* * *

  As evil genius bases go, a shabby industrial estate in Sunbury-on-Thames lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. Had Phibes’s fortune kept pace with expectations, Vulnavia is in no doubt that she’d be walking into a spotless chrome-and-steel vault in the caverns beneath an extinct volcanic island in the Pacific. But con men,2 stock market crashes, and wars have left them in sorely reduced circumstances, and these days Phibes can’t even afford the upkeep on the family crypt on Egyptian Avenue in Highgate Cemetery, never mind a legion of boiler-suited minions.

  The windowless industrial unit is part of an anonymous complex within earshot of the M3 motorway. It’s fronted by a roller door behind which are parked two vehicles: an anonymous white Transit van, and the Doctor’s most valuable possession—his 1921 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost.3 (Vulnavia’s Nissan Qashqai sits out front.) The back of the unit is walled off and partitioned into a cramped office-and-toilet block, a practice room with a brace of MIDI keyboards configured to imitate the Wurlitzer, storage space for the Clockwork Band, and a reconstruction of the Phibes family crypt in Highgate Cemetery.

  The crypt is kept clean by one of the bandsmen, who Phibes has lately equipped with a second-hand Dyson in place of his right forearm. The larger of the glass coffins has been moved to the Buckingham Palace basement, but the single-occupant casket sits gleaming and spotless atop its stone plinth. Vulnavia leans over it, and her breath catches in her throat as she stares at Victoria, who lies within.

  The passage of nearly a century hasn’t touched Victoria’s appearance: she’s a lapidary blonde goddess captured like a butterfly within a collector’s glass-lidded case, still in her white satin presentation gown. She looks much as she did on the sacrificial altar, aside from the leather straps and the fading echo of her screams. Vesalius and his congregation hadn’t quite gotten around to removing her liver when Vulnavia erupted into their operating theater like an avenging fury at the head of Phibes’s automata. She’d fled with Victoria’s unbreathing body, then followed Anton’s instructions to prepare her for suspended animation. Vulnavia’s hands had been steady as she worked even though her soul was cold as ice. It had barely warmed up in all the decades since that horrible evening, not even in the sunbaked sands of Egypt or the humidity of Shanghai. Vulnavia took the chill of the grave into her heart that day and held it tight: until now.

  Now she works at the foot of the casket, examining the hoses and refilling the fluid reservoirs. There is a checklist and she reads through it twice, ticking off each step, then checking her work an extra time. Once the plumbing is sound, she checks the wards and the containment grid on the floor of the crypt for discontinuities. No alien eaters will be permitted to worm their way into Victoria’s vacant head during the revival process. Failure is unimaginable. Finally, satisfied that everything was in order, she twists a valve and starts a clockwork timer counting down. Then she ties on a surgical mask, walks over to the ratty, threadbare office chair in the corner, and settles down to wait.

  She’s done this before, but the last time—she has to think about it—was five subjective years ago, in the early 1950s. In theory the coffin can revive its occupant unaided to the point of restarting respiration and raising its lid. Nor is this Victoria’s first awakening. But she is always disoriented and somewhat delirious at first, and besides, the world outside will be passing strange to her. (Even the electrical sockets have changed this time.) It would be cruel to make her confront the corrosive winds of time without love and support, and Vulnavia won’t have it.

  Hours pass. Occasionally the coffin clicks, or gurgles softly: forty minutes into the process a gas burner ignites with a soft whoosh to warm the perfusion fluids to body temperature. Somewhat later, there’s a rattling splashing confusion as used embalming liquor, no longer even slightly radioactive, drains into the sluice beneath the coffin. Periodically Vulnavia puts down her book—she is rereading the first volume of Fantômas, drawing inspiration for the fanfic she is posting on AO3 for her own amusement—and checks the state of the mechanism. Despite its age it still works flawlessly, and shortly after sunset a motor buzzes softly and the lid opens.

  Vulnavia approaches the open coffin. Victoria lies so still that for a panicky moment Vulnavia wonders if she is truly dead this time. But then she notices the faint rise and fall of her chest, the tiny flicker of movement behind a closed eyelid. “Victoria,” she says softly, “it is I, Vulnavia. Can you hear me? Are you awake?”

  Eyelids flutter. Victoria’s voice is barely more than a croak: “Am I?”

  “I should say so.” Vulnavia smiles tenderly. “I’ll fetch you a glass of water.”

  Half an hour later Victoria is sitting in a threadbare armchair, fleece-slippered toes peeping out from under her gown as she sips a cup of weak tea. Her expression is slightly stunned. Vulnavia has propped a flat-screen television on top of the coffin and it is running a video she has compiled, titled Welcome to the world of the New Management. It might equally well be titled Welcome, Time Traveler, to the Future.

  Victoria has spent a grand total of two weeks out of her coffin since her first incomplete revival in 1925: most recently, a confusing day in East Berlin in 1955 (when her coffin was stolen by devotees of the Smoking Mirror as bait in a fiendish trap for Anton). Victoria is a socialite of the silent movie era, at home with biplanes and Ford Model Ts. Nuclear power, Concorde, and computers are not in her wheelhouse. “These fashions…” She clicks her tongue. “This film, it’s not a joke? Please tell me it’s not a joke?”

  Vulnavia tilts her chin toward a wheeled aluminum suitcase. “I bought you a selection of suitable outfits, dear. Luckily this century is very tolerant of eccentricity—in dress, at least. Casual attire is perfectly acceptable for the next week, because you need further medical treatment—” She catches Victoria’s involuntary flinch. “You needn’t fear the followers of rival rulers, though.” She smiles triumphantly: “The Black Pharaoh returned to us two years ago, and now He lives in Downing Street! The Mute Poet and the Red Skull have been purged, their followers’ heads are displayed on spikes in public, and His supremacy will be absolute in just a few more weeks! Anton and I have arranged for you to be treated in a clinic run by one of our congregation, guarded by the very government agency that once hunted us! It’s quite the most extraordinary turn-around.”

  There are secrets Vulnavia will keep from her love for the time being. A few awakenings ago she learned the term Future Shock, and it explained so much that had confused and frightened her during her stop-frame fast-forward progress through the twentieth century. Vulnavia has been awake for almost a decade since 1925: a year every ten years was barely enough to keep her bearings intact. But the archpriestess has slept for so long, most recently for sixty years, that she has been awake for barely two weeks out of the past nine decades. The shock of the new will hit her like a collapsing New York skyscraper if Vulnavia doesn’t ease her in. So she has resolved to spare Victoria the worst of her own disorientation by carefully staging her rehabilitation.

  “Once you are awake and suitably dressed I shall drive you to the hospital and we can get you checked in. There will be a battery of tests and examinations, but the actual surgery is quite minor, more like a spinal tap than actual”—she waves her hand in instinctive aversion—“cutting. There will be an additional ritual to improve the probability of success. You will be in an isolation room during your recovery, to reduce the risk of infection. But that’s good. There are books and educational television, and a thing called the web that I’ll have to show you.”

  Victoria looks guardedly hopeful. “When can I see His Dark Majesty?” she asks. “I have waited so long…”

  Vulnavia slowly smiles. “As it happens, there will be an opportunity shortly after your treatment is complete—at least, complete enough to leave isolation. A ceremony at Westminster Abbey, after which He shall reign uncontested!”

  Victoria’s gaze sharpens. “You say that as if it is in question! There is no other god in play—what are you withholding from me?”

  “His Majesty rules Downing Street as Prime Minister, head of the secular government, but England remains a monarchy for the time being.”

  “Oh.” Victoria nods, understanding dawning.

  “Arrangements have been made. In three weeks’ time, the Queen will take your place inside that box.” Vulnavia indicates the coffin, ignoring Victoria’s raised eyebrow. “There will be a ceremony at Westminster Abbey and the Prince of Wales will be appointed Regent while she sleeps.”

  “And the King?”

  Vulnavia sniffs dismissively. “There hasn’t been a King in England for more than sixty years.”

  “Good. I approve.” Victoria smiles. “Please continue.”

  “The problem is that the current Queen has been in power for far too long to simply depose: she’s almost outlasted Queen Victoria! The mana, the intricate web of oaths of fealty … the transition needs to be handled delicately. But once she is safely isolated from her worshippers His Majesty will assume complete control. The crown prince is elderly, and when he dies the traditional monarchy will be deprecated in favor of our Lord. And you are still his anointed archpriestess.”

  “Hmm.” Victoria puts her teacup down. “But surely there must be an archpriestess in London already?”

  “There is nominally a high priestess but you outrank her, my dear. The actual position of archpriestess has been vacant since you were murdered—the current high priestess is not of the prophet’s bloodline. So as soon as you are cured”—the sooner you have a working immune system again—“you will take your rightful place.”

  Victoria’s smile sharpens. “And the world will bow down in fear before us…”

  GLASS COFFIN

  After lunching at his club, Michael Armstrong returns to his office and sends a memo to HR about setting up a cover identity and private medical billing for Victoria Phibes. With the documentation he is expecting from Vulnavia it should be routine. Then he succumbs to an introspective stupor. It’s his own fault for trying to work after a heavy meal and most of a bottle of wine: he’s of an age when afternoon or early evening naps are a dismayingly frequent necessity. (To be fair, he’s not so oblivious that he didn’t clear his afternoon schedule of meetings first.) But it’s also partly the consequence of the black dog of depression that trails him everywhere these days.

  Dr. Armstrong has spent his adult life—almost forty years—in service to his country, quietly working to fix it wherever it is broken. He used to quote an American senator, Carl Schurz, if anybody asked why he did it: My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right. When he was in his early fifties he’d considered getting a sign made for his desk. But motivational rhetoric was frowned upon back then—not because it was against policy, but because it looked like trying too hard—and it seemed prudent to lead by example.

  Anyway, today honesty would necessitate a different sign, one more darkly resonant with the times:

  Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?

  Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

  Sitting on his office sofa with his eyes closed, he daydreamed about explaining himself to an old friend and co-worker who had been killed in action four—or was it five?—years ago. “You made a mess, son.” Angleton’s avuncular icy gaze always made him feel like a guilty schoolboy. “You had a choice and you made an unforced error and now you need to correct it, but are you sure you’re not making things worse?”

  Angleton—the previous host of the hungry ghost known as the Eater of Souls, before Bob Howard inherited that dubious role—would definitely make that point if he was still around, Armstrong realizes. Come to think of it, so would Jenny, his late wife. But she isn’t around anymore—fuck cancer—and it seems to Michael that there are fewer and fewer people on his side who he trusts unreservedly these days. Of course he reserves a different kind of trust for adversaries—the Prime Minister, his priestess and chief of staff Iris Carpenter, the despicable Phibes, his not-entirely-sane muse Vulnavia, and a host of other specters—but the certain knowledge of an enemy’s malice is grounding and reliable, if not comforting.

  Dr. Armstrong feels every day of his sixty years right now. There’s no respite in sight: he feels as if he’s been in survival mode for decades. He has so much accumulated leave that he can bring his retirement date forward six months if he makes it through the next few years, unlikely as that seems right now. But he has the certain knowledge that if he takes his eye off the ball everything will fall apart. Let us just get through the next month, he tells himself, and things can only get better. It’s his mantra, and if repeating it can make it true, that will be fine. (It isn’t fine, though. And he’s pretty sure he won’t get through the next month unscathed. Or at all.)

  Operation FAIREST is the moment of maximum crisis, a crisis that has been snowballing for decades; first came CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, and then the gods-damned alfär invasion triggered CASE NIGHTMARE RED. But the blithering idiots who’d been the government of the day had exceeded expectations entirely when they invited the worshippers of the Sleeper in the Pyramid to help them out! He’d been left with no choice but to make a pact with the avatar of a god in order to prevent a greater evil from taking root. But then the lesser evil had proven to be alarmingly competent (What did you expect? He was a Pharaoh back in the day, he ran an empire of darkness for centuries), and now …

  “Three more weeks. Or four. Then it’s not my job anymore.” He’s set things up so that Dr. O’Brien will be ready for the aftermath. He’ll be out of the game afterward, but she is competent to take over the reins. Come to think of it, she is about the age he was when he had to step up without notice to take over as Senior Auditor in the wake of events in the South Atlantic. (It was an unexpected promotion, and not the kind anyone ever desired: he still misses Sam’s advice and quiet, steady wisdom.) Dead men’s shoes.

  Fifteen minutes of postprandial shut-eye is all Dr. Armstrong can allow himself. Time, he reckons, is almost up: the reckoning is at hand. It’s at times like this that he takes comfort from the sure and certain knowledge that Hell is a figment of the human imagination. He opens his eyes and blinks blearily at his watch, seeing that he’s had almost seventeen minutes—unacceptable slothfulness. He stands and walks to his desk, perches on the edge of the chair he still doesn’t entirely feel he deserves, then picks up the phone.

  “Dominique, how are you? Yes? Good, very good. Can you spare me a few minutes this afternoon? Yes, when? Yes, very good. I’ll see you then.”

  Click.

  And the game is afoot.

  * * *

  For a miracle, both Mo and I get through the remainder of the day with no further humiliating meetings, incursions of extradimensional tentacle monsters, or other undesirable trauma: it is, in short, one of those rare afternoons when we both escape the office on time.

  Mo looks at me. I look at her. “Movie night,” we chorus, then I add, “after a takeaway.” Anything to forget the debacle with SIS this morning.

  (Reader, we do not get to do this anything like often enough these days: this is the first time since the Phibes movie double bill of a week ago.)

  I phone in an order and grab a quick shower while Mo fiddles with the TiVo box and queues up a film without telling me what—it’s her turn to surprise me—and then it’s time for me to go and pick up my goat biryani and her bhindi gosht. I plate it up and we eat at the kitchen table, then I grab a bottle of Big Chouffe and two glasses and head for the living room. “What’s on?” I ask.

  “It’s a surprise!” She gives me a saucy wink, which is a highly ambiguous sign in the context of a movie marathon, as opposed to, say, lacy underwear and an open box of condoms, but then moves over on the sofa and we settle down thigh-to-thigh and she raises the remote.

  “Augh!” I shriek, sitting bolt upright. “What? They made more?”

  “Ssh.” Mo puts a hand on my arm (meanwhile holding the remote well outside of my reach with her other arm—she’s not stupid). “I did some digging and, well, I thought we could combine some oppo research with entertainment?”

  “But I thought they canceled the third movie! Right after Phibes turned up and mummified the director with several reels of Super 35?”

  “Yes.” She smirks at me mysteriously: “But this is the other third movie, the one that eventually got filmed.”

  The title sequence scrolls, over a backdrop of bloodily illuminated curtains around a cinema organ pit where a sinister black-robed figure is hammering away at the keyboards like a masked maniac: The Revenge of Doctor Phibes, starring Vincent Price, Charlotte Rampling as Victoria Phibes, and Diana Rigg as Vulnavia Mrożek. What? I boggle slightly. “When was this—ah.” The credits scroll and I see it was released in 1978. “Okay, that’s different.” They must have upgraded the female leads to speaking roles in this one: how enlightened.

  Mo hushes me. “It’s really obscure, it’s not fully downloaded to the TiVo, and the rewind is crap, so don’t make me hit pause.”

  I make a grab for the remote and hit pause just after Phibes (for it is he) rises from the organ pit, throws back his hood dramatically, and blats, “Come, Vulnavia, let us descend to the crypt and awaken the sleeping beauty,” in his expressionless Dalek voice. (I see they upgraded his vocoder as well.)

  “Was this the same script?” I ask. “What changed his mind about it?”

  “The one they canceled was Dr. Phibes Meets Mabuse the Gambler, in 1973. But Revenge got made, followed by The Brides of Doctor Phibes, which is coming up next. Either the doctor didn’t hate the new script or they paid him off.” (I have some sympathy for his position: being the subject of a movie franchise is all well and good, but if it’s a horror franchise and you’re the monster, that’s got to suck.)

  “Brides plural?” I ask.