Arthur Ransome
THE WOMAN WHO CALLS HERSELF CASSIE MAY WAITS PATIENTLY, sitting on a backless stool behind the antique cash register in George Dower’s shop while keeping an eye on the proprietor, who is busy in the workshop behind the bead curtain (which she has tied back, to afford her a clear view).
The back of the shop is not what she had expected. She’s been in instrument makers’ workshops before, smelled the glue and fresh-planed wood, the wax and varnish. She’s familiar with other musical specialties as well, with signal generators and plugboards, amps and filters, the hum and hot metallic smell of overdriven amplifiers. Dower’s shop is not like any of these. It has some of the characteristics of a jeweler’s workshop, or a watch repairer’s-but it is not entirely like either of those. It’s summer but the air is uncharacteristically chill, and not from air conditioning: it’s stuffy, and there’s a faint charnel-house scent, as if something has died under the floorboards.
Dower has donned a pair of white cotton conservator’s gloves and hung a dictaphone around his neck. He keeps the bone-white violin at arm’s length, as if he doesn’t want to hold it too close, muttering into his microphone: “C-rib thickness varies between 3.2 and 5.5 millimeters; as with the right lower curve, this material appears to be ductile and rigid, although examination at 6X magnification reveals the characteristic spongiform structure of endochondral ossification…” He swallows, as if nauseous-as well he might be. (The instrument is indeed made of bone, preserved and treated to give it a rigidity and resonance similar to mountain maple. The treatments that modify the material in this way are applied while its donor is still alive, and in excruciating pain.) Peering into a fiber-optic probe, the end of which is inserted through one of the violin’s f-holes: “The upper block appears to be carved from the body and lesser cornu of os hyoideum; the greater cornu is avulsed in a manner usually indicative of death by strangulation…”
Dower may suspect, but the woman knows, that the materials used to construct this instrument were harvested from the bodies of no less than twelve innocents, whose premature deaths were believed to be an essential part of the process. Before he became a highly specialized instrument maker, Dower trained as a surgeon. He’s a sensitive, trained to see what lies before his eyes: most people wouldn’t recognize the true horror of the instrument, seeing merely a white violin. Which is why the woman came here, after checking the files for a list of suitable examiners.
After almost three hours, Dower is flagging, but his work is nearly done. The woman is checking her watch now, with increasing concern. Eventually, finally, he replaces the bow in its recess and folds the lid of the case shut, snapping the latches closed. He steps back and fastidiously peels off his gloves, then drops them in a rubbish bin, being careful not to touch their contaminated outer surface with his bare skin. Finally he clicks off the dictaphone. “I’m done,” he says flatly.
The woman stands, smooths the wrinkles out of her skirt, and nods. “Your written report,” she says.
“I’ll write it up after I’ve had some lunch. You can collect it after four, this afternoon…”
She shakes her head. “I won’t be back.” Reaching into her bag she pulls out another envelope. “Print out one copy of your report-and no more-and place it in this envelope. Then seal it and post it.” There is no address on the envelope. “After you have done that, you should destroy your records. Erase your word processor files, burn the tapes, whatever it takes. You will be held responsible if your report leaks.”
“But there’s no-” He takes the envelope. “You’re sure?”
“If you post that envelope I will have the contents on my desk by morning,” she tells him, staring at him with pale green eyes as unquiet as a storm surge.
“I don’t want to see that thing ever again,” he tells her.
“You won’t.”
“But you want to know how to make more-”
“No.” Her face is as smooth as plaster, as if any hint of human emotion might crack the surface of her glaze: “I want to prove to my superiors that the cost is too high.”
“Isn’t that obvious?”
“Not given the magnitude of the threat we face. Desperate measures are called for; I merely believe this one to be too desperate. Good-bye, Mr. Dower. I trust we shall never meet again.”
BACK IN THE OFFICE:
Photograph One: A large slate, resting on a table beside a wooden measuring rod. According to the rod it is twenty inches high and (inferred using a ruler) eighteen inches wide. Cleaved along a plane, it reveals a well-preserved fossil of what appears to be a starfish of class Asteroidea. On closer inspection, there is something wrong with the fossil. Although it possesses the characteristic five-fold symmetry, each tentacle tip appears to be blunt, as if truncated. Moreover, the body doesn’t show signs of radial segmentation-it’s an integral whole, giving an effect more like a cross section through an okra fruiting body, or perhaps an oversized echinoderm-a sea cucumber. Photograph Two: Is another large slab of broken rock, this time revealing the partially dissected and fossilized arm of a juvenile BLUE HADES… Photograph Three: Is in the pile Bob has just dumped on the floor.
I rub my eyes and quietly snarl: “Fuck this shit!” The temptation to start jumping up and down and shouting is well-nigh irresistible, but my office shares a plasterboard partition with that of an easily distracted computer-phobic project manager, and the last time I punched the wall he made me come round and put all of his GANT chart stickies back in the right order on pain of being forced to attend a training course on critical path analysis. Which is deeply unfair, in my book-if the lines on one of Roskill’s charts don’t join up, all that happens is a project goes over budget: nobody gets eaten or goes insane (unless the Auditors decide to get involved)-but there’s no arguing with him: ex-RAF type, thinks he runs the country.
It’s almost too late for lunch, and all I’ve succeeded in figuring out so far is that F had a lot of interesting correspondents in the Baltic states, not to mention a huge and not entirely rational hard-on for the Bolsheviks. (Mind you, he was a bit unhinged in more ways than that.) On the other hand, this Ransome chap seems to have had his head screwed on. A journalist, obviously, but corresponding with a colonel in the War Office? And his correspondence ended up filed in the Laundry archives? That’s pretty suggestive. And those photographs…! Roman Von Ungern Sternberg clearly had a disturbed childhood if his idea of fossil-collecting involved elder race relics. No wonder Daddy ended up in the loony bin and Mummy shacked up with a boringly conventional country squire with no questionable hobbies.
I look at the stack of files: nine of the bloody things, brown manila envelopes with dates and security classifications scribbled on their front, beneath the familiar Dho-Nha geometry curve of the Internal Security Sigil (“read this without authorization and your eyeballs will melt,” or words to that effect in one of the simpler Enochian metalanguages). They’re identified by number, using a system we call the Codex Mathemagica-four three-digit quads, just like IP addresses (and isn’t that a significant coincidence, given that the Laundry archives predate the internet by thirty years? Although the Laundry stacks use decimal as a native format, not two hex digits, now that I think about it: Does that mean their original numeric routines were written to manage BCD primitives?)-with no overall meaning except that they’re unique in the index…
Nine folders.
I rummage around on my desk for the original paper Angleton gave me. Weren’t there ten files there? Ten sets of numbers? I can’t find the note, damn it, but I know where I entered the document retrieval request. I wake my computer and call up the transaction log. Yup, ten files requested.