Grave Importance

by Vivian Shaw

  Ruthven smiled. “I shall have small wheels attached to it, so I can push you around like the world’s largest and least innocent infant in a mahogany pram.”

  “Quite right,” said Grisaille, and then, “Why are you all the way over there, it’s insupportable,” and Ruthven didn’t even stop to take off his shoes before flopping on the bed beside him and taking him in his arms.

  At Oasis Natrun, Sister Brigitte put down the telephone and turned to Tefnakhte. “She’ll be back in a week,” she said. “It must have been rather a significant emergency. She sounded all right, at least.”

  “Good,” said Tefnakhte. “And—I rather think it was.”

  He could remember some of it, and didn’t want to. Where the humans had a vague blank space in their memories, mummies were creatures of memory, recorded history, and the thing that had washed over the world and wiped away the images of horror had left a faint stain in his mind. There had been—blood, and hail, and a terrible star from a book of magic that was not his own, and then he lost coherent sequential memory; it all blurred together in a sickening pulse of fear and pain.

  Brigitte was looking at him, head tilted. “Are you all right?” she said. “You’re not—having an attack?”

  “What? No,” he said. “I’m fine. And we don’t have to worry about the attacks anymore; remember, that stopped with Van Dorne—you weren’t there, that’s right, you didn’t see. Be glad of that.”

  Brigitte frowned. “I can’t remember; she was… there, and then she wasn’t, and the stela wasn’t, either.”

  They had discovered that the Hermopolis Stela was missing not long after the world came back. There was no sign of it anywhere in the facility; they searched every room, every hiding place, any possible location it could be. It had simply vanished without a trace.

  It had been Tefnakhte and Nefrina, the IT specialist mummy here to have her tendons replaced, who had thought to look it up on the Internet and see if there was anything in the news about it being found somewhere, and oddly enough, there didn’t seem to be any mentions at all of it having been stolen in the first place. They looked through all the news sites back to before the robbery, and there simply was nothing there. Leonora Van Dorne’s disappearance had hit the news; she was sufficiently rich and well known that her sudden vanishing was worth talking about. There were multiple theories floating around the Internet: she’d been kidnapped, she’d been killed, she was on the run from something. But the stela wasn’t there.

  The patients argued about it in between playing board games in the sunroom. Antjau was finally well enough to get up and join the others, but didn’t say much; Nesperennub insisted that the stela had returned itself to its origin once its work was done; it was sacred to Thoth, and Thoth did not like disorder, or loose ends. Maanakhtef, who was hardly limping at all now, thought that some enterprising local had stolen it during the—strange dream everyone had had.

  It wouldn’t be until Tefnakhte and Nefrina spent enough time on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website to check the gallery map and look at the images of the room that popped up that they discovered the stela and its plinth simply weren’t there. The Metternich Stela stood alone in its narrow glass case.

  The Hermopolis Stela wasn’t on the Met’s catalog list. It wasn’t on the Internet, either. There were no references to it in any of the literature they skimmed. There were no pictures of it, even low-res Pinterest JPEG files. There were no references to it in any of Oasis Natrun’s books. It didn’t exist.

  Tefnakhte thought that it was part of the forgetting. He couldn’t forget it, of course: he’d used it to perform the spell to summon Thoth, which was written in the book of his heart, never to be erased; but the humans, well, the humans were so ephemeral these days.

  After they’d had tea, and Greta had redirected Emily’s inquisitive focus to learning about the work she was doing over at Oasis Natrun—the account of having to rebuild most of Maanakhtef’s left side fascinated and grossed Emily out at the same time—Greta made her apologies and left the two of them alone with the hairmonsters, trudging up the grand staircase to Varney’s huge bedroom. After the—crisis, afterward, when everything woke up to find itself repaired, she had thought the sleep debt might have been wiped out with all the rest of the chaos, but apparently partying with demons was a really great way to get exhausted all over again.

  It was difficult to bother taking off her clothes, but the grandeur of the bedroom almost required it; one didn’t crawl beneath the covers in a vast canopied bed like this one wearing jeans, a somewhat battered shirt, and an even more battered white coat that still read MEDICAL DIRECTOR over the left breast. The last time she’d stayed down here, she had left some things, and it took her only a few minutes searching in drawers to find an actual nightgown.

  After that, she barely remembered pulling back the covers, let alone lying down: she was gone, sunk away from consciousness like a stone into water, so deep she could not dream.

  Varney found her like that a little while later, and stood for a time by the edge of the bed, looking down at her, at the face he had grown to love long before he could admit it even to himself. It was a pale, pointed little face, relaxed in sleep, but the faintly pink lines where worry-wrinkles habitually formed were still visible. He thought he could picture what she’d look like as an old woman, and his chest hurt sharply, vividly, at the idea.

  Asleep, she looked almost frighteningly fragile. Like one of the maidens he used to terrify in the night, so vulnerable, so defenseless; but Varney knew that the fragility was false.

  One can always do what one must, he thought again, and knew that it was the same for her as it was for him: there was no particular valor in the act of doing what must be done, because it needed doing, and he happened to be at hand.

  He turned away, walked over to the window, looked out over the ornamental lake—smaller than it had been, but still brimful—and at the rolling parkland and the woods beyond. Varney remembered this view yesterday, a century ago, two centuries: the trees had changed but the contours of the landscape remained the same; time’s blurring brush had not altered the bones of the land itself. What had changed was—everything else. What had changed was him.

  He took the little blue glass bottle from his pocket, watched the pearly liquid swirl. I want to forget this ever happened, he had told Samael. Here was forgetfulness enough to wipe out all the horrors of his past, all the things he had done in his long and fruitless life, all the hurt he had caused and the pain he had inflicted and the loss he had forced upon people whose only crimes had been being in the way of something Varney wanted. Here was a blank curtain falling on a bad and venal play, its characters unsympathetic and its plot both unpleasant and dull. He could, if he so chose, wipe it all away, and—have to hope that he would fall in love with Greta all over again, and build a new Varney for a new and brighter world.

  The stuff in the bottle was both heavy and cold, chilling his hand. After a little while he set it down on the windowsill, and thought without realizing he was thinking it: What should I do?

  And again, just as unexpected, extraordinary, the sense of something listening was back. Inside the quiet empty place he had only recently discovered was still present deep inside himself, something was listening, and heard him very well.

  Absurdly, Varney thought, Should I be kneeling now, I don’t know how to do this, I don’t know how to pray, I just asked questions, and there was not so much an answer as a drawing back: an invitation to speak words into that emptiness, and have them be heard. He shut his eyes—it was easier to concentrate, not looking at that small and somehow terrible bottle—and let himself float in the darkness, heard his own voice inside his mind, not realizing he had already begun.

  It was full dark when he came back to himself, blinking, to find his feet and back aching, his muscles stiff and numb from standing still for hours. Greta was beside him, pale in the dimness, her hair and her nightgown the same shade of silver-gilt. “Varney
?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was—thinking?”

  “How long have you been standing there?” she asked softly. “Come to bed, it’s cold, you must be frozen. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he said, sounding vague even to himself, and then cursed and reached for the windowsill to steady himself when he tried to take a step and his aching knees threatened to give out. Instantly there was a narrow shoulder insinuated under his arm, a hand on his waist, warm and living and real.

  “Lean on me,” she said, and he did, and together they made their way back to the bed: deliciously sleep-warm and huge and welcoming. Varney got out of his clothes without the usual flicker of shyness and embarrassment; perhaps he’d burned up his store of that somewhere in the recent series of events. It felt… perfectly ordinary, to undress, to climb into bed mostly unclothed next to a living woman, as if he was supposed to do any such thing.

  When they were comfortably settled, Greta leaned her head against his shoulder and said softly, “What were you thinking about, that you were so far away?”

  “Forgetting,” he told her. The space inside his mind where listening happened was empty now, but a comfortable emptiness, not a yearning void. “Whether it’s better to forget terrible things, or to keep the knowledge that they happened so that they don’t happen again.”

  “That bottle on the windowsill,” said Greta. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “Lethe water,” he said. “Samael—gave it to me. As a gift.”

  Greta nodded against him, and was still for a while. When she spoke, her voice was quiet. “Do you want to forget it all?”

  “Yes and no,” said Varney, still conscious of an uncharacteristic sense of calm: it seemed to be acceptable to say these things, out loud, to talk about his own wants and failings without the constant lapping weight of melancholy and the tide of memory bringing with it bitter and self-excoriating wrack. “I would… like to erase certain parts, and keep others, and I don’t think it works that way. All the things I should like to forget are long past the recent times, and I can’t destroy those memories without destroying the good ones that came afterward, and those I do not wish to lose.” He curled an arm around her shoulders; she was so warm, delicious, intensely pleasing to hold. “I would not want to forget you.”

  Greta rested a hand on Varney’s chest. In the dimness the jewels in her ring caught whatever light there was and held it, a tiny row of colored sparks. “That’s the problem, isn’t it. You keep getting farther and farther away from the old and awful stuff, every moment, every breath, every word.”

  “Yes,” he said. “And it becomes harder and harder to countenance erasing the good to get to the bad.”

  “There’s probably a metaphor in there,” said Greta. “This isn’t we must pass through bitter waters to reach the sweet. You’ve done that, Francis. Your whole life’s been bitter water, and—now you’re out of that. It’s over and done with. You can be who you are now, not what you were then.”

  Somewhere inside his own mind Varney was astonished at the fact that he was able not only to have this conversation at all but to laugh, a little, and rest his cheek against the pale silk of her hair. “It is convenient,” he said, and heard himself say, “that the people who actually remember any of those events are all dead, and getting deader all the time, as it were.”

  She laughed, too. “I might want to take a nip out of that bottle from time to time myself, but—despite how bloody awful so much of this has been, I don’t want to lose it all, either. There were some amazing moments, in amongst all the bad.”

  “We can keep it under the bathroom sink,” said Varney, “with the spare shampoo, and no one will be the wiser,” and that made her laugh more, and then he simply had to kiss her; there was no choice in the matter at all.

  When he pulled back, he was aware, very aware indeed, of the warmth of her, the sweet weight against his side, all the places that they touched; and he was enormously glad of his strange newfound ability not to go to pieces, because desire washed through him like a tidal bore and, oh, he wanted, wanted things he should not have, and—

  “… when do you want to get married?” he asked, not quite steadily.

  “Now,” said Greta, still pressed close to him. “Right now, in this bed. One of the little brown bats in the roof colony can officiate, or a mouse, I’m sure it’s allowable protocol.”

  “We should have asked Samael to do it,” he said, definitely unsteady now, and heard himself make a soft and helpless sound as Greta’s hand on his chest slipped lower and lower. “He did say I could ask for anything—oh—”

  “What did you do, Varney?”

  It was so difficult to concentrate enough to talk. “Saved the world, I think—”

  “In that case,” said Greta Helsing, smiling in the dark, “you deserve rather more of a reward,” and shortly afterward Varney’s ability to string words together in any semblance of order vanished like a blown-out candle flame, and all there was, was joy.

  And so, ten days later, there was a wedding: officiated not by bat or mouse but by the perfectly inoffensive local vicar—and for once the British weather had relented, and allowed them to hold it outside, on a clear and lovely autumn day.

  Greta was amazed all over again at how fast things happened when you threw money at them; Varney had called Ruthven, and the latter had slipped into accelerated event-planning mode, and she had found herself taken to town and made to try on a lot of silly dresses until she found one she actually absolutely loved; there were absurd appointments for cake tasting (“It tastes like cake,” she had said, and Ruthven had sighed at her) and the dress had to be altered to fit, and everybody had to be rung up and invited and told to arrive at such and such a time, Fastitocalon had to be invited to give her away (and Ruthven had sulked about it until she said, “I’ve got two arms, haven’t I, you can both walk with me”) and so much of it seemed to happen at once, around Greta, a whirlwind of activity. She herself kept out of Ruthven’s way except when he needed her to do something, and spent the time with Emily and the monsters—and Varney, when he could be spared from the wedding effort.

  It had all seemed somewhat unreal to her, bemusing rather than exciting—until the day actually came, and she had to excuse herself right before walking down the aisle to swallow one of Emily’s anti-anxiety pills and something for her stomach. As soon as it began, though, the crawling stage-fright lifted from her like a cloak.

  Afterward she would remember the whole thing in a series of images, beads strung together on a thread, each a turning jewel: taking Ruthven’s and Fastitocalon’s arms and stepping between them out of the house on that long walk across the terrace and up the grassy slope to the old stone summerhouse draped with garlands of peach roses; passing between the rows of chairs, face after familiar face turning to follow the bridal party as they went. Almost everyone they’d invited had been able to come, and in many cases had their travel paid for by Varney and Ruthven; she was enormously pleased to catch a glimpse of several of her mummy patients in the throng. Sheelagh Montrose the banshee, Krona the barrow-wight, St. Germain the wolf, Ruthven’s vampire friends from Paris, practically everyone Greta knew and liked was there to watch this moment. Even the psychopomps were there, Crepusculus Dammerung looking absurd in a dinner-jacket and grinning at her, Gervase Brightside actually smiling for once.

  Having Ruthven and Fastitocalon flanking her felt right in a bone-deep way, the solid comfort of their presence giving her something to hold on to. And looking up the grassy aisle between the rows to see Sir Francis Varney in deep grey, Grisaille and Cranswell beside him, closing the distance, her heart beating too fast, felt a little like walking up to the edge of some unknown precipice: exciting and dangerous at once.

  After that, it all happened very fast. Taking her place next to Varney, with Nadezhda and Hippolyta and Anna and Emily arrayed beside her, listening to the murmured speech of the vicar and the solemn recitation of the vows, feel
ing the strange lovely weight of her wedding band warming to blood-heat, all of it blurred together until the moment when Varney lifted her veil, took her face in his hands, and kissed her as his living wife; with that, she had taken the last step over that precipice into clear air, and was not falling but flying.

  Through the applause she thought, How strange it is that all of this should have happened so quickly; I have only known him for a little over a year.

  I want to make up for lost time.

  Looking out over her friends, her family, the people she had met and worked with and loved and cared for, saved and been saved by, Greta thought how utterly fortunate she was to be what, and who, she was. All her life she’d been aware of existing in the strange liminal space between the ordinary world and the one her patients inhabited, not quite wholly in either one, and resigned to loneliness. Now the borders of that space seemed to have expanded, drawn back like stage-curtains to encompass not just Greta but the people she loved, and who loved her.

  The old golden stone of Dark Heart House glowed against the copper beeches that had given it its nickname, the rolling green parkland stretching away to the woods on the other side of the valley. The house had stood there for six centuries, while the world around it shifted and changed and moved on; she thought now, looking at it, that it could stand for six more.

  Home, she thought. That’s home. Not the flat in Crouch End where she’d lived for so many years, in her other life.

  The crowd of their guests was mingling now, wandering down toward the house, where champagne and canapés had been set out in the great hall. Varney smiled down at her. “Shall we? I’m sure Edmund is going to want to make a speech, and he’ll mind if we’re not there to listen.”

  Tomorrow she would go back to Oasis Natrun, and her job; there would always be the job, the need, the work and care of it, but for now—just for now—Greta took the arm her husband offered her, and let him lead her home.