The Apocalypse Codex lf-4

by Charles Stross

  This is one of those jobs.

  I’ve been ordered home, the mission terminated. Unfortunately the external assets I’m here to shadow have decided that the mission is not over, and in any case my withdrawal route is blocked. So I am unofficially tagging along to keep an eye on them and make sure they don’t do anything…no, scratch that. It’s the official truth, the pravda, but it’s not the real deal. What is going on is that Lockhart wants Persephone and Johnny to be here, raising hell, but he doesn’t want to be held responsible for the consequences: it might create a stink when the Black Chamber find out about it. At least, I think that’s the subtext.

  Me, I’m here because I can’t get out, and while I’m locked in the asylum I might as well take notes on the inmates. That, and obey standing orders if I run into any of the aforementioned special circumstances. As seems regrettably likely right now.

  So, you see, Persephone has to do the door-breaking. If I break down doors without orders, I might just be breaking the law. She is too, but she isn’t accountable for her actions as long as the other side don’t catch her; I’m not a cop, remember?

  Listen, I didn’t make these rules—I just have to work within them.

  Nobody said this job was going to be easy…

  THE MISSIONARY LEADS JOHNNY FROM THE PARKING SPOT TO a side door, through the teeth of an icy gale. The door opens onto a narrow, windowless corridor curving around the side of the sanctuary. Johnny hears many voices raised in song, their joyous words muffled by the echoing acoustics of the bare concrete walls.

  They come to a door that opens into the sanctuary.

  “Please come this way,” says the missionary, head cocked to one side as if listening to words inaudible to others. “Our father will see you in the vestry.”

  “Uh-huh.” The music is louder near the door, backed by instruments: an organ or synthesizer and electric guitars. It’s like a rock concert singalong, but Johnny can’t make out any of the words. “Lead on,” he says, palming his throwing knives. They feel as if they’re writhing between his fingers, reluctant to be here.

  “Do not be afraid,” the missionary adds, “nothing here will hurt you.” Then it opens the door.

  Visualize a church.

  Make it a really big church, the size of a large cinema, with a funnel of gently sloping terraces set with rows of theater-style seating that converge to focus on a stage decked with altar, pulpit, and rock band. In the walls all around, stained-glass windows backed by halogen lights shine the glory of the Lord; overhead floodlights and stage spots illuminate the brilliantly gowned choir and the musicians on stage.

  The soundproofing on the door is excellent, because inside the sanctuary the voice of the crowd is nearly deafening as they stand, chanting along with a holy rolling rock anthem. Johnny’s ward squeezes against his breastbone, beaten back by the passionate strength of the congregation. There are thousands of them—most of the seats would be occupied if the occupants weren’t on their feet, singing their hearts out. But there’s something odd about it, because they’re not stomping: they’re mostly swaying in place, hands clasped before them in attitudes of prayer, and though they sing—

  Johnny squints. He can’t see to the front of the stage, but follows the missionary along one of the aisles leading round the outside of the congregation. Something is wrong. The skin on the back of his neck crawls. There’s a glamour here, a monumentally powerful one, stupefying and cloying. He’s seeing and hearing what he’s meant to see and hear, thousands of churchgoers singing and clapping along to a wholesome Christian rock band between prayers led by the pastor at the front, a joyous act of collective worship.

  But every five or ten seats in the rows there’s one who doesn’t feel right. There is something about them that Johnny recognizes: the taint of the old school, the stolid soulless stance of the missionary in front of him. The crowd is seeded with the possessed, positioned behind and scattered among the congregation like fence posts surrounding a flock of sheep. The shepherd has sent his own to bring the flock home. There’s a faint smell, too, aromatic burning incense overlaying something slightly fishy, like burning electrical insulation. A powerful glamour lies over the whole congregation like a stifling blanket, leaking into eyes and ears and warping perceptions. His knives are uneasy for good reason: created to cut, oblivious to mercy and mistruth, they are themselves shrouded in this gummy, foggy cloud of mind-sticky deception. And the music, the singing, the chant is deafening—

  The chant. Johnny focusses on it, trying to make out the distinctive words that the congregation are repeating. They slide away from his ears, half-masked by the glamour: Latin? No, this isn’t a Catholic mass. Think, sonny! he tells himself, tightening his grip on the soul-stealer knives as he follows the missionary around the next block of seats. I’ve heard this before.

  At the O2 Arena in Docklands. On the stage. Glossolalia, speaking in tongues. Specifically: Old Enochian.

  “Hell and damnation,” Johnny mutters to himself in near-shock, as the glamour falls away from his eyes and ears and he sees what is going on around him with unclouded senses. It exceeds his worst imaginings. For he is indeed in church, but the shift in perception shows him what lies beneath the glamour.

  The pastor still stands behind the altar, but his chant is a continuous incantation in the formal language of magic, and he, too, is one of the missionaries, driven and controlled by the host of an alien Lord. It is a chant of control, binding and compelling, coercing and demanding obedience and submission in the name of the Sleeper.

  The rock band and the choir are still there, but they’re not playing and singing of their own volition: they’re puppets dancing to an alien tune. The sound swells from somewhere deep beneath or behind them, using their voices and their instruments as a vehicle to penetrate the wall between the worlds. Johnny is still far enough back that he has to squint—but there is blood on the guitarists’ fingertips, and the choir members eyes are rolled back in their heads as they sway, unconscious in the grip of something that only looks like rapture when seen through glamour-fogged eyes.

  The plain steel cross behind the altar is gone, replaced by an iron hoop three meters in diameter, standing on edge. He knows without having to examine it that the rim will be inlaid with glyph-like circuit patterns, connected to external signal generators; different shades of darkness shimmer within the gate’s heart. He feels the ghostly fingers of the wind from the abyss pulling on his mind, urging him forward towards it.

  The missionaries aren’t there to herd the congregation forward, they’re in the crowd to hold them back, lest they rush the gate and trample each other in the crush.

  “Oh, Duchess,” Johnny mutters, “I hope you know what you’re getting into.” Then he tightens his grip on his knives and follows his unwitting guide, down towards the side door at the front of the aisle that leads backstage, where Schiller is waiting to receive his long-lost cousin.

  PERSEPHONE STEPS IN FRONT OF ME, CLOSE ENOUGH THAT I can feel her breath on my face. “The Hand of Glory,” she whispers; “now would be a good time to restart it.”

  I fumble in my pocket lining, which has become twisted around a disgusting jumble of bits of scorched pigeon toes, a cigarette lighter, and other peculiar odds and ends. The camera dangles and spins from the lanyard around my wrist as I try to rearrange things—luckily it’s in standby mode—until I manage to extract the pigeon’s foot. I’m about to light it when Persephone helpfully fastens an elasticated grounding strap to my wrist, and takes hold of the other end. “Thanks.” The click of the lighter and the sudden flicker of the butane flame seem deafening in the twilight at the top of the stairs. Then the claw is burning again, sputtering a foul trail of smoke, and everything around us acquires the very slight pallor that tells me it’s working. “Okay, lead on.”

  She doesn’t speak, but takes a couple of steps forward, towing me along at the end of the grounding strap like a leashed panther.

  There’s a fat bundle of cables
and some narrow insulated pipes slung from a shelf suspended from the ceiling above our heads as we descend the stairs to what proves to be a narrow corridor with doors to either side: a basement that’s been partitioned off into rooms. The complaints department is scritching excitedly at the inside of the warded pizza box and I can feel its eagerness to be reunited with…what? Something down here, that’s for sure. I have a surreal sense of déjà vu, as if I’m trapped in a live-action game of Dungeons and Dragons or something. It’d be funny if my skin wasn’t crawling.

  Persephone pauses at the bottom of the stairs and glances at me. I gesture with the box, pointing where its occupant is scritching loudest, towards the door at the end of the corridor. One of the other doors is propped open, and the smell tells me all I need to know: it’s a sluice room and basement toilet, currently unoccupied. We tiptoe past it and Persephone stops again outside the end door. “You’re sure?” she whispers, and I nod.

  I’m half-expecting her to kick down the door, but instead she reaches out, pauses just short of the door handle for a few seconds, then turns it and takes a quick step forward. Somehow that little snub-nosed revolver has appeared in her hand—I never saw it move—but there’s nobody in the darkened storeroom to point it at. There is, however, a presence.

  The complaints department is going apeshit with delight as I follow Persephone across the threshold and smell burning insulation, a rotting sea-smell like the slops rinsed from a fishmonger’s slab on a hot summer afternoon. I hear a loud scritching hissing clattering, like an infinity of giant wood lice. Persephone backs up in a hurry and turns to hit the light switch by the door and nearly clouts me in the gut with her gun. The light is oddly red, and I look past her to see a giant glass-walled tank occupying the middle of the room, its panels smeared on the inside with a thin coat of algae behind which—

  “Hsss!”

  The complaints department is eager to be reunited with its siblings, who seethe and burble in the breeding tank around the sessile, slowly pulsating body of a monstrously large isopod. The mother of hosts sits at the bottom of the tank atop a mound of small, gelatinous eggs, resembling nothing so much as a giant wood louse. There’s a dual-purpose summoning and containment grid inlaid on the floor around the tank, of course; even so, I can hear its song of joy, an eternal hymn to the glory that is the father-thing that feeds it. And now it’s seen us, because the compact Hand of Glory is nearly burned to a stub and in any case the bloody thing doesn’t have eyes, and it focusses the full strength of its moronic worship on me.

  It wants me to kiss it. Which is okay, because it loves me like I’ve never been loved before: it feels utter adoration and delight at my presence.

  The Hand of Glory is burning my fingertips so I drop it; it fizzles out and I shrug off the grounding strap. Persephone is between me and the tank. That’s annoying. I try to sidle around her but she keeps getting in front of me. “Mr. Howard. Bob,” she’s saying, as if my name means something. “Stop that. Bob—”

  Something rattles in my hands: in the pizza box. It’s unimportant, so I drop it and try to shoulder-barge past her to get to the tank. It loves me, I can tell. It wants me to kiss it so it can be with me forever and save me for our ecstatic union in the Lord’s embrace.

  “For fuck’s sake,” says Persephone. She won’t get out of my way. She’s got her feet braced and is leaning against me, trying to hold me back. I get a glimpse of her eyes, dark and wild and scared, and then suddenly she wraps an arm around the back of my head, pulls me closer, and sticks her tongue in my mouth. It’s like a parasite’s tentacular mouth-parts, questing, looking for a blood vessel to latch onto: I choke with disgust and recoil, nearly biting her before I realize what’s happening.

  The thing in the tank is spinning a high level glamour—class four, at least. My mouth feels slimy and revolting; Persephone wipes her lips on the back of her wrist as I double over and gag, drooling copious saliva on the floor. Ritual magic runs on sympathy and contagion, and she just hit me with a simple channeling of what she sees when she looks at the thing in the tank to break through the glamour. It nearly had me…clearly my standard-issue defensive ward isn’t up to blocking that kind of assault.

  “Better now?” she asks.

  I nod, wordlessly, then spit again. “Got to kill it—” She raises the revolver and takes aim. “No, wait.” If she shoots, it’ll bring everyone within a couple of hundred meters at a run. “Better idea.” I stagger backwards, then turn into the sluice room and hit the light switch. There’s the usual stuff you’d expect to find: mop and bucket, taps, hose, janitor supplies. I grab a gallon bottle of Liquid-Plumr and squint at the ingredients. Sodium hydroxide, sodium hypochlorite, detergent: That’ll do. I step back into the tank room, and pass the bottle to Persephone. “Here.”

  “Wait for me at the top of the stairs. And take your host.” I bend and pick up the pizza box, which is rattling away furiously. Maybe the complaints department realizes it’s about to become an orphan. I’m halfway up the corridor when all hell cuts loose in my head and the host in the box starts to vibrate and spasm, like a wasp that’s been hit by a concentrated blast of insecticide. There’s a pungent stink of chlorine inside my head and it feels as if someone is ramming nails in my eyes and ears and tongue. I nearly fall over, but grab the handrail and stumble upwards in the grip of the worst headache ever until I bump into the inside of the door at the top of the stairs. The pain begins to subside, and I take a couple of deep breaths. Persephone’s still down there. Is she going to be all right? I turn round and experimentally open my eyes, but the migraine distortions swirling around make it hard to see. “Hey,” I call quietly.

  “Hey.” I startle. She’s right in front of my face, nose-to-nose with me. “We made it. Are you okay?”

  “I—yeah.” I nod. “Just a sec.” I pull out my phone, call up OFCUT, and poke it at my ward. The damn thing says it’s fine, which is seriously worrying because Jesus nearly had me for a fish supper back there. The mother-of-hosts totally bypassed my defenses. On the other hand, my ward didn’t stop me feeling the missionaries back in the hotel. Come to think of it the ward I was using back in Germany and St Martin during the business with Ramona didn’t block our entanglement, either. Maybe it just plain doesn’t work on soul-eaters? I shut my eyes again. I can feel Persephone in front of me—feel the outlines of her mind, if that makes sense. I try and spread my awareness, but apart from a very faint presence outside the door (the attendant Persephone decked?) I don’t feel anyone. I open my eyes. “The good news is, I think we’re alone. The bad news is, there’s nothing down here but that.”

  A quick nod. “The gate must be somewhere else, then.”

  I was afraid she’d say that. “Can you tell where?”

  She gives a funny little choking laugh. “You—no, don’t. Don’t look in the Other Place. We’re almost inside it’s mouth.”

  “Oh.” I open the door. “Then we’ll just have to do this the old-fashioned way.”

  The complaints department has shut up since Persephone drenched its mother in caustic soda, but I’m willing to make a wild-assed guess that Schiller won’t have hidden an occult portal anywhere where random visitors might stumble through it. We’ve checked the basement, and the ground floor reception rooms don’t look promising, so that leaves upstairs: his private apartments or his office. I shove the pizza box inside my shoulder bag and pull out the gun I took from its human steed. “Upstairs first.”

  We go upstairs. There’s a corridor running laterally across the house and we rapidly establish that one end is residential—guest rooms, bathrooms, and the like. Which means the other end, behind a fire door, is where Schiller attends to business. He has a nice-looking office with decent quality oak paneling, bookcases full of impressive-looking leather-bound volumes, and a public desk flanked by American flags. It’s backed by a huge wall-mounted cross. Never trust a religion whose symbol of faith is a particularly gruesome form of execution, say I: but at least this is t
he abstract kind, lacking the figure of Yeshua ben Yusuf writhing in his death agony. “There’s also a private office.” Persephone points to a door to one side of the desk. “Do you see any wards?”

  I peer at the door. Then I haul out my phone and take a look at it with OFCUT. Augmented reality for the win: my nascent necromantic spidey-sense doesn’t see anything, but there’s a spiderweb of really nasty schematics tingling and twitching all across the door’s surface. A fine thread leads from it towards the giant cross. I’ve got a nasty feeling that if you touch the door without an invitation you’re going to get to ride on Jesus’s tree, and not in a happy way. It’s probably Schiller’s idea of a cute joke. “I wouldn’t mess with that if I were—”

  Bang.

  I wince and clutch my head as she lowers the pistol with which she has just blown a hole in the central binding node of the trap-ward. It shorts out in a storm of fat violet sparks and a brain-wrenching twist at right angles to reality. She kicks the door hard, right above the lock. It crashes open and she goes straight into a crouch, covering the room within, which does indeed appear to be a private office. Of course, it’s unoccupied. The desk is smaller than the one up front, but there’s a much nicer chair behind it, and there are more bookcases and a much more eclectic collection of bindings visible on their contents. I raise my camera, wake it from sleep, point it at the floor, and mess with the settings. Knowing Brains it’ll be here somewhere…ah, gotcha. Basilisk guns able to set fire to wide swathes of carbon-based life forms are all very well, but in my line of work a camera also comes in handy, and this one’s a lot better than the one in my phone. I was pretty sure Brains wouldn’t have disabled the photographic firmware entirely, just augmented it. I raise the camera and start taking shots, partially obscured by Persephone’s panicky head as it snaps round and does a double take.