Dead Lies Dreaming

by Charles Stross

  “I say we open it,” said Game Boy.

  Doc yawned. “You can if you want; I’m going to take a nap.”

  Game Boy pouted. “No fun!”

  “Raid tonight,” Doc reminded him. “Got to get my beauty sleep in first or you’ll have me falling asleep on you.”

  “Fuuu…” Game Boy trailed off. “Really?”

  “Yeah.” Doc yawned again. “I pushed it too hard this afternoon. Got a headache. Fucking Imp.” He grimaced. “I had to hold five of them down at the same time back there: five. Why did there have to be five?”

  “Hey, you’re not the one the guards tried to get physical with!” Game Boy puffed his chest out: “Did you see the way I left them? Did you?”

  “Yes, yes I did,” Doc said gravely. Game Boy preened. “You did great back there.” Doc’s shoulders slumped. “Good thing too,” he added faintly. “It could have gone bad so easily.”

  “Yeah, Deliverator—” Game Boy’s voice caught, and his fragile bravado turned brittle as he looked at Doc for approval.

  “Becca should know better,” Doc agreed. He opened his arms and straightened up. “Hugs?”

  “Hugs.” Game Boy leaned his head against Doc’s shoulder and shivered like he was cold. Doc held him tight until the shudders subsided.

  “She should know it triggers you by now,” Doc murmured. “I’ll have a word with her.”

  “Please don’t, I mean, you don’t have to get involved…”

  “She can be an asshole at times. Like, she just doesn’t think. No excuses.”

  Doc knew—they all knew—what Game Boy’s parents had put him through before he ran away: the conversion therapy and the pray-away-the-gay sessions intended to turn him into the obedient teenaged daughter they expected. Del—Rebecca—was out and proud, ferociously so: she took no shit from anyone, ever, and couldn’t quite get her head around Game Boy’s lack of resilience. She had no feel for how his marginal identity could be so much more tenuous than her own. He’d had it half beaten out of him by his family with their oppressive conformity and their capital-E Expectations, a background quite unlike her own experience of benign neglect. When Del came out to her mother at sixteen, her mother had said, “That’s nice, dear,” and continued painting her nails. When Game Boy announced he was trans at fourteen, his parents made him undergo compulsory desistence “therapy” at a clinic with a 30 percent suicide rate.

  “Doc, she didn’t mean—”

  Doc let go of Game Boy. “You’re doing it again? The apologizing thing? Remember what I told you about it last time?”

  “Crap. Yes.” Game Boy glanced at him furtively. “I know I shouldn’t, but it just comes out.”

  Time to change the subject, Doc decided. “Listen, I’d help you with the cupboard, but like I said, I’ve got a headache and something tells me there’s going to be a lot of hammering.”

  “Nope, I’ve got a better idea.” Game Boy’s smile crept out again, briefly. “I was going to use paint stripper and a heat gun on the hinges and the frame. Then see if it’s actually locked, before I start with the crowbar. How ’bout you take a painkiller and crash out for a bit? I’ll wake you when I need help.”

  It was, Doc thought, not a terrible plan. He decided Game Boy needed encouragement: “No hammering, but if you can get it open I’ll lend a hand. Wake me up, okay? But bring bin bags! It’s probably full of crap.” Likely it was just a closet, shelves piled high with yellowing newspapers and cans of lead-laced paint curdled with age. Likely they’d just mismeasured the interior dimensions of the bedrooms. But: “You never know, there might be some buried treasure…”

  Game Boy gave a perfunctory nod, then scurried off to his hobby room. Doc glanced after him, just once, and sighed. And I thought I had problems? Everyone who lived in Chateau Impresario was at least a little bit fucked-up, but Game Boy was the worst by a mile. He wasn’t quite eighteen and he was desperate but couldn’t even get on the waiting list at a gender clinic without parental approval for another five months. He was a lot better now he was on black market hormone supplements and out from under his folks’ roof, but he was still fragile. Doc felt as if he had to tiptoe around Game Boy: if he ever got angry and lashed out Doc could easily break him. It would be as easy as dropping an egg from the top of a skyscraper. With great power comes great responsibility he reminded himself, and snorted. Then he went into his bedroom, closed the door, and lay down.

  It felt as if only seconds passed but it must have been a lot longer when Doc awakened to find Game Boy leaning over him. “Doc? Doc!”

  “What.” Doc yawned. He’d been lying on his back, mouth open, and now it felt gluey and his throat was dry. But his headache had receded. “What is it?”

  “You told me to wake you if I found something! And I found all the things!” Game Boy was back to what passed for normal again, ebullient and excited.

  It was so contagious that Doc found himself smiling back at him. “What did you uncover?”

  “The door wasn’t locked and it’s not a closet! You’ve got to see this! We’ve got a bathroom!”

  It took Doc a few seconds to set his brain in motion. He sat up, yawning, and pulled his shoes on. “A bathroom? Where?”

  “Off the corridor behind the door! It’s not a closet, it’s more like the wardrobe in The Lion, the Witch, and—”

  Doc bit his tongue before he could say the first—stupid, negative—thing that slipped into his head: You’ve been raiding Imp’s special stash, haven’t you? He settled for an ambiguous “This I have got to see,” as he followed Game Boy out onto the landing.

  Game Boy had been busy. He’d heaped a pile of crap—rags, paint scrapings, tools—atop an old newspaper at one side of the landing, then attacked the frame and hinges. The door, previously a grubby white expanse of gloss paint, was now a mess, scraped all the way down to bare wood in places. The brass knucklebones of hinges peeped around the frame. It stood ajar, and now Doc could see why Game Boy was excited. He wouldn’t have credited it otherwise.

  “There’s a corridor,” he said stupidly.

  “Yes! And look, doors!”

  It wasn’t a particularly pretty passageway. The carpet was the sort of muddy brown weave beloved by landlords in decades past. It was wallpapered in woodchip-textured light brown, and it stank of dust and a dank note of mold that made Doc’s sinuses clench like fists. There were no windows, but a naked filament bulb, so dim that Doc could almost look at it directly, hung overhead. It cast a questionable light on two closed doors to either side, and another at the end of the corridor. Doors which, quite obviously, couldn’t possibly exist.

  “Right, that’s it.” Doc turned, about to march downstairs to have it out with Imp (who had clearly been a bit too generous with the hallucinogens lately) when something Game Boy had said, in combination with the state of his post-nap bladder, made him pause. “Hey. You said there’s a bathroom?”

  “First door on the left. Check it out!”

  I’m going to regret this, Doc thought, and opened the first door on the left.

  The bathroom was quite unexceptional—for a room furnished in the 1970s with the sort of fixtures and fittings that had been commonplace when Doc’s parents were growing up. The suite was a peculiar shade of bilious green—optimistically dubbed “avocado” by marketers—with plastic taps and a showerhead that promised to spray a lukewarm dribble of water all over the bathroom floor if one dared to use it. There was a frosted-glass window, and a bathroom cabinet with mirror-fronted doors. A radiant heater bolted high up on one wall and controlled via a pull-cord threatened a charmingly domestic electrocution to anyone who used it. It was all completely mundane and normal, except that it couldn’t possibly exist because it occupied the same space as the back bedroom on the left.

  “Okay, then.” Doc shut the bathroom door behind him and raised the toilet lid. He sniffed. Water. He wished he hadn’t: it was quite appallingly stagnant. He pushed down on the old-style handle and it flushed, almost a
s if it was real. There was even a roll of toilet paper on a wall-mounted holder beside it. Sighing, he lowered the toilet seat, and then his trousers, and gingerly lowered himself until he felt the seat rim—quite solid—under his buttocks. “Fucking hell.”

  After flushing again, he stumbled back onto the landing at the top of the stairs and shook his head. He looked doubtfully back at the door, then went inside the back bedroom on the left and looked around. Nobody had broken into their house and installed an avocado suite while they’d been robbing Hamleys, that much was clear. Increasingly worried, he checked the other back bedroom, with similar results. This makes no sense. “Game Boy?” he called, then looked down the corridor again.

  “Here!” A flaming orange haircut popped out of the door opposite the bathroom.

  “What have you found?” What now?

  “It’s a bedroom! I mean, there’s a bed and a chest of drawers and a wardrobe but everything’s really old, there’s a thing that I think is a stereo? It’s got a vinyl record player and a radio and one of those old cassette things, all in one box with lots of dials and knobs on it, like my grandparents had? But it doesn’t work!” Game Boy paused, drew breath, and gave vent to an elephantine sneeze. “It’s so dusty! It’s like nobody’s been up here for years and years and years!”

  Afterwards Doc was never quite sure from whence it came, but a deep sense of foreboding settled over him. “This is—” he took a deep breath—“it shouldn’t be here. It can’t be here. Or we shouldn’t be here. It’s somewhere that shouldn’t exist. That’s some fucked-up Narnia-grade shit right there.”

  “Yeah! Great, isn’t it?”

  “I think we should tell Imp,” he said, then reluctantly added, “and Del.” See if Imp knows something he wasn’t telling us. Anything at all. The house had been in his family for generations, up until the late 1960s. We’ve wandered into a fucking TARDIS: What if there are Daleks? An urgent impulse prompted him to add: “Whatever you do, don’t split up!”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen the slasher flicks too…”

  “I’m going to get Imp.” And Del. “Don’t go any deeper until I get back?”

  “Okay! I’ll just fetch my phone. I can’t wait to Instagram the hell out of it!”

  * * *

  After he hung up on Miss Starkey, Rupert de Montfort Bigge sighed happily, slipped his phone inside the breast pocket of his suit, and strolled onto the balcony to survey his estate. The flagstones were warm beneath the afternoon sun, and heat rose from the steep streets on the hillside below. Waves broke on the pebbled foreshore a quarter of a kilometer away, singing the never-ending song of the wild seas. All of this is mine he reminded himself, and if a man’s heart could burst from the joy of gloating over his possessions, he could not think of a better way to go at just that moment.

  This was not, admittedly, as large a demesne as a fellow like Rupert might wish for. The territorial rights that had come with the title of Seigneur of Skaro—a steal for the asking price of a mere £48.2M—only covered the 2.8 square kilometers of Skaro itself, plus the surrounding fisheries out to the internationally agreed territorial limit. He barely had the right to levy taxes on the population of 462 souls, and he owed feudal dues to the Duke of Normandy by way of the Lieutenant Governor in Guernsey, dammit, so strike out the dream of a seat at the United Nations General Assembly. (At least for now.) But he was nevertheless the undisputed Lord of Skaro, and it was a start, and that was the main thing: he had an island base with minions, a castle, a luxury helicopter, and a multibillion-pound hedge fund to manage.

  What more could a man ask for?

  (Quite a lot, actually.)

  It was early afternoon, and far to the west the dealer floor on Wall Street would be open for business. But business could wait on his attention for just a little longer. Rupert’s calling was more esoteric than the simple-minded worship of Mammon he was identified with in the public eye. He searched the horizon, gazing into the distance as if looking for signs of trouble in his private paradise: but his attention was directed inwards.

  Footsteps approached him from behind, then stopped on the threshold of the balcony.

  “Mr. Bond,” he said.

  The name was Rupert’s little joke. A succession of men had played this role for him, their faces changing with the years (and seldom for any reason as benign as cosmetic surgery). They all answered in turn to the same code name. Indeed, Rupert was at pains never to learn their actual identity, to preserve a fig leaf of deniability. This one, being a twenty-first-century Bond, had a neatly groomed beard and moustache, wore his dress shirt with an open collar, and softened his hard-edged appearance with spectacles (albeit with non-corrective lenses). But despite the overhaul, he was still a Bond—the bludgeon-wielding counterpart to Miss Starkey’s poisoned stiletto.

  “You asked for me, sir?”

  “Yes, I did,” he said vaguely, then fell silent.

  “The usual, sir?”

  “With variations.” Rupert glanced at him. “I have recently tasked Miss Starkey with an extremely sensitive procurement job. I believe she will perform her assignment with her usual efficiency.”

  “Sir.” The Bond’s eyebrows furrowed minutely, but otherwise his face displayed all the expressiveness of a brick wall. The faint twang of a Midwestern accent and the bulky musculature of a former US Navy SEAL were all that betrayed his background. (Rupert supposed he could have hired some former SBS muscle, but he liked to keep the Bonds just slightly alienated; in Rupert’s experience, British mercenaries tended to lack the deference towards nobility that he expected of his servants.)

  “There may be loose ends,” Rupert continued. “Miss Starkey will tie off any that she notices, but the nature of the assignment is such that there will be competition, and it will leave a trail. So your job is to mop up after her.”

  The Bond nodded, almost imperceptibly, then spoke: “Is Miss Starkey herself to be considered a loose end?”

  Rupert turned the idea over in his mind, imagining Eve’s luscious lips turning blue and cyanotic, her purpling tongue protruding between them, eyes wide and innocent. It was almost enough to make him hard again: but no. “Not unless you find clear proof of treachery, which I don’t expect.” She’s not stupid: she knows the consequences of disloyalty.

  Once again, he savored the memory of her shock and anger when he revealed his opening hand in their little game. Her submission had been grudgingly given at first, then resigned, finally willing—eager, even, once she grasped the advantages of his patronage. The lengthy, enjoyable training program he’d subjected her to had tested her loyalty: but she’d never quite reached breaking point, requiring him to fully reveal his power over her. She clearly didn’t realize how much further his control went than the petty little geas he’d imposed at the start via her employment contract. He sincerely hoped it wouldn’t be necessary to liquidate her: it would take him a very long time to replace Eve if she turned rotten, even without taking into account her unique birthright. “She knows I’m watching. The panopticon sees all, what?”

  “Very good, sir.” The Bond actually clicked his heels. “Will there be anything else, sir?”

  “On your way out, tell Anthony to lay out my vestments in the dressing room, I’ll be conducting the midnight rites tonight. That’s all for now. You may take the helicopter as far as London, but send it back once you arrive.”

  “Sir.” The Bond was waiting for something.

  “Dismissed, Mr. Bond.”

  Rupert ignored the Bond until he went away. Then he returned to his office. The bulletproof French windows whirred shut behind him as he sat at his desk, opened the humidor, and selected a cigar. It was one of the few vices he still permitted himself, and that in moderation: doctor’s orders lest he die before the Great Working was complete. He prepared and lit it, then leaned back in his chair for a few minutes of peaceful meditation. It was his last window of solitude until after tonight’s communion service: partaking of the blood and body of the in
nocent, reading their entrails, juggling their giblets, and conducting the divination to learn which trades to place when the markets opened in the Far East tomorrow.

  No rest for the wicked, he thought, and chuckled to himself. It would be another sleepless night but in the morning he would be the richer for it, and the Great Working would be one step closer to fruition.

  BOOKISH LORE

  Game Boy went exploring while Doc went to fetch Imp and Del.

  This wasn’t deliberate perversity on Game Boy’s part; it was just that he hated being bossed around, even by Doc, who he liked, a lot. He’d always had an itchy impulse towards activity, but when he’d been a kid he’d been drowned in parental expectations of passivity and feminine behavior, which were now tangled up inextricably in his sense of identity. Telling Game Boy not to do something was a surefire way to make him do it, even despite his own better judgment. So while Doc went downstairs, Game Boy began opening doors to see where they led.

  * * *

  Fragments from Game Boy’s photo stream:

  Bathroom: First door on the left. Avocado suite with corner bath, bidet, pedestal washbasin. Mirror-fronted bathroom cabinet above washbasin. Floored in cork tiles, walls in green and white ceramic up to one meter, painted white up to ceiling. Wall-mounted filament bulbs behind splash-proof covers. Radiant electric heater on wall above small, single-glazed sash window with frosted glass lower pane. Vintage: late 1970s.

  Bedroom 1: First door on the right, opposite bathroom. 3.5 meters by 2.5 meters. Double bed with sprung mattress and down pillows, duvet, and plain white sheets, covered by dustsheet. Wardrobe in corner, chest of drawers (one meter high) at foot of bed, one bedside table with ceramic bedside lamp. 1970s Hitachi music center (stereo radio/cassette/record player) on top of chest of drawers, not plugged in, speakers on floor to either side. Wallpaper: dark orange and red abstract pattern. Carpet: plum woolen shag, medium pile. Curtains: brown, concealing sash window overlooking garden to rear of house. Mains socket: single BS 1363 socket with a 2-way adapter for the lamp, one receptacle free.