The Apocalypse Codex

12. WITH A BIBLE AND A GUN

THERE’S A MOTEL 6 JUST OFF I-25, SOUTH OF DENVER. THE rental satnav directs me to it, and there are no highway patrol roadblocks; we reach it around eight o’clock. I head for the front desk. “Hi. I’d like to rent a couple of rooms for tonight? Singles.”

“Sure thing.” The middle-aged clerk barely looks up from her laptop screen. “Can I see your ID, please?”

I glance around to ensure we’re alone, then slide my warrant card under her nose.

“Wait, that’s not a—” There’s an almost audible clunk as the card gets its claws in behind her eyeballs and her jaw sags.

“Our papers are in order,” I explain to her. “Two single rooms please, for Mrs. Smith and Mr. Jones.”

“That will be—” Her eyeballs slowly unkink.

“Cash.” I shove a pre-counted stack of greenbacks at her. “The banknotes are correct.” She’s still drooling over the warrant card. I wait for her to wake up enough to make the money disappear then pull the card back.

“Let’s see.” She fiddles with her terminal and the room card reader. “You’re in 403 and 404. Have a nice day.”

I hand Persephone the Forbidden Room card and keep Room Not Found for myself. She looks at me oddly. I shake my head and walk towards the door—block 4 is across the car park. “Yes?” I ask once we’re outside.

“Your card. If they’ve got OCCINT assets in the field, that’s going to be a red flag to anyone nearby.”

“True. But they’re trying to keep a low profile.” I look both ways before crossing: “I reckon they’ll go through the regular police first, and I trust you did a good job of muddying the trail with that ward—you stole that pickup truck, yes?”

“They were going to install an alien mind parasite on me—what would you do?”

“Probably the same.” I swipe the key card. “Let’s go inside.”

The Motel 6 rooms are basic but adequate, with office desks and broadband as well as TVs and en-suite showers. I’ve just had time to dump my stuff and do basic set-up. I’m installing a ward on the desk beside the pizza box when there’s a knock on my door. It’s Persephone.

“Come in.” She stands on the threshold, clutching her handbag and shifting from foot to foot, edgy as a vampire with toothache. She sidles past me and stalks around restlessly as I close and ward the door. She pays particular attention to the window, and in particular the cobwebby diagrams I’ve sketched across the glass with a conductive pen: distraction patterns designed to slide observers’ attention elsewhere. “I’m still working on the room.”

“Oh, right.” She stares at the pizza box. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Yup.” I haven’t got it wired up to the handy little USB breakout box yet, but it’s adequately trapped for the time being. I gesture at her bag. “Is that what I think it is?”

“If what you expect is a bible and a gun, it probably is.” She plants the bag on the double bed.

“Let’s get this room secured before we discuss anything else,” I suggest, discreetly palming my JesusPhone. (Thaumic resonance: there’s an app for that.) “In case Schiller’s people have got a Listener out for you.”

“Okay.” She reaches into the neck of her blouse and pulls out a discreet chain with a stainless steel cross attached. Before I can stop her she gives the arms a twist, then stabs the ball of her thumb with the tiny knife blade that pops out of the stem like a demented switchblade. “I always carry a concealed athame. It’s not ideal, but it works…Ouch.” I point my phone’s camera at her and fire up the thaumometer and, sure enough, the cross is now pulsing violently. She mutters something in glassy syllables that slide around the edges of my mind, then retracts the blade and drops the concealed ritual knife back down between her breasts. “Deafness be upon us, and inner ears stoppered with wax. Will that do?”

I hate this ritual magic stuff; it just doesn’t come naturally to me, even if I set everything up carefully beforehand—I need a debugger and a proper development environment before I can whip up so much as a hello, world invocation. (Hopefully followed rapidly by a good-bye, world from whatever I just summoned: that stuff is dangerous.) But she’s very good at it. I suppose different people have different aptitudes, but the non-repeatability irritates me—it’s anathema to observational science. I force myself to nod. “What else did you find there?”

“Aside from the Bible? That’s not enough for you?” She shrugs again, then turns it into a low-grade shudder. “Gods, you don’t want to know…They’re believers, Mr. Howard. Pentecostalist dispensationalists—they are saved, but they are surrounded by the unsaved, and they think their master is returning imminently, and anyone who isn’t saved by the time of his arrival is doomed. So they intend to save everyone whether or not they want to be saved, one brain parasite at a time.” The shudder is more emphatic this time round. “They’re also quiverfull—they raise as many children as they can as ammunition for the cause, because they’re not completely sure whether imminent means their god is coming in fifteen minutes or fifteen years. There’s a clinic in town, with a combined maternity unit and spinal injuries ward for the runaways they’ve rounded up.”

“A what?”

“You heard me.” She looks away, avoiding my eyes. She’s the kind of woman who walls away that which makes her angry, presenting an outward appearance of calm; behind it I’m certain she’s furious. “The ends justify the means: we are all to be saved, and it will take a large army to do the saving. As their women can raise larger families than they can give birth to, they use host mothers to make up the numbers. ‘In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children’—they take that as an instruction.”

“Oh ick.” I swallow. “But why don’t they just use the hosts to—” Then I realize why: they want loyal brainwashed storm troopers who’ll fight for the cause in situations where a parasitic faith module would be a liability. (If you try to smuggle one of those giant wood lice into Dansey House or the New Annex, you won’t get very far.) “So they’re raising a little army of brainwashed believers, and they have the mind-control hosts to keep down the rest of us. And they’ve got this clinic”—if it’s real, I feel like screaming, because the picture she’s painting is so vile—“and, uh, what else are we looking at? What are their goals?”

“I don’t know for sure.” She sounds calm. “I planted a worm on their office network but then I had to break out, so I’ve got to assume the exploit is compromised. The Omega Course session went off the beaten track yesterday, and this morning they were forcibly installing parasites on the attendees. I think they’ve decided to bring their plans forward in a hurry. We’re going to have to go back in person if you want to know any more.”

Urp. Time to change the subject in a hurry. “About Johnny. Do you want to contact him, or would you rather I used the tattoo? Get him to—”

She looks at me. It’s a bit like being a nice juicy grasshopper in front of a very sexy mantis. She’s wired on something, and I wonder for a moment if she’s sourced some nose candy, then I realize: this is what she lives for. Field work: that’s why Lockhart was able to get her out here. Persephone is addicted to danger.

“Johnny is coming.” Her lips crinkle into something resembling a smile. “He has a passenger to deal with first.”

“A pass—” I stop.

They say our eyes are windows on the soul, but Persephone’s eyes are more like murky brown pools, utterly impenetrable. Only the muscles around them tense enough to betray her, faint crow’s feet of worry radiating from their corners. “I called him as soon as I closed the door.” She’s not apologizing, merely explaining. “He is meeting old friends. The Black Chamber are having problems operating in Colorado right now. And the Golden Promise Ministries have their own police force who appear to be experiencing no such difficulties. They tried to take him at one of our safe houses. He is joining us as soon as he deals with an, ah, loose end. Maybe later tonight, maybe early tomorrow.”

I swallow. “What kind of loose end?”

“Mr. Howard, Johnny and I are external assets. The whole point of working with us is that you can later swear that you didn’t know what we were doing, that we did whatever-it-is on our own initiative.” She pauses. “Are you sure you want me to answer that question?”

I stare at her. She’s a beautiful piece of work, porcelain skin and not a hair out of place after a day of escape-and-evasion: as beautiful and deadly as a black widow. “I can’t countenance murder,” I say, with a sense that if I’m watching myself from a great distance—perhaps the witness box at the Black Assizes. “Do you understand?”

“Is it murder if it’s another of those? Like the thing you took that from?” She points at the pizza box.

“If—” I stop and force myself to take a deep breath. “If they’re possessed, that changes things. But. Minimum use of force necessary to achieve designated goals. Can we agree on that?”

She looks at me oddly. “Of course we can. Who did you think I am—Murder Incorporated?”

“One can never be too sure,” I mutter. “Sorry, sorry, I had to ask.” (Because I have dealt with people in the past whose main criticism of Murder, Inc., would be their messy inefficiency.) “Where were we?”

She sits down on the bed, cross-legged. “Motives. I don’t know for sure, but I’ve made some inferences, and then there’s this damned book.” She glances at the Bible.

“What do you think Schiller’s trying to achieve?”

“Besides the usual?” Her laughter is an abrupt bark of released tension. “Well, he’s clearly set on converting the entire planet. Isn’t that enough for you?”

“I need to know what he’s trying to achieve in the short term. Through the Prime Minister.” My arms are crossed and I’m leaning against the wall and not making eye contact: defensive body posture redux. “That’s my core mission, as I see it. It’s why we’re here. We can admit that the mission’s a wash and bug out, but if so, that’s not going to help the, the victims.” The women in the maternity unit. The pithed, god-struck men in black with their tongues half-eaten. “Come on. What do you know?”

“I don’t.” She looks frustrated. “Perhaps Johnny will have something…”

“And if not?”

“We can go back in if you dare.” She cocks her head to one side. “There are ways. Let’s say…Johnny runs into the Pinecrest police. You have a host, and so does he. We kill it and shell it, then you and he stick your tongues in them and pretend to be police, and I’m your captive. I have a glamour to provide cover against shallow inspection, and—”

“If you think I’m putting that thing in my mouth, alive or dead—”

“That’s a shame.” She stares at me with those huge, darkly unreadable eyes. “It’s a low risk approach. If we make them come after us we hand them the initiative.”

I take a deep breath. “Any other options?”

“Oh yes.” She nods at the field-expedient pentacle and its inmate sitting on the desk. “That was just the direct approach. There are indirect ones. We could try to hook up that thing and snoop on whatever or whoever powers it, to learn where it comes from. Feed it misinformation, tell it where to go to find us.”

I think for a moment. “I’ve got another idea. Is there any significant risk of them finding us here, if we stay overnight? Other than following Johnny?”

“I don’t think so. You warded this room well, I sanitized the path to your car…” She thinks for a moment. “What preparations do you need that will take so long?”

“I’ve got to phone a man about a book,” I say. “I need an hour to do some admin work. Then how about we go get some dinner? It’s going to be a long day tomorrow.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Lend me the car keys in the meantime?”

I chuck the keys her way. “Use them wisely.”

AFTER PERSEPHONE LEAVES I SIT DOWN AND THUMB THROUGH the back end of the Bible, trying to get a feel for the page count. I decide I can discount the first couple of chunks; a quick google confirms that the Old Testament, New Testament, and Apocrypha look like standard factory spec. They might have been tweaked and tuned under the hood, but I don’t have time to do more than check the table of contents. The Books of Enoch, however, aren’t part of the standard trim level package, or even the deluxe leather upholstery option with sports kit: they’re the biblical equivalent of the blue LEDs under the side skirts and the extra-loud chromed exhaust pipe. And when I get close to the end we’re off the Halfords shelves and into nitrous oxide injection territory, complete with a leak into the cabin airflow. Using my JesusPhone I find a listing of the Books of Enoch on the interwebbytubes, but it sure as hell doesn’t include chapters with titles like “The Book of Starry Wisdom,” “The Second Testament of St Enoch,” and—most intriguingly of all—“The Apocalypse Codex.”

The bumper bonus extra features aren’t particularly long, they only run to about eighty pages. But they’re typeset differently, in a different layout, and the footnotes and glosses don’t match up with anything in the front three-quarters of the book. So I place the Bible on the desk, shine the work lamp on it, and pull out the JesusPhone. Then I start photographing and flipping pages. Autofocus and five megapixels mean that just about any pocket camera these days is the equivalent of a flatbed document scanner, and a quarter of an hour later I’m stitching a bunch of image files together and converting them into a PDF. I run it through an OCR package and quickly check that it doesn’t mention certain unmentionable keywords (it doesn’t: it’s not that kind of occult text), then I take a deep breath, and do something deeply illegal and, much more importantly, quite possibly unforgivable.

I stick the PDF of the page images on a public file sharing site, then I phone Pete and Sandy at home.

Ring-ring. Ring-ring. Ring. “Wha, who—Bob? It’s one in the morning! What’s up?” Sandy sounds confused and as befuddled as I’d be if you woke me in the wee hours with a phone call. I scrunch up my eyes and wish that I believed in a god I could pray to for forgiveness.

“Sandy, is Pete awake?”

“Yes, but is it an emergency?”

“Sort of. Can I talk to him, please?”

“Hang on.” There’s a muffled noise, as of a phone being passed from one hand to another.

“Bob?” It’s Pete. He doesn’t sound very awake.

“Pete? Can we talk privately? I’ve got a problem.”

“What sort of—of course. Hold on.” There follows a period of muffled thudding as, presumably, Pete disentangles himself from his bedding and leaves Sandy to go back to sleep. “There, I’m on my own. I assume this couldn’t wait for morning?”

“It’s sort of urgent.” I pause. “What I’m going to say mustn’t go any further.”

“Cross my heart and hope to die: you know what I do for a living, right? Pastoral care a speciality, spiritual care, too, although I guess that’s not what you’re looking for…”

There is an eerie pins and needles prickling at the back of my tongue. I am going to have to watch what I say very carefully: my immortal soul is very much in danger, and I’m not speaking metaphorically. The consequences of betraying my oath of office are immediate, personal, and quite hideous.

“You’ve probably guessed that, uh, I’m not allowed to talk about my job. But that it’s a bit different from what I’m required to lead people to believe.”

The hair on the back of my neck is all but standing on end, but the ward doesn’t clamp down on me—yet. To some extent it’s driven by my own conscience, by my own knowledge of wrongdoing. And as I’m not actually planning on betraying any secrets, I still have a clean conscience. But. I’m wearing saltwater-soaked shoes and walking alongside the third rail.

“I’ve recently come into possession of an interesting document, and I badly need a sanity check. Unfortunately, the only person I know with the right background to give it to me is you.”

(Which is entirely true: while the Laundry can probably cough up a doctor of theology with a security clearance and a background in Essene apocalyptic eschatology, it might take them a couple of weeks. Whereas Pete wrote the dissertation and I’ve got him on speed dial.)

“A document.” He sounds doubtful. “And you want a sanity check.” And you got me out of bed at one in the morning.

“It’s a, a non-standard biblical text. Not your regular apocrypha. I’m having to do due diligence on people who are, uh, believers. I’d normally write them off as your regular American evangelical types, but they aren’t reading from your standard King James version. And it’s kind of urgent: I’m meeting with them in the morning.”

“You’re meeting with—” I can almost hear the audible clunk from the mechanism between his ears as his brain jolts into gear. But you work in computer support in a civil service department, he’s thinking. And almost certainly putting two plus two together and getting five, which is just fine by my oath of office, if not my conscience…“Okay, I think.”

“I’ve got a PDF of a scan of the variant bits of their Bible,” I say. “Mostly it’s the King James version plus a bunch of standard apocrypha, but this stuff is entirely different. I’m going to email you a link to it as soon as I get off the phone. It runs to about eighty pages. If you can take a peek and email me back, what I need to know is: If you start out from a bog-standard Pentecostalist position and add these extra books, what does it do to their doctrine and outlook? What do they believe and what are they going to want to do?”

“That’s horribly vague! I—” He swallows. “You really want an opinion from me?”

“Pete.” I pause, feeling like a complete shit. “You’re the guy with the PhD in whacked-out millenarian sects from the first century, right? Work could probably put me in touch with someone else, but they’d take weeks. And I’ve got to do—business—with these people tomorrow.”

“What time tomorrow?”

“I’m in America. Mountain Time Zone. Tomorrow morning—call it three p.m., your time.”

Pete whistles quietly. “You’re in luck; I was planning on spending the morning working on a sermon.”

“I’ll email you that link,” I promise. “Text me when you’ve got it, then go back to bed?”

“Sure. God bless.”

“And you,” I say automatically. Then he hangs up, and I get the shakes. I haven’t blown my oath of office—I’m still upright and breathing, not smoldering and crispy around the edges—but I’ve just bent it creatively. I haven’t told Pete about the Laundry, but at a minimum I’ve suggested to him that I’m not just a boring IT guy, that my job takes me to strange places and involves dealing with very odd people. If the Operational Oversight—no, scratch that. External Assets doesn’t normally answer to them. But if Gerald Lockhart decides I’ve exceeded my authority…well, he probably will, but it is easier to ask forgiveness than to request permission, especially if the gambit works. It’s possible I’ll be up before the Auditors again. And in the absolute worst case, the Laundry can probably find a use for a Vicar with a PhD in Unmentionable Mythology. They aren’t going to be motivated to dump on Pete. I hope. Not with Pete and Sandy expecting a kid. Not because I’ve gone and fucked up and dragged my work home with me to smear around my social circle.

I feel soiled. I hope I’m not wrong about the significance of that Apocalypse Codex. It would suck to be hauled up before the Black Assizes. It would suck even harder to have gotten my friends into trouble because of a false positive. Mo would never forgive me; worse, neither would I.

I’M BUSY TRACING A SECOND CONTAINMENT GRID ON THE pizza box lid containing Crusty McNightmare when my mobile rings. It’s Persephone. “Yes?” I say.

“I’m in the car park. Dinner’s on you.”

I glance at the gray, many-legged thing snoozing on the oily corrugated cardboard. It’s quiescent, but I know better than to poke it—I don’t want to risk breaking the ward. The primary pentacle serves much the same function as a Faraday cage: as long as it’s locked down this way, whoever owns it can’t connect to it and see through its sensory organs. But if it’s locked down like that, I can’t use it to feed misinformation to said owner. Hence the second, outer ward I’m working on.

Once it’s in place I can set up a bridge between the inner and outer containments to let it phone home while I snoop on its communication and introduce material of my own: a man-in-the-middle (or, more accurately, a thing-in-the-middle) attack. But it’s a delicate job, I haven’t actually tested this particular configuration in the lab, and there’s no way I’m getting it down before dessert. So I double-check the outer diagram for flaws in the logic, ensure that it’s fully powered up—rechargeable batteries and a frequency generator disguised as a pocket digital multimeter take care of that—and grab my coat. On the way out the door I grab my shoulder bag, complete with phone, camera, and passport; you can never be too prepared.

By the time I get to the car park night is falling, and with it a light dusting of snow. There’s a convertible drawn up near the entrance, headlights on and roof up. I walk around the passenger side and Persephone pops the door. “Get in,” she says. I obey and I barely have time to get my seat belt fastened before she’s moving, fishtailing into the road with a harsh scrabble of grit and ice under the wheels.

“What have you been up to?”

“I got you a laptop.” She gestures at the back seat. “And I bought ammunition at Walmart. Then I went for a drive, up north. I tried I-76. Ran into a diversion and checkpoint out past E-470. So I drove around the beltway until I hit I-70. Same deal. The north- and eastbound interstates all detour back into the city. The airport is shut,” she adds. “I double-checked in case you have no-fly cooties. They gave me some crap about a frontal system coming down from Canada that’s due to dump a meter of snow on us overnight. It’s all lies: I checked the NOAA aviation weather reports and NOTAMs. There’s a front coming, but it’s not carrying snow. So I tried a couple of general aviation fields, even a helicopter taxi service, but they’re all grounded.”

“But—” I stop dead.

“I drove out to Meadow Lake Airport,” she adds. “I went in two offices. The front desk staff were all infected.”

I tense. “How did you handle it?”

“There was nothing to handle. I didn’t go in and say, Hi, I’m the Big Bad your pastor told you about and I want to hire an escape plane. One air taxi firm have an enquiry from a dentist’s wife called Lonnie Williams on file, and a helicopter company have a phone number for a lawyer’s secretary who is setting up a day trip to the Grand Canyon for an office party. Unless Schiller mobilizes the entire population of Colorado to hunt us door-to-door with torches and pitchforks, I left them no leads.”

“They’ll be looking for—” I stop. She’s not driving the stolen pickup, and somehow while I haven’t been looking she’s changed her clothing and hairstyle from off-shift nursing scrubs to suburban American soccer mom. In jeans and a skiing jacket, ponytail and sunglasses, she’s just about unrecognizable as the rich socialite Schiller’s people will remember. Still glamorous, though. “You’ve got paperwork for that cover?”

She nods. “I probably have more experience of escape and evasion than you do.” She checks the mirrors and slows, turns towards a downtown thickening of concrete and flags. “I thought perhaps we might try a small brasserie I’ve heard good things about. Their Kobe steaks are said to be excellent.”

Kobe beef? The soccer mom is trying to upgrade to premier league WAG territory. My wallet cringes: despite Lockhart’s scandalously liberal approach to expenses I’m probably going to be called upon to justify this in writing, then cough up for it out of my own pay packet. (Unless I can convince the small-A auditor that Kobe is a kind of cheeseburger…) “If you insist.”

“I insist.” Is that an impish gleam behind her shades? “We are not flying out tomorrow, Mr. Howard. Better get a full meal while the meal is to be had.”

“What about trains? Driving?”

“Amtrak runs one train daily to Salt Lake City or Omaha, it takes a day either way, and they insist on checking ID. Driving—it’s possible, but we’d have to cut cross-country and run past those road blocks. I do not advise it: we would be too obvious, even if we didn’t get stuck in a snowdrift and die of hypothermia. If they are infiltrating the general aviation companies, what about the highway patrol?”

I shiver, and not from cold. “You think Schiller’s locked down half the state?”

We slow, and Persephone pulls in at the roadside. “Yes. The real question is how soon he’ll be in a position to extend it to the entire continental United States.”

As she kills the engine I try to force my brain to shift gears. It’s painful. “Back up. You think he’s organized a total lock-down, blocking escape by air and probably by road, because of us? And he’s going to what?”

“It’s not just us, and I have a very bad feeling.” She opens her door and climbs out. I join her on the pavement. “We know he has ambitions.” She heads for the parking meter. “We know he has a powerful sponsor, and a supply of these parasites, and a messianic desire to bring his salvation to everyone. The Omega Course I attended—it wasn’t the first, or even the tenth. He’s been saving the souls of the rich and powerful for many years, working his way up. He must know that the higher he goes, the greater the risk of exposure. So if he is trying to suborn governments at the highest level, he must be nearly ready to move. And now something has just come up that convinced him to bring his plans forward. Possibly us, I fear.”

My stomach rumbles, but I’m not sure I’m hungry. It feels as if Persephone is dredging these fears out of the depths of my own imagination. “He won’t be doing this on a whim. Whatever he’s planning is close enough to completion that he can’t back off and try again later. At the same time, he thinks he can hold the lid down for long enough to—how long can you lock down a city without anyone noticing, anyway? A few hours? A couple of days?”

Persephone shoves quarters into the meter. “If he can conjure up a weather anomaly that matches the weather warning, he might manage a week-long clampdown. And nobody would question what had happened afterwards—especially if we disappear in the middle of it.” Light snowflakes swirl in her misting breath. “Winter is not over yet; there can be savage cold snaps.”

“Where’s he going to get the bandwidth to create an entropy sink that big?” Then my eyes widen involuntarily because I’m having an unwelcome flashback to something that happened more than a decade ago in Amsterdam.

YOU’VE SEEN THE SETTING IN A THOUSAND GANGSTER MOVIES: the unfurnished room in an abandoned house, empty but for the wooden chair in the middle of the floor, centered in a pool of light beneath an electric lantern hanging from the low, paper-peeling ceiling. A man sits on the chair, his arms cuffed behind the back and his ankles tied to the legs.

In the movies he’d be a good guy, a cop or an investigator perhaps. And the figure in the shadows, the interrogator preparing to ask him questions, would be a killer and a thug. In that respect, this scene is a movie cliché.

The interrogator walks up behind the slumped figure in the chair and grabs a handful of hair. He pulls the prisoner’s head back, and with his free hand he smears a ball of cotton wool and baby oil across the prisoner’s forehead.

“You can wake up now.”

The prisoner snorts incoherently, coughs, drools, and twitches as awareness returns in fits and starts. It’s a messy process, never as neat and clean-cut as cinematography portrays. But the prisoner is waking from sleep unnaturally enforced by the ward the interrogator has just erased from his forehead. There’s no concussion or intracranial bleeding to complicate things here.

“Would you like a glass of water?”

The victim coughs again and tries to look round at the speaker. Chooses the other direction. Begins to nod, then stops, suspicious.

The interrogator produces a bottle of water and a paper cup. Still standing behind the victim’s chair, he half-fills the cup. He holds it in front of the man’s mouth and tilts, slowly, taking pains to stay out of his prisoner’s field of vision.

After a moment, the prisoner sucks greedily, gulping down the contents of the cup. There is no Mickey Finn moment, no dramatic double take: it’s just water. The interrogator re-fills the cup and lets his subject empty it once more before he walks away and deposits it at the other side of the room.

“Do you know who I am?” he asks conversationally.

“Yuh”—cough—“you’re in too deep.” Arm muscles tense, come up against handcuffs. “Let me go now and lessee if’n we can sort this out so you get a day in court, huh? Because if you don’t—”

There is a scraping of metal on concrete. The interrogator drags up a chair behind the prisoner and sits, just outside the geometric design sketched on the bare boards around the other’s chair. The prisoner, uncertain, trails off.

“Do go on, son.” The interrogator sounds amused rather than afraid.

“Hss.” There’s an odd undertone to the sibilant.

“You can stop pretending.” The interrogator leans forward. “Because I know what you are, minion.”

The prisoner’s voice shifts: “You should join us. Life eternal awaits the brethren of the chosen, perdition and damnation the apostate. For I am the light and the way, sayeth the Lord—”

The interrogator listens to the godbabble for a couple of minutes. It has a nice stirring ring to it, sonorous phrases honed by centuries of preachers: the shock and awe programmed into generations of believers by their priests. But it falls on willfully deaf ears, for though the interrogator grew up thoroughly churched he has long since shed the naive belief in the trinity and the gospels and the crucifixion and the resurrection and the Church triumphant. He knows the truth, knows the creed of the One True Religion, the nature of its worshipers and what passes for its deities.

Right now what interests the interrogator is the state of his prisoner’s mind. Because it’s certainly not what it ought to be under these circumstances—knocked unconscious and brought round in a situation designed to intimidate, a situation familiar from a thousand entertainments and notorious for ending badly—indeed, the prisoner’s attitude is positively abnormal. A normal reaction might run the gamut from panic, fear, and offers of cooperation, through self-pity and ingratiation to anger, even defiant threats. A well-prepared subject might be grimly committed to silence. But a small-town cop accustomed to the casual exercise of force-backed authority will not be well-prepared for capture and debriefing; he’ll bluster or break. So: first evangelism, then…what?

After a while, the prisoner begins to repeat his offers. The interrogator waits a minute to be sure, then moves on to the next stage: he tosses a small object onto the floor before his prisoner. It’s about the size of a severed human tongue, a silvery banded carapace or husk of chitin, somewhat flattened by repeated encounters with a rifle butt. It sparks and sizzles briefly as it touches the ward. “You can stop now,” he says in a steady tone that gives no hint of his own state of mind. “Just put me through to head office.”

The prisoner falls silent. Then the light flickers.

“Faithlesssss…” There is little humanity in the prisoner’s voice, but an odd sharp clicking as of dozens of chitinous legs tapping against the teeth in a dead man’s jawbone, a buzzing as of the wings of a thousand flying insects.

“Do you remember me?” Johnny’s tone is light, almost mocking. “Father?”

I’M HAVING A GUILT DREAM—SOMETHING ABOUT RESCUING A dead man from a burning hotel and hoping he won’t eat my face as I climb backwards down a ladder, then finding that he’s got no tongue and I’ve suffocated him by accident—when my phone rings. I roll over, nearly strangling myself in the sheets as I grab for it. It’s showing an international call, no caller-ID. “Hello?” I see the illuminated digits of the bedside radio: it’s a quarter past five.

“Bob?” It’s Pete. “Bob, is that you?”

“Ye—yeah.” I sit up and wince, swing my legs over the side of the bed. It’s dark. “Returning the favor.”

“I looked at the manuscript you sent me.” Pete sounds odd. It’s hard to tell over a mobile phone, but I could swear he’s upset about something.

“Great.” I summon up some false cheeriness as I shuffle towards the curtained window. “What did you make of it?”

“You said you’re doing business with people who, who have bibles containing this material?” Yes, Pete is worried. “I’d advise against that, Bob. I mean, assuming your business has anything to do with their beliefs, obviously; if you’re just buying office supplies from them that’s probably safe, but…” he trails off.

I yawn hugely, and peel back a corner of the curtain with one pinkie. Outside it’s dark and cold, but flakes of snow are falling just beyond the glass. Very large snowflakes. I let the curtain fall. “How non-mainstream are they?” I ask. “If you had to describe them to a colleague, what would you call them?”

“I’d”—Pete clears his throat—“I’d call them dangerously loopy heretics who are well down the slippery slope to hell, Bob. A hell of their own creation, even if you don’t believe in the literal sulfur-and-brimstone variety presided over by a big red guy with horns and cloven hooves. Which these people very likely do, but they think they’re on the side of the angels, which makes them doubly bad. They’re outside the Nicene Creed and they’re not actually Christians, although they think they are—like the Mormons. But while the Book of Mormon is just a nineteenth-century fabrication there’s stuff in here that’s, uh, disturbing. Very disturbing, Bob. The marginalia—are they yours?”

“Marginalia?” I ask before I can stop myself, then bite my tongue.

“Not yours?” Pete sounds relieved.

“Not mine. Er, I don’t think I’m supposed to have been allowed to have access to the book. If you don’t mind keeping that under your hat…?”

“Naughty, naughty! Well, that’s a relief because it means you haven’t turned batshit crazy on us since dinner last Tuesday. Mo will be relieved. In fact—”

“Pete.” I yawn again, but my head’s clearing. “What do they believe?”

“What? Oh. Hang on, let me check my notes.” I wince, but there’s no helping it: Pete runs on paper, so there will be an evidence trail of this unofficial consultation. Damn. “Let’s see. We have a bunch of foundational mythology about the Nephilim, an alternate creation myth to Genesis—that’s not so new. We then have a line of prophets descended from Adam by way of Lilith, not Eve, who are able to talk to these supernatural beings, angels or demons. And a couple of confused allegorical stories, sort of like the Book of Job only not as upbeat and cheery. But then there’s the new stuff. An entirely new apocalypse that devotes some verses to denouncing St John the Divine as a charlatan—that, right there, tells you we’re in uncharted territory. Between you and me, that conclusion is mainstream among serious biblical scholars—but it’s not something you generally run across among the literalists. And then the authors construct a bizarre eschatology around the image of a dead-but-sleeping god, whose followers on Earth will receive their reward in heaven if they conduct a series of purification rituals and—it says bind—enough converts to resurrect him? That’s literal heresy, Bob, insofar as it goes entirely against the two pillars of Christian doctrine, which are that the path to salvation is through voluntarily accepting Jesus as your personal savior, and that he’ll return when he’s good and ready. It’s not right.” There is a rising note of disquiet in his voice. “There are other hints that something is wrong: lots of elaborate gibberish about the ritual of summoning that requires the participation of two pure-blood descendants of the sons of Lilith. Lots of references to the sacrifice of Abraham, pronouncements of anathema upon the followers of false churches, imprecatory prayers and declarations that anyone who isn’t within the circle of salvation is going to regret it, that kind of thing. Who are these people, Bob? What are you doing with them?”

I stare at the thing in the pizza box on my desk. “I can’t tell you that.”

“They’re dangerous,” he insists. “Bob? If they invite you to one of their church services? You really don’t want to go—”

“I got that already.”

“No! You’re an outsider, Bob. There’s this stuff about binding converts. It sounds like some sort of coercion to me, and whoever owned this Bible was very keen on underlining passages relating to it. And stuff about making the unclean vine bear clean fruit whether it will or no. There’s a strong stench of the unholy about this book, Bob. Bob? Are you listening?”

I close my eyes. “Pete. You know damn well I’m an atheist.” He does, and he forgives me for it because he’s Pete. Even though it’s a lie; I’m not an atheist these days (even though I wish I was). “I’m not going to visit these folks’ church, either.” (That is a lie.) “But I have to prepare a report on, on their reliability. Deadline’s later today. You’ve been a real help. Is there any chance you can send me your notes?”

“They’re on paper…”

“Use your phone; photograph each page and send it to me as an MMS. I’ll pay you back. It’s really urgent.” A plausible white lie jumps into my mouth and is out before I can swallow it: “I’ve got to put the word out before they land a contract to set up half a dozen faith schools.”

“Oh dear! No, that wouldn’t do at all. But I’ve only got six pages. It’s handwritten, they’re not very legible…”

“Just send them. Please?”

“All right.” He pauses. “God bless, and take care.” Then he ends the call.

I open my eyes again, and take a deep breath. I really hope I haven’t got one of our last remaining innocent friends into deep trouble.

Then I peel back the curtain and let my eyes adjust. It’s snowing heavily now, and a thick rind of spongy white covers the car park, turning the vehicles into hunchbacked white boulders. The snowflakes are big, and they fall fast. At a guess there’s upward of five centimeters down there already. I shiver, check the time, and go back to bed for an hour or two.

But I can’t get to sleep again.

I don’t like snow.

Years ago now, when I was young and foolish and ignorant, I got a ringside view of what happens when it snows for forty years. Or rather, of what happens when a team of mad necromancers use a certain very unpleasant ritual to summon up what they mistakenly called an ice giant, a monster out of Norse mythology who they hoped would freeze the Red Army in its tracks and secure victory for the Thousand Year Reich.

Well, in the short term their plan worked. Predators from dying universes trump T-34 tanks and B-29 bombers. But their triumph was short-lived: consuming energy from the structure of spacetime, the monster grew and grew and…well, when we went through the gate in Amsterdam to shut it down, there wasn’t a lot left. A layer of dirty carbon dioxide snow beneath unblinking, reddening stars. A view down a hillside towards a blue-tinged lake of liquid oxygen, a crust of solid nitrogen slowly growing across it. A gibbous moon carved with Hitler’s saturnine portrait rising behind the battlements of a dead SS castle…

Like I said, I don’t like snow—especially the supernatural kind.