Work Text:
Extracts from the Private Journal of Victoria Matheson-Quinn
Apartment 10-E
University Towers North
Arkham, Massachusetts
June 20, 2032
11:43 PM
Early night tonight. Did a walk-through in Demontown -- none of the locals ran when they saw me coming, which I guess means either that nobody is currently planning trouble or that the people who are planning trouble are bright enough to stay out of sight.
People. Dr. R. would have a fit if she heard me saying that. But the old Greshkau demon who runs the open-front diner on Waiteley Street always has a skewer of grilled spicy chicken ready for me when I come by -- it should be vregh and not chicken, he says, but you can't get fresh vregh in this dimension -- and we always argue about whether I should pay him for it or not, and when he won't take the money I leave it on the counter anyway.
Sometimes we talk, while I eat the chicken. He has a grand-daughter back home (I guess she's a grand-daughter, anyhow; I'm not sure how Greshkau reproduce), and I think he misses her. He has a picture of her thumbtacked on the wall next to the chalk board with today's prices on it. She looks like a younger, greener version of her grandfather, and he looks like a six-foot-tall praying mantis in trousers and a blue cotton work shirt.
"She wants to come over" -- the old guy's accent is kind of clicky, but I've gotten used to it by now -- "and live here with me."
"Uh-huh." I remembered how Dr. R. had reacted to the thought of me leaving Arkham. "What does the rest of her family have to say about that?"
"They would never permit it," he said. "She's very beautiful, you see -- " I didn't; but I'm not a Greshkau so I was willing to take his word for it that she was drop-dead gorgeous -- "and they think perhaps the rigkrk will choose her for snkgrek vrau brggt and their fortunes will be made."
I finished up the last of the spicy chicken and tossed the skewer into the trash can. "Selfish of them, if you ask me. A girl shouldn't have to snick-greck with anyone if she doesn't want to. You can tell her the Slayer said so."
After Demontown, I did a quick circuit of the main feeding and hunting zones, but nobody vampish came near enough to get my senses stirring. Spike says that most of the local activity is consensual, anyhow: Humans with a thing about having someone drink their blood get together with well-behaved vampires in specialized clubs and bars, where everybody gets what they came for and nobody gets turned or killed. Most of the time.
But there are always out-of-towners drifting in who need to be shown the local ways at the point of a stake, and even a long-time club regular can lose it sometimes -- who knows why -- and go on the kind of rampage that makes the newsfeeds. Without a Slayer to do the job, the local undead population would have to police its own -- "and we're a lazy lot, most of us," Spike says. "We'd sooner clear out and leave the job to the torches-and-pitchforks crowd."
Nobody was in the mood to cause trouble tonight, it seemed. The vamp-madam at Bloody Mary's nodded at me when I stuck my head in the door and eyeballed the parlor full of waiting clients. They all looked old enough to know what they were doing; heck, they all looked older than me, which when you think about it is pretty pathetic -- grown men and women needing a skinny schoolgirl in black leather to watch over them at night.
"Slayer," the vamp-madam said.
I nodded back at her. "Lizzie. How's it going?"
"No problems. I'd tell you if there were, you know that."
"Sure you would."
"Spike would come after me himself if he thought I wasn't playing by the rules," she said. "And the last thing I want right now is a run-in with that crazy bastard."
"He isn't crazy," I said.
Lizzie laughed at me. "Honey," she said, "he's an Aurelian. That whole line is crazier than bedbugs. Powerful, though . . . master vampires and slayers of Slayers. They think they can get away with treating the rest of us like dirt, and mostly they're right."
"Huh," I said, and left it at that.
A quick turn through the usual hunting grounds later, I was home for the night.
"How was it?" Dr. R. asked when I came in. She was at work with the printouts and colored highlighters again, and it looked like her night was going to be as late as mine was early.
I opened the refrigerator and took out the milk. "Quiet. No misbehavior of the supernatural variety anywhere."
"Don't drink out of the carton." She wrote some numbers in blue highlighter along one margin of the printout. "That's always a bad sign."
"What -- drinking milk out of the carton?"
"No," she said. "That's just disgusting. But when you start getting nothing where there should be something . . . trust me, Victoria, that's never good."
June 21, 2032
6:12 AM
I dreamed again last night.
I was in the University Quadrangle -- at night, of course. By day the Quad is okay, just four extremely ugly old buildings and a big patch of grass-covered ground that nobody ever walks on except at Commencement. (It's tradition. I don't know why.) But the Quadrangle at night is dark and scary. When I was little, and Daddy and Poppa used to take me out to the midnight laser-theatres as a special treat, I never liked walking through the Quad on the way home.
Now, in my dream, I was standing in the middle of the ground where nobody walks. The full moon overhead seemed about five times bigger than normal, and the face in it looked dark and threatening.
In the dark behind me, a voice said, "Victoria."
I turned and looked, but nobody was there, only Hutchinson Hall looming up like always on the far side of the Quad.
"Victoria," said the voice again. Behind me.
I whipped back around.
Nothing.
But the full moon had turned the color of old blood, and all of the stars were gone.
June 21, 2032
10: 22 PM
I told Dr. R. about the dream over breakfast. She blinked a couple of times, said "That's . . . interesting," and went back to her everlasting printouts while I went off to my summer class. I didn't really think that she'd heard me, with her mind so far off in research-land, but when I came back in the afternoon she wasn't alone. Spike was there ahead of me, and the two of them were sitting at the kitchen table like a pair of old chums, drinking beer and discussing signs and portents.
It took me by surprise, I have to admit. Spike's every bit as sunlight-sensitive as the next vampire; a daytime visit isn't something he'd do by choice. And Dr. R. never used to drink anything stronger than coffee -- at least not in front of me. Here she was, though, gesturing emphatically with the hand that wasn't holding a longneck bottle and saying, " . . . weren't much good. All cheese and monsters and 'hello, Dr. Freud' and maybe if we were lucky a phrase or two that didn't make sense until it was too late."
"Interpretation. That's the key. None of you lot were any bloody good at it. Except for maybe -- "
"Don't go there, Spike." Dr. R's voice had that don't-screw-with-me tone again, the one that always scared me a little. "Meanwhile -- where are we supposed to find an interpreter on short notice?"
He took a long swig of his beer. "As it happens, Red, you've already got one."
"You? I suppose if the qualifications are 'caused nightmares for over a century' -- "
"More like, 'spent a hundred and twenty years keeping company with a mad sybil'," he said. "After a while, you pick up the knack."
I decided it was time for me to say something. Spike, at least, already had to know that I was there, and mostly-reformed master vampires shouldn't ignore young people whom they're supposed to be instructing in the fine art of killing things. I dropped my backpack onto the floor with a thud.
"So what's the verdict, people? Prophecy or indigestion?"
"The nature of your dream isn't in question," Dr. R. said. "But the meaning -- "
" -- is that there's something nasty going on in the Quad," I said. "There. Interpretation done. Can I have a beer?"
"No," said Spike and Dr. R. at the same time. He laughed; she didn't.
"We need to find out more about the Quad, then," she said. She set down her beer and flexed her fingers. "I've been away too long in the land of robots and nanotech -- I hope my evil-fighting research chops haven't gotten rusty."
"They'll be just fine," Spike said. "But we may need to do a spot of divination afterward."
"No. I told you -- "
"Didn't say you'd be the one making with the mojo, did I?"
While they bickered, I opened the refrigerator. The top shelf held a gallon of milk, a six-pack with two bottles missing, and a couple of sealed plastic bags full of dark red liquid. So Spike had not only shown up in daylight, he'd brought his dinner with him . . . whatever Dr. R. had told him about my dream, it must have worried him more than he was letting on. I wondered which one of them had bought the booze.
"If I can't have a beer," I said, "can I order out for pizza?"
By the time the pizza arrived, we had the official history of Arkham University up on Dr. R's home workstation, along with an equally official history of the entire city. Interesting stuff -- I hadn't known, for example, that Adonijah Hutchinson studied at Wittenberg in Germany before coming to the New World and founding the University -- but tame by comparison with the picture that started taking shape after we called up Pickman's Secret Narrative of Arkham and augmented its story with data extracted from four centuries' worth of local court records.
"Whooo," I said. "Do you guys really think the Board of Governors once hung the head of the Divinity School for witchcraft? In the middle of the Quad?"
"Looks here like the actual charge was 'consorting with demons'," Spike said. "Not your standard witchcraft trial at all."
Dr. R. snorted. "Hardly. For one thing, if we believe Pickman's account, it looks like Obadiah Chapman really was guilty of the crimes he eventually confessed to."
"And they hanged the silly bugger anyway, which just goes to show he should have kept his mouth shut."
"What kind of demons was he consorting with?" I asked, thinking about the old Greshkau and his spicy chicken and his lime-green grand-daughter.
"Succubi, judging by the descriptions in the record," Dr. R. said. "The terminology's all wrong, though -- succubi aren't demons in the hostile sub-terrestrial sense. They're corporeal manifestations of malevolent spiritual entities."
Spike looked amused. "Still not something you want the Dean of Divinity shagging on the parlor sofa. Chapman was a piker, though; one twinge of remorse and he was on his knees in the Provost's office confessing everything. Old Adonijah, on the other hand . . . the books don't say what kind of bargains he struck, back in the day."
"Maybe they were scared to," I suggested.
"Slayer," Spike said, "I like the way you think."
June 22, 2032
3:14 AM
All I can say is, it's a good thing being the Slayer means I don't need very much sleep.
We hit the wall in our research at about the same time as we ran out of pizza and refrigerated blood. Dr. R. frowned at the empty box for a while as if she expected it to give us the missing answers. Then she said to Spike, "I hate to admit it, but you were right the first time. If we want to find out anything more, we're going to have to resort to divination."
"Don't worry. Once we've got everything set up, you can back off and play lookout. The Slayer and I will handle the magicking."
"Oh, goody," I said. "I thought I was just supposed to do the staking and decapitating and general menacing of things while you older-and-wiser types did all the other stuff."
"A little cross-training never hurt anyone," he said, and that -- of course -- was that.
Not surprisingly, it turned out that the best time for doing a spot of divination was on the stroke of midnight, and the best place was -- you guessed it -- the middle of the University Quadrangle. We carried our equipment with us in a paper shopping bag: a paraffin emergency candle, a box of matches, one of Dr. R's cereal bowls, and a bottle of India ink. Dr. R. seemed to think all this was substandard somehow, and kept fretting about it the whole way to the Quad.
"You should be using beeswax," she said, "and a silver bowl. Or at least something from the good china."
"Bollocks," Spike said. "I've known seers who could read the future in a mud puddle."
"Just because it's possible is no reason to use inferior --"
"Speaking as the potential seer in question," I said to both of them, "I vote for less arguing and more divining. Especially since we're here now."
The Quad at midnght was dark and deserted and quieter than a place in the heart of a modern city ought to be. Standing there surrounded by ivy-covered buildings with blank, black windows, I didn't have any trouble believing that the Board of Governors had picked this spot to build a gallows for Obadiah Chapman.
"Right, then. Showtime." Spike pulled the cereal bowl and the paraffin candle out of the shopping bag and gave them to me. "Here you go -- candle in your right hand, bowl in your left. Hold them steady, now, while I get the ink."
He unstoppered the bottle and poured all the ink into the bowl. Then he tossed the empty bottle back into the paper bag and retrieved the matches. Before he lit the candle, he looked over at Dr. R.
"I believe this is the point where you move out of range and keep an eye open for the campus cops."
She didn't say anything, just nodded and faded away into the shadows at the edge of the Quad. Spike lit the candle. I could see the yellow reflection of the candle flame in the pool of black ink, and my own face looking back at me, but nothing else. He began to recite something in what sounded like Latin -- no chanting or gestures, just a steady conversational flow of words.
I let the syllables wash over me while I stared at the candle's reflected flicker. A few months ago I would have been surprised when I started seeing colored shapes instead, but now I just watched them turn into moving pictures and waited to see what they would do.
"Buildings," I said eventually. Nobody had told me I was supposed to report out loud on what I was seeing, but the part of my mind that wasn't absorbed in watching the show seemed to think that it was a good idea. Maybe there was something buried in all that Latin -- I still don't know what Spike was saying. "The Quad. Night and fire. It opens, like a pit, and what comes, what comes, what . . . damn, it's gone and I can't see it, just the buildings again, all falling . . . Green. Green with an axe."
I heard a sharp whistle from the other side of the Quad. Spike's hand came into my field of vision, taking away the candle and dousing it in the bowl of ink. The flame hissed as it went out. Startled, I twitched and dropped the bowl, spilling the ink out onto the grass.
"Time for us to scamper off like good little creatures of the night," Spike said. He was already stuffing the bowl and the candle back into the paper bag. "Red can do better at spinning a tale for campus security if we aren't there to cramp her style."
Dr. R. made it back to the apartment a few minutes after we did, looking irritated. "I hope you're satisfied," she grumbled at Spike. "I had to lie like a Persian carpet to the rent-a-cop."
"And don't think we don't appreciate it." Spike handed her one of the remaining bottles of beer from the refrigerator. "Victoria saw quite a lot once she got going."
"I don't suppose either of you remembers the specifics by now."
"Not a chance," he said. "But don't worry. I took notes during."
He pulled a cheap notepad out of his jacket and passed it across the table to Dr. R. There was more stuff there than I remembered saying -- several pages' worth, in fact. She read through it, frowning a little and sipping absently at her beer.
"'Green with an axe'?" she asked, when she got to the end. "What does that mean?"
I shrugged. "I dunno. It came after the other stuff, and I think it was separate. And it was . . . I don't know what it was. Just green. With an axe."
"Don't worry," Spike said. "It'll all come clear in time. As for the rest of it, I'd say the short version is that the Hellmouth is buried somewhere underneath the Arkham Quad. And there's something in there that wants to get out."
Dr. R. looked weary. "Spike," she said, "there's always something dreadful in the Hellmouth that wants to get out."