The Annihilation Score

by Charles Stross

  ***It can’t hear you,*** Lecter tells me. ***You can only get her attention in one way. Allow me?***

  I rest the bow lightly across the bridge and tweak gently, between two fingers. Lecter obliges, singing a soul into torment. “Keep away from him, you bitch,” I call through the doorway.

  The vampire moans.

  “Stop hurting her,” someone is saying.

  I keep moving the bow. It’s not something I can control: the notes want to flow.

  “Stop!” Bob sounds upset.

  “I can’t—” The bow drags my fingers along behind it, burning them. I’m bleeding. The strings are glowing and the vampire is screaming in pain.

  I try to lock my wrist in place but the bow is fighting me. I try to open my fingers, to drop the bow. “It won’t let me!”

  ***You want me to do this,*** Lecter assures me. His voice is an echo of my father (dead for many years), kindly, avuncular, controlling. ***This is simply what you want.***

  “Stop,” says Bob, in a tongue and a voice I have never felt from him before. He grabs my right elbow and pinches hard: pain stabs up my arm. There’s a rattling crash from the living room as the Vampire Bitch from Human Resources legs it through the bay window and runs screaming into the predawn light.

  ***Mistress, you will obey,*** hisses Lecter, and there’s a cramp in my side as he forces me to turn, raising his body and bringing it to bear on my husband in a moment of horror—

  “Stop,” Bob repeats. He’s speaking Old Enochian; not a language I thought he was fluent in. There’s something very weird and unpleasantly familiar about his accent.

  I shake my head. “You’re hurting me.”

  “I’m sorry.” He loosens his grip on my elbow but doesn’t let go. Something inside me feels broken.

  “Did you have sex with her?” I have to ask, God help me.

  “No.”

  I drop the bow. My fingers tingle and throb and don’t want to work properly. They feel wet. I’m bleeding. I finally manage to unkink my elbow and put down the violin. Blood is trickling along its neck, threatening to stain the scrimshaw.

  “You’re bleeding.” Bob sounds shocked. “Let me get you a towel.”

  He vanishes up the hall corridor and I manage to bend down and lay the violin on top of its case. I don’t trust myself to think or to speak or to feel. I’m numb. Is he telling the truth? He denies it. But is he? Isn’t he? My ward should tell me, but right now it’s mute.

  A sharp realization hits me: regardless of what Bob may or may not have been up to, Lecter wants me to think the worst of him.

  Bob hands me a roll of kitchen towels, and I tear a bunch off and wrap them around my hand. “Kitchen,” I say faintly. I don’t trust myself to speak in any sentence longer than a single word.

  We get to the kitchen. I sit down quietly, holding the bloody wedge of tissue to my fingertips. I look around. It seems so normal, doesn’t it? Not like a disaster scene. Bob just hangs around with a stupid, stunned expression on his face.

  “She’s a vampire,” I say numbly.

  “So is that.” He nods in the direction of the hall door, pointing at Lecter and his quick-release carapace.

  “That’s . . . different.” I don’t know why I should feel defensive. Lecter wanted to kill Bob, didn’t he? First he wanted to kill Mhari, then . . . Bob.

  “The difference is, now it wants me dead.” Bob looks at me. He’s tired and careworn, and there’s something else. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “When it turned on you, it was horrible.” I shudder. I can’t seem to stop shaking. The paranoia, the suspicion: they say there’s no smoke without fire, but what if an enemy is laying a smoke screen to justify terrible acts? “Oh God, that was awful.” You should be dead, Bob, something whispers at the back of my mind. Lecter is too powerful. “Bob, how did you stop it? You shouldn’t have been able to . . .”

  “Angleton’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “The Code Red last night. The intruder was a, an ancient PHANG. He killed Angleton.”

  “Oh my God. Oh my God.”

  I lose the plot completely for a few seconds. Stupid me. I reach for him across the infinite gulf of the kitchen table and he’s still there, only different. He takes my hand. “You’re him now.” Angleton is another of our ancient monsters, the mortal vessel of the Eater of Souls. One of the night haunts upon whose shoulders the Laundry rests. For years he’s used Bob as a footstool, dropping tidbits of lore in front of him, sharing abilities, but over these past two years, Bob’s become something more: the ritual at Brookwood, where the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh tried to sacrifice him, changed something in him. Now he’s different. The way he managed to break through Lecter’s siren song . . .

  “Not really,” he demurs. I feel a flicker of sullen resentment: his talent for self-deprecation borders on willful blindness. “But I have access to a lot of, of—” He falls silent. “Stuff.”

  Unpalatable facts:

  Bob and I have come this far together by treating life as a three-legged race, relying on one another to keep us sane when we simply can’t face up to what we’re doing anymore. I’ve come to count on our relationship working like this, but in the space of a couple of hours the rug has been pulled from under my feet.

  This is a new and unfamiliar Bob. Whether he’s lying or not, whether he was hosting an innocent sleepover in a safe house or carrying on an affair in my own bed while I was away, pales into insignificance compared to the unwelcome realization that he isn’t just Bob anymore, but Bob with eldritch necromantic strings attached. He’s finally stepped across a threshold I passed long ago, realized that he has responsibilities larger than his own life. And it means we’re into terra incognita.

  “What are you going to do?” I ask him.

  “I should destroy that thing.” His expression as he looks at the hall doorway is venomous, but I can tell from the set of his shoulders that he knows how futile the suggestion is. I feel a pang of mild resentment. I’d like to be rid of the violin, too; what does he think carrying it does to me?

  “They won’t let you. The organization needs it. It’s all I can do to keep squashing the proposals to make more of them.”

  “Yes, but if I don’t it’s going to try and kill me again,” he points out.

  I try to plot a way out of the cleft stick we find ourselves in. Of course, there isn’t one. “I can’t let go of it.” I chew my lip. “If I let go of it—return it to Supplies, convince them I can’t carry it anymore—they’ll just give it to someone else. Someone inexperienced. It was inactive for years before they gave it to me. Starving and in hibernation. It’s awake now. And the stars are right.”

  This is why I have to keep calm and carry Lecter. Until someone better qualified comes along, I’m where the buck stops. And the chances of someone coming along who is more able than I—an agent with eight years’ experience of holding my course and not being swayed by the blandishments of the bone violin—are slim. I hope Bob can understand this. It’s not really any different from the Eater of Souls thing: now that Angleton’s gone, Bob’s next in the firing line.

  “What are we going to do? It wants me dead,” he says dolefully.

  I talk myself through to the bitter end, as much for my own benefit as for his. “If I let go of it a lot of other people will die, Bob. I’m the only thing holding it back. Do you want that? Do you really want to take responsibility for letting it off the leash with an inexperienced handler?”

  I meet his gaze. My heart breaks as he says the inevitable words.

  “I’m going to have to move out.”

  3.

  THE FOURTH WALL

  I reassemble the violin case on the kitchen table while Bob moves around upstairs, assembling his go-bag and adding an extra supply of necessities. His footsteps are heavy and drag as if he’s d
runk. My hands are shaking and I have to sortie to the bathroom for sticking plasters a couple of times, but I finally succeed in fitting the case back together again. I retrieve the bow and violin, then fetch the cleaning kit: then I focus on the fingerboard so intently that the sound of the front door closing takes me by surprise. I realize with a start that my husband has left me without saying good-bye.

  I shut the case and leave it on the kitchen table. To my mild surprise, I feel numb and distant. It feels wrong: I should be angry, bitter and burning and full of rage and resentment. I ought to be furious with the violin, which is sleeping smug and satiated in its bone-white coffin-case, having finally gotten its way. I should be pissed off at Mhari for having injected herself back into Bob’s life like some kind of vile parasitic worm. (At least Ramona has the decency to stay away and lead a life of her own.) I should be having a screaming jealousy fit at my husband for fucking that bitch, or worse, for not fucking her and for being so oblivious to the possibility and to what it might mean to me that he didn’t realize offering her crash space in our living room while I was away without telling me might be open to misinterpretation. I should be mourning Angleton, the scary old coffin-dodger. I should be having a screaming breakdown fit right now, shouting imprecations at the setting moon and throwing toiletries out of the window. But I’m not; I’m just icily over-controlled, methodically going through the motions.

  How very grown-up of me.

  Around six o’clock I realize I’m yawning uncontrollably. My emotional state is freewheeling downhill with burned-out brakes: I’ll be unable to put up a fight if Lecter tries to romance me in my dreams. Also, my mobile phone is down to about 30 percent of battery charge—which is bad, if I’m even potentially on-call. So I take precautions. I lock and bolt the front door, arm the burglar alarm, check and then power up the protective grids on all the windows, and prepare for a siege. (The living room window, it turns out, is both intact and closed: Bob must have seen to it on his way out. Damn him for his consideration.)

  I pick up the violin case and carry it upstairs. We have a big old wardrobe in the bedroom, and there’s a lock on its door. I bed Lecter down between Bob’s mothballed funeral suit and a random selection of dresses left over from the last decade of wedding invitations, lock the wardrobe, carefully draw a basic containment ward around the lock using my conductive Sharpie, then take the key downstairs and put it inside the ceramic jar of pre-ground coffee. Bob carefully left an old crowbar under the bed some years ago, just in case, so in event of a real emergency I can get to the violin without going downstairs . . . but I’d rather not make it too easy. I’m not a sleepwalker, but there’s always a first time. Finally, I use the bathroom, then lock myself in the bedroom, plug in my phone, and set an alarm for noon.

  And so to bed, perchance to sleep like a log. And, by some miracle, Lecter leaves me alone.

  * * *

  Unfortunately I do not get my full lie-in.

  I vaguely register confused sensations of a furry face pushing against my head, but I grew up in a house with cats and I can ignore Spooky ruthlessly, even in my sleep. But an hour before my alarm call—at about ten to eleven—my ears register the distant ringing of the work telephone in the kitchen. I’m asleep when it rings the first time, but by the second I am on my feet, and by the third I walk straight into the closed-and-locked bedroom door. Swearing ensues.

  It takes me eleven rings—six more than usual—to get to the phone, and I pick it up bleary-eyed and panting. “Yes?” I gasp, certain that something is wrong—then I realize what it is: Bob would normally have answered the phone because he sleeps on the side of the bed nearest the door.

  “Ops desk. Is that Agent Candid?”

  Two calls in twelve hours. “Yes,” I admit, and authenticate myself. “What is it?”

  “Sorry to bother you after last night, but we have a”—the DO sounds reticent, which is just plain wrong—“peculiar situation emerging. How soon can you get to Trafalgar Square? With your instrument?”

  “What for?”

  “We want you to busk.”

  Flummoxed is my middle name. “You want me to busk why, precisely? In Trafalgar Square? Don’t you need a license to—”

  “The police will cover for you. Um, it would be best if you dressed casual—a mature student out having fun, something like that.”

  My mouth flaps uselessly as I try to process this vexing—not to say patronizing—instruction. I don’t know how to explain to the DO that most music students aren’t in their early forties: Maybe I just look young for my age? I sigh. “I’ll give it a try. What’s the plan?”

  “There’s a developing situation on the Fourth Plinth, and we need someone to keep an eye on it who isn’t going to draw attention and who is equipped to intervene if it escalates. All our reserves are committed after last night, so, um, I know this sounds bad, but when I say we’re scraping the barrel I mean we’re totally overcommitted and running on 120 percent and we didn’t want to disturb you but we’re entirely out of unobtrusive assets . . .”

  Suddenly it clicks. “You want me because I’m socially invisible.”

  “You could put it like that: personally I’d rather not, but Colonel Lockhart said you’d understand?” He ends on a whimper blue-shifting into a whine, and so he should. The landline phone is a 1940s-era Bakelite-and-steel assembly. If it was made of flimsy modern plastics my death-grip would be crumbling it to splinters at this point.

  “I’ll be there in an hour,” I snarl, then slam the receiver down so hard that it bounces.

  The Laundry is, regrettably, top-heavy with men of a certain age. Institutional culture propagates down the decades, and however much we may want change, change takes time. As it happens, the Laundry is a lot better today than it was when I was sucked into the machinery a decade ago. We’re part of the civil service, and we’re required to follow anti-discrimination law to the letter: and for the most part we do an okay job. But as with all organizations, shit trickles down from the top, and if the assholes at the top hold antediluvian attitudes formed in previous decades, you’re going to have to keep practicing your shit-eating grin until they retire.

  In this particular case I am forced to admit that Lockhart has a valid point. Women over a certain age become socially invisible: people just ignore us. I’m close enough to the tipping point that if I don’t take care of my appearance, I can fall foul of it. It’s a very strange experience, being the invisible middle-aged woman. You can walk into a shop or restaurant or a bar and eyeballs just seem to slide past you as if you aren’t there. When you’re trying to get served, it’s infuriating, sometimes to the point of being humiliating as well, but in our line of work . . .

  . . . Sometimes having a passive cloak of invisibility that doesn’t set off every thaum detector within a kilometer comes in handy.

  Okay, Mo, you can do this. One step at a time. Treat it as an exercise in street theater, you can do that, can’t you? I grumble to myself as I refill the cat’s bowl, retrieve my instrument, run a brush through my hair (which is lank from the seaside air and subsequent helicopter ride: slept in sufficiently that it’s probably on the edge of becoming a des res for upwardly mobile dormice), and hunt out casualwear I’d ordinarily have relegated to housework-only use. I pick out: jeans, a chunky cable-knit sweater, what used to be a nice flying jacket of Bob’s, a comfy but worn pair of DMs, and by way of accessories a Liberty scarf and a black beret that have both seen better days. Yeah, that’s my boho mature student persona, baby. For a moment I contemplate going hipster instead, but that might stand out. A smear of lipstick and a battered leather handbag and I’m ready to serenade the one-legged pigeons of London.

  I collect my instrument, head for the end of the street, and flag down a cab, trying not to spook at odd-looking low-slung black cars or random passers-by. Taxis are expensive, but I’m going to take a “how soon can you” call by the DO as cart
e blanche to run up a tab. “I need to get to Charing Cross,” I tell the driver. She nods, drops the apocryphal fifth wheel that allows the black cab to pivot in place, then floors the accelerator.

  London traffic is its normal self, which is to say composed entirely of nose-to-tail black cabs, red buses, and confused delivery drivers. Bike couriers weave in and out of the intermittently stationary vehicles without once demonstrating their possession of a survival instinct; I cringe at a couple of near misses and hunker down in the back, wishing the windows were tinted. I feel way too exposed out here: exposed and trapped simultaneously. A killer on a stolen motorbike could come up behind us while we’re stopped at traffic lights and put two bullets in the back of my head and I wouldn’t even see them approaching . . . try not to think about it. There are commuters on bicycles, and numerous tourists pedaling along gamely on bright blue Boris Bikes. Maybe I should have rented one instead of paying the cabbie? Tried to blend in with the anonymous hordes? It might even have been faster.

  She drops me precisely outside the nearest entrance to Charing Cross tube station. I thank her and head towards the confused mass of pedestrian crossings on the Strand. It takes me a minute or two to make it to the edge of the Square, where I pause beneath the supercilious gaze of the one-eyed admiral, mentally tug my middle-aged invisibility cloak tight around my shoulders, and take stock of my surroundings.

  In the middle of the square: the fountains, fronted by Nelson’s Column. At each corner: the four plinths, three of them surmounted by pompous Victorian triumphalist statues—General Sir Henry Havelock, General Sir Charles James Napier, and His Nobby Nob-ness, King George the Fourth. (Who was not even remotely as pompous as his statue suggests.) Over to the left at the back, there’s the infamously empty Fourth Plinth, subject of the Duty Officer’s scrutiny.

  And the instant I clap eyes on it, I realize that we have a problem. No, make that a problem.

  The Fourth Plinth is one of those British affectations which we love to parade around in public as a sign of our broad-minded tolerance and love of eccentricity. It’s actually just another classical stone plinth, originally intended to support an equestrian statue. It’s been empty for about a hundred and fifty years because nobody could agree who to put on it. Then around the turn of the millennium, the Royal Society of Arts said, “Oi, can we borrow the spare plinth? It’s an Art thing.” And since then it’s been occupied by an ever-changing succession of arts projects: sometimes a statue, sometimes an abstract sculpture, sometimes a random member of the public reciting poetry or narrating Shakespeare in semaphore.