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Harrogate, Part Eight

4: Knaresborough

Books have led some to learning and others to madness.

Petrarch

The Black Cat Bookshop was located down a narrow side street off Market Square. Many of the houses seemed to be Victorian but the bookshop looked as if it had been around since Tudor times. It was only two storeys high, unlike its taller neighbours, and with mullioned windows. Giles had expected the place to be locked up - despite the ‘Open’ sign in the window - but when he tried the handle, the door opened at once, an old-fashioned bell clanging noisily.

The interior was dark in that peculiarly comforting way of old bookshops everywhere; wide oak boards slightly warped with age; the grime of ancient nail-heads and the steely glint of newer additions dotting the floor. The place was far larger than he had imagined from outside, almost Tardis-like in the contrast between its modest frontage and these shelves of old books stretching back into what appeared to be infinity. Wide stairs led up to what were presumably the rooms in which Karin and Dora Pendleton had been living. It was considerably darker and dustier and less welcoming than The Magic Box had been, but to Giles it seemed to capture that leather and beeswax scent of a hundred bookshops in which he had spent his youth looking for rare volumes. There was a part of him that always felt a little as if it were coming home when he entered a bookshop but in this one it was an even stronger feeling than usual. There was also that tingle of magical activity; unmistakable after so many years on the Hellmouth. Whoever had situated this building had known what he or she was doing.

A woman with red-rimmed eyes looked up at them from behind the dark wood counter.  Behind her was a locked glass-fronted bookcase in which presumably the most valuable books were kept. She had fair hair scraped back into a ponytail and wore a purple embroidered top and some rather ornate silver jewellery. “Can I help you?”

Giles smiled in a way he hoped was reassuring. “I’m Alicia Davidson’s godfather.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.” She wiped her eyes. “Did you know Karin and Dora?”

“I’m afraid not. Were you a friend of theirs?”

“I was at school with Karin. I used to help out in the shop when they were busy. That’s why I opened today the same as usual. The police have finished taking fingerprints and I thought Dora would want me to keep the shop open the way I did when they… They used to get…called away sometimes - to help people.”

He recognized the expression on her face; one he had grown used to in Sunnydale, people in the know wondering if he were one of the wilfully ignorant or could be numbered amongst the dangerously knowing. He nodded. “I understand.”

“Dora…knew things. Before they happened. Like Mother Shipton, you know?”

Giles half-smiled: “‘Carriages without horses shall go/And accidents fill the world with woe/Around the world thoughts shall fly/In the twinkling of an eye…’” He held out a hand. “Rupert Giles.”

She took his hand a little hesitantly. “Beth Greene. Are you a psychic, too?”

“Good Lord, no. Just a researcher. Let me introduce my colleagues…” He managed to introduce Willow and Gunn but Wesley had wandered off to the back of the shop. Giles decided to leave him in peace. “Are you a…practitioner yourself?”

“I dabble a little,” Beth admitted. “But I was never anything like as good as Karin. She and her grandmother were really good.” There was an awkward pause before she said in a rush: “And I know you’re thinking if they were any good - how come they didn’t know what was going to happen to them? And the answer is, I don’t know. They knew so many things. They helped a lot of people. They knew there was something wrong but they couldn’t find it. They were going to try some more spells but then…” She wiped her eyes again.

Willow said: “There are lots of different kinds of witches, and some have lots of psychic powers and can heal and see ghosts and sense good and evil, but they don’t practise active magic. For those kinds of witches it’s difficult to fight off anyone really dangerous, because all their skills are about healing people not hurting them. Were Dora and Karin those kinds of witches?”

Beth looked a little taken aback. “They weren’t all sweet and good and nice if that’s what you’re asking? I mean they were ‘good’. They helped people, and they wouldn’t poison the mice or tread on spiders or anything but they could make books get hot if they weren’t paid for. And they sent that demon to hell that was living in Mrs Fitter’s attic. And when Karin was sixteen and got angry because Lizzie Stark cheated on her with Nancy Collins she made her think her hair was on fire. And I think when she was ten she was the one who made Fleur Polehampton’s knicker elastic snap in the middle of assembly.”

“Okay, she sounds like a normal kind of witch to me.”

Beth looked at Willow curiously. “Are you a witch?”

“Yes,” Willow nodded. “I really am.”

“Are you scared too?”

Giles became aware for the first time that the poor girl behind the counter was practically reverberating with fear.

“Because I am,” she continued. “Scared. If Karin and Dora couldn’t stop them then I don’t see how anyone can.”

“We may have access to resources that they didn’t,” Giles explained.

Beth pointed at the books in the glass-fronted bookcase behind the counter. “I don’t think so.”

Giles noticed for the first time that in between the other first editions were a number of extremely rare books of magic. “Nevertheless, we’re going to try.”

“This is what we do,” Gunn explained. “And we’re good at it.”

“Sometimes. When we don’t all get killed.” Wesley placed a book on the counter whose cracked brown binding had worn off in several places. A cloud of dust arose from it.

Giles waved away the dust. “Wesley…”

“I want to buy this book.”

Gunn held out a hand for Giles’ wallet. “Just let him have it. It’s not expensive, is it?”

Beth examined it distastefully. “That’s from that box of books Dora got from that last auction. Some of them were mouldy. You can have it for nothing.”

“I have to pay you for it.” Wesley gazed back at her stolidly. “Otherwise it won’t work.” He placed a battered coin on the counter. It looked Roman and was much blackened with age, but did show faint lines of silver through the grime. “And I have to pay you in silver.”

Looking at the man under the low bulb above the counter, Giles noticed that Wesley’s fingernails could have been cleaner, his fingers were ink-stained, and that the sage-coloured jumper he was wearing seemed to have lost its shape about a decade before. He suspected Gunn had been rather too kind about allowing Wesley to pack his own suitcase. Glancing down to check, he saw that Wesley had managed to round off his whole ‘care in the community’ ensemble with some drab grey trousers that were a good two inches too long for him even with his belt cinched on the last hole, and a pair of very scuffed brown shoes with mis-matched laces.

“You only have to pay with silver for the most sacred grimoires, Wesley,” Giles pointed out. He had a sudden uncomfortable memory of his first meeting with Wesley, the man all spotless and brylcreemed and wearing that Saville Row suit; so neat and shiny and convinced that he was prepared. It was hard to believe that man and this one were even distantly related, let alone the same person.

“I need to pay for this book in silver,” Wesley insisted.

“Just take his money,” Giles told Beth wearily. “Otherwise we’ll be here all day.”

Beth gave Wesley a nervous smile and took the bent coin gingerly, dropping it into the old fashioned cash register as if she were glad to be rid of it. “I have a cousin who’s autistic,” she offered in what was clearly meant to be sympathy.

Giles could practically feel Gunn bristling and put a hand on his arm before he said anything he would regret. “Wesley isn’t…He’s just a little… He lost most of his family in an accident. He’s still having to adjust to a world that they’re not in.”

Beth gazed at Wesley warily and Giles could practically see her wondering if it was the kind of family accident that happened when an obvious lunatic was given access to a chainsaw.

While Wesley found himself a chair and settled down to read his book, Giles asked Beth to tell him everything she could about what Dora and Karin had sensed, but the girl was vague. She could tell him that they had been very concerned, that they had been doing a lot of research into spells of revelation and summoning but not the books they had used. Not that it sounded as if those books had been a great deal of use as, according to Beth, they hadn’t managed to discover what it was that was making them both so uneasy or find a spell that had been successful in revealing it.

“Can we take a look upstairs?” Giles asked.

Beth grimaced. “I’m not sure. The police have looked at everything already and I don’t think Dora would like strange men in her rooms.”

“What about me?” Willow asked. “Would she have let me look?”

Beth nodded. “She liked other witches. She just wasn’t too sure about men. I mean she’d help them if they needed help but on the whole she thought they were a waste of space. She liked Detective Denison ‘cause he’s kind of…nuts, and they understood each other. She used to help him out with missing kids and things. They respected each other. That’s how I know the police are doing everything they can.”

“I’m sure they are,” Giles reassured her. “But we may be able to explore the possibilities that they can’t.”

While Beth took Willow upstairs, he looked through the glass of the bookcase at the valuable volumes, noting some very rare titles, including the Book of True Black Magic and the Grimorium Verum. Continental reprints going by the look of the binding, but still important books for any practising witch to have. And they did seem to have been practising witches, not just the charm-selling, fortune telling, joss stick-burning diluted remnants of a once powerful clan. This area had always been noted for its links with the supernatural, of course, but Giles could feel a more than ordinary pulse of the mystical mixed in with the dust and shadows. This certainly wasn’t a hellmouth, but so many centuries of magical practice had left an imprint on the land, and this part of the land was particularly sympathetic to magic in the first place. He could imagine that all kinds of creature could be drawn here who were attuned to the wavelengths of magic, forces for both good and evil.

Turning to Wesley he found the man intently reading his book. Giles looked over his shoulder and saw that half of the text was missing on the page that he was reading; not that Wesley seemed to care. He wondered if he should stop pretending that Wesley was going to get well if they treated him as if he already was, and get him some professional help. Except…what professional help could one get for a man whose trauma had been caused by a fatal stabbing by a demonic warlock and the wrenching of his still raw body and soul back to the earthly plane by a super-powered witch? Who would listen to his story of kidnapped babies carried into a hell dimension, the pain of losing one friend to a mystical coma after her body was hijacked by a higher power and another to possession of her reanimated corpse by the god-king of the primordium and not have him committed? Giles knew that he could be nicer to Wesley than he had been. The man had just always rubbed him up the wrong way and it would have been so much easier for everyone now if he had just been sane. He had lost Jenny without totally unravelling and Buffy had been dragged back from the dead very much against her will, and neither of them had decided that they no longer needed to sleep or wash or connect in any way to the world around them. He also wasn’t sure that Being Nice to Wesley was his job. He rather thought he had enough on his plate trying to solve a murder and keep them all alive and in one piece.

He wasn’t Angel or Buffy. He didn’t have super powers or immortality at his disposal. He was a forty-seven year old all-too ordinary human being, who had already suffered more concussions in a decade than most people - who weren’t professional boxers - sustained in a lifetime. He was tired and he would have really liked a rest, and instead he had to gear up all over again, go back into battle, and this time, instead of Buffy, and Xander as his companions - a Slayer he loved like a daughter, and a boy who, whatever his intellectual limitations, had certainly always had his heart in the right place - he was having to babysit a vampire-killing gang leader and his crazy ex-colleague - a man he had never liked, and, he suspected, probably never would.

Nevertheless he touched him briefly on his bony shoulder. “We’re going to visit the scene of the…crime next, Wesley. I don’t suppose there’s anything in that book about Brimham Rocks?”

Wesley didn’t look up. “It has a chapter about how to sanctify a place in preparation for ritual sacrifice.”

Giles snatched his hand away and Gunn said quickly: “He’s just answering the question. He doesn’t mean to…”

“I’m not so sure.” Giles turned away. “He always was a tactless little shit.”

“That ain’t who he is,” Gunn insisted, following him. “And I don’t want you talking about him like that.”

Giles wheeled on him. “I wasn’t the one who almost fractured his skull last night.”

“I was tired and I told him I was sorry. But you need to stop taking it out on him because you’re grieving.”

“You didn’t know him when he was in Sunnydale but you can take it from me that he was a pompous annoying little twerp who would have been greatly improved by smothering. Now, I am happy to protect him and feed him and keep him and put up with him, but don’t expect me to do so with a smile on my lips and a song in my heart.”

“And, according to some people, your Buffy was a self-involved, self-righteous bitch with a God complex, but I don’t see Wes complaining about having had to work with her, maybe because five years happened and that’s not where he is any more.”

“For one thing - don’t ever talk about Buffy like that again in my hearing or you will be picking your teeth up off the floor - for another thing, by ‘some people’ I presume you mean Cordelia, who was, I can assure you, far too self-involved herself - not to mention vain, vacuous and shallow - to have noticed anything about anyone else other than the make of her shoes.”

“Hey, she’s my friend and she’s dead. So shut the fuck up.”

“Can’t I leave you two alone for five minutes?” Willow demanded in dismay.

Giles turned to see Willow at the foot of the stairs looking shocked and Beth with her mouth open. He ran a hand through his hair. “Apparently not.”

There was a long awkward silence in which Gunn went over to where Wesley was sitting and said: “Pick up your book, Wes, we’re going now.” There was an edge to his voice and Giles wondered when they had all started sounding like the world’s most frayed parents in the supermarket checkout queue.

Willow nodded to Beth. “Thanks for your help. We’ll keep in touch, okay…?” The girl looked both surprised and touched when Willow impulsively gave her a hug, and then extremely wistful as they began to leave.

“Yes, thank you.” Giles was painfully aware of Willow giving him a Look, but decided to ignore it for the moment. He felt a pang of loss as they stepped out of the shop, the bell clanging behind them. He would have liked nothing more just now than to spend a quiet hour alone in a bookshop. He met her eye reluctantly. “I know.”

“You said you were going to be more patient.”

“Well, obviously I lied.”

Willow’s eyes were full of hurt and disappointment. “He can’t help being the way he is. He can’t help not being who he was before. When people are like that, you have to take care of them. That’s what you do.”

Giles put his hand on her arm. “Willow, Wesley isn’t Tara. We are going to take care of him and we are going to do everything that we can to…help him and keep him safe but he isn’t a member of our family and we’re not obligated to - ”

“You heard what Gunn said last night,” she lowered her voice to say. “We’re all that they have now. How does that not make them family?”

And then she was striding towards his car with a straight-backed indignation that made him sigh wearily. He missed Buffy; he missed Dawn; sometimes, he actually found himself missing Xander, and perhaps fair exchange was no robbery but he didn’t consider an obstreperous Gunn and a crazy Wesley a good deal.

They were all waiting for him by the car, Gunn glowering at the world from his ridiculously tall height, Wesley still reading his book, Willow with her arms crossed. Gritting his teeth, Giles said: “We are about to drive to look at the place where my god-daughter was horribly murdered. If anyone is going to be in a filthy mood for this journey, it’s going to be me. If anyone else wants to act out - take a number and get in line.” And then he was getting in the car he had evidently forgotten to lock and slamming the door with a very satisfying bang.

Giles wondered why all women were convinced that they could read maps when, in his experience, precisely none of them actually could. “Willow, I can assure you we are meant to be driving towards Ripon not further away from it.”

“Well, it would have made a lot more sense to go to Brimham Rocks from Harrogate, not Knaresborough. And all you have around here are fiddly little roads that don’t even look like roads.”

Giles pulled into the side of the road and took the map from her, examined it for a moment, replayed the last few signposts they’d passed in his mind, and then wearily began to perform what promised to be a six point turn.

“Hope you’re noticing the way we’re not saying a word,” Gunn piped up from the back. “Even though some of us said all along we should go to the rocks first and then the bookshop later.”

Giles finally got the car pointing in the right direction and had his mouth open to say something scathing to Gunn when he noticed Wesley still reading in the back of the car. As if becoming aware of Giles’s eyes upon him, he looked up, and Giles had another view of those awful shadows under his eyes. He wondered if he’d even combed his hair this morning - or week; when was the last time he’d shaved - or washed. Again, he thought of the man he had first met who had been so impeccably dressed and groomed and closed his eyes for a moment. “We need to buy Wesley some clothes.”

Gunn looked at Wesley in surprise. “He’s got clothes. He just picked these this morning.”

“They don’t fit him, Gunn. He doesn’t even have matching laces in his shoes. People are going to think he’s a mental patient.” He sighed. “And he used to care about his appearance.”

“He did?” Gunn took another look at Wesley. “Wes? Do you want to buy some new clothes? Or I could find some of those shirts you used to like? You had that purple one. I definitely packed that.”

“Lilah bought it for me. It was different when I thought she was at peace or I could save her, but I don’t want to wear shirts that still smell of her when she’s in hell.”

“It’s been over a year since she died. That shirt doesn’t smell of her. Nothing you own still smells of her.”

“I can smell her on it.” Wesley went back to his book. “And I bought the others with money they paid me at Wolfram & Hart. The Senior Partners tried to kill all of us. I don’t want to wear shirts I bought with money from them.”

Gunn tugged at the ill-fitting grey top that looked as if it would be handed out in some third world prison. “That’s why you’re wearing this? Because it’s from before Wolfram & Hart?”

“It’s from before Connor.” Wesley turned a page of the book. “That was why we ended up in Wolfram & Hart. Because of what I did.”

“If we’re talking ancient history then Angel getting naked with Darla is the reason Connor was around in the first place to have fake prophecies made up about him.” As that got no response, Gunn exhaled. “Okay, so how about when we get back we talk about what you will and won’t wear and I give the other stuff away and we get you something new?”

“If I buy you clothes it will be from money paid to me by the Watchers’ Council, Wesley,” Giles added, trying to talk clearly without sounding too much, he hoped, as if he were talking down to the man. “You don’t object to money being spent on you by them, do you?”

“I don’t need any new clothes.” Wesley took the pen from behind his ear and made a note in a notebook he seemed to be keeping in the pocket of his shapeless top.

“Wesley, you look like a wino. If you sat down next to the obligatory nutter on the bus in your present attire, he would undoubtedly move to a different seat.”

Wesley looked up again, almost shocking Giles with the clarity of his reflected blue gaze. “Dressing me differently won’t make me be able to comprehend reality any better. It will just look as if I do. I’m not crazy. I’m just not entirely…sane. I know dead people aren’t supposed to talk to you. I remember everything that ever happened to me, including all the things I’d much rather forget. I know who you all are, I just don’t believe that you’re…”

“Real?” Willow prompted gently.

He nodded and went back to his book.

“We are real, Wes,” Gunn protested. “You’ve got to get off this whole ‘Carnival of Souls’ thing and believe that we’re real and you’re alive.”

“They all say they’re real, though, including the people you can’t see. They can see each other and see all of you, too. One group of you has to be mistaken and they usually talk more sense.”

Giles took the road to Ripon. “Then why are you helping us? If you don’t think we’re real or that any of this is really happening? Why are you bothering to research who murdered Alicia?”

“Just in case it is real. Because if it is - someone killed three women at least two of which should have been able to fight back. I don’t approve of innocent women being murdered, and I wouldn’t want anything to happen to Willow.” His glance transferred briefly to the young woman in the passenger seat. “She was always very kind.”

Willow undid her seatbelt turned around in her seat. “Wesley, please believe we’re real.”

He looked up at her sadly. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

He didn’t answer and Giles felt another wave of weariness rush over him. “Because he couldn’t take the disappointment if he allowed himself to believe we were real and then it turned out that we weren’t. Well - I think he could probably live with the loss quite well in my case, but not Gunn. He’s already lost too many people to be able to lose Gunn twice.”

Wesley glanced up at him and for a moment his façade of calm removal from them all shimmered like a curtain and Giles saw how appallingly lost he really was. His ‘yes’ was barely audible.

Gunn looked as if someone had slapped him and then reached out and gripped his shoulder. “It’s okay, Wes. You believe it when you’re ready to believe it, okay? We’re all going to be here when you do. You take your time.” He transferred his gaze to Giles. “And I’m sorry about what I said about your friend.”

Giles nodded an acknowledgement. “Thank you. And I apologize for what I said about Cordelia. It was - completely inappropriate. Nor was it in any way a reflection of how I felt when I heard she’d… I was actually rather fond of Cordelia. She was certainly not the most tactful person I’ve ever met, but she was honest and brave and had enormous strength of character and, as with Anya, I miss her considerably more than I ever expected.” He glanced back in the rearview mirror. “If you tell Cordelia that I said that, Wesley, I will kneecap you with a monkey wrench.”

Wesley made a zipping motion across his mouth and Gunn straightened his collar for him as Wesley bent back over his book. When Giles looked back in the mirror as they were - appropriately - driving through Bedlam, he saw that Gunn had pulled out a comb and was endeavouring to do something about the untidy mess sticking up from Wesley’s head that had evidently once been a very expensive haircut.

“Gunn, Wesley’s disorientated, he’s not six,” Willow pointed out.

Giles, who had been pleased to see Gunn taking some responsibility, looked at her in surprise. “He’s only trying to help.”

Willow turned back round in her seat and did up her seatbelt, pulling down the sunshield to keep an eye on Gunn and Wesley in the mirror. “It would just be nice if you two could help Wesley without talking to him as if he came in on the Special Bus.”

Giles exchanged a look with Gunn that was entirely in accord with the other man’s indignation, although Giles couldn’t help noticing that Wesley took that moment to mouth ‘Thank you’ to Willow in the mirror, who responded with an equally clandestine ‘You’re welcome’ back. Giles decided that not only were women hopeless at reading maps, they were also entirely unreasonable.

*** Part Nine