The Private Life of Elder Things

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  *

  Again, there was a helicopter piloted by Schochtauer. The chief difference here was that the man’s avuncular friendliness was gone, which I felt an improvement. He barely looked at me when I embarked, and maintained a tense silence throughout most of the flight. I am not sure what he would have done, had I been of a more talkative nature. As it was, a journey in utter silence was entirely agreeable to me.

  But he was a man fond of his own voice and opinions. As the lights of Montpelier were visible, his reserve broke and he said, “It’s not what you think, what they’ve promised you.” He sounded very bitter.

  I made some noncommittal sound.

  “You don’t know what they mean for you to leave behind,” he told me. And then, so incongruously that I laughed, “They only want you for your mind.”

  His expression was not amused, though, and he said, “I’ve served them for a decade now.” “Served them” not “worked for”. “They said it would be me, that I would get to go … and then you come along with your nonsense maths and…” and I just about tuned him out, from there, because there has been nothing in my professional life I have achieved that has not come with a chorus of people like Schochtauer complaining that I have somehow usurped an honour earmarked for their own kind.

  “I’m saving you, really,” he said then, and I realised we had diverted from our previous course, because Montpelier was over to our left, and he was flying out across dark farmland, dropping low enough that we were in danger of clipping trees and rooftops.

  I demanded to know what he was doing, but he was concentrating now, finding a place to land, jockeying with the controls to bring the helicopter down on the flat expanse of a meadow.

  “Get out,” he told me, the moment the vehicle came to rest.

  I opened my mouth again, but I saw that he had produced a pistol from inside his jacket, which rendered most of my objections void. At his repeated command I clambered out of the helicopter. I had it in mind to run, but I had got only a few steps before he was out himself and ordering me to halt.

  “I really am saving you, you know,” he told me. Why do such men always feel the need to justify their actions to themselves? “Did they offer you the chance to travel? Believe me, it’s a mode of travel you’d need to sacrifice all of yourself for.” The gun’s aim shakily described a course from my head to my toe.

  “And yet you would take it?” Because keeping him talking right then seemed wise.

  “Yes! Because I have spent a decades researching them and their places, their ways. I have earned my place with them. And I’ll get it, too, when you’re gone. When they think you’ve turned away from them. They’ll turn to me next.”

  I laughed, which was probably not wise. I couldn’t help it, though. “They’ll turn to Doctor Han in Beijing, or even to Jayne Shen from Cornell. They at least understand. You never have.”

  He scowled and jabbed the gun at me, and I thought of how I had never known when to speak and when to be silent. My lack of tact was about to kill me, it seemed. Except that Shochtauer was still in love with the sound of his voice. He wanted to make me agree with him before he killed me.

  “I’m twice the mind you’ll ever be,” he hissed. “I’ve spent my life piecing together the words of ancient rituals, the invocations and rites that open the gates of Yogg-Sothoth and allow travel to the furthest reaches. The ways the ancients did it, the ways our ancestors reached out into the universe. There are entities to be appeased, you idiot woman. There are sacrifices and prices to be paid! And you think you can accomplish that with nothing but numbers?”

  All this had taken place in the pool of yellow radiance shed by the helicopter’s lights. Other than the orange glow on the horizon that was Montpelier, and the silent stars above, the rest of the world was dark. And I had reason to be glad of that, because now I saw there was something atop the helicopter, crouched around the hub of the blades.

  “Yes,” I told Schochtauer. “I think that you can do anything with numbers.”

  It must have come down silently from the sky, just a shadow against the greater blackness. It had landed there with barely a sound, covered by Schochtauer’s brash boasting. I could see nothing of it but a shape that owed nothing to the human. There were great outspread wings and many limbs.

  As I watched, whilst trying to show Schochtauer that my attention was on him, it shifted forwards, swaying like a chameleon does as it readies its strike. One limb shifted forwards and I saw something like a crab’s pincer emerge into the light and take hold of a spar. It was half the size of the helicopter, in silhouette, but it seemed to weigh nothing at all as though it was made of some substance that simply did not interact with the world as normal matter might.

  Schochtauer was still howling that there were traditions and old ways that must be followed, and then he actually began some bizarre chant, “Ia! Ia!” and similar unfamiliar sounds, so that he slobbered and spat about the awkward syllables. The gun was waving wildly.

  I ran. In that moment it was not the man, not the gun, but an overwhelming dread of what the helicopter lamps were about to reveal. His chant broke off in a bark of fury, and he shouted my name, and “I’ll shoot! I’ll shoot!” as if he had some other purpose all this time to train a gun on me.

  But I looked back. The urgency of his voice dragged at me despite my common sense, when I should just have kept running. I looked back, and saw it in the moment that it fell on Schochtauer. Just one moment I saw it, before I tripped and fell. I saw the great bronze sweep of its wings and the segmented, curved body busy with limbs. I saw the bristling lump it had for a head, which threw back the light in new and unknown colours.

  I saw it in that instant, and then the ground drove the breath and senses from me. My last recollection is of gunshots and screaming.

  *

  When I awoke, I was in the building, propped in the security desk chair, and for a moment I wondered if it had all been a deranged dream. Was Noyes about to come and take me to the helicopter after all? Was Schochtauer still back in the boardroom arguing with his unseen employers?

  And then I saw Schochtauer on the screens. He was indeed in the boardroom, laid out on the table there, quite naked. There were no marks at all on his sagging, pallid flesh, but his face—!

  There was such a look on his face, of terror in the face of the unknown. As I watched, he twitched slightly, and I thought he must still live, but his face remained locked in that horrible goggling stare. When the twitch repeated it was not the motion of something moving, but of something being moved.

  I thought of matter that is not like our matter, heedless of our gravity and our light. I thought of what wings might serve, to soar the vastnesses of Rigolo space.

  Then there was a polite cough, and Noyes was there.

  My return to the building, I learned, had been no less mundane than Noyes himself driving to get me, on his employer’s instructions. “They cannot carry us as we are,” his croaky voice affirmed, and I thought of Schochtauer saying, You’d need to sacrifice all of yourself, and They only want you for your mind.

  And that perfect artificial voice over the phone, Would you like to travel? and We can show you how to make your transformations real.

  “There was an offer,” I told Noyes, and he nodded sagely.

  “Are you here to accept?” he asked me, and I had the sense of others listening, all around and yet unseen.

  “I’m ready for my transformation,” I confirmed.

  New Build by Adam Gauntlett

  “Hi, I’m Maidah,” she said, and held her hand out. She hoped she didn’t seem nervous. This was her first solo; she wanted everything to go smoothly. “You are?”

  He shook her hand. “Call me Mike.”

  “Okay. Is that your name, Mike?”

  He shrugged. “It’s what people call me,” he replied, and any possible offence drifted away with a dazzling smile.

  Handsome, she added to her mental checklist. But not for me.

/>   “Have you visited the site before?” She started walking. The quicker they got there, the sooner they could get on with the job.

  He fell in beside her. “Haven’t been inside yet, but yeah, I was by last week to get a look at the place. It looks … well, I suppose you can guess what it looks like.” He gestured expansively at the street and shops they were walking past.

  “This is the new Hoxton.” She laughed. “Or so they tell me.”

  “Looks more like the old Hoxton to me.”

  “You didn’t park your car near here, did you?” Maidah’s brow furrowed.

  “No fear. I left it a couple streets back. I figured that was better than trying to find a space near the site, you know?”

  “Yeah. The senior partner got a look at the place the first time a few days ago, and when he walked out again he didn’t have his brand new mid-life-crisis mobile. I think it ended up a cinder. I can’t complain, though, since I’m betting the reason I have this project is because he didn’t want it after that. Speaking of, I think that’s our baby across the road.”

  It was. Built in 1880-something-or-other, it had all the late Victorian marks of excess, apparently complete with third floor ballroom, transformed in the 1970s to a second bar. To Maidah it was like seeing a distant relative for the first time; the brief, which she’d read again and again, was pretty extensive.

  “Five quid says there’s asbestos.”

  “You’re on. We had the place surveyed; they didn’t find any.”

  “I still say there’s some lurking in here somewhere. Hang on, I’ve got the keys … there we go. Careful as you go in.”

  The cavernous interior hadn’t been touched in decades. Dim, uncertain shafts of light snuck in from outside through cracks in the layers of wood and posters over the window. To most it would have seemed a dump, but Maidah saw opportunity. Saloon and public bar, with snugs, and was that original frosted glass? It might just be, and if so, she blessed whichever unsung saint had let it survive the ’70s holocaust. The carpet underfoot was beyond unsalvageable, but the floorboards might not be. The air lay heavy on them, thick enough to see. Mike’s face twitched comically, and he clapped his hand over nose and mouth.

  “Breathe it in,” she told him. “That’s the smell of money.”

  “If money died a week or so back, yeah.”

  More ticks on the spreadsheet: coal fire, two of. That might be the source of the smell. It wouldn’t be the first time some bird had gone to dust in a chimney. The extension at the back was a shame, but it was the only way to get a kitchen in, and food service was a big seller. It would have to be redone of course, and they needed seating, which might mean further extension. At least there was space for it. By London standards, it was almost indecent how much room for expansion they had.

  “Damp problems?” She was pleased to see Mike professionally assess the job in front of him.

  “The gutters have been buggered for years, so yeah, but it’s not as bad as it could have been, according to the report.”

  “I read that report. He left a lot out, didn’t he?”

  “Well, that’s the risk you take. ‘A survey report is not a guarantee that all defects that are present, or which may occur in the future, are covered by this limited inspection,’” she quoted. “But they were pretty optimistic. That reminds me. There was a space downstairs that the surveyor couldn’t inspect; something about lack of access. Shall we?”

  Both of them had torches, and the stair access was in reasonable shape. Whoever had tarted the place up, back when The Sweeny went around thumping toerags, hadn’t bothered to touch anything the customers were never going to see. Maidah was pleasantly surprised not to detect the tell-tale smell of rat; the air was almost clean, compared to the bar above.

  The door in question probably led to a storeroom, but over the years bits of rubbish had been added to the pile, such that the door was barely visible behind a mountain of aged and ragged tat. Judging by the expression on his face, Mike half expected Maidah to back out at this point, but she put her gloves and mask on, and when he saw that, so did he. It was a messy job, but not troublesome. She wondered why the surveyor hadn’t gotten off his duff and tried to do the same.

  The door was a little unusual, in that it wasn’t a recent import, but judging by appearance was original to the building, which made it more than a century old. Thick, sturdy wood, and a lever lock that hadn’t been touched in God alone knew how long.

  “Don’t suppose you’ve got the key?”

  “I’ve got half a dozen, but none of them long barrel. I don’t think anyone’s had the key to this, not for a long time.”

  “How much do you love this door?”

  “I hate it.”

  “Give me a little room to work, then.”

  It took some bashing. Just when Mike worried he’d bust the thing for good to no purpose, it sprang open.

  The room was small and stuffy. It had been bare brick, once upon a time, but someone had plastered over every least thing, even to the extent of sealing the one window permanently off. It was as if the unknown meddler had tried to turn the place into the inside of an egg, smooth-walled, and not even damp and the passage of years had thwarted that intention. The plaster was as featureless as a baby’s dream. It made Mike think of the Tate Modern, some surrealist art exhibit where you had to inhabit the artist’s mind.

  “Someone’s been drawing on this,” he pointed out. Symbols adorned the walls. “Looks like algebra, or something like it.”

  Maidah was more interested in the piles of clothing on the floor. Despite the passage of what probably had been a very long time, they were still more or less intact. Monk’s robes, or more likely some kind of modern religious; they almost seemed Egyptian. Gold thread aplenty, and colour, with silver headbands, and what seemed a staff, with a pine cone at its top. She was thinking furiously, and making a very quick decision.

  “Right. We didn’t see this.”

  Mike’s jaw sagged. “You what?”

  “Didn’t see it, didn’t find it, don’t know nuffing and never did. You’d better take this stuff away,” she prodded the costumes with her foot, “and burn it. Make sure nobody sees you do it, okay? And when you bring some blokes back to clear the place out, make sure they smash up that plaster and cart away the rubble.”

  Mike wasn’t at all sure about this, and it showed.

  She sighed. “Look at it this way. Nothing will kill a job quicker than bad publicity, right? And this stuff, to me, it just screams bad press. We’ll have the conspiracy nuts in here, the ghost hunters, Christ alone knows what. Then it’ll be the council, and if we don’t have people breaking in with their bloody cameras to get a closer look, I’ll be amazed. The whole job will turn into a circus, and we don’t need the bother, all right? Just get rid of it, all of it, and don’t tell anyone where you got it from.”

  *

  CAD was a sod.

  Maidah had never really been comfortable with it, even in college. Ratchet wasn’t much better, but she was happier with it. The senior partners were not, and so when drawing architectural plans Maidah was stuck with good old CAD, several updates behind the current version. But even pure hatred wasn’t enough to get her through this one, so, she hoped, stubbornness would have to do.

  At least the project was going well. Mike and his crew were getting on with the clearance. Everything that was not to be harmed in any way had been carefully pointed out, especially those lovely snugs and their lovely, lovely frosted glass. The council was even obliging and quick to respond, a condition unheard of in Maidah’s admittedly limited experience. With a bit of luck the last permits they needed to start the rebuild would be done by the end of the week. Then it was off to the races; or, more accurately, off to the quants gnomes, who would add up their sums one last time before the job went out to tender.

  After that, of course, several months of sheer bliss. Mike had already sent one picture through on her phone. It was a lumpy bit of yellowi
sh nothing, hidden up in the roof void. The tagline simply read, ‘asbestos?’ with a smiley face attached. It was going to be a busy week.

  “Senior wonk at six o’clock,” hissed her bench-mate, giving Maidah enough time to put on a professional smile. It was Malcolm Hughes, one of the leading, indeed founding, partners.

  Hughes was one of those people you didn’t trust. She knew that much from the office Christmas party – lecherous old sod – but it was more than that. He had the knack of coming out of nasty situations smelling like a rose, which, she knew, invariably meant that someone else was covered in shit.

  “Hello Maidah,” he said. “Hard at work on the Angell Street project, I see. Any updates?”

  There hadn’t been anything too dramatic since the Monday meeting, but she filled him in on the progress since. She had the impression his mind wasn’t on what she was saying. Oddly enough, it didn’t seem to be on her chest, either.

  “Good, good. You had the inspection, yes?”

  “We did. I met with the clearance firm’s rep, and we went over the details. Everything’s on target.”

  “That’s fine. You didn’t find anything unusual on site?”

  She straightened in her chair. “Like what?”

  “Oh.” He gave her his very best not-trying-to-screw-you, honest, smile. “Anything, really. Nothing to report?”

  “No. It was pretty much as you’d expect. In fact, it was in better condition than I’d have given it credit for, no surprises at all. Barring accidents, I think this is going to be a good contract for us.”

  “Brilliant. Keep up the good work.”

  Then he was gone, leaving a very puzzled junior in his wake.

  She phoned Mike.

  “Before you start, no, it is not asbestos,” she told him, “And anyway, I’m not calling about that. I need to know something. You dealt with that room, yes?”

  “Sure did.”