The Fuller Memorandum l-4

by Charles Stross

  “We all do, eventually. Dying is terrible. So is killing. But I’ve killed people and survived. And as for dying—you don’t have to live with yourself afterwards.”

  “Ah, but you can die. Have you considered what it might be like to be . . . undying?”

  She opens her eyes, at that, and looks at him coldly. “Pick an innocent, if you’re looking to put the frighteners on someone.”

  “You misunderstand.” Angleton’s eyes are luminous in the dark of the cab. “I can’t die, as long as I am bound to this flesh. Have you ever longed for death, girl? Have you ever yearned for it?”

  Mo shakes her head. “What are you getting at?” she demands.

  “I can feel my end. It’s still some distance away, but I can feel it. It’s coming for me, sometime soon.” He subsides. “So you’d better be ready to manage without me,” he adds, a trifle sourly.

  Mo looks away: through the windscreen, at the onrushing darkness of the motorway, broken only by cats’ eyes and the headlight glare of oncoming cars on the other carriageway. “I hope we get there in time,” she murmurs. “Otherwise you’ll have to do more than die if you want me to forgive you for losing Bob.”

  MY ARM HURTS, AND I’M FADING IN AND OUT OF CONSCIOUSNESS. There’s a foul taste in my mouth but I can’t spit it out because of the gag. Iris is singing. Her voice is a strangled falsetto, weird swooping trills that don’t seem to follow the chord progressions of any musical style I’m familiar with. I’m tied to an altar between two long-dead corpses as the Brotherhood choral society sing a dirge-like counterpoint to Iris’s diva and slowly walk around me, bearing candles that burn dark, sucking in the lamplight . . .

  The distorted lines inscribed in the canopy above my head seem to blur and shimmer, cruel violet lines cutting into my retinas, surrounded by a pinprick of stars—or are they distant eyes?—as I keep up my lines. They don’t make much sense, translated into English: the sense is something like, for iterator count from zero to number of entropy sinks within ground state, hear ye, hear ye, I open the gates of starry time for ye that you may feel the ground beneath your feet and the air upon your skin; I invoke the method of Dee and the constructor of Pthagn, forever exit and collect all the garbage, amen. See? I said it didn’t make much sense. In a particularly corrupt Enochian dialect that allows one to string together arbitrary subjunctive tenses it’s another matter, though.

  Standing before her altar Iris is recounting the myriad names of the Eater of Souls, and she’s also pumping energy into this system. She’s got twenty black-robed followers and the computational hardware I lack, and if I’m lucky I can piggyback on her invocation—

  Uh. I don’t feel so good.

  A wave of darkness sweeps over me. For a moment I can feel the bony bodies to either side of me in the bed, and they’re warm and flesh-covered, almost as if they were breathing a moment ago. The tomb-dust stink is the yeasty smell of bodies from which the life departed only seconds hence. But the really weird thing is that I feel light, and dry, and unspeakably thirsty, a mere shell of my former self. The lines on the canopy overhead are glowing like a gash in the rotten fabric of reality, and I seem to be rising towards it. It’s death magic, pure and simple. I can summon the feeders out of night, I can open the way for them to crawl into the empty vessels all around me, buried in the wall niches outside this temple and the holes in the ground above its ceiling, but only if I use myself as a sacrifice, thinning the wall and letting them feed on my mind. The reason cultists prize virgins as human sacrifices is nothing to do with sex and everything to do with innocence. Iris probably thought the morphine would fog me enough to lie back and gurgle at the pretty lights. Or that the training—to never, ever attempt magic in one’s own head—would hold. Or perhaps it simply didn’t occur to her that I’d take the Samson option. But be that as it may—

  Is that what I look like?

  I’m looking down on my body from above. I’m a real sight, hog-tied between two irregular mounds in the bedding, gagged, my head split open and bleeding where Jonquil knocked a handful of butterfly sutures loose, my right arm leaking into a messy stain on one pillow. Eyes are closed. I’m floating. Iris is singing and I can understand the harmonies now, I can hear her as she tries to summon something that isn’t there.

  “Beloved and forsaken! Eater of Souls! Lover of Death! Mother of nightmares! We who are gathered to observe your rite remember you and recall you by name! Come now to this vessel we prepare—”

  I’ve got company up here. I can feel them gather in the darkness, blind curiosity thrusting them close, like sharks butting up against the legs of a swimmer stranded in the middle of an ocean. They’re class three abominations. I have summoned them to feed on the rips and gashes of my memory that I dribble in the water of Lethe. I’m not alone up here: and they sense me. Soon one of them will taste me, take a bite of my soul and find that my memories are richly textured and deep. And then I’ll begin to lose stuff. I push at them, trying to shove them towards the empty vessels that I have primed, but they aren’t having it; I’m far more interesting than any century-dead bag of bones.

  And then I feel a horrible visceral pain, as if someone has stuck a barbed knife through my umbilical.

  “Come to this vessel!” shrieks Iris. “Come now!”

  I convulse: the pain is unspeakable. And I feel the tugging. If I travel with it, the pain lessens slightly. “Obey me! Enter the empty vessel! On pain of eternal torment, I instruct you to enter!”

  I drift down from the canopy, watching the ripples of nightmare twitch and spiral above me, still seeking. What the fuck?

  “Enter! Enter! Enter!” Iris yodels. And as I lie on my back, looking up at the canopy above me, the pain in my guts evaporates.

  What the fucking fuck? I close my eyes, and resume my gurgling, muffled invocation. For a moment, I’d swear I was having an out-of-body experience . . .

  Then a coherent picture forms in my mind’s eye.

  It’s like this. Iris is trying to summon up the Eater of Souls and bind it into my body where, among other things, it’ll eat my soul and take up permanent residence. But the Eater of Souls is otherwise occupied right now. But Iris doesn’t know this—she doesn’t have TEAPOT clearance.

  Meanwhile, I have just been trying to vacate my body all on my own, in order to summon up the feeders in the night, because if a bunch of Goatfuckers are trying to sacrifice me, I might as well fuck ’em as hard as I can. Again: it’s not Iris’s fault for failing to anticipate this, because she’s never had to visit the Funny Farm. She’s not really much of a demonologist. And she’s such a good manager she’s never had reason to see me when I’m seriously pissed off.

  Here’s the upshot: Iris’s invocation has got a dangling pointer, an un-initialized variable pointing to an absent preta. But there’s a soul in the vicinity, cut free—mostly—from its body. So instead of hooking onto the Eater of Souls, the preta manger, it latched onto me. So she’s just spent fuck knows how much carefully hoarded ritual mojo to bind me into my own flesh.

  Like she said: “Fatal accidents never have just a single cause, they happen at the end of a whole series of errors.” Well, Iris has strung about five errors together and she’s about to go down hard, because I’m about to turn fatal on her.

  I open my eyes again and stare at the canopy overhead.

  The feeders in the night are dispersing—but they’re not going back from whence they came. They’re rippling outwards, through the temple towards the walls. This body’s occupied. But outside the doors, the vessels I’ve been prepping are waiting.

  The chant continues, as do the invocations and imprecations in the name of an absent monster. I lie back and try to calm my hammering heart. I don’t feel quite myself—I’m sweating and cold even though it’s a summer night, and my skin doesn’t seem to fit properly. It’s very strange. The cultists continue with their rite, which takes some unexpected turns. There is a large silver goblet of wine, into which a hooded man empties a f
amiliar-looking syringe full of blood—it boils and steams on contact, which is rather disturbing. Then a quorum of the chorus line start to shed their robes, and don’t stop at their underwear. They walk around me naked, which is really disturbing because they appear to be into mortification of the flesh in a big way—even bigger than Opus Dei—with a genital focus that makes me wonder how they ever get through airport metal detectors. Or reproduce. No wonder Jonquil is an only child—

  And speak of the devil’s daughter: here’s her mother, leaning over me—black robes covering up who-knows-what, and really clashing with her blonde rinse. Iris unhooks the gag, steps back, and throws her arms wide: “Speak, oh Eater of Souls!”

  I work my jaw. It feels subtly wrong, as disarticulated as if I’ve just done hard time in a tomb and haven’t noticed I’m one of the walking dead. I force myself to inhale, try to salivate, turn my head sideways (that feels wrong, too) and expectorate. A thin stream of spittle lands on the bedding beside my eternally sleeping companion: it’s black in the torch light. Dust, of course, because I can’t be bleeding. Right?

  “Speak!” she commands me. I stare at her, and feel a nearly irresistible urge to bite her throat out. Right now I should be trying to make like I’m a freshly reincarnated Eater of Souls, but I am thirsty and I am hungry and I have just been through hell and I really don’t care.

  Some imp of the perverse takes control of my larynx: “I’ll drink your blood,” I croak, and instantly regret it. But much to my surprise, her eyes light up.

  “Certainly, lord! Bring the chalice!” she shrills over her shoulder. A naked minion steps forward, bearing the huge silver goblet: it’s full of what I’m pretty sure is red wine, and it smells wonderful. Iris accepts it and holds it near my face. I slurp greedily, spilling more than I suck into my mouth. It’s thick and sweet, like tawny port, but also warming, as if there’s a trace of ginger or chili oil dissolved in it. “In the name of the Unhallowed One, I command you to stop drinking,” she says.

  I freeze momentarily, acutely aware that I want to keep going, but—she won’t order them to untie me if she doesn’t think I’ll obey her, I realize. And I really, really want to be untied. I can sense the feeders all around us, dispersed throughout the soil around the crypt, doing what they do best: eating in the darkness, consuming and corrupting and possessing the material forms that are normally denied to them. Soon, they’re going to take possession of their withered husks and go looking for more upmarket digs. I don’t want to be tied down and helpless when that happens—

  Evidently Iris mistakes my indecision for compliance. She turns to her audience: “The Eater of Souls obeys!” she calls. “The first test!”

  She turns back to face me, triumphant and happy. “What would you have me do to hasten the opening of the way?” she asks.

  “Untie me.” I tug lightly at the ropes. “Untie me.” My right arm feels wrong, but so does my left—they both obey me, but feel oddly distant. Blood sugar must be low, I tell myself. Or that wine has a kick to it.

  Wrong response. Iris is shaking her head. But she’s still smiling. “Not yet,” she says. “Not until the rite of binding is complete.” Rite of binding? Uh-oh.

  “The rite is complete,” I tell her, hoping she’ll buy it. “The blood and the wine ...”

  “I don’t think so.” She looks at me sharply, and I see something greenish reflected in her eyes. Something behind me? She turns back to her altar before I can work it out, walks towards the front of her congregation. “Bring me the sacrifice pure of heart and soul!” she calls.

  Then the true horror show begins.

  THEY’RE CULTISTS. WORSE: THEY’RE THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE Black Pharaoh, hated and persecuted wherever they are exposed to the horrified gaze of ordinary people.

  Why?

  There is a pernicious and evil legend that comes down to us from ancient history: the legend of the Blood Libel. It’s a regular, recurring slander that echoes down the ages, hurled against out-groups when an excuse for a pogrom or other form of mass slaughter is desired. The Blood Libel is a whisper that says that the strangers sacrifice babies and drink their blood. There are variant forms: the babies are stolen from good Christian households, the blood is baked into bread, the babies are their own incestuous get by way of the bodies of their own daughters. No embellishment is too vile or grotesque to find its way into the Blood Libel. The most frequent victims are Jews, but it’s been used against many other groups—the Cathars, Zoroastrians, Kulaks, Communists, you name it. The Romans regularly used it against the early Christians, and doubtless they’d stolen it from somebody else. Its origins are lost in antiquity, but the sole purpose of the Blood Libel is to motivate those who believe it to say: “These people are not like us, and we need to kill them, now.”

  I always used to think that was all there was to it.

  But now I know better; I’ve witnessed the wellspring of the bloody legend and seen its practitioners in action.

  And I’m still in their hands.

  16.

  EATER OF SOULS

  MEANWHILE, SOME DISTANCE ABOVE MY HEAD, HERE’S WHAT happens as Iris’s rite runs to completion:

  Benjamin paces around the Chapel of the Ancient and Honourable Order of Wheelwrights, nostrils flaring to take in the sweet summer night air, heavy with pollen and sweet with the scent of new-mown hay.

  Benjamin is a mild-mannered debt management consultant from Epping, and he’s doing very well, thank you. He works out for half an hour every morning in the gym downstairs from his comfortable office; then he goes to work, where he helps distressed businesses find ways and means of improving their cash retention practices. He spends his evenings arranging social activities under the aegis of his local church (who the neighbors consider to be slightly odd but generally friendly and helpful), and sometimes, at the weekend, he plays with the church paintball team.

  Epping is one stop down the line from Barking, which is what the neighbors would think of him if they could see him now, wearing the black cloak of a member of a very different Order, and carrying a gun that fires something more substantial than paint pellets.

  Grigori, in contrast, is not mild-mannered at all. Grigori is a violently aggressive young thug from the slums of Nizhny Novgorod, born in the year of the collapse of the Soviet Union and raised half-feral amidst the wreckage of the timber and steel industries. Conscripted into the Russian army at eighteen and subjected to twelve months of brutal training, he showed a remarkable aptitude for butchering Wahhabi guerillas in the hills of the Kadar zone during the Dagestan war. Already tapped for promotion to sergeant he was instead inducted into Spetsgruppa V, “Vympel,” the FSB’s special operations unit, where he was taught German, Arabic, and sixteen different ways to strangle a man in his own intestines.

  Grigori does not play paintball; Grigori kills people.

  Here comes Grigori, crawling silently through the bushes, taking care not to place hand or foot on any twig that might snap, nor to disturb leafy shrubs that might whisper in the darkness. He pauses regularly, glancing sidelong to maintain situational awareness and positioning relative to his comrades, neither too far ahead nor lagging behind the line of advance. They use no radio; the occasional flicker of a red LED torch or the hoot of a tawny owl are more than sufficient. Grigori pauses before the open apron of the parking lot in front of the chapel, waiting for the sentry to complete his round. While he pauses, he double-checks his crossbow. The body is made of black resin and the bow sports a profusion of pulleys. It’s a hunting bow, fine-tuned for hunting the kind of game that shoots back on full auto; it’s totally silent and it throws a cyanide-tipped bolt that can slice through five centimeters of Kevlar armor.

  Here comes Benjamin, pacing quietly around the side of the chapel. Benjamin is a good sentry. He’s been bushwhacked by rival paintball players often enough to be ambush-savvy, scanning the darkness with nervous, night-adjusted eyes. He is well-equipped, his cloak concealing a small fortune in camouflaged bo
dy armor; to his belt is clipped a small pager. It vibrates every ten seconds, and if he fails to press a button on it within another ten seconds a siren will sound, loud enough to wake the dead. And he’s cranked up on a cocktail of provigil and crystal meth, sleepless and compulsively alert. All-Highest has briefed the Security Team carefully. The threat of a hostile intrusion is very real tonight, and Benjamin holds his AA-12 assault shotgun at the ready, his index finger tense beside the trigger guard.

  Grigori and Benjamin are not as mismatched as a superficial comparison might suggest. Grigori’s lieutenant has meticulously planned a seek-and-destroy raid on a nest of cultists defended by vicious but amateurish killers. And Iris’s security chief has briefed the sentries to be on the alert for an infiltration attempt by an elite unit of special forces troops attached to a secret interior ministry department.

  But as Grigori and Benjamin are about to discover, they’ve both been briefed for the wrong mission.

  Benjamin pauses in the shadow of an ornamental buttress at one corner of the chapel, and scans the darkness beyond. There are low shrubs, and a row of lichen-encrusted gravestones, some of them leaning towards a low dip in the ground where a willow tree holds court over a circle of beeches. He sniffs. There’s something in the air tonight—something beyond the efflorescences of pollen spurting from the wildly rutting vegetation, something beyond the tang of mold spores drifting from the cut ends of the lawn over by the road. His eyes narrow. Something about the bushes is wrong.

  His pager vibrates. He peers into the gloom, tensing and raising the heavy shotgun, and tries to move his right foot forward into a shooter’s stance.