Dead Lies Dreaming

by Charles Stross

  She took a deep breath and turned to Imp: “Anyway, it’s probably safe for either of us to take it off the shelf and look at it, as long as we don’t try to read past the flyleaf or remove it from the library. We’ve got a degree of immunity to cursed spell books, at least the ordinary kind. But if we try to make a withdrawal—bang.”

  “Huh.” Del strolled over to the far wall and ran her fingertip along a shelf. “Prove it.” She half-turned and smiled proudly at Eve, baring her teeth.

  “Crap,” Eve muttered under her breath. “That’s it? That’s the lost concordance?”

  Rebecca’s fingertip rested on a dusty shelf of bone, almost touching the cracked spine of a volume bound in a stiff, almost golden-hued leather quite at odds with the volumes to either side of it (which had the boring uniformity of a bound run of law gazettes or dirty magazines). “I think this is it. Mind you, it could be a compilation of tax records from the Duchy of Cornwall in 1688—how would I know? I’m not taking it.”

  “Sis—” Imp took her shoulder—“you don’t have to. It’s your boss’s problem, isn’t it? If there’s some risk it’s going to do that … don’t do it if you don’t have to, is what I’m saying?”

  “Oh, but I do have to. Because how else do you think I’m going to get back at the bastard?”

  She grinned like a skull as she reached for the book, and for a moment of frozen panic Imp sensed that the book grinned back.

  CHARNEL LIBRARY

  The last normal day of Eve’s life began much like any other Sunday: she slept in an hour later than on a regular workday, then travelled by tube and overground to her parents’ house.

  After graduation she had moved in with her then-boyfriend for a few months, but they’d split up under the pressure of sixty-hour work weeks and sharing a bedsit-sized flat while in their first training-wheels relationship. (Also, their sex life had been lacking a certain something—which she only discovered later.) She’d moved out again, into a room in an HMO shared with three other millennial girls all straining for a grip on the bottom rung of corporate serfdom: a baby solicitor, a freshly minted hospital doctor who only ever came home to snore, and a junior marketing manager. Still, it was better than going back to her old bedroom in the wilderness beyond Heathrow, even though her digs were just as far from the office and cost her a thousand a month more than her parents’ spare bedroom.

  By turning up around noon, Evie ensured that Mum would already be out. Her church-going had gone from mildly serious to moderately alarming over the past five years, as she drifted from a wooly mainstream C of E congregation towards a hardcore evangelical import from the USA. If Evie turned up too early Mum would try to get her to come along. She hated to say no, but something about the eight-hour-long audience participation services with the meals and the singing and the readings from their weird apocrypha—The Apocalypse of St. Enoch the Divine?—resonated in all the wrong ways with her magic. She’d been to one service and sneaked out halfway through after throwing up in the ladies’—just the memory of it left her distinctly nauseous.

  The combination of religious faith and actual ritual power made Evie deeply uneasy. It was as bad as if her mum was a habitual drunk-driver, so she reacted by pretending to herself that it wasn’t happening. And the easiest way to make that work was to avoid any reminder of it.

  That lunchtime she found Dad in his den (really a windowless closet off the side of the living room, which he’d fitted out with shelves, a comfy chair, and a fold-down desk bolted to the wall), wearing his threadbare sorcerer’s robe over jogging pants and a gray sweatshirt with a coffee stain on the front. “Hey, Daddy.” She leaned forward to kiss his bald spot. “How’s life treating you?”

  Her father sighed uneasily then smiled for her. He picked up the leatherbound journal he’d been writing in and closed it then stood up, a trifle creakily. “I’ll make tea,” he said. With his back turned, he added, “I’m worried about your mother.”

  Oh crap. Evie dutifully tensed up, even though—she hated to admit this even in the privacy of her own head—Mum was increasingly alien to her these days, her eyes coming alive with enthusiasm only when she tried to overshare her faith with someone who made the mistake of asking how she was. Evie followed Dad out to the kitchen. “Is it her church habit again?”

  Dad shoved the jug kettle under the tap and filled it. White noise washed out conversation for a few moments. He closed the lid, placed it back on its base, and turned it on in silence, lost in thought as he prepared the teapot and measured out the correct quantity of his precious breakfast tea leaves. It was a calming ritual he carried out every day, for as long as she could remember. Now his hands were shaking. “It’s cancer,” he finally said. “Cancer and church. One or the other I think I could handle.”

  Evie felt a momentary sense of unreality, the instant in which, stepping off a curb, one sees the oncoming dump truck: the instant in which one is committed to that fatal footfall, toes caught in mid-stride and unable to avoid the disaster, but aware of rushing towards one. “What kind of cancer?” she heard her voice ask.

  The kettle came to a rolling boil and switched off. Dad filled the teapot before continuing. “Bowel cancer,” he said, calmly enough. “She was too embarrassed to talk about the spotting. Her GP noticed something wrong during her health MoT and referred her for screening.”

  “Oh crap—sorry.” Dad normally didn’t like it when his little girl swore, but either he didn’t notice or he chose to ignore it this once.

  “Her pastor told her to ignore the doctors and trust in the Lord,” Dad added, as calmly as if he were discussing the weather. “She doesn’t like the idea of chemo, Evie. I’ve had enough of this church. I intend to take them down. Will you help?”

  And there it was, the moment of impact, and she found herself nodding and going along. “Sure. Which one are they, anyway? I mean, is she still with the Promise, uh, the—”

  “The Golden Promise Ministries, yes. Bunch of gold-digging prosperity gospel charlatans.” Dad’s tone was even, but there was a quietly venomous undernote to his voice that his daughter could barely recognize. “Evie, I’m not going to let my wife die just to line the pockets of a high-rolling American preacher in a ten-thousand-pound suit. She was sane before he got his claws into her. She’ll thank us once she’s back in her right mind and the cancer’s in remission.”

  Evie’s tongue froze to the roof of her mouth. “She won’t consent,” she said carefully. “Have you got medical power of attorney?”

  “No.” Her father looked grim. “Never thought we’d need it, and now it’s too late. It’s much harder if the subject refuses consent.”

  “So you’re going to do it without her willing…”

  For a moment Dad was distraught. “Do you think I want to? Do you think I shouldn’t? They’ve planted something in her head, Evie, and it’s growing, there’s less of her with every week that goes by.”

  She blinked at him. “You mean, they literally planted something in her? Like what, one of the lesser daemones?”

  “Yes, exactly that. You can see it in her mouth when she eats—she’s avoiding the dentist, did you know that?” He spoke harshly. “It’s eating her soul, and I intend to kill it.”

  “That’s—” Her breath caught. “She’s definitely possessed?”

  Her father stood stiffly, as if his knees ached. Of a sudden Evie realized that he was, in fact, old: or at least middle-aged, which from a twenty-three-year-old perspective was the same thing. Hair thinning and graying to ashy silver, belly sagging over the waistband of the jeans he wore on his day off, a reminder that he’d met her mother after a rock concert in 1980. “Come with me,” he said.

  Evie trailed him upstairs to what had once been her bedroom. It had been repurposed at some point in the last few months, her own detritus boxed up and stripped out, Mum’s hand clearly at work. A dressing table had been installed in place of her desk, bearing a small and obscenely personal shrine. Gilt-framed photographs o
f a smiling toothy preacher man surrounded a stainless steel cross big enough to crucify her childhood Barbie; a Bible rested before it, oddly disproportionate.

  “What the heck?” Evie asked her father, backing up against the wall to which she’d once taped posters of Take That.

  “Look.” Dad picked up the Bible and riffled the pages, turning to the New Testament—no, turning past the New Testament. “Look at the apocrypha in this thing. Try to read them.”

  Evie took the book with nerveless fingers. “I don’t think I can.” A dizzying sense of wrongness swept over her. It was open at a title page: The Final Codex.

  “Then let me show you. Here.” Her father flipped forward. “The Apocalypse of St. Enoch the Divine, does that ring any bells? No? Good, because it shouldn’t.” He frowned at her. “It’s a summoning ritual, Evie, one that purports to bring about the return of the Christ-child. Only that’s tosh and nonsense, every initiate knows he isn’t sleeping under some damned pyramid on a dead moon—” He stopped and cleared his throat—“still, it summons something. Opens a door that should have been welded shut and buried under a tectonic subduction zone eons ago,” he said bitterly. “It’s hers. She sleeps in here, now. Her Church forbids non-reproductive sexual activity of any kind—or even contact with the opposite sex—and she’s post-menopause.”

  “Dad.” Evie winced. “Too much information.”

  “I want to save her.” He looked haggard.

  Evie bit her lower lip. “How?”

  “We need an exorcism to get rid of that goddamned tongue-leech. Which means I need rather more mana than I’ve got to hand here … I’m going to have to consecrate the tools in a place of power where the family Lares can hear me. Which means going back to the manse again. Are you with me?”

  “Shit.” She winced again. “Sorry, Dad … yes, I’ll come and spot for you. When do you want to do it?”

  Her father glanced at his wristwatch. “Now is as good a time as any, don’t you think? Jeremy’s staying with his loser friends—” a curl of the lip emphasized Dad’s opinion of art students in general and Imp’s choice in flatmates in particular—“so at least he’s out of the way. Your mother won’t be home until after seven, and it’s nearly noon. If we’re discreet we can be there and back and get everything prepared in time for tea. I’ll slip her something to make her dozy and we can perform the rite in our—I mean my—bedroom.”

  There were so many holes in Dad’s plan that Evie ached every day thereafter, whenever she thought about the horrible risk they’d taken in the name of her mother’s sanity. Yet at the time it all seemed reasonable and sensible. They’d taken the course of least resistance. Mum would thank them afterwards, wouldn’t she? Never mind that Dad knew, going in, that it would take more power than he could normally channel. Never mind that Dad intended to petition the family Lares—the domain-specific micro-deities with whom his ancestors had made a blood pact—to grant him that power. Never mind that it came at the price of the inter-generational curse that had struck out so many names in the family spell book. Never mind that the curse was why her grandfather had nailed shut the doors and buried guardians at all four quarters of the grounds, then fled the house he’d grown up in. Never mind that power always came at a cost, and the price of the family bloodline was paid in blood by every second generation.

  Never mind that the price was too high, and that Dad wasn’t the one who’d pay it. Mum was in desperate danger, her very soul in peril of mutilation by feeders from beyond the walls of the world: and ever-dutiful Evie had always been more eager to oblige than was prudent.

  * * *

  Under the New Management, everybody knew that magic was real, and that occult beasties generally found muggles tasty with ketchup. What Rupert had overlooked was the possibility that an overly autonomous agent with an overly realistic fear of magic might eschew magical transit shortcuts entirely, in favor of something he understood.

  The Bond knew better than to set foot on a faerie path alone, without so much as a cold iron horseshoe or a bag of salt about his person—at least, not unless his life was already in danger. Consequently, his hansom-hijacking hijinks set his arrival time back behind the team of Transnistrian insurance loss adjusters. But it also meant that they didn’t overtake him before reaching the misty warrens of Whitechapel.

  (This was not entirely the Bond’s fault. Rupert was leery about employing minions with a working grasp of magic. He only used them if he had a noose around their throat, and that in turn necessitated a degree of micromanagement: cameras in every corner of their offices, accommodation in a secure dormitory attic, escorted at all times by a bodyguard assigned by the Bigge Organization. That sort of thing.)

  But wherever the blame might lie, going off the map—even briefly—had cost the Bond his lead, and picking up a local guide had cost him even more time.

  “It’s in ’ere,” said Ned, pointing at a dark backstreet opening off the yard they stood in. The yard was fitfully illuminated by a gas lamp bolted to the back wall of an unusually well-kept house. (Its ground-floor windows were all bricked up: presumably it was the home of someone who chose to live in Whitechapel and could afford the lighting as a deterrent against burglars.) Ned spat: the mist hereabouts was so thick that it swallowed his expectoration before it hit the cobblestones. “Not gunn’ any further. Pay me.”

  The Bond produced a coin and held it just out of reach. “Why not?” he asked.

  “Them Piss-Gavey boys will fuck you up.” Ned’s idiolect warped towards modernity when he swore: or perhaps scatology was less prone to updating than other linguistic elements.

  “How.” The Bond paused. “What do they do?”

  “Issa molly house, but it ain’t like the others. Lads who go in ter try their luck fer a shilling, e’en if they come out again they’re nivver right in the head.” Ned spat behind him. “’S not right. ’S’not fucking right. What they do in there—”

  The Bond flipped Ned the coin, a silver sixpence, and he dived to grab it. The Bond was pretty sure that a molly house was a gay brothel. Well, they could keep their fucking hands off him. Assuming it was a knocking shop, of course—it was called a reading room, and he was here for a book, so fuck, a library in a molly house would do. “You can piss off now,” he told Ned, giving him a hard stare. Ned tugged his cap down, shoved the coin in his cheek, then staggered away up a narrow yard beside the building with the lamp. The Bond allowed him to go: his silence wasn’t worth the price of a bullet. But a few seconds later there was a muffled thud and a sound that the Bond recognized as a body falling on pavement. Then a metallic chink and a clatter of something bouncing off the bricks.

  The Bond bolted sideways and flung himself around a corner, drawing one of his pistols. He crouched and crab-walked away from the yard, keeping his head down. A couple seconds passed, then the gut-shaking crack of a fragmentation grenade reverberated from the walls. Ears ringing, the Bond barely heard the ping of shrapnel hitting the opposite wall. He loped back to the entrance, raised his gun and braced his wrist, careful to keep one eye closed. As he covered the alley Ned had chosen, a shadow emerged from the mist, and he squeezed the trigger.

  A Glock 18 outwardly resembles a regular Glock 17 semiautomatic pistol—except that it was developed specially for the elite Austrian EKO Cobra counter-terrorist unit. It’s capable of burst and fully automatic fire at 1200 rounds per minute, making it one of the smallest submachine guns on the market.

  The Bond wasn’t one to spray and pray: he aimed and squeezed the trigger repeatedly, three-round bursts that set the mist swirling beneath the shattered streetlamp. A scream, cut off sharply, told him he’d hit someone. Whether it was Ned or his assailant was impossible to tell. He ducked back into the alley and darted back down it as hastily as he dared, relying for night vision on the eye he’d screwed shut against his muzzle flash. He counted as he ran. He’d fired three bursts, giving him twenty-four rounds left. He reached for a spare magazine with his free hand. Both his
guns had the extended, 33-round magazine, but his accuracy shooting left-handed would be compromised and he could swap magazines faster than he could swap guns.

  As he neared the corner of the building the harsh crack of a modern Kalashnikov sent him diving for the ground. He was up against professionals; he’d tried to outflank them from behind the building and they’d done exactly the same thing. But it was suppressive fire—they hadn’t seen him, of that he was sure. Which meant they were ahead of him and trying to cover their entry—

  As he lay on his back aiming his gun towards the corner of the building, someone opened up on full auto. But they were firing away from him. Interesting. The Bond’s lips drew back in a feral rictus. He rolled over and scrambled to his knees just as a different gun started firing, single shots, much louder, like a shotgun. So two factions were shooting at each other now? This is going to be fun, he thought, reloading his pistol, then reaching under his coat for a concussion grenade as he stealthily approached the end of the alley.

  Half deafened by the gunfire-induced tinnitus ringing in his ears, the Bond missed a tinkling as of malevolent glass windchimes, following him up the alleyway.

  * * *

  Alexei was having a really bad night.

  First they’d missed the asshole assassin even though they’d run through the building like Satan’s laxative. He was almost certainly ahead of them—he might be the kind of bastard to hide in a closet long enough to shoot them in the back, but he wasn’t a coward and Alexei’s back was still intact, so their target had to be in the lead. The banging open door on the darkness and mist proved it conclusively. So Alexei was on edge as he and his team followed the directions to the ley line route from the graveyard. Although they did cheat slightly; the instructions took no account of the utility of night-vision goggles on a moonless night as they flitted along the fog-bound sunken road into London’s past.