by Briana Snow
“But the tunnel is still there?” Verity pressed, as Shenk nodded to where the next set of metal stairs disappeared down a shaft into the floor below. He paused, holding his light up.
“Yes. Past the Restricted Vault, which is just down there.” Shenk nodded. “It’s the next floor down. If we can get past the guards, and get the second volume, then I was planning to lead you out through the old tube tunnel.”
“Good thinking, Batman,” Verity said, nodding down to the metal stairs beyond. “So, go on. Lead the way!”
“We’re going to have to get our stories straight. We’ll only have one shot at this…” Shenk said.
“You’re bringing the first volume of the Luminaire to its rightful resting place beside the second volume.” Penelope was struck by an idea. “We’re here because we’re the only ones who can touch it. You’re our guard.”
“Me?” Shenk looked about as menacing as a large, angry dishcloth, and it was clear to anyone that he couldn’t be asked to secure two dangerous subversives.
“Well, it’ll just have to do.” Verity shrugged. “Just get us close, Shenk, that is all I ask.”
“Right. Okay. Uh, right…” He swallowed nervously.
“You can do it,” Penelope whispered at him. It wasn’t that she wanted to trust him, but that I have to trust him, she told herself heavily. At her soft words of encouragement, Shenk nodded once to them, and then once more to himself, before leading the way, his feet clattering on the metal stairs downwards, towards the second grimoire.
Chapter XXIII
“Good evening, good evening!” Shenk boomed as he walked forward towards the two Knights Templar Guards, who were both taller, broader, and looked a whole lot meaner than Penelope had anticipated.
They had just almost-marched at a quick-step down the metal stairs, Penelope wincing with every ringing clang and echo of their feet, and found themselves in another of the oddly uniform semi-circle corridors, tiled in white and black. There was nothing differentiating this corridor from any of the others, save that there were no more openings in the floor and no more metal stairs to traverse down, and there was an odd, slightly dust-covered breeze that was eddying towards them with the slight howl of wind like they were listening to a faraway lost ghost, trapped forever in the mazework of tunnels below the city of London.
The only other differing feature of this tunnel also, was the fact that it was occupied by two tall men dressed in heavy canvas shirts, boots, and heavy padded jackets and woolen caps, standing in front of an arched door made of solid steel. To Penelope’s eyes, the two Templar guards had the look of special forces, or ex cops to them, and to complete the image they even carried short and stubby, ugly looking rifles slung across the front of their chests.
“By Order of the Knights Templar, halt! And announce yourselves!” the nearest guard said, in a tone that suggested that this was a phrase that he took very seriously indeed.
“I, Knight-Researcher John Shenk do go here, and with me are two valuable assets to this holy order under my guard,” Doctor Shenk said, as Verity brought a foot down on one of the guard’s shins.
“Argh!” The injured man gasped as the other moved with professional ease, bringing up the rifle.
Doctor Shenk moved not with professional ease, but instead with a good amount of desperation, flinging himself bodily forward into a crushing wave that fell upon the second guard with all of the unstoppable momentum of a hurricane.
There was a moment of struggling, and Penelope found herself stepping back, her hands clutching the suitcase and the Luminaire within to her body. She watched as the first guard seized Verity—who then managed to do something very complicated with her elbows and hands, making the guard crumple up in agony with an alarming popping noise.
Next to her, Doctor Shenk wasn’t so lucky. He had managed to force the soldier to the wall with a heavy thud (as Shenk was clearly the bigger of the two men, but also, Penelope could see, the weakest), but then it happened. A muffled whump like a distant cave-in, and an almost instantaneous crack like a bone being broken. The noise was so loud and high pitched that the Special Collections Librarian found herself blinking and yawning as her ears popped, and a small puff of dust appeared in the plaster of the wall behind her ear.
What was that? she thought, turning to look at where a spider web of cracked and broken plaster and stone sat behind her, and in its dark center, a small, dark, slug of anthracite grey.
Oh no! The Librarian’s mind caught up with the rest of her, turning to look back at the form of Doctor Shenk as he slid forward to the floor in a slow, and graceful ripple. Upon his chest, there expanded a large wet circle that wasn’t red, but was almost black. He had been shot.
“Shenk?” Penelope found herself saying, uselessly, looking at the Templar Knight guard, his stubby, ugly little gun still smoking as he raised it upwards towards her, and she saw his hands tightening on the trigger.
This time, and at these close quarters, the shot from the gun was even more deafening. Penelope felt something kick her chest like a horse, and she was flung backwards into the wall behind, her ears ringing with white noise. She thought that she could hear a scream or a shout, but her eyes weren’t working as she opened them. All she could see was white. Maybe I am dying. Maybe this is it after all. The Librarian felt a little relieved, but also terribly panicked for the world that she was leaving behind.
“…up!” Someone was shaking her, and her vision cleared as the smoke and dust started to dissipate. Someone was shouting, but it was as if God had turned down the volume control on reality, because all that Penelope could hear out of Verity’s mouth was a whisper. “Get up!” she said again, Penelope once more getting an understanding from the way that she read her lips rather than heard her with her ears. The Book Hunter looked pale and shocked, the fine white dust covering her jacket and sticking to her hair like flour.
“Where are the guards?” Penelope asked, not realizing that she was shouting, adding, “and why aren’t I dead?”
“Heavens above, Penelope!” Verity mouthed, clamping a hand over Penelope’s mouth before making a shushing gesture with the other. She pointed behind her, to where the two guards were now lying on the floor next to the body of the very dead Shenk, their limbs in a complicated array of brokenness.
“DID YOU DO THAT?” Penelope shouted again, causing Verity to wince. “OH. Sorry.” The Special Collections Librarian started to ‘whisper’ (to talk normally).
“Never mind what I did, look at what happened to you.” Verity pointed down to Penelope’s chest, which was still holding the small red suitcase, but now with a blackened hole in its dead center, where the Knight had blasted the fabric.
“How come I’m not dead?” Penelope repeated, looking at the suitcase with wonder, as her hearing started to return, albeit slowly, and with a tremendous amount of static noise. “Oh, my god! The book!” The Special Collections Librarian quickly tore at the catches of the little battered suitcase, throwing it open to discard a layer of tee-shirts, jumpers and clothes that she had been using to pack the grimoire in safely. Every item had a neat burn hole moving straight through it, heading straight for the grimoire itself. With a moment of wild hope, Penelope thought that the Knight Templar’s gun might have managed to accidentally ‘kill’ the Luminaire minus Clavem, and now their terrible quest would be finally at an end.
But it was not to be. Somehow, amazingly, the manuscript bound in little more than hide over a thin wooden board had not been scratched at all. It had not even been damaged by the point-blank bullet.
“But it can’t be! That’s impossible…” Penelope watched in amazement as something fell from the grimoire with a chink onto the floor below. It was a flattened slug of the bullet. It had amazingly been caught on the ornate metal catch like a serpent eating its own tail, and the Librarian could clearly see where the catch metal had warped and scratched as the bullet had wedged into it.
“It’s a miracle,” Penelope breathed.
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“I don’t think miracle is exactly the word that you are looking for,” Verity said with a grimace. “Put that thing back, before it breaks any more laws of physics.” The Book Hunter turned to look at the body of Shenk, her shoulders slouching. “What a waste. He would have made a good man, if he ever got out from under the Knight Templar’s thumb.” But grief, it seemed, did not stop the taller woman, as she started rifling through the bodies of the guards, collecting things like identity cards, keys, and most alarmingly, a rifle and spare ammunition.
“What? You’ve just been shot, he’s just been shot,” Verity said at Penelope’s stunned and disgusted look at the guns. “Don’t think that the Templar will stop at anything to get that manuscript off of you—even if it is seeking to protect itself.” She handed a set of keys to Penelope and barked gruffly, “Please, open the door. We won’t have long before your brother and the rest find out that we’re missing and figure out what we’re doing—if they don’t already know.”
Still in a haze of shock, Penelope did as she was told, taking the curiously old-fashioned keys on the iron ring, and inserting one after the other until the right one bit home, and turned in the lock.
The door opened, and on the other side was the second volume of the Luminaire Minus Clavem.
Chapter XXIV
On the other side of the metal door was a circular room, tiled with the same white and black ceramic tiles on the walls and domed ceiling, with the floor being a smoothed, almost polished glassy-marble. Penelope was hit by a sensation like a cold breeze, although her hair did not move, and there were no openings for any air channels to get through into this room. It certainly looks like the sort of room that the Knights Templar would keep a magical grimoire. Penelope saw a stone pedestal in the center of the room, and a ring of inscribed runes and sigils on the floor in a circle around the pedestal. None of the signs there inscribed were anything that Penelope recognized, but they seemed to crawl and shift in her vision, as if they had been written or painted in iridescent inks.
And on the pedestal, there was another grimoire, just like the one that the Special Collections librarian had in her suitcase. It sat atop its plinth in the odd mockery of a lectern in a church, but this one, instead of radiating calm and dignity, had an ugly black chain looping from the twisted serpent design catch to bolt it securely to the stone below.
“Woah,” Penelope said, stepping forward into the room and pacing around the new grimoire. The book was shut, but, she was sure that she could see it quiver slightly.
“What are you waiting for, Penelope? A sealed invitation from the Prince of Hell himself?” Verity was walking backwards into the room, keeping the rifle raised pointing back out at the tunnel through which they had come (empty of anything except bodies).
“It’s locked and bolted to the bloody stand,” Penelope said, a flutter of annoyance crossing her mind. Just why was Verity speaking to her like this all of a sudden? If it wasn’t for her, for Penelope Harp, then the whole world would be overrun by devils and worse by now, right? “So… unless you brought a bolt cutter and an angle grinder…” Penelope said sharply.
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” Verity said darkly. “The Luminaire wants to be freed, and it doesn’t want to be destroyed. Just like the first volume caught that bullet, the second—”
“Vorja!” An incensed voice broke through their frantic whispers. It was Darius Harp. “And little sister of mine, of course. What have you gone and done! Those two were my best guards.” His voice traveled down the tunnel towards them.
“Well, it doesn’t say much for the rest of you!” Verity shouted back.
“No, Verity—don’t!” Penelope said, putting one hand on the handle of the rifle that the Book Hunter was holding. The tall woman looked at the librarian as if she were mad.
“You do know that the Knights out there just killed Shenk, don’t you?” Verity Vorja hissed back at her accomplice.
“Yes, of course I do!” Penelope said, feeling tears run down her cheek. “But, but Darius, for all that he’s evil and done terrible things, he’s still my brother, and I’ve only just met him…”
“You fool, you’ll get us both killed.” Verity shook her head, and opened her mouth, looking about to explain why when Darius’s voice filled the tunnel outside once more, and with it, the sound of rustling and clanking feet.
“Come on now, ladies. This doesn’t have to be messier than it already is. You will have the count of ten, and then I will be coming in, and taking what is rightfully mine,” Darius crowed.
“Yours?” Penelope watched as Verity shouted out into the tunnel. “In what way is the Luminaire yours at all? Just because your sister is holding a copy? Two copies, now, I might say?” There was a hiss outside of frustration, as the Book Hunter continued. “Just try to come and get it and you’ll get a bullet in the brain, Knight!” Vorja said savagely.
“Ten!” Darius shouted.
Penelope found herself stumbling back towards the occult lectern, with the battered red suitcase clutched across her chest. How could it all have come to this? How?
“Nine!” Another shout.
“I’m warning you, Darius,” the Book Hunter spat, as Penelope shook her head in horror.
“Eight!”
More deaths. That was all that was going to happen here, Penelope thought. More Knights and Verity and me and Darius are all going to die, all over this! She looked down at the grimoire that was now somehow in her hands. She didn’t even remember opening the suitcase to get the first volume out.
“Seven!”
How could any of it be worth it? Isn’t all of this bloodshed and mayhem just what the demons and devils and hells wanted?
“Six!”
BLAM! There was a shot from behind her, and the sound of it hitting stone like a thunderclap as Verity let off a round in the direction of Penelope’s brother. No!
“I’m warning you!” Verity snarled once more.
“Five!”
Penelope’s hands started moving. She opened the first volume of the Luminaire Minus Clavem, and suddenly, immediately, she felt that sensation that came with the opening portal. A spiritual drag-factor that pulled at her clothes, her hair, everything.
“Penelope! What are you doing back there?” Verity was shouting, able to feel the vortex as suddenly as Penelope could. It was like a sudden sensation of creeping horror, coming closer and closer to them, and it was happening much faster than it last had in the librarian’s apartment.
“Penelope?” This time it wasn’t Verity shouting for her attention, but instead it was Darius, and she realized that he must feel it too.
“You fool!” someone shouted, although the roar of the invisible winds was too high for Penelope to work out just who had said it out of either Verity or her brother. It could have been either, as both seemed pretty mad at her.
“What have I done? What I had to!” she called, stepping back from the lectern to see that, horribly, both volumes of the Luminaire were now open. A part of her thought that had been impossible, seeing as the second volume from London had been bolted and chained closed, but there it was—open and with pages flying in perfect time to the first volume on the floor.
“Close it, for god’s sake, close it!” Verity was shouting at her, trying to crawl towards the books even though a gale had seemingly erupted around them.
It was only Penelope herself who was unharmed and unaffected. She could feel the buffeting spectral winds, of course, but they did not pull at her in the same way. Like I am in the eye of the storm, she reasoned.
“If you stop fighting!” she called at Verity and at Darius beyond.
“What? Are you mad?” Verity called to her.
“Probably,” Penelope said to herself, as she saw the swirling winds start to take on colors. They were forming a funnel, streaked with angry red, purple, and blue. On the other side of that funnel crawled Verity and the rest of the room and, somewhere beyond—the others—but here, on the
inside, Penelope felt a sense of malignant calm.
She knew then, what she could do. Tunnels work two ways, she thought. “Take my hand, Verity,” she said calmly to the Book Hunter, who reached a quivering hand towards the vortex of power. It was an easy thing for Penelope to seize her hand to drag her through, into the perfectly calm eye of the storm.
“We… We have to close them.” Verity was gasping for air, clearly shaken by the ordeal. “If we don’t…”
“Then a portal to hell will open, yes, I know,” Penelope said. “But not if the last Luminaire isn’t also open, right?” She looked at Verity, who appeared deflated somehow.
“I—I don’t know.” She was looking worriedly at the two grimoires, rushing through the pages until they were both over halfway through, three quarters, four-fifths.
“Then come with me,” Penelope said. “I have had an idea.”
“Penelope!” It was a shout, rising through the vortex itself, and when the two women looked up they could see that there, at the door to the grimoire vault was none other than Darius himself, raising his gun, and—
Thump-thump. The two grimoires reached the last page, and, in unison they turned it over, and the ground beneath Penelope’s and Verity’s feet vanished. Penelope jumped forward, seizing both volumes as she fell, as the gun in Darius’s hand went off.
Chapter XXV
“What have you done?” Verity groaned from the floor, as she rubbed her aching head. The room felt different somehow, even the air felt different. They were in what appeared to be a rock cavern, with rough-hewn walls carved out of a brownish-black sort of rock.
“I, uh, I’m not quite sure, actually,” Penelope said, looking around themselves, and then looking upwards, expecting to see the vault of the British Library still above them as if they had fallen through the floor. Actually, they had fallen a whole lot lower than that, and there was no hole in the ceiling above their heads.