“The Free Church of the what?”

Mo takes a big mouthful of wine. “The Free Church of the Universal Kingdom. Officially they’re pre-millennial dispensationalists with a couple of extra twists, subtype: utterly barking and conflicted; oh hell. According to their party line Jesus was just there to set a good example, and we all have the ability to save ourselves. Who will be saved is predestined from the beginning of time, it’s their job to bring the Church militant to everybody on the planet by fire and the sword, and, er, it gets complicated real fast, in ever diminishing epicycles of crazy. I swear, the doctrinal differences between some of these schismatic churches are fractal… Anyway, the key insight you need to bear in mind is, they’re anti-birth control. Very anti-birth control, with overtones of accelerating the Second Coming by bringing more souls to Earth until Jesus can’t ignore their suffering anymore-is this ringing any bells yet?”

“You’re telling me they’re CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN groupies?”

Mo nods vigorously. “They’re mesmerized. What they believe doesn’t make sense in terms of traditional Christian theology, never mind real-world logic. That’s because the outer church is just a cover for something even weirder. The members we were monitoring were laboring under a really horrid glamour, level four or higher-I’m not sure.”

I shudder. I knew someone with a level three glamour about her once. Men would die for a chance to bed her if she crooked her little finger at them-often literally. The theological equivalent… I don’t want to think about it. “So. Amsterdam, then…?” I prompt her.

“Four of them were already there. Another three flew in the week before; that’s why the full-dress incident watch was started. AIVD thought it was preparation for an abortion clinic bombing campaign at first. But then the pastor bought a couple of white goats and the penny dropped and they threw it at Franz and his friends, who asked us to chip in.”

“Goats-”

“Goats, sacrificial, summoning, for the purpose of. The Watch Team were so busy keeping an eye on the explosives stockpile that nobody noticed the metalworking tools and the crucifixes, or the fact that they’d rented a deconsecrated Lutheran chapel three months earlier and invited their bishop over for a flying visit. It was only last Tuesday that they put two and two together and realized what was really going on. That’s when they called me in.”

She looks bleak and alone, clutching her wineglass as if it’s the sole source of warmth in the world.

“The bomb was a decoy. Turns out there were two cells working, one of whom-outer church-didn’t know they were set up as a cover story. The other cell, the ones with the goat and the summoning grid in the crypt of the chapel, they were the real operators, initiates of the true faith. They were all set to open a gate to a, a-” She swallows. I sit down next to her and take her free hand in mine. “I hate those things,” she says plaintively.

“It wasn’t just goats, was it?” I probe. “The goats were the setup for something else.”

“The chapel was right next to a nursery school,” she says, and falls silent.

Ick is about all I can say to that, so I keep my mouth shut and squeeze her hand gently until she feels like continuing.

“We’d picked up a squad of UIM specialists and a police anti-terrorism group who prepared to seal off the area. Trouble is, it was mid-afternoon and the neighborhood was busy; the last thing you want to do is to run an anti-terrorism exercise next door to a nursery school when the parents are coming to pick their kids up. It’s a target-rich zone and it draws journalists like flies to a sewage farm. So we were going to hold off until evening. But then the OCCULUS command truck monitors lost the sound from the bugs, and I began to pick up probability disturbances in the vicinity of the chapel, and it looked too risky to hold off. The troops went in, and I followed them. It was unpleasant.”

“What did they…?”

“They’d built a summoning grid in the altar. And they’d set up a greater circuit, with a geodesic pointing straight at the… the nursery school over the road.” She dry swallows again. “They started with the goats as a warm-up exercise. But there was a homeless woman, and they’d used her as, as-” Mo gulps, then wipes her lips. “Intestines. Ropes and hanks and skeins of-a greater circuit made of human guts, still joined to the sacrifice.” She’s not swallowing: she’s trying not to throw up.

“Stop.” I try to let go of her hand. “You don’t need to go on.”

“I need to.” She clenches her fist around my fingers and stares at me. “They’d crucified her, you know? The microphones picked up their prayers earlier: I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me-they meant it literally. I don’t know why we didn’t hear the screams, I think they might have sedated her first. I hope they, they did that.” That’s a forlorn hope; pain is a power source in its own right. But I don’t remind her of this. She’s shaking now: “The gate was open, Bob. I had to go through.”

My Joan of Arc. I rescued Mo, once, years ago; it’s ironic, a real giggle, that she turns out to be stronger and tougher than I am. Would you dive through a steaming intestinal gate into a soul-sucking void, armed only with a violin flensed from the bones of screaming sacrifices? She did. And she kept a lid on it afterwards, a stiff upper lip, while I was shuddering and stressed over what was basically an industrial accident. It’s a good thing to put your problems in perspective from time to time, but right now I’d rather not, because I’m doing the comparison right now and I find I’m coming up so short I’m ashamed of myself.

“The things in the cultists’ bodies had already eaten the blonde teacher’s face and most of her left leg,” Mo tells me earnestly, “but the Somali boy-child was still screaming, so I had to go after him.”

I feel my gorge rising: “Too much.” I splash wine into my empty glass and take a too-hasty swig. “ Jesus, Mo -”

Jesus was evidently the wrong word; she stands and manages to make it as far as the doorway, en route to the bathroom, before she doubles over and sprays the wine-soaked remains of her dinner on the floor.

I make it to the sink and pull the plastic bowl and the cleaning supplies out, then fetch her a glass of tap water. “Rinse and spit,” I say, holding the bowl under her mouth.

“Fucking gods, Bob-”

“Bed. Now.”

“We killed the bad things, but, but the little girl with the pigtails, I managed to carry her head back but it was too late-”

She’s crying now, and it’s all coming out, all the ugly details in a torrent like a vomiting storm sewer unloading a decade of pain and bloody shit and piss, and I carry her up the stairs as best I can and tuck her under the duvet. And she’s still crying, although the racking sobs are coming further apart. “Sleep and remember,” I tell her, touching her forehead: “Remember it’s all over.” I pull my ward over my head and hang it round her neck. “Repeat command light paramnesia level two, eight hours REM, master override, endit.” Then I touch her forehead again. “It’s over, Mo, you can let go of it now.”

As I go downstairs to clean up, I hear her beginning to snore.

MOPPING UP VOMIT AND CONSIGNING THE WRECKAGE OF DINNER to the recycling bin and the dishwasher keeps me distracted for ten minutes, but unfortunately not distracted enough to avoid looping through everything Mo said in my mind’s eye. I can’t help it. I’ve been through some bad shit myself, similar stuff. I’ve been through situations where you just keep going, keep pushing through, because if you stop you’ll never start again: but for all that, this one was particularly horrifying.

I think it’s the civilian involvement that does it; I’m more or less able to look after myself, and so is Mo, but a primary school… I don’t want to think about that, but I can’t stop, because this is where we’re all going, when the walls of reality come tumbling down and the dead gods begin to stir in their crypts. It’s put me in a theological frame of mind, and I hate that.