I’M HAVING A GUILT DREAM—SOMETHING ABOUT RESCUING A dead man from a burning hotel and hoping he won’t eat my face as I climb backwards down a ladder, then finding that he’s got no tongue and I’ve suffocated him by accident—when my phone rings. I roll over, nearly strangling myself in the sheets as I grab for it. It’s showing an international call, no caller-ID. “Hello?” I see the illuminated digits of the bedside radio: it’s a quarter past five.
“Bob?” It’s Pete. “Bob, is that you?”
“Ye—yeah.” I sit up and wince, swing my legs over the side of the bed. It’s dark. “Returning the favor.”
“I looked at the manuscript you sent me.” Pete sounds odd. It’s hard to tell over a mobile phone, but I could swear he’s upset about something.
“Great.” I summon up some false cheeriness as I shuffle towards the curtained window. “What did you make of it?”
“You said you’re doing business with people who, who have bibles containing this material?” Yes, Pete is worried. “I’d advise against that, Bob. I mean, assuming your business has anything to do with their beliefs, obviously; if you’re just buying office supplies from them that’s probably safe, but…” he trails off.
I yawn hugely, and peel back a corner of the curtain with one pinkie. Outside it’s dark and cold, but flakes of snow are falling just beyond the glass. Very large snowflakes. I let the curtain fall. “How non-mainstream are they?” I ask. “If you had to describe them to a colleague, what would you call them?”
“I’d”—Pete clears his throat—“I’d call them dangerously loopy heretics who are well down the slippery slope to hell, Bob. A hell of their own creation, even if you don’t believe in the literal sulfur-and-brimstone variety presided over by a big red guy with horns and cloven hooves. Which these people very likely do, but they think they’re on the side of the angels, which makes them doubly bad. They’re outside the Nicene Creed and they’re not actually Christians, although they think they are—like the Mormons. But while the Book of Mormon is just a nineteenth-century fabrication there’s stuff in here that’s, uh, disturbing. Very disturbing, Bob. The marginalia—are they yours?”
“Marginalia?” I ask before I can stop myself, then bite my tongue.
“Not yours?” Pete sounds relieved.
“Not mine. Er, I don’t think I’m supposed to have been allowed to have access to the book. If you don’t mind keeping that under your hat…?”
“Naughty, naughty! Well, that’s a relief because it means you haven’t turned batshit crazy on us since dinner last Tuesday. Mo will be relieved. In fact—”
“Pete.” I yawn again, but my head’s clearing. “What do they believe?”
“What? Oh. Hang on, let me check my notes.” I wince, but there’s no helping it: Pete runs on paper, so there will be an evidence trail of this unofficial consultation. Damn. “Let’s see. We have a bunch of foundational mythology about the Nephilim, an alternate creation myth to Genesis—that’s not so new. We then have a line of prophets descended from Adam by way of Lilith, not Eve, who are able to talk to these supernatural beings, angels or demons. And a couple of confused allegorical stories, sort of like the Book of Job only not as upbeat and cheery. But then there’s the new stuff. An entirely new apocalypse that devotes some verses to denouncing St John the Divine as a charlatan—that, right there, tells you we’re in uncharted territory. Between you and me, that conclusion is mainstream among serious biblical scholars—but it’s not something you generally run across among the literalists. And then the authors construct a bizarre eschatology around the image of a dead-but-sleeping god, whose followers on Earth will receive their reward in heaven if they conduct a series of purification rituals and—it says bind—enough converts to resurrect him? That’s literal heresy, Bob, insofar as it goes entirely against the two pillars of Christian doctrine, which are that the path to salvation is through voluntarily accepting Jesus as your personal savior, and that he’ll return when he’s good and ready. It’s not right.” There is a rising note of disquiet in his voice. “There are other hints that something is wrong: lots of elaborate gibberish about the ritual of summoning that requires the participation of two pure-blood descendants of the sons of Lilith. Lots of references to the sacrifice of Abraham, pronouncements of anathema upon the followers of false churches, imprecatory prayers and declarations that anyone who isn’t within the circle of salvation is going to regret it, that kind of thing. Who are these people, Bob? What are you doing with them?”
I stare at the thing in the pizza box on my desk. “I can’t tell you that.”
“They’re dangerous,” he insists. “Bob? If they invite you to one of their church services? You really don’t want to go—”
“I got that already.”
“No! You’re an outsider, Bob. There’s this stuff about binding converts. It sounds like some sort of coercion to me, and whoever owned this Bible was very keen on underlining passages relating to it. And stuff about making the unclean vine bear clean fruit whether it will or no. There’s a strong stench of the unholy about this book, Bob. Bob? Are you listening?”
I close my eyes. “Pete. You know damn well I’m an atheist.” He does, and he forgives me for it because he’s Pete. Even though it’s a lie; I’m not an atheist these days (even though I wish I was). “I’m not going to visit these folks’ church, either.” (That is a lie.) “But I have to prepare a report on, on their reliability. Deadline’s later today. You’ve been a real help. Is there any chance you can send me your notes?”
“They’re on paper…”
“Use your phone; photograph each page and send it to me as an MMS. I’ll pay you back. It’s really urgent.” A plausible white lie jumps into my mouth and is out before I can swallow it: “I’ve got to put the word out before they land a contract to set up half a dozen faith schools.”
“Oh dear! No, that wouldn’t do at all. But I’ve only got six pages. It’s handwritten, they’re not very legible…”
“Just send them. Please?”
“All right.” He pauses. “God bless, and take care.” Then he ends the call.
I open my eyes again, and take a deep breath. I really hope I haven’t got one of our last remaining innocent friends into deep trouble.
Then I peel back the curtain and let my eyes adjust. It’s snowing heavily now, and a thick rind of spongy white covers the car park, turning the vehicles into hunchbacked white boulders. The snowflakes are big, and they fall fast. At a guess there’s upward of five centimeters down there already. I shiver, check the time, and go back to bed for an hour or two.
But I can’t get to sleep again.
I don’t like snow.
Years ago now, when I was young and foolish and ignorant, I got a ringside view of what happens when it snows for forty years. Or rather, of what happens when a team of mad necromancers use a certain very unpleasant ritual to summon up what they mistakenly called an ice giant, a monster out of Norse mythology who they hoped would freeze the Red Army in its tracks and secure victory for the Thousand Year Reich.
Well, in the short term their plan worked. Predators from dying universes trump T-34 tanks and B-29 bombers. But their triumph was short-lived: consuming energy from the structure of spacetime, the monster grew and grew and…well, when we went through the gate in Amsterdam to shut it down, there wasn’t a lot left. A layer of dirty carbon dioxide snow beneath unblinking, reddening stars. A view down a hillside towards a blue-tinged lake of liquid oxygen, a crust of solid nitrogen slowly growing across it. A gibbous moon carved with Hitler’s saturnine portrait rising behind the battlements of a dead SS castle…
Like I said, I don’t like snow—especially the supernatural kind.
13.
FIMBULWINTER
PERSEPHONE HAZARD LIES FULLY CLAD ON TOP OF A MOTEL bed, with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling.
She does not appear to be breathing, but she is not dead. In fact, she is very much awake.
In he
r mind’s eye she is standing on an infinite gray plain, flat and dusty, that sweeps away towards a horizon beneath the utterly black sky above. She is wearing ritual vestments, a gown made to a pattern designed by Jeanne Robert Foster to the specifications of her magus; her hair is bound up with silver wire, and she holds a blunt-tipped knife with two notched ivory blades bound together by a band.
All this is immaterial, existing only within her imagination—but for a practitioner of ritual magic, as opposed to a technician of computational demonology, the set dressing of the Cartesian theater is a matter of great importance. Ritual magic is unpredictable, and the civil service hates it because it relies on the unaccountable exercise of power by the dismally eccentric, if not un–house trained; nor does it work as reliably as numerology or cabbalism, let alone their infinitely more potent and reliable descendants, algorithmic imprecation and computational demonology. Its practitioners also tend to die young and horribly, of Krantzberg syndrome or something worse. But to a trained adept it delivers the power to make a reality from the field of dreams and visions.
The plain she stands on—again, imaginary—is the raw material with which she works. It is also a meeting place, for minds and other things.
Persephone kneels and begins to inscribe symbols on the featureless landscape with the tip of her ritual object. Where it touches the ground it leaves a glowing trail like a line of red LEDs in the dust. She writes rapidly, in a formal dialect of Old Enochian. The featureless plain provides syntax completion and automatic indentation: as she scribes, some of the words change shape and hue subtly. (There are many (many (nested)) parentheses: ritual magic, realtime spell-casting, hasn’t been the same since John McCarthy.)
Finally she completes her—spell? theorem?—and watches as a violet border forms around it, shrinking until the words are wrapped in a fist-sized knot of metaphor. It begins to rise, pulling free of the landscape, forming a glowing sphere. “Go,” she tells it. It slowly drifts away from her face, until after a meter it stops abruptly and rebounds sideways.
Below it, the featureless ground begins to glow, forming first the yellow outline of a wall, and then an open doorway.
Thaumotaxis: the attraction of magical power. Persephone has constructed a tool that will map the energy gradients around her and sketch yellow contours across the infinite plain, building up a map. If Fimbulwinter is indeed on the way, or if Schiller is preparing a rite of power, the solar glare of the ground will show her which directions to avoid. The map, growing in her mind’s eye, will take some hours to mature. But there’s nothing like knowing the ground you’re fighting over better than your enemy…
She can’t return to the real world while the spider is spinning the first iteration of its map-web. It’s going to take quite some time. She rises to her feet and stretches; then, reluctantly, she raises one leg and pinches the blister plaster on the back of her heel between two sharp fingernails.
***Johnny. Sitrep.***
He’s lying on his back in a dark space that stinks of mildew and neglect: an underfloor space, or a tomb, perhaps. It’s bitterly cold but he’s swaddled up in a bivvy bag, like a moth in a cocoon.
***Duchess? Where are you?***
***I’m in the Other Place, working on a map. My body is secure and I’m with Howard. Sitrep.***
***They jumped me as I checked on safe house three. We’ve been tracked—***
***I know. Howard took down two of them.***
She feels Johnny’s flicker of surprise.
***Eh? Well, they sent a brick to tackle me. I showed ’em a clean pair of heels and pocketed two. Found a suitable venue and unpacked them and they lit up on me, so I nailed one with Soulsucker and KO’d the less crazy motherfucker. Then laughing boy and me had a nice long chat.***
His mood is grim.
***I told you I had a bad feeling about this?***
Persephone waits. Finally he continues.
***The cops from Pinecrest, they’re all possessed. All of them. And the hosts are, they’re…they’re like that time in Barcelona, Duchess, that hive we ran across. So I did the full smackdown take-me-to-your-leader thing and what do you know, he did. Full-on channeling. The usual all-your-souls-are-belong-to-me bullshit, at which time I terminated the interview, but. But. Their boss is close enough to dial in for a chat, know what I mean? Schiller’s almost certainly an elder of the old church, he recognized me that time in London, and he’s actually trying to set up one of the great summonings. It’s the only explanation that fits, and it does not fill me with joy and happiness. Oh, and before I forget, Patrick says to say ‘hi.’ He’s stringing for the Nazgûl who are having a spot of bother with Denver. I don’t know about you, but I reckon the shitter is about to blow up under us; I would strongly recommend wiping arse and leaving the bathroom with extreme prejudice.***
Patrick?
***What’s Patrick doing here?***
***He’s stringing for the Black Chamber, like I said. They’ve got their claws in deep—not his fault, by the way. We had a little misunderstanding over him tailing me but it’s all sorted now. He says the Nazgûl would be very grateful for any information we could give them about what the fuck is happening in Colorado because their own people can’t visit and the local affiliate offices are all compromised. Am I getting this across, Duchess? Because if not, I am really not very fucking happy about being here. This level of shit is above even your admittedly stratospheric pay grade, in my opinion—***
Persephone has heard enough.
***Agreed, and we’re leaving tomorrow. How mobile are you? What did you do with the cops?***
***I’ve got wheels. As for laughing boy, after his boss used him as a telephone there wasn’t a lot left. Nobody’s going to find them for a while.***
***Good. I want you to come round here at first light.*** She visualizes the motel’s location. ***You, Howard, and I are going to try to drive out. But it looks like Schiller’s put a cordon around us. If we can’t get out, I intend to go for the throat. I want to nail these bastards, Johnny.***
***Whoa, you’re taking it personal, Duchess?***
***You bet I am. But I’m going to be professional about it. See you first thing tomorrow morning.***
SIGNING OFF, SHE OPENS HER EYES TO SEE WHAT KIND OF web her thaumotropic spider has woven.
Beyond the threshold of her room—a yellow outline surrounding a rectangle of slate-gray emptiness—loop vast whorls and spires of sun-yellow energy. Denver itself is a valley, low and dark, but around it rise ramparts of power. A narrow cutting leads towards Colorado Springs, another valley cupped between high walls of compulsion, but near the edge of the city there rises one leg of a towering arch of light. A torrent of power roaring into the sky, coming out of nowhere and leaping out across the plain towards an answering pillar ten miles to the north. It’s so strong it’s right off the scale, a multiple reactor meltdown in the middle of the background field of ambient radiation.
Persephone stares at the arch of power for a subjective minute. Then she swears, clicks her heels together, and vanishes from the Other Place.
I’D SET MY PHONE TO WAKE ME UP AT 7 A.M., BUT I’M AWAKE and dressed and waiting for it three minutes before it sounds.
I go into the motel bathroom and splash water on my face, then shave. There are dark bags under my eyes and, not to put too fine a point on it, I look like something the cat tried to bury. I haven’t had enough sleep, and what sleep I managed to snatch came with an unpleasant freight of dreams: plateau, temple, sleeper, you know the drill.
There is a shitty filter coffee machine and I use it with malice in mind, dunking two whole bags of Starbucks’ oiliest caffeinated charcoal in the cone. As it hisses and burbles I try to check my email on my phone.
Nothing.
Now, there are few existential crises as unnerving for a geek like me (the original feral kind—not your commercialized cash cow as-reimagined-by-Urban-Outfitters-and-Hollywood fashion geek, who is basically a hipster with a ne
ckbeard and worse fashion sense) as being off the net. It takes me a couple of minutes of prodding and poking to determine that the motel’s wifi network is up but has no way of sending packets to the wider internet, and AT&T’s two-wet-shoelaces-and-a-tin-can excuse for wireless broadband has also shat its routing tables and is drooling in a corner. There are a couple of laptops hooked up to the hotel wifi network—I can see their owners’ porn stashes from the shiny new Dell—so it’s not my equipment. Frowning, I check for Google. Nope, and if their private backhaul isn’t talking to the local ISPs we’re in major blackout territory. Following a hunch I punch up the maps app and see if I can get a GPS signal. Nothing, nada.
The coffee pot is making drowning-squirrel noises as I do something I never do in hotel rooms, which is to pick up the TV remote for a purpose other than hammering the “off” button. The in-house check-out channel comes up on the screen, but once I start to channel hop I rapidly confirm an unpleasant suspicion. There are too many dead spots. I can see a local news channel, a couple of community spots where amateur dramatics types are playing with their camcorders in a studio that looks like an abandoned warehouse, and of course the local porn buffet. What I don’t see is anything national: no CNN, no MSNBC, no Hitler Channel or Mythbusters. Not even Top Gear reruns on BBC America. The local cableco is clearly having a spot of bother. Mind you, I do find the God Botherer Channel, where they’re advertising a love-in at some place called the New Life Church in Colorado Springs. Live coverage from two o’clock.
I stare at the screen for a minute, jaw hanging slack. Ha. Ha. Very funny. Not. They’re even giving directions for how to get there, for any locals crazy enough to drive in this weather, and a special dispensation from Lord Jeebus to say that his faithful won’t have to worry about doing four-wheel drifts into oncoming snowplows. Raymond Schiller, Impresario and Evangelist. On stage in the New Life Church this afternoon at three. Bring all the family! A first-class production is guaranteed for all.
The Apocalypse Codex Page 25