by Vivian Shaw
He saw a flicker of something in Corvin’s eyes that might have been fear or apprehension, but only a flicker. “As you wish,” he told him, and Corvin spat.
“Take the remains to – oh, where you always get rid of them, it’s not my job to consider disposition. Just get her out of here and then have someone remove the furniture; I’ll want an all-new suite.”
“As you wish,” Grisaille repeated, and slipped past Corvin into the room. It had not been so many hours ago that he and the human had worked here together to try to preserve what of Lilith’s existence might be worth the bother, and here was all that work, all those hours of disgusting, thankless, miserable work, wasted with one sharp twist.
She looked younger, dead. Younger and more vulnerable, without the sneer she habitually wore, without her makeup. He remembered Helsing gently unpeeling the fake lashes from her eyelids, loosened by tears; remembered washing this face himself, dabbing away the dark stains of mascara and eyeliner, the smear of lipstick.
“Well?” demanded Corvin from the doorway. “I gave you an order, Grisaille. Get on with it.”
He looked up, and something about his face must have given Corvin pause, because the latter blinked hard and drew himself up to his full height and said, “Fucking move, all right?” before stalking away. For a moment Grisaille let himself enjoy that brief change in expression; then the flicker of pleasure drained away again. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t entirely sure if anything did.
Grisaille bent over the bed, slipped his arms under Lilith, gathered her up as he had done once already in the past night and day. She was heavy now with the total gracelessness of death, her head rolling at an unbecoming angle on her broken neck. He could vividly remember holding her through shuddering spasms of misery, helping Helsing keep her upright and stable, trying to give her some comfort or at least some ease with the power of his own thrall.
Looking down into the beautiful, stupid face, he made a decision, as he had also done once already. He could not carry this one to the breach in the tunnel wall communicating with the cloaca and let the sewer current take her where it would. Not like this. Not now.
Grisaille looked around the room for a last time, not at all sure he’d ever see it again, and then carried Lilith out into the tunnels, into the warrens of old mine-drifts under the city, the ancient honeycomb cut into the stone. He knew where he was going; it was a bit of a walk, but Lilith was not heavy, and he wanted rather badly to be far away from Corvin and his works.
In fact, it took him only about three-quarters of an hour before he came to the surface. It was extremely evident that someone had come and gone along this particular tunnel many times in the recent past, tracks of a woman’s high-heeled shoes visible in the dirt and rubble of the floor, and he recognized this particular violet-and-vanilla perfume.
What were you up to? he thought, looking down at the woman in his arms. What did you want with this particular place?
Stepping out of the tunnel mouth into the small enclosed space of a mausoleum was briefly claustrophobic, but Grisaille leaned against the stone door slab and it opened easily on the blue-black quiet of a peaceful spring night. He stepped out into the air, Lilith cradled against his chest. All around him were acres of tiny houses of the dead: Paris’s largest and most famous necropolis, the Père Lachaise cemetery, with its narrow cobbled streets, spreading trees, and prestigious inhabitants – and its crematorium, at the top of the hill, neo-Byzantine grandeur with two stark chimneys rising above the stonework.
One of the jobs Grisaille had done, in his long, long not-quite-life, was run the retorts in the small hours of the night at a crematorium in London. It was easy work, they paid reasonably well, didn’t mind that he was largely nocturnal – it fit the hours – and nobody asked any inconvenient questions. That had been about ten years ago, but he thought he’d probably be able to work out how French crematory retorts were operated. And fire was better than – so much better than – the black sewer water. Fire was… clean.
No one else was around. He could do this, and then think about his next move. It wouldn’t take long; there wasn’t much of her. Two hours, maybe, and then – well. Then he’d have to make a few more decisions.
Grisaille loped easily up the cobbled street toward the white building, glimmering through the trees, and had absolutely no difficulty whatsoever in gaining entry without setting off alarms. By now he had a sixth, seventh, and eighth sense for where cameras were likely to be, and he shoved enough energy into not being seen that visible-light sensors couldn’t pick him up; infrared, of course, would show him only as a very slightly increased patch of room temperature.
He was in luck. The company that had built the Père Lachaise retorts was one he knew.
Grisaille didn’t bother with the cardboard container; he set Lilith’s body down on the gurney exactly as it was, still clad in the nightgown he and Helsing had put her into not so long ago. He lit the burners, and – before he slid her into the firebrick-arched enclosure of the retort, silent except for the faint roar of almost colorless gas flame – bent to kiss her forehead, just once. She hadn’t deserved this.
Most of them hadn’t. Not all, but most.
He could remember, when he’d first woken to a subtly different consciousness after the change, mourning for the things he had suddenly lost. For a life left behind, a lifetime’s worth of presence in the world, closed up and ended. He could remember weeping a little at the thought of everything lost and wasted, everything gone beyond his reach. He could even almost remember what it had been like to understand for the first time, truly understand, that there was no going back; that there was no back to go to.
That was a long time ago, he thought, closing his eyes. It did no good; he could still see much too clearly with his mind’s eye.
One gets used to it. With practice.
He looked down again at Lilith’s face for a long moment; and then sent her into the retort in a single smooth motion. The door descended slowly enough that he could clearly see the faint blue burning jets splash into bright gold fire as they found her, as they began to feed.
Crepusculus was more subdued than Brightside had seen him in years as they turned to leave the ghosts’ little soiree; subdued, and that was wrong, that was yet another indication that the world was spinning off its accustomed bearings, heading toward something unpleasant and yet not quite entirely understood. This morning he’d been remembering things Brightside hadn’t thought about in decades.
“You all right?” said Brightside uselessly as they walked down the narrow cobbled street.
“Fine,” said Crepusculus. He paused to light a cigarette, and then stiffened, staring back the way they’d come.
“What is it?” Brightside asked, already turning himself; he saw it at once, pale wisps of smoke where no smoke should be, rising from the stack of the cemetery’s crematorium. Someone was burning bodies at an hour when no respectable person should even be present inside these gates.
Bodies, or something else.
He and Crepusculus looked at one another, and then the latter threw down his cigarette, stepped on it, and nodded back up the hill. Brightside didn’t have to say a word; neither of them did. This was at least something easier to think about than the potential destabilization of the fabric of the universe.
It didn’t take them long to climb the hill to the crematorium. The building was dark except for the faint pale smoke coming out of the right stack; of course, the retort chamber wouldn’t have windows for the curious to peer through.
“We should go in,” said Crepusculus, as if he wanted to be reassured.
“We should.”
Together they concentrated briefly and proceeded to walk directly through the wall – it felt a little bit like passing through a dull cold waterfall – and found themselves in a thoroughly utilitarian chamber containing two large metal monoliths, each with a rectangular door stained black with soot, each surmounted by a massive exhaust chimney, each equ
ipped with a control panel with a whole Christmas tree’s worth of telltale lights. One of these was lit up; there was a roaring like a distant gale, heavy in the air, and a smell of burning matter.
And sitting beside the oven that was running: a vampire in a folding chair, bent over with his head in his hands, who took a good thirty seconds to react to their appearance.
“Who the hell are you?” he said in French – sounding, Brightside thought, less surprised than resigned, as if the night had already offered him sufficient surprises to render the sudden appearance of two strangers relatively uninteresting.
“Could ask you the same question, sir,” said Crepusculus. The ghosts had described vampires, or a vampire, actively excavating graveyard dirt, but by no means could the one sitting on the folding chair by the oven be described as voluptuous – or female of any description. He had died in what looked like his early thirties, and the only thing even vaguely feminine about him was the length of the silvering hair falling over his shoulders. “You haven’t by any chance been digging up people’s graves and taking bits away with you?” Crepusculus continued.
“What?” said the vampire, and both of them could tell the irritated confusion was genuine. He had no idea what they were talking about. “No. I’m – who are you? What are you doing here?”
“Investigating,” said Brightside. “Who’s in the retort, and how exactly did they come to be in there?” He nodded at the oven still busily roaring away.
They watched as his face went greyish for a moment, the confused look hardening into a profoundly grim expression. “Her name was Samantha, but she went by Lilith,” he said, “and she deserved a bit better than simply being dumped into the drains like all the rest of them. Who are you?”
“Brightside and Dammerung, remedial psychopomps,” said Crepusculus. Brightside thought: All the rest of whom? “We’ve had a report of vampires, or a vampire, disturbing some graves on a regular basis. You wouldn’t know anything about that, Mr…?”
“Grisaille,” said the vampire. “Remedial psychopomps? You – what, go around tidying up after people who didn’t get shuffled off to the afterlife properly the first time?”
Brightside raised an eyebrow, glancing over at his partner, who looked equally nonplussed. “Most people need a bit more explanation than that,” he said. “Yes. And there’s something going very badly wrong with the world, or at least this particular bit of it: something to do with that incredibly gaudy opera house, to go by what we’ve seen already, and it might involve grave-robbing by voluptuous lady vampires.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Grisaille, and looked back at the door of the crematory retort. “All I know is that I spent several hours quite recently helping to pull this one through a particularly nasty OD, which I can tell you was not the most joyous and pleasant of experiences – only to find that her charming boyfriend had subsequently snapped her neck and wasted all our hard work and time, and why I am telling you gentlemen this is beyond my comprehension —”
He broke off and pressed his hands to his face, and both of them watched as he forced himself back to something approaching calm. “His last instruction to me was ‘clean up this mess,’ and here I am cleaning it up, all nice and neat and environmentally conscious and aboveboard, like a good little lieutenant.” The words dripped acid.
Brightside looked from him to Crepusculus and back again. “I see,” he said after a long moment. “I’m – sorry for your loss.”
“Oh, she’s not my loss,” he said. “Frankly I couldn’t stand her; but – all that work, all that effort, and then he simply switched her off like a toy he’d had enough of, and I – don’t think I can see myself going back for more of that. I really don’t.”
“Who’s he?” Crepusculus said.
“Our great and fearless leader? Corvin. King of the fucking vampires.”
“How many of you are there?”
“Sixteen – no, seventeen now with the kid. Sixteen without Lilith. Fifteen without me.”
Crepusculus and Brightside exchanged another glance. “You know,” said Brightside, “there’s someone you should probably talk to about this. Someone who might be able to give you some advice about what to do next.”
“Oh yeah?” said Grisaille with a sneer. “Vampire oracle of Paris, step right up and receive your fortune?”
“Not quite. His name is Irazek and he’s a demon – and he should probably know about gangs of vampires running around the city. St. Germain’s really the one to talk to, but he’s been distracted recently; Irazek might be your best bet for reporting this. If you do mean to leave the group.”
“I already have,” said Grisaille bleakly. “I’m not going back. Fuck it. I might as well go tattle on the rest of them. Look – you’re – if you’re really psychopomps – I don’t know if she has any kind of soul left, if there’s much in there at all, but if there is, could you…”
He trailed off, scrubbing his hands over his face again, took a deep breath. “Could you maybe stay to make sure whatever’s left of her gets to where it’s going? She wasn’t a prize specimen of humanity when she was alive and she was damned annoying as a vampire but – she deserves some peace, if she can get there.”
Brightside nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course. We’ll take her home, if there’s anything to take.”
“Thank you,” said Grisaille, and stood up. He was taller than Brightside had thought, slender, dressed in grey and black. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, with grave-robbing, but it’s not exactly out of character for Corvin’s lot.”
“Tell Irazek that, too,” said Brightside. “He lives at 126 Rue du Temple, third floor. Give him this.” He handed Grisaille a card, which the latter stared at for a moment before pocketing. “And – good luck.”
“In my experience, there’s no such thing,” said the vampire, sighing. “You have to make your own luck. But… thanks for helping Lilith, if there’s anything there to be helped.”
They watched him stalk out of the room, and turned to one another. Brightside held out his hand, and Crepusculus took it, squeezing firmly.
“Time to go play in the fire,” he said. “I think there is something in there, Gervase, a little bit of soul left: I can feel it, but it’s very faint.”
“Me too,” said Brightside. “No time like the present, eh?”
Hand in hand, they stepped forward, and walked into the stainless steel facing of the oven; through the refractory firebrick, through the roaring of the gas jets, until they could close their arms around the wavering faint image of a woman’s body invisible to human eyes; flickering and trembling, it was barely present at all until their arms closed around her.
— who are you —
A tiny thread of a voice, terrified and lost.
We’re friends, said Crepusculus. It’s okay, Samantha. It’s over now. It’s time to come home.
I have had enough of stumbling through underground passageways, thought Greta Helsing, to last me any number of lifetimes, and yet here we are again: lost under Paris, lost in the dark.
The tunnel leading away from Corvin’s lair had undergone several twists and turns, leaving the electric light of the inhabited passageways behind, and it was only because the little turnip-sized wellmonster huddled against her neck had quite unexpectedly begun to glimmer palely with a cold unnatural light that she was able to find her way at all. When I get out of this, she told herself, eyes wide in the near-complete darkness, I am so writing a paper on these creatures. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of them bioluminescing, but I’m jolly glad they do. Its eyes were two small pale lamps, brighter than the glowing skin around them.
But even by monsterlight, Greta could make out only a few feet in front of her, and she walked along with one hand trailing against the tunnel wall to keep her bearings, moving as fast as she dared. She had no idea how long it would take for the vampires to discover her absence, and she knew very well – and wished she didn’
t – how sensitive their sense of smell was: they’d have no problem tracking her —
She stumbled over a rougher patch in the floor and stopped to clutch at her foot, toes stinging in pain. Maybe she should have kept the stupid shoes Grisaille had made her wear. Four-inch spiked heels might at least have offered some protection from sharp objects underfoot, and if worse came to worst, she could have tried using one as a weapon.
The whistler had been following her a few feet behind her left shoulder, and now she felt the soft brush of fabric as it got close enough to touch. It was oddly comforting, despite the actual nature of the thing manifesting inside the fabric, a small affirmation: You may be lost in the dark, but you’re not lost in the dark alone.
Limping a little, she got moving again. Soon the nature of the tunnel itself underwent a change: instead of a rough-walled quarry passage, it was lined with masonry, a thing built rather than simply dug out of the living rock. A breath of dank, chilly air from the darkness up ahead touched Greta’s face, and she paused for a moment with her fingertips on the cold stone of the wall while another wave of dread washed through her: what was up ahead, what was she walking into, whose lair might this be?
