Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(57)

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 grace 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.’





20

A Slave’s Flattery

The next day I spent the morning going through Camilla Turner’s email archive. I started by identifying as many of her contacts as possible to add to her nominal file – I did a preliminary cross-check against her colleagues at MOLA and requested that the Inside Inquiry Office run them through the PNC to see if anything nefarious popped out. Then I checked through all the messages from John Chapman’s email address. There was no obvious difference in the writing style between the early emails and the ones sent after he was shot to death in Cleveland.

Then I went hunting with a variety of keyword searches: Dark Ages and various spellings of sub- and post—Roman, which turned up in three quarters of the emails – so no real help there. I had more luck with Excalibur. Here there were a couple of exchanges where Chapman was pushing the Saxon sword-in-the-lake theory. There were similar discussions around the historicity of Arthur and Merlin, but nothing about Lancelot. Presumably because he was too French.

And, probably because I was spooked by Abigail’s discovery the night before, I tried ‘Genius Loci’ and the names of the rivers. The results were sparse and mostly related to digs located near watercourses. But one exchange caught my eye.



>I’m curious did you ever find offerings to a tutelary spirt associated with the river walbrook