The Mona Lisa Sacrifice

by Peter Roman

  There are real ghost stations under London, of course, but they are deeper down, hidden among the government bunkers and secret tunnels and the Other London. There’s more than one underground beneath the city.

  I pulled myself up on the empty platform and pressed myself into the far corner of the station, against a wall, as the next train went past, a blur of light and faces peering blindly out at me. Petals on a wet, black bough. Then it was gone and I was left in the darkness again.

  I pulled the skull out of my backpack and saw that it was still glowing, but now the glow pulsed in a regular pattern, like a heartbeat.

  I tried to destroy the skull once more, hammering it into the wall. Not with all my strength, because that would have shattered the wall, but with enough force to shatter a human skull, let alone a crystal one. It simply bounced off and grinned that skull grin at me when I looked down at it. They made these gorgons tougher than they appear.

  I had to get creative, which I didn’t really want to do, because it would mean using grace. But a deal with a gorgon is a deal with a gorgon. That is, it’s best not broken.

  I raised the skull to my lips and blew a little grace into it, just enough to give me something to work with. Or so I thought. The glow pulsed quicker for a few seconds, and then the skull melted away in my hands before I could do anything. But it wasn’t truly gone. In its place hung Victory’s face, like when I’d summoned her at the Louvre, only much more real and terrible now.

  How do I describe what she truly looked like? There was fire and smoke and snakes made of fire and smoke and a gaze that was broken glass and a mouth that looked like it opened into hell when she smiled at me. She was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen, even though the mere sight of her nearly killed me and would probably stop most people’s hearts.

  I could see now why she’d been separated into pieces. And I wondered who had been capable of such a feat.

  “Impressive, hydra,” she said. “To be honest, we didn’t think you would succeed where so many others have failed. You are indeed a hero.”

  “No, I’m not,” I said. I didn’t know what she meant by that “others” bit, but now was not the time to press for details. “I’ve lived up to my end of the bargain,” I said. “Time for you to tell me what you know about the Mona Lisa.”

  She laughed, and the sound was like knives digging into my ears.

  “You may not want to know,” she said.

  “I’m pretty sure I don’t,” I told her. “And yet here we are.”

  “We like you, hydra,” she said, and her snakes lashed out at me, sinking their spectral fangs into my eyes. I couldn’t help but flinch. “We suspect we could find ways to make it worth your while to return our other limbs to us,” she added.

  “I’m enjoying the single life these days,” I said. I coughed at all the smoke in the air. Another train went by, and more faces stared out at us. I wonder what they saw. “Mona Lisa?” I said.

  “She is our sister,” Victory said.

  I had to let that one sink in for a moment.

  “The Mona Lisa was a gorgon?” I said.

  “She is the most powerful among us,” Victory said. “So much so that her spirit lingers even in those inferior portraits the mortals insist upon painting.”

  Yeah, I noticed the plural too. Portraits.

  Victory sighed. “But even our power is as fleeting as human lives. Once we ruled over men, and now we are nothing but prizes in men’s collections. That is the way of it though. Everything passes from one realm to another.” Her snakes went for my face again, but this time they caressed it. “Even you, my special one. Even you.”

  So. I’d been played by Cassiel. I thought he had me chasing after a secret painting when in fact he had me chasing after a secret gorgon. I wondered what other secrets I didn’t know about.

  “Can you just find her in there with the rest of you and ask her where she is?” I said. “That would make my quest a little easier.”

  Her snakes all drooped on her head and Victory closed her eyes.

  “She is not among us,” she said.

  “But if Medusa is in there with you—” I said.

  “She is far from us,” Victory said. “Farther than Medusa and the other dead ones,” she said. “She has been taken.”

  “Taken?” I said. “Taken where?”

  The snakes all spread themselves out and looked in different directions. They hissed at things I couldn’t see.

  “We do not know where she is,” Victory said. “She was torn from us during the Windsor Castle fire.”

  I had a vague memory of watching footage of the fire on the news year ago. I thought it had been a construction accident, but I should have known better.

  “She has been lost to us ever since,” Victory added, and the snakes continued their search.

  “Who took her?” I asked.

  She opened her eyes again and looked at me. “If we knew that, we would have gone on the hunt ourselves,” she said.

  I felt a chill at the thought of that. An angry group of gorgons was not to be taken lightly. Just ask anyone who’s ever encountered the Bacchae.

  All right. One step at a time.

  “What was she doing at Windsor Castle?” I asked.

  “We are not certain,” Victory said. “She was blind, deaf and mute at the time, her powers bound, so we could not tell. She had been held captive in another realm for a long time, so we had no contact with her. Those few followers we still have told us she was a guest of the Queen when she returned to the land of the seasons, but she was taken again before we could find out what happened to her. And now she is gone once more, and even the Queen’s representatives don’t know where she is.”

  “Are you sure they’re telling you the truth?” I asked. I decided to leave alone the revelation that the gorgons still had followers.

  “Yes,” Victory said, in a tone that suggested . . . well, I don’t know what it suggested, other than something not particularly pleasant had probably happened to the Queen’s representatives.

  A guest of the Queen. As I knew well, the Royal Family’s guest accommodations could be anything from a castle to a dungeon cell deep underground with no entrance or exit. And I suspect the latter was more likely if Mona Lisa was blind, deaf and mute at the time. The Royal Family. Damn.

  “I really wish you would have told me all this before,” I said.

  “But then we wouldn’t have had this lovely time together,” she said. “Come. Kiss us before we go.”

  So I did. When a gorgon tells you to kiss her, it’s generally a good idea to comply.

  Her lips burned mine, and her snakes bit at my face, and when I looked into her eyes from this distance, my heart actually stopped for a second.

  “If only you had been the one to slay us,” she breathed.

  “One last thing,” I said. “Why does Cassiel want to find her?”

  “We cannot say for certain,” Victory said, “but we assume it’s because they were once lovers.” And then she was gone, blown away by the wind of another train going past.

  I stood in the dark, empty station for another moment, thinking things over.

  Mona Lisa a gorgon.

  A guest of the Queen.

  Cassiel’s lover.

  It was only then that I realized I’d been so preoccupied with learning about the Royal Family connection that I hadn’t even asked who’d held Mona Lisa captive before that. Or who was Mona Lisa’s lover now. I hoped they were only minor details.

  I shook my head and tried to come up with a plan as trains came and went. I had to talk to a member of the Royal Family to figure out what was going on here. But I knew none of them would speak to me. Not any of the living ones, anyway. Which left me with only one option.

  It was time to raise the dead.

  LOOKING FOR AN ANGEL

  IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHE
RE

  When I said earlier that Penelope raised me from the dead I meant it figuratively, not literally. But I was dead and buried in that graveyard in British Columbia when she showed up just in time for me to resurrect.

  It was the 1940s. I don’t remember the exact month or year. I’ve never been that good with time, given that it’s meaningless for me. I had tracked down the angel Gabriel to a lair in the Rockies, just a little north of the Canada-U.S. border. It was a cave high in the mountains, and a tricky spot to reach. The cave entrance was hidden from the ground, so most people wouldn’t even know it was there. But I’m not most people, etc. Also, I saw him fly in there one sunset.

  I found him in the cave but he was waiting for me, probably on account of the avalanche I caused on the climb up. It made a lot of noise, and I suppose I didn’t help things by using some grace to melt my way out of it. So when I stepped into the entrance of the cave he was ready for battle. I only had time to register the homey touches he’d made—renderings of dead angels in blood on the walls, an ice sculpture of the true face of Christ, a cross made of bones taller than me—and then he came hurtling out of the depths and smashed into me, carrying us both out into the night sky. He knocked the climbing axe from my hands, which ruined my plan a little, as I’d been intending to lodge the axe in his skull, and then we fought, grappling with each other and exchanging blows as we fell.

  Normally this is the point of the story where I get the upper hand, but Gabriel is stronger than me, especially when I’ve wasted half my grace on things like melting my way out of avalanches and he has an ice sword so perfectly clear and polished it may as well be invisible. I certainly didn’t notice it before he rammed it through my heart. I’ve no doubt I’ll beat him someday, but that day was not the one.

  I woke with dirt in my mouth and cold all around me. I opened my eyes but there was only more dirt. I’d been buried without the courtesy of a coffin.

  This wasn’t the first time, of course. I’d lost track of the number of times I’d been tossed into some pit in the ground after dying. But it’s not really the sort of thing you ever get used to. Try it sometime if you don’t believe me.

  I was still in one piece. Thankfully, I don’t have to contend with being scavenged by animals and insects like most corpses. For some reason they leave me alone. I don’t know why. I’m dead when they’re ignoring me, remember?

  Waking up after dying is like waking up from a deep sleep: you come to slowly, and it takes a while for your mind to start working, to recognize where you are. But when you wake from sleep you tend to be in the same bed or corner of the bar you passed out in. You pick up where you left off. When you wake up from being dead, however, you’re usually in some place different. Like a grave somewhere. It’s a bit disorienting. You also tend to remember the last thing you were thinking of before you died. In this case, it was getting skewered by Gabriel in the night sky, so I woke up screaming and swinging my arms to fend him off.

  It turned out I’d been buried in a shallow grave, because my belated attempts at self-defence caused me to erupt from the ground. I spat dirt from my mouth and wiped it from my eyes. When I could see again I looked around. I was sitting in a graveyard in a forest somewhere. Simple wooden crosses surrounded me, leaning from age or maybe the weight of the moss covering them. Some had already fallen to the ground. Mist wreathed everything, and steam rose from my skin.

  I pulled myself the rest of the way out of the ground and brushed the dirt off my clothes. I was still dressed in my climbing gear, but it was too warm for that now. It felt like a summer morning. So I’d probably been dead for six months or so. Time enough for Gabriel to disappear again.

  I did a quick inventory. The knife I’d never gotten around to using during our battle was gone, as was my wallet. I’d been robbed, probably by whoever it was that dragged me to this graveyard from wherever it was they’d found my body. They’d even taken my boots. I couldn’t fault them for that though. Good boots were hard to find in those days.

  Well, I’d woken up in worse situations.

  I took another look around, and that’s when I saw the woman at the edge of the graveyard. She was standing behind a camera pointed in my direction. Most people would have run screaming at the sight of someone erupting from a grave like I just had. But she simply lifted her head from underneath the focusing cloth and looked at me.

  “Well, you are almost the strangest thing I’ve ever seen,” she said.

  I was caught off guard by her presence, so I didn’t know what to say to that. She filled the silence by crossing the graveyard to hand me her canteen. I drank from it without taking the time to thank her. We studied each other as I guzzled the water. She wore sensible clothes—and definitely unladylike for the time. Trousers, a long-sleeved shirt, a vest for her camera gear, a safari-type hat. Good, worn boots. Her skin was tanned and unmarked by makeup. If she was wearing perfume, I couldn’t smell it through her sweat. There was something familiar about her, even though I didn’t think we’d met before.

  “Do I know you?” I asked her when the water was gone.

  She smiled. “I hope that’s an honest question and not just you being flirtatious,” she said.

  “It’s as honest as I get,” I said. I tipped an imaginary hat. “Cross.”

  She curtsied with an imaginary dress. “Penelope,” she said.

  Yes, the same Penelope I’ve been going on about.

  I studied her a few seconds longer, but if I did actually know her, it wasn’t coming back to me. I handed her the empty canteen.

  “What are you doing out here?” I asked.

  “I was going to ask you the same thing,” she said, looking at the grave.

  I shook my head. “I don’t really remember,” I said, which was truthful enough. “I was climbing and fell. I guess someone must have found me and thought I was dead. But obviously I’m not.” Yeah, I was really going to have to work on better cover stories for moments like this.

  “You’re wearing winter clothes,” she pointed out.

  “It gets cold in the mountains,” I countered.

  “Not that cold,” she said. “Not this time of the year.”

  I decided it was probably time to change the direction of the conversation.

  “Where are we anyway?” I asked. I looked around some more. The mist was burning off in the morning sun now, but I still couldn’t see much more than the trees around us.

  “In the woods, in a graveyard,” she said.

  “Thanks, but I’d already figured out that part,” I said.

  “We’re in British Columbia, Canada,” she said. She reached out and brushed some dirt from my hair. “About a day’s hike from the mountains,” she added.

  All right, so Gabriel hadn’t thrown me that far then. Not that it mattered. He was too long gone to track him now. I’d have to start over.

  I looked back at her and found her eyeing the hole in my jacket where Gabriel had run me through. At least she didn’t say anything about that, which saved me from having to come up with another bad lie.

  “You look hungry,” she said. “Come on, I’ll take you back to the cabin for something to eat.”

  “You still haven’t answered my question,” I said.

  “What’s a nice gal like me doing out here?” she asked.

  “What’s a nice gal like you doing out here, taking photos of graveyards?” I asked.

  She smiled at me again. “I’m looking for an angel,” she said.

  ALWAYS EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED

  WHEN RAISING THE DEAD

  I went back out into the tunnel between trains and climbed onto the platform at the Holborn station. A man and woman in evening wear were the only ones to notice me. They stared and then in true British fashion pointedly looked away, carrying on a conversation about the production of Doctor Faustus they’d just seen. I’ve always liked Marlowe, so I was tempted to stop and expl
ain to them the play was partly biographical and based on moments of Marlowe’s life. But then I would have had to explain he wasn’t a spy in addition to being a scholar, as the common myths went, but was instead a demon hunter in addition to being a scholar. Not the sort of conversation you wanted to have with people when you were trying to maintain a low profile in the country. Especially if you’d just been seen climbing out of a Tube tunnel. I kept my knowledge to myself and got on the next train. The well-dressed couple waited for me to board before choosing a different car.

  I switched lines at random for an hour, in case there was any pursuit I hadn’t noticed, and tried to remember my London geography. I got off at the Archway station and made my way to the Highgate Cemetery a few blocks away. I walked along the fence until I found a lamp post with a burned-out light. I stepped into the shadows and climbed the fence and dropped into the shrubbery on the other side. Although shrubbery may be too polite a word. The bushes swallowed me up, scratching and gouging me with thorns and sharp branches as I came down, and looming over my head like deformed trees when I’d landed. The cemetery was one of those rare places in England where the caretakers allowed plants to grow wild rather than cultivating and grooming them. It was wonderfully atmospheric and all, but it did make skulking about a little more difficult.

  I moved through the undergrowth in a random direction. I didn’t have a destination in mind, although I’d been here many times before. I’d visited Karl Marx’s grave a few times to read him the latest news from the papers, until it got too crowded with students and their bottles of cheap wine—and the news grew too unpleasant for Marx’s taste. I’d brought a few bottles of wine myself to the grave of Adam Worth, a criminal artist I’d once worked with. Yes, artist—there’s no other way of describing him. I don’t know if the rumours that Conan Doyle modelled his Professor Moriarty on him are true or not, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Worth wasn’t much of a criminal sort these days—death has a way of mellowing out most people—but he still had plenty of stories to tell from his younger days. And he had fewer visitors than Marx, partially because he’d been buried in a pauper’s grave, under a pseudonym. Such is the legacy we leave.