Epilogue
ON THE BEACH

THE MIND’S EYE HAS A FAST - FORWARD BUTTON. IT’S FUNNY: most of the time we don’t think about it in those terms; but when you’re trying to write down a sequence of experiences, to take a series of unfortunate events and turn them into a coherent story, the mind’s eye takes on some of the characteristics of an old-fashioned videotape recorder: balky, prone to drop-outs and loss, cumbersome and wonky and breakable.

So call me a camera and stick a battery in my ear.

FIRST, PANIN GOT AWAY.

Here’s what I imagine happened, around the time I was screaming my lungs out on a bed of nightmares:

In the back of a shiny black BMW speeding towards Woking—and thence to the motorway south to Dover and the Channel Tunnel—an old man opens his eyes and takes a deep breath. "That was altogether too close for comfort," he says aloud.

Dmitry glances at him in the rearview mirror. "With respect, sir… I agree." His knuckles are white where they grasp the steering wheel, and he is racking up fines from the average-speed cameras at an almost surreal rate. "The men…"

Panin closes his eyes again. "Dead. Or they’ll exfiltrate. Vassily in the embassy can see to their needs. I am going home to explain this fiasco." He is silent for nearly a minute. "We nearly had it all: a transcript of the Sternberg Fragment, Fuller’s memorandum on binding the Eater of Souls."

"With respect, sir, cultists are always unreliable proxies. And we did get the schemata for the violin, and we weakened the British…"

Panin glares at Dmitry: "Weakening the British is not the goal of the great game! Survival is the goal. We are intelligent men, not panicking rats biting each other as they struggle to escape the sinking ship. They are the enemies of our enemy, never forget that. It is the cultists’ error, to imagine themselves beset by foes they can never defeat."

"Like back there?" asks Dmitry.

Panin doesn’t answer. They drive the rest of the way to the Channel in silence.

SECOND, HERE’S WHAT I KNOW HAPPENED:

Once I woke up briefly, in a darkened nighttime room with two beds and a door and a man in a blue suit standing outside the door with a gun. The man in the bed next to me was familiar. He was asleep, and I remember thinking that there was something very urgent that I had to tell him, but I couldn’t remember what it was and the file was missing—

Then the alarm went off and the medics came and they made me go back to sleep.

I don’t remember much after that. Which is a mercy—the dreams were bad.

Mo tells me that for the first week they kept me heavily sedated—if they eased up on the chlorpromazine I started screaming and trying to eat my own fingers. She visited every day. She sat by my bedside and fed me, spooning mush into my mouth and making sure I didn’t choke on it.

Angleton recovered much faster. Two nights under observation and they released him. Then he heard about me and kicked up a stink. They were planning on moving me to St. Hilda’s. Angleton had a better idea of what was wrong with me and refused to take no for an answer; so after nearly a week in hospital (with my head wrapped in the pink fluffy haze of a major antipsychotic bender), a private ambulance picked me up and deposited me in the Village.

The Village used to be called Dunwich, back before the Ministry of War evacuated it and turned it into a special site. It was allocated to the wartime Special Operations Executive, part of which later became the Laundry and inherited this small coastal community with its street of cottages and decaying pier, its general store and village pub. Today we use it as a training center, and also as a quiet place for taking time out. There’s no internet access, and no mobile phone coverage, and no nagging from head office about time sheets and sickness self-certification. There is a medical doctor, but Janet is sensible and very patient, and has seen an astonishing number of cases of Krantzberg syndrome (and other, more esoteric sorcerous injuries) over the years.

They billeted me in a tiny seaside cottage and Janet took me off the chlorpromazine, substituting a number of other medications—not all of them legally prescribable. (MDMA helps a lot when you’re suffering from the delusion that you’re one of the walking dead.) After three days, I stopped shivering and hiccuping with fear; after a week, I could sleep again without a night-light. At the weekend, Mo came to visit. I was glad to see her. She knows what it’s like where I’ve been, to a good first approximation. We spent a lot of time together, just holding hands. It feels very strange, touching someone who’s alive. Maybe in another week I’ll be able to hug her without recoiling because I’m terrified I’m going to accidentally eat her mind.

(That’s the trouble with this job. Sometimes it chews you up and spits you out—literally.)

Mo came back the next weekend, too. She says she’s trying to get a week’s compassionate leave, but the fallout from Iris’s actions has been beyond earthshaking. We’ll see.

★★★

I’VE BEEN WORKING ON THIS REPORT FOR A COUPLE OF WEEKS now.

This being the Village, and an internet-free zone, I’m allowed to use a computer and dictation software—although it’s had its CD drive and wifi chipset removed, the case is welded shut, and it’s padlocked to an oak desk that weighs approximately half as much again as Angleton’s Memex. It beats the manual typewriter hands down, but when I asked if I could take it home with me, the security officer barely managed to conceal his sneer.

I suppose there are some loose ends I should tie up, so here goes:

We never did find out exactly what happened to any of Panin’s men apart from Alexei, or to Panin himself: you should read my speculations with more than a pinch of salt. I can’t even be certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that Panin was behind the theft of the violin report, although theft of state secrets is the sort of thing that the Thirteenth Directorate’s parent agency traditionally excelled at. I’m assuming that the elite Spetsnaz infiltration troops assigned to an occult warfare department probably stood more of a chance of escaping alive than the cultists: but we didn’t account for all of them, either. The scene at Brookwood the next morning was indescribable. I’ve seen the pictures. It was easy enough to close down the cemetery—police roadblocks, reports about an illegal rave and graveyard vandalism, a handful of D-notices to gag the more annoying local reporters—but then they had to do something with the bodies. The feeders raised just about everything that wasn’t totally dismembered and disarticulated. In the end, they had to bring in bulldozers and dig trenches. They identified some of the cultists—but not Jonquil the Sloane Ranger, or her boyfriend Julian.

I don’t think Brookwood will reopen for a long time.

Brains has been given a good talking-to, and is being subjected to the Security Theater Special Variety Show for breaching about sixteen different regulations by installing beta software on an employee’s personal phone. Reminding Oscar-Oscar that if he hadn’t done so they’d have lost the Eater of Souls to a cultist infiltrator appears to be futile. Right now, everyone in Admin has joined in the world’s biggest arse-kicking circle dance, except possibly for Angleton, who is shielding me from the worst of it. Because they haven’t forgotten that I’ve been a naughty boy too—if it wasn’t for me, they wouldn’t have needed all those bulldozers at Brook-field, would they? Although Angleton has had a measure of success in pointing out to certain overenthusiastic disciplinarians that if it wasn’t for the feeders I summoned, they’d have had the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh trying to open up a long distance call to the Sleeper in the Pyramid, paid in the coin of London’s dead.

AS FOR THE MAN HIMSELF—CALL HIM TEAPOT, CALL HIM Angleton, call him Sir—I haven’t seen him since I woke up here, and I won’t be seeing him until the Auditors hear my final report and I go back on active duty. But I have this to say:

I used to think he scared the shit out of me, but now I know better. I know what he’s like, from the inside. The effects of Iris’s botched binding faded fast, and I probably only borrowed a tiny fraction of his power. I didn’t know how to use it properly, either. But I have been destiny-entangled before, and I know what it was like then, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Angleton was in a flatlined coma for the entire duration of my funny turn.

I also learned this much: Angleton isn’t bound to the Laundry by the ramshackle geas that Fuller and his fellow eccentric occultists threw together in the 1930s. He’s a free agent—or at least as free as any of us are, be we beasts, men, or gods. The reason he puts up with us? I don’t know. It may be long habit—he’s lived the life of an Englishman for so long now that he self-identifies as such. But I have a theory.

Angleton knows what’s coming. He knows exactly what is going to bleed through the walls of reality, when the stars burn down from the pitiless heavens and our ever-thinking numbers begin to corrode the structure of reality. And he believes we’re his best hope for his own survival.

Like I said: the only god I believe in is coming back. And when he arrives, I’ll be waiting with a shotgun.