The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [170]
And Pete stands up. The chains holding him to the floor rip like damp cardboard, his eyes glowing even brighter than Emma’s wand. With no actual summoning vector spliced into the grid it’s wide open, an antenna seeking the nearest manifestation. With my blood to power it, it’s active, and the first thing it resonates with has come through and sideloaded into Pete’s head. His head swivels. “Get her!” I yell, clenching my fist and trying not to wince. “She’s from personnel?”
“Personnel?” rumbles a voice from Pete’s mouth—deeper, more cultured, and infinitely more terrifying. “Ah, I see. Thank you.” The being wearing Pete’s flesh steps across the grid—which sparks like a high-tension line and begins to smolder. Emma’s wand wavers between me and Pete. I thrust my injured hand into the Bag of Holding and stifle a scream when my fingers stab into the bag of salt within. “It’s been too long.” His face begins to lengthen, his jaw widening and merging at the edges. He sticks his tongue out: it’s grayish-brown and rasplike teeth are sprouting from it.
Emma screams in rage and discharges her wand at him. A backwash of negative energy makes my teeth clench and turns my vision gray, but it’s not enough to stop the second coming of “Slug” Johnson. He slithers towards her across the floor, and she gears up another spell, but it’s too late. I close my eyes and follow the action by the inarticulate shrieks and the wet sucking, gurgling noises. Finally, they die down.
I take a deep breath and open my eyes. Below me the room is vacant but for a clean-picked human skeleton and a floor flecked with brown—I peer closer—slugs. Millions of the buggers. “You’d better let him go,” I intone.
“Why should I?” asks the assembly of molluscs.
“Because—” I pause. Why should he? It’s a surprisingly sensible question. “If you don’t, HR—Personnel—will just send another. Their minions are infinite. But you can defeat them by escaping from their grip forever—if you let me lay you to rest.”
“Send me on, then,” say the slugs.
“Okay.” And I open my salt-filled fist over the molluscs—which burn and writhe beneath the white powderfall until nothing is left but Pete, curled fetally in the middle of the floor. And it’s time to get Pete the hell out of this game and back into his own head before his mother, or some even worse horror, comes looking for him.
Afterword
THE GOLDEN AGE OF SPYING
The Mary-Sue of MI6
“My Name is Bond—James Bond.”
These six words, heard by hundreds of millions of people, are almost invariably spoken during the first five minutes of each movie in one of the biggest media success stories of the twentieth century. Unless you’ve lived under a rock for the past forty years, you hear them and you know at once that you’re about to be plunged into a two-hour-long adrenaline14-saturated extravaganza of snobbish fashionable excess, violence, sex, car chases, more violence, and Blowing Shit Up—followed by a postcoital cigarette and a lighthearted quip as the credits roll.
It wasn’t always so. When Casino Royale was first published in 1953, it got a print run of 4,750 hardcover copies and no advertising budget to speak of; while the initial reviews were favorable, comparing Ian Fleming to Le Queux and Oppenheim (the kings of the prewar British spy-thriller genre), it took a long time for his most famous creation to set the world on fire. Despite his rapidly rising print runs (Casino Royale eventually sold over a million paperbacks in the UK alone), and despite his increasing prominence among the postwar thriller writers, a decade elapsed before any of Fleming’s novels were filmed; indeed, their author barely lived to see the commercial release of Dr. No and the runaway success of the icon he created. (Nor were the films seen as a runaway success before they were made—Dr. No was notoriously made on a tight budget, even though it went on to gross nearly $60 million around the world.)
Literary immortality—or indeed,