The Jennifer Morgue Read online

  “Shit.” Enlightenment dawns: Ramona has dragged me out here because she thinks I’m bugged. “What’s down below us . . . ?”

  “It’s a defensive emplacement. The French got serious about that in the early ’60s, before the treaty arrangements got nailed down. You’re standing on a discordance node, one of a belt of sixteen big ones designed to protect the east coast of Saint Martin against necromantic incursions. If you swim through it, any thaumaturgic bugs they’ve planted on you will be wiped—it’s a huge occult degaussing rig. Which is one of the reasons I brought you here.”

  “But if it’s a defensive emplacement, how come the zombies up at—” I bite my tongue.

  “Exactly.” She looks grave. “That’s part of what’s wrong here, which is the other thing I want to check out. About four months ago one of our routine geomantic surveillance flights noticed that the defensive belt was—not broken, exactly, but showed signs of tampering. One of Billington’s subsidiaries, a construction company, landed the contract to maintain the concrete ballast units. Do I need to draw you a diagram?”

  Here we are surrounded by ocean, and my mouth is dry as a bone. “No. You think somebody’s running a little import /export business, right?”

  “Yes.”

  I take a deep breath. “Anything else?”

  “I wanted to get you alone, with no bugs.”

  “Hey, you only had to ask!” I grin, my heart pounding inappropriately.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way.” She smiles ruefully. “You know what would happen if—”

  “Only kidding,” I say, abruptly nervous. The conversation is veering dangerously close to territory I’m uncomfortable with. I look at her—correction: I force my eyes to track about thirty degrees up, until I’m looking at her face. She’s watching me right back, and I find I can’t help wondering what it would be like to . . . well. Sure she’s attached to a level three glamour so tight you’d need a scalpel to peel it off her, but I can probably cope with whatever’s underneath it, I think. Her daemon is something else again, but there are things we could do, without intercourse . . . but what about Mo? My conscience finally catches up with my freewheeling speculation. Well, what indeed? But the thought drags me back down to Earth, after a fashion. I manage to get my worst instincts under control then ask: “Okay, so why did you really bring me out here?”

  “First, I need to know: Why the fuck did you go rushing off to Anse Marcel?”

  The question hits me like a bucket of cold water in the face. “I, I, I wanted to check something out,” I stutter. It sounds lame. “Last night, I was inside Marc’s head. He was going to—” I trail off.

  “You were inside his head?”

  “Yes, and it wasn’t a nice place to be,” I snap.

  “You were inside—” She blinks rapidly. “Tell me what you picked up?”

  “But I thought you knew—”

  “No,” she says tightly. “I didn’t know it went that far. This is as new to me as it is to you. What did you learn?”

  I lick my lips. “Marc had an arrangement. Every couple of weeks he’d pick up a single female who wouldn’t be missed and he’d—let’s not go into that. Afterwards he’d drop a geas on her, a control ring he’d learned from the customer, and he’d drive her up to Anse Marcel where a couple of guys would come in on a boat to pick the victim up. They paid in coke, plus extras.”

  “Ri-ight.” Ramona pauses. “That makes sense.” I can feel it snapping into place in her mind, another part of a lethal booby-trapped jigsaw puzzle she’s trying to solve. I realize in the silence between heartbeats that we’ve stopped pretending. It feels as if some huge external force is pushing us together, squeezing us towards intimacy. She gave me an opening to pretend that I wasn’t involved, and I didn’t take it. But why? I wouldn’t normally do this kind of thing; maybe the tropical clime’s addled me.

  “What part of the picture does it fit?” I meet her gaze. I have the most peculiar feeling that I’m watching myself watching her through two pairs of eyes.

  “Billington’s diversified into a variety of fields. You shouldn’t think of him as simply a computer industry mogul. He’s got his tentacles into a lot more pies than Silicon Valley.”

  “But kidnapping? That’s ridiculous! It can’t possibly be cost-effective, even if he’s selling them off for spare parts.” I swallow and shut up: she’s broadcasting a horrible sense of claustrophobic dread, fear rising off her like a heat haze. I shuffle, grounding my feet against the concrete defense platform, and for a moment her skin acquires a silvery sheen. “What is it? Is he—”

  “You know better than to say it aloud, Bob.”

  “I was afraid that was what you were trying to tell me.” I look away, towards the breakers foaming across the reef and the open seas beyond. And it’s not just her sense of dread anymore.

  Some types of invocation need blood, and some require entire bodies. Whatever lives in the back of Ramona’s head is a trivial, weak example; the creature I ran across in Santa Cruz and Amsterdam three years ago was a much more powerful one. Ramona is afraid that we’re dealing with a life-eating horror that lives off the entropy burst that comes from draining a human soul: I’m pretty sure she’s right. Which means the next question to ask is, who on Earth would summon such a thing, and why? And as I’m pretty sure we know the answer to who . . .

  “What’s Billington trying to do? What is he summoning up?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Any guesses?” I ask sarcastically. “The Deep Ones, maybe?”

  Ramona shakes her head angrily. “Not them! Never them.” The sense of dread is choking, oppressive: she feels it personally, I realize.

  I stare at her. That flash of silver again, the water lapping around her chest, drawing my eyes back towards those amazingly perfect breasts—I fight to filter out the distraction. This isn’t me, is it? It’s hard work, fighting the glamour. I want to see her as she really is. Taking a deep breath I force myself back to the matter in hand: “What makes you so sure the Deep Ones aren’t behind him? You’re holding out on me. Why?”

  “Because they don’t think that way. And yes, I am fucking holding out on you.” She glares at me, and I can feel her wounded pride and defensive anger fighting against something else: Concern? Worry? “This is all going wrong. I brought you out here so I could tell you why you’re being kept in the dark, not to pick a fight—”

  “And here I was thinking you wanted me for my body.” I hold my hands up before she has time to swear at me: “I’m sorry, but have you got any idea just how bloody distracting that glamour is?” It’s amazing and frightening and beautiful, and it makes it a real bitch to try to concentrate on a conversation about subterfuge and lies without wondering what horrors she’s concealing from me.

  Ramona stares at me, until I can feel her inside my head, watching herself through my glamour-ensnared eyes. “Okay, monkey-boy: you want it, you got it.” Her voice is flat and hard. “Just remember, you asked for it.”

  She lets go of the anchor of the glamour she’s been clinging on to. The constant repulsive force emanating from the concrete countermeasure emplacement we’re standing on blows it away, like a hat in a hurricane—and I see Ramona as she truly is. Which gives me two very big surprises.

  I gasp. I can’t help myself. “You’re one of them!” I meet her clear emerald gaze. And, quietly: “Wow.”

  Ramona says nothing, but one perfect nostril flares minutely. Her skin has a faint silvery iridescent sheen to it, like the scales of a fish; her hair is long and green as glass, framing a face with higher cheekbones and a wider mouth, rising from an inhumanly perfect long neck, the skin broken by two rows of slits above her clavicle. Her breasts are smaller, not much larger than her nipples, and two tinier ones adorn her rib cage beneath them. She raises her right hand and spreads her fingers, revealing the delicate tracery of webbing. “So what do you think of me now, monkey-boy?”

  I swallow. She’s like a sculpture in
quicksilver, created by inhuman sea-dwelling aliens who have taken the essence of human female beauty and customized it to meet their need for an artificial go-between who can walk among the lumpen savages of the arid continental surfaces. “I’ve met half—sorry, the sea-born—before. At Dunwich. But not like, uh, you. Uh. You’re different.” I goggle at her, my mouth open like a fish. Different is an understatement and a half. The glamour she customarily wears doesn’t make her look unnaturally beautiful to human eyes; rather, it conceals the more exotic aspects of her physiognomy. Strip it away and she’s devastating, as unlike the weak-chinned followers of St. Monkfish as it’s possible to imagine.

  “So you’ve met the country cousins.” Her cheek twitches. “Yes, I can understand your surprise.” She stares at me, and I’m not sure whether she’s disappointed or surprised. “So do you still think I’m a monster?”

  “I think you’re a—” I grind to a stop, before I can push my foot any further down my throat. “Um.” An inkling comes to me. “Let me guess. Your people. Go-betweens, like the colony at Dunwich. And you were given to the BC and they dropped the, your daemon on you to control you. Am I right?”

  “I can neither confirm nor deny anything to do with my employers,” she says with the flat-voiced emptiness of a necromancer’s answering machine, before snapping back into focus: “My folks lived off Baja California. That’s where I grew up.” For a moment her eyes overflow with a sense of loss. “The Deep Ones did . . . well, they did what they did at Dunwich. My folks have been go-betweens for generations, able to pass as human and visit the depths. But we’re not really at home among either species. We’re constructs, Bob. And now you know why I use the glamour!” she adds harshly. “There’s no need for flattery. I know damn well what I look like to you people.”

  You people: Ouch! “You’re not a monster. Exotic, yes.” I can’t look away from her. I try to pull my eyes away from those perfect breasts and I keep looking down and there’s another pair—“It just takes a little getting used to. But I don’t mind, not really. I’ve already gotten over it.” Down in the Laundry compound at Dunwich they’ve got a technical term for human employees who start spending too much time skinny-dipping with a snorkel: fish-fuckers. I’ve never really seen the attraction before, but with Ramona it’s blindingly obvious. “You’re as attractive without the glamour as with it. Maybe more so.”

  “You’re just saying that to fuck with my head.” I can taste her bitter amusement. “Admit it!”

  “Nope.” I take a deep breath and duck under the water, then kick off towards her. I can open my eyes here: everything is tinged pale green but I can see. Ramona dodges sideways then grabs me by the waist and we tumble beneath the reflective ceiling, grappling and pushing and shoving. I get my head above water for long enough to pull in a lungful of air, then she drags me under and starts tickling me. I convulse, but somehow whenever I really need air she’s pushing me up above water rather than trying to pull me down. Weirdly, I seem to need much less air than I ought to. I can feel the gills working powerfully in her pleural cavity; it’s as if there’s some kind of leakage between us, as if she’s helping oxygenate both our bloodstreams. When she kisses me she tastes of roses and oysters. Finally, after a few minutes of rubbing and fondling we settle to the bottom and lie, arms and legs entangled, in the middle of the circuit-board tracery of gold that caps the concrete table.

  ★★Fish-fucker!★★ She mocks me.

  ★★It takes two to tango, squid-girl. Anyway, we haven’t. I wouldn’t dare.★★

  ★★Coward!★★ She laughs ruefully, taking the sting out of the word. Silver bubbles trickle and bob towards the surface from her mouth. ★★Y’know, it’s hard work breathing for both of us. If you want to help, go up to the surface ... ★★

  ★★Okay.★★ I let go and allow myself to stand up. As I pull away from her I feel a tightness in my chest that rapidly grows: we may be destiny-entangled, but the metabolic leakage is strictly short-range. I break surface and shake my head, gasping for air, then look towards the beach. There’s a loud ringing in my ears, a deep bass rattle that resonates with my jaw, and a shadow dims the flashing sunlight on the reef. Huh? I find myself looking straight up at the underside of a helicopter.

  “Get down!” Ramona hisses through the deafening roar. She wraps a hand around my ankle and yanks, pulling me under the surface. I hold my breath and let her drag me down beside her—my chest eases—then I realize she’s pointing at a rectangular duct cover at one side of the concrete platform. ★★Come on, we’ve got to get under cover! If they see us we’re screwed!★★

  ★★If who see us?★★

  ★★Billington’s thugs! That’s his chopper up there. Whatever you did must have really gotten them pissed. We’ve got to get under cover before—★★

  ★★Before what?★★ She’s wrestling with the iron duct cover, which is dark red with rust and thinly coated with polyps and other growths. I try to ignore the tightness in my chest and brace myself to help.

  ★★That.★★ Something drops into the water nearby. I think it’s rubbish at first, but then I see a spreading red stain in the water. ★★Dye marker. For the divers.★★

  ★★Whoops.★★ I grab hold of the handles and brace myself, then put my back into it. ★★How long—★★ the grate begins to move ★★—do we have?★★

  ★★Fresh outa time, monkey-boy.★★ Shadows flicker in the turbid waters on the other side of the coral barrier: barracuda or small sharks circling. My chest aches with the effort of holding my breath and I think I’ve ripped open the skin on my hands, but the grate is moving now, swinging up and out on a hinged arm. ★★C’mon in.★★ The opening is about eighty by sixty, a tight squeeze for two: Ramona drops into it feet first then grabs my hand and pulls me after.

  ★★What is this?★★ I ask. I get an edgy, panicky feeling: we’re dropping into a concrete-walled tube with hand-holds on one side, and it’s black as night inside.

  ★★Quick! Pull the cover shut!★★

  I yank at the hatch and it drops towards me heavily. I flinch as it lands on top of the tunnel, and then I can’t see anything but a vague phosphorescent glow. I blink and look down. It’s Ramona. She’s breathing—if that’s what you call it—like she’s running a marathon, and she looks a bit peaked, and she’s glowing, very dimly. Bioluminescence. ★★It’s shut.★★

  ★★Okay. Now follow me.★★ She begins to descend the tunnel, hand over hand. My chest tightens.

  ★★Where are we going?★★ I ask nervously.

  ★★I don’t know—this isn’t in the blueprints. Probably an emergency maintenance tunnel or something. So how about we find out, huh?★★

  I grab a rung and shove myself down towards her, trying to ignore the panicky feeling of breathlessness and the weird sensations around my collarbone. ★★Okay, so why not let’s climb down a secret maintenance shaft in an undersea occult defense platform while divers with spear guns who work for a mad billionaire wait for us up top, hmm? What could possibly go wrong?★★

  ★★Oh, you’d be surprised.★★ She sounds as if she does this sort of thing every other week. Then, a second later, I sense rather than feel her feet hit bottom: ★★Oh. Well that’s a surprise,★★ she adds conversationally.

  And suddenly I realize I can’t breathe underwater.

  8.

  WHITE HAT/BLACK HAT

  AN ADVENTURE DEMANDS A HERO, AROUND WHOM the whole world circles; but what use is a hero who can’t even breathe underwater?

  To spare you Bob’s embarrassment, and to provide a shark’s-eye view of the turbid waters through which he swims, it is necessary to pause for a moment and, as if in a dream—or an oneiromantic stream ripped from the screen of Bob’s smartphone—to cast your gaze across the ocean towards events transpiring at exactly the same time, in an office in London.

  Do not fear for Bob. He’ll be back, albeit somewhat moist around the gills.

  “THE SECRETARY WILL SEE YOU
NOW, MISS O’Brien,” says the receptionist.

  O’Brien nods amiably at the receptionist, slides a bookmark into the hardback she’s reading, then stands up. This takes some time because the visitor’s chair she’s been waiting in is ancient and sags like a hungry Venus flytrap, and O’Brien is trying to keep her grip on a scuffed black violin case. The receptionist watches her, bored, as she shrugs her khaki linen jacket into place, pats down a straying lock of reddish-brown hair, and walks over towards the closed briefing-room door with the AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY sign above it. She pauses with one hand on the doorknob. “By the way, it’s Professor O’Brien,” she says, smiling to take the sting out of the words. “‘Miss’ sounds like something you’d call a naughty schoolgirl, don’t you think?”

  The receptionist is still nodding wordlessly and trying to think of a comeback when O’Brien closes the door and the red light comes on over the lintel.

  The briefing room contains a boardroom table, six chairs, a jug of tap water, some paper cups, and an ancient Agfa slide projector. All the fittings look to be at least a third of a century old: some of them might even have seen service during the Second World War. There used to be windows in two of the walls, but they were bricked up and covered over with institutional magnolia paint some years ago. The lighting tubes above the table shed a ghastly glare that gives everybody in the room the skin tint of a corpse—except for Angleton, who looks mummified at the best of times.

  “Professor O’Brien.” Angleton actually smiles, revealing teeth like tombstones. “Do have a seat.”

  “Of course.” O’Brien pulls one of the battered wooden chairs out from the table and sits down carefully. She nods at Angleton, polite control personified. The violin case she places on the tabletop.