Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

The bedroom's a mess: maybe someone searched it in a hurry, or maybe she's the nesting kind. There's a pile of clothing by the bed that looks worn, so I bundle a T-shirt into my bag and head back to the car. Skin flakes, that's what I need; I try not to think too hard about what might be happening to her right now.

As I'm going down the path I see someone coming the other way. Middle-aged, male, thickset. "Howdy," he says, slightly suspiciously.

"Hi," I say, "just dropping by. Mo asked me to water her plants."

"Oh." Instant boredom, conjured by her name. "Well, try not to leave your car there, it's blocking the disabled space."

"I'll be gone before anyone notices," I promise, and do my best to do just that.

Parked safely round the corner I pull out the T-shirt. In the dashboard light it looks faded; hopefully that'll do. I reach into my travel bag and pull out my hacked Palm computer, call up a specialised application that will erase itself if I don't enter a valid password within sixty seconds, pop open the expansion slot on its back, and swipe the concealed sensor across the fabric. Oh great: The arrow on the screen is pointing right back at me-I must have contaminated that swatch with my own biomagnetic whatever. Swearing, I restart the program and the machine promptly crashes. It takes another three tries before I get an arrow that's pointing somewhere else, and points in the same direction no matter which way I hold the gadget.

The wonders of modern technology.

AN HOUR LATER I'M LYING ON MY BELLY IN THE undergrowth at the edge of a stand of trees. I'm clutching a monkey's paw, a palmtop computer, and a cellphone; my mission, unless I choose to reject it, is to prevent a human sacrifice in the house in front of me-with no backup.

The hiss and crash of Pacific surf drowns out any noise from the road behind me. There's an onshore breeze, and along with the dampness of the ground-it rained earlier-it is making me shiver. The bruise on my left shoulder smarts angrily: I probably won't be able to move it in the morning. (My damn fault for getting in the way of a bullet. The kinetic impact binding worked its intended miracle but I'm not covered anymore.)

There's a truck parked in front of the carport, the house lights are on, and the curtains are drawn. Ten minutes ago a couple of guys came out the front door, took the dirt bike from the garage, drove straight across the lawn and onto the main road without pausing for traffic. I didn't get a good look at them, but an applet on my palmtop is screaming warnings at me: huge, honking great summoning fields are loose in the area, and judging by the subtype it's a gateway invocation that they're planning. They're actually going to try and open a mass-transfer gate to another universe-seriously bad juju. I've no idea who the hell these people are, or why they snatched Mo, but this is not looking good.

A flicker of light from the road; there's the snarl of a two-stroke engine, then the bike is turning back into the carport with its two passengers on board. One of them has a backpack… they've picked something up? Something they don't want to store too close to home? I hunker down lower, trying to make myself invisible. Take another reading, like the others I've made around this side of the garden. I think I've got a feel for it; a complex spiral of protection more than two hundred feet across, centred on the house. Major League paranoia, to protect something big that they're planning. This is where they've brought Mo-I wonder why? I sneak closer to a large window at the side, trying to keep the bushes between myself and the road, and hope like hell that there aren't any dogs here.

They've got the curtains drawn but the window itself is open-although there's some kind of bug screen in the way. I can hear voices. I don't recognize the language and they're muffled by the curtain, but there are more than two speakers. One of them laughs, briefly: it's not a pleasant sound. I settle back against the wall and take stock, trying not to breathe too loudly. Item: I'm sure Mo is in here, unless she's in the habit of lending her T-shirts out to strange swarthy men who perform major summoning rituals whenever she's kidnapped by somebody else. Item: they're not with ONI, or the Laundry. In fact, they're presumed hostile until proven otherwise. Item: there are at least four of them-two on the bike, two or more who stayed in here with Mo. I am not a one-man SWAT team and I am not trained in dealing with hostage-rescue situations, and like Harry said, setting out to be a hero without knowing what you're doing is a good way to end up dead. Hmm. What I need right now is a SWAT team, but I don't happen to have one up my sleeve. And aren't SWAT teams supposed to figure out where the hostage is and what's going on before they go storming through the building?

There is, of course, one constructive thing I can do, though it's going to get me yelled at when I go home. I switch my mobile phone back on, then fumble my way through its menus until I find the call log and tell it to dial the last caller. That would be Mo, and if ONI hasn't put a wiretap on her I'm a brass monkey's stepfather. It rings three times before there's an answer and I listen carefully, but there's nothing audible from inside the house.

"Who is this?" It's a man's voice, rather harsh-sounding.

I hold the mouthpiece very close to my lips: "You're looking for Mo," I say.

"Who is this?" he repeats.

"A friend. Listen. Where you find this phone you will find a house. There are several perps in the vicinity, at least four in the building. They've kidnapped Mo, they're building a Dho-Nha circle, at least level four, and you will want to take defensive precautions-"

"Stay right there," says the man on the other end of the phone, so I carefully put it down under the window and scramble round to the back of the house on hands and knees. The front door bangs open. A different voice calls out, "Is that you, Achmet?"

No answer. I hold my breath, heart pounding in my chest. Footsteps on gravel. "The American bitch, she is secure." I back away from the house toward the nearest clump of bushes-the men loom out of the shadows-but the footsteps halt. "I stay out here. Cigarette."

Bastard's on a fag break! I glance up at the sky, which is dark as a marketing hack's heart and full of coldly distant stars. How am I going to get past him? I grip the monkey's paw in my pocket, carefully withdraw it, and point it at the ground. A red-eyed coal glowers from the doorway, just visible round the side of the house. A distant buzzing bike engine grows louder, heading up the hills far above. Apart from that, the night is silent. Too silent, I realise after a minute; that's a road over there-where's the traffic? I begin to edge backward, trying to get farther into the bushes, and that's when everything blanks.

"Yes, that's what I've been telling you for the past hour." There's no point getting angry with them; they're just doing their job. I resist the temptation to rub my head, the dressing covering the sore patch behind my right ear. "All I remember after that is waking up in hospital the next day."

"Harrumph." I blink; did I really hear someone say harrumph ? Yes-it's the guy who looks like something the gravedigger's cat dragged in, Derek something or other. He blinks right back at me with watery eyes. "According to page four of the medical notes, paragraph six-"

I watch while they all obediently shuffle their notes. Nobody thought to give me a copy, of course, even though they're mine. "Contusion and hairline fracture on the right occipital hemisphere, some bruising and abrasion consistent with a weighted object." I turn my head, wincing slightly because of the pain in my neck, and point to the dressing. It's been nearly a week; one thing they don't tell you in the detective potboilers is how bad being whacked on the head with a cosh hurts. No, not a cosh: an Object, Weighted, Black Chamber Field Operatives for the Use of, Complies with US-MIL-STD-534-5801.