The Annihilation Score (50 page)

Or can I?

I look up at the shadowy recesses of the ceiling. Jim's up there somewhere, isn't he? He took the score. I can only hope he's got the sense to run away, that the feeders didn't notice him, and that the high-power ward I upgraded him to is strong enough to protect him as long as Lecter can't see him directly—

(My belt pouch vibrates. A moment later the ring on my right hand contracts painfully, pulsing twice.)

—
This had better be important.
I reach into my pouch and quickly glance at my phone. There's a text message, from Mhari. My knees go weak.
We're coming in. Can you distract them?

I tap out a reply with shaking fingers:
will try
. I hit “send,” then shove my phone back in the pouch and look around. The second violin sits slumped forward, eyes glowing—her instrument has fallen at her feet, unnoticed. I pick up her stand and score. My fingertips feel as if they've been burned, and I leave a reddish smear on everything I touch, especially the papers. Careful not to brush up against any of the possessed, I pick my way past the immobile players and walk towards the concert grand parked at the side of the stage. I'm in luck: the lid is down, the pianist not yet on stage to play his part of the program. I climb onto the stool, then boost myself up onto the top of the horribly expensive instrument, trying not to think about what my boots are doing to its finish—but for what I'm going to do next, I need a raised platform with a good view in all directions, the better to see my audience.

I set up the stand, open the score, and raise my instrument.
Mine
, not Lecter's. It's still the same bone-white body, made from materials nobody in their right mind would enquire too closely about, but there's no sense of his attention hovering around it. Lecter, the entity bound into the body, is elsewhere right now. No time to check whether this is safe, I've just got to hope that it works—

I flip through the score, looking for what I need.

Stanwick's inadvisable editing of the second half of the night's program replaced a medley of popular pieces with
The King in Yellow
, but she didn't touch the traditional closing sequence: even to a manipulative philistine like her, rearranging the traditional end of the Last Night concert qualifies as sacrilege or treason or both. So I cut straight to the climax. First up in the sequence is Ansell's
Plymouth Hoe
, a nautical overture, but there's precious little I can do with it with just one violin—I could run through the main theme, but it's light on strings and heavy on the brass and winds. So I flip past it and go straight to “Rule, Britannia!” Now
that's
scored for strings. I'll have to improvise a bit, and I can't count on any support from the chorus (who are peering, green-eyed and silent, in the direction of Lecter's body), but it's really hard to mess up something so deeply
ingrained in anyone who learned violin in a British secondary school. It's traditionally followed by Elgar's
Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1
in D minor—better known as “Land of Hope and Glory”—then “Jerusalem” (the Proms are
really big
on Elgar), finishing with the national anthem.

“This had better be worth it, Mhari,” I mutter. I'm terrified that I'm going to get this wrong: that's what comes of paying too much attention to my own fear and self-doubt. I've
got
to do this, got to get it right the first time. I take a deep breath and I start to play, my fingertips sore and bleeding across strings that remain stubbornly dark.

The sound of one violin playing in a concert venue the size of the Albert Hall is a lonely thing, but there is none of the usual quiet side chat, shuffling, and laughter you'd expect from a regular audience: as I begin, you could hear a pin drop. Normally the audience would be on their feet, brandishing banners and singing along with the lead soloist and the BBC chorus: it's the nearest thing you'll get to an American-style display of hyper-patriotic flag-waving from the normally reticent British. But this isn't a normal concert audience. As I play, I look around at my audience. They're cold, cold as the grave: thousands of pairs of pale green-glowing eyes focus on the thing in my hands, their bodies standing immobile, trapped within shells of flesh. I can't even tell if they're still alive or if their souls have already been eaten. Part of me is still concentrating on my invisibility, fearful that if I relax my focus, Lecter will notice me. If he wins again, I'll have to play, and I won't be able to stop until my hands are bleeding stumps no longer able to hold bow to string—

Heads begin to turn, one by one at first, then in a wave of iridescence that flashes across the floor of the hall. Something is happening behind me, but I don't dare look round: I have to keep the music flowing. But it's hard to concentrate on playing and to withhold myself from visibility at the same time. The need to remain unseen is the antithesis of the performative impulse.

***Stop it. Stop it now!***

Lecter has finally noticed me. My fingertips burn as the strings and
bow light up with blue-green fire, spiraling whorls of light that echo the gaze of the possessed. Is it my imagination or does he sound frightened, querulous?

“Not going to stop,”
I hum quietly along to the score.

***You must not do this! Where is the score? Where has he taken it?***

“Don't know, don't care. We're going to finish this, Lecter. We're going to bring this back to the Last Night of the Proms, and you're going to make all your little friends go away.”

Somehow I manage to flip the page without smearing blood all over it.

***I've won, you know.*** The voice in my head bleeds menace. ***Eat them all.***

“If you eat the audience, I can promise you an eternity of torment. The Auditors won't stop me: you can go too far, you know.”

Before me, the audience sway gently. One by one, they begin to raise their arms. I don't dare to hope: they're possessed, after all. This might just be Lecter directing them to act in unison. But I feel his attention drifting from me; no, something is wrong. Something I didn't anticipate. But what?

At first I think the stage lights are coming up. But then I realize the shadow of my legs stretching out before me is being cast from a single source, directly behind me rather than overhead. I turn to face the light and falter, recover, then force myself to keep playing even though I desperately want to flee.

***Carcosa,*** Lecter tells me. ***Where the King in Yellow waits.***

It's a gate; circular, perhaps five meters in diameter, its rim burning with a pale limelight fire as it stretches across the stage in front of the organist's pit. Beyond it I see a shadowy stage, dreadfully familiar rows of cracked stone seats rising up in the amphitheater beyond, other performers on stage, white-shrouded, their features invisible as they dance and sway to inaudible music performed at the command of one who has not yet come.

With a barely audible sigh, the first rank of the possessed audience
collapse in windrows, their glowing eyes simultaneously extinguished. The ward I wear around my neck stings my skin, heating up painfully. The gate ripples, then firms up—

“Mo!” A shrill voice shouts behind me. “Hold on!”

I stare at the gate, horrified, as the bubbling laughter and triumph of the strings rises from between my fingers and my nerveless hands continue to pull notes from the white violin without any conscious volition on my part. All I can do is watch as Lecter rips the life from bodies by the thousand, pouring it into the opening he's carved in spacetime. I can feel something else on the other side of the gate respond, a dreadful sense of recognition as an echo of Lecter's attention turns my way. I want to stop my hands moving, but they won't do what I command.
Is this my fault?
Part of me wonders as I fail to make the music stop before the thing on the other side answers the call of its smallest part, the fingernail scraping bound in bone that is Lecter—

Something slams into me from behind, throwing me bodily off the top of the piano. For a split second I'm falling, but then I land and someone cushions my collapse. In a blurring moment I'm surrounded by Bee, interposing her hands between my elbows, knees, head, and floor. Somehow I'm still holding the violin in one hand and the bow in the other: still glowing blue-green, so intense that they leave after-images when I glance at them.

“What,” I manage to say, then my arms are trying to raise the instrument and set bow to string, but it's really hard to play the fiddle when your shoulders give a painful wrench and your wrists are suddenly handcuffed.

“Don't fight,” Bee pants in my ear. There's a huge weight on my back, and after a moment I realize it's Captain Mahvelous. I'm being sat on by my own minion. Wonderful.

“Mhari—”

“Here, Mo.” She jumps across fallen chairs and lands beside me, the two halves of the violin case in her hands. “Can you put it in—”

“Too strong,” I gasp. “Won't hold it. Also—” I nod towards the gate.

“Well, all the same—” Mhari cringes back from the fiddle, which is trying to poke her. “Who can—”

“Coming!” calls Ramona. “Wait for me!” The whine of her wheelchair sets my teeth on edge like a dentist's drill as she rises and flies above the field of bodies. For a moment the glamour slips and I see it as it is, and wish I hadn't: those aren't wheels, and her chariot is disturbingly alive. But then it descends to the stage and I blink and it's a wheelchair again.

***
You can't stop me!
*** Lecter roars. I try to let go again, but all that happens is my hands twitch helplessly.

“Wrong.” Ramona throws something to Mhari. “Warded gloves. Bee, go and help Lollipop and Torch. Eric, see if you can work that thing out of her hands; Mhari, hold the case while Eric closes it, then shove it over here while I—”

***
Slaves! To me!
***

I've been dreading this moment. All around us, the possessed are rising—those who haven't already been life-drained by Lecter. But they're not going to human-wave us: rather, they're bunching up, opening corridors to the back of the floor where I see other bodies with green-glowing eyes that almost match the luminosity of their high-vis vests. Of course: Lecter's had over an hour to work on Laura's people, hasn't he?

“Get off me,” I gasp.

“Soz, not going to happen until you let go, boss.” Some unseen force tugs at my fingers as Eric—Captain Mahvelous—shifts his weight. My ribs creak. Then suddenly my fingertips close on air. “Great! Is it in—”

There's a loud clatter as the bone violin and its bow skitter into the case that Mhari holds warily at arm's length. She slams it shut, then fumbles the catches closed. “In the bag.” Mhari sounds exhausted. “You can let her up now. Sorry, Mo.” She turns and shoves the case across the stage. I can still feel Lecter in my head, buzzing furiously, but he's curiously muffled.

Eric rolls off me and apologetically produces a handcuff key. I raise my wrists. “Jesus, boss, what happened to your hands?” he asks.

I look past his shoulder as he unlocks the cuffs. “Behind you!”

Because I'm watching the approaching cops with the green-glowing eyes and their raised batons, I am looking away at the moment when Ramona runs her chair at the violin case and sends it skidding across the stage and through the gate to Carcosa. Even though I know it's for the best, the memory of losing my instrument forever fills me with an unrelieved sense of gray anguish even now. Decades ago I read
The Lord of the Rings
; I believe Tolkien understood something of that sense of loss, from his description of the ringbearer's torment at the edge of the Crack of Doom. It's the anguish born of losing a part of your body, or a chunk of your soul, and like all amputations it is best for the subject not to watch it with their eyes open. I don't see the violin case skitter across the threshold, but I feel it, a bone-deep ache in my hands and heart that spreads rapidly.

***Come back!*** The voice is muffled but I can still hear him, from a great distance.

The officers are closing in. There are at least half a dozen of them in crowd-control gear; behind them, another four uniforms, Laura Stanwick among them. The glowing eyes—is that my perception of them? Or is this something else? They move too normally, too fluidly, to be truly possessed, but—

“You
idiot
,” Stanwick swears, glaring at me. “You had just
one
job and you still managed to make a balls-up of it.”

“Was
that
part of your so-called job?” I ask, waving a bloody thumb behind me at the rippling portal. “Because—”

“You're under arrest,” she tells me, ignoring the gate floating at the back of the stage. It's as if she can't see it. And yes, her eyes
are
faintly luminous: What's gotten to her? Backwash from the payload she tried to install in everyone? “We'll work out the charges later, but disobeying orders issued under a CCA note will do for starters. Also, destruction of—”

***Soon.***

My skin crawls as I hear Lecter's call in the distance, and an answering echo. Something is approaching the other side of the gate: I can feel
it. So, from their behavior, do the rest of my team—but Stanwick and her people seem blind to the sense of immanent dread. “Close the fucking gate,” I call, not caring who responds. “Close it down
now
.”

Mhari: “On it—”

“Not yet,”
an amplified voice booms out. A moment later, the floor beneath me vibrates. I register shock on Stanwick's face for a split instant before I look round and see Officer Friendly standing before the gate. In the ghostly moonlight streaming through the portal the blue strobe light on top of his helmet looks almost washed out, a flickering sapphire of doubt against the forces of night. He's holding a tube of some kind in one hand: I recognize it just as he throws it through the gate, rippling pages unfurling and flapping.
“Close it now!”
he booms, as I feel something lurch closer, the focus of a malevolence a thousand times vaster than Lecter searching for—