“Are you centered?” I call over my shoulder to Hastings. “In the safety zone?”
“Yes.” He sounds bored. “How about you?”
“I’ll be okay.” I keep my eyes peeled as I shove the plug on the end of the strap into the anti-static point, and twist. I’ve plonked my PDA down on the floor a couple of meters away and set it to audio, beeping like a Geiger counter in the thaum field. It ticks every few seconds, like a cooling kettle. The airframe itself is probably safe, unlike the blue-glowing instrument panel on the workbench, but it’s a bigger physical hazard, which is why I’m tackling it first.
I take a couple of steps back, then straighten up and walk over to the signal generator. Where was I? Ah, yes. I flip a couple of switches and there’s a loud chime, almost like a bell ringing, except slightly off-key. It sets my teeth on edge. “Degaussing resonator on,” I say aloud. Continuing the checklist from memory: “Exclusion field engaged.” I pick up my PDA, fire up the ebook reader, and shuffle round the airframe slowly, reading aloud as I go: words in an alien tongue not suited for human lips. The signal generator chimes periodically. There’s your exorcism in a nut-shell: bell, book, and candle—although the candle is strictly optional if you’re reading from a backlit screen, and the bell’s a synthesized tone.
Finally, after squeezing between the Lightning and a tarp-shrouded jet engine on a trolley I fetch up where I started from, back by the workbench. “Last words.” I pick up the microphone that’s plugged into the signal generator, flip the switch, and say, “Piss off.”
There’s a bang and a blue flash from the grounding point on the airframe, and my PDA makes an ominous crackling noise. Then the thaum field dies. “You nailed it,” says Hastings.
“Looks that way,” I agree, turning to face him.
He looks past me. “What about the—Hey, what are you—”
Now here’s where things go wrong.
Muggins here didn’t bother to set up a ward around the workbench with the contaminated cockpit console before he sorted out the airframe, because he thought that he could do the two jobs separately. But they’re not separate, are they? The law of contagion applies: the cockpit instruments had been physically bolted to the airframe for a number of years, and things that form a unitary identity for a long time tend to respond as one.
More importantly, nobody had thought to tell Muggins precisely what Squadron 666, Royal Air Force, did with its planes. Escorting the white elephants. Muggins here still thought he was dealing with a simple spontaneous haunting—bad memories, terrified pilot in near-death experience, that sort of thing—rather than secondary activation caused by overexposure to gibbering unearthly horrors; the necromantic equivalent of collecting fallout samples by flying through mushroom clouds.
But I’m second-guessing the enquiry now, so I’ll shut up.
Warrant Officer Hastings survives the explosion because he is still inside his protective pentacle.
Muggins here survives the explosion because he is wearing a heavy-duty defensive ward around his neck and, in response to Hastings’s call, has turned to look at the open doorway where little old Helen with her tightly curled white hair is standing, clutching a tea tray.
Her mouth is open as if she’s about to say something, and her eyebrows are raised.
I will remember the expression on her face for a very long time.
Beauty may be skin-deep, but horror goes all the way down to the desiccated bone beneath, as the eerie purple flashbulb glow rises and her eyes melt in their sockets and her hair and clothes turn to dust, falling down and down as I begin to turn back towards the airframe and reach for the small pouch around my neck, which is scalding hot against my skin as the air heats up—
There’s a dissonant chime from the signal generator on the bench, unattended, then a continuous shrill ringing alarm as its safeties trip.
The hideous light goes out with a bang like a balloon bursting, a balloon the size of the Hindenburg.
“Shit,” I hear someone say as I grab the ward and feel a sharp pain in my hand. I blink furiously as I yank, breaking the fine chain. There’s a clicking in my ears and I blink again, see white powder everywhere—like snow or heavy dust on the floor, a patina of corrosion on the aircraft wings stacked in their jigs around me, white on the workbenches—
“Helen!” shouts Warrant Officer Hastings, stepping over the boundary of his protective perimeter.
I don’t need to look round to know it’s too late for her but I still cringe. I drop the ward and gasp as air touches the palm of my hand and the spot on my sternum that’s beginning to sting like a kicked wasps’ nest. My ears are ringing.
I turn back to the bench with the signal generator to check my PDA for the thaum field. Unwelcome surprises come in threes: Number one is, the bench is a centimeter deep in white dusty powder. Surprise number two is, my PDA has gone to meet its maker—it’s actually scorched and blackened, the case melted around one edge. And surprise number three—
A thin, wispy trickle of smoke is rising from behind the (scorched, naturally) canvas screens around the Lightning’s cockpit instruments—ground zero for the pulse of necromantic energy that has just seared through the hangar like a boiling propane vapor explosion.
Here’s Hastings, kneeling and clutching a dented steel teapot that looks as if it’s been sandblasted, sobbing over a pile of—
The ringing in my ears is louder, and louder still, and the big hangar doors crack open to admit a ray of daylight to the crypt and the howl of the airfield fire tender’s siren, but they’re too late.
I GET HOME LATE, REALLY LATE: SO LATE I END UP EXPENSING a taxi to take me into Birmingham to catch the last train, and another taxi home at the other end. Iris will probably give me a chewing out over it but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. The emergency response team kept me at the first aid post for a couple of hours, under observation, but I’m okay, really: just scooped out and full of a numinous sense of dread, looping on the bright purple flash as I looked round and saw the door opening, Helen standing there for a moment as the thaum field on the instrument console collapsed, sucking out the life from anything within a fifty-meter radius that wasn’t locked down and shielded.
(Hangar Six isn’t going to have a rat problem for a while.)
The unshielded instrument console entangled with the shielded airframe I’d just exorcised. And the seventy-something lady in the pink slippers, shuffling forward with a tea tray and two mugs she’d carefully poured for us—
Too clever by half.
As I open the front door, I can feel the house sulking. I switch on the lights and hang up my coat in the hall, fighting the urge to hunch my shoulders defensively. It’s Mo, of course. This is her house as much as it’s mine—okay, it’s our maisonette, two civil servants can’t possibly afford a house in London even if they’re both management track—and it reflects her mood. I canceled Pete and Sandy but I can’t cancel Mo. She’s got a snit on, perfectly justifiable. I really ought to go upstairs and apologize, but as I bend down to untie my shoelaces I find my hands are shaking.
An indeterminate time later I open my eyes. I’m sitting at the kitchen table with an empty glass in my hand. The quality of the light just changed.
“Bob?” It’s Mo, wearing a dressing gown, rubbing her eyes. “Shit. Bob”—her tone of voice changes, softening slightly—“what’s wrong?”
“I—” I clear my throat, force air through my larynx: “I screwed up.”
The bottle of Talisker sitting beside my left hand is half-empty. Mo peers at it, then takes a step closer and peers at me. Then she picks up the bottle, pops the cork, and pours a generous two fingers into my glass, bless her.
“Drink up.” She pauses with a hand on the back of the other kitchen chair. “Am I going to need one too?”
“Dunno. Maybe.”
She goes to the cupboard and takes out another glass before she sits down. I blink at her, red-eyed and confused.
“Talk
.” She pours a shot into her own glass. “In your own time.”
I glance at the kitchen clock. “It’s one a.m.”
“And it’ll be one a.m. again, at least once a day for the rest of your life. So talk, if you want. Or drink up and come to bed.”
I sip my whisky. “I screwed up.”
“How badly?”
“I killed a bystander.”
“A by—” She freezes with her glass halfway to her lips. “Jesus, Bob.” Pause. “How did you do that?”
She looks appalled, but probably much less appalled than your spouse would look if you confessed to killing someone over the kitchen table. (Mo is made of stern stuff.)
“Angleton sent me to do a routine job. Only I missed something and fucked up my prep.”
“But you’re still—” She bites her lip, and now she looks shaken; my ears sketch in the missing word: alive.
“Oh, I almost got it right,” I explain, waving my glass. “Warrant Officer Hastings wasn’t hurt. And I’m here.” But then I remember the purple flash again, and the door opening, and the sight of Helen’s face aging a hundred years in a second right before my eyes. “Only the tea lady opened the door at the worst possible moment . . .”
Mo is silent for a while, so I take another sip.
“Fatal accidents never happen because of just one mistake,” I try to explain. “It takes a whole chain of stupids lining up just so to put a full stop at the end of an epitaph.”
“So what did you do afterwards?” she asks quietly.
“Afterwards? It was too late to do anything.” I shrug. “I told ’em not to disturb the scene and called the Plumbers. Then I had to wait until they arrived and hang around while they logged the scene and filed a preliminary report and bagged the body, which took all evening. They had to use a Dyson—there wasn’t enough left of her to fill a teacup, never mind a reanimator’s workbench. It’s on the books as a level four excursion, incidental unintended fatality. The desk officer was very understanding but I’ve got a ten o’clock appointment with someone in Operational Oversight to file an R60.” An official incident report. “Then I suppose there’ll be an enquiry.”
And the juggernaut of an internal investigation will start to roll, bearing down on my ass like hell’s own lawn mower in search of an un-trimmed blade of grass, but it’s not as if I don’t deserve it. I take another sip of the whisky, wishing I could drown myself in it. This isn’t the first time I’ve killed someone, but it’s the first time I’ve killed a civilian bystander, and I lack the words to express how I feel.
“I was going to dump on you,” Mo tells me, “but . . . forget it.” She empties her glass and I realize that while I was seeing that purple light the whisky has evaporated from my tumbler. “Come to bed now.”
I push myself to my feet, neck drooping. “It won’t make things better.”
“No.”
“I feel like shit.”
“No, Bob, you need to get some sleep.”
“I am a shit.”
“You need to get some sleep. Come to bed.”
“If you say so.”
I follow her upstairs. Today’s been shit, and tomorrow is quite possibly going to be worse—but it can wait for a while.
2.
POINTING THE FINGER
I GO TO WORK IN A NONDESCRIPT OFFICE IN CENTRAL LONDON, south of the river and east of the sun—I can’t say precisely where—located above a row of shops. It’s a temporary home for the department, and it’s officially called the New Annexe, probably because it was thrown up in 1964. It consists of three floors of characterless sixties concrete piled up above a C&A and a couple of other boring high street stores like a bad perm on a grocer’s granny; it used to belong to the Post Office, back in the day. And nothing you can see through the windows from outside is really there.
The weather is just as unpleasant as yesterday, if not worse—muggy and humid, warm enough to be annoying but not hot enough to provoke businesses into paying for air conditioning—and there’s a stale tang of vehicle exhausts and fermenting dog shit underlying every noisome breath I take. Wasps buzz around the overflowing litter bins on the street outside the office as I nip into the staff entrance to the store, then push through a plywood door labeled BUILDING MAINTENANCE ONLY and up a whitewashed stairwell with peeling linoleum treads. (A lot of people go through that door every day, and they don’t look much like store employees, but for some reason nobody seems to notice. Or more accurately, they can’t notice.)
At the top of the stairs there’s another door. This one’s a bit more substantial. The wards make my skin crawl and send pins and needles singing up my arm as I push it open, but they recognize me as someone who belongs here, for which I am profoundly grateful. (A couple of years back a gang of thugs decided to ram-raid us and steal the office computers. Boy did they get an unpleasant surprise . . .)
I slouch over to reception. “Are there any messages for me today?” I ask Rita.
Rita, who is about a year younger than my mother and about as maternal as an iron maiden, stares at me in brassy-eyed surprise. “Iris said she wants to see you, if you showed up today!” she declares. “Are you signed off sick or something?”
“No, but I might be contagious.”
“Be off with you.” She turns back to her web browser, dismissing me, and I take a deep breath and head for Iris’s office.
Iris is my (How to describe our relationship accurately? Person from Porlock? Morlock?) latest line manager. I seem to get through about one a year. It wasn’t always so: but Andy got moved sideways into Research and Development, and before him, Harriet and Bridget are, ahem, long-term indisposed. They took on Angleton and lost, epic level. I actually work directly for Angleton these days, but Angleton isn’t a manager according to our org chart; he’s a DSS, and DSSs are too important to burden with boring administrative duties like overseeing staff performance appraisals. So although I work for him, I have to have an actual manager to report to, at least in theory, and that’s where Iris comes into the frame. She handles my interface with Human Resources, Payroll, and general admin stuff. She doesn’t know everything I do, but she knows I work for Angleton and it’s her job to be my manager-on-paper. And she’s good at it.
Her office door is ajar as I turn the corner between the reception area and the coffee station: she’s the kind of manager who’s happy to sacrifice an outside office with a window in return for an interior one that lets her keep an eye on everyone entering and leaving her little fiefdom, which should tell you something. Her attitude is one of those irregular verbs peculiar to bureaucracies: if you like her she’s attentive, and if you don’t, she’s paranoid.
“You wanted to see me, boss.”
Iris waves me at the seat opposite her desk. She’s leaning back with feet up and phone clamped between ear and shoulder, nodding along unconsciously to the beat of her unseen caller’s narrative.
“Yes, I understand. You can use his office, I think. When? . . . Half an hour? Excellent, thanks. Yes, and you too. Bye.” She puts the receiver down, then hits the divert to voice mail button on her handset. “How are you feeling, Bob?” She looks concerned.
“Like shit.” I don’t see any need—or room—to dissemble. “I came in because I’ve got a report to file.”
“Are you sure that’s wise?” She raises a penciled-in eyebrow. “I’ve given you my presenteeism lecture, haven’t I?”
Bless her, she has: she’s the first manager I’ve ever had who explained to me in words of one syllable that she’d be really pissed off if she caught me skulking around the office while I’m feeling ill. (This is the Laundry; they don’t fire you for calling in sick, in fact, they can’t fire you: all they can do is give you scut work. Back in my first year I took two weeks off, once, just to try it on—I ended up going back to work when I got bored with counting the cracked tiles on the bathroom wall. We still maintain this endless pretense that we’re the same as any other government department, clock-punching t
ime misers all, but it’s not true: we do things differently in the Laundry. And so does Iris, and for a blessing, she admits it.)
I nod.
“Good,” she says briskly, her accent so clear she could get a job as a BBC news anchor. “So.” She pauses. “Something went wrong yesterday, and you’ve got a report to file. Want to fill me in on it? So I know what to expect?”
So I know what to expect is Iris-speak for so I can cover your ass.
“Yeah . . . I fucked up a routine out-of-the-office job for Angleton.” I take a deep breath. “One dead bystander, in front of witnesses—luckily the only direct eyewitness is already sworn to Section Three.” (Section Three of the Official Secrets Act, which covers our activities, is itself classified Top Secret under the terms of Section Two, making knowledge of it by unauthorized persons an offense—and we enforce it ferociously.)
“I’ve got to file an R60 and then Operational Oversight are going to be calling the shots. There’ll probably be an enquiry. I may be suspended pending the outcome.” Oddly, it’s a lot easier to say this to Iris than it was to Mo.
Iris watches me for a few seconds. “Oh, you poor thing.” She nods to herself. “Was it bad?”
“It was stupid,” I say between gritted teeth. “Stupid, stupid. If I’d noticed the entanglement channel between the airframe and the control panel, or warded both artifacts at the same time, it wouldn’t have happened. And if she’d opened the door five seconds sooner, or later, it wouldn’t—shit. If I’d been told what the airframe had been used for I wouldn’t have . . .” I trail off.
“Save it for the Auditors,” Iris says tiredly. She takes her booted feet off the desk, then leans forward. “That phone call I just took was your case officer, Bob. I think you should go and get yourself a nice cup of tea or coffee or whatever pleases you, then go and wait in your office. Business as usual is canceled for the day, and if I catch you doing your time sheet or answering support queries I will personally kick you around the block, okay? Go play games on Facebook or something. I’ll bring your case officer round and sit in with you while you fill out the R60, so you’ve got a witness. If you think she’s giving you grief, let me know and I’ll handle it. Then”—she takes a deep breath—“I’m signing you off sick for two weeks. You don’t have to take it, I mean I can’t force you, hell, maybe you’d rather do some light admin and filing than sit at home or go for a week in York—that’s my suggestion—but you’re overdue for a slowdown, and I’m going to make sure you get it.”
The Fuller Memorandum Page 3