by KJ Charles
I suppose it is not easy to imagine Simon as a vulnerable man. Most people would sooner say intimidating, or ill-tempered, or terrifying, and I should not argue, but dear God, if you knew the pressures he was under. If you knew the risks he ran, the price he paid. If you knew what price I have had to pay…
I have never told this before.
I am afraid to tell it now.
I will not go over the case again. It was the matter that I have written up for public consumption in my third published Casebook as “The Lavender Girls”: a haunting that left men dead, asphyxiated, with the cloying stench of flowers around them. It was a terrible and complex case, where the vengeful ghosts had been victims of the men they had killed, and the spiritual pressure had been nigh intolerable. Simon was forced to use the Second Line of the Saaamaaa Ritual, and he does not speak those inhuman syllables lightly. The scent of lavender sickens me still.
What I did not put in the published work, what I had to hide as a matter of course, was our personal relations at that time.
It had been a period of intense pressure. We had had two or three cases on the go at a time for several months, often involving late nights (the occult, endlessly supplied with dark deeds at midnight, really is no profession for a man who likes his sleep) and it had taken something of a toll on our intimacy. We had been together for some four years at that point, and naturally the savage need of the first months had worn off. We could make love at a slower pace; we did not feel the same urgent compulsion as we reached for one another; and we were tired.
Nevertheless…
For a few weeks now, Simon had worn nightclothes to bed. Flannel pyjamas, in fact. It had struck me as odd at the time, since it was summer and the nights warm. I asked him if he was well. He grunted.
He did not look well, in truth. His skin had a pallor I did not quite like; his eyes were reddened and ringed with sleeplessness, and I had observed him flinch, just once or twice, when he moved. He looked to be in pain.
So he wore flannel pyjamas to bed and was not inclined to fuck. Had, indeed, declined my suggestions and removed my questing hands on grounds of exhaustion, on the few occasions I found him in bed, because that was the other new habit he had developed that month. He would tell me he would join me in bed shortly, then delay for half an hour, so that with the best will in the world I was nigh-on asleep before he came into the room. And he rose before I woke. That was not new; he was a habitual (if ill-tempered) early riser, but previously he would at least sometimes reach for a book and stay until I awoke, or even shake me into consciousness for a bit of morning glory. Not now.
But we were busy, and he was under pressure. I did not think a great deal of it at first. Not until the case of the lavender girls.
As I have said, it was a hard one. The ghosts of the murdered men cried out; the ghosts of the women they had abused cried louder. Or so Simon told me, because he did not invite me to look with him in the mirror when he examined the runes on his skin. He found other tasks for me, or vanished on some pretext, and told me what the messages from the world beneath our world had said.
Three days into the case, we came home late after some fifteen hours on our feet chasing up leads, human and inhuman, that went nowhere. Cornelia and Miss Kay had both retired for the night. Simon made the usual noises that he would close up the house and follow me to bed.
“No,” I said. “You are exhausted. I shall do it, you go up. And Simon: I want you to stay in bed tomorrow morning.”
“We are too busy,” he said brusquely. He looked drained, the grey stubble on his chin dark against his unusual pallor.
“We are not too busy to sleep, and we are not too busy for one another. You may be inclined to martyrdom but I am not. For heaven’s sake, Simon—”
I reached for him as I spoke. He stepped back.
I blinked, not precisely hurt, because it seemed more inexplicable than hurtful in that moment. Simon might be tired, but he did not avoid my touch.
“Simon?”
“I shall go to bed.” He turned as he spoke, not meeting my eyes.
I stared after him. It seemed wrong—it was wrong. In another man it would have suggested guilt, perhaps, even a heart inclining elsewhere. I did not believe that of Simon, and frankly, if I had, I couldn’t imagine where he would have found the time. But he had avoided my touch and turned from me.
I closed up the house, locked the door, came upstairs to the bedroom we had shared for four years now…
He was not there. His pyjamas and dressing gown were gone.
I looked around, bewildered. Went out to the corridor. “Simon?”
The door to the next room, the spare bedroom, opened a crack. “I am restless tonight. You need sleep. I shall stay here.”
“What? But—”
He closed the door.
I could not understand. Was he ill? Had I offended him? Even at the worst of times, even in exhaustion, we took strength from one another. “With you I can breathe,” he had told me so often, and I could feel its truth in the relaxation of his powerful body when he lay with me.
Why did he not want me now?
I wanted to hammer on the door of the spare bedroom and demand answers, but I was tired too, so tired that in my confusion and distress I felt tears prick at my eyes. I had no intention of enacting a sentimental drama while we were both exhausted. I would go to my solitary bed, I decided; I should allow him to avoid me, if he must, until this case was concluded; and then I should insist on knowing what the devil he was playing at before we embarked on any other work.
So I resolved, at least, but sleep did not come easily. How could it, when I lay alone in a solitary bed, and did not know why my lover had separated himself from me?
We put an end to the case the next day. As I have said, Simon was forced to use the Ritual to dispel the thing that smelled of lavender. He spoke down the ghosts of the girls, and—angrily, reluctantly, harshly—those of the men who had been their murderers and their victims. He concluded the story, standing square-shouldered in a room that seemed empty to human eyes, and sent the spirits on their way, and then—
You must understand: he was so strong. A heavyweight boxer, who daily relieved his tensions in the ring so that his body was a thick mass of muscle. In four years he had never had so much as a cold. I had seen him injured, of course; I had seen him shot through the upper arm, only to reach for his assailant with his uninjured limb and wreak retribution.
So you may imagine my feelings as he spoke the last words that freed the spirits, then let out a gasp, and folded, hunching into himself, knees bending, his great powerful body toppling to the floor.
“Simon!” I was at his side in an instant. “Simon, what is it? What has happened?”
“Nothing.” His face was a terrible shade of grey-white, and sweaty, like a man in shock. “Leave me.”
“Rubbish,” I snapped. “What the devil is wrong?”
Simon’s face was drawn with pain. He knelt on the floor, huddled in his coat, wincing. His jaw was set, cords standing along his neck, lips white, and his arms were held oddly, around but not touching his chest, wrists crossed in front of his body.
“Nothing,” he snarled again.
“Is it your chest that hurts? Let me see.” I reached out a hand and he jerked up his arms in defence.
It was not a blow. Nothing like that. For one thing his wrists were still crossed; for another, if Simon had hit me I should have been left in no doubt of it. But I had reached to him, and he had knocked my hand away to stop my touch.
We stared at one another. His dark eyes were wide with shock and strain.
“Simon,” I said. “I will see. You will show me.”
I thought for a moment he might refuse. But then, with an angry turn of his head, he moved his arms away from his chest. He did no more. I took the lapels of his coat, moved them carefully aside. I unbuttoned his waistcoat.
There was blood seeping through his shirt. Not just in one place but in
lines. It was almost as if he had been slashed by some great beast’s paw, and I stared in bewildered horror for a moment before the far worse truth dawned on me.
“Christ.” I fumbled at the buttons of his shirt with clumsy fingers, as I had so often, but not like this. God, not like this. I pulled the cloth apart.
The scrawled writing on his skin. Red and black. Mostly red. And as I watched, as the unreadable script formed, blood beaded at its corners and oozed along its lines, the whorls and points becoming gleaming red stars on his skin. A long rune wrote itself like a slow razor slash across his chest, and I saw his face tighten with pain.
“Why is that happening?” I whispered.
He shook his head.
“How long— That’s why you would not sleep with me these last nights. Isn’t it? Curse you, Simon!”
“You think I wanted you to see this?”
“Why the devil should I not? How can I help you if I don’t know—”
“You can’t.” He spoke with unutterable weariness, and it silenced me. “You cannot help me, Robert. In truth, I am fortunate to have had so long.”
“What do you mean?” I asked through dry lips. “Damn it, what do you mean?”
“I am not made to bear this.” Simon put a hand on my shoulder and leaned on me to rise. He was very, very heavy at that moment. “No man is. Let us go.”
At home, we repaired to our bedroom in silence.
“Undress,” I said.
Simon stripped himself with weary movements. It was a distressing sight. The runes moved on his skin, the usual gentle murmur, but now they had left traces: thin scab lines all over him, holding the shapes of the inscrutable alphabet in dried blood.
“Dear God,” I said. “Why did they do that? Why are they not bleeding now?”
Simon sat on the bed, heavily. “You know as well as I that when one is touched by the occult, it leaves marks. I have been more than touched. The messages have been coming through my skin for so long. It could hardly fail to leave a trace.”
I could imagine it. As though a man were to write, day after day, on the same sheet of paper. Sooner or later the inscription would begin to wear its way through. The paper would tear, first at the heaviest strokes of the pen, soon enough at the lightest touch.
I watched the runes scribbling themselves over him like an infection.
“It’s going to get worse, isn’t it?” It was barely a question.
“Probably. Yes.”
“Can you stop it? Stop the runes?”
Simon smiled without mirth. “Do you imagine I should have them now if I could?”
“Yes,” I said. “I imagine—I know that you would go on bearing these messages as long as you were able, because they are what help you do your work. You, turn your back on lost souls for such a small thing as your own comfort? I doubt it, Simon, and I ask you again, can you stop it?”
Simon looked at me, dark eyes unblinking for a couple of seconds, then reached out an arm. I came to his side, holding him with reluctant care. I should have preferred to cling, to cry out my sickening fear and demand his comfort, but one must be a man.
“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I don’t know.”
“How did you get them?”
I had asked before, of course, and never had an answer. I had respected his privacy in days past. Damned if I was doing that again.
I pushed him back and sideways, urging him to lie on the bed. I lay by his side, still dressed, my arm over him, head on his broad chest with those hateful narrow scab lines scratching across it. I could not see his face that way, and I asked again, “How, Simon?”
A long pause.
“There is an occultist,” he said at last. “His name is Karswell. A remarkable scholar. He dedicated many years of his life to studying the world beneath the world. Attempting to see below and beyond. You understand me.” He put his arm round me, almost absently. “He wanted more sight than man is entitled to, and studied the twin branches of necromancy and divination. Neither are safe studies, as you know.”
I did know. Occasionally, when one looks into the pit, the pit looks back. Sometimes it winks.
“Karswell is a cautious fellow. Once he felt ready to move from theoretical studies to practical experiments, he made sure to carry them out on others.”
“Others,” I repeated.
“Children. He bought several. The first experiments failed. But eventually—well, either he refined his work or he found a subject attuned to it. He bought an eight-year-old boy, sharpened his pens, and began to write the runes.”
“Sweet Jesus.”
“The black ink was the first set.” Simon sounded very remote. “That was done with a pen fashioned from an obsidian blade used for sacrifice. The red ink was put on by a bone pen. The ink—” He exhaled hard. “It took five years, in all, and it was—painful.”
I wanted to kill this Karswell. I wanted him dead. I have not often wished death on any man, but I should have killed him then, with my own hands.
“He experimented on his own child at that time,” Simon went on. “More of his inks. He is an expert in ink. Feeding it into the nails of her left hand, to form the looking-surface for divination. Theodosia cried herself to sleep every night, curled over her hand. And then, during the day he educated us. I believe his initial intention was that we should be living conduits for his sight into the world of the dead and the world of the future. Merely exist for the convenience of his vision. But we proved resilient, and as he said, he could not see any reason we should not become useful, at least until our bodies ceased to tolerate what had been done to them.”
“Simon…” My voice cracked.
“Karswell did not consider Theodosia’s work more than a partial success,” Simon went on. “Her sight into present events is deep but intermittent, not always clear, and she has no vision of the future. Eventually he decided to repeat the work on her other hand, with a different formula. It would have left her unable to use either hand without agony, but she would fulfil her purpose.” I could feel the anger, old and deep, roiling low in his chest.
“What happened?” I asked.
Simon shrugged. “We grew.”
“You…?”
“Theodosia was old enough to reject any remaining filial duty to her father. I was fifteen years old, close on the height I am now, and boxing regularly. And though Karswell is a powerful occultist and a dangerous, ill-willed man, he is physically negligible. I pinned him to the wall by his neck, she told him what she had put in his coffee, and we resigned from his service.”
“Good,” I said, with some force. “I wish you’d killed him.”
Simon shrugged, his powerful shoulders lifting my head with the motion. “I have enough on my conscience.”
“So what then?”
“We, ah, made a bargain. Karswell would move out and leave us in possession of Fetter Lane in return for the antidote. He was not feeling very well by then. We evicted him on the spot, packed up such of his possessions as Theodosia chose not to keep, and took the house for our own. He attempted retaliation more than once, but…we gave him reason to believe that we would reciprocate.”
I tried to imagine it. Simon as a sturdy young man, dark-haired and earnest. Miss Kay—I could not picture her as a girl at all. It did not surprise me to learn that she was capable of poisoning her own father; I could only be sorry she had shown mercy.
“In the end Karswell came to accept that he had lost his control of us, that it would never be regained. He retreated to a country property to pursue other studies. We stayed in Fetter Lane.”
My jaw hung open. “Those things happened to you here? In our house? Why in God’s name do you still live here? How can you bear it? What he did to you…” No wonder its atmosphere was so chilling, no wonder neither of them had ever made it a home.
“We take what he did to us wherever we go,” Simon said. “And at least there’s no rent to pay.”
I stared, speechless. He cupp
ed his hand over my head, stroking my hair. “It’s all right, Robert.”
“It is not. It is damned well not. Why did you never tell me this?”
He let out a long breath that shook a little. “Because you have been such a comfort to me. You cannot know how much. And I did not want to cause you pain.”
“I may scream,” I said. “Blast you, Simon, when will you stop trying to protect me? You can bear all this, but you don’t think I can bear to hear about it? For God’s sake, man.” I propped myself up with an elbow on his chest, glaring down. “You believe your own publicity.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I may be nothing more than your chronicler, your humble assistant, your John Watson to the world, but I expect better than that between ourselves. I am not your subordinate partner.”
He exhaled hard. “No, you are not, and nor are you here to carry my burdens. Damn it, have I not tainted you enough with the life you lead because of me?”
“Because of me,” I snarled back. “I chose this path, Simon. I’ve been at your side for four years now, God help me. I have taken a life, I have faced creatures the likes of which I had not known existed, I have never ever run, or left you alone, and still you persist in this bloody patronising indulgence of my supposed weakness as though I were some fainting damsel—”