Grave Importance

by Vivian Shaw

  EPILOGUE

  The setting sun struck fire from the windows of Oasis Natrun, turning the distant sea into a sheet of gold; above it the sky shaded from lemon-yellow through a delicate green to the deepest of blue scattered with stars. Greta Helsing stood on the terrace’s balcony, watching the spa’s helicopter dwindling with distance as it bore a departing patient to the airport: Mr. Antjau, officially cured, carrying the jar containing his lungs in a crocodile-skin travel case.

  She leaned her elbows on the railing, pleasantly tired, and was not at all surprised when Varney came to join her, drinks in hand. He was spending a week at the spa, ostensibly so that Tefnakhte could tutor him in Egyptian, but also because of evenings like this one: pale gold and deepening blue, the air like wine.

  “Thanks,” she said, taking the glass he offered, clinking it with his. “I keep thinking the sunsets can’t get better, and I keep being wrong.”

  Varney slipped an arm around her waist. “Dark Heart isn’t much for spectacular sunsets,” he said mildly. “I ordered you dinner in an hour.”

  She smiled. “I should be doing work, not lazing about and eating gourmet food.”

  “You’ve been doing work all day,” he said. “I watched you. That infestation case this morning was remarkably nasty.”

  “One of the worst I’ve seen, but she was under the sterilization linac within half an hour of checking in, and that thing works like—well, like magic.” Greta sipped her drink. It had been a relatively slow day, after dealing with poor Ms. Akhetbasaken’s dermestid beetle problem; a couple of routine daily exams, one replacement finger, one partial rewrap. The spa’s clientele was growing. “Which reminds me, I need to actually set aside some time to concentrate on reading Faust’s book; I got halfway through the first chapter on introductory mirabilic principles before I had to go and fix somebody’s kneecap, and it’s all gone right out of my mind. How’s the Egyptian coming along?”

  “Slowly,” said Varney. “I’ve read a lot of it in translation, and it’s slightly infuriating just how long it will take me to be able to read Egyptian poetry to you. They’re fragments, but they’re beautiful nonetheless.”

  Greta smiled, leaning against him, shoulder to shoulder. “You could do it in French.”

  “All the French poetry I know is extremely depressing,” said Varney, “which I should imagine comes as no surprise. I will master Egyptian if only to be able to tell you beautiful things.”

  “And to help with the patients when you’re here,” she said. “It really does make a difference having you recite the spells along with Tefnakhte. There’s a unique quality to your voice that seems to act as a force multiplier.”

  “‘Mellifluous,’” Varney said, and made a face.

  “Precisely. I’m thinking of doing a paper on the effects of auditory spells on patient outcomes; I don’t think it’s been studied before. I might use that to open the conference, in fact.”

  Varney sighed. “I suppose I could—I don’t know, have my voice recorded and analyzed, if it will make you happy, and that reminds me, I’ve got to hurry up and get the last bit of the roof finished before your learned friends are scheduled to arrive.”

  “You’ve got time,” said Greta. “It’s not until next year, and I haven’t decided if I want to hold it in a different place each year or if it should stay at Dark Heart. There aren’t that many mummy specialists worldwide, it’s such a niche area; I think we can all fit into the great hall without getting too friendly with one another.”

  Varney nodded, sipped his drink. “I’m proud of you,” he said after a moment, slightly awkward. She turned to look at him.

  “For what? Dealing with those beetles wasn’t much fun, but it’s hardly the first time I’ve had to manage.”

  “For—everything,” he said, flushing very pale pink. “For all of the work you did in Hell, and—coming back here after that and still doing your job, and organizing conferences and studying magic and being patient with people who don’t strictly deserve it, and—”

  Greta smiled. “You do know,” she said, “that I’m able to do my job because it must be done, but do you also know how much easier everything is when I don’t have to do it alone?”

  Varney’s blush deepened. She covered his hand on the balcony railing with her own, the dying sun catching in the stones of her ring. “I mean it, Francis,” she said. “Everything is better with you. Simpler. I can do more because I know there’s someone there to catch me, somebody I trust to help when I need it. I didn’t know how badly I needed it before.”

  “I will always be there to catch you,” he said. “That at least I can promise.”

  “And I will be there to help.” She set down her glass. “It’s what I’m for, when you get right down to it. I—can’t believe it’s only a year and a bit since I met you; it feels like forever.”

  “Forever’s not long at all,” said Varney. “But it’ll do, for now.”

  He took her hand in his, and together they watched as the vault of the sky above them slowly came alight with stars: a hundred, a million stars, diamonds scattered across a vast and endless blue. Greta thought of golden snowflakes falling in Hell, lit with the moving opalescent glow of the burning lake; thought of jeweled battlements in Heaven, white-winged angels, Samael, almost indistinguishable from them save for the color of his eyes; thought of all the mummy bones she had repaired, the architectural structure of muscle and tendon and ligament replaced with new materials, the time she had spent just sitting with her patients, listening, understanding, learning. Thought of the books she had read and the books she would read, how much more there was to learn, how she never wanted to stop learning, all the days of her life, with him beside her. How she never wanted to waste a single moment.

  Varney was right, she thought, looking up at the stars: forever would do, for now.

  THE END

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This series would never have happened without the encouragement and support of a great many people. First and foremost, my wife, Arkady Martine; Stephen Barbara, best of agents; Emily Byron and Sarah Guan (and Lindsey Hall), my editors; Ellen Wright, my publicist; Laura Schlitz, who told me not to stop, and Jane Mitchell, who first led me to some of the places Greta explores; Melissa Bresnahan, who asked what happened next; Dr. Kevin Ferentz, who prevented me from getting too much of the medicine wrong; and everyone else who came along with me on this bizarre, intense, and absolutely incredible three-year journey.

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  meet the author

  Photo Credit: Emilia Blaser

  VIVIAN SHAW wears way too many earrings and likes edged weapons and expensive ink. She was born in Kenya and spent her early childhood in the UK before relocating to America at the age of seven. She has a BA in art history and an MFA in creative writing and publishing arts, and has worked in academic publishing and development while researching everything from the history of spaceflight to reactor design to mountaineering disasters to supernatural physiology. In her spare time she draws, sews, makes jewelry, collects vintage cookbooks and fountain pens, and writes fanfiction (pen name: Coldhope). She lives in Baltimore with her wife, the author Arkady Martine.

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  GRAVE IMPORTANCE

  look out for

  THE UNLIKELY ESCAPE OF URIAH HEEP

  by

  H. G. Parry

  For his entire life, Charley Sutherland has concealed a magical ability he can’t quite control: He can bring characters from books into the real world. His older brother, Rob—a young lawyer with a normal house, a normal fiancée, and an utterly normal life—hopes that this strange family secret will disappear with disuse, and he will be discharged from his life’s duty of protecting Charley and the real world from each other. But then literary characters start causing trouble in their cit
y, making threats about destroying the world… and for once, it isn’t Charley’s doing.

  There’s someone else who shares his power. It’s up to Charley and a reluctant Rob to stop them before these characters tear apart the fabric of reality.

  I

  At four in the morning, I was woken by a phone call from my younger brother. He sounded breathless, panicked, with the particular catch in his voice I knew all too well.

  “Uriah Heep’s loose on the ninth floor,” he said. “And I can’t catch him.”

  My brain was fogged with sleep; it took a moment for his words to filter through. “Seriously, Charley?” I said when they did. “Again?”

  “I’ve never read out Uriah Heep before.”

  “True, but—you know what I mean.” I rubbed my eyes, trying to focus. The bedroom was pitch black and cold, the glow of the digital clock the only fuzzy source of light. Next to me, I heard Lydia stir and turn over in a rustle of sheets. I had a sense then of being suspended between two worlds: the sane one in which I had fallen asleep, and Charley’s, reaching to pull me awake through the speaker of my phone. It was a familiar feeling. “That’s Dickens, isn’t it? You know you and Dickens don’t mix—or… mix too well, or whatever it is the two of you do. I thought you were sticking to poetry lately. Those postmodern things that read like a dictionary mated with a Buddhist mantra and couldn’t possibly make any sense to anyone.”

  “There is not a poem on earth that doesn’t make any sense to anyone.”

  Even half-asleep, I could recognize an evasion when I heard it. “You promised. You promised it wouldn’t happen again.”

  “I know, and I meant it, and I’m sorry.” He was whispering, presumably trying not to alert the security guards roaming the university campus—or perhaps not to alert Uriah Heep. “But please, please, Rob, I know it’s late and you have work tomorrow, but if they find him here in the morning—”

  “All right, all right, calm down.” I forced exasperation out of my voice. There were times when he needed to hear it, and times when it would only tip him over the edge, and right now he sounded dangerously close to the edge. “You’re in your office? I’m on my way. Just try to keep an eye on him, and be down to let me in the building in ten minutes.”

  He sighed. “Thank you. Oh God, I really am sorry, it was only for a second…”

  “Ten minutes,” I told him, and hung up. I sighed myself, heard it go out into the darkness, and ran my hand through my hair. Oh well. It wasn’t as though I was surprised.

  “It’s my brother,” I said to Lydia, whom I could sense watching me with sleepy concern from the other side of the bed. “He’s having a crisis.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “He’ll be fine.” Lydia didn’t know the form my brother’s crises took, but it wasn’t the first time he’d phoned me with one. It wasn’t even the first time in the middle of the night. I had no idea who used to help him while he was living in England, but since he’d come to Wellington, I seemed to be on speed dial. “He just needs some help with a problem. You know how he is.”

  “You’ve got a trial this morning,” she reminded me.

  “I know,” I said. “I’ll make it. Go back to sleep.”

  “You can’t fix all his problems for him. He’s twenty-six.”

  “I know.” She was right; he did need to learn to deal with these things himself.

  Uriah Heep, though. I’d never read Dickens myself, but I’d learned to have an instinct for the names, and that one didn’t sound promising.

  My brother works as a lecturer at Prince Albert University of Wellington, which I can, as I promised, drive to from my house in about ten minutes, provided I stop only to pull on a pair of shoes and shrug on a coat over my pajamas. It’s a tricky road in the dark, skirting the central city and winding up into the foothills of Kelburn. I missed a turn, and found myself on the wrong side of the botanic gardens. Wellington’s like that. The city itself is nestled between the harbor and the hills: too far one way, and you hit the ocean; too far the other, and you’re facing a wall of impenetrable forest sloping up into the clouds. It’s not a good place for my brother, whose relationship with “too far” has never been a healthy one.

  The campus is perched halfway up the Kelburn hills, a tumbling assortment of buildings on either side of the road connected by an overpass. They’re old buildings, by New Zealand standards, but they probably don’t seem that way to Charley. Until three years ago, he’d been at Oxford, where referring to a building as old meant someone was studying in it a thousand years ago. I’d been there on a family visit once, and had felt the dust-stifled weight that comes from centuries of scholarship and ancient stone. I wasn’t certain I liked it. It felt too much as though it had come from the pages of a book. The Prince Albert campus, just over a hundred years old, still feels as if it was built by people. Most of its office blocks started life as a settler’s house, and even its grandest buildings are infused with the labor of Victorian colonials re-creating England in basic scaffolding. When I think of Oxford, I think of the still peace of the summer air; here, the air is never still, and rarely peaceful. That particular night, it was raining lightly, and the streetlights caught the drops in a mist of silver. When I got out of the car, the haze clung to my face and stung like ice.

  I think Charley had the door to the English department open before I could even knock. In the light spilling from the corridor behind him, I could see his eyes huge and appealing, his unruly mess of dark curls and baggy sweatshirt making him look smaller and younger than he was. He’s very good at that. It didn’t mean I wasn’t going to kill him this time—I was—but maybe not when he was completely beside himself with worry.

  “He got away from me,” Charley said immediately. As usual in a crisis, he was talking almost too fast to be understood. “I tried to stay with him, but I had to call you, and… and my cell phone was in my office, so I had to go there, and then once I called you I tried to find him again, and he…”

  “Hey, slow down.” My left shoe had a hole in it I hadn’t noticed until I ran through the puddles. I could feel my wet sock squelching inside it now. “Take a breath. He has to still be in the building, right? He hasn’t got a card to swipe out, and the building locks down after dark?”

  “That’s right,” Charley confirmed. He took a deep breath, obediently, and released it. It didn’t help. “Unless he breaks a window, or someone left one open—”

  “Any sign of that?”

  “No. And I’ve looked in every room. But I can’t find him.”

  “We’ll find him,” I assured him. “Don’t worry. It’s only some nasty Victorian with no eyelashes.” I’d Googled the character on the way here, which might have contributed to the wrong turn I’d taken. Apparently he was an ugly redheaded clerk who tries to ruin the lives of the main characters in David Copperfield. Also, there was a rock band named after him, which sounded cool. “Not like that time you brought Dracula out of his book, when you were eight.”

  “Vampires have weaknesses,” Charley said darkly. “Stoker wrote them in. People are far less predictable.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. “Come on. Let’s start in your office.”

  I’d never been in Charley’s office before, but it was exactly how I’d pictured it: complete chaos. Mugs littered the desk and peered out from bookshelves, books spilled from every nook and cranny, and the computer was buried beneath pages of scribbled notes. The battered armchair by the window was the only thing clear of clutter, because it was obviously where he sat in order to clutter everything else. It was a Charley-shaped hole in the mess, like an outline at a police crime scene.

  There was no sign of a wayward Dickensian villain, but I could smell the faint tang of smoke and fog that I’d learned to associate with Dickensian England, amid the more usual smells of books and stale coffee.

  “What were you doing here at four in the morning, anyway?” I asked. I was out of breath: we’d climbed the stairs to the nin
th floor so as not to alert Uriah Heep of our coming. The elevators were notorious for breaking down in this building anyway. I remembered that from my undergraduate days, although my classes had usually been at the law campus in the central city.

  I’d never been in the English department, and right now it was eerie in the dark. Reception was locked off, and the corridors were a labyrinthine world of shadows.

  “I was finishing an article,” Charley answered. “Well, I was starting it, actually. Someone wants it by next week, for an anthology. And I just—I don’t know, I’d actually proposed something about the autobiographical form in David Copperfield and Great Expectations, but I became very interested in how Uriah Heep was functioning as a scapegoat for middle-class anxieties in David Copperfield, and the means by which he’s constructed as a threat to the social order, and I was reading and thinking about him quite closely—”

  “And he sprang off the page,” I finished grimly. I’d heard it before. “You couldn’t just put him back?”

  “He was too fast. He knew what I was going to do, and he wasn’t going to let me.”

  I shook my head. “You shouldn’t be here in the middle of the night.”

  “I got caught up.” He sounded apologetic. “Anyway, it’s better to work when no one’s around, in case something like this happens.”

  “I suppose, but you know it’s more likely to happen when you’re tired. And definitely when you’re caught up.”

  “I didn’t mean it.”

  “Never mind.” I picked up a paper from the top strata covering the desk, filled with the least legible version of Charley’s handwriting. LOOK AT pg. 467, it began. Model clerk—model prisoner—Heep is his own parody—becomes what people expect him to be—commentary on 19thC hypocrisy—fear of squiggle squiggle—shape-squiggle—squiggle David’s own squiggle—like Orlick and Pip from GE—Fitzwilliam writes on this in squiggle—“You say you were thinking about him as a threat to the social order?”