by Vivian Shaw
Irazek took it with slightly floury fingers, and then looked back at the pair of them, and swallowed hard. “Would – either of you like a croissant?” he asked. “There’s coffee.”
“I’d love one,” said Crepusculus with a broad grin.
It turned out that demons could, in fact, bake remarkably decent pastries, and once they were settled around Irazek’s kitchen table with coffee and croissants and homemade strawberry jam, the tension in the atmosphere had defused a lot. Brightside let Crepusculus do the talking to begin with: how they’d been called in to see to an unexpected sudden attack of ghosts, how they’d dealt with it quite easily, and decided to stick around and enjoy Paris for a few days, and how despite the uneventful resolution of the haunting, it hadn’t quite felt right – why now, and not before – and then their adventure last night in the Place Joachim-du-Bellay.
“So what we want to know,” Brightside put in, “is what the essograph traces look like for the past week and a half – if there’s been any unexpected planar incursions other than the one we were called in to handle. Could you pull those for us, by any chance?”
Essographs – literally, thing-writers, named after the esson, the reality particle – measured fluctuations in the standing magical, or mirabilic, field. Any travel between planes of existence would cause a disturbance in the field, and the magnitude of that disturbance corresponded to the size or power of whatever had come through. Hauntings were generally a very mild blip on the essograph trace, unless there was some serious psychic trauma involved. Every major city and location of mirabilic significance had several essograph placements, installed by a division of Hell’s bureaucracy charged with keeping an eye on interplanar travel, and monitored by a surface operative – in this case, Irazek. Heaven was generally assumed to be running a similar operation, although they were extremely cagey about it. The point was to keep an eye on things going and coming between the planes in order to maintain a balance between Heaven and Hell.
Brightside watched Irazek, who had gone first pink and then white and then pink again and dropped his gaze to the tabletop: something was wrong. He should have been able to produce the weekly records with no hesitation at all.
“Um,” said Crepusculus. “Irazek? Is there a problem with the traces?”
“Ye-ess,” Irazek said, still looking firmly down at his plate. “I mean. No. They should be just fine. I just – didn’t get around to collecting this week’s yet, that’s all.”
Crepusculus and Brightside shared a look. “Didn’t get around to it?” Brightside repeated.
“I know, it’s dreadfully irresponsible,” said Irazek wretchedly. “I’ve just – I got caught up in other things and I simply forgot to go out yesterday and change the tapes.”
“Can you take us to go and look at them now?” said Brightside.
“Better late than never,” Crepusculus added, not unkindly, and the demon looked up at them both. Some of the stricken look faded from his face.
“Of course,” he said. “Yes, of course I can take you to see them – that’s no trouble at all – let me just tidy up and I’ll get my coat.”
Brightside glanced at Crepusculus again while Irazek cleared the table, and neither of them had to say anything out loud: it was rather painfully evident that Paris’s surface monitoring protocol was substandard at best, and who knew what important events might already have been missed?
What else might have come through, and why? Brightside thought. The sense of unease he’d felt the night before was back, stronger than ever.
“Right,” said Irazek, returning to them with a determinedly cheerful expression. “Let’s go and check out some essographs, shall we?”
“Lead on,” Brightside said, thinking privately that whoever was responsible for matching assignments to operatives – or selecting candidates for surface-op duty – might need to pay a little more attention to their job.
In a city the size of Paris, multiple essograph installations were required to cover the various loci of particular interest to M&E. And at least one of them was broken.
Brightside watched Irazek peering disconsolately into the innards of what was obviously an ex-machine – its magically concealed location on top of the Arc de Triomphe had perhaps not been the safest of all possible installation spots, as it appeared to have been recently struck by lightning. The roll of paper on which the mirabilic field fluctuations would have been recorded was so much charred ash.
He remembered a storm a couple of nights earlier, a brief but violent affair that had walked and talked and flared the sky blank white-violet with sheets of lightning for about ten minutes before passing off; and he tried not to think, If Irazek had done his bloody job right and changed out the machine’s roll when he was supposed to, we’d still have whatever this thing’s been recording.
He and Crepusculus were making themselves unnoticeable, and so was Irazek, using a variant on the mirabilic influence laid on the essograph itself; nobody was paying any attention to the three of them. There were a couple of tourists at the other end of the huge platform that was the top of the arch, exclaiming and taking photographs, but Irazek, Crepusculus, and Brightside were effectively invisible, casting no shadows at all.
They had already visited two of the other installations, and successfully retrieved the paper rolls with the red-ink trace of the recordings on them – and what they had shown had made Irazek go white all over again, the spray of freckles across the bridge of his nose standing out stark as sepia ink drops. Both the Bastille and the Sorbonne essographs demonstrated a repeated pattern of brief disturbances interspersed with unremarkable background readings; to Brightside, it looked not unlike a heartbeat on an EKG trace. Certainly it didn’t show any major incursions of the sort that’d really worry anyone, but Irazek looked pretty damned worried all the same – and that was enough to send a cold finger of unease down Brightside’s back. Demons – even fairly ineffective demons – weren’t supposed to look at esso traces like that.
Or to put it another way, esso traces weren’t supposed to make demons look at them with that sort of expression.
All at once, the sensation he’d felt last night at Les Innocents was back: a feeling of something going very badly wrong, just out of sight, too distant to be easily recognized.
“What does that pattern mean?” Crepusculus asked a moment or two later, when it was obvious Irazek wasn’t going to explain on his own.
“It means I still need a third reading,” Irazek told them unhelpfully, standing up. “There’s – oh, no, there is another one, I just – haven’t looked at it in ages – hopefully it still works…”
Brightside couldn’t prevent himself from glancing at Crepusculus, and had seen the same thought on his partner’s face: How did M&E’s Department of Operative Training and Placement ever decide to pick this particular demon to do this job?
It wasn’t like Hell to be inefficient. And now Irazek looked so miserable, staring at the wreck of his lightning-struck essograph, that Brightside had to sigh and pat him on the shoulder, despite his gathering sense of unease. “Where is it? The last installation?”
“In the Opera,” said Irazek. “In the Palais Garnier, all the way up inside the dome. I’ll have to flip us; it’d take too long to walk. Hang on to me.”
He and Crepusculus were both perfectly capable of translocation themselves, but they didn’t have Irazek’s clear mental image of the destination; it was easier to take hold of him and hang on through the disorienting wrench as Irazek flipped all three of them. When Brightside’s vision cleared from the brief white blankness, he saw that they were in an oddly shaped room, almost semicircular, with ornate round windows set into the curving wall – and jumped a little to realize that there were in fact huge mirrors all along the straight wall, reflecting the three of them without doing anybody any favors.
Brightside had never liked mirrors. He looked away, and watched as Irazek reached into a dusty corner and pulled out another of the seismo
graph-looking things. This one at least didn’t appear to have undergone structural damage, but Irazek blew enough dust off it to make them all cough.
Underneath the dust, the red-ink trace showed the same pattern: flatline and spike, flatline and spike. This one had the spikes quite a lot closer together than the others Brightside had seen.
“Could you please explain what it is we’re looking at?” Brightside said with slightly forced patience. “I don’t think I quite understand.”
“Interference,” said Irazek. “Interference patterns. These are peaks. Nodes. I need to get back and do some calculations, I’m afraid. I can’t tell you more than that until I’ve worked out the numbers for each of these locations.”
Brightside looked at Crepusculus, mouth drawn into a thin line. “I see,” he said. “Is there anything we can do to help?”
“Yes,” said the demon, sounding a little surprised. “Yes, actually there is. I – you can talk to ghosts, right?”
“One way of describing it,” said Crepusculus. “Why?”
“Could you go to one of the cemeteries – Père Lachaise is probably the best bet – and ask the ghosts there if they’ve noticed anything out of the ordinary in the past couple of months?”
He sounded sharper, more businesslike, than they’d yet heard him; it was evident that, having failed so far to do his job properly, he meant to make up for lost time.
“There are ghosts haunting the cemeteries?” said Crepusculus. “Just hanging out? They aren’t causing any trouble?”
“Several of them. They seem to be quite happy staying there, rather than venturing out into the city. I need to know if they’ve seen or heard of anything like – oh, necromancers, people grubbing around for graveyard dirt or doing any sort of ceremony that might possibly have an actual result. There’s been magic done, but I don’t quite know what kind yet, and it matters.”
“These spike readings,” said Crepusculus. “Are they ripples, from something coming through?”
“I think so. Nothing really huge or powerful, just multiple minor incursions, but the effect on reality is cumulative – it could have set up a standing wave, that’ll shake things to pieces – no, I’m catastrophizing.” He pushed his hands through his carroty-orange hair, leaving a smudge of dust on his forehead. Brightside felt slightly sick; catastrophizing wasn’t the kind of word one wanted to associate with demons. Whatever was wrong was more wrong than he knew what to do with, and it was clear that the authorities who ought to have been keeping an eye on the situation had not been – and he wondered again what else might have been missed.
Irazek straightened up. “I have to get back and start on these calculations, I’m terribly sorry – but if you could go and talk to the ghosts, I’d be much obliged to you both.”
“We can do that,” said Crepusculus, glancing at Brightside, and a moment later they both winced at the tiny thunderclap as the air collapsed in on the space where Irazek had been standing. The faint electric smell of mirabilic discharge dissipated after a few seconds, but Brightside’s profound sense of unease remained.
“I don’t suppose this will all turn out to be a hilarious misunderstanding,” said Crepusculus. “Ha ha, incompetent demon is incompetent, news at eleven?”
“No,” said Brightside.
“No. Well. Let’s go, shall we? This place gives me the creeps. And that’s a professional opinion —”
Abruptly, without any warning, the room around them flared brilliant white, shutterflash brightness, the violet-white of lightning strikes, of arc flash, of released energy jumping to ground: a stutter of actinic light like a projector running empty with the douser open. Brightside was aware of an awful sliding sensation as his solid presence in a steady timestream suddenly lost stability – for creatures like him, temporal dislocation produced intense vertigo – and had just about enough time to reach for Crepusculus’s hand, but not to find it, before everything around him changed —
— all around them the walls of the poky little dance studio first flickered and then faded away, drawing down from the ceiling like a film played backward, an outgoing tide —
— a sudden clamor of noises, shouting of men at work, the thud and chug of steam machinery, clang of iron on iron, a man’s voice in French: It’s no use, the water’s back again – tell them to turn the pumps back on and pull everyone out, we can’t lay a foundation in a goddamn lake —
— falling, Brightside was falling, through a space that changed around him even as he fell: open air with pitiless white winter skies above, black half-constructed iron girderwork below, the city all around him – and then he was enclosed once more, a mad spider’s web of ropes all around him like the rigging of a ship, vast winches like horizontal capstans arrayed in long rows, the musty closeness of a space shut up when not in use – glimmers of gaslight, butterfly-flames in dim glass prisons —
— and now he was falling farther and farther down, into cellar after cellar, passing through stone and dark air with equal helplessness – and into icy water, shocking and painful, closing over his head —
— through the shock, all around him, there was a sound like faint sweet singing, poison-sweet, seductive, and a bell ringing, and a man’s voice: You’ve been here for twenty-four hours. You’re bothering me, and I warn you this is going to end badly – if Erik’s secrets do not remain Erik’s secrets, it will be too bad for many members of the human race —
— a beautiful voice, which did not at all match the words it spoke: Remember that grasshoppers jump, and they jump very high —
— and now suddenly Brightside was rising up again, rising as if drawn by those endless forests of rope up through the layers of dark and busy cellars, into sudden brilliant light and open air – the heat of burning gas jets lifting his hair, bank after bank of them focusing on Brightside as he stood on a raked stage – beyond the lights the huge waiting hollow silence of a darkened space – and farther down the rake, with others nearby but clearly cast into the background: a woman in white raising her arms, glorious golden hair tumbling over her shoulders, caught frozen for a moment before the image began to move again and sound came back, shocking him into stillness with the force and sweetness and pure, golden, crystal clarity of her voice —
Anges purs, anges radieux, she sang, portez mon âme au sein des cieux – and beyond her there was a dead hush and then a gathering murmur that exploded into a roar, voices and applause raised together – Brightside knew this opera, this was Gounod’s Faust, she had just sung the final trio in Faust, and now in an instant, the woman was gone, vanished from the wide-open space of the stage upon which she had just triumphed —
— and just as suddenly he was not on the stage at all but in a box, one of the expensive ones near the stage, looking down at a different woman, horrorstruck in the middle of a line at the terrible sound that had just come out of her mouth – there was a voice in Brightside’s ear, laughing a poisoned laugh, the way she’s singing tonight she’ll bring down the chandelier – knowing before he even looked up at the huge brilliant brass-and-crystal confection that it was beginning to fall – five hundred thousand kilos on a concierge’s head, in the papers the next day – God, he knew this, he’d seen some of it before —
— and the vivid images dwindled away as suddenly as they had begun, drawing away from Brightside like the picture in an old television, shrinking to a point of light and then gone entirely.
He blinked hard to clear his vision, finding himself on his hands and knees on the polished wood floor of the dancers’ practice room, dizzy and sick. Nearby Crepusculus lay curled on his side, clutching at his head, and a stab of worry registered even through Brightside’s own distress.
The quality of the light had changed appreciably, the angles of shadows on the floor visibly different. How long had they spent caught in – whatever the hell that had been?
“Dammerung,” he said, not liking the shaky sound of his own voice, and was extremely glad when Crepusculus uncurl
ed and sat up, rubbing at his face with both hands. “Dammerung, are you all right?”
“No,” said Crepusculus hoarsely. “You?”
“Not really. Did you – did you see all that, the building being built and the lake underneath it – all those cellars —”
“And the girl disappearing from the stage,” Crepusculus finished. “And the lights. I think that happened, Brightside. I think we saw it happen. Timeslips.”
“A series of them,” he said. He’d been through a couple of timeslips before, in his long and storied career, but they had been brief instants of disorientation, not a kind of unfolding poorly cut-together immersive film. “That’s – not right. Not even slightly right. I think we should get out of here before it happens again.” He didn’t know why it had happened in the first place, but Brightside was absolutely one hundred percent sure he never wanted to experience anything like that again.
“This building’s wrong,” Crepusculus agreed. “And – shit. I don’t know what to do about it, and I don’t think I trust Irazek to know, either – what do you say we go to the university library and look it up ourselves? It’s old enough; there’s bound to be some interesting source materials in there.”
