Dreadful Company

by Vivian Shaw

  And she’d watched The Prisoner. There was that to consider.

  He let himself imagine what it might be like to sit outside her cell and have a conversation, like people, and knew that any such encounter would end his tenuous ability to ignore the bars of the cell, and that would mean he’d simply have to let her out, and that would mean…

  No, he thought, arm still pressed over his closed eyes. Not that.

  Greta was getting used to waking without any idea of how much time had passed since the last time she’d paid attention. It had stopped being disturbing; all she had to go on was the physiological level of her own hunger, and that was deranged by things like being taken to a vampire dinner party and then being woken up some unknowable length of time later to deal with an OD-in-progress.

  After Grisaille had taken her back to the cell, she’d tried very hard not to wonder if she could still somehow convince him to let her go; had gone over her own memory of the past few hours and tried to find any chink, any weakness that she could possibly lever into an advantage – and, still trying, had fallen into a restless sleep. At some point in the following hours, the tricherpetons had found her again, and Greta woke with her head pillowed on the warm, moving ribs of something soft and very much alive.

  They were all around her. Warm bodies, soft and determined, nudged into the small of her back; others lay over her legs, her feet, lending her their heat. She drifted off again, something close to comfortable for the first time in days; when she woke properly, only two of them were left, mewing and crawling into her lap when she sat up, trying to nurse on her fingers.

  They’re very new, she thought, petting the earless silky heads with a fingertip. So new. Like the wellmonsters. Someone must have been summoning them – or breeding them.

  Why, though? What on earth would a bunch of urban Goth vampires want with hairmonsters? She hadn’t really thought Corvin would be into the monster-breeding hobby. That was more the kind of thing that old-money aristocrats went in for, people with nicknames like Muffy who owned country houses —

  The mental image of Sir Francis Varney sitting in the library at Dark Heart House with a couple of thoroughbred tricherpetons lying at his feet occurred suddenly and vividly to Greta. That was where these creatures belonged, sprawled elegantly on the hearthrug, or trotting along behind Varney as he walked in the house’s rolling parkland. Not down here in the caves underneath Paris.

  The ones in her lap gave her fingers a last lick before stretching enormously and making their way between the bars of the cell, padding silently on the rock floor. She watched them go, not without a certain regret: it had been pleasant to hold something soft and warm and friendly.

  Someone had brought her another pastry and coffee while she slept. She got up, crumpled taffeta ballgown swishing around her feet, and snagged the cup and bag sitting outside the cell: both stone cold now. It didn’t matter. She settled down to eat hungrily enough that she managed to get a bite of greaseproof paper along with the croissant: calories, gorgeous much-needed calories, and she could feel her blood sugar rising back up to something bearable.

  After she’d eaten, she balled up the wrappers and put them neatly into the empty coffee cup, still sitting barefoot beside the bars in her horrible ballgown. She’d taken off the matching red Louboutin stiletto sandals Grisaille had pressed on her the night before: no reason to wear them in here, and if she had to run, if she’d ever have the chance to run, barefoot was better than four-inch heels. At some point while she slept, the hairmonsters had found the Louboutins, and one of them had been gnawed fairly thoroughly, which afforded Greta a measure of mean satisfaction.

  The warm hardness of the whistle pressed against her ribs, and she took it out, rolling the silver cylinder on her palm. You know how to whistle, don’t you, she thought again, staring at the tarnished silver of the object so recently freed from its imprisonment behind the wall.

  It looked… perfectly ordinary. It held around it no dark and ominous impressions; it felt just like plain sterling silver in her hand, warmed to her blood-heat from its long sojourn inside her bodice. It could have been simply a whistle, a thing to make noise with, and nothing more.

  She knew better. QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT, the inscription read: Who is this who is coming? Or – not who, but what. There was a reason it had been walled up in a niche for God only knew how long: these things could be dangerous. There were cases in the literature of people who had been literally frightened into heart attacks by an unintentionally summoned whistler. The old cliché of the ghost wearing a sheet and gibbering had some basis in reality.

  I have to get out of here, she thought, feeling her heartbeat in her temples, the roots of her teeth. No matter what, I have to get out of here, I’m not spending any more time in this cell waiting for Corvin to get bored and rip my head off.

  Greta still didn’t know why he’d had her captured. Emily had said something about Ruthven, that guy Corvin’s obsessed with, but the terms of that obsession were still unclear. Presumably they knew each other, or knew of each other, and she couldn’t imagine Ruthven looking with kindness on the kind of antics Corvin displayed – but that didn’t tell Greta enough about Corvin’s intentions toward her. Whether she was of more use to him alive or dead.

  I’m not sticking around to find out.

  Something touched her hand, and she jumped, looking down. Greta hadn’t realized that the smallest of the wellmonsters was still there; it had been sitting in the corner and resembling a small grey stone, but now it had come over to her and determinedly began to climb up her arm with cold little hands and feet. It tickled; she held as still as she could while it made its slow ascent and attached itself very firmly to her bare shoulder.

  I’m going to have to take it with me, she thought, stroking the wellmonster, as the tiny grey hands clung to her neck. It’ll slow me down, but it can’t be helped.

  She padded to the cell bars, leaned out, tried to see down the corridor.

  What the hell time was it? Enough time had passed since the coffee and pastry had been left outside the cell that both had been completely cold when she had woken – but the croissant was still soft and flaky in the middle, not yet stale. That meant, she was almost sure, that it was far enough past daybreak – late afternoon, in the other world, maybe early evening – that most of the nocturnal vampires must be asleep, especially after their debauch; but that they wouldn’t necessarily stay asleep for all that much longer. It had to be now. If she was going to do this, it had to be now.

  Okay, she thought. Still in her somewhat-befouled red taffeta ballgown, with the tiny monster attached to her shoulder like the world’s least elegant accessory, Greta stood in the middle of her cell and closed her fingers around the whistle lying on her palm. She was about to lift the whistle to her lips when she thought, You idiot, it has to manifest in something, and having it inhabiting your skirts while you are also still inside them is not going to be one of the world’s greatest experiences.

  Also, fuck this dress.

  She put the whistle back into her bodice and – with a sense of enjoyment that was the first positive emotion she’d felt in days – grabbed two handfuls of the vast rustling skirt and pulled. The fabric ripped with a satisfying noise.

  She tore most of the overskirt off, leaving herself enough of the underlayers to maintain at least a little decency, and spread the panel of fabric on the floor: that would have to do.

  Now, she thought again. It has to be now.

  Greta drew a deep breath, deep enough that the boning of her bodice creaked, put the warm silver to her lips, and blew: a long, strangely sweet note that seemed to echo much longer than it should have.

  There was nothing for a minute – three – five, and then a soft gust of wind blew itself into her cell: a wind out of nowhere, which rippled the taffeta panel on the floor and then died away.

  And the fabric moved. Humped up, as if something underneath it was growing. The surface of the taffeta wrinkled up
and clung to a developing shape as it rose: a head, two arms, hanging in the air. It held still for a long moment, only the blind head turning this way and that as if to work out where it was – or where Greta was – and gave the impression of listening very intently for the slightest sound.

  She’d never actually seen a whistler manifest before.

  She’d read about it, of course, but written accounts hadn’t quite conveyed the intense and visceral horror it produced, like a physical blow, draining all the strength from her at once, her knees threatening to give out and spill her to the floor. It was with considerable difficulty that Greta managed to make herself speak out loud, a single word: “Hello.”

  Instantly the thing’s head turned to her, and then it was right there, a face made out of wrinkled fabric thrust close to her own, and she was not going to scream, she was not going to scream, she was going to shut her eyes tight to block out that awful crumpled face and breathe like a sensible person —

  The little monster clinging to her neck glupped unhappily, and with that small noise, Greta’s horror snapped, draining away all at once. She had summoned this thing; she knew how they worked. She could do this.

  She looked the creature straight in the eyes it didn’t have and said, “Thank you for coming. I need your help.”

  This obviously was not what it had had in mind. It tilted its head a little, the rudimentary expression shifting from one of leering menace to one of puzzlement. Her confidence was flooding back now, a warm tide. “I’ll make you a deal,” she told it. “You help me get out of here, and when I’m free, I’ll take your whistle and put it anywhere you want to haunt.”

  Egredior sibilus wasn’t among the brighter of the object-linked apparitions. It seemed to take a while to consider her proposal, during which time Greta stroked the wellmonster’s flat little head with a fingertip. It’s too dry, she thought, poor thing, nobody’s actually caring for them down here, they need proper moisture to keep their skin in good condition. When I get out, I’m going to…

  Going to what? she wondered. Come back down here again armed with a bunch of stakes to dispatch the vampires, rescue this irresponsibly summoned menagerie, and incidentally try to get that one kid out of here?

  Why not?

  At which point the thing hanging in the air in front of her gave a decisive nod, and reached out one of its arms toward her face.

  Greta stayed quite still while the crumpled fabric ghosted over her skin, a light touch that sent goosebumps flaring all down her arms and legs. There was an unexpected sense of wonder in that touch, as if it had never before actually had a chance to investigate a human like this, without all the terror and screaming and carrying-on. She wondered how long its whistle had spent walled up inside that niche, and who had put it there – and how.

  It took a minute or two before the whistler was satisfied. When it took its arm away, there was a subtle difference in the way it held itself in the air: a straightening of its rudimentary shoulders, a kind of readiness for action.

  “I can’t reach the key on the other side of the door,” Greta said, tucking the whistle back inside her bodice. “They’ve left it in the lock but I can’t reach it. I need you to slip out there and turn it for me. Can you do that?”

  She wasn’t actually sure it could: this was a small whistler, there wasn’t much of her skirt for it to manifest in, and the key would require strength to turn. Nonetheless it turned and swooped through the bars as easily as a piece of paper blown on the breeze. There was a faint sound as it took hold of the key, and then a grinding of metal on metal. It took so long that Greta had begun to feel the edges of despair rising in her throat when all at once the key turned. The lock’s tumblers fell into place with a clank so loud she thought it must have alerted the vampires – she held her breath, heart hammering, listening for the distant sound of footsteps —

  Nothing. Just silence, and her blood roaring in her ears.

  But the lock was open. She closed her hands around the bars, very aware of the chill of the metal, the prickle of rust-flakes against her palms; pushed, hard and then harder. Reluctantly the door swung on its hinges, silent and well-oiled, and Greta was out.

  The whistler, in its taffeta drapery, was hovering in the corridor with a definite air of satisfaction in a job well done. “Thank you,” she told it. “Thank you so much, you did wonderfully – and now I think I know which way is out.”

  On her various excursions to different parts of Corvin’s lair, she’d built up a pretty decent mental map of where the tunnels ran, and she had definitely seen one that went off in the opposite direction from the main complex – one that she might have overlooked but for the marks in the dust on the floor, marks as if something heavy had been towed along without much regard for its comfort, accompanied here and there by drops of dried-up blood. That’s the way they take the bodies when they’re done with them, she had thought, fixing it in her mind as Grisaille hurried her along. Taking out the trash, like civilized creatures.

  She looked back for the last time at the rectangular rock-cut room she’d grown to know so terribly well over the past few days – every inch of it familiar – relatively safe, compared to whatever might be waiting for her outside. It was surprisingly difficult to turn away from that familiar known environment; she had to steel herself, taking a deep breath.

  Go, she thought, and set off down the corridor at a trot, her bare feet making no sound on the tunnel’s floor.

  The most dangerous phases of any cycle are not the extremes, but the point halfway through the cycle: where things are balanced precisely between those two extremes, where matters could tip either way with equal ease. The edges are sharpest, right there where the balance-point lies, and the vast potential energy of either extreme hangs waiting.

  This is why magic done at dawn and twilight is easier, and more dangerous, than at other times – and why the half-moon, neither crescent nor full, holds the most power of any phase. Crepusculus and Brightside had arrived at Père Lachaise cemetery under a rising half-moon, in that strange uncanny twilight when the edges of everything seem indistinct, and both of them could feel that balanced potential as the moon rose in the sky.

  They’d spent the day back in the library, and while they had discovered more information about the Opera’s potential significance as a locus of mirabilic force, they had found few answers as to why, or what was going on. Now, under cover of darkness, they were fulfilling Irazek’s request of the previous day, whether or not he might be able to do much with the information.

  Ask them if they’ve seen – oh, necromancers, people grubbing around for graveyard dirt, Irazek had said. Now, at least, they had some more specific questions to pose of the cemetery’s inhabitants, other than have you seen anything strange lately.

  Not for the first time Brightside wondered about the process whereby Hell trained and tested their potential surface operator candidates, and what would possess a demon to want this particular job, to want to live on Earth – in Irazek’s case, apparently, it was the opportunity to teach himself the art of pâtisserie, which Brightside appreciated for its intrinsic merit but considered somewhat divergent from the main job description, i.e., watching the bloody monitors. At least he had seemed to be fairly focused on the patterns they had discovered in the essograph traces, even if he should by rights have noticed them before. Nor did it make much sense to Brightside that one single solitary operative had been assigned to Paris, with something as complex as the Palais Garnier to keep an eye on. The problems here went deeper than Irazek, but he was all they had: neither Brightside nor Dammerung had the ability to contact Hell and say what are you doing, exactly. They had to make do with Irazek.

  Maybe he’d even know what to do with the information they’d found in the library. What would be ideal, of course, was if Irazek could be convinced to give Hell a ring and ask for backup from somebody who did know what they were doing, but that kind of admission of incompetence probably didn’t look too shiny on
one’s permanent record.

  “Hey,” said Crepusculus beside him. They were walking along one of the cemetery’s narrow little lanes; it was laid out like a miniature city of the dead, cobbled streets flanked with neat little mausolea like tiny houses, some decorated with statues, some starkly plain. In the moon’s half-light everything was touched with silver. “Chopin’s in here, isn’t he?”

  “And Jim Morrison,” Brightside said. “And Oscar Wilde. Édith Piaf. Maria Callas. Loads of famous people.”

  “Mm. Look,” said Crepusculus, and pointed: in the distance, up a little hill, a pale greenish light had begun to glimmer between the tombs. “How much do you want to bet they’re having a soirée?”

  Brightside realized he could hear faint music, a ripple of liquid piano notes, almost too distant to make out. It sounded a little like wind chimes, and a little like the Étude no. 3, and along with it he thought he could hear singing —

  A sound like the singing of the dead, he thought, without knowing quite why the phrase rose fully formed into his mind. They stopped walking, tilting their heads to listen, and the song came to an end in what sounded like distant laughter.