The Apocalypse Codex

by Charles Stross

  Lockhart runs a hand through his thinning hair distractedly. “Yes.”

  Angleton peers out across a bony cage of interlaced fingers. “The black bag job,” he says smoothly. “It was deniable, yes?”

  Lockhart bristles. “It was a journalist from the News of the World, if you must know. He bribed a cleaner. We used a cut-out in the Met to suggest he investigate Schiller—Freaky Fundie Preaches Polygamy at Number Ten, that sort of thing.” He shrugged. “Our friends at the Doughnut were good enough to send us his cameraphone contents. Totally, utterly hands-off, you may rest assured.”

  “Ahem.” The Senior Auditor interrupts. “I’d like to get back to the situation in hand, which has evidently spiraled out of control in the last day. Thank you for drawing it to our attention.” He glances at his colleague. “Do you think we have time to send this back up the ladder to board level? Will it keep overnight?”

  Her expression could chill liquid nitrogen. “No.” She glances at her watch. “If there’s any risk whatsoever that Schiller is attempting to raise the Sleeper I think we should act immediately on our own cognizance.”

  Lockhart looks as if he’s about to say something, but freezes at a glance from Angleton.

  “This isn’t a regular external operation anymore,” the Senior Auditor tells Lockhart, not ungently. “Nor is there any need for it to remain so. You can let go, if you want. A more collegiate protocol is called for.”

  “Collegiate?” Lockhart pales. “But Hazard and McTavish are at that level.”

  “He’s talking about the reciprocal monitoring provisions of the Benthic Treaty,” Angleton points out. “Someone has to tell the Black Chamber. Stands to reason, old man.” Angleton looks at the Auditors. “Well?”

  “Doctor Angleton.” The older Auditor pauses to push his bifocals up the bridge of his nose. “I believe you have dealt with those entities in the past. Would you mind…?”

  “What? Right here and now?” Angleton, normally imperturbable, for the first time sounds taken aback.

  “Can you suggest a reason not to? As this is a matter of some immediate urgency…”

  Angleton looks round. “Well, we should ward the documentary evidence first. Anything that’s not cleared for sharing under these admittedly irregular circumstances. And we should ward ourselves thoroughly. And have suitable backup in place to contain any hard contact. Otherwise, no.”

  “Then so be it.” The Auditor looks at Lockhart. “Gerald. When called upon, you will give an account of the inception of this operation, the direction of the external assets, and the status of Agent Howard as their monitor, and a concise report about what they found. You may mention the motivation for this operation, but should not identify the participants in the black bag job. You may discuss material classified under GOD GAME color codes freely—the Black Chamber will already be fully aware of their content—but may not refer to those codewords directly. Do not discuss McTavish’s background unless the Black Chamber show prior cognizance of it. If you wish to vary these constraints you may request it of us, but not in the presence of the other party. Am I understood?”

  Lockhart swallows. “Yes, I think so. Am I to negotiate?”

  “No.” The Auditor peers at him over his spectacle frames. “That’s Angleton’s job. He knows what we’re dealing with.” He puts down his pen. “I wish we had time to send out for a longer spoon, though…”

  “I THINK THEY’RE ONTO US,” I SAY.

  I have been sitting in the passenger seat for the past hour, as Persephone flogs the rental coupé down the interstate in weather only a homesick penguin could love—it’s so cold I’m shivering inside my anorak just from looking out the windows—when I realize what’s going on.

  “Where?” she asks, instantly focussed.

  “Not in sight right now.” I pause, and glance down at the pizza box. “But we keep passing cops on the shoulder with light bars going. Every ten minutes or so. If you knew you were tracking someone on this highway, wouldn’t that be how you’d do it if you had the resources? Station observers every five to ten miles to radio in a sighting, instead of putting a car on their tail which they might spot.”

  “That would work.” Persephone glances at me. “If they knew we were here.”

  “Yes, well.” I tap the pizza box. She swears loudly and swerves. “It shouldn’t be able to talk. I put wards on this box that are strong enough to gag a death metal band. But if it’s found some kind of back-channel—”

  Persephone isn’t listening to me: she’s chanting something in a tonal language that makes the hairs on my arms stand up, and her eyes are shut. I’m about to make a grab for the steering wheel—we’re beginning to drift out of our lane—when she turns her head to the box, then turns sharply frontwards and opens her eyes again. “Merde.”

  “Yes?”

  “It is leaking. Bleed-through in the Other Place.”

  “The other—” Oh. That’s one of the things about ritual magicians; they use visual or tactile metaphors instead of nice standard well-defined terminology. The Other Place, the astral plane, the land of dreams—it’s not a real place like, say, Walsall. But it’s a metaphor for a mathematical abstraction, a manifold containing an n-dimensional space where everything is the product of geometrical transformations, including mass and energy and time. Leakage between dimensions occurs there: it’s how we summon demons from the vasty deep, communicate with aliens, and try to extract our tax codes from the Inland Revenue. And if she says it’s leaking—“I should have grounded it there, too?”

  “That might not have worked.” Her fingers are white on the wheel. “It has an astral body: separate the two and it’ll probably die. It’s connected to something in the distance off and to the right. Like a spiderweb. I think it’s in the compound near Palmer Lake. Which is the next turnoff.”

  Signs blur towards us, warning of a junction: turn right for the Air Force Academy. Without indicating, Persephone crosses lanes and brakes hard, dragging us into a sharp turn before merging with a main road below the grade of the interstate. “Hey!” I say.

  “We’re going to Palmer Lake,” she says firmly, “to pay a visit to the Golden Promise Ministries compound while Schiller’s people are attending their revival show. Besides, it’s lit up like a lighthouse in the Other Place.”

  “But the church service—”

  “Is fuel for Schiller’s invocation, yes, but do you think he’ll have set up the major summoning itself in the middle of a mega-church?”

  It’s like arguing with a madwoman, except she’s not mad. “But he might have—”

  “No. He hasn’t had the free run of the mega-church until very recently. If he had, he wouldn’t be using it to attract new victims. They’d already belong to him.”

  It’s hard to argue with her logic because it fits the pattern that’s emerging, but I really want her to be wrong. A few months back, Mo came home in meltdown after closing down CLUB ZERO in Amsterdam—a circle of cultist fanatics (from this neck of the woods, now that I think about it) who’d decided to summon up something unpleasant. The venue for the summoning was a deconsecrated Lutheran chapel, but the fuel was the kindergarten on the other side of the road. Linked by a path through the Other Place—exactly the MO Persephone is proposing. I really want Persephone to be wrong about this.

  “If he’s got the summoning grid set up in his own compound, then there’ll be a connection via the Other Place to the church,” I reason aloud. “This is the shortest route to Schiller. Bypasses his muscle, too.” I’m whistling past the graveyard at this point, you understand. “As long as he hasn’t already woken the Sleeper.”

  “The Sleeper.” She takes her eyes off the road ahead long enough to spare me a sharp glance. “What exactly do you know about it?”

  I look at the pizza box on my lap. The complaints department is quiescent, locked down by occult manacles. “It’s not human. Dead but immortal. Sleeps in a temple on a high plateau, surrounded by a lovely necromantic picket fenc
e constructed by a genocidal maniac more than ninety years ago. On a planet that’s definitely not in our neck of the woods, if not in our universe.” I shiver. “It’s sometimes known as the Opener or the Gatekeeper.” I know more about it than that, but I’m not sure how much Persephone knows and I don’t want to provoke my oath of office again.

  “That’ll do,” she says absent-mindedly as she wrestles the car through a sharp left turn onto a narrower street where the snowfall is outpacing the traffic’s ability to turn it into slush. “You’re mostly right, although I hope your analysis is wrong. Disturbing the Gatekeeper would be bad. Not so much in its own right, but because of what’s on the other side of the gate.” With that encouraging sentiment she hits the gas again; the wheels spin for a few alarming seconds, then we’re back on course.

  We haul ass through snow-capped suburbia for a few silent minutes. Side roads with scattered houses roll by every few hundred meters. I stare at the pizza box in my lap, nervous and upset and simultaneously keyed-up. The thing inside is in communion with its master: they’ll know we’re coming. It’s probably a directional beacon, too. But by the same token, I ought to be able to use it to probe what’s going on ahead. If I dare to shut down part of the firewall I’ve built around it and stick my head up against it, of course. That option does not appeal.

  I’ve been keeping my mind inside my own head ever since the incident back at the hotel, because to say I don’t like my new-found proficiency at soul-sucking is a bit like saying that cats don’t like swimming. But there may be no alternative, if I want to try spoofing our location.

  I take a deep breath. “Persephone. Your map. Can you show it to me?”

  She chuckles grimly. “All you need to do is open your eyes, Mr. Howard.”

  “But I don’t—” I stop. No more excuses. The inner eye, the vision thing, that’s what let me know there were monsters on the other side of the door, isn’t it. That’s how I saw the feeders under Brookwood last year.

  “You’re a necromancer, Mr. Howard, not just another button-pushing computer nerd. That’s why they sent you here with me. You have the aptitude for ad hoc invocation and control. I think you would be extremely powerful, if you get over your squeamishness. It makes you as useful as a heart surgeon who faints at the sight of blood.”

  I stifle the urge to swear at her. Instead, I close my eyes as we tear down the highway towards Palmer Lake and the turnoff for Schiller’s compound, and force myself to gaze inwards. There is a sudden shift of perspective as the world changes. And then I see—

  IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TABLE SITS AN ANTIQUE ROTARY-DIAL telephone. It dates to an age when telephones were made of wood and brass, crowned with the royal crest of George the Fifth’s Post Office. A separate speaking horn carved from yellowing bakelite or some other more organic substance hangs by a hook from its side, connected by a length of cloth-wrapped wire.

  Four people sit at one side of the table: Angleton, Lockhart, and the two Auditors.

  The phone sits in the middle of an elaborate double ward, concentric Möbius loops of eye-bending power wrapped around its base. There is no sign of a power source or telegraph wire connected to it. Nevertheless, the audience watch with abated speech as Angleton carefully lifts the speaking horn and dials a series of digits.

  “Hello, I’d like to speak to Overseas Liaison, please.” He leans across the table, placing his ear close to the speaker. “Yes. This is Angleton. I am calling on behalf of SOE on official business. I would appreciate an immediate conference call with a representative of your Internal Affairs department. This concerns current events in Colorado Springs and Denver.” He waits for almost a minute. “Yes, that is correct. As I said, we would like to discuss this matter with you—oh very well.”

  He hangs up the speaking horn and sits back, arms crossed.

  “Well?” asks Lockhart.

  “They’ll call us back.”

  “Really.” The female Auditor’s lips are a thin line. “This is preposterous—did they give any indication as to how long they would take? We have an operation to run—”

  Silently, without any fuss, the walls of the meeting room dissolve. The conference table extends, doubling in length, but the far side is ash-gray and the three figures that sit behind it are indistinct shapes, shrouded in cloaks and cowls of black mist, their faces in shadow.

  Angleton, clearly unimpressed, nods at the new arrivals. “Good evening. Can you identify yourselves?”

  There is silence for a few seconds. Then the leftmost of the wraithlike figures nods, a slight inclination of the cowl that hints at a skull within. “I am Officer Black. This”—a band of mist that might conceal a hand, or some other, less human limb, gestures to its right—“is Officer Green. And I have the pleasure of introducing Patrick O’Donnell, formerly of the Hazard Network, subsequently one of our freelance informers, now deceased.”

  The phantom limb stretches alarmingly past Officer Green and flips back the hood covering the wreckage of O’Donnell’s head.

  Lockhart swears very quietly—but not so quietly that he escapes notice.

  Officer Black emits a dry chuckle. “Remember our service motto? ‘Death is no escape.’ Now, who are you?”

  Angleton points at Lockhart: “This is Officer Blue. And you can call these two”—he gestures at the two Auditors, who are watching, rapt—“Officers Red and Yellow.” A mirthless smile wrinkles the corners of his eyes but reaches no further. “You have a problem. We have a problem. And I think it’s the same problem.”

  Officer Black folds his arms. The drape of the fabric suggests extreme emaciation. “However, your agents within the Continental United States are illegals, under Title 18 of the US Code—‘gathering or delivering defense information to aid foreign government,’ not to mention Title—”

  “Bullshit!” Angleton snaps. “As you well know, the UKUSA Treaty exception takes precedence. What’s sauce for the goose will do for the gander.” He clears his throat. “And before you continue with your next point, we felt it necessary to act immediately. In the absence of evidence that your assets in the warded zone had not been turned by the opposition, and because of certain other considerations, we could not go through the bilateral coordinating committee. Your late colleague’s presence here”—he nods in the direction of O’Donnell’s ghostly wreckage—“suggests that we were right to do so. The situation is deteriorating by the hour, so I suggest we discontinue the bluster and concentrate on ways of preventing a meltdown.”

  Officer Green’s hood twitches, but he—or she, or it—passes no comment. Officer Black, however, appears to be considering Angleton’s words carefully. Finally he nods. “Would you care to summarize your understanding of the situation?”

  Angleton pointedly looks for the chief Auditor’s permissive nod before he speaks. “We are dealing with a particularly dangerous cult: Christian millennialists who are reading from some extra books in their Bible. They set up shop in Colorado Springs and have extended their influence through Denver and Colorado in recent years, but they were under our radar until very recently because of the resemblance to ordinary evangelicals. Our interest was triggered”—he glances sideways for permission to proceed—“by their missionary activity in London, and specifically by what appeared to be an attempt to suborn members of our highest level of government.”

  Officer Black nods again. “Was your concern justified?”

  “Yes, I think so.” Angleton laces his fingers together in a bony pile upon the tablecloth. He frowns thunderously. “Our officers secured a copy of the Bible used by the Inner Circle of the Golden Promise Ministries. Its apocrypha provide a recipe for performing a Class Five Major Summoning, and a theological imperative to do so. It’s a necromantic ritual, like most such pre-modern operations, and prodigiously wasteful—completely unoptimized. The body count just to open the portal is in the hundreds; to actually bootstrap the target entity to full immanence it’s in the double-digit millions. Oh, and there’s worse: Pastor Sch
iller has got his hands on a fertile tongue-eater, and is using its spawn to conscript and direct bellwethers. We ordered our assets to scram, but this morning they confirmed that they’re having difficulty evacuating and there are indications that Schiller is proceeding with the second stage of the summoning, the build-out. Hence this call.”

  The Senior Auditor, who has been watching with an expression of distant amusement, takes Angleton’s silence as his cue. He abruptly raises his right index finger and points it at Officer Green. “I command you to speak,” he says mildly.

  The robed and shadowed figure’s response is remarkable: it quivers spasmodically, shrinks in on itself, then expands back to original size, emitting a burp of foul-smelling bluish smoke as it does so. A hacking, emphysemic cough follows, which goes on for a long time. Finally, a thin piping emanates from the depths of its hood: “Fuck you!”

  Angleton raises an eyebrow at the Senior Auditor, who shakes his head. “Ancient history.” He looks back at Officer Green. “I do not approve of your presence at this table. Explain yourself immediately!” He turns to Officer Black. “Your choice of colleagues does not incline us to trust your bona fides,” he adds icily.

  Lockhart, who has been watching the exchange from the sidelines, leans back in his seat and fans himself, looking faintly aghast.

  “I don’t work for you anymore, Michael,” Officer Green quavers. “Not this century, you bastard.” He stretches out an arm, lays a hooklike claw on the other side of the illusory shared table; it appears horribly burned. Then he raises his other claw and pulls back his cowl, to reveal a thing of horror.

  The Senior Auditor looks at him evenly. “To betray your oath of office was your decision, not mine.” He looks at his colleague, who is shaking her head, appalled: “I don’t think there’s any point continuing with—”