Transitions - Ch. 50

For a moment, the attic bedroom spun rapidly around him, and Giles shut his eyes, willing it, desperately, to stop. His training would not seem to reassert itself, and for the longest time he could only swallow, trying not to notice the reek in the air, trying not to allow the images that the room contained to resurface in his mind. He knew that Xander and Buffy had been overwhelmed, and that he ought to come to their aid, but he found himself temporarily helpless to do so.

He felt no sense of Ripper's presence, though he'd clearly--God, there was evidence enough of that!--been in the room recently.

Giles attempted to focus on other, more mundane details: the angled ceiling that slanted to match the sharp pitch of the roof overhead, the nubbled white walls, the deep grain of their dark wooden beams. The air in the bedroom felt quite cold, and he wondered how the girls bore the deeper chill of winter. Had born the chill. Had...

Perhaps the cold came, really, from the ghosts that filled the bed-chamber. He counted two score at least, forty pairs of mirrored eyes, forty silvery-pale faces as still in death as they had been in life.

Giles forced himself to look at the bodies again, not dispassionately--for whatever his young friends might, at times, have thought of him, he was not and never had been a man capable of dispassion. Instead, he regarded the young LeFayes with pity. It was not difficult to make that emotion replace his earlier horror. The girls were ten in number, and each shade still hovered close by its former bed-head, as if the spirits had not yet realized their separation from the bodies that Ripper had come to harm so terribly.

Why? the girls seemed to plead. Why are we so parted? They looked cold, and lost, and alone--and Giles pitied them, in fact, with all his heart.

Not one had been more than a year or so older than Buffy. What a waste. What a bloody, bloody waste. Of lives, of talent. Of...of everything.

Giles thought suddenly of the old days, in his library--days that now seemed years past instead of mere weeks. He recalled watching Buffy, his future love, and his sweet young friend Willow, with their heads bent together, whispering secrets in one another's ears. They'd thought him absorbed elsewhere, lost in the dullness of his books, but he hadn't been, not always. Whenever he'd been weariest, or had most questioned his calling, Giles would summon that image to mind, the golden head and the copper nearly touching, the lovely murmur of their voices--all the reason he ever needed to keep up the fight.

Had these girls ever shared such secrets, shut off, as they were, from Buffy and Willow's world, the world of boys, clothes and music? Or had they been entirely LeFaye, as restrained and focused as their elders? They did not seem so now--whilst the others appeared impassive, they seemed restless, troubled. Again and again they looked to him, as if they sought his aid.

What do they want of me? Giles wondered. What is it they are asking? The ghosts seemed, so far, incapable of speech.

Then he spied Horace Stanley, a wretched huddle upon the spattered floor. The very sight of the old man made Giles's breath catch in his throat, and a dreadful, burning, tearing sensation fill his body, as if his chest might any instant split open and some hideous monster emerge.

Mr. Stanley was a big man--even now, in his later years, quite a bit larger than even Giles himself. When he'd been a boy, his stepfather had seemed like a mountain, a vast presence that filled the world with his voice, blocking out the light of the sun. Now that familiar, hated face turned up to him, slack-jawed, its eyes pathetic.

"Rupert?" he said. "Rupert, my boy, is that you?"

"You--!" Giles choked on the word. Seek as he might, he could not discover an epithet foul enough for what he felt. His eyes began to burn, until he knew they must positively glow with fury.

He struggled vainly against this burgeoning rage for bare seconds before it broke uncontrollably free. With a strength that far exceeded any he'd known he possessed, Giles dragged the old man to his feet, flinging him the length of the room, so that he fell against, and shattered, the window glass.

Again, Horace Stanley gazed up at him, his large handsome face blank with shock, tears in his cold blue eyes. The long window-casements, now empty of their panes, flapped behind him, blown by a wind that Giles could not feel. He felt nothing, really, except the pain in his chest, and the overwhelming, all-consuming anger.

All around him, the eyes of the ghosts darkened to polished flint.

Gasping with the force of his fury, Giles took hold of the old man, and hauled him up again. His voice seemed to have returned to him--a version of his voice at any rate, for he shouted words of such foulness, such venom, he hadn't known they existed within him. He struck Stanley in the face, the throat, the abdomen, in any soft part that would cause the old man pain. Stanley's cries of agony fell upon deaf ears, and when he slipped again to the floor Giles followed him down, hitting and hitting until he scarcely recognized his stepfather's face--not that he could have seen it with the tears that flooded his own eyes.

All the while, Mr. Stanley pleaded for his mercy, calling him son, until Giles screamed back, "Where was your mercy for me, or for Buffy? Where was yours for my family, you sick old bastard?"

At the word, the same word Celeste had used, with literal accuracy, to describe Sebastian, all the anger drained from Giles's body, leaving him dizzy and ill, mindful, once more, of the murdered girls. Mindful of the two-score ghosts, who now smiled coldly.

"Did you even give a thought to what you'd set in motion?" Giles whispered, in a harsh voice. "Did you even, for a moment, care? Where were you, when Augustina died? Where were you, when the demon my father had become killed my sisters, and I was forced to drive a stake through his heart? Where were you when I was a boy, or as poor Helena Penglis was losing her mind? Where were you when my mother died, or when the monster you brought forth murdered these young women?"

Suddenly too revolted even to touch the old man, Giles released his grip on Mr. Stanley's shirt. "My God, you pillock, where was your heart, your mind or your soul?"

"I...didn't do it," the old man quavered, through the bloody remains of what had been his well-shaped mouth. Suddenly, too, he did look old, weak and hollow--but Giles felt no pity anywhere in his heart. He scarcely felt that he had a heart any longer, only a raw wound where that organ formerly resided.

"Was it your idea?" he asked coldly. "Did you hire Ethan to let Ripper loose again?"

"I--" Horace Stanley lurched to his feet, holding his battered body with his arms.

Giles rose too, still feeling sick and weary, disgusted to his soul. "Don't bother to answer. I know. You very likely sent the vampires to Sunnydale as well. There's not sufficient evil in the world, is there? Such men as you must make more?"

"I--" Stanley said again, in a quavering, old-man's voice. "Our traditions--"

Giles only stared at him. He'd become aware of an electricity in the air, a hum of gathering power. "Have you any excuse whatsoever," he asked quietly, "That a rational mind would accept?"

"I am not..." Stanley wiped blood from his chin. "I am not...in my right wits."

Giles could feel his eyes grow cold, and colder, as he continued to stare at his stepfather. If he listened hard, he felt sure that the hum would contain words. If he listened harder, he might hear them.

"Rupert..." Mr. Stanley pleaded. "I beg you, don't look at me so."

Giles turned his back. Truly, he couldn't stand to regard the old man any longer, but when he looked into the room, all he could see was his stepfather's horrid work, and the eyes of Ripper's victims..

"Damn you to hell, old man," he whispered.

For a long time, there was silence, and then Mr. Stanley said, "Non sum qualis eram."

A quote from Horace, Giles thought bitterly. How apt.

A wind that did not originate with the open window blew sharply through the room, and Giles waited, expecting his stepfather to make further comment.

"I am not as I was?" he wondered. What did the old man mean by that?

And then it struck him--the tapping of the casements, the gusting of the wind. When he turned around again, Giles knew, Horace Stanley would be gone. The ghosts stared at him, half-accusingly, and the murmur of half-heard voices increased almost to a babble.

Giles shut his eyes tight, saying to himself, over and over, I don't care. I don't care. The exact words he'd repeated, again and again, sitting high off the ground in the cleft of Clarice's tree, hands clenched about the cluster of little treasures she'd once hidden in a disused squirrel-hole, her talismans against evil. He wished that Clarice would appear to him now, and tell him what he ought to do--except that he knew what he ought to do. What he had to do.

He'd promised to make Horace Stanley burn.

Giles turned at last, walking to the window. It let out onto a sort of sub-roof, which was flattish, in an uneven way. He could see Mr. Stanley clearly, a hulking darkness against the indigo sky. The moon, waxing gibbous, threw down a hard light, outlining his stepfather's body in intermittent silver as stormclouds scudded across the lunar brightness.

"You might as well come inside, old man," Giles said. "We both know you haven't either the bollocks to jump from there, or the conscience to feel truly sorry for what you've brought to pass."

Horace Stanley turned to look at him, a great blankness in the night. He seemed, for once, at a lost for words.

"Come in or not, it's your choice," Giles told him. "I haven't the time to waste on you."

He thought--rather incongruously, given the circumstances--of a film his young friends had watched during his convalescence. There had been a young girl trying to find her way through a maze like something out of Lewis Carroll, and she'd been vexed at every turn by the Goblin King, played convincingly by one of his secret favourites, David Bowie. At the end, the girl had won her freedom by speaking the words he spoke now, "You have no power over me."

"You have no power over me." Even as he said it, Giles knew the sentence to be true: for the first time in thirty-five years, he felt entirely free. Free of destiny and duty. Free of the Watchers. Free from this evil old man. Any act he performed now, he performed by choice.

The two men stared at one another through the dark, and Giles wondered what Horace Stanley saw in his face. The old man took a step backward, then another, whilst Giles watched with nothing beyond curiosity.

"On your head be it," Horace Stanley said, but if he meant the words as a curse, that curse had no power.

The babble in the air became clear, a concise sequence of words, readily understandable. Giles shut his eyes yet again, listening, remembering. The LeFayes may have imprisoned, and nearly brought about his death, but in this Giles felt he owed them a debt. He ought to have acted before things came to this pass. He ought to have acted back in the forest, or in the dreadful, haunted tower-block in Whitechapel.

Giles called on the powers of earth and water, fire and air. The stormclouds thickened, bringing utter darkness, and then the sky flashed violet, flashed indigo. Rain fell in sheets, and even the air from outdoors bore the sharp, coppery, electrical smell of blood.

He spoke the spell, word for word, and the clouds spat fire.

Giles turned back into the room. He told himself he never heard the screaming, that he could not detect the hot glow of the flames, red and orange, yellow and green, behind him. He told himself that he wasn't glad to have it ended, though he knew that was a lie.

One by one, the ghosts winked out around him.

Giles walked from bed to bed and, with sadness rather than horror, covered the murdered girls over with their counterpanes. Above each, spoke a blessing. He didn't know how he would tell Moira what had transpired--but perhaps, in her LeFaye heart, she already knew. She would be the only one ever to hear this particular confession.

Poor Moira. Poor Em. He must remember to be extremely kind to her. Giles knew that her feelings about her family were, in the main, confused, and that she would have been outraged by the state of affairs that brought his party to Mermorgan. And yet, she'd spoken with fondness of the young LeFayes, and there was, after all, a bond between them all that an outsider would not, perhaps, be able to understand.

He glanced out the window. Only a drift of multicoloured sparks remained, and as Giles watched, they twisted upward in the wind. Part of him still expected Mr. Stanley to stride suddenly out of the dark: powerful, cruel, threatening--and part of him, the part that was harder to believe, knew that would never happen. He was, truly and entirely, free--of the evil old man, at least, if not of the knowledge of what he himself had done.

All that mattered now was to find the demon, and put an end to all of this.

Xander had begun to come round, and Giles knelt beside him, helping the boy to sit. "Better, then?" he asked quietly.

"No," Xander replied, in a choked voice.

"Shut your eyes," Giles told him. "Are you able to stand?"

"I'm gonna barf again."

"No, you are not. To your feet, now. Lean on me." With his arm about the boy's waist, and Xander's arm round his shoulders, Giles managed to steer him from the room. He settled Xander at the foot of the stairs, where the reek was less prevalent.

Xander bent over his knees, gasping in the fresher air. Giles laid a hand on the back of his neck. The boy's skin felt clammy, but he supposed that was to be expected: he'd had rather a terrible evening.

"Will you be all right on your own for a moment?" Giles asked him quietly. "I ought to fetch Buffy."

But when he looked up, she was there already, halfway down the stairs. He'd never seen her look so pale. Her eyes appeared dark and haunted. Leaving Xander with a light squeeze to his shoulder, Giles climbed toward his love, enfolding her in his arms.

"Well, I feel dumb," she said, in a soft, unsteady voice. "So much, huh, for bravely battling evil. Do you think Wonder Woman ever threw up or passed out in the face of danger?"

"I rather doubt Wonder Woman ever encountered evil of such a graphic nature. Her foes seemed to be confined to men of colourful names and coarse demeanor, who were considerate enough to succumb readily to a brisk blast from her power bands."

"Did he just--?" Xander asked.

Buffy pulled away, to stare at him wide-eyed. "Uh, Giles--you didn't get possessed or something, did you?"

He looked into those great, sorrowful eyes, and wanted nothing more than to take her away from all this horror. Away from the grief, the sadness, the fear--away from ever having to battle monsters again.

But Buffy was as she was, and she'd seen her duty. As for himself, he might no longer have had a duty to the Council, but he owed every duty to her.

Giles took her in his arms again, her slight body nearly melting into his. "Willow's been coaching me," he whispered in her ear, trying to speak with some vestige of lightness. "You were right: I seem to learn more readily when I approach it in the same manner I approached my studies in archaeology, sifting through the evidence of an alien culture."

"That's my alien culture, Mister," Buffy answered, but beneath her seemingly carefree words he could hear a desperate struggle to regain her composure.

Her body trembled violently against his, and Giles was, himself, beginning to experience a nearly devastating amount of aftershock. He felt a powerful need to sit down, and tried not to give in to it--but he was suddenly quite unable to stand.

Buffy lowered him to a seat on the steps, and took her own place beside him, gazing into Giles's face with love and concern, stroking his brow with her soft fingertips.

"And what happened to the old guy?" Xander moved closer to them. to them. "I did see an old guy, didn't I?"

Giles tried to imagine what he ought to tell them, then realized that he had no words, just then, to describe the scene that had passed whilst they lay unconscious.

"It was Mr. Stanley, wasn't it?" Buffy asked, troubled. "So what happened with him?" She glanced again into his face, then downward, taking in his battered hands. "Giles--?"

"He was there," Giles answered, trying hard not to draw in a hiss of breath as she examined the left hand, and then the right. In his rage, he'd been less than prudent. Oddly, he hadn't felt a thing at the time. "We...aren't looking for him any longer. I believe the demon's gone into Ethan now."

"Great," Xander said. "I don't know about you, but a demon-infested evil sorcerer strikes me as not a good thing."

"I hear you there," Buffy told him.