the dripping of water, the distant roar of the fans that never stop turning, the intermittent rumble of trains passing through in tunnels nearer the surface. Down here there is only blackness, and the slow drip as unseen water patiently works its way through cracks in the concrete, stretching milky fingers of newborn stone down from ceilings, rotting away the man-made rock, fraction by fraction over the years. The creatures that use these tunnels have no need of light to see by. It is dark everywhere but in one chamber, and in that one chamber the light never goes out.

  In its glass prison, the dancing point of blue-white brilliance is surrounded by a cold blue glow that turns red into black, burning on and on in the relentless dark. The steady atonal humming that accompanies the light does not change with its flickering intensity.

  Inside the blue glow, inside the hum, past the silver trickle of condensing mercury on the glass walls of the bulb, an entity watches, and considers.

  It is not an entity that had been present when this installation was built. In fact, it has only been here, in this physical metal-and-glass stronghold, for a matter of months, finding it peculiarly comfortable as a dwelling place. Before that it had ridden through the centuries in many kinds of vessels: weapons, jewels, living creatures, the minds of men. Twined with their thoughts, their ideas, their dreams, unnoticed and unremarked, it watched in the darkness behind their eyes. From time to time it has spoken to them from the mouths of oracles, or been the voice of gods and idols in their heads; sometimes it has merely whispered words to them in the long watches of the night, and planted seeds that bore strange fruit.

  It has been around for a very long time, this formless, bodiless entity. It is as old as creation itself—an overlooked fragment of existence, like the scraps on a cutting-room floor—and it has slept from time to time, from age to age, but it is awake once more.

  Awake and hungry.

  Its purpose is and always has been to consume, to devour; and all the mischief it has made in all the ages of civilization, and before civilization itself, is merely to generate hate and fear to feed its unending hunger. It has turned the course of history to its own desires, fomenting unrest, provoking conflict, steering what might have been peaceful agreements toward aggression, over and over again.

  It was in the adder that stung King Arthur’s knight at Camlann, starting the last battle. It rode in the hearts and minds of those who set fire to the Library of Alexandria. When the Mongols took Baghdad in 1258 and the waters of the Tigris ran black with ink from ruined books and red with blood from ruined men, ninety thousand dead, it feasted. But it can focus its attention far more tightly, and some of its favorite feedings have been spiced by the intense fear that springs up surrounding the work of a single human’s hands; the spell cast over a town, a city, by a series of high-profile and mysterious deaths. There is a certain satisfaction it finds in such careful and delicate work.

  And the web of threads it has woven through this city, through hearts and minds and the dark holes under the earth, through faith and fervor, is almost complete. Perhaps it is time for the end of this game, for it to take its meal.

  The belief of these zealous little god-botherers whose ready-made cult it has settled into, as a king might assume a captured throne, has been surprisingly rich and nourishing. It had found them ideally suited to its purposes: a group of men only just formed into a tiny sect intent on following the example of a long-lost secret society. They had been quite ordinary, if intense in their devotions to a particular view of God.

  The entity has enjoyed them immensely from the beginning, their fervent belief tasting rare and delicious. At first it had merely watched; then it began influencing these believers, settling into their hearts and minds, lending them the slightest edge of its (vast, unmeasured) strength—and rendering them no longer entirely human in the process. Now their belief has metastasized from devotion into blank-eyed madness, which it enjoys for its own piquancy; but it is the formless terror, the gathering fear that its creatures have induced in the city above that the entity truly desires. The generalized fear brought about by the killings, and the bright, delicious spikes of it each time someone has found themselves being watched—being followed—by two pinpoints of blue light. The deaths are delightful; the fear is much, much better. It had intended to draw this out a little longer, but perhaps the time has ripened long enough.

  It is not only the killings of ordinary people that have stirred up the city to its current rich and wonderful concentration of dread. On its own that would have been reward enough for all the thing’s efforts; but here and now it has been able to taste a rarer and more potent vintage. The terror of the living is delicious. The terror of the dead, however, is exquisite.

  When it had first settled into place and was beginning to choose its tools, it had not thought to bother with the effort and concentration required to engage the city’s small group of monsters. There were always monsters; there always had been. Mostly it was simply too much work to manipulate them, to play upon their minds the way it played upon the briefer, brighter minds surrounding them; but this time it had hit upon a little band of tools that were in a peculiarly appropriate position to make that leap. It is quite proud. Armed with their pretty poisoned ritual toys, they have done a remarkable job so far both in directly engaging the monsters and in persecuting the humans they apparently valued, and the heady savor of supernatural fear is profoundly satisfying to experience—goes, in fact, much further toward sating the entity’s unending hunger than anything has done in a very, very long time.

  When the entity’s chief servant had discovered that the excommunicate still lived, that the monster-doctor woman he had failed to kill had somehow brought what was left of their outcast brother to a place of safety, he had been furious, incandescent with hatred, blazing with the most delicious determination to rectify this wrong.

  (That the woman must die had been clear from the beginning; she was peculiarly necessary to the monsters, and killing her would send a lovely ripple effect of not only fear but despair through the city’s undead, which the entity has been looking forward to a great deal. The young man who had stolen the books was much less important,
and merely frightening him had seemed sufficient expenditure of effort at the time.)

  The rich and heady anger of its chief servant at the initial failure to dispose of the woman had gone some way toward distracting the entity from its hunger—but not for long. Thinking, now, it reaches out for the servant’s mind—a red welter of intense and fervent belief that, to the entity, is beautiful—and gives a little tug. It does not have to wait long before the man appears in its chamber, in the chamber of the peculiar talisman it has chosen to inhabit, and falls on his knees in the glare of its light. In his rough-spun habit and cowl he could have been kneeling before any number of altars in the centuries gone by. This chamber is as much a sanctuary as any cathedral of stone and gold and jewel-colored glass.

  Come closer, it says inside his head. The servant’s scarred face and blank, unblinded eyes are turned up to it, worshipful. I have a new task for you.

  “Yes, Lord,” he says, a whisper, barely audible under the endless hum. “I will not fail You again.”

  I know. Its voice is gentle. I have made you the minister of God, a revenger to execute My wrath. Your heart is true, and in your mouth are the names of God, and in your hand the great and strong sword.

  Speaking in the forms and cadences its tools expect has always been easy. It has an ear for language; taking on the role of these people’s very specific image of God had posed no challenge whatsoever. It has been many gods, over the millennia. Many.

  The servant bows lower before it. Tears gleam on his blue-lit face. “Yes, Lord, thank You, Lord, what would You command me?” In his voice is such joy.

  Let them be burned with fire, says the voice inside the light. Kindle a fire in their company, and the flame shall burn up the wicked, the blood-leeches and their servants, the thief and the Devil’s whore and the demon-creature and the excommunicant. Let them be burned with fire. There is no darkness, nor shadow of death, where the workers of iniquity may hide themselves.