“The things in the cultists’ bodies had already eaten the blonde teacher’s face and most of her left leg,” Mo tells me earnestly, “but the Somali boy-child was still screaming, so I had to go after him.”
I feel my gorge rising: “Too much.” I splash wine into my empty glass and take a too-hasty swig. “Jesus, Mo—”
Jesus was evidently the wrong word; she stands and manages to make it as far as the doorway, en route to the bathroom, before she doubles over and sprays the wine-soaked remains of her dinner on the floor.
I make it to the sink and pull the plastic bowl and the cleaning supplies out, then fetch her a glass of tap water. “Rinse and spit,” I say, holding the bowl under her mouth.
“Fucking gods, Bob—”
“Bed. Now.”
“We killed the bad things, but, but the little girl with the pigtails, I managed to carry her head back but it was too late—”
She’s crying now, and it’s all coming out, all the ugly details in a torrent like a vomiting storm sewer unloading a decade of pain and bloody shit and piss, and I carry her up the stairs as best I can and tuck her under the duvet. And she’s still crying, although the racking sobs are coming further apart. “Sleep and remember,” I tell her, touching her forehead: “Remember it’s all over.” I pull my ward over my head and hang it round her neck. “Repeat command light paramnesia level two, eight hours REM, master override, endit.” Then I touch her forehead again. “It’s over, Mo, you can let go of it now.”
As I go downstairs to clean up, I hear her beginning to snore.
MOPPING UP VOMIT AND CONSIGNING THE WRECKAGE OF DINNER to the recycling bin and the dishwasher keeps me distracted for ten minutes, but unfortunately not distracted enough to avoid looping through everything Mo said in my mind’s eye. I can’t help it. I’ve been through some bad shit myself, similar stuff. I’ve been through situations where you just keep going, keep pushing through, because if you stop you’ll never start again: but for all that, this one was particularly horrifying.
I think it’s the civilian involvement that does it; I’m more or less able to look after myself, and so is Mo, but a primary school . . . I don’t want to think about that, but I can’t stop, because this is where we’re all going, when the walls of reality come tumbling down and the dead gods begin to stir in their crypts. It’s put me in a theological frame of mind, and I hate that.
Let me try to explain . . .
I generally try to avoid funerals: they make me angry. I know the purpose of a funeral is to provide comfort and a sense of closure for the bereaved; and I agree, in principle, that this is generally a good thing. But the default package usually comes with a priest, and when they start driveling on about how Uncle Fred (who died aged sixty-two of a hideous brain tumor) is safe in the ever-loving arms of Jesus, the effect it has on me is not to make me love my creator: it’s to wish I could punch him in the face repeatedly.
I’m a child of the enlightenment; I was raised thinking that moral and ethical standards are universals that apply equally to everyone. And these values aren’t easily compatible with the kind of religion that posits a Creator. To my way of thinking, an omnipotent being who sets up a universe in which thinking beings proliferate, grow old, and die (usually in agony, alone, and in fear) is a cosmic sadist. Consequently, I’d much rather dismiss theology and religious belief as superstitious rubbish. My idea of a comforting belief system is your default English atheism . . . except that I know too much.
See, we did evolve more or less randomly. And the little corner of the universe we live in is 13.73 billion years old, not 5,000 years old. And there’s no omnipotent, omniscient, invisible sky daddy in the frame for the problem of pain. So far so good: I live free in an uncaring cosmos, rather than trapped in a clockwork orrery constructed by a cosmic sadist.
Unfortunately, the truth doesn’t end there. The things we sometimes refer to as elder gods are alien intelligences, which evolved on their own terms, unimaginably far away and long ago, in zones of spacetime which aren’t normally connected to our own, where the rules are different. But that doesn’t mean they can’t reach out and touch us. As the man put it: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Any sufficiently advanced alien intelligence is indistinguishable from God—the angry monotheistic sadist subtype. And the elder ones . . . aren’t friendly.
(See? I told you I’d rather be an atheist!)
I push the button on the dishwasher, straighten up, and glance at the kitchen clock. It’s pushing ten thirty, but I’m wide awake and full of bleak existential rage. I don’t want to go to bed; I might disturb Mo, and she really needs her sleep right now. So I tiptoe upstairs to check on her, use the bathroom, then retreat downstairs again. But that leaves me with a choice between sitting in a kitchen that smells of bleach and a living room that smells of sour fear-memories. I can’t face the inanities of television or the solace of a book. I feel restless. So I clip on my holster, pull on my jacket, and go outside for a walk.
It may be summer but it’s already dark and the streetlights are on. I walk down the leafy pavement, between the neatly trimmed front hedges and the sleeping cars parked nose to tail. The lichen-stained walls and battered wheelie bins are stained by the stale orange twilight reflected from the clouds. Traffic rumbles in the distance, pulsing with the freight of the unsleeping city. Here and there I see front windows illuminated from within by the shadow puppet play of televisual hallucinations. I turn a corner, walk downhill under the old railway bridge, then left past a closed back street garage. Cats slink through the moonless twilight with nervous stealth; the smell of night-blooming pollen meshes with the gritty taste of diesel particulates at the back of my throat. I walk through the night, wrapped in my anger, and as I walk I think:
Angleton is missing. Why? And where? He doesn’t live anywhere, according to Human Resources; doesn’t have a life. Well, that’s not much of a surprise. Angleton’s grasp on mundane humanity has always struck me as tenuous—the idea that there’s a four-hundred-year-old stone cottage in a village in the countryside, and a Mrs. Angleton puttering around hanging out the laundry on a line in the back garden, simply doesn’t work for me. He goes beyond the usual monasticism of the man who married his job; he never takes holidays, he’s always in the office, and then there’s the photograph. (Maybe he inherited it from Dorian Gray?) So, let this be Clue #1 that something is wrong. Angleton never does anything by accident, so either something is rotten in the state of Denmark, or he’s embarked on a caper he didn’t see fit to tell anyone about.
I turn right, across a main road—quiet at this time of night—then along and left down an alleyway that leads between rows of high back-garden fences. Grass grows beneath the crumbling, silvery woodwork and around the wheelie bins; here’s a concrete yard where someone has parked a decaying caravan, its windows frosted dark in the urban twilight.
The Fuller Memorandum is missing. Whatever is in it is still a hot potato after seventy-odd years. Angleton was interested in it, and in BLOODY BARON, and in this new business about CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN coming into effect sooner rather than later.
Item: Why are the Russians sniffing around? And what did Panin mean about finding the Teapot? He can’t be talking about Ungern Sternberg’s psychotic batman, can he? I did some checking. Teapot was fragged by Ungern Sternberg’s own rebellious troops in 1921, right before they handed the Baron over to Trotsky’s commissars. At least, the mutineers said they shot him. If he’d run away into the Siberian forest, alone, might they have concocted some cock-and-bull cover story . . . ?
I make a right turn into a narrow path. It leads to a tranquil bicycle track, walled in beech and chestnut trees growing from the steep embankments to either side and sporadically illuminated by isolated lampposts. It used to be a railway line, decades ago, one of the many suburban services closed during the Beeching cuts—but it wasn’t a commuter line. (I stumbled across it not long after we moved to this part of town, and
it caught my attention enough to warrant some digging.)
The Necropolis Service ran from behind Waterloo station to the huge Brookwood cemetery in Surrey; tickets were sold in two classes, one-way and return. This is one of its tributaries, a tranquil creek feeding the great river of the dead. Today, cyclists use it to bypass the busy main roads on their way into the center. It is, however, unaccountably unpopular with the after-work exercise set, and I have the left lane to myself as I walk, still chewing over what I know and what I don’t know.
CLUB ZERO and Mo. Who sent Uncle Fester? I see three alternatives: Panin and his friends, the cultists she was sent to shut down, or some third party. Taking it from the top: Panin is a professional, and can be expected to usually play by the rules. Sending a zombie to doorstep an officer in a foreign nation’s service at home just isn’t done; it’s not businesslike, and besides, once you start sending assassins to bump off the oppo, you’ve got no guarantee that their assassins aren’t going to outperform yours. The reason great powers don’t usually engage in wars of assassination is that it levels the playing field. On the other hand, cultists like the perps behind CLUB ZERO are far more likely to do that sort of thing. Assassination and terrorism are Siamese twins: tools for outsiders and pressure groups. So my money is on Uncle Fester being an emissary from the cultists the AIVD called Mo in to neutralize . . . unless there’s a third faction in play, a prospect I find far too scary to contemplate.
The cycle path narrows, and descends deeper into its cutting. The lights are more widely spaced here, and a number of them are out. Hearing a rustling scampering sound behind me, I glance round as something flickers in the bushes between lights—dog-like, with a great bush of a tail. An urban fox? Maybe: I didn’t see the ears or muzzle, though. Urban foxes aren’t a problem (unless you’re a cat), but feral dogs might be another matter. I keep walking in the twilight. London is warm and humid in summer, but down here it’s almost clammy-cold, and there’s a faint whiff of something like a sewer, sweet and slightly rotten. I break into a slow jog, aiming to outrun the stench.
I have a growing, edgy feeling that I’ve missed something critically important. I’ve been plowing along, in harness and under stress, assuming that the crises I’m trying to deal with are all independent. But what if they aren’t? I ask myself. What if Angleton’s disappearance is connected to Panin’s search for the Teapot, what if the Fuller Memorandum holds an explanation, what if the cultists know that we stand closer to the threshold of the End Times than we realize and are trying to topple the balance, or perhaps to steal—
There’s a crack of dead branches under the trees behind me. Panting inhuman breath punctuates the thudding of a four-footed pursuit. The orange sodium glare leaches away around me, giving way to a different shade of darkness. Trees loom overhead, clutching at each other with wizened arms as bony as concentration camp victims’. A thin mist at foot level obscures the tarmac path and my stomach lurches. I’m not running through suburban London anymore; I’m running along the ghostly track bed of the Necropolitan line, and the hounds of hell are on my trail, and I left my protective ward with Mo, and I am a fucking imbecile. Shit, shit, shit.
Whatever the thing behind me is, it’s only seconds away. My heart’s already thudding uncomfortably from jogging an hour after dinner—fucking stupid of me—but while I’m ninety percent sure that I’m being tracked by something that’s about as bad as the proverbial hellhound, in which case I really ought to simply plug it with my pistol and ask questions later, I’ve got an even nastier feeling that it’s tracking me for someone, or worse, herding me along.
I have: a gun, a Hand of Glory, and a JesusPhone. So of course I draw my phone and flip the case open, thumb-swipe to unlock, and spin round, raising the camera to focus as I tap the grinning skull icon.
There’s method in my madness and my pursuer isn’t mindless—I get a glimpse of flying haunches and bushy tail as it leaps off the path and into the trees with a startled “yip!”
The screen flashes a red-rimmed maw gaping at me and my hair stands on end as the phone and my fingertips are engulfed in pale blue fire. Balefire , it used to be called. I hastily go back to the main screen and stab another app: a diagnostic. Seeing what it says, I swear quietly and pull up another one that sets a spinning wireframe projection of a 5D Tesseract on the screen as it does its valiant best to set up a ward around me. The dog-thing is hiding and the tendrils of mist draw away from my feet, so I shove the phone in my pocket—still running—and draw my pistol. Then I turn back to the way I was going.
The emulator running on the phone’s a poor substitute for a real ward, and it’s only going to keep it up for as long as its battery can keep its tiny electronic brain running at full power, but armed and warded is the first step to survival and now I see the peril I’m in with an icy clarity. The second app I looked at was the thaumometer, and I should have kept an eye on it earlier, as I walked—it’s almost off the chart. And all because I’m walking the Necropolitan line. If you wanted to set up a ley line, what better source of power could you hope for than the accumulated grief and sorrow of millions of mourners, to say nothing of the decaying lives of the corpses that traveled it? I should have seen it coming—but I usually only use this cycle path as a shortcut to and from the tube station, in daylight.
I’m pretty sure I’m being trailed by cultists. When I left home I was angry in the abstract but now I am really fucked off. These are the bastards who murdered a bunch of nursery school tots and their teachers, put Mo through the horrors—and they’re trying for me now. The only question is, are they chasing me or herding me?
I keep going, slowing my jog to a brisk walk, scanning ahead as I move. I hold my gun at the ready with both hands, close to my chest, relying on the invisibility ward to make it look as if I’m just clutching my right wrist with my left hand. The mist at ground level coils and curdles around a pair of translucent parallel rails the color of old bones, resting on a bed of ethereal track sleepers. The trees writhe and knot overhead, clutching at each other, imploring and beseeching. In the distance I hear odd noises—the ghost of sobbing, deep voices intoning something, words I can’t quite make out.
I’m sure it’s all very eerie, but when reality starts to imitate a second-rate computer game you know the bad guys have over-egged the pudding. Some fuckhead is hitting me with a glamour in hope of spooking me. It’s the sort of tactic that might stand a chance of working if I was a little less cynical, or if they had enough imagination to make it, oh, you know, horrifying , or something. Luckily for me they don’t seem to have grasped the difference between a Sam Raimi movie and standing by your dad’s hospital bed trying to work up the nerve to switch off the ventilator. So I find the fact that they’re sending me woo-woo noises and mist perversely encouraging.
(I’m having second thoughts about the cultist thing, though. The probability of running into two different cells of the fuckers in the same month is vanishingly slim; and if this nonsense is a message from the same group that tried to landscape downtown Amsterdam last week, they’ve definitely sent the B-Team.)
I up my pace again, and just then I hear a scraping noise from the embankment to my left and every hair on my neck stands on end simultaneously.
I swing round, extending my arms in front of my face and sliding my index finger through the trigger guard as this thing clatters and scrambles down the side of the cutting in a mad dash towards me, a growl of hatred and hunger sounding an organ note deep in its chest, and I have time to think, I hate fucking dogs, just as it launches itself towards me.
I squeeze the trigger twice, aiming below where my eyes are focused on it—I can’t look away; I get a flash of bared fangs and slavering tongue, eyeless and horrid and taller than any dog I’ve ever imagined—and there’s a sound like a palm slapping a lump of wet meat as the gun kicks silently in my hand. I jump sideways as it slams into the track sleepers where I was standing a moment ago, howling a scream of agony and snapping those huge
jaws at its own shoulder.
It’s not a dog. Dogs aren’t as black as a hole in space, and their musculature and articulation follow mammalian norms—this thing bends wrong as it bites and flails around, and I have an inkling of a memory that tells me I should be very afraid right now. But I’m not. I started out pissed off and I am now toweringly angry. Which is why I walk behind the flailing body, lower my aim towards the back of its skull, and call: “Show yourself right now, or the doggie gets it!”
There’s a low chuckle. “Give us the Teapot and we will let you live, mortal.”
Mortal? Yes, it’s the B-Team all right; probably in robes with upside-down crucifixes or something. They’re the occult equivalent of the kind of suicide bombers who post their confession videos on YouTube two weeks before they learn the hard way that trying to blow themselves up with chapatti flour isn’t going to do anything except give the police an excuse to pat themselves on the back and reassure the public that Everything Is Under Control. “Come out where I can see you,” I demand.
The hound-thing on the ground whines in agony. It’s getting on my nerves, cutting through the barricade of my determination—then I notice out of the corner of one eye that the shoulder I blew a fist-sized chunk out of is writhing and foaming, dark tubules questing inwards from the ripped and shredded edges. Shit. If this is what I think it is, then by summoning it the B-Team have bitten off more than they can chew—and so have I. “You’ve got five seconds,” I add. “It won’t die, but it’s going to be real pissed off. And I reckon it’s fifty-fifty whether it blames me or blames you.”
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