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It's easy to see where he went wrong, now that he's on the other side of the veil.
He should have said something earlier. But there was something about Gertrude's sharp disappointment that reminds him of his mother, that made his soul shrink away from the idea of her glaring disapproval.
So, as Gertrude hauls him around the globe, Gerard Keay ignores the headaches, pops paracetamol like candy, and pretends everything is fine.
Gertrude has this way about her, where her willpower just seems to make things happen like magic. Gerry knows it's not that -- he knows how much work Gertrude puts in -- but she makes it look so effortless that he can't help but want to imitate her. Everything is fine, he thinks, teeth gritted against the throbbing pain in his head, as he waits in the hotel hallway for Gertrude to finish talking to the tape recorder so they can check out. Everything is fine.
When Gerry was seven he caught mono at school. It wrecked him at the time. At one point his fever had shot up to a solid 40 degrees. The memories he has of being sick are fuzzy, but he remembers his mother holding him on the sofa in the middle of the night, running her fingers through his hair, the telly playing something with the volume down low. Mum offering him anything he wanted -- water, juice, milk, whatever she could get him to drink. Hot tea and cold lemonade and something, in the places where the fever made things especially blurry-bright, that went down like grainy sludge and left bits stuck in his teeth. He never asked what it was. Why would he have wanted to know?
He treasures those memories and he's ashamed of it. Miserable as it had been at the time, he clings to the image of the mother he wanted and, for a split second, had. One who stayed up all night to rock him in front of the telly when the fever wouldn't let him sleep, running gentle fingers through his hair. One who staved off dehydration by giving him anything he asked for, whether it was cinnamon cocoa or a milkshake at three in the morning. One who resorted to witchcraft to soothe his raging fever, because he was loved. He was.
As always, the thought brings up the same horrific image of her half-flayed on the kitchen floor, screaming at him, but it's no more nauseating than it usually is.
Whatever's left of her, whatever can still manifest, can't help him. If she ever loved him, she sure as hell can't now.
He's resisted the urge to tell Gertrude about his headaches for now. It's not likely to gain him any sympathy. He's under no delusions that Gertrude loves him. She feels obligated to him for some shadowy reasons, and she's taken steps to mark him for the Beholding so he's largely safe from other factions. But she does not love him. No one really does.
Gerry takes two more pills and sets his jaw against the ache in his skull.
-
He gets clumsy.
His left hand tingles, on and off, for weeks before he really notices it. He finds himself shaking it out more frequently during long stints at a keyboard. He assumes it's carpal tunnel and leaves it at that.
It takes him several tries to light the cigarette now, outside some university in Italy, ignoring the sidelong glances he gets. It feels like he's got too many fingers suddenly, bizarrely, and that gives him pause - but no, there've been no Flesh-related incidents to mark him recently. And besides, he's pretty sure a few of his mother's old enchantments are still active.
She did several little rituals to him. Most of them were protective in nature. Some were horseshit entirely. A few of them, he doesn’t to this day have the faintest idea what they were meant to do. The earliest one he can remember is her filling a motel bathtub with soil and rock salt, packing it around him. The salt scratched his bare skin and the dirt was cold and he shivered and tried not to cry as his mother read something aloud that made the walls lean in to listen.
But the Buried has always left him alone.
Which is why, when Gertrude emerges from the building, tight-faced, to tell him they’ll be breaking into a mining site, he agrees to go first.
-
He gets a dislocated shoulder for his trouble.
The nurse who does the x-ray is nice about the fact that he can’t speak Italian. She mostly talks to Gertrude, but she makes an attempt at repeating herself in English for him.
Gertrude is clearly annoyed at the delay, and as soon as the nurse leaves she whirls on him. “You’re very lucky it’s not worse,” she says, cold and curt. “If it were, I’d be sending you home. I still might.”
“Don’t start with that,” he says. “You’re not going to.”
Gertrude is already turning back to the door, fishing in her pockets for her phone. “You’re reckless,” she snaps.
“It was clumsy. It won’t happen again. I can still travel.”
Gertrude is halfway out the door. “I have a job to do. I can’t be looking after you at the same time. We’ll talk later.” She puts the phone to her ear and ducks out.
Gerry rubs his eyes. His vision feels fuzzy. He doesn’t know if it’s from exhaustion or frustration or the shitty fluorescent lights or his constant headaches or dehydration or the fact that he hasn’t gotten a hit of nicotine in twenty-four hours.
-
His mother hated him smoking.
That’s why he did it, of course, because there’s only so many reasons why someone picks up a cigarette at thirteen. It wasn’t even her attention he wanted — it was just such a refreshingly normal thing for his mum to be furious about. Sure, he might get in trouble at school for drawing sigils in his textbooks, and he can tell the freshness of deli meat down to the day it was slaughtered by the smell alone, but he could still come home and get shouted at for smelling like an ashtray. It was nice, being ordinary, even for a moment.
When he gets back to the hostel, Gertrude is packing. “There’s something about a missing clown in New Zealand,” she says without preamble. “It’s probably nothing, but I’m going to follow up. I won’t be taking you.”
Gerry sighs but doesn’t argue. They’ve done that dance before. “I’ll head back to London, then.” He reaches for his own bag. Neatly stacked on top are two unopened packs of the shitty menthols he’s been smoking lately. “You’re an enabler,” he says instead of thank you.
“Don’t say I never did anything for you,” Gertrude says over the files she’s scooping off the cramped desk in no particular order. “There’s probably a dozen things that’ll kill you before the cancer gets a chance, anyway.”
“Poetic. You nicked the last of mine, didn’t you?”
“I don’t have to answer that,” Gertrude announces with dignity.
His head aches and his hand tingles and his recently-dislocated shoulder throbs and his vision is fuzzy and he’s fine.
He takes another pill.
-
He smokes too much once he’s back in the UK. Part stress, part boredom, and part because nothing but the shitty menthols seems to have any taste.
Carrie comes to see him once, a few days after he gets back, when his shoulder is still tender and his sulking, predictable ego is still researching circuses in New Zealand. She drops by Pinhole Books with some cheap takeaway and a stack of antiques she wants him to look at.
“You look like shit, babe,” she says instead of hello, offloading a bag of Chinese food into his hands whether he wants it or not. “I thought you were off relaxing.”
“I never said that. I said I was in Italy.” He spends about as much time in this building as Carrie does. He couchsurfs if he can. There are too many ghosts here to feel safe.
Carrie breezes in with her easy American bustle. “I’m serious. You’ve lost weight. Is it, you know, your mom? I know you two—“
“Yeah, no, just. Work shit. The usual.”
Carrie has never met his mother. And she rubs Gertrude the wrong way. But she’s got her finger to the pulse of several occult subcultures, and she turned up a Leitner for him once, so he sits with her and keeps the conversation light and focused on the books. Carrie does most of the talking, the light glinting off her lip piercings beginning to give him another headache.
“—right, so he brings us back to this, like, I think it was a laundry room originally, but now it just reeks of raw meat and it’s full of trash and I’m thinking, well, this is it, this is how I die. Cause it’s crusty as fuck and also incredibly sketchy, so I’m either going to get murdered or catch some horrible STD and without even having fun catching it. But ultimately I think he was just some sort of heterosexual who doesn’t do laundry and also maybe traffics exotic pets or something because he did way too much coke while I was there and that laundry room smelled like tiger shit.”
“Tiger shit,” Gerry echoes. His hand tingles in its latex glove and he shakes it out absently before returning to flipping through the books. Mundane, so far. No Leitner bookplates, but that doesn’t mean much. There’s got to be at least some abnormal books the man didn’t rub his greedy, withered balls over.
“I took a course in zoology when I was a kid, we — nevermind. I know what tiger shit smells like. They don’t get much fiber in their diets. Not the point. And,” she adds, “I am dead serious, you need to eat a sandwich or something. Is your blood sugar okay? You’re shaking.”
His hands are shaking, now that he pays attention. The ancient pages of the book he’s leafing through rustle faintly with every tremor. Probably his nicotine addiction. He shuts the book, sets it down, peels off the gloves. “Yeah, ‘s fine. Gonna go out for a smoke. You want one?”
“Nah. Thanks. I’ve got a morning shift tomorrow and need to catch a ride before the trains stop running. Unless you’re burying the lead and you’re really about to tell me I’ve brought you, like, Satan’s Apocalypticon and you’ll pay me millions for it?”
“Unfortunately, we already have the Apocalypticon in storage. There’s a bidding war happening on the website.” Gerry tosses the gloves in the bin and scrubs his good hand over his eyes. One of them still fuzzes over from time to time, or sends starbursts of color creeping across his field of vision in time to his pulse. He doesn’t have time to see anyone about it. It’s fine. He can read well enough.
“Ah, well, can’t all be bangers.” Carrie scoops up the books and sets about packing her things. Gerry has the terribly selfish urge to kiss her. He doesn’t even like Carrie, romantically, but he desperately doesn’t want to be alone in this house, and maybe he could talk her into staying over if he kisses her before she gets her coat on.
He dithers too long and then Carrie’s got her coat on and hugs him goodbye, her arms warm around him, her hands hot through his shirt as she pulls him close.
It’s the last time he will ever see Carrie, and it’s the last hug he’ll ever get.
-
The night is full of ghosts.
He gets a half hour of sleep that ends in nightmares of everything he dreads. Gertrude on the kitchen floor, naked and flayed and commanding him in a voice full of static to finish it, to do this for her, she’s never asked a thing of him until now, please, baby, I can’t do it, you’ve got to do this, all right? Breathe, baby, it’s all right. Just like we practiced. Under the skin. You’ll have to pull hard, understand? And again he staggers out of the house in a blind panic, covered in blood, and no matter how far he runs he can hear Gertrude as she bleeds to death, telling him in her stern and businesslike voice how disappointed she is that he fled.
When he wakes, he’s covered in sweat and his muscles ache like they’ve been clenched for hours and his mouth tastes like blood and his skull feels like it’s imploding and he doesn’t quite remember going to bed —
“Oh, baby.”
No.
He jerks away from the cold finger that tries to stroke his cheek. The movement makes his head shriek with pain, but he bites it down and looks.
His mother crouches before him, skeletally thin and covered in Sanskrit. Her eyes are blank voids and the smile stretching her mouth is the smile of a shark about to bite.
“No,” he chokes out through the pulsing pain that sends starbursts of color splashing across his vision. “Gertrude — the book. You’re gone. You’re gone.”
Mary Keay reaches for him with a withered hand and he throws himself out of her reach, his back slamming into the wall, sending stacks of books toppling to the ground. “Gerard,” croaks his mother through bloodless lips.
He runs.
-
In hindsight, that was probably his first seizure. It fits the timeline.
-
He breaks into the Magnus Institute and sleeps fitfully under Gertrude’s desk for a few hours. He hasn’t brought anything — a charger, painkillers, not even his passport — so he raids the employee break room at 5:30 to splash water on his face before he heads back to Pinhole. He’s going to New Zealand. He doesn’t care what Gertrude says. He doesn’t want to be alone. He has to do something. If he has to wait for his shoulder to stop aching, he’ll lose his mind.
He throws up in the sink, splashes his face again, and books a ticket to New Zealand on his phone. He leaves the Institute through the fire door in the maintenance closet. Just to be safe. He doesn’t want to be seen. Well, he amends wildly at the eye tattoos on his knuckles, present company excluded.
He vomits again in the alley outside.
-
The plane ride is long and agonizing. The pressure of the cabin makes his skull howl in pain for the entire trip. He has a layover in Beijing and he spends most of it curled in a chair waiting. He puts his backpack of essentials on the seat beside him to keep neighbors at bay.
He’s hungry. The last thing he ate was Carrie’s takeaway the night before last. He couldn’t eat anything on the plane (the idea made him nauseous) and none of the restaurants in the airport are tempting, but he buys some overpriced prawn wontons in a vain attempt to get rid of the sour taste in his mouth. It lingers anyway. The wontons do little to settle his stomach, but the shake in his hands eases up. His left hand still prickles with pins and needles, though.
Now, what's left of the wontons sits forgotten as he does more digging into the Circus. The wifi is a little reluctant to work with him, but within a few hours he's managed to access all his old research and pick up more or less where he and Gertrude left off. Aside from the missing clown in New Zealand, they didn't have many leads, but there's a ping from one of his half-dozen daisy-chained alert systems that wasn't there the last time he checked. It sends him to a copy of a police report from rural Pennsylvania, taken about sixteen hours ago, about an abandoned property.
Music, it said. A neighbor had reported loud, unusual music, audible from an acre away. "Like an accordion or something," the caller had told the dispatcher. It had taken forty minutes for any unit to respond. Quick for the area. They looked around and found nothing.
It's a scrap, but it's better than the zero leads he'd had before. And it makes sense, if he thinks about it. Old-growth Appalachia would make a good haven for the Circus and its followers. Calliope music can be audible for miles, so it makes sense to move someplace where your closest neighbors are half a mountain away. His thoughts roam in circles and get nowhere. He's so lost in grasping for puzzle pieces that just won't come that he nearly misses the boarding announcement for his flight.
He stows the laptop and braces himself for another eighteen-hour flight.
-
He clenches his jaw so hard that he breaks a tooth on the plane. He barely notices.
-
When Gerry was nineteen he did cocaine in a friend's basement for the first time. It was terrifying, in retrospect, but at the time he was at the tail end of teenagerhood and had bravado born from both his unorthodox education and his mother's aura of confidence. The rush that bloomed in his blood then, on his mate Will's shitty sofa, was so unlike anything he'd felt before that he was swept away by it. He thought he could have fought God, if he had the chance. And later, he'd been sensible enough to never try it again. It makes you reckless, he'd told his haggard reflection in his mate Will's shitty bathroom, and recklessness gets people killed. That goes double for you.
-
But when the plane lands at Marlborough Airport and a flight attendant quietly asks him to step into the staff section to offer him a bump, he takes it without question. It quiets the raging pain in his head, and clears his thoughts enough to thank the man.
The attendant squeezes his arm. "Do you want a ride to the hospital?" he asks quietly.
Gerry knows he looks like shit, but it's unexpected. "No. Thank you, though." His mouth tastes like blood from his freshly-cracked tooth, but the bright sparkling tingling glittering in his blood keeps him from feeling it. Much.
The flight attendant lets it go. Gerry flees.
-
He manages a shower and a change of clothes before he finally catches up with Gertrude. His hand still tingles, up into his wrist and forearm now, but it's overshadowed by the far more immediate pain of his still-tender shoulder, his near-constant headaches, and his newly broken tooth.
He hadn’t told her he was coming, so when she walks out of the man’s house and sees Gerry leaning up against her rental car, Gerry expects the double-take. He doesn’t expect for her to cross the distance in a few quick strides and drop the briefcase beside the car. “Gerard,” she snaps.
“I have a lead,” he interrupts, because that’s the only way he’s going to get out of trouble.
Then, of all things, Gertrude sets the back of her hand to his cheek.
The gesture shocks him speechless of the explanation he’d had planned and he stands there for a moment, stunned. Then Gertrude steps back and scowls. “What’s happened?” she asks, but doesn’t Ask, for which he’s grateful.
“Nothing. Nothing’s happened. Christ. I said I have a lead.” Gerry avoids looking at the man now coming out of the house behind Gertrude. He looks like exactly the kind of rural farmer who would have a story about a missing clown. “Pennsylvania. It’s close to the Usher place. Well, not close, but not far.”
Gertrude stares him down, unreadable. Her gaze has weight to it that pins Gerry to the spot. “Get in the car,” she finally says.
He does.
-
The first flight they can get from Marlborough to America is to Chicago. Gertrude looks over her reading glasses at Gerry’s laptop while they both wait by the terminal.
“This is what dragged you to New Zealand after me,” she finally says, shutting the laptop and folding her glasses away. “And you couldn’t have just called.” She’s watching him now.
Gerry is redoing his eyeliner with the help of his phone camera. His left hand won’t cooperate. He shakes it out. “You don’t answer when I call anyway.”
“I do. Sometimes I just have other things to handle at the time.” She’s watching him closer than he’d like. “Am I going to have to Ask?”
“Ask what?” Like he doesn’t know.
Gertrude is silent for a long moment that seems full of static. It’s a moment that makes the hair on the back of his neck prickle. She is watching him. She is Watching him.
He pretends he doesn’t notice. He shakes out his left hand again. It tingles.
Their flight boards before Gertrude can decide on a course of action. He’s grateful.
-
They get to Chicago, eventually.
They get a short-term rental, because they’ve both been doing a lot of traveling, frankly, and maybe Gerry just wants a goddamn shower in a bathroom that isn’t haunted.
It’s nearly three days before things go to hell.
Gertrude is on her laptop at the kitchen table, scrolling through crime scene photos over her morning coffee, and Gerry is just trying to plug in his fucking phone when splashes of neon color sweep over half of his field of vision, sparking in time with his pulse.
“Shit,” he manages to get out around his numbing tongue.
Gertrude looks up from her laptop just as he blacks out.
-
The seizure is short.
When he comes to, he tells Gertrude anything she asks. Symptoms. Dates. How long it’s been since he’s eaten. How long it’s been since he’s slept. His numb-tingling hand. The endless screaming headaches. She doesn’t take him to a hospital. He doesn’t ask her to.
He doesn’t keep food down anymore.
They get on a bus to Pennsylvania.
-
The bus has crap wifi.
Gertrude is Watching him.
He wishes his mum were here.
-
He has another seizure on the bus. Gertrude convinces the other passengers not to call an ambulance.
-
They get to Pittsburgh in the early morning hours. There’s a rental car already waiting. He staggers off the bus with Gertrude right at his back. He doesn’t need to look back to know that she is Watching him.
He’s sure she knows what’s wrong with him. The fact that she hasn’t said so frightens him in a way he’s not quite able to articulate. One of the other passengers gives him a steadying hand to the rental car. Gerry tries to thank him but his mouth won’t work. His left hand is numb.
Gertrude drives him to the hospital.
He wants his mother.
-
The nurse is trying to find a vein to start an IV line when he overhears it.
“Two that I’m aware of,” Gertrude is saying, using the artificially-apologetic voice she uses when she’s trying to tell some poor statement-giver that she cannot help them shake a curse or a ghost or a what-have-you. “There may have been more seizures. The most recent was on the bus, maybe two hours ago.”
“Any diagnoses?” asks the doctor who is doing an excellent job of holding back her anger. If Gerry hadn’t spent so much of his life surrounded by emotionally constipated women, he’d have thought the doctor was really, truly sorry for this old British woman.
Gertrude hesitates for a moment that is full of static.
Gerry clenches his hands. The eye tattoos swivel on his skin, just a millimeter, to Look at him, and the nurse trying to find the IV jerks back a little before she restarts her attempts. She will tell herself she didn’t see anything. Gerry knows her type.
“Right frontal glioma,” Gertrude finally says. It sounds like it’s being dragged out of her the way she drags secrets out of blustering businessmen when they’re being difficult.
The flimsy curtain that offers a perfunctory attempt at privacy offers no defense against the curling dread that settles in his stomach with the pinch of the nurse’s needle. It’s her fourth try.
“Any treatment?” asks the doctor after a beat of silence.
Gertrude is quiet for a beat of her own. Then: “No.”
The doctor inhales loud enough to be heard over the bustle of the emergency department, and then when she speaks, it’s without the attempt at covering her annoyance. “Nothing? Any supplements, any vitamins, any homeopathic remedies?”
“No.”
The nurse gets the IV started at last.
-
They don’t let Gertrude back to see him unsupervised.
He’s all right with it until the fuzzy dark of a sedative starts to take form. The nurse who had hung up the IV bag had assured him it was just saline, to hydrate him, but there’s no mistaking the blurry warmth now dragging his mind to a sluggish crawl. He didn’t consent -- but Gertrude probably did, claiming to be his mother like she usually does.
And in a fit of spite he wishes his real mum were here, viciously, because he knows what Mum would do. She would tear this place apart. She would peel flesh from his back to bind into her book as a failsafe, and then she would take the effusively-polite American nurses and dismantle them limb by limb. He imagines her, flayed and skinless and her grin like a shark, coming to rescue him. She would run her fingers through his hair with the telly on low and ask him what he thinks he can keep down. Ginger ale, he might ask, and his mother would take him home and save him, she wouldn’t have let this happen to him the way Gertrude has, Mum loves him, she loves him, she loves him. Loved. Past tense.
An orderly comes in to cut his hair. They’re talking about neurosurgery, outside the curtain.
He throws up stomach acid and foam.
Gerard Keay will have his next seizure in three hours. He will not survive it.