Strange Practice

by Vivian Shaw

  “My name is Ruthven, and this is Greta. She’s a doctor.”

  “Don’t need doctors,” Whitlow said, tugging at his hair. “Don’t need anyone.”

  “We’re not here to do anything to you,” Greta said in her calmest and most reassuring voice, the one she used for frightened children of varying species. “We’re friends of Stephen Halethorpe, like Ruthven said. We were hoping you could tell us a little about him.”

  “Halethorpe,” he muttered, shaking his head. Dandruff flew. “Don’t talk about him. Halethorpe’s dead. Don’t talk about him. Any of them. All dead. Better that way.”

  “He isn’t dead,” Greta said, leaving off the yet. “He’s very ill, but he’s alive, and I’m taking care of him. He was part of a religious group calling itself the Gladius Sancti, and we wanted to know if you had any information about them, since you and he were rooming together at the seminary.”

  Whitlow stopped fidgeting, staring at her with a hollow, burning intensity. “Wait,” he demanded. “You’re saying he got out?”

  “That’s right,” she said. “He got out. He’s—”

  She could see very clearly, just as clearly as with the girl a little earlier, the effect of Ruthven’s attention, because at this point Ruthven cut it off, looking around himself for somewhere remotely unhazardous to sit, and Eric Whitlow’s eyes widened very suddenly. His whole body seemed to hunch, as if preparing for some kind of terrible flight, and she could see the little hairs on his forearms all stand up at once in an intense flush of terror. He was sitting on the edge of what she had to assume was his bed, piled high with books and papers and crumpled-up clothing, and now he leaned back away from them.

  Humans did smell of fear, Greta thought. There was a sudden sour tang in the air that even she could pick up. Ruthven was wrinkling his nose. “Hey,” she said, gently, but with an edge on it. “Hey. Eric.”

  “Who are you?” he asked, shrinking away from them, and Greta’s heart hurt when he reached behind him and grabbed a pillow as if it could offer some kind of shielding, scrabbling his way backward onto the bed, into the corner. “Who—what are you?”

  Ruthven moved a little, but Greta made a sharp little gesture with one hand and he subsided. “Eric,” she said. “We’re not here to hurt you. Look at me. Look at my face, okay? Look at my eyes; you won’t come to any harm. Look at me and tell me what you see.”

  He wouldn’t, for another awful terrified moment, and then hesitantly—she could see the effort, the courage that went behind it—he looked up at her.

  “Tell me what you see,” said Greta again, still low and kind, holding his gaze steadily.

  “You’re …” He trailed off, blinking. “You’re a person.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “I’m a person. Just a person. Bog-standard ordinary person, but—Eric, I believe you. Whatever you saw. I believe you. I don’t know the explanations for all of what’s been happening, but I believe you, and I want to understand.”

  For a moment longer he stared up at her, and then in a sudden terrible collapse covered his face with his hands, dissolving into violent, uncontrollable tears.

  Greta said a couple of bad words under her breath and sat down beside him on the edge of the bed, putting a hand on his back. Beneath her fingers the knobbles of his spine were much too clear, much too sharp, shaking with the force of his sobs. “It’s going to be all right,” she told him, hoping it was true, and when he turned to her with a face twisted into a damp and miserable mask of fear she put her arms around him and pulled him close, and stroked the greasy tangled hair.

  He cried in the hard and choking, almost retching spasms of someone very near the end of their endurance. It didn’t take very long, though, before he subsided into hitching, juddering gasps and pulled away from her, mumbling something that sounded like I’m terribly sorry through the hair.

  Greta’s shoulder had been moistened by rather more unpleasant fluids in its time, but she was still very aware of its dampness as she stroked Whitlow’s back gently. “It’s all right,” she said. “Eric—what you saw, whatever you saw—it was real. You’re not—”

  “Going crazy,” he said, and parted the unlovely mess of his hair with both hands, wiping at his face. “Gone crazy. He—the eyes—and that voice—I didn’t know what to do—what was your name, I’m sorry, I’m terrible at names—”

  “Greta,” said Greta, who couldn’t help a little smile. “Tell me what you saw. I can perhaps—we can perhaps explain some of it, not a lot, but some. But I need to know what happened. You and Stephen were roommates at the seminary?”

  Ruthven silently offered her a handkerchief, and she took the pristine square of lawn and pressed it into Whitlow’s hand. He blew his nose, copiously, and she avoided looking at Ruthven as she went on rubbing his back. “Keep it,” she said.

  “Thank you,” Whitlow said damply, and swiped the hair out of his eyes again. “It’s—it was months ago, I’ve kind of lost track of time, but Stephen was … he started out so ordinary. You know? Nothing strange about him. Didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, came to the seminary right out of undergrad with a degree in classics or something. His idea of fun on a Saturday evening was discussing the minutiae of a passage’s translation with a couple of his colleagues.”

  “And you wanted something else?” Ruthven said, and Greta could feel Whitlow tense under her hand as he shot a look at the vampire.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, giving Ruthven a let me handle this, okay? look. “All we need to know about is the order.”

  “The order,” Whitlow repeated, and gave a nasty clogged little laugh. “It was … fun, at first. Like a club. A little secret society that the faculty didn’t know about. John came up with it. John Arbeiter. Said he’d found the idea in some ancient manuscript or other.”

  “The Holy Sword?” she said.

  “Sword of Holiness, but yeah. It was … more interesting than the course of study, you know? A little time to … enjoy ourselves.”

  “The ceremonial aspect,” Ruthven said.

  Whitlow looked up. “Yeah, exactly. The … pageantry. Only on our terms. It felt … oh, fuck, I don’t know. Rebellious and holy at the same time.”

  “Where did you meet?” Ruthven pulled his chair closer, across the unspeakable carpet.

  “A bunch of places. We’d use the seminary chapel sometimes but mostly it was parish churches, around the city.”

  “Anglican churches?”

  “John said God wouldn’t mind. That He could hear us just as well from a C of E altar as from a proper Catholic one.”

  “How progressive,” said Ruthven.

  “Yeah, well.” Whitlow coughed raggedly. “We were all a little dazzled, I think. John was good at it. At the preaching thing. Some people have it, you know, the, the ability to grab people’s attention and hold it, and make them … believe things, at least for a little while.”

  “I can imagine,” said Greta. “Go on. You and Halethorpe were part of John’s congregation?” Not Johann, she thought. John.

  “Yeah. It sounds stupid but it was all … fun and games, really, until he showed up with those fucking spike things.”

  “The crossblades?” Ruthven’s eyes narrowed.

  “He had … found them. Somewhere. Didn’t tell us where. Just that God had led him to their hiding place, which—I mean, really? And some recipe for a magic potion that you were supposed to put on them. I was fine with all the … rhetoric, all the great smite-the-infidel shit, but then there were knives. I wasn’t there for knives.”

  “But Stephen was?” Greta asked, her hand still on his back.

  “Oh yes. Yes, Stephen was.”

  She exchanged a look with Ruthven, over Whitlow’s bowed head, and felt the weight of uncertainty spinning down to a single, solid point.

  “What happened after that?” she said.

  “John wanted us all to take an oath,” he said. “I could recognize bits of it. He was cherry-picking from Scripture. B
ut the night he wanted us to sign this paper—”

  He gave another racking, hoarse little sound halfway between a cough and a sob. “It wasn’t John. Or, not just John. I could … I could have sworn his eyes were brown before, but that night in the church they were blue. And he—he sounded like more than one voice was speaking, when he talked. Like the demons. Our name is Legion.”

  “What did you do?” she asked, gently.

  “I said I needed to meditate on it. He didn’t like that, but he let me go. I went back to our room and prayed. For hours. I was still praying when Stephen came back.”

  She and Ruthven exchanged a glance, but neither spoke. After a moment Whitlow sagged a little farther, burying his face once more in his hands. “He came back late at night. Early in the morning, actually. He was … different.”

  “Different how?” Greta asked, with a fair idea of the answer.

  “His eyes were strange. Bluer. They had been grey before. I could have sworn they gave off light, how—I don’t know what I saw, just—he said some things, some stuff out of Revelation, it wasn’t like him at all. I asked what had happened and he said he’d seen the light, like one of those American preachers on TV, do you see the light, and he said he wanted me to see it, too, and his voice—like John’s earlier, it wasn’t just his voice, there was something else in there talking, something that wasn’t Stephen—”

  Whitlow broke off again, pressing his hands against his face. “And I saw him across the room, clear as day, and I saw—I saw the carpet underneath his feet, and there was light there, he wasn’t touching the ground, he wasn’t standing on the fucking ground at all—”

  She could feel him shaking helplessly under her hand. “What did you do then?”

  “I ran,” he said, still hiding his face. “I ran, what the fuck do you think?”

  It was late into the afternoon, getting on toward evening, when Halethorpe regained consciousness again. This time it was Fastitocalon dozing in the chair by the bed. The slight shift in Halethorpe’s signature as he woke caught his attention.

  “Hello,” Fastitocalon said, sitting up properly. “How are you feeling?”

  Halethorpe blinked several times, hard, the exaggerated blinking of someone trying to clear his vision, but the ruined eyes remained unfocused. His face was turned almost, but not quite, in Fastitocalon’s direction.

  “Who’s there? I can’t … I can’t see, who’s there?”

  The voice was … different, now, subtly; it had lost a quality Fastitocalon realized had been something like an echo, a reverb effect. Now he just sounded tired and desperately ill, and very, very human. But recognizably himself, and not that other.

  Fastitocalon was struck, again, by how tenacious the human race could be—against what odds it had managed to hang on over the centuries. “I’m Fastitocalon,” he said. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced; I’m a friend of Ruthven and Dr. Helsing.”

  The blind face turned farther toward him, looking not at Fastitocalon’s own face but somewhere just beyond his right ear. Without the blue glow Halethorpe’s eyes looked even nastier. Visible ulceration had begun to spread.

  “Not … with the mirror eyes?”

  “No, that’s Varney. Another friend. The chatty young man with the American accent is August Cranswell. I’m the antique in the beautifully cut suit.”

  “You’re … grey,” Halethorpe said, half a question.

  “That’s right. It’s a constitutional thing, I’m afraid.”

  Halethorpe seemed to consider that, closing his eyes for a moment. Fever spots burned in his cheeks, the shiny blotches of burn scars standing out starkly against the red. “I can’t see,” he said again. “Why can’t I see?”

  Fastitocalon sighed. “Well. It’s rather a long story, and we were hoping you could tell us most of it, actually. Do you remember anything at all?”

  “The … blue light underground. Light of God. Voice of God.”

  “You know it isn’t really God,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “It speaks … in your head. Speaks words. Voice of God … only not still or, or small. It burns you.”

  “It puts out a great deal of UV radiation,” said Fastitocalon. “I gather you were … made to do vigil before it?”

  “There was … there was a ritual.” He seemed to be making an effort to speak, eyes still squeezed shut, but slightly more lucid than before. “Fasting and … prayer and … being allowed to enter the light. Be burned clean.”

  Fastitocalon watched as his hands on the bedclothes curled into fists. “Gave us … new sight. Different sight. I … I learned how to move again. To recognize where walls were, seeing through them …” He swallowed hard, and fresh tears spilled down his face. “Only … only the purified could carry the blade.”

  “Those blades, where did they come from? Who made them?”

  Halethorpe shook his head slightly. “I don’t know. Johann—Brother Johann—he found them. God guided him to find them.”

  Fastitocalon sighed. “You lived underground, then?”

  “Yes. In the tunnels. Once we were burned … we stayed underground, except to do God’s work.”

  “And God’s work was to execute monsters.”

  “Evil,” he said. “Yes. And … and the wicked. The workers of iniquity.”

  “The light determined who was wicked and who wasn’t, I gather?”

  “It spoke to Brother Johann. Those who failed to carry out his orders are … punished.” The hollow between his collarbones pulsed with the rapid beating of his heart.

  “Where is it? The thing itself?”

  “Under the Underground,” Halethorpe said. “Deep under. Some kind of … old tunnels beneath St. Paul’s tube station.”

  Fastitocalon blinked. It had been that close to them, all along? The half a mile or so of space that separated Ruthven’s house from St. Paul’s Cathedral felt suddenly very, very narrow indeed.

  “Thank you,” he said, after a moment, gently. “Enough for now. You need to rest; you’re safe here, nothing can harm you.”

  “Not safe. I’m damned. Cursed of God, anathema—”

  “No, you aren’t. Believe me, I would know. You were a creature other than human for a while there, but the thing that was inside you has gone; you are no more damned than any other man, and less so than some, I would say. Being excommunicated from the Gladius Sancti is a serious mark in your favor.”

  “How do you know?” Halethorpe sounded faintly peevish.

  “I’m a demon. Well, mostly a demon. I felt it leave you.”

  Halethorpe’s eyes widened, trying helplessly to focus. “You—”

  “Relax. I’m not going to do anything demonic. Just take my word for it, your soul is intact: I’m looking right at it. What is in trouble with the Lord your God is the thing that caused all this mess in the first place. I’m almost certain that claiming to be the Voice of God when you are not, in fact, the Voice of God is something upon which Heaven frowns. The job’s taken, you know.”

  “What is it?” Halethorpe whispered. “What is it inside the light? What spoke to me?”

  “I’m not quite sure, but it doesn’t feel entirely demonic, either. It’s gone from you, Mr. Halethorpe. Spiritually I expect you could use a bit of a wash and brush-up, but you are not headed straight for the bottomless pit.” He sighed. “You really had better rest now, or Greta will be cross with me. Do you want anything?”

  “No. Wait. Water?”

  Fastitocalon poured a glass from the carafe on the nightstand, helped him sit up to drink, aware of the sick heat of his skin even through layers of clothing, trying not to hurt him more than absolutely necessary.

  “You don’t … sound like a demon,” Halethorpe said when Fastitocalon had let him go. “Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure. Don’t worry—it’s not catching.”

  Halethorpe looked as if he were about to say something else, but just closed his eyes. He seemed both young and very fr
agile: barely out of childhood, heavily weighed down by the knowledge and the cruelty of what had been done to him.

  Fastitocalon was suddenly aware of just how pale he was beneath the scarring, everywhere other than the burning fever spots high on each cheek; how rapidly and shallowly his breath came, and even as he noticed the blue tinge deepening in his lips, Halethorpe gave a little sigh and slumped sideways against the pillows.

  Fastitocalon moved without thinking, reaching out his right hand to flatten the palm against Halethorpe’s chest, fingers spread. He could feel the shaken, out-of-tune beating of the heart beneath his hand not simply with touch but several other senses as well. He knew how desperately strained that heart had been, how tired it was, how much it would rather be still.

  No, he thought, not now, not like this; for one thing Varney is right and you can and should receive absolution, and for another Greta left this duty to me, and I mean to do it.

  He closed his eyes and felt strength running out of him like water, pushed it, sending out reaching fingers of influence through bone and muscle, breath and blood, steadying and strengthening the flagging heart. After a few moments the beating eased back into a proper rhythm. The blue faded from Halethorpe’s lips, his fingertips. Still that stuporous fever heat baked into Fastitocalon’s hand through the thin fabric of his shirt.

  Without taking his hand away, Fastitocalon fished his phone from his pocket and dialed one-handed. He had to wait for the stretch of three full rings before Greta’s voice came on the line, sounding somewhat breathless. “Fass?”

  “You’d better get back here,” he said. “In something of a hurry. He’s on fire; I’ve convinced his heart not to give up for now, but I can’t hold it for very long.”

  “Fuck,” she said. “On our way. Hang on, Fass, please hang on, for everybody’s sake—and thank you.”

  CHAPTER 13

  By the time Ruthven and Greta returned, Fastitocalon had begun to lose sensation in his fingertips. He was extremely glad when she arrived to take over, with her vials and syringes, and told her what he could—which wasn’t anything she didn’t already know; there was just so much damage, and at this point it was probably just a question of time. Even if they got him to a hospital with all the supportive measures imaginable, it was only going to be a question of how long.