The Apocalypse Codex lf-4

by Charles Stross

  “Evidence,” I say. I should have remembered to do this in the cellar but I was too rattled. I turn to the nearest bookcase and begin scanning. The titles don’t mean much to me, but it’s a fair bet that someone in the library section will find a picture of Schiller’s background reading informative and useful.

  “Yes, well.” She circles the desk cautiously, leans towards the oil painting on the wall behind it. It’s a medium-scale picture of New Republican Jesus descending towards the Manhattan skyline on what looks like a fire-breathing war horse, wielding a spear while a squadron of B-52s circle behind him, outlined against thunderclouds. I guess it’s a mission statement for the Christ Militant or something. “Hmm. There doesn’t seem to be a safe here.”

  “You were expecting one?”

  “Schiller is not an original thinker; that’s not his strength. He probably has a private chapel. Very private, but it is unlikely to be hidden well. So—”

  I lean towards the bookcase I’ve been photographing. It appears to be free-standing, but it’s built very solidly into the wall opposite the window, running floor to ceiling, and there’s clear carpet in front of it. The carpet strikes me as being rather thin for a plush private office. “Huh.” I begin looking at the spines of books. I switch the camera off, then pull out my phone. Again, I scan the books using OFCUT. Most of them glow faintly—contamination from Schiller’s hands, at a guess—but it doesn’t take me long to find what I’m looking for. “Would a secret door be of interest?”

  “A what?” She blinks at me. “Oh, of course! Open it, please.”

  “Want to double-check first?”

  “Okay.” She steps forward, sees the book I’m pointing to. “The worm turns. Very droll. It’s safe.” It’s right next to one side of the bookcase, at door handle height. She pulls it and there’s a click and the bookcase begins to pivot—slowly, because it scrubs against the carpet and it’s laden with about half a ton of tree pulp.

  Persephone follows her pistol into the small inner sanctum hidden behind the bookcase, and I trail behind her—and so it is that I’m close enough that when she says “shit” very quietly it’s too late for me to back out.

  * * *

  JOHNNY FOLLOWS HIS GUIDE PAST THE SHAMBLING, SWAYING crowd, past the queue that snakes across the front of the stage to the altar and round to a side door at the other edge of the platform, down three steps to a red carpet leading through an awning into darkness, then up six more steps and around a corner to a room off the side of the sanctuary.

  “Glory!” chant the crowd, but not in English or Latin or any language most humans understand. “He is coming! Glory to God in the highest! The Sleeper awakens! Glory!”

  Johnny nerves himself for the coming confrontation.

  The door closes behind him, deadening the sound of the damned next door. The vestry is roughly twenty feet on a side, low-ceilinged and windowless. There are lockers lined up against one wall, a table pushed up against the other, and a cold iron circle three meters in diameter propped up against the wall opposite the door. It’s plugged into a ruggedized equipment case and a spluttering plastic-clad Honda generator that doesn’t quite drown out the sound of the wind soughing into the starless sky behind the open gate.

  “Eldest McTavish.” Schiller sits on an ornately carved wooden throne before the gate. He wears a charcoal-black three-piece suit under his surplice. His face is gaunt with exhaustion. One of the four missionaries who wait with him hovers solicitously, ready to support him if he falters. His smile is pained. “There are many things I’d like to ask you, if we had more time together.”

  Johnny forces a smile, aware that it’s as unconvincing as a three-dollar bill. “I’m sure there are.” He keeps his face pointed at Schiller, but is scanning the room, registering the positions of the missionaries. They’re bodyguards, of course, all tooled up, suit jackets cut loose to conceal their holsters. There are a couple of handmaids in long dresses, their hair veiled, waiting beside something that looks like a giant silver soup tureen on a catering trolley. But soup tureens don’t usually contain live crustaceans that chitter disturbing thoughts that flood the room with the sickly sweet flavor of a gangrenous god’s love. “What exactly are you trying to achieve?”

  Schiller straightens his back. A momentary grimace betrays his pain. “The same thing the order’s been trying to achieve for centuries, eldest. The difference is, I’m going to succeed.”

  “You want to bring him back.” Johnny crosses his arms. “The Sleeper.” Johnny keeps one eye on the open gate behind Schiller. The breeze sighs faintly as it drifts through the portal, into the twilit chamber stone beyond.

  “The sleeping Christ, yes. The one whose mortal vessel we call Jesus.”

  Johnny nods; he grew up with this deviant theology, although he doesn’t hold with it himself—the doctrine that Jesus was a supernatural vessel for the Gatekeeper is inner doctrine, but he considers the idea that the Sermon on the Mount was delivered by a sock puppet for the Sleeper in the Pyramid to be somewhere between implausible and hilarious. “You know me through my father, I take it?”

  Schiller nods. “You are the eldest son: it’s in your blood. Baptized and confirmed in a sister church dedicated to bringing this wandering in the wilderness to an end, obedient to the True Creed. I saw you in the back row in London, shining like a beacon; once your friend Ms. Hazard drew our attention, the genealogy department identified you within hours. You were sent here for a reason. It’s your destiny.”

  “Maybe.” Dead right I was sent here for a reason. Johnny runs the numbers: two knives, four bodyguards, not looking good—and that’s before counting the handmaids and the boss himself, who may look like he’s half-dead but that’s only because he’s pouring his entire will into holding open the gate while his pastors funnel willing souls through it to wake the sleeping god. Threaten his holy mission and he’s quite capable of sacrificing himself to bring it all together. No, this isn’t like that job in Barcelona, or even that hairy caper in Pripyat: it’s worse. So: Keep him talking. “What do you think I was sent here to do?”

  Schiller chuckles drily. “They thought they could send you here to kill me, didn’t they? You and your mistress.”

  “She’s not my mistress,” Johnny says automatically before he realizes he’s been played. “An’ you don’t believe that shite about me being here to kill you, else—” He raises a hand and makes a cutting gesture across his throat, letting the blade steal into view just in case the muscle are getting twitchy: message to goons, It could be you. “So deal or quit, guv. You’ve got an offer in mind: make it.” Draw him out. Intelligence is vital.

  “You are aware that it takes two to open the gate fully? As it says in the Third Book of Revelations, fifth chapter: ‘for the two elders of the blood of Lilith shall be as doorposts in the House of the LORD, and they shall be as stout beams of cedar: And they shall hold the lintel above them that the father of dreams shall walk under it.’ We have—had, until you showed up—a shortage of elders.” Schiller coughs. “I am the last of my line. So you can name your price, eldest McTavish. Once our father awakens and returns to bring about the kingdom of heaven on earth, you’ll have a throne at his side, and a fiery shield and sword, and any temporal reward you want. Do you want your little witch? Do you secretly dream of owning her, body and soul? You can have her, for merciful is the Lord, and you, as one of his prophets, have the power to pardon her for her sins. Would you like a billion dollars? A trillion? Immortality? The throne of England? It’s all yours, if you agree to your destiny. What do you say?”

  The bodyguards are clearly keyed-up; soul-sucking knives or no, there’s no way that one against four is going to end well. Johnny nods, smiling. “Sounds like a great offer,” he says, taking a step forward—the bodyguards begin to move and so does one of the gowned handmaids, her sleeve pulling back as she raises the machine pistol concealed in it. “And I’m inclined to take it.” The guards pause. “Only one thing”—he’s in motion,
bounding forward past Schiller—“first you’ll have to catch me!”

  A couple of bullets crack through the air above his head as Johnny dives through the open portal. And then the chase is on.

  BUTTERFLIES IN MY STOMACH; IT’S DARK AND THERE’S A breeze from behind—

  A breeze.

  There are two types of breeze: man-made, and natural. Sources of the man-made kind include things like desk fans, jet engines, and driving with the window open, none of which apply right now. The latter kind occur where there’s a difference in air pressure. Air is blowing from behind me, and it wasn’t doing that until we opened the secret door. Which, now I think about it, is a revolving secret door. Revolving doors made high-rise buildings with elevators possible by allowing pressure equilibration without blowing the windows out whenever a passenger hit the button for the umpteenth floor; but if there’s a skyscraper in front of me I’ll eat my hat. Rather, there is a large volume of low pressure air into which a natural wind is blowing. And in my line of work—

  “Keep moving,” Persephone says very quietly.

  I wish I’d brought a door-wedge with me. Or a flashlight. This’d be a fine time to be eaten by a grue… I take another couple of steps forward and there’s floor under my shoes instead of carpet. Huh, I think, just as Persephone throws the light switch.

  “We found it,” I say, feeling sick.

  We’re in what’s left of Schiller’s private sanctum, facing an open gate. It probably used to be a small windowless room, much longer than it was wide, before he had the secret door and the altar installed. But now the light of the bare overhead bulb shows us that one of the walls is almost entirely missing. There’s a circular summoning grid installed on edge in front of it, and the damn thing is running. It’s the sump the breeze is blowing into, and I feel like throwing up when I see it because I recognize the landscape on the far side: I’ve only been dreaming about it for nine months or so.

  “This is it,” says Persephone.

  “Looks like it.” I walk over to the altar. It’s a plain slab of stone positioned in front of the gate. There’s an ornate silver cup on it, and an ivory wand capped in gold—ritual objects, at a guess—and a smaller grid that, thankfully, is plugged into a boring old-fashioned laptop. (Have I said how much I hate ritual magic? It makes my head hurt.) “This is the other end of Schiller’s operation. Quiet, isn’t it? He’s pumping lots of energy into it from the other side, from the church downtown, so where’s it all going? And what’s this other grid for?”

  “It’s going here—no.” She’s quick on the uptake. “Okay. The small grid looks like”—she closes her eyes briefly—“yes, it’s the source of the ward that’s locking out the Black Chamber.” Without further ado, she yanks the cable connecting it to the laptop. There is a brief spark and a smell of burning plastic, then she points at the wall. “He opened this gate first. It leads to the site of the ritual. Then he opened another gate in the church to power the ritual. The ritual takes place over there”—she points through the gate—“and that which is summoned then comes here, to grow free from unwanted attention while it is still young and weak. Yes?”

  I try to untangle her syntax: “That sounds about right.”

  “The women in the hospital,” she says conversationally, “haven’t been disposed of because they’re its prepared food.”

  “It. The Sleeper?”

  “Yes. And I’m ending this now.” And she takes a step towards the gate, crossing its threshold before I can shout at her to wait.

  So of course I follow her.

  WHEN I WAS A KID MY DAD ONCE TOOK ME UP TO THE YORKSHIRE Dales, to go walking and see the limestone pavements around Malham. They’re eerie landscapes, carved by glaciers and corroded by water over thousands of years—on a bright, dry summer afternoon it feels as if the bones of the Earth are poking through the parched skin of a mummified planet.

  This place looks well and truly dead at first sight. I take three steps after Persephone and nearly go arse over tit, for with each pace I land too late, too far away. Lower gravity than Earth, but not too low—this planet still has a breathable atmosphere, which suggests something is still putting oxygen into it. Above me the sky is dark, save for a broad sash of bluish glowing dust that crosses the upturned bowl of the heavens—and a sun, angry and red-eyed and much too small. It’s daytime and the milky way (or what passes for the ecliptic of the local galaxy) is visible and the ground underfoot is dry, uneven grit and stone slabs. Mountains rise in the distance, beyond a fencelike series of isolated lumpy posts.

  I look away hastily and see Persephone turning, to face the thing behind me.

  The gate is a circle of darkness hanging in the air, its bottom edge just brushing the ground. About fifty meters behind it start a flight of steps so wide they seem to reach halfway to the horizon. I look up. Steps, and more steps. And up, and up, vanishing towards a false perspective, a horizon capped by a monstrous pillared building, somewhat like the Parthenon.

  “Oh fuck me,” I mumble.

  The ground under my feet vibrates, as if a heavy truck has just driven past. Earthquake is not a natural thought to crawl into an English brain, but it’s an understandable one when there’s not a truck in sight, nor one within a thousand lightyears for that matter.

  “Huh. So this is the Sleeper’s plateau?” Persephone observes with bright-eyed interest. “Because it’s smaller than I expected—”

  There’s a scritching in my shoulder bag: the complaints department is enthusiastically pointing the way ahead—right up the side of the pyramid.

  “If it’s okay by you I’d rather not hang around here: the locals aren’t terribly friendly. We have a job to do—close this gate, open the next. Right?”

  The next couple of minutes pass me by because I’m in the zone. Persephone, it turns out, is not carrying any high explosives or banishment rounds, so the job falls to me. “Hold this,” I say, passing her the camera. “If anything comes at us, take a portrait.”

  I rummage through my bag, pull out the wire-wrap board and breakout box and my phone, and go to work. The gate is straightforward. Schiller didn’t try to booby-trap it; all you have to do to close the thing is toss a coil of wire through it and hit it with a signal at the gate’s resonant frequency—

  (Memo to self: do not degauss interdimensional portals at close range without ear protection in future.)

  “Bob. What do you see?” My work done, I look up: Persephone has been trying to get my attention, waving and pointing across the plain.

  I have a premonition, so I look at the fence. Then I look at it again with my eyelids screwed shut. I open my eyes. “We should start climbing. Now.”

  Persephone heads for the steps. I follow her. She’s walking, not running. “What can they do?” she asks as I pass her. “What are their capabilities? You’re the expert…”

  “The fence wasn’t put here to keep the Sleeper in, it’s not strong enough to do that. It’s to keep people who might want to wake the Sleeper out.” (I can feel them waking up all around us, hanging on their stakes like nests of sleeping hornets. We’ve got their undivided attention because we’re the only moving things for a hundred kilometers around. They’re curious about the still-living: I think they see us as a mistake.) “And, if someone is stupid enough to open a gate inside the fence and stick around for a picnic, they’re supposed to deal with that, too. Fuck knows how Schiller managed it…” I put one foot in front of the other with careful determination, not so fast I’m going to run out of breath before I reach the top, but not too slowly either. “They’re vessels for the feeders in the night. You don’t want to be here when they arrive.”

  Persephone glances behind me. “I agree.” She hurries to catch up, bounding gracefully up the steps two at a time on the tips of her toes—for the steps are shallow and the gravity low. “I might be able to hold some of them…”

  “Me too, for a while.” Step. Step. (I have a history with the feeders—it’s possible I can
even control them.) Step. “But.” Step. “Don’t want to weaken.” Step. Step. Step. “The defenses.” (And my contractors are another matter.) Step. Step. There are at least a hundred, possibly two hundred steps to the top of the pyramid, and the air here is as thin as in Denver: I’m already beginning to feel my heart pounding. I feel light-headed too, but not from too little oxygen—there’s something about this place that makes me feel as if my skull’s too thin and the universe is trying to leak in.

  “What. Do you expect. To find up there?” Persephone asks.

  “Big temple.” Step. Step. “Sarcophagus.” Step. “The Sleeper—” I misstep as the next flagstone under my foot abruptly isn’t there, then bashes into my sole hard, then drops away. “Shit!”

  “Quake! Drop.” Persephone pancakes across three steps and I land hard beside her, taking the impact on one buttock. I gasp and wheeze in the thin air as dust devils rise across the plain and the steps groan and wail beneath us, stone grinding on stone. For a moment I’m terrified that the temple will fall on us: but no, it’s stood here for many thousands of years. In fact, the designers will have picked this plateau precisely because it was tectonically stable, so why is it shaking now? Don’t think about that Bob, you wouldn’t like the answer.

  The tremors continue for almost a minute. I lie on my back, then as they begin to die away and the groaning and moaning stops I sit up and look down the slope of the pyramid.

  One by one, the mummified corpses are helping each other down from the stakes upon which they were impaled. Limping and wobbling and rattling, they shuffle and lurch towards us across the dusty plain, still wearing the scraps of Russian civil war uniforms they wore when they were murdered. Many of them are fully skeletonized, but they’re still articulated, and they carry knives and rusty cavalry sabers. They don’t have working lungs or larynx with which to hiss brains, but you don’t need to have seen many Romero flicks to know what they’ve got in mind.