And If Thou Wilt, Forget

“…Statement ends.” Gertrude sighed and removed her glasses, massaging the bridge of her nose. “Well. That was a waste of time and effort. Promising at the start, but nothing to it. I think this one can go in its proper place.”

She tucked the useless pages back with their unsatisfying fiction back into the file and carried it over to one of the shelves. After a moment’s pause, she reached for a rather thick file, removed several pages from the middle, and tucked them into the false one before shelving it. That statement would do well to be spread out a bit. She took the last few pages out as well, moved the original file to another shelf, and went in search of somewhere to hide the end of the statement.

Hunters. They had their uses, of course, although there was little a Hunter could do that a liter of petrol and a good kitchen match couldn’t do just as well. It was one of the few points she and Adelard had seriously disagreed on—that and the impending emergence of the Extinction.

Gertrude paused and pressed a hand to her chest for just a moment. Contrary to outward appearances, carefully cultivated ones at that, she did mourn the loss of her assistants and allies alike. She just couldn’t afford to let it show. Caring and trust were weaknesses, ones that those she stood in opposition to would be keen to exploit. Not that there was much they could do now, but still, she owed it to Eric to keep his son alive. Or so she told herself.

But Adelard’s death still hurt. It was too raw, she told herself, too fresh a loss to have begun to heal over properly, so it was understandable that her memories of him were still a minefield, needing careful navigation to avoid them blowing up in her face. After all, it had been less than a month.

She missed him.

Gerard wasn’t the same. Among other things, she hadn’t fully brought him in on the truth; he was mostly concerned with Leitners and the man himself, someone she was even more careful to keep from him. And she knew he was only helping her out of a sense of obligation, really. She still hadn’t decided if he would help her take down the rituals—should she ask him—because he wanted to stop them or because he hoped it would pay off a debt she hadn’t bothered to talk him out of thinking he owed.

She probably ought to feel guilty about that.

With a sigh, she stuffed the file carelessly onto a shelf and turned to the door between the Archives and the rest of the Institute. She could do with a cup of tea. While she did have an electric kettle in her office, meaning she never had to interact with anyone else in the building if she didn’t particularly want to, it never hurt to check in with Rosie from time to time and see if anything unusual was going on with…Elias. Not that Rosie had the slightest idea what was actually going on, but she was nosy and Gertrude knew how to use nosy people to her advantage. She loved to gossip, had a habit of picking up information and either hugging it to herself or whispering it in choice ears, and tended to prattle on about seemingly inconsequential nonsense that nevertheless turned out to eventually have a kernel of extremely useful information in it. However clever Elias might be, or might think he was being, Rosie would often drop an innocuous comment about his movements or meetings that revealed startling depths.

She sensed it as soon as she emerged on ground level. Someone with a statement had crossed the invisible boundary that marked what, for lack of a better term, she thought of as her hunting range. Likely just someone walking past, but possibly a visitor actively approaching the Institute for one reason or another. Normally that would be her cue to go back downstairs until whoever it was came to her, departed on their own business, or passed by without stopping. However, the disappointment of the earlier statement was still keen and the hunger was sharp. On an impulse, she found herself veering towards the front door of the Institute without consciously commanding her feet to do so.

Just as she reached it, it swung open, flooding the little entrance hall with daylight. Standing on the threshold was a young man, older than she had been when she became Archivist, but still young—in his early thirties, if Gertrude was any judge. He was good-looking, with cerulean blue eyes and dark hair with auburn highlights, dressed in a crisp white dress shirt and somber black tie beneath a tailored heather tweed jacket, but what caught Gertrude’s attention was the faint pink tint to the whites of his eyes. Either he hadn’t been sleeping, or he’d been crying. Possibly both.

“Timothy Stoker?” she asked.

The young man’s eyes widened briefly, and then he made an attempt at a grin. “I guess you don’t get a lot of visitors here, huh? You must be Rosie Zampano.”

Gertrude mentally kicked herself for an idiot. Sloppy. She knew better than to address people she’d never met by their names before proper introductions were made. Fortunate for her that he had actually called ahead.

“This way, Mr. Stoker,” she said, without acknowledging his assertion.

He followed her docilely enough. They were halfway to the steps leading to the Archives when cold awareness swept over her, accompanied by a prickling on the back of her neck. A cultured voice called from towards the stairs. “Ah, Gertrude—”

“Busy, Elias,” Gertrude interrupted briskly. “I’ll be there when I have finished this discussion.” Without giving him a chance to respond, she hustled her inadvertent guest down the steps and into the Archives.

Stoker looked around as they entered, then, to her surprise, nodded grimly. “Manuscripts? Or research?”

“Statements, actually.” Gertrude studied Stoker with interest. “Encounters with the supernatural, that kind of thing. I imagine you know what is meant by that.”

Stoker shivered, but merely said, “You’re damn right I do.”

Gertrude hummed. “This way.”

She led Stoker into her office, gestured for him to take a seat, and reached for the tape recorder. “You don’t mind if I record this, do you?” she asked. It wasn’t really a question, especially as she’d apparently hit the appropriate button without even realizing.

“Uh…no?” Stoker frowned at her. “That’s…fine.”

“Excellent. Well then.” Gertrude set the recorder on the desk between them. “Statement of Timothy Stoker, regarding…?” She lifted her eyebrows at him, prompting him to continue.

“The disappearance of—of my brother, Danny,” Stoker said, his voice catching slightly.

Gertrude pretended not to notice. “Gertrude Robinson recording, fifth September, 2013.” She nodded. “Whenever you’re ready.”

“I don’t know that I’ll ever be ready, but…sure. Here goes nothing.” Stoker took a deep breath and began speaking.

Gertrude kept her eyes on his face as he spooled out the story. It was quite interesting, on a number of levels. The fact that Stoker was an older sibling who’d lost his younger sibling to one of the Fourteen was hardly unusual and merely fit into a pattern she’d noticed long ago; regardless of what specific fear they preyed upon, the terror of standing by helpless while a person you’d always sworn to protect was utterly destroyed by something too horrifying to comprehend that you couldn’t defend them from added an extra seasoning that They seemed to relish. What was unusual, though, was that Stoker, unlike most of the older siblings she’d heard or read statements from—at least the ones who had lost their siblings later in life—genuinely seemed to love his brother still rather than tolerate at best or even outright resent him.

On top of that was the statement itself. When Stoker first mentioned urban exploration, she expected it to be the Dark or the Buried, and she certainly knew Robert Smirke would be involved, but something…drew her in. And she certainly sat up and took notice when he mentioned the Covent Garden Theater.

A lead? At last?

Stoker’s voice cracked with emotion as he began describing the scene beneath the Royal Opera House, and that really caught her attention. For the most part, people’s emotions…didn’t precisely fade, but at least seemed to be placed on the back burner when they were giving their statements. Stoker wasn’t stammering and stuttering the way even the ones with genuine encounters often did when she wasn’t there to…influence them, but he was aware of what he was saying and feeling it in a way she hadn’t witnessed in a long time—not since the earliest days of her time as Archivist. He had a good grip on himself. She wouldn’t call it a resistance to the Eye, per se, but there was a strength to him she found intriguing.

“The next thing I remember was the cool night air on my face, as the opera house patrons pushed past me to get into the evening performance of Tosca,” Stoker concluded. “In my hands I held an old black and white circus flyer. It was written all over in Cyrillic, but in the bottom left corner was a certain clown’s face, leering out at me, billed as the guest performer. As I watched, it crumbled to ash, and floated away on the breeze.”

Gertrude felt a small pang of regret at that. She did not herself read Russian, but it still would have been nice to have the confirmation. “I don’t suppose you still have your brother’s drawings.”

“As a matter of fact, I do. Here.” To Gertrude’s surprise, Stoker reached into his suit jacket and withdrew a manila envelope. He extracted a few sheets of paper, flicked through them, and withdrew one, then handed it to her.

As he had said, it was a series of simple drawings of the same clown’s face. It was an amazingly skilled likeness, considering it had been done in darkness and distress with a cheap ballpoint pen. There was no mistaking it for anyone else.

“Do you know who this is?” she asked, not expecting a reply.

“Joseph Grimaldi,” Stoker replied unhesitatingly. “Didn’t take long to find a picture that matched up, once I knew what I was looking for.” He gave a short, bitter laugh. “Three weeks ago I would have said there was no way it could be the same one, even if the pictures were identical, but then again three weeks ago I’d have said there couldn’t be a stone theater underneath the Royal Opera House, or a monster that steals people’s skins. Compared to that, a zombie clown is almost mundane. Or ghost or whatever he is.”

"I’m not altogether certain myself,” Gertrude admitted. “It may not be Grimaldi at all, merely something wearing his face.”

“In the clown sense, or in the Appalachian folk horror sense?”

Gertrude blinked, momentarily startled. “I beg your pardon?”

Stoker met her eyes without flinching, which was rare enough these days. “There’s a legend in the Appalachian mountain region of the United States about a monster who lost—”

“I’m familiar with the legend of Skin Tom. What do you mean by ‘the clown sense’?” Gertrude interrupted.

“Oh. When you become a clown, you’re supposed to register your makeup so no other clown can copy it. Some might get passed down when a clown retires, maybe, but the name has to go with it. You wouldn’t catch a clown named, I don’t know, Bonzo wearing a face registered to Grimaldi.”

“You’ve done your research.”

Stoker shrugged. “The egg register is right here in London, and it’s open to the public. I figured it would be a starting place. It’s only really been a thing since the forties, but they do have a historical exhibit with a few of the really high profile faces, and when I went in, there he was. You know, minus the blood. From there it was just a matter of asking the right questions of the right people and they were telling me things they probably didn’t even realize they knew.”

Gertrude studied him sharply, but, no, as she’d rather suspected, he hadn’t been Marked by the Eye. Not yet, anyway. His ability to get people talking and get answers from seemingly innocuous questions and mundane responses was purely down to his charisma and social skills. He’d never be an Archivist, but he would make a remarkably able Assistant.

She caught that thought and suppressed it ruthlessly. No. Not after Emma’s betrayal. She couldn’t trust like that again…

“Well. Thank you for your time,” she said instead. “If you’ll leave your name and contact information, I will be certain to let you know if anything comes of it.”

Stoker huffed out what might have been a very soft, bitter laugh and may have just been an attempt to clear his throat as he handed over the remainder of the papers he had pulled from the envelope. “No offense, and this is probably going to hurt my chances, but this is the strangest job interview I’ve ever had in my life.”

Gertrude froze. She looked down at the papers Stoker had just handed her and realized that she was holding his CV. He hadn’t come to the Institute looking to make a statement—he’d come looking for a job.

The correct thing to do would be to take this upstairs to Rosie and get her to match it with an open position. At the very least, she should ask what department Stoker had meant to interview with. Actually, the correct thing to do would be to lie to this young man and then set fire to his CV as soon as he was out of the Institute, because if he stayed here, he was going to get killed.

On the other hand…

On the other hand, she thought, Elias had clearly been expecting him, and even if she burnt the CV it wasn’t without the realm of possibility that he would call Stoker personally to offer him a job—to trap him in the Institute. If he was in one of the other departments, he wouldn’t know what was going on, and Gertrude wouldn’t be able to warn him thoroughly—she’d been trying with Sasha, and a bit with Rosie, and neither of them really seemed to get it. And with the Stranger having Marked him this deeply, his next encounter would be fatal if he didn’t have some form of protection.

She shouldn’t care. But she did. And she could use the help.

“We tend to do things differently here at the Institute,” she said slowly. She laid down the papers and met his eyes levelly. “Why do you want to work here, Mr. Stoker?”

“Because I want answers,” Stoker answered promptly. “I want to know what it is that killed my brother, and I want to know how to get revenge on it. The Magnus Institute is the only place I might get those answers, and I’m not going to find them just poking around on my own, am I?”

“Not likely,” Gertrude agreed. “This is a salaried position, not hourly, and there would be times I would need your assistance outside what are normally thought of as ‘business hours’. I expect my instructions to be carried out, even if the reasoning behind them seems obscure or unhelpful; I know what I’m doing and I do not give orders lightly. And most importantly, Mr. Stoker, if you accept this position, you will not be able to quit. An appointment to the Archives is an appointment for life. Do you understand me?”

Stoker shrugged and nodded. “Quite frankly, Ms. Robinson, what have I got left to lose?”

Gertrude knew that feeling, far too well. “Well then, Mr. Stoker—”

“Tim. Please.”

“Tim, then.” Gertrude stood and held out her hand. Stoker—Tim—rose and shook it. “Welcome to the Magnus Institute.”