Being Human: Medley Relay [Quicksand RP, OC]
Title: “Medley Relay”
Author: Shaitanah
Rating: PG
Timeline: 1942-2012
Summary: The snippets of the story of one Agent Colin Sparks, from a kid with ideas to the ghost in grey.
Disclaimer: Being Human belongs to Toby Whithouse and the BBC. Colin Sparks and the Quicksand RPverse belong to yours truly and shirogiku.
A/N: I’ve been struggling with this for ages. It’s finally done, more or less. It’s not all of Sparks’s backstory, not even all of his key moments, but it’s the basics.
Dedication: for shirogiku who’s amazing, creative, supportive and very adept at saving me from RL. ;)
MEDLEY RELAY
In tombs of gold and lapis lazuli
Bodies of holy men and women exude
Miraculous oil, odour of violet.
But under heavy loads of trampled clay
Lie bodies of the vampires full of blood;
Their shrouds are bloody and their lips are wet.
W.B. Yeats, "Oil and Blood"
Colin Sparks was six years old when he saw his first ghost. It was the spirit of his older brother, August, that came to tell him where he had stashed four bars of chocolate, secreted adroitly before the rationing began. In the years to come, Colin would frequently flash back to his humble beginnings and retrace those first steps in the realm of the paranormal. It had been a matter of vital importance to aid August in recovering those buried treasures; otherwise, he could not have passed on. After the initial shock had worn off (and there hadn’t been much of it in a six-year-old to begin with), Colin happily went about settling Gusty’s business with the living. The chocolate bars were located and the hiding place (a tin box buried under the swing in the schoolyard; Gusty had always had a dramatic flair) pronounced fit. One of the bars was solemnly eaten during a makeshift memorial service, and afterwards… To this day, Colin is not clear on what happened afterwards. He knows the mechanics now, he’s gone through more doors than anyone, yet all he remembers from that day is the way Gusty smiled at him and sort of drifted away into the light. It might have just been his childish imagination supplying the visual he could deal with.
He tried telling his parents, of course. But they hadn’t seen Gusty and they had a fair share of their grown up problems. Mother started sobbing and Father pointedly told Colin not to upset her. That didn’t actually make any sense. Mother had been upset every day since Gusty died, and Colin believed that news of him would make her smile.
When he brought that up again a couple of weeks later, Father gave him a disconcerting look that rather put him off the whole subject for years.
* * *
Colin saw his first vampire at fifteen. It was a woman, not particularly beautiful, but there was something dangerously alluring about her. It could be the unlikely emptiness where her reflection should have been as she passed by a mirror.
Colin felt a surge of strange, scientific interest. He remembered Gusty, whom he hadn’t thought of for years, and his burning desire to share that childhood secret with the world. But the world didn’t want to know, and the secret had brewed in him for too long. He took this one - the black eyes, the curve of the bloodied lips, the absence of a mirror image - and catalogued it, feeling proud of being in possession of two equally important mysteries of the unseen world that was just a hairbreadth away.
The rational half of him, the half that loved physics and biology and looked upon religion with condescension, told him there must be a reasonable explanation for the things he had seen. He resolved to find it but first, he had to obtain more secrets.
Three years later, when the men in grey suits came, Colin had already accumulated enough and was dancing around the most significant discovery of all: he was on the verge of proving that old man Downey who lived farther down the street was a werewolf.
The men in grey did not take kindly to amateurs. They tolerated those who stumbled into this world by accident, but people like Colin who had the gall to seek these things out, to study and observe them, incited a mixture of disdain and grudging admiration in the members of the agency.
They took Colin’s scrapbook, his collection of newspaper clippings, his journal where he mapped out moon phases, and his camera. They made it clear that should he ever attempt to renew his research, they would return and he would not like it. Colin imagined they could answer a lot of his questions. He almost wanted to provoke them.
Provocation, however, was not necessary. On their way out, one of the suits appraised him with a brief, sharp look and asked:
“Sparks, was it? Any relation to Mabel Sparks?”
Colin blinked. Nothing they had said before surprised him. This did.
“She was my grandmother, sir,” he answered cautiously.
The suit nodded like it explained a lot, and was off.
* * *
The setup of the agency reminded Colin of a chess game. There was a mysterious figurehead nobody ever saw, and a grey cardinal that controlled the board while not being formally in charge. There were active agents that could move in any direction and there were guards that operated on a need-to-know basis and there were pawns that were kept on a leash. Discipline was the glue that kept it all together. Much like in chess, there was no leaping over other pieces, and every person had their own mission.
Pawns, knights and bishops were easy to spot. Not that Colin would share that information with anyone. He was not entirely sure which category Mr Kingsleigh belonged to. A rook most likely - and that was only because Colin did not believe a queen would personally interview him for a job.
Mr Kingsleigh was a nondescript middle-aged man with faded blond hair and pale grey eyes. The agency seemed to be swarming with men like this, as if it were a requirement in addition to the faultlessly tailored grey suit and the aura of superiority as thick as London fog.
“I doubt you are aware of the fact,” he said in a business-like tone, “but your grandmother did us a great service during the Blitz. There was an influx of data to be processed and catalogued. She was the Archivist then.”
Up until that point, the only things Colin knew about Mabel Sparks were that she had been a librarian, that she smelled like dust and sour milk, and that she had all her teeth at age sixty-seven. When she smiled, she reminded him of a shark. Mabel Sparks passed away a few years before, and nobody told him she had worked for the men in grey.
Colin took a deep breath.
“Before you come to the wrong conclusions, sir, there is something I wish to make clear. I am not here to follow in my grandmother’s footsteps. That is to say I desire to be an operative.”
“An operative,” Mr Kingsleigh repeated thoughtfully. It was not a question. “Have you any experience with the supernatural?”
Colin listed his findings and his occasional encounters with creatures that could be classified thus. After a brief moment of doubt, he mentioned Gusty as well.
Mr Kingsleigh cocked his head slightly, resting his transparent eyes upon Colin’s face for the first time. It made Colin feel as if he had spots all over his skin.
“Mr Sparks, as someone whose childhood was, shall we say, spurned by war, are you fully aware of the sacrifices you will be required to make? We are not here to fight evil or whatever romantic delusions you harbour concerning the duties you will be performing. We do not attack. We stand by. We are hardly soldiers.”
“If the war has taught me anything, sir, it is that I do not wish the repeat of it. I do not go blindly into battle. But these creatures. Are they dangerous?”
“Some of them, yes.”
Colin smiled.
“Then I merely wish to play my part in keeping the danger at bay.”
* * *
“Tell me what happened,” said Mr Kingsleigh, twiddling a pen between his fingers.
There was not much to tell. Colin flashed back to the damp autumn forest in Essex. He didn’t like it that Kingsleigh was not looking at him. It made him feel like a schoolboy at fault.
(“Are you afraid of death, Sparks?” Crawford asked, handing him a cigarette. Colin didn’t smoke when he could help it but something about the desolate atmosphere of the night forest had been conducive to it.
“Yeah,” he said almost flippantly. “Not this, though.”
“Is there any death worse than others?”
Colin thought about it. “Drowning. For some reason.”
“So you don’t mind being torn apart by a werewolf.”
“At least it’ll count.” He listened to the haunting sound the rustling leaves made and felt small. “Out there in the water, nothing counts. Not even you. And if they don’t find a body, it’s as if you never existed at all.”)
Kingsleigh looked up from the pen, but his gaze traveled leisurely past Colin and lingered on the clock. It was a simple round-shaped clock, the only decoration in his otherwise featureless office.
“You and Mr Crawford were not sanctioned to contain the Type 3. Why did you choose to attempt it?”
Colin had no sensible answer. At least no answer that Mr Kingsleigh would deem sensible.
“Was it close to the settlements? Was there any danger of exposure?”
“Picnic, sir,” he said quietly.
(“Who the fuck would have a picnic in the forest at night?” Crawford exclaimed. “In autumn?”)
“Why would somebody have a picnic in the woods on a rainy night?” echoed Mr Kingsleigh.
It bothered Colin too. But there had been voices and the glares of a camp fire and laughter - and a giant werewolf lurking nearby. They’d had to act quickly.
Kingsleigh put something down in his notebook and flicked the pen against the page.
“Was that when the Type 3 attacked Agent Crawford?”
Crawford was a frail lad, about a head shorter than Sparks, but he moved like a whirlwind. He had a friendly demeanour and the explosive temper of someone who was misfortunate enough to turn out Irish on his mother’s side. He had worked for the agency for thirteen years.
“The Type 3 killed Agent Crawford, is that correct? Your statement says-.”
“Yes, sir,” said Colin. It was the first he had ever interrupted a superior. “Ripped him to shreds.”
(He fell on his knees, hands slick with rain water and blood. The carcass of the monster lay a few feet away from him. The tranquilizers appeared to work. Colin’s stomach revolted, and he heaved into the shrubs.
“It’s all right,” he told Crawford. “It’s all right, it doesn’t look… fatal.”
Crawford grabbed him by the front of his jacket and spat: “It’s a fucking werewolf clawmark! How is that in any way not fatal?”
His shoulder was bleeding profusely. Colin had always felt a bit queasy at the sight of blood. He thought looking away now would be slightly unethical, considering that Crawford had got mauled while pushing him out of the beast’s way.
Crawford slipped his hand into his pocket and fished something out and shoved it into Colin’s hand. A penknife.
“Just sever the artery. Make it quick.”
Colin let out a nervous laugh before realizing Crawford was not joking. There was something hysterical in Crawford’s eyes, something desperate. He was balancing on the edge of an abyss and asking for a nudge in the right direction.
“I’ve seen what these things can do. I can’t do it. I can’t live like this. Not even once a month. Think of it… Think of it as my drowning.”
His throat made an unpleasant sound when he stopped breathing. Colin didn’t see the door.)
Kingsleigh’s question caught him on the way out: “Do you normally go for a walk at night, Mr Sparks? Specifically out of town.”
Colin pondered it. It could be a trick question. “Not unless it’s job-related, sir.” He was getting tired of the word. It had too much weight. One day they would call him “sir”.
“Then would you say it was largely their fault?” Kingsleigh concluded. Colin marveled at the complete absence of any fluctuations in his tone. He always sounded the same.
Wrong place, wrong time. A classic excuse.
With Kingsleigh, not answering a question was very seldom an option. Colin gave a curt nod.
“It is understood that Agent Crawford must be replaced,” said Kingsleigh, looking through his papers. “I was going to recommend you.”
A pawn about to be knighted shouldn’t have the word “no” in its vocabulary. “Thank you, sir,” on the other hand, was a must.
* * *
May wandered around the flat, appraising every corner with the critical eye of a professional housewife.
“When was the last time you littered?” she asked finally.
Colin chuckled. Anyone else would have wanted to know how long it had been since he cleaned up.
“You can’t clean up if you don’t actually live here,” she reasoned. “I worry about you, Col. Every time I stop by, your place is sterile as an operating theatre and you’re impeccably dressed and smelling of toothpaste and,” her lips curled involuntarily, “gin. How much have you been drinking?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t been collecting empty bottles.” She gave him a disapproving look. “I’ve got a stressful job.”
“You work in a bank.”
“Banks get robbed,” he parried defensively.
Not that she could have appreciated it even if he had told her the truth. His little sister was three when Gusty died. She didn’t remember him. To her, a door was just a door.
“You always have an excuse for everything,” said May, sadly.
He wondered what kind of excuse he had, in her opinion, for being unmarried, having never fallen in love, living in a rented flat and thinking that she, with her two kids, a lawyer for a husband, and Christmas trips to Paris, should stop flaunting her fucking perfect life because she made it look like people had no right to live anything else.
May 2, 1973 was the last she saw him, but not the last he saw of her. He passed out in the armchair in front of the telly, a quarter full bottle of Blackwood’s rolling out of his grip, and he came to the next morning, looking down on his body, strangely content that he’d at least shaved the day before. He had to admit he did not look half-bad. He was dressed in his grey suit, and he could adjust the loosened tie and button up the jacket, which made for quite a presentable image. Still, dying at thirty-seven from what looked like a heart attack seemed rather anti-climatic.
Colin lowered himself onto his desk and stared at his lifeless form.
“Bollocks,” he said thoughtfully.
* * *
In the end, it was a colleague who found him. They hauled him away on a gurney, masquerading as a medical team. He knew he would not see himself again; the men in grey were big fans of cremation.
The flat seemed even emptier now that he was a mere suggestion of a presence. He positioned himself on the edge of the bed and sat still for what seemed like hours, refusing to ask himself the obvious question: What now?
A quiet, amused voice snapped him out of his ruminations.
“How unfortunate. Did you have plans?”
“I never do,” Sparks answered. “Who are you?”
Another ghost, no doubt. He hadn’t heard the front door opening.
“You may call me Jones,” the stranger introduced himself.
It was beginning to seem entirely too familiar. Sparks chuckled.
“That’s not your name.”
“No, it’s a generic name. It will do.”
“I rather prefer individuality.”
The stranger circled him and came to stand before him. He had an unremarkable face framed with reddish sideburns, and was dressed in an old-fashioned grey suit.
“In that case, you chose the wrong line of work.”
Colin rose to his feet. He thought about his door not being here and imagined sitting in this abominable clean room, watching dust conquer every surface inch by inch, while nothing else changed. He thought that May might visit and pick up some of his belongings and he would be unable to explain what had happened to him just as he was unable to make them all believe Gusty had been there to say goodbye.
“I came to offer you a job, Mr Sparks,” said Jones. “You have the mind of a scientist and the imagination of a dreamer. Yet you have been relegated to a janitorial position. Don’t tell me you find it satisfactory.”
“It was my choice.”
“No, it wasn’t. They made you an offer and you signed up because it was the only way you could receive any answers at all. Vampires, werewolves, demons, they have all been a nice distraction. But at the end of the day, what you really want to know is what lies beyond the door your brother had walked through all those years ago. You saw the physical proof that death was not the end, and it never let you go.”
Sparks looked at the stranger and tried to determine his age. Forty-five? Fifty? He could not say anything for sure except that Jones used to - and may still somehow - work for the men in grey. A nagging suspicion that this man knew something about the delay of his door wormed its way into Colin’s mind.
“You don’t understand-.”
“Yes, I do, Mr Sparks,” Jones cut him off. “And so would you if you knew the regrettable circumstances of my own passing. Laudanum overdose. As you can see, my death, not unlike yours, had neither an express purpose, nor happened in any remotely glorious situation.”
“How long have you been like this?” Sparks asked, warily.
“A century. Give or take a few years.”
A century! He couldn’t take this long. Whatever was holding him here, could not be this monumental. He looked at Jones and saw the other man smile briefly like he knew what Colin was thinking and considered it to be quite amusing.
“I’m not afraid of death,” Colin said, with more conviction than he felt.
“Yes, you are,” Jones said, dismissively. “It is a common weakness of human character. But unlike most people, you do have the luxury of acting on that fear.” He picked up a pencil and twirled it between his fingers, the means to elegantly display restlessness that all men in grey somehow shared. Sparks glared at him with exasperation mingled with jealousy. He had tried moving or holding things before, and failed. “It’s offensive, is it not? That it keeps hiding from you. The other side. You had a glimpse of it once. You must have thought you were special. But in the end, you’re just like everybody else.” The pencil dropped. “I represent the ghost division of the men in grey. Come work for us. I think you’ll like it.”
With a sly smile, the ghost disappeared. Sparks’s face darkened. He walked back to the bed and resumed his position. He tried to make a mental list of the things that could constitute his unfinished business and arrived to the conclusion that he was content with his life and there was nothing he may have left unfinished. Except…
* * *
It took Sparks two days to fully make up his mind. Even then, getting outside proved to be rather challenging. He still lacked the ability to touch any solid objects, but when he tried to take Jones’s way out, he discovered that he could not concentrate enough on the point of his destination. After several failed attempts, he grew unreasonably irate and simply charged head-on through the wall. He felt like his insides were being minced in a meat chopper and decided not to do it again unless it was strictly necessary.
There was another problem: he had no idea where to go. He had assumed the flat was grounding him, but as he moved away from it, walking unseen through the busy morning streets, he felt no pull from the other side. It inspired a new confidence in him. He headed briskly towards one of the bunkers outside the city where the men in grey stockpiled evidence before it went to the central archives.
He found Jones sitting beside a young clerk who was smoking nervously in a recess. Jones had his palm resting on the back of the boy’s head, which undoubtedly made the latter even more uncomfortable even though he couldn’t have said why.
“This is the only thing I truly miss from time to time,” said Jones in place of a greeting. “Unfortunately, young Barnes here uses such cheap rubbish that I predict lung cancer in his foreseeable future. Either that, or dying of poor taste.” As if to illustrate his point, Jones’s face contorted with extreme snobbish disgust.
“I didn’t know we had a ghost division,” said Sparks.
“Few do. After all, very few of them can see us.” Jones waved his hand in front of the clerk’s face. No response of any kind followed. “I’m glad you decided to join us, Colin. Do you mind if I-?”
Sparks minded but he kept it to himself. He came from a world where few people used his Christian name, and none outside family. But something in him resisted saying no to this man.
“How did you do that?” he asked. “With the cigarette?”
“It’s quite simple really. Don’t worry. It’s one of the tricks you will learn easily.”
* * *
They stood by the bedside of a dying man in a nondescript flat a few blocks away from where Sparks used to live. Jones was telling him about doors. According to him, locating them was not that difficult if you knew where to look. He had been teaching Sparks to read auras, focusing on potentially sick people, those who could collapse of a heart attack or an aneurysm any minute producing a perfectly comfortable gateway to the other side. Terminal patients fit the profile too, but with them, there was always a bit of a hold up.
“I don’t understand,” Sparks said. “First you want me to be a ghost; now you want me to pass over.”
“But not through your door. You will see the difference as soon you enter. The other side is a tricky place. You have to learn to bend its rules.”
Sparks glanced at the skeletal frame on the bed, so pale it was hard to tell where he ended and the pillow began. He felt a knot in his stomach tighten. Taking this man’s door would be a violation of his privacy, would it not? Jones chuckled and said that not taking it would be a crime against curiosity.
“Curiosity,” he noted, “is just another terminal disease. How many people have you sacrificed for this?”
“Are you implying that I had someone killed?” Sparks flared up.
“Didn’t you? Your entire lifestory is marked by accidents, Colin. June 5, 1942. Your brother August falls off the stairs and dies. Later, he comes to you as a ghost. This is where it all begins.”
“You make it sound like I am defined by a family tragedy. I’m not. I refuse to be.”
“We are all defined by something. People. Events. Fixations. Nineteen years later, Allen Crawford, your field operations supervisor, is killed by a werewolf that dies in an accident a week later. Over the years, three partners of yours are lost to various causes, predominantly supernatural. Finally, there is one Kevin Wells, a protégé of yours, drained of blood by a vampire, the vampire later staked by you sans authorization.”
Jones smiled indulgently. By the time he finished talking, the dying man had already left his body and was now looking at the pair of grey-suited strangers quizzically. Sparks wanted to say something comforting, but found himself at a loss for words. He cleared his throat and looked away.
“You can be honest with me, Colin,” said Jones. “You hadn’t seen a single ghost since your brother’s, but you wanted to study them. So you kept trying to create them.”
An old wooden door opened in the wall and bluish light spilled forth. The dead man glanced uncertainly at Jones, as if asking for directions, and the ghost nodded calmly. He nodded the second time upon catching Colin’s mystified look.
“Your manipulations have been rather redundant. People die all the time. You simply need to be there when they do.”
Sparks looked at the doorway and imagined that sliver of light diminishing until the door snapped shut, cutting off the mysteries that dwelled behind it. He took a deep breath and walked in, feeling like the cat that curiosity killed.
* * *
Jones told him they bridged the gap between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
“For as long as those creatures have existed, there have been men like us. And for as long as men like us died, there have been ghosts like us.”
The rules were simple: go in, get out, say no, become stronger. After a while it got easier to pretend the clinical chill of the corridor did not affect him. Sparks roamed through the trash heaps of someone else’s memories until he was sick of his own strength. Each time, the cracks in him deepened, but it was all right. He had never been too human to begin with.
After the tenth voyage, there was one thing he knew for certain: death was in need of cosmetic repairs.
After the twentieth one, he saw that the damage went much deeper.
The other side was not empty. Far from it. If anything, it was overpopulated like a town full of refugees waiting for the relocation to a better place, except the ships and the trains never came. It fed on fear, so Sparks taught himself out of feeling it. It dipped its feelers into his memories; he renounced them. It locked the doors before him; he started breaking and entering. This terrifying world was perfect for him: it didn’t deal in closure. Nothing lasts forever, an othersider once told him, was just a comforting lie invented by humans who could not deal with eternity.
* * *
Time had a tendency to move incredibly fast, which Colin felt even more acutely now that he was a fixed point in it. He tried to keep tabs on his nephews but as they changed from the kids he knew and grew into teenagers he could hardly recognize, as the wrinkle lines on his sister’s face deepened, he felt less and less connected to his living kin. Some twenty years later it would take him a moment to remember who they were if anyone so much as gave them a passing mention.
The faces at the agency changed too. Sparks watched them with detached interest, moving up, stepping down, entire regimes falling and rising around him. He discovered eventually that his excursions to the other side had significantly increased his ghostly abilities. He did not feel bound to his city, not even to his country. He teleported all over the globe and supervised various clandestine operations of the ghost division. He could read auras as clearly as he could read a text in a book. He worked with shamans and psychics. He knew how to kill a poltergeist or disarm a vengeful spirit. He rose through the ranks and the ghost division became his. He never thought about dying as a career-making advancement, but that was essentially what it had been.
The archives remained the only place where the pandemonium of time would slow down. Sparks stopped by there once in a while, at times lurking between the shelves, but sometimes revealing himself to the Archivist. It was during one of those visits that he spotted a fresh face in the bunker. There was hardly anything remarkable about the lanky young man except the novelty of seeing him for the first time and his icy blue eyes that reminded Colin of the late Mr Kingsleigh.
“Mr Sparks!” the Archivist exclaimed once the young agent left. “Always a pleasure to see you around these parts.”
Colin smiled. “Good afternoon, Arthur. Who was that?”
“That’s Mr Rook, sir. Fresh blood. He will go far, that one, mark my words. I have a good feeling about him.” True to himself, Arthur was already putting on a tea kettle. “I hear Mr Jones has passed over.”
“Indeed he did. A hundred and twenty years, give or take. Can you imagine?”
“Oh, I don’t know, sir.” Arthur winked at him. “Rumour has it there are far older ones in the Tower of London.”
Sparks chuckled. “Rumour has it.” It was common knowledge that one of the most haunted areas in Britain had in fact never been haunted but was instead used as a decoy to distract nosy humans from actual hotspots. The Tower of London apparitions had been a running joke in the agency for as long as Colin could remember.
Arthur placed a steaming tea cup in front of him. Green tea, with ginseng, red date fruits, haw berries, raisins, and tiny, yellow-whitish chrysanthemum blossoms floating on the surface. There was a small bowl of ice-white cane sugar cubes on the table. Colin smiled at Arthur’s meticulous planning. It was absolutely unnecessary since ghosts could only taste anything through the living, but Arthur would never insult a colleague by not doing his best.
“There’s been an influx of evidence on Type 2 lately,” said Arthur matter-of-factly.
Sparks nodded with a mysterious smile. Lately was something of a stretch, much like Arthur’s innocently prosaic tone. It took Sparks years to figure out why his grandmother had been held in such high respect. His own juvenile statement of not wanting to follow in her footsteps seemed pitifully naïve to him now that he knew that an Archivist was truly the person who controlled every single bit of information at the agency.
“You know how it is,” he said, holding his fingers to Arthur’s wrist, sampling the tea. “We didn’t start the fire.”
And fighting it was certainly out of question. It was so much more intriguing to leave it burning, maybe even throw in some firewood every once in a while.
* * *
Sparks approved of the twenty-first century. It was fast-paced, technological and frankly insane, but it got the job done. It opened doors, perhaps even easier than its predecessors did, and that was all Sparks’s division really wanted. Everyone always seemed to be running somewhere, and usually Sparks could tell quite effortlessly which one of them was about to fall and break his neck.
“You seem to be in a good mood,” Arthur commented. “Anything brewing?”
Sparks brushed his fingers over the tally sheet of evidence on the desk. There had been a surge of Type 1 activity, first in Bristol, then Barry Island. One could only begin to guess what that might promise.
“The dead are whispering,” he said with a smile.
That was never not interesting.
Author: Shaitanah
Rating: PG
Timeline: 1942-2012
Summary: The snippets of the story of one Agent Colin Sparks, from a kid with ideas to the ghost in grey.
Disclaimer: Being Human belongs to Toby Whithouse and the BBC. Colin Sparks and the Quicksand RPverse belong to yours truly and shirogiku.
A/N: I’ve been struggling with this for ages. It’s finally done, more or less. It’s not all of Sparks’s backstory, not even all of his key moments, but it’s the basics.
Dedication: for shirogiku who’s amazing, creative, supportive and very adept at saving me from RL. ;)
MEDLEY RELAY
In tombs of gold and lapis lazuli
Bodies of holy men and women exude
Miraculous oil, odour of violet.
But under heavy loads of trampled clay
Lie bodies of the vampires full of blood;
Their shrouds are bloody and their lips are wet.
W.B. Yeats, "Oil and Blood"
Colin Sparks was six years old when he saw his first ghost. It was the spirit of his older brother, August, that came to tell him where he had stashed four bars of chocolate, secreted adroitly before the rationing began. In the years to come, Colin would frequently flash back to his humble beginnings and retrace those first steps in the realm of the paranormal. It had been a matter of vital importance to aid August in recovering those buried treasures; otherwise, he could not have passed on. After the initial shock had worn off (and there hadn’t been much of it in a six-year-old to begin with), Colin happily went about settling Gusty’s business with the living. The chocolate bars were located and the hiding place (a tin box buried under the swing in the schoolyard; Gusty had always had a dramatic flair) pronounced fit. One of the bars was solemnly eaten during a makeshift memorial service, and afterwards… To this day, Colin is not clear on what happened afterwards. He knows the mechanics now, he’s gone through more doors than anyone, yet all he remembers from that day is the way Gusty smiled at him and sort of drifted away into the light. It might have just been his childish imagination supplying the visual he could deal with.
He tried telling his parents, of course. But they hadn’t seen Gusty and they had a fair share of their grown up problems. Mother started sobbing and Father pointedly told Colin not to upset her. That didn’t actually make any sense. Mother had been upset every day since Gusty died, and Colin believed that news of him would make her smile.
When he brought that up again a couple of weeks later, Father gave him a disconcerting look that rather put him off the whole subject for years.
* * *
Colin saw his first vampire at fifteen. It was a woman, not particularly beautiful, but there was something dangerously alluring about her. It could be the unlikely emptiness where her reflection should have been as she passed by a mirror.
Colin felt a surge of strange, scientific interest. He remembered Gusty, whom he hadn’t thought of for years, and his burning desire to share that childhood secret with the world. But the world didn’t want to know, and the secret had brewed in him for too long. He took this one - the black eyes, the curve of the bloodied lips, the absence of a mirror image - and catalogued it, feeling proud of being in possession of two equally important mysteries of the unseen world that was just a hairbreadth away.
The rational half of him, the half that loved physics and biology and looked upon religion with condescension, told him there must be a reasonable explanation for the things he had seen. He resolved to find it but first, he had to obtain more secrets.
Three years later, when the men in grey suits came, Colin had already accumulated enough and was dancing around the most significant discovery of all: he was on the verge of proving that old man Downey who lived farther down the street was a werewolf.
The men in grey did not take kindly to amateurs. They tolerated those who stumbled into this world by accident, but people like Colin who had the gall to seek these things out, to study and observe them, incited a mixture of disdain and grudging admiration in the members of the agency.
They took Colin’s scrapbook, his collection of newspaper clippings, his journal where he mapped out moon phases, and his camera. They made it clear that should he ever attempt to renew his research, they would return and he would not like it. Colin imagined they could answer a lot of his questions. He almost wanted to provoke them.
Provocation, however, was not necessary. On their way out, one of the suits appraised him with a brief, sharp look and asked:
“Sparks, was it? Any relation to Mabel Sparks?”
Colin blinked. Nothing they had said before surprised him. This did.
“She was my grandmother, sir,” he answered cautiously.
The suit nodded like it explained a lot, and was off.
* * *
The setup of the agency reminded Colin of a chess game. There was a mysterious figurehead nobody ever saw, and a grey cardinal that controlled the board while not being formally in charge. There were active agents that could move in any direction and there were guards that operated on a need-to-know basis and there were pawns that were kept on a leash. Discipline was the glue that kept it all together. Much like in chess, there was no leaping over other pieces, and every person had their own mission.
Pawns, knights and bishops were easy to spot. Not that Colin would share that information with anyone. He was not entirely sure which category Mr Kingsleigh belonged to. A rook most likely - and that was only because Colin did not believe a queen would personally interview him for a job.
Mr Kingsleigh was a nondescript middle-aged man with faded blond hair and pale grey eyes. The agency seemed to be swarming with men like this, as if it were a requirement in addition to the faultlessly tailored grey suit and the aura of superiority as thick as London fog.
“I doubt you are aware of the fact,” he said in a business-like tone, “but your grandmother did us a great service during the Blitz. There was an influx of data to be processed and catalogued. She was the Archivist then.”
Up until that point, the only things Colin knew about Mabel Sparks were that she had been a librarian, that she smelled like dust and sour milk, and that she had all her teeth at age sixty-seven. When she smiled, she reminded him of a shark. Mabel Sparks passed away a few years before, and nobody told him she had worked for the men in grey.
Colin took a deep breath.
“Before you come to the wrong conclusions, sir, there is something I wish to make clear. I am not here to follow in my grandmother’s footsteps. That is to say I desire to be an operative.”
“An operative,” Mr Kingsleigh repeated thoughtfully. It was not a question. “Have you any experience with the supernatural?”
Colin listed his findings and his occasional encounters with creatures that could be classified thus. After a brief moment of doubt, he mentioned Gusty as well.
Mr Kingsleigh cocked his head slightly, resting his transparent eyes upon Colin’s face for the first time. It made Colin feel as if he had spots all over his skin.
“Mr Sparks, as someone whose childhood was, shall we say, spurned by war, are you fully aware of the sacrifices you will be required to make? We are not here to fight evil or whatever romantic delusions you harbour concerning the duties you will be performing. We do not attack. We stand by. We are hardly soldiers.”
“If the war has taught me anything, sir, it is that I do not wish the repeat of it. I do not go blindly into battle. But these creatures. Are they dangerous?”
“Some of them, yes.”
Colin smiled.
“Then I merely wish to play my part in keeping the danger at bay.”
* * *
“Tell me what happened,” said Mr Kingsleigh, twiddling a pen between his fingers.
There was not much to tell. Colin flashed back to the damp autumn forest in Essex. He didn’t like it that Kingsleigh was not looking at him. It made him feel like a schoolboy at fault.
(“Are you afraid of death, Sparks?” Crawford asked, handing him a cigarette. Colin didn’t smoke when he could help it but something about the desolate atmosphere of the night forest had been conducive to it.
“Yeah,” he said almost flippantly. “Not this, though.”
“Is there any death worse than others?”
Colin thought about it. “Drowning. For some reason.”
“So you don’t mind being torn apart by a werewolf.”
“At least it’ll count.” He listened to the haunting sound the rustling leaves made and felt small. “Out there in the water, nothing counts. Not even you. And if they don’t find a body, it’s as if you never existed at all.”)
Kingsleigh looked up from the pen, but his gaze traveled leisurely past Colin and lingered on the clock. It was a simple round-shaped clock, the only decoration in his otherwise featureless office.
“You and Mr Crawford were not sanctioned to contain the Type 3. Why did you choose to attempt it?”
Colin had no sensible answer. At least no answer that Mr Kingsleigh would deem sensible.
“Was it close to the settlements? Was there any danger of exposure?”
“Picnic, sir,” he said quietly.
(“Who the fuck would have a picnic in the forest at night?” Crawford exclaimed. “In autumn?”)
“Why would somebody have a picnic in the woods on a rainy night?” echoed Mr Kingsleigh.
It bothered Colin too. But there had been voices and the glares of a camp fire and laughter - and a giant werewolf lurking nearby. They’d had to act quickly.
Kingsleigh put something down in his notebook and flicked the pen against the page.
“Was that when the Type 3 attacked Agent Crawford?”
Crawford was a frail lad, about a head shorter than Sparks, but he moved like a whirlwind. He had a friendly demeanour and the explosive temper of someone who was misfortunate enough to turn out Irish on his mother’s side. He had worked for the agency for thirteen years.
“The Type 3 killed Agent Crawford, is that correct? Your statement says-.”
“Yes, sir,” said Colin. It was the first he had ever interrupted a superior. “Ripped him to shreds.”
(He fell on his knees, hands slick with rain water and blood. The carcass of the monster lay a few feet away from him. The tranquilizers appeared to work. Colin’s stomach revolted, and he heaved into the shrubs.
“It’s all right,” he told Crawford. “It’s all right, it doesn’t look… fatal.”
Crawford grabbed him by the front of his jacket and spat: “It’s a fucking werewolf clawmark! How is that in any way not fatal?”
His shoulder was bleeding profusely. Colin had always felt a bit queasy at the sight of blood. He thought looking away now would be slightly unethical, considering that Crawford had got mauled while pushing him out of the beast’s way.
Crawford slipped his hand into his pocket and fished something out and shoved it into Colin’s hand. A penknife.
“Just sever the artery. Make it quick.”
Colin let out a nervous laugh before realizing Crawford was not joking. There was something hysterical in Crawford’s eyes, something desperate. He was balancing on the edge of an abyss and asking for a nudge in the right direction.
“I’ve seen what these things can do. I can’t do it. I can’t live like this. Not even once a month. Think of it… Think of it as my drowning.”
His throat made an unpleasant sound when he stopped breathing. Colin didn’t see the door.)
Kingsleigh’s question caught him on the way out: “Do you normally go for a walk at night, Mr Sparks? Specifically out of town.”
Colin pondered it. It could be a trick question. “Not unless it’s job-related, sir.” He was getting tired of the word. It had too much weight. One day they would call him “sir”.
“Then would you say it was largely their fault?” Kingsleigh concluded. Colin marveled at the complete absence of any fluctuations in his tone. He always sounded the same.
Wrong place, wrong time. A classic excuse.
With Kingsleigh, not answering a question was very seldom an option. Colin gave a curt nod.
“It is understood that Agent Crawford must be replaced,” said Kingsleigh, looking through his papers. “I was going to recommend you.”
A pawn about to be knighted shouldn’t have the word “no” in its vocabulary. “Thank you, sir,” on the other hand, was a must.
* * *
May wandered around the flat, appraising every corner with the critical eye of a professional housewife.
“When was the last time you littered?” she asked finally.
Colin chuckled. Anyone else would have wanted to know how long it had been since he cleaned up.
“You can’t clean up if you don’t actually live here,” she reasoned. “I worry about you, Col. Every time I stop by, your place is sterile as an operating theatre and you’re impeccably dressed and smelling of toothpaste and,” her lips curled involuntarily, “gin. How much have you been drinking?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t been collecting empty bottles.” She gave him a disapproving look. “I’ve got a stressful job.”
“You work in a bank.”
“Banks get robbed,” he parried defensively.
Not that she could have appreciated it even if he had told her the truth. His little sister was three when Gusty died. She didn’t remember him. To her, a door was just a door.
“You always have an excuse for everything,” said May, sadly.
He wondered what kind of excuse he had, in her opinion, for being unmarried, having never fallen in love, living in a rented flat and thinking that she, with her two kids, a lawyer for a husband, and Christmas trips to Paris, should stop flaunting her fucking perfect life because she made it look like people had no right to live anything else.
May 2, 1973 was the last she saw him, but not the last he saw of her. He passed out in the armchair in front of the telly, a quarter full bottle of Blackwood’s rolling out of his grip, and he came to the next morning, looking down on his body, strangely content that he’d at least shaved the day before. He had to admit he did not look half-bad. He was dressed in his grey suit, and he could adjust the loosened tie and button up the jacket, which made for quite a presentable image. Still, dying at thirty-seven from what looked like a heart attack seemed rather anti-climatic.
Colin lowered himself onto his desk and stared at his lifeless form.
“Bollocks,” he said thoughtfully.
* * *
In the end, it was a colleague who found him. They hauled him away on a gurney, masquerading as a medical team. He knew he would not see himself again; the men in grey were big fans of cremation.
The flat seemed even emptier now that he was a mere suggestion of a presence. He positioned himself on the edge of the bed and sat still for what seemed like hours, refusing to ask himself the obvious question: What now?
A quiet, amused voice snapped him out of his ruminations.
“How unfortunate. Did you have plans?”
“I never do,” Sparks answered. “Who are you?”
Another ghost, no doubt. He hadn’t heard the front door opening.
“You may call me Jones,” the stranger introduced himself.
It was beginning to seem entirely too familiar. Sparks chuckled.
“That’s not your name.”
“No, it’s a generic name. It will do.”
“I rather prefer individuality.”
The stranger circled him and came to stand before him. He had an unremarkable face framed with reddish sideburns, and was dressed in an old-fashioned grey suit.
“In that case, you chose the wrong line of work.”
Colin rose to his feet. He thought about his door not being here and imagined sitting in this abominable clean room, watching dust conquer every surface inch by inch, while nothing else changed. He thought that May might visit and pick up some of his belongings and he would be unable to explain what had happened to him just as he was unable to make them all believe Gusty had been there to say goodbye.
“I came to offer you a job, Mr Sparks,” said Jones. “You have the mind of a scientist and the imagination of a dreamer. Yet you have been relegated to a janitorial position. Don’t tell me you find it satisfactory.”
“It was my choice.”
“No, it wasn’t. They made you an offer and you signed up because it was the only way you could receive any answers at all. Vampires, werewolves, demons, they have all been a nice distraction. But at the end of the day, what you really want to know is what lies beyond the door your brother had walked through all those years ago. You saw the physical proof that death was not the end, and it never let you go.”
Sparks looked at the stranger and tried to determine his age. Forty-five? Fifty? He could not say anything for sure except that Jones used to - and may still somehow - work for the men in grey. A nagging suspicion that this man knew something about the delay of his door wormed its way into Colin’s mind.
“You don’t understand-.”
“Yes, I do, Mr Sparks,” Jones cut him off. “And so would you if you knew the regrettable circumstances of my own passing. Laudanum overdose. As you can see, my death, not unlike yours, had neither an express purpose, nor happened in any remotely glorious situation.”
“How long have you been like this?” Sparks asked, warily.
“A century. Give or take a few years.”
A century! He couldn’t take this long. Whatever was holding him here, could not be this monumental. He looked at Jones and saw the other man smile briefly like he knew what Colin was thinking and considered it to be quite amusing.
“I’m not afraid of death,” Colin said, with more conviction than he felt.
“Yes, you are,” Jones said, dismissively. “It is a common weakness of human character. But unlike most people, you do have the luxury of acting on that fear.” He picked up a pencil and twirled it between his fingers, the means to elegantly display restlessness that all men in grey somehow shared. Sparks glared at him with exasperation mingled with jealousy. He had tried moving or holding things before, and failed. “It’s offensive, is it not? That it keeps hiding from you. The other side. You had a glimpse of it once. You must have thought you were special. But in the end, you’re just like everybody else.” The pencil dropped. “I represent the ghost division of the men in grey. Come work for us. I think you’ll like it.”
With a sly smile, the ghost disappeared. Sparks’s face darkened. He walked back to the bed and resumed his position. He tried to make a mental list of the things that could constitute his unfinished business and arrived to the conclusion that he was content with his life and there was nothing he may have left unfinished. Except…
* * *
It took Sparks two days to fully make up his mind. Even then, getting outside proved to be rather challenging. He still lacked the ability to touch any solid objects, but when he tried to take Jones’s way out, he discovered that he could not concentrate enough on the point of his destination. After several failed attempts, he grew unreasonably irate and simply charged head-on through the wall. He felt like his insides were being minced in a meat chopper and decided not to do it again unless it was strictly necessary.
There was another problem: he had no idea where to go. He had assumed the flat was grounding him, but as he moved away from it, walking unseen through the busy morning streets, he felt no pull from the other side. It inspired a new confidence in him. He headed briskly towards one of the bunkers outside the city where the men in grey stockpiled evidence before it went to the central archives.
He found Jones sitting beside a young clerk who was smoking nervously in a recess. Jones had his palm resting on the back of the boy’s head, which undoubtedly made the latter even more uncomfortable even though he couldn’t have said why.
“This is the only thing I truly miss from time to time,” said Jones in place of a greeting. “Unfortunately, young Barnes here uses such cheap rubbish that I predict lung cancer in his foreseeable future. Either that, or dying of poor taste.” As if to illustrate his point, Jones’s face contorted with extreme snobbish disgust.
“I didn’t know we had a ghost division,” said Sparks.
“Few do. After all, very few of them can see us.” Jones waved his hand in front of the clerk’s face. No response of any kind followed. “I’m glad you decided to join us, Colin. Do you mind if I-?”
Sparks minded but he kept it to himself. He came from a world where few people used his Christian name, and none outside family. But something in him resisted saying no to this man.
“How did you do that?” he asked. “With the cigarette?”
“It’s quite simple really. Don’t worry. It’s one of the tricks you will learn easily.”
* * *
They stood by the bedside of a dying man in a nondescript flat a few blocks away from where Sparks used to live. Jones was telling him about doors. According to him, locating them was not that difficult if you knew where to look. He had been teaching Sparks to read auras, focusing on potentially sick people, those who could collapse of a heart attack or an aneurysm any minute producing a perfectly comfortable gateway to the other side. Terminal patients fit the profile too, but with them, there was always a bit of a hold up.
“I don’t understand,” Sparks said. “First you want me to be a ghost; now you want me to pass over.”
“But not through your door. You will see the difference as soon you enter. The other side is a tricky place. You have to learn to bend its rules.”
Sparks glanced at the skeletal frame on the bed, so pale it was hard to tell where he ended and the pillow began. He felt a knot in his stomach tighten. Taking this man’s door would be a violation of his privacy, would it not? Jones chuckled and said that not taking it would be a crime against curiosity.
“Curiosity,” he noted, “is just another terminal disease. How many people have you sacrificed for this?”
“Are you implying that I had someone killed?” Sparks flared up.
“Didn’t you? Your entire lifestory is marked by accidents, Colin. June 5, 1942. Your brother August falls off the stairs and dies. Later, he comes to you as a ghost. This is where it all begins.”
“You make it sound like I am defined by a family tragedy. I’m not. I refuse to be.”
“We are all defined by something. People. Events. Fixations. Nineteen years later, Allen Crawford, your field operations supervisor, is killed by a werewolf that dies in an accident a week later. Over the years, three partners of yours are lost to various causes, predominantly supernatural. Finally, there is one Kevin Wells, a protégé of yours, drained of blood by a vampire, the vampire later staked by you sans authorization.”
Jones smiled indulgently. By the time he finished talking, the dying man had already left his body and was now looking at the pair of grey-suited strangers quizzically. Sparks wanted to say something comforting, but found himself at a loss for words. He cleared his throat and looked away.
“You can be honest with me, Colin,” said Jones. “You hadn’t seen a single ghost since your brother’s, but you wanted to study them. So you kept trying to create them.”
An old wooden door opened in the wall and bluish light spilled forth. The dead man glanced uncertainly at Jones, as if asking for directions, and the ghost nodded calmly. He nodded the second time upon catching Colin’s mystified look.
“Your manipulations have been rather redundant. People die all the time. You simply need to be there when they do.”
Sparks looked at the doorway and imagined that sliver of light diminishing until the door snapped shut, cutting off the mysteries that dwelled behind it. He took a deep breath and walked in, feeling like the cat that curiosity killed.
* * *
Jones told him they bridged the gap between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
“For as long as those creatures have existed, there have been men like us. And for as long as men like us died, there have been ghosts like us.”
The rules were simple: go in, get out, say no, become stronger. After a while it got easier to pretend the clinical chill of the corridor did not affect him. Sparks roamed through the trash heaps of someone else’s memories until he was sick of his own strength. Each time, the cracks in him deepened, but it was all right. He had never been too human to begin with.
After the tenth voyage, there was one thing he knew for certain: death was in need of cosmetic repairs.
After the twentieth one, he saw that the damage went much deeper.
The other side was not empty. Far from it. If anything, it was overpopulated like a town full of refugees waiting for the relocation to a better place, except the ships and the trains never came. It fed on fear, so Sparks taught himself out of feeling it. It dipped its feelers into his memories; he renounced them. It locked the doors before him; he started breaking and entering. This terrifying world was perfect for him: it didn’t deal in closure. Nothing lasts forever, an othersider once told him, was just a comforting lie invented by humans who could not deal with eternity.
* * *
Time had a tendency to move incredibly fast, which Colin felt even more acutely now that he was a fixed point in it. He tried to keep tabs on his nephews but as they changed from the kids he knew and grew into teenagers he could hardly recognize, as the wrinkle lines on his sister’s face deepened, he felt less and less connected to his living kin. Some twenty years later it would take him a moment to remember who they were if anyone so much as gave them a passing mention.
The faces at the agency changed too. Sparks watched them with detached interest, moving up, stepping down, entire regimes falling and rising around him. He discovered eventually that his excursions to the other side had significantly increased his ghostly abilities. He did not feel bound to his city, not even to his country. He teleported all over the globe and supervised various clandestine operations of the ghost division. He could read auras as clearly as he could read a text in a book. He worked with shamans and psychics. He knew how to kill a poltergeist or disarm a vengeful spirit. He rose through the ranks and the ghost division became his. He never thought about dying as a career-making advancement, but that was essentially what it had been.
The archives remained the only place where the pandemonium of time would slow down. Sparks stopped by there once in a while, at times lurking between the shelves, but sometimes revealing himself to the Archivist. It was during one of those visits that he spotted a fresh face in the bunker. There was hardly anything remarkable about the lanky young man except the novelty of seeing him for the first time and his icy blue eyes that reminded Colin of the late Mr Kingsleigh.
“Mr Sparks!” the Archivist exclaimed once the young agent left. “Always a pleasure to see you around these parts.”
Colin smiled. “Good afternoon, Arthur. Who was that?”
“That’s Mr Rook, sir. Fresh blood. He will go far, that one, mark my words. I have a good feeling about him.” True to himself, Arthur was already putting on a tea kettle. “I hear Mr Jones has passed over.”
“Indeed he did. A hundred and twenty years, give or take. Can you imagine?”
“Oh, I don’t know, sir.” Arthur winked at him. “Rumour has it there are far older ones in the Tower of London.”
Sparks chuckled. “Rumour has it.” It was common knowledge that one of the most haunted areas in Britain had in fact never been haunted but was instead used as a decoy to distract nosy humans from actual hotspots. The Tower of London apparitions had been a running joke in the agency for as long as Colin could remember.
Arthur placed a steaming tea cup in front of him. Green tea, with ginseng, red date fruits, haw berries, raisins, and tiny, yellow-whitish chrysanthemum blossoms floating on the surface. There was a small bowl of ice-white cane sugar cubes on the table. Colin smiled at Arthur’s meticulous planning. It was absolutely unnecessary since ghosts could only taste anything through the living, but Arthur would never insult a colleague by not doing his best.
“There’s been an influx of evidence on Type 2 lately,” said Arthur matter-of-factly.
Sparks nodded with a mysterious smile. Lately was something of a stretch, much like Arthur’s innocently prosaic tone. It took Sparks years to figure out why his grandmother had been held in such high respect. His own juvenile statement of not wanting to follow in her footsteps seemed pitifully naïve to him now that he knew that an Archivist was truly the person who controlled every single bit of information at the agency.
“You know how it is,” he said, holding his fingers to Arthur’s wrist, sampling the tea. “We didn’t start the fire.”
And fighting it was certainly out of question. It was so much more intriguing to leave it burning, maybe even throw in some firewood every once in a while.
* * *
Sparks approved of the twenty-first century. It was fast-paced, technological and frankly insane, but it got the job done. It opened doors, perhaps even easier than its predecessors did, and that was all Sparks’s division really wanted. Everyone always seemed to be running somewhere, and usually Sparks could tell quite effortlessly which one of them was about to fall and break his neck.
“You seem to be in a good mood,” Arthur commented. “Anything brewing?”
Sparks brushed his fingers over the tally sheet of evidence on the desk. There had been a surge of Type 1 activity, first in Bristol, then Barry Island. One could only begin to guess what that might promise.
“The dead are whispering,” he said with a smile.
That was never not interesting.