into an ascending fireball that lights up the grass in front of my nose before it dissipates.

I realize what’s happening: Alan’s men have made hard contact. There’s a rattle of small-arms fire, then another of those gas flares followed by a gut-liquefying explosion. They must be the XM-1060’s Scary was talking about, I figure. I stay down, but pull my phone up and speak: “Bob here. I’m still in the south field, and the balloon’s gone up about three hundred meters north of my current location. Can you let OCULUS Control know I’m out here?” I do not want to be a blue-on-blue casualty. I’m shivering as I speak, and feeling shaky and cold. I work my jaws and spit, trying to get the metallic taste of blood out of my mouth. I’m pretty sure it’s Greg’s blood. I feel awful about getting him into this, and about leaving him in the Landy.

“Patching you through right away,” says the DO, and there’s a click.

“Bob? Sitrep!” It’s Alan, sounding sharp as a button.

“I’m lying low in the south field about three hundred meters short of the yard. Greg’s down, the Landy is down, we nailed one target, there is an injured little girl in the wreckage.” I lick my lips, then spit: “Suspect EMOCUM Two is on the loose with a rider, either adult male or juvenile female. There’s a stealth glamor on the entire farm; you may not spot the Queen until you step on her.” A horrible thought hits me. “The woodshed.”

I put it together all at once. No sniggering now: Georgina was planning to clear the woodshed, but there’s damp rot in the roof beams. And it hasn’t been cleared. And the four-year-old is forgotten. And there’s “—Something narsty in the woodshed,” I hear myself saying aloud into the phone. “Wait for me before you go in!” I add hastily. Ada. Named for her great-great. Why should that resonate so—“Alan. Brick three. You sent them to search the outbuildings. Have you heard from them recently?”

“Yes, Bob,” he sounds almost bored. “They report all’s clear.”

“There’s a glamor!” I realize I’m shouting. “Are they in the woodshed?”

“I’ll just… shit.”

“I’m on my way,” I hear myself saying. “Let your people know I’m coming from the south field on foot.” It takes all my willpower to force myself to push upright onto my knees, then to raise one leg, and then the other until I’m standing. I am deathly afraid of what I’m going to find in the farmyard. One foot goes in front of the other. Clump, clump, squish, clump. The small-arms fire has stopped, but something ahead is on fire and the flames are playing hell with my night vision. A smell of woodsmoke drifts on the evening breeze, making my nose itch but partly masking the uncanny stink of the field.

I stumble towards the skeletal outline of a gate. It takes me a while to cover the distance because I keep stopping to peer around in the murk, rifle raised. If EMOCUM Unit 2 was in the field with me I expect I’d know about it by now, but you can never be sure. How do feral unicorns stalk their prey, anyway? Do they run in packs, like wolves, or are they ambush hunters?

Beside the gate I stumble across the disemboweled corpse of another cow; Graceless, I think, going by the prosthetic leg. It’s upsetting. (You can tell I’m English by the way pointless cruelty to animals dismays me.) The gate itself is hanging open, the chain and padlock neatly fastened around its post. EMOCUM Units don’t have hands, so that tears it—we’re definitely dealing with ensorcelled human servitors here. And that implies a controlling intelligence, which in turn implies—

The upper story of the west wing of the farmhouse is on fire. The thatching on the roof is smoldering, and the bright light of active combustion is rippling out behind a row of windows. I see the silhouettes of men crouching in the shadows around the barn. A fire engine hulks in the entrance to the yard, around the side of the house. I stand up. My phone rings. “Yes?”

“Get down, idiot.” Alan is tense. I drop to my haunches, keeping the rifle barrel vertical. “It’s the shed.”

“Yeah.” There’s something narsty in the woodshed. “Brick three?”

“Not responding, presumed down.” His voice is flat. “I’m behind the barn. Get yourself over here but stay low.”

I scurry over to the barn, where I find Alan and Sergeant Howe and a couple of troopers. They’re all in body armor and face paint, armed to the incisors with big scary guns. And they look very, very, pissed-off.

“There’s probably a little girl in there, Alan. Four years old, and all alone in the nest of, of a spawning unicorn Queen.” I’m light-headed and feeling careless, otherwise I wouldn’t dare speak like that under the circumstances.

“Yes. Also Lance Davies and Troopers Chen, Irving, and Duckworth,” he adds. “Do you have anything useful to contribute?”

“Lovecraft’s monster implied that a spawning Queen becomes part of a group mind or a swarm intelligence, or somehow becomes conscious, shortly before its offspring eat it. We’re now seeing signs of ritual magic—possession, concealment glamor. Let’s put that down to the sidereal age—” CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, when the stars are coming right and all things esoteric become dangerously accessible—“and speculate that the thing H. P. Lovecraft called Shub-Niggurath is using the thing in that woodshed as a vector.” I swallow. “And it’s in this farm. What I’m wondering is, what’s it going to do now? We’ve got it encircled, but unlike the sterile females, it’s not stupid. And it knows it’s going to die. Its whole raison d’etre is to maximize the number of its spawn who mate and survive…”

I trail off.

A little girl, a toddler really, who is under the power of the thing in the woodshed. Her elder sister should be at St. Ninian’s girl’s boarding school, but has instead gone AWOL and turned up on the family farm, riding an EMOCUM, in the middle of term-time, just as we began to investigate. I shudder. “Someone needs to go over—” I stop. “Shit!”

“Bob! Explain.”

“Lucinda is down on EMOCUM One in the South Field. Octavia was in prep an hour ago, but EMOCUM Two is missing. You know about schools and cross-infection? How if a kid goes to school with an infection, all their classmates and then everyone else catches it? If you wanted to massively amplify a unicorn infestation, about the best way to go about it would be to dump a ton of fertilized unicorn spawn on the doorstep of a girls’ boarding school. Especially with the TV series and movies and magazine spin-offs doing the rounds right now.” I spit again. “But the teachers and staff wouldn’t let a girl bring a live pet into a boarding school. She’d have to smuggle them in some time after the start of term, hide them in the saddle bags, or send for a magic steed and go collect them in person.”

Sergeant Howe stares at me like I’ve grown a second head, but Alan just nods. “You should double-check on that,” he says. “Be rather awkward if we had to firebomb a boarding school.” He taps his throat mike: “Alpha to all, flash, incoming hostile on horseback. Shoot the horse on contact, assume rider possessed. Over.”

I’m on my phone to the DO again. “Howard here. Please can you double-check that Octavia Edgebaston is still doing her prep in her dorm? This is an emergency. If she’s missing we need to know immediately. Also: any reports of white horses with glowing blue eyes riding cross-country—”

“Will do! Anything else I can help you with?”

I sigh. “That’s all for now.” I hang up, then look at Alan. “Why haven’t you burned the nest already?”

“Well, now.” Alan looks at Howe. “Sergeant, if you’d care to explain the little problem to Mr. Howard?”

Howe sucks his teeth and looks pained. “It’s like this, Bob me old mate: it’s a woodshed. Wood: made of cellulose, right? Burns if you ignite it?” I nod like a bobble-head. “Well, they also stored other things in there. Inadvisable things. This is a farm, and for fertilizer they use—”

“Oh no,” I say, as he continues—

“Ammonium nitrate. About a ton of it. Harry Edgebaston moved it into the woodshed a month ago, last thing anyone remembers seeing him do.” Howe bares his teeth. “It’ll make a bit of a mess if it brews up.”

Alan grins humorlessly. “Your theory that the thing in the woodshed is growing more intelligent and more powerful just got a boost, Bob. What do you propose to do about it?”

I’m about to swither and prevaricate for a bit when my phone rings again. It’s the DO. I listen to what he has to say, then thank him and look at Alan. “A riderless stray horse jumped the gates at St. Ninian’s about fifteen minutes ago. When it left, it had a bareback rider. So I reckon, let’s see, ten miles… you’ve got maybe five to ten minutes to get ready for Octavia and EMOCUM Unit Two. They’ll be trying to get to the barn.” I bare my teeth. “I want a sample retrieval kit, and some extras. Then I’m going to go and talk to the monster while you guys neutralize Octavia and her ride. If I stop transmitting, pull back to a safe distance and use the woodshed for target practice. Any questions?”

Five minutes later, I’m ready. At Alan’s sign, two of his troopers pull the woodshed door open in front of me. I step forward, into the stygian darkness within.

This is a pretty dumb thing to do, on the face of it; if you’ve read this report and the EQUESTRIAN RED SIRLOIN dossier you might well be asking, “What the fuck, Bob? Why not send in a bomb-disposal robot instead?” And I will happily agree that if we had a freaking bomb-disposal robot to hand we’d do exactly that. Alas, they’re all vacationing in Afghanistan this month—either that, or they’re in storage in a barracks in Hereford, which does us precisely no good whatsoever. And we’re clearly dealing with a many-tentacled occult incursion from the dungeon dimensions here, and those things eat electronics for breakfast. Much better to send in a warded-up human being: faster, more flexible, and I’ve got a couple of field-expedient surprises up my sleeves to boot.

For one thing, I’m wearing a borrowed helmet with a very expensive monocular bolted to it—an AN/PVS-14 night vision camera. Everything’s grainy and green and a bit washed-out, and I can only see through one eye, but: in the kingdom of the blind, and all that. For another thing, I’m wired up with a radio mike and carry a crush-proof olive drab box under my arm. We’re pretty sure there are no survivors in the building, which makes my mission all the more important.

For another thing—hey, don’t worry, I’ve nearly finished reading my laundry list—I may not be a hero, but I’m not the fourteen-year-old H. P. Lovecraft either. Dealing with eldritch horrors is part of my day job. It’s not even as bad as the paperwork, for the most part. True, the “moments of mortal terror” shtick really sucks, but on the other hand there’s the rush I get from knowing that I’m saving the world.

And finally?

I’m more than a little bit angry.

So I walk into the booby-trapped woodshed full of explosives. Two guys with guns are waiting behind the door as it scrapes shut behind me. All I have to do is yell and they’ll do a quick open-and-close, then cover my retreat. I plant the horrifyingly expensive mil-spec shockproof LED lantern on the floor. Right now, it’s a brilliant flare of light in my night vision field, quite bright even to my unaugmented eye. Showing me precisely where to jump if, if, if