The Atrocity Archives (27 page)

"This skinny guy, with a suntan and a German
accent—"

"From Santa Cruz?"

"No, I'd never seen him before."

"Shit. Did he have any friends? Or do anything
to set up that rack over there?"

I inspect the top of the framework. The
chandelier-thing hangs from the roof of the execution machine like a
bizarre, three-dimensional guillotine blade: cut
any of the ropes holding Mo to the bed and it will fall. I'm not sure
what it's made of—glass and bits of human bone seem to figure in the
design, but so do colour-coded wires and gears—but the effect will be
about as final as flicking the switch on a frog in a liquidiser.
Trouble is, I'm not sure the damned thing won't fall anyway, if someone
switches on the device.

"No," Mo says, but she sounds doubtful.

I'm checking around the foot of the necromantic
bed now, and it's a good thing the instrument's got a log display: lots
of
very
bad shit has gone down here, ghosts howling in the
wires, information destroyed and funnelled out of our spacetime through
weirdly tangled geometries of silver wire and the hair of hanged women.
Bastards. I really ought to keep Mo talking.

"I was asleep," she says. "I remember a
dream—howling air, very cold, being carried somewhere, unable to move.
Like being paralysed, scary as hell and I couldn't breathe. Then I woke
up down here.
He
was leaning over me. My head aches like the
mother of all hangovers. What happened?"

"Did he say anything?" I ask. "Make any
adjustments?"

"He said I'd served my purpose and this would be
my final contribution. His eyes, they were
really
weird.
Luminous. What do you mean, make adjust—" She tries to raise her head
and the bed creaks. There's an ominous buzzing sound from the control
panel at the far side of the room and a red light comes on.

"Oh shit," I say, as the door opens and two
soldiers in vacuum gear come in and the lights flicker. I see the
chandelier-like thing above Mo sway on its ropes, hear the bedframe
creak. As she gathers breath to scream I clumsily jump onto the bed and
brace myself on hands and knees above her. "Someone cut the fucking
cables, pull her out, and
cut the fucking wires!
" I yell. I'm
kneeling on one of them when the descending mass of obsidian and bone
and wire lands on my backpack with a crunch—and I discover the hard
way
that the thing is electrified, and Mo is wired to earth.

My head is spinning, i feel
nauseous, and my right knee feels like it's on fire.
What am
I doing—

"Bob, we're going to pull it off you now. Can
you hear me?"

Yeah, I can hear you. I want to throw up. I
grunt something. The crushing weight on my back begins to lift. I blink
stupidly at the wooden slats in front of me, then someone grabs my arm
and tries to pull me sideways. Their touch hurts; someone, maybe me,
screams, and someone else yells "Medic!"

Seconds or minutes later I realise that I'm
lying on my back and someone is pounding on my chest. I blink and try
to grunt something. "Can you hear me?" they say.

"Yeah—
oof
."

The pounding stops for a moment and I force
myself to breathe deeply. I know I should be lying on something, but
what? I open my eyes properly. "Oh, that wasn't good. My knee—"

Alan leans over my field of view; people are
bustling about behind him. "What was that all about?" he asks.

"Is Mo—"

"I'm all right, Bob." Her voice comes from right
behind me. I start, and it feels like someone's clubbed me behind the
ear again—my head is about to split open. "That—thing—" her voice
is
shaky.

"It's an altar," I say tiredly. "Should have
recognised the design sooner. Alan, the bad guy is loose here.
Somewhere. Mo was bait for a trap."

"Explain," Alan says, almost absent-mindedly. I
roll my head round and see that Mo is sitting with her back to the
wall, legs stretched out in front of her; someone's given her one of
the red survival suits, no good in vacuum but enough to keep her warm,
and she's got a silver foil blanket stretched around her shoulders.
Behind her, the altar is a splintered wreck.

"It's not so hard to open a gate and bring an
information entity through, especially if you've got a body ready and
waiting for it at the other end, right? Physical gates are harder, and
the bigger you want 'em, the more energy or life you have to expend to
stabilize it. Anyway, this is an altar; there are a couple like it in
the basement of that museum we came to visit. You put the sacrifice on
the altar, wire it to an invocation grid, and kill the victim—that's
what the chandelier was for—channelling what comes back out. Only this
one—the guards and wards around the altar are buggered. They'd offer
no
protection at all once the summoning was manifest, and the thing would
take over anyone it could come into contact with. Transfer by
electrical conduction, that's how a lot of these things spread."

"So you tried to shield her with your body,"
says Alan, "How touching!"

"Huh." I cough and wince at the answering pain
in my head. "Not really; I figured the scaffold wouldn't be able to cut
through my air tanks. And if it killed her we'd all be dead, anyway."

"What was it set up to summon?" Mo asks. Her
voice still hoarse.

"I don't know." I frown. "Nothing friendly,
that's for sure. But then, this isn't the Ahnenerbe, is it? Even though
they built this place, they've been dead for a long time. Suicide, by
the look of it. This bastard's some kind of possessor entity—jumps
from
body to body. It's been shadowing you from the States, but when it got
you all it did was use you as raw material in a summoning sacrifice.
Doesn't make sense, does it? If it wanted you so bad, why not just walk
up to you, shake hands, and move into your head?"

"It doesn't matter right now." Alan stands. "We're leaving soon.
According to Roland the gate's shrinking; we've
got about four hours to pull out, and your mystery kidnapper hasn't
tried to make a break for it. What we're going to do is put a guard on
the gate, get the hell out of here, and leave the demo charge ticking.
He won't be able to sneak back around us, and the
gadget will toast what's left of this place."

"Uh-huh. How's my tankage?"

"Dented, and your suit front panel is blown—it
took the brunt of the charge, otherwise you'd be a crispy critter right
now. Look, I'm going to get things organised in person, seeing all our
radios are flaking out." Alan looks round. "Hutter, get these people
sorted out and ready to pull back; I want them both mobile within the
hour, we've got a lot of shit to move out of here." He glances down at
me and winks. "You've done well."

Over the course of the next fifteen minutes I
recover enough to sit up against the wall, and Mo just about manages to
stop shivering. She leans against me. "Thank you," she says quietly.
"That went
way
beyond—"

Hutter and Chaitin bang in through the door,
heaving a couple of bulky kit-bags full of assorted gear: vacuum
support underwear, heated outer suit, a new regulator and air tank for
my framework, a new backpack and helmet for Mo. "Look at the
lovebirds," Chaitin says, apparently amused by us. "On your feet,
pretties, got to get you ready to move and ain't nobody going to carry
you."

While Hutter is getting Mo into her pressure
gear I stumble around the wreckage of the procrustean bed and hunt for
my palmtop—dropped when I had to leap for her life. I find it lying on
the concrete floor, evidently kicked into a corner of the room, but
it's undamaged, which is a big relief. I pick it up and check the thaum
level absently, and freeze: something is really
not
right
around here. Following the display I trail around the walls until I
find an inexplicably high reading in front of that rack of high tension
switchgear.
Something
is happening here: local entropy is
sky-high as if information is being destroyed by irreversible
computation in the vicinity. But the rack is switched off. I pocket the
small computer and give the rack an experimental yank; I'm nearly
knocked off my feet when it slides toward me.

"Hey!" Chaitin is right behind me, shoving me
out of the way and pointing his gun into the dark cavity behind the
rack.

"Don't," I say tersely. "Look." I switch on my
suit headlamp, and promptly wish I hadn't.

"Oh Jesus." Chaitin lowers his gun but doesn't
look away. The room behind the instrument rack is another cell: it must
have been undisturbed for a long time, but it's so cold that most of
the body parts are still recognisable. There's a butcher's shop miasma
hanging over it, not decay, exactly, but the smell of death. Enough
spare parts for Dr. Frankenstein to make a dozen monsters lie heaped in
the room, piled in brown-iced drifts in the corners. "Shut the fucking
door," he says distantly, and steps out of my way.

"Anyone got a hacksaw?" I ask.

"You can't be serious—" Chaitin pushes up his
visor and stares at me. "Why?"

"I want to take samples from the top few
bodies," I say slowly. "I think they may be something to do with the
Mukhabarat's Santa Cruz operation."

"You're nuts," he says.

"Maybe, but don't you want to know who these
people were?"

"No fucking way, mate," he says. Then he
breathes deeply. "Look, I was in Bosnia, y'know, the mass graves?" He
glances down and scuffs the floor. "Spent a couple of weeks guarding
the forensics guys one summer. The worst thing about those pits, you
scrubbed like crazy but in the end you had to throw your boots away.
Once that smell gets into the leather it won't leave." He looks away.
"You're fucking out of your skull if you think I'm going to help you
take trophies."

"So just get me an axe," I snap irritably. (Then
I wince again and wish I hadn't.) He looks at me oddly for a moment, as
if trying to make his mind up whether or not to get physical, then
turns and stomps off.

When Chaitin returns he's carrying a fireman's
axe and an empty kit-bag. He leaves me alone for ten minutes while I
discover just how difficult it is to chop through
the wrist bones of a corpse that's been frozen for days or months. I
find that I'm angry, very angry indeed—so angry, in fact, that the job
doesn't upset me. I want to find the bastard who did this and give him
a taste of his own medicine, and if chopping off dead hands is the
price then it's a price I'm happy to pay—with interest.

But why do I still feel as if I'm missing
something obvious? Like, maybe, what the demon—dybbuk, possessor,
whatever-you-call-it—lured us here for?

When i come out of the
cellar clutching my grisly handbag, Hutter and Mo are gone.
Chaitin is stooging around, shuffling from foot to foot as he waits for
me. "Let's go," he says, so I heft the bag at him.

"Got it." We head back up the corridor past the
glow-tubes and I glance over my shoulder just once, breath steaming in
the frigid air. Then I lower my visor and lock it in place, check my
regulator, and listen to the hiss of cool air through my helmet. "Where
is everybody?"

"Boss man's up top arming the gadget; your
squeeze is on her way back to the gateway."

"Great," I say, and I mean it. This place is
getting to me; I almost want to dance a little jig at the thought of
blowing it to atoms. "Did anybody find any documentation?"

"Documentation? Tons of it. These guys were
Germans, dude. You ever worked with the fucking Wehrmacht, you'd be
able to tell a story about documentation, too."

"Huh." We hit the bottom of the stairs. Scary
Spice is waiting for us.

"Go on up," he says to Chaitin. He stops me: "You, wait." He
twists a dial on my chest pack: "Hear me?"

"Yeah," I say, "loud and clear. Has anyone seen
any sign of the bastard who kidnapped Mo?"

"The target, you mean?" Scary hefts his heavily
insulated gun and for a moment I'm glad I can't see through his face
mask. "Naah, but you're going up the stairs right now and I'm following
you, and if you see anyone behind me yell like hell."

"That," I say fervently, "is fine by me."
Already the shadows are lengthening as the glow-tubes slowly burn out.

There's crosstalk and terse chatter all over the
radio channel Scary has tuned me to; I get the impression of three
teams retreating to prearranged positions, keeping their eyes peeled
for company. Some evil bastard demon has been here in the past couple
of hours, wearing a stolen body: Can't we move faster? Evidently not.
"Timer set to seven thousand seconds by my mark," Alan cuts in on the
common channel. "This is your hundred and ten minute warning, folks.
I've pulled the spoiler chain and the initiator is now live; anyone
still here in two hours better have some factor one-billion sunblock.
Sound off by name."

Everyone seems to be accounted for, except the
three outside. "Okay, pull out in LIFO order. Scary, Chaitin, make sure
Howard's in tow and cycle when ready."

"Right, boss." Chaitin. "C'mon, you, let's go."

"Okay." I wait while Chaitin cycles through the
airlock into the garage, then open the door and squeeze into the
cramped closetlike space. "I'm on tank one, everything working."

"It better be. Okay, cycle yourself through."

I wait for a tense two minutes while the air
hisses out of a tiny tube and I feel the pressure suit tightening
around me. Oddly, I begin to feel warmer once I'm in partial vacuum;
the chilly air in the redoubt was sapping my body heat. Presently the
outer door swings open. "Move, move!"

I walk out into the garage, open doors gaping at
the ink-black sky, then out into the courtyard in
front of the building. Chaitin's waiting there. Someone's parked that
electric trolley next to the wall, but the little half-track thing with
a motorcycle's front wheel is missing. "Someone taking souvenirs?" I
ask.