The Annihilation Score

by Charles Stross

  My partner chuckles, then answers: not in Daddy’s long-dead voice, for which I am grateful. ***Of course not. You can’t blame me for trying, though, can you? It only works around ten percent of the time, but when it works, it’s very effective.*** He lifts me bodily from the floor and swings me around him, forcing me to cling to his arms for dear life. ***But if you won’t cooperate of your free will, I’m afraid I’ll have to compel you.***

  “Wait what—”

  And I’m somewhere else but still trapped in the claustrophobic dream, still spotlit but now seated: in an orchestra pit, wearing concert black with Lecter at my shoulder and his bow between my fingers. There is a music stand with a score positioned just where it belongs. The other violinists of the ensemble sit motionless to my right and left. I’m afraid to glance sideways: there’s something uncannily gaunt about them as they wait, utterly still, like a bone sculpture garden at midnight. I sight-read the visible pages of the piece, feeling increasingly doubtful as I go along. It’s an operatic composition with a vaguely familiar name: The King in Yellow. Wait, isn’t this one of the stolen manuscripts that Mhari crosschecked in the Laundry archive index? It seems to be a solo piece for first violin from Act I, Scene 2: “Cassilda’s Song.” It’s a pleasant if somewhat naively conventional melody, although the lyrics for the soprano who I am to accompany fill me with a vague sense of dread.

  ***Play me,*** urges the thing in my hands—white and polished bone and, simultaneously, bloated and visceral and filled with rotting blood, ***it is the price you must pay.***

  “No,” I try to say, the skin-crawling sense of wrongness intensifying, as the bow tries to drag itself across the strings, my fingers in thrall to it. “No!”

  I am choking. I can’t breathe. I try to stand up or to move but I’m being held down by something and it’s so heavy and I can’t breathe, and when I try to inhale there’s a hideous charnel house smell and something sharp stabs at my forehead—

  —And I’m awake in bed with Bob sprawled across me and the fucking cat is standing on my forehead with her claws out, hissing like a teakettle that’s about to explode—

  I manage to vent a shuddering wordless cry of unease and aversion: “Waaugh!”

  Spooky stops hissing, hunkers down, and leaps—using my head as an extremely painful springboard—right onto the small of Bob’s back, nearly driving the wind out of both of us. Bob raises his head, and phosphorescent green pinworms coil and whirl behind his eyelids—

  Blink.

  I’m crouched on the landing at the top of the staircase, naked except for one wrinkled and laddered stocking and a couple of bruises that will be impressive by morning. I’m pulling the bedroom door closed and I’ve got a crowbar in my hand and the thing in Bob’s body is slowly sitting up in the middle of the bed, raising zombie hands towards its face. A black furry shadow zips through the narrowing gap with a squawk of protest, leaps over my legs, and bolts downstairs. Clever puss. The revenant is between me and the wardrobe, and the bedroom door only locks on the inside and I am so fucked that it isn’t funny—

  Blink.

  “Mo? Are you all right?”

  The next thing I am aware of is that I am lying on the upstairs landing carpet, staring at the light bulb swinging overhead at the end of its tether. Bob is lowering himself to crouch by my side, a look of deep concern on his face. I startle and try to slither sideways away from him, but I run into the wall before I can go anywhere and then I realize that his eyes are perfectly normal. “You—you—” I raise my right hand and point at him: “Feeders!”

  “What?” he asks, very intelligently.

  I’m beginning to wake up, and the questions cluttering up my head distract me so that I only notice after a few seconds that he’s stroking my knee in what he evidently believes is a reassuring manner. I close my eyes and try not to cry. I’m not dying. The green glowing worms in the eyes are a sign of possession by the feeders in the night, which are contagious and lethal if you’re not warded. Oddly, I don’t wear a ward in bed with my husband. I am clearly losing the plot. I sniff, then sniff again, and begin to weep piteously. After a minute I feel the comforting warmth of his arms around my shoulders.

  “What scared you?” he asks after a while. “Can I get you anything?”

  I just weep harder, from sheer frustration as much as anything else. Stupid lachrymatory reflex. What can I say? I thought you’d died in the night and were possessed by a feeder? I was going to stick this crowbar through your chest? None of it works; all of those sentences lead to broken futures.

  “The cat,” I finally manage through my sniffles. “Is she all right?”

  “Is she—I don’t know. Do you want me to go and look?”

  I try to nod. “Yes. She ran downstairs.” She saved my life. Or maybe yours. If she hadn’t woken both of us in time . . .

  I sniff again and take a deep breath. We’re both grown-ups, aren’t we? Bob thinks, with some justification, that my violin is a danger to his life. Well, I’m sure we can find a way to work around that. But what if Bob is a danger to me? I think back to something he said last week. I have access to a lot of stuff. Angleton’s stuff. Angleton was possessed by—or superpowered by: take your pick—an ancient and powerful alien intelligence from another universe. Bob was accidentally cross-linked to it a couple years ago when a cult of murderous idiots tried to sacrifice him in order to invoke and incarnate the Eater of Souls. Now Angleton is dead, Bob is the only mortal vessel for the Eater of Souls to walk the Earth. And one of the first skills Angleton taught him was the control and summoning of the lesser feeders.

  I take another deep breath that ends in a bubbly snuffle. I shuffle back against the wall and then push myself creakily to my feet. I stumble to the bathroom: I’m a sight fit to frighten babies. I blow my nose, then, hands shaking, I pull out a couple of makeup remover pads. Sleeping in eyeliner and lipstick: ick. The ritual of removal gives me time to calm down and center myself, and I manage not to jump out of my skin when the floorboards outside the bathroom door creak under the weight of Bob’s tread.

  I turn and look at my husband. He’s standing there completely naked except for the black furry comma cradled in his arms. Spooky blinks at me dim-wittedly, then purrs as Bob scritches along the edge of her jaw. Stupid self-centered animal! I straighten up and extend a tentative finger for the cat to sniff. All I can manage for Bob is my most fragile smile: one suitable for weddings, funerals, and being woken up in the middle of the night by demons. “Thanks,” I say.

  “Thanks for what?” He looks puzzled.

  “Thanks for not being dead.” I can’t help myself: I nearly lose it again.

  When I come back to myself, he’s not holding Spooky anymore, but he still looks puzzled. “What happened?” he asks.

  I take a deep breath. “I’m not sure we can make this work.”

  “Oh, Mo—”

  “It’s not just Lecter. Your eyes: Did you know they glow in the dark?”

  “Wait—what?”

  “You’ve become the fucking Eater of Souls.” I cross my arms. “Pardon my French. You, you, I can’t stand this!”

  A couple of seconds later I’m shivering and weeping on his shoulder. He stands still, holding me. He periodically tries to pat my shoulder, ineffectually offering reassurance.

  “Are you undead?” I ask anxiously between sobs.

  “I don’t think so,” he says after a while. “I don’t feel as if I died. At least, not recently.”

  “But your eyes did the glowing thing. If Spooky hadn’t woken you up—”

  “Do you really think I’d willingly harm a hair on your head?”

  “Not you.” I’m shaking. “It. The thing you carry around with you all the time now. Your new passenger.” The irony of what I’m saying isn’t lost on me. “I don’t know what it wants, but it frightens me.” Another little white lie: I’m afra
id that it is aware of Lecter and sees the violin and its bearer as a threat. I’ve been steering my own course for most of a decade, despite being burdened with a monstrous payload. I know how hard it can be to know your own mind, to separate your desire from the subtle blandishments of an insidious intruder. How hard is it going to be for Bob? He doesn’t have my experience. I grab his waist and try to bury my chin in his shoulder. The shaking intensifies. I feel cold.

  “I think”—I hear his voice as if it comes from far away—“we can still live together. If it’s only sleeping that’s the issue, we just need another bedroom, locks and wards on the doors—”

  I pull back for just long enough to punch his arm. “In London. Stupid. Might as well ask for a lottery win.” We live in a key worker’s house we rent from the Laundry at a price based on what it was worth thirty years ago. London’s current overheated bubble market has been running for decades and the average two-bedroom apartment with cardboard walls in a bad part of suburbia costs around half a million pounds. We’re civil servants. While we’re not badly paid, we’d need a hundred thousand in cash just to put down a deposit. We don’t have that kind of money.

  “If only a life of crime was an option.”

  “I’d have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids.”

  He chuckles sadly. “Go back to bed, Mo. Lock the bedroom door. I’ll grab the spare duvet and use the living room sofa.”

  “But tomorrow—”

  “Tomorrow I’ve got to go down to Dunwich. We can talk about it while I’m gone, can’t we? We’ll figure something out.”

  “Yes, we will,” I reply.

  But I’m increasingly scared that we won’t.

  9.

  TEAM OF CHAMPIONS

  I wake up hours later than I meant to. A small black cat is curled up against my head, weighing down my hair. Her purr is deafening, but what pulls me out of a deep and dreamless sleep is the indescribable sensation of having my eyebrows licked. “Urgh!” I growl. Spooky chirrups in satisfaction and walks across the pillow, pulling my hair painfully, then applying her surprisingly heavy paws to various parts of my anatomy through the duvet. She migrates to my belly, sits down—and starts to massage my bladder.

  “Ow. Okay, I get the message.” I sit up, grab her behind her shoulders, and pour her onto the floor. Then I go to the bathroom. When I get back, she’s washing herself with evident unconcern, right in the middle of the bed. Clearly determined to wake me up. Typical.

  I rattle the wardrobe door for a minute before I remember giving the key to Bob. “Bob?” I call. There’s no reply, so I stumble downstairs and peer round the living room door. The spare duvet is neatly folded on the sofa with a white envelope sitting neatly on top of it like a cherry on a pudding. I pick it up and the key falls out. So does a sheet of paper.

  Dear Mo—

  Had to leave early to get the train. You’re right but I don’t like it. Will try to figure out how to rob a bank without breaking the law.

  Love, Bob

  I sigh. Bob, you incurable fool. No, he doesn’t like it. Neither do I, but I went through a divorce once before, some years before I met him. Neither of us want it to happen but that doesn’t mean it’s not going to. Yesterday I thought it was just a matter of finding someone else to carry Lecter. Now it looks infinitely bleaker.

  I go upstairs and unlock the wardrobe, pull out the violin case, and sort out a work outfit: slacks, top, regular jacket. Then I pick out a severe suit and blouse, suitable for emergency meetings with ministers, and fold them into an old carry-on bag. It can go live in the office: I’m not planning on dressing like an undertaker every day, just on the off chance that I will come to the attention of important people.

  “Mrrow?” I glance down as Spooky weaves between my legs, tail high, eyes big and pleading.

  “Oh, you.” I take my kit back down to the kitchen, then hunt around until I figure out what Bob’s been feeding her. I top up her bowl and then—this is icky—look in the cellar. Oh dear. Well, at least Bob cleaned the litter tray before he left. Spooky follows me in and, seeing a pristine field, determines that this cannot be. I turn my back and flee while she goes about her business.

  I see from the kitchen clock that it’s nearly ten o’clock. I swear softly. Bob must have left an hour or two ago. Dismay sweeps across me like a frontal weather system, deepening and darkening as it comes. This is silly: We have phones, don’t we? Suddenly the kitchen feels claustrophobic and stifling: everything in here reminds me of our life together, piling weight atop the feeling that we’re sliding out of control towards the edge of a cliff. I’ve lived with Bob for half my adult life, nearly a quarter of my entire existence: I can’t stand this, I realize. I set up the cafetière with shaking hands, boil the kettle, and carefully make myself a coffee. I pull my laptop out and plug it in to check my email, then find I can’t read the subject lines because my eyes are watering all the time.

  I ache, physically and mentally.

  When I pull myself together and finish snivelling, I wipe my eyes and try again. The first message is from the SA. “Good grief,” it reads, “what did you tell them at the Home Office briefing? HomeSec reported to have said it’s the funniest thing she’s seen since the remake of Yes, Minister. PS: Scuttlebutt is that they’re taking yr. pitch seriously. Budget likely to be approved, subject to enhanced performance metrics and a ten percent haircut.”

  I blink with surprise. No plan survives contact with the enemy, so I’d assumed they’d approve a fraction of what I was pitching for. To get 90 percent is unexpected, to say the least.

  It is against my personal policy to answer any email message short of a declaration of war within an hour of waking up, or before finishing my morning coffee. So I don’t reply, but move on to the next. And the next. I’m just about certain it’s all trivia when I run across a missive from Internal Security. “With regard to your enquiry about Chief Superintendent James Grey, I can confirm that he has cleared background checks and has signed Section Three. Chief Superintendent Grey is an approved liaison officer for Laundry operations requiring a Command Level or lower London Metropolitan Police contact. Chief Superintendent Grey reports to Deputy Assistant Commissioner Smedly of the Metropolitan Police Service, is assigned to the Special Operations Directorate led by Assistant Commissioner Stanwick, and is currently on semi-permanent secondment to ACPO. He is an approved liaison officer for Laundry operations requiring a Command Level or lower contact to coordinate with any Territorial or Special Police Force.”

  So Jim is on the up-and-up? I speed-read the rest of the (detailed) reply. Then I double-check my assumptions and go look for a description of a Chief Super’s role and responsibilities. He’s one step below chief officer rank—that makes him the equivalent of an Army colonel. The secondment to ACPO . . . think in terms of a colonel working for the General Staff of an army: he’s clearly riding the “up” escalator. In other words, he’s a high-flyer. Which in turn means that he’s quite possibly more ambitious than Mhari. Now that’s a scary thought.

  I file it away for later while I check the rest of my inbox, which is overflowing with mundanity. Mhari has, of course, sent over a full list of the confirmed-missing manuscripts. Following a hunch I double-check, and yes, the score to an unperformed operetta of The King in Yellow is on the list, along with an index number in the Dansey House stacks. I keep on reading. Something about the business at the British Library is nagging at me, something that feels wrong, even in the context of a Mad Scientist with a horror music obsession: but it doesn’t quite gel, so I lose myself in the pile of routine correspondence. Nothing else demands my immediate attention until I get to a missive from Mhari, time-stamped half an hour ago. “Help! HR are threatening to send us a liaison from [REDACTED BY FIREWALL FILTER]! I don’t know what to do!”

  A what? Damn. This calls for a reply—she’s clearly in a tizzy, and anything com
ing out of HR that is capable of wrong-footing my bureaucratic tightrope–walking MBA vampire is definite cause for concern. Especially as Emma told me to expect a second wave of staff to show up this week. I fire back: “Hold the fort, I’ll be in by noon. PS: The firewall ate your key facts.”

  I finish my coffee, descend into the cellar, and hold my nose while I wield the slotted scoop of shame on behalf of Spooky. Then I pack my bags and head for the office.

  I arrive around half eleven and climb the stairs, cursing my aching knees, not to mention last night’s intimate aches and strains. Sara is busy with the equipment rack behind the front desk; she nods as I go past. The analysts, Sam and Nick, are at their desks, but they look as if they only just got there: I give them what I hope is a sufficiently knowing smile as I walk by. I dump my violin and the overnight bag in the corner of my office, and I’m just about to head next door when Mhari pops her head round the corner. I manage not to hiss and jump backwards as she recoils dramatically into the corridor. “What is it?” I ask.

  “The windows—”

  “Oh. Wait one.” I dive back across my office and pull down the Venetian blinds. “That better?”

  “Yes, thank you,” she says, sounding slightly shaken as she sidles into the room. She’s back to her anti-sunlight warpaint, but less of it this morning: she’s probably afraid it’s insufficient to avoid sunburn. She’s also dialed back on the office formalwear a notch. “It’s that HR thing, I’m afraid, I don’t know what to do about—”

  “Wait.” I offer her the visitor’s chair. “You’ll need to explain it all over again; the firewall ate the middle of your message.”

  “The firewall what?” It almost comes out in a wail. She grabs the armrests and digs her fingers in. “You didn’t get it?”

  “Get what?”