by Vivian Shaw
Its host collapsed back against the bed, gasping, a trickle of bright blood tracing down his chin from a bitten lip—but the eyes he opened a few moments later, while ruined and weeping, were no longer blue.
His name was Stephen Halethorpe.
They’d gotten that much out of him before Greta sent everyone away. Whatever had been inhabiting him had been keeping his physical condition stable, and after its departure she was having to do some rapid work to restore that stability. The others had retreated to the kitchen, where Fastitocalon was trying to explain what the hell had just happened.
“Fascinating,” said Ruthven, who had followed the explanation rather more closely than Varney or Cranswell. He was eyeing Fastitocalon thoughtfully. “When we have time—not now, but when we have time—I want you to go over all this in quite a lot more detail.”
“If you like,” Fastitocalon said. He had an absolutely clanging headache. Being in the same room as the recent events had been a bit like experiencing a metaphysical sonic boom. “The parallels between the science of magic, more properly termed mirabilics, and physics are not complete but offer a useful viewpoint from which to begin examining the subject.”
Varney seemed to have lost some of his melancholy distance. He was leaning into the conversation, frowning intently, even if he did keep rubbing at his shoulder as if it hurt him. Fastitocalon thought he was probably finding the sensation of being an active and valued participant in a group to be a novel, and not unpleasant, one. “This mirabilics business,” Varney said. “Is it strictly relevant?”
“To a certain extent, I’m afraid,” said Fastitocalon. “It doesn’t require that you understand the whole of the theory behind it, just the concept of the laws that govern the behavior of pneuma.”
“Pneuma being …”
Fastitocalon sighed. “You can use the Gnostic definition if you like, spirit, but it technically refers to the equivalent of matter on the higher planes. Each individual has a unique pneumic signature that can be identified and tracked. It’s how I found our Mr. Halethorpe in the first place. Ordinary humans’ pneumic signatures are easily differentiated from supernaturals’ because of the behavior and interaction of certain particles and the resulting mirabilic field arrangements, which are perceptible to several nonhuman species and, under some circumstances, to individual humans with a certain type of genetic peculiarity.”
“What Fass means, I think, is that we all have a … a specific identifiable code,” Ruthven said. “Which can be called a spirit or a soul, if you want, and which varies based on the organization of these particles and so on. But an outside influence can actually alter that alignment, changing the code itself, which means that the way we ourselves interact with reality is changed. Am I close?”
Fastitocalon nodded. “More or less. It’s like instant genetic engineering, in a way. Change someone’s pneumic signature on the higher planes to indicate he’s got a tail and bang, there he is with a tail on the prime material plane, for as long as you keep the influence on. That’s important. Without it, the normal signature will reassert itself. This thing, whatever it is, made some pretty significant changes to Mr. Halethorpe’s weight on reality, which have now been undone.”
“That is the explanation for his apparent ability to see despite the injury to his eyes?” Varney asked.
“Yes, and now that it’s gone he’s probably stone blind. It’s also been keeping him from succumbing to shock and infection despite the amount of abuse his body’s undergone. I don’t honestly know how long he’s got without it.”
“But he is mortal again,” Varney said, looking distant. “He is human, and may receive absolution?”
“I should think so. Theology isn’t really my division.”
Ruthven tapped his nails on the table thoughtfully. “And you think this isn’t related to Heaven or Hell, or at least not in any official capacity? As in, they aren’t responsible for it and moreover aren’t aware of it?”
“I don’t know,” Fastitocalon said. “I honestly don’t. It doesn’t feel infernal or divine, those are generally easy to recognize, but there have been instances of internal schism more than once over the course of existence and I suppose it’s just possible that some ancient splinter of one or the other is responsible for this mess.”
“Schism?” Varney asked, once more focused on the present. “There are doctrinal disagreements between demons?”
“Oh yes, that didn’t stop with the Fall. It’s happened more than once, but the last big shakeup Below was, oh, late sixteenth century.” Fastitocalon closed his eyes for a moment, pushing away vivid memories. “That one had to do with a rogue faction directly influencing human interactions and events, partly camouflaged to implicate Heaven. Samael’s response was … abundantly clear regarding his opinion of such activity. I can’t see anyone from my side trying that again, not after what he did to Asmodeus. No, this is … something small enough so neither of them know about it, or know enough about it to care; otherwise it would have been caught and squashed before now. If we can just … quietly stop it without getting either side actively involved, it would save a great deal of political and bureaucratic bother.”
Ruthven just nodded, apparently dismissing postvital political climate and the question of what might have happened to the unfortunate Asmodeus. “How precisely are we going to stop it? These Gladius Sancti people are not only armed with physical weapons that are capable of causing us major damage; they also now have whatever powers this supernatural influence has given them. I would not want to go up against more than one or two of them at a time, and there might be up to ten lurking under the city. Not to mention the … the thing itself, its physical location; that’s likely to be guarded, and we don’t know anything about it.”
“Yet,” Varney said. “We don’t know yet. When he wakes again, he will tell us everything.”
“We don’t know if he’ll be capable of that,” Fastitocalon said. “This … forcible rearrangement business is extremely hard on the individual, and he’s ill and hurt to begin with. It may have damaged his mind beyond repair.”
“Assuming he wakes up at all,” said another voice, and they all looked up. Greta was standing in the doorway, grey with fatigue.
“He’s stable,” she went on. “For now. I’ve done all I can, given the circumstances, but I can’t … tell you when, or in fact if, he will regain consciousness. There’s … a lot of damage. A lot.”
Fastitocalon wondered if he had ever seen her looking quite so bleak, and thought briefly of the morning Wilfert Helsing had died, white sky and winter-barren trees, crows calling from the rooftops. His illness had been—perhaps mercifully—swift; Fastitocalon had not been there at the end, but he had felt him go, felt the change in reality as a familiar signature winked out.
That morning, when he had arrived to find Greta dry-eyed and blank, he had not hesitated a single moment before reaching out to touch her mind: the same instinctive gesture as an outstretched hand, open arms, let me help, you are not alone, I’m here, I’m with you.
“We’ll pursue alternative avenues,” he said, his chest tight with a pain that had nothing to do with pathology. “He did already give us quite a lot, remember. The seminary—Allen Hall—I know where that is, and it sounded to me as if this little sect started out rather more innocently than it ended up.”
“There might be actual records of it,” Ruthven said, and Cranswell looked from him to the others at the table.
“Or if not records, there have to have been other people aware of the group,” he suggested. “We could maybe try figuring out if anybody knows what happened to them, where they went to ground, that kind of stuff.”
Varney nodded. “And perhaps it might be possible to find out where Brother Johann located these peculiar knives, and if there are likely to be any more of them.”
Greta was still looking almost evanescently worn, but Fastitocalon could see renewed determination under the tiredness. He knew very well that havi
ng a particular task to accomplish, a set of actions to undertake rather than trying to face the formless enormity of a situation, had always helped her cope.
“I know where the seminary is, too,” she said. “Dad had a friend there years ago, when I was just a kid; we used to visit sometimes. I have to work out how to get there on the bus, though. Cranswell is right, I’m not going into any tunnels right now unless I have to.”
“I’ll drive you,” Ruthven said. “I want to find things out just as badly as you do, but are you sure Halethorpe will be all right without you?”
“He’s stable,” she said again, but now there was guilt in her face as well as determination. Fastitocalon sighed. He could hear it as clearly as if Greta were shouting, the bright-burning thought at the surface of her mind: I can’t leave him alone.
“He won’t be left alone,” Fastitocalon told her. “I’ll keep a close eye on him, Greta. And if anything does go wrong I’m probably the one of us who can stop it going any further wrong, at least in the short term.”
She brightened visibly. “I hadn’t thought of that, but yes. Of course you are. You’re magic. Or mirabilic, whatever.”
There was a warm fondness in the words, and in fact Greta stopped leaning in the doorway and crossed the kitchen to kiss Fastitocalon firmly on the cheek.
“It’s hideous,” said Ruthven, staring across the street at the 1970s-era façade of the seminary building. “I mean, the brick bit on the left is bad, but the concrete egg carton attached to it is beyond contempt. I thought Catholics were supposed to go in for the good kind of architecture.”
It was, in fact, pretty dire. Greta couldn’t remember a lot about her occasional visits here with her father, decades back, only that the chapel had smelled of lilies and brass polish and incense the way Catholic churches always did, and the priests in their black suits had unnerved her with the silent way they moved. The front of the building facing Beaufort Street was mostly a low, unprepossessing yellow-brown brick structure, but the chapel attached to it with its concrete gridwork façade could only be described as grim.
“Are you going to be okay going in there?” she asked.
“My aesthetic sensibilities may need a stiff restorative drink afterward,” he said. “Don’t worry about the God thing. As long as I don’t touch holy water or the Host I ought to be all right.”
“No communion for you,” she said, feeling slightly unhinged. “Or me, for that matter. I’m a heretic. Let’s get this over with.”
Inside it wasn’t much more appealing than the external architecture had suggested, but Greta was rather acutely aware that even in a very nice (borrowed) coat over her jeans and sweater she was underdressed. Beside her Ruthven, in his quietly but extremely expensive dark clothing, fit in much less noticeably. She was a little glad when he stepped in front of her and smiled kindly at the man behind the desk. “Hello,” he said. “I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but my friend and I were hoping you could help us.”
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Westminster, it turned out, was less inclined to be helpful than Greta might have wished. Yes, they had had a Stephen Halethorpe studying formation with them, in his second year as a seminarian. He had left a little over two months ago. No, they did not have any information on his whereabouts. No, he had not said where he was going. No, they did not have a Johann on their books, regardless of surname. And no, they certainly were not aware of any student-run clubs or organizations interested in thirteenth-century armed monastic orders. As they had informed Scotland Yard more than once, they were not a home to cults of any sort, and who exactly had Ruthven said he was, anyway, and why was he so interested in their business?
At that point Greta was very aware of Ruthven taking a deep steadying breath, and put in, “We’re just worried about Stephen, that’s all. I’m an old friend of his from ages ago, and he had stopped answering his letters. I wanted to find out whatever I could.”
There were two men behind the desk, one of whom eyed the pair of them with cold pale blue eyes and emanated officious disapproval, and the other of whom—rather younger, with facial bone structure that reminded Greta of certain rodents she had met—looked a bit less inimical, but frightened of his superior. She was not entirely surprised when, on their way out, he caught up with them.
“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “It’s just—the police have been around several times asking the same sorts of questions. It’s—this rosary business, at the murder scenes, they don’t seem to understand that it has nothing to do with the Church, they just go on and on about religious cult activity and it’s all very upsetting.”
Greta made sympathetic noises, waiting for him to get to the point. “About Halethorpe,” he said, eventually. “We don’t know where he went, but he—Just before he left, he seemed to be less than sure of his vocation. Sometimes that happens. People do, er, wash out, I believe is the colloquial term. It—there was—when he did leave, his roommate was terribly upset, and in fact he left, too. That wasn’t a very good time for any of us.”
“His roommate?” Ruthven asked.
“Eric Whitlow. A promising student but—well. Perhaps a little unstable.”
“Did Whitlow disappear, too?”
“Oh no,” said the man. “No, but he … seemed slightly unhinged. I gather he is still in London, however. I can get you the last address we have for him.”
“Thank you,” Greta said, exchanging a look with Ruthven.
The building in which Eric Whitlow currently lived was not a great improvement over the seminary, architecture-wise, but at least it wasn’t supposed to look either nice or welcoming: one of a row of grotty subdivided houses in West Ham. There were five doorbell buttons with hand-printed names beside them, stacked in a row beside the door. Edging into garret territory, Greta thought, and pushed the one marked WITLOW with no H.
After rather a long time the door opened to reveal a girl in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt advertising a band Greta had never heard of, who looked her and Ruthven up and down and demanded, “Yeah?”
“We’re here to see Mr. Whitlow. Eric Whitlow. Is he in?” Greta asked.
“Him? He’s weird,” said the girl, eyes narrowing in suspicion. “He’s not answering his door. Who are you, anyway?”
“I—” she began, but Ruthven cut her off smoothly, and Greta could see the change come over the girl’s face as he applied a hint of thrall.
“We’re friends of a friend,” he said. “We just want a word with Eric, if that’s all right.”
She was already nodding, eyes wide and firmly fixed on Ruthven’s face. It was clear that Greta had ceased to exist entirely in her world, and that she had just joined the ranks of People Briefly If Hopelessly In Love With Edmund Ruthven. “Come in,” she said. “I’m in the middle of studying, but I was just about to make a cup of tea, if you’d like anything?”
“That’s very kind,” he said, as she stepped aside to let them in, “thanks awfully, but we can’t stay. If you could just show us to Eric’s room, that would be wonderful.”
“Of course,” said the girl, and Greta could practically see the little hearts in her eyes. She sighed, following Ruthven up the stairs after his latest conquest. It was undeniably useful, of course, but sometimes Greta wished he wouldn’t do that in front of her. It wasn’t a comfortable thing to watch.
The girl led them to a door at the end of the hall and knocked. “Hey, Eric,” she called. “You’ve got company, and I want that mug back, and it better not have green fur in it this time, okay?”
There was a muffled response that Greta interpreted as fuck off, and the girl sighed. “He really is weird,” she said. “I’m sorry, it—Maybe you could come back later; he’s usually up later in the afternoon or evening. Eric, come on, open the door, there are people.”
This time the fuck off came from much closer range, and in fact they could hear the repeated click as several locks were unfastened. The door opened—a few inches, anyway. It was on a chain. Greta fe
lt a flicker of profound sympathy for Eric Whitlow’s housemates.
A pair of suspicious eyeballs regarded them from within a quite extraordinary profusion of hair. It was difficult to tell where the hair on the head ended and the beard began; a kind of tangled shock of sandy growth seemed to have taken over most of his face. Greta was reminded, absurdly, of the It’s man from the beginning of Monty Python episodes.
“Who are you?” Whitlow demanded.
This time Greta simply let Ruthven speak first. “We’re friends of Stephen Halethorpe,” he said, smoothly. “May we come in?”
Whitlow was a harder mark than his housemate, but after a moment the suspicious look relaxed and he opened the door properly. The view thus afforded was more than enough to verify the girl’s classification of weird. It was, in fact, bizarre, but Greta said nothing other than “Thank you” and led the way into the room, leaving Ruthven to say good-bye to his new friend.
She stood in the narrow open space in the center of the floor, looking around. Every square inch of the walls, and some of the ceiling, was covered in devotional imagery. Plaster saints stood in a row on the windowsill and crowded the top of the desk and wardrobe, sharing the space with candles. There was a strong and distressing smell indicating that, if not the coveted mug, something in here was growing green fur; it was joined by a different if equally unappetizing smell given off by Whitlow himself, who seemed to have given up bathing as well as shaving quite some time ago.
He was short, thin—much too thin, Greta realized, clinically noting just how hollow his eyes were, how clearly the edges of his sternum were visible in the half-open V of his shirt—and even with the edges of Ruthven’s influence acting as a mild tranquilizer, his fingers would not stop moving. They fiddled with the ends of his sleeves, with each other, with the mess of his hair, never staying still for more than a few moments. The nails were bitten right down to the quick, cuticles raw and torn.
Ruthven closed the door behind them, and with it a kind of relief visibly washed over Whitlow; he didn’t stop fidgeting, but the anxious hunch eased a little, and he looked less hunted. “Who are you?” he said again.
