The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel by Charles Stross Page A

Arndale Centre?”
    “Oh, right!” The voice warms several degrees. “Are you one of the London exiles?”
    Alex assesses his existential state. “I guess so. Are you —”
    “Yes, me, too. What it is, Brains and I found a five-bedroom house for rent near Harehills Lane” – Alex winces, and begins to think of a polite formula for saying
don’t call me, I’ll call you
, but the speaker is continuing – “not
in
Harehills exactly, just close enough to be affordable. It’s got everything we want except it’s a bit too big for just the two of us, so we’re looking for someone to rent the two rooms on the top floor for, oh, five hundred a month plus bills? It’s fully detached, parking out front and a back garden, central heating, fiber broadband, and plenty of room. We can probably get Facilities to ward it and certify it as a class two safe house, if we can just sort out the rent and ensure it’s entirely occupied by agency bodies.”
    Five hundred a month for two rooms is admittedly very cheap, and it’s far enough away from his parents to offer a line of defense in depth. Sharing with a couple of guys could be very uncomfortable if they have bad habits, but on the other hand, they’re co-workers. They’ve presumably passed their security vetting, and a class two safe house with co-workers would mean not having to worry about keeping the curtains shut at all hours.
    “What’s the story behind it?” he asks.
    “It’s a family home. Something happened, and they relocated to Scotland, I think, and they’re looking to rent it out long term. They gave us a standard twelve-month let, and I think they’ll be happy to extend it – it had been vacant for three months when we got it.”
    “Is it available for viewing? This evening? Uh, what did you say your name was?”
    “I didn’t, but you’re welcome: I’m Pinky, your other hypothetical housemate would be Brains. You’re the guy we were tracking around Whitby last weekend, aren’t you?”
    Fuck me,
Alex thinks dismally. “Yes,” he says. He’s almost ready to make his apologies right now, but he can’t rent a whole fully detached house by himself – that’s the minimum Facilities will look at, for security warding – and it’s not as if Leeds is crawling with potential flatmates who are happy to cohabit with a creature of the night. At least these two jokers are unlikely to nail cloves of garlic to his bedroom door or install UV flash bulbs in the fridge. What can possibly go wrong?
    “I’ll text you the address. Say, are you in the office today? How about I pick you up from the Arndale car park when I clock off, backside of six?”
    Alex pulls his jacket on and picks up his backpack, then hangs out the room service card and heads downstairs. The hotel lobby is painfully bright: as the lift doors open he puts on a pair of tinted glasses and then his hat – not the current hipster-fashionable trilby, but a well-worn homburg he found in a charity shop in Epping Forest. There’s nothing like a full-face helmet for keeping the sunlight off your skin, but eating while wearing a helmet or a hooded robe tends to get you odd looks.
    Leeds’s city center is densely packed and walkable, but not very car-friendly – it grew from a village to a regional metropolis in fifty dizzy years starting in the early nineteenth century, before the automobile was a thing. The local red brick buildings (still smut-stained by a century of coal fires) rub shoulders with pompous municipal edifices carved from imported sandstone. Glass-fronted modern structures fill the gaps like bridgework spliced between rotten teeth. Leeds was blitzed in 1941, and the damage is especially visible south of the river, where the bomb sites were finally filled in during the 1980s with strip malls, windowless modern retail parks, and warehouses. It’s a thriving, bustling city, but not exactly high-rise. The only skyscraper on the horizon, the Dalek-shaped carbuncle that is