So far, William H. Keith has published over eighty novels, including military novels, geopolitical spy thrillers, and science fiction, writing under his name and several pseudonyms. As "H. Jay Riker" he wrote the long-running SEALs: The Warrior Breed. As "Ian Douglas," Keith wrote the Heritage, Legacy, and Inheritance military-SF series, following the exploits of the U.S. Marines into the far future. Most recently, he's been writing spy thrillers in collaboration with best-selling author Stephen Coonts. Bill currently lives and writes in the mountains of western Pennsylvania.
I have to say right up front that I didn't believe our Mr. Johnson. I mean, I've seen some freaked-out scat in my time, but this was just too hardwired weird for school.
"What?" I yelped at the guy. "You're doodoodling me, man, right?"
We were sitting in the High Tox, the bar I'd chosen for the face-to-face. I guess I yelped a bit too loud when I heard what the op was, because I noticed Tony surreptitiously reaching for the scattergun he kept behind the bar. I met his eye, shook my head a little, and he relaxed.
But it was good knowing I had back-up with this bozo. He just meatjackin' couldn't be cruising the Real!
"I'm very serious, Mister, er, Faceman," my contact said. "Roger Nakamura is supposedly paying forty million nuyen to Zayid if he can pull this off. My sponsors wish to intercept the… ah… package. At the source."
I leaned back in my chair and sipped my drink. A banzai boomer, neat, bitter, the way Tony knows I like it. I needed to think this through. The Johnson had to be scamming us, had to have an angle.
The thing is, I'd worked for this Johnson before, and he'd always been a straight burner. He'd been the one who leveraged the Yokahama smartdust deal for us, and that had been pure sugar, a quick in-and-out that netted each of us forty-K nuyens, easy money.
And it had been a while since our merry band had scored. This time, our Mr. Johnson was offering us 200 K. We needed the money, and it wasn't like we could afford to be picky.
The bastard was grinning at me. "You don't believe me, do you?"
"Truth?" I asked. "Hell no. I think someone's playing with your head, man." I didn't add that I was still trying to see how the Johnson might be trying to scam us. This thing just wasn't adding up.
"Ah. But if it's true. If Zayid has found the Gate… think of what it might mean!"
"Look," I said. "It's reality-check time, okay? Has anyone told your sponsors that this thing isn't real? It's a freakin' work of fiction, for the gods' sake!"
"That," Mr. Johnson said, "is a matter of what you believe, isn't it?"
"Aw, c'mon, Slick! The effing Necronomicon? Get real! Lovecraft was a writer, okay? He invented the thing for his damned stories!"
"And if enough people believe in a thing, Mr. Faceman, it takes on a certain amount of hard-cache reality. You know that."
Of course I knew that. Everybody since 2011 knew that. But, damn it… this was fiction!
H.P. Lovecraft. The guy was all but unknown when he was alive, a minor horror writer in the pulp magazines of the day. He acquired quite a following in the years after his death, though, spawning a sub-genre all his own, populated by monstrous gods or godlike monsters that cared nothing for humanity save how they were going to eat us for dessert. Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos. Hastur the Unspeakable. Azathoth, the daemon sultan bubbling and blaspheming at the center of infinity. And, of course, Great Cthulhu himself, lying dreaming in sunken R'lyeh.
Jesus. All those stories from the 1920s and '30s, set against a backdrop of hopelessness, nihilism, madness, and despair. God doesn't love you; He's going to squash you like a bug. Or better. God loves you, because you taste great with a little BBQ sauce. Maybe that's why old HP was so popular with the younger set, even now, a century and a half later.
And Lovecraft had invented the Necronomicon as a singular plot McGuffin, an ancient tome of dark magic replete with forbidden knowledge, including the incantations and formulae necessary for calling forth dread Cthulhu and his kind. It was supposed to have been written by Abdul Alhazred, the Mad Arab. Hell, anyone who speaks Arabic ought to get a clue right there. No Arab would ever be named "Abdul" in real life. That's Western racist ignorance. It means "slave of-" and needs to have a name tacked on at the end. "Abdullah," for instance, "Slave of God." Do you understand? Lovecraft made it up… and he got it wrong!
"Let me get this straight," I said after a moment. "Nakamura has hired this Arab magician or technomage to open some sort of a gateway to… what did you call it? An alternate reality?"
"Or a parallel dimension, if you like."
"And this Zayid character is supposed to find an actual, physical copy of the Necronomicon and bring it back."
"Exactly."
"And you want us to hijack the book before Zayid passes it on to his boss."
"Just so. Can you do it?"
"Not if the book doesn't exist!"
"Ah, but it does exist. It must. Don't you see? For 150 years, millions of readers, the fans, the devotees of H.P. Lovecraft, have read those stories, and they have believed. Believed! Did you know that fifty years after Lovecraft's death, libraries at places like Harvard and Oxford were deluged with search requests for that book? Perhaps a dozen works were actually published under that title, adding to the confusion."
"You… you're saying that because a bunch of losers believed the Necronomicon was real, it is?" I looked him up and down. "That's just whacked! You been doing too much BTL, man?" I was serious. Folks jazzed on better-than-life sims could pick up some weird delusions, sometimes.
"I assure you I'm completely rational," Mr. Johnson said. "And in earnest. Belief is everything. So, will you take the job?"
Belief? Was that all it took to create reality from fiction? Belief?
Nah…
But we did need the nuyen.
"Okay," I said. "We'll take it. But half up front. And it's nonrefundable if this turns out to be a goose chase."
"Uh-uh," Mr. Johnson said. "Fifty-K up front. And you wear nannies."
"Shit. Why?"
"So my people can peek over your shoulders, as it were. What you see and hear, they'll see and hear. And they'll know you're not ripping them."
"Hey! You've hired us before! When did we ever scam you or your clients, huh?"
"Never. And you won't." He shoved a plastic bag across the table at me, with a tangle of equipment inside. "Besides, there's one thing more."
"What?"
"If you can't get the… merchandise, my clients want to be sure Nakamura can't get it either. These will help verify that."
"Makes it more complicated, man," I told him. "Seventy-five kay up front."
He hesitated, then nodded. "Done."
An hour later I was on the streets of Pittsburgh, my collar and hood up against the thin drizzle of acid rain, shouldering through the muggliemasses beneath the neon wink-blink of come-hither signs in twenty different languages, beneath the five-story buildingboards with their smiling, naked women and sleek cars and mindless MadAv babble. Megacorp massage, direct to you from the nuyen necromancers. An alien world, Slick, a billion klicks from the streets.
In my belt was the bag of nannies, plus a credstick worth 75,000 nuyen. Not bad for a morning's work.
I didn't know who our Mr. Johnson worked for, of course. Shadowrunners generally don't. But the guy had the fashion sense and street-cred trust-me feel of a Fed, and I was pretty sure our employers were the good old UCAS.
Nakamura, of course, we knew. Roger Nakamura was Pittsburgh's grand high Pooh-Bah of Mellon-Mitsubishi, itself a branch of Renraku Megacorp.
The team was waiting for me at the Eat 'n' Meet at Fifth and Forbes, almost in the shadow of the M amp;M Tower. Boy, they were just gonna love this…
I'd been working with them for maybe three years, and loved 'em all like siblings. Better, maybe, in Cammy's case. I never banged my sister.
Her name was Camilla Gonzales, but we all called her Cammy. The name fit. She was a weapons specialist who had this way of blending into the background so perfectly you'd never know she was there. And Thud's name fit too. I never knew what he called himself, but he was eight powerfully muscled feet of rather dim attitude, and those curved ram's horns growing from the sides of his skull gave him a certain in-your-face presence, you cop? Then there was Scooter, our pimple-faced magician, our very own wizardry whiz. And Dee-Dee wasn't just a hacker. She made computers speak, roll over, and sit up and beg.
And me? Well, never mind what my birth name was. Cam, Thud, Scoot, and Dee all just called me Fixer. I was the team's face, the one who talked nice to the Mr. Johnsons and brought in the gigs.
"We're supposed to do what?" Cammie said after I'd laid out the deal.
"I know," I told her. "Sounds a little over-the-top…"
"Over the top? It's not even in this galaxy! Hey! Earth to Fixer! Comm-check!"
"Did you tell this clown the difference between fiction and reality?" Dee-Dee asked, grinning.
"Of course. He told me belief is everything."
"He's right, you know," Scooter said. "Belief is what makes the world we know."
Scoot was using The Voice, and that made us all take notice. Normally, he's got this adenoidal whine that makes him sound like an annoying teen fanboy, but every now and again the adenoids vanish and his tone drops about two octaves. It's what he calls his magical voice, and when he talks that way, you know he knows what he's talking about. Cammie calls it speaking ex cathedra, which sounds like she thinks he used to be a church.
"Scoot," See said, shaking her head. She reached out and rapped the tabletop with her knuckles. "This is real." She tapped the side of her head. "This is imagination…"
He cocked his head to one side. "So… when you run the Matrix, it's not real?"
She scowled. "Of course it's real."
"But it's all in your head."
"No it's not!" She waved vaguely in front of her face. "It's… it's out there…"
"What you keep forgetting, Dee-Dee, is that according to the well-known laws of quantum mechanics, we create reality. In effect, there is no 'out there' out there."
I'd heard this argument before. It was popular with some hermetic magicians, I knew, though it wasn't at all mainstream. Not yet.
"You're talking about the Awakening, right?" I asked.
He nodded. "And a lot else. But we brought the Awakening on ourselves."
"Nonsense," Cammie said, but she was frowning. "That was just… just magic."
"What do you think magic is, but the use of belief to change reality?"
I glanced at Dee, at her delicately pointed ears, then at Thud, who was sitting there sharpening the tips of his horns, apparently not even listening, massive as a mountain, with fangs protruding two centimeters up from behind his lower lip.
An elf, a troll, and two humans. A hundred years ago, it would have been four humans. So where did the metahumanity come from?
Oh, yeah. We did it to ourselves. At least Scoot and a few like him thought so, and I had to admit the theory made as much sense as anything I'd ever heard. Seems that back at the end of the 20th century, and through the first decade of the 21st, we had all kinds of belief in the Big Changes coming. Cop it. The fundy Christians were so certain that Armageddon was right around the corner, with all the hosts of Satan ready to rise up and follow the Antichrist. And the fundy Muslims, the Shiites, anyway, were invested in the coming of the Mahdi and the creation of Allah's New Order on Earth. Even the New Agers got into the act, focusing on channeled messages of coming Earth Changes, and the ancient Mayan prophecies that the Fifth Sun was coming to an end in 2012.
With that much pure, raw belief gnawing at the foundations of Reality, man, something had to give.
And it did. It's tough to remember sometimes, sixty years later, that the Old World Order was all human. No trolls. No orks. No elves. No dwarves. And no magic. None that worked reliably, at any rate.
We called it the Awakening when the Old Order fell. Hidden away within the human genome were all of the metahuman racial types, it turned out, and suddenly Black and White and Latino and Asian didn't matter anymore. We were all humans, and we were sharing the planet with the stuff of myth and legend. Magic worked and dragons were real and Civilization itself was crumbling around our ears.
So, what the hell? Maybe old H.P. Lovecraft's little nightmares could have something to them after all. The potential of becoming real, if enough people closed their eyes and thought about it real hard.
"What do you think about all of this, Thud?" I asked.
"Don't think," the troll rumbled. He sounded like a good-natured earthquake. "Just do. Long as the nuyen're there."
Thud could be remarkably down-to-earth about things.
"We got our advance," I told them. "Look, at the very least we clear better'n eighteen-K apiece, right? We go in, show 'em it can't be done, and get out. Simple."
"Yeah? What if it can be done?" Scooter asked. The Voice had gone, and the annoying fanboy was back.
I shrugged. "Then we get fifty-freakin'-K apiece. How hard can it be?"
"Don't say that, Fix," Cam told me. "Don't ever say that. Somebody might be listening."
"They will be." I chuckled, and held up the bag of nannies. "Count on it."
"We really need to wear those things?" Dee said. "I don't like it."
"Me neither. But it's just for the op. They won't be watching you shower."
"It's just upgraded RFID," Dee said. "No big deal."
She used the streetslang pronunciation, "ar-fid." Radio frequency identification devices are everywhere-those little tags that control shoplifting and inventory, keep track of the kids, and let you dial in to the local net to get the name and number of the pretty girl you're chatting up on the street. They work by broadcasting a limited chunk of data that you can read on your commlink from like thirty or forty meters away.
Nannies are the same, but with more bandwidth, and with audio and vid channels. You wear the little flesh-colored dot on your forehead. It sees everything you see through an ultra-small nanocamera, and hears what you hear through a microphone the size of a large protein molecule. The range varies, depending on whether it's a government or a corporate model, but it's a lot farther than forty meters… and it can get through almost any of the usual RF barriers. Mr. Johnson's people really would be watching. • • •
It took Dee three days to hack the system, but we got what we needed to make the strike. Mitsubishi-Mellon had all kinds of defenses up, of course, but there are always cracks in the walls. We'd snuck into tougher places.
The biggest problem was that we were operating under deadline. Our Mr. Johnson had provided us with a few details. Seems he had a pipeline into this Zayid character's inner sanctum-a circle of twelve that was doing the heavy lifting for Zayid's major working. A street shaman named Shifter hadn't liked what he'd seen, and he'd made contact with our Mr. Johnson's people, whoever they were.
So, courtesy of Shifter, we knew Zayid was doing a series of incantations every night of the waning Moon, and that it was all coming to a head at midnight on the night of the new Moon-the 5th. And that was three days from my meeting with the Johnson.
But Dee found us a way in that ought to bypass the defenses at the front entrance, at least. We'd need to jimmy a lock to get us into an infrastructure service tunnel two blocks from the M amp;M building, then follow the fiber-optics and water pipes into the tower's basement. At that point, Dee would have to hack the building OS to take down certain surveillance cameras and the pressure sensors in the floor, and there would be guards outside the staff elevator.
From there it was up sixty-eight floors to where Zayid was doing his thing.
Simple. What could possibly go wrong? • • •
What indeed?
How about the extra SWAT-rigged security facing us as soon as we stepped out of the service tunnel?
I still don't know what the hell went wrong. Maybe Dee missed a security line when she hacked in. Maybe the whole op was compromised from the start. Hell, maybe we were set up. But Cammie stepped through that door, muttered a heartfelt oscar-sierra over her comm, and rolled for it as the bullets started slamming into the wall.
Scoot spat something under his breath, and a guard three meters away snapped backward, arms pinwheeling as he slammed into a wall. Thud reached out with two hands the size of large turkeys and grabbed a couple of other guards by the throats, hoisting them off the floor and giving them a hard shake as a pacifier. I stepped out from behind him with my Predator IV in both hands, squeezing off one shot after another into the mob of black-suits in front of us.
I don't know if it was Scoot's stunbolt, the sight of the Predator, or Thud's enthusiasm, but the rent-a-cops still standing bolted for the cover of a bend in the hallway. I pulled out a bouncy-boom, squeezing hard to arm it. I tossed it hard, aiming to bounce off the floor, hit the back corridor wall, and ricochet behind the corner. On the third bounce, it detonated with a serious ear-ringing wham, and corp-cops were spilling back out into the opening, hands clutched to bleeding ears.
"Put 'em to sleep, Thud-boy!" I called. I didn't like killing the local security, even if a second ago they'd been trying to kill me. After all, their only crime was trying to earn an honest credstick… unlike yours truly.
They'd have headaches when they woke up, after Thud finished with them, but probably no broken bones. Probably.
The elevator required an electronic passkey. Dee could have finagled it… but one of the guards was nice enough to furnish us with one. We crowded inside-it's always a crowd with Thud present-and told it we wanted the 68th floor.
Of course, we weren't born yesterday. Thud had the maintenance hatch in the car's ceiling open with one, heavy-fisted bam, and we were already scrambling up through the opening and on top the roof when the car came to an abrupt and unscheduled halt between floors 64 and 65. When the gas came hissing into the car beneath us, we were already on the maintenance access ladder and climbing.
Cammie paused long enough to drop an RFID gas sensor down the open hatch in the elevator and check the result on her commlink.
"Shit!" she said, pocketing the comm and starting to climb. "Neurotox! One-whiff deadly! Climb!"
Hell, that just sucked big slimy ork toes. The corp-bastards could have used sleepy-gas. These guys were trying to kill us!
At the sixty-sixth level we let ourselves in through a maintenance hatch, and quietly slipped into a nearby stairwell. We were two floors from our goal and well ahead of sched. We didn't have the luxury of much time, though. It would take them maybe ten minutes to ventilate the elevator, and then they'd know we'd stepped out. And up.
Scoot used another of his bolts to slam an armed and armored guard in the stairway senseless, and Dee tripped the maglock on the door to the 68th floor. We were in.
But I scowled at my watch and signaled for the others to wait. The toughest part about this op was the timing. We knew from our informant that Zayid expected to get the "merchandise" at midnight tonight… and we were running about four minutes fast. If we burst in on the chanters now, we might interrupt the circle, keep them from opening the gate… which, of course, meant we couldn't get the merchandise either.
Assuming there was any merchandise to get. I still couldn't make myself believe that we were going to find the storied Necronomicon when we broke up Zayid's little party.
But we waited, waited as sweat prickled at our necks and backs, waited as Scooter psychically scanned for approaching trouble.
The nanny on my forehead itched. The thing drew power for the cam and mike set from my skin. The larger transmitter on my belt had a built-in power unit all its own. I hoped our unseen employers were getting an eyeful; we were counting on them to airlift us off the roof after we'd completed the hit. It was better than trying to fight our way all the way back down the M amp;M Tower to the street.
Time.
I looked back at Thud, who crouched behind me with his usual patient mountain-presence. His forehead sloped back so sharply between his massive horns that we'd placed his nanny on his throat. Otherwise, our peeping Toms would've seen nothing but the ceiling through his minicam. "Get to the roof," I told him. "Clear it and wait for us. Got it?"
"Got it," he rumbled. He unslung the autocannon he'd been wearing over his shoulder and gave it a friendly pat. "I wait for you."
So now it was just the three of us, stepping through the stairwell door and moving along the passageway looking for Conference Room 68-4. That was where our informant had said Zayid was casting his circles. It ought to be just ahead.
And we could hear it now… an eerie, droning harmony of male voices. We couldn't make out the words, but we could hear the tones easily enough, moaning and buzzing and humming from the next doorway down the hall. There was another guard standing there, but Scooter was muttering under his breath again, throwing up a stealth spell around us as we closed in on him. He saw us… but too late. He went down as Dee burst-fired three silenced rounds into him from her Ingram Smartgun.
The door beside the body was locked, and the passkey on the body didn't work.
By now, the building's defenses must be fully alerted to our presence. We had minutes now, at most, before a small corporate army converged on the 68th floor.
Midnight. Now the only question was whether Zayid's people were on time inside that conference room. I considered waiting another minute… but a minute is forever on a run, and I didn't much care to hang around in a corporate hallway waiting for the M amp;M goons to show. I nodded at Dee, and she went to work on the lock with a sequencer.
I could hear the chanting much more clearly now. Funny words… incomprehensible, like people trying to gargle and cough at the same time.
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn…"
The maglock hummed and opened and the door slid aside. A cloud of pungently sour incense wafted out as we plunged into darkness.
The room was huge, and seemed larger with the lights off. An oval pool of light marked the center twenty meters up ahead, where robed figures stood in a circle filled with a shifting, auroral glow.
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn…"
Twelve men with raised hands continued the eerie chant. That could only mean that the thirteenth figure, robed and hooded and standing at the circle's center, hadn't yet managed to establish the astral gate.
I hesitated, unsure, now, as to what to do.
The chant faltered as we stepped into the room. "Keep going!" the central figure shouted. "Keep the chant going!"
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn…"
The guy in the center had to be Zayid, and he seemed flustered. Good, because that gave me my chance to take control of the situation. "Good evening," I said, and I walked forward, keeping my Predator aimed at Zayid. "Hope you'll excuse the interruption. Don't move-and don't try any magic on us-and no one gets hurt."
Sure, it was trite. But I wasn't thinking real clearly at the moment.
"What are you doing here!" Zayid snapped. "You have no business here!"
"On the contrary. I have some very important business here."
Zayid was a big man, hooded and robed like the others, but I saw his eyes glaring at me from beneath the cowl. Behind him was an altar, with a sword, a chalice, a bell, and a clutter of less readily identifiable stuff. A couple of six-foot candle stands to either side cast most of the physical light… but that weird aurora shifted and danced in the air around them.
"You do not understand what you're dealing with here," Zayid said. "You have no possible conception! I recommend that you and your people turn around and quietly leave. Now."
"Thanks, but I think we'll hang for a while. This looks interesting."
I was taking in the chalked-out marks on the floor surrounding the thirteen magicians. They'd drawn your standard nine-foot circle-a double circle, actually, filled with your standard arcane occult sigils, signs, and squiggles. Just outside the circle, touching it at one point, was a chalk triangle three feet across.
"How about it, Scoot?" I asked.
Scooter had his hands up, facing the circle and the chanters in a kind of magical stand-off. They outnumbered us, but they were penned inside their protective circle. I hoped that meant they couldn't flame us from in there, or worse. And Scoot was working some protective spells, just in case.
"Looks like an ordinary Hermetic ritual," Scooter said, his brow furrowed with concentration. He was using The Voice. "Complete with a triangle of evocation. The circle protects the magicians inside. The triangle is where whatever you're summoning is supposed to appear. Now don't break my concentration!"
I stepped closer, keeping my Predator aimed at the black-robed bunch inside the circle. I was pretty sure that whatever protection those chalks marks conferred on the chanters, they were more effective against spirits and beings and forces coming out of the astral than they were against copper-jacketed slugs with a muzzle velocity of 400 meters per second.
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn…"
That droning chant was getting inside my head. I felt a bit dizzy, though I was putting that down to the adrenaline rush of combat.
"Careful!" Scoot warned. "Don't break the triangle!"
"I'm not." I peered inside.
And… Dunkelzahn! There was something in there!
It was tough to see clearly. There was something… wrong about the space above and inside that triangle, something that made my eyes ache as I tried to follow the shifting blur of fog and cold light moving inside. But I could make out one solid shape within the haze-a book. A very large book.
And it was speaking to me.
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn…"
Okay. I'm not a magician, but I'm not stupid. I know a little about the astral.
Part of the Awakening, you see, was the opening of channels between what we were always so smugly pleased to call the "real world," and the astral, a kind of parallel universe "on the other side" whatever the hell that might mean. The astral is the realm of spirits, demons, elementals, and other occult entities, and it may be generated by all life here on Earth. Magicians go up onto the astral all the time to read auras or taste the emotional or magical imprints lingering on material items.
Beyond the astral are the metaplanes, other worlds, other realities accessible only to highly trained initiated magicians… and even the best mages have limits to where they can pass.
This was not the astral I was looking into within the triangle… nor was it one of the more usual or accessible metaplanes. This was something decidedly else…
The Necronomicon.
It was fiction, damn it, a myth, a literary gimmick created by a hack pulp-writer to spice up his story submissions to Weird Tales a century and a half ago.
And yet I had no doubt whatsoever that what I was seeing within that luminous aether was the fabled tome of dark magic itself-bigger and thicker than an encyclopedia, bound with iron hasps, with a binding of some brown, leathery material heavily wrinkled and cracked. As I stared at it, one of the puckers in the leather opened, revealing a still-living eye, an eye staring up at me with what might have been a keen and analyzing intelligence… or stark, shrieking madness.
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn…"
According to the mythos, the thing had started out as the Kitab Al-Azif, written in Arabic by the Mad Arab with the impossible name somewhere around 730 A.D. Two centuries later, a Byzantine scholar, Theodorus Philetas, translated it into Greek, and called it the Necronomicon-the Book of Dead Names…
I holstered my Predator, and took another step toward the triangle. The air was bitingly cold.
"Fixer!" Dee-Dee screamed. "No!" Cammie was lunging at me and Scooter was just starting to turn, trying to block me… but I reached into that ethereal light with both hands, grasped the Book, and pulled it out.
No, I didn't know what I was doing, so don't ask! It felt like a dream, really, distant and insubstantial, like I was watching something happening to someone else. I saw the chanting magicians relax, though, and I saw Zayid throw back his head and give a wild and shocking laugh.
"Thank you, my impetuous friend!" he said, and he sounded almost relieved. The auroral light was gone, now, the chamber illuminated solely by the flicker of the candles.
"Fixer!" Thud's voice was bellowing in my ear over the commlink. "Fixer! It's a trap!" Over the link I could hear the whop-whop-whop of a helicopter, the stuttering crackle of automatic weapons. "Fixer!" Thud bellowed again from the roof. "It's-"
And the channel went dead.
At the same instant, Dee-Dee and Cammie both raised their weapons, aiming at Zayid… but there was a crack and a flash of lightning, and both women were tossed backward in a sharp, actinic glare of magical light. Scooter was screaming, clawing at his eyes, dropping to his knees…
"You may place the book on the floor outside of the triangle," Zayid told me, "then step away with your hands high above your head."
I was aware of doors opening, of light spilling through from outside. M amp;M security people were spilling in, and I heard the click-clack of their weapons as they took aim. They killed poor Dee first, shooting her down as she tried to rise. Gunfire echoed through the chamber, cutting down Scooter and Cammie both.
My whole team, wiped out in the space of three seconds…
Cammie…
She was curled up in a bloody fetal curl, whimpering. Scooter was dead on his back, arms outflung, blood pooling beneath his body.
"Place the book on the floor outside of the triangle, Mr. Michaels," Zayid said. "Slowly and carefully."
I met his eyes. How in hell had he known my birth name?
I looked at the others, all watching me expectantly from the depths of their hoods. One of them, I knew, must be the one called Shifter, our informant. But if they knew my name, Zayid and those working for him must have done a hell of a lot of digging to find out about me. This whole miserable op had been a freaking set-up, for Christ's sake. We'd been suckered here specifically to get this book.
And maybe it made sense, in a weird, puppet-master kind of way. The protective circle was inviolable. Zayid couldn't drop it or break it without risking some rather nasty metaphysical consequences. Someone outside the circle had to come in and actually lift the Necronomicon out of the triangle, out of the metaplane where it had manifested.
I suppose they could have hired some poor schmuck to do the grabbing, some rent-a-cop or clueless middle-management corpie… or maybe the spell required an outsider, or even an enemy, someone with his own will, doing his own bidding, doing it voluntarily.
For whatever reason, the bastards had sought out our Mr. Johnson and, through him, hired us to do the actual grab from the metaplane. And now they had what they wanted. I could feel all those guns aimed at me from around the room, feel the eyes and the sharp magical focus of the chanters, feel Zayid's mad delight.
I felt that single, nightmare eye peering out from the cover of the book in my hands, looking up at me with its glare of malevolent madness. It whispered to me, in my mind, whispering blasphemous things about God and power and life. Hideous things, things so terrible I can no longer remember the words.
But I remember their feel. And the fire-charred and worm-eaten and ichor-slimed malevolence behind them.
"Don't be foolish, Mr. Michaels," one of the chanters said. He brushed back the hood of his robe. I recognized the face-Roger Nakamura. "Put the book down. You will come to no harm, I promise you. Your friend there needs medical help. And you have no place to go."
"Maybe not." My voice cracked. Cammie! I'm so sorry I got you into this! "But you can go straight to hell!"
I dropped, falling into a knee-bend crouch, and as I did so, as a dozen fingers tightened on the triggers of those aimed weapons behind me, I snapped out with my right leg, the sole of my combat boot on the floor inside the now empty triangle, and swept in a sharp turn to the left, dragging my foot across the chalk marks, scuffing a gap between triangle and circle where they'd touched.
Then I lost my balance and fell flat on my face, and that might have saved my life as full-auto gunfire cracked and reverberated through the conference room.
A few of the bullets meant for me chewed through black robes and thrashing chanters. "Don't shoot!" Nakamura was screaming. "Idiots! Don't shoot!" One of the magicians sprawled back against the altar, knocking the table and both candle stands over. The flames flared, then winked out.
But there was still light…
Flat on my belly, the Necronomicon clutched beneath me, I couldn't see what was happening very well, but I could see that that cold and sickly illumination was back, all shifting blues and greens, and as I looked up I could see the look of sheer, brain-curdling terror on Zayid's face as something like a sinuous shadow stretched past and over me, uncoiling to reach from the unplumbed depths of that hellish triangle to encircle and grasp the shrieking Arab mage.
Gunfire continued to bark, but it wasn't aimed at me. I rolled over onto my back, still clutching the evil book to my chest, and looked up into sheerest Nightmare…
People nowadays think they understand magic. They think they understand the Awakening. Orks. Trolls. Elves. Astral spirits. Elementals. Magic circles. Mystic incantations. It's all frou-frou, man. Fluffy-bunny Halloween dress-up make-believe, robed in black and pretending to be all about power. I looked into the face of that… that thing emerging from the triangle of evocation and I knew that our magic-obsessed and technically adept modern reality was nothing, nothing compared to the eldritch Horror writhing and gibbering at Reality's gates.
Five of the chanters inside the circle were hanging in the air, now, shrieking and struggling as near-invisible tentacles slowly but inexorably squeezed. Nakamura was among them, his eyes bugging from his face in agonizing, mind-rending terror. The rent-a-cops were running, but the Thing had reached out from the triangle and grabbed two of them as well.
And tentacles were reaching for me.
"Here!" I screamed. "Take it!" And I hurled the heavy book at the monstrous chaos emerging from the triangle's rift. The tentacles hovering above me snatched the book from the air, and by then I was scrambling to Cammie's side, scooping her up in my arms, and running, running like Doomsday itself was descending upon us.
And for all I knew, it was. The entire building was shaking and swaying, as though its century-old structure was barely containing the unimaginable force emerging from that alien plane. Ceiling panels and overhead lighting tubes burst and fell in a shower of glass and plastic. The floor danced and shivered, earthquake-wracked, and I heard shatterproof windows outside the room shattering, the crashes like gunshots.
It sounded like the whole damned building was screaming…
I reached the nearest door, pausing just long enough for a quick glance back over my shoulder. Maybe the Thing had what it wanted. One by one, the shrieking, squirming men suspended in the air vanished, though I swear I could hear their fading screams long after they'd gone.
I could still hear them as I descended the stairwell. • • •
The surviving guards had rushed out ahead of us, mingling with the late-night crowds downstairs who wondered what the commotion was up in the penthouse. I was stopped a couple of times by white-faced security people, but got by each time by saying, "Special security, with Roger Nakamura! I've got wounded here! Get the hell out of my way!"
Somewhere in all the confusion, I'd lost my nanny… and I'd peeled Cammie's off her blood-splattered face. They wouldn't track us. The humans wouldn't, anyway.
Gods of all the Metaverse… what did I see?
It still haunts me.
It wasn't a mouth that got Zayid and Nakamura. I don't think it was a mouth.
Is it true that our thoughts create Reality? That imaginal beings and places and nightmare horrors all somehow take shape and form and mass and seething, malevolent will in some other dimension, some other metaphysical plane?
Our myths may have more reality than we can credit. Beelzebub and Lucifer. Dark Hecate and Ammit, Eater of Souls. Yog-Sothoth, Keeper of the Gate, and Great Cthulhu, dreaming in the depths until the stars are right.
Perhaps whatever can be imagined is real, somehow, solid and fully manifested, residing just beyond the insubstantial gauze veils of Reality rising around us. Perhaps evil, true evil, arises from the lightless corners of our own hearts and minds. Perhaps even our darkest nightmares take shape and will, gibbering at the gates.
I have nightmares, now. Nightmares about Dee-Dee and Scooter and patient Thud. Dead names, now.
The nightmares where I again see the Thing are the worst.
And at night Cammie takes me in her arms and whispers soothing words in my ear and holds me close and tells me it's all right.
But it's not.
I can still hear the screams, the terror-maddened shrieks of souls dragged down into darkness. I still hear the despair. The wrenching agony of dying souls.
And I can still hear the blasphemous whisperings of the Book.
The Book of Dead Names.
Oh, gods! Gods in whom I've never believed, help me! The Art of Diving in the Dark By Ilsa J. Bick
Ilsa J. Bick is an award-winning, bestselling writer of short stories, ebooks and novels as well as a child psychiatrist, film scholar, surgeon wannabe and former Air Force major. (She is also fairly peripatetic and easily bored, but no fair diagnosing her until she's left the room.) She has published extensively in the Star Trek, BattleTech and MechWarrior: Dark Age universes, as well as original science fiction, fantasy and mystery. "The Key," a supernatural murder-mystery about the Holocaust and reincarnation, was named "distinguished" in The Best American Mystery Stories, 2005 (edited by Joyce Carol Oates); a novelette-length sequel, "Second Sight," has just been released in Crime Spells (eds. Martin H. Greenberg and Loren L. Coleman); Locus's Rich Horton calls the novelette " the best (in the anthology)… heady and involving."
Forthcoming are two young adult novels, in hardcover, from Carolrhoda Books: Draw the Dark, a paranormal mystery Publisher's Weekly called "inventive" and "riveting," which also made the semifinals of the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (as Stalag Winter); and The Sin Eater's Confession, revolving around the murder of a gay high school student in rural Wisconsin.
Currently, Ilsa and her family live in Wisconsin where theirs is the only mezuzah in town.
– Kupau wau i ka mano ka mano nui ka mano nui kupau wau i ka mano:
I am finished to the big shark, all consumed by the big shark, I am finished.
(Old Hawaiian saying)