And If Thou Wilt, Forget

Tim had no idea how long they sat on the floor of the storage unit, nestled into the small, cramped hollow in the stacks of boxes, silently curled into one another. He knew there were a thousand and one things they should be doing. They should be looking through the rest of the unit for whatever Gertrude had left here to stop the Unknowing so they would at least have a vague idea. They should be planning contingencies. They should be trying to figure out where Gertrude’s ashes had ended up and whether they could dig out the urn and take it to Dover.

Instead, he simply sat, cold and numb, staring at the tape recorder as if it would suddenly burst to life again and give them more. More information, more warnings, more suggestions. More of Gertrude’s voice.

The tape recorder, a plain little black thing with no discernible features, nevertheless stared back at him judgmentally and refused to answer.

Finally, Gerry pulled Tim his feet. The tape recorder tumbled to the ground and popped open again. Tim bent over to retrieve the tape and, to his mild surprise, a second recorder fell out of his pocket. He didn’t remember putting it in there, but it, too, appeared to be loaded. The tape looked like it had something on it, too, but damned if he knew what.

He popped the tape out of that one for good measure, tucked it and the tape from Gertrude into his pocket, and led Gerry over to the door of the storage unit, leaving both recorders where they were. They could come back for them another day. Right now, he was just too tired, too raw, too strung out to focus on anything in here. He relocked the unit, checked to make sure it was secure, and took Gerry’s hand to walk out of the storage unit and back to the car. Thankfully, Gerry didn’t question it; indeed, it seemed like he was having thoughts along the same lines as Tim’s, because when they got back to the car, he simply unlocked it, waited for Tim to get in and get buckled, and pulled away. He didn’t even bother turning on the radio, and they drove through the streets without speaking.

Gerry was finally the one to break the silence, quietly, as if he wasn’t sure he was even allowed to suggest it. “I suppose it’s possible there’s another explanation for why Jon hasn’t played the tape for you.”

Tim sighed, heavily. “Well, yeah. I mean, I didn’t find any tapes, anywhere in the Archives. Maybe she hid his somewhere separate from the key that turned out to be more obvious than the hole under the floorboards and whoever killed her took it and put it with all the other tapes that were found with her, so he never got hold of it and now it’s in police custody. Or maybe he did get it and he’s just stubbornly refusing to listening to it, first because he was too busy or too unsure of what he might hear and now out of principle. Or maybe he had it, was steeling himself up to listen to it, and then Prentiss attacked and it got destroyed. Or maybe somebody recorded over it on accident. There are plenty of explanations. I guess I should ask him about it, but…”

“But Gertrude told you not to trust anyone,” Gerry completed.

“Well, except you.”

“You can always trust me. Just like I know I can always trust you.” Gerry reached over the gear shift and squeezed Tim’s hand lightly. “The question is if you can trust the Archivist.”

Tim felt the response bubbling up in his throat. He tried to swallow it, but it forced its way out anyway. “We can trust the Archivist. The question is if we can trust Jonathan Sims.”

Gerry jerked his hand back as if he’d been stung. Before Tim had time to feel guilty, though, he’d put it back, and this time he gripped it much more tightly and didn’t let go. The pressure, and the warmth, helped ground him and settle him. “That seems like a pretty crucial distinction, but we can talk about it.”

Tim exhaled. “Thanks, Ger.”

“Hey, if I cut every single person I cared about out of my life the second they started displaying signs that they’d fallen into the clutches of an otherworldly entity that embodied primordial fear, I wouldn’t have anybody left to care about,” Gerry said lightly. “Except maybe the dog.” He squeezed Tim’s hand again. “I’m here for you. I told you that. You were there for me when I was at my worst.”

“I don’t think a brain tumor is exactly the same thing as the Ceaseless Watcher.”

“Yeah, one’s easier to cut out of your head than the other. Both are going to fuck up your life and leave you with scars that you never fully recover from. And even if you do get away, or think you have, you’ll spend the rest of your life making sure it isn’t coming back.”

Tim managed a small laugh. “I don’t think this is the best possible metaphor.”

“That’s because it’s a syllogism.”

“A syllogism is a logic argument, not a literary device.”

“What? No, it’s—isn’t it that thing where you say one thing is another thing?”

“I think you’re thinking of simile, babe. And it’s only a simile if you say a thing is like another thing. ‘My love is like a red, red rose’ is a simile. ‘Love is a flower and you its only seed’ is a metaphor.”

“Oh, I thought you were going to say ‘Love is a rose’.”

“And a rose is a flower. So if love is a rose, and a rose is a flower, then love is a flower. That’s a syllogism.” Tim eyed Gerry. “And don’t think I don’t know you’re doing that on purpose.”

“I’m not. I actually was mixing those words up,” Gerry confessed. He looked both ways at the intersection they were stopped at, then turned left.

Tim blinked. “Where are we going, by the way? This isn’t the way home.”

Gerry glanced at him. “No, but you skipped out without having breakfast this morning, and Jon sent you home before lunch, so you haven’t eaten all day. You’re not going to be able to focus on anything else until you get some food in you. There’s a pub down this way that looks like it should be crowded enough we can chat without being noticed but empty enough we’ll actually be able to get a booth.”

Tim genuinely smiled at that. “Thanks for having my back.”

Gerry gave him a roguish smirk. “And your front.”

The pub was obviously fairly popular with the neighborhood, but they were able to find a corner to tuck themselves into and place their orders. Tim appreciated that Gerry didn’t try to encourage him to talk right away; instead, they simply sat for a little while. The patterns in the grain of the wood were…almost hypnotic, Tim thought, or at least he did at first. After a moment, though, he realized he was looking to see if the knots resembled eyes, and wondering if the symbolism of the eye had to be deliberate for Elias—Jonah—to see through them, or if something that kind of looked like an eye if you squinted would be good enough. Maybe it would make his perception distorted.

“Am I supposed to call him Elias or Jonah?” he mumbled, tracing a particularly swirly bit on the table.

Gerry, as if knowing what he was thinking—which he probably did, since he was probably thinking along the same lines—slid one of the tiny cocktail napkins meant more to act as coasters than anything over the knot. “I think if you called him Jonah to his face, he’d probably kill you on the spot.”

“I’m not that stupid. I mean when we’re talking.”

“Up to you. I—” Gerry stopped. “No. Never mind. I’m not asking that.”

Tim looked up. “Asking what?”

“Asking anything I’m worried the Ceaseless Watcher might shove into your head if it thinks you need the information,” Gerry snapped. “I don’t want you falling any deeper into this bullshit, Tim, you know that. We just had a conversation about not asking you questions that tempt it, and…”

“Okay, okay, hold on,” Tim interrupted, holding up a hand. “The Ceaseless Watcher didn’t tell me if I could trust Jon, remember? Just that I had to trust the Archivist. He’s too important not to. Elias? Or Jonah? If they’re not…important, I probably don’t need that info. Besides, he’s probably got a lot of that information hidden. Jon just isn’t good enough to hide from me yet. That’s not the Beholding, that’s just logic.”

Gerry stared at him for a moment, then slumped slightly. “Okay,” he said quietly. “Okay. In that case…I wonder if Elias Bouchard actually exists outside Jonah Magnus.”

“He…does,” Tim said slowly. “Or at least he did. He was a smarmy, unimportant rich kid stoner who got his job at the Institute because of his daddy—that’s kind of public record, or at least it’s easy to deduce from the personnel files. I don’t know exactly what Jonah does, but…”

“You mean, you don’t know if he’s just taking on new identities or taking over their bodies?”

“I think it’s that last one. Which kind of makes me think that I’ve never met the actual Elias Bouchard, only Jonah Magnus wearing him like a meat suit.” Tim rubbed his forehead. “I think even if I asked the Ceaseless Watcher to give me that information, it wouldn’t. An Eye can’t look inside itself, you know?”

“That’s…disturbingly profound, but I’m choosing to believe it came from you and not the Beholding, so please don’t disillusion me if you have information to the contrary. Anyway, what now?”

Tim sighed and stared into his pint. “Now I guess I need to think about what I’m telling Martin and Sasha.”

Gerry studied him. “About if they can trust Jon?”

“Yeah.” Tim looked up at Gerry. “I don’t know that I need to talk to Sasha, frankly. I get the strong sense she knew Gertrude wanted her as her successor, and she’s still pissed Jon got the job over her. She already has good reason to hate him and not trust him. It’s Martin I’m worried about.”

“How likely is he to believe you?” Gerry asked quietly.

Not very, was the answer, but Tim shrugged. “Only one way to find out, I guess.”

Gerry nodded slowly. “Well, you’ve got three days before you need to face Jon. I suppose you could always call Martin. Get him to come over, show him what we’ve got, clue him into everything.”

“I don’t want to do that much right off the bat,” Tim said. “It’ll overload him. I just mostly want to see if I can get him on our side, you know?”

“Against Jon?”

“Against…no. No, I’m never going to get Martin to side against Jon.” Tim wrinkled his nose. “We could hear a gunshot and run into a room to find Jon standing over a bleeding corpse with a smoking gun in his hands and a ‘holy shit I can’t believe I actually just did that’ expression on his face and Martin’s first instinct would be to rush over to make sure he wasn’t hurt, and his second would be to tell him to put the gun down in case there were fingerprints on it. But I’m hoping I can at least get him to hear me out without wanting to immediately run to Jon. And, hell, if anyone can get Jon to admit whether or not he actually listened to that tape, it’ll be Martin. I just need to figure out how to phrase it.”

Gerry took a pensive sip of his beer. “He’s got to know there’s more to…all this than he thinks. Right?”

“At this point, almost certainly. And hell, he worked for the Institute for years, even if it was just in the library. He’s got to have some kind of background.”

“Probably not on your level, though. And…” Gerry hesitated. “I hate to admit it, but part of the reason Gertrude didn’t tell you everything right up front is she wasn’t sure who you worked for.”

“I knew that, Ger,” Tim said, raising one eyebrow. “She told me once that ‘a sufficiently traumatic mark is nearly indistinguishable from a total claim or declaration of allegiance’, and I didn’t think she was talking about someone who just came to give her a statement.”

Gerry waited until the server had dropped off their soup before he asked, “Which of the others do you trust?”

“Completely? Martin,” Tim replied quietly. “He’s the only one who’s not marked by anything more than the Eye…well, and the Corruption, now anyway. But Sasha’s always had the Stranger on her and Jon…I told you about his Web mark. I trust that even less than I trust the Stranger. I really wouldn’t be surprised if the Mother of Puppets wants something in the Archives and is using Jon to get it.”

“But the Archivist is of the Eye, and I don’t think Jon can just get rid of that now,” Gerry pointed out. “If he is working for the Web…or was…the Eye’s got a stronger claim on him now.”

“Or his brain’s going to tear itself apart,” Tim replied. “Or the Web and the Eye will pull him apart like a wishbone on New Year’s and I’ll have to keep a look out for who gets the bigger part. I suggested that as a possibility to Elias a couple months ago, not really seriously, but now I’m starting to wonder. It’s…I won’t pretend it doesn’t worry me.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Even if I can’t trust him…I need to keep him safe.”

Gerry studied Tim keenly. “Jon? Or the Archivist?”

Tim froze and examined the question from all angles. Which one was he bound to protect? In some senses, it didn’t matter; they weren’t exactly two different people, more two different aspects of the same thing. It wasn’t like Jon was carrying around some kind of malevolent passenger in his head—he wasn’t possessed or anything. Probably it was closer to Billy Batson turning into Captain Marvel. But in another sense, it kind of did matter.

“The Archivist,” he said finally. “I don’t worry about Martin and Sasha so much when they’re not in the Archives—well, I do worry about Martin, but that’s because he’s Martin, and that’s me worrying about him, but the Beholding doesn’t nag me to make sure he’s okay when he’s not at work. With Jon it doesn’t seem to matter. I thought maybe it was because I was so bothered by what happened to Gertrude, but now I’m not sure.”

“The part of you that wants to protect the Archivist, maybe,” Gerry said. “The compulsion bit is probably just the Ceaseless Watcher protecting its assets. Or maybe it’s just a coincidence.”

Tim couldn’t help but laugh. “You know, I’ve seen a lot of frankly unbelievable shit in the last three and a half years, but I still don’t think I’ve ever actually encountered a genuine coincidence.”

Gerry laughed, too, then sobered. “I guess we should get home, then. Figure out what it is you’re going to tell Martin and go from there.”

“Yeah. Maybe I’ll show him the other way into the tunnels. Might be easier to talk to him down there, too. It’s easier to believe in this sort of thing when—” Tim jerked and dropped his spoon into his soup. His chest suddenly clenched, and he found it hard to breathe.

“Tim? Tim, what’s wrong, are you okay?” Gerry reached across the table, his face going ashen.

“Archives,” Tim croaked out. He curled his hand into a fist—the ring didn’t feel tight, he wasn’t being watched, but the gesture made him feel better—and tried to force some coherency through the clamor of Danger! Danger! Danger! currently resounding in his head—no, his entire body. “Something’s wrong. I need to get to the Archives. Now.”

Gerry threw some money on the table and stood. “Come on, let’s go.”

Tim had never been more grateful for, and more forgiving of, Gerry’s predilection for pushing the boundaries of and even exceeding the speed limit. From where they were it would normally have taken an hour and a half to get back to the Institute—less if they weren’t avoiding the toll roads, not because they were cheap but so they couldn’t be tracked, and it only would have saved them fifteen minutes going that way anyway—but, thanks be to God and Saint Christopher, they hit the damned lights just right and traffic was on their side, and it was just over an hour before Gerry turned up the road where the Institute was. Tim no longer felt the same immediate sense of urgency and danger, but there was still a low-grade panic and anxiety and he knew that, whatever the danger had been, he had to face it, had to either prevent it from getting to the Archivist or avenge what it had done to him.

“Let me out here,” he said, reaching for the handle.

“What? Tim—” Gerry began.

“You don’t need to get that close to the Institute, I don’t know what’s there. Just wait here, I’ll call you as soon as I know what’s going on.” Tim leaned over and gave Gerry a quick kiss. “It’s fine, I’ve got this.”

“I’ll stay close. Call if you need me.” Gerry, with obvious reluctance, stopped the car so Tim could get out.

Tim sprinted for the Institute, keenly aware that time was of the essence. More importantly, he realized that it was well past the time most people left, and Jon had supposedly left for the day as well…and he no longer had the keys. Unless Jon had somehow left the door unlocked, or someone else had, it was going to be a challenge for him to get in quickly, and he couldn’t spare the time it would take to travel back through the tunnels again. He would need a good deal of luck, or else some supernatural help. As he ran, he tried desperately to come up with which saint he should be praying to—Michael, Baldomerus, or Quentin—before giving up and addressing his thought directly to the Ceaseless Watcher, as stupid as that was: If you want me to help, the door better be open.

It was. Even as Tim approached the courtyard, he could see that it was just slightly ajar, like someone had gone through too hastily to be sure it caught closed. A single cigarette stub had been ground into the stone patio, probably by whoever had used the door. Tim flung it open and leaped down the steps. The Archives were silent and still, but there was a sense of dread, and a feeling of oppression, and a smell of—

Copper. A sort of metallic tang in the air. Tim hadn’t tasted that tang often, but he knew well enough what it was.

Blood.

“Jon!” he shouted, fear and anger and desperation rising up all at once and threatening to choke him as he charged across the floor of the Archives. The Archivist was in danger, something had threatened him, something had hurt him, it was worse than when the Distortion had got in, he would have to act quickly, he—

The yelp and the clatter of something being dropped scraped across his nerves like a key on a piano wire and brought his thoughts to a discordant halt. He didn’t slow, though. Instead he picked up the pace and burst through the shelves just in time to see Martin stumble towards him, looking pale and disheveled and panicked and—what had happened to his shirt?

“Tim?” Martin squeaked out.

“Martin.” Tim tried to put the brakes on before he skidded straight into Martin, or past him. “What’s going on? Where’s Jon?”

“I—I don’t—it’s, it’s bad, I—” Martin wrung his hands desperately.

“What happened to him, Martin?”

Tim felt rather than heard the Ceaseless Watcher take possession of his voice, and if he could have bitten his own tongue in half, he would have. Martin didn’t deserve…whatever that was. Still, something in his eyes cleared; the panic and terror didn’t really go away so much as move aside, but he was at least able to answer Tim directly. “I don’t know, but there’s a dead body in his office.”

“What?!” Tim leaped for the office door.

“Tim, don’t, there might be fingerprints!” Martin cried out.

Tim almost laughed at the echo of his ironic comment from the pub, but he kept it to himself. Anyway, there wouldn’t be any fingerprints on the door that weren’t supposed to be there, of that he was certain. He slammed his hand into the door and flung it open. Sure enough, there was a dead body slumped backwards in the guest chair, listing slightly to one side, arms dangling limply, half slid out of the seat.

It wasn’t Jon. That was the first thought that hit Tim’s brain, and it flooded him with relief. The body was bigger, lumpier, and considerably more aged than Jon, and dressed in a fussy tweed suit that had probably been quite nice in its day. Now it was about thirty years out of date…and, of course, quite liberally soaked with blood. Said blood appeared to have originated from the man’s head, or at least what Tim presumed to be his head based on its position at the top of the body.

The hair, what was left of it anyway, appeared to have been sparse and brittle, either white or a very light grey, and there was a truly impressive mustache that matched in the few places that hadn’t become covered with blood. A single eye, shockingly bright blue against the broken capillaries that had turned the entire sclera an angry reddish pink, stared unseeingly at the ceiling; Tim found himself instinctively avoiding being in its scope of vision. The forehead, scalp, and much of the rest of the face was a shocking mass of violent contusions, caving it in and turning it into something between raw hamburger and an overripe plum that had been stepped on in an orchard. The murder weapon was fairly easy to deduce, as a length of cast iron pipe, clotted with gore, lay tossed casually on the floor.

Tim exhaled a slow, shaky breath. “Damn. Maybe he didn’t need my help after all.”

“What?” Martin said from behind him, his voice high and shrill.

“Jon,” Tim said by way of explanation. He turned to see Martin staring at him in utter shock, jaw slack. “Don’t look at me like that. He must have come back for some reason, and…what were you doing here, anyway?”

“I—” Martin flapped a hand desperately. “I got worried, I mean, why would he have just sent us home if he was sick? He wasn’t acting right, so—so I doubled back. I managed to sneak in while Rosie wasn’t looking, and I was just going to try and find Jon when—”

“When this guy broke in?”

“No! No, I didn’t even—it, it was a woman. I think. Or something. It, it kind of looked like Sasha, like if you stretched her out, but i-it couldn’t be. Anyway, it came down roaring and I ran and—it went into the tunnels.” Martin wrung his hands. “I heard it yelling Jon’s name, so I went down after him, and I heard a voice, and—I, I ran into Michael, the thing that Sasha met that time, and he—it—he said he was there to watch the Archivist die, and that he was going to kill me and it would be easier than killing Jon and—”

Tim swore and slammed his hand onto the desk. A pen rolled off it and hit the ground. “Don’t tell me. You went through a door. And wound up in strange tunnels?”

“Yes! Yes, how—how’d you know that?” Martin sounded surprised, and a little suspicious.

“Michael. It’s what he does. Those are—never mind, I’ll explain later.” Tim took a deep, steadying breath. “And then you came out here?”

Martin still looked suspicious, but he nodded. “In the Archives. It felt like I was in there for days, but—um, what day is it?”

“It’s still the sixteenth,” Tim said, and Martin’s shoulders relaxed. “Time wouldn’t have felt the same in there, Martin, it’s not your fault. It’s maybe been a few hours.”

“Well, that’s…that’s good.” Martin scrubbed at his face for a moment. “I, I found…I was looking for Jon and I found…” He gestured vaguely at the office.

Tim exhaled. “Yeah. We’ll have to find him. Hopefully he’s okay.” Turning back to the body, he studied it for a minute. It was hard to tell under the blood, but he thought it felt vaguely familiar. “God, what a mess. Lucky thing there’s no carpeting in here.”

“Tim!”

“What? Bloodstains out of carpets are a bitch to clean out. Hardwood floors we can manage it with industrial bleach.” Tim made a face. “Technically we’re not actually qualified to clean up biohazards, but I won’t tell if you don’t.”

Martin swallowed hard. “Did Elias make you clean it up when it was Gertrude’s blood?”

Tim gritted his teeth at the mention of Elias Bouchard. Not telling Martin who he really was would probably be the hardest part, but he couldn’t put him at that kind of risk. Not yet. Not until they got this sorted out. “No, it was cleaned up by the time I got back. This, though…”

“You really think he’ll make us do it?” Martin blurted.

“Were you planning on telling him?” Tim asked without thinking. He turned to see Martin staring at him in shock and horror again and sighed. “Look. This was probably self defense, and…fuck, I don’t blame Jon for it right now, but we’ll need an explanation from him. We might be okay for the next couple of days, since Elias knows we’re not supposed to be back until Monday, but I don’t want to leave this sitting here for three days or it’s going to dry and start to smell and be worse to get rid of.”

“Tim!” Martin shrieked. “You’re not actually suggesting we cover up a dead body, are you?”

“What’s the alternative?” Tim demanded, jabbing a finger at the body. “Call 999 and report another body in the Archives? Tell them not to worry about sending the cops, just send someone to get the corpse out, we’ll handle it ourselves? Hope the police don’t show up and assume that the reason Jon sent us all home early was because he was meeting whoever this was in a place where the cameras don’t show so that he could—”

He stopped. Martin’s eyes had been growing steadily wider, and his face steadily paler, as Tim ranted. At first he thought his tone was too harsh and he’d need to tone it down, but then he connected it with the sound he had heard when he first came into the Archives and pinched the bridge of his nose. “You already called 999, didn’t you?”

“I thought Jon was in danger!” Martin practically wailed.

“He was. He is.” Tim looked back at the body, then looked back at Martin as sudden, heavy awareness came over him that he really had been too late after all. “And you just made it worse.”