“No,” he said. “It was underneath … but it’s on the surface now, I’d swear to it, and very nearby. This way.”
He began to walk west again along the Camden Road, and she could see he was shivering, too. She’d had enough. They should be on their way back to Ruthven’s like sensible people, she told herself. They should stop following the invisible track Fastitocalon said he couldn’t quite see but sensed, especially if the monk was close by. What if he had another of those pigsticker things and decided to poke holes in Fass with it this time? She had seen enough of Varney’s reaction to be pretty sure it would do real harm to him and …
Greta sighed and hurried after Fastitocalon. All right, fine, she thought. So I’m curious. Curiosity had never done anybody any good—M. R. James had written a couple of pithy illustrations of that particular point—but dammit, she wanted to know what was going on.
Fastitocalon was moving deceptively quickly. She caught up with him as they passed under the railway bridge, and she noticed with a sinking feeling that he was beginning to wheeze. This really wasn’t good for him. She needed to get him somewhere warm and dry as soon as possible, but one look at his face told her it was a waste of time trying to argue the point for the moment.
The rain was intensifying as they crossed the canal. Greta had her hood up; she couldn’t hear much over the drumming of raindrops, and she would have put money on it that Fastitocalon couldn’t, either. Nevertheless, as they passed the late Victorian St. Michael’s Church incongruously squashed between the supermarket and an interior design shop, he stopped dead in the middle of the pavement with his head tilted, clearly listening for some faint sound to come again. She looked around. Just wet, cold, miserable London, nothing glowing blue.
“There,” he said softly, and pointed to St. Michael’s. “Inside. It’s very faint, but it’s there. I think it’s badly hurt.”
She didn’t have to ask if he was sure. He looked bleak and exhausted, shoulders hunched against the rain, and Greta couldn’t help a miserable cowardly wish that he would say don’t go in there, it’s much too dangerous or maybe let’s go home and leave it to die on its own.
No. She shook away the thought and the wash of hot shame that went with it. That wasn’t something Fastitocalon would ever say. “Let’s go, then.”
“I’ll stay out here, if you don’t mind. Churches tend to give me a nasty headache.”
Greta looked at him despairingly. “Fass, please—”
“You’ll be fine on your own,” he said. “You can do this.”
She wasn’t even remotely sure of that. “Fass, what if it’s got the knife?”
If it had the knife, she realized, cross with herself, he was probably in more danger than she would be. He sighed, and for a moment looked not only ill but old—ancient, heavy with the weight of years, the way some of her barrow-wight patients were weighed down.
“All right,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I’ll come with you.” But Greta knew even as he said the words that she couldn’t take the offer.
She made her hands relax from the tight fists they’d curled into, took a deep breath. “God damn it. No. Never mind. You stay here. I won’t be long, I hope.”
Greta opened the gate, passing through into the churchyard—a narrow strip of space with a few trees offering some shelter from the rain. She could very vividly remember the cold clarity of her terror when the monk had held the knife to her throat; some of that chill rose again in her despite the daylight and the nearby presence of her friend.
The door handle itself was cold, shockingly cold under her hand, and slick with rain. She gripped it hard enough to hurt, and pulled the door open on empty silence.
When nothing glowing blue and screaming flung itself at her, she let out her breath, took another one, and stepped forward into the gloom. It smelled of brass polish and lilies and age, like all churches she’d encountered: that indefinable tang of wood and stone that had been where it was for many centuries, and was not going anywhere for many more. There was nobody in there with her. Fastitocalon had been wrong.
He wasn’t frequently wrong. Greta’s eyes had adjusted to the gloom, and her ears to the curious echoing deadness of church halls everywhere, and she stood perfectly still, straining both senses to catch what he had caught. At first she thought it was her own breathing, still too fast from fright; then it came again, and the sound curdled disgust in her stomach even as it called out to instincts she had been trained to obey. It was a faint mewling, the sound of something exhausted and in terrible pain.
She paced slowly up the aisle, wishing she had the little can of pepper spray to hold on to: Even empty, it had felt comforting. That sound came again, closer now. Closer. She was aware of a smell now, overpowering the lilies-and-polish atmosphere of the church: the smell she’d noticed for the first time bending over Varney’s wound, a low, sour reek of herbs and metal, somehow rancid, as if exposure to the air was turning something bad. Underneath that was the unmistakable smell of shit. Of sewers.
She reached the end of the rows of empty folding seats, and looked around: nothing. Nothing in the nave, anyway. The shadowy aisles were separated from the nave by a series of vast arches reaching up to the clerestory windows, supported by huge stone pillars, each easily wide enough for a man to hide behind.
She took a step and then another step around the heavy curve of the last pillar. At first she didn’t realize what she was looking at. She thought for one absurd moment that someone had left a heap of mottled-pink rags lying on the floor, and then the heap moved. It moved, and opened its horrible eyes at her, and made that low, mewling sound again, and Greta Helsing only just made it to the rubbish bin by the door in time to lose what was left of her breakfast.
The sounds she made echoed unpleasantly in the dim air of the church, and seemed to go on echoing after she had finished being sick. She wanted Ruthven. She wanted Fastitocalon. She wanted her father, oh God, how she wanted her father, because Wilfert Helsing would have known what to do; he always had known what to do, her whole life, and now she was left alone with the thing slumped behind the stone pillar and it was going to be up to her to make all the decisions.
Greta remembered being a medical student, years and years ago, and for the first time truly understanding the difference between working in a hospital, in a department run by a senior physician, under a set of rules and guidelines and frameworks, and working as a solitary GP. There were no tiresome staff meetings, no interpersonal conflicts, no bureaucratic bullshit to wade through in order to do the job—and there were also no instructions or support from superiors. No one to ask for help, advice, consultation.