by Vivian Shaw
“I think that’s the best idea I’ve heard in days,” said Brightside, wincing. The dizziness had faded finally, leaving behind a nasty throbbing headache behind one eye. “If nothing else, we can do a bit of historical research about the construction of this place. It feels odd to me, like it’s got supernatural conductivity inside every structural member.”
“I’m trying not to imagine what happens if lightning strikes the goddamn lyre on top. Do we get walking armies of opera ghosts all singing at once?”
“Let’s not stick around to find out.”
CHAPTER 6
F
rancis Varney had not traveled outside the country in over a hundred years, and it had not occurred to him during his more recent interactions with the world that along with an ordinary driver’s license he ought to get himself a passport.
This became a problem almost at once, and it was really only due to the urgency of the situation that he didn’t hesitate at all before fixing the ticket agent with the full force of his metallic eyes and dropping half a ton of thrall on her. He was aware that he would have to spend rather a lot of effort over the next several hours doing just that to various officials in various positions of authority, and the thought came to him with bitter clarity: One can always do what one must.
After that, actually purchasing a first-class ticket on the next BA flight to Paris had been easy. So had the process of making his way to the gate and trooping down a narrow rectangular corridor that ended in a concertina of rubber pressed against the curving wall of an airplane; actually stepping through the door let into that curving wall had been much more difficult. He had to duck his head slightly; straightening up inside, surrounded by bright artificial light and the smell of plastic, he had been assailed with a powerful sense of claustrophobia. The last time he’d really been going to and fro about the world or walking up and down in it for any length of time, aviation had been a pipe dream. Varney had slept through the early days, through the introduction of the first passenger aircraft, through the evolution of flight from an exciting and luxurious experience into an unpleasant and exhausting necessity for modern life, and the inside of an A320 looked to him like a narrow coffin lined with row upon row of squashed-together armchairs.
Greta, he thought, and just before the uniformed flight attendant had to ask him a second time for his seat number, he forced himself to smile and apologize for his moment of inattention.
The seats had been exactly as uncomfortable as they looked, although up here in the front they were a bit bigger and set farther apart than the ones he could see down the aisle. He settled into one of them next to the curving wall, peering out through a thick window at a world that looked already alien in its distance. Peculiar vehicles of various shape and size, whose purpose Varney could not begin to imagine, scurried around the tarmac.
The flight attendant’s little lecture on disaster preparation had left him clutching the armrests and wondering why in God’s name he hadn’t just taken a train, they could do that now, somebody had built a tunnel under the Channel so you didn’t have to bear the awful, awful sea passage – like most sanguivores, Varney was afflicted with crippling seasickness – was it too late to get out now – they were moving, damn it all —
Greta, he thought again, and looked down at the rose in his buttonhole.
When, a few minutes later, the plane began its takeoff roll, a vast invisible hand pressed Varney back into his seat harder and then harder and harder, the sound of the engines waking a kind of idiot trapped-animal terror in him. It seemed to go on forever – surely this couldn’t be right, some disaster was befalling them – and then with a giddy vertiginous ease the world outside his window dropped away.
It was the strangest thing he could remember experiencing in a very long time. His stomach seemed to have been left far behind them on the ground; he was very much aware of being heavy still, pressed back into the seat by an invisible force – but as the world grew smaller and smaller underneath them, as the plane tilted to show him London as a tiny model of itself, a perfect dollhouse reproduction, Varney found himself staring in total fascination.
And then they’d offered him a drink, with faultless courtesy, exactly as if he’d been sitting in the Savoy; and he had spent the next forty minutes sipping quite decent brandy at what he was told afterward was something like four hundred miles an hour. It was surreal. It was almost enough to take his mind off the gnawing worry about Greta, who didn’t do things like fail to answer her phone. Or disappear. She didn’t do that, either.
Now, standing in the arrivals hall at Charles de Gaulle and trying not to have a headache after thralling three different customs officials into believing they’d seen a nonexistent but perfectly unremarkable UK passport, all that worry came back to him. It was a relief to see the familiar figure of Edmund Ruthven threading his way through the crowds, wearing a very stylish coat and an expression of determination.
“Varney,” Ruthven said, stopping beside him and looking around. “You got here.”
This was not something Varney felt required a response. He’d found the business of existing in the world, of managing the logistics of travel, while tiring, less difficult than he’d expected. He watched Ruthven’s pale eyes tracking through the tangle of people coming and going, carrying suitcases or rolling them along like obedient gun dogs trotting at their masters’ heels. It was obvious that Ruthven was not only worried as hell, he was angry; Varney thought of him saying, I knew something was wrong, and wondered how much of that was hindsight and how much was actually true.
“There he is,” Ruthven said, and waved; after a moment Varney saw a man striding toward them who was very definitely not a man, although he passed without question among the humans thronging the hall.
He was large. Varney put him at about six foot six, broad-shouldered, thickly muscled, moving with the easy grace of someone who keeps themselves in excellent physical condition. The hair pulled back into a loose queue at the back of his neck was wavy, thick, dark gold, streaked and grizzled with grey. To vampire – or vampyre – eyes, however, he stood out from the rest of the crowd because he appeared to be lit subtly differently: like a person in full color against washed-out, desaturated surroundings.
Weres always looked like that: slightly but noticeably brighter. As soon as he got close enough, Varney could see his eyes were amber-yellow. He looked not exactly grim but determined, entirely focused on the task at hand.
“Edmund,” he said, holding out his hand to Ruthven, who shook it. “I’m so sorry.”
“Yes, well,” said Ruthven. “Alceste St. Germain, meet Sir Francis Varney; Varney, St. Germain. Local werewolf, keeps an eye on the city.”
St. Germain winced. “And hasn’t been doing so brilliantly at that. Pleased to meet you, Sir Francis. Do you have any bags?”
“We do not,” said Ruthven. “My plan is to go straight to the hotel and collect Greta’s things.”
The werewolf nodded. “Once I have her scent, I can be of some actual use, I hope,” he said. “This way, gentlemen.”
Paris had changed much the way London had, to Varney’s eyes. The city he’d visited before, so very long ago, was still there – the bones of it – only now thickly encrusted around the edges with new construction, layers of humanity building on itself. They took the train from the airport, and as it passed through the outer industrial sections of the city and grew nearer its core, Varney felt himself increasingly glad to be here – it was strange, inexpressibly strange to be traveling again, particularly for such an awful reason, but it was also oddly exhilarating. They passed underground at the Gare du Nord, and the next time Varney saw the sky, it was in the heart of the old and beautiful center of Paris.
It was the kind of overcast grey day that meant neither he nor Ruthven needed to worry terribly much about sunscreen and hats, but Varney was glad when they got to the hotel nonetheless: even diffused sunlight had a cumulative effect, and his headache wasn’t getting any bett
er. Thralling the customs officials had been a little bit like lifting weights with his mind.
He had very deliberately not been thinking about Ruthven sharing a hotel suite with Greta Helsing, but actually entering the rooms made the thought impossible to ignore. He knew perfectly well Greta and Ruthven had absolutely no feelings toward one another than friendship, but Varney couldn’t avoid picturing what it would have been like if he had been here instead – staying with her, in a five-star hotel, overlooking the Tuileries, in arguably Europe’s most romantic city —
He was glad of the dimness of the suite, the curtains half-drawn: he had to turn away, his face briefly hot, and pretend to be busy inspecting the knickknacks on the mantelpiece. Ruthven and St. Germain were going through Greta’s things, and that brought another wave of heat to Varney’s cheeks. Her clothes. Her things, which she had touched —
For Christ’s sake, he told himself viciously. You’re supposed to be helping, not dissolving into embarrassingly clichéd emotion like some idiot teenager. You stopped doing that centuries ago after Flora Bannerworth, bloody well get a grip.
When he came to join the others in the room Greta had occupied, he was mostly all right again; perhaps a little flushed, a little bright around the eyes, but in control. Ruthven was zipping up Greta’s suitcase, and Varney was profoundly grateful that he hadn’t witnessed the werewolf getting a good sniff of her scent.
“We’ll take her luggage back to my apartment,” said St. Germain, giving Varney a slightly curious look. “For safekeeping. And then —”
“Then we search,” said Ruthven, getting up. For a moment Varney could see the weariness in him, the worry, before the smooth facade slipped back into place. He had a brief flicker of memory – last winter, after the business under the city, carrying an unconscious Ruthven over his shoulder, all the urbane polish gone to tatters of exhaustion, and thought: This isn’t any good for him, either.
“We search,” Varney repeated, as if something other than the three of them were there to hear.
After Yves and Emily had left, Greta had curled up again and tried to sleep; this time there were dreams, confusing fragments of imagery – ghouls, not the ones that had attacked Yves but her ghouls, the London tribes whose leader she knew well, passing through low tunnels that were not the ones she remembered from her brief sojourn underneath that city. In the dream there was a sense of urgency, but no clear purpose or danger, and eventually it faded out altogether.
She woke stiff and aching, but could tell by the level of her own hunger that she must have managed several hours of mediocre rest; when one of the vampires came to take her to the bathroom and provide her with food, she devoured the pastry despite how bored she was getting of chocolate croissants.
How long have I been down here? she thought, licking her fingers. Three times they’ve brought me food; does that mean it’s Monday in the world?
She was supposed to check out of the hotel on Monday morning, and when she didn’t show up, they would have to do something – contact Ruthven at the very least – and she’d be missed. Someone would know to look for her, although by now, Greta thought there were going to be damn few clues for anyone to find.
But they’d probably try. It wasn’t as comforting a thought as Greta could wish.
She couldn’t help wondering what was going on with Emily and Yves, either. Her patch job on the vampire’s wounds had been the best she could manage given the situation, but she didn’t have much confidence in her patient’s common sense – or his ability to keep the entire business a secret. Greta didn’t know what was likely to befall a prisoner convicted of providing unauthorized and secret medical care against the local dictator’s wishes, but it wasn’t going to be good.
She spent some time pacing across the cell, turning over assorted dire repercussions in her mind, expecting to hear footsteps at any moment; sitting down, getting up again, unable to settle, as time passed without the benefit of measure.
Eventually, though, she ran out of imagination. Nothing had happened; perhaps nothing was going to happen, and she would simply be left here forever, forgotten about. That wasn’t much fun to contemplate, either, but at least it didn’t involve having her throat torn out, and she slid down the wall to sit wearily on the cell floor and stare at the opposite wall.
She didn’t know how long she had been sitting there when the monsterlets reappeared. Silently clambering through the bars of her cell, the little group of them were the friendliest things she’d seen in a long time, and she was profoundly grateful for their company.
Even if they only gave her a perfunctory sniffing before ignoring her completely and crawling toward the back corner of her cell.
Hm. That was interesting.
They were, in fact, gathering in the corner where the flat rock wall gave way to stonework – the walled-up space behind which, that first night, she had distinctly heard something move. At the thought, all the little hairs on Greta’s arms stood up at once in a long wave of chill.
“I wouldn’t go near that if I were you,” she said, standing in the middle of the cell, arms wrapped around herself. “I don’t know what’s behind it.”
Glup, said one of the monsters – the medium-sized one – and as Greta watched, it actually climbed on top of the largest of its friends-and-relations with the deliberate slowness that characterized the species. It seemed to be very interested in the stonework, and it reached with small grey hands to feel the chinks between the bits of limestone.
She shivered. “I really don’t think you ought to be messing with that,” she said, and this time didn’t even get a glup in response: something about the wall was apparently much more fascinating than she was.
They liked enclosed spaces, of course. They were often set in such spaces to guard things – the classic example, of course, being a treasure hidden in a secret alcove in the stonework of an abandoned well, thus the colloquial name for the species. The unwise adventurer who tracked down such a treasure and went down the well to retrieve it would find themselves taking hold of a large heavy leathery baglike object, which, when pulled out of the secret hiding place, wrapped its arms around their neck and hung on tight. At this point in the story the adventurer would invariably describe a horrible smell of mold and the sensation of a cold face pressed against their own, and one could hardly blame them for being somewhat upset thereby, but Greta tended to think that people who went after buried treasure were greedy little twerps who probably deserved whatever curse they might invoke. She felt much the same about people who broke into mummies’ tombs, with or without university affiliation to back them up.
She watched the monsters. They were all working their fingers into the cracks between the stonework now. There was an awful kind of inexorability about it: slow, inefficient, but endlessly patient.
They wanted to get through. They wanted whatever was on the other side.
Greta shivered again. If she didn’t stop them, they’d eventually manage, and she absolutely did not want to know what it was they thought they were after. Something about that rattling sound had badly frightened her, even if she had no idea what it might actually be.
She retreated to the far corner of the cell again, and sat down, arms still wrapped around herself. After a few minutes the smallest wellmonster left off picking crumbs of stone out of the wall and made its slow toadlike way across the floor to her; she scooped it into her hands, lifted it up to get a closer look. “What are you so interested in?” she asked it.
Glup. It wrapped its hands around her thumb and chewed on it thoughtfully – well, gummed was more accurate; the European wellmonster didn’t have any teeth – and this was distracting enough to take her mind off whatever might be behind the wall.
They weren’t bright, but they were what you might call canny: they had a strong sense of self-preservation, as befitted a creature whose purpose was to guard valuable treasure. They could see very well in almost lightless conditions, with those huge eyes, and their
vomeronasal organs were highly sensitive – the generally accepted explanation for the characteristic P. incolens odor of mold or mildew was pheromonal – and, Greta thought as the specimen in her hand went on gumming her fingers, they were capable of detecting danger with a fairly high level of specificity.
Which meant that whatever was behind that stone wall, they didn’t think it was dangerous to them, at least. And they wanted it.
What wellmonsters wanted was – treasure.
And what was most often walled up in cellars, other than mad wives, pregnant nuns, or importunate ex-friends? Valuable objects.
Greta could feel the curiosity surfacing through the dread, and resented it. She didn’t want to know what was in there, and – yes, okay, fine, she did, she wasn’t going to be able to ignore it. She knew better than to indulge curiosity; of course she did – there was an actual ghost story titled A Warning to the Curious – but sufficient levels of boredom were apparently capable of overriding even her fairly solid common sense. She sat there for a little longer, debating with herself, before finally getting up and going to have a look.
