The Fuller Memorandum

15. DEAD MAN WALKING

THERE IS A HALF-EATEN SANDWICH SITTING ON A BREADBOARD IN the kitchen, and an empty milk carton next to the electric kettle, and to the witness in the corner of the room the sandwich is a thing of horror.

Mo stares at it for almost a minute. Then she reaches out very carefully and lifts the upper slice of bread. Lettuce, sliced tomato, and either chicken or turkey—not ham. She breathes in deeply, shudders for a moment, then moves on. Battery farmed and de-beaked chicken, not properly stunned at the slaughterhouse—that would account for the shadow in her left goggle. No need to remember the tunnel in Amsterdam, nor where it led . . .

Behold: a typical London family home. Recently renovated kitchen, dining room with French doors opening onto a patio in the garden, lounge with bay window out front, staircase in hall, under-stair closet, side door leading into garage, bedrooms and bathroom upstairs. Why the creeping dread, then?

Mo stalks the lounge like a shadow of judgment, violin raised and ready. There’s a row of books on a shelf above the plasma TV. Management for Dummies, The Power of Positive Thinking, The Book of Dead Names—she pauses. “What the fuck?” she says, very quietly. She’s seen that one before, in the unclassified section of the archives: it’s the Sir Richard Burton translation of Al Azif, the source text referred to by the mad pulp writer of Providence, who renamed it Necronomicon. It’s not of any great significance—it’s mostly the deranged babbling of a schizophrenic poet who’d smoked far too much hashish—but it’s as out of place in a suburban living room as a main battle tank on the high street.

There’s a rumble outside, as of a heavy truck. Mo glances at the window in time to see the blue strobes flickering. A knot of tension leaves her shoulders. She steps into the hallway, towards the front door, and freezes.

Lying on the carpet before her is a runner. The rug is handwoven with an intricate mandala. To an unequipped civilian it might look harmless, but in Mo’s goggles the buzzing, humming tunnel of lies flickering with greenish light is unmistakable. She kneels beside it, inspecting its woolen edge. Very carefully, she lowers her bow across the strings of her instrument. Her fingers slide on the fretboard, leaving a fine sheen of skin oils and blood behind as the strings light up, cutting brilliant blue gashes in the air above the mandala. She plays a phrase that trails down into a wailing groan, then up into an eerie scream. Then she plays it again, louder. The rug smolders. Once more, with emphasis: and there is a bang, as the binding between the woven wool carpet and the place it connected to gives way.

The cloud of acrid smoke from the rug sends Mo into a coughing fit. An unseen smoke detector starts to scream as she stumbles forward and yanks the front door open. “In here!” she calls to the firemen walking up the driveway. As the first of them reaches her she holds out an arm: “I’ve checked the ground floor. There was a welcome mat, but I defused it: I think it’s clear now, but let me check out the stairs.”

“Understood, ma’am.” Howe turns to face his men as Mo starts to check the staircase for surprises. “Wait while the lady checks the staircase. Scary, secure the garage. Len, backyard. Joe, show Dr. Angleton to the living room.”

Ten minutes later, Mo joins Angleton downstairs. He’s sitting in a floral print armchair with a book in his lap, looking for all the world like someone else’s visiting grandfather. He closes it and looks at her mildly. “What have you found?” he asks.

“Nothing good.” She peels her goggles off and perches on the edge of the sofa, then begins to return her instrument to its case. Wiping down the bloody finger-marks on the fretboard with a cloth: “Who lived here?”

“That’s an interesting question. Would you be surprised if I told you these are designated premises?”

Mo’s fingers stop moving. Her eyes grow wide. “No. Really?”

“It’s very interesting: the Plumbers don’t seem to be aware that they’ve signed off Safe House Bravo Delta Two as clean without inspecting it. It’s assigned to one of our managers, by the way: SSO 6(A) Iris Carpenter. She’s lived here for some years.” Angleton’s cheek twitches. “Husband and university-age daughter, a typical happy family. The family that prays together stays together: or preys, perhaps? Bob was reporting to her, and she was on BLOODY BARON. We’ve found our mole.”

“But the back patio—”

Angleton closes his book. It is, of course, the Burton. “Yes,” he says, cramming paragraphs of foreboding into the monosyllable.

“There’s a bedroom upstairs,” Mo says shakily. “The window frame is nailed shut, the door locks from outside, and there’s a foam mattress on the floor with bloodstains on it. There’s a monstrous thaum field, echoes of violent death—recently. And a dirty plate.”

“Is that so?” Angleton carefully removes his spectacles, then extracts a cloth from his suit pocket. He begins to polish the lenses.

Boots thunder on the staircase. A moment later, a fireman bursts into the living room. “Sir!” He’s holding something shiny in his right hand.

“What is it?” Angleton asks irritably, holding his glasses up to the light.

“Give that here.” Mo reaches for it. “It’s Bob’s new phone.” She stands up, holding it close: “Where did you find it?”

“It was under the chest of drawers in the small room. Oh, and there’s a body in the garage—not one of ours.” Warrant Officer Howe looks gloomy: “We only missed them by an hour or so. Judging by the bloodstains and the body—still damp and still warm.”

Mo scuffs her right foot on the floor in frustration. “They’ve been one jump ahead of us all along, because they’ve been sitting in on our investigations, inside our decision loop. That’s where the Dower report went. It’s where that missing memo went. They’ve got Bob—what are we going to do?”

Angleton slides his spectacles back on. “I’d have thought that was obvious,” he says mildly: “We’ve got to find him.”

“How?”

Angleton stands up. “That’s your department. You’ve got his ward, his phone, his laptop, if you’ve got any sense you’ve got an item of recently worn underwear ...”

Mo nods jerkily. “He was here. If there’s a trail—” She turns to Howe: “The foam mattress, with the blood. Have you taken a sample?” Howe holds up an evidence bag, its contents black and squishy. “That’ll do.”

“Back to the truck.” Angleton waves them out of the living room, ahead of him. “I hope we’re in time.”

“What do you think they’ll do to him?” Mo’s anxiety is glaringly obvious.

“They’ve got the memorandum.” Angleton shrugs. “I think they’ll try to invoke the Eater of Souls and bind it to Bob’s flesh.”

“They—” Mo glares at him. “Bob said you gave him a fake!” she accuses.

“No, just a photocopy.” Angleton’s ironic smile is ghastly to behold. “The Eater of Souls is already taken: if they try the rite, they won’t get what they think they’re asking for. And I will admit, I didn’t expect them to make it this far. I’m not infallible, girl.”

A minute later, the driver switches on the blue lights and pulls out into the road. Behind the departing truck the house’s front door gapes open, as if ready to welcome the next official visitors. But the victims under the patio will have to wait a little longer.

OKAY, SO I WAS WRONG ABOUT THE A-TEAM AND THE B-TEAM.

And I was wrong about the cultists, and what they believe.

Assuming Iris is telling the truth, there’s an angle to view things from which their actions are, if not justifiable, then at least understandable. Poor little misunderstood mass murderers, with only the best of intentions at heart. And their hearts are pure for the goal they seek is the only one any sane—

Stop it. That’s Stockholm syndrome talking, the tendency of abductees to start seeing things from their kidnappers’ viewpoint. Just stop it.

They’re frog-marching me along a tunnel towards a summoning grid where they plan to turn me into a host for a demonic intrusion from another universe, and my subconscious is trying to see things from their point of view? I’m confused—

It’s a broad tunnel, low-ceilinged. Every five meters or so there stands a cultist, male or female figures in hooded black robes who hold lamps, the better to illuminate the whitewashed brick walls and the niches therein. The niches have occupants; they’ve been standing there for a long time. There’s a soft, dry breeze blowing—I’ve got no idea how they manage the ventilation—and some of the inhabitants are pretty well preserved. The way the skin shrinks across the skull, drawing the shriveled lips back to reveal yellowed fangs and blackened tongues, almost as if they’re screaming. The dead outnumber the living here, all dressed in dusty Victorian or Edwardian finery. If Iris has her way, I’ll be joining them soon—or worse. When I signed the Act there was a binding promise placed on my soul: the Laundry doesn’t like its staff to leave ghosts and revenants behind to face interrogation. No afterlife echoes for me.

We pass a rack of wooden shelves, bowed with age beneath piles of skulls and bundles of femurs tagged with faded labels, and pause at another oak door. One of the cultists—do I recognize Julian the shotgun-toting cannibal under that hood?—steps forward with a key. My heart’s pounding and I feel feverish, and to top it all I’m so scared I’m in danger of losing bladder control, like an innocent man being dragged to his execution. I’m also angry. Hang on to that anger, I tell myself. Then I start trying to string phrases together in Enochian, in my own head.

If they’re determined to kill me, then fuck ’em—I’m going to go out with a bang.

The dead. I can feel them pressing in around us, outside the wan light of the LED torches. Empty vessels waiting, entropic sinkholes of randomized information, all charged up with nowhere to go. These dead bear no love for the living among them: followers of a ghastly fertility cult, the spawner of unclean things—now dead and withered, they lie here where once they conducted strange bacchanalian ceremonies, watching while the austere puritans of the Black Brotherhood desecrate their tombs and reconsecrate their altars. They can’t possibly be happy with the new tenants, can they?

To summon up a possessive entity takes a Dho-Nha geometry curve, a sacrifice of blood, and an iteration through certain theorems. (Not to mention a power source, but I’m sitting right on top of the necromantic equivalent of the Dinorwig stored hydropower plant: if I can’t turn the lights on with that, I might as well give up.) I know this shit: it’s years since I first did it. I can just about visualize the curve, and if I try to flex my right arm—oh gods, that hurts—is that a trickle of blood I feel? I start to subvocalize, trying to hold a warped wireframe image in my mind’s eye: One plus not-one equals null; let the scaling coefficient be the square root of—

The door is open. How big is this place, anyway? The Ancient Order of Wheelwrights must have been rolling in cash. The sacrificial cortège begins to move again, and now the cultists around me begin to sing a curious dirge-like song. We’re descending across broad steps—almost two meters wide, topped with dusty mattresses to either side—towards a central depression beneath a low, vaulted ceiling. The skullfuckers probably used this space for their orgies, more than a century ago; it’s haunted by the ghostly stink of bodily fluids. We’ve been brought up to think of the Victorians as prudes, horrified by a glimpse of table leg, but that myth was constructed in the 1920s out of whole cloth, to give their rebellious children an excuse to point and say, “We invented sex!” The reality is stranger: the Victorians were licentious in the extreme behind closed doors, only denying everything in public in the pursuit of probity.

Now the cultists around me are breathing faster, raising their voices higher, trying to drown out the phantom sighs and moans of a thousand dead and withered seducers. I try and keep to my own chant, but it’s hard to focus on suicide when all around you the ghosts of gluttony sleep so lightly.

There is a huge bed at the center of the well of mattresses: a four-poster, canopied in rich black brocade, ebony uprights supporting a drapery as ornately swagged as any Victorian hearse, with a huge chest sitting in front of its footboard. The bed alone is wide enough to accommodate half a dozen—not sleepers, I realize—although only two bodies lie there now, curled in fetal death, close to one side.

As the singers continue, two of Iris’s minions walk up to the bed. They raise the quilt piled against the footboard, covering the mummified occupants; then they take hold of cords dangling from the base of each post and attach manacles to them.

“No,” I say. “No!” Then I try to bite the hand that’s reaching in front of my mouth with a gag.

“Mummy said not to hurt you unnecessarily,” Jonquil explains. “So open wide, or—” Her other hand grabs my crotch and squeezes. I gasp in pain. Bitch. “Good boy!”

When they dump me on the counterpane a cloud of stinking dust billows out in all directions, hanging so thick in the air that I spasm and sneeze. It takes six of them to hold me down and fasten the manacles, and I nearly faint when they extend my right arm—the morphine must be wearing off. Everything blurs for a few seconds. I look up at the inside of the canopy over the bed, and it seems to me as if I’ve seen it before—seen it in my mind’s eye a minute ago, in fact.

This isn’t a bed: it’s an altar. It used to belong to a fertility cult. It’s been used for sex magic. What do I know about sex magic, and revenants, and summonings? Think!

The chorus take up positions around the bed, continuing their chant; Iris walks around it slowly, tracing a design using a small fortune in granulated silver tipped from an antique powder horn. Then she walks to the chest at the foot of the bed and waits while two more cultists produce the varied tools and ingredients for a summoning: knives, mirrors, unpleasantly molded black candles, a laptop computer, and bookshelf speakers. She is out of my sight most of the time, unless I lift my head—it’s hard—but I gradually realize something else: she’s using the chest at the foot of . . . the original altar, as her own summoning altar. They’ve put me on the other cult’s summoning grid.

Iris is an SSO 6(A)—middle management in the administrative branch—because she’s not actually very talented at magic. And I’m in the position of a man, sentenced to hang, whose inexperienced executioners have temporarily sat him in the electric chair while they work out how to tie a noose. Except magic doesn’t work like that. My shoulders begin to shake. I try to get a grip on myself. A few seconds pass. I open my eyes and stare at the headboard, and flex my right arm until I nearly black out. Then, when I’m awake again, I start to subvocalize again, repeating the black theorem I started outside the door to this place.

Iris begins to chant, in Aramaic I think—something containing disturbingly familiar names. I tune her out and focus on my own liquid, gurgling subvocalization.

They strapped me to the electric chair, but they didn’t notice I was wearing a suicide belt . . .

A BLACK BMW CRUISES DOWN A TREE - LINED COUNTRY LANE IN the late evening dusk. To one side, there’s a fence, behind which trees block out the view. To the other side, there’s a two-meter-high brick wall, the masonry old and crumbling, with trees behind it—but spaced more widely than the woods opposite. A black minivan follows the BMW saloon, which has slowed to well below the national speed limit.

“It’s around here, somewhere,” says the driver, frowning at the brightly glowing rectangle of card on his dash.

“It’s getting weaker,” says Panin. “I think”—he glances sidelong out of the window—“our man is on the other side of that wall.”

At just that moment, the wall falls away from the road, as a driveway opens out. Dmitry needs no urging to turn into it; the trailing minivan overshoots, but the road is empty, and its driver reverses back up to the drive.

There’s a gatehouse, like that of a stately home, and a black cast-iron gate topped with spikes. There are no lights in the house, and the gate is chained shut. Panin points at it. “Get that open.”

“Sir!” The front seat passenger gets out and approaches the gate. It takes him less than a minute to crack the padlock and unwrap the chain; he waves the small convoy through, then leans in the BMW’s open door as it creeps alongside. “Do you want it closing or securing, sir?”

“Both.” The guard disappears again, the car door closing as the driver slowly accelerates along what appears to be a narrow and unlit wood-land road. The driver spares him a glance in the wing mirror. He’s the lucky man: all he has to do is stand guard over a gate tonight. What could go wrong?

“Brookwood cemetery,” Panin says quietly. He uses a pen torch to read his gazetteer. “The London necropolis, built in the nineteenth century. Eight square kilometers of graves and memorial chapels. Who would have thought it?” He clicks his tongue quietly and puts the torch away.

“What do you want me to do, sir?” asks Dmitry.

“Drive. Headlights off. Follow the card until you see a chapel ahead of you, then pull over.”

Dmitry nods, and switches off the headlights. The BMW has an infrared camera, projecting an image on the windscreen: he drives slowly. Behind them, the minivan douses its lights. Its driver has no such built-in luxuries—but military night-vision goggles are an adequate substitute.

Panin pulls a walkie-talkie from the back of the seat in front of him and keys it. There’s an answering burst of static.

“Rook One to Knight One. Closing on board now. We’ll dismount before proceeding. Over.”

“Knight One, understood, over.”

The big saloon ghosts along the winding way, past tree-shadowed gravestones and monuments that loom out of the darkness and fade behind with increasing frequency. Then it slows. Dmitry has spotted a car parked ahead, nearside wheels on the grassy verge, its tires and exhaust glowing luminous by infrared: it hasn’t been there long.

“That will be the target,” says Panin.

Dmitry kills the engine, and they coast to a silent halt. Doors open. Panin walks around the BMW, to stand behind it as the minivan pulls up behind. More doors open. Men climb out of the minivan: wiry men, clad in dark fatigues and balaclava helmets, moving fast. They deploy around the vehicles, weapons ready. Panin pulls his own goggles on over his thinning hair and flicks the switch. Then he drags a tiny, grotesque matrioshka doll on a loop of hemp string from one pocket and holds it high. Seen by twilight it appears to have a beard: and the beard is rippling. “Wards, everyone,” he says softly. “This is the target. Clear it. Spare none but the English agent—and don’t spare him either, if there’s any doubt.” He slides the loop of string over his head. “Sergeant Murametz, this is your show now.”

Murametz nods, then waves his men towards the building they can dimly discern in the distance. The Spetsnaz vanish into the night and shadows, searching for guards. Dmitry turns to his boss. “Sir—what now?”

“Now—we wait.” Panin frowns and checks his watch. “I hope we got here in time,” he murmurs. “We must finish before James and his men arrive.”

ANGLETON TURNS HIS HEAD SIDEWAYS TO WATCH MO. SHE LEANS against her seat back in the control room of the OCCULUS truck, eyes closed and face drawn. She clutches the violin case with both hands, as if it’s a lifesaver; the fingers of her left hand look bruised.

“I’m not infallible,” he repeats quietly.

She doesn’t open her eyes, but she shakes her head. “I didn’t say you were.”

(Up front, Major Barnes—who is navigating by means of a simple contagion link Angleton established for him—tells the driver to take the second left exit from a roundabout. The truck sways alarmingly, then settles on its suspension as it accelerates away.)

“I had a long list of suspects. She was very low down.”

“Angleton,” Mo says gently, “just shut up. To err is human.”

“It seems I have not been truly myself for a long time,” he says, barely whispering, a dry, papery sound like files shuffling in a dead document archive.

Mo is quiet for a long time. “Do you want to be yourself?” she asks, finally.

“It would be less—limiting.” He pauses for a few seconds. “Sometimes self-imposed limits make life more interesting, though.”

The engine roars as the truck accelerates up a gradient.

“What would you do, if you weren’t limited?”

“I would be terrible.” Angleton doesn’t smile. “You would look at me and your blood would freeze.” Something moves behind the skin of his face, as if the pale parchment is a thin layer stretched between the real world and something underneath it, something inhuman. “I have done terrible things,” he murmurs.

“We all do, eventually. Dying is terrible. So is killing. But I’ve killed people and survived. And as for dying—you don’t have to live with yourself afterwards.”

“Ah, but you can die. Have you considered what it might be like to be . . . undying?”

She opens her eyes, at that, and looks at him coldly. “Pick an innocent, if you’re looking to put the frighteners on someone.”

“You misunderstand.” Angleton’s eyes are luminous in the dark of the cab. “I can’t die, as long as I am bound to this flesh. Have you ever longed for death, girl? Have you ever yearned for it?”

Mo shakes her head. “What are you getting at?” she demands.

“I can feel my end. It’s still some distance away, but I can feel it. It’s coming for me, sometime soon.” He subsides. “So you’d better be ready to manage without me,” he adds, a trifle sourly.

Mo looks away: through the windscreen, at the onrushing darkness of the motorway, broken only by cats’ eyes and the headlight glare of oncoming cars on the other carriageway. “I hope we get there in time,” she murmurs. “Otherwise you’ll have to do more than die if you want me to forgive you for losing Bob.”

MY ARM HURTS, AND I’M FADING IN AND OUT OF CONSCIOUSNESS. There’s a foul taste in my mouth but I can’t spit it out because of the gag. Iris is singing. Her voice is a strangled falsetto, weird swooping trills that don’t seem to follow the chord progressions of any musical style I’m familiar with. I’m tied to an altar between two long-dead corpses as the Brotherhood choral society sing a dirge-like counterpoint to Iris’s diva and slowly walk around me, bearing candles that burn dark, sucking in the lamplight . . .

The distorted lines inscribed in the canopy above my head seem to blur and shimmer, cruel violet lines cutting into my retinas, surrounded by a pinprick of stars—or are they distant eyes?—as I keep up my lines. They don’t make much sense, translated into English: the sense is something like, for iterator count from zero to number of entropy sinks within ground state, hear ye, hear ye, I open the gates of starry time for ye that you may feel the ground beneath your feet and the air upon your skin; I invoke the method of Dee and the constructor of Pthagn, forever exit and collect all the garbage, amen. See? I said it didn’t make much sense. In a particularly corrupt Enochian dialect that allows one to string together arbitrary subjunctive tenses it’s another matter, though.

Standing before her altar Iris is recounting the myriad names of the Eater of Souls, and she’s also pumping energy into this system. She’s got twenty black-robed followers and the computational hardware I lack, and if I’m lucky I can piggyback on her invocation—

Uh. I don’t feel so good.

A wave of darkness sweeps over me. For a moment I can feel the bony bodies to either side of me in the bed, and they’re warm and flesh-covered, almost as if they were breathing a moment ago. The tomb-dust stink is the yeasty smell of bodies from which the life departed only seconds hence. But the really weird thing is that I feel light, and dry, and unspeakably thirsty, a mere shell of my former self. The lines on the canopy overhead are glowing like a gash in the rotten fabric of reality, and I seem to be rising towards it. It’s death magic, pure and simple. I can summon the feeders out of night, I can open the way for them to crawl into the empty vessels all around me, buried in the wall niches outside this temple and the holes in the ground above its ceiling, but only if I use myself as a sacrifice, thinning the wall and letting them feed on my mind. The reason cultists prize virgins as human sacrifices is nothing to do with sex and everything to do with innocence. Iris probably thought the morphine would fog me enough to lie back and gurgle at the pretty lights. Or that the training—to never, ever attempt magic in one’s own head—would hold. Or perhaps it simply didn’t occur to her that I’d take the Samson option. But be that as it may—

Is that what I look like?

I’m looking down on my body from above. I’m a real sight, hog-tied between two irregular mounds in the bedding, gagged, my head split open and bleeding where Jonquil knocked a handful of butterfly sutures loose, my right arm leaking into a messy stain on one pillow. Eyes are closed. I’m floating. Iris is singing and I can understand the harmonies now, I can hear her as she tries to summon something that isn’t there.

“Beloved and forsaken! Eater of Souls! Lover of Death! Mother of nightmares! We who are gathered to observe your rite remember you and recall you by name! Come now to this vessel we prepare—”

I’ve got company up here. I can feel them gather in the darkness, blind curiosity thrusting them close, like sharks butting up against the legs of a swimmer stranded in the middle of an ocean. They’re class three abominations. I have summoned them to feed on the rips and gashes of my memory that I dribble in the water of Lethe. I’m not alone up here: and they sense me. Soon one of them will taste me, take a bite of my soul and find that my memories are richly textured and deep. And then I’ll begin to lose stuff. I push at them, trying to shove them towards the empty vessels that I have primed, but they aren’t having it; I’m far more interesting than any century-dead bag of bones.

And then I feel a horrible visceral pain, as if someone has stuck a barbed knife through my umbilical.

“Come to this vessel!” shrieks Iris. “Come now!”

I convulse: the pain is unspeakable. And I feel the tugging. If I travel with it, the pain lessens slightly. “Obey me! Enter the empty vessel! On pain of eternal torment, I instruct you to enter!”

I drift down from the canopy, watching the ripples of nightmare twitch and spiral above me, still seeking. What the fuck?

“Enter! Enter! Enter!” Iris yodels. And as I lie on my back, looking up at the canopy above me, the pain in my guts evaporates.

What the fucking fuck? I close my eyes, and resume my gurgling, muffled invocation. For a moment, I’d swear I was having an out-of-body experience . . .

Then a coherent picture forms in my mind’s eye.

It’s like this. Iris is trying to summon up the Eater of Souls and bind it into my body where, among other things, it’ll eat my soul and take up permanent residence. But the Eater of Souls is otherwise occupied right now. But Iris doesn’t know this—she doesn’t have TEAPOT clearance.

Meanwhile, I have just been trying to vacate my body all on my own, in order to summon up the feeders in the night, because if a bunch of Goatfuckers are trying to sacrifice me, I might as well fuck ’em as hard as I can. Again: it’s not Iris’s fault for failing to anticipate this, because she’s never had to visit the Funny Farm. She’s not really much of a demonologist. And she’s such a good manager she’s never had reason to see me when I’m seriously pissed off.

Here’s the upshot: Iris’s invocation has got a dangling pointer, an un-initialized variable pointing to an absent preta. But there’s a soul in the vicinity, cut free—mostly—from its body. So instead of hooking onto the Eater of Souls, the preta manger, it latched onto me. So she’s just spent fuck knows how much carefully hoarded ritual mojo to bind me into my own flesh.

Like she said: “Fatal accidents never have just a single cause, they happen at the end of a whole series of errors.” Well, Iris has strung about five errors together and she’s about to go down hard, because I’m about to turn fatal on her.

I open my eyes again and stare at the canopy overhead.

The feeders in the night are dispersing—but they’re not going back from whence they came. They’re rippling outwards, through the temple towards the walls. This body’s occupied. But outside the doors, the vessels I’ve been prepping are waiting.

The chant continues, as do the invocations and imprecations in the name of an absent monster. I lie back and try to calm my hammering heart. I don’t feel quite myself—I’m sweating and cold even though it’s a summer night, and my skin doesn’t seem to fit properly. It’s very strange. The cultists continue with their rite, which takes some unexpected turns. There is a large silver goblet of wine, into which a hooded man empties a familiar-looking syringe full of blood—it boils and steams on contact, which is rather disturbing. Then a quorum of the chorus line start to shed their robes, and don’t stop at their underwear. They walk around me naked, which is really disturbing because they appear to be into mortification of the flesh in a big way—even bigger than Opus Dei—with a genital focus that makes me wonder how they ever get through airport metal detectors. Or reproduce. No wonder Jonquil is an only child—

And speak of the devil’s daughter: here’s her mother, leaning over me—black robes covering up who-knows-what, and really clashing with her blonde rinse. Iris unhooks the gag, steps back, and throws her arms wide: “Speak, oh Eater of Souls!”

I work my jaw. It feels subtly wrong, as disarticulated as if I’ve just done hard time in a tomb and haven’t noticed I’m one of the walking dead. I force myself to inhale, try to salivate, turn my head sideways (that feels wrong, too) and expectorate. A thin stream of spittle lands on the bedding beside my eternally sleeping companion: it’s black in the torch light. Dust, of course, because I can’t be bleeding. Right?

“Speak!” she commands me. I stare at her, and feel a nearly irresistible urge to bite her throat out. Right now I should be trying to make like I’m a freshly reincarnated Eater of Souls, but I am thirsty and I am hungry and I have just been through hell and I really don’t care.

Some imp of the perverse takes control of my larynx: “I’ll drink your blood,” I croak, and instantly regret it. But much to my surprise, her eyes light up.

“Certainly, lord! Bring the chalice!” she shrills over her shoulder. A naked minion steps forward, bearing the huge silver goblet: it’s full of what I’m pretty sure is red wine, and it smells wonderful. Iris accepts it and holds it near my face. I slurp greedily, spilling more than I suck into my mouth. It’s thick and sweet, like tawny port, but also warming, as if there’s a trace of ginger or chili oil dissolved in it. “In the name of the Unhallowed One, I command you to stop drinking,” she says.

I freeze momentarily, acutely aware that I want to keep going, but—she won’t order them to untie me if she doesn’t think I’ll obey her, I realize. And I really, really want to be untied. I can sense the feeders all around us, dispersed throughout the soil around the crypt, doing what they do best: eating in the darkness, consuming and corrupting and possessing the material forms that are normally denied to them. Soon, they’re going to take possession of their withered husks and go looking for more upmarket digs. I don’t want to be tied down and helpless when that happens—

Evidently Iris mistakes my indecision for compliance. She turns to her audience: “The Eater of Souls obeys!” she calls. “The first test!”

She turns back to face me, triumphant and happy. “What would you have me do to hasten the opening of the way?” she asks.

“Untie me.” I tug lightly at the ropes. “Untie me.” My right arm feels wrong, but so does my left—they both obey me, but feel oddly distant. Blood sugar must be low, I tell myself. Or that wine has a kick to it.

Wrong response. Iris is shaking her head. But she’s still smiling. “Not yet,” she says. “Not until the rite of binding is complete.” Rite of binding? Uh-oh.

“The rite is complete,” I tell her, hoping she’ll buy it. “The blood and the wine ...”

“I don’t think so.” She looks at me sharply, and I see something greenish reflected in her eyes. Something behind me? She turns back to her altar before I can work it out, walks towards the front of her congregation. “Bring me the sacrifice pure of heart and soul!” she calls.

Then the true horror show begins.

THEY’RE CULTISTS. WORSE: THEY’RE THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE Black Pharaoh, hated and persecuted wherever they are exposed to the horrified gaze of ordinary people.

Why?

There is a pernicious and evil legend that comes down to us from ancient history: the legend of the Blood Libel. It’s a regular, recurring slander that echoes down the ages, hurled against out-groups when an excuse for a pogrom or other form of mass slaughter is desired. The Blood Libel is a whisper that says that the strangers sacrifice babies and drink their blood. There are variant forms: the babies are stolen from good Christian households, the blood is baked into bread, the babies are their own incestuous get by way of the bodies of their own daughters. No embellishment is too vile or grotesque to find its way into the Blood Libel. The most frequent victims are Jews, but it’s been used against many other groups—the Cathars, Zoroastrians, Kulaks, Communists, you name it. The Romans regularly used it against the early Christians, and doubtless they’d stolen it from somebody else. Its origins are lost in antiquity, but the sole purpose of the Blood Libel is to motivate those who believe it to say: “These people are not like us, and we need to kill them, now.”

I always used to think that was all there was to it.

But now I know better; I’ve witnessed the wellspring of the bloody legend and seen its practitioners in action.

And I’m still in their hands.