Dreadful Company

by Vivian Shaw

  She was using exactly the tone one might employ to coax a kitten out from hiding. This did not seem to mollify Ruthven in the slightest. “Greta,” he said, “what the hell is going on? If you’re going to wake me up at half past two with bloodcurdling shrieks when I’m already worried about you, at least have the decency to explain yourself. I gather that you are not in fact being murdered, but what are you doing?”

  “Shh,” Greta said again, reaching out a cautious hand under the bed. “Come here, sweetheart, it’s okay, I promise…”

  A dim humped shape moved tentatively toward her, and something soft and hairy touched her fingertips, sniffing. She held perfectly still for it, and a few moments later the hard curve of a skull came under her palm, nudging to be stroked. “There,” she said gently, “that’s right, come on out,” and sat back on her heels.

  What emerged from under the bed was not completely unlike a smallish dog. It was covered in long, soft, silky hair in a fetching shade of auburn, had four legs and no tail, and while it did have a head, it seemed to be rather lacking in the face department. There was just lots and lots of hair.

  “Oh, good grief,” said Ruthven, and dropped into a chair. The hairy thing startled, and Greta had to talk softly to it again for a few more moments before it climbed into her lap and settled down to be stroked.

  It had been a long time since she’d seen a tricherpeton, commonly if unimaginatively known as hairmonsters. There was a very specific and small community within the supernatural and super-adjacent world that bred them, like pedigreed dogs, in lots of different varieties, although you could summon them individually via magic if you didn’t have the patience or wherewithal to set up a breeding program. This one wouldn’t have won any show awards for conformation or breed-specific traits; in fact, it looked like a complete mongrel – but the quality of the hair under Greta’s hands was impressive nonetheless.

  (There were sphynx varieties, but they were somewhat mercifully rare: a hairless faceless creature with nothing but a mouth was difficult to look at, even though their temperament was among the sweetest of the tricherpeton breeds.)

  Once she was pretty sure the one in her lap wasn’t likely to scuttle back under the bed in terror, she transferred some of her attention to Ruthven. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t intend to wake you like that, but it took me by surprise: someone rang me by mistake and the monster happened to be in the way when I reached for my bag, poor little thing.”

  “I don’t suppose there are any other creatures hiding in here? Have you checked the wardrobe for bogeymen, by chance?”

  “I have not. I don’t think there’s anything else here, but it’s weird, Ruthven. First the wellmonster this morning and now this. Do I have – I don’t know, monster-attracting pheromones all of a sudden?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. You haven’t changed your perfume lately?”

  She gave him a look, and sighed. “I really am sorry. Go back to bed, all right? I’ve got this.”

  “Yes,” he said, “you have, and I will in a minute, but perhaps I will raid the minibar first. For nerve-settling purposes.”

  The monster in Greta’s lap gave a very doggy contented sigh, and a small pink tongue appeared amid the hair to lap at her fingers. Ruthven stared, running his hands through his own hair, then had to laugh at the absurdity of the entire situation – and came to kneel down beside her for a closer look. “I don’t know what you’re going to do with it, I’m sure,” he said, reaching out a finger to stroke the silky hair. “You can’t possibly adopt stray French monsters; wherever would you put it?”

  “I have no idea,” she said. “It doesn’t appear to be in bad shape; honestly, I think someone’s been taking at least basic care of it – no mats or snarls, it’s a decent weight for its size, completely tame. It’s not a thoroughbred, though, which means either it’s an adopted stray or it’s been summoned, which is a little odd. God knows why anyone would bother doing that kind of magic, but whatever – I suppose Parisian monster fanciers have to get their jollies somehow. I think it’s come to visit, not to stow away in my suitcase.”

  “If this keeps up, you are going to be the most absurd Disney princess of all time,” Ruthven told her. “Instead of happy little bluebirds perching on your finger to sing duets, you will be hung about with monsters like a tree with monkeys, and it will thoroughly complicate your personal life. You can’t talk to them or anything, can you?”

  Greta laughed. “No. You know perfectly well I have no special abilities whatsoever, I’m not even slightly clairvoyant, and a good twenty percent of the population has at least some degree of that, whether they realize it or not. I don’t know why I seem to have acquired monsters all of a sudden, but poor old Richard is going to be terribly chagrined to have missed this experience.”

  “I expect so,” Ruthven said. “It’s objectively less unpleasant than having his appendix out, although I could do without the middle of the night part. Do you suppose it’s worth trying to go back to sleep?”

  “I’d better make the effort if I’m going to be sparkling and vivacious in the morning. Why is it always sparkling and vivacious? Can’t one simply glitter?”

  Ruthven quirked an eyebrow at her. “That’s a loaded question to ask a vampire. I’m going to make us a drink, and then I’ll attempt sleep – is that thing going to let you get back into bed?”

  “I expect so,” Greta said, looking down at her lapful. The hair really was beautiful; in sunlight it would be full of golden glints and deep red shadows, and she knew that underneath it, the tricherpeton’s skin would be scattered with little coppery freckles. “I certainly intend to find out.”

  The green awnings of Paris’s famous Les Deux Magots café glowed the expensive green of a banker’s lampshade, in the clear light of midmorning. Across the way, the ancient church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés caught the light and held it, mellow stone pale and pleasing; it had stood exactly as it was for ten centuries, while the city around it ebbed and flowed and reinvented itself.

  Gervase Brightside, remedial psychopomp, swirled his pastis and held it up to the light: louched pearl-yellow, the liquid was entirely opaque, but nonetheless he could see the church tower through it as clear as glass if he so chose. He could personally remember when the tower had been new; it, unlike several other items of his acquaintance, had aged gracefully.

  “I can’t believe you’re swilling strong drink before ten a.m.,” said his companion. Brightside took a sip and put the glass down, fixing him with a reptilian look.

  “And I can’t believe you’re playing morality police,” he said. “Doesn’t suit you. Anyway, by our standards it is both all times and no times at once, so the sun is over the yardarm somewhere in eternity, hmm?”

  “I hate it when you get philosophical,” said Crepusculus Dammerung, grinning at him. “I think it means you’re bilious. Pass me the paper?”

  Brightside handed it over. Dammerung, like Brightside himself, was ageless – but appeared to be perhaps twenty-five, short and energetic, dark brown hair tumbling in untidy curls to his shoulders; he was wearing a T-shirt advertising Led Zeppelin and a leather jacket that seemed to have seen hard wear, and had a cigarette parked behind one ear. The overall impression was one of boundless, unsquashable cheer.

  “Ta,” said Crepusculus, refolding the copy of Le Monde and settling down to read about whatever atrocities the Americans had been up to recently. Brightside sipped his drink and watched the people come and go, and tried to ignore a faint, yet growing, unsettled feeling.

  Crepusculus and Brightside – they did in fact have official business cards – were in the business of remedial psychopompery: in layman’s terms, they helped the unquiet dead off to a peaceful afterlife. They’d been in that particular business approximately as long as humans had been around, and were in fact as old as creation itself, although Brightside appeared to be stuck in the mid-1970s and his partner would have fit right in at a Pearl Jam concert circa 1998. Nor were the
y directly affiliated with either Heaven or Hell; operating as independents, like the handful of others who performed this particular service, they went wherever they were needed. It had always been common enough for spirits of the departed to get hung up somewhere, caught between worlds, and Brightside and his partner simply came along and gave them a metaphorical tow.

  The pair of them had been in Paris for a week now. The city’s unofficial guardian, a large and amiable werewolf, had called them in to sort out an unexpected haunting some days back – and after dealing with the business at hand, they had decided what the hell, they could take a holiday. Paris was at its most beautiful in springtime, and it wasn’t as if people were clamoring for their services anyway; the call had been their first job in weeks. They had settled into a routine: leisurely breakfast, largely in liquid form, at the café; people-watching; strolling around various points of interest.

  The case that had brought them here had been a little odd, however. A whole host of ghosts – or parts of ghosts – had suddenly appeared in a group, in the square that had replaced the long-gone Cimetière des Innocents, confused and distressed: missing arms, legs, heads, milling about in a translucent crowd and demanding to be told where their vanished parts had gone. It hadn’t been difficult to move them on, even though there were nearly thirty individuals, and Brightside thought he knew why they’d shown up in the first place: the desperately overcrowded cemetery’s occupants had been transported piecemeal in the eighteenth century to what would become the Paris catacombs, and undoubtedly bits must have been left behind, causing their owners consternation and distress.

  Why they’d suddenly shown up now, though. That was bothering him. Why now, after hundreds of years had passed since the removal?

  There seemed to be an awful lot of coincidence going on; yesterday morning they’d been sitting here over coffee and pastries and watching people come and go, and whom should they spy strolling down the boulevard but Edmund Ruthven, accompanied by a blonde human woman. They knew the vampire socially – he’d never had recourse to their services, but they’d met several times over the past century or so, and it was a bit surprising to come across him in Paris: he didn’t travel much outside Britain.

  Brightside had considered calling out, or waving to him, but Ruthven and his companion had seemed to be talking fairly intently, and he had decided to let them enjoy the city on their own.

  He drained the glass and waved over a waiter to order another. It was, in fact, half past nine in the morning, but Brightside was on holiday, damn it, and he was allowed the occasional flirt with sybaritism. In another couple of days they’d be back in London, their current base of operations, and it would be grey and rainy and ordinary, and the clear light on the church tower was too pleasant to ignore in favor of vague forebodings and disquiet.

  “You think it’s a timeslip?” said Crepusculus, out of nowhere. Brightside blinked at him. His partner was irritatingly good at reading Brightside’s thoughts, even when he wasn’t trying to. “Those ghosts suddenly showing up now, I mean. Could be one of those wrinkle-in-time things like we saw in Lyme Regis last year. Seems like there’s been more and more of those lately.”

  “I don’t know,” said Brightside. “The thing in Lyme was – I’m pretty sure that was just the standard local wannabe necromancer meddling with things he oughtn’t. Ghost smugglers landing a ghost cargo? That’s classic self-contained disturbance-of-the-dead stuff; there wasn’t any kind of ripple effect, no other weird temporal things going on. We would have noticed.”

  “Right, and nobody’s disturbed these dead since seventeen-eighty-whatever,” said Crepusculus, finishing his café au lait. “So why are they showing up complaining about it now? I mean, sure, the laid-back French approach is a thing, but that’s several hundred years of lag time. It’s weird, is what I’m saying.”

  “Why indeed? Perhaps some idiot urban explorer knocked over a bunch of bones somewhere in the catacombs and woke them up. It’s over, Dammerung. We sorted it.”

  “So why are you still on edge?”

  “I’m —” he began, and sighed, and was grateful for the waiter’s return with a tray. “I’m not,” he said once the drink had been set before him and the man had retreated once more. “I’m not on edge. I just would like to know what that was.” He wasn’t used to being less than certain.

  “Maybe we’ll find out,” said Crepusculus. “I want one of those, come to think of it. Call him back over?”

  Brightside sighed again and pushed the glass across the table toward him, trying to dismiss the lingering unease. “Be my guest. And then we should work out what we want to do today, other than wandering around feeding Gallic pigeons.”

  “Yeah,” said Crepusculus, “the Gallic pigeons can take care of themselves; and I want to go look at Versailles while we’re here.”

  “Versailles we can do,” he said. “At least everyone there who’s dead has the decency to stay dead.”

  “At least as far as we know.”

  Brightside found himself – unwillingly – returning his partner’s grin.

  Above the vast and colorful interior dome of the Opera, above the brass-and-crystal edifice of the chandelier, in a forgotten and dust-filled corner of the rehearsal room that occupied the next floor up, something peculiar was going on.

  This was a part of the superstructure that had been modeled and remodeled multiple times over the years, and was now used by the corps de ballet: it had the vacant, somehow desolate air of all dance practice rooms when not in use, the long mirrored walls reflecting themselves into infinity. There was natural light from several of the circular windows in the curving wall; the room was approximately semicircular, taking up about half the interior space of this floor. To one side a locked cabinet stood tucked into a niche between support pillars, and beyond this cabinet, in the very far corner, unbeknownst to the people who used this space, was a strange dust-covered object.

  It looked a little like a seismometer: a drum with a pen resting on it, tracing a faintly wavy line. The drum turned almost imperceptibly slowly – it would take a full week to complete one revolution – and the line was very nearly straight, although it was being drawn over several previous very similar lines. Whatever it was meant to measure seemed not to have been particularly active.

  Now, however, a bluish glow, faint but present, surrounded the machine, and the pen trembled as if in the grip of two opposing and nearly equal forces; trembled, and then shot violently to one side and back again, drawing a wide jagged line. The whole machine shook. A smell like burned tin drifted from it, and a blue spark jumped to ground – and then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the transient came to an end. The pen returned to its neutral position. The blue glow vanished as if it had never been there at all. The machine was silent, still. The smell lingered for a few minutes before dissipating into the air completely.

  The layer of dust on the machine would seem to suggest that whoever was meant to come and look at its tracings every now and then had not been doing so – which was a pity, because had they bothered to look, they would have seen that nineteen hours ago an identical transient had occurred: a sudden, powerful spike in the reading that lasted only a second before returning to baseline. Unrolling the paper from the drum to examine the recent readings would have shown two things: one, the machine had been drawing over its previous lines with each revolution because nobody had bothered to take away the completed week’s recording, and two, these brief but violent anomalies had been occurring not just over the past week but over the past month, with increasing frequency.

  When, in fact, the individual who ought to have been monitoring its readings finally came to look at it, he would be extremely alarmed at what he saw. Alarmed, and fascinated, and profoundly inclined to kick himself for thirty kinds of a lazy idiot.

  The catacombs of Paris were a well-known tourist attraction: a curated series of passageways neatly lined with row upon row of skulls interspersed with femurs, the stacked V
-shapes of their medial condyles forming a pattern reminiscent of rough knitting. There were some very big names down there – Danton, Robespierre, Camille and Lucile Desmoulins, among others – although it was now impossible to know which cranium was whose; liberté, égalité, et fraternité demonstrated in death if not in life.

  Only a section of the catacombs was open to the public – which represented a very small fraction of the Parisian undercity. The tunnels themselves, chambers and passageways cut into the cream-pale rock, were the remains of subterranean quarries that once produced limestone and gypsum in vast quantities: the source of the phrase plaster of Paris. It was not until the late eighteenth century that they had been pressed into use as a place to store the city’s dead, in response to overflowing cemeteries. Beyond the sections of the tunnel network serving as an ossuary, miles of passageways stretched into the darkness beneath Paris – forbidden territory, in which it was quite possible to lose oneself and be unable to find the way back out again. This was the realm of the cataphiles, a secretive strain of urban explorers who regularly went down into the dark for the thrill of it – who held parties underground, even at one point setting up a fully functional cinema – despite the dangers.