Chapter Text
GERARD
Dying isn’t so bad. It’s staying dead that sucks.
Flames lick up the sides of the torn page. “You owe me one, Gerry,” Jon sighs. “Rest in, uh… Just rest.”
That was supposed to be the end. The End, even.
So why does Gerry wake up to screaming and circus music?
Gerard Keay opens his eyes to flashing lights. The brightness is first. The sound comes second, like a radio tuning in. He can hear a chaotic calliope organ, loud discordant music resonating throughout the room. Everything feels distant and tooclose at the same time.
And Gertrude is there. Her voice, distorted and echoing— “ I really cannot express how much of a disappointment you are .”
Gerry is transient, translucent. His form is nothing but a shade. Still, somehow the words cause shame and anger to burn in a gut that is no longer real. Gertrude Robinson’s words sting sharper than a slap. How dare she? He followed her all over the world, working alongside her, disregarding his own health and wellbeing until his body finally gave out.
He opens his mouth, prepared to defend himself to Gertrude, but then he realizes that she hadn’t been speaking to him at all.
Jon is there.
Jon, the Archivist who replaced Gertrude when she died. Jon, who promised to burn his page and give him rest. Who actually followed through. And yet Gerry is still here, somehow, lost in a kaleidoscopic cacophony of light and sound where the only discernible detail is Gertrude’s disappointment.
Gerry remembers that Gertrude is meant to be dead. (He is also, of course, meant to be dead. But rules and supposed-to-bes don’t seem to matter in this place of circus music and stolen skin.)
And as Gerry watches Jon fumble to apologize to his predecessor, to defend himself, to make any sense at all of what’s going on, another voice joins the chorus.
Jurgen fucking Leitner.
So Gerry’s pretty sure now that he’s passed on and this is Hell.
“I told you once that dying isn’t all that bad,” Gerard sighs, staring down at Jon’s expressionless face in the hospital bed. “I meant it. It isn’t. But this… hanging out in the middle, one foot in the grave and one in the land of the living… it’s not good, you know. Not for anyone, not you and not the people who love you.”
The heart monitor is silent, just like always. Jon doesn’t twitch. Doesn’t even breathe.
It’s been days since Tim Stoker stopped the Stranger’s ritual with a massive explosion. The Unknowing is nothing but ash and a half-remembered nightmare. Jon’s been laid up here in the hospital, comatose and unresponsive. And Gerry’s pinned here with him, unable to leave or move on.
“Just… just make up your mind soon, Jon,” Gerry says, perching on the edge of the cot— or at least imagining that he is perching on the edge of the cot. The sheets do not wrinkle, and the springs do not creak beneath his weight.
He and Jon wait on opposite sides of death, as if daring the other to just jump across.
The man who comes to sit at Jon’s bedside is broad-shouldered and tall, but stooped in his sorrow. He ducks his head and wrings his hands in his lap, but it does little to hide his sweet face and doe eyes. “I don’t know if you can hear me, Jon,” he starts. “I mean, I… heh. I hope you can. But I just don’t know, do I?”
Gerry entertains himself by sticking his hand in and out of the man’s head, wondering if he feels a chill or notices anything amiss.
“The plan worked. Elias is in prison—”
“Wait, what?” Gerry shouts, immediately retracting his hand. “That rat bastard’s in jail?” But the man has moved on to talking about other members of the Archives that Gerry’s never heard of. “Go back. How’d you get him caught? Say more about Elias.”
The rest of the one-sided conversation is mainly just soft little besotted things. The guy’s making it abundantly clear where his heart lies. Gerry would pity him, except it’s hard for him to pity the living.
“Gertrude was going to light Elias on fire,” Gerry muses. “And you lot called the police in. They don’t make Archivists like they used to, huh?”
The guy leaves after a few hours. Gerry lets out a low whistle and looks down at Jon’s lifeless form. “He’s got it bad,” Gerry says. “Cute, too. You’d better wake up and lock that down or I just might steal him from you.”
“Jon? It’s… it’s me, Georgie.”
“Finally, somebody introduces themselves,” Gerry mutters. “Hi, Georgie. I’m Gerry. Nice to meet you.”
Georgie doesn’t hear him. Naturally. “I thought… you know, maybe you were getting a bit tired of only Martin’s voice, ha.” And she’s finally given a name to Jon’s pining mystery man? Gerry decides he likes Georgie. “I, um. I actually don’t know what to talk to you about… but I thought maybe it would be good if you heard a friendly voice. So, I’m… if you don’t mind, I brought my laptop and mic. Thought I’d do some recording in here.”
Gerry watches her unpack her gear and test her audio settings. He listens to her run through a handful of vocal exercises— red leather, yellow leather, one hen, two ducks, three squawking geese . “Hi there, haunts fans!” she finally says into the microphone. “I’m Georgie Barker, and this is another episode of What The Ghost?, your weekly insight into ghouls, ghosts, and ghastly goings-on.”
Maybe listening to podcasts is something Gerry can get into now that he’s dead.
Georgie introduces the latest flimsy ghost story she’s covering and explains that she’s recording in the hospital room of a dear friend. She launches into a tale of strange chills and mysterious messages scrawled in mirror mist. She pauses in her sordid story at one point to advertise Bedcetera mattresses.
While Gerry is leaning over Georgie to read the stickers on her laptop, he accidentally drifts too close to the microphone. And the recording fuzzes over. He backs away, startled, expecting Georgie to just shrug it off and redo the take.
But she looks suddenly hyperalert, staring at the soundwave readout on her computer. “Um,” she says, eyes wide, “listeners, I mentioned I was recording in the hospital room of my comatose friend. Well, I’m getting some interesting feedback on the microphone. It’s… I don’t want to jump to conclusions? But I also don’t want to exclude the possibility of electromagnetic energy… and a possible ghostly presence.”
“Oh, shit,” Gerry says. “That’s me.”
“I’m going to try to speak to him… it…” Georgie says. “Hello? If you can understand me… if you can understand me, make yourself known.”
Gerry swipes his hand through the microphone. The same thing happens— static, distortion. Georgie’s mouth drops open.
“Okay. Ah, control. Don’t do anything this time.”
She waits. Gerry listens to her and stays absolutely still. The audio levels remain consistent. Georgie watches her computer screen with something between determination and astonishment. Then her eyes dance around the room, like she might catch Gerry’s ghost hovering in a sunbeam.
“I think…” Georgie says, still looking around. Gerry wishes more than ever that he could make himself visible. “Listeners, I think there’s a ghost trying to contact me.”
“Thank you,” Georgie says, accepting the equipment from the short, dour woman Gerry heard her call Melanie. “You’re sure you don’t want to stay?”
“I’m sure,” Melanie says, glancing around the room suspiciously. “I’ve been… trying to keep all the ghost bullshit at work. Isolated from my personal life.”
“Understandable.”
“Unless you…” Melanie looks down, her expression softening when she looks at Georgie. “Unless you really want me to stay?”
“Oh, uh,” Georgie sputters, “I’d… I mean, it’s fine. I’ll be fine, I’m not… it’s not a malevolent ghost.”
“Right,” Melanie scoffs, her hand drifting unconsciously to her leg. “Well. I, um. I’ll let you get on with it, then.”
“Thank you again,” Georgie says, “for the…” She rattles the EM-wave detector.
“Of course,” Melanie says. “... Bye.”
The door swings behind her. Gerry whistles. Georgie’s nose twitches, as though she could hear it. “Now that’s some sexual tension you could cut with a cake knife,” Gerry says. Georgie starts unpacking her supplies. “Jon, you gotta wake up. Your friends are totally into each other.”
Georgie gets all her borrowed ghost detecting equipment properly set up. Gerry watches on with anticipation, knowing what it means that Georgie Barker is attempting to communicate with him. It’s been weeks since the Unknowing. He’s been trapped here just as surely as Jon is, silent and immobile. And now this podcaster is giving him a voice.
Once Georgie’s plugged in all the wires and enabled all the sensors, Gerry finally has a chance to truly communicate with someone for the first time since before Jon burned his page.
“Jon?” Georgie asks. “Jon, are you here with me?”
Gerry speaks clearly to his own ears, but it comes through Georgie’s equipment somewhat distorted. “ ... Not… Jon… ”
Immediately, Georgie becomes defensive. “Alright, well if… if you’re some evil spirit here to do him harm—”
“ Jon— tchk— friend. ”
Georgie laughs without smiling. “Jon doesn’t have any friends.”
“ Not living ones.”
Her face pales. She starts fidgeting with the sensors.
It says something about Georgie that she believes him, though. Maybe it says something about Jon, too. Why shouldn’t Jon be friends with a ghost? Never mind that Jon and Gerry have only had one conversation. Never mind that one of them is already dead and the other is currently hovering at the threshold. At the moment, Gerard really feels like Jon is his only friend in the world.
At the very least, he’s the only person who ever actually called him Gerry.
“Are you here to help Jon, erm… pass on?” Georgie asks him.
“ If I — tchk— knew that, I’d be — tchk— there myself… ”
Georgie fidgets with the dials and switches on Melanie’s ghost hunting equipment, trying to eliminate the interference. “Is there anything I can do? To help you?”
“Jon did… what he was s’posed to,” Gerry says. “Didn’t work.”
“I’m sorry,” Georgie says, and Gerry doesn’t know how to respond.
He’s sorry, too.
Gerry speaks with Georgie for an hour, then two. They share the things that drew them into the world of monsters and the macabre, and the things that drew them into Jon’s life, and the overlap. “ Are you going to put me on your podcast ?”
Georgie frowns. “I… I don’t have to.”
“ But you told your loyal fanbase about me .”
“Not the first time I’ve lied to my listeners,” Georgie says.
“ Really ?”
“‘I got the best sleep of my life on this mattress,’” she quotes flatly. “‘SteakOut meat deliveries are both convenient and delicious!’”
Gerry laughs, surprising himself in the quiet of the room. “ I like you ,” he decides.
Gerry recognizes Jon’s latest visitor from the Unknowing. The only survivor, save Jon— though it’s still too soon to say whether Jon has survived or not.
It’s been a month.
The visitor stares down at Jon’s motionless body with something Gerry thinks might actually be envy.
“It’s just me and Melanie now,” she says. “And Martin, of course, but… he doesn’t really talk to anyone anymore.” It looks like it’s hard for her to be here. The weight of the room pushes her down, sinking her shoulders, digging her heels into the linoleum.
“Jon, I wish to God I’d gotten you out of that damn wax museum. And Tim, and Daisy—” Her voice breaks over the last name. “Most days, I’m angry with you,” the visitor admits. “I need you to be okay.”
She’s not as chatty as Georgie or Martin. After saying her piece, she sits beside Jon’s cot in silence for about half an hour. Something about her steely pragmatism reminds Gerry of Gertrude, and he can’t decide whether that feels like a compliment or an insult.
She comes back a couple of times over the months to visit Jon, not as frequently as Georgie. She never notices that Jon is being haunted. It’s interesting, sure— anything to break up the monotony and numb, distant despair of Jon’s hospital room. But Gerry vastly prefers when Georgie visits.
She always talks to Jon a little, catches him up on her own life and the world outside these four walls, and then she sets up all her ghost walkie-talkie crap and checks in with Gerry. They form a weird sort of camaraderie, sitting and talking and waiting for Jon to wake up. (Or not wake up.) Georgie talks about Melanie quite a bit, but Melanie never comes back to the hospital room after that first time.
(After the first two months, Martin’s visits stop entirely.)
It’s a little funny, in a really sad way. Being bound to Jon. Gerry had been so desperate to be released from the Book. And this, now— it’s different. It’s completely different.
But it’s also the same.
Of course he would wind up attached to another Archivist.
“You know who came to visit me when I was in hospital?” Gerry says to Jon’s comatose body. It’s a rainy Thursday, and Jon is as engaging a conversationalist as ever. “Nobody. Not a soul. Except Gertrude. And she just came to put me in my mother’s godforsaken book.” He shivers. “I’m going for a walk,” he says, as if Jon can hear him.
He leaves and walks around the halls of the hospital, waiting for the moment when he tries to go too far and Jon’s presence snaps him back like an elastic band.
Gerry doesn’t care for Oliver Banks.
Jon’s latest visitor represents the same force that kept Gerry bound to a book for several painful years. It’s intriguing, the way Jon keeps getting visited by avatars of the End or those touched by it. Death lingers over Georgie Barker like a film of gauze. As a ghost and former page in the Catalogue of the Trapped Dead, Gerard is the poster boy for The End.
And Oliver serves it willingly. (Well— as much as anyone can act as a willing servant to the Fears.) Gerry listens dutifully, perched at the edge of Jon’s bed, as Oliver details the events that brought him to the most isolated place on the planet, then to the brink of death, then to Jonathan Sims’ hospital room.
“I made a choice,” Oliver claims. “We all made choices. Now you have to—”
The door swings open and Georgie Barker walks in, headphones around her neck and laptop bag slung over one shoulder. “Can I help you?” she asks, immediately suspicious.
Gerry hops off the bed. “He killed a bunch of people on a boat,” he says, knowing she can’t actually hear him. “Make him go away, Georgie.”
He watches from Jon’s bedside as Georgie basically chases Oliver Banks out of the room. She shuts the door and turns to Jon’s unconscious form. “Sorry about that,” she tells him. “But you really don’t need friends like that.”
“Agreed,” Gerry says. “Just us ghosts and No Fear Shakespeare over here.”
That’s when Georgie notices the tape recorder. She goes running out of the room, after Oliver Banks, leaving Gerry alone with Jon’s unresponsive body and one very insistent tape recorder. He wonders what it means. When it first showed up, he just thought it was there to record Oliver’s statement. Why would it still be running now?
Then he watches as Jon starts to breathe again.
It’s unclear whether Jon even notices he’s there, when he first wakes up.
It happens when Georgie comes back, with the other one in tow— the no-nonsense one, with the sharp eyes. He hears Georgie call her Basira. “So, what does it mean?” Georgie asks, glaring daggers at the tape recorder.
It’s Jon who replies, popping up as though he’s just been napping instead of comatose. “That’s a very good question.” Georgie and Basira startle, badly, at the sound of his voice. Jon gives them the shadow of a smile, shifting in his hospital bed. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“I’ll get a nurse,” Georgie decides.
“Wait.”
“ Basira .”
Basira looks at Jon, Looks , the way Gertrude used to Look at people. Then she asks a very good question. “Jon, is it still… you?”
Crouched in a corner, Gerry watches the fear and doubt chase themselves across Jon’s face. Jon says, “I think so. I don’t know how you’d prove it though.” He says it like he’s looking for an answer, for a definitive way to prove that he’s still Jonathan Sims. That he didn’t wake up Wrong.
If there is an answer, Basira and Georgie don’t have it. What Basira does have is a Statement for Jon to read.
Jon’s eyes don’t focus on Gerry until after Basira leaves to get him some water. He fixes his gaze on the place in the corner of the room where Gerry has been standing and watching, an observer of Jon’s return to walking and talking. It’s hard to tell whether Jon really didn’t see him until that moment, or if he spotted Gerry immediately and acted otherwise for Basira and Georgie’s sake.
He’ll have to tell Jon that he and Georgie have become pals. (He’s actually kind of bothered that she stormed out of here, too mixed up about Jon to even address the ghost in the room. Sure, without her equipment she wouldn’t have known he was even there, but she could have taken a guess. It stings.)
Jon looks disappointed to see him, and Gerry braces himself. But Jon just says, softly, “It didn’t work, then.” And Gerry realizes that Jon’s disappointed in himself , not in him.
“Guess not,” he says.
“I’m sorry.” Jon’s voice still sounds weak and gravelly.
Gerry shrugs. He thinks about saying, It’s okay , or It is what it is , but none of the responses he can think of sound right. Jon made his choice and came back to the world. Gerry didn’t choose to come back, but he’s still stuck here, anyway.
Such is life. (Such is death.)