Dreadful Company

by Vivian Shaw

  Greta stared. It was a summoning circle, all right, with the candles at each star point, but it had been drawn in what looked like iridescent violet lipstick.

  This was still turning over in the forefront of her mind while a rather more practical part of it pointed out candles, and then matches, in a box, by the tapes, light a goddamn candle and curse the darkness so you can see what you’re doing, woman.

  She stepped carefully around the circle – even poorly drawn in lipstick, with the runes misshapen, it still held potential power – and picked up the box of matches. Even with her eyes closed, the shock of light when she struck a match was painful after so long in near-darkness, and Greta was dazzled by it almost long enough for the flame to burn down to her fingertips. With another hissed expletive, she bent over to light two of the candles, and slowly the room brightened into being all around her; the wellmonsters’ luminescence faded out as the candle flames grew, leaving them just the familiar dappled grey she recognized.

  Along with the black cobweb drapery and purple lipstick spell circle, there were definite signs that this room had been occupied recently, and Greta was pretty sure she knew whose lair this was. Even above the generalized background reek of rot and damp and mildew – and monsters – she could make out a particular and familiar scent: sickly-sweet artificial vanilla and violets. Greta had spent a couple of solid hours surrounded by that particular perfume while she and Grisaille worked over Lilith; the woman must bathe in the stuff.

  In the corner not taken up by the wreck of the organ, a damp beanbag chair covered in purple velvet bore the imprint of an occupant. It was difficult to tell in the flickering uncertain candlelight, but Greta thought she could make out a faint sparkle: body glitter.

  There was no doubt about the forest of bottles beside the chair: mostly vodka, a couple of absinthe, one still half-full of crème de menthe – apparently even Lilith hadn’t been able to stomach much of that cloying sweetness – but the rest of them were empty. And —

  Greta took another step around the rim of the summoning circle, careful of the little monsters who had gathered all around it, and squatted down to get a closer look. The wellmonster that had been riding on her shoulder climbed down and hopped to the floor to join its fellows; the floating taffeta ghost of her whistler had already gone to investigate the ruined organ. Tucked down beside the edge of the chair, barely visible, was something whitish and bedraggled. She reached out to touch it – damp plush, soft under her fingertips – and pulled it out into the candlelight, and again stopped perfectly still to stare.

  Dangling from her hands was an ancient and disintegrating stuffed white rabbit, one button eye missing, half its seams coming apart, most of its plush worn down to nothing. The fake vanilla scent was very strong.

  She looked closer. The seams were coming apart, but someone had repaired them before. Repaired them many times, with varying levels of success, in different-colored thread.

  She sat back on her heels and looked from the elderly rabbit to the boombox, and the tapes beside it, and recognized even in the dimness a couple of the albums. Bon Jovi, she thought. Bon Jovi and U2 and Debbie Gibson, here, alone in the dark, her place, the only safe place she could find, where these things might be kept away from prying eyes.

  Greta thought of Lilith in her ridiculous Bride of Dracula outfits kneeling beside this circle, drawn in lipstick according to whatever spellbook she’d been able to find; Lilith buzzed on vodka and blood, listening to the familiar worn-thin tapes she must have taken with her from her first life, must have kept with her all this time through who knew how many moves over the decades; Lilith alone, and chanting words in the dancing candle-lit dimness to call creatures into being, small silent company but – perhaps – sometimes preferable to the clamor of the glitterati at their celebrations. Lilith with her ancient stuffed bunny. Samantha, Greta thought. Her real name is Samantha.

  And Emily. Emily, looking at her with those huge kohl-rimmed eyes, saying, It’s permanent, then? Like I can’t – it can’t be fixed?

  Her eyes prickled. Greta could remember five months ago, in a different abandoned room under a different city, on her knees, crying for grief but also for everything lost, everything stolen, everything thrown away, wasted, unwanted; and she felt those same tears threaten now.

  Underneath the city, in the mine galleries and passageways that had been abandoned for hundreds of years, lights glimmered: here and then gone, a flickering unsteady glow, several of them at once appearing, moving through the tunnels at head height before winking out again. Along with the lights came sound, a dim clink and shuffle of hammer and pick on stone, the susurrus of distant voices, fading in and out as if borne on an unfelt breeze.

  Only a few of Corvin’s people had seen the moving lamp flames in the distance, the yellowish cast of oil-lights where no lights ought to be, and none of them had reported it for fear of being laughed at for superstitious idiots. Now – as the sky in the world above began to pale in the east – the lights bobbed and flickered in a rock chamber whose barred door stood ajar, hovering around a hole that gaped in the far corner of one wall. In the dim uncertain moving illumination they provided, shadows seemed to hunch and sway inside the hole, as if something in there was trying to get out.

  Corvin saw them, saw them very well, but his vision was suffused scarlet with fury, and he could not spare a thought for the provenance of mysterious moving lights inside his cell block: everything else was eclipsed in the roaring blaze of anger at the empty cell, where was the human, where was the goddamn human he’d had safely tucked away, where was his bait —

  Yes, okay, he’d meant to murder her, bait or not, after that unspeakable little scene in the bedchamber. That didn’t matter; she was his to do with as he chose, bait or personal indulgence, it was his right – and where was his lieutenant, where was Grisaille? He’d never taken this long to arrive when Corvin yelled his name. It couldn’t have taken him more than half an hour to dump the body at the absolute outside, why hadn’t he come back —

  His hands closed on the bars of the cell – useless bars, they hadn’t stopped her getting out because someone had opened the fucking door for her, and all of a sudden Corvin was pretty sure who that might have been.

  Who knew what the two of them had talked about while they’d been messing with Lilith, who knew what kind of treachery they had plotted together, Grisaille and the human, oh, he was going to kill them both, he was going to kill them both, slowly, creatively, when he caught up with them —

  The iron of the cell bars tore in his grip with a shriek of tortured metal, echoed by Corvin’s own scream of pure fury, and it rang and rang again in the rock-cut passageways of the undercity, echoing and re-echoing into the dank chill of the webwork of tunnels, into the darkness left after the flickering lights – all at once, a wrinkle in time smoothing itself – went out.

  CHAPTER 11

  I

  t had been such a long time since Varney had been the bat.

  You never really forgot how to do it, a kind of disorienting shiver while you changed shape and size, but after a while even the familiar sensations drew away into strangeness, like old neighbors you had not seen in a long time. His chest and shoulder muscles were already aching from the unaccustomed strain of flight.

  He and Ruthven – and between them, so they both could keep an ear on him, Grisaille – flew through the breaking dawn, the rose-gold light barely registering in his limited vision but the city beneath them spread out in strobe flashes of sound. Several hundred feet below, St. Germain was running at a steady pace on all fours, keeping up with effortless ease.

  It didn’t take them very long to get from Irazek’s apartment in the Marais to the 9th arrondissement: flight and wolf-gait were much faster than they could have managed in their ordinary forms. The huge massif of the Opera was visible from quite some distance, set like a jewel in the center of the diamond pattern of its four adjoining streets, the early light gilding Apollo’s lyre ato
p the dome and beginning to slide down the shallow gables of the flyloft roof.

  Between Varney and Ruthven, the silvery-dark bat that was Grisaille drew ahead and dipped a wing, banking left. Neither of them honestly expected him to make a break for it, but both banked sharply with him, following quite close through the descent, until he landed in the shelter of a kind of alcove formed by two intersecting walls of the Opera facing the Rue Scribe.

  At this hour there were very few people around, and nobody witnessed the spectacle that was three specimens of Desmodus rotundus changing – in a rather briefly horrible manner – into three strange-eyed men. The arrival a minute or two later of a large wolf registered no more interest; St. Germain shook himself and sat down.

  “This is the Rue Scribe,” said Ruthven, hands on hips. “They park coaches here. You’re not telling me there’s a door into your underground lair right here in plain view?”

  “You haven’t read your background lit,” said Grisaille with a rather unsuccessful smile. “Don’t you know there’s a secret passage from the Rue Scribe to the underground lake? Everybody knows that. It’s so well known, in fact, that nobody actually bothers to look for it. Here.”

  He gestured toward an iron grating let into the wall which Varney had thought simply another basement window grating – and then stopped, because St. Germain’s black nose had neatly slid into the space between him and the metal. Varney was a little impressed at how silently the wolf moved.

  “Hold,” said St. Germain, very soft. “I smell something.”

  “That’s not —” Grisaille began, and a sharp elbow in the ribs from Ruthven shut him up. The wolf bent closer to the grating, hooked a paw into the cross of iron bars, and pulled gently: there was a brief unpleasant sound of tortured metal and the grating came free.

  “It’s her,” said St. Germain. “Her, very strongly.”

  “Should we go in?” Ruthven said, blinking at him.

  “I rather think we wait for the lady to come out,” St. Germain said, and backed away several steps, sitting down with his tail wrapped over his feet. Varney glanced at Ruthven, at the dark hole in the building, and had decided St. Germain was entirely wrong – had, in fact, ducked under the stone lintel – when a movement in the darkness froze him entirely still.

  Something was there. Something, coming toward them.

  After a moment Varney could make out a pale shape, and then a face, and he made a little helpless sound he could not in the least suppress: wordless gratitude. He didn’t know what to do with the alarming, unfamiliar sensation of his own rib cage trying to expand despite itself, containing a gathering, spreading, growing heat; he’d never experienced anything like it before. It was tempered with a gloss of fear: she’d been down there for days now, and God only knew what they had done to her, would she be she, would she be Greta, would she remember him at all —

  And then he saw her face change – saw the change come over her all at once, completely – saw her pick up what was left of the ragged skirts of the dress she wore and not just climb the remaining steps up to the world but run up them, emerging into the daylight all at once and flinging herself at Varney, throwing her arms around his neck.

  The scrim of fear holding back his gladness shattered all at once, and he was more than a little afraid of the sheer volume and force of it, a flood of bright hot gold. He wrapped his arms around her, held her close: stroked the planes and angles of her back. Too sharp, the bones too near the skin – what had they done to her, oh, he was going to kill somebody, he was going to – never mind, it didn’t matter now. The inexpressible sweetness of her face against his shoulder. He could have died a thousand times over if he only knew this could be waiting at the end of it.

  She was filthy, covered in various sorts of mud and slime, and the dress she was wearing had at one point been a strapless red taffeta ballgown but was now something out of nightmare, and she had a thing clinging to her neck, a creature that opened coppery froglike eyes at Varney, stared at him with what he considered impertinence, and went glup.

  Nothing seemed to matter very much, grey froggy creatures notwithstanding, because Greta was back with him; the presence of the others signified not at all, he didn’t care that they were watching, didn’t care that they were there. When her knees gave out, he caught her; lifted her gently in his arms, cradled against his chest, and leaned down to kiss her forehead very lightly.

  It was the first time Sir Francis Varney had kissed anyone in far, far longer than he could clearly remember. He could have died all over again for the faint little sigh she gave as unconsciousness rose up to claim her. No one, even when he’d been alive the first time, just a man and not a monster, had ever trusted Varney quite this much.

  Like a lot of the classic horror literature Greta had read, it turned out that Leroux’s novel had been partly accurate – much more so than she had expected – but not all the way. There was, in fact, a body of water underneath the deepest cellar of Garnier’s gold-and-marble confection – a feature that hadn’t been included in the original plans – but it did not have a shore along which one could stroll.

  When the foundations for the Opera had been dug, Garnier and his colleagues and construction workers had been thoroughly dismayed to find an underground waterway passing right through the bit of ground he’d intended to put the building on. Huge steam pumps running day and night could not dry things out sufficiently for construction to go ahead as originally planned. The solution Garnier came up with was elegant in its simplicity: to resist the pressure of the surrounding groundwater on the foundations of the building, he created a vast underground water tank – a cistern – the pressure of which pushing outward on the foundation walls would counteract the groundwater pressure coming the other way and stabilize the entire structure.

  And one of his contractors, in the process – a remarkable individual in many ways – had built himself a little house inside the cistern wall. Which also did not appear on the official plans. A house with certain peculiarities originally imagined and built by this particular architect at the Persian court, in the period known as the Rosy Hours of Mazenderan, to please the little sultana’s desire for amusing forms of death.

  A secret house. Like a few other little alterations made to Garnier’s plans by the same individual, to allow him to move throughout the vast empire of the building without ever being seen unless he chose to be.

  Greta opened the front door of Erik’s house on almost utter darkness. In front of her, two steps down, a dead-still surface reflected her candle’s flickering glow like a black glass mirror. The lake. There was no way to tell how deep it was, or what lay under the surface.

  She knew there had to be a way out to the interior of the Opera itself from here – surely the caretakers had to come down now and again to check on the water levels, or something – but she had no idea where it could be, or if it was accessible from the water itself. Paralyzed by indecision, she stood at the top of the water stairs and stared into the darkness, so thick and black it felt as if it carried physical weight.

  The tiny wellmonster was back on her shoulder, which had come as some surprise; she had been pretty sure it was happy to rejoin its fellow monsters in the dark and slimy ruins of the house, but as soon as she got to her feet, it had given an ungainly hop and clung to her ankle – feeling exactly like the cold wet nose of a dog pressed against her bare skin – and begun laboriously to climb up her leg, so she had let it. There was something pleasant, in a weird way, about being wanted, even by a thoroughly improbable little supernatural creature.

  Her whistler, whom Greta was thinking of more and more fondly as Winston, after a poltergeist she’d once encountered with a similar rough charm, had swept past her shoulder as soon as she opened the door on the lake and was now presumably enjoying itself zooming around in the pitch darkness where she couldn’t follow its maneuvers. It couldn’t go very far, because its whistle was still firmly shoved down Greta’s bodice, but it had a full ran
ge of perhaps a couple of miles from that anchor.

  What the hell do I do now? she thought, trying to see past the candle and managing only to ruin what visual purple she’d managed to build up. Now what?

  Far behind her, she heard a faint clang, and a sudden brief wind blew past her, lifting the remains of her skirt and snuffing the candle out completely.

  Someone, somewhere back in the tunnels, was moving. It was probably her imagination that the clang had been accompanied by a distant shriek of rage.

  Greta stared wildly into the darkness, clutching the dead candle in one hand, and when a ripple of water and a hollow bonk sound of wood on stone came out of nowhere to her left, she let out a tiny little scream, almost voiceless: what else was down here with her, what was going to reach out of the dark and grab her and —

  A hard little hand made out of crumpled taffeta curled around her fingers and tugged her forward, tipping her off balance, and in the faint light of her shoulder monster, she could just make out the curving gunwale of a small rowboat before she fell into it, scraping the skin off one knee in the process.