The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel (3 page)

(I’m not bitter or anything.)

Anyway, this is my work diary. It’s pretty boring right now because my work is pretty boring, and if you’re sitting here reading my diary that means
your
work is pretty boring. Maybe I’ll try and liven it up by telling you all about my family, or coming up with some more lies about the Nazi gold, the stolen secret files, or the IRA Semtex. Except I’m not very good at lying.

Go on, fuck off. It’s not as if anything interesting ever happens to me, is it?

It’s a cold, damp Monday and Alex is ready for work.

It’s still early enough in the year that he can be out and about at five in the afternoon without fear of immediate photocombustion, as long as he covers up and slathers himself in heavy-duty sunblock. So he loiters behind the snack kiosk in the entrance to the city railway station, the collar of his coat turned up and his hat pulled down like a spy movie cliché. He’s already drawn a couple of curious glances from the transport police, but they’re too busy to check on him. Meanwhile, the kiosk provides some cover from the homeward-bound throng of commuters as they stumble through the echoing concourse, eyes downturned, attention focussed on their phones.

The 17:12 from King’s Cross is showing on the Arrivals board. Alex figures this means his co-worker and nominal mentor will be with him as soon as he puzzles out the maze of escalators and overhead walkways from Platform 10 to the ticket gates. Alex shifts from foot to foot resentfully. He knows in an abstract kind of way that Pete has a wife and a young baby, and was in any case needed in the New Annex for a morning committee meeting (something about a scary American televangelist), which is why he couldn’t come up at the weekend. Still, Pete is effectively forcing Alex to wait in public, and he feels horribly exposed. He’s always been a little bit agoraphobic, and PHANG syndrome gives him every reason to dread public spaces – it’s not that accidents don’t also happen to normal people, but he can’t help morbidly rehearsing the possible fatal outcomes.
Leg broken by a hit-and-run driver, he ends up on a hospital ward, screaming and sizzling as the dawn light breaks through the window.
He can distract himself for a while if he starts counting the passers-by, but the counting thing is obsessive, and that doesn’t end well in a busy railway station at rush hour. So by the time Pete finally arrives, Alex is a bundle of raw nerve endings.

“Wotcher, cock! Ow’s yer whippet?”

Alex directs a withering glare over his shoulder. “Je ne comprends pas. Parlez-vous Yorkshire?”

“Sorry, I thought that was how they spoke up here?” Pete grins, an expression that takes a decade off his face. Wearing jeans and a biker’s jacket with hands thrust deep in his pockets, he’s not exactly anyone’s picture of a spook – or a Man of the Cloth for that matter.

“We’re not scousers. Listen, you’re late. We
could
get a bus but it’s tipping down and the nearest stop is a ten-minute walk away and anyway it isn’t dark yet. Can you sign for a taxi?”

“Um.” Pete thinks about it. “There are two of us, so yes, as long as they give receipts and you countersign the claim.”

The taxi rank is outside the front of the station, snaking around a weird circular sixties concrete building with a broad awning. (Originally the Transport Police offices, today it’s a bicycle shop.) Alex scuttles for cover from the elements, Pete following close behind with his wheelie bag. They join the queue, and a couple of minutes later they’re in the back of a Toyota creeping around the traffic-choked Inner Loop towards the bottom of Woodhouse Lane. Destination: Lawnswood Cemetery, out in the blasted wilderness beyond the northern arc of the Leeds ring road.

“Have you visited the local office yet?” Pete asks.

“Not yet.” Alex shrugs. “I’ve been holed up in my hotel room today, to be honest. Night shift suits me best for now.”

“Awkward.” Pete leans against the other side of the taxi’s back seat. “Are you okay here? I mean, living out of a suitcase —”

Alex cuts him off: “I’m fine. The sooner we look the site over and report back the sooner we can kill this stupid idea and go back to London.”

“Kill —” Pete raises an eyebrow. “You mean you don’t want to move to Leeds?” Alex can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic. “Bright lights, big city, affordable housing?”

“Listen.” Alex tries not to spit: “I
grew up
in Leeds. I spent eighteen years here before I escaped. Trust me, it’s a
stupid
idea.”

“But it’s going to —” Pete glances at the front seat, realizes that they’re in the presence of ears that do not possess a security clearance, and changes the subject. “Is the weather always like this?”

“It could be worse. They could be looking at relocating to Manchester, where the locals are evolving webbed fingers and gill slits. But if you’re used to the southeast, everything hereabouts looks kind of gray and squishy.”

“Leaky roofs. Hmm…”

I’ve been part of the Laundry for nearly six months now, and I still don’t have a clue what I’m meant to be doing, but I’m told this is entirely normal and I’ll figure it out sooner or later if I live long enough.

(I can’t make my mind up whether that last qualifier is entirely serious.)

I spent the first week with no clear idea that the Laundry even existed, mind you. It was all Mhari’s idea. She used to be in Human Resources and she basically conscripted us under irregular circumstances which were later shoveled under the rug. (Probably because if they hadn’t been, some
very
embarrassing questions would have been asked.) It was for the best, I suppose, but it meant that from the very first month I was dumped in at the deep end with no idea what was going on, except for an endless string of interviews in dingy government offices, forms to fill in (don’t get me started on the Official Secrets Act, As Amended), and interminable committee meetings. It was like all the worst aspects of being back in university crossed with
The Office
by way of
Nathan Barley
.

Then I nearly died.

Lots of other people
did
die, so I suppose I got off lightly. But it’s a hell of a reality check when you spend just three days in hospital recovering from third-degree burns to your face and hands, the bone-deep kind that should leave you scarred for life. Fortunately for me, as long as my condition is well-managed, I heal like a Hollywood movie hero. Unfortunately for me, my ability to heal like that makes me useful for an organization that needs… well.

To make matters worse, at about the same time all this was happening they sprang a mentor on me.

My mentor is the Reverend Peter Russell, MA, D. Theol. He’s fifteen years older than I am and he’s a vicar, although he rides a motorbike and has long hair and a beard and does aikido. Pete’s primary qualification for mentoring me is that he’s been in the organization fully three months longer than I have, and has lots of experience in helping disturbed young men come to terms with the vagaries of life. He’s the modern, intelligent, progressive, the-Bible-is-just-a-metaphor type of clergyman, and he’s a nice guy, even though he grumbles about having to neglect his pastoral duties in the name of national security. He seems to spend most of his office time reading sermons, checking some
really strange
Bible concordances, and frowning furiously. (NB: I don’t know many vicars, so for all I know they’re all like this, but I’m just saying: he’s not what I expected.)

I asked what he’s doing here. It turns out he got sucked into the Laundry last year because Mr. Howard knew him socially and needed an expert on Biblical apocalypses in a screaming hurry, in order to stop said apocalypses from coming true. I’d feel sorry for him, but even knowing about the tentacle monsters from beyond spacetime hasn’t shaken his faith or made him bitter or anything. Never mind Gödel’s theorem or Kolmogorov–Chaitin complexity, let alone the Turing Principles on which the whole field of computational magic is based.

For the past six months we – me and the other PHANGs – have been fumbling our way through a series of one-week intensive orientation courses and stacks of briefing papers, making it up as we go along, with the occasional nudge in the right direction from our managers. There is a screaming rush on pretty much all the time because the Laundry is taking on new staff, gearing up for something unpleasantly big, and we’re a little bit short on managers and experienced senior people because a number of them ended up being taken away in body bags after a couple of asshole elder vampires used me and the Scrum as pawns in a lethal chess game.
*
Mr. Howard once told me he was here for two whole years before anyone even sent him for training in out-of-office operations. Pete and I don’t have the luxury of that much time.

Anyway, this week they’ve sent us both up to Leeds as part of the task force preparing the way to move our main emergency command center out of London.

Apparently the Laundry used to occupy a ramshackle government building in Westminster.
†
That building, Dansey House, was closed for complete renovation under a public-private partnership about six years ago, while everyone moved to a variety of temporary (and not very secure) satellite offices. It was due to reopen three years ago but there were, apparently, “problems” relating to thaumaturgic contamination of the ground it was built on – problems too big for remediation. It turned out to be the necromantic equivalent of a toxic waste site – and that was before we discovered the hard way that an elder vampire had single-handedly infiltrated the department. He’d spent literally decades installing a
geas
– a procedure or spell that induces a compulsive cognitive bias in whoever it is applied to – on Dansey House, with the effect that people who work there
don’t believe in vampires
, even if their office-mate sleeps in a coffin under the desk and leaves bloodstained cups in the break room sink.

In the absence of evidence that this was the
only
compulsion woven into the brickwork of Dansey House, Mahogany Row came to the decision to sell the site for redevelopment and move elsewhere. Which then left them with a big headache: where to relocate to. The New Annex, where I was initially assigned, was ruled out. It turns out that the New Annex isn’t proof against pissed-off vampire elders. Also, it’s too small. Apparently we’re facing some sort of nightmarish conjunction – due to a combination of circumstances we’re in a period when computational magic gets easier to do, and the effects are amplified – so the organization needs room to grow. And, London property prices being what they are, a decision was made to move most of us out of the big smoke.

Leeds is a big metropolitan zone in the geographical middle of England, sitting at the intersection of a bunch of major transport routes. I suppose it was inevitable that it’d be one of the top options, along with Manchester, Newcastle, or possibly Cheltenham (because of the strong GCHQ presence). I come from Leeds. Which is why, even though I’m a wet-behind-the-ears probationer who’s up to his ears with training courses, they saw fit to shove me on the train up here with Pete to look around various outlying facilities before we get the grand tour of the proposed new headquarters building in the city center, Quarry House, and go to town on its perimeter wards.

Please God, why couldn’t it be Manchester instead?

The taxi takes almost a quarter of an hour to slither out of the city center and onto the Otley Road. But they get there in the end, and while Pete adds the receipt to his battered paper organizer Alex climbs out and looks around. The car has parked beside a rather forbidding hedge, on the other side of a dual carriageway from a row of poplars. Beyond the trees he can just make out the lights of the police station. There are few houses hereabouts, but a driveway leads out of sight beyond the hedge. And it is, predictably, raining even harder.

“We’re not going to have much luck getting a taxi home from here, are we?” Pete says as the cab pulls away.

“Nope. There are buses, but they’ll only be running every twenty minutes at this time of evening.” Alex doesn’t explain that he has this part of the Leeds bus timetable memorized cold. He turns and heads up the gravel drive, avoiding the worst of the pothole puddles. They come to a chain-link gate and an unfriendly sign: DEPARTMENT OF WORK AND PENSIONS – THIS PROPERTY IS MAINTAINED BY TELEREAL TRINIUM – KEEP OUT – G4S SECURITY. The padlock that holds the gate shut is grimy with rust stains, but a prickling in Alex’s fingers tells him that the site is heavily warded. Only authorized visitors will be able to get in. “Did you bring the key?”

“Sure.” Pete fiddles with the padlock, and they step through the gate. The drive dog-legs behind another hedge before it passes out of view of the road. Black poles surmounted by the hooded eyes of CCTV cameras stare at them, and Alex suppresses a shudder of dread. Beyond the second hedgerow they come to a low building with narrow frosted-glass windows set high under its eaves, like a public toilet or a cricket pavilion. There are more signs: KEEP OUT, ENTRY FORBIDDEN, THIS SITE IS ALARMED. “Do you ever get the feeling that we’re not welcome?” Pete asks.

“Hello, ma’am, we’re from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, do you have a few minutes to talk about our Lord and Savior?”

Pete winces as he produces a key and tries it in the door lock. It doesn’t fit. He fumbles with the keyring in the chilly rain, trying various others until he finally gets a result. The door creaks open to reveal a bare concrete-floored lobby surrounding a circular stairwell, descending into darkness. “Get the lights, will you? I know you can see in this but I can’t —”

Alex flicks the switch and a bare bulb flickers on above them, illuminating the staircase down to the tunnel that leads to the entrance of the former Leeds War Room Region 2 bunker.

Peeling paint, the smells of stagnant water, wet concrete and mold, cobwebs: these are Alex’s first impressions of the 1950s cold war installation. It skulks on the edge of the city, bookended by a police station and one of the city’s larger crematoria, as if to underline the brooding horror of its purpose. Perhaps the rising damp and other signs of neglect are a good thing. Better by far if it could be left to decay on the scrapheap of history. But the Laundry has plans for it.