Phoebe Harkness Omnibus

by James Fahy

  “And how, precisely, do you know this?” Cloves asked, following me closely.

  “Marlin Scott mentioned it, back at the masked ball,” I explained. “He was making his big fundraising spiel about how much we all needed the new power plant, trying to get his cronies and business associates to cough up the dough and offer their backing to the project. Part of his speech, he talked about the Labyrinth, and how this tunnel was the only potential weak spot remaining in New Oxford’s security. The other three tunnels which lead out of the city, they’re all closed off now permanently. The only reason we still use this one here is for occasional maintenance access to the power station at the Arboretum.” I looked along the softly-lit corridor of blank concrete. “It was one of his main arguments, of why we needed the new power plant at the Botanical Gardens – so that we could close this baby off for good. Close the last weak spot in New Oxford’s armour.”

  “No doubt this is how your higher powers intended to export my people to this site, should we have accepted the rancid offer of relocation,” Kane grumbled to Cloves. “Is this the glamorous path we would have walked? This tunnel…like a death march to a gas chamber. We are not rats, to scurry beneath the earth into exile.”

  “Don’t take it out on me,” Cloves said harshly, with little sympathy. “I already told you, I didn’t know about any such offer.” She dismissed the Tribal with a condescending snarl, turning to me. “I can see why Scott would use this angle though. If he was trying to drum up support. If we had the Botanical for a site, this place could be sealed up forever. No more risk of the Pale getting in this way. Can you imagine? If they found this tunnel, countless zombies pouring through into our underground in their thousands, popping up into the city all over out of every sewer grate to kill?” She blew air out of her nose. “Jesus. The thought of it makes my skin crawl. I bet that got some wallets rustling alright. Scott does know how to push people’s buttons. This place is a crack in the dam.”

  “Well, it’s not entirely unsafe,” I said. “Look.”

  Ahead of us, the tunnel finally ended. Filling the space from floor to ceiling before us was a great set of dull metal doors. They looked sturdy as hell. The rivets punctuating the sides were the size of my fist. Stencilled in their centre were the usual hazard symbols and strict instructions against unauthorised personnel proceeding any further. The listed penalties for opening these door, we read, were harsh, but we ignored them with the universal disdain given to all such safety instructions.

  “Blast doors,” I said as we reached them. Kane reached out and ran a hand over the metal. It was dusty and rasped under his rough palm.

  “Over a metre thick, according to Griff’s specs,” I said. “Reinforced steel and coded against anything like the Pale. Scott and the other early fathers of the city who put up our defences way back when weren’t stupid. This is very, very secure.”

  Cloves stared up at the impregnable door for a moment, her hands on her hips. “Dandy, Harkness,” she said. “So what you’re basically saying, in essence, on this little field trip into Oxford’s lower intestine, is that there’s no way through? What precisely was the point of the expedition then?”

  At eye level, to the side of the door, there was a panel, looking like an oversized fuse box. I walked over and opened it with a deafening screech of hinges. Revealed below the casing was a heavy, industrial looking keypad. None of the glossy touchscreen tech of today’s datapads. This was old tech, from just after the wars. Manual keys, covered in a thick protective plastic; numbers and the alphabet. Above the suspended keyboard was a display panel. Two small bulbs, one dark, the other lit and glowing a dull, demonic red.

  “Because there is a way through," I said.

  God, I hoped I was right.

  “Scott said that the all the doors keeping our city safe, not just this one, but the others down here, those that used to lead out of the city but are no longer in use, they all have a passcode. Closely guarded, high level clearance.”

  “Don’t suppose he happened to blurt it out?” Cloves asked sardonically. “As you do at a party in front of three hundred guests?” I looked back at her.

  “No, he didn’t,” I said patiently. “He only said it was very secure. A twelve digit code consisting of letters and numbers.”

  There was a small display panel above the keypad, showing three entry fields. “Seems obvious enough,” I said. “12 digit code, broken into three groups of four digits each. Each group has to be a combination of letters and numbers, according to Scott.”

  “There must be countless combinations,” Kane said, wiping the dust from the doors between his hands absently. He was looking at me incredulously. “Even with just the single digit numbers. Too many permutations, millions.” He shook his head a little. “When you add also the letters of the alphabet, twenty six more levels of combination, on top of the number possibilities. It would be almost impossible to randomly punch in the right code.”

  “Well, someone knows it,” I said. “Maybe Coldwater found the information in the Cabal archives. I don’t know, but people have been through here, and recently, in both directions. I believe Professor Knight and Amanda Bishop, and also her students.”

  “Her students?” Cloves said.

  “Whatever this project Knight alludes to,” I nodded, “it was clearly covert. Let’s face it, they weren’t baking cookies. Dark and questionable deeds have been done, right? And it happened out here, beyond these doors, beyond the city. Out of the way of prying eyes at the old site. They knew the code, they had access.”

  Cloves rubbed the bridge of her nose, as though staving off a migraine. “Yes, that’s all very fascinating, Harkness, with just one small technical hitch, which is that everyone involved is either dead or missing. It’s not like we can give them a quick call. Bishop, Knight, the torn up students we found at the Jenner. If they knew it, they took this code to the grave with them.”

  I didn’t think so. I wasn’t entirely certain, but it had come to me on the wall, a stroke of inspiration which had hit me as I’d stood in that high place in the darkening purple sky. I had stared out at the Harcourt Arboretum, distanced from the city by the blackness of no-man’s land, and I had thought of the Labyrinth, a subterranean web connecting the two places. The murdered people: chauffeurs, professors, biologists, and the students. The terrible mess at the Jenner.

  “I don’t think they did,” I said, looking at them both. “I think they wanted someone to know, they left it for us. When I told Coldwater about it, she seemed to think it was irrelevant. I thought she was just being dismissive, now I’m wondering if she was just deliberately throwing me off the scent.”

  “What are you babbling about?” Cloves snapped.

  “The murders at the university, when we found the dead students. Don’t you remember the crime scene? Everything had gone. Their datapads, all their research, everything had been cleaned up, all possible evidence of what they had been working on had been taken away or destroyed.” My eyes flicked to Kane. “All they left were corpses. Except they weren’t thorough enough. One of the kids wasn’t quite dead.”

  They were both staring at me in the soft hum of the underground fluorescent lights. “So he did the only thing he could,” I explained. “He left us a message, in his own blood. He gave us the key.”

  I looked at the blast doors, huge, monolithic and impenetrable before us, feeling like Dorothy before the closed gates of Oz. “It wasn’t the Tribal gate at the Botanical, it wasn’t the name of some seedy vampire nightclub, or a shadowy doomsday cult. It wasn’t an alchemy process from Bacon’s manuscript or even a secret codename for some black ops Cabal initiative. It was just…the magic word.”

  “You speak of the crescent moon?” Kane said with wonder. “Written in blood on the walls.”

  I looked at him and nodded.

  “You said at the time, Kane, that the boy’s dying brain must have been muddled, as he’d scrawled both the ‘e’s backwards. What if…they were never supp
osed to be ‘e’s in the first place?”

  “Threes?” Cloves said, staring at the keypad behind me thoughtfully, my theory slowly sinking in.

  We stood a moment in silence, a low hum coming from the lights and fuse box.

  “Well, fuck me,” Cloves breathed artlessly.

  Kane walked to the fuse box, his large hand hovering over the digits.

  Cloves shone her flashlight on the keypad with grim urgency. “Try it.”

  With no small amount of trepidation, he keyed in the first three digits as I said them out loud. Groups of numbers and letters each.

  “C, R, 3, S.”

  Small green digits filled the first of the four window displays. There was a click somewhere.

  “C, 3, N, T,” I said, and Kane flicked the buttons.

  Another click.

  Only the last window remained. I swallowed hard as Kane looked back at me darkly.

  “M, 0, O, N.”

  The display was full. We collectively held our breath. For several seconds nothing happened, and then, all letters disappeared from the windows. The red light flashed once, and then returned to its dull glow.

  The anti-climax poured over the three of us like a breaking wave. The doors remained resolutely closed. I exhaled, disappointment rolling through me. I was wrong? I had been so certain.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Cloves into the silence after a few seconds. “Do it again, but this time, for the last group, type ‘em, oh, zero, en’. Not ‘em, zero, oh, en’. The other way round.” We both looked at her curiously. “What? It’s the only one of the groups which could be either way round and still have both numbers and letters in it.”

  Kane typed the digits again, resulting in the same series of clicks, until the display flickering on the monitor finally read the same as the message we had all last seen left in blood:

  CR3S / C3NT / MO0N

  The red light died, and the other bulb lit green. A klaxon sounded somewhere, making us all jump, and with a rumble that made the loose dirt skitter across the floor, the blast doors opened, rising from the ground and ponderously disappearing above us into a recess in the ceiling.

  We stared through the open doorway. Beyond, the corridor continued into darkness, endless and straight. There was a rail fixed to the floor, stretching away like a perspective line, toward the old power plant beyond the city, seven miles in the darkness. Atop this monorail sat a strange, boxy contraption with windows in front and back, which looked to me like some ugly and very ancient cable car.

  “Open sesame,” I said quietly, as the klaxon finally died, echoing away in both directions. Disturbed dust floated down.

  Cloves went ahead. Shining her flashlight over the monorail car. “Well, at least we’re not going to have to walk all the way to the power plant. Not if we can get this rusty piece of shit up and running anyway.”

  Kane and I followed through the blast door. It slowly rumbled down behind us, presumably on a timer. We all turned to stare at the wall of steel blocking our way back.

  “I trust…” Kane said, when the wall of steel had settled firmly into place, cutting off the city behind us, “…that it is the same combination to return.”

  “Well,” I said, as brightly as I could manage. “Let’s hope so, eh? We’re outside now.” It sounded off just saying it. I’d never been outside the city, and even though we were several levels below the surface, I was now technically out of bounds, in the wilderness. “There’s no saying the Pale aren’t crawling around this tunnel on this side of the doors. We should keep our eyes open.”

  “There’s a cheery thought,” Cloves said dryly. She had clambered into the contraption. “All aboard the death train then. There are controls here, they look pretty basic.”

  Kane and I joined her in the ugly, functional cab. It was rather cramped, probably only intended for one solitary maintenance worker. Kane took up most of the space admittedly, but Cloves commandeered more than her fair share as well. She exuded an invisible personal bubble, like a poisonous stinging nettle, and Kane and I ended up squashed together on one side of the cab. He gave me an apologetic smile and slung his arm over my shoulder, resting it on the window grate behind me. Cloves saw and snorted. “Men…they’re the same in any species.” I ignored her, stoically staring out of the front window and emphatically not at the Tribal I was now chest-to-chest with. I could feel his breathing on my hair.

  Ahead of us, the tunnel stretched away to vanishing point. Yellow and black striped hazard-lines ran along either side of the central rail.

  “I guess we follow the yellow brick road then,” I said. “Off the map…”

  Cloves thrust forward what looked like a heavy gearstick with her black-and white gloved hand. “If you even think about finishing that sentence with ‘here be monsters’, Harkness, I swear I will kill you myself with my bare hands.” She looked back at Kane. “Or maybe I’ll get this one here to kill you with his ‘bear’ hands.” She snickered a little, in a very un-Cloves’ manner. I guess everyone, even her, has some kind of sense of humour.

  33.

  The machine juddered to life and the monorail began moving us forward. It was in good working order. Old, but well-maintained. I was right. Someone had been using it recently.

  It quickly picked up pace, and we were soon rolling along the dark corridor with a low rumble at a stately twenty miles an hour or so. I held on to the open side, the metal cold under my fingers, watching the wall slide by and wondering what the hell we were moving towards. Perhaps Cloves was right. Perhaps we should have called it in. I would feel a whole lot better with a fleet of Cabal agents behind me, armed to the teeth. But we didn’t know enough, and Kane wouldn’t hear of it. His daughter was at stake here, estranged or not, he wouldn’t risk going in guns blazing until he knew what her fate was. I glanced up at him quickly. He was staring straight ahead, his deep yellow eyes focussed unfathomably over Cloves’ shoulder at the blackness swallowing us up.

  I put my hand on his forearm in what I intended as a reassuring manner. “We’ll find her,” I said quietly.

  It was odd, to find myself trying to comfort a creature that, just a few hours ago, had been a nightmarish giant bear ripping me out of a steel coffin.

  He glanced down at me, his jaw muscles clenching. “She came this way,” he said. He spoke quietly, and I felt rather than heard his deep bass rumble. “I can smell her. I can smell them too. The Pale. They’re all over this place.”

  That was to be expected, I thought. It still made me feel cold to my stomach to hear it though.

  “And I smell something else. Something…alien,” he added.

  “Alien?”

  “I’ve only ever smelled it once before,” he said, looking down at me as the tunnel rolled by. The light from the intermittent wall lamps chased shadows across his features in a strobe. “When I first met you.”

  I was a little taken aback. “I smell…alien?”

  He actually smiled a little, wolfishly, which was ironic as he wasn’t a werewolf. “Not now, but when we met. You had been near something…unnatural. I smelled it then, I smell it here.” His smile faded. “As of now, you smell only of vampire.”

  I released his arm, looking away. Well, thanks for bringing that up, I thought. I felt bad enough about what had happened with Allesandro already.

  Embarrassment at being caught on the verge of…well…something was only half of it. I hadn’t meant to take his blood. I hadn’t expected to enjoy it so much.

  On the plus side, if he hadn’t been lying to me, if his blood really was the miracle cure he claimed it was, then the Pale virus within me, my own personal rage demon, was finally repressed, and would stay that way now for a good while. No need to dope myself with Epsilon every few hours. I wondered if it were so. Had Allesandro been telling the truth, or selling me snake oil? I couldn’t help but notice that I didn’t feel like slaughtering Kane and Cloves in a violent bloodbath, so I surmised he had been telling the truth after all. First t
ime for everything, I suppose.

  Vampire blood is a heady thing. Even here rolling along in a dark underground catacomb, when I should feel scared and tired, I could still feel it coursing through me. I felt rejuvenated, practically glowing. I could feel every limber muscle in my body. It was hard to remember a time I’d felt stronger or healthier. They should bottle the stuff. I wondered if this is how vampires felt all the time. So…vital?

  “You should not trust them,” Kane said to me, looking straight ahead down the tunnel. “The vampires.”

  “And whom should I trust?” I asked. “You?”

  He shrugged, indicating that my trust was not particularly something he desired or needed. “They do nothing but serve themselves,” he said. “It is what they are. It is all they are. But they will get inside your mind.” He tapped his temple with his finger. “No vampire has ever yet lifted a finger but to further its own ends.”

  “That’s a cynical view,” I muttered.

  “They will use and abuse all around them. It is how they move through the world, Doctor, a dance they have done with humanity since olden days. They take and take, and people will thank them for it. It is their special brand of magic.”

  I wondered if the Tribal spoke from experience. I couldn’t really argue. Allesandro had certainly used me in the past, keeping me safe and helping to disband the Black Sacrament, that breakaway group of apocalyptic suicide-cultists last year. His heroic rescue and dogged determination to keep me alive may have seemed on the surface a noble and heroic act, but the end result was that he’d got exactly what he wanted. His rival dead and the Dukedom of Sanctum firmly in his grasp. Checkmate. Any thoughts I’d had that there might be more to it than that kind of fell flat when he then didn’t bother even trying to contact me afterwards.

  But then, I had told him not to. Perhaps he had merely been respecting my wishes.

  It still pissed me off a little that he hadn’t even tried.