The Atrocity Archives

by Charles Stross

  "Go!" he yells.

  Upstairs, I pause in the guardroom, about to ignite one of the two Hands of Glory that are waiting for me on the table. I wonder if I'm far enough away from the bomb. (That American scientist–Harry Dagnian, wasn't it?–who did something similar by accident in the Manhattan Project: dropped a neutron reflector on top of a weapon core during an experiment. He died a couple days later, but a guard just ten feet away wasn't affected.) There's a muffled thud that I feel through the soles of my boots; a split second later I hear a noise like a door slamming.

  I hear my pulse racing erratically. I hear it, therefore I am still alive. I heard the explosion, therefore the bomb fizzled. There will be no nuclear fireball to energize the conquest dreams of the ancient evil that lurks in this pocket universe. All I have to do is pick up the Hand and walk back to the slowly evaporating gate before it closes . . .

  A minute passes. Then I put down the Hand of Glory and wait for another minute. It's no good. My feet carry me back inside and I fasten down my faceplate, switching to my canned air supply as I head down the corridor that leads to the staircase.

  At the top of the stairs I key my microphone. "Alan? Are you there?"

  A momentary pause, then: "Right you are." He chuckles hoarsely. "Always knew I'd die in my own bed, laddie." Another pause. "Make sure you're buttoned up before you come downstairs. This isn't a sight most people ever get to see."

  Chapter 10

  INQUEST

  Three days later I am back in london. Most of the intervening time seems to be spent in interview rooms, doing debriefs and going over every last aspect of events. When I'm not talking myself hoarse I am fed institutional food and sleep in a spartan institutional bed. Officer's Mess or something. The flight back to London is an anticlimax, and I go straight from the airport to Alan's hospital bed.

  It's in a closed bay off a ward devoted to tropical diseases in one of the big London teaching hospitals. There's a staff nurse on the desk out in front, and a police officer on the door. "Hi," I say. "I'm here to see Alan Barnes."

  The nurse barely looks up. "No visitors for Mr. Barnes." He goes back to studying someone else's medication chart.

  I lean on the front of the nursing station. "Look," I say. "Personal friend and coworker. It's visiting hours. Please."

  This time the nurse looks at me. "You really don't want to see him," he says. The cop straightens up and takes notice of me for the first time.

  I pull my warrant card. "How is he?" I ask.

  The nurse exhales sharply. "He's stable for now but we may have to move him to the ICU at short notice; it isn't pretty." He glances at the cop. "We can arrange to call you if there's any change."

  I glance at the officer of the law, who is inspecting my warrant card as if it's the clue to a particularly nasty murder: "Are you going to let me in or not?"

  The cop looks at me sharply. "You can go in, Mr. Howard." She opens the door and steps inside first, not bothering to give me back the card.

  "No more than five minutes!" calls the nurse.

  It's a small room with no window; fluorescent lights and a trolley bed surrounded by machines that have far too many dials and knobs for comfort. A trolley beside the bed is draining bags of transparent fluid into the arm of the bed's occupant by way of a vicious-looking cannula. The bed's occupant is reclining on a mound of pillows; his eyelids flicker open as I come in. He smiles. "Bob."

  "I came as soon as they let me go," I say. I reach into my inner pocket for the card, barely noticing the policewoman behind me tense; when she sees the envelope she relaxes again. "How are you feeling?"

  "Like shit." He grins cadaverously. "Like the world's worst-ever case of Montezuma's revenge. Have you been all right, lad?"

  "Can't complain much. They haven't given me a chance to talk to Mo, and I spent the first day back being prodded by the witch doctors–I think they liked the colour of my bile or something." I'm babbling. Get a grip. "Guess there was enough concrete between you and me. Have they let you talk to, uh, Hillary? Is the food okay?"

  "Food–" He turns his head to look at the cannula in his arm. His skin is brown and ulcerated and seems to be hanging loose, patchy white flakes falling from the underlying reddish tissue. "Seem to be eating through a hose these days, Bob." He closes his eyes. "Not seen Hillary. Shit, I'm tired. Feverish, too, some of the time." His eyes open again. "You'll tell her?"

  "Tell her what, Alan?"

  "Just tell her."

  The policewoman clears her throat behind me. "Yeah, I'll tell her," I say. Alan doesn't give any sign of showing that he's heard me; he just nodded right off, like an eighty-year-old on Valium. I open the envelope and put the card in it on his bedside table, where he'll see it when he wakes up. If. He always knew he'd die in his own bed. Tell Hillary?

  I turn and walk through the door, blind to the world. The cop follows me out, shutting it carefully. "Do you know who did that to him, Mr. Howard?" she asks quietly.

  I stop. Clench my fists behind my back. "Sort of," I say quietly. "They won't be doing it to anyone else, if that's what you're asking. If you'll give me back my card now, I have to go in to the office and make sure someone's told his wife where he is. I take it you'll let her in?"

  She glances at the nurse. "Up to him." She nods at me, then some misplaced piece of Metropolitan Police customer relations training kicks in on autopilot: "Have a nice day, now."

  * * * *

  I check into the laundry via the back door. It's three in the afternoon and a light rain is falling: mild breeze from the southeast, cloud cover at 90 percent, a beautiful match for my mood. I head for my cubicle and find it unchanged from when I was last here, more than a week ago: there's a coffee cup containing some amazingly dead dregs, a pile of unread unclassified memos, and a bunch of yellowing Post-it notes saying SEE ME plastered all over my terminal and keyboard.

  I drop into the chair in front of the terminal and poke listlessly at the decaying hayrick of email that's cluttering up my user account. Oddly, there doesn't seem to be a lot from more than one day into the trip. That's kind of strange: I should be deluged with stupid nonsense from HR, requests for software upgrades from the losers in Accounting, and peremptory reports for the GDP of Outer Mongolia in 1928 from Angleton–well, not the latter.

  I kick back for a moment and stare at the ceiling. There are a couple of coffee-coloured stains up there, relics of who-knows-what mishap, deep in the Precambrian era of Laundry history. Rorschach-like, they call up the texture of Alan's skin: brown, loose, looking burned from the inside out. I glance away. For a moment even the fossil Post-it notes are preferable to thinking about what I have to do next.

  Then the door opens. "Robert!" I look round. It's Harriet, and I know something's wrong because Bridget is lurking behind her, face a contemplative middle-management mask, and she's clutching a bunch of blue-covered files. "Where've you been hiding? We've been looking for you for days."

  "I don't know if you're cleared," I respond wearily. I think I can see what's coming.

  "Would you please come with us?" says Bridget, voicing the order as a request. "We have some things to talk about."

  Harriet backs out of the cramped doorway and I haul myself upright and let them march me down the corridor and up the stairs to a vacant conference room, all dusty pine veneer and dead flies trapped between perpetually closed Venetian blinds. "Have a seat." There are four chairs at the table, and as I glance round I notice that we seem to have picked up an escort: Eric the Ancient Security Officer, a dried-up prune of a former RAF sergeant whose job is to lock doors, confiscate papers left lying on unoccupied desks, and generally make a pestilential nuisance of himself–a sinecure for the irreformably officious.

  "What's this about?" I place both hands palms-down on the table.

  "It's about several things, as a matter of fact," begins Harriet. "Your controller and I have been worried for some months now about your timekeeping." She plonks a thin blue file down on the table
. "We note that you're seldom in the department before 10 A.M., and your observance of core hours falls short of the standard expected of an employee."

  Bridget picks up the tag-team prosecution: "Now, we understand that you're used to working occasional off-shift hours, being called out on those odd occasions when there's a problem with one of the servers. But you haven't been filling out variance form R-70 each time you've put in these hours, and without an audit trail I'm afraid we can't automatically accept requests for time off in lieu. According to our records you've been taking off an average of two unscheduled days per month–which could get us, your supervisors, into serious trouble if Audit Bureau were to get interested."

  Harriet clears her throat. "Simply put, we can't cover for you anymore. In fact–"

  Bridget is shaking her head. "This latest escapade is unacceptable, too. You've absented yourself from work for five consecutive working days without following either the approved sick/leave-of-absence procedure or applying to your department head for a holiday variance or even compassionate leave. This sort of thing is not only antisocial–think of the additional work you've made for everybody else who's been covering your absence!–but it's a gross violation of procedures." She pronounces the last phrase with the sort of distaste usually reserved by the tabloid press for ministers caught soliciting on Hampstead Heath. "We simply cannot overlook this."

  Harriet nods. "And then there's what Eric found in your mailbox."

  By this time my neck is aching as I try to keep my eyes on all three of them at the same time. What the hell's going on? Harriet and Bridget administering a procedural mugging is all very well, and I'm damned if I'll let them plant a written warning on my personnel file without an appeal. But Eric's the departmental security officer. What's he in here for?

  "Very bad indeed, young fellow," he quavers. And now Bridget barely tries to conceal a triumphant, somewhat feral grin as she plants a raw printout of an email message on the tabletop. "Subject: Some Notes Toward a Proof of Polynomial Completeness in Hamiltonian Networks." My mind goes blank for a moment, then I remember the black-bag job, Croxley Industrial Estate, the hum of servers at midnight and security guards hiding under their desks. And my stomach goes icy cold.

  "What's this about?" asks Bridget.

  "I think you've got some explaining to do," opines Eric, peering at me with watery blue eyes like an elderly vulture contemplating a wildebeest that's just made the terminal mistake of drinking from a poisoned watering hole.

  My stomach feels like ice, but the sense of gathering outrage at the back of my head is like a red-hot band. As I see them watching me with varied degrees of expectancy I feel a flash of raw anger: I press my hands down on the tabletop because I really feel like punching somebody in the face, and that wouldn't be the right way to handle this situation.

  "You have no need to know," I say as firmly as possible.

  Harriet's smile slips first. "I'm your team leader," she says sternly. "You aren't in a position to tell me what I need to know."

  "Fuck that." I stand up. "Minute this, if you're going to start writing it down: I want it noted that I deny all accusations, that my actions are justified. I am not going to be party to a procedural lynch mob held on spurious grounds. You don't have need to know and I don't have permission to tell you. If you want to take this further I insist that you take it up with Angleton."

  "Angleton–" Now Bridget's smile has slipped, too. Eric is blinking rapidly, confused. I pick on him.

  "Let's put this on Angleton's desk," I say soothingly. "He'll know what to do with it."

  "If you say so–" Eric looks uncertain. He's been around so long that he doesn't have to imagine the reasons behind Angleton's mystique: he knows. He almost looks afraid.

  "Come on."

  I grab the papers off the table, yank the door open and march out. Behind me, Bridget protests: "You can't!"

  "I bloody can," I snarl over my shoulder, speeding up to a trot as I head for his basement lair. "You bloody see if I can!" I've got a fistful of accusations and a startled Harriet flapping after me: that's all I need. Fucking departmental politics, see where it gets you.

  Angleton's outer vestibule; the door gapes open. I barge right in, startling the spotty young geek who's threading microfilm between the Memex's rollers. "Boss!" I call.

  The inner door swings open. "Howard. We were just discussing you. Enter."

  I slide to a halt on the green carpet, in front of the great olive-coloured metal desk. I hold up the papers. "Bridget and Harriet," I say. "Oh, and Eric."

  Andy leans against the wall next to Angleton's desk and whistles quietly. "You sure know how to make friends and influence people."

  "Silence, please." Angleton leans forward, "Ms. Brody. May I ask what you're trying to pin on our young friend here?"

  Bridget parks herself on the other side of the desk from Angleton, and leans over him. "Violation of departmental procedures. Security breaches. Misuse of Internet access. Poor timekeeping. Absence without official leave. Breach of protocol and abusive behaviour toward a superior amounting to gross misconduct."

  "I . . . see." Angleton's voice is cold enough to freeze liquid hydrogen.

  Out of the corner of my eye I find Andy trying to catch my eye. He seems to be twitching his cheek in Morse code–telling me to keep my mouth shut.

  "He's a loose cannon," Bridget insists, in a Thatcheresque tone of total conviction. "He's a menace. Can't even fill out a time sheet accurately."

  "Ms. Brody." Angleton leans back, looking up at Bridget across the expanse of his desk. That's odd, why is he relaxing? I wonder.

  He holds something up. "You appear to have overlooked something." The thing in his hand is small and walnut coloured: a tuft of hair sticks out of one end of it, bristly and dry. Bridget inhales sharply. "Howard works for me now. He's on your budget allocation, I agree, but he works for me, and you will henceforth confine your relationship with him to issuing monthly payslips and ensuring that his office is not accidentally re-allocated, unless you wish to wind up emulating the fate of your illustrious predecessor." He jiggles the thing in his hand.

  Bridget's eyes are fixed on the thing. She swallows. "You wouldn't."

  "My dear, I assure you that I am an equal-opportunity executioner. Eric!" The elderly security officer shuffles forward. "Please remove Ms. Brody from my office before she makes me say something I might regret."

  "You bastard," she snarls, as Eric places a hand on her shoulder and urges her away from the room. "Just because you think you can go outside channels and talk to the director, don't let that fool you–"

  The door shuts behind her. Angleton puts the wizened thing down on his blotter. "Do you think I'm bluffing, Robert?" he asks me, his tone deceptively mild.

  I swallow. "Uh-uh. No way. Never."

  "Good." He smiles at the shrunken head before him. "Something the pen-pushers never seem to get straight: don't threaten, don't bluff. Isn't that right, Wallace?"

  The shrunken head seems to nod, or maybe it's just my imagination. I take a deep breath. "Actually, I was meaning to see you. It's about Alan."

  Angleton nods. "He took five hundred rems, boy. They tell me that ten years ago that would probably have been fatal."

  "Has anyone told Hillary yet?"

  Andy coughs. "I'm going round there in a couple of hours." My expression must be sceptical because he adds, "Who do you think was best man at their wedding?"

  "Oh. Okay." 1 feel an enormous letdown, as if some tension I'd barely been aware of has been released. "Well, then. That's the main thing."

  "Not really."

  I glance back at Angleton. "There's more?"

  "Bad timekeeping." He looks contemplative. "So you visited Alan first off, then came in to work. I'd say you've done a full day's work today already, Howard. Better go home before you're too late."

  "Home?" Then I realise. "How long has she been back?"

  "Two days." His cheek twitches. "Better hope she isn't
angry with you."

  * * * *

  As I stick the key in the front door lock, I look up at the roofline–both infinitely familiar and strangely alien. I've only been away one week, I tell myself. What can have changed?

  The front hall is full of petite tank tracks. They're about twenty centimetres wide, covered in dried-up mud, and they run past the hulking Victorian coat rack and the living room door to stop just short of the kitchen. I stumble between them as I close the outer and inner doors, try to find somewhere to stow my bag that isn't covered in leftovers from the retreat from Moscow, and remove my coat.

  There's most of an engine block on the kitchen table. Whoever put it there for dissection had the good sense to spread a couple of copies of the Independent under it; a headline peeps out from under one oily corner: AMSTERDAM HOTEL GAS BLAST KILLS FOUR. Yeah, right. Depression crashes down on me like a black tide: I suddenly feel very ancient, old beyond my years' span in centuries. The kitchen sink is full of unwashed dishes; I turn on the hot tap and swirl it around in search of a mug that's more or less cleanable, then go rummage in my cupboard for some tea bags.

  A new crop of bills has sprouted in the fertile soil of the cork notice board. I'll have to read them sooner or later–later will do.

  There's a small pile of letters with my name on them in the usual place–half of them look to be junk mail, judging by the glossy envelopes. And there's no water in the kettle. I fill it, then sit down next to the engine block and wait for enlightenment to spring on me. I am, I realise, tired; also depressed, lonely, and afraid. Until a couple of months ago I never saw anyone die; for the past couple of nights I haven't been able to dream about anything else. It's exhausting, physically and emotionally. One of the doctors said something about stress disorders but I wasn't listening properly at the time. I wonder if the engine block belongs to Pinky or Brains: I've got a mind to give them a chewing out over it when they come home. It's antisocial as hell–what if someone wanted to eat lunch in here?

  The kettle boils, then clicks off. I sit in silence for a moment, feeling a chill in the air, then stand up to pour a mug of tea.