The Fuller Memorandum

“There!” says Iris, smiling at me as she hands the half-empty goblet to her daughter. “Isn’t it so much better now?”

I roll my eyes, force saliva, and spit. I’m not aiming at Iris, I’m just trying to clean the taste from my tongue—but her smile slips. “Hey now, I didn’t give you permission to do that. No spitting. Do you understand?”

I bite my tongue before I succumb to the impulse to tell her where to shove it. I want to be rid of these ropes. There are things waiting outside in the dark, learning once again how bones and sinews are articulated, and I don’t want to be tied up down here when they arrive. Her words of binding slide over and past me, like a fishing line with rotten, unappetizing bait, but if I really was the Eater of Souls they’d sink into my inner ears like barbed-wire kisses. The only way out of here is to convince Iris that her little ritual worked: I’ll just have to pretend. “I—understand,” I croak after a brief pause, and it’s not hard to sound utterly unlike myself. “Mistress.”

The fat, happy smile begins to steal back across her face. “Here are your orders. You will serve the goals and rules of the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh. You will not attack or attempt to damage any of the Brotherhood, under penalty of the binding I hold over you. You will not reveal your true nature to anyone outside the Brotherhood without my permission. And you will inform me at once if you suspect you are under suspicion. Do you understand?”

That’s a no-brainer: “Yes, Mistress,” I say, looking her in the eyes. Her face has an unhealthy greenish sheen to it, as if there’s an ethereal light source behind me. She’s really sucking this up.

“Good.” She nods to her minions. “Untie him.”

They bend over the black cords that bind me, and as they loosen I feel a very strange sensation in my chest —a gathering sensitivity, an awareness of the darkness around me. The ropes, part of the ritual apparatus prepared by the Brotherhood of the Skull for their own purposes so long ago, held their own geas: it made me feel weak. But now they’re gone, the sense of strangeness redoubles. I’m an alien in my own body. It’s very disturbing.

“Can you stand?” Iris asks me.

“I’ll try.” First I try to sit up, using my left arm as a lever. It’s clumsy and I’m physically unbalanced, and my right arm is still throbbing distantly—but I succeed. Throwing a leg out sideways I crab round, then lean forward and (with a silent apology) slide across the back of the mummified sleeper under the counterpane. Is it my imagination or do they twitch, and push back at me? I don’t stop to find out, but continue, sliding my feet towards the floor. It’s like standing for the first time after being bedridden with a fever. At first it takes all my energy, and I nearly black out: everything goes gray for a few seconds, and there is a buzzing and chittering in my ears. But then my head clears, and I find I feel fine. I feel fine: and the feeling extends beyond me, beyond the walls of the crypt, out into the damp soil and among the tree roots and into the cavities encysted in the ground, their occupants now waking from their long slumber. “I’m standing,” I say, swaying slightly.

“Good.” Iris turns towards the altar. “Behold, the Eater of Souls!” she says, and takes my left wrist and holds it up, for all the world like a referee hailing a winning boxer.

“What would you have me do now?” I ask her out of the corner of my mouth, hamming it up for the benefit of the audience.

“Nothing yet. But I have sent out a summons to our brethren; next month we will hold another rite, and you will open the way to the Gatekeeper. If all goes well, the Pharaoh shall walk Earth’s ground again next March. Do you think you can do that?”

Silent voices tickle the back of my skull: What would you have us do, Lord?

I tell them precisely what I want, in pedantically detailed Enochian—a dead language with which to command dead things.

“Eater. Speak?” Iris stares at me. We’re close enough that I can see that greenish glow reflected on her face. Oh, it’s me. I’m glowing, I realize. My eyes are glowing. I’m possessed.

I look at her. “Iris,” I say softly, “you’ve forgotten the first rule of applied demonology.”

She stares. “How did you know my—”

“Do not call up that which you cannot put down.”

She tries to jerk her left hand away from me, making a grab at her improvised altar with her right. She reaches for the blood-tarnished silver sacrificial sickle but I yank her back and bring my right hand up to catch her wrist. We stand for a second in a parody of a waltz step, and I smile at her, baring my teeth. Her expression of heart-struck terror is as pure as fresh-shed blood. Around us her followers are turning, beginning to realize something has gone wrong, as the voices at the back of my head whisper oaths of fealty to me and the feeders bend to their tasks.

I raise my right arm—painless, now—over her head, and spin her round, then gather her to my chest, with my mouth centimeters from the nape of her neck. I’m careful not to make contact with her bare skin: a strangely irresistible aroma rises from her, and I suspect if I touched her I’d be unable to control myself. She smells of food. “Nobody try anything!” I shout. “Or I’ll kill her!” A couple of the cultists are armed, but their security guys seem to favor shotguns: not the ideal weapon for dealing with a hostage-taker if you want the hostage back in anything other than lots of little pieces.

Simultaneously there’s a stifled scream, and Jonquil falters in the act of raising a knife to throw at me. “The bed!” She hiccups—yes, fear gives some people the hiccups. “Look at the bed!”

“Shut up—” Iris begins to say, as I twist us both round so that I can see what everyone else is looking at; then she falls silent.

A man near the back of the congregation yells: “Run for it!” He grabs his robe and legs it in the direction of the doors.

In front of my eyes, on the bed, and everywhere else I can sense around me, the dead are rising.

“ALPHA TWENTY, THIS IS CHARLIE MIKE , DO YOU RECEIVE , over.”

“Charlie Mike, Alpha Twenty receiving you clear, over.”

The Eurocopter EC 135 banks gently as it turns towards Brookwood. Behind it, the streetlights of Guildford sprawl across the North Downs like a gigantic luminous jellyfish, swimming in deep waters; ahead, the ground is dark and peaceful until Woking, another amber-pricked sprawl of suburbia sleeping lightly in the summer night.

“Alpha Twenty, are you in visual range yet, over.”

“Charlie Mike, two miles out and closing. No lights on the ground, over.”

“Alpha Twenty, roger that, we recommend Nitesun. Focus is any parked vehicle on side roads off Cemetery Pales, we’re looking for a Mercedes 500SL, color silver. Over.”

The police sergeant sitting in the backseat with the controls to the infrared camera is peering into his screen, searching the tree-lined darkness for any sign of life. Tracking down the straight boulevard that leads through the park-like cemetery, his eyes are drawn to a row of vehicles parked off to one side of a crescent-shaped side road. “Got vehicles,” he says, tweaking the joystick to turn his camera and zoom on them. “Location, Saint Barnabas Avenue, adjacent to building in clearing to south of road—Jesus!”

The bright pinpoints of bodies are clearly visible on his camera. They’re moving around in the woods northeast of the building, and a couple south of the building—and there are flares, moving fast, bursting like fireworks.

“Alpha Twenty, we see fireworks, repeat, fireworks, numerous parties, situation confused, south Saint Barnabas Avenue. Climbing to flight level twenty, over.”

The ground drops away and the airframe throbs as the pilot pulls up on the collective pitch and climbs at full power. “Roy, what’s going on down there?” he asks over the intercom.

“Not sure, skipper—looks like rockets—” There are dark pinpoint figures down there, what looks like a mob, but they’re not showing up as heat sources. “Something wrong with the camera, damn it. There are people down there but I think the rockets are masking their body heat. Never heard of that—”

“You can use the Nitesun once we’re above three thousand feet. Clear?”

“Got it. Tell me when. Jesus, that was big—they’ve set a tree burning. Oh Jesus fucking Christ I’ve never seen anything like it! Sir, there’s a whole crowd down there, and the idiots with fireworks