The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel Read Online Free Page B

university crossed with
The Office
by way of
Nathan Barley
.
    Then I nearly died.
    Lots of other people
did
die, so I suppose I got off lightly. But it’s a hell of a reality check when you spend just three days in hospital recovering from third-degree burns to your face and hands, the bone-deep kind that should leave you scarred for life. Fortunately for me, as long as my condition is well-managed, I heal like a Hollywood movie hero. Unfortunately for me, my ability to heal like that makes me useful for an organization that needs… well.
    To make matters worse, at about the same time all this was happening they sprang a mentor on me.
    My mentor is the Reverend Peter Russell, MA, D. Theol. He’s fifteen years older than I am and he’s a vicar, although he rides a motorbike and has long hair and a beard and does aikido. Pete’s primary qualification for mentoring me is that he’s been in the organization fully three months longer than I have, and has lots of experience in helping disturbed young men come to terms with the vagaries of life. He’s the modern, intelligent, progressive, the-Bible-is-just-a-metaphor type of clergyman, and he’s a nice guy, even though he grumbles about having to neglect his pastoral duties in the name of national security. He seems to spend most of his office time reading sermons, checking some
really strange
Bible concordances, and frowning furiously. (NB: I don’t know many vicars, so for all I know they’re all like this, but I’m just saying: he’s not what I expected.)
    I asked what he’s doing here. It turns out he got sucked into the Laundry last year because Mr. Howard knew him socially and needed an expert on Biblical apocalypses in a screaming hurry, in order to stop said apocalypses from coming true. I’d feel sorry for him, but even knowing about the tentacle monsters from beyond spacetime hasn’t shaken his faith or made him bitter or anything. Never mind Gödel’s theorem or Kolmogorov–Chaitin complexity, let alone the Turing Principles on which the whole field of computational magic is based.
    For the past six months we – me and the other PHANGs – have been fumbling our way through a series of one-week intensive orientation courses and stacks of briefing papers, making it up as we go along, with the occasional nudge in the right direction from our managers. There is a screaming rush on pretty much all the time because the Laundry is taking on new staff, gearing up for something unpleasantly big, and we’re a little bit short on managers and experienced senior people because a number of them ended up being taken away in body bags after a couple of asshole elder vampires used me and the Scrum as pawns in a lethal chess game. * Mr. Howard once told me he was here for two whole years before anyone even sent him for training in out-of-office operations. Pete and I don’t have the luxury of that much time.
    Anyway, this week they’ve sent us both up to Leeds as part of the task force preparing the way to move our main emergency command center out of London.
    Apparently the Laundry used to occupy a ramshackle government building in Westminster. † That building, Dansey House, was closed for complete renovation under a public-private partnership about six years ago, while everyone moved to a variety of temporary (and not very secure) satellite offices. It was due to reopen three years ago but there were, apparently, “problems” relating to thaumaturgic contamination of the ground it was built on – problems too big for remediation. It turned out to be the necromantic equivalent of a toxic waste site – and that was before we discovered the hard way that an elder vampire had single-handedly infiltrated the department. He’d spent literally decades installing a
geas
– a procedure or spell that induces a compulsive cognitive bias in whoever it is applied to – on Dansey House, with the effect that people who work there
don’t believe in vampires
, even if