The Fuller Memorandum

here, and my feet seem to know which way they’re going. I turn left and find myself on an incline, ascending a tree-flanked slope. The faint tinkle of a bell prompts me to stand aside as an urban cyclist in luminous lycra zips past, coasting in the opposite direction.

Item: Angleton wants to use me as a tethered goat, but I’m not much use to him if I’m not in the right place when the Goatfuckers come calling. Damn, I hope he gets my message via the Memex. Where are we leaking? Is it via the BLOODY BARON committee? That seems to be the logical place, but . . .

A chill creeps over me and I glance up at a turbid cloudscape that wasn’t there five minutes ago, swirling masses of dirty cumulonimbus crammed with a promise of rain to come. Uh-oh. Here’s me, out and about in a lightweight summer jacket. I really ought to head for home. I keep walking, because it seems like the thing to do, although the shadows are lengthening among the dark green trees to either side. The cycle path is empty; I ought to start looking for an exit from it that’ll take me back down to street level and a bus stop or tube station. I glance behind me, but I can’t see the ramp I came up anymore.

Item: Doctor Mike’s research finding about the early onset of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. Let’s hypothesize that the Goatfuckers heard about it by way of our security breach. We know the Goatfuckers want CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN to come about—they’re fans of the old, dead nightmares that will stalk the planet once more. (They worship the things. How twisted is that?) Ford’s new finding suggests that the onset conditions for tearing a hole in the structure of reality are a bit more flexible than we previously thought. Which suggests that there are things the Goatfuckers can do to accelerate the onset of apocalypse, the stars coming right as the pulp writer put it. They’re showing an interest in the Eater of Souls. Why? Do they think that if they get their hands on the Fuller Memorandum they can control him, make him do something unspeakable that will shiver the stars in their tracks and split the sky apart like—

—I look up. “Oh fuck.” Then I shut my mouth and save my breath for more important activities. Like, for example, running away.

While I have been wandering aimlessly, locked in my head, my feet have guided me onto a dismal path. There are no cyclists or pedestrians in sight, just an endless dark strip of tarmac that curves out of sight ahead and behind me, surrounded by impenetrable walls of spiny evergreen shrubs that lean inwards above my head. I can’t see through the hedge, but there are pallid mushroom-like structures bursting from the soil around their roots. The cloudscape overhead is turbulent and dappled, side-lit by sunlight slanting under its floor—even though there are hours yet to go until sunset—and the ever-shifting whirlpools and knots of darkness roll and dance, lit from within by the snapshots of cosmic paparazzi.

I have no idea how I got here and I’m not amused with myself for succumbing to what was, at a guess, a very low-key glamour, but the urge to get out and find a safe refuge is overwhelming. Every instinct is screaming that I’m in immediate danger. And so I begin to jog, just as the U-boat klaxon starts to honk urgently from my breast pocket.

“Bob?” It’s Mo.

“I’m kind of busy right now,” I pant. “What’s up?”

“The memo I was after, are you sure it wasn’t in?”

Huh? “I’m dead sure. Listen, what was it about?”

“That external appraisal of my violin, I told you about that, remember?”

“Oh, that—”

“The examiner was murdered! About thirty-six hours ago. Bob, if they think you’ve got the violin report —”

“Listen, let me give you an update. I’ve been suspended on pay. I need you to pick up a ward for me, as soon as you can. I’m heading home now, but I’m in a spot of bother and they took my pistol. Angleton isn’t AWOL: Can you find him and tell him he was right, the Goatfuckers are after the bait and I need backup right now—”

The NecronomiPod beeps at me three times and drops the call.

“Fuck.” I thumb-tap the software ward back to life, then shove the JesusPhone back in my pocket and keep jogging, breathing heavily now. There’s a breeze in my face, shoving me back and slowing me down, and the surface of the footpath feels greasy and turgid, almost sticky. The sense of wrongness is overwhelming. I have a sense of deja vu, harking back to my midnight run, although that path was miles away and didn’t look anything like . . .

Oh. Am I on a siding? I ask myself, as the headwind builds and the shadows deepen. I hear distant thunder and the first heavy slap of rain-drops on the path ahead: Did the Necropolitan line have branches that were edited out of the public record decades ago, by any chance?

The hoarse scream of a ghostly steam whistle echoes in my ears. It’s behind me. And it’s gaining ground.

It’s funny how you lose track of a situation while it spins out of control: in the space of about fifteen minutes I’ve let myself be led by the nose—or rather, the feet—from a busy suburban high street in London, right into an occult trap. There are places where the walls of reality are thin; the service corridors of hotels, subway footpaths at night, hedge-mazes and cycle paths. You can get lost in such places, led astray by a lure and a snare and a subliminal suggestion. These routes blend into one another. Of all the myriad ways that link the human realm to the other places, these are the ones we know very little about—because those of us who stumble into them seldom return with their minds intact.

I can feel my heart hammering as I run. The hedges to either side brandish spikes edged with a nacreous rind of blight. There are pale white shapes embedded in the wall of leaves, the flensed bones of intruders trapped in the interstices of the vegetative barrier. Overhead, the clouds are black as smoke from the funnel of a racing steam locomotive, boiling and raging at the ground. I don’t dare look back, even though I’m sure I’m being herded towards an ambush: the phone in my pocket is buzzing and vibrating in urgent Morse, signaling the presence of hostile intent.

I need to get off the path. The trouble is, there’s nowhere to go—

Hang on, I think. Am I seeing true?

There is this about the interstitial paths: it takes a fair bit of power to open a gate, and I didn’t notice any pentacles and altars draped in eviscerated goats during my walk through the decaying shopping center. On the other hand, it takes relatively little power to fake up a glamour to provide the illusion of a dark path. Wheezing, I reach for my phone, thumb it on, and slow my stride just enough that I can see the display. Bloody Runes, ward detector, turn the camera on the footpath—

A silver thread, disappearing around the bend ahead of me. I pan sideways, and the camera blurs then clears, showing me ordinary English nettles and a thinly spaced row of trees pruned well back from the path. It’s bright, too, the ground dappled with summer daylight filtered through the branches overhead. Gotcha. I jink sideways, towards the menacing hedgerow on my right, slowing, eyes focused on the face of my phone as the shadows of the thorny wall loom over me—

And I crash through a stand of waist-high nettles and narrowly miss a young beech tree as the hedge and the thunderstorm sky vanish like the illusion they are.

“Ow!” I swear under my breath, the hot-bright pinprick sting of nettles rising on the back of my phone hand. I examine the side of the cutting the path runs through. Yes, it’s familiar. I’ve been here before, or somewhere very like it. Except for the lack of pedestrians walking the dog, or cyclists en route from one side of town to the other, it could be a normal bike track. But this one’s been warded off; anyone starting down it who isn’t wanted is going to feel a mild sense of dread, rising after a while to an urgent conviction that they need to be anywhere else.

I thumb my phone back to the start screen, and look for a signal. There’s nothing showing. That shouldn’t be possible, not on a major network in the middle of a city, but there are zero bars. Do the bad guys have a jammer? It wouldn’t be unheard of. And they knew enough to lay a snare right outside the New Annexe, one tailored for me . . . that is not good news. I sit down behind a tree, careful to check that I’m concealed from the path by that stand of stinging nettles, and then I do something that’s overdue: I compose an email to the two people I know I can trust —Angleton and Mo. The JesusPhone is smart enough to keep looking for a connection, and to send the mail as soon as it snags a signal. Then I compose a slightly different email to a whole bunch of people I don’t entirely trust, remembering to include Angleton and Mo on the recipient list, and send it. Now that