Chapter Text
The Institute is exactly how Jon remembers it.
Same creaking plastic as he settles into his desk chair. Same half-dead bulb in his green glass desk lamp. Same stack of unread statements piled up in the intake bin, abandoned that morning one month ago when he’d fled from the worms suddenly pouring like quicksand from the hole in his office wall. The pages are only slightly stained with the reminder of how close to death they all came. Even the wall the worms came through had been patched in his absence, and painted the same off-white-turned-yellow as everywhere else in the Institute. It’s as though nothing had ever happened.
Except that Jon can still feel the scabs pulling on the skin of his chest when he breathes. His fingers still shake where he grips his pen. And Gertrude Robinson was still murdered.
There’s a knock at the door. Two quick and cheerful raps followed by a muffled curse, and Jon runs his hands down his rumpled tie, settling himself before Tim can peek his head through, uninvited. Jon should start locking his door, now that he knows he’s working with murderers.
“Gosh it’s good to see your shiny, scowly face again, boss. I was worried the worms had eaten the pep right out of your step.” It’s a painstaking production, watching Tim try to muscle his way through the heavy oak door while balancing on his new and unfamiliar cane. He struggles, trying to hold the door open with his shoulder as he swings his stiff legs through. Jon watches from his seat at his desk and wants to help, he feels it twitching through his fingers like static, the knowledge that he should be up, should be over there, should be using his one good leg to supplement Tim’s until between the two of them they can walk on their own. But his body is frozen—Rigor mortis—and his conscience is a bird in a cage, beating its wings at his stomach and his ribs, begging him to be better than he is. To get up. To help Tim.
The door swings shut behind Tim and the moment is past.
“I tell you,” Tim says, jovial energy seemingly not impeded by Jon’s lack of basic chivalry. Although it is darkened somewhat by the way he can’t quite catch his breath after the short walk across Jon’s office. He slumps down into the stiff, hard backed visitor’s chair like it’s a well-worn beanbag. Bandaged leg slung up over the armrest. “Bouchard must never have done physical therapy if he thinks we should be healthy enough to come back into work already.”
Jon screws up his nose. “I was rather anxious to come back, really. I didn’t think I could make it through another brain-rotting week of daytime television.”
“Not a fan of soaps?” Tim asks, tossing his head. “Figure you’d appreciate a good twist. It was his identical twin! Or he’s been dead all along!”
Jon isn’t sure he’s capable of giving Tim a look dry enough for what he deserves in response to that, but he does his best.
“You’re such an overachiever.” Tim sighs and shakes his head. “I bet you were the kid who reminded the teacher when he’d forgotten to assign homework. Have some pity on the rest of us normal folks!”
“I can’t believe you weren’t just as desperate as I was, Tim. You were attacked by a woman hosting a living colony of sentient worms. How could you go from that straight back to pints at the pub and chatting with the old lady down the hall about the weather?”
“This may come as a shock to you, boss, but most reasonable people who come face to face with death actually run away from it, not back towards.” Tim taps the end of his cane against the pitted wooden floor with a muffled clack. “Not that I’ll be running either direction anytime soon.”
A tiny little piece of the sympathy clawing desperately at the inside of Jon’s skull breaks loose and tumbles down to his tongue. “Ah,” he says, glancing up and then down again. “I’m sorry.”
Tim waves his apology off magnanimously. “Not like it was your fault. You were right there in the trenches, taking the bites with me. Besides, I’ve always kind of wanted a cane to see if I can pull off the dapper gentleman look now that I’m turning into a proper silver fox in my dreadfully elderly late forties. I asked the nurse at hospital the chances of getting one with a sword inside it, but apparently those are just show canes, not lean the full weight of your leg that was bored through by murder worms kind of canes.”
“Mm,” Jon responds, tactfully, while searching his mind for anything appropriately comforting. “As your supervisor, however, I do feel that I have some blame—”
“Jon, I doubt your contract listed supernatural monster fighting under duties and responsibilities.”
“I’m the center of this.” The words exist outside of Jon’s mouth before they exist within it, as if the truth was dangling ripe all around them and all Jon needed to do was bite. “If I wasn’t here, none of this would be happening.”
There’s a sudden rumble, low and deep as if it’s rising out of the ground far below them and shaking its way up through the floorboards. Jon grips the edge of his desk, white-knuckled, as his pens chatter against each other like teeth.
“Self obsessed much? If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s Elias’s for not bringing exterminators down here often enough, clearly. Maybe we can leverage it against him for a bigger worker’s comp settlement.”
“Did you feel that?” Jon asks, palms pressed flat against his desk.
Tim cocks his head. “Feel what?”
There’s another knock on the door, heavier, but more hesitant. Tim shoots Jon one of those looks that says let’s be a united front against this. Jon’s never known what to do with that sort of look. He’s too used to being on the outside.
Martin shoulders in through the door much the way Tim did, but for a different reason; he keeps two mugs of tea carefully vertical as he enters. “Bit of an earthquake, wasn’t there? Been a while since I felt one of those. Scalded myself with the tea when I felt the shaking. Poor timing on my part.”
“What earthquake?” Tim asks.
“It was just a little tremor.” Jon folds his hands in his lap so they can’t betray the nervous flutter of his heart. “You probably didn’t feel it.”
“Or, more likely than a sudden earthquake that I couldn’t feel, may I posit that what you and Martin have in common is that you haven’t exactly been getting much sleep?” Tim reaches up to take his mug as Martin passes it down to him. “How’re you holding up there, Marto?”
“Me?” Martin seems genuinely surprised by the question. Or he’s a better liar than he seems. “I’m fine, I didn’t even get hurt, just ran myself in circles down in the tunnels like a chicken with its head cut off.”
“I don’t mean injuries, I mean…” Tim pauses meaningfully and inclines his head. Martin’s perpetually worried eyebrows creep another few inches closer to merging forever.
“It’s fine. I’m fine.”
“Very convincing. A+ work.”
“I brought some tea for you,” Martin says, turning away from Tim and the subject to place the mug down on Jon’s desk. “Figured you might need some warming up considering it’s pretty chilly down here today.”
“Mm,” Jon says again, the better nature within him beating behind his furrowed brow. “It is a bit nippy.”
Tim looks back and forth between the two of them, and then down to his own short sleeves. “What are you two talking about?”
Jon wraps his numb fingers gratefully around the mug of steaming tea and feels the warmth leach into him. “Actually, if you wouldn’t mind turning up the thermostat out there before you get back to work, Martin, I’m sure it’d help us all concentrate.”
“I’m serious about this getting some goddamn sleep thing,” Tim says. “It’s a pretty important part of being human.”
“What does being human even mean?” Jon says. The words drip like honey down his chin. They taste foreign, like a page of a journal, all paper and ink and regret.
“I’ll go get to work on that thermostat,” Martin says quickly, walking backwards to the door. “First day back, don’t want you uncomfortable.”
“God forbid anyone be uncomfortable sorting worm murder stories in the worm murder pit.” Tim looks over Jon’s shoulder and Jon follows his gaze to the neatly painted patch of office wall, indistinguishable from the rest of the room around it. Where the worms broke through had been fixed, but the memory remains like a band-aid on a knife wound.
When Jon turns back around, the door is already closing behind Martin.
“I’m worried about him,” Tim says, putting voice to his look from earlier. “You don’t just get over something like that. Seeing a corpse.”
“You also don’t get over being one,” Jon grumbles, not sure whether he wants Tim to hear him. After what happened, he’s even less sure who he can trust.
“I know, right? Gertrude Robinson.” Tim shakes his head in wonder and then takes a long sip of tea. “Who would want to murder a little old lady who works in a library?”
“Maybe a worm monster.” Jon stares at Tim until he breaks eye contact, his light-hearted laughter forced.
“I suppose there is infinitely more high stakes action involved in this job than I’d first imagined,” Tim admits. “Perhaps I should leave you to your work.”
“Perhaps you should.” Jon regrets his tone for the entire odyssey Tim makes with his cane and his bandaged legs from the chair to the door. He sits in it, stewing, like a held muscle filling with stinging acid, but he does nothing. Just sits, and watches.
In the corner of the room, the radiator rumbles to life. Air gasps from it, groaning into the room, hot and wet and twisted with pain. Like a dying man crying out in breathy moans and strangled breaths. The last he’ll ever take.
Jon swallows the fear in his chest and pulls a statement off the pile. He’s back now, and there’s work to be done.
***
“Supplement.” Jon hunches over his recorder, rustling the pages of the statement still splayed out across his desk to further muffle his words for anyone who might be lurking outside his office, trying to listen in. “I’ve been watching Martin. He’s been very attentive to my needs and recovery since I returned to work, almost to the exclusion of his own tasks.”
There’s a knock at the door with a distinctly Martin cadence, and Jon hits the stop button on his recorder hard enough to drive him backwards into his seat. Spine straight against the padded desk chair. From the corner of his eye, he can see his clock flick from 20:46 to 20:47. What could Martin still be doing here?
“Jon?” Martin says, rattling at the handle Jon miraculously remembered to lock before starting his recording. No one in these archives understands the purpose of knocking. “I can see the light on under your door, I know you’re still here.”
“Just finishing something up,” Jon calls back, feeling frustrated and small like a child being called down to dinner. “I’ll be done soon.”
“You know, Tim told me that his doctor recommended reduced hours when he’s first going back to work,” Martin says, clearly not getting the hint. “I doubt anyone would recommend fourteen hour days for a body recovering from injury.”
“Yes, well, Tim also told me that his doctor recommended medicinal cannabis, so pardon me if I don’t exactly consider him a trusted source.”
“Jon,” Martin says, exhausted. Fed up. As if a murder suspect has any kind of moral high ground.
“This work is important, Martin.” Jon’s chair scrapes over the floorboards with a pained screech as he pushes back from his desk and gets to his feet. He’s not having this conversation through a door like a toddler. “Need I remind you that our lack of information about a certain Jane Prentiss nearly ended with the death of everyone on my staff?”
“That’s not what this is about. I know why this door is locked.”
Jon’s hand freezes on the door handle. On the other side, through a scarce chunk of wood, Jon can hear Martin’s breathing. He can hear Martin’s heartbeat as if they were inches apart.
“Gertrude’s team, her assistants, they all left her one way or another. When she was murdered, she was all alone down here. It won’t happen to you. I won’t leave you alone.”
Jon’s toes are going numb inside his shoes. He’s never been so cold in his life.
“I’ll keep you safe, Jon.”
“Christ, Martin,” he snaps, his teeth clacking together with the force of his words. “How about you learn to do the job you actually have before you go around playing make believe MI6 agent.”
There’s nothing but a sucking silence from behind the door and Jon can feel it like a knife in his chest when Martin takes a step back. The floorboard whimpers beneath him. “I understand,” he says. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Jon presses himself against the door, listening to the receding creak of each stair up and out of the archive. Martin is gone.
Jon pushes off the door and rushes back for his tape recorder, fumbling to grab it off the desk. He wraps his shaking fingers around it, clutching it tight. It’s the only thing he can still trust in this place. His only lifeline. He hits record, and the tape whirrs back to life.
“Supplement continued. Martin is insistent on both the subject of Gertrude’s murder and not leaving me alone to investigate his desk. Where both Tim and Sasha leave on their usual schedule, or frustratingly earlier in the former’s case, Martin has been hanging around to ostensibly escort me to the tube station.” Jon pulls open his office door and steps out into the quiet dark of the archives. Martin left the stair lights on for him, but the desk lamps are all shut off, and even if there were windows down here the advanced hour would mean no sunlight to brighten the oozing darkness eating at the edges of the stacks.
Jon pulls open his office door and steps out into the quiet dark of the archives. “I’m glad, at least, that he’s moved out of the archives, as it gives me a chance to work here without his constant presence. Also because he managed to leave some of his possessions behind.”
Jon wastes no time making his way to Martin’s desk. It’s remarkably tidy, considering Martin’s usual tendencies. Perhaps left that way intentionally to broadcast an image of the dutiful assistant. Open case files stacked neatly to the left, notes and to-do lists on sticky notes covering the other half.
“This notebook seems to be entirely full of poetry,” Jon narrates into his recorder as he searches. He folds down onto the ground beside Martin’s desk, crossing his legs and settling in. He scans through the book, his fingers tapping impatiently against the soft cover. “All relatively awful stuff. There were a few pieces I feel could almost have been affecting, if his style wasn’t so obviously enamored with Keats.”
Jon’s eyes linger over the final poem in the book before he shuts it and moves on.
“There’s quite a few crumpled documents in his trash. I would expect most undercover murderers to not leave incriminating evidence somewhere so accessible, but considering this is Martin I ought to take a look.” Jon smooths the pages out against his thigh as he reads. Receipts. Grocery lists. Cited sources with obvious typos. Near the bottom, ripped almost entirely in half, is an unfinished letter. Addressed to his mother.
“Jon?”
Jon’s head whips up as Martin’s desk light flicks on and he sees Martin there, standing over him. Staring down.
“I…” Martin fumbles, at a loss for words. “I forgot my oyster card. Are you looking through my trash?”
“Martin, I…I didn’t—”
“Is that…?” Martin is staring down at the crumpled pages, reading his own handwriting upside down. “Oh god. Jon, listen, I can explain. My mom, she needs me and, and I just needed this job and—”
“You don’t have to explain.” Martin pauses mid-sentence, jaw still hanging open in shock. Jon crumples the letter in his hands, guilt rushing in fast. As if Martin hadn’t already proven himself enough. “What was I doing suspecting you of murder?”
“Suspecting me of murder?” Martin laughs out the words, finding them about as unbelievable as they now sound to Jon. “I once scared myself by sitting down in my chair a bit too hard. I’m too afraid of getting in trouble to even call in sick to work.”
“I remember. You almost took the whole library out with that summer flu of yours.”
“No way I could murder someone. It’d keep me up the rest of my life with the stress nightmares.” Martin scratches at the side of his head, considering. “Unless they were a really terrible, terrible person. A proper bully. Then I might be justified.”
“A proper bully.” Jon hangs his head, ashamed. “Maybe you would be justified in putting the archives out of my collective misery.”
“Oh, don’t be so melodramatic.” Martin crouches down beside Jon, resting a hand on the top of his desk for balance. “I’m not talking about someone being a dick occasionally. I know you’re a good person, Jon. I know you care.”
“I just feel so guilty for creeping around, suspecting you, when I already know how anxious you are about lying on your resume, and affording your mum’s medication and all.”
“What?” Martin’s face goes white. Maybe Jon’s garnered even more of a reputation for being a heartless misanthrope than he’d assumed if a simple apology is met with such shock. “You know I forged my CV? You’ve known all this time? How did you find out?”
“Martin, you told me.” Jon says it matter of factly, because it is a matter of fact. How else would he have known?
“I didn’t tell you.” Martin is shaking his head far more vehemently than Jon really feels the situation warrants. “I wouldn’t have told you. I would never tell anyone unless it was the last possible option.”
“Martin, I distinctly remember you—”
Suddenly, the ground heaves beneath them. All around them is the cacophony of sheafs of paper and staplers and nameplates crashing to the ground. The room tips and Martin tips with it. He tries to grab his desk for stability, but his fingers catch a post-it instead and he collapses on top of Jon in a shower of green and pink and inspirational quotes. He grabs Jon as they collide headlong, wrapping him in his arms to provide what insulation he can before they hit the ground in a heap. They brace together against the sudden earthquake until finally the shaking starts to slow, receding away beneath them, leaving the floorboards quivering in its aftermath. And then, as quickly as it began, the tremor is gone, and the only sound in the archives is the quiet hiss of cracked bits of drywall drifting lazily through the air. They settle over the wreckage of scattered office supplies, coating the aftermath like snow.
“Are you okay?” Martin asks, before Jon can even summon up the presence of mind to know the answer to that question. He checks in on the individual stinging pain of each of his partially-healed puncture wounds, and the brand new aching in his head and back, but they’re not much worse than the average daily consequences of his posture, thanks to the cushion of Martin’s arms still wrapped around him.
Jon stares up at Martin, the proximity of his chapped and bitten lips oddly familiar in an impossible way. “You feel it too.”
“I what?” Martin pulls his arms back fast enough that Jon’s head nearly cracks against the ground and sits up again. When he runs an anxious hand through the tangle of his curls it comes out with a puff of dust and wood shavings. “I mean. I feel all the normal things. Why, wh-what do you feel?”
“I felt another earthquake,” Jon says. He pushes himself up on his elbows and narrows his eyes. “And you can’t pretend you didn’t as well. This confirms it.”
“Oh, the earthquake. Of course. Yeah, yup. How could I miss it?”
“Tim didn’t feel the one this morning. And I’ve been having this feeling…” Jon balks at putting the feeling into words. It would make it too real, like he’ll speak the worst case scenario into existence before he even knows how to escape from it. “Something has been feeling off ever since I came back. I think something is here, in the Institute.”
“What, like another Jane Prentiss type thing?” Martin recoils, as if Jon’s words could burrow into his skin. “Or like, one giant worm burrowing under us that’s so big it can cause earthquakes?”
“No. Well,” Jon tilts his head with a raw, pained smile. “I suppose I can’t rule anything out, but I was picturing more like…you know how cold it’s been in here? Even though it’s August. And the radiator, it’s been sounding like it’s moaning out in some kind of pain and…”
“Jon.”
Jon furrows his brow and scowls, burying his embarrassment beneath the comforting heat of anger. “Don’t treat me like this is ridiculous. When you had your arms around me I felt your skin, you know. You were ice cold.”
“Are you really accusing me of being a ghost? Again?” Martin is laughing, his defensive posture melting with the shaking of his shoulders. Jon, on the other hand, sinks into himself, growing sharp edges in the bitter jut of his chin. “One time I can almost excuse, considering how many stories you read every day, but twice in one month is just ridiculous, Jon.”
“I’m not saying the ghost is necessarily you, Martin, just that I’ve been noticing a lot of common signs of poltergeist…y…ness,” Jon finishes, lamely, undercutting his own sharp, professional tone.
“Poltergeistyness,” Martin echoes, mockingly. “What would a ghost want with a research institution?”
“Well. We do know someone who died here.”
Martin isn’t laughing anymore. “That’s not funny, Jon.”
“Gertrude was murdered in the tunnels right below us, someone from the Institute did it, and all of a sudden there are two freak earthquakes in the same day?” Jon pushes himself to his feet. “Don’t look at me like that, I’m not being paranoid.”
“So that’s why you were going through my things?” Martin follows him up, not letting Jon break their eye contact. “You think the ghost of Gertrude Robinson wants you to solve her murder?”
“I think she’s trying to destroy the Institute. But solving the murder could help appease her before she can manage it.”
“Oh, come on!” Martin throws his hands out to the sides imploringly. “You do know we get earthquakes in London, right?”
“I took the keys to the trapdoor that leads down to the tunnels from Elias’s office while he was out at lunch.” Jon turns away from Martin, back towards his office. “I’d appreciate you guiding me to the room where you found Gertrude. There might be clues there. But I won’t force you.”
“Jon…” When Jon looks back at him, Martin is clenching his hand over his heart.
“Just tell me this.” Jon pauses in the entrance to his office and his voice grows gentle in a way he thought he’d lost in the breakup with Georgie and the stress of his job and a world that seems to want to kill him. “What have you been feeling all day, ever since you woke up this morning?”
“I…” Martin bites his lip, worrying over the answer before he says it. “I’ve felt like something awful has happened. And I’ve been so guilty, like I’ve done something terrible and I need to fix it before we lose everything.”
Jon’s nods in grim agreement. “You’d better grab your coat.”
***
No one cleaned the tunnels after what happened. Maybe Elias hadn’t given the key to whatever cleaners swept away the heaps of worms and broken drywall and extinguisher foam caked into the floorboards of the archives. Or maybe they’d just refused to come down. The steep descent down the old, carved steps into choking darkness isn’t exactly welcoming. Jon certainly doesn’t feel welcome, picking his steps carefully to stay within the illuminated safety of Martin’s torch. Their footsteps echo down the hollow corridor, making it sound like the darkness goes on forever. Maybe it does.
“Is that chalk?” Martin asks, swinging his light over to watch as Jon draws an arrow on the wall, pointing back the way they came.
“Not a great place to get lost,” Jon says.
“Ugh.” Martin wraps his free hand around his other arm and scrubs hard at the goosebumps rising there. “How did I let you talk me into this? Underground, in a maze of old, probably structurally unstable tunnels is definitely the worst place to be during seismic activity.”
“It’s not real seismic activity.” Jon skims the tips of his fingers over the rough stone wall as they walk. It’s damp with the moisture that blooms in underground places. Somewhere below them, Jon thinks he can hear something dripping.
“We don’t know that though, do we? That would be just my luck.” Martin chuckles nervously. “Martin Blackwood, heroically cowered his way through an entire worm monster siege, only to boldly die believing that earthquakes don’t exist.”
Jon catches Martin’s wrist and pulls him back just before he steps into a pile of rotting worm carcasses. “Watch out.”
Martin makes a horrified sound, skittering backwards away from them. “O-oh. They’re dead. That startled me.”
“Are you sure this is the way to the room where you found Gertrude?”
“Not in the slightest.” Martin looks back and forth between the two diverging paths in front of them before shrugging and turning to the left. Jon marks the intersection with an arrow, but his confidence in the system has been steadily declining since they first descended into the crushing darkness. Martin is still moving though, so Jon hurries to catch up before he disappears and takes their only light with him.
Jon’s hand on the wall hits the rim of a door, but when he gropes for the handle and pulls it open, there’s nothing on the other side but flat stone entirely filling in behind it. He closes it again, feeling oddly superstitious about it, before he pulls his tape recorder out of his pocket.
“I generally consider myself to have an excellent sense of direction, but within just a few minutes of exploring down here, I have become unsure of exactly which passages we’ve come from. We don’t even have the excuse of the corridors all looking the same, as the more we walk, the more they seem to vary significantly in height and construction.”
“You’re recording this?” Martin asks.
“It’s a paranormal occurrence, Martin,” Jon snaps back, peevishly embarrassed by Martin’s tone. “I know you don’t take your job very seriously, but recording these things is what we’re meant to be doing.”
“Actually, I think filing them is what we’re meant to be doing, not going out and finding them.” Martin skims his torch beam back and forth across the narrow hallway like a searchlight. “Besides. It’s not a paranormal occurrence yet. I haven’t seen a single ghost. Should’ve ditched the recorder and brought, like, an EMF reader or something.”
Jon scoffs. “Please tell me you don’t believe in all that pseudo-scientific drivel.”
“I’m serious! Do you remember, a few months ago, that famous ghost hunter Melanie King came in to give a statement. I bet we could pull her contact information from her statement and get her in here with some of her equipment. They could do like,” Martin waves his hands vaguely in the air, sending the light bouncing. Shadows lunge back and forth across the walls. “Ghost readings or something.”
“We do not need some self-aggrandizing, video blogging, amateur hack with no formal training running around trying to suck up ghosts in like, a big vacuum.”
“Formal training?” Martin stops walking to turn to Jon with such a look of disbelief that Jon can see it even through the impenetrable darkness. “You never went to ghost school either, Jon. That’s not even a real thing.”
“Says the man who faked a degree in ghost school,” Jon grumbles beneath his breath.
“I’m serious. Have you ever even seen the show? They do research. They’re very experienced with this sort of thing.”
“Oh, I’ve seen the show.” Jon stacks as much disdain onto the words as they can bear. He rolls his eyes from one blank stone wall to another. “I am intimately familiar with all these ghost shows, and trust me when I say they’re not worth getting involved with.”
“Intimately familiar?” Martin asks, his voice suggesting something beyond anything Jon would care to consider.
“Melanie King is a self-obsessed sensationalist,” Jon declares, punctuating the statement by throwing open another door into another empty concrete room. “Besides, the last time I saw her, she stabbed me.”
“She stabbed you?” Martin swings the light around until it’s shining straight into Jon’s eyes. He pulls back with a hiss and a curse, lifting a hand to shield himself before he’s blinded by his incurably incompetent employee. Which, to be fair, has always been a strong possibility for ways his life would go. “What did you do?”
“What did I do?” Jon swipes at the front of the torch, pushing the beam off to the side. “She stabs me and you just assume it was my fault?”
“Well, after working with you for a little over a year…”
“Oh, you’re planning on stabbing me too, is that it? Remind me to reopen that file about you being Gertrude’s murderer.” Jon doesn’t feel nearly as amused by this line of conversation as Martin seems to be, considering he’s not the one who’s probably got an archivist shaped target on his back.
“I wasn’t planning on stabbing you,” Martin protests in a way he certainly thinks is helping his case. Jon scowls back at him extra hard so that it reads through the dim. “It's just that I could sympathize with how someone could reach the point with you where there was simply no option left but a stabbing.”
“You sympathize.”
“Mhm.”
“With my stabber.”
Martin shrugs and the light bounces cheerfully. “You have to admit, you’re very stabbable.”
“I’m done with this conversation.” Light be damned. Jon squares his shoulders and stomps off down the black expanse of the tunnel. Behind him, Martin is laughing so hard he can barely catch his breath to jog after Jon.
“No, wait, seriously Jon, I mean this seriously this time,” Martin calls out between fits of deeply unprofessional and uncalled for giggling. “What made Melanie King, YouTube personality, famous ghost journalist, commit armed assault against you?”
“Famous journalist,” Jon scoffs. He lifts his hand to his shoulder and grips it hard, feeling the thick fabric of his coat slide beneath his grip as he remembers the pain of cold steel. The panic, the fear, the heat of blood and someone screaming, someone was screaming, who was there? He remembers Melanie there, the blade in her hand and the rage in her eyes and the blood all over his hands. Dripping down his arm, between his fingers, pooling on the table. Glistening slick, sinking into the fabric of his cuffs. Staining him. Stained.
“Jon?”
Jon gasps for breath, clutching his hands over his heart as he doubles over from the pain suddenly lancing through his chest. It’s like heartburn, but sharper, digging into him and twisting behind his ribs. In an instant, Martin is there, wrapping his arm around Jon’s shoulders and pulling him up. He surfaces like a drowning man, gasping in air as the pain recedes into nothing.
“What just happened?” Martin is wild eyed in the stark shadows of the torch that is digging painfully into Jon’s shoulder. Martin still has him, pressed into his chest.
“I… I don’t remember.” A wave of exhaustion comes up over Jon and he lets his head tip forward to rest against Martin. It’s understandable that he would need to catch his breath for just a moment. “I don’t remember why she stabbed me.”
“How hard did you fall when that earthquake struck?” Martin rests a nonsensical hand against Jon’s forehead, and Jon can feel his blood pumping hard where their skin is touching.
“You’re cold,” Martin says.
“Yeah.” Jon closes his eyes for a moment and relaxes into the cooling touch. “So are you.”
“We should get out of these tunnels. You aren’t even fully recovered from what happened with the worms, I can’t believe I let you come traipsing around down here. Your body can’t handle it yet.”
“No.” Jon pushes his way out of Martin’s arms and takes a step further down the tunnel. “We haven’t found Gertrude’s room yet. We have to get to the bottom of this.”
“Jon, I don’t know if it’s even possible for me to find Gertrude’s room again. We might be going in circles in this place. We could be here for hours!” When Martin puts his hands on his hips and squares his shoulders, he nearly takes up the entire tunnel.
“Then it takes hours,” Jon snaps. He turns around and marks the wall in chalk before heading off down the opposite branch of the tunnel.
“Jon, wait,” Martin says from behind him. But he doesn’t turn around. “Do you smell that?”
That stops him in his tracks. “Smell what?”
“Doesn’t it smell kind of like…” Jon looks over his shoulder to see Martin sniffing at the air like a ridiculous greyhound in a sweater vest. “Gas?”
Jon takes a deep breath and, sure enough, the tinny smell of gas sticks to the roof of his mouth like gum. “Now that you mention it, I do remember someone telling me once that the Institute was built directly over a gas main. But I don’t remember who…”
“The earthquake must have knocked something loose.” Martin closes the distance between them in three big steps. “Come on, Jon, you have to see now how dangerous this is. Ghost or no ghost, staying in tiny little unventilated underground tunnels filling up with flammable gas is what’s generally considered a bad idea.”
“We haven’t found the room yet,” Jon repeats, setting his jaw.
“You absolutely ridiculous man!” Martin steps forward and grabs Jon by the collar, lifting him onto his toes. “I carried you away from the worms. I swear to god I’ll do it again if you make me.”
“If we report a gas leak and they close off these tunnels, we’ll never get a second chance. Please, Martin.” Jon covers Martin’s hands with his own. “Please. Just a little longer.”
“I cannot believe you—” Martin starts to say, before his overexaggerated eye roll brings his head to the side and he stops dead, staring at a door in the wall just beside them. “Wait. This is it.”
“This is it?” Jon stumbles a bit as Martin releases his collar. “You’re not just saying that to make me go back upstairs sooner, are you?”
“No. Look.” Martin pushes the door open and shines his torch through, illuminating a rusty stain of brown dried blood marring the center of the concrete room. He steps through the doorway, casting the beam of his torch all about, and Jon follows him through.
“What are we looking for?” Martin asks, his voice echoing strangely against the wide, bare walls.
“I don’t know.” Jon turns in a slow circle, but all he sees is an empty, silent room, with only a long forgotten bloodstain to mark its difference from the miles of twisting corridors around it. Will it be the same when he dies? Will he disappear like this? Forgotten? Leaving nothing behind.
“I told you, the cops took everything. The body, the chair, the tapes. It was all evidence.”
“You’re right. There’s nothing here.”
“Can we please go now?” Martin’s voice has a slightly hysterical edge, and when Jon looks up, he notices for the first time the way his fingers are shifting anxiously around the handle of the torch. “There’s no sign of a ghost. Sometimes an earthquake is just an earthquake.”
“I suppose so. I’ll need to tell Elias first thing tomorrow morning about the gas leak. Wouldn’t want the whole archives to go up in flames.” Jon wipes his hand down the side of his trousers before holding it out to Martin. “Come on. I marked the way back.”
***
After Martin’s repeated insistence the day before about the dangers of a gas leak beneath the Institute—no matter how far down it might be—Jon goes straight to Elias’s office, first thing in the morning. He supposes if a hasty evacuation is in order, people would rather it happen sooner rather than later. Both so that it doesn’t interrupt whatever tasks they’ve settled into, and for the markedly reduced likelihood of death.
“Elias?” Jon calls out, rapping the back of his knuckles against the door. When he’d passed by Rosie’s desk down the hallway, she’d waved him along without question, so Jon assumed Elias was already expecting him. He was a remarkably modern minded boss, always seeming to make time for his employees to come and speak with him personally when they deemed it necessary. Jon would have thought an open door policy was more the purview of pony-tailed professors than serious heads of formal research institutions. Perhaps it was a vestige of the young age he’d been when he took the position.
“Come in,” says Elias, on perfect, nearly uncanny timing with the end of Jon’s knock. He had been expected after all.
“Ah, Elias, I was hoping to talk to you about a discovery Martin and I made yesterday in the tunnels—”
Jon stops dead, his hand still on the knob of the door he’d just swung open. Elias watches him from across his desk. Straight-backed and hands folded neatly over the papers in front of him. Although, perhaps watches is an inaccurate word, given that where Elias had once had eyes were now gaping holes carved into his face. Jon stares, frozen, and the hollow wounds in Elias’s face stare back.
“I can only hope this discovery is less gruesome than the last one Martin found in those tunnels.” When Elias speaks, the muscles in his face contract and the slick exposed red in his ocular cavities shift with them. Blood, as thick and fresh as if Elias’s eyes had been carved out mere seconds before Jon stepped into his office, slips down his cheeks like tears. As Jon watches, a fat red droplet spills from his chin and splashes crimson across the back of Elias’s knuckles.
“Well?” Elias says, cocking his head with casual impatience. He blinks his eyelids over the empty mutilations in his face. “What did you find?”
Jon slams the door shut, staggering backwards until his back hits the wall across from it. Inside the room, he can hear the shifting movement of Elias standing up, coming over to the door. Coming after him. Jon’s pounding heart is so high in his throat that he cannot seem to catch a panicked breath to use to flee.
“Jonathan?” Elias calls from beyond the door. Jon can hear the footfalls bringing him closer. Closer. “What’s wrong?”
“Where are your eyes?” He gasps, pressing himself flat against the wall behind him.
“Right where they have always been, Jon.” Elias’s voice seems to grow deeper and more sinister until suddenly the door is thrown open between them and standing in front of him is nothing but Elias. Looking over him with concerned gray eyes in a bloodless face. “Are you quite well?”
“I don’t…I thought I saw…” Jon doesn’t know what to do with the adrenaline coursing through him, so it shivers its way out of his trembling hands as he slowly detaches himself from the wall. Elias holds out a hand and Jon takes it gratefully, letting Elias take some weight off his wobbly knees as they make their way back into his office. “I don’t really know what I thought I saw.”
“You’ve had a dreadful experience with that worm infestation,” Elias responds, deftly cutting off any embarrassment Jon might have felt. “I was deeply saddened by my inability to reach the emergency fire suppression system any sooner, but truly none of us could have anticipated the severity of being attacked by mere bugs.”
“Ah, yes, well,” Jon mumbles, processing a strange sort of deja vu as he lets Elias guide him to one of the chairs set up in front of the desk. Elias had used the exact same wording in his email to the staff, hadn’t he?
“And so I’m sure your first short while back in the office may be difficult in ways we cannot anticipate,” Elias continues. “Just know that I am here to offer any assistance at our disposal. The Institute takes care of our own.”
“Thank you, Elias.” Jon musters up a smile as Elias squeezes his shoulder once before circling back around his desk and sitting down in his own chair. “But it’s actually a more…tangible matter that I’m concerned with today.”
“Perhaps I needn’t be so concerned with your health if you’re already back to mustering up your usual amounts of judgment about how everything runs here.” Elias opens his hands invitingly. “Let’s hear it.”
“Well you see, Martin and I were in the tunnels yesterday—”
“In the tunnels?” Elias doesn’t sound pleased.
“And we noticed that when we got a bit further down, we could smell something like gas. I wonder if perhaps yesterday’s earthquakes didn’t knock a pipe askew. They were rather severe. It seems like a problem we should address, before the gas makes its way up to the archives, or somehow catches fire. An explosion like that could bring the entire building down.”
“Did you say earthquake, Jon?” Elias asks, furrowing his brow.
“Yes. There was quite strong seismic activity.”
“There were no earthquakes in London yesterday.” Elias leans back in his chair, decisively.
“Well maybe you just weren’t in the right place to feel them,” Jon snaps.
Elias stares sternly into Jon’s eyes. “There were no earthquakes in London yesterday.”
“Regardless. No matter the cause, Martin and I were down in the tunnels yesterday and we smelled gas. Don’t you think we should do something about that?”
“Jonathan,” Elias says, with the gentle authority that always sets Jon’s teeth on edge. “Exploring those tunnels is dangerous and stressful, especially for a man in your condition. You only just returned from your leave, and your wounds are not healed. You should not be romping around trying to re-injure yourself. Can you not just leave well enough alone and let yourself rest?”
“This isn’t about my condition, Elias.”
“Is it not?” Elias straightens a cuff link, giving Jon a momentary reprieve from the suffocating pity of his gaze. “You’re jumping at shadows, seeing things, imagining earthquakes. I know it can be difficult to come out of an experience like you had and return to a normal, simple life. Your mind wants there to be an emergency, something for you to fight. But you are done fighting, Jonathan. Now you just have to let go of all that struggle inside you and rest.”
“This is not just something in my head,” Jon argues, leaning forward in his chair. “Martin was there too! He felt the earthquake. He smelled the gas.”
“Or perhaps, instead of a phantom earthquake, may I posit that what you and Martin have in common is that you haven’t exactly been getting much sleep?”
Jon opens his mouth to retort and then he stops. “That’s what Tim said.”
“Yes, well, Mr. Stoker has some sense in him every now and then.”
“No, I mean…” Jon looks up at Elias. “That’s exactly what Tim said.”
“You’re working far too hard, Jon,” Elias says, with an air of finality that announces the meeting is over whether Jon wants it to be or not. “The battle is already over. There’s nothing more to solve. You just need to let yourself rest.”