Dead Lies Dreaming

by Charles Stross

  And that’s how things stood until the catastrophic Sunday when Imp learned about the family curse.

  * * *

  “This isn’t like Assassin’s Creed Syndicate at all,” complained Game Boy.

  “Yeah, because your PlayStation games stink like raw sewage,” Wendy snarked. They paused at the darkened maw of an unlit street where buildings clumped like rotting teeth in the mouth of a blind drunk. “Where is everybody?”

  “Don’t know.” Del turned in place, checking the tunnel they’d just exited. It looked as if it had once been a night soil alley, and backing onto it were the privies of actual houses with yards. Now it was almost roofed-over in places, the sky blocked out by overhanging rickety balconies to either side, and it was awash with ankle-deep filth so vile it stunned the nose like a fist to the face. Something twitched and scuttled close to one wall, half-submerged in ordure: a rat, perhaps, or the world’s biggest cockroach. “Staying out of this crap, I’m guessing.”

  “No, I mean—” Wendy gestured past Imp and Doc, who were poking around a doorway further down the alley, possibly because it was all they could see by the light of Doc’s flashlight—“isn’t this place supposed to be densely populated? Sleeping twenty to a room, stacked up like timber?” Mist swirled just beyond the reach of Doc’s light, deadening all sound but a steady plop plop plop of filth dripping onto bricks streaked white with saltpeter.

  “It’s nothing but a dream,” Imp said loudly.

  “But the kind of dream that kills,” Doc cautioned. “Don’t ever lose sight of that.”

  “A dream?” Game Boy was outraged.

  “It was my family’s speciality,” Imp said defensively. “Oneiromancers, able to enter the past through dreams. Or maybe dreams of the past—of other pasts that never happened, or that happened and got trampled over by time travellers.”

  “The fuck are we doing here, then?” demanded Del. “What’s it a dream of?”

  “It’s a dream of the version of 1888 where the book we’re looking for was misfiled and lost, rather than our 1888, where the book went back into a closed library collection and got bombed to fuck during the Blitz. And maybe if we find the book and take it home with us this stops being a dream, and the version of history where the book was correctly-filed-and-then-bombed, that turns into the dream.”

  “Fucking time travel,” complained Doc. “Makes my head hurt.”

  “But the people—” Wendy repeated.

  “It’s a dream. Dreams attract resonant stuff that doesn’t happen in the real world.” Doc coughed significantly. “The lasses who’d be working are hiding or sticking to well-lit streets, this is poor pickings for beggars, everybody’s abed, and the police are looking to protect the money, not the likes of people who live here. So we’re anomalous—”

  “Hey, everybody,” Game Boy broke in, “what’s this?” He’d found the one door in the alley that wasn’t stove-in or hanging drunkenly askew. Now he stood in front of it, peering at a chiselled engraving in a stone plate to one side. “What’s that name again, Purse Galveston something?”

  “We’re looking for the reading room of the Piers Gaveston Fellowship,” Imp announced. “Named after King Edward II’s catamite. There was a notorious Oxford drinking club in the eighties—nineteen eighties, that is—who took his name. They were basically an upper-class BDSM orgy club. This bunch is somewhat older.” He did a double-take. “Hey, is this—”

  “Yep.” Game Boy looked smug until he clocked the lack of a doorknob. Indeed, the door was most formidably shut, a barrier of blackened oak studded with iron rivet-heads, with only a keyhole by way of an entry point. A very old-looking keyhole, clearly not fronting for a modern cylinder lock or anything easy to extract or pick. “How do we get in?”

  “We knock,” Wendy said. She flexed her hand and a baton appeared: “Open up in the name of the law!” she called as she pounded on the door.

  “Uh, honey—” Del caught her eye, shook her head, looking amused—“when did they first take women in the filth, anyway?”

  Wendy swore, then glanced back down the route they’d come. Nobody stirred in the mist, but: Whitechapel. The police had swarmed the area after the bodies began to turn up, conducting house-to-house searches and interviewing hundreds of suspects. There’d been vigilantes, the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, harassing strangers and stalking butchers, surgeons, and anyone else with cause to carry sharp knives for work. “Dammit,” she muttered, “criminal damage it is, then.”

  Wendy made her baton disappear. In its place, a steel battering ram coagulated out of the mist. It was heavy, and an ice-cold sweat broke out on her forehead as she pulled it into existence. Wendy’s power of illusion had its limits. Her pulse hammered and a chittering sounded in her ears, like a million hungry mandibles chewing at the edge of her sanity. “He-help me,” she tried to say, sagging under the weight of the steel cylinder.

  Del grabbed two of the handles. “I’ve got it,” she said. “Together?” Wendy nodded wordlessly, concentrating on staying conscious and lining the head of the cylinder up on the unseen lock behind the keyhole. “Okay, in three, two, one…”

  CRASH.

  The impact jarred all the way up to Wendy’s shoulders. Del voiced a muffled grunt of pain. “Shit!” The door held, although it had buckled around the keyhole. “What the hell?”

  “Try again,” Wendy gasped. “I can’t hold it together much longer.”

  “Let me guide it?” Game Boy stepped in close and laid his hands over Wendy’s wrists. “Now—”

  CRASH. Something gave way and with a shriek of tearing metal the door swung inwards, away from the strike plate. The lock mechanism clattered to the tiled floor within. “Hey, what if there’s someone in—”

  “Allow me?” Imp stepped across the threshold, grinning as he pushed his shirt cuffs back. “Some light would help—no, I really don’t think there’s anybody home.”

  Wendy let go of the battering ram and it vanished instantly. The pressure on her skull subsided more slowly. “Breaking, and now entering.” She steeled herself for the inevitable sense of wrongdoing as she followed Imp into the entrance hall. “Is anybody home?” she called, feeling slightly fatuous after the tumult of smashing in the front door.

  Game Boy followed her. “I hope we’re in time—” he began, just as Imp turned his flashlight up to full brightness and lit up the roof—“Oh shit.”

  * * *

  Eve was fretful because an unpleasant sense of déjà vu had stolen up on her as she realized what she was doing: once again pursuing a male family member through empty nighttime streets towards an illicit destination, hoping she’d be in time to save him from the consequences of actions she’d unwittingly set in motion.

  “It should be here,” she muttered grimly, checking the map for the umpteenth time. Under her breath: “Dammit, Jeremy!”

  The alleyways and yards of Whitechapel grew danker and more noisome the further away from the main roads they went. Eve hadn’t seen any open doors and red-shaded lamps for a while, nor constables or costermongers; not even tattered match-selling beggar children. If she had to guess the time she’d have said it was past midnight. While the fog still swirled, a chilly drizzle had begun to fall.

  “Any ideas, ma’am?” Even the Gammon, Franke, was showing signs of unease.

  “We’re looking for an alleyway off Dutfield’s Yard by Berner Street, not far from Whitechapel Road—” Eve stopped, realizing she was talking to herself, a habit she despised in others. “Unmarked sturdy door faced with rivets and a sign saying Piers Gaveston Fellow—”

  “Like this one?” The Gammon froze, then stepped warily aside. He brushed back his coat and reached for his UMP9.

  “Bingo.” Eve’s shoulders heaved as she saw what he’d found. A door that stood ajar, blackened timbers punched in around the lock. “Dammit, we’re late.”

  “Ma’am, if you’re going in I suggest—”

  Eve levitated a fistful of glass marbles a
nd smiled at him. He shut his mouth with an audible click. “Stand guard. Nobody enters. Clear?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” She crossed the threshold, feeling a prickly chill run up her spine as her sight dimmed for an instant. “I’ll cover the approaches from inside.”

  “You do that.” She entered the hallway, then paused to listen. There were doors inset with panes of glass at the end of the hall, but there was also a staircase spiraling up into the gloom. Offices, she thought. Where are the offices? Up or down?

  She pushed through the darkened door, then pulled out her flashlight. Parquet floor, a wood-panelled wall with a transom and inset window, more doors. One of them stood ajar, affording a glimpse of white tiles and a familiar whiff of bleach. There was a gilt title above the small window: RETURNS. An itchy sense of unease told her that either there was no librarian on duty, or if there was, she really didn’t want to meet him.

  Upstairs, she decided. She darted back to the staircase. “Going up,” she quietly called to the Gammon. He didn’t stir from his position behind the door, submachine gun held ready and eyes vigilantly focussed on the alleyway.

  Dammit, Imp. She skidded on the landing halfway up—her boots filthy, probably ruined by the icy muck splashed halfway up her ankles—then caught herself on the banister rail, a knobbly yellowed ivory thing that reminded her of the artistic style of H.R. Giger. Finally she reached the top step and paused, reconsidering. If it’s Imp’s gang we’re good, but if it’s somebody else—a handful of marbles lacked a certain something in the deterrence department, however lethal they might actually be. She slowed, wishing she’d taken the Apache gun or borrowed the Gammon’s spare pistol. Not that she needed a firearm if she wanted to poke holes in people: but folks tended to stop and listen when you pointed a gun at them. And right now Eve was all about making people stop and listen, rather than performing highly inadvisable summoning rituals in a liminal space haunted by the ghost of Leather Apron.

  The landing at the top of the stairs had smaller doors to either side, but directly ahead of her a big pair of double doors with glass windows promised something more. A dim radiance flickered behind them. She switched off her flashlight, then approached, lurking in the darkness, listening.

  “—Hell designed this place? It’s creeping me—” A woman’s voice.

  “Naah, it’s just ossuary kitsch.” Eve took a deep breath of relief: the speaker was Imp. He continued, “If you want to see the real thing, you need to visit the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic: it’s got a great website. I reckon these are just plaster replicas, there’s no way you could get your hands on that many skeletons in London without somebody noticing—”

  What? Eve blinked. She glanced up at the shadowy lintel above the door, at the chandelier dangling from the shadows above the stairwell. Emboldened by knowing it was her brother’s crew on the other side of the door, she flicked her flashlight at it. No, it wasn’t an H.R. Giger homage, not in the late nineteenth century: the graceful chandelier was festooned with chains of human vertebrae, lamp-holders set in bouquets of skulls, braced by arms of … well, arms. Eve switched the flashlight off. Creepy but not dangerous, she decided, and pushed the double doors open.

  “Imp?” she called: “It’s me! We need to talk.”

  * * *

  The library was made of bones.

  Imp cringed as he looked up at the room’s vaulted ceiling, arching two stories above his head. Cornices and ornamental moldings of femurs and skulls; roof beams exposed like the rib cage of a dead giant, chandeliers of … bones, more bones, bones atop bones, everywhere bones.

  The wooden bookcases seemed to be safe at first glance—once living, now dead, bone becomes brittle and ceases to be a decent structural material—but they were fretted with a veneer of sliced fingerbones and surmounted by a display of maxillaries and mandibles. And the closer he got to them, the more realistic they looked.

  “Guys, I don’t think these are fakes.” Doc’s whisper was a loud library-hushed voice. “What is this place?”

  “A club library.” Imp scuffed his shoe on the black-and-white tiled floor, leaving a dark trail. “Shit.” He looked around, counting bookcases. “We must be looking at two or three hundred shelf-meters of books on this level alone.” There was a narrow walkway around the waist of the room, reached by a cast-iron spiral staircase in each corner of the library. It provided access to the higher shelves, for the room was walled in books to a height of perhaps five meters. Above the uppermost shelf a row of oval windows like so many eye sockets kept vigil over the outside world.

  Doc was already poking at one of the shelves. He pulled out a leatherbound volume and opened it. “Hey. Engravings? Engravings of—” He did a double-take. “Interesting, I didn’t know it was legal to print this kind of stuff back then.”

  “What kind of—” Game Boy crowded him—“porn? Hey, it’s hot man-on-man love.” He looked worried. “I think.”

  “What was this place again?” Wendy asked.

  “If I had to guess, going by the books I’d say it’s the private collection of a rich dude sex club.” Imp peered at the nearest bookcase, then slid a slim volume out. “Mm, Catullus, but not as we know him. Heh. I mean, the Victorians were really uptight in public about morality, but in private—”

  “The bones,” Game Boy reminded him.

  Imp shrugged. “Death and sex, two big taboos that taste great together.”

  Game Boy winced.

  “So this is club dead sex.” Del sounded annoyed. “You want me to search all this necroporn, bro? What’s the title of the book, anyway?”

  “It, uh, doesn’t have a title,” Imp admitted. “It’s something with the catchy title of AW-312.4 which may or may not be a handwritten concordance of the true Necronomicon, and it was produced by an Archbishop Rodriguez, about whom surprisingly little is known. There might or might not be a Vatican Index Librorum Prohibitorum stamp on the flyleaf. And it’s rumored to be bound in the archbishop’s skin so it’s going to look a bit weird—oh, and don’t, really don’t, try to read it—”

  He stopped. Del was backed up all the way against a bookcase, staring at him wide-eyed. “What?” he asked: “Did you think Eve would pay us a quarter of a million to retrieve it if it was just a simple matter of waltzing in and picking a book off the shelf?”

  “No, but—”

  “Imp?” He startled, then spun round and aimed his flashlight at the doorway. “It’s me! We need to talk.”

  Caught square in the beam, his sister raised one hand to shield her eyes.

  “Who’s—” Wendy raised her bow and arrow and began to draw—“this—” as Eve raised her other hand and began to open it, a palmful of glass spheres catching the light—

  “Stand down, everybody chill! This is my sister, the one who’s paying us! Eve, what the fuck?” Imp’s heart tried to climb out through his throat.

  “You haven’t taken the book yet?” Eve demanded anxiously.

  “No, we only just got here—”

  “Great! I mean stop, wait. The book—”

  “It’s cursed, isn’t it?” Imp guessed.

  Eve nodded vigorously. “Yes! But that’s not why I’m here. When I told you there wasn’t any chance of pursuit I think I spoke too soon.” She turned round. “This place—I wasn’t expecting the decor, I must say—I came to say you can expect unfriendly company if you hang around too long. And there’s a problem with the curse on the book, too.”

  “Unfriendly company.” Game Boy stepped out of the shadows and walked up to Eve. His attempt at an intimidating approach foundered on the fact that she was taller than he. “What kind of unfriendly? Like those nutters from the bank? Or is it some other kind of asshole?”

  “My boss likes to big himself up in front of his friends. The snatch squad at the bank is just one possibility—they’re dead, but there are worse people out there. I brought a bodyguard—he’s covering the front door—but we don’t have much time.” She looked at Rebecca. “Yo
u can find things, right? Can you locate it, please? Don’t touch it—just go to wherever it is on the shelves and point to it?”

  “I’m not a fucking dowsing rod,” Del grumbled. “Say I can find it. What then? You’re just going to take it and not pay us for our work?”

  Eve shook her head. “No! It’s not like that. I can’t take it. It’s protected by an anti-theft ward—if you try to steal it, it kills you.”

  “Well that’s just peachy.” Game Boy pouted. “You were going to tell us about this when?”

  “Oh, it’s perfectly safe to handle if somebody else has triggered the curse and you took it from their still-smoking body.” Eve paused. “Or if they sold it to you.”

  “You bought it, didn’t you?” Imp walked towards her. “Didn’t you?”

  “I think so. I may have screwed up that side of things,” Eve admitted. “It’s unclear.”

  “What’s unclear?”

  “It was up for auction: obvs, right? But it’s not clear that the person auctioning the location of the manuscript actually owned what they were selling, that’s the thing. Also, ancient death spells and intellectual property law don’t always play nice together. I, uh, my boss has a standard procedure he has me follow in cases of handling blackmail and extortion. We pay the ransom, then once we’ve destroyed the threat I repossess the payment from the blackmailer’s bank account. Via a Transnistrian mafiya underwriter—”

  This time it was Wendy who interrupted: “The Russian mafiya has underwriters?”

  “Transnistrian, please, and yes, criminal business models are inherently expensive because they have to pay for their own guard labor—there are no tax overheads, but no police protection for carrying out business, either—so of course they evolved parallel structures for risk management, mostly by embedding the risk in a concrete slab and dumping it in the harbor—anyway. At what stage does the book consider itself to have been legitimately acquired? And by whom? Is it safe for you to handle it, as my employee? What about as an independent freelance contractor not subject to the HMRC IR35 regulations? Am I an acceptable proxy for Bigge Enterprises, a Scottish Limited Liability Partnership domiciled in the Channel Islands, in the view of a particularly dim-witted nineteenth-century death spell attached to a codex bound in human skin by a mad inquisitor? It’s like digital rights management magic, only worse.”