The Apocalypse Codex

about it, because they’re not stomping: they’re mostly swaying in place, hands clasped before them in attitudes of prayer, and though they sing—

Johnny squints. He can’t see to the front of the stage, but follows the missionary along one of the aisles leading round the outside of the congregation. Something is wrong. The skin on the back of his neck crawls. There’s a glamour here, a monumentally powerful one, stupefying and cloying. He’s seeing and hearing what he’s meant to see and hear, thousands of churchgoers singing and clapping along to a wholesome Christian rock band between prayers led by the pastor at the front, a joyous act of collective worship.

But every five or ten seats in the rows there’s one who doesn’t feel right. There is something about them that Johnny recognizes: the taint of the old school, the stolid soulless stance of the missionary in front of him. The crowd is seeded with the possessed, positioned behind and scattered among the congregation like fence posts surrounding a flock of sheep. The shepherd has sent his own to bring the flock home. There’s a faint smell, too, aromatic burning incense overlaying something slightly fishy, like burning electrical insulation. A powerful glamour lies over the whole congregation like a stifling blanket, leaking into eyes and ears and warping perceptions. His knives are uneasy for good reason: created to cut, oblivious to mercy and mistruth, they are themselves shrouded in this gummy, foggy cloud of mind-sticky deception. And the music, the singing, the chant is deafening—

The chant. Johnny focusses on it, trying to make out the distinctive words that the congregation are repeating. They slide away from his ears, half-masked by the glamour: Latin? No, this isn’t a Catholic mass. Think, sonny! he tells himself, tightening his grip on the soul-stealer knives as he follows the missionary around the next block of seats. I’ve heard this before.

At the O2 Arena in Docklands. On the stage. Glossolalia, speaking in tongues. Specifically: Old Enochian.

“Hell and damnation,” Johnny mutters to himself in near-shock, as the glamour falls away from his eyes and ears and he sees what is going on around him with unclouded senses. It exceeds his worst imaginings. For he is indeed in church, but the shift in perception shows him what lies beneath the glamour.

The pastor still stands behind the altar, but his chant is a continuous incantation in the formal language of magic, and he, too, is one of the missionaries, driven and controlled by the host of an alien Lord. It is a chant of control, binding and compelling, coercing and demanding obedience and submission in the name of the Sleeper.

The rock band and the choir are still there, but they’re not playing and singing of their own volition: they’re puppets dancing to an alien tune. The sound swells from somewhere deep beneath or behind them, using their voices and their instruments as a vehicle to penetrate the wall between the worlds. Johnny is still far enough back that he has to squint—but there is blood on the guitarists’ fingertips, and the choir members eyes are rolled back in their heads as they sway, unconscious in the grip of something that only looks like rapture when seen through glamour-fogged eyes.

The plain steel cross behind the altar is gone, replaced by an iron hoop three meters in diameter, standing on edge. He knows without having to examine it that the rim will be inlaid with glyph-like circuit patterns, connected to external signal generators; different shades of darkness shimmer within the gate’s heart. He feels the ghostly fingers of the wind from the abyss pulling on his mind, urging him forward towards it.

The missionaries aren’t there to herd the congregation forward, they’re in the crowd to hold them back, lest they rush the gate and trample each other in the crush.

“Oh, Duchess,” Johnny mutters, “I hope you know what you’re getting into.” Then he tightens his grip on his knives and follows his unwitting guide, down towards the side door at the front of the aisle that leads backstage, where Schiller is waiting to receive his long-lost cousin.

PERSEPHONE STEPS IN FRONT OF ME, CLOSE ENOUGH THAT I can feel her breath on my face. “The Hand of Glory,” she whispers; “now would be a good time to restart it.”

I fumble in my pocket lining, which has become twisted around a disgusting jumble of bits of scorched pigeon toes, a cigarette lighter, and other peculiar odds and ends. The camera dangles and spins from the lanyard around my wrist as I try to rearrange things—luckily it’s in standby mode—until I manage to extract the pigeon’s foot. I’m about to light it when Persephone helpfully fastens an elasticated grounding strap to my wrist, and takes hold of the other end. “Thanks.” The click of the lighter and the sudden flicker of the butane flame seem deafening in the twilight at the top of the stairs. Then the claw is burning again, sputtering a foul trail of smoke, and everything around us acquires the very slight pallor that tells me it’s working. “Okay, lead on.”

She doesn’t speak, but takes a couple of steps forward, towing me along at the end of the grounding strap like a leashed panther.

There’s a fat bundle of cables and some narrow insulated pipes slung from a shelf suspended from the ceiling above our heads as we descend the stairs to what proves to be a narrow corridor with doors to either side: a basement that’s been partitioned off into rooms. The complaints department is scritching excitedly at the inside of the warded pizza box and I can feel its eagerness to be reunited with…what? Something down here, that’s for sure. I have a surreal sense of deja vu, as if I’m trapped in a live-action game of Dungeons and Dragons or something. It’d be funny if my skin wasn’t crawling.

Persephone pauses at the bottom of the stairs and glances at me. I gesture with the box, pointing where its occupant is scritching loudest, towards the door at the end of the corridor. One of the other doors is propped open, and the smell tells me all I need to know: it’s a sluice room and basement toilet, currently unoccupied. We tiptoe past it and Persephone stops again outside the end door. “You’re sure?” she whispers, and I nod.

I’m half-expecting her to kick down the door, but instead she reaches out, pauses just short of the door handle for a few seconds, then turns it and takes a quick step forward. Somehow that little snub-nosed revolver has appeared in her hand—I never saw it move—but there’s nobody in the darkened storeroom to point it at. There is, however, a presence.

The complaints department is going apeshit with delight as I follow Persephone across the threshold and smell burning insulation, a rotting sea-smell like the slops rinsed from a fishmonger’s slab on a hot summer afternoon. I hear a loud scritching hissing clattering, like an infinity of giant wood lice. Persephone backs up in a hurry and turns to hit the light switch by the door and nearly clouts me in the gut with her gun. The light is oddly red, and I look past her to see a giant glass-walled tank occupying the middle of the room, its panels smeared on the inside with a thin coat of algae behind which—

“Hsss!”

The complaints department is eager to be reunited with its siblings, who seethe and burble in the breeding tank around the sessile, slowly pulsating body of a monstrously large isopod. The mother of hosts sits at the bottom of the tank atop a mound of small, gelatinous eggs, resembling nothing so much as a giant wood louse. There’s a dual-purpose summoning and containment grid inlaid on the floor around the tank, of course; even so, I can hear its song of joy, an eternal hymn to the glory that is the father-thing that feeds it. And now it’s seen us, because the compact Hand of Glory is nearly burned to a stub and in any case the bloody thing doesn’t have eyes, and it focusses the full strength of its moronic worship on me.

It wants me to kiss it. Which is okay, because it loves me like I’ve never been loved before: it feels utter adoration and delight at my presence.

The Hand of Glory is burning my fingertips so I drop it; it fizzles out and I shrug off the grounding strap. Persephone is between me and the tank. That’s annoying. I try to sidle around her but she keeps getting in front of me. “Mr. Howard. Bob,” she’s saying, as if my name means something. “Stop that. Bob —”

Something rattles in my hands: in the pizza box. It’s unimportant, so I drop it and try to shoulder-barge past her to get to the tank. It loves me, I can tell. It wants me to kiss it so it can be with me forever and save me for our ecstatic union in the Lord’s embrace.

“For fuck’s sake,” says Persephone. She won’t get out of my way. She’s got her feet braced and is leaning against me, trying to hold me back. I get a glimpse of her eyes, dark and wild and scared, and then suddenly she wraps an arm around the back of my head, pulls me closer, and sticks her tongue in my mouth. It’s like a parasite’s tentacular mouth-parts, questing, looking for a blood vessel to latch onto: I choke with disgust and recoil, nearly biting her before I realize what’s happening.