—If I couldn’t hear an echo of Mo’s voice, reminding me: the things in the cultists’ bodies had already eaten the blonde teacher’s face and most of her left leg, but the Somali boy-child was still screaming—
“You used a phrase there,” I say quietly. “I don’t think it means quite the same thing to you that it means to me. At all costs.” I put my energy drink can down. I’ve emptied it but I’m still exhausted and the pain is still lurking, just beyond the edge of my awareness. Plus, I feel drained, countless years older than my age. “Implying that the ends justify the means.”
“Just so.” Iris nods. “So. Will you join us of your own free will?”
I give her question the due weight of consideration it deserves. “Piss off.”
She sighs. “Don’t be childish, Bob. I like you, but I’m not going to let your selfish little fit of pique stand in the way of human survival.” She stands up, gathers her robe around her, and walks past me. “Bring him,” she commands.
Strong-armed cultists seize me under the shoulders and lift. I’m in no position to put up a fight as they frog-march me after her. “What are you going to do with me?” I call after her.
She pauses before an oak door studded with heavy iron nails. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to sacrifice you,” she says apologetically, “so that the Eater of Souls can stalk the corridors of the Laundry wearing your promotion-fast-tracked skin. I’m really sorry, dear. I promise I’ll try to make sure it hurts as little as possible.”
The door opens before her, and they drag me down into the catacombs.
15.
DEAD MAN WALKING
THERE IS A HALF-EATEN SANDWICH SITTING ON A BREADBOARD IN the kitchen, and an empty milk carton next to the electric kettle, and to the witness in the corner of the room the sandwich is a thing of horror.
Mo stares at it for almost a minute. Then she reaches out very carefully and lifts the upper slice of bread. Lettuce, sliced tomato, and either chicken or turkey—not ham. She breathes in deeply, shudders for a moment, then moves on. Battery farmed and de-beaked chicken, not properly stunned at the slaughterhouse—that would account for the shadow in her left goggle. No need to remember the tunnel in Amsterdam, nor where it led . . .
Behold: a typical London family home. Recently renovated kitchen, dining room with French doors opening onto a patio in the garden, lounge with bay window out front, staircase in hall, under-stair closet, side door leading into garage, bedrooms and bathroom upstairs. Why the creeping dread, then?
Mo stalks the lounge like a shadow of judgment, violin raised and ready. There’s a row of books on a shelf above the plasma TV. Management for Dummies, The Power of Positive Thinking, The Book of Dead Names—she pauses. “What the fuck?” she says, very quietly. She’s seen that one before, in the unclassified section of the archives: it’s the Sir Richard Burton translation of Al Azif, the source text referred to by the mad pulp writer of Providence, who renamed it Necronomicon. It’s not of any great significance—it’s mostly the deranged babbling of a schizophrenic poet who’d smoked far too much hashish—but it’s as out of place in a suburban living room as a main battle tank on the high street.
There’s a rumble outside, as of a heavy truck. Mo glances at the window in time to see the blue strobes flickering. A knot of tension leaves her shoulders. She steps into the hallway, towards the front door, and freezes.
Lying on the carpet before her is a runner. The rug is handwoven with an intricate mandala. To an unequipped civilian it might look harmless, but in Mo’s goggles the buzzing, humming tunnel of lies flickering with greenish light is unmistakable. She kneels beside it, inspecting its woolen edge. Very carefully, she lowers her bow across the strings of her instrument. Her fingers slide on the fretboard, leaving a fine sheen of skin oils and blood behind as the strings light up, cutting brilliant blue gashes in the air above the mandala. She plays a phrase that trails down into a wailing groan, then up into an eerie scream. Then she plays it again, louder. The rug smolders. Once more, with emphasis: and there is a bang, as the binding between the woven wool carpet and the place it connected to gives way.
The cloud of acrid smoke from the rug sends Mo into a coughing fit. An unseen smoke detector starts to scream as she stumbles forward and yanks the front door open. “In here!” she calls to the firemen walking up the driveway. As the first of them reaches her she holds out an arm: “I’ve checked the ground floor. There was a welcome mat, but I defused it: I think it’s clear now, but let me check out the stairs.”
“Understood, ma’am.” Howe turns to face his men as Mo starts to check the staircase for surprises. “Wait while the lady checks the staircase. Scary, secure the garage. Len, backyard. Joe, show Dr. Angleton to the living room.”
Ten minutes later, Mo joins Angleton downstairs. He’s sitting in a floral print armchair with a book in his lap, looking for all the world like someone else’s visiting grandfather. He closes it and looks at her mildly. “What have you found?” he asks.
“Nothing good.” She peels her goggles off and perches on the edge of the sofa, then begins to return her instrument to its case. Wiping down the bloody finger-marks on the fretboard with a cloth: “Who lived here?”
“That’s an interesting question. Would you be surprised if I told you these are designated premises?”
Mo’s fingers stop moving. Her eyes grow wide. “No. Really?”
“It’s very interesting: the Plumbers don’t seem to be aware that they’ve signed off Safe House Bravo Delta Two as clean without inspecting it. It’s assigned to one of our managers, by the way: SSO 6(A) Iris Carpenter. She’s lived here for some years.” Angleton’s cheek twitches. “Husband and university-age daughter, a typical happy family. The family that prays together stays together: or preys, perhaps? Bob was reporting to her, and she was on BLOODY BARON. We’ve found our mole.”
“But the back patio—”
Angleton closes his book. It is, of course, the Burton. “Yes,” he says, cramming paragraphs of foreboding into the monosyllable.
“There’s a bedroom upstairs,” Mo says shakily. “The window frame is nailed shut, the door locks from outside, and there’s a foam mattress on the floor with bloodstains on it. There’s a monstrous thaum field, echoes of violent death—recently. And a dirty plate.”
“Is that so?” Angleton carefully removes his spectacles, then extracts a cloth from his suit pocket. He begins to polish the lenses.
Boots thunder on the staircase. A moment later, a fireman bursts into the living room. “Sir!” He’s holding something shiny in his right hand.
“What is it?” Angleton asks irritably, holding his glasses up to the light.
“Give that here.” Mo reaches for it. “It’s Bob’s new phone.” She stands up, holding it close: “Where did you find it?”
“It was under the chest of drawers in the small room. Oh, and there’s a body in the garage—not one of ours.” Warrant Officer Howe looks gloomy: “We only missed them by an hour or so. Judging by the bloodstains and the body—still damp and still warm.”
Mo scuffs her right foot on the floor in frustration. “They’ve been one jump ahead of us all along, because they’ve been sitting in on our investigations, inside our decision loop. That’s where the Dower report went. It’s where that missing memo went. They’ve got Bob—what are we going to do?”
Angleton slides his spectacles back on. “I’d have thought that was obvious,” he says mildly: “We’ve got to find him.”
“How?”
Angleton stands up. “That’s your department. You’ve got his ward, his phone, his laptop, if you’ve got any sense you’ve got an item of recently worn underwear ...”
Mo nods jerkily. “He was here. If there’s a trail—” She turns to Howe: “The foam mattress, with the blood. Have you taken a sample?” Howe holds up an evidence bag, its contents black and squishy. “That’ll do.”
“Back to the truck.” Angleton waves them out of the living ro
om, ahead of him. “I hope we’re in time.”
“What do you think they’ll do to him?” Mo’s anxiety is glaringly obvious.
“They’ve got the memorandum.” Angleton shrugs. “I think they’ll try to invoke the Eater of Souls and bind it to Bob’s flesh.”
“They—” Mo glares at him. “Bob said you gave him a fake!” she accuses.
“No, just a photocopy.” Angleton’s ironic smile is ghastly to behold. “The Eater of Souls is already taken: if they try the rite, they won’t get what they think they’re asking for. And I will admit, I didn’t expect them to make it this far. I’m not infallible, girl.”
A minute later, the driver switches on the blue lights and pulls out into the road. Behind the departing truck the house’s front door gapes open, as if ready to welcome the next official visitors. But the victims under the patio will have to wait a little longer.
OKAY, SO I WAS WRONG ABOUT THE A-TEAM AND THE B-TEAM.
And I was wrong about the cultists, and what they believe.
Assuming Iris is telling the truth, there’s an angle to view things from which their actions are, if not justifiable, then at least understandable. Poor little misunderstood mass murderers, with only the best of intentions at heart. And their hearts are pure for the goal they seek is the only one any sane—
Stop it. That’s Stockholm syndrome talking, the tendency of abductees to start seeing things from their kidnappers’ viewpoint. Just stop it.
They’re frog-marching me along a tunnel towards a summoning grid where they plan to turn me into a host for a demonic intrusion from another universe, and my subconscious is trying to see things from their point of view? I’m confused—
It’s a broad tunnel, low-ceilinged. Every five meters or so there stands a cultist, male or female figures in hooded black robes who hold lamps, the better to illuminate the whitewashed brick walls and the niches therein. The niches have occupants; they’ve been standing there for a long time. There’s a soft, dry breeze blowing—I’ve got no idea how they manage the ventilation—and some of the inhabitants are pretty well preserved. The way the skin shrinks across the skull, drawing the shriveled lips back to reveal yellowed fangs and blackened tongues, almost as if they’re screaming. The dead outnumber the living here, all dressed in dusty Victorian or Edwardian finery. If Iris has her way, I’ll be joining them soon—or worse. When I signed the Act there was a binding promise placed on my soul: the Laundry doesn’t like its staff to leave ghosts and revenants behind to face interrogation. No afterlife echoes for me.
We pass a rack of wooden shelves, bowed with age beneath piles of skulls and bundles of femurs tagged with faded labels, and pause at another oak door. One of the cultists—do I recognize Julian the shotgun-toting cannibal under that hood?—steps forward with a key. My heart’s pounding and I feel feverish, and to top it all I’m so scared I’m in danger of losing bladder control, like an innocent man being dragged to his execution. I’m also angry. Hang on to that anger, I tell myself. Then I start trying to string phrases together in Enochian, in my own head.
If they’re determined to kill me, then fuck ’em—I’m going to go out with a bang.
The dead. I can feel them pressing in around us, outside the wan light of the LED torches. Empty vessels waiting, entropic sinkholes of randomized information, all charged up with nowhere to go. These dead bear no love for the living among them: followers of a ghastly fertility cult, the spawner of unclean things—now dead and withered, they lie here where once they conducted strange bacchanalian ceremonies, watching while the austere puritans of the Black Brotherhood desecrate their tombs and reconsecrate their altars. They can’t possibly be happy with the new tenants, can they?
To summon up a possessive entity takes a Dho-Nha geometry curve, a sacrifice of blood, and an iteration through certain theorems. (Not to mention a power source, but I’m sitting right on top of the necromantic equivalent of the Dinorwig stored hydropower plant: if I can’t turn the lights on with that, I might as well give up.) I know this shit: it’s years since I first did it. I can just about visualize the curve, and if I try to flex my right arm—oh gods, that hurts—is that a trickle of blood I feel? I start to subvocalize, trying to hold a warped wireframe image in my mind’s eye: One plus not-one equals null; let the scaling coefficient be the square root of—
The door is open. How big is this place, anyway? The Ancient Order of Wheelwrights must have been rolling in cash. The sacrificial cortège begins to move again, and now the cultists around me begin to sing a curious dirge-like song. We’re descending across broad steps—almost two meters wide, topped with dusty mattresses to either side—towards a central depression beneath a low, vaulted ceiling. The skullfuckers probably used this space for their orgies, more than a century ago; it’s haunted by the ghostly stink of bodily fluids. We’ve been brought up to think of the Victorians as prudes, horrified by a glimpse of table leg, but that myth was constructed in the 1920s out of whole cloth, to give their rebellious children an excuse to point and say, “We invented sex!” The reality is stranger: the Victorians were licentious in the extreme behind closed doors, only denying everything in public in the pursuit of probity.
Now the cultists around me are breathing faster, raising their voices higher, trying to drown out the phantom sighs and moans of a thousand dead and withered seducers. I try and keep to my own chant, but it’s hard to focus on suicide when all around you the ghosts of gluttony sleep so lightly.
There is a huge bed at the center of the well of mattresses: a four-poster, canopied in rich black brocade, ebony uprights supporting a drapery as ornately swagged as any Victorian hearse, with a huge chest sitting in front of its footboard. The bed alone is wide enough to accommodate half a dozen—not sleepers, I realize—although only two bodies lie there now, curled in fetal death, close to one side.
As the singers continue, two of Iris’s minions walk up to the bed. They raise the quilt piled against the footboard, covering the mummified occupants; then they take hold of cords dangling from the base of each post and attach manacles to them.
“No,” I say. “No!” Then I try to bite the hand that’s reaching in front of my mouth with a gag.
“Mummy said not to hurt you unnecessarily,” Jonquil explains. “So open wide, or—” Her other hand grabs my crotch and squeezes. I gasp in pain. Bitch. “Good boy!”
When they dump me on the counterpane a cloud of stinking dust billows out in all directions, hanging so thick in the air that I spasm and sneeze. It takes six of them to hold me down and fasten the manacles, and I nearly faint when they extend my right arm—the morphine must be wearing off. Everything blurs for a few seconds. I look up at the inside of the canopy over the bed, and it seems to me as if I’ve seen it before—seen it in my mind’s eye a minute ago, in fact.
This isn’t a bed: it’s an altar. It used to belong to a fertility cult. It’s been used for sex magic. What do I know about sex magic, and revenants, and summonings? Think!
The chorus take up positions around the bed, continuing their chant; Iris walks around it slowly, tracing a design using a small fortune in granulated silver tipped from an antique powder horn. Then she walks to the chest at the foot of the bed and waits while two more cultists produce the varied tools and ingredients for a summoning: knives, mirrors, unpleasantly molded black candles, a laptop computer, and bookshelf speakers. She is out of my sight most of the time, unless I lift my head—it’s hard—but I gradually realize something else: she’s using the chest at the foot of . . . the original altar, as her own summoning altar. They’ve put me on the other cult’s summoning grid.
Iris is an SSO 6(A)—middle management in the administrative branch—because she’s not actually very talented at magic. And I’m in the position of a man, sentenced to hang, whose inexperienced executioners have temporarily sat him in the electric chair while they work out how to tie a noose. Except magic doesn’t work like that. My shoulders begin to shake. I try to get a grip on mys
elf. A few seconds pass. I open my eyes and stare at the headboard, and flex my right arm until I nearly black out. Then, when I’m awake again, I start to subvocalize again, repeating the black theorem I started outside the door to this place.
Iris begins to chant, in Aramaic I think—something containing disturbingly familiar names. I tune her out and focus on my own liquid, gurgling subvocalization.
They strapped me to the electric chair, but they didn’t notice I was wearing a suicide belt . . .
A BLACK BMW CRUISES DOWN A TREE - LINED COUNTRY LANE IN the late evening dusk. To one side, there’s a fence, behind which trees block out the view. To the other side, there’s a two-meter-high brick wall, the masonry old and crumbling, with trees behind it—but spaced more widely than the woods opposite. A black minivan follows the BMW saloon, which has slowed to well below the national speed limit.
“It’s around here, somewhere,” says the driver, frowning at the brightly glowing rectangle of card on his dash.
“It’s getting weaker,” says Panin. “I think”—he glances sidelong out of the window—“our man is on the other side of that wall.”
At just that moment, the wall falls away from the road, as a driveway opens out. Dmitry needs no urging to turn into it; the trailing minivan overshoots, but the road is empty, and its driver reverses back up to the drive.
There’s a gatehouse, like that of a stately home, and a black cast-iron gate topped with spikes. There are no lights in the house, and the gate is chained shut. Panin points at it. “Get that open.”
“Sir!” The front seat passenger gets out and approaches the gate. It takes him less than a minute to crack the padlock and unwrap the chain; he waves the small convoy through, then leans in the BMW’s open door as it creeps alongside. “Do you want it closing or securing, sir?”
The Fuller Memorandum Page 28