It’s taken Gerard a while to get all of this set up. First he had to read the book a few times to make sure he understood it, a process that was not made easier by the fact that it’s only nominally written in English. Then he spent the better part of two weeks gathering all the necessary supplies. The hardest and most important part has been finding someone who can, and will, actually do it. He supposes he could have done it himself, but there will be places he can’t get to, and anyway, it’s better to go to an expert.
Well. Expert might be pushing it a bit.
Gerard tries not to look like he’s in too much of a hurry. This isn’t the best part of town, and that’s the quickest way to get himself in serious trouble with someone who thinks he’s a drug dealer, or some kind of lowlife, or someone who will pay to avoid anyone knowing he’s been in the area.
He’s not in trouble, and he’s not doing anything wrong—not very wrong, anyway—and he has as much right to be here as anyone. What’s safely tucked in an inner pocket of his trench coat is perfectly legal. Probably legal. Mostly legal. There’s no actual law against him carrying it, at least. The ethics are a bit dubious maybe, but there’s a saying about ends and means that Gerard figures he can make use of, just this once.
After all, it doesn’t affect anyone but him when all’s said and done.
Left, another left, a right, straight shot, and then it’s a left down the last alleyway before he reaches the docks and knock at the third door on the right. At least he doesn’t have to remember some complicated pattern or a password to get in. This isn’t quite at that level of clandestine bullshit. It’s probably close, though.
The door opens, no more than a crack, and a voice that’s half nicotine and half seawater growls in Dutch, “Who is it?”
“Gerard. We spoke last week,” Gerard says, his own Dutch a bit rough around the edges—worse than his French but definitely superior to his Arabic, and at least he’s understandable. He pats his pocket. “I’ve got the stuff.”
There’s a short pause, and then the door opens enough that Gerard can slip through.
He’s never met the man on the other side, but he’s not exactly surprised by his appearance. Tall and broad-shouldered, albeit a bit stooped, with grizzled hair and tattoos up and down both arms, the man looks like either a retired longshoreman or the sort of person you’d find in fantasy games sitting in the corner of the tavern to dispense lore and quest hooks to the shiny new adventuring party. He eyes Gerard up and down. “Money first.”
Wordlessly, Gerard reaches into a different pocket and pulls out a roll of bank notes, freshly exchanged when he made the transfer. The man flicks through it with a calloused thumb, then nods once and leads Gerard through a short hallway into an inner room hidden behind a curtain.
The room is…dingy isn’t the word. It looks run-down, slightly sagging around the edges, and definitely shady as all fuck, but at least it’s clean. Which is a good thing. Gerard is taking enough risks with this as it is; he doesn’t need tetanus, or worse, on top of it. It’s lit well enough, and the floor is bare. The walls are plastered with sketches and photographs, some of which are more interesting than others, especially to a sixteen-year-old bisexual. There are no windows, and the only way in or out is the doorway Gerard just came through. There’s a cabinet, painted black, pushed against the opposite wall. In the middle of the room is the setup you’d usually find at the dentist’s office—a rolling tray-table with tools already laid out on it, a low rolling chair of the kind normally sold for use at a computer desk, and an adjustable padded lounge chair.
The man tucks the money into his own pocket. “Right, let’s see this special stuff you’re insisting on.”
Gerard slips off his trench coat and hangs it on a hook at the man’s nod, then produces a vial of black ink. The man holds it up, then looks at Gerard sharply. “The seal’s broken. You sure about this?”
“I broke it. Thought it would save time,” Gerard lies. There are several reasons he opened this bottle almost immediately after buying it, but worry about how long it would take the man before him to open it isn’t one of them. He hands the man a piece of paper. “This is what I need.”
The man studies the paper, then shrugs and sets the bottle on the tray with the rest of the equipment. “Fine then. Let’s get started. We’ll go from the bottom up, yeah?”
Gerard nods and bends down to untie his boots. He probably should have worn shoes that would be easier to get into and out of, but he doesn’t own any shoes like that, his mother has ridiculously large feet, and while he and Martin wear the same size shoe—for the moment, anyway—he’d have had to explain why he was asking to borrow Martin’s loafers, and either he and Melanie would try to stop him doing this or they’d insist on coming along too, and he emphatically does not want that. Not yet. He needs to be sure this will work before he even suggests it to Martin and Melanie, and no way are they doing something like this until he’s sure it won’t hurt them in the process. Not to mention the fact that they aren’t technically—no, not technically, actually—old enough to do this just yet.
He’s the big brother. He needs to be the one protecting them. And he finds himself praying to a god he only half believes in that this works, because if it does…if it does, it might be the key to all of them getting away for good.
“You want this the same size in each place, or does it need to cover the whole joint?” the man asks, studying the paper again. “That’s going to change things.”
Gerard has no idea, come to think of it. The image drawn on the page he got it from is just the right size to cover his smallest joints, but does it need to scale up on larger areas or will that affect its power? It’s an experiment in so many ways and he doesn’t know the right answer.
“Same size,” he says after a moment’s pause. The man grunts in acknowledgment and waves for him to hurry up.
Hastily, Gerard strips down to his underpants and comes over to take a seat on the adjustable chair. The man raises the bottom bit so his feet are propped up, closer to where he can reach, then takes a seat on the rolling chair next to it.
“This is going to hurt,” he warns Gerard. “These are sensitive areas and it’s tiny work you’re wanting.”
“I can handle it,” Gerard assures him. “I’ve dealt with worse.”
The man grunts again, then bends over and gets to work.
Gerard rests his head back against the seat and stares up at the ceiling. It’s covered in mirrors, which is…a little creepy, he’s not going to lie, but hardly the worst thing he’s ever seen. He looks older than his age, which isn’t always a good thing, but in this case is definitely a boon. He’s technically old enough for this, at least in the Netherlands—which is why he’s here and not back in London, where he’d have had to either go to an unlicensed parlor or lie and risk the person losing their license, neither of which appeals to him. He doesn’t want to get anyone in trouble, and he doesn’t want to die, that would rather defeat the purpose.
It’s a sound principle, even if his mother seems not to think so. (Then again, his mother dismisses a lot of what he has to say; he’s used to it by now.) Sigils are a fairly common thing, as are protective charms, and it’s hardly unheard-of for people to tattoo protective sigils directly onto their bodies. The issue is that he’s not altogether certain it’s going to work. The book he found isn’t a book of power, or to put it more accurately, it isn’t of the Fourteen. But knowing what Martin told him a couple years back—that the books aren’t magic themselves, just have the Fourteen’s power all over them—he’s willing to trust it. If it belonged to someone who warded them off successfully enough that they could share that with someone else, he’ll take it.
So here he sits, in a slightly shady one-room parlor in the Netherlands, getting the tiniest of tattoos on every joint on his body.
The writer obviously has some knowledge of the Fourteen, although he doesn’t call them by the names Gerard and his family usually use—which makes sense, since the book is hundreds of years older than Robert Smirke. Gerard plans to show it to Martin and Melanie when he gets back to London, because even if he’s not a hundred percent certain this is going to work, he think they’ll both be interested in the book’s contents. In particular, he’s looking forward to the discussion they might be able to have—assuming they can have it somewhere neither his mother nor Aunt Lily will hear them—about the way the author writes about the Fears. He describes several aspects Gerard recognizes from his studies, but rather than divide them into the categories he’s familiar with…well, Gerard isn’t really sure if the writer divided them into more categories or lumped them all under one or doesn’t seem to realize they’re connected at all. It’s so old it predates modern English, and Gerard is definitely making a guess at the translation of several passages. At least it’s Middle English rather than Old English—he’d have no chance at that.
Still, the important thing is that, if Gerard understands the book correctly, the writer thinks it’s possible to gain a bit of protection from the Fears by using a bit of one of them. He quotes Geoffrey Chaucer: A theef of venysoun, that hath forlaft His likerousnesse and al his ode craft, Kan kepe a forest best of any man. In other words, by harnessing the power of one of the Fourteen, he should be able to ward against the others, at least to a point. There’s a page almost filled with tiny drawings representing various aspects of the Fears, and another with instructions on how and where to place it on the body. Some of the symbols scare him quite a bit, others less so, but after poring over all the options, he’s chosen this one in particular.
It’s not that it’s his favorite by any stretch of the imagination. He’s not really fond of any of them, really, and he’d like all of them to leave him alone. But of all the symbols, he considers that this one is the least likely to do him any real harm if he borrows a bit of it for protection. Besides, they’ve all been Marked by the Beholding already—Martin more than Gerard or Melanie, but still, he wouldn’t be surprised to learn that all three of them have it breathing down their necks and that’s why they’re even able to pick out books of power without Leitner’s label in the first place. So really, it can’t hurt anything, can it?
The needle pricks a bruise on his knee he’s forgotten was there, and he jumps involuntarily, then grips the arms of the chair and steels himself. “I’m sorry,” he says immediately. The Dutch words flow off his tongue easily—too easily. Gerard can apologize in thirty-seven languages, not counting the ones he’s got some degree of fluency in anyway, and his mother has always made damned sure he uses that to full effect. Martin is the same way. Melanie navigates life completely unapologetically; she’s been a good influence on both of them in that respect.
The man grunts, but doesn’t say anything, just keeps going. They continue to sit in silence, except for the buzzing of the tattoo gun, for some time, Gerard thinking over the details of what he’s added to this ink and hoping he hasn’t fluffed it. There’s just so much contradictory opinion on what some of the terms actually meant, so he had to take his best guess. At least he didn’t literally have to go scoop the eyes out of a newt. Thank Martin for that one; Gerard still smiles at the memory of the way his face lit up on the train to Glasgow back in August as he detailed the paper he wrote about the interpretation of the witches’ brew in Macbeth.
“Is this some kind of cult thing?” the man asks eventually as he prepares to go to work on Gerard’s knuckles. The Dutch word is sekte, which Gerard’s never heard exactly, but it’s not hard to figure out the meaning from context clues.
“No, not a cult.” It’s not technically a lie; there are cults around the Fourteen, but Gerard doesn’t belong to one of them. He does lie about the next part, though, because how can he explain the truth without sounding crazy? “It’s for this band I’m in.”
“Ah.” Is it Gerard’s imagination, or does the man relax at that? “What kind of music do you play?”
Gerard spends the next hour or so inventing a death metal band that plays out of his mate’s garage (meaning he also has to invent the mate, and enough other people to fill out a theoretical death metal band), which is extremely difficult to do in Dutch. Fortunately, his less-than-perfect facility with the language provides a good enough cover when he hesitates or stumbles over a detail. The man turns out to be a fan of death metal himself, and when the conversation shifts to professional (and, Gerard thinks a bit guiltily, real) bands they’re able to talk much more confidently. It’s not until Gerard has to stop the conversation because the only joints left they can get to without him having to lie on his stomach are the hinges of his jaw that the man says quietly, “I escaped, you know.”
“Hmm?” Gerard can’t talk, obviously, it’ll ruin the work, and he can’t turn his head, but he lifts his eyebrows inquiringly and hopes that’ll prompt the man to continue.
The man switches to English. Like most people in major European cities, especially tourist-heavy ones, he speaks far better English than Gerard does Dutch. It’s one of those things that always makes Gerard a little ashamed to be British. “I was in a cult. That is where I learned the art. I was apprenticed to the man who put the sign on the members, and the rank markings. Much simpler than what I usually do now, but it was very like this, except the eye was closed, and not so many.”
Gerard hums, not really sure what he’s trying to convey. The man nods anyway. “But I am lucky. When I was not much older than you are, a woman came. She was not supposed to be there, and I was the first to find her. And I never forget what she said. She looked me in the eye, and her Dutch was very bad, but she told me, ‘You I can save. You will leave.’” He chuckles. “Strange, no? So simply said. And yet…when she said the words, I found that my feet moved of their own accord, and I went out, for the first time in my life.” He laughs a bit more, then sighs as he blots at Gerard’s left cheek before moving on to the right. “The compound burned down that night. And the woman spoke true. Only I lived.”
Gerard mulls that over for a long time. When it’s finally safe for him to speak again, as the man is reclining the chair for him to lie down, he asks carefully, switching back to Dutch as a sign of respect, “Who was she?”
The man shrugs and gestures for Gerard to roll over. “I do not know. No one but me seemed to see her, or recall her afterwards. And I had to be…” He says a word in Dutch that Gerard doesn’t understand, then adds in English, “Deprogrammed.”
Gerard winces. “I am sorry.”
“It is better than dying.” The man presses two fingers to the first vertebra on Gerard’s neck, then follows it with the tattoo gun. “As for the woman, I would not have believed she was real if I had not seen her myself. I think she was a good spirit, or perhaps an angel come to save me. I still can’t say why I alone was worth saving, but I will never waste that gift.”
Gerard can understand that completely. He’s pretty sure death is the only thing that’s going to get him away from his mother—either his death or hers—and if he’s the one to survive, he won’t waste it either. Only he doesn’t intend to be the only one worth saving. Martin and Melanie are worth it far more than he is, and he’ll get them out, too, if he can. He just has to survive long enough to manage it.
Hopefully, the tattoos will get him most of the way to that point. He knows his brother and sister will be what gets him the rest of the way.