And If Thou Wilt, Forget

“So I know it’s not the most important part of your conversation with Anansi’s daughter, but I’m curious.” Gerry looked up from the papers he was studying. “What do you think the other two objects from the Night Market were?”

Tim pursed his lips. Over the course of the last forty-six hours, he and Gerry had had serious conversations about Tim’s visit from Annabelle Cane—and what it might have meant that a Lukas had actually come into the Archives and toyed with someone who’d already been tormented by the Web—as well as what their next move was going to be. They honestly probably had talked about all the important aspects of it, at least so far. But he had to admit, Gerry’s question was one he’d been puzzling over, too.

“The mask…I’m pretty sure that was the Spiral,” he said finally. “Just a hunch, but…I mean, masks can be the Stranger for sure, but there’s a poem I read years ago. The first couple of lines always stuck with me—We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes…” He shrugged. “Isn’t that another name for the Spiral? It Is Lies?”

“Good point,” Gerry allowed. “What about the mirror?”

“Mm, not sure. I wouldn’t really be able to hazard a guess without looking at it, but—” Tim broke off and frowned, looking over his shoulder.

Gerry tensed. “What?”

Tim put a hand on the back of the sofa. “Not sure, but I think we’re about to—”

Knock, knock, knock.

“—have company,” he finished. He got to his feet. “Rowlf, stay.”

Rowlf lowered his head onto his paws and wagged his tail. Gerry glanced at Tim, then gathered their papers and headed towards the back room. Tim nodded, even though Gerry couldn’t see him, then crossed over to the door and opened it.

“Tim.” Jon stood on the threshold of the flat, looking slightly uncertain and nervous, but deadly serious.

“Jon.” Tim leaned in the doorway and studied him.

He definitely looked better than the last time Tim had seen him in person. Some of the shadows and terror—not all, but some—had receded from his eyes, and he looked as though he’d had at least one good night’s sleep. His hair was clean, combed, and tucked behind his ears, and while the trousers and shoes he wore had almost certainly been purchased with him in mind, the maroon jumper engulfed him so thoroughly that it had to be Martin’s. If Tim was a betting man, he’d wager a month’s salary that a big part of why Jon wasn’t currently half crazed with terror and hunger was because of Martin.

“May I come in?” Jon asked. “I think we need to talk.”

Tim stepped back from the door and gestured for him to enter. “Does Martin know you’re here?”

A fleeting smile, there and gone in a second, tugged at Jon’s mouth. “Yes. He’s, ah, he’s hanging back at the station. He wasn’t…exactly happy about letting me go on my own, but I told him I wanted to talk to you privately first.”

“Makes sense,” Tim said cautiously. He wasn’t exactly happy about this, either—there was a risk of someone figuring out Martin was the key to getting at Jon and going after him—but he could hardly say so. And besides, he and Jon did probably need to talk alone.

As the thought crossed his mind, Gerry came out of the back and gave Jon a quick nod, then turned to Tim. “How about His Lordship and I trot down to the station and get Martin, then the three of us go pick up dinner? There’s that Romanian place just opened up. You like Romanian?”

Jon stared at Gerry, eyes wide, and Tim didn’t think it was because he’d just uncovered his secret favorite dish. “Wait, you’re—Gerard? Gerard Keay?”

“I go by Delano these days,” Gerry corrected him. “And my friends call me Gerry. Good to finally meet you properly.” He kissed Tim’s cheek. “I’ll let you two have a chance to talk. Rowlf! Here, boy! Walk!”

Rowlf barked happily, sprang to his feet, and bounded towards them, leaping on Tim’s knees and then Jon’s, nearly knocking him to the ground. Gerry laughed, managed to clip the lead on his collar, and got him out the door, leaving Tim and Jon in silence.

Jon finally broke it. “I—I didn’t realize you knew Gerard Keay. Gerry.”

He somehow sounded surprised and wary and…hurt all in one, and, honestly, that was fair. Gerry’s name had come up in a statement for the first time less than three months into Jon’s tenure in the Archives, and Tim hadn’t even batted an eyelash, let alone revealed that he shared a bed, a dog, and a healthy dose of trauma with the man.

“Gertrude told us not to trust anyone,” he admitted.

Jon swallowed hard, pressed his lips together, and nodded—not really in agreement, Tim thought, just in understanding. He wasn’t saying Tim was right not to have told him, just that he got why he hadn’t. “You know, now that I’m here and…I’m not actually sure where to start.”

“Maybe by sitting down,” Tim suggested. “You want some tea? I’m not as good at it as Martin, but I can make a decent cup of tea. Or there’s orange juice, I think.”

“Ah—tea’s fine. Thank you, Tim.” Jon followed Tim into the kitchen and took a seat at the table.

Tim set the kettle to boil, then took the seat opposite him. “We’ve got a bit before that’s ready. Do you want to go first, or shall I?”

Jon hesitated. “I’d…like to know how you found me. Martin said the last time he saw me was a bit over a week ago, so I was…was I really only there for a week? It felt so much longer.”

“Only a week,” Tim confirmed. “Gerry was actually the one who pinpointed the location, but honestly, we wouldn’t have found you so quickly if we hadn’t had a head start. He’d had a brainwave about where the most likely sort of place for the Unknowing and started getting ideas. That’s why I called you—well, it’s one of the reasons I called you the night you got kidnapped.”

“I wondered if you knew about that,” Jon murmured. “I, I would have thought you did, but…Leitner seemed to think Gertrude wouldn’t have told you. Not that he knew your name. He just kept saying she’d promised to keep him out of sight of ‘her assistant’ and that she’d…sent you to America to get you out of the way while she did the real work.”

Tim could hear the implied question in Jon’s words. “She kept us separate, but I saw him once or twice in passing. Didn’t ever ask her about him, and I really didn’t know who he was until—Elias dropped that on us.” He shrugged. “As to the trip to America, no. I took over the trip for her. She’d actually left first—Gerry went with her to help out and I stayed here to keep track of things.”

“Why the switch? I mean, I suppose it made sense to have the Archivist at the Institute, but I—no offense, Tim, but I’m not sure why she thought you would do better than she did.”

“No offense taken. And really, I think it was a matter of convenience. You remember when we were looking into that hospital incident, when Sasha dug up that Gerard Keay had been admitted to a hospital in Chicago?”

“Yes, I—a brain tumor. We couldn’t find any records of his discharge, but…” Jon trailed off. “She had you pick up her work while she waited for him?”

Tim smiled. “Other way around. Kind of. She called me and told me to come out immediately because she’d listed me as his domestic partner on the paperwork, probably to throw off suspicion. Once he’d come safely out of surgery, she gave me a copy of her notes and said for us to head to Pittsburgh once he was well enough to travel again, and from there to use our best judgment. That was around the middle of November…we spent the next four months crossing the United States looking for answers, then came back to Europe to look for more. We were on our way to Turkey when she called us back.”

Jon blinked. “Why did she call you back?”

“The Extinguished Sun. The Dark’s ritual. It was—you know about the Fourteen, right?”

“The…what?”

“The Fourteen. The Fears.” Tim stared at Jon. “Please tell me you just didn’t know that was what we call them.”

“I—no. No, I didn’t know that was what they were called, but…” Jon looked incredibly shaken. “Leitner mentioned…fear beings. He named a couple, and Elias mentioned a couple more, but…fourteen?”

The kettle whistled; Tim snapped off the stove and busied himself for a moment preparing the tea. He set Jon’s cup in front of him and sat opposite. “Right. Let’s start at the beginning. Which ones do you know about?”

Jon took a deep breath. “There’s the Stranger…that’s the one that had me. The one that’s preparing for the Unknowing. Michael—the thing that—i-it’s what the Distortion is calling itself, Leitner said, but he said it was an aspect of something he called the Spiral. I know there’s one that’s…that has to do with death. There’s the Lightless Flame—Jude Perry called it the Desolation. And then there’s…the Eye.”

He said that last word with a heavy dose of dread, and he hunched his shoulders as he said it. Tim nodded. “The Eye. The Beholding. The Ceaseless Watcher. It Knows You. It’s got a lot of names. And I’m guessing you’ve figured out it sort of controls the Institute.”

“Yes. And pretty much everyone I’ve spoken to since then has confirmed it,” Jon said bitterly. “Leitner. Jude Perry. Elias. Even Mike Crew seemed to know, but…”

“Mike Crew? Shit, I know that name…” Tim mused. “Oh, wait, he’s the one who turned that copy of The Boneturner’s Tale into the library, right? And he was a previous owner of Ex Altiora. When did you talk to him?”

“After I talked to Jude Perry. She said he was more likely to give me answers than she did, and…I think I offended him, so I didn’t get much out of him,” Jon admitted. “He told me to take his mercy and leave, and I was going to, but that’s when Daisy turned up.” He shivered and hunched into himself.

Tim tamped down the anger and forced himself to stay calm. Going rabid at the mere mention of Tonner’s name wouldn’t help, not now. “Based on what I know about him, which isn’t much, I’d guess Crew belongs to the Vast.”

“Belonged,” Jon murmured. “He’s dead. She killed him before—” He broke off and closed his eyes briefly, then looked up at Tim. “The Vast is…heights? Falling?”

“Open space. Big, empty places. Agoraphobia, you know? It’s sort of the opposite of the Buried, which is…exactly what it sounds like.” Tim counted off quickly. Stranger, Spiral, End, Desolation, Eye, Vast, Buried…“That’s the first half covered, I guess. The other seven are the Dark, the Flesh, the Slaughter, the Hunt, the Corruption, the Lonely, and the Web.”

Jon looked down at his hands, both the one mottled with healed burns and the one simply dotted with holes. “Which one was Jane Prentiss?”

“The Corruption, also known as the Filth, or the Creeping Rot. And by the way, I am sorry about that. I should have been able to keep her away.” Tim sighed. “Attacks on the Institute weren’t uncommon when Gertrude was here, apparently, although I was lucky enough not to ever see any. Then she goes and dies and I immediately drop the ball.”

“It’s not your fault,” Jon protested. "Good Lord, if anything, I think you’re the reason any of us survived as long as we did. Now that I know what I know…which, granted, isn’t much, but still…you, you were trying to keep us from getting too close to any of this. It’s why you kept trading statements with them, isn’t it?”

Surprised, Tim blurted out, “I didn’t think you noticed, frankly.”

“Truth be told, I didn’t,” Jon confessed. “Martin did. He…he told me the other day that you’d been trying to tell him something for a while now, but he’s been putting you off. He mentioned a few other things about you he’d noticed, and—I’ve, I’ve not been the best boss. Or the best Archivist, frankly. I should have noticed these things, but…”

“I was doing my level best to make sure you didn’t,” Tim pointed out. “And like I told you the other day when you tried to compel me, I’ve had more practice defending against things like you than you’ve had…being a thing like you. Especially at the beginning.”

“You said Gertrude Robinson told you not to trust anyone. Even me?”

“Even you. Not by name, mind you. She expected Sasha would be her successor if anything happened to her, but she allowed for the possibility.” Tim decided to just lay it all out. “She left me a note…well, a note and a tape. Said she was leaving a tape for ‘the new Archivist’ as well and that she’d put instructions on it for them—you—to play it for me, so if you didn’t then, whatever your reasoning might be, Gerry and I shouldn’t trust anyone but one another. I wasn’t supposed to clue you in all the way until I was absolutely sure you could be trusted. Same with any assistants who came down. Sasha might or might not have chosen to appoint anyone else—Gertrude claimed she told her she could do just fine with just me—but we weren’t sure about anyone else. I was supposed to evaluate carefully and be sure they could be trusted before I said anything, but, well, she trusted my judgment.”

Jon studied Tim for a moment. “I gather that wasn’t common.”

“Not from what I’ve heard,” Tim said simply. He wasn’t bragging or boasting, and he could see in Jon’s eyes that he knew that—it was a simple statement of fact. Gertrude Robinson hadn’t trusted many people. But she’d trusted him.

“Why didn’t you tell me how close you were to Gertrude?” Jon asked softly. “I wouldn’t have suspected you as much as I did of killing her.”

Tim let out a bark of laughter before he could stop himself. “Jon, I was positive you were the one who killed her. I figured you were just putting on an act to throw off suspicion.” He paused. “Actually, I owe you a serious apology for how hostile I was to you. I—I was hurting and scared and I took it out on you, and that wasn’t fair to anyone.”

“I forgive you,” Jon said immediately. “Honestly, I think in your position I’d likely have done the same. Well, I did, but…I-I didn’t have such good reasons as you did. You wanted to know who killed her because of her. I just was afraid I was going to be next.”

“I wouldn’t have let that happen.”

“That’s what Martin said. That you wouldn’t have, I mean.” Jon managed a small smile. “He seems prepared to give you a good deal of grace for that. Although he was quick to blame you for why he didn’t come find me after finding Leitner’s body.”

“I’ll happily take the blame for that,” Tim said seriously. “Tonner’s with the Hunt and she absolutely would have been tracking Martin. If he’d gone looking for you—and I don’t doubt he’d have found you eventually—he’d have led her right to you, and…” His gaze flicked to Jon’s throat, briefly.

Jon rubbed it reflexively, even though the cut had well healed by now. “No sense in making it easy for her, I suppose.”

“And Martin would never have forgiven himself.” Tim sipped at his rapidly cooling tea. “I knew you were safe, wherever you were. Certainly safer than you’d have been if we’d found you.”

“He did say you didn’t believe I’d killed Leitner. He, ah—he also mentioned you were planning to hide the body?” Jon raised an eyebrow at him.

Tim scoffed. “Like it would be the first illegal thing I’ve done for the Institute. Or the worst. But—well, I didn’t believe you’d murdered him, but I did assume you’d killed him in self defense, at least at first and I just wanted to keep everything under wraps long enough for us to find you and get an explanation before the cops assumed you sent us away for three days so we wouldn’t find the body ourselves. Too late, though. Martin was afraid you were in danger and that the police would catch the murderer more quickly.”

“He meant well,” Jon said defensively.

“I never said he didn’t.” Tim swallowed down on the urge to laugh. Two years ago Jon would have claimed a belief in the supernatural only insofar as he hoped it would kill Martin, and now he would fight for him to his last breath. “The point is that, even as much as I hated you then—and I still wasn’t completely convinced you hadn’t killed Gertrude to get the position or something—I needed to keep you safe. Well, I needed to keep the Archivist safe, and unfortunately for me, that meant you, too.”

“Regardless of the reason…thank you. And thank you for rescuing me—I should have said that first off. And thank you for taking me to Martin.” Jon’s face softened at that. “I didn’t realize how much I would need that…need him. I certainly slept better than I have in I don’t know how long.”

“I think he needed it, too,” Tim agreed. “You’re welcome. And for the record, when I called you last week, I was going to offer to let you stay here since I was pretty sure you were getting ready to move out of your friend’s flat, but I suspect you’ll be staying with Martin instead.”

“He’s offered, and…I don’t want to impose on him, but I’m also finding I don’t want to be alone right now,” Jon confessed. “Especially with the Unknowing coming up. I don’t particularly want him to be alone, either, just in case.”

“Fair. The Stranger wouldn’t hesitate to use him against you if they thought they could get away with it,” Tim said as gently as he could. Jon still flinched. “How much do you know about the Unknowing, by the way?”

“Very little. I know that it’s a ritual to bring the Stranger into the world, and that Nikola Orsinov wanted a gorilla skin that used to be at the Trophy Room to wear as a costume for it, but that she’s—she had decided to use mine instead.” Jon rubbed at his arms almost compulsively.

Tim, again, had to fight down his anger. “Not an option.”

“Well…I don’t think she can, since you got me out. But I just…I don’t know anything else.” Jon looked up at Tim. “I—I assume you know more. That you were helping Gertrude.”

“I’ve got a fair amount,” Tim agreed. “I don’t know the exact shape of it, of course, but I’ve got a pretty good idea of what it’s going to be like. I can tell you whatever it is you want to know about it.”

Jon hesitated. “I do have—I know this is likely not the most important question, but—”

“You’d be surprised how many puzzles we’ve unraveled because Gerry has asked what he fully believed to be the world’s dumbest, most useless question,” Tim said, earning a smile from Jon. “What’s your question?”

“Is there…Martin said that after Daisy interviewed you about Leitner, when she was leaving, you were snarling at her—not in what you were saying, but ‘like a dog,’ he put it. Was he exaggerating or—I, I thought you might have been doing that when you burst into Elias’s office.” Jon flapped a hand helplessly. “And she called you—”

“Farm dog. I remember.” Tim hesitated. “Martin’s not wrong. He asked me when I started doing that and I sort of brushed him off, but the truth is—I don’t know. I think it had been building for a while. Probably how the Ceaseless Watcher expresses itself through me.”

“By growling?”

“No, but…” Tim shrugged helplessly. “Like I keep telling everyone, protecting you is my job. Sometimes that comes out as me getting a sense that you’re in danger and knowing more or less where to find you—which is probably how I knew the number of the phone you were using. Sometimes it comes out as knowing when you’re spending too much time in your office or forgetting to eat. And when there’s a threat directly in front of me, especially to you or the Archives, it comes out as whatever it needs to in order to keep you safe.” He managed a smile. “And as anyone who’s ever owned a livestock guardian dog can tell you, they’re trained to attack as a last resort.”

Jon was silent for a moment. At last, he said softly, “The night after I turned back up at the Institute…when I was telling you about the dreams. I told you something like a dog knocked me aside and went for Daisy. I think—I think the Ceaseless Watcher was trying to tell me something.”

Tim licked his lips. Part of him wanted to let that go, but…no, they were being honest. There was only so much he could conceal, and even less that he should. “Yeah, that was me. You’ve been dreaming about the statements for a while, right? Watching them, watching the people in them beg for your help but…”

“But I can’t interfere.” Jon’s voice was low and troubled. “I can’t even speak to them, and I want to, but as long as I can see them, it’s like I’m frozen in place. And I—I know I won’t suffer their fates, I know they’re not for me, but I’m always so afraid…” He passed a trembling hand over his face, then looked up at Tim. “How did you know? Did Gertrude…?”

“Yes, but I didn’t know that until recently, and only because Gerry told me. I knew about yours first.” Tim reached across the table and touched Jon’s hand lightly. “I’ve been there, too. Watching you. Or, more accurately, watching after you. Their fates may not be for you, but that doesn’t mean that if what’s after them takes an interest in you instead they could hurt you. Tonner went for you that night because she saw me—they don’t usually see me, but she did—and I pushed you out of the way to get between you and her. I guess I woke you up.”

“I guess so.” Jon looked shaken. “I—this is rather a lot. I don’t know what I expected in coming over here, but…”

“Welcome to the rest of your life,” Tim sighed. “We can table this for tonight, if you like. I’m not sure how much longer we have before Martin and Gerry get back.”

“I think that’s wise. I—” Jon paused, then took a deep breath. “I’d like you to tell the others everything. Tomorrow. I, I think I trust them—Martin and Melanie, at least—and I think if we lay everything out and pool what we know, we might be able to figure out more. Elias claims that if he just gives me the answers it won’t work, but…”

“Elias is full of shit. Anyway, I’ve already done the legwork, so you don’t need to get anything from him.” Tim nodded. “I’m more than happy to give everyone a rundown, and we’ll see where we go from there. Tonight, you mind setting the table while I get Rowlf’s dinner ready? He’ll be hungry when he gets back.”

“Not at all.” Jon got to his feet. “Thank you again, Tim. For everything.”

Tim stood as well. He smiled, reached over, and gripped Jon’s hand in something approaching a warrior’s handclasp. “Welcome back, Hazel-rah.”