Simon Green - Daemons Are Forever

Mr. Stab, Roger Morningstar, and Janissary Jane didn’t seem to notice the heat at all. They’d endured much worse, in their time.

I had a quick chat with the guy running the airfield for us, an old rogue with a dark, wrinkled face who’d served the family well and loyally for many years. And would continue to do so, as long as the money kept coming. My armour didn’t throw him at all; he’d seen it before. Though he did compliment me on my new colour scheme. I asked him what he knew about the unusual business down on the Nazca Plain, and he told me what he could, in excellent English.

It seemed foreigners had been coming to the plain in small groups for several months now. All nationalities, all types, but not the usual tourists. These were strange people, even for foreigners, talking and acting oddly, though he found it hard to be specific about what bothered him about them. As though they were always thinking of something else , was the best he could manage. They bought many things in the surrounding towns, and always paid cash. The local merchants loved them, and hoped they’d stay forever. When I pressed him on what these strangers had been buying, he said mostly technology, off-the-shelf stuff and special orders, and an extraordinary amount of livestock. All kinds. Presumably for slaughtering, since none of the foreigners professed any interest in farming, and they bought far more than they could ever hope to eat.

I thanked him and slipped him a little extra for his trouble, just to cement friendly relations. I didn’t need to worry that he might talk about us; he knew better than to talk about Drood business. He’d helped bury the previous airfield owner after he got a bit too talkative. No one betrays the Droods and lives to boast of it.

Janissary Jane got the expeditionary force sorted out into squads and loaded onto the fleet of jeeps the owner had provided, and we set off on the long, hard journey to the Nazca Plains. There was no scenery and no road, just an endless jolting ride across a sullen, empty desert under a baking sun. The trip seemed to last forever, but finally we came to a halt at the base of a cliff overlooking the plain. We disembarked from the jeeps, did a certain amount of stretching and stamping our feet, and then we climbed the steep rise all the way to the top and looked out over the plain. Callan Drood was waiting for us there, looking very sunburned, and extremely pissed off that we hadn’t brought any cold drinks with us. Molly conjured him up an iced bottle of Pepsi, and he drank it so fast he gave himself a headache.

I looked down at what the Loathly Ones were doing on the Nazca Plain. From this height they looked like ants, swarming around and over the huge structure that rose up from the heavily lined and grooved stone plain like a single alien skyscraper. It had to be three hundred feet tall now, a strange and unearthly mixture of styles and materials. Its shape made no sense at all. My mind couldn’t seem to cope with the unexpected dimensions and distortions. Just looking at it made my eyes hurt. Callan came forward to join me.

“It’s better if you look at it for just a few moments at a time. I’m pretty sure we’re looking at something that exists in more than three spatial dimensions, and what we see is only our minds trying to make sense of it. Don’t ask me what the hell it is, or what it’s for, but the Loathly Ones are all over it, all day and all night, inside and out. There’s a single opening at the base, and a lot of what goes in never comes out again. I get the feeling it’s almost finished. The pace of work has accelerated in the last twelve hours, like they’re fighting a deadline. Where are my cold drinks? I was promised cold drinks. And I’d better get a torc out of this. I’ve spent weeks out here, dodging the bastards’ patrols. Very heavily armed patrols, I might add. They kill anyone who gets too close, even clearly harmless tourists, whether they’ve seen anything or not.”

I gestured for him to shut up, and he did. My silver mask allowed me to zoom in on the towering edifice down on the plain, so I could study details as though I was right on top of them. The alien structure struck me as much as a machine as a building, designed to do … something, but the more I looked, the less sense it made. It didn’t take me long to discover what they’d been doing with so much livestock. The Loathly Ones had incorporated bits of them into the structure. Parts of the tower were clearly technological, even if I couldn’t identify it, but other parts were just as clearly organic. Living flesh, whole organs, bloody guts and connective tissues, even entire brains and heads. All alive, maintained as part of the functioning structure. I’d never seen anything like it before, and I’ve seen my share of alien and other-dimensional technology.

Janissary Jane came forward to stand on my other side, and I described what I was seeing to her. She nodded slowly.

“I have seen…something like this, before. It’s not a hellgate. Not as such. But it’s definitely a gateway of some kind.”

“So they’re planning to open a door to somewhere else,” said Molly, joining us to show she wasn’t going to be left out of things. “Maybe they’ve heard you declared war on them, Eddie, and they’re running for home while they’ve still got the chance.”

“A nice thought, but no,” I said. “They were building this long before I took control of the family.”

“And I don’t think this was designed just to open a gateway to Outside,” Janissary Jane said slowly. “It looks more like it’s designed to summon…something, from Outside, and bring it through into our world.”

“Reinforcements?” said Molly. “More Loathly Ones?”

“No,” said Janissary Jane. “With the power this thing uses, it would have to be something more powerful…something far worse than the Loathly Ones.”

“Something worse?” said Callan. “What could be worse than soul-eating demons?”

“Stick around,” I said. “If we don’t shut this thing down before they can open their gateway, you might just find out.”

“I want to go home,” said Callan. “I hate it here.” Molly produced another iced bottle of Pepsi for him, and he wandered off to kick moodily at the unyielding ground.

We all took turns to peer over the edge of the cliff and study the movements of the tiny figures scurrying around down below. There were hundreds of them, men and women and even some children, scrambling all over the huge structure with no regard for their own safety. Heat haze muddied the air between us and them, even with the help of the silver masks, but the extreme temperatures didn’t seem to bother the Loathly Ones at all.

No one was obviously in charge, no orders were given, but they all seemed to know exactly what to do. When I zoomed in on any particular individual worker, the strangeness of them hit me hard. They didn’t move like humans move, and their faces were blank. Sometimes they would all move at once, in perfect precision, like flocking birds. There was nothing human left in them but their shapes; everything else had been driven out by the Loathly Ones.

This was all new to Mr. Stab, and he insisted on having it all explained to him. So I did my best to give him the short version.

The Loathly Ones come from somewhere else, Outside of space and time as we understand them. They have no physical presence in our world, so to survive here they have to invade a body, mentally as well as physically. Preferably human, but not always. When a Loathly One invades, or infects, a human body it eats or corrupts or drives out the soul, opinions differ, and inhabits the remaining husk. Which soon burns out from the unbearable stresses and strains the new owner puts on it. But even after the body dies, and slowly decays, it still goes on, driven by the unearthly energies of the Loathly One. Until the body finally falls apart, and then the Loathly One goes looking for a new host. We call the infected humans drones. Basically, they’re zombies driven by an alien will, for alien purposes.