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“I think… I think I finally understand why she brought me back.
I just don’t understand why she left me behind.”
( 1 )
There’s nothing but road ahead of them. It stretches infinitely under a sun that burns bright and hot into the rental car. It has been weirdly difficult acquiring it, having to talk to the rental service and Gertrude needing to make sure that there wasn’t any unnecessary scratch on any of the cars very clean surfaces.
“If I will have to pay extra, Elias will take it from my salary. And I’m not going to grant him that satisfaction”, was her very sensible and clipped answer. Gerard stood besides her in the sun and focused very hard on not taking off his black coat. Even here and now, in the heat of the car, sweat pooling on his forehead and threatening to drip into his eyes. That could lead them to a funny end: One dead Archivist over her sidekick goths stupid pride. Car accident ass death. Everyone would get a good laugh out of it.
Until the world ends. That one always is a bit of a bummer.
And anyways, Gerry can handle it. He does! Otherwise, Gertrude would scold him into taking the coat off. She has an even better grip on the situation than he does. At all times. It’s kind of infuriating. And very terrifying.
Anyways, the coat stays on. She can bug him until they both crash and die about it.
The coat is an anchor. It is home.
Gertrude has never asked him to take it off, even if she spared some curious and slightly judgmental glances at his more particular habits.
“How do you explain the blood, when you take it out for laundry? I can only imagine you have to give it away every two weeks or so.”
“I wash it myself.”
“That explains a lot of things about you.”, she had answered and Gerard Keay did hear that she meant it; even when he didn’t want to dwell on that fact any longer than necessary. And thankfully that was the end of that discussion.
Even now she stays quiet about it. Maybe because she has her own habits she doesn’t want to break. It’s not like she is exactly dressed for the hot sun. Or didn’t cut the eyes out of one of Gerard’s favorite shirts that one time.
“Are you getting tired?”, she asks instead. “I’ll take over if you need a break.”
“Or we could just…”
He shrugs in the vague direction of… anything. A real break would be nice right now. Finding a bit of shadow and some quiet. But he already knows it’s a lost cause, doesn’t even have to glance in the direction of his “business partner”.
“I’d prefer it if we could get to our destination as fast as possible, Gerard”, is her answer and that’s that. No point in fighting the decision.
It only takes a minute to swap places. The movement is practiced and almost comforting. They are well-oiled machine or maybe even a well-trained duo. Some lousy but efficient adventurers on their great quest to save the world!
What a laugh.
And then Gertrude starts the car and the road swallows them again.
Gerard has always hated the road. And he had loved it just as much.
It had been an escape at first. Or at least it felt like one. Just a place to not be at home and with his mom and the books and the confusing studies. The chance to catch your breath and let the world be… simply that. A place to stay.
Yeah. As if things ever were allowed to be that easy.
As if there weren’t enough clues and weird things to see. As if he wouldn’t get needled if he went home about where he had been and what he had done and what use his silly little walks had been.
His mom had laughed at him when he told her that he was just out in the park. Gerard never found out if she thought of it was a criminal offense, a deliberate waste of everyone’s time or just plain stupidity.
One day Gerard had found himself sitting at a train station, wondering what would happen if he ignored all the signs and bordered cabin after cabin until he found himself… where? Where exactly would it lead him? Where could he ever go? What would he find if he just… went away?
The answer came weirdly easy to him. Somewhere haunted, somewhere strange, somewhere dangerous and frightening and just like home. A burned out building that was hiding ghost. An empty street that would only hold the shadow of other people. A quiet night, where monsters lurked behind the dimly flickering street lamp.
He had gone home and looked up where to find his first Leitner not soon after. It had been a manic desire to reestablish some control in his life. If he needs to go out – and small little Gerry really really needed to – then he needed to know where he was going and why. He needed to have his answer ready both for himself and his mom.
Going outside and coming back… both would be so much easier if he would simply know, why he was doing it! And if it was an answer that didn’t taste like dirt or fog or rot.
It was becoming a predictable rhythm very easily. Both for him and his mom. But at least she smiled when he opened the door to their little books shop.
At the book at least.
The little twitch of her lips was barely bearable and Gerry found himself out on the road as soon as he can.
( 2 )
Their apartment is small but quiet and secluded. The owner seems… fine. Eager to get out of their hair and that is probably best for everyone. Gertrude does most of the talking and it’s… as surreal as it always is. Gerard does his best to help, which means not flinching when she calls him her son and he feels his memories of his real mom once again creep up. Like she can simply pop up and grab him again.
She can’t. Not now and not ever again. Gertrude made sure of that herself. Showed him the mangled book with a slightly mischievous smile and then waved it away. After all, there was nothing more than Gerard’s life at stake.
“If you help me out on my travels, we’ll call it even. I’m getting old and the help of someone who can tell their left foot from their right would be of use here.”
Which brings him right back to the present. He’s not even unhappy here. Tired, sure. Wary, all the time. But life continues and sometimes things become better and not entirely worse. Sometimes a parent gets swapped out with a lighter mirror image.
At least there is still something to do. There always has to be. And who would want to have it any other way?
Gerard lays down on the bed trying to forget the ordeal of the day as fast as possible. His head hurts, probably from the sun shining constantly down on them with little more than some water bottles and a broken air conditioner to support them.
Did that show up on the car warranty? Or did they get one over Gertrude after all? Hopefully not, no one wants to fight a war against a car rental service on top of Eldritch fear entities. One of them gets you to places!
“Get me some of that water, mom”, he jokes, still lying on the bed. Gertrude throws the bottle with practiced precision and it would have fallen against his nose, if Gerard hadn’t already anticipated the move and catches the thing. His joints ache together with his throbbing head, as he sits up again.
“I’m glad, somebody else got to raise you. You’re a handful.”
“It would’ve been a nightmare”, Gerard agrees.
For both of them, honestly. Not that he is particularly happy with what he got but… eh. Beggars can’t be choosers. Sometimes he still likes to dream though and in very rare moments he wonders if Gertrude does the same thing. Wonder if things could have been different for both of them.
He doubts it. But one can never be sure.
There had always been something sinister about the word ‘family’. It meant “obligation” or “history”, or simply a story one could never escape from.
“We did once emerge out of a noble family, Gerard. Can you believe that?”
He definitely could but only as a really bad joke. Yet his mom laughed at her own words in bitter and deeply serious honesty.
“They of course took everything from us. I wonder what Von Closen really found at the depths for him to be shut up this greatly and abruptly. It must have been something truly marvelous!”
By which she of course meant something really fucking awful. And Mary knew it, one could hear it in the way she spoke, with this familiar light in her eyes, that Gerard always took as his own warning sign.
He never really cared. He was almost sure that no one but his own mother did.
She cared about oh so many things in her own way. Even Gerard, thought he would have preferred literally anything else.
He was the only thing she really had after all. In a way. And in oh so many she didn’t.
And wasn’t that infuriating?
He knew that it would drive both of them insane. And it did one day. Sometimes, he thinks, he had only been silently waiting for her to move over the edge and fall and fall and fall into the very thing she worshipped with awful and aweful hatred.
“You have to help me”, she had begged him then, her own skin flayed into strips, tearing at her flesh and the hooks she hung up. Her very being suspended above a pool of blood, the cursed book right beside her and the razor blade still between her bloody fingers.
“We can do so much more, together. You have to do it! You have to!”
She was barely coherent after those words, babbling on about death and power and things Gerard could have never really cared about at all.
He had tried. God, had he tried! And he wanted to believe in the same fate she did. In this very moment it felt like he had to. But Gerard had always been a terrible child. Wasn’t his mom the one who always said that he couldn’t do anything right?
Why trust him now? Why was she suspending her very being right next to his shaking hands?
He was sure that this was the last piece of love she did ever offer him. Before her soul got torn into shreds together with her very being.
But it was still him who ran away. The one who had murdered her, if only by reputation and some complicated betrayal. And Gerard Keay kept running and running even though he had learned years ago how very futile that was.
( 3 )
The next morning the headache hasn’t stopped. It pounds into his ears so hard, that Gerard finds it difficult to even sit and rummage through his bag until he gets a hold of his painkillers. He isn’t too sure, how many pills he ends up swallowing. Or if they do anything at all.
In the other room behind a closed door, Gertrude sits in a chair silently mumbling to herself, Statement in her hand. He knows that her brow is slightly furrowed in concentration, even though he doesn’t see it right now. Even though he feels far away, so far that he doesn’t dare entering her room or even breathing into her direction. He knows she wouldn’t have wanted to and asked him if he didn’t have something better to do right now. They had leads to follow up and he could spend the exact same time planning their rout anyways.
If his head wouldn’t have given him so much shit, that is.
He washed himself and got his clothes done, when she shows up again. Even now after the statement Gertrude looks tired and a bit… sad. Wow, that is definitely new. Maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised, it’s a long business trip and even an Archivist can probably feel their age at some point. But it’s still weird. Sudden. Something inconceivable, maybe.
He had been able to see her mom flaying herself open. That had only been terrible.
Gertrude Robinson was a rock. A very stubborn rock, that someone hat snapped a very very sharp edge into. A tool able, to break other things into even tinier pieces.
She would never do something as foolish as risking her own life if there was more work to be done. And there always was work. Especially now and so far away from London.
“You know, if you’re feeling woozy, I could tell you a story or two. It’s not like the Eye doesn’t know about my misadventures already.”
“Believe me, there’s no need for something this drastic, Gerard”, she answers, her voice crystal clear. Her face, however, betrays her. She simply takes a second too long rearranging the old expression out of it and now the new one sits as an uncanny mask above it. “Even if someone else might appreciate your willing approach.”
He grimaces at the clear warning. The implication that he is here because he wants to. He doubts that the same can be said for her… or at least not in a way this literal.
It’s bullshit of course. It’s all bullshit and they both know it.
But it’s also another knife Gertrude wields with precision. He knows she is staring right at him. He knows his throat an fingers and jaw is starring blankly back.
Gerard also knows he’ll shut up for the time being at let her get back to her work
There have always been eyes in Gerards life. First his mother’s, of course. A pale blue, like a dried-out lake or a puddle at the beach’s low tide. Waiting for you to lose yourself and then moving fast to swallow you whole.
He sometimes tried to remember his father’s eyes too. He never managed and the one time he had asked his mom about him, she only started laughing and laughing and laughing until he left the room.
He knew what it was like to watch something. To go looking and to find what one didn’t even want to know. There was a comforting regularity about it. One can only swallow so many horrible news before the brain adjusts and the only thought in your mind is “Of course, that would be the case too!”.
Reactions come easy when one expects the outcome of everything to be unpleasant. And in his word no one would ever think differently. It became at least funny at some point.
When his mother’s eyes disappeared Gerard knew that he had to replace them.
At first the police and the courts and their scrutiny seemed good enough. Almost comforting in their desire to dig into his family business, trying to find its ugly side. Or only his. He almost willingly showed them everything, hoped that they would dig deeper and find all the corpses. Maybe even the ones he didn’t uncover. Could he even be surprised like that anymore?
He almost hoped that one of them would dare to look at the locked book case, pick one of those vile little things up and then pay the price. At least the other ones would have witnessed. They would have seen the danger. They would have known.
His mom laughed at those words and only shook her head.
That is what he remembers most about the time. Her laugh. And her sudden presence and his surprise every time he showed her face.
Maybe that was what drove him to his own insanity. To his own decision to completely and utterly disregard his mother’s most pressing advise.
Never give yourself over to one entity. They will start to take and take until there is nothing left of you.
He had already known this to be futile. Simple desperation clad in such a neat little rule. A fence to safeguard a house against forces of nature. “I will not step over it!”, Mary Keay hat shouted and boxed herself in while refusing this fact so very very bravely. And then she had started ripping herself apart to bind herself to her very End.
Fucking fantastic.
Really great work. Only it was Gerard Keay who – as always – had to clean up the mess.
Had it really been nothing but pettiness that drove him to the tattoo parlor with little sketches and very clear instructions? Was a needle supposed to hurt that much? Was the opened skin supposed to also rip into his mind?
It had been nothing against the frightened anticipation and then the relive, as he stared at his own wrist and saw the pupil of the tiny eye slowly turn in his direction.
And then there was his mom’s laugh, when she returned still. Her hand on his shoulder hadn’t been a surprise this time but a very well-known terror.
( 4 )
Gerard hasn’t expected that the day would end with him in the hospital. He hasn’t been sure if Gertrude did but now she carries herself well. Her explanations to the staff are curt but comprehensible and they come together with a weirdly detailed description of his past medical history. Which isn’t exactly expansive but Gerard still doesn’t like hearing it from anyone else. It makes the entire trip sound weirdly serious.
“They are thinking about impromptu brain surgery”, Gertrude had told him and even she couldn’t hide the mirth in her voice. Gerards snorts.
He is going to die. He really is going to die and in a hospital of all places!
Maybe he should have tried skinning himself. Or maybe not that he still hates that shitty book that ruined his life. But something that would have ended him before lying here under bright neon lights and next to the only woman he would have liked to see here. He must have done something horribly wrong if he got Gertrude Robinson as his best and only friend now standing watch over his last minutes on this stupid terrible earth.
Gerard wished he had the strength to close his eyes and let the silence in the room wash over him. But he is still afraid. And no one here can back out of their own decisions anyways.
“I’ll need to leave you alone for a little while”, Gertrude says. “We still need to follow up on our lead, even when you are taking a little break.”
A little break. That sure is one way to put it!
Maybe he should wish for her to stay here and the world to end. Then there would be some consequences to his brain spontaneously deciding to shut itself down. He wouldn’t even miss out too much if the rest of reality were to follow in his footsteps.
But he doesn’t. Not even for the world’s sake. No. Fuck this world, honestly. What a shit place to spend his last moments in!
But Gertrude losing this fight… that seems downright cruel. And too sad to think about right now. At least give her a chance to let all of this go up in flames. Have someone be warm through this entire nightmare. Other then the freaks from the lightless flame. Their heat has touched him more than enough. No need to give them another inch!
It is when she turns away, when Gerard sees it in her bag. Papers and Statements, of course, but also the glimpse of a slightly big and unwieldy book, bound with uneven pieces of… well it’s not paper, isn’t it?
He only glances at a tiny piece, only for the fraction of a second, but his mind helpfully provides the rest of a book, Gerard could never have forgotten. Whose both painfully smooth and terribly mangled pages burned themselves under his eyelids.
Then Gertrude is gone and suddenly it’s a relief again.
There were still the books. The ones taken. The ones burned. And, of course, always the same one, that haunted him from the very beginning.
What if Mary Keas had never found the Catalogue of the Trapped Dead? What a useless question! There was a reason that the Eye never dealt in hypotheticals.
It doesn’t feel that there could have ever been a life without these shitty books. They were a constant. He was the son of a book-store-owner after all! The only legacy, he had every believed in. The one he had run into in his youth instead of away from. One of the many big mistakes in a very cursed life.
Sometimes burning a Leitner had felt like undoing a bit of that legacy. Hurting the collection that he once had added to. More often it felt simply like a different direction on the very same road. The only one he was ever meant to take.
Was that, what legacy was about? Did his holy and probably equally stupid ancestors walk the same street? Also haunted by stupid ass libraries and their shitty evil keepers?
Gerard had tried to burn the page though. Of course, he had! Kind of…
It was difficult to do when he could still here her pleading to finish the job. To take the razor into his own hands. Fire was more vicious. What right did he have to hurt his mother, when he couldn’t even have done it the right way?
So he had to give the book to her when she offered him a chance to get rid of this curse that had plagued him not only in the last few years.
He had to trust Gertrude Robinson.
He barely had a different choice.
There was a smile playing on the edges of her lips, when she took the book. Like an inside joke that would never open itself to Gerard Keay. He hadn’t liked that smile and preferred her steady hands and cold eyes way more.
Then he was left alone and his own place felt too small as the outside world grew too big with possibility.
Until she appeared again and he saw the mangled book. He knew that there would be no other way for him to go. That he would follow this woman to the end or the world. Or his own life.
It was a relief to have his eyes on the road again.
( 5 )
It hurts to wake up again. It hurts to speak without the lungs to do it. It hurts to feel without a beating heart and to see without eyes.
It hurts to exist, when everything that made Gerard Keay should have ended long ago.
Yet he still finds himself in a car. An old one, not the weirdly clean rental with the still broken AC.
The faces are new though. An old and grimy man with a woman whose determined stare never leaves the road.
Hunters, obviously. Gerard would have been annoyed by that realization if it wouldn’t have been so endlessly fitting. Or if his exasperation wouldn’t have hurt too much.
Everything was a bright stab of pain and a deep ache at the same time. Every sensation, every word, every thought were angles cutting through his mind.
“Good to see that you are awake”, says the woman, her gaze still not leaving the road. The man next to her chuckles and Gerard Keay wonders how he is not phasing through the car if he doesn’t have a body that can hold onto it.
It’s probably the book. The Catalogue of the Trapped Dead sure is… trapping him.
Figures. How could he have ended otherwise?
It still hurts. In so many ways the pain feels endless.
Gerard opens his mouth even when he doesn’t want to talk. He has nothing to say to these people.
But there are still eyes on his non-existent skin. And maybe now trapped in the book as well. That might be one reason why he speaks at all, when the dynamic duo starts asking him questions.
Even in this painful nothingness, there is at least work. Work and the road and eyes and books and whatever is left of his own pitiful self.
Gerard had always been haunting himself, he thinks, as he looked at the woman packing a stack of statements into her suitcase.
He didn’t even have to be here! He’s not sure he wanted to.
But he was also not sure what else he could have done. Probably implode? Maybe even literally? Even without a contract he might have been bound to the Institute. Or to Gertrude Robinson herself. He wouldn’t be surprised if there is a thing like ‘magical debt’ in the world. And if there is, she’s definitely earned that.
He was treated like an honorary member of the Archives anyways. Gerard can only hope that it was Gertrude’s doing. She never had seemed like anything is off, but that had been a meaningless observation. The Archivist stayed calm at all times.
If she faltered, the world would falter. So she kept her back raised high and her head beyond any doubt.
Gerard wonders how she had done it, when he couldn’t even hold onto a razor blade for his family.
But work and travel and information are things he grasped much easier. So maybe, so he thought, there was hope for him. Maybe even for both of them.
“With any luck we can cut the trip short, but I wouldn’t count on it”, Gertrude continued to explain. “The moment we learn enough about the Unknowing it’s time for preparation.”
“Let’s just hope that we’ll find anything at all”, Gerard suggested.
“Yes. Let’s.”
There is a hint of a smile again and sometimes Gerard still wonders, if anyone but him had seen it.
As Gertrude turned away, she held the door for him and they step out of the archives.
“You got the coordinates and the spare key for my storage unit?”
“Sure do. You’re worried?”
That would be a first.
“No more than I have to. It’s always good to have a plan B… In case of any of our demise.”
That was the one thing that made him anxious, It had always sounded to Gerard like challenging fate. But Gertrude would know better than that, he had thought.
“I am hoping that this will be a fun one. I don’t think I will be doing this that much more often.”
“The travel? Or the rituals?”
“Both, of course. I am not sure I’ll be doing both for much longer.”
“You are getting old. And wrinkly.”
“Charming as always, Gerard.”
“That’s why you keep me around.”
As they exited the Institute Gerard turned around to watch it disappear behind the corner. And then he sighed and focused on the road ahead of them.