In each of the galleries there had been several discreet security cameras, none of which were registering anything at all out of the ordinary. They passed through more rooms, down a flight of stairs into a rather dated section with worn 1970s-era linoleum on the floor, and Cranswell led him to a door marked STAFF ACCESS ONLY between signs describing Early Greek Inscriptions and Athenian Public Documents. Fastitocalon stood patiently beside him, keeping the contact as he shifted the books he was carrying to balance on one hip and fished out a set of keys from his pocket. The keys jingled, but dully, as if even that little sound could not make it out of the bubble Fastitocalon was maintaining around them.
The door opened onto a dim hallway, and as it closed behind them, leaving the public space behind, Fastitocalon could feel the difference in the atmosphere. There had been something here other than people, and it had been here recently.
“This way,” Cranswell whispered, unnecessarily, and led Fastitocalon down another narrow flight of stairs. The lights here were fluorescent, yellowish, buzzing, and the temperature had gone up. More doors to unlock, and then they were in a long, low room with cabinets arranged in rows, like stacks in a library. The traces of something not entirely human were much, much stronger here. He could almost smell them.
Cranswell hurried along the rows of cabinets, glancing around with the furtive air of someone trying not to be noticed. In here, though, there were no security cameras to worry about, and Fastitocalon let go of him and leaned against the wall for a moment or two, breathing hard.
As Cranswell unwrapped the books from their protective plastic and very, very carefully returned each of them to its proper place, Fastitocalon looked around—not quite seeing what an ordinary person might see. To his eyes, which were now noticeably if faintly lit with orange, there were crisscrossing trails left by everyone who had been down here in the past several days—he could easily make out Cranswell’s earlier track, when he had come down to take the books in the first place—and most of them were human, but some of them were not. Three of them, in fact.
They had come quite close to Cranswell, last night. Stood there, watching him.
Fastitocalon shivered suddenly, in the warmth of the underground chamber.
The creature Anna escorted into Greta’s office would not have won any beauty contests on a good day, which this rather obviously wasn’t. She turned the lights down a little, coming around the desk, and offered him a hand. The way Kree-akh was moving, as if the air itself was too heavy and the floor beneath his feet uncertain, spoke volumes; the fact that he took her hand and let her steady him, help him to a chair, was worse.
Ghouls never did look well. Anna had been quite right about that. Almost skeletally thin, wiry ropes of muscle and tendon holding bone to bone under their greenish-grey skin, they gave off a distinct air of the grave. Most of them didn’t have much hair, and what they did have was stringy and knotted, clinging like seaweed to their skulls. They were built for moving quite fast through low tunnels, their backs bent and long arms dangling, and even when standing upright the tallest adults were only just about Greta’s own height. Their skin was slick and damp, dappled like a frog’s, and mostly they wore nothing but necklaces and a kind of loincloth stitched together out of hides whose origin did not bear close contemplation; this one, however, had a long grey-brown fur cloak draped around his shoulders. Whoever made it had not removed the individual rats’ tails before sewing the pelts together, and the rows of shriveled dangling tails offered an interesting textural counterpoint to the velvety fur.
In the dimness of her office she could easily see his eyeshine, two points of red light that winked off as he squeezed his eyes shut. He was leaning a little sideways in the chair, hanging on to it with clawed fingers, visibly fighting off dizziness. Greta sat on the edge of her desk, looking closely at him. “What’s the matter?” she asked. “What happened?”
“I need more medicine,” he said. Or rather hissed. Ghoul dentition brought to mind the more alarming types of deep-sea anglerfish; their own language was ideally suited to a mouthful of needle-teeth, but pronouncing standard English presented a bit of a challenge. Kree-akh was something close to fluent in it, which was an impressive achievement. “I—ran out,” he said. “Two days ago.”
“More Effexor?” Greta said, nonplussed. “You should have had at least another two weeks worth on that refill. How did you manage to run out so quickly?”
There wasn’t a lot in the literature about the use of antidepressants in ghouls. Greta and Kree-akh had gone through three different medications before they found one that treated his symptoms, which was more or less the same process as she would expect to go through with a human patient, and she had been toying with the idea of writing a case study simply to establish precedent. He had been on venlafaxine for three months now, and they had settled into a regular routine of visits for her to monitor his progress and provide him with the prescription refills, since he could hardly be expected to go to the pharmacy himself. Which was all well and good, except for the part where suddenly stopping venlafaxine brought on really nasty side effects.
“I … lost the bottle,” Kree-akh said, and she could hear the lie very clearly.
This entire business had been extremely difficult for him, and Greta was still impressed by the bravery it had taken to visit her in the first place asking for help. Ghoul chieftains were not supposed to suffer from anything so pathetic—and human—as depression, but he was what she might term a progressive example of the species. Being responsible for three separate ghoul clans in a kind of extended tribe was a hell of a difficult job, made more so by the fact that Kree-akh’s rule did not rely on vicious brute force so much as reasoned authority. He had come to her—and Greta was very much aware of the level of trust this had implied—initially complaining of headaches, and then admitted that he had heard there were medicines that might do something for exhausting, anxious misery.
He was still leaning sideways in the chair, eyes shut, greener than usual with nausea and dizziness. “Stay there,” Greta said, unnecessarily. “I’ll be right back.”
She went to look through her store of drug samples, wondering how exactly he had come to lose the pill bottle; ghouls were scavengers, notorious for hanging on to things, even when those things weren’t of paramount pharmacological importance.
That made Greta think of the stuff on the crossblade, and its pharmacological importance; and that made her wonder if the people who had attacked her and Varney could be going after the ghouls as well. It wasn’t a nice thought, even though Greta was more confident in ghouls’ ability to defend themselves than her own.
After a few minutes she found what she was looking for, and brought him a couple of pills and a glass of water. “Here. Effexor, and meclizine for the nausea.”