Dead Lies Dreaming

by Charles Stross

  “Just remember not to call me Abraham,” he snarked. Then the gloom cloud dropped again. “I’d never do that to one of my kids. Although Jeremy has tempted me a time or two.”

  The nature of the family’s relationship with their Lares was contractual: in every second generation the family would provide the Lares with a sacrifice, and in return the Lares would provide the family with the power to walk through dreams and warp dreams into reality.

  When Great-great-great-to-the-nth-gramps had signed in blood on the dotted line, it had probably seemed like a superb bargain to a sociopathic pre-Victorian paterfamilias. Life was cheap in those days and the family had grown rich and powerful trading in powerful artifacts, visiting other realms. As recently as 1900, one in five infants died before the age of five: a century earlier, it had been closer to two in five. What was another child’s life cut short in sorrow and pain, if it was the price of safety and prosperity for their siblings and nieces and nephews? Great-great-grandma had birthed twelve babes, of which eight survived to adulthood. Great-grandpa was one of the survivors. Group selection was the term for it in evolutionary biology: sacrificing a life to enhance the survival prospects of one’s kin.

  But the drought of magic had coincided with the onset of the demographic transition, the birthrate plummeting even as the survival rate among infants rocketed, and the sacrificial pact grew onerous. One infant among many was few: one among few amounted to many. Grandpa’s sacrificed sibling, his name struck through in the family spell book, had been the last, for Grandpa had only the one brother, and had been guilt-stricken thereafter. Dad was an only child. Evie and Imp were two, and Dad had declined to ritually slit either of their throats, although Mum’s melancholia—

  “Dad, did Mum ever try to—” Her mouth dried up as he led her into the bedroom and pushed the bed to one side, revealing a pre-scribed containment circle.

  “Yes,” he said, after staring at his feet in silence for almost a minute. “We’d hoped that the contract might be fulfilled if, if—”

  “—An early termination?”

  “—Was not acceptable to the Lares.” He nodded slowly, caught up in decades-old grief. “The contract specified it had to be a natural born child. She tried, Evie, she did it to protect you both. It didn’t work.”

  “There must be another way around it, surely?”

  “Not that we could find.” He sighed. “Magic’s easier now, though. It may not be necessary any more. Or there might be new possibilities. Cloning, maybe. Something with stem cells. Who knows?” He draped a cloth across the bedside table and then laid the skull upon it, an improvised altar for a scratch-built ritual exorcism. “It’ll only become an issue if you or Jeremy want to have children.”

  “I’d dissolve the contract with the Lares first,” she warned him. “Walk away from the power.”

  “Yes, well, you wouldn’t be the first to try to do that. Unfortunately life has a way of making liars of us, for all our good intentions.” He carefully scribed a trail of sea salt around the circle. “Our ancestor didn’t have the foresight to add a termination clause, so it runs in perpetuity. There’s a write-up in volume four and a commentary in volume nine of the annals. The price of forfeiture tends to be the life of the contracted party. In fact, the whole goddamn binding is a trade of power for death. The whole point of the sacrifice is to deflect the death onto someone else, rather than the adept’s own head.”

  Life sucked but it sucked less than the alternative, Evie would freely admit. Also, the way magic was becoming easier these days gave her a prickly premonition. It wasn’t just that she was gaining experience, becoming more proficient. Something fundamental was shifting in the world, and in the long term it would be to their benefit. Maybe they wouldn’t need the grotesque pact with the Lares for much longer. Maybe she and Imp would acquire sufficient power in their own right that they’d be able to break free of it. The future beckoned, offering hope for the kind of prosperity their family hadn’t known since Great-granddad’s days.

  Presently all was in position. Dad checked his watch. “Your mother should be home in an hour or so. We should cook tea, Evie. You can say you did it as a treat? She’ll like it if she thinks you’re learning to look after yourself.”

  “Huh.” Evie sniffed, mildly offended: “Just because you don’t want to, Dad!” But she headed for the kitchen all the same, calling, “Why don’t you make yourself useful and lay the table?” over her shoulder.

  “I’ll do that.” Her father shuffled through into the dining room and began assembling place mats and cutlery. “Your mother will feel sleepy after supper and want to go and have a lie-down,” he called.

  “Do I want to know?” Evie asked. “Where do you even get roofies, anyway?”

  “I’d never do that to Jenny!” His offense was tangible. “As long as she sits in her usual place she’ll find it hard to keep her eyes open.”

  “Ah, volume six, section three?” She mentally patted herself on the back as she raided the freezer for Sunday’s ready meal and then set to work peeling spuds and preparing fresh vegetables to go with it. Gravy would come last.

  “That would be your great-grandfather’s memorandum on sleep disorders and their treatment, yes. It was a regular money-spinner before modern tranquilizers came along.”

  “Got it.” Evie pulled out the roasting pan, turned on the oven, and got the rosemary, sea salt, and olive oil ready. The saucepan full of potatoes was already simmering. She drained them and readied them for roasting as her father scribed a soporific ward on the underside of her mother’s chair.

  Finally, with the food in the oven and the good silverware set out (and a bottle of burgundy uncorked to breathe), she followed Dad upstairs to lay out the trappings of the exorcism grid under the bed Mum slept in these days: bell, hand-cast clay vessel, ritually purified stopper, the skull in which the Lares’ flame rode, like a kitsch prop from a sixties horror B-movie—

  And then the front door lock unlatched, and nothing more stood between Evie and the end of her childhood.

  * * *

  A burst of automatic gunfire from the lobby at the front of the building rattled Imp’s teeth in his head. “Get down!” shouted Wendy, who ignored her own advice and darted for the spiral staircase up to the mezzanine gangway. Eve crouched, cradling the leatherbound volume in her arms. Glass marbles floated around her head, catching the gaslight like a shattered halo. Game Boy squeaked and dived behind the librarian’s desk at the front of the room.

  A moment later there was another burst of gunfire—Imp couldn’t tell who was shooting slower pistol bullets and who was spraying assault rifle rounds, but the two shooters were audibly different. A body fell backwards through the doors at the front of the reading room, then rolled sideways to a seated position and put three rounds through the door at waist height. The shots reverberated, deafening in the confined space. “Get the table!” shouted the new arrival. “Barricade!”

  “Do it,” snapped Eve. To the prone gunman: “Are you hit?”

  Del tipped the table at the front of the room over on its side, and shoved it towards the doorway. A moment later Game Boy shot out from behind the front desk, grabbed a table leg, and did something odd that somehow levered it up on one edge, so that the table top was vertical right behind the doors.

  “Not hit,” the gunman gasped. He wore immaculate formal evening attire and had somehow kept his hat on through the firefight, but his white gloves were stained gray with gun oil and he stank of burned powder. He pulled a magazine from inside his cloak and reloaded his submachine gun. “Sitrep, ma’am?”

  “Who’s out—” Boom. Eve winced as the room was shaken by a concussive blast. A thin shower of plaster dust rattled from the front cornice.

  “Looks like they brought a grenade launcher, ma’am. Sorry.” The Gammon didn’t look sorry; he looked cold-bloodedly professional as he rolled to his feet and rapidly took stock. “You, you, and you—” he pointed at Game Boy, Imp, and Doc—“if y
ou want to live, start moving furniture fast. We’ve got maybe three minutes, then they’ll force entry through the windows—”

  The hiss and thud of an arrow met the crash of breaking glass and a climactic scream, dwindling: “No they won’t,” Wendy called down.

  “Who the fuck are they?” Imp asked, finally getting a grip. He glared at the Gammon. “And who the fuck are you?”

  “He’s with me.” Eve rested a hand on Imp’s shoulder. “Listen,” she told the Gammon, “we need to make sure whoever’s out there gets this book, then we need to follow them—not too close—and retrieve it when they die.”

  The Gammon stared at her, hard. “Why can’t you just swipe it?” he asked. “It’s not as if there’s a librarian on duty. Ma’am.”

  Eve smiled tightly. “It’s cursed. If you take it out of the library that would be stealing and you’d die, sweetie. Unauthorized withdrawals are not permitted.”

  Suddenly the Gammon’s eyes narrowed. “So it’s a weapon.”

  “A weapon?” Game Boy squeaked.

  “We need to make an exit,” Imp announced. “Me and Doc, and—Wendy—we have to go first. You and Evie need to make it look like we’re retreating. Del and Game Boy, can you guys hide? Or, I dunno, play dead?”

  Del kicked off first: “You have got to be fucking—”

  “—Bad guys shoot their way in, find dead bodies and a book while Eve and—”

  “—Sergeant Franke—”

  “—Retreat under cover. Bad guys take the book and GTFO. Game Boy, you follow them until they drop dead, then you’re merely picking the book up and handing it to Del. Doc and I will make sure nobody looks at you, and we’re outta here. Plausible?”

  “I love it when a plan comes together,” Franke quoted, deadpan.

  Boom. Another shower of plaster dust. Imp’s ears were ringing, almost loudly enough to drown out the hoarse shrieking from outside.

  “How many are there?” Eve demanded as a protracted burst of gunfire rattled what was left of the window glass.

  Franke froze, looking thoughtful: “Too many—and that’s not an AK.” He flicked on a flashlight clamped to his gun and lit up the back wall of the library. There was a discreet door beside the spiral staircase at the far end of the catwalk. “Go there. Go now! Go! Go! Go!”

  “Do as he says, kids, unless you want to play with our new friends,” Eve announced. She walked towards the middle of the room and carefully positioned the book on the floor, facedown. “I renounce custody,” she declared formally. “Whatever you do, don’t touch it now: it’s armed—metaphorically, at least.”

  “Fuck it, this is a very bad plan,” Game Boy complained quietly. He headed towards the back of the library, where a series of bays jutted into the room, and disappeared between two upright bookcases.

  There was a crash from beyond the front doors and the table wobbled. Wendy briefly popped her head up to check out a window, then ducked down again; she picked up her skirts and raced down the spiral staircase. “’Ware grenades!” she warned.

  Imp grabbed the handle of the small door at the back of the library and twisted. “It’s locked!”

  “Shift.” Wendy pushed him aside. “In or out?” she asked over her shoulder.

  “Out,” said the Gammon, raising his gun to cover the front entrance from behind a trolley laden with unsorted volumes waiting to be reshelved.

  “Good call.” Wendy’s hands were suddenly filled with a battering ram. “A hand here?”

  “What do I do?” Doc took the weight of the rear of the ram.

  “Count of three: one … two … three … go!” Together they swung the ram at the doorknob. The door splintered around the lock as it crashed open, revealing an unlit staircase leading down past shelves of supplies.

  Imp directed: “Into the basement, everyone except Game Boy and Del. Remember the book won’t kill anyone unless they take it without permission. We’ll wait near the exit and follow the trail of bodies.”

  “Fucksake,” grated Del, melting into the shadows near the spiral staircase. A moment later Game Boy emerged and lay prone atop one of the bookcases, face to the wall. In the torchlit twilight he resembled a decorative molding. Del followed him, taking up a symmetrical position on the other side of the room.

  “Good luck to you, too,” Eve said coolly. Del flipped her off as Imp and Doc trotted down the stairs. There was another crash from the other end of the room and the table lurched inward as their assailants tried to ram the front doors. Eve glanced at Franke: “Remember, we need to make it look good, but at least one of them has to survive.”

  “You know it’s risky, ma’am?”

  “Don’t talk to me about risk: I’ve been living on borrowed time ever since he was born.” She jerked her chin at the cellar door, where Imp had just vanished into the shadows.

  Franke focussed on the table blocking the entrance. “Here they come,” he breathed, switching from flashlight to laser sight. A red firefly danced across the underside of the table. “In three, two—” Glass shattered high above them; gaslight caught the tumble of two canisters to the middle of the floor. “Grenades!” snapped the Gammon. “Get out!”

  He squeezed off a short burst at the back of the door just as the front doors crashed inwards and the two canisters hit the tiles. “Cover!” he shouted. Eve’s halo of glass marbles shimmered and erupted towards the doorway as the Gammon fired three more rounds and darted back into the basement stairwell. Eve was close on his heels: she pushed the damaged door shut behind them moments before a brilliant light and concussion lit up the room and the gunmen stormed in.

  ACQUISITIONS AND TAKEOVERS

  I am not paid enough for this shit, the Bond thought disgustedly, as fog swirled around his ankles. He bent over the body at his feet, probed with two fingers above the stiff blue collar. The unconscious constable’s pulse held steady. Fuck. He reached down with his other hand, grabbed the man’s chin, and yanked hard until he felt the cervical vertebrae grind. In the distance, wooden rattles clattered like knucklebones in a graveyard crypt, converging on the Whitechapel rookery.

  The cop had nearly iced him, and it would have been entirely his own fault that he’d fallen to an amateur. He’d been so busy reloading and focussing on the headbangers with the full auto kit that he’d nearly missed the double-barrelled shotgun sneaking up behind him. Loss of situational awareness was a perennial problem, and—he froze, alerted by the sound of a different caliber of automatic weapon opening up.

  Well, fuck this for a game of toy soldiers. Stalking Miss Starkey’s clown crew was one thing. Taking on a goon squad with AKs was another. Throwing feral Victorian cops toting shotguns on their home turf into the mix was something else again—and now some joker was lighting up the night with a machine pistol. Nope, this mission’s a bust. Four groups stalking each other in the fog: What is this, a fucking Peter Pan pantomime? All it needed was a crocodile scuttling around with a ticking bomb in its stomach, leatherbound death on four legs. It didn’t matter how good you were; if enough bullets were flying, you could catch one in the neck purely at random. This was shaping up to be a total shit-show, and the Bond was acutely aware that he was hanging his ass out here without backup.

  Oh well. Someone else could get their hands wet collecting the consignment. They’d have to come back to the house if they wanted to get home, and when they did, he’d be waiting for them.

  The Bond kept his back to the wall as he stole away from the firefight at the front of the reading room. There was a crash of breaking glass as something whizzed out through a skylight and disappeared into the night: they were fighting inside the building now. Another hiss, and someone screamed above his head, then fell off the building and hit the cobblestones with a meaty thud. A grenade exploded round the front, the blast muffled by the mist. It sounded like a pitched battle.

  An alleyway over, a corner turned, and the screams and percussion ebbed as if they were a distant memory of another world. But the wooden rattles we
re still audible, coming closer. The mist parted briefly, affording the Bond a glimpse of two burly figures in police helmets and capes. Unfortunately, it also gave them a glimpse of him. “Stop in the name of the law!” shouted one of the constables. “’E’s the Ripper!” shrieked an unseen woman. The Bond winced and dived into the next street as the clatter of a policeman’s rattle echoed off the walls behind him.

  The gunfire and explosions cut off abruptly as he rounded the corner, crossed a backyard (carefully skirting a noisome midden), and turned onto White Church Lane. He drew his coat tight, concealing his webbing vest and twin Glock 18s. Boots on cobblestones behind him, hurrying: “Stop, I say!”

  Fuck. The smog, a classic yellow-tinged pea-souper that smelled of burning coal and sulfur, was getting thicker. The Bond hurried towards the hitching rail where he’d left the stolen cab. Entirely predictably, it was gone: not just the horse and hire-trap, but the hitching rail too. He squinted into the murk, eyes watering as he searched for what he knew to be there. There’d been a pub, and there still was, but the signboard was … was it the same one? Navigating by pubs in the late Victorian East End of London was like navigating by fire hydrants in Manhattan. As he looked around, the Bond gradually realized that he was on the wrong street: he’d lost situational awareness again and taken a wrong turn, become lost inside Whitechapel.

  The Bond was not a neophyte navigator. He’d hiked through mapless jungles in Central America and trackless mountains in Afghanistan. He wasn’t a slave to satnav and GPS, like so many contemporary civilians: he’d been orienteering since he was old enough to tie his own bootlaces. But navigating Whitechapel in 1888 was another matter. The whole point of a rookery was that it was unmappable, with seventeenth-century streets crossing medieval routes cleared by the Great Fire of London that subsequently got filled in and fractally overgrown. People lived in a rookery because they could afford no better or they didn’t want to be findable. A surveyor who ventured inside without a police escort would likely wake up several miles away with a splitting headache, minus his charts, instruments, wallet, and clothing—if he ever woke up. And this version of Whitechapel was just wrong, like the dream of an architect delirious on absinthe, specifying angles that didn’t add up properly.