Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

I crane my neck round at Nick, whose expression is uncharacteristically flat: he stares right through me with eyes like gunsights. "I don't like it. I really don't like it."

"You don't have to," Andy says flatly. "We're telling you what to do. Your job is-I shouldn't be telling you this, it should be Angleton, this afternoon, but what the hell-you're going to be assigned to shadow Mo. We'll do the rest. All I want to hear from you now is that you're going to do as you're told."

I tense. "Is that an order?"

"It is now," says Nick.

WHEN I GET HOME AFTER RECEIVING MY MISSION orders and preemptive chewing-out from Angleton I find my key doesn't turn in the lock. It's dark and it's raining so I lean on the doorbell continuously until the door swings open. Pinky stands behind it, one hand on the latch. "What took you so long?" I ask him.

He steps back. "These are yours, I believe," he says, handing me a bunch of shiny new keys. He clanks as he walks; he's wearing black combat boots, matching trousers, what looks like a leather vest, and enough chains to stock a medium-sized prison. "I'm off clubbing tonight."

"Why the new keys?" I close the door and shake my hair, shrug off my coat, and try to find room to hang it in the hall.

"They changed the locks today," he says conversationally, "departmental orders, apparently." There's a new mat inside the front door, and when I look closely I see silvery lettering in a very small font stitched into its edges. "They came and swept the house for listeners and actors then renewed the wards on all the windows, the doors, the air vents-even the chimney. Any idea why?"

"Yeah," I grunt. I head for the kitchen, squeezing past someone's battered suitcases that are parked in the hall.

"We've got a new flatmate, too," he adds. "Oh, Mhari's fucked off again, but this time she says she's moving into House Orange for good."

"Ah-hum." Twist the knife in the wound, why don't you? I inspect the kettle, then poke around inside my cupboard to see if there's any food more substantial than a pot noodle.

"You'll probably like the new flatmate, though," Pinky continues. "She's helping Brains with his omelettes in the front cellar-he's using high-intensity ultrasound, this time."

I find a pot noodle and a desiccated supermarket pizza base. There's cheese and tomato paste in the fridge, and a pork sausage I can chop up to go on top of it, so I turn the grill on. "Any newspapers?" I ask.

"Newspapers? Why?"

"I have to book a flight. I'm taking a week's leave next Monday, and it's already Wednesday."

"Going anywhere interesting?"

"Amsterdam."

"Cool!" There's a pair of fur-lined handcuffs on the bread board; Pinky picks them up and eyes them critically, then starts polishing them on a square of kitchen roll. "Party on?"

"I have some research to do at the Oostindischehuis. And in the basement of the Rijksmuseum."

"Research." He rolls his eyes and tucks the handcuffs into a belt clip. "What a boring use for a holiday in Amsterdam!"

I chop bits of pork sausage up and sprinkle them over my garbage pizza, oblivious. The cellar door swings open. "Did somebody mention Amsterdam-hey, what are you doing here?"

I drop my knife. "Mo? What are you -"

"Bob? Hey, have you guys met?"

" 'Scuse me, would you mind moving? I need to get through-"

With four people in the kitchen it's distinctly cosy, not to say crowded. I move my pizza up under the grill and switch the kettle on again. "Who put you up here?" I ask Mo.

"The Plumbers-they said this was a secure apartment," she says, rubbing the side of her nose. She peers at me suspiciously. "What's going on?"

"It is a secure apartment," I say slowly. "It's on the Laundry list."

"Bob's girlfriend just moved out for the fourth time," Pinky explains helpfully. "They must have thought the spare room needed filling."

"Oh, this is too much." Mo pulls out a chair and sits down with her back against the wall, arms crossed defensively.

"Guys?" I ask. "Could you take it outside?"

"Certainly," Brains sniffs, and disappears back into the cellar.

Pinky smiles. "I knew you'd hit it off!" he says, then ducks out of the room hastily.

A minute later the front door slams. Mo fixes me with a magistrate's stare. "You live here? With those two?"

"Yeah." I inspect the grill. "They're mostly harmless, when they're not trying to take over the world each night."

"Trying to-" She stops. "That one. Uh, Pinky? He's out clubbing?"

"Yes, but he never brings any rough trade home," I explain. "He and Brains have been together for, oh, as long as I've known them."

"Oh." I see the light bulb go on above her head: some people are a bit slow on the uptake about Pinky and Brains.

"Brains doesn't get out a lot. Pinky is a party animal, a bit of rubber, a bit of leather. Every few weeks, whenever the moon is in the right phase, hairs burst from the palms of his hands and he turns into a wild bear with a compulsion to terrorise Soho. Brains doesn't seem to notice. They're like an old married couple. Once a year Pinky drags Brains out to Pride so he can maintain his security clearance."

"I see." She relaxes a little but looks puzzled. "I thought the secret services sacked you for being homosexual?"

"They used to, said it made you a security risk. Which was silly, because it was the practice of firing homosexuals that made them vulnerable to blackmail in the first place. So these days they just insist on openness-the theory is you can only be blackmailed if you're hiding something. Which is why the Brain gets the day off for Gay Pride to maintain his security clearance."

"Ah-I give up." She smiles. The smile fades fast. "I've still got to move my stuff in. They're packing up the flat and I didn't have much anyway, most of my furniture is in a shipping container somewhere on the Atlantic… Why Amsterdam, Bob?"

I prod at the pizza, which is beginning to melt on top as the grill strains to heat it up. "I've been doing a bit of digging." I wince: my rib stabs at me. "Things you said last night. Oh, has anyone said anything to you?"

"No." She looks puzzled.

"Well, don't be surprised if in the next couple of days Andy or Derek drops by and gets you to sign a piece of paper saying that you'll cut your own throat before talking to anyone without clearance. That's what they did to me; they're taking it seriously."

"Well that's a relief," she says with heavy irony. "Did you learn anything?"

The pizza is bubbling away on top; I turn the grill down so that it can heat right through. "Coffee?"

"Tea, if you've got it."

"Okay. Um, I did some reading. Did you know that what you overheard is completely impossible? As in, it can't happen because it's not allowed?"

"It's not-hang on." She glares at me. "If you're pulling my leg-"

"Would I do a thing like that?" I must look the image of hurt innocence because she chuckles wickedly.

"I wouldn't put anything past you, Bob. Okay, what do you mean by 'it's not allowed'? As your professor I am ordering you to tell me everything."

"Uh, isn't it my job to say, 'Tell me, professor'?"

She waves it off: "Nah, that would be a cliché. So tell me. What the fornicating hell is happening? Why does someone or something try to render me metabolically incompetent whenever I meet you?"

"Well, it goes back to around 1919," I say, dropping tea bags into a chipped pot. "That was when the Thule Gessellschaft was founded in Munich by Baron von Sebottendorff. The Thule Society were basically mystical whack-jobs, but they had a lot of clout; in particular they were heavily into Masonic symbolism and a load of post-Theosophical guff about how the only true humans were the Aryan race, and the rest-the Mindwertigen, 'inferior beings'-were sapping their strength and purity and precious bodily fluids. All of this wouldn't have mattered much except a bunch of these goons were mixed up in Bavarian street politics, the Freikorps and so on. They sort of cross-fertilised with a small outfit called the NSDAP, whose leader was a former NCO and agent provocateur sent by the Landswehr to keep an eye on far-right movements. He picked up a lot of ideas from the Thule Society and when he got where he wanted he told the head of his personal bodyguard-a guy called Heinrich Himmler, another occult obsessive-to put Walter Darre, one of Alfred Rosenberg's protégés, in charge of the Ahnenerbe Society. Ahnenerbe was originally independent, but rapidly turned into a branch of the SS after 1934; a sort of occult R amp;D department cum training college. Meanwhile the Gestapo orchestrated a pretty severe crackdown on all nonparty occultists in the Third Reich; Adolf wanted a monopoly on esoteric power, and he got it."