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“We have all fought for our lives
more than we know,
survived our own questions.”
― Andrea Gibson, The Madness Vase
As a kid, Gerry Keay had come up with a hypothesis. People, he decided, with all the conviction of a philosophical pre-teen, were a lot like planets. He doesn't remember exactly when this had first crossed his mind, but he had some guesses. It was definitely sometime before his mother had realized that maybe letting him spend hours alone and unsupervised in the library was a poor choice -- not for him but for her, and the prying eyes of librarians who had started taking too much interest in the home life of a boy who seemed to have nowhere better to be during typical grade school hours.
Regardless, it went like this: People were like planets -- they had their own unique systems to sustain themselves, they orbited one another in specific but completely intertwined ways, and most importantly, they each carried with them their own sort of gravity.
Growing up, he couldn't really articulate that last part, but he certainly felt it. At first he thought it might be a feature unique to people like him and his mom; people who existed in the strange and secret world Mary had pushed him into. But he realized soon enough that that wasn't really true -- there was plenty that made his life different, "special" his mother would say, but that wasn't one of them. It was true of everyone, whether they were privy to the secrets of his mother's teachings or not. He saw it on TV, between characters that fought and fell in love and helped and hurt each other. He saw it out in the world, sitting quietly by himself, watching other children and adults from afar as they moved through their blissfully unaware lives. He saw it everywhere. All living things exerted their own kind of force.
Some were just stronger than others.
Mary, for instance, was like a gravity well -- and, try as he might, there was nothing he could do to escape. If people were like planets, he decided, then maybe he himself was more like a moon -- destined to forever exist only in relation to another, stronger thing. Something that could keep him locked in place and moving in circles.
The day Mary Keay died but did not die, Gerry finally realized just how true that was.
To say that he'd always been afraid of his mother wouldn't be entirely accurate. When he was young, he hadn't been able to put two and two together to figure out just what had happened to his father -- that particular revelation didn't come until much, much later, when it was far too late to be shocked. It wasn't so much fear as it was an instinctive need to avoid, or, failing that, to appease.
Usually appease.
Even before he understood just how dangerous his mother was, he felt the need to try and protect himself from her. Giving in to her pull and letting himself spin in aimless, endless orbit as the world around him got darker and darker. It was just the path of least resistance. The simplest possible solution in a life that was rarely, if ever, very simple.
When Mary manifested for the first time, the product of her own botched binding to the End's book, Gerry's first instinct hadn't been terror or disappointment or even grief. He had stood very still, listened to what she had to say -- her orders for him, really -- and then he'd nodded. He hadn't said a word.
Then, when he was alone again, standing in the company of Pinhole Book's crowded stacks and shelves, he'd laughed.
It spilled out of him in peels, starting slow and quiet and finally escalating, louder and louder until he began to struggle to recognize the sound of his own voice. Maybe he was crying, then, too, but he didn't care. Even when the hysterics died down and he was left choking for air, snot bubbling from his nose, ears ringing, he hadn't been afraid.
That's the thing about gravity. It doesn't care about your feelings, and you don't get a say in how hard it drags you down.
To be completely honest, Gerry had not noticed the door at first -- which in his line of work, should have been a death sentence. Getting caught unaware by The Slaughter had been sloppy enough. This was arguably worse.
The initial tip had been run-of-the-mill by their standards -- an eBay listing for a "cursed" copy of All Quiet On The Western Front coupled with a handful of news stories about people mysteriously manifesting what tabloids were calling "stigmata" but doctors were calling puncture wounds, likely caused by something like a bayonet. No one had died yet but it was clearly only a matter of time unless someone stepped in. That's how Gerry found himself on a flight bound for Frankfurt and then in the back of a cab bound for a quaint little town called Dieburg about 40 kilometers out of the city.
Finding the Leitner had been easy. The poor book seller, an aging man with salt-and-pepper hair who cut anything but an imposing figure, had been eager to get it out of his shop and gave it to Gerry for a measly €300.
It wasn't until later that night when Gerry had actually pulled out his lighter and tried to burn the damn thing that all hell broke loose.
Before the first page could even begin to curl up under the flame, Gerry had found himself surrounded by what looked like the ghosts of an entire platoon of soldiers, dressed head to toe in World War 1 garb. Germans, by the look of their uniforms if Gerry were remembering his history correctly. He may not be. In fairness to him, everything he'd ever learned about the Great War had been to better understand the signs of The Slaughter. He was hardly an expert.
The next several seconds were a bit of a blur.
The soldiers themselves may not have been entirely corporeal but their weapons sure seemed to do the trick -- the bayonet wounds were easy to understand after that -- and, well, Gerry hadn't exactly been prepared for this specific contingency. Slaughter books were a bit more rare than you might think, especially given humanity's collective obsession with war history, and when he did find them, they were usually more flash than substance. Easy enough to destroy.
Served him right for being too cocky.
And that's how Gerry Keay had found himself hobbling down the street of a tiny German suburb with a half-singed Leitner under one arm and a nasty stab wound in his thigh. The soldier-ghosts weren't fast, thankfully, but the fact they seemed able to teleport to the book the second a flame so much as got close to it posed a problem. This one wasn't going to be easy to burn -- at least not here, and not like this. He needed to get somewhere secure, somewhere protected, so he could destroy the book and go home.
Easier said than done, it would seem.
The alley he turns down is a dead end -- should be a dead end, anyway -- and for a second, it is. And then, immediately, it isn't. But that's a fact that takes Gerry almost a full minute to become aware of as he presses himself to the cool bricks and tries to put pressure on his wound with his free hand. He curses under his breath.
"Now, now, little Assistant, that's no way to greet someone who is here to help." Gerry doesn't actually see the door open, but he does hear it -- a creek, like rusted hinges, the click of a latch that isn't actually there. And then, all at once, he is no longer alone.
The voice immediately makes Gerry think of an echo, somehow -- the sound of something being thrown down a well.
Gerry whirls around, ignoring the shooting pain of his leg and very nearly tripping himself on a pile of garbage bags he'd been half-heartedly using as cover -- he honestly wasn't sure if eldritch ghost creatures could see through walls or not but it seemed worthwhile to at least try.
Before him was -- well, it definitely wasn't a man, standing at the end of the formerly dead-end alley, in front of a very garish yellow door. It's difficult to look directly at it, though Gerry thinks that might be in part due to the adrenaline coursing through his system coupled with the blood loss. The puncture definitely didn't knick anything vital but it certainly hasn't slowed down and the pant leg of his dark jeans was doing little to stem the blood flow.
He can clock a definitively humanoid shape, and some animal part of his brain unhelpfully supplies a jumbled collection of frantic details like "sharp teeth" and "menacing eyes" though he can't exactly verify those claims directly. It feels almost like trying to stare into one of those magic eye pictures, except whoever asked you to look at it now won't stop moving it around. The image solidifies for just a second and then it's back to the blur.
Gerry inventories his options. They are as follows:
- Run. A tried and true method, to be sure, but unlikely to have any real success, given both his wound and the almost too literal rock-and-hard-place he's put himself in between the door creature and The Slaughter book's...whatever they actually are prowling around. Not a great idea.
- Ignore. A viable back up plan, though perhaps a stupid one. Gerry hasn't had many direct encounters with The Spiral, but he knows enough to understand the signs of its Power when he experiences them. This thing would probably love nothing more than his attention. He's never heard of The Spiral and The Slaughter working together but it was absolutely a possibility that this thing had shown up just to distract him so Gerry could be torn to shreds and the Leitner saved. Ignoring it and focusing on -- well. Okay, so the ignore option did sort of require Gerry having an actual clue what he would do instead and -- He didn't. Not yet, anyway. He was still working on that part.
- Give up, sit down, and accept his fate. Again, not really ideal.
In lieu of making any real decisions, Gerry swore again, louder this time. The thing in front of the door laughed. Gerry didn't realize his nose was bleeding until he felt it drip down onto his lips.
"Now really isn't the best time for this," Gerry finally allowed as he wiped at his face with the back of his hand. By the feel, he probably only managed to smear blood on his cheek but it wasn't like he was trying to impress anyone right now, so he'd deal with it later. If he ever got a later. "Can we maybe rain check for after I'm done with my work? One crisis at a time and all that."
As far as arguments go, it's not one of Gerry's strongest.
The thing looms and, apparently at some point during Gerry's stymied internal debate he realizes that it solidified into something a bit more bearable. It could even pass as human now, lanky and a little gawky with messy hair, sure, but human -- except the illusion only really works as long as Gerry keeps his eyes slightly unfocused and aimed at the space right over the thing's shoulder. The second he catches it dead on it's shattered all over again in a too-sharp-too-tall-too-many-bones mess.
"You'll forgive me my rudeness, then," it says, lilting and casual and too sweet by half, "I certainly didn't mean to intrude -- but you seem to have caught the attention of something that very much wants you dead and, like I said, I'm here to help."
Gerry very much doubts that.
He narrows his eyes. For a moment, the door-thing meets his gaze directly and Gerry's ears start to ring. Its irises look like the space between TV channels. Color bars searching for a signal.
"Burning that particular book won't do you any good," it continues, as though Gerry had asked it a question. "But you've realized that haven't you?" It gestures to his leg where the black denim was now tacky and glistening with blood. "It's too...defensive. The Slaughter does prefer to meet violence with more violence."
Gerry's face must do something at that, because the thing's expression twists into an even bigger grin -- smarmy, now, and deeply self satisfied. It's teeth are in rows, like a shark's -- or maybe it's just a trick of the light. Gerry bristles. "Why, exactly, should I trust you?"
"Oh, you absolutely shouldn't." The thing answers easily, shrugging one shoulder in a motion that looks almost superimposed onto its body. "That would be a very stupid thing to do. Thankfully I'm not asking for your trust, I'm just offering you a favor. And, by the look of things, you don't have many alternate options here, little Assistant. From what I've heard, you are quite good at surviving so it would be a shame to see your lucky streak come to an end like this, wouldn't it?"
As if on cue, there's a noise from the mouth of the alleyway -- echoing footsteps, heavy boots, scraping trench knives. Gerry doesn't have to look behind him to know the ghost soldiers have finally closed in.
Gertrude, Gerry thinks belatedly, is going to be furious.
"What does The Spiral want with a Slaughter book?" He finally thinks to ask, desperately trying to buy time to come up with any other option.
"It doesn't. I don't. I'm much less interested in whatever clumsy marching orders The Slaughter might be giving and much more interested in you, Assistant. I would hate to see you taken off the board so soon and so inelegantly." As it speaks, its lips pull into a vague approximation of a pout. Watching its expression change makes Gerry momentarily lose track of the rest of its features. "So here I am, offering my services."
It is not entirely clear, even in context, what those services might actually be, but the thing extends a hand anyway. It looks mostly normal, except that it doesn't -- it's the magic eye effect all over again, but somehow worse. Gerry gets the distinct impression that if he were to touch that hand, he'd come away even bloodier than he already is. But the alley way isn't very long and the ghost soldiers may be slow but they're not that slow and --
Well.
"Fine."
At least if he doesn't survive this, Gertrude won't be able to kill him herself, right?
Gerry reaches under his jacket and pulls the lightly charred Leitner out from under his arm, dropping it right into the thing's palm.
He's not exactly sure what he expected to happen after that, but he certainly didn't anticipate the thing very casually and with no fanfare at all tossing the book right over its shoulder like a grade school student who was just let off on summer holiday. It sails breezily through the air, it's pages fluttering with the sudden force, through the -- wait, Gerry hadn't even seen the door open. When did it open?
The door slams shut.
The ghost soldiers vanish in an instant, as if they'd never even been there in the first place. The gash on Gerry's leg, unfortunately, does not.
The door thing claps its hands together, dusting them off as though it had actually done something more than throw a €300 cursed literary classic in what Gerry assumed was the eldritch equivalent of a bin.
"There we are, taken care of." It's grinning again, pleased with itself. "That particular volume won't be bothering anyone for a great long while, I would say."
Gerry knows better than to bank on that but he also knows better than to argue with or question a creature of The Spiral.
"You're welcome," the thing continues, emphatically put-upon when Gerry declines to speak. It rolls its eyes theatrically, and in doing so, they momentarily blip entirely off of its face, leaving two skin-colored sockets filled with prismatic flecks of light.
"I'm not--" Gerry starts, then stops, shifting his weight so that he can brace himself against the alleyway wall and finally actually tear a piece of his shirt off to tie as a tourniquet around his leg. Thankfully the shirt he'd been wearing was already old and starting to develop some holes all on its own. It tears easily.
Can other-worldly rust still cause tetanus? He should probably go get a shot either way. Better safe than sorry.
"You keep calling me 'Assistant,' you mean Gertrude right? I'm not her assistant. I don't work for the Institute. I'm afraid you might have the wrong guy."
"No, I don't think I do at all," the thing replies easily. "You may not be formally bound to that place like the others, but you're marked all the same." It nods, pointedly, to Gerry's tattoos, blood slicked as they are. "Though I do enjoy that you pretend not to know it. Denial is a very funny thing in the right hands."
Gerry's face scrunches into a distasteful frown. The blood from his nose has died, mostly, and pinches at the skin around his mouth, sticking to the fine hair there. "Yeah, well, be that as it may, I'm afraid I can't get you any special favors with The Eye or The Archivist or whatever it is you're after for what I can only assume was the world's shittiest quid-pro-quo. I'm freelance."
The thing's smile turns sharp in a very literal way, and Gerry is suddenly extremely aware of the fact that the Leitner may be gone but he is still very much in danger.
"I do not want anything from The Eye or The Archivist." It's the first time the thing's voice hasn't sounded almost saccharine -- it's not exactly the impression of anger, at least not something a human could categorize as anger, but it is bitter. Gerry can almost taste it, acidic as he swallows.
Maybe it's time to go for broke on the running plan, afterall.
But as quickly as it came, the moment passes and the thing's face slides back into a grin. "You, however, Book Burner, may be a different story entirely."
In fairness, it's not the most ominous thing a person has ever said to him -- still, it doesn't exactly feel great. Not that there's anything he can do about that now.
"I do have a name," he offers, instead of voicing any of his concerns. If he's going to be dragged by the hair into the abyss, he may as well try and get the monster doing the deed to stop calling him stupid pejoratives."It's Gerard. Hell, you can even call me Gerry, if you'd like. I guess we're friends now since you did just save my life."
The thing positively beams at that. It's mouth stretches so far that Gerry can swear he can see its back molars -- and what honestly might be a ring of teeth lining its throat and --
The ringing in his ears is back. Gerry realizes the thing has started laughing again.
"And I am Michael," it says, thrilled. It's somehow both far too mundane for it and exactly right all at once. Thinking about the little incongruency while looking directly at it makes the inside of Gerry's mouth taste like tinfoil. "I suspect we will be seeing each other very soon, Gerard Keay. But in the meantime, do try not to get yourself killed. I may not always be available to intervene."
Before Gerry has the wherewithal to speak, even if it's just to point out that he didn't actually offer his last name, and if the monster knew who he was this whole time why did it even bother with introductions, there's the sound of a creaking door hinge, a clicking latch, and the thing and its door are gone. Dimly, Gerry realizes he never actually saw it move -- he heard it, certainly, but it seemed to vanish in the space between blinks, the sound lagging behind almost like an afterimage, leaving him and his bloody leg standing in the alleyway alone.
Gertrude is going to fucking kill him.
He gives himself 5 stitches with dental floss in his hotel bathroom, silently thanking whatever higher powers -- real, imagined, or otherwise -- for his high pain tolerance and strong German liquor. Then he blacks out on cheap, scratchy bedding for several hours, relishing in the way the booze and the adrenaline crash make for an absolutely dreamless sleep.
He burns his bloody clothes, lighting a cigarette on the fire, before booking himself a flight back home on the credit card Gertrude had given him for expenses. First class seat for the extra leg room. The Institute can take the financial hit, he's sure.
He neglects to tell Gertrude about the encounter in any real detail when he finally gets back to London and she, unsurprisingly, doesn't ask, keeping things as perfunctory as ever. He's not stupid enough to assume she doesn't know, though. Her scowl is even deeper than usual and signals enough of her overall disapproval. In some ways, the fact that she doesn't outright scold him for his recklessness is almost worse than the alternative.
Sometimes she really does remind him of his mother. Goal oriented. That's what a more polite person would say about both of them. Driven. The Leitner is no longer in play, no Power is currently on the cusp of manifesting because of it, so it's mission accomplished. If that means Gerry has a new scar and a slight persistent limp for the next week or so, so be it. It's not even worth the energy for her to voice her obvious disapproval of his tactics.
He never does get that tetanus shot.
The next time Gerry sees the door, he's in a far less compromising position. He'd partially taken over a booth at one of the city's many fast-casual cafe franchises with a notebook and his laptop when he notices, out of the corner of his eye, that a brick wall that had been empty just a moment ago now has a yellow door invitingly placed right in the middle.
If he didn't know what he was looking at, he might honestly not have realized it wasn't part of the building to begin with. That, and the immediate understanding that that particular wall ought to have been shared with the neighboring business and not somewhere you should go about finding a door.
He heaves a sigh, feeling that headache that's been plaguing him off and on starting to come on again. It's daylight, the cafe isn't necessarily busy but there are people around, which means either the thing -- Michael -- doesn't care about being seen or noticed (likely), or it simply wants to create as much risk for collateral damage as possible (even more likely).
Gerry does his best to remember where the nearest fire alarm is, should he need to pull it for a quick evacuation.
But to his surprise, it never actually comes to that -- in fact, Michael itself (himself?) never actually shows up. The door doesn't have a face or eyes, but Gerry gets the distinct impression that it's watching him anyway.
Well, if there's one thing he's become very used to over the course of his admittedly strange life, it's the feeling of being watched, so if Michael is hoping to drive him mad with paranoia or something, he'll just have to try harder.
He lifts his cup of tea in a mock salute at the door before turning his attention back to his screen. He misses the way the woman at the booth nearest to his looks directly at the door, then back to him, a confused expression pinching her cartoonishly severe face.
If Gerry were ever forced to really get down to it, he'd admit that, when stripped of all the pomp and frills and technicalities, working for Gertrude really was very, very similar to working with his mother.
Gertrude was just better than Mary at hiding the violence of her existence, that was all. She was still willing to get her hands dirty, Gerry had learned that much very quickly, but she was quicker to wash them clean after the fact. Mary had never really been interested in that part.
And, frankly, Gerry found that he actually liked Gertrude despite himself. He'd never really had that problem with his mom, ironically enough. He knew, deep down, that in more ways than one he'd only managed to trade one gravity well in for another -- hell, he hadn't even truly rid himself of the first one yet. But at least Gertrude had the resources to help him on his one-man crusade to rid the world of Leitners and gave of them almost freely. The enemy of my enemy and all that.
Their arrangement was actually quite nice. Convenient. Comfortable, even.
For some time after Gertrude had appeared in his life, his mother would manifest in a rage, burning coal-hot around her edges, spitting venom about the Institute, The Archivist, The Eye. Her emotions ran freer and more forcefully in death than they ever had when she was alive -- which, Gerry supposed, was a little odd. Maybe it was just that death had freed her of what little connection to social and familial norms she'd ever had in life. He supposes it's much easier to show overt disdain for your fuck-up of a son when you're no longer trying to keep outsiders from catching wind and calling you on on it.
It probably would have been funny if every part of it weren't already so massively fucked up.
Still, for all he hated his mother, he knew she was right about some things -- about the Institute, especially. And the risks of pledging yourself to serve the Powers. He had plenty of practice in living with dangerous people who would sooner see him dead than their plans spoiled -- but even he had to admit it was tricky, sometimes, with Gertrude, who seemed to redraw the line at her own convenience rather than toe it.
But she was much better at maintaining the mask of carefully distant professionalism than his mother ever was, and she was also kinder to him, for a certain value of kindness. And he could work with that. He'd been working with that. It suited him just fine.
Most of the time it was actually very easy to forget that he was caught in orbit all over again. At least it was familiar.
Gerry does his best to spend as little time in Pinhole Books as he can.
Distantly, he's aware he should be grateful for it. It's nice to have a back-up place to live that costs him literally nothing. He'd inherited the deed after his mother's death and whatever magic she'd done to the place prevented such mundane things as utility bills, census takers, or tax collectors from ever showing up or even noticing it existed in the first place.
Unfortunately, those same magical protections also meant that it wasn't exactly the sort of place that could be sold. Grisly murder history aside, the complicated legal red tape and the looming threat of someone cracking through the thin veneer of unnoticable normalcy that surrounded the building and realizing "hey, wait, don't you owe the government hundreds of thousands of pounds?" Was enough to keep the idea of ever letting Pinhole Books go out of Gerry's mind entirely.
All of which was to say that, though Gerry deeply loathed to spend time surrounded by his mother's dusty old collections, it was nice to have somewhere that guaranteed a roof over his head should he ever need it.
Sometimes he could even think of it as a safe house -- though it was obviously the furthest thing from safe. It was just nice to have in his back pocket, is all. Some day the money would dry up and his shitty flat some 20-odd blocks away would no longer be practical, right? Galavanting around the world to commit strategic arson and fight off the worshipers of eldritch deities, surprisingly enough, did not provide the highest salary, even with the Institute allowing him access to expense reports.
Besides, after starting his -- whatever it was. Partnership seemed too generous a word. With Gertrude, he tended to limit his time at Pinhole Books to twice a month or so, stopping by only to make sure that nothing catastrophic had happened in his absence
If he were very, very lucky, he could make it in and out totally unnoticed.
He was rarely lucky.
Over the years, Mary's manifestation had seemingly weakened. Gerry didn't know if that were technically true -- or even possible -- but it had seemed to him, at least as of late, that her form was even more scattered and ephemeral. There had been a period of time there, right around his very aborted and admittedly silly flight of fancy when he decided to pack up and try and run away to Genoa, that she seemed to only be getting stronger, manifesting more and more often, further and further away from the book itself. But now she seemed...reigned in, maybe. Caught by it. Not that Gerry was complaining.
The End tended not to suffer those who tried to flaunt its rules for very long, that much Gerry was sure of.
When Mary manifested at all, it was only ever in Pinhole Books proper and only ever in limited bursts. He knew she was there sometimes when he wasn't around -- the store had security cameras that clocked her, on occasion, a ghostly, horrific thing making the tapes buzz static as she moved around the stacks -- but if he didn't know better, he'd earnestly believe that she was somehow saving up all her strength (or whatever resource that things like her drew from) just to manifest when he came around.
"Still out there playing righteous crusader, are we?" He hears her before he sees her as he flicks the lights on. He does not startle. Instead, he sighs.
"Find anything interesting lately?" She continues. "Or has Gertrude moved you up in the ranks -- no, no, she hasn't has she? She knows what you're worth as well as I did."
It's been over a month this time -- Germany and a handful of more mundane tasks around the city kept him away. That was part of the reason he had accepted them in the first place.
"Hi, mom." He keeps his voice flat as he sets his messenger bag down on the table. There's a healthy layer of dust coating it. He should probably clean. At least it looks like regular dust and not some sort of Corruption infestation or something. Small blessings.
Mary shuffles around the stacks into full view. The script tattoos that line her skin always look a little different every time she manifests -- this time it's hard to tell that the lines are words at all, sanskrit or otherwise, they're so densely packed together. She gives him a once-over, face pulling into a familiar sneer that somehow mixes both disinterest and disdain; then shrugs and turns back to -- whatever it is that ghosts do in a bookshop full of haunted merchandise. Obviously not cleaning.
"Surprised she's kept you around this long," she offers as a sort of after-thought. "It's been, what, a few years now, yes?"
Gerry has had enough experience dealing with his mother to know that this is her own way of asking him to clarify how much time has gone by. The dead don't experience it the way living things do and things that are caught between life and death tend to experience some strange degree of anxiety about the whole thing, Gerry had found. It doesn't make a ton of sense to him, really, but he doesn't think too hard on it.
"It's been five years, yeah," he says in the same carefully neutral tone, "and about a month and a half since I was last here. I've been busy."
Mary snorts disbelievingly at that, somehow heaving breath that doesn't actually exist in her lungs which no longer work out a nose she no longer needs. She says nothing after that.
Gerry hates a lot of things about his mother, but none more than the fact that he can't seem to actually hate her at all. She makes him feel so small, somehow -- like a kid again, despite the fact that he had turned thirty-goddamn-years-old back in February. There was absolutely no excuse for the way he always feels like he just….shrinks away when he was around her. He can do nothing and all and still feel like he's rolled over, showed his belly, allowed her to do and say whatever it was she pleased. She's dead for gods' sakes, and yet here he always is, letting her make him feel -- whatever this was.
It was pathetic, honestly. There has never been anything stopping him from locking the door to Pinhole Books and hurling the key into the river. There has never been anything stopping him from taking a match and burning the entire place to the fucking ground.
Except that was a lie. And he knew it.
He's always known it.
Gravity is like that, after all.
Mary, thankfully, doesn't speak to him for the rest of his visit as he makes sure nothing has flooded, rotted, broken, or otherwise developed signs of manipulation beyond earthly means. He makes a reminder that he knows he'll probably ignore on his phone calendar to come back with some genuine cleaning supplies in two weeks. As he's thumbing through his screen, he sees he has an email from Gertrude. He'll read it later.
Mary does not say goodbye as he leaves. He's not entirely sure she's even still manifested at all when he locks the door behind him.
He recognizes immediately that the yellow door now taking the place of Pinhole Book's neighboring shopfront -- a chain hat store, if Gerry remembers right, something trendy, he's never paid much attention -- is out of place.
Typical.
He stops walking, but doesn't approach it or knock, opting instead to fish out his pack of Marlboro Reds and finally allow himself the indulgence of a smoke.
Without bothering to remove the filter from his mouth, he says, "you know, if you're just going to stalk me like this through the most boring moments of my life, I'm going to start thinking that you might be in dire need of some better hobbies."
Michael steps into view from...somewhere behind him. Definitely not from the door. Had it even opened? It must have. Michael looks more human today than he had back in the alley, but the eyes are still wrong, arched up like too-large crescents as he grins, pleased. A nightmarish Cheshire cat.
"I very much disagree."
Gerry exhales the smoke in his lungs, not bothering to turn his head away. He doubts Michael has a real respiratory system to be bothered by second hand inhalation anyway. "That you need better hobbies?"
"That your life is boring."
"Well, thanks I guess, agree to disagree on that front." Gerry takes another drag as he talks, and debates on whether he should just start walking again -- he'd been planning on heading back to the Institute to see what Gertrude wanted -- or stay and wait for Michael to either kill him or leave.
The problem is that Michael, as far as Gerry can tell, doesn't seem all that interested in doing either.
Gerry opts to split the difference. The idea of walking while being stalked by an extra-dimensional creature pretending to be a person is somehow preferable to standing still and waiting for it to make the first move. And, in fairness, Michael isn't exactly stalking him -- at least not right now -- he seems perfectly content to keep pace with Gerry as they make their way down the sidewalk.
There aren't many people on the street at the moment but the few who are seem to instinctively avoid the space at Gerry's side that Michael occupies. Gerry figures most people can't actually notice him, if only because the handful that do seem to overtly stare at him. One man almost walks directly into traffic as he turns his head around to watch. Michael looks almost disappointed when he doesn't.
"As fun as this is," Gerry finally breaks the silence as a small flock of stumpy, peg-legged pigeons scatter around their feet near an intersection, "are you planning on telling me what you want from me? I'm not afraid of you and I don't think I'm losing my mind any more than I already was before we met, so I can't imagine I'm a great food source right now. Hate to waste your time."
Michael is very quick to laugh. Gerry doesn't like that about him at all. The sound makes him feel seasick. A young woman walking near them pops an ear bud out and looks at it questioningly, like it may have started malfunctioning. There's a tiny bit of sticky red blood visible around the rim of white plastic.
"I don't believe in time," Michael says simply. "And even if I did, I wouldn't be worried about something as silly as wasting it. I only wanted to check in on a friend."
"Friend?" Gerry isn't a huge fan of the word, especially not from the mouths of monsters. "Is that what we are?"
Michael beams. "You said so yourself, did you not?"
Shit.
Gerry supposed he had.
His silence seems a good enough confirmation for Michael, who at some point shifted position from Gerry's left to his right without having moved at all. Then, apparently apropos of nothing, he asks: "Why do you go back to Mary Keay's bookstore?"
It's enough of a non-sequitur that Gerry nearly trips over his own feet. Michael does not try and catch him, which is actually probably a good thing. It takes him a moment to formulate a coherent response. "You obviously know who I am, I don't know why you pretend you don't."
Michael only tilts his head. The gesture is somewhere between curious and predatory. "I do. That is not an answer to my question."
It grinds Gerry to a halt, mid-stride. Michael looks less human than he did only moments ago as Gerry turns his full attention on him. The headache that's been brewing behind his eyes feels like a thunderstorm. "If you know who I am, you know why I keep going back."
Making eye contact with Michael feels like looking directly into an eclipse. It makes him smell ozone, inexplicably, on top of that horrible taste in his mouth. For a split second he wonders if his nose is going to start to bleed again -- but that only seemed to happen when Michael was laughing. He's not laughing now. In fact, he's not even smiling as far as Gerry can tell. It's difficult to see his face like this. He's much closer than he ought to have been, for how far apart they had been -- are currently -- standing.
Gerry tries not to let himself flinch and mostly succeeds.
Michael's lips do not move as he says, "you are a very good liar, Gerard Keay."
And then Gerry is alone on the street.
The headache does not go away for the rest of the day.
It turned out that Gertrude had only wanted to tell him about a potential lead on yet another Leitner -- a Vast book by the sound of it -- and wanted him to pivot his attention to tracking it down.
If she could tell he was feeling a bit shaken when he arrived at the Institute later that evening, she didn't mention it.
In fact, Gerry was actually a little surprised to see her in person at all. It seemed to happen less and less these days. From the outside looking in, Gerry could tell that her paranoia about not only the Powers but the people surrounding her at work was in a steady tailspin downward and while he may not officially be employed by the Magnus brand name, he knew well enough that he was included in that group. She was still unavoidably around, if that made any sense, usually in her office, but there was a distance he was certain she was trying very deliberately to cultivate.
It was fair enough, really. As long as he didn't walk in on her committing any heinous acts of arcane self mutilation that resulted in him being tried for murder, he was going to consider this a perfectly fine working relationship and refrain from asking too many questions.
If he surreptitiously skimmed the Archives for any material relating to The Spiral and its collection of Avatars and manifestations as he pulled whatever information he could find to track down the Vast book, that was his own business.
Gerry ignores and then deletes the reminder on his phone that reads "clean supplies, PB, 1:00 PM" when it finally chimes off his calendar.
He hasn't seen Michael or his door since that day. He doesn't know why that makes him uneasy.
The thing about Gertrude Robinson was that she was -- well, okay, she wasn't an easy person to like or to get along with, but she was a very hard person to disobey. Gerry hadn't known her before The Eye had seeped into the edges of her life, but he imagined this was true even before she had the ability to compel anyone she spoke to.
And in a very strange way, that was a comfort.
If Gerry ever had the urge to indulge that particular vein of psycho-analysis -- and he most assuredly did not -- he'd likely uncover something about being conditioned for a lack of control in his own life. Something about liking strong direction but hating authority.
The point was that he knew it was unwise to allow Gertrude to have as much power in his life as she did, but he also knew that he had no real desire to strip it from her. There had been a time in their arrangement when he tried to question her more, prod at the flimsier parts of her excuses and test the limits of her forgiveness more thoroughly, but he'd mostly let that go these days in favor of simply nodding and keeping his mouth shut when it came to things that actually mattered. Maybe he was just getting tired. Or maybe it was really all just a half hearted way to get a petty little "fuck you" in to The Eye which had been slowly getting more and more bold with its attempts to worm its way into his head.
Sure, he liked knowledge. He was as curious by nature and his mother had instilled in him enough useful skills, legal and otherwise, that finding it was rarely as difficult as it could have been, especially in their secret little world. But over the years he'd come to accept that sometimes not knowing things was ultimately better (and safer) than the alternative.
It was a bit counter intuitive, and a fine line to walk, sure, but it worked. And more importantly it kept things running smoothly between him and Gertrude and that meant an easier time ridding the world of Leitners one volume at a time.
So when The Vast book turned out to be a dead end, it really wasn't a big deal. Leads didn't always pan out, that much was normal for any profession, not just theirs. In the end it just made for a brief jaunt to rural Sweden for the two of them which was as lovely as it was blisteringly cold and borderline inhospitable. The fact that Gertrude had come along didn't even ping Gerry as odd -- sometimes she liked to handle things along with him, and the fact that she then peeled off, heading to Denmark for some other project she had decidedly declined Gerry's help with, leaving him to catch a train back to London on his own as fine, too. He didn't ask.
A flight would have been far, far quicker and definitely less expensive, but flying was always a terrible idea when there was even the slightest potential for The Vast to be lurking around.
So that's how Gerry finds himself slouched in the uncomfortable seating of a quaint Sweedish train station with a paper cup of lukewarm complimentary tea in hand and a couple hours to kill, bracing himself for the complicated journey ahead of transfers and buses and lots and lots of farmland.
This time, there is no door -- at least none that Gerry notices. The space across from him in the stylish little lobby area of the station is empty, and then it's not.
Michael looks far too tall for the plastic chair, but comfortable nonetheless. Gerry's mind unhelpfully provides an image of an origami animal, all folded up and compact into a shape that it didn't start in.
"I thought we went over you showing up for the boring bits last time you did this," Gerry crosses his ankles in front of him, trying to make his body language communicate 'you didn't startle me' any way he can, even though he had in fact, been a little startled. Sue him.
Michael doesn't seem to notice or care. He also doesn't smile. For some reason, this little detail unsettles Gerry even more than when he leans forward and says: "You are a good liar, but I think the people you trust may be better at it than you."
Asking The Spiral for clarification is a fool's errand. Gerry tries anyway. "What?"
"Exactly what I said,'' Michael continues. He feels -- sharper, somehow, to look at. More focused and therefore more painful to observe. He's very, very still, but he still -- feels? Looks? Like he's moving. Gerry doesn't like it. "You should take my word for it. Gertrude Robinson is no more your friend than she is your captor." He seems frustrated to have to say this outloud but Gerry can't tell whether it's because it's maybe the least evasive thing he has ever said to him or because he thinks Gerry is an idiot for not knowing this already.
"Sorry," Gerry finally allows, "but I try not to make a habit of trusting the word of monsters who, by definition, spout nothing but lies."
Maybe this had been Michael's -- The Spiral's -- plan all along, to try and plant a seed of doubt deep enough in him to undermine him and Gertrude's work. If that was the case, it seemed odd that Michael was offering the bait up so freely. It didn't feel like a lure at all. In fact, everything about Michael at the moment felt less like a waiting trap and more like a tooth extraction. Something not willingly given up or surrendered; something the body naturally wanted to hold onto.
Still.
"You're going to spell out doom for more than just yourself if you continue to follow her so blindly." Gerry notices the place where Michael's hands meet his wrists no longer seems to match up, like an off-set screen print. His fingers are far, far too long to fit in their neatly presented human package.
Several rows over, a teenage boy's nose begins to bleed. There's a small commotion to get him some tissues. Gerry's just glad in that moment that his tolerance has apparently gone up, though he is starting to feel a little motion sick and to smell ozone and copper.
He's also glad that he has a pretty solid poker face.
"Is The Spiral planning a ritual or something? Is that what you're so worried about distracting me from?"
Michael's frustration seems to reach some kind of crescendo. The fluorescent lights above their heads buzz with a warning, flickering almost imperceptibly -- the sort of not-quite-there strobing that makes people sick. For a very brief and semi-hysterical moment, Gerry wonders what will happen to his body if he dies in Sweden with a shitty forged passport as his only form of ID. He very much doubts Gertrude or anyone at the Institute would readily jump to play his next-of-kin.
But just like that, the moment snaps back into place. Michael himself seems to almost rubber band with the force of it, his form wavering, glitch-like and artificial, for a split second before solidifying. It makes Gerry's ears pop, for some reason, to focus on him again. He's still not smiling but he seems less ready to destroy this entire train station in a fit of delusional aggression or whatever it would have been. Gerry's heart is slow to get the memo -- it's thumping in his chest and his ears, rabbit-quick.
"No ritual, no." Michael's voice isn't exactly back to that sugary coyness, but it's no longer overtly venomous. "I only want to issue a reminder that Gertrude Robinson has been and will be wrong about a great many things, and when Gertrude Robinson is wrong she becomes very, very dangerous."
Gerry would argue that Gertrude can be dangerous when she's right as well, but now doesn't feel like the time. He shifts forward in his seat and uncrosses his ankles, ready to ask just what the hell Michael is talking about, but opens his mouth only to find himself about to speak to an empty chair.
Gerry knows better than to take anything Michael says at face value. He knows any doubts he may have inspired are likely part of a scheme Gerry can't actually see in full yet.
But he's already spirited an entire stack of Spiral-related statements and documents out of the Archives and -- well. It couldn't hurt to at least try and to do some research, especially in Gertrude's absence.
After all, trying to look into The Spiral wasn't actually giving in to any delusions Michael may be trying to sow in Gerry's mind, right? It was almost the opposite of that, in fact. Due diligence or something.
At least that's what he tells himself as he hunches over his laptop, back at his standby cafe. They're near closing. He'd have to vacate soon lest he wind up feeling like an asshole, hanging around as part time employees struggled to contain their annoyance with him while also understanding that if they let their veil of professional politeness slip in any real way, their job could be on the line.
Gerry knew the feeling, sort of. Not that he'd ever been an employee, part-time or otherwise, in the traditional sense.
God, his life was a mess. No wonder he could never really imagine quitting. What would he put on his non-existent resume?
The Spiral related statements were mostly exactly what we expected -- insomnia, paranoia, plenty of doors, mazes that shouldn't exist. When the anecdotes don't seem to amount to much, Gerry narrows his focus, trying to suss out if The Spiral's ever actually attempted a ritual. Presumably if it had any time in recent memory Gertrude would have stopped it and it was therefore likely that Michael was actually telling the truth about not attempting one now. Rituals sometimes took decades to build up to -- whole human lifetimes, even.
If The Spiral had been stopped under Gertrude's watch, there was no way it was already gearing up for round two so soon.
Gerry couldn't tell if that was a good or a bad thing, given the circumstances.
The ritual angle in his search turned up only a handful of information, however. As far as he could gather, from the documents he'd borrowed, there had been something -- a very ritual-like something -- attempted, about a year or so before Gerry had been brought into Gertrude's fold. The documentation was odd, even by his admittedly lax standards.
Things weren't directly expunged -- at least not in the traditional blocky black censor bars that one might associate with real redaction -- but every mention of whatever event may have taken place felt deliberately written around, rather than about. According to the paper trail something had happened, it had been related to The Spiral, maybe, then Gertrude had done something and it was no longer an issue.
The only real concrete piece of evidence he could find was, bizarrely, an expense report of all things, claiming two plane tickets to Norilsk Airport in Russia. Scanned copies of the tickets had been added with a hasty staple. One one, Gertrude's name was easy enough to spot. On the other was a name Gerry did not recognize: Michael Shelley.
It wasn't -- it didn't mean, anything, obviously. As far as names were concerned, Michael had to be one of the most common in the English-speaking world. But as far as Gerry could see in the information he had, Michael Shelley did otherwise not exist in the Institute or the Archives in any capacity. Gerry had known Gertrude had had plenty of assistants that came and went (or, perhaps more frequently, were killed in the line of duty -- but that was sort of inherent to this line of work, Gertrude or otherwise). He even knew some of their names, but Michael Shelley was not one he'd ever heard before.
Behind him, something clattered and Gerry, much to his own dismay, flinched. He half expected to turn around and see Michael -- Spiral Michael, not whoever this Michael Shelley person was -- looming over him ready to pounce. Instead, he saw a very bored looking girl with brightly dyed hair and a lip ring stacking chairs on top of vacated tables with perhaps a bit more force than was strictly necessary. He also realized in that moment that he was the last patron in the cafe.
So much for not being an asshole.
He snaps his laptop closed on top of the pages he had spread across it, turning it into a very expensive and very shitty folder for the time being and quickly gathers the rest of his belongings. He leaves a tenner on the table in apology and tries not to make eye contact with her as he slinks through the door.
He does not ask Gertrude about Michael Shelley or the expense report when she returns from Denmark.
He also does not ask about any Spiral rituals.
Gertrude looks at him as though she knows he's hiding something, and the thought makes him feel a familiar weight press down on his shoulders.
Gravity.
Unsurprisingly, and in keeping with his unorthodox upbringing, Gerry has never been one for things like social media. He's no luddite, but he's also never felt the need to reach out to strangers, even on the internet -- and it's not as though he has any friends from school to reconnect with.
But be that as it may, he does understand the appeal -- and he is, on occasion, even thankful for its pervasive use in society. It makes finding people, for better or for worse, so much easier than it really ought to be.
That said, "Michael Shelley" is still an overwhelmingly common name.
There are no less than 70 public profiles under the name alone on Facebook with their location listed as "Central London." Other platforms return similarly muddled results -- everything from old men to greyed out default-images and cartoon photos in profile picture sections. Nothing immediately helpful or recognizable, even though he's not sure what he's hoping to recognize.
About 45 minutes into his search, Gerry begins to wonder if this isn't the stupidest goose chase he's ever sent himself on. It's not as though one of the profile images is going to feature an impossible, inhuman creature for Gerry to recognize on sight -- and that's even assuming the two of them are related afterall, something that Gerry has absolutely no evidence of yet.
The search proves almost entirely fruitless, save for one errant LinkedIn page that lists someone named Michael Shelley who studied at the University of London in Library Sciences, graduated in 2003, and, at some point, had flagged a listing for the Magnus Institute to signal that he'd like to be notified for any available positions.
It was, at the very least, enough to confirm that this person had existed in some capacity and wasn't a pseudonym or a dummy account Gertrude had used to -- what, passively defraud her employer and pocket a few hundred extra pounds by filing a fake expense report?
Ridiculous.
Gerry had been about to pivot his search to what he could find of the Library Sciences department on the University's public website when his wifi cut out.
This wasn't an altogether uncommon occurrence -- his flat was cheap and poorly insulated. There was probably lead in the paint or something, too, for all he knew. But when he drug himself up to dust off and reboot the modem, it took him a moment to process what he was actually looking at. The kinked blue ethernet cable that tethered the modem to the wall had been completely unplugged from the box, which was strange, but far from the strangest thing about it. The jack that would have allowed Gerry to simply plug it back in looked almost like it had been melted by something, though there was no sign of burning. Instead, the last several centimeters of the cord had been...twisted, somehow. Elongated like sea salt taffy and coiled into a spiral.
Gerry knows he should probably feel a lot of things -- fear, chief among them, maybe even violated. The idea that something like Michael had gotten into his flat without him noticing should be enough to send him running for the hills. Instead, the only thing that bubbles to the surface is a mildly annoyed laugh.
"God damn it," he says to no one and nothing in particular, "those things cost money."
There is no response.
Gerry sees neither hide nor hair of Michael or his door for more than two weeks after the ethernet incident, but the act in and of itself confirmed some suspicions that he's keen to dig into -- or, rather, that he would be keen to dig into, had he not been almost immediately thrust into yet another near death situation.
This time, it's a surprise onslaught from The Stranger and its ilk on the Institute that leaves everything feeling a bit frantic.
Apparently one of the low level staffers in Artifact Storage had, unbeknownst to anyone in charge, been declared briefly missing by their roommate over a week ago. There had been two days of no-call-no-show shifts that, ordinarily, would have been grounds for immediate termination had they not shown back up on the third day looking a little feverish and glassy eyed but carrying a very convincing doctor's note detailing a 48 hour flu bug that landed them incommunicado in the hospital.
The cold weather and the rain made the fact that they only ever seemed to show up wearing turtle necks with sleeves down to their wrists equally unremarkable -- downright believable, in fact. That was until one of their coworkers happened to catch a glimpse of a thin line of silver stapes holding their skin on at their wrist to the skin on their hand when their sleeve had slipped, just so.
And that's when all hell had broken loose.
Of course, it was just Gerry's luck to have picked that day of all days to post-up in one of the vacant offices in the Archives themselves, doing some gopher work on Gertrude's elusive Vast book leads.
But really, all told, it wasn't as bad as it probably could have been. The doppelganger's cover had been blown which gave them a bit more time to prepare and left The Stranger scrambling to make up for it. It definitely wasn't great -- no attack ever was -- but it could have been much, much worse.
Gerry was lucky to make it out with only a small handful of cuts and bruises and a nasty looking black eye that would probably be difficult to see out of for a few days. One of the Stranger's doll-things had tried to bite his finger clean off, but it had only managed to break the skin before he quite literally tore the stuffing out of it.
The Institute counted no real casualties, a win if there ever was one for both the organization and the neighboring hospital which, Gerry could only assume, was being paid a small fortune in hush money by Elias and his many backers to tend the wounded and ask no questions. Gertrude was almost entirely unscathed, save for a nasty gash on her forehead that bled and bled even after it was stitched and bandaged.
Maybe it's the leftover adrenaline pumping through his system, or maybe it's the way Gertrude sometimes plays up the doddering old woman act to outsiders (they always, always buy it), but either way, Gerry comes out of the encounter feeling two parts angry and one part completely reckless. Still, he surprises himself when he turns to her as they make their way back down to the half-destroyed Archives from the ER and blurts out: "Who was Michael Shelley?"
Gertrude levels an almost unreadable look at him, one that Gerry has learned means she's doing a very careful set of calculations in her mind about which version of the truth -- or which lie -- she's going to tell.
Before she can open her mouth, Gerry continues. "Please don't tell me some bullshit like you've never heard of him or that's not a name you recognize, I know he had something to do with the Institute, I know that he's not here now, and I know what that probably means."
Gertrude considers this. Her expression does not change. "If you already know, I do not see what good it would do for me to tell you."
That strange, weighted feeling on his shoulders is back all at once. Gerry has to consciously fight to unclench his jaw, though he doesn't remember tensing up. "No. No, don't do that. Don't play that game with me. I've earned the right to some truths now and then."
Gertrude finally breaks eye contact, but it's only to pinch the bridge of her nose beneath her glasses. "Gerard. Honestly. Now is not the time to go poking around the past for inconsequential details. Michael Shelley worked as an assistant here several years ago. Unfortunately, as you well know, there are risks involved with that particular position. I do wish I had a better answer for you, really I do, but I think both of us would be better off focusing on the clear and present dangers that we are currently facing. Do you agree?"
It's frustrating because she's not actually wrong. That's the thing. This is probably the worst possible time for this to come out. Gerry doesn't know what he expected. He shouldn't have -- it was stupid to --
The weight is stronger now. It makes his shoulders hunch. Or maybe that's just the crash, his nerves finally catching up to his body, his muscles taking the hint. The frustration doesn't go away, though; the animal need to grit his teeth, to yell even though he doesn't let himself.
"Fine." He bites, and turns away to gather up yet another toppled stack of files.
She's not wrong. Gertrude Robinson is very good at not being wrong.
But what was it that Michael had said that day in Sweden?
When Gertrude Robinson was wrong, she became very, very dangerous.
Gerry leaves the Institute late that night and he's not sure if it's the exhaustion or the frustration or both that turn him towards Pinhole Books rather than his own flat. His wifi is still out besides, and if he can just keep his eyes open long enough he may actually be able to get some research done tonight before he loses consciousness.
Mary is….not there, strangely, when he walks through the door. He can tell right away. Ghost hunting shows are mostly bullshit but they are absolutely right about the way the atmosphere of a place changes when a spirit is around.
For some reason, this makes Gerry feel both very relieved and very sad.
He knows, in an intellectual way at least, that he does hate his mother. He doesn't even feel bad about it. Not really. After all the brutality and the trauma and the nearly-going-to-jail-for-ritual-murder, hate even seems like too soft a word for it sometimes. It's just that other times, the feeling feels very far away from him. Like it's sitting out there somewhere on the horizon where he can see it, sure, but can't actually reach out to hold it in his hands.
Michael had asked him why he continues to come back here and at the time, Gerry thought he had been answering honestly, bristling at the question for how obvious it all was. He comes back here because he's supposed to. Because his name is now on the deed. Because it's a responsibility. Anyone who knows who Gerry is ought to already know all of this. None of it was a lie.
But it wasn't necessarily the truth, either.
As Gerry throws his stuff down on the table and tries not to cough at the layer of dust that goes sailing into the air, he kicks himself for dismissing his stupid phone reminder about cleaning, if not for appearances than for his own sake. He makes another as he sinks down into one of the heavy wooden chairs and promises not to repeat the cycle. Pinhole Books, cleaning supplies, 1PM, don't forget.
It's easier to make that promise without his mother's ghost lurking around -- though he supposes that makes plenty of sense.
In that moment he realizes just how long it's been since he's actually been here without Mary looming in the corners of his vision. It isn't peaceful to be here alone -- there's too much bad shit crammed into every nook and cranny of this place both literally and metaphorically for it to ever be peaceful ever again -- but it is very different. Less oppressive. A little bit easier to move and breathe in.
He admits to himself that he's well past the stage of rallying with a true second wind, but the lighter, looser feeling does at least keep him from just giving up entirely and conking out face down on the table for a while, which was a very real possibility when he'd first arrived.
The Stranger's doll-thing's bite on his finger had managed to bisect one of his tattoos almost clean in half. He'd probably have to get it redone at some point. Or maybe covered up. There were 33 eye tattoos on his body and over half of them visible on his hands, arms, and neck. The artist who had done them had been fine but inexpensive, the type to not ask many questions or provide any commentary, and the quality showed in some places more than others.
Gertrude had asked him about them only once, in her own very disinterested way. Why dress himself up like a servant of the Beholding while he held so much obvious disdain for it? Gerry had laughed and said something about how poison dart frogs survived the way they did not only because they were poisonous but because they looked poisonous. She'd seemed satisfied enough with the answer.
Mary hadn't asked about them at all -- he'd gotten them not long after she'd died, paid for them with some of his inherited money, even. But she had scoffed at him the first day she'd manifested and noticed them; she had rolled her eyes. She never acknowledged them again.
At first he figured it was because she really didn't care, the same way she hadn't cared when he had started dying his hair black and letting it grow out, or when he'd first stepped out of his bedroom at age 15 with clumsily smeared liner making his eyes look bruised and sunken. Kids in movies and on TV always dealt with overbearing parents, disapproval for rebellion, rules that made them want to sneak out in the middle of the night and run away but Gerry had never experienced anything like that. The best he could hope for when Mary's attention was on him was a hushed and frantic lesson in the arcane, where her eyes would light up and her mouth would curl into a proud smile as she realized he was paying attention.
Those moments grew more and more rare as he got older -- less to teach him, he supposed.
Even now, he struggled to admit to himself that, especially toward the end when Mary's mania was reaching a fever pitch, he would have done anything to earn even her disapproval -- just some level of acknowledgement at all that he was a person and not just a tool to be used and tossed away in her crusade.
So maybe, in that way, the scoff, the eye roll -- that was really the best he could hope for. At least it was something. And to be completely honest, deep down Gerry figured she understood in her own way that they were as much a 'fuck you' to her as they were to any other Power that wanted him dead. Besides, covering his body in ink ought to make his skin a little harder to write on, right?
Whatever.
Placebos exist for a reason, he reminds himself. Even if they don't actually work.
He keeps coming back because Pinhole Books is familiar, dark, and quiet.
He keeps coming back because gravity doesn't care how much you want to get away.
He's just so fucking tired.
He falls asleep at the table with his laptop still open and head pillowed on his arms. He wakes up with his entire body aching.
One of the pens that he'd been using to underline things is sitting several inches away from his notebook, perfectly curled in on itself into an impossible spiral.
"You have to stop breaking my shit," is the first thing Gerry says when he finally sees the door again, this time standing rather conspicuously in the hallway leading to his flat's entrance. Thankfully none of his neighbors have seemed to notice it at all. He doesn't want to have to deal with moving right now on top of everything else.
Michael is waiting for him on his couch, stretched back like he's been there for a while and has made himself quite comfortable. Maybe he has. He's smiling brightly; self-satisfied. Gerry fumbles his keys as he goes to toss them into the dish by the door and the clatter to the ground.
"And stop stalking me. If you wanted me to be suspicious of Gertrude, congratulations, I guess. Though I've been suspicious of her for a while now so I don't know if you really did anything that I hadn't already done myself. Now I'm tired, I survived an attack from a bunch of horrible dolls, one of which used to be a person I actually sort of knew, I still haven't found the fucking book Gertrude has me looking for because I've been too busy trying to investigate you for some god forsaken reason -- oh, and I haven't fixed the wifi here yet, which you broke, by the way, so you really ought to fix it yourself."
By the time he stops to take a breath he's moved from the entrance way to the kitchen and has poured himself two fingers of the cheap-but-serviceable whiskey he keeps in the cupboard above the sink into a coffee mug. It's barely noon. He slugs it down.
Michael is blinking at him from the couch. He's still grinning, but as Gerry catches him from the corner of his eye, he can tell, somehow, that he's a little surprised. Or at least a little unbalanced. Good. It serves him right.
"Well? You're the one sitting on my couch like you pay me rent. I can assume you're here to spout off something cryptic and weird and then vanish, or incur a little more property damage while you're at it for fun. Or are you finally here to just get it over with then, hm? Put me down or feed me to a door or make my brain boil in my skull or something?"
There is a small part of Gerry's brain, currently not boiling as it is, that very much wishes his mouth would stop moving. He draws some vague association to ringleaders sticking their head in lion's mouths -- but in fairness to himself, he has had the Stranger on his mind lately and it sort of goes hand-in-hand with circus iconography. Also, he slept hunched over a table last night. He's not exactly working at full capacity.
Michael, for his part, is still just...watching him. He looks almost completely human at the moment and isn't hurting Gerry's eyes at all. At some point his smile had fallen a little, which was odd, but odd in a very regular type of way. If Gerry didn't know better he could even believe he was trying to look sympathetic.
Gerry's halfway to convincing himself to pour another finger or so of whiskey when Michael finally speaks up. "What happened to Michael Shelley is none of your concern."
Gerry's hand stalls out mid-reach for the bottle and he blinks. "I -- what?"
"You are spending a great deal of your limited resources trying to follow a trail that is none of your concern," Michael tries again, as if that makes it any more clear.
Gerry's mind clicks over the handful of details he has been able to nail down, the way Gertrude had brushed him off, what little information he could find about The Spiral's ritual, had there actually been one in the first place. It seems almost too simple for a second. "You don't like that I'm looking into him because he's you, right?"
Michael's face blurs very briefly, like trying to watch a 3D movie without the right glasses. Gerry tries to keep track of his mouth; tries to tell if his expression has changed at all. It's too hard to be sure. "I am not Michael Shelley, no. I was, and he was, and now I am and he is not. It is, as I said, not your concern."
Gerry isn't sure how true that is. He's not even sure what Michael is actually trying to say. His voice sounds sort of like it did back in the Sweedish train station -- tinted, almost visibly, by a weird frustration Gerry can't actually pin down. But it doesn't feel directly angry at the moment. If anything it feels sort of sad. It hovers around him like a soap bubble, catching the light.
"Then what is my concern, Michael?"
"A great many things, I'm afraid." Michael offers, after some apparent consideration. That makes Gerry laugh because, well, yeah, no surprise there.
Second drink abandoned and sore muscles complaining, Gerry finally allows himself to collapse down into the chair opposite Michael's spot on the couch. It is a very tactically unwise move, considering the danger, but Gerry just -- he doesn't care anymore. He's not stupid, but he's also exhausted. If Michael wanted him dead, he would probably already be dead. "Yeah, tell me something I don't already know."
The sad -- expression? Energy? In Michael's face crackles and dissipates, leaving him grinning all over again. Bizarrely, Gerry notes, he's actually quite handsome when he has discernible, physical traits. Round face, nice hair, doe eyes. The fact that trying to look at him directly for too long threatens to make his eyes start bleeding notwithstanding.
"I am sorry," he says, which makes Gerry's eyebrows tick up toward his hairline. "Transparency is not in my nature. I am....not very well practiced. But the fate of Michael Shelley is only the smallest piece of a puzzle I fear you haven't begun to see yet."
The Spiral does not deal in truths. The Spiral is defined almost entirely by lies. Gerry knows this. He is certain of this. He does not intend to forget this. But in that moment, he finds himself at a loss for reasons he shouldn't trust Michael, rather than searching for reasons he should.
Fuck.
"Why are you doing this?" Gerry is not proud of the way his voice catches in his throat, "why me? Why now?"
He figures this must be a series of questions creatures of The Spiral are asked quite often, but it seems to take Michael a moment before he answers, like he's choosing his words very carefully. "Because you are interesting. Because you are too strong to have gone down this road for as long as you have to come out with nothing to show for it but a head full of half-truths. Because we are not the same. Because we are."
The headache is back. It feels different sometimes. Being around Michael for too long has given him a sort of motion sickness before, like the headache you get when you're dehydrated or sleep deprived. This one -- the one he keeps seeming to get -- feels sharper, localized to a spot to the back left part of his skull. He sucks in air through his teeth.
Michael watches him very closely. And then, gracefully stands, stretches tall (too tall) and makes short work of the small distance between the couch and the chair Gerry is sat in. It strikes Gerry as odd for a second -- he's seen Michael move before, but he's never really watched him do it. The last time they had walked together, Michael had stayed perched just on the edges of his vision, at his side, over his shoulder, lingering behind. He has the tendency to just be places, and then to just not be places. Gerry's almost gotten used to it. Seeing him do something as mundane as taking a handful of steps -- it doesn't necessarily shatter the illusion of him, but it certainly doesn't make him look any more monstrous. It's weirdly charming, even.
Maybe that's why he doesn't flinch back when Michael reaches a hand towards him.
His brain catches up a split second too late, unhelpfully reminding him that Michael's hands are sometimes -- knives? Bones? Dangerous, certainly -- but by then he's already got four decidedly non-sharp fingertips lightly resting against the crown of Gerry's head.
Every muscle in Gerry's body tenses up.
Michael does not seem to notice or care. His hand feels...too heavy, somehow, against Gerry's hair. Not dangerous, at least at the moment, but certainly not human. Buzzing, like the moment before you get a static shock from a door knob, but the shock never actually comes.
This, Gerry thinks with the sort of calmness that only comes from realizing how completely doomed you probably are, is a really weird way to die.
But Michael's hand remains dull and totally non-lethal and, after a moment of what looks like quiet contemplation -- or at least Michael's vague approximation of quiet contemplation -- he takes a step back. The buzzing sensation lingers for a second and for some reason Gerry's brain kicks up an unhelpful commentary on just how long it's been since someone has touched him in a way that doesn't hurt. It's not something he wants to linger on, and hates the fact that he can feel the tips of his ears heating up anyway.
It's been a weird fucking day.
At least he's still breathing, somehow, against all odds.
"What was that about?"
Michael looks even more gawky like this, standing while Gerry is sitting. His proportions aren't quite right, even though he's arguably the most human-passing Gerry's ever seen him right now in this moment. His face is still too hard to read but Gerry may even call his expression...gentle? Melancholy even. Not unsettling, except for the ways it is -- the ways that Michael is just inherently unsettling.
"Try and stay focused, please."
It's not an answer.
Michael is gone in the space between blinks, leaving Gerry sitting dumbfounding in his own living room.
At least his headache is, inexplicably, mostly gone.
For all Michael emphasized that Michael Shelley's fate wasn't actually something Gerry should be focusing on, he kept finding himself coming back to it. It wasn't all consuming -- the mystery had basically been solved. Both Michael himself and Gertrude had all but confirmed every one of Gerry's hypotheses -- but it still felt...Wrong? Somehow. To just let it lie. Especially if he was supposed to be figuring out what the fuck Gertrude apparently had up her sleeve.
If she did actually have anything up her sleeve at all.
Gerry tries not to think too much about the fact that, at some point between that night in his flat and now he had, apparently, decided to just up and trust Michael at his word.
But he wasn't dead yet, so that had to count for something.
The illusive Vast book finally did turn up, but not without a considerable amount of effort and late nights calling boutique skydiving places, of all things. Just another one of the many strangely niche but ultimately thematically on-brand curveballs his life has thrown at him, he supposed. One he did finally track it down -- one of the clerks on the phone had been chatty enough to mention someone who had stopped by asking for a private flight in one of their planes, wouldn't say way, gave off a very uncomfortable sort of vibe, got angry when they turned him away at first -- it had been easy enough to find the owner.
It had been slightly trickier to convince him to hand it over, even for a wad of cash, which put Gerry in the unfortunate position of having to steal it. He'd stolen Leitners before, of course, and not to brag or anything but this man didn't seem like the sort of guy Gerry would have a hard time intimidating or shaking down if it really came to that, too. There were certain advantages to cutting a pretty imposing figure, even beyond the aesthetic qualities of the leather and the boots and the black. He worked hard to look like the sort of person who made people want to cross the street away from him for a reason.
Fortunately, it never had to get physical. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite as simple as a run-of-the-mill b-and-e, either. Gerry had managed to jimmy open the guy's office window, locate the Leitner, and then very, very foolishly assume he was on his merry way, when he suddenly found himself treading water.
Swimming had never been a hobby he particularly enjoyed even as a child, but he could do it. It was just, regrettably, not very easy to pull off when you were a.) surprised, having been, as far as your senses could tell, on dry land just seconds beforehand and b.) wearing steel-toed boots and three layers of clothing. An unfortunate mouthful confirmed that he was, indeed, in salt water, too. Great.
He sputtered and choked, desperately willing his legs to pick up the pace as he calculated his next move. It was always so easy to forget that The Vast and The Buried, for as antithetical as they were, both shared a love of water. Sure, The Buried was more interested in drowning you and The Vast was a lot more invested in reminding you just how tiny and hopeless you were if you lost sight of land, but it was water all the same.
God damn it.
Picking a direction and swimming would ultimately be a fruitless endeavor, he knew. There was a very low chance that this was even a real ocean -- the Leitner was probably only making him think he was drowning or something sinister and weird like that. Or if it had actually teleported him somewhere, he very much doubted it was located on any map.
Better to assume the former, though, because the implications of the latter were admittedly not great.
So, what did the room look like? Where was his body oriented in space? How far away was the book from his hand? Had he touched it? It had been open, hadn't it -- on a desk -- no, an end table --
His legs were already getting tired from kicking into the abyss. His wounds had mostly all healed up alright, but they still stung and twinged painfully as he tried to slow his breathing and center himself. His eyes stung where the salt dripped into his tear ducts.
He hadn't turned, so in theory, he was still oriented the way he had been in the room. Assuming it wasn't mirrored or abstracted -- dream logic -- somehow, he could just swim forward and to the left and --
"Oh, dear. What have you gotten yourself into now?"
Michael's voice came from nowhere and everywhere, but more specifically, rang like a whisper against his ear. It made Gerry jolt, splashing back on reflex. Water flooded his mouth and he sputtered and choked.
"Good thing I'm here to help again, isn't it?"
Everything goes a bit sideways and Gerry finds himself suddenly sinking like a stone -- but it's not into the unfathomable depths of an imaginary ocean, it's to his knees in the study of a house he had only recently broken into. He's still absolutely soaking wet and coughing up salt water. Michael is standing in front of him, bent down at the waist and watching him with flickering, static-hazy eyes that are far, far too visible in the gloom of an otherwise very dark room.
"There you are," he says, casual as can be. "You'll probably be wanting this." The Leitner is in his hand, closed, its leather cover secured by a wrapped piece of twine. It has the words "In Fine Horizon" embossed in faded gold script. The Endless Horizon. Sure. It's not like the Powers have ever been subtle.
Gerry's sopping wet clothes stick to him uncomfortably as he stands up. His hair clings in little black ink spills all down his face and neck. It feels absolutely disgusting. If he sets foot outside, he'll freeze to death. Cross that bridge when he comes to it.
Michael is looking far too satisfied for a monster who just saved his life, even as Gerry snatches the book out of his waiting hand. "Give me that."
At some point during this misadventure, Gerry realizes he lost the plot a bit -- at least the part of it where he started the night by committing a low grade crime, because the thought of stealth doesn't even cross his mind until, as if on cue, a light flicks on in the hall outside the office door.
Shit.
Gerry looks over his shoulder, listening in for the sound of approaching footsteps, then down at the Leitner in his hands and the very large puddle of salt water gathering on the expensive rug and his soaking clothes. He looks back up at Michael who looks seconds away from breaking into full on hysterics, like this might be the funniest thing he's ever seen -- hell, maybe it is, and maybe that means he'd rather watch Gerry try and figure his own way out of this just to see how it all plays out.
Unfortunately for him, Gerry has gotten pretty good at throwing every possible self preservation instinct to the wind, these last few months especially.
"Can you get us out of here?" He finally remembers to keep his voice down to a whisper -- not that it matters now. The footsteps are getting both faster and closer.
Michael tilts his head, apparently weighing his own options. They are rapidly running out of time.
Gerry takes a deep inhale through his nose, ready to whirl around and prepare for a fight.
But the moment doesn't come. Just as the office door swings open behind them, Michael casually steps to one side revealing a door all his own. It's yellow and standing in the middle of the room, attached to no walls, but when it swings open it reveals a very mundane looking -- but altogether impossible -- stretch of dimly lit hallway. He says "after you," with a welcoming gesture just as the old man all but shouts "what the hell?!" And, well.
Gerry doesn't have time for a second thought. He topples forward, nearly tripping on his own wet boots, right into Michael's hallway. The door swings shut behind him just in time for Gerry to hear what sounds like a shotgun blast pepper the outside of the door.
He whirls around.
Michael isn't behind him.
Neither is the door.
Fuck.
The inside of Michael's hallway -- hallways, plural? Are they actually Michael's? The Spiral's? Gerry isn't quite sure on the nomenclature here -- regardless. It's...tricky.
The biggest and most immediate problem that Gerry can identify, beyond the fact that he's still wet and exhausted and deeply uncomfortable, is that nothing seems to be going obviously wrong. He doesn't feel threatened, which, in and of itself kind of feels like a threat. The walls are lined with very mundane looking yellow wallpaper and lit by dusty looking sconces. Every few meters there's a frame -- some containing unsettling portraits, presumably of people who have died in here, Gerry imagines -- some containing mirrors that reflect versions of the hallway Gerry knows shouldn't be there. The portraits' faces are all messed up -- or maybe he just can't seem to focus on them correctly. From a distance they seem fine.
The headache is back -- not the sharp one, the motion sick, cotton-y one that seems to roll off Michael in waves.
He has no idea how long he's been in here. He's walking but he also doesn't seem to be moving. He doesn't remember taking a first step.
He clutches the Leitner under his arm, and briefly wonders what would happen if he opened it in here.
Probably nothing good.
Instead, he opts for the obvious.
"Michael!" He yells to nothing in particular. For some reason he expected the sound to echo. It doesn't. The sound falls absolutely dead the second it leaves his mouth. "Michael, come on. Did you really come all the way to the middle of no where Sweden just to save me and then murder me?"
He knows the answer to that question could very likely be 'yes.'
A door opens beneath his feet.
For the second time that night, time and space go sideways. Instead of falling down, Gerry finds himself tumbling forward, like he'd been shoved out of the passenger side of a moving vehicle. He lands in a very undignified heap on --
The floor of his own flat.
Michael is standing in front of him, arms crossed, grinning quite literally ear-to-ear.
Gerry stands up and promptly doubles right back over to vomit on his own boots.
It's mostly sea water.
The boots were probably already ruined anyway.
Michael, for his part, does not seem disgusted or surprised. He laughs like someone's memory of a windchime.
"What." Gerry gets all of the syllable out before his stomach roils again and he gags. Nothing comes up. When was the last time he ate? "The fuck was that all about?"
"I gave you a way out, did I not?" Michael does not offer him a hand as Gerry rights himself, swaying woozily. Probably for the better. "And I did my best to ensure your safe passage -- the failings of your own anatomy are really not my responsibility."
Gerry glowers at him.
The Leitner, he realizes, is now very damp, thanks to the way he'd been clutching it against his wet clothes. As much as he'd like to burn it right away, it would probably be smarter to wait until morning when it's dry. He sets it down on his table, double checking the cord wrapped over the cover. It seems strong enough.
Belatedly, he realizes he's probably going to need to figure out an excuse for Gertrude about just how he managed to get back to London without buying himself a return train ticket this time around. Also, he never actually checked out of his hotel. As a rule, he never travels with anything incriminating or irreplaceable when Leitner hunting, so he's not so much worried about retrieving anything he may have left behind. It's a potential loose end he'll want to clean up.
For all that the ability to instantly teleport from point A to point B may seem like a dream superpower, the reality is a logistical nightmare.
Yet another bridge to cross when he comes to it, he supposes. He'll call the hotel in the morning and check out like that. Hopefully they won't ask too many questions.
Right now, there's still a monster standing in his kitchen, he's still soaked to the bone, and his nausea has given way to something considerably more painful.
He strips his jacket off, ignoring the wet smack it makes as he drapes it over the back of the nearest chair. Water isn't great for leather. He makes a note to go buy some decent conditioner for it tomorrow once he's done scraping together the crumbled shards of the rest of his life, if he ever gets that far. Then, he does his best to scoop his hair up and wring it out. The floor is already covered in vomit and water anyway, so a little more won't hurt.
It's not vanity or any sort of commitment to his aesthetic that keeps his hair long, it's mostly laziness, so at the very least he's not terribly concerned about damaging it any more than he already has with year upon year of semi-botched home dye jobs and minimal care.
There's a rubber band on his counter, probably one leftover from his landlady collecting up his forgotten mail and leaving it in a passive aggressive stack in front of his door. It'll do. He uses it to bundle his hair up into what could very generously be called a bun at the back of his head. At least it won't feel like tentacles clinging to the back of his neck anymore.
Michael watches him with a great deal of interest.
Gerry isn't really sure why he's still here. "Can I help you?"
Michael taps his chin with one too-long-too-sharp finger. "You are not very good at saying thank you when someone saves your life. It's very rude, isn't it?"
Gerry pauses as he reaches down to tug his t-shirt up over his head. He ought to feel annoyed -- he knows Michael is very much trying to annoy him for whatever reason -- but instead he really does feel like kind of an asshole. For all that accepting his help may have been the equivalent of making a deal with the devil, Michael has undeniably saved his life not once but twice in the last -- wait, how long had it been?
He eyes the digital clock on his stove. It reads 8:09 AM. He doesn't entirely remember what time he had broken into the house. It had been at least several hours.
Whatever. Regardless of the math, his life had been saved two times in rapid succession tonight.
"Fair enough. Thank you." Gerry says, earnest, and strips off his t-shirt. He lays it on top of his jacket on the back of the chair. He'll hang them both, and his jeans and socks, from the shower curtain rod once he himself has had one himself. That's his next mission.
He expects some sort of witty or cryptic rejoinder from Michael, maybe something about being unable to believe he's survived this long doing what he does without Michael's help -- though thinking it briefly makes him cringe inwardly at just how quickly and casually he was able to conjure up Michael's voice saying those things in his head. As if Michael were just one of his normal associates -- friends, even, if he'd had any friends to speak of.
But Michael isn't even smiling anymore. He's just staring at him.
Gerry is suddenly very aware of his own partial nudity.
He's not really shy about his body -- it's not because he's proud or anything, he's just spent so much of his time both growing up and as an adult either alone or in mortal peril that the idea of another person looking at him when he's vulnerable has never had time to gestate into a full fledged anxiety. It's just not something he thinks about. He's always had more pressing things to worry about, honestly. And the very few and far between moments he'd had with people where nudity had been preferred -- well, being self conscious hadn't really been the first thing on his mind there, either.
But the expression on Michael's face, at least what parts of it Gerry can manage to focus in on, doesn't read curiosity or even desire (quite frankly, the question of whether or not something like Michael can feel desire is a can of worms Gerry needs to file away far, far down his to-do list). It's more like concern.
"What're you looking at?"
"You have been marked a great many times already, haven't you?" Michael says this like he's surprised by it. Then Gerry realizes he's talking about the scars.
The thing about traveling in a secret and arcane world full of unfathomable horrors that feed off of fear and flagrantly disregard the laws of physics is that you tend to amass quite a few very bizarre and very specific injuries in the process. It just happens. If you don't die, you come away with some grisly reminders.
And Gerry has been traveling in this world basically since birth. His entire body is practically a roadmap of nightmarish encounters. He doesn't even remember where most of them came from at this point.
His tattoos cover some, others intersect and overlap with one another. There's a very distinctly human-mouth shaped gash on his left side from a Flesh-creature with too many teeth. The wound he got only recently from The Slaughter's ghost soldiers healed up fine but left a little pinkish-white triangle on his thigh. There is a series of straight white lines down his back, overlapping like cross-hatching in sets of three from a Hunter. A very large portion of his right arm is mottled by a long-healed burn care of a believer in the Lightless Flame.
He once ended up in the hospital with a shattered ankle thanks to a trigger happy servant of The Vast and a fall that really ought to have killed him. That had earned him a row of tiny dot-shaped marks tracing over the top of his foot in a perfectly symmetrical line -- the echo of 17 surgical staples from where he'd had to have the bones reconstructed. He'd even been stabbed in the palm with a fountain pen of all things, years and years ago, by a person who'd been driven so out of their mind by a Spiral book they were convinced Gerry had been a demon straight from hell, coming to drag them down into the pit. That one was hardly visible at all anymore, but he could still feel the tiny bundle of knotted toughened tissue if he pressed down on something too hard. He wonders if Michael can somehow remember that one, too. He doesn't know how these things work for Avatars and Avatar-like things. Collective memories or something, maybe.
In fact, if Gerry actually took the time to think about it for any length of time, he'd be hard pressed to think of a Power that hasn't gotten its hands, claws, teeth, or talons in him at one point or another -- except for The End, he supposed. Unless you counted the psychological scars inflicted by his mother, which Gerry would really prefer not to, if he got any say. People didn't tend to have run-ins with The End and live long enough to develop any real physical reminders. Kind of defeated the purpose, that did.
Either way, he's glad to have had to deal with that particular inevitably yet.
"I guess I have, yeah," he says, finally with the shrug of one shoulder.
Michael seems deeply unsatisfied with this answer -- worried, even. His face is very strange -- stranger than normal, rather. The air in the room is shifting to something that is making the hair on the back of Gerry's neck stand up. He doesn't say anything and Gerry knows he doesn't need to tell him that he doesn't understand. I wouldn't make a difference if he did.
Gerry doesn't see the door he leaves out of, but he hears the latch click shut anyway.
He stands under the luke-warm spray of his shower for a very long time, until he can no longer smell salt water on his skin or taste it in his mouth.
He decidedly does not let his mind wander to the question of whether or not desire is within the scope of something like Michael's emotional range.
By some miracle, Gerry does actually manage to get back around to Pinhole Books with a bag full of cleaning supplies from the corner store. With the Vast book disposed of, his laundry mostly salvaged, the Sweedish hotel called and dealt with, and his own fragile grip on whatever else is happening in his life (Michael) still hanging on by a thread, he figures it's the absolute least he can do.
Mary is standing in the doorway when he arrives.
"It Is Not What It Is is a very stupid choice indeed," is how she greats him. She spits the word 'stupid' with such venom it takes a moment for Gerry to actually process what she'd said in its entirety. Then he notices what she's holding, partially phased through her not-quite-corporeal hand.
The fucking pen, useless and curled up and deeply incriminating.
All at once, Gerry feels caught out, though he's not sure why. He's not even sure what his mother is accusing him of and he's an adult, besides. Why should he care? She's dead. It doesn't matter.
But it does, doesn't it?
That's the problem.
Always has been.
Mary seems to take his silence as acknowledgement and continues. "Bad enough when you were out there cavorting with Gertrude Robinson, pretending to serve The Beholding. At least with The Eye there's actual power to be had."
Gerry blinks down at her. The lines of ink that snake around every inch of her skin are practically squirming.
"Bad enough when you set out to undo all of my hard work," she continues, face curled into a sneer. "But choosing madness over your own family? Choosing The Twisting Deceit? I should have kn--"
Gerry brushes past her -- or through her, mostly, pulse thudding in his ears. She honestly thinks he'd -- what, become a servant of The Spiral? Committed himself to a power without her blessing? As if any of that were -- as if he had --
It's such an avalanche of absurdity he's not even sure where to start.
He drops his bag onto the table with enough force that it almost covers the door slamming behind him. Mary watches him with crossed arms and a scowl.
"Nothing to say for yourself, then? Just going to invite The Liar and its ilk into my home without a word? Did you think I wouldn't notice? Did you think--"
"I don't think about you at all, because you're dead!" Gerry finally rounds on her, explosive in a way startles him more than he can let on. It garners virtually no reaction from Mary herself, aside from cutting her off mid-sentence.
Gerry takes a single deep breath in and exhales through his nose. His face feels hot. His heart is racing. "You're dead," he repeats. "And even if I had committed myself to The fucking Spiral -- which, I haven't, by the way -- but if I had, I wouldn't owe you anything, least of all an explanation."
Mary scoffs. "Gertrude has really done a number on you, hasn't she?"
And that's -- Christ. That's so deluded in and of itself that Gerry has to laugh. It's a humorless and bitter thing. There's never been a clearer picture painted of just how absolutely low his own mother's regard for him is -- she doesn't even believe he could sacrifice himself to a fucking elderich abomination by his own power. It's hilarious.
His head is throbbing.
Mary does not laugh with him. She does not move.
"You have to realize," he says finally, venom gathering in his voice in kind -- a trait, he realizes with some degree of irony, he must have picked up from her, "how absolutely insane you are, right? To be standing here, now, trying to scold me like some god damn teenager caught out after curfew with a date, from beyond the fucking pale?"
"You never did understand the world we were destined for, or the legacy we were meant to inherit. I always knew, I just didn't want to believe it. So naive, despite it all, despite all my work. Just like your father."
It stings more than Gerry would like to admit. He must flinch, though he doesn't necessarily feel it, because Mary's mouth ticks up into a cruel smile; a predator who's caught the scent of blood.
"I suppose that's even more credit to Gertrude, then. Trying to make something of you despite it all."
Gerry, abruptly, feels very heavy. All the vitriol and venom suddenly evaporating out of him almost as fast as it had gathered. It's a familiar feeling. Futility, betrayal, shame. Some combination of all of the above.
Gravity.
"I don't --" he starts, after what might be seconds or minutes of stillness between them. He keeps his voice very even. "Owe anything, much less an explanation to you or to her. Now leave me alone."
"Oh, you are not a very good liar, Gerard. Not very good at all." Mary's voice is still as cruel and as sharp as ever, even when she's halfway dissipated, more the suggestion of a person than anything that can really take up space.
Gerry won't kid himself into believing that she was vanishing to comply with his wishes -- more likely she'd been moving around the shop long before Gerry had even shown up and only had so much energy to use for now. That, or she had decided that the effort of the argument just wasn't worth the time. Either was equally likely, to be honest, and Gerry didn't know which option stung less. It didn't matter, anyway.
Now, he was alone, for better or worse.
He can feel his heartbeat in his throat and his head is throbbing, out of time with it, just enough to unbalance him.
He allowed himself a few moments to just stand there and breathe before turning back to the task at hand. He may as well clean, despite everything. It's what he came here for, after all, and he refused to let this be a wasted trip only to be berated by his dead mother.
Christ. Every single part of this was so beyond parody, if he'd had any energy left in him he would have laughed -- properly laughed -- at the scope of it all. Every last bit.
Instead, he tears open his bag and, very slowly, gets to work.
Six hours later the sun has long since set and Pinhole Books is maybe not immaculately clean, but certainly no longer covered in dust and cobwebs and Gerry's entire body aches with the expended effort.
He doesn't necessarily feel proud of his work, but he's glad for having done it anyway. At the very least it had been a chance to stop thinking for a while. He doesn't get many of those.
"You are worth more than she will ever now," says the familiar voice in his ear that may be a dream or may be nothing at all. "She and Gertrude both."
Gerry wakes up with a jolt, disoriented covered in a thin layer of tacky sweat, loose strands of hair falling in his face, over his eyes.
There is no one else in the room.
His headaches are getting worse.
Not the ones from Michael's general presence, he realizes -- those come and go like sun showers and are just as likely to bring other symptoms with them, like the nose bleeds or the tinnitus. And conveniently enough, all that seems to be happening less and less -- it's never completely gone away but something in Gerry's brain seems to be adjusting to the way Michael seems to loom on the peripheries of his life now, even when he's not actually present.
In medical terms, Gerry thinks with some degree of humor, the idea of a person just slowly becoming accustomed to things like that would probably be called 'going mad.'
He doesn't feel mad, though -- or at least no more mad than usual. He supposes it's all very relative. Nothing in his life has changed all that much, with the exception of now having the occasional cryptic discussion with a monster powered by an eldritch force made entirely of delusion. And really, if anything, having Michael around now and then has been sort of nice. For all his many flaws, and the fact that he's very likely slowly luring Gerry toward his inevitable doom, it's nice to have someone -- something -- in his life that knows the score.
A friend.
He'd said as much, last time he noticed Michael's door snooping on him from the cafe. The waitress -- the same one, he thinks, who had glared him out before closing time all those weeks ago -- had thought he was talking to her. It was more awkward than it was worth. He swears he hears Michael laugh through the entire exchange.
Speaking of Michael -- his casual check-ins have remained just that. Casual. And more sporadic than ever, which Gerry supposes, isn't something he ought to complain about. Still, it feels like something has shifted since the incident with the Vast book and that night in his flat. Like suddenly Michael's priorities had changed.
That is, of course, assume Michael ever had real priorities in the first place.
Gerry has seen him physically less and less -- his door, sure. The little warped reminders that he's still very much keeping tabs? Absolutely. But the actual blonde-haired, dizzy-eyed facsimile that Gerry has come to associate with the name feels increasingly rare.
This is something that Gerry is definitely, absolutely not disappointed about.
Why should he be?
The headaches, however, are causing him some concern.
They come on slowly -- miragine-like, but not quite -- sharp and strange and localized -- the back, left side of his head -- and almost enough to make him need to stop what he's doing and sit down. He's been going through pain killers at an alarming rate.
Worst of all, when he mentions this to Gertrude -- more in passing than anything else -- she gives him a look that sets him inexplicably on edge. It's dismissal but more, somehow; like she's waiting for something.
She has him on another set of what feel like wild goose chase leads. Something about the People's Church, a sacred text, Maxwell Rayner -- it's all vague and unverified and if Gerry didn't know better, he'd say Gertrude was deliberately trying to make him spin his wheels for a while, but he can't actually figure out why.
Perhaps it's some desperate bid to stave off that particular anxiety cocktail that finds him sitting at his computer typing "Michael Shelley" into another search algorithm again. He'd mostly dropped it after Michael had told him too -- and, honestly, the mystery was at least partially solved already. Both he and Gertrude had all but confirmed everything Gerry could really need to know in their own ways. Michael Shelley was an Archival Assistant, something happened, and now, for whatever reason, the Michael Gerry knew partially used his name.
Okay, maybe the mystery wasn't mostly solved. Afterall, for as high the mortality rates of Archival Assistants tended to be at the Institute, the fact that Michael even existed as he did at all posed more questions than it answered. And even if it was ultimately a waste of his time, Gerry couldn't help but feel like it all meant something he really ought to know, if only for his own sake.
After about 20 minutes of dubiously legal probing in some of London University's student records and a cross-referenced roster of names of Archival Assistants from an employee register dated January, 2005, he finds himself staring right into the eyes of a ghost.
The picture is marred by jpeg artifacts and compression -- he'd found it on the Facebook wall of one Fiona Law, also a former Archival Assistant, also presumed dead -- but the face is absolutely unmistakable.
Michael Shelley's curly blonde hair is half covered by a thickly knitted hat, his big doe eyes, completely free of any static-y haze or distortion, are shielded by a pair of large, round wire-rim glasses. He's wearing a very puffy winter jacket, even though he's clearly standing inside the Institute's halls. He's holding his hands up to display a pair of mittens -- they look like they match the hat. If Gerry had to guess, he'd say they were all hand-made. He looks embarrassed. He's smiling, but his cheeks are spotched with bright pink. He can imagine Fiona Law badgering him to put on the gifts she'd made for him and pose for a picture against his obvious protests.
The caption beneath the image reads, "have fun in Russia, baby bear!" There's a tiny sparkle emoji -- the kind made out of ascii characters, not the ones you'd see on a modern phone.
It's not lost on him that the plane tickets he'd found those weeks ago had been destined for Russia. He doesn't need to access any part of The Beholding to know that he's looking at what is most likely the last photo of Michael Shelley ever taken.
The realization sits in his stomach like a rock. Gerry can't tell if it's just because he looks so young -- probably no older than 24 or 25 -- or because he's been spending the last couple months having on-again-off-again chats with a thing that is now wearing his face.
What was it that Michael had said? 'I was, and he was, and now I am and he is not.'
Gerry still doesn't understand what that means, but it certainly doesn't sound as simple as death.
He just can't tell if that's a comfort or not.
He needs to talk to Gertrude.
Within seconds of stepping through the doors of The Magnus Institute, Gerry knows that something is very, very wrong.
"Hello, Gerard." A voice says, like he'd been expected.
And then everything goes black.
If asked, young Michael Shelley would have told you that he honestly could not remember when he had first noticed the door. He supposes that in itself is its own sort of answer -- he'd obviously been too little to understand, or even be unsettled by, the presence of something that was so obviously not right. For years it was just something that he'd dealt with quietly and on his own -- it wasn't as though he ever felt particularly lured in, or even invited -- it was never even open, not a crack. It was just -- well, a door that was there sometimes, and other times it wasn't. Simple as that.
When he'd told his parents, he wasn't sure what he had been expecting. By then, he'd grown so accustomed to the sometimes-presence that it barely registered and so his own air of casual dismissal must have, in some way, prompted their reaction. They'd laughed and shrugged and told him that active imaginations were good, especially when they were harmless, and that maybe he could make up an imaginary friend to go with his imaginary door. In some strange way, that had been the thing to actually unsettle him -- the very suggestion that something could actually come through his door made some animal part of his brain start to shiver, though he couldn't define or grasp why exactly. He just knew that for as harmless and easy to ignore as the door seemed, that whatever might be behind it probably wasn't.
He did not tell that to his parents. In fact, he stopped mentioning it all together after that.
All through his childhood, the adults in Michael's life used words like "reserved" and "shy" and "sweet" to describe him. It wasn't that he was coddled, necessarily -- but once he'd overheard another boy in his grade one class talking about how his father had snapped a belt at him one night and Michael could never imagine his parents, either of them, doing anything beyond sharpening the tone of their voice if they were ever cross with him. Not that they were ever cross with him. He was reserved and shy and sweet, afterall.
The day Ryan disappeared, many things changed..
It had started peacefully enough. Ryan had not been reserved or shy or sweet -- that was why Michael had liked him so much. He had been loud -- sometimes too loud -- and full of energy -- sometimes too much energy -- and when the adults in their lives talked about Ryan, they did so with concern in their eyes and their voices. More than once, Michael's parents had taken him aside to warn that, if Ryan began talking about things that did not make sense, then Michael should err on the side of caution and find an adult.
This was a silly thing, Michael had thought, because most of the children Michael knew spent a great deal of time talking about things that did not make sense -- he quite liked it, in fact, when their games and make believe spilled out into places where it probably didn't belong. But when Michael saw the door -- his door -- and Ryan saw it, too, he knew something was wrong in that same primal way he'd known that whatever lay beyond it was wrong. And, unlike Michael who'd had at least a meager handful of years to grow accustomed to avoiding the door all together, Ryan had --
He'd --
There had been laughing, at first, giddy excitement -- it's just like the Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, isn't it? -- and then there had been--
When Ryan had knocked on the door, the sound it made wasn't what a knock should sound like. It didn't open the way a door ought to open. And when Ryan's laugh turned into a scream, he didn't sound like Ryan at all. He had been right there, inches away, and then something had happened -- or didn't happen -- and he had been gone.
The police questioned Michael for hours, until he was wrung out and shivering with his eyes and nose crusted over with tears he couldn't feel embarrassed for crying. He did not want to lie, but he also did not know what the truth was.
At the end of the day, there was simply nothing to be done. Ryan was gone. As far as the law was concerned, no crime had been committed. Words like "schizophrenia" and "runaway" were used, rumors began to spread between both adults and children Michael's age and Michael pulled himself inward, maybe not understanding completely but preferring the absence of stares and hushed voices to the feeling of being watched or talked about or pitied.
He never stopped seeing the door, and it never beckoned to him anymore than it already had -- and in some odd way, that was almost worse, because now he knew the truth almost as much as he knew nothing at all. The nosebleeds that came and went were misdiagnosed and medicated, the creeping isolation was written off as the ultimate culmination of his reserved childhood, and the nightmares were kept mostly a secret -- a skill that grew easier and easier to perfect as he grew older.
When Michael Shelley applied for an Archival Assistant position at the Magnus Institute, it felt like an inevitably -- a spooky, half-hidden trauma culminating in a spooky, half-hidden career. He didn't learn the truth until it was far too late.
The day he was unmade, only hours before he was handed a map and told to walk through a maze, he had tried to tell Gertrude about the door, about his past, and about the creeping sense of purpose he'd been avoiding all his life. She had not been surprised at all.
The Distortion could not feel pain. It did not have nerves.
But Michael Shelley does.
Michael Shelley did.
And it hurts to become.
For a long time, Michael is nothing.
And then Michael is very, very angry.
This is new. Before, anger had always been something observed from afar. The Distortion was impartial, cruel but only in the way natural disasters are cruel. It did not experience anything as mundane as hatred or joy, not even for the people it consumed. It would watch them scream and beg and cry, stumbling through its hallways for days turned seconds turned decades and it would drink in their terror until it swallowed them whole. It did not feel for them.
Other parts of The Spiral, The Distortion had known, skewed closer to human than it ever had. The Worker of Clay had a body, a voice; hands to touch and grab and twist. The Distortion had never envied it, it scarcely knew what envy was. It could speak, of course, but often it chose not to. It could see, but it had never been limited by anything as restrictive as eyes. It existed, as all things exist, but it also simply did not.
The world as it is had been no place for The Distortion as it was. The Great Twisting would have changed that.
It nearly had.
Time is...difficult, like this. The collapse of The Great Twisting had sundered more than just the Worker's impossible edifice and the shores of Sannikov Land. It had left him - it - him - reeling and everywhere at once, further away from the heart of The Spiral than The Distortion had ever been.
It takes time for Michael to regroup, and when it does, he - it - feels horrified for the first time in its existence.
The form it - he - settles in could be generously called human. At first, Michael does nothing but tear his - its - self apart, over and over and over, doing and undoing, trying to claw out what feels like an infection; a splinter lodged somewhere far too close to the bones he - it - does not have. But each time, his form -- this form -- seems to snap back, elastic and unharmed, leaving its - his - nerves, the ones that should not exist, screaming out in pain it should not feel.
It would have been impossible to place The Distortion in a cage. There was no prison on this Earth or any other that could have held it. But somehow, Gertrude Robinson had done something worse -- she hadn't caged it, she'd defined it.
And now The Distortion was Michael and Michael was something else entirely.
Anger may be new, but Michael soon learns that it, like anything, can be useful.
The problem with "Smirke's Fourteen," or any taxonomy, really, is that it tries to apply limits to things that are, by their very definitions, limitless. Michael had never given this much thought before. He had, in the past, allowed every name humans had ever tried to assign him roll off of him in waves. But now, stuck as he is in the glue trap of being just-next-to-known, he finds that he can't help but ponder the system.
He wonders if humanity will ever truly be able to grasp the danger they've put themselves in by trying to understand.
It's made them too comfortable -- complicit, even, more often than not. They tended to believe that once they had assigned a name to something, it could no longer harm them. That it could never change.
Michael himself is evidence enough to the contrary, but he's certainly not vain enough -- especially now that he is aware he can feel vanity at all -- to think that something like him is really the greatest threat out there. There has always been so much more, so far beyond any comprehension, and yet the world spins on, populated by people who go to bed each night so sure of themselves.
Oh well, it didn't matter. Not in the long run. Things could change. They always did. And the more humanity wanted to believe they didn't, the easier they would be to consume when the time came.
Gertrude Robinson may have hamstrung him, but he's adapted. He's very good at adapting.
Gertrude herself had seen to that.
Dealing with his newly discovered anger posed certain challenges.
There had been a time when he had been able to be everywhere just as easily as he could be nowhere, but these days it was much more difficult to spread himself so thin. He'd had to acclimate to collecting information with more deliberate intent, stalking prey with purpose rather than haphazard interest. And more often than not, that purpose drove him...fixate, on things.
He has certain obvious targets, the ones that made him want to gnash the teeth he had never meant to have.
Gertrude Robinson wore The Beholding like a suit of armor; an exoskeleton. No matter how hard Michael tried, he could never seem to reach out and tear her apart, no matter how badly he wanted to. In the beginning, he'd tried and tried and tried. The Ceaseless Watcher's gaze had nearly unmade him all over again.
Gertrude herself seemed utterly unsurprised by these bursts of violence. She'd probably expected them. Michael honestly didn't know if she knew exactly what she was doing -- what she was making -- when she'd sent Michael Shelley through that door with nothing but a map, but he had to believe that she'd planned for every possible contingency, including this one.
Either way, he couldn't seem to touch her -- not directly at least. Knowing this did absolutely nothing to mitigate his rage or to slake his bloodlust, but it did force him to start thinking a bit more creatively.
He turned his attention to someone else who had been there that night, who had helped Gertrude do what she did. Peter Lukas was a more powerful creature than Gertrude herself had ever been, sure, but The One Alone did not harbor the same amount of instinctive disdain for It Is Not What It Is that The Eye always had. And while he could not kill Peter Lukas -- not without starting a fight that Michael knew he'd be unlikely to survive himself -- he could watch him and hold out hope that maybe someday, if the timing was ever right (or very wrong) he would be able to swoop in and rip poor, lonely Peter limb from limb. He could wait.
And aside from offering a stress test for his patience, Peter came with the unexpected benefit of being in near constant contact with Elias Bouchard. If Gertrude were impossible for Michael to get too near, Elias Bouchard was worse. Michael had known him, before, only in passing, and harbored no real ill will -- aside from just general distaste and distrust, which was common sense -- but he found himself interested nonetheless. After all, Michael was hardly picky or precious about most forms of collateral damage -- if figuring out a way to take Elias off the board presented itself, he'd take it. Especially if that put him any closer to seeing Gertrude destroyed.
He was no Beholder himself, obviously, and certainly no puppeteer of The Web, but the act of watching and waiting and learning seemed to scratch some sort of itch within him. Ever since the collapse of The Great Twisting, Michael found he had a great many of those to deal with. Itches; tiny fissures in his self that should never have been a self to begin with. He tried to bend and twist and change in kind, if not to solve the problem entirely than at least to mitigate it.
Sometimes it worked.
Ms. Robinson, I found that statement you asked for --
Other times it didn't. The echoes in his head would grow so loud and discordant that he could no longer be anything at all, much less Michael, and that only made the anger burn so hot and brite it threatened to consume him entirely.
It's the same instinct that drives him to keep tabs on both Peter and Elias that first brings Michael's attention to Gerard Keay.
At first he thought that maybe Gerard was a new assistant, someone totally inconsequential, but it wasn't that. He dressed himself up in The Beholding almost the way Gertrude herself did, but it was different. She treated him differently. The Ceaseless Watcher did, too.
Where Gertrude went, Gerard Keay seemed to follow.
Michael knew from personal experience that was unlikely to be a good thing.
Have fun in Russia, baby bear!
The odd thing was that Gertrude did not seem to be doing anything particularly interesting with him.
She certainly didn't seem to be thwarting anything of note. Each of the little missions not directly related to Leitner's volumes she would assign Gerard on his own were, more often than not, virtually inconsequential. She was keeping an eye on The Stranger, on their Unknowing, and sometimes she'd send him on errands for that, but it seemed almost perfunctory.
Michael had gone as far to seek out Nikola Orsinov herself and she had confirmed the static she'd been getting from The Archivist and her lap dog, she called him, was laughable at best. Rakes for them to step on, she'd said, like Wile E. Coyote. Did The Archivist really believe they were that stupid?
Then, she'd offered to peel Gertrude Robinson's skin off when they finally caught her and fashion it into a coat for him.
Tempting, Michael had said, quite tempting, but no, thank you.He wanted to see this one through himself.
Nikola said she made no guarantees.
Fair enough.
And so, he observed and he waited, and as he did, began to realize.
When Michael Shelley had existed, Gertrude had done her best to keep him as ignorant to the reality of the world as possible. He'd come to the Institute already at least somewhat aware, so there were certain things she allowed to slip in through the cracks, but Michael Shelley had never once realized that even those crumbs had been calculated -- just enough to keep him at attention, keep him engaged and focused. He had believed in her so fervently, trusted her so completely, and by the end the betrayal had been so unthinkable he hadn't even been able to fight back. He'd walked through the door confused and scared and nothing else. The anger had come later. The fight was only coming now.
Ms. Robinson, was there anything else you needed?
Gerard, Michael can see, has been angry for a long while. He knew so much even before Gertrude had come to him, and as such, she'd had to change her tactics. She pretended to treat him like a confidant; a partner even, and let him think that theirs was an arrangement of mutual benefit.
He was too smart, had survived too much, to not see the trap around him swinging shut, so Gertrude had yet to actually set it at all. She used his singular obsession with destroying Leitner's work -- something that Michael didn't fully understand but could respect, if only for how it took knowledge out of the world in such a direct and elegant way -- to keep him busy, keep him moving and distracted. Keep him burning.
Gertrude offered just enough to spur him on but never enough to let him get too comfortable. And all the while, Michael could tell, Gerard Keay had convinced himself that it was working in his favor -- or, failing that, that he was aware enough to know when and if he were getting the raw end of the deal.
She'd always had a good eye for things that could be exploited, and it was so obvious from afar just how well she understood exactly how to use Gerard's own nature against him.
Or maybe it was only obvious because Michael himself had lived it, too.
But the fact of the matter was that Gerard Keay was being played.
Michael just needed to figure out why.
Slowly but surely, Michael begins to see the shape of things -- or at least, some of the pieces. Limited as he was, as he is like this, in this form, it's not hard to be a fly on the wall; to press his ear against his door and simply listen. Sometimes he gets a little too bold, lets Elias and his Beholding catch sight of him sniffing around every now and then, but he's so blinded by his own overwhelming ego -- his absolute certainty in his own superiority -- that he pays little to no attention. Michael, it would seem, is well beneath him. A nuisance The Archivist has already dealt with. Rather than being annoyed by this, Michael chooses to see it for what it really is: an advantage.
Eventually, Michael comes to several conclusions.
One: Peter Lukas wants Elias's help to stop something he's calling The Extinction because a world without people at all would be all the wrong kind of Lonely.
That one is easy. Peter is not trying to be all that secretive -- The Lonely may be insidious but Peter's own anxieties are making him practically transparent. And for all that he is powerful in his own little domain and in the purview of his own deity, he is not a very clever man.
But quite frankly, Michael couldn't care less about his goals, real or imagined.
Two: Elias, for whatever reason, seems deeply invested in keeping Peter chasing his tail. Michael has no interest in trying to understand exactly what their relationship entails but he knows that whatever complicated and probably deeply personal intricacies are at work here are unlikely to be of any real interest to him.
That one takes a bit more doing to see in full relief, though -- for all Elias is a pompous ass with far too high an opinion of himself, he isn't stupid. And he is very good at obfuscation, even if the thing he's trying to obfuscate seems like a colossal waste of time.
And failing that, Michael knows that his motives have never really changed from the time The Distortion first became aware of Jonah Magnus all those years ago. It doesn't matter much which name he's using. Always power, always the ultimate victory for his beloved Beholding, so Michael feels confident in writing whatever they're doing off as a nonstarter.
That leaves Gertrude, who seems to be proceeding through her own schemes with the freedom that comes from total and unobstructed autonomy. With Peter and Elias both occupied in their self indulgent and wildly circuitous dance, Gertrude has been left unchecked. Sure, there were others out there who could try and topple her -- Rayner and the like, Orsinov and her circus -- but the fact that she seemed so unconcerned with whatever extant threats may be out there was concerning in and of itself. Michael doubted that Gertrude had suddenly chosen now to become cocky and foolishly self assured. He knows -- he's convinced -- she's got something else in play.
But he does not actually know what Gertrude Robinson intends to do, aside from the fact that it has something to do with Gerard Keay -- a player in this game that both Peter and Elias have seemingly chosen to completely ignore. Not that that's much of a surprise -- aside from his slightly irritating arson hobby, Gerard Keay's only remarkable feature is being an associate of The Archivist, and both Peter and Elias are very well aware at how precarious a position that is.
Michael can't really begrudge them their logic. He might be the only living creature on Earth as uniquely suited to noticing the warning signs of Gertrude Robinson as he is. He feels a bit like a weather vane, a radio, some device that has been forcibly fine tuned into the signal of one specific person. He has no say in the matter at all.
Ms. Robinson, did I ever tell you about the door?
Dimly, Michael realizes that even if he never actually gets the chance to kill her, he's happy to settle for ruining her life in any way he possibly can. And if that means meticulously tearing apart whatever convoluted plot she's trying to prepare? So be it. .
Intervening in Germany had been, he would admit, a bit impulsive.
Michael knew that the path of least resistance may actually be to just let Gerard Keay get killed by his own foolishness. He certainly tried hard enough at it. But that had felt wrong, too. It was too anticlimactic, maybe, or just too simple -- like somehow Gerard Keay's unremarkable death would only be another passive victory for The Archivist.
It was a ridiculous thing to think. But be that as it may, Michael knew that allowing Gerard's spectacular lack of self preservation instinct to do him in might briefly waylay Gertrude's agenda, but that was likely it. It obviously wouldn't stop her. It probably wouldn't even phase her.
Failing stopping her heart with his own hands, he wants her to suffer, not just stumble.
He briefly considers taking him for The Spira as a possible alternative. As a concept, it felt sort of poetic in its symmetry. An eye for an eye, or something. It wouldn't be difficult and it might get Gertrude out in the open long enough for him to make his move. But he gets as far as fully turning the theory over in his head before he abandons it, deciding with surprising force that he won't use Gertrude's own methods, her endless stream of sacrificial lambs, against her. He won't sink to that, even if it would help him in the long run.
Pride, it would seem, is something he's been cursed with now, in addition to all these other clumsy emotions.
He thinks, maybe, he could get Gerard to start distrusting her and then maybe he'd kill her himself. It wouldn't be quite as satisfying but it would be nice. He intends to give that one some serious thought.
But in the meantime, Gerard Keay could not die. Not like this. It would just be such a waste.
He does let him get hurt, though. That he doesn't mind so much.
And, honestly, how did a person who bleeds that much survive for so long?
As it turns out, dealing with humans you didn't intend to trap and devour was actually a bit more difficult than Michael would have guessed.
Conversation is...not easy for him. Least of all when it's laced with prying questions that Michael wants to provide answers for, he does, sort of, but at the same time he doesn't. He can't.
Gerard's frustration and trepidation with him feels...charming, maybe? Thrilling in a way Michael is unfamiliar with. It's all very interesting. A completely new experience. He likes this game.
He had never fully realized that he could actually feel boredom, much less understand what it was when he did. Apparently he'd been feeling it for a while.
Dealing with Gerard isn't boring, though. He won't go as far as to say it's pleasant, but it's definitely not boring.
Gerard tries very hard to pretend he is not afraid of him.
Michael likes that very much, partly because it is a lie and partly because it might also be true.
Mary Keay's persistence after death was something Michael had never given much thought to.
He'd been aware of her, of course. Even before he was unmade, he'd been aware of her -- perhaps not to the extent he should have been, but he'd heard the name and some of the stories. There were few in their world who hadn't. But, like most people with any good sense, he hadn't cared for her much then, and he certainly didn't now, especially as he watches Gerard physically shrink in her presence.
For all his attention on Gerard has been a boon of things that were new and unfamiliar for him -- this isn't. This is something he knows immediately, right down to his core.
Michael, how many times must I tell you --
He may not hate her the way he hates Gertrude, but it doesn't matter. It leaves him weighing his options, thinking of breaching The End's territory for himself, consequence be damned.
He asks Gerard why he returns to her. Gerard lies.
Michael likes lies, usually, but he does not like this one.
The Vast book Gertrude has set Gerard's sights on is a dead end, and Michael knows it. The volume she has him searching for is almost entirely harmless -- certainly not worth the effort. Even Simon Fairchild seemed to think so when he left it to be sold off at an unsuspecting Helsinki bookstore in what Michael could only assume was some kind of practical joke. It then traveled through the hands of a small chain of collectors before ending up somewhere some nowhere Sweedish village to collect dust and do nothing of any real interest except cause a minor uptick in the skydiving business, and subsequent skydiving accidents, of that particular region.
Pointless.
But still she insists on traveling with him -- by train of all things -- to Sweden.
Michael follows along. Thankfully not by train.
Gerard rapidly realizes what an incredible waste of time it's all been -- though he does not seem the least bit suspicious when Gertrude abruptly peels off, citing some project or another she'd like to check up on in Denmark, leaving Gerard to take the arduous journey back to London on his own.
In the last month, Gertrude has spent less and less time outside of the Institute proper unaccompanied -- usually by Gerard, sometimes by her few remaining official assistants. It was very uncommon. One might guess that it was just a natural outcropping of the many, many enemies she'd made over the decades -- a case of diminishing returns on her own safety. After all, Gertrude had only survived this long -- and been this successful -- with a very healthy dose of paranoia. But Michael suspected there was more to the story.
Staying cooped up under The Eye's protective gaze definitely did have the added benefit of keeping her more secure from the other things that went bump in the night, but Michael knew, from before, that Gertrude's appreciation of The Eye's power was matched only by her resentment for it.
But either way, her little Coppenhagen adventure seems wildly out of character, so Michael follows along at a healthy distance and waits.
Like Mary Keay, Michael had always been aware of Mikaele Salesa. Michael Shelley had even done some brief correspondence with him at Gertrude's behest, though he had had no real information on whatever deal he may have brokered or idea why, and he'd never asked. He just made some phone calls, scheduled some meetings and set the corresponding calendars when told. That was all. Even now Michael doesn't have much of an opinion on the man.
Gertrude meets with him at a freight shipping dock. She looks magnificently out of place, small and silver haired beneath her felted winter hat, surrounded by gruff looking sailors and dockworkers in coveralls. Salesa towers over her. She does not seem intimidated in the slightest -- in fact, Michael might guess, it may very well be the other way around.
He does not get close enough to hear what they say, but at the end of a very brief conversation, Gertrude hands over a thick brown paper envelope and Salesa signals for one of his men to bring around a sturdy wooden crate. It's not very large and doesn't seem very heavy, but the man doesn't look comfortable to be holding it. He sets it down at Gertrude's feet instead of passing it off to her directly, and quickly retreats.
The box has the word FRAGILE written in blocky red paint printed on each of its sides.
It's -- familiar? Michael's fingers twitch at his sides with the urge to reach out and touch, to take, but the impulse is muffled and far away, easy enough to ignore as Gertrude loads it onto a small handcart and leaves Salesa with a curt nod. If Michael hadn't been what he is, he might even believe Gertrude to be an innocent old woman, wheeling away an antique she'd purchased, or some sort of grocery delivery. No one seems to mind.
For some reason, this makes him furious.
Later that evening, Michael finds Gerard in a train station and wants to tell him more than he knows how to say.
The conversation probably could have gone better.
In retrospect, Michael probably should have anticipated Gerard's research would bring him around to Michael Shelley.
It wasn't as though all records of him had somehow ceased that night in Russia. And Gerard was nothing if not tenacious, even if he was searching in the wrong direction.
Is it the wrong direction?
At some point, Michael realizes, his goals had shifted slightly. He still wants Gertrude dead, and failing that, ruined, but Gerard is --
Gerry is...unusual. He's special. Michael doesn't doesn't think too hard about it.
And regardless, it really does take him by surprise. It's an odd feeling -- not the surprise, but the things that come after it -- the way it makes Michael simultaneously want to push Gerry away, to swallow him whole, to unmake him in every way possible to prevent him from learning anything else and to throw himself at Gerry's feet, to lay that story at his feet and let him understand.
In lieu of any of that, he breaks Gerry's modem.
It seems as good a tactic as any at the time.
But of course, Gerry does not let it go.
It occurs to Michael that he has never actually heard someone say the name Michael Shelley outloud until Gerry. It sounds unfamiliar, but it gets stuck in his head regardless.
The night Michael goes to Gerry's flat for the first time -- physically, as himself, that is -- Gerry does not seem surprised. He's come a long way from the performative bravery Michael had seen on him in the beginning. That probably ought to annoy him. It doesn't. He doesn't mind the lack of fear. It's...helpful, even. Pleasant in a way that Gertrude's absolutely is not.
The conversation about Michael Shelley maybe gets away from him a bit. He's trying, is the thing. But it's never going to be that easy. Nothing in their world ever is. He can practically feel the poke and prod of Gerry's curiosity against his edges, sharp as they are. It reminds him of the itches he sometimes gets, the splinter-like things he used to want to gouge out of himself, the way he'll sometimes remember things he both should and shouldn't know.
The itches still come and go, but the need to rip and tear has turned into something softer, maybe. Unpleasant but only because it is so defiantly unusual.
Maybe that weird new awareness is why he notices, as Gerry sits before him trying so desperately to figure him out. Or maybe it's just the way Gerry's defenses, physical or otherwise, are so clearly down here. That's not very smart of him in Michael's presence, of course, but it is convenient.
It's faint -- a smell, sickly and too sweet for anything Gerry would have near him on purpose. Michael can't place it at first; has to get closer. When he closes the distance between them, he comes to a very troubling realization.
The End, out of all the Powers, is the one Michael finds himself fearing the most. It was only natural, he'd always assumed -- everyone and everything had at least a little fear of death. And The End was omnipresent. It very rarely had to actually act at all, preferring to sit back and just let things take their inevitable course. But in the same way, it also tended to have a degree of overlap with just about everything else -- Death could come in many, many forms, and once you knew what you were looking for, they weren't hard to spot.
Michael also knew there were times when it could be coaxed along. The End was as susceptible to change and manipulation as any of them were in the right hands, and Peter Lukas wasn't the only Avatar in the world who loved a good wager.
When Michael touches the crown of Gerry's head, he feels it immediately, lurking quietly beneath his skin, somewhere inside his skull. The brain is The Spiral's playground as much as anyone else's and Michael instinctually knows what should and shouldn't be there. It's not very large -- a tiny cluster of what ought to have been ordinary cells but aren't anymore -- soaked through by the touch of something Michael can't quite see.
A tendril of The End.
It hovers like a tiny black hole near the base of Gerry's skull.
Michael wonders absently if Gertrude knows and then, almost immediately, realizes that yes, of course she does.
Of course she does.
He wonders for how long.
He wonders how this factors into everything else.
Gerry is watching him very carefully. His eyes, Michael notices, are so brown they're almost gold.
He cannot stave off The End like this -- not here, outside of his own domain or without doing something far more invasive than simply touching. He'll need to regroup -- maybe even, heaven forbid, seek out someone like Oliver Banks; see if he can broker a deal of his own. But in the meantime he can dull Gerard's senses just a bit, take some of the pressure off.
"Do try and stay focused, please."
It's advice for the both of them.
Gerry's second venture to Sweden is infinitely more chaotic than the first.
Michael loves it, despite himself.
He has half a mind to deny Gerry the door he asked for, just to see how this whole cat burglar turn plays out for him. He wouldn't let him die of course but it's fun. It's a reprieve. Tracking down Oliver Banks hadn't been easy and being around any of The End's minions has always made him deeply uncomfortable. It's nice to have a little break.
Oliver's a perfectly nice man, don't get him wrong -- but that doesn't make the experience pleasant.
He's gentle, at least, when he explains that he can see The End's tendril coiling its way within Gerry's skull. "It does seem unnatural," he allows, pondering, "but sometimes death is unnatural, especially for us. You ought to know that better than anyone."
Michael supposes that much is true.
If Gertrude did make some sort of wager or broker some sort of deal, Banks had explained after a bit more coaxing, it wasn't with him. The End did not like the Keay family -- did not like Mary, specifically -- so it would not have been hard, he had said, to find someone out there willing to perhaps pull a few strings to see her son succumb to the inevitable sooner rather than later. It wasn't beyond the realm of possibility, even if it meant striking a deal with someone like The Archivist.
Or, he had continued, it could simply be that Gerard Keay had always been meant to die this way and that this tiny timebomb lodged in his skull was just Banks' patron exercising its own power. It had the right to, after all.
The End will always collect its due, doesn't matter who you are or who your family's pissed off in life -- or undeath, in Mary's case.
Michael had left Banks feeling deeply dissatisfied with his answers, but not surprised.
He does wind up providing Gerry with his door, no matter how interesting it would have been not to. He devours the man who comes barging in with his shotgun a moment later, after Gerry is safely out of the crossfire. Let the police deal with a disappearance rather than a traumatized, Vast-touched old man reporting a break-in and a stolen book.
For his part, Gerry handles the trip through Michael's domain admirably, even though it does make him vomit. It's the first time in Michael's not inconsiderable memory that he's had a human in his halls that he expressly wanted to let go of and he hadn't been certain just how that would work out for either of them. Gerry had been touched by The Spiral -- not The Distortion specifically, but other parts -- and survived several times over so Michael had assumed it might soften the blow.
Apparently it had, if only just a little.
At least he doesn't look all that worse for wear when they arrive back at his flat, vomit notwithstanding.
Watching him there, stripping off his soaking wet clothes, looking like a very large black cat someone had just hurled into a bathtub, brings that strange feeling back -- the one that makes Michael want to both destroy him and flay himself wide open.
He still can't seem to hate it -- the feeling, that is.
He wants to. He also very much does not want to.
But that's a problem for another time -- because Gerry is stripped to the waist and vulnerable as he's ever been in Michael's presence and, all at once, Michael comes to a troubling revelation.
Gerry is a mess of marks -- scars or otherwise. Now that he can see them plainly, Michael can't believe he missed them in the first place. They're not as loud or as colorful as The End's seed in his brain; some are so old they're almost invisible but others are so new Michael can scarcely believe they aren't still bleeding.
He does a quick inventory, pushing the parts of himself that do not exist against the parts of Gerry that only sort of do, the things he carries with him and doesn't even know, and counts.
It immediately makes the worst kind of sense.
Of course. Of course. This is why it had to be Gerard Keay. This is what Gertrude has been angling for. It's so rare that a human being survives with even a single mark, but to have someone who has managed to collect up all of them?
Michael Shelley had been touched, just slightly, by The Spiral and Gertrude Robinson had fed him to it to stop The Great Twisting. Only after Michael Shelley was gone did he learn that years before she'd done practically the same thing to a man who had been touched by The Vast, this time to stop The Buried. And later, she had burned a Web-touched woman alive, just to spite The Spider.
Gertrude's singular devotion to stopping rituals in whatever form they took had always involved hurling those who had been marked bodily into the maw of whatever beast she saw fit. Now, she had in her pocket a man who bore more marks than any of her past victims, and who had a timebomb ticking down inside his head, completing the set.
He'd been wrong. Gerard Keay was not being played, he was being groomed. Trussed up and perfectly positioned. The sacrifice of the century. That was the plan. It had always been the plan.
All at once, the rage reaches up and takes him, blinding and all consuming, and it's impossible to hold his shape. He leaves Gerry standing in a briny mess on his own kitchen floor.
He doesn't intend to end up at the Institute.
Forcing himself to exist here is problematic. It hadn't been, at least not like this, before, but it was now. But he had to. He had to. He feels volcanic and primal and deeply it hurts to be here, to stand so plainly in The Eye's unavoidable gaze, but he can't -- he can't --
He'd felt like this before, in the beginning. In between his bouts of ripping himself to shreds, he'd feel the need to lash out at something or someone else and would usually end up back here. He always regretted it after the fact, when he was inevitably forced to retreat and lick his wounds. The small handful of employees he'd been able to take or maim or drive mad in the process was hardly a reward worth the risk, especially not when Gertrude had scarcely even seemed to notice, much less care.
He can't kill Gertrude here, not like this, not with his hands like he wants to, but he can't stop himself. He needs to look her in the eye and see for himself.
She does not seem at all surprised to see him when he opens his door inside her office.
"And what can I do for you?" She says by way of a greeting. Her position is neutral in her seat behind her desk. There are statements -- recorded and written -- spread out in messy stacks around her. A cup of tea sits steaming faintly in the gloomy, artificial light. She's wearing her reading glasses, perched very low on her nose, like he'd interrupted her in the middle of research and she can't be bothered to give him her full attention.
It's all very desperately familiar.
That will be all, thank you Michael.
He wants to flay her alive, beat Nikola to the punch in making that coat she'd promised. He wants to unmake her.
Instead, he surges forward, hands sharpening menacingly and just quick enough to catch one of her's on her desk before he can roll her chair back. He skewers his finger down through her palm, pinning it to the surface. Blood blots out onto the file folder beneath it. She hisses in a sharp breath through her teeth, but does not scream. Good. He doesn't want anyone to come running, to know he's here, anymore than he's sure Elias already does.
Still, her air of calculated calmness only barely shifts. Pain has never scared her -- Michael knew this, even before -- and she certainly isn't scared now. He can already feel the burn of The Beholding from where his hand is touching hers. If this is a war of attrition, she's going to be the winner. And she knows it.
Michael very much doubts he looks even near human right now, for all that his vision has warped and swayed and gone hazy with barely restrained violence. He forms a set of vocal cords anyway. "I'm only here because I need you to know, Archivist."
Gertrude raises an eyebrow, impassive despite the sweat prickling at her temples. "And what is it I should know?" It's difficult to keep your voice even when your body would like nothing more than to go into shock, but Gertrude is very well practiced. As she speaks, she even has the presence of mind to reach into her cardigan pocket with her opposite hand and pull out a handkerchief to dab away some of the blood before it oozes too deeply into the files.
Michael pushes his finger deeper, twisting it like a knife, just to see her jaw twitch with the effort. "That I am the one who figured out your game, and the one who is going to ruin you. I will not let you take Gerard Keay." He relishes in the way Gertrude's mask of impassivity slips again, almost imperceptibly toward confusion at that. It's hardly a reaction -- if Michael had been anyone else, he wouldn't have noticed at all, probably -- but coming from Gertrude it's as good as shock.
It does not occur to him in the moment that her confusion may not be for the reasons he thinks.
He pulls back, his hand retracting from Gertrude's newly formed puncture wound with a slick, wet sound, leaving her with a stigmata-like circle of red gore on the back of her hand. She'll heal, but it won't be pleasant. Good.
"Is that right?" There's a faint sound of static under her voice. She fixes him with a look that sends painful sparks down his chest as it twists and shifts, trying to instinctively avoid even the passive force of a Beholder's compulsion as he holds himself in place. "Well I suppose I should thank you for doing me the courtesy. You know how I hate to be left in the dark."
Michael is halfway to deciding that murdering The Archivist and taking himself down with her may actually be worth it after all when the moment is interrupted by a brisk knock on the door.
Elias, no doubt, coming to intervene. It was inevitable. A vulture circling a wounded animal.
It's enough to derail Michael's fantasy of mutually assured destruction.
Stupid.
He'd been stupid and hasty and out of control.
God damn it.
Having to make such an abrupt retreat out of the Institute does absolutely nothing to slake the anger. If anything it makes it worse, leaves him spread out and nowhere all at once, stalking his own halls in a sort of futile, practiced routine before he can gather himself enough to exist again.
It's not as surprising as it probably ought to be when he finds himself back at Gerry's flat in the dead of night.
Gerry is asleep, but it doesn't look restful.
Michael suddenly feels invasive, somehow, as if his entire existence wasn't based on being exactly that. It doesn't necessarily bother him, but it is -- off, maybe. More and more, things dealing with Gerry are feeling off. Hard to parse. The fact that he's now watching him like this, after that, and feeling protective does not help.
He hadn't meant to use Gerry's name directly when he'd confronted Gertrude. He didn't know why he had. Gerry wasn't supposed to be the important factor here. The Archivist -- Gertrude -- was.
He wishes he would have killed her. He still might. He wants to tell Gerry as much. He wants Gerry to understand. He wants to run away and he wants to never leave. He wants to keep him safe. He wants to devour him.
It's too much.
Instead, he leans in and whispers the only true thing he can manage. It's not enough.
When Gerry wakes up, gasping and convinced he'd heard a voice in his ear later that night, Michael is nowhere to be seen.
His half-baked invasion of the Institute has, unsurprisingly, only made things harder for him. Gertrude's defenses are higher than they've ever been and he's piqued Elias's curiosity as well.
There is no way he'll be able to get close enough to her to simply kill her, not in the way he wants.
And, not without risking Gerry in the process, he realizes.
At some point, that became a priority too.
He understands why, sort of. She cannot be allowed to get away with it all over again. He will not allow her to send another person into the mouth of the beast in the name of whatever greater good she thinks shes--
Ms. Robinson, I'm scared, please, I don't--
He has to stop her. There's a ritual she's planning on stopping. She's prepping Gerry like an atom bomb and he has to stop her. And then, he will kill her, even if it means unmaking himself all over again.
But before that, he's going to need more information.
Thankfully, Mikaele Salesa is as neutral as they come.
Michael is finally able to corner him in a port town near Rio de Janeiro. By the look of it, he'd been taking a vacation -- his garishly patterned shirt certainly does not scream 'business.'
Neither does the way he visibly tenses up, groans, and then deflates when Michael sits down in the chair across from him in the dingy, anonymous bar he'd made himself comfortable in. The drink in front of him has an umbrella sitting against its rim. Michael, by way of greeting, snatches it up and slides the maraschino cherry its toothpick end had been skewering off with his teeth.
"Hello, Mikaele," Michael says.
"God damn it," Mikaele replies, mostly into his hands. "Can't you people ever give it a bloody rest?"
Michael doesn't feel bad for him in the slightest.
"I need some information I hope you will be able to provide," he smiles sweetly, allowing the cherry pulp to ooze, blood-like and impossible against his lips. Salesa is a very, very imposing man -- or he would be, if Michael had any reason to be worried about him -- but he's still as susceptible to Michael's abilities as anyone else. When Salesa looks up, he already looks queasy and admirably trying to hide it.
Michael suddenly realizes that it's been quite a while since he's directly interacted with a person who was properly afraid of him. Since all this business had started, really. It feels good.
"Out with it, then," Salesa sighs.
"You recently concluded a business transaction with Gertrude Robinson. Copenhagen, I believe it was. I need to know what you sold her."
Salesa's face scrunches up at the sides, confused. "Robinson in Denmark? I haven't --"
Something dawns in his eyes. He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out his phone, unlocking it and thumbing through what Michael assumes are a handful of encrypted drives. Then he scoffs, disgusted or annoyed or both.
"Fuck, figured that would happen. That one was one of yours." He says 'yours' like Michael had owned it personally, which is a funny concept in and of itself. He doesn't say as much, and lets Salesa continue. "That goddamn vase. Had to take a fucking book to it -- a security manual, of all fuckin' things -- to make sure it couldn't erase my memory of it again, lined its crate with the pages and it still doesn't want me to know that I even had it in the first place."
That...is certainly not what Michael had expected. He blinks at Salesa, who blinks at him in return, looking even more seasick and hazy for the eye contact, which he promptly breaks.
"Did she say why she wanted it?"
Salesa scoffs. "Why would she? And I didn't want to know. Took the money and left. Hope I never see that damn thing again, honestly. It's hardly worth the trouble."
He can tell Salesa is telling the truth, if only because he so obviously wants to get Michael as far away from him as possible as quickly as he can. It's fine. He got what he came for.
"Thank you for your time, Mikaele," Michael knows Salesa would (wisely) decline to shake his hand if he offered it, so he doesn't. Instead, he opts to curl the tiny tiki umbrella in his hands up into a warped paper-and-wood spiral, and drop it back in Salesa's drink before slinking out through his door.
Salesa struggles for several minutes to stem the nosebleed that starts the second it swings shut.
The Fractal Vase is a strange variable.
Before Michael was Michael, he had been more connected to it, he thinks. Before The Great Twisting had collapsed and The Spiral had been left fractured and struggling, when he was not himself and had been much stronger.
He's not anymore though, not really. But he can still feel it, if he tries hard enough. The fact that it's kept, as Salesa had said, bound by what we can only assume are pages from an Eye book, makes it harder but he knows that it's at least still in one piece, if that counts for anything. Gertrude had not purchased it to destroy it.
Something else, then.
The Vase, in the simplest possible terms, has the ability to...delete things, Michael supposes is the best way to think of it. It feeds things directly into The Spiral itself; people, objects, it didn't matter, and it leaves absolutely nothing in their wake. Only the owner of the Vase, whoever it might be at the time, would be able to remember they ever existed at all.
It was sort of cute, really, Michael had always thought. Low level, sure, but fun to watch. Pretty to look at. Made for all sorts of interesting messes for survivors to clean up, if there were any. They often did not stay survivors for too long.
But now its owner was, apparently, Gertrude Robinson, and it no longer seemed like a quaint little toy.
In the end, it's Peter Lukas who comes to him instead of the other way around.
Michael would be impressed by his bravery if he weren't so intensely annoyed. He is not in the business of being called upon by outsiders -- certainly not Lukases -- and he hates to admit that it does actually catch him by surprise to have Peter suddenly standing at his door, the one he'd left surreptitiously about five blocks away from the Institute itself as a sort of personal CCTV -- a way to monitor comings and goings without catching too much attention.
So much for that, it would seem.
Oh well, he supposes that while he's obviously good at avoiding detection, those who serve The One Alone will always be better.
Peter is as irritatingly forward with his false politeness as always when he knocks -- three light taps -- and then stands and waits, like he's an expected guest for some rich family's dinner party. Michael seethes and very seriously debates leaving him there unanswered. But the truth is he'd already been halfway to convincing himself that a conversation with Peter was his next, and perhaps his only, course of action so as much as he hates to admit it, Peter's presumption is actually saving him some effort.
Still, that doesn't mean this entire rendezvous has to happen completely outside of his own terms. When he swings his door open, he doesn't even allow for Peter to finish the word 'hello' before he grabs him by the lapels of his navy blue peacoat and pulls him into his halls.
Peter, for all the sudden movement had obviously unbalanced him, appears mostly unruffled. Why would someone who can just immediately remove themself from any situation with an immediate trip to The Lonely ever be concerned about being trapped? Even if the place they were stuck in could, quite literally, make their head spin.
He brushes himself off once Michael has pulled back, straightening his jacket with both hands. "Well now," that false politeness is still there in force, "hello to you too, Michael. Glad to see you seem to be doing as well as ever."
Michael says nothing. Peter does not seem to mind.
"I'm doing well too, actually." He continues, like Michael had asked. "Best as can be expected, I suppose, considering I've only recently been made aware of a dear friend of mine's plan to destroy the world. And not, I should clarify, in a fun way. But you know all about this already, don't you?"
Michael looks at him and, all at once, a great many things slot into place.
Elias. Fuck -- of course Elias had been doing exactly what Elias always does. Wheels within wheels within wheels.
That was the ritual Gertrude was countering. That was what Gerry had been meant for. Who else but The Eye could require such a massive effort from The Archivist?
Peter's eyebrows shoot up, half perplexed, half amused. "Or maybe you didn't. Now that's very interesting. Very, very interesting indeed. You see, I caught wind of your little stunt in the Archives not long ago and thought that maybe you'd been trying to catch him off balance, remove The Archivist from the equation, I don't know. You'll have to forgive me, I don't often try to follow your lot's logic, but I thought that was a bold move, which I can respect, and considered that we might be able to broker some sort of truce in the name of the greater good."
For a person who worships the holy power of being alone, Peter Lukas loves to talk. Michael considers turning his windpipe into a corkscrew just to make him stop -- it wouldn't kill him, probably. It could be a freebie.
He presses his mouths into a very thin, very dangerous line. "What is Elias planning?"
Peter only shrugs. "I don't rightly know -- not the details at least. Turns out, his vested interest in my theories about The Extinction have -- and this will surprise you, I'm sure -- not actually been rooted in any altruistic core deep within his heart. In fact, I can't even be certain that he believes me at all, in the end, which I do admit does hurt a bit. But at the same time I'm also flattered to have posed such a threat to him in the first place. He did want to keep me preoccupied, didn't he?"
Actually, Michael realizes, maybe Peter's terminal chattiness isn't despite his connection to The Loney, but because of it. He certainly seems to think of Michael as an audience member for his monologue right now, even as the hallways warp and twist around him, even as Michael's teeth grow sharper and sharper.
"Anyway," Peter continues, still sounding like he's talking about a petty spat with a boyfriend rather than a potentially apocalyptic event. "Should have seen it sooner, probably -- you do know how Elias is, though. I don't have to tell you as much. And as I said, your little attack on Robinson was really what made me realize what was happening. Seemed to properly startle him, that did. Don't know if it was so much you, no offense, or the way Robinson reacted, but it's now abundantly clear that there are things in motion that I would like to stop."
It dawns on Michael that Peter doesn't seem to know about Gerry at all, much less what Gertrude has been doing. Elias really does seem to have him absolutely wrapped around his finger. He'd respect it if he didn't hate both of them so much. But then again he supposes the same could be said for Gertrude and himself, in a strange way -- he's been so fucking blinded by his own resentment that he failed to see the third and final game being played here. It was more than just Elias playing Peter and Gertrude playing Gerry -- she'd been after Elias as well, this entire time.
Wheels within wheels within wheels.
Leave it to the servants of The Beholding to always believe they were the smartest people in the room. Problem was, more often than not, they actually were.
"As much as I'd love to stand here and develop a spectacular case of eye strain trying to look at you, I don't think we have a huge amount of time to weigh our options," Peter waves a hand, "Elias may be subtle but he can be very quick to action when he wants to be. So, what do you say? I know you've good cause to hate me, and I don't blame you, but a temporary truce so that neither of our patrons meet an untimely demise in the unfettered gaze of The Ceaseless Watcher seems like a wise choice to me."
Peter may be insufferable, but he isn't actually wrong, even without seeing the whole picture. And having a temporary ally in The Loney could benefit him. Peter was the closest person to Elias in the world and if stopping Elias meant the key to saving Gerry, Michael was willing to accept it.
"I expect you'll be in touch, then." He says with a nod, then tilts his head back meaningfully to the empty hallway wall where the door he'd been drug in through used to be.
Michael can only barely hold in a put upon scoff as he opens it, releasing Peter around thirty or so blocks from where he'd first come in, just to be petty. Peter only nods and waves, unbothered as ever, as Michael pushes him out and slams the door in his face.
Only then does he realize that Peter had probably been counting on their conversation happening in Michael's halls to begin with -- safely tucked away from Elias's prying eyes.
He needs to talk to Gerry. It's as simple as that. The idea of just -- of behaving so transparently may make some part of his mind roil in disgust, but he knows he just --
He needs to talk to Gerry.
Gerry is not at his flat. He is not at Pinhole Books. Michael reaches out through himself, pressing against his doors, and searches only to find himself scorched. The Watcher is looking directly at him. He seethes and sharpens himself every way he can.
He knows where Gerry is.
He only has one real option.
He finds Peter Lukas on the deck of his empty ship and ignores the horrible taste in his mouth that comes from asking for help.
Contrary to popular belief, Gertrude Robinson did, in fact, have a conscience. Sometimes she wished she didn't. It would undoubtedly make her life easier if she actually was the hollowed out and heartless bringer of vengeance and retribution the world at large seemed to believe her to be..
In fairness, she had cultivated that reputation in very deliberate fashion. Once, a long while ago, Gerard had told her that he'd covered himself in those silly little eye tattoos as a sort of defense mechanism -- warning coloration, like one might find in the animal kingdom -- and while Gertrude assumed that this was at most only partially true and largely a joke, she had never bothered to question him further.
She did understand the principal of the thing, though. Sometimes a reputation could be a far more reliable means of survival than any weapon.
But conscience or not, she was willing to do what needed to be done. That part was true. It was just that the process was never as pain free as she liked to make it look.
Sacrificing Michael Shelley to The Spiral had not been easy, nor had it been a decision she had taken lightly. He may not have been the brightest boy in her employ but she had liked him, sure -- which, was actually rather unfortunate, considering her approval on his hiring had, in fact, been mostly dictated by the fact he had been touched by The Spiral so young. It was hard to find people who carried that particular mark and also retained enough of their sanity to function in society. But Michael Shelley was almost completely unremarkable -- reserved, really, shy, sweet. She knew she couldn't pass up the opportunity when his resume had crossed her desk, no matter how badly she would have liked to spare him.
The fact that he actually did turn out to be as kind and as bravely empathetic as his doe eyes and deceptively youthful face would have had anyone believe only made the whole process harder.
She did not cry for him, but she would carry the guilt -- the memory of his voice, finally so full of fear on that cold night off the coast of Russia -- somewhere in her heart forever.
It was the same for the others, though she may not have been as close to all of them, or as privy to their emotional lives. Mr. Killbride had been so accomplished in life -- he'd been to space for Heaven's sake -- and all it had amounted to was a quick and merciful death before dismemberment. Even Emma Harvey, whose betrayal cost Gertrude a great deal of time, lived somewhere in the back of her mind like a shadow, not of regret but of loss -- grief, even, in a way.
The point being that she did feel for them, all of them, very much.
She felt for Gerard Keay as well, and for everything that was about to happen to him.
Mary Keay had been a truly vile woman in life, and an even worse one in death. Gertrude had never been afraid of her, but she did use a considerable amount of caution in dealing with her whenever it came to that. She tried to make that an uncommon occurrence. Sometimes people were better off avoided than confronted directly. This was just common sense.
But the opportunity afforded by Mary's death had been too great to ignore.
At first, she had only intended to extend an invitation to Gerard to test the waters, see exactly how much damage had been done to him; how useful he could be. It was very rare to find someone else so staunchly unaligned, though they had both been at least partially claimed by The Eye, and rarer still to find someone with Gerard's particular skill set. She had to give Mary credit there -- she had trained the boy well, though she had no doubt it had never been a consensual or mutual effort between them.
It turned out to be better than she could have even hoped. Though she could very clearly see the spark of a very similar passion lurking just beneath the surface, Gerard had apparently inherited none of his mother's madness. He would make an excellent soldier for the cause -- one of the best, maybe -- and, more importantly, his reflexive distrust in both her and the Institute itself meant he could stay at least partially under Elias's radar. Better than she herself could, at least.
And that could be very useful indeed.
The plan had come to her one piece at a time -- a scrap of information here, the whisper of an idea there, the steady culmination of decades upon decades of research into the horrifying and the unknown.
The fact that the Institute itself was a direct pipeline of power to The Eye had never been lost on her, not from the day she started. And with that fact accepted it had been easy to understand that there would come a time when it was their own ritual she would have to stop. She had no illusions about the virtues of her would-be patron -- or about Elias Bouchard, who had never once shared her concerns about taking The Eye as a master
Watching Elias was a difficult thing to do, semi-omnipotent as he was, but she'd started small. Calculated carefully. Kept herself busy and her mind occupied. The stronger The Eye's presence in her own life became, the easier it got -- though sometimes she felt that worked both ways. Reaching out too closely to Elias could feel like being repelled by a magnetic charge tuned to the same polarity. An invisible barrier; two objects trying to occupy the same space at the same time.
But she could wait. She could bide her time and gather scraps. It was far from the most challenging part of her career.
Elias, as it turned out, had been brewing a very curious series of ideas and theories of his own, aided in part by the ongoing anxieties of Peter Lukas, who may have not been particularly clever, but Gertrude understood to be a threat in and of himself. At first, she had wondered if it was a diversion -- a red herring meant to confuse both her and whatever other potential enemies may be lurking about, perhaps even a ruse meant for Lukas himself.
It wasn't until she realized that Elias had a very specific interest in the failed rituals -- specifically the ones that Gertrude herself had thwarted -- that she began to clear the clutter and the noise from her image of things.
In Elias's mind, the key to a ritual wasn't speed, it was superiority. Establishing a hierarchy. While everyone had been playing their own eldritch game of king of the hill, Elias had been planning an all-out battle royale.
Or so it might seem. But Gertrude knew that all-out war had never been The Eye's style, and neither had it been Elias's.
That was when she began to wonder why the Institute needed an Archivist in the first place.
There were the obvious reasons -- the mundane ones, clerical things, academic things, the carefully curated front of normalcy and legitimacy the Institute so valued -- but that could not account for The Eye's tremendous interest in her, personally. It was almost too obvious in how badly it called out to her -- though perhaps it was only exactly as obvious as it needed to be. Skilled as some of its minions were in the art of obfuscation and secrecy, concealing had never been The Beholder's strong suit. It much preferred to reveal.
She never tried to fool herself into believing she was actually the one that either The Eye or Elias himself actually wanted in the role, especially given her resistance to both of them. She had many faults, but ego had never been one of them -- perhaps that was why she'd been able to spot the dominos that Elias had so carefully stacked in the first place; why she was able to take what ought to have been an outside perspective and apply it to her own role in The Eye's ever-churning knowledge machine.
What was her job, really? What did it entail aside from feeding The Eye? Why did Elias allow her to move about the world as she did?
Establishing a hierarchy would not require a war if the battlefield itself could be reduced to a single localized point. And what could be more localized than one person's body. A ritual using someone who had managed to gather the mark of all fourteen Powers could, in theory, pull all of them forward at once -- and if that someone had the strongest connection to The Beholding, then, well -- it was really only simple math.
Survival of the fittest, but in a game that was rigged from the start.
Gertrude had spent so long figuring out how to use the marked to stop rituals, she'd never considered it the other way around; the power they could represent if used to start one.
This revelation was followed by two more in very rapid succession. The first was that she, Gertrude Robinson, the current Archivist, had very likely been doomed from the start. She was a test run at best, a guinea pig at worst. An experiment for Elias to observe and notate and then, to replace with a better, more cooperative version when he saw fit. This meant she was very rapidly running out of time.
The second was that she, Gertrude Robinson, the current Archivist, had spent decades of her life learning exactly how to stop these rituals from happening. It would not be easy, but she could do what needed to be done.
Gerard Keay had come to her with a great many marks already. It was almost too good to be true -- she'd even spent some time honestly wondering if perhaps The Web had had some hand in bringing them together. All the attributes -- the ones she had at first written off as the signs of his very useful survival skills -- turned out to be so much more.
This was fantastic news for her, less so for him. His collection of marks also represented a degree of extreme risk, specifically with regard to the one touch of Power he had, as far as she could tell, managed to avoid.
This wasn't a terrible shock -- those marked by The End did not tend to live for much longer afterward.
It took her quite some time to find a viable solution.
Her first instinct had been to look into Mary and the Book of the Trapped Dead. Gerard may have avoided The End's mark but he was situated closer to it than most by blood. At first, she considered binding Gerard to the book like his mother -- it was a grisly and tragic fate, yes, but it would certainly put a mark on him and had the added bonus of allowing Gertrude a level of direct control over him, which could be convenient.
But useful as that may have sounded, she knew that a ritual was unlikely to succeed with a ghost -- that, and she needed Elias to take the bait for the ritual to even begin, and she couldn't imagine trying to sell him on a dead man.
No, if this was going to work, she needed Gerard Keay to be not only alive but autonomous. A perfectly viable candidate to be very hastily snatched up and placed on the stage by Elias himself after Gertrude applied the correct amount of pressure to force his hand.
In the end, it wound up being almost too simple..
If Gertrude had to guess, she would put money on the tumor being The Corruption's doing somehow -- not that it actually mattered. It just seemed so incredibly unlikely for someone like him to succumb to something as painfully ordinary and pointlessly cruel as a cancerous growth for no other reason than a trick of his own biology. But then again, pointless cruelty was part and parcel with their business -- so, maybe.
Either way. Natural or not, she was made aware of it with one very succinct phone from Tova McHugh -- a deeply unpleasant woman that Gertrude had been proud to find some use for. She'd been keeping an eye on Gerard at Gertrude's behest. All it took was a little bit of blackmail, the contents of Ms. McHugh's very incriminating statement, and a polite request. It was only meant to be a very far-flung contingency, really. Gertrude had never imagined in a million years it would actually pay off.
Life -- and death -- were funny that way, though.
And again, it didn't really matter in the long run. Because it turned out he had been marked, and Gertrude hadn't even needed to lift a finger to get the job done.
Gerard Keay is going to die.
And that meant she needed to plan her next steps both quickly and carefully.
It's not as hard as you might expect, putting an idea in someone's head; making them believe it's theirs -- especially when they're very clever themselves. Ego was like that; easy to exploit if you know what you're doing.
Elias was a creature of order and habit but he could be provoked into recklessness as well as anyone or anything else. All Gertrude really needed was to make him notice Gerard as a viable piece for his own puzzle, and then to get him scared. Scared people made compromises.
What she had to find was a catalyst -- something to start pouring the gasoline before she could light the spark.
She had not expected the thing that wore Michael Shelley's face to represent a perfect solution to all of her problems, but far be it from her to look a gift horse in its horrifying, impossible mouth.
Whatever The Distorion's interest in Gerard actually was, she didn't care. It was about as subtle as a molotov cocktail and exactly what she needed.
Gerard returns from Germany looking rattled and wounded but very much alive. He makes no mention of any doors or monsters in addition to the book he's burned.
She almost feels bad, in that moment, for not scolding him like he seems to wish she would. He wants someone to talk to, someone to absolve him of his mistakes with punishment -- a trait likely carried over from time spent under his mother's thumb.
She cannot be that for him and she will not try.
Later, she does not even begrudge his foolish efforts to exhume the proverbial bones of Michael Shelley from her records. It's not guilt. It's an effort to not get bogged down in wasted time. There isn't much of it to spare, though Gerard may not realize it. And while he is welcome to continue sneaking files out of the Archives all he wants, she does not have the personal bandwidth to hold his hand on this one. Besides, she knows that learning the truth of Shelley's fate will hardly tell Gerard anything he doesn't already know about her.
She can tell he's frustrated by this. It's probably better that way.
Over the years, Gertrude has found that inspiration tends to strike when you least expect it.
The biggest problem she had run into in managing the house of cards that had become her plot was figuring out exactly what she needed to do to stop Elias at the critical moment. This wasn't exactly unique to this particular ritual -- figuring out when and how to stop the smaller ones was an acquired skill and something that was rarely easy, but she had never attempted anything on this scale.
It was a needle to thread. She had to allow for Elias's efforts to almost reach their zenith before throwing a wrench into the works. One wrong move and everything would be lost, either The Eye would succeed or Elias would simply kill her and quickly regroup.
There is a very good chance she would not have remembered the existence of the Fractal Vase at all, had The Distortion not been buzzing around so eagerly, though that was rather appropriate, she thought. It was that sort of artifact. It didn't like to be remembered, but Statements were often more difficult to delete than they really should have been so it did have a paper trail.
Mikaele Salesa demands a frankly absurd sum of money for the effort of retrieving it and only agrees when Gertrude offers the Security Camera Instruction Manual up as a means of neutralizing it for storage and travel.
To be completely honest, she hadn't been certain it would work -- she'd never actually tested it out, but knew there was some precedent for certain artifacts to be bound by the application of their counters. Salesa did not need to know it was all theoretical, however, and she would never tell him.
Besides, the deal goes off without a hitch and Gertrude finds herself the proud owner of a piece of pottery capable of eating all sorts of things, including, she hoped, ritual conduits.
"You know, Gertrude, it really is a shame you've already already sold so much of yourself to your silly little Eye," Says the spider with Annabelle Cane's voice from its perch on the wall behind Gertrude's desk.
"Is that so?" She'd known it was only a matter of time before The Spider came to call.
"Oh yes, it is. I know we've had our...disagreements in the past, you and I, but I am not so short-sighted as to pretend I don't recognize talent when I see it." The spider with Annabelle Cane's voice begins to dreamily weave its silk from one side of the corner to the other, and, somewhat absurdly, Gertrude's mind conjures up images of Charlotte's Web.
Of course there's no message to be found in this particular weaving, just a perfectly symmetrical lattice, slightly too high for Gertrude to swat down with her hand. She'll have to get a broom.
"I have no interest in a partnership with you, Annabelle, nor do I feel as though I need your approval," she says very evenly as the spider spins away.
It clips off one thread and starts another, then another, then another, in quick, even strides. "Hm. A pity, though I'm not surprised you feel that way. Then consider this a courtesy call, I suppose. We see what you are doing, Archivist. Please do not take our lack of interference as ignorance." It finishes its work, then scuttles up its newly formed web to the ceiling, slipping into one of the cracks between tiles.
"Wouldn't dream of it," Gertrude says to the empty cobweb left behind.
She's dealt with The Mother of Puppets and its children for long enough to read between the lines. Cane wants Gertrude to know that so but for the grace of The Spider goes she -- and, really, that's fine. All for the better, honestly. She'd been counting on Cane realizing that Gertrude's gambit was to her benefit as well and it seemed that she had. The Web did love to have others do its work for it.
The cobweb in the corner collects dust and tiny flies for several days before Gertrude finally remembers to take the broom and knock it down. It is never rebuilt.
Elias has never cared much for The Distortion -- not many people do, obviously -- but his lack of interest was because of genuine ambivalence rather than anxiety or fear. And if he'd been ambivalent then, he was even more so now, being well aware of how completely Gertrude had hobbled it. So the game at this point became a trial in getting him to notice it again, to actually pay attention. She had to get Elias to change his mind.
Having it storm into the Archives and attack her directly hadn't exactly been part of the plan, but it was a beautiful opportunity, wounded hand notwithstanding.
Really, she couldn't have asked for better.
With the bait taken and the trap set, all Gertrude really needs to do is wait just a bit longer.
An anxious Elias Bouchard really is an unusual sight to see.
Of course she knew that this also tipped her over the edge to the point of no return. She had never lost sight of the fact that Elias, at any moment in this process, could have very easily decided she was simply too much trouble than she was worth. She may be difficult to kill. She didn't doubt Elias could still pull it off.
That was where Peter Lukas had to come in. Gertrude would never pretend to understand the full extent of...whatever it was that was going on between the two of them, but she knew Elias spent a great deal of his time with his attention at least partially dedicated to Peter, and the opposite was true as well. The two of them combined seemed to believe that getting one over on the other was as worthwhile a pursuit as any ritual -- all encompassing or otherwise. It would almost be romantic if it weren't so desperately deranged.
It also meant that Peter would be just as quick to note Elias's sudden anxiety as Gertrude had been and, if she had played her cards right, he'd begin preparing countermeasures of his own.
She had no idea what those countermeasures may be, but it didn't matter. Having Peter move in from the opposite side would only tighten the noose. A flanking maneuver, as it were. And she just had to count on that extra bit of pressure to keep Elias too busy to deal with her, personally.
It was a gamble. Peter, who she knew had always loved a good wager, ought to appreciate that at least.
It was a tremendous risk, but she had to remind herself that, if it worked, it would all be over. No more rituals to track, no more threats lurking around every corner, each of the fourteen Powers shoved as far back as they could go, safe and tucked away and struggling to recover; no bother to anyone. At least not for a great long while.
It's not likely to be a permanent solution, that much was true, but it was undoubtedly the greatest victory she could ever be able to achieve.
But the hardest part was yet to come.
Elias Bouchard does not like to be inconvenienced. In fact, he had spent the vast majority of his many lifetimes trying to make sure that inconveniences could not happen to him as a rule. Naturally, they still do, on the very odd occasion, but they were usually minor and easily rectified.
That is, until Gertrude Robinson.
Peter had told him that it was foolish to hire her in the first place. He'd been right, as it turned out, but even now Elias was loath to admit it. He'd just spent so long playing these intricate games of chess against no one but himself, trying to seek out any sort of challenge as he did his work, anything to stave off the boredom, to hone his skills, keep him sharp that --
Sure. Yes. Perhaps hiring Gertrude Robinson all those years ago had been foolish, but that didn't mean he regretted his decision, even after he began to realize just how thornily persistent she could be. Sometimes it's necessary to stack the deck against yourself if only to see what happens. Especially if you're the one who controls the house.
He was, however, starting to regret it now.
When the time came, he was very much going to enjoy killing her, assuming she didn't die in the change, which she likely would. Wouldn't that be wildly convenient? A cosmic two-birds-one-stone moment. He'd appreciate that. A pretty little grace note at the end of so many years toiling and theorizing and biding his time.
He did hope Peter would survive, at least for a while. He was stronger than Gertrude but less clever and more apt to come at problems, even ones he didn't fully comprehend, head on and with brute force and -- well, Elias would miss him dearly, but he wasn't about to try and protect him.
Gerard Keay was not ideal, but as it stood that was not his biggest issue at the moment. In a way, he supposed it was even a little poetic, plucking one of Gertrude's own out of her grasp to use for himself. And penchant for poetry aside, Gerard really was the simplest possible solution to a very complicated series of problems, delivered to Elias practically gift wrapped. Occam's Razor given physical form.
Elias can work with that.
"Hello, Gerard."
Gerard Keay has, in fact, woken up in restraints before. For whatever reason both the People's Church and the Lightless Flame tended to really favor them. Maybe it was just a cult thing. Regardless, it had never been a pleasant experience and it certainly isn't one now. And if his head had been throbbing before, the blow to it hadn't helped. No surprises there.
It takes him a while for his eyes to focus in. It doesn't help that it's dark -- not pitch black, but not well lit, either. The air is musty, old -- heavy somehow. If he had to bet, he'd say he's underground. But the walls aren't closing in around him or anything so probably not The Buried's handiwork -- wait, he'd been at the Institute hadn't he?
Where was Gertrude?
His eyes slowly adjust to the gloom, enough to see that his wrists and ankles have been fastened to the chair -- a gaudy looking stone thing from what little of it he can see -- with thick leather straps. There's another in his mouth, pulling tight against his tongue. He can't speak. He can barely swallow. At least he wasn't blindfolded. That would seem excessive.
A quick test confirms that, no, the straps are very unlikely to give way with any force he's able to produce himself. And the stone chair is far, far too heavy to move.
Not great.
God, his head is killing him. He would have perfered fucking chloroform to this, which is something he never imagined thinking in his life.
Elias Bouchard steps into view.
Fucking typical.
Gerard hopes his eyes are enough to broadcast the 'fuck you' he's thinking. Elias only smiles with the corners of his mouth in that way he does, the one that keeps his eyes looking both dead and laser focused at the same time.
"I'm sorry about this, Gerard, really I am," is how he starts. He even almost sounds it. Frayed, just slightly, around the edges. The tiniest bit unstarched. "This wasn't how I wanted this to happen. It wasn't even supposed to be you. You have your Ms. Robinson to thank for that though. I've always thought of you as a perfectly clever boy so I hope that doesn't come as a surprise to you."
It doesn't. At least not really. He doesn't completely follow what's happening to him yet but the idea that it could have somehow been Gertrude's doing doesn't burn him as long as he doesn't count the weird wave of disappointment that tries to lurch up in the pit of his stomach. The strap in his mouth is making it hard to breathe.
Elias moves in closer. He's holding a book in his hands. Gerard can tell it's a Leitner, just by the plain, worn leather cover. It's embossed with a single golden eye on the spine.
"I won't waste your time with a monologue," Elias continues. "Though I won't do you the disservice of keeping you entirely in the dark. Just know that what is about to happen to you is the product of a great many years of my life, Gerard. And though you will undoubtedly not appreciate that fact now, please try to find some comfort in knowing that you were a critical part of a very important moment in our history."
Gerry thrashes against his bindings. His head is swimming. He doesn't know what Elias is talking about; it doesn't matter -- he's going to die, isn't he? It's funny, almost -- he'd gotten so used to the idea that Michael was going to be the one to ultimately do him in, what after how stupidly and blatantly Gerry had come to trust him. He'd thought for sure that was going to be how it went and now, in a very strange and distant way, he's disappointed that it's not.
Elias leans in and slowly unfastens the gag in Gerry's mouth.
Gerry does the only thing he can and twists his head and shoulders around, whip fast, ignoring how his vision sails woozily in and out of focus. He doesn't need to see to bite down as hard as he can on the side of Elias's hand, tearing away a small chunk of meat with his teeth.
He doesn't even get a chance to spit it out before Elias backhands him, snapping his head the opposite direction. His mouth already tasted like blood but he can tell he bit his tongue. He spits. The skin and the blood and the saliva that had been pooling in his mouth since he woke up lands on the ground with a wet, disgusting sound.
He wants to throw up. There are shadows pulling in dangerously around the edges of his vision. When he says "fuck you," out loud this time, it comes out slurred.
"That was terribly rude of you," Elias says placidly, not bothering to find a way to stem the bleeding from his hand, "but I do understand your frustration. It will all be over soon."
And then he takes the book out from under his arm, flips it open, and begins to read.
The words aren't in English or any other language Gerry speaks. Or maybe he's just concussed. They're not musical but they seem to have a sort of tune to them, a rhythm that almost instantly gets stuck in his head. Without realizing it, his lips have begun moving, mouthing along. He doesn't know what he's saying -- why isn't he stopping -- what --
There is a very soft sound. Gerry almost misses it entirely under the sound of Elias's -- and his own -- voice. He hears Elias break off. He's yelling at -- someone? The words are still coming out of Gerry's mouth. What is he saying? Why can't he stop?
Who else is there?
Then there is a very loud sound. A...gunshot? No, couldn't be -- who had a gun?
Why can't he stop? Why won't it stop?
And then, everything does.
Michael had never actually set foot in The Lonely in any of his forms.
He decides he doesn't like it, but he doubts Peter will care much to hear his opinion one way or the other. They both know this wouldn't be happening if they had any alternative. The fact of the matter is that Michael's doors may not be welcome in the Institute, but they are far from the only spaces between worlds that people can travel.
It's definitely not the most traditional use for Peter's powers -- but it is serviceable. Clever, even, if Michael had to admit it, though he'd rather not. Just the fact that he'd actually had to take Peter up on his truce at all, so soon after they had spoken, even, was frustrating enough.
But Peter knew the way, knew the secret parts of the Institute better than Michael ever had and could get them both there quickly.
When Peter ushers them out of his world and back into reality, they're standing in a part of the Institute Michael has never seen. Immediately, he feels his very being start to twist and contort with the need to avoid -- The Watcher is everywhere here and it burns. He has to grit his teeth, every row of them, to keep from collapsing in on himself.
They're underground, maybe -- a great, round room, ringed with what might have once been cells. There's a platform in the center with a hewn throne. Michael barely chokes back the startled, "Gerry!" that tries to claw its way up his throat.
This was wrong. This was all wrong.
Elias has -- why is Gerry on that fucking throne? His head is tilted back, mouth open and he's screaming in voices that aren't his -- where is Gertrude? This is all wrong. How can it --
For a split second, Gertrude Robinson fears she may be too late. The tunnels beneath the Institute are difficult to navigate even when you're not running and for as well as she may have tried to plan for every possible contingency, the act of preparing and the act of doing are two very different things, especially when the stakes are this high.
Thankfully, Elias hadn't bothered to fasten the padlock or the chain back around the Panopticon's hidden doors.
She still has to use her full body weight, and the weight of the crate she's carrying -- which may not be heavy, but she's not a very large woman herself -- to force the rusted hinges to swing open.
They make a horrible wailing sound.
It's almost inaudible next to the low, oppressive roar that has started to fill the air. Gertrude can feel it in her chest. The entire room is quaking with it.
Elias is on the platform with Gerard but there's someone -- something else here --
Peter Lukas says, "Gertrude fucking Robinson?!" Just as Elias whirls around and pulls a gun from his waistband.
The shot he fires hits Gertrude square in the shoulder as she enters the room. The sound she makes isn't quite a scream. Everything is so loud. It feels like reality is coming undone at the seams.
Maybe it is.
Gerard's skin has started to shine a sickly white. His tattoos are impossibly black. His eyes have rolled back in his head. The voice coming out of his throat doesn't belong to him. There are so many of them, heaving out of him all at once in a nightmarish chorus that is far too big for his body.
There's a trickle of blood dripping from his nose but instead of rolling down his face it's arching upward against the pull of gravity. His hair is starting to follow its trajectory, pulling out, up, away from his head, like he's underwater. It is so loud.
Gertrude drops the crate, her wounded arm going limp at her side.
It splits open.
Michael has an idea.
Michael's body stretches and bends and scatters through the Panopticon as he wills himself forward to pluck the Vase up from its position at Gertrude's feet. She's clutching her shoulder, bleeding profusely, wild eyed and straining with the force of her own will against the shock in her body. It's betraying her, Michael can tell. Age and effort and agony all coming to a head that prevents action. He knows the feeling. As the veil between The Watcher and the world starts to fall, every move he threatens to tear him apart.
The Fractal Vase is a very strange artifact indeed. It can consume anything but it prioritizes things that its owner cares for -- things that its owner will notice are missing -- and when it consumes them, they cease to exist.
Or, more specifically, they cease to exist everywhere but the owner's memory and The Spiral itself.
It's so familiar in his hands.
The blood from Gerry's nose has become a torrent. The voices in his throat are building toward a crescendo.
Elias has thrown his gun aside. He's holding the book again -- the eye on its spine is glowing. Michael can barely hear him speaking --
"Ceaseless Watcher, turn your ga--"
"Do it, Michael!" Gertrude Robinson yells, voice a bloody rasp through her bared teeth.
Michael moves. He turns the mouth of the Vase at Gerry, and calls out to The Spiral.
The sudden absence of noise in the room feels like a vacuum.
Gerard Keay is gone.
Michael drops the vase.
It shatters.
And then Michael is gone, too.
For a long time, Gerry can see nothing but endless, unfathomable black. There's nothing to it but still it swirls around him -- every color at once and none of them. He can't focus or think or process what happened to him at all. It's so quiet now, and it had been so loud and -- Elias? Something had happened. He knew that much.
His head is still in agony. It feels like his throat has been ground out with sandpaper, like if he could talk at all the words would come out as sea glass, physical pieces instead of sound. Every single one of his senses seems to be swimming upstream.
Where is he?
What is he?
How did he get here?
"Sorry about that," says a voice, so close to his ear it may as well be inside it. He feels a weight on something that probably was his shoulder once, and then a tug and suddenly he's tumbling backwards through a door that couldn't be there into a hallway he immediately recognizes. Yellow walls, dusty sconces, no echoes.
Michael is standing in front of him and Gerry can't tell if it's the way his brain has been most likely scrambled by whatever just happened or if it's just because his only point of reference is a hallway that both looks and feels like it's breathing around him but Michael looks more human than Gerry's ever seen him, static-clouded eyes and all. His expression is soft around the edges.
Gerry wants to say "what?" But it gets stuck in his throat and he gags, pitches forward, his vision near whiting out. Michael catches him with two hands that don't feel like hands should feel, perched gently against his ribs.
"Oh, right. One moment." Michael shifts his grip, propping Gerry up just a bit, still taking most of his weight. Every move he makes sounds and feels just slightly off-key and out of step with what Gerry's eyes are able to see, like the foley artist scoring the scene is just a few seconds behind. "This is going to hurt, I'm sorry."
Gerry doesn't have time to argue, or to comment on how strange it is to hear Michael apologize so sincerely. How long has he been here? Why was he --
Michael reaches up with one hand and Gerry can see his fingers elongating into impossible, lethal looking needles from the corner of his eye. He wants to pull away or scream or fight back or do something, anything at all but he can't. His feet are stuck -- fused? -- To the carpet. His mouth won't work.
He very dimly remembers feeling disappointed that Michael wasn't going to be the one to do him in, an hour or a lifetime ago and wants to laugh about the sort of wishes that apparently get to come true.
Michael's hand closes in, fingers curling around the space near the bottom left of his skull, first, middle, and thumb pressing up and then in. They sink into Gerry's skull, through bone and muscle and it's agony, white hot and blinding and --
As Michael pulls back, he's clutching what looks like a blackened, writhing maggot, partially skewered on one of the needle tips. It's very quickly turning to dust.
More importantly, Gerry is not dead.
Actually, if he's being honest, he feels...better?
"I'm breaking quite a few rules for you, I hope you know. I'm probably going to have to pay off Oliver Banks for this one," Michael's voice is playful as he crushes what's left of the maggot-thing in his hand, which at some point shifted back to something almost akin to human. "But I think I'll get away with it after all that -- you are going to be in a, hm, how shall I say this?" He pauses to think. Gerry stares at him. "Unique? Position from here on out."
"I didn't think something like you much cared for rules anyway," is for some reason the first thing out of Gerry's mouth.
Michael laughs. It is the only sound that echoes in this place and it seems to come from everywhere but Michael's mouth. Gerry's nose does not start to bleed. "Oh, I don't, but I try not to go around making enemies with The End if I can help it."
Gerry blinks at him. Michael's hand is somewhere between comfortable and uncomfortable in its weight on Gerry's side, just above his hip. He has yet to pull back -- though, in fairness, Gerry supposes, neither has he.
They stare at each other. Or, at least, Gerry tries to stare. He may not feel absolutely incapacitated by the pain in his head anymore, but it's still desperately hard to zero in on Michael's features with any sort of discretion. He hopes he gets points for trying.
"Michael. What happened?"
"Oh, I very briefly removed you from existence entirely." Michael answers, like it's that simple.
Gerry blinks at him again.
"In my defense, it was to stop The Eye from piercing through the veil and ruining your world for the rest of us." For a split second, Michael's face solidifies enough for him to see that he's wrinkled his nose.
He continues. "Also, it was to ruin Gertrude Robinson's horrible plan, which is frankly the more important part," He sounds less convinced about this part, but doesn't pause long enough to let Gerry ask for any clarification. "Also I...needed to save you."
He sounds almost shy.
"Okay…" Gerry starts hesitantly, trailing off, trying to process. "So, what? Do I no longer exist now? Am I -- I don't know, taken by The Spiral? Because I don't really feel dead."
Michael shakes his head, which makes him look like pages flickering across a flip-book for just a moment. "No, you're not dead and -- well, yes I suppose you were briefly taken by a part of The Spiral but I pulled you back out. The only thing you need to concern yourself with now is the fact that no one in the world is going to remember you exist."
"Uh...huh." Gerry supposes he ought to feel some level of -- fear, maybe? Or grief? At the thought. But beneath the low level confusion, he doesn't really feel much of anything. There weren't many people in the world who could remember him anyway, which sounded a lot more melancholy than it actually was. He'd just lived that sort of life. He'd grown accustomed to it.
And to be frank, a lot of the people who did know him actively wanted him dead, so, maybe there was a silver lining here after all.
"Why did you pull me back out?" Gerry asks after a beat.
It's clearly not a question Michael was expecting. He shifts his weight from one side to the other and for a second his more human features overlay onto the unfathomable thing in a strange double. Gerry abruptly remembers that photo, jpeg artifacts and all, of a human boy who doesn't exist anymore. He guesses he and Michael Shelley sort of have that in common now. "I--" Michael starts and then stops, body flickering again. The hand at Gerry's side is sharpening -- it doesn't feel like a threat, but Gerry knew it could quickly become one.
He realizes just how close together they're still standing all over again and then, he has a very reckless idea.
In the purview of stupid things Gerry has done in his life, he's not sure where kissing a Spiral creature actually ranks.
But he's had a very strange few days -- a very strange life, really so, fuck it.
He leans forward, pausing just long enough to signal his intent to let Michael -- react, he guesses. Kill him, maybe, since that was a thing he had recently learned he'd be alright with. But Michael leans forward too, big doe eyes -- too many of them -- bright and curious and inviting and --
Kissing Michael feels a bit like the first few seconds before anesthesia kicks in. Gerry's senses have no idea how to process what's going on. He's not even really sure if Michael currently has a mouth he could be kissing but -- it feels like he might? Or maybe it feels the way one of those teacup rides at carnivals look -- all neon blur and doppler effect and -- oh, is Michael kissing him back? He might be. Both his hands are on Gerry's waist now and he's pressed against his chest. Why is he so tall? He always has been, right? His hands are so heavy. It's nice.
It's not like gravity at all. It's freeing.
Escape velocity.
Gerry's nose is bleeding when he pulls back. By the taste in his mouth, he thinks his gums might be too. He grins.
Michael grins back at him, huge and partially stained red.
"Oh," he says, eloquently.
"Yeah," Gerry's heard of people describing the feeling of a kiss as champagne bubbles but he assumes they were not trying to be literal. Gerry's brain feels fuzzy and half drunk in a very non-metaphorical way. Dream-like and high. It also kind of makes him feel like he's about to faint. He doesn't regret it.
"I guess that's why I pulled you out," Michael continues with an awkward shrug. Gerry thinks if he could blush, it would probably look like an oil spill.
"Fair enough," Gerry laughs, giggles really, feeling tipsy. "Or, thank you, I guess. Though I don't really know what not existing in people's memories is going to mean for me. Hey -- can we --" Oof, he really does feel drunk, "if I'm not dead, can we go back to my flat or something? It's -- no offense or anything -- but it's very dizzy in here. Am I allowed?"
It does look like an oil spill.
"You're allowed, yes." A door that was not there before opens and Michael helps him balance as they step over the threshold and into the real world.
Gerry's flat looks exactly like he left it. Apparently being pulled out of existence for however long hadn't vanished his furniture, so that was nice. The woozy feeling increases tenfold his boots are back on solid ground but he doesn't throw up this time. Another win.
He takes all of two steps and one deep breath before collapsing down onto the couch.
"We should probably talk about this."
By 'this' Gerry means everything, not just the kiss, but he wouldn't mind starting there.
"We should," Michael answers gently, "but perhaps you should sleep first."
Gerry realizes very abruptly that he actually is exhausted. Maybe more exhausted than he's ever been in his life. The fact that he feels like he's also still coming off a low dose of an anesthetic medley probably isn't helping.
He doesn't mean to fall asleep right there on the couch, but he does anyway. When he startles himself away with a cramp in his shoulder, there's a blanket from his bed tugged over him. It had been plaid once, but the lines and patterns have all curled in on themselves, twisting like grey and red optical illusions. It looks like they're moving across the dips and folds.
Michael is nowhere to be seen, but there's a familiar yellow door sitting invitingly against his living room wall.
Spiral-induced haziness having finally, mostly, abated, Gerry levers himself up and stares at it in the dark.
He thinks about planets and orbits and the ways people pull and push at each other. He thinks about almost dying and how it hadn't felt scary to wish that Michael would be the one to do it. He thinks about all the weird, fucked up turns in his weird fucked up life and wonders if falling for monsters was something he'd inherited in his genes, somehow, and how it wouldn't matter if he did or not.
He thinks about gravity and all the ways he's learned to escape it.
He smiles.
Michael does not know how to feel.
He hasn't, not really, since this whole ordeal started.
But layered in with the overall confusion is something else. He doesn't have a name for it, but if pressed he would say it's a sense of...calm, maybe. It's not uncomfortable.
That itch under his skin, the skin he shouldn't have, near his bones, the bones he didn't want, has abated almost completely; settled into something different -- still present, but less miserable.
He wants to kiss Gerry again.
He thinks Gerry will be receptive to the idea, and it sends a strange and wonderful thrill through all the parts of himself he'd spent so long fighting.
He is decidedly less thrilled to learn that Gertrude Robinson had apparently survived with the help of Peter Lukas of all people, but more surprised by the way his familiar rage, the hatred he's been carrying for so long, doesn't come rushing back. Maybe that part of him is less miserable, too.
He could have killed her in that moment, turned the Fractal Vase on her instead of Gerry and then allowed the world to succumb to oblivion right along with them. But it hadn't even crossed his mind.
And besides, he can't imagine Elias will allow her to stay alive for too much longer. He may be hobbled, but he was hardly forgiving. And if and when that comes to pass, Michael knows he'll feel nothing glad for it -- but until then, he thinks he's had about enough of Gertrude Robinson occupying any of his time.
Speaking of Elias, Michael's very brief reconnaissance mission reveals that his spectacular failure had been exactly that: Spectacular. The Vase really had briefly pulled Gerry completely out of the fabric of reality leaving even pompous, semi-omniscient Elias Bouchard grasping for answers, fumbling in the dark. It was rather delicious, if Michael did say so himself, even though he knew it was likely to only be a temporary condition.
Gerry may be as good as a ghost to the world at large but people like Elias and Peter -- or anyone who played at their dangerous little game -- were good at finding ways to perform exorcisms, both metaphorical and otherwise.
Michael isn't worried, though. He figured Gerry could use a little time out of the world, all things considered, and they could deal with the fallout whenever it inevitably came calling.
Until then, he finds himself perfectly content to just...exist. To be. To straddle the strange not-line in his strange not-life and adapt.
He's good at that, after all. And he can always get better.
In the quiet gloom of his halls, he hears a knock at the door, and knows exactly where to go.