“Untie me and I’ll take you to it,” says Iris, quick as a flash. “Please?” I can just about see her batting her eyelids at Laughing Boy. Then she adds: “You’d better cut All-Highest’s throat before he wakes up. He was going to sacrifice me-”
I try to shout, She’s lying! But nothing comes out of my throat. I am not, in fact, breathing, I realize distantly. Am I dead? I wonder. Am I undead? I’m not one hundred percent clear on the clinical definition of death, but I’m pretty sure that lying trapped in my own unbreathing body meets some of the requirements. I don’t know about the continuity of consciousness bit, but maybe it’s a side effect of the binding ritual they used. If I had my phone I could go online and google it, but zombie don’t surf. I feel the knife blade move, and I really start to panic-
“Nyet. Is already dead. You take me for fool! Where is Fuller Memorandum? Tell and I release.”
The knife is at Iris’s throat; I lie beside her, paralyzed and apprehensive.
Iris’s breath ratchets harshly through her throat. “The file All-Highest is clutching. Be careful, you don’t want to touch his skin by accident-”
But she’s too late.
Alexei, Laughing Boy, pulls the Fuller Memorandum from my hands. As he does so, he makes momentary contact with one of my fingers. And the inevitable happens, because this torpor that’s come over me-the torpor associated with the summoning, and the control of lesser eaters, and with K syndrome-is symptomatic of something else: I’m hungry.
IN THE BACK OF AN AMBULANCE SPEEDING TOWARDS THE ROYAL Surrey Country Hospital with lights and siren, an old man opens his eyes and whispers, “Good job, boy.” The paramedic, who is looking at the EEG trace, glances at him in surprise.
The stroke victim tries to sit up, struggling against the straps that hold him on the stretcher. Then he frowns thunderously. “How long was I out?” he asks the paramedic. Then: “Forget that. Turn round-I want you to take me to Brookwood. Immediately!”
SECONDS LATER, BARNES AND HIS MEN COME THROUGH THE DOOR with a strobing flicker of light bombs and a concussive blast of stun grenades. They’re ready for business: they’ve got Mo and her singular instrument ready to suppress any residual occult resistance. But they’re too late.
The screaming is mine; I’m yelling my throat out: a weird, warbling abhuman keening that doesn’t stop until the squad paramedic gingerly sticks me with a battlefield-grade sedative. Which takes some time: when they find me I’m lying on a vampire prince’s bed, covered in gore, with a lump missing from my right arm, and my eyes rolled up in my head so that only the green-glowing whites show. It takes them a while to confirm that I’m safe to approach; and a while longer to get an insulated stretcher down to the chamber and strap me down onto it.
Iris is sobbing, cringing away from me as far as the ropes will let her. She can’t get very far, though: she’s weighed down by the body of the dead Spetsnaz trooper, a black ring-binder lying on the floor beside him.
As for Alexei, he’s dead: eaten by the thing the cultists tried to make of me. Their sacrifice bit a huge and vital chunk out of my soul; after the power of my death-magic ran down, I was all but inert until Alexei unintentionally filled up the hole. I don’t think he intended to do that. I didn’t intend to do that, certainly: I’m no necromancer. But when they’ve performed the ritual of binding upon you, trying to turn you into a vessel for the Eater of Souls…
You need to eat.
Epilogue. ON THE BEACH
THE MIND’S EYE HAS A FAST – FORWARD BUTTON. IT’S FUNNY: most of the time we don’t think about it in those terms; but when you’re trying to write down a sequence of experiences, to take a series of unfortunate events and turn them into a coherent story, the mind’s eye takes on some of the characteristics of an old-fashioned videotape recorder: balky, prone to drop-outs and loss, cumbersome and wonky and breakable.
So call me a camera and stick a battery in my ear.
FIRST, PANIN GOT AWAY.
Here’s what I imagine happened, around the time I was screaming my lungs out on a bed of nightmares:
In the back of a shiny black BMW speeding towards Woking-and thence to the motorway south to Dover and the Channel Tunnel-an old man opens his eyes and takes a deep breath. “That was altogether too close for comfort,” he says aloud.
Dmitry glances at him in the rearview mirror. “With respect, sir… I agree.” His knuckles are white where they grasp the steering wheel, and he is racking up fines from the average-speed cameras at an almost surreal rate. “The men…”
Panin closes his eyes again. “Dead. Or they’ll exfiltrate. Vassily in the embassy can see to their needs. I am going home to explain this fiasco.” He is silent for nearly a minute. “We nearly had it alclass="underline" a transcript of the Sternberg Fragment, Fuller’s memorandum on binding the Eater of Souls.”
“With respect, sir, cultists are always unreliable proxies. And we did get the schemata for the violin, and we weakened the British…”
Panin glares at Dmitry: “Weakening the British is not the goal of the great game! Survival is the goal. We are intelligent men, not panicking rats biting each other as they struggle to escape the sinking ship. They are the enemies of our enemy, never forget that. It is the cultists’ error, to imagine themselves beset by foes they can never defeat.”
“Like back there?” asks Dmitry.
Panin doesn’t answer. They drive the rest of the way to the Channel in silence.
SECOND, HERE’S WHAT I KNOW HAPPENED:
Once I woke up briefly, in a darkened nighttime room with two beds and a door and a man in a blue suit standing outside the door with a gun. The man in the bed next to me was familiar. He was asleep, and I remember thinking that there was something very urgent that I had to tell him, but I couldn’t remember what it was and the file was missing-
Then the alarm went off and the medics came and they made me go back to sleep.
I don’t remember much after that. Which is a mercy-the dreams were bad.
Mo tells me that for the first week they kept me heavily sedated-if they eased up on the chlorpromazine I started screaming and trying to eat my own fingers. She visited every day. She sat by my bedside and fed me, spooning mush into my mouth and making sure I didn’t choke on it.
Angleton recovered much faster. Two nights under observation and they released him. Then he heard about me and kicked up a stink. They were planning on moving me to St. Hilda’s. Angleton had a better idea of what was wrong with me and refused to take no for an answer; so after nearly a week in hospital (with my head wrapped in the pink fluffy haze of a major antipsychotic bender), a private ambulance picked me up and deposited me in the Village.
The Village used to be called Dunwich, back before the Ministry of War evacuated it and turned it into a special site. It was allocated to the wartime Special Operations Executive, part of which later became the Laundry and inherited this small coastal community with its street of cottages and decaying pier, its general store and village pub. Today we use it as a training center, and also as a quiet place for taking time out. There’s no internet access, and no mobile phone coverage, and no nagging from head office about time sheets and sickness self-certification. There is a medical doctor, but Janet is sensible and very patient, and has seen an astonishing number of cases of Krantzberg syndrome (and other, more esoteric sorcerous injuries) over the years.
They billeted me in a tiny seaside cottage and Janet took me off the chlorpromazine, substituting a number of other medications-not all of them legally prescribable. (MDMA helps a lot when you’re suffering from the delusion that you’re one of the walking dead.) After three days, I stopped shivering and hiccuping with fear; after a week, I could sleep again without a night-light. At the weekend, Mo came to visit. I was glad to see her. She knows what it’s like where I’ve been, to a good first approximation. We spent a lot of time together, just holding hands. It feels very strange, touching someone who’s alive. Maybe in another week I’ll be able to hug her without recoiling because I’m terrified I’m going to accidentally eat her mind.