Dreadful Company

by Vivian Shaw

  “We had one of those,” said Greta. “I will never forget the day he sort of tried to lecture the professor in the middle of grand rounds; it was the well, actually trope in its purest and most crystalline form. I have to admit I really enjoyed watching him be taken apart in the office later.”

  “Ours never got taken apart by professors, which I think would have done him a great deal of good in the long run,” said Grisaille. “He came to a sticky but appropriate end. It’s probably some form of irony that he spent all that time trying to work out a way to defeat death, and he’s stayed dead for, oh, coming up on two centuries now – and here’s me, who didn’t try anything of the kind, still going after all this time.”

  “Defeat death?” said Greta, making a face. “Ours just wanted everyone to tell him how clever he was, but the delusions of grandeur had a limit.” She looked down at Lilith; the active eruptions seemed to have passed for the moment. “I think she’s over the worst of this. Can you get me a clean bowl of water and something to wash her face with?”

  “I think I can oblige.” Grisaille got to his feet, aware of his joints aching a little – he was very much older now than he had been that winter in Ingolstadt – and thought again about Victor and the dogged visceral stupidity of that brilliant mind. Perhaps only someone with that kind of arc-flash intelligence could have not only come up with, but put into action, such an idiotic concept; perhaps only someone whose mind was trained to focus on the task at hand to the exclusion of all else could have failed to notice the horror of what he was actually working on. That it had come as a surprise to Victor – Grisaille had heard it all, in Victor’s delirium, in the weeks following his collapse, the whole story, over and over again, the terrible idea and the terrible execution, the long descent into madness during the construction of the experiment – still, even now, made him pointlessly angry. There was so much hubris in the entire business. Why should Victor have thought that he, of all people ever to have been born, should be the one to work out how to resurrect the dead?

  And why didn’t you stop him? Grisaille’s mind piped up again, and he pushed the thought away with conscious effort.

  By the time he’d fetched the water and some towels from the bathroom, he was more or less in control of his own memories again. He even found the smile and reapplied it, handing the basin to Helsing, and then without meaning to said, “Why do you do this?”

  She looked for a moment desperately unhappy, and Grisaille found it in himself to feel vicious distaste for the universe and everything in it, particularly him.

  “You aren’t the first sanguivore to ask me that,” she said. “The answer is extremely simple: because it needs doing. Help me get her changed, will you?”

  Helsing was bathing Lilith’s face. Now that the vomiting had stopped, she appeared to be semiconscious and totally exhausted, responding to questions in a slurred, vague voice. That was the comedown from the absinthe, Grisaille thought, plus the amount of opioids she’d consumed earlier probably still circulating in her blood.

  He went to find some clean clothes for her – the wardrobe was a symphony in black, with black accents, black detailing, and the odd flash of purple – and together he and Helsing peeled Lilith out of her unspeakable nightgown and cleaned her up with the wet towel.

  Grisaille had no concerns about his own ability to deal with handling the naked body of a woman who happened to be his superior’s consort: Lilith was emphatically not his type, and he had cultivated a certain detachment over the time he had spent with Corvin which he leaned on now, and which served him well. He was struck, however, by the way Helsing touched her: impersonal, efficient but gentle, with a care he knew damn well Lilith had done nothing to deserve.

  He was also slightly impressed, and tried not to be, by the way Helsing stripped the bed down and remade it with clean sheets – she had to be told where they were, of course, but she didn’t even ask him to help her with any of it. He watched, sitting on the arm of the chair they had deposited Lilith in, and realized for the first time in some hours how tired he was. It had to be early morning, at least.

  “There,” said Helsing, and piled the clean pillows up against the headboard. “In you get, Lilith. Can you – ah, thanks,” she added to Grisaille, who was already lifting Lilith in his arms to replace her in the bed. “She’ll do; she’ll probably sleep the clock around and wake up with the world’s worst and most richly deserved headache, but she’ll be all right, you can tell Corvin.”

  Grisaille was sure Corvin didn’t give even half a fuck, but nodded. Helsing tucked the covers over Lilith, put her hands on the small of her back, and stretched to the accompaniment of a series of cracks – and then looked up at him.

  “Thank you,” she said. “You were… very helpful. I appreciate it.”

  Grisaille bit down on what he’d been going to say and simply nodded, thinking again: Why didn’t you stop him? “You’re welcome,” he said, and his mouth was filled with the old familiar taste of self-loathing, a taste like the bitterness of snow.

  CHAPTER 8

  A

  t the balcony of a hotel suite not so very far away from the one in which Greta Helsing had first encountered a wellmonster, Crepusculus Dammerung stood leaning on the iron railing and looking out at the Jardin des Tuileries across the street. The midmorning light was gorgeous, with that oddly powdery clarity that comes with spring, and beyond the gardens the river glinted like a sheet of electrum.

  He was still wrapped in the hotel’s bathrobe, his hair damp from the shower, listening behind him for the tapping on the door that would mean breakfast had arrived. In the other bedroom, Brightside hadn’t yet shown any sign of stirring, and Crepusculus hoped the room-service knock wouldn’t wake him.

  They’d come straight back from the university library the previous night without going to ask any questions whatsoever of any ghosts; Crepusculus had made the decision that whatever was happening to the fabric of reality was probably not going to mind waiting one more night, and Brightside had been half-blind with one of his rare but vicious headaches. Crepusculus had put his foot down, carefully, and insisted that they return to the hotel. It had been a testament to just how bad Brightside had been feeling that he hadn’t offered any argument.

  After the experience in the Opera – they’d lost about twenty minutes of real time, Crepusculus calculated, while they flipped between periods in history like a kid hunting for a reference in a dictionary – they had gone looking for some answers.

  The afternoon had started looking up when they’d found out that the majority of the Bibliothèque-Musée de l’Opéra National de Paris collection had been temporarily moved to the Sorbonne library while the part of the Opera building that normally housed it underwent renovation. Neither of them had been too terribly keen on spending any more time in the Palais Garnier than absolutely necessary – the awful vertigo of sliding out of time, of temporal dislocation, had been bad enough that neither Brightside nor Crepusculus had been able to face the possibility of a second experience just now. Having access to those records without having to set foot in the place was an unexpected stroke of luck.

  Getting into the university had been remarkably easy: Crepusculus supposed they resembled a professor and a postdoc closely enough that nobody cared very much what they were up to, and in fact they had found quite a lot of information about the history of the building and the somewhat complicated process of its construction. Charles Garnier’s single-minded purpose had felt more than slightly suspect to both of them, and they had spent the entire afternoon and evening buried in primary sources. It really did seem as if something thoroughly out-of-the-ordinary had been built into the structure from the very beginning; a significant proportion of the ironwork girders that supported it had been specially made to order, using a specific alloy, and the long list of stones that had been chosen for the interior decoration included a noticeable number of minerals that held specific occult meaning. The kind of crystal-healing enthusiast who
spelled magic with a k would have a field day with the masonry manifest.

  On a three-dimensional map of reality, Crepusculus thought, the Opera would be analogous to a heavy weight on the rubber sheet of space-time – and Hell should have known that, honestly, how had they just glossed over it, why hadn’t there been a more intense monitoring presence? Crepusculus had been to other major loci of mirabilic significance from time to time – Stonehenge, Hagia Sophia, Cluny, however many else – and there had been at least two surface operatives per site detailed to keep an eye on things, and you’d better believe the esso traces were kept up to date. Something else was wrong here, profoundly wrong: something other than the problem of the reality incursions themselves.

  It was only because they’d been asked to leave so that the library could close that Crepusculus and Brightside had stopped working – and Crepusculus had surfaced from his own concentration to find that his partner should have given up hours ago. It was easy to tell when Brightside had one of his bad headaches – there was a particular shade of greenish-grey that crept into his complexion, and he went very quiet. Crepusculus didn’t blame him: the effects of that multiple timeslip had been pretty damn horrible, and he hadn’t precisely been feeling his very best and brightest, either, truth be told.

  Now he sighed, looking down at the tourists trundling along the Rue de Rivoli. He and Brightside hadn’t contacted Irazek with the information they had found, partly because when they got back to the room, all either of them wanted to do was collapse, and partly because they didn’t have a hell of a lot of confidence in the demon’s ability to use that information. Today, he thought, they’d probably have to go over there, and they could also have a go at talking to the ghosts tonight if that still seemed worth the bother.

  Tap-tap, discreet, on the door behind him. Crepusculus turned from the balcony and went to let the waiter in. He intended to let Brightside sleep as long as he could, but, well. Fresh croissants were fresh croissants, after all.

  (He could remember so many other strange mornings, over the centuries. Saigon at dawn, the air already flannel-thick and drowning-hot, how green everything had been, how green and how lush, and the blank helpless awareness of just how many souls there were to escort home. A field in Guyana, patchwork-bright with a carpet of bodies lying facedown amid the rising song of flies, like a bow drawn across strings; blue and red and white and pink and yellow and green, clothes tight over swelling bodies; a horrible cacophony of voices no ears could hear but theirs, hundreds of people, all frightened, all wanting to go home. Tuol Sleng, unspeakable: that one they could not possibly hope to remedy, not all the way, pieces of people’s souls irrevocably soaked into checkered linoleum, bonded, welded to this world due to the means by which they’d left it. Tuam Care Home, in Ireland, and Smyllum in Scotland, so many others, mass graves of babies and children, orphans left in care and killed instead. And back, back, back through the centuries, over and over, the same story – but this one was different, wasn’t it, this one was not man’s inhumanity to man but something much larger, much more frightening, the underlying machinery of reality itself…)

  Stop it, Crepusculus told himself, closing his eyes. Stop it: you’re here to help, that’s it, that’s all that you can do.

  “At least I have the grace to have my horrors somewhere other than the breakfast table,” said a voice, and he blinked, looking up. Brightside was leaning in the doorway, his own hotel robe neat and white and somehow vaguely monastic. He smiled, and as always it lit up his face, transformed him briefly. Crepusculus had to smile back, the memories receding.

  “I was going to let you sleep,” he said.

  “You didn’t take into account how good fresh coffee smells,” said Brightside, coming forward into the sitting room. He looked better than he had the night before, still somewhat worn but entirely back on his game. “We’ll – do what we can, Dammerung. Whatever that might be. Tonight when it gets dark, we’ll go over to the cemetery, like we said we would, and have a chat with whatever happens to walk there in the night. Today we can try to get a better idea of what’s been going on with that wretched building. We’ll do what we can to help this situation, and the rest isn’t up to us.”

  “I hate it when you’re right,” Crepusculus told him.

  “I know. Pass the croissants, there’s a good eternal, hmm?”

  Grisaille stared up at the ceiling of his bedchamber, the darkness relieved only by the faint red light of his eyes; he didn’t need the lamps lit to see by. He knew it was getting on for midday in the world above, but sleep did not seem to be a thing that was happening to him.

  After returning the doctor to her cell – and hadn’t that just been awkward, really – Grisaille had taken the time to wash very thoroughly and change into something that wasn’t liberally spattered with the evidence of Lilith’s indisposition; but he still felt soiled.

  The stain is on the inside, he thought, where no soap can reach it, and… good lord I must be in bad shape; I’m thinking in the worst kind of clichés.

  He got like this sometimes. Once he’d heard a miner describe what they called attacks of the weight: an occasional sudden and visceral awareness of the sheer mass of stone over their head, the heaviness of all that rock pressing down on them, the weight of it driving them into something like a panic attack. You got it a lot when you were new to the job, the miner had told him. Experienced miners, old hands, rarely felt the weight – but it was always there. For Grisaille, the thing that occasionally threatened to squash him flat was not physical weight but memory, two hundred years of it stacked up and teetering unsteadily, a precarious balance.

  He had never found a method for forgetting things that really worked. Getting blind drunk, or sufficiently fucked up on some other substance to induce brief periods of amnesia, yes, sure, but he couldn’t spend his entire unlife in a state of profound inebriation; there wasn’t enough vodka in the world. The problem was that he had done things – or not done things – and that he remembered doing or not doing those things, and most of the time he was able to file those memories away in not now space but occasionally – like right now – the file storage overflowed.

  Victor, and the thing in the snow, with its wet yellow eyes, misbegotten and tragic; he could have stopped that, perhaps, or at least done something to try to prevent it. Bitter cold and that sharp acid smell of snow over the lower, deeper reek of decay: he remembered that.

  And fleeing west, after that dreadful little episode; pawning everything he could to buy passage to America, as far away from his old life as he could go. And, one night in New York, walking down the wrong alley. The one that had a vampire at the end of it.

  That had been something he didn’t want to remember in any detail, but it was still quite clear in his mind – the pain of it, the frantic confusion after the change, the adjustment period while he got used to his new abilities and limitations. For the first time since Victor, however, he’d found himself among – well, friends was a bit much, but friendly new acquaintances, who had helped him understand what he’d become, and that had made things easier to bear.

  Working his way across the country, as time passed. Leaving a trail of unexplained cases of anemia that could probably have been followed without too much difficulty, if anyone had been trying. Finding himself eventually in Seattle, and staying there for long enough that people began to comment on his apparent lack of aging. He’d liked the Pacific Northwest. It was very much not like Ingolstadt, and he did have friends, some of whom were human; and one of them even came with Grisaille when eventually he ran out of explanations and had to conveniently disappear.

  They left the States for England on the request of Grisaille’s companion, who was of the British persuasion. Crossing the continent back to New York had been all right, but oh, gods and monsters, did he not want to remember the eight days of unending misery that followed embarking the ship for Southampton; he hadn’t realized that one of the side effects of the change was a tendency
to crippling seasickness. He was sure he’d come close to turning all the way inside out.

  It’s in the legends, his friend had told him, one interminable afternoon in their cabin, looking excited at having Worked Something Out. They – you – can’t cross running water. I don’t really think the ocean is running water, but —

  Grisaille’s reply had not been verbal. Now, lying on his back, he rested an arm over his eyes and wished the visceral memory of that experience and the much more recent Lilith episode did not match up quite so well with one another.

  At least dealing with Lilith he’d been assisting someone who knew what they were doing, rather than having to rely on his own limited and long-ago training to handle the situation. Grisaille had never wanted to be the one at the very top, the master of all and maker of decisions; he was one of Nature’s seconds-in-command, at his happiest when following the directions of a person he could actually trust, and… it had been a long time, hadn’t it, since he had been happy.

  It was stupid, but he liked the doctor – possibly because competence in any field was always nice to observe, and possibly because she was easy to talk to.