The Annihilation Score (Laundry Files)

by Charles Stross

  Voices rise in unearthly harmony, singing lyrics that blend with the god-voice of the distant strings towards which I am now running:

  Along the shore the cloud waves break,

  The twin suns sink behind the lake,

  The shadows lengthen

  In Carcosa.

  Strange is the night where black stars rise,

  And strange moons circle through the skies,

  But stranger still is

  Lost Carcosa.

  Songs that the Hyades shall sing,

  Where flap the tatters of the King,

  Must die unheard in

  Dim Carcosa.

  My avenue of the dead terminates at a huge circular plaza, dominated by the shattered segments of a fallen column of vast proportions. Four plinths surround it, much like Trafalgar Square, but surmounted by unfamiliar statues: heraldic alien monsters, a dragon with a beard (or tentacles?), a cephalopod with baroque spines sprouting from the edges of its shell. The dancers, all clad in white chitons and with skin as pale as chalk or bone, converge on the stage at the bottom of the semicircular amphitheater that lies at the feet of the ruined column. The music comes from a hidden pit at the side of the stage —

  ***Come quickly! We shall be late for the chorus.***

  My hitherto-unseen bone-white dance partner takes my hands and swings me around, redirects me on a breakneck scramble down the worn stone seats of the amphitheater towards the orchestra – the stage – towards which the other dancers are racing. He’s muscular and tall, overlooking me, and when he pulls me tight and lifts me across a huge segment of the column that has crushed half a row of seats into rubble, I seem to recognize his face. “Jim, we can’t —”

  ***That’s not my name in this place. Quickly! There’s no time to lose!***

  We arrive on the stage as the white-draped singers form up in two rows across the middle, standing before the audience of ghosts and memories that overflow the seats. But my partner doesn’t stop and pull me into one of the lines: instead he redirects me towards the side. “Wait, what do you want?” I demand.

  ***There is no time! Quickly, you must play!***

  He picks me up and carries me into the shadows at the edge of the orchestra, then lowers me down into the pit of shadows. The bone-shapes of the half-glimpsed players shift and rattle, making space for me upon a shelf-like bench. Claw-hands tug and worry me into place, fencing me in and handing me a familiar instrument that glimmers in the darkness.

  “But I don’t know the score!” I cry as Lecter settles into my hands like a long-lost bloody secret.

  ***Yes you do,*** says my dancing partner, wrapping his arms around me from behind. I look round in terror – the kind of terror that wakes one shuddering from a nightmare – and find myself in his arms, for now he is seated and I am straddling my demon lover, legs spread for his bone-white body. Because this is a dream I am simultaneously drawing my bow across his glowing violin strings and riding atop his all-too-human manhood: grasping the instrument, gripped by the instrumentalist.

  I feel him pulse in rhythm as the notes flood through him, rising from my crotch to my blood-dripping fingertips in a wave of ecstasy and horror. I can do this, I realize, I can play these fingerings, I can draw sul tasto and bring these notes into existence and soar all the way to heaven – but the music is wrong, corrupting, the implications of its inexorable logic leading to a concluding nightmare. I do not want to play this piece, I realize. “No,” I say, the horror winning out in a race against ecstasy, “no, no —”

  I wake up.

  I wake up.

  Those words are prosaic, inadequate to describe the experience of emerging from that dream: I feel as if I’ve been hit by a truck. I lie atop the sheets, drenched in sweat, and feel shaky and very, very horny. I am simultaneously repelled by my own sensuality and furiously angry.

  I roll over to the side of the bed and grab Lecter’s case. “Listen, you fucker,” I hiss: “You will not ever, ever, do that to me again, do you understand?” I shake him: “If you ever try that again I will put you in a weighted box and dump you in the English Channel. Or maybe I will just pick up this crowbar and smash you to pieces. Oversight and Internal Assets can piss up a rope: you will not ever force yourself into my head again or I will destroy you.”

  There is a contrite, dread-filled silence in my head, where once might be heard the echo of a sly titter.

  Good, I think. I scared the bastard.

  I’m still horny. I need a distraction; it’s late, but… I open the case, unlocking its evidently ineffective wards. In the real-world moonlight coming through the Velux window overhead, my bone-white violin is still a thing of beauty. Passive, lying still, just an instrument. I’m angry and horny. I pick up bow and body, my grip harsh, over-controlling: let’s see, let me improvise around a theme… how about no means no? I make up a harsh little ditty, a discipline song, and work out my anger with a fiddle and a snarl of concentration, sawing and shuddering as I work my will on him, letting him know exactly who’s on top in this relationship. He’s very submissive, very contrite, very compliant. Offering to make good. But I don’t want that: I just want him to know that my dreams are my own, and he has no right to invade and pervert my most intimate fantasies.

  Silence is not consent.

  When I’m done with my harsh music lesson I put him away, and this time I store him in the wardrobe, sketch reinforcement wards across the violin case, and for good measure seal the major containment ward on the door. Then I go to the bathroom and hunt in the medicine cabinet for a sleeping pill. I take one, head back to bed, and eventually fall into a deep, solitary sleep.

  And this time, I do not dream of the King in Yellow.

  15: FRESH MEAT

  I avoid the office on Saturday. Instead, I spend the morning trying to catch up on the housework. I manage to put in two hours before I give up in despair: at least I vacuumed the carpets, and the dishes are all clean. Then I goof off for an hour of not-entirely-fruitful internet research on a subject that is close to my heart: ways and means of destroying human bones. But my heart isn’t in it, and I keep checking the clock. Finally I go upstairs and prepare a suitable outfit, something artfully bohemian-casual and utterly not office-appropriate, and go back downstairs to pretend I’m not waiting.

  At ten minutes to two the doorbell chimes. I check the peephole, then open it. “Hello?” I ask.

  A gawky teenager with skin to die for and inexpertly applied eyeliner looks up at me. “Are you Mo?” she asks, sizing me up with a judgmental eye.

  “Yes.” I glance past her and see a Volvo Estate sitting double-parked like a self-propelled roadblock, engine idling. There’s a familiar profile at the wheel, and as I glance back at the girl, I recognize echoes of Jim’s bone structure. “You must be Sally?”

  “That’s right,” she says. “Dad says he can’t find anywhere to park – you coming?”

  “One minute,” I promise, and retreat back inside to grab my shoulder bag. Then I vacillate violently for a minute over what to do about my violin case. It’s still upstairs in the wardrobe: I ought to take it, I’m responsible for the instrument – but I’m still several steps beyond pissed off at Lecter. I’m furious and not entirely rational, and anyway, from a safety perspective this is a secured safe house, with an alarm system and wards up to the eaves. Lecter is locked in an anonymous-looking wardrobe behind a particularly vicious containment ward, and anyone who breaks in and takes him while I’m gone will regret it for about as long as a cable thief gets to regret grabbing hold of a live high-tension bearer in an electricity substation.

  Lecter can look after himself for a few hours. And I really don’t want to touch him right now. What is usually a comforting security reflex currently sets my skin a-crawl. I feel naked without him, but feeling naked in public is less uncomfortable than having to pick up his case and haul him around with me. I was well on my way to learning how to look after myself before they offered me the custody of a really
special instrument; I can still look after myself: all I need is to find a new and suitably qualified custodian and I can be done with the White Violin for good.

  I suddenly realize that I have turned a hitherto-unseen corner in my own mind.

  I lock up, set the alarm, and follow Sally out to the car. After a brief no-you-go-first tap dance she slips into the back, leaving me the front passenger seat. “Afternoon,” Jim says breezily. “Mo, this is Sally. Sally, this is Mo. Please don’t kill each other. Have we got everything?”

  “I’ve got my Nexus,” Sally says with the long-suffering air of a teenager who is used to adults trying to organize her, “and my phone and my pen and my class notes,” she adds. Oh dear: do I detect an attitude?

  “Forget the notes,” I advise her. “I don’t know what he’s been telling you, but we’re going to see a farce. Slapstick comedy with music, eighteenth-century style. It has a chunk of romance that was so smutty they had to censor it back in the day, and a sprinkling of pointed political satire that also nearly got it banned – and the music’s by Mozart, which might not be your thing but which is generally considered to be not half bad, which is why they’re still performing it more than two hundred years later. My advice is to sit back and enjoy the music and the costumes and the farce, or whatever takes your fancy, and ignore the notes unless you get hopelessly lost.”

  “So it’s a musical,” she says, chin on fist, elbow propped on knee, telegraphing boredom. “The last musical Mum took me to was Chicago.”

  “Do you think they’ll still be performing Chicago in the twenty-third century?” I ask lightly.

  Jim drives the urban tank sedately, but I’m pretty sure I feel his wince through the steering rack when Sally drops her Broadway bombshell. Or maybe I’m projecting. I glance at him. He’s in weekend casual, chinos and open-necked shirt with a sports jacket – this is an afternoon matinee performance. When he’s not in uniform or a business suit, he looks younger and free-er than the Jim I know from the office; also older and more mature in a family-guy-with-teenage-daughter-in-tow kind of way. “Liz and I have, shall we say, different tastes in music,” he says.

  “Yeah, he likes all kinds of crap eighties rock, like Devo and The Fall,” Sally warns me.

  “Are we not human?” he asks rhetorically.

  “No, we are Devo,” I answer. Devo is fun. Musically unpolished and simple but conceptually ironic fun.

  “You see?” Jim says to his daughter.

  “No fair!”

  There ensues the usual parking-in-central-London ritual, a walk to the Coliseum, soft drinks and strictly no popcorn for Sally, and then a cracking performance of Mozart’s adaptation of Beaumarchais’s stage masterpiece. Sally seems bored at first, or at least expects to be bored, until midway through the first act between the dueling insults and the start of the cross-dressing comedy of mistaken identities. By the end of the first act she’s paying attention, and by the end of the second she’s agog.

  After nearly three hours Sally is clearly flagging, but from what I can see out of the corner of my eye, when she looks at her tablet she’s checking up on the plot rather than goofing off on Facebook – a good sign. Jim is clearly enjoying himself, which is also good. As for me, I’m immersed in Mozart’s complexity and richness, with a lush visual extravaganza to keep my eyeballs occupied as I follow the music. A pall of existential fatigue actually seems to fall away from me during the performance: by the Count’s final plea for forgiveness I’m as relaxed as I’ve been in weeks.

  Afterwards we take a wander and end up in Wagamama, which is clattery and white and stark, a complete antithesis to the opera. “Did you enjoy that?” Jim asks Sally as she tackles a bowl of yaki udon. She nods, wide-eyed.

  “It was different,” she says. “Not stuffy, like I’d imagined.”

  “We could do it again some other weekend,” I say. “Some operas are stuffy and boring” – Bob would say, up their own arse – “but I know which to avoid.”

  Sally fixes me with a Look that stacks at least three years on top of her notional age and asks, “What’s in it for you?”

  Jim looks at her sharply but I shake my head and smile at her. “I need to get out more. Your dad can tell you about what I do, but I’ve been working too hard lately, putting in regular seventy-hour weeks. This is me attempting to redress the balance.”

  “Are you married? I mean, do you have a partner? What do they think?”

  “I don’t know what he thinks,” I say truthfully. “We’re going through a bad patch, and he’s moved out. Like I said, too much work. For both of us, I think.”

  “Hah.” She lowers her eyes back to her soup bowl, worst suspicions evidently confirmed.

  “I’m not dating your father,” I tell her. “We just agreed we both needed to get out of the office some more.”

  When we finish our food, it becomes apparent that Sally has plans for the evening. “Thanks for the show, it was great. I want to go shopping now,” she says. “The shops don’t shut for another hour.”

  “But your mother’s —” Jim is obviously thinking of feeding the parking meter.

  “I can get the tube home,” she says artlessly. “You two need to talk.”

  “Wait —” he begins to say, but she’s already walking away.

  “That one sees more than she lets on,” I warn him as his eyes follow her retreating back. “Don’t worry, she’s got a phone.”

  “I know,” he says, sounding anything but confident. “I mean, I know in theory. But it still feels like she only learned to walk last month.”

  “What were you telling me the other night about not helicoptering?”

  His shoulders slowly relax.

  “Maybe you’re right. Want a lift home? I’m afraid I’d rather stay out of pubs or wine bars – it being Saturday night.”

  “A lift would be good.” I shudder slightly at a passing shadow, reach for a hard case that isn’t slung over the back of my chair, then check myself. “I’m quite tired, to tell the truth. I slept really badly last night.”

  We head back to the urban tank and climb in. “By the way,” he says, “there’s a run of La traviata at the Royal Opera House, ending next week. Can I interest you in it? Just the two of us, perhaps?”

  “I’m – hmm.” Suspicion and skepticism set up a train wreck clangor in my head: Has he been cold-bloodedly stalking me, using his daughter as a human shield? Or am I seeing ulterior motives where none exist? “Why not take Sally?”

  “She’s got exams the week after next. Resits, I’m afraid. Culture’s all very well, but not at the expense of grades.” Both his hands are on the steering wheel as he checks for cross-traffic. I can only see his face in side profile, but he seems more intent on driving safely than on slyly checking me out. As excuses go, it has the ring of truth to it.

  “Okay, then yes” – tentatively, I warn myself – “you may indeed consider me interested. How about, oh, Saturday, if we can score tickets?”

  “You’ll be lucky. Would you like me to try and shake some loose?”

  “That’d be great,” I tell him. Saturday evenings hit me hardest when Bob’s away exorcising sacrifice pits in Yucatán or something. Tonight I’ll be okay – even if I’m stuck at the kitchen table with a mug of Horlicks and a stack of purchase orders to approve – but often those evenings seem to stretch out endlessly.

  “Deal,” he says, looking pleased: his expression makes me feel happy.

  Jim takes me home, and I resume my macabre research with a light heart and a mug of the aforementioned Horlicks. My social appetite is sated for the time being, and I’m happy to be back in my comfort zone with the front door locked.

  To tell the truth, I just about managed to forget about Lecter while we were at the opera – but I felt a nagging sense of unease as we braved the crowds on New Oxford Street on our way to the restaurant, and it didn’t go away even when I reminded myself that I was on a date with Officer Friendly and his daughter, that the bracelet on
my left wrist was a beefed-up ward strong enough to stop the Mandate dead in his tracks should I run into him again by accident, and that even without the violin I am a certificated combat practitioner with the ability to cause an unholy amount of collateral damage if I cut loose by accident. I’ve become accustomed to relying on my singular instrument to an unhealthy degree. I’ve got to stop using Lecter as a crutch, if only because I can’t start to sort things out with Bob if I don’t.

  I take a break from the purchase orders to go back to my macabre (and ultimately futile) research project. Destroying the bone violin would be quite easy if he was merely made of mundane scrimshaw. Bone is a somewhat more rigid material than the spruce and maple of a conventional instrument, but Lecter’s body is thinner in places, to impart the flexibility required by a resonant instrument. If he was inanimate, a wood axe would suffice to dismember him, and a kitchen waste disposal unit would crunch the debris. You might wreck the kitchen unit, but the violin would come off worse.

  The trouble with trying to do away with him using mechanical tools – the problem that renders this entire project an exercise in futile wish-fulfillment fantasy, if I’m perfectly honest – is that Lecter is an occult instrument. To destroy him, I would first have to reverse and unwind the bindings that anchor his soul, or what passes for one, to his body. They weren’t designed to be unwound, and to make matters worse I could reasonably expect Lecter to put up a fight.

  Your sidekick Mr. Grenade stops being your friend the moment you pull his pin out: just so with the violins Erich Zahn created at the behest of Dr. Mabuse. Lecter has steadily grown more powerful ever since we entered the opening stages of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. He’s now alarmingly strong; if I’d met him for the first time as he is now, he’d have eaten me alive. I expect any attempt at exorcism will result in him making an all-out bid to suck my soul out through my eyeballs, and I suspect the only entity I’ve met who could possibly hold him in check is the Eater of Souls.