Strange Practice

by Vivian Shaw

  He could feel her in his mind as he had always felt her, since that cold, bleak morning when he had first offered that support, saying you are not alone, saying I’m here, I’m with you. She was a small bright weight on reality that for some reason always made Fastitocalon think of rain-washed air, the clarity of light after a storm. He couldn’t spare much attention for wondering how she was handling the night’s eventualities, not with the entity in the rectifier fighting him for control of two men’s souls. He would have to trust Greta to take care of herself. At least she was out of it, safe back at the house.

  He was so tired, and the thing was hanging on so tightly, and he could feel the monks’ pneumic signatures beginning to crack and craze from the incredible strain on them, and it did not occur to Fastitocalon to wonder what the rest of the Gladius Sancti might be up to this fine evening until it was too late. He did not even sense the approach of four other blue-eyed monks, shielded as they were by the blue-lit power of the thing he had come down here to destroy, the thing that had summoned back its servants to deal with this unscheduled intrusion; he did not even hear them coming. There was only a split second between the sudden unspeakable realization that they were right behind him and the blank, thudding shock of the crossblade in his back; and after that there was, quite simply, nothing left to think.

  Cranswell was barely five feet from the rectifier when he heard Ruthven say, “Oh God,” half-choked and strengthless.

  “Edmund,” Varney said, sounding horrified, and in the same moment that Cranswell turned to look back, suddenly and completely the clear cool mirrors in his mind all went away at once.

  Because Varney’s attention was no longer focused on Cranswell at all. It was directed instead at the three monks standing in the tunnel just beyond the doorway, holding their poisoned knives. The one in the middle had something staining his blade all the way to the hilt and beyond, black in the cyan light, glistening on the man’s knuckles. Still wet. As Cranswell watched, a drop ran down the edge of the blade, paused for a moment, swelling at the tip, and fell silently to the floor.

  Ruthven took a step toward the door, hands curling into fists, and Cranswell had time to see the silver eyes blaze scarlet before a voice like a thunderclap spoke in his head.

  Look at me, it said, buzzing in his teeth, his bones. Look at me, look into my light.

  He could not stop himself from turning. He felt his tendons creak like dry leather straps. He was suddenly and completely aware that if he fought against that pull hard enough, he would break his own bones.

  Look at me, said the thing inside the glow, and Cranswell’s eyelids would not obey his frantic efforts to close them. Look at me.

  He had no choice. He looked. He saw.

  All the world went blank and terrible blue.

  The pain was huge; the pain filled all the world, on every plane; every sense, every way of seeing was flooded solid with raw, agonized sensation.

  Fastitocalon lay on the gritty tunnel floor, one wing broken and twisted under him, and felt his own blood moving warm and liquid in his lungs: heard the bubbling of air escaping the wound in his back, breath he could no longer draw.

  The pain was not the worst of this. He could bear pain. Had borne it. The worst was the sure and certain knowledge that he had failed—failed everyone: Ruthven and Varney and Cranswell, who were certainly the returning monks’ next targets; failed Greta, who had been counting on him to help the others; failed the two young men whose pneumic signatures he had been attempting to free before the crossblade buried itself in his back. Failed himself, even, not that that mattered in the slightest.

  He coughed, bringing up dark and bitter blood, and thought: Asmodeus was right, after all: I was a mistake.

  The thought brought with it less pain than he expected. In fact, Fastitocalon realized, the pain was receding, drawing away from him like a slow tide, and in the darkness around him one by one he could see stars. One by one, and then ten, twenty, a hundred, a thousand stars, blinking into existence, scattering the dark tunnel with points of diamond light.

  He could not feel his hands, his feet. As he watched the stars come out, the numbness crept over him, taking away pain and sorrow and grief. He rolled over to look up at the brilliant constellations above him, the wound in his back no longer hurting at all.

  It’s so beautiful. Like Hell, a spring night in Hell, with all the crystal spheres chiming as they turn, and the flames of the lake like a floor of moving opal. He tried to reach up with one hand, to see if he could touch them, but he couldn’t seem to move.

  Oh, Sam, he thought, thinking suddenly, vividly of Samael standing on the water stairs at the lake’s edge with a wreath of pale flowers in his hair, all gold and white and blue, lit by the rippling glow of the water itself and by his own warm light. The image took his breath away. Oh, Samael, how I miss it. How I miss it all.

  Around him the wings were slowly fading out of existence—but the feathers remained, dropping one by one to the tunnel floor in soundless drifts of white. Samael, his mind echoed. Samael, distant now, the word and the name going away from him, out of one world, into another.

  Oh, Sam, I want to go home.

  Fastitocalon watched the stars and thought, dimly, of a white sky and crows calling. Thought of Greta, far away now, of the determination of her, that cold morning; and, still thinking, began to drift away.

  In the end Mewleep carried her as they ran: carried her on his back, like a child, because ghouls were designed to run through low tunnels in pitch blackness, stooped over, carrying heavy weights. They would have lost time Greta was certain they did not have to lose if the party was limited to a pace she could manage on her own two feet.

  It was not the most pleasant experience of Greta’s life, bumping and jouncing along on Mewleep’s back in complete and utter darkness, having to trust to ghoul sight and ghoul instinct. Akha and her baby—who did not yet have a name, apparently; they did not name children until a certain age because so many ghoullets died in infancy—ran behind them. The only sound in all the world was the slap-slap of feet on the tunnel floor and their quick, sharp breathing. She had not realized just how fit they were; Mewleep had been running hard for maybe ten straight minutes, carrying a heavy weight, and while his respiration was rapid it was in no way distressed.

  Greta had no idea where they were, or what the tunnels actually were that they ran through. Without light one hollow black space was much the same as another. Several times they had turned left or right down winding ways, and once they had had to slow right down and negotiate a passageway so low Greta’s back scraped along the ceiling. She had squeezed her eyes shut and hung on very tight and waited for it to be over, and when they emerged into a much larger tunnel bore and Mewleep could straighten up she had been very strongly aware of her own heart racing much too fast, sour adrenaline and fatigue poisons sloshing in her brain.

  She had no way of knowing how much time had passed, either, when he finally slowed to a trot and then to a walk, and then let go of her legs; she half-slid off his back and had to steady herself against the unseen tunnel wall. A moment later he took out the sliver of glowing wood again, and in its feeble light she could make out the fact that they were in a cast-concrete corridor rather than a brick-arched tunnel. Wires and conduits draped in multicolored swags along the walls, and there was—

  —there was a shoulder-high metal box against one wall, its color indistinguishable in the faint glow of foxfire, but Greta knew it would be the blank grey-green of electrical equipment housing all over the world.

  The corridor shook as a train passed by in a tunnel very close, very close indeed. Dust sifted down from the ceiling as the last of the cars went rattling past, the sound fading off into the distance. We must be just below the Underground, Greta thought, and looked back at the metal box standing against the wall, at the fat electrical cables that fed into it on both sides.

  “In there,” Mewleep said. Behind him Akha was watching her intently, m
ore intently than Greta would really have liked. “The men in the deep tunnel are saying, in the box in access corridor north of the shelter is the cutoff switch.”

  It was locked, of course, heavy padlocks preventing any unauthorized entry. “To the whole station, or just to the shelter?” she asked.

  “Shelter,” he said, and then turned and said something to Akha in ghoulish, his tone completely different. Greta heard both reassurance and what sounded like the ghoulish version of Please?

  Akha looked from him to Greta to the box and back, and then down at the baby in her arms. “You say lectristy will not burn us,” she said, returning her gaze to Greta. “Not come out of bottle Mewleep is seeing, and … escape.”

  “It won’t,” said Greta. “I promise that it won’t. Breaking the glass won’t set it free. Breaking the glass will put it out. I don’t want you near this box when I throw the switch in case anything does happen, but can one of you please open the lock for me.”

  Akha sighed, the deepest sigh Greta had ever heard a ghoul fetch, and handed the baby to Mewleep, who at once began the unconscious practiced sway of someone used to the task. She knelt in front of the box and took the lock in her left hand, and belatedly Greta noticed that her claws were much longer than most ghouls’ were, longer and very sharp, their tips black like porcupine quills. One of them was not completely straight, with some zigzag notches filed into its sides, and it was this claw that Akha inserted carefully into the first padlock’s key slot and twisted very slightly.

  Greta had been expecting them to simply yank the lock off the door and toss it aside, the way a vampire would, but as she watched Akha work she realized how important—how vital—it must be to the ghouls’ safety and livelihood to be able to open and close locks without leaving a trace. She thought of Gandalf, keep it secret; keep it safe, and almost laughed, jagged with exhaustion.

  As she watched there was a faint but decisive click from inside the lock, and the shackle sprang free. Akha dropped it and began to work on the second lock, which lasted even less time. When she had them both open she stood and retreated from the electrical box, and took the half-asleep baby back from Mewleep, cradling him against her shoulder.

  Greta was lost for words. “Thank you,” she said, after a moment. “I—Thank you.”

  “Do it,” said Akha. “Doctor. Make it stop.”

  Greta nodded, and swung the doors open, and despair sank into her stomach at the complexity of the equipment revealed—how the hell could she hope to know which of these switches to throw—and then Mewleep said, “Second from right, top row.”

  “Thank you,” she said again. “Can you give me the light, and then go back down the tunnel a safe distance, please, all of you?”

  He gave her the piece of rotting wood, which felt as if it should be either hot or cold to the touch, giving off that eerie green light, but which felt like any other splinter: quite ordinary and unremarkable. Their hands touched briefly, and then Greta was alone.

  She held the wood up to the electrical switchgear, trying to read the curling, ancient Dymo tape labels, unable to make out more than a string of useless numbers and letters on each one. It doesn’t matter, she thought. Mewleep heard the men say it. Second from the right, top row. She would have to trust his recollection.

  The switches were huge, old. She closed her fingers around the Bakelite handle of the one she needed.

  Oh God, she thought. If this doesn’t work—

  But her hand was already moving, and the switch came free of the ON detent in a crack and fizzle of sparks, and slammed into OFF with a sound that seemed to Greta much, much too loud: loud enough that people on the surface might have heard it, loud enough to crack the concrete tunnel around her and send the earth cascading in.

  Cranswell hung in a blue void, unable to move, unable to scream, as the thing inside the light unpeeled his thoughts and memories slice by translucent slice. It was in his head. It saw everything, all of the small and shameful perfidies of childhood, everything he had ever hated, every time he had failed, each flare of lust and envy, each deliberate insult, dissected out in a clean and clear unseaming and set out for his own view, one by one.

  This is what you are, August Cranswell. This is all that you are.

  No! he thought. I’m not like that! I’ve never—

  Never what? said the voice, amused. Never lied? Never cheated, stolen, envied, hurt? One by one it showed him flickers of his own memory, example after example after example.

  I’ve never killed!

  Oh? said the voice. What about Mrs. Jennings’s dog, when you were nineteen and driving your mate’s car and fiddling with the stereo system instead of looking where you were going?

  That was an accident! He could see it in his mind’s eye, very clearly, presented for his approval like a wine bottle in a restaurant: his younger self on his knees in the gutter beside what had recently been a dog, the stupid car’s stupid stereo still belting out the song he had been trying to skip over, dog blood soaking into the knees of his jeans, mouthing, I take it back, oh God, I take it back, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please, I take it back—

  I didn’t MEAN to! he howled, inside the light. Tears ran down his cheeks.

  Could just as easily have been Mrs. Jennings’s little son, August, couldn’t it? Couldn’t it? You weren’t looking where you were going, and a man who will run over a dog will run over a child.

  I didn’t mean to, Cranswell said again, dully now, strengthless, and he could feel the thing drawing itself up for its next attack, feel it relishing the sick misery from that day years ago and searching his head for more—and abruptly, suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, the light cut off.

  Total blackness filled the room, a darkness so complete it felt solid, as if the air had gelled into some impenetrable substance. In that dark Cranswell could hear the faint roaring of some huge fan slowing as the blades spun down toward stillness, could hear his own breathing, panting like a man who has run up several flights of stairs. His mind was his own again, a book closed from prying eyes; he was alone in his head once more, and he had time to think, We will never find our way out of here, we are lost under London, lost in the dark, and they have poison knives and we have just one sword I don’t know how to use before the spark in its glass bulb flickered back into existence.

  The light grew, and with it the voice, like a volume knob being turned up. Cranswell could feel it beginning to pull at him once more, the tears still drying tacky on his face, but it was weak now. He could see its edges.

  He took another step toward it, and another, Ruthven’s sword still in his hand, and even as the voice in his head scaled up and up and up he wrapped both hands around the hilt and drew the sword back over his shoulder.

  Mrs. Jennings’s dog was off its lead, he told the voice. It should never have been in the fucking street, that was an ACCIDENT, and YOU are NOT THE VOICE OF GOD—

  Cranswell brought the sword around in a baseball swing that had his full weight behind it, and the voice screamed, No, you do not DARE, YOU DO NOT DARE, YOU MUST NOT, but nothing in the world or out of it could have stopped the saber now as it sang through the air to make contact, at last, with the pregnant curve of the rectifier’s bulb.

  Not so very far away, Greta Helsing snatched her hand away from the power switch, now slammed back from OFF to ON, and clutched at her head with both hands, eyes squeezed shut. “Fass,” she said, voice wavering on the edge of tears, “Fass, I—I undid it, I put it back, I turned it on again, where are you—”

  There was a hole in her mind where Fastitocalon should have been. His presence, quietly protective, safe, was the one thing she had always been able to count on, after her father was gone. I’m here, I’m with you, he had said, and through the numbing, bitter shock of grief she had felt that, felt herself drawn into a mental embrace, held and steadied, reassured: You do not have to bear this all on your own; you do not have to be alone. I’ve got you.

  In the years since then
she had always known he was there, and now she had thrown the switch and in the moment when it slammed into the OFF detent he had simply vanished. A line cut, a lamp blown out: just empty nothingness in the back of her mind where he ought to be.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, Fass. Come back, fucking come back, please, this isn’t funny, I need to know if you’re okay, I know you can read minds, just please …”

  The mental socket where he should have been felt cold, empty, raw. She was barely even aware of Mewleep and Akha kneeling down beside her, of their chilly, strong hands on her shoulders, still preoccupied with trying to find any trace of him in her head. It wasn’t until the baby woke up in his sling against Akha’s chest, woke up and protested in a wail that he was hungry, that Greta came entirely back to the present. She felt scoured-open, ancient, more lonely than she knew what to do with. Empty.

  “Are you hurt?” Mewleep said, still holding her shoulder.

  “No,” she said. “No, I’m not hurt. But I have to get in there, Mewleep. Into the shelter. Do that for me and then—I don’t know what’s happened, what I did, what any of us did, but you—and Akha and the baby—you should get well clear of here.”

  “Not leaving you,” he said.

  “You have to. The baby’s hungry and the others in there will keep me safe. You did what Kree-akh asked,” she said. “Thank you. Thank you so much, both of you.”

  “Not thank us yet.” Mewleep watched as she reclosed the locks on the electrical cabinet and then stood up, giving Greta a hand to her feet. “Not until all are safe. I take you to the shelter—”

  “And then go,” Greta said, hollow-eyed in the last of the foxfire’s light. “Get far away from here. There may be humans, coming down to see what’s going on. I want you all safely gone by the time they get here.”

  Mewleep nodded after a moment, and turned. “This way,” he said. “Not far.”

  Cranswell would remember for the rest of his life how the cracks raced outward from the point of impact through the glass envelope of the rectifier, crazing spidery pathways around its swollen bulb. The whole of it hung together for a long and terrible moment before imploding in a musical crash of glass. The awful voice in his head screamed like nothing Cranswell had ever heard, or ever wanted to, as, for the second time, the light cut off completely like a blown-out lamp.