#archivist gerry

And so when he opened the door to the Archive and found blood on the carpet, brown and already drying. Gerard blinked several times, closing his eyes and counting backwards from ten—fighting back the images of blood and skin drying on wire.

When he looked again, there was still blood. A long streak of it, leading to Gertrude’s office.

“No,” he told himself. “This isn’t happening.”

It occurred to him that he could leave, but the thought was as distant as his own body as he floated through the Archives. Even without Knowing, he knew what he would find on the other side of the door. That’s why she needs me. I know my way around a body. Disposing of it, and anything else she’ll need to do first.

He was queasy, sick and nauseous, wanting to puke up everything that Mary had written on him, erasing everything he knew until he was clean.

“Gertrude?” he called. No answer. The door was locked, and he watched himself reach into his pocket for the key she’d given him. For emergencies, she’d said. He heard that and knew she didn’t keep anything valuable in her office; she didn’t trust him that much.

Gerard opened the door.

He didn’t know what he was looking at. At first he thought it was another hallucination. He didn’t believe he was actually looking at Gertrude’s body sagged back at her desk with her throat slit and torso vivisected, her guts gathered in her lap.

This time he didn’t close his eyes. He stood there, breathing heavily, running through the script that he’d played before—escaping to the street, collapsing at a table covered in blood, knowing that everyone was watching him but somehow not feeling it.

“Excellent for you to come, Mr Keay.”

Gerard turned, watching as Elias joined him. He walked steady, stepping around the blood without breaking stride. His hands were tucked behind his back with the propriety of a soldier.

“What the fuck is this?”

“I believe that’s the question that I should be asking you,” Elias said. “Are you not the one standing in front of my murdered Archivist? Although that’s hardly a new situation for you.”

Gerard pulled back his arm and decked Elias. He watched it happen in slow motion. Shaky, wobbly, like punching in a dream. Only when his knuckles connected with Elias’ face, and he felt a crunch vibrate up his arm, did Gerard realise that he’d actually done that.

Elias stumbled back, touching his nose and grinning when saw the blood. “I suppose the police won’t be surprised when I tell them that you assaulted me when I found you standing over Gertrude’s body.”

“Why?” Gerard asked, his voice so small to his own ears.

“Let’s just say that she and I had conflicting interests.”

“I thought stopping the Unknowing would be at the top of your priorities. Don’t you have your own Ritual to plan?”

Elias’ smile widened. With blood dripping over his lip, he looked demented.

“Did Gertrude tell you her plans for the Unknowing?” Elias asked. “What your role would be?”

“I could guess.” The same role he always played.

“Yes. Well, you’re not wrong. Not entirely.”

It was weird, knowing Elias was rooting through his thoughts. Gerard had the dull thought that he’d expected Elias to have already looked, if he was going so far as framing him for murder.

“I have a better proposition,” Elias said. “One that is in both of our interests.”

“Well, let me think—fuck no.”

“Don’t you want to know what’s on offer?”

“No,” Gerard said, but by the time the word left his mouth he already knew. It was obvious; he couldn’t believe that he hadn’t worked it out on his own, without Elias mind-raping him.

Elias watched pleasantly.

“Fuck off,” he said. Gerard took a step closer to the stairs. When Elias didn’t move out of the way he ploughed forward, shoving him to the side.

“What is waiting for you out there?”

“Prison,” Gerard said dully. “Whatever. It wasn’t that bad.”

“I suppose not. Not compared to the prison that you were born to.”

Gerard needed to keep going. He’d already made up his mind not to listen. If this was Elias’ game, then whatever—he’d been in shit situations before, his back against the wall, no way out. He’d live. But it wasn’t over yet. He just wasn’t going to think about his plans until he was out of the Institute, where Elias was most powerful.

He didn’t move.

“Do you really want to spend the rest of your life in a cage?”

“I wouldn’t be any more free as Archivist.”

“You’d still breathe fresh air,” Elias said. “You could still smoke, and choose when to go to bed each night, what to read, when to eat. Oh, and you could still take holidays—twenty-eight days each year, plus Bank Holidays. The Institute is proud of its generous bonuses.”

“You know that I won’t do it,” Gerard said. “I’m not letting you use me for whatever creepy ritual you and the rest of your freaks are doing.”

“Were you always this stubborn? This spiteful?”

“Why don’t you ask your master?”

“It was a rhetorical question,” Elias said. “By all means—I can’t keep you here. You are, of course, welcome to leave. It will take the police, oh, around half an hour to send someone. They’ll be very interested in the CCTV footage.”

“I’m sure they will be. What’s your point?”

This was ridiculous. He’d already made up his mind. What was he waiting for? There was nothing stopping him from leaving, but to his annoyance he just stood there.

“How are your headaches, Gerard?” The question was so unexpected that Gerard actually turned to look at Elias, briefly knocked out of his own thoughts.

“My headaches…?”

“More frequent than usual, I see,” Elias said. “But you’re not surprised—you’ve been under a lot of pressure, and it’s not like you’ve slept much. Gertrude kept you very busy.”

A heavy feeling was growing in Gerard’s gut, sinking and weighing him in place. He shook his head, but it was too late, he knew about the tumour, the cancer growing unchecked in his skull for months. For all the danger that Gerard faced, the certainty of his own death that he’d always been intimately familiar, he’d never considered that he could die for a reason so… mundane. Who cared about cancer when he could be burned from the inside out, murdered and skinned and preserved in a fucking book, slowly suffocated to death as the whole world closed around him? A hospital bed with a morphine drip sounded like a holiday.

Treachery from his own body blinded him. Gerard could barely breathe.

“You never had a preferred way to die, or even a death that you expected,” Elias said. “You just expected one that you deserved. You thought that knowing about Smirke’s Fourteen was a ticket into a death that was at least, how shall we say this… interesting.”

“You say that like I wanted to die.”

“Of course not,” Elias said. For a moment he sounded almost sympathetic. “At the very least you can congratulate yourself on never giving in to the delusion of a ‘good death.’ But you expected it to matter, even if only in your own mind—the direct cost of knowing too much. Really, you’re more like your mother than you can imagine.”

Gerard laughed. To his relief it sounded solid, with a bite. “Right. You almost had me for a moment.”

“Your cancer is too advanced for medical help to do anything for you, except to buy you a miserable few months,” Elias said. “It’s far too aggressive. You wouldn’t survive long enough to stop the Unknowing, even if you weren’t going to spend that time behind bars.”

“Call the police, then,” Gerard said. “Here—I’ll even wait. I’ll turn myself in.”

“How about this,” Elias said. “I’ll call the police tomorrow, at five-o’clock. No one else will be down here. That’s plenty of time for you to consider my offer.”

There were other options. Leitners that he hadn’t yet burned. Servants of the Flesh that would make him pay for it in blood and fat and bone, but who could help. Twenty-two hours was, long enough that Gerard could think of something. Assuming Elias was telling the truth—

“I am.”

—that was a lot of time. Especially if the last ten minutes were anything to go by.

“Think about it,” Elias said, stepping past Gerard to the stairs. “You’ll know where to find me if you want to discuss this further.”

The dreamy haze from earlier had vanished, and Gerard felt every inch of coiled muscle as he watched Elias climb the stairs. His breaths came short, something caught in his throat like a smoker’s cough. If he made a sound he’d start screaming, and he couldn’t guarantee he’d ever stop. 

Elias opened the door without looking back. He stepped into the rest of the Institute, shutting it decisively behind him with a click.

Gerard shut his eyes, willing himself to be still. He tried to ground himself again, but all he could focus on was the blood on the carpet, Gertrude’s mutilated body.