Chapter Text
There wasn’t time for Jon to think about Michael.
Not when he could still feel the ghost of a gag in his mouth, tugging at the corners hard enough to leave cuts in the skin. (Would they start from the mouth, he had wondered, when it came time to skin him? Would they start from the corners of his eyes? Would he still be conscious by the end of it? There were too many questions, too many – ha-ha – unknowns.)
No, there wasn’t time for Jon to think about Michael.
Not when his own blood was fresh on his tongue, and with it, the promise that more would soon be spilt. Not when Nikola could return at any minute, with her drawn-on smile and that demented voice – so much like that of a Cbeebies presenter – promising him a death she would exult in.
Not when Helen stood there beckoning, with hands that weren’t quite hands any more. Not when that was all the hope he had: to trade one monster for another and hope that he had opted for the gentlest.
There wasn’t time to think about anything, let alone the body that lay discarded on the concrete between the Spiral’s threshold and himself.
There was only time to move.
Jon walked upright through the door and emerged from it falling.
The world moved too quickly for him to brace for impact. When the herringbone floorboards of the Institute connected with his temple and his cheek, his eyes were open, and he felt as though he’d walked into them more than he had fallen – as though he were stuck to a wall, not lying on the ground. Why, he wondered, is gravity not dragging me down the hall?
His heart hammered. His body took a moment to assert itself. To remember his horizontal from his vertical. To understand where he was.
To realise that he had survived.
There had been times in the past – before Jane Prentiss, before Gertrude’s body – when Jon had bitten the inside of his mouth to keep himself from smiling wryly at one of Tim’s jokes. Times, since then, when he had been interrupted mid-statement by Martin with a well-meaning cup of tea, and he had kept his head turned sharply deskward so that Martin couldn’t see the stricken look on his face. Somewhere along the trajectory of his life, Jon had begun to conflate professionalism with stoicism, and it was an attitude which served him well – or, at least, he thought it did.
So, absurdly enough, it was embarrassment that flooded him when – upon landing in the bleak, dusty hallways of the Archives – his eyes began to well up with tears.
Voices from around the corner stalled him before any tears could escape. He swallowed back a building sob and, without moving, tried to pick out those he recognised.
“Did you hear that?” – Tim.
“Yeah, what was it?” – Martin. “It sounded like the ceiling—oh God.”
Their footsteps came to a clattering halt at the end of the hall. With effort, Jon lifted his head. The world veered drunkenly into its new orientation, proving to him once and for all that he was lying down, and not somehow glued like a magnet to a wall made out of floorboards. A high-pitched whistling noise pooled in his right ear, then faded into silence.
His assistants were hovering in place like they’d stumbled into the scene of a car crash. Jon wasn’t sure how long he had been trapped with the circus, but he must’ve been there long enough for his disappearance to cross the bridge from inconvenient to worrying. Finding him face-down in a the middle of a hallway – especially without Rosie having signed him in at the front desk – must be, at minimum, disconcerting. Then there was the matter of the blood on his clothes.
Martin floundered and made to approach, but Tim splayed a hand in his path. “No. Don’t go near them.”
Them?
Puzzled, Jon drew himself up onto elbows and knees. He stopped dead when he felt something brush his hand. It was a lock of hair. Blond hair. Another body lay sprawled at his side. Face-down, it should’ve been difficult to identify, but it wasn’t.
It was Michael.
Helen must have taken it with them, though he hadn’t seen it in the corridors. What a sick joke, he thought, to dump it here in the Archives.
“That’s the thing from the tunnels,” breathed Tim. “Remember?”
“How could I forget,” said Martin limply. He didn’t move closer.
Jon rolled his shoulders and stared down at the body, too numb – for now – to acknowledge the living. He knew, objectively, that the body couldn’t hurt him: it was dead. More than dead, it was human. What he was looking at were the remains of Michael Shelley; everything the Spiral had chewed up, failed to digest and spat out again. A mass of curls – lifeless, normal keratin, which didn’t twist and writhe and hurt his head to look at for too long – under which hid a normal, human frame. A bony wrist protruding from a frayed jumper sleeve. At its hip, Jon could see the dark green ribbon of an Institute lanyard escaping from a trouser pocket.
The body had the same delicate, untouchable quality as a wilted flower. A single prod might send it crumbling, he thought. And yet – and yet – he recoiled at the sight, skittering back until his shoulder hit the wall.
“Jon,” called Martin. “Are you okay?”
Jon laughed at that; a laugh that made both Tim and Martin flinch. It wasn’t – he thought – the laugh of a human. If he let his hypochondria take over, he could swear there was an edge to it now, almost like – like there had been to Michael’s. Before Michael had died. Before Helen – no, the Spiral – had discarded him. It. The thought of what he’d witnessed brought with it a fresh shiver of revulsion. His laugh shivered with it, trailing off like a wisp of smoke that grew higher in pitch as it thinned. Would the Eye discard him one day too? What would be left when it did?
“Jon,” Martin tried again.
“It wanted to kill me,” Jon answered in a breath.
“What, Michael?”
“Yes,” said Jon. “And I – I think I was going to let it.”
He swayed where he sat. This time, Martin did rush to him, in spite of Tim’s protests. Tim ran too, because he wasn’t going to leave Martin. It was like they were a team of cavers, all tied together with ropes and carabiners. When one of them fell, the others all pitched forward.
Martin wrapped a heavy arm around him, the weight at once a comfort and a shock. Jon shuddered against it. “Nikola had me,” he breathed, too low for Tim to hear. “Nikola Orsinov. She wanted – it doesn’t matter. How long was I gone?”
“At least a month,” answered Martin, doing the sums in his head. “I think – yeah. A month. Oh, God, Jon. Elias said you were absent. He never told us—”
“Never mind Elias,” said Tim. He was eyeing the body on the floor the way one might eye a wild animal, waiting for it to pounce. “How does Michael tie into this?”
“I told you,” said Jon. “It wanted to kill me.”
“Wanted? Past tense?”
“It’s – he’s dead.”
“Oh.”
“The Spiral is dead?” Martin started. “You killed an entity? How did you – is that even—”
Jon cut him off with a wave of a hand. When he thought back on the past month of his life, it felt like a blur. He knew he wouldn’t be able to articulate it well. “Breekon and Hope took me,” he said. “For the Stranger. For a ritual. I don’t want to talk about it—”
Tim barked a laugh. “That’s rich, Mr. Give-Me-Your-Statement.”
“Yet, Tim,” Jon cut in. “I don’t want to talk about it yet. My head’s still… spinning. From the corridors. The Spiral’s corridors, which still exist because I didn’t kill – probably couldn’t kill – the Spiral.” He gestured briskly to the body. “What you’re looking at is… a severed hand.”
Tim, for once, was cowed. He slid down the wall so that he was sitting level with Martin and Jon, and puffed out a sigh. “Go on, then. How did it happen?”
The words grew sticky in Jon’s throat as he reiterated the story Michael had told. He glossed over the intensity of the panic he had felt, though he was sure they caught some in his voice. When he was done recounting the worst of it – how Helen had arrived at the last minute, and the Spiral had torn free of its avatar’s body – he slumped back against the wall and shut his eyes. They were so heavy, so tender underneath.
With nothing left to say, his assistants sat silently beside him, shoulder-to-shoulder against the scuffed old skirting board. None of them was ready to do more than keep vigil over the corpse of Michael Shelley. None of them was brave enough to turn it over and look at his face.
“Poor bastard,” said Tim, eventually. “He deserved better.”
Jon made a gruff sound of agreement.
“If you ever try that shit on us, Jon—”
“I wouldn’t,” he snapped. “I’m not Gertrude.”
“Still. I’m just saying.”
There was an uncomfortable pause as Jon mulled over the ways he could retort, deciding against all of them. In that pause, Martin sat forward. “At least he’s not in pain any more. If he was alive for any of it, I mean. He might’ve died the moment the Spiral was bound to him, but… these things are never that kind to their victims, are they?”
Jon nodded. “I suppose that’s true. Michael did say that it wasn’t really him, but I think – there was something of him in there. I don’t know what, exactly.” He shook his head. “Its word choice. The way it talked about Gertrude. Like it knew her. Like it had more than Michael’s memories. It had his feelings – his fear.”
He tried to imagine how it might feel, to be the fragile human anchor which kept a creature like the Spiral at bay. To be locked out of time – out of reality – with the Distortion twisting through him, unravelling the very fabric of what made him human. Gertrude’s plan was like looping a paper chain around the handles of a set of double doors, he thought. Forcing a human to bear that sort of weight… what would that do to a person?
Martin was right – it was a good thing Michael had died.
None of them said anything else. The silence stretched slowly, like a tightrope, until it was taut. And then Tim snipped through it.
“Well! Lovely seeing you, Jon. But if this delightful picture—” he gestured at Michael’s remains – “is all we’ve got to look forward to in the end, then I’m calling it a night. Time to go and enjoy my evening, if I can before the existential dread creeps in and reminds me that I’m bound for a horrible demise. Cheerio!”
He stood and Martin started up after him; the cavers’ line ran both ways. Jon felt it tugging at his heart, a painful twinge like a snagged thread. Or that might’ve just been leftover panic.
“Tim,” said Martin. “Tim, wait. You can’t just leave – you have to help us get rid of the—”
Michael’s body jerked.
Jon felt his stomach drop like he was falling again. Beside him, Martin froze halfway to standing. Tim stumbled back and caught himself against the wall.
“No,” Tim muttered. “Christ, no.”
Martin’s words came back to Jon in a horrible rush.
These things are never that kind to their victims, are they?
Of course not. Of course not.
It would’ve been kind to let Michael die; to let him know peace, at last, if there were any to be found after a life like his. Instead, he was breathing – like a drowned man dragged ashore – and scrambling onto hands and knees which shook almost too violently to hold him. His face still hidden beneath his hair, it was impossible to see how much of him was human. How much of him was left.
“Jon,” said Martin, pawing at his shoulder. “Jon, what do we do?”
Jon, for once in his life, said nothing.
He didn’t know.