Strange Practice

by Vivian Shaw

  He said as much to the others, coming downstairs. “We know roughly where the thing is, at least. I don’t think he could give us much more information than that. He’s—wandering. But we know it’s in a system of tunnels underneath St. Paul’s tube station—”

  “Christ. The deep-level shelters,” Ruthven cut in, looking disgusted with himself. “Of course. The old bomb shelters attached to the Underground. I should have thought of that.”

  “Wait,” said Cranswell, “what bomb shelters?”

  “In the war people used the Underground stations to hide from air raids, which made perfect sense, but there simply wasn’t enough room down there for everyone. So during the Blitz they started to build separate shelter complexes. There were supposed to be ten of them, mostly on the Northern line, but not all ten got built.” He sighed. “I’ve even been in a couple of them, back in ’44 when the bombing really got nasty—not the one at St. Paul’s, but I imagine they’re all much of a muchness. These days I think they’re used for storage if they’re accessible at all, but as a ready-built lair one could do a great deal worse.”

  “Why would a bomb shelter have one of these rectifier things?” Cranswell asked.

  “Most of the electrical equipment down there ran on DC. Lift motors, fans, that kind of thing. What I don’t get is why it would still be working after all these years.”

  “You said they’re used for storage,” said Varney. “Surely people would need to have the lights on in order to access whatever is being stored.”

  “I suppose so.” Ruthven straightened his shoulders. “Well. We’d better go and do something about it, hadn’t we?”

  “Wait a minute. Let’s consider the practical aspects of the situation.” Fastitocalon coughed, wincing. “The ultraviolet light aspect in particular. Even without the mad monks and their envenomed Gothic-novel armament, you, Ruthven, are not going to be able to go anywhere near the thing. Sir Francis is less vulnerable to sunlight than you, but even so it poses a considerable problem.”

  Ruthven stared at him. “You know perfectly well I don’t burst into flames in sunlight. That bit didn’t come along until Murnau in 1922.”

  “You don’t like direct sunlight and you can’t be out in it for very long at all without getting a blinding headache and going shocking pink over all exposed surfaces,” he said. “I’ve seen you with sun poisoning, back in the seventies, and that’s with the atmosphere absorbing most of the ultraviolet in sunlight. This thing is putting out much, much more UV than that. Look at what it did to ordinary humans. Remember the burns? It would do you absolutely no good at all.”

  “I’ll wear sunblock,” Ruthven said. “If you think I’m going to let you and Varney go down there on your own, you’re sadly mistaken, Fass. This is my bloody city.”

  “Fastitocalon has a point. I would not have you harmed for anything, L … Ruthven,” said Varney. “If it is in my power, it is my duty to put an end to this wretched business myself. It was I who brought the trouble to your door.”

  “It’s everybody’s trouble, Varney, not just yours. I’ve been here over two hundred years now, and I’m not going to sit back and hide while everybody else protects me.”

  Fastitocalon leaned back in his chair, rubbing at his eyes. His fingers were still bothering him, and he was uncomfortably aware of having poured rather more energy into Halethorpe than he had necessarily meant to. “Could we possibly have the hero argument later?” he said. “Or preferably never. ‘Never’ works for me. We’ll have to do this in an organized fashion, given the danger the rectifier poses; we need to deal with that first. I think that once the object that’s transmitting the influence is physically destroyed, its power over them will cut off, but getting to it in the first place is going to be challenging.”

  “I’m coming, too,” said Cranswell. All of them turned to look at him.

  “No you’re not,” said Ruthven. “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re staying the hell out of this.”

  “I mean it,” Cranswell said, the levity gone from his voice. “I’m pretty sure you guys can thrall me to the point where I don’t know what the fuck’s going on and keep me here while you take the opportunity to go play self-sacrifice tennis under the city, but, Ruthven, I’m telling you right now that if you do that, any trust I have in you is gone. Any trust my family has in you. That’s what, two, three generations of friendship you’re gonna throw away? How much of that do you have to spare?”

  Ruthven clawed his hands through his hair, completely disarranging it for the first time Fastitocalon could remember seeing. He looked bleak and old, much older than usual. Under the tangle of black hair he had no color in his face at all except the silver of his eyes. “Ugh,” he said. “Damn everything in the universe to hell. All right. You can be part of this, but you do not get to go up against those lunatics alone in unprotected hand-to-hand combat.”

  “Hopefully no one will have to,” Fastitocalon said. “The first thing to do is to find the rectifier. Find it and break it, or turn it off, or whatever we can do to kill the light and the power it’s putting out. I don’t care how determined you might be, Ruthven. You aren’t going to be able to do much of anything after you get in direct line of sight to that source.”

  “What about silk?”

  All three of them turned to Cranswell once again. “What do you mean, what about silk?” Ruthven asked.

  “It’s an insulator.” He shrugged. “Don’t you guys ever read any proper occult mythology? I’ve seen it more than once. The Sidhe can touch iron if it’s wrapped in silk, although they don’t like it much, and in a bunch of the stories it’s the same deal with weres and silver. I’m not gonna say that a silk veil is necessarily capable of stopping UV from doing bad shit to you, but it might cut down the effects for long enough for you to get in smashing range.”

  There was a brief silence.

  “What a useful person you are, to be sure,” said Fastitocalon with genuine appreciation, looking from Cranswell to the others. “He’s right. The silk thing. We often use it if we have to touch anything significantly holy, and I’m fairly certain Above does the same thing with infernal artifacts. I ought to have thought of it myself.”

  “Next question,” said Varney. “Where do we get hold of silk veils? I fear the current state of ladies’ fashion does not allow for Dr. Helsing’s wardrobe to offer much, even if she were willing to sacrifice a ball gown or two.”

  “I’ve got silk sheets somewhere,” Ruthven said, waving a hand. “The dining room net curtains are silk, too. Yards of the stuff, no problem there.” He gave an off-kilter little hiccup of laughter, covering his mouth hurriedly.

  Varney raised an eyebrow. “What?”

  “Nothing,” he said, “just the mental image of wandering around tunnels wearing a bedsheet like a grimly traditional ghost is rather an astonishing one. I’d feel the need to rattle chains and gibber.”

  “Let’s focus,” said Cranswell. “Okay, so, you guys get draped in as much silk as we can find, we go down there—figuring out some way to get in without being noticed—and we go find the thing and break it. Vampires don’t get mercury poisoning, do they?”

  “I’ve no idea,” Ruthven said. “Meanwhile the other occupants of the tunnels are somehow distracted, yes?”

  “Yes,” said Fastitocalon. “I think I may be capable of providing sufficient distraction. Briefly, anyway.” He rubbed at his tingling hand, hoping he was right about that. “I’m almost sure that once the vessel’s broken, they are likely to collapse and pose no further threat.”

  The way he said it got a curious look from Cranswell, but no questions.

  Silence fell for a moment. “When are we going to do this?” Ruthven asked. “I’m inclined to suggest that any expeditions be undertaken after dark.”

  “Well,” said Varney, “we know that they are active at night. But given their previous behavior, it’s likely that several if not the majority of the—I keep wanting to call them monks, although I serious
ly doubt they have taken holy orders that would be recognized by any proper church—will be busy doing terrible things on the surface, leaving their headquarters relatively unguarded. And I agree. Access will be much easier after dark.”

  “There’s still the question of sneaking into this place. This bomb shelter.” Cranswell tapped his fingers on the table. “Two super-pale guys with weird eyes—one grey Edward Murrow–looking person in a vintage suit, and one regular human—are going to be pretty noticeable trying to climb down manholes or whatever, even at night. Can you do that don’t-notice-me thing for all of us?” he asked, turning to Fastitocalon. “Like at the museum?”

  “Not for very long, I’m afraid. And I need to try to keep as much strength in reserve as possible so I can use it for distraction-creating purposes.” He had rarely been quite so annoyed at his own limitations.

  “We’ll wait for nightfall before we make a move,” said Ruthven.

  Fastitocalon looked from him to Varney, reflecting that Cranswell wasn’t wrong: two super-pale guys with weird eyes. Of all the people he could have selected to accompany him in a highly dangerous activity involving a powerful source of ultraviolet radiation, a couple of vampires ranked near the very bottom of the list.

  “Yes,” he said. “In the meantime, I suggest you and Sir Francis have supper; you’ll need all the strength you can get.”

  In the end there was very little discussion over who would stay behind to keep an eye on Halethorpe. Greta had already come to the obvious conclusion, and it did not make things easier to see the profoundly relieved expressions of the rest of them when she told them she would be staying. There were any number of very good reasons for this, and none of them made up for the crawling miserable awareness that she would be safe and comfortable up here while the others faced whatever they would find beneath the city.

  “It has to be me,” she said, biting off the words, “because I’m the only person qualified and capable of taking care of our guest, and because I have responsibilities to the rest of my patients and to London’s supernatural community in general. I am not replaceable.”

  If she got herself killed chasing mad monks, her patients would have to find somebody else to provide specialist care, and for some of them that might not be possible at all. It was not lost on her that this would please whatever was running this whole wretched business enormously.

  Greta had rarely resented the responsibilities of her job quite so much as she did just at this moment. She hated this like fire, both the fact that she had to be the one who stayed and the fact that she knew it.

  “Quite right,” said Ruthven, doing the annoying thing where he tipped up her chin with his finger. “The city needs you a great deal more than it needs any of the rest of us.”

  “It needs you, too,” she said. “You know that. You’ve always known that, Ruthven.”

  “I don’t intend to deprive it of the benefit of my presence and attention,” he told her. “But if, in theory, it came down to losing you or losing me, I think both of us know which one represents the more significant hardship to the greater number of people.”

  She held his gaze for a long moment—which was damned difficult, he was looking at his most inhuman, silver-white eyes enormous—and then turned her head away from his hand. “Try not to get lost,” she said. “In any sense.”

  “That at least I can promise,” Ruthven said, letting his hand drop. He took a step away from her, and the place where his fingers had touched her skin felt absurdly, awfully cold, the instant of time stretching slightly out and then snapping back to normalcy. The clock struck half past eleven.

  Cranswell had watched this little exchange in silence, but as soon as the clock’s chimes ended he spoke up, arms folded, truculent. “Like I said, I’m coming with you. You guys are gonna need all the help you can get.”

  “They can see in the dark and they’re considerably stronger than ordinary humans,” Ruthven pointed out. “Like I said, you’re at a distinct disadvantage.”

  “Which is why I’m gonna be carrying these,” Cranswell said, turning to the knife block on the kitchen counter and removing a couple of Wüsthofs, which he brandished at the group. Ruthven went slightly paler.

  “Put those back,” he said. “I have had to overlook a number of personal inconveniences just lately, but I am not having you ruin the edge on my good knives by using them to chop up violent lunatics. If you insist on coming with us, go and get one of the damn swords over the dining room mantelpiece, and try not to hurt yourself with it.”

  Cranswell grinned. “Thought you’d never ask,” he said, and hurried out, coming back with a very fine nineteenth-century cavalry saber. He gave it an experimental swish. Ruthven backed hastily out of range, looking as if he was seriously reconsidering the wisdom of this move. Greta wondered, briefly, where the hell the saber had come from, and who had last been using it, and if that previous owner would have approved.

  The others were unarmed, but wearing silk gloves; Varney and Ruthven both carried a length of what had up until recently been Ruthven’s best silk gauze curtains to use as veils against the ultraviolet light. Varney gave his a faintly suspicious look and tucked it into his pocket, or as much of it as would fit. “I hope you’re right about this,” he said.

  “Me, too. Only one way to find out,” Cranswell said. “Let’s get going.”

  In the hallway Greta wrapped herself impulsively around Fastitocalon in a hug. “Bloody well be careful,” she told him. “All of you. I—Just be safe. I need you.”

  “We’ll do our best,” he said, gently, and with that she had to be content.

  From Fastitocalon she moved to Ruthven, who blinked at her but returned the hug, and to Cranswell, who didn’t blink but grinned, and then to Varney—and stopped short. “Sir Francis,” she said, and looked up at him. He was absolutely not the sort of person one embraced.

  After a moment, though, he made her a courtly bow and took her hand in his—cold, hard, but very careful—and brushed the lightest of kisses over it. A shiver ran through her, racing down her arms and legs, all the tiny hairs on her skin standing up at once, and just for a second, as he straightened up, Greta saw herself reflected in his eyes. A wave of dizzying numbness washed through her, just as it had when she’d touched him in the middle of thralling Halethorpe, and she heard his voice again inside her head with that astonishing musical sweetness, very faint but unmistakable: Thank you.

  Then he broke eye contact. Sound and light and time seemed to come back in a rush, and she stepped back, feeling herself blushing, powerless to stop it and barely able to fight down the rising threat of angry, frightened tears.

  “Good luck,” she said, keeping her voice from cracking with grim determination.

  Varney simply nodded, and turned away with the others, and she noticed that his hair was mostly black now, just a little silver glittering here and there in streaks. She remembered seeing that hair spread tangled over the sofa cushions the night she had arrived—was it really less than a week ago?—all silver-grey with darker streaks; remembered him smiling unexpectedly up at her, changing his face for a moment into something memorable in a different way.

  Ruthven opened the door on the darkness, and she watched them go. Out of the bright and into the black. The darkness seemed almost opaque, closing like ink around the four of them, as if they had never existed at all. For a moment she stood there, the night air biting at her face, before turning back inside. She thought helplessly of travelers setting sail across cold unknown oceans, passing beyond her reach, beyond her help, where she could not follow.

  Greta leaned her back against the closed and locked door, and slowly slid down to sit on the floor, breathing deeply to try to clear her head. In a minute she’d go back upstairs and sit with Halethorpe. In a minute.

  When her phone rang it seemed appallingly loud in the echo chamber of the hallway, and she fumbled it out of her pocket, suddenly sure it was one of the others calling to tell her they’d chan
ged their minds, she should come with them anyway.

  It was not. Greta sighed and lifted the phone to her ear. “Hello, Dez,” she said. “I’m pretty sure I won’t be in again tomorrow. I’m sorry to keep asking you to help—”

  Nadezhda cut her off, her voice uncharacteristically sharp. “Greta, Anna’s been hurt. I’m with her right now, at Barts.”

  Greta froze, the by-now-familiar hot-cold shock of adrenaline flooding through her yet again, dropping a weight into her stomach. “Hurt how?” she demanded.

  “Some maniac with a knife. She was on her way home from the clinic. She’s going to be all right, but she’ll need to spend tonight here, possibly tomorrow night as well.” The witch’s voice was still sharper than usual, acerbic with worry. “I can take the clinic tomorrow but the day after that I have to be in Edinburgh, so if you’re still out, either we’ll need to shut down or call in somebody else to help—Greta, are you still there?”

  “Yes,” said Greta, tonelessly, staring at the far wall of the foyer without actually seeing it. Her fingertips on the phone were cold and numb. “I’m here. Forget the clinic coverage. Tell me about Anna.”

  “Like I said, she had locked up and was walking to the bus stop. She says she’d felt kind of uneasy all day, and it got worse as soon as she got outside—like she was being watched, or even followed, but she couldn’t see anyone.”

  Greta could picture it very clearly: a dark shape invisible at night, the only hint of its presence two small points of blue light, watching Anna set the alarm and lock the front door and set off on her way—and following. Slipping soundless from shadow to shadow, avoiding the pools of light from streetlamps, slowly gaining on her, the short ugly blade of the poisoned dagger hidden in its sleeve.