Monster who's all out of spells. Luckily for them, they're not out of shells.
It's dark down here, and you think you hit your head — because you know everything's black, but everywhere you look it looks arterial red and you can hear the crickets, and you're back in the campaign of '32, rooting out Shaper cultists outside Tangier. You can almost hear the noises; the grunts, the cackles, the rip of flesh and crack of bone.
(In Africa, the grues hunt above ground at night.)
You hit your head on the way down here; or somebody hit it for you.
Somebody at the Ministry knew you in the War and evidently still has it out for you; sent a nice little telegram to the office, and Val found it before you could burn it in the wastepaper basket — god damn the woman and her perverse habit of waking before eleven, you didn't demob to ever see the uncivilised side of lunchtime ever again. LITTLE JOB STOP. BENEFIT FROM YOUR PARTICULAR TOUCH STOP. EXPENSES PAID STOP—
Well, alright, Val grew up on the finer things in life, like the office being fewer than three months behind on rent, that's probably what did it.
The British Government's diplomatic coziness with the tentacular horrors from places inimical to human sanity extends somewhat further than the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas. The Shapewar pushed that even further from the light of scrutiny than previously — Merry England's average public-house squire rather lacking the initiative to distinguish between those soul-devouring eldritch abominations with which we are and are not, currently, as a nation, chums. Or soul-devouring abominations and, say, the French.
The French would only devour your soul if it could be made into a sufficiently presentable pâté.
The point is, Val telephoned the Ministry man before you brought your hangover and other talents into the office, and after you were done swearing at her you had to push the Steadley out of the garage.
Wonderful example of prewar British engineering, the Steadley. The very last crank-start horseless carriage foisted on a world that frowned at its obsolescenct affrontery. Barely able to climb a hill. The sleek racing lines of Le Mans and a body largely of balsa wood, which crumples if you look at it too sternly, held back by an engine made largely of a block of cast iron, a runic rotor with an efficiency unparalleled...in the mid-eighteenth century, and a refusal to comprehend the mysteries of the differential which peaked in pushing the damnable contraption along with an airscrew. Late models made a limp concession, in the form of a wire cage to prevent, say, fingers and scarves getting caught in the prop; the added weight cut several additional miles per hour off the top speed. Its three wheels have tyres of solid rubber, and no suspension to speak of.
Val is very fond of her Steadley; however, her limp noodle Oxford-educated arms cannot start the bastard. You can start it.
You are not fond of it.
Some visitor from beyond the dark corridors of space and time was being entertained by a minor hereditary arsehole with a country estate in darkest Kent. It had been there some weeks, you were given to understand; learning to puppet a humanlike form and pass well enough as a Earthly being for any remaining foibles to to be waved away as eccentric, or Scottish. (Best not to ask how the humanlike body was manufactured, or otherwise procured.)
And then...they lost it.
You take long moments to rest your shoulder against the rough stone wall. It's equally dark with your eyes open and closed; equally red. You can smell blood. Your head pulses with the pain of the cosh.
Perhaps you could lie down. Perhaps you could rest, just for a minute.
(The grues hunt above ground at night, in Africa. Torn meat, glinting with the protruding splintered ends of a calfbone; and with the brass eyelets of a regulation British army boot.)
You force your eyes open, or you think you do; stumble on.
What is there to say that couldn't, hasn't, been said already about any of England's stately homes? Dry rot, wet rot, someone shagging the butler, years-long cold silences, abruptly catalysed hysterics? Debt, of course, estate-threatening debt. Aristocratic chancers with a scheme.
Cultists. It's always fucking cultists, isn't it?
You tried to telephone the Ministry, which of course is when they knocked you over the head and dumped you down here, wherever down here is, exactly; presumably so they can do some kind of rite to Bunga Bunga the Leopard Which Devours Faces, the kind of jolly evening activity that ends with people screaming, "Argh! If only those curséd tomes which were ninety per cent dreadful warnings by length had somehow warned me! Alas, I have invented hubris," and perishing along with an entire remote village of innocents. (Innocent of that, anyway.)
You're innocent (ha! ha! of that, anyway) and don't really fancy the whole thing, and more importantly—
You stop to retch, sick from dizziness. It makes your head feel like it'll split open. You haven't felt this bad since the War ended and you spited the Ministry's efforts to absorb you; eight pints, swiftly downed, and a long, long night on the table for the kind of tattoo artist who needs payment in salt and blood and gold and oaths; under the needle for candlelit hours, black wax burning down as colourless ink went under your skin, from the soles of your feet to the straight-razored crown of your scalp. The Cure. The ward that parts and seals; parts you from magic, from your usefulness to the Ministry and its burgeoning little covert operations unit, seals it away. No Black Hennin for you.
—more importantly, if you've been conked on the head and thrown in the cellars, what have they done with Val?
Fortunately, you can just follow the throbbing in your head, which gradually resolves into also being outside your head: chanting. You'd think they could branch out into musical accompaniment — if it can warm pews for the Anglicans....
You stagger into a cliché: flickering firelight, rough altar, robes, masks, impractical virgin-filleting dagger. (Must be the first time this side of a school uniform that anyone's assumed that of Val.)
"Couldn't afford another set of gear from the solstice orgy getup, your lordship?" you sneer from the rough-hewn tunnel entrance, and Val shoots you a look from wide and red-rimmed eyes before taking advantage of their distraction to knee the dagger-wielding butler sharply in his testicles.
Confiscated belongings, yours and hers, are piled on a ledge next to you. Pure arrogance, to keep them in the room with a captive you took them off to begin with; you half think you should leave the overconfident arseholes to Val's tender mercies. With your other half, you rifle through them.
(Val was in the army, too; that's where you met her. And Val would never take the Cure.)
There it is; object, found. As his lordship starts for you with a silly knife of his own, you raise the .404, decidedly not a regulation British army sidearm.
(In the Moroccan night, slippery with your own blood, wriggled back into a corner and surrounded by what was left of the cultists and your squad, you wedged your shaking wrist between your drawn-up knees. Out of spells, cold with shock, you kept a raw conjured light burning in the palm of your hand, only the size of a candleflame; you didn't point the gun at the doorway. Only one round left. In Africa, the grues aren't afraid of a light that size; but there was easier meat, while you watched.)
You shoot him twice in the chest, and then put a stop to her ladyship's attempted histrionics by wordlessly putting the muzzle to her face. Val can sort out the butler herself.
The darkness is red and you're cold but there's a halftrack coming over the Moroccan dunes driven like a lunatic and they'll get you to a field hospital before you entirely run out of blood.
"You drive like a lunatic," is the first thing you'll ever say to Val, when you manage to sneak out past the duty nurse—
(You might pass out, a little bit.)
Halfway back to London, Val abruptly pulls the Steadley over onto a verge full of wildflowers, in a long squeal of underengineered brakes, and shakes for long minutes, biting on her knuckle.
"I thought they'd killed you," she says finally, in that mangled, aching way where the specific emotion is unreadable past her stiff upper lip. They probably learn to, along with which forks to use.
You gingerly touch your bandaged head, and start to say something.
"Don't," she warns. "I can't bear you joking about it. Not now." She pauses, and you know, you know what she's going to say. "In Marseilles—"
"We shall never speak of this again," you say, in imitation of what she had to say about Marseilles, when you were still there, and she brings her open hand down hard enough to leave its distinct print in the bodywork.
"Well, what else could I say?" she barks, not looking at you. "Let's desert and run away to Paris? I'll be a waitress, you be a painter, we'll drink cheap wine and smoke terrible French cigarettes and it'll be fun until somebody finds us?"
It hurts, unbearably, low in your chest.
"A painter?" you say with rusty incredulity, as if that's the important part.
(It would have been fun.)
"Don't," she repeats, and stares off over the fields with her knuckle back between her teeth until she stops shaking enough to drive.
