Two of the secondary bedrooms show signs of being occupied by women: closets hung with business suits, blouses, and a couple of formal gowns in carriers; chests of drawers with underwear; suitcases empty and stashed neatly in the wardrobes. Dress shoes lined up neatly two by two. Toiletries and makeup boxes in the dressing area tell their own story, as do the wardrobes. Schiller’s handmaids have clearly settled in for the long haul, but their rooms are frustratingly free of anything approximating signs of independent personality: both of them have bibles out and prominently positioned on the bedside table, but that’s about it. The kitchen shows signs of a succession of takeaway meals, and there are coffee supplies and soft drinks in the fridge but, again, there is absolutely nothing that betrays any sign of personality. There are no casual clothes, no magazines or newspapers, no games or distractions or stuffed toys or jewelry or ornaments. Mhari shudders for a moment as a chilly flush washes over her. It’s almost as if they come home from a day at the office, read the bible, then climb into bed and switch off like robots.
She moves swiftly on to the master bedroom. Again, it’s bereft of personality. A rail of men’s suits—conservative but expensively tailored, if she’s any judge of quality—fill the wardrobe, along with a row of shirts and a rack of ties. The same bible, this time with a somewhat dog-eared look. Mhari picks it up, then puts it down again hastily when it stings her fingertips. That’s unusual: PHANGs don’t have any kind of reaction to religious symbols—contra popular vampire mythology—so she takes out her smartphone and calls up the OFCUT app. “Schiller’s bible is contaminated,” she tells Gary and Persephone, “medium-high thaum count.”
“If you can bear to check it, can you tell me if it contains the Apocalypse of St. Enoch?” Persephone replies after a moment. “Should be near the back.”
Mhari flips it open. “Huh. Weird … you’re right, there’s a lot of stuff here I don’t remember from RE classes.”
“Okay, at least we’ve been bugging the right guy.” Persephone sounds edgy.
Mhari closes the book and continues. The en suite bathroom contains more masculine toiletries: aftershave, a razor and accoutrements, and a bag full of medication. Schiller is on a bunch of stuff. Mhari photographs all the labels, just in case they’re useful to someone. “Cialis—is that what I think it is?” she asks over the open circuit.
Gary chuckles nervously. “Weekend get-it-up drug, you mean?”
“Schiller’s on a bunch more stuff. How old is he again? Fifty-five?”
“Wouldn’t surprise me.”
Persephone cuts in tonelessly: “Focus, please.”
“Yes, mum.” Mhari puts the medications back where they were, then starts checking the luggage at the bottom of Schiller’s walk-in wardrobe. “Oh my.”
“What is it?”
“Is our man into the mortification of the flesh, or what?” Mhari blinks at the contents of the second suitcase, then pulls out her phone for some more candid snapshots. “I see a, a ball gag, some kind of bridle, manacles … is that a chastity belt? Kinky!” She zooms in. “Uh. That doesn’t look right … there’s blood on it.” Suddenly it’s not remotely funny. “Something’s wrong here. These aren’t, they’re not toys. I mean, if Schiller’s into consensual BDSM he’s really hard-core.”
“Schiller’s hard-core all right, but it’s the no-sex-except-for-procreation kind of hard-core that gets him up.” Persephone sounds distracted. “Mhari, come into the kitchen and tell me I’m not hallucinating, please?”
“The kitchen?”
Mhari finds Persephone leaning against the full-sized refrigerator with her eyes closed. “What?” she asks.
“Check out the thing in the fridge.” She steps sideways to give the other woman access.
“Okay.” It takes Mhari a little while to take inventory. Milk, a box of Coke cans, various food products. “The Mason jar?” She peers at it. “What’s that?”
The one-liter Mason jar on the shelf is full of a cloudy, turbid liquid that at first conceals her view of the contents. The thing inside looks like a pickled dead fish—about five centimeters in diameter and twenty centimeters long—but it’s banded or segmented along its length, and something about it makes her skin crawl. There are no fins, but membranous attachments dangle from its lower end. She can feel something faintly, like static on a dead radio frequency, plucking at her nerves.
Then the fish squirms and turns the tip of its head towards her, lamprey mouth-parts puckering in concentric toothy rings that scrape at the glass. She squeaks and jumps backward, fangs sliding out defensively. “Fuck!”
“Yeah.” Persephone pushes the door shut. Her face is pale and pinched. “My ward’s holding up, but it’s hot. That thing, it wants … wants to be inside someone.”
Mhari can feel it now: its flesh-hunger is slowed by the chill of the fridge but not entirely dampened, the urge to squirm and thrust, to pump deeper into a warm and yielding cavity, a chewing, eating drive to move forward ever deeper in orgasmic lust, until it swims in screaming blood and sprays eggs from every pore into the victim’s abdominal cavity—
“Gaah. I feel sick.”
“Not here. Bathroom.” Persephone leads her out of the kitchen.
Back in the living room Mhari breathes deeply for a minute, forcing her stomach to settle. It’s not fair: becoming a vampire should, she feels, have rendered her immune to feelings of queasy disgust. “What, what is that thing?”
“If I had to guess, it’s the new type of host that Schiller’s got his hands on. Johnny said the goons he and Bob took down at the camp on Dartmoor had them—segmented wormlike body and cartilaginous teeth, with added mind control capability. You’ve read the GOD GAME BLACK transcript. This is like the tongue-eating isopods, only it’s a hypercastrating parasitoid: one that lives inside its victim, eats the victim’s gonads, and repurposes their reproductive drive to spread itself. The Sleeper has a lovely library of parasite-derived biological weapons it uses to control its victims, and evidently Schiller has been helping it refine its choice of human-specific vectors. Evidently this is one he was saving for later.”
“Uh, can we kill it with fire? Like, right now?”
“I approve of your instincts, but”—Persephone freezes—“Incoming! Get in the master bedroom, go hide right now. Leave this to me.”
Because of the churning in her stomach it takes Mhari a moment to register what Persephone has just heard: that in the hall, the doorknob is turning.
*
Mo’s arrival at Nether Stowe House goes smoothly, despite her last-minute stage fright. Part of her discomfort, she realizes, is a side effect of her single status. She has no escort: Bob can’t be here—Schiller would recognize him instantly—and it would be inappropriately out of character for her to turn up with a boy toy. Her social unease is ancient programming instilled in childhood, a Victorian sensibility that good girls don’t go to parties on their own or bad things happen to them. So as Zero pulls up outside the front steps and a uniformed police officer steps forward to open the door for her, she manages to disguise her snarl of self-directed irritation as a smile. “Good evening, ma’am. Your invitation, please?”