And If Thou Wilt, Forget

Gerry was going to kick himself for how long it took him to ask the question—or either of them, really. After all, they’d both been working on this project for three years now, separately and together. They’d researched, asked questions, tracked trends, and unearthed secrets. They’d gone back and forth across the long history of the Stranger, the Circus of the Other, the Fears themselves. Tim could have taught an entire term’s worth of lectures on the work of Robert Smirke alone, probably an entire degree program if he categorized it properly and had the credentials. They probably had the clearest possible idea of what the Unknowing was likely to look like that anyone living who hadn’t been part of an attempt in the past or involved in planning the current one could be.

But they didn’t know where. Or when, for that matter, other than probably soon, but they didn’t have the faintest idea of where a location would be to even begin staking it out. They weren’t sure if they would choose a location before it was absolutely time to start or if they would wait until the last possible moment, or if they had a location but weren’t moving in yet, or if they were using the ultimate site of the ritual as a staging area, but they needed to figure out which of those was most likely so they could begin formulating a plan. And the statements they’d followed were so…scattered, really, that they couldn’t easily pick out a specific place where the Stranger was focusing its activity. Especially since there weren’t so many that were from within the last three years, which, as Tim pointed out, might have meant they weren’t letting people live with the Unknowing being so close or might have meant they were just turning them to their cause and telling them to keep away from the nosy bastards in London who might spoil all their fun. Either way, it was frustrating and unhelpful and possibly keeping them from finishing their plans.

“I just don’t even know where to start looking,” Tim said in a fit of frustration. He’d run his hands through his hair enough that it was practically standing on end, and he was staring at their cork board covered in index cards and string. They didn’t even know if they’d strung it the right way.

Gerry stared at the board and blew out a sigh of exasperation. “God. How the hell did Gertrude even work out where the other ones were going to be?” he murmured.

Suddenly, he froze as the question sank into his brain. He realized, with a shock, that in all the time he’d been working with her, he’d never actually asked her to explain her reasoning, just done what she’d told him and trusted she was right. He turned to look at Tim. “Wait. How did she work that out?”

Tim, too, froze for a moment, then turned to look at Gerry, his eyes wide. “You know, I never asked? I just assumed she Knew. Maybe that it became obvious the more research she did, or that she had some sort of firsthand evidence, but…” He trailed off, and his eyes went vacant for a moment before his brow furrowed. “Hang on.”

“She told you something you’re just now connecting the dots on,” Gerry guessed.

“No. Well, yes, but…” Tim went over to where he’d left his bag, rummaged around inside it for a moment, and came up with the folio Gertrude had given him before leaving London for the last time, now straining at the zipper with everything he’d added to it. “Last place she told us to go was the Faroe Islands. To wait for the onset of the Extinguished Sun, remember?”

“Yeah. ‘Watch and observe,’ she said. You mentioned the totality of the eclipse would be visible from there.” Gerry remembered something else. “And when we went to investigate the Hither Green Dissenters’ Chapel, you said Gertrude reckoned the ritual was going to happen in stages. How did you know that, by the way?”

“I don’t know,” Tim confessed. “In retrospect, the Eye probably just gave me that information, but back then I wasn’t aware of how much I was getting from it. My point is, though, it makes logical sense that they’d have been at Ny-Ålesund, but why Hither Green? London’s not exactly dark, and I can think of at least five places in the UK alone that are certified by the International Dark Sky Society. You couldn’t even see the totality of the eclipse from here, which means there’s not an obvious reason it would have been part of the ritual. She must have worked out the chain of it somehow.”

Gerry watched Tim page through the folio. “While we were gone, though. You don’t have those notes, right?”

Tim shook his head. “No, but there’s this.” He finally reached a page towards the back, a bit battered as if it had been turned to a few times, covered in Gertrude’s handwriting. “I’ve been ignoring this section because most of it is gibberish…or so I thought. But now I have an idea.”

Gerry looked over Tim’s shoulder to get a better look. It was the first time he’d actually looked, really looked, at the folio rather than having Tim tell him what it said, and he did a double take. The page was covered—mostly—in numbers, with a scattering of letters throughout. “Tim—are all her notes in that damned cipher of hers?”

“Most of them, yeah,” Tim said absently, running his finger along one of the lines.

“Then for fuck’s sake, why are you so worried about it falling into someone else’s hands?”

“Any code written can be broken, Delano. There’s no such thing as a completely unsolvable cipher. Even this one. And I don’t trust Jonah not to just…Know what it says, if the Ceaseless Watcher wants him to.” Tim glanced at him. “I broke it in an hour, and I’m not even that much of an expert.”

“Yeah, but you’re the smartest human being this side of the International Date Line.”

“Funniest and hottest, too.” Tim flashed Gerry a charming, cheeky grin, then grew serious. “It’s more that I can’t risk losing it. You understand.”

“Yeah, I do,” Gerry conceded. “So. Tell me your idea about the gibberish.”

“My idea is that it isn’t gibberish at all. I thought it was because I used the Eye as the key, and this line was the only one that translated into actual words.” Tim tapped a string of letters and numbers. “Where I went wrong, though, is that the rest of this isn’t about the Eye. See the tick marks? I think this is her summary of all the rituals—what they’re called, what they look like, when they took place, and what she’s done to disrupt them.”

Gerry got it. “That’s why this one is so short. Because the Eye’s ritual hasn’t happened yet?”

“Right. It just says the ritual is called the Watcher’s Crown and hasn’t been attempted since Gertrude’s been Archivist.” Tim pursed his lips and looked at the others. “If I can work out which of the Fourteen she’s talking about in each section, I can translate it. Might take me a while, though.”

Gerry pursed his lips and looked around the room. In the two weeks since they had set up shop there, they had moved a few things down to both help—in theory—their work and make it more comfortable. There were a couple of floor cushions, a better light and extra batteries, and a couple boxes full of papers and other things they’d picked up in their travels and investigations. Only the precious folio, the one thing that truly tied it all together, came out with them. It wasn’t meant for long term use, not really, but it was as good a place as any to get a bit done.

“Well,” he said finally. “You get working on that, then. I’ll nip out and grab us something to eat. You’ll be hungry before long.”

Tim kissed his cheek. “Thanks, Ger.”

Tim was way better at navigating the damned tunnels than Gerry was, especially since they couldn’t risk him going up into the Archives, so he got turned around a few times before he finally managed to find some stairs going up and exited. Once he had, he discovered he’d found an entirely new way into the tunnels, just outside the Kensington Street Tube station, which was either extremely helpful or maddeningly frustrating. Certainly it was going to make getting back complicated.

There was a falafel place relatively nearby that Tim had mentioned liking, so Gerry stopped in and waited in, he couldn’t help but feel, an unnecessarily long line—although he could understand why when he smelled what was coming out of the fryers. Food in hand, he made his way back to the Kensington Street entrance, loitered until he was sure he was unobserved, and ducked in. Getting back was by no means intuitive, and he just hoped the food would still be good by the time he finally figured out which of the twelve lefthand corridors would connect with the hallway to the correct stairs.

“Fear not, fair maiden, for the mighty hunter has returned with glorious bounty,” he announced as he finally found the right door and burst in dramatically, holding himself with flair and confidence so Tim hopefully wouldn’t call him out on the fact that he had made the exact same joke to seventeen different empty rooms.

Tim didn’t look up, and didn’t seem to respond. He was sitting more or less where Gerry had left him, his back pressed against the wall of the room and the folio open across his knees. One hand was supporting it, the other slack across his abdomen, and he was staring vacantly at the wall opposite him—which was not the one with the red thread board on it, but a perfectly blank, featureless grey stone wall.

“Tim?” Gerry was suddenly very nervous. “Babe? Are you okay?”

“Hey, Ger.” Tim’s voice was quiet and more than half mechanical, and he didn’t look up at him.

Gerry carefully crossed the floor and sat down next to him. At least he was awake and breathing and responsive, more or less, so he didn’t have to call emergency services. “Did you get any of the notes translated?”

“Oh, yeah, no issues with that at all.” Tim turned his head to face Gerry, and the worry and, yes, fear in his eyes was unmistakable. “That’s the problem. I didn’t even have to think about it. It just…translated itself automatically in my mind.”

“That’s good, right?” Gerry said uncertainly. “It means you’re familiar enough with Gertrude’s code that you can just translate it without having to look it up.”

“Before I had decided which Fear I was going to use as the key.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.” Tim sighed and banged his head lightly on the wall behind him. “Saves time, I guess, but I really don’t want to get in the habit of letting that happen. Or try to lean into it. I’m afraid of what will happen if I do. Still, we are on a deadline and I don’t have time to look a gift horse in the mouth, so if the Eye is going to just give us the key to solving the puzzle, I’m going to run with it.”

Gerry held up the bag from Fadlan’s Falafel. “Want something to eat first?”

“You go ahead. I’ll talk while you eat.”

“The hell you will. Either we both eat, or we both talk and then we eat. But either way, you eat.”

Tim smiled faintly. “Okay. Let’s get this over with, then.” He turned back to the first page. “In the first place, she’s been keeping this list for…ages. Since she realized every Fear had one. From the looks of it, though, it was before she really got into stopping them. She made lots of notes at different times, probably as she had concrete answers rather than just idle guesses and speculation. The first one she stopped she calls the Scorched Earth—that was the Desolation’s, obviously—and if I’m right about it, she’d already disrupted it before she started taking the list. They’d created a ‘messiah,’ someone who was meant to usher in the Desolation…”

“Created?” Gerry repeated. “Ugh. I can’t imagine how much that would suck, knowing you were being specifically crafted and raised to destroy the world.”

“Like the world’s worst inversion of a savior baby.”

“A what?”

“A kid conceived for spare parts, basically. Parents who have a child that’s been diagnosed with a chronic illness like leukemia that go out and deliberately conceive, or genetically create, a baby that’s the perfect donor.” Tim shrugged at Gerry’s incredulous look. “It happens, and it sucks, especially when it doesn’t work. You’re right, though, this would be worse. Anyway, according to Gertrude, she…bound them together somehow, a ritual to—oh, God, that circle of trees up in Scotland. The man who accidentally broke a bottle and lost everything he loved to fire and…there was a picture of Gertrude in it, that was her ritual. Fuck.” He gnawed on his lip for a moment.

Gerry winced, remembering the statement Tim had told him about. “Is that what…do we still have to worry about the Desolation, then?”

Tim came back to himself and shook his head. “No. Agnes Montague died in 2006. She apparently committed suicide…it’s a long story, but basically, that fizzled out. I don’t think they can get another ritual going any time soon.”

“Thank goodness for that. Does she say how she figured it out?”

“Rumors of a death cult and a messiah, that’s all. She admits in her notes that she didn’t realize they weren’t unique at the time.” Tim turned the page. “She took care of that back in the…seventies? Fairly early in her time as Archivist, anyway. She didn’t really date these, but she mentions your dad in one of her early notes. Apparently one of the last cases he completed before he quit was what sparked the realization that there were multiple Fears. She dedicated a page to each one. Like I said, this Watcher’s Crown thing she doesn’t have any information on…not surprising, she told me once that an Eye cannot See inside itself, so she was probably talking about that. And the one for the End just says ‘none’.”

Gerry blinked, then nodded slowly. “Makes sense. It would die out if it came through to a world already dead, wouldn’t it? Nothing to fear, so nothing to feed it.”

Tim nodded. “That’s her logic. The others, though…it looks like out of the fourteen, she took out a total of five before I started working with her.”

“That…doesn’t seem like a lot, given what I know of Gertrude. I mean, she was the Archivist for fifty years. Surely…” Gerry gestured vaguely around them.

“Weirdly, they’ve all largely been stacked in the last ten years or so. Mostly. Or at least the ones she’s attempted to stop have been.” Tim tapped the end of his pen against the folio. “I think they can be pretty broadly divided into three categories. The first is rituals she had already disrupted. The second is rituals she knew were coming up but wasn’t sure when at the time she gave me this, and the third is rituals she had no clue about. I’m hoping the answer to where the Unknowing will be, or at least the path to finding it, is somewhere in that first category. Maybe some in the second.”

“Tell me which ones we aren’t worrying about first. The End, the Eye…”

“The Web, and the Corruption. She’s not sure there is a Web ritual but admits it would be difficult to suss that out, since it’s so…tangled. The Corruption I just don’t think she was all that bothered about, honestly. She seems pretty dismissive of it. Although I think when she started hearing about Jane Prentiss she started taking a bit more notice, but I don’t think she thought it was ready yet. Honestly, it probably wasn’t. Jane Prentiss just got impatient.”

“So which ones did she disrupt for sure? Besides the Desolation.”

“The Lonely, sometime in 2007 from the looks of it. She calls it the Silence, and it took place right here in London. Or would have.” Tim snorted. “She’s pretty contemptuous of it, actually, and it seems like she only twigged onto it because she already had her eye on Peter Lukas and took notice when he stepped out of his usual groove. He was building a block of flats in the center of London designed to make everyone isolated and confused by the constant knowledge that there should be other people there, but they couldn’t find them or get to them, and offering them incredibly cheap. Apparently Gertrude disrupted it by tipping off the papers.”

“Simple, but effective,” Gerry conceded. “I can’t imagine the Lonely would be able to stand that much attention. Almost as bad for it as it would be for the Stranger. What was next?”

“She took out two in 2008, one right after the other. The Last Feast—that’s the Flesh, in case you hadn’t guessed—was in Istanbul, in October. It took her ten years to track it down, watching them stockpiling meat, and then she just…tracked where they were taking it. The other was the Sunken Sky, the Buried’s ritual, and that was out in Washington in November of the same year. She…” Tim winced. “You remember me telling you about the Daedalus? That space station project that Maxwell Raynor, Simon Fairchild, and Peter Lukas all helped fund?”

“Yeah. You said you were pretty sure they were each getting feelers out for their rituals with that,” Gerry said slowly. “Gertrude argued with you about Peter Lukas.”

“Yeah, for him I think it was a distraction, but I think the other two were doing prep work out there. I don’t think we have to worry about Simon Fairchild’s ritual until technology advances a bit more, but Raynor was probably prepping something for the Extinguished Sun.” Tim pursed his lips. “The point is, though, the astronaut Fairchild picked, Jan Kilbride, he was touched by the Vast. And he’d come to give his statement, so Gertrude knew where to find him. She, uh…she killed him, cut him apart, and dropped him in the middle of the pit that would have been the focus of the Buried’s emergence. The two things touching one another just…canceled each other out.”

Gerry flinched. “Jesus fucking Christ. Even for Gertrude, that’s…brutal.”

“Yeah, well, hold on to your hat. It gets worse,” Tim warned. “I’m not sure if she forgot this was in here when she gave it to me or maybe wanted me to know, either as a warning or a penance, but the last one…it’s called the Great Twisting. It was the Spiral’s ritual, and it took place in Russia…sort of. The alleged island where it was taking place didn’t actually exist. But Gertrude apparently knew how to get there. And more importantly, she had a map.”

“To the Island?”

“To the core of the Spiral, Ger. She had a map of the Distortion’s corridors, to where it was waiting.”

A chill ran down Gerry’s spine. “I…I can’t imagine her being so reckless as to go into it. Not if she didn’t have an exit strategy, and it sure as hell wouldn’t let her leave, even with a map.”

Tim shook his head. “Oh, no. No, she didn’t go in there herself. See, she didn’t go to Russia alone. She took one of her assistants—a man named Michael Shelley. She gave him the map, told him to walk through the door.” He swallowed hard and looked up at Gerry. He’d expected to see fear, maybe bitterness, but instead he saw…guilt. “But she didn’t tell him what was behind it?”

“What?” Gerry gaped at Tim. “She…what?”

Tim turned the page and ran his finger over a string of the meaningless—to Gerry, anyway—numbers. “She’d kept him ignorant. The whole time he worked there. It was one of her other assistants’ idea—a woman named Emma Harvey—and she says here she went along with it because she thought it would be useful to have someone who didn’t know enough to stay away. And she fed him to the Spiral, and she didn’t hesitate.” He took a deep breath. “It worked, obviously, and…you know, if he’d known, he’d probably have done it anyway, he was devoted to her. But she didn’t give him that choice, just…pushed him into a situation he knew nothing about and stood back to avoid getting the damage on her. Stop me if this sounds familiar.”

“It sounds like what Jonah is doing,” Gerry said, firmly. He reached over and squeezed Tim’s arm. “You’re trying to keep them away from this stuff until they know more. Not your fault it isn’t working, or that they’re stubborn.”

“I shouldn’t still be keeping the facts from them. I should…” Tim shook his head. “Not important right now, I guess. Point is, it looks like all of these rituals, she figured out what was going on with them by tracking known…affiliates? Associates? People who were involved. Avatars, victims, that sort of thing. Her friend Adelard Dekker got her more than a few leads. So…we’ve just got to find the people involved in the Unknowing, I guess. Or associated with the Stranger. God, I wish I’d listened to Melanie when she asked about a database, it probably would help right now.”

Gerry hummed. “So how’d she work out the Dark’s ritual? And how did she disrupt the Flesh’s, by the way? You didn’t mention that.”

“Dynamite. She blew up the abandoned old church they were doing the ritual in and killed almost everyone involved…there’s an addendum at the end that there were apparently two survivors, but neither of them noticed her. One must’ve come to give a statement.” Tim blew a chunk of hair off his forehead. “So it looks like her options are ‘use another agent of a contrasting Fear to interrupt it’ or ‘blow it to smithereens.’”

“Makes sense…I think. It Knows You would definitely stand against It Is Lies, not to mention the Forsaken. And you could probably disrupt the Unknowing that way, but…”

“But I’m not putting Jon or Martin in that kind of danger, so it would have to be me,” Tim reminded him. “And I don’t think my kind of Knowing would do any good. So I think it’ll have to be the plastic explosives there.”

Gerry pursed his lips for a moment. “You know what I want to know? What did she use against the Dark? She didn’t blow it up, or we’d have heard about some kind of explosion in London—and we wouldn’t have been able to investigate the Hither Green Dissenters Chapel if she had. So it has to have been one of the other Fourteen, right? What stands against the Dark?”

Tim gave a short bark of laughter. “The Desolation.”

“True,” Gerry admitted. “Probably the Eye as well, but…well, we were gone, she didn’t have anyone to sacrifice. Maybe she would have used you if it had come down to it in the Faroe Islands, but—”

“No. Only in an extreme emergency, but I think if it had gotten that far she’d have blown it up.” Tim’s eyes went unfocused as he stared at the wall again. “But it was Hither Green that was the London site. Not of the final ritual. More of a…preparation for it, I think? It…” He trailed off, then suddenly sat up straighter. “Wait. But she was never there.”

“What?”

“Remember? I told you when I visited. I could feel the…the shape of the ritual, what had been done there. I knew something had happened. Sacrifices. Something to feed the final ritual at Ny-Ålesund. But there was no sense Gertrude had been there. It’s because she wasn’t, Ger. She didn’t show up. She didn’t even bother trying to disrupt it.”

“But it didn’t happen,” Gerry reminded him. “Did someone else?”

“I can’t imagine who. Gertrude—and the two of us—were the only ones that really bothered, or seemed to notice. And it’s a lot of research for someone not Eye-aligned. Most of the other Fourteen wouldn’t bother, probably.” Tim frowned. “Maybe she interrupted it somewhere else, but…no, no, that doesn’t make sense, either. She died in London. Even if Elias lied about what day he found the bloodstain on her desk—and while the tape she left us was dated the same day she summoned us back initially, the letter w—”

He froze. His eyes suddenly went so wide Gerry could practically see the whites glowing all the way around in the low light. All the color drained out of his handsome face, and Gerry wasn’t even entirely sure he was breathing.

“Tim? Tim, what’s wrong?” Gerry grabbed Tim’s wrist again, feeling awkwardly for a pulse.

“The letter,” Tim whispered. He turned to look at Gerry, and his expression was one of mingled awe and terror. “Gerry, the letter.”

“The one she left with the C4? What’s that got to do with—” Gerry began, and then stopped. He felt as though something cold and wet was trickling down his spine, leaving him with nothing but shock and dread. Most of the letter Gertrude had left them—left Tim—had been intense, a lot of information to pack into their brains, but there was a paragraph Gerry had more or less dismissed as something they already knew. It wasn’t until this exact moment that the full implication of that line hit him.

“Motherfucker,” he whispered.

“She said she thought we would work it out. She said she thought we’d do it faster than she did.” Tim stared around them at the notes they’d made, at all the theories and effort they’d put into it. “’If he suspects what I do, he knows enough to have one that will work.’”

He looked back at Gerry. “She didn’t have to disrupt the Extinguished Sun.”

Gerry nodded once, and spoke the words that had occurred to both of them at the same time that Tim did. “It failed on its own.”