by James Fahy
His fingers flickered over the screen. Allesandro walked off slowly, making for the stairs, his footsteps echoing. “Heat sensors won’t be a problem for me,” he said.
“There,” Oscar said, finished at the keyboard. “We should be free to move about now, though for God’s sake don’t touch anything. The exhibits are all individually protected and I don’t have the codes for that.”
“Thank you, Oscar,” I said. “For this, I mean. You didn’t have to go out on a limb for me, especially after the trouble at your party the other night. I really owe you one.”
He smiled up at me knowingly. “I know you do,” he said, smiling evilly. “So…” He clapped his hands together. “Do I get to know why we’re here then? Is someone going to stick another blowdart in my neck, Phoebe? Or are we just on some kind of midnight scavenger hunt? Geocaching?”
“The human child should remain here,” Allesandro said from the foot of the stairs, looking up into the darkness above. I got the distinct impression that the vampire found him irritating.
“Child?” Oscar said darkly.
“He’s right, Oscar,” I agreed. “People getting mixed up in this particular scavenger hunt are tending to get a bit…well…dead,” I finished lamely. “Mauled, beheaded. Not good times. Safer for you if you wait here while we find what we’re looking for.”
Oscar came around the desk. “Well pardon my French, but fuck that.” He reached into his coat and brought forth two thin torches, one of which he casually tossed to me. “Most interesting thing I’ve done in ages, this. Nice t-shirt by the way, big guy.”
I heard Allesandro sigh in the darkness.
27.
The professor’s office was easy enough to find, up through the museum proper, with its silent exhibits looking eerie and haunted in the darkness. The third floor held staff areas, backstage I guess, though I don’t know what the proper museum lingo is. I felt a tad ashamed as we wandered through. I hardly ever visited the museum during daylight hours. It had the largest collection of Pre-Raphaelite art in Europe, I heard. And the only known surviving Michelangelo was in here somewhere, along with everything else we could salvage. Before the wars, there had been a million people a year through these doors. Now? Well, there probably weren’t a million people alive in Britannia. Unless you counted those who had devolved into the Pale, whom I most sincerely hoped never flocked in their millions through these doors.
“Here it is,” Oscar said, after we had wondered up and down a few dead end corridors, all identical. He was shining his light on a blank wooden door at the end of a narrow corridor. “Knight. That’s the chap, right?” He tried the handle. “It’s locked.”
“You don’t have access keys to the offices?” I asked him. Oscar shook his head apologetically.
Allesandro leaned between the two of us and grabbed the handle. He tugged lightly and it came out of the door in a careless splintering of wood. The door swung open.
“After you,” he nodded politely.
I considered that vampires certainly have their uses. I need never worry about opening a pickle jar again.
The office beyond was tiny and cluttered. I crossed to the window and closed the blinds, feeling very cat-burglary, as Oscar flicked the desk-lamp on nonchalantly. It was every professor office cliché I’d ever seen. Oxblood leather chair, cluttered desk covered in books and paperwork, a silver letter opener and paperweights. The walls were lined with crammed bookshelves. The only thing missing was a replica human skull.
“What exactly are you two looking for here?” Oscar asked.
“A notebook,” I said distractedly, rifling through the disarray on the desk.
Allesandro browsed the bookshelves curiously. “Our dear, recently murdered Professor Knight was working on a translation of sorts, of an ancient book,” he told Oscar. “He kept private notes about it. His findings. His conclusions.”
“Something important?”
“Important enough to get the old boy killed, certainly,” the vampire said. “He was one of the three Portmeadow murders.”
Oscar’s eyes widened, as he shone his flashlight into nooks and crannies, quite unnecessarily now the lights were on. “Bloody balls,” he said. “That’s been all over the news. Tribals they think, right? They came to interview my father. Wanted a soundbite from a famous MM supporter.” He looked up. “The press came to interview him, I mean, not the Tribals. You know what he’s like though, wouldn’t come out of his rooms as usual, batty old coot. Gave a recorded quote through the door. Some speciesist raving about how the GOs have it all coming to them. I swear, he’s totally senile now. Either that or he’s gotten too weak to get out of bed finally. I don’t know how he thinks he’s going to manage hosting this gala thing tomorrow night.”
There was a tiny datascreen on the desk, behind piles of books. It was covered with dust and looked as though it had never been used. I wondered briefly if the notes might be electronic, but dismissed the idea. Knight had a lifelong love affair with ancient books and manuscripts. He struck me as an aficionado of the old style. It would be a hard copy we were looking for.
“Bingo!” I said, after riffling through the bookcases.
“You got it?” Oscar asked.
“Not the notebook, no,” I said, holding aloft a human skull, albeit a plastic one. “Just restoring my faith in humanity.”
Allesandro looked at me strangely. I swear I heard him mumble ‘bloody humans’ as he resumed his search. I shook the skull, making the hinged jaw flap. “Ack ack ack,” I mock-laughed, ventriloquilistically.
“Here,” Allesandro said, after a few minutes of us all rummaging. I looked up from the desk where I’d moved to after my impromptu Hamlet. He was standing by a roll-top bureau, holding a thin notebook, nothing more than an old exercise jotter. “Voynich,” he confirmed, leafing through.
“You’re sure?” I asked. “It was in the bureau?”
“No, masking-taped to the wall in the thin space behind it. Seems Professor Knight was getting worried about what he had been tasked to research. This was hidden.”
He tossed the jotter to me and I sat at the desk, the vampire and Oscar joining me, peering over my shoulders on either side.
Knight’s notebook was filled with scribbled handwriting, a lot of it in shorthand. Brief notes and bulletpoints. Photocopies were inserted between the pages here and there, facsimiles of the illustrations in the book, snippets of text from the original document of Bacon’s. I recognised the women bathing in their strange connected tubs, and the near-faceless figures holding the stars, although they looked odd and blurred as photocopies. There were other inserts too. Loose sheets of paper jammed between the pages of the book. A lot of maths that meant nothing to me. Chemistry symbols, and arcane pentagrams.
“This is it,” I said. “It looks like he was translating the manuscript, not into words, but into…formulae?” I furrowed my brow.
I leafed further in. News clipping fell out onto the desk. They were old pre-war articles, scientific, cut out from journals it seemed. Several of them seemed to focus on cloning. Others on splicing DNA, or on my own field of fighting diseases.
“Where were you going with all this, Professor?” I murmured. There were older copies too, pasted into the pages of the notebook. Illustrations of Roger Bacon, lists of dates and seemingly random European locations. None of it made much sense to me.
“Wait, go back a page.” Allesandro put his hand on mine, stopping my random leafing. “I recognised that map. From the library.”
I flicked back. It was indeed a photocopy of the fold out map that our recently decapitated librarian had shown us. Several islands, castles, and a volcano. Atop it, Knight had stapled a piece of tracing paper, on which he had plotted the locations of each feature, and careful lines had been drawn between them, each with chemical symbols and crowded formulae attached.
“This looks like…molecular structure,” I puzzled. “The map as a code for an element? Or a process?”
&n
bsp; “You think Bacon was encoding an alchemical process throughout his work?” the vampire asked.
“It looks like Knight thought that. More than one process from what I’m seeing. What was Bacon talking about? What had he discovered which was so important it needed to be coded and hidden in this…convoluted mess? Herbs, stars, anatomy, chemicals?”
I flicked onward, stopping suddenly when I saw a picture of a sentinel.
A model of Aryan perfection, it was a pre-war propaganda photograph. Before things had gone bad in the old world, the Pale had been genetically engineered super-soldiers. Sentinels, built and grown and mass produced, designed with the intention to protect us all. Part human DNA, part other – the ‘other’ as I had discovered the previous year, being DNA taken directly, and unwillingly, from the greatest vampire ever known. This name was scrawled under the photograph in Knight’s handwriting:
Tassoni?
The origin of the Pale, what they were made from, how they were actually originally engineered was not common knowledge. I had only discovered the truth myself by getting caught up with Gio and his plans, and it had almost cost me my life. I was tied to the legacy of the Pale, the now devolved and insane cannibals who had overrun Britannia and forced us all behind the great wall. My father had been their creator, a scientist member of a top secret government team, along with Oscar’s father, and Allesandro’s true Clan Master. The Pale carried all our DNA, the three of us, as surely as I now, in turn, carried their virus.
This train of thought reminded me with a jolt that I had used my only remaining shot of Epsilon to bring down the Tribal assassin down in the Labyrinth. This meant I was out of meds. I wasn’t due to medicate for a couple of hours, but it still made me uncomfortable not to have them with me.
“What do the Pale, of all things, have to do with this?” the vampire asked. I scan-read the attendant article. “It looks to me as though Knight was trying to find out more about how they were engineered,” I said. “Back when they were sentinels, I mean, before they zombified and killed off almost everyone in the world. He’s very interested in GOs. Both natural GOs like yourself and the Tribals, and also human-created ‘others’, like the Pale. There’s all kinds of notes in here on splicing and dicing, and constant references back to the Voynich. To Bacon’s original masterwork.”
At the end of the book, the final two pages contained no further notes, formulae or diagrams. Instead, Knight has scribbled, in a less organised hand than his usual, what seemed to be a diary entry. I read aloud in dubious tones:
It’s clear to me now that my work here must not be completed. I have taken on a task for the devil himself. The only thing my client fears is death, and we are all in danger from this mad ambition! The black devils will come to collect their souls, nothing can stop that, no desperate search for a philosopher’s stone. God have mercy on them, and on me for the secrets I’ve unlocked and translated. Not even the great works I have uncoiled here can undo their fate. Vitality, immortality? Eternal life is a pipe dream, and I was a fool to think that’s what I had been instructed to search for. It was all lies. That’s not what the client is after. These pages, this manuscript, give a detailed understanding of the genetics of those we call GOs, how they are made, and how they are un-made. There is such enlightenment here, so much more I could learn if I had time. But put to foul use, such darkness. Dear God, if this fell into the wrong hands, it will make the biblical plagues pale in comparison. I will not aid genocide to chase the dream of immortality for one deranged and doomed individual. They will kill me for this. I know they won’t let me just bow out of the project. I’m in too deep already. I know too much. There’s no one I can trust. I cannot go to the authorities. I have seen her come and go at the old site. They are tied into this. Cabal are tainted, but I don’t know how much, or how many. And the children. God help me for getting them involved. They will not be allowed to live. Those poor students. Why did we let them get caught up in this?
“It’s so clear to me now. The walls are not here to protect us. We are not safe. The black devils have orchestrated everything. They gave mankind Tassoni on a plate. Why? Out of the goodness of their hearts? I think not. They helped us to fortify when the world fell apart. So helpful, such saviours. And now I know why.
“We are not rescued, we are not protected. We are corralled like cattle.
“I’ve spoken with Amanda, she’s the only one I trust. She is equally terrified and has the code. God bless the woman. I don’t know how she got it but she did. With the code we can get out of the city. We will go to the old site ourselves and stop this. I cannot bring myself to destroy this work, to burn what I’ve filled this journal with. It has been my obsession and my greatest project. But if my client finds it, all is lost. The things that have been created. These hosts. Abominations.
“Death will rain over the city. I cannot allow it…”
The entry stopped.
“Gosh,” Oscar said, blowing his cheeks out as I set the journal down. “Bit florid, the old boy, wasn’t he? Opium, do we think?”
“He was afraid, so was Amanda Bishop,” I said to Allesandro. “They both wanted out, of whatever the hell they’d been duped into doing, and now they’re both dead. What the hell is this code? And the old site; site of what?”
“More questions. Plus, we still have no idea about the last victim,” the vampire said. “The ex-taxi driver, he has no connection to either of these two as far as I know. He wasn’t a scientist, he wasn’t a professor, and he wasn’t a Helsing.”
“I saw him on the news,” Oscar said. “Couldn’t bloody believe it. Poor Mr King. I knew the fellow.”
We both stared mutely at Oscar. He looked back at us blankly. For a few silent seconds, the only noise was the quiet ticking of the carriage clock on a shelf in the professor’s study.
“You…knew him?” I asked eventually. Oscar nodded.
“Well, he was my driver for a few months, before he disappeared,” the boy explained, frowning in confusion at our twin stares. “He used to help me sneak down to St Giles to the GO clubs all the time. Best driver I ever had. Kept his mouth shut, didn’t ask any questions. Very discreet.” He thrust his hands into his pockets. “Gutted I was when he upped and left. I figured he’d just gone back to the bottle. Couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw him dead on the news tonight. Never would have had him mixed up with all this. Poor chap.”
I stared at Oscar. “And the ‘she’ that Professor Knight’s referring to here, in this paranoid mumbling? The one he apparently saw come and go at the old site? Any clues on who that might be?”
He shrugged unhelpfully. “I know about as much about that as I do about black devils,” he said apologetically. “Was this Knight a racist or something? I’ve read about those, from before the wars. Mental world it used to be, people actually caring about things like that.”
Allesandro stood up straight suddenly. “Wait…” he hissed, silencing Oscar with a hand. We both stared at the vampire questioningly. “We’re not alone.”
Before I could open my mouth to speak, the door to the office flew open, banging against the wall. Books shuddered and fell from the shelves.
There were several figures standing in the corridor beyond, but all our eyes were drawn to the one blocking the door.
Almost seven feet tall and cloaked from head to toe in a long black-hooded robe, it filled the doorway like the grim reaper. In a slow fluid motion, it ducked its head and pushed forward into the office with us, robes billowing around its body in slow motion. Fabric swirling underwater. The figure was utterly silent.
I had met one of these creatures only once before, and it had terrified me then, as it did now. It reared back to its full height within the room, its hooded head almost scraping the ceiling, and looked slowly, silently at the three of us.
It was a Bonewalker. Its face, as with all of its kind, was hidden entirely beneath the billow of its hood behind a white porcelain mask, the blank features terrifyingly expressionl
ess. Its eyes were inky voids, blackness from edge to edge. The lamplight glittered off them and I got the impression of anything but indifference.
It had grown unnaturally cold in the office. I felt like I should be able to see my breath. My legs felt rooted to the floor. Someone in the corridor outside spoke, but I didn’t hear what was said, my terrified mind was filled with the vision of the Bonewalker. Was this Knight’s black devil? It seemed more than apt now. As I stared, it inclined its head, and slowly opened its arms, the robes, pitch black, spreading like tar to fill my vision. It seemed to fill the room, darkness blooming from the GO, ink in water, and the lights grew dim. I was dimly aware that Allesandro was shouting, but his voice was a million miles away, an echoing whisper down a long well that I couldn’t focus on, couldn’t think. There was nothing but the enveloping shadows. Nothing but the darkness and the cold, and at the heart of the void blooming from this unearthly creature standing before me, colder and more smothering than space, the floating, disembodied white mask staring back at me.
I tumbled into the darkness, and then…there was nothing.
28.
The sun beat down on the wide river, making the sky a white haze, and reflections glittered on the water’s surface as the boat glided along. I lounged, lying back in the narrow vessel, a glass of champagne cupped in my hand. The heat of the sun warmed me, but every now and then, a delicious breeze floated across the water, caressing my arms. My dress was white and light cotton, dazzlingly bright. I adjusted my sunglasses and let my other arm hang languorously over the edge of the boat, my fingertips trailing in the river as the lush greenery floated by. Gnossiennes played in my head.
“How’s the water?” Allesandro asked. He sat opposite me, expertly sluicing the oars through the water, his movements as he rowed smooth and natural. The gentle, rhythmic lapping of the oars was hypnotic.
“Cold,” I smiled. “And delicious.”
