Dreadful Company

by Vivian Shaw

  Can’t be much worse than what’s behind me, she thought determinedly, and turned to face the hovering specter of the whistler. In the pale greenish light, the taffeta looked brown-purple, the color of dried blood. “Can you go on up ahead,” she said, “and listen for danger?” She’d been about to say “see what you can see,” but of course it couldn’t: E. sibilus was completely blind, navigating only by hearing and touch.

  This one touched her shoulder again, with that oddly gentle touch, as if it was still so curious about what kind of creature she might be – and then turned and floated away into the darkness of the passageway.

  Greta, left alone with the small wellmonster, discovered that her hand was damp from leaning against the stone wall. She moved closer and saw in the dimness a faint reflection, a trickle of water making its way out from between two stones. Cupping her hand against the wall, she gathered a scant palmful of water and offered it to the monster – which promptly let go of her neck, finally, and hopped straight into the hollow of her hand with a splash.

  “You really are thirsty, aren’t you,” she said, and held it close to the trickle running down the wall. If she hadn’t been quite so desperately exhausted and strung out and terrified in general, she would probably have squeaked at the sheer adorability of watching a tiny monster giving itself a bath after lapping up quite a lot of water with a small grey leaflike tongue. As it was, she simply leaned against the wall and let her eyes close for a long moment or two, breathing. The metallic tang of exhaustion in the back of her throat was stronger now.

  And suddenly she was somewhere else, the cold stone gone into a dizzying swirl of confusion, like being spun unexpectedly in some huge off-kilter machine – still dark, in the dark, somewhere in the dark and —

  — enveloping her all at once, sinking into her, sharp and vivid emotion: fear, raw fear, heart-pounding sickening fear and somewhere nearby music playing, titanic, vast, furious music, an organ giving voice to notes both glorious and terrible, feverish, scarlet —

  Something touched her face.

  Greta jerked out of the – dream, that had to have been a dream, there was no music and no fury here: only the hollow dripping of water onto stone, and the slowing of her own heart from its frantic speed.

  The whistler tilted its head at her, with what looked like concern. Greta straightened up and returned the little creature in her hand to its perch on her shoulder, where it continued to wash itself not unlike a very small cat. “I’m all right,” she said, scrubbing at her face, remembering too late that one hand was regrettably covered in wellmonster smell. “Is it safe up ahead?”

  A nod, in the dimness, and then it reached out one of its arms to her. After a moment Greta held out her hand, and the taffeta wrapped itself around her fingers, feeling like a small hand inside a mitten. I wonder what their physical form actually is, she thought disjointedly, and then, as it tugged on her hand, she simply let herself be led.

  The passageway twisted and turned. She had a horrible idea that they were doubling back on themselves, that this was all just a maze Corvin had had installed to toy with escaping prisoners – and then she thought: No, that’s too clever for him, too clever by half. They were going somewhere. She only wished she knew where.

  Greta had no idea how much time had passed when she began to smell the unmistakable high-sulfur reek of sewers, and for a nasty moment she was back in a church in London staring at the wreck of what had been a man, a creature that used the sewers under London as its highways and byways on its journeys around the metropolis. I can’t, she thought, I can’t go into the sewer. She made herself think of Jean Valjean, pacing through the cloaca with an unconscious idiot slung over his shoulder, but it didn’t help.

  The whistler tugged at her hand, and Greta kept walking, into a thicker and thicker stench. She was expecting at any moment to pass through some kind of archway into a round tunnel knee-deep in human waste, and tried not to think of her nice clean cell back in Corvin’s lair, with all mod cons, even if she did have to be taken to and from them under guard —

  — blaring, deafening music, an attack on the ears and the mind, music written by a madman who had already tasted the heady brew of murder and now could not satisfy his thirst – red, scarlet, crimson notes, and around her, smooth glass walls in the blackness, smooth glass that met at a precise angle, that offered no purchase to her scrabbling fingers, and she could not reach the trapdoor that had dropped her into the monster’s killing bottle, it was too far, and oh but when the music stopped, that was so much worse, that meant he was there, right outside, and who knew if he had heard her fall, if he knew she was there, if the tortures would start automatically – he had secret ways, he was the lover of trapdoors —

  This time Greta knew it wasn’t a dream: she’d been wide awake when that one flashed over her, an incredibly vivid snatch of someone else’s memory. She came back to herself finding the whistler squeezing her hand almost painfully tight – okay, they are pretty strong, she thought, note to self – and squeezed back, just as hard.

  She wasn’t hallucinating.

  She hadn’t ingested anything that could do that to her, and vampire thrall simply didn’t cause hallucinations, either immediate or delayed.

  It didn’t feel like a hallucination, either: she knew what those were like, she’d had a couple of bad reactions to some medicine or other as a child, and she would have recognized the physical symptoms long before the point of seeing stuff that wasn’t there. This was different. This felt like the patchy fading in and out of a radio station just on the edge of its range, static occasionally washing through the sound, interspersed with clear reception.

  It’s not me, she thought. It’s this place. I’m – moving through patches of something that isn’t right.

  And it was so familiar. She couldn’t remember where she’d seen – or heard – about any such thing, but it was sickeningly familiar all the same: mad music, trapped inside glass walls.

  Greta had never been even slightly capable of metatemporal perception, or in fact any supernatural ability at all, as she’d told Ruthven in the hotel a thousand years ago: she was an entirely bog-standard ordinary human, and therefore the fact that she was perceiving this, while lucid and of relatively sound mind, meant something was badly wrong. Something very much larger than herself.

  The whistler tugged at her hand again: Come on. Still a little dazed, she stumbled after it, and only noticed afterward that they’d passed a black opening in the tunnel to one side, following which the smell of human waste began immediately to decrease. They weren’t going into the sewers, after all. They were going… somewhere else.

  — the torture chamber, this is the torture chamber, he had showed her how it works, six-sided mirrored walls and the drums with images on them that reflect into eternity, the illusion of a forest in the Congo, the iron tree in one corner with its painted leaves and dangling Punjab lasso —

  Greta shook her head as if she could somehow dislodge the flickering scraps of sound and vision, still trying to work out where the hell she’d seen or read about something like it before; she squeezed the whistler’s unseen hand, and walked faster into the dark.

  Twice more in the passageway she saw and felt things that were not there, but with varying levels of clarity: interspersed with the vivid images and awareness of her surroundings there was a kind of formless, visceral, atavistic terror. After the second time, there had been a pause, and she had begun to hope that maybe they were fading out, that she was passing beyond whatever sphere of influence was responsible for the effects, when the third hit like a physical blow.

  — drowning, she was drowning in the dark, like a rat in a trap, the water swirling all around her, cold pressure against the crevices of her body, whirling in the rising tide like a piece of wreckage – the tree, the iron tree, under her reaching fingers – how much space was there between the iron tree and the domed ceiling of the torture chamber? – the air rushing away as the black water ros
e – she cried out, Erik, Erik, I saved your life, you were doomed and I opened the gates of life to you, Erik, but there was nothing in all the world but the gurgle and roar of water, nothing at all, but a faint echo of some unseen voice: barrels, barrels, any barrels to sell? – before the world closed like a fan in darkness —

  Hard stone, damp and cold, pressed into her knees and the palms of her hands. The dark around her had changed: it was no longer black water surrounding her, but air, and the faint glow of the monster still clinging to her shoulder was enough for her to see a little by. Her hair hung in her face, swaying as she panted.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said in a little strengthless voice. “Jesus Christ, I remember this.”

  She hadn’t liked Phantom of the Opera at all, really, other than the lovingly detailed descriptions of the Palais Garnier and the bit at the end where the boring vicomte was suddenly plunged into an adventure with the Persian, the only interesting character other than the phantom himself. That part of the book she’d paid more attention to, and now she could remember reading about what she’d just experienced. It had felt real: the terror of drowning in the dark, in the monster’s mirrored torture chamber, had felt as real as you like.

  So why, she thought now, why is that story suddenly happening to me?

  Maybe Leroux hadn’t been making it up. Maybe the book was actually faithful, unlike the rest of classic horror lit. Maybe there really had been a lover-of-trapdoors who called the Palais Garnier his home.

  Wonder about it somewhere else, she told herself, and got to her feet. She didn’t have time for this – the vampires might already have discovered she was missing; she couldn’t hang around all night waiting to be found, story or no story.

  The whistler, which had been hovering awkwardly a little way away, came back over to her. She was probably confusing the hell out of it with her behavior, poor thing. Greta reached out her hand and felt the firm grip of its narrow hand inside the taffeta. “Let’s go,” she said. “I’ll try not to fall over again, I’m sorry about that.”

  The chill of the imagined water was still with her, and she shivered in the remains of the stupid ballgown as she hurried along. The passageway narrowed, growing damper: water dripped from the rock above her head and ran down the uneven stone of the walls. They had been descending for a little while, she thought, and was dimly aware that the water table under this part of the city was very high indeed, and then tried not to think about it. The whistler was leading her somewhere, and it was probably not directly to certain death.

  When the passage dead-ended in neatly mortared masonry, much neater than the stone walls of the passageway, she blinked at it, and at the metal pressure door that had been set into the stone as if into some ship or submarine’s interior. It was the kind of door that locked with a central crank wheel, ancient and corroded.

  Greta closed her fingers around the wheel, and expected a terrible rusty shriek when she gave it a turn – but the wheel spun smoothly, well greased, and the door swung open on a subtly different darkness.

  She knew where she was now. With the light of the tiny creature sitting on her shoulder to guide her, with the hard little hand of wrinkled taffeta in hers, Greta stepped over the threshold of another kind of monster’s home.

  CHAPTER 10

  T

  he knock on the door startled St. Germain – startled all of them, in fact. Irazek broke off mid-sentence and looked up, blinking. They’d moved from the kitchen to the living room, but the discussion of interference points and their significance for the fabric of reality had continued.

  “Who on earth is that this time of night?” Ruthven said. “Do you have a particularly busy social life?”

  “Not even slightly,” said the demon, getting up. “Nobody’s rung the bell to be let in downstairs; it must be someone with access to the building – or maybe Mr. Brightside and Mr. Dammerung, but I would have thought they’d call. I do hope nothing’s happened to them; it’s been ages.”

  “Those can’t possibly be real names,” said Ruthven. St. Germain had noticed before that fatigue and worry tended to erode the vampire’s usual shell of patience and understanding; he wasn’t usually quite so sharply acerbic. “‘Mr. Brightside’? I —”

  He broke off, looking past St. Germain at the door, and all the faint color drained out of his face, leaving him wax-white and staring. St. Germain turned to see a stranger standing in the doorway and was hit all at once with a wave of scent he recognized.

  “You were the one I smelled at the Sorbonne,” he said. “I knew it was a vampire, but not which —”

  St. Germain broke off, only just in time to grab Ruthven by the arm before the latter could lunge out of his chair. He’d never seen him look quite so inhuman. “Edmund,” he began. Ruthven ignored him.

  “I know you,” he snarled at the newcomer. “I saw you at the Opera. Before all this began. You winked at her. If you are behind this, I swear to all the gods I will dismember you – Alceste, let go —”

  St. Germain had to exert considerable force to hang on to him. “Edmund,” he said again, aware that Francis Varney had also gone dead-white. “Let’s at least ask him a few questions.”

  He had been watching the strange vampire’s face. Tall and slim, dark, his long hair in narrow locks, wearing an expression of slightly superior and cynical amusement – but just for a moment there had been both weariness and a drawing kind of misery in those red eyes. He hid it well, but nothing could lie to a werewolf’s nose: whoever this was, he was not even slightly all right.

  “It’s a whole party,” he said, drawling not just with his voice but his expression. St. Germain had heard that kind of drawl before; it was specifically designed to elicit a strong desire to hit the drawler. “Here’s me being told to go and have a natter with a demon, and what do I find but a little congregation. So terribly sorry for interrupting the fun.”

  “Who are you?” said Varney, grinding out the words, keeping control of himself with visible effort.

  “The name’s Grisaille. And you are a vampyre and you are a werewolf and you, my dear, are Lord Ruthven, famed in song and story; très bona to varda your particular eek, and haven’t I just got such a lot of things to tell you.”

  Behind him, Irazek looked apologetic. “Um,” he said. “He’s – I had to let him in – Dammerung and Brightside sent him to see me, something’s going on —”

  “Where’s Greta?” Ruthven’s voice cracked like a whip.

  “Safe underground, as far as I know.”

  “As far as you know,” repeated Varney. “That’s not good enough.”

  “He wants her alive.” The drawl had dropped almost completely, and St. Germain could see the effort with which he got it back again. “She’s still useful, don’t you know.”

  He’d clearly meant useful to be mocking, but it slid into vicious, and St. Germain thought the cutting edge of it was directed at Grisaille himself, sharp and acid. He wondered why.

  “Who is he?” Ruthven demanded.

  “His name is Neil Geoffrey Higgins, which is why he’s calling himself ‘Corvin.’ He’s originally from Sheffield. He’s behind the series of bodies in the river drained of all their blood, and also the theft of several hundred thousand euros’ worth of wine and spirits from the cellars of various unsuspecting citizens into which he has caused tunnels to be dug. He murders people when he gets bored with them, decorates his lair with stolen bones, and dyes his hair black with L’Oréal box color. Up until a couple of hours ago, I was his second-in-command.”

  Grisaille’s voice had been steadily losing the affected tone, and underneath it, there was nothing but stark and exhausted bitterness. When he’d finished reciting the list, he covered his face with his hands and took a deep unsteady breath.

  “Are you all right?” said Irazek after a moment.

  “No,” said Grisaille behind his hands, “although I hoped you wouldn’t notice.”

  “Sit down,” St. Germain said firmly, and r
ecognized the flicker of relief in Grisaille’s scent: gratitude for being told what to do. Obedience.

  He kept his hand wrapped around Ruthven’s arm, in case Ruthven was still feeling actively murderous, but the tense dangerous energy had gone out of him; expressionlessly he watched Grisaille sink into a chair as if a string holding him up had just been cut, and St. Germain thought the immediate danger of bloody violence was past.

  “I think,” said Varney, “you had better tell us everything, quite rapidly.” The iron control was still there in his voice, the effort it was taking him to remain calm and collected.

  Grisaille nodded, his eyes shut. “If I have to remember everything,” he said, “I’d like to remember doing something right for a change.”