The Atrocity Archives (22 page)

We start moving again and she takes my hand. "Great evening out. Try
it again some time?"

I smile back at her, feeling both regret and
optimism. "Yeah."

"
Without
the audience."

We reach the hotel, share a last drink, and head
for our separate rooms.

I dream of wires. dark
landscape, cold mud. Something screams in the distance; lumpy
shapes strung up on barbed wire stretched before the fortress. The
screams get louder and there's a rumbling and crashing and somewhere in
the process I become aware that I'm not dreaming—someone is screaming,
while I lie in bed halfway between sleeping and waking.

I'm on my feet almost before I realise I'm
awake. I grab a T-shirt and jeans, somehow slide my feet into both legs
simultaneously and I'm out the door within ten seconds. The corridor is
silent and dim, the only lighting coming from the overhead emergency
strips; it's narrow, too, and by night the
pastel-painted walls form a claustrophobic collage of grey-on-black
shadows. Silence—then another scream, muffled, coming from upstairs.
It's definitely human and it doesn't sound like anything you'd expect
to hear from a hotel room at night. I pause for a moment, feeling silly
as I consider that particular possibility—then duck back into my room
and grab the multitool and the palmtop I've left atop the dresser.
Now
I head for the staircase.

Another scream and I take the steps two at a
time. A door opens behind me, a tousled head poking out and mumbling,
"I'm trying to sleep … "

The hair on my arms stands on end. The stair
rail is glowing a faint, eerie blue; sparks sting my bare feet as I
climb, and the handle of the fire door at the top of the stairs gives
me a nasty shock. Air sighs past me, a thin breeze blowing along the
corridor where blue flickering outlines the door frames in darkness.
Another scream and this time a thudding noise, then a muffled crash; I
hear a door slam somewhere below me, then the shattering whine of a
fire alarm going off.

Mo is in the Plato suite. That's where the
screams are coming from, where the wind blows—I hit the door with my
shoulder as hard as I can, and bounce.

"What is going on?"

I glance round. A middle-aged woman, thin-faced
and worried. "Fire alarm!" I yell. "I heard screaming in here. Can you
get help?"

She steps forward, waving a big bunch of keys:
she must be the concierge. "Allow me." She turns the door handle and
the key, and the door slams open inward as a gust of wind grabs us both
and tries to yank us into the room. I grab her arm and brace my feet
against the doorframe. Now there's a scream right in my ear, but she
grabs my wrist with another hand and I wrestle her back into the
corridor. A howling gale is blowing through the doorway, as if
someone's punched a hole in the universe. I risk a glance round it and
see—

A hotel bedroom in chaos and disarray—wardrobe
tumbled on the floor, bedclothes strewn everywhere—all the hallmarks
of
a fight, or a burglary, or something. But where in my room there's
another door and then a cramped bathroom, here there's a
hole.
A hole with lights on the other side of it that cast sharp shadows
across the damaged furniture. Stars, harsh and bright against the
darkness of a flat, alien landscape shrouded in twilight.

I pull my head back and gasp into the woman's
ear: "Get everybody out of here! Tell them it's a fire! I'll get
help!"
She's half doubled-over from the wind but she nods and stumbles toward
the staircase. I turn to follow, shocked, half-dazed.
Where the
hell have the watchers gone? We're supposed to be under surveillance,
dammit!
I look back toward the bedroom for a final glance through
that opening that shouldn't be there. The wind batters at my back, a
gale howling past my ears. The opening is the size of a large pair of
doors, ragged bits of lath and wallpaper showing where the small gate
ripped through the wall. Beyond it, rolling ground, deep cold; a valley
with a still lake beneath the icy, unwinking stars that form no
constellations I can recognize. Something dim frosts the sky; at first
I think it's a cloud, but then I recognise the swirl—the arms of a
giant spiral galaxy raised above a dim landscape not of this world.

I'm freezing, the wind is trying to rip me
through the doorway and carry me into the alien landscape—and there's
no sign of Mo, nor of her abductor. She's in there somewhere, that's
for sure. Whoever, whatever opened it was waiting for her to go to bed
when we came back to the hotel. They left fragments of their geometry
inscribed in bloody runes on the walls and floor. They'll have planned
this, taken her for their own purposes—

A hand grabs my arm. I jerk round: it's Alan,
looking just as much like a schoolteacher as ever, wearing an
expression that says the headmaster is angry. His other hand is wrapped
around the grips of a very large pistol. He bends close and yells,
"Let's get the fuck out of here!"

No argument. He pulls me toward the fire door
and we make our way down the stairs, shocked and frostbitten. The wind
quietens behind us as we rush down to the ground floor, all the way to
the bar where Angleton is waiting to be briefed.

The emergency gathers pace
over the next three hours.

When I glance out the front door I see a
fire-control truck—a big lorry with a control room mounted on its load
bed—squatting in the middle of the street outside the hotel, blue
lights strobing against the darkness; a couple of pumps are drawn up on
either side, and a gaggle of police vans are parked round the corner.
Cops are busy buzzing around, evacuating everyone on the block from
hotel and dwelling alike. The cover story is that there's a gas leak.
The pump engines are real enough, but the control vehicle has nothing
to do with the fire brigade: Angleton had it shipped into Holland
before Mo and I arrived, just in case. It belongs to OCCULUS—Occult
Control Coordination Unit Liaison, Unconventional Situations—the NATO
occult equivalent of a NEST, or Nuclear Emergency Search Team. But
while NEST operatives are really only trained to look for terrorist
nukes, OCCULUS has to be ready for Armageddon in a variety of guises. I
only just found out about OCCULUS and I really don't know whether or
not I want to punch Angleton or just be
grateful for his foresight.

There's rack after rack of specialised
communication equipment in the back of the truck, and a scarier bunch
of paramilitaries than I've ever seen outside of a movie. They're
poking around the hotel right now—sending in robots with cameras,
installing sensors on the way up the staircase—laying the groundwork
for whatever comes next.

Alan leads me into the bar, where Angleton is
waiting. Angleton has dark hollows under his eyes; his tie is loose and
his collar unbuttoned. He's scribbling notes on a yellow pad in between
snapping instructions on a mobile phone that's just about glued to his
ear. "Sit down," he gestures as he listens to someone at the other end.

"We ought to pull back to the amber zone," Alan
says. "There's structural damage."

"Later." Angleton waves him off and goes back to
talking on the phone. "No, there's no need to go to Rung Four yet, but
I want the backup wagon on twenty-four by seven alert, and we'll need
Plumbers crawling over everything. And Baggers, but especially
Plumbers. Tell Bridget to fuck off." He glances at me. "Grab a drink
from the bar and get ready to tell me everything." Back to the phone:
"I'll expect hourly updates." He puts the phone down and turns to me.
"Now. Tell me exactly what happened."

"I don't
know
what happened," I say. "I
went to bed. Next thing, I hear screams and wake up—" I clench my
fists
to stop my hands shaking.

"Fast forward. What did you find in her room?"
Angleton leans forward intently.

"How did you know … hell. I
got up there, heard whistling like wind. So I tried to break the door
down. Then the concierge showed up, unlocked the door, and nearly got
sucked in; I grabbed her and sent her back down. There's a gate in
there, class four at least—it's about two-plus metres in diameter,
runs
straight through the wall, and it's stable. Furniture was thrown around
as if there was a fight, but there's a big wind
blowing. On the other side of the gate there's no atmosphere to speak
of."

"No atmosphere." Angleton nods and makes a note
as two firemen—I think they're firemen—enter the bar and begin
setting
up something that looks like a rack of industrial scaffolding in the
middle of the room. "The source of the wind?"

"I think so. It was bloody cold, which suggests
expansion into vacuum." I shiver and glance up; above our heads the
whistle of wind through rubble continues unabated. "She wasn't there,"
I add. "I think they took her."

Angleton's lips quirk. "That is not an
unreasonable deduction." His expression hardens. "Describe the other
side of the gate."

"Twilight, a shallow valley. I couldn't see the
ground very clearly; it sloped down to a distant lake, or something
that looked like one. The stars were very clear, not twinkling at all,
and I could see they weren't familiar. There was a huge galaxy
covering, uh, about a third of the sky."

Alan sticks a glass between my fingers: I take
an experimental swallow. Orange juice spiked with something stronger. I
continue: "No air on the other side. Alien starscape. But there
are
stars, and at least one planet; that means it's pretty damn close to
us, it's not one of those universes where the ratio of the strong
nuclear force to the electromagnetic force prevents fusion." I shiver.
"Whoever they are, they've got her and they've got an open
mass-transfer gate. What do we do now?"

Alan silently leaves the room. Angleton looks at
me oddly. "That's a very good question. Do you have any ideas to
contribute?" he asks.

I swallow. "I have one idea. It's the Ahnenerbe,
isn't it? That's the connection. The Middle Eastern guy, the one with
the luminous eyes that she described—it's a possession. Something left
over from the war, an Ahnenerbe revenant of some kind, possessing the
leader of a Mukhabarat strike cell in California.
And now they've snatched Mo."

He closes his eyes. "Your email this afternoon.
You are
sure
she positively identified the scan you sent me
from California? You'd bet your life on it?"

"Pretty sure." I nod. "Was it—"

"We found the same pattern in Rotterdam." He
sighs and opens his eyes again. "The very same; my compliments on your
search criteria. Was there something similar in her room?"

"I honestly can't say; it was dark, I was trying
not to be dragged in by the wind, and the gate had instantiated in the
middle of it. I don't think so, but if you can get a photograph from up
there I can confirm—"

"In progress."

Alan comes back in; he's wearing a bright orange
overall and carrying a bulky box, some kind of sensor gear. "You'll
have to move now," he tells Angleton. "The top floor's in danger of
collapsing. Hole up in the van and stay out of the way; we need to
sweep the block for werewolves."

"Were—"

I must look surprised because Alan barks a brief
laugh at me. "Leftovers from the authors of this incursion, old boy,
not hairy-palmed wolf-men with a silver allergy. Come on, shift
yourself."

"Shift—" I find myself on my feet, Angleton
holding my elbow in a vicelike grip.

"Come now, Mr. Howard. This is no time to lose
your self-control." He steers me out into the street (barefoot, the
tarmac under my toes makes me wince) and then up the steps into the
OCCULUS command vehicle. A guard waves us in, insect-eyed in
respirator. "A spare overall for Mr. Howard here," Angleton calls, and
a minute later I'm loaded down with enough survival gear to equip a
small polar expedition, from the y-fronts out.

"You're going to send people in to try and close
the gate," I predict in the general direction of
the back of Angleton's head as he dials a phone number. "I want to go
with them."

"Don't be silly, boy. What do you think you can
achieve?"

"I can try to rescue her," I say.

There's a burst of static from farther up the
compartment and one of the men in black (black turtleneck, black
fatigues, black face-paint, and MP-10 slung over his chair) turns and
calls out: "Message for the captain!" Alan mutters a curse and
squeezes
past me. I begin pulling on a sock. There are one-way windows along one
side of the cabin and outside in the road I see some kind of large
truck squeezing past us.

"I'm serious," I tell Angleton. "I know what's
going on here, or most of it. Or I can guess. Werewolves, he said.
Holdovers from the Reich, huh? And the Mukhabarat connection. That gate
doesn't go into the dark anthropic zone; it stops short, somewhere
where humans can exist. Really
evil
humans, whoever survived
from the Ahnenerbe-SS after the war was lost." I begin to wriggle into
the bottom half of my survival suit shell. "I've been studying Sheet
45075 from Birkenau, you know. If it's the same one they used over
there, I can shut it down safely—without a massive discharge when it
arcs to ground."

He's on the phone again. "Very good, any
survivors? Two, you say, and three sacrifices? That's excellent. Have
you identified—"

I tap him on the shoulder. "Mo told me what she
was researching on the Black Chamber contract," I say. "You really
don't want them to get their hands on it."

Angleton's head whips round. "One minute, boy."
Back to the phone: "Get them to sing. I don't care how you do it; by
dawn I want to know who they thought they were summoning." He puts the
phone down and glares at me. "Tell me."

"Probability manipulation," I say.