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?