Overtime (3 page)

“So preempt his prophecy already! Use the weak anthropic principle: if we cancel next year’s Christmas party, his prophecy is delayed indefinitely. Right?”

Andy rolls his eyes. “Don’t be fucking stupid.”

“It was a long shot.” (Pause.) “What are we going to do?”

“We?” Andy raises one eyebrow. “
I
am going to go home to the wife and kids for Christmas and try to forget about threats to our very existence for a bit. You”—he takes a deep gulp of smoke—“get to play at Night Duty Officer, patrolling the twilit corridors to protect our workplace from the hideous threat of the Filler of Stockings, who oozes through chimneys and ventilation ducts every Dead God’s Birthday-eve to perform unspeakable acts against items of hosiery. Try not to let it get to you—oh, and have a nice holiday while you’re at it.”

* * *

My appetite for nocturnal exploration is fading, tempered by the realization that I may not be the only one putting in some overtime in the office tonight. I reach for my ward—hung around my neck like an identity badge—and feel it. It tingles normally, and is cool.
Good.
If it was hot or glowing or throbbing I could expect company. It’s time to get back to the NDO room and regroup.

I tiptoe back the way I came, thinking furiously.

Item:
It’s the night before Christmas, and backup is scarce to nonexistent.

Item:
You can fool everyone at an office party with a class three glamour, but you can’t fool a photocopier.

Item:
Kringle’s prophecy.

Item:
We’re in CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, and things that too many people believe in have a nasty tendency to come true; magic is a branch of applied computation, neural networks are computing devices, there are
too many people
and
the stars are right
(making it much too easy to gain the attention of entities that find us crunchy and good with ketchup).

Item:
Who or what kind of uninvited entity might want to sit in on Kringle’s little pep talk. . . . ?

I’m halfway down the corridor through Mahogany Row, and I break into a run.

* * *

“Good afternoon, everyone.”

Kringle wrings his hands as he speaks; they’re curiously etiolated and pale-skinned, like those of a Deep One, but he lacks the hunched back or gills: there’s only the pallid, stringy hair and the thick horn-rimmed glasses concealing a single watery blue eye—the other is covered by a leather patch—to mark him out as odd. But his gaze . . .

“It
will
be a good afternoon, until I finish speaking.” He smiles like a hangman’s trapdoor opening. “So drink up now and be of good cheer, because this will be the last Christmas party held by the Laundry.”

Up to this point most folks have been ignoring him or listening with polite incomprehension. Suddenly, though, you could hear a mouse fart.

“You need have no fear of downsizing or treasury cuts to comply with the revised public spending guidelines.” His smile fades. “I speak of more fundamental, irrevocable changes.

“My department, Forecasting Operations, is tasked with attempting to evaluate the efficacy of proposed action initiatives in pursuit of the organization’s goals—notably, the prevention of incursions by gibbering horrors from beyond space-time. Policies are originated, put on the table—and we descry their consequences. It’s a somewhat hit-and-miss profession, but our ability to peer into the abyss of the future allows us to sometimes avoid the worst pitfalls.”

Kringle continues in this vein for some time. His voice is oddly soporific, and it takes me a while to figure out why: he reminds me of a BBC radio weather forecaster. They have this slot for the weather forecast right before the news, and try as I will I
always
zone out right before they get to whatever region I happen to be interested in and wake up as they’re finishing. It’s uncanny. Kringle is clearly talking about something of considerable importance, but my mind skitters off the surface of his words like a wasp on a plate glass window. I shake my head and begin to look round, when the words flicker briefly into focus.

“—Claus, or
Santé Klaas
in the mediaeval Dutch usage, a friendly figure in a red suit who brings presents in the depths of winter, may have a more sinister meaning. Think not only of the traditions of the Norse Odin, with which the figure of Santa Claus is associated, but with the shamanic rituals of Lap antiquity, performed by a holy man who drank the urine of reindeer that had eaten the sacred toadstool,
Amanita Muscaria
—wearing the bloody, flayed skin of the poisoned animals to gain his insight into the next year—we, with modern statistical filtering methodologies, can gain much more precise insights, but at some personal cost—”

Eh?
I shake my head again, then take another mouthful from my paper cup of cheap plonk. The words go whizzing past, almost as if they’re tagged for someone else’s attention. Which is odd, because I’m trying to follow what he’s saying: I’ve got a peculiar feeling that this stuff is important.

“—particular, certain facts appear indisputable.
There will be no Laundry staff Christmas dinner next year.
We can’t tell you why, but as a result of events that I believe have already taken place this will be the last one. Indeed, attempts over the past year to investigate outcomes beyond this evening have met with abject failure: the end of this party is the last event that Forecasting Operations is able to predict with any degree of confidence. . . .”

* * *

I arrive back in the Duty Officer’s Room with a chilly sheen of sweat coating the small of my back. The light’s on, casting a cheery glow through the frosted glass window in the door, and the TV’s blathering happily away. I duck inside and shut it behind me, then grab the spare wooden chair and prop it under the door handle. My memory of Kringle’s talk seems altogether too disturbingly like a dream for my taste: even the conversation with Andy has an oddly vaporous feel to it. I’ve had this kind of experience before, and the only thing to do is to test it.

I plonk myself down behind the desk and unlock the drawer, then pull out the phone book. Rain rattles on the window above my head as I open it, an electric tingling in my fingertips reminding me that the wards on the cover are very much alive.
Come on, where are you
. . . . I run a shaky finger down the page. What I’m looking for isn’t there: the dog that didn’t bark in the night. I swallow, then I go back and search a different section for Andy’s home number. Yes,
he’s
listed—and he’s got a secure terminal. Time check: it’s twenty to midnight, not quite late enough to be seriously antisocial. I pick up the telephone receiver and begin to laboriously spin the dial. The phone rings three times.

“Andy?”

“Hello? Who is this?” It’s a woman’s voice.

“Er, this is Bob, from the office. I wonder, is Andy available? I won’t take a minute. . . .”

“Bob?” Andy takes the receiver. “Talk to me.”

I clear my throat. “Sorry to call you like this, but it’s about the office party. The guy who spoke to us, from Forecasting Operations. Do you remember his name, and have you ever dealt with him before?”

There’s a pause. “Forecasting Operations?” Andy sounds puzzled. My stomach clenches. “Who are they? I haven’t heard of any forecasting . . . what’s going on?”

“Do you remember our conversation in the clubhouse?” I ask.

“What, about personal development courses? Can’t it wait until next year?”

I glance back at the phone book. “Uh, I’ll get back to you. I think I’ve got a situation.”

I put the handset down very carefully, as if it’s made of sweating gelignite. Then I leaf through the phone book again. Nope, Forecasting Operations aren’t listed. And Andy doesn’t remember Dr. Kringle, or his lecture, or our conversation on the balcony.

I’ve got a very bad feeling about this.

Like the famous mad philosopher said, when you stare into the void, the void stares also; but if you
cast
into the void, you get a type conversion error. (Which just goes to show Nietzsche wasn’t a C++ programmer.) Dr. Kringle was saying his department tests new policies, then read the future and change their plans in a hurry if things don’t work out for the best. Throwing scenarios into the void.

What if there
was
a Forecasting Operations Department . . . and when they stared into the void once too often, something bad happened? Something so bad that they unintentionally edited themselves out of existence?

I glance at the TV. It’s movie time, and tonight they’re running
The Nightmare Before Christmas
: Jack Skellington sings his soliloquy as he stands before the portal he’s opened to Christmas Town—

And that’s when I realize what’s going on.

* * *

It’s Christmas Eve, and the stars are Right.

Parents the world over still teach their children that if they’re good, Santa will bring them presents.

There are things out there in the void, hungry things hidden in the gaps between universes, that come when they’re called. Tonight, hundreds of millions of innocent children are calling Santa.

Who’s
really
coming down your chimney tonight?

* * *

It’s distinctly cold in the Duty Officer’s room. Which is odd, because it’s not that cold outside: it’s windy and raining heavily, but that’s London for you. I turn and stare at the aluminium duct-work that runs from floor to ceiling.
That’s the incinerator shaft, isn’t it?
It’s coated in beads of condensation. I reach a hand towards it, then pull my fingers back in a hurry. Cold air is spilling off the pipe in chilly waves, and as I glance at the floor I see a thin mist. I left a nearly empty cup of tea on the desk when I went on my nocturnal ramble: now I pick it up and throw the contents at the chimney. The drops of ice crackle as they hit the floor, and my ward is suddenly a burning-hot weight at the base of my throat.

I’m on my feet and over the other side of the desk before I have time to think. There’s an anomalously cold chimney in my office. Cold enough that the air is condensing on it. Cold enough that it sucks the heat out of a cup of tepid tea in milliseconds. But what does it
mean
? (Aside from: I’m in big trouble. That’s a given, of course.)

What it means is . . . there’s an incursion. Something’s coming down the chimney, something from the dark anthropic zone—from a corner of the multiverse drained of all meaning and energy. Let’s steal a facetious phrase from Andy and call it the Filler of Stockings: Lurker in Fireplaces, Bringer of Gifts. (Odin, Jòlnir, the King in Red. Pick your culture: prepare to die.) All it knows is that it’s
cold
and it’s
hungry
—and it wants inside.

These things gain energy from belief. This office, this organization—we’re its first target because we know it’s kind of old. If it can get a toehold anywhere, it’ll be here, but I haven’t seen it yet, so I don’t have to believe—
damn
Kringle for coming and talking to us! If I can keep it out of the New Annexe until dawn it’ll be too late for the Bringer of Gifts to claw its way through the wall between the worlds, for this year at least. But if it’s already in the incinerator chimney—

I pull the chair out from under the door handle, grab my torch, and head out in a hurry.

* * *

Nighttime hijinks and explorations in the office take on a whole different significance when you know that it’s eighteen minutes to midnight and—by tradition—that’s when something hungry and unspeakably alien is going to break out of the incinerator in the basement, expecting to find a stocking and some midnight snacks to appease its voracious appetite.

Here’s the flip side of millions of sleeping believers-in-Santa providing an opening for something horrible to enter our cosmos:
they expect him to go away again after he leaves the toys
. The summoning comes with an implicit ritual of banishment. But you’ve got to get the ritual
right
. If you don’t, if you break your side of the bargain, the other party to the summoning is free to do whatever it wills.

Seventeen minutes to midnight. I’m in the admin pool again, and there’s the stationery cupboard. It’s locked, of course, and I spend a precious minute fumbling with the bunch of keys before I find one that fits. Inside the cupboard I find what I’m looking for: a box of pushpins. I move on, not bothering to lock it behind me—if I succeed, there’ll be time to tidy up later.

I bypass Mahogany Row and the sleeping ghosts of management to come, and head for the canteen. Maxine and her friends put some effort into preparing it for the party, and if I’m lucky—

Yup, I’m in luck. Nobody’s taken the decorations down yet. I turn the lights on, hunting around until I see it: a red-and-white stripy stocking stuffed with small cardboard boxes hangs from the corkboard by the dumb waiter. I grab it and dig the boxes out, nearly laddering it in my haste. The canteen’s bare, but the kitchen is next door, and I fumble for the key again, swearing under my breath (why aren’t these things clearly labeled?) until I get the door unlocked. The fridge is still humming. I get it open and find what I was hoping for—a tray of leftovers, still covered in cling-film.

Ten minutes.
I run for the staircase, clutching stocking, pin box, and the tray of stale mince pies. In my pockets: conductive marker pen, iPhone loaded with the latest Laundry countermeasures package, and a few basic essentials for the jobbing computational demonologist. I’m still in time as I leg it down two stories. And then I’m at the basement doors. I pause briefly to review my plan.

Item:
Get to the incinerator room without being stopped (optionally: eaten) by the night watch.

Item:
Get the stocking pinned up above the incinerator, and place the pies nearby.

Item:
Draw the best containment grid I can manage around the whole mess, and hope to hell that it holds.

What could possibly go wrong? I plant my tray on the floor, pull out my key ring, and unlock the door to the basement.