The Jennifer Morgue

by Charles Stross

  Pinky has finished drawing a pentacle around my chair, and he finally signals that he’s got it wired up to the isochronous signal generator—two thumbs up at Boris. Boris shuts the laptop lid with a click and sticks it under his arm. “Is time for entanglement,” he tells me, “briefing will continue after.”

  “Whoa! What has she—” I nod at the far wall, beyond which the sleeping beauty lies “—got to do with this?” I glance at the laptop.

  Boris harrumphs. “If had spend your time on briefing, would understand,” he grumbles. “Brains, Pinky, stations.”

  “Yo. Good luck, Bob.” Pinky pats me on the shoulder as he scuttles past the end of the beds to a small ward he’s already set up on the carpet in front of the TV set. “It’ll be all right—you’ll see.” Brains and Boris are already in their safety cells.

  “What if someone’s in the hall outside?” I call.

  “The door’s locked. And I put the DO NOT DISTURB sign out,” Brains replies. “Stations, everyone?” He pulls out a black control box and twists a knob set on its face. I force myself to settle back in the chair; and in the other room, beyond the two spy-holes drilled through the back of the wardrobe, a very special light comes on and washes over the trapped entity in the pentacle.

  WHEN YOU GO SUMMONING EXTRA-DIMENSIONAL entities, there are certain precautions you should be sure to take.

  For starters, you can forget garlic, bibles, and candles: they don’t work. Instead, you need to start with serious electrical insulation to stop them from blowing your brains out through your ears. Once you’ve got yourself grounded you also need to pay attention to the existence of special optical high-bandwidth channels that demons may attempt to use to download themselves into your nervous system—they’re called “eyeballs.” Timesharing your hypothalamus with alien brain-eaters is not recommended if you wish to live long enough to claim your index-linked, state-earnings-related pension; it’s about on a par with tap dancing on the London Underground’s third rail in terms of health and safety. So you need to ensure you’re optically isolated as well. Do not stare into laser cavity with remaining eye, as the safety notice puts it.

  Most demons are as dumb as a sackful of hammers. This does not mean they’re safe to mess with, any more than a C++ compiler is “safe” in the hands of an enthusiastic computer science undergrad. Some people can mess up anything, and computational demonology adds a new and unwelcome meaning to terms like “memory leak” and “debugger.”

  Now, I have severe misgivings about what Boris, Pinky, and Brains propose to do to me. (And I am really pissed at Angleton for telling them to do it.) However, they’re more than passingly competent and they’ve certainly not skimped on the safety aspects. The entity that calls itself Ramona Random—hell, that might even be her real name, back when she was human, before the Black Chamber rebuilt her into the occult equivalent of a guided missile—is properly secured in the next room. Sitting in the bedroom closet—in front of the two holes Brains has drilled in the wall—is a tripod with a laser, a beam splitter, and a thermostatically controlled box containing a tissue culture grown from something that really ought not to exist, all wired up to a circuit board that looks like M. C. Escher designed it after taking too much LSD.

  “Everyone clear?” calls Brains.

  “Clear.” Boris.

  “Clear.” Pinky.

  “Totally unclear!” Me.

  “Thank you, Bob. Pinky, how’s our remote terminal?”

  Pinky looks at a small, cheap television screen hooked up to a short-range receiver. “Drooling slightly. I think she’s asleep.”

  “Okay. Lights.” A diode on the back of the circuit board begins to flash, and I notice out of the corner of my eye that Brains is controlling it with a television remote. That’s smart of him, I think, right before he punches the next button.

  “Blood.”

  Something begins to drip from the box, sizzling where it touches a wired junction on the circuit, which suddenly flares with silver light. I try to look away but it sucks my eyes in, like a bubble of boiling mercury that expands to fill the entire world. Then it’s like my blind spot is expanding, creeping up on the back of my head.

  “Symbolic link established.”

  There’s an incredibly strong stink of violets, and a horde of ants crawl the length of my spine before holing up in the pit of my stomach to build a nest.

  ★★Hello, Bob.★★ The voice caresses my ears like the velvet fuzz on a week-dead aubergine, sultry and somehow rotten to the core. It’s Ramona’s voice. My stomach heaves. I can’t see anything but the swirling pit of light, and the violets are decaying into something unspeakable. ★★Can you hear me?★★

  ★★I hear you.★★ I bite my tongue, tasting the sound of steel guitars. Synesthesia, I note distantly. I’ve read about this sort of thing: if the situation wasn’t so dangerous it would be fascinating. Meanwhile my right arm is straining against the duct tape without me willing it to move. I try to make it stop and it won’t. ★★Leave my arm alone, damn you!★★

  ★★I’m already damned,★★ she says flippantly, but the muscles in my arm stop twitching and jumping.

  Then I realize I haven’t been moving my lips, and more importantly, Ramona hasn’t been speaking aloud. ★★How do we control this?★★ I ask.

  ★★The will becomes the act: if you want me to hear, I hear you.★★

  ★★Oh.★★ The light show is beginning to slow down, with reality bleeding back in through the edges, and my head feels like someone’s rammed a railroad spike through my skull right behind my left eye. ★★I feel sick.★★

  ★★Don’t do that, Bob!★★ She sounds—feels?—disturbed.

  ★★Okay.★★ Try not to think of invisible pink elephants, I think grimly, my skin crawling as the implications set in. I’ve just been rendered uncontrollably telepathic with a woman—or something woman-shaped—from the Black Chamber, and I’m such a dork my first reaction wasn’t to run like fuck. Why’d Angleton do a thing like that? Hey, isn’t this asking for a really gigantic security breach—at least, if both of us survive the experience? How am I going to keep Ramona out of my head—?

  ★★Hey, stop blaming me!★★ Somehow I can tell she’s irritated by my line of thought. ★★My head hurts, too.★★

  ★★So why didn’t you run away?★★ I let slip before I manage to clamp a lid down on the thought.

  ★★They didn’t give me the option.★★ A metallic, bitter taste fills my mouth. ★★I’m not entirely human. Constitutional rights don’t apply to non-humans. All I can say is, those bastards better hope I never get loose from this geas . . . ★★ I feel like spitting, then I realize the glands full of warmth at the back of her throat aren’t salivary ducts.

  “Bob.”

  I blink in confusion. It’s Brains. He looms over me, out of his grounded pentacle. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yuh, yeah.” I try to swallow, feeling the sensation of venom sacs throbbing urgently inside my cheeks begin to fade. I shudder. There’s a trailing wisp of wistfulness from Ramona, and a malicious giggle: she doesn’t have fangs, she just has a really good somatic imagination. ★★Let me get my head together,★★ I tell her, and then try to do the invisible pink elephant thing in her general direction.

  “How do you feel?” asks Brains. He sounds curious.

  “How the fuck do you think you’d feel?” I snarl. “Jesus fuck, give me ibuprofen or give me a straight razor. My head is killing me.” Then I realize something else. “And cut me loose from here. Someone’s got to go next door and release Ramona, and I don’t think any of you guys want to get within spitting range of her without a chair, a whip, and a can of pepper spray.”

  I remember the shape of her anger at her employers and shiver again. Working with Ramona is going to be like riding sidesaddle on a black mamba. And that’s before I get to tell Mo, “Honey, they partnered me with a demon.”

  3.

  TANGLED UP IN GRUE

 
THEY WAIT FOR THE IBUPROFEN TO START WORKING before they untie me from the chair, which is extremely prudent of them.

  “Right,” I say, leaning against the back of the chair and breathing deeply. “Boris, what the fuck is this about?”

  “It is to be stopping her from killing you.” Boris glowers at me. He’s annoyed about something, which makes two of us. “And to be creating an untappable communication, for mission which you have not be briefed on because—” He gestures at the laptop and I realize why he’s so irritated: they weren’t joking when they said the briefing would self-destruct. “Here are your ticket for flight, is open for next available seat. Will continue the briefing in Saint Martin.” He shoves a booklet of flight vouchers at me.

  “Where?” I nearly drop them.

  “They’re sending us to the Caribbean!” It’s Pinky. He’s almost turning handstands. “Sun! Sand! And skullduggery! And we’ve got great toys to play with!” Brains is methodically packing up the entanglement rig, which breaks down into a big rolling suitcase. He seems amused by something.

  I try to catch Boris’s eye: Boris is staring at Pinky in either deep fascination, pity, or something in between. “Where in the Caribbean?” I ask.

  Boris shakes himself. “Is joint operation,” he explains. “Is European territory, joint Franco-Dutch government—they ask us to operate in there. But Caribbean is American sea. So Black Chamber send Ramona to be working with you.”

  I wince. “Tell me you’re joking.”

  Another voice interrupts, inaudible to everyone else: ★★Hey, Bob! I’m still stuck here. A girl could get bored waiting.★★ I have a feeling that a bored Ramona would be a very bad girl indeed, in a your-life-insurance-policy-just-expired kind of way.

  “Am not joking. This is joint operation. Lots of shit to spread all round.” He carefully picks up his dead laptop and drops it into an open briefcase. “Go to committee meeting tomorrow, take memos, then go to airport and fly out. Can file liaison report later, after save the universe.”

  “Uh-huh. First I better go unlock Ramona from that containment you stuck her in.” ★★I’m coming,★★ I send her way. “How trustworthy is she, really?”

  Boris smiles thinly. “How trustworthy is rattlesnake?”

  I excuse myself and stagger out into the corridor, my head still throbbing and the world crinkling slightly at the edges. I guess I now know what that spike of entropy change was. I pause at the door to my room but the handle is no longer dewed with liquid nitrogen, and is merely cold to the touch.

  Ramona is sitting in an armchair opposite the wall with the holes in it. She smiles at me, but the expression doesn’t reach her eyes. ★★Bob. Get me out of this.★★

  This is the pentacle someone has stenciled on the carpet around her chair and plugged into a compact, blue, noise generator. It’s still running—Brains didn’t hook it up to his remote. ★★Give me a moment.★★ I sit down on the bed opposite her, kick off my trainers, and rub my head. ★★If I let you go, what are you going to do?★★

  Her smile broadens. ★★Well, personally—★★ she glances at the door ★★—nothing much.★★ I get a momentary flicker of unpleasantness involving extremely sharp knives and gouts of arterial blood, then she clamps down on it, with an almost regretful edge, and I realize she’s just day-dreaming about someone else, someone a very long way away. ★★Honest.★★

  ★★Second question. Who’s your real target?★★

  ★★Are you going to let me go once we get through this game of twenty questions? Or do you have something else in mind?★★ She crosses her legs, watching me alertly. Every guy I’ve ever slept with died less than twenty-four hours later, I recall. ★★I wasn’t joking,★★ she adds, defensively.

  ★★I didn’t think you were. I just want to know who your real target is.★★

  She sniffs. ★★Ellis Billington. What’s your problem?★★

  ★★I’m not sure. Bear with me for one last test?★★

  ★★What?★★ She half stands as I get off the bed, but the constraining field prohibits her from reaching me: ★★Hey! Ow! You bastard!★★

  It brings tears to my eyes. I clutch my right foot and wait for the pain to subside from where I kicked the bed-base. Ramona is bent over, hugging her foot as well. ★★Okay,★★ I mumble, then kneel down and switch off the signal generator. I don’t particularly want to switch it off—I feel a hell of a lot safer with Ramona trapped inside a pentacle; the idea of setting her free makes my skin crawl—but the flip side of the entanglement is fairly clear: not only can we talk without being overheard, there are other (and drastically less pleasant) side effects.

  ★★You’re not a masochist, are you?★★ she asks tightly as she hobbles towards the bathroom.

  ★★No—★★

  ★★Good.★★ She slams the door shut. A few seconds later I clutch at my crotch in horror as I feel the unmistakable sensation of a full bladder emptying. It takes me seconds to realize it’s not mine. My fingers are dry.

  ★★Bitch!★★ Two can play at that game.

  ★★It’s your fault for keeping me waiting for ages.★★

  I breathe deeply. ★★Look. I didn’t ask for this—★★

  ★★Me neither!★★

  ★★—so why don’t we call it a truce?★★

  Silence, punctuated by a sharp sense of impatience. ★★Took you long enough, monkey-boy.★★

  ★★What’s with the monkey-boy business?★★ I complain.

  ★★What’s with the abhuman-bloodsucking-demon-whore imagery?★★ she responds acidly. ★★Try to keep your gibbering religious bigotry out of my head and I’ll leave your bladder alone. Deal?★★

  ★★Deal—hey! How the hell am I a gibbering religious bigot? I’m an atheist!★★

  ★★Yeah, and the horse you rode in on is a member of the College of Cardinals.★★ I hear the toilet flush through the door, a sudden reminder that we’re not actually talking. ★★You may not believe in God but you still believe in Hell. And you think it’s where people like me belong.★★

  ★★But isn’t that where you come from ... ?★★

  The door opens. Her glamour’s as strong as ever: she looks like she just stepped out of a cocktail party to powder her nose. ★★We can go over it some other time, Bob. You can just call room service if you want to eat; I have to make more elaborate arrangements. See you tomorrow.★★ With that, she picks up her evening bag from the bedside table and departs in a snit.

  “MO ?”

  “Hi! Where are—hold on a moment—Bob? You still there? I was about to jump in the bath. How’s it going?”

  Gulp. “About a ton of horse manure just landed on me. Have you seen Angleton this week?”

  “No, they’ve billeted me in the Monkfish Motel again and it’s really dull—you know what the nightlife in Dunwich is like. So what’s Angleton up to now?”

  “I, uh, well, I got here—Darmstadt—to find—” I double-check my phone to confirm we’re in secure mode “—new orders waiting for me, care of Boris and the two mad mice. Almost got run off the autobahn on the way in and, well—”

  “Car accident?”

  “Sort of. Anyway, I’m being shunted off on a side trip instead of coming home. So I won’t be back for the weekend.”

  “Shit.”

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  “Where are they sending you?”

  “To Saint Martin, in the Caribbean.”

  “The—”

  “And it gets worse.”

  “Do I want to hear this, love?”

  “Probably not.”

  Pause. “Okay. I’m sitting down.”

  “It’s a joint operation. They’ve inflicted a minder from the Black Chamber on me.”

  “But—Bob! That’s crazy! It just doesn’t happen! Nobody even knows what the Black Chamber is really called! ‘No Such Agency’ meets ‘Destroy Before Reading.’ Are you telling me . . . ?”

  “I haven’t been
fully briefed. But I figure it’s going to be extremely ungood, for, like, Amsterdam values of ungood.” I shudder. Our little weekend trip to Amsterdam involved more trouble than you can shake a shitty stick at. “I guess you know the Chamber specializes in taking the HUM out of HUMINT? Golems and remote viewing and so forth, never send a human agent to do a job a zombie can do? Anyway, the minder they’ve sent me is, you know, existentially challenged. They’ve sicced a demon on me.”

  “Jesus, Bob.”

  “Yeah, well, He isn’t answering the phone.”

  “I can’t believe it. The bastards.”

  “Listen, I’ve got a feeling there’s more to this than meets the eye and I need someone watching my back who isn’t just looking for a good spot to sink their fangs into. Can you do some discreet digging when you get back to the office? Ask Andy, perhaps? This is under Angleton, by the way.”

  “Angleton.” Mo’s voice goes flat and cold, and the hair on the back of my neck rises. She blames Angleton for a lot of things, and it could turn very ugly if she decides to let it all hang out. “I should have guessed. It’s about time that bastard faced the music.”

  “Don’t go after him!” I say urgently. “You’re not meant to know this. Remember, all you know is I’ve been sent off somewhere to do a job.”

  “But you want me to keep my ear to the ground and listen for oncoming train wrecks.”

  “That’s about the size of it. I’m missing you.”

  “Love you, too.” A pause. “What is it about this spook that’s got you so upset?”

  Whoops. I’m no good at hiding things from her, am I? “For starters she’s crazier than a legful of ferrets. She’s seriously bad magic, wearing a perpetual glamour—level three, if I’m any judge of such things. The only thing keeping her on track is the geas that ate Montana. She’s not a free actor. Actress.”

  “Uh-huh. What else?”