Dreadful Company

by Vivian Shaw

  Greta lay sprawled in the bottom of the boat, which rocked only a little before settling, and reached dazedly for the creature on her shoulder; it was still there, hanging on very tight, apparently unhurt. She could feel motion. They were being towed.

  Winston had found a boat for her, of all the improbable things. And now Winston was pulling her along in said boat, in a businesslike fashion, silent except for the liquid babble of water lapping along the sides. It was a very small boat, large enough for one rower and perhaps a passenger, if they didn’t mind close quarters. The wood was dark with age but still apparently sound —

  And at this point Greta realized she could see the grain in the planks. Could see her hands in front of her face, see the fluttering shape of the whistler towing them along on a rope tied to the bow, and the light was brightening all the time – a diffuse, blue-tinged light, from somewhere up ahead, somewhere in the ceiling.

  She tried to think through the fog of exhaustion and residual stress hormones, reaching for her memories of the book. There had been a way to get from the underground lake to the Rue Scribe, hadn’t there? Another secret passage in and out of the building, by which the lover of trapdoors could come and go at his discretion —

  — music, faint but present, all around her; whispered singing in the dark, achingly sweet, so beautiful that all she wanted was to go on listening; music that seemed to come out of the air – no, out of the water itself, a song rising like the faint pale mist of dawn from the dark water – tantalizingly far away, and she wanted more than anything to hear it clearly —

  — leaning over the edge of the boat, leaning down toward the lake —

  — a pair of arms bursting from the surface, seizing her by the shoulders in a grip like iron, pulling her headfirst into the shock-cold of the water —

  Greta thrust herself back from the edge of the boat so violently that it rocked, splashing faintly. Her heart was racing. That’s him, she thought, that’s – him, that’s Erik, playing the lake-guardian siren to prevent unwanted visitors to his horrible little house, it’s in the book, I’m still in the book, I’ve been in the book for hours now – it’s like some kind of strange possession —

  Or like a haunting.

  The whistler had paused to look back at her over one taffeta shoulder when she’d jerked away from the gunwale. She tucked back her hair and tried to smile for him, wondering again where the hell he was actually taking her, knowing that she had no choice but to trust him. He’d got her out of the cell. And he had guided her this far.

  Greta sat in the very center of the boat, the candle end lying forgotten beside her, and strained to see through the brightening gloom – holding on tight to both worn wooden sides. There was never any warning with the flickers, which made them worse – it was bad enough that they were happening, that they were somehow possible for someone like herself with no supernatural powers whatsoever to perceive; were hauntings ever like this, glitches in time, rather than the unquiet dead hanging about and bothering the people on this side of breath? It was the kind of strange she could not understand because she did not have the necessary information, and not understanding was almost worse than the fear.

  They passed under another set of arches and the source of the light suddenly came into view: a grating in the curved roof of the chamber, iron bars crisscrossing a square opening, through which broad rays of light fell to the surface of the water. Through the surface. Greta realized it was crystal clear, and only about four feet deep; there went all her worries about unspeakable bottomless black waters populated by creatures hungry for human meat.

  That was daylight she was seeing. Daylight. The first natural light she had seen in – she didn’t know how long. The real world was so close now. So close.

  They passed under the grating, and the light falling on her head and shoulders, her hands, felt like a blessing; then it fell away behind them, and she wondered again what the whistler was doing.

  She closed her eyes, leaden-heavy, and had no idea if it was a minute or ten minutes that passed before the boat abruptly bumped into something solid with that hollow bonk, and jarred her all the way back to consciousness again.

  Water stairs. Leading up to a dark archway in the wall with more stairs beyond it, bending to the right as they climbed upward.

  It was the right direction, at least. And Winston was hovering in the archway, looking impatient, if a tattered bit of taffeta could look impatient.

  Greta cupped her hand to her shoulder monster for a moment, and then reached for the stone edge of the steps and hauled herself ashore.

  There are probably vampires waiting up there to recapture me, and right now I don’t know if I can actually make myself care. If I can do much of anything at all.

  She was all out of can.

  Climbing the stairs felt like the summit push to Everest. Greta was aware, intensely aware, of the muscles in her thighs being made to do work: that grew to take over most of the world, she was not so much a person as a thing that climbs, she would be climbing forever, and possibly at the end of the stairs there would be a locked iron grate, and if there was a locked iron grate, she would simply sit down on the top stone step and close her eyes and wait for Corvin’s goons to come and find her —

  Someone was talking, up ahead. Someone with a deep voice she thought she’d heard before, and a moment later another voice answering them.

  That was a voice she did know, and in fact it turned out she did have the strength not just to climb the rest of the stairs but run up them, and there was not an iron grate, there was just a brilliant square opening with a tall thin figure outlined against the brightness, and Greta made it up the last steps and flung herself into light and air and vast, enormous space – and into Sir Francis Varney’s arms.

  He held her close, tight, heedless of her filthy ragged state, and she felt him stroke her hair, dizzy with sudden reaction. Everything was sliding, confused.

  Behind Varney, that deep voice chuckled briefly. “A very belated welcome to Paris, Doctor,” it said, and she looked up long enough to register a wolf the size of a Volkswagen sitting on its haunches and observing the two of them with warm yellow eyes – and beyond him, Ruthven, pinched and focused, and a shock of familiarity as she recognized Grisaille. “I do so apologize for the way it’s been treating you thus far,” said the wolf.

  It was a voice she knew: she’d made a date with the owner of this voice to meet at a bar and talk about peculiar happenings, approximately a thousand years ago. Greta would have liked to put together some kind of apology for that entire business, but she was drunk on fatigue poisons and the sheer relief of being held. Nor could she think about Grisaille, or why he should be out here with the others; her mind was skipping like a scratched record, locked in the Varney’s here, I’m safe, I’m safe, I’m out, I’ve gotten out, Varney’s here feedback loop.

  Varney squeezed her a little tighter, and she clung to him, shaking in long helpless tremors. “I, for my part, am so sorry it has taken us this long to find and rescue you,” he said, and with her ear against his chest, she could both hear and feel his voice. “Only you seem to be largely self-rescuing, which does not in fact surprise me in the least. Also you appear to have a passenger,” he added as the wellmonsterlet on her shoulder glupped at him.

  “Please feel free to do it anyway,” she said, muffled in his suit jacket. “The rescuing. I don’t – think I can stand up for very much longer, actually —”

  She didn’t have to finish the sentence: Varney simply bent to slip his arm under her knees and lifted her off her feet with no apparent effort whatsoever. It felt absurdly nice just to be held, to be someone else’s problem for a while, and Greta leaned against his chest and let herself think of nothing.

  Well, no. One thing. “There’s a whistle-monster,” she said, sounding very far away even to herself. “I don’t know where he went – I’ve got his whistle, I owe him a very large number of favors, he’s been extraordinarily helpful —”


  “I expect he’ll turn up,” said St. Germain. “For right now I’m taking you all back to my flat, where it is safe, and you can get some proper rest and decent food.”

  “And a bath,” said Greta, nearly asleep. “Possibly several baths. And can I borrow something else to wear?”

  “I don’t believe burgundy taffeta is very you,” said Varney. “We’ve got your things from the hotel; don’t worry.” And she felt a brief cool touch on her forehead that might have been the faintest brush of lips; she took that sensation – the shock of it, deep and terrible and sweet – down with her into the dark.

  The demon Irazek had had a fairly terrible night – well, day and night – well, actually he didn’t quite recall how long it had been; he’d lost track somewhere in the impromptu house party while he’d been scrambling to do the calculations to triangulate where all this wretched business had begun. That Brightside and Dammerung were still around was a little bit of a relief, although Irazek could have wished they’d bloody well been in touch with him themselves rather than retreating into complete radio silence and then sending him a discontented vampire to pump for information.

  At least said vampire had had some information. Irazek could very clearly tell that Edmund Ruthven wanted to pull his head off, and that Francis Varney had similar but rather more violent desires – but after Grisaille had told them his story, both the vampires had seemed to calm down from active murder into organizational mode.

  They and St. Germain had left with Grisaille some time ago to rescue the missing Dr. Helsing. Irazek had stayed behind, ostensibly to work out what was to be done next, but in point of fact he was simply stalling: he knew what was to be done next, and a significant aspect of that was going to be losing his job.

  At least, he thought, looking around his familiar and beloved apartment, he could do it with a bit of class. Somewhere that wasn’t here.

  He put on his coat. The dawn had run a pale lemon-colored flood of light up the eastern sky while he was dithering; now it was day properly, even if the only people abroad at this hour were the deeply industrious, the crepuscular, or the kind of libertines who rarely went to bed.

  Irazek walked through the streets, aware of Paris in a way he wasn’t normally. Trying to register the city, imprint it on his memory, storing up recollections for the time when he’d be stuck back down in Hell. There wasn’t really a gigantic hurry, he told himself. The weak spot in reality had been there for ages now: surely it could wait a little longer, couldn’t it? Just a little longer, and then Irazek would be properly chastised.

  The delicate light, shading from powder-pale into clear, slipping down the facades of the city, seemed more beautiful this morning than it ever had before. He wondered, walking along with his hands in his coat pockets, looking up, if it had really always been that lovely and he simply had not bothered to notice until now.

  Irazek stopped at the base of the long, long hill of Montmartre, with its classic steps. In the new day’s light the white confection of Sacré-Coeur atop the hill glowed against the sky: a church wrought of perfect meringue, crisp and weightless and snowy-white, breathing sweetness into the morning.

  Here’s as good as anywhere, he thought, and began to climb the stairs.

  He was going to miss it, living here. Going to miss the colors of early morning, like today: dew-damp green leaves in window boxes, the blue and dove-grey of the city before the sun found its way up the sky. Going to miss small things, like the tiny perfection of those new leaves, vivid jade-green, soft and delicate before they grew into sturdy dark green architecture: a constant sweet pleasure in the perception of life, of growth. Going to miss the way croissant dough folded back on itself in layer after layer, puffing up in the oven to a delicate flaky melting-light golden brown. So many things he hadn’t paid enough attention to, one way or another.

  He’d been here for two years. Long enough to fall in love with the place in ways he hadn’t even slightly anticipated, during the surface-op training: M&E had told them to expect a period of adjustment, but not the kind of weirdly unfolding pleasure Irazek had felt walking through the streets of his newly assigned city. Parts of Paris were enough like parts of the city of Dis – the gloriously overdone architecture of the Opera, for example, the Palais Garnier and the Pandemonium Conservatory could have switched places with barely anybody noticing – that he had found the adjustment remarkably painless.

  He didn’t know why they had never bothered to send up a second agent to assist him with monitoring the essographs. When he’d volunteered for the Paris job, it had been with the understanding that he’d almost certainly be sharing the duties with another operative, and the days and then weeks and then months had just gone by without a single message from Below, so he’d… got on with it, and found himself really enjoying the work. And since Hell clearly hadn’t been paying terribly close attention, he had gradually slipped into something like complacency.

  And now it was almost certainly going to be over.

  Standing on the steps just below Sacré-Coeur, Irazek took a narrow flat glass object out of his pocket, distinguishable from a smartphone by the fact that it was mostly transparent except for a few iridescent sigils floating inside the glass itself, and touched it here and there in a particular sequence. The sigils glowed briefly as his finger made contact, and then faded.

  Audible only to the demon, a faint chime of sound came and went several times. Four. Five. He was beginning to wonder if he’d placed the request-to-contact correctly when a tired, somewhat irritable voice resonated inside his head.

  “Yes?” it said.

  “Um.” Irazek was not entirely sure he had made the right call. “Is this Monitoring and Evaluation?” He’d been expecting one of Asmodeus’s lower-level functionaries, and he didn’t think this voice belonged to any of them.

  “Yes, it is, we’re a little busy just at the moment” – it paused, as if accessing data – “Irazek; what is it you need?”

  “Um,” he said again. “There’s – been a problem up here. In Paris. The – there’s been some repeated incursions from the P3 plane and the – fabric of reality is a little bit —”

  “What? How many incursions? When?”

  “I’m not… entirely sure,” said Irazek wretchedly. “But enough to weaken reality, and it’s – I can’t repair it on my own, I’m afraid.”

  “You aren’t sure,” said the voice, delicate. “Could you perhaps hazard a guess as to how long this has been going on?”

  “About a month and a half,” he said, “maybe a bit longer. I take full responsibility for the failure to recognize the severity of the situation. I abjectly and humbly abase myself before the just and justified displeasure of my lord Asmodeus, before whom I am but a —”

  “Can we dispense with the forehead-knocking, it gives me a pain,” said the voice, “and – let me see, you’re in Paris – damn, Paris, I’d meant to do something about that before now. I haven’t got anyone I can send at the moment, either; everyone’s already occupied. I suppose I’ll have to do it myself.”

  “Yourself?” said Irazek, profoundly puzzled. “I – may I have the pleasure of knowing with whom I speak?”

  “Hang on,” said the voice. “I’ll be there shortly. Don’t do anything to reality until I get there.”

  “Who —” Irazek began, but there was flat silence in his head once more. He rubbed at his temples, where a headache was beginning to throb, and wished not for the first time that he had never put his name in for the surface-ops training curriculum. Whoever it was would – hopefully – be able to fix this mess, but what happened next, Irazek had absolutely no way to predict.

  Maybe they’d let him make pastries back in Hell, once he was demoted. If there was anything left of him after this situation was resolved.

  Safety – the lack of immediate, visceral need to do something – felt absurd right now. Sitting in St. Germain’s rather pleasant living room with a glass of red wine between his palms – h
e was getting tired of wine, but it was better than nothing – Varney was conscious of the weight of fatigue held at bay only by an effort of will.

  It was so difficult to think, and he didn’t know what to do with this new kind of worry: not that Greta was somewhere in the clutches of monsters, but that she had been in the clutches of monsters, and that the things they had done and said to her might mean she was not quite the woman he had known, or had grown to know a little. He understood very well the ways in which trauma could leave a mark on somebody, change them, and the thought of her being thus changed was… awful.

  What had happened to her down there, and what did it mean, and what could he do about it, about any of it —

  Varney tried again to push away the thought, and let the blank tiredness close over it again. He was staring vaguely ahead of him, not seeing the werewolf’s furniture or the brightening windows – it must be seven or eight in the morning, the sun climbing the sky – and he was inexpressibly grateful when St. Germain himself arrived with a steaming cup of coffee and sat down across from him: something else to focus on other than the inside of his own head.