“Martin, sit the fuck back down. I think we can invoke the ‘you’re supposed to keep the bandages dry’ exception to the ‘you didn’t make the food so you have to help with the dishes’ rule,” Melanie said, a little exasperated.
Martin shrugged and didn’t even look in her direction. “I’m also supposed to change them out every twelve hours. Your argument is invalid.”
“One of these days I am going to convince you to sit down and take it easy after you do something stupid and reckless.”
“Yeah, you keep saying that, but you still haven’t invested in the horse tranquilizers. Hand me the dish soap, would you?”
Sasha came up and bumped her hip lightly against Martin’s, nudging him to the side. “Here, I didn’t help with breakfast either. I’ll wash, you wipe.”
Melanie grudgingly ceded her space at the sink and crossed back to the table to continue gathering the dishes. She still wasn’t sure how she felt about Sasha after last night—she was altogether too curious for her own good, nosy would perhaps be a better word, and she struck Melanie as the sort who would risk anything, including the lives of those around her, to gain a little bit more knowledge. There’d been rumors that the previous Archivist was the same, and now that she knew Gerry had been traveling with her, she was even more inclined to believe them.
Actually, if she was being honest, the only person from the Archives she was sure about was Tim. He was solid, true-blue, courteous, respectful, protective, solicitous of his friends, generous to a fault, a damn good cook—and Gerry was right, Martin was definitely selling himself short if he thought Tim was out of his league. But the other two…jury was still out.
She wanted to like Sasha. She didn’t want to like Sims. The fact that he’d given her less reason to dislike him than Sasha had pissed her off for reasons she chose not to think about. It took a conscious effort not to glare at him when he wordlessly began collecting the dishes from the other side of the table without being asked.
Andy had never done that. They’d lived in the same house since they’d started getting Ghost Hunt UK off the ground, since they’d been able to afford someplace with more than one bedroom and wiring that wouldn’t short out the whole building every time Melanie tried to edit the video, and in all that time he’d never once cleared the table without her having to ask him. Arguments about common courtesy had almost always been met with I never asked you to make food, Mel, that’s on you or something similar. Pete and Toni, on the infrequent occasions they stayed the night or came over for a meal, had had similar attitudes, not that she would have asked them. But Tim had asked, Sasha had offered, and now Sims was just…helping.
It would have been annoying if she hadn’t guessed they were doing it because of Martin. There were a lot of things in this world she could forgive if it meant her brother’s life sucked at least a little less.
“We can wait and talk about…everything in a bit,” Gerry said, nudging his silverware towards Melanie. “I, uh, hope you don’t mind me waiting to give you my statement until later. Might be a bit much.”
Sims shook his head. “I don’t mind. There are…probably more important things that need discussing.”
“You’re not even a little bit curious as to how he came back from the dead?” Sasha asked. Something in the quirk of her lips suggested she was teasing, which was honestly a surprise to Melanie, who hadn’t expected Sims to be the kind of person you teased.
“He’s been in America,” Sims said, dry as the Sahara. “Between him and Damien Mitchell, I have to assume either incompetence on the part of the authorities or it’s something in the water.”
Melanie whirled around to face Sims, shock at what he’d said temporarily overriding the fact that he’d been the one to say it. “Damien Mitchell is alive?”
Sims froze, for just a second, then straightened and turned to face her. “I overheard someone mention it on the Tube the other day, so I looked it up—apparently he turned up in San Francisco a few weeks ago, alive and well.”
Melanie swore. “How’d I miss that? You think they’ll start touring again? It won’t be Sinner’s Gin without Gonzalez and Nichols, but they could get others, or even just do a two-man act, you think?”
“They could, but like you said, it wouldn’t be Sinner’s Gin, and I don’t think they’d perform under that name,” Sims replied. “They need a bassist and a drummer to really sound right, though. It’s not about the music, a lot of their discography would work with just an acoustic guitar, but Mitchell gets lost in the music without something to ground him.”
“Okay, but their first album—”
It had been too long since Melanie had been able to have a conversation like this. Martin and Gerry might have both listened to it with her, but while Martin could appreciate some of the technical aspects of it, he’d never really connected with the music like she had, whereas Gerry preferred heavy metal to the softer, more blues-y feel of Sinner’s Gin. (Martin had once commented that Gerry was too angry for it and he wasn’t angry enough, and she still wasn’t sure if he’d been joking or not.) This was the kind of talk she hadn’t had since the band’s heyday, and it didn’t stop with the band itself either. She was drawing breath to launch a new argument over two albums by a band she’d never met anyone in person who’d even heard of and which was better when the rattle of water against the window punctuated it and distracted her for a moment.
“When did it start raining?” she asked, surprised that she hadn’t noticed—and also a bit surprised that nobody was standing between her and the window over the sink.
“Somewhere between whether Rising Sun was justified in dropping their bassist after he went to rehab and you attempting to give Tim unanesthetized gender reassignment surgery,” Gerry said dryly.
“My fault,” Tim said, holding up a hand, before Melanie could register her horror. “I was in Scouts, I know better than to get within the blood circle when someone’s holding a knife. Even a butter knife.”
“Do either of you want some tea before we start talking?” Martin asked. His hands—which were wrapped to allow better movement than the EMTs had done the night before—curled around the body of his mug, which was held in front of his face; Melanie could have sworn he was hiding a smile.
“No, I think this is going to be a hot cocoa conversation. Jon, you want a cup?” Melanie turned towards the cupboard where she kept the mugs.
“Oh, ah—yes, that—that sounds good.”
Gerry mumbled something Melanie couldn’t hear, but when she looked in his direction, he was looking at the Archives group as a whole. “So where do we want to start?”
Sasha reached into her pocket and pulled out a notepad and pen, which she laid on the table in front of her. “I had a hard time getting to sleep last night, so…I started making a list.” She tossed Melanie an apologetic look. “This was on the nightstand in the room you set me up in, so…”
“Yeah, don’t worry about it.” She’d put Sasha in Andy’s old room—they’d rented the house furnished—and he’d probably left behind a few little things he didn’t care about or hadn’t noticed. The notepad looked like the one he’d pilfered from the Holiday Inn Express in Glasgow. “What’s the list about?”
Sasha tapped the pen against the page. “You said last night the statements that couldn’t go on the laptop, the ones we have to record on tape, those are all to do with the Fourteen. So I started making a list of the statements and what they go with. Some I’m not sure about, but…I guess you know, so you can tell me if I’m right and fill in the blanks.”
“Most of them, yeah,” Martin said slowly. “One or two…I dunno, they could go a couple of different ways. But we can do our best.”
Melanie handed Jon a cup of cocoa and sat down; he gave her a nod of thanks before turning to Sasha, who skimmed her list. “All right. We’ve got…well, technically I think we’ve got thirty-seven different tapes, but only thirty-six different statements because of that one that got split into two parts. I think I got them in order that we recorded them, but…”
“Order’s not important.” Martin’s voice wavered uncertainly. “Maybe. I dunno. Might be some kind of pattern, but…”
Tim looked over Sasha’s shoulder. “First one was that one from Edinburgh, right? ‘Can I have a cigarette?’”
“Right, the anglerfish thing. I think that’s the Stranger. Pretending to be something it’s not, you know?” Sasha looked to Martin for confirmation, who nodded. “Second one, Joshua Gillespe and that weird singing coffin. That’s the Buried, that’s obvious. Third one was Amy Patel and the thing that wasn’t her friend Graham and the table up in Artifact Storage. That’s the Stranger, too. Obviously it’s the Stranger.” She paused. “Right?”
“The thing that isn’t Graham is the Stranger,” Martin said slowly. “I’m…not altogether sure the table is, though. It’s—there’s something about that one that’s nagged at me. The pattern on the table makes me think more of the Spiral, but…”
“You didn’t…” Sasha gestured at his face. Melanie felt a surge of irritation again.
“Christ, Sasha, no. I—honestly, I can’t risk even going into Artifact Storage if I can help it, but I sure as hell can’t Look while I’m in there.” Martin rubbed his forehead. “There’s too much in there. I’d knock myself out, at best. And it’s too much of a temptation.”
Jon tightened his grip on the mug briefly, then seemed to force himself to relax. “Moving on. The next one on the list—that was Ex Altiora, wasn’t it? I-I assume that was the Vast.”
“Oh, yeah,” Gerry said. Melanie scowled at the mention of the book.
Sasha tapped her pen thoughtfully against the table. “After that was the bin man, right? With all the weird—that’s one I’m not sure about. The teeth made me think the Flesh, but the doll’s heads makes me think the Stranger, and the burnt prayer could maybe be the Desolation.”
“I don’t think it’s the Desolation,” Martin said slowly. “I’m not completely certain about that one, but I think it’s the Flesh. Lancaster Road is pretty close to…there was a Flesh stronghold not far from there at around the same time, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were related somehow. Can’t prove it, though. I’ll admit I was a bit tempted to take a Look at Mr. Woodward while I was doing the follow-up with him, but he seemed like he’d managed to get some distance from it, so I left him be. No sense in dragging him back if he’s managed to escape.”
Melanie pursed her lips, but didn’t say anything. Sasha continued. “After that was Timothy Hodges—well, we know that one, Jane Prentiss was involved, that was the Corruption. The one after that was that construction worker at Hill Top Road—”
“No, there was one more before that,” Jon interrupted. “I didn’t have you all do any research into it—there wasn’t any point, or at least I-I didn’t think there was—but it was that one from 1922 that was mixed in with the statements from the early aughts. A staff sergeant who served with Wilfred Owen during the first World War.”
“That’ll be the Slaughter, then,” Melanie said with a wink for Martin. “War’s always the Slaughter.”
Martin gave her a crooked smile. “I can take a look at it when we get back to the Archives…whenever that is…if Jane Prentiss didn’t destroy it. But yeah, probably.”
“No need. I believe you.” Jon turned back to Sasha. “The next one on your list…I remember there was an awful lot of fire involved. That was the Desolation, right?”
“That’s what I have written down.”
“I’m pretty sure, yeah,” Martin said. “Might have been a couple other things involved there, but not with the statement itself.”
Sasha nodded. “Then we had Julia Montauk’s statement—that one was the Dark, obviously. After that was Trevor Herbert, the so-called vampire hunter…was that the Hunt?”
Melanie set her mug down a little harder than she meant to, making Jon flinch; she gave him an apologetic gesture, even as she spoke to Martin. “Not Trevor the Tramp?”
“One and the same. He was dying of lung cancer at the time, apparently.” Martin stared into the depths of his tea, worrying at his bottom lip. “Midway through he took a nap in the break room. Rosie told me he died there.”
“Wait, what? I thought you said you saw him,” Jon said, looking up at Martin in surprise.
Martin shook his head, still avoiding looking anyone in the eye. “No, I—I couldn’t risk it.”
Sasha set down her pen and cocked her head. “Couldn’t risk what?” she began, then stopped. “Being recognized. You thought he’d know you. You were—doing things outside the Institute, you were involved in the whole paranormal community—that’s how you know all these people when we need contacts for the really weird ones. You thought he’d expose you.”
Melanie was abruptly reminded that she hadn’t decided if she liked Sasha or not. She turned a glare on her that could have melted glass. “You don’t understand the Hunt. Most people who are bound up in it think they’re doing good—hunting monsters, saving the world, that sort of thing. But it usually turns into hunting down anyone who’s bound up in one of the other Fears, and then it just becomes about the Hunt itself. Depending on how far along on that path Trevor was, he might have been able to smell how tightly bound to the Eye Martin is—and seen him as something to take down. As prey.”
“And if he had,” Martin added, looking up finally, “it’s not like he would have just killed me where I stood. The Hunt’s about the chase, not the killing. I didn’t know he was dying, and even if I had known he was sick, the Fears tend to protect their favorites, so I wouldn’t have known for sure he’d actually drop dead of lung cancer mid-statement. If he started stalking me, he’d have found too many other people. That’s what I couldn’t risk, Sasha, putting anybody else in danger. I might be the monster, but that doesn’t mean a Hunter wouldn’t see someone I care about and assume they’re just as bad.”
“You’re not a monster,” Melanie and Jon said in unison.
A smile flickered over Martin’s face. “Not the point, but thank you.”
“I’m sorry,” Sasha offered, and at least she sounded sincere. “I didn’t—that wasn’t how I meant it. I just meant you’ve worked so hard to conceal…all of this from everybody.”
“Yeah, the more you know about this sort of thing, the more attention you attract.” Martin made a face. “Sorry.”
Jon sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I suppose it was inevitable.”
Tim, who’d been quiet for a while, spoke up then. “The one after Trevor’s half-statement was that one we couldn’t track down, right? The completely made-up personal details from the guy who said he’d dreamed about Gertrude dying?”
“Yeah, ‘Antonio Blake,’” Sasha said. “If that’s not the End, I’ll eat my hat.”
“You don’t wear hats.”
“Doesn’t mean I don’t own one. Anyway, then we had the second statement with our friend Gerard here in it.”
“Gerry,” Gerry said.
Sasha paused. “Sorry, what?”
Gerry shrugged, but Melanie saw the same desperate hope in his eyes she remembered from when she was a little girl as he said, “My friends call me Gerry. What was I involved in this time?”
“Desolation,” Martin answered. “That book you tried to get off that one bloke where you both wound up in hospital a couple nights before Christmas.”
Gerry touched the side of his face tentatively and sighed. “Yeah, I remember that one. Nasty business.”
“May I ask a question?” Jon asked hesitantly. “Martin mentioned that—the three of you used to burn Leitners together. Yet every statement I’ve seen involving you, you’ve done it on your own. Is there…a reason for that?”
“Time constraints, mostly,” Gerry answered. “Both the incidents you’ve mentioned, my mum was…uh, hanging about. And with Ex Altiora, she knew it was out there and that someone wanted to get rid of it. If I hadn’t burned it quick, I might not have been able to before she stopped me. With the other one, I didn’t want Martin or Melanie getting hurt, so I lied and told them it was a basic purchase run so they wouldn’t end up in the line of fire, literally. Then it all went tits up and I had to take care of more than just the book.”
“For the record, we knew he was lying,” Melanie said. “He was really, really bad at it.”
“Hey!” Gerry said, offended.
Melanie ignored him. “We wouldn’t have gone with anyway. We’d made plans to go visit Dad and Lily for Christmas. Or at least that was the excuse. Just wanted to get out of London for a bit, really. Anyway, what’s next on that list of yours?”
“Our first live statement,” Sasha said, looking down at the list. “Naomi Hearne.”
Gerry’s face fell. He looked up at Martin and Melanie. “Evan?”
“Five months after you,” Martin said quietly.
Gerry slumped. He looked suddenly a thousand years old. “Christ. None of us were ever getting out, were we? Doesn’t matter how fucking young we were, doesn’t matter if we wanted it or not, we were always going to have to stay or pay the price.”
Tim looked back and forth between the two of them. “Didn’t he die of a heart condition?”
“Yeah, sure.” Melanie snorted. “The Lukas family is really tightly bound to the Lonely. Evan was fighting it with everything he had—we didn’t all see as much of each other as we used to at the end there, but we’d all go out for drinks sometimes, and he was happy. When Naomi proposed, we tried to convince them to elope, up stakes and move, but neither of them wanted to give up their jobs. Two months later Evan was dead. Dunno if it was the Lonely or his family punishing him for trying to leave, but even with all the shit I was going through at the time, I thought it was suspicious that they said it was his heart that did him in.”
There was a moment of silence before Sasha returned to her list. “After that was that creep who kept losing body parts—that’s the Flesh, right?”
“Angela Grackle,” Jon murmured. He looked embarrassed when both Melanie and Tim shot him identical looks of surprise. “I—I heard the three of you talking last night. Martin mentioned that he, ah, wasn’t going to let anyone else investigate that in person.”
Martin exhaled slowly. “Yeah. We’d heard of her before—I recognized that one as soon as you brought up the name. It did legitimately take me a bit to find her, but the real reason it took so long was I had to take precautions. Attacks on the Archives by other entities aren’t uncommon, and I didn’t want to give her any wiggle room to use me as a vector for that attack.”
Jon shivered. Tim frowned slightly at Martin, but Sasha kept going. “Lost Johns’ Cave…is that the Dark or the Buried? I wasn’t sure.”
“It’s both. I think they were both trying to claim Laura Popham, but she was always more inclined to the Dark, so she sacrificed her sister to the Buried. At least, that was the impression I got, since I didn’t—I couldn’t help with that one.” Martin gave Jon an apologetic look. “We had a bad run-in with the Buried a few years back—long story—but I was lucky to get out alive, and I won’t be so lucky a second time, so I kind of have to keep well away from anything to do with it.”
“No, absolutely,” Jon said firmly. “I would think that would apply to all of us. We’ll need to be extra careful with anything any of us have encountered before.” He paused, and a flicker of something very like genuine fear came into his eyes for a moment before he turned back to Sasha. “The next one on your list…it’s Carlos Vittery’s statement, isn’t it?”
Sasha nodded. “That’s the Web, of course. Not particularly subtle, if you ask me.”
“No.” Jon exhaled heavily. “I never should have let you go back to investigate.”
“If you’ll remember, I didn’t exactly tell you I was going back,” Martin pointed out. “And…if I’m being honest, I would have gone back even if you’d explicitly told me not to bother. I, um, I kind of Looked at the building the first time I was there, mostly to make sure the Web wasn’t still hanging about. It wasn’t, but I saw the hints of the Corruption in the basement, which is why I really went back to take a second look.” He turned to Sasha. “I think the next few you investigated while I was, um, out, so—”
“It’s all right, Martin, you can say ‘held prisoner in my own home by six million worms in a trench coat while the rest of you went about your lives without a thought for me like the horrible excuses for friends you are,’” Tim said flatly. Both Jon and Martin flinched at that, but Tim was already looking over Sasha’s shoulder. “Oh, yeah, that one—next one should be easy enough, it involved a Leitner, and I remember you were actually the one who went to talk to the statement-giver, we’d been investigating it at about the same time as the Carlos Vittery statement. The Boneturner’s Tale, that’s the Flesh, right?’
“Oh, God, yeah. Christ, and I though Angela Grackle was nasty.” Martin pulled a face. “What came after that?”
“What did you write down here, Sash—does that say ‘meat flat’?”
“Meat flat?” Melanie and Martin said in unison.
Sasha swatted Tim’s shoulder. “Man who had a ground floor flat put up with a load of banging and a rancid smell every two weeks for a good two, three years, only to eventually find out the man upstairs was getting meat delivered and just…nailing it to every available surface. I assume that’s also the Flesh.”
“That…yes. It’s also one of the most bizarre things that I have ever heard of.” Gerry frowned. “And that’s saying a lot. Might have to see what I can come up with there…what else do you have?”
“The next one…well, two really, it was two parts to the same statement…” Sasha shook her head. “Honestly, Martin, I think you might have to actually look at this one, because I’m stumped.”
Martin spread out his hands, palms turned upwards. “Could you at least give me something to start with?”
“Father Edwin Burroughs,” Jon said slowly. “The priest Ivo Lensik mentioned coming to Hill Top Road. He was arrested in 2009 for, ah, apparently murdering two first-year university students and…eating their skin. Which sounds like the Flesh, but there’s so much more to it than that…”
Melanie sucked in a sharp breath before she could stop herself and shot a look at Martin, who looked flustered and slightly guilty. Gerry narrowed his eyes at both of them. “What? What did you do?”
“Nothing,” Martin said, not entirely convincingly.
As many times as Martin had thrown himself on the sword, or under the bus as the case may be, for her, Melanie felt like she owed it to him to do the same for him now. Besides, it was mostly her fault. “Look, in my defense, I was left unsupervised.”
“Melanie.” Gerry’s eyes narrowed further.
“No, it’s not—nothing like that. It’s just, you know, I’d just had to put Dad in a care home and Lily had gone in as well, and Martin was working double time to try and keep abreast of any issues we needed to deal with and handle things with you being in prison, and I was on break between terms, so I had all this energy and nowhere to put it,” Melanie said, the words tumbling out of her almost desperately. She’d always hated confessing her shortcomings to Gerry—it was different with Martin, he never judged, just found a way to help—but if it meant he didn’t get on Martin’s case about this, she’d do it. “As soon as I saw in the papers about what had happened, I knew it had to be something involving the Fourteen, so I started poking around the edges of it—”
“Melanie!”
“—and I honestly found more questions than answers,” Melanie continued as if she hadn’t heard him. “I couldn’t pinpoint it either, and I sat with Martin a few nights and went over what I’d figured out, and there were just too many threads, so, well, I found out when he was going to be taken to the courthouse and convinced Martin to call out of work and dragged him to get a good spot to view and—”
“And you Looked,” Gerry completed. His lips pressed together in a flat line. “Fuck, Martin, what if he’d sensed what you were doing?”
“I wouldn’t have risked it if I’d thought he could do that,” Martin protested. “Not in public. Everything Melanie came up with—and if you’ve got his statement, you can tell me if I’m wrong about this—but it seemed like he didn’t choose to do any of it. So yeah, I took a Look.”
“And?” Gerry prompted.
Martin winced and dropped his gaze. “And I passed out.”
“What?” Tim, Gerry, and Jon all said at once.
“It’s not what it sounds like,” Martin said quickly. “It’s just—I’d not ever really seen someone with more than one Mark before and I wasn’t prepared for him to have seven or eight different ones. And they were all still fresh, so they were bright. It was like someone suddenly aimed a spotlight at a disco ball. Hit me hard and I lost consciousness for a minute or two.”
“Nobody noticed,” Melanie added. “Not really. One or two people standing closest to us did, but I told them we’d seen him around campus, and we were still young enough—well, I was a uni student—that people bought it. I did kind of have to give a fake interview to one of the reporters, but I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true, just, uh, not originally mine.”
“Melanie.” Gerry pinched the bridge of his nose.
Tim grabbed the pen from Sasha, flipped to another page of the notebook, and scribbled something. “I have a question, but it can wait until we’ve finished this, I don’t want to get distracted…okay, next on the list, you’ve written ‘Enjoy Sky Blue’. Yeah, that was that woman whose son got eaten by the sky, right? Definitely the Vast.”
Jon nodded. “And I was recording that one when you—ah, came back to the Institute, Martin, so the next statement would have been yours. Obviously that was the Corruption. Then after that was the letter from Albrecht von Closen to Jonah Magnus…”
Gerry groaned dramatically, tipping his head back. Martin grinned. “Ah, yeah, I remember that one. That’s the Eye.”
“You’re sure?” Sasha asked, surprised. “I would’ve thought it was the End. I mean…the thing was dead.”
“It was watching him with no eyes. Definitely the Ceaseless Watcher. Besides, I can always tell those without effort.” Martin grimaced. “Call it kinship, I guess.”
“Oh.” Sasha took her list back from Tim and made a note. “After that was the clown puppet and the calliope…I guess that’s the Stranger? You said clowns tend to be.”
Melanie noticed Tim’s fists clench tightly, but didn’t call attention to it. Martin nodded slowly. “I know the Circus of the Other was, too.”
“After that was that weird church woman—that’s definitely the Dark—and then…Michael,” Sasha said, staring at the notebook. “I know Timothy Hodges was, well, Corrupted, but…who is Michael?”
“I don’t think Michael is a who,” Martin said. “From the description you gave, I’m pretty sure ‘Michael’ is just what the Distortion is calling itself these days.”
“Oh, is that all,” Tim huffed. “Just the Distortion.”
“I mean…th-that’s not what I mean, Tim. I mean Michael isn’t really its name, or its identity, any more than anything else would be. It’s lies incarnate, deception made manifest, the Twisting Deceit.” Martin’s voice shifted slightly as he spoke, and Melanie felt the prickle of static in the air. “There is no just about the Distortion. It is all-encompassing, all-embracing, it wraps itself around you until truth becomes lies and lies become confusion and you can no longer even recall the question, let alone find an answer to it. If it gives itself any other name, it is only to—” He broke off in a sudden, high-pitched yelp. The static died abruptly. Jon gave a choked gasp and dropped his mug, which miraculously didn’t spill or break.
Gerry withdrew his hand from the back of Martin’s exposed neck, scowling and looking worried at the same time. “Christ, Martin, when did you start doing that?”
Martin’s eyebrows drew together in a bewildered frown. Melanie’s heart dropped into her stomach, and she covered her mouth with her hand, even before he asked, “Start doing what?”
“Your voice went…weird there,” Tim said slowly. He looked as worried as Gerry did. “Like it maybe wasn’t you doing the talking.”
“I—oh, shit.” Martin went pale under the bandages. “That’s not supposed to—I-I don’t—”
“If it helps,” Jon said, not sounding altogether sure if he thought it did himself, “I’ve never heard you do that before.”
Melanie stood up decisively. “Okay. Anyone want refills? Because I think this is where we take a break, move into the living room, and light a couple candles before we keep going here.”
Nobody argued with her, not that she would have expected them to. Even the people who didn’t know much about this sort of thing realized that Martin needed all the protection he could get. The Ceaseless Watcher was trying to dig its hooks in tighter, and Melanie and Gerry would fight that with everything they had. They always would have.
She was starting to realize the Archives crew would, too. It made her feel better about Martin being trapped there. At least a little.