Charles Stross - The Fuller Memorandum

“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.”