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late-to-the-magnus-archives · 7 months

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The Incident - a Malevolent one-shot for the zine, This Too Shall Pass

Arthur and John are in Arkham, getting their burgeoning P.I. business off the ground.

And then Kayne asks for a favor, and everything goes to hell,

AO3

Written for the Malevolent zine, @malevolent-fanzine

————

“Right,” says Arthur, settling at his desk. “Widow Morris on Thursday. Friday is the court date—that’s the big one, John. I want this guy going down.”

Agreed. People who hurt children were never going to get mercy from either of them.

“The Morris case, at least, won’t be difficult,” Arthur verbalizes. “I still think it’s just a squatter.”

I don’t. I just have a feeling about it.

“Fine, fine.” Arthur sips tea with his right hand. “We’ll go armed however you think is wise. Make a note.”

John writes in the appointment book with his left.

Arthur considers the rest of their Tuesday. “So what about—”

“Hey, guys?” Kayne whines out of nowhere, then suddenly speaks like a rocket without punctuation. “I’m busy and need a hand this is Lucy (short for Lucifer of course) and I got stuff to do (big boy god stuff) a meeting of biblical proportions don’t you know (oh wait you wouldn’t) so anyway do me the favor of keeping an eye on her bye!”

And then he drops a monster in the middle of the office and vanishes.

At least, John presumes he vanishes. John is a little distracted trying to make sure Arthur doesn’t die.

Down! Behind the desk! Fuck!

Fortunately, Arthur is not in one of his stubborn moods today, and obeys.

Lucy is a horrible thing, oil-slick black and just as shiny, the size of a large dog, and possessed of enormous blue eyes that do not fit her hideous face. She has a shark-teeth perma-smile, six prehensile arms (or legs?), and flexible stingers lining her spine all the way to the tip of her pointed tail.

John knows they’re stingers because Lucy likes to embed them in things.

All things.

Anything.

Within seconds of her landing between them and the door, she has layered the carpet, the desk, the chairs, and much of the ceiling in freaky, pulsing spines, which she then regrows at once so she can do it again.

Unfortunately, Lucy seems to be throwing a tantrum.

There’s neither rhyme nor reason for her actions. She does not let them go for the door; when they try, she swipes her tail and lines Arthur’s arm with stingers, which apparently burn.

“Fuck!” Arthur hisses, back behind the desk as John works to pull the stingers free.

John does not like how… dusky Arthur’s skin gets around each little hole, but at least he gets them all out.

Lucy rampages around the office. She storms the bathroom. She crashes the kitchen.

The window is right there! John howls at her.

She does not even try to leave.

By this point, John knows the only reason they’re alive is Lucy doesn’t actually want to kill them.

After about an hour and a half, Lucy wears herself out, curls up like a weird, hairless cat, and enters a fitful sleep in front of the door.

She twitches in her sleep as though dreaming.

“What the fuck?” moans Arthur.

Kayne returns seconds later.

“Aww, there there, there there,” he coos hideously, scooping her up while Arthur peers with John’s sight around the war-wounded desk. “You did so good? Yes you did, yes you did! Thanks, you two. I owe you. Bye!” And he’s gone again.

The place is wrecked.

Arthur is feverish.

Fuck, says John, which seems a good summation of it all.

They call it The Incident. It seems unwise to mention Kayne or Lucy by name.

Arthur doesn’t seem particularly… well? He’s pale, and his reaction time is just a pinch slow; but he seems otherwise sharp enough, and scoffs at John’s idea of going to a doctor.

“I’m fine, damn it,” he says when prompted. “We don’t have time, anyway.”

Widow Morris turns out to have a damned wraith in her attic, which requires digging through old, dusty trunks and some fairly clever workarounds to bind.

They’ve done this before, but when Arthur goes to free her in exchange for a request, he seems to pull a blank. “Help someday?” he says, which is vague as fuck, and John is pissed.

Arthur! The hell!

“Hn?”

The wraith takes the deal and leaves. Who knows what she made of it.

Widow Morris pays them and tells Arthur he’s looking peaky.

That wraith shit is going to come back to bite us, John warns. What the hell were you thinking?”

“I think… I think I need to go home,” says Arthur, and says not one more word until they do.

They haven’t had much time to fix the place. Arthur crunches through wreckage, curses as he trips over a stinger John missed in the carpet, and mutters his way into the smashed-up kitchen.

Arthur, you’re worrying me.

“One more day, John,” Arthur mumbles as he eats some cold canned soup. “Once we finish this court case, we’ll be good for a bit. We can rest. ‘S what we need. Rest.”

Sure, Arthur. John is unconvinced.

Arthur showers.

Arthur goes to bed.

John is very concerned.

The morning of the court case—three days after The Incident—begins bright and early with Arthur throwing up.

He simply turns to the side and heaves all over the floor until there’s nothing left.

The fuck! John says, deeply startled. Are you all right?

“Sure,” says Arthur lightly, as though that didn’t happen, and staggers like a drunk toward the bathroom.

Arthur. Arthur, stop, you’re about to hit the—

Arthur wakes face-first into the open bathroom door, hands uselessly stretched on either side.

He grunts.

What the fuck, Arthur?

“‘S fine,” Arthur mumbles, and feels for the shower.

John is disturbed at how damp and tacky Arthur’s pajamas are. He must have sweated all night. You have a bad fever.

Not that they have any way to know. The thermometer, of course, is smashed.

Arthur, you need a damn doctor.

“No time for doctor,” Arthur mumbles with precise elocution and caveman grammar, and steps in before the water is even warm.

Arthur?

No answer this time.

Also no singing, which is absolutely out of character.

Arthur, if you walk into court like this, we are going to blow our testimony, and that murderer will get away.

“Sure, sure,” says Arthur, and—leaving the water on—staggers toward the closet, soaking wet.

Uh, Arthur?

“Mm?”

You didn’t shave.

Arthur stumbles back in.

No, says John, taking the straight razor from Arthur’s shaking hand. Better let me do this today.

“Kay.”

Tilt your head. There you go.

Arthur doesn’t argue or push back or anything.

Apparently, it takes a horrible mystery illness to make him amenable. Figures.

Arthur, I really think we should call the prosecutor and let them know you’re ill. Maybe your testimony can be rescheduled.

Arthur does not reply.

It takes nearly twenty minutes to get him dressed, and it goes… poorly.

“How do I look?” says Arthur, his shirt sticking to his wet skin and buttoned entirely wrong, his tie a configuration definitely not listed in The Gentlemen’s Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness and possibly a runic knot.

Okay, says John. Okay, this isn't great. Arthur, I don’t think this is going to work.

“Sure it is,” says Arthur, and then he passes out.

John doesn’t have a body to wince, but that thud shakes him, anyway.

Arthur?

John pats his face.

Nothing.

John smacks him hard.

Nothing.

This is no mere fever.

Fuck, John says.

If this is another coma, John doesn’t know what to do. Drag himself to the phone and dial the police? Sure—but he wouldn’t be able to speak.

And today’s court case will be a bust. That asshole will get away with literal murder, and that is…

The man hurt kids. This is unacceptable.

Don’t panic, John tells himself. Humans do this. They pass out when their bodies require resources for things other than consciousness. He’s going to wake up. Don’t panic. Don’t—

Bare feet come into view in front of Arthur’s face. Casual. Quiet. Filthy with what might be tar, but is just brown enough to make John think of blood.

“Oh, no, do panic, darling, very much do,” says the owner of the feet.

John is not particularly obedient, but he rockets into panic now. What? Why are you here? Go away!

Kayne does not, but crouches, studying Arthur like a fascinating bug. He grips Arthur’s hair to lift his head and drop it back down again, thud.

Hey!

“He is out for the count, isn’t he? My, my, my.” Lift, drop, thud.

Stop doing that!

“And here you have a court date, don't you? Dramatic! Terrible! Whatever shall you do?”

Go the fuck away.

“Oh, you want to go away from him?” Lift, drop, thud.

No! John thrusts his left hand beneath Arthur’s head.

“Not even to get his body for yourself? He wouldn’t suffer if you did it now! Wouldn’t even know it happened. He’d just float away (which is what he wants to do, anyway, though I know you’re not ready to tangle with that one), and maybe even end up with Faroe—and you’d be one step closer to whole.” Lift, drop—

Kayne allows John to catch Arthur’s head with a smack.

That seems pointed, somehow.

No!

“You sure? You could make the court date.” Lift, drop, smack.

At the cost of Arthur’s life? No!

“What if it wasn’t at the cost of his life?”

This time, Kayne doesn’t let go. He holds Arthur’s head by the hair, that fragile human neck bent, and John is suddenly very afraid what will happen to Arthur if he says no.

I… I’m listening.

“Good boy,” says Kayne, low and dangerous. “I’m bored, see? And this is an opportunity. So here’s what we’re going to do.”

An hour later, John walks Arthur’s body into the courtroom.

He hasn’t quite got the hang of it yet. Two legs instead of dozens of tentacles just doesn’t feel right, and balance is a whole thing, but there was no more time to practice.

He has a plan if anyone asks: something something out on a case, something something got beat up, something something doing just fine.

“Do you solemnly swear that you will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” they ask him.

Well, John sure does, even if the only gods he knows he’s actively avoiding.

“Are you prepared to tell this court what you observed on the day in question?” says the prosecutor, and John goes off.

Maybe he shouldn’t have gone off.

The prosecutor’s eyes are pretty damn big before John finishes his recollection.

So are the judge’s.

The jury looks fairly stunned, too.

John’s not sure what he did wrong. He just told them what happened. Everything he saw.

Everything that murderer did, including messing with evidence, which was the reason Arthur’s testimony matters so much.

What did he do worth staring at like this?

“Call for recess,” says the judge, and everybody takes a break.

John walks Arthur’s body to the men’s room.

Everyone else spoke in a measured, calm tone, as though this wasn’t a monster they were judging.

John was… passionate. Maybe shared some details humans would not (though the birthmark visible on the man’s dick seemed like important identification).

John has no regrets.

Next, he will be cross-examined, and he is ready.

He checks the tie (perfect).

He does the sniff test to ensure he didn’t sweat too much (soap and human, perfectly standard).

Teeth clean. Eyes clear. Hair -

Wait.

The eyes are not clear.

John leans in.

Arthur’s irises used to be brown; they have been gold since John took them, and it is a color John really likes—it’s damn near metallic, hardly a human tone. But now, there is something new.

Jagged black lines radiate out from the irises, as if Arthur’s eyes are broken glass.

“That’s not right,” John mutters in Arthur’s suave tenor.

“Looks fine to me,” says Kayne from one of the stalls, and (obnoxiously) flushes the toilet. He slams open the stall door and stalks over to lean on the sink, then (obnoxiously) doesn’t use it.

John doubts he needs to use it. He’s also certain Kayne has far worse than human effluvia on his hands. “What do you want?”

“You know, Arthur keeps surprising me?” says Kayne conversationally. “Not a clue why (which is a whole thing in itself), but he’s reacting to Lucy a lot faster than anticipated.”

Of course this goes back to The Incident. Of course it does. “What? Those fucking stingers? I got them all out!”

“Did you, though?”

John is very still.

“I had been calculating a couple of weeks before he would start showing, but yow. Those eyes, buddy. You ain’t convincing anybody on the stand with eyes like those, unless you were arguing for demon possession.” Kayne cackles. “Might get you a date, but not a conviction.”

John can feel Arthur’s heart pounding. He peers in the mirror again. “What is happening to Arthur’s body?”

“Don’t you know? It’s being taken over, darling. Little by little. Maybe your presence helped? Hurried it along? We’ll never know. Anyway, got to go! Ciao!” And he takes one step backwards and vanishes.

Oh.

Oh, this was not good.

Oh.

John peers again.

They’re expecting him back in the courtroom.

The other guy’s lawyer will definitely notice these eyes.

John won’t be able to make an excuse about a late-night excursion for this.

He has to protect Arthur.

But the court case…

Damn it.

John wants justice, but he wants Arthur safe far more.

He can hear them all walking down the hall, talking, laughing, ready to resume.

John climbs out the bathroom window.

Behind him, he thinks there are screams, but he tells himself his borrowed human brain made them up.

Back in their small apartment behind the office, John studies Arthur’s face in the cracked bathroom mirror.

Since he left the courthouse, the lines have grown darker, sharper-angled—and have begun to reach past his sclera and into the flesh of his face.

This is very bad.

He must have missed a stinger.

John strips and inspects himself. He can’t quite see Arthur’s back, so he rummages until he finds a shaving mirror.

And there, in the reflection, is a small, black dot between his kidneys.

A stinger. Shit.

If John is very still and doesn’t breathe, he can see it throbbing slightly, pumping something unknown into Arthur’s body.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” snaps John, and, using tweezers, manages to wriggle it out.

Yup. It’s one of Lucy’s spines, still pulsing, oozing a weird and nasty black.

How much of this is in Arthur? How the hell can he counteract it?

A witch. He needs a witch.

He doesn’t know any witches.

Not here, anyway.

The only witches John knows are back home—

He catches himself. Are back in the Dreamlands. Which isn’t home. This is.

Still, he needs a witch. “Damn it, Kayne,” he growls.

“What?” Kayne says from behind the shower curtain. “Can’t a guy take a relaxing bath in a stolen tub with expensive oils and fine wine and a severed head in peace while another guy in a stolen body pulls a baby chaos stinger out of his back with tweezers?”

John decides not to engage with that sentence. “I need a witch.”

Kayne scoffs. “You need more than that, darling.”

“This happened because we did you a favor,” John snarls.

“No, it happened because your human is a fucking klutz.” Kayne does something, and water splashes.

John hopes Kayne is not getting severed-head bits all over everything. He sighs. “Fine. I’ll find a witch on my own.”

“This should be good.”

John grabs Arthur’s clothes and exits the bathroom at a run.

John misses Arthur.

The human world is much less interesting without him to talk to, and he finds himself mentally describing everything he sees as though still guiding his friend.

It’s not the same.

He wants Arthur back.

At any rate, the yellow pages are no use for finding witches.

He already knows there are no shops offering such things.

Come to think of it, though… he does know one person who’s connected to witchery.

She’s not likely to help him.

Maybe he can scare her into it? No, that wouldn’t work.

“This is a bad idea, Arthur,” he says out of habit, though of course, there is no response.

He misses Arthur.

It takes him an hour by bus to get to Boston. By the time he arrives, other passengers are avoiding him, glancing nervously at his face, visibly afraid.

Most of them, anyway. Kayne was right about that—a few look distinctly interested, though he’s not sure in what.

If it were John’s body, he might be curious enough to find out, but it isn’t his body, so he doesn’t.

He won’t do that to Arthur, any more than Arthur would do that to him.

The Dunwich Repository looks exactly the same—an understated brownstone with a sign by the door, and no indication just what horrors lie within.

The whole shoggoth thing hadn’t gone… great? And Asenath’s father had died in the middle of it, and honestly, she should have, too, but Arthur had insisted she’d been used and was innocent and needed another chance, all of which John disbelieved, but now maybe he could leverage that mercy.

He climbs the steps to the brownstone’s door and hesitates. Is this really the only option?

Ah. Jagged, black lines have shattered their way from his fingernails down into Arthur’s hands, not following any vein pattern he can see.

John dares not wait. He rings the bell.

She doesn’t make him wait long.

Asenath hasn’t aged much. That she’d aged at all in only a few months, though, is disturbing—and maybe indicates just how long she and her father had been siphoning life from other people to extend their own.

Maybe this was a bad idea.

Too late now, though. “Hello, Asenath,” says John.

She raises her perfect eyebrows, her dress diaphanous and pearlescent, her jewelry gleaming and clean.

Then she hauls off and smacks him in the face.

Arthur’s face still stings. He was going to be unrecognizable by the end of all this—though maybe that was good. They had left in the middle of a court case.

“I should throw you out,” says Asenath. “You don’t deserve help from me.”

“We’d hardly be here if we had another choice,” says John, distinctly more kingly than intended.

The look she grants over her shoulder—a full body scan, up and down—is ugly.

The Repository seems serene. The carpet is thick, the wallpaper is silk, and paintings line the walls—but they are not ordinary landscapes.

John knows the landscapes in those paintings. None of them are of this world. Neither are the books on the second and third floors. The whole place is a ticking time bomb of esoteric knowledge.

“Hm,” she says.

John grips Arthur’s gun in his pocket. “What?”

“It’s a curse,” says Asenath, moving forward into the building.

“Is it?” says John. “Seemed like venom of some kind, to me.”

“Well, that’s what happens when an amateur looks into complicated things,” Asenath says, and John remembers why he dislikes her so badly.

“So can you help or not?” he grumps.

“Depends. Can you help me?”

“The last time you wanted help, it was a trap,” says John with conviction.

Because it had been.

Because they’d gotten wind Arthur had a special passenger, and hired him with plans to siphon his life. John’s life.

It hadn’t worked only because they’d underestimated just how completely outrageous Arthur could be when threatened.

“Well, this time, it isn’t one,” says Asenath, and enters the last room in the place.

It might have been a bedroom once. Its windows are boarded; its furniture is gone. A single structure remains now: a rough, wooden rack, on which the dead, rotting body of Ephraim Waite currently stretches.

He’s been there a while. The flesh has begun to pull away from his bones. The ropes around his wrist indent as if in soft cheese.

“Uh,” says John, who had not expected this.

“I’m going to inhabit him with something,” says Asenath. “I haven’t decided what yet, but I need power to keep him from decaying further until I figure it out.”

John stares at her. She would, he thinks, do gangbusters business in the Dreamlands. “Why the fuck?”

“So,” she says, ignoring the question, “I help you with your little chaos curse, and you give me some of your power.”

“I don’t have any power,” says John, lying through Arthur’s teeth.

Her look could shrivel deserts into the richest lagoon.

He sighs. “How much power are we talking?”

“From you? Not much.”

“How do I know you aren’t going to trap us again?”

“Practicality. It’s more useful to have you as a living contact than a dead one right now—though I’ll warn you: at the end, you will need to walk out of here under your own power.” She smiles, and it is not a good smile.

“Fine,” says John, who hopes he’s not making a mistake. “We’ll do it here. Remove the curse, chaos, whatever. I’ll figure it out.”

He does not figure it out.

Removing the chaos is awful, and John is glad Arthur doesn’t have to experience it.

He’s tied to a second wooden frame. He’s bled until his heart stops, shocked to groaning shudders by some kind of jumping electrical arcs from a green wand, and subjected to a screaming rock until his ears ooze blood and he feels half-mad.

Everything she does extracts steaming black stuff from Arthur’s body, which seethes in the jars she uses to catch it, and he knows it’s probably bad to let her keep it, but he’s in no position to argue.

At one point, it feels for all the world like she pulls out his eyes and scoops something black and nasty that was hiding behind them.

Awful, just awful.

But by the end, he is cured. He can feel it; the fever has broken, and the sharp, black lines that had been radiating out from his fingernails are gone.

Unfortunately, so is Arthur’s strength.

“This will do,” she says, untying him by pulling a single knot and letting him fall to the floor. She studies the simple mason jar she filled with sparking yellow magic—when she extracted it, he doesn’t know, but it’s wild to see his power taking form. “Payment received. Business concluded. See yourself out.”

Right. That might be a problem.

John can’t even make the body roll over.

Asenath ignores him, moving around in her weird little lab, sizzling things, smacking things, cutting something that squeals.

He needs to get out of here.

“This is good power,” says Asenath, not even looking at him. “It should preserve the body for several months—so I’ll grant you an hour. After that, you’re a trespasser, and I will do what I want with you. You’ve been warned.” And off she goes with her awful self to do awful things to her awful father, and John curses Kayne for putting him in this situation.

He tries to pull himself toward the door.

Tries.

The thick carpet does not lend itself to dragging, and he makes no progress.

This brownstone is huge, he realizes, though it had seemed small on the way in. Panting, John wonders if he should stop trying, pull out the gun instead, and prepare to defend himself.

“Fuck,” he breathes, staring down the interminable hallway, at the distant door that seems so small. “I need help. Fuck, I need help.”

“You do?” says Kayne, standing suddenly between him and the door.

“Go away,” John groans.

“No,” says Kayne, tapping his chin. “I think I’d rather watch what she’s going to do to you when you don’t make it out in time.”

“You wouldn’t!”

The look Kayne gives makes Asenath’s seem humid.

“What do you want?” John snarls.

“Pity I’m all full up for things to do right now,” says Kayne. “No time to help you out. Schedule’s packed. Just swamped with responsibility.”

John knows what he’s hearing. He understands.

It might start this whole mess over again.

Arthur being alive to start it over again outweighs dodging whatever Asenath has in mind. “If we… watch Lucy for another evening, will you…” he says.

“Done!” And Kayne yanks him off the floor like he’s a stuffed toy.

On Tuesday—a full week after The Incident—John knows that Arthur is finally okay because his control of Arthur’s body slips away, heavy like wet silk.

John is so relieved.

Arthur, on his own, stirs.

He’s on the floor. There is a weight on top of him, sitting on his chest—kind of poky, not too heavy, but distinctly uncomfortable and inhuman.

It smells like the underside of a wet log.

A dog?

Not a dog.

He almost panics.

Shhh, John says. She’s finally fucking sleeping.

“She?” Arthur whispers, and can feel himself go pale. “Lucy?”

Yeah. Fucking Lucy.

“What… the hell is she doing here again?”

Arthur, I swear to fuck, if you wake her up—

Arthur gasps. “The court case!”

Relax. It’s been moved.

“Moved? How?”

The wraith. After I made our escape, the wraith went crazy on the courtroom, tearing shit up, scaring everybody. The whole case got moved to next month.

“Wh… what?”

I guess that’s how she helped us. Nobody knows we left before being cross-examined. Talk about luck.

Arthur is very clearly struggling. “I don’t even remember testifying?”

John sighs. So… about that. We—oh, shit.

Lucy wakes up.

She starts with a humming noise, a whir, as though she’s secretly mechanical, and that is the only warning.

After much deliberation, The Incident has now been extended to include the whole week.

I’m telling you, Lucifer is not Kayne’s offspring, John argues.

“Why else would he demand we watch her?” Arthur grouses from behind the gouged desk.

He is banged to hell. The scrapes are healing. There are no new barbs, by all the luck in the world.

They have figured out how to play fetch. Whatever they throw gets destroyed five or six tosses in, but it is enough to keep her from fully rampaging.

I’m telling you, he did this to fuck with us, says John.

Arthur huffs. “Maybe you’re mistaken.”

Maybe you’re naive.

“Maybe he has a daughter,” says Arthur, wistful, though how he could be wistful over a thing that broke every piece of glass in the office (and smashed half the furniture, and ate all the food, and somehow made the ceiling in one corner drip a constant, sticky red) and damn near got him killed is beyond John.

Maybe it was because he hadn’t seen it. Maybe it was because—

“How are my favorite babysitters?” says Kayne quite brightly, and Lucy makes a weird, trilling sound and leaps into his arms.

Arthur peers around the desk. “Is she?” he says.

“Is she what?” says Kayne, somehow even brighter.

“Your daughter.”

Kayne laughs hard as Lucy crawls over him, settling around his neck like a venomous scarf. “Fuck, no! I found this thing by the side of the road. I don’t even know what she is, but she’s got some attributes, doesn’t she?” He laughs again.

For the love of hell! John snarls.

“Oh,” says Arthur quietly.

Arthur is sad, and John has had enough. If that thing ever shows up here again, we are going to shoot it, he warns. I don’t care what you say.

“Oh, by all means,” says Kayne. “You could’ve shot her now, and I wouldn't care. Anywho, gonna go see how a few planetary royal families handle her brand of play. Thanks for being guinea pigs!” And he disappears with a pop.

In his place, on the ruined rug, is a single orange lollipop, as if to say they were very well-behaved at the dentist.

Arthur groans.

Told you it wasn’t his kid.

“Fuck him,” says Arthur.

Yeah. Definitely.

“How much time did I lose?”

Five days.

Arthur considers this grimly. “We are definitely shooting it next time,” he says. “No questions asked.”

Finally, you’re showing sense.

“Get me to the bathroom. I need to clean up.”

And by mutual decision, they never speak of The Incident again.

#Malevolent #malevolent fox #malevolent fanfic #arthur lester #John malevolent #kayne malevolent #one shot