Dead Lies Dreaming

by Charles Stross

  * * *

  Wendy Deere caught the bus home to Lewisham, where she lived in one of half a dozen bedsits in a converted 1930s family house. It was cramped, damp, and inconveniently close to the diesel fumes and noise of the high street, but it was all she could afford. As she walked the last couple hundred meters the gray overcast finally began to drizzle. It had been a clear, cold day when she’d left for work. Coatless, she was now exposed to the kind of irritatingly persistent rain that lingered like a drunk in a pub doorway.

  Annoyed, she raised her left hand tentatively and willed the handle of an umbrella into existence in her palm. She knew she shouldn’t, but … Hard, knobbly plastic slid from imagination into reality, tugging in the intermittent gusts as raindrops pattered across it. Head bowed and brolly lowered to cover her hair, she sped up, dodging dog turds and uncollected refuse, resisting the uncanny tugging on her mind which always came with such manifestations. (The papers were full of scare stories about Metahuman-Associated Dementia and saying it was connected to overuse of talents: well maybe, but then again, most smokers didn’t die of lung cancer, did they?) She crossed the street and fumbled for her front door keys; while she was distracted the umbrella returned from whence it came, leaving her bare neck exposed to the icy droplets.

  Shitgoblins, she swore silently, and fucksticks. She closed the door and flicked the light switch to no avail. Of course the card meter had run out of credit while she was at work, because the landlord-supplied fridge-freezer kept icing up. The door wouldn’t close properly and it kept trying to freeze the entire living space. (Her so-called kitchen was an illegally windowless nook with about a square meter of floor space, separated from the main room by a doorless doorway. Before the house had been turned into bedsits it had probably been an airing closet.)

  Wendy changed out of her work uniform into her parkour gear (combat pants and a hoodie), pulled her DMs back on, stuffed her phone, keys, and purse into trouser pockets, then grabbed the electricity meter keycard and went out to buy a top-up.

  Poverty was expensive, and electricity on the card plan cost nearly twice as much as a regular tariff. As with her mobile phone bill, and the gas. Wendy lived week to week on top-ups, buying a little extra when she got enough work to cover it. At least today she could afford to turn the lights on again (and bloody had to, before the food in the laughably small freezer compartment defrosted and went off). If Gibson came through—

  There was a note taped to the inside of the shared front door in the lobby. She hadn’t noticed it on her way in, too intent on getting to her own bedsit, but now she read it.

  “Fuck,” she swore aloud.

  NOTICE TO ALL TENANTS:

  THE FREEHOLD ON THIS BUILDING

  IS BEING SOLD TO—

  There goes the neighborhood. Gentrification was a cruel predator, pricing real people out of homes, regardless of their circumstances, however long they’d lived there. In retrospect, the signs had been obvious for months. Houses up and down the road were boarding up their windows, long-term residents draining away like an outgoing tide. A developer was moving in, determined to buy all the old semis and replace them with an estate of luxury apartments with valet parking and a residents’ health club, single bedroom flats starting at only £900,000, truly a bargain, snap yours up now—

  They can’t kick us all out immediately, Wendy reasoned. Assured shorthold tenancies had to expire first. Something would come up, and if it didn’t, at least on her new contract she’d be earning enough to move somewhere better. (She hoped.)

  Gearing up to a brisk walk, Wendy headed towards the post office in the shopping center a half mile away. The rain had let up, dwindling to an intermittent spatter of small droplets. She turned the corner onto another residential street, to see more signs outside boarded-up ground-floor windows reading THIS SITE PROTECTED BY HIVECO HOME SECURITY. As if. Wendy snorted. Sure, HiveCo would take the property owner’s money in return for a cardboard sign out front and a weekly drive-by; but protected implied something more and different. Protected meant active security, cameras monitored 24/7, maybe a human body on-site, dogs, lights, fences. Derelict homes awaiting demolition weren’t—

  “Huh.” Wendy slowed, then stopped. The hasp on the padlock securing the front door of the house she’d just passed was hanging loose, and when she looked she saw that the door was ajar. Not open, just not properly shut. “Well, then.” Taking a closer look couldn’t hurt, could it?

  The police are the public and the public are the police had been drilled into Wendy during her Hendon days, back when she was training to be a copper. She could recite the Peelian principles in her sleep: the police were just members of the public who were paid to give full-time attention to duties every citizen should support. But I’m not a cop any more, Wendy reminded herself, and anyway the current government didn’t have much time for empowered citizenship. Trespassing and squatting had only been made criminal offenses in the current millennium, but the New Management had tightened up the penalties for almost everything, as if they thought the threat of sadistic and unusual punishments would distract the voters from noticing cuts to police numbers. But it’s my beat because I live here and nobody else is taking responsibility … Shit.

  Wendy eyed the broken doorway apprehensively. Maybe it was kids, maybe it was homeless people, maybe it was crackheads or a neighborhood dealer: these were not exclusive sets. There were other possibilities, too, less obviously criminal ones. But whoever they were, they ought to know better, and Wendy hadn’t quite had all the community spirit beaten out of her. She felt responsible, although any gods that knew why remained silent on the matter when she cried, Why does it have to be me? And in the absence of any sworn officers to remind the squatters of the law (and also to check that they weren’t dying of neglect), it was a duty that fell to her. Peelian principles in action.

  Breathing deeply, she glanced up and down the road to ensure she was unobserved, then hopped over the rotting wooden fence that surrounded the house. The tiny garden was overgrown, knee-deep in dirty grass concealing trip hazards and discarded refuse. A wooden hut with broken windows that gaped emptily stood between two dying trees and an overgrown hedge at the back. No wonder they’d picked this one, whoever they were. The rear aspect was concealed, and there were numerous escape routes across neighboring gardens. Good for them. The windows on the upper floor at the back weren’t boarded up: light shone from one of the bedrooms, a peculiar flickering blue like an electric arc—and suddenly, by the prickling in her fingers, Wendy knew that she had to check this out, just in case. She’d seen this kind of thing before, after all.

  “Right, let’s do this,” Wendy muttered, nerving herself. She checked for watchers again, then willed a crowbar into existence as she approached the back door. Like the front, this too had been secured with a shiny aluminum latch and a padlock. It was cheaper than changing the original locks on a house destined for demolition and it signalled vacant possession, but the latch was only stapled to the doorframe. Wendy hefted the pry bar and with a practiced flick ripped the latch away. She pushed inside, then paused to listen while she let her eyes grow accustomed to the twilight within.

  Unlike her own home, this house hadn’t been turned into an HMO or subdivided into cramped bedsits. In fact, it looked to have been left untouched since the 1970s. Peeling wallpaper still trapped the eye in endless paisley-print swirls of brown and orange. Wood-veneered kitchen cupboards flanked an ancient electric cooker with coiled heating elements on top. The lino was almost worn away in front of the fridge and the stainless steel sink. Beneath the latter a twin-tub washing machine had once been tucked for safe keeping. A strange smell pervaded the room, like a combination of malodorous socks, rotten vegetables, and chlorinated swimming pools.

  Wendy inhaled slowly, arms and shoulders tense. Something was wrong. Responding to her unease, her crowbar transformed into a friction-lock ASP baton, the model she’d carried on duty. A muffled voice drifted from the darkened hallw
ay, muttering imprecations, and then, amidst a sudden burst of hissing and crackling, a triumphant howl: “It lives! Ahahaha! Science!”

  Wendy relaxed instantly. Of course it would be him. It’s like a tradition, or an old charter, or something. She strode through the darkened house, boots squelching softly on the soaking remains of the hall carpet. Reaching the staircase, she rapped on the wall with her baton. “Professor? It’s Wendy; I’m coming upstairs.”

  “I told them they’d be sorry, the fools! But I—Wendy?” Prof’s voice abruptly dropped out of his Mad Science falsetto into something only a stone’s throw away from sanity. “Oh good, is it visiting time already? Wait, what are you doing? No, don’t eat her! She’s our friend—”

  Wendy heard an overloud scuttling noise then a chirr of mandibles, cut off sharply. A bedroom door opened, spilling light across the landing. She sighed, exasperated. “You can’t keep wandering off like this, Prof!”

  “Really?” Professor Skullface blinked at her in confusion. “Why ever not?”

  “You know why! People will talk. Are you going to invite me in or—”

  “Of course! Come in, come in, I’m forgetting my manners, would you care for a tube of tea?”

  “Maybe,” she said doubtfully. She followed Prof as he retreated back inside his lair, tugging his grimy lab coat tight around his shoulders. He wore it with panache over striped pajamas and felt slipper-boots. One of them still sported a price tag. He’d refurbished the master bedroom, fitting it out with all the homely comforts of a mad scientist’s lab. (Or perhaps that should be MAD scientist: Prof could have been a poster model for Metahuman-Associated Dementia.) Benches with bubbling stills and retorts burbled cheerfully alongside the walls; in the middle of the room a pair of Jacob’s ladders flanked an operating table, atop which was strapped a supine form.

  “Mine’s an Earl Grey, milk, one sugar, please.” She tried to ignore the jump leads connected to the body on the slab. There was no point worrying: anyway, it was probably a shop dummy. Most of Prof’s workplace was just set dressing.

  “They called me—milk, one sugar—a madman, but I showed them!” Prof scooped dark powder into an Erlenmeyer flask full of liquid, then swirled it over a Bunsen burner, gripping it with a pair of tongs. She couldn’t help noticing that the hand tremors had gotten worse. Leaping gaslight flared reflections off his wire-rimmed spectacles. “And I make a mean tube of tea while I do it, if I say so myself.”

  “Prof. Prof.” Wendy found herself smiling despite herself. “How long have you been liv—uh, working here?”

  “You know, I couldn’t say,” he said vaguely. The flask of tea was beginning to boil from the bottom up. He lifted it out of the flame and placed it on a heatproof tile to steep. “The lease was up on the castle, and the villagers kept threatening me, so I sent Igor out to find a new lair, and he brought me here.” Igor chirred emphatically from under the operating table. Wendy took a cautious step backwards. Igor was a construct Prof had manifested, much like Wendy’s baton; but while she was limited to simple mechanical tools, Prof could make minions. Igor resembled a giant robotic scorpion with hands instead of claws, forking into ever tinier hands at each fingertip, branching endlessly down into a rainbow fuzz of light-diffracting nanoscale digits. Igor wasn’t aggressive or evil, but Igor was dangerous the way a badly programmed industrial robot was dangerous—or a construct animated by a transhuman with the Mad Science delusion who had come into his powers at the same time the Metahuman-Associated Dementia took hold. (And don’t even start on the transhuman/metahuman terminology wars: more than one lexicographer had been driven to a nervous breakdown by the flame wars over what to call the people the public still insisted on referring to as caped freaks.)

  Wendy accepted Prof’s offering of tea and sipped it in silence, considering her options. She allowed her telescoping baton to dissolve back into the shadows. She used to visit Prof regularly as part of her caseload back when she was with the Old Bill, along with a handful of other transhumans who required an occasional steady hand. This was the third time he’d wandered away from a care home or forgotten his way back, or been turned out on the street. The causes might vary but the progression was always the same. Prof inevitably told Igor to find him a lab, and Igor would do exactly as he was told. So Prof would hole up somewhere wildly inappropriate (a shuttered petrol station, a house scheduled for demolition), and settle into a life of genteel squalor and mad science. Igor raided the bins behind supermarkets and fast food outlets to feed the master, while Prof whipped up gizmos for his lair—a turbogenerator powered by the water mains to provide electricity, the grow-lamps from an urban cannabis farm repurposed as a mind-control laser. Or, on one memorable occasion (thank fuck Prof had been working in a cellar at the time), a working muon-catalyzed cold fusion reactor.

  Prof and Igor were mostly harmless, really more a danger to themselves than others—Prof’s instinct to retreat into a mad science lair when disturbed meant that he tended to avoid situations where he might frighten his neighbors into forming a pitchfork-wielding mob—but he was still not safe on his own. If a stroke left him paralyzed Igor would go in search of help, which might mean dismantling and stealing an air ambulance. Or it might progress to kidnapping a trainee nurse and demanding brain surgery through the medium of interpretative dance. That was the problem with mad scientists who succumbed to MAD: as they went downhill the constructs they animated became dangerously unpredictable, not to say prone to episodes of gratuitous bugfuckery. And for some reason, if he was going to turn up on anybody’s doorstep, it would be Wendy’s. She had this to look forward to if she overused her own ability: it was almost enough to make her swear off crime fighting for life.

  “Do you remember who you were staying with?” She tried again, between sips of tea. “What the home was called?”

  “I’m not quite sure.” For a moment Prof looked puzzled. “The Golden Farm Residential Care Community, perhaps?” He scratched his head. Privately, Wendy despaired. Golden Farm Residential had kicked Prof out two years ago when the private equity firm that had purchased the care home chain finished looting their pension scheme and forced them into bankruptcy. But as he raised his arm Wendy saw a band looped around his scrawny wrist: a Tyvek label with a bar code and some writing on it. “Itches,” he said indistinctly, worrying at it with his teeth.

  “Let me help you with that?” she offered, and slowly leaned in close. PROF. ARTHUR P. MACANDLESS, ST. BRIDE’S CATHOLIC CARE HOME, it read. CONTACT PHONE … Gotcha, she thought. Before the New Management, about 80 percent of modern police work had been indistinguishable from social work: domestic violence mediation, getting drunks home safely on a Saturday night, rounding up dementia patients who’d wandered away with only their lab coats and killer robots to look after them. “I’ll just take this down to the kitchen and wash it,” she said, showing him the empty Erlenmeyer flask. Then she sidled out of the doorway and trotted down the stairs to make a quiet phone call without agitating the patient. While the New Management had cranked all the judicial penalties up to 11, the law still operated much the same as previously—and as a dementia sufferer Prof was clearly not competent to stand trial. But the house was unfit for human habitation, and probably unsafe as well. She still had the social work department’s front desk number in her phone. They could take it from here.

  However, the path to neighborly virtue was paved with stumbling blocks. In this case, they took the form of successive government cuts that had pared public services to the bone. Bounced from extension to extension, it took Wendy most of an hour to get through to Prof’s case worker, who agreed to come straight over—as soon as she’d visited her next two extremely urgent patients and contacted St. Bride’s to confirm that they hadn’t reallocated the mad scientist’s bed. In the event, it took three and a half hours for Mavis from Social Services to get to the condemned house. By which time it was raining steadily, Wendy was out of fucks to give, Professor Skullface had run out of tea—and the Post
Office had shut for the day.

  * * *

  While Evelyn Starkey was being subjected to sordid telephone sex by her boss, Del and Imp bickered in the drawing room, and Wendy Deere struggled to sort out a care home bed for a mad scientist, Game Boy and Doc Depression were discussing breaking and entering on the top floor.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Game Boy complained, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “It shouldn’t be there!”

  “And yet, it is.” Doc leaned against the wall, detachment personified, and watched as Game Boy got more and more excited about a painted-over closet door.

  The top floor of the town house had once housed servants beneath the steeply pitched roof. Four bedrooms opened off a central landing at the top of the stairs. Each had a dormer window projecting out through the sloping roof, so that it was possible to stand upright in the middle of the rooms. (The roofline sloped down to eaves only a meter beyond the outer wall of each bedroom, so that there was barely space to sit up in bed if the bed abutted that wall.) Doc and Game Boy had moved into the attic, stripping out the ancient carpets and slapping a coat of landlord magnolia paint over the walls and ceilings in an effort to render them habitable. Doc had claimed one of the rooms as his own, and Game Boy was building a model railway layout in another (though he preferred to sleep downstairs on a roll-up futon beside his gaming rig).

  But there was one more door on the landing. It stood opposite the top of the attic staircase. It had been nailed shut and painted over long ago, its keyhole blocked with putty as if some previous occupant had been determined to barricade it against all intruders. And Game Boy had observed that it shouldn’t exist. When he’d brought a tape measure to check, he’d found a gap of only fifteen centimeters between the interior walls of the two back rooms: the thickness of an internal load-bearing wall. The painted-shut door was positioned right between the two bedroom doors, and by rights there should be no room for anything behind it—not even a cupboard.