The Fuller Memorandum

Angleton stands up. “That’s your department. You’ve got his ward, his phone, his laptop, if you’ve got any sense you’ve got an item of recently worn underwear ...”

Mo nods jerkily. “He was here. If there’s a trail—” She turns to Howe: “The foam mattress, with the blood. Have you taken a sample?” Howe holds up an evidence bag, its contents black and squishy. “That’ll do.”

“Back to the truck.” Angleton waves them out of the living room, ahead of him. “I hope we’re in time.”

“What do you think they’ll do to him?” Mo’s anxiety is glaringly obvious.

“They’ve got the memorandum.” Angleton shrugs. “I think they’ll try to invoke the Eater of Souls and bind it to Bob’s flesh.”

“They—” Mo glares at him. “Bob said you gave him a fake!” she accuses.

“No, just a photocopy.” Angleton’s ironic smile is ghastly to behold. “The Eater of Souls is already taken: if they try the rite, they won’t get what they think they’re asking for. And I will admit, I didn’t expect them to make it this far. I’m not infallible, girl.”

A minute later, the driver switches on the blue lights and pulls out into the road. Behind the departing truck the house’s front door gapes open, as if ready to welcome the next official visitors. But the victims under the patio will have to wait a little longer.

OKAY, SO I WAS WRONG ABOUT THE A-TEAM AND THE B-TEAM.

And I was wrong about the cultists, and what they believe.

Assuming Iris is telling the truth, there’s an angle to view things from which their actions are, if not justifiable, then at least understandable. Poor little misunderstood mass murderers, with only the best of intentions at heart. And their hearts are pure for the goal they seek is the only one any sane—

Stop it. That’s Stockholm syndrome talking, the tendency of abductees to start seeing things from their kidnappers’ viewpoint. Just stop it.

They’re frog-marching me along a tunnel towards a summoning grid where they plan to turn me into a host for a demonic intrusion from another universe, and my subconscious is trying to see things from their point of view? I’m confused—

It’s a broad tunnel, low-ceilinged. Every five meters or so there stands a cultist, male or female figures in hooded black robes who hold lamps, the better to illuminate the whitewashed brick walls and the niches therein. The niches have occupants; they’ve been standing there for a long time. There’s a soft, dry breeze blowing—I’ve got no idea how they manage the ventilation—and some of the inhabitants are pretty well preserved. The way the skin shrinks across the skull, drawing the shriveled lips back to reveal yellowed fangs and blackened tongues, almost as if they’re screaming. The dead outnumber the living here, all dressed in dusty Victorian or Edwardian finery. If Iris has her way, I’ll be joining them soon—or worse. When I signed the Act there was a binding promise placed on my soul: the Laundry doesn’t like its staff to leave ghosts and revenants behind to face interrogation. No afterlife echoes for me.

We pass a rack of wooden shelves, bowed with age beneath piles of skulls and bundles of femurs tagged with faded labels, and pause at another oak door. One of the cultists—do I recognize Julian the shotgun-toting cannibal under that hood?—steps forward with a key. My heart’s pounding and I feel feverish, and to top it all I’m so scared I’m in danger of losing bladder control, like an innocent man being dragged to his execution. I’m also angry. Hang on to that anger, I tell myself. Then I start trying to string phrases together in Enochian, in my own head.

If they’re determined to kill me, then fuck ’em—I’m going to go out with a bang.

The dead. I can feel them pressing in around us, outside the wan light of the LED torches. Empty vessels waiting, entropic sinkholes of randomized information, all charged up with nowhere to go. These dead bear no love for the living among them: followers of a ghastly fertility cult, the spawner of unclean things—now dead and withered, they lie here where once they conducted strange bacchanalian ceremonies, watching while the austere puritans of the Black Brotherhood desecrate their tombs and reconsecrate their altars. They can’t possibly be happy with the new tenants, can they?

To summon up a possessive entity takes a Dho-Nha geometry curve, a sacrifice of blood, and an iteration through certain theorems. (Not to mention a power source, but I’m sitting right on top of the necromantic equivalent of the Dinorwig stored hydropower plant: if I can’t turn the lights on with that, I might as well give up.) I know this shit: it’s years since I first did it. I can just about visualize the curve, and if I try to flex my right arm—oh gods, that hurts—is that a trickle of blood I feel? I start to subvocalize, trying to hold a warped wireframe image in my mind’s eye: One plus not-one equals null; let the scaling coefficient be the square root of—

The door is open. How big is this place, anyway? The Ancient Order of Wheelwrights must have been rolling in cash. The sacrificial cortege begins to move again, and now the cultists around me begin to sing a curious dirge- like song. We’re descending across broad steps—almost two meters wide, topped with dusty mattresses to either side—towards a central depression beneath a low, vaulted ceiling. The skullfuckers probably used this space for their orgies, more than a century ago; it’s haunted by the ghostly stink of bodily fluids. We’ve been brought up to think of the Victorians as prudes, horrified by a glimpse of table leg, but that myth was constructed in the 1920s out of whole cloth, to give their rebellious children an excuse to point and say, “We invented sex!” The reality is stranger: the Victorians were licentious in the extreme behind closed doors, only denying everything in public in the pursuit of probity.

Now the cultists around me are breathing faster, raising their voices higher, trying to drown out the phantom sighs and moans of a thousand dead and withered seducers. I try and keep to my own chant, but it’s hard to focus on suicide when all around you the ghosts of gluttony sleep so lightly.

There is a huge bed at the center of the well of mattresses: a four-poster, canopied in rich black brocade, ebony uprights supporting a drapery as ornately swagged as any Victorian hearse, with a huge chest sitting in front of its footboard. The bed alone is wide enough to accommodate half a dozen—not sleepers, I realize—although only two bodies lie there now, curled in fetal death, close to one side.

As the singers continue, two of Iris’s minions walk up to the bed. They raise the quilt piled against the footboard, covering the mummified occupants; then they take hold of cords dangling from the base of each post and attach manacles to them.

“No,” I say. “No!” Then I try to bite the hand that’s reaching in front of my mouth with a gag.

“Mummy said not to hurt you unnecessarily,” Jonquil explains. “So open wide, or—” Her other hand grabs my crotch and squeezes. I gasp in pain. Bitch. “Good boy!”

When they dump me on the counterpane a cloud of stinking dust billows out in all directions, hanging so thick in the air that I spasm and sneeze. It takes six of them to hold me down and fasten the manacles, and I nearly faint when they extend my right arm—the morphine must be wearing off. Everything blurs for a few seconds. I look up at the inside of the canopy over the bed, and it seems to me as if I’ve seen it before—seen it in my mind’s eye a minute ago, in fact.

This isn’t a bed: it’s an altar. It used to belong to a fertility cult. It’s been used for sex magic. What do I know about sex magic, and revenants, and summonings? Think!

The chorus take up positions around the bed, continuing their chant; Iris walks around it slowly, tracing a design using a small fortune in granulated silver tipped from an antique powder horn. Then she walks to the chest at the foot of the bed and waits while two more cultists produce the varied tools and ingredients for a summoning: knives, mirrors, unpleasantly molded black candles, a laptop computer, and bookshelf speakers. She is out of my sight most of the time, unless I lift my head—it’s hard—but I gradually realize something else: she’s using the chest at the foot of . . . the original altar, as her own summoning altar. They’ve put me on the other cult’s summoning grid.

Iris is an SSO 6(A)—middle management in the administrative branch—because she’s not actually very talented at magic. And I’m in the position of a man, sentenced to hang, whose inexperienced executioners have temporarily sat him in the electric chair while they work out how to tie a noose. Except magic doesn’t work like that. My shoulders begin to shake. I try to get a grip on myself. A few seconds pass. I open my eyes and stare at the headboard, and flex my right arm until I nearly black out. Then, when I’m awake again, I start to subvocalize again, repeating the black theorem I started outside the door to this place.