Strange Practice

by Vivian Shaw

  Ruthven was still looking at him, the silver eyes narrowed in consideration. “I don’t think it’s impossible that something could have survived undiscovered for this long, just … vanishingly improbable.”

  Varney laughed, a hollow sound that echoed in his chest. “One thing I have learned beyond the shadow of a doubt throughout my existence is that anything that can possibly go wrong will go wrong. If there were some hidden cache of thirteenth-century manuscripts containing the instructions for this … this holy poison … and the original blades to carry it, and if this cache could be found by someone of a mind-set to put them to use instead of into a museum, then …” He spread his hands, shrugging. It was one of the first things he had really come to understand about his half-existence, in the early years; it explained why everything he ever attempted to achieve had ended up the same way, at the point of a sword, the tines of a pitchfork, the flames of a torch.

  Ruthven was looking at him with a surprised, and faintly pitying, expression. “Well,” he began, and Varney could hear the diplomacy being applied. Ruthven didn’t believe him; well, why should he? He had a beautiful house and an espresso machine and two automobiles, and a number of imperial dressing gowns, and actual human friends who enjoyed spending time with him, and he apparently found it entirely untroubling that he belonged to a tribe of undead monsters used to frighten children into obedience. Varney was abruptly, suddenly exhausted, tired almost to the point of nausea. The wound in his shoulder itched like fire.

  “I don’t suppose it matters, much,” he said, cutting Ruthven off in mid-platitude. “The fact is that they’re here, they have these weapons, and they are … using them. Whether or not they are entirely human. And we need to know how they are getting around.”

  Ruthven looked as if he had been about to pursue the diplomatic line further, but—thankfully—decided against it, taking the computer back and resuming his search. He had been looking up Underground maps, and unsurprisingly finding only the standard line maps rather than the more useful blueprints indicating where the off-limits tunnels ran. As Varney watched, one of his searches popped up a picture of a complicated intersecting series of brick arches and openings.

  Ruthven stared at it, his pupils expanding and contracting rapidly. “I’m an idiot,” he said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “An idiot. Really, I ought to have thought of it at once. You’ve read your Hugo just the same as I have; what did he famously spend half a damn chapter describing in detail as the easiest way of moving around a city while escaping pursuit?”

  Varney straightened. “They can’t be using the sewers, surely?”

  “Look.” Ruthven searched for, and found, a map of the main drainage network of London (circa 1930, but close enough). He centered it on the map of modern-day London and turned down the opacity just enough to let the two superimpose, and turned the screen to show Varney. Every single one of the markers he’d placed at attack or murder scenes was located along a sewer line. Not entirely surprising, given the way the sewers often tended to lie beneath the roads, but the correlation was exact.

  “I think the question now is not how they’re getting around,” he said, “but where it is they’re coming and going from.”

  Greta had brought back blood and danishes for the household when she’d come back from the clinic, which meant Ruthven didn’t have to go out to eat. Just as well, he thought, looking out at the uninviting prospect of a cold rainy night. Even if there weren’t mysterious zealots with poisoned spikes out there looking to perforate him, he wouldn’t have looked forward to braving the elements; it took some little time to first select and then thrall somebody, and then find somewhere they wouldn’t be disturbed for the few minutes it took to drink, and all this was much more tiresome to contemplate in the rain. Besides, it really did make his hair frizz.

  Everyone was home: Cranswell and Fastitocalon had returned from the museum sans priceless literary artifacts shortly after Greta’s arrival, and were in the middle of a conversation about metaphysics. Ruthven listened with half an ear, and then with his full attention, coming to lean in the doorway of the kitchen and watch Cranswell consuming pastries while Fastitocalon explained how demons worked.

  After a little while Greta came to join Ruthven, and they exchanged a look. Neither of them had ever actually come right out and asked Fastitocalon to tell them the details of his nature, but Ruthven at least had been curious about it for decades. One did not flat-out ask an old friend what they were. Perhaps it was different for Cranswell, who had only just met him, or perhaps Cranswell simply didn’t mind the impropriety. Either way, this was fascinating.

  It seemed that Heaven and Hell both existed, although much of theology had got hold of the wrong end of the stick. The two sides were not in active competition. “You don’t go after souls,” Cranswell repeated.

  “No. Well. … see, this is the biggest misconception people have and I’m fairly sure Sam has left it this way for a reason, but we don’t actively try to tempt people into Hell. Hell just provides the torments, or the boredom, either way, which people believe at the most basic unconscious level that they deserve.”

  Cranswell stared at him, hand frozen halfway through reaching for the last pastry. “You’re kidding, right? Hell is what you make it?”

  “Well, not exactly. Your fate is sort of whatever you subconsciously know it ought to be.” He looked wretched. “This is not my field. I’m … I was an accountant, not an afterlife counselor.”

  “What if you’re an atheist?” Greta said. “What if you don’t believe there even is an afterlife, that you just die and decompose and are recycled?”

  Fastitocalon looked over at her. “Then that’s more or less what happens, I think. The idea is not that one side gets more souls than the other in order to win, like celestial checkers or something, but that the influence and power of the two sides remains in balance at all times. The balance is incredibly important. Otherwise very bad things happen. Rivers of blood, rains of fire, horses eat each other. Generally to be avoided.”

  He looked dreadfully tired, Ruthven thought. Tired, and ill; this was taking a lot out of Fass, first the business with the artifacts and now having to tell everyone things that were probably supposed to be kept secret. Even as the thought crossed his mind, Fastitocalon began to cough, and Greta nudged Ruthven aside and went into the kitchen to steady him with a hand on his back.

  “You need to be in bed,” she said, when the fit was over. “I should have sent you there directly when you got back from the Museum, but I’m sending you now. Varney’s already taken himself off.”

  “Mmh,” Fastitocalon said, leaning into her hand. “I’m … not going to argue.”

  Ruthven glanced at Greta, saw the flicker of concern behind the calm doctor-face. It wasn’t a good sign when Fastitocalon didn’t immediately protest that he was quite all right and people shouldn’t fuss. “Well, good,” she said. “Go on. I’ll bring you a cup of something heartening in a little while. Do you—”

  “I’m all right,” he said, cutting her off, and got up with a brief effort. “I can manage the stairs without expiring, I believe.”

  Cranswell looked up at him as he rose. “Thank you,” he said. “For the—the museum thing. Thank you, Fastitocalon. That was kind of incredible, actually, and I really appreciate you doing it.”

  Fastitocalon blinked at him, looking surprised. “Oh, well,” he said, “you’re quite welcome. I’m glad I was able to help. It is so pleasant being useful.”

  After Fastitocalon had gone to bed, Ruthven made dinner for the human contingent, and when he was finished with the washing up he went to check the locks again, unable to excise a certain formless nagging anxiety. He could not make himself settle to anything. For the first time since this whole business began he was thinking about getting out of London—maybe not Scotland, maybe somewhere warm and dry, with scenery. Italy might do. Or Greece. He’d liked Greece, even if the last time he’d been there it ha
d been during a less-than-admirable phase of his existence and he had made some extremely poor decisions—but the seas really had been wine-dark, and the olive groves fragrant, and all in all it was a much more pleasant prospect than London in November.

  Ruthven filed that thought under profoundly unhelpful, and sighed. Running away was out of the question.

  Cranswell and Greta were looking through the lab results on the fragment of metal she’d dug out of Sir Francis, and he joined them in the dining room. The table was covered in books—half of which he barely even remembered buying, back in one of his more Gothic phases: witchcraft lore, herbals, and … apparently a paperback of Montague Summers’s drivel that he absolutely had no memory of purchasing at all. The contrast between their bowed heads, dark and fair, under the warm lamplight made him think of Renaissance paintings.

  “Anything interesting?” he inquired.

  Greta looked up. “Yeah. This stuff … Ruthven, Harry’s results are kind of incredible. It’s like a broad-spectrum antisupernatural cocktail. There’s the iron, for the ones who can’t bear cold iron; there’s silver, for the weres; there’s a bit of lead; and the rest is all a potpourri of classic white-magic herbs. Look at this.”

  She pushed a couple of books out of the way and slid her notebook across the table to him. “Furanoacridones and the acridone alkaloids arborinine and evoxanthine, plus coumarins—all of that you can get out of plain old Ruta graveolens, otherwise known as rue. Rosmarinic acid and carnosic acid, from rosemary—and a whole bunch of stuff you can extract from sage and wormwood, including thujone. There’s lavender, valerian, yarrow, all kinds of stuff. And not to leave you out, we’ve got a ton of thio-2-propene-1-sulfinic acid S-allyl ester.”

  Ruthven looked at her, one eyebrow slightly raised. “Which is what exactly, when it’s at home with its feet up?”

  “Allicin,” she said. “Derived from garlic. What you might call the active principle.”

  He was suddenly very, very glad the blade was sealed up in plastic and safely locked away in the garage; even just touching it for any length of time would almost certainly make him break out in hives and wheeze for breath.

  “These guys really did their homework,” Cranswell said, still scribbling notes. “There’s a bunch of other stuff in here that I can’t identify as specifically toxic to a specific kind of monster—no offense—but none of it looks like something you’d want to have inserted into you on a pointy instrument.”

  “No kidding,” said Greta, touching the side of her neck. “It looks like they’re not only loaded for vampire, as it were, but they’re also equipped to take down pretty much any other kind of undead and/or generally supernatural being that’s known to have a particular physical or chemical weakness. Did you lock the doors?”

  “I did,” said Ruthven, “but I am suddenly moved by the inspiration to go and do it yet again. And possibly chalk some sort of protective rune on them, if I knew any. Do you know any?” he added.

  “Not my field.” Cranswell shrugged apologetically, but he looked uneasy nonetheless.

  Greta rose and went to join Ruthven, and together they checked the locks once more, not only on Ruthven’s front door, but his back door and cellar doors as well, and all the windows one by one.

  Elsewhere, another door was opened on blue light.

  Something—someone—hit the floor of the low arched little room with a squelchy thud, and moaned. In the blue light his torn habit looked black, sodden with rainwater and less mentionable things from the journey through the tunnels in the dark.

  They had found the nameless man in the overflow chamber, and at first he had been glad to see the dim pinpoints of light approaching; at least until the first blow doubled him over and sent him face-first into the shoals of filth on the floor. After that they had dragged him by the arms, silent, their grip implacable as iron, through the undercity to the inner sanctum.

  Two blue-eyed monks looked down at his crumpled form. Without saying a word, they drew dull grey crossblades from their sleeves and knelt to cut the remains of his habit away. First the rope cincture around the waist, then the cowl and hood, and finally the garment itself was stripped off in pieces, revealing half-healed burns still weeping fluid. Still without speaking, they folded and set aside the remains of the clothing.

  The humming of the spark in its globe seemed to intensify, as if focusing its attention. Both monks crossed themselves, murmuring something under their breath, and then bent to take his arms and drag him toward the metal cabinet. Hanging from the corners of the cabinet were two stained leather straps, just the right length for fastening round somebody’s wrists.

  He roused from stupor enough to cringe away from the light, now just inches away, and made a thick choking sound. The straps held firm. The curve of the glass bulb was so close he could feel the heat from it on his skin, in his bones, like desert sunshine. The noise of it filled the world. It resonated in the hollow spaces of his skull, mindless and insistent, and somewhere deep in the remains of the nameless man the thought occurred that it would drive him mad, that this was what the insane must hear inside their heads.

  He was not worthy of the light of God, if he could think such things. He deserved the pain.

  When the priest with the long braided whip came in, he was silent, hanging half-conscious from the restraints, but it was not long before the dim ozone-smelling tunnel rang and echoed with screams.

  “We separate him, together with his accomplices and abettors, from the precious light of the Lord God and from the society of all Christians; we exclude him from our Holy Order.”

  Twelve men in rough robes and hoods stood in darkness lit by a single shaking candle flame, their shadows moving on the tiled walls of the sewer tunnel. Twelve men, surrounding a heap of something on the noisome floor. They were together in fellowship, at this time and in this place. The work they did now was entirely the work of God.

  “We declare him excommunicate and anathema,” their leader continued. “We judge him damned, with the Devil and his angels and all the reprobate, to eternal fire and torment.”

  The words had the ring of practice, of familiarity. In point of fact this small group of men, or men-shaped creatures, had read words like them many times before, under vastly different circumstances. Not these precisely—in that earlier life, one spent under the sky rather than beneath the city streets, there had never been a need to speak these particular phrases, only praise and adulation—but words like these. They knew the text and the cadence and response. It was right. It was true. It was just.

  The one who had spoken wore a blue stole around his neck, vivid against his brown monk’s habit, bright and strange in the dimness of the tunnel. Now he reached out shiny-scarred fingers into the candle flame, holding them steady and unwavering in the middle of the light for a moment before pinching it out. Darkness flooded in, so absolute as to be almost tangible; then, slowly, pinpoints of blue light appeared in pairs. A small and shifting group of constellations.

  “He is unclean,” said the figure who had snuffed the candle. In the faint light of their combined eyeshine the stole around his neck was just visible. “Expel him. And then purify yourselves.”

  Two of the monks broke from the circle and bent to pick up the thing lying on the tunnel floor: a thing that grunted as it was lifted, and left a bloody trail behind it in the dark. A third led them down the tunnel to the circular alcove of a manhole, and without a single word they carried it up the iron ladder and into the larger darkness of the night.

  Sir Francis Varney was also damned, with the Devil and his angels and all the reprobate, and it was keeping him up at nights.

  As the city slept toward morning, he leaned once more on the windowsill of his room and—his mind running in familiar, well-worn ruts—considered himself. He was a very old monster, and quite a cunning one, except for the part where he always somehow got in the way of his own plans and ended up either dead or on the run from a crowd of irate humans—still, t
he planning was all right, as far as that went. It was the tiresomely persistent self-loathing factor that really doomed him to continued failure.

  Ruthven had been undead for what, four hundred years? More than that. Almost as long as Varney himself. And yet he dwelled here, in this comfortable, gracious house with its warmly living atmosphere, surrounded with the innocent and clean. With the living.

  Varney went over it again in his mind, deliberately making himself iterate Ruthven’s advantages, like a man probing at a rotten tooth with his tongue. He had his cars, and wireless Internet, and subscriptions to magazines, and a kitchen with food in it, food that he himself cooked and fed to living people. How could he manage to be so … so ordinary, when he was an undead fiend from hell? And that didn’t even take into account Frederick Vasse, or, properly, Fastitocalon, who by his own admission was actually a fiend from Hell, or at least used to be one before a management shakeup in the seventeenth century. Fastitocalon worked as an accountant, for crying out loud. He’d even mentioned that there was an official representative of the nether realms stationed in London to keep an eye on things, and Varney simply couldn’t wrap his head around the idea of demons cheerfully walking the streets with the rank and file of humanity, as if they didn’t mind being what they were.

  As if they didn’t mind their own selves.

  He could not imagine it, could not comprehend considering himself anything other than a stain on the skin of reality, a regrettable blot on the world’s copybook. His sins were beyond forgiveness.

  Not only the fact of his unholy nature, but the terrible deeds he had done, cried out for retribution. Any one of them would damn him to the fiery pits, but one in particular cried out for vengeance: the episode in his existence—he could hardly call it life—he most regretted; the turning of Clara Crofton. Of all the foul, indefensible, destructive, unforgivable acts he had perpetrated on the world during his various sojourns in it, none could be worse than the sin of changing a human being into a damned, parasitic horror such as himself. To doom her to an eternity of pain and loathing, to take away the last sweet gift any human could receive, the gift of absolution—no, Varney could not forgive himself for that, and would not try. Redemption was beyond him.