Julian bends over and holds a plate under my nose. Two red and blubbery lumps of raw meat about as long as my index finger sit in the middle of a thin pool of blood. “Anyone for sashimi?” he asks. Jonquil giggles; Gareth makes lip-smacking noises.

“Jolly good, that man.” Julian’s accent is plummy, camped-up; he peels one of the strips of meat off the plate and stuffs it in his mouth.

Jonquil follows suit, passing the plate to Gareth. “Nom nom nom,” she says around her mouthful. “Chewy!”

Goatfuckers, I think fuzzily, then everything goes blank.

The next thing I know, Jonquil’s hand is hovering in front of my nose. She’s holding a couple of white cylindrical tablets. “Here, swallow these-oh.” Her other hand tugs at the glove. I let go of it. She drops the tablets into my mouth, careful not to let her fingers close enough for me to bite. As if I would; all she’d need to do is breathe on that fucking hole in my arm. It’s kind of hard to bite someone’s fingers off when you’re screaming in mortal agony. I try to spit the tablets out but she pinches my nostrils shut. “Naughty naughty!” I hold out until my lungs are burning, but there’s only one way this contest of wills can end. “They’re only pain-killers,” she chides. “By the way, if you don’t swallow them toot sweet I’ll grind them up and inject them into you, there’s a good boy.”

Fucking Goatfuckers. She’s entirely capable of making good on the threat; I swallow. “What do I taste like?” I ask, trying to distract myself.

“Like raw pork, only not as smoky. Want some? Oh, sorry: the boys have eaten it all.” She giggles again. “Don’t worry, give the Coproxamol time to work and you’ll feel fine for your interview with Mummy.”

My heart’s still hammering, and I feel a little dizzy. My arm is cold and damp all the way down to my wrist. I don’t want to think about how much blood I must have lost. Half a liter? More? Fucking bastard goatfucking cultists. I flash on a momentary fantasy, digging my thumbs into her eye sockets-but only momentary. I have a bad feeling about my right arm. It’s throbbing like an overheated diesel engine, sending waves of pain radiating up to my shoulder and down to my elbow. I don’t know whether I can bend it. Hell, I probably need surgery to repair what these fine young cannibals have just done. Anything that takes two arms-forget it.

“What are you going to do with me?” I ask.

“Patience, patience! You’re going on a magical mystery tour! It’ll be fun!” She turns to Gareth. “What’s he got in his pocketses?”

“This.” Gareth produces my wallet and opens it in her direction. She jumps back with a hiss as my warrant card falls out. “Ooh, nasty! You naughty boy!” She grabs the wallet and turns it round. “Credit card, debit card, driving license, library card, Tesco clubcard. Huh.” She pulls out a solitary twenty-pound note. “Civil servant. Right.”

Gareth and Julian seem to think it’s funny. Civil servants shop at Tesco, don’t have platinum credit cards, and suffer being eaten alive by cannibals in the course of their duty-and they think it’s funny? A vast sense of indignation threatens to overwhelm me. Fucking bastard over-privileged snooty upper-class goatfucking cultists.

“Ooh, look! Shiny!” Gareth has found my NecronomiPod.

“What’s that-ooh!” Julian leans over, and they nearly bang their heads together, cooing over the glamour-shedding curves of the JesusPhone. “Wow! Here, let me feel that-”

“Mine! Preciouss! Is it an iPod Touch?”

“No I think it’s a-” Julian straightens up suddenly. “It’s an iPhone, isn’t it? How do you turn it off?”

I lie on the foam pad, a puddle of dizzy throbbing misery.

“Why would you want to switch it off?” Gareth demands.

“Because it’s a phone. They can trace them, can’t they?”

“Let’s see…” I hear a familiar sound effect as his finger finds the home key. “How does this work-ooh! Wow. What are all these icons?”

“I thought you knew-”

“Yes, but he’s been messing with the home screen.” Gareth finds the earbuds, untangles the white wires trailing from the jacket pocket. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

“Guys.” Jonquil sounds tense. “We don’t have time for this-”

I lie there, trying to be invisible, hoping Gareth is as stupid as he seems.

“It must have an off button somewhere,” Julian mumbles. “Shiny…”

“Mine!” Gareth clutches it possessively. The earbuds are wrapped around his hand, convolvulus climbing.

Jonquil clears her throat: “If you can’t switch it off, leave it behind. It’s time to go. Now.”

“Bah.” Julian shakes himself and steps back. Bastard, I think. “Put it down, Gareth-”

“Mine!” Gareth squeaks, and plugs the earbuds into his head as his thumb is inexorably dragged to the NecronomiPod’s home button.

“Stop him-” Jonquil is too late, and she and Julian are clearly not B-Team members in my eyes because she steps behind Julian as he grabs up his shotgun and brings it to bear on Gareth-

Who is limned in black, dancing to a different beat as the writhing white wires drill deep into his consciousness through the shortest possible path, drilling and eating and consuming the unauthorized intruder who has had the temerity to plug himself into a device running a Laundry countermeasure suite-

And he’s jitterbugging across the floor, a shadowy silhouette of his former self twitching as if he’s plugged into a live wire. It only lasts for a couple of seconds, then the ’Pod finishes discharging its lethal load through his brain and Gareth’s body drops to the floor, crashing across my legs like a dead weight.

The white earbuds roll away from his corpse, satiated and somehow fat.

“You bastard-” Julian is across the room and the shotgun muzzle is a subway tunnel filling my right eye.

“Stop!”

Julian takes a deep, shuddering breath. The gun doesn’t waver.

“Gareth fucked up,” Jonquil says shakily.

“Don’t care. He’s got to die.” I can see a snarl building in Julian’s chest, sense the tension in the set of his jaw. I’ve stopped breathing: if I move-

“Gareth failed the All-Highest.” Jonquil is standing behind Julian now. “He was weak. He surrendered to a naff little glamour. Are you going to surrender to a stupid impulse, Julian? Are you weak? Do you want to hear what All-Highest will say if you damage the vessel?”

For a moment Julian does nothing-then he breathes out. “No.” He squints at me along the barrel of his gun. “You’re going to die, meat. And I’m going to watch you go.” The shotgun swings away suddenly, pointing at the floor.

“What are we going to do with that?” he asks Jonquil, gesturing sideways at Gareth’s body.

“Drag it downstairs and stack it with the others.” She shrugs dismissively.

“The vessel’s phone-”

“This for his phone.” She kicks the NecronomiPod; it caroms off the wall and skids beneath the chest of drawers. “Gareth’s safe to touch now. Get him downstairs.”

“How are you going to move the prisoner?”

“I’m sure he can walk.” Jonquil rests a hand on my right shoulder. I shudder. “You can walk, can’t you, Mr. Howard? Please say you can walk? Because if you can’t-” She moves her hand a couple of centimeters down my arm and squeezes.

“I can walk!” I yelp, gasping for breath. “Let me… up…”

Julian grabs me under the left armpit-the undamaged one-and heaves me to my knees. I try to get my feet under me, and everything goes gray for a few seconds, but I don’t faint. I’m just gasping for breath and dizzy, and a bit nauseous, and my right arm feels awful.

“That’s good,” says Jonquil, taking my right elbow as Julian lets go and bends down to pick up their phone-fiddling former friend. “Now you’re just going to step this way, Mr. Howard, and then you’re going to follow Julian downstairs and get in the back of the car and sit quietly, aren’t you?”

I nod. Bastard Goatfuckers. If they think a blood-soaked man with his arms handcuffed behind his back won’t draw attention in the average London suburban street-