Strange Practice

by Vivian Shaw

  “Back with us?” he said mildly.

  The immediate past was filtering back into her memory little by little. Greta could recall getting off the bus and wrapping around Ruthven like a panicky octopus, and then it was raining on her, and then he’d said something and … everything had gone grey and sparkly, and Greta had no idea how much time she’d lost. She made herself stop fiddling with the bandage, with an effort; she wanted to get a look at the cut itself and make sure it was properly clean.

  “I didn’t go anywhere,” she told Fastitocalon.

  “You fainted dead away,” he said, reaching over to the coffee table for a cup of something. “Don’t worry; you haven’t been out more than, oh, I’d say fifteen or twenty minutes. Quite a creditable swoon, if I’m any judge; Ruthven caught you in his arms very prettily indeed, just like in the films. I expect he felt quite pleased with himself. Drink your nice tea; it’s good for you.”

  “I don’t faint,” Greta said crossly. “Or at least I’ve never done it before, and I don’t plan on doing it again.” She took the cup in both hands. “How’s Varney?” Thank God he hadn’t seen that; it was bad enough for Ruthven to have witnessed it, but Varney was a comparative stranger, and she particularly hated doing embarrassing things in front of people she didn’t know.

  The tea was strong and extremely sweet, with brandy in it, and she realized with a slightly sheepish smile that it was exactly what she’d push on someone else under the circumstances. Oh, Fass.

  “Varney,” he said, “is awake and talking. Ruthven’s with him now. He’s led an interesting life, apparently. We had quite a nice little conversation about being ancient and decrepit, he and I.” Fastitocalon coughed. “And he was good enough to confirm that the account we found in one of that young chap Cranswell’s books sounded a great deal like the people who’d attacked him. Some sort of medieval warrior monks wielding magic swords, if you can imagine.”

  Greta stared at him, and then put down the teacup and looked wildly around the room. “Where’s my bag? What happened to my bag?”

  “Right here,” August Cranswell said, coming through from the kitchen with Greta’s battered handbag. She recognized him after a blank moment; they’d met at a party Ruthven had thrown several months back.

  “You’re awake,” Cranswell added, unnecessarily. “Are you okay? What’s going on?”

  She pushed herself to her feet, grimly fighting off another wave of dizziness, and grabbed the bag out of his hands. Ignoring the others for the moment, she rummaged frantically through the litter of phone and notebook and Chapstick and keys and receipts and bits of string. Her fingers closed around something cold and heavy at the very bottom of the bag, and her hand shook a little as she drew it out into the light.

  It was a knife about eight and a half inches long, including the hilt. The blade, or blades, tapered to a sharp point, and resembled two daggers intersecting at right angles, forming an X. Or a cross. Where the blades met the leather-strapped hilt, the metal was a sort of tarnished-looking silver color, but from a little farther down the length of the cross-shaped blade was covered by a dull dark grey coating. It looked powdery, friable. Here and there a little of it had flaked off, revealing the paler metal beneath.

  One of the four blade edges had a dark smudge along it, and Greta’s other hand rose slowly to the wound on her throat.

  London’s lost rivers had taken on a romantic sort of mystery in popular awareness. The idea of waters flowing on and on in the endless darkness under the city streets was deliciously eerie, and of course lost and abandoned tunnels and caverns had always appealed to a certain sort of adventurous spirit. Even the names were evocative: the Tyburn, the Fleet, the Effra, the Westbourne, once broad streams in their own right—now bound and channeled in the bowels of the ancient city, but not entirely forgotten. The old rivers flowed now in a muffled roar and chime of water through cathedrals of tile and brick, unseen arches and coigns of gorgeous complexity guiding and shaping their eventual journey to the sea.

  Now the unrelieved darkness of one of these tunnels resolved itself around two pinpoints of light, moving with a steady loping rhythm against the flow of dirty water. There was a heavy, almost snoring sound of breathing accompanying the two glowing points as they proceeded through the darkness; that breathing and the slosh and splatter of footsteps echoed and re-echoed in the close confines of the tunnel, so narrow a bore that the creature moving through it had to stoop over; but after a few minutes the pipe abruptly opened into a much larger chamber. It paused, just inside the opening, the little steady pinpoints of light blinking on and off twice, and then moved out into the wider space beyond.

  The illumination of those pinpoints was limited to perhaps two or three feet of distance, but the creature did not actually require visible light to perceive its surroundings; it could see quite well. It stood in a high-ceilinged space. Above it stretched an arching, intersecting set of vaults at sharp angles to one another, the old brick glistening with slime. Other tunnels opened into the chamber, black maws in the greater blackness.

  It stood there for several minutes—apparently waiting for something. Eventually a second pair of blue pinpoints appeared in the mouth of an intersecting tunnel, higher up on the chamber’s wall.

  The second creature came to a halt looking down at the first; there was silence again in the chamber, underneath the rush and murmur of moving water. “Well?” the newcomer demanded, after a moment.

  “The monster-doctor lives,” said the first. “Wounded, but not severely. She is with the demons again. Under their protection.”

  There was a hiss, and the points of light above it blinked on and off, once, and steadied as their owner regained control of itself. It looked down once more. “She is unclean and shares the habitation of devils; she is anathema; she nurses the wicked.” It paused, and when it spoke again the voice was cold and blade-sharp around the edges. “Our brother has failed to destroy her; the task will be given to one more worthy. He will find no welcome for him among our order, but the retribution of sins. Henceforward he, too, is excommunicate and anathema. Find him, and cast him out.”

  In the darkness of the chamber the first pair of lights moved, and the short, ugly blade of a knife gleamed bright for a moment, drawn from its sheath and then replaced again. “It will be done,” it said.

  “Go. Instruct the others and then continue your vigil.”

  “Lux aeterna,” said the thing, and it bowed, low, before turning and loping away into the dark. Behind it, the twin blue pinpoints of its interlocutor remained still for a moment longer, watching until it was beyond the range of even these rather remarkable senses; shortly afterward complete and utter darkness returned to the chamber where three tunnels met.

  In Crouch End, the rain had tapered off to the sort of miserable drizzle common to Novembers all over the world, and the dome light of Greta’s abandoned Mini was fading to a dull, tea-colored glow as the car’s elderly battery gave up what was left of the ghost.

  The driver’s-side door was closed; the back door on that side gaped open, and rain had soaked the worn upholstery from blue to black. The car stank of the incapacitant spray residue that coated most of its interior, and also of old sweat and something unpleasantly sharp and acrid, metallic. Here and there on the backseat little shreds of something that looked like damp tissue paper lay mashed into the upholstery. Some of them still showed the raised loops and whorls of fingerprints.

  The Mini was parked along the curb of Middle Lane, not far from the gate leading into the adjoining Priory Park. In the mud by the gate itself, a couple of footprints and a twist of some sort of brown fiber caught in the ironwork bore witness to the fact that someone had passed that way since it began to rain.

  Nobody was there when a dark, indistinct figure stumbled out of the trees; nobody but a couple of sparrows were disturbed when it slipped on the wet grass and fell into some bushes, or staggered to its feet again, leaving tufts of coarse-spun wool snagged on the br
anches. No one was there to register its labored, painful breathing, or the words it was muttering in little runs as it made its way across the park. It was, or up until fairly recently had been, a man.

  The shiny, lumpy pink scars of recent burns stood out against hairless white skin, piebald and blotchy; his eyebrows and eyelashes had vanished, his teeth showed an odd dark stain at the gum line, and his mouth was twisted up on one side with scar tissue. What had happened to his eyes was perhaps the worst. They were the white of poached eggs, a blank mass of pale, formless, membranous tissue. They were eyes that had, quite literally, been cooked.

  And they were also glowing faintly blue. At the moment it was almost impossible to tell, as the remains of his face were scarlet and puffy with the effects of capsaicin spray, the eyes almost swollen shut, a trickle of blood here and there where he had clawed at his skin in a helpless attempt to stop the burning—but little slits of light still showed between the lids. It had been several hours since the attack, and his frantic coughing had subsided, but the pain of the spray on the burn-scar tissue was slower to fade.

  He knew very little at the moment other than that the monster-doctor woman had escaped him, and that this had displeased God, with the consequent punishment of physical agony. Words of prayers he had only just committed to memory came back to him, and he was muttering them as he crossed the park, following a distant yet undeniable call in his head. He knew which direction he needed to go in to reach the holy light. As soon as he found the right kind of way down into the tunnels, he would leave the surface and make his way there.

  By the time the abandoned Mini’s dome light guttered out completely, he had, in fact, gone underground.

  CHAPTER 6

  Tuesday morning came grey and bleak, the sourceless light of a winter dawn throwing no shadows over the vast arching teeth of the Thames Barrier, rendering Cleopatra’s Needle a dull white spike, flattening the baroque shadow-play on St. Paul’s dome. Even without venturing into the streets, people could feel the bone-coldness of the city, feel the year’s end creeping upward from the soles of their feet.

  It was August Cranswell who got up and made the day’s first pot of tea, wearing a borrowed dressing gown over his boxers and a T-shirt advertising the fact that Guinness was Good for You. Both Ruthven and Varney were still sleeping the sleep of the undead, and Greta had made Fastitocalon swallow a fairly powerful antihistamine before the lot of them trooped severally off to bed. Cranswell had the house to himself.

  He went to fetch the newspaper, pausing for a moment on Ruthven’s front steps to watch the early traffic crawl along the Embankment and the poor bastards who had no choice but to be not only up and about but working at this hour toil along the pavement, breathing out great clouds of white in the frigid air. Winter had definitely shoved autumn out of the way and settled in for a good long stretch of bitter chill to wind up the year. Cranswell wondered how the mad monks planned to celebrate Christmas, and decided he didn’t want to know.

  In the kitchen he put the kettle on and unfolded the newspaper. The headline screamed RIPPER DEATH TOLL RISES TO 11: NEW VICTIM DISCOVERED AFTER YESTERDAY’S TWO KILLINGS.

  Cranswell hadn’t caught the news of the latest murder on the radio the evening before—he’d been too busy perpetrating theft of antiquities—and now he read with a dull kind of horror about the tenth and eleventh victims. It was somehow worse to realize he had almost become used to reading about murders, that there was very little shock in his reaction, just intensifying fear.

  The article made particular mention of the plastic rosaries found at all the scenes so far:

  The Roman Catholic Diocese of Westminster has released a statement condemning the activity of this serial murderer and in no uncertain terms vilifying his or her blasphemous tactic of using rosaries as an accessory to his or her crimes. Some commentators have questioned the actual sanctity of the rosaries involved, given that they are apparently mass-produced in Taiwan and retail for 50p apiece, but so far this point has not been directly addressed by the diocese.

  The kettle boiled, and Cranswell made the tea, glad for the brief distraction.

  He’d been frightened—badly frightened—by the previous night’s experience; in fact he thought he had never been quite so scared in his entire life, which sparked exactly no desire to go home at the moment. The fact that he didn’t know what he’d seen, or thought he had seen, was no comfort whatsoever; he didn’t want to go out there right now. The Embankment house was much nicer than Cranswell’s flat; also he rather strongly wanted to remain under the immediate protection of someone physically capable of tying lampposts in knots.

  Ruthven wouldn’t mind putting him up for a few more days. He was always encouraging people to come and stay with him; it was not out of any noticeable desire to bite their necks—unless they were into that, maybe—but Cranswell thought partly just because he was lonely. It must be inescapably lonely, being that old, having watched so many people come and go, quite separate from the ordinary lives all around him. Having to pretend he was one of them, for the most part.

  Ruthven was good at pretending. He didn’t, in fact, tie lampposts in knots; that was precisely the sort of objectionable and dangerous showing off that he condemned roundly in the supernatural community. Cranswell could remember a story Ruthven had told him two or three years ago, in which a group of very young and very stylish vampires had been given the choice of leaving the city in a hurry or having their pretty necks wrung, after a series of unacceptably high-profile incidents. “But you’re one of the Kindred,” their leader had said, according to Ruthven. “You’re above the humans.”

  “I expect,” Ruthven had told him, “that if you ever actually take the time to think clearly about what you’ve just said, you will be absolutely paralyzed with embarrassment. You are barely a decade changed and you have been reading entirely too many tiresome novels. We are not above or below the living, we are beside them, and if we want to go on existing at all we have to understand that the secrecy must be maintained for everybody’s sake. I thought the way you’re thinking, four hundred years ago and change, and it was only through sheer dumb luck that I survived that thought process. Get out of my city and grow up, if you can manage it.”

  And then he had hit the leader hard enough to break quite a lot of bones, mostly because by then he had realized that rational conversation wasn’t doing the trick, and put the lot of them on a lorry heading for the Midlands. Nobody had heard from that particular soi-disant coven again, and Cranswell wondered from time to time whether any of them were still around, and what they’d ended up doing with themselves.

  Cranswell’s own familial connection with the world of the supernatural dated back to the early nineteenth century, when two Cranswell brothers, Michael and Edward, and their sister Amelia, had leased an unprepossessing property in Cumberland known as Croglin Low Hall, and were unfortunate enough to catch the attention of a local and extremely uncivilized vampire. Amelia was attacked and survived the encounter, although much weakened, and after a trip to Switzerland to get her strength back had with considerable pluck returned to Croglin with her brothers to lure the creature from its lair and put it properly to rest.

  After that success they had stayed at the house only a year or two before Michael received an inheritance from a distant aunt; then the family could afford to move to London, where they had remained ever since. Edward—August’s great-great-grandfather—had become an authority on mythology and superstition, and the next generations carried on the work of gathering as much knowledge as possible about creatures like the one from Croglin.

  Like the Helsing family—who had dropped the van from their name in the 1930s, fleeing the Netherlands ahead of the gathering storm of World War II—the Cranswells had found themselves making a transition from hunters to simply scholars, after having made actual neutral contact with the supernatural. In their case, August’s great-grandfather had found himself face-to-face with Lord Ruthven, the latter h
aving been uncharacteristically careless about being seen while changing forms, and had managed to convince Ruthven not to immediately thrall away his memory. The subsequent conversation had surprised both parties with its pleasant interest; and after that first meeting a tentative friendship had developed. It didn’t take long to solidify, based on mutual respect, and—after a little while longer—mutual trust; Ruthven and the Cranswell family had been good friends ever since.

  It had in fact been Ruthven, without the title, who introduced Cranswell’s father to the woman he would end up marrying, a Nigerian scholar doing a postdoc at University College London. August himself had first met Ruthven seven years ago; his father had been dying, and August had come home from his master’s program at Harvard to be there. Francis Cranswell had introduced Ruthven to his son as an old family friend who would look after August and his mother.

  This Ruthven had done. Adeola Cranswell’s mortgage had been paid off, the death duties taken care of, and her aging car repaired—he had offered several times to replace it, but she told him not to be silly—and August’s student debt mysteriously vanished without trace. That in itself would have been enough to endear the vampire to him forever, world without end, but he simply liked Ruthven as a person, money or no money. Even after the revelation of his actual nature.

  In fact, he owed his job at the British Museum partly to Ruthven’s influence, and had been more than happy to oblige whenever asked to do a bit of specialist research. He’d always found his scholarship and time well rewarded—with prettily penned notes accompanying generous and prettily penned checks, or tickets to some particularly desirable show, or reservations for dinner for two at the Petrus.

  “Really,” Ruthven had said when the question of his nature had first (awkwardly) arisen, early in their acquaintance, “the easiest thing is to think of me as a large well-dressed mosquito, only with more developed social graces and without the disease-vector aspect. Actually the leech is probably a more accurate simile, but the mosquito tends to offer less objectionable aesthetic connotations. It doesn’t hurt; the bite wounds heal almost immediately, with only a little itching; people have no memory of the experience. I don’t take more from any single individual than they’d give in a Red Cross blood drive, and half the time I just get by on blood packets Greta collects for me.”