A sort of companion to this piece by @focsle, which I’d recommend reading first. In which Gilmore Abernathy, self-professed cynic, lets his curiosity get the better of him in the early hours after Fugue Feast.
Anson Lydstern belongs to @focsle.
“I’m just going to make sure you don’t break your nose on the floor.”
“I won’t break my nose on the floor,” Anson muttered, petulantly.
“I’m just going to make sure,” Gilmore repeated, bracing an arm under Anson’s elbow to keep him from pitching forward if another bout of dizziness took him. The corsetier’s feet dragged with each step, Anson muttering some unintelligible rebuke under his breath as Gil escorted him into the inviting dark of the bedroom.
Without ceremony, Gilmore deposited Anson onto the bed, ignoring the man’s whine of protest. He’d managed to work one of his boots off before Anson was out, chest rising and falling with his faintly rasping breath. The steady rivulet of blood on his forearm showed no sign of quitting, Gil noted with vague concern, but then Anson had said it could bleed for another hour or two.
Leeches. Gil snorted. Anson and his guests had a gruesome way of defining entertainment. He felt sure he didn’t want to know what other brands of madness lay in the pages of Anson’s books.
As he arranged the silk coverlet over Anson’s boneless form, he heard the deep, distant hrooomm of a ship horn sounding off the river. He turned to glance out the fogged glass balcony doors, where the dark Wrenhaven wended its way through Dunwall as the city sent off the old year with its revels. It had begun to rain, and a cold mist gathered along the shoals of the riverbank beneath Anson’s small balcony.
Gil moved to the double glass doors, wiping a swath of the pane clear to look out over the balcony and the riverbank below, where the waves lapped languidly against the concrete barricade. Across the way, the floodlights of John Clavering Boulevard shone out behind silhouetted rooftops and ramparts, ghostlike through the fog.
Dunwall could almost be called peaceful, from this vantage.
He thought of his own apartment’s view -- the one window with its peeling paint that opened out to the rickety fire escape. The alleyway so narrow he could practically reach from the window to touch the ashy brick of the neighboring building’s facade.
A bitter smile curled at his lips. Even what little beauty this shambling city had to offer was the purview of the rich. He tried to imagine for a moment, gazing over the water, that the apartment, the balcony, were his. Tried to imagine what it would feel like to look out every night across the river to where the lamps of the Distillery District waterfront burned like a sea of stars, and never think of the spent lives staining the streets beneath him, the red pulse of the Empire’s capital bleeding out between its ruined ribs like the ichor of some great leviathan.
Gil made a noise of frustration at his own brooding. Anson, in any case, didn’t deserve his bitterness -- even if the corsetier’s life did come with the same trappings as those who did.
He glanced back at Anson, snoring lightly in his bed. A lantern stood on the table by the bed, burning with a dim amber glow, but it was only now Gil realized it wasn’t the only light in the room. Beneath the door to the bedroom closet, a line of faintly violet light hinted at what Gil already knew lay beyond -- the crawlspace and the secret room where the evening’s Fugue debauchery had taken place.
Gilmore raised an eyebrow. Drink and hallucinogens aside, he’d not expected Anson to be so careless as to leave a candle or a lamp burning unattended. Though, then again, he hadn’t even noticed he was bleeding when he’d greeted Gil at the door. Whatever Anson thought he’d seen must have been persuasive to incite him to such a nervous frenzy.
“Glimpses of the Void, like looking through blinds. Like a city reflected in a puddle. Dark, rippling. Upside down too. I looked out the window and that’s what I saw. Put my hand--”
Gil pressed a hand against the glass balcony door. It was cold, yes, and wet -- not the marsh mist Anson had described, but easy enough to be mistaken for it by a drug-addled mind.
Was that all it had been? Wine and Pandyssian fungus and blood loss?
Struck with a reckless kind of curiosity, he paced to the closet door and tried the latch, expecting to find it locked. But the latch turned, and the door creaked open on its hinges to the closet and the unboarded crawlspace, aglow with purple light.
He paused, aware of a sudden that he was trespassing on ground his friend considered most private -- but it was Anson who had forgotten to lock the room and Anson who had left a candle burning. And after all, he reasoned, it wasn’t as if Anson had never shown him there.
Gil took the lantern off Anson’s night table and ducked through the crawlspace, careful not to strike his head against the low beams overhead. The lantern’s soft glow seemed to dim the further he moved through the passage, swallowed by the deeper dark of the violet-tinged room beyond.
The walls fell away, and Gil emerged in a small space unrecognizable as belonging to the almost tediously conventional apartment at the other end of the crawlspace. His eyes drew to the offending lamp, burning away atop Anson’s workbench behind its panes of purple-stained glass. Gil hesitated on the threshold. He’d seen the room before, but then it had seemed quaint, an amusement, an eccentricity of his then newfound friend.
Now in the dark wake of Fugue Feast it felt altogether foreign, and unwelcoming. The dim atmosphere, still hazy with incense and cigarette smoke, lent the lamplight an unearthly haloed effect. Shifting silhouettes seemed to move over the walls, where Anson had scrawled his heretical alphabets and nonsense symbols in charcoal. Chaise pillows were piled at the corners of the room, accompanied by half-empty glasses of wine and overturned bottles. A mask in the snarling visage of a rat stared up at him from the floor where it had been discarded along with what he presumed to be its owner’s waistcoat.
In the middle of the room, another of Anson’s circles traced out occult glyphs in concentric patterns across the floor -- not in charcoal but blood, staining the boards darkly red with gore. The hair rose on Gil’s forearms, and he shivered, though the room was warm enough to be stifling.
“The circles are…hungry…” Anson had stuttered. “Does that make sense? They’re hungry. You don’t get something for nothing.”
A sharp swell of nausea and memory, and Gil felt the floor pitch under him.
Blood. Blood on his hands, in his mouth. He gags, tasting coppery bile at the back of his throat. Through the mask covering his face, flashes of violet light. He feels wetness on his face. He can’t remember why, can’t think through the fog of opium and fear. He hears a voice, laughing, and another reciting words in a made-up tongue as cold and familiar hands pin his shoulders to the floor.
“Make him say it again, Morgan,” the first voice laughs. “I want to hear him say it again…”
Gil shot out an arm to brace himself against the wall. He felt suddenly numb, suffocated, the walls of the dark space seeming to shrink around him. He clawed at his bloodstained cravat to tear it from his neck, yanking his collar loose, and forced himself to breathe in harsh, shuddering gasps, until the blood stopped pounding in his ears and the room stopped shrinking and became, again, just a room.
“Bloody-- fuck,” he swore, dragging a hand down his face. Gilmore grit his teeth and shook himself. Fool he was, letting this witchery and superstition run away with him.
He crossed to the workbench, neverminding the blood under his soles, and flicked his thumb and forefinger over his tongue to put out the stubby lamp candle with a fizzling hiss. The spectral light fled from the room as if banished, and the warmer flame of the lantern Gil held in his clenched fist chased the shadows back to their dark corners.
Gil let a long breath out through his nose, and felt his shoulders relax. Then, he chuckled. How overwrought he’d made himself, all because of Anson’s gibbering! Served him right for venturing out during Fugue. Better he left the magic and mysticism to younger men who still had the vigor for such dramatic recreation.
As he turned back toward the crawlspace, his eye caught on the row of curious trinkets hung from hooks in one of the walls. He recognized them immediately -- bone charms. Bits of wire and reclaimed metal adorned the oddly carved scrimshaw, almost gleaming in the lantern light. Not one of them was exactly the same, but one drew his eye that he didn’t recall seeing last time. Hung from the centermost hook, a half-circle of white bone encircled with a ring of metal -- a shape that called back a half-forgotten memory.
The Wynnedown docks. He’s never been aboard one of the ships he’s helped to build since he was eleven years old, but that’s about to change. The steamship Telluride, bound for Dunwall, the capital of the world. A handful of coins pass from his mother’s hand into the Gristolian captain’s purse. She has no coin left for him, but gives him something else, not silver or copper but stark white in the shape of a half-circle.
“Take this, and keep it close,” she whispers. “It’s a piece of somethin’ older’n me and older’n your Da, much older. It’ll protect ye, wherever the sea carries ye from here.” She lifts the cord over his head and tucks the charm safe out of sight under his shirt, before patting his chest. She looks close to tears -- her chin quivers -- but she clenches her jaw as her fingers curl tight around his shoulders.
“Don’t ye forget, Gil. Don’t forget.”
Gilmore traced the irregular curve of Anson’s charm with the prosthetic fingers of his right hand. He had forgotten, though. How many years…? As he wondered, the charm seemed to sway on its hook -- against the faint draft from the crawlspace behind him. Gil jerked his hand away and shook his head, sharply. He was getting pulled into his own thoughts again. It had to be four…nearly five in the morning, by now, and the hour had played enough tricks on him.
Lantern out to lead the way, he retreated back through the crawlspace and toward the ordinary earthly comfort of Anson’s apartment.
--------------------------
It wasn’t till the next evening that he bid Anson goodnight, and turned his collar against the cold sweep off the river to trudge home through the lengthening shadows.
Dunwall the day after Fugue was eerily subdued, recuperating from the hangover of its ravishes and revelries the day before. As the shuttered boutiques of Drapers Ward gave way to the sooty brick warehouses of the Waterfront, Gilmore quickened his stride, eyes roving the alleyways for straggling Feasters who might look to cause him trouble, but by some fortune he met with no one.
His tenement was a narrow, four-story building propped between the rear of a canning plant and an abandoned orphanage that had been repurposed as a gambling house and pub. Lights burned in the pub’s first floor windows, but for once Gil hastened straight past and up the stairs to the familiar dark refuge of his apartment.
After a minute of tired fumbling with the key ring at his waist, he shouldered through the door into the small, cluttered room he’d called home for some twelve years. The disparity with Anson’s manicured riverfront apartment was stark. His only furniture was the cramped desk he’d salvaged from the pub next door, the mattress shoved into the far corner, and the wardrobe where he hung his clean, pressed clothes. Newspapers and books littered the floor around the desk and faded, peeling wallpaper clung to the lath and plaster walls, yellowing with age and stained with soot from the squat coal-burning stove beneath the window.
Gil stood a moment with his back against the door, brows drawn in a thoughtful scowl, then strode across the room to his mattress and knelt to the floor. Long, calloused fingers traced the seam to where he’d cut a discreet slit, years before, and he worked around the rusted springs until his hand closed over a thin slip of metal and bone.
It sat perfectly in the curve of his palm, a semi-disk of bleached bone etched with letters Gil couldn’t read, bound in wire and rusted iron -- not exactly the same as the charm he’d seen in Anson’s room, but close. He brushed his thumb over the jagged carvings, scratched there however many decades or centuries before.
How long had it been in his mother’s possession before she passed it to him? He hadn’t thought to ask how she came by it, or what convinced her it could protect her son on the other side of the Empire, before he sailed from Morley forever.
A knot of old bitterness stuck in Gil’s chest. Protect him. His mouth tightened into a thin line. Protect him from what? Death? Men suffered things worse than death in Dunwall, and there was no protection from any of them.
Yet he’d kept the charm all these years. He’d never asked himself why until now.
Gil plucked his pince-nez off his nose and scrubbed his face with the heel of his palm. Weariness had settled as a steady ache in his joints after spending the night before on Anson’s couch. He ought to eat, but the thought of dragging himself to the pub downstairs for a plate of hard bread and brined hagfish didn’t pique his appetite, and Anson’s words hounded him in the back of his mind.
“Have you ever heard it sing? Would you like to?”
And the thought he kept coming back to, as he lay awake turning the charm over in his hands, was if it sang, would it have his mother’s voice?
Concept art for Erik and Christine from the Phantom of the Opera. Sorry, I know I've posted both of these before, at least in black and white. Bear with me - I'm still trying to work out a final design.
