The Jennifer Morgue (Laundry Files, #2)

by Charles Stross

“Consider Phlebas,”

About six years ago I nearly landscaped Wolverhampton, not to mention most of Birmingham and the Midlands, while experimenting with a really neat, new rendering algorithm that just might have accidentally summoned up the entity known to the clueful as “Fuck, it’s Nyarlathotep! Run!” (and to everyone else as “Fuck, run!”).

I take notes on my tablet, briefly consider a game of Minesweeper before deciding it’s not worth the risk of exposure, and finally settle down to the grim business of not falling asleep and embarrassing myself in public.

Five heads, their eyes swimming with luminous green worms, turn to face me.

“Walther P99, 9mm caliber, fifteen-round magazine, silvercap hollow-points engraved with a demicyclic banishment circuit in ninety-nanometer Enochian.” “Banishment rounds?” I ask hesitantly, then: “Hang on.” I hold up one hand: “I’m not cleared for carrying guns in the field!” “We figured the exorcism payload means it’s covered by your occult weapons certification. If anyone asks, it’s just a gadget for installing exorcism glyphs at high speed.”

Someday I’ll write a textbook about personality profiling through possessions; but for now let’s just say

this example is screaming “megalomaniac!” at me. Billington may have an ego the size of an aircraft carrier but he’s not so vain as to leave his desk empty (that would mean he was pretending to lead a life of leisure) or to cover it with meaningless gewgaws (indicative of clownish triviality). This is the desk of a serious executive. There’s a functional-looking (watch me work!) PC to one side, and a phone and a halogen desk light at the other. One of the other items dotting it gives me a nasty shock when I recognize the design inscribed on it: millions wouldn’t, but the owner of this hunk of furniture is using a Belphegor-Mandelbrot Type Two containment matrix as a mouse mat, which makes him either a highly skilled adept or a suicidal maniac. Yup, that pretty much confirms the diagnosis. This is the desk of a diseased mind, hugely ambitious, prone to taking insanely dangerous risks. He’s not ashamed of boasting about it—he clearly believes in better alpha-primate dominance displays through carpentry.

him.

The Tillinghast resonator is running: in this confined space it should give me just enough warning to shit myself before I die,

I flip open the lid on top of the gear-stick and punch the eject button. And the car ejects.

These days he’s got a corner office with a blond Scandinavian pine desk. (It’s a corner office on the second floor with a view over the alley where the local Chinese take-away keeps their dumpsters, and the desk came from IKEA, but his office still represents the cargo-cult trappings of upward mobility;

Angleton makes a wheezing noise, like a boiler threatening to explode. After a moment I recognize it as two-thousand-year-old laughter, mummified and out for revenge.