by KJ Charles
And this was cruelty indeed. To put Simon under such an unwanted obligation, when his desire was always to protect me… He would be angry, I had no doubt of that. Brutally angry, savagely resentful. It would change everything between us, if he even permitted it.
And I did not want to let a malevolent occultist work on me as he had Simon and Miss Kay. Christ knew what he intended to do, but the light in his eyes suggested it would be bad.
He’d do it though. I had reason to know that. Simon and Miss Kay, still little more than children, had appealed to the great occult investigator Hesselius for help when they had thrown Karswell out. A pity they had not done so before. Hesselius put Karswell under interdict, Mrs. Phan had told me, binding the man not to continue his physical experiments on living subjects. I should have to bring my case to the Remnant’s committee for permission, assure them that I had no greater desire than to let this lunatic do his will. And Karswell would once more have the opportunity to work on human flesh. He would not turn that down.
He would not, and I could not. But I felt my gorge rise at the thought, and the bile was sour in my mouth as I said, “I will do it.”
“You will not,” Simon said. “You will not. Christ above, Robert, what the devil were you thinking! How dare you do such a damned stupid thing! I should rather cut my own throat than give you over to that maniac—”
“You’re going to die!” I shouted over his tirade. “Do you not understand that? You’re going to die, and you want me to watch?”
“You think I want to live at this price?” he roared.
He looked drained. Eyes sunken, face pale; bandages visible round his exposed skin and bulking his form under his dressing gown. He shouted at me from a sitting position because it hurt him too much to stand.
“I should damned well hope so!” I shouted back. “I should hope you want to live, and to bring peace to lost souls and an end to other people’s troubles, and to be with me, Simon. Do you want to leave me alone?”
“That is the most contemptible blackmail I have ever heard.”
He had a point, at that. Under other circumstances I would have embarrassed myself. “What do you expect of me?” I asked, at a more moderate volume. “Do you think I can see you afflicted like this when I can help you—?”
“You cannot help me,” Simon snapped. “Karswell can, or claims it. I do not want his help.”
“Nor do I, and if we had any other choice I should not have gone to him. But we have no choice and I have a solution. I can help, Simon. Why can’t you accept that?”
“It’s not… I don’t…” Simon was struggling. He never did find this sort of conversation easy. “For God’s sake, Robert. How can you imagine I would let Karswell get his hooks into you?”
“How can you imagine I would let you die?”
“I am grateful for the time we have had—”
“Well, I’m not,” I said. “Answer me this, Simon Feximal. You have told me this will kill you. We can all see that. Do you acknowledge you need help? Even if you don’t want it, even if you will not take it, can you not admit that you are in need of it?”
“I grant this is hardly a comfortable position,” he growled.
“Answer the question!”
He stared at me, brows furrowing. “If you must have the words, yes. I need help. I won’t take Karswell’s.”
I ignored the second of those remarks. “You need help. You admit it. Do you remember a promise you made me, Simon? Near on four years ago, when I came to you in my own time of need, but I did not want your aid?”
Silence. Silence that stretched an uncomfortably long time, until, very softly, he said, “God damn you.”
“‘Accept my help now, and I swear to you, when the day comes that I need help, I shall ask for yours and accept it.’ That’s what you said in this very house. Don’t dare give me ‘but’, blast your eyes. I had your promise.”
“I did not mean this,” he forced out through his teeth.
“I don’t care what you meant. You will, you must accept my help, or go to your grave having broken an oath to me.”
He shut his eyes. I honestly think he would have been tempted to strike me, if he had had his strength. Simon has never liked to be constrained.
“I made you that promise as a courtesy,” he said finally. “There was no reason for you to refuse my help except foolish pride. The circumstances now are different.”
“Entirely different. Then, we barely knew each other. If I had gone, you would not have been bereaved. You didn’t love me then.”
“I don’t like you now,” he rasped. His voice was thick with pain, fury, humiliation and a terrible weakness.
I was hurting him, because I was too selfish to mourn him.
“There is no way through this, but for one of us to give in,” I said, into the ragged, raw-edged silence. “If I give in, you suffer, and die. If you give in, I suffer—”
“And live to regret it,” he interrupted. “Have you any idea what Karswell may do to you?”
“Not really. And I am well aware you cannot bear the idea of my pain. But do not insult me by imagining that I can bear yours.” I propped myself against the mantel, suddenly exhausted. “Simple as this, Simon: we began our association when you gave me that promise. Will you end by breaking it?”
He exhaled, long and hard, clenching a fist. “Damn you, Robert. God damn you. I shall not forgive this.”
“Then I shall summon Karswell,” I said, and left him.
Karswell’s return to Fetter Lane was hedged about with caution. Miss Kay, whose disapproval of my proceedings was second only to Simon’s, insisted on being present. The look she gave her estranged sire when they met would have made a better man go to his knees with shame. Karswell returned it with an expression of scorn.
The procedure was to involve a cartouche, a small piece of metal, which was to be embedded in the back of my hand. Karswell created the thing from what he called a blood alloy: Simon’s blood, and mine, mixed with certain curious metals. It looked like a plain dull grey metal lozenge, fringed by spikes that gave it a resemblance to a clawed millipede.
“Mr. Caldwell is to be the lightning conductor,” Karswell explained. “Under normal circumstances, the power will run through him harmlessly. Almost harmlessly. I dare say it may be a little uncomfortable. Of course, you will have to stay close. A hundred feet, perhaps. And when the contact is strong, physical touch will be needed, flesh to flesh.” He hissed those words at Simon. “Mr. Caldwell will bear your pain while you watch, like a coward—”
“And will do it willingly,” Theodosia Kay interrupted, voice cool. “Get on with it.”
Mrs. Phan and Dr. Silence attended the procedure. That had been a condition of Karswell’s permission to do the work, to ensure that he played no malicious tricks, and I was glad of it. The more people present, the less possible it was for me to change my mind. Dr. Silence’s quiet authority and Mrs. Phan’s open disdain also seemed to lessen Karswell somewhat. He made one attempt to speak to Simon, a few words of a taunt, but Mrs. Phan said, simply, “No,” and the occultist snapped his mouth shut once more.
Simon was so weak by then, bandaged, bloodstained, white faced. We crowded into the bedroom where he lay: Miss Kay staring intently into her nails, Mrs. Phan and Dr. Silence flanking the bedstead. I sat in a chair by the bed, a wooden-framed one with arms, and my wrists tied down to them. Karswell had insisted on that. He had another chair, and a table, with the cartouche and the instruments he needed. Bowls. A scalpel. Needles.
I cannot write of the procedure. I thought I could, I have tried, half a dozen times, and the floor is littered with crumpled sheets as a result. The fact is
What he did
The process
I can tell you it hurt. I can tell you I screamed, that I bit my lip till the blood ran, and Miss Kay fetched a leather strap on which I could bite down, that it hurt in my flesh and bones and soul as the terrible metal fangs pierced my hand and I felt its
probe reach down into my nerves, into very my essence. I can tell you that Simon’s face was as unbearable as the pain, and that he leaned over and reached for my other hand, angry and so very weak as he was, and held it through the procedure, and that his grip felt like my only connection to sanity.
Let me be clinical. Julian Karswell embedded a small metal cartouche in the back of my left hand. That was all.
It was not all. I felt its malignity. I felt it put roots through my hand, a connection made to the world beneath the world. Worse, I knew, with sickly knowledge, that the connection would never be unmade: I had come to the attention of the great forces now. Before I had been touched by powers, now I was tainted, marked forever, and as I held Simon’s hand I felt the presence of the dead whisper across my own skin.
But I held his hand, and I lived through those long hours, and so did he.
I do not wish to write more of this.
Karswell was not permitted to stay in the house, of course. He returned the next day. I sat in the drawing-room, curled over my left hand, which throbbed in a way that felt infected, though I had no doubt the infection was purely spiritual. Miss Kay stood by me. Simon still lay in bed. I had not asked after him. He had not wished to see me.
“That seems to have taken,” Karswell said, examining my hand. His thumb dug cruelly into the swollen flesh, and I bit back a cry. “I hope you are pleased with your work, Mr. Caldwell. I wonder if Feximal will be happy when he knows, every day, that you endure what he was not able to bear.”
“Ah, my father,” Miss Kay said. “What a mighty revenge you have wrought. All you have achieved is to let Simon know how dearly he is loved. You underestimate Mr. Caldwell’s courage and devotion as much as you overestimate your own cunning, and for the same reason: your entirely misplaced pride. You are a worm, and you will leave my house or I shall throw you out.” She gave him the coldest smile I have ever seen. “I don’t need Simon to do that for me now.”
“My house,” Karswell said, and she struck him. She hit with her left hand, those dark, deep nails out, and Karswell recoiled, clutching his face with a cry as she took another stride forward to stand over him.
He straightened, taking his hand from his face. The long scratches on his cheek welled with blood. There was rage and fear in his expression, nothing but contempt in hers, and I saw the moment that something broke in him as he met her eyes.
“Get out,” Miss Kay told her father again, pointing with a black-nailed finger, and he shrank from her as he left.
Five days later, we tested the connection.
Simon had not spoken to me in the interim. He had recouped his strength, lying in bed, and I had slept fitfully in the other room, curled around my hand, wondering what I had done. A couple of times I got up in the nights and went to sit in the corridor, by his door, so I could hear him breathe.
The cuts had healed. There were no new ones. The cartouche worked. If he never spoke to me again, it would be worth it. I sat alone on the floor of a draughty corridor and told myself that it had been worth it.
Simon stood now, scowling, stripped to the waist. The runes moved as they always had on his skin. His chest and arms were still bandaged, and the visible skin was lined with scratches and cuts, little and big, some stitched, some healing. The colour was back in his face, gaunt though he looked. Everything else was falling apart, but my Simon lived.
“Well,” I said. “Let us try it.”
Simon nodded. He tipped his head back, face tightening, murmuring something in jagged syllables, a calling. I felt a faint tremor of movement through the air, in a way I had not before, even as the writing on his skin leapt to frantic life. He inhaled sharply, and I reached out and grasped his hand with my own.
That was…a shock. There was a second’s stillness, then the power surged through me, bitter-cold, ice along my blood. The cartouche burned with cold on the back of my hand, and I could not help a gasp.
“Robert?”
“It’s all right,” I managed. It was not all right; it hurt. That nauseating sensation of an alien presence in one’s flesh that one can get from a splinter, but worse. Quite considerably worse.
Bearable, though. Bad, but bearable, and the scrawling on Simon’s skin left him undamaged. “By God,” I said. “It works.”
“Apparently.”
“Well, get a mirror.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The spirit. We might as well look at it, since we’re doing this.”
Simon gave me a look compounded of half a dozen forms of annoyance. “For God’s sake, you—we are both barely convalescent. Later.”
He tried to pull his hand away. I took tighter hold of it. The cold gnawed through the cartouche, sickeningly invasive.
“What’s done is done, Simon. And I know you are displeased with me, and God knows I understand why. But may I remind you that we will need to be within a hundred feet of one another for the rest of our lives if this is to be to any purpose. If you intend to keep sulking, that is going to be uncomfortable.”
“I am not sulking!” Simon shouted, making the walls ring. “I am angry.”
“Sulking.”
“Oh, for—” He turned abruptly, his back to me, pulling his hand away, and I could not hold back a grunt of relief as the contact broke and the cold drained from my bones.
“That. You see?” His voice was muffled. “My God, Robert, I have been tainted all my life by what Karswell did. I had wished you to stay clean.”
My heart plunged at those brutal words. It took me a moment to form a response. “You…you see me as contaminated, now? Am I less to you because I chose this?”
“No!” He spun round, with a spectacular scowl on his face. “I am the less for allowing this to happen to you.”
“You did not allow me. I do not require your permission to act, and I wish to God you would stop—”
“Treating you like a child,” he interrupted. “So you keep saying. Damn it, can you not understand—?”
“I understand perfectly,” I interrupted in return. “It is a misery to see me in danger. You would take on any suffering to spare me pain. You would rather risk your own death than mine.”
“Of course I would. A thousandfold. You know that. Why in Christ’s name could you not accept it?”
I sighed. “Because, you overbearing ogre, I feel the same way.”
We stood in silence for a moment, and then Simon’s shoulders dropped from their tense position. He walked over, put his hands on my shoulders, very carefully, then ran a finger up my neck. “Does it…does it hurt when I touch you?”
“Of course not.”
“You don’t feel anything? Any pain?”
“No, not at all,” I said, and then the import of his words dawned upon me. “Oh my God.”
“That has only just occurred to you?” he enquired sarcastically. “That every physical contact between us might have been tainted by the other world?”
It had not occurred to me at all. Between my terror of what might happen to Simon and of what might happen to me, I had not even thought about other matters. My legs felt weak under me at the thought of what might have been. Christ, if Karswell had known about our relationship, if he had known how much he could have taken from us—
I would have sought a chair, but Simon’s powerful arms closed round me, with unusual care.
“You will never, ever be so damned rash again,” he growled into my hair. “You will never do such a stupid thing or put yourself in such a man’s hands. Never.”
“I will do precisely as I see fit at all times,” I mumbled into his chest. “Don’t let go of me.”
“I am never letting you out of my sight again. Imbecile.”
“Well, you can’t,” I pointed out. “A hundred feet, he said.”
“Closer than that.” Simon tugged at my hair, pulling my head back, and stared down into my eyes. “My God, Robert. You irresponsible, reckless fool. I am furious with you.” His mouth came down on mine
with passionate hunger, lips colliding hard with mine, and I gave myself over to his kiss with overwhelming relief.
I did not expect our new circumstances would be easy. I did not expect thanks for my sacrifice. (Indeed, I never got them. My ever-graceless Simon.) But I knew in that moment, as he kissed me with such angry, loving care, that I was forgiven for my presumption in saving his life, and that was all I needed.
I was never to meet Mr. Karswell again, thank God. The conclusion of his tale can be found in a somewhat dramatic account by Professor Montague Rhodes James, published under the title “Casting the Runes”. Professor James’s publishers are clearly as shamelessly sensational as my own. I like to think that Mr. Karswell would have been irritated by that.
You will see, if you care to look it up, that his end was every bit as bad as he deserved.
Turn of the Century
I will not pretend that things were unchanged, afterwards. Simon treated me like the most precious porcelain for months, to my increasing fury, until I was compelled to provoke him out of his fit of chivalry (by underhand means which I shall not detail here; suffice to say that a little jealousy spiced things up nicely). Even once he was forced to accept that I would not permit his consideration, he worried.
In fairness, our relationship was taking a toll on me. Simon, at thirty-eight but free of the constant draining effects of the runes, was as healthy as a horse. His grey hair merely made him look distinguished; his muscular form was powerful as ever. By contrast, I had the disfiguring scar below my eye, and the thrice-damned cartouche in my hand.
It was not painful, in general; Mr. Karswell’s professional pride equalled his malice. But I felt just a little bit drained, all the time I was with Simon, and when he leant on me, when the spirits spoke on his skin and I served as the lightning conductor for their force…well, suffice to say that my hair started to lose its colour at the beginning of the year, and was as grey as Simon’s by December.
