The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross Read Free Book Online Page B

managed to
convince Andy I needed it; getting her own back for last month, I
think." Harriet has been having problems with her email system and
asked my advice; I don't know quite what went wrong, but she ended up
blowing five days of the departmental training budget attending a
course on sendmail configuration. Took her three weeks to stop
twitching every time somebody mentioned rules. "Well and all, I guess
what he did qualifies as a massive self-LART, but … "
    I realise I'm not talking anymore and shudder
convulsively.
    "His eyes were full of worms."
    Brains turns, silently, and rummages in the
cupboard above the sink. He pulls down a big bottle labelled DRAIN FLUID , rinses out a couple of chipped
cups that are languishing on the draining board, then fills them from
the bottle. "Drink this," he says.
    I drink. It isn't bleach: my eyes don't quite
bulge out, my throat doesn't quite catch fire, and
most of the liquid doesn't evaporate from the surface of my tongue.
"What the hell is this stuff?"
    "Sump degreaser." He winks at me. "Stops Pinky
dipping his wick in it, right?" I wink back, a bit nonplussed; I do
not
think that phrase means what Brains thinks that it means, but if I told
him I doubt he'd give me any more of this stuff, so I'm not going to
enlighten him. Right now I've got a strong urge to get blindingly
drunk—which he seems to have sensed. If I'm blind drunk I won't have
to
think. And not thinking for a while will be a good thing.
    "Thank you," I say, as gravely as I can—it's
Brains's secret, after all, and he's confided it in me. I'm obscurely
touched, and if I didn't keep seeing Fred grinning at me whenever I
closed my eyes it might actually get to me.
    Brains peers at me closely. "I think I know your
problem," he says.
    "What's that?"
    "You need"—he's already topping up my cup—"to
get pissed. Now."
    "But what about your—" I wave feebly at the
worktop.
    He shrugs. "It's an early success; I'll get it
working properly later."
    "But you're busy," I protest, because this whole
thing is very un-Brains-like; at his worst he's a borderline autist. To
have him paying attention to someone else's emotional upsets is, well,
eerie.
    "I was only trying to prove that you can make an
omelette without breaking eggs. That's just a dumb metaphor or a silly
practical experiment; you're real, and a classic example of what it
means, too. You're broken, in the course of scrambling a
body-snatcher's zero point outbreak, and I figure we need to see if all
the king's men can fix you, or at least make you feel better. Then you
can help me with my egg-sacting project."
    I do not throw the glass at him. But I make him
refill it.

    An indeterminate but nonzero number of semifull
vodka glasses later, Pinky appears, looking tall and gangly and
slightly flustered. He demands to know where the nearest bookshop is.
    "Why?"
    "For my nephew." (Pinky has a brother and
sister-in-law who live on the other side of London and who have
recently spawned.)
    "What are you getting him?"
    "I'm buying an A to Z and a bible."
    "Why?"
    "The A to Z is a christening present and the
bible is so I know the way to the church." Brains groans; I scrabble
drunkenly behind the sofa for a sponge bullet for the Nerf gun, but
they all seem to have fallen through the wormhole that leads to the
planet of lost paper clips, pencils, and irreplaceable but detachable
components of weird toys. "Say, what's going on here?"
    "I'm taking a break from my cunning plan to help
Bob get drunk, because that's what he needs," says Brains. "He needs
distracting and I was doing my best until you came in and changed the
subject." He stands up and throws one of the suckers at Pinky, who
dodges.
    "That's not what I meant; there's a weird smell
in the kitchen and something that's, er, squamous and rugose"—a
household catch-phrase, and we all have to make the obligatory
Cthulhu-waggling-tentacles-on-chin gesture with our hands—"and yellow
tried to eat my shoe. What's