Gerry can’t sleep. Or maybe more accurately won’t sleep. The flashbacks don’t happen when he’s actually, truly sleeping, but they tend to come on just before he falls asleep—at least he’s never stayed awake after one—and he doesn’t want to risk one, not now. Partly it’s that he doesn’t want to see which memory, his own or someone else’s, Terminus will dredge up for him today. Partly it’s that he doesn’t want to be in the middle of one if—when—someone calls.
He doesn’t know what it’s like from the outside when he goes into one, but the look on Tim’s face when he woke him up that morning tells him it’s probably not a picnic for his boyfriend (bedmate, partner, boytoy, whatever) to witness any more than it is for him to experience them. And this last one was a real whopper, one that left him sick and shaking and feeling like Lady Macbeth—Out, damned spot, out! He doesn’t really want to sleep after that anyway, and Tim not being there makes it worse. He and Melanie—and Sasha, which Gerry can’t decide if that makes it better or worse—are up in Great Yarmouth again, staking out the place they’re sure will be the site of the Unknowing. They haven’t been able to confirm it one way or another, but they’re still trying. Gerry is nervous and anxious about them; it’s not that he doesn’t trust them, although Martin is ninety percent of Melanie’s impulse control, it’s just that he knows the Stranger can be insidious and he worries that it will sneak in where they’re least expecting.
He’s also worried about Martin. Nobody’s heard from him in three days, since he called to ask about Gertrude’s arrest records—and that was news to Gerry, that she’d been caught adding him to the Book—and he would have expected him to at least text and tell Jon what his plans are. Strung out, nervous, and more than a little worried that the Hunters who had the Book last might have heard Martin mention his name and decided to take steps, he finally tried calling shortly after Tim let him know they’d reached Great Yarmouth, only for the phone to ring a few times and then abruptly drop the call. He tried again a few minutes ago and only got the automated intercept message, and texts are going through as undeliverable. Either the international plan provided by the Institute has reached its limit…or something has happened.
Gerry isn’t betting on the plan not being an unlimited one.
So here it is, inching ever closer towards the wee small hours, and he is running out of ways to keep himself awake. He’s tried reading, but the point he’s at in Dracula isn’t helping; he’s tried drawing, but what appears on his canvas is scaring him almost as bad as the flashbacks, and the music he usually listens to makes things worse. About the only things he’s been able to do are smoke and fret, and he’s down to his last cigarette.
He’s starting to get shaky. It’s been a while since he’s…fed, for lack of a better word, and without Tim, Martin, or Melanie there to redirect his attention or hold him accountable, the temptation to go prowl the streets and find something more substantial than the stopgap measures he’s been using is almost too strong. Woodbines are a poor substitute for a human soul—and Gerry is not sure at what point in time that became a normal fucking thing for him to think, but here he is—and he’s already asking himself if Martin would really condemn him if he knew, which is not a good sign for either of them. God, it’s a good thing Melanie isn’t becoming a full-blown avatar of something, because the three of them would be an absolute disaster, regardless of what Fear she found herself bound to.
He paces, and smokes, and frets, and tries calling Martin again, only to get the fucking automatic intercept message. It’s not that late over there, Martin should be able to answer, but he isn’t, which means something is wrong, but there’s nothing he can really do. He still hasn’t got a new passport because he keeps getting the runaround about whether he needs to renew or reapply and it’s honestly not that high on his list of priorities right now, so he can’t exactly go over to America to help. And it’s a big fucking country; even knowing the last place Martin was, there are so many places he could have gone since and so many places he could be. It’s the main reason he’s reluctant to express his worries to anyone else, particularly Jon. He doesn’t doubt for a minute that Jon will go over there and tear the entire country apart with his bare hands if he thinks Martin is in trouble, but Martin will kick Gerry’s ass if he lets him get hurt.
Damn Gertrude. Did she have to be so bloody mysterious all the time? Why couldn’t she have left them a clear, concise folder with all of her plans and provisions laid out in color-coded bullet points, rather than traipsing around the world with her cards so close to her chest they’re practically down her bra and her trust no one attitude that obviously hadn’t served her well at all? Or even left it in a file—or several files—on her laptop? But the team had already scoured her office…
Gerry freezes mid-puff. The Archivist’s office. A conversation he had with Gertrude once pops into his head. He stares off into the distance for a moment, running through his thoughts, then picks up his phone and dials a number.
“I’m breaking into your office,” he says without preamble as soon as the call is picked up.
“Wh…Gerry?” Jon sounds confused and fogged with sleep.
“Yeah.” Gerry backtracks and tries to remember the appropriate social script for calling someone in the middle of the night to get permission to do something that would otherwise be illegal. “Sorry. Hi. It’s Gerry. Didn’t mean to wake you up. I’m going to break into your office.”
There’s a long pause, and a bit of rustling from the other end. “Okay? N-no, wait…there’s security. I think. You—I’ll let you in.”
Gerry decides it’s not worth the argument. “Fine. I’ll meet you there.”
The Underground runs late now, so he’s able to get to the Institute fairly quickly. He doesn’t know if he’s going to beat Jon there or not—he’s still a bit hazy on where exactly he and Martin live these days, so he doesn’t know which train he has to take—but he’s not prepared for Jon to pull into a parking spot right as he walks up.
“I didn’t know you drove,” he says, gesturing at the car.
Jon shrugs. He still doesn’t look like he’s completely awake, but he’s at least functioning. “It’s Tim’s. He didn’t want to be up there in something that could be traced back to him and loaned it to me while they were gone in exchange for—” He stifled a yawn. “—taking them to the train station.”
Which makes sense, at least. Gerry sighs. “Fine. So how do we get in without alerting security?”
Jon leads him around to the side door, unlocks it, and lets him in. The Archives are pitch black and—quite frankly—spooky this late at night, but before Gerry even has time to really get nervous or start wondering if the Dark itself somehow got in, Jon clicks on a torch with a familiarity that tells Gerry he’s done this more than once.
“Come here often, then?” he asks dryly, and then instantly regrets it. Even if Jon wasn’t asexual, he’s dating Martin—although dating is a bit of a mild term to put on the level of commitment, depth of feeling, and amount of pining that goes on between the two of them.
Jon, however, doesn’t seem to notice. “We didn’t always want Elias to know how often we’d been in the tunnels,” he says, a bit distractedly. “It’s this way.”
Gerry trails after Jon to his office, then takes the torch so he can unlock the door. He’s about to start scanning when Jon flips a switch and lights up the room.
It’s…unsettlingly familiar, and yet odd at the same time. Gerry hasn’t been here since coming back to life—he never made it down to the Archives during the attack and hasn’t been back to the Institute since, to keep Elias from knowing he’s alive—and he hasn’t adequately prepared for seeing it. Gertrude was never one for the personal touch, but he remembers the very specific tea mug, the fountain pens, the smart jacket that always hung on the coat rack even though he never saw her wear it, the calendar she claimed she left up despite it being a quarter century out of date because the cat in the picture looked like hers. Now the coat rack is gone, replaced with a flimsy set of shelves bristling with files and a cardigan Gerry recognizes as one Martin made to use up his scrap yarn and gave Melanie as a gag gift tossed casually over some of them. There are no pens or tea mugs to be seen; Jon is seemingly obsessive about keeping his desktop clear. The calendar has been replaced with a more up-to-date one, the dates methodically and precisely crossed off, although the picture is still one of cats. Even the desk is different, a heavy dark walnut that could easily be used as a barricade in a siege.
For a moment, Gerry stares at the office in dismay. Then he shakes it off and turns to Jon. “Since you’re here, I can look through your office, right?”
Jon gestures vaguely at the room. “Knock yourself out.”
Gerry begins going through the desk, even though it’s new; he presumes whatever was in the previous desk would be transferred over, so it’s a chance. In the top drawer he finds the pens—not fountain pens, but not cheap biros either—plus a stamp pad, a bottle of ink, and a pack of what look like statement forms. The next one contains several blank tapes and a jar filled with what appears to be dirt, or possibly ashes. The bottom drawer contains nothing but a spare set of clothing. With a regretful sigh, he shuts the drawer and starts looking through the shelves.
Jon watches him for several minutes, then finally asks, “What are you looking for?”
“Oh.” Gerry sighs, half buried in a stack of files. “I finally remembered…not long before I ended up in the hospital, Gertrude told me that if something got her first…there’s a storage unit on an industrial estate up near Hainault. It’s where she was storing what she had that she reckoned might disrupt the Unknowing, once she pinpointed where it was. She said she rented it under the name Jan Kelly, and hid a key for it somewhere in the Archives.”
Jon blinks. “Oh. Why didn’t you say so? I found that already.”
Gerry straightens too fast and bangs his head on the underside of the shelf. He lets out a string of Italian profanity he learned from Tim and carefully extracts himself, then turns to face Jon. “You what?”
Jon shakes his head and looks embarrassed. “I’m—I’m sorry, I should have asked you sooner, but…”
Gerry takes a deep breath and tries to calm down. “Sorry, my fault, I did kind of wake you up and throw questions at you. Uh, thanks for just helping me without demanding to know what I was doing, though.” That elicits a tiny laugh out of Jon. “You found the storage unit?”
“N-no, no, I found the key,” Jon replies. His eyes go vacant for a second. “It was—early December sometime? Martin and I listened to one of Gertrude’s tapes together…it, your mother was on it, she was telling Gertrude about…the Book.”
Gerry shivers. “I can’t imagine Martin took that well.”
“He didn’t. But at the end of it…your mother gave Gertrude a page out of the Book. She didn’t say who was in it, just that it was in English. And I heard Gertrude…open a floorboard after.” Jon crosses over to a corner of his office, kneels down, and levers up a board; it does in fact give a rather distinctive creak. “This is where her laptop was. And…I also found this.” He holds up a plain, ordinary-looking key.
“That’s it.” Gerry moves closer and takes the key from him, examining it.
Jon puts the board back and gets to his feet. “Near Hainault, you said?”
“Yeah, an industrial site. Not sure which one.”
“Well, there can’t be but so many up there. Come on, then.” Jon turns for the door.
Gerry blinks at him. “What, now?”
Jon turns and looks back at him. “Now that I know it’s there, I don’t think my curiosity will let me wait much longer. And…I’m not sure I can go back to sleep.”
Gerry feels a bit guilty. “I shouldn’t have woken you.”
“Well, regardless, you did. Anyway, if we go now, Elias is less likely to know where we’ve gone. Personally, I’d like to keep him in the dark as much as possible.”
“Fair point,” Gerry admits. “All right. Let’s go.”
Jon gives him his phone to look up storage units in the area while he drives them up to Hainault. Gerry finds two and calls both, without any particularly high hopes. One goes to a voicemail that informs him the office hours are nine AM to five PM, but that access to the units is available year round, which is not helpful. The other, surprisingly, gets an actual human being who seems delighted to have something to disrupt their boring night and happily assures “Mr. Kelly” that his unit is still fully paid up, although only through the end of the month. The kid on the other end even “confirms” the unit number and gives him the access code to the gate, as apparently they’re not actually on site, which is a boon Gerry hasn’t been expecting.
When they reach the unit, Gerry has Jon key in the number—65317—and the gate slowly swings open. Jon finds an unobtrusive spot to park the car, and they begin wandering the rather eerie rows of units. Finally, Gerry stops. “This is it. 1034.”
Jon hands Gerry the key. He fumbles with the lock for a moment, then pops it open and rolls up the metal door. The light from the outside doesn’t provide a lot of illumination, but it enables him to spy a cord dangling from the ceiling, which he pulls. A light clicks on overhead.
Jon almost drops the torch. “Good Lord.”
It’s…cluttered isn’t the word. Everything is neatly stacked and, if not organized, at least put in relatively orderly rows. But it’s crowded, and Gerry is suddenly thankful they didn’t bring Martin, who would likely be feeling more than a little claustrophobic, especially after Gerry shepherds Jon in and rolls the door down behind them—not, however, before pocketing the lock, just in case.
“That’s Gertrude.” Gerry sighs. “If something’s worth doing, it’s worth…searching through a couple dozen unmarked cardboard boxes for.”
“Did she give you any hint of what it might be we’re looking for?” Jon asks. “Other than ‘something to disrupt the Unknowing’?”
Gerry shakes his head. “She said she’d show me when we got back to London. Mind you, she had this weird look in her eyes, like it was some kind of joke.”
“Was it?”
“Probably not. She didn’t make jokes.”
Jon goes quiet for a moment, looking around the storage unit. Gerry figures he’s trying to figure out where to start until he asks, very softly, “Do you think she knew? That, that you weren’t likely to make it back to London alive?”
Gerry…honestly hasn’t considered that question before. “I-I mean…not exactly? She couldn’t have Known. Not like that. The future, it’s—anyone who tells you they can see the future, for certain anyway, is lying. There are…probabilities, sure, but everything we’ve ever found that has to do with fortune-telling or, or predictions or whatever, it’s been Web-aligned. Someone once said the only two things the Eye can’t See are what might have been and what might be.”
“Who told you that?”
“Genuinely, can’t remember. I was a little kid and they weren’t talking to me.” Gerry doesn’t even remember who the person was talking to, either, but he’s not going to say that. “Anyway, Gertrude might’ve known I was sick. I kept having headaches, real bad ones, but she always said I’d be fine. I just…assumed she Knew it wasn’t all that bad, but looking back on it, she probably didn’t want to waste energy on something like that, not when she was focused on clowns and skin-stealing monsters and saving the world. She was never one to treat one life as more important than that.”
Jon exhales heavily. “She sounds like a delightful person.”
Gerry shrugs. “She had her moments. Most of the time, though, yeah, she frustrated me. Anyway, let’s…see what’s here.”
They begin searching through the stacks and boxes. Jon finds a few paintings with the eyes cut out; Gerry finds a box full of dolls that have also had their eyes removed. Something about that tickles at the back of his mind, but he—perhaps unwisely—ignores it and keeps searching. There are a number of shredded newspapers, too, but Gerry can’t tell if they are—or were—important, or if they’re just there for packing.
An exclamation from Jon draws his attention, and he whips around. “What? You found something?”
“I—I don’t know. It’s…” Jon gestures helplessly. “I found a book.”
Instantly, Gerry is at Jon’s side, staring down at it. It’s a notebook, or appears to be one from the outside, which…isn’t necessarily comforting. One of the nastiest books he’s ever picked up for his mother was ostensibly a mimeographed recipe book bound with a plastic comb, the kind put together and sold by Ladies’ Auxiliaries to raise money for a new sanctuary roof or something. He pokes at it gently, but the book, thankfully, doesn’t respond.
“I…Gertrude wouldn’t have kept it here if it was dangerous,” he says, a little uncertainly.
“Unless she thought it would stop the Unknowing,” Jon points out.
“Tell you what.” Gerry hands Jon his lighter. “Stand back. And be ready with that if I start screaming.”
He waits until Jon backs away, then gingerly lifts the book out of the box, where it’s nestled between several empty glass frames and a moth-eaten scarf. Holding his breath, he slowly opens the cover, then sighs in relief when he sees what’s inside. “It’s okay. It’s Gertrude’s handwriting.”
Jon relaxes and comes closer again. “What does she have to say?”
“Absobloodylutely nothing useful,” Gerry grumbles, angling the notebook so Jon can see as he flicks through the pages. Names, locations, dates, none of them with any meaning as far as he can see. “We can take it with us, but I doubt it’s going to give us anything helpful.”
“You never know. I-it might have something.” Jon takes the book from Gerry and sets it somewhere obvious they won’t lose it, hopefully. “There were dates. Maybe we can match them with statements.”
“That’s a thought,” Gerry admits. “But it’s likely not what she meant.”
“No,” Jon agrees. “We should keep looking.”
Gerry resumes his search. Frankly, it looks like an old woman’s storage unit, filled with things she doesn’t want or need anymore. He’s frowning down at a box of what appears to be dusty old lace, about to reach into it and pull something out, when Jon asks in a voice that sounds very much like he doesn’t want to ask it, “Have you…heard from Martin?”
Gerry straightens and turns to look at Jon, who is studiously avoiding him, but also not really looking all that hard—more scuffling through the boxes pretending to look busy. He doesn’t want to answer him, but does, reluctantly. “No. Not since you said he’d called. I—I tried to call him earlier, and it didn’t go through.”
“So did I. I was hoping…” Jon shakes his head. “He’s, he’ll be fine. He promised.”
Gerry doesn’t point out that he made a promise, too, and that it took a deal with the devil to even partially fulfill it. “Martin’s tough. I’m sure he’ll be all right. Probably he’s just in a dead zone or something.”
Jon’s head comes up in alarm, and then he suddenly relaxes. “Oh, you mean…l-like a cell phone dead zone.”
“Yeah. Martin’s alive. I’d know if he wasn’t.” Gerry taps his left temple. Jon probably can’t see the streak of white there—Gerry’s careful to arrange his hair to keep it hidden—but he can never seem to cover it up with dye, no matter how he tries.
“That’s…oddly comforting.” Jon sighs and goes back to furricking through the boxes, but at least this time he seems less upset.
Gerry turns to look in another box and frowns. “Now why in the hell would she have a box of…mangy fur scraps?”
Instantly, Jon is at his side, snatching the scrap from beneath his fingers. He turns it over, a look of mingled disgust and upset on his face. “It’s a gorilla skin.”
“Are those even legal?”
“It was from the fourth century.” Jon stares at the scrap of skin, then lets it fall back into the pile. “Orsinov was looking for it. She…she wanted to ‘wear it to dance the world new.’”
A chill runs down Gerry’s spine. “Fuck. It was her costume for the Unknowing.”
Jon gives a single nod. “And in its absence…she needs something powerful.”
“Like the skin of an Archivist. Well, that does it, you’re not allowed to spend a minute alone until Martin gets back.” Gerry scowls at the box, then folds the top closed. “Maybe not even then, but that’s up to him.”
“What if they try for him again?” Jon holds up his hands, backs towards Gerry, showing him the raised scars and chapped edges. “I’m…not in good condition, but…”
“I can’t do anything for him,” Gerry says. “Except protect you.”
Jon slumps and turns away. Something seems to catch his eye, and he moves towards it. Curious, Gerry follows him over to a hard case, dull black with brushed nickel clasps. It could be something simple, like a typewriter or a record player, something left over from Gertrude’s childhood…but he doesn’t say anything, just watches as Jon undoes the buckles and lifts the lid slowly. Both of them stare at the contents for a long time, then look up at each other.
Gerry’s the one to finally break the silence in the end. “Yep. That’ll do it.”