The Apocalypse Codex

by Charles Stross

  (Johnny expects there to be a second pair of operatives around the back of the safe house, and he’s got maybe thirty seconds before they stop waiting for the prey to come to them and storm the house in search of their fellows—but by then Johnny intends to be gone.)

  The chain sags heavily on the passenger seat as he climbs in and starts the engine. Revving, he slams the truck into second gear and pulls out without lights. As he leans forward over the wheel there’s an unwelcome and familiar metallic rattle from behind him. For a moment he’s livid with indignation: What do the fuckers think they’re doing, shooting in a residential neighborhood? Then he clocks it as a hopeful sign—they wouldn’t be hitting his tailgate if they were firing on the move—and rams the truck into third. There are no more bullet impacts; he brakes hard, takes a left without signaling, checks his mirrors, and finally turns on his lights when a passing car flashes its high beams at him. It wouldn’t do to get stopped by the traffic cops, not with what’s sitting on the passenger seat…

  The paper chain rattles, like the echo of an occult manacle that immobilizes a pair of angry ghosts. But these two aren’t ghosts yet, and it’s already starting to ripple and distort; there isn’t a lot of power in the ward, and sooner or later it’s going to degrade, at which point the two game beaters trapped inside it are going to get out. When that happens, Johnny intends to be ready for them. It wouldn’t do to find out the hard way that they’ve got more tear gas grenades where that first one came from.

  The downtown Denver safe house has been burned, which means—if the opposition are halfway competent—that the other two are also compromised. On the other hand, it’s a weekday evening, there is a light snowfall, and suburbia beckons. Johnny drives, looking for a certain kind of street, one with too many For Sale / To Let signs, too few lit windows and parked cars, unkempt lawns, foreclosed mortgages: the stench of neglect and decay. It’s not easy, to be sure, because real estate agents like to hide such signs (they pay landscapers to mow the lawns of empty houses) but he has a nose for the wild places and, presently, he finds a side road where half the street lights are dead and the potholes are unfilled. Slowing, he inspects the houses to either side as he drives. He’s after a specific type of vacant property—one with boarded-up windows and a backyard to park in, unobserved by neighbors.

  “Just like that caper in Barcelona, Duchess,” he mutters to himself as he pulls over, checks for passers-by, then does a three-point turn and drives into the yard of the house he’s selected. “Had a bad feeling about that one, too.”

  The snow in front of it is unswept, pristine; the windows boarded over. He rummages in the back of the cab for a laminated card proclaiming Big John’s Real Estate Services, lays it on the dash—often the simplest covers are the best—and heads for the front door.

  The lock is easy. Once inside, Johnny pulls out a compact LED lantern and closes the door behind him. The house is dark and chilly as a pub toilet after closing time: the electricity is shut off and there’s a smell of mildew in the air. It’s just right for what he’s here to do. So many of the significant events of his career take place in rooms like these, cold and abandoned. He goes through into the combined kitchen-dining room. There’s junk strewn all over, and dust. A row of open cupboard doors gape at him like broken teeth in a screaming mouth as he kicks shattered crockery and rotting junk mail aside to reveal the wooden floor. He sets the LED lantern down on a countertop. Working fast with a can of spray paint he scribes the circle, joins the lines, and sketches the necessary sigils. He dumps the paper chain in the middle of the new grid and it jitters, the echo of a ram slamming into a door; working in haste he kneels outside the incomplete grid and links it up to a wire-wrap circuit board and a battery.

  The folded chain of rice paper men jerks and jumps for a moment, casting long shadows from the lamp. Then it snaps. Johnny steps to one side so that his shadow is not cast across the circle, and draws both his knives. The heavies in the circle will probably have handguns, and Johnny isn’t carrying. On the other hand, the heavies in the circle were dumb enough to go in through the front door. From where they’re standing, an instant ago they were storming into a dim hallway; suddenly they’re in near darkness in the wrong place with a glowing violet circle around them that they somehow can’t bring themselves to cross—

  “Cover! Left!—”

  They’re wearing Mall Ninja body armor and black helmets with gas masks and they’ve got flashlights and lots of spurious accessories bolted to the barrels of their carbines: it’s all very Tactical Ted, in Johnny’s mildly contemptuous opinion. One of them stumbles sharply in a shower of sparks as he comes up against the edge of the grid.

  “You!” He’s seen Johnny. The gun barrel comes up. “On the—Jesus—”

  More blue sparks. The goon takes a dance-step backwards, nearly goes over. His companion is less talkative; there’s a hammering roar and a series of flashbulb-bright sparks go off at the boundary of the grid as the bullets strike it and go wherever it is that steel-jacketed bullets go when they run into an energized containment field. He seems to be trying to shoot out the lantern on the breakfast bar.

  Johnny is coldly angry. He opens his mouth to speak as the first goon stumbles into the field again, then jitters twitchily backward in a shower of purple flashes. Johnny can barely hear his own voice through the ringing in his ears. “Drop your guns!” he bellows. “Drop ’em now or I’ll rip your lungs out and shit down your windpipes!”

  The drill sergeant’s voice of command usually works on anything short of a meth head’s full-blown psychosis, but it’s less than effective when punctuated by gunfire in a confined space. The talkative one appears to be frozen, but the second goon, the one with the hate on for light sources, whips round and raises his gun. There’s a loud snick.

  “Drop it, son,” Johnny snarls, drawing his right hand back. For an answer, the goon fumbles with the magazine release. That’s more than enough for Johnny. He releases the knife and it accelerates towards the grid. There’s a crimson flash as the design inscribed on its blade flares white-hot for an instant before it lodges hungrily in the man’s throat, and Johnny feels a brief stab of melancholy horror as he takes two quick strides forward across the shorted-out grid and punches the other goon in the face. The man goes down as if poleaxed; Johnny spins knife-first towards the trigger-happy one, but he’s already down in a growing puddle of arterial blood. The knife-shaped thing sticking out of his throat is drinking greedily; one glance tells Johnny that the cop’s beyond help. There’s always a cost for using such occult weapons, and Johnny will pay it later, of that he is sure; but for now he’s simply relieved to still be alive.

  First he sees to the one he punched out. Johnny rolls him away from the blood, grunting with effort, and turns him into the recovery position. The man’s still breathing, albeit noisily—Johnny fumbles a pair of handcuffs from the goon’s belt and secures him, then bends to unfasten his helmet and gas mask, keeping one ear alert for police sirens in the distance. Then he searches him.

  The one who’s still breathing is in his forties, unfit, a salt-and-pepper mustache adorning a flaccid upper lip. The bad news is, he’s wearing a law man’s badge: Officer Benson of the Pinecrest Police Department. Worse: so is the dead gunman. Not rent-a-cops, real cops, Johnny decides. Pinecrest: home of the Golden Promise Ministries. No, not like Barcelona: this is worse.

  Benson is breathing, but won’t be answering any questions for a few minutes. Johnny turns to the trigger-happy goon’s body, stoops, and takes hold of the knife-thing in his throat. A brief electric jolt runs up his arm: the feeder is intent, gorging, and does not wish to return to its warded scabbard. Johnny grimaces and tugs. There’s very little blood as the knife-thing comes free. A thin sheen of red droplets that cling to the blade disappears under his gaze, as if sucked into the metal. He prepares to sheath it, but stops. The dead goon’s mouth is moving, opening—

  “Well, well, well.” Johnny pokes at the emerging host wit
h the tip of the blade: it flinches away, avoiding contact. “Fancy meeting a girl like you in a dive like this!” He pulls his knife back, unwilling to use it on such an unclean thing; hunting around for a suitable object he finds the fallen goon’s carbine and hammers the host flat with its butt.

  Roughly three minutes have elapsed since he completed the grid and unlocked the two captive goons. Police response times to reports of gunshots out here won’t be speedy, but they’ll be along by and by. Johnny checks on Officer Benson—unconscious, breathing stertorous—then exits the house. He knows a ward that will cause eyes to glaze and slide aside from the building: it needs to be applied to the gateposts out front before anyone comes by to check.

  Then he and Officer Benson are going to have a little chat.

  IT’S GETTING DARK AND I NEARLY MISS THE BATTERED PICKUP as I drive along the side street, half wondering if she’s sent me on a wild goose chase. But something about it catches my attention, and as I slow down I think I recognize the woman in the driver’s seat, her hair tied back in a bun, head bowed over a book.

  I don’t stop. Instead, I drive around the block, checking my mirrors for company and the side streets for other occupied vehicles. Finally, when I’m certain we’re alone, I park behind her.

  The cab door opens. It’s Persephone, wearing nursing scrubs, a battered-looking handbag slung over one shoulder. She pauses beside the coupé and does something fiddly with a ward before she opens the door and slides into the passenger seat. “Drive,” she says. “They’re a half hour behind me, but that should delay them.” I glance at her. Her eyes have aged about a thousand years since the last time we met. I start the engine and pull out carefully, then hunt for an avenue that’ll take us south and east, back towards the highway.

  After a couple of minutes, Persephone inhales deeply, then sighs as if she’s expelling her final breath.

  I glance sideways. The handbag is on the floor and there’s a book in her lap, open. “Where do you want to go?” I ask.

  “Johnny’s in Denver.” She turns to study me, her face expressionless. “Head back up the interstate.” A pause. “I’d like to collect him. We need to talk.”

  I turn my eyes back to the road. I don’t want to see her expression. “You know I’ve been ordered home. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200, don’t stop to pick up hitchhikers.”

  “Yes.”

  “The operation is a bust: we’ve been blown, and the only thing left to do is to withdraw. All three of us.” I can feel her eyes on me as I take a right turn. “Mind you, Lockhart thinks it’s a qualified success. He thinks we’ve got enough evidence to justify him starting an official investigation into Schiller’s activities.”

  Persephone is silent for a while. Then: “He’ll be too late.”

  “Too late for what?”

  She doesn’t reply immediately, so I let the silence lengthen as I drive. I don’t like people trying to pull mystery-man (or -woman) head-games on me. “Pull over,” she finally says as we’re passing a drive-through Dunkin’ Donuts. I turn into the car park and kill the engine.

  “What is Lockhart going to be too late for?” I ask.

  “Armageddon.” She taps the cover of the Bible with a crimson nail.

  “Arma-what?”

  “It’s all in here.” She opens it, close to the back. “Testament of Enoch, Second Book of Dreams, the return of Azâzêl at the End of Days, the triumph of the elect.”

  “Testament of…” It doesn’t ring any bells from RE lessons back when I was in school. “What kind of bible is that?”

  “I had to leave Schiller’s little indoctrination session in a hurry. It wasn’t a teach-in, Mr. Howard; he was making converts. He has helpers—”

  “Silver carapace, too many legs?” She tenses as I stick my tongue out at her, then the penny drops. She wiggles her tongue back at me, unsmiling: it’s pinkish and she can roll it. “I caught one,” I tell her. “It’s in my bag. In a grid.”

  She raises an eyebrow. “Really.”

  “I was thinking of taking it home to see what the boffins in cryptozoology can make of it.” I pause expectantly. “What about that bible?”

  “I took it from the nurse I stole the truck from. Believe me, the clinic she worked in—it would give you nightmares. It’s her bible and she is one of them, a true believer, not an involuntary convert.” She leafs through it, looking for something. “The first two sections are from the King James Version, I believe. Vanilla Protestant: Old Testament, New Testament. Then there are the Apocrypha, in a separate section. That’s not too unusual, even if it contains some rather dubious extras. But then there’s this.”

  She points to a page near the back, open recto, a fancy border surrounding a title: The Final Codex. Then she turns the page. The Apocalypse of St Enoch the Divine.

  “Uh—”

  She stabs at the page with a finger: “‘This is the Revelation of Enoch, Seventh from Adam, which God gave unto him through his son Jesus Christ, to show unto his true servants the things which must be made to pass in the latter days—’”

  “Hang on.” I rub my forehead. “Enoch is pre-Christian, right? I mean, really pre-Christian.”

  She looks at me slightly pityingly. “Adam’s get were peculiarly long-lived, according to the mythos. So the contradiction you’re fishing for isn’t there.”

  “Bugger.” I focus on the page. “‘Must be made to pass in the latter days’?”

  “Yes.” She reads aloud: “‘And that the elect of the true creed shall listen and heed, for blessed is he that hears the words of this prophecy and law and sets his hand to building the kingdom of God on Earth. And grace be unto you, and peace, from him which is, and which was, and which is to come. And when the time is as prophesied and the son of God rises from his deathbed in the pyramid of the Black Pharaoh, all men shall bow before him, but first among them shall be the elect of the true creed, who shall be taken up bodily into the seven heavens of the pillars of law…’” She stops. “Want me to go on?”

  “Please tell me this is a hoax?” Like the fakes titled Necronomicon that come out every couple of years and force the poor bloody sods in Records to run around like headless chickens making sure that nobody’s got their hands on something they shouldn’t (and don’t get me started on the full-dress fire drill the first time somebody brought a made-in-China plush Cthulhu doll to the office)…

  “No.” She closes the book. “It’s no hoax. But it’s best not to overstate things. This is evidence that Schiller’s congregation march to a different drumbeat from the other Christian churches. Like all such, they believe in the literal truth of their holy book.”

  “So they’re Pentecostalists with special sauce?”

  She nods. “The question is, what do these extra apocrypha mean? What beliefs do they add to the mix?”

  “The communion hosts…” I stare at the Bible. “That passage. The Apocalypse of St Enoch. Isn’t it a bit heavy on the thou shalt do this and that?”

  “Yes. I didn’t have time to read further; I have other worries. But where the Revelation of St John is descriptive, this book is prescriptive. A road map for opening the way and speeding the return of Jesus Christ.”

  I close my eyes. That dream. The skin in the small of my back crawls. “The Sleeper in the Pyramid.” The giant step pyramid on a waterless plateau, baked beneath the ruddy glow of a dying star, surrounded by its picket fence of necromantic sacrifices—

  “Of course, the trouble with following occult texts blindly is that there is no guarantee that the thing the ritual summons is what it says on the label.”

  “But they’re Christians. If you want to get them to raise something from the dungeon dimensions, of course you tell them it’s Jesus Christ. I mean, who else would they enthusiastically dive into necromantic demonology on behalf of?”

  “I believe the KGB have a term for people like that. They call them ‘useful idiots.’” Her expression hardens. “I want to know who is behind them. Or what
. Johnny had a theory. I think I discounted it too soon.”

  “I’d be interested to hear it.”

  She looks at me oddly. “Why are you still here? You said Lockhart ordered you home.”

  “He did.” I peer at the doorway of the Dunkin’ Donuts. “But I don’t leave people behind. It’s a personal habit.” I try to explain: “Lockhart should have known that. He’s got my transcript. He could have asked Angleton—my regular boss.”

  (It’s not quite that simple, but some years ago I was leaned on to leave someone behind—and refused. Which worked out for the best, insofar as when a subsequent job went wrong she returned the favor, and we’ve been happily married for some years now; and if that’s not positive endorsement for the idea of not leaving anyone behind, I don’t know what is.)

  “Hmm. This is your first time working for Mr. Lockhart, isn’t it? Mr. Howard, Bob, you are working for External Assets. I think Mr. Lockhart regards everyone as disposable—including, ultimately, himself.”

  “You’ve worked with him before?”

  She shrugs and changes the subject: “I suggest we pick up Johnny and try to drive out. But if the airport is closed and more than one highway is blocked, that could be very difficult, don’t you think? We might be trapped here.”

  I sigh. “I’ve been trying not to think of that.” I start the engine. “Next stop, Denver.”

  RAYMOND SCHILLER SLUMPS IN THE BIG EXECUTIVE CHAIR behind his desk. The skin below his eyes form dark pouches in his face, wrinkled and tired. Joe Brooks studies him, concerned. Ray is powerful, but Joe’s seen him perform miracles before, understands the toll that God’s work exacts from his latter-day prophet. Please, Lord, let him be all right this time, he prays. The last thing the mission needs is for its shepherd to take to his sick bed for a week just now.

  “Father.” Roseanne—now decently veiled and gowned—sounds as concerned as Joe feels. “Can I get you anything? Coffee and a Danish for your blood sugar? I can call one of Doctor Jensen’s residents if it’s your sciatica again—”