* * *
Two days later I grabbed Briscoe as he was leaving class.
“Go down to the geology department,” I said. “Ask them about some sort of crystal or stone that changes color between ‘firelight and sunlight.’ One color in sunlight, different color in firelight. Only found in the Ural Mountains.”
“If so, it’ll be bloody hard to get our hands on,” Briscoe said.
“Worse, we’ll need one the size of ‘the last joint of a tall man’s thumb,’” I said. “Just find out what it is.”
* * *
“You’re not going to like this,” Briscoe said.
“I’m not liking anything about this,” I said. “I’m not liking having to depend for information on eleventh century alchemists, gnolls whose language I think I’m translating right and an undergrad para who has enough trouble with English much less any other language.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Briscoe said.
“What am I not going to like?” I asked.
“Alexandrite,” Briscoe said. “Extremely rare, color-change variant of chrysoberyl. Changes color from green in sunlight to red-purple in artificial light. Named after Tzar Alexander the Second. Only mined in a few areas, the Northern Urals, Sri Lanka, and Brazil.”
“We’ll need the Urals one to be sure,” I said, frowning. “Bit of a trick what with that being the Soviet Union. And a good, clear, pure-quality one.”
“More of a trick than you think,” Briscoe said. “The Russian deposits were the finest in the world. ‘Were’ being the important word. They were all mined out in the 1950s. ‘Of the size of a large man’s thumb’ is about ten carats. I asked Professor Shelley how much that would cost and he said, ‘Oh, about a hundred.’”
“Hundred dollars?” I asked.
“Hundred thousand,” Briscoe said. “Pounds.”
“Not my problem,” I said, grinning. “That’s on MI4.”
* * *
“You’re bloody insane,” Gordon said. “A hundred thousand pounds?” He patted his pockets for a moment. “Here, let me just pull it out of my arse, why don’t I?”
“The night creature is a piru,” I said. “Or at least a Uralic version of the piru. It’s found in Slavic folklore as well. Previously, and I’ve checked with Dr. Henderson, there was no known way to dispel or entrap one. According to the book Briscoe turned up, there is a way using a Ural alexandrite and a spell. The fact that they’re rare is unsurprising given that piru are really nasty spirits. As I said, Dr. Henderson had no answer to how to dispel or kill them. Generally you do what the gnolls are doing which is propitiate them. But if you want to dispel it, you’re going to need a big alexandrite. And it will be destroyed in the spell so you won’t even be able to sell it afterwards.”
“Bloody hell, there goes my budget,” Gordon said. “We’ve got the area blocked off for now. I’ll have to get back to you. That really is a bit of a budget item for us at the moment.”
“Feel free,” I said. “I’ve got exams coming up.”
* * *
“That do?” Gordon said, setting a large reddish-purple gem on my desk.
I’d done well on my orals. Now all I had to do was pass the written portion and turn in my thesis and I’d have my second master’s.
“Pretty,” I said. The stone was deeply colored, cut in an oval and just beautiful. “Hate to ruin it.”
I pulled out a loupe and checked to be sure. I’d followed up on pretty much everything Briscoe had brought to me and there was a way to check if it was a Russian stone.
“Bit of a budget line item,” I dropped it in a pocket.
“I had to call in a favor,” Gordon growled.
“Favor from whom, might I ask?”
“MI6,” Gordon said. “Let’s just say it didn’t come out of my budget. Or theirs. I had to get authorization but it came pretty quick. Seems this beastie has gotten out of the sewers. Two people were found dead from natural causes in the area in the last few days. Both were in the prime of their lives. And MI6 had to burn a cell. So this had better work.”
“I tried out some of the White incantations from the book,” I said. “They worked well enough. Only one way to find out. And if it doesn’t, you won’t have my ass to chew, if you know what I mean.”
“When can you get started?” Gordon said.
I had exams all week. If I missed one there went my master’s. And I really needed to bone up before each of them. Not to mention sleep.
Death is lighter than a feather. And I could sleep when I was dead.
“Tonight.”
* * *
“You don’t really need to be here,” I said.
The capture and destruction of a piru takes more than just an alexandrite. First, the piru must be attracted and fed. They liked expensive food, drink, and drugs. Yes, drugs. Tobacco will do but opium has much the same effect on them as on humans for some reason. We were banking on heroin for that. You could find it on various street corners in Manchester, and it wasn’t like we were in danger of getting arrested. On the other hand, MI4 could just get it out of an evidence locker, which they had.
We were doing the rite in an alleyway off of the Sanctuary, which I thought rather ironic in the circumstances. It was where the now three people had died of “natural causes,” one each night.
You bring them in by burning tobacco and alcohol, then set up a little tableau with the various comestibles laid out. Checking the police reports, all three of the dead had been smokers, if young enough that it shouldn’t have caused their deaths, and all three had been drinking. So they’d “called” the piru but hadn’t offered to share. Die, humans, die. Handy tip: always be unselfish if you’re being tracked by a wraith. If one shows up when you’re smoking and drinking, offer them a fag and a shot. Or else.
“Rather want to see what we’ve been chasing,” Briscoe said.
We laid out a brass tray with some shots of rum, a prime cut of lamb, and a small brazier on it. Then we lit the rum and dropped pipe tobacco on the coals in the brazier.
We were right by a storm drain and it took about fifteen minutes for the piru to appear, following the scent of burning alcohol and tobacco. It was just a darker shadow amongst the shadows, a tenebrous fog rising from the storm grating.
The piru floated closer. It was difficult to see in the moonlit darkness even with the help of the streetlights. It moved from shadow to shadow. We’d placed the tray in shadow, knowing it would avoid any sort of light. It was generally bipedal; I’m fairly sure it wasn’t anything derived from human, though. You get a certain feeling around human ghosts and this was definitively unearthly.
The wraith floated to the tray and into the smoke from the tobacco and the burning essence of the rum. It was clear it was feeding in some way. Maybe it just liked the aroma. But it also made contact with the lamb. I’d gotten a tissue sample and I intended to check the differences between the original and the sacrificed. It was pretty sure that the people who had “died of natural causes” had died of some sort of loss of something. Phosphate, calcium, something. It would be easier to find between the two versions of lamb.
Since we were properly propitiating it, we weren’t in any danger at this point so I took notes as carefully as I could. I knew there was no way to photograph it but I wish I could have.
The rum had burned out so Briscoe lit another shot. Give the guy credit, para or not he wasn’t fazed by an other-wordly spirit being.
Once the piru was feasting I opened up the nickel bag of heroin and dropped that on the brazier.
The result wasn’t immediate. The thing wasn’t moving real fast as it was but it slowly…slowed until it was simply hanging there in the smoke from the fire like a black sheet on a clothesline.
I got out my cheatsheet and the irreplaceable gem. I laid the gem on the tray, in contact with some of its tendrils of shadow, and began to read.
The toughest part of the whole thing had been finding the proper pronunciation for s
ome of the Uralic and Germanic in the incantation. Dean Carruthers had put me in contact with a traditional Uralic speaker and that had helped. Some of the words were close enough to tribal Tibetan I had to wonder if there was a racial connection.
I began the incantation, calling upon the owl spirit and the moon spirit and the spirit of the gem to bind and entrap this creature of darkness. Three repetitions and I could see it starting to sink into the stone. It also was starting to move so I gestured at the second heroin packet and Briscoe tossed it in. Good little wizard’s apprentice.
It took nine repetitions of the incantation but finally the piru sank into the stone completely.
I picked the stone up with a pair of tongs and winced.
“Let’s hope this works,” I said and dropped it into the brazier.
Nothing happened at first but then a sound started to emit from the stone. It was so high-pitched at first it wasn’t even audible but dogs started barking in all the flats nearby. Then it was in the audible range, for me at least, and I started to get the whole banshee cry thing. Horrible sound, eerie and painful to the ears despite being surprisingly quiet. A bit like what a hamster would sound like if it was being slowing burned to death. At least a bizarre space hamster.
Finally, with one last tortured wail, the priceless gem shattered amongst the charcoal bricks and it was done.
“Did we get it?” Briscoe asked.
“Only way to know is if nobody dies tonight,” I said. “Let’s pack up. We’ve both got exams in the morning.”
* * *
Nobody died that night nor in the subsequent weeks. A guy died of a heart attack three weeks afterwards in the area but he was a risk case, so all good.
The lamb samples were subsequently bent, folded and mutilated by MI4’s labs. There was a significant difference in the levels of isoleucine, an amino acid, between the two samples. Notably less in the one that the piru had touched. So apparently, besides liking to get high, pirus steal isoleucine. The pathologist who gave the report started to explain about isoleucine and I asked him not to. I’ve got enough stuff stuffed in my head. I’ll leave that to the medical professionals. Bottom line, not enough will kill you.
I later went back and translated the book of incantations and traps for various Slavic and Siberian entities as well as adding quite a few others from Europe and Eurasia. The three-book set: Identification of, Protections Against, and Traps for Supernatural Entities of the Slavic, Siberian, Balkans and Eurasian Spirit Tribes by Dr. Oliver Chadwick Gardenier, PhD (CrLing), is available from Oxford University Press. If you have the clearance. There’s a complete copy in the MHI library as well.
Now to explain why I added all that to my memoirs besides as a commercial plug:
My teacher hat is on at this point, so bear with me with the pro-tip. One reason for this long explanation of tracking down one minor entity is this is stuff you’re going to have to learn at some point. You can’t always depend on someone else to do your research for you. I don’t mean you have to learn Proto-Uralic. But you do need to learn the Dewey Decimal System.
It’s also about teaching. I could have taken the time to go look all this stuff up myself. But part of why Briscoe was at Oxford was to learn how to do the research. So I delegated. And that, too, is part of your job once you get past “me dumb grunt.” He learned how to find some very obscure stuff in the sometimes baroque library system. For that matter, he found the tome that had exactly the right information. I might not have. Why? I knew where to look, he didn’t. Sometimes sending out the person who doesn’t know the “right” answer is the right answer. Sometimes it’s not. But until that day, we didn’t have an answer to piru. We found it because Briscoe went and looked in what was basically the wrong place.
Most of this particular memoir, for one reason or another, has been about the background of hunting. Everyone likes the big fight scenes. But hunting is about more. Learn the more.
For God’s sake, at least learn Latin and crack a book once in a while. Don’t just expect me or Milo or Ray or whoever is the equivalent in your day and age to do all the work.
CHAPTER 17
In summer, Oxford doesn’t shut down completely but it does shut down mostly. The lawsuit was still wending its way through court and I was still persona non grata in US hunting. So I took a few trips to work toward my doctorate. There was no new information about the potential mava paṇauvaā beneath New Orleans. I’d done all the research I could at Oxford. It was time to sally forth.
I started in the US, specifically in the Everglades. There was a known group of swamp-apes in the Everglades and nobody knew how to communicate with them. Time to change that.
As I drove through the endless mass of sawgrass on an airboat, I noted that I really should have done this in winter. Summer in England is a charm. Summer in South Florida was killing me. I was back in the heat and hating every moment of it.
My guide was an old Seminole who spoke barely passable English. I’d book-studied Seminole in preparation and he spent most of the ride yelling corrections to my accent. Finally we reached the cluster of hammocks where the swamp-apes were reported to have been sighted. He dropped me off, fast, and took off. He clearly thought I was an idiot for going anywhere near them.
Florida swamp-apes are not pacific herbalists like the sasquatch. They were omnivorous and were known to have attacked, and rumored to have eaten, humans. But I wasn’t worried about being eaten by swamp-apes. They were going to have to fight the mosquitoes.
I found a clearing to set up camp, sprayed on some more OFF!, laid out the tasty viands I’d brought to propitiate the hostile cryptids, sprayed on some more OFF!, inflated the boat I was going to use to get from one hummock to the other, sprayed on some more OFF!, drank some water, cursed the heat, sprayed on some more OFF! and finally just got in my tent, despite it being—if anything—hotter inside, and sprayed insect killer all over to kill the mosquitoes that followed me in.
Then shot a spider so big I swear to God it should have been PUFF-applicable. Christ, I hate the tropics and subtropics. Those idiots who think exploring jungles are fun are fucking nuts.
I had a mantra, though, to keep up my spirits. Doctorate. Doctorate. Doctorate. Doctorate.
The fuckers attacked in the middle of the night.
* * *
The first inkling I had was when my tent collapsed. Then the hooting started and I was punched through the tent material so hard I was sure I was fighting trolls.
“Guh! Guh!” I yelled, hoping that some Sasquatch remained in their language. Other than that I just balled up and took it. “Guh! Guh! Oomph! Oomph!” (Friend, friend, good good.) Then I tried some Louisiana Swamp-Ape since they were closer. “Yut! Yut!”
Whatever was pounding me stopped attacking.
“Yooo?” it said in a querying tone.
“Yooo?” I said back. “Oomph?”
There was a rustle and they were gone.
It took a few weeks for me to finally make real contact. Weeks of moving from hummock to hummock, swatting insects, avoiding alligators and rattlesnakes and giant spiders. In a couple of cases, actually PUFF-applicable giant spiders.
They were smaller tribes, I’m pretty sure fairly inbred, smaller in stature, meaner and much devolved from the noble sasquatch. The language was much devolved as well. Forget phonemes, there were barely two hundred words in the language and sixteen related to mosquitoes. For one thing, they were a primary food source as well as a scourge. The swamp-apes picked them off of each other and ate them as they were foraging.
And aggressive? Jesus. They make chimpanzees look tame. I figured out the beta posture pretty quick and spent most of my time learning their language at arm’s length. Territorial as hell. The family groups even got into it frequently and viciously. Fortunately, they weren’t quite as strong as chimps and I eventually got a reputation as someone who could hit back. Hard. Not quite the way you’re supposed to do crypto-anthropology, but after watching one family g
roup rip an alligator to pieces for lunch, I wasn’t taking any chances.
I spent most of June among those fucking monsters and it was the worst June of my life. I can understand them being off the PUFF table but it’s a near run thing. Doesn’t really matter. Between inbreeding and habitat loss, they’re pretty much going to be extinct in short order. I’m not going to sweat it.
I flew back to England, wrote up my notes and then headed to Canada.
* * *
Why Canada? There were, and are, Laurentian yeti. Shorter, darker and squatter than sasquatch, they are frequently mistaken for brown bears. They’re also more aggressive, similar to swamp-apes. But at this point I had pretty good contact techniques and was able to make contact more smoothly than in Florida.
The bugs were nearly as bad as Florida’s but at least it was cooler. In fact, one night it snowed. Blessed relief.
The language was even more removed from Sasquatch than Swamp-Ape, yet richer. Many more nouns, some fairly complex verbs, several adjectives that were more related to Inuit, with whom they must have made contact in the past. They even had cursing which neither other group had developed. Three of their curses, though, had an etymology that escaped me until I was on my way out and the Quebecois guide dropped a heavy pack on his foot. Ah. Etymology accepted.
June in Florida. July in the Laurentians (better than Florida). Now it was off to Nepal where I hoped to make contact with true yeti.
* * *
I didn’t climb Everest, but I went there to see where Sir Edmund Hillary and Shaman Tenzing Norgay defeated the Goarahli Snow Demon. Why did they climb Everest? “Because it was there.” The snow demon, that is. It had been using Everest as a safe redoubt only going lower to steal children to eat.
I did make contact with the yeti. They were even more shy than the sasquatch but I had Hillary’s book to fall back on and I was really just verifying the data. Most of it held out. I think either Nepalese yeti were less developed than Tibetan or he’d exaggerated a bit. They weren’t nearly as insightful as he’d described. I’d put them as less developed than Laurentian. But most of his information held true and at least the dictionary was more or less on.
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