The Annihilation Score (Laundry Files)

by Charles Stross

  On the other hand, I’m probably the only violinist in the country who can both sight-read the particular score in front of me and understand what it’s saying on all levels – the musical phrasing and the deeper expressions it invokes. The first page is light enough, an introduction in a minor key that gives me time to warm up; but soon enough Jim turns the page before me and we’re into a much stronger exposition, two themes alternating from F-minor to D-flat major… with a subtext that makes my skin crawl and itch as if tiny insects are burrowing beneath the surface, for I recognize the pattern of an invocation when I see one. My instrument’s strings glow almost invisibly in the spotlight glare, but I can feel Lecter’s power gathering in a rush as he awakens. From the corner of one eye I can just see the soprano soloist taking breath as she prepares to give voice to Cassilda’s lament, beside the turbid waters of the Lake of Hali —

  ***My turn,*** Lecter hums, overwhelmingly satisfied, like a gigantic predator that is gathering himself to pounce on the fattest, juiciest prey —

  “What will this do?” I can’t stop reading, my fingers refuse to still themselves – the geas has me enchained – but sight-reading doesn’t quite take all my attention.

  ***I return to myself thuswise.***

  I glimpse a vision through the eyes of Lecter’s interior space, and it is truly frightening. The stony amphitheater of my earlier dream is superimposed over the stage of the Royal Albert Hall. The ceiling has disappeared, revealing a clear sky pierced by the lights of a thousand alien stars. Around me an orchestra of the dead plays for an audience of the damned.

  “Who are you?”

  Lecter laughs, the madness of strings: ***I am an echo of an echo, ripped from yellowing bones enrobed in shrouds to dance within this rigid body: Do you know me yet?***

  The violin in my hands feels alive by proxy. As the piece moves back to the major theme, I feel him, warm and pulsing with stolen life, all the lives he’s drunk down over the years and decades since the mad luthier of Munich bound a summoned demon into an instrument carved from the still-raw bones of human sacrifices: “Are you the King in Yellow?” I demand as Jim, somnambulant, turns the page and our little songbird at the podium raises her voice in song.

  ***I am no more the King in Yellow than your littlest fingernail is the bearer of the white violin! But soon…***

  Then the development steps up a level, and I can’t spare any attention for horrified contemplation: my fingers and hands and arms and upper body are all caught up in the progression as the chorus join in song, chanting lyrics increasingly mutilated and warped to serve the ends of Freudstein:

  Strange is the night where black stars rise,

  And strange moons circle through the skies,

  But stranger still is

  Lost Carcosa.

  Songs of law the Hyades shall sing,

  Where flap the tatters of the King,

  Must die unheard in

  Dim Carcosa.

  Bind those who hear these words,

  To love the law though death itself shall die,

  Unquestioning, obedient in

  Dim Carcosa —

  — The Albert Hall has completely disappeared.

  I seem to stand amidst a frozen orchestra as the music dies away around us. Jim is frozen beside the music stand, a puppet in the hands of a tired master: his eyes glow faintly with the spiraling wormsign of feeders in night. The audience on the stone steps of the amphitheater are familiar, Prom-goers transported bodily to the alien place, immobile in the grip of some force that has stopped time itself. I look up at where the ceiling should be and see moons – two of them, shining down like symbols of merciless alienation.

  My hands are empty. I jerk round, half-panicked, a sense of helpless vulnerability – I know in retrospect this sounds laughable – gripping me, because the violin is my most powerful defense and Lecter vanished just as I found myself on this stony stage. But then I realize what’s going on.

  ***Looking for me?***

  I dry-swallow, looking up at Lecter’s true form. “Not really,” I say in a very small voice, trembling slightly.

  ***Too bad.***

  In this place Lecter doesn’t wear the body of a bone-white violin. He doesn’t need to. I know where we are: previously he’s invaded my dreams, but now, flushed with the power of a major summoning, he’s dragged me into his dream. Now I know what to look for I can feel ghost fingers moving, the tension of neck and shoulder betraying a performance still in progress.

  ***I couldn’t risk you refusing to cooperate further with my little joke.*** The gaunt figure floating in mid-air before me seems to smirk, even though its face is hidden from my perception by a veil of palest golden lace. ***So I thought I’d invite you backstage with me, while your body plays on without you.***

  “This is where you live, isn’t it?” I glance away. Around us the frozen figures stand, row upon row, eyes flickering with tainted phosphorescence. “This is where you’ve always been.”

  ***I’m the last one, you know. The last surviving key. All the other violins are lost, destroyed or locked away – all but me.***

  “Yes.” I turn back to face him. It. Him. The avatar of that which the pale violins were created to summon, when the stars were right. Lecter’s shadow: the King in Yellow, released from captivity within the body of the bone violin. “There are people who really don’t think you should exist anymore, did you know that?”

  ***I am aware.*** His amusement is icy. ***But once the key turns in the lock, I shall come into my full birthright, and they will cease to be of concern…***

  Here I stand, trapped timeless in the gap between two beats of a measure in a work of transcendental melodic magic that has been perverted into a summoning. Here I stand, caught inside the dreamscape of my own cursed musical instrument, while it seeks to pervert the perversion, to turn Operation Freudstein’s insanely dangerous attempt at a mass geas of compulsion into an invocation instead, a summoning for the King in Yellow. Here I stand outside of time and space, and I notice that I’m shaking.

  I’m not in shock, and I am not cold, for there is no temperature in Lecter’s dream. I am, I slowly realize, livid with anger and just barely bottling it in. Anger? Rage, actually.

  Let me enumerate the roots of my rage:

  I’m furious with Bob for deserting me to become the new Eater of Souls. I’m mortified and angry with myself for falling for Jim’s charms while failing to realize that he’d been placed in my organization – whether or not he knew it – by our adversary, to provide them with a continuous stream of intelligence about us via his weekly reports. Even before we come to my abduction into this waking nightmare, I was furious at my instrument for daring to tiptoe around my dreams and hopes and fears, resentful of the way it manipulated me with Mhari.

  I’m pissed off at Dr. Armstrong for dumping me into the Directorship at INCORRIGIBLE, also known as the Transhuman Police Coordination Force, a job for which I am absolutely inadequate and unqualified; but above and beyond that I am disgusted with him for knowingly putting me in a position of assumed helplessness in hope that it would lead our enemy to play their hand, despite being fully aware of my history, of what unquiet ghosts it would dredge up.

  I’m upset at myself for being afraid of standing backlit against windows and for spooking at loud noises in crowds. I’m angry with all the waiters and shop assistants and police foot patrols who can look right at me and fail to see me as I slowly drown in the oceanic waters of social irrelevance, succumbing to the invisibility of the middle-aged woman until it gradually becomes a three- or four-sigma superpower, an expression of my own not inconsiderable strength as a practitioner feeding on my sense of self-doubt and inadequacy. (The invisible man is a Wellsian supervillain, but the invisible women are all around us, anxious and unseen.)

  I lack the words to adequately express how incensed I am by the activities of Deputy Commissioner Laura Stanwick of the Metropolitan Police and her cronies within ACPO, who have
decided on their own initiative that nanny knows best, and that creating a nightmare supervillain as a stalking horse to justify raping twenty million minds in parallel is a perfectly acceptable price to pay, if it improves cooperation with the police in a time of national crisis – a crisis that they barely understand and are in no small measure unintentionally contributing to, by diverting our scarce resources.

  That the culmination of Operation Freudstein is an attempt to compel millions of people to obey the rules of policing is bad enough. That they’ve recklessly chosen to ignore my urgent warnings about the risks of overfeeding the white violin is worse. That the instrument in question sees this as an opportunity to become the undead avatar of the King in Yellow (and is well on the way to doing just that, if I’m any judge of demonic summonings gone wrong) is just unspeakable.

  But all of this is displacement.

  The harsh fact is, I don’t much like who I’ve become or what I’ve done with my life since I followed Bob down the rabbit hole of the Laundry all those years ago. I have, admittedly, had all those extra years of life and even some stretches of something approximating marital bliss; I can’t forget the way Bob rescued me twice from fates that don’t bear thinking about. (Admittedly, I returned the favor: we’ve played a hair-raisingly extreme version of “for better or for worse” over the years.) But it’s been crumbling for ages now, as I was sent on one nightmarish job after another, culminating in Vakilabad and then the nonsense in Trafalgar Square – history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. I’ve sacrificed a lot to the Laundry. I allowed my academic career to wither, marking time in a teaching niche. Kids – well, they were a nonstarter once I understood the horrifying implications of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. Salary… don’t get me started. I’m in my forties now, my best years behind me, marriage coming unraveled, career tanking spectacularly, and when the chips were down, the oath of office I swore rendered me unable to say “no” to the most heinously immoral order anyone has ever given me.

  My self-respect has taken a battering from these successive betrayals of trust. But I’m still angry: and as long as I’m not numb, I’ve got something to work with.

  And more to the point, I think Lecter has inadvertently given me a way out.

  There is this thing about my oath of office: I’m sworn to the defense of the realm, and I’m sworn to obey lawful orders.

  That’s the horrible thing about Laura Stanwick’s having served me with notice under Part 2 of the Civil Contingencies Act, signed by the Home Secretary, after the SA helpfully seconded me to the Home Office. It’s entirely lawful, because the CCA is essentially an enabling act that allows designated emergency commanders to make it up as they go along. It was designed to ensure continuity of operations in event of a major catastrophe, such as a nuclear war. And I’m helpless to refuse it, because the geas built into my oath of office requires me to obey lawful orders.

  But the sorcerers who devised the geas weren’t stupid. I have some latitude in how I interpret an order.

  Laura Stanwick ordered me to go on stage with the white violin and play the sonata from The King in Yellow before a live audience.

  But she didn’t order me to help Lecter unlock the astral gate and summon his master. That’s the instrument’s agenda, not the Home Office at work.

  And, more prosaically, she forgot to order me not to do anything else.

  In that frozen moment, standing in the middle of the amphitheater of dreams in Lecter’s memory of long-lost Carcosa, I realize what I have to do.

  I draw on what willpower I have and slip sideways, away from even this shadow of reality. Lecter’s spectral outline shifts, drifting towards me: I take a step back, then another.

  ***Where have you gone?***

  I can feel my invisibility, like a cloak I can tug around myself. I take a step sideways, towards Jim’s frozen image. The glowing eyes – he’s not possessed yet, not quite: he’s just open to possession, if Lecter comes into his full power and erupts, unleashing a tidal wave of hunger across the stage. I reach around his shoulders and shroud him in my imaginary cloak.

  ***What are you doing? Reveal yourself at once!***

  A voice of thunder rattles from the stone steps around us, hammering my ears. Jim’s body is rigid as stone, stiff, unbreathing in this place – an instant between heartbeats —

  The thing that is Lecter pounds away across the stage, bowling through the oboes and clarinets like a vengeful fury, scattering mannequin musicians in all directions.

  ***Come back!*** he howls, distracted. Good.

  I can’t feel my fingers properly. That’s also a good sign. It means the illusion he’s woven to trap me here is slipping slightly.

  I lean in close towards Jim’s face. “Jim. Jim! Wake up! Snap out of it!”

  Something changes. He doesn’t move, doesn’t respond – but after a moment I realize he’s breathing. Trapped in this place with me, outside time.

  “Jim!” If this were a fairy tale, I’d have to kiss him or something, but unfortunately the real world is a whole lot more complicated – and I am not going there until Officer Friendly and I have had a free and frank exchange of opinions about loyalty —

  So instead, I kick him on the right shin, hard.

  “Ow!” Jim staggers, the luminosity fading from his eyes. “Ah, ow! Mo, where are —”

  “Get down!” I grab him again, stretching my shroud, and drag him to the ground as Lecter howls and shrieks overhead, blotting out the moons as he flies across the arena.

  “Where are —”

  “Shut up,” I hiss. It takes concentration to extend my imaginary cloak around others, but I’ve done it before. I did it for Busy Bee in Downing Street; I can do it for Jim here. “Listen, we’re awake in Lecter’s dreamscape. Stanwick thinks if I play this sonata with the modified lyrics, she can turn a third of the population into obedient little constables. Lecter has other ideas, and if I finish it, we’re in a world of hurt. That” – there is a pale silver ovoid glimmering in the air at the far side of the stage, a portal of a kind I’ve seen before and really don’t want to be seeing here – “is Lecter attempting to summon his superior avatar, the King in Yellow —”

  “Oh shit, is that —”

  “Yes, shut up – in a moment you’re going to wake up on stage again and you’ve got to stop me playing. Do you understand?” I grab his shoulders, wrap my arms around him.

  I stare into his eyes and see the confusion bleed away, replaced by worried concern: “Mo, can’t you —”

  “Laura hit me with a geas! Do you know the story, the red shoes? Someone else has to stop me.”

  “But I —” He looks sick. “I’m really sorry, I had no idea she was planning —” Another mournful howl splits the air: Lecter soars high above the ruins of Carcosa, searching for his runaway host. “You want me to stop you playing?”

  “Got it,” I say. “And try not to use your superpowers. If you use them here, it could be really bad.” That would attract the feeders, like sending up an occult signal saying K syndrome fast food buffet here. He’s hugging me back, and because we’re trapped between ticks of the clock in a dream of desolate ruins, I lean close to him and kiss him on the lips once, by way of a good-bye, and as I feel him respond we —

  — Fade to standing spotlit on a stage, wrists and shoulders feeling pierced by hot wires and blood trickling down my stinging fingertips to lubricate the blue-humming strings of the white violin as I face the music in the Albert Hall, the bow dragging my hand back and forth as the tempo increases and the chorus raise their voices in an unearthly counterpoint —

  ***Found you!*** Lecter shrieks inside my head, as my right ring finger buzzes emphatically and I sense rather than see a great tattered bat shape flapping towards me out of the darkness beyond the lights.

  Then Jim makes his move and all hell breaks loose.

  For a split second Jim stands beside me, white-gloved hand hovering over the corner of the score from which my bleeding h
ands are compelled to play. Then he grabs the manuscript and jumps. I told him not to: but of course, silly me, my mojo is all about being ignored.

  I gape, following his leap. Any lingering doubt that Jim is indeed Officer Friendly vanishes after him as I follow his trajectory towards the dress circle boxes.

  ***COME BACK!*** Lecter howls in my head, deafening me, but the geas is broken: with no musical score I can’t continue the performance. I slowly turn towards the orchestra, lowering my bow as a steady trickle of blood runs down the fingerboard of my instrument and splatters to the floor.

  There’s something wrong with the bow, I realize dimly. My finger vibrates again, an urgent imperative. Faces look at me, and these eyes are indeed glowing, writhing blue-green worms twirling within the heads of people who no longer exist in any human sense of the word. The instrument feels dead. It feels like, like a violin made of bone. The anima that gave it such a vibrant sense of life has departed.

  No, it’s not dead. Rather, I’m keeping an iron grip on my own visibility because something in the back of my head is terrified that Lecter will notice me again. I’ve blocked him out completely. As long as he can’t see me, his attention will be turned elsewhere. But that might not be a good thing.

  All around me stand the bodies of orchestra and Proms-goers, occupied by the lesser feeders in the night for whom the recital has opened the way: mindless processes of contagion and possession that swirl in the wake of the greater summonings and seek living bodies to run on, allowed to swarm in because Laura Stanwick wouldn’t take no for an answer and didn’t let me fully explain the risks of a recital with the white violin so close to breaking loose – and in a moment they’re going to realize that I’m not one of them —