Gertrude is in a foul mood by the time Gerard catches up to her, if the fact that she’s practically bitten her cigarillo in half is any indication. The scowl, the way she’s pacing back and forth, the tapping of the toe—that’s all normal. But the way her teeth clench around the burning cigarillo is a sign that all is not well in Archivist Land.
“Pouri ahau,” he says automatically, stopping just outside of slapping range.
Gertrude shoots him a glare. “You speak Maori? That would have been useful three days ago.”
“I can apologize in forty-seven languages. And thirteen dialects. That’s not exactly the same as speaking a language,” Gerard replies. “Is there anything I can help you with now?”
Gertrude jerks her head over her shoulder and hands him a key—not a plastic key card, but an old-fashioned bit of bent metal that looks like it might date back to European colonization of Aotearoa. “Room 103. The tape is in the recorder and the laptop is set up. I need you to transcribe and format the statement properly.”
“Why not just add the tape to the Archives?” Gerard asks, palming the key. “I mean, why do you bother writing them up at all?”
“I haven’t bothered transcribing the ones that are…relevant. This one isn’t. Should I die before we are able to stop the Unknowing, my predecessor will need as much information as possible.”
Gerard grimaces. “That is not nearly as helpful an answer as you seem to think it is.”
Gertrude glares at him. “Really, Gerard, I wish you would give these things just a little thought. There are hundreds upon thousands of statements in the Archives, and even if only a small percentage of them are true, and an even smaller percentage are relevant to the current situation, how will a new Archivist know where to begin? If they find a tape that does not have a paper statement to match, my hope is that they will pay attention.”
“Makes sense,” Gerard allows. “So this statement you got isn’t relevant, then?”
Gertrude waves her cigarillo dismissively. It droops in the middle as she does so, and she curses and flicks it away. “Go listen and you’ll understand.”
Obediently, Gerard heads into the inn and goes searching for the room. He’s not surprised she picked this place; it’s small, out of the way, and probably keeps records by hand, so the likelihood of anyone finding out they’ve been here is slim. Of course they can likely trace her plane tickets, but first of all there’s the question of whether or not they would, and second of all she flew into Wellington. This is a good distance away—it took him a while to find her and she’d told him where to meet her—so there’s every chance their location can remain a secret.
Room 103 is an inner room with no windows, which is appropriate to Gertrude’s usual level of paranoia. (Is it actually paranoia if they’re really out to get you? a voice whispers in his mind, a voice he feels like he should recognize but doesn’t and therefore ignores.) He locks the door behind him out of habit and turns to see, as promised, the tape recorder, a set of cheap over-the-ear headphones, and the laptop set out on the small table. The fact that the room is otherwise empty tells him this is his room, not Gertrude’s, and he scans until he locates the connecting door. He checks it, and sure enough, it’s unlocked on both sides and leads to a mirrored but otherwise identical room with Gertrude’s laptop bag and kit bag set out on the dresser.
He locks the door on his side with malice aforethought before heading back to the table.
By the laptop is set up, Gertrude clearly means I changed the settings and it’s unlocked. She’s ruthless about making sure Gerard can’t access any of her files without her knowledge. Out of curiosity, and a bit of boredom, and a bit of bitter spite lingering from the fact that he just had to leave his brother and sister again and it hurts, he’s not sure why it’s so much harder than usual this time, he clicks into the settings to see if he can either find out what her password is or change it to something he’ll remember, only to discover that the old bat has deleted her password entirely. Further investigation proves that actually what she’s done is set up a secondary profile without admin privileges that can’t access any of her files, just for Gerard.
Gerry, the voice that he both knows and doesn’t know whispers in his mind.
What? He blinks and talks back to the voice, even though it’s probably just his thoughts.
Gerry, the voice repeats, and God it’s so infuriating that he can’t place whose voice it is. Your friends call you Gerry. You have friends. You are loved and deserving of love. Stop calling yourself Gerard and start calling yourself Gerry, even if Gertrude fucking Robinson doesn’t. Be your own friend. God knows you could use one right about now.
Gerard—Gerry—nods slowly, and feels something warm settle inside him, and wonders what the fuck that’s all about. Then he shakes off the weird sensation, pulls his notebook and pen out of his bag, snaps on the headphones, and pushes PLAY.
It’s not the first time he’s heard a statement. She’s had him do this a couple times, although usually she’s in the room for it; this one must really bother her if she doesn’t want to listen again. On the other hand, the date is today’s—he confirms that with the time displayed at the bottom of the screen—so maybe she just doesn’t want to hear it twice in rapid succession. Especially since he usually has to make her stop and replay sections when the tapes get too far ahead of his typing; he’s fast, but not that fast. Since she’s not here, though, Gerry decides to deploy his secret weapon.
He hopes he can remember how to do this.
It comes back to him fairly quickly as he listens, the loops and scrawls he first learned the summer he turned fourteen, the summer Melanie almost had a breakdown because she and Martin wouldn’t be in all the same classes in the fall and she couldn’t take notes fast enough to keep up and be sure of understanding them. If she’d had her dyslexia diagnosis three years earlier she might have just brought a tape recorder to class, but then Gerry found a book on the Gregg shorthand method, and it helped, or at least she said it did; they eventually developed their own variant on it. Since they’d moved past writing letters to one another when they were separated, Gerry at least fell out of the habit. He doesn’t know if Martin and Melanie still use it and makes a note to ask them when he gets home. In the meantime, he uses it to scrawl down the statement in more or less real time.
It’s not a pleasant statement, that’s for sure, but the Flesh is rarely pretty. He supposes it could be worse. At least it wasn’t a gigantic chicken. He remembers getting chased through the Spanish countryside by a particularly vicious flock, and those were just ordinary chickens. It isn’t hard to look in the eyes of a rooster and know it’s the last living descendant of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and that it’s aware of that fact too. Pigs are nasty, but at least you expect to get eaten by a pig…if you know anything about them, anyway. Most people don’t.
Gerry snaps himself back to the present as the man on the tape begins going on about a circus. He understands now why Gertrude wanted this statement in the first place, and why she’s so upset now. It’s not just any circus she wants, it’s the Circus of the Other—Martin will probably know how to say it in Russian without Gerry even having to translate it—but of course she can’t say that. Can’t tell people she’s looking for a Russian circus, or a circus that isn’t supposed to be there. No, she’s got to be all vague and mysterious and imprecise, and then she gets annoyed when they don’t tell her what she wants to hear. If she’d just ask up front, they wouldn’t waste her time so much, but why should she listen to him?
He can’t help but chuckle a little at the end—he can only imagine what Gertrude’s face must have looked like when the man offered her bacon—and then the tape clicks off. He studies it briefly, then skims over his shorthand notes. Concrete. Seems a neat solution, if a bit quiet and controlled for Gertrude’s usual methods, but then again she wouldn’t risk burning down the man’s livelihood just to destroy a monster pig. Maybe. Probably. She might if it had actually been the Stranger, but not for the Flesh.
Sighing, he takes off the headphones and turns to the laptop. Easier to transcribe his notes, he thinks, than to try and type while listening. He remembers Melanie telling him once about court stenographers, and how they have a special keyboard that types in shorthand, and he thinks it’s too bad Gertrude can’t set her laptop up to do that. Then he pushes the thought out of his mind and gets to typing.
He’s just about done when he hears the rattle of someone trying to turn, then jiggling the doorknob behind him. A moment later, he hears Gertrude’s muffled voice. “Gerard. Gerard, open the door.”
“Sorry, what’s that? I can’t hear you,” Gerry calls over his shoulder, trying to sound as innocent as possible while typing as fast as he can to get to the end of the statement. “There’s a door in the way.”
“Gerard Albrecht Keay, I do not have time for this.” Gertrude’s voice was dark and ominous. “Unlock this door at once or I will compel every secret you possess out of you.”
“All right, all right, no call for that, it was just a bit of fun,” Gerry grumbles. He types the last line, quickly folds his notepad closed and tucks it in his pocket, then gets up to open the door. “Sorry. Wasn’t completely sure you had that room and I didn’t want to risk someone walking in who wasn’t supposed to. Not while I had the statement open.”
“Hmm, yes, quite.” Gertrude doesn’t seem inclined to apologize, but she at least stops yelling. “Are you finished transcribing it yet?”
“Just got to the end. I see what you mean. Flesh, is it?”
Gertrude nods crisply. “That particular threat is at the very least contained, but I am rather disappointed the lead didn’t pan out.” She tilts her head at him. “How did yours turn out?”
Right. Gerry told her he had a lead to follow up on, which was why he’d gone back to England after Beijing rather than come with her to Wellington. Luckily, thanks to Melanie and a bit of gossip she picked up from someone in her ghost hunting circles, he at least has a thread they can look into. “Actually, I do. Town called Tonopah, Nevada, in the US.”
Gertrude raises an eyebrow. “Oh? Do tell.”
“There’s a motel there called the Clown Motel. No, I’m not making this up,” Gerry adds, seeing the look on her face. “Honestly, it’s there. And equally honestly, it’s right next to an abandoned cemetery…”
“Oh, really, Gerard.”
“I’m serious! According to my source, the graveyard is mostly miners, and it’s a fairly well-known haunt, but, well, as creepy as the motel is, it’s never really been associated with anything…supernatural.” Gerry spreads out his hands, palms up. “Until recently. One of those ghost hunting shows over there went to do a bit on the cemetery and stayed in the motel because it’s the most convenient place, and…it went weird. My source didn’t have too many details, not specific ones. All I know for sure is that one of the crew members swore they were being followed by one of the clowns.”
“Clowns do tend to move.”
“Not when they’re painted on cinder brick walls, they don’t.”
Gertrude pauses, but in that moment, Gerry knows he’s won. He presses his advantage. “Could be the Spiral, but clowns…that’s almost always the Stranger. We wear the mask that grins and lies…”
At that, Gertrude looks up sharply. “What was that?”
“Uh, it’s a poem. ‘We Wear the Mask.’” Gerry tries and fails to remember who it’s by, or where Martin learned it.
“You weren’t…compelled to say that?” Gertrude continues to interrogate him, digging at him with razor-keen precision. He appreciates that she isn’t compelling him, at least.
Gerry taps the eye on the hinge of his jaw twice with a forefinger. “I’d know if I was. It’s just a poem a kid I knew recited once that stuck with me.”
Not exactly a lie, but a bit of a misdirect. Martin’s not just “some kid he knew”, and while the poem had in fact struck Gerry hard when he’d first heard Martin recite it, he’d actually learned it by dint of making him repeat it several times until Martin finally gave him his copy. He recites it for Gertrude now.
“Hmm.” She purses her lips. “An interesting poem. I can’t say if it’s relevant here, but it does seem to be of the Stranger.” She closes her laptop and picks up both it and the tape recorder. “Come. If we’re going to get to Nevada in a timely fashion, we need to get to the airport sooner rather than later. You haven’t unpacked, have you?”
“When have I had the time?”
As usual, his sarcasm rolls right off her. “Good. An abandoned cemetery next to a motel already full of clowns in a largely empty desert would be an ideal spot for a ritual unobserved, so if the Unknowing is going to be held there, we need to be on the spot to disrupt it.”
Gerry finds, as he follows Gertrude out the door and to the rental car at the curb, that he’s actually desperately hoping she’s right, and the Unknowing is happening in Tonopah, Nevada. Because if it is, then they can stop it without having to go back to England or involve anybody else in their fight. The world will be safe from being taken over by the Stranger.
And, most importantly, Martin and Melanie will be safe, too.