And so he dances down the aisle, leans over the lady tied to the bed, and—holding a knife to the neck of the man lying next to her—who just happens to be me, myself: Bob Howard—asks: “Woman, you tell, where is Fuller Memorandum? Speak now, or will cut throat of All-Highest.”
I LIE IN THE GRIP OF A GREAT LASSITUDE . I’VE BEEN LYING here for what seems like decades, staring with unblinking eyes at the star-pricked canopy of black silk above the Skull Cultists’ altar. I know, distantly, that I am in extreme danger; I’m in the middle of a monstrous summoning, and lying like a drunkard next to a bound but still deadly Iris while her minions panic and try to fight off the eaters outside the chapel is not a life-expectancy-enhancing situation. But I can’t move. I don’t even feel tired; I feel dead. Some kinds of summoning cause serious physical fatigue, possibly via a mechanism not unlike a mild form of K syndrome, and this would appear to be one of them.
The black sky above me, pierced by the flickering light of unfamiliar constellations, blows like a chill wind through my awareness. I’ve seen this sky before, I realize; where? Oh. Yes, the canopy of the altar-bed of the Black Skull mirrors the chill starlight that sluices across the desiccated plain surrounded by the fence of impaled corpses that I dreamed about, the fence that locks the Sleeper in the Pyramid in somnolent darkness. I’m not the only one to see that skyscape when I close my eyes, I think.
I can feel Iris nearby, her mind slowed and frustrated, defocused by the bindings woven into the ropes that trim the altar of the sex-magic cultists that used this chapel before her own people moved in. She’s angry, terrified, embittered; I could almost feel sympathy for her if my right arm didn’t remind me constantly of what she stands for, who she is. There are the eaters, torpid and in some cases well-fed, resting in their bony chrysalids in the porous earth beyond; and there are other human lives upstairs, some of them familiar. They’re coming this way. One of them, not so familiar, is almost here already—
Something touches my neck, as a voice speaks, in a thick eastern European accent: “Woman, you tell, where is Fuller Memorandum? Speak now, or will cut throat of All-Highest.”
Bastard. I’m lying here helpless and I can’t even tell Laughing Boy that I’m not the All-Highest! That, and the Fuller Memorandum happens to be snugly jacketed in the folder I’m clutching to my bosom with arms like lead weights: this is not looking good. Close to panic, I try to twitch a finger or blink an eyelid—anything to reassert control over my own treacherous body.
“Untie me and I’ll take you to it,” says Iris, quick as a flash. “Please?” I can just about see her batting her eyelids at Laughing Boy. Then she adds: “You’d better cut All-Highest’s throat before he wakes up. He was going to sacrifice me—”
I try to shout, She’s lying! But nothing comes out of my throat. I am not, in fact, breathing, I realize distantly. Am I dead? I wonder. Am I undead? I’m not one hundred percent clear on the clinical definition of death, but I’m pretty sure that lying trapped in my own unbreathing body meets some of the requirements. I don’t know about the continuity of consciousness bit, but maybe it’s a side effect of the binding ritual they used. If I had my phone I could go online and google it, but zombie don’t surf. I feel the knife blade move, and I really start to panic—
“Nyet. Is already dead. You take me for fool! Where is Fuller Memorandum? Tell and I release.”
The knife is at Iris’s throat; I lie beside her, paralyzed and apprehensive.
Iris’s breath ratchets harshly through her throat. “The file All-Highest is clutching. Be careful, you don’t want to touch his skin by accident—”
But she’s too late.
Alexei, Laughing Boy, pulls the Fuller Memorandum from my hands. As he does so, he makes momentary contact with one of my fingers. And the inevitable happens, because this torpor that’s come over me—the torpor associated with the summoning, and the control of lesser eaters, and with K syndrome—is symptomatic of something else: I’m hungry.
IN THE BACK OF AN AMBULANCE SPEEDING TOWARDS THE ROYAL Surrey Country Hospital with lights and siren, an old man opens his eyes and whispers, “Good job, boy.” The paramedic, who is looking at the EEG trace, glances at him in surprise.
The stroke victim tries to sit up, struggling against the straps that hold him on the stretcher. Then he frowns thunderously. “How long was I out?” he asks the paramedic. Then: “Forget that. Turn round—I want you to take me to Brookwood. Immediately!”
SECONDS LATER, BARNES AND HIS MEN COME THROUGH THE DOOR with a strobing flicker of light bombs and a concussive blast of stun grenades. They’re ready for business: they’ve got Mo and her singular instrument ready to suppress any residual occult resistance. But they’re too late.
The screaming is mine; I’m yelling my throat out: a weird, warbling abhuman keening that doesn’t stop until the squad paramedic gingerly sticks me with a battlefield-grade sedative. Which takes some time: when they find me I’m lying on a vampire prince’s bed, covered in gore, with a lump missing from my right arm, and my eyes rolled up in my head so that only the green-glowing whites show. It takes them a while to confirm that I’m safe to approach; and a while longer to get an insulated stretcher down to the chamber and strap me down onto it.
Iris is sobbing, cringing away from me as far as the ropes will let her. She can’t get very far, though: she’s weighed down by the body of the dead Spetsnaz trooper, a black ring-binder lying on the floor beside him.
As for Alexei, he’s dead: eaten by the thing the cultists tried to make of me. Their sacrifice bit a huge and vital chunk out of my soul; after the power of my death-magic ran down, I was all but inert until Alexei unintentionally filled up the hole. I don’t think he intended to do that. I didn’t intend to do that, certainly: I’m no necromancer. But when they’ve performed the ritual of binding upon you, trying to turn you into a vessel for the Eater of Souls . . .
You need to eat.
Epilogue
ON THE BEACH
THE MIND’S EYE HAS A FAST - FORWARD BUTTON. IT’S FUNNY: most of the time we don’t think about it in those terms; but when you’re trying to write down a sequence of experiences, to take a series of unfortunate events and turn them into a coherent story, the mind’s eye takes on some of the characteristics of an old-fashioned videotape recorder: balky, prone to drop-outs and loss, cumbersome and wonky and breakable.
So call me a camera and stick a battery in my ear.
FIRST, PANIN GOT AWAY.
Here’s what I imagine happened, around the time I was screaming my lungs out on a bed of nightmares:
In the back of a shiny black BMW speeding towards Woking—and thence to the motorway south to Dover and the Channel Tunnel—an old man opens his eyes and takes a deep breath. “That was altogether too close for comfort,” he says aloud.
Dmitry glances at him in the rearview mirror. “With respect, sir . . . I agree.” His knuckles are white where they grasp the steering wheel, and he is racking up fines from the average-speed cameras at an almost surreal rate. “The men ...”
Panin closes his eyes again. “Dead. Or they’ll exfiltrate. Vassily in the embassy can see to their needs. I am going home to explain this fiasco.” He is silent for nearly a minute. “We nearly had it all: a transcript of the Sternberg Fragment, Fuller’s memorandum on binding the Eater of Souls.”
“With respect, sir, cultists are always unreliable proxies. And we did get the schemata for the violin, and we weakened the British ...”
Panin glares at Dmitry: “Weakening the British is not the goal of the great game! Survival is the goal. We are intelligent men, not panicking rats biting each other as they struggle to escape the sinking ship. They are the enemies of our enemy, never forget that. It is the cultists’ error, to imagine themselves beset by foes they can never defeat.”
“Like back there?” asks Dmitry.
Panin doesn’t answer. They drive the rest of the way to the Channel in silence.
SECOND, HERE’
S WHAT I KNOW HAPPENED:
Once I woke up briefly, in a darkened nighttime room with two beds and a door and a man in a blue suit standing outside the door with a gun. The man in the bed next to me was familiar. He was asleep, and I remember thinking that there was something very urgent that I had to tell him, but I couldn’t remember what it was and the file was missing—
Then the alarm went off and the medics came and they made me go back to sleep.
I don’t remember much after that. Which is a mercy—the dreams were bad.
Mo tells me that for the first week they kept me heavily sedated—if they eased up on the chlorpromazine I started screaming and trying to eat my own fingers. She visited every day. She sat by my bedside and fed me, spooning mush into my mouth and making sure I didn’t choke on it.
Angleton recovered much faster. Two nights under observation and they released him. Then he heard about me and kicked up a stink. They were planning on moving me to St. Hilda’s. Angleton had a better idea of what was wrong with me and refused to take no for an answer; so after nearly a week in hospital (with my head wrapped in the pink fluffy haze of a major antipsychotic bender), a private ambulance picked me up and deposited me in the Village.
The Village used to be called Dunwich, back before the Ministry of War evacuated it and turned it into a special site. It was allocated to the wartime Special Operations Executive, part of which later became the Laundry and inherited this small coastal community with its street of cottages and decaying pier, its general store and village pub. Today we use it as a training center, and also as a quiet place for taking time out. There’s no internet access, and no mobile phone coverage, and no nagging from head office about time sheets and sickness self-certification. There is a medical doctor, but Janet is sensible and very patient, and has seen an astonishing number of cases of Krantzberg syndrome (and other, more esoteric sorcerous injuries) over the years.
They billeted me in a tiny seaside cottage and Janet took me off the chlorpromazine, substituting a number of other medications—not all of them legally prescribable. (MDMA helps a lot when you’re suffering from the delusion that you’re one of the walking dead.) After three days, I stopped shivering and hiccuping with fear; after a week, I could sleep again without a night-light. At the weekend, Mo came to visit. I was glad to see her. She knows what it’s like where I’ve been, to a good first approximation. We spent a lot of time together, just holding hands. It feels very strange, touching someone who’s alive. Maybe in another week I’ll be able to hug her without recoiling because I’m terrified I’m going to accidentally eat her mind.
(That’s the trouble with this job. Sometimes it chews you up and spits you out—literally.)
Mo came back the next weekend, too. She says she’s trying to get a week’s compassionate leave, but the fallout from Iris’s actions has been beyond earthshaking. We’ll see.
I’VE BEEN WORKING ON THIS REPORT FOR A COUPLE OF WEEKS now.
This being the Village, and an internet-free zone, I’m allowed to use a computer and dictation software—although it’s had its CD drive and wifi chipset removed, the case is welded shut, and it’s padlocked to an oak desk that weighs approximately half as much again as Angleton’s Memex. It beats the manual typewriter hands down, but when I asked if I could take it home with me, the security officer barely managed to conceal his sneer.
I suppose there are some loose ends I should tie up, so here goes:
We never did find out exactly what happened to any of Panin’s men apart from Alexei, or to Panin himself: you should read my speculations with more than a pinch of salt. I can’t even be certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that Panin was behind the theft of the violin report, although theft of state secrets is the sort of thing that the Thirteenth Directorate’s parent agency traditionally excelled at. I’m assuming that the elite Spetsnaz infiltration troops assigned to an occult warfare department probably stood more of a chance of escaping alive than the cultists: but we didn’t account for all of them, either. The scene at Brookwood the next morning was indescribable. I’ve seen the pictures. It was easy enough to close down the cemetery—police roadblocks, reports about an illegal rave and graveyard vandalism, a handful of D-notices to gag the more annoying local reporters—but then they had to do something with the bodies. The feeders raised just about everything that wasn’t totally dismembered and disarticulated. In the end, they had to bring in bulldozers and dig trenches. They identified some of the cultists—but not Jonquil the Sloane Ranger, or her boyfriend Julian.
I don’t think Brookwood will reopen for a long time.
Brains has been given a good talking-to, and is being subjected to the Security Theater Special Variety Show for breaching about sixteen different regulations by installing beta software on an employee’s personal phone. Reminding Oscar-Oscar that if he hadn’t done so they’d have lost the Eater of Souls to a cultist infiltrator appears to be futile. Right now, everyone in Admin has joined in the world’s biggest arse-kicking circle dance, except possibly for Angleton, who is shielding me from the worst of it. Because they haven’t forgotten that I’ve been a naughty boy too—if it wasn’t for me, they wouldn’t have needed all those bulldozers at Brook-field, would they? Although Angleton has had a measure of success in pointing out to certain overenthusiastic disciplinarians that if it wasn’t for the feeders I summoned, they’d have had the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh trying to open up a long distance call to the Sleeper in the Pyramid, paid in the coin of London’s dead.
AS FOR THE MAN HIMSELF—CALL HIM TEAPOT , CALL HIM Angleton, call him Sir—I haven’t seen him since I woke up here, and I won’t be seeing him until the Auditors hear my final report and I go back on active duty. But I have this to say:
I used to think he scared the shit out of me, but now I know better. I know what he’s like, from the inside. The effects of Iris’s botched binding faded fast, and I probably only borrowed a tiny fraction of his power. I didn’t know how to use it properly, either. But I have been destiny-entangled before, and I know what it was like then, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Angleton was in a flatlined coma for the entire duration of my funny turn.
I also learned this much: Angleton isn’t bound to the Laundry by the ramshackle geas that Fuller and his fellow eccentric occultists threw together in the 1930s. He’s a free agent—or at least as free as any of us are, be we beasts, men, or gods. The reason he puts up with us? I don’t know. It may be long habit—he’s lived the life of an Englishman for so long now that he self-identifies as such. But I have a theory.
Angleton knows what’s coming. He knows exactly what is going to bleed through the walls of reality, when the stars burn down from the pitiless heavens and our ever-thinking numbers begin to corrode the structure of reality. And he believes we’re his best hope for his own survival.
Like I said: the only god I believe in is coming back. And when he arrives, I’ll be waiting with a shotgun.
GLOSSARY OF ABBREVIATIONS, ACRONYMS, AND ORGANIZATIONS
AIVD Algemene Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdienst (General Intelligence and Security Service) [Netherlands]
BA British Airways [UK]
BLACK CHAMBER Cryptanalysis agency officially disbanded in 1929 (secretly retasked with occult intelligence duties) [US]
CESG Communications-Electronics Security Group (division within GCHQ) [UK]
CIA Central Intelligence Agency [US]
CMA Computer Misuse Act (law governing hacking) [UK]
COTS Cheap, Off The Shelf (computer kit; procurement term) [US/UK]
DEA Drug Enforcement Administration [US]
DERA Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (privatized as QinetiQ) [UK]
DGSE Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure [France]
DIA Defense Intelligence Agency [US]
FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation [US]
FO Foreign Office [UK]
FSB Federal Security Service (formerly known as KGB) [Russia]<
br />
GCHQ Government Communications HQ (equivalent to NSA) [UK]
GCSE General Certificate of Secondary Education (high school qualification; not to be confused with GCHQ) [UK]
GRU Russian Military Intelligence [Russia]
JIC Joint Intelligence Committee [UK]
KCMG Knight-Commander of the Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George (honors service overseas or in connection with foreign or Commonwealth affairs) [UK]
KGB Committee for State Security (renamed FSB in 1991) [Russia]
THE LAUNDRY Formerly SOE Q Department (spun off as a separate organization in 1945) [UK]
MI5 National Security Service (also known as DI5) [UK]
MI6 Secret Intelligence Service (also known as SIS, DI6) [UK]
NEST Nuclear Emergency Support Team [US]
NKVD Historical predecessor organization to KGB (renamed in 1947) [USSR/Russia]
NSA National Security Agency (equivalent to GCHQ) [US]
OBE Order of the British Empire (awarded mainly to civilians and service personnel for public service or other distinctions) [UK]
OCCULUS Occult Control Coordination Unit Liaison, Unconventional Situations [UK/NATO]
ONI Office of Naval Intelligence [US]
OSA Official Secrets Act (law governing official secrets) [UK]
OSS Office of Strategic Services (disbanded in 1945/remodeled as CIA) [US]
The Fuller Memorandum Page 33
