to find promise of peace (and the solace of rest)

a TMA fanfic

Chapter 24: July 2016

Content Warnings:

Mention of all fourteen Fears, disease, infection, death, darkness

Since Gerard—Gerry—folded himself into the armchair, even after Melanie nudged Martin to the sofa, Jon decided to claim the seat on Martin’s other side. He found himself wanting, even needing, to reassure himself however he could that Martin was okay. So once he’d watched Melanie light three of the candles in the room, he took the seat to Martin’s right, letting Melanie settle on his left, closer to Gerry, while Tim and Sasha took the loveseat.

There was a more serious air in the room now. Earlier, in the kitchen, they’d all been interested, maybe curious, and Jon was pretty sure they’d all been at least a little worried. But now it was different. Now they were all beginning to really understand what the stakes were. They had to be more careful.

Melanie wrapped the throw that had been on the armchair around Martin’s shoulders, then leaned against him for a moment before looking over at Sasha. “Right, we’re safe enough for now. What’s next on your list?”

Sasha looked down at the pad in her hands. “Paul McKenzie. That old man who heard…noises in the night, the one who died of a stroke two months after he made his statement. I…kind of assumed that was the Stranger.”

Martin shook his head. He looked tired. “That’s the Spiral as well. He’d have seen a figure if it were the Stranger.”

“Right. Well…um.” Sasha winced and looked over at Melanie. “Next one’s yours, then.”

Melanie sighed. “We know Sarah Baldwin was the Stranger, obviously. But I still haven’t got a clue what it was she disturbed. At least I know it was her that got it riled up, though.”

“Is anyone going to tell me what this is all about?” Gerry growled. He sounded annoyed, and Jon was about to come to Melanie’s defense—an instinct that caught him a bit off-guard—until he recognized the same look in Gerry’s eyes he’d had when regarding Martin a few minutes before. He was worried…no, not worried, scared. Jon remembered that Melanie’s statement had taken place some three months after Gerry’s death. Gerry was likely beating himself up for not being there to protect his siblings.

“Cambridge Military Hospital,” Melanie explained. “We were shooting an episode of Ghost Hunt UK there. I had to bring along a temporary sound person and we got this woman, Sarah Baldwin…she was a bit odd, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Anyway, at one point she got up in the middle of the night and I found her kneeling in front of…something. Tried to film it, but got nothing, big shock.” She rolled her thumb against her fingers in a gesture Jon recognized as one Martin made when he’d finished a particularly difficult phone call. “Wasn’t really enough for me to…see what it was, but I’m guessing it left at least a small mark, so we’ll figure it out at some point. No—” She touched Martin’s hand lightly. “Not now. Maybe later, maybe when we’ve talked a bit more, but right now you’re too vulnerable and you’ll get hurt if you call on It.”

“She’s right,” Jon said, less because he knew enough about the situation to be sure of that and more because he trusted Melanie, at least where it came to Martin’s wellbeing. “There’s time enough for that. Let’s just…finish Sasha’s list and then we can reevaluate.”

Martin blinked at him, then sighed and nodded. “Fine. We’re almost done anyway, I think.”

“Yeah, just a few more,” Sasha said. She referred to her list again. “Next up we had that one from the 70s—Nathaniel Thorpe, the one who claimed he’d cheated Death, or beat Death in a rigged game of Faro, something like that. Obviously that’s…the End.”

Gerry nodded slowly. “I don’t know the name, but I know the story. There’s a fair few of that kind wandering about. Men who died, who somehow beat Death in a game and became Death themselves, then stayed that way until someone else took their place. They’re not…pleasant to deal with, whether you know what you’re running into or not.”

Jon leaned forward to frown at him. “You’ve met one? More than one?”

“My mum ran a bookshop that specialized in the sorts of books Jurgen Leitner collected,” Gerry pointed out. “And it was the only one of its kind operating openly in the greater London area. It wasn’t just collectors who came to her. People who were looking for escapes, or ways out, came to her too.” He shot a wary glance at Martin, but didn’t say anything else.

Martin, however, sighed. “One of them was my mum. It’s how they met. She was just starting to get sick then, and evidently she knew something about the Fourteen, so she went hoping she’d find something that could fix it…I guess. Anyway, they wound up becoming friends and she started working there instead, so…who knows. Which one was after that?”

“The abattoir…well, that was obviously the Flesh, but I dunno, I kind of wonder if them talking about the building being bigger than it should be is the Spiral, too,” Sasha mused.

“Maybe. Honestly, the damn things overlap more often than not. Could’ve been the Vast, too. Or it could’ve just been that they sensed the Flesh’s…domain, I guess, lying just underneath the surface of the abattoir.” Martin rubbed his forehead, looking still more tired. “The human mind wasn’t really made to comprehend all this.”

“You’re telling me,” Tim muttered. “Was that werewolf on the Appalachian Trail the next one, or did that come after the Tundra?

“Not a werewolf,” Jon said, and bristled at the amused look Tim shot him. “Well, it’s not. I think it was more accurately described as a wolf-man, but yes, that was next.”

“I mean, that’s what ‘werewolf’ means, doesn’t it?” Gerry pointed out. “Or ‘man-wolf’, at least. Anyway, that sounds like the Hunt to me.”

“That’s what I thought,” Sasha said. “After that was Jane Prentiss’ statement, which is obviously the Corruption, so we don’t even need to talk about that. Then was the Tundra…that was another one Elias wouldn’t let us look into because it involved the Lukases, so it must be the Lonely.”

“Why is this Elias guy so invested in the Lukases?” Gerry muttered. “I like him less and less the more I hear about him.”

Martin actually laughed, which made the knot in Jon’s chest loosen, at least a little. “They’re Institute donors, Ger. It’s not that deep. Although there’s nothing to like about Elias.”

Jon nodded fervently. Sasha returned to her list. “Next…ooh, right, the other live statement. The one Tim kept making ‘bone apple teeth’ cracks about.”

“The anatomy class.” A chill ran up Jon’s spine. “The one where all the students had fake names…that’s the Stranger, right?”

Martin nodded. Gerry raised an eyebrow. “Fake names? Did you run them?”

“Didn’t have to,” Tim said, a grin teasing at his mouth. “Their names were Erika Mustermann, Jan Novak, Piotr and Pavel Petrov, John Doe, Fulan al-Fulani, and Juan Perez.”

Gerry’s other eyebrow shot up. “John Doe?

Tim laughed. Martin shook his head, looking amused. “I know. How obvious can you get? But yeah, they were all learning about anatomy and asking questions on how the different body parts functioned…that’s the one that they made the hearts beat in different ways and asked which was correct, right? Guessing they’re trying to fake humanity better, which cannot be good.”

Melanie hummed in agreement. “We’re almost done, right?”

“Right.” Something ticked at Jon’s brain, and he blurted, “Next was Harold Silvana’s statement, wasn’t it? That was another one you were in, Gerry.”

Gerry frowned. “What book was it this time?”

“Ah—I don’t know,” Jon admitted. “You—ran out with a book, I definitely remember that being part of the statement, but nothing really…”

“Oh,” Martin said suddenly, sitting up straighter. “Shit. That statement.”

“What? When? What did I do?” Gerry’s frown deepened.

“March of 2002. The Reform Club. Ringing any bells?”

Gerry somehow turned pale, despite the fact that there wasn’t really any color in his cheeks to begin with. “Oh…damn.”

“Yeah.”

Tim looked back and forth between the three of them. “I remember this one. A false wall turned out to lead to the remains of the old Carlton Club that Robert Smirke built, right?”

Jon suddenly sat up straighter as well, barely managing to stop himself from sloshing hot cocoa all over his borrowed clothes. “There were fourteen tunnels leading off that room. Mr. Silvana said the one they came down felt like it was getting narrower…and one gave him vertigo, one swallowed the light from the torches…”

“And the one I found that book down was covered in blood,” Gerry confirmed. “Yeah, it was a nexus of the Fourteen. A lot of Smirke’s work centered around the Fears, really. He was trying to understand them…maybe master them, I’ve never been clear about that. But yeah, he was big on that sort of thing.”

Melanie grimaced. “Was that the book that dropped animal bones? The one we thought we’d get a lecture on being ‘hardly worth the trouble’ and instead your mum acted like we’d brought her the Holy Grail?”

Something cold ran down Jon’s spine. “‘We’?”

Martin sighed heavily, slumping back against the sofa. “Melanie and I were outside. Actually, we’d been trying to find a way in from a different direction, but the Reform Club being under renovation was the only way we were going to get in. Aunt Mary said there was a very important book under there that she needed us to get for her. I would’ve gone in, too, but we couldn’t all go, so we tossed for it. Gerry won—”

“Or lost, as the case may be,” Gerry interjected.

“—so he went in and we stayed out on guard, and also as backup. When Gerry came out with the book we had to get out of there fast, partly because we weren’t sure what might come after him and partly because the cops would be showing up any minute.” Martin grimaced. “Sorry for not telling you then, but…”

“I suppose I should have guessed. I knew you knew Gerry, you’d told us as much, and you’d said you’d known him since he was ten,” Jon said slowly. “I-I suppose I just…assumed you would have told us if you’d known anything about the situation.” He paused, recalculated in his mind, then added, “Actually, I think I was still operating under the assumption you were older than he was, so I just assumed you weren’t around and didn’t know what had happened.”

Martin had the grace to look sheepish. Tim counted on his fingers momentarily. “How old were you, anyway?”

“I was fifteen,” Gerry replied. “Almost sixteen. About six weeks off my birthday. Neens and Martin were thirteen. We were still mostly looking where we were told to look then. It wasn’t until later that year that you…”

“Got stupid,” Martin completed.

“I was going to say ‘poked around on your own,’ but sure, we can call it that if you want.” Gerry sighed. “Anyway, that one wasn’t really related to a single Entity. The book’s for the Flesh, it’s a little thing really, but the room I found it in belonged to the End. What else do you have?”

“Just three more,” Sasha said. She’d been unusually silent during the discussion, and Jon noticed her flip back to the first page—she’d obviously been taking notes or postulating something. “The next one was Nicole Baxter’s statement, about Ivy Meadows. You said that was the Corruption, and…honestly, I can see that.”

Both Melanie and Gerry tensed. Martin opened his mouth, but Jon forestalled him with a tentative touch. “No, I—l-let me. You don’t need to…you don’t need to take that on.” He set the mug down on the coffee table and slid forward on the sofa, scooting around to face Melanie directly, and began talking before Martin could bring more pain on himself by inflicting it on his sister. She already didn’t care for Jon—let him make it worse. “Nicole Baxter worked for Baxter and Gordon Funeral Directors in Woodley. She was called to the Ivy Meadows Care Home in August of 2012 for a removal and, when she saw the body, it was in an…appalling condition. She described it as ‘a wet, creamy yellow rash’ that had taken over most of the dead man’s body. A couple of weeks later she got a second call and went back out to find that the same…sickness seemed to have taken over the entire facility, including the staff member who had called her and said only, ‘Come quickly. We’ve taken ill. We’ve passed away.’ A man and a woman were there—she described the man as an old man with a white, matted beard, unblemished pink skin, and a Mancunian accent, and the woman as young, tall and lean with close-cropped hair and a scar over her right eye—and told her to leave. She asked them what was going on, but they only told her again to leave, and she did. She smelled the smoke, but didn’t look back.” He took a deep breath. “We—we could only find records for seven of the patients transferring, and…”

“Dad wasn’t one of them,” Melanie said hoarsely. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Christ. I knew he was still there when the place burned down, even though it had been officially decommissioned, but…they said he died of smoke inhalation.”

“They lied,” Martin said simply.

Tim winced. “I probably don’t want to ask this, but I’m going to. Martin, your mum…?”

“Wasn’t at Ivy Meadows.” Martin rubbed his face. “Well, she was at first, she and Roger went in together, end of 2008. But they weren’t able to do much to help her, and in early 2010 they transfered her to a program up in Devon that they thought would do some good. They said it might save her life. Guess it did, just not the way they meant.”

Jon wanted to hug him, but held himself back. He was still sore and assumed Martin was as well. Besides, that was not something he wanted Tim to tease him about just yet. “I still wish we knew where to find those two people who burnt the place down.”

“They’re in America,” Gerry said quietly. “And trust me, mate, you don’t want to find them.”

“What?” Jon, Martin, and Melanie all said at once, Jon confused and both Melanie and Martin in voices sharp enough to cut skin.

Gerry met Jon’s eyes. “I still owe you a proper statement—not today, you don’t have the energy for that—once you’ve healed up a bit maybe. But the long and the short of it is that I recognize those two from the description you gave. They’re Hunters. Not sure why they’re in America, but they are. And they had the Book.”

The way he pronounced it, with a capital B, sent a chill down Jon’s spine. Martin’s hands tightened around his mug, and when he spoke, it was through clenched teeth. “I fucking knew you didn’t put it in storage.”

“Gertrude said she was working out a way to burn the whole thing safely. I was stupid enough to believe her.” Gerry sighed. “Instead she bound me to it. Dunno how the Hunters got hold of it, although that really should have been my first clue she was dead, she never would have just…given it away. Guess I assumed she gave it to them as payment for services rendered or something.”

Melanie growled. “If she wasn’t already dead, I’d kill her myself.”

Gerry actually smiled a little at that. Martin took a deep breath and a sip of tea for good measure. “Right. Okay. That’s…yeah, that was the Corruption. The one after that…God, you’d think I could remember, we only dealt with it a couple weeks ago…oh, wait, was it that ecologist up in Scotland who stumbled on some ritual involving Gertrude Robinson?”

“That’s the one. And then he lost everything except his son to fire,” Sasha said softly. “The Desolation?”

“Couldn’t be anything but. And then the last one on your list…”

“The homophobic vase,” Tim said with a quirk of his lips. Martin actually laughed, which effectively stifled Jon’s instinct to reprimand Tim for the moniker.

Melanie snickered, too. “I guess that’s the one we were listening to last night, yeah? The one you were recording when everything went sideways? Definitely the Spiral. Not surprised Salesa had it.”

“Salesa? That idiot?” Gerry threw up his hands.

Jon blinked. “You know Salesa?” he asked, a bit stupidly. Of course they would have known Salesa, or at least known of him. Even if he dealt, as he seemed to, with objects more than books…

“Everyone in this life’s heard of Salesa. Probably the foremost dealer in artifacts of the Fourteen. I bet you even money that if you got your hands on the provenance of some of the things up in Artifact Storage at the Magnus Institute, a good percentage of it passed through Salesa’s hands at some point, even if his weren’t the last hands to touch them.”

“We met him once,” Melanie mused. “Up at the antique fair in Newark, you remember that, Mart?”

“Yeah, I remember.” Martin sat back, a faraway look coming into his eyes. “Nice enough guy. Probably the only person we ever interacted with back then who didn’t treat us like kids. Or bait.”

Melanie snorted. “I think he also appreciated that we didn’t leave him to get eaten by the Nightcrawlers.”

“The what?” Tim and Gerry both shouted in almost the exact same tones. Jon was once again forcibly reminded that Tim was an older brother.

“That’s just what we called them.” Martin sounded way too nonchalant about the whole thing, in Jon’s opinion. “They were…like sentient shadows, I guess? Got a sense something was off, but couldn’t pinpoint it until we realized it was getting awful quiet, and if you know anything about Newark Antiques Fair, it’s the biggest one in Europe. It’s never quiet.”

“How did you get away from them?” Jon asked. He had to admit he was a bit shaken.

“Same way we usually do.” Melanie shrugged. “Martin threw a bit of poetry at them that slowed them down long enough to give us a head start, and we legged it. By then we knew enough not to let Salesa fall behind. Things like that go worse for anyone who’s come close to the Fourteen before, and you can’t sell the sorts of things Salesa does without cutting it a bit fine.”

Sasha looked a little queasy as she set her notepad and pen on the table. “How old were you then? Or do I want to know?”

“Sixteen, going on seventeen. It was right after we took our O-levels.” Just like that, Martin’s smile faded. “It was supposed to be our last brush with…things. We’d just gone up to have a look around, really. Salesa offered us both an internship if we wanted one and we told him we were getting out, that we’d planned futures that didn’t have anything to do with the Fourteen, and he wished us the best of luck.”

“So why didn’t you?” Tim frowned. “Get out, I mean?”

“Told you. Mum got sick. I needed a job, and the Magnus Institute was the only place I could get that would even hire me, let alone pay enough for what we needed.” Martin tilted his chin at Melanie and Gerry. “I tried to convince them to keep out, but—”

“Yeah, that wasn’t happening.” Gerry made a gesture Jon couldn’t quite interpret. “I could walk away when I believed you two were free, but even if I’d been selfish enough to try and turn my back on all this and leave you to it, I’d never have actually been able to. I’d have worried constantly about what you were up to and how much danger you were in, with the added layer of not being tapped into the grapevine enough to hear if things went bad.”

“And let’s be realistic, I was never going to actually walk away for long.” Melanie nudged Martin’s foot with her own. “Even if things had gone the way they were supposed to, I’d have kept poking into things I shouldn’t have without telling you or anyone else and I’d have eventually run afoul of something I should have left alone and got hurt and hidden it from you so you wouldn’t feel guilty about not being there to protect me and you’d have found out when it was too late to do anything about it and felt worse and by that point I’d be enjoying whatever I got out of it and there’d be nothing for it but a concrete overcoat.”

Martin laughed. It sounded a little unwilling to Jon’s ears, but he did relax a little. “True. And God knows I’d have been fretting about what you were getting into with Ghost Hunt UK no matter what.”

“Piffle. You’d have been too busy rising the ranks at the Royal Opera to worry about me.”

Martin’s face turned bright pink, but all he said was, “You’re my sister. I’m never going to not worry about you.”

Tim smiled, but the pain in his eyes was palpable and Jon had to look away. “Okay, so that’s Sasha’s list sorted. Can I ask my questions that I didn’t want to distract us with now?”

“Please do.”

“These…Marks. The things you can see. What…what are they, exactly?”

Martin pursed his lips. “I don’t really know what they are exactly. I think they might just be my mind trying to give me a visual reference for something beyond mortal understanding or whatever. They’re…like colors, but colors that hate me.”

Jon pressed his lips together tightly to stifle a sudden urge to laugh. “How so?”

“It’s just…l-like an aura, maybe? Not exactly, but that’s the closest I can come up with. It’s like there’s a haze of color and light. When I was younger and first started seeing them, that’s all they were, just a blur, but now they’re more…distinctive, I guess. N-no, not…” Martin gave a frustrated sigh. "Sometimes there are just…streaks of color, like someone’s been smeared in paint, but it glows. And sometimes they’re more like…glyphs or sigils. Once in a while they’re handprints, like something has grabbed at the person, or…hit them or something. I think it’s got to do with how deeply they’re Marked, but it’s not like I’ve had a lot of opportunities to check. People who know about the Fourteen tend not to talk about it with people who belong to one of the other Thirteen, and even the ones who try to—how’d your mum put it? ‘Diversify their portfolios’ a little—tend to end up locked into one or another eventually. And I don’t think there are that many of them.” His shoulders slumped. “Us.”

“We weren’t trying to diversify. We were trying to avoid getting caught at all,” Melanie pointed out. “Same thing in the end, though.”

Sasha tilted her head at Martin. “So which was Gerry? Is, I should say. I guess the Marks don’t go away just because you’re not Looking.”

“No,” Martin said softly. He dropped his head for a moment, then looked up at Gerry. Jon couldn’t see his face, but from the way Gerry’s shifted, it probably wasn’t a good expression. “It’s…your whole body glowed, Ger. I couldn’t even really see you underneath it. Just a white light shaped like a person.”

Gerry looked extremely tired, but nodded. “I was afraid of something like that.”

Tim suddenly sat up straighter. “Wait. On the tape…when you and Jon were trapped in Document Storage, between Sasha running out and me coming in, you were looking through the glass and you—there was that, that weird hissing noise, and Jon said something about you taking your glasses off. You Looked, like you did when Gerry came in. And you said there was ‘something person-sized.’”

Jon sucked in a breath. “You said it was ‘a lot,’ too. Prentiss. It’s the same thing. Gerry is…Gerry is to the End whatever Prentiss was to the Corruption.”

“We call them Avatars,” Melanie said quietly. “They’re people who’ve gone over fully to one of the Fourteen. They’ve accepted powers—and, usually, longer lives—in exchange for…whatever the consequences are.”

Gerry winced. “I…may have some idea about that.”

Martin pinched the bridge of his nose. “Why do I suspect I’m going to like this even less than usual? And does this have to do with what you were up to with Gertrude?”

“Yes and no. It’s not…exactly the same, but all Fourteen have one. I think. Or at least most of them do.”

“One what?” Jon asked, as certain as Martin that he wasn’t going to like the answer.

He was right. Gerry looked him in the eye and said, “A ritual to bring that Fear fully into the world. To take it over, remake the world in its image. And their Avatars are probably a key component of that.”