“This is my partner, Victor,” said Adam, gesturing with one hand as he busied himself removing files from chairs.
Alison jumped a little as what she had taken for a pile of shabby old clothes on the chair of the far desk turned out to be a young man. He slowly raised a hand and flicked his wrist, a gesture that could have been either a greeting or a shoo, then struck a single key on the grimy keyboard before him. This accomplished, he let his arms hang loosely by the sides of his chair as if the effort had drained him of all energy.
“Hello, nice to meet you, Victor,” said Alison, recovering quickly. “I’m Alison.”
He was a scrawny man of roughly Adam’s age, with a thick clump of black curly hair and a hawk-like nose that seemed to be pulling his upper lip into a permanent unimpressed look. He was wearing a black coat that was almost identical to Adam’s, although not as broad. “Mm,” he replied.
“Are you finishing that report on the werewasp hive we took care of?” asked Adam.
Victor fixed him with a glare. “Yes. I am finishing the report on the werewasp hive we took care of in the course of the mission we completed last week and other redundant statements we are both fully aware of.”
“I said it like that to fill Alison in,” said Adam weakly.
“Then why didn’t you just say, ‘Alice, this is Victor, and he’s finishing a report on something you know sod all about’? Were you trying to sound casual?”
“Werewasps,” she said instinctively, with a little burst of resentment. “Created when a magical infusion manifests in a queen. The infusion extends to all the subjects, and the entire swarm undergoes magical mutation. They nest underground, and their hives are often mistaken for mole burrows. First discovered by—”
“Ah,” said Victor, heaving his head up and down in a laborious nod. “That’s right. You’re Marvo the Memory Girl, aren’t you.”
“Alison.”
“W-why don’t you take a seat,” said Adam, now sitting behind his desk and gesturing towards the one free chair, whose prior contents had now been piled on top of the wastepaper basket. “I thought maybe I could run you through some quick questions while we’re waiting? To help us figure out what kind of work would be best for you here.”
“Oh, can I ask a question, first?” said Alison, sitting.
“Go ahead.”
“I’m not saying I don’t want to, but if the Ministry doesn’t care about secrecy anymore, why do you still need me to stay and work here?”
“We don’t,” said Victor, jabbing another key.
“Shut up, Victor,” said Adam, without anxiety, before returning his embarrassed smile to Alison. “They haven’t completely dropped secrecy. They just eventually figured out that locking everyone up is only slightly more efficient than keeping them in the same social circle. Even if we do talk to outsiders about work, like I said, most of them don’t want to believe it.”
“But people do believe in the supernatural, don’t they?” said Alison. “Lots of people believe in God. Or in ghosts or astrology and stuff.”
“Um, yes, true. I suppose what I meant by supernatural, was, er . . .” He floundered, circling a hand as if his brain was crank operated.
Victor let out an irritated sigh. “He means chaos. People don’t want to believe in chaos. God, ghosts, horoscopes, that’s all order. That’s people wanting to think there’s some kind of plan behind everything they don’t understand. And we couldn’t just cease to exist tomorrow if an Ancient blinks twice.”
Adam scowled. “There is nothing that conflicts with any popular religions in current occult theory.”
“No,” said Victor, bored, returning his gaze to his computer. “Just in basic common sense. Aren’t you supposed to be interviewing her?”
Adam coughed and readied his stubby fingers to type. “Right. Alison. What would you describe as your most developed skills?”
“Eidetic memory,” she replied.
“Er, yes, I already typed that,” said Adam. “Tell you what, I’ll underline it as well. What else?” He waited patiently as she stared at the ceiling for a few seconds, then came to the rescue. “What school subjects did you do particularly well in?”
“All of them,” said Alison proudly, bouncing in her seat a little.
“Any in particular stand out?”
“Nope, one hundred percent on all of them.”
Adam drummed his fingers on the keyboard, not heavily enough to depress the keys. “Well, let’s come back to that. Skills aside, what do you want to do?”
“Oh, anything,” insisted Alison. “Just give me any chance to be useful.”
“Right,” said Adam, still not typing. “I mean, what specifically? What would be the dream job? Fieldwork, research, administration?”
“Yep, any of them. Really, I don’t mind.”
Victor was doing a very poor job of pretending to work. He and Adam exchanged meaningful looks, both conveying completely different meanings. “Well, there is the memory thing,” said Adam, mostly to himself. “Maybe Archibald could use an assistant archivist . . .”
Someone knocked on the wide-open door. A man stood in the doorway, dressed in rolled-up shirtsleeves and a loosened tie. He was older than Hesketh and Victor, but not as old as Burling; he still had all his hair, but with flashes of gray at the temples, and there were deep shadows under his eyes. He gave off the general effect of a career politician at the end of a long day of interviews. “Hi, guys,” he said. “Is that report on the wasp hive ready?”
Victor and Adam were suddenly both sitting a lot straighter, like schoolboys as the teacher walks in. “Yeah, just about,” said Victor, hastily deleting the last thing he had typed. “Be done by lunch.”
“Er, Mr. Danvers, this is Alison,” said Adam.
“Hello, nice to meet you, Mr. Danvers,” said Alison brightly.
“Hello,” said Mr. Danvers, meeting her gaze for a fraction of a second before turning back to Victor. “Lunch isn’t helpful. The Hand are meeting in three minutes, and this needs to be on the agenda.” He waved a slim tablet in his right hand. “Could you give me the quick summary?”
“ ‘They’re dead’?” suggested Victor.
“Is that really all you’ve got?” said Danvers wearily.
“ ‘They’re dead because we killed them’?”
“I suppose it’ll have to do.” Danvers passed the tablet to Victor. Alison snuck a look as it changed hands and saw a collection of hasty notes vaguely arranged into bullet points. “Just add it to the middle there. Where, when, how many you killed. Quick as you can.”
Victor jabbed at the screen. “Durble, durble, couple of hundred.” He flashed a mischievous smile to Adam. “Someone’s getting a big boost to their kill count.”
“It should only count as one,” insisted Adam. “It was a hive mind.”
Victor let the tablet smack onto the keyboard and gave him an insulted look. “What are you on about?”
“Just saying. You hadn’t actually killed it–killed it until the queen was dead.”
“Guys,” warned Danvers, unheard.
“Those drones weren’t pissing about!” spat Victor. “You gonna say to that farmer, ‘It’s all right, the thing that killed your dog didn’t count’?” He returned to the tablet. “Why’s it gone black?”
Danvers quickly took it from his grasp, then just as quickly dropped it again with a yelp. The electronics crackled like a mouthful of popping candy. “Victor! Your hand!”
Victor looked down. A heat haze was rising from the glow in the center of his palm. “Not my fault,” he said rapidly, pointing across the room. “He got me worked up.”
“Two minutes to the meeting,” grumbled Danvers, mashing the unresponsive button flusteredly. “What am I supposed to do now, Casin? Recite it from memory?”
Instantly, Adam caught Alison’s gaze, and he felt the rising excitement of a Scrabble player finally noticing a place for his troublesome J. “Alison. Did you . . .”
“Yes,” she said, rising from her seat. “I saw the whole thing.”
“What did it say?”
“ ‘Item one, evidence of shoggoths reported in the Lake District . . .’ ”
“Mr. Danvers,” said Adam, holding his arms towards Alison like a stage magician indicating the box his lovely assistant had just walked trustingly into. “Alison just came from the monastery. I sent an email around about her? She’s the one with the eidetic memory?”
“And not much else,” muttered Victor, in a sulk.
Danvers glanced between Adam and Alison, nonplussed. “So you can recite the agenda because you looked at it once?”
“That’s what eidetic memory means,” said Alison, now standing proudly.
“Follow me.”
Danvers darted out into the hall without waiting to see if she was following, and Alison had to break into a trot to catch up. As she left the office behind, the last thing she heard before leaving earshot was Victor, muttering, “And now the normals are getting promoted past us halfway through their bloody job interviews . . .”
05
In the picturesque landscape of the Lake District, along a narrow lakeside road just south of Keswick, Mike Badger, freelance demon hunter sanctioned by the Ministry of Occultism, drove his battered Range Rover. Which is to use the word drove generously; with a handwritten list of directions in his left hand and a sausage roll in his right, he was having to control the steering wheel with his wrists.
“Get a lungful of that air, lad,” he said, in his broad Yorkshire accent. “This is proper British country, this ’ere.”
The occupant of the passenger seat said nothing. He was a pale teenager with dyed black hair that had grown a little too long for Mike’s comfort, and his attention was entirely occupied by the glowing screen he was holding with both hands.
“Davey, will ye stop playing with your bloody Nintendos and listen?” said Mike, fully aware of the reaction he would provoke.
“david,” said David, snapping his device closed. “My name’s David. Stop calling me Davey. And it’s not a Nintendo, it’s my phone. God, you’re such an idiot.”
“Well, maybe if ye opened yer mouth and bloody said summat for once maybe I’d learn.”
“What do you want me to say? It’s just trees. Trees and a lake.”
“Bloody ’ell, there was me thinking ye don’t pay attention. Aye, it’s just trees and a lake, and the bloody Mona Lisa’s just a moody cow on a stool. It’s only the bloody Lake District. Me dad used to call it Britain’s tit.”
“Da-ad . . .” protested David.
“Well, it is. Look at t’ shape of t’ island, and if it were a girl on t’ side we’d be in the tit. Bristol would be her fanny.”
“Dad, that’s sexist.”
“No, it weren’t. How were that sexist? ’S not a real woman. Too much reading, not enough thinkin’, that’s your trouble. Coh, what would you even put up a fanny that big? You’d have to use Denmark or summat . . .”
“da-ad,” barked David.
Mike chuckled to himself. He’d given up smoking and drinking when he’d started a family, so embarrassing his children was very nearly his last source of uncomplicated pleasure. “Ah, this looks like the place.”
He turned off the narrow road onto a somehow even narrower one, flanked by tall bushes that fluttered against the sides of the car. Shortly, the tires were grinding their way up the large gravel driveway of the holiday home belonging to Henry Wollstone’s family. It was a stout brick cottage, somewhat faithfully built according to classic local tradition, but for the fact that the entire front exterior wall was painted bright magenta.
“Bloody southerners,” muttered Mike as he parked and stored his unfinished sausage roll in the glove compartment.
“That’s prejudiced,” said David.
“No, it bloody isn’t. I’m not saying all southerners paint their houses pink. I just ’appen to know that these particular ones did.”
He opened the door, and almost immediately closed it as the stench hit his nostrils like a rancid meat pie to the stomach lining. He took a deep breath and opened the door again as he concentrated on breathing through his mouth.
“Yep, it’s shoggoths all right,” he said. “Come on, lad, work to do.”
“I’ll just wait—”
“No, you bloody won’t, you’re gonna come learn summat. This is your future ’ere.”
“I keep telling you I’m not gonna be a demon hunter,” said David, covering his face with his sleeve and leaving the car as slowly as possible, one limb at a time. “I’m gonna be a DJ.”
“You can’t be a DJ, you haven’t got any bloody turntables,” said Mike, surveying the house as he worked the kinks out of his back.
David’s scoff of contempt seemed to come out of every orifice in his face. “What year do you think it is?”
“Now, shoggies,” said Mike, losing interest instantly and turning to the boot of his car. “Nasty lads, made of slime. What them genius types at the Ministry call ‘amorphous.’ Smacking ’em about won’t help. You might as well try to spank a bowl o’ water.” From the esoteric contents of the boot, Mike took up a double-barreled shotgun and a small box of shells with blue casings. “Rock salt is what we use. Same principle as slugs.”
“Uh-huh,” said David, who was on his phone again.
“Now, shogs have popped up now and again round these parts t’ last few years,” said Mike, casually pushing shells into his gun as he sauntered towards the front door. “I keep saying, there must be a dimensional fault round ’ere somewhere, but the Ministry couldn’t change the bloody toilet rolls without making a big song and dance of it, so they ’aven’t sent a proper cleanup troop.” He knocked twice on the red front door, and while he waited, noticed his son’s complete lack of attention. “What did I just say?”
“Hm?” David slipped his phone into his back pocket and pretended to look earnest. “Yeah, cleaning up. Good plan.”
“Make yourself useful, go round t’ back.” Mike cocked his shotgun and meaningfully gestured sideways with it. “If you can keep your eyes off Super Mario long enough to see summat movin’, give us a scream.”
“Yeah, yeah.” David buried his hands in his pockets and started dragging his feet towards the corner of the house, creating two trenches in the gravel deep enough to start the foundations for a new, more tasteful house.
No one had answered the front door after thirty seconds, so Mike gave it a push. The latch had been locked, but it immediately fell out of the door and landed on what had once been a rubber doormat with a wet squelch.
Almost the entire ground floor of the cottage was a single large room: lounge, kitchen, and dining areas divided by wide archways and changes in flooring. So Mike could see at a glance that a shoggoth had been all over it. The entire floor was reduced to soggy mulch from countless crisscrossing trails of digestive slime.
“Demon hunter calling! Anyone still alive?” yelled Mike. The Ministry had provided him with a dense wad of false documents, allowing him to pass as anything from an asbestos removalist to a Boy Scout leader, and most of it was back at his house, being used to hold the shed door open. “Poor bastards,” he muttered, when no one answered his shout.
After a quick trip back to the car to fetch his Wellington boots, Mike examined the damage to the house interior more closely. To his surprise, except for an overturned bin in the kitchen, it was only the carpet that had been totally ruined; the furniture was mostly untouched. Some of the ornaments and bookshelves had little traces of goo, as if the shoggoth had examined them idly out of mild interest, but otherwise had kept a respectful wide berth of the homeowner’s possessions.
There was a scuffling near the back door, and Mike glanced up. “Davey?”
“Can we go now?” whined David’s voice from the back garden.
Mike blew the air out of his lungs. “Definite shog activity in ’ere. Must’ve gone around the place a few times, looking at it. Actually .
. .” He crouched and lowered his face as close to the floor as he dared, which still left a foot and a half of clearance. “There might even’ve been two of the buggers. That’d be a first. Anything out there trying to suck yer face off?”
“Yeah, probably,” droned David.
“Hm.” Mike braced his hands on his thighs and pushed himself upright with a throaty grunt. “S’pose we just have to follow the trail, see where they went. It’s usually pretty ’ard to miss.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” said Davey.
“There a trail out there?”
“Dunno, maybe.”
Mike gave a little sigh and plodded his way across the squelching carpet to the back door, but the mild scolding he had been preparing died abruptly in his throat as he took in the rear grounds of the house.
As Henry had discovered, every single plant in the rear garden was dead, their skeletal leaves pasted to the cracked earth by a thick layer of shoggoth slime. At the far end was a perimeter wall whose rough white bricks were polished to an unnatural gleam, and beyond that was a low grassy hill that stretched to the horizon.
And most of the grass on the hill was also dead. There was a massive circle of brown mulch around the perimeter wall, which split off into individual slime trails leading away. At least twenty of them. No, thirty. Meeting and crossing and overlaying each other as the biggest horde of shoggoths in the entire history of occult defense had congregated and begun journeying south.
“I mean, yeah, I guess,” clarified David, still looking at his phone.
06
Alison followed Mr. Danvers back to the Ministry’s central hallway and down a short but broad set of stairs that led through the largest and grandest archway she had seen yet. Its columns were crowded with carvings of open hands and half-closed eyes, each with a sparkling emerald set in the center for maximum effect.
The antechamber beyond was a stark contrast to the poky corridors of the office complex. The ceiling steeply rose until it was lost in darkness. A patterned red carpet swelled out from the entrance into a massive oval that stopped ten feet from the smooth stone walls, exposing a tasteful ring of black marble. The far wall was a dense cluster of columns around a foreboding set of ebony double doors as tall as her mother’s house.
Differently Morphous Page 3
