Dead Lies Dreaming

by Charles Stross

  But this job, this was something else.

  “Sound off,” he spoke into his throat mike. “Positions, people.”

  One by one his men confirmed that they were in position, gloves and masks sealed. All good.

  “Five seconds. Knockout gas, ready. Okay, two … one … go!”

  Glass shattered in four windows, followed moments later by the screeching hiss of the aerosol bombs his men had thrown inside. They crouched, all holding their breath despite the gas masks. Aerosolized carfentanil was serious shit, an opiate more than a thousand times as potent as heroin. It made a better nerve gas than a painkiller: they’d used it in Grozny, in the Dubrovka theater siege, anywhere there was a hostage situation where they wanted KO gas with an antidote that didn’t leave the survivors crippled for life. Alexei clutched a spring-loaded Naltrexone injector tightly in his left hand, counting off his breaths, alert for the first sign of disorientation.

  Ten seconds passed, as the hiss from the gas bombs died away. “Sound off,” he ordered. When everybody had reported in, he unwound a fraction. “Okay, let’s get in there. Go! Go! Go!”

  The operatives on door duty hit the lock with a battering ram, shattering the frame and throwing the front door wide open. Two more soldiers rushed past them to cover the interior, flashlight beams skidding across staircase and hallway. Interior doors led to the rooms they’d fumigated: the gas wouldn’t linger for long with broken windows and unsealed chimneys.

  “Nobody in the back,” reported Vassily as Alexei did a quick sweep of the front room. “You’re going to want to see this, boss.”

  The back room was a weird mess. Strange theatrical backdrops blocked off the windows. A huge sofa—almost a double bed—dominated the room, flanked by a rack of clothing and a crazy gaming rig set up with multiple monitors and PCs. Alexei took it in: Staging area, he realized. Vassily was pointing at a laser printer. “Get papers.”

  Alexei peered at the document. It was some kind of flowchart or map diagram, and after puzzling over it for a short time he realized a chunk of it referred to this building. Andrei’s intelligence was right: the gate was on the top floor. He keyed his mike again. “Team one, second floor. Team two, third floor. Go!”

  * * *

  The fuse of Imp’s family curse was lit the moment Jeremy placed his hand on the cover of the black leatherbound volume. He removed it from the trunk, and opened it to read the flyleaf.

  As with a black powder bomb, when the fuse is lit, the powder fizzles furiously, burning down through the pinhole. The bomb is about to detonate, but for a split second nothing appears to happen. A split second: or, in Imp’s case, a number of years.

  At first he’d mistaken it for an old family bible. Certainly the list of Starkeys and dates, inscribed in copperplate script, suggested a record of births, marriages, and deaths. It was a family dogged by a curse: in every other generation, at least one child’s name was struck out. When he turned the page, there was more handwriting, much of it in Latin, some of it in a weird squiggle that hurt his eyes. What English text he could make out appeared to be marginalia and commentary. After a while he realized the squiggles reminded him of a mathematical notation or chemical formulae, or a spiderweb of arrows. (Mind maps were not something he’d encountered yet, and the book predated modern flowchart symbology.) He flicked through pages idly, then came to a cartoonish picture sketched in pencil: stick figures surrounding an inscribed circle with candles burning around its perimeter, and clear references to formulae on the preceding pages.

  Finally the penny dropped. It’s a spell book! he realized excitedly. It wasn’t much like the ones in Harry Potter. It looked awfully dry and rather turgid, and he was quite clear on the distinction between the land of make-believe and the territory of is. But … he turned back to the flyleaf and translated: MDCCCLXIII, that meant 1863, the year of Augustus Starkey. “This is really old!” His eyes widened. Below the book he saw a small stack of similar volumes, their covers increasingly fragile and dried-out the further down the pile he looked, nestled beside a black velvet cloth wrapped around a number of tools. Geometer’s tools: a protractor and compass sized to hold chalk but made from a dull metal, tarnished black with age. A wooden box of chalks and paper-wrapped crayons. A pair of knives with double-edged blades and stained leather-wrapped handles. Dark blue ridged bottles with corks stoppered with wire and wax. A small wooden letter-writing box, with dried-up inkwells and wooden-handled pens with dipping nibs. And, wrapped in a deep blue velvet cloth with gilt-trimmed tassels, he happened upon something oddly close to spherical—unwrapped, it proved to be a yellow-brown human skull covered with a filigree of intricate graffiti that resembled the notation in the book. “Wow.”

  Is this some kind of joke? ran through his head, followed rapidly by No, this isn’t funny at all, and It’d be too much work. Mum was too busy and pragmatic, and Dad was too, well, Dad, to concoct an enigma like this chest for his amusement. As for Evie, maybe, but the skull would totally gross her the ick out. It hinted at black magic, the stench of low-budget Hammer Horror movies on late night TV.

  But it had belonged to Grandpa.

  Imp carefully repacked everything except the topmost book, or journal, or whatever it was. This he carried downstairs to his bedroom, where he leafed through it for another hour before shelving it between a copy of Peter and Wendy (he was reading it for his GCSE practice assignment), and his sister’s The Fellowship of the Ring (which he had tried to read because of the movie).

  Jeremy forgot about the book for a couple days, but that Saturday Evie popped her head around his door and asked, “Have you seen my copy of Fellowship?”

  “Uh, dunno…”

  Sharp eyes caught his lie: “So what’s this, then?” She stepped inside and her hand went to his bookshelf. “How could you forget?” He was still trying to think of an excuse when her fingers slipped sideways and embraced the knobbly black spine. “And what—” She pulled it out. “Hey, where did you get this?”

  “I found it in a trunk in the attic. I was just playing,” he said defensively.

  “Never said you weren’t.” She opened the book to the flyleaf. “Oh wow, weird, what was it doing there? Hey, does Mum know about this?”

  “Wait!” he said frantically. “It was in Grandpa’s box!” Mum was spending altogether too much time on church things these days. Magic books would not be safe in her hands.

  “Oh.” Evie sounded thoughtful. “So Dad must’ve…” She trailed off, seemingly having reached a decision. “I’m going to show him.”

  “No! It’s mine!”

  “It’s Dad’s,” she told him firmly. “You shouldn’t take what’s not yours, Jerm, it’s not right.” She marched downstairs with Jeremy hot on her heels, grabbing for the book, which she held out of reach overhead—Evie was tall for a girl, and Imp hadn’t hit his growth spurt yet—“Daaad?” she hollered.

  And so Jerm’s light-fingered bibliophiliac ways were brought to book, or at least to the attention of his father, who after a brief moment of alarm seemed minded to be forgiving—as long as Imp learned his lesson. “I was keeping the box until you were both older,” said his father. “It’s not safe to meddle with that stuff unless you know what you’re doing. And you,” he glanced at Evie, “thank you for showing me this, but it’s not safe to handle. Apparently it likes you, but books like this are usually powered or protected by a ward—a kind of curse—and anyone who’s not family will be very unhappy if they accidentally touch it.” (This, Imp later learned, was a dark and terrible understatement. Cursed magical texts were nothing to fuck around with.)

  “What does it do?” Imp demanded.

  “What does…?” Dad was briefly nonplussed: “It’s magic, son.”

  “What, you mean like Harry Potter? Or like doing card tricks and pulling rabbits out of hats?”

  Dad sighed, so lugubriously that Imp expected an eye roll: “No, stuff like this.”

  Nothing happened for a moment. “Like what?”
Evie demanded.

  “This,” Dad repeated.

  Then Evie, who was as level-headed and non-screamy as they came, screamed. And a moment later Imp joined her.

  * * *

  Wendy was skeptical at first, but once Imp explained his reasoning they set to work.

  “According to the map we have to go out through a scullery door and cross twelve kilometers of Victorian London to where the manuscript is supposed to be, which is in this building. It’s the private library of some kind of gentlemen’s club, although why it’s in Whitechapel is … I’m guessing it’s where they keep their porn stash? There’s a ley line here that replaces about nine and a half kilometers of surface streets with two kilometers of, uh—fairyland, it says—it runs from a graveyard to an old plague pit, so it’s going to be pretty grody, but it’s better than a three-hour hike. Hmm. If we find some old money we may be able to squeeze into a couple of hansom cabs, but I’m not sure how much the fare would cost. So let’s not count on it: we’re walking via the ghost roads.”

  Imp had taken courses on wardrobe and props in art school because they were as useful to his grand plan as acting and cinematography. Now his expertise with safety pins and fabric shears came in useful. They ended up cannibalizing three or four of the gowns Doc had retrieved to make just two costumes and neither would pass inspection in daylight. But they were bound for a bad part of 1880s London after dark, where the destitute wore rags and the merely poor wore every garment they owned lest they lose the lot if they couldn’t find a crib for the night. Hair was the hardest part to disguise. Rebecca’s bundled dreads and Wendy’s dyke crop would stick out like sore thumbs. But Game Boy produced a battered wig and a pair of mob caps—servants’ headgear—and they were good to go.

  “You’re sure this isn’t all an elaborate joke?” Wendy asked Rebecca as they climbed the steps to the third floor. They walked behind Imp, who had his arm around Doc’s shoulders as he spun an elaborate yarn about one of his other boyfriends. Game Boy huffed to keep up.

  “You just wait, hon.” Rebecca grinned at her, then stumbled: “Dammit!” Wendy caught her wrist. “Hem adjustment needed ’ere,” Rebecca called up to Imp, “I just tripped: don’t wanna break my neck on any stairs if I have to run.”

  “It’s okay to take it up another couple of inches,” Doc volunteered. “Working women didn’t drag their skirts on the ground back then. Too much sewage in the gutters. That right, Imp?”

  “Yes.” Imp sounded slightly annoyed to have his exclusive grip on the exposition of social history challenged. “Okay, let’s fix this.”

  They paused to adjust Rebecca’s costume, then Game Boy opened the door to Neverland. “Whoa, how does that even fit in here?” asked Wendy.

  “It doesn’t.” Rebecca took her arm and led her into the first passageway, pointing out features to either side. “Look! Bathroom. Bedroom. ’Nother bedroom. Kitchen—”

  “Holy crap!”

  “Welcome to my family abode,” Imp said, ironically.

  “You do realize you could crash the entire London property market if you opened this up to renters?” Wendy said when they got to the second passageway, home of G Plan furniture and poodle skirts. “Make a fortune on Airbnb.”

  “The phone signal is crap,” Game Boy noted.

  Wendy frowned at her mobile. “Shit, you’re right. Why?”

  “This corridor is stuck in the 1950s. It gets worse the deeper you go,” Doc told her. They came to a square interior space with multiple doors on each side. “Which way now, Imp?”

  Imp checked his treasure map. “Go left, then ahead two and down three steps to the landing on the right. This way.”

  Wendy side-eyed Del, who rolled her eyes and shrugged, then very deliberately produced a piece of green chalk. She scrawled an arrow on the wall next to the door they’d just exited. Then the ladies hastened to keep up with the gentlemen of the party, as they forged deeper into history.

  The corridors led them inexorably back into the past. Modern styles of wallpaper and paint gave way to older designs that had faded with age. Light fittings held fewer bulbs, and mains sockets became scarce. The familiar rectangular three-pin sockets vanished, replaced by two or three round pins and cloth-wrapped cables trailing from hulking wooden radiograms and lamps like flower vases wearing bonnets. The furniture became drab and heavily varnished, the woodwork all painted over. When they traversed a kitchen, the range had a coal scuttle. Descending a second flight of stairs and going up a third, they came to a corridor with unlit gas mantles. It was dark until Del produced a Zippo and lit one of the burners. To Wendy’s surprise, the lamp shed a brilliant white light.

  “The ceramic mantles glow when they get hot,” Doc explained. “They’re made of thorium oxide, so don’t eat any—it’s mildly radioactive. And we’ve gone far enough back in time that they burn town gas, which is mostly carbon monoxide. Never leave a gas lamp turned on and unlit unless you want to die in your sleep.”

  “Thanks, I’ll remember that.” Wendy flicked an imaginary lighter’s flint, then grimaced as a shower of sparks landed on her knuckle. “Ouch,” she mumbled.

  They bypassed the library and skirted the drained swimming pool, descended a spiral staircase, then ignored a darkened lift shaft protected by a shuttered grille. Gas lamps became rare and they proceeded by the glow of their phone flashlights. They came to a long corridor lined with pillared arches that descended at an angle, then a claustrophobic rookery of cramped, drunken-angled bedrooms, many of them windowless, with peeling or no paint and rotting cots crammed in edge to edge. The stump of a burned-out candle sat atop an exposed beam. There was another room with bricks and broken planks piled in the corners, strung wall to wall with ropes for the destitute to lean on as they slept upright. Then there was a short ascent to a scullery and cold store, and a final stairwell.

  Imp paused at the top for a brief confab with Doc. “Here.” He gave everyone a copy of the map and an old-fashioned box of matches. “If we get separated, you can try and find your own way back.”

  “What’s this for?” asked Wendy, squinting at her matchbox.

  “Begging is a crime under the Vagrancy Act. So is sleeping rough. But if you’re offering something for sale—even a single match—that’s not begging. Also,” Doc gave Rebecca a significant look, “if they don’t like your face they might try to bust you for soliciting. The match is an out.”

  Wendy glared at him: “I’d never—!” She stopped. “That’s grossly unprofessional!”

  “Dickensian, even.” Imp’s face was illuminated from below by his phone which lent it a skull-like visage, deep shadows making pools of his eye sockets. “Let’s try not to split up, eh? But if we do, follow the map and keep moving. Once you get back to the side-door you’re, uh, not safe exactly, but you really don’t want to get lost on the other side.” He licked his lips. “And remember, this isn’t real. It’s a version of the past, but the past was never stable. It can’t be stable if time travel is possible. By visiting the past we change things, and it can only stabilize in a state when time travel never happens. Probably something bad happened that prevented this sort of thing, like the way magic mostly stopped working when—” Imp stopped, with a look on his face like he suddenly realized he’d said too much.

  Doc took over again. From the moment they’d begun this trek he’d come out of his usual reticent haze to act as their self-appointed guide. “Victorian London was awful. I mean, it was an utterly shit place to live, unless you were one of the thousand families—the equivalent of a multimillionaire—”

  “—So what’s new? I mean old,” Del snarked.

  “No, really, I mean the air is full of acidic soot particles that condense into choking fogs so thick you can’t see three meters past the end of your nose: pea-soupers, they called them. The streets are full of horse-crap and dogshit, there’s no food hygiene, and a tenth of the population have or are incubating tuberculosis which eventually kills them. Every kind of disease runs ram
pant. Unaccompanied women are usually prostitutes, so if you get split up you can expect to be propositioned.” He nodded at Wendy: she bared her teeth and produced a side-arm baton out of thin air. “Well, maybe not.” He looked at Game Boy who stared back, glassy-eyed. “We think of Victorian London as a world capital, but really, it’s as dirt-poor as the slums of Mumbai back home. Poorer, maybe. Rich is relative and we’re all dressed well enough to be targets for muggers. Let’s not go wandering off or splitting up, huh? In fact, let’s buddy up: I’m going to keep track of you, Imp, and you, Del. Del, I want you to watch Wendy and Game Boy. Wendy, you can keep an eye on—”

  “Let’s go,” Imp butted in as soon as Doc finished mother-henning them to death with stern injunctions about holding hands and wiping their noses and keeping track of one another. “Time’s getting on.” He marched to the staircase and started down it, the boards creaking ominously underfoot.

  “Hey! I hadn’t finished!” Doc squawked after him.

  Game Boy looked up at Wendy. “Is this okay?” he asked slowly. “Because—”

  “I’m in.” Rebecca took Wendy’s arm and leaned close. “This is totally wild, right?”

  “One question!” Wendy shouted after Imp.

  “Yeah?” His voice welled up from the depths of the stairwell like icy water in a cave underground.

  “Just what year are we visiting?”

  “Didn’t I say? Silly me!” He tittered briefly. “We’re going to party like it’s 1888!”

  WHITECHAPEL NIGHTS