The Nightmare Stacks

by Charles Stross

  Eventually they stumble out onto the pavement. The air is cool but the rain clouds have blown away towards the east, and the sky above them is darkening from azure to indigo in the north. Venus drifts overhead, a bright and lonely promise of the starry night to come. “Walk with me?” Agent First asks as she takes hold of Alex’s arm. She leans on him for balance as they descend the slope down Vicar Lane, heading back towards Quarry Hill. She’s wearing a pair of ankle boots with spiky heels that Cassie’s memories prompted her to buy, but balancing in them is challenging.

  “Let me show you the river walk,” Alex offers.

  “Yes, let’s. Which way is it?” she asks, wobbling slightly. She likes hearing his voice. It reminds her that she’s not alone in this drab, mana-bereft world.

  “Back the way we were, past the Playhouse . . .” He leads her along the side of Eastgate, half-deafened by buses and cars, under the old railway viaduct and past the shiny glass and concrete hotel. “Not far to go.”

  “You work in Quarry House, don’t you?” she asks. “Are you really a civil servant, then?” The nest of twisty concepts behind the term baffles Agent First: as if it’s possible for abstractions to command minions to serve them. “A servant of the, the Crown?”

  “I—” He pauses for a moment. “I suppose I am.” He sounds surprised and slightly depressed, as if she’s shocked a confession of guilt out of him. “I’d rather not talk about it,” he adds apologetically.

  “Then don’t,” she says. Normally she’d find this reluctance irritating, as it threatens to prolong her mission. (It’s already getting late, and if she wants to maintain the pretense of being a student she’ll need to go home soon and get some sleep before lectures.) But instead she finds herself warmly happy at the excuse for a second date, an opportunity to spend more time in his company. “What did you think of the movie?”

  “I thought it was—” Alex pauses. There are steps here, leading down to a path alongside the river, which is as thoroughly walled-in as an artificial canal. “It annoyed me,” he admits as he helps her descend.

  “Why?” she asks breathily, leaning on him a bit more heavily than is strictly necessary for balance.

  “Vampires—” He stops again, as if a distant instructor is reading lines for him to repeat: almost as if he harbors a secret narrative, Agent First recognizes with a shiver. “Bah.” The air alongside the river is moist and cool, and there’s a faint shimmer of activity in the air by some bushes. “Midges.”

  “Midges—” The haze dances closer. “They bite, don’t they?”

  Alex glitches again. She squeezes his fingers encouragingly. He takes a deep breath, preparation for the confessional: “Midges are vampires.”

  She looks at him sharply, but he’s not smiling. “What?”

  “Midges and mosquitos are blood-suckers, but nobody thinks they’re sexy, do they?”

  “YesYes, but . . .” Cassie’s head spins as, abruptly, she sees Alex on the edge of self-disclosure—not the insight she’d asked for, but an important one nonetheless. “What do you mean?”

  “Insects. Bats.” They pick their way hand-in-hand along the tow path, past a mooring where a narrow-boat is tied up, light leaking from behind curtained portholes. “Blood-suckers. They’re not sexy, are they? Not like Adam and Eve.” The stars of the movie, star-crossed ancient lovers. “There’s a species of leech, you know? Placobdelloides jaegerskioeldi, the hippo arse leech. Leeches come in all shapes and sizes and are adapted to feed on different hosts. Hippos have thick skin, so the only place jaegerskioeldi can suck blood is inside the hippo’s rectum. They breed in there, if you can believe it? And if you ever wondered why hippos spin their tails when they shit, it’s to throw the leeches as far away as they can. That’s what a vampire is,” he adds, either bitterly or enviously—his tone of voice is distinctly odd. “A hyperspecialized parasite. The only sexy blood-suckers are ones that look like us—and they don’t—” He coughs. “Well. What I’m saying is, real vampires are nasty. You want to avoid them.” And he lets go of her hand.

  “Well, thank you very much for spoiling what was shaping up to be a really good evening!” Cassie fumes. She stands in the path and glares.

  Alex looks stricken. “Oh gosh, I didn’t mean it like that,” he says with a deer-in-the-headlights look that makes him seem a decade younger, “I wasn’t trying to gross you out, honest. I was just . . .” Finally his brain catches up with his mouth. “I should stop talking now, shouldn’t I?” he asks nobody in particular.

  Agent First thinks rapidly. So you aren’t allowed to talk about what you are, and it’s a source of shame, is it? She can work with that, although it makes her feel dirty. “Well, now I feel sick, which means you owe me another date!” she announces, letting the tension bleed out of her shoulders. “One without leeches,” she adds, keeping a wary eye on the river passing hippopotami. “How about Saturday?”

  “Why, uh, yeah, yes! I can do Saturday!” He’s transparent, she thinks sadly, and so appealingly vulnerable, if occasionally disgusting in the manner of a cute puppy that hasn’t completely mastered the finer points of toilet discipline. She gets it now: she’s dealing with great power coupled with total dorkish innocence and an unaccountable sense of shame.

  “Great! I’ll text you!” Agent First leans forward and briefly kisses his cheek. She forces herself to ignore the impulse to grab his ass, nibble his neck, and see if he’s up for helping her explore Cassie’s torrid fantasy life: she doesn’t want to spook him by moving too fast. But she’s breathing faster as she pulls away. “You’d better show me back to the bus station now. It’s definitely time to go home.”

  * * *

  Another day, another meeting in the DM’s basement man-cave. Lockhart is afraid he’s getting used to it: it’s sordid, but no worse than what you often find in the way of living circumstances when a squaddie musters out and falls off the map.

  “So,” he says, “what have you got for me?”

  “Plenty.” Derek smiles faintly, maybe a touch enviously. “He’s a lucky bastard, our boy.”

  “Maybe so, but I want a full situation report.”

  It’s a reminder, not an order, but the DM gets the message. There is some sighing and grunting as he shifts his belly into position behind the edge of the table, then rummages for the paper files. It’s all on neatly gridded graph paper, drawn with a Rotring 0.5mm technical pen and a variety of propelling pencils. Maps, names, probabilities, flow charts.

  “Alex Schwartz, Whitby. The changeling, Whitby. Not a coincidence, oracular nudging is highly likely. Whether by ours or theirs is unclear: the inference fog is obscuring almost everything. But anyway, they run into each other and proceed directly to boy-meets-girl stuff, desirable from whichever side of the wall you look at it, theirs or ours.” He slides a couple of CCTV stills across the table towards Lockhart, whose expression of stiff-lipped disapproval deepens. “There’s no need to be like that,” Derek adds; “our boy had no way of knowing who or what she was.”

  “That’s beside the point: it’s still Fraternization with the Uncanny, and the Assizes will take a dim—”

  “I know, but when life hands you honey, you build a honey trap.” The DM shrugs. “She’s here on her own in a strange world, surrounded by people like—” His gesture takes in the other photos, the Victorian cosplayers and strolling goths and street theater. “And if what we can infer about her background is right she must be suffering from massive cognitive whiplash right now. You know how many agents the Soviets lost, trying to gain traction in the United States during the cold war? About three thousand. They figured out how things worked, did a double-take, and then they dived underground—not just into deep cover, they actually cut their ties and hid. The KGB thought the FBI were ruthlessly efficient at rounding up and shooting spies, but in reality, the kids from the Kolkhoz were living the American dream. They worked out they’d been lied to ab
out the evils of capitalism, so why put out?”

  Lockhart rolls his eyes but doesn’t say anything. After a few seconds to savor his self-derailment, Derek gets back on course.

  “Anyway, we set Alex up to meet cute with her, as agreed. It worked. Now we need to give him room to run. Serendipity: he has a mentor who specializes in counseling, awkward conversations, relationships, that sort of thing. Less serendipitous: he’s inexperienced and he’s got PHANG syndrome. Well, the bathroom cabinet is well-stocked with condoms and lube, that’s all we can do for him without it being obvious. Oh, and we got her phone’s IMEI and SIM ID so we can man-in-the-middle their lovey-dovey texts and Snapchats and whatnot pro re nata. If he clams up and goes shy we can poke her until she talks to him, or vice versa. Main thing is to get her on a string and reel her in. Then apply Stockholm syndrome proactively.”

  Lockhart twitches. “I do not think Stockholm syndrome means quite what you think it means.”

  “What, the tendency of people—usually women—in unfamiliar societies to enculturate rapidly?”

  Lockhart inclines his head. “Point.”

  The DM summarizes. “It worked on the Eater of Souls. If we’re lucky it’ll work on whatever is walking around wearing the late Cassiopeia Brewer’s face. Then we can milk her for information and prepare a suitable response, hopefully before the full-scale incursion Forecasting Ops are screaming about takes place. It’s our job to ensure Alex doesn’t end up too moon-struck to do his job. And to make sure the beehive is positioned close by the rhododendron bushes and busily accumulating poison honey, of course, and position a company of archers just beyond the ridgeline. Or Apache Longbow gunships. Whatever it takes . . .”

  * * *

  After that one chaste kiss—to which Alex had so little idea of how to respond that he simply froze in place—he walks Cassie to the bus station before heading up Briggate towards the bus stops for Harehills Lane. His head is spinning; butterflies are shooting up crystal meth in his chest. Oh God a girl kissed me, what does it mean? Well, in the abstract, Alex knows exactly what it means. He’s old enough to know better, too. He got the memo, after the late-night chat with John. Oh crap, I don’t know what to do.

  He’s completely mesmerized, and suddenly frightened for his future. It’s not as if he’s had much of a chance until now, but somehow he has internalized the ur-cultural narrative: you grow up, go to university, get a job, meet Ms. Right, get married, settle down, have kids, grow old together . . . it’s like some sort of checklist. Or maybe a list of epic quests you’ve got to complete while level-grinding in a game you’re not allowed to quit, with no respawns and no cheat codes.

  But a few months ago Alex found a cheat code and now he’s infected with the thaumaturgic equivalent of HIV. He’s locked out of the normal player mode, pressing his nose against the plate-glass window of reality and peering inside longingly, wondering what the hell happens next—when Ms. Right shows up, with blue-green pigtails and a smile like the sunrise he no longer dares to face. And she’s a bit weird, too, but that’s okay . . . that’s entirely okay . . . if only he wasn’t a PHANG . . .

  Alex’s brain is still spinning around these imponderables as he walks into his bedroom and lies down. He is asleep almost instantly, because he’s working days this week and it’s past midnight. But morning brings no surcease, and his previous befuddlement is replaced by a low but pervasive sense of anxiety by the time he gets to the Arndale office for a morning briefing.

  Pete is waiting there with a mug of decaf helpfully lined up for him. “We were going to go over the take from the K-22 survey of the Armouries, weren’t we,” he says by way of introduction. “Then report on whether we need to do anything more on-site. Tomorrow’s a training day, and . . .” He frowns. “What is it?”

  Alex looks perplexed. Something is missing, something important. “Just a sec.” He puts his phone down on the desk, then fumbles with his unbuttoned shirt collar. “Just want to check something.” He pulls out his ward, unclips it from the lanyard, and puts it beside his phone.

  “What?”

  “I think I felt a surge yesterday evening, near Quarry House,” Alex says, “and now I can’t feel it. It’s cold.” The inscribed crystal feels like a lump of stone, lifeless and dead.

  “Really?” Pete leans back and sips his own coffee as Alex fidgets with the OFFCUT app on his phone.

  “Yeah, I’m getting nothing. Can you check it for me using your own phone? This isn’t working.”

  “Okay . . .”

  A minute later they’re both shaking their heads over the duff ward. “You’d better indent for another one,” Pete tells him. “That’s not supposed to happen. Do you remember breaking it?”

  “No.” Alex frowns. “It might have been at the RA. They have a lot of blood-soaked history there, and there’s that anomalous new ley line node down by the river. But it could have been any time, really. I normally check it weekly.”

  Pete shakes his head again. “They’re not supposed to just die on you. I mean, if something burns out a ward, it gets hot, right? Eddy currents or something. You’d know about it, unless you were completely away with the fairies.”

  “Well I wasn’t.” Alex is mildly defensive. “So, um. What should I do?”

  Pete sighs. “Nothing right now. So let’s go over the survey first and see if we can get these wandering ley lines nailed down, then when we’re done you can email Facilities for a new one.” His face brightens. “How did your date go?”

  Alex twitches. “We went to a movie,” he says tentatively. “And we’re meeting up again on Saturday.” The less said about hippo arse leeches, the better.

  “Oh excellent!” Pete smiles. “I thought you looked a bit distracted. Jolly good.”

  “Work,” Alex nudges his mentor. The last thing he wants is a forensic examination of his personal life.

  “Okay, work. Did you get enough readings to generate a heat map of the ground floor of the museum . . . ?”

  They finish the post-mortem on Alex’s trip to the Royal Armouries, and Pete wanders off to another busywork session—a meeting about the ongoing headache of how to replace the MAGIC CIRCLE OF SAFETY public information campaign, which passed its use-by date some time around 1980. Alex returns to the office alone, and finds a familiar internal post package waiting in his in-tray.

  He sits down and stares at it for a minute, stomach cramping. Then he stands up again, walks stiff-legged to the doorway, and flips on the DO NOT DISTURB lamp outside. He locks the door, sits back down, and reaches for the package. His hand trembles slightly.

  It’s a day early, which is slightly upsetting if he stops to think about it. Somewhere in England (he doesn’t want to know where) a ninety-something Alzheimer’s patient is going downhill, feverish with a pneumonia infection that will kill them in the early hours. (No, probably not Alzheimer’s. That would damage the gray matter.) Or maybe they’re a middle-aged man, wracked by terminal cancer and dosed up to the eyeballs on morphine. (That’s better: more likely, too.) But maybe they’re a woman in her early twenties, lonely and depressed, who burned her liver out with a handful of paracetamol tablets in a mistaken call for help; the ambulance was too late and she won’t live long enough to receive a compatible transplant organ because suicides go to the back of the queue. (That’s the worst. All the wasted years ahead . . .)

  Alex takes a shuddering breath and pulls the rip-tab along the edge of the padded envelope, then shakes it until the box drops out onto his blotter. He tosses the envelope in the bin, then leans over the desk, hands to either side of the box, and forces himself to wait.

  This is a personal ritual. Making himself wait, despite the hunger pangs cramping his stomach and twisting around his spine, sending needles of lightning-like cold up and down his arms and legs to gnaw on his extremities. It seems to Alex that every time he consumes one of the “ration tubes” he loses part of
his claim to humanity. They taste of sinful complicity, of the willful shortening of a human life. It doesn’t matter that the donors are already dying, so that his feeding will merely add a haze of confusion to their final hours. It’s still a reminder that what keeps mankind alive involves gruesome death. And it comes in a Civil Service mailer, as if to say, Remember that you owe your life to the state.

  He meditates until he feels he understands what he’s about to do. Then he slides open the catch on the box, pops the seal on the plastic tube, and upends it onto his tongue.

  There is a faintly ammoniacal tang to the blood: it tastes slightly off, teetering on the edge of decay. Yes, definitely a suicide. (Or liver cancer, but that’s rare.) He shudders at the sense of release as his V-parasites latch onto the link to another unprotected brain and flit across to feed on it. It’s better, the other PHANGS tell him, than sex. But the relief he gains from feeding does nothing for the numb sense of grief that outlasts his hunger, and leaves him so fragile that he has to sit for half an hour before he is ready to unlock the door and switch off the DO NOT DISTURB sign.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, the invaders are refining their plans.

  With the arrival of the coatl bearing Agent First’s preliminary report, clear confirmation is received that the shadow road to Urükheim is open and anchored barely six leagues from the enemy’s northern palace. The report contains Agent First’s sketchy map of the ley line endpoints around the enemy hive—city seems too dignified a word for such a grotesque chaos—and close scrutiny offers up some promising snippets. There is an endpoint very close by the palace, down by the river. Less plausibly, it appears to be completely unguarded, which bespeaks either terrifying indifference or total incompetence on the part of the defenders. There’s another one near an abandoned fortification and a ritual corpse disposal site a league and a half from the end of the shadow road, and that one links in turn to a powerful line that terminates at the counterpart of the Host’s garrison: a large limestone outcropping in the foothills of the low mountain range that forms the spine of the urük kingdom that is All-Highest’s target.