The Atrocity Archives (6 page)

He hands me an egg. I stare.

The normally not-so-clean kitchen worktop is
gleaming and sterile, as if in preparation for a particularly fussy
surgeon. At one side of it sits a syringe and needle
preloaded with a grey, opaque liquid—essence of concrete. At the other
side of it sits a food processor, its safety shutoff hacked and
something that looks worryingly like half an electric motor bolted to
the drive shaft that normally turns its blades. I stand there dripping
and staring: even for Brains's projects, this is distinctly abnormal.

I hand the egg back. "I'm not in the mood."

"C'mon. Just hold it?"

"I mean it. I've just been suspended, pending an
enquiry." I unzip my jacket and let it tumble to the floor. "Game
over,
priority interrupt, segmentation fault."

Brains cocks his head toward one side and stares
at me with big bright eyes, like a slightly demented owl. "Seriously?"

"Yeah." I hunt around for the coffee jar and
begin ladling scoopfuls into the cafetiére. "Water in the
kettle?"

"Suspended? On pay? Why?"

In goes the coffee. "Yes, on pay. I saved six
people's lives, plus my own. But I lost the seventh, so there's going
to be an enquiry. They say it's a formality, but—"
Click,
the
kettle is now on, heating up to a steam explosion.

"Something to do with that training course?"

"Yeah. Fred from Accounting. He grounded a
summoning grid—"

"Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now!"

"It's not funny."

He looks at me again and loses his levity. "No,
Bob, it's not funny. I'm sorry." He offers me the egg. "Here, hold
this, I implore you."

I take it and nearly drop it; it's hot, and
feels slightly greasy. There's also a faint stench of brimstone. "What
the hell—"

"Just for a moment, I promise you." He pulls out
a roughly made copper coil, the wire wrapped around a plastic pie
cutter and hooked up to some gadget or other, and gingerly threads it
over the egg, around my wrist and back again. "There. The egg should
now be degaussed." He puts the coil down and
takes the egg from my nerveless hand. "Observe! The first prototype of
the ultimate integral ovine omelette." He cracks it on the side of the
worktop and a yellow, leathery curdled sponge flops out. The smell of
brimstone is now pronounced, tickling at my nostrils like the
aftereffect of a fireworks show. "It's still at the development
stage—I
had to use a syringe on it, but next on the checklist is gel-diffusion
electrophoresis using flocculated hemoglobin agglutinates pending
in-ovo polymerisation of the rotor elements—so how did your pet luser
autodarwinate?"

I pull up a trash can and sit down. Maybe Brains
isn't as monumentally self-obsessed as he looks? At least he slipped
the question in painlessly enough.

"You know how there's always someone who ends up
in the wrong course? It was that dumb accounts clerk I'm always
bitching about. He got in the Intro to Occult Computing course by
mistake. I shouldn't have been there, anyway, but Harriet managed to
convince Andy I needed it; getting her own back for last month, I
think." Harriet has been having problems with her email system and
asked my advice; I don't know quite what went wrong, but she ended up
blowing five days of the departmental training budget attending a
course on sendmail configuration. Took her three weeks to stop
twitching every time somebody mentioned rules. "Well and all, I guess
what he did qualifies as a massive self-LART, but … "

I realise I'm not talking anymore and shudder
convulsively.

"His eyes were full of worms."

Brains turns, silently, and rummages in the
cupboard above the sink. He pulls down a big bottle labelled
DRAIN FLUID
, rinses out a couple of chipped
cups that are languishing on the draining board, then fills them from
the bottle. "Drink this," he says.

I drink. It isn't bleach: my eyes don't quite
bulge out, my throat doesn't quite catch fire, and
most of the liquid doesn't evaporate from the surface of my tongue.
"What the hell is this stuff?"

"Sump degreaser." He winks at me. "Stops Pinky
dipping his wick in it, right?" I wink back, a bit nonplussed; I do
not
think that phrase means what Brains thinks that it means, but if I told
him I doubt he'd give me any more of this stuff, so I'm not going to
enlighten him. Right now I've got a strong urge to get blindingly
drunk—which he seems to have sensed. If I'm blind drunk I won't have
to
think. And not thinking for a while will be a good thing.

"Thank you," I say, as gravely as I can—it's
Brains's secret, after all, and he's confided it in me. I'm obscurely
touched, and if I didn't keep seeing Fred grinning at me whenever I
closed my eyes it might actually get to me.

Brains peers at me closely. "I think I know your
problem," he says.

"What's that?"

"You need"—he's already topping up my cup—"to
get pissed. Now."

"But what about your—" I wave feebly at the
worktop.

He shrugs. "It's an early success; I'll get it
working properly later."

"But you're busy," I protest, because this whole
thing is very un-Brains-like; at his worst he's a borderline autist. To
have him paying attention to someone else's emotional upsets is, well,
eerie.

"I was only trying to prove that you can make an
omelette without breaking eggs. That's just a dumb metaphor or a silly
practical experiment; you're real, and a classic example of what it
means, too. You're broken, in the course of scrambling a
body-snatcher's zero point outbreak, and I figure we need to see if all
the king's men can fix you, or at least make you feel better. Then you
can help me with my egg-sacting project."

I do not throw the glass at him. But I make him
refill it.

An indeterminate but nonzero number of semifull
vodka glasses later, Pinky appears, looking tall and gangly and
slightly flustered. He demands to know where the nearest bookshop is.

"Why?"

"For my nephew." (Pinky has a brother and
sister-in-law who live on the other side of London and who have
recently spawned.)

"What are you getting him?"

"I'm buying an A to Z and a bible."

"Why?"

"The A to Z is a christening present and the
bible is so I know the way to the church." Brains groans; I scrabble
drunkenly behind the sofa for a sponge bullet for the Nerf gun, but
they all seem to have fallen through the wormhole that leads to the
planet of lost paper clips, pencils, and irreplaceable but detachable
components of weird toys. "Say, what's going on here?"

"I'm taking a break from my cunning plan to help
Bob get drunk, because that's what he needs," says Brains. "He needs
distracting and I was doing my best until you came in and changed the
subject." He stands up and throws one of the suckers at Pinky, who
dodges.

"That's not what I meant; there's a weird smell
in the kitchen and something that's, er, squamous and rugose"—a
household catch-phrase, and we all have to make the obligatory
Cthulhu-waggling-tentacles-on-chin gesture with our hands—"and yellow
tried to eat my shoe. What's up?"

"Yeah." I struggle to sit up again; one of the
straps under the sofa cushions has failed and it's trying to swallow
me. "Just what was that thing in the kitchen?"

Brains stands up: "Behold"—he hiccups—"I am in
the process of disproving a law of nature; to wit, that it is
impossible to make an omelette without breaking eggs! I have a punning
clan—"

Pinky throws the (somewhat squashed, but
definitely formerly spherical) omelette at his
head and he ducks; it hits the video stack and bounces off.

"I have a cunning plan," Brains continues, "which if you'll let me
finish—"

I nod. Pinky stops looking for things to throw.

"That's better. The question is how to churn up
an egg without breaking the shell, then cook it from the inside out,
correct? The latter problem was solved by the microwave oven, but we
still have to whisk it up properly. This usually means breaking it
open, but what I figured out was that if I inject it with magnetised
iron filings in a lecithin emulsion, then stick it in a rotating
magnetic field, I can churn it up quite effectively. The next step is
to do it without breaking the shell at all—immerse the egg in a
suspension of some really tiny ferromagnetic particles then use
electrophoresis to draw them into it, then figure out some way of
making them clump together into long, magnetised chains inside it. With
me so far?"

"Mad,
mad
I say!" Pinky is bouncing up
and down. "What are we going to do tonight, Brains?"

"What we do every night, Pinky: try to take over
the world!" (Of haute cuisine.)

"But I've got to buy a couple of books before
the shops close," says Pinky, and the spell is broken. "Hope you feel
better, Bob. See you guys later." And he's gone.

"Well that was useless," sighs Brains. "The
lad's got no staying power. One of these days he'll settle down and
turn all normal."

I look at my flatmate gloomily and wonder why I
put up with this shit. It's a glimpse of my life, resplendent in
two-dimensional glory, from an angle that I don't normally catch—and I
don't like it. I'm just about to say so when the phone chirrups.

Brains picks it up and all expression drains
from his face. "It's for you," he says, and hands me the phone.

"Bob?"

My free hand starts to shake because I really
don't need to hear this, even though part of me wants to. "Yes?"

"It's me, Bob. How are you? I heard the news—"

"I feel like shit," I hear myself saying, even
though a small corner of my mind is screaming at me. I close my eyes to
shut out the real world. "It was horrible. How did you hear?"

"Word gets around." She's being disingenuous, of
course. Mhari has more tentacles than a squid, and they're all plugged
into the Laundry grapevine. "Look, are you okay? Is there anything you
need?"

I open my eyes. Brains is staring at me blankly,
pessimistically. "I'm getting as drunk as possible," I say. "Then I
plan to sleep for a week."

"Oh," she says in a small voice, sounding about
as cute and appealing as she ever did. "You're in a bad state. May I
come round?"

"Yes." In an abstract sort of way I notice
Brains choking on his drain fluid. "The more the merrier," I say,
hollow-voiced. "Party on."

"Party on," she echoes, and hangs up.

Brains glares at me. "Have you taken leave of
your senses?" he demands.

"Very probably." I toss back what's left in my
cup and reach for the bottle.

"That woman's a psychopath."

"So I keep telling myself. But after the tearful
reconciliation, hot passionate bunny fucks on the bedroom floor,
screaming pentacle-throwing tantrum, and final walkout number four, at
least she'll give me something concrete and personal to feel
really
depressed about, instead of this gotta-save-'em-all shit I'm kicking my
own arse over."

"Just keep her out of the cellar this time." He
stands up unsteadily. "Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some omelettes
to nuke … "

A week later:

"This is an M11/9 machine pistol, manufactured
by SW Daniels in the States. In case you hadn't figured it out, it's a
gun. Chambered to take 9mm and converted to accept a sten magazine, it
has a very high cyclic rate of 1600 rounds per minute, muzzle velocity
350 metres per second, magazine capacity thirty rounds. This cylinder
is a two-stage wipeless supressor,
not
what you might have seen
in the movies as a 'silencer'; it doesn't silence the gun, but it cuts
the noise by about thirty decibels for the first hundred or so rounds
you put through it.

"You need to know three things about this
machine. One: if someone points one at you, do whatever they tell you,
it is not a fashion accessory. Two: if you see one lying around, don't
pick it up, unless you know how to carry it safely. You might blow your
feet off by accident. Three: if you need one, dial the Laundry
switchboard and ask for 1-800-SAS—our lads will be happy to oblige,
and
they train with these things every day of the week."

Harry isn't joking. I nod, and jot down some
notes, and he sticks the submachine gun back in the rack.

"Now this—tell me about
this.
"

I look at the thing and rattle off
automatically: "Class three Hand of Glory, five charge disposable,
mirrored base for coherent emission instead of generalised
invisibility … doesn't seem to be armed, maximum
range line-of-sight, activation by designated power word—" I glance
sidelong at him. "Are you cleared to use these things?"

He puts the Hand of Glory down and picks up the
M11/9 carefully. He flicks a switch on its side, looks round to make
sure he's clear, points it downrange, and squeezes the trigger. There's
a shatteringly loud crackle of gunfire followed by a tinkle of brass on
concrete around our feet. "Your call!" he shouts.

I pick up the hand. It feels cold and waxy, but
the activation code is scribed on the sawn-off radius in silver. I step
up beside him, point it downrange, focus, and concentrate on the
trigger string, knowing that it sometimes
takes a few seconds—

WHUMP.

"Very good," Harry says drily. "You realise it
cost an execution in Shanxi province to make that thing?"

I put it down, feeling queasy. "I only used one
finger. Anyway, I thought our suppliers used orangoutangs. What
happened?"

He shrugs. "Blame the animal rights protesters."

I'm not back on duty—I'm suspended on full pay.
But according to Boris the Mole there's a loophole in our official
procedures which means that I'm still eligible for training courses
that I was signed up for before being suspended, and it turns out that
Andy signed me up for a full package of six weeks of prefield training:
some of it down at the village that used to be called Dunwich, and some
at our own invisible college in Manchester.