Dead Lies Dreaming

by Charles Stross

  Another police rattle clattered behind him and the Bond took off into the mist and night again, furious and hunted as he searched for something, anything, he recognized and could orient on: a church, a pub, a hitching rail.

  Behind him, the silvery chatter of windchimes in the fog tinkled louder.

  * * *

  “That was lovely, dear,” said her mother, lining up her knife and fork to bisect her empty plate neatly. She covered her mouth, trying and failing to suppress a yawn. “I’ll just … I think I need a lie-down.”

  “You go right ahead,” her father said indulgently. “Evie and I will do the washing up.”

  Mum was really out of it. She hadn’t been herself for months, but this was by far the worst she’d been in Evie’s presence. When she came home she didn’t ask Evie why she hadn’t come to church with her, or how her flatmates were, or … anything, really. She just smiled vaguely, recited grace, and ate her food, swaying tiredly in her chair. Her body was sitting at the table but her mind was elsewhere. Evie had never been any good at aura work, but even she could tell there was something wrong. It wasn’t a zombie-like absence; it was somehow Stepfordian to Evie’s mind. It was as if her mother’s soul was a candle wick that had been pinched between finger and thumb so that the flame was out, only a burning ember at the tip bespeaking the possibility of reillumination. I hope Dad knows what he’s doing, she told herself.

  Mum yawned again, this time without covering her mouth. Her eyelids were closing, lifting slightly then falling again. She made no move to stand up, but the swaying was growing more pronounced.

  “Evie, would you mind helping your mother upstairs?” Dad asked. “Otherwise I think she’ll fall asleep at the table.”

  “Yes.” Evie stood, and helped her mother up from the chair. Mum mumbled something that might have been a gargled Thanks, then shuffled towards the stairs, her head nodding. Evie got her up to the landing and into the bedroom, terrified that she might face-plant on the carpet at any step. Finally, they were there. “Why don’t you lie down, Mum?” she suggested.

  “Yes, I’ll just…” Her mother sat on the edge of the bed, then slowly toppled backwards until she sprawled crosswise atop the covers. A moment later she began to snore.

  Evie removed her mother’s shoes, then tried to turn the sleeping woman. Mum turned out to be unexpectedly heavy. “Dad? Dad!”

  Heavy thudding on the stairs. “What is it, Evie?”

  “A hand, here? She’s totally zonked. I can’t move her.”

  “Let me.” Dad slid his arms beneath his sleeping wife and gently took her weight while Evie swung her legs up on the bed. “Oww.” He straightened up and rubbed the small of his back, breathing heavily. His brows wrinkled as he stared at the sleeping woman, as if she was a puzzle he couldn’t solve.

  “Dad.” Evie found herself holding his hand. “It’s going to be all right.”

  “No, no it isn’t.” For a moment he sounded distraught.

  “But Dad—”

  Her father leaned over her mother’s head. “Attend,” he told Evie, slipping into the didactic, professorial manner he adopted for her lessons in magecraft. “Your mother is infected.” Using his thumbs at the sides of her jaw, he gently levered her mother’s mouth open. “Observe.”

  Evie only just made it to the toilet. She never again ate a Sunday roast.

  When she finished, she rinsed out her mouth in the sink, and lingered in front of the bathroom mirror staring at her face, seeing half her mother’s features reflected back at her. Her hands were trembling, not with fear or anger, but with a less familiar emotion: hatred.

  She joined her father. “What the fuck is that thing?” she snarled, wiping her runny nose on the back of her sleeve. She pointed past her mother’s sagging lips, at the silvery articulated shield nestling in her lower jaw like an armored parody of a normal tongue: “How did it get in there?” She reached for it, but Dad caught her hand.

  “There is a species of deep sea isopod, Cymothoa exigua, that is called the tongue-eating louse. It crawls into a fish’s mouth and attaches itself to the tongue. It’s a vampire—it severs the blood vessels supplying the tongue, which falls off, and then it attaches itself, drinking the fish’s blood and becoming its new tongue.” Her father swallowed. “This is a relative. It’s what that church she goes to uses in place of a communion wafer.”

  “But it’s eating her soul—” Evie lost it and went straight back to the bathroom. It was a couple of minutes before she could speak again. “Fuck.”

  “Why doesn’t somebody stop them?” she demanded, when she could face the bedroom again.

  “How?” Her father shrugged, and for a few seconds the entire weight of the world was mirrored in his expression of despair. “They’re too powerful, Evie. They’ve got the government wrapped around their little finger—their head preacher man is best mates with the Prime Minister. They’ve got thousands of communicants who’ve taken the host, like your—like Jenny.” He swallowed. “If you take them on, they’ll steamroller you. Put you on a plane to Colorado Springs and make you one of them. Evie, we’re small fry. We can’t—”

  “You can’t.” Her eyes burned with rage. “I’ll find a way, Dad, that I promise you.” She picked up her mother’s hand. “That I promise her. This is evil, and I’m not going to stand for it. Whatever it takes—I’ll do it.” Her back straightened.

  “You can help me right now by checking my circle and lighting the candles, love.” While they’d been talking, dusk had fallen and the bedroom had dimmed to twilight. “We can discuss what you might be able to do—might—about the Golden Promise Ministries some other time. Assuming they fail to raise their sleeper,” he added in an undertone. “If they succeed, we’re all fucked.”

  And without further ado they began their half-assed and foredoomed attempt to exorcise her mother.

  The style of invocation her family used was long on preparation and props but short on chanting. Dad had already diagrammed the precise integration of forces he wanted to produce on an expanse of paper tucked under the bed. It was a simple exclusionary ward, to force out anything non-human—and by human, he’d been careful to include in his definition the human microbiome, and endosymbionts like mitochondria. (As his ancestors had discovered the hard way, failing to do so had varied and drastic consequences ranging from explosive diarrhea to sudden death.) What it boiled down to was an occult vermifuge. The Lares’ mana or stored power, bottled up in the inscribed skull like an osseous Leyden jar, would surge through the grid and burn out anything that didn’t belong inside it. Simple, powerful, foolproof.

  Dad was already breathing heavily and sweating as they started. “Are you feeling okay?” Evie asked.

  He nodded tensely. “I’ll be fine.” His brow wrinkled in concentration as he chanted instructions to the reined entities in the skull, invoking the long-ago pact his family had made with them.

  Mum lay on her back, mouth slightly agape, snoring softly as Dad chanted. Evie echoed Dad’s invocation, but something felt wrong even though the ritual objects were all beginning to glow softly with the radiance that bespoke an operational summoning. She felt oddly hollow. And Dad seemed to notice it, too: his voice rose, his ritual commands growing emphatic.

  Evie licked dry lips. This isn’t working, she thought. Why isn’t it working?

  The bell sitting on the floor at her feet, at the end of the bed, chimed softly, and she startled.

  “In the name of our ancient agreement I command thee to—”

  “A sacrifice has not been made,” tinkled the bell, and somehow Evie understood exactly what it was saying, what the Lares were conveying through the medium of metal. It was a language not English, but something much older that plugged straight into Broca’s area in her frontal lobe, generating speech in a form she could understand. “Broken dependency. Backtracking. Failed to initialize compact. Make sacrifice or die.”

  “What—” Alarmed, Evie tried to step away from the circle, but h
er legs refused to obey her.

  Dad looked up at her in horror. “Evie!”

  “—Does it mean?” she heard herself asking.

  “Oh god. Oh god. Oh god. The curse.”

  Of course, Evie realized distantly, Mum refused to have any more kids because she couldn’t bear to let Dad sacrifice one of them—as if Dad would ever do that to me or Jerm—Her father was no psychopath, nor even an abused and damaged teenager like Grandpa with his endless guilt over what was behind the painted-over door on the top floor of the house he couldn’t bear to live in any longer—

  “Make sacrifice or die,” demanded the Lares.

  —One must die in every two generations, that the pact with the Lares be renewed: and now Eve found herself staring into her father’s eyes as his pupils blew out, darkening in the twilight—

  “Can we abort?” she asked.

  Her father shook his head. “Not at this stage, no…” He swallowed as he stared at her. “I’m sorry, Evie: be strong for me,” he said, raising the athame, the ceremonial knife. Then, before she could stop him, he said, “Take me instead.”

  * * *

  Alexei and his crew stormed the library. There were defenders: at least one with a submachine gun, and a joker with a bow. They fucked up Boris but good. He was up on the roof with Yuri, scoping out the interior and positioning to drop stun grenades inside, when he took an arrow to the knee and fell off the roof. They were all wearing ballistic vests, but arrows were much slower and heavier than bullets and he lost his balance and fell. Fuck. The occupants retreated and Alexei’s crew wasted vital minutes checking the offices in the back and upstairs, making sure nobody was sneaking around behind them, before they discovered the targets had barricaded the fucking doors with an oak table or something. At which point Alexei saw red. The forced entry went smoothly but when they rammed the table out of the way they were too late: a door at the other end was already closing, and although Yevgeny wasted half a magazine on it, there was no likelihood of a kill. With his team at half strength—Yevgeny was limping badly and Igor and Boris were dead—he wasn’t about to go clearing ratholes.

  Get the fucking book. Get the hell back to the mansion. Shoot anyone who gets in the way. Get home and bring the house down behind you. Simple. Right?

  “Fuck,” he hissed, sweeping the catwalk under the upper shelves with his flashlight as Yevgeny and Yuri methodically took the lower galleys and the librarian’s counter.

  “Is fucking library. How the fuck we meant to find right book?” complained Yuri. He poked his gun barrel at a stack of unshelved books at the front desk, dislodging them.

  “Index cards. Stop that. If it is a mess, search will take ten times longer.”

  “Index cards—” Yuri processed—“in English?”

  Alexei forced himself not to clout his subordinate. Yuri was not the sharpest hammer in the toolbox. “Yes, Yuri, in English.” Except according to Intel, the book had been deliberately misfiled. Fuck.

  Their forced entry hadn’t exactly left the library in pristine condition. There were cracks in the plasterwork and dust everywhere. Broken glass and books on the floor, tumbled higgledy-piggledy in the gloom. Gas lamps hissed but barely beat back the darkness. No blood, dammit, and Alexei wanted to see blood badly, wanted it with an urgent and righteous anger. Because fuck this job, fuck these English assholes with their smug magical mojo, fuck this shithole version of London—he hadn’t seen this much poverty since the time he’d been posted to the favelas outside Rio—fuck. All this shit for one goddamn book?

  He shone his flashlight towards the door at the far end of the room. Broken lock, clear signs of a hurried exit. Books strewn around the path of the defenders’ stampede. They wouldn’t be so stupid—he told himself, even as he strolled towards the big leatherbound tome that someone had dropped facedown on the floor in their hurry to escape the flash-bangs. Well, maybe. He grinned humorlessly and reached for the magic compass doohicky on a cord that hung around his shirt collar. It twisted in his grip and tugged straight at the book on the floor. “Hey, Yuri, is your lucky day,” he called softly as he edged towards it, every sense on full alert for trickery, “or is maybe an IED.” Because if he was mounting a staged withdrawal he sure as fuck wouldn’t leave his target lying on the floor—but he might yank the cover off and use it as bait for a trap.

  But the charm-fetish-thing still tugged towards it. Which meant it was full of magical go-juice. Well. Maybe it was a trap, but—Alexei bent towards it. There was nothing to be seen: no wires, no pads, no infrared beams visible in his night-vision scope. “Yuri. Does this look clean to you?”

  Yuri joined him in his inspection. “Sure, boss. What, you think they drop it while run away?”

  “Why, yes, Yuri.” Alexei straightened up. “That’s what I think.” He forced himself to relax and shake the tension out of his neck and shoulders, even though his heart was still hammering and he was on a hair-trigger in case the asshole with the submachine gun popped up again.

  “Then why we not—” Yuri bent towards the book—“take book and go home?”

  He straightened up, cradling the book across his body as he looked at Alexei expectantly.

  Alexei gave him a hard stare, then nodded to himself. “Yes, Yuri, why not,” he breathed. Raising his voice: “Yevgeny? Target acquired! Going home! Last one to the bar is buying!”

  He turned and strode back through the ruined front doors of the reading room, into the lobby, and then into the Whitechapel night. Behind him, Yevgeny and Yuri followed.

  His ears still ringing from the flash-bangs, he didn’t hear the glockenspiel tinkling that followed them out of the library.

  * * *

  Game Boy waited for the angry bowler-hatted Russians with the very big guns to leave, counted to fifty, then sat up. He clutched his head and suppressed a moan of pain as he blinked furiously, trying to flush away the purple and green afterimages. He’d had his head turned to the wall when the flash-bangs detonated, but the wall in front of his face was painted ivory and the flashgun aftermath was taking its time to fade.

  “Fuck,” he whispered, frightened to move: even breathing seemed like a dangerously risky activity. But his sixth sense twitched, prodding him. He needed to make a speed run and start nownownow or it’d be toolatetoolatetoolate—and through the muffled buzzing in his ears he heard nothing else, no footsteps or grumpy Slavic tongues. He rolled over and looked down on a scene of devastation by gaslight. Books and broken glass strewn everywhere, furniture smashed or pushed aside. Across the galley from his niche he saw shadows stir. “Becca?”

  “Shh.” The whites of Del’s eyes were startling in the darkness. Her drab gown was draped unevenly about her, like a fallen curtain or a pile of dirty laundry.

  “They’ve gone and I’m on my way.” He straightened up and dropped lightly from his hiding place. Del followed, a rustling fall of cloth across the shadowed floor. “They went out the front door. You go out the back and meet me round the side.”

  Game Boy nerved himself to move. He pulled his top hat tight around the crown of his head, shot his shirt cuffs (then thought better of it, and tugged his gray coat sleeves down over their bright white shine), and cleared his throat. Bad men with big guns. Well yes, but he’d done it a million times before in games, done it for reals as well—stolen a letter right out of Becca’s new girlfriend’s grasp, ducked and weaved between security guards—but bullets. Game Boy swallowed. Then he ghosted out through the drunkenly askew front doors, feeling the familiar prickle of knowing where to put his feet, where to lean his back, nudging at the back of his skull with a hungry, chattery feeling like insects chewing on his tension.

  It was still night out there, and a sea of mist rose nearly to his kneecaps, swirling in the dim overcast from a million streetlights diffusing through the smog. The air was acrid, choking, and cold. Leftleftleft said his scalp, driving him with a sense of unease. Catchup. He heard boots clattering on cobblestones ahead, then a low chatter. Polis
h or—he supposed this was Russian—sounded odd to his ears, the phonemes unfamiliar and nasal with rolling Rs.

  He heard an abrupt strangled wail cut eerily short. It broke through the ringing in his ears and his talent screamed divefortheground. Game Boy dropped face-first to the pavement, choking on the sweet-sick stench of raw sewage nearby, just before an arpeggio of eardrum-pounding automatic gunfire cut the night apart just above his head. He wasn’t the target, though. The target was a tinkling, chilling laugh of tinkerbell windchimes ringing in the steel breeze, voicing a wild, malignant glee that made his skin crawl. He’d heard it before, back in Imp’s mansion, and thought nothing of it. But it had followed them through the maze of memories of times past, growing more terrifying with every passing era: the Lares, the household gods bound to Imp’s family by their curse.

  “Fuckfuckfuck,” Game Boy babbled under his breath, frightened half out of his wits even though the angry shouting gunmen hadn’t spotted him. Someone else had caught their attention, but not their fire. Only one of them was shouting now, clearly issuing orders to the others. Bright spotlight beams lashed out, visible like searchlights in the foggy air as they crisscrossed the alleyway with lethal blades. Game Boy threw himself sideways, out of the path of deadly light. He heard metallic clicking and barked orders as the gunmen swapped out their magazines. One of them crouched over another, who had fallen, bubbling bloody froth that ran black in the tenebrous gaslamp glow. Something was stalking them.