Dead Lies Dreaming

by Charles Stross

  Game Boy waited until their flashlight beams shone away from him, then scuttled for cover against the nearest wall. There he waited and watched, shivering from tension.

  The one who had fallen did not move again, and now there were two. The one who had been on the receiving end of the other’s orders bent and picked up something rectangular—the book, Game Boy realized. And now his power was shouting GoGoGo! in the back of his head again, so Game Boy was off—racing away from them in the opposite direction, half-skipping and shuffling to break up the rhythm of his stride, until a prickling in his scalp told him to duck into a doorway and push. The door, slimy and rotten beneath his fingers, swung inwards into darkness.

  Game Boy skipped along a narrow passageway in total darkness, walls close enough to touch without stretching his arms, and bounced over more than one body—sleeping or dead, he couldn’t tell—then into a room where he dropped and rolled to avoid clotheslining himself on a horizontal rope against which sleeping derelicts leaned. Another rope, another roofed-over yard, rats scuttling for cover.

  A silent voice sang glassy-toned in his ears: “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack duck under the razor’s flick”—and then there was another door, an alley with flagstones slippery with noisome muck, a rotting gate, and another narrow street carpeted in unnatural mist. He tiptoed to the next corner and turned, to see two retreating backs half-shrouded by the smog, their bowler-hatted heads twitching side to side. His talent had taken him on a shortcut through a doss-house just as the thugs with the book began a sweep of the alley for threats. If he’d been in sight—

  Game Boy darted after them, sure-footed with the practiced buzz of a speed run through a well-known level. Only his lack of health potions and power-ups held him back; that, and the sick knowledge that he’d never played this game before in his life, and might not live to do so again if he took a step wrong. Jack be nimble, this is the Ripper’s vestibule, only I’m not a—

  A gurgling scream and a hand up-flung in the coiling fog-banks of the past: this Ripper targeted men as well as women, hard or soft made no difference. Game Boy dropped again, shivering with fear, as the last man standing from the goon squad screamed imprecations into the night then punctuated his rant with a squeezed trigger, blasting gunpowder shadows that strobed across the weeping brick walls on either side.

  It takes about a minute, a quietly rational corner of his mind narrated: a minute from taking the book without permission to being struck down. The curse isn’t instantaneous. Assuming the stalker in the mist was actually the curse finding its way to the target, and not something else, some metaphysical epiphenomenon of this fever dream of Whitechapel made real. Not Leather Apron, not Spring-heeled Jack, but the tangible effect of a curse applied to a physical object. Game Boy breathed deeply of the foul air, suppressing his coughs until the gunman wound down from his screaming jag and ran off into the night, heading in the direction of the plague pit and ley line. He totally lost it, Game Boy marvelled. Not so easy to be a hard man when you’re on your own among aliens, is it?

  Game Boy crept across the alley to where the book thief had fallen. It was mercifully dark, shrouding the dead man’s face in shadows and hiding the frightfulness that had been inflicted on his body. He’d dropped the book a few paces away, and Game Boy nearly tripped when his toe struck the spine. Bingo.

  He raised his face towards the fuming chimneys and the clouds above and whispered, “Deliverator? I’ve got a package for you.”

  Something rustled behind him: he jumped and spun round just in time to see the end of a rope drop to the pavement. A couple of seconds later a body dropped from the gutter above, stockinged feet gripping the rope as Del abseiled down from the rooftop. She unhooked her sling, shook down her hitched-up skirts, and stepped away from the wall as another body joined her. Game Boy’s jaw fell. “Mountaineering gear? Where did you get that?”

  “Remember the Boy Scout motto?” Wendy said ironically. She let go of the ropes and harnesses: a moment later they thinned into vapor, merging with the mist.

  “We took to the rooftops ’coz that seemed safest, what with all the shooting,” Del explained. “Where’s the book, then?”

  “Oh, wait.” Game Boy took a deep breath, then bent down. “Hello, book,” he said, laying hands on the leather cover: it felt greasy and slightly warm, and his mouth tasted like he’d just licked the contacts of a nine-volt battery. “I am picking you up because you seem to be lost, and I’m sure you need help finding your way back to your rightful owner.” It seemed very important to get these words exactly right. “I want to help return you to where you belong. It’s not right to leave books lying around on the streets in the rain. Del—” Game Boy swallowed—“here is a book. It does not belong to me but I want to help it go where it needs to be, to where it rightly belongs. I’m sure—” his mouth was abruptly dry—“it won’t hurt someone who is trying to put it right. Would you accept it from me now? It needs to go home.”

  The devil was in the details: if the curse was activated by illegitimate acts of possession, Game Boy might have triggered it (or not), but by passing it voluntarily to another before the curse could fully power up, he was simultaneously insulating Del from it and removing himself from its crosshairs. Or so he hoped. Promising to take it to where it belonged was just a belt-and-braces precaution. He didn’t want to be on the receiving end of a razor-blade smile just because an insane eighteenth-century inquisitor hadn’t anticipated modern offshore financial vehicles in his ritual magic’s definition of ownership.

  “Got it,” said Del. She opened the carpetbag she carried and slid the book carefully inside. “Follow me, I know exactly where we’re going.”

  “To meet up with Imp and Doc?” asked Game Boy.

  Del nodded. “Then we’re taking the ley line.”

  “About time, too,” said Wendy, glancing around. “This place is getting to me.” A gibbering howl of sorrow and heart-stricken loss spiraled into the night, and the clappers of police rattles buzzed like huge, slow-moving hornets in the mist. “I can’t wait to get home.”

  Del stalked up the alley beside Wendy, Game Boy scurrying along to take up the rear. Behind them, a slow tinkle of windchimes sounded, slow and doubtful. And then they went elsewhere.

  * * *

  “We’ve dropped the ball,” Eve announced, “I need to get home ahead of the rush. Which presents us with a bit of a problem.”

  “Hmm,” said the Gammon, staring up the high street. They’d made their way out of the slum and onto a relatively well-lit road near Spitalfields. “We could take another cab…?”

  “Not fast enough. We could take the ley line route instead, but we’d be behind them and on foot and we need to get ahead.”

  A man on a bicycle—a recognizably modern safety bicycle with a chain drive, not a penny-farthing—pedalled slowly past, and Eve smiled, delighted. But of course, we’re at the right end of the 1880s, she thought.

  The last decades of the nineteenth century had been a time of massive change and innovation, with new inventions coming thick and fast, upending the old order. Telephones, steam turbines, electricity, an endless litany of change: gas fires, electric timers, cylinder phonograph music players, movie cameras.

  The modern safety bicycle was just another of the innovations of the 1880s, albeit one of the most visible. It landed in the middle of the decade with a bang, like a Victorian harbinger of the iPhone. They were suddenly everywhere, the first form of cheap mass transportation to emerge and a must-have personal accessory for the modern generation. Unlike the earlier penny-farthing, safety bicycles didn’t require gymnastics to mount and dismount—and they were available to women, who took to them with alacrity.

  By 1892 they’d killed the older two-wheeler stone dead. And they were the answer to Eve’s dilemma.

  “Mr. Franke? Get us bicycles.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  * * *

  The Bond hid among piles of skeletons wrapped in stiff and r
otten shrouds like too-old spiderwebs. While he lurked, he brooded: and as he brooded, he checked his sole remaining pistol.

  They’re not late yet, he told himself. The indefinite they applied equally to Imp’s motley crew and the assclown Transnistrians (whom he had every intention of teaching a short, sharp lesson in fire discipline), or even the chilly ice maiden Miss Starkey. It was only a matter of time before somebody brought him the book, and when they did he’d be ready.

  He’d made it to the plague pit highlighted on the map, swallowed his misgivings, and tackled the sunken road at a ground-eating jog. Time moved strangely in this space, and he wasn’t sure how long he’d been there—but whatever, he’d not run into anyone along the way and it was pretty clear that neither the Lost Boys nor Miss Starkey were up to the sort of brutal wilderness forced-march he’d cut his teeth on in BUD/S land warfare school. (The mafiya guys were another matter, but he was pretty sure they had run into something—someone—heavily armed. They wouldn’t be coming at him without prior attrition.)

  The ley line thoroughly spooked him. That bell-like mocking laughter—he’d lit up the sunken path with his guns, bullets thundering into the mist. It hadn’t worked, and he’d expended half his remaining ammunition along the way. He’d also lost his second Glock 18. He’d put it down while he prepped a reload magazine, and when he reached to pick it up again the tree roots fought him for it, gnarly tubers coiling around the grip and the barrel until he released it and fled, swearing up a silent blue streak inside his skull.

  So now here he was, holed up in a graveyard charnel house at the homeward end of the ley line, all tooled up and waiting for a partner to dance with—

  Voices. Echoing up the tunnel that led from the rusty gate onto the sunken road. “I tell you, we’re nearly home. See? The floor, here? We’re nearly back to the garden gate.”

  “I barely care.” A squeaky voice. “My feet are killing me. Like, I’ve got blisters on my blisters.”

  “You can have a footbath when we get home, dearie.” A man, somewhat effeminate in the Bond’s disdainful opinion. “Keep moving. You’re sure you haven’t seen any sign of Eve?” He sounded worried: Interesting. Possibilities fanned out in the Bond’s mind, a flowchart of goal-directed options from theft and murder to hostage-taking and torture.

  “Could she have gotten ahead of us?” asked Squeaky-Voice.

  “Anything’s possible, I suppose,” said another, deeper male voice, roughened from smoking (or the damnable coal smog back in dream-time London town), “but I doubt it.” And so do I, gloated the Bond.

  “Fucksake, let’s just get this over with,” groused a different woman. One of the lesbos from the cafe in the park, the Bond figured.

  They were nearly in range, so he stepped out from the charnel room and raised his gun. “Good evening.” He smiled, the moonlight inking his eye sockets with shadow and turning his teeth the color of old ivory.

  The short, squeaky-voiced guy screamed and clutched the arm of one of the other overgrown kids. They were barely out of their teens: sucked to be them. The girls stood shoulder to shoulder. The black one clutched a carpetbag against her chest, her chin aggressively tucked down as she glared at him: her special friend looked like she might be more of a problem from her posture—Some martial arts training there, the Bond thought—but was focussed on his gun. Good.

  “You are going to give me the book,” he explained patiently. “Otherwise you will all die, and I will take it from you anyway.”

  “How do we know you won’t kill us?”

  The Bond resisted the impulse to roll his eyes: “Because I don’t fucking need to. Have you any idea how hard it is to find 9mm Parabellum in London these days?” (The answer: extremely hard, unless you had an end-user certificate and a licensed arms dealer at your beck and call who could have it shipped to your boss’s private island base and flown in on his VIP helicopter.) “Give me the book and I’ll let you live. I’ll shut the gate behind me when I go. You’re not stupid so you’ll sit tight and give me a fifteen-minute head start before you follow me because if I ever see you again I will kill you. Clear?”

  He snapped his fingers. “Do. It. Now.”

  “Give him the book,” said Squeaky-Voice, his tone dismal.

  “Fuck.” The black woman sounded totally disgusted as she held up the carpetbag. “Really?”

  “Do it,” hissed her girlfriend.

  “Stop!” the Bond said tensely. “Put the bag down and open it. Slowly. Show me.” This was when they’d try something if they were stupid.

  She put the bag down and then opened the top. One of the boys slowly reached for a pocket. “Flashlight,” he said.

  “Very, very, slowly.” The Bond smiled again and the boy shook in his boots as he carefully removed a phone and tapped its screen.

  The interior of the bag lit up, revealing a leatherbound volume.

  “Kick it towards me,” said the Bond. “Now I want you to go back that way, all the way down the tunnel to the sunken road—” their impresario-ringleader startled, as if he hadn’t realized the Bond had known about it, how stupid was he?—“behind the gate. And then you wait fifteen minutes. Remember that. You got a stopwatch on that thing? Fifteen minutes, or maybe I shoot you. Do you understand?”

  The Impresario nodded. “Worst game of hide and seek ever,” said the squeaky-voiced boy.

  “You got it. Now piss off. Damn meddling kids.”

  They backed away, looking bereft. Lost, maybe. Sucked to be them, utterly incapable of fighting back in a real man’s world. The Bond grabbed the bag with his free hand and hastily retreated to the crypt entrance. He holstered his gun, then shut and locked the cast-iron gate. Next, he pulled out a small double-barrelled syringe of quick-setting epoxy resin and squirted it into the keyhole. It’d be set hard in two or three minutes, although it’d take a day to cure to full strength. But that didn’t matter. It’d stop them picking the lock, and he’d hear the noise if they somehow smashed the gate while he was still in the vicinity. Once he was home, well, he had a couple of kilos of C4 in the boot of the Aston Martin: more than enough to drop the entire rotten Georgian town house on their heads before they found their way back from Neverland.

  Whistling tunelessly to himself, the Bond jogged through misty streets towards the Starkey family mansion, and the portal back to the real world.

  * * *

  “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

  “Shut it, Game Boy, I’m trying to think here.”

  Game Boy rounded on Imp. “Since when are you in charge any more? You got us into this mess! Why didn’t you roll him? Or you, Doc—”

  “I tried.” Doc massaged his temples. “My head hurts. He had a ward—”

  “He also had a great big gun, and in case you hadn’t noticed there are no save points in real life,” Imp scolded Game Boy.

  “I shouldn’t worry, though,” Wendy chipped in. “He’ll be dead soon enough.”

  “Why—”

  “Oh.” Game Boy smiled. “Oh. Oh!”

  “Yes, oh indeed.” Del smiled back at him. It was not a friendly smile. “He’s fucked. That guy’s a dead man walking, he just doesn’t know it yet.”

  “If Eve’s right about the curse,” Imp pointed out. “And if her boss didn’t send him as insurance, did that occur to you? And we need to get moving. I’ve got a bad feeling about this place. Like the wallpaper is falling off and there’s something rotten underneath.”

  “Sit tight,” Wendy told him. “It’s only been a minute and he can murder the lot of us if we run into him before, the, the curse hits.” She took a deep breath. “Did you see the size of the magazine on that thing? I’m pretty certain it’s a Glock—the Met use them—but the fully automatic version. While we’re bunched up in here…”

  She punched her left hand forward and flourished her fancy compound bow in front of Del: “I’m not feeling that lucky, thank you very much.” The bow vanished. “Anyway, assault with a deadly weapon is not my cup of tea and I�
�m not feeling much love for a self-defense plea in mitigation, so let’s maybe wait another twelve minutes before we try to get ourselves killed?”

  Game Boy spoke up again: “I’m not sure we can hang on that long.” He shivered. “You know that thing when you’re on a trap run through a kill zone and the ceiling’s coming down right behind you and it’s a trade-off between movement speed and hit points? I’m getting that feeling. That one. We’re on a timer and we don’t have fifteen minutes.”

  “You’re saying we’re fucked,” said Doc.

  “Yeah, and you—” Game Boy rounded on him—“this isn’t helping.” He deflated.

  Imp focussed on Game Boy. “You’re absolutely sure we’ve got to move right now?”

  Game Boy nodded.

  “Okay, I’ve got this.” Wendy shoved her way to the front of the queue and marched straight up the stairs to the gate at the front of the crypt. “Torch.” Del passed her a flashlight and she summoned up the same skeleton key she’d used before. “Huh. Shit. It’s not going in properly, it’s—fuck! He jammed the lock!”

  The key morphed frantically in her hand, expanding into a pry-bar and then a flat surface she could use for leverage. But the lock was well and truly jammed. “Fuck.” Wendy froze, then looked over her shoulder. “We’re going to need to break it, but if he’s waiting outside he’ll hear—”

  Del laid a calming hand on her shoulder. “Peace! There will be no battering here. Listen, can you make a stepladder?”

  “Yes, but—” Wendy gestured at the staircase—“it might slip—”

  “Not if you hook it over the top of the gate.”

  Game Boy was positively frantic, hopping up and down on his toes: “Do it! Do it! Do it! The bad things are coming!”

  Wendy made Del’s ladder appear, while Imp gaped, his usual pose of detachment abandoned for the time being. She stood aside as Del scrambled up the ladder and dropped to the graveyard dirt on the other side of the gate. “Game Boy? You go next.” Wendy gripped one side of the ladder. “If I let go it’ll fade,” she said tensely. “Go on, go, I can’t hold it for long, it’s too heavy.”