And If Thou Wilt, Forget

May gave way to June gave way to July, and Tim was of two minds about the days getting longer. The part of him that had stood in the northern shore of Viðareiði with bated breath praying for the shadow to pass away rejoiced in the further proof that the Dark had lost and the sun had not been extinguished; the part of him that was gripping the Ceaseless Watcher’s metaphorical fingers and straining to peel them back from closing around the throats of the other three people working in the Archives resented the long hours of daylight extending Jon’s time spent in their depths. Tim had more than once considered (and then quickly discarded) the possibility of cluing Martin in on what he was up to so that he’d either let Tim do his research after hours or assist him with it, but the idea of telling Jon wasn’t even in the realm of possibility. The more he knew, the deeper he’d fall in while trying to see what lay beyond his understanding, whereas this way Tim could at least keep him confined to the end of the swimming pool where at least his feet touched bottom.

He’d also thought about bringing Sasha in, and honestly, that held a bit more promise. She was less skeptical of everything than she’d been before she was attacked, and she and Tim had begun to get closer, but something still held him back. It wasn’t worry about what Gertrude might say. At this point, he had enough data to make his own decisions on the matter, and she was probably to be trusted when it came to this sort of thing. Maybe it was worry for her. She might be more likely to believe in the Fourteen and everything else, but he didn’t put it past her to test the “you can’t quit or leave” part of things, and he didn’t want her to get sick. Or worse. Depending on how drained she got when she was away from the Archives, if something attacked her, she may not be able to fight it off. He was going to have to take care letting her in on the situation.

The siege of the Institute—that was the only way he could think of it—was beginning to tell on his nerves a bit, too. Jane Prentiss was obviously waiting for something, God alone knew what. If it was Gertrude coming back…well, Tim was surprised Prentiss had waited this long. It wouldn’t be long, he suspected, before she lost patience and attacked to draw the Archivist out, make her come back to defend her Archives, at least, if not her assistant. Assistants, plural, because they were all definitely trapped now. Tim had watched Martin type up and delete a letter of resignation—he hadn’t called him on it, no point really—and Sasha hadn’t brought up the possibility of leaving since he’d dropped her off at her building weeks ago. They belonged to the Archives now and Gertrude was going to have to fucking deal with that. And he would fight to make sure she didn’t use any of them as cannon fodder or sacrifices.

In his less charitable moments, he considered letting her at least cut off one of Jon’s legs or something.

By tacit agreement, Tim and Gerry had sort of…let research into the Unknowing go for a bit. Tim was trying to focus on the Corruption, on figuring out if there was some kind of ritual planned. It felt like the more immediate threat, anyway. There hadn’t been much from the Stranger since the Dark’s ritual was thwarted…however the fuck Gertrude had done it…and while that probably wasn’t exactly a good thing, it at least meant there was only so much he could do. The Corruption, though, that was actively threatening them, and it was here. And since Gertrude wasn’t around—Tim had accepted she probably wasn’t sneaking in after hours, she definitely would have come out of hiding by now—it looked like it was going to be up to him.

A part of him wondered if that was why she was doing it. If the reason Gertrude was staying away was only partly because she was working on the Unknowing uninterrupted, without the distraction of Archiving because she trusted Tim to handle that, and partly because she wanted to see how Tim would handle anything else attacking the Archives in her absence. She trusted him—he’d known that for two years now—and maybe she didn’t want him to take over her position, which was good because he didn’t want it either, but she counted on him to be her deputy in her absence. And while up until now that had mostly meant protecting their team, he was starting to think the Corruption and its ritual was going to be his responsibility, too.

So he’d shifted gears. He was also cross-referencing anything to do with the Creeping Rot, scouring the shelves whenever he got the chance, focusing on the more recent stuff, especially since Jane Prentiss had given her own statement. February of 2014, about a week before Gertrude had first told him about…everything. He’d started scribbling notes in Gertrude’s code about notable avatars for the various Fears and comparing them to when Gertrude had disrupted those rituals, for all the good it would do, but there was a chance that the creation of an avatar was some kind of sign that the power was building enough for a ritual to be ready, so Jane Prentiss’ ascension could be a sign. It was possible, even probable, that it wasn’t ready yet, that Jane Prentiss was jumping the gun and her ritual, whatever she was going to try, wouldn’t have enough power behind it. He kind of hoped so. For a first test—and one he couldn’t afford to fail—he’d prefer if it wasn’t too terribly hard.

He didn’t know if the Corruption’s ritual had a name. They probably weren’t required to have names, and he wasn’t even sure all of them had names and that Gertrude hadn’t just made them all up herself. Until he learned otherwise, though, he’d started thinking of it as the Great Pestilence. Fire extinguishers likely wouldn’t be enough to turn it back, but it would at least be a start. Or maybe it would, if they caught it early enough. Just because the Unknowing had to be disrupted right at the height of it didn’t mean all of them did, did it? Maybe Gertrude just had a taste for the dramatic.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t still keeping his finger on the pulse of anything to do with the Stranger, which wasn’t much these days. He must have developed some kind of sensitivity to it, though, because he stopped mid-conversation with his colleagues and froze as a sensation slammed into him. He felt, rather than heard, some kind of strange music that set his teeth on edge.

The Stranger, or someone affected by it, was close.

“Tim? You okay?” Martin asked cautiously.

Tim forced back the urge to spill everything and grinned. “Yeah, I’m good. Just someone walking over my grave is all. You two go to lunch.”

Martin looked like he was about to protest, but Sasha linked an arm through his. “Come on, Martin. I still owe you from last month, and you need some sunlight. We’ll spray the hell out of the steps on our way out.”

Tim watched them go until he was sure they were gone—they were well out of whatever was going to happen next. That just left Jon, and as long as he stayed in the office…

With incredibly bad timing, the Archivist’s door opened and Jon stepped out, looking tired and irritable. “Oh—Tim, good, you’re still here. Rosie just called down. There’s someone wanting to make a statement.”

The sensible thing to do would have been to try to maneuver Jon into having whoever this was write their statement out, but if Rosie was calling down, it was because the person didn’t want to do that. And since Tim knew that Jon didn’t write fast enough to transcribe a live statement, he recorded them directly. He got to his feet. “I’ll go get them for you.”

“Thank you. Maybe I can finish recording this file before you get down,” Jon grumbled. “It figures. Martin’s been working so much faster these days that I’ve got almost twice as many statements to record as I used to, and if I run into any more that won’t go on the laptop I’ll never get through them, and now I have to stop and—” He stopped and took a deep breath, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Sorry. I’m tired, and I don’t mean to be taking this out on you.”

Tim pursed his lips briefly. Gertrude would—well, okay, Gertrude would probably raise her eyebrows pointedly at him, Gerry would probably kill him for it. But if it kept Jon from falling too deeply in, and also kept him safe from the Stranger…Tim had defenses, not great ones, but he could probably stand up to whatever it was better than the others, and he had more of the pieces to put things together, for obvious reasons.

It was a possibility. No more than that. But it was one of the few things he could do.

“I can take it for you, if you want,” he offered.

Jon looked up at Tim, startled. “What?”

Tim shrugged, as if it was no big deal. “If this guy, whoever he is, doesn’t want to write out his statement and just wants to tell someone, I can listen just as well as you can. And I know shorthand, so I can even write it down at the same time and type it up after, save you having to deal with it at all.”

Jon wavered. Tim could see in his eyes that he both desperately wanted to take him up on the offer and genuinely feared that he was going to run back to Elias and tattle that he couldn’t handle the job and needed to be replaced, demoted, or even fired. It would only take the tiniest push to send him in either direction, and Tim would need to be extremely careful to get him to fall the right way.

“You’ve got enough on your plate without dealing with every single crackpot and addle-pate that comes through the door,” he added. “Delegate it to me, Coach, I can take it.”

The relief in Jon’s eyes was fleeting but palpable. He nodded. “Please try not to let on that you think he’s a fool. It won’t do much for our reputation.”

The hypocrisy of Jonathan Sims, who had taken two live statements and sent both of them storming out of the Institute in a rage—one of whom had made an official complaint about him—telling him to fake sympathy almost choked him, but Tim nodded with a grin that, should Jon have been paying attention, he would have seen didn’t quite touch his eyes. “Mum’s the word.”

Jon retreated into the Archivist’s office. Tim gave him to the count of three, then pocketed his tape recorder, found a clipboard and the blank statement forms he kept in his own drawer, and headed up to the main floor.

Standing at Rosie’s desk was a man in late middle age, his sparse silver hair carefully combed to almost cover his shiny bald pate, with sharp, keen eyes and a worried expression. His attire screamed academic, and something about his bearing whispered biology, and the way his eyes darted back and forth definitively asserted victim. Not an acolyte come to taunt, not an avatar come to attack, just someone who’d fallen afoul of the Stranger come to the one place that might believe him. Tim relaxed, but not a whole lot. This could still go so incredibly badly.

Still, better him than anyone else.

He strode across the floor, hand already held out to shake. “Dr. Elliott?”

The man started and turned, then relaxed and smiled. “Yes, I’m Dr. Lionel Elliott, King’s College. You must be, ah, the Archivist?”

“Tim Stoker. I’m the senior Archival Assistant.” Tim kept his smile in place as he shook Dr. Elliott’s hand firmly while making eye contact. This was that kind of guy. “The Archivist is busy right now”—not technically a lie—“and asked me to come get your statement from you.” Technically a lie, but not one he was going to lose sleep over. “Shall we?”

Dr. Elliott followed Tim down to the Archives, giving him at least a topic as they went, then back to the small glass-walled study room. As he held the door, Tim explained, “Normally we’d do this in the Archivist’s office, but it’s occupied at the moment. This is a study room that usually only gets used when someone needs to listen to the audio files rather than read the physical documents, and we’re in a bit of a slow period at the moment, so we should be undisturbed.”

“I appreciate that. I’m not quite ready for anyone else to hear this,” Dr. Elliott said with a bit of a self-deprecating laugh. “I imagine it wouldn’t do much for my reputation. My experience is…somewhat unbelievable.”

“Dr. Elliot,” Tim said with perfect accuracy, “you would be amazed at what I find believable. Please, get comfortable.”

He settled in the seat opposite where Dr. Elliott seated himself, set the tape recorder on the table between them, tugged his ring off and slid it back on to see if it would feel any looser after he did that, uncapped the fountain pen Gerry had given him for his birthday, pressed RECORD on the device, and picked up the clipboard. “If it’s all right with you, I’m going to transcribe while you speak. It saves time later.”

“Oh, no, I quite understand,” Dr. Elliott assured him. “Having a written record as well as a verbal one does help to get one’s thoughts clear on the subject, and it helps to confirm impressions later on.”

“Something like that. Are you—”

“You know you have an infestation, don’t you?” Dr. Elliott interrupted.

Tim stiffened. He hadn’t heard about anyone upstairs noticing the worms, exactly—he’d thought they were concentrating themselves around the Archives—but if Dr. Elliott had noticed them on his way in, they were spreading. Or worse, he’d seen them on his way down, although the likelihood of him spotting them when Tim hadn’t was slim.

Still, if they were in the Archives…

“Where did you see them?” he asked, hoping his voice didn’t sound too sharp.

“On my way in. Little grey maggot things. Don’t recognize the species, but I’d say you need to get the exterminators in here. Gas the little blighters.”

“We’ve put in a request with Mr. Bouchard.” Tim assumed they had, anyway. This might not have been traditional pest control territory, but surely someone could come and take a look at it. “But you know how administrators are. Everything has to be filled out in triplicate and sent out to the lowest bidder, and meanwhile we’re down here figuring out how to peel the two sides of a piece of paper apart to stretch it further and harvesting walnuts to make our own ink.”

Dr. Elliott smiled. He’d obviously hit the right mark with that. “Yes, I’ve noticed that over the years myself.”

Tim smiled back. “Right. Are you ready to get started, Dr. Elliott?”

“Oh, certainly. Where would you like me to begin? The bones? The blood? The…uh…the fruit?”

That was…certainly a combination of words. Tim kept his expression neutral. “As the King of Hearts said to the White Rabbit, ‘Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end; then stop.’ One moment.” He directed his attention to the recorder. “Dr. Lionel Elliott recording, regarding a class…”

“Introduction to Human Anatomy and Physiology,” Dr. Elliott supplied.

Oh, that boded well. Tim continued without missing a beat, the way Gertrude always had. “At King’s College, London, in early 2016. Recording date twelfth July, 2016.” He scrawled that information across the top of the statement form as he spoke, then nodded to Dr. Elliott. “Whenever you’re ready.”

Dr. Elliott swallowed. “Right. Well, I shouldn’t have even been teaching the class, really.”

It was obvious as he spoke that Dr. Elliott was used to lecturing in front of a class. It was equally obvious that, while his experience had unsettled him, it had left a powerful impression on him. Enough that he hadn’t recognized the oddities in names, anyway; for God’s sake, one of them was literally called John Doe.

Tim had at least a little bit of sympathy for the man, though. Certainly more than Jon would have, at any rate. That was the thing about the Stranger. It wasn’t like the Spiral, warping reality and making you doubt your senses until you didn’t know which way was up and which world was real. No, the Stranger was just to the left of reality, plausible enough to be true but off enough to be uncanny. The Spiral made you doubt what was true. The Stranger had you convinced it was all true. Maybe there was some overlap there, but Tim guessed that it was the difference between the monster every kid imagined running alongside the car and the person behind you in traffic who’d turned the same way you had one too many times.

This statement was…unpleasant. Not just in the nature of the actual events, but in what it represented. It sounded like the Stranger was trying to learn how mimic humanity more thoroughly, which couldn’t have meant anything good. It was possible the things that had taken this class were like what had happened to Danny, skins removed and hollowed out and filled with God knows what. He’d gathered a fair few stories in Appalachia of that sort of thing—not just Skin Tom, but a thing in the shape of a woman who’d killed people and trapped their ghosts inside bodies that weren’t theirs, or a man’s skin stuffed to the gills with thousands of tiny buzzing things, or the fearful whisperings of legends passed down of what had just been called “the Hollow Men”. But if they were trying to mimic internal organs and skeletons, if they were trying to create undetectable humans…

Well, actually, that wasn’t as bad as it appeared on the surface. It meant they had work to do that needed them to be able to blend in properly with humanity, and if that meant they had to work at it, all to the good. It meant they might have upwards of another year before things came to a head and Tim, Gerry, and please dear God Gertrude needed to stop it. At the same time, though, it heightened the risk. Surely Elias wouldn’t be stupid enough to hire someone like that to the Institute, surely he’d know, but if they got good enough to fool the head of the Magnus Institute, if that was their goal…

He really couldn’t see their goal, exactly. Well, that wasn’t important right now. Probably. Maybe. Most likely. Best to just focus on getting this over with and figuring out what it meant for the Unknowing. Maybe they just wanted a really, really gory dance.

“I did call the police, but they just told me that the house was currently unoccupied, and they’d found no evidence that there had been anyone present,” Dr. Elliott concluded at last. “I took great pains never to see the class again. I avoided all tutorials, and simply waited until the end of term. I haven’t seen them since.”

“Did they get in touch with you again?” Tim asked, pen poised delicately over the page. He knew they had. It was obvious. Something had happened to prompt him to come in.

Dr. Elliott hesitated. “I assume it was them, yes. When I went to the classroom shortly after what should have been their final tutorial, I found something on the desk. It was an apple. Next to it was a handwritten note that said ‘Thank you for teaching us the insides.’ I burned the note, just in case.”

Tim nodded. “Smart. Did you burn the apple too?”

“No, I—I cut it in half. To check if it was…off.”

“And?” Tim prompted. His eyes strayed involuntarily to the pocket of Dr. Elliott’s jacket.

“Human teeth,” Dr. Elliott said simply. “Inside were human teeth, arranged in a smile. Here, I brought you the two halves to see for yourselves.”

He reached into the pocket and pulled out an object wrapped in a slightly stained handkerchief. Tim braced himself. He still wasn’t prepared for what he saw. An apple, probably a Red Delicious apple, sliced cleanly in half, long enough ago that it had oxidized but not yet begun to dehydrate. Pressed into the flesh, just below the seeds, was a perfect arc of healthy teeth, white against the browning apple.

No…no, on closer examination, Tim could see that they hadn’t been pressed there. They had grown there.

“Well,” he said, as calmly as he could. “That’s…”

“Deeply unpleasant, yes.” Dr. Elliott held them out to Tim. “You can keep them, if you like.”

“We can’t keep something like that down here without having it vetted by Artifact Storage first, but I’ll walk you up that way when we’re done here,” Tim promised. “They can decide what to do with it.” He scrawled a short note at the bottom of the page. “When was this, by the way? That you found the apple?”

Dr. Elliott looked a bit sheepish. “Term ended on the tenth of June. I…I couldn’t bring myself to cut into the apple for some time. It was in my refrigerator untouched until earlier this week. I’d heard of your Institute and I thought…I know what people say about it, but I was sure if anyone would know about this, you would.” He took a deep breath. “Is there anything else?”

“If you’re done your tale, then no, we don’t need anything else from you,” Tim said, capping his pen and slipping it into his shirt pocket. “We’ll investigate and let you know what we find. I should probably warn you it probably won’t be much, though. I might not have seen these exact…people…before, but I know their type, and they’re going to be like smoke on the wind.”

“Yes.” Dr. Elliott sighed. “I was afraid of that.”

Tim leaned forward. “Statement ends,” he said, clearly, and turned off the tape recorder. He popped it open, removed the tape, and put it in a separate pocket so he didn’t accidentally record over what he’d done—and so the recorder didn’t switch on and add things he didn’t want to be on the tape later. “Come on, Dr. Elliott, we’ll see if the head of Artifact Storage can see you now.”