Charles Stross - The Fuller Memorandum

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.