Lies Sleeping

19 Taming the Wild Frontier

It was while I was helping Camilla into the local IRV for transport back to Belgravia that I realised who her neighbour was. Harry Acworth – who’d played bass guitar with the Clarke-Boland Big Band and had briefly formed a trio with my dad in the late nineties. I’d have to tell my dad when I got a moment, because I was pretty sure he thought Harry was dead.

I told Camilla Turner that everything was going to be fine as long as she co-operated, and sent her off to have Stephanopoulos turn her life inside out. My main worry was that Martin Chorley might take his usual ‘direct’ approach to operational security, but I had some hope that he might regard Camilla as too unimportant to take the risk. Especially if we kept her stashed at Belgravia.

I got back to the Folly that evening to find that Abigail had gone to sleep on the couch in the reading room – it wasn’t the first time.

She’d left her laptop open and around it a sprawl of papers. And, because I’m a nosy bastard, I sat down and had a good shufti. Judging from its position, the last thing she’d been working on was her notebook – open at a page with clusters of words written in Cyrillic.

Varvara and Nightingale had agreed, when teaching Abigail, to stick to classical Newtonian spell notation, in Latin. But this looked suspiciously like a spell notation to me – the giveaway being фоз in Cyrillic, which I recognised as φῶς or phos in Greek. I thought I recognised ἐλαύνω followed by the abbreviation ел in Cyrillic – the notation for Impello. This was the notation that Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina had been taught during the Second World War, but following it was another notation which I didn’t recognise. It looked like a doodle of ф linked by an upward curving line ел – the line representing the upwards spin you put on lux when combining it with impello to make a fireball.

Nightingale had been taught to write out in spells in full, using parentheses to indicate which formae were affected by which subordinate modifiers. He’d passed that system on to me.

‘This way encourages clarity and precision,’ he’d said, when I asked if there was a shorthand notation. ‘Aim for perfection of form – speed comes later.’

He wasn’t going to like this at all.

‘My principal concern,’ Nightingale had told me, ‘is that she will run ahead of herself and put herself in danger.’

We were going to have to have the safety talk again.

I looked up to find Molly staring at me from the other side of the table. I glanced over at Abigail and saw that somebody had covered her with a red and green tartan blanket without me noticing. I looked back at Molly, who tilted her head to the left.

‘Her dad’s doing nights and her mum is at the hospital with her brother,’ I said. ‘She’s going to text me when they’re finished and I’ll take her home.’

Molly’s eyes narrowed.

‘She can’t live here,’ I said. ‘Even if it was allowed, it wouldn’t be right.’

Molly gave me a reproachful look, as if that was my fault, then turned and went gliding out the door.

In among Abigail’s notes I spotted the initials VGC and the sentence Montana Territory Campaign 1877. I had a rummage through the pile of books and found a thin, yellowing pamphlet titled Devil River by Robert Sharp. Along the top somebody had paper-clipped a handwritten note on good quality paper that read: I thought you gentlemen should know how things go in the former colonies. Signed with the initials RS.

This was probably the American material Nightingale was thinking of. I opened it up and had a look.

Robert Sharp claimed that an – unnamed – participant of the expedition had related the story to him a year after the events portrayed. I personally couldn’t tell whether it was totally made up, or a heavily fictionalised account of a true story. Abigail had attached yellow Post-it Notes to strategic passages with references to proper Newtonian practice – although this was referred to in the text as ‘proper knowledge’, ‘true magic’ and on one occasion as ‘white sorcery’.

The story itself purportedly followed the adventures of a group of bold gentlemen from Virginia, accompanied by scouts and experienced Indian fighters, as they sought out the legendary ‘Devil’ of Yellowstone River in the Montana Territory. This was somehow in revenge for the death of General George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn the previous summer.

I was too knackered to get into the story or the personalities, but fortunately Abigail’s Post-it Notes indicated the details we’d been looking for. The target was obviously, from the description, a genius loci which took the form of a well-made Chief with a handsome countenance which belied his savage nature.

The take-down was a classic. The gentlemen from Virginia lured out Yellowstone by formally asking for an audience and then presented him with gifts, including a red hatbox containing the very spirit of death itself. As soon as Yellowstone opened the box he was struck down into a swoon and while the rest of the company ‘held off’, i.e. shot the attendant locals, the leader of the Virginians – one Captain Nathanial Buford – stepped forward to deliver the coup de grâce with his pistol. He then took great pains to recover the red box and its contents even as the fighting raged around him.

So the sixty-four thousand dollar question – what was in the box?

The very spirit of death itself.

Again Abigail had picked out the clues. Somebody, probably Postmartin, would have to check her work, but on past form I doubted she’d missed anything. The unnamed narrator of Devil River was equally curious about its contents, but Captain Buford remained cagey.

On one occasion I thought to touch the box myself only to receive a severe rebuke from the Captain who called me a “D— fool!” And asked if I did not feel the evil contained within. I admitted that I had felt only a strange chill.

Buford tells the narrator that anything capable of rendering a devil senseless would make short work of a man. But when the narrator presses him as to what that thing might be, he replies only that it is an evil brought over from a corrupt and degenerate Europe: An infection of the old world that we have bent to God’s purpose.

‘Infection’ was written on the Post-it Note which marked the page.

There were two more references to infection in the book, including one that made reference to inoculation as a simile, which only proved that neither the narrator nor Captain Buford knew how inoculation worked. Or the difference between a metaphor and a simile, for that matter.

A page ripped from her notebook marked this passage and had written on it – infection, cold, drain of power, tactus disvitae, vampires.

And then, underneath:

Weaponized vampires?

I idly corrected the z in weaponised and then realised what I’d done.

I’ve been spending way too much time with librarians, I thought.

I made a note to action a scan of Devil River so I could send a copy to Reynolds, along with Abigail’s conclusions. Also a query to Postmartin to see if he could find similar American material in the Oxford stacks.

Abigail rolled over in her sleep and said somebody’s name – I think it was Simon, whoever that was – and then subsided.

Nightingale had once told me that the Germans had carried out experiments to weaponise vampirism during World War Two. Maybe they’d got the idea from the Americans. Or maybe everyone had tried it – although Nightingale denied that the British had.

And that research was probably sitting less than fifteen metres below me, hidden behind some face-hardened steel and God knew what kind of magical defences. The Black Library, the poisoned fruit of the raid on Ettersberg, with the details of the genocidal experiments carried out by the Ahnenerbe in an attempt to change the course of the war.

‘It didn’t help the fascists,’ Varvara said once. ‘There’s nothing in there that would be any use to you.’

Still, you had to wonder.

My phone pinged – Abigail’s mum was heading home from Great Ormond Street.

‘Hey,’ I said to Abigail. ‘Wake up – time to go home.’