Work Text:
1977
The apartment in which Agnes Montague would eventually hang herself had a balcony, a small first-floor affair that looked out on a scraggly back lawn and a parking lot. It wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination a romantic location.
The first time, after the binding, was an exercise in curiosity. At twenty-six, Gertrude was the youngest Head Archivist in the Magnus Institute’s (admittedly short and conservative) history. She had already tied herself to an eldritch god of voyeuristic terror, and she had no idea what the consequences were for figurative double-dipping in Smirke’s Thirteen. After suffering through the excruciating pain of an accidental binding ritual, Gertrude figured that she might as well see this messiah of the Lightless Flame herself.
Gertrude had actually written an essay on eyewitness accounts of religious messiahs while getting a first in history at Oxford. The paper was a heavily-footnoted gripe about the unreliability of historical bystanders, who tended to wax poetic through the lens of their chosen dogma or reroute their attention towards the distressingly mundane. She had criticized this tendency at particular length when it came to medieval translations of Dares’ Phrygii de Excidio Trojae historia, itself a Latinized version of the original Greek text. Hundreds of years of translations turned the account into a game of grandiose telephone when each successive author was more concerned about his prosody that clear and concise historical fact.
She’d once said a version of this to one of her professors during a tutorial. “Ah, but the past is always mediated,” he replied easily, swirling a shallow glass of whiskey even though it was only four in the afternoon. “It’s a foreign country. We can’t go there.”
Gertrude, as it turned out, could go there, though it cost her freedom and the better part of her humanity. So those history tutorials were really a waste.
“Hello,” Agnes said, leaning on the balcony railing. “You must be the Archivist.”
It was the first time that anyone besides Mendelson or Wright had ever referred to Gertrude as such, and for a moment it threw her off her guard.
“Ah,” Gertrude said, standing near the tree line of the scrubby apartment backyard. “Yes. I am.”
Agnes looked out, backlit by the lamp shining from inside her house. “For some reason, I thought you’d be taller,” she said.
Agnes herself was tall and statuesque in a way that seemed predictable for a chosen messiah, even a messiah for an embarrassment of a cult that was the Lightless Flame. She was dressed in baggy jean cutoffs and an oversized Earth, Wind & Fire t-shirt that might have been ironic. Gertrude had yet to meet a Desolation avatar with a sense of humor.
“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” Gertrude replied drily.
Agnes grinned. “I’m not disappointed,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
There were many possible answers to that question. Gertrude was assessing an enemy for a weakness. She was checking up on the consequences of her first reckless ritual. She was testing the feasibility of the bond that the Web had tricked her into.
“I was curious,” she finally admitted, surprised by her own candor. “I’m afraid it comes with the territory.”
Agnes tilted her head. “I’d be careful,” she said teasingly. “You know what they say about curiosity.”
Gertrude shrugged. “I don’t have a cat.”
Agnes looked her up and down again. “Really?” She asked. “You look like someone who owns a cat.”
Gertrude was currently wearing a bulky macintosh over a turtleneck-and-dress combination that served as the de facto uniform of academic spinsters. Her glasses were half-fogged from the evening damp. She smiled thinly. “It’s a helpful image to cultivate.”
“Sure,” Agnes responded. “You know, it’s entirely possible that Arthur or Diego are watching us right now.”
Gertrude pulled a hunting knife out of a pocket of the mackintosh. It wouldn’t do much against a desolation avatar, but she was proving a hunch.
Agnes’ smile widened. “Steady on,” she said. “If anything, they’re terrified that I’ll die now if they kill you. And if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to live to see the next Star Wars film. I want to know how it ends.”
Gertrude didn’t get to the movies much, if only that after three years as an archivist, she was too paranoid to sit in a dark room for two hours without looking over her shoulder for Maxwell Rayner at every opportunity. “You’re not entirely what I expected,” she said, stowing the hunting knife back into her pocket.
Agnes shrugged. “I get that a lot,” she said. “What did you expect?”
Gertrude paused, uncharacteristically uncertain over whether to speak with total honesty. “Conviction,” she admitted.
Agnes’ smile turned sharper, self-mocking. “Fuck you,” she said.
Gertrude, who at the very least knew when to make an exit, turned away and back towards the safety of the shadowed tree line. Foremost on her mind was the satisfied surety that the Lightless Flame had picked a bad messiah. Whether or not Agnes was changed by Gertrude’s reckless and under-researched binding, she didn’t have it in her to end the world.
In the back of Gertrude’s mind, though, was a roiling curiosity that she tampered down. It didn’t matter. There was no reason for her and Agnes to ever meet again.
1985
“Hello, Archivist,” Agnes said, smirking in the way that ruined the line of her stoic messiah profile. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”
Gertrude sighed. “I doubt we’re ever going to meet under any other circumstances,” she said. It was drizzling out, a miserable damp rain in the March chill, and she wasn’t really in the mood to be lurking on the muddy pavement of someone’s backyard.
“Not with that kind of attitude,” Agnes retorted.
Gertrude had just returned from Egypt, and there were still irritating kernels of sand in the inside corners of her boots, slowly rubbing blisters onto the edges of her feet through her socks. At least it had been warmer there.
Buying a trove of C4 in London was surprisingly easy. Transporting a trove of C4 from London to Cairo without alerting any national authorities, or, more pressingly, Elias, was much harder. Even with all of her burgeoning resources, Gertrude had to call in a favor with someone who was intimately acquainted with explosive devices. This someone was currently standing on her porch, looking incandescently smug.
“How did it feel?” Agnes asked.
Gertrude stared at her. “Agnes, I blew up the last remnants of the Serapaem of Alexandria. I destroyed relics that were thousands of years old. I killed seventeen people.”
Agnes snorted. “So, what you’re saying is, it felt great and you’re having a whole moral quandary about it.”
The short answer was yes. The long answer was: yes, but not quite. By this point, Gertrude had killed people before. She was years away from killing people she knew personally, chopping up Jan Kilbride or sacrificing Michael Shelley, but this wasn’t the first time that foiling rituals had claimed innocent bystanders.
This time, though, the seventeen people killed in the explosion that destroyed the Serapaem was genuinely an accident. Gertrude had known from the moment that Walter Heller had doddered in and talked about the creature with the single glowing eye under the sand in Alexandria that she was going to have to destroy the last remnants of a previous Institute. Elias might have even approved of disposing of the competition, but would more likely balk at exploding any iteration of the Archives. Either way, an Archivist that had survived under the sand for almost two thousand years offered an unknowable threat.
The underground remnants of the Serapaem were buried deep enough that dropping C4 into the remaining tunnels shouldn’t have caused any serious public harm. If Gertrude had spent the requisite time re-checking the wiring of the C4— if she had waited to pull out the blueprints of the city’s infrastructure before lightning the match to set off the delayed fuse—
But she hadn’t. And the moment she had ignited the match, standing beside a fuse attached to enough plastic explosive to sink a battleship, she felt a euphoric glee singing in her veins and a sudden lurch beneath her feet, a roiling combination of ancient fury and fear. She hadn’t gotten near as far as she’d planned to from the explosion, which seemed to happen within her as much as around her.
The C4 had dismantled the foundation of a nearby apartment building, sending its east wing crumbling. Gertrude had watched the news report on the resulting deaths in her hotel room that night; the ERTU was calling it a freak accident, a sudden structural failure. Gertrude scanned the news report automatically, her mind still focused on that moment of uncomplicated euphoria, the existential high of holding a burning match in her hand and feeling the sudden fear of the subterranean Archivist become aware of her presence. Her awareness of their fear, her Beholding, had been inextricably tied up in the destructive pyre that was to come. She could still almost hear the sounds of crackling papyrus under the sand.
“Is that how you experience fire all the time?” Gertrude asked, carefully keeping her tone that of a dispassionately curious Archivist.
Agnes wiggled the fingers on her left hand, creating a small rope of fire that jumped from finger to finger like a bouncing ball. “I guess,” she said. “I don’t really have anything to compare it to. What did it feel like before?”
Gertrude cleared her throat. “Different,” she said flatly.
Agnes looked pleased. “It’s only fair. You know, I can compel people now.”
Gertrude wasn’t sure what surprised her more, the fact that Agnes had identified compulsion as a particular skill of the Ceaseless Watcher, or that she seemed genuinely self-satisfied at this bleed-through from the Beholding. Gertrude herself rarely compelled people. It was her last holdout against total immersion, a weak buoy of self-determination that she could cling to and claim that she would not be totally subsumed into the role of the Archivist. She could see, though, how a sheltered messiah might grasp at the power to control others.
“And what have you compelled out the Lightless Flame?” She asked.
Agnes gestured impatiently, accidentally setting a nearby begonia on fire. It slowly fizzled out under the mist of rain. “Answers,” she spat. “I want to know what I’m destined to do. I want to know when. I want to know why.”
Arthur Nolan must have been furious. Gertrude smiled. “That seems reasonable.”
“So try it,” Agnes said impatiently. “Try asking me something.”
“I would prefer not to,” Gertrude said in the kind of tone she used on her assistants that usually caused them to disappear for several hours out of an excess of self-preservation.
Agnes just leaned farther forward on the porch railing. “That’s the point. Try it. It won’t work.”
Gertrude sighed and shifted her stance. “Very well,” she said tiredly. “Do you think you’ll achieve the Scoured Earth?”
Agnes looked disappointed, as if this was an underwhelming question on which to test her powers. She paused, demonstrating the failure of the question to snare an answer in her mouth like a hook in a fish.
“I don’t know,” she said finally, showy in her contemplative pauses. “I want to. You can understand now, how it would feel, to burn everything down and begin anew. It might be better that way. I understand why not to, though. There are things that I like. I like coffee, and good music, and love stories. I wouldn’t want to lose those in the fire. But sometimes a fire can be a love story.”
From anyone else, it would sound like a true compulsion: honest, and slightly self-indulgent. Gertrude knew, though, and Knew, that Agnes was still half-lying to herself, only admitting to a fraction of the doubt that she harbored.
“Very well,” Gertrude said. “You’ve proved your point. Do you want to try setting me on fire?”
Agnes smiled, and it was something other than the overconfident smirk that she’d been parading on and off for their last two meetings. She extended one arm down from the railing of the balcony. “Something like that,” she said. “Come here.”
Gertrude wasn’t compelled— she couldn’t be, at this point, perhaps not even by Elias— but she moved forward through the yard automatically anyway. The still-smoking begonia smelled like ash and sugar.
The porch of the first-story flat was raised maybe four feet off the ground, enough to avoid the damp of the earth underneath. Agnes was tall enough to bend down over the railing at the waist, hesitantly grasping the side of Gertrude’s face with one hand. Gertrude didn’t realize until after Agnes’ hand made contact that it could have burned straight through her skin, seared through the meat of her face like a hot poker through wax. Instead, it felt vaguely warm, only a little warmer than a normal human hand, even though Agnes had been playing with fire like an idle pair of brass knuckles minutes before.
Agnes froze, seemingly fascinated at the touch, so Gertrude took it upon herself to move up onto the toes of her boots and kiss her. In for a penny.
It was shockingly, achingly normal; Agnes’ lips are soft and dry, pressing tentatively against her own as if Gertrude was going to recoil back at any moment. She drifted forward instead, angling Agnes’ face and brushing back the auburn fringe that Agnes absolutely dyed for the aesthetic. For a moment, she let herself drift in unabashed fondness.
Then Gertrude stepped back, exhaling, and felt rather than saw the crawling tendrils of fire that spilled from her mouth. It made the outer skin of her lips crackle and tingle, like the sensation of breathing in the bitter cold.
Agnes watched her, enthralled, for a moment nakedly euphoric about what had just happened. Then she retreated backward on the porch, visibly trying to school her expression into something more casual. “You should really get a cat, Gertrude,” she said finally. “You shouldn’t be so alone.”
Gertrude didn’t exactly have a cult surrounding her at all times, but she did have three assistants who she tolerated, even if she didn’t trust them, and a series of colleagues outside of the Institute who were moderately reliable. She wasn’t alone; she was just cautious.
Gertrude laughed quietly and turned away, starting to head back toward the street where her rusted sedan was parked under a lone streetlamp. “I don’t need a reluctant companion who ignores me and offers me killed things in turn,” she said. “I have you for that, don’t I?”
1997
And yes, Gertrude was aware that the Romeo and Juliet comparisons could write themselves. Two households, both alike in dignity, if one ignored the fact that the Cult of the Lightless Flame was a joke and the Magnus Institute had at least procured nonprofit funding.
Gertrude had never been a particular fan of Shakespeare. Too many derivative lectures on iambic pentameter and de casibus tragedy as a student. Too many self-satisfied men claiming that Lear, with all of his casual cruelty and smug privilege, was the height of tragic heroism. Maybe he could have been less of a shit to begin with, Gertrude wanted to say. His daughters didn’t owe him anything.
She wasn’t much of a poetry person in general. The environmentalist movement was in full swing, and Gertrude had never been able to feel very much excitement over trees or babbling brooks or whatever pastoral nonsense that those new-age American poets had got so excited about. Emma loved poetry and had coaxed her into some Robert Frost between assassination attempts on her fellow assistants. Gertrude wasn’t sure if poetry was a particular Web-based trait, an appreciation for the interlinked language of prosody, or if Emma was just nudging her back toward Agnes.
“Some say the world will end in fire,” Frost wrote. “Some say ice. For what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire.”
If Emma had been pushing her back towards Agnes, it certainly hadn’t ended the way that her assistant had expected: Gertrude and Agnes sitting across from each other in a diner booth, each nursing a coffee, and planning Emma’s death. It was the closest that Gertrude had ever come to an awkward meeting with an ex.
It hadn’t taken Agnes a lot of convincing to agree to help with her plan; it was taking slightly more convincing to assure Agnes that this was not the first volley in an all-out war against the Web.
“What do you think she wanted?” Anges asked, furrowing her brow in a way that made her coffee roil like magma in the thick ceramic white mug.
Gertrude shrugged. “I try not to think too hard about it. The Web has wheels within wheels. You could spend your whole life trying to unravel it.”
Agnes snorted. “If only there was someone who had dedicated their life to knowing everything,” she said belligerently, stirring her coffee without noticing her spoon warp and bend within the liquid.
Gertrude smiled. “Knowing and understanding are two different things, Agnes.”
Agnes gestured with the spoon, which was now half-melted. Gertrude leaned back slightly to avoid the drips of liquid metal that fell and burned through their beer mats. “Don’t do that, Gertrude.”
“Don’t do what?”
“That ‘oh-the-things-I’ve-seen’ mysterious shite,” Agnes snapped. “Just because you look older than me doesn’t mean that you are older than me.”
Agnes still looked the same as she did on the day they met, somewhere vaguely in her twenties. Gertrude didn’t envy her the eternal youth, though she would have liked to retain her ability to pull all-night research sessions and put back a generous amount of whiskey without a disgustingly terrible hangover. In a few years, she was just going to fully embrace middle age and get one of those oversized woolen cardigans, the kind with the long pockets good for storing shell casings.
“Could you age?” Gertrude asked before she realized the question was coming out of her mouth. “If you wanted to?”
Agnes sighed, and Gertrude felt a hot rush of air blow past her cheek. It was like standing too close to an engine turbine. “I don’t think so,” she admitted. “Arthur said that it’s so I can wait out time immemorial for the coming of the Scorched Earth.”
Gertrude thought that Arthur Nolan was an absolute nitwit, but it didn’t seem the time to say so. Agnes could tell, anyway, from her expression.
“Will you do it?” Gertrude asked abruptly.
Agnes lifted one ginger eyebrow. “Age?” She asked.
“No,” Gertrude said. “Emma.”
Agnes looked back down into her coffee, which had congealed into some kind of primordial sludge. “Yes, Gertrude,” she said quietly. “I’ll do it. It’s hardly a chore.”
“Thank you,” Gertrude said primly, like they were settling a business deal and not arranging an assassination.
“I don’t see why you just do it yourself, though,” Agnes continued. “You’ve built yourself quite a reputation when it comes to fire.”
Gertrude hummed, unwilling to reopen that line of conversation. “Emma is an old friend,” she said. “Agent of the Web or no, even I would have . . . difficulty doing the work myself.”
Agnes looked up from her coffee, suddenly interested in the conversation. “An old friend, huh?” she asked, looking torn between curious glee and jealousy. “How old?”
“Agnes—” Gertrude sighed. “We’re not having this conversation.”
“Your own assistant!” Agnes crowed quietly. “I knew that stuffy librarian front of yours was all a lie.”
“I’m not a librarian,” Gertrude said automatically.
“Did you ever see that movie?” Agnes asked, now staring out the window as if the peeling billboard across the road was going to offer answers. “Indiana Jones and the something something. He’s a librarian but also travels around and shoots things. It reminded me of you.”
“I haven’t seen it,” Gertrude lied. “Did you ever get to see the end of Star Wars?”
“Yeah,” Agnes said. “I liked it. It was a hell of a better take on having a proscribed destiny than anything I ever experienced. I don’t suppose you’d take me with you the next time you foil a ritual? I’d like to see what it’s like.”
Gertrude looked disparagingly down at Agnes’ half-eaten plate of sausage and beans. She’d temporarily gone vegetarian after her disruption of the Flesh ritual in Istanbul.“It was a pit full of meat, Agnes,” she said. “It was hardly Spielberg-worthy.”
Agnes grinned conspiratorially until Gertrude realized that she’d revealed more than she intended. “Is that a yes?” She asked.
“No,” Gertrude said forcefully.
“Alright,” Agnes said, her face settling back into a bad mask of nonchalance. “I guess I’ll see you the next time you need someone to kill an ex.”
It was unfortunate that Agnes’ parting words turned out to be somewhat true.
2006
Years later, Gertrude finally said ‘fuck it’ and bought that cardigan, which was currently doing very little to brace against the November chill as she stood outside of Agnes’ same flat. The Cult of the Lightless Flame was apparently rather attached to particular residences, which was emphasized by the fact that several of their members were lurking ominously inside. Gertrude was carrying a loaded shotgun in case Jude Perry felt like coming out onto the patio, and she leaned on it to take the pressure off of her bad knee.
“Really Agnes,” she said drily. “A barista?”
Agnes flushed with a combination of anger and embarrassment, which meant that she had actually liked the boy. “He was nice,” she said defensively.
“He was an idiot,” Gertrude replied. “I thought you, of all people, would react poorly to what was clearly an envoy from the Web.”
If Agnes hadn’t already suspected this, it didn’t show on her face, but Gertrude Knew the shame and anger that coursed like lava under her skin at being played like a marionette. Agnes’ anger even outstripped her concern and regret over poor Jack Barnabas, Gertrude noted wryly. Well, they were two of a kind.
“Stop knowing things, Gertrude,” Agnes snapped. The warped wood of the deck blistered under her hands, crackling into charcoal. “The only reason that the Web even sent someone was because you couldn’t do your job!”
Gertrude sighed. Well, she was bound to figure it out eventually, even without the eldritch knowledge powers. “What,” she said carefully, “do you think my job was supposed to be? Taking you on movie dates?”
Agnes gestured in frustration, and the air rippled with heat around her hands. “To get me to leave, to walk away from the Cult of the Lightless Flame.”
That was certainly one way of putting it. Not for the first time, Gertrude felt a wave of irritation at the persistence of cult messaging, even among those who saw the eldritch powers at play in the world. Adelard Dekker had once called the Lightless Flame a ‘jumped-up multilevel marketing scheme,’ which had caused Gertrude no little mirth over the last few years.
“I’m afraid that you can’t walk away, Agnes,” Gertrude said. “Neither of us can. Not in the way that you’re thinking.”
This had been true since their very first meeting; Gertrude had already been the Archivist for three years then, more than enough time to fall into the service of the Eye even if she hadn’t been stuck as soon as the ink on her signature dried. Agnes had been trapped since birth. At least Gertrude had had the dubious honor of kissing people without burning their faces off; Agnes’ surprise and indignation possibly meant that she genuinely hadn’t tried it beyond Gertrude and probably Jude, who was already wax. Maybe Agnes had thought that Jack was immune as well because he cared about her. It was the kind of desperately optimistic belief that Agnes would carry, even after all these years.
“I’m not going to do it,” Agnes said as if this was going to be surprising news to Gertrude and not something she had intuited five minutes into their first meeting. “The Scoured Earth. I can’t end the world.”
“I know,” Gertrude said.
“Then why didn’t you stop me from the beginning?” Agnes demanded. Tears were falling from her eyes, boiling and hissing as they carved rivulets down her cheeks. “If you were— whatever you are, my anchor. You could have saved so many people.”
Gertrude looked down at her feet. She knew, of course, that Agnes had killed people, either in childhood rages or as part of the Cult’s sacrifices to her as a messiah. She could have saved all of those people. She could have done from the beginning what she was reluctantly aiding and abetting in now, and let Agnes run, repentant, to her family for an early death. Gertrude didn’t feel particularly guilty about holding off. She hadn’t expected Agnes to feel the guilt for both of them. “I am sorry,” she said quietly. “I . . . . . couldn’t find it in myself to do so.”
Agnes nodded, and maybe she did understand. She could certainly have engulfed Gertrude in flames at that point, just the two of them standing ten feet apart and surrounded by the moldering wood of the porch. They could have made quite the pyre.
“Will you do something for me?” She asked instead.
“Yes,” Gertrude said.
Agnes took a deep breath, and the carved weals in her cheeks healed and re-filled, retuning to face to a look of calm lucidity. She looked like a muse again. “Will you keep them away from Jack?” She asked.
Gertrude winced. It’s the anticlimactic last request that she deserved. “If I must,” she said. “Goodbye, Agnes.”
“Yes,” Agnes said quietly, and turned on her heel on the porch, walking slowly back into the house like a funeral march. It was, really, her funeral march. Her hand drifted on the side of the porch railing, leaving sparks cracking in their wake like fireworks of a last sendoff. As soon as the porch door slammed behind Agnes, Gertrude turned to leave. She didn’t want to hear any of what was going on behind the door, even though she had a dark suspicion that she would Know the details whether she wanted to or not.
Gertrude walked back to the Institute slowly, where she would wait for the enraged phone call from Arthur Nolan and know that it was done. She wrote out a message for Gerry to warn him off of the Lightless Flame until one of them— probably Eugene— tried to make a move.
She sat at her desk for a while, realizing after the first few hours that she wasn’t going to be Nolan’s first call. The Lightless Flame had always pretended that the connection between herself and Agnes was a dirty secret that was best ignored. If she got a confirmation, it would likely be from Annabelle Cane, twisting the knife in the consequences of Gertrude’s failed compliance.
Even if Gertrude couldn’t perceive the Web’s initial plan for her and Agnes, she could make an educated guess. A double suicide and two failed rituals: the Magnus Institute burning and the Cult of the Lightless Flame extinguished. Two avatars, ripping themselves away from the entities they served. They would have made a beautiful Romeo and Juliet.
Gertrude’s musings were interrupted by a sudden clicking at the left of her desk. She turned to see a bulky tape recorder whirring, though she hadn’t remembered turning one on. She would occasionally record her personal notes, but there was rarely a machine on hand. This one was black and square, with a brand-new tape whirring under its glass window.
“Oh, hello,” Gertrude said, even though she hated people who talked to inanimate objects like they were favored children. “How did you get here?”
It was one of Gertrude’s rare foolish moments to assume that she had foiled the Web’s plan, that she had definitively chosen to stop the Apocalypse, chosen her commitment to the Ceaseless Watcher over the Desolation avatar she was bonded to.
In the years to come, Gertrude continued to fight the physical mundanities that threaten the fabric of reality. She worked for James and then Elias and then the man who had claimed to be both and is neither. She doesn’t second guess the Ceaseless Watcher— she never trusted it in the first place— but she must continually fight the urge to burn it all down, until it became a drive rather than a distraction.
It does figure that Gertrude’s proverbial crisis of faith would be facilitated by a pallet of C4.
2015
Years later, Gertrude was bleeding out from a bullet wound in her chest in the tunnels under the Institute, and it didn’t feel like she thought it would. It didn’t burn: it just hurt. It was petty and painful, underwhelming, and overwhelming at the same time. Elias had left the room, which was a blessing. She didn’t want to be looking Jonah Magnus when she died. He’d be watching her either way, so she might as well pretend to have some privacy.
In her last moments, Gertrude didn’t think about the broad, faceless humanity that she’d sacrificed so much for. She was grateful, in the end, that she was going to die before Jonah’s plans stand any chance of succeeding. Humanity was going to be on their own from here on out.
It was only after Gertrude had recorded the tape for Sasha James that she paused and thought about how her predecessor might interpret her, given the facts. The Archivist who killed her assistants. The Archivist that sacrificed innocent civilians. The Archivist that bound the closest thing she had to an adoptive son into the painful limbo of an eldritch Fodors. If she was worried about a legacy, it’s hardly a flattering one.
Gertrude had considered recording a second tape for Sasha. She could describe the process of tying yourself to someone else’s soul and then using that tie to shipwreck them, to drag them into a slow path of crisis and self-destruction. The way that it made pale any other kind of betrayal. It would be a beautiful excuse, but Gertrude had never cared much for prosody.
Somewhere to the left of her head, Gertrude could hear the distant whirring of a tape recorder that she hadn’t turned on.
“If you say I told you so,” she threatened faintly. It was the only time she had ever acknowledged that the tapes might be something beyond a manifestation of the Eye.
But if I had to perish twice, Frost’s prosey nature poem ended, I think that ice is also great, and would suffice.
It would have been a poetic last thought. It wasn’t; the poem registered in passing beyond the steam of shitting hell this hurts and fucking Jonah. In her woozier moments, Gertrude thought about an afterlife standing in the backyard of a scrubby two-story flat. A young woman was lounging there, like a disaffected Angel Gabriel who knew that Gertrude had fuck-all chance of getting into the pearly gates of heaven.
In the end, Gertrude was perhaps the only person who envisioned Agnes as a genuine messiah; not someone who ushered in the end of the world, but someone who welcomed her into the end of her own.
“Hello, Archivist,” she said, leaning against the charred wood of the balcony, and Gertrude let her head fall back against the stained concrete of the Institute tunnels.