The Annihilation Score

by Charles Stross

  “Jim will hold the score for you,” she tells me. “Now get up there and do your job, Officer.”

  I can’t stop myself: and as my feet carry me towards the steps leading up to the back of the stage in the Albert Hall, unready and unwilling to give the performance of my life, I work out why. The geas working against me is my own oath of office. I was lawfully assigned to the Security Service and thence to the Home Office: so Deputy Commissioner Stanwick is lawfully able to order me to do this, with authority right from the top of my secondment! It’d take the SA himself suspending me from active duty to break me out of this trap, and in the meantime—

  —I’m climbing the stairs with Lecter crooning tuneless alien phrases in the back of my mind, and then the spotlight leads my unwilling feet towards the violin soloist’s podium. And I’m out of time.

  19.

  THE KING IN YELLOW

  That nightmare I had, weeks ago, about performing naked on stage at the Albert Hall in front of an audience of empty police uniforms?

  Too realistic for comfort: the nascent sense of panic is chokingly familiar, but there’s no escape through waking up this time around.

  As I walk out onto the stage, past the percussion, then forward to the strings, I can’t see the audience. We’re lit brightly from above, but the whistles and chatter and applause and the crackle of party poppers all take place beyond the footlights. There’s a burst of clapping as I walk towards the front, and the odd appreciative wolf whistle. The other musicians are in formal concert black, the soloists in evening gowns and tuxes, our conductor in white tie and tails; my superhero drag marks me out as if I was naked—

  There is a music stand waiting for me. Jim stands stiffly beside it, perspiration glistening on his forehead. The other violinists look at me with ill-concealed incredulity as an announcer hurries up to the conductor and they confer quietly.

  I can’t break out of this walking nightmare however hard I try. I find my hands are full, busily unlocking my violin case and extracting the bow and body without my conscious volition getting a look-in. Fuck it, Mhari, where are you? Why aren’t you here? I glance at Jim. Maybe I can talk to him: “Jim?” He doesn’t make eye contact. He looks slightly glassy, swaying in place as if anchored to the ocean floor in the grip of a watery current: Another geas? “Jim? Snap out of it!”

  His hand reaches out towards the music stand, adjusts the somewhat tattered, brown-covered score that waits for me, and Lecter snarls, triumphant.

  The young, incredibly pretty, and astonishingly talented soloist who carried me away with her brilliance during the first half—she’s barely twenty and she’s already better than I’ll ever be—leans towards me and peers at my instrument in perplexity. “Who made this?” she asks, raising one perfectly threaded eyebrow. “I haven’t seen one of these before—”

  I manage to tear my eyes away from the cover of the score and stare at her. “If you value your life, run,” I hiss at her, and she recoils, eyes wide. “I mean it! Get out now, before it’s too late!” I raise my bow and lay it across Lecter’s strings, and he responds, just a faint ripple of lightning blue running up and down the fingerboard, which is incredibly sensitive tonight.

  “Who are you?” she asks.

  “Trafalgar Square. The Mayor, remember? Things are going to break bad. Get as many people out as you can—”

  The lights are going down on the audience, and the background of noise changes. Jim is still swaying slightly, and after a moment I realize he isn’t blinking: faint tear tracks run down his cheeks, but that’s an autonomic reflex. “If you’ve done anything to him,” I warn Lecter, “I’ll—”

  ***Not me.*** Lecter sounds awfully smug. ***Play now?*** His anticipation fills me with an awful, dull foreboding.

  Beside the conductor, the announcer clears his throat, then raises a cordless microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to announce a change of program for the second half.”

  He pauses. You could hear a pin drop. Changes of program are not normal during the Last Night of the Proms. “We will, of course, be concluding the evening as usual with a round of ‘Rule, Britannia!’ then Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 in D major, ‘Jerusalem,’ and the national anthem. But first—

  “First, we have something very special for you tonight. It has never been played before in a concert hall: indeed, the score of this piece was thought to have been lost until, barely a month ago, a copy came to light in the rare manuscripts archive during the clean-up after the Mad Scientist Professor Freudstein’s robbery of the British Library! Some of you may have heard of a famously obscure play called The King in Yellow—it was in part the subject of a television crime drama last year. The King in Yellow was converted to an opera but never performed in full; Franz Kafka prepared the libretto and a score was subsequently written by his collaborator, the violinist Erich Zahn, for performance on specially adapted instruments of his own devising, but the rise of fascism put an end to all attempts to perform it until after the war. During the early 1960s, Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop attempted to rescore the concerto for electronic instruments, but the controversial nature of the piece resisted attempts to bring it to a mainstream audience.

  “Until now, that is. With the recovery of the original score we are delighted to present, for the first time, the extraordinary violin sonata from the second act that marked the zenith of Erich Zahn’s career. Our special guest soloist for tonight is Dr. Dominique O’Brien, lecturer in music at Birkbeck College, who is not only a leading authority on atonality in modernist composition during the Weimar period, but a talented soloist in her own right and one of the few musicians who performs with an original Zahn instrument. Accompanying her on percussion, wind, and brass is the BBC Philharmonic orchestra, while elements of the text will be narrated as prose by . . .”

  Jim reaches out jerkily, as if not in control of his own arm muscles, and turns back the cover to reveal the first page. My nerveless feet shuffle sideways, positioning me before the stand. I turn to face the invisible audience, wishing that my own superpower would manifest right now and vanish me from their purview—wishing the very earth would open up beneath my feet and swallow me. My guts are loose with fear; this is not stage fright but something far, far worse: the sum of all my nightmares.

  I can’t stop myself: I read the bracketed staves of the first line, see how the movement begins with the wind section, and where I’m supposed to come in. A will not my own compels me to seat my instrument properly between shoulder and chin, and pushing past my terror, brushing my pathetic resistance aside, Lecter takes control of my wrists and fingertips. My traitor hands begin to play.

  * * *

  I have been playing the violin since I was eight years old, and I’ve practiced virtually every day with Lecter for the past decade. I’ve published papers on the intersection of music theory and occult inference systems; I came to the attention of the Laundry for my research—and the Black Chamber, too—so I know whereof I speak when I say that music has power. I also know what I’m on about when I assert, with some certainty, that while I am a reasonably proficient musician, I am in no way up to the standard of a guest soloist performing before the Last Night audience at the Albert Hall. (Third violin, maybe—at a pinch, if I really worked at it and the orchestra director was hard up for talent.)

  On the other hand, I’m probably the only violinist in the country who can both sight-read the particular score in front of me and understand what it’s saying on all levels—the musical phrasing and the deeper expressions it invokes. The first page is light enough, an introduction in a minor key that gives me time to warm up; but soon enough Jim turns the page before me and we’re into a much stronger exposition, two themes alternating from F-minor to D-flat major . . . with a subtext that makes my skin crawl and itch as if tiny insects are burrowing beneath the surface, for I recognize the pattern of an invocation when I see
one. My instrument’s strings glow almost invisibly in the spotlight glare, but I can feel Lecter’s power gathering in a rush as he awakens. From the corner of one eye I can just see the soprano soloist taking breath as she prepares to give voice to Cassilda’s lament, beside the turbid waters of the Lake of Hali—

  ***My turn,*** Lecter hums, overwhelmingly satisfied, like a gigantic predator that is gathering himself to pounce on the fattest, juiciest prey—

  “What will this do?” I can’t stop reading, my fingers refuse to still themselves—the geas has me enchained—but sight-reading doesn’t quite take all my attention.

  ***I return to myself thuswise.***

  I glimpse a vision through the eyes of Lecter’s interior space, and it is truly frightening. The stony amphitheater of my earlier dream is superimposed over the stage of the Royal Albert Hall. The ceiling has disappeared, revealing a clear sky pierced by the lights of a thousand alien stars. Around me an orchestra of the dead plays for an audience of the damned.

  “Who are you?”

  Lecter laughs, the madness of strings: ***I am an echo of an echo, ripped from yellowing bones enrobed in shrouds to dance within this rigid body: Do you know me yet?***

  The violin in my hands feels alive by proxy. As the piece moves back to the major theme, I feel him, warm and pulsing with stolen life, all the lives he’s drunk down over the years and decades since the mad luthier of Munich bound a summoned demon into an instrument carved from the still-raw bones of human sacrifices: “Are you the King in Yellow?” I demand as Jim, somnambulant, turns the page and our little songbird at the podium raises her voice in song.

  ***I am no more the King in Yellow than your littlest fingernail is the bearer of the white violin! But soon . . .***

  Then the development steps up a level, and I can’t spare any attention for horrified contemplation: my fingers and hands and arms and upper body are all caught up in the progression as the chorus join in song, chanting lyrics increasingly mutilated and warped to serve the ends of Freudstein:

  Strange is the night where black stars rise,

  And strange moons circle through the skies,

  But stranger still is

  Lost Carcosa.

  Songs of law the Hyades shall sing,

  Where flap the tatters of the King,

  Must die unheard in

  Dim Carcosa.

  Bind those who hear these words,

  To love the law though death itself shall die,

  Unquestioning, obedient in

  Dim Carcosa—

  —The Albert Hall has completely disappeared.

  I seem to stand amidst a frozen orchestra as the music dies away around us. Jim is frozen beside the music stand, a puppet in the hands of a tired master: his eyes glow faintly with the spiraling wormsign of feeders in night. The audience on the stone steps of the amphitheater are familiar, Prom-goers transported bodily to the alien place, immobile in the grip of some force that has stopped time itself. I look up at where the ceiling should be and see moons—two of them, shining down like symbols of merciless alienation.

  My hands are empty. I jerk round, half-panicked, a sense of helpless vulnerability—I know in retrospect this sounds laughable—gripping me, because the violin is my most powerful defense and Lecter vanished just as I found myself on this stony stage. But then I realize what’s going on.

  ***Looking for me?***

  I dry-swallow, looking up at Lecter’s true form. “Not really,” I say in a very small voice, trembling slightly.

  ***Too bad.***

  In this place Lecter doesn’t wear the body of a bone-white violin. He doesn’t need to. I know where we are: previously he’s invaded my dreams, but now, flushed with the power of a major summoning, he’s dragged me into his dream. Now I know what to look for I can feel ghost fingers moving, the tension of neck and shoulder betraying a performance still in progress.

  ***I couldn’t risk you refusing to cooperate further with my little joke.*** The gaunt figure floating in mid-air before me seems to smirk, even though its face is hidden from my perception by a veil of palest golden lace. ***So I thought I’d invite you backstage with me, while your body plays on without you.***

  “This is where you live, isn’t it?” I glance away. Around us the frozen figures stand, row upon row, eyes flickering with tainted phosphorescence. “This is where you’ve always been.”

  ***I’m the last one, you know. The last surviving key. All the other violins are lost, destroyed or locked away—all but me.***

  “Yes.” I turn back to face him. It. Him. The avatar of that which the pale violins were created to summon, when the stars were right. Lecter’s shadow: the King in Yellow, released from captivity within the body of the bone violin. “There are people who really don’t think you should exist anymore, did you know that?”

  ***I am aware.*** His amusement is icy. ***But once the key turns in the lock, I shall come into my full birthright, and they will cease to be of concern . . .***

  * * *

  Here I stand, trapped timeless in the gap between two beats of a measure in a work of transcendental melodic magic that has been perverted into a summoning. Here I stand, caught inside the dreamscape of my own cursed musical instrument, while it seeks to pervert the perversion, to turn Operation Freudstein’s insanely dangerous attempt at a mass geas of compulsion into an invocation instead, a summoning for the King in Yellow. Here I stand outside of time and space, and I notice that I’m shaking.

  I’m not in shock, and I am not cold, for there is no temperature in Lecter’s dream. I am, I slowly realize, livid with anger and just barely bottling it in. Anger? Rage, actually.

  Let me enumerate the roots of my rage:

  I’m furious with Bob for deserting me to become the new Eater of Souls. I’m mortified and angry with myself for falling for Jim’s charms while failing to realize that he’d been placed in my organization—whether or not he knew it—by our adversary, to provide them with a continuous stream of intelligence about us via his weekly reports. Even before we come to my abduction into this waking nightmare, I was furious at my instrument for daring to tiptoe around my dreams and hopes and fears, resentful of the way it manipulated me with Mhari.

  I’m pissed off at Dr. Armstrong for dumping me into the Directorship at INCORRIGIBLE, also known as the Transhuman Police Coordination Force, a job for which I am absolutely inadequate and unqualified; but above and beyond that I am disgusted with him for knowingly putting me in a position of assumed helplessness in hope that it would lead our enemy to play their hand, despite being fully aware of my history, of what unquiet ghosts it would dredge up.

  I’m upset at myself for being afraid of standing backlit against windows and for spooking at loud noises in crowds. I’m angry with all the waiters and shop assistants and police foot patrols who can look right at me and fail to see me as I slowly drown in the oceanic waters of social irrelevance, succumbing to the invisibility of the middle-aged woman until it gradually becomes a three- or four-sigma superpower, an expression of my own not inconsiderable strength as a practitioner feeding on my sense of self-doubt and inadequacy. (The invisible man is a Wellsian supervillain, but the invisible women are all around us, anxious and unseen.)

  I lack the words to adequately express how incensed I am by the activities of Deputy Commissioner Laura Stanwick of the Metropolitan Police and her cronies within ACPO, who have decided on their own initiative that nanny knows best, and that creating a nightmare supervillain as a stalking horse to justify raping twenty million minds in parallel is a perfectly acceptable price to pay, if it improves cooperation with the police in a time of national crisis—a crisis that they barely understand and are in no small measure unintentionally contributing to, by diverting our scarce resources.

  That the culmination of Operation Freudstein is an attempt to compel millions of people
to obey the rules of policing is bad enough. That they’ve recklessly chosen to ignore my urgent warnings about the risks of overfeeding the white violin is worse. That the instrument in question sees this as an opportunity to become the undead avatar of the King in Yellow (and is well on the way to doing just that, if I’m any judge of demonic summonings gone wrong) is just unspeakable.

  But all of this is displacement.

  The harsh fact is, I don’t much like who I’ve become or what I’ve done with my life since I followed Bob down the rabbit hole of the Laundry all those years ago. I have, admittedly, had all those extra years of life and even some stretches of something approximating marital bliss; I can’t forget the way Bob rescued me twice from fates that don’t bear thinking about. (Admittedly, I returned the favor: we’ve played a hair-raisingly extreme version of “for better or for worse” over the years.) But it’s been crumbling for ages now, as I was sent on one nightmarish job after another, culminating in Vakilabad and then the nonsense in Trafalgar Square—history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. I’ve sacrificed a lot to the Laundry. I allowed my academic career to wither, marking time in a teaching niche. Kids—well, they were a nonstarter once I understood the horrifying implications of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. Salary . . . don’t get me started. I’m in my forties now, my best years behind me, marriage coming unraveled, career tanking spectacularly, and when the chips were down, the oath of office I swore rendered me unable to say “no” to the most heinously immoral order anyone has ever given me.