Chapter Text
It’s early, Gerry realizes. Not just early — it’s sunrise. He tries to leave the Archives to burn the book he’d just brought in, and has to immediately slam the door shut.
“Shit,” he says to no one. Gertrude will be in shortly, disappointed to find him.
If he puts up an umbrella or something, he might make it to a Tube station. Pimlico is the closest one, isn’t it? But it’s blocks away. He’s got gloves, but his face won’t fare that well.
Of course, there is a cot in Document Storage. He’s seen the old man Dekker lock himself in there overnight more than once, usually with a crate full of something — or someone. The Archives are mostly windowless, but Document Storage is lightless. To protect the documents, allegedly. It would be a reasonably safe place for someone like Gerard Keay.
Still, Gertrude will find him there. And while he has permission to be here, he doesn’t necessarily have permission to stay.
Beggars can’t be choosers. And ever since Gerry snuck away from his mother to meet with the bane of Europe’s supernatural beings, what else has he been but a beggar? On the night of a full moon nearly a year ago, he brought his mother’s grimoire to the Archivist. Just as she had asked him to. Since then, both Mary Keay and her book have been gone. And for lack of anything better to do, Gerry has worked for the Archivist. Not for the Archives, of course. Only the Archivist.
The Archives are a prison, Gertrude says. They are shackles and chains.
“You already have one sort of un-life, Gerard,” she had advised him. “Are you seeking out another?”
Inside Document Storage, there is a climate-controlled room with a safe door built into the floor.
No one goes in there, Gerry figures. It holds only the oldest items — fragile things made of animal skin and papyrus. There might even be a clay tablet or two. One might think of these as artefacts, but… In their own way, they are statements like the rest.
Once inside, Gerry wonders whether his mother’s grimoire is here. Or did Gertrude burn it?
He lies down beside the safe door.
That’s where he smells the blood.
It’s fresh, though dried on the metal handle. It can’t be older than a day. Gerry presses his face very close to the floor and smells older blood soaked into the floorboards.
Gertrude doesn’t use a very difficult combination, really. It’s the same as the safe in her office, which Gerry has already opened. She has — well, the only word for it is “scold.” She has scolded him for going through her office at night when she isn’t there. He knows she has a trapdoor under her desk that locks with a key. She told him it goes into the dirt, for getting rid of things that must be buried rather than burned.
If there were tunnels beneath the Archives that could be used, surely they would already be using them. She’s made the joke herself — a place to hold all her darkest secrets. It was pretty funny, actually. The kind of thing too obviously outlandish (not to mention, convenient) to believe.
The safe is only a safe. The blood only means that Gerry will find something gruesome within it. He’s too tired, too aware of the sun creeping up into the sky outdoors, to halt his curiosity.
But when Gerry opens the safe built into the floor, he doesn’t find the freshly dismembered corpse of some unfortunate monster. Because he doesn’t find the inside of a safe.
Gerry finds a staircase. It reeks of blood, compelling him down it. He can see in the dark of it, but not that well. He creeps down until his boots hit flat stone. From there, he follows the smell of blood. There is a lot of blood down here. Much of it is old, old, old. Not all of it is human. Every sort of monster that Gerry has ever sniffed out in his life and his un-life has probably died down here.
“Sinister tunnels,” Gerry says to himself. That old, senile bird had lied to his face and laughed about it.
She’s been here. He knows because someone has installed a new, locked door on one of the rooms. He can smell her there. Not as strongly as he smells blood, but still. She hasn’t been down here this week, he’d guess, but probably within the month.
Gerry follows the smell of blood to where it’s freshest. A door of broken iron bars hangs open in the corridor. He hears something moving, smells it bleeding.
What he finds, what he can see in the dark, curls in on itself away from Gerry. Its matted hair hides its face except for one eye. Gerry takes out his phone and shines a light on it. The light shines back greenly, not so differently from the way it would in Gerry’s own eye. It’s pale. The limbs it hides behind are so long and gaunt it hardly seems human. But it wears torn khaki pants. There’s a ripped up canvas shoe on one of its feet.
So it was human, probably, or pretending to be.
The only word for it now, Gerry thinks, is “wretched.”
Blood oozes from its neck. Deep gouges seem to be closing up under the light of Gerry’s phone. The thing’s pupil constricts slightly. Its eyes might be blue.
It bares its teeth at him, making a wet sound like a snarl.
Easy prey, Gerry thinks. His mouth starts watering. His teeth press sharply at his own tongue. The smell of blood is heavy. There is blood all over the floor, as well as chunks of hair and... fur? Oh, yeah, that’s definitely fur. There are a few broken off teeth on the stones as well. One cracks under Gerry’s boot as he steps forward.
He had a pint of AB before he went out on tonight’s mission. He doesn’t need to feed. And Gerry hopes he never has to feed on something as weak and pathetic as this. There are rats in the alley behind Sainsbury’s with more fight than this thing.
The thing looks him in the eye, somehow seeing past the light of Gerry’s phone. Its bleeding mouth moves, but all that comes out is a whine. Like a kicked dog, he thinks.
Gerry takes off his jacket. He swallows the drool under his tongue.
“Hey, hey, it’s alright,” he says, as softly as he can.
He swings his phone’s light about and sees the silver chains holding the creature by its throat and ankle to the wall. The whole rest of the cell is empty, though the blood has gotten everywhere.
The thing in the corner of the room shivers from pain or blood loss or fear or cold.
“This place is big enough for both of us,” Gerry says. “Don’t you think? Yeah, here. Here you go. Peace offering.”
He lays his leather coat on the ground as close to the thing as he dares. Even if he wasn’t in the habit of layering black on black to keep the light off him, Gerry has more than tatters of blood-stained clothing to cover him. Not that the cold bothers Gerry much. That’s for warm-blooded, living things. Which, he can guess, this monster is. At least, it smells alive.
“I’m just going to go over here now,” he says.
“Look,” he says, pressing his hand to the far wall of this cell. It’s definitely a cell, isn’t it? This is Millbank. It has to be.
“I can go if you want me to,” Gerry says. “Just, uh, give me a sign.”
The creature doesn’t snarl or whine. Instead, it reaches out for Gerry’s coat with one bloody hand. It has claws. It has large, misshapen hands with hair and fucking claws.
All Gerry can think is that wolves change back. They look human. He’s seen werewolves before. Right now, Gertrude has him chasing all manner of creatures that change shape or steal skins. All of them look more human than this thing, imprisoned beneath the Archives.
The thing takes his coat, covering its bloody hand first.
“Alright,” Gerry says. “I need to sleep and I think you do, too. It's okay, I'm not going to hurt you.”
With that, he lays down on the stone floor and closes his eyes.
Sunset isn’t until after 8 p.m. But when Gerry turns his phone back on, it tells him it’s nearly out of battery and not yet seven. He has no service down here. And Gertrude has been known to stay at the Archives until ten or later.
But, Gerry knows, the moon usually rises sooner than the sun comes down.
“Sorry,” he says.
The creature makes a rasping sound, which could be a growl or something else. The blood on its skin has dried there. When Gerry checks it over, the gouges in its neck have closed. Some of the marks on its ankle look like scars more than wounds. They might be. It has all its teeth, as far as Gerry can see. As much of its body as possible stays hidden beneath Gerry’s coat.
“Keep the coat,” he says, expecting the creature will probably chew it to shreds in an hour or so.
He uses up the rest of his phone’s battery guiding himself back to the stairs he came down. For hours, Gerry stays there. He sits on the stairs and listens as the creature begins to howl.
It’s a miserable sound. Gerry presses his hands to his ears and tucks his head between his knees. It brings him back to his childhood, hiding away from the sounds of his mother’s feeding. He feels the same terror. It won’t be enough. She’ll turn on him. In the end, she did. Didn’t she?
But the sounds go on and on and on. They grow more pained and animalistic. Gerry smells the blood. It makes his whole body taut with hunger. His teeth grow sharp inside his mouth. Saliva drips past his lips.
Bursting back into Document Storage, Gerry’s vision is red around the edges.
He flees the Archives. He goes as far as he can from that whole place. Spends a few days in Paris.
Gertrude Robinson is a liar. She joked about her lies to Gerry’s face, all while she kept that thing under the floor. How long has it been there? Was it there, under his feet, when he came in to plead for her help? Is she using it? How could she be using it?
Restless with fury, Gerry goes back to Toulouse and burns down the house of an old monster that Gertrude considered too lowly to bother with — Benoît Maçon’s wife.
It’s days before Gerry wonders who the creature under the Archives is.
But that’s the question that drives him back into central London. He stops into Sainsbury’s before they close. It’s easier to navigate than he remembers. There’s now a massive, lit sign that reads “MEAT.”
Gerry contemplates a massive roast behind the counter, but he knows that starving people can make themselves sick trying to eat too much, too soon. It’s the same for vampires. So, probably, it’s the same for werewolves? He buys some diced beef, hopefully bite-sized. The plastic bin is hard to tuck under his jacket, but Gerry is certain the cameras at the Institute’s entrances have caught him trying to sneak in much worse things.
He goes directly to the safe in Document Storage.
Tonight, it’s a new moon. Gerry checked on his phone before he got on the Tube up to Chelsea. He made sure to eat before he left his flat.
And now he’s walking toward the creature in the tunnels. The smell of blood makes his mouth water, again.
Gerry stops in the corridor to open the plastic container full of meat. As soon as it’s open, he hears the scrape of metal against stone. When Gerry comes in, the creature is standing. It hunches over itself all the same, hiding its hands away under the length of Gerry’s coat. It’s wearing it properly, which Gerry hadn’t expected. How did it get its hands through the sleeves?
Gerry stands there holding a little box of meat and facing off against a monster that towers over him when it slouches. Even if its limbs look narrow and its face is gaunt, he still feels small. If there’s still blood sitting in his stomach, it feels curdled.
“Yeah, next time I’ll bring some wet wipes,” he says. “But here, you look…”
Starving, he thinks. It looks starving.
“Yeah,” Gerry says. He doesn’t take his eyes off the creature as he leans down to put the meat on the stone floor. He slides it over with a gentle kick from the toe of his boot.
“You have a name?” Gerry asks.
The creature makes a rasping noise. Gerry wonders if it has damaged its own throat so badly trying to claw the silver chain off that maybe it’s mute. Or stuck as whatever it is, it can no longer form human words. Maybe it’s forgotten them? Who knows how long it’s been here. Though it does look like it wore Vans once. So, hopefully, not centuries.
“Well, I’m Gerard Keay,” he says. “Friends call me Gerry.”
He laughs. “Or they would, if I had any.”
The creature makes another rasp, and Gerry takes it as a cue to leave.
The next week, Gerry brings some bottled water as well as the wet wipes he promised. While wandering around Sainsbury’s, he finds all sorts of things to spend his dead mother’s money on. Dry shampoo, mouthwash, a tin of Nivea. Why not? He tops it off with three, aged sirloin steaks.
He doesn’t get down the stairs until around two in the morning, but he hears the creature stirring when he sits down to open all the plastics.
It reminds Gerry a bit of some of the exchanges he used to do, leaving money in a spot and picking up a book later. That was rare, though. Most people don’t want to give up the things that Gerry goes into the world to collect. Also, a lot of them end up dead. Not always related!
So, Gerry carries a reusable shopping bag into some ancient cell of Millbank Prison and hands it off to a werewolf like they’re a pair of occult secret agents. Gerry supposes that they sort of are. At least, he might be. Jury’s out on the werewolf.
“Can I sit here?” Gerry asks, still holding the bag.
He watches the creature, whose eyes are locked on the sirloin in Gerry’s hands like a starving animal. He supposes that’s exactly what it is. But then it looks at Gerry, and nods. Twice, it moves its head up and down quite deliberately. That’s enough of an invitation, so Gerry sits down. The creature crouches down, its spindly knees poking out from under the coat Gerry gave it. It’s not really his coat anymore, now is it?
He slides the first steak across the ground.
The creature picks it up with one of those huge, clawed hands, and then turns away from Gerry. He can clearly hear it chewing. Sooner than Gerry expects, the sound stops.
“Another?” he asks, holding up the second steak.
The creature looks over its shoulder at him. One blue eye peeks out from behind blood-matted hair.
Then it makes a little rasping sound, a bit of a hiss. He’s not sure what it’s supposed to mean. But the creature nods again.
This time Gerry moves a little closer when he slides the steak over. He watches the creature stare at him, wary. It clearly doesn’t want to take its eyes off Gerry, even after it has taken the steak. But it does turn away again to eat. He wonders what that means. What any of it means.
The third steak is too much, for now. Gerry explains all the other things he bought.
“Actually not sure you could get a brush through all that,” he says, “but I got you one. Don’t rip your hair out with it, I guess.”
The creature uses its claws almost delicately to pull out one of the wipes. The room smells faintly of soap and baby powder, to go along with meat and blood. The creature cleans its face and then makes a sound Gerry can only interpret as pleased. It’s almost something he’s embarrassed to hear. He can see blood coming into the skin of the creature’s face. It’s probably just from the scrubbing. It glows sort of pink in Gerry’s vision. Aside from its teeth, it has very soft features. Its eyes are very large. It wipes its neck as best it can, avoiding the skin too close to the chain.
“I haven’t mentioned you to her yet,” Gerry says, mostly to himself. “So, don’t go telling Gertrude I wa —”
Gerry stops when the creature flinches. His mouth hangs open for a moment.
“Sorry,” he says. “Never mind.”
The creature goes back to scrubbing itself with a wipe.
“It was just a joke,” he says, after a while.
But it’s hard to talk only to himself.
The creature doesn’t turn away when it drinks from the water bottle. It’s one of the massive liter and a half ones, and Gerry watches it hold it easily in one hand. He can see its throat moving as it swallows continuously. It drinks easily a liter all at once.
“I can take the waste,” Gerry offers.
And the creature lets him get close enough to take away the plastic from the steaks, as well as last week’s diced beef. It reaches out and lays a protective hand over the wipes, but Gerry wasn’t going to take the pack away. He picks up the used one, can smell the blood on it.
It’s not hard to fit in one visit a week, really. Gerry had missed the novelty of going grocery shopping anyway. It’s been years since he bought food!
He tells the creature that he’s doing this in exchange for a place to crash — especially in summer.
“The nights are getting shorter and shorter,” he says.
At some point, he expects Gertrude to confront him.
She changes the combination on the safe at the end of June. Then, again in July.
Gerry knows he won’t confront her himself. Some part of him wants to. She lied to him. It was an outrageous, blatant, dangerous lie. He’s seen stairs that go deeper down and the corridors extend terribly far in so many directions. Gerry tampers down his curiosity and only goes to visit the creature.
That always reassures him that he’s right not to confront Getrude.
Because she did this, he knows. At first, he was only angry that she had lied about the place. She had lied about such a creature existing. But it cringes away from Gerry’s presence still, after months. The mention of Getrude’s name makes it flinch like it’s been hit. So, he knows. It doesn’t need to tell him. Likely, it never will. It probably can’t. But he knows Gertrude put the creature down here and probably chained it up herself. There’s a silver pin in the back of its skull, to match the silver chain around its throat and ankle that tie it to the wall. The chains disappear into the stone wall and Gerry has a theory that the chain can be released and retracted, like one of those little leashes on the fuzzballs being walked about Wimbledon Common. After all, there’s blood all through the corridors. And, now that he knows what to look for, Gerry has found deep gouges in the stone and even scratches on the back of the safe door.
Whenever it turns its head away from him, though, Gerry looks at the silver pin buried there.
Gertrude could kill him for betraying her. She’s killed stronger, older vampires than Gerry.
But that silver pin tells Gerry there are worse things than death for creatures like him.
Then, it finally happens.
Earlier that week, Gerry had brought the werewolf some pork chops and watched it eat them, cracking only one very stupid joke about halal meat. Now the werewolf would actually let him see its face. It sometimes even pushed its hair out of its eyes and looked at him. It looked nearly human until it started to eat. And then, of course, it had large and pointed teeth to tear into the pink meat. Gerry had watched its long, narrow throat when it swallowed. His own teeth poked him in the sides of his tongue.
On the day things go awry, Gerry stays down in the Archives too long trying to correlate statements on the Stranger. He’s going to be mannequin hunting later this week, probably. So he needs to know which direction the sightings have gone.
The sun rises around 5:30, but Gerry left his phone on silent. It’s almost six when he checks it.
For a moment, he still panics a bit. But he has the option to stay here.
Gertrude turns the lights on when she comes in before seven.
“You’re still here,” she says, sounding almost surprised.
“Yeah, well,” Gerry says. He shrugs his shoulders.
“The doll sightings are heading northeast now,” he offers.
“Will you be staying in the Archives then?” she asks. “Until sunset?”
“Yeah, sort of,” Gerry tells her.
She looks at him. “I hope this isn’t a regular habit of yours.”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. He continues to put things away, in random order.
“Good,” she says. “I know you’re a kind young man, Gerard, and that isn’t a particularly bad thing in your line of work. But I’d hate for you to do anything stupid and end up…”
She frowns, not at him but at the filing system to his right. It’s not her usual disappointed frowning either.
“I’m not stupid,” Gerry says.
“I’d hope not,” she replies.
In the silence, he hears her sigh. He finishes putting everything away and slings his jacket over his shoulders.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “for not telling you sooner.”
“It’s fine,” he says.
She says nothing. “You have your reasons, I’m sure.”
She doesn’t give her reasons, after that. And Gerry knows she hasn’t really told him anything. He knows not to push it, all the same.
But she does, probably, have her reasons.
Even if she’s a liar, Gertrude Robinson isn’t selfish. She doesn’t fight monsters for fame or money. She doesn’t employ Gerry out of the kindness of her heart, sure, but she’s also not doing it to take over the world.
The creature in the tunnels starts to stir at the sound of Gerry’s boots, like it usually does.
“No food today,” he says. “Sorry.”
The creature is laid out on the floor of its cell, with Gerry’s coat over its gangly body. It has its knees drawn up toward its chest.
“Sunrise,” Gerry says. “I just need to rest.”
He can see it blinking at him.
“Is that alright?” he asks. He could just sleep in the corridor; he doesn’t have to sleep in this blood-soaked room with it.
The creature nods. He could swear it says, “Yeah.” But it’s probably just a sigh.
This time, Gerry takes his boots off and folds his leather jacket into something to rest his head on.
He wakes up hungry. The smell of blood is just too strong here. There’s drool dried in the corners of his mouth. It’s probably on his jacket. Gerry sneers with disgust and blindly reaches for his phone.
It’s just after five. Sunset isn’t for another three and a half hours. He really hates summer.
“Hello,” the creature says.
Gerry sits up too fast. His head spins. His spine pops when he turns his head toward the werewolf. It sits in the corner, dirty hair hanging over its face. The black of the leather coat hides most of its upper body, but its skinny shins and ruined shoes poke out the edges.
“You can talk,” he says. Yes, very astute, Gerard.
“Yes,” it says. Its voice is quiet and very rough. The end of the word is close to a hiss.
He blinks.
“Who — wait, uh, so, what’s your name?” he asks. Saliva drips down his lower lip and chin. He wipes it with the back of his hand, pressing his lips back against needle-sharp teeth.
“You think,” it says, slowly. It speaks very deliberately, over-enunciating around its teeth. “I am a who.”
“I mean,” Gerry says. “Yeah. Of course, I do.”
The creature makes a rasping sound that Gerry remembers from their first meeting. It leans into the folds of its long arms.
“Even monsters have names,” he says. “I mean, obviously. I’m Gerard.”
“Gerry,” the creature says, just as carefully as every other word.
For some reason, that makes Gerry smile. “You remember.”
“Call me Michael,” it says.
“Michael,” Gerry says. His teeth cut into his lips and tongue when he says it, so it can’t have been easy for Michael to say.
“So, you’re a… a guy, then?” he asks.
“Hardly,” Michael answers, which is almost dryly funny. Gerry finds himself still smiling.
“Well, I can go, if you want,” Gerry explains. “But, uh, I’ve got like four hours until the sun goes down.”
“Don’t go,” Michael says.
“Yeah,” Gerry says. “Alright.”
Then, he asks, “Seen any good movies lately?”
Michael makes that rasping sound again, which is when Gerry first starts to suspect that it’s a laugh.
Gerry finds himself telling the creature in the tunnels about his latest mannequin-hunting adventures. He carefully avoids mentioning Gertrude by name.
“They don’t even burn well,” he says. “Except the wooden ones, I guess. But plastic just melts.”
“And it tastes terrible,” Michael says.
Gerry laughs. He can’t help himself. It’s the sort of sudden, shocked laugh that he never learned to bite down on. Probably because he’s not had many opportunities.
“This might be a stupid question,” he says, “but can you read down here?”
“Probably,” Michael answers. His voice is little more than a whisper.
Gerry stays until the sun has certainly gone down, telling Michael about his favorite books. He promises to bring one of them with him next week, but Michael only nods.
When Gerry re-emerges into the Archives, he finds the door to Gertrude’s office propped open. Light pours out into the hall. He could certainly slip past without being noticed. He can move faster than most people, probably faster than the old woman can see. But that suggests Gerry has something to hide.
Gerry walks up and knocks on the door.
“Can I help you?” Gertrude asks.
“You left the door open,” he tells her.
“You can shut it,” she says, without looking up from her work.
“I had a nice visit with Michael,” he says, watching for some reaction. He can hear the beating of her heart, but it doesn’t even flutter.
“Yes,” she says, “he used to be a very pleasant young man.”
The dead blood in Gerry’s veins feels colder than usual. He’s still hungry.
“Gerard,” she says. “Please take care this week.”
“You’re…” Gerry stops himself. The joke he wants to make dies on his tongue. There’s nothing soft in her concern for him, not coming on the tail of that. A very pleasant young man? What is that supposed to mean? It sticks in his throat like a clot.
“You’re right,” he says, instead. “I will.”