by Vivian Shaw
Still that bitterness, and still the flicker of gratitude for being given an order to follow. I was his second-in-command, he’d said.
St. Germain wondered what that had been like. And then thought, as he got up and went to fetch a glass of Irazek’s whiskey, that he didn’t actually want to know.
Ruthven, too, had had recourse to Irazek’s drinks trolley. In fact, all of them had: the story Grisaille told was the sort of thing that went much better with something to take the immediate edge off.
His arm hurt a little where St. Germain had grabbed him; he knew there would be brief red marks on his skin in the shape of the werewolf’s fingers, and was glad now of St. Germain’s quick reflexes. The shock of seeing the stranger from the Opera again – the one who’d winked at Greta, the one she’d pointed out – had blanked out half his higher brain functions, leaving only the uncivilized desire to rend and maim; and that sort of thing simply wasn’t done.
Ruthven didn’t go in for vicious murder, as a habit. And truth be told, as soon as Grisaille started telling his story, the flat blank hate had drained out of Ruthven’s mind, to be replaced with a weary, familiar kind of misery. The world was, as several of his kind had taken pains to point out, a terrible old vale of tears in which unspeakable things occurred with depressing regularity.
And under that misery, of course, the need to fix this situation. And the guilt: he should have made sure of this particular vampire coven leader the last time they’d met, ages ago now, back in London. He could clearly recall the crunch of that face underneath his fist, the way Corvin’s people had held him up by his arms, choking and sobbing through the blood that poured from his nose; could remember telling the lot of them to get the fuck out of his city and try to grow up, if they could manage it. He’d thought that had been the end.
The litany of things that Corvin had done since then – had bragged of doing – was more than enough to send red rage-mist clouding Ruthven’s vision all over again, but he did his best to compartmentalize: he needed to hear what this person had to say.
“I’ve only been with his group for a couple of years,” Grisaille was saying now, sitting forward in the demon’s period piece avocado-green armchair, forearms resting on his thighs, looking into the amber depths of his glass rather than meeting anybody’s gaze. “He’d already had the hate-on for you, Lord Ruthven, long before I joined up. I think he’s been thinking about it ever since that incident in London, and waiting for a chance to get revenge, and your friend Dr. Helsing simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time: he chanced to see her with you, wondered who she was, and told me to find out. And I found out, and – told him. And he had me snatch her as bait to capture you.”
Another flare and fade of intense, furious anger; this time Ruthven was in control of it, and set down his glass with deliberate care before it shattered in his hand. He was feeling slightly sick.
Grisaille hurried on, still not meeting anyone’s gaze: “Before that – he traveled. I know he’s been to Russia, at least, and possibly to some of the other bits of Eastern Europe. Wouldn’t put it past him to have gone looking for old Dracula’s castle, in the hopes that he could set up his headquarters in such a storied site.”
“He’d have a bloody difficult time of it,” said Ruthven, without actually meaning to. “The Voivode doesn’t take kindly to outside intrusion, no matter who’s intruding, dead or alive. He and his lady wife keep themselves very much to themselves.”
Grisaille looked up at him, the scarlet eyes dilated, huge black pupils eating up all but a thin ring of red. “He’s real, too?”
“Oh yes,” said Ruthven. “He’s real. And actually I think he’d absolutely want to host your Corvin, if by ‘host,’ you mean ‘throw into the oubliette and leave him there for a century or two.’”
“He’s not my Corvin,” Grisaille said, and rubbed at his face again. “I’m – look. Can we by any chance perhaps pretend that we’ve already established how bloody awful I feel about my part in the current situation, and move on to what the hell to do about it? Is that a thing we could do?”
Beside Ruthven, Varney stiffened slightly, and Ruthven knew his expressionless expression would have cracked a bit to let the menace through. “Perhaps. If you care to provide a single solitary reason for us to believe you’re really here to be of use, tell us exactly how we are to get inside this person’s lair,” he said, enunciating with silken, deliberate clarity.
Ruthven thought again how much his voice balanced out the rest of him: Varney could have had any career he liked on radio or as an orator, and almost certainly as a professional singer. He lacked the easy unintentional style and grace of the classic draculine species – but that voice made up for so very much.
“The four of us ought to be enough to deal with whatever we find down there,” said St. Germain, and Ruthven glanced over at him, a little glad to be distracted. “Fifteen vampires, most if not all of which will be asleep during daylight hours, of varying levels of competence, against us.”
Grisaille blinked at him, and looked at Varney and Ruthven, his expression much too clear; Ruthven was sure he didn’t know how transparent he looked. “You want me to come with you?”
“Of course we do,” Ruthven said, sharp. “We need a guide. And you might prove useful.”
He hadn’t meant it as a barb, but the word useful made Grisaille flinch ever so slightly. “Yes,” he said, “of course, I’ll take you in the back way, most of them don’t know about it – you’d trust me?”
“I don’t think we’ve got a lot of choice right now,” said Ruthven, and then deliberately reaching for his own memories of Polari slang, “ducky.”
That, an intentional jab, went home far harder than he’d intended. Grisaille flushed dark mahogany, instinctively jerking back a little as if he’d been physically struck. “Yeah, all right,” he muttered, sounding entirely like a tired and miserable person not trying to pretend to be anything else at all.
“You —” Ruthven began, but just then Irazek dropped his pen and said, “Oh, no.”
Everyone else turned to stare at him; he was sitting at the table with his head in his hands, staring at a map of Paris on which he had drawn several red lines converging on two points quite close to one another.
Ruthven came over to peer at the map. One of the crosses was located not very far from the Moulin Rouge, about where Grisaille had said the lair’s main entrance and exit lay. The other was directly over the Palais Garnier.
“They aren’t just murdering people,” said Irazek, looking up at Grisaille. “I mean, that would be bad enough. But whatever they’re up to is affecting reality itself. This is where those incursions happened, and because one’s in the Opera, which is – like a kind of magical echo chamber, it augments whatever’s done in there – every time they do whatever they’re doing, it’s weakening the fabric of reality. Something’s been repeatedly summoned, over and over, far more often than any such spell is supposed to be invoked. It’s a bit like – oh, I don’t know, hitting a thick glass window over and over and over with a tiny mallet; each individual blow isn’t that hard but over time the cracks just… well, spread, until the whole thing gives.”
“Do you know,” said Grisaille, sounding slightly unhinged, “I would bet money that Lilith had no idea she was doing that with her little hobby?”
“What was she doing, other than orgiastic murder parties?” Ruthven said.
“Well, other than orgiastic murder parties in which she abused multiple substances and had a lot of very noisy public sex with Corvin, I’m pretty sure she spent her time making monsters. Or – I suppose summoning, if that’s the word we’ve decided to use.”
“She what?” Varney demanded, blinking.
“Monsters. I never saw it happen, but she’s got —” He broke off, took a swallow of his drink, coughed. “She had. I keep having to remind myself that she’s dead, that he killed her. She had this – charm-circle thing, with all sorts of squiggly rune
s, and candles, and she did something every now and then, some kind of magic, and afterward there were more of the creatures. There’s two kinds: a hairy kind and a sort of grey froggy sort that smells terrible, and there are lots of them.”
He looked at the others, the frank puzzlement impossible to mistake. “Corvin threw a fit a while ago, told her to cut it out or take it elsewhere; he didn’t like all the magic bullshit cluttering up the place. Not that she’ll be doing it now. How bad of a problem is this?”
“How long had this been going on?” Irazek asked.
“Months,” said Grisaille. “I think, anyway. She seemed to like doing it. At first it was just one or two, but she’d been doing it more recently. Or they’ve been breeding. Or both. I don’t know which.”
St. Germain snapped his fingers. “That’s where they came from, then. The ghoul chieftain I talked to mentioned them, but didn’t make any sense – I couldn’t work out why anyone would be making them. And that has to be why the ghosts at Les Innocents showed up now. That’s damaged reality enough to allow easy timeslips – before, there wasn’t such a straightforward route through the planes for them to manifest.”
Irazek nodded. “And if it’s not stopped – and patched – we’re just going to see more and more of that, and it will get worse.”
“How much worse?” Grisaille asked.
“You do not wish to know.” Irazek ran his hands through his hair again, and for the first time, Ruthven realized that he had a tiny, neat pair of horns hidden among the curls – hidden very well, because they were exactly the same carroty-orange as his hair.
“Can you patch it?” Ruthven asked him. “More importantly, is it an immediate threat right now?”
“Well – yes and no, I mean – not right this second, but if anything else comes through, I can’t promise you reality won’t totally fracture – it has to get fixed and I can’t do it. I have to call someone who can. Your friend —”
“Needs to get out of there,” said Varney, clipped and neat, and probably no one who didn’t know him would have been able to tell quite how murderously angry he was. Ruthven moved a little closer to him, instinctive. “Now,” Varney added. “And once we’ve got her safely out of this creature’s clutches, you and whatever less-incompetent friends you’ve unaccountably managed to make can get on with papering over the hole in the world at your personal leisure.”
“That’s not how it works,” said Irazek, squeezing his eyes shut. “That’s not how any of this works – but go, get her out of there, before anything else starts to go very badly wrong.”
Not very far away at all, Greta Helsing paused in a subtly different darkness: too wide and open for the faint glow of the little creature on her shoulder to make much of a difference. Even without sight she could tell that she was in a room rather than a tunnel – a room with ordinary walls, straight and vertical rather than roughly cut out of the rock or arched in masonry overhead.
There was a very strong smell of mildew – no, of mold, a specific kind of rot. Wellmonsters, Greta thought. Lots of them. Very carefully she took another step into the room, one hand clasped in the wrinkled taffeta grip of her whistler, and was not entirely surprised when the metal door swung shut behind her with a final sort of clang.
The sound had sent a shock through the unseen room, and the floating whistler let go of her hand. One by one, a constellation of little points of greenish light appeared in the dark, all around her. In pairs. Little pale cold lamps, watching her, unblinking. Wellmonster eyes.
The one on her shoulder gave a series of glups that Greta really wished she could interpret. There were a lot of them. Rather more than one might comfortably wish to see in one place, especially alone in the dark in a ruined underground lair.
Well. Mostly alone. The whistler in its taffeta drapery had drifted a little way away from her, invisible in the darkness, and she wished she still had the negligible comfort of its hard little hand in hers.
Glup, said her shoulder monster, and whatever that meant appeared to be convincing: slowly the room lightened around her, details becoming visible, as the monsters’ skin began to glow almost as brightly as their eyes.
I am going to have to write a paper on bioluminescence in P. incolens, she thought again, in the part of her mind not actively engaged in observation. The revealed surroundings were… surreal. She was standing in what must have been at one point a rather upsettingly ordinary sitting room, complete with Louis Philippe couch and armchair, the remains of knickknacks still sitting on a stone mantelpiece. Everything looked green and black with rot in the wellmonsters’ light; satin-striped wallpaper hung down in wet tatters; the carpet underneath her bare feet squelched with unpleasant slime.
Her whistler drifted along the mantelpiece, apparently sniffing at what it found there, and then ascended to hover just beneath the ceiling, intent on something. Greta looked up at it, wondering what it was looking at, and went cold again all over.
To her left, high on the wall, was a little curtain half-rotted from its rod, the small rectangular window behind it opening on complete darkness. A ladder led up to it. Greta thought she knew what was on the other side of that window —
— drowning, drowning in the dark like a rat in a trap, the water swirling all around her, nothing but flat cold mirror glass and then the tree, the iron tree, under her reaching fingers —
She knew exactly where she was now. She was in the house of the phantom, the house of Erik, built directly into the double wall of the Opera foundation. If the book was accurate after all – and so far it seemed to be matching up exactly – she knew that beyond one of the black-gaping doorways would lie a decaying bed on which a dim if talented young woman had once slept, and that beyond the other almost certainly would be the remains of a pipe organ, and a red-lined coffin on a bier. So far it had been practically word-by-word, at least as closely as she could remember Leroux.
Corvin would like this, she thought to herself. It’s just his terrible style, only much too much of a mess.
And the monsters were everywhere. Lurking in corners, settled in groups on the remains of the furniture. One clung upside-down, like a tiny grey sloth, to the sagging brass curve of a gaslight fixture. They were all very, very new.
The largest she could make out was barely the size of a half-grown kitten, six months old at most. The rest of them ranged in size from days to weeks old. Someone had been summoning them as recently as – Christ, she thought, some of these were probably made while I’ve been kept prisoner down here, what on earth are they thinking, who could possibly want this many wellmonsters?
It’s got to be the vampires, who else is down here, but why would they be making monsters at this rate, or at all?
They were watching her, glow-pale eyes steady and unwavering. There had to be forty or fifty of them at least. She was glad when the whistler drifted down to take up its position just behind her left shoulder; the touch was slightly comforting, odd as it seemed.
“Hello,” Greta said out loud, slightly surprised at how unconcerned she sounded. “I’m… a friend. I won’t harm you.”
She had no idea how good they were at human languages, but it was worth a try, and although she did get the feeling that the one on her shoulder had pretty much convinced them she wasn’t a threat, this many wellmonsters could actually be dangerous to a human if they decided to work together.
Her announcement was met with a slow wave of blinking, the creatures’ eyes slipping closed and open again, like a cloud passing in front of stars. At least these ones aren’t dehydrated, she thought; this place was the ideal temperature and humidity level for wellmonsters to thrive. Whoever was making them had at least taken that into consideration.
No, she thought after a moment, I’m pretty sure that was coincidental; whoever’s behind this isn’t exactly well versed in responsible monster husbandry.
Glup, said the one on her shoulder again, which apparently translated to show us where to go: the entire constellat
ion of monsters began a slow but inexorable process toward the door on the far side of the room, the one she thought would lead into Erik’s music chamber. She could vaguely remember a description of black hangings with white musical notes on them and thought again how much Corvin would have appreciated the opera ghost’s I-am-made-of-death aesthetic. The original edgelord. She was so tired of it. Of everything. The silver whistle was very heavy in her bodice; she thought it had probably printed itself in bruise colors over her ribs, and she could not remember a time in her life when she had felt more exhausted.
Too bad. There’s still a lot of miles to go before I sleep.
She followed the tide of monsters through the doorway – and stopped still.
There were black hangings on the wall, but these weren’t a hundred-forty-something years old, not the rotting remains of a long-dead creature’s decor: they were a very familiar spiderweb-patterned netting. And while there was a jumble of tubes and piping that might once have been an organ shoved unceremoniously into a corner, the only thing in here capable of making music was what looked in the dim light like a 1980s-vintage boombox, battered silver plastic, with a stack of cassette tapes beside it. On the floor in the center of the room was —
