#stupid decisions

The notes Gertrude had given Tim were pretty much exclusively about the Unknowing, and while she’d mentioned a few of the other rituals—and not just the Extinguished Sun—neither of them could recall her ever saying anything about the Corruption’s. Which might have meant she didn’t consider it a worry, or might have meant that she’d already disrupted it, or might have meant something else altogether. Either way, it was possible that the Crawling Rot was attempting to remake the world in its own image before I Do Not Know You did, which meant they would be scrambling to stop it…and worse, they’d be having to start from scratch. No notes. No precedent. No Gertrude. Tim was smart, and Gerry had a good deal of practical knowledge of the Fourteen, but they weren’t Gertrude Robinson and they might not be able to fix it.

Less drastic for the universe at large, but every bit as concerning to Gerry, was the fact that Tim’s nightmares were getting really, really bad. He hadn’t woken up swinging since the first one back in January, but five nights out of eleven he was waking up screaming or with tears rolling down his cheeks, and Gerry didn’t know how to fix it. Logically, he knew there wasn’t really anything he could actually do, short of getting him good and tired before they went to bed and hoping that would make him sleep too deeply to dream or being there for him when he woke up—and Tim kept assuring him that was plenty. Still, he kept wishing there was a way to just wave a wand or flip a switch and make it all better. Which was a new experience for him. Not just the feeling, but having someone he wanted to do that for.

The first day of spring topped out in the low teens under a leaden sky—so pretty typical for London—and Gerry spent most of the day in his studio. Someone who’d made an appointment to ask about a book had gotten distracted by the painting on the wall and asked if Gerry took commissions, and Gerry had surprised himself by saying yes, so he was working on a piece for the man’s living room. The thought of giving over the rare book business, which he wasn’t all that keen on to begin with, and being able to make a living as an artist was an enticing prospect, but it wasn’t much more than a pipe dream at that point. Still, he hummed along with the music as the image began to take shape.

Once the light passed the studio window, meaning it was gone five o’clock, he reluctantly put down his work, closed the door to the studio, and took Rowlf for a walk before starting on dinner. He’d found a recipe book that claimed to have been put together by some ladies’ auxiliary or other, probably as an effort to raise money for a new roof or some such, in one of the boxes his mother had never bothered to go through, and since it didn’t appear to be a book of power—unless Indigestion had emerged as a fifteenth Fear—he was determined to find out if any of them were worth eating. Most of the gelatin molds could be dismissed out of hand, but the recipe for chicken paprikash intrigued him, so he was giving it a go. Evidently, he was doing well with it, since Rowlf was sitting at his side with his ears perked, very attentively watching everything Gerry did, nostrils twitching the entire time.

Suddenly, Rowlf’s ears pricked further and his tail started thumping. A second later, he leaped to his feet and ran towards the front of the flat. Gerry heard the jingle of keys in the bowl and called, “Dinner will be ready in about twenty, I hope.”

Tim waltzed into the kitchen, almost literally, with Rowlf prancing about his feet. His eyes were sparkling with excitement and mischief in a way Gerry hadn’t seen in close to a year, and he was carrying the folio Gertrude had given him. Gerry considered trying to guess what was up, then decided that would take all the fun out of it. “What happened?”

Tim danced over to Gerry’s side and kissed him on the cheek. “Hither Green.”

Gerry blinked, trying to figure out what that cryptic phrase meant. “Whither green?”

“Are you doing some kind of—no, never mind, you haven’t seen Young Frankenstein.” Tim glanced at the simmering chicken momentarily, then turned his gaze back to Gerry and grinned. “Got another real statement today.”

He had Gerry’s attention. Maybe not in the way he wanted. “And that’s…good?”

“Yeah. How much attention do you need to pay to that?”

“It’s simmering right now, and I don’t need to start worrying about it or the pasta for another ten minutes.”

“Good.” Tim hitched himself up onto the counter and unzipped the folio, then pulled out a few sheets of paper that looked like notebook paper rather than official Institute stationery. He rattled it in Gerry’s direction. “This was in a box that came down from Research about six months ago that we’ve just never got to. Martin unpacked it and cataloged everything in a fit of nervous energy last night and Jon told us to parcel everything out. I snagged this one. Couldn’t justify taking the real thing, but I copied it out. Here.”

He handed the paper to Gerry, who took it and glanced at the top. The statement number clearly labeled it as being from April of the previous year, a couple weeks after they’d got back from the Faroe Islands and found out Gertrude was AWOL, which meant she hadn’t seen it yet—smart of Tim to snag it before anyone else did, especially since they wouldn’t know if it would be important or dangerous. If he was this excited about it, Gerry assumed it was to do with the Unknowing somehow.

It wasn’t. Gerry’s eyebrows jumped into his hairline, not that they had far to jump, as he began reading further into the statement. The words church and evenings and light bulbs jumped out at him, painting a coherent picture even before he got to the really meaty bit. As soon as the man who’d given the statement repeated his girlfriend’s roommate’s phrase—it wasn’t long until they were collected by Mr. Pitch—Gerry knew exactly what was going to happen.

He lowered the pages and looked at Tim sharply. “She was preparing for the ritual?”

Tim rolled his hand eagerly. “Keep going.”

Gerry resumed reading. The woman had attempted to recruit her roommate—failed, thank God, or that could have been bad—and when the statement giver had gone back to have it out with her, she had vanished. That her room was sealed against the light was completely unsurprising, but what caught Gerry’s attention was the paper the man found: A drawing of a closed eye, backed with the words Hither Green Dissenters.

He looked up at Tim again. “Hither Green Dissenters. You think that’s how the People’s Church of the Divine Host is rebranding themselves these days?”

Tim shook his head. “It’s a chapel. When they laid out the Hither Green Cemetery in 1873—it was Lee Cemetery then, that’s what parish it belonged to—they put up two chapels. One was the Anglican chapel, but the other was for ‘dissenters’—nonconformists, people who weren’t Anglican, specifically Protestants. Which was kind of a big deal back then, since burials were still largely controlled by parish churches until 1880 and a lot of urban chapels didn’t have graveyards attached, so having a cemetery where people of multiple faiths could be buried was kind of important.”

The inklings of understanding began to niggle at Gerry’s brain. “When did all this happen?”

“He just said ‘a few weeks’ before he came in to talk to the Institute, but I ran a search on Natalie Ennis.” Tim’s grin notched up a bit. “She was reported missing by our Mr. Bilham on the eleventh of March, 2015. You and I were still in Sicily, getting ready to head to Prague.”

“So right before…” Gerry let out a long, low whistle. “Fuck me.”

“Maybe later.” Tim slid off the counter. “You finish reading that, I’ll get the pasta started. Did you have something in mind?”

“The recipe calls for egg noodles,” Gerry said distractedly, fumbling for a chair with one hand while trying to find where he’d left off in the statement.

“Northerners are weird.” Nevertheless, Tim reached for the cupboard.

Now that he didn’t have to pay such close attention to the food, Gerry let himself sink a little deeper into the statement, slowing down and paying attention to the details. The man had investigated the Hither Green Dissenters Chapel, gone in—as stupid as that was for someone unprepared—and tried to find the missing woman, to no avail. And then, of course, the torch had gone out and the Dark had attempted to claim him, or at least remain undisturbed. Somehow, he wasn’t surprised to read that the floor had seemed transformed. His skin crawled, though, as he read the description of the man’s having found some kind of metal grating and touched hands with something…odd. It could have been a worshiper, but then again, it might not have been. Either way, the man was damned lucky to have survived it.

Especially given the timing.

Slowly, Gerry lowered the last page to the table, pursing his lips thoughtfully. He looked up at Tim, who was watching him from the corner of his eye as he stirred at what he presumed to be a pot of noodles. “Does ‘nee alisund’ mean anything to you?”

“Yep.” Tim popped the P sharply. “Ny-Ålesund is a small town in Norway, and except for research stations, it’s actually the most northerly human settlement on Earth.”

“I thought that was the Faroe Islands.”

“No, that was just the northernmost place we could get to without flying, remember? Ny-Ålesund is on Svalbard, but we could see it from where we were.”

Gerry mulled that over for a moment, then said slowly, “So, a Dark statement, about an incident that took place nine days before the solstice, that mentions Mr. Pitch, the culmination of three centuries of waiting, and the place we’re pretty sure Gertrude was going to charter a boat and take us over to if she’d had to meet us in the Faroe Islands instead of staying in London to do what she needed to do, which is incidentally the same place where this statement largely occurred? Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Probably. Should we bring the dog?”

In the end, they didn’t have a choice; Rowlf invited himself along whether they wanted him or not. Gerry had to admit that it was probably for the best; they were armed with a heavy-duty torch plus the small one on Tim’s keychain, but if the Dark was still hanging about those could become inadequate, to say the least. Rowlf’s nose might, key word was might, come in handy. Since the cemetery closed at five and it was gone eight before they even left the house, they were dressed in all black, and Gerry took out a few of his more noticeable piercings. He also managed to persuade Tim to let him give him a bit of a makeover, on the perfectly legitimate grounds that if they got caught, they could pretend to be a goth couple looking for romance in a crypt or something.

The eyeliner suited him, actually, and Gerry almost wished he had a mobile phone just so he could take a picture and make it his background.

They parked about two miles from the cemetery and walked the rest of the way, trying to look casual despite the late hour. Fortunately, there weren’t many people to observe them. As they approached the gates, Gerry started thinking about how they were going to get in unobserved.

He needn’t have bothered. Something clattered on the path inside the cemetery; Rowlf’s ears perked up, and he leaped forward, seeming to jerk the lead from Tim’s hand as he slipped through the bars of the gate.

“Noodles!” Tim called, which surprised Gerry for a moment until he shook the gates, cursed, and glanced around—rather obviously—before hauling himself over the wall. Then Gerry got it.

“Jesus,” he hissed for the form of things, then shinned over the wall himself. Thank God he’d quit smoking or this would have been a lot more difficult.

He caught up to Tim and Rowlf just off the path. Tim had once again taken hold of the lead, and Rowlf was sitting attentively, tail thumping. Tim blinked innocently at Gerry. “Sorry, officer, our dog was chasing something and we had to catch him.”

“You devious bastard.” Gerry gave Tim a quick kiss. “Come on. Where’s this chapel?”

“Near the back. Where else?” Tim glanced up at the sky. “I’m not sure if we picked a good night for this, or if we should’ve waited a couple weeks.”

Gerry understood what he meant. The clouds of earlier had passed, leaving the sky clear and pristine, and the moon was near enough to full that it bathed the cemetery in a silvery glow. It was going to be hard for them not to be detected. On the other hand…

“Well, it’s got to be easier to tell if we run into the actual Dark this way,” he pointed out.

“Good point. Let’s go. Carefully,” Tim added. “Mind your step.”

Gerry nodded and looped his arm through Tim’s. Rowlf stayed close to Tim’s other side, although he was certainly sniffing about, as they headed deeper into the cemetery.

“Tiptoe…through the graveyard…” Gerry sang under his breath.

“Cemetery,” Tim corrected him.

“What?”

“It’s a cemetery. Not a graveyard.”

“Same thing, isn’t it?”

“Graveyards are attached to churches. Cemeteries are unattached, and usually well away from populated areas.”

“How do you know that?”

“There’s a Robert Frost poem, ‘On a Disused Graveyard’, that we studied in one of my A-levels. Someone in class asked why a cemetery wouldn’t be used anymore and our teacher gave us an impromptu lecture on the difference between cemeteries and graveyards and why they stopped burying people on the church grounds.” Tim checked over his shoulder, then clicked on the torch he was carrying. It did more than Gerry would have thought. “Further up and further in.”

Gerry hummed in acknowledgment. “So why did they? Stop burying people on church grounds, I mean.”

“Overcrowding. And they were too close to human habitation. The decomposing bodies were starting to affect the water supply. Especially after the cholera epidemic of 1831.” Tim swept the beam of the torch ahead of them; Rowlf chased it momentarily. “That’s why they built the Magnificent Seven. Hither Green isn’t one of those, it came about fifty years later.”

“And…why is this chapel so far back?”

“Dissenters,” Tim reminded him. “Most of the cemetery is for good C of E Christians—you know, the official religion. This place wasn’t built that long after they stopped requiring you to have taken sacrament in an Anglican church in order to be eligible for public office, so there were thirty-nine acres for the Church of England and fifteen for the Nonconformists.”

“Got any relatives buried here?” Gerry asked, and he was only partly joking.

Tim, however, shook his head. “No Catholics here. Not from back then anyway. Nonconformists really meant other Protestant denominations—Baptists, Methodists, Moravians, that kind of thing—plus atheists, or anyone who didn’t openly express to being religious. There are two Catholic cemeteries in London, Saint Mary’s and Saint Patrick’s. Four Jewish cemeteries would’ve been open at the time Hither Green broke ground, too, since I know that’s going to be your next question.”

Gerry waited until they had darted across a paved road and started making their way between the mausoleums before he spoke again. “Whose rule was that? That only Protestants and atheists could be buried here, I mean.”

“Kind of both? There was a lot of anti-Catholic sentiment up until the 1940s, really, and anti-Jewish sentiment was, and is, way worse. But even besides that, the fifteen acres where they buried the Dissenters aren’t consecrated, so you can’t have a proper Catholic burial in that.” Tim tugged Rowlf’s lead, steering him away from a headstone, and nodded to it. “Pardon us, ma’am.”

Gerry assumed Tim could see the name carved on the front, because otherwise, there was no way of telling a woman was buried there. “Religious people are weird.”

“I am a religious people, and I agree with you. Come on, I don’t want to be caught out here if the moon goes behind a cloud.”

Eventually they found what they were looking for—a small, clearly abandoned stone structure that had once been a chapel, with a pointed bell tower and boarded up windows. The double doors stood open, or at least slightly ajar. Gerry eyed them for a moment, then turned to Tim. “If something in there springs out and tries to attack us, I want you to know that I will live the rest of my life without feeling the slightest bit guilty that I tripped you and left you to die in my place.”

Tim nodded solemnly. “And if we walk in there and everything is laid out for a grand ritual sacrifice, I want you to know that I almost decided you were worth not going through with the last stage of my plan to ascend into godhood.”

Rowlf barked softly and wagged his tail. Gerry leaned down and scruffed his ears vigorously. “That’s right, boy! When you shed this earthly disguise and reveal your true monstrous form, you will be merciful enough to kill us both before you enslave the world and bend it to your will!”

Rowlf’s tail wagged harder. Tim squared his shoulders. “Come on. Let’s go.”

“What are we actually looking for, anyway?” Gerry asked as they took the last few steps and paused outside the door. “It’s been a year. The bodies will definitely have decomposed by now.”

Tim shook his head. “If Gertrude was going to kill them all, she’d have blown the place to bits. The fact that it’s still intact means she did something else to disrupt the ritual.”

“We’re absolutely certain it was happening here, then?”

“Part of it was. Gertrude reckoned it was going to happen in stages, sort of. Like a gradual eclipse. Disturbing any one part of it should have disrupted the whole thing, and the fact that it never got to the point where she had to come up to Ny-Ålesund means it definitely worked down this way.”

“How do you know that?”

“Didn’t I tell you? Anyway, I’m not reckoning on there being anything dead in here. But I am pretty sure we’ll find some sort of hint as to where Gertrude is. At least what she did to disrupt it, which might give us another clue.”

Gerry shrugged. “Right. On three, then?”

Tim nodded, put his hand on the left-hand door, said, “Three,” and slipped in.

“Motherfucker,” Gerry said under his breath, but he followed his partner and dog into the building.

The chapel was exactly as Mark Bilham had described it: dusty, littered with junk, and utterly empty. It had maybe been used to duck in out of the weather and have a smoke or a drink—or a shag, Gerry thought, nudging what was clearly a spent rubber with his toe—but nobody had worshiped here in a long time.

“When did they stop burying people here?” he asked. On an instinct he didn’t know he possessed, he kept his voice low.

“It’s still an active cemetery,” Tim said distractedly. “Burials are only in the mornings, though…damn. Ger, do me a favor, would you?”

“If I can,” Gerry said, a bit warily.

Tim held Rowlf’s lead towards him. Rowlf was sniffing enthusiastically at one of the pews. “Take the dog and stand by the door, would you?”

Gerry assumed he was worried about Rowlf messing up a trace, or possibly eating a cigarette butt, which…was probably valid, actually. He took the lead and clicked his tongue; Rowlf trotted over to him and sat, eager and attentive. Gerry fished a cold cube of chicken out of the little canister attached to the lead and rewarded him for obeying orders. “Any clues, Holmes?”

Tim looked up at him. Gerry, very suddenly, did not like the look on his face. “I’m about to do something extremely ill-advised. If I scream, for God’s sake and mine, run. All jokes aside, I need to know you’ll be safe if I fuck this up, okay?”

Gerry swallowed hard. “Tim, what are you going to do?”

In answer, Tim took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and clicked off the torch.

The boarded-up windows, combined with the fact that the moon was directly overhead at best, meant that the interior of the chapel was now pitch dark. Gerry tightened his grip on Rowlf’s lead and held his breath. He couldn’t hear anything but the rapid thudding of his heart and Rowlf’s very, very faint whimpering, couldn’t feel anything but the encroaching cold and the leather biting into his hand. He clenched his free hand into a fist and kept his eyes fixed on the spot where he had last seen his partner, hoping, praying to a god he didn’t even really believe was there—

The sound of Tim cursing was the sweetest of music to Gerry’s ears, second only to the click as the torch came back on. Tim stood exactly where he’d been before, looking none the worse for the wear and maybe just a little disappointed. “I should have guessed.”

“What the hell was that all about?” Gerry dropped the lead without thinking and strode across the floor to embrace his boyfriend, because fuck it, after a scare like that he could use that word and not be ashamed of it. “Were you trying to summon the Dark?”

“Yeah,” Tim admitted, hugging Gerry back. “I know it’s stupid, but…I thought Gertrude might be hiding in it. Or stuck in it, maybe. You know, Elias was surprised she’d texted me on the twentieth, I thought maybe she got attacked by something, came out here to finish the Dark off, and it…I dunno, held on to her or something. That if I could lure it out, it would at least let me step into it and find her, the way I stepped into the Night Market.”

“Jesus, Tim.” Gerry rested his chin on Tim’s shoulder for a moment, then slowly, reluctantly, eased back. He kept hold of his hand, though, even as he bent to pick up the lead, Rowlf having trotted over to join them.

“I know. I know. But it…it’s not here anymore.” Tim stared down at the floor, his forehead puckered in a frown. He untangled one of his fingers from Gerry’s and worried at the ring on his finger for a moment.

Gerry slid the loop of the lead around his wrist, brought Tim’s hand up, and tugged the ring off for him—damn, it was unusually tight, it took him a second to work it up to the knuckle, never mind yank it over it. “Whatever Gertrude did disrupted it good and proper, I guess.”

Slowly, Tim shook his head. “Gertrude didn’t do it. Not from here, anyway. Don’t do that if you’re not serious about it.”

Gerry paused for no more than half a second as he contemplated what Tim had just said—both of the things Tim had just said—before mentally shrugging and resuming sliding the ring onto the slightly smaller finger between his middle and pinkie fingers. “What makes you say that?”