There's a knock on the door.
It's daytime; the nurse who brings him breakfast has been and gone. (Nothing more compromising than factory-farmed eggs, which he's wolfed down, as ravenous after as before).
The knocking repeats. Then, the door opens a crack. A head pokes through.
"Pete?"
He stares at the grains of salt on the table.
"Pete."
25,496 . . . 25,497 . . . 25,497 . . . 25,49 . . . - Fuck.
He looks up. Bob stands by the door, shoulders hunched, face rumpled with tension, worry. Guilt is pouring off him. It's a replay of a scene from two years ago, only this time, Pete understands.
"Hey." Bob sounds as hesitant as Pete has ever heard him.
Pete opens his mouth; finds his voice gone. He hasn't spoken since he asked for paper the day before. He looks down at the table, resists the temptation to start counting. He takes his time sweeping all of the salt back into its little glass receptacle, using a piece of antique paper to corral stray grains. Midway through he hears Bob shift uneasily on his feet. As he screws the salt shaker's lid back on Bob pulls out the other chair and sits.
Pete clears his throat. "I told them no visitors."
"I know."
Pete manages a weak glare.
"What is this then, an intervention?" He sounds petulant to his own ears.
"Dunno. Do you need one?"
"Mhari promised –"
"Uhm. Yeah. I didn't exactly tell her I was coming here. Well, I guess she probably knows, now. They weren't sure who'd win a pissing contest between a Laundry DSS and a member of the House of Lords who heads her own shiny new agency, so they phoned around. Mhari's gonna bite my head off. But that's ok, I'm pretty sure I'm indigestible. – I'm babbling, aren't I?"
"A little," Pete confirms, feebly. Something inside him unclenches, because this is Bob, Mo's husband, whom he has known a decade or more – not the closest of friends but familiar: Bob, being predictably crap at visiting a suicidal friend in the hospital.
Pete wants nothing more than to relax into the normality of that.
Yet Bob's nerdiness only accounts for one part of his awkwardness. Pete's counselling instinct – ingrained, no matter how absurd the circumstances – latches on.
"It's not your fault," he says, making his voice soft, which isn't difficult.
"It is, actually." Bob's bitterness is well-worn - so thoroughly resigned that it startles Pete right off his script.
"But it isn't!" he protests.
(What he should be saying is, "Why do you feel that way?" Or something to that effect.)
"Yes. It is."
"Bob. C'mon, we've been over this. It really isn't."
Bob's eyebrows draw together in mild annoyance. "Yes it is! What is this, a Monty Python sketch?"
"Only if you keep saying 'yes it is'."
Bob snorts.
"I'm serious." Pete insists. "You mustn't blame yourself for. . . this. You were trying to save the world! You did postpone the apocalypse. Or something very much like the apocalypse, anyway. I didn't volunteer - but if I had known, I would have. You know that."
He has made this argument to Bob before, with conviction, a couple of times.
He hopes it is still true, now.
Bob gives a pained grunt. "Pete. With all due respect for your admirable. . . forgiveness reflex – absolution really isn't what I'm here for. It's. . ." He pauses, caught in a moment of tense introspection. "I've. . . been there. Kind of. So. . . if you need to talk, or. . . Well."
His offer made, however inarticulately, Bob sits back and wraps his arms around himself.
Pete sits staring at him, touched, vaguely mystified. Bob is not a person who will bare his soul to many. Yet what, exactly, is it that has been revealed? When Pete tries to meet his eyes, Bob briefly, reflexively, looks away – then, with a visible effort, makes eye contact again.
Some years ago Bob disappeared for several months and Mo grew extremely cagey about explaining his absence. Pete has pieced together, since, that there had been a health crisis of some sort, perhaps physical, perhaps mental, perhaps both.
Is that it, then: has Bob, too, spent some time under St. Hilda's brand of suicide watch?
Suddenly - much belatedly - Pete notes an absence, the lack of a scent whose new ubiquity still feels alien: Bob is the first visitor since Mhari who doesn't reek of fear.
It makes Pete at home in his body in a way he hasn't felt since Washington.
Of course. Bob is a DSS – a rank that nobody has been able to explain to Pete, except for the possibly only half-jocular claim that it's short for "Deeply Scary Sorcerer". Bob has gone up against Schiller and what was behind him once before; against God knows what else, in a decade plus of service. He has, during that decade, acquired a sinister-sounding nickname that people are even less eager to explain than his rank. Alex, well on his way to becoming a fairly scary sorcerer himself, is properly terrified of him. And every night, Bob goes home to Mo, who. . .
The hunger that for days has been a scream at the back of Pete's mind has gone quiescent - as if the part of him that didn't exist a few days ago has decided that he is not, right now, in the presence of food.
Pete's scalp crawls. New as he is to his senses he can't be entirely sure, yet an instinct he is just as new to tells him that on some plane that has nothing to do with the physical Bob smells. . . dead.
He seeks Bob's eyes, now, with the full acuity of his new senses. Sees. . . only Bob.
Then –
It is a maw it is an infinite emptiness it is hungry always hungry it is a dark vast presence watching –
Pete recoils, knocking over his chair – scrambles up, back, away from the thing across the room.
He comes to, seconds or minutes later, his back against the wall, hand held out as if that could ward off the monster. His breath comes in gasps.
"What – what –" . . . are you? (No. Obvious.)
"Eater of Souls," Pete whispers.
He can still sense the presence behind Bob's face.
Bob sighs. "Sorry. There's just no non-horrifying way of doing this."
Then there is only Bob.
Pete stands, trying to calm his breathing.
"Why don't you sit down again?" Bob suggests. "It's no more dangerous than it was a minute ago."
That is as dubious as comfort gets.
Pete picks up the chair, gingerly. Rights it. Sits down. He looks at Bob, sees a human, familiar face. There is some degree of pity on it, and perhaps regret.
Pete tries to look past the face, not at the thing that he knows is behind it but at the man who must be in there, too.
He realises that he still has no idea what it is he is looking at.
Eater of Souls.
"What. . . " His voice catches. – . . . is it that you. . . do?
That implies that it is something that Bob does do. That seems like a big, perhaps unfair assumption. Pete thinks of the little glass vial that sits, untouched, in the fridge.
"What. . . does it mean. . . eating souls?" he says, very carefully.
"It means what it says on the tin."
"I'm sorry, but. . . what does that mean?"
Bob takes a while to reply, this time.
"It feels like eating. Bite – chew - swallow. 'Cept all the organs involved are purely notional."
Pete nods, although this is beyond comprehension.
"What happens to the. . . " – victim – ". . . person, on whom this. . . notional act of eating is performed?"
Bob very deliberately meets his eyes. "They die. It's instant. Painless, as far as I can tell. So there's that to be said for it."
Pete forces himself not to look away, not to let his horror show.
"It's something you've done. Something you do."
Again Bob meets his eyes. "Yes."
". . . Something you have to do?" Like me?
Bob inserts a pause at this point, in which he uncrosses his arms, releasing himself from their tight embrace. He shifts his shoulders, looks at his hands as if he doesn't know where to put them, shoves one of them under his thigh, then pulls it out again.
"I don't know. I haven't ever gone. . . hungry for long enough to find out. Work has a way of landing me in situations where. . . you know."
He looks up. "Until fairly recently I would have said that at least this way, it's clean. Precise. No collateral damage. I always hated that about guns: too damn easy to fuck up, hit someone who's just standing in the wrong place."
He looks down at his hands which lie open in his lap.
"But I came by this. . . skill. . . quite suddenly. The only person who could train me is dead. Discorporated, what-have-you. I'm going on instinct and guesswork. Sometimes that gets people killed. People other than the people I. . . meant. . . to kill."
He grimaces, a sickly half-grin. "Mind you, most times it makes me puke up my guts, afterwards, no matter if it's someone I meant to eat or not."
Someone I meant to eat. Said without a hitch.
How many? Pete wants to ask. Does not.
They sit, silent, two monsters looking at one another.
"How can you live with it?" Pete asks, tonelessly, after a long while.
Bob snorts. "Keeping too busy to think is good. Easily accomplished, too – only good thing about living through Case Nightmare Green. As for the evenings. . ." He shrugs. "Booze helps. Somewhat."
". . . Jesus, Bob."
Bob raises an eyebrow.
"He objects to His name being taken in vain, not to being called upon in our extremity. Our situation's certainly extreme enough. . . Granted, I probably no longer have the right."
Bob peers at him, curious. "You still believe?"
Pete considers it. "I think so." More resolutely: "Yeah."
He knows, though, that he is far from done thinking about it.
To distract himself he says, "You know, this really isn't how I imagined having the existence of the soul proved to me."
Bob gives a weak, semi-amused snort.
So is that it? Pete thinks, despairingly. Am I joking about this now?
A thought hits him. "Can you. . . see it, when you look at me? Is it like. . . " He finds he cannot say it.
"Like what you saw when you looked at me?" Bob helps him out, gently enough. "I don't know what exactly you saw, I can't look at myself that way. But your parasites and the Eater. . . they're only distantly related. Like some single-celled organism that lives in a puddle is related to humans, maybe. You have an infection, but you're still, essentially, yourself."
"Myself. . . " Pete mutters. Thinks of the terrible purity.
"Yourself," Bob confirms. "Capable of moral reasoning. Able of making your own decisions."
Pete looks at his hands, remembers dreams, nightmares. Fire and teeth.
"Speaking of," Bob says suddenly, breezily. "You can probably hold out a little while longer, but at some point your little brain squatters will start chewing holes into your thinkmeat."
Pete looks up, jarred.
Bob regards him calmly from across the table. "You know that, of course. And you know that Mhari went to a lot of trouble to source you some. . . ethical blood. Maybe don't let it go to waste?"
For a moment Pete is too shocked at the change in tone, in tack, to react. Then anger starts to percolate. He welcomes it.
"There is a way out for me, you know," he says. "I'm not going to be part of Monster Club."
"Yeah, well. It's one of those things. If you want to be part of Monster Club, you shouldn't be part of Monster Club. You don't want to be, so I'm afraid you're in. Sorry, but that's how it works. And I do mean that, I am sorry."
"What – No, I mean," Pete sputters."Fuck. Seriously. What are you saying? It's. . . what, it's okay? As long as we feel properly bad afterwards?"
Suddenly it is Bob who is furious. "It's not okay! It'll never be okay! – But there's a fucking war on, in case you hadn't noticed, and you're. . . not a nuke, maybe, but let's say a grenade launcher. Potentially, at least. And our arsenal is mostly sticks and knives, in case that, too, has escaped your notice."
Pete sits back, numb with disbelief. "You're trying to recruit me."
Bob makes a 'what can you do' face, mouth thin with self-loathing. "I recruited you years ago. As I said, sorry 'bout that. But you're ours now, which makes you a resource, and we can't afford to waste those. - Or let them waste themselves, for that matter."
Pete stares at him: old friend, new-found fellow abomination. First and foremost: Laundry agent.
He suddenly feels very foolish.
"I'm not made to be a soldier," he tries, eventually.
Bob laughs, a sound close to a sob. "You think I am?"
"Or a sorcerer."
"The basics are easy enough. Being a nerd is helpful but not required. And anyway, even without leet skillz you're stronger, faster, a thousand times less fragile than a baseline human. There's always a use for that."
Pete stares at the table; longs for the salt shaker.
Bob pulls something from the pocket of his hoodie and pushes it across the table.
"Sandy wants you to have this. Mhari wouldn't take it."
It's the small, framed picture of Sandy and Jess that used to live on Pete's desk.
"Historically speaking. . ." Bob says, slowly, "I haven't. . . always been terribly great at getting what Mhari is about. At a guess, though, she didn't want to remind you that you have something to live for."
The faces in the picture blur and clear as tears collect and fall from Pete's eyes.
"Mhari thinks I should kill myself," Pete says, after a moment. "I think she's trying to be kind."
"Let's say she wants you to feel that you have the option."
"And you don't." Pete discovers, with mild surprise, that he is still angry.
Bob is silent for a while. When he starts to speak again his voice is low, measured.
"You know what's going on out there. You know. . . enough, about what's coming. You may not be as familiar with what exactly we can throw into the ring, but you must've gathered that, by and large, we. are. fucked.
"You know what that means for the world. For the humans. Other sentients, too. They're going to die, Pete. Die, and worse. Sandy, the kid. Everybody. And I'm not going to insult you by telling you that you're going to make a decisive difference."
Bob pauses, needing a respite from his own litany or wanting to give it a moment to sink in.
"If that is your pitch for going on as. . . this, it needs work," Pete mutters. He feels faint.
"That wasn't my pitch. That's just the facts. My pitch is this: responsibility is a choice you keep making. If something is worth fighting for. . . you just fucking . . . keep fighting."
Pete's mind, unasked, conjures up an image of Sandy and Jess in the rubble of London, in a tube station turned bomb shelter, cowering in some dark corner as large shapes loom, shapes that are shadowy but human.
That is not how it is going to be.
"This isn't about. . . about going up with nothing but my fists against a bloke twice my size who wants to, to gun down my family!" Pete spits, hotly. "This isn't about fighting! This is. . . premeditated, state-sanctioned – state-facilitated murder!" He takes a deep breath; tries to calm down. "There isn't a battlefield here. The people I'd be killing aren't the enemy. – Not that I'm particularly happy about killing in actual combat," he adds, an afterthought that feels important.
"You're right," Bob says, after a pause. "This isn't a battle. It's a fucking Trolley Problem. On the one track there's most of humanity. On the other, a random stranger – likely someone not too nice, who's made at least one criminally stupid decision. Who do you try to save?"
"Ah. Utilitarianism. You do know that I'm practically required to be a deontologist, don't you?"
"Deo-what-now? Thought you were a Christian."
Sometimes it's hard to believe that Bob is married to someone who holds a PhD in philosophy.
"Okay. . ." Pete sighs, deeply weary. "Even just sticking with utilitarian ethics. . . It's not a single stranger on that second track. It's hundreds, because that train won't stop until I step into sunlight. – Are there more people on the other track? Yes, probably, if you're right and that's really all of humanity there. But you also said it's quite unclear if killing the people on the one track will save even a single person on the other, not least because the entire rail network is built on a clifftop that's about to drop into the sea."
Pete notes that he has slipped into lecture mode, and there's comfort in that: it's not sermon mode but close enough.
Bob sits watching; listening. Waiting for Pete to reach some foregone conclusion.
"Well. Okay," Pete concedes. "You weren't entirely wrong, with what you said about responsibility. Making choices. Maybe trying to save those people does matter - even if it is just for a few minutes. Maybe that is a decision I have to make, maybe it's the decision that matters, even if it makes no practical difference at all, in the end."
Something happens to Bob's face, here: a minute hardening, a mustering of stubborn, hopeless determination.
What, thinks Pete. And, Oh. Dear God.
For the third time in an hour he feels as if he is seeing Bob for the very first time.
He marvels how he could miss it; how for all this time it's been hidden by bureaucracy and procedure, by Bob's weary, routine professionalism.
He has to spell it out now. "That's what you mean, when you speak about fighting. You're not a utilitarian. You believe in picking a side; making a choice and sticking with it - no matter what." He pauses, shudders. "No matter what. Even if there's no hope at all. Because it's the right thing to do."
Bob looks Pete in the eyes, with an intensity that Pete has never seen in him. "Can you say that it isn't?"
Pete stares back at him.
"Some people," he ventures, "would say that if saving people involves setting up a system for feeding on them, we've already lost what we're trying to save."
It's a good argument, but Pete notes even as he makes it that it is almost entirely beside the point.
"Some people?" Bob's eyes bore into Pete's.
Pete can do intense, too. "Can you say that what we –" he considers verbs carefully, chooses: "– are . . . doesn't feel . . . evil?"
Bob's expression is unreadable.
An Old Testament silence stretches.
Pete looks back at the picture on the table.
"Human life is incommensurate," Pete says. "I do believe that. If I could save a billion by killing just one. . . killing that one would be no less wrong." He looks up at Bob, who is frowning at him from the other side of the table. "Outside of a philosophy class or a church that can be. . . hard to maintain. Doesn't mean that it's wrong."
Bob's frown grows deeper. "So, what: we turn the other cheek as horrors from beyond space-time gobble up all life on Earth?"
Pete looks at the picture again. "No. I can't believe that that is. . . God's will."
It feels strange to say it. For all his professed faith, he has never been one to make pronouncements on the volition of an entity that is surely so far beyond human understanding as to be, for most intents and purposes, an abstraction.
He studies the smiling faces. "Any calculus is wrong. Can only ever be wrong. But there are situations, yes, in which I would choose the many, or even the few, over the one. Where maybe it isn't the right thing to kill, but certainly the lesser wrong."
He pulls the photo closer, regards it silently. Then he turns it face-down.
"You said you wouldn't tell me that I could make a difference but you bring me this picture. You're asking me to become a murderer, not to save them, but. . . for the idea of them."
Bob exhales, exasperated. "I'm asking you to be useful. We can't choose to be human. We can choose to be useful."
The thought comes unbidden, tangential at best, the product of calculations almost entirely subconscious: And maybe – just maybe – if I'm useful enough – if, at some point, the PM should decide to hold his strong, eldritch hand over the families of key personnel . . . Jess and Sandy may get to be on whatever lifeboat we manage to find or build. . .
He is disgusted with himself – grateful that Bob hasn't pulled that particular card; not at all sure if, given the chance, he would be able to refuse.
Realisation rises as a sudden obstruction in his throat. "Sandy will leave me. I will have to leave her. Them. - I'll never see Jess again." He pushes the words out as if that could remove the blockage, let him breathe again.
Has he decided, then? He doesn't know. He stares at the blank back of the picture frame. When he looks up, Bob is watching him with intense compassion, and again regret.
"I haven't decided," Pete says, stubborn.
Bob doesn't respond
"I need you to leave now. Please."
Bob watches him a moment longer; says, "Okay."
Politeness is a reflex, too, so Pete gets up as Bob does, and walks him – two, three steps – to the door. Bob's hand is on the doorknob when Pete says, "No matter how I decide, tell Mhari not to bother finding me any more 'ethical' blood."
Bob gives him a questioning glance.
"Any guilt I share in, I'm gonna share in fully," Pete explains.
Bob scrutinises him. Then he nods. "If it's any help," he says, "you've worked for this government for months. You're part of the system – whether you drink the blood or not."
Pete snorts, feels like crying. "Is that what you tell yourself after you've eaten?" He regrets the low blow immediately.
Bob doesn't even wince.
Pete doesn't apologise, and neither does Bob.