The Delirium Brief

by Charles Stross

  After all, Nether Stowe House caters to any and all requirements—just as long as the customer has enough money to pay.

  Mo finds herself in a low-ceilinged corridor, paneled in antique oak and well lit. Paintings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aristocrats line the walls in lieu of windows, punctuating the gaps between doors. The doors are labelled: some mundane (CLOAKROOM), others less so (BONDED STORE). Near the end of the passage, a staircase leads down into the cellars. Mo descends carefully, acutely aware that she’s moving beyond the bounds of the easily explained. I got lost will only carry you so far when you go wandering around the private spaces at this kind of venue. Also, she realizes, she’s underground. If she needs backup and her phone loses signal, this could be a problem.

  She is on edge as she reaches the bottom of the stairs, so she startles as an usher clears his throat. “Ma’am, the chapel is nearly ready for communion, but it will be another five minutes. Would you mind waiting in the club lounge?”

  She smiles instinctively as she assesses him. He’s another of Schiller’s security guards, but he wears a surplice over his dark suit, an unadorned silver cross dangling from his collar. His eyes track her incuriously. “Certainly, if you’d show me where it is,” she replies. “Which service is it to be, first?”

  “The Communion of the Inner Temple,” he states. “The lounge is that way.” His movements are slightly off, as if an unseen puppeteer is pulling his strings. Mo nods and follows his direction, trying not to shudder. She’s read the GOD GAME BLACK report and knows about Schiller’s parasites packaged as communion wafers. But isn’t the Inner Temple something different? She strolls along another low-ceilinged corridor, towards a lounge furnished in oak and red leather with brass fixtures, all wingback chairs and gentlemen’s club ambiance.

  She’s not the only partygoer here; there must be another staircase, she realizes. But this is a different crowd, older and expectant. The media stars and party people and escorts Schiller had invited for the event upstairs are absent; this is a more select gathering, although the bar is open and a bartender is offering wine by the glass to all comers. Mo accepts one, then does her best to fade into the wallpaper between prints of a Stubbs racehorse painting and an aristocrat who wears an identical expression to the steed.

  “Cassie, where are you?” she subvocalizes tensely. Opening her clutch she sneaks a quick glance at her phone. It’s showing one bar of signal, a tenuous connection at best. “Sitrep.”

  “Here I am!” The breathy voice next to her, in her ear, nearly makes her jump. “Am I Late Late?”

  Mo gives Cassie a hard stare. “Not yet.” She’s still recognizable, but the alfär woman’s glamour has lent her waitress uniform the semblance of a black cocktail dress. She’s done something to her hair and added face paint, too, or more enchantment so that she looks older, elegant, and less out of place than she might otherwise be. “Whatever they’re doing, they’re going to start soon—”

  Very soon, as it happens. Mo hears jovial laughter and bonhomie as a new party approaches by way of the corridor she used. Eyes turn, conversations temporarily dampened, for the arrival of Jeremy Michaels, arm in arm with the Minister of Magic and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. All three of the ex-public-school types are somewhat tipsy; the outer two are trailing bottles of Bolly. “Party on, ladies and gentlemen!” The Prime Minister is avuncular, his smile magnanimous. The small talk starts up again on all sides, but there’s an edgy note of pleased anticipation to it, and Mo feels her ward heat up, prickling the skin of her chest like a nettle rash. All of a sudden the lounge feels sultry and small, the background noise pulsing with turgid expectation.

  “Oh this is not good.” Cassie clutches her left arm. “FuckFuck!”

  “Yes,” Mo says tightly. Despite her ward she feels a tight heat growing in the pit of her belly. She clenches her thighs together instinctively, unsure whether she’s resisting or complying. Around the room, middle-aged men are shedding their jackets and loosening their bow ties. And now a peculiar pilgrimage emerges from the staircase: gorgeously muscled and toned young men and shapely women wearing not very much at all, most of it underwear of a kind normally reserved for bedroom games. Overholt and McGuigan, Schiller’s handmaids, enter the lounge from the side passage that Schiller’s usher was guarding. They’re wearing sheer white gowns, their movements languid and hesitant, as if they’re sleepwalking. Four more women follow them, all statuesque Valkyries: they converge on the ministers of state, take them by the hand, and offer them dreamy smiles and air-kisses as they lead them towards the chapel.

  Mo taps her left earpiece. “MADCAP, get Alex down here right now. OCCULUS, go go go. ZERO, red alert, extraction imminent.”

  Cassie’s grip on her arm tightens painfully. “What are they doing?” she asks shakily. “There’s something in there, something horrible—”

  The alpha males are whooping it up, stripping off their clothing and grappling with the Middle Temple communicants Schiller has brought in to service them. They don’t seem to notice that none of the youngsters are speaking or smiling as they press breasts and crotches up against the VIP guests.

  Mo feels the strength of a host-mother’s will beating down like tropical sunlight, a glowing benign lust that floods every body and moistens the driest soul. “Schiller’s endgame,” she says quietly. “He’s going to plant those parasite things in everyone here. Cassie, we need to leave now.”

  But Cassie is staring at the passage to the chapel. “YesYes, but there’s something different—”

  “Different?” Mo stares at her. “Didn’t you hear me?”

  Cassie’s eyes blur momentarily as her glamour slips; for a moment her pupils seem to stretch vertically, becoming catlike. “I—I’ve heard of this,” she says, and Mo realizes her younger companion is shaking. “Don’t you see?” Abruptly she releases Mo’s arm and darts towards the chapel.

  “Cassie!” Mo hurries after her. The rich chords of organ music swell from the open door ahead, liturgical and naggingly familiar. The usher stands before the doorway and moves to intercept Cassie, but she reaches out to touch him lightly and he crumples to the floor. Mo swears, then runs after her on throbbing feet. But she doesn’t have far to go, for Cassie stops just outside the chapel.

  “Look,” says Cassie. She points, her eyes and mouth wide.

  Mo presumes the chapel was added by the current owners of Nether Stowe House in order to make it easier to host private VIP wedding ceremonies. But this evening it’s being put to a use that the owners are hardly likely to approve of. The altar is the central prop in a communion service the like of which Mo has never imagined. Behind it stands the Reverend Raymond Schiller, surrounded by his handmaids; before the altar forms a queue of seminaked politicians. The air is rich and heavy with the fumes of an incense that throbs with lust and the sickly sweet floral scent of opium. Two of the handmaids swing thuribles as they chant prayers in a language that Mo recognizes as a dialect of Old Enochian, invocations and invitations to a God who was already ancient and feared before the rise of Egypt. As each of the communicants approaches, Schiller utters a brief prayer and seats the communicant on the altar, then directs one of the handmaids forward to meet him; they strip off their robes as they mount the new initiate, bucking and moaning beneath their open thighs.

  Mo tries to look away, but there is an erotic compulsion here that has her itching to throw caution to the wind and join in the bacchanalia. But then Cassie—whose expression is one of wide-eyed horror rather than heavy-lidded lust—pinches her arm. “Look at the altar!” A dark fluid stains the front of the tablecloth, darker than wine and dripping from beneath the lovers locked in communion. The moaning takes on a keening note as the current handmaid kneels over her victim and pulls herself away from him. His penis pulses, fat and segmented and maggot-white as he continues to keen and the blood drips from between his thighs. The other handmaids come and carry him down to the pews before the altar, legs twitching in the grip
of what might be a protracted orgasm, or the clonic spasms of a hanged man. Meanwhile the handmaid who initiated him kneels, gasping, beside the altar, her face purple, blood trickling down her thighs.

  “Let’s go, now,” Mo whispers, the spell slipping away in a cold wash of terror as she focuses on the Minister for Magic’s newly installed host, its cyclostomic mouth squeezing rhythmically as it draws his penis fully into its digestive tract and begins to suck blood from the dorsal vein.

  “YesYes!” Cassie turns away from the open doorway and Mo leads her aside gratefully. The occupants of the chapel are so focused on their ritual that they appear not to have noticed their audience. Mo takes a grip on Cassie’s arm and pulls her shroud of invisibility tight around them both, then leads her back towards the lounge area on shaky legs. “It’s them,” Cassie whispers, horrified, “the monsters that hunted my people. They must have followed my father hither—”

  “No,” Mo reassures her, “they were already on their way. But we—”

  She stops dead. While they spied on the occupants of the chapel, the guests remaining in the lounge have relaxed into orgiastic excess, sucking and kissing and squeezing and in some cases enthusiastically fucking. The sweet, floral scent of the incense is chokingly thick in the lounge. The air is heavy with sighs and moans and happy chuckles at first—but as Mo and Cassie reach the threshold of the room, a sudden silence descends as all around them the youthful initiates of Schiller’s Middle Temple collapse in stuporous piles. Someone has cut the master puppeteer’s strings, and as Mo watches the guests raise their heads and start to look around, seeking the source of disruption.

  * * *

  From behind the altar in the chapel, the being calling itself Raymond Schiller—for there is increasingly less of Schiller and more of the Other inside him, with every new Inner Temple communion rite—makes eye contact across the room with Jeremy Michaels, who is watching the initiation of his cabinet peers from the sidelines. “The mother of the Middle Temple has been cut off,” he rasps, the human tongue no longer coming easily to his mouth and throat. “Something is wrong. Fix it.”

  The Prime Minister stands and marches stiff-legged towards the exit, led by the will of his recently grafted New Flesh. If he is slightly glassy eyed, the partygoers upstairs will merely think he’s been hitting the Bolly. As he walks, he smiles experimentally, then runs through a series of facial expressions before settling back to his usual assumed superiority.

  Meanwhile, Schiller addresses his handmaids: “Gina, activate the perimeter ward, the Middle Temple appears to be under attack and we may be next. Anneka, do we have intruders here too? Find them!” Anneka Overholt nods; eyes glowing pale green, she stalks towards the downstairs lounge, mouth silently forming words in an ancient tongue. A handful of new initiates stumble after her. Behind the altar, Bernadette McGuigan pulls out her mobile phone to contact the site security office.

  At the top of the stairs, Michaels finds two police officers standing guard. “There’s been some sort of incident,” he tells them in clipped tones, then holds up a hand. “No, no, not here—there’s been a break-in at Dr. Schiller’s business premises at Heathrow. Armed robbers. Would you send someone to deal with it? Our host is quite annoyed.”

  By the time he is halfway down the staircase back to the chapel, one of the officers is already reporting to the inspector in charge of the PM’s security detachment; by the time he resumes his seat at the ceremony, the inspector is briefing the desk officer in the airport station at West Drayton.

  And the jaws of a trap begin to close.

  * * *

  I’m standing in an office full of computers and filing cabinets, swearing under my breath as I try to figure out where to start, when my phone vibrates. Not now, I think. Chris has holed up in the supervisor’s office in the corner and is working the phone to the Transport Police, and a bunch of corporate crime folks from the National Crime Agency are apparently on their way in the next hour, but I’m increasingly worried that we’ve blown it. Knocking out Schiller’s host-mother will have blown all of his communicants’ little minds, and he’s bound to notice and come running. So why isn’t he running, come to think of it? It’s been over five minutes since I locked down the fish tank and the remaining warm bodies among the defenders—the ones the OCCULUS crew put on the floor in warded restraints, instead of shooting—all went sleepy-bye at once. It’s a real mess out there: six dead bodies, two injured and unconscious, four more unconscious. In fact, we’re about three live victims short of lighting up the local hospital’s major incident plan, and if this doesn’t make headlines tomorrow I will be very much surprised. So who—

  Oh, it’s the SA. Of course. So I answer the bloody phone.

  “Sir?”

  “You need to pull out, Bob,” he says, with no warm-up, no preamble, no social nattering. “Let Chris hand over to the NCA when they arrive, deal with the fish tank, then get Johnny and the OCCULUS crew out of there. We’ve got a developing situation.”

  I resist the urge to swear. “Change of plan, why, exactly?”

  “I want you to get up to Nether Stowe House to support the Target One team ASAP. Schiller’s making an end-run and the evidence from Target Two is frankly irrelevant at this point—nothing short of a bloodstained altar and a pile of bodies would do. The take from Target One is deeply alarming and we’ve run into problems—Cassie and Dr. O’Brien appear to have sprung a trap and are boxed in. They need a distraction and the special backup I arranged for is late.”

  Shit! Here I am at the far end of the M25. “I’m at least an hour away by road, with blues and twos.”

  “Not if you hit on the ASU. I’ve put in a request and India 97 is en route to Heathrow to ferry you out there. They should be landing in about ten minutes. Get moving.”

  I don’t waste time arguing. If Mo is in danger it’s not just a screaming emergency, it’s personal. And these days she doesn’t carry a white violin. I know she’s an Auditor and anything but helpless, and she’s got the All-Highest of the Host of Air and Darkness with her, but they’re up against the Sleeper’s living avatar. This is what I’ve been afraid of all along, and I get a weird shivery feeling in my stomach that it takes me a little while to recognize as gut-wrenching fear.

  I stride briskly back towards the cubicle farm and nearly walk into Johnny coming the other way. “What’s eating you, guv?” he asks, raising an eyebrow; he looks pleased with himself about something.

  “I’m needed at Nether Stowe House an hour ago. The SA’s sending a chopper.”

  “Oh right.” Suddenly his expression is as sober as a heart attack. “Yer other ’alf ran into trouble?”

  “So I gather.” I start moving again, and as soon as we reach the cubicle farm I fill Chris Womack in on the situation. “So Johnny and I need to be on the other side of the airport in ten minutes—”

  There is a thunderous bang from the front door and as I try and munch carpet tiles Johnny tackles Chris. “What—” She tries to speak, but my ears are ringing and I can barely hear anything. Boots rush past the cubicle from behind us, with much shouting—the OCCULUS team responding to a perimeter breach—and there’s a brief crackle of automatic gunfire, still painfully loud through the building wall and the cubicles. I close my eyes and look around, outside at the mindscape around the warehouse and the terminal building and the bright, shining hard-focused minds with their wards and their guns—

  “Fuck, it’s the police!” I yell.

  “On it,” Johnny says tensely, and he’s away.

  Fuck, this is the very worst outcome, or close enough: there are cars outside and men and women with guns converging on the building and up against the walls outside the loading bay, a dozen of them already and more coming and that’s an airport fire tender bulling the OCCULUS truck away from the entrance—

  Mo is in trouble. I could end this and be on my way—

  I force the panic back down but it keeps bubbling up. It shouldn’t be anything new but just b
ecause she’s been in danger before and I haven’t been there doesn’t make it any easier; this one’s different because the SA told me to go and I can’t, not unless I—

  There are fourteen of them outside and they’re in my way and all I have to do is grab their minds and squeeze and their crappy little wards will fracture like glass—

  Another gunshot. Shouts: “Disengage! Stand down! Stand down!”

  I’m shaking. I swear I’m shaking, lying here on the carpet feeling the warm, soft, crunchy things all around the building, flickering lights against the infinite darkness of un-life, and it would be so easy to kill them all, the constellations in the neighboring warehouses and the distant galaxy of Terminals 1–3 and beyond them the M25 motorway; and I could extinguish them for her, I would extinguish them all in a heartbeat and go flying to her rescue if I couldn’t already see the look on her face when she learned what I’d done—

  (Does this make me a monster?)

  Seconds that feel like minutes slide into minutes that feel like hours as I lie there shivering, not trusting myself to move a millimeter or twitch a finger, silently weeping with the strain of holding back the infinite hunger. I distantly realize that I’m overloaded, irrational, and suddenly unable to cope. The breakdown on Mo’s shoulder in the safe house was a warning temblor, not the earthquake itself; I don’t trust myself not to kill thousands of people by accident and I’m paralyzed with fear of what I have the potential to become, if I haven’t become that thing already.

  Hasty footsteps. “Bob? Can you hear me?” It’s Johnny.

  Someone else, voice full of concern: “Oh fuck, did he catch a bullet—”

  “No, something worse, seen ’im get it bad but never like this before—”