The Apocalypse Codex

15. BLACK BAG JOB

WE’RE DRIVING THROUGH SNOW DESCENDING IN THICK, BLANKETING sheets across the street so that Persephone must follow the tire tracks of other cars and trucks. Overhead, the sky has darkened to the color of unpolished iron, gray-black with a hint of rust when the snowfall lightens enough to see it. We’re heading for darkness at noon. The trees are sodden mounds of white, rearing up out of the twilight around us as we drive uphill, along a narrowing trail through the outer fringes of a forest.

Seen with my eyes closed, it’s a very different picture. The patterns in the darkness (random firing of nerves in my retinas) glow oddly greenish, following the curves of the landscape. But beyond the hills ahead of us there is a waterfall of light, greenish-blue—a bilious tint I’ve seen before in the phosphorescent gaze of walking corpses—fountaining into the sky in a vast geyser of unconstrained power. Something has ripped a hole in the fabric of reality, and a chaotic flux of raw information is bleeding in through it. I know it’s not an artifact of my eyesight because the glowing patterns don’t move when I turn my head. It’s unpleasant to watch, so much so that after a minute of staring at it I have to open my eyes again.

“There is a fence and a gate coming up in a quarter of a kilometer,” Persephone warns me. “There are probably cameras. If you have any useful ideas…?”

“Pull over,” I say. This is where some of the tools I signed out of the armory back home might come in handy.

Persephone stops the car, and I rummage in my go-bag. It takes me a while to find what I’m looking for: a small pouch containing a wizened, stumpy gray claw, and a cigarette lighter. I rummage around some more and come up with a small, battered tin: an electronics geek survival kit stuffed full of wires, diodes, capacitors, and bits’n’pieces. The breadboard is already configured, just waiting for me to connect the miniature Hand of Glory to it via a cable clip and plug in a nine-volt battery, then light the thing. I unroll the grounding strap and plug it into the dashboard cigarette lighter. “All set.”

“Neat,” Persephone observes warmly. “I didn’t know they came that small.”

“Ever wondered why there are so many one-legged pigeons around Trafalgar Square?” You don’t really need a hand from a hanged murderer to make one: like so many pre-modern magics, there’s plenty of room for optimization tweaks. I hook up the battery. “Once this lights off we should be good for about three to five minutes of invisibility. But it smokes and stinks of burning rotted pigeon, and if you turn up the aircon too high you’ll risk blowing it out.”

“When you’re ready.” She fiddles with the climate control, redirecting the warm air towards our feet and turning up the fan. Then she drives on.

I don’t need to be told: I flick the lighter and set fire to the mummified claw. It fizzles and sends up a plume of acrid, smelly smoke, and a green LED lights on the board. “Three minutes.”

Persephone doesn’t answer. There’s a fence alongside the road, three meters high and topped with rolled razor wire—casual visitors clearly not welcome. We follow it around a curve and then there is indeed a gate in the fence, overlooked by a pole with what might be the black plastic dome of a CCTV camera on top. Right now it’s buried under a shroud of snow. Luckily for us, the gate is open. Maybe they just couldn’t be bothered shutting it, with all the traffic to the church? I hope that’s what it is. Otherwise, we’re in big trouble.

Persephone turns through the gate, onto a single-track road that is almost entirely covered in snow. There’s an unpleasant lurch as the back wheels let go, but she calmly turns into the skid and regains control before we end up in the ditch. Then we’re driving up the path to the compound, albeit slowly, following the almost-buried tire tracks.

“Let’s hope we don’t run into anyone coming the other way,” I opine.

“We won’t.” She sounds very certain. “They’re all in the New Life Church or the compound ahead. This is Schiller’s big day. That tells me.” I blink and see what she’s nodding at. It’s just around the next hillside.

I reach into my bag and rummage around for the camera, pull it out, and hit the power button while pointing it at the floor and keeping my finger well away from the shutter release. It pings a cheery tune as it boots, then the screen darkens for a few unpleasant seconds. I’m about to swear and pop the battery compartment—I think it may have crashed—when Pinky’s lethal firmware comes up, showing a live view of my kneecaps with an angry red gunsight superimposed. Eek! I turn it off hastily. Okay, so it takes ten seconds to boot from cold to full readiness. That’s a lot longer than the ordinary camera firmware takes. I should have driven out of town and found somewhere discreet to practice with it before relying on it in a hostile situation, but it’s too late for tears now.

“That’s for your tourist snaps?” she asks.

I nod. “It’s a basilisk gun.” Her violent flinch would be gratifying if she didn’t nearly lose control of the car. “Don’t worry, I turned it off. Until we need it…” I thread my wrist through the lanyard. Dammit, why do they make these things right-handed? My upper arm still aches; it’s going to be painful if I have to use it in anger.

“Oka-ay…” She unkinks slightly. “We are about five minutes from the buildings. There is a high street with three smaller roads crossing it. I think we are looking for the church. You may want to keep that for later.”

She takes one hand off the wheel for long enough to point to the miniature Hand of Glory. I sniff, and immediately wish I hadn’t. “Agreed.” I blow on it hard, turning my face away before I inhale. It stops burning, but a hideous smoke trail that stinks of burning fingernails rises from the claws. “Are we—”

We turn a bend, leave the trees behind us, and we’re there.

I’m not sure quite what I was expecting. The Branch Davidian compound at Waco, perhaps? But GPM isn’t poor, isn’t marginal or ascetic, and Ray Schiller is no David Koresh. The layout is more like the residential quarters on a military base: a long, straight boulevard with low buildings set to either side, manicured hedges fronting rows of curtained windows, and a church with a steeple at the far end of the road. It’s half-deserted right now, going by the empty car parks covered in snow outside closed doors. Probably most of the folks who work here commute in from Colorado Springs.

I’m glad there’s virtually nobody about. The fewer people on hand, the less chance I’ll fuck up and kill someone by mistake. Or worse, not kill someone, by mistake.

I blink, trying to cop a brief sense of where everything is in here. There’s a pale green haze in my lap—the complaints department is leaking like crazy on the other side—and what looks like heaps and drifts of green slime all around us: the uncanny residue of its occult origins adhering to the snowfall. The buildings are limned in violet, until I look towards the church at the end which is shining with a harsh emerald light—and the building next to it is on fire, a harsh cuprous glare of raw power that shines through doors and windows, leaching through the concrete. “The building next to the church—”

“I’m on it. That’s Schiller’s residence, I think.”

She drives forward two blocks and parks carelessly, opens the driver’s door, and bails out in front of the church. A gust of freezing air slams into me; I swear, turn my camera on, pick up the pizza box and my phone, and follow her into an ankle-deep chilly white blanket.

Persephone high-steps towards the front door of the big house, holding some sort of gadget in her left hand (a ward, perhaps, or a smartphone with some nonstandard firmware). Her right hand is buried in her coat pocket. I rush after her. My mood is dismal: I’ve been trying to keep a lid on it and mostly succeeding, but since we set off on this journey I’ve had a continual sense of foreboding, and it’s getting worse by the second. We should be getting out of this rat trap, not burrowing deeper into the darkness. This is a job for the Black Chamber, along with the Colorado National Guard and maybe the USAF, not a couple of deranged external assets (whatever they are) and a junior manager who’s so far out of his depth—

Persephone is at the front steps when the door opens and a figure bundled up in cold-weather gear leans out. “Can I help—” It begins to say in a woman’s voice, as I raise my camera and try to focus past Persephone, who is standing too damn close for the smart autofocus to get a clean lock on. I can feel it in the back of my head, feel the sleepy hunger in its mind as it recognizes the thing in the pizza box I’m holding in my left hand and begins to turn towards me, reaching for its gun—

Persephone’s right hand lashes out and the figure drops. She’s holding some kind of compact dumbbell; she turns and beckons me forward urgently with it. “Get her inside before she freezes.”

“It’s one of—”

“I know. Keep a tight hold on that pizza box.”

The complaints department is twitching and writhing in the cardboard, kicking up a fuss: it knows where it is. I join Persephone in the octagonal lobby of an expensively furnished house. Reception rooms open off to either side, and there’s an alarm panel behind the door. The one she dropped used to be a fifty-something woman. Now it’s a husk with a silvery carapaced horror for a tongue. I can see it, shining green inside the victim’s mouth and throat. I can hear its panicky mindless scrabbling for escape now that its carrier is unconscious. I bend over the body and before Persephone can stop me I do whatever it is I did to the missionaries in the hotel (it feels like biting) and the host dies. Trying not to think too hard about what I’m doing I push my fingers between the unconscious woman’s lips and tug, tug again until the corpse of the parasite tugs free. (The complaints department kicks up a racket, scritching at the inside of the pizza box lid as if it thinks I’m about to eat it, too. Silly mind parasite!) I wipe my hand vigorously on my coat and catch Persephone staring at me. “What’s the problem?”

“We have a”—she coughs quietly—“job to do.”

“Oh, right.” I look around. “Where—” The answer is obvious. Going by the nacreous glow from below, whatever is waiting for us is downstairs in the basement. Of course, they sent the wrong man; this is the sort of job Agent CANDID handles best, preferably in conjunction with a house clearance team from the Artists’ Rifles. (But would I really want to put her in my shoes right now if I could make a wish and swap places with her? Probably not…) There’s a staircase leading upstairs, and a wooden door in the side of the panel behind it which probably leads down to the cellar. I’m about to go that way when Persephone gets in front of me and starts mumbling and waving her hands around animatedly, as if holding a conversation with a deaf Italian-speaking alien.

There’s a pop and a flash from the door handle. “Clear,” she says quietly, glancing over her shoulder at me. I peer at the door. Yes, there was some kind of ward there; Persephone shorted it out with her semaphore ritual.

I raise my pizza box. “Okay, you,” I say. “Lead me to your taker.”

The complaints department scritches and shuffles round, nudging urgently towards the cellar door. Persephone holds it open and I duck through. There’s a light switch just inside the door and I thoughtlessly flick it, do a double take, and shudder. I lucked out this time—no booby traps—but I am so unprepared for a black bag job that it’s not funny.

A WORD ON THE SUBJECT OF BLACK BAG JOBS:

Don’t.

I’m not a cop and it’s not my job to enforce the law, any more than it is the job of any other citizen to do so. (Yes, I know about Peel’s Principles: nevertheless, there’s a good reason we mostly leave the job to professionals.) I am, however, a civil servant, which means I work for the government, who make the laws. Consequently, lawbreaking is something I’m supposed to avoid unless there’s an overriding justification in the national interest, and it’s not up to me to define what that means.

The situation is murkier when I’m working overseas in other jurisdictions, but I’m normally supposed to obey both sets of laws, HMG’s and the host nation’s. Unless compelled by overriding justification in the national etcetera, of course, or subjected to cruel and unusual circumstances where they contradict each other.

Anyway. Black bag jobs—burglary, bugging, and breaking in—are by definition forbidden, most of the time. Especially since the Spycatcher business. They may be authorized in the interests of national security, but that happens at a level well above my pay grade, all the way upstairs. When I get sent to run a little errand, it has generally been pre-cleared by a committee, or it’s covered by standing orders relating to what we euphemistically call “special circumstances.” In which case there will be an enquiry after the event and the Auditors will be there to ask pointed questions and wield the clue-bat if I’ve exceeded my authority.

This is one of those jobs.

I’ve been ordered home, the mission terminated. Unfortunately the external assets I’m here to shadow have decided that the mission is not over, and in any case my withdrawal route is blocked. So I am unofficially tagging along to keep an eye on them and make sure they don’t do anything…no, scratch that. It’s the official truth, the pravda, but it’s not the real deal. What is going on is that Lockhart wants Persephone and Johnny to be here, raising hell, but he doesn’t want to be held responsible for the consequences: it might create a stink when the Black Chamber find out about it. At least, I think that’s the subtext.

Me, I’m here because I can’t get out, and while I’m locked in the asylum I might as well take notes on the inmates. That, and obey standing orders if I run into any of the aforementioned special circumstances. As seems regrettably likely right now.

So, you see, Persephone has to do the door-breaking. If I break down doors without orders, I might just be breaking the law. She is too, but she isn’t accountable for her actions as long as the other side don’t catch her; I’m not a cop, remember?

Listen, I didn’t make these rules—I just have to work within them.

Nobody said this job was going to be easy…

THE MISSIONARY LEADS JOHNNY FROM THE PARKING SPOT TO a side door, through the teeth of an icy gale. The door opens onto a narrow, windowless corridor curving around the side of the sanctuary. Johnny hears many voices raised in song, their joyous words muffled by the echoing acoustics of the bare concrete walls.

They come to a door that opens into the sanctuary.

“Please come this way,” says the missionary, head cocked to one side as if listening to words inaudible to others. “Our father will see you in the vestry.”

“Uh-huh.” The music is louder near the door, backed by instruments: an organ or synthesizer and electric guitars. It’s like a rock concert singalong, but Johnny can’t make out any of the words. “Lead on,” he says, palming his throwing knives. They feel as if they’re writhing between his fingers, reluctant to be here.

“Do not be afraid,” the missionary adds, “nothing here will hurt you.” Then it opens the door.

Visualize a church.

Make it a really big church, the size of a large cinema, with a funnel of gently sloping terraces set with rows of theater-style seating that converge to focus on a stage decked with altar, pulpit, and rock band. In the walls all around, stained-glass windows backed by halogen lights shine the glory of the Lord; overhead floodlights and stage spots illuminate the brilliantly gowned choir and the musicians on stage.

The soundproofing on the door is excellent, because inside the sanctuary the voice of the crowd is nearly deafening as they stand, chanting along with a holy rolling rock anthem. Johnny’s ward squeezes against his breastbone, beaten back by the passionate strength of the congregation. There are thousands of them—most of the seats would be occupied if the occupants weren’t on their feet, singing their hearts out. But there’s something odd about it, because they’re not stomping: they’re mostly swaying in place, hands clasped before them in attitudes of prayer, and though they sing—

Johnny squints. He can’t see to the front of the stage, but follows the missionary along one of the aisles leading round the outside of the congregation. Something is wrong. The skin on the back of his neck crawls. There’s a glamour here, a monumentally powerful one, stupefying and cloying. He’s seeing and hearing what he’s meant to see and hear, thousands of churchgoers singing and clapping along to a wholesome Christian rock band between prayers led by the pastor at the front, a joyous act of collective worship.

But every five or ten seats in the rows there’s one who doesn’t feel right. There is something about them that Johnny recognizes: the taint of the old school, the stolid soulless stance of the missionary in front of him. The crowd is seeded with the possessed, positioned behind and scattered among the congregation like fence posts surrounding a flock of sheep. The shepherd has sent his own to bring the flock home. There’s a faint smell, too, aromatic burning incense overlaying something slightly fishy, like burning electrical insulation. A powerful glamour lies over the whole congregation like a stifling blanket, leaking into eyes and ears and warping perceptions. His knives are uneasy for good reason: created to cut, oblivious to mercy and mistruth, they are themselves shrouded in this gummy, foggy cloud of mind-sticky deception. And the music, the singing, the chant is deafening—

The chant. Johnny focusses on it, trying to make out the distinctive words that the congregation are repeating. They slide away from his ears, half-masked by the glamour: Latin? No, this isn’t a Catholic mass. Think, sonny! he tells himself, tightening his grip on the soul-stealer knives as he follows the missionary around the next block of seats. I’ve heard this before.

At the O2 Arena in Docklands. On the stage. Glossolalia, speaking in tongues. Specifically: Old Enochian.

“Hell and damnation,” Johnny mutters to himself in near-shock, as the glamour falls away from his eyes and ears and he sees what is going on around him with unclouded senses. It exceeds his worst imaginings. For he is indeed in church, but the shift in perception shows him what lies beneath the glamour.

The pastor still stands behind the altar, but his chant is a continuous incantation in the formal language of magic, and he, too, is one of the missionaries, driven and controlled by the host of an alien Lord. It is a chant of control, binding and compelling, coercing and demanding obedience and submission in the name of the Sleeper.

The rock band and the choir are still there, but they’re not playing and singing of their own volition: they’re puppets dancing to an alien tune. The sound swells from somewhere deep beneath or behind them, using their voices and their instruments as a vehicle to penetrate the wall between the worlds. Johnny is still far enough back that he has to squint—but there is blood on the guitarists’ fingertips, and the choir members eyes are rolled back in their heads as they sway, unconscious in the grip of something that only looks like rapture when seen through glamour-fogged eyes.

The plain steel cross behind the altar is gone, replaced by an iron hoop three meters in diameter, standing on edge. He knows without having to examine it that the rim will be inlaid with glyph-like circuit patterns, connected to external signal generators; different shades of darkness shimmer within the gate’s heart. He feels the ghostly fingers of the wind from the abyss pulling on his mind, urging him forward towards it.

The missionaries aren’t there to herd the congregation forward, they’re in the crowd to hold them back, lest they rush the gate and trample each other in the crush.

“Oh, Duchess,” Johnny mutters, “I hope you know what you’re getting into.” Then he tightens his grip on his knives and follows his unwitting guide, down towards the side door at the front of the aisle that leads backstage, where Schiller is waiting to receive his long-lost cousin.

PERSEPHONE STEPS IN FRONT OF ME, CLOSE ENOUGH THAT I can feel her breath on my face. “The Hand of Glory,” she whispers; “now would be a good time to restart it.”

I fumble in my pocket lining, which has become twisted around a disgusting jumble of bits of scorched pigeon toes, a cigarette lighter, and other peculiar odds and ends. The camera dangles and spins from the lanyard around my wrist as I try to rearrange things—luckily it’s in standby mode—until I manage to extract the pigeon’s foot. I’m about to light it when Persephone helpfully fastens an elasticated grounding strap to my wrist, and takes hold of the other end. “Thanks.” The click of the lighter and the sudden flicker of the butane flame seem deafening in the twilight at the top of the stairs. Then the claw is burning again, sputtering a foul trail of smoke, and everything around us acquires the very slight pallor that tells me it’s working. “Okay, lead on.”

She doesn’t speak, but takes a couple of steps forward, towing me along at the end of the grounding strap like a leashed panther.

There’s a fat bundle of cables and some narrow insulated pipes slung from a shelf suspended from the ceiling above our heads as we descend the stairs to what proves to be a narrow corridor with doors to either side: a basement that’s been partitioned off into rooms. The complaints department is scritching excitedly at the inside of the warded pizza box and I can feel its eagerness to be reunited with…what? Something down here, that’s for sure. I have a surreal sense of déjà vu, as if I’m trapped in a live-action game of Dungeons and Dragons or something. It’d be funny if my skin wasn’t crawling.

Persephone pauses at the bottom of the stairs and glances at me. I gesture with the box, pointing where its occupant is scritching loudest, towards the door at the end of the corridor. One of the other doors is propped open, and the smell tells me all I need to know: it’s a sluice room and basement toilet, currently unoccupied. We tiptoe past it and Persephone stops again outside the end door. “You’re sure?” she whispers, and I nod.

I’m half-expecting her to kick down the door, but instead she reaches out, pauses just short of the door handle for a few seconds, then turns it and takes a quick step forward. Somehow that little snub-nosed revolver has appeared in her hand—I never saw it move—but there’s nobody in the darkened storeroom to point it at. There is, however, a presence.

The complaints department is going apeshit with delight as I follow Persephone across the threshold and smell burning insulation, a rotting sea-smell like the slops rinsed from a fishmonger’s slab on a hot summer afternoon. I hear a loud scritching hissing clattering, like an infinity of giant wood lice. Persephone backs up in a hurry and turns to hit the light switch by the door and nearly clouts me in the gut with her gun. The light is oddly red, and I look past her to see a giant glass-walled tank occupying the middle of the room, its panels smeared on the inside with a thin coat of algae behind which—

“Hsss!”

The complaints department is eager to be reunited with its siblings, who seethe and burble in the breeding tank around the sessile, slowly pulsating body of a monstrously large isopod. The mother of hosts sits at the bottom of the tank atop a mound of small, gelatinous eggs, resembling nothing so much as a giant wood louse. There’s a dual-purpose summoning and containment grid inlaid on the floor around the tank, of course; even so, I can hear its song of joy, an eternal hymn to the glory that is the father-thing that feeds it. And now it’s seen us, because the compact Hand of Glory is nearly burned to a stub and in any case the bloody thing doesn’t have eyes, and it focusses the full strength of its moronic worship on me.

It wants me to kiss it. Which is okay, because it loves me like I’ve never been loved before: it feels utter adoration and delight at my presence.

The Hand of Glory is burning my fingertips so I drop it; it fizzles out and I shrug off the grounding strap. Persephone is between me and the tank. That’s annoying. I try to sidle around her but she keeps getting in front of me. “Mr. Howard. Bob,” she’s saying, as if my name means something. “Stop that. Bob—”

Something rattles in my hands: in the pizza box. It’s unimportant, so I drop it and try to shoulder-barge past her to get to the tank. It loves me, I can tell. It wants me to kiss it so it can be with me forever and save me for our ecstatic union in the Lord’s embrace.

“For fuck’s sake,” says Persephone. She won’t get out of my way. She’s got her feet braced and is leaning against me, trying to hold me back. I get a glimpse of her eyes, dark and wild and scared, and then suddenly she wraps an arm around the back of my head, pulls me closer, and sticks her tongue in my mouth. It’s like a parasite’s tentacular mouth-parts, questing, looking for a blood vessel to latch onto: I choke with disgust and recoil, nearly biting her before I realize what’s happening.

The thing in the tank is spinning a high level glamour—class four, at least. My mouth feels slimy and revolting; Persephone wipes her lips on the back of her wrist as I double over and gag, drooling copious saliva on the floor. Ritual magic runs on sympathy and contagion, and she just hit me with a simple channeling of what she sees when she looks at the thing in the tank to break through the glamour. It nearly had me…clearly my standard-issue defensive ward isn’t up to blocking that kind of assault.

“Better now?” she asks.

I nod, wordlessly, then spit again. “Got to kill it—” She raises the revolver and takes aim. “No, wait.” If she shoots, it’ll bring everyone within a couple of hundred meters at a run. “Better idea.” I stagger backwards, then turn into the sluice room and hit the light switch. There’s the usual stuff you’d expect to find: mop and bucket, taps, hose, janitor supplies. I grab a gallon bottle of Liquid-Plumr and squint at the ingredients. Sodium hydroxide, sodium hypochlorite, detergent: That’ll do. I step back into the tank room, and pass the bottle to Persephone. “Here.”

“Wait for me at the top of the stairs. And take your host.” I bend and pick up the pizza box, which is rattling away furiously. Maybe the complaints department realizes it’s about to become an orphan. I’m halfway up the corridor when all hell cuts loose in my head and the host in the box starts to vibrate and spasm, like a wasp that’s been hit by a concentrated blast of insecticide. There’s a pungent stink of chlorine inside my head and it feels as if someone is ramming nails in my eyes and ears and tongue. I nearly fall over, but grab the handrail and stumble upwards in the grip of the worst headache ever until I bump into the inside of the door at the top of the stairs. The pain begins to subside, and I take a couple of deep breaths. Persephone’s still down there. Is she going to be all right? I turn round and experimentally open my eyes, but the migraine distortions swirling around make it hard to see. “Hey,” I call quietly.

“Hey.” I startle. She’s right in front of my face, nose-to-nose with me. “We made it. Are you okay?”

“I—yeah.” I nod. “Just a sec.” I pull out my phone, call up OFCUT, and poke it at my ward. The damn thing says it’s fine, which is seriously worrying because Jesus nearly had me for a fish supper back there. The mother-of-hosts totally bypassed my defenses. On the other hand, my ward didn’t stop me feeling the missionaries back in the hotel. Come to think of it the ward I was using back in Germany and St Martin during the business with Ramona didn’t block our entanglement, either. Maybe it just plain doesn’t work on soul-eaters? I shut my eyes again. I can feel Persephone in front of me—feel the outlines of her mind, if that makes sense. I try and spread my awareness, but apart from a very faint presence outside the door (the attendant Persephone decked?) I don’t feel anyone. I open my eyes. “The good news is, I think we’re alone. The bad news is, there’s nothing down here but that.”

A quick nod. “The gate must be somewhere else, then.”

I was afraid she’d say that. “Can you tell where?”

She gives a funny little choking laugh. “You—no, don’t. Don’t look in the Other Place. We’re almost inside it’s mouth.”

“Oh.” I open the door. “Then we’ll just have to do this the old-fashioned way.”

The complaints department has shut up since Persephone drenched its mother in caustic soda, but I’m willing to make a wild-assed guess that Schiller won’t have hidden an occult portal anywhere where random visitors might stumble through it. We’ve checked the basement, and the ground floor reception rooms don’t look promising, so that leaves upstairs: his private apartments or his office. I shove the pizza box inside my shoulder bag and pull out the gun I took from its human steed. “Upstairs first.”

We go upstairs. There’s a corridor running laterally across the house and we rapidly establish that one end is residential—guest rooms, bathrooms, and the like. Which means the other end, behind a fire door, is where Schiller attends to business. He has a nice-looking office with decent quality oak paneling, bookcases full of impressive-looking leather-bound volumes, and a public desk flanked by American flags. It’s backed by a huge wall-mounted cross. Never trust a religion whose symbol of faith is a particularly gruesome form of execution, say I: but at least this is the abstract kind, lacking the figure of Yeshua ben Yusuf writhing in his death agony. “There’s also a private office.” Persephone points to a door to one side of the desk. “Do you see any wards?”

I peer at the door. Then I haul out my phone and take a look at it with OFCUT. Augmented reality for the win: my nascent necromantic spidey-sense doesn’t see anything, but there’s a spiderweb of really nasty schematics tingling and twitching all across the door’s surface. A fine thread leads from it towards the giant cross. I’ve got a nasty feeling that if you touch the door without an invitation you’re going to get to ride on Jesus’s tree, and not in a happy way. It’s probably Schiller’s idea of a cute joke. “I wouldn’t mess with that if I were—”

Bang.

I wince and clutch my head as she lowers the pistol with which she has just blown a hole in the central binding node of the trap-ward. It shorts out in a storm of fat violet sparks and a brain-wrenching twist at right angles to reality. She kicks the door hard, right above the lock. It crashes open and she goes straight into a crouch, covering the room within, which does indeed appear to be a private office. Of course, it’s unoccupied. The desk is smaller than the one up front, but there’s a much nicer chair behind it, and there are more bookcases and a much more eclectic collection of bindings visible on their contents. I raise my camera, wake it from sleep, point it at the floor, and mess with the settings. Knowing Brains it’ll be here somewhere…ah, gotcha. Basilisk guns able to set fire to wide swathes of carbon-based life forms are all very well, but in my line of work a camera also comes in handy, and this one’s a lot better than the one in my phone. I was pretty sure Brains wouldn’t have disabled the photographic firmware entirely, just augmented it. I raise the camera and start taking shots, partially obscured by Persephone’s panicky head as it snaps round and does a double take.

“Evidence,” I say. I should have remembered to do this in the cellar but I was too rattled. I turn to the nearest bookcase and begin scanning. The titles don’t mean much to me, but it’s a fair bet that someone in the library section will find a picture of Schiller’s background reading informative and useful.

“Yes, well.” She circles the desk cautiously, leans towards the oil painting on the wall behind it. It’s a medium-scale picture of New Republican Jesus descending towards the Manhattan skyline on what looks like a fire-breathing war horse, wielding a spear while a squadron of B-52s circle behind him, outlined against thunderclouds. I guess it’s a mission statement for the Christ Militant or something. “Hmm. There doesn’t seem to be a safe here.”

“You were expecting one?”

“Schiller is not an original thinker; that’s not his strength. He probably has a private chapel. Very private, but it is unlikely to be hidden well. So—”

I lean towards the bookcase I’ve been photographing. It appears to be free-standing, but it’s built very solidly into the wall opposite the window, running floor to ceiling, and there’s clear carpet in front of it. The carpet strikes me as being rather thin for a plush private office. “Huh.” I begin looking at the spines of books. I switch the camera off, then pull out my phone. Again, I scan the books using OFCUT. Most of them glow faintly—contamination from Schiller’s hands, at a guess—but it doesn’t take me long to find what I’m looking for. “Would a secret door be of interest?”

“A what?” She blinks at me. “Oh, of course! Open it, please.”

“Want to double-check first?”

“Okay.” She steps forward, sees the book I’m pointing to. “The worm turns. Very droll. It’s safe.” It’s right next to one side of the bookcase, at door handle height. She pulls it and there’s a click and the bookcase begins to pivot—slowly, because it scrubs against the carpet and it’s laden with about half a ton of tree pulp.

Persephone follows her pistol into the small inner sanctum hidden behind the bookcase, and I trail behind her—and so it is that I’m close enough that when she says “shit” very quietly it’s too late for me to back out.

JOHNNY FOLLOWS HIS GUIDE PAST THE SHAMBLING, SWAYING crowd, past the queue that snakes across the front of the stage to the altar and round to a side door at the other edge of the platform, down three steps to a red carpet leading through an awning into darkness, then up six more steps and around a corner to a room off the side of the sanctuary.

“Glory!” chant the crowd, but not in English or Latin or any language most humans understand. “He is coming! Glory to God in the highest! The Sleeper awakens! Glory!”

Johnny nerves himself for the coming confrontation.

The door closes behind him, deadening the sound of the damned next door. The vestry is roughly twenty feet on a side, low-ceilinged and windowless. There are lockers lined up against one wall, a table pushed up against the other, and a cold iron circle three meters in diameter propped up against the wall opposite the door. It’s plugged into a ruggedized equipment case and a spluttering plastic-clad Honda generator that doesn’t quite drown out the sound of the wind soughing into the starless sky behind the open gate.

“Eldest McTavish.” Schiller sits on an ornately carved wooden throne before the gate. He wears a charcoal-black three-piece suit under his surplice. His face is gaunt with exhaustion. One of the four missionaries who wait with him hovers solicitously, ready to support him if he falters. His smile is pained. “There are many things I’d like to ask you, if we had more time together.”

Johnny forces a smile, aware that it’s as unconvincing as a three-dollar bill. “I’m sure there are.” He keeps his face pointed at Schiller, but is scanning the room, registering the positions of the missionaries. They’re bodyguards, of course, all tooled up, suit jackets cut loose to conceal their holsters. There are a couple of handmaids in long dresses, their hair veiled, waiting beside something that looks like a giant silver soup tureen on a catering trolley. But soup tureens don’t usually contain live crustaceans that chitter disturbing thoughts that flood the room with the sickly sweet flavor of a gangrenous god’s love. “What exactly are you trying to achieve?”

Schiller straightens his back. A momentary grimace betrays his pain. “The same thing the order’s been trying to achieve for centuries, eldest. The difference is, I’m going to succeed.”

“You want to bring him back.” Johnny crosses his arms. “The Sleeper.” Johnny keeps one eye on the open gate behind Schiller. The breeze sighs faintly as it drifts through the portal, into the twilit chamber stone beyond.

“The sleeping Christ, yes. The one whose mortal vessel we call Jesus.”

Johnny nods; he grew up with this deviant theology, although he doesn’t hold with it himself—the doctrine that Jesus was a supernatural vessel for the Gatekeeper is inner doctrine, but he considers the idea that the Sermon on the Mount was delivered by a sock puppet for the Sleeper in the Pyramid to be somewhere between implausible and hilarious. “You know me through my father, I take it?”

Schiller nods. “You are the eldest son: it’s in your blood. Baptized and confirmed in a sister church dedicated to bringing this wandering in the wilderness to an end, obedient to the True Creed. I saw you in the back row in London, shining like a beacon; once your friend Ms. Hazard drew our attention, the genealogy department identified you within hours. You were sent here for a reason. It’s your destiny.”

“Maybe.” Dead right I was sent here for a reason. Johnny runs the numbers: two knives, four bodyguards, not looking good—and that’s before counting the handmaids and the boss himself, who may look like he’s half-dead but that’s only because he’s pouring his entire will into holding open the gate while his pastors funnel willing souls through it to wake the sleeping god. Threaten his holy mission and he’s quite capable of sacrificing himself to bring it all together. No, this isn’t like that job in Barcelona, or even that hairy caper in Pripyat: it’s worse. So: Keep him talking. “What do you think I was sent here to do?”

Schiller chuckles drily. “They thought they could send you here to kill me, didn’t they? You and your mistress.”

“She’s not my mistress,” Johnny says automatically before he realizes he’s been played. “An’ you don’t believe that shite about me being here to kill you, else—” He raises a hand and makes a cutting gesture across his throat, letting the blade steal into view just in case the muscle are getting twitchy: message to goons, It could be you. “So deal or quit, guv. You’ve got an offer in mind: make it.” Draw him out. Intelligence is vital.

“You are aware that it takes two to open the gate fully? As it says in the Third Book of Revelations, fifth chapter: ‘for the two elders of the blood of Lilith shall be as doorposts in the House of the LORD, and they shall be as stout beams of cedar: And they shall hold the lintel above them that the father of dreams shall walk under it.’ We have—had, until you showed up—a shortage of elders.” Schiller coughs. “I am the last of my line. So you can name your price, eldest McTavish. Once our father awakens and returns to bring about the kingdom of heaven on earth, you’ll have a throne at his side, and a fiery shield and sword, and any temporal reward you want. Do you want your little witch? Do you secretly dream of owning her, body and soul? You can have her, for merciful is the Lord, and you, as one of his prophets, have the power to pardon her for her sins. Would you like a billion dollars? A trillion? Immortality? The throne of England? It’s all yours, if you agree to your destiny. What do you say?”

The bodyguards are clearly keyed-up; soul-sucking knives or no, there’s no way that one against four is going to end well. Johnny nods, smiling. “Sounds like a great offer,” he says, taking a step forward—the bodyguards begin to move and so does one of the gowned handmaids, her sleeve pulling back as she raises the machine pistol concealed in it. “And I’m inclined to take it.” The guards pause. “Only one thing”—he’s in motion, bounding forward past Schiller—“first you’ll have to catch me!”

A couple of bullets crack through the air above his head as Johnny dives through the open portal. And then the chase is on.

BUTTERFLIES IN MY STOMACH; IT’S DARK AND THERE’S A breeze from behind—

A breeze.

There are two types of breeze: man-made, and natural. Sources of the man-made kind include things like desk fans, jet engines, and driving with the window open, none of which apply right now. The latter kind occur where there’s a difference in air pressure. Air is blowing from behind me, and it wasn’t doing that until we opened the secret door. Which, now I think about it, is a revolving secret door. Revolving doors made high-rise buildings with elevators possible by allowing pressure equilibration without blowing the windows out whenever a passenger hit the button for the umpteenth floor; but if there’s a skyscraper in front of me I’ll eat my hat. Rather, there is a large volume of low pressure air into which a natural wind is blowing. And in my line of work—

“Keep moving,” Persephone says very quietly.

I wish I’d brought a door-wedge with me. Or a flashlight. This’d be a fine time to be eaten by a grue… I take another couple of steps forward and there’s floor under my shoes instead of carpet. Huh, I think, just as Persephone throws the light switch.

“We found it,” I say, feeling sick.

We’re in what’s left of Schiller’s private sanctum, facing an open gate. It probably used to be a small windowless room, much longer than it was wide, before he had the secret door and the altar installed. But now the light of the bare overhead bulb shows us that one of the walls is almost entirely missing. There’s a circular summoning grid installed on edge in front of it, and the damn thing is running. It’s the sump the breeze is blowing into, and I feel like throwing up when I see it because I recognize the landscape on the far side: I’ve only been dreaming about it for nine months or so.

“This is it,” says Persephone.

“Looks like it.” I walk over to the altar. It’s a plain slab of stone positioned in front of the gate. There’s an ornate silver cup on it, and an ivory wand capped in gold—ritual objects, at a guess—and a smaller grid that, thankfully, is plugged into a boring old-fashioned laptop. (Have I said how much I hate ritual magic? It makes my head hurt.) “This is the other end of Schiller’s operation. Quiet, isn’t it? He’s pumping lots of energy into it from the other side, from the church downtown, so where’s it all going? And what’s this other grid for?”

“It’s going here—no.” She’s quick on the uptake. “Okay. The small grid looks like”—she closes her eyes briefly—“yes, it’s the source of the ward that’s locking out the Black Chamber.” Without further ado, she yanks the cable connecting it to the laptop. There is a brief spark and a smell of burning plastic, then she points at the wall. “He opened this gate first. It leads to the site of the ritual. Then he opened another gate in the church to power the ritual. The ritual takes place over there”—she points through the gate—“and that which is summoned then comes here, to grow free from unwanted attention while it is still young and weak. Yes?”

I try to untangle her syntax: “That sounds about right.”

“The women in the hospital,” she says conversationally, “haven’t been disposed of because they’re its prepared food.”

“It. The Sleeper?”

“Yes. And I’m ending this now.” And she takes a step towards the gate, crossing its threshold before I can shout at her to wait.

So of course I follow her.

WHEN I WAS A KID MY DAD ONCE TOOK ME UP TO THE YORKSHIRE Dales, to go walking and see the limestone pavements around Malham. They’re eerie landscapes, carved by glaciers and corroded by water over thousands of years—on a bright, dry summer afternoon it feels as if the bones of the Earth are poking through the parched skin of a mummified planet.

This place looks well and truly dead at first sight. I take three steps after Persephone and nearly go arse over tit, for with each pace I land too late, too far away. Lower gravity than Earth, but not too low—this planet still has a breathable atmosphere, which suggests something is still putting oxygen into it. Above me the sky is dark, save for a broad sash of bluish glowing dust that crosses the upturned bowl of the heavens—and a sun, angry and red-eyed and much too small. It’s daytime and the milky way (or what passes for the ecliptic of the local galaxy) is visible and the ground underfoot is dry, uneven grit and stone slabs. Mountains rise in the distance, beyond a fencelike series of isolated lumpy posts.

I look away hastily and see Persephone turning, to face the thing behind me.

The gate is a circle of darkness hanging in the air, its bottom edge just brushing the ground. About fifty meters behind it start a flight of steps so wide they seem to reach halfway to the horizon. I look up. Steps, and more steps. And up, and up, vanishing towards a false perspective, a horizon capped by a monstrous pillared building, somewhat like the Parthenon.

“Oh fuck me,” I mumble.

The ground under my feet vibrates, as if a heavy truck has just driven past. Earthquake is not a natural thought to crawl into an English brain, but it’s an understandable one when there’s not a truck in sight, nor one within a thousand lightyears for that matter.

“Huh. So this is the Sleeper’s plateau?” Persephone observes with bright-eyed interest. “Because it’s smaller than I expected—”

There’s a scritching in my shoulder bag: the complaints department is enthusiastically pointing the way ahead—right up the side of the pyramid.

“If it’s okay by you I’d rather not hang around here: the locals aren’t terribly friendly. We have a job to do—close this gate, open the next. Right?”

The next couple of minutes pass me by because I’m in the zone. Persephone, it turns out, is not carrying any high explosives or banishment rounds, so the job falls to me. “Hold this,” I say, passing her the camera. “If anything comes at us, take a portrait.”

I rummage through my bag, pull out the wire-wrap board and breakout box and my phone, and go to work. The gate is straightforward. Schiller didn’t try to booby-trap it; all you have to do to close the thing is toss a coil of wire through it and hit it with a signal at the gate’s resonant frequency—

(Memo to self: do not degauss interdimensional portals at close range without ear protection in future.)

“Bob. What do you see?” My work done, I look up: Persephone has been trying to get my attention, waving and pointing across the plain.

I have a premonition, so I look at the fence. Then I look at it again with my eyelids screwed shut. I open my eyes. “We should start climbing. Now.”

Persephone heads for the steps. I follow her. She’s walking, not running. “What can they do?” she asks as I pass her. “What are their capabilities? You’re the expert…”

“The fence wasn’t put here to keep the Sleeper in, it’s not strong enough to do that. It’s to keep people who might want to wake the Sleeper out.” (I can feel them waking up all around us, hanging on their stakes like nests of sleeping hornets. We’ve got their undivided attention because we’re the only moving things for a hundred kilometers around. They’re curious about the still-living: I think they see us as a mistake.) “And, if someone is stupid enough to open a gate inside the fence and stick around for a picnic, they’re supposed to deal with that, too. Fuck knows how Schiller managed it…” I put one foot in front of the other with careful determination, not so fast I’m going to run out of breath before I reach the top, but not too slowly either. “They’re vessels for the feeders in the night. You don’t want to be here when they arrive.”

Persephone glances behind me. “I agree.” She hurries to catch up, bounding gracefully up the steps two at a time on the tips of her toes—for the steps are shallow and the gravity low. “I might be able to hold some of them…”

“Me too, for a while.” Step. Step. (I have a history with the feeders—it’s possible I can even control them.) Step. “But.” Step. “Don’t want to weaken.” Step. Step. Step. “The defenses.” (And my contractors are another matter.) Step. Step. There are at least a hundred, possibly two hundred steps to the top of the pyramid, and the air here is as thin as in Denver: I’m already beginning to feel my heart pounding. I feel light-headed too, but not from too little oxygen—there’s something about this place that makes me feel as if my skull’s too thin and the universe is trying to leak in.

“What. Do you expect. To find up there?” Persephone asks.

“Big temple.” Step. Step. “Sarcophagus.” Step. “The Sleeper—” I misstep as the next flagstone under my foot abruptly isn’t there, then bashes into my sole hard, then drops away. “Shit!”

“Quake! Drop.” Persephone pancakes across three steps and I land hard beside her, taking the impact on one buttock. I gasp and wheeze in the thin air as dust devils rise across the plain and the steps groan and wail beneath us, stone grinding on stone. For a moment I’m terrified that the temple will fall on us: but no, it’s stood here for many thousands of years. In fact, the designers will have picked this plateau precisely because it was tectonically stable, so why is it shaking now? Don’t think about that Bob, you wouldn’t like the answer.

The tremors continue for almost a minute. I lie on my back, then as they begin to die away and the groaning and moaning stops I sit up and look down the slope of the pyramid.

One by one, the mummified corpses are helping each other down from the stakes upon which they were impaled. Limping and wobbling and rattling, they shuffle and lurch towards us across the dusty plain, still wearing the scraps of Russian civil war uniforms they wore when they were murdered. Many of them are fully skeletonized, but they’re still articulated, and they carry knives and rusty cavalry sabers. They don’t have working lungs or larynx with which to hiss brains, but you don’t need to have seen many Romero flicks to know what they’ve got in mind.

I catch a flash of light in the corner of my left eye and begin to turn just in time to see Persephone standing, camera before her face, taking aim at the lead zombie before I can tell her not to.

There is a concussive blue-white flare of light from the vicinity of the eater: it’s so painfully bright it brings tears and leaves a green-purple haze in my eye. About half a second later the crump! of the explosion reaches us.

“Woo-hoo!” Persephone bounces straight up in the air, lands a step higher up behind me. “That was fun!”

“Give me that back.”

“Why?”

(It’s a Basilisk gun. When you point and shoot one, about a tenth of one percent of all the carbon nuclei in whatever it’s locked onto are spontaneously replaced by silicon. There is a slight insufficiency of electrons to go around: the result looks a lot like an explosion, and what it leaves behind is more like concrete than flesh. Red hot concrete full of short half-life gamma emitters.)

“Firstly, you don’t want them to start shooting back. Secondly, I may need them.”

“Why, can you—” She looks at me and does a double take. “Oh, that. Angleton said you—” She swallows whatever she was about to say, hands it over, and we start climbing again. Actually, she may have done us a favor. The other walking corpses are still picking each other up: the blast knocked most of them down. On the other hand they’re angry now, and some of them have rusty bolt-action rifles.

We climb again until we reach the top of the steps. I’m gasping for breath and my buttocks and upper thighs feel as if I’ve been beaten with baseball bats. Ahead of us there’s a wall of unmortared giant limestone blocks, windowless and surrounded by a row of pillars the size of ICBMs supporting the roof above. It is like the Parthenon in Athens—if the ancient Athenians who built it had been twenty-meter-tall giants. I can see a dark-mouthed opening between two pillars about eighty meters away, and I am at a loss for words to describe my lack of eagerness to go there. On the other hand, our pursuers are wheezing angrily through the gaps in their rib cages and brandishing stabby implements in a most unfriendly manner, as they come surging up the steps below us like a wave of bony hooligans.

I point at the opening wordlessly. Persephone nods, then picks herself up and breaks into a loose-limbed jog.

I stagger drunkenly towards the opening, trying to ignore the grotesque carvings inlaid on the bases of the pillars and the walls of the temple—not so much Achaean as Aztec, but with added writhing tentacles and horned skulls—and follow Persephone up to the threshold. It’s a big rectangular doorway about five or six meters high and three meters wide, and the wooden doors that would normally block it have been carefully opened and wedged. Gee thanks, whoever. I pause beside Persephone and look inside. It’s gloomy, the dim light filtering down from skylights in the ceiling. The roof is free-standing, vaulting high overhead—the classical columns outside are decorative, for there’s no forest of roof supports within—and I find myself peering across fifty meters of stone towards a raised dais that supports an altar-shaped sarcophagus. There’s a glowing circle in the air beside the sarcophagus and, unlike the one we found in Schiller’s office, this one reeks of power, fat and bloated with the life energy of worshipers. There’s a faint metallic smell in the air, as of blood, and it makes me feel hungry. I can feel Persephone’s mind behind me, wondering at our surroundings; I tap her on the shoulder and she glances at me.

“No time,” I say, then take a step forward. The eaters will be reaching the top step soon, and I’d rather not stop to dicker with them. Besides, there are more tremors. They’ve started again, gentle aftershocks to the earlier screeching and groaning of stones. The ground is vibrating again, as if some huge beast is stirring uneasily in its sleep beneath our feet, and even though the shocks are weaker they’re making me nervous.

Then a human figure dives through the open gate towards us, and all hell breaks loose.