PERSEPHONE STEPS IN FRONT OF ME, CLOSE ENOUGH THAT I can feel her breath on my face. “The Hand of Glory,” she whispers; “now would be a good time to restart it.”
I fumble in my pocket lining, which has become twisted around a disgusting jumble of bits of scorched pigeon toes, a cigarette lighter, and other peculiar odds and ends. The camera dangles and spins from the lanyard around my wrist as I try to rearrange things—luckily it’s in standby mode—until I manage to extract the pigeon’s foot. I’m about to light it when Persephone helpfully fastens an elasticated grounding strap to my wrist, and takes hold of the other end. “Thanks.” The click of the lighter and the sudden flicker of the butane flame seem deafening in the twilight at the top of the stairs. Then the claw is burning again, sputtering a foul trail of smoke, and everything around us acquires the very slight pallor that tells me it’s working. “Okay, lead on.”
She doesn’t speak, but takes a couple of steps forward, towing me along at the end of the grounding strap like a leashed panther.
There’s a fat bundle of cables and some narrow insulated pipes slung from a shelf suspended from the ceiling above our heads as we descend the stairs to what proves to be a narrow corridor with doors to either side: a basement that’s been partitioned off into rooms. The complaints department is scritching excitedly at the inside of the warded pizza box and I can feel its eagerness to be reunited with…what? Something down here, that’s for sure. I have a surreal sense of déjà vu, as if I’m trapped in a live-action game of Dungeons and Dragons or something. It’d be funny if my skin wasn’t crawling.
Persephone pauses at the bottom of the stairs and glances at me. I gesture with the box, pointing where its occupant is scritching loudest, towards the door at the end of the corridor. One of the other doors is propped open, and the smell tells me all I need to know: it’s a sluice room and basement toilet, currently unoccupied. We tiptoe past it and Persephone stops again outside the end door. “You’re sure?” she whispers, and I nod.
I’m half-expecting her to kick down the door, but instead she reaches out, pauses just short of the door handle for a few seconds, then turns it and takes a quick step forward. Somehow that little snub-nosed revolver has appeared in her hand—I never saw it move—but there’s nobody in the darkened storeroom to point it at. There is, however, a presence.
The complaints department is going apeshit with delight as I follow Persephone across the threshold and smell burning insulation, a rotting sea-smell like the slops rinsed from a fishmonger’s slab on a hot summer afternoon. I hear a loud scritching hissing clattering, like an infinity of giant wood lice. Persephone backs up in a hurry and turns to hit the light switch by the door and nearly clouts me in the gut with her gun. The light is oddly red, and I look past her to see a giant glass-walled tank occupying the middle of the room, its panels smeared on the inside with a thin coat of algae behind which—
“Hsss!”
The complaints department is eager to be reunited with its siblings, who seethe and burble in the breeding tank around the sessile, slowly pulsating body of a monstrously large isopod. The mother of hosts sits at the bottom of the tank atop a mound of small, gelatinous eggs, resembling nothing so much as a giant wood louse. There’s a dual-purpose summoning and containment grid inlaid on the floor around the tank, of course; even so, I can hear its song of joy, an eternal hymn to the glory that is the father-thing that feeds it. And now it’s seen us, because the compact Hand of Glory is nearly burned to a stub and in any case the bloody thing doesn’t have eyes, and it focusses the full strength of its moronic worship on me.
It wants me to kiss it. Which is okay, because it loves me like I’ve never been loved before: it feels utter adoration and delight at my presence.
The Hand of Glory is burning my fingertips so I drop it; it fizzles out and I shrug off the grounding strap. Persephone is between me and the tank. That’s annoying. I try to sidle around her but she keeps getting in front of me. “Mr. Howard. Bob,” she’s saying, as if my name means something. “Stop that. Bob—”
Something rattles in my hands: in the pizza box. It’s unimportant, so I drop it and try to shoulder-barge past her to get to the tank. It loves me, I can tell. It wants me to kiss it so it can be with me forever and save me for our ecstatic union in the Lord’s embrace.
“For fuck’s sake,” says Persephone. She won’t get out of my way. She’s got her feet braced and is leaning against me, trying to hold me back. I get a glimpse of her eyes, dark and wild and scared, and then suddenly she wraps an arm around the back of my head, pulls me closer, and sticks her tongue in my mouth. It’s like a parasite’s tentacular mouth-parts, questing, looking for a blood vessel to latch onto: I choke with disgust and recoil, nearly biting her before I realize what’s happening.
The thing in the tank is spinning a high level glamour—class four, at least. My mouth feels slimy and revolting; Persephone wipes her lips on the back of her wrist as I double over and gag, drooling copious saliva on the floor. Ritual magic runs on sympathy and contagion, and she just hit me with a simple channeling of what she sees when she looks at the thing in the tank to break through the glamour. It nearly had me…clearly my standard-issue defensive ward isn’t up to blocking that kind of assault.
“Better now?” she asks.
I nod, wordlessly, then spit again. “Got to kill it—” She raises the revolver and takes aim. “No, wait.” If she shoots, it’ll bring everyone within a couple of hundred meters at a run. “Better idea.” I stagger backwards, then turn into the sluice room and hit the light switch. There’s the usual stuff you’d expect to find: mop and bucket, taps, hose, janitor supplies. I grab a gallon bottle of Liquid-Plumr and squint at the ingredients. Sodium hydroxide, sodium hypochlorite, detergent: That’ll do. I step back into the tank room, and pass the bottle to Persephone. “Here.”
“Wait for me at the top of the stairs. And take your host.” I bend and pick up the pizza box, which is rattling away furiously. Maybe the complaints department realizes it’s about to become an orphan. I’m halfway up the corridor when all hell cuts loose in my head and the host in the box starts to vibrate and spasm, like a wasp that’s been hit by a concentrated blast of insecticide. There’s a pungent stink of chlorine inside my head and it feels as if someone is ramming nails in my eyes and ears and tongue. I nearly fall over, but grab the handrail and stumble upwards in the grip of the worst headache ever until I bump into the inside of the door at the top of the stairs. The pain begins to subside, and I take a couple of deep breaths. Persephone’s still down there. Is she going to be all right? I turn round and experimentally open my eyes, but the migraine distortions swirling around make it hard to see. “Hey,” I call quietly.
“Hey.” I startle. She’s right in front of my face, nose-to-nose with me. “We made it. Are you okay?”
“I—yeah.” I nod. “Just a sec.” I pull out my phone, call up OFCUT, and poke it at my ward. The damn thing says it’s fine, which is seriously worrying because Jesus nearly had me for a fish supper back there. The mother-of-hosts totally bypassed my defenses. On the other hand, my ward didn’t stop me feeling the missionaries back in the hotel. Come to think of it the ward I was using back in Germany and St Martin during the business with Ramona didn’t block our entanglement, either. Maybe it just plain doesn’t work on soul-eaters? I shut my eyes again. I can feel Persephone in front of me—feel the outlines of her mind, if that makes sense. I try and spread my awareness, but apart from a very faint presence outside the door (the attendant Persephone decked?) I don’t feel anyone. I open my eyes. “The good news is, I think we’re alone. The bad news is, there’s nothing down here but that.”