(Up front, Major Barnes-who is navigating by means of a simple contagion link Angleton established for him-tells the driver to take the second left exit from a roundabout. The truck sways alarmingly, then settles on its suspension as it accelerates away.)
“I had a long list of suspects. She was very low down.”
“Angleton,” Mo says gently, “just shut up. To err is human.”
“It seems I have not been truly myself for a long time,” he says, barely whispering, a dry, papery sound like files shuffling in a dead document archive.
Mo is quiet for a long time. “Do you want to be yourself?” she asks, finally.
“It would be less-limiting.” He pauses for a few seconds. “Sometimes self-imposed limits make life more interesting, though.”
The engine roars as the truck accelerates up a gradient.
“What would you do, if you weren’t limited?”
“I would be terrible.” Angleton doesn’t smile. “You would look at me and your blood would freeze.” Something moves behind the skin of his face, as if the pale parchment is a thin layer stretched between the real world and something underneath it, something inhuman. “I have done terrible things,” he murmurs.
“We all do, eventually. Dying is terrible. So is killing. But I’ve killed people and survived. And as for dying-you don’t have to live with yourself afterwards.”
“Ah, but you can die. Have you considered what it might be like to be… undying?”
She opens her eyes, at that, and looks at him coldly. “Pick an innocent, if you’re looking to put the frighteners on someone.”
“You misunderstand.” Angleton’s eyes are luminous in the dark of the cab. “I can’t die, as long as I am bound to this flesh. Have you ever longed for death, girl? Have you ever yearned for it?”
Mo shakes her head. “What are you getting at?” she demands.
“I can feel my end. It’s still some distance away, but I can feel it. It’s coming for me, sometime soon.” He subsides. “So you’d better be ready to manage without me,” he adds, a trifle sourly.
Mo looks away: through the windscreen, at the onrushing darkness of the motorway, broken only by cats’ eyes and the headlight glare of oncoming cars on the other carriageway. “I hope we get there in time,” she murmurs. “Otherwise you’ll have to do more than die if you want me to forgive you for losing Bob.”
MY ARM HURTS, AND I’M FADING IN AND OUT OF CONSCIOUSNESS. There’s a foul taste in my mouth but I can’t spit it out because of the gag. Iris is singing. Her voice is a strangled falsetto, weird swooping trills that don’t seem to follow the chord progressions of any musical style I’m familiar with. I’m tied to an altar between two long-dead corpses as the Brotherhood choral society sing a dirge-like counterpoint to Iris’s diva and slowly walk around me, bearing candles that burn dark, sucking in the lamplight…
The distorted lines inscribed in the canopy above my head seem to blur and shimmer, cruel violet lines cutting into my retinas, surrounded by a pinprick of stars-or are they distant eyes?-as I keep up my lines. They don’t make much sense, translated into English: the sense is something like, for iterator count from zero to number of entropy sinks within ground state, hear ye, hear ye, I open the gates of starry time for ye that you may feel the ground beneath your feet and the air upon your skin; I invoke the method of Dee and the constructor of Pthagn, forever exit and collect all the garbage, amen. See? I said it didn’t make much sense. In a particularly corrupt Enochian dialect that allows one to string together arbitrary subjunctive tenses it’s another matter, though.
Standing before her altar Iris is recounting the myriad names of the Eater of Souls, and she’s also pumping energy into this system. She’s got twenty black-robed followers and the computational hardware I lack, and if I’m lucky I can piggyback on her invocation-
Uh. I don’t feel so good.
A wave of darkness sweeps over me. For a moment I can feel the bony bodies to either side of me in the bed, and they’re warm and flesh-covered, almost as if they were breathing a moment ago. The tomb-dust stink is the yeasty smell of bodies from which the life departed only seconds hence. But the really weird thing is that I feel light, and dry, and unspeakably thirsty, a mere shell of my former self. The lines on the canopy overhead are glowing like a gash in the rotten fabric of reality, and I seem to be rising towards it. It’s death magic, pure and simple. I can summon the feeders out of night, I can open the way for them to crawl into the empty vessels all around me, buried in the wall niches outside this temple and the holes in the ground above its ceiling, but only if I use myself as a sacrifice, thinning the wall and letting them feed on my mind. The reason cultists prize virgins as human sacrifices is nothing to do with sex and everything to do with innocence. Iris probably thought the morphine would fog me enough to lie back and gurgle at the pretty lights. Or that the training-to never, ever attempt magic in one’s own head-would hold. Or perhaps it simply didn’t occur to her that I’d take the Samson option. But be that as it may-
Is that what I look like?
I’m looking down on my body from above. I’m a real sight, hog-tied between two irregular mounds in the bedding, gagged, my head split open and bleeding where Jonquil knocked a handful of butterfly sutures loose, my right arm leaking into a messy stain on one pillow. Eyes are closed. I’m floating. Iris is singing and I can understand the harmonies now, I can hear her as she tries to summon something that isn’t there.
“Beloved and forsaken! Eater of Souls! Lover of Death! Mother of nightmares! We who are gathered to observe your rite remember you and recall you by name! Come now to this vessel we prepare-”
I’ve got company up here. I can feel them gather in the darkness, blind curiosity thrusting them close, like sharks butting up against the legs of a swimmer stranded in the middle of an ocean. They’re class three abominations. I have summoned them to feed on the rips and gashes of my memory that I dribble in the water of Lethe. I’m not alone up here: and they sense me. Soon one of them will taste me, take a bite of my soul and find that my memories are richly textured and deep. And then I’ll begin to lose stuff. I push at them, trying to shove them towards the empty vessels that I have primed, but they aren’t having it; I’m far more interesting than any century-dead bag of bones.
And then I feel a horrible visceral pain, as if someone has stuck a barbed knife through my umbilical.
“Come to this vessel!” shrieks Iris. “Come now!”
I convulse: the pain is unspeakable. And I feel the tugging. If I travel with it, the pain lessens slightly. “Obey me! Enter the empty vessel! On pain of eternal torment, I instruct you to enter!”
I drift down from the canopy, watching the ripples of nightmare twitch and spiral above me, still seeking. What the fuck?
“Enter! Enter! Enter!” Iris yodels. And as I lie on my back, looking up at the canopy above me, the pain in my guts evaporates.
What the fucking fuck? I close my eyes, and resume my gurgling, muffled invocation. For a moment, I’d swear I was having an out-of-body experience…
Then a coherent picture forms in my mind’s eye.
It’s like this. Iris is trying to summon up the Eater of Souls and bind it into my body where, among other things, it’ll eat my soul and take up permanent residence. But the Eater of Souls is otherwise occupied right now. But Iris doesn’t know this-she doesn’t have TEAPOT clearance.
Meanwhile, I have just been trying to vacate my body all on my own, in order to summon up the feeders in the night, because if a bunch of Goatfuckers are trying to sacrifice me, I might as well fuck ’em as hard as I can. Again: it’s not Iris’s fault for failing to anticipate this, because she’s never had to visit the Funny Farm. She’s not really much of a demonologist. And she’s such a good manager she’s never had reason to see me when I’m seriously pissed off.