The Quorum by Kim Newman Read Free Book Online

said. ‘You should get a good night’s kip.’
    Sally agreed.
    ‘You’ve been driven to smoking?’
    There was a packet of cigarettes on her desk. Sally coughed and smiled.
    ‘Your face looks better, Pomme.’
    ‘Fuckin’ tell me about it, Sal.’
    The girl shrugged and left. Sally realised she’d miss some of the others. Even Useless Bruce. She’d never worked much with people before, and there were nice things about it. From now on, she’d be alone again. Perhaps she would re-start the Agency.
    Alone in the office as it got dark outside, she ate more crisps, made herself tea and sat at her desk with a new-bought occult paperback. She gathered the building was a magical pressure cooker and the accumulation of ‘melancholy humours’ was a species of sacrifice, a way of getting someone else to pay your infernal dues. It was capitalist black magic, getting minions to pay for the spell in suffering while the conjurers got ahead on other people’s sweat. Obviously, some people would do anything to get a television franchise. Since catching on, she had been noticing more and more things about the Mythwrhn Building: symbols worked into the design like the hidden cows and lions in a ‘How Many Animals Can You See in This Picture?’ puzzle; spikes and hooks deliberately placed to be hostile to living inhabitants; numerical patterns in steps, windows and corners.
    Sally divided the cigarettes into five sets of three. Pinching off the filters, she connected each of the sets into six-inch-long tubes, securing the joins with extra layers of roll-up paper. Then she dripped lighter fluid, letting the flammable liquid seep through the tobacco cores. One test fuse she stood up in a lump of blu-tak and lit. It took over five minutes to burn down completely. Long enough.
    At eight o’clock, she put an internal call up to the Penthouse and let it ring. After an age, Tiny’s answering machine cut in asking her to leave a message. She double-checked by opening a window in the office and leaning out as far as possible into the well, looking up. No light spilled out of the Penthouse.
    The lift was still out of order, so she had to take the works up the stairs. First she went up and circumvented the suite’s personal alarm. With some deft fiddling and her electronic key, she got the doors open. The Penthouse was dark and empty. It took three quick trips to get everything into Tiny’s office and she arranged it all on his desk, working by the streetlight.
    She felt ill. Since realising what was going on, she’d been more sensitive to the gloom trapped within the walls of the Mythwrhn Building. It was a miasma. The water in the pipes smelled like blood.
    Had Bender been trying to break the Device when he smashed the windows? If so, he’d made a mistake.
    There was a hatch directly above the desk, just where it was indicated on the plans she’d borrowed. Above would be a crawlspace under the lead shield. She put a chair and the now-untenanted statuette stand on the desk, making a rough arrangement of steps, and climbed up to the ceiling. A good thump dislodged the hatch and she stuck her head into smelly dark.
    She’d assumed this was where all the energies would gather. The cavity didn’t feel any worse than the rest of the building and she had a moment of doubt. Was this really crazy?
    After ferrying up the four buckets and the other stuff, she jammed through into the crawlspace. Here she could turn on the bicycle lamp Connor had left in her flat. She shone the beam around. She almost expected to find screaming skeletons and the remains of blood sacrifices, but the cavity was surprisingly clean. Meccano struts shored up the lead shield and criss-crossed the plastered ceiling. There was a slope to the roof, so the crawlspace grew from a two-foot height at the street edge of the building to four feet at the rear. If she placed her buckets near the rear end, the blast should neatly slide off the lead shield and dump it into the