The Nightmare Stacks

by Charles Stross

  “The—” Alex flashes back to the bizarre machine in the garage. “It’s running?”

  “Not only is it running, it’s legally roadworthy.” The kettle begins to whistle, and for a minute Pinky is busy pouring, filling, and finally pumping. (The artificial heart or whatever it is makes an alarming repetitive gurgle-sploosh noise as it sucks near-boiling water and crams it through some sort of filter cartridge.) “You could borrow it, I suppose.”

  “Is that even legal?” Alex ponders the possibility.

  “Sure. Technically it’s also a company car, but there’s nothing secret about it except for a Fuller-Dee Tetragram to power a glamour that stops other drivers from crashing when they see it. And that’s just a bit of random graffiti in the leg-well until you plug your OFCUT device into the cigarette-lighter socket Brains installed and fire up the see-me-not app.”

  “But, but driver’s license!”

  Pinky thrusts a mug towards him. “Relax. Sure you’d need a category DM license endorsement—tracked vehicles—and you’ve only got a moped license. But”—his eyes swivel side to side, cartoon-conspiratorially—“you’ve got a warrant card. With the see-me-not ward nobody’s going to notice you—they’ll just see a totally forgettable car, and if you do get pulled over you just hand over your warrant card when they ask to see your paperwork.”

  “Um.” Alex sips his decaf cautiously, gears spinning in his head. What Pinky is proposing is bad, naughty, and wrong—but he’s right. The van’s off-limits, his moped is no good, and as for Pete’s big bike . . . what if she wears a skirt? Alex asks himself. And anyway, Pete will probably be riding it home to London tomorrow morning. He’s got family, after all.

  Alex also has a vague idea that the kind of girl who studies drama and dresses as a vampire in Whitby on Halloween might be amused by his turning up for a date driving an antique half-track: or at least take it in her stride.

  “If you don’t like it, you can borrow the hovercraft,” Pinky says, as a rumbling noise outside heralds the triumphant return of the Kettenkrad. “But you might have some trouble with the hills.”

  * * *

  Agent First dreams uneasily in the early hours of Saturday morning.

  She dreams of standing, stiff-legged, on a darkling plain beneath a sky of tattered, speeding clouds. Behind her stands a frozen waterfall of stone. Her feet rest on a limestone pavement much like the landscape above her father’s redoubt. But this is not her home. There is no flicker of in-falling meteors lighting up the night, no vast disk of snowy dust and rock arching overhead to occlude the southern half of the sky. She wears the clothes of a young woman of the urük, but her wrists and ankles are fettered with cold iron and her stomach is as empty as a slave’s. Two of her father’s soldiers hold her upright between them: her knees are too weak to support her. They drag her before her stepmother, who is flanked by a pair of magi. From their leaden expressions she can tell that they’re half-starved, exhausted by the working of great art. First Liege smiles contemptuously at her.

  Oh, thinks Agent First, this can mean only one thing. She tenses leaden limbs that feel too short, too weak to support her. “Your life will be mine.” She rallies, mustering what defiance she can for her death-curse. Not that curses work, as a rule, but—

  “I don’t think so.” Her stepmother’s ears go up, signaling smug satisfaction, and she motions the elder of the magi towards her.

  Agent First tries to pull away, but the soldiers hold her in place when the thin-faced eunuch leans close, his grimace revealing razor-sharp canines. He locks gazes with her, and her shreds of bravado slip away in the face of the hangman’s horror in his eyes. She screams in fear as he yanks her head back and sinks his teeth into the soft flesh at the base of her throat, then in pain as the blood flows. Too bad he hasn’t ripped an artery: there is no abrupt gout of merciful release here, just the hungry lapping of a soft-tongued parasite suckling on her venous circulation.

  Barbed appendages latch onto the surface of her mind, tearing and compressing, and she shudders, horrified as her self-image contorts and shrinks.

  “Before you depart, your father gave me a sending for your true self,” says First Liege, leaning close. She peers into Agent First’s dying proxy’s eyes with hungry fascination. “Deliver this dream tomorrow at dead of night. Time is running out. You received your orders from your Second. Present yourself and your prize”—clear-eyed contempt shines through First Liege’s words—“to All-Highest no more than thirty hours from now.” (As the People count time, there are twenty hours to a day.) “Find the nearest ley line, it will take you to him. He is eager to see what you have accomplished. As am I.”

  “W—w—” Agent First can’t feel her lips or toes and fingers. The pain is subsiding now, supplanted by a tingling chilly numbness in the periphery that is nevertheless exquisitely sensitive and unpleasant, as if the edges of her being are dissolving.

  “He will arrive tomorrow,” says her stepmother, almost sympathetically. She takes Agent First’s sagging head between her hands—the magus is holding her upright, arms around her chest and his face nuzzling against her throat—and now she, too, gazes into Agent First’s raw and battered soul as it recedes, stabbing a mental image at her. “Be present by noon on the morrow or your loyalty will be questioned, little rabbit.”

  There are many things Agent First would say to this if she was present in her own person, and not dying, palsied and shaking, in the grasp of a magus. But her mind is not her own: she can feel pieces of Cassie Brewer slipping away into darkness, the ground crumbling beneath her identity. She can’t feel her hands and feet anymore, and her tongue is a huge and cumbersome block of timber between the numb white steles of her teeth. Even the vampire’s grip is fading from her awareness as his parasites suck the life from her brain, all memories fading. The last to go is the dark poisoned well of her stepmother’s gaze.

  * * *

  It’s Saturday evening.

  Alex has spent the afternoon in a nervous tizzy, worrying about what to wear. He’s combed and re-combed his hair in instinctive fear of Mum’s reaction, ironed a shirt and run straight into the question of what to wear with it. One of his office suits from the bank would be overkill, jeans and a hoodie would be underkill, and as for in-between . . . to tie, or not to tie? In the end he chickens out, goes for chinos and a tweed sports jacket, shoves a tie in his jacket pocket just in case, and finishes it off with a cashmere scarf and a matt-black motorcycle helmet with mirror-finished visor. Daft Punk meets Stephen Fry.

  Finally he goes downstairs. Brains is sitting at the kitchen table, doing something on an iPad. “Do you have the k-keys?” he asks, all but breaking into a stammer.

  “Keys?” Brains looks momentarily lost. “Oh, so you do want to borrow Ilsa?”

  “Ilsa?”

  “The Kettenkrad. C’mon, I have to check you out on the controls.”

  Five minutes later, Alex is sitting on an ancient motorbike saddle in a steel bathtub, with a petrol engine gurgling busily behind him. He sets his phone to vibrate: there’s no way he could hear it through his helmet and the engine and track noise. “Clutch pedal on the left, brake pedal on the right, handgrip throttle on the right handlebar,” Brains points out helpfully. “The gears are like a car—three forward, one reverse, and this lever selects the low ratio. You’ll need to double-declutch because there’s no synchro—ouch,” as Alex stuffs it into first gear with a grate of gear teeth. “Headlamp, indicators, hazard flashers. (We added that.) To steer, pretend it’s a car: at low speed the handlebars engage the track brakes, at high speed the front wheel provides steering input.”

  “Right, right.” Alex eases up on the clutch pedal carefully. The bathtub shudders, jerks forward, and the engine stalls.

  “It helps to release the handbrake.” Brains chides. Alex nods rapidly; he can see that another sixty seconds of this is going to cause Brains to re-evaluate th
e wisdom of lending Alex his toy.

  “How about I back out of here, then take it down the hill for a spin around Potternewton Park?” Alex asks. “That way I can get used to changing gears in low ratio without risking it in traffic.” The park is off-limits to vehicles, but with the no-see-em in operation he should be safe enough.

  “That’s a good idea. But first, see if you can get it out of the driveway.”

  Alex gets Ilsa started again, engages first gear without any hideous crunching noises, and eases out into the quiet residential street. At the bottom of the hill there’s a sharp right turn onto Harehills Lane—a commuter rat-run plagued by speeding idiots in hatchbacks—then an immediate left through the park gates. At this time of evening the park is mostly empty of joggers and dog-walkers. For the first minute, Alex gingerly experiments with the throttle and sticks to the footpaths. Then he pinches himself—Ilsa is an off-road vehicle, after all—points the handlebars at the grass, and guns the throttle.

  Clattering around the grassy slopes of the park in a pint-sized half-track is tremendous fun, and the tracks (which rumble and grate on the road) are nearly silent. Alex finally gets the hang of shifting gears. But time is getting on, the light is fading, and the address Cassie gave him in Headingley is a few miles away. Luckily it’s en route to his parents’ place. So he drives back up to the park gates, turns onto Harehills Lane, and sets off in search of his date.

  By some miracle, he does not crash.

  Ilsa grunts and squeals like a pig humping a farm tractor. She sways at speed, shimmies worryingly above forty miles per hour, and vibrates excitedly until Alex eases off the throttle in a cold sweat. The heater is rubbish, the suspension is antediluvian, and the instruments rudimentary. Most of the creature comforts he expects of, say, a third-hand Honda moped, seem to have been replaced by things better suited to the minion of a particularly demented supervillain: it’s not as if he expects to get any mileage out of the set of snow chains that clutter up the tiny baggage compartment, or the pintle-mount for the air-cooled machine gun. A few idiots honk their horns at him or flash their lights at him, but it’s his speed they’re complaining about, not his tracks or the Wehrmacht insignia painted on the fuel tanks. He drives past a parked police car without attracting any notice; the no-see-em glamour is clearly doing its job.

  Google Maps takes him to the door on time, and he parks around the corner. Then, taking his courage in both hands, he raises his helmet visor and rings the bell.

  The door bursts open: “Alex? Eee! I thought you’d forgotten me!” Cassie grabs him and drags him inside. She kisses him on the mouth, and by the time his circuit breakers have reset she’s wrapped her arms around his waist. “I’m so glad you came,” she says breathlessly.

  “Er . . .” Alex’s larynx seizes up as his mental circuit breakers trip out once more.

  “Which way to your chariot, my lord?” She relaxes her grip, giving them both room to inhale.

  “I’m—I’m parked round the corner. I brought you a spare helmet,” he adds hesitantly as she opens the door and drags him out onto the pavement again. “Are you going to be okay like that?”

  “YesYes!”

  His pupils dilate as he sees what she’s wearing. “Um. That’s very—striking. When I said fancy, I, uh, wasn’t expecting fancy dress . . .”

  Cassie squeezes his hand. “My flatmates are going to a costume party late tonight and I was looking for an excuse to wear this! You should come too! Isn’t it great?” She twitches an ear-tip at him.

  “Yes, but what are you? I mean, who are you supposed to be?” Alex asks, mesmerized.

  Cassie strikes a pose. “I’m a high-born lady of the Host of Air and Darkness! A child of the All-Highest of the hidden people, a courtier at the Unseelie throne!” She lets go of his hand and twirls quickly in place, nearly bowling over a passing dog-walker with a flare of her heavy black cloak. “It’s very me isn’t it? YesYes?”

  After a couple of fruitless hours spent trying to second-guess Alex’s occult and powerful parents, Agent First had a clever idea. She went out to Golden Acre Park to repossess her semi-charged mace of power, then she used what mana she could spare from it to implant in some of her more suggestible classmates the idea that they’re going to dress up as fantastic, mythical beings and go clubbing later that evening.

  So today she is wearing her traveling outfit, which she dry-cleaned after her arrival and stored in a dress carrier in the back of Cassie’s battered wardrobe. Her closely tailored jacket and leggings are of emerald and black velvet trimmed with lace; gaudy glowing gemstones shine from the rings she wears on every gloved finger and the choker clasped around her throat. A jeweled mace dangles from one side of her belt, opposite a long dagger of questionable legality. It’s the perfect disguise, for it gives her an excuse to drop the glamour she normally uses to conceal her unusual features—there is no telling how perceptive Alex’s mother and father might be, if they are sorcerers of sufficient power to have spawned this one. So she will allow them to see her as she truly is: her high cheekbones, slightly slanted eyelids, hair worn in a glossy black braid falling almost to her waist, and the tall, expressively mobile ears of her kind.

  Alex cocks his head in thought for a moment. He manages to simultaneously look disconcerted and poleaxed by her beauty. Finally he mumbles, weakly: “If I’d known we were going to a party afterwards I’d have come as Dracula!”

  “Oh, there’s still time for you to change if you want to!” she tells him airily. “I took the keys to the wardrobe room and borrowed the most dashing silk-lined opera cape and tailcoat for you! They’re upstairs. But first, I want to meet your parents.”

  * * *

  It is nearly seven o’clock. Thanks to his test-drive around the park, Alex is running late. So he leads Cassie around the corner to where Ilsa the Kettenkrad sits parked, helps her get settled on the backward-facing bench seat, then hits the road.

  It’s only about four or five miles to Alex’s parents, but they include a nerve-racking drive up a busy dual carriageway, followed by circumnavigating the big roundabout at the intersection with Leeds’s outer ring road. Halfway around the roundabout Alex’s phone vibrates, the family SOS ringtone translating into an angry buzzing that’s barely audible over the rumble of rubber-shod tank tracks on asphalt. He ignores it because he’s busy maneuvering a slow, unwieldy vehicle across four lanes of high-speed traffic, trying not to throw Cassie off the back of the half-track as he dodges BMWs and minicabs that seem to see him as an agile motorbike. Ilsa’s engine roars like an injured she-wolf, vibrating so much that his vision blurs. A minute later his phone rings again, but there seems little point in answering because now that he’s passed the junction of doom it’s a simple five-minute run to his parents’ front door.

  Alex recovers from the gut-watering terror of driving a half-track around a roundabout just in time to recognize a familiar suburban close. He drives slowly between rows of densely packed semi-detached houses, each fronted by a neatly groomed lawn and (in most cases) one or more parked cars. He has to make an effort not to let his overeager enumeration cantrip predigest the house numbers. Number twenty, number twenty-two . . . twenty six. He gingerly noses in alongside the pavement, sets the handbrake, then kills the engine. He sits for a moment and stares at his hands, which are shaking. In the sudden silence, he hears a whoop from behind: “That was fun! Do it again! YesYes!”

  Oh God, he thinks. He removes his helmet, clambers over the side of the bathtub-shaped carrier, and walks round the back to offer Cassie his hand. She steps down daintily, unstrapping her own helmet and dumping it on the bench seat. “Are you sure you want another lift?” he asks doubtfully: “I was afraid you were going to fall off . . .”

  “No, it was wonderful! I haven’t had that much fun since I borrowed one of Daddy’s sparkle ponies for a joy ride!” Her face is such a picture of innocent joy that Alex can’t bear to tell
her how scary the hell-ride across the roundabout had been. “I must take you to meet my father soon, YesYes?”

  “Of course,” Alex agrees.

  “Promise?” she persists. “A third date, third time lucky?”

  “I promise.” He pats her wrist, and she smiles triumphantly.

  “Is this it?” she asks, looking around.

  “Er, yeah. Yes.” His parents’ house sits precisely twenty pre-metric feet back from the pavement, slightly downhill, behind a cement footpath and a lawn as carefully manicured as AstroTurf. The house itself is faced in red brick, with cellular double glazing and about as much character as one of the night shift zombies. Alex leads her to the porch and is about to push the buzzer beside the fiberglass-paneled front door when his phone vibrates again.

  Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but three times means a family crisis. He glances at the screen: it’s Sarah. “Yes? I’m on the front step right now—”

  “You’re late!” Her voice is odd, as if she’s trying not to be overheard. “Help! Mum’s having a seizure or something and Dad’s trying to drink himself to death—”

  Alex goes cold. “Have you called an ambulance?” He stares at the door. “Let me in, I’ve got some first-aid training—”

  “Not that kind of seizure, I think the penny dropped—she’s just met Mack.” There’s a click as the door unlatches from the inside. It swings open just as Sarah says, “Bye,” and drops her phone. It clatters noisily on the front step, unnoticed.

  “Hello?” Cassie says from behind Alex’s shoulder. She waves her left hand hesitantly. Sarah stares at her wide-eyed and open-mouthed for long seconds, until Alex remembers he’s supposed to do something other than wait for the doorstep to grow teeth and a digestive tract beneath his shoes and swallow him whole.

  “Uh, Sarah?” he says carefully. “This is Cassie. Cassie, this is Sarah, my sister. Sarah, Cassie’s my, uh, my—”