Dreadful Company

by Vivian Shaw

  The ghosts were having a party. It was just about absurd enough to fit into the strangeness of the last several days; why shouldn’t the dead be carousing in the early-morning hours in Paris’s most famous necropolis?

  Crepusculus looked up at him. “They sound like they’re having a good time,” he said. “Nice to know that somebody is.”

  “You want to crash it, don’t you?”

  “I totally want to crash it,” said Crepusculus, grinning. It was the grin that defined him, bright and cheerful and irrepressible, and Brightside felt a wave of fondness for the simple familiarity. Everything else might be going off the rails, but Crepusculus Dammerung’s enthusiasm endured.

  “Very well,” said Brightside, “let’s go and say hello.”

  The cold greenish light grew as they climbed up the hill, but the owners of the voices had chosen a kind of square surrounded by high-walled tombs for their get-together, and it wasn’t until they were almost upon them that Crepusculus and Brightside saw who was doing the talking.

  They’d… manifested furniture. There was a translucent piano, its lid open, all its strings visible in pale green light; there was a vast curvy Second Empire chaise longue and several chairs, and what looked to Brightside like a spectral narghile, a tall water-pipe with several hoses, standing in the center of the space.

  The ghosts themselves were of slightly different colors, some paler shading to white, some greenish, some almost blue, but all of them translucent – their features recognizable, finely drawn, their eyes dark hollows surrounding points of cold light. Brightside had seen innumerable ghosts on his journeys through time and space, and these were absolutely classic.

  One of them, a man whose dark hair was outlined by faint pale flames – that was a good effect, Brightside thought, nicely conceived – sat at the half-visible piano; he had stopped playing when the psychopomps appeared, and was now glaring at them instead. On the chaise longue another ghost, this one holding a lily and wearing an embroidered dressing gown made out of dim white light, looked up. Several other men and women, wearing clothes from a variety of centuries, followed suit.

  “Hi,” said Crepusculus with a little wave. “You, uh. Having a good time?”

  “Who is it?” said one of the women.

  “It’s the living,” said the man at the piano, the way one might say “the taxman.”

  “They’re not living, darling,” the occupant of the chaise longue corrected in a drawl, “they’re eternals, and they’re here to meddle. Aren’t you?”

  Crepusculus glanced up at Brightside, who sighed. “We’re here to ask you a few questions about the Opera,” he said, “and determine if any of you happened to have noticed anything going on recently that’s magic-related.”

  There was general derisive laughter. “The Opera?” said another ghost, a shirtless young man with long wavy hair, smoking a faintly green-glowing translucent joint. “I’d stay away from that place, man. It’s haunted.”

  A striking woman with dark hair nodded, trying not to laugh. “There’s a phantom in residence. All the singers know about it; the managers just pretend otherwise.”

  Crepusculus folded his arms. “Anyone know why it apparently got built with all kinds of arcane symbolism hidden in the blueprints, and half the materials chosen for occult significance? Was the architect trying to bring about the Second Coming, or some magical transformation, or what?”

  “Who knows how architects think?” said the shirtless man, and blew a glowing smoke ring. “There something specific you had in mind?”

  “What about the magic thing?” Crepusculus wanted to know. “Who’s been doing magic, and has that got anything to do with the Opera?”

  “Magic, he says,” drawled the chaise longue’s occupant. “Magic. Do you mean like the stupid little tart digging up graves by moonlight? We know about all that, don’t we, Freddie my love.”

  “Oscar, you said you wouldn’t call me that in front of people,” said the man at the piano, and pushed back his dramatic hair.

  “What tart?” Crepusculus asked, redirecting his attention with some effort.

  “The one with the tits and the teeth, dear boy.” He gave an extraordinarily expressive little gesture, indicating that the lady had been well endowed with tracts of land. “Nasty sharp pointy teeth and a voice like a whining kettle. Smelled like a downmarket whorehouse. Whoever she belongs to, I devoutly wish him joy of her.”

  “A vampire,” Brightside said, unwillingly distracted from the question of the Opera. “A vampire’s been digging up graveyard earth?”

  “Mm. Bearing it off rejoicing, to be used in eldritch ritual and unholy rite, I shouldn’t wonder. Possibly even in the opera house, although that place is a bit classy for the likes of her, bizarre though it may seem.”

  “When was this?” Brightside demanded.

  “Oh, she comes back regularly to top up. Must be going through the stuff at quite a rate. Up to no good, just you mark my words.”

  Crepusculus and Brightside looked at one another. “That would explain the incursions Irazek mentioned,” said Crepusculus. “Repeated summoning. Even if each individual incident was minor, doing it over and over again could set up a standing wave, couldn’t it?”

  “And weaken that already-thin spot on the plane,” Brightside agreed. “That and the mirabilic weight of the Opera together might be enough to do some serious damage.”

  “Splendid,” said the Second Empire chaise longue’s occupant, waving his lily at them. “Do carry on.”

  “Look, this is serious. What’s happening could quite possibly rip reality apart,” Brightside snapped at him, hoping he was exaggerating. “It’s dangerous, it’s stupid, and it has to be stopped before anything else goes wrong, do you understand?”

  “Yeah, this isn’t okay,” said Crepusculus, as close to serious as he ever got. “Maybe not the best time to throw parties right now.”

  “Oh please,” said the ghost of Oscar Wilde, lying back against the cushions of his chaise longue. “I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics, I really do. Sod off, won’t you, there’s a nice couple of eternal beings, you’re interfering with the expression of art.”

  Corvin woke with an ironclad certainty: he had had enough.

  No sex, even mind-blowingly good sex, was worth dealing with a girlfriend – consort – who regularly got so fucked up on various substances that she woke you up screaming like a goddamn banshee and throwing a fit.

  And he was going to have words with Grisaille about making unilateral decisions right in front of him – who did he think he was, taking over like that, and who said Corvin wanted the bloody human involved in this, it was – embarrassing, and now that the human had seen that little performance, Corvin was basically going to have to tear her throat out, because no way was he going to risk her telling anybody about it.

  And the human had given him, Corvin, orders, expected him to do what she said, and to – ugh, he just couldn’t handle this situation any longer; it was more than he could be expected to put up with. He’d been far more patient with Lilith and her habits than she deserved, and it was long past time to get rid of her.

  Probably time to get rid of Grisaille, too. He didn’t like the way his lieutenant had been acting recently, even before all this started. Culling both Lilith and Grisaille would throw a healthy dose of fear into the rest of his people – his children, Corvin thought, his subjects. The new little vampire would do nicely in Lilith’s place, at least for now.

  Still in his gorgeous, embroidered red silk pajamas, his raven hair slipping over his shoulders in a waterfall of midnight-black, Corvin stalked through the passageways of his lair. Those few of his subjects who were awake this early in the evening flattened themselves against the walls as he went by, fear bright and vivid in their eyes. When Corvin was angry, everybody knew it, and the ones who were bright enough to stay out of his way were the ones who tended to survive.

  The opulence of his bedchamber was restored, but to
Corvin’s eyes, even the clean sheets were irretrievably sullied; he decided everything would have to be replaced, furniture and all.

  Lilith lay sleeping in the high carved bed, propped on pillows, her face pale grey, bruised stains under her eyes. Her crystal-silver hair spread over the black silk of the bedclothes like lace. Her lips were bloodless, slightly parted in a rose-petal curve. He could see the darkness of her eyes through the delicate vein-traced eyelids; the lush sweep of her eyelashes looked too dark and heavy to be real. She breathed slowly, shallowly, a faint tide drawn in and out like waves on a far shore.

  Corvin stood looking down at her for a long moment before he reached down to cup her face very gently between his hands; her lashes fluttered and parted, and she gazed up at him with huge, brilliant eyes – and smiled a little, hazy, half-asleep. Without the purple contacts they were silvery-pale.

  He waited until the look in those eyes changed; waited until he saw the truth begin to dawn, waited until she took a breath to say something; and then he tightened his hands and gave a sharp and vicious little twist.

  There was a bitter snap, like a branch breaking under a weight of winter ice; and a moment later Corvin straightened up. One less little difficulty to take care of.

  He had at least ninety-nine problems, but a particular bitch was no longer among them, and now he could turn his attention to the newest of his subjects. The girl – Sofiria, such a suitable name – needed breaking in properly. He’d been meaning to exercise his droit de seigneur in that direction for some time now; it was understood that Corvin could, and did, take anyone he wanted into his bed at any time he pleased, and that this honor was something only the fortunate and special received, but he hadn’t gotten around to her yet. Something to look forward to.

  He stood back from the bed. She looked better like this: death became her. Nonetheless it was untidy to leave bodies lying around, human or Kindred, and Corvin thought he had one last task to demand of Grisaille before the latter’s enforced retirement from duty: clean up this mess.

  It was his job to take care of small matters so Corvin didn’t have to think about them, after all. Somebody else would have to take out the trash once he was gone, but for right now this was entirely Grisaille’s problem.

  Corvin smiled unpleasantly, and went to summon his domestic help.

  CHAPTER 9

  V

  arney woke with the disquieting sensation of having no idea where the hell he was. The last time that had happened, he’d been in Ruthven’s spare bedroom with a square of white gauze taped over a hole in his shoulder, and things had rapidly gone downhill from there.

  He sat up, and it all came back in a rush: Paris. The demon’s flat in Paris. He was alone in the living room, stretched out on a rather boxy old-fashioned sofa; it, and the matching armchairs, were in a shade of avocado he himself would not have picked out, and the rug under the plastic coffee table was a deep-piled shag. It looked very much like a set for a 1970s period piece.

  Demons were weird, Varney thought. The only other one he had ever encountered, Fastitocalon, went around dressed rather like Edward R. Murrow, pinstriped suits and perfectly-parted 1950s hair and all. On the whole, Varney preferred the latter aesthetic to Irazek’s, even if he didn’t understand the motivation.

  He had no idea what time it was; the windowpanes were black mirrors in the light cast by a floor lamp. Nighttime, but which night, or which time of night, Varney wasn’t sure.

  He could remember now coming back to Irazek’s with Ruthven after that strange little interview with the vampire ladies, quite late, and the exhaustion hitting him like a wave. Ordinarily he could go much longer without sleeping, but in the recent past he’d had to thrall several people very hard for quite some time, which always took a lot out of him – and the sheer force of worry in itself was a source of fatigue. Irazek had offered him the sofa and Varney hadn’t tried to protest that it was unnecessary.

  Presumably the others were somewhere close by: he could hear faint voices. Varney swung his legs off the sofa and stood up, stiff and aching but at least less miserably tired, and went to see what was happening.

  They were in the kitchen, sitting at the table together, and looked up as he came in. The clock on the wall read nearly eleven; he must have slept all day and well into the night. No wonder my back hurts, he thought, and then, Has anyone else gotten any rest? Ruthven was more than a little heavy-eyed himself, and St. Germain looked more rumpled than usual.

  “There you are,” said Ruthven. “We were beginning to wonder if you’d slipped into hibernation by mistake. Have some wine.”

  He pushed the bottle across the table. Without blood, red wine was the best Irazek could do for them – better than nothing, it offered vampires at least a little energy. Varney sat down, trying not to wince, and took a long swig; somewhere along the line, the nicety of his manners seemed to have lost its edge. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Irazek is telling us about the essographs,” said St. Germain. “Which are not even slightly reassuring.”

  Irazek went faintly pink for a moment, looking apologetic. Spread on the table in front of the demon were three wide strips of graph-ruled paper with a red line traced down the middle of them, and a notebook full of calculations lay open at his elbow.

  “I’d forgotten all about the essograph at the Opera,” he said, tapping one of the strips with a forefinger. Varney looked closer; all three of them showed a spike in the red-ink trace at regular intervals, like the regular peaks of a heartbeat, but the intensity of the spikes and the length of the interval varied between the three readings. The one Irazek was talking about had the shortest interval of the three. “I know I ought to have remembered to check them all regularly, but it’s tricky to get to most of them and there just didn’t seem to be such a crucial need for multipoint monitoring of planar incursions. I’m going to get shouted at very loudly for a long time about this.”

  Varney thought he’d roundly deserve it. “What does this actually mean, though,” he asked. “These readings. What conclusions can be drawn?”

  “Well, it’s – these are interference patterns, when the reading spikes,” said Irazek. “Whenever something comes through from another plane, it sends out ripples in the background mirabilic field, and they move outward in all directions in a series of spherical wavefronts.” Irazek turned the page in his notebook and drew what looked a little bit like a bull’s-eye target. “If there’s only one incursion, one point source, you don’t get these interference patterns, but if there’s two close to one another, the ripples intersect and you get constructive interference…” And he drew a second bull’s-eye next to the first, tapping the pen on each place where the concentric sets of rings crossed one another. “Nodes and antinodes. Here and here and here. They show up on the esso as a series of regular spikes.”

  “Why do you need three of these recordings?” said Varney, who was feeling a little pleased with himself for following this at all.

  “To determine the location of the incursion points. The frequency of the spikes on each reading show me how far away the location is from that individual essograph, and with three of them to triangulate with, I can work out where the point sources have to be.” Irazek sighed and ran his hands through his hair. “I wish I had any idea what could be causing it.”

  Grisaille had slept – must have slept, because Corvin’s voice woke him: that bellow he thought his leader probably considered a stentorian roar but which actually brought to mind a suburbanite shouting at the newspaper delivery boy for tossing a paper into the hedge.

  He got up, still fully clothed, and went to go see what the matter was. Corvin hadn’t changed out of his thrice-gorgeous crimson silk sleepwear, and the dyed-black hair falling over his shoulders, meant to evoke Antonio Banderas in the Anne Rice film, needed some work.

  “Fuck, there you are,” Corvin said, looking slightly up at him. “I have a job for you.”

  “Anything,” said Grisaille, w
ith no inflection whatsoever. Corvin narrowed his eyes.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Anything you command,” he said. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Come with me.” He spun on his heel and crossed the empty chamber to the door of his own bedroom, and Grisaille thought he knew – no, knew he knew, with a sinking certainty – what he would see when Corvin threw the door open wide.

  Lilith lay in the bed as he and Helsing had last seen her, only her head was tilted at an unnatural angle and her eyes, open, were glazed dull. There was a faint expression of horror in those perfect features.

  “Clean up this mess,” said Corvin. “And then come to see me. I need to discuss certain matters with you in private.”

  For a moment, only a moment, Grisaille saw himself turning on his leader and closing his hands around Corvin’s throat, the way Corvin had closed his own around Lilith’s white neck: the dead did not bruise easily while they were still up and around and walking, but there were vivid dark handprints on that snow-white skin.