And If Thou Wilt, Forget

Gerry had actually expected Tim to have a hard time not breaking into the box of Gertrude’s tapes immediately. After all, even setting aside that she’d been his mentor, even forgetting how badly he’d wanted to hear her voice again just a short month ago, there was the simple fact that these were statements, this was knowledge he would need. Certainly knowledge he didn’t have. Surely he would cave before they were through dinner and go digging, or at least get up in the middle of the night.

To his surprise, though, Tim seemed to put them completely out of his mind the second they left the closet. He didn’t refer to them once throughout dinner or the early evening, and he slept soundly through the night—or, at least, every time Gerry woke up and rolled over to check on him, he appeared to be deep in slumber. And when he woke up in the morning, he went across the hall to take a shower, and when Gerry peeked into the closet, the box was exactly where they had left it, apparently undisturbed.

“What’s on your agenda for today?” Tim asked when Gerry came into the kitchen to find him frying sausages with an almost casual ease he found, for some reason, frustrating. “Still working on that commission?”

“Yeah, I—ugh, damn it, that’s right, he’s coming in for a sitting today.” Gerry smacked his forehead lightly. “I’ve got most of the drawing done, and the underpainting on the background, but by the time he gets here after school the light in the studio isn’t great. Apparently they need his building today for a council election or something, so his mum arranged to bring him in earlier in the day for a longer sitting.”

“Not that I don’t relish having weekends with you, but is there a reason you can’t do these sittings with him on Saturday mornings if the afternoons during the week aren’t working out?”

“Parents are divorced, or at least separated. Dad has him weekends. He’s up in Edinburgh, I think.” Gerry sighed heavily. “At least I’ll be done with him by three so he can make his train.”

Tim raised an eyebrow. “I take it you don’t like the kid much.”

“He’s…fine. I guess. I just don’t…know what to do with children,” Gerry said, a bit helplessly. “I wasn’t allowed to be one, you know? And I never really interacted with them much, even when I was that age. I feel like I ought to be engaging him in conversation or something while we’re sitting, but I don’t know what to say.”

“Ask him about his hobbies. What kind of music he likes. How he’s doing in school. Favorite foods, favorite books, favorite colors.” Tim turned the sausages out onto a plate. “Anything but ‘what do you want to be when you grow up’, unless he’s old enough to be seriously thinking about college and university. Maybe not even then. Kids hate it when adults expect them to have their whole lives figured out before they’ve finished losing all their milk teeth.”

“Is that actually the term for them?”

“The proper term is ‘deciduous teeth’, actually, but literally nobody but medical professionals call them that. And before you ask, the last couple usually fall out by the time you’re around twelve.”

“My boyfriend, the walking encyclopedia.” Gerry rolled his eyes.

“Call me Dexter Riley, I guess.” Tim must have seen Gerry’s expression, because he clarified, “Old Disney film from the seventies. They did a remake in the nineties that wasn’t as good…anyway, want me to pick up something on the way home today?”

Gerry blinked. “Uh, no, don’t worry about it. We can…I dunno. Go out later, maybe. Or make something here. What time do you think you’ll be leaving work?”

“The usual time,” Tim said with a shrug. “Martin’s better about getting out on time than Jon ever was, and God knows Melanie doesn’t seem to want to linger if she’s not getting paid extra for it, not that I blame her. Why?”

“Oh…no real reason, I just…I, I thought you’d want to get into the tapes faster,” Gerry confessed. “You know, see what was so important that it had to be recorded, hear what she had hidden away, that kind of thing.”

“I told you, it’s the research I feed on, not the statements,” Tim said gently. “I’m eager to hear what she recorded, yeah, because I’m hoping it’ll be something useful about the Unknowing, but I’m not…compelled or anything. I’ll be fine until tonight. If you want to start going through them without me—”

“No! No, I’ll wait,” Gerry said quickly. “Just surprised is all.”

Tim shut off the stove top and turned to him with a raised eyebrow and a smirk. “Surprised? Or curious yourself and wishing I’d give you an excuse to break into them now?”

“I hate you,” Gerry claimed, then spent a few minutes making a thorough lie of that particular statement.

It was possible he’d hoped to delay Tim long enough that he decided not to bother going into the Institute, but logically, he’d known that was never really going to happen. Anyway, he did actually have to make it down to the studio before his client—clients, he supposed—arrived. They turned up promptly at eight-thirty, right on time. As usual, Moira Brodie gave him a tremulous, brittle, too bright smile as she gripped her son’s shoulders hard enough that it had to hurt, as though she was afraid he would slip away from her if she didn’t. The boy—Callum, his mother called him, on the rare occasions she used his name and not a pet name like treasure or sweetling—also looked much as usual, sullen and silent and suspicious. Gerry welcomed them both in, indicated the comfortable chair off to one side where Moira could sit, and arranged Callum in his usual spot before getting to work.

Gerry had never really done portraits until recently, and he rarely did sessions of longer than a couple of hours, but they had the day and he was determined to make use of the light while he had it. Not that he had much. Frustratingly enough, despite having the curtains drawn and plenty of space to catch it, the sky was leaden and overcast and the light wasn’t really significantly better than it was in the afternoons. He didn’t have enough lights in the room to make up the difference, and the hot bulbs and artificial harshness would have affected the colors anyway. Still, he did his best. He also did his best, as Tim had suggested, to draw out Callum through questioning and encouragement. There wasn’t much of a response, though, mostly tiny shrugs and noncommittal noises, until he asked about music. To his surprise, the kid listened to a lot of the same bands he himself did—and, like Gerry, it seemed as though his mother wasn’t too keen on them. It filled about twenty minutes of painting time, but like all good things it didn’t last.

To his supreme irritation, the sun came out from behind the clouds not two minutes after Moira said they had to get to the station so Callum could be on his way to visit his father.

He cleaned up the studio, set the canvas to one side to dry—it would require a couple more sessions before it was done, and he was probably just going to have to live with the shadows—and headed back to the flat. The second he stepped through the door, he found himself looking at the closet where the tapes were. Directly at the closet.

He could start going through the tapes. Tim had told him it was fine to do that on his own. For just a second, he imagined himself sorting through the tapes and finding exactly the right one, the one that detailed all Gertrude’s plans for stopping the Unknowing, maybe even her contingency plans for the other rituals as well. He imagined himself presenting it to Tim when he got home, ready and waiting for them to put everything in motion.

Then he shook his head minutely. He’d said he would wait, and even though he didn’t think Tim would actually mind all that much if he didn’t, what he’d said about Gerry wishing he’d give him an excuse to break into them first thing disquieted him a little. To distract himself, he grabbed his mp3 player and earbuds, clipped Rowlf’s lead to his collar, and took him to the park. He spent the next hour or so listening to a playlist Tim had put together for him, which turned out to be mostly death metal in languages that were not English with an unexpected detour about fifteen songs in into what sounded like a novelty song from the 1940s, and throwing sticks for Rowlf to chase. It did at least distract him from thinking about the tapes a little bit.

Finally, though, he was able to justify heading home…and found himself immediately looking directly at the closet again. He sighed and forced himself to head into the kitchen to make sure Rowlf had dinner. He knew better than to try cooking anything for himself and Tim, though. As distracted as he was, he would definitely end up setting the building on fire.

It felt like forever, but it was probably less than twenty minutes later that the door finally opened and Rowlf ran to greet Tim. Gerry, admittedly, was only a few steps behind him. He came into the main part of the flat just as Tim straightened up from scratching Rowlf’s ears and gave him a warm smile. “Hey. How are you, babe?”

“Hey. I’m hungry, I’m keyed up, and I’ve had ‘I’m a Lonely Little Petunia in an Onion Patch’ stuck in my head for the last half hour, so I’m going to have to kill you now.” Gerry crossed the floor and gave Tim a quick kiss. “I just got back from walking Rowlf, though, so one thing accomplished.”

“If I wanted to be a dick, I’d say you need to eat before we do anything else.” Tim caught Gerry around the waist, dipped him dramatically, and gave him a kiss that left him slightly dazed and confused as he set him back on his feet. “But I know you’ve been waiting all day, so come on, Toad, I think we can take down the cookies now.”

“Uh.” Gerry decided to ignore what was definitely a reference he didn’t get. “Did you eat anything today? I kind of forgot.”

“Had lunch with Lou. She had something for me on one of the statements we’re researching, and she wanted to hear how things were going at the Institute. She sends her love and says if she doesn’t get to meet you some time before her next birthday she’s going to steal all my left socks.” Tim led the way to the closet where they were storing the tapes.

They probably could have taken it into the living room to go through it, but with the slight protection from observation afforded by the closet, they were probably safer this way. Rowlf followed them in and lay in the corner with his head on his paws as Tim reached up, pulled down the box, and settled on the floor next to Gerry.

“Do you have any idea why Jonah had these now?” Gerry asked, a bit distractedly, as he peered into the box. The tapes were jumbled in a heap with—seemingly, anyway—no rhyme or reason.

“I think he confiscated them from Jon’s office after the old man’s murder.” Tim shifted a couple of tapes aside and plucked out a scrap of paper, which looked like a corner torn off a carbon paper. “This is a bit of a police evidence sheet. I’m not supposed to know that that police constable was smuggling him the tapes, but she was for a while. I think she quit the force, though, and I’m betting she brought Jon a big box of them for some reason. My guess is that Jonah took them for some reason.”

“Any guesses on the reason?”

“Most charitable possibility is that he knows where Jon is and he’s worried he’ll get sick without statements, so he’s mailing him the tapes to give him something to feed off of while he’s gone. Most dangerous possibility is that he’s looking for the same thing we are. Most likely it’s somewhere in between.” Tim pursed his lips. “He hasn’t been through it, though.”

Gerry looked up at him. “You just…Know that?”

Tim shook his head. “Even if I tried, I don’t think I’m good enough to…Know anything about Jonah Magnus. Whether he believes I’m a threat right now or not, he’s more than two hundred years older than I am, he knows how to defend himself better. Might get a lucky shot or two in, if his guard was way down, but trying that hard would likely end up with me getting hurt at best. No, that’s just logic. You saw what his office looked like when you went in there to get the tapes. The man is meticulously organized. He’s the kind of guy who sorts his ties by color, width, and thread count. If he’d gone through these tapes, I mean really gone through them, he’d have put them in a logical order. Or at least logical to him.”

“I guess that makes sense. Are we going to organize them?”

“We can certainly try.”

“Well then.” Gerry took the box from Tim’s hands, turned it over, and dumped it on the floor in front of them, like a toddler emptying out a toy box. Rowlf picked his head up at the noise.

“It’s okay, boy,” Tim said soothingly, leaning over to rub Rowlf’s ear. Placated, the dog lay back down again, watching them from big brown eyes. “Right. Let’s start sorting them by file number and see where we go from there. And if anything jumps out at you…well, just let me know.”

They got to work, or at least Tim did. If this was anything like how he worked at the Institute, Gerry could see why Gertrude had appreciated him as an assistant—and why Elias Bouchard kept him around. He was methodical and precise, deftly plucking tapes from the scattered heap, glancing at the labels, and placing them in neat stacks, alternating direction so that they didn’t slide about or topple from being imbalanced. He worked quickly, too, obviously not caring what might actually be on any of them, just wanting to get them sorted by date.

Gerry, however, found his attention wandering. His skin felt…itchy, the way it had when he’d got his first tattoos and hadn’t known how to take proper care of them, or like when he had a really bad sunburn—like it was too tight and making it difficult to breathe. There was something in the room, some kind of tension, that Tim seemed oblivious to but that meant Gerry couldn’t concentrate. It was as though something was about to happen, or something was…waiting for him.

“Mind if I play one?” he said, just to get his mind off of everything.

Tim gave him a half glance before returning his attention to work. “Sure. Just don’t disturb my stacks.”

“Okay, Archimedes. Sheesh.” Gerry looked over the rapidly diminishing pile of tapes.

There was one towards the middle of the heap that caught his attention. He didn’t know why. Maybe it was the way Tim seemed to be circling around it, almost like he was saving it for last as he snatched up tapes from either side, even to the point that his fingers skimmed it briefly before choosing a different one for his sorting. Maybe it was the fact that there didn’t seem to be any visible writing on the label. Whatever it was, he knew he wanted to listen to that one. He hesitated a second, just to make sure Tim wasn’t going to grab it, before he swiped it off the stack, picked up the recorder lying a short distance away, and popped it in. He set it on the floor between them and drew his knees up to watch Tim sort and while the statement washed over them.

After a second of silence, there was a sharp sigh that definitely sounded familiar, and then Gertrude spoke. “Right. No use putting it off further.”

Gerry was intrigued by what statement she’d been avoiding and tilted his head to listen as she—evidently—picked up the page. When she began speaking, however, he bolted upright, legs flattening and accidentally kicking the tapes in front of him. “Wait, what?” he blurted, lunging for the recorder.

“What—Ger, what’s wrong?” Tim looked up, bewildered and a bit alarmed. He grunted and rubbed the side of his head. “Fuck, that—what’s wrong?”

Instead of answering, Gerry rewound the tape and scooted across the closet floor to sit next to Tim. “That’s—fuck. This is a page out of the Book.”

“The B—your mum’s book?” Tim asked sharply. “The one she tried to bind herself to? Fuck, did Gertrude read one of the pages when she—wait. Wait, that didn’t…that was in English. Didn’t you say it was all in Sanskrit?”

“Yeah, but I don’t think it has to be Sanskrit, just that the original pages were and…” Gerry trailed off and shook his head. “Jesus Christ. I should’ve known she might have done something like this, but…why?”

Tim took a deep, steadying breath and wrapped his arm around Gerry’s shoulders. “Well. We don’t…have to keep listening, but the only way we’re going to find out is to listen.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess you’re right. And at least it isn’t Mum’s page.” Gerry rested his head on Tim’s shoulder, reached over to take his free hand and squeeze it tightly, and pressed PLAY again.

Again the sigh, again the begrudging encouragement, again the rustle of the page—now that he was listening more closely, obviously dried skin and not paper—and again Gertrude began to read. Gerry frowned, trying to guess who the person whose final moments were being described might have been. Tim suddenly sucked in a sharp breath and his arm tightened around Gerry. Gerry was about to look up at him, to ask what was wrong, when Gertrude—evidently—reached the bottom of the page and uttered five words that stole the air from his lungs.

“And so Eric Delano ended.”

Gerry’s hand tightened around the recorder without conscious thought, and he drew it closer to him, almost like he wanted to hear it better. He couldn’t help the small, pained sound that emanated from the back of his throat as a voice at once strange and heartbreakingly familiar spoke, in the strained, echoing way he had always heard his mother’s ghosts speak in. “Gertrude? I—wha—what am I doing here?”

That they’d known each other was obvious. That Eric Delano, or the memory of Eric Delano anyway, still held quite a bit of resentment towards Gertrude Robinson, for whatever reason, was equally obvious. He sounded equal parts bitter and resigned. Gerry was just aware enough of what was being said to dread the assertion that it was hard to get old in this business, you either die or you stay young and nestle closer to Tim over it, but most of him—almost all of him, really—was focusing on the ache of hearing his father’s voice again and knowing what it meant. He smiled a little through the hurt as his father asked about him, but when Gertrude said she hadn’t seen him…well, either she was lying, or this was earlier than he thought.

He suddenly came back to reality with a sharp jerk as a sentence caught up to him. “Wait, what did he—”

“Shh.” Tim’s eyes were fixed on the recorder in Gerry’s hand with the intensity of a dog watching the mouth of a badger’s den. They weren’t exactly glowing yellow, but they looked like they were about to start.

Some sudden instinct made Gerry shift his hand, just slightly, so it was covering the buttons and angle the tape recorder in such a way that Tim couldn’t grab it without hurting him. A moment later, the conversation having continued, Gertrude’s voice asked with slight impatience, “So. What did they not want me to know?”

His father’s response was simple and matter of fact and made Gerry’s heart start racing. “I quit.”

Tim’s hand twitched, but Gerry tightened his grip on his fingers and brought the recorder close to his chest, almost protectively. Gertrude pushed his father for an explanation; he—there was no other word for it—coquetted for a bit before finally agreeing, under two conditions. Gerry’s very soul ached when his father asked for Gertrude to find him, to make sure he was all right after whatever his mother was about to do.

But when he demanded to be allowed to make a statement—that made it worse.

“Subject is Eric Delano, recorded twenty-first July, 2008, regarding…”

“What else? Me, Mary, and the Archives.”

Mary Keay had never spoken about her husband. Gerry had only been a little boy when his father had died, too young to really remember him, and certainly too young to know anything about the dynamic between his parents. Hearing his father describe it hurt. Not because it was so very awful, even though it was, but because…he almost seemed to embrace it. He’d never understood alloromantics to begin with, but the idea of choosing to be with a woman he knew was a murderer simply because she was more honest about it than the known murderer he worked for, or because of some nebulous notion of love, was honestly the most unbelievable part of the statement. The rest of it was pretty much par for the course, for this sort of thing. It being his father made it worse, for Gerry personally, but in general, it was about standard.

His father didn’t seem relieved by his statement, and Gertrude, true to form, only seemed mildly sympathetic, simply reminding him that they’d had a deal and asking him again how he’d quit. He drew it out a bit, evidently teasing her one last time, then finally gave in and gave her the answer.

And he was right. It was simple.

“I left to avoid dragging my family—my son into this life, to try and look after him. But Mary decided that a newly blinded husband was simply too much of a burden.”

The tape finally ended, and shut off with a click, and there was silence in the room, except for harsh, ragged breathing that sounded like someone was losing a struggle not to cry. Then there was a faint whining sound, and something cold and wet nudged Gerry’s cheek before a rough tongue dragged across it, and he realized the one crying was him.

“Fuck,” he said hoarsely.

“I’m sorry, babe. I’m so sorry.” Tim took a deep, shuddering breath and pulled Gerry onto his lap. “That…that was…that was a lot for me. I can’t imagine how it must have been for you.”

“I always wondered…” Gerry let the tape recorder fall from his hand and reached out, tentatively, to pet Rowlf, who had crawled into the middle of their cuddle pile and was trying his level best to be comforting. Between the dog and the partner, it did at least help him feel safe and cared for, but the ache of loss was still strong. “I had always assumed she put him in the Book, but by the time I got hold of it he wasn’t in it anymore. I guess if she tore it out and gave it to Gertrude…fuck, July of 2008. That wasn’t long before Mum tried her ritual.”

“Took Gertrude long enough to find you.” Tim’s voice was a bit bitter. “Jesus. No wonder I didn’t want to listen to that tape.”

“I’m sorry. I should have—I should have noticed you were avoiding it, but…” Gerry sighed. “But I was drawn to it.”

“Not surprised. Your dad was on it, that’s a big deal. Of course you were going to be drawn to it. Explains why you’ve been wanting to dig into the box all day, too, it’s probably been calling to you since you brought it home.” Tim rested his chin on the top of Gerry’s head. “I, on the other hand, belong to the Eye. Naturally it’s going to try and shoo me away from knowing how to get away from it. Probably why Gertrude sounded so reluctant to read the page, too. The Eye knew, even if she didn’t.”

“Jesus.”

They sat in silence for several more moments before Gerry managed to take a deep breath. “I messed up your piles. I’m sorry. Let me help you fix them and…and then what?”

“And then?” Tim, too, took a deep breath and eased his grip on Gerry, who slid awkwardly to the floor and glanced at the palm of his hand. The buttons of the recorder had left an imprint in the skin that he wondered if it would turn into a bruise. “And then we have dinner, and get a good night’s sleep, or at least as good a night’s sleep as we’re going to get tonight. But we need to get some rest. Because tomorrow, we’re going to need to go back to the storage unit and see what else is there besides a tape telling me not to trust Jon.”

“Not that I disagree with you, but why?”

“Because I think Gertrude was planning to quit after all,” Tim said quietly. “Maybe she wanted to leave before she was killed stopping a ritual, or before she was too old and frail to be truly effective, I dunno, but I think the answers are somewhere in the storage unit. And I think she left us the solutions to stop all of them before I quit myself, because I really don’t think she expected I would want to stay on for the rest of my life, especially if I can’t trust the new Archivist.”

“And are you going to quit?” Gerry asked, equally quietly.

Tim didn’t answer. He simply sat up straight again, crossed his legs under himself, and began sorting out his piles once more. Gerry decided to take a hint from him and get back to sorting also, rather than press the question.

Anyway, he didn’t need Tim to say it out loud. His silence was answer enough.