The Fuller Memorandum (44 page)

Which is when the screaming starts.

 

 

He’s been down in the crypt for half an hour, moving with painstaking care. The place is literally crawling with the risen dead, feeding on the dwindling survivors of the Black God Slave Cult—some of whom have barricaded themselves into the ossuary, with predictable consequences—and only sheer luck and the revenants’ lack of situational awareness has saved him. They don’t communicate with each other, don’t raise the alarm when he lands among them and lashes out with a sharp-edged entrenching tool or shoots their neighbors with a silenced pistol firing banishment rounds. It would be good news under other circumstances, but Alexei is acutely aware that he has a serious lack of backup and a mission that under other circumstances would be hopelessly compromised.

The sounds of gunfire from up above had nearly died out ten minutes ago. Now they’re getting louder and more frequent. And there’s something different about them: different weapons, much tighter fire discipline. The new shooters are professionals, but they’re not his squad—they’re firing NATO spec ammunition.

As it is, it looks like the only way out is in; if he can find somewhere to hole up until morning, he stands a chance of exfiltrating on foot, and if he can meet the mission’s core objective, retrieve the missing document, so much the better—

And everything looks like it’s coming down to this corridor here, and the open doorway gaping blackly at the end of it.

Alexei glides towards the entrance, then pauses briefly on the threshold. It’s a cul-de-sac, and every instinct warns him not to go in—at least, not without a couple of fragmentation grenades to clear the way. But there’s a quiet sobbing sound coming from inside, a woman’s lamentation. (And if the mission target is present, it wouldn’t do to cut up hard.) He adjusts his goggles, then flashes his infrared torch briefly at the ceiling.

A confused jumble of impressions: bodies. Mattresses arranged in concentric rings around a pit, leading down to an altar. There’s a four-poster bed behind the altar. The sobbing comes from a figure on the bed.
Sacrificial victim,
thinks Alexei. There are bodies, some new and some old: this is not a novelty. The idea of rescuing a victim from the cultists, however, holds some appeal—especially as she might know where they will have taken the mission target. Alexei is Spetsnaz through-and-through: the product of an incredibly harsh training system, ruthlessly self-disciplined, and trained as a soulless killing machine. But he’s also intelligent, a misfit who was a round peg in the square hole of the regular army, and possessed of the romantic streak that leads some men into professional soldiering. Given an opportunity to rescue a damsel in distress
and
expedite his mission goals at the same time, Alexei will go for the gratitude shag. And who can blame him? It’s been a hard night’s work.

And so he dances down the aisle, leans over the lady tied to the bed, and—holding a knife to the neck of the man lying next to her—who just happens to be me, myself: Bob Howard—asks: “Woman, you tell, where is Fuller Memorandum? Speak now, or will cut throat of All-Highest.”

 

 

I LIE IN THE GRIP OF A GREAT LASSITUDE . I’VE BEEN LYING
here for what seems like decades, staring with unblinking eyes at the star-pricked canopy of black silk above the Skull Cultists’ altar. I know, distantly, that I am in extreme danger; I’m in the middle of a monstrous summoning, and lying like a drunkard next to a bound but still deadly Iris while her minions panic and try to fight off the eaters outside the chapel is not a life-expectancy-enhancing situation. But I
can’t
move. I don’t even feel tired; I feel
dead
. Some kinds of summoning cause serious physical fatigue, possibly via a mechanism not unlike a mild form of K syndrome, and this would appear to be one of them.

The black sky above me, pierced by the flickering light of unfamiliar constellations, blows like a chill wind through my awareness.
I’ve seen this sky before,
I realize;
where? Oh
. Yes, the canopy of the altar-bed of the Black Skull mirrors the chill starlight that sluices across the desiccated plain surrounded by the fence of impaled corpses that I dreamed about, the fence that locks the Sleeper in the Pyramid in somnolent darkness. I’m not the only one to see that skyscape when I close my eyes, I think.

I can feel Iris nearby, her mind slowed and frustrated, defocused by the bindings woven into the ropes that trim the altar of the sex-magic cultists that used this chapel before her own people moved in. She’s angry, terrified, embittered; I could almost feel sympathy for her if my right arm didn’t remind me constantly of what she stands for, who she is. There are the eaters, torpid and in some cases well-fed, resting in their bony chrysalids in the porous earth beyond; and there are other human lives upstairs, some of them familiar. They’re coming this way. One of them, not so familiar, is almost here already—

Something touches my neck, as a voice speaks, in a thick eastern European accent: “Woman, you tell, where is Fuller Memorandum? Speak now, or will cut throat of All-Highest.”

Bastard
. I’m lying here helpless and I can’t even tell Laughing Boy that I’m not the All-Highest! That, and the Fuller Memorandum happens to be snugly jacketed in the folder I’m clutching to my bosom with arms like lead weights: this is not looking good. Close to panic, I try to twitch a finger or blink an eyelid—anything to reassert control over my own treacherous body.

“Untie me and I’ll take you to it,” says Iris, quick as a flash. “Please?” I can just about see her batting her eyelids at Laughing Boy. Then she adds: “You’d better cut All-Highest’s throat before he wakes up. He was going to sacrifice me—”

I try to shout,
She’s lying!
But nothing comes out of my throat. I am not, in fact, breathing, I realize distantly.
Am I dead?
I wonder.
Am I undead?
I’m not one hundred percent clear on the clinical definition of death, but I’m pretty sure that lying trapped in my own unbreathing body meets some of the requirements. I don’t know about the continuity of consciousness bit, but maybe it’s a side effect of the binding ritual they used. If I had my phone I could go online and google it, but zombie don’t surf. I feel the knife blade move, and I really start to panic—

“
Nyet
. Is already dead. You take me for fool! Where is Fuller Memorandum? Tell and I release.”

The knife is at Iris’s throat; I lie beside her, paralyzed and apprehensive.

Iris’s breath ratchets harshly through her throat. “The file All-Highest is clutching. Be careful, you don’t want to touch his skin by accident—”

But she’s too late.

Alexei, Laughing Boy, pulls the Fuller Memorandum from my hands. As he does so, he makes momentary contact with one of my fingers. And the inevitable happens, because this torpor that’s come over me—the torpor associated with the summoning, and the control of lesser eaters, and with K syndrome—is symptomatic of something else: I’m
hungry
.

 

 

IN THE BACK OF AN AMBULANCE SPEEDING TOWARDS THE ROYAL
Surrey Country Hospital with lights and siren, an old man opens his eyes and whispers,
“Good job, boy.”
The paramedic, who is looking at the EEG trace, glances at him in surprise.

The stroke victim tries to sit up, struggling against the straps that hold him on the stretcher. Then he frowns thunderously. “How long was I out?” he asks the paramedic. Then: “Forget that. Turn round—I want you to take me to Brookwood. Immediately!”

SECONDS LATER, BARNES AND HIS MEN COME THROUGH THE DOOR
with a strobing flicker of light bombs and a concussive blast of stun grenades. They’re ready for business: they’ve got Mo and her singular instrument ready to suppress any residual occult resistance. But they’re too late.

The screaming is mine; I’m yelling my throat out: a weird, warbling abhuman keening that doesn’t stop until the squad paramedic gingerly sticks me with a battlefield-grade sedative. Which takes some time: when they find me I’m lying on a vampire prince’s bed, covered in gore, with a lump missing from my right arm, and my eyes rolled up in my head so that only the green-glowing whites show. It takes them a while to confirm that I’m safe to approach; and a while longer to get an insulated stretcher down to the chamber and strap me down onto it.

Iris is sobbing, cringing away from me as far as the ropes will let her. She can’t get very far, though: she’s weighed down by the body of the dead Spetsnaz trooper, a black ring-binder lying on the floor beside him.

As for Alexei, he’s dead: eaten by the thing the cultists tried to make of me. Their sacrifice bit a huge and vital chunk out of my soul; after the power of my death-magic ran down, I was all but inert until Alexei unintentionally filled up the hole. I don’t think he intended to do that.
I
didn’t intend to do that, certainly: I’m no necromancer. But when they’ve performed the ritual of binding upon you, trying to turn you into a vessel for the Eater of Souls . . .

You need to eat.

THE MIND’S EYE HAS A FAST - FORWARD BUTTON. IT’S FUNNY:
most of the time we don’t think about it in those terms; but when you’re trying to write down a sequence of experiences, to take a series of unfortunate events and turn them into a coherent story, the mind’s eye takes on some of the characteristics of an old-fashioned videotape recorder: balky, prone to drop-outs and loss, cumbersome and wonky and breakable.

So call me a camera and stick a battery in my ear.

 

 

Here’s what I imagine happened, around the time I was screaming my lungs out on a bed of nightmares:

In the back of a shiny black BMW speeding towards Woking—and thence to the motorway south to Dover and the Channel Tunnel—an old man opens his eyes and takes a deep breath. “That was altogether too close for comfort,” he says aloud.

Dmitry glances at him in the rearview mirror. “With respect, sir . . . I agree.” His knuckles are white where they grasp the steering wheel, and he is racking up fines from the average-speed cameras at an almost surreal rate. “The men ...”

Panin closes his eyes again. “Dead. Or they’ll exfiltrate. Vassily in the embassy can see to their needs. I am going home to explain this fiasco.” He is silent for nearly a minute. “We nearly had it all: a transcript of the Sternberg Fragment, Fuller’s memorandum on binding the Eater of Souls.”

“With respect, sir, cultists are always unreliable proxies. And we did get the schemata for the violin, and we weakened the British ...”

Panin glares at Dmitry: “Weakening the British is not the goal of the great game! Survival is the goal. We are intelligent men, not panicking rats biting each other as they struggle to escape the sinking ship. They are the enemies of our enemy, never forget that. It is the cultists’ error, to imagine themselves beset by foes they can never defeat.”

“Like back there?” asks Dmitry.

Panin doesn’t answer. They drive the rest of the way to the Channel in silence.

 

 

Once I woke up briefly, in a darkened nighttime room with two beds and a door and a man in a blue suit standing outside the door with a gun. The man in the bed next to me was familiar. He was asleep, and I remember thinking that there was something very urgent that I had to tell him, but I couldn’t remember what it was and the file was missing—

Then the alarm went off and the medics came and they made me go back to sleep.

I don’t remember much after that. Which is a mercy—the dreams were
bad
.

Mo tells me that for the first week they kept me heavily sedated—if they eased up on the chlorpromazine I started screaming and trying to eat my own fingers. She visited every day. She sat by my bedside and fed me, spooning mush into my mouth and making sure I didn’t choke on it.