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  “I’m good,” said Morag.

  “I’ll have yours then,” said Lois and unwrapped a Penguin. “Forms,” she said around a mouthful of crumbly chocolate biscuit.

  Lois produced a sheaf of forms. Morag stifled a body-trembling yawn and started to fill them in.

  “Pecuniary Interest Declaration?” read Morag.

  “Vaughn brought it in.”

  “Does he think we’re going to getting backhanders from the Venislarn?”

  “I’m sure someone will try to make a profit from them somehow before the end. Smile!”

  “What?” Morag blinked at the flash and Lois reviewed the picture on her phone screen.

  “Staff ID,” said Lois.

  “Seriously? You didn’t give me any warning.”

  “I do prefer a naturalistic look.”

  “Jesus.” Morag took Lois’s phone and looked at the picture. “I look like a scarecrow. A zombie scarecrow. A zombie scarecrow who’s just been turfed out of bed at 2 a.m.”

  “I’m a dab hand with Photoshop,” said Lois.

  “I don’t care if you’re a bloody magician. That’s an awful photo.”

  “You’ll see.”

  Morag was about to protest further but was distracted by Lois passing her a small bunch of keys with a plastic tag.

  “What’s this?”

  She read the tag. Flat 2, 27 Franklin Road.

  “We know this has been an abrupt change for you so we’ve rented a furnished flat for you. Just for the short term. Bournville is nice enough. They have a festival in the park each year which is a laugh. And it’s just up the road from Cadbury’s.”

  “Cadbury’s?”

  “Seriously? The chocolate factory.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Last form and then I’ll give you the grand tour.”

  Morag looked at the form. “Spiritual Audit. Cute.” She hovered over ‘atheist’ and then ticked ‘agnostic’. She ticked ‘baptised/christened’. “Last time I ate blessed food or water?”

  Lois nodded.

  “Apparently, Yo-Morgantus can smell that stink on you, even if it’s been years.”

  “What’s that cookie dough stuff you get at Sikh weddings?”

  “Kara Parshad. That counts.”

  Morag wrote ‘two years’ as a best guess.

  “Who’s Yo-Morgantus?” she asked.

  “A Venislarn prince. You’ll have to be presented to him at court.”

  “Sounds formal.”

  “He has veto on all humans who work with the Venislarn.”

  “He dictates who you can hire? Like some mafia boss?”

  Lois nodded.

  “We exist at his sufferance.”

  “And if we don’t comply? Or he takes exception to your hiring choices?”

  “Yo-Morgantus eats.” She laughed. “Don’t worry. It really is just a formality.” Lois pointed out of the window and across the city. “Can you see that multicoloured building? The one that looks like a game of Tetris? That’s the Cube. Yo-Morgantus owns the top floors. They’ve got a restaurant there. Nice steaks but far too expensive for my tastes.” She gave Morag a reassuring smile. “Trust me. Yo-Morgantus will like you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Oh, you’ll see. Right, last bits. I need you to sign the declaration that you’ve not sold your soul or other intangibles or are, in any other way, beholden to a Venislarn faction.”

  “No problem.”

  “And I need to make an official record of your Abyssal Rating. Vaughn might be a wanker but he won’t put his people up against anything they can’t handle.”

  “Um.” Morag thought. “It was four but I have, er, met one of the August Handmaidens of Prein.”

  “Really? That’s a seven, I think. You met one?”

  “Met one,” said Morag. “Last night.”

  “Last night?”

  “My last act as officer at the Edinburgh mission.”

  “Wow. What did you do?”

  “Pissed myself with fear,” Morag lied.

  “Who wouldn’t?” Lois gathered the papers. “And now the tour. We’ll do the offices, the holding cells, the Vault, the support crew and even perhaps the actual Library. I’ll introduce you to all the people who you’ll need to make friends with and probably point out a couple of cockwombles with wandering hands who should be Tasered if they get within ten feet of you.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Lois led her out into the corridor. “You’ve seen this place from the outside,” she said. “Those rings are a magnesium-tungsten alloy with a selenium core.”

  “They don’t build them like they used to, do they?”

  “Apparently, it’s a good ward against some of the lesser Venislarn. I think most would go through it like tissue paper. There are other wards and sigils built into the structure. Even the escalators are aligned as spirit flow channels. I’ll be able to show you some when we get to the basement.”

  Morag saw a petite, dark-haired woman in a sharp trouser suit and a revealing blouse walking swiftly towards them.

  “Lois,” she said. “You seen Vivian?”

  “Not since she went out in search of a heart.”

  “Who’s this? The new investigator?”

  Lois made the introductions.

  “Morag, this is Nina Seth. Nina, Morag. Nina’s in a hurry because the shit’s hit the fan and her legs are so tiny she has to run to keep up with normal people.”

  “Freakish giants, you mean,” said Nina with an impish smirk.

  Nina pointedly looked Morag up and down. “Are you a virgin, Morag?”

  Morag gave this some thought.

  “You know, I don’t think that question was on any of the forms,” she said. “Everything else. Not that.”

  Douglas Hamilton, surfacing through layers of sleep, drugs and discomfort, woke to discover a woman at his hospital bedside. She sat beside the quietly beeping life monitor. She was on the far side of middle age and had the look and manner of a severe headmistress. The screen curtains were drawn around the bed.

  “Mr Hamilton,” said the woman. It sounded like an accusation.

  “You’re real?” he croaked. His throat was dry, as always.

  “Very real, Mr Hamilton.”

  “Some of these painkillers they have me on. They have very groovy side effects.”

  “I am no hallucination,” she said. “Or dream.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Vivian Grey. Mrs Vivian Grey.”

  “Not a doctor?”

  She shook her head. “I need you to answer a ques—”

  “Where’s my jelly?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Jelly. My jelly.”

  “Yes, it wasn’t the actual words I didn’t understand, more the overall meaning. Never mind. I need to you to —”

  “There’s pots of jelly in the fridge. For my throat.”

  “I understand. I will call for the nurse in a minute.”

  “What do you want then?”

  Douglas tried to shift on the bed, but was too weak to do more than rock from one shoulder blade to the other. He found the bed controls and tilted the headboard up.

  The woman, Vivian, leaned forward and looked at the monitoring equipment beside Douglas’s bed.

  “I am very interested in you, medically. I need your help. Actually, it is not so much your help I need as it is your heart.”

  “Yeah. The side effects. I could have sworn you said heart. Is this an organ donor thing?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “I filled out a form weeks ago. I particularly wanted to donate my corneas.”

  The woman smiled like someone who had learned how to do it from a YouTube video but not previously tested it out on another human being.

  “You like the idea that your eyes will go on seeing after you have gone.”

  “No,” he said. “I stipulated an open casket funeral in my will and I want to freak the shit o
ut of everyone.”

  The effort of speaking was too much and brought on a weak but prolonged coughing fit. Vivian waited for him to stop and offered no assistance.

  “It’s not that kind of organ donation,” she said. “I want your heart and I want it rather urgently.”

  Douglas grunted. “I’m riddled with sodding tumours. Bones, blood, I’m fucked. Come back in a week and it’s all yours.”

  “Yes, I need it more urgently than that.”

  He blinked at her.

  “Simply put,” she said, “I need your heart today. Before nightfall, I imagine. Yes, this would entail you being dead, a handful of days earlier than you intended.”

  “Shit,” said Douglas. “I know the hospital is keen to free up beds but that’s really cold. Are you going to tell me there’s a little girl in the Children’s Hospital who’s gonna die if she doesn’t get my heart tonight?”

  “No, Mr Hamilton. I am not with the hospital. But, yes, funnily enough, there’s a little girl or maybe a little boy, or maybe a full grown adult who is going to die soon if I don’t have your heart.”

  “My heart? Why me? Is it something I’ve done? If it’s because I complained about that guy in the next —”

  “It’s actually more about something you haven’t done. You are a virgin, Mr Hamilton. You are a virgin, aren’t you?”

  Douglas blushed, or at least felt his cheeks tighten; he wasn’t sure if his body was even strong enough to push the blood to his face.

  “A —”

  “Virgin, Mr Hamilton. Could you confirm it for me?”

  Douglas heard footsteps beyond the cubicle curtain; one of the ward nurses by the sound of it. He considered calling out for help.

  “I mean, it’s not like I don’t like… people,” he heard himself say to the woman. “It was just finding… the time. And the right person.”

  “Do not fret, Mr Hamilton. The whole experience is wildly overrated and probably would have offered you less pleasure than…” She gave him a quizzical look. “What gives you pleasure, Mr Hamilton?”

  “Netflix,” he said.

  She nodded, understanding perfectly.

  “Buffy,” he said. “Angel. Firefly. Lasagne. Jelly. Where’s my jelly?”

  “Soon,” said Vivian. “Sex, I can assure you, does not hold a candle to Netflix or lasagne or, quite possibly, jelly. You really haven’t missed much. It is positively awkward, as poorly engineered as a Heath Robinson contraption, unpleasantly messy and far less efficient than relieving one’s basic animal urges manually.”

  “I’m confused,” said. “You want my heart because I am… inexperienced?”

  “Yes, Mr Hamilton.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure you would want to know.”

  Apart from the constant buzz of background pain, Douglas’s throat was moving from the painfully dry to gargling with razorblades territory. His finger hovered over the nurse call button but he didn’t press it.

  “Did you know that waiting to die is really boring?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve not got much left. But I’ve got my curiosity.”

  “You really want to know?” Vivian pulled a ‘don’t say I didn’t warn you’ face.

  “There is a creature on the loose in the city. Kerrphwign-Azhal.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Kerrphwign-Azhal.”

  “Gesundheit.”

  “Let’s call him Kevin.”

  “And what’s…?”

  “Kevin. Kevin is one of the Uriye Inai’e which, for want of a better word, is a family of Venislarn.”

  Douglas stared. “English, please,” he said.

  “It’s a giant predatory starfish. All mouth and teeth and appetite.”

  “Like an actual starfish? From the sea?”

  “No. From elsewhere.”

  “It’s alien?”

  “Yes, but not in the way you think.”

  “Some inter-dimensional nonsense?”

  “Nothing as clean or simple as that. More like a demon.”

  “Is it a demon?”

  “No.”

  Along the ward there was an anguished shout and the clatter of a metal bedpan.

  Vivian consulted her wristwatch furiously, visibly bit down on an angry comment and adjusted her skirt.

  “There are beings, the Venislarn. That’s actually an earth word for them. Their names for themselves are many and varied and have far too many glottal stops and strange vowels. They are invading our world – have already invaded our world. They will destroy us all. Not because they are evil or because they hate us. Those are human concepts. They will do it because they will do it. Every living thing on our planet, including seven billion humans, will die in prolonged and screaming agony. Indeed, there is a day – an event – in the indeterminate future, generally referred to as the Soulgate. When that moment comes, even death will not offer an escape and the soul, consciousness, mind-state of everyone still on earth will be trapped in an eternal hell of colourful, inventive and unbearable tortures.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “But true. I work for a government agency – one of many around the world – tasked with managing the Venislarn threat.”

  “You’re fighting them.”

  “No, Mr Hamilton. Do pay attention. They will destroy us. This is cold concrete fact.”

  “But?”

  “Our role is to oversee the process and ensure it goes smoothly.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, it is the end of the world. Yes, we are all going to die. But we are British. These things still need doing in an orderly manner and there is certainly no excuse to get all emotional about it.”

  Morag, grateful at least that the exercise kept sleep at bay, followed Nina Seth down the canal towpath. Derelict factories lined the canal on one side, swanky new apartment blocks on the other. It was some time past noon and the sun was hidden behind office blocks.

  A large and almost perfectly circular mass of feathers floated on the surface of the otherwise deserted canal.

  “Did a swan explode or something?” said Morag.

  “Goose,” said Nina. “I think Kevin’s getting hungry. Or angry. Or both.”

  “And it went in there?” said Morag, pointing.

  The canal continued into a brick tunnel beneath a high wall.

  “Rod says one of the coppers saw it coming this way.”

  “I can’t see any light at the end,” said Morag.

  Nina nodded and stepped onto the narrow, railed path that hugged the tunnel wall.

  “A hundred metres maybe,” said Nina. “Then it comes to Snow Hill station.” She looked back at Morag. “Tunnels start overlapping. Railway, road and canal.” She hand-jived a series of sandwiched layers. “And then there’s the railway arches and these cool side tunnels. A real labyrinth. Actually, I think I know of a dungeon a little way off from here.”

  “Dungeon?”

  “Dungeon,” said Nina with a grin. “I’ll show you sometime.”

  “Sometime,” agreed Morag cautiously.

  Morag followed her in. The brickwork curved over her head and she walked with one hand constantly to her side to avoid scalping herself against it. It was soon sufficiently dark that she took out her phone and used it as a light. The black still waters caught the meagre beams and reflected them off the low roof.

  “You have stuff like this in… Edinburgh, was it?” said Nina.

  “No. Scotland’s grim enough as it is. We don’t have to take it underground. Shit. What’s this?”

  “Shit.”

  “No, look.”

  Morag cast her phone’s light to the ceiling.

  “Graffiti tags,” said Nina indifferently.

  “Look!”

  Nina put her hands on her hips and looked. The intersecting lines and weird angles seemed to shift under the phone’s light. The overall design was not unlike a Celtic knot, wrapped into a triangular pattern that, quite possibly
, didn’t have three sides.

  “That’s a Venislarn symbol,” said Morag.

  “We’re a bit outside of samakha territory,” said Nina. “The fish-boys do a lot of tagging. They think they’re Original Gangstas. I tell them, ‘this ain’t LA and you have gills’. It’s sad really.”

  A faint knocking echoed up the tunnel. Nina heard it too and hurried onward. The tunnel abruptly widened out into a cathedral-sized space, it was fifty feet high and lit by daylight from the tunnel end ahead. The rumbling of trains could be heard above and around them.

  At another time, Morag might have marvelled at the scale of the Victorian civil engineering about her — it was probably Victorian, it usually was — but her attention was more immediately grabbed by a man in red Nike running shorts and vest standing directly ahead of them. He was staring up in fearless curiosity at something hanging from the dank wall high above his head. At first glance, one might have mistaken the thing for tattered plastic sheeting. A second glance would have disabused anyone of such ideas. The teeth, the pulsating flesh, the bouquet of eyes at its centre… They were far from subtle clues.

  The man – the idiot – was gesturing to it as though trying to coax a cat from a tree.

  “Oi, mate!” shouted Nina. “Get away from there!”

  He looked round and took out his headphones.

  “What do you think it is?”

  “You are in danger, mate. Move away!”

  “Really, it’s nowhere near Hallowe’en,” he said. “Is it art?”

  “What?” Nina put her phone to her ear, making a call. Morag stepped forward, can of tracer spray in her hand.

  “Sir,” she called, calmly, loudly, “that thing is dangerous.”

  He frowned. Neurons were finally firing in his Cro-Magnon brain.

  “What? You don’t mean —”

  The Venislarn, Kevin, dropped on the runner, the momentum of its fall wrapping tongue-limbs around him in an eye-blink.

  “Azbhul!” swore Nina softly.

  Kevin twisted, tightening its hold. The runner’s feet, luminous yellow flashes on his trainers, still poked out from the unholy mass of flat tentacles. They teetered and tottered and spasmed like a crappy en pointe ballerina.

  “Was he a virgin?” said Nina.

  “I don’t know,” said Morag. “He didn’t have time to show me his official virgin registration card.”