And If Thou Wilt, Forget

It helped. Not a lot, but it helped. Or at least, Tim thought it helped. Certainly Jon seemed a lot less paranoid and suspicious over the next week. Martin began relaxing and smiling more, and Sasha was paying better attention to her lunch breaks. Tim, for his part, felt calmer and less jumpy.

That ended abruptly when he came back from lunch and nearly slammed face first into Detective Alice “Daisy” Tonner, who didn’t even slow down long enough to snarl at him to get out of her way before she was storming off towards her vehicle. The Hunt on her was unmistakable, though, and radiating off her with her anger, and even knowing it was less likely to have made her do anything to Jon the first time around than any of the other twelve Fears would have wasn’t enough to stop his anxiety spiking. He’d rushed down to the Archives to find Jon shaken but ostensibly fine, and while he’d claimed nothing was wrong he had left early with what he said was a headache. The next day he’d been tense and snappish at both Martin and Tim for what he called hovering—admittedly, probably not undeservedly.

Tim’s own mood took a decided downturn when he picked up one of the statements needing research and saw the opening line: I’m sure you know what urban exploring is. He made sure not to let the others mess with this one, especially after he’d read through it. This was personal. Anyway, nobody else would have been able to get to talk to the Gallagher-Nelsons; telling them he’d lost his own brother to an urban exploration in a Robert Smirke building had opened a lot more doors. It turned out Erin and Danny had even met, briefly anyway. Not that Tim disclosed that to Jon. He’d promised to keep the conversation off the record, and even if he hadn’t, he definitely wasn’t going to let Jon get any closer to St. Paul’s or the ersatz rector than he could help. He turned in his research and went home.

“I have a feeling that whatever it was, it’s long gone,” he told Gerry that evening as they took Rowlf for a walk—Tim usually did it on his own, but Gerry had insisted and he hadn’t argued. “Whether it got used in the attempt at the Extinguished Sun or just didn’t have the energy to continue once all that dissipated, I don’t know, but there’s no point in going back to St. Paul’s to look for it. Not that I would anyway, that’s not how I want to die. But I can’t help thinking about that camera.”

“It’s probably long gone, too,” Gerry said. “The…rector, you said? Probably destroyed it.”

Tim shook his head. “I don’t think so. It captured the Shadow.”

“The what?”

“The thing that killed Luke Nelson.”

“Yeah, I figured, but you just said the Shadow with a capital S,” Gerry pointed out. “Where did you get that name from?”

Tim hesitated, just for a second. “I don’t know if it has an actual name. It just seems like a good one to use. But whatever it is, Ms. Gallagher-Nelson got it on film. You and I both know how rare that is.”

Gerry hummed. He didn’t look happy, but when he spoke, it was in a mild enough tone. “So what, you want to go talk to the rector and ask what he did with it?”

“I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the actual rector. Anyway, what would they have been doing there at five in the morning on a Wednesday? Their Wednesday services are at ten-thirty in the morning. And there’s no alarm on the sanctuary, I checked when I was there trying to talk to someone.” Tim paused while Rowlf cocked his leg against a street lamp. “No, it’s got to be one of two things. Either someone who knows about the Fourteen and was trying to keep her from falling into it worse took it from her so she wouldn’t get obsessed with it like Melanie King has done, or someone involved in the People’s Church of the Divine Host took it so they could use it for their ritual. I’m inclined towards the latter.”

“I’d love to hear your reasoning.”

“Robert Montauk. Those photographs he took that were part of the evidence. I’m thinking the Dark, even more than some of the other Fears, makes use of photographs in their rituals. If Erin Gallagher-Nelson had a camera that could actually catch Mister Pitch? For sure they would want that.”

“Please tell me you’re not contemplating chasing down the People’s Church of the Divine Host.”

“Not seriously, no,” Tim said honestly. He glanced up at the sky. “But it’s a quarter moon.”

Gerry followed his gaze. “Which means?”

“Which means there’s one other place we might be able to track it down.” Tim slipped his hand into Gerry’s and squeezed lightly. “Feel like checking out the Night Market with me?”

It was a Thursday night, which meant this was undoubtedly a terrible idea, but Tim found he couldn’t let it go. Gerry must have known that, because he didn’t take off his coat when they got home, just made sure Rowlf had water and food before coming back to Tim and taking his hand to lead him out the door. They took the Tube to the closest spot to where the Night Market had been before, then started walking.

“How did you find it before?” Gerry asked as they walked along the path, hand in hand. Tim could almost fool himself into believing it was just a regular romantic walk. “I mean, did you just stumble on it or…?”

“Just…random things Nonno told me. Old folk legends about hiding from the moon and dancing with your shadows, that kind of thing. Hard to explain.” Tim paused briefly to listen. “I think I hear it. Come on, around here.”

“I don’t hear anything,” Gerry said, but he followed Tim anyway.

It wasn’t like the last time. This time, when Tim stepped the quarter turn around the width of a shadow, he didn’t find himself standing directly in the center of the Night Market. He could still hear the muted bustle of the crowd, the stillness so reminiscent of a snowy day, but he stood on one side of a short arched tunnel that opened out on the other side into the rows of stalls. Which normally wouldn’t have made any sense; they’d fetched up against the side of the Putney Bridge, which didn’t have access to the other side from down here. Normally someone walking this path had to turn away from the river and walk a bit up the A219 before getting to a point where it was safe to cross. And Tim knew there was no marketplace on the other side of Putney Bridge. Nevertheless, the Night Market was there.

He took a deep breath and glanced up at Gerry. “Ready?”

Gerry didn’t answer for a moment. He simply remained where he was, staring straight ahead. Tim was about to assure him they didn’t have to do this if he didn’t want to when he said, very carefully, “Tim? Can you tell me what it is we’re looking at?”

Tim laced his fingers through Gerry’s and turned to study the entrance ahead of them. “I—it’s a tunnel, I guess. Dark stone, looks like it’s probably a bit slimy to the touch. On the other side it opens up into the Night Market. Looks like the stall right by the entrance is selling”—he adjusted his head slightly to get a better view, but there was no need to banish the illusion this time, he could see it clearly—“carnival masks. I’m, uh, not totally sure what they’re made from, but…probably don’t want to buy one.”

Gerry pressed his lips together tightly. Finally, he said quietly, “I can’t see anything, Tim. It’s just black to me. If you say the Night Market is there, I trust you, but…”

“No, I’m not doing that to you. Either the Dark is waiting for you or it really isn’t there for you, but either way, I’m not risking you.” Tim turned away from the tunnel without a second thought. “We can do something else.” He paused as something else caught his attention. “Uh, can you see that?”

Gerry followed Tim’s finger. “The door over there? Yeah, that I can make out. Why?”

“I think that might be an entrance to the tunnels. Or else there’s a secondary entrance to the tunnels behind it.” Tim gave Gerry a mischievous grin. “Want to check it out?”

“I’m game if you are,” Gerry said after no more than a second’s hesitation. “Won’t it be locked, though?”

“Probably, but I can fix that.”

It wasn’t locked, actually, or else the lock was a very cheap one. The door itself turned out to be a maintenance tunnel, but Tim clicked on his pocket torch and scanned the walls, then nodded, tracing a finger along a crack. “Look—right here. It’s like the trapdoor in the Archives. Subtle, hard to find, but…yeah, this is it, I’m sure of it.”

“How did you know it was there?” Gerry asked.

“Guessed, really, but it had to be in here somewhere. This tunnel goes straight through. Let me see if…” Tim felt around for a moment, then pushed on one of the stones. More or less as he’d expected, the section of wall in front of him swung away silently, obviously on a very delicate counterweight. “Bingo.”

“Okay, next question. How do you know this is connected to the tunnels under the Institute? We’re, what, two miles from Chelsea?”

“Bit under. Closer to two and a half to the Institute. But the tunnels go too far down to actually be the remains of Millbank, so they probably go further than we thought. And I know everyone who’s been in those tunnels has wandered long and far enough they probably stretch a good way.” Tim swept the torch ahead of him and frowned. “And these are steps going down. We’re almost definitely going to get in on a lower level. I’m not sure how deep Jon has explored, honestly, so we might be treading new ground here. We’ll have to be careful.”

“This isn’t exactly going to be a convenient way to get into work while avoiding the front door,” Gerry said as he followed Tim into the stairwell. The door swung almost silently shut behind him, and his hand tightened around Tim’s.

Tim squeezed back comfortingly. “Not exactly what I’m looking for. But I’m sure we can find other exits on our walk if that’s what I end up wanting to go for.”

“Right. Down into the depths of hell we go.”

Tim glanced over his shoulder. “That was a selling point for the London Underground at one point.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Okay, not exactly in those words, but it was a genuine poster that was commissioned in 1924. ‘It’s Warmer Down Below.’ They made another version in 1927, I think. Anyway, it was meant to promote the Underground and how it was so much warmer, and consistently so, than taking transport on the surface. 1927 was an exceptionally cold and windy winter.” Tim checked the walls briefly to make sure there were no turns leading off the stairs before he kept going down. “The poster, at least the ‘27 one, really does look like it’s saying the Underground is warmer because it’s closer to hell. Or at least to the Earth’s core.”

Gerry sighed. “How do you just know that?”

“Haven’t you ever been to the London Underground museum? They’ve got copies of quite a few old posters in the gift shop. Mind your step, there’s a loose stair here.”

The stairs went down further than Tim had maybe expected, and they weren’t steep, either; he reckoned you could probably put a board over the top of them and have an almost perfectly legal wheelchair access ramp. It finally bottomed out, though, and they were presented with a short, curved hallway that led to a maze of tunnels. Tim scanned the area with the torch. “Okay. Do we want to try and figure out a way to one of the higher levels, or explore this one?”

Gerry hummed thoughtfully. “Let’s just explore and see where we end up. Do you think Jon’s made it down this far?”

“No,” Tim said with a shake of his head. He set off down one of the corridors. “He’s terrified to go too deep, or too far from the Institute—it’s going to take us an hour at least to get close. And he doesn’t come down in the tunnels as often as he used to. It’s harder for him to sneak the key, and he hasn’t been able to figure out how to get a copy of it from Elias.”

“Told you that, did he?”

“He’s been talking about it on the tapes. Not the official ones. I think he’s started keeping backups with his own research. But he’s not as subtle about recording them as he likes to believe.” Tim couldn’t remember when he’d heard Jon narrating into the recorders, but he must have overheard at some point.

The tunnels on this level were definitely warmer than the ones above them. Tim found himself unbuttoning his coat to get a little more air in. The floor was dustier, too, and the walls, while they still shifted from worked stone to carved rock with no apparent pattern, at least made more sense to him.

Less so to Gerry, apparently. “Are we just going in circles?”

“No, we’re good,” Tim assured him. “The pattern’s meant to make you think you’re doubling back on yourself, but trust me, we haven’t passed the same stretch of rock in ages. Smirke didn’t do closed loops.”

“Still convinced this is Smirke’s work, then?”

“I’m probably the closest thing living to an expert in it, Ger. Yeah, I’m convinced.” Tim paused at an intersection, then turned to the left. “There ought to be a stairwell up this way.”

Twenty feet further along, they did in fact come to a set of stairs, these much steeper than the ones they’d come down and spiraling tightly. Gerry shook his head. “I probably ought to be worried about how you knew this was here.”

“Just logic. The way Smirke designed things, we’d gone too many steps not to run into a stairwell of some kind.” Tim started up.

“Okay, smart guy, then why are they so different from the others?” Gerry followed Tim into the stairwell.

Tim concentrated on his footing. The weird wedge shape of the risers meant that if you weren’t careful, you could easily slip off the narrowest portion of the step. “Further from the river, I’m guessing. The ground along the bank of the Thames is softer, so you have to kind of go more gradual to avoid the whole thing collapsing in on itself, and you don’t want to have too many rooms right up alongside it anyway. Those stairs were wide enough that they’d provide a bit of a barrier if the Thames did swell its banks, too. This is probably a repurposed well, actually, one that dried up or maybe got closed because it was contaminated.”

“How would you know for certain?”

“Maybe if we found a Shape?” Tim smiled at Gerry’s groan from behind him. “No, that part’s just a guess. I’d need to look at old plans of the area. But I think I’m right.”

Gerry muttered something Tim couldn’t quite make out, but he evidently chose not to say anything further.

Going up the narrow helix took a lot more effort than it would have to go up the steps they’d come down, and definitely took a lot more than going down them would have. Tim thanked God, Saint Anthony, and his lucky stars that Gerry had actually stuck to his resolution to quit smoking after they got back from their trip, because his lungs were damaged enough; if he was still an active smoker, he’d be in serious trouble. As it was, he climbed stoically, if unhappily.

For his part, Tim found himself quietly murmuring a litany of prayers under his breath, both to keep his pace steady as he ascended and to give them what aid he could. He started off with the novena to Saint Lucy he’d recited during his first exploration, the one that had give him the clarity to see into the room of worms properly, then shifted to one of the prayers to Saint Anthony to guide them to what was lost—what, exactly, he wasn’t sure, but he felt certain there was something he needed to find, and hopefully his patron saint would guide them. For good measure, he tossed in a prayer to Saint Thomas the Apostle, patron saint of architects and builders, in the hope that he’d maybe had some influence over Smirke or could at least get a line to him in a hurry to guide them through whatever he had wrought.

The question of whether Smirke had gone to heaven or hell flitted through his mind, but since Gerry didn’t really believe in either one, Tim decided not to bring it up.

Three Aves and one Pater later, he spotted the edge of a doorway a half turn ahead. He was about to turn and suggest to Gerry that they maybe go through it when he froze. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled, and…he couldn’t explain the sensation exactly. It was like he could just make out a noise on the edge of his hearing, or barely catch a whiff of a scent he couldn’t identify. Whatever it was, there was something through that door, something that was…dangerous? Was it dangerous? His senses were all mixed up. It wasn’t…whatever was out there wasn’t dangerous now, but could it be? Jon—no, Jon wasn’t here—was it Jon? It wasn’t Jon, it wasn’t the Archivist, it might be a danger to the Archivist, or to the Archives, or—

“Tim?” Gerry said from behind him.

“Shh,” Tim hissed. He reached back and found Gerry’s hand with his free one, squeezed it twice, then clicked off the torch and pocketed the key ring. Luckily there was—somehow—just enough light to at least give texture to the darkness, so he wasn’t going to be doing this in pitch black. As soft as he could and still be audible, he whispered over his shoulder, “Stay close, and try not to make any noise.”

They inched forward, slow and careful. Tim knew it was stupid to take his eyes off the stairs in front of him, but he would have to trust his free hand against the column as he slowly made his way backwards up the steps, looking over Gerry’s head and keeping his eyes fixed on that doorway. Thankfully, nothing followed them, and whatever was down there, they seemed to have escaped its notice. Still, Tim didn’t breathe easy until they’d gone two more turns around and the door was completely out of sight. He turned back around and saw, somewhere above them, another doorway.

Another quick prayer—to Saint Michael this time—and Tim led Gerry around the steps, which dead-ended at the door. Still, he waited until they had gone through the arch and he’d listened intently before he clicked on the torch again.

“Sorry,” he said, squeezing Gerry’s hand lightly. “You okay?”

“I’m good. I think.” Gerry took a deep breath. “What the fuck was that all about?”

“I’m not sure…there was something down there. It’s…” Tim blew out a sigh of frustration. “Everything’s all mixed up down here, but it felt like…I dunno. It’s not dangerous to us, I don’t think, but I couldn’t risk leading it to the Archives. And I’m not prepared for a fight.”

Gerry pressed his lips together tightly. “We need to get out of here, then. Not because I think you’re likely to end up in a fight if we stay down here, but because I worry about you being down here too long, Tim, you know that. And it’s already been almost two hours.”

“Two hours seventeen, but who’s counting?” Tim tried for a grin and got only a half worried, half exasperated look in reply. He sighed. “Come on. Let’s see if Jon got this far.”

It became very quickly evident that he hadn’t. There was a complete absence of arrows on any of the first three tunnels they tried. There weren’t any down the fourth tunnel, either, but the reason for that was immediately obvious. These walls were neither stone nor brick nor hewn rock, but…dirt. Solid packed dirt, smoothed out and arced overhead like a rabbit’s run. The floor, too, was tamped earth, covered with a thin, loose layer of soil freshly fallen from the ceiling above. There was no sign of footfall down them whatsoever.

“This isn’t right,” Gerry murmured. “This can’t…why would there be a solid earth tunnel above stone ones?”

“It’s not solid earth. Look.” Tim angled the torch at a spot on the ceiling and was rewarded with the faintest glint. “That’s mortar up there. This is a brick tunnel, it’s just been covered with earth for some reason.”

“I don’t feel the Buried,” Gerry said slowly. “Not that that means it isn’t here.”

Tim closed his eyes for a moment and let the sensations settle over him. He’d gotten pretty good at telling when one of the Fourteen was around. “I think…there’s a sense that it’s been nearby, maybe? But not in this tunnel. This dirt is just…here. Probably it used to be a mud coating over the brick—this isn’t a sewer or anything, so no reason for it to be exposed brick particularly—and it’s just dried out over the decades. Maybe Smirke meant to attract the Buried for some reason, or maybe to…contain it, but…” He paused, frowned, and opened his eyes. “Wait.”

“What?” Gerry sounded extremely unsettled.

Tim swept the torch down the tunnel, then pointed at a barely-noticeable passage running off to one side several meters ahead. “There. We need to go there.”

“Why?”

“Just…trust me.” Tim set off towards the passage. Gerry cursed in what sounded like German, then followed.

As Tim had suspected, the side tunnel had an extremely sharp jog right next to it, meaning that anyone stumbling down this corridor would be unlikely to recognize the tunnel wasn’t a dead end. A few feet away was an arch that looked deceptively like the ones that led to the stairwells, but Tim’s breath caught in his throat when he saw it. “That’s it.”

“What’s it? That’s what?” Gerry demanded.

Instead of answering, Tim moved toward the archway, almost like he was drawn to it, and stepped through. On the other side was a bare stone room, perhaps eight feet on each side, completely empty. There was a halfhearted attempt at a cobweb in one corner, a single smear on another wall, but otherwise, it was just…empty.

“This is where she was,” he said quietly.

Gerry stopped in the doorway. “Where who was?”

“Gertrude.” Tim crossed to the center of the room, knelt, and touched the stone floor. It was strangely cold to the touch, even for what and where it was, and it felt…empty. “This is where Martin found her. It’s not where she died, but…her killer brought her down here. He left a trail getting her here, obviously, but he must have cleaned it up behind himself. Martin found it by accident—obviously he wasn’t meant to. He said there were no cobwebs, no spiders.” He got to his feet and tilted his head to study the wisps of cobweb in the corner. “This place was warded against interference by the Fears. Martin broke the seal when he came in, which is how the Mother of Puppets got started…she must have decided it wasn’t worth the effort, though. And it’s how the police found it. They never would have if they hadn’t had a Hunter with them. But nobody needs this place anymore, so now it’s just…abandoned. There’s nothing left.”

“Tim?” Gerry said, in a choked, barely controlled voice. “How did you know that?”

Tim opened his mouth…

…and closed it.

He thought about every argument he could make. About probabilities, and logic, and experience. He thought about sensations and signs and counting steps. He thought about all the possible answers he could give Gerry, all the reassurances, all the soothing little…

Lies.

He turned slowly around and met Gerry’s eyes. The worry and fear in them was obvious, as was the way he was gripping the door frame. Tim suddenly became aware that the battery in his torch had flickered out and died before they had made it out of what he was persisting in thinking of as the rabbit tunnel, and that, much like when they had been climbing the spiral staircase, Gerry was actually standing there in complete and total darkness.

And Tim was not. He couldn’t see as clear as daylight, but he could, at the very least, see. He Saw. And in that moment, he Knew.

Quietly, fighting to keep his voice steady, Tim said what he had been avoiding admitting, even to himself, for…God, months. “I don’t know.”