The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel (9 page)

Six months earlier:

Professor McPherson taps the trackpad and conjures up another slide on the screen in the drawing room of Audit House.

No more skulls on stainless steel trays: this one is a photograph of an archeological dig. The excavation proceeds beneath a wild, cloud-swept sky, somewhere where the grass grows emerald green between huge slabs of bone-white stone, the soil is a dark peaty brown-black, and skeletons are buried lying on their side. The one in the grave at the center of the screen is curled headless in a fetal position, its broken skull placed before its rib cage, a reddish-brown spike of rust plunging through its ribs.

“This photo was taken at a dig in The Burren, in County Clare – that’s out in the west of Ireland – two years ago. It’s a limestone karst pavement with low hills, and there are a lot of ancient megalithic burial sites in the national park. Portal dolmens, hill forts, Neolithic sites – you name it, they’ve got it. This excavation was part of a field course by the Archeology folks at the University of Bradford. They thought this was going to be the usual early Dark Ages tribal chief’s burial site with lower-ranking household members around it, but when they saw this, they realized they’d found something else.”

Another slide. Close-up of the skeleton, half-excavated, still in the grave. Jez Wilson clears her throat. Lockhart sends her a quelling glance, but Professor McPherson has other ideas: “You have a question?”

“Yes.” Jez peers at the photograph. “Is that a containment circle around the remains? And an iron spike?”

McPherson’s eyebrow rises minutely, then she nods. “Correct. The archeologists got excited at first because they thought they’d uncovered a new-to-this-culture ritual sacrifice practice. Then they got around to thinking it was a more recent prank, because the spike through the ribs is wrought iron, and the carbon dating dates the burial to the late ninth century AD: wrought iron was very valuable in that place and time, much too valuable to leave in an executed felon. But then they noticed the other morphological anomalies, and that led them to call me in.”

Now it’s Ms. Hazard’s turn to interrupt: one perfectly manicured finger goes up, then she glances at Jez rather than the professor. “You’re thinking PHANG, aren’t you?”

Jez shrugs noncommittally. “Professor, is there a folkloric tradition of vampires in that part of Ireland?”

“Good try, but you’re on the wrong track.” McPherson smiles faintly. “Let me cut to the chase. The skeleton is
wrong
– it’s
Homo
, but not
Homo sapiens
. It’s closer to us than old Jim, our
Homo erectus
, but further away than LB1 or our Neanderthal cousins. There are anomalies in the structure of the inner ear, in what remains of the left hemisphere – the right side of the skull was stove in – and the hyoid bone looks wrong, too. The jaws do not show the typical dentition of a PHANG, with retractable canines; in fact they don’t show human dentition
at all
: they’re narrower and there is no evidence of wisdom teeth. Cranial volume is comparable to
sapiens
, long bones are somewhat lighter and thinner, and the digits are elongated, almost like a human with Marfan syndrome. But the real surprise came to light when we extracted samples from the long bones and conducted a preliminary genome sequencing exercise.” She winces slightly. “Expensive, but for a new member of genus
Homo
that survived into the near-present…”

She brings up the next slide. It’s some sort of incomprehensible bar chart – incomprehensible because the bars are more like a bar code than a meaningful chart, snaking back and forth across the screen in loops like a demented tapeworm. Then she taps again and another tapeworm joins the first, striped in color-coded bands to highlight areas where their segments differ. “Behold, the mitochondrial genome of
H. sapiens
– that’s the lower one – and a similar map for Specimen B. This was the first surprise we got solid data for. There’s a difference of 292 base pairs between us and Specimen B. This compares to a 202 base pair difference between us and Neanderthals, 385 base pairs between us and the Denisovan hominids of Siberia, and 1,462 base pairs between modern humans and chimpanzees.”

Now Lockhart raises his hand. “There’s no chance this is a mistake?” he asks, almost pleading.

“None whatsoever.” McPherson crosses her arms. “Mitochondrial DNA is much easier to sequence exhaustively than the general genome, and we got this one nailed down. She’s definitely not a modern human female – yes, two X chromosomes – but she’s a close cousin. But that’s not the interesting bit. You see, exhaustively sequencing a human being is still pricey, but you’ll notice the burial format: the head was detached and laid alongside the torso in a circle bearing ritual inscriptions. The neck was damaged, but enough remained intact for it to be clear that the hyoid bone was abnormally formed. That suggests some sort of developmental divergence involving the larynx, so among other areas of interest we looked at one particular gene, FOXP2, because it’s a hot area of study in hominin evolutionary biology.”

She brings up another slide, this time showing a bizarrely knotted big molecule. “Forkhead box protein 2 is required for proper development of language and speech in humans. There are some hereditary conditions in which it’s absent, and people born with these conditions suffer from really severe language impairment. Chimps have this gene, too, but significantly,
Homo sapiens
FOXP2 differs by just two point mutations from that of chimps.” She takes a deep breath. “Specimen B has a mutant FOXP2 gene. There are three single nucleotide polymorphisms that differ between it and chimp FOXP2, and they’re different from ours.

“So, let me summarize. We did a full cladistic work-up and it looks like Specimen B’s people diverged from our ancestors around a third of a million years ago. You’re looking at a hitherto unknown subspecies of
Homo sapiens
. Gracile – lightly built – with elongated digits and toes. It developed language quite recently, about 50,000 years ago, despite which the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex is about thirty percent larger than in modern humans. We’re looking at strong theory of mind, possibly an abaptive response to not being able to use speech as a proxy for grooming in extended family situations. That’s also the area that gets chewed up most in cases of K syndrome – it’s implicated in the practice of ritual magic.

“Specimen B was beheaded and buried with an expensive cold iron stake through her heart inside a crude ward, some time around 950 AD. This happened in proximity to a much older structure that had been abandoned centuries earlier. A long way away from where anyone lived at the time, in other words. There are no grave goods or clothes, suggesting they didn’t have any or, more likely, their property was sufficiently valuable to be stolen. But.” Professor McPherson smiles triumphantly. “There’s one remaining clue that really got the archeologists’ attention – although it made them think it was a hoax at first, before they carbon-dated it on principle.”

Another photograph, this time of a fully excavated mandible sitting on a display tray, and now McPherson’s got everybody’s undivided attention because the gold fillings are unmistakable.

“Baby’s got bling, and the dental caries they plug show the characteristic abrasion pattern of a diamond-tipped drill.

“
So.
Are there any questions?”

After his midweek meeting with Jez Wilson, Alex returns to Leeds on an evening train. On arrival he heads for the Arndale Centre, where he spends the hours until midnight reading briefing papers that can’t be removed from organization premises. Whenever he gets bored he wanders the empty office corridors. There are bulletin boards for nonclassified organization-related material, such as vacancies and out-of-hours activities. One of them is reserved for personal ads, including flat shares. This one he scrutinizes. When he finally tires of being the last night owl in the building (apart from the night watch body in the stairwell) he lets himself out and rides his moped back to the room he’s renting in an old red-brick hotel on The Calls.

He has a lot of food for thought. But for the time being, he confines himself to writing up his worries in the diary HR told him to keep – he saves it on an encrypted thumb drive – then duct-tapes the curtains firmly shut, hangs out the do-not-disturb sign, and crawls into bed.

One of the disadvantages of being a vampire on the night shift is that you never wake up in time for the cooked full English breakfast. But it’s early spring and Alex’s hotel is in the city center, in a clump of densely packed late-Victorian buildings five and six stories high, interleaved with newer slabs of glass and steel. They form a canyon-like maze, and on an overcast day it’s possible to go out with no more protection than heavy-duty sunblock and a wide-brimmed hat. So Alex showers, shaves, covers his face and hands in skin-toned theatrical latex paint, and gives thanks to the Lares of street fashion for decreeing that hoodies are de rigueur this decade.

First things first: it is nearly noon, he has the day off work, and there is a tantalizing “roommate wanted” ad on the bulletin board at the office. Even with the organization’s bargaining leverage working to his advantage, the hotel is costing an arm and a leg compared to his share of the rent on a house. It is beginning to look as if he may be stuck here for the foreseeable future – not just a couple of weeks – and the beckoning bedroom in his parents’ house holds all the appeal of a rusty man-trap. So before he ventures out Alex screws his courage to breaking point, checks the photo of the ad that he snapped the night before, and dials a local number.

“Yo. Who is this?” The voice is male, and has a naggingly familiar accent lurking behind the reserve with which unidentified callers are invariably received these days.

“Um, this is Alex Schwartz? I’m answering the room for rent ad on the bulletin board at the offices in the Arndale Centre?”

“Oh, right!” The voice warms several degrees. “Are you one of the London exiles?”

Alex assesses his existential state. “I guess so. Are you —”

“Yes, me, too. What it is, Brains and I found a five-bedroom house for rent near Harehills Lane” – Alex winces, and begins to think of a polite formula for saying
don’t call me, I’ll call you
, but the speaker is continuing – “not
in
Harehills exactly, just close enough to be affordable. It’s got everything we want except it’s a bit too big for just the two of us, so we’re looking for someone to rent the two rooms on the top floor for, oh, five hundred a month plus bills? It’s fully detached, parking out front and a back garden, central heating, fiber broadband, and plenty of room. We can probably get Facilities to ward it and certify it as a class two safe house, if we can just sort out the rent and ensure it’s entirely occupied by agency bodies.”

Five hundred a month for two rooms is admittedly very cheap, and it’s far enough away from his parents to offer a line of defense in depth. Sharing with a couple of guys could be very uncomfortable if they have bad habits, but on the other hand, they’re co-workers. They’ve presumably passed their security vetting, and a class two safe house with co-workers would mean not having to worry about keeping the curtains shut at all hours.

“What’s the story behind it?” he asks.

“It’s a family home. Something happened, and they relocated to Scotland, I think, and they’re looking to rent it out long term. They gave us a standard twelve-month let, and I think they’ll be happy to extend it – it had been vacant for three months when we got it.”

“Is it available for viewing? This evening? Uh, what did you say your name was?”

“I didn’t, but you’re welcome: I’m Pinky, your other hypothetical housemate would be Brains. You’re the guy we were tracking around Whitby last weekend, aren’t you?”

Fuck me,
Alex thinks dismally. “Yes,” he says. He’s almost ready to make his apologies right now, but he can’t rent a whole fully detached house by himself – that’s the minimum Facilities will look at, for security warding – and it’s not as if Leeds is crawling with potential flatmates who are happy to cohabit with a creature of the night. At least these two jokers are unlikely to nail cloves of garlic to his bedroom door or install UV flash bulbs in the fridge. What can possibly go wrong?

“I’ll text you the address. Say, are you in the office today? How about I pick you up from the Arndale car park when I clock off, backside of six?”

Alex pulls his jacket on and picks up his backpack, then hangs out the room service card and heads downstairs. The hotel lobby is painfully bright: as the lift doors open he puts on a pair of tinted glasses and then his hat – not the current hipster-fashionable trilby, but a well-worn homburg he found in a charity shop in Epping Forest. There’s nothing like a full-face helmet for keeping the sunlight off your skin, but eating while wearing a helmet or a hooded robe tends to get you odd looks.

Leeds’s city center is densely packed and walkable, but not very car-friendly – it grew from a village to a regional metropolis in fifty dizzy years starting in the early nineteenth century, before the automobile was a thing. The local red brick buildings (still smut-stained by a century of coal fires) rub shoulders with pompous municipal edifices carved from imported sandstone. Glass-fronted modern structures fill the gaps like bridgework spliced between rotten teeth. Leeds was blitzed in 1941, and the damage is especially visible south of the river, where the bomb sites were finally filled in during the 1980s with strip malls, windowless modern retail parks, and warehouses. It’s a thriving, bustling city, but not exactly high-rise. The only skyscraper on the horizon, the Dalek-shaped carbuncle that is Bridgewater Place, rises a mere thirty-two stories above the city center.

Alex heads into the pedestrianized shopping maze between Lower Briggate and Call Lane, works his way round to Neon Cactus, and dives into the back room. He finds a table as far from the daylight as he can get. It’s still early, and he’s hungry. (He’s always hungry, thanks to the V-parasites, but at least he’s learned to distinguish between the need to eat and the need for a more recondite repast.) He orders chimichangas and a decaf, then he pulls out his tablet and starts to catch up on his unclassified reading. He doesn’t keep work documents on his personal tablet, but he likes to fantasize that he still has a working life outside the Laundry, and there are plenty of interesting preprints in higher-dimensional topology to keep his delusion fed.