Glasshouse - Charles Stross [90]
His breathing is deep and even. Maybe he’s already asleep. I close my eyes and try to join him, but it takes me a long time to drift off. I can’t help wondering how badly he must have been missing contact with another human being, to share my bed again.
11
Buried
MONDAY is a working day, and it’s also usually a lunch date, but I’m not about to break bread with Jen after yesterday’s events. I head for work with the brass key hidden in my security bag. Once inside I rip into the filing and cleaning immediately. It’s midmorning before I realize that Janis hasn’t arrived yet.
I hope she’s all right. I don’t remember seeing her yesterday, but if she’s heard about what happened—well, I don’t know how close to the victims she was, but I can only imagine what she must be going through if she knew them well. She was feeling ill a couple of days ago—how is she now?
I head for the front desk. Business is dead today, and I haven’t had a single visitor, so I have no qualms about flipping the sign on the door to CLOSED for a while. In the staff room there’s a file of administrative stuff, and after leafing through it for a bit, I find Janis’s home number. I dial it, and after a worryingly long time someone answers the telephone.
“Janis?”
Her voice sounds tired, even through the distortion the telephone link seems to be designed to add. “Reeve, is that you?”
“Yes. I was getting worried about you. Are you all right?”
“I’ve been sick today. And to tell the truth, I didn’t feel like coming in. Do you mind?”
I look around. “No, the place is dead as a—” I stop myself just in time. “Listen, why don’t you take a couple of days off? You were going to be leaving in a couple of months anyway, there’s no point overdoing it. If you want, I’ll drop round with some books on my next day off, day after tomorrow. How about that?”
“That sounds great,” she says gratefully, and after a bit more chat I hang up.
I’m just shifting the CLOSED sign back to OPEN when a long black limousine draws up at the curb outside. I manage a sharp intake of breath—What’s Fiore doing here today?—before the Priest gets out, and then, uncharacteristically, holds the door open for someone else. Someone wearing a purple dress and a skullcap. I realize exactly who it must be—the Bishop: Yourdon.
The Bishop turns out to be as cadaverously thin and tall as Fiore is squat and bulbous. A stork and a toad. There’s a peculiarly sallow cast to his skin, and his cheekbones stand out like blades. He wears spectacles with thick hornlike rectangular frames, and his hair hugs his scalp in lank swatches the color of rotten ivory. He strides forward, skeletal-looking hands writhing together, as Fiore bumbles along huffing and puffing to keep up in his wake. “I say, I say!” Fiore calls. “Please—”
The Bishop pushes the library door open, then pauses. His eyes are a very pale blue, with slightly yellowish whites, and his gaze is icily contemptuous. “You’ve fucked up before, Fiore,” he hisses. “I do wish you’d keep your little masturbatory fantasies to yourself in future.” Then he turns round to face me.
“Hello?” I force a smile.
He looks at me as if I’m a machine. “I am Bishop Yourdon. Please take me to the document repository.”
“Ah, yes, certainly.” I hurry out from behind the desk and wave him toward the back.
Fiore harrumphs and breathes heavily as he waddles after us, but Yourdon moves with bony grace, as if all his joints have been replaced with well-lubricated bearings. Something about him makes me shudder. The look he gave Fiore—I can’t remember having seen such an expression of pure contempt on a human face in a very long time. I lead them to the room; the Grim Reaper stalking along behind me in angry silence, followed by a bumbling oleaginous toad.
I stand aside as we reach the reference section, and Fiore fumbles with his keys, visibly wilting under Yourdon’s fuming gaze. He gets the door open and darts