Chapter Text
HELP WANTED: Maintenance Worker (late hours)
Seeking a person of steady disposition and keen intellect. Generous compensation. Room and board available upon request. Not suitable for those possessed of a delicate constitution or nervous temperament. Mechanical aptitude a must, fast runners strongly preferred. Priority will be afforded to candidates with no dependents or other living relatives. Applicants may report to Mr. Edwin Payne, acting head curator and recondite warder of the London Athenaeum.
Office hours: 11:30pm – 5:30am, Mondays only
Address: 121 Westminster Bridge Road, SE1 7HR
*
It’s the weirdest bloody job interview Charles has ever done.
Based on the name – seriously, who’s called Edwin these days? – and the stuffy, old-fashioned wording of the advert, Charles was expecting the acting head curator to be a doddery old boy, someone who’s not as handy with a stepladder and a toolbox as he once was. But the lad who opens the door and introduces himself as Edwin Payne can’t be much older than Charles, even if he is dressed like someone’s granddad in a natty little three piece suit.
“You’re late,” he says, and makes a disapproving note on his clipboard. “Come in.”
Charles steps inside, puzzling over that. Maybe they’ve got him confused with someone else. The advert didn’t include a phone number or any other way to make an appointment, so he’d just waited until after midnight, then, when he was good and sure his parents were asleep, he’d climbed out of his bedroom window and slipped away.
“You had no trouble finding us, I trust?”
Edwin Payne is looking at him intently, and Charles has the funny feeling that this isn’t just small talk.
“Er,” says Charles. “Yeah, thanks.” When he’d first pitched up outside, he stood there in the dark for a minute, just looking up at the imposing main gates, before he spotted the narrow little side door with its heavy brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head. But the address was straightforward enough.
“Good. Well, Mr. Rowland—”
Charles flinches and hopes Edwin Payne hasn’t noticed, but he looks up sharply and raises an eyebrow.
“Sorry,” says Charles. “Mr. Rowland’s… just Charles is fine.”
“Very well, then. You may call me Mr. Payne. Follow me, please.”
Mr. Payne leads Charles down a narrow, dimly-lit corridor, lined with dark green tiles. When they reach the end, it opens out onto a mezzanine balcony, with stairs leading up on the left and down on the right. Charles strays towards the railing and looks out, dumbstruck. The place is huge, much bigger than he’d thought, based on the tall, narrow brick façade outside. The balcony overlooks an enormous well of empty space, sunk vertically through the middle of the building, with the cloistered stairs spiralling around the edge. When Charles looks down over the edge of the railing, he realises with a dizzy swoop of vertigo that it goes so deep that he can’t see the bottom. He looks up instead to see a vast, ornate skylight set into the ceiling, high, high above his head. Odd dapples and flashes of moonlight are falling through.
The silence has weight and thickness, a velvet quality. A cathedral sort of silence. Charles lets out a low whistle.
“Come along, please,” calls Mr. Payne, already some way down the stairs. “It isn’t safe for you to be wandering about on your own.”
Charles trots after him. “So—what is this place, exactly?” he says. “The ad didn’t really explain. I tried to look you up but you’re not in the Yellow Pages.”
“This place,” says Mr. Payne, with a note of reverence softening his cut-glass voice, “is the London Athenaeum. An archive, of sorts. A repository. A museum.”
The staircase is punctuated with little landings, each one open on one side to the cavernous atrium. There are doors, too, but Charles is almost having to jog to keep up, and it’s too difficult to read the signs in the dim light. “What sort of museum?”
“This building was once the station that served the London Necropolis Railway,” says Mr. Payne. There’s a well-worn storybook cadence to it. “By 1854, London’s cemeteries were full, so trains carried bodies and mourners out to Brookwood, in Surrey, where there was more space.”
“This place was a train station?” Charles looks around, trying to square the railway stations he knows with what he can see: the dark wood floor, waxed to a soft shine, and the honeyed light of the gas lamps glinting where it catches the edges of each tile on the wall, and that vast, ornate skylight.
“Mm. There have been… renovations, in the interim, of course.” Mr. Payne glances back over his shoulder and Charles double-times his way down a few steps to catch up, his footsteps echoing strangely in the quiet. “The Athenaeum began as the Necropolis Railway’s lost and found department. The station was relocated here from Waterloo in 1902, but the trains continued to run until 1941, when the tracks were badly damaged during the Blitz. The Necropolis Railway was shuttered, but the Athenaeum remained. The Work we were doing was deemed too important to stop.”
Weird thing to say about a museum, Charles thinks. How important can it really be?
Mr. Payne stops so abruptly that Charles almost walks into him. They’re standing in front of a door with a fussy little sign that reads STAFF ONLY!, fenced off with a red velvet rope. Mr. Payne unclips the rope and produces a big, heavy-looking ring of keys from his pocket. The ring is loaded with them, more keys than Charles can count, but Mr. Payne seems to find the one he’s looking for almost immediately. He shakes it free of the others, unlocks the door, and holds it open for Charles.
“In here, please,” he says.
He leads Charles down to the end of another little corridor and into a snug, dark-panelled office. It’s small, and so overstuffed with heavy furniture and shelves groaning under the weight of hundreds upon hundreds of books that there’s barely space for the desk and two spindly, antique-looking chairs. Charles sits down gingerly, not entirely trusting the chair not to give way underneath him. Mr. Payne takes the other chair and switches on the little lamp on the desk, its green glass shade casting a warm, diffuse light.
“Now,” he says, flipping a page on his clipboard. “Just some housekeeping to start with, if you don’t mind. Date of birth?”
“Sixth of May, 1973.”
“Making you… eighteen. Very good. Full name?”
“Charles Prayadarshi Rowland.”
He’s expecting to have to spell it, but Mr. Payne just nods and writes it down. He’s a strange one, Charles thinks. Handsome, in a severe, old-fashioned sort of way, with a face that wouldn’t look out of place in an oil painting or a soft-edged, unsmiling old photograph or one of those posters that made enlisting in the army look like a grand old time. Dressed the part, too, from the polished Oxfords to the pomade in his hair. Sounds like public school through and through, as if you could snap him in half like a stick of rock and find ETON printed the whole way down the middle. It’s like he’s wandered in here by mistake from another time.
Mr. Payne glances up and says, “Rowland with a W, I presume? Good. How is your classical Greek?”
Charles’ heart sinks. “My…?”
“Your Greek. It’s just your ability to read and write it that I’m interested in, you understand, rather than your knowledge of particular texts.”
“I can’t,” says Charles. “Sorry.”
“That’s quite alright,” says Mr. Payne, but he writes something that looks suspiciously like a zero on his clipboard. “Latin, then?”
“Um… no. Not Latin, either, I’m afraid.”
“Coptic?”
“No. Look, this is for a maintenance job, right?”
“Yes. Answer the questions, please. Old Norse?”
“No.”
“Sumerian?”
“No.”
“Aramaic? Old Arabic?”
“No and no.”
“Sanskrit?”
“I speak a bit of Gujarati,” says Charles, like a man grasping for a lifeboat. “If that’s any good.”
“Hm.” More zeroes on the clipboard.
“It wasn’t—your ad didn’t say anything about languages,” Charles blurts out, after a long moment of frustrated silence. Mechanical aptitude a must, it said, and Charles is aces at all that stuff, walkmans and radios and telephones and cars, taking things apart and putting them back together. And… well. Room and board available upon request. That was what really caught his eye. Charles thought he might finally be able to get out of his dad’s house.
Mr. Payne looks up from his notes and gives Charles a polite, tight-lipped smile. There’s a clock on the wall with a swinging pendulum carved into the shape of a pinecone and a wooden owl perched on the top, and Charles could swear there’s a judgemental look about it. “Just establishing your… hinterland,” he says. “And your family situation?”
Priority will be afforded to candidates with no dependents or other living relatives. It doesn’t sound like it’s a dealbreaker. But all that stuff about what languages he speaks has rattled Charles badly, and he really, really needs this job. So—
“Dead,” he says. He realises he’s bouncing his knee up and down under the desk and forces himself to stop. “Parents are gone and I was an only child.”
“My condolences,” says Mr. Payne. If he doubts it, it doesn’t show on his face. He makes a note and Charles lets out a long, slow breath. Well, it’s too late to walk it back now. He’s just going to have to try not to put his foot in it and hope Mr. Payne is too polite to bring it up again. It’s not like Charles is planning to go home often, or maybe ever again, if this works out.
Mr. Payne is uninterested in Charles’ exam results, but he does hand Charles a complicated wooden puzzle box that looks a bit like a posh Rubik’s cube. “I’d like you to try to open this for me, please,” he says.
Charles spends a miserable minute or two twiddling all the little bits around, utterly failing to pop the bastard thing open while Mr. Payne watches him intently. He can see where the seam is between the two halves, but he just can’t make the pieces line up. Fuck it, he thinks, and reaches for the metal ruler sticking out of the pen pot on the desk in front of him. “Can I borrow this?”
“Of course.”
Charles grabs the ruler, jams it into the seam and levers the box open like a clam shell. “There,” he says, and pushes the box and the ruler back across the desk. He’s half expecting Mr. Payne to kick him out then and there – half hopes he will, even, just to put an end to the humiliation – but Mr. Payne just purses his lips and makes a note.
“Unorthodox,” he says, in a voice that gives nothing away.
It goes from bad to worse. Mr. Payne hands him a bewildering list of all kinds of different things and Charles sits there chewing his lip and trying to figure out what on earth the common factor could be until Mr. Payne whips the sheet of paper away and instead, to Charles’ dismay, asks him to recite as much of it as he can remember. Charles fumbles his way through the first few, then, in a fit of belligerence, asks to see the list again. Mr. Payne hands it over and Charles reads it back to him, but Charles has a feeling that wasn’t the answer Mr. Payne was looking for.
There’s a series of those horrible verbal logic puzzles next, all rivers and animals that want to eat each other. Mr. Payne’s face gives Charles no indication at all of whether or not he’s getting them right, which is excruciating – each increasingly desperate answer gets the same neutral ‘hm,’ and the same inscrutable little nod. Charles can feel his already slim chances dwindling with every passing second.
“One last thing,” says Mr. Payne, and he picks up a little soapstone polar bear from his desk and throws it at Charles. Charles ducks out of the way just in time to stop it beaning him between the eyes and snatches it out of the air with one hand, momentarily possessed by the spirit of his younger self and those long summers spent playing cricket. He sits there, wide eyed and frozen, the little bear still clutched in his hand.
“Well, your reflexes are quite good, at least,” says Mr. Payne. “Come with me, please.”
He gets up and leaves without looking over his shoulder to check whether Charles is following. Charles sits there for a long moment, feeling like he’s tripped and fallen sideways into some weird parallel universe. Then he puts the bear back down on the desk, gets to his feet, and jogs after Mr. Payne.
Charles had thought fast runners strongly preferred was a little joke on behalf of whoever wrote the ad, but Mr. Payne leads him all the way down to the huge, circular atrium at the very bottom of the stairs and tells him to run – ten laps, as fast as he can.
“You’re kidding,” says Charles.
Mr. Payne raises his eyebrows. Charles sighs, and starts running.
“Done,” he wheezes, several minutes later, bent double with his hands braced on his knees, his lungs on fire.
“Hm.” Mr. Payne inspects his antique-looking silver stopwatch and writes down the time on his clipboard. “Adequate.”
“Oh.” Charles sucks in another gasping breath. The black and white flagstones under his feet are swimming queasily before his eyes. “Good.”
“No,” says Mr. Payne, crisply. “Adequate.”
Charles straightens up and tips his head back. They’re so far below ground here that the atrium is much bigger than he’d thought, looking down on it from above. Standing there in the shafts of moonlight streaming through the distant skylight, they could be at the bottom of some strange ocean. It’s a warm August night outside, but there’s a chill in the air down here. Charles’ polo shirt is sticking unpleasantly to his back, and these loafers definitely were not made for running.
“There anything else I can do for you?” says Charles. “I might not speak Latin, but you need someone to rewire a plug, put some shelves up, I’m your man.” He has a good go at a convincing smile, but he can feel it wobbling.
Mr. Payne flips a page on his clipboard. “No, thank you,” he says. “I believe I’ve seen all I needed to see.”
A wave of hopelessness closes over Charles’ head. He feels like a prize idiot for getting his hopes up. He should have known as soon as Mr. Payne opened the door that this place wasn’t for him. He’s trying not to think about going back to square one, trudging around looking for HELP WANTED signs in shop windows and scouring the papers for classifieds.
“Right,” he says, trying to keep the bitter taste in his mouth out of his voice. “Well. Thanks for your time. If that’s everything, I’ll get out of your hair.”
“Ah.” Mr. Payne is frowning down at his clipboard. “My apologies, there is one more thing. How are you at holding your breath? There’s a little spring down here that’s been diverted into a pool – quite clean, of course—”
Charles snorts. “Yeah, I don’t think so,” he says. Mr. Payne’s as good as told him he isn’t walking out of here with a job offer; Charles isn’t about to embarrass himself any more than he already has by having a panic attack in front of Mr. Payne the second he gets his head under water. He hoists a smile back onto his face, then hesitates. It’s difficult to tell the story in the negative space between all the parts he’s leaving out. “Sorry. Nothing personal. I just had a… a bit of a rough go of it, last time I got dunked. Not so keen on water anymore.”
Mr. Payne… the best way Charles can think of to describe it is that he sharpens. He looks up from his clipboard, his undivided attention focussed on Charles like sunlight through a magnifying glass. Standing there, utterly still, he looks so powerfully other that Charles takes a tiny, involuntary step backwards. It occurs to him for the first time that he probably should have told someone he was coming here. “Oh?” says Mr. Payne.
“Yeah.” Charles shifts his weight uncomfortably. “Nothing, like—just a practical joke that got a bit out of hand, that’s all. Anyway, they stopped eventually. Got me back to the school nurse just in time and she called an ambulance, so… no harm done, eh? Nothing wrong with me. Just like to keep my feet dry these days.”
There’s a long, silent moment. Mr. Payne doesn’t look away, and Charles tilts his chin up minutely, daring him to have something to say about it when he doesn’t know the first thing—
“Quite understandable,” murmurs Mr. Payne, and it’s like… it’s like his face changes, or the light shifts, but suddenly he looks so perfectly normal again that Charles almost wonders whether he imagined how strange he seemed before. Mr. Payne clears his throat and makes a final note on his clipboard, then tucks it under his arm and puts his hand out for Charles to shake. “Well, welcome to the Athenaeum. How soon can you start?”
*
London Athenaeum Programme of Events
Autumn 2023
Opening hours: 11:30pm – 5:30am, Tuesday through Sunday
Welcome, dear guests, to the Autumn 2023 season at the London Athenaeum. All of the glass broken during the bean sidhe incident which occurred in August has now been replaced, the missing members of the visiting group from St. Cajetan Catholic School have now been fully reconstituted and returned to their families, and we have several exciting new acquisitions. Please see below for our full seasonal programme.
New Exhibitions:
Feathering the Nest: Cursed and Haunted Furniture of the British Isles, September 5th – 24th
Zoologically Improbable and/or Terrifying to Small Children: Experimental Taxidermy, September 19th – October 8th
Flotsam, Jetsam, Lagan & Derelict: High and Haunted Seas, October 3rd – 29th
The Can Of Worms: Supernatural Parasites of the Tropics, October 17th – November 12th
The Body Ceramic: Scottish Clay-Bodies in Theory and Practice, November 7th – 26th
Resurrection Men: An Interactive History of Graverobbing, November 21st – December 10th
Events:
Augury for beginners – four week course beginning on September 6th (all attendees to bring their own knives)
Bacchanal and wine-tasting (18+) – September 17th
Hell hound care and feeding – October 5th
Anthropodermic bibliopegy – one-off workshop taking place on October 12th
Annual Halloween gala for all friends and patrons of the Athenaeum (past and present) – October 31st
An introduction to cromniomancy – four week course beginning on November 8th
The curse removal clinic held on the 27th of each month will continue to run as usual throughout the Autumn season.
*
Charles sticks his arm out from under his duvet and feels around for his alarm clock until he finds the button to stop it ringing. Nine thirty, and the sky outside is a deep, electric indigo. Time to get up.
He spins through his nightly routine like a wind-up toy, pure muscle memory guiding his hands through the same dance he’s been doing every night for the last thirty years: radio on, kettle on, toast in the toaster. He eats his toast over the sink, watching the two fox cubs in the alley behind his flat tumble over each other, nipping at each other’s tails. When his tea is cool enough to drink, he takes it into his bedroom and sips it while he’s pulling on his clothes – black jeans, black polo shirt. He’s had plenty of time to wear Edwin down on the matter of the uniform, and they finally reached a compromise sometime in 1999.
In the bathroom, he tips his head from side to side, considering. The face looking back at him is just the same as it was on his first day at the Athenaeum – not a line, not a wrinkle, not a single grey hair. He’s got one more day before he has to shave, he reckons. He goes to put his boots on.
It’s the first proper day of autumn outside. There’s a bite in the air, and the trees shiver and drop flurries of leaves when the wind catches them. It’s a bit of a way to Westminster Bridge Road from Charles’ little ex-council flat in Brixton, but he quite likes the walk. It stops him feeling like he’s fallen clean out of the world. He locks his door behind him, turns his collar up against the wind, and steps out into the night.
*
TO DO LIST
1. Mop floor underneath weeping painting in the Dowager Countess Dolorosa D’Aubert gallery
2. Feed all carnivorous plants in the Bathory greenhouse (please do not feed the Basano pitcher plant! I fear that our attempts to discern its preferred food source have led it to develop a taste for human blood, and at its current rate of growth it will soon be big enough to consume small children whole – I will investigate further. E.P.)
3. Read to the Bronze Lady in the Lady Defoliana Paraquat memorial garden – restart from pg. 52 of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (she seems to be enjoying this one, she’s been far less restless of late. E.P.)
4. PAY PEST CONTROL INVOICE!!! Franz has phoned twice already this week!
5. Oil door hinges of Slumbering Gallery
6. Count number of hands in the Hands Resist Him painting (I share your concern about this one. I confess I don’t get up to the Orlac wing as often as I should but I also think there are more hands in it than when I last looked. E.P.)
7. Sweep up sand in the Hawass gallery of Egyptian antiquities – where is it all COMING FROM? Use to refill sand buckets in ifrit exhibition???
8. Scrape chewing gum off underside of reproduction gallows
9. Scrape chewing gum off underside of genuine gallows
10. Bleed radiators in Spirits Of The Northwest Passage exhibition (If the radiators are actually bleeding again, you might try to find out whether the blood is an acceptable sacrifice for the Roman haruspex’s knife in the Gallery of Informative Rituals. The fact that it has to remain wet with blood at all times is terribly inconvenient and this could be an efficient solution. E.P.)
[Rest of list is scorched and illegible.]
*
Charles kicks Edwin’s office door open without bothering to knock first. “Edwin, mate.”
Edwin doesn’t look up from his newspaper. They still get the Times delivered every weekday morning; Edwin always leaves five shillings out for the paperboy at Christmas. “Good evening, Charles.”
Charles brushes soot off his polo shirt and slouches against the doorframe. “You know that big tapestry in the Goraidh exhibition hall? Ugly old thing, about so wide by so high.” He sketches out the rough dimensions with his hands. “Reckon anyone would miss it?”
Edwin glances up and pins Charles in place with a suspicious look. “I suspect that the Dowager Countess Gashlycrumb might, yes. Although she has been dead for fifty years. Why do you ask?”
“You know them fossilised salamander eggs we’ve got downstairs?”
Edwin sighs, and puts his newspaper down, refolding it neatly along the creases. “You know I hate it when you answer one question with another. What’s happened?”
“They’re not very bloody fossilised anymore.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah. You know, warm summer. Climate change, innit. Anyway, we’re down half a tapestry and up two salamanders. Give Stavi a call for us, would you? I can’t be dealing with salamanders. We’re the London Athenaeum, not—”
“—Not the London Cryptozoological Gardens, I know, I know. I shall call him, I’m sure he’d be happy to take them off our hands.” Edwin reaches for the telephone receiver and pauses with his other hand hovering over the rotary dial, those sea glass eyes ticking over Charles. “Are you sure you’re quite alright?”
Charles is so tired he’d be swaying on his feet if he weren’t leaning on the doorframe, but he dredges up a smile. “Yeah, mate. You know me, I’m aces.”
“Hm.” Edwin doesn’t look convinced. “Oh, before I forget—not to add to your list of woes, but the Very Reverend Lazarus Arbuthnot needs burying again.”
“What, already? He can’t do, I only buried him…” Charles counts on his fingers. “Oh. Yeah, it’s been about six months, hasn’t it? Bloody hell, time flies when you’re having fun, eh?”
“Yes,” says Edwin. “As inconvenient as the biannual reinterments are, one has to admire his commitment to remaining on this plane of existence until the Rapture.”
“We knock him down, but he gets back up again,” says Charles. With a grunt of effort, pulls the heavy, metal-bladed spade out of Edwin’s cast-iron umbrella stand. He swings it up and over his shoulder and trudges off to the Lady Defoliana Paraquat memorial garden, whistling Tubthumping as he goes.
Art by dont-offend-the-bees
*
Music box with rotating ballerina figurine
Manufacturer unknown (presumed defunct)
Predominantly plastic with some metallic moving parts
c. 1996
This small and arrestingly ugly music box serves a dual purpose, as it can also be used to store jewellery or other small trinkets. When the rhinestoned plastic bow is depressed, the lid is released and the music box mechanism is activated, causing the ballerina figurine inside the box to rotate and a short, looping piece of music to play. The origins of the curse afflicting the music box are unknown, but it seems that anyone within earshot when the music starts to play is immediately rendered unconscious and will remain so until the box is closed, stopping the music. Although the manufacturer has not been identified, several identical music boxes have been discovered in charity shops in and around Birmingham, none of which appear to bear the same curse. Unfortunately, the family from whom this music box was acquired are not available to provide further information regarding the circumstances under which the item came to be in their possession, on account of all of them being dead.
Please press the button on the front of the glass case to activate the music box. Rest assured that the case is soundproofed, and in the event of failure, the All Work And No Play exhibition of cursed and haunted toys is checked nightly at closing time by the conservator.
Mr. E. Payne, acting head curator, January 9th 2021
*
Charles risks a glance around the bend in the L-shaped gallery of Egyptian funerary ceramics, his hands clasped around the handle of his cricket bat. A fist-sized faience jar whistles past his ear, missing him by inches, and he ducks back out of the line of fire as it shatters against the wall behind him, swearing under his breath. He’d been on his way back up from burying the Very Reverend Lazarus Arbuthnot when he’d heard the unmistakable, musical crash of breaking pottery from a distant gallery. He’d abandoned his spade, grabbed the cricket bat he keeps in the fourth floor supply cupboard for emergencies, and gone to investigate. This gallery is usually so quiet that it’s one of the ones Charles tends to skip on his rounds if he’s pressed for time – flying pottery is definitely out of character, which means there’s something in here that shouldn’t be. Charles takes a cautious sniff, and—yeah, there it is. A faint but discernible breath of sulphur on the air.
Poltergeist.
“Alright, then, dickhead,” Charles mutters, tightening his grip on the handle of the bat. “Let’s play.”
He steps out from behind the wall. Another jar comes flying towards him, but he’s ready this time, swinging the cricket bat in an arc that connects with a crunch and a flurry of razor-edged ceramic shrapnel. He sighs. Edwin’s going to lose his rag when he finds out about this. As if summoned by the thought, there’s a sudden sound of running footsteps in the corridor outside.
“Charles?” Edwin calls. “What’s…?”
Charles glances reflexively over his shoulder, narrowly avoiding a heavy canopic jar that’s on a collision course with his face. “Edwin? Don’t come in here—”
Too late. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Edwin skid through the door – if Charles has told him once he’s told him a thousand times, there’s no grip on those posh dress shoes he insists on wearing, he needs to get himself something with a good sturdy rubber sole – just before an invisible hand slams it shut behind him.
“I told you not to do that,” Charles says, resignedly, smacking another little bright blue jar out of the air.
Edwin ducks easily underneath a dislodged exhibit card that’s spinning through the air like the blade of a circular saw and hurries over to stand behind Charles. “Nonsense,” he says, briskly. “You clearly needed—” Charles jabs a giant ceramic scarab beetle with the end of the bat and shoves Edwin out of the way of a great scything shard of it. “—Assistance.”
“I had it under control,” says Charles. He can’t see anything, but there’s a visible patch of perfect stillness at the epicentre of all the airborne pottery. He starts edging towards it, keeping himself and the bat in front of Edwin.
“So I see. Come on, then, apprise me of the situation and we’ll get this straightened out, shall we?”
“Poltergeist,” says Charles tersely. He brings the bat up just in time to deflect a dagger-like piece that would have got him right in the neck. “I reckon one of those schoolkids must’ve left something here last night as a joke, this room’s usually dead quiet. We’ve got all those haunted toys in the gallery next door at the moment, that’s where I’d hide a poltergeist box if I was a little ankle-biter.”
“Oh dear. It seems likely, doesn’t it?” A vase the size of a labrador comes sailing towards them with a whistle like a falling bomb and Charles drops to the ground, grabbing Edwin by the arm and taking him down too. The vase smashes on the floor several feet behind them, and Edwin gets to his feet and brushes imaginary dust off his trousers. “Well,” he says. “It could be worse, I suppose. I’ve been meaning to undertake something of a cull of this gallery for months, and this sort of thing is what we pay that pest control company for. If we can just nudge it into range of one of the traps…”
“Ah,” says Charles. “Yeah. Paying the pest control company. About that.”
Edwin groans. “Charles! You haven’t—?”
“Alright, alright, leave it out! Had a lot on, haven’t I?”
“Very well,” says Edwin, still a bit snippily, but Charles can tell without looking at him that he’s already formulating a plan, music filling that soaring cathedral of a brain. “It’s not ideal, but – yes. Alright. I can improvise a banishing rite that should work. It won’t be clean, but I don’t see how else… do you have any brimstone on you?”
Charles shrugs his way out of his jacket and tosses it in Edwin’s direction, his eyes still following the eye of the storm in the middle of the whirling pottery. “Knock yourself out, mate. Should be in the left pocket.”
There’s a rustle of fabric as Edwin rummages through Charles’ jacket. “It’s not in here.”
“The other left, then.” Charles swings the bat at a little ushabti figurine that’s spinning towards him like a chunky throwing star. He squints. It’s hard to tell when it’s something you can’t technically see, but – “Does it look like it’s moving to you?”
“Aha! Found it, thank you. Does it look like it’s what? Did you say it’s moving?”
“Yeah, look.” Charles points. “It’s heading for the toy gallery.” He glances over his shoulder at Edwin, who’s gone pale.
“Charles, we can’t let it get in there,” he says. “It’s too dangerous, this room might be quiet but there are things in there that aren’t to be disturbed—”
“Better get your skates on, then, hadn’t you? Come on. Stay behind me.”
They advance on the roving tornado of destruction as it veers towards the archway that opens out into the exhibition of cursed and haunted toys, shards of broken pottery crunching under their feet. Charles takes a swing at yet another flying vase, but it jukes in mid-air and he misses. There’s a sharp hiss of pain from behind him and he looks back at Edwin, his heart in his throat, but Edwin has his lethally sharp antique Swiss army knife in his hand and he’s rolled up his sleeve to make a straight, decisive cut across the top of his forearm. He drops to his knees, drags two fingers through the blood and starts drawing runes on the hardwood floor.
Art by dont-offend-the-bees
Charles turns back to the poltergeist. “Edwin, mate,” he says. “I don’t want to worry you, but it’s definitely heading towards—”
“Damn it all. How long do I have?”
Charles sucks his teeth. “Thirty seconds before shit gets really bad, I’d say.”
Edwin doesn’t answer, not even to tell Charles off for swearing in the galleries, so he must be concentrating hard. Charles can hear the squeak of Edwin’s fingers in his own blood on the floor. He’s absolutely kicking himself about the bloody pest control stuff. He could have stayed late and just called them up any day last week! Ten minutes, it would have taken him, if that, but he didn’t, so now here they are, surrounded by the dust of what’s probably a small fortune’s worth of shattered antiquities while Edwin’s had to slice his own arm open to clean up Charles’ mess. He sets his jaw and swings hard at another huge vase, the twin of the big one that’s now lying in pieces sprayed across the floor. The force of the collision sends shockwaves juddering all the way up Charles’ arms, the inertia keeping the top and the bottom of the vase hanging in the air for a split second while the bat knocks the middle of it into oblivion. Charles throws his forearm up to shield his face from the shrapnel, and when he puts it down again, the poltergeist is almost on the threshold of the toy gallery.
“Almost,” Edwin mutters from behind him. “Just… a moment longer…”
“I don’t think we’ve got a moment,” says Charles. He watches a figurine of Sobek shatter the glass of a display case on the other side of the archway, and the force of the miniature storm yanks the little white plastic box inside the case off its pedestal. For a split second, Charles can’t remember what it is, then the ice-cold horror hits him like a bucket of water being emptied over his head.
Time deforms like molten glass as Charles throws himself into the air. “Edwin!” he bellows. “Cover your ears!”
He watches the box bounce once, springing back up into the air, and then again as he reaches for it, and the lid snaps open. He hears the first few notes of the music as he throws himself on top of it, his vision already warping and blackening at the edges like a burned photograph. Clinging to consciousness by his fingernails, he fumbles with the lid, distantly aware of Edwin’s voice, calling his name. The last thing he feels as the floor rushes up to meet him is the two halves snapping shut again – and everything goes dark.
*
MEMORANDUM
To: Mrs. S. Castle (sales clerk), Ms. K. Devi (archivist), Miss F. Featherstonehaugh (acquisitions assistant), Mr. E. Payne (junior curator), Ms. V. Sentinel (custodian), Mrs. M. Skinner (docent), Mr. W. Stonecipher (conservator), Mr. B. True (day watchman)
From: Miss C. Knight (head curator and recondite warder)
Subject: Staff First Aid Training
Date: September 12th 1939
All Athenaeum staff are to report to the Robert Liston medical bay at 12:00am sharp on Monday 18th for mandatory first aid training. Your wages will be adjusted accordingly, and as such, I shall be most displeased if I hear any complaints about Monday being everybody’s day off. Under the circumstances, I think it best that all of you have at least a modicum of medical training to fall back on in the unlikely event that I am indisposed.
We shall be discussing wound debridement, correct application of dressings, splints and tourniquets, appropriate treatment for burns (heat, chemical, salt and iron), identification of common supernatural and mundane poisons and their antidotes, parasite removal, procedures for halting and minimising curse- and hex-related bodily harm, and best practices for emergency amputations.
*
Charles sits on the edge of Edwin’s desk, scowling, as Edwin’s delicate pianist’s fingers tilt his head gently from side to side.
“You were lucky,” he says. He’s standing between Charles’ spread knees, so close Charles can see every fleck of colour in those stormy grey-green eyes. Charles can smell his cologne, a clean pine tree scent that’s always struck Charles as Christmassy. It’s familiar. Comforting.
“I wasn’t lucky,” says Charles, mulishly. Embarrassing, really, to have pulled off a heroic stunt like that only to lie there unconscious and get hit in the face by a flying vase while Edwin finished banishing the poltergeist. “That was a… a freak accident.”
Edwin makes an impatient little noise and ghosts his fingertips over Charles’ tender cheekbone and the arch of his orbital bone, his other hand cradling Charles’ jaw. “Charles, you put yourself in grave danger—”
“Yeah, protecting you! That’s my job, isn’t it?”
Edwin sighs explosively. He looks like he’s about to say something, but then he turns away and reaches up for the first aid kit he keeps on top of the bookshelf. The angle hides his face from Charles as he sorts through it, looking for something.
“It was… foolish,” says Edwin, so quietly Charles can barely hear him. “To put yourself in harm’s way for me like that.”
Charles bites his tongue, his face hot with frustrated shame. He feels like a naughty kid being told off by a teacher. “I’d do it again,” he says. “If I had to.”
Edwin steps back into the V of Charles’ legs, raising a cotton wool ball splotched with evil-smelling iodine to dab the crusted blood away from Charles’ split eyebrow. Charles hisses through his teeth at the bright, clean sting of it. “I know,” Edwin murmurs. Their eyes meet and there’s a stillness that feels like the moment before a lightning strike, all crackling, breathless anticipation, before Edwin looks away. Charles’ heartbeat is thumping painfully in all the places where he’s bruised and bleeding.
Edwin clears his throat and tosses the bloody, iodine-soaked cotton ball into the wastepaper basket. “I… cannot countenance you getting hurt on my account,” he says, stiffly, without meeting Charles’ eyes. “It is becoming increasingly clear to me that I’ve overtaxed you, which is a failing on my part.”
Charles groans. “Stop it,” he says, looking down at Edwin’s shoulder so he doesn’t have to look him in the eye. Edwin’s too well-bred to shout, but sometimes Charles wishes he’d just do it and get it over with. “You’re doing that thing where you try to make it your fault to make me feel better. Drives me mental, that does.”
“I’m not. Listen to me.” Edwin ducks his head, forcing Charles to look at him. “Charles, it is because you do such an extraordinary job that I have allowed the situation to deteriorate so badly, for which I can only apologise. You know that both I and the Athenaeum have come to… depend upon you.” He soaks another cotton wool ball with iodine and starts cleaning up the cuts on Charles’ forearms where the shrapnel caught him. “I’ll put an advertisement out tomorrow. This is—untenable. We need more help.”
Charles tips his head back and looks up at the ceiling, trying to keep his breathing steady. It’s crushing the air out of him like a tombstone on his chest, breath by breath, the thought that Edwin almost got hurt because he couldn’t keep him safe. What’s Charles good for, if he can’t do that? “Look,” he says, “you don’t have to… I’ll be more careful next time, alright? It won’t happen again, I promise. I just need—”
“Oh, for—Charles, it isn’t a punishment and it isn’t an indictment of your work!” snaps Edwin, throwing his hands up.
“Feels like it,” mutters Charles.
“I know.” Edwin bites his lip unhappily at the mutinous look on Charles’ face. They’re of a height, but perched on the edge of Edwin’s desk, Charles is looking down at him, his dark eyelashes and his slightly crooked nose. Edwin’s expression softens. “I would hate for you to think that I’m in any way dissatisfied with you,” he says, his voice low and warm. He sighs, and moves his empty hand as if he’s about to touch Charles’ knee, then changes his mind and drops it again. “I’d be… quite lost without you, as you know. Will you at least permit me to staff the gift shop again?”
He always knows exactly what to say, is the thing. Edwin has the unerring ability to stick a lock pick into Charles’ soul and talk until he can hear Charles’ internal tumblers clicking into place. Despite himself, Charles thaws. “The gift shop, eh?” he says, laying it at Edwin’s feet like an olive branch, and Edwin smiles a cautious little smile.
Art by dont-offend-the-bees
*
MEMORANDUM
To: Mr. C. Rowland (conservator)
From: Mr. E. Payne (acting head curator and recondite warder)
Subject: Standards of professional conduct
Date: June 17th 2007
Charles, I must apologise unreservedly for my conduct during the incident which occurred last night. My behaviour was entirely inappropriate, and as not only your colleague but your employer, I can find no excuse or justification for it.
I am aware that you and I have, perhaps, become overly familiar
I consider you a close friend, and
If you have ever felt
Please do not hesitate to
I would hate for you to think
Please rest assured, it will not happen again.
[The remainder of the message has been scribbled over with a black marker, and on the other side of the paper, the same pen has been used to write the following:]
DON’T YOU FUCKING DARE APOLOGISE.
*
By the time Charles gets home, the city is beginning to stir and the first pink and gold breath of dawn is stealing across the sky. He feels like he’s moving through treacle, heavy-footed and foggy-headed. He stands there outside his door for a good minute, wondering what’s wrong with his key, before he realises it’s actually his key for the front door to the Athenaeum. He tries again, this time with the right key, then steps inside and shuts the door behind him. There’s a letter on the doormat, and he stoops to pick it up. He tears it open, stifling a jaw-cracking yawn. He usually likes to make himself a hot mug of sweet, milky chai and drink it in bed before he dozes off, but he can hear the siren song of sleep calling to him, and it’s getting louder by the second. He pulls the single sheet of paper out of the envelope. On it, in neat black handwriting, is written:
CHARLES, I KNOW IT’S YOU. WHY WON’T YOU TALK TO ME?
Charles looks down at the handwritten note for a long moment. There’s no signature, and no stamp or address on the front of the envelope.
He tosses it onto the pile with the others, and goes to bed.