The Fuller Memorandum

16. EATER OF SOULS

MEANWHILE, SOME DISTANCE ABOVE MY HEAD, HERE’S WHAT happens as Iris’s rite runs to completion:

Benjamin paces around the Chapel of the Ancient and Honourable Order of Wheelwrights, nostrils flaring to take in the sweet summer night air, heavy with pollen and sweet with the scent of new-mown hay.

Benjamin is a mild-mannered debt management consultant from Epping, and he’s doing very well, thank you. He works out for half an hour every morning in the gym downstairs from his comfortable office; then he goes to work, where he helps distressed businesses find ways and means of improving their cash retention practices. He spends his evenings arranging social activities under the aegis of his local church (who the neighbors consider to be slightly odd but generally friendly and helpful), and sometimes, at the weekend, he plays with the church paintball team.

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

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

Grigori does not play paintball; Grigori kills people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

His boot is stuck . . .

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

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

His boot refuses to shift.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mo sits up instantly. “Yes?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Angleton leans against his seat belt, unmoving.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Can you stand?” Iris asks me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She stares. “How did you know my—”

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

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

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

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

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

A man near the back of the congregation yells: “Run for it!” He grabs his robe and legs it in the direction of the doors.

In front of my eyes, on the bed, and everywhere else I can sense around me, the dead are rising.

“ALPHA TWENTY, THIS IS CHARLIE MIKE , DO YOU RECEIVE , over.”

“Charlie Mike, Alpha Twenty receiving you clear, over.”

The Eurocopter EC 135 banks gently as it turns towards Brookwood. Behind it, the streetlights of Guildford sprawl across the North Downs like a gigantic luminous jellyfish, swimming in deep waters; ahead, the ground is dark and peaceful until Woking, another amber-pricked sprawl of suburbia sleeping lightly in the summer night.

“Alpha Twenty, are you in visual range yet, over.”

“Charlie Mike, two miles out and closing. No lights on the ground, over.”

“Alpha Twenty, roger that, we recommend Nitesun. Focus is any parked vehicle on side roads off Cemetery Pales, we’re looking for a Mercedes 500SL, color silver. Over.”

The police sergeant sitting in the backseat with the controls to the infrared camera is peering into his screen, searching the tree-lined darkness for any sign of life. Tracking down the straight boulevard that leads through the park-like cemetery, his eyes are drawn to a row of vehicles parked off to one side of a crescent-shaped side road. “Got vehicles,” he says, tweaking the joystick to turn his camera and zoom on them. “Location, Saint Barnabas Avenue, adjacent to building in clearing to south of road—Jesus!”

The bright pinpoints of bodies are clearly visible on his camera. They’re moving around in the woods northeast of the building, and a couple south of the building—and there are flares, moving fast, bursting like fireworks.

“Alpha Twenty, we see fireworks, repeat, fireworks, numerous parties, situation confused, south Saint Barnabas Avenue. Climbing to flight level twenty, over.”

The ground drops away and the airframe throbs as the pilot pulls up on the collective pitch and climbs at full power. “Roy, what’s going on down there?” he asks over the intercom.

“Not sure, skipper—looks like rockets—” There are dark pinpoint figures down there, what looks like a mob, but they’re not showing up as heat sources. “Something wrong with the camera, damn it. There are people down there but I think the rockets are masking their body heat. Never heard of that—”

“You can use the Nitesun once we’re above three thousand feet. Clear?”

“Got it. Tell me when. Jesus, that was big—they’ve set a tree burning. Oh Jesus fucking Christ I’ve never seen anything like it! Sir, there’s a whole crowd down there, and the idiots with fireworks are aiming at them—”

“Hit the switch when ready, we need to see this.”

The observer hits the power switch on the Nitesun searchlight: thirty-million candlepower dialed to maximum area washes over the churning landscape of the cemetery, turning night into day.

“Alpha Twenty, this is Charlie Mike, do you have a Sitrep, over.”

“Charlie Mike to Alpha Twenty, major incident in progress. Illegal fireworks, also major crowd control issue, vegetation on fire. Center of disturbance is the chapel on Saint Barnabas Avenue but the crowd—they’re everywhere. Is there an illegal rave? Request backup, major incident team, Plan Red, over.”

Half a mile up the road, a red fire-control truck has pulled up just outside the entrance to the cemetery, blue lights strobing; a small army of police cars are streaming in behind it, converging from every point of the compass, breaking the amber-lit monotony of the roads with red and blue flickers. The observer in the back of Charlie Mike zooms in with his FLIR camera, focusing on the crowd, frowning.

“Skipper, I don’t know how to put this, but a lot of the bodies down there—they’re showing up cold. I mean, stone cold. I can see them by Nitesun, but they ought to be in hospital with hypothermia, know what I mean?”

OVER THE CENTURY AND A HALF FOR WHICH IT HAS BEEN OPEN for business, roughly a quarter of a million funerals have been carried out in Brookwood; many more cremations have been held, and many older graves have been disinterred and their occupants moved piecemeal to the ossuaries, but the ground still holds more souls than the nearby towns of Guildford and Woking combined.

The cemetery grounds are churned like newly mown fields, but no birds will chance this terrain in search of earthworms and grubs. Below the helicopter, thousands of eyeless faces look up. They stand where they have risen: strange fruiting bodies sprouting from the decay-riddled earth, in concentric circles that ripple outwards from the Chapel of the Ancient and Honourable Order of Wheelwrights. Their withered faces track the helicopter as it spirals overhead, shattering the night with a thunder of blades. Among them, a handful of warm bodies still move, desperately trying to form a defensive line around the chapel.

But one by one, the pinpoints of warmth and life are going out.

THE STROBING BLUES CAST GHOSTLY SHADOWS ACROSS THE interior of the OCCULUS truck as it sits at the entrance to the graveyard, engine idling. W/O Howe and his paramedic, Sergeant Jude, are sitting over Angleton’s supine body.

“Flatline,” Jude says phlegmatically. “He’s breathing and his heart’s beating, but there’s nobody home. Might be a stroke, but if so it’s a big one.” Jude’s specialty is trauma, especially violent trauma; he’s rusty at this end of the game. “Wish that ambulance would hurry up.”

“It’s too big a coincidence,” Mo says harshly.

“You diagnose enemy action?” asks Barnes.

“Absolutely. We’re on our way to retrieve”—she glances around the cabin—“among other things, a document of binding. And there’s that.” She gestures forward, through the windscreen, at the churning night beyond the gates. “What are the odds that he’d blow a gasket right at the critical moment?”

Alan Barnes thinks for a moment, then nods vigorously. “All right, Doctor, assuming you’re correct, how do you think I should deal with the situation? We came expecting to deal with cultists and a possible hostage rescue, not the night of the living dead. There are certain tactical issues to consider.” He nods at the windscreen. “Notably, (a) how we get through the crush to wherever our cultists are holed up, (b) how we deal with them when we arrive, bearing in mind that our arrival is not going to be terribly stealthy, and (c) how we get out alive afterwards. I should say that the possessed are your department. We’ve got a SCORPION STARE interferometer, but that’s an area denial weapon—wouldn’t do us much good to burn through the walking dead and catch Mr. Howard in the sweep, would it?” He looks at her expectantly. “Do you have any recommendations?”

“Hmm.” Mo squints at the windscreen. “If this truck can get close to the chapel—you’ve got a link to the police helicopter?”

“Yes—why?”

Mo looks up at the hatch in the roof of the driver’s cab. “I need to be able to see what’s going on,” she says. “We need to find the center of this summoning and kill whatever’s responsible. Can you give me something to stand on?”

“You’re thinking of—” Alan looks at her violin case. “That’s not terribly safe.”

“Can you think of a better idea?” Mo bares her teeth in something not too unlike a smile. “Because I’m fresh out of subtlety right now.”

“As long as we keep moving ahead, and they don’t come climbing over the bodywork, it ought to get us in close,” Howe says slowly. “Sir, if we ride topside with entrenching tools to keep ’em off her—”

“Very good.” Barnes nods jerkily. He looks at Angleton: unconscious but breathing. “We can’t wait for the ambulance,” he says finally. To Howe: “Off-load him. Jude, you wait with Dr. Angleton. Howe, you want to leave a guard?”

“Sir. McDonald, you’re staying with Jude and the doctor until the ambulance shows up. Once he’s on his way to hospital, wait here. If the trouble overflows, leg it—we’ll pick you up later. Clear?”

McDonald—short, wiry, still dressed as a fireman—nods. “Can do.”

“Okay, get the stretcher and jump to it. Williams, get Dr. O’Brien’s instrument patched into the external sound system. Scary, collect two shovels and get up top. Let’s move it!”

Minutes later the truck rolls slowly towards the gates of Brookwood and the heaving darkness beyond, three figures crouched on its roof. Two of them hold collapsible shovels with sharpened edges; the third clutches something bone-white in her hands. She lowers her bow until it kisses the strings of her instrument. The walking dead turn to listen as Mo plays her lullaby. Beyond them, in the darkness, the screams are getting fainter.

HERE’S WHAT I SEE IN THE CRYPT:

The dusty counterpane on the altar-bed falls away as the two mummified lover-sacrifices sit up. They glow with the pallid green of bioluminescence from within, their empty eye sockets writhing with a nauseating slow-motion churn as they look around. Bony metatarsals click on the flagstones as they rise to their feet.

A bunch of the cultists are fleeing, making a dash for the iron-studded door. They don’t care whether they end up on Iris’s shit-list; they’re more scared of the walking dead.

A male cultist, still robed and bearing one of their shotguns, is the first to show some balls. He moves into a firing line on one of the rising dead, bringing his gun to his shoulder. He aims, and fire gouts from his weapon. Indoors, reflected and reverberating from stone, a fired shotgun hammers your eardrums with spikes of compressed air as sharp as knives. I see people shouting, and Iris spasms and screams in my grip, but I hear nothing but echoes from that dreadful report. The walking cadaver’s head vanishes in a spray of bone and parchment, but still it stumbles forward, straight towards the shotgun-aiming guard. He stares at it in disbelief, then lowers his aim and fires again, blasting a hole in its thoracic cavity. The truncated revenant falls, but its arms and legs are still moving. Another cultist, one of the ones who stripped for Iris’s disastrous summoning, dances forward, holding up a billet of wood. He smashes it down on the twitching remains, raises it, prepares to bring it down again—

The mortal remains reach out, and one bony fingertip scrapes the inside of his calf.

I can feel what happens. The glory of satiated hunger, the sensual, almost erotic sense of dissolution as the feeder in the night moves from the parched, damaged host to this new playground of sensual corporeality, driving down and digesting its former owner’s identity, submerging him in a tide of white noise.

It only takes a split second. I make eye contact with the possessed one: I recognize the glow at the back of his eyes, a reflection of my own refulgent glory. I nod at the shotgun bearer, who is sidling carefully around the bed, clearly stalking the other cadaver, and mouth “Take him.” The syllables my tongue curls around are not English, nor any other language routinely spoken by human beings. The feeder blinks with delight at being so honored as the vehicle of my will. And then he begins to move.

Perhaps five seconds have passed since the man at the back shouted Run for it and broke for the door.

What Iris and those cultists who aren’t fleeing see is probably something like this:

They see the Eater of Souls, newly risen from his bed, grab their high priestess and whirl her around in a deadly embrace, warning them to stand back. Then the skeletal remains on the bed sit up. One of them stands and begins to advance on the congregants. A guard shoots its head off, then blows the still-walking corpse in half at the waist. A member of the chorus bashes it twice with a length of wood. He freezes for a second—then hurls the timber at the guard’s head and leaps.

The other feeder hobbles out from behind the four-poster bed. It’s halfway up the stepped ring of mattresses, and it’s moving towards the exit. Meanwhile, the mob of terrified cultists have gotten the door open. And that’s when the real panic begins.

Iris is shaking but I force her to turn, holding her so that she can’t look away. “This is your doing,” I shout in her ear, barely able to hear my own voice. Harsh words force themselves through my larynx, words that come without my willing them: “Death waits you! You’re all going to die! You have signed an oath of obedience to your dark master, and with Hell you are in agreement. Death awaits you all!”

Her congregation numbers perhaps thirty to fifty at most, with another eight to ten on guard outside. The Wheelwright dead, in contrast, number in the hundreds, and the honored dead of the Skull Brethren certainly outnumber Iris’s followers. I can feel the feeders waiting outside the door, eager for the warmth they can sense within. Wait for my word of release, I tell them.

(Eager? Sense? I’m not sure those words are applicable to feeders. I’m not sure feeders are conscious in the way that we are—or even as aware as mammals or birds. They’re bundles of rough reflexes, bound together by the strange grammars of night, more like software agents than anything that’s ever had flesh. But if it walks like a lizard and breathes gouts of fire you might as well call it a dragon, and the feeders certainly seem to prefer bodies with a bit of metabolic energy and structural integrity remaining . . .)

Behind me, the first feeder completes his leap, slamming chest first onto the floor with a bone-snapping crack. The shotgun-toting guard is reeling from the thrown baton as the feeder lashes out and grasps him by the trouser hem, yanks him closer, and touches skin to skin as the butt of the shotgun descends with force born of panic.

In front of me, the other feeder lurches towards a robed woman. She’s made of sterner stuff than the ones who are panicking, or perhaps she’s just running her anti-rapist self-defense training script on autopilot: she raises a highly illegal taser, and there’s a snap and a blue flare as she zaps the feeder. The cadaver collapses like a marionette with its strings cut, its rider temporarily banished back from whence it came: beings who are basically patterns of energy bleeding through from a parallel universe to ours don’t respond well to high-voltage electrical noise. A femur goes rolling underfoot among the panicking congregants, triggering a rush to avoid touching it. Wimps, I think contemptuously. Shoot her, I instruct my surviving feeder.

The feeder raises the shotgun, its butt sticky with a mat of blood and hair, and tries to aim it in the general direction of the door, but its musculoskeletal control is patchy—it has taken three hosts in less than thirty seconds, all in different states, and it’s confused. The shotgun pitches up as it clumsily jerks the trigger, and there’s a repetitive stabbing pain in my ears as it blasts away at the ceiling above the crowd.

They’ve got the doors open, and they’re trying to run away. Stop firing, I tell it, as the panicking cultists scramble for the exit. Shut and barricade the door behind them. I can see a hooded female, eyes staring back at me and full of hate; it’s Jonquil. She mouths something—probably some variation on I’ll be back—but she’s not going to stay in a locked crypt with the Eater of Souls, even to save her mummy dearest. That’s the trouble with cultists: no moral fiber to speak of.

Iris tenses as her followers leave, and it’s then that she makes her bid for freedom, stamping hard on the inside of my right shin and trying to elbow me in the guts. “Let me go!” she shouts.

I feel the pain in my leg as if from a great distance, and the elbow in my abdomen is just a mild nuisance. “I don’t think so,” I say, and tighten my grip on her. “You don’t know what’s going on out there,” I add. She keeps struggling, so I force her facedown on her own altar. “You made a really big mistake,” I explain, as the feeder with the shotgun stalks after the last fleeing worshiper, and reaches for the door.

“Fuck you!” she snarls.

The feeder with the shotgun draws the door shut. You may rise now, I call silently to the ones who wait patiently outside, and I feel them begin to stir in their niches, shaking the cobwebs from their uneasy bones.

“You made several procedural mistakes, Iris.” I don’t need to shout now, but my ears are still ringing. “You tried to summon up a preta but it didn’t occur to you to check first to see if it was already incarnate. Which it was, leaving you with an invocation and no target. So it latched onto the first available unhomed soul in the neighborhood, and it just happened to be mine. You’re an idiot, Iris: you bound me into my own body. And you’ve just killed us both.”

She’s still tense but she stops struggling. She’s listening, I think. “You’ve killed me, because I—You know what happens to demonologists who run code in their head? You made a big mistake, giving me time to think about what was happening. Suicide invocations are always among the most powerful, and you put me in the middle of the biggest graveyard in the country, with all that untapped necromantic go-juice. Bet you thought it would make your summoning easier, didn’t you? Well, it worked for me. But I’m dead, Iris. I don’t know how long this binding is going to hold up, and when the field collapses I’ll be just another corpse.”

The ringing in my ears is subsiding, almost enough to hear the muffled banging and screams from outside the door. Oh dear, it sounds as if they want in again. Can’t those people make up their minds?

“I don’t believe you,” she says. “Ford’s report ...”

“Angleton arranged it. He knew we had a leak; Amsterdam proved it, but he’d already spotted the classic signs. He briefed Dr. Mike to put out a plausible line in bullshit, intending to drive you guys into a frenzy of self-exposure. I don’t think he expected you to go quite this far, trying to bind the Eater of Souls and turn it loose inside the Laundry, though.”

She’s shivering. Fear or rage, I can’t tell—not that it matters. Dimly and distantly I realize that fear and rage is what I should be feeling, but all I seem to be able to muster up right now is a vague malevolent joy. Ah, schadenfreude.

Fetch the taser, I tell my minion. I could kill her, but she knows too much. So I need to lock her down until the seventh cavalry arrive, even if I fall apart before then. And maybe get us the hell out of this crypt before the things in the air tonight get loose and come looking for me.

“How are you doing this?” she says in a loud whisper. “You shouldn’t even be alive—”

“I’m one of them, Iris, weren’t you listening? I’m possessed, recursively.” Take aim, I tell my feeder. You don’t want this one, she tastes bad. “Which is, on the face of it, nuts—I’ve never heard of such a thing—but we learn something new every day, don’t we?”

I let go of her abruptly and step clear to give my minion a clear line of fire. She straightens up and begins to turn, and I realize I miscalculated as she raises her sickle. I duck as she lets fly and the feeder shoots, all at the same time. Iris collapses; something nicks my shoulder and falls off. Stand back, I tell my feeder. Then I walk over to the bed and collect the black sacrificial cords. The sickle did some damage, I realize, and I appear to be bleeding, but I can worry about that once I get Iris tied up.

By the time I finish binding her wrists and ankles, I’m beginning to feel oddly weak. The noises outside the door to the crypt have died down. Go to sleep, I tell my feeders; they crawl and writhe outside in the tunnels, happy and replete with the feast of new flesh, and need little urging to fall into a state of torpor. It’s becoming hard to think clearly. I know there’s something I ought to be doing, but . . . oh, that. I take the ring-bound black folder from Iris’s improvised altar and tuck it under my arm, then I look at my patient feeder, who stands by the altar with a vacant expression, his eyes luminous in the dark. Go to the entrance to the chapel. Open the doors. A truck will come with men. Lead them here, then sleep.

He turns and shuffles towards the door, grateful and obedient to the Eater of Souls for granting him this brief existence. Then I am alone in the crypt with Iris. Who has begun to recover from her tasering, and tries to squirm aside as I walk past her to the bed. “Hasta la vista,” I tell her: “Give my regards to the Auditors.”

Then I keel over on the dusty black satin sheets, dead to the world.

THERE IS CHAOS IN THE CHAPEL AS THE CULTISTS DESPERATELY prepare to defend the perimeter.

On the roof, the surviving guards—Benjamin is not among them—have taken up positions around the corners, pointing their guns out at the sea of bodies that slowly shuffle towards the building. Below them, the worshipers on the ground mill and rush in near-terror until three of their number, better organized and equipped than the rest, gather them into groups and set the unarmed to dragging pews into position to form an improvised barricade, while those who bear arms prepare to defend against the creeping wave of darkness.

Crouching behind the gargoyle at the southwest corner, Michael Digby (orthodontic technician, from Chelmsford) glances sideways at the cowled head of his principale, the sergeant-at-arms responsible for the coven’s guard. “What are we going to do, sir?” he asks quietly.

“What does it look like, soldier?” Clive Morton (retail manager, from Dorking) studies the darkness with dilated pupils.

Digby looks back to the field of fire in front of the chapel as a brief snap of gunfire knocks over a clump of drunkenly walking figures that have shuffled out of the long shadows cast by the floodlights in the chapel doorway. “Looks like zombies, sir. Thousands of ’em.”

“Right. And we’re going to hold out here until dawn, or until All-Highest figures out how to drive them away, or we run out of ammunition. That answer your question?”

“You mean the only plan is to stand behind a few feet of church benches?”

“Beats having your soul eaten ...”

Down below them, the worshipers have dragged the bench seats into position in an arc around the entrance and steps leading up to the chapel. Their fellows inside the building have lifted up the heavy wooden tables and tipped them against the windows, barring entry. They think they’re safe, as long as the armed men on the roof can pick off any shuffling revenants that enter the circle of light. But death is already among them.

Alexei from Novosibirsk idles in the darkness behind the worshipers, lurking in the vestry where a cultist guard now lies beneath a pile of moth-eaten curtains.

Alexei is seriously annoyed, but professionally detached from the cock-up and chaos going on around him. The operation has not gone in accordance with earlier plans. He has, as expected, succeeded in infiltrating the vestibule area; the seething chaos outside, accompanied by a panicking mob erupting from the depths of the chapel, has made things run much more easily than anticipated—up to a point. But the ward around his neck is hot to the touch, smoking faintly with a stench of burned hair. And his radio has clicked three times—panic signals from soldiers unable to take their assigned places. Once is happenstance but twice is enemy action, and thrice is a fuck-up. Something has gone wrong, and he can no longer count on backup from Yuri and Anton. Finally, as if all of that isn’t bad enough, the dead are rising.

This latter item, Alexei thinks, is deeply unfair. He’s a sergeant in Spetsgruppa “V”—a professional, in other words—and when he kills someone professionally he expects them to stay dead. These walking abominations are an insult to his competence. If it wasn’t for their annoying habit of infecting further victims through touch, they’d be a trivial obstacle at best; as it is, with his ward and his full-body insulated clothing, not to mention his Ostblock ballistic knife, AKM/100 assault gun, and other tools of the trade, he’s well-equipped to deal with them. Except that there are too damned many, and they won’t stay dead, and the rest of his team are dispersed and in trouble.

Speaking of trouble, here comes more. Most of the cultists are wearing black robes, or stupidly inappropriate army-surplus camo gear for the guards; if it’s naked and you can count the ribs, it’s probably one of the risen dead. Bonus points for shuffling like a stockbroker on a stag night, and big booby prize if you let it get so close you can see the green luminosity writhing in the depths of its eye sockets . . .

Alexei melts into the shadows behind the figure climbing the steps from the crypt. It’s wearing a robe and shuffling drunkenly, and he’s about to slide the blade of his knife between its two uppermost cervical vertebrae when he realizes that it is not, in fact, one of the possessed. Which raises some interesting questions. A moment later his gloved hand is covering the climber’s mouth and his knife is at her throat. “Say nothing,” he grunts, tugging her backwards into the vestry. “You want live, yes? Be silent.” The cultist stumbles as he drags her into the shadows, but doesn’t say anything. Alexei rolls her to the ground and has her pinioned in a second. “Where is All-Highest?” he demands, in heavily accented but serviceable English.

“Downstairs—with the Eater of Souls—” The young woman stiffens for a moment, then sags bonelessly. Alexei rises, wraps himself in the cloak that she won’t be needing anymore, and wipes his knife on the back of her dress. Then he tiptoes towards the steps down to the crypt. If the Eater of Souls is lurking downstairs, he reasons, then it’s very probable that what he came for is to be found there. And Alexei doesn’t give up easily.

TO THE NORTH, A RED TRUCK CREEPS ALONG A DARKENED AVENUE. Three figures sit atop its roof. One of them holds a white electric violin. Her two guards watch and wonder, entrenching tools raised and ready to shovel mortal remains off the roof should any such encroach. The truck bumps slowly along in low gear, pushing through a sea of withered bodies that sway and jostle slowly. Occasionally there is a crunch or crackle as the truck rolls over bones that failed to get out of its way in time. The driver doesn’t speed up or slow down; to stop in the middle of this unnatural crowd is to court disaster, although none of the feeders has so far attempted to climb aboard the OCCULUS truck.

Down in the darkened truck cab Major Barnes rides next to the driver, peering into the darkness for any sign of ambush. He talks into his headset: “Two hundred meters in. Dr. O’Brien, do you see any sign of survivors—”

Mo, atop the cab, raises her bow. “Not right here,” she says shortly. The walking dead are undirected; the grounded metal framework of the truck blocks their ability to sense those who ride within, and the warm meat on the cab roof is out of easy reach.

A crack of gunfire sounds. Mo looks round sharply as Howe grabs her shoulder. “Down!” he snaps, and she ducks as he raises his MP5 and squints through its night sights. The gunfire is coming from a chapel, half-concealed by trees and the silent army of walking corpses. There are more shots, followed by shouts and a scream, cut off short. “Shooters on the building roofline,” Howe reports: “Four, no, five bodies. Defenses at ground level, barricades, I can’t see anyone manning them. The crowd’s thickest there. Defenders have—no, wait.”

Cold flesh, bodies that do not show on infrared, have formed an abhuman pyramid to one side of the chapel. The survivors on the roof are shooting, but not at the OCCULUS truck: they have problems that are closer to hand. As one corpse disintegrates another takes its place, and the defenders have fewer banishment rounds than Brookwood has open graves. “Doc, can you do anything about them?” Howe asks. “Because I don’t think we’re going to get in there without—”

Mo raises her bow, strikes a shivering note from the burning strings. Howe winces and moves aside. “Give me some elbow room,” she says flatly. Then she touches the strings lightly, coaxing an eerie, familiar leitmotif from her instrument. “Put this out through the PA circuit,” she mutters, grimly determined.

Down below, Barnes grimaces tensely and twists input dials on the truck’s external public address systems. The growing wild resonance of die Walkürenritt floods from the big speakers mounted to either side of the cab; the driver looks sidelong at his CO, then floors the accelerator in low gear, adding the roar of the big diesel (and the crunch of unburied bones) to the music. Barnes announces to the back of the truck: “All right, gentlemen, this is going to be an opposed entry and they know we’re coming. Wards, up! Arms, up! Party time in sixty seconds!”

The risen dead are fleeing, for the most part, out of the way of the truck as it roars and bucks across the path. It’s the music that does it; Mo stands atop the roof, utterly engrossed in tracking the melody. Richard Wagner, it was said, hated violinists: blood drips from her fingertips as the eerie extradimensional resonances of her interpretation of one of his most famous works drags the sound of an entire string section—and a brassy resonance echoing from the metal flanks of the truck—into being.

The truck crunches across skeletal remnants that lie in rows around the chapel, silent and unmoving. A few bodies, less damaged than the rest, lie near a minivan; others are clustered near the door to the building, which is ajar. A few less emaciated figures lie among the skeletonized forms: of these, most bear the signs of gunshot wounds.

“Back us up to the door,” Barnes tells the driver. Switching to the common channel: “All right, we’re going in. Standard entry protocol for mass possession. Scary and Howe, over to you. Dr. O’Brien, time to get down off the roof. You can follow with me once we’ve cleared the way. See if we can figure out what we’re looking at.”

The soldiers pile out of the back of the truck, wearing bright yellow HAZMAT suits, MP5s at the ready. The bodies are packed in so tightly around the steps to the chapel that they dash across rib cages and cloak-swathed torsos on the way to the open door.

There’s a snap of gunfire from up top: two of the soldiers drop to their knees and reply with a burst of aimed fire. A black-clad figure tumbles from the roofline. One of the soldiers throws something up and over the eaves; the others take cover as the fragmentation grenade explodes.

“What’s up there?” Mo tries to ask, shouting in Barnes’s ear.

“Bad guys.” Barnes grins hungrily. “Ah.” He taps the earpiece screwed into his left ear: “Follow me.” The gunfire from the defenders on the roof has stopped as he steps out of the back of the truck and walks towards the chapel entrance. Mo follows him, her violin raised. They’re halfway across the ten-meter gap when a silhouette lurches clear of the side of the building and throws itself towards the major. Barnes raises his HK-5 and plants a neat three-round group in the middle of the assailant’s torso; by the time Mo’s bow makes contact with an eerily blue-glowing string, the fluorescence in the back of the revenant’s eye sockets has begun to fade. “Bloody fans, always waiting outside the dressing room ...” Barnes cocks his head on one side, listening. “Dr. O’Brien? This way, now.”

They’re inside in seconds, and one of the soldiers pulls the tall oak door shut behind them. The chapel hall is full of bodies, the long-dead and the fresh draped across one another in promiscuous embrace. Some of the recent bodies are naked: in the soldier’s infrared vision they still glow with body heat.

“Look sharp, some of them made it to the door,” Howe comments over the open channel. A couple of bodies still clutch bulky assault shotguns with drum magazines: one, wearing a distinctly more professional camouflage rig than the rest, is holding a Russian AKS-74 rifle. None of them, however, are moving. The feeders have eaten their fill and moved on.

“Trapdoor over here, sir!” One of the troops waves, pointing at a raised door.

“Secure it,” says Howe. “Tidily, our boy might still be down there.” He doesn’t say what everyone fears: the next living soul they find in this city of the dead will be the first.

As the soldiers move in, something runs at them, out of the tunnel, frighteningly fast. There’s a burst of automatic fire. “Hold that!” yells Howe, as the revenant comes apart in a tumbling rain of dust and bones. “Batons!” A pair of troops step forward, holding heavily customized cattle prods before them—electrical shock-rods, customized with signal generators to loosen the grip of extradimensional horrors on their walking hosts. There’s a snap and crackle of sparks as they test their tools.

“You think he’s down there,” Mo says quietly.

Major Barnes nods. “Cultists. They go to ground for their rituals.”

Up ahead, Scary triggers his shock-stick, sparking the terminals: he grins at Howe. “I love the smell of—”

“Don’t say it, son, unless you want a week on toilet duty.”

“Aw, Sarge.” He steps forward, bending to follow the lead team into the cellar. “That’s harsh.”

There are no living bodies in the tunnel. Some of the possessed are still stirring feebly, their luminous eyes guttering in the darkness, but the flying wedge of soldiers with shock-sticks shut them down in short order: it’s easier than clubbing baby seals.

At the end of the tunnel they come to an open door. Now there’s noise, and the troops take up position to either side of the entrance, ready for a forced entry. But while they’re waiting, Dr. O’Brien and Major Barnes arrive. Mo holds her violin, ready for a killing chord. Barnes glances at her, then waves Howe back from the right-hand side of the door. “What do you think?” he asks quietly.

“It stinks, sir. You saw the sov kit back there?”

“I did. I reckon we’ve got company. More to the point, we haven’t found our boy yet. Could be a hostage situation.”

“Shit. I’ll tell Moran to bring up the snoop kit—”

Mo’s eyes are hollow shadows in the darkness. “Major?”

“What is it?”

She points at the entrance with a hand half-folded around something. “He’s definitely in there.” She unfolds her hand, palm upwards to reveal the cracked and battered screen of Bob’s iPhone, icons glowing balefully in the darkness. “Got a soul tracker on this thing. He’s alive, and he’s not alone—”

Which is when the screaming starts.

ALEXEI IS BECOMING ANNOYED.

He’s been down in the crypt for half an hour, moving with painstaking care. The place is literally crawling with the risen dead, feeding on the dwindling survivors of the Black God Slave Cult—some of whom have barricaded themselves into the ossuary, with predictable consequences—and only sheer luck and the revenants’ lack of situational awareness has saved him. They don’t communicate with each other, don’t raise the alarm when he lands among them and lashes out with a sharp-edged entrenching tool or shoots their neighbors with a silenced pistol firing banishment rounds. It would be good news under other circumstances, but Alexei is acutely aware that he has a serious lack of backup and a mission that under other circumstances would be hopelessly compromised.

The sounds of gunfire from up above had nearly died out ten minutes ago. Now they’re getting louder and more frequent. And there’s something different about them: different weapons, much tighter fire discipline. The new shooters are professionals, but they’re not his squad—they’re firing NATO spec ammunition.

As it is, it looks like the only way out is in; if he can find somewhere to hole up until morning, he stands a chance of exfiltrating on foot, and if he can meet the mission’s core objective, retrieve the missing document, so much the better—

And everything looks like it’s coming down to this corridor here, and the open doorway gaping blackly at the end of it.

Alexei glides towards the entrance, then pauses briefly on the threshold. It’s a cul-de-sac, and every instinct warns him not to go in—at least, not without a couple of fragmentation grenades to clear the way. But there’s a quiet sobbing sound coming from inside, a woman’s lamentation. (And if the mission target is present, it wouldn’t do to cut up hard.) He adjusts his goggles, then flashes his infrared torch briefly at the ceiling.

A confused jumble of impressions: bodies. Mattresses arranged in concentric rings around a pit, leading down to an altar. There’s a four-poster bed behind the altar. The sobbing comes from a figure on the bed. Sacrificial victim, thinks Alexei. There are bodies, some new and some old: this is not a novelty. The idea of rescuing a victim from the cultists, however, holds some appeal—especially as she might know where they will have taken the mission target. Alexei is Spetsnaz through-and-through: the product of an incredibly harsh training system, ruthlessly self-disciplined, and trained as a soulless killing machine. But he’s also intelligent, a misfit who was a round peg in the square hole of the regular army, and possessed of the romantic streak that leads some men into professional soldiering. Given an opportunity to rescue a damsel in distress and expedite his mission goals at the same time, Alexei will go for the gratitude shag. And who can blame him? It’s been a hard night’s work.

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.