And If Thou Wilt, Forget

“—going to have to tranquilize him to keep him from diving headfirst into them,” Tim continued. “Or nail his tongue to the desk. Rowlf, heel!”

Rowlf, who was well-suited to his new family in that he was probably the most contrary thing on four legs, nearly yanked Tim’s arm out of its socket trying to lunge down the sidewalk. Tim planted his feet and stood still, waiting for him to give up pulling and come back. Gerry stood beside him, trying to look sympathetic but only succeeding in looking very much like he was trying not to laugh. “Maybe we should get one of those retractable ones they had in the pet shop.”

“Too hard to control, and as strong as he is now I don’t trust him not to snap it later on down the road.”

“You’re the expert. I was never allowed a pet growing up…how many real ones has he found so far?”

Tim grimaced. “Five that I know of.”

Rowlf evidently tired of straining on the lead and trotted back to Tim’s side. Tim waited until the chain slackened into a J shape before setting off again. Gerry reached over and laced their fingers together. “What do they involve? Do you remember?”

“The one I took off him hoping it was the only real one was the Buried. The fragment he used as a test recording sounds like the Dark, if you ask me, but I can’t prove it.” Tim stopped as Rowlf sniffed at a fire hydrant, then cocked his leg against it. “Don’t even have a name for that one. Two of the others are definitely the Stranger.”

Gerry was quiet for a few minutes as they strode along towards the Morden South station. Two nights before the summer solstice meant sunset was almost as late as it could be, which meant they had more time to get to some of the further-flung parks without having to drive and fight for parking, and Tim had successfully sold Gerry on the idea of spending an evening in Greenwich Park and letting Rowlf run around for a bit as a reward for how well he was—theoretically anyway—doing at learning to walk on a lead.

“Anything we can do anything about?” he asked finally. “Or at least anything…helpful?”

“Not sure,” Tim said slowly. “The one he’d already recorded, the one Sasha researched, it’s from up in Edinburgh. Something luring people into an alley and then…they just disappear. My best guess is that they’re taking sacrifices for the Unknowing, but I don’t know. It’s awfully spaced out. Maybe they’re just recruiting. Then there’s one from a woman who said she’s the only person who remembers her friend Graham suddenly looking—and acting—completely different.”

“Like a changeling type thing?” Gerry asked.

Tim nodded. “Gertrude said something to me once—did she ever mention the name Adelard Dekker to you?”

“Yeah, and then she got this look like someone had just stepped on her heart?”

“That’s the one. Never worked up the courage to ask her too much more about him. Anyway, she said something in passing about an encounter he had with something like that, she called it a Not-Them. I remember she said it didn’t affect magnetic tape for some reason.”

Gerry hummed. “What about the third? Rowlf, drop it.”

Rowlf casually let whatever unidentifiable thing he’d picked up fall from his mouth and kept trotting on his merry way. Tim snorted. “He sure listens to you better than he does me…uh, I’m not sure about the last one, actually. Sasha showed it to me, kind of a ‘can you believe this’ type thing, and it’s…iffy. Bunch of weird stuff that keeps turning up in trash bags. First it was a bag of doll heads, then a single coiled strip of paper with the Pater Noster written over and over again—”

“Isn’t that a kind of lift?”

“No—well, yes, but it’s actually just the Latin name for the Lord’s Prayer. Pater noster qui est in cælis—Our Father, who art in heaven—it’s the first line. The name got applied to the style of lift because it was similar to the beads on a rosary. And before you ask how I know that, I’m Catholic,” Tim added. Gerry laughed. “Anyway, after that it was a bag full of teeth, and then at the end one of the bin crew went missing and the guy who came to give the statement found a bag full of packing peanuts with a metal heart in the center of it.”

Gerry made a face. “That’s…weird.”

“You’re telling me? It—I dunno, Ger. I think it might be the Stranger, trying to figure out some things. Or it could be the Flesh, or it could be the Spiral. Could be a lot of things.” Tim sighed. “I just…wish I’d been able to look it up myself. The whole point of me setting those aside was so I could investigate them, see if they would help us, but now Martin and Sasha and even Jon are looking into them and…”

“Making a mess of it?” Gerry supplied. “I get it. And it’s not like we can just tell them everything.” He considered for a moment, then added, “I mean, we could, but Gertrude would be pissed.”

Tim bumped his shoulder against Gerry’s companionably. “This from the man who was pissed Gertrude didn’t clue me in.”

Gerry smiled, but his eyes were serious as he said, “That’s different, Tim. Gertrude was actively having you look into these things without telling you what it was you were really looking at. If she’d kept you to the fake stuff as much as possible, just used you to keep Elias off her back while she did the real work, I wouldn’t have minded so much. Well…I would have eventually, because it’s you, but I wouldn’t have pushed her so hard so fast if she hadn’t sent you to the Night Market the night before I met you.”

“To be fair, she only sent me to the Night Market because I found that statement about the last attempt at the Unknowing and started investigating it on my own. Otherwise I think she’d have been happy to leave me ignorant until it suited her purpose.”

“And she’d be floundering right now.” Gerry glanced towards the oncoming train. “Trying to do everything on her own. I know she can turn back the rituals on her own, but I’m sure she’s glad we’re helping.”

Tim didn’t say anything until they were on the train. Once they were sure Rowlf understood that he wasn’t allowed on the seats, he said quietly, “Are you sure?”

Gerry blinked. “That we’re helping?”

“That she’s glad about it. I know we’re helping, otherwise she’d have pulled us home months ago. But if we’re right, she’s been fighting these things off on her own for years. Decades, even.” Tim glanced out the window, wondering—for the briefest of moments—if he’d somehow see a sign from Gertrude if he did so. “Can’t imagine she likes the idea that she can’t anymore.”

“Gertrude Robinson isn’t one to let human sentiment get in the way of what needs to be done,” Gerry said. “I think that includes ego. She does what she does because there’s a job that needs to be done and she’s decided to do it, not because she’s some sort of all-powerful Chosen One or whatever. She wouldn’t have asked us to help if she didn’t need us, and she wouldn’t be trusting you now either.”

Tim sighed and turned back to face his partner. “I just wish she had left us a clue. A hint. Something.”

“You’ve got all her notes, right?”

“From up to the point where you went into the hospital. And I have everything I put together while you two were gone, and what we found on the trip after…but I don’t have what she found. And I get why, anyone could sneak it, but…” Tim sighed in frustration. “Something’s wrong, Ger. I can feel it.”

Gerry reached over and squeezed Tim’s hand. “I trust your instincts, but…I am curious as to why.”

Tim leaned his head on Gerry’s shoulder. “We were due back on the thirtieth. She went missing sometime between the fourteenth and the twentieth—I mean, nobody’s said dates, and it’s not like that sort of thing got into the paper, it’d hurt the Institute’s funding if they knew people were getting murdered on the premises, but Elias said me having got those texts from her ‘added a new layer to things’, so probably somewhere in there. Best case scenario, it’s been three months.”

“I’m with you so far.”

“If she knew she was going to be away this long, don’t you think she would have left us something? Even just a way to contact her? She obviously thought she’d be back before now. That or that the Unknowing was going to happen sooner rather than later and that we’d know where it was and meet her there, but I really don’t think that’s ready yet.” Tim sat up and looked into Gerry’s eyes again. “Something’s wrong.”

Gerry stared back into Tim’s eyes. “Fuck.”

“Not in front of the dog.”

Gerry ignored him and ran a hand through his hair. It had grown out long enough that it brushed the tops of his ears, and while Tim had trimmed his own hair back in anticipation of the coming summer rise in temperature, Gerry was currently trying to train it to flop dramatically over one eye. “You think it’s the crew Elias assigned to the Archives? Maybe she’s not willing to come back because of them?”

Tim pursed his lips. “Maybe? I dunno. From what Sasha’s said, just in passing, I get the impression they know each other and Gertrude trusts her, although that could be just her manipulating us—”

“It’s not. Gertrude mentioned once, when I joked about taking over her job someday, that she was really hoping it would be ‘Sasha James in Research, who might be the only person in the Institute with the background to understand these things and the sense to keep away from them.’” Gerry did a pretty decent impression of Gertrude’s voice. “’Course, that was before you came along.”

Tim snorted. “I think Gertrude wildly overestimated Sasha’s sense, but okay. She doesn’t actually believe in any of this anyway. But still…if Gertrude is staying away because of someone in the Archives, it wouldn’t be her. Martin seems pretty harmless, but that could be an act, I guess. Jon’s an okay guy but he’s a terrible boss, and not much better of an archivist, and I’m honestly not sure if he or Sasha is the bigger skeptic.” He thought for a minute. “Maybe it’s just Elias.”

“Maybe we should bring our boy here to have a search for her in the Archives.” Gerry bent over to scratch Rowlf’s ear and was rewarded with a furiously wagging tail and a head in his lap. “Tell Jon you got called in over the weekend to give an exclusive behind the scenes tour to one Lord Leo Fortitude Lenox.”

Rowlf’s tail wagged even harder at the mention of his full name, or most of it. Tim understood why Gerry had left one part out of his mostly joking comment, though; Jon might believe that a real live actual aristocrat would name their son “Fortitude” but even he wouldn’t believe they would name one “Noodles”. “Spaniels are flushers, not hounds. They don’t track game. But…I dunno. I’d like you to come by the Archives sometime and help me see what we can come up with. There’s got to be something I’m missing.”

Gerry’s eyes went vacant. “She mentioned there’s a key somewhere in the Archives to a storage unit. Just before I went into the hospital, she said that if something got her first, there was something in that storage unit that would help. Up in Hainault. But since nothing has got her yet…”

“She probably took the key with her. Anyway, I’m talking notes. Backups. Maybe something on the computer, which I can’t get to during the workday because Sasha claimed that project and I can’t keep all of them.” Tim sighed in frustration. “I should’ve fought Elias harder on hiring new people. Not like he expects the place to be in any kind of order anyway. It wouldn’t have worked, but I should have fought harder.”

“How can you be so sure it wouldn’t have worked?”

“Because short of taking on the Archivist role myself, and Gertrude would boil me alive if I had, there wouldn’t have been any way to prevent it. Elias is convinced, or pretending to be convinced anyway, that Gertrude is really dead. Any arguments I made that she wasn’t would’ve just been chalked up to grief.” Tim tightened his hand around Rowlf’s leash without conscious thought. “He probably would have brought up Danny and I’d have had no choice but to beat him to death with a typewriter.”

“Manual or electric?”

“Depends on if it’s still plugged in or not.”

They dropped the subject and concentrated on the train trip. Greenwich Park was busy but not too crowded when they arrived, and they walked Rowlf until they reached a place where they could let him off the leash and throw sticks for him. “Throwing sticks for him to fetch” very quickly turned into “chasing him down because he got too excited to respond to the recall word”, and once they had managed to recapture him—thankfully before he bolted into the restricted part of the park—they headed by unspoken agreement for the train station again. Rowlf seemed to understand he’d done something wrong, and stayed practically glued to Tim’s side with his tail drooping and head down. Tim almost felt bad, except that he’d really brought it on himself.

As they were passing London Bridge, Gerry said suddenly, “Let’s do it tonight.”

“What?” Tim blinked at Gerry, a bit startled. It took him a split second to mentally page back through their conversations until he reached a more likely candidate for it than turning Rowlf into a throw rug. “Go through the Archives?”

“Yeah. It’s Friday, so we’ve got three days. Even if we just stop long enough to drop the boy off and go straight for the Tube, it’ll still be after dark by the time we get there, so nobody will notice us. And if we find anything, we’ll have more time to go over it before Monday the sooner we find it.”

Tim had to admit, he couldn’t really see a flaw in the logic. “Sounds good. I should make a backup of the research on the computer anyway.”

He took Rowlf for a run when they got off, just to tire him out a little bit—difficult, as the vet estimated he was only about seven or eight months old and still a puppy in a lot of ways, but Tim was up for the challenge—then shut him up in the room they had designated as his before pocketing the Institute keys. He and Gerry set off again just as the last rays of the sun slipped below the horizon, bathing the city in a blood-red glow.

Hopefully it wasn’t an omen.

As an extra precaution, they got off at Battersea and walked the extra half hour to the Institute and made it unobserved. It was well into twilight by then, and very few windows were lit along the Embankment, which told Tim that the people who lived there were either out or asleep. He listened carefully, hand dangling loose by his side. Finally, he was satisfied they were unobserved and slipped his hand into his pocket for the keys.

Gerry, who was as familiar with this process as Tim at this point, waited until they had closed the outer door before he clicked on the torch he’d brought. Keeping his voice low, he asked, “Where do you want to start?”

For a moment, Tim stood where he was, paralyzed with indecision. It wasn’t like it was the first time he’d been in the Archives alone after dark, but it was the first time he’d come in intending to look for Gertrude’s notes, not his own research.

“Right,” he muttered, more to himself than to Gerry. “I’m a paranoid old bat who’s been fighting against the forces of evil for the last fifty years. Something’s gone wrong and I have to go on the lam, but whatever went wrong is something that makes everyone think I’m dead, so I have to count on not being able to come back any time soon. I work for a paper-pushing pencil-neck who starches his underwear and gets off on bureaucracy, so I can assume he’s going to ‘hire’ someone to replace me, but he’s also probably evil and might be involved in whatever it is that just went wrong, so he’s almost certainly going to hire someone who’s going to be incompetent at best and actively working against me at worst. My assistant is probably going to stick around, but there’s no guarantee that if I leave a note on his desk, either my boss or my ‘replacement’ won’t find it first, or force him to read it out loud. So where am I going to hide copies of anything I’ve researched but not sent him yet where he’ll be smart enough to find it, but anyone else coming down here won’t be stupid enough to stumble over it?”

“Depends on who you thought was going to come down here,” Gerry said slowly. “Let’s start with Sasha James. Arguably Gertrude knew her best.”

“She’s a snoop. If she thinks something’s being kept secret from her, she’ll ferret it out just to say she knows it,” Tim replied. “She’s hacked the personnel records, for God’s sake. I don’t think she cares what the secrets are, just that they exist. So that’s a paradox. If she wanted Sasha to know it, she’d have locked it away somewhere, but somewhere it was super obvious something was hidden, so she’d be tempted to look into it and see what it was.”

“So not the file cabinets, not the locked case in Document Storage, and not in the computer. Where would she put it that Sasha wouldn’t be interested, then?”

“Mm, maybe the computer? That’s complicated. On the one hand, it’s tied into the Institute’s network, but on the other hand, it can’t hold anything on the computer.” Tim thought for a minute. “If it is, it’s metatext in a code somewhere. Gertrude wouldn’t make it blatant.”

Gerry shone the torch under his chin, illuminating his face like a preteen boy at a slumber party. “But we’ve established she doesn’t want Sasha to know.”

“She might. You said she’d tapped Sasha as a possible replacement—maybe she figured she’d be able to help. Hell, maybe this was her only way of possibly getting Sasha down here without also getting Martin—he’s a hard worker, and he’s probably better at the work than either Jon or Sasha, falsified credentials notwithstanding, but she doesn’t know that. Anyway, maybe she figured Sasha would find it sooner or later.”

“Would she have told you if she did?”

“Dunno. But whether she did or not, it’s probably where I should look.”

Gerry pursed his lips, then nodded. “Tell you what. You try and see what you can find in the computer. I’ll try and look through all her hidey-holes.”

“There’s nothing in the desk,” Tim told him. “I know that for sure.”

“Yeah, that would have been too obvious.” Gerry paused. “Have you found any of her tapes?”

Tim shook his head. “Nope. She must have those with her, wherever she is.”

“Shame. That’s probably the most likely place for them. Right, let’s see what we’ve got.”

He navigated Tim over to the computer, then, once the familiar thrum of the CRT monitor had started up and was spitting out enough light him to see by, gave him a kiss and moved off into the bowels of the Archives. Tim hummed to himself quietly, then made himself go silent and instead pulled over the notebook they’d used as a combination manual and usage log. Sasha and Martin had obviously kept using it, so he could at least skim over it and get an idea of what they’d done, and what they knew.

By the time the boot-up sequence had completed, he had enough of a picture to mentally pat himself on the back for putting the disks into the case in a more or less random order. Sasha hadn’t touched the statements; Martin had looked at a couple, apparently, and he was smart enough to figure out the system they’d used for notating what statements they’d pulled out, but he either hadn’t looked at enough or didn’t have enough background or both to figure out the careful color-coding Tim had used for them.

Gertrude knew it, though, and he flicked through the case of floppy disks to see if he could find one that broke the pattern. Black, black, red, blue, red, yellow, black, black, black, red, yellow, black, blue, green, green, red—bingo. Triumphantly, he pulled out a translucent purple disk, labeled in Gertrude’s familiar handwriting: 0151403.

That had to be it. It was the day she’d summoned him back to London, surely that was a clue. He loaded the disk into the slot and waited patiently for it to load. To his mild surprise, there was a statement—or at least there appeared to be one—as well as a secondary file for the follow-up.

He clicked on the statement first. If it was unique, it was likely to hold a clue, or maybe it wasn’t an actual statement. The more he read, the more he suspected—or hoped—it wasn’t. He also really, really hoped that if there was a paper version of this one floating around the Archives, it would record on Jon’s laptop. The statement giver was claiming to have foreseen Gertrude’s death.

Tim hesitated, the cursor over the supplemental file. Did he really want to see what Gertrude might have had to say about this? Was he sure it was useful? Yes, he decided, it had to be. The mysterious Antonio Blake—and if that was a real name, Tim would unravel his hat and eat it like spaghetti—had come in to give his statement on the fourteenth of March. He’d said he’d been having the dream for three days, and he was betting on it happening within ten days. Gertrude wasn’t dead, of course, which meant the dreams were fallible if true, but…that would have been the day of the eclipse. Either the dream had been contingent on the Dark’s ritual succeeding, or it had assumed she would bring all the death upon herself rather than let it rain down on the rest of the world. Either way, she wouldn’t have had time to do any actual follow-up, so this had to be a hint.

He clicked on the file.

A string of numbers with the occasional random letter greeted him, which told him he was definitely onto something. He’d teased Gertrude about this code once—what kind of nerd makes codes in base fourteen—and she’d responded by challenging him to learn it himself. It had taken him about an hour, which, as she had pointed out, didn’t make him much less of a nerd himself. The fact that she’d coded her “supplemental” meant that she didn’t want anyone else to figure it out, and also meant that it was, as he’d suspected, important. It was short, but it probably packed a lot of punch.

Tim quickly spaced down a couple of lines and began translating the numbers back into letters—that was the easy part—and then deciphering the substitution cypher she’d used for the letters, which was a bit harder. It took him two false starts before he realized that she’d coded it based on the End, not the Dark. Once he had that, though, the rest fell into place.

“Gerry,” he hissed into the darkness.

Like magic, Gerry appeared over his shoulder, torch pointed at the ground. “I haven’t found anything,” he whispered. “She must’ve taken it all with her. What did you find?”

Tim twisted his head to look up at Gerry. “Statement that apparently came in right before she called us back to London. Guy claiming he had a dream that foretold Gertrude’s death—it’s complicated. And I don’t think she believed it, even if he did. But this was her follow-up notes, look.”

Gerry bent over to peer at the screen. Tim, too, turned back to reread it, even though the words had already burned themselves into his memory.

Ten days from the night I seemingly appeared in his dreams is the twentieth or twenty-first, depending on how good his math is. Tallies with the eclipse, which means the climax of the Extinguished Sun. Can’t Know the future, but if there’s a chance this won’t work, need Tim and Gerard near enough that I can protect them in a pinch. They’re foolhardy enough to try and turn it back.

“She doesn’t think there’s a way to,” Gerry said softly after several moments. “If one of them gets through. She reckons that’s it and we’ll all be trapped forever, until we eventually die.”

“Like she said, she can’t Know the future,” Tim said, just as softly. “And patterns are more the Web’s thing, so she can’t even say she really sees the shape of it. There’s always a chance. And she’s right, we would try and turn it back. Sia la luce.”

“That’s ‘let there be light’, right?”

“It seemed appropriate.” Tim drummed his fingers lightly on the tabletop. “There might be more in this. In the code, or in the metatext, or if I up the contrast or something.”

Gerry hummed. “So what are you going to do?”

“First, I’m going to trust that Sasha doesn’t pay attention to the statements and that Martin isn’t a handwriting expert.” Tim took the torch from Gerry and headed to the supply closet.

It didn’t take him long to find the box of candy-colored translucent floppy disks and select another purple one. Returning to the computer, he saved the file, closed it, and popped out the disk, then laid it down next to the blank one and carefully, meticulously duplicated the label in the exact right spot.

“Wait.” Gerry plucked the blank one off the table, slid back the drawer, and fished something out of his pocket. Tim realized it was a magnet. He rubbed it over the opening, then winked. “Even if they do check it, this way they’ll think it just got corrupted.”

“Brilliant.” Tim kissed Gerry, then tucked the disk into the spot before pocketing the other and shutting down the computer. “Once this shuts down, let’s get out of here. We need to get some rest before tomorrow.”

“Why, what’s tomorrow?”

Tim patted his pocket. “Tomorrow we go see if we can find anyone else in this damned city that will sell us a computer with a working floppy disk drive.”