The Atrocity Archives (4 page)

Next message: a directive on sick leave signed
(digitally) by Harriet, pointing out that if more than half an hour's
leave is taken a doctor's note must be obtained, preferably in advance.
(Why do I feel a headache coming on?)

Thirdly, there's a plea from Fred in
Accounting—a loser, basically, who I had the misfortune to smile at
last time I was on hell desk duty: "Help, I can't run my files
anymore." Fred has just about mastered the high art of the on/off
switch but is sufficiently proficient with a spreadsheet to endanger
your payroll. Last time I got mail from him it turned out he'd
reinstalled an earlier version of some critical bits 'n' pieces over
his hard disk, trashing everything, and had the effrontery to be
mailing virus-infested jokes around the place. (I bounce the plea for
help over to the hell desk, where the staffer on call will get to
grapple with it and curse me vilely for trying to be helpful to Fred.)

I spend a second stretch of five minutes staring
at the chipped cream paint on the wall behind my monitor. My head is
throbbing now, and because of various Health and Safety directives
there isn't so much as an aspirin on the premises. After yesterday's
inane fiasco there doesn't seem to be anything I can do here today that
conjures up any enthusiasm: I have a horrible gut-deep feeling that if
I stay things will only get worse. Besides, I put
in two days' worth of overtime yesterday, regs say I'm allowed to take
time off in lieu, my self-help book says I should still be grieving for
my pet hamster, and the Beowulf cluster can go fuck itself.

I log out of the secure terminal and bunk off
home early: your taxes at work.

It's eight in the evening
and I still have a headache. Meanwhile, Pinky is down in the
cellar, preparing another assault on the laws of nature.

The TV console in the living room of Chateau
Cthulhu—the geek house I share with Pinky and Brains, both of whom
also
work for the Laundry—is basically brain candy, installed by Pinky in a
desperate attempt to reduce the incidence of creative psychosis in the
household. I think this was during one of his rare fits of sanity. The
stack contains a cable decoder, satellite dish, Sony Playstation, and a
homemade web TV receiver that Brains threw together during a bored half
hour. It hulks in the corner opposite the beige corduroy sofa like a
black-brushed postmodern sculpture held together with wiring spaghetti;
its purpose is to provide a chillout zone where we can collapse after a
hard day's work auditing new age websites in case they've accidentally
invented something dangerous. Cogitating for a living can result in
serious brain-sprain: if you don't get blitzed on beer and blow or
watch trash TV and sing raucously once in a while, you'll end up
thinking you're Sonic the Hedgehog and that ancient Mrs. Simpson over
the road is Two-Tails. Could be messy, especially if Security is
positively vetting you at the time.

I am plugged into the boob tube with a can of
beer in one hand and a pizza box in my lap, watching things go fast and
explode on the Discovery Channel, when there's a horrible groaning
sound from beneath the carpet. At first I pay no attention because the
program currently showing is a particularly messy
plane-crash docudrama, but when the sound continues for a few seconds I
realise that not even Pinky's apocalyptic stereo could generate that
kind of volume, and maybe if I don't do something about it I'm going to
vanish through the floorboards. So I stand up unsteadily and weave my
way into the kitchen. The cellar door is ajar and the light's on and
the noise is coming from down below; I grab the fire extinguisher and
advance. There's an ominous smell of ozone … 

Chateau Cthulhu is a mid-Victorian terrace, an
anonymous London dormitory unit distinguished mainly by having three
cellar rooms and a Laundry residential clearance, meaning that it's
probably not bugged by the KGB, CIA, or our enemies in MI6. There is a
grand total of four double-bedrooms, each with a lock on the door, plus
a shared kitchen, living room, dining room, and bathroom. The plumbing
gurgles ominously late at night; the carpet is a peculiarly lurid
species of paisley print that was the height of fashion in 1880, and
then experienced an undeserved resurrection among cheap-ass landlords
during the 1980s.

When we moved in, one of the cellars was full of
lumber, one of them contained two rusting bicycle frames and some
mummified cat turds, and the third had some burned-out candle stubs and
a blue chalk pentacle inscribed on the floor. The omens were good: the
house was right at the corner of an equilateral triangle of streets,
aligned due east-west, and there were no TV aerials blocking the
southern roofline. Brains, pretending to be a God-botherer, managed to
negotiate a 10 percent discount in return for exorcising the place
after convincing Mr. Hussein that a history of pagan activities could
severely impact his revenues on the rental market. (Nonsense, but
profitable nonsense.) The former temple is now Pinky's space, and if
Mr. Hussein could see it he'd probably have a heart attack. It isn't
the dubious wiring or the three six-foot-high racks containing Pinky's
1950s vintage Strowger telephone exchange that make it so alarming:
more like the way Pinky replaced the amateurish chalk
sketch with a homemade optical bench and properly calibrated
beam-splitter rig and five prisms, upgrading the original student
séance antics to full-blown functionality.

(Yes, it's a pentacle. Yes, he's using a fifty
kilovolt HT power supply and some mucking great capacitors to drive the
laser. Yes, that's a flayed goatskin on the coat rack and a half-eaten
pizza whirling round at 33 rpm on the Linn Sondek turntable. This is
what you get to live with when you share a house with Pinky and the
Brain: I
said
it was a geek house, and we all work in the
Laundry, so we're talking about geek houses for very esoteric—indeed,
occult—values of geek.)

The smell of ozone—and the ominous crackling
sound—is emanating from the HT power supply. The groaning/ squealing
noise is coming from the speakers (black monoliths from the
2001
school of hi-fi engineering). I tiptoe round the far wall from the PSU
and pick up the microphone lying in front of the left speaker, then
yank on the cord; there's a stunning blast of noise, then the feedback
cut out.
Where the hell is Brains?
I look at the PSU. There's a
blue-white flickering inside it that gives me a nasty sinking feeling.
If this was any other house I'd just go for the distribution board and
pull the main circuit breaker, but there are some capacitors next to
that thing that are the size of a compact washing machine and I don't
fancy trying to safe them in a dark cellar. I heft the extinguisher—a
rather illegal halon canister, necessary in this household—and
advance.
The main cut-off switch is a huge knife switch on the rack above the
PSU. There's a wooden chair sitting next to it; I pick it up and,
gripping the back, use one leg to nudge the handle.

There's a loud
clunk
and a simultaneous
bang
from the PSU. Oops, I guess I let the magic smoke out. Dumping the
chair, I yank the pin from the extinguisher and open fire, remembering
to stand well clear of those big capacitors. (You can
leave 'em with their terminals exposed and they'll pick up a static
charge out of thin air; after half an hour, if you stick a screwdriver
blade across them you'd better hope the handle is well-insulated
because you're sure as hell going to need a new screwdriver, and if the
insulation is defective you'll need a couple of new fingers as well.)

The smoke forms a thin coil in midair, swirling
in an unnaturally regular donut below the single swinging light bulb. A
faint laughter echoes from the speakers.

"What have you done with him?" I yell,
forgetting that the mike isn't plugged in. The pentacle on the optical
bench is powered down and empty, but the jar beside it is labelled
Dust
from ye Tombe of ye Mummy (prop. Winchester Road Crematorium)
and
you don't need to be a necromancer to figure out what that means.

"Done with whom?"

I nearly jump right out of my skin as I turn
round. Pinky is standing in the doorway, holding his jeans up with one
hand and looking annoyed.

"I was having a shit," he says. "Who's the fuss
about?"

I point at the power supply, wordlessly.

"You didn't—" He stops. Raises his hands and
tugs at his thin hair. "My capacitors! You bastard!"

"Next time you try to burn the house down,
and/or summon up a nameless monstrosity from the abyss without adequate
shielding, why don't you give me some warning so I can find another
continent to go live on?"

"Those were fifty quid each in Camden Market!"
He's leaning over the PSU anxiously, but not quite anxiously enough to
poke at it without insulated gloves.

"Doesn't matter. First thing I heard was the
feedback howl. If you don't shut the thing down before answering a call
of nature, don't be surprised when Mrs. Nature comes calling on you."

"Bugger." He shakes his head. "Can I borrow your
laser pointer?"

I head back upstairs to carry on watching my
plane-crash program. It's at times like this that I think I really need
to find a better class of flatmate—if only the pool of
security-cleared
cohabitants was larger.

It's the afternoon of day
two of the training course Andy sent me on, and I have just
about hit my boredom threshold. Down on the floor of the cramped
lecture theatre our teacher is holding forth about the practicalities
of summoning and constraining powers from the vasty deeps; you can only
absorb so much of this in one sitting, and my mind is a million
kilometres away.

"You need to remember that all great circles
must be terminated. Dangling links are potent sources of noise in the
circuit, and you need to stick a capacitor on the end to drain it and
prevent echoes; sort of like a computer's SCSI bus, or a local area
network. In the case of the great circuit of Al-Hazred, the terminator
was originally a black goat, sacrificed at midnight with a silver knife
touched only by virgins, but these days we just use a fifty microfarad
capacitor. You, Bob! Are you falling asleep back there? Take some
advice: you don't want to do that. Try this and get the termination
wrong and you'll be laughing on the other side of your face—because
your face will be on the other side of your head. If you still have a
head."

Bloody academic
theoreticians … 
"Yes," I said. I've been over
this before with Brains; electrical great circles are a bad thing, best
shunned by anyone with easy access to decent quality lasers and a
stabilised platform. Electricity, for ages the primary tool of the
experimental vitalists, is now pretty much obsolete—but it's so
well-understood that these ivory-tower types prefer to use it as a
vehicle for their research, rather than trying more modern geometry
engines based on light, which doesn't have any of the nasty side
effects of electrical invocations. But that's the British school for
you. Over in the States, when they're not dangling stupid "remote
viewing" disinformation tricks in front of the press corps the Black
Chamber is busy running experiments on the big Nova laser at Los Alamos
that everyone thinks is for bomb research. But do we get to play with
safe opto-isolated geometry engines and invocation clusters here? Do
we, fuck: we're stuck with Dr. Volt and his thuggish friend Mr. Amp,
and pray we don't get a stray ground loop while the summoning core is
present and active.

"Anyway, it's time to break for coffee. After we
come back in about fifteen minutes, I'm going to move along a bit; it's
time to demonstrate the basics of a constraint invocation. Then this
afternoon we'll discuss the consequences of an uncontrolled
summoning."
(Uncontrolled summonings are Bad—at best you'll end up with someone
going flatline, their brain squatted by an alien entity, and at worst
you'll end up with a physical portal leading somewhere else. So don't
do that, m'yeah?)

Teacher claps his hands together, brushing
invisible chalk dust from them, and I stand up and stretch—then
remember to close my file. The one big difference between this training
course and a particularly boring stretch at university is that
everything we learn here is classified under Section Three; the penalty
for letting someone peek in your notebook can be draconian.

There's a waiting room outside, halfway between
the lecture theatres, painted institutional cabbage with frumpy modular
seating in a particularly violent shade of
burnt orange that instantly makes me think of the 1970s. The vending
machine belongs in an antique shop; it appears to run on clockwork. We
queue up obediently, and there's a shuffle to produce the obligatory
twenty-pence pieces. A yellowing dog-eared poster on the wall reminds
us that
CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES
—it
might be indicative of a sardonic institutional sense of humour but I
wouldn't bet on it. (Berwick-upon-Tweed was at war with the Tsar's
empire until 1992, and it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest to
discover that one of the more obscure Whitehall departments—say, the
Ministry of Transport's Department of long-reach electric forklift
vehicle Maintenance Inspectorate, Tires Desk—is still locked in a
struggle to the death with the Third Reich.)

It is quite in keeping with the character of the
Laundry to be aware of the most peculiar anomalies in our diplomatic
heritage—the walking ghosts of conflicts past, as it were—and be
ready
to reactivate them at a moment's notice. That which never lived sleeps
on until awakened, and it's not just us citizens of old-fashioned
Einsteinian spacetime who make treaties, right?

A fellow trainee shuffles up to me and grins
cadaverously. I glance at him and force myself to resist the urge to
sidle away: it's Fred from Accounting, the pest who's always breaking
his computer and expects me to fix it for him. About fifty-something,
with papery dry skin that looks as if a giant spider has sucked all the
juice out of him, he's still wearing a suit and tie on the second day
of a five-day course—like he's wandered out of the wrong decade. And
it
looks slept in, if not lived in to the point of being halfway through a
second mortgage and a course of damp-proofing. "Dr. Vohlman seems to
have it in for you, eh?"