The Apocalypse Codex (42 page)

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.

The thing in the tank is spinning a high level glamour—class four, at least. My mouth feels slimy and revolting; Persephone wipes her lips on the back of her wrist as I double over and gag, drooling copious saliva on the floor. Ritual magic runs on sympathy and contagion, and she just hit me with a simple channeling of what she sees when she looks at the thing in the tank to break through the glamour.
It nearly had me
…clearly my standard-issue defensive ward isn’t up to blocking that kind of assault.

“Better now?” she asks.

I nod, wordlessly, then spit again. “Got to kill it—” She raises the revolver and takes aim. “No, wait.” If she shoots, it’ll bring everyone within a couple of hundred meters at a run. “Better idea.” I stagger backwards, then turn into the sluice room and hit the light switch. There’s the usual stuff you’d expect to find: mop and bucket, taps, hose, janitor supplies. I grab a gallon bottle of Liquid-Plumr and squint at the ingredients. Sodium hydroxide, sodium hypochlorite, detergent:
That’ll do
. I step back into the tank room, and pass the bottle to Persephone. “Here.”

“Wait for me at the top of the stairs. And take your host.” I bend and pick up the pizza box, which is rattling away furiously. Maybe the complaints department realizes it’s about to become an orphan. I’m halfway up the corridor when all hell cuts loose in my head and the host in the box starts to vibrate and spasm, like a wasp that’s been hit by a concentrated blast of insecticide. There’s a pungent stink of chlorine inside my head and it feels as if someone is ramming nails in my eyes and ears and tongue. I nearly fall over, but grab the handrail and stumble upwards in the grip of the worst headache ever until I bump into the inside of the door at the top of the stairs. The pain begins to subside, and I take a couple of deep breaths. Persephone’s still down there. Is she going to be all right? I turn round and experimentally open my eyes, but the migraine distortions swirling around make it hard to see. “Hey,” I call quietly.

“Hey.” I startle. She’s right in front of my face, nose-to-nose with me. “We made it. Are you okay?”

“I—yeah.” I nod. “Just a sec.” I pull out my phone, call up OFCUT, and poke it at my ward. The damn thing says it’s fine, which is seriously worrying because Jesus nearly had me for a fish supper back there. The mother-of-hosts totally bypassed my defenses. On the other hand, my ward didn’t stop me feeling the missionaries back in the hotel. Come to think of it the ward I was using back in Germany and St Martin during the business with Ramona didn’t block our entanglement, either. Maybe it just plain doesn’t work on soul-eaters? I shut my eyes again. I can feel Persephone in front of me—feel the outlines of her mind, if that makes sense. I try and spread my awareness, but apart from a very faint presence outside the door (the attendant Persephone decked?) I don’t feel anyone. I open my eyes. “The good news is, I think we’re alone. The bad news is, there’s nothing down here but
that
.”

A quick nod. “The gate must be somewhere else, then.”

I was afraid she’d say that.
“Can you tell where?”

She gives a funny little choking laugh. “
You
—no, don’t. Don’t look in the Other Place. We’re almost inside it’s mouth.”

“Oh.” I open the door. “Then we’ll just have to do this the old-fashioned way.”

The complaints department has shut up since Persephone drenched its mother in caustic soda, but I’m willing to make a wild-assed guess that Schiller won’t have hidden an occult portal anywhere where random visitors might stumble through it. We’ve checked the basement, and the ground floor reception rooms don’t look promising, so that leaves upstairs: his private apartments or his office. I shove the pizza box inside my shoulder bag and pull out the gun I took from its human steed. “Upstairs first.”

We go upstairs. There’s a corridor running laterally across the house and we rapidly establish that one end is residential—guest rooms, bathrooms, and the like. Which means the other end, behind a fire door, is where Schiller attends to business. He has a nice-looking office with decent quality oak paneling, bookcases full of impressive-looking leather-bound volumes, and a public desk flanked by American flags. It’s backed by a huge wall-mounted cross. Never trust a religion whose symbol of faith is a particularly gruesome form of execution, say I: but at least this is the abstract kind, lacking the figure of Yeshua ben Yusuf writhing in his death agony. “There’s also a private office.” Persephone points to a door to one side of the desk. “Do you see any wards?”

I peer at the door. Then I haul out my phone and take a look at it with OFCUT. Augmented reality for the win: my nascent necromantic spidey-sense doesn’t see anything, but there’s a spiderweb of
really
nasty schematics tingling and twitching all across the door’s surface. A fine thread leads from it towards the giant cross. I’ve got a nasty feeling that if you touch the door without an invitation you’re going to get to ride on Jesus’s tree, and not in a happy way. It’s probably Schiller’s idea of a cute joke. “I wouldn’t mess with that if I were—”

Bang.

I wince and clutch my head as she lowers the pistol with which she has just blown a hole in the central binding node of the trap-ward. It shorts out in a storm of fat violet sparks and a brain-wrenching twist at right angles to reality. She kicks the door hard, right above the lock. It crashes open and she goes straight into a crouch, covering the room within, which does indeed appear to be a private office. Of course, it’s unoccupied. The desk is smaller than the one up front, but there’s a much nicer chair behind it, and there are more bookcases and a much more eclectic collection of bindings visible on their contents. I raise my camera, wake it from sleep, point it at the floor, and mess with the settings.
Knowing Brains it’ll be here somewhere…ah, gotcha.
Basilisk guns able to set fire to wide swathes of carbon-based life forms are all very well, but in my line of work a camera also comes in handy, and this one’s a lot better than the one in my phone. I was pretty sure Brains wouldn’t have disabled the photographic firmware entirely, just augmented it. I raise the camera and start taking shots, partially obscured by Persephone’s panicky head as it snaps round and does a double take.

“Evidence,” I say. I should have remembered to do this in the cellar but I was too rattled. I turn to the nearest bookcase and begin scanning. The titles don’t mean much to me, but it’s a fair bet that someone in the library section will find a picture of Schiller’s background reading informative and useful.

“Yes, well.” She circles the desk cautiously, leans towards the oil painting on the wall behind it. It’s a medium-scale picture of New Republican Jesus descending towards the Manhattan skyline on what looks like a fire-breathing war horse, wielding a spear while a squadron of B-52s circle behind him, outlined against thunderclouds. I guess it’s a mission statement for the Christ Militant or something. “Hmm. There doesn’t seem to be a safe here.”

“You were expecting one?”

“Schiller is not an original thinker; that’s not his strength. He probably has a private chapel. Very private, but it is unlikely to be hidden well. So—”

I lean towards the bookcase I’ve been photographing. It appears to be free-standing, but it’s built very solidly into the wall opposite the window, running floor to ceiling, and there’s clear carpet in front of it. The carpet strikes me as being rather thin for a plush private office. “Huh.” I begin looking at the spines of books. I switch the camera off, then pull out my phone. Again, I scan the books using OFCUT. Most of them glow faintly—contamination from Schiller’s hands, at a guess—but it doesn’t take me long to find what I’m looking for. “Would a secret door be of interest?”

“A
what
?” She blinks at me. “Oh, of course! Open it, please.”

“Want to double-check first?”

“Okay.” She steps forward, sees the book I’m pointing to. “
The worm turns.
Very droll. It’s safe.” It’s right next to one side of the bookcase, at door handle height. She pulls it and there’s a click and the bookcase begins to pivot—slowly, because it scrubs against the carpet and it’s laden with about half a ton of tree pulp.

Persephone follows her pistol into the small inner sanctum hidden behind the bookcase, and I trail behind her—and so it is that I’m close enough that when she says “shit” very quietly it’s too late for me to back out.

*     *     *

JOHNNY FOLLOWS HIS GUIDE PAST THE SHAMBLING, SWAYING
crowd, past the queue that snakes across the front of the stage to the altar and round to a side door at the other edge of the platform, down three steps to a red carpet leading through an awning into darkness, then up six more steps and around a corner to a room off the side of the sanctuary.

“Glory!” chant the crowd, but not in English or Latin or any language most humans understand. “He is coming! Glory to God in the highest! The Sleeper awakens! Glory!”

Johnny nerves himself for the coming confrontation.

The door closes behind him, deadening the sound of the damned next door. The vestry is roughly twenty feet on a side, low-ceilinged and windowless. There are lockers lined up against one wall, a table pushed up against the other, and a cold iron circle three meters in diameter propped up against the wall opposite the door. It’s plugged into a ruggedized equipment case and a spluttering plastic-clad Honda generator that doesn’t quite drown out the sound of the wind soughing into the starless sky behind the open gate.

“Eldest McTavish.” Schiller sits on an ornately carved wooden throne before the gate. He wears a charcoal-black three-piece suit under his surplice. His face is gaunt with exhaustion. One of the four missionaries who wait with him hovers solicitously, ready to support him if he falters. His smile is pained. “There are many things I’d like to ask you, if we had more time together.”

Johnny forces a smile, aware that it’s as unconvincing as a three-dollar bill. “I’m sure there are.” He keeps his face pointed at Schiller, but is scanning the room, registering the positions of the missionaries. They’re bodyguards, of course, all tooled up, suit jackets cut loose to conceal their holsters. There are a couple of handmaids in long dresses, their hair veiled, waiting beside something that looks like a giant silver soup tureen on a catering trolley. But soup tureens don’t usually contain live crustaceans that chitter disturbing thoughts that flood the room with the sickly sweet flavor of a gangrenous god’s love. “What exactly are you trying to achieve?”

Schiller straightens his back. A momentary grimace betrays his pain. “The same thing the order’s been trying to achieve for centuries, eldest. The difference is, I’m going to succeed.”