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Gehrman returns home to find Laurence digging through the dirt.
Home is a generous word for what it is: four walls, some wood and some stone. A hearth in need of sweeping. A table with three working legs and a dubious fourth one. A bed, soft enough for his needs, softer than the hard stone floors of the labyrinths below Byrgenwerth. Outside, a sad little square of soil that doubles as a vegetable patch, where desperate, hardy things occasionally grow. Pails hung by the windows to collect rainwater. A stream for bathing, cluttered by cattails and hidden by high rushes and, past it, the path to the workshops, hard floors he’s made his bed on plenty of nights before. He’d like to sleep in his own bed, tonight. But first he needs to tend to the scholar rooting through his makeshift garden.
He walks up to the door and unlatches it. An old habit, the latch - useless here, deep in the forested paths of the academy grounds. It opens with a groan of protest.
“I’ll be done in a moment,” comes the voice from the soil patch. Low, distracted, the sound travelling from a face that hasn’t looked up.
Gehrman lays his overcoat across the back of one of two wooden chairs, pulled close to the hearth. He lights it, slowly, feeding it thin, dry logs at first; then any other detritus still lingering in his four square walls that he can afford to give up. Bones, most often, or scraps of parchment. A garment too worn to repair, or the nettle that grows insistently over the back windows of the little homestead. It reeks of something sharp and brackish when it burns. Below him are old, treacherous wooden planks that lead straight down, into two meters carved through the packed earth and sealed by stone, a makeshift little cellar for storing harvest and salt meats. The tough kind, the kind he likes to chew while he tinkers in the workshop. It signals to the other Prospectors his desire to be left in silence.
He reaches down to haul a sack of apples up from the cellar before covering the opening with a loose plank of wood. The rest of the floors are blanketed in the pelts of things he’s hunted on the outskirts of the grounds - beavers, mostly, though a fox or two and even a sable marten, which he’d used to make trimmings for Maria’s favourite gloves and hat, late last winter. A single wolf pelt is lain out by the fire - a beast separated from its pack, driven mad as much by starvation as by solitude. On an amber autumn night it had tried to take a student, and met its end with its mouth around the muzzle of Gehrman’s pistol. He’d managed to save everything but its head. He does the skinning and tanning in the workshops to avoid the overwhelming stink from settling in his cottage for good.
Instead, the claustrophobic space smells like his little assortment of vices - poppy resin and tobacco, mainly; with notes of a bright, floral gin, which he’d been told was odourless but is certainly not. It tastes like red peppercorns and berries with a hint of copper, infused with regret.
He takes his pipe and tobacco pouch and steps outside into the fading afternoon. With what little light remains, he knows he should check the squirrel traps - he’d forgotten to do so yesterday, his routine upset by the hubbub surrounding the lake dive. He’d set the traps ages ago, to protect the berry bushes around the shack: wispy, grasping brambles, mostly naked branches masquerading half the year as shrubs that yield handfuls of little tart pink specks, scarcely edible. Maria, in an act halfway between sympathy and self-sabotage, prefers to release the squirrels when she finds them. She never laments the tartness of the berries. He plucks one, brushes it off with the pad of his thumbs and slips it on his tongue. The acid pulls at the corners of his mouth, a flush that wakes him from the languor of the late afternoon.
He will tend to it later, he thinks, watching the sun melt past the crown of trees and down to the horizon. He rounds the side of the cottage, treading all the while across verdant, mossy things that release fragrant evidence of their decay. A few mushrooms pop their smooth, capped heads alluringly from the soil, a flash of white like a quick smile, bare flesh against black robes. Not edible, Maria had told him once. Not if you want to see tomorrow. He’d laughed, and she’d looked at him strangely. Gallows humour, he came to learn, made little sense to her.
Sidling up beside Laurence, he watches the last of the afternoon’s fading light travel down the scholar’s back. The anatomist’s knees are planted squarely in the dirt, legs folded under him. His sleeves are rolled up, white cuffs stained around the edges, and his suspenders hanging loosely around his waist. He’s left his robes hanging by the door, on the same hooks where Gehrman hangs the nets of nettle and flax to catch fish in the generous stream nearby. He’s long since ceased trying to weave or patch them himself; not since Laurence began to do it for him with the quick, deft fingers of a surgeon used to sewing more than just plant fibres.
With the kind of methodical boredom of a practised hand, Laurence roots through the scattering of wild grasses and weeds to gather leaves and blooms - the cheerful blossoms of chamomile, the garish yellow spray of Saint-John’s-Wort. Not for the first time Gehrman wants to chase off the other man, to berate him for laying claim to what isn’t his. Hunched at the shoulders and peering down his upturned nose, the scholar looks half a clever little wild animal, always rooting around for something more. Always taking, this creature of appetite.
But Gehrman keeps his peace, and instead knocks old cinders from his pipe and pats down the fresh mixture before charring the top. The tobacco is sweet, the quality fair - a rare indulgence he’s allowed himself. He doesn’t mind the telltale bitterness of poppy resin laced through it, the way it settles in his mouth after each breath. The hiss of the match fills the silence between them. He takes a few sips before speaking.
“Does Maria know you’re here?”
He watches Laurence place the blooms meticulously in the square of his neckerchief, laid out in the dirt beside him. The red silk, wet at the edges, gleams like a pomegranate split open.
“No. I’ll thank her for these later.”
Gehrman, for all his reproach, does little for the soil patch himself. Maria cultivates it, when she comes around: her own private garden, her own little research supply. When Laurence comes he only takes from it, as he does with everything else around him. And Gehrman, patient as the white cliffs whittled away by the sea over aeons, does not stop him.
He ought to tell Laurence now, he thinks - get it over with. Best to do it as evening approaches, when the dark comes down heavy, and the smoke from the fire and the swill of gin in chipped cups can dampen the tightness in his belly. There are things he dreads in the tombs - ways he’s imagined dying, some as quick and painless as others are long and intimately lurid. Detailing such possibilities in his mind make them bearable, cathartic. An acceptable risk, nothing out of the ordinary - one more consequence of the violence he wears every day, like an old coat.
But there are no deaths he’s imagined at the bottom of that lake, not yet. He hasn’t worked through what it would feel like to drown, or to be crushed like pearl dust from the pressure. Or for some unknowable thing to reach out from the depths and wind its way around his body and drag him down, down into nothing. That, at least, is close enough to a labyrinth death that it’s almost comforting. Less upsetting than not knowing how the other man will react when Gehrman tells him the decision is made.
He tamps the charred tobacco in his pipe and relights it. When he exhales, the smoke curls invitingly into the darkening air. “I’ve decided I’ll do it.”
Laurence stops and looks up at him. Gehrman can see where soil under his fingernails hides the ever-present ink stains.
“The suit looks steady enough,” he continues, under the weight of Laurence’s gaze.“Watertight, the scholars told me, and reinforced with canvas. The helmet can withstand pressure much greater than the lake’s bottom.”
“I know,” Laurence replies, turning back to the dirt. He lays marigold across the silk neckerchief. “I checked with the scholars myself.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“Because I don’t trust it.” He tucks a strand of hair behind his ears with dirty fingers. “The diving suit. It’s a thing made by men. Fallible.”
Gehrman coughs through a smile. “But you trust the blades I sharpen in the workshop to keep you alive.”
Laurence brushes soil from a long, spindly valerian root. “A blade can kill a monster. It can’t defend against a lake.”
Gehrman imagines himself clothed in the absurd rubber contraption, swinging a blade underwater, the bulbous iron and glass helm bobbing with the weight of it. It’s amusing, almost - but there was no note of mirth in Laurence’s tone, and so he turns away to hide his wan smile and makes a show of checking the pails hanging by the windows. It hasn’t rained in a few days, and what little water he has left won’t last beyond tomorrow. He’ll have to fetch some at the academy, or hike a little ways up the forest path, where the gentle hills veer up into steeper cliffs, and the streams offer cold groundwater, icy and safe for drinking. There’s ale in his makeshift cellar, plenty of it - but he’s not sure that’s what he wants to be drinking right before he descends into the fathomless dark of the lake.
“No one else will go below,” he says when the silence begins to stretch, as if it’s justification enough.
Laurence shrugs without looking at him. “I’m sure they can find another fool with a death wish.”
“Would you go?” Gehrman allows himself to press, chewing absently on the end of his pipe. He puts the empty pails back on their hooks. “You want to know, don’t you? If there are more passages down there. Hidden ways into the tombs.”
Laurence opens his mouth, then closes it. Gehrman studies his expression, familiar enough after so many years of companionship. There’s something watchful about it - not animal wariness, but a sort of jaded watchfulness that speaks to a hurried, instinctive rush to action, narrowly held in check by the burden of consequences, a pinprick of self-preservation. He gathers some chickweed leaves gently in both hands and places them to the side before leaning back on his heels.
“I tried to talk Willem out of it, you know. But he wouldn’t hear me.” Something drifts languidly between them, long and iridescent, like a dragonfly. “Truthfully, I can’t understand why he still searches for seals. It’s been years. Eventually we will need to do something with all the labyrinth relics. We’ve a cabinet of curiosities from the depths and very little practical research to show for it -”
“This will double my wages for the month,” Gehrman blurts.
“A great consolation when you’re dead, I’m sure.”
Keep the garden in my absence, he wants to retort, but he doesn’t have the stomach for it now. The tombs took his father, and the tombs will take him. What use in pretending otherwise?
Laurence shifts on his knees, looks up at him through the last muted rays of daylight. Silently Gehrman refills the oil in the lantern hanging from the roof’s shallow awning. The warm light ignites the copper in the scholar’s hair.
Laurence plunges his hands back into the dirt, gaze focused on the vivid, bell-like blossoms of foxglove. “Who’s to accompany me on labyrinth expeditions, if you’re gone? Maria? She would push me down a well if no one were looking.”
“She would,” Gehrman concedes, his smile weary at the edges. “But you handled yourself well enough with a torch last time, if memory serves.”
Laurence scoffs at that, a disgruntled sound that matches his expression. They’d been separated for the first time, Gehrman remembers; someone had failed to leave the proper markers and they’d circled back, lost in the gloom, torches burning low. Gehrman had heard the scholars cry out in the same heartbeat he heard the bell - that malign silver sound he dreads on every descent. When he’d finally found them in the blackness they were at the mercy of a rat, all teeth and sinew and madness in its mouth - and Laurence, waving a torch with the kind of dogged indignation of a man who rebukes the reaper because he’s otherwise occupied.
“Well enough that I almost set fire to the lot of us.” Laurence grabs a fistful of his own hair as if to make his point, cut just below his jaw, shorter than Gehrman ever remembers seeing it.
“Aye.” The nauseating reek of burnt hair had made the rest of the blackened tunnels smell almost agreeable on their way out.
He inhales deeply, tries to keep the taste of resin on his tongue. The foxglove blossoms look soft and inviting enough to caress in the pleasant glow. Laurence begins to fold the scarlet neckerchief on itself, his touch light, careful not to crush the little trove of flora, delicate as vellum. Then, like an afterthought, he plucks a few leaves of mint and slips them into his sleeve.
“Twenty minutes,” Gehrman says into the quiet hum of twilight. “Enough time to see what’s down there. No more.”
Laurence looks at him with all the frankness of a fist to the face. “More than enough time to drown.”
Gehrman ignores this. “He’s looking for a Great One, isn’t he? Willem, I mean. Weren’t you the one to tell me water is a channel through which to commune?”
“It’s only a theory.” Laurence pulls his suspenders back over his shoulders and gathers the little bundle of silk in one hand. He extends the other to Gehrman. “And I sincerely doubt you’ll find a Great One waiting for you at the bottom of the lake.”
Gehrman takes his hand and pulls the smaller man to his feet. “What if I do? I’ve heard it said the gods are merciful, if you can get their attention. Sympathetic, or suchlike, to our dull little existence.”
“Gods help me, Gehrman, do you believe every fanciful thing scholars tell you?”
Gehrman’s chuckle rolls from his throat in thick puffs of smoke. “Only the ones I hear from you.” He lets go of Laurence and removes his hat, brushes the wild tufts of hair back from his cheeks and forehead, then puts the hat back on. “Will you come in and have a drink to my last night on earth?”
He watches Laurence chew the edge of a mint leaf thoughtfully. He turns away to spit the leftovers, then wipes the flecks of green from his mouth. His fingers linger over his lips.
“Can I talk you out of it?”
“No, silver tongue. You can let me smoke my pipe in blessed silence."
Laurence flashes a smile. The tight one, the one that shows his chagrin at the corners. Then he reaches into his trouser pockets and pulls out two coins. Gehrman catches their surface only faintly in the dim firelight. Old Yharnam silvers, from the looks of them.
Without a word, Laurence takes Gehrman’s hand, lays the coins in his palm and closes his fingers. His expression doesn’t change.
“If something happens, I won’t be the one to bury you.”
Gehrman makes his own face very still so that Laurence will not see the bitterness there. But Laurence only ever sees what he wants to see.
“And if you don’t drown, you can use them to buy something other than that vile gin you insist on serving me.”
Gehrman dims the lantern and lets the night air chase the spectre of death from his face.
“Come inside.”