There is this to be said in favor of posh hotel rooms: they come with handy stuff like an adjustable shaving mirror in the bathroom, a sewing kit (for needles), and most of the stuff you need in order to whomp up a field-expedient summoning grid (class one, minor). I take my time, puttering around for half an hour as I round up the ingredients, jot down a recipe, take the time to step through it in search of fatal errors, jot down a second—this time, non-fatal—version, then execute.
It’s a good thing I took my time and I’m sitting down because for a moment I can’t see. I know my eyeballs are still where they belong—they haven’t fallen out or anything—but I’m not registering what they’re looking at. Then, with a really uncomfortable mental crunching of gears, I land back in my own head. Except I’m hearing things. Like: ***Wotcher fuck d’you think you’re doing, fuck-head?***
It’s Johnny. And he’s not terribly happy.
***Testing, testing, one, two, three, Peter Pepper picked a—***
***Fuck off, son. You trying to cause an accident? Coz I’m on the highway, overtaking…***
Whoops. ***Sorry.***
There is a pregnant pause. ***Fuckin’ A.*** A longer pause, synonymous with a sigh. ***Okay, say your piece and get out of my head.***
***Update from head office: they say to avoid all contact with law enforcement, especially the FBI.***
***No need to teach your grandmother to suck eggs.*** His disgust is palpable. ***Got any other good advice for yer maiden aunt?***
I rack my brain and apply some spare rusty pilliwinks to my thought processes. ***I’ve been kibitzing on your boss’s session. Trouble is, there’s just the one of me and no shift relief. So I’m going to have to rely on you to alert me if anything goes wrong. Hence the chat.***
***Kibitzing—*** I have the most peculiar feeling that he’s rolling his eyes. ***Jesus, son, that’s not clever. The Duchess has a short way with snoops when she finds them: if yer skull’s still intact that’s only ’coz she were distracted. Knock before entering, wipe yer feet on the mat, and wash yer hands on the cat, do I have to draw you a diagram?*** Another pause. ***Anyways. You’re calling ’coz you want me to drop everything and page you if Schiller takes a crap. Right?***
That draws me up sharp, and I do a double take followed by a brisk self-test. ***No.***
There is good management and bad management: good management is like air—you don’t know it’s there until it’s gone away. Looking at the back of my head, I have a feeling I’m not being a good manager right now. So I take a deep breath and try to explain myself: ***I’m hanging out alone, in an information vacuum, and it’s doing my head in, so I’m acting out. Right now I have no idea what you two are planning or what you expect me to do if things go adrift and you two have to cut and run. Or if there’s any support you need.***
There’s a long silence. ***Like that, huh?*** He sounds thoughtful. ***Okay, Howard. It’s like this: you don’t know where I am because I don’t want you to know where I am. And we haven’t asked you for any support yet. And if we have to run, you’ll know about it. Like this.*** I scream and clutch my upper right arm. Bastard feels like he’s twisting it between his hands—not hard, but he got the scar that Jonquil left in it last year. ***If you get that, it means you want to leave town now, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred kilos of China White, because everything has gone to fuck. Got that?***
***Jesus,*** I mutter verbally. ***I get the message. But use the other arm, please.***
***Any particular reason?***
***No.*** I might just be a bit snippy right now. My eyes are certainly watering. ***Just do it. In case I’m pointing a gun at someone.***
***You and guns don’t mix, unless I mistake my man.*** The bastard sounds amused.
He’s not as right as he thinks he is, but I pass. ***Next. I gather the course is outside the GPM compound, so your boss is looking for a way to get in and plant her bug. Which is fine, if she can do it—but I don’t want her to take any unnecessary risks. Put it this way, I don’t think it’s worth her life. If she can’t get in, we’ll figure out what to do later. But I want you to get that message across, because I’ve got a feeling if I tell her directly she’ll take it as a challenge. Am I right?***
Silence. Followed by more silence. Finally he says, ***You’re not wrong.*** For a moment my vision fuzzes again, almost as if he’s decided to drop the mental firewall. But no: ***I don’t reckon she’ll take that from me, either. But she’s not stupid, son. Sit back, stay out of our hair, and I’ll feed you updates when it’s safe.***
***Okay.***
***Okay,*** he says, and there’s an empty moment that feels like I’ve just been punched in the head, minus the pain—then I’m staring at a cracked mirror and clutching my right bicep, which is aching like a pulled molar.
This management gig isn’t as easy as it looks at first sight, is it?
I ORDER UP DINNER ON ROOM SERVICE, WATCH A SHITTY COMEDY on the in-room TV channel, then hit up the minibar for a half bottle of wine. Drinking on my own is a bad idea but I manage to keep to just the one serving, and anyway, going out and looking to get drunk in company is an even worse prospect under the circumstances. I am not merely stranded in hotelspace, I am adrift in hoteltime in my very own personal air-conditioned TARDIS. Eventually I drift off to sleep, at first to dream of burning goats checking my time sheet for accounting errors, and then—
Oh shit, is my first reflexive thought as I wake up inside a dream: I’ve been here before, and I didn’t like it the first time.
I’m in a dream, and in this dream I am awake, and I am immobilized, and I am very, very thirsty for something other than water.
Above me the sky is dark from horizon to horizon, dark but not black: a gossamer streamer of varicolored dust clouds splashes across the night like a Thuggee strangler’s silk scarf. The starscape itself is crammed with the red and dying stellar wreckage of a prematurely aged galactic core. Below the horizon I can sense the dying sun, bulbous and red, choking on the corpses of its planetary children. But not this world. The moons—plural—have set, but the dim radiance of the nebula overhead casts long shadows across the parched plateau and the Watchers and the Pyramid.
The Pyramid.
I’m one of the Watchers—or rather, I’m a passive, helpless passenger inside the skull of one of the dead, mummified Watchers who the Bloody White Baron impaled in a huge circle on the dying plain nearly a century ago, to form a ring of human sacrificial guards around the Pyramid. The Baron, himself a figure out of nightmares and a necromancer of no small talent, had nightmares of his own about the thing that sleeps in the Pyramid: the Opener of the Ways, some call it. The sleepers are quantum observers, eyeless and dead but still alive, condemned to collapse the wave function of the thing in the mile-high tomb so that it is forever asleep—
(Because if the Watch on the Pyramid fails the Black Bird of Hangar 12B will fly its one-way mission, the last forlorn hope of the British strategic nuclear deterrent, and then all hell will literally break loose.)
—Why am I here?
I am, it occurs to me, having a lucid dream. Which is an utterly horrible experience when you wake up inside an impaled, mummified corpse propped up on a stainless steel spike in front of a geometric shape that makes your imaginary insides curdle with terror. I’d pinch myself if I could move the withered, blackened claws I have instead of hands. The peripheral nerves of this body have shriveled and decayed along with its flesh, but I can still feel the other Watchers to either side of me. Indignant and hungry and incoherent with rage and grief and the shattering of life’s dream, they recognize the presence of a not-dead soul and lust to eat my identity, to pour my waters into the drained pool of their deaths—