Grave Importance

by Vivian Shaw

  Fastitocalon had appeared without any fanfare whatsoever other than a faint and polite ahem, the equivalent of someone clearing their throat in the doorway to announce their presence: one moment Varney had been alone in his office, and the next he hadn’t been, looking up at the tall, thin, pinstriped presence of the demon, double-breasted suit and all. He looked like a banker. The only visual tell that he was a demon lay in the fact that his skin was ever so slightly grey, as if he had a faint case of argyria, and that when he was really annoyed his eyes took on a faint orange iridescence like Persian lustreware.

  The last time they’d seen one another had been in Paris, in the spring, and Varney had been in no real condition to say polite good-byes after a rather nasty little battle underground. It had been Fastitocalon, with the assistance of another demon and a couple of individuals Varney still had trouble thinking of as remedial psychopomps, even if that was what they had on their business cards, who had welded shut the weak place in reality caused by a series of extremely unwise summonings—how, Varney wasn’t sure and didn’t want to ask—and had promptly vanished back to Hell. Greta had told him afterward that Fass had not only gotten himself cured of the chronic ill health he’d been suffering the first time Varney had met him, back in London, but had also managed to secure a fairly important job in the infernal civil service.

  “I’m sorry for taking up your time,” he’d said last night, and Fastitocalon smiled.

  “You are not taking up very much of it,” said the demon. “And this is important. Have you got your jewels with you?”

  Varney showed him the case: a tangle of gems, the collection of three centuries. “Good,” said Fastitocalon. “I am entirely sure our jewelers will be able to put something together for you. Take my hand.”

  His fingers had been dry and smooth and slightly warm to the touch. Varney had just had enough time to close his eyes very tightly against the vertigo of translocation before both of them were no longer in the office at all, or even on the prime material plane.

  Now, as the view across the park grew dimmer and dimmer—nobody had seen a goddamn sunset in weeks, it really was depressing—Varney turned the box over in his pocket and thought of Greta as he’d last seen her disappearing into the security line at Heathrow, and of himself as he’d been when he first met her, poisoned, sick and half-delirious with pain, snarling at the pale stranger bending over him on Ruthven’s couch. That creature could not, he knew perfectly well, have countenanced the possibility of visiting Hell at all, except to stay there as a damned soul for all eternity. That creature would not have been able to imagine visiting Hell to get a piece of jewelry custom-made, the way one might pop into Garrard’s with a handful of gems and order a bespoke tiara.

  He smiled, without realizing he was doing it, and took out his phone to check the time. Just gone six; it would be seven in Marseille. He could at least try her; she might still be busy putting patients together, but he could leave her a message.

  She picked up on the third ring. “Varney,” she said, and he could hear the delight in her voice. “How are you? Is it still pouring?”

  “Hello,” he said. “I’m fine, and yes, although subtly less so than it was. We may not actually need to build an ark to house the monsters after all.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. Are they all right?”

  “Mostly. Some of the hairmonsters seem to have caught colds, and Emily and I have moved them into the house—her entrance exam to the vet school is coming up and she’s keen on any excuse to avoid studying—oh, and apparently we have skulls. I’m sorry about that, I had no idea.”

  “Skulls?” said Greta. “What kind of skulls?”

  “The kind that scream. These are very little, still. I think they must have just hatched; they don’t scream so much as squeak faintly. It’s rather charming, although I expect they will become less so as they get larger.”

  “Screaming skulls are real?”

  “Oh yes, I’m afraid so,” said Varney. “Lots of the old places have them, you know. They only really make a fuss if you try to take them out of the house. Never mind the skulls, tell me about yourself, my dear, how is the job?”

  “It’s wonderful,” she said, and he could hear the smile in her voice. “I can’t get over how beautifully fitted-out this place is, Varney, they have equipment I’ve never even seen in person before, it’s—they have a lot of money, and it’s being well spent. And it’s so beautiful here. I wish I could show it to you, I’m on the terrace watching the sun set—hang on a sec.”

  Varney waited. After a few seconds the phone vibrated, and he took it away from his ear to see that she’d texted him a picture: a gorgeous, improbable view down from a mountaintop to the glittering city caught in the lap between two massifs, like a crystal formation hugging the edge of the sea, and the sea itself a burnished sheet of rose-gold beneath a sky fading from aquamarine to violet, with wide strokes of gold across the depth of it.

  “Good God,” he said after staring at it for a moment, trying not to think why would anyone ever leave that to come home? “That’s exquisite.”

  “And it isn’t raining,” Greta said. “It hasn’t rained, in fact, since I got here. At all. I think it’s a miracle. It’s ridiculously lovely here, and the only thing that’d make it better is to have you with me. The work is—well, it’s the kind of work I love most.”

  He could hear a faint undertone in her voice that spoke of unease, and wondered if she knew it was there. “Tell me about it?” he said.

  “I can’t go into much detail, but I’m doing a lot of reconstructive surgery,” she said, and the unease was gone. “God, it’s so nice to have all the equipment and supplies I could possibly need, instead of having to work out how to fudge it with what’s available to hand. I have six different grades of dual-cure resin cement, Varney, and some of the replacement tendon and ligament materials are straight out of NASA—they won’t perish or fail with use and age—and the scanners they have here are some of the best in the world; I can do noninvasive imaging in a quarter of the time it’d take me with less advanced technology. One of the patients is convinced his treatment was magic, and—well, in a way I suppose it is magic to be able to knock out a fulminant fungal infection with electron-beam radiation; the lines between magic and technology are increasingly blurred when you get this far up the sophistication scale.”

  Varney found himself grinning. “That’s what Dr. Faust said about their whatsit, mirabilic resonance scanner. Magic and technology are often a matter of perspective.”

  Greta paused. “Dr. Faust?” He could hear the excitement and also the jealousy in her voice very clearly. “You met Dr. Faust? Varney, did you go to Hell?”

  “I did,” he said, enjoying it. “I had a very specific need that the artisans of Hell were more than capable of meeting. Fastitocalon came to get me last night and took me down there for a brief visit. He seems well, by the way, if extremely busy.”

  “I can’t believe this,” Greta said, “you went to Hell, that’s—Varney, I’m dying of envy here, why did you go, what did you need done, did you meet Samael, isn’t he terrifying, tell me everything.”

  He had to chuckle. “I needed a particular object made for me which I did not trust London’s artisans to manage with sufficient elegance and skill and speed. Something small but quite important, which you will learn more about in due course.”

  “Varney,” she said. He realized how unlike the old Varney it was to be able to keep secrets, and his smile widened. It wasn’t an expression common to his face; he could feel it stretching the muscles.

  “Which,” he continued, “I have now in my possession; but while it was being made, I had some time to kill, and so Fastitocalon summoned an underling and assigned them to give me a short walking tour of Dis. It’s incredible, Greta. It’s like a series of very specific and bizarre fever-dreams, but not the kind that are frightening exactly.”

  “Did you take pictures?” she demanded.

  “No
. I did ask about that, and I was informed that the—thing, the image sensor—in my phone camera would pick up nothing at all, so I didn’t try. But—picture a huge, huge lake on fire, with no smoke, no reek of burning. It looks a bit like a vast fire opal, only constantly moving, shimmering. The flames are small and blue and golden, and apparently demons can pick them up and hold them without harm.”

  “Lake Avernus,” said Greta. “Fass has told me a little bit about it. The water’s bottled and sold as a tonic.”

  “It is, and there’s a great big white building that looks almost exactly like the Brighton Pavilion sitting at the water’s edge which is the demon spa—”

  “—where Fass went to get himself cured,” said Greta. “I have got to see this for myself. Go on.”

  “The city itself is mostly white and crystal and gold,” Varney continued, enjoying himself. “At least the downtown bits by the waterfront. I gather it is much less grand in the outlying suburbs. There’s a big central plaza surrounded by eight huge glass towers that sort of—twist, like spiral horns, I can’t describe it properly—and further back there’s all sorts of much more old-fashioned architecture including an opera house and a university, which is where they do all the magic research business. I knew you were interested in the medical aspect of Hell, so I asked to see as much of that as I was allowed to.”

  “You are exquisite,” said Greta. He could picture her, right now, picture the pale but present flush in her cheeks, the brightness of her eyes—they looked grey sometimes, but when she was excited, they were definitely blue—and the desire to hold her in his arms washed over Varney in an almost frightening wave. He was conscious of the kind of excitement he had not felt for centuries.

  “—I try,” he said, faintly unsteady. “I wasn’t permitted to tour the laboratory facilities, but I did see some of the spa and the hospital, and I did in fact meet Dr. Faust. Who is—very human, still. I think you would get on quite well with him, actually.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “He shouts a lot, I gather,” said Varney. “He is, I am told, in fact the only person in Hell who is allowed to shout at Samael, which tells you something. He only had a few minutes to spend talking to a visitor, but I mentioned that you were very eager to have the chance to visit yourself and discuss medicine, and he said he’d think about it.”

  “I love you,” said Greta. “Enormously. Oh, Varney, thank you so much.”

  “My pleasure,” he said, entirely honest: I love you still sent a deep sweet shock through him every time. “And Fastitocalon asked after you; I told him where you were and what you were up to, and he seemed very pleased.”

  “He looked okay? He’s not overworking himself?”

  “I couldn’t say about overworking or otherwise,” said Varney, “but he seems to be reasonably healthy, if a little short-tempered. He has new suits. They look exactly like the old ones, of course, except for not dating back to 1958.”

  Greta laughed. “He is probably going to look like that for all eternity; it suits him. I find it difficult to picture him ever having worn anything else, even back in the middle ages.”

  “The mental image of Fastitocalon in doublet and hose does rather boggle the mind,” said Varney, bone-dry. “He’s got lots of staff and I gather he’s very busy with some sort of large-scale research project that may not be going tremendously well, but he didn’t vouchsafe many details.”

  “Last time I talked to him about work was—right after the thing in Paris,” said Greta. “I haven’t heard much from him at all since then. He was having to clear up an enormous mess brought about by the demon who used to run Monitoring and Evaluation, who was doing a dreadful job of it and has since been turned into a large banana slug for crimes against the infernal civil service. There’s some poetic justice in the fact that this demon happens to be the one who kicked Fass out of Hell in the first place. I don’t know how much of a problem the M&E situation is, but that might be it.”

  “Could be,” said Varney, thinking, banana slug? “He didn’t seem in bad spirits, at least, despite how busy he is, and he was quite energetic and brisk. He brought me home again very early this morning.”

  “You still haven’t told me why you went,” said Greta.

  “I have not,” he agreed. “You’ll see quite soon, I promise. I know you’ve only been there at the spa for a few days and it may not be possible to receive visitors while you’re still settling in, but—do let me know when would be suitable for me to visit, if I may?”

  “You may,” said Greta firmly. “And—there’s a couple of surgeries I need to do in the next few days, but after that, yes, please do come and see me? You’d be very welcome, everyone here is extremely pleasant, and I will arrange to come down to meet you myself in the helicopter.”

  “Helicopter?” he repeated. “Good heavens. You can’t fly one, can you?”

  “I cannot, but I can ride in it. Oasis Natrun has its own bloody helicopter, which delights me immeasurably. Please come this weekend, if you can? I want to see you so much.”

  “Of course,” said Varney, “I’ll—”

  There was a commotion on the other end of the line, running footsteps, someone calling: Dr. Helsing, Doctor, please come quick, it’s Maanakhtef, we need you right away.

  “Of course,” he heard Greta say, and then “Varney, I’m sorry, I have to go—”

  “Go,” he said, “I love you, dear,” and heard the click as she hung up.

  He closed his eyes, briefly dizzy with a sort of emotional water-hammer at the sudden end to the conversation, and his hand crept again to touch the velvet box, its strange but undeniable solidity.

  I hope you like it, darling, he thought, I harrowed Hell and brought it back, and tried to squash a small but sharp wave of jealousy for Greta’s patients and their monopoly on her time and attention.

  Ah, he thought, not without bitterness. There’s the nasty vindictive creature I’ve always been. Not much is changing, after all, no matter how daring I have become. I’m still damned, and always will be, even if Hell let me go again; there is no getting around that awkward little fact.

  And it would have been very easy for Varney to descend into one of the spirals of self-disgust that characterized his particular brand of melancholy if at that moment something small and round and white that had been climbing down the velvet curtain had not chosen to squeak, and in doing so lost its grip on the curtain and fall, still squeaking, in midair. Varney’s hand darted out, faster than a human’s could have moved, that eerie vampyre quickness, and caught the thing as it fell; he opened his hand to find a skull the size of a walnut sitting on his palm and staring up at him with tiny empty eye sockets.

  Squeak, said the skull, and Varney had to sigh.

  She had been leaning on the terrace railing, looking down the lap of the valley to the city and the sea beyond, pleasantly tired but satisfied, enjoying the luxury of listening to Varney’s voice on the other end of the phone. Until now Greta hadn’t really had much time to enjoy the view from the spa’s highest terrace, let alone lounge around on the comfortably cushioned chairs with a drink in her hand, and she had been thinking seriously about ordering one when the sliding doors behind her opened and running feet approached.

  It was Sister Melitta, one of the shift nurses, out of breath. “Doctor,” she said, “please come quick, it’s Maanakhtef,” and Greta’s stomach sank like a stone. She said good-bye to Varney and hung up the phone, hooking her stethoscope around her neck as she ran inside, the nurse having to catch up with her. What did I do wrong, she was thinking, what the hell did I do this time that I haven’t done a thousand other times with the bone shaping and stabilization?

  Aloud she said as they hurried through the corridors, “What happened?”

  “It’s one of the spells, Doctor,” Sister Melitta said. “It’s worse this time, it’s much worse, he was on his way back from the sun lounge when it happened and he—well, he fell.”

  “Oh, shit,” sai
d Greta, quickening her pace. Mummies were brittle. “What’s the extent of the damage?”

  “We aren’t sure—Sister Brigitte is with him, she said we weren’t to move him without you—”

  Good, she thought, at least that’s something, he won’t splinter any further, with luck I can stabilize him enough to get him on a stretcher. She was trying quite hard to focus on the immediate situation rather than picking at the constant nagging awareness that she didn’t know what was going on, what was causing this bizarre series of episodes, and it got a lot easier as she and Sister Melitta turned the corner and she got a good look at what they were dealing with.

  Maanakhtef had been leaning on his crutches, of course; he wasn’t allowed to put any weight on the damaged foot at this point. When the fainting spell had struck, he must have been taking a step forward, and in losing consciousness had slipped to the side as he’d fallen, landing with his back nearly flat on the floor and his legs twisted, the right hip uppermost. It was an enormous mercy that the crutches hadn’t tangled themselves up with him; both of them lay safely flung wide on the floor.

  Greta took all this in very quickly indeed, in a matter of a few seconds, and then she was on her knees beside the mummy. Sister Brigitte was kneeling by his head, her palms holding it completely still. “Doctor,” she said tightly. “The skull’s intact. This is what—”