by Vivian Shaw
“You’d do it decoratively,” said Grisaille. “Collapsing in an artistic fashion with your head pillowed on one out-flung arm, I have no doubt.”
“Yes, and there would have been less being horribly sick,” said Ruthven with feeling. “Is it just mummies?”
“So far,” said Greta. “In a way it’s sort of reassuring to know I’m not the only medical professional being completely stumped by something mysterious, and in another it’s emphatically not comforting to consider that the best minds in Hell can’t figure it out. I might ask Dr. Faust if he has any pointers, because right now I am at an utter loss.”
“Fass diagnosed your curse,” Grisaille said to Ruthven. “I was right there. It was alarming.”
“Maybe he can diagnose this, too—but he seemed awfully busy with his research work,” Greta said.
“He did take the time to come and fetch me for my visit to Hell,” Varney put in. “Perhaps we can ask him—or one of the demon physicians?”
“Wait a sec,” said Ruthven, “Faust is back—Doctor, Greta has a question for you.”
“Make it quick,” said Faust’s voice. “I want my phone back and you ought to be resting.”
She made it quick. Acute but transient idiopathic dizziness, weakness, collapse; attacks followed by varying levels of malaise and exhaustion; no pattern she or anyone else could discern; increasing in frequency, some patients experiencing multiple instances. Extremely difficult to map to any physiological issue, given the largely nonphysiological nature of the mummy as a species. “Which is why I am wondering if it’s also magic in origin, but the closest thing we have to an ancient Egyptian magician can’t find any answers, either.”
“Mm,” said Faust. “I’d like to have a look, get one of the patients down here and run ’em through the scanner, but frankly I don’t know what that would do to someone whose functional presence in reality is based on a completely different belief system. The pneumic signature mismatch could be catastrophic.”
“That’s what I was afraid you’d say,” said Greta, sighing. “The last thing I want to do is cut any of these people loose from the system of magic that sustains them. There aren’t any new mummies being made. They’re a critically endangered species as it is, and I won’t do anything that might jeopardize the survival of any of them.”
“Exactly,” said Faust. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I can help. You said you had an Egyptian magician?”
“Well, sort of. He was a priest of Thoth when he was alive,” said Greta, and looked up; Varney was pointing at the conference room door, which had a window beside it. “And he’s, uh, apparently right outside the room—just a minute—”
She got up and let Tefnakhte in. He was carrying his clipboard and looking, insofar as it was possible to tell, excited. “I’m sorry to interrupt, Dr. Helsing—”
“Not at all,” said Greta. “Everyone, allow me to introduce the mummy Tefnakhte. We’ve got Ruthven and Grisaille on the line as well as Dr. Faust.”
“Er,” said Tefnakhte. “I’m not sure I—”
“What have you found?” she asked.
“Well. As this seems to be getting worse,” he said, “I was thinking about what we might have done in the old days to find answers to an unanswerable problem.”
“The old days?” said Faust.
“Twenty-first Dynasty,” said Tefnakhte. “Anyway—well. When I was alive, praying to Thoth—Djehuty—for wisdom and guidance was one way to approach it.”
“You were a priest of Djehuty,” said Greta. “Is—can you just sort of do that, and if so, please will you do it at your earliest convenience?”
“It’s not quite that simple,” said Tefnakhte. “I mean, yes, I could offer up a basic request, but there’s a difference between that and the kind of prayer that actually gets the god’s attention. That asks for direct intercession. That’s a little more complex.”
“What do you need?” Varney asked. “I mean, if you can do this at all, what do you need?”
“A very rare kind of artifact,” said Tefnakhte. “One with the right spells on it, that’s been used for this kind of thing for thousands of years. Can’t be just any version, it’s—I didn’t think I’d be able to find one, but I think I have.”
“Where is it?” said Greta.
“That’s sort of the problem,” said the mummy. “It’s in the Met. In New York. Where it’s undoubtedly extremely well guarded and secure.”
“And you have to actually be able to touch this thing, not just look at it through glass?”
“I’m afraid so,” said Tefnakhte. “I have to—well, interact with it. Make offerings and so on. I need to actually have access to the artifact, and it’s locked up very tightly indeed.”
“Oh my God,” said Grisaille. “Oh God, finally something is beginning to look up.”
“What do you mean, look up?” Varney demanded. “This is not a positive development—”
“Do you know,” said Grisaille gleefully, “do you have any idea how long it’s been since I got the chance to steal something priceless from a major world museum? This is fantastic.”
“Hang on, hang on,” said Greta, rubbing at her eyes. “Nobody said anything about stealing it, we just need access.”
“Oh, like they’re gonna let an actual mummy lurch in there and open up the case if he asks nicely so that he can do weird arcane rituals to an irreplaceable historical artifact,” Grisaille said, and Greta could very easily picture his expression. “I’m sorry, I must have missed the part where members of the supernatural community were widely recognized and welcome in human society, silly of me.”
“No, you missed the part where we know a museum curator,” said Greta sourly. “He’s with the British Museum, not the Met, but if he asks nicely, we might get somewhere.”
“Cranswell,” said Ruthven. “Remember? August Cranswell. You tried to get him drunk and waltz with him last time I had people over, and you got your feet stepped on for your pains.”
“… oh,” said Grisaille. “Well, fine, he can help me steal it. Even if he’s the worst dancer in London.”
“Let’s start by giving him a call,” said Greta. “Dr. Faust, I’m sorry to have taken up so much of your time, and thank you for getting in touch. On a more personal note: if this goddamn mess ever does get cleared up, do you think it’d be possible for me to tour your facilities?”
“Happy to,” said Faust. “Nice meeting you,” and the phone cut off.
“Well,” said Greta, leaning back and looking at the others. She was reaching the stage of sleep deprivation where everything felt ever so slightly hilarious. “That was unexpected.”
“Did you really just talk to people in Hell with your cell phone?” said Tefnakhte. “That was actually a thing that just happened?”
“I think so, or we’re all trapped in some thoroughly complicated group hallucination,” said Varney, “and I’d prefer to believe the former. Greta, do you want me to call Cranswell?”
“Yes,” she said, making herself sit up with an effort. “Do that while I do my rounds. Tefnakhte, if you have time, I’d like you to come along with me. Let’s just hope nobody else has succumbed to totally idiopathic syncope in the meantime.”
The hospital room in Erebus General was, Grisaille considered, upsetting in its ordinariness. You would have expected there to be some kind of visual indication regarding the fact it was in Hell. There wasn’t a window, so the view of the burning lake and the white city of Dis wasn’t available to orient the observer; the walls were that beige no-color that seemed to characterize all such institutions, the uncomfortable chair was unremarkable and upholstered in something that appeared to be dull pink vinyl, the various tubes and monitors hooked up to Ruthven seemed to be little different from the ones you’d see on Earth.
Grisaille was having trouble parsing that. Earth versus Hell. Actual Hell. The place where you went at the end of tragic operas. After the immediate and awful anxiety over Ruthven had begun to ease, as
he’d begun to improve with startling rapidity, Grisaille had had more time to think about things, and he regretted this.
The journey here had been brief but unspeakable. He’d held on to Fastitocalon through a nauseating, dizzying white flash of sensation, being twisted, and then had to hang on a little longer while the sparkles obscuring his vision went away and the room stopped spinning. At least it was a room, rather than some terrible flaming wasteland pockmarked with pits full of sinners getting on with eternity. Grisaille hadn’t had time—or presence of mind—to take in more than bright light and a smell of disinfectant, people crowding around them, someone barking orders—that had been Dr. Faust—someone else had brought a gurney, Fastitocalon set Ruthven gently down on it, and Grisaille had had to watch all over again as he was wheeled away. The echo was very strong: arriving at Oasis Natrun, arriving in Hell, and both felt like a bad dream.
Don’t worry, Fastitocalon had said, putting a hand briefly on his shoulder. He’s in the best of hands. I’ve got to go, and go he had, popping out of existence with a faint thunderclap, leaving Grisaille in what he realized was the waiting area of a busy emergency room. All around him people came and went, some in scrubs and some in ordinary clothes and some in—well, robes, and as he regained some measure of self-possession, he noticed that a lot of the people were also sporting accessories such as horns and tails and folded wings. I’m in Hell, he thought, I’m actually in Hell and these are demons and I’m in Hell I’m in Hell I’m in HELL…
By the time somebody in pink scrubs came up to him with a friendly smile, Grisaille had been very close to hysterics; the person, who appeared to be of indeterminate gender and relatively human except for their blank pupilless red eyes, had guided him to a chair and pushed a cup of what turned out to be very nice brandy-laced hot blood into his hands and told him to breathe. He’d demanded to be told what was happening to Ruthven, and the person—in a soothing tone he would under other circumstances have found unbelievably twee—told him his boyfriend was undergoing scans and would be moved to a room as soon as possible.
The brandy helped; the blood helped more, even if Grisaille didn’t want to think about wherever it might have come from, and by the time the person in the pink scrubs came back to tell him Ruthven was out of imaging and already showing vast improvement, he could stand without his legs shaking very much at all.
The sight of Ruthven in the high white hospital bed, covered in tubes and wires, looking so small under all that technology, had given Grisaille a bad moment of déjà vu: he’d looked just the same in Greta’s bizarre mummy clinic, however long ago that had been.
And then Ruthven had opened his eyes, and turned his head on the pillow, and smiled at him, and the awful tightness around Grisaille’s chest had let go in a sudden dizzying rush of relief. He couldn’t remember what he’d said—something utterly inane, no doubt—all he remembered was holding Ruthven’s hand in his, resting his face on the edge of the bed, feeling Ruthven leaning over to stroke his hair, as all the terror and sleep deprivation of the past however many days and nights caught up with him all at once and took him away.
He’d woken up in the uncomfortable chair, for a long horrible moment unsure of where he was or how he’d got there, and nearly panicked all over again to see Ruthven lying with his eyes closed and his hands loosely curled on the bedclothes—but the steady, regular, slow beeping of the monitors reassured him.
That morning had come and gone with a series of persons coming in and out of the room, occasionally wheeling Ruthven away to do some other arcane tests, and by the time Dr. Faust came in with Greta on the phone, Grisaille’s desperate worry had turned into restless boredom. His excitement at the prospect of breaking into museums had been entirely genuine.
“So this Cranswell person,” he said now, sitting on the edge of Ruthven’s bed. “Other than being a shitty dancer, he’s unknown to me. Fix that?”
Ruthven had closed his eyes, and Grisaille winced a little at how unutterably weary he looked, despite the improvement. Let him rest, he thought, stop being insufferable, and just as clearly heard the echo back: I can’t.
“August Cranswell,” said Ruthven, his eyes still shut, “is in his mid-to-late twenties and the latest and possibly last scion of a family I first encountered a very long time ago. The Cranswell dynasty shows up in the annals of classic horror lit due to an unfortunate experience with a sanguivore, which—from the description—seems to have been a member of the nosferatu subspecies. Unlike many other heroines in similar circumstance, Amelia Cranswell recovered fully from her experience and in fact insisted on returning to Croglin Grange, the house they had leased and into which the vampire had broken. Stop me if I’m boring you.”
“Boring is not the word, dear heart,” said Grisaille. “Complete tenterhooks. Go on.”
“Due to some reasonably clever planning ahead, the second time the thing crept over from the local churchyard to pick the lead out from between Amelia’s windowpanes and let itself in—that’s real, by the way, same thing happened to me—the family was ready, and drove it off with a bullet in its leg; and of course the next day they went and opened all the coffins and found the corresponding corpse and had a bonfire. The point is, they were brave and inquisitive and determined, and so were their offspring, and their offspring’s offspring, and somewhere along the lines they switched from vampire hunters to vampire scholars, and somewhere further along the line one of them ran into me.”
Ruthven opened his eyes and looked up at Grisaille. “I don’t think I was living one of my best unlives at the time, but we eventually ended up friends, and that tradition has lasted. August Cranswell is the son of a British Cranswell and a Nigerian scientist; he is quite bright despite how hard he tries to obscure this fact and has a degree from Harvard; he is now well on his way from junior curator to full curator at the museum; and he was instrumental in stopping that business with the Holy Sword chaps last year. It was in fact Cranswell who smashed the possessed rectifier, even if a number of factors had to be in place for him to get the chance.”
“And you think this kid will help us get the whatever-it-is out of the Met.”
“No,” said Ruthven, “but I expect him to give you a believable cover story.”
“You’re—okay with this?” Grisaille asked, suddenly hesitant. “Me leaving you here, I mean. I don’t have to go—”
“You do,” said Ruthven, “for any number of reasons, but to pick two completely at random: you hate being down here, and you’re the most experienced thief we know.”
“I don’t—” he began, and had to stop, running a hand over his face. “Okay, I do hate it but that doesn’t mean I can’t—suck it up and be supportive?”
“Oh, Grisaille,” said Ruthven, and held out his arms; there was something in the strength of that hug which went a little way toward reassuring Grisaille he really was approaching all right. “I am in good hands here. Even if they’re slightly alarming hands. I’m—not thinking about being stuck here right now. I am thinking how nice it is not to hurt. I can’t be of use to Greta and the others, but you can, and they need you. We need you.”
Grisaille also was trying not to think about him being stuck here forever, and held him tight. “I’m not used to that. The—being needed.” It was an admission he could not have made this time last year. “But I’d be lying if I said the chance to steal something priceless didn’t make my heart go pitter-pat.”
“I know,” said Ruthven with a smile in his voice, and when he let Grisaille go and lay back against the pillows, it was there on his face as well. “Go and plan a heist, my dear. I am going to go back to sleep, in a strategic and forethoughtful kind of way.”
Grisaille leaned over and kissed him. “Will they take me back upstairs if I ask nicely?”
“Flutter your eyelashes,” said Ruthven, “and look demure, and—be careful.”
“I will,” he said, and although it hurt to leave him, all alone in the little hospital room surrounded by
demons, Grisaille felt a stirring of excitement he hadn’t experienced in years.
“Do you think that monster’s dead?”
Amitiel was gazing dreamily out the window of their Greenwich Street loft, elbows on the windowsill, chin in hands. He wasn’t bothering to wear the human-seeming, not when it was just the two of them together, and his folded wings nearly brushed the ceiling. More than once he’d knocked things over with them, or bumped into the overhead light fixtures, since they’d been here; Zophiel glanced up at the chandelier.
“Probably,” he said. “I can’t know for sure. It seems likely.”
“I want it to be dead,” said Amitiel. He turned and looked at Zophiel with wide golden eyes, pupilless and blank but nevertheless expressive. His real face was not so very different from the one he wore as a model. “Something went through the planes early this morning. I felt it. The disturbance. It wasn’t our spell, either.”
“I know,” said Zophiel. Amitiel often seemed to need to talk things over very deliberately; he thought it might have something to do with how difficult the angel found it to be in this world, needing reassurance and clarification. “We both felt it,” he said. “It woke me up.”
“Me, too. You came to bring me tea,” he said, with a smile so beautiful it would have been dangerous for a human to observe for any length of time. “That was kind.”
“I thought you might have been—upset,” said Zophiel. “You’re sensitive, and that was a strong disturbance.” It had been distant but still powerful; he’d had no idea quite how far away, but if the monster had stayed in Rome while Amitiel’s curse did its work, that would be over four thousand miles. Anything passing between planes sent a concentric series of ripples through reality, like a stone dropped into water, which creatures like himself could detect; the farther away from the point of transit, the weaker the ripple effect would be, and anything that could propagate over several thousand miles must have been a significant event. A monster being taken to Hell might do it, possibly.
