Sasha apparently has a particular New Year’s Eve tradition involving a karaoke club and far too much alcohol, and the Primes are understandably not enthusiastic about the whole concept, so in the end it’s just Jon and Martin and Tim who venture out to the celebrations. Martin manages to coax Charlie’s grandmother into allowing them to take him along, and they have a grand old time. Jon manages to actually get a decent picture at one point, and now his phone background is of Charlie perched on Martin’s shoulders, arms folded on top of his head, with Tim standing beside them, all three of them looking up at the sky with expressions of absolute delight and wonder. It makes him smile every time he looks at it.
Back in the Archives, they all buckle down to an individual project, in addition to their regular duties. Tim, of course, is still attempting to get a handle on his newfound ability to see the color of fears. It’s slow going, since Jon absolutely forbids him to practice in the Archives, or anywhere on Institute property, until he’s got a better handle on it; the sheer overwhelming presence of the Eye means he can’t look around without nearly passing out, so he finally agrees to hold off until he gets to a point where he can target it to a single person or object, or at least narrow down his field of vision. Jon Prime warns that that’s something that will only come with time, but Tim is determined. He at least makes some small progress.
Martin starts working on a cross-index of the statements they’ve studied—not just which ones relate, or seem to relate, to the same entities, but ones that have common names, locations, circumstances, or even dates. Honestly, it’s the sort of thing they should have been doing from the beginning; it’s just that Martin is the only one with any kind of library training, so he’s the only one who thought of it. And now that they know more about what’s going on, he has something to work with. Wisely, he saves it to a flash drive rather than on the Institute’s servers, so there’s no chance anyone outside the four of them or someone they approve to help out can use it.
Sasha focuses on the Institute, or more specifically on its Heads. While the four of them know that it’s actually been Jonah Magnus the entire time, or at least his eyes, she’s interested in the apparent successors—why they were chosen, how they were chosen, where they came from and what happened to them when Jonah Magnus was ready to move on, at least ostensibly. Jon cautions her to be careful, and she reassures him with a flurry of technical terms he loses track of halfway through, but there’s a crackle and pop of static that makes them both wince but leaves them with the Knowledge that she’s right. Her research is as secure as can be.
For his part, Jon digs into Gertrude.
He knows Jon Prime has some knowledge of her—of her travels, her past—but he wants to find out as much as he can on his own. Besides, he isn’t sure Jon Prime has the answers he’s looking for. Really, he’s not sure what answers he is looking for, but whatever it is, he’s going to do the research himself. It just feels like it’s cheating otherwise. So he tries to find out as much as he can about where she came from, how she came to the Institute, and what sort of things she might have been up to.
In doing his research, he comes across the startling information that Gertrude’s flat is still unlet. Apparently there were some legal complications due to the nature of her disappearance and death, and she was paid up for several months, so the agent simply never bothered to clean the place out. Something about this nags at him with a sense of wrongness, but—perhaps unwisely—he ignores it and keeps looking.
He tells his team that he plans to break into the flat. Tim and Martin both protest, and even he has to admit it’s not the world’s best idea, but he can’t think of any other way to gain access. Sasha rolls her eyes and tells him to give her twenty minutes.
Two hours later, he presents himself at the lending agent’s office as Gertrude Robinson’s grandson and asks, all innocence, what they’ve done with her things.
The agency is only too happy to let Jon clear the place out, even providing Jon with a couple of boxes in case he wants to take things with him. Jon’s not sure what he would want to take, but he accepts anyway. If nothing else, he can take it all and they can sort through it with the Primes’ help. The agent brings him up to Gertrude’s flat, lets him in, and tells him to just lock it behind him when he leaves, then wishes him luck and leaves him alone.
Jon gives the agent to the count of ten to get well away while he unwinds his scarf and unzips his jacket, then reaches into his inner pocket. Once upon a time it’s where he kept his cigarettes, but what he pulls out now is his new tape recorder. Not that he went out and bought one, of course, or that anyone on the team bought it—as far as he knows. They all came back from the holidays to find a neatly-wrapped package topped with a black-and-white striped bow on each of their desks; when they, with some trepidation, unwrapped them, they found separate and distinct tape recorders—a pretty clear sign, as Sasha says with what Jon considers unnecessary enthusiasm, that they’re all meant to be recording statements. And probably everything else they do. Since Elias doesn’t seem to know about them, they’re not using them for anything official, but Jon knows they’re all dictating their supplemental research onto them. He checks to make sure the tape is properly loaded, then thumbs the RECORD button.
“Right,” he says. “I’m standing in Gertrude Robinson’s flat. Former flat, I suppose I should say, but it hasn’t been relet and all her things are still here…such as they are. Thanks to Sasha, and some technical maneuvering I am not going to ask about on the grounds that she is an excellent and able assistant and I don’t want to have to visit her in prison, I was able to gain access by plausibly claiming to be her grandson. I’m here to look around and…hopefully get a better idea of her. So…let’s begin.”
He keeps up a running commentary as he searches the apartment. Gertrude’s life was an austere one; the kitchen contains nothing but a collection of teabags, a pot, a kettle, and a single mug. Jon goes ahead and packs it all into a box, especially the tea, which is Martin’s preferred variety. The bed is neatly made, as if she expected to be back soon—which, well, of course she must have—and she has no more than a dozen different outfits. Three suits—two skirt, one pant—and a red silk chiffon evening gown of a style popular in the 1970s hang in the closet, along with two pairs of sensible brogues and a pair of pointy-toed high heels; the drawers contain a few pullovers and a couple pairs of more casual slacks, beyond the usual assortment of undergarments.
The bookshelf draws his attention. It’s a single shelf, filled with books, but there are no others in the apartment. Quickly, he scans the spines, narrating a few of the titles into his recorder, before stopping and sighing.
“It’s…it seems to be mostly nonfiction,” he says. “Some fiction, but most of these appear to be books on history. I don’t have time to go through them all here, so I’m going to do the next best thing. The agent did tell me to pack up and take what I wanted and they’ll throw away the rest. There might be something useful in here. And if all else fails, we’ll have some new books to read, I suppose.”
His first box is relatively full, so he sets up a second box and begins layering the books in it, muttering to himself as he does so. “I have no idea if all of these will fit in this box or not, but we’ll see what we can do. For that matter, I don’t know if I’m even going to be able to pick it up myself. And if I have to carry more—”
The lightbulb goes out overhead with a faint, metallic pop.
Jon blinks the spangles away from his retinas and glances up with an exasperated sigh. It was late in the afternoon when he arrived here, and the sun has set by now, so with Gertrude’s unexpectedly thick, dark curtains drawn, there’s no light coming from outside. The ceiling light is too high for Jon to reach; he has a brief moment of wishing Martin was there, or Tim, before heaving himself to his feet with a sigh. He gives his eyes a second to adjust, then makes his way carefully towards the end table with its small china lamp. It’s not optimal, but it will at least give him enough light to see.
“You don’t want to do that,” a sing-song voice says from behind him.
Jon nearly leaps out of his skin. Footsteps sound behind him—sharp and crisp and ominous—and he turns around to make out a tall, slim shadow moving towards him.
“I mean,” the same voice continues, “you can if you really want to, but you’re not going to like it. Sometimes not being able to see is a good thing.”
“Wh-who are you?” Jon stammers out. He tries to tell himself that it’s simply one of Gertrude’s neighbors, that this is perfectly harmless, but he doesn’t believe it. The last eight months have knocked most of his capacity for deliberate self-delusion right out of him.
He can’t actually see the grin in the darkness, but he can hear it. “Well, my father named me Nikola, and then I killed him, so I thought I rather deserved to have his second name, too. Which makes me Nikola Orsinov. Pleased to meet you at last.”
Jon now wishes Tim or Martin were here for a completely different reason. He swallows hard. “Y-you, ah—you killed Gregor Orsinov?”
“Yep!” Nikola Orsinov says brightly. “He was really boring, and I’m a monster. What did you want me to do—not pull him to pieces? I did use all the bits.”
Jon can feel the bile rising in his throat and mingling with the terror, threatening to choke him. “How—how did you get in here?”
“I followed you, silly! You didn’t even lock the door.” There’s a slight creaking noise as the shadowy figure shakes its head. “Gertrude would be so disappointed in you. You let me into her house!”
“There’s nothing here,” Jon says. He fervently hopes that’s true. “N-nothing important…”
“Oh, I don’t believe that. And neither do you, or you wouldn’t be here! That nasty old Eye wouldn’t have told you to come if there wasn’t a reason.”
Jon wonders if it was actually the Eye’s idea that he come here, or if it was his own idea, or a conflation of the two. He also wonders if anyone will hear him if he screams, if he can make it past Orsinov to the door or if he’ll need to use the window, and if he’ll manage to survive if he passes out. Irrationally, on top of all of this, he finds himself trying to remember the name of that girl in his Intro to Drama class with the gift for fainting on cue without hurting herself. Slowly, he reaches for the lamp.
“Don’t turn that on,” Orsinov orders, somehow managing to sound sharp and intimidating while at the same time never losing the high, lilting, almost childish sweetness to her voice.
Jon freezes. The name Ellie Hall slams into the front of his brain and he desperately tries to clear it away. He refuses to let his last thoughts be ones of regret, refuses to wonder if he’d still be trapped in a dark flat with a manifestation of the fear of the unknown if he’d stayed on the theatre track, certainly refuses to waste any more brainpower on the stereotypical prima donna who’d been the reason he switched his degree path in the first place. Think, he tells himself. He needs to pull up something to give him strength, or at least the courage to face his doom.
His hand falls away from the lamp and hits his pocket; his fingers trace the outline of his phone through the fabric. He thinks of the picture on the background—of Martin and Tim with Charlie, watching the fireworks display. The people he cares about are waiting for him to come home. Whether they need him or not is immaterial. They’re waiting for him and he can’t let them down.
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail.
“Are you here to kill me?” he asks, and he manages to ask it without his voice shaking. Small victory, but he’ll take it.
“No!” Orsinov says, sounding absolutely aghast. Jon relaxes, marginally, until she adds after a moment’s thought, “Well, yes, but not now. That would spoil everything. It would be a shame for you to go to waste.”
Unbidden, Jon wonders how, exactly, she used all of Gregor Orsinov’s “bits” and what she plans to use his for. He really and truly does not want to think about it, but he can’t seem to stop. He decides to put the blame for that on the entity of fearful and forbidden knowledge looming over his shoulder. “Wh-why are you here then?”
“I’ve heard so many interesting things about you, Archivist. I decided it was finally time for us to have a good old chat,” Orsinov says. “Face to no face! Eye to…well.”
Face to no face. Okay. Jon is definitely not turning on the light now. “What have you heard?”
“Well!” Orsinov says with relish. “First my friends came to make a delivery for you, and they said you called on all sorts of nasty powers to send them away. That wasn’t very nice, Archivist. It’s rude to chase away your guests.” She gives a delighted little laugh—not a giggle, not like Michael’s, but unnerving in its own way. “And then it turns out we have a friend in common! Isn’t that nice? Only he’s very sneaky. He came to visit Daniel and Sarah, and they thought he was coming to join us in our dance, but then he was…unmasked. He ran away! So very rude.” She sighs. “But then, what do you expect from the Eye? No manners.”
Tim. Oh, God, she knows Tim was at the Trophy Room, of course she does. And if Breekon and Hope are her “friends”, then she knows about Martin and Sasha, too. Jon’s terror compounds. “Leave them alone.”
“Oh, I’m not interested in them. Maybe. Or maybe it’s all of you! But if you can do it by yourself, that would be fine, I’m sure.”
Jon takes a deep breath and squeezes his phone—for luck or comfort, he’s not sure which. “What do you want from me, then?”
“I want you to find that old skin for me,” Orsinov says cheerily.
“The sk—the gorilla skin?” It’s the only thing Jon can think of—the gorilla skin missing from the Trophy Room when Tim went to investigate.
“Mm-hmm! We thought nasty old Gertrude had destroyed it, but your friend came asking so many nosy questions, so now we think maybe she was just very good at hiding,” Orsinov told him.
“I’m sorry, you want me to find it for you?” Jon’s tongue seems to have become temporarily disconnected from his brain, because he cannot seriously be talking like this to something that has already made no bones about telling him it tore its creator to pieces.
“That would be lovely. And a lot nicer for you than our other ideas.”
The idea that Gertrude might have stolen a skin from the Trophy Room never occurred to Jon, but now that he thinks about it, it makes sense. He’s beginning to realize that she likely did read all of the statements, at least all the real ones; if he and his team can sense a true statement, surely she could, after forty years. She kept the Archives in disarray in hopes of slowing down Jonah’s plan, but he realizes she had to have read the statements to know they needed to be misfiled, and oh, God, why is he thinking about this now instead of getting out of this alive?
Because, a small voice in the back of his head says, if Gertrude stole the skin, it must be important to the Stranger.
“Wh-why—why do you want it?” Jon stammers out.
Orsinov’s hands clap together twice with a disturbingly hollow, plastic sound, and Jon can’t explain why that’s somehow more terrifying than his initial thought that she was an animated piece of taxidermy like Rawlings and Sarah Baldwin. In a voice of childish glee, she says, “I want to wear it when I dance the world new!”
Jon wonders if he can borrow some of Tim’s wit—what, you’re going to turn it into a dress or something?—but as the thought crosses his mind, another one meets it halfway and strikes him momentarily dumb with terror. The painting Martin Prime described all those months ago—the figure in the warehouse with the manic grin, the man tied to a chair. I thought you’d make a lovely frock.
Oh, God.
“But—but wh—” he begins, but gets no further. A shadowy arm shoots out of the darkness, faster than he can move, and seizes him around the throat in a powerful grip. It is, as he surmised from hearing the clapping, made of plastic—or at least something hard and unyielding—smooth, firm, and cold. He finds himself both wishing he kept his scarf on and glad he didn’t, as the plastic joints would probably pinch at Charlie’s inexpert and uneven stitches and unravel them.
That thought quickly takes second place to the fact that his feet are not touching the floor, followed by the fact that his flow of oxygen is very definitely being cut off.
“Question time is over, little Archivist,” Orsinov says, still in that same sing-song voice. “Find the skin. You have until…well, until I change my mind.”
She opens her hand, and Jon drops to the ground in a graceless, undignified heap. He gasps and sputters, struggling to force air back into his lungs, and looks up at the silhouette looming over him, equal parts terrified and angry.
“Shh,” she says, the sound far eerier than it has any right to be. “Save your energy for the dance.”
The plastic footsteps sound on the laminate again, and Nikola Orsinov is gone, leaving Jon alone in the darkened apartment.
He spends a few minutes greedily gulping down air. Tears stream down his cheeks and he’s not sure if it’s from the near-asphyxiation or from fear or maybe a little bit of both. Rubbing at his sore throat with one hand, he fishes out his phone with the other, activates it, and stares at the picture for a long moment, hoping to draw on that sense of peace and happiness he felt in the moment he took it.
He doesn’t. All he feels is a renewed sense of terror, because everything he loves is in this picture. It’s a reminder of what he stands to lose if he fails—of what can be taken from him in an instant if he’s not careful. He has to find that skin. Somehow.
He thumbs over to his contacts, hovers over the button to call Martin, and stops. He can’t. He’s still coughing and gasping for air, so if he tries to call, Martin will know by his voice something is wrong and try to come after him, and he can’t put him in danger. Can’t worry him, not like that.
Instead, he switches over to the group chat Tim has arbitrarily labeled Team Archives Happy Fun Times And Doomsday Prophylactic Society Executive Committee and sends a text. [Almost done. Where are you all?]
Sasha replies first. [Still back at the Archives. Cleaning up for the night.]
Tim is the next to respond. Rather than words, he sends a picture he obviously took at arm’s length, crammed between Martin and Sasha and with the time and date on a laptop screen behind them prominently displayed. Jon smiles, briefly. They’ve all grown a bit less trusting of text messages since the whole Jane Prentiss incident; he’s pretty sure the next step is going to be code phrases that change on the daily.
[Stay there. All of you. I’ll be back shortly.] Jon struggles to his feet and switches on the lamp. He contemplates the boxes for a moment, then sweeps as many of the books as he can into one and folds it up. The other he unpacks and unfolds again, then tucks the box of tea into his jacket along with the tape recorder. He puts the scarf back on carefully, hoping it’ll hide any bruising, hoists the box in both arms, and remembers to lock the door on his way out.
He drove today. Thank God he drove today. After carefully checking the backseat, the boot, and under the car for stray clowns or mannequins or anything else, really, he climbs into the car and drives the exact speed limit back to the Institute. It’s well past the end of the day by the time he arrives, and it’s a Friday to boot, so he’s pretty much the last car in the parking lot. Jon leaves the box of books in the boot, double-checks the locks, and practically runs down the steps into the Archives.
His team is there, standing by the cluster of desks. Martin is the first to notice, and he makes a small noise that alerts the others to turn around. Jon doesn’t slow down, just charges straight across the Archives floor and all but flings himself at Tim and Martin. As their arms wrap around him, he relaxes for the first time since the lights went out, even though he’s very aware of the fact that he’s still shaking.
“Jon? Jon, what’s wrong?” Martin’s voice is sharp with anxiety. “Are you hurt? What happened?”
“We’ve got you. We’ve got you,” Tim murmurs. “It’s okay. You’re safe. What happened?”
“Orsinov,” Jon croaks out, and damn, his voice is still raw. He doesn’t pull back from the comfort of his friends’ embrace, though. “Gregor Orsinov—his, his daughter, I suppose—calls herself Nikola Orsinov—she was there.”
“Oh, God.” Tim pulls both Martin and Jon closer to himself. There’s a brief rustle, and then Jon feels someone else join the embrace; he sincerely hopes it’s Sasha. “In Gertrude’s flat? Was she waiting for you?”
“No—no, she followed me.”
“What did she want?” Sasha asks, and thankfully her voice is right where he’d expect it to be if she was the fourth member of this hug.
Jon tries to take a deep breath and accidentally gets a mouthful of fluff from Tim’s sweater, so it takes a second before he can answer. “The gorilla skin—the one from the statement. The one that Rawlings told you had been stolen. She wants me to find it.”
Some of the pressure eases up; Jon clings harder to Martin and Tim, feeling a little foolish but not really caring. He’s scared, damn it, he needs the comfort, and while sometimes when he’s afraid he wants to be given space and left alone, more and more lately he’s found himself only feeling safe when he’s being held. He decides not to think too hard about what that says about him.
“Why does she think you can find it?” Sasha asks, sounding puzzled.
“A-apparently Gertrude stole it. Orsinov thought she’d destroyed it, but…” Jon hesitates. He doesn’t want to make Tim think it’s his fault.
Tim groans. “But I was asking leading questions, so once Breekon and Hope outed me, she thought we were looking for it, too. God, Jon, I—”
“No, it’s not your fault,” Jon insists. “I-it—it’s not your fault.”
“Did she hurt you?” Martin asks quietly. “Or just try to frighten you?”
Oh, Jon is tempted to lie. Martin didn’t force him to answer; he can just stay silent. But his options don’t exist in a vacuum, and he can’t do that to Martin.
“She grabbed me,” he admits. “By the throat. J-just for a minute, but—”
“Oh, God. Let me see.” Martin tries to pull back, but Jon grabs him tighter and shakes his head.
“I’m all right. I’m all right,” he insists. It’s not quite the truth and not quite a lie. “It’s not—I’ll take a look when we get home. I just don’t—right now I don’t want anyone going anywhere alone. Sasha, are you—do you want to spend the night or—”
“I really need to go home,” Sasha says, and when Jon looks over at her, she seems regretful. “Visiting hours tomorrow, and I promised Uncle Wade I’d be there.”
“Okay. Then I’m driving you, at least.”
“I’ll accept a ride.”
Jon nods. “Just…give me a minute.”
He knows it’s silly. Knows it’s a lot to ask of Tim and Martin. But he just needs a few more minutes in the safety of their arms before he has the strength to move.
They don’t talk about it further that night. They drop Sasha off, bring the books into their house, and have dinner. Martin makes a soothing tea and Tim carefully tends to the bruises forming on Jon’s throat and Jon makes tomato soup despite the other two saying he doesn’t have to cook. They end up going to bed early, snug under a quilt and a knitted afghan and cuddled close together. Jon falls asleep safe and warm in Tim and Martin’s arms, and for the first time in over a year, he doesn’t dream.