The Fuller Memorandum

by Charles Stross

  Epping is one stop down the line from Barking, which is what the neighbors would think of him if they could see him now, wearing the black cloak of a member of a very different Order, and carrying a gun that fires something more substantial than paint pellets.

  Grigori, in contrast, is not mild-mannered at all. Grigori is a violently aggressive young thug from the slums of Nizhny Novgorod, born in the year of the collapse of the Soviet Union and raised half-feral amidst the wreckage of the timber and steel industries. Conscripted into the Russian army at eighteen and subjected to twelve months of brutal training, he showed a remarkable aptitude for butchering Wahhabi guerillas in the hills of the Kadar zone during the Dagestan war. Already tapped for promotion to sergeant he was instead inducted into Spetsgruppa V, “Vympel,” the FSB’s special operations unit, where he was taught German, Arabic, and sixteen different ways to strangle a man in his own intestines.

  Grigori does not play paintball; Grigori kills people.

  Here comes Grigori, crawling silently through the bushes, taking care not to place hand or foot on any twig that might snap, nor to disturb leafy shrubs that might whisper in the darkness. He pauses regularly, glancing sidelong to maintain situational awareness and positioning relative to his comrades, neither too far ahead nor lagging behind the line of advance. They use no radio; the occasional flicker of a red LED torch or the hoot of a tawny owl are more than sufficient. Grigori pauses before the open apron of the parking lot in front of the chapel, waiting for the sentry to complete his round. While he pauses, he double-checks his crossbow. The body is made of black resin and the bow sports a profusion of pulleys. It’s a hunting bow, fine-tuned for hunting the kind of game that shoots back on full auto; it’s totally silent and it throws a cyanide-tipped bolt that can slice through five centimeters of Kevlar armor.

  Here comes Benjamin, pacing quietly around the side of the chapel. Benjamin is a good sentry. He’s been bushwhacked by rival paintball players often enough to be ambush-savvy, scanning the darkness with nervous, night-adjusted eyes. He is well-equipped, his cloak concealing a small fortune in camouflaged body armor; to his belt is clipped a small pager. It vibrates every ten seconds, and if he fails to press a button on it within another ten seconds a siren will sound, loud enough to wake the dead. And he’s cranked up on a cocktail of provigil and crystal meth, sleepless and compulsively alert. All-Highest has briefed the Security Team carefully. The threat of a hostile intrusion is very real tonight, and Benjamin holds his AA-12 assault shotgun at the ready, his index finger tense beside the trigger guard.

  Grigori and Benjamin are not as mismatched as a superficial comparison might suggest. Grigori’s lieutenant has meticulously planned a seek-and-destroy raid on a nest of cultists defended by vicious but amateurish killers. And Iris’s security chief has briefed the sentries to be on the alert for an infiltration attempt by an elite unit of special forces troops attached to a secret interior ministry department.

  But as Grigori and Benjamin are about to discover, they’ve both been briefed for the wrong mission.

  Benjamin pauses in the shadow of an ornamental buttress at one corner of the chapel, and scans the darkness beyond. There are low shrubs, and a row of lichen-encrusted gravestones, some of them leaning towards a low dip in the ground where a willow tree holds court over a circle of beeches. He sniffs. There’s something in the air tonight—something beyond the efflorescences of pollen spurting from the wildly rutting vegetation, something beyond the tang of mold spores drifting from the cut ends of the lawn over by the road. His eyes narrow. Something about the bushes is wrong.

  His pager vibrates. He peers into the gloom, tensing and raising the heavy shotgun, and tries to move his right foot forward into a shooter’s stance.

  His boot is stuck . . .

  Grigori crouches in the darkness behind a drunkenly leaning gravestone. His nostrils flare. The ground here smells bad, in a way that reminds him of a mass grave outside a nameless village near Rakhata in the mountains above Botlikh. Damp ground, rainy hills, and a season of death had soured the very earth, making the nauseous soil threaten to regurgitate its charges. After a week on duty there he’d had to indent for a new pair of boots: no matter how he scrubbed and polished he couldn’t get the stench of death out of his old ones.

  Grigori frowns, and raises his bow, sighting on the buttress to the right of the chapel, where he is sure the sentry will appear in a few seconds. His view is partially obstructed by the gravestone, so he tries to move his left foot sideways a few centimeters.

  His boot refuses to shift.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the chapel wall, Benjamin slaps his pager into silence then tries to lift his right foot again, freeing it from the root or wire or whatever he’s caught on. His left knee nearly buckles. Something has caught on his right ankle. Cursing silently, he glances down.

  Grigori’s nostrils widen as he smells rottenness, mold, and mildew. He shifts his stance slightly as the ground softens beneath his right foot. There’s a faint vibration underfoot. Do they have earthquakes in England? It was once like this in the mountains near Botlikh—but the vibration is getting stronger. He glances aside, and sees the ground rippling.

  Oddly, none of the bells are sounding—not in this chapel, nor in any of the others.

  Benjamin sees something moving in the loose soil underfoot. Adrenal glands squirt, and his pulse spikes: he unslings his gun and turns it, slamming it butt-first on the white and crawling thing below, thinking snake—

  A second hand, less fully skeletonized than the first, pushes through the soil and grabs the shotgun’s dangling tactical sling.

  Grigori’s nerves jangle as he sees the ripples of ground spread silently out around the chapel: he is not superstitious but he belongs to the company of Spetsgruppa “V” assigned to KGB support operations, and this is a fucking graveyard at fucking midnight. He lowers the crossbow, raising his left hand to the matrioshka charm dangling at his throat just as the earth beneath him heaves and a bony claw punches up through the grass beneath him and reaches for his neck.

  THE OCCULUS TRUCK ROARS ALONG THE M3 MOTORWAY, DRIVING south in darkness.

  Major Barnes has a mobile phone glued to his ear. He’s nodding unconsciously. Then he turns, looking at Angleton and Mo in the back of the cab. “Dr. Angleton, Dr. O’Brien, we have a fix.”

  Mo sits up instantly. “Yes?”

  “That was Jameson at headquarters—DVLA have coughed up the registration details on Iris Carpenter’s car. Highways Agency say it came this way earlier this evening and turned off onto the A322 at junction three. The ANPR cameras on that stretch are down, but looking at this map—what does Brookwood cemetery suggest to you?”

  “Brookwood.” Angleton raises an eyebrow. “Yes. Continue.”

  “I’m waiting for—” The major’s phone rings again. “Excuse me.” He flicks it open. “Yes?” He nods vigorously. “Yes, yes . . . I concur. Yes. I want you to get onto the Surrey Police control center and ask if the ASU can provide top cover. Get them to send a car with a downlink receiver round to the main entrance on Cemetery Pales, we don’t have a police downlink—no, no, but if the armed response unit is on duty get them up there. Yes, I’m authorizing that.” Barnes blinks at Angleton, who inclines his head. “I’m in the OCCULUS with Howe’s brick; get the rest of third platoon moving immediately, I think we’re going to need all the support we can get. Is there any SCORPION SCARE coverage—all right, that was too much to hope for. We should be at the gates in another fifteen minutes. Get the police to block all the roads in and out—The Gardens, Avenue de Cagny, yes, and the rest—tell them it’s a terrorism incident.”

  When he finally hangs up he looks tired. “Did you catch that?” he asks.

  Mo stares at him. “It’s a cemetery. Yes?”

  “Brookwood is not just a cemetery,” Angleton informs her: “It’s the London necropolis, the largest graveyard in Western Europe. Eight thousand acres and more than a quarter of a mill
ion graves.”

  The penny drops. Her eyes widen. “They’re planning a summoning. You’re thinking it’s death magic?”

  “What does it sound like to you? Lots of space, no neighbors within earshot, lots of raw fuel for a necromancer to work with, raw head and bloody bones.” Angleton looks at Barnes. “Have you tried to call the cemetery site office?”

  “Gordon tried that already. Got a bloody answering machine.”

  “Ten to one there’s nobody at the gatehouse. Or if there is, he’s one of them.”

  “And we’ve got eight thousand acres to cover, and no CCTV, never mind SCORPION STARE.” Barnes’s expression is sour. “No surveillance, no look-to-kill—the ASU had better deliver or they’ll hand us our heads on a plate.”

  “What would your preferred option be?” Angleton asks softly, his voice almost lost beneath the road noise.

  “If we had time—” Barnes grimaces. “I’m sorry, Mo. I can’t afford to throw lives away needlessly by going after Bob before we’re ready.”

  “But we’re not just going in after Bob,” she says tartly. “We’re going in to prevent the Black Brotherhood doing whatever it is they’re planning. Angleton: the Ford paper was a decoy, granted—but what can they do anyway? What kind of summoning are we looking at?”

  “They can try to summon up the Eater of Souls.” His smile is ghastly. “They won’t get him. What they get in his place—could be anything—” His smile fades, replaced by a look of perplexity. “That’s funny.”

  “Funny?” Mo leans forward. “What’s funny?”

  Angleton raises his right hand and rubs it against his chest. “I feel odd.”

  “Oh come on, you can’t pull that—” Mo stops. “Angleton?”

  His eyes are closed, as if asleep. “They’re calling,” he whispers. “The dead are calling ...”

  “Dr. O’Brien—” Major Barnes stares at Angleton. “Code Red!” he calls, yelling at the back of the truck. “Code Red!”

  Angleton leans against his seat belt, unmoving.

  THE HUMAN SACRIFICE IS OVER IN SECONDS: IRIS IS THE KIND of priestess who believes in running a tight ship, and the tiny body stops thrashing mercifully fast. She lowers the bloody knife to the altar below the foot of the bed and what happens next is concealed from me.

  I lie back and screw my eyes shut, but blocking out the sight of what they’re doing doesn’t make things better: I can feel blind things moving in the darkness, all around, scraping and scrabbling at the porous walls of the world. They’re trying to get in. I invited them, and many of them have found bodies, but those that haven’t—there are myriads of them. What have I done? I’m not sure. I’m not sure of anything except horror and disgust and a sense of nauseous unease at my own body. I’m lying on a bed, surrounded by corpses, at the exact end of a ley line that connected the capital with its dead underbelly, the citadel of silence in the English countryside. And they’re trying to do something awful, using me as a vessel, but it failed. Just like my attempt to use the energy of my own death to summon the eaters in the night—

  “By the blood of the newborn be you bound to this flesh, this body, and this will!” Iris’s voice is a dissonant screech like nails on a blackboard, compelling and revolting, impossible to ignore. I open my eyes. She stands beside the bed, holding the silver goblet before my chin. It’s full to brimming with dark fluid, thick and warm and amazingly wonderful to smell and I finally twig, That’s not wine. I try to turn my head away, but two of her followers grasp me with gloved hands and push me up, straining against the ropes and brutally stretching my sore arm. “I command you and name you, Eater of Souls and master of Erdeni Dzu! I name you again, heir of Burdokovskii’s flesh! And I bind you to service in the name of the Black Pharaoh, N’yar lath-Hotep!”

  Then they pry my jaws open and stick a funnel in my mouth and start pouring while some bastard grips my nostrils shut, giving me a choice between drowning and swallowing.

  “There!” says Iris, smiling at me as she hands the half-empty goblet to her daughter. “Isn’t it so much better now?”

  I roll my eyes, force saliva, and spit. I’m not aiming at Iris, I’m just trying to clean the taste from my tongue—but her smile slips. “Hey now, I didn’t give you permission to do that. No spitting. Do you understand?”

  I bite my tongue before I succumb to the impulse to tell her where to shove it. I want to be rid of these ropes. There are things waiting outside in the dark, learning once again how bones and sinews are articulated, and I don’t want to be tied up down here when they arrive. Her words of binding slide over and past me, like a fishing line with rotten, unappetizing bait, but if I really was the Eater of Souls they’d sink into my inner ears like barbed-wire kisses. The only way out of here is to convince Iris that her little ritual worked: I’ll just have to pretend. “I—understand,” I croak after a brief pause, and it’s not hard to sound utterly unlike myself. “Mistress.”

  The fat, happy smile begins to steal back across her face. “Here are your orders. You will serve the goals and rules of the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh. You will not attack or attempt to damage any of the Brotherhood, under penalty of the binding I hold over you. You will not reveal your true nature to anyone outside the Brotherhood without my permission. And you will inform me at once if you suspect you are under suspicion. Do you understand?”

  That’s a no-brainer: “Yes, Mistress,” I say, looking her in the eyes. Her face has an unhealthy greenish sheen to it, as if there’s an ethereal light source behind me. She’s really sucking this up.

  “Good.” She nods to her minions. “Untie him.”

  They bend over the black cords that bind me, and as they loosen I feel a very strange sensation in my chest—a gathering sensitivity, an awareness of the darkness around me. The ropes, part of the ritual apparatus prepared by the Brotherhood of the Skull for their own purposes so long ago, held their own geas: it made me feel weak. But now they’re gone, the sense of strangeness redoubles. I’m an alien in my own body. It’s very disturbing.

  “Can you stand?” Iris asks me.

  “I’ll try.” First I try to sit up, using my left arm as a lever. It’s clumsy and I’m physically unbalanced, and my right arm is still throbbing distantly—but I succeed. Throwing a leg out sideways I crab round, then lean forward and (with a silent apology) slide across the back of the mummified sleeper under the counterpane. Is it my imagination or do they twitch, and push back at me? I don’t stop to find out, but continue, sliding my feet towards the floor. It’s like standing for the first time after being bedridden with a fever. At first it takes all my energy, and I nearly black out: everything goes gray for a few seconds, and there is a buzzing and chittering in my ears. But then my head clears, and I find I feel fine. I feel fine: and the feeling extends beyond me, beyond the walls of the crypt, out into the damp soil and among the tree roots and into the cavities encysted in the ground, their occupants now waking from their long slumber. “I’m standing,” I say, swaying slightly.

  “Good.” Iris turns towards the altar. “Behold, the Eater of Souls!” she says, and takes my left wrist and holds it up, for all the world like a referee hailing a winning boxer.

  “What would you have me do now?” I ask her out of the corner of my mouth, hamming it up for the benefit of the audience.

  “Nothing yet. But I have sent out a summons to our brethren; next month we will hold another rite, and you will open the way to the Gatekeeper. If all goes well, the Pharaoh shall walk Earth’s ground again next March. Do you think you can do that?”

  Silent voices tickle the back of my skull: What would you have us do, Lord?

  I tell them precisely what I want, in pedantically detailed Enochian—a dead language with which to command dead things.

  “Eater. Speak?” Iris stares at me. We’re close enough that I can see that greenish glow reflected on her face. Oh, it’s me. I’m glowing, I realize. My eyes are glowing. I’m possessed.

  I look at her
. “Iris,” I say softly, “you’ve forgotten the first rule of applied demonology.”

  She stares. “How did you know my—”

  “Do not call up that which you cannot put down.”

  She tries to jerk her left hand away from me, making a grab at her improvised altar with her right. She reaches for the blood-tarnished silver sacrificial sickle but I yank her back and bring my right hand up to catch her wrist. We stand for a second in a parody of a waltz step, and I smile at her, baring my teeth. Her expression of heart-struck terror is as pure as fresh-shed blood. Around us her followers are turning, beginning to realize something has gone wrong, as the voices at the back of my head whisper oaths of fealty to me and the feeders bend to their tasks.

  I raise my right arm—painless, now—over her head, and spin her round, then gather her to my chest, with my mouth centimeters from the nape of her neck. I’m careful not to make contact with her bare skin: a strangely irresistible aroma rises from her, and I suspect if I touched her I’d be unable to control myself. She smells of food. “Nobody try anything!” I shout. “Or I’ll kill her!” A couple of the cultists are armed, but their security guys seem to favor shotguns: not the ideal weapon for dealing with a hostage-taker if you want the hostage back in anything other than lots of little pieces.

  Simultaneously there’s a stifled scream, and Jonquil falters in the act of raising a knife to throw at me. “The bed!” She hiccups—yes, fear gives some people the hiccups. “Look at the bed!”

  “Shut up—” Iris begins to say, as I twist us both round so that I can see what everyone else is looking at; then she falls silent.