“Oh no.” Her escort shakes her head very seriously. “I’m certain Father will take time to help you.” She turns, then pauses, looking over her shoulder. “Follow me, please.”
There’s something oddly affectless about the woman, and it gives Persephone the creeps. But she tags along behind her. After a few seconds Persephone realizes something else: the slight heaviness in her guide’s hips, something about her body fat distribution, her shape in profile. She’s pregnant: not hugely so, but certainly well into the second trimester. Odd, Persephone thinks, but she remains silent and unquestioning until they come to an elevator. “Hey. This isn’t the way back to the hall, is it?”
“No.” Her guide pushes the call button. “Father led everyone to the chapel after you left, so he sent me to show you the way there. He decided to invite everyone to attend holy communion. Wouldn’t you like that?”
Persephone blinks as the doors open. What would a true believer say…? “I suppose so. I mean, absolutely!”
The doors slide closed behind her and the elevator begins to descend. “You sound a bit conflicted,” her guide says guilelessly. “That tells me you need the host in your heart. It’ll make everything better.”
“I guess so.” The elevator stops and the doors open. The guide leads Persephone out into a wide corridor, windowless but lined with illuminated niches holding spotlit stained-glass panels. At the end, the wide double doors gape open. “This way.” They reach the doors and step through. “See, everyone is waiting for you!”
Persephone sees everything, taking in the timeless scene in front of her with horrified eyes: the waiting flock, the guards holding an unwilling inductee before the altar, the pastors and the silver bowl full of things that to her warded eyes are not what they seem to everyone else—
Persephone turns at bay, ready to fight her way to freedom.
IT’S LATE.
I shudder and awaken on my hotel room bed.
As I turn my head fireworks explode in my skull, accompanied by a wave of unbelievable pressure. I have a headache, my tongue feels as if something died on it, and I ache all over. In fact, my body has an eerie not-quite-me-here feeling that I’ve had only a couple of times before, most notably in a dank room under Brookwood Cemetery—a really disturbing sensation, and not one I care for. I figure the headache is the after effect of being given the oneiromantic heave-ho by an angry sorceress; but I can’t account for the not-me feeling. Outside my thirtieth-floor window the sky is slate-gray and angry-looking. (Luckily it’s turned cold outside, and the temperature’s too low for tornadoes. That’s one of the local attractions I really don’t mind missing.) I check the clock and realize with a start that I’ve been asleep for about eight hours.
The bathroom is calling. I stumble through and splash water on my face. One thing leads to another, and ten minutes later (by way of the toilet and a brisk application of my shaver) I’m feeling a little more human, if still somewhat grumpy from the slowly subsiding headache.
I stare at my red-eyed face in the bathroom mirror. What am I doing here? I feel like an eight-year-old who’s been handed a laser pointer and a bag of catnip and told to go amuse the kittens behind the chain-link fence labelled Siberian Tiger Enclosure; my so-called External Assets are off the reservation and halfway to the horizon while I sit here with my thumb up my ass, nursing a dream hangover, with nothing to do but fill out expense accounts while Rome burns.
Pull yourself together, I tell myself.
Once you start managing other people, you can’t control every aspect of how they do their jobs or keep yourself informed on everything that’s going on. I’m supposed to be taking on a managerial role, for very small values of management (Look at me! I’ve got two contractors working for me! Whoop-de-do!) and I should bloody well stop trying to act like an over-stressed prima donna and start doing my job. Beginning with sending Lockhart a brief sitrep, an expenses update, and a revised estimate on when I expect to have something concrete to report—
There’s a knock at the door.
I’m not expecting anyone, the room’s made up, and it’s evening: all this passes through my head before I’m even off the bed.
I’m halfway to the vestibule, the narrow corridor running past the bathroom to the doorway, when I hear a rattle, then the thud of the door coming up against the security chain. For a moment I think I’m hallucinating: in the back of my head I’m hearing the crunching, munching sound of brain cells dying in the skulls on the other side of the portal, their waiting bodies occupied and animated by something blind and segmented and possessed of a vast, unthinking faith.
Possessed. Not human anymore. These aren’t the feeders in the night; I’d recognize those guys anywhere. These are something else. They seek and they save—
(Where am I getting this from?)
“Who’s there?” I ask aloud.
“Hotel security. Open up.”
There’s something wrong with his voice, as if he’s speaking around a mouthful of chopped liver. I mutter a macro in High Enochian, a pre-canned invocation that will open up my inner ear and let me listen again, eavesdropping on what’s left of his mind with a corner of my own consciousness that was only fully awakened last summer, and this is what I get:
A vast and wistful inner peace has stilled the fragmentary thoughts of the once-frightened human vessel. He knows he’s Saved, for he has eaten the blood and the body of Christ—and the host trans-substantiated into something that has in turn eaten his mind. He isn’t alone, he has a companion in arms. They are barely separate individuals anymore, for their hosts bind them together and control them. They’re united not merely by a common mission but a shared hunger for salvation. They want to help me. They’re dying to help me. And they’ve been sent here to help me find a friend in Jesus.
I left my phone and my warrant card beside the laptop on the table, didn’t I? I’m going to have to do this myself, I realize queasily.
“Open up,” says the seeker, its voice breaking into a very inhuman rasp.
I crunch down on them hard and fast, and I feel their savior-damped fears and needs stab at the edges of my mind like shell splinters as I engulf their shattered minds swiftly, a squid reaping a pair of unwary crabs from the seabed.
There is a heavy double-thud from the corridor. My stomach lurches. I feel queasy: bloated and simultaneously light-headed as I unhook the security chain and open the door.
Two men lie on the beige hotel carpet, looking for all the world as if they’ve just decided to take a nap. White shirts, black suits, black ties, like they came to audition for a role in Reservoir Dogs: The Musical. Focussing on the discreet cross lapel pins I see no motion: they aren’t breathing. My bad. I grab the nearest arm and pull; his jacket spills open, revealing a leather holster nestled in his armpit. I pull harder. Corpses are heavy, but I keep dragging until he’s well inside the doorway, then force myself to go back for the other one. I feel numb, like my emotions are wrapped in cotton wool. It’s not as if I murdered them—they barely had enough soul left to keep their bodies breathing and responsive—but I still feel responsible. Most of what was left of their minds was given over to experiencing a weird ecstatic rush of surrender, a feeling of being saved. I don’t think it’s any kind of salvation that Pete the Vicar would recognize, though.