Dead Lies Dreaming

by Charles Stross

  “Will be the usual.” She smiled: “But if you hear any names, there might be a bonus in it.” Bernard’s usual was 3 percent plus expenses, but 3 percent of upwards of ten million was nothing to sneeze at. “And ten percent plus a half million bonus if you can identify the seller before it goes to auction. I’m eager to make them an offer to preempt.”

  “Jolly good then, I’ll get digging right away—”

  “I’m sure you will! And Bernard? One more thing?”

  “Yes?”

  “Really don’t tell anyone else about this; it wouldn’t do for the wrong people to get the idea that they could get a leg up by gazumping Rupert in an auction. Rupert finds that sort of thing intensely irritating.” Rupert’s preferred treatment for irritants was an unmarked grave. “And he can be very possessive.”

  “I’m sure—” Bernard’s face flushed as he got the message: good, so he knows about Rupe’s temper—“that won’t be a problem!”

  “Of course not,” Eve said graciously as she let herself out. “Be seeing you!”

  * * *

  “This is nuts,” Doc said when he caught up with Game Boy, in lieu of telling him off—he was still in a fragile state, Doc guessed. “A library?”

  “Wouldn’t you want one in your house if you could have one?” Game Boy enthused.

  “I don’t see what’s so special about a load of old books,” said Del, blowing a plume of dust off a tome as fat as an old-timey computer manual. The book was bound in green cloth, the spine bleached by sunlight. She flipped it open and recited the title: “A Boy’s Compendium of Lore and Legend: Valiant Legends from before the British Empire. Yeah, right.” She dropped it on the floor: Game Boy winced but didn’t bend to pick it up.

  “Some of these are probably worth something secondhand,” said Imp, his eyes alight with avarice. He’d heard stories about places like this in his infancy, fairy tales Dad told him at bedtime, but he could hardly credit the reality of it. Mind scrabbling for traction, he latched onto its most mundane utility first.

  “Good luck figuring out which,” Doc opined dourly. “Have you checked your phone signal?”

  Imp squinted at his phone. “You got no signal either? That sucks.”

  “There’s no signal anywhere once you get past the steps at the end of the first corridor,” Game Boy volunteered. “I tried to Instagram it, but…” He shrugged adorably and Doc had to fight the impulse to pick him up and carry him to safety, away from this confusing spatiotemporal maze of rooms. There was something disturbing about the idea of being cut off from modern communications even though they were so close to the throbbing heart of a capital city—especially as his phone had plenty of data out on the landing, just beyond the door Game Boy had opened.

  “What the fuck is this place anyway?” complained Del. “I counted paces. We should be next door by now!”

  Imp was poking around the lower shelves, replete and bulging with leatherbound hardbacks. “Look what I found.” He bent down and, with a grunt of effort, heaved a book out of a row of identically bound volumes. He laid it on the leather-topped reading desk in the middle of the room, directly beneath the warm beam of sunlight that filtered in through the skylight. Dust rose as he leafed through it. He took an uncharacteristic degree of care. “Encyclopaedia Britannica … tenth edition? That’s, uh—” he puzzled over the roman numerals for a bit—“published in 1902. My great-grandparents could have owned this.” He looked up. Rebecca was staring at him. “What?”

  “I thought you only read graphic novels these days?” She sounded as if she felt personally betrayed.

  “I can read if I want to! I used to read lots!”

  “Children,” Doc intervened, “what we have here is a puzzle and a problem and can I suggest we discuss it downstairs, maybe over a can of beer?” He side-eyed the two closed doors at the far end of the library. Doors that he’d noticed Game Boy eyeing with a worrying degree of curiosity. They were a peril and a provocation. “It would be really easy to get lost in here,” he explained. The thought of Game Boy haring off into who-knew-what liminal spaces made him sweat.

  “That’s an excellent idea!” Imp wasn’t far behind the curve of his thoughts: “We need a strategy, and a plan for exploration, and a map and a key and a ball of string to find our way back if we get lost! I shall work on an exploration plan forthwith! But I really think we jolly well ought to go downstairs right now.”

  “There are no games up here.” Rebecca turned to Game Boy. “Can you even survive?”

  “There’ll be something,” he said confidently. “There’ll be a games room, you’ll see! And it’ll be full of 1970s games consoles and pinball machines!” But he still followed Imp back down the hallway and up the staircase and past the avocado suite of mundane contemporanea.

  Doc didn’t have the heart to point out the other thing he’d noticed down on the skirting board, the thing that Imp had also clocked. The electricity sockets in this room all had round holes, rather than the more normal rectangular cross-section ones. He’d seen round-pin sockets in a documentary about home life during the Great War. They’d gone out of use in the 1940s. There was no phone signal here. Nor were there LED and halogen lights, automatic machinery, or (beyond the first few rooms) modern electrical appliances. Where might it all end—with gaslight and coal fires, or all the way back to Roman hypocausts?

  * * *

  Eve found the whole idea of a cursed concordance of a book of spells fascinating. But not as fascinating as the fact that Rupert had gotten wind of it and was willing to trust her—her!—with its acquisition.

  Rupert had kept Eve on a tight rein for years, ever since the day he’d laid his cards before her and told her how things were going to be. That day he’d taught her that in order to win at the high-stakes games of the elite, it was not enough to be right: you had to be powerful and ruthless enough not to have to play by someone else’s rules. This had been a hard lesson to stomach. True, over the years since then he’d given her progressively more autonomy. But the rope around her neck was still a rope, whether it was woven from hemp or silk. The benefits of every project she masterminded accrued to Rupert, while the penalties for failure were hers alone to bear.

  As part of her penance these past five years, Eve had single-mindedly studied Rupert for weaknesses she could exploit. If she tried to escape him prematurely, he could make a single phone call that would condemn her to life as a fugitive or even, these days, have her executed: his real hold was not any kind of geas or spellwork, but a dossier of cold, hard crimes she had committed in his service. But knowing he held one end of her noose had made him complacent. Rupert had come to rely on her for too many services, minor and major. In the process, she’d become intimately aware of certain aspects of his business that he should not have trusted to anybody, let alone to one who served out of fear rather than love.

  It was Eve who had commissioned the architectural drawings and managed the planning process and hired the contractors who dug out the second subbasement beneath the Knightsbridge apartment. It was Eve who, working with the head of security, had arranged for the secret tunnel with the pits and the quick-drying cement. It was Eve who had helped Rupert’s strange co-religionists—never say cult—convert the old home theater room into a shrine with an altar that required drainage and running water. And it was Eve who carried out his acquisition, over a multi-year period, of a collection of texts on the subject of witchcraft and magic that started with the swivel-eyed lunacy of the Malleus Maleficarum, worked through the bloodthirsty magnificence of the Codex Yoalli Ehēcatl, and included not less than six pretenders to the title of Al Azif, the Book of Dead Names.

  Frankly, it had come as no surprise whatsoever to Eve to learn that her employer was an ecclesiast in the Cult of the Mute Poet—an esoteric religious order that, because of the sanguinary nature of its devotions, had a pronounced tendency towards secrecy. These days cultists were crawling out of the woodwork like cockroaches. Under the New Management, mem
bership of such dark churches was hardly a career-killing move, as long as they did not challenge the supremacy of the Mad God of Downing Street. And enough money could buy a worrying amount of selective blindness on the part of the authorities. Rupert had connections, Bullingdon Club connections, Piers Gaveston Society connections. Rupert had probably been inducted into the cult by Count Gottfried von Bismarck himself. Rupert could get away with shit that would have any normal person gazing eyelessly down from the glass and chrome skull rack at Marble Arch before you could blink.

  But that was okay, because Eve didn’t plan to tackle Rupert head-on. She wasn’t going to denounce him to the secular authorities, or leak about him to the press.

  Information wants to be free: but information also wants to cost the Earth. Eve was acutely aware of this. Eve was also aware that, over the past few years, certain strange things had crept across the threshold of possibility, slithering out of the shadows to caper in the daylight, openly mocking the age of rationality and reason that had prevailed for the past several centuries. Superheroes flying overhead, the charismatic narcissism of a reborn god in pinstripes sitting in Parliament, magic that worked—Eve was hardly an innocent, and she knew enough about the contents of Rupert’s locked and alarmed cabinet of curiosities to know that the concordance of AW-312.4 was a most desirable asset.

  Rupert had complacently told her to obtain it by any means necessary, putting her in charge of the process of procurement. It hadn’t occurred to him to ask why he’d been allowed to hear about the auction in the first place, or just how broadly Eve might interpret her remit.

  Eve intended to do exactly as she’d been told, and take custody of the manuscript.

  And then she intended to give it to Rupert.

  Give it good and hard.

  * * *

  Safely downstairs, once the door to Neverland on the top floor was wedged shut with wadded-up newspapers to stop the history from leaking out, Imp celebrated their deliverance by opening a half-gallon jug of Old Rosie. He sloshed generous libations into four mugs and then handed them out as Rebecca passed around a never-ending spliff provisioned from Imp’s stash.

  “We need gridded paper and pencils,” said Doc.

  Game Boy nodded along to a beat only he could hear through imaginary headphones. “Used to do paper-and-pencil dungeon crawls with all that stuff.”

  “You won’t get the angles right.” Rebecca waved her joint around by way of punctuation. “Need to measure everything.”

  “No.” Imp glared around the room, slightly red-eyed from the smoke. “That’s not necessary. We know the angles don’t add up to three hundred and sixty degrees up there! The distances don’t sum, the spaces overlap. What we need are the, the connections. Like a tube map, where the lines are nothing to do with the actual distance between stations. This way we won’t get lost even if the measurements say we’ve doubled back on ourselves.” He leaned backward precariously, sinking into the carnivorous brown sofa until he nearly toppled sideways onto Doc. “Huh. I could totally use that shit in the script—an infinite house! Somewhere.”

  “If it keeps getting older the further back we go, eventually we’ll hit the Victorian period,” Game Boy said. “Could you use it for filming the set for the Darlings’ house?”

  “Yes!” Imp sat up excitedly, nearly spilling the dregs of a mug of scrumpy across his lap: Doc caught it in time and gently took it away from him. “The Darling household! That totally works! We’ll need lights, which means power, but did you notice there wasn’t any traffic noise up there? It’ll work for all the indoor scenes!” Then his smile sagged. “I’ll still need to sneak into a soundstage for the motion capture bits aboard the asteroid base and pirate ship, though. Hmm.” Doc pulled him closer and rubbed his hand in small circles on the small of Imp’s back.

  “So it all comes back to the great work, huh?” Rebecca blew a lazy smoke ring at the ceiling.

  “Everything converges on the great work,” Imp confirmed. He took his mug back from Doc, then frowned at the lack of contents. “Top me up, boy,” he demanded, waving it languorously.

  His pose was so theatrically exaggerated that for a moment Doc expected him to add something tasteless—a thoughtlessly racist chop-chop, perhaps—but Imp wasn’t quite that wasted, or was finally beginning to get a clue. Or maybe Game Boy was just in a good mood and chose to ignore it. Either way it summed to zero. Game Boy shook the jug of scrumpy, then threw it in the air, lidless: as it fell back into his hands it sprayed cloudy hard cider that somehow all ended up in Imp’s mug. Oblivious, Imp raised a toast: “Here’s to the great work!”

  Mugs, or joints, or both, were raised all around as the Lost Boys drank, or toked, or both, to Imp’s projected fifteen minutes of fame.

  Imp was mercurial, charismatic, and theatrical by disposition. He was also full of himself. Since the age of seven and three-quarters he had held an unshakable conviction that he was destined to be London’s twenty-first-century answer to Pittsburgh’s Andrew Warhola (if Andy Warhol had grown up with computer graphics, a Peter Pan fixation, and a willingness to fund his art by robbing toy shops rather than painting soup cans). Imp’s magnum opus, the project upon which he had lavished the majority of his creative energies for years, was to be the definitive video (and now classic, old-school, film-camera movie) experience of Peter and Wendy—the stage play by J. M. Barrie. He’d gotten hooked on it as an infant, when his father read it to him at bedtime. It was a family tradition, Dad had insisted. You read Peter and Wendy to your children when it’s your turn to have them. Imp had no intention of ever having children—in fact, he found the prospect existentially terrifying—but the book still had a profound influence on him.

  Imp intended to channel the spirit of the original author’s intent, not the twee rubbish pandered by the Disney Corporation. Peter Pan was an inspiration to Imp in every way imaginable: a chillingly grandiloquent and narcissistic serial killer, detached even from his own shadow. Even in adulthood Imp found himself unaccountably irritated by his inability to fly.2

  However there were obstacles on Imp’s path to greatness. For starters, the bank of Mum and Dad wasn’t around any more. He had a not-terribly-large trust fund, but most of the checks went to keeping the Student Loans Company off his back for his time at art school. Then there was the vexatious issue of copyright law. Peter and Wendy was in perpetual copyright—a copyright granted by Act of Parliament to Great Ormond Street Hospital. All recordings and derivative works were liable to pay royalties, and a pirate production would be perceived by the public as a sin as dastardly as any of Hook’s escapades. Stealing money from sick kids never played well with the tabloids unless you were a billionaire. (Billionaires, in Imp’s world view, could do anything. They could—and many did—play the villain in their very own live-action Bond movies.)

  So Imp’s goal involved egregious and lamentable copyright violation as a precondition, followed by folding, spindling, and rendering nightmarish a children’s fantasy beloved by the millions who had been brainwashed by the evil Wizard of Walt. (Never forgive, never forget—Imp had committed to memory an impassioned half-hour peroration on the evils of the Rodent Corporation, just in case he was ever called upon to monologue, or even soliloquize, in the dock at the Old Bailey.)

  And finally there was the matter of the ever-evolving script, which in Imp’s view required alterations to render it palatable to a modern audience.

  Imp’s version of Peter and Wendy featured dead kids being downloaded from cyberspace and resurrected by the hacker Peter, a maniac with a detachable shadow who led the Lost Boys. Peter was a ruthless gang leader locked in eternal struggle with a lawless cyborg ravager, the Dread Space Pirate Hook, with whom he shared a mutual homoerotic love-death relationship. (Imp totally shipped Peter and Hook. In fact, Imp was bent on starring in his own movie as Peter, with Doc playing opposite him as Hook.)

  A psychopathic murderer and child kidnapper, Peter slew without remorse or affection, and demanded ab
solute unquestioning obedience of his followers on pain of being thinned out. (This bit was totally faithful to the original.) He had a malign ghostly AI servant that ran through the tunnels and structures of the abandoned asteroid colony where they lived. She had a crush on Peter—Peter was nothing if not pansexual—and tinkled maliciously as she vented the air from the sleeping capsules of any Lost Boys who dared grow up. But that didn’t happen often because Peter kept them trapped in an eternally delayed pre-pubertal state using a cocktail of hormone suppressors (Game Boy had given him a list), for to grow up was the ultimate betrayal of the principles of the Neotenous Underground.

  Other aspects of Imp’s script were distinctly heterodox. (That is: they took liberties with the source material’s intent.) His Wendy was in no respect a maternal figure—Rebecca would have kicked Imp’s ass all the way around Camden Market if he tried to write her into any kind of mothering role. She was a lethal bounty hunter, modelled on Grace Jones’s character in Luc Besson’s The Sixth Element. Imp’s Wendy had been sent to the asteroid to infiltrate Peter’s cell of nihilistic terror-children and assassinate their leader, but she was destined to fall in love with him and, after his heart was cut out by Hook, she was to graft his head onto the side of her own neck while his body regenerated. Finally there was the alien, the ticking lizard-monster in the ventilation ducts, that lived only to lay its eggs inside their bodies. And there was also going to be a blue, six-legged, brain-upgraded, psychopomp cyberdog called Nana that would win the boss fight with the crocodalien, just because it was awesome.

  (“Steal from the best” was Imp’s watchword, as was “steal from more than one source and remix them so nobody spots what you’re doing.” (This last assertion was, Doc insisted, highly questionable.) And so was “try to make sure your sources are dead: if they’re still worth stealing, they’ve stood the test of time.” Alien wasn’t dead yet, but since the Disney takeover the Alien Queen was technically a Disney Princess. So it was all a moot point in Imp’s opinion; and anyway, revenge was sweet.)