- Book info
- Sample
- Media
- Author updates
- Lists
Synopsis
In this new Laundry Files adventure the fate of the world will literally depend on the roll of dice... twenty-sided dice, that is.
In 1984, Derek Reilly was just another spotty teenage dungeon master growing up in middle England. But then a secret government agency tasked with suppressing magical intrusions received a tip-off – and one midnight raid later, his life was turned upside down by the Satanic D&D Panic.
Decades later Derek, now middle-aged and institutionalized, is a long-term inmate at Camp Sunshine, a center for deprogramming captured Elder God cultists. He’s considered safe enough to edit the camp newsletter, and he even has postal privileges – which he uses to run a play-by-mail game. After 25 years, Derek finally has reason to escape: a nearby D&D convention. While Derek’s D&D games were full of fictional elder gods and world-ending threats, a LARP game at the con is a dread ritual designed to summon a great evil into our world, and it’s up to Derek and his players to stop them.
The fate of the world may depend on the contents of Derek’s magic dice bag.
Release date: January 7, 2025
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group
Print pages: 288
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
Reader buzz
![](/img/default_avatar.png)
Author updates
A Conventional Boy
Charles Stross
1
There was only one kind of weather in Camp Sunshine, and the wind threw rain by the rattling bucketload against the office window as Derek leaned myopically close to the typewriter’s platen. He dabbed a blob of correction fluid onto the stencil, biting his upper lip with concentration:
CANP NEWSLETTER, MAT 15th
Derek sighed. “I need new glasses,” he muttered, flipping them up onto his forehead so that he could squint the page into focus. A second blob followed the first, along with a sigh of exasperation. Am I turning long-sighted as well? He’d heard that happened with age. But the traveling optician wasn’t due to visit again for another couple of months. I’ll just have to wait. The correcting fluid stubbornly refused to dry:
CAMP NEWSLETTER, MAY 15th
Greetings to our new readers! This is the Camp Sunshine newsletter, brought to you by the Arts and Entertainments Office and edited by Derek Reilly.
WHAT’S NEW IN ARTS AND ENTS
We’re in for a rainy May, so this month we’re bringing you a shimmering schedule of indoor arts and pursuits. Jenny Morgan will again be teaching her extremely popular course in basket-weaving in Crafts Block ‘C’ on Tuesday afternoons, and Ryan O’Neill will be facilitating a workshop on Mayan poetry—
Derek lost himself in concentration, and laboriously typed another ten whole lines without needing any more of the precious correction fluid—it was fiendishly hard to get management to sign off on the stuff. The keys of the manual typewriter thwacked into the stencil, gouging letter-shaped indentations as he stolidly hammered out the news, referring occasionally to handwritten notes that he took from an in-tray. After transcribing each item he speared the notes on a rusting six-inch nail, where they fluttered in the draft from the window. Another jugful of water splashed off the glass and gurgled down the side of the Portakabin: Derek grunted and typed on and on, marching down the front page in disciplined single-spaced silence.
“Derek? Coo-ee!”
The door burst open, admitting a howling gust of rain and an unwelcome interloper.
“Hello, Marge.”
Marge—Margaret Nash, plump and busily forty-ish—unzipped her bright yellow kagoule and hung it atop Derek’s on the coat hook behind the door. “I brought you the Gazette,” she said brightly. “It’s Baltic out there! Is the kettle on?”
“It just boiled.” Derek peered at his nearly completed front page. He had a vague recollection of switching on the electric kettle awhile ago. Time really flew by when you were cutting a stencil. Marge sidled over to the chipped Formica worktop at the far side of the cabin and readied two tea mugs, with a prodigious clanking and clattering of crockery. “Any news?”
“Oh, you!” She chuckled as she switched the kettle on again. It began to rattle and hiss: the solitary filament bulb dangling from the ceiling flickered, a victim of the ancient camp wiring. “Iris was saying something about the public private partnership that’s just come in”—she emphasized the unfamiliar phrase—“about us all having to move out for six months while they rebuild everything.”
“What?” Derek finally looked up: “What did you just say?”
“The reconstruction! The budget’s come through.” Marge looked uncertain. “She says we’ll all have to move out. All of us lifers.”
“All of…” Derek trailed off uncertainly. He shook his head. “She can’t mean it. There must be some mistake?”
“Of course there’s a mistake!” She sniffed, pointedly. “We wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t some mistake. But this rumor’s true, for sure. The camp’s closing while they rebuild the accommodation blocks, and Iris says they’re going to rehouse us for the duration.”
“But what about the, the regular in-inmates?” Derek stared at his almost-finished front page, totally perplexed. “Are they going to be moved?”
“Oh, you! Of course they’re going to be moved!” The kettle gurgled to a crescendo and clicked off; Marge slopped near-boiling water into the two mugs, then put it down. “I heard they’ve got another camp all ready,” she said confidingly. “Somewhere in the Welsh borders, or maybe South Georgia. It’s going to be announced tomorrow morning at roll call.”
“But, but—” The nearly finished stencil mocked him from behind the platen. “—what about my newsletter? It’s going to the duplicator before then.”
“You’ll just have to do a special edition!” she said, showing no sign of awareness of the extra day’s work she was prescribing: “Think of it as an exclusive! Isn’t it exciting?”
* * *
Marge and Derek were both lifers: long-term inhabitants of Camp Sunshine who had arrived there through an unhappy chain of circumstances many years ago, and who had failed, for their own peculiar reasons, to reintegrate into civil society.
Most of Camp Sunshine’s population were transients, consigned to the camp therapists for reprogramming and rehabilitation prior to release back into the community. In most cases mere months separated their arrival (raving and straitjacketed in the back of a fake ambulance at midnight, their imprecations stifled by the containment grids built into the walls of the prisoner transport vehicles) from their departure (with friendly if slightly uncomprehending goodbyes, clutching a cheap overnight bag as they waited for the minibus to the railway station). If someone was still there after a year, it meant one of two things: either they were a member of staff, or the Laundry had fucked up.
The Laundry—not its real name, but it had been established during wartime in offices above a Chinese laundry in Soho, and the name had stuck—was the department of the Secret State charged with defending Great Britain against occult threats. Mathematics is more than an abstract intellectual pursuit; when we solve certain theorems we set up disturbances in the Platonic realm of Theory, creating echoes which beings in parts of the multiverse far stranger than our own can tap into. Theoretical computer science is a branch of formal logic—itself a branch of mathematics—which encompasses some very disturbing phenomena, including applications of computational demonology. And where you get demons, you get worshipful cultists.
The government had eventually learned—the hard way—that killing dissidents—or cultists—was counterproductive. It was better by far to monitor the harmless ones and only arrest the violent cases, then deradicalize or deprogram them at suitably secluded sites before releasing them back into society. Temporary disappearances could be explained with a variety of cover stories, but mass graves increasingly tended to leak ghosts these days. Furthermore, like armed political radicals, followers of the Elder Gods were less likely to fight to the bitter end if they knew they would not be killed if they surrendered. For these and other reasons, the Public Control Department of the Laundry pursued a tedious course of containment and harm reduction—and Camp Sunshine was a key component of the war against the cults.
Camp Sunshine was not exactly a prison, although an inmate who tried to walk to the gray-green fells of the Lake District visible in the distance would inevitably find their feet leading them back to the huddle of buildings at the foot of the isolated valley. (And the less said about the fenced-off driveway leading to the nearest road, the better.)
The facility had been built by Pontins Holiday Camps in the 1950s. Pontins marketed their holiday camps on the basis of sun, sand, and fun—a cheap all-included package holiday experience suitable for all the family, a short coach ride from the factory gate for those enlightened workplaces who ran annual summer clubs.1 Camp Sunshine was an experimental attempt to break out of their seaside niche and cash in on the hill-walking market. But it was doomed to failure from the very start by the whimsical microclimate of the Cumbrian valley it was situated in. The Lake District is one of the most beautiful, if hilly, areas of North West England, but it’s also notorious for its rain and Camp Sunshine sat on the lee side of a low mountain, downwind of a semipermanent hairball of dank, gray cloud.
Alternately freezing cold and raining, and cursed in the rare intervals of sunshine by midges that had apparently evolved from stealth-equipped horse flies, the package holiday entrepreneur finally gave up and traded Camp Sunshine to the government in settlement of a tax bill after three disastrous summer seasons in a row.
The Laundry had not been at the top of the list of organizations on whose behalf the Ministry of Defense bid for the land. But the Adjutant General’s Corps rejected it for a military prison (hardship pay for the guards had been an issue), then the Air Force passed on it for a radar site (not much use in a valley), and the Fleet Air Arm didn’t want it for a bomb range. At which point it defaulted to the lowest priority user: and so it was that Camp Sunshine was taken over by the Laundry and run on a shoestring budget, paint peeling, weary, and unmodernized since the early 1950s.
Camp Sunshine had never delivered on Pontins’s promise of sun, sand, and fun. Instead it rained sideways eight days a week, the local mice had evolved webbed toes and were working on gills, and such recreational necessities as paper and crayons were strictly rationed lest the inmates amuse themselves by sketching elder signs in their cell blocks after lights-out.
Derek was admitted to Camp Sunshine in 1984. Like everyone else he arrived in the back of an ambulance, straitjacketed and sedated. He was admitted as part of a batch, along with his friends Ian, Tony, and Nigel. Ian’s usual character was a level-eight halfling thief, Tony had a sixth-level dual-class half-elven fighter/mage, and Nigel a seventh-level human cleric. Derek, of course, was their Dungeon Master—or, as it said on the charge sheet, “suspected cult leader.”
What had happened was this: a concerned teacher, sensitized to the possibility of the occult dangers inherent in D&D by a Chick Publications comic someone had left in the staff break room, called an anti-terrorist tip line. “Last night I cast my first spell! This is real power!” boasted one of the children in the comic, and the teacher (being of an earnest, not to say religious, bent) desperately wanted to talk to someone about the problem pupils in Class 4B. He’d overheard them talking Demogorgon and Asmodeus behind the bike sheds, and the world of tabletop role-playing games was sufficiently unheard-of in southeast England at the time that the duty officer in Dansey House thought it better to be safe than sorry, and sent a snatch squad.
The snatch squad did their usual thing: they secured the ritual paraphernalia in accordance with their standard secure containment protocol, then detained the suspects before delivering them to Camp Sunshine for investigation and deprogramming. The family members were left memories of the disappeared going on a boating holiday in the lakes and a profound conviction that everything would be all right. Reports were written, memos sent, a case file created for Operation MIDNIGHT DUNGEON. Then the snatch squad went home—done and dusted.
But for Derek, the best years of his life were already over—and he was just fourteen years old.
* * *
The Arts and Ents Portakabin sat at one side of the fenced-off administration block. It was separated from the inmate barracks by two more fences: one of them conventional, the other featuring sacrifice poles bearing the oddly misshapen skulls of eldritch ungulates and a series of wards fit to curdle the blood of any necromancer who clapped eyes on them. The rain was still bucketing down as Derek shrugged into his kagoule, zipped it all the way up to his chin, and dashed across the gravel-strewn mud to the permanent site office.
As a trusty—an inmate who had been deemed useful and co-opted by the short-staffed management to fill a zero-risk job, in exchange for pocket money and access to the staff break room and its flickering tube television—Derek was legitimately allowed to wander freely inside the perimeter fence. (A freedom he mainly used in order to stay as far away as possible from the more deranged short-termers cluttering up the high-security zone.) Now he opened the outer door to the site office, turned left along a narrow, paint-peeling corridor, walked to the end, and knocked on a door.
“Enter.”
Derek opened the office door—sorcerously constrained to only allow entry with the permission of the occupant—and walked inside. Iris was working, or at least appeared to be working, so he sat in the least creaky visitor’s chair and waited patiently for Mrs. Carpenter to finish whatever she was reading. Admissions file, he thought absently. (Blessed with a photographic memory, he’d long since learned to recognize all the different admin documents at a glance by their table layout. He’d created some of them himself. Knowing how to design a character sheet turned out to be a useful life skill after all, despite his mum’s admonitions.) Probably another of the Golden Promise people. He tried to remember which bunch Mrs. Carpenter had been with when she was pulled in: Red Skull Cult, maybe? Or was she one of the Crawling Chaos crowd?
Like most of the other camp administrators, Mrs. Carpenter was an inmate—one who had come from the Laundry itself. She had done something unspeakable for which she was now paying the price: not so much one of the Slow Horses as a Slow Equoid. But because she’d been management level in her old job, she already had the necessary security clearances to work in camp admin. It was safe enough: she was watched and bound by geas to prevent her falling back into old bad patterns of behavior, and she could no more leave without permission than any other prisoner.
Mrs. Carpenter finally sat up and gave him a look that scattered his woolgathering thoughts like a blast of birdshot through a murmuration of starlings. It wasn’t a hostile look, exactly, but it had more than a faint whiff of what, now?
Derek cleared his throat. “I, er, heard a rumor,” he said experimentally, then his brain crashed and his lips froze and the world came to a screeching halt outside his head. “A-a-a-a—”
Mrs. Carpenter held up a hand, his cue for a time-out. “Sneeze or stutter?” she asked.
“Stutter.” Simple binary questions were easily answered. Derek took a deep breath while he got his thoughts back in order, then tried again. “Marge said the reconstruction budget’s been approved and I was w-wondering if I could ask you a few questions for the newslet-letter?” His stutter got a lot better—almost went away, in fact—if he got the words out fast enough. It was like rushing over a rope bridge, pointedly not looking d-d-d-down. Thought was the speech-killer.
“Of course. Let me just put this away.” Iris stood, character sheet in hand. She walked to the wall of filing cabinets, muttering something as she passed her fingers over the front of a drawer. It opened just far enough to suck the pages right out of her hand before it slammed shut again. There were no writing implements on her desk: she wasn’t so slack that she’d leave a pen in full view of the window, however many fences there might be between her office and the high-security zone. She walked back to her chair, dusted her hands on her jeans, then dropped her formality like a wet cloak. “How about we go to the break room for a cup of tea while I fill you in? You’ll want to take notes.” She gestured at the stationery cupboard he’d been wistfully looking at, unsealing it with a flicker of mana.
Oops, Derek thought guiltily. She’d somehow seen right through him. But—“It wasn’t a pretext,” he said defensively, “I really d-do want to write it up! Special issue, even.”
“Teatime,” she repeated firmly. Derek surrendered: he was at least a decade older than Iris but she clearly wore a +3 invisible cloak of authority, the same kind that head teachers, mothers, and policemen were all issued. She led him helplessly through to the break room, where somebody had already boiled the kettle.
Over the next half hour she gave him a quick rundown of the plans. “There is projected to be a four hundred percent increase in prisoner numbers over the next four years, due to circumstances you aren’t cleared for,” she began. Are the stars coming right? Derek pondered: there were plenty of rumors about that, an historic conjunction that thinned the walls between the worlds and brought the creepy-nasties out to play, making it easier to practice all sorts of mischief and magic. But he didn’t dare ask—loose lips didn’t sink ships half so much as they led to some energetic jobsworth organizing a fake boating accident, so that some poor fool like Derek ended up spending the next thirty years in pokey.
(Nigel, Tony, and Ian had been bound to silence and released into the wild under false identities pretty much as soon as Psych and Cults realized their mistake, a year after the midnight snatch. But Derek had swallowed too much esoteric lore about gods and demigods, then gone diving for legends and fables in the mythology section of the school library to customize the campaign he was running. It took them too long to work out that he was just a harmless Nerd of Dungeon Mastery with a stutter, some signs of mild autism, and an iffy talent. Once stripped of supportive family and friends, he was effectively institutionalized. Camp Sunshine was worse than a prison: it had become his home.)
“So we’re all going to have to move out for at least six months,” Iris was explaining. “They’ve prepared a temporary facility for you—a room in an approved safe house—and apparently there’ll be some job-related training. When the Phase One construction is complete and it’s time to move the trusties and admin teams back you’ll be offered full-time employment on-site. You’ll be an official staff member of the Arts and Entertainments department! Isn’t that good?” She smiled at him encouragingly, so Derek nodded, even though something inside him wanted to curl up and die. “You’ll be paid more, and though security will be tighter you’ll be housed in the staff wing—there’ll be much fewer restrictions there, you can even play video games and have your own DVD player.” Derek nodded. He’d seen adverts for DVD players and video games on the black-and-white TV. They didn’t make much sense to him, but he was sure there was a reason why people wanted them.
Copyright © 2024 by Charles Stross
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
![A Conventional Boy](https://bingebooks.com/files/books/photo/2025-01-07-002035/thumb2_8188Z7uzQNL._SY425_.webp?ext=jpg)