Stop it. That's Stockholm syndrome talking, the tendency of abductees to start seeing things from their kidnappers' viewpoint. Just stop it.

They're frog-marching me along a tunnel towards a summoning grid where they plan to turn me into a host for a demonic intrusion from another universe, and my subconscious is trying to see things from their point of view? I'm confused—

It's a broad tunnel, low-ceilinged. Every five meters or so there stands a cultist, male or female figures in hooded black robes who hold lamps, the better to illuminate the whitewashed brick walls and the niches therein. The niches have occupants; they've been standing there for a long time. There's a soft, dry breeze blowing—I've got no idea how they manage the ventilation—and some of the inhabitants are pretty well preserved. The way the skin shrinks across the skull, drawing the shriveled lips back to reveal yellowed fangs and blackened tongues, almost as if they're screaming. The dead outnumber the living here, all dressed in dusty Victorian or Edwardian finery. If Iris has her way, I'll be joining them soon—or worse. When I signed the Act there was a binding promise placed on my soul: the Laundry doesn't like its staff to leave ghosts and revenants behind to face interrogation. No afterlife echoes for me.

We pass a rack of wooden shelves, bowed with age beneath piles of skulls and bundles of femurs tagged with faded labels, and pause at another oak door. One of the cultists—do I recognize Julian the shotgun-toting cannibal under that hood?—steps forward with a key. My heart's pounding and I feel feverish, and to top it all I'm so scared I'm in danger of losing bladder control, like an innocent man being dragged to his execution. I'm also angry. Hang on to that anger, I tell myself. Then I start trying to string phrases together in Enochian, in my own head.

If they're determined to kill me, then fuck 'em—I'm going to go out with a bang.

The dead. I can feel them pressing in around us, outside the wan light of the LED torches. Empty vessels waiting, entropic sinkholes of randomized information, all charged up with nowhere to go. These dead bear no love for the living among them: followers of a ghastly fertility cult, the spawner of unclean things—now dead and withered, they lie here where once they conducted strange bacchanalian ceremonies, watching while the austere puritans of the Black Brotherhood desecrate their tombs and reconsecrate their altars. They can't possibly be happy with the new tenants, can they?

To summon up a possessive entity takes a Dho-Nha geometry curve, a sacrifice of blood, and an iteration through certain theorems. (Not to mention a power source, but I'm sitting right on top of the necromantic equivalent of the Dinorwig stored hydropower plant: if I can't turn the lights on with that, I might as well give up.) I know this shit: it's years since I first did it. I can just about visualize the curve, and if I try to flex my right arm—oh gods, that hurts—is that a trickle of blood I feel? I start to subvocalize, trying to hold a warped wireframe image in my mind's eye: One plus not-one equals null; let the scaling coefficient be the square root of—