“Both.” The guard disappears again, the car door closing as the driver slowly accelerates along what appears to be a narrow and unlit wood-land road. The driver spares him a glance in the wing mirror. He’s the lucky man: all he has to do is stand guard over a gate tonight. What could go wrong?
“Brookwood cemetery,” Panin says quietly. He uses a pen torch to read his gazetteer. “The London necropolis, built in the nineteenth century. Eight square kilometers of graves and memorial chapels. Who would have thought it?” He clicks his tongue quietly and puts the torch away.
“What do you want me to do, sir?” asks Dmitry.
“Drive. Headlights off. Follow the card until you see a chapel ahead of you, then pull over.”
Dmitry nods, and switches off the headlights. The BMW has an infrared camera, projecting an image on the windscreen: he drives slowly. Behind them, the minivan douses its lights. Its driver has no such built-in luxuries—but military night-vision goggles are an adequate substitute.
Panin pulls a walkie-talkie from the back of the seat in front of him and keys it. There’s an answering burst of static.
“Rook One to Knight One. Closing on board now. We’ll dismount before proceeding. Over.”
“Knight One, understood, over.”
The big saloon ghosts along the winding way, past tree-shadowed gravestones and monuments that loom out of the darkness and fade behind with increasing frequency. Then it slows. Dmitry has spotted a car parked ahead, nearside wheels on the grassy verge, its tires and exhaust glowing luminous by infrared: it hasn’t been there long.
“That will be the target,” says Panin.
Dmitry kills the engine, and they coast to a silent halt. Doors open. Panin walks around the BMW, to stand behind it as the minivan pulls up behind. More doors open. Men climb out of the minivan: wiry men, clad in dark fatigues and balaclava helmets, moving fast. They deploy around the vehicles, weapons ready. Panin pulls his own goggles on over his thinning hair and flicks the switch. Then he drags a tiny, grotesque matrioshka doll on a loop of hemp string from one pocket and holds it high. Seen by twilight it appears to have a beard: and the beard is rippling. “Wards, everyone,” he says softly. “This is the target. Clear it. Spare none but the English agent—and don’t spare him either, if there’s any doubt.” He slides the loop of string over his head. “Sergeant Murametz, this is your show now.”
Murametz nods, then waves his men towards the building they can dimly discern in the distance. The Spetsnaz vanish into the night and shadows, searching for guards. Dmitry turns to his boss. “Sir—what now?”
“Now—we wait.” Panin frowns and checks his watch. “I hope we got here in time,” he murmurs. “We must finish before James and his men arrive.”
ANGLETON TURNS HIS HEAD SIDEWAYS TO WATCH MO. SHE LEANS against her seat back in the control room of the OCCULUS truck, eyes closed and face drawn. She clutches the violin case with both hands, as if it’s a lifesaver; the fingers of her left hand look bruised.
“I’m not infallible,” he repeats quietly.
She doesn’t open her eyes, but she shakes her head. “I didn’t say you were.”
(Up front, Major Barnes—who is navigating by means of a simple contagion link Angleton established for him—tells the driver to take the second left exit from a roundabout. The truck sways alarmingly, then settles on its suspension as it accelerates away.)
“I had a long list of suspects. She was very low down.”
“Angleton,” Mo says gently, “just shut up. To err is human.”
“It seems I have not been truly myself for a long time,” he says, barely whispering, a dry, papery sound like files shuffling in a dead document archive.
Mo is quiet for a long time. “Do you want to be yourself?” she asks, finally.
“It would be less—limiting.” He pauses for a few seconds. “Sometimes self-imposed limits make life more interesting, though.”
The engine roars as the truck accelerates up a gradient.
“What would you do, if you weren’t limited?”
“I would be terrible.” Angleton doesn’t smile. “You would look at me and your blood would freeze.” Something moves behind the skin of his face, as if the pale parchment is a thin layer stretched between the real world and something underneath it, something inhuman. “I have done terrible things,” he murmurs.
“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 eno
ugh 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 familiar-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.
T
HEY’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.
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