This time, there were only four of us for the teleport bracelets to throw across the world. Myself, Honey Lake, Peter King, and Walker. Two missions down, and already two of us were dead. After we solved this new mystery, would there be only three of us left to travel on? Alexander King had said, There can be only one, and it looked like someone in our group was taking that very seriously.
The hot and sweaty woods of Arkansas disappeared, and the next moment we were standing in the middle of a large frozen forest. The fierce cold hit us like a hammer, and we all cried out involuntarily at the shock of it. Harsh dead ground underfoot, tall dark trees with leafless branches all around, and a bitter wind that cut to the bone. I thought Loch Ness was cold, but it was nothing compared to this. Everywhere I looked, I saw nothing but dead trees in a dead land under a harsh gray sky. The sun shone brightly directly overhead, but its warmth couldn’t reach us. The air burned in my lungs with every breath, and my bare face and hands ached horribly.
I shuddered helplessly and hugged myself as tightly as I could to hold in some warmth.
The four of us stumbled over to each other, feet dragging on the uneven and unforgiving frozen ground. We huddled together in a circle to share our warmth, driven by the same brute instinct for survival that makes sheep pack together on the moors. All our teeth were chattering loudly and uncontrollably now, and our breath steamed thickly on the bitter air. Honey made a soft pained sound with every breath she let out. She didn’t even know she was doing it. Peter made low moaning sounds, and while Walker was putting on his best stiff upper lip show, he was shaking and shivering just as badly as the rest of us. We huddled in close, shoulder to shoulder and face-to-face, heads bowed against the fierce chill of the gusting wind. And for a while that was all we did. The cold was simply overwhelming, freezing our thoughts as well as our bodies.
Eventually, I forced my head up and looked around me. We had to find shelter soon, or cold like this would kill us all. But I saw only the widely spaced trees and the harsh stony ground stretching away to the horizon in all directions. Miles and miles of nothing but forest. My face and hands were already numb, and I could see hoarfrost forming on the others’ faces, flecks of gray ice across blue-gray skin. Ice forming on my eyelashes made my eyes heavy.
“Where the hell has your grandfather dumped us this time?” said Honey, forcing the words past numb lips as she beat her hands together to keep the circulation going.
“Don’t ask me,” said Peter. “You’re the one with a computer in your head.”
“No wonder you put Area 52 in the Antarctic,” said Walker to Honey. “Safest place to store all that alien technology you’ve accumulated down the years and still didn’t know how to operate.”
“First things first,” I said quickly. “We need to find some kind of shelter, or just the windchill will finish us off. Anyone know how to build an igloo?”
“I think you need snow for that, don’t you?” said Peter.
“Contact Langley,” Walker said to Honey. “Have them find out where we are, and then have them drop us some survival gear.”
“I’ve been trying!” Honey said through teeth gritted together to stop them chattering. “They’re not answering. I’m not picking up any comm traffic. The best my diagnostics can suggest is that something is blocking the carrier signal. That would take a hell of a lot of power, so the source must be somewhere nearby.”
“Good,” said Peter. “Let’s go there right now and get warm. Before things I’m rather fond of start falling off me.”
“Look around,” I said. “There isn’t anything but trees. We’re on our own out here.”
“What?” Peter glared wildly about him. “There has to be something!”
“Try not to panic quite so loudly,” murmured Walker. “It’s bad enough being frozen to one’s marrow without being deafened in one ear.”
“Screw you!” said Peter. “I can’t feel my balls anymore!”
“If you’re looking for help there, you’re on your own,” said Honey.
“I think you’re supposed to rub snow on them to prevent frost-bite,” I said.
“Rub some on yours!” said Peter ungraciously. “Mine are cold enough as it is!”
“You just can’t help some people,” said Walker.
“Let me try something,” I said.
I forced myself away from the relative warmth of the group, subvocalised the activating Words, and armoured up. The golden strange matter slid over me in a moment, covering me from crown to toe, and it was like slipping into a well-heated pool. I gasped out loud as the armour insulated me from the cold and the wind, and already I could feel sensation flowing back into my numbed extremities. I gritted my teeth against the pins and needles of returning circulation, and through my featureless golden mask I looked slowly around me. The mask boosted my vision until I could see clearly for miles and miles, my eyes seeming to dart and soar over the dead and frozen ground. And still there was nothing until I raised my Sight as well, and then at last I detected faint emanations rising up in the distance. An energy source of such size and scale practically promised a good-sized city. But it was seven, maybe eight miles away, on foot, through cold dead wilderness.
Under normal conditions, an easy stroll. Here, just possibly a death sentence for some of us.
I armoured down, gasping as the shock and pain of the awful cold hit me again. I gestured northwest with a shaking hand.
“There’s a city . . . that way. I think. Can’t say what kind of welcome we’ll get, but it’s our best bet. Hell, it’s our only bet.”
“How far?” said Walker.
“Seven miles,” I said. “Maybe less.”
We all looked at each other. No one said anything. No one had to. We all knew what that meant.
“Let’s go,” I said. “Sooner we’re there, sooner we can lounge around in front of a great big fire with hot toddies and a steaming fondue.”
“Fondue,” Peter muttered disparagingly as we set off. “So bloody up itself. It’s only bread and cheese, when you get right down to it.”
I led the way through the trees, and the others stumbled after me. We couldn’t even huddle together for warmth anymore; the uneven ground kept shaking us apart. So for a long time we struggled along in silence, heads bowed to keep our vulnerable faces out of the cutting wind, conserving our energy as best we could. The unyielding ground made every step an effort, like walking along the bottom of the sea with chains around our ankles. There wasn’t a sound to be heard anywhere in the forest. No birds singing, not the slightest sound from any animal. As though we four were the only living things left in this dead deserted land. My feet grew so numb I had to crash them against the hard ground just to feel the impact, and then my legs grew so tired I couldn’t even manage that anymore. I kept going. Complaints wouldn’t help and would only take up energy I couldn’t spare. Besides, I was damned if I’d be the first one to stop and call for a rest.
Not least because if we did stop, I wasn’t sure all of us would be able to find the strength to start up again. Real cold is constant and unforgiving, and it kills by inches when you aren’t looking.
After a while, I realised Honey had moved forward to trudge along beside me. I raised my head just a little to look at her. Honey’s coffee skin had gone gray from the cold, and her eyes had a flat, exhausted, hurting look.
“Why aren’t you wearing your armour?” she said abruptly. “Then you wouldn’t feel the cold.”
“I chose not to,” I said. My mouth was so numb I had to concentrate on carefully forming each word. “Because . . . we need to work as a team. Working together, striving together. As equals, respecting each other. Because if we’re a team . . . maybe we’ll stop killing each other.”
“You didn’t believe Katt’s and Blue’s deaths were accidents for one minute, did you?” said Honey.
“No. You?”
“Of course not. I’m CIA. We’re trained to see the worst aspect of any situation and plan accordingly. And you heard the Independent Agent. Only one of us can return to claim the prize. Killing each other off was inevitable at some point.”
“Killing is never inevitable,” I said roughly. “I’m an agent, not an assassin.”
Honey shot me a heavy glance from under iced-up eyelashes. “You really think you can keep this group from each other’s throats?”
“Of course,” I said. “I’m a Drood. I can do anything. I have it in writing, somewhere.”
“You could put on your armour,” said Honey. “Run ahead to the city and send back help.”
“No telling how long that would take,” I said. “Or how many of you would still be alive when I got back.”
She chuckled briefly. “You’re a good man, Eddie Drood. How you ever got to be a field agent is beyond me.”
We strode on, fighting for every step and every breath, forcing our slowly dying bodies through the dead forest. I lost track of time. The sun seemed always overhead, the shadows never moved, and every part of the forest looked just like every other part. No landmarks, nothing to aim for, nothing to mark distance passed. We were all close to failing, the last of our hoarded strength draining away, only willpower and brute stubbornness keeping us going. No one complained, or cursed, or asked for help. We were, after all, professionals.
I could have armoured up. Gone on, and left them behind. But I couldn’t do that. Someone had to lead this group by example, and unfortunately it looked like it was down to me. Considering how much trouble I always have with authority figures, it’s amazing how often I end up being one. Sometimes I think this whole universe runs on irony.
And then, long after I’d reached the point where I just couldn’t take any more and couldn’t go on, and did anyway, the trees fell back and I stumbled to a halt at the top of a long gentle slope leading down to a city in the middle of a wide-open plain. There wasn’t much to see: just high stone walls surrounding blunt and functional buildings. Not much bigger than a decent-sized town, really, with only the one road leading in and out. Could have been any place, anywhere. No traffic on the road, no obvious signs of life. Could we have come all this way across a dead land just to reach a dead city?
It didn’t matter. It was shelter. And the mood I was in, I’d burn the whole place down just to build a fire.
The others crowded in beside me, looking down at the city on the plain, too cold and numb and exhausted to ask even the most obvious questions. I started down the gentle slope. No point in arguing anyway. There was nowhere else to go.
We followed the only road to the main gate set deep into the towering wall. The brickwork was seriously weather-blasted, but it still stood firm and strong, which was more than could be said for the massive main gate. Something had torn the gate right off its hinges and left it lying on the cold featureless ground outside the boundary wall. It could have happened yesterday or years ago. There was no way of telling. Inside the towering walls, the city lay still and open and utterly silent. The streets were deserted, with no signs of life in any of the buildings and not a sound anywhere of men or machines. A brief Cyrillic inscription had been carved deep into the stone above the gateway.
“Cyrillic!” said Walker. “We’re in Russia! Anybody read Cyrillic, by any chance?”
“I do,” said Honey.
“Of course you do,” I said. “Know thy enemy. Well, what does it say?”
“Well,” said Honey, trying to frown with her frozen forehead. “I can read one letter and two numbers. X37.”
“Somehow it always sounds so much worse when he says it,” said Walker. “What’s wrong, Eddie? Are we to take it you know of this place?”
“If there was anywhere else to go, I’d go there,” I said. “Running. I know this city’s reputation. I know what it is and what it was for, and we shouldn’t be here.”
“I want to go home,” Peter said miserably.
“Russia,” Honey said thoughtfully. “I have contacts here, if I can just find a working comm system . . . What’s so bad about this place, Eddie?”
“Who cares?” said Peter. “It looks warm.”
“This is one of the old secret Soviet science cities,” I said. “Abandoned years ago. X37 means we’re in Tunguska territory, in northern Siberia.”
“Wait a minute,” said Peter. “As in, the Tunguska Event of 1908? That must be what we’re here for!”
“I hope so,” I said. “There’s a mystery in X37 too, but I really don’t think I want to know what it is. X37 was a bad place where bad things happened, and just maybe they still do.”
“It offers shelter and the possibility of warm clothes and food,” said Walker. “First things first.”
And so we became the first people to enter X37 for many years, lambs to the slaughter, walking its empty streets looking for a suitable store to break into. To keep all our minds off the cold and to keep the others from asking too many questions about X37 just yet, I did my usual Drood font-of-all-knowledge bit and filled them in on what I knew of the great Tunguska Event.
In 1908, at 7:17 a.m. on the 30th of June, something hit northern Siberia with enough force to shake the world. There was a huge explosion in the remote and largely uninhabited territory of Tunguska, later estimated to be between ten and twenty megatons—more powerful than any nuclear bomb ever exploded. The force of the explosion felled some eighty million trees, uprooting them and knocking them flat over a range of eight hundred and thirty square miles. The light generated by this impact was so bright and lasting that men in London were able to read a newspaper in the street at midnight.
But the event wasn’t properly investigated until some twenty years later. The First World War and the Russian Revolution got in the way, and the Soviet authorities consistently refused all offers of outside scientific help. In 1928, a team of Russian scientists made the long and difficult journey into the frozen heart of northern Siberia, to investigate, and that’s when the mystery began. Because what the scientists found there made no sense at all.
Everyone’s first thought was that a really big meteor had finally made its way down through the atmosphere and struck us what should have been a killing blow, but there wasn’t any crater. Nothing. Not even a dent in the ground. So it couldn’t have been a meteor. Next thought: a comet. Since comets are mostly composed of ice and gas, it was just possible that a really big comet had made its way down through the atmosphere and exploded at ground level. Such things had been known to happen, on a much smaller scale. But in every such case, the exploding comet had driven certain identifying chemicals and elements into the ground, and there weren’t any at Tunguska. So, not a comet.
Then someone came up with the idea of a great volcanic explosion from underground caused by accumulated pressure. Except that would have left a crater too. There have been more theories down the years: a crashing alien spacecraft, a miniature black hole just passing through, even an escape attempt from Hell. But my family would have known about those. A century after the Tunguska Event, the scientists are still arguing and getting nowhere.
“That’s all very well and groovy,” said Peter. “But that’s there, and we are here. What is this place? Why doesn’t it have a proper name? And, most important, why the Oh, shit?”
“All those old science cities had bad reputations,” I said. “But X37 was in a class all its own. And, it may be coincidence or it may not . . . but we’re not that far from one of the great Drood secrets. Some miles from here, something very old and unspeakably powerful lies sleeping, buried deep under the permafrost. We need to be really careful while we’re here that we don’t do anything that might waken it.”
“The end of everything,” I said. “The destruction of the world and humanity as we know it. Hell on earth, forever and ever.”
“Ah,” said Walker. “Let’s not do that, then.”
“Best not,” I said.
“You can be such a drama queen sometimes, Eddie,” said Honey. She looked at me suspiciously. “How is it you Droods know so much about this godforsaken area anyway?”
I smiled as much as my frozen mouth would allow. “Wouldn’t you like to know . . .”
We trudged on through the deserted city. Still no sign of anyone. The only sound in the streets was the tramp of our unsteady feet echoing back from blank, unresponsive walls. We were all deathly tired now, inside and out, every movement an effort. I felt like shouting out to challenge the quiet, to see if anyone might answer, but I didn’t. If anyone was still alive in this abandoned place, I was pretty sure they wouldn’t be the kind of people I’d want to meet. And even beyond that . . . this city was too still, too quiet. Like a crouching cat ready to jump out on its prey. It felt like we were being watched. From everywhere.
The streetlamps were out, and there wasn’t a single light burning in any of the windows. No sign of any power in any part of the city. Now and again we’d come across an old-fashioned boxy car with its doors open and its windows and windshield shattered. Great rusty holes gaped in the metalwork, as though it was rotting away. The buildings were all typical old Soviet architecture: massive concrete blocks and brutal stone edifices, with all the character and appeal of a slap round the face. No sign of occupation anywhere.
We finally found a clothing store. Behind the smeared glass there were heavy coats and hats on display. We gathered before the display like starving children confronted with an all-you-can-eat buffet. Walker tried the door, but it was locked.
“Let me beat some feeling back into my hands, and I’ll have that lock picked in under a minute,” said Honey.
I armoured up and kicked the door in. My golden foot slammed the heavy door right off its hinges and sent it flying back several feet into the store. I armoured down. The others were all looking at me. They still weren’t used to seeing me in my armour and all the things it could do. Good. Keep them respectful and off balance, and maybe they’d think twice about killing each other. Honey looked almost envious that I should have such a useful thing and she didn’t. Certainly beat the hell out of her yellow submersible. Walker looked thoughtful. Peter kept his distance and tried to pretend he wasn’t staring at the torc around my throat.
Inside the store, we grabbed the heaviest overcoats we could find from the display dummies and wrapped ourselves up in them, almost moaning with pleasure. We then spent some time just walking up and down, hugging ourselves with furry arms as warmth slowly returned to our frozen bodies. We swore and grimaced as feeling bit back into our numbed extremities, and when we could feel our hands again we clapped on lumpy hats and heavy leather gloves and long woollen scarves. We were out of the bitter wind at last, but our breath still steamed on the damp store air. Walker suggested breaking up the furnishings to make a fire, but I had to say no. I didn’t want us doing anything that might get us noticed. Not yet. Peter had all but buried himself under the biggest coat he could find, together with an oversized fur hat and half a dozen scarves. The colour had come back into his face, and the ice in his eyelashes had melted. He noticed me watching him and scowled.
“I’m still cold,” he said, his voice muffled behind a pulled-up scarf. “And very hungry.”
“And utterly unfashionable,” said Honey. Incredibly, she’d managed to find another long white fur coat to replace the one she’d left in Arkansas. And a white pillbox hat, white gloves, and white leather boots. Somewhere, a nude polar bear was shivering in his cave and cursing mankind.
Walker looked smart but casual, which was no mean feat when wrapped in old-fashioned Russian tailoring, which went in more for bulk than quality. He looked at the mechanical till on the counter, with its dusty brass keys, and frowned.
“Do you suppose we ought to leave . . . something? As payment? Feels a bit like stealing, otherwise.”
“Leave it to who?” said Honey. “Everyone’s gone.”
“Odd, that,” said Peter from deep inside his huge fur coat. “It’s like everyone just got up and left. Maybe they left some canned food behind. You got a can opener in that armour of yours, Drood?”
“How can you be hungry already?” said Walker. “You had some perfectly nice charred beaver only a few hours ago.”
“I am trying very hard to forget that,” said Peter. “Look, I am so hungry right now that if we should happen to come across a monster in this city, I am going to kill, skin, and eat the whole thing. Not necessarily in that order. In fact, someone had better find me a monster pretty damned soon, because you guys are starting to look increasingly edible.”
Strength returned with our new warmth, and we went back out into the street. One direction seemed as good as any other. I was still wondering what we were supposed to be looking for, which particular mystery Alexander King had sent us here to solve.
“What are we looking for, exactly?” said Walker.
I shrugged, though my heavy coat muffled most of the movement. “If we are where I think we are, we’re a long way from the impact site of the Tunguska Event. So I assume we’re here to find out what happened to this city, to X37. On the whole, I think I’d rather stick my dick in a light socket.”
“You still haven’t properly explained what the problem is with this city,” said Walker. “Why was it built all the way out here, in the middle of a wilderness? I thought the Soviets only used Siberia for forced labour camps. What happened here, Eddie? Where is everyone?”
“Well,” I said reluctantly, “X37 was one of a whole series of secret science cities, all of them without any official name, just a designation. Because none of them officially existed except on very secret maps, in very secret offices. The building programme began in the fifties, at the height of the Cold War. Scientists were soldiers then on both sides, their discoveries ammunition for the war. The science cities were built using forced labour from the camps, deliberately set miles from anywhere civilised. Partly for security, partly because some of the experiments being run were so extreme that even the Soviet people wouldn’t have stood for them, but mostly so that if anything did go severely wrong, no one else would be affected. Especially if the whole city had to be shut down or bombed into rubble to cover up what had happened. Which did happen more than once, to my certain knowledge.”
“So only scientists lived here?” said Peter.
“Scientists and their families and enough people and infrastructure to support them,” I said. “And a military presence, to keep an eye on everyone. Most of the people who lived here probably never knew what horrors were being perpetrated in the strictly off-limits laboratories. Curiosity was not an encouraged trait in Soviet Russia.”
“What kind of . . . experiments are we talking about, exactly?” said Walker.
“Nasty ones, from the few files I’ve seen,” said Honey. “Early organ-transplant technology, using criminals and dissidents as sub jects. I once saw some disturbing black-and-white film of a man with two heads, both of them very much alive and aware. Other subjects were exposed to radiation at varying doses, just to see what it would do to them. They were a long way from any kind of protection or cure in those days. They needed data to work with.”
“Then there was chemical warfare,” I said. “Biological, psychic, and supernatural: all the officially forbidden weapons of war. The Geneva conventions didn’t reach out here. But . . . as the years passed and the pressure of the Cold War intensified, the research in these completely deniable cities took stranger and more dangerous turns. City X17 was tasked with trying to open gateways into other dimensions. They must have had some success, because the whole city vanished in 1966. That did leave a crater. X35 specialised in making superhumans out of ordinary people, using drugs, radiation, tissue grafts, and implanted alien technology. All they got for their trouble was a series of very expensive monsters. Who broke loose, in the end. The military hit the whole area with a thermonuke in 1985. No one got out.
“X48 produced cloned duplicates of important personages, with organic bombs hidden in their bellies. The ultimate suicide bombers, and the very best unsuspected assassins. My uncle James terminated that programme with extreme prejudice back in 1973. But X37 . . . was the worst of all by far.”
“Did your family shut this city down?” Honey said suddenly. “Did you do this?”
“No,” I said. “The Soviets hid what they were doing very successfully, until it was too late. By the time we got a whisper of what they were trying to do, it had already blown up in their faces. All we could do was send in a couple of agents to watch from a safe distance and stand ready to contain it, if necessary. It wasn’t. X37 ate its own guts out.”
“What the hell did they do here that was so terrible?” said Peter.
“Yeah,” said Honey. “I’d like to know that myself, before I take one step farther.”
“X37 specialised in genetic research and manipulation,” I said. “Ripping human DNA apart to see what made it tick. Cutting-edge stuff, in the early 1990s. They were looking for secrets, for marvels and wonders, and they found them. Poor bastards.”
The others waited, but that was all I was prepared to say for the moment.
“If I remember correctly, most of these science cities were shut down or abandoned in the nineties,” said Honey. “Too expensive to run in the more austere days of the new order, with the economy crashing down around everyone’s ears. A lot of scientists weren’t being paid, so they voted with their feet and walked out. The soldiers didn’t try to stop them, because they hadn’t been paid in months either. A few cities survived for a while by switching over to commercial research, with corporate or mafiosa backing, but by the turn of the century all of these backwater places were deserted and abandoned. Expensive leftovers from the Cold War, pretty much forgotten in the new corridors of power. No one cared. No one even remembered what most of them had been working on.”
She stopped and looked at me. So did Peter and Walker. I sighed and reluctantly continued.
“X37. Genetic research and manipulation. And not the kind you stumbled across, Peter. No Frankenfood, no goldfish that glow in the dark, no mice with human ears growing out of their backs. And no alien intruders going skinny-dipping in our gene pool, either. No . . . the scientists here were exclusively interested in uncovering the secrets of human DNA. It makes us who and what we are, but we still don’t know what most of it does. What it’s for; what it was intended to do. The Soviet scientists approached the problem in their usual blunt and pragmatic way. They experimented on people. Criminals and dissidents, Jews and homosexuals, anyone who spoke out or just wouldn’t be missed. There was never any shortage of unpeople, in the bad old days of Soviet Russia. No one knows exactly how many people suffered and died in the secret laboratories of X37. Hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands . . . no one knows.”
“Why didn’t your family do something about it?” said Walker.
“Most of what we know, we only found out afterwards,” I said. “When it all went bad, and the Soviet military tried to shut the place down and failed. It’s a big world, and even the Droods can’t be everywhere at once. Though I understand we’re working on that . . .
“The scientists working here were struggling to identify, stimulate, and just plain poke with sticks every part of human DNA they didn’t understand. All this information coded into each and every one of us on the most basic level. If they could access and learn to control even a part of it, maybe they could produce something more than human. So . . . here they were, working blindly in the dark, pushing buttons pretty much at random. Like walking into a room full of gas and striking a match to see where the leak is.”
“What happened?” Peter said impatiently.
“We don’t know, exactly,” I said. “The first clue the Soviets had that something had gone terribly wrong was when X37 suddenly went quiet. No comm traffic at all. No answers to increasingly urgent inquiries. The Soviet authorities followed their usual procedure and sent in the military. And not just soldiers either; these were Spetsznaz, their equivalent of the SAS. Hardened veterans of hard fighting on the Afghanistan front. They were ordered to go in, restore order at any cost, and ask pointed questions until someone provided answers.
“But even they couldn’t deal with what was running loose in X37.
“Five hundred heavily armed men went in; nineteen came out. Broken, hysterical, traumatised. Screaming about . . . monsters. The Kremlin was preparing to nuke the city, but by then we’d picked up on what was happening, and we stepped in to stop them. It hadn’t been that long since Chernobyl, and there was no way the world would have stood still for another travelling radioactive death cloud. World War Three was a lot closer than most people realised, in those days. We were run ragged, stamping out bushfires and making people play nice. Anyway, we sent in two of our local agents to look the place over from a safe distance, but the city was, to all extents and purposes, quite dead. So we just declared the area off-limits to everyone, on pains of us getting really peeved at them, and let sleeping dogs lie.
“And now here we are, breaking every rule there is just by being here. If we had any sense we’d get the hell out while we still can.”
“And go where?” said Honey. “There is nowhere else.”
“And the teleport bracelets won’t move us on till we’ve solved the mystery,” said Peter.
“I don’t like this city,” said Walker. “It’s unsettling.”
We all looked at him. “Oh, come on,” I said. “You police the Nightside! One of the most dangerous and distressing locations in this or any other universe. And you’re . . . unsettled?”
“Something bad happened here,” said Walker. “I can feel it. I feel . . . vulnerable. Not something I’m used to feeling. It’s . . . invigorating, I think. Yes . . . Been a long time since I faced a real challenge, with no backup, no Voice, just . . . me. The fate of the whole world could be resting on our shoulders, depending on what we do next. Isn’t it marvellous?”
“You’re weird,” said Peter.
“No,” Honey said immediately. “That’s Eddie.”
“I am not weird!” I said. “I’m just differently normal.”
No one had much to say after that, so we moved on, pressing farther into the city. Like most Soviet-designed cities, the streets were set out in a simple grid, and each street was just wide enough to let a tank through in case of insurrection. No signs of life anywhere, past or present. But after a while we began seeing signs of fighting, of armed struggle and mass destruction. Doors kicked in, or out.
Windows with little or no glass left in them. Fire damage, smoke-blackened walls, burnt-out homes. Whole buildings blown apart, reduced to single walls and piles of rubble. Some gave indication of being blown out from the inside. And lots and lots of bullet holes.
“There was a major firefight here,” said Walker. “Lots of guns, all kinds of calibre. Grenades and incendiaries too. So why aren’t we seeing any bodies?”
“The few soldiers who staggered out of this place spoke of monsters,” I said. “That is, those who weren’t so traumatised that they never spoke again. So who, or what, were they firing at? There must have been bodies at some point, soldiers and civilians. So who moved them?”
None of us had any answers, so we just kept walking. We passed one building so weakened and precarious that just the rhythm of our footsteps was enough to bring it down. It slumped forward quite slowly, almost apologetically, giving us plenty of time to get clear. The walls just folded up and fell apart, and the whole thing slammed down into the street. A great cloud flew up, as much dust as smoke, but the sound of the collapse was strangely muffled, and the echoes didn’t last. The silence quickly returned, as though it resented being disturbed.
Honey had her shimmering crystal weapon in her hand, glaring around her, ready for an attack or a target, but nothing showed itself. Part of a wall crumbled forward unexpectedly, and Honey whirled around and shot it. The vivid energy blast blew the brickwork apart, sending fragments flying through the air. We all ducked, and then straightened up and looked at Honey accusingly. She gave us her best I meant to do that look and made the crystal weapon disappear.
“Well done,” said Walker just a little heavily. “That wall will never jump out at anyone ever again. And if there are any survivors here, they now know for certain that they have visitors. Visitors with guns and a complete willingness to use them. Perhaps you’d like to shoot one of us in the foot while you’re at it?”
“Don’t tempt me,” said Honey.
“In dangerous situations, self-control is a virtue,” said Walker.
“Don’t you patronise me, you stuck-up Brit,” said Honey. “Sometimes you just have to shoot something.”
“Typical CIA,” said Peter.
We headed deeper into the city, and the evidence of hard fighting became more extreme. Whole buildings blown apart, leaving gaps in street terraces like teeth pulled from a jaw. Those left standing had been gutted by fires left to burn until they died down naturally. We checked inside a few of the safer-looking ruins. Still no bodies. There were long straight cracks in the walls, almost like claw marks, and gaping holes like jagged wounds. There was something . . . off about it all. I’ve seen my share of fighting and the damage it causes, but this was different. The pieces of what had happened here wouldn’t fit together, no matter how I arranged them.
And then we came to a street covered and caked in dried blood. More black than red, the great stain ran the whole length of the street, rising up in long tidal splashes along the sides of buildings, as though a great raging river of blood had swept from one end of the street to the other.
“So much blood . . .” Honey said thoughtfully. “How many people died here?”
“And who killed them?” said Peter, looking quickly about him.
“Still no bodies,” observed Walker, leaning casually on his umbrella and studying the scene with professional interest.
“Maybe something ate all the bodies,” I said. “Monsters, remember? Something’s still here. I can feel it. Watching us.”
“Hope it’s not rats,” Peter said abruptly. “Can’t stand rats. Not too keen on mice, either.”
“Oh, mice are no bother,” I said. “When I was a youngster, part of my duties at Drood Hall was to do a round before breakfast and check all the mousetraps. Then I’d take the filled traps to the toilets and give the little bodies a burial at sea. Used to make quite a ceremony out of it, when I was in the mood.”
“You see?” said Honey. “Weird.” And then she broke off, looking at me thoughtfully. “Eddie, you said earlier there was something very powerful not far from here, sleeping deep under the permafrost. Could it have anything to do with what’s happened here?”
“No,” I said immediately. “First, we buried him over a hundred miles away. And second, if he had even stirred in his sleep, we’d have known about it long before this. If he’d been involved with what happened here, it would have been much worse.”
“How much worse?” said Walker, professionally curious.
“Apocalyptically worse,” I said.
Walker shrugged. “Been there, done that.”
I didn’t challenge him. He probably had. I did once think about visiting the Nightside . . . and then had a nice lie-down with a cold compress on my head till the idea went away.
“Could this . . . thing, person, whatever have had anything to do with the Tunguska Event?” said Peter.
“No,” I said. “My family planted him centuries before that.”
“Something or someone that dangerous,” Honey said accusingly. “And you never told anyone?”
I met her gaze steadily. “It was Drood business. No one else’s. It wasn’t like there was anything you could have done. Then, or now. There’s a lot we don’t tell anyone else. Because if you knew, you’d never sleep well again. Droods guard humanity, in all senses of the word.”
Honey looked like she wanted to argue the point, but she could tell this wasn’t the time. She settled for giving me her best hard look, and then ostentatiously turned her back on me and glared at the blood-soaked street.
“So,” she said. “What were the scientists of X37 trying to achieve? Something to do with unlocking the hidden secrets and potential of human DNA. Potential . . . perhaps that’s the key word. Could they have been trying to produce psychic gifts to order? During the Cold War both sides put a lot of time and money into psychic research, hoping to produce people they could use as weapons.”
“Yeah,” said Peter, sniggering. “I saw that documentary. Trying to produce soldiers who could make goats fall over just by staring at them. Then there was that general of yours who was convinced he could learn to walk through walls if he could only concentrate just right. And let us not forget the whole remote-viewing fiasco . . .”
“We were getting really good results with that, towards the end,” said Honey, still not looking around.
“Yeah,” I said. “I heard. Problem was, you couldn’t keep them out of Pamela Anderson’s bedroom. Or George Michael’s bathroom.”
Honey’s stiff back positively fumed, while Peter and Walker and I exchanged smiles. I didn’t have the heart to tell Honey that the Droods sabotage all such government programmes, as a matter of course. We have the best farseers and psychics in the world, and we’re determined to keep it that way. We didn’t interfere with the fainting goats thing, though. Didn’t need to.
“This city covers a lot of ground,” said Walker. “We could spend whole days just walking up and down in it. And we don’t have days.”
“And I’m still cold and I’m still hungry,” said Peter. We looked at him. He sniffed loudly. “Well, I am.”
“We should have left you in the car,” said Honey.
“There has to be some way we can cut to the chase,” said Walker. And then he gave me a hard look. So did Peter. Honey turned around, just so she could join in.
I sighed and armoured up. The golden armour slipped over me in a moment; immediately I felt sharper, stronger, better able to cope. I hadn’t realised how much the city was affecting me until my armour protected me from its malign influence. Interestingly enough, the armour still fit me like a second skin, with no sign of the bulky fur coat beneath. Interesting, but a thought for another day. I looked around me, focusing my Sight through my featureless golden mask.
At once, the street was full of ghosts. Men and women and children, running and screaming and dying from no obvious cause, all of them trapped in repeating loops of time. Images, echoes, from the past. People, terrified, howling like animals, dying . . . Images imprinted onto the surroundings, repeating over and over again. Even with the Sight, I couldn’t see what it was that scared them, what was killing them. Just . . . glimpses of something at the corner of my mental eye. Quick impressions of something unbearably awful hanging over the city like a storm, running wild in its streets, close and threatening and utterly unstoppable. Inside my armour, my skin was crawling.
As though the Devil himself had come to X37 and was standing right behind me.
I sent my Sight soaring up into the harsh gray sky and looked out over the woods, miles and miles away, to where the terrible old thing lay buried, deep and deep under the permafrost. I could feel his presence, like a wound in the world, but he was still sleeping soundly, hopefully till Judgement Day itself. I looked down at the city spread out below me, and my Sight immediately picked up strange emanations blasting up into the sky from one untouched research building only a dozen or so streets away from where we’d stopped. A shuddering, staccato glare of unnatural energies stabbing up into the sky like a stuttering searchlight. Pure psychic energy spiking up from a single location as though to say, Here I am! for anyone with the Sight to see it. So there was at least one survivor left in X37, after all.
I dropped back into my head, shut down my Sight, and sent my armour back into my torc. The cold oppressive gloom of the city weighed down on me again. It was actually harder to think clearly . . . I told the others what I’d seen and pointed out the direction, and we all set off immediately, glad to leave the street of blood behind us.
The atmosphere of the city seemed to change subtly as we closed in on its secret heart. There were shadows everywhere I looked, dark and deep and threatening. The light seemed to be fading, even though the painfully bright sun was still directly overhead. The streets became narrower, closing in on us, and the buildings all leaned inwards, as though the brick and stone walls might bulge forward and engulf us at any moment. There was something in this city that didn’t want to be found. I increased the pace, striding down the increasingly narrow streets with a confidence I wasn’t sure I felt. I’ve always been happiest with menaces I could hit. The sooner we got to the heart of this mess and did something about it, the better.
“What’s the hurry?” Peter complained. “Whatever happened here, it’s over and we missed it.”
“No,” I said. “It isn’t over. It’s still happening. The beast is waiting for us to come to it. I think it wants to show us things.”
“Beast?” said Honey. “No one said anything to me about a beast.”
“Oh,” I said, “there’s always a beast. Come along, Peter. Don’t lag behind. That’s a good way to get picked off. Besides, the exercise will do you good.”
“Oh, God,” said Peter. “Someone shoot me now and put me out of my misery.”
“Don’t tempt me,” said Honey and Walker, pretty much in unison.
I looked at Honey, and she caught my eye and inclined her head slightly. I fell back to walk beside her, letting Walker take the lead. Peter just trudged along, head down. Honey started talking without looking at me directly.
“I always knew there were places like this. Hidden places, secret cities, where the Soviets did terrible, unspeakable things to their own people, in the name of patriotism and the all-powerful State. It never occurred to me, until now, to wonder if there might have been secret cities in other countries. If everyone had them, including America. I never even heard a whisper that there were, but we all did terrible things in the Cold War, in the name of security. Not just my people, the Company; there was a whole alphabet soup of secret departments in those days. Very covert, very specialised agencies, doing necessary, unspeakable things that were always strictly need-to-know. Officially they were all shut down after we won the Cold War. But in these days of terrorist atrocities and rogue nations . . . who’s to say someone hasn’t set up an X37 in America? What monsters might we be producing right now just so we can feel a little bit safer?
“Eddie, if there were such places, cities like this, on American soil . . . You’d know, wouldn’t you? You’d tell me, if there were?”
“I don’t know,” I said carefully. “Not my territory. For years I was just a field agent based in London. Hardly ever left the city, never even went abroad till the Hungry Gods War. Field agents are only ever told what they need to know, when they need to know it. It’s your country, Honey. What do you think?”
“I don’t know, Eddie. It seems to me . . . the more I learn from solving these mysteries, the less sure I am of anything.”
She leaned in against me, and I put an arm around her. Our heavy furs rather muffled the gesture, but she cuddled up against me anyway. For warmth, or comfort. Or perhaps something else entirely. We were both professionals, after all.
We came at last to the building blasting psychic fire into the heavens. The street seemed very dark, the shadows deep and furtive. We stood close together, alert and ready for a covert attack that never quite seemed to materialise. From the outside, the building we’d come so far to find didn’t look very different from all the others in the street. Stark and brutal, smoke-blackened and bullet-holed, but the front door was still firmly in place, and the windows were unbroken. There were no signs anywhere to tell us what went on inside.
Presumably because either you already knew, or you had no business asking.
“Are you sure this is it?” said Honey. At some point in the journey she’d pushed herself away from me and made a point of walking alone. Whatever moment of humanity or weakness or affection had moved her, she was over it now.
“Something bad happened here,” said Walker. “I can feel it so strongly I can almost smell it. What were they doing in this place?”
“Beats me,” I said. “But it left a hell of a strong impression on its surroundings. Bad things linger; really bad things sink in. And they can take a hell of a lot of shifting.”
I moved forward for a closer look at the ordinary, everyday door that was the only entrance to the building. A big block of badly stained wood with a surprisingly complicated electronic lock.
“Primitive stuff,” sniffed Honey. “I can crack that, easy.”
I armoured up and kicked the door in. Honey glared at me as I armoured down.
“Will you stop doing that, Eddie! The rest of us do like to contribute something now and again!”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Men like kicking things in,” Peter explained to her. “It’s a guy thing.”
The lobby was a mess, with overturned furniture and scattered papers everywhere, none of them in any condition to be deciphered. There were no signs on the wall, no arrows pointing out various departments. Again, either you worked here and knew where your place was, or it was none of your business. The first surprise was that the building’s heating system was working, and the place was warm enough for us to undo our coats. The second surprise came when the lights snapped on without anyone even touching a switch. The lobby immediately looked a lot less gloomy and threatening.
“First time I’ve felt human since I arrived in this godforsaken wilderness,” said Peter. “This ugly pile must have its own generators in the basement. Though I’m surprised the activation sensors are still working after all these years.”
“Russians built things to last,” Walker murmured, peering about him in an absentminded sort of way. “I wonder what else has survived here . . .”
I armoured up and looked around through my golden mask. The others backed away a little.
“Eddie?” Honey said carefully. “What are you doing?”
“Checking for things that might have survived,” I said. “Radiation, hot spots, chemical or bacterial spills . . . But I don’t see anything. Until I use my Sight, and then . . . The whole building’s a repository of past events: ghosts and echoes and memories. Just memories, though; no living presence I can detect. Just a lot of bad feelings. Pain and horror and death. And something very like despair.”
I armoured down. The others made a point of being very interested in something else to show they weren’t impressed by my transformation anymore.
“The generators worry me,” Honey said abruptly. “They shouldn’t still be working after being down for so many years. Soviet technology, for the most part, was never that efficient or reliable. If the city’s designers spent serious money on top-of-the-line machinery . . . what the scientists were doing here must have been really important.”
“The psychic energy source is very definitely upstairs,” I said. “It’s so strong it’s blasting out through the roof. So let’s pop upstairs, people, and see if we can scare up a few ghosts.”
“I never know when he’s joking,” said Peter.
We found the laboratory on the top floor easily enough by following the heaviest electrical cables along the walls. Extra cables had clearly been added later, and somewhat clumsily too, as though the work had been done in a hurry. The whole place seemed strangely clean. No dust, no cobwebs, nothing to mark the passing of so many years’ neglect.
The laboratory itself turned out to be just a great open room cut in two by a huge one-way mirror so someone could observe the scientists. Without being seen themselves. And there you had Soviet Cold War thinking in a nutshell. They even spied on each other. We stayed in the observation room, looking through the one-way glass. I had a really bad feeling about the other room, and others were so jittery by now, they were quite happy to accept that.
The laboratory was packed with bulky, old-fashioned computer equipment, powerful enough in a brutal sort of way. Old and new models were crowded together and sometimes even connected to each other. A single skylight let in a dim glow from outside. And directly under this natural spotlight was set something very like a dentist’s chair: all cold steel and black leather, complete with heavy arm and leg restraints. The chair was bolted to the floor. It didn’t look like the kind of chair anyone would sit down in by choice.
The room we were in was mostly full of recording equipment. Old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorders, bulky videotape recorders, and a single large television set to play them back on. It all looked very neat and organised, as though nothing had been disturbed for years. And again, not a speck of dust anywhere. Someone, or something, was preserving this room just as it had been, before . . . whatever had happened here, happened. Honey bent over a pile of videotapes, her lips moving slowly as she worked her way through the handwritten Cyrillic labels.
“Anything?” I said, trying hard to sound calm and casual.
“Mostly just dates and names. Nothing to indicate what they were up to.”
“That chair does not inspire confidence,” said Peter. “What did they do in that room . . . that they needed bulletproof one-way glass to protect the observers from what they were observing?”
We all looked at him. “How did you know that was bulletproof glass, Peter?” said Walker.
“I just . . . felt it,” Peter said, frowning. “Ever since I came in here, it’s been like . . . remembering someone else’s memories. Creepy . . .”
In the end, we just took a video from the pile at random and stuck it in the nearest machine. The old television set took a while to warm up, and when the picture finally arrived it was only black-and-white. The recording showed exactly what the scientists had been doing in the other room. Experimenting on unwilling human subjects, and testing them to destruction. We watched as the subjects yelled and screamed and shouted obscenities, straining desperately against the heavy restraining straps while blank-faced men and women in grubby lab coats stuck them with needles, or exposed them to radiation, or just cut them open, to see what was happening inside.
It was bad enough in black-and-white. In colour, it would have been unbearable.
We ran quickly through the tapes, just checking a few minutes from each. A few minutes was all we could stand. They were all pretty much the same. Cold-blooded glimpses of Hell.
One man’s head exploded, quite suddenly, blood and brains showering wetly over the attending scientists. Another man melted right out of the chair, his body losing all shape and cohesion, his flesh running through the restraining straps like thick pink mud. He screamed as long as he could, until his vocal cords fell apart and his jaw dropped away from his face. He ended up a pink frothing mess on the floor. One of the scientists stepped in it by accident, had hysterics, and had to be led away.
A middle-aged woman sat on the floor, wearing nothing but a stained oversized nappy. She had a huge bulging forehead held together with heavy black stitches and crude metal staples. She was assembling a strange machine, whose shape and function made no sense at all. When the scientists expressed displeasure at what she’d built and gestured at the chair, the woman calmly picked up a sharp piece of metal and stuck it repeatedly into her left eye, until she died.
And one man, with a Y-shaped autopsy scar still vivid on his chest and rows of steel nozzles protruding from his abdomen from implanted technology, burst all the straps holding him to the chair and killed three scientists and seven of the soldiers sent in to restrain him before one of them got close enough to shoot him repeatedly in the head.
We watched as much of it as we could stand, and then I told Honey to check the dates and find us the tape from the last experiment. The very last thing the scientists were working on before it all went wrong.
“Whatever happened here,” said Walker, “they deserved it. This isn’t a scientific laboratory; it’s a torture chamber.”
“What did they think they were doing?” said Peter. “What were they trying to achieve?”
“I think they were all quite mad,” said Honey. “If they weren’t when they started out, what they did here drove them mad.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think they had that excuse. I think . . . they just did what they were told. Perhaps because if they didn’t, they’d end up in the chair themselves.”
“We should burn this city to the ground,” said Walker. “And seed the earth with salt.”
“Play the tape,” said Peter. “The sooner we’re out of here the better.”
We stood before the television screen, standing shoulder to shoulder for mutual comfort and support. For a long time there was just static, as though an attempt had been made to wipe the tape, and then the picture cleared to show a man sitting in the chair. He was naked, the leather straps cutting deeply into his flesh. He sat stiffly upright, unable to move a muscle. He looked tired, and hard used, and severely undernourished, but there was nothing visibly unusual about him. Except for what they’d done to his head.
Two scientists, a middle-aged man and a somewhat younger woman, watched the man in the chair from a safe distance. They looked tired too, and from the way they kept glancing at the one-way mirror, I sensed they were under pressure to get results. The woman had a clipboard and a pen and ugly heavy-framed glasses. The man was smoking a cigarette in quick, nervous puffs and dictating something to the woman. He didn’t even look at the man in the chair. They had a job to do, and they were getting on with it. The man in the chair was of no importance to them except as the subject of their current experiment.
I wondered who he was, what he did, what his life had been like before they brought him here and took away his name in favour of an experiment number. I wondered if they tattooed the number on his forearm.
The man’s head had been shaved, and there were signs of recent surgical scars. Holes had been drilled through his skull at regular intervals so electrical cables could be plugged directly into his brain. Recently clotted blood showed darkly around the holes. The cables, carefully colour-coded, trailed away to a bunch of machines on the far side of the room. I didn’t recognise any of them.
Without quite knowing how or why, I began to understand what was happening. I just . . . seemed to know. The scientists were sweating, nervous, under intense pressure to produce results, to justify all the money that had been spent so far. Practical results that the military overseers could present to the Party to ensure further funding and preserve their own precious skins. So . . . certain shortcuts had been taken.
X37’s scientists had been studying the mysteries of human DNA for eleven years now and had nothing useful to show for it. Just a hell of a lot of dead ends and almost as many dead experimental subjects. Not that that mattered; they could always get more. Still, everyone was getting just a bit desperate. This particular experiment involved exposing selected genetic material to certain radioactive elements, and then grafting the new material directly onto the brain of the test subject. So far, so good. The subject had survived the operation. Now the scientists were electrically stimulating certain areas of the brain to see if they could make something happen.
The two scientists, the man and the woman, talked nervously together; sometimes clearly for the record, and sometimes talking across each other as they studied the monitor displays and argued over what was happening. I seemed to understand what they were saying, even though I knew only a handful of words in Russian.
(What was going on? Where was all this information coming from? Was the past sunk so deeply into its surroundings that just playing the tape was enough to evoke it all again, in all its details? Was the laboratory . . . waking up?)
The male scientist spoke of those parts of human DNA that resisted explanation. Whole areas whose purpose and function remained a mystery. Both scientists were convinced hidden talents lay buried in human DNA, just waiting to be forced to the surface. Old talents, long forgotten by civilised man. The male scientist’s name was Sergei. He spoke of old DNA, ancient genetic material, from before man was really human. He talked about the earliest civilisations, where men talked directly with their gods. They saw this as an ordinary, everyday thing: quite commonplace and not remarkable at all. Gods and devils, monsters and angels walked openly among mankind, their conversations described in great detail in all the oldest written records. Gods walked and talked with men. No big deal at all; just the way things were, back then. If you believed the written records, said the female scientist, whose name was Ludmilla. If these records were accurate, said Sergei, as accurate as everything else they described, who or what were these early humans talking to? Not gods, obviously; both scientists were good Party members and did not believe in such things. But . . . something powerful, certainly. Could it be that these gods and devils still walked among us, but we had lost the ability to see them?
I thought about that. They were talking about the Sight: the ability of specially trained people to See the whole of the world, and not just the limited part most people live in. (Just as well, really; if most people knew who and what they were sharing their world with, they’d shit themselves.) But though the Sight had shown me many strange and wonderful and dangerous things, it had never once shown me anything like a god.
I said some of this to the others, and Walker nodded slowly.
“There are things very like gods, in the Nightside. They have a whole street set aside for them, so they can show off for the tourists. But I am here to tell you that most of them are just supernatural creatures with delusions of grandeur and not worth the breath it takes to damn them. Godly pretenders and wannabes are one of the oldest con tricks humanity has had to endure.”
“I talked with the Wizard of Northampton once,” Peter said diffidently. “He said gods and demons are just artificial constructs of the deeper recesses of the human mind. We create these subpersonalities so that the conscious mind can communicate more easily with the subconscious. Or maybe . . . so that an individual could make contact with the human mass mind, Jung’s collective unconscious. The wizard said gods and demons were just two sides of the same superluminal coin.”
“Yeah, well, writing comic books for twenty years will do that to you,” growled Walker.
“I’m picking up all kinds of information from this room,” Honey said abruptly. “I know things I have no way of knowing. It’s like . . . suddenly remembering a book I read long ago that I know for a fact I never read. My head hurts.”
“It’s the psychic imprinting,” I said. “What happened here was so powerful, so traumatic, it literally soaked into its surroundings. Genius loci, and all that. A stone tape. And now, just by being here, we’ve started the tape playing again. I know things too. The man in the chair is mentally ill. His name is Grigor, and he hears voices in his head. Almost certainly paranoid schizophrenic, though no one’s bothered to accurately diagnose him. Apparently Sergei and Ludmilla there believed that people who hear voices and speak to people who aren’t actually there are being dominated by ancient DNA that’s been accidentally reactivated. So they’ve been experimenting exclusively on the mentally ill to try to locate and control that particular part of human DNA. Just in case they are seeing gods and devils . . .”
“That’s crazy,” said Peter.
“Bastards,” Walker said succinctly.
“Bad idea either way,” said Honey, staring fascinated at the flickering black-and-white images on the television screen. “If the old gods and monsters really are just projections from the subconscious, they might not take kindly to being forced out into the light. We keep things locked away in our heads for a reason.”
“Let sleeping gods lie,” said Peter.
“Well, quite,” said Walker.
“This conversation is getting seriously strange,” I said. “What does any of this have to do with what happened out in the city?”
“It’s something to do with the man in the chair,” Honey said flatly. “With Grigor. I can feel it. Can’t you feel it?”
“Could we be talking about Jungian archetypes here?” said Walker. “They were all the rage in my young days. Ideas and concepts given shape and form and even identities. Dark dreams from the depths of the human mass mind, driving people in directions they would never have chosen otherwise . . . Fads and fancies, politics and religions . . . Things are in the saddle and ride mankind. Pardon me; I’m rambling, I know. But we are on very dangerous ground here, and I think it behooves us to tread carefully. Remember that film Forbidden Planet? Monsters from the id? Unbeatable and unstoppable, rage and horror and all our most unspeakable lusts, given form and let loose on the world? Like the Hyde, only more so. Is that what happened here, in X37?”
“You’re right, Walker,” said Honey. “You are rambling.”
I was still studying the man in the chair and the two scientists. Grigor and Sergei and Ludmilla. Whatever information I was picking up, it wasn’t coming from the video recording. It was coming from the other room. Haunted, stained by what these people had done in it. The scientists had wanted to access the old DNA so they could learn to talk with gods again and bend them to the State’s will.
Children, playing with nuclear weapons.
Grigor suddenly convulsed, his scrawny naked body fighting the leather straps that held him in place. The chair creaked and groaned, but the straps held. (I was right there with them now. I could hear and see everything. Smell Grigor’s sweat, feel the static charge building on the air.) Sergei checked the readings on his instruments, and Ludmilla scribbled frantic notes on her clipboard. The cameras recorded everything. Grigor’s face writhed, his eyes bulged, his breathing grew faster and faster. The cables leading from his shaven head lashed back and forth.
And then he stopped moving. He held himself unnaturally still, as though afraid of drawing something’s attention. Sweat ran down skin flushed bright pink from exertion. Grigor was barely breathing now, his expression set and fixed. He was Seeing something; I could sense it. Something not present or evident to normal human senses. He Saw it, and I think it Saw him. His face twisted with horror and revulsion, racked by a terror beyond bearing. He screamed like a small child, like a wounded animal, like a soul newly damned to Hell.
I knew what was happening, even though I couldn’t see it. Information was pouring into my head, forcing its way in despite everything I could do to keep it out.
The scientists had done it. The old DNA was awake again on-line and up and running. Grigor’s eyes were full of the Sight. But he hadn’t looked outward, as intended, beyond the fields we know into other worlds and dimensions or the many overlapping layers of our complicated reality. Instead, his Sight had turned away from the world that had hurt him so very much, turned away and turned inward. He looked deep into himself, into humanity, into all the hidden secrets of our DNA. And he found something there, something buried deep in the genetic material of us all, something so awful in its significance that he couldn’t stand it.
His mind broke, leaping up and out, his artificially augmented thoughts tapping into the human mass mind, the shared unconscious that linked all the people of X37. He drew upon the power he found there, took it and shaped it and sent it out to destroy every living thing in the city. So that the vile experiments would finally stop, and the awful knowledge Grigor had stumbled across would die with him.
Grigor called up nightmares. All the things we’re really afraid of. Monstrous shapes, terrible archetypes, all the private and personal horrors that have power over us in the dark, in the early hours of the morning, when we dream awful dreams, of things we can only escape from by waking up and leaving them behind. Grigor summoned them up from the mass mind, gave them material shape and form, and turned them loose on the people of X37.
And the city screamed.
The scientists realised something had gone terribly wrong with their experiment. Grigor wasn’t crying out or straining against his straps anymore. He sat perfectly still. Sergei and Ludmilla approached him cautiously. He slowly turned his tortured head to look at them. Blood ran in endless tears from his unblinking eyes. Having finally Seen the truth, he could not look away, even though it was killing him. But he still managed a smile for his tormentors.
He sounded like a dead man speaking. A man who can speak unbearable truths because he has nothing left to lose. Sergei backed away, calling hysterically for help. Ludmilla threw her clipboard aside, ran to the control board, and hit the abort button. It should have killed Grigor instantly, frying him with a massive electrical charge, but he wasn’t ready to let go just yet. Huge sparks spat and sputtered on the air, discharging into the surrounding equipment. Ludmilla grabbed a fire ax from the wall and chopped at Grigor in his chair with hysterical strength. The heavy steel blade bit into his flesh again and again, but he didn’t cry out, and he wouldn’t die.
Sergei tried to escape, but the door wouldn’t open. Security guards were pounding on it from the other side, but it wouldn’t budge. Ludmilla backed away from the bloody mess in the chair that was still smiling at her, and she laughed shrilly past the dishevelled hair falling into her stark white face. The ax head trailed a bloody path across the floor, as though it had grown too heavy for her to hold up.
They came through the walls, and up through the floor, and down from the ceiling. Real and solid, not alive, still bearing the wounds that had killed them. All the subjects who’d been experimented on, who’d suffered and died in the chair, screaming for help and mercy and simple compassion that never came. They came for Sergei and Ludmilla, who died slowly and who died screaming at the hands of those they’d wronged. And when the dead were finally finished with them, they left the bloody messes behind on the floor and went out of the room and into the city to do even worse things.
The tape stopped. I looked around, startled. I’d forgotten who and when I was. The room, what had happened in it, had filled my head. I took a deep breath and wiped sweat from my mouth with the back of my hand. Honey had shut the tape machine down. She was breathing hard. I wondered if she’d seen all the things I had. Walker was looking at the floor. Peter had his back to us. I looked through the one-way mirror into the next room. It was empty, and so was the chair.
“How much of it did you pick up?” I said after a while. It didn’t sound like my voice. It sounded . . . shocked, uncertain. Lost.
“Enough,” said Walker. “Monsters from the id. The city’s id.”
“He killed a whole city with their own nightmares,” said Honey. “A whole city . . .”
“The one thing no one can face,” said Peter. He turned around but looked past us to stare into the other room.
“Good thing the crazy bastard’s dead and gone, then,” said Honey, trying for a brisk, professional tone and not quite managing. “No telling how much damage he might have done otherwise. No wonder the Soviets couldn’t cope . . .”
“They wanted a weapon,” said Walker. “They got one.”
“I think he’s dead,” I said. “No one could See what he did, and survive. But I don’t think he’s gone. What he did was so powerful, the psychic energies stamped themselves into the physical surroundings. Ready to emerge again at any time. Why isn’t Grigor’s body still in the chair? Why aren’t the scientists’ bodies still on the floor, or at least, what was left of them? Why didn’t we discover a single corpse in the whole damned city? Because the nightmares are still here. Still active. Still hungry.”
“I can feel it,” said Walker. “Like the tension in the air before a storm breaks. Like the pause before the ax falls . . .”
“Will you shut up?” said Honey. “All of you: pull yourselves together! We’re professionals; we can handle this.”
“Are you crazy?” Peter’s voice was shrill, almost hysterical, all the colour gone from his face. It was the first time I’d seen him really scared. “We have to get out of here! The city’s coming alive, and the nightmares are coming back. All the bad dreams you ever had. There are things in dreams no man can face!”
“Get ahold of yourself, Peter,” said Walker, but his voice lacked its usual authority and conviction.
“Hush,” said Honey, and something in her voice stopped us all dead. “I think . . . it’s here.”
The video recorder turned itself back on. The television screen came to life again. We all turned unwillingly to look. Grigor was back sitting in his chair, hacked apart but still alive. The two bloody messes that had been Sergei and Ludmilla were spread out on the floor before him like sacrifices to an unforgiving god. From outside the room, from the surrounding streets, came terrible sounds. Screaming and shouting and the roaring of what might have been maddened animals. Grigor turned his bloody head and looked right through the one-way mirror at us. He smiled at us, and there was little humanity in that smile, and less compassion. It was the smile of a man who had looked beyond the gates of Hell and seen what they did there; what was waiting for him.
“Why?” I said. “We never hurt you.”
Of course he couldn’t hear me. Grigor was dead, long dead. This was just a recording of his last message to mankind.
“What truth?” said Honey.
“Why nightmares?” said Walker. “Why kill all the people of this city in such a terrible way?”
The tape snapped to a halt, and the television screen went dead again.
“Well,” I said, putting a lot of effort into sounding calm and casual. “That was . . . worrying. And more than a bit spooky.”
“What did he See in our DNA?” said Honey.
“Probably best we don’t know,” I said.
“Could Grigor still be alive somewhere, do you think?” said Walker. “Hiding, perhaps, transmitting these . . . images to us?”
“No,” I said. “If there was anyone else alive in this whole damned city, I’d know. Nothing’s lived here for years. Even the animals have enough sense not to come in here. I don’t think anyone could live here for long, not after what happened here. This is a city of memories. Stored memories, gone feral.”
It was getting colder and darker. The room on the other side of the one-way mirror was almost gone now, consumed by shadows. The lights in our room were dimming, as though the power was being sucked out of them. Our breath began to steam on the air, and we all buttoned up our coats again. There was a growing atmosphere of imminence, of something about to happen. The four of us moved together, and then moved away again, driven by a need to be able to look in all directions at once. From outside the building there came noises. Voices . . . almost human. First as scattered individuals, then in growing numbers, until finally it was the voice of the crowd and the mob, driven mad by horror and bloody slaughter.
The sound of an entire city maddened and murdered by its fears.
“What is that?” said Honey, clapping her hands uselessly to her ears. “What’s making that noise? There’s no one here; this city is empty! It is! There can’t be anybody out there!”
“The dead don’t always stay dead,” said Walker. He looked confused, as though someone had just hit him.
“No,” I said quickly. “There’s no one out there. Not as such.
It’s . . . the memory of nightmares. When the people here died, when the city died, when all the men and women and children trapped in this place fell victim to their own nightmares, that out-pouring of emotion and trauma completed what Grigor started. Everything they experienced was psychically imprinted into the stone and brick and cement of X37. The whole place is one gigantic stone tape. And by entering the city, we’ve started it up again.”
“So, it’s not real?” said Peter.
“Real enough,” I said. “Real enough to kill us, if we let it.”
“But where’s the energy coming from to fuel that kind of manifestation?” said Walker. “What’s powering the playback?”
“We are,” I said. “Whatever happened here is still happening and always will be. Grigor started this by drawing on the power of the human mass mind, and we’re part of the mass mind. Just by being here, we’ve reactivated the recording and powered it at the same time. X37 is a trap: Grigor’s revenge on a world that would allow such awful things to be done to him.”
“We’ve got to get out of here!” Peter was shouting now, his voice strident and ugly.
“Where can we go?” said Walker. “There’s nothing else out there! Just the woods, the cold, and certain death. So suck it in and be a man.”
“Something’s in the building with us,” said Honey. “I can hear it, coming up the stairs. It doesn’t sound . . . human.”
“We’ll all start hearing things soon,” I said. “Whatever scares us.”
“There must be something we can do!” said Peter. “You’re a Drood! Do something!”
“I think Grigor’s still here, in this building, in some form,” I said. “He’s the origin and the focus for the stone tape. We have to find what’s left of him and shut him down.”
“How?” said Walker.
“I’m open to suggestions,” I said. “I’m just jumping from one educated guess to another.”
“You’ve got the Sight,” said Honey. “And the armour. Find him for us, Eddie. Before our nightmares find us.”
“It’s not that simple,” I said.
“I just knew he was going to say that,” said Peter. “Didn’t you just know he was going to say that?”
“Shut up, Peter,” said Walker. “What’s the problem, Eddie?”
“The stone tape recorded what Grigor originally Saw,” I said carefully. “If I go looking for Grigor, I might See it too. If that should happen, kill me.”
“No problem,” said Honey.
I armoured up, and the golden strange matter flowed out and around me in a moment, insulating me from the city’s psychic assault. I hadn’t realised just how close to the edge I’d come until the armour brought me back. Everything in the city was now dedicated solely to the destruction of the human mind and soul. I took a deep breath to steady myself, and then looked out over the city through my featureless golden mask, my Sight sending my mind soaring over the broken city streets, searching for a single pattern: the last remaining traces of the man called Grigor. There were other patterns, strange and awful, surging through the streets and closing in on the building where I and my associates were hiding, but I couldn’t look at those patterns too closely. Man was not meant to stare upon the Medusa.
Something tugged at my mind, half a warning and half a summons, and I turned my Sight in that direction. Grigor looked back at me, nailed to a cross made of intertwined technology. The computer leads trailing from his head had wrapped themselves around his brow in a crown of thorns. He smiled at me, a cold and pitiless smile. His face was full of something more than just insanity, as though he had gone through madness and found something else on the other side.
“I must,” I said.
I couldn’t tell exactly who or what I was talking with. It wasn’t just the stone tape, a recording of past events. Something of Grigor himself had been stamped into the stone and concrete of X37. I could feel his presence, the ghost in the machine. It took every bit of willpower I had to turn my head away and shut down my Sight. I didn’t dare See what Grigor had Seen. A madman in Drood armour would be more dangerous to the world than any nightmare currently running through the streets of X37. Grigor’s presence receded into the distance, still trying to latch onto me, as I fell back into my head and shut down my armour. I was breathing hard, as though I’d just run a race and come scarily close to losing. My knees buckled, and I think I would have fallen if Walker hadn’t got a chair under me. Honey leaned in close, pushing her face right into mine, holding my eyes with hers.
“What is it?” she said. “What did you see, Eddie?”
“Grigor is quite definitely dead,” I said. “But unfortunately, not entirely departed. He’s the key to all this. Stop him, and we stop the nightmares, the city, everything.”
“All right; what do we do?” said Peter.
“Only thing we can do,” I said. “Grigor’s part of the stone tape, which exists through the city. So the whole city has to be destroyed. Reduced to ashes, and less than ashes. A physical and a psychic strike, to destroy Grigor and X37 on all the levels they currently inhabit. This entire city has become spiritually corrupt, a real and present danger to the whole of humanity. Body and soul.”
“How the hell are we supposed to take out an entire city?” said Honey.
“He’s lost it,” said Peter. “He’s raving.”
“No,” said Walker. “He’s right. Destroy the city and seed the ground with salt.”
“Wonderful!” said Peter. “Anyone got an exorcist on speed dial? Preferably one with side interests in nuclear devastation?”
“Shut up, Peter,” said Walker. “You’re becoming hysterical.”
“Even if I could contact Langley, which I can’t,” said Honey, “and call in a dozen long-range bombers armed with city busters . . . Langley would never authorise it. An unprovoked attack on Russian soil? We’re talking World War Three, and Hallelujah! The missiles are flying!”
“If we could contact the Russian authorities and explain . . .” said Walker.
“We can’t,” said Honey. “And anyway, what makes you think they’d believe a CIA agent, a Drood, and someone from the Nightside?”
“Good point,” said Walker.
“Bombs wouldn’t be enough anyway,” I said. “Not even thermonukes. You could reduce the whole city to one big crater that glowed in the dark, and the imprinting would still remain, bound to this specific location. Genius loci. Grigor’s revenge has been stamped on space itself.”
“So what do we do?” said Honey. “Could your family help?”
“That’s . . . what I’ve been considering,” I said slowly. “A psychic strike that would wipe the area clean. But you’d need an incredible amount of power for that; enough energy to burn out any human mind or combination of minds. Even if I could call home, which I can’t, no one there could help me with this. But there is a power source nearby . . . that I might be able to draw on. More than enough to do the job. But it means disturbing what lies sleeping under the permafrost. I think . . . I can tap into his power without waking him. But if I’m wrong . . . if he wakes up . . . We could end up worse off than we are now.”
“Worse?” said Peter, waving his arms around. “The whole city’s come alive and wants to kill us horribly with our own nightmares! What could be worse?”
“It’s time for the truth, Eddie,” said Walker. “We need to know. Who, or what, did your family bury here, all those years ago?”
“One of us,” I said. “He’s family. A Drood, put to sleep like a dog that’s gone bad, buried so deep he’s already halfway to the Hell he belongs in. Bound with iron chains, wrapped in potent spells and curses, left to sleep till Judgement Day and maybe even longer. Our greatest shame, our greatest failure. The Drood who tried to eat the world.
“Our torcs and our armour make us powerful beyond anything you’ve ever imagined, but for one of us, one Gerard Drood of the eleventh century, that wasn’t enough. He explored the possibilities of the torc, studied its nature more deeply than any of us had ever done before. He . . . upgraded his torc, using certain forbidden techniques and ancient machines, and used his torc to absorb the torcs of others. Hundreds of them: men, women and children. He became . . . unspeakably powerful. An eater of souls. A living god.
“Having defeated and subjugated the family, he set out to subdue all humanity to his will and remake the world in his own image. He very nearly succeeded. Whole countries fell beneath his influence; millions of people bent the knee and bowed the head and praised his unholy name. He carved his features into the surface of the moon so that the whole world could look up and see him smiling down on them.
“But there have always been more Droods than are officially acknowledged; field agents and . . . the like. The Matriarch called them in, all the Droods who still held out against the traitor’s will. She bound them into a Drood mass mind, hundreds of torcs working together against Gerard’s stolen torcs. And in the end, even that wasn’t enough to defeat him. All that power, and all they could do was put him to sleep, bind him tight, and bury him deep.
“Gerard Drood. Grendel Rex. The Unforgiven God.”
“I’ve heard of him!” said Peter. “He’s buried under Silbury Hill, in the southwest of England!”
“Actually, no,” I said. “We let that rumour get out as a distraction. Silbury Hill is a burial mound from Celtic times with so many legends wrapped around it that one more slipped in easily enough. No; we brought him here, to what in the eleventh century was the ends of the earth. A harsh and bitter place where no one with any sense would want to live. Where nobody would disturb him.”
I managed a small smile. “You can’t expect me to tell you all my family’s secrets.”
“Why let the rumour out anyway?” said Peter.
“Because Grendel Rex had followers,” I said patiently. “His kind always does. They can dig their tunnels into Silbury Hill forever and a day and never find anything.”
Honey was frowning. “I never heard of Grendel Rex before this. And I certainly never read about any such takeover in the history books.”
“We wiped all trace of him from history,” I said. “Destroyed every account, burned every book and manuscript, shut up everyone who tried to talk. We could do that, in those days. Only myth and legend remained, and we could live with that. Scrubbing the moon clean was a bit more difficult, but we managed.
“Do you understand now? Why I’m so reluctant to do something that might reawaken the Unforgiven God and let him loose on the world again?”
“Hell,” said Peter. “If the Tunguska Event didn’t wake him . . .” He paused. “Or was it supposed to, and failed?”
“A lot of my family wondered about that,” I said. “But . . . he slept on. Our ancestors did good work. That’s what gives me the confidence to try this. But . . . if I accidentally break the bonds that hold him, he will rise up. And perhaps this time not even the efforts of all the Droods and all our allies and all our weapons would be enough to put him down again.”
“Oh, come on!” said Honey. “Get over yourself, Drood! The world’s come a long way since the eleventh century. We have access to weapons and resources unheard of in those days. I speak for the CIA: we’ve put down living gods before in our time.”
Walker looked at her, and then at me. “Eddie, what is the worst that could happen if he did rise again?”
“He’d finish what he started,” I said. “Subjugate all humanity, reshape the continents according to his whim, absorb the souls of every living thing into himself, and leave us just enough of our minds to love and worship him. Hell on earth, forever and ever and ever. That’s what could happen, if I get this wrong.”
“Well,” said Walker. “Try not to do that, then.”
The bedlam in the street outside was growing louder all the time. Screams and howls that had as much of the beast in them as anything human. They came from all sides, surrounding the building. We were under siege by the reawakened ghosts of old horrors. The room seemed colder than ever; a spiritual cold, a bleakness of the soul. The shadows were very dark, like holes that could swallow you up, or down which you could fall forever. They moved sometimes, when you weren’t looking at them directly. The room was changing all the time in small, subtle ways. Growing larger or smaller or deeper, while the corners seemed to have too many angles.
I could feel my breathing coming fast and hard. I could feel my pulse racing and a vein throbbing almost painfully in my temple. I’ve been scared before; being a Drood doesn’t make you immune to pain or death or failure . . . but this was different. A different kind of fear: primal, almost pure. We were surrounded by nightmares crossed over into the waking world and closing in. Despite myself I remembered running from things in dreams: unspeakable, unbearable, implacable things that I could only escape from by waking up. And I couldn’t wake up from this.
Anything can happen in dreams; in bad dreams. The dead can walk again and say unforgivable things. Physical shapes lose their integrity, become uncertain, their edges loose and slippery, no longer tied down to shapes you can cope with. I could feel a whimper building in the back of my throat. Honey had a hand at her mouth, gnawing on a knuckle. Walker had his back against a wall, lashing his umbrella back and forth before him like a sword. Peter’s bulging eyes were darting this way and that, anticipating the coming of something awful that always seemed to be coming from somewhere else.
Soon we’d start to see each other as nightmares. Maybe even attack each other, because you couldn’t trust anything or anyone in a dream. Shadows were rising up everywhere, taking on unnerving shapes rich with terrible personal significance. The floor beneath my feet was soft and spongy, and the walls were leaning inward, slumping forward like tired old men. Cracks in the walls took on the shape of human faces, smiling at what was to come.
Heavy hands slammed against the closed laboratory door. It shook in its frame, the wood bulging unnaturally under the force of the blows. Dreadful voices from outside, crying, Let us in! Let us in! I armoured up, but it didn’t help. Even that couldn’t protect me from the unleashed power of my own nightmares. I grabbed the nearest piece of heavy equipment and hauled it over to the door to make a barricade, but the solid metal turned soft and putrid and fell apart in my armoured hands. I couldn’t depend on anything anymore.
That’s the real horror of nightmares.
Lethal Harmony of Kathmandu and the Blue Fairy walked through the closed door as though it wasn’t there. I backed away. They looked at me accusingly, heads lolling limply on their broken necks. Honey saw them too. She opened fire with her shimmering crystal weapon. The energy blast shot right through the figures and blew up the door behind them. And then the weapon wilted and twisted in Honey’s hands, curling and coiling slowly and deliberately like a snake. Honey threw it away from her in horror.
Katt and Blue turned into my mother and my father and advanced slowly on me. They didn’t look like zombies, or the living dead, or two people who’d been in their graves for most of my life. They looked just the way they always did, when I thought of them: the way they looked in the last photograph taken, before they went off on the mission that killed them. Except they weren’t smiling now. I backed away, and they came after me. They didn’t say anything. They didn’t have to. They looked accusing, disappointed, damning.
And in the face of my certainty, they faded softly and silently away.
Honey grabbed my golden arm with a shaking hand. “How did you do that?” she said shrilly.
“I have worse things than that on my conscience,” I said.
“Then do something!” shouted Walker. “Before the worse things show up!”
Peter was spinning around and around now, convinced there was something sneaking up on him from behind, no matter which way he looked. Walker began to shrink, in sudden jerks and shudders, until he was just a child again, swamped in a man’s suit. He tried to say something but couldn’t get the words out, and he began to cry helplessly. Honey dropped down abruptly, sinking into a floor that had taken on the consistency of quicksand, sucking her down in slow, purposeful gulps. I grabbed her arm and tried to haul her out, but the drag of the quicksand was too great. I pulled harder, and Honey screamed in agony.
“Let go, Eddie! You’ll pull my shoulder out of my socket before it’ll let me go! You have to risk waking your sleeping god! Nothing could be worse than this. At least he’s real!”
And so I let her go. Turned my back on them all, drew on the power of my torc and my armour, and made contact with Grendel Rex, the Unforgiven God. The devil in his cold dark Hel, deep and deep under the permafrost.
Finding him was easier than I expected. My mind shot across the miles separating us in a moment, my Sight drawn like a magnet by the bond we shared. Of family. My vision sank down into the frozen earth, and immediately I was hit by the impact of his ancient presence, huge and forbidding and still impossibly powerful. I felt like a scuba diver, swimming through the cold night of the ocean and coming unexpectedly upon a blue whale or a giant squid. I felt so small, overwhelmed by the sheer size and scale of him. Just a mote in his eye.
I carefully reached out and touched his power. It was like sticking a drinking straw into an ocean or dipping a bucket into a bottomless well. The power surged into me, rich and raging, all I needed and more. And one great eye slowly opened in the dark and looked at me.
I stopped where I was, absolutely frozen by fear. “I’m Edwin Drood,” I said finally. “Just . . . doing my job. Trying to save humanity from destruction.”
“Because what I’m doing is important and necessary. Because I’ve nowhere else to go. And because . . . I’m family.”
I started to explain, but he pushed effortlessly past my defences and took what he needed from my mind.
I should have just taken the energy and left, but I had to know. “What did Grigor see in the depths of our DNA? What could he have seen to terrify him so completely? Do you know?”
The great eye slowly closed, like an eclipse moving across the face of the sun. I’m tired. It’s not time to wake up yet. Tell the family . . . I’ll be seeing them.
I ran, holding myself together through sheer force of will. The power I’d taken burned inside me, demanding release. Already it was consuming me from within. If I didn’t let it loose soon, it would consume me. I left the permafrost behind, my mind streaking over the frozen forest, and the city loomed up before me like a bug on a windshield. The streets were full of unspeakable things. Buildings rose and fell or melted into each other. A tidal wave of screaming faces swept down a street like so many possessed and terrified masks.
The sun was a giant face, screaming with rage. Grigor’s face.
I called up all the power I’d taken and bent it to my will. I held it in one hand, spitting and fizzing like a million lightning bolts, and then I threw it at the city. A great cry went up from the milling streets of rage and defiance and soul-deep horror, but I was riding the lightning with my mind. I slammed it down into the dark heart of X37 and drove the nightmares out; up and out, into the sun with Grigor’s face. For a moment I held all the writhing horror of X37 in one place, every last bit of Grigor’s revenge . . . and then I sent it away. Threw it in the one direction it could never return from.
Into the past.
I watched with godlike eyes as the compressed psychic energy shot back through time, screaming and howling all the way, until finally it couldn’t hold itself together any longer and it exploded into nothingness over the empty plain of Tunguska, on 7:17 a.m., June 30, 1908.
I woke up back inside my own head, lying on the laboratory floor. The power was gone, and I didn’t feel like a god anymore. I was exhausted, I hurt all over, and my eyes felt like they’d been sand-papered. I sat up slowly, wincing all the way. I wasn’t wearing my armour anymore. I looked around me. The floor was hard and certain beneath me, the walls were just walls, and the building and the street outside were silent again. X37 was no longer haunted by the ghosts of its own atrocities.
The floor had spat Honey out. She was sitting on a chair, shaken and trembling, but already bringing herself back under control. Walker was himself again, calm and collected and giving all his attention to adjusting his cuffs. Peter was trying very hard to look as though nothing had happened. I rose slowly to my feet, and they all turned to look at me.
I told them what had happened and what I’d done. I didn’t tell them what Grendel Rex had said concerning human DNA. He was a devil, and devils always lie. Except when the truth can hurt you more.
“A Drood did it,” said Honey. “I should have known.”
“Proving it to my grandfather is going to be a tad difficult, though,” said Peter.
“Are you kidding?” I said. “You can’t hide something like this! Psychics and telepaths across the world will have been deafened by what I just did. You won’t be able to stop them talking about it, though my family will undoubtedly try. Luckily only the four of us know the details, and I think it’s better we keep it that way.”
“Or the Droods will come and make us forget, like they did over Grendel Rex?” said Honey.
“Yes,” I said.
“Just another reason why we don’t let you people operate in the Nightside,” murmured Walker. “Only I am allowed to be that arbitrary.”
“Can we please go out and find a food store now?” said Peter. “There must be some canned goods here somewhere. If I was any hungrier, my stomach would leap up my throat and eat my head.”
“You know, I think I’d pay good money to see that,” said Honey.
We left the laboratory and the building and set off through the deserted streets. I hung back a bit, considering the others thoughtfully while they were still relatively open and vulnerable. Peter interested me the most. I’d never seen him really scared before. In fact, for all his youth and inexperience with the greater world, he’d taken the Loch Ness monster and the Hyde pretty much in his stride. He was interested, even impressed, but when the time came for action he didn’t hesitate, just got stuck in with the rest of us. Rather more than you’d expect from a man whose only experience of spycraft was in industrial espionage.
So; he was Alexander King’s grandson, after all.
But it was useful to know he had his limits. The nightmares had shattered his self-control, reduced him to hysterics. Perhaps because they were so clearly outside of his control. In fact . . . when it came to fighting the Loch Ness monster and the Hyde, he’d taken the first opportunity to fall back and let the rest of us do the hard work while he filmed it all with his precious camera phone.
Whatever happened, I had to get my hands on that phone.
Walker fell back to walk with me, and we talked quietly together. He deliberately slowed our pace, allowing some distance to develop between us and Honey and Peter.
“While you were gone,” he said, quietly and entirely matter-of-fact, “someone tried to kill me. Even in the midst of all that was happening. With so much madness running loose it’s hard to be sure, but someone quite definitely tried to remove my head from my shoulders from behind. Would have succeeded with anyone else, but fortunately my years in the Nightside have made me very hard to kill.”
“Even with the Authorities gone?” I said.
“Especially now they’re gone. I’m protected in ways you can’t imagine. But the point is, we now know who killed Lethal Harmony and the Blue Fairy. It has to be either Honey or Peter.”
“Ah,” said Walker. “There is that, yes.”
“None of us can be trusted,” I said. “We’re all agents.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
All at Sea
There was sun and light and warmth, and after the bitter cold There of Tunguska and X37 it felt like very heaven itself. All four of us cried out in relief as the teleport bracelets delivered us to our new destination in the sun. And the first thing we all did was tear off our heavy fur coats and drop them in a pile on the ground before us. Hats and gloves and everything else that reminded us of X37 followed as fast as we could rip them off, and when the pile was complete we all gave it a good kicking, just on general principles. And only then did we take the time to look around and see where we were.
We’d been dropped off in a neat little side street looking out over the docks of some major city. Ships everywhere: mostly navy, but some commercial, some tourist, and some fishing boats. American navy: big, impressive ships, longer than some roads, equipped with the very latest technology and the very biggest guns. Crew members swarmed over the huge decks like ants serving their queen. Not, therefore, a good place to be four strangers strolling around asking questions . . . I moved down to the end of the side street and looked out over blue-green waters without a trace of a swell under a pale blue sky with not a cloud to be seen. The sun was high in the sky, fat and friendly and deliciously warm. Seagulls rode the thermals, their distant voices raucous and mocking.
“I’m back in contact with Langley,” Honey announced, one hand pressed to the side of her head. Though how that helped with a brain implant, I wouldn’t know. She frowned, almost wincing. “There’s a lot of shouting going on. Apparently they took it pretty damned personally when I fell off the edge of the planet and they couldn’t locate me anymore. They’ve had three different spy satellites tasked to do nothing but look for me ever since. They were concerned. Which I’d think was very sweet of them, if they’d just stop shouting at me . . . Ah; it seems we are currently in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.”
“How long have we been off their radar?” I said.
“Three days, seven hours,” said Honey. “I’m being asked a lot of questions.”
“Who cares,” said Peter. “I smell food!”
“What kind?” said Walker.
“I don’t care; I’m going to eat it.” Peter glared about him, sniffing the air like a bloodhound on a trail. He plunged forward into the main street, following his nose, and all we could do was hurry after him.
“I will admit to feeling a bit peckish myself,” said Walker, striding along with a military gait. “Are there any noted restaurants in Philadelphia?”
“Oh, bound to be,” I said cheerfully. “Sailors like their food. And booze, and tattoo parlours and—”
“Langley is demanding to know exactly where we were and what we’ve been doing,” said Honey, striding along beside me like a tall dark goddess in her blazing white jumpsuit. “They were under the impression there wasn’t anywhere they couldn’t follow me with their brand-new toys, the poor babies.”
“Don’t tell them anything,” Walker said immediately. “Not . . . just yet. There might come a time when we need confidential information to bargain with.”
“Why would I wish to bargain with my own superiors?” said Honey just a bit coldly.
“I meant bargain with Alexander King,” Walker said patiently. “It’s well known the Independent Agent has contacts everywhere, in every organisation. Except possibly the Droods. Either way, I think we need to hold our secrets close to our chest until the game’s over.”
“He’s right,” I said. “Secrets only have power and value as long as they remain secrets.”
“So what do I tell Langley?” said Honey. “I’ve got to tell them something, if only so they’ll stop shouting inside my head.”
“Tell them about X37,” I said. “But not what we did there. They’ll be so excited about the confirmed location of an old Soviet science city, they won’t care about us and what we did.”
“What you did,” said Walker. “I’m still a trifle uneasy over that.”
“That’s a good way to feel about Droods,” I said. “Helps keep you properly respectful.”
“Blow it out your ear,” said Walker.
Honey’s face went vague as she presumably filled in her CIA handlers with information about X37, hopefully being just a bit discreet about the whole Tunguska Event thing. Of course, she could have been telling them absolutely anything. Or everything. I had no way of knowing. It was important to remember that she was an experienced field agent, and I couldn’t afford to trust her. Or Walker. Or Peter.
Katt was dead. And the Blue Fairy. And . . . I never saw a thing. I couldn’t help feeling that if I’d been just a bit more on the ball, a bit more observant, I might have seen something. Done something. Katt was a rival, and I hardly knew her. And after what Blue did to me and my family, we were enemies to the death. But even so, I liked Katt. And Blue was my friend.
This is why I prefer to work alone in the field. There’s nothing like people to complicate a mission.
Peter took us straight to the eatery he’d sniffed out. By that time we’d all got the scent and were practically treading on his heels. I hadn’t realised how hungry I was. A little beaver doesn’t satisfy you for long. Peter barged right through the front door without even glancing at the bright shiny posters on the windows, but Walker took one look and balked.
“But . . . this is a burger bar!” he said plaintively. “I wanted food. Real food!”
“Don’t be such a snob,” said Honey. “This is America, home of the brave and incredibly fast food.”
Walker sniffed loudly. “And even faster indigestion. Any country that has to advertise laxatives on television at prime time is in serious trouble.”
“Oh, shut up and get in there,” I said. “I can smell dead animals burning, and my taste buds are kicking the crap out of each other.”
“If anyone even attempts to serve me something in a bucket, there will be trouble,” Walker said ominously.
Honey and I pushed him through the front door and joined Peter at the table he’d commandeered. He’d already attracted the attention of a pretty young waitress in a seriously ugly pink uniform and was giving her his order. He was only halfway down the card, and already she’d filled up half her pad. As burger bars went, this was perhaps a little better than most. Clean enough, not too crowded, and the piped Muzak had been selected by someone who’d at least heard of tunes. There were big glossy posters everywhere, with marvellous illustrations of all the wonderful things you could order. Presumably there so that if you couldn’t read the menu, you could still point at things. I have a soft spot for the big happy posters, even though what they’re showing you usually bears only a passing resemblance to what you actually end up with. I keep hoping that one day I’ll actually get what I order; a triumph of optimism over experience.
“What do you fancy, Eddie?” said Honey, running her eyes down the laminated menu.
“Anything,” I said. “Everything. Just kill a cow and bring it to me. I am seriously hungry. I may eat you if the service takes too long.”
“That’s a nice thought, Eddie,” said Honey. “But maybe later, okay?” And she fluttered her eyelashes at me.
“Mostly I prefer Burger King,” I said, tactfully changing the subject. “At least there you get what you ask for and nothing else. I mean, if I order a bacon double cheeseburger, as I have been known to do on St. Cholesterol’s Day, that’s what I want. Double beef, cheese, bacon, in a bap. Nothing else. No bloody lettuce, no bloody gerkin. If I’d wanted a side salad, I’d have asked for one.”
“Fussy, fussy,” said Honey, not taking her eyes off the combo menu.
In the end, between us we ordered the entire menu. I took a look around as the waitress laboriously wrote it all down, using up most of her pad. The big clock on the wall said 2:25 in the afternoon, which helped to explain why the place wasn’t too crowded. I drew Honey’s attention to the clock, and she nodded.
“God alone knows where my body clock is at,” she said, stretching slowly and languorously, like a cat. “I hate teleportation; it always ends up giving me jet lag. And your luggage usually ends up in another dimension.”
We’d persuaded Walker to order some of the more straightforward choices, but he was still fussing over the drinks list. He sighed, shook his head, and finally looked up at the waiting waitress.
“Just a tea, please, my dear. Do you have Earl Grey?”
“Don’t embarrass me,” Honey said firmly. “You’ll have coffee and like it.”
“American coffee,” said Walker. “I am in Hell. Just bring me a cup of water, my dear.”
“You don’t want to drink the water around here, honey,” said the waitress. She’d rather taken a shine to Walker, or at least his accent. “Even the bottled stuff is suspect. Tell you what; I’ll bring you a nice Dr Pepper. How about that?”
Walker smiled at her. The waitress was a tall healthy-looking girl, whose prominent bosom put an unfair strain on the front of her ugly pink uniform.
“Thank you; that would be lovely, my dear.”
The waitress flashed her perfect teeth at him and tottered off with her pad full of orders.
“What a warm and understanding chest that girl had,” said Walker. “What’s a Dr Pepper?”
“It’s like the docks,” Honey said kindly. “Close to water.”
The food finally arrived, and we gave all our attention to pounding it down. Nothing like real hunger to make everything taste good. To my relief, my burgers arrived entirely uncontaminated with lettuce or pickle, and neither had they been skimpy with the cheese. None of us felt like talking; we just sat and chewed and swallowed, along with the occasional grunting noise of satisfaction. Walker wolfed his stuff down too and even ended up trying bits from everyone else’s plate. Though no doubt he’d go to confession later and confess that his stomach had gone slumming.
It wasn’t as though we had much to say to each other, even after all we’d been through together. Perhaps because of what we’d been through. A lot of what happened at X37, all the things we experienced . . . were just too private, too personal to discuss. We were all hurting on a spiritual as well as physical level. I remembered seeing my parents. Or something that looked very like my parents. Nothing ever has a hold on you like unfinished emotional business . . . When this was all over, and Alexander King had his information, and the Drood family had his precious secrets locked safely away from the rest of the world . . . it was time, and well past time, that I finally got to the truth about what happened to my parents. Who really killed them, and why. And Molly’s parents too, perhaps. Was there really a connection? Molly always was ready to see the worst in the Droods . . . Still, I’d waited long enough for the truth. Once this game was over, I would make time for something that really mattered.
I’d allowed my family to distract me for far too long.
We all finally reached the point where even brute willpower couldn’t force another morsel past our lips, and we sat back from the table, favouring our distended stomachs, and looked at each other to see who felt like talking first. And since none of us felt like talking about X37, we talked about Philadelphia and why we’d been sent there.
“Has to be the Philadelphia Experiment,” I said.
“Has to be,” said Honey, nodding emphatically.
“Didn’t they make a film about that?” said Walker.
“I’ve seen it,” said Peter. “Started badly, ran out of steam, and then really went downhill. Sequel wasn’t bad, though.”
“If all you know is the movie, then you don’t know anything,” I said. “The film was all about time travel, while the experiment wasn’t.”
“I always thought the Philadelphia Experiment was just another urban legend,” said Walker. “The Case of the Vanishing Ship, and all that. I’ve never seen any official files on it, and I’ve seen files on most things that matter. Remind me to tell you about the Unholy Grail sometime.”
“I wouldn’t touch a straight line like that for all the tea in China,” I said firmly. “The experiment—”
“You’re about to lecture us again, aren’t you?” said Honey, not unkindly. “Droods know everything, right?”
“Right!” I said. “You’re catching on! Now hush while I tell you all a nice story. The legend first. There are many variations, but the gist is that on October 28th, 1943, the USS Eldridge was used as the setting for a very advanced scientific experiment, to see if a navy ship could be made invisible to enemy radar. This was also known as Project Rainbow. But something went very wrong with the experiment.
“The Eldridge set off from the docks, and set their brand-new machines working. Other ships in the area were standing by to observe any changes that might happen. They weren’t prepared to see the Eldridge completely disappear—become actually invisible. All they could see was a deep depression in the water where the ship had been. And then the gap in the river suddenly filled up as the Eldridge vanished. Thrown out of our reality entirely by the power of its new machinery.
“The ship reappeared just a few moments later at Norfolk, Virgina. It was observed, and identified, and then it disappeared again, returning to Philadelphia’s waters. The scientists on shore radioed the Eldridge again and again, demanding to know what had happened, but got no reply. There was a lot of dithering among the scientists and the navy brass over possible radiation leaks and the like, but in the end the navy had no choice but to send ships out to make contact with the Eldridge sitting still and silent in the water.
“When the team of volunteers got on board to investigate, they found blood and death and horror. Most of the crew were dead. Many were insane. Quite a few were missing. There was extensive damage to the ship, as though it had taken part in a major firefight, but no clue as to who or what they’d been fighting. Worst of all, something had gone terribly wrong when the Eldridge teleported. Some of the crew had rematerialised inside steel walls and doors. Flesh and metal fused together on the molecular level. But still horribly alive and begging to be put out of their misery. Luckily, they didn’t last long.
“The whole thing was hushed up by naval intelligence, denied all the way up the line. There was a war on, after all. And while a success has many fathers, a clusterfuck has no friends. The ship was broken up for scrap, after the burnt-out machines had been removed, and another ship was given the Eldridge’s name. The surviving crew . . . disappeared. It was wartime, after all. I like to think they were taken care of properly; the U.S. Navy has a long tradition of looking after its own.
“And that . . . is the legend of the Philadelphia Experiment. The U.S. Navy still denies any of these things ever happened.”
“Right!” said Peter. “If you look up Philadelphia Experiment on the Net, the first site it offers you is run by the U.S. Navy, presenting their answers to the most frequently asked questions, denying everything. Backed up by loads and loads of official-looking records.”
We all looked at him.
“I was curious,” said Peter. “After the film . . .”
“Be that as it may,” said Walker, “that is the legend. What do we know about the facts?”
“Not a hell of a lot,” I said cheerfully. “Various Droods have looked into it down the years; we’re fascinated by mysteries, and we don’t like not knowing something that might turn out to be important. But American naval intelligence has gone to great lengths to deny, hide, and destroy all evidence of what really went down on that day of October 28th, 1943. And short of launching a major offensive on U.S. soil, we had no way of progressing. So we didn’t. We didn’t care that much.”
Our waitress had been busy removing empty plates for some time, coming and going so often that we’d forgotten she was there and talked openly in front of her. That’s why servants and service staff make such great sources of information. They’re around so much they’re practically invisible. And big people do so love to pretend that little people don’t really exist.
“You folks here about the Eldridge ?” she said cheerfully, and we all jumped, suddenly aware of her presence. “We get a lot of tourists ’cause of that. We got whole shops dedicated to selling nothing but. They can fix you up with books and posters and films and God knows what else. All junk, of course. Don’t waste your money. They make most of it up over drinks in the back rooms of bars. Tourists do love a good tall tale, God bless them. You know, my granddaddy worked right here in the docks, during the war. What he always called the Big One. He said, people back then used to call that ship the Eldritch, ’cause of all the weird stuff that went on around it.”
“What kind of weird things?” said Honey as casually as she could.
“Oh, shoot. Bright lights, strange noises, lots of coming and going. And tons and tons of brand-new equipment. Granddaddy always said the ship would have had to be bigger on the inside than it was on the outside to fit it all in!”
“And the . . . legend?” said Walker. “The tall tales . . . Was your grandfather here when all that happened?”
“Bless you, no, honey!” said the waitress. “Never saw any such thing! It’s all just stories to bring in the suckers. Sorry; tourists. Got to work that tourist dollar!” She smiled at Walker. “You know, if you want, I could get you a cup of tea from the cook’s private stock. Real tea bags!”
“We’re not stopping,” Honey said firmly. “Could we have the check, please?”
The waitress bestowed another gleaming smile on Walker and swayed off on her high heels.
“She likes you,” I said.
“Shut up,” said Walker.
“She likes you. She’s your special waitress friend.”
“I am old enough to be her father,” said Walker with great dignity.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” said Peter. “This is America. Most men here wouldn’t be seen dead with a woman old enough to be their wife. This is the only country that thinks Zimmer frames are sexy.”
Honey slapped him round the back of the head.
“Stop that!” said Peter, edging his chair back out of her reach.
“Then stop being you,” said Honey.
“Well,” I said quickly, “I think it’s safe to assume we were sent here to investigate the mystery of the Philadelphia Experiment.”
“Seems like our best bet,” said Honey.
“You could ask your people at Langley to lean on naval intelligence,” said Walker. “Get them to open some of these secret files they claim not to have.”
“Take too long,” said Honey. “Our intelligence agencies have a really bad track record when it comes to cooperating with each other. Partly politics, partly jurisdiction, partly because each agency has its own secret agenda, but mostly it’s just a pissing contest. The Company has more clout than most, but even so . . .”
“We don’t have the time,” I said. “Especially since we lost three days at Tunguska.”
“Right,” said Peter. “Grandfather could be dead by now, or getting close.”
“I have to say,” said Walker, “that you don’t sound too concerned.”
“Well, that’s probably because I’m not,” said Peter. “Except that the old goat could turn up his toes at any time, and then all of this would have been for nothing. Are any of you going to try to pretend you care?”
“I don’t know the man,” said Honey. “All I know is the legend of the Independent Agent.”
“It’s always sad when a legend passes,” I said. “One less wonder in the world.”
“Like your uncle James?” said Walker. “The famous, or perhaps more properly infamous, Gray Fox?”
“Yes,” I said. “Like that.”
“How did the Gray Fox die, exactly?” said Honey. “We never did get all the details.”
“And you never will,” I said. “That’s family business. We will now change the subject.”
“What if we don’t want to?” said Peter.
I looked at him, and he stirred uneasily in his chair. “Don’t push your luck, Peter,” I said.
“Now, children,” said Walker. “Play nice.”
“We need to go back to the docks,” I said. “I can use my Sight, boost it through the armour, if necessary. Perhaps pick up some ghost images of the experiment itself, back in 1943.”
“You think they’ll still be here?” said Honey.
“Of course,” I said. “Bad things sink in; remember?”
“Have we got time for some dessert?” said Peter. “Stop hitting me, woman!”
“How are we going to split the bill?” said Walker.
“Hell with that,” I said. “Honey can pay. CIA’s got the deepest pockets of anyone at this table.”
Honey scowled as she reached for her credit card. “Hate doing my expenses,” she growled. “They challenge everything these days. Whole damn Company is run by bean counters.”
Before we left, Walker made a point of leaving a generous tip for the waitress.
We headed back to the docks, strolling along with the portly, unhurried steps of the well-fed. There were tourists all around in brightly coloured shirts, looking like mating birds of paradise. Mostly they seemed interested in architecture, historical points of interest, and shops selling overpriced tatt. We were the only ones standing on the edge of the docks, staring out at the ships. No one paid us any special attention. I checked. The river was calm and peaceful, the sky was untroubled by cloud or plane, and the sun was pleasantly warm. Just enough of a breeze blowing in off the water to be refreshing.
I raised my Sight and looked at the river again. To my surprise, I couldn’t make out a thing. So much psychic energy had been released in the vicinity that the aether was jammed solid with an overlapping mess of signals. As though so many strange and wonderful things had happened here that the atmosphere had become supersaturated with information. It was all just a fog of events, magical and scientific, piled on top of each other like a thousand voices all shouting at once, desperate to be heard. I subvocalised my activating Words and clad myself in golden armour. Honey moved in close beside me.
“Is that really wise?” she hissed. “We’re supposed to be undercover agents, remember? Aren’t you in the least concerned that the tourists will see you in your armour and run screaming for their lives? Or an exorcist? All it needs is one quick-thinking onlooker to catch you on his phone camera, and we will be the local news, on every channel!”
“Try not to panic,” I said, still looking out over the river through my golden mask. “It’s very unbecoming in an agent. My torc broadcasts a signal that prevents anyone from seeing the armour. Unless I decide otherwise.”
“We can see it,” said Peter.
“Only because I let you,” I said.
“Hold everything,” said Walker. “Are you saying your torc has influence, even control, over our thoughts?”
“Pretty much,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. I am a Drood and therefore by definition far too nice and good and noble to even think of abusing such a privilege.”
“Typical Drood arrogance!” said Honey. “You never thought to mention this before, because . . . ?”
“I thought you knew,” I said. “You’re CIA. You know everything.”
“Don’t hit him,” Walker said to Honey. “You’d only hurt your hand. Wait till he’s armoured down; then hit him.”
“My turn to say, Hold everything,” I said. “I See something.”
Focused through my golden mask, my Sight forced its way through the mass of information to show me ghost images of the final voyage of the USS Eldridge. The long ship came out of the docks on a gray afternoon in 1943, not knowing it was sailing out of history and into legend. The Eldridge was travelling severely low in the water, as though carrying far more weight than it was designed for. Every square inch of the open decks was covered with bulky equipment trailing wires and cables all fussed over by uniformed sailors dashing frantically back and forth. Tall spiky antennae thrust up at regular intervals the whole length of the ship, and long traceries of vivid electricity crawled up and down them, spitting and crackling. Strange energies pulsed and seethed, building an increasingly powerful aura around the ship.
Up till then, it was just a weirder than usual scientific experiment, but that all changed abruptly with the arrival of the green fog. It appeared out of nowhere: no warning, no clue, just thick green mists boiling up around the ship and enveloping it from stem to stern. A green fog thick with otherworldly magic, merging with and then suffusing the Eldridge’s energy field. Magic and science combining, producing an effect neither could achieve on their own.
I could hear the sailors screaming faintly, all the way back in 1943. The green fog rose up, swallowing the ship, and then both fog and ship were gone in a moment, and nothing at all remained. No invisible ship, no depression in the water. Just . . . gone. Snatched away. The other ships sent out to observe the effects of the experiment sailed back and forth across the empty waters, to no avail. Back on shore, scientists and navy brass shouted hysterically at each other.
And then the fog returned, thick and pulsating, glowing with its own sick bottle green light. The colour and the texture of the fog was subtly different now; it looked . . . rotten, corrupt, poisonous. The Eldridge burst out of the green mists, as though forcing its way out, and headed jerkily for the shore. The green mists faded away almost reluctantly, revealing a ship that had been to war. All the antennae were gone, nothing left but jagged trunks and snapped cables, as though the antennae had been torn away by some gigantic hand. The ship’s hull had been breached in several places, fore and aft. It was a wonder she was still afloat. There were great blackened burn marks and fire damage throughout the superstructure, smashed glass everywhere, stove-in bulkheads and blast damage all over. And dead crewmen scattered the length of the ship, many torn to pieces.
Blood everywhere.
I concentrated, focusing my Sight still further, closing in on the ghost image of the ship to get a better look at what had happened. Because I had a horrid feeling I knew where the Eldridge had been, and who and what had done this to her and her crew. And it had nothing at all to do with invisibility or teleportation.
The green fog had been the first clue, and the unearthly lights that burned within it. I had Seen the colours of magic, interfering and then combining with the ship’s science, heard the great sound of a door opening between dimensions. The Eldridge’s brand-new machines had inadvertently opened a portal to outside, and something had reached into our world and taken the ship and its crew as casually as a hand removes a goldfish from its bowl.
Up close, it was clear the Eldridge had fought a major battle. Hours or even days had passed for the ship in those few moments it had been away. Solid steel bulkheads had split like paper, compartments were crushed, and the crew . . . Torn and broken, crushed, ripped apart, the pieces scattered over the blood-soaked deck. And yes, some caught up in the misfiring energies of teleportation: merged horribly with steel walls and doors, trapped in bulkheads, rematerialised inside metal, flesh fading seamlessly into steel. Screaming for help that would never come. This crew had fought one hell of a battle, and only some of them had come home to tell of it.
I shut down my Sight, put away my armour, and looked at the others. “Bad news, people. I’m pretty sure I know what happened to the Eldridge back in 1943, and it has nothing at all to do with Project Rainbow or any other of the myths and stories of the Philadelphia Experiment. I don’t know what all that technology they put on board was supposed to do, but something about it interfered with a soft spot, a weak place in reality, and opened up a long-dormant portal to another place. Somewhere . . . outside our reality. And something in that other place reached out and dragged the Eldridge through the gateway.
“Something bad happened in that other place, and the Eldridge had to fight her way out. She got home again, but her crew paid a terrible price. Hundreds dead, and worse than dead. No wonder the navy hushed all this up. No wonder they never experimented with that equipment again. They couldn’t risk opening the portal again. Something might come through, from the other side.”
The others looked at me for a long moment. They all wanted to ask questions, but something in my face and in my voice stopped them. In the end, it was the old soldier Walker who nerved himself to ask the obvious question.
“Do you know where the Eldridge went?” he said. “Do you know who took them?”
“Yes,” I said. “They went to the Land Beneath the Hill. To the Sundered Lands. The Faerie Kingdoms. To the place the elves went, when they walked sideways from the sun and left this world behind them. The elves did this.”
Honey pursed her mouth as though she wanted to spit. “I’m supposed to tell my superiors at Langley that the Eldridge was abducted by fairies?”
“I’ve never known what the big deal was with elves,” said Peter. “Elves aren’t scary. Pointy-eared losers in period costumes, playing stupid jokes on mere mortals . . . Elves aren’t hard. Wouldn’t be even if they wore black leather and drank cider. I mean, look at the Blue Fairy.”
“Blue was only half-elf,” I said. “And he could still have taken you with one hand on the best day you ever had.”
“Oh, come on . . .”
I glared at him till he stopped talking. “The only ones you ever see in this world are the broken-spirited ones. The ones who stayed behind or got left behind because they weren’t good enough. The beachcombers of Faerie, wasting their remaining energies in screwing over humans, because that’s all they’ve got. The real thing . . . is so much more. Monsters . . . Inhuman, soulless, immortal, or at least so long-lived it makes no difference. They breathe magic and sweat sorcery. They can bend the rules of reality just by thinking about it.
“We stole this world from them. Not by defeating them or bettering them but by outbreeding them. Do you wonder they still hate us, after all this time? In the Faerie Kingdoms, they are powerful and potent. They can do things we can’t even dream of, with magics and technologies beyond our comprehension. They were here first, and they still dream of returning and delivering a terrible revenge upon us. And we’re going to have to go there, to the Elven Lands, to the Unseeli Court, to get the truth about what happened to the Eldridge and her crew.”
“I don’t think I want to know that badly,” said Walker. “I’ve had . . . experience with elves, in the Nightside. The real thing. They’re always bad news.”
“Is it true they don’t have souls?” said Honey. “And that’s why they’re immortal?”
“Not . . . as such,” I said. “Not souls, as we understand the term. The elves are an ancient breed, far older than humanity, born of a time when the very nature of this world was different. Our rules and restraints don’t apply to them, but then they don’t have our certainties, either. Like Life and Death, Good and Evil, Heaven and Hell.”
“Still don’t see why we have to go there,” Peter said with a glower. “You say you Saw them take the Eldridge; what more do we need?”
“You really think your grandfather will settle for my word?” I said. “I wouldn’t. He’ll want facts, details, evidence. No one will win the prize unless they can tell the whole story. Besides . . . the Eldridge’s technology opened a door between Philadelphia and the Land Beneath the Hill, and I think it’s still there. A soft spot in the world, a potential door just waiting to be pushed open by one side or the other. A vulnerable back door through which the Fae might one day invade. We have to check it out.”
“What do you mean we, paleface?” Peter said immediately.
“Are you sure it was the Fae, Eddie?” said Honey, ignoring Peter. “You have to be sure about this before we risk disturbing them.”
“The Eldridge disappeared into a green fog,” I said steadily. “Nothing at all to do with electromagnetic radiation or radar invisibility. The green mists are one of the traditional ways the Fae use to disguise an opening between their world and ours. That fog was thick with magic, and I know elven magic when I See it.”
“The Land Beneath the Hill,” muttered Peter. “The Elven Lands. The Faerie Kingdoms. How many names does this place have, anyway?”
“As many as it needs,” said Walker. “In old magic, to know the true naming of a thing was to have power over it, so the Fae like to confuse things. It appeals to their . . . mercurial nature. They’re not fixed and certain, like us. They’re many things all at once. More than us, and less. Greater than us, but still childlike in many ways. The only human qualities they have are the ones they’ve copied from us, because it amuses them.”
He turned and looked at me. “Even if we can close this door, there are others. Other ways of accessing the Faerie Kingdoms. The Street of Gods in the Nightside. A doorway in Shadows Fall. A deep tunnel beneath a small town in the southwest of England. There are openings and soft places all over the world, fortunately forgotten or overlooked by most people.”
“But if this is an unknown, unsuspected entrance, we have to shut it down,” I said steadily. “Or persuade the Fae to close it from their side, at least long enough for us to set up the usual defences and observers.”
“I still don’t see what the Fae would want with a U.S. Navy ship anyway,” said Honey.
“We’ll just have to ask them,” I said. “When we get there. This is a mystery that needs solving; not just for us, but for the sake of all humanity. We can’t have the elves thinking they can just reach out and grab us whenever they feel like it. I think I shall have to speak quite sternly to them about that. Are you with me?”
“Not if you’re going to be rude to elves,” Honey said immediately. “They don’t like it. And I like my organs on the inside, where they belong.”
“I shall be polite and diplomatic at all times,” I said. “Right up to the point where I decide not to be and administer a good slapping. Don’t worry; I’ll give you plenty of warning, so you can duck. Walker?”
“We have to go,” said Walker. “Duty is a harsh mistress, but she never asks more of us than is necessary.”
“Always knew you were kinky, Walker,” said Honey. “Langley’s gone very quiet. I’ve brought them up to date and asked for instructions, and they’re passing the buck back and forth so fast they’re wearing it out. So let’s get going before someone tells me not to. No one takes a U.S. ship and its crew and gets away with it on my watch.”
We all looked at Peter, who shrugged. “You’re right. Grandfather isn’t going to cough up his precious prize for an incomplete story. I’m in.”
“Just how much do you know about elves, Eddie?” said Honey. “I know enough to be seriously worried about this.”
“Right,” said Peter. “The best way to win a fight with an elf is to run like fun before it even knows you’re there.”
We all looked at him.
“Thought you weren’t afraid of elves,” I said. “And just when did you come in contact with the Fae, in your time in industrial espionage?”
He shrugged angrily. “I get around. I hear things. Even in my business, Grandfather’s reputation follows me. Anything with even a trace of weird attached to it ends up on my plate. One of the reasons I’ve worked so hard to maintain a good distance between my world and his. All I ever wanted was a sane, sensible, normal life. It’s safer.
“I’ve heard about elves. But I don’t believe half of it.”
“Well, you’re about to get a crash course, the hard way,” said Honey. “Try not to cry.”
Peter sniffed loudly. “I think I liked it better when you were hitting me . . .”
“The Blue Fairy was a guest at the Fae Court just before he joined up with us,” I said. “According to him, there’d been some major upheavals there. He said Queen Mab is back, after centuries of exile, and sitting on the Ivory Throne. Which begs the question, what’s happened to Oberon and Titania? Has there been civil war in the Elven Lands? Who’s in, who’s out, who’s been horribly maimed and disfigured? Could make a big difference to how much we can reasonably hope to achieve. I mean, Oberon and Titania might have been flitty psychopaths with a really unpleasant sense of humour, but at least they were a known quantity. My family have been able to make deals with them in the past. Mab . . . is an unknown quantity.”
“Why was she exiled?” said Honey.
“No one knows,” said Walker. “The elves have never talked about it. I had heard Mab was back; we had an elf turn up in the Nightside, begging for sanctuary. Not that we could do much for him. Someone had turned the poor bastard inside out, all down one side . . . We killed him, eventually. As a kindness.”
“You really think we can get answers, maybe even concessions, out of the elves?” said Honey. “They never miss a chance to do us down! Pride’s all they’ve got left.”
“No,” Walker said immediately. “It’s . . . more complicated than that. Elves are always passing through the Nightside on some errand or other, and I’ve had my share of dealings with them. Can’t say I’ve ever got to know one; they’re just too different. They are honourable, in their way. It’s just not an even remotely human way. They admire courage, and boldness, and outright insanity. You really think you can make the elves do anything they don’t want to, Eddie?”
“Of course,” I said. “I’m a Drood.”
“This is all going to end in tears,” said Peter.
“Shut up, Peter,” said Honey.
“Queen Mab was still . . . away, in 1943,” I said. “So whatever happened to the Eldridge was due to Oberon and Titania. Maybe we can use that . . . The real question is, if the elves did take the ship, why did they let her go? The Eldridge looked like she’d been through a real fight, but even so, their weapons wouldn’t have been enough to hold off elves . . .”
“No,” said Honey, looking out over the water. “The real question is, is the soft spot still out there? Is the doorway still there? And if it is, can you open it, Eddie?”
“That’s three questions,” said Peter. “Ow! Damn it, Walker; that hurt!”
“Good,” said Walker. “It was meant to.”
“It’s like working with bloody kids,” I said, glaring about me. “Can we all please stick to the subject? All we need is a boat to get us out there, and I can do the rest. But I’m not taking any of you anywhere until I’m sure you’re taking this seriously. There is a really good chance the elves will kill us all on sight. They’ve been given good reason to respect the Droods, but they have very recent reasons to hate my guts.”
“Oh, wonderful,” said Peter. “This gets better all the time. What did you do, pee in their wishing well?”
“I killed a whole bunch of elven lords and ladies,” I said.
Honey and Walker looked at me sharply with what I liked to think was respect. Even Peter looked at me in a new way.
“I think I’ll get Langley to express-order us some Really Big Guns,” said Honey.
“Nice thought,” I said. “But they wouldn’t help.”
“Just how are you intending to force your way into the Sundered Lands?” said Walker. “I wasn’t sure such a thing was possible, even for the legendary Droods. Even if there is a soft spot . . .”
“Blue had a torc stolen from the Droods,” I said. “Though he never did learn how to operate it, or he’d still be alive. Anyway, after he died, I used a spell built into his elven breastplate to send him home. My armour remembers the spell, and I can use it to force open the soft spot.”
“I didn’t know your armour could do that,” said Walker.
“There’s lots of things it can do that people don’t know about,” I said airily.
But that wasn’t one of them. My armour is strange matter, not magic. Whole different thing. I had a different plan to get us through. When Blue stole his torc from us, he took it to the Fae Courts, and they put their mark upon it. When I absorbed Blue’s torc into my armour, those changes became a part of my strange matter too. Changes I could follow right back to their origin. I could break into the Elven Lands any time I chose.
So why did I lie to my companions? To mislead them and keep them off balance. To keep something to myself. In the spy game, you take your advantages where you can find them.
Honey used her CIA contacts to hire us a boat. It wasn’t much of a boat, just something to run tourists around in, but it was close at hand and we were in a hurry. And it wasn’t as if I was paying for it. The Hope Street was little more than a long paint-peeling cabin set over an antiquated motor, but it looked sound enough. Honey found a discarded captain’s hat, clapped it on her head, and took over the steering wheel as though she’d been born to it. Walker stepped gingerly aboard, poking things with the tip of his umbrella and then shaking his head sadly. Peter dithered on the dockside, reluctant to step aboard.
“You have got to be kidding,” he said unhappily. “Surely we can do better than this piece of shit?”
“It’s a perfectly seaworthy piece of shit,” Honey said firmly. “And that’s all that matters. We’re not even going out of sight of land, technically speaking. It is also the very best boat available . . . at such short notice.”
“You’re CIA,” said Peter, not unreasonably. “Couldn’t you just have commandeered something more reliable on the grounds of national security?”
“We are supposed to be keeping our heads down,” said Honey. “I start throwing phrases like that around, and the local authorities will be all over us. Now get on board, or I’ll have you keelhauled, or something equally nautical and distressing.”
“Should never have given them the vote,” muttered Peter, slouching on board.
I looked over Honey’s shoulder and studied the instrument panels set out before her. They looked reassuringly up-to-date and mostly functional.
“You sure you can run this thing?” I said, trying hard not to sound too dubious.
“What’s the matter?” said Honey, grinning broadly. “Is there something here the high-and-mighty Drood field agent can’t operate?”
“I can drive anything modern,” I said defensively. “But have you seen this tub’s engines? Wouldn’t surprise me to find they ran on coal. Or clockwork.”
“I could pilot this tub through the Bermuda Triangle and out the other side,” said Honey. “She’s sound. Nothing to it. Easy peasy.”
Walker sank into a battered old leather chair, which creaked noisily with his every movement. “Then let us get under weigh, Captain.”
“I’m still waiting for Peter. Peter! Where are you?”
“I’m here, I’m here!” He slouched into the cabin, peered about him, and sniffed miserably. “I hate boats and I hate the water. In particular, I hate the way boats go up and down when they travel across the water. I just know I’m going to be unwell. I really enjoyed my dinner, and I was hoping not to see it again anytime soon.”
“The water is perfectly calm,” Honey said patiently. “And there’s not a cloud in the sky. If the surface was any flatter, you could Roller Derby on it.”
“It just looks that way,” Peter said darkly. “It’s planning something. I can tell.”
“Don’t worry,” said Walker. “I know an infallible cure for seasick-ness.”
“Really?” said Peter.
“Of course. Sit under a tree.” He chuckled at the look on Peter’s face. “Ah, the old jokes are always the best.”
We left the Philadelphia docks at a steady rate of knots, heading out to the middle of the river. The Hope Street chugged along cheerfully, the engines reassuringly loud and steady. Peter clung grimly to the arms of his chair, but the water remained calm. Honey stood happily at the wheel, whistling a sea shanty, her captain’s hat pushed back on her head. I did my best to give her a proper heading, but really all I could do was point her in the direction where I’d seen the Eldridge disappear into the green mists, back in 1943. It was entirely possible the soft spot had . . . drifted since then. Still, Honey aimed the Hope Street in the right direction, and we all mentally crossed our fingers.
We hadn’t been out on the water long when dark clouds appeared in the sky out of nowhere. The wind whipped up, and the waters became distinctly choppy. Honey glared at the instruments before her.
“Weather reports didn’t say anything about a storm. Supposed to be calm and sunny all day. Well, that’s weather for you. Brace yourselves, everyone. We’re in for a bumpy ride.”
“Told you,” said Peter miserably.
“It’s you, Peter,” Walker said calmly from his chair. “All your fault. You’re a jinx. Or maybe a Jonah. If I see a whale, you’re going overboard.”
I used my Sight, without my armour. This close, I didn’t need it. The soft spot was hanging on the air dead ahead, strange magical forces churning around it like a vortex. Something in our approach had activated it; perhaps my torc, or the changes Blue had added to his torc. The doorway was forming, becoming more solid, sucking us in. Just its presence in our world was enough to disrupt the weather patterns. The closer we got, the more I could See, and the less I liked. This wasn’t just a soft spot or a natural opening; someone had fashioned a proper door here and wedged it open just a crack against all the powers of this world to heal itself. Someone intended this door to be used.
A growing tension filled the Hope Street’s cabin as we drew steadily closer. We could all feel it: a basic wrongness in the warp and weft of the world that raised ancient atavistic instincts and grated on our souls. The tension grew worse, like an ax hanging over our heads, like a danger we could point at but not identify. It felt like walking the last mile to our own execution. Give Honey credit; she never flinched, never changed course, never even slowed our approach.
I could See the gateway hanging on the air ahead, waiting for us, drawing us in with bad intent. A convoluted spectrum of forces, as though someone had taken hold of space and time with a giant hand and . . . twisted them. And the closer I got, the more I realised it wasn’t an actual door, as such; more a potential door. That’s why my family had never suspected its existence. It wasn’t . . . certain enough to set off our alarms and defences. As though the elves had set this up and then walked away . . . waiting for just the right person to come along and activate it . . . and walk into their trap.
Had to be a trap. It’s always a trap, with the elves.
Wisps of green mist appeared around the Hope Street, materialising out of nowhere; long green streamers twisting and turning on the air as the boat rose and fell on increasingly violent swells. The mists thickened steadily; elf magic, summoned into being by our proximity to the doorway. The thick green fog was cutting us off from our world, bending the rules of our reality to make easier the transition to the Land Beneath the Hill. Walker and Peter scrambled up out of their chairs and hurried over to join Honey and me at the wheel. We all felt the need for simple human contact.
The boat was thrown all over the place; the fog was all around us. Honey struggled to hold the Hope Street on course. It felt like . . . leaving all certainty behind us, losing everything we’d learned to depend on. As though the ship itself might fall apart and disappear into the green mists . . .
“We’re almost there,” said Walker. “I can feel the doorway right ahead. Feels like staring down a gun barrel.”
“I don’t feel that,” said Honey. “I don’t feel anything. Except that it’s really cold in here, all of a sudden. And my skin’s prickling, like the feeling you get right before a lightning strike. And I’m not sure I’m steering this boat anymore. The wheel’s stopped fighting me, but it’s not answering me, either. I think . . . this boat knows where it needs to go.” She took her hands off the wheel, and nothing happened. The Hope Street was still on course.
“The storm’s getting worse!” yelled Peter above the howl of the rising winds outside. “Listen to it!”
“I don’t think that’s the storm,” I said. “The door is opening.”
“So we’ll be safe once we’re through the door?”
“Well,” I said. “I wouldn’t go that far . . .”
“I want to go home,” Peter said miserably.
The green fog was boiling all around us now, thick bottle green mists that isolated and insulated us from the outside world. Strange lights flared and sputtered inside the cabin. They smarted where they touched my bare skin, making it crawl with revulsion. There was something basically unclean about the green fog. It smelled of sulphur and blood and strange animal musks. It was getting hard to see anything, even inside the cabin. The Hope Street pressed on, not bucking or heaving nearly so much now but travelling faster and faster, like a runaway train.
“One problem,” I said.
“Only one?” Honey said immediately. “I can think of hundreds!”
“Getting through the door isn’t going to be a problem,” I said. “I think it recognises my torc. But getting back again . . . might prove a little tricky.”
“Terrific,” said Peter. “Why don’t we all just throw ourselves overboard and swim back?”
“I wouldn’t,” said Walker. “I’m pretty sure we’re no longer in our world, as such. No water, no sky; just green mists. We’re in the soft place now, the in-between place. And it smells really bad.”
“Throw yourself overboard here,” I said, “and there’s no saying where you might end up.”
“I may cry a little, if that wouldn’t upset anyone,” said Peter.
“Stand tall, man,” said Walker. “You show weakness in front of the elves, and you’ll be carrying your testicles home in a goody bag.”
“You’re really not helping,” said Peter.
“It’s not as if we’re going in there alone,” said Honey. “I’m CIA, remember? I can call on serious backup and resources and dirty tricks even elves have never thought of.”
“They won’t care,” said Walker. “I speak for the Nightside. I have powerful friends, and enemies, who’ll come if I call or who would avenge my death. But the elves will still kill us if they have reason to, or even if they don’t. They are creatures of whim and malice and have no care at all for consequences.”
Honey looked at me. “But you’re a Drood, Eddie. You even ran your family for a while. They wouldn’t dare touch you.”
“Elves dare,” I said. “It’s what they do. My family would certainly avenge my death, might even do terrible things to the Sundered Lands . . . but still the elves will do what they will do, and no one can predict or punish them. And, as I said, the elves do have good reason to want me dead. Or worse.”
“Maybe we should have left you behind,” said Walker.
“You’d never get in without me,” I said.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” said Peter.
“So,” said Honey. “No backup and no threats we can use to enforce our position. Not really what I wanted to hear.”
“Have the CIA ever had any direct dealings with elves?” said Peter. “Not because I particularly care, you understand; I’d just like people to keep talking to distract me from thinking about all the terrible things still to come.”
“Quite understandable,” said Honey. She gave the wheel a good turn, and then watched it sway back and forth, not affecting the Hope Street in the least. “If the Company ever did have direct dealings with elves—which is possible on the grounds that the Company has had dealings with far worse in its time, when necessary, and no, I’m not going to go into details—it would all have taken place on a much higher level than mine. I’m only ever told what I need to know, when I need to know it.”
“Trust me,” I said. “Elves are powerful creatures, yes, but at heart they’re just another bunch of aristocratic snobs who think they’re better than anyone else. And I’ve been talking rings around creeps like that my whole life. I’ll get us in, and I’ll get us back home again, and I might just get us the keys to the city and a big box of chocolates to take home with us while I’m at it.”
“That’s it,” said Peter. “He’s delirious.”
“Trust a Drood?” said Honey. “Things aren’t that desperate. Not yet, anyway.”
“Getting damned close,” muttered Peter.
“Shut up, Peter,” said Walker, not unkindly.
The green fog filled the cabin now, thick and unrelenting. I couldn’t see the cabin. Couldn’t see anything except Honey and Walker and Peter. We linked arms and held hands to make sure we wouldn’t be separated. We were all breathing hard, as though there was less and less air in the fog. It smelled like the crushed petals of flowers from other worlds, like the breeze off unknown alien seas, like the stench of piled-up bodies of creatures that could never have thrived in our world. It smelled of elves. The stench raised the hackles on the back of my neck, tugging at all my deepest fears. As though my very DNA remembered elves and cringed at the thought of encountering them again.
All perfectly normal and sensible. Any sane man would be afraid of elves. But I had been here before, walked in the Fae Courts before, and I knew how to handle them. If I could just stay alive long enough.
The Hope Street dropped suddenly, as though the water had been snatched out from under her, and we all fell sprawling, crying out to each other as we were forcibly separated. The green mists rushed away in all directions, revealing the gateway hanging open and beckoning before us. I couldn’t look at it directly; it hurt my eyes and my mind. It wasn’t real, as we understand real things. It was an insult to everything humans understand about how our universe works. Elf magic; elf thinking.
I subvocalised my activating Words, and the golden armour slipped around me in a moment, hugging me tight like a friend or a lover, determined to stand between me and all danger. I picked myself up and made myself look at the doorway directly through my golden mask. It still hurt like hell, but I could stand it, perhaps because the torc’s strange matter was just as unnatural as the elves’ construct.
We weren’t moving. The boat was hovering, held where she was on the edge of the event horizon, as though the door was waiting for . . . something. I reached out with a golden hand and thrust it into the energies pulsing before me. I took a firm hold, and then pulled with all my armoured strength. The boat surged forward, and we were on our way.
The doorway unfolded before me over and over again, like some great alien flower blossoming in endless iterations, until finally it swallowed us up, and we passed through, leaving the world behind.
And so we came to the Sundered Lands, the Land Beneath the Hill. The world the elves made for themselves, when they left the Earth behind. No one’s really sure why. The elves certainly didn’t leave for the good of humanity or because they recognised any human authority over our world. Some say we just outnumbered them, crowding them off their land, because we bred so much faster than the long-lived elves, and their pride would not allow them to take second place. Some say the elves fought a war against someone or something they still won’t talk about. They fought a war and they lost, so they ran away to somewhere safer . . . And some say the Droods found that safe haven for the elves, which is why they still respect and hate us.
They say a lot of things about the elves. Believe what you will or whatever makes you feel most comfortable. The elves don’t care.
I armoured down. The Hope Street was sailing a whole new sea now, beneath a pale pink sky with three huge moons hanging low and a sun too bright to look at directly. Long slow ripples spread out from the boat as we chugged steadily towards the simple docks straight ahead of us. The water was thick and viscous, almost syrupy, with half a dozen vivid colours swirling in it, like a painter’s palette. Far, far below, huge dark shadows swam in great slow circles around the Hope Street, escorting us to shore.
We passed between massive elven ships, standing tall and graceful in the multicoloured waters. Old-fashioned three-masters with great billowing sails and delicate metal hulls, thin as foil, dainty as petals, strong as eternity. The sails were made from tanned hides, their rigging as intricate as the most delicate lace or spiderwebs. No one stood on the decks or at the wheels, but none of the ships moved at all, despite the gusting wind. We moved between these sleeping giants like small children creeping through an adult’s world.
“They’re more like works of art than working vessels,” said Walker. “Like the dream of a ship in the designer’s mind . . .”
“They’re real enough,” I said. “Their sails are made from the stretched skins of vanquished enemies.”
“Including humans?” said Peter.
“Most definitely,” I said.
We all stood very close in the cabin, watching the docks approach. A simple construction made up of thousands of bones, neatly fitted and locked together. On either side of the docks stood two huge elven statues carved from a dark, green-veined marble. They towered above us, sixty feet tall and more, like the legendary Colossus of Rhodes. At least, I thought they were statues until they slowly turned their great heads to follow our progress.
Beyond the docks lay vast stretches of green land. Not exactly grass or moss, but close enough to pass and of a shade so sharp and vivid it almost glowed. And striding across these peaceful green-lands, their feet slamming down in perfect lockstep, came the elves. Thousands of them. They finally crashed to a halt at the very edge of the land, all around the docks, standing straight and tall in perfectly set out ranks. Thousands of elves, standing impossibly still, watching the arrival of the Hope Street with cold glowing golden eyes.
They were fine, tall, and noble, and far more dangerous than the broken-spirited elves I was used to seeing on Earth.
The Hope Street slid expertly in beside the docks, and then we all jumped just a bit as the engine shut down without us telling it to. We all looked at each other, and then we left the cabin and went out on deck. None of us made any move to step out onto the docks. Having a whole army of elves studying you, silently and implacably, is enough to give anyone pause. I could have armoured up, just to show them who I was and who I represented, but I didn’t. Encasing myself in protective armour might have been taken as a sign of fear or even weakness. And no man can afford to be thought weak when dealing with elves. Up close, they looked almost painfully beautiful. Some have sought to dismiss this as mere glamour, protective illusion, but that’s not strictly true. The elves can be, or seem to be, anything they choose. Especially here, in the world they made for themselves.
“What is that they’re wearing?” said Walker very quietly. “Some kind of armour?”
“Made out of porcelain maybe?” said Honey just as quietly. “Though how it hangs together . . . The pieces seem to be moving independently . . .”
“They’re shells,” I said. “Up close, you can hear them rasping against each other as they move. The creatures inside those shells are still alive: stitched together, constantly suffering. That’s the elven way.”
“How do you know that?” said Peter.
“Because I’ve been here before,” I said. “Let’s go ashore and say, Hi! Can’t have them thinking we’re afraid of them.”
I led the way forward across the bone docks. The bone ridges were soft and polished under my feet, worn down by long use. The elves made no move as we approached, standing impossibly still, utterly silent. They looked more alien than ever up close. Unbearably glamorous, burning with an intensity no human could ever match. The sheer passion of their presence beat in the air like a fast drumroll. I could feel the weight of their massed gaze, and there was nothing of surprise in it. They were here because they’d known we’d be here. Elves don’t have the same relationship with time as everyone else. They treat it like a pet and make it do tricks for their amusement.
“Anything else we need to know about this place?” Honey said urgently, murmuring the words right into my ear.
“It’s dangerous,” I said. “This is the world the elves made, and we have no place in it. Have you noticed, there are no birds flying in the sky? No animals anywhere, not even any insects? When the elves first came to this place, they killed everything that lived here. Right down to the last of every kind and the smallest of species. The only things that live here now are the elves and the creatures they brought with them. Or made. They always did like tinkering.”
“The light hurts my eyes,” said Peter. “It’s too bright . . .”
“It was never intended for human eyes,” I said. “Look down; we don’t even have any shadows here.”
“Now, that is disturbing,” said Walker. We came to a halt at the end of the docks, and he looked out over the massed ranks of assembled elves, his gaze impressively cool and calm. “Which one is Mab?”
“She wouldn’t come here to meet us,” I said. “She’s the Queen of all the Elves; we’re nobody. So, we go to her.”
“How?” said Honey. “They’re blocking the way.”
“They’ll make a way for us,” I said. “When they’re ready. They’re great ones for protocol and intimidation.”
Honey sniffed. “I’m American. We don’t bow our heads to foreign royalty.”
“You do if you’re a diplomat,” I said patiently. “Our only hope for surviving this is if we’re perceived as representatives of greater powers. And . . . I think we’ve stood around here far too long already. We have to put on a good show, or they’ll never respect us. So follow me, and whatever happens . . . don’t let it get to you. The elves love to see us afraid.”
I strode forward off the docks, heading straight for the nearest rank of elves. They stood firm before me, an implacable wall. I still didn’t armour up, but I did lift my chin just a little, so they could clearly see the torc around my neck. At the very last moment, the elves stepped gracefully to one side, leaving a narrow gauntlet for me to walk through. I kept my face carefully calm and composed, as though I’d expected nothing else. I could hear the others hurrying behind me and hoped they were putting on a good show. There were limits to how much I could hope to protect them in this world.
I could feel the steady pressure of the elves’ regard as I walked through their massed ranks. It’s not easy, walking through a crowd of people, any of whom might kill you in a moment, for any reason, or none. The skin on my back crawled in anticipation of an attack that never came. I could sense as much as feel my companions all but treading on my heels, crowding in close behind me.
And then the ranks of elves fell away abruptly, revealing a great and wondrous city. Miles and miles of buildings like works of art, like dreams cast in stone and marble and other things. Dreams, and nightmares. I led the way through the massive central gate carved from the skull of a dragon. A single skull bigger than a house. All the teeth had been yanked out of its long jaws, and the empty eye sockets were crammed with strange alien flowers. They writhed and hissed at me as I passed by them, my attention fixed on the city.
The streets were wide and wandering. Distorted buildings towered to every side, all of them different, individual, diseased, like the cunning dreams of a mad mind. Their shapes were basically organic but sick and harsh and even distressing to merely human eyes. Like they might have been grown as much as put together. Most of the shapes made no sense to my human eyes and aesthetics. And they moved, all of them, subtly changing, only ever still when looked at directly. Only fully real when actively perceived. I thought about quantum states and observer’s intent, and then tried hard not to think about it at all.
In a small open square we passed by an elf who had been made into a statue and forced to function as a fountain. Water gushed from his open eyes and mouth, but I could still make out enough of his face to know he was still alive, and aware, and suffering. Later, we passed by a heap of severed hands, piled up as tall as a man, with all the fingers still twitching. The impact of the overbright sun beat down on my head, and my bare skin stung and smarted from the light, as though exposed to strange alien radiations.
A dragon flew by overhead. Not the ugly wyrms the elves ride when they come to earth, but the real thing: vast and glorious, bigger than a jumbo jet, with wings so huge and wide they hardly moved as the dragon flew past. Very beautiful, and very deadly. Half a dozen dragons could take out any human city. Fortunately, there aren’t half a dozen of them left anymore.
We stopped abruptly to let a huge beast go by: a great unnatural creature with skin stretched so tight you could see the organs pulsing within. It strode on long stiltlike legs, and elves rode on its back. They beat at its pulpy head with long barbed sticks and laughed musically as it moaned. Small scuttling things stuck to the shadows of side streets, trying not to be noticed. And now and again the walls I passed would have pulsing veins or eyes that opened, or they would slowly melt away. I kept looking straight ahead. It helps if you have an aim, a destination to concentrate on. The human mind isn’t equipped to deal with a world where there are no certainties or constraints and not a damned thing on which you can depend.
Honey moved forward to walk beside me. Behind me, I could hear Walker murmuring comfortingly to Peter. Of course the elf world wouldn’t bother Walker; he was used to the Nightside.
“You’ve been here before, Eddie,” said Honey. Her voice was steady but strained. “What are the protocols for meeting the Queen?”
“Damned if I know,” I said. “It’s always different here and in the Fae Court. The city didn’t look anything like this the last time I was here. The sea and the sky weren’t those colours. The Elven Lands are always changing. They like it that way. I suppose when you’re immortal, you can get tired of things pretty quickly.”
“I thought you said they weren’t immortal,” said Honey.
“They’re not, but they might as well be. Either way, don’t tell them they’re not immortal. They tend to take it rather badly.”
“What brought you here before? I thought you were just a London field agent.”
“I was,” I said. “But you go where family needs you to go. A few years back, an elf called Peaseblossom came to London and misbehaved himself on a rather grander scale than usual. My family got word he’d been abducting small children and carrying them away; easy enough to do with his glamour. I was sent after him to get the children back, but by the time I tracked down his squalid little lair, he’d already eaten three of them.” I stopped for a moment, remembering the cold rage, the bitter helplessness . . . “I was ready to kill him on sight, but there are ancient pacts between the Droods and the Fae. The best I could do was find him, kick the crap out of him, and then send him back to the Fae Court for punishment.
“But then things got complicated . . . It turned out Peaseblossom hadn’t come to London for children. They were just appetisers. He was on his way to the Old Soul Market in Crouch End Towen. The fool.
“Elves don’t have souls. Not as such. Or at least nothing we’d recognise as a soul. Peaseblossom wanted to buy one for himself. Not as difficult as you’d think, and not actually a problem in itself, but . . . the Old Soul Market is almost as ancient as the elves, and the proprietors didn’t take kindly to discovering that Peaseblossom thought he could just waltz in and demand their very best merchandise and expect to pay on credit. So they mugged and rolled him, locked him in a cage, and made arrangements to sell his stuffed and mounted corpse to the Collector. (Apparently Peaseblossom was considered a collector’s item because he’d been name-checked in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.) Which was fine by me, but I was ordered to get the elf out and take him home before he started a war. So I went down into the London Warrens and the Subterranean Ways and retrieved Peaseblossom via my usual blend of calm reason, calculated diplomacy, and applied mayhem. And was he grateful? What do you think? So I beat the crap out of him on general principles and took him home to the Fae Court.”
“You do get around, don’t you?” said Honey. “So the elves are beholden to you? They owe you, for your help?”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “It’s more complicated than that. It always is, with elves.”
“It always is with you,” said Walker, appearing suddenly on my other side. “Why did you kill all those elves, Eddie?”
“Because they were trying to kill me,” I said. “It was an honest enough fight; no one cheated more than usual. But still, there are many here who would just love to watch me die slowly and horribly. Except they can’t kill me, because then they’d never be able to pay me back the favour they owe.”
“But if they tried to kill you before . . .” said Honey.
“I was rogue then,” I said. “Disowned by my family. Fair game. Now that I’m a Drood again and back in good standing with my family, they can’t touch me. Unless they can find a way to justify it to themselves. Elf honour is . . . complicated. Remember, everyone: once we get to the Fae Court, don’t eat or drink anything they offer you, don’t speak unless you’re spoken to directly, and don’t start anything. Leave that to me. And above all don’t try to have sex with them or you’ll be carrying your genitals home in a bag.”
“Was that last bit really necessary?” said Walker.
“You’d be surprised,” I said. “Okay, people; look sharp and cool and very confident. We’re here.”
We had come at last to Caer Dhu, the last great castle of Faerie, brought here in its entirety from our world, long and long ago. Caer Dhu, home to the Unseeli Court and the rulers of Faerie. Once, and for many, many years, that had been King Oberon and Queen Titania, but if Queen Mab really was back . . . then just maybe the returned Queen had had new thoughts about the old pacts that bound the Droods and the Fae.
From the outside, Caer Dhu looked like a huge golden crown: a massive raised dome surrounded by hundreds of golden spikes reaching up into the sky. And on those spikes, transfixed and impaled, hundreds of elves. Still alive, still suffering, their golden blood steaming endlessly down the long spikes, collecting in the guttering and gushing from the mouths of screaming gargoyle faces. Elves are very hard to kill, but that’s not always a good thing. Above the entrance, a dozen lesser spikes held up severed elf heads. The faces were still alive and aware, and their mouths moved when they saw us approach, as through trying to warn or curse us.
That’s civil war for you. There are always fallen heroes, leaders of the losing side who must be publicly punished as an example to others. And the elves know all there is to know about punishment.
I held my head up high and strode into the Unseeli Court as though I had every right to be there and an engraved invitation that promised free drinks. Honey and Walker and even Peter took their cues from me and strode along beside me with their noses in the air. Inside Caer Dhu, it was dark. The only dark place in the Elven Lands. The Fae Court was huge and empty, barely visible through the gloom. A single shaft of sparkling light slammed down like a spotlight, illuminating two Ivory Thrones standing on a raised dais at the back of the court. A huge dark form sat on the left-hand throne, but the other was empty.
I strode across the great empty space, heading for the thrones, and the others hurried along with me. Despite the open space, our footsteps didn’t echo at all. The farther into the court I went, the bigger it seemed to get. Crossing the open space seemed to last forever, but finally I came to a halt at the base of the dais and looked defiantly up at the ghastly dark figure on its throne. Before I could say anything, I heard a faint sound behind me and looked back. The great open space of the court was now crammed from wall to wall with rank upon rank of silently watching elves. Thousands of them. I swallowed hard and looked back at the throne. No Oberon, no Titania, not even a sign of the Puck, the only elf who was not perfect. Instead Queen Mab sat on the Ivory Throne, wreathed in shadows, so much larger than life and a thousand times more dreadful.
Four elves emerged unhurriedly out from behind the second, empty throne. They draped themselves insolently across it and smiled at me. Mab’s current favourites. I knew their names from my previous visit. Peaseblossom, arrogant as ever. His child and lover, Mustardseed. And Cobweb and Moth, enforcers sent occasionally into the human world to do necessary dirty work. I wouldn’t have chosen any of them as my favourites, but no doubt they had their uses.
Peaseblossom remembered me. He scowled fiercely, but I ignored him, ostentatiously giving all my attention to the Elven Queen while I tried to figure out what was the matter with the Fae Court. It felt wrong. Too big, too large, stretched thin like old skin, like something forced to serve a purpose long after it should have been retired and replaced.
After all this time, were the elves really getting old?
“I am Eddie Drood,” I said loudly. My voice seemed such a small thing in such a large place. “I am here to speak with the Queen of the Fae.”
“We know who you are,” said Cobweb in a voice like dust.
“We hate you,” said Peaseblossom in a voice like splintering ice.
“You’re expected,” said Moth in a voice like the end of the day.
“Hate you forever and ever,” said Mustardseed in a voice like dying friends.
“Queen Mab will have words with you,” said Cobweb.
“Won’t that be nice?” said Moth.
In the end, their voices all sounded the same: like evil or insane children pretending to be polite, knowing that something really nasty has been planned and is being held in reserve.
“How could they be expecting us?” said Honey. “We didn’t know we were coming here just a few hours ago.”
“They know because they’re elves,” I said.
“Is this bad?” said Peter.
“It’s not good,” I said. “But then, I never thought it would be.”
Queen Mab leaned forward on her throne, and we all stopped talking. The darkness fell away from her like a discarded cloak, and the sheer impact of her appearance was like a slap in the face. Mab was huge, greater in size and scale than any other elf. Ten feet tall, supernaturally slender and glamorous, naked save for blue-daubed signs and sigils glowing fiercely against her iridescent pearly skin. She was beautiful beyond bearing, personifying power and authority. I couldn’t have looked away if I’d wanted to. Her eyes were pure gold, with no pupil. Her mouth was a deep crimson, the red of heart’s blood, red as sin itself. Queen Mab was a first-generation elf, and it showed. There are records at Drood Hall, in the Extremely Restricted section of the old library, that suggest she might be older than the Nightside, older than humanity itself. Perhaps even older than our world . . . But then, you can’t trust anything you read, when it comes to elves.
No one knows how or why Mab was removed from power and replaced by Oberon and Titania. It’s dangerous even to ask.
Queen Mab looked down on me and my companions like an artist considering early sketches and wondering whether they should be erased. Meeting her gaze was like staring into a searchlight. One wrong word and she’d kill me with just a gesture. But I’m a Drood, and we don’t take shit from anyone.
“So, Mab, how’s it going?” I said pleasantly. “Getting much?”
There was an audible stirring among the massed ranks of elves behind me and angry hissings from the four favourites grouped at Mab’s feet. They actually started to rise up, flexing their clawed hands, only to stop abruptly at some unheard command from their Queen. They sank reluctantly back, curling around her pale feet like sulky pets. The Queen did not move, did not look away, didn’t even seem to be breathing. But another elf stepped out from behind her throne, coming forward to the edge of the dais to look down on me. He was tall, long-limbed, clad in diaphanous silks, his skin so pale as to be almost translucent. Long-stemmed roses plunged in and out of his skin, the heavy-thorned stems skewering his flesh. They wrapped around his limbs and plunged through his torso, and from deep inside the points of the thorns rose and fell, rose and fell, breaking his skin again and again. Golden blood dripped endlessly. And one great white rose blossomed from his left eye socket, completely replacing the eye. As I watched, the tips of thorns pressed up against the underside of his face, threatening and then retreating, biding their time.
I couldn’t even imagine the kind of agony he must be in, but his step was sure and certain as he descended from the dais to face me, and when he spoke, his voice never wavered once.
“I am the Herald,” he said, fixing me with his one golden eye. “Mab’s Herald. I speak for her to lesser things. And yes, I am being punished, for sins beyond your comprehension. Or appreciation. Still, it is good to have you here, Drood. It’s been so long since we had anything human to torment.”
I armoured up and took him out with one punch to the head. His skull broke audibly under the impact of my golden fist, and he sat suddenly down, as though someone had pulled the floor out from under him. Start as you mean to go on, I always say. The massed ranks of elves stirred again, and the four favourites hissed with rage, but Queen Mab raised one perfect hand and immediately all was still and silent again. The Herald rose slowly to his feet, the bones of his head creaking and cracking as they moved slowly back into place. Golden blood ran steadily down the side of his face and dripped off the lobe of his pointed ear. The blow would have killed anyone else, but elves are hard to kill. You couldn’t slow an elf down with a wrecking ball. Not in their own world.
“I am Edwin Drood,” I said flatly to Queen Mab, ignoring the Herald. “The Droods are bound to the Fae, and the Fae to the Droods, by ancient pact and treaty. Or have the elves forsaken honour?”
“The elves are honour,” said Queen Mab in a slow heavy voice like poisoned honey, as though she was half dreaming. “More than can ever be said for humankind. But be you welcome to our lands, Edwin Drood, and your companions. Do keep them under control. If they make a mess we’ll have them disciplined.”
“They’re with me,” I said. “And therefore protected by the Drood protocols.”
“Speak,” said Queen Mab, neither agreeing nor disagreeing for the moment.
“You did not inform us of your return, Your Majesty,” I said carefully. “We would have sent envoys to welcome you home.”
“We have returned,” said Queen Mab. “Let all the worlds tremble and all that live beware.”
“Well, yes,” I said. “Quite. So, what’s happened to Oberon and Titania?”
“Is that what you came here to ask, Drood?”
“No; just making conversation.”
“They are gone. Mention them not in our presence.”
“All right,” I said. “Where have you been, Your Majesty? You’ve been gone a long time.”
“Oberon sent us away.” Her dark red mouth widened slowly in a terrible smile. She had the look of the Devil contemplating a new sin. “He really should have had us killed, but he always was too sentimental for his own good. It took us a long time to claw our way back and take our long-anticipated revenges on all those who betrayed us . . .”
“Where did he send you?” I said, honestly interested. “Where could he send someone of your undoubted power?”
“Where all the bad things go, little Drood. He sent us to Hell. Damned us to the Pit, to endure the eternal Inferno.” She was still smiling her awful smile, her golden eyes fixed on me. And even inside my impenetrable armour, I could feel beads of sweat popping out on my forehead. “While we were in Hell, little Drood, during our long sojourn in the Houses of Pain, we met your precious witch, Molly Metcalf. Such a sweet little thing. Shall we inform you of the deals she made, of all the awful things she agreed to, in return for power?”
“Let us make a deal, Your Majesty,” I said. “I will not talk of Oberon and Titania, and you will not talk of my Molly. Yes?”
“Speak, little Drood,” said Queen Mab. “Tell us what brings you here to our recovered court, to our noble presence. Tell us what brings you here with the blood of so many of our noble cousins still wet and dripping on your armoured hands.”
“Ah,” I said. “I wondered when we’d get around to that. They attacked me, Your Majesty. They really should have known better. I might have been rogue at the time, but I was still a Drood, and they were just elves. Even if they had been armed with strange matter by a traitor within my family.”
Peaseblossom hissed loudly and started to rise up again. Queen Mab shot him a glance, and he flinched and fell back as though he’d been hit.
“Keep your pets on a leash, Your Majesty,” I said. “Or I might find it necessary to discipline them.”
The Queen considered me silently for an uncomfortably long moment. There was no sound in the Unseeli Court apart from the heavy breathing of my companions. I should have been able to hear the massed breathing of the thousands of watching elves, but there was nothing. I didn’t look back, but I knew they were still blocking the only way out, and it was highly unlikely they’d step aside for me again without Mab’s command. Unless I won the argument with the Queen, got the information I needed, and struck some kind of deal that would get me and my companions out of here with our organs still on the inside. The odds were not good, but I’m a Drood, and when you wear the golden armour, the odds do what they’re told, if they know what’s good for them. In the end Queen Mab nodded very slightly, and I felt a great weight rise off me. She was ready to listen, at least.
“I’m here about the USS Eldridge,” I said. “An American naval vessel that found its way here in 1943. You weren’t on the Ivory Throne at the time, Your Majesty, but I’ll bet the Herald was around back then. I need to know what happened to this ship; how it was able to come here and what happened to it while it was here.”
Queen Mab turned her great head slowly to look at the Herald, who bowed low in return.
“I do indeed remember the occasion, Your Majesty. Would it please you to have me tell of it?”
“Show them,” said Queen Mab.
The Herald clenched his left hand into a fist. Razor-sharp thorns burst out the back of his hand. Golden blood splashed onto the floor before him, quickly spreading out to form a golden scrying pool. And in that pool appeared images from the past, showing all that had befallen the unfortunate USS Eldridge.
“Your world was at war,” whispered the Herald, his golden eyes fixed on the images forming in the scrying pool. “Its very boundaries weakened by the sheer extent of the savagery and slaughter. So when one of your ships came knocking at our door, we were tempted and let it in. Such cunning machines in that ship: primitive but effective. They pushed open a doorway we had long forgotten, and all we had to do was help them through. I wonder where they thought they were going . . . A warship, yes, but small and pitiful compared to our glorious vessels. They came right to us, not knowing where they were or the danger they were in.
“We played with them for ages, teasing and tormenting as the impulse took us, delighting in their pain and horror. They cried so prettily. And then it occurred to us what a fine jest it would be to alter the ship and its crew in subtle, deadly ways and send them home again. To corrupt them body and soul and send them back to your world as a spiritual plague ship . . . We debated for hours, searching for something especially sweet and cruel and amusing . . . but that delay gave the crew of the ship time to recover. The Eldridge’s captain took control again, roused his crew, and had them reactivate their cunning machines. They forced the door open again and fled our shores in search of it. See and know what happened next . . .”
The images were clear and sharp in the scrying pool. The USS Eldridge was heading out to sea. Their decks were slick and running with blood and shit and other things, but the sailors ran frantically back and forth, leaping over dead and mutilated bodies where necessary while the captain screamed orders from the bridge. There were still enough of the crew left alive to do the work, though their faces were racked with memories of pain and rage and horror. On the bridge, the captain stared straight ahead with sunken dark eyes like cinders coughed up out of Hell.
Strange energies began to glow and crackle around the Eldridge as the powerful machinery packed into the compartments below began to operate. And that was when the elves attacked.
Huge three-masted sailing ships surged out after the Eldridge and soon overtook it, though there was scarcely wind enough to stir the massive sails. They circled lazily around the Eldridge, taunting the ship and its crew until the sailors manned the deck guns and opened fire. The cold iron of their ammunition punched through the sliver-thin hulls and made ragged messes of the spread sails. Elves danced and shimmered on their decks, moving too fast to be hit but unable to stay still long enough to operate their weapons. The Eldridge kept up a steady fire, blowing the elven ships apart inch by inch.
The elven vessels fell back, raging and frustrated, and the Eldridge sailed on.
Elf lords and ladies laughed merrily high in the sky, mounted on the back of a dragon. Not the ugly wyrms they’d been forced to use on Earth, but the real thing. Impossibly large, it hovered over the Eldridge like an eagle over its prey. The ship’s guns fired but could not touch it. The dragon opened its great mouth, and raging streams of liquid fire washed over the decks of the Eldridge, consuming sailors, blowing up guns and ammunition, and scorching the metalwork. The elves on the dragon’s back unlimbered strange unearthly weapons and blew great holes in the Eldridge’s superstructure. Sailors died in the hundreds, but some still manned the deck guns or fired up at the dragon with rifles or handguns.
The captain kept his ship going, heading right into the heat of the attack even as his bridge disintegrated about him, heading doggedly towards the door he knew had to be there, the door that would take his ship and his remaining crew home. A door out of the Hell he had brought them to. Even as his ship fell apart around him and his deck burned with dragonfire, even as his skin blistered and blackened, the captain battled on.
Until the green mists rose, and he headed the Eldridge into them, and the ship disappeared. Safe at last from elven rage and spite. My heart went out to the captain. He had no way of knowing that just getting home would not be enough. That his ship’s marvellous new equipment had been damaged or perhaps even sabotaged. That he would return home not in triumph but only to more horror. Because the Eldridge had been through Hell, and it had left its mark upon them all.
The final images faded from the scrying pool, and it was just golden blood upon the floor.
“We let them go, in the end,” said the Herald. “Their machineries were . . . interesting, but they could never have left our lands without our help and consent.”
“Why?” said Honey. Her voice was strained, hoarse. “After all you did to them, and planned to do, why . . . ?”
“They fought well,” said the Herald. “We admire courage. And by letting them pass through the gateway again, their science and our magic combined to do what neither could do alone: force it all the way open. An unsuspected back door into your world. We thought it might be useful someday.”
“You bastards,” said Honey.
“Easy,” murmured Walker.
“No!” said Honey. “Those were good men, doing their duty in a righteous war, and you—”
“Hush,” I said. “Hush.”
“We have given you what you required, little Drood,” said Queen Mab, entirely unaffected by Honey’s outburst. “Now you must give us what we require. Give us the Blue Fairy’s torc. It was not on his body when he returned to us, and it is ours by right.”
“He stole that torc from its rightful owner, nearly killing him in the process,” I said.
“What is that, to us?” said Queen Mab.
“Torcs belong to Droods and no one else,” I said. “That was true before you were sent away, and it’s still true now.”
“Such a childish attitude,” said Queen Mab, smiling lazily. “To have such pretty toys and to refuse to share them. Well, those who will not play nicely with others must be punished, for their own good. Do you really think you can defy me, little Drood?”
“Thought I’d give it a bloody good try,” I said.
“We have you,” said Queen Mab. “And so we have your torc, as well as his. You can either present them to us of your own free will and know our gratitude, or we will take them from your broken body. And from these torcs we shall learn to make more. Enough to equip an army of elves. And then we shall lead our people home, back through the unsuspected door . . . and take back what was ours from the treacherous little creatures who currently infest it. There shall be blood and horror and killing beyond your capacity to imagine, little Drood. And all because of you; because you came here and brought us what we need—”
She broke off because I was laughing at her. “Not going to happen,” I said cheerfully. “The source that powers our torcs and our armour resides with the Droods and answers only to us. It likes us. It would never work for such as you. It has much better taste than that.”
“Just a suggestion,” murmured Walker. “Let’s not antagonise the incredibly powerful and psychotic Queen of all the Elves.”
“Hell with that,” I said, glaring up at the Queen. “Listen to me, Mab. No one threatens humanity and gets away with it as long as the Droods still stand. And we do still stand, despite all the years you’ve been away. Now, you can apologise to me, or I can drag you right off that throne and make you kneel to me. Your choice.”
“You underestimate us, little Drood,” Queen Mab said calmly. “Your small and limited kind always did. There is nothing our sciences and magics cannot duplicate, given time. And we have nothing but time. Whatever your source is, we shall bind it to our will and make it ours. Still, it was good of you to confirm the existence of this source, separate and distinct from the dreaded Droods. We had reason to suspect its nature but no proof, until now. Makes our planning so much easier. For, after all, if we have this source, what do we need the Droods for?”
“Any weapon is only as good as the one who wields it,” I said. “It’s not the armour but who’s inside it.”
“Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?” said Queen Mab. “Now, inform us of the true nature and extent of this source.”
“I don’t think so. That’s Drood business.”
“That we shall take first the truth, and then the torcs, from your screaming shell,” said Queen Mab. “We shall have such fun, tearing the secrets from you and breaking your spirit, bit by bit.”
“You proceed from a false assumption, Your Majesty,” said Honey. I was so caught up in the moment I’d actually forgotten she and the others were with me, and it made me feel a little better to know I wasn’t alone in this.
“You tell her, Honey,” I said, hoping she could buy me time to think of something. Anything.
“You would not like the Earth as it is these days, Your Majesty,” Honey said smoothly. “You wouldn’t recognise the old place after all we’ve done to it. It’s very . . . normal now. Very sane and reasonable. All science, with magic forced into the shadows and the nooks and crannies. The Earth has changed and evolved, just like humanity. Whereas you and your people, Your Majesty, haven’t. There’s no place for you in our world anymore. You’re better off here. Really.”
“Speak again, little thing, and we will change you into something amusing,” said Queen Mab. “We speak only to the Drood, and only then because his family is bound to us, and us to them.”
“And because you’re still afraid of my family,” I said. “That hasn’t changed. Stay here, Mab. Where you’re safe.”
She leaned suddenly forward, a movement as unexpected as a statue bending in two. Her great head came down to glare at me, and it was all I could do to keep from falling back. Up close, her golden eyes blazed like the sun.
“You killed my Blue,” she said in a voice soft and implacable as death. “He wasn’t much. A half-breed, born of taboo. But he had courage, and we liked his style. The only elf ever to trick his way into the stronghold of my enemy the Droods, win their trust, and steal a torc. Not for himself, but for us. That we might return in glory again. We would have raised him high in our regard, forgetting the taint in his blood . . . But he insisted on going back alone to your world to play one last game. We couldn’t say no. It meant so much to him, to prove his worth in your world as well as ours. And you killed him for it.”
“I didn’t kill him,” I said. “I was his friend. A real friend; not like you. I valued him for who he was, not for what he could bring to the table. I sent you back his body as a sign of respect. To him, as well as to you.”
“Not good enough, elf killer. There are so many other dead. Elf lords and ladies in good standing with this court, dead by your hand, lost to your unnatural Drood weapons. Did you even bother to learn the names of those you killed? They had noble names and mighty lineages; their lives and deeds and accomplishments were the things of legend. And you murdered them. Their spilled blood calls out for revenge, and we are minded to have it.”
I deliberately turned my back on her and looked over the ranks of elves lined up behind me. They all had some kind of weapon in their hands, and every single one of them was smiling, anticipating suffering and slaughter: food and drink to elven kind. An old story, where elves and humans were concerned, but unfortunately for them, I wasn’t playing by the old rules. Honey stepped away to give herself room to work. The shimmering crystal weapon was back in her hands. Walker leaned casually on his umbrella, beaming happily about him, apparently completely unconcerned, as though he knew something no one else did. And perhaps he did; this was Walker, after all. And Peter King . . . was looking at me. He didn’t seem especially concerned or scared, just interested to see what I was going to do.
I looked back at Queen Mab. “You’ve been gone so long, you’ve forgotten the first rule of the universe. Don’t mess with the Droods.”
I concentrated, and my armour glowed and glared like an angry golden flame. Razor-sharp blades rose up out of my armoured arms and legs, thick spikes protruding from my knuckles. My featureless face mask became a savage demonic visage topped with curling horns. Strange exotic weapons burst out of my back on long golden streamers, covering the elves in their ranks, and rose up over my shoulders to threaten Queen Mab on her Ivory Throne. This was the battle form the Deathstalker had taught me to make from the malleable strange armour of my new torc. I didn’t have time to perfect it before the war with the Hungry Gods was over, but I’d spent a lot of time working on it since.
The elves stood very still. This was a new thing, and the elves have always been cautious of change. They don’t know how to react to new things.
“Meet the new boss, even more of a bastard than the old boss,” I said to Queen Mab, my voice amplified to a deafening roar, filling the whole vast chamber. Honey and the others actually flinched away from me, and Queen Mab sat back on her throne.
“You dare to threaten us, in our own court, in our own land?” she said, but she didn’t sound nearly as certain as she had before.
“Why not?” I said. “Who are you?”
“What are you?” whispered the Herald. “What have the Droods become?”
“Shamans,” I said. “Protectors of the tribes of man. Threaten humanity, and you threaten us. Threaten one of us, and the whole family stands ready to go to war. Is that what you want, Queen Mab? War in the Sundered Lands between all of your people and all of mine? To throw away your word and your honour and everything you’ve recovered here in a quest for torcs you couldn’t use and a world you couldn’t live in? Is that what you want?”
“No,” said Queen Mab, slowly and reluctantly. “But speak not to us of honour, Drood. Your family is corrupt, rotten from within, riddled with traitors. We have heard this even here.”
“We’re cleaning house,” I said. “And then let all the worlds tremble and all that lives beware.”
I allowed my armour to return to its usual smooth and gleaming human form, blades and spikes and weapons sinking smoothly back into the golden surface. My devil’s face had become a featureless mask again. Maintaining the battle form took a hell of a lot out of me, so much that I’d never been able to use it in training for more than a few minutes, but of course Queen Mab didn’t know that.
“We’re leaving now,” I said. “We’ve learned what we needed to know. Open the door for us, assist our departure, and then close the door and seal it shut behind us. My people will check, at regular intervals, to make sure it stays closed.”
“Why should we assist you in even the smallest of ways?” said Queen Mab. It was meant to be a threat, but it sounded more like the sullen, sulky tones of a disappointed child.
“Well, put it this way,” I said. “You wouldn’t want us to stick around and spoil the rest of your day, would you?”
“Go,” said Queen Mab.
We sailed the Hope Street back through the green mists, back through the gateway to our own world, and no one tried to stop us. We all cheered as the green mists fell away, dissipating rapidly to reveal a reassuringly normal river and sky. We all took great lungfuls of sharp fresh air, and laughed, and clapped each other on the back. Honey jumped up and down at the wheel, and then poured on the speed, putting as much space as possible between us and the gateway, just in case.
“I don’t believe it!” she said. “You stared down Queen Mab! You went eyeball to eyeball with the Queen Bitch Psycho herself, and she blinked first!”
“I have to say I’m impressed,” said Walker, reclining comfortably in his leather chair again. “To see elves back down, confronted by nothing more than words and nerve, is . . . unprecedented. Were you bluffing, Eddie?”
“I’ll never tell,” I said, letting the breeze flow soothingly over my unarmoured face. It felt good, natural . . . everything the Sundered Lands were not.
“But no, really; how did you get away with it?” said Honey.
I sighed, suddenly tired. “Because the elves . . . are not what they were. They’re finally getting old. Couldn’t you feel it? In the air, in the land, in the ships, and in the buildings? Time is finally catching up with them.”
“But they’re . . . if not immortal, then near as dammit,” said Walker.
“Did you see any children there?” I said. “Any signs of children? The elves are always proud of their rare offspring and never miss a chance to show them off. And we didn’t see a single child anywhere in the whole city. I can’t prove it, but I can feel it in my bones: the elves we saw today are all the elves there are now. I think they stopped breeding completely when they left our world. That’s why they’re so desperate to return. Because they’re dying out in their splendid sterile new land. And it’s a shame.”
“A shame?” said Honey, actually turning around from the steering wheel to look at me.
“Yes,” I said. “Because then . . . there would be one less wonder in the universe.”
Walker nodded slowly. “They are very beautiful. And you can’t have the rose without the thorns.” He stopped suddenly and looked around. “Where’s Peter?”
We searched the boat from stem to stern, but he wasn’t on it. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it before, but Peter had not returned with the rest of us. We reconvened in the cabin and studied each other soberly as the Hope Street drew steadily closer to the Philadelphia docks.
“Did we leave him behind?” said Honey. “We couldn’t have left him behind in the Elven Lands! We would have noticed!”
“Would we?” I said. “When did you last see him? Did you see him get on board, before we left? I thought he was with us, but I had my mind on other things, like a last-minute attack from a spiteful Elven Queen.”
“Maybe Mab kept him,” said Walker. “As punishment for your insolence to her.” His mouth compressed, and he stood very straight.
“Turn this boat around. We have to go back. We can’t leave him there.”
“We can’t go back,” I said. “The elves sealed the doorway behind us, remember? That was the deal.”
“We don’t know he’s there,” said Honey. “He could have disappeared anywhere . . .”
“And he has his teleport bracelet,” I said. “He could just turn up at the next location.”
“If it still works in the Sundered Lands,” said Walker. “We have to go back! There are other ways, other entrances! We can’t leave him in their hands!”
“No!” I said with such force that both of them looked at me sharply. I made myself sound calm and reasonable. “If they’ve got Peter, and that’s if—we don’t know—they’ll be waiting for us. He’ll be the bait in a trap. We’d have to force our way in past strongly defended doorways, and that would take all the resources and most of the manpower of the Drood family. It would mean war between the Fae and the Droods, with the fate of all humanity hanging in the balance. I won’t risk that . . . on an if.”
“What else could have happened to Peter?” said Honey.
I looked at her steadily. “You could have killed him. Or Walker. While my attention was distracted. Stuck a knife between his ribs and tipped him over the side. In the thick green mists, no one would have seen or suspected anything.”
“How can you say that?” said Honey.
“Someone killed Katt and Blue,” I said. “And may have tried to kill Walker back in Tunguska. If he’s to be believed.”
“You could have killed the others,” said Walker. He sounded quite reasonable, not at all accusing. “You could have killed Peter. You’re a Drood. That’s what Droods do.”
“Any one of us could be the killer,” I said. “There can be only one to return for the prize, remember? And we all want that prize so very badly.”
For a long while, no one said anything. The Philadelphia docks were looming up before us. Walker stirred suddenly.
“What are we going to tell his grandfather?”
“Alexander King set the rules for his precious game,” said Honey. “And he was the one who pushed his grandson into the game in the first place.”
“I shall miss Peter,” said Walker. “Or at any rate, I shall miss his exceedingly useful phone camera. I mean, without it, we have no direct proof of what happened to the USS Eldridge.”
“Then it’s just as well I had the foresight to pick Peter’s pocket on our way back to the boat,” I said, holding up the phone camera.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Blood and Horror
It all went bad so quickly.
We arrived at our last destination in a blaze of bright sunshine to the sound of happy laughter. We were standing in the middle of a crowded main street, surrounded by people strolling back and It forth, chatting pleasantly to each other and paying the three of us no attention at all. Which was . . . odd. The air was hot and dry, and the people passing by stirred up low clouds of dust from the sidewalks. But everyone seemed to be in a good mood and well under the influence of the holiday spirit. Walker and Honey and I waited for a while to see if Peter might teleport in to join us, but he didn’t.
“Very well,” Walker said finally. “Where are we this time?”
Honey indicated a large sign on the other side of the street, and we all studied it in silence. Underneath a bright and cheerful cartoon of a Gray alien leaning out the top of a flying saucer was the oversized greeting WELCOME TO ROSWELL! THE UFO TOWN!
“Oh, no,” said Walker.
“The first person to use phrases like Out of this world, or Far out! gets a severe slapping,” said Honey.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “This is it? Really? The climax and finale of the great game? Bloody Roswell? It’s a joke! There’s no mystery here, and never was; just a tall tale that got out of control. My family has been monitoring alien visitors to this world for hundreds of years; if anything had actually happened here, I’d know about it.”
“There must be something here worth investigating, or Alexander King wouldn’t have sent us,” said Honey just a bit doubtfully.
“Interesting,” murmured Walker. “We appeared here out of nowhere, right in the middle of a busy shopping centre, but so far no one has batted an eye. In fact, no one is paying us any attention at all, except to walk around us. So either this particular crowd has a lot on its mind, or . . .”
“Or what?” said Honey.
“Damned if I know,” said Walker. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say someone was running an avoidance field . . .”
“No one knew we were coming here,” said Honey.
“Alexander King knew,” I said. “Maybe he’s trying to help.”
“He never helped before,” said Walker. “What could there be in Roswell that the Independent Agent thought we might finally need assistance?”
“Roswell,” I said disgustedly. “When my family finds out I was here, they’ll laugh themselves sick.”
“I take it we all know the basis of the legend?” said Honey. “In 1947, just outside the small town of Roswell, New Mexico, a farmer found strange metallic objects scattered across his field. He couldn’t identify them, so he notified the authorities. On July 8, the local air force base informed the local newspaper that they were the remains of a crashed flying saucer. The local radio station wasted no time in spreading the news to an excited world . . . at which point the air force slammed on the brakes and went into reverse. Swore blind it was just the remains of a crashed weather balloon. End of story.”
“Except,” I said, not to be left out, “thirty years later, people started saying it was all a cover-up. The air force admitted the weather balloon stuff was a lie, but all the explanations they’ve come up with since have proved equally flawed. All of which had probably nothing to do with flying saucers and a hell of a lot more to do with the fact that the 509th Bomb Group was stationed just outside Roswell: the only bombing command authorised to carry nuclear bombs at that time. Hardly surprising they didn’t want the world’s attention anywhere near them. Especially if they were carrying out missions the public weren’t supposed to know about.”
“It is interesting how the legend has continued to change and mutate down the years,” said Walker. “Everything from crashed UFOs with alien bodies scattered all over the mesa, to alien autopsy films, to a really screwed-up First Contact. The last version I heard talked about was the direct downloading of an alien consciousness from a higher dimension. Absurd.”
“Oh, sure,” I said. “Utterly absurd.”
“I saw that alien autopsy film,” said Honey. “Never saw anything so obviously fake-looking in my life.”
“Right,” I said. “Alien autopsies don’t look anything like that.”
Walker and Honey looked at me for a long moment.
“Moving on,” said Walker, turning to Honey. “You’d know, if anyone, what’s going on here, so . . . What’s going on here?”
“Not a damned thing, as far as I know,” said Honey. “Though admittedly, if anything really important was under way here, it would all be discussed on a much higher level than I have access to. I know what I need to know, but I don’t need to know everything. On the other hand . . . you’re right, Eddie. People like us . . . If there was anything to the legend, we’d have heard something . . .”
“So why are we here?” I said. “What mystery are we supposed to investigate?”
“Beats the hell out of me,” said Honey.
“Why don’t you use that frankly rather disturbing computer implant in your head and phone home?” said Walker. “Ask your higher echelons at Langley if anything of interest has happened here recently.”
Honey’s face went blank for a moment, and then she scowled heavily. “The signal’s jammed. Again . . . I can’t get through. Eddie?”
I reached out to my family through my torc . . . and there was nobody there.
“You too?” said Honey. “Cut off again? That shouldn’t be possible.”
“Can’t be a coincidence,” I said. “Someone here doesn’t want us talking with anyone outside Roswell. Someone . . . or something.”
“Maybe something’s due to happen here,” said Honey. “Something important or significant, and somebody doesn’t want to risk us calling in reinforcements.”
“The nearest Drood field agent is in Texas,” I said. “Do your people have anyone useful any closer than that?”
“Not that I know of. Besides, this would be FBI business, and the Company has never got on well with the Bureau.”
“Why don’t you try Peter’s mobile phone?” Walker said reasonably. “See if it’s just the two of you who’ve been jammed, or whether it’s more general.”
I tried Peter’s phone. Couldn’t get a signal. We walked down the street till we found a public pay phone and tried that. Nothing but dead air; not even a hiss of static. I put the phone back, and we looked at one another.
“I would be willing to wager good money that the whole town is like this,” said Walker. “Someone (or something; yes, Eddie) has gone to great lengths to isolate Roswell from the outside world. So why hasn’t anyone else here noticed? Why has no one raised a fuss?”
“Look around you,” said Honey. “Roswell is a tourist town. Most of these people are tourists. Probably haven’t a clue anything unusual is going on.”
“And the local people?” said Walker.
“That’s what makes this interesting,” I said. “They might be keeping quiet so as not to scare off the tourists, or . . . Actually, I don’t have an or. Something’s definitely happening here, and we need to investigate.”
“I don’t know . . .” Honey looked around her, her face cold and thoughtful. “What if all of this . . . is just a distraction? The Independent Agent sent us here to solve the mystery of Roswell. We go back without that specific information, we could forfeit the prize. And I have come too far, and been through too much, to miss out on that now.”
“She has a point,” Walker said to me reluctantly. “We’re here for a specific purpose, and nothing can be allowed to interfere with that. Alexander King’s hoarded secrets are of vital importance to the world. They must not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands.”
“He chose the time and place of our arrival,” I said. “So what’s happening here, or about to happen, must be significant.” And then I stopped dead as I suddenly made a connection. “They’re all significant! All five locations we’ve been to! Remember the photos and trophies we saw back at Place Gloria? All scenes of the Independent Agent’s most important cases? We’ve been following in his footprints all along! He’s been here before us!”
Honey and Walker both nodded quickly. “So,” said Walker, “are we reliving his past triumphs? Or making up for his greatest failures? Is that the point of the game? That only the agent who could get to the truth where he failed would be worthy to replace him and have access to his treasure?”
“Let’s take a look around,” said Honey. “Get the lay of the land. See what’s really going on here.”
“Okay,” I said. “Hey! Let’s follow that gaudily painted minivan with the four kids and the oversized dog. They look like they’d know a mystery when they saw it.”
“You really do get on my tits sometimes, Eddie,” said Honey.
Roswell, not surprisingly, was something of a tourist trap. Far too many of the shops and stores we passed were dedicated to off loading overpriced UFO junk on gullible tourists, all of it linked to one or the other of the many prevailing Roswell myths. And the happy families swarming through the packed streets ate it all up with spoons. One man sold three-foot-tall balloons shaped like cartoonish Gray aliens. A man and a woman in Reptiloid costumes handed out leaflets headed Impeach David Icke! Plugging their new book, apparently. A towering statue of a Gray alien bestowed a fatuous smile on passersby and blessed them with a peace sign. (Boy, had they got that one wrong. I wouldn’t turn my back on a Gray unless I had my armour on.) Someone had graffitied the base of the statue, ET was a fink!
A lot of the tourists were wearing Star Trek costumes, original and Next Generation. I couldn’t help but feel there should be a strict weight limit enforced on people who wear skintight costumes. Lycra isn’t meant to stretch that far.
We passed by an entire restaurant in the shape of a flying saucer. Outside the front door, a full-sized replica of Robby the Robot recited the day’s specials in his roboty voice. A DVD shop had a poster in its window proudly proclaiming the imminent arrival of a new big-budget remake of The Starlost, directed by Harlan Ellison and starring Laurence Fishburne and Paris Hilton. Even more distressing, many stores were given over to all that crystal-channelling angel-worshipping flower-aromatherapy New Age bullshit, all of it priced through the ceiling. I sometimes feel people should be required to sit a mandatory IQ test before they’re allowed into places like that.
I vented some of this to Walker, who just nodded and said, Angels! in a rather grim tone of voice. I didn’t press him. I didn’t think I wanted to know.
We finally stopped beneath a large sign from the Roswell Chamber of Commerce bearing the invitation HEY, SPACE PEOPLE! COME ON DOWN AND BE FRIENDLY! YOU’RE SURE OF A WELCOME HERE! Stephen Spielberg’s got a lot to answer for. Never met an alien yet that was prepared to share the secrets of the universe with us. Mostly they just see our world as prime real estate, once they’ve got rid of the inconvenient species currently inhabiting it. And don’t even get me started on the ones who come here on sex trade cruises.
A television crew was doing a vox populi, stopping passersby and asking them fatuous questions for the local news channel. The interviewer’s hair had been teased and sprayed to within an inch of its life, and her teeth were blindingly bright. It was the usual fluff, with lots of bad puns and jokes about illegal aliens. I did consider asking them if they’d seen or heard anything unusual, but none of them looked like they’d know a real news story if they fell over it.
The three of us gave the camera crew a wide berth and wandered on through the town. People had finally started to notice us but in a weird kind of way. They’d glance at us, and then look away, and then stare openly when they thought we weren’t looking, as though they thought they recognised us but couldn’t quite place us. They didn’t seem at all startled or disturbed . . . just intrigued. Honey started to get a bit irritated.
“I am a CIA agent!” she said huffily in a voice that was perhaps just a little too loud and carrying. “I am not supposed to be noticed!”
“Maybe they think you’re a supermodel,” Walker said generously.
“It’s the Elven Lands,” I explained. “Some of their glamour rubbed off on us. Don’t worry; it won’t last long.”
“I’ve always wanted to be glamorous,” said Walker just a bit wistfully.
“I don’t like being so . . . visible,” muttered Honey.
“Relax,” I said. “They’re not seeing us, just the glamour. Probably think we’re film stars, or local celebrities, or someone they’ve seen on a reality show. If anyone comes up and asks for an autograph, just glare haughtily at them and brush them aside, and they’ll go away quite happy.”
“Why did you steal Peter’s phone?” Walker said abruptly.
I’d been considering that myself. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “It was an impulse, done as soon as thought. I can’t help wondering if some outside influence nudged my thoughts for good or mischief. Can’t say I regret it, though. I don’t trust Peter. Too quiet, too watchful . . . always hanging back and doing his best never to get directly involved. And he does seem to know rather more about our weird world than someone of his supposed background should know.”
“You think he’s a ringer,” said Honey. “Planted on us to report back to his grandfather. The spy within.”
“Let’s just say . . . I wasn’t comfortable with Peter having the only hard evidence of all we’ve discovered,” I said.
“And now he’s gone,” said Walker, looking at me thoughtfully. “I always knew you Droods could be ruthless on occasion.”
“Have you checked the phone’s camera files?” said Honey. “Just to make sure it really does hold the proof Peter said it did?”
“Not yet,” I said. “And I have to wonder . . . whether he’d gathered any evidence of our trip to the Sundered Lands. I’m not even sure our technology would work in a place like that.”
“The boat worked,” said Honey.
“True.” I looked at Honey, and then at Walker. “Did either of you see Peter use his camera in the Fae Court?”
“Can’t say I did,” said Honey. “But we were all somewhat preoccupied at the time.”
“So we might not have any evidence of the elves’ involvement with the USS Eldridge?” said Walker.
I weighed the phone in my hand. “Not necessarily. And . . . I’m reluctant to try and access any files on this without checking it over thoroughly first. Peter was the Independent Agent’s grandson. No knowing what kind of protections and booby traps he built in to protect his data.”
“We could always go back to the Elven Lands and ask them to pose for photos,” said Honey.
“Let’s not,” said Walker. “I’m more concerned about what Alexander King might say if we don’t have any hard evidence to back up our stories.”
“What’s this we stuff, paleface?” said Honey. “There can be only one, remember? The CIA didn’t send me on this mission to share the spoils with anyone else.”
“We started out with six, and now we are three,” I said. “Wouldn’t take a lot now to whittle us down to one. Treachery and backstabbing have always been a recognised part of the spy’s trade.”
“Sometimes literally,” said Honey. “Where were you, Eddie, when Katt and Blue died? Or when my submersible was sabotaged and I nearly died?”
“I saved your life,” I said.
“Good misdirection,” said Honey. “How better to make me trust you?”
“We could still be four,” said Walker. “Peter might still turn up.”
“Perhaps,” said Honey. She looked at me for a long moment. “Keep a close watch on that phone, Eddie. I’d hate for it to go . . . missing.”
“Right,” said Walker. “A tourist trap like this is bound to be lousy with pickpockets.”
Honey sniffed loudly. “If I find someone else’s hand in my pockets, I’ll tie their fingers in a knot.”
I smiled, perhaps a little complacently. “No one steals from a Drood and lives to boast of it.”
“The Blue Fairy stole a torc from you,” said Walker. “Is that why you killed him?”
I turned to face him, slowly and deliberately, but to his credit, he didn’t flinch.
“Is that an accusation?”
“Not yet,” said Walker.
“You’re sure someone killed them?” said Honey. “No way it could have been just . . . chance?”
“I don’t believe in chance,” said Walker. “Not where professionals like us are concerned. And especially considering someone tried to kill me back in Tunguska.”
“So you say,” I said.
“Well, quite,” said Walker.
“We have business to attend to,” Honey said firmly. “Starting with working out just what that business is. Everything else can wait.”
“Yes,” I said. “It can wait.”
“For now,” said Walker.
“Men . . .” said Honey. “Why don’t you just get them out and wave them at each other?”
We walked on through the town, taking in the sights, hoping for a glimpse of something significant. The sun blazed fiercely in a clear blue sky, not a hint of a cloud in sight, and not a whisper of a breeze to take the edge off the increasingly uncomfortable hot dry air. And still, tourists everywhere: large, red-faced, happy souls in colourful outfits with not a care in the world . . . or any sense of danger, apparently.
“I may be wrong about this,” Walker said quietly, “but I rather think we’re being followed.”
We stopped, looked into a shop window full of cute little stuffed aliens, and then casually turned and looked about us, as though wondering where to go next. I let my gaze drift easily back and forth, but with so many people milling about it was hard to spot anything unusual.
“I don’t see anyone,” I said finally. “And I really am pretty good at identifying tails.”
“I run the Nightside,” said Walker. “You don’t last long in the Nightside without developing especially good survival instincts. There’s someone out there, and they’ve been following us for at least five, maybe ten minutes.”
“I don’t see anyone,” said Honey. “But I do feel . . . something.”
We walked back the way we’d come, darting in and out of shops, using front and back entrances, doubling back and forth and using shop windows as mirrors . . . All the usual tactics for surprising a tail into betraying himself. And even after all that, not a glimpse of anyone anywhere doing anything they shouldn’t. But now I was definitely getting that prickly feeling at the back of my neck of being watched by unseen eyes. Someone was out there, shadowing our every move; someone really good at what they were doing.
A professional, like us.
“Who knows we’re here?” Honey said finally. “Who knows who we are? Hell, even we didn’t know we were coming here till we were here!”
“Alexander King knew,” I said. “He could have arranged for word to get out. And we have been making waves . . . We were bound to attract attention sooner or later from any number of groups or organisations or even certain powerful individuals. Damn, this is creepy. I spy on people; I don’t get spied on.”
“Use the Sight,” said Walker.
“No,” I said immediately. “If he’s as good as I think he is, and he must be really bloody good if he can hide himself from me, he’ll detect it the moment I raise my Sight. And then he’ll know for sure he’s been spotted.”
“He must know that now, the way we’ve been acting,” said Honey.
“No . . .” I said. “He may suspect, but he doesn’t know. And as long as he’s still not sure, we’ve got the upper hand.”
“Perhaps,” said Walker. “Whoever they are, they must represent whoever it is that’s responsible for whatever’s happening here . . . or what’s scheduled to happen. God, I hate sentences like that. But consider this: if you were setting up a major operation in a small town and all of a sudden just happened to notice a Drood, a CIA agent, and the man who runs the Nightside strolling casually around taking an interest in things . . . You’d want to know more about them, wouldn’t you?”
“Let him watch,” I said. “Let him follow. He can’t do anything without revealing himself, and if he’s stupid enough to do that, I will then quite happily bounce the bugger off the nearest wall and ask him pointed questions.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” said Honey.
Our attention was attracted by a small group of tourists gathered in front of a shop window. They seemed more than usually excited. We strolled over to join them and found they were watching a news programme on a television set in the window. The local news anchor, a small man in a large suit with a deep voice and an obvious toupee, was getting quite excited over the story that was just coming in through his teleprompter.
“We’ve all heard about cattle mutilations,” he said, his voice only slightly muffled by the shop window. “Cattle found dead of no obvious cause, with bits missing and numerous incisions made with almost surgical skill. All kinds of people (and others) have been blamed for these: aliens, mad scientists, government agencies backed up by their ubiquitous black helicopters . . . even Devil worshippers and extreme vegetarians. But events right here at Roswell have now taken a new and disturbing turn.”
I looked at Honey. “Black helicopters?”
“Nothing to do with me,” she said. “Cattle mutilations are just so beneath us. We’d never be involved in anything that messy and that obvious.”
She broke off as several people in the crowd shushed her, and we all turned our attention back to the news anchor.
“Early this morning, seven dead and mutilated cattle were discovered on the ranch of well-known local businessman Jim Thomerson, some twenty miles outside of Roswell,” he said. “In each case, major organs were missing, removed from the carcasses with professional skill. Strange burn marks were noted on the ground near the dead cattle . . . but no other signs to show how the attackers came and went, according to local law enforcement officials. Disturbing enough, you might think, but the breaking news is that Jim Thomerson himself has been found dead and mutilated not far from his cattle. His body has been brought into town, to the new morgue, for forensic examination.”
The news anchor forced a smile for the camera. “Have our little Gray friends finally gone too far? We hope to be able to show you actual photos from the crime scene later this evening. We must warn you that these photos are likely to be of a graphic nature; viewer discretion is advised.”
“Translation: everyone gather around the set; this is going to be good!” said Honey. “Yes, I know; shush.”
And then the television screen went blank. The four other television sets in the window that had been showing other channels with the sound turned down also went dead. The crowd stirred nervously, broke up into couples and families, and drifted away, chattering animatedly. Walker and Honey and I looked at each other.
“This . . . was weird,” said Honey. “All the local stations going off the air at the same time? If it was just a technical thing, the screens would be showing the usual variations on Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, accompanied by lots of Be happy, don’t worry music. No . . . those broadcasts are being jammed, just like ours. Which, if nothing else, must take a hell of a lot of power. Someone doesn’t want this news getting out of Roswell.”
“So it’s not just our comms that have been targeted,” I said. “The whole town’s been cut off from the outside world. Isolated . . . So that whatever’s going to happen, or maybe even already started . . . no one from outside will know till it’s all over, and it’s too late to do anything.”
“But even so, cattle mutilations?” said Walker. “They’re just rural myths, aren’t they?”
“Not when it starts happening to people,” I said. “I think we have to assume this is the mystery we were sent here to investigate.”
“King knew in advance this was going to happen?” said Walker.
“Who better?” said Honey. “The man was and is seriously connected.”
“That farmer’s body should have got here by now,” said Walker. “I think it behooves us to visit this new morgue and take a look for ourselves.”
“I love it when you use words like behoove,” I said. “Oh, please, Walker; teach me to talk proper like you, so I can sound like a real agent.”
“Shut up, Eddie,” said Walker.
“We can go take a look,” said Honey. “And then you can make the poor guy sit up on his slab and tell us what happened. Right, Walker?”
“It was just the one time!” said Walker. “I do wish everyone would stop going on about it!”
“Any idea where the local morgue might be?” I said. “It’s not the kind of thing you can just go up and ask complete strangers. They tend to look at you funny.”
“Maybe we should look for someone in local law enforcement,” said Walker.
“And just maybe you two should try living in the twenty-first century with the rest of us,” Honey said scathingly. “We passed a cybercafé just a few blocks back.”
It didn’t take long to log in on the town site, call up a map, and locate the new morgue. It wasn’t that far from where we were. Walker and I carefully didn’t look at each other. Honey looked decidedly smug as she led us out of the cybercafé.
“What’s the matter, Walker? Don’t you have computers in the Nightside?”
“Of course,” he said stiffly. “Some of my best friends are artificial.”
“Somehow that doesn’t surprise me,” said Honey.
The new morgue was a calm and civilised structure, very modern and stylish and not at all threatening. Honey bluffed her way in with a fake Homeland Security ID that she just happened to have about her person while Walker and I did our best to look properly mean and hard and American. No one gave us any trouble; the locals were only too happy to have someone experienced on hand to come in and take over. A local deputy carrying too much weight and topped off with a hat far too small for his head led us through the outer offices to the morgue at the back of the building. People watched us pass with wide eyes and spooked, scared expressions. It was one thing to make your living exploiting alien visitations, and quite another to have them turn up in your backyard with chain saws and scalpels, intent on playing doctor. The deputy looked more openly nervous the closer he got to the morgue. He was sweating profusely despite the arctic air-conditioning and jumped at every sudden sound.
“All communications systems are down,” he said abruptly. “Can’t get a word in or out. You folks know anything about that?”
“Sorry,” said Honey in her best brisk and professional voice. “Information only on a need-to-know basis. You know how it is.”
“Oh, sure, sure.” The deputy actually relaxed a little in the presence of such obvious authority and competence. “Good to have someone here who knows what they’re doing. We’re mostly part-timers. Sheriff’s off sick with his allergies, and Doc Stern’s busy with a car cash on the other side of town. This is all . . . a hell of sight more than I signed on for.” He looked at Honey sharply. “Did your people know this was going to happen? Is that why you’re here?”
“It’s our job to know about things like this,” said Honey. “Has there been any panic in the town? Any rush to get out of Roswell?”
“Well, no,” said the deputy, frowning heavily. “Everyone here was expecting the tourists to get in their cars and head for the hills once the news got out, with the townsfolk right behind them, but . . . everyone’s being real calm about it. Doesn’t make a blind bit of sense . . . I’d leave, if I had anyone halfway competent to leave in charge, but . . . it just doesn’t seem right to go off and leave old Jim Thomerson lying there in the morgue. Not . . . respectful. Here; this is it.”
He showed us a large reinforced steel door with a keypad lock. More security than I’d been expecting. We all waited impatiently while the deputy keyed in the six-digit number with great concentration.
“I don’t normally get back here much,” he said. “Only the sheriff and the doc ever come in here. Doc’ll be back as soon as he can. You want me to stick around . . . ?”
“No,” said Honey. “Go back to your post, Deputy. We’ll handle it from here. And, Deputy: no one comes back here till we’re done, and no one says anything to anyone. Got it?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the deputy. He hurried away, not looking back.
“Potentially bright young fellow, I thought,” said Walker.
We went into the morgue, shutting the door behind us. It was a lot bigger than I expected, with bright lights and immaculate gleaming walls.
“This . . . is not normal, for a small town,” said Honey. “Maybe . . . ten times larger than it should be. This is more the kind of thing you’d expect to find in a major city. Makes me wonder if they might have had to contend with . . . unusual situations before.”
“This was custom-made,” said Walker. “By someone expecting trouble.”
“Maybe something did happen here back in the day, “ said Honey.
“And no one told you,” said Walker. “Shame on them.”
“Never mind that,” I said. “Look at that! They brought one of the bloody cows in here!”
Two mortuary slabs had been pushed together on the far side of the room, and a cow was lying across them on its side. The four legs stuck stiffly out over the edge of the slab. We all gathered around the carcass. The cow had been sliced open the whole length of its underside, from throat to udder. The sides of the belly had been pulled out and pinned back to reveal that the whole interior had been . . . rummaged through. Some organs were missing, others had been cut open and had pieces removed, still others had been moved around, rearranged. Large holes had been drilled through the hide and the head to no obvious purpose. Both eyes were gone, and all the top teeth had been neatly extracted. The tongue had been sliced in half lengthwise, and then left in place. One stiff leg had been dissected to show the nerves, another to show the muscles.
“Interesting,” said Walker, leaning in close for a better look.
“Extremely,” said Honey, leaning right in there with him.
“Gross,” I said, staying well back. “I want to know how they got that thing in here through that little door.”
We all looked back at the distinctly human-scaled door, shrugged pretty much in unison, and turned our attention back to the cow.
“The work looks professional enough,” said Walker. “Definitely used scalpels rather than knives. And since there’s no damage from local predators, it was done not long ago. Some burn marks on the internal tissues. Laser drill, perhaps? But none of this work makes any sense . . . It’s not just a dissection. I feel sure there was a definite end in mind, but I’m damned if can make out what . . .”
“They practically strip-mined the poor creature,” I said. “But why take some organs and just cut up others? Why open the beast up just to move things around?”
“Presumably they were curious,” said Walker. “Perhaps . . . they’d never seen a cow before.”
“What?” said Honey. “They came all the way here with their snazzy new stardrive but couldn’t tap into our computers to get the information they needed?”
“Maybe they just like to get their hands dirty,” said Walker. “Assuming they have hands, of course.”
“Seems more to me as if they were looking for something,” I said. “And if they didn’t find it in the cow, maybe that’s why they moved on to the poor bastard lying on that slab over there.”
We all moved over to look at the middle-aged man lying naked and cut open on the next mortuary slab: Jim Thomerson, farmer and well-known local businessman, who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and paid for his mistake with blood and horror. We leaned in for a closer look at the terrible things that had been done to him. His injuries were similar to the cow’s but so much more disturbing for having been done to a man. Organs missing, limbs dissected, his insides rearranged . . . His empty eye sockets stared accusingly up at us.
“Judging by the defensive wounds on his hands and arms, he was alive when they started,” said Honey. “Though hopefully not for long.”
“Why now?” said Walker. “Why start doing cattle mutilations to people now? What’s changed?”
“Obvious answer,” I said. “These are new aliens. A species newly come to Earth, who don’t know the rules. I’m going to have to teach them a hard lesson: that you don’t come waltzing in here unless you’ve cleared it with the Droods first and learned the bloody rules. Someone’s going to pay for this.”
“But even so,” said Walker, “why take some organs but just—”
“I don’t know!” I said. Walker and Honey looked at me, and I lowered my voice. “I don’t know. They’re aliens. They don’t think like us. My family has been dealing with aliens for centuries, and we still don’t have a translation device that works worth a damn. Sometimes we don’t even have basic concepts in common.”
“What do you do, if you can’t communicate with a species?” said Walker. “If you can’t get it to follow your rules?”
“We kill them,” I said. “And we keep on killing them till they stop coming. What do you do in the Nightside?”
“Pretty much the same,” said Walker.
“I’ve had some experience with aliens,” said Honey just a bit defensively. “Not really my department, but all hands to the pump when the river’s rising.”
“What?” said Walker.
“It was an emergency!” said Honey. “And I was the only experienced agent on the spot. I was in the Arctic, searching through Area 52 for something important that had been shipped there by error (and you’d be surprised how often that happens), when something got loose from the holding cells. I swear, I’ve never heard alarms like it. I had to dress up in a total environment suit and go out on the ice to hunt it. Fortunately, it didn’t get far. Stupid thing made the mistake of trying to go one on one with a polar bear. Took us ages to find all the bits. And we had to stomach-pump the bear.”
“Aliens aren’t always the brightest buttons in the box,” I agreed. “Just because they’re smart enough to build better toys than us doesn’t mean they’ve got any more common sense. Or self-control. Going back a few years, something from Out There crash-landed right in the middle of a London park, and then disappeared down into the sewers. I was called in and was all ready to go down and pull the bloody thing out when the word came down from above to leave it be. Apparently our outer space beastie was eating the sewage. Along with all the vermin down there in the tunnels with it. So naturally our first thought was Result! And we left it alone, to get on with it.
“About six months later I was called back. The alien had eaten all the sewage, all the local underground wildlife, and half a dozen people sent in to investigate the situation. And it was still hungry. It started sending extensions of its nasty protoplasmic self up through the manholes to attack whatever was in the street, and up through the pipes and plumbing into people’s homes. People started disappearing, and given the state of their sinks and toilets I think I know how, though I rather wish I didn’t. Had a hell of a job keeping that one out of the news. In the end, half a dozen of us entered the sewers at different points and went after the alien with molecular flame throwers. Burned our way through the whole underground tunnel system, end to end, until there was nothing left to burn. We still run chemical and DNA checks at regular intervals, just in case.
“Took me weeks to get rid of the smell.”
Honey and I then looked at Walker, who shrugged easily. “The Nightside is no stranger to close encounters. Aliens have come slipping in through our various Timeslips from the past, the future, and any number of alternate dimensions. We had some Martians turn up last year on huge metal tripods, complete with heat rays, metal claws, and poisonous black smoke. Nasty, squidgy things that fed on human blood, fresh from conquering some other Earth and keen for new lands to expand into. The fools. We blew their metal legs out from under them, dragged them out of their control pods, and ate them.”
“You ate the Martians?” said Honey, wrinkling her perfect nose.
“Delicious,” said Walker. “Oh, we killed them first, of course. But for a while then, fresh Martian delicacies were all the rage in all the very best restaurants in the Nightside. Some of us have been hoping rather wistfully that the Timeslip to that particular Earth will open up again before stocks run out.”
“I don’t know why I talk to you,” said Honey. “You always say the most disturbing things.”
Walker smiled. “It’s the Nightside.”
“Hold everything,” I said. “I think I’ve just made another connection. The aliens moved from dissecting cattle to working on people . . . at exactly the same time as the town’s communications went down. I have an awful feeling these new aliens are planning something very nasty . . . Human mutilations on a grand scale. To a whole town full of people . . .”
“That’s a hell of a jump, Eddie, from one dead cow and one dead farmer,” said Honey.
“But what if I’m right?” I said. “Work as a Drood field agent long enough, you get a feel for this sort of thing.”
“You’re right, Eddie,” said Walker. “Only alien technology could black out a whole town’s communications so easily, never mind Honey’s and yours. But what can we do? We can’t alert everyone in town with the communications down, and even if we could spread the word . . . what good would it do them?”
“They could get the hell out of here!” said Honey. “And so could we. Put enough space between us and the town and our comm systems should come back on line again, and we could get some reinforcements in here.”
“Leave?” I said. “Run away and abandon the people of Roswell to their fate? To be cut open while they’re still alive, like that poor bastard on the slab? By the time we got back here, everyone in this town could be dead!”
“And what if you’re wrong?” said Honey, sticking her face right into mine. “Imagine the mass panic once word got out! How many would get trampled underfoot or killed in car crashes? You could end up with hundreds dead and injured, all over a . . . a conjecture!”
“I’m not wrong!” I said. “And I won’t abandon these people! That’s not what Droods do!”
“Have you noticed it’s getting darker in here?” said Walker.
Honey and I broke off from glaring at each other and looked around. The overhead strip lighting was blazing as fiercely as ever, but a dark and heavy gloom was seeping in from all sides, soaking up the light. A blue tinge invested all the other colours in the morgue, giving everything a strange and unhealthy look. I felt heavy, drained, with even my thoughts moving more slowly than normal. My torc burned coldly around my neck, trying to warn me of something.
And then both the cow’s carcass and the farmer’s body burst into flames: fierce blue-tinged flames that burned with such intensity that all three of us were driven back, holding up our arms to shield our faces from the intolerable heat. The flames snapped off as abruptly as they’d begun, and conditions in the morgue returned to normal. The slabs were completely empty with just a few ashes floating on the air above them.
“Damn,” said Honey. “Someone really didn’t want anything left behind.”
“Which would seem to imply that someone was, and probably still is, looking in on us,” said Walker. “Three unexpected new factors endangering their planned experiment.”
“So this was a warning to us not to get involved,” said Honey.
I had to grin. “They don’t know us very well, do they?”
And then all our heads snapped around as we heard steady quiet footsteps in the corridor outside the morgue. They drew steadily closer, sounding louder and heavier all the while, until finally they stopped right outside the closed morgue door. We all stood very still, listening. The silence stretched on and on. Until finally Honey lunged for the door, with Walker and me right behind her. She hauled the door open and we spilled out into the corridor . . . but there was nobody there. The corridor stretched away before us, still and silent and completely empty.
“You heard it, didn’t you?” said Honey. “He was right outside the door!”
“I heard it,” I said.
“Told you we were being followed,” said Walker.
“Those were human footsteps,” said Honey. “Nothing alien about them. So where did he go?”
“I don’t see any other exits,” said Walker.
“Could someone in Roswell know what’s going to happen?” said Honey. “Some human Judas goat, perhaps, betraying his fellow humans for thirty pieces of technology?”
“There are other organisations who might have an interest in what’s happening here,” said Walker. “Black Air, Vril Power, the Zarathustra Protocols . . . Any one of them could have chanced across evidence of what’s due to happen here and struck a deal . . .”
“No,” I said flatly. “There’s no organisation on this planet better informed than the Droods when it comes to aliens. If anyone had known, it would have been my family, and I would have been told.”
“Really?” said Honey. “The Matriarch tells you everything, does she?”
“Everything that matters,” I said.
“Yes, well,” said Honey. “You would think that, wouldn’t you?”
“Children, children,” murmured Walker. “We still have to decide what we’re going to do, while there’s still time.”
“Less time than you think,” I said, my torc burning cold as ice. “Brace yourself, people. Something’s coming . . .”
The corridor before us changed, altered, stretched, its far end receding into the distance. The kind of corridor you could travel all your days and never reach the end. The kind of corridor you run through endlessly in the kind of dreams you wake from in a cold sweat. A strange glow replaced the normal corridor light, intense and overpowering, a light not designed for the tolerances of the human eye. Even the air was different, tasting foul and furry in my mouth, and so thin I was half suffocating. A different kind of air, for a different kind of being. Static tingled painfully on my bare flesh, and I could hear . . . something. Something scrabbling at the outsides of the corridor walls, trying to get in.
“I recognise this,” said Honey. Her voice was harsh and strained and strangely far away. “I know this, from abduction scenarios. An intrusion of alien elements into our world. The aliens aren’t waiting for us to track them down . . . They’re coming to us.”
“Let them come,” I said, and armoured up. Immediately I felt much better, more human, more myself. “Stay close to me,” I said to Walker and Honey through my featureless face mask. “Proximity to my armour should help ground and protect you, insulate you from the effects of this alien-created environment.”
Their faces cleared quickly as they moved in close, and they both stood up straight, strength and resolve rushing back into their features.
“I’m even breathing easier now I’m close to you,” said Honey. “How does that work?”
“Do you tell me all your secrets?” I said to hide the fact I wasn’t entirely sure myself. “Just stick close and get ready to beat the crap out of anything that isn’t us.”
“Good plan,” murmured Walker.
“No one takes a Drood anywhere against his will,” I said. “Or his companions. Walker, why are you standing behind me?”
“Because I’m not stupid,” said Walker.
“I don’t hide behind people,” Honey said haughtily.
“Bet you I live longer,” said Walker.
Wild energies crackled up and down the impossibly long corridor, seething and howling. They jumped from wall to wall, fast as laser beams, snapping on and off, leaving pale green trails of ionisation hanging on the air. Malevolent forces surged forward to attack my armour. I stood my ground, Honey clinging to my golden arm, Walker right behind me. The energies raged furiously all around us, discharging on the air with blinding flares and flashes, but still stopped dead, balked, unable to touch or even approach my armour.
As though they were afraid of it.
Lightnings rose and fell, pressing in from this side and that, searching for some weak spot in my armour that would let them in . . . but I stood firm, and suddenly the energies fell away, retreating back down the corridor, fading like the memory of a bad dream. I could hear Honey’s and Walker’s harsh breathing in the sudden silence. I warned them quietly against moving away from me. This wasn’t over. I could feel it.
And then the alien appeared. No door opening in space, no teleport effects; it was just there, right in front of us, no more than ten feet away. Its appearance was so sudden that Walker and Honey actually jumped a little, and if I hadn’t been wearing my armour I think I might have too.
“That . . . is a really ugly-looking thing,” I said.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Honey. “Walker? You ever seen anything like that?”
“Thankfully, no. Eddie?”
“Nothing even remotely like that,” I said. “It is quite definitely not one of the fifty-three alien species currently covered by the Drood Pacts and Treaties.”
“Fifty-three?” said Honey. “There are fifty-three different kinds of alien currently wandering around our world? When were you planning on telling the rest of us this?”
“Fifty-three that we know of,” I said. “The Droods don’t know everything, though never tell anyone I said that. And . . . there are always a few species coming and going we don’t have any kind of agreement with or control over. It’s a big universe, and life has taken some really strange forms Out There.”
“Fifty-three . . .” said Honey.
“From other worlds, other Earths, higher and lower dimensions,” I said. “They add up. Droods protect humanity from all outside threats.”
“All right; I’ll put you up for a raise,” said Honey. “Now what is that?”
“Haven’t a clue,” I said.
We studied the alien as it presumably studied us. It looked like a pile of snakes crushed together or lengths of rubber tubing half melted into each other. Each separate length twisted and turned, seething and knotting together, sliding up and around and over, endlessly moving, never still for a moment. The pile was taller than a man and twice as wide, and though its extremities were constantly moving and changing, the bulk and mass stayed the same. Lengths of it melted and merged into each other, while new extensions constantly erupted from the central region. It was the colour of an oil slick on polluted water, with flashes of deep red and purple underneath, and it smelled really bad. Like something dead that had been left in the hot sun for too long. The alien’s basic lack of certainty was unsettling and painful to the human eye and the human mind. We were never meant to cope with things like this. We’re not ready.
Shapes began to form on the end of long writhing tentacles. Things that might have been sensory apparatus . . . or even organic weapons. And then a dripping bulge rose up through the top of the squirming pile and sprouted half a dozen human eyeballs. A pale pink cone formed beneath the eyes, wet and quivering as it dilated.
“Communication,” said the alien through the cone in a high, thin voice like metal scraping on metal. “Speak. Identify.”
And then it waited for an answer.
“I am a Drood,” I said carefully. “I have authority to speak to other species. To make binding agreements. Talk to me. Explain what you’re doing here. What you’re planning. Or steps will be taken to kick your nasty species right off this planet.”
“Drood,” said the alien. “Name. Function. Not known to us.”
“Maybe I should try,” said Honey.
“Hush,” I said.
“You are unreachable,” said the alien. “Explain.”
“Why did you injure, kill, and . . . examine the human?” I said. “For what purpose? Explain.”
“Necessary,” said the alien. “Don’t know Drood. Don’t recognise Drood authority. Don’t recognise any authority. We are. We exist. We go where we must, to do what we must. We dominate our environment. All environments. Necessary, for survival. For survival of all things.”
“Is it saying what I think it’s saying?” murmured Walker.
“Damned if I know,” I said. “At least it looks like we have basic concepts in common.” I addressed the alien again. “What brought you to this particular world? What interests you in our species? Explain.”
“Potential,” said the alien. “Experiment. Learn. Apply.”
“Experiment?” I said. “Why the animal, and then the human? Explain.”
“Learned all we could from the animal,” said the alien. “Limited. Useless for our purposes. Humans are more interesting. More potential. This will be our first experiment on your kind. On this town. This Roswell. Do not be alarmed. We are here to help you. This is all for your own good. Necessary. See.”
A screen appeared, floating on the air before us. And on that screen the alien showed us what it and its kind were going to do. What would happen to the people of Roswell.
Scenes from a small town, undergoing blood and horror.
People ran screaming through the streets, but it didn’t save them. They ran and they hid, and some of them even fought back, and none of it did any good. They were operated on, cut open, violated, and explored by invisible scalpels in invisible hands. Unseen forces, unknowable and unstoppable, tore the people apart.
Cuts just appeared in human flesh, blood spraying on the empty air. The cuts widened, and invisible hands plunged inside living bodies to play with what they found there. Organs fell out of growing holes, hands fell from wrists, fingers from hands. Some bodies just fell apart, cut into slices. Men and women exploded, ragged parts floating on the air to be examined by unseen eyes. Discarded offal filled the streets, and blood overflowed in the gutters.
The screaming was the worst part. Men, women, and children reduced to terrified, helpless animals . . . screaming for help that never came.
I saw families running down the streets, pursued by horror. One man had his legs cut out from under him, just below the knee, and he tried to keep on going on bloody stumps. Until something opened up his head from behind and pulled out his brains in long pink and gray streamers. A woman clung desperately to an open door as something unseen pulled doggedly at one outstretched leg. She howled like a maddened beast as her ribs were pulled out one by one, examined briefly, and then tossed aside into the blood-soaked street. I saw children . . .
I saw a pile of lungs assemble, one by one, next to a pile of hearts, some still feebly beating. A man sat alone, crying bloody tears from empty eye sockets. A woman screamed her mind away over what was left of her daughter. I saw whole families reduced to their component parts by unseen surgical instruments . . . Cold clinical procedures that went on and on until the screaming finally stopped because there was no one left alive to protest.
Everyone in the town of Roswell was dead. Butchered. Just because.
The floating screen disappeared, taking its views of Hell on Earth with it. I was so angry I was shaking inside my armour. My hands clenched and unclenched helplessly. Honey clung to my arm, making small shocked noises. Walker had come forward to stand beside me. His eyes were full of a cold, dangerous rage. I stared at the alien before me. I’d never hated anything so much in all my life.
“Why?” I said finally.
“You wouldn’t understand,” said the alien. “You can’t. You’re only human. It limits you. This is necessary. You claim authority in this place, Drood; you threaten the success of the experiment. Leave. All of you. Remove yourselves from Roswell before we begin in six hours. Tell everyone. First there is a town, then there is a city, then there is a world. We will do more as we learn more. We will remake you and your world, and when we are done you will thank us for it.”
I charged forward, my golden fists studded with heavy spikes, reaching for the alien. It disappeared, gone in a moment, and the corridor returned to normal. No more strange lights, no energies, no distortions of space. I stumbled to a halt and cried out in wordless rage. I spun around and punched the nearest wall with my golden fist, hitting it because I had to hit something or go insane. I hit the wall again and again, the plaster cracking and the brick crumbling. And then I made myself stop, reining in the anger and forcing it down, storing it for later. I armoured down and stood before the wrecked and ruined wall, breathing harshly. Walker and Honey approached me cautiously. Honey touched my face with her hand, wiping away my tears. I hadn’t even realised I was crying.
“We have to warn the local authorities,” said Walker.
“They wouldn’t listen,” I said. My throat hurt, my voice a harsh rasp. I’d been yelling at the alien all the way through its presentation, but I hadn’t realised. “Would you believe something like this, without proof? And even if we could make them believe, what good would it do? I don’t think the aliens would let them leave, and no one here has anything that could defend them against unseen forces and invisible scalpels. No; it’s down to us. We stand between the townspeople and the aliens. We’re all there is.”
“But what about the game?” said Honey. “What about Alexander King’s prize?”
I looked at her, and she met my gaze steadily.
“How can you think about that at a time like this?” said Walker. “After everything we’ve just seen!”
“It’s my job to stay calm and focused and to concentrate on the bigger picture, on what really matters,” said Honey, her voice perfectly reasonable. “What we saw, what the aliens are going to do . . . It’s not what we’re here for. I have a duty not just to the people of one small town, but to all the people. You heard that thing: after Roswell the cities, and then the world. I don’t know of anything that could stop them, and neither do you. But maybe Alexander King does. Maybe there’s something in his hoarded secrets that will do the job.”
“That’s not why you want his secrets,” said Walker. “You want to win the game.”
“We were sent here to solve the old mystery of Roswell, not this new one,” said Honey. “There’s no way King could have known about this. So this . . . is irrelevant.”
“You’re scared,” I said. “Scared of what you saw. You can’t cope with something this big, this important, so you hide behind the rules of a stupid little game that doesn’t matter anymore. We have to stand our ground here, stop the aliens from doing this. There’ll be time for games later.”
“I’m sorry,” said Honey. “I have my orders and my responsibilities. The Independent Agent’s secrets must end up with the right people.”
“And my duty is to ensure that people like you never get their hands on the prize,” said Walker. “You can’t be trusted with it.”
“And you can?” said Honey. “Little dictator of a little world?”
“More than you,” said Walker. He looked at me, as calm and composed as ever. “I’m sorry, Eddie. The game must come first. We can’t be distracted by . . . lesser events, no matter how disturbing.”
“Let’s not jump to conclusions here,” I said carefully, holding my anger in check. “Don’t be so quick to assume these aliens aren’t what we’re here for. Why couldn’t these aliens be the answer to the Roswell mystery? The teleport bracelets must have dropped us here and now for a reason . . . So let’s stop the aliens, save the town, and take evidence of that back to Alexander King, so we can claim the prize. Screw There can only be one. We can share the information.”
“No,” said Honey, and to her credit she did sound honestly regretful. “The mystery of Roswell is what crash-landed here in 1947. And that had nothing to do with cattle mutilations. They didn’t start until much later. And none of the descriptions of the original aliens were anything like the thing we just saw.”
“Then why are these new aliens here?” I said. “Why choose Roswell out of all the small towns in the world?”
“Perhaps because Roswell has such strong alien connections,” said Walker. “To make what happens here more . . . visible to the rest of the world. An alien atrocity in this town would be reported all over the world.”
“We’re not here to be heroes,” said Honey. “We’re here to be agents. To discover the answer to a specific question. That has to come first. It’s the job. And Eddie, I really don’t think my superiors at Langley would approve of me sharing King’s secrets with anyone else. They might even call it treason. So, I will do what I have to do. I know my duty.”
“So do I,” said Walker. “You cannot be trusted with King’s secrets, Honey. Or your masters. I’m not sure anyone can. So I will win the game, take the secrets, and bury them deep in the Nightside, where no one will ever find them.”
“And the people of Roswell?” I said.
“There will be time for revenge later,” said Walker.
“My duty is to protect people from outside threats,” I said. “All people, everywhere. To hell with all games, and secrets, and politics. People come first, always. Get out of my sight, both of you. Go play your precious game. And when this is over, and I’ve stopped the aliens and saved the town . . . I will come and find you and take your precious prize away from you.”
“You do what you have to,” said Honey. “And I’ll do what I have to. I hope you do defeat the aliens, Eddie; I really do.”
“Yes,” said Walker. “I’m sorry it has to end this way, Eddie. But we must all follow duty in our own way. Good luck.”
And just like that, we all went our separate ways.
I walked slowly through the crowded Roswell streets, one man in the middle of unsuspecting crowds, all of them so much dead meat unless I could come up with a plan to save them. It was hard to keep from staring into their happy, innocent faces. How could they not know how much danger they were in? Couldn’t they feel the tension on the air, the first echoes of the horror that was coming, so close they could almost reach out and touch it? Of course they didn’t know, didn’t even suspect; they lived in their world and I lived in mine, and it was my job to keep them from ever finding out my world even existed.
Five and a half hours now and counting . . .
I strode on more purposefully, not going anywhere in particular yet, just full of the need to keep moving, to at least feel like I was doing something. I concentrated on this idea and that, coming up with and discarding one plan after another, scowling so hard as I thought that people hurried to get out of my way. I could just leave Roswell. Commandeer a car and get the hell out of town until I was out from under the aliens’ communications blackout. Yell to my family for backup and support. Throw enough Droods at a problem, and any enemy will go down in flames. The Hungry Gods found that out the hard way. Of course, there was no telling how long that might take; it could all be over by the time I got back. And nothing left to do but contain the situation and make sure the aliens couldn’t repeat their bloody experiment somewhere else. Like Walker said: there’s always time for revenge. But there was no telling what I’d run into outside of town. The aliens might just stop me at the town’s limits and hold me there, and then there’d be no one left to stand between the townspeople and the aliens.
I couldn’t risk that.
No; my only realistic hope was to locate the aliens’ base of operations and shut them down before they could start anything. One man against an unknown number of aliens and an unknowable amount of alien technology . . . For anyone else that would be suicide, but I was a Drood, with a Drood’s armour and training. And the aliens were going to find out just what that meant. So . . . think it through. If the aliens were jamming all communications going in and out of Roswell . . . it made sense that the jamming signal was coming from apparatus somewhere inside the town. And a jamming signal that strong would have to be pretty damned powerful and leave its own distinctive footprint on the local electromagnetic spectrum. Shielded from detection by Earth technology, of course, but not from me.
I concentrated hard on my torc, coaxing and bludgeoning it into doing something new and different . . . until at last a long thin tendril slid up my neck from the torc to form a pair of stylish golden sunglasses over my eyes. An absolute minimum use of my armour, hopefully not enough to set off any alien detection systems. I focused my Sight through the golden strange matter over my eyes and Saw the town of Roswell very clearly indeed. Parts . . . I’d never tried parts of armour before . . . I made a mental note to discuss this with my family when I got back. Assuming I ever got back, of course . . .
My augmented Sight showed me a whole new Roswell. Dark shapes drifted through the streets like animated wisps of shadow, lighting here and there on people disturbed by a vague sense of menace or unease. Elemental spirits are always drawn to potential arenas of spiritual destruction. They feed like vultures on the fiercer, more distressed emotions. On the other hand, Light People were standing and watching all through the town. They were scintillating light and energy bound into human form, almost abstract living things. Their appearance at a scene was both a good and a bad thing. It meant something severely dangerous was about to happen, with many lives on the line, but also that they expected some agent of good to put up a fight. I always think of the Light People as basically good-hearted supernatural sports fans. There were ghosts too, and semitransparent memories of places past, along with other-dimensional entities and travellers just passing through. None of them mattered. I looked slowly about me, sifting through the various information streams permeating the local aether, and soon enough, there it was . . . A strange alien energy broadcasting from a location right near the centre of town.
I’d found them.
I headed straight for the source of the alien signal, and people grew increasingly scarce the closer I got. In fact, the few people still on the streets seemed to be actually hurrying away. I stopped a few and asked them why, and wasn’t that surprised to find they couldn’t tell me. They didn’t know. They just knew . . . they weren’t supposed to be there.
The source itself turned out to be something very like a giant termite mound, thirty feet tall and almost as wide, pushing up from the broken earth of a deserted back lot. There were no people here at all, the surrounding streets silent and empty. I studied the alien mound from the shadows of a side alley, my augmented Sight feeding me almost more information than I could handle. The mound itself was a strange mixture of technology and organic materials. Grown as much as made, its vast sides undulated slowly, slick and sweating, as though troubled by passing dreams . . . There were shadowy entrance holes all over it, set to no discernible pattern. The cracked and broken earth around the mound’s base suggested it had thrust up from below and that there might be a hell of a lot more of it deep below the back lot. What I was Seeing could be just the tip of the alien pyramid. I watched for a long time, but nothing came out, and nothing went in.
Apart from the jamming signal, the mound was also broadcasting a powerful avoidance field. More than just the usual Don’t look at me, nothing to see here, move along suggestions; this was mind manipulation, a field strong enough that people couldn’t even think about the alien mound or anything connected with it. No wonder everyone in Roswell had seemed so unnaturally calm and languid; the alien signal was all but lobotomising them to be sure they’d stay in place for the great experiment. Presumably the signal would be dropped once the bloodletting began so the aliens could observe the full spectrum of human reactions to what was being done to them.
My Sight punched right through the avoidance field, but I knew I couldn’t risk that for long for fear of being detected. There had to be all kinds of surveillance going on within the mound. So I grabbed as much useful information as I could in quick looks and glances, ready to shut down my Sight at a moment’s notice that I’d been spotted. I couldn’t See any alarms or proximity fields or booby traps . . . Just the mound, sitting there, sick and smug and serene, like an abscess on the world. So sure of its own strength and superiority over mere humanity that it didn’t even feel the need for protection. Fools.
I checked the time. Four and three quarter hours, and counting.
I began to get the feeling I was being watched. At first I thought it was the mound, that some alien device had finally reacted to the presence of my torc and locked onto me. But it felt more like someone, rather than something, was watching me from behind. That someone had sneaked up on me while I was concentrating on the mound. Walker had been convinced someone was following us through the streets of Roswell . . . and we never did find out what that was all about. Could there be some unknown third party at work here in Roswell? Someone with their own agenda? Whoever it was, it felt like they were really close now. I let my hand drift casually onto the butt of my holstered Colt Repeater, took a slow steady breath, and then spun around sharply with the gun in my hand.
And there was Walker standing a discreet distance away, leaning casually on his furled umbrella. He smiled easily at me.
“Hello again, Eddie. I’ve been standing here for some time, waiting for you to notice me.”
“I was busy,” I said. “Concentrating on the alien mound.”
“Of course you were. I didn’t know you carried a gun.”
“Lot of things you don’t know about me,” I said, putting the Colt Repeater away. “Even a Drood likes to have an ace or two up his sleeve. And I like aces that go bang. How did you find this place?”
Walker smiled vaguely. “I have my methods.”
“You’ve been following me, haven’t you? And I was so taken up following the alien signals I never even noticed you.”
“Actually, no.” Walker came forward to stand beside me, curling his lip at the alien mound. “Ugly-looking thing . . . No, I just have a sense for these things . . . and it led me here. Like a bad smell. I did have a sort of feeling that I might have been followed . . .” Walker looked back sharply over his shoulder. I looked too, but the streets were as silent and empty as ever. Walker sniffed. “I haven’t even been able to catch a glimpse of whoever it is, and I’m really very hard to hide things from.”
“That suggests another agent,” I said. “Someone of our calibre, with an interest of their own in what’s happening here.”
“Let them watch,” said Walker. “We have work to do.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You’ve come around to my way of thinking, then? What about your duty to win Alexander King’s prize so the rest of us can’t have it?”
He met my gaze steadily. “I’ve seen too many good people die on my watch. I can’t just look away and let it happen again. You were right, Eddie; we can always take the prize away from Honey and her small-minded masters later on and share whatever it turns out to be. We are professionals, after all.”
We shared a brief smile. On an impulse I stuck out my hand, and he shook it solemnly.
“Good to know I’ve got someone to watch my back while I’m in the mound,” I said.
“Hell with that,” Walker said easily. “You can watch my back . . . Are those sunglasses what I think they are? I didn’t know you could do things like that with your armour.”
“You see?” I said. “Being around me is an education.”
“It’s certainly taught me a lesson,” Walker agreed. “Can your Sight find us the best way in? We are on the clock here.”
I looked back at the mound. “There don’t seem to be any obvious defences; no force shields, proximity mines, energy weapons . . . No chemical or biological agents. Nothing to stop us walking right in. They do have a really strong avoidance field, so maybe they’re depending on that.” I looked at Walker. “Why isn’t the field affecting you? You shouldn’t even be able to tell the mound is here.”
“There are lots of things about me you don’t know,” said Walker.
I had to smile. “None of the openings seem any more used or significant than any of the others. So we might as well choose one at random at ground level and stroll right in. And hope my Sight can lead us to where we need to be.”
“You’re not a great one for forward planning, are you?” said Walker. “Let’s do it.”
“Yes,” I said. “Let us descend into the underworld, and show these alien bastards what Hell on Earth is really like.”
The moment I marched through the semicircular entrance and into the mound itself, things stopped making sense. The entrance became a tunnel, suddenly large enough to hold a tube train and full of a shimmering light. The tunnel descended sharply, falling away before me. The walls were slick, moist, the surface slowly sliding towards the floor, which absorbed it. Strange protrusions rose and fell within the walls, indefinable things that might have been machines or organs or something humanity had no name for. The air was thick and foul but still breathable.
I set off down the tunnel with Walker right there at my side. I was glad to have him there, someone I could depend on. As a Drood field agent I’ve seen more than my fair share of weird shit, but this place was seriously creeping me out. There were new gaps or openings in the tunnel every few feet or so, and it rapidly became clear we were in some kind of labyrinth or honeycomb. I kept heading down, following my Sight, towards the dark beating heart of the mound. I could feel its presence far below, like the monster that waits for heroes at the heart of every maze.
The monster that wins more often than the tales like to tell.
This much was familiar, but as Walker and I continued to descend things grew increasingly strange and odd and subtly disturbing. It was hard to judge distances anymore; things seemed to move suddenly forward and then recede, to stretch endlessly away and then suddenly be gone or behind you. There were things in the curved ceiling that looked down on me and turned slowly to watch me pass. The aliens knew we were there, but I still didn’t see one anywhere. The tunnels occasionally widened out into vast chambers whose shape made no sense at all, that actually hurt my eyes if I looked at them too long, even with the protection of my golden sunglasses. I didn’t know how Walker was coping. We didn’t speak at all once we entered the mound, as though human speech simply didn’t belong there.
There were objects in the caverns I couldn’t look at directly, shapes without significance, forms with no function. Shadows flowed across the floor, slowly changing shape like oil on water, and that didn’t react at all as I strode through them. Gravity fluctuated so that sometimes I bobbed along like a balloon on a string . . . and other times it was all I could do to trudge along, as though I was carrying Old Man of the Sea on my back. My sense of direction snapped back and forth, and I would have been hopelessly lost in minutes without my Sight and my torc to guide me. I didn’t always know where I was going, but I always knew which turn or opening to take next. The floors sloped continually down, leading me on into the subterranean heart of the mound. To the place where all bad things were decided. I knew that much, even if I didn’t always recognise the man walking beside me.
It was getting harder to breathe, harder to think. But every time my thoughts began to drift, all I had to do was remember the vision the alien had shown me back at the morgue, and a cold rage would blow the cobwebs from my thoughts and let me think clearly again. I was here to bring the aliens blood and horror, and nothing was going to stop me.
Not even me.
An alien surged forward out of a side tunnel and stopped abruptly to block our way. A great pile of writhing snakes, of twisting tentacles, of thick threads that melted and merged into each other. I stopped and stood very still, looking steadily at the alien. Walker stood beside me. The alien showed no signs of moving or yelling for its security people. I tensed, half expecting the invisible scalpels, and then concentrated on how best to kill the thing. I was reluctant to summon up my full armour; the presence of so much strange matter within the mound might set off any number of alarms. I had my Colt Repeater, but even its many and varied bullets wouldn’t have much effect on a heap of seething tubes.
“Allow me,” said Walker, his words just a breath in my ear.
He took a firm hold on the handle of his umbrella, pulled and twisted, and drew from its hiding place a long slender steel blade. He strode purposefully forward and cut, hacked, and sliced the alien into a hundred pieces with cold, stern ferocity. The steel blade sliced keenly through the writhing tubes, severing and opening them up almost without resistance. The alien seemed more surprised than anything. It made no attempt to defend itself, just slid slowly backwards down the tunnel. Walker went after it, cutting it up with vicious precision, his arm rising and falling tirelessly. No blood flew on the air, just a thick clear ooze that dripped from the severed ends of twitching tentacle pieces as they writhed feebly on the floor of the tunnel. Soon enough the alien stopped moving, because there wasn’t enough left of it to hold together. Walker finished it off, hacking away until there wasn’t a length of alien tissue longer than a foot or two. Even at the end, there were no signs of any organs within the alien, just the endless pulsing tubes.
Walker stopped and lowered his sword. He stood over the last remnants of the alien and looked slowly about him at the scattered pieces. He was breathing harshly, as much from emotion as exertion. He straightened up, flicked a few drops of clear ooze from the tip of his sword, and then slid it neatly back into the spine of his umbrella.
“A sword?” I said finally. “Hidden inside an umbrella?”
“Don’t show your ignorance,” said Walker, his breathing already back to normal. “It’s an old tradition in the British spy game. Mention it to your Armourer; he’ll remember.”
“Why hasn’t the alien’s death set off any alarms?” I said, glaring about me into the painfully sharp light.
“Perhaps they weren’t expecting such a basic response,” said Walker. “There is such a thing as being oversophisticated.”
“And if more aliens do arrive?”
“Let them come,” said Walker. “I feel like killing some more aliens. I want to grind their bodies under my feet and dance in their blood.”
“Good,” I said. “I want that too.”
The centre of operations turned out to be a honeycomb of interlinked tunnels and caverns and what might have been other-dimensional spaces. There were openings and doorways that changed shape as you approached, tunnels that turned back on themselves if you didn’t concentrate on your destination strongly enough, and floating viewscreens that popped on and off, showing glimpses of distressingly inhuman other worlds. It was getting harder and harder to be sure of anything. Just being inside the alien mound distorted my thinking and filled my head with sudden thoughts and impulses that made no sense at all. I’d lost all track of time. My watch didn’t work. But I had to believe there was still time to stop the aliens, or this had all been for nothing.
I entered into a chamber like all the others and stopped dead in my tracks. Walker stopped beside me and swore softly. We weren’t the only people in the mound. The aliens had abducted men and women and even children from the town of Roswell and done things to them. For knowledge, or curiosity, or as a precursor to the experiment they were planning. Or maybe just because they could. For some alien purpose I could never hope to understand or forgive.
Some forty men, women, and children lay scattered across the sticky floor of the great open cavern. More protruded from the walls, half sunk and immersed in the slick wet surfaces. There were no cages, no bars, no force fields. These people had just been . . . worked on, and then dumped here to live or die. Many had died, their broken and distorted bodies unable to accept the terrible things that had been done to them.
Most had not been so lucky. They were still alive, aware, and suffering.
Their bodies had been vivisected: opened up and changed, made use of for surgical experiments. Not the brute mutilations I’d seen on the farmer in the morgue, or even in the future vision the alien had shown me. There was purpose to some of what had been done here, even if its end remained unknown. These people had been opened up, had their organs removed . . . and then put back again in different places, set up to work in different ways. Some organs had been replaced with alien substitutes, pulsing organic machines that wrapped themselves around kidneys and lungs and intestines.
I moved slowly forward into the chamber, like walking in a dream, a nightmare from which I wanted so badly to awaken. A man lay on his back, split open from crotch to throat, the sides pinned back with metal staples to reveal he’d been stuffed full of extra human organs. There were others like him, with several lungs, or half a dozen kidneys connected together, or miles of added intestines threaded in and out of his skin, the whole length of his torso. Others had been hollowed out, with nothing left inside them but threads of alien tissues performing unknowable alien functions.
The children were the worst. I couldn’t look at the children.
“Dear God,” said Walker. “What . . . What is this, Eddie? Are the aliens . . . playing with them?”
“I think . . . they’re trying to upgrade us,” I said. “According to their lights. Make us . . . better. More like them.”
“Is that what this is all about?” said Walker. “Forcibly . . . improving us?”
“All for our own good,” I said, and I didn’t recognise my own voice. “That’s what the alien said. Remember?”
“What are we going to do?” said Walker. He sounded lost. “What can we do? I mean, we can’t leave them like this . . .”
“No,” I said. “We can’t. That would be . . . inhuman.”
I armoured up and took on my battle form, covered with razor-sharp blades. And then I went among the suffering people and gave them the only comfort I could. I killed them. I killed them all. I raged back and forth across the great chamber, cutting throats, tearing out hearts, stamping on heads; killing men and women and children as swiftly and mercifully as I could. I cut off heads and stabbed alien organs, running them through and through till they stopped moving. I cut and hacked and stabbed, doing whatever it took to put a stop to this obscenity. It wasn’t easy; the aliens had made their improved people very hard to kill.
Some of them still had voices. I think some of them spoke to me, but I’ve never let myself remember what they said.
I went screaming and howling through the chamber, ripping bodies out of the walls and tearing them apart with brute strength, shouting obscenities and prayers, and blood sprayed across my armour and ran away in thick crimson rivulets. I killed them all, every last one, and when it was over, when I had dispensed the only mercy left to me, I armoured down and stood shaking and crying in the middle of the piled-up bodies. Drood field agents are trained to deal with horrors, to survive acts and decisions no one else could, but there are limits. There have to be limits, or we wouldn’t be human anymore.
Walker had known better than to try to interfere. He came forward, stepping carefully over blood and offal, and put his arms around me and held me as I cried. And just for a moment, it felt like my father was with me again, and I was comforted. After a while I found the strength to stand up straight again, and Walker immediately let go of me and stepped back. He watched silently as I rubbed the drying tears from my face and took a deep steadying breath.
“Damn them,” I said, and my voice was cold, so cold. “Damn the aliens to Hell for making me do that.”
“Yes,” said Walker.
“The aliens have to die,” I said. “They all have to die. No treaties or agreements for them. No mercy. I have to send a message. That no one can be allowed to get away with things like this.”
“I never thought otherwise,” said Walker.
The centre of operations wasn’t far away. My Sight led me straight to it. Just another cavern, perhaps a little larger than the others, the slick curving walls almost buried under extruded alien machinery and some things that looked to be at least half alive, studded with metal protrusions and lights like staring eyes. Long silvery tendrils hung down from the high ceiling, twisting and turning and twitching in response to unfelt breezes or perhaps just the passing of unknowable thoughts and impulses. And there were aliens, whole bunches of them, working at unrecognisable tasks, lurching across the smooth floor like tangles of knotted ropes. They operated the unnatural technology with limbs or manipulators formed for each specific purpose and spouting sensory organs as needed in the shapes of eyes or flowering things or rippled sucking orifices.
They all stopped at the same moment, and then three of them rolled together to melt and merge into one great pile over eight feet high, hundreds of dripping tentacles piled on top of each other. Disturbingly human eyeballs formed on the end of bobbing tendrils, all aimed at me and Walker. A bright pink speaking trumpet extruded from beneath the eyes, flushing with rhythmic crimson pulses.
“Welcome,” it said. “Be calm. You will not be killed; you are useful. Of use to us. You have demonstrated impressive capabilities. Your value will be incorporated into us, and when you have been improved we will send you back out into your world to prepare the way for us. You shall be our voice, our messengers and prophets.”
“I wouldn’t put money on it,” I said.
“Their language skills are improving,” said Walker.
“Practice makes perfect,” I said.
Parts of the greater alien reached out to manipulate semi-organic machines that rose up out of the floor. The eyeballs still looked steadily in our direction. Creamy white eyeballs without any veins and pure black irises.
“I destroyed your discarded experiments,” I said. “The people you ruined and threw away. They’re all dead now.”
“They were failures,” said the alien. “Of no further use to us. You will be of use to us. There is much that we can do with you.”
“I’ll die first,” said Walker. “Better yet, you’ll die first.”
“I represent the Droods,” I said, raising my voice so all of them could hear. “No visiting alien species goes anywhere or does anything on our world without our consent. We exist to protect humanity from things like you. You should have come to us first. We could have worked something out. Prevented all this.”
“No,” said the alien. “This is necessary. You are small, limited, incapable of understanding what is best for you. We know. We are experienced in changing, upgrading species.”
“You’ve done this before?” said Walker. “On other worlds?”
“On many other worlds,” said the alien. “You must be changed; your species is inefficient. It will not survive the future that is coming. You are wasteful of your potential, but you can be made better. Remade. You must not try to interfere. That is wasteful, of time and energy and resources. We are doing important work here. You will thank us later. This is our work. Our responsibility. Our joy. We make things better.”
“Not here,” I said. “Not to us. We decide our own destiny. The experiment you’re planning is an abomination, and we will not allow it to happen.”
“You can’t stop it,” said the alien. “It is already in motion. Humans. You think so small. So petty. Even your language is barely adequate for communication. You do not even see us clearly. We are not what you look at. This body. You talk with an extension. You are inside our body.”
“The mound,” said Walker. “The whole damned mound is the alien . . . One massive organism. That changes things.”
“Yes,” I said. “Don’t suppose you have any explosives about you?”
“Nothing big enough.”
“You will be remade,” said the alien speaker. “Improved, made speakers of our purpose. You will convince others to do what is necessary. Conflict is wasteful. You will observe the results of our experiment, the greater things we will make out of those who survive. You will tell your world to cooperate, that it is all for the best.”
“We’ll never work for you,” said Walker. “No one on this world will do anything but fight you to the last breath in their bodies.”
“You won’t fight us,” said the alien. “After a point, you won’t want to. You will become greater. And it starts now.”
Dozens of aliens appeared in the chamber: rising up out of the floor, sliding out of walls, dropping from the ceiling. They blocked all the entrances to the chamber. More and more of them, too many to count, surrounding Walker and me as we moved quickly to stand back-to-back. He had his sword blade in his hand again. I called up my armour and took on my battle form, bristling with weapons. Holding its form was a strain, but I was too angry to care. The aliens filled the chamber around us, packing the place from wall to wall, piles of slimy ropes sliding in and out of each other.
“Bad odds,” said Walker, his voice as calm and cool as always.
“I’ve seen worse,” I said.
“Really?”
“Actually, yes. Of course, I had reinforcements then.”
“Terrific,” said Walker. “How powerful are those energy weapons protruding from your armour?”
“The blades are sharp enough to cut through a loud noise,” I said. “Everything else . . . is just for show.”
“No energy weapons?”
“No. I don’t normally need them.”
“Well,” said Walker. “When there’s nothing left to do but die, die well. And take as many of your enemies as possible down to Hell with you. Get out of here, Eddie.”
“What?”
“I’ll hold their attention while you make for the surface. Don’t worry; you’re not the only one with a few tricks up his sleeve. You get the hell out of here and do whatever’s necessary to stop them. I’ll buy you time. Go, Eddie. It’s all up to you now.”
“I can’t leave you here! Not with them; they’ll—”
“No, they won’t. I’ll make them kill me first.”
“I can’t . . .”
“You must, Eddie. It’s the human thing to do.”
I was still looking at him, trying to decide what to do for the best, when a blast of searing energy slammed out of one entrance, incinerating a whole bunch of aliens. They blew apart, great lengths of burning ropes flying through the air. More energy blasts raked across the cavern, blasting aliens out of the way, as Honey Lake came striding in with her shimmering crystal weapon in her hands. She laughed cheerfully, a bright and wonderfully sane sound in that hellish place, like a Valkyrie come down to Hel to rescue her heroes. She fired again and again, and pieces of ragged tentacles flew this way and that as she opened up a space around her.
“Heads up, guys!” she yelled cheerfully. “The cavalry just arrived!”
I whooped with joy and relief and ploughed through the nearest aliens, hacking them apart and kicking the pieces aside so I could get to the next. My golden blades tore through them as though they were made of paper. I waded through alien gore like a hungry man going to a feast. A cold and vicious rage burned within me, not just at what they had done and planned to do, but at what they had made me do. I killed and killed, and it was never enough. Walker cut about him with his sword, deadly and elegant, and Honey fired her gun, and soon we’d cleared the whole chamber of living alien forms.
But more bodies slipped out of the walls, and rose up out of the floor, and dropped from the ceiling; again the entrance ways were blocked and the chamber was full. Because the alien was the mound, and we were just destroying things it had made to fight us. The alien was distracting us, keeping us busy, while the clock ticked down to the great experiment in the streets of Roswell. I had to stop the alien, not just its extremities. I called up my Sight, focused it through my mask, and made myself concentrate on what really mattered. The dark and secret heart of the alien mound: the one thing it couldn’t live without. I glared around me, Seeing terrible things hidden in the walls and floor of the chamber, until finally I Saw, deep below my feet, something that blazed and burned like a dark sun: living energy sourced in alien flesh.
I yelled to Honey to blast the floor with her energy weapon where I pointed, and she nodded quickly and hit the floor with everything she had. The floor rocked beneath our feet, splitting apart, forced open by the crystal weapon’s implacable energies. They dug deeper and deeper into the alien tissues until finally I could see the dark heart itself. It wrapped itself in thick protective alien tissues, struggling to replace them as fast as Honey’s weapon burned them away. I formed one long, slender, and very deadly blade from my golden right hand, and sent it plunging deep into the dark heart of the alien mound.
It exploded. Alien flesh was no match for other-dimensional strange matter. Particularly when driven by the terrible cold anger of the human heart.
The individual alien forms collapsed, sinking in upon themselves, the long ropy tentacles already rotting and falling apart. The cavern shook like an earthquake, great jagged cracks opening up in the slimy walls. The floor seemed to fall away beneath my feet in sudden drops and shudders. The whole mound was dying, rotting, falling apart. I ran for the nearest exit, Honey and Walker right behind me. I followed my Sight back up through the mound, heading for the surface even as the mound collapsed in on itself, sinking down into the earth. I ran through piles of dead alien bodies, kicking them aside, punching holes through walls where necessary. Strange lights flared all around me, vivid energies spitting and crackling helplessly on the air. I ran for the surface with Honey and Walker.
We burst out of the final exit and kept running out into the fresh and human air of Roswell. We jumped over cracks opening up in the back lot, urged on by the sound of the dead mound slowly sinking down into the earth. Finally I decided I was far enough away, and only then did I let myself stop and look back to see the last death throes of the alien mound. It was dry and cracked and corrupt now, disappearing into the hole it had made for itself. Walker and Honey and I watched till all of it was gone and there was nothing left to show it had ever been there but a dark hole in the ground of a deserted back lot.
“Go down,” I said to it. “Go all the way down to Hell, where you belong.”
I put away my armour and stood there in the empty street, just a man again. I was shaking and breathing hard from exertion and emotion and from relief that we’d stopped the filthy experiment before it even started. Honey and Walker stood with me, breathing just as hard.
“So,” I said finally. “You came back, Honey. Right in the nick of time. What changed your mind? What about the game and the prize?”
“How was I going to be able to get anything done here with all this nonsense going on?” said Honey reasonably. “Besides, I didn’t get into the spy game to turn my back on people. I serve the American people. As I decide best.”
“What are we going to tell the townspeople?” said Walker. “Do we tell them anything?”
“Would they believe us, without evidence?” I said. “They don’t even have the farmer and his cow in the morgue anymore, remember?”
“This is Roswell,” Walker said dryly. “They’ll believe anything, or at least just enough to make money out of it. This time next year, this will all be a television movie. I wonder who they’ll get to play me?”
“You were never here,” Honey said sternly. “None of us were.”
“Right,” I said. “This isn’t the Nightside. We have to keep a low profile.”
“There could be more aliens . . . from where those things came from,” said Honey, hefting her shimmering weapon. “They could be back.”
“My family will take care of that,” I said. “We have connections in faraway places. Treaties and compacts work both ways. Or we’ll kick alien arse till they do.”
“I never knew you could do that,” said Walker.
“Not many do,” I said.
“And you wonder why other organisations don’t trust the Droods,” said Honey. “Your family has secrets the way other families have pets. Would it kill you to share information like that so we could all sleep better at nights?”
“Possibly,” I said. “We don’t take chances. But . . . I will talk to the Matriarch. Sharing can be good. What say the three of us go back to Alexander King, give him the answers we’ve accumulated, and then share the secrets he gives us?”
“Hell,” said Honey, “I’m game if you are. Nothing like hanging out with a Drood to help you see the bigger picture.”
“Fine by me,” said Walker. “But will the Independent Agent agree?”
“The man is dying,” I said. “He doesn’t have enough time left to haggle. He can give his prize to three agents who’ve proved their worth or risk his precious secrets falling into unworthy hands after he’s dead.”
“And . . . Peter?” said Honey. “How do we tell an old man that we got his only grandson killed?”
“We don’t know that he’s dead,” Walker said immediately. “He’s just . . . missing in action.”
“Alexander King wanted his grandson in the game,” I said. “He knew the risks.”
“Did Peter?” said Honey. “He didn’t operate in the same world as the rest of us.”
“No,” said Walker. “He worked in industrial espionage. I’m pretty damn sure he wouldn’t have shared the prize.”
“The game is now officially over,” I said. “We’ve been to all five of the designated areas, investigated each mystery we found there, and come up with an answer. We may not have uncovered the answer to the original Roswell mystery, but I think this . . . is better. Certainly it’s more than enough to prove our worth as the Independent Agent’s successors, which was supposed to be the whole point of the game. Time . . . to call it a day.”
“How are we supposed to let Alexander King know?” said Walker, glaring at the teleport bracelet on his wrist. “How do we persuade these infernal contraptions to take us back to Place Gloria?”
I took out Peter’s phone and showed it to the teleport bracelet around my wrist. “See this?” I said loudly. “Proof, evidence, and answers to all the questions we were set. I know you’re listening, Alexander! We can either give this to you or . . . take it back to our respective organisations. So, beam us up, Scotty!”
And that was when Peter King stepped out of the shadows, stabbed Honey Lake between the ribs with a long-bladed knife,
snatched the phone from my hand, and disappeared, teleported away.
Honey made a shocked, surprised sound, and then collapsed as the strength went out of her legs. I caught her and eased her to the ground. Her whole left side was already soaked with blood, and more ran down between our closely pressed bodies. Walker was saying something, but I wasn’t listening. Honey made a pained sound and blood spilled from her mouth. I held her tightly to me. I looked up at Walker to yell at him to get some help, but the look on his face stopped me. It confirmed what I already knew.
“It was Peter all along,” said Walker. “The treacherous little shit. He killed Katt, and Blue, and—”
“No,” said Honey. “That was me.”
“Hush,” I said. “Hush.”
“No.” She forced the words out past the pain and the blood. She needed me to know the truth. “I killed Blue and Katt. Tried to kill Walker. Even sabotaged my own sub at the loch, so I wouldn’t be suspected. I thought . . . it was my duty. To win the prize at any cost.”
“Honey . . .” I said, but the hard knot in my stomach wouldn’t let me say anything more.
She smiled briefly, showing perfect teeth slick with blood. “Never fall in love with another agent, Eddie. You know it’s never going to end well.”
She died in my arms. I held her for a long time.
It all went bad so quickly.
CHAPTER NINE
The Spying Game
Why be an agent? All right, you get to play with all the best toys, you get to see the world (though rarely the better parts), and now and again you get a real chance to stand between humanity and the forces that threaten . . . You get to be a hero, or a villain, and sometimes both. But what does any of that buy you in the end? Except death and suffering and the loss of those you care for. What makes a man an agent? And what keeps him going, in the face of everything?
Why be an agent?
Walker and I stood together in a dirty backstreet, looking down at Honey Lake’s body. I’d like to say she looked peaceful and at rest, but she didn’t. She looked like a toy that had been played with too roughly, and then thrown aside. I’d seen a lot of people look like that in the years I’d spent playing the spying game. When all the fun and games, all the adventure and romance, adds up to nothing more than bright red blood on a white jumpsuit.
“She was a good agent,” said Walker.
“Yes,” I said.
“She wouldn’t want us to just stand around, waiting to get caught.”
“No.”
“My teleport bracelet is gone,” said Walker, looking at his bare wrist. “Yours too?”
“Yes,” I said. “Honey’s bracelet is gone as well.”
Walker sniffed loudly, shooting his impeccably white cuff forward to cover his wrist. “Peter must have taken them with him.”
“Only one way he could have done that,” I said, still looking down at Honey’s body. “Peter must have been working with his grandfather all along. The Independent Agent always intended for his nephew to win the game, to keep his precious secrets in the family. This whole contest was a setup to establish Peter King as the new Independent Agent. I should have known. It’s always about family. The rest of us were just here for show. Window dressing for Peter’s great triumph.”
“And we’re left stranded in Roswell,” said Walker. “With a dead body at our feet and the local law no doubt already on their way, tipped off by an anonymous source. How very awkward. Time to be going, I think.”
“We have to go to Place Gloria,” I said. “Alexander and Peter have to pay for this.”
“Yes,” said Walker. “They do. I’ve always been a great believer in an eye for an eye, and a death for a death. Comes of a traditional public school upbringing, no doubt. Unfortunately, getting to the Independent Agent’s private lair isn’t going to be easy. We can’t be sure Place Gloria is where or even when we think it is. Remember the flux fog? The exterior we saw may have no connection at all to the more than comfortable retreat we walked through.”
“You’re just talking to distract me,” I said. “I appreciate the thought, but don’t. What are we going to do about Honey?”
“Communications should be working again, now that the alien mound has been destroyed,” said Walker. “We’ll call her people and tell them what’s happened, and they’ll get the local people to do what’s necessary. The Company’s always been very good at cleaning up after itself.”
I looked at Walker, and to his credit he didn’t blink. “Just walk away and leave her?” I said. “Leave her lying here in the street, alone?”
Walker met my gaze unflinchingly. “You’ll pardon me if I’m not overly sympathetic, Eddie. She did try to kill me back in Tunguska. And she did murder poor little Katt and your friend the Blue Fairy.”
“I know,” I said. “She was an agent.”
“Yes,” said Walker. “And that’s why she’d understand. In the field, you do what you have to do. She wouldn’t have hesitated to walk away from you and leave your body to be taken care of by the Droods.”
“Is this why we became agents?” I said, and was surprised by the bitterness in my voice. “To play games, to chase after secrets that are rarely worth all the blood spilled on their behalf . . . To end up stabbed in the back, just when you thought you’d won, bleeding out in some nameless backstreet . . . With most people never even knowing who you were, or what you did, or why it mattered?”
“You can’t work in the shadows and still expect applause,” said Walker. “The right people will know, and sometimes that’s the best we can hope for.”
“Anything for the family,” I said. “Anything for England. For humanity. But for us? What about us, Walker?”
“Duty and responsibility are their own rewards,” said Walker. “Old-fashioned, I know, but some things don’t change. The things that matter. We do it because it has to be done. We do it because if we don’t, who will? Who else could we trust to do it right?”
“She shouldn’t have died here,” I said. “Not like this.”
“It’s always somewhere like this,” said Walker. “That’s the job. Did you . . . love her, Eddie?”
“No,” I said. “But she was . . . special. If things had been different . . .”
“If,” said Walker. “Always the harshest word.”
“Why did you become an agent, Walker? I had no choice; I was born into the family business. So was Honey, I suppose. But why you?”
“For the sheer damned glamour of it all,” said Walker.
I couldn’t manage a smile for him just yet, but I nodded to show I appreciated the effort. I turned my back on Honey and walked away. Walker strode calmly along beside me, flourishing his furled umbrella like an officer’s stick. Say what you like about Walker, and many people have; the man has style. We left the back lot and the empty street behind us and went back into the town of Roswell to walk among sane things again.
“We can’t let Peter take the prize,” I said. “Not after everything we’ve been through. Not after what he did. He’s not worthy.”
“I’ll see him damned to Hell first,” Walker agreed cheerfully. “And his bloody grandfather too. Peter must have been the one following us earlier. I said it had to be a professional . . . He probably changed the settings on his teleport bracelet while he was still in the Sundered Lands, leaving ahead of us so he could arrive here separately.” Walker frowned. “Surely he couldn’t have known about the alien threat in advance . . . No . . . No; must have come as a very nasty surprise to find he was trapped here with the rest of us. That’s why he stayed well back until it was all over, before making his move.”
I nodded. I didn’t really care. It was just details.
Walker found a public phone and told the CIA about Honey. I contacted my family through my torc. That wouldn’t have been possible with the old torc, supplied by the corrupt Heart, but Ethel’s upgrade to strange matter had gifted us with many new options, some of which we were still getting used to. The Drood communications officer was all over me the moment he recognised my voice.
“Where the hell have you been, Edwin? We haven’t been able to reach you for days! You know you’re supposed to report in regularly.”
“I’ve been busy,” I said.
“But where have you been? It was like you’d dropped off the whole planet! We’ve had the whole family searching for some sign of you. Even Ethel couldn’t locate you, and she sees in five dimensions!”
“Good for her,” I said. “Now shut the hell up and patch me through to the War Room. I want to speak to the Matriarch. The whole game’s gone to hell, and the Independent Agent has screwed us all.”
“I’m here, Edwin.” The Matriarch’s cool and utterly professional voice sounded as though she was standing right next to me. “Where are you? What’s been happening?”
“The game was fixed from the start,” I said, doing my best to sound equally calm and collected. Even after everything that had passed between us, I still didn’t want to let myself down in front of her. “Alexander King never intended to let any of us get our grubby little hands on his treasure trove of secrets. So I’m going to be a very bad loser and take them anyway. I need to know where his secret lair really is, Grandmother. Tell me.”
“If anyone in this family had even a strong suspicion where to get our hands on the Independent Agent, we’d have kicked in his door and shut him down long ago,” the Matriarch said calmly. “We don’t like competition, we don’t like people who change sides according to which way the wind is blowing, and we’ve never approved of his methods. We would also very much like to get back all the records, trophies, and forbidden weapons he’s stolen and cheated us out of down the years. Alexander King is no friend of this family and never has been. I’m sorry, Edwin. His present location is a complete mystery to us. The space-time coordinates he provided for your transport to Place Gloria were a strictly one-time-only thing. I did send three field agents after you, just on the off chance, but they ended up materialising halfway up an Alp with not even a climber’s hut anywhere in sight. Callan in particular was very upset about that.”
“You know Alexander,” I said. “You were close to him once.”
“I was younger then, and much more impressionable.” The Matriarch’s voice didn’t change a bit. “And even back then, I would never have let my feelings get in the way of a mission. The family comes first, Edwin. You know that.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know that.”
“Are you all right, Edwin?” said the Matriarch. “You sound . . . tired. Do you require assistance?”
“No,” I said. “I need to do this myself.”
I shut down the contact before she could start asking me questions I had no intention of answering. I looked at Walker, who’d finished his phone call and was looking at me patiently.
“My family can’t help,” I said.
“I can,” said Walker.
“You know how to find the Independent Agent?” I said just a bit suspiciously.
“Not as such,” said Walker. “But I can get us there. It’s always been part of my job, to be able to go where I’m needed. Of course, this will mean travelling via the Nightside. And, Eddie, if I’m going to take you there, you’re going to have to promise me that you’ll behave. Droods are forbidden access to the Nightside for good reason. Do you give me your word you won’t start anything?”
“I’ll be good,” I said. “No matter what the provocation. I can do that, to get to Alexander and Peter. But how do we get to the Nightside from here?”
“I am about to reveal one of the great secrets of the Nightside,” said Walker. “And to a Drood, of all people. What is the world coming to? . . . Anyway, here it is. Timeslips don’t just happen. Well, actually, they do. Suddenly and violently and all over the place. Bloody things are always opening up, forming temporary gateways to the past, the future, and any number of alternate Earths. Apparently it’s the result of a major design flaw in the original creation of the Nightside . . . But you don’t really think the powers that be in the Nightside—the poor bastards who think they actually run the place—would let such a thing happen without trying to take advantage of the situation? No; they found a way to tap into the basic energies involved and made the energies work for them. The Authorities didn’t just gift me with my Voice, you know; they also gave me my very own Portable Timeslip so I could come and go as I please and be wherever I need to be, whenever I need to be there. And sometimes just a little before.”
He produced a large gold pocket watch on a reinforced gold chain from his waistcoat pocket. He hefted the watch thoughtfully, and then held it out for me to see. The watch cover had an engraving of the snake Oroborus, with its tail in its mouth, surrounding an hourglass. Walker flipped open the cover, and inside there was nothing but darkness. Like a bottomless hole, falling away forever. I pulled my head back with a snap to keep from being sucked in. Walker smiled faintly.
“If you look into the abyss long enough, the abyss looks back into you. And sometimes it knows your name. I’ve been told there is someone or something trapped at the bottom of the watch, powering the Portable Timeslip. I’ve never felt inclined to pursue the matter.”
“My family has something similar,” I said, for pride’s sake. “A portable door. We’ve been using them for years.”
“Makes you wonder who had the idea first, doesn’t it?” said Walker. “And who sold what to whom? Droods may be banned from the Nightside by long tradition, but the intelligence community has always had its connections on many unofficial levels. Your portable doors operate in space and local time; my Portable Timeslip is more ambitious. The Authorities, in their various incarnations, have spent centuries studying Timeslips and slowly learning how to influence and manipulate them. Not the Authorities personally, of course; they have people to do that kind of thing for them. But this little watch can take me anywhere I need to be, and once it’s been there it never forgets. Which means the exact coordinates of Alexander King’s lair are safely tucked away in the watch’s memory core.
“Unfortunately, it’s running very low on power. It has just enough metatemporal juice left to transport both of us to a prearranged setting in the Nightside, where I can get it recharged.”
“I’ve always wanted to visit the Nightside,” I said.
“You only say that because you’ve never seen it,” said Walker.
He turned the fob on the pocket watch back and forth like a combination lock, muttering under his breath as he did so. He made one final dramatic twist of the fob, and the darkness leapt up out of the watch to form itself into a door hanging on the air before us. A simple rectangle of impenetrable darkness, a patch of night sky with absolutely no stars that could lead anywhere. Walker gestured for me to walk through. Only a few days earlier I would have refused, knowing better than to turn my back on Walker . . . but I didn’t care anymore. I wanted justice and revenge, and if I had to make a deal with the Devil to get them, then so be it. I walked into the darkness and out the other side and found myself in the dingiest, sleaziest bar I’d ever seen. Walker appeared out of nowhere to stand beside me.
“Welcome to the oldest bar in the world,” he said grandly. “Welcome to Strangefellows.”
I have to say, I was not impressed. I’d heard about Strangefellows, of course; everyone in my line of work has. It’s the place to go if you want to make things happen. Dreams can come true, in the oldest bar in the world, whether you want them to or not. Miracles can happen, and deals can be made, and if you sit at a table long enough, everyone in the world who matters will pass by. And while you’re watching all this, someone will steal your wallet, your clothes, and quite possibly your soul. Strangefellows is where heroes and villains, gods and monsters, myths and legends go . . . to sulk in corners and cry into their drinks.
I much preferred the upmarket, brightly lit, and certainly more civilised ambience of the Wulfshead Club, which might have its share of disreputable customers but always knew where to draw the line. The Wulfshead believed in security, good cheer, and basic hygiene, all of which were ostentatiously lacking here. The lighting was not so much low as suppressed, probably so you couldn’t tell what a dive the place actually was, and the air was thick with a whole bunch of different illegal forms of smoke. Just by breathing it in, my lungs were slumming. No one paid any attention to my sudden appearance; in fact I rather got the impression that the regulars were quite used to strangers dropping in unannounced. A lot of people were watching Walker carefully out of the corners of their eyes. I was about to remark on that when I spotted a number of small scuttling things in the shadows where the walls met the floor. I pointed them out to Walker, who shrugged.
“Don’t mind them,” he said easily. “They provide character. And the occasional bar snack.”
I tried not to shudder too openly as I followed Walker through the crowded tables towards the long wooden bar at the back of the room. I passed among vampires and ghouls, mummies wrapped in yards and yards of rotting gauze, a party of female horned daemons out on the pull, and even a few gods in reduced circumstances who leaned over their drinks and muttered how they used to be a contender. They all ignored me with a thoroughness I could only admire. They didn’t know Shaman Bond, and with my shirt collar pulled as far up as it would go, they couldn’t see my torc and mark me for a Drood.
None of them looked like people I’d talk to by choice, unless I was pursuing a case. I do have my standards. I’ve known my share of dubious dives in London: sleazy back-alley establishments where you have to mug the doorman to get in—or out. I’ve strolled through my share of members-only clubs where the air of decadence and debauchery is so thick you can carve your initials on it. I’ve moved among spies and traitors, rogues and villains, friends and fiends and felons . . . and none of them had ever made my hackles stand up on end the way this place did.
Strangefellows is where you go when the rest of the world has thrown you out.
A larger-than-life male personage was standing on a small stage beneath a single spotlight, providing the live entertainment. He wore battered black leathers left hanging open to show off the many scars covering his unnaturally pale torso. One of the Baron Frankenstein’s creatures. He held on to the old-fashioned mike like he thought it might escape while murdering an old Janis Joplin standard, “Take Another Piece of My Heart.”
“He’s often here,” said Walker, though I hadn’t asked. “Appears on as many open-mike talent shows as will have him, and let’s face it, most of them have more sense than to say no. Seems he’s not entirely satisfied with the baron’s work. He’s saving up his pennies for a sex-change operation.”
I never know what to say when people tell me things like that. So I just smiled and nodded vaguely and fixed my gaze on the bar ahead.
“I need a drink,” I said firmly. “In fact, I need several large drinks, preferably mixed together in a tall glass, but quite definitely not including a miniature umbrella or ragged slices of dodgy fruit I don’t even recognise. Any suggestions?”
“Yes,” said Walker. “Whatever you do, don’t let yourself be persuaded into trying the Merovingian cherry brandy. That’s not booze; that’s sudden death in a bottle. And don’t try the Angel’s Urine either. It’s not a trade name. They have to bury the bottles in desanctified ground. I’d stick to Perrier, if I were you. And insist on opening the bottle yourself.”
“You take me to the nicest places, Walker.”
People made space for us at the bar without actually seeming to or looking in our direction. Walker smiled charmingly at the blond barmaid.
“Hello, Cathy. I need a favour. And you’re not going to say no, or I’ll send in a team of health inspectors with armed backup.”
She scowled at him with real menace. “What do you want, Walker?”
“I need you to recharge my watch while I wait.”
“What, again? I swear you only do it here so you can fiddle your expenses . . . All right, hand it over. But if it blows the fuses again, you’re paying.”
Walker and I stood with our backs to the bar, staring out at the crowds, drinking our Perrier straight from the bottle. Walker drank with his little finger extended, of course. The roar of conversation in the bar rose and fell, interrupted now and again by moments of music and mayhem. The place might be a dump, but it was a lively dump.
“What do you intend to do when we finally catch up to Alexander and Peter?” said Walker. He didn’t look at me.
“Kill them,” I said. “No excuses, no plea bargaining. I’m going to kill them both.”
“For Honey?”
“For Honey and Blue and Katt and all the other people the Independent Agent has screwed over down the years. Alexander King made himself a legend in our field by trampling over everyone who got in his way. He did good things, important things; there’s no denying it. But only to build his reputation, so he could charge more. That’s not what being an agent is about. The world’s become too precarious to allow rogue operatives like him to run around loose . . .”
“You went to great lengths,” murmured Walker, “to establish yourself as an independent field agent for the Droods.”
“I still am,” I said. “It’s not what you do; it’s why you do it. I maintain a healthy distance from my family so I can see them clearly for what they are and operate as their conscience when necessary . . . I’m an agent, not an assassin. But I will kill Alexander and Peter King for all the things they’ve done. Not just because of Honey. And Blue and Katt. Am I going to have problems with you over this, Walker?”
“Not in the least. But, Eddie, understand this. If it comes to the point, and you find you can’t do it . . . you can’t kill them . . . I will. And you had better not get in my way. I was never an agent, Eddie. I was a soldier.”
“For Honey?” I said.
“No; I never cared much for her. Typical arrogant CIA spook. No, some people just need killing.”
At which point a large, heavily muscled, and more than fashionably dressed young man emerged suddenly from the crowds to loom over us. He planted himself right in front of Walker and smiled nastily at him. He was handsome enough, in a blond Aryan steroid freak sort of way, and up close he smelled of sweat and testosterone.
“Hello, Georgie,” said Walker. “You’re looking very yourself today. How are the bowel movements?”
“Screw you, Walker,” said Georgie. “I don’t have to take any shit from you anymore. Not so high and mighty now, are you, without your Voice? Not so powerful, since you lost your precious Voice in the Lilith War! All these years you’ve interfered in my business deals, humiliated me in front of my people, just because you could . . . Well, you can’t talk to me like that anymore! It’s my time now. And your time to get what’s coming to you!”
“Friend of yours?” I said to Walker.
“Not even remotely.” Walker gazed calmly back into Georgie’s fierce gaze, and if he was at all concerned, he hid it really well. “This appalling and slightly hysterical person is Good Time Georgie. Your special go-to man in the Nightside for everything that’s bad for you, when you’re working on a low budget. Whether it’s drugs, debauchery, or demonic possession, Georgie can get it for you at a lower price than anyone else. Of course, at such prices you can’t expect guaranteed quality or customer service. Never any refunds or apologies from Good Time Georgie. Buyer beware, and there’s one born every minute.”
“That’s all you’ve got now,” said Georgie. “Words. No Voice to back them up. I’m going to break your bones, Walker, and stamp you into the floor. No one here will help you. You’ve got no friends here.” He glanced at me. “You keep out of this. It’s none of your business.”
“You smell funny,” I said. I looked at Walker. “Would you like me to . . . ?”
“No need,” said Walker.
“Really, I don’t mind. It wouldn’t be any trouble.”
“It’s only Good Time Georgie,” said Walker. “I could handle Good Time Georgie if I was unconscious.” He smiled easily into Georgie’s reddening face, completely unmoved by the man’s size or presence or anger. “Are you sure you want to do this? Are you really so sure I don’t have my Voice anymore? Would I be here in Strangefellows, without my Voice to protect me? Perhaps you’ve forgotten all the terrible things I’ve done to you down the years. Or made you do to yourself. You’re just a cheap thug, Georgie, whereas I . . . am Walker. Now go away and stop bothering me. Or I will tell you to do something deeply amusing and so extreme that people will still be laughing about it thirty years from now.”
There wasn’t an ounce of uncertainty in Walker’s voice. He sounded like he meant every word he said and all the ones he was just implying. Good Time Georgie hesitated, his anger draining away in the face of Walker’s calm certainty. Georgie looked around him. A lot of people had stopped what they were doing to see what would happen, but none of them looked like they had any intention of getting involved. This was Walker, after all. Georgie turned abruptly and stalked away. Walker took a sip of his Perrier, little finger extended even more than usual. And everyone went back to what they’d been doing.
“Awful fellow,” murmured Walker. “I’d have shut him down years ago, but ten more would just spring up in his place. There will always be steady business for those who come here to sin on a restricted budget.”
“Neatly handled, I thought,” I said.
“Thank you. I’ve had a lot of practice.”
“How long do you think you can keep this going before people know for sure you’re bluffing about your Voice?”
“What makes you think I’m bluffing?” said Walker.
I didn’t look at him. “Can I just ask . . . You lost your Voice originally in the Lilith War? As in, the biblical Lilith?”
“Yes.”
“Forget it. I don’t think I really want to know.”
“Very wise,” said Walker.
Behind the bar, the Portable Timeslip made a polite chiming noise to let us know its recharging was complete. The blond barmaid unplugged the pocket watch from what looked like a battery recharger on steroids and slapped the watch down on the wooden bar before Walker with a violence that made both of us wince. Walker smiled politely, tipped his bowler hat to her, and then picked up the watch and turned to me.
“We have to do this outside,” he said. “Too many built-in protections and defences inside the bar.”
“To keep creditors from getting in?” I said.
“I heard that!” said the barmaid.
“I notice you’re not denying it,” said Walker. “Let’s go, Eddie.”
Outside the bar, I got my first real look at the Nightside. Walker gave me a few moments to look around and brace myself. The Nightside was everything I’d always thought it would be: loud, sleazy, brightly coloured, and steeped in its own dangerous glamour. It was like standing on a city street in Hell. Harshly coloured lights blazed from the half-open doors of nightclubs that never closed, along with every kind of music that ever made you want to dance till you dropped, till your feet bled and your heart broke. Shops and stores, selling everything you ever dreamed of in your worst nightmares. All sins catered for, every desire encouraged. The pavements were packed with would-be customers hot for pleasures and secrets and knowledge forbidden by the outside world. Beasts and monsters moved openly among them. Anywhere else, I would have had to use my Sight to see so much, so clearly, but this was the Nightside. And this, all this, was just business as usual.
Everyone knows there’s no law in the Nightside. Just a few overseers like Walker to keep things from getting out of hand. Anything is permitted, everything is for sale. You can buy anything or anyone, do anything or anyone, and no one will stop you or call you to account. Or rescue you when things go bad. A place of casual sin and unchecked appetites, and no one gives a damn because . . . that’s what the Nightside is for. I ached to call up my armour, take my aspect upon me, and bring justice and retribution to the only city where the night never ends.
“Now you know why we don’t allow Droods in here,” said Walker. “You’re really far too simple and straightforward for a place like this. We do things differently here.”
“You can’t have sin without victims,” I said. “Who cares for them?”
“And you do take things so very personally . . . Everyone who comes to the Nightside knows what to expect, Eddie. There are no innocents here.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
He sighed briefly. “There are some who do what they can. And that’s more than most of those who come here are entitled to.”
“How do you stand it?” I said. “Working in a moral cesspit like this?”
“It’s my job,” said Walker. “And I’m very good at it. Now, time we were going.”
His hands worked expertly on the pocket watch, and the darkness within leapt up and out, forming a great dark blanket above us. It slammed down like a flyswatter, and I didn’t even have time to react before suddenly we were somewhere else.
The interior of Place Gloria looked just as I remembered it. Tacky, gaudily coloured reminders from the decade that taste disowned. I looked quickly about me while Walker put his pocket watch away, but everything was still and silent. I knew this room; it was where we’d all stood together at the start of the game, when we’d still thought we had a fair chance of winning. I caught Walker considering me thoughtfully and made myself unclench my fists.
“I don’t think we should just go charging through the rooms at random,” murmured Walker, “in the hope of just running into Alexander and Peter . . . There are bound to be protections, alarms; probably even booby traps for the unwary and those in a hurry.”
“Searching this place thoroughly could take forever,” I said. “I’ve a better idea. Make a lot of noise and make them come to us.”
I drew my Colt Repeater, the gun that doesn’t need to be aimed and never runs out of ammunition, and I fired it again and again, calmly and coldly destroying everything of value in the room. Anything that looked important, or expensive, or hard to replace. Ancient china blew apart, glasses and mirrors shattered, and the room was full of vengeful thunder. Photos of Alexander’s old cases and triumphs jumped off the walls, precious memories destroyed in moments. The photos showed him posing with the great and the good, the famous and the infamous. Smiling faces, blown away. I shot holes in objects of historical significance and artistic merit, and I didn’t give a damn. I destroyed antique furnishings and modern furniture and stamped the pieces under my feet as I raged around the room. The continual roar of the gun in the confined space was almost unbearable.
Some things had their own protections. An oversized clock whose hands swept steadily backwards faded away before my bullets could reach it. An ancient black runesword mounted on the wall began to sing menacingly in no human language. My bullets couldn’t touch it, so I moved on. And a huge stone hand in an impenetrable glass case gave me the finger. I didn’t care. There were still many good things left to destroy.
It did occur to me that I was probably destroying or at least vandalising important relics of spy history, but none of that mattered. Not with Honey’s blood still drying on my clothes, from where I’d held her close as she died. Not with the Blue Fairy’s death message still fresh in my mind. And not while Alexander and Peter still lived.
I finally ran out of things to shoot and slowly lowered the Colt Repeater. It felt heavy in my hand. The echoes from the continuous gunfire died away, and Walker removed his hands from his ears. The room was destroyed, bits and pieces everywhere, but no one came to investigate.
“Odd,” said Walker, entirely unmoved by the destruction all around him. “No alarms? No bells or sirens or those annoying flashing lights that always give me a headache? And no attempt to protect most of the items? Try this in the Collector’s warehouse, and the security robots would be picking up bits of you for weeks afterward. I think we have to assume that Alexander and Peter know we’re here and have no intention of exposing themselves to danger . . . Which is understandable. If I was out here after me, I wouldn’t show myself either. You know, this could be a trap.”
“I don’t care,” I said.
“Don’t care was made to care,” said an angry, familiar voice.
I looked around sharply, and there they were, the three of them, standing in a tense threatening row on the other side of the room. Coffin Jobe, the Dancing Fool, and Strange Chloe. My three fellow conspirators from the raid on the Tower of London. It all seemed so long ago now . . . a different world. But here they were now, and they were clearly not on my side. Coffin Jobe, the necroleptic, who died and came back to life so frequently he saw the world so much more clearly than the rest of us. The Dancing Fool, who created his own martial art based on Scottish sword dancing, and won every fight because he knew what you were going to do even before you did. Déjà fu. And Strange Chloe, the Goth’s Goth, with her black and white markings tattooed on her face, who could make anything in the world disappear if she just hated it enough. And she had a lot of hate in her.
Friends of a kind. Colleagues, certainly. All of them with good cause to want me dead. Life’s like that, sometimes.
“Guys,” I said. “This really isn’t a good time. Could we do this some other time?”
“What’s the matter, Eddie?” said the Dancing Fool. His voice was harsh, vicious. “Forgotten all about us, had you? The three friends you betrayed and left helpless for the authorities in the Tower of London? The colleagues you stabbed in the back and then left to rot? If Alexander King hadn’t stepped in to rescue us, we’d still be behind bars!”
“Alexander?” I said. “Damn, how long has he been watching me . . . ?”
“Get over yourself, Shaman!” said Strange Chloe. “This isn’t about you! It’s about us!”
“Only Shaman isn’t your real name, is it?” said the Dancing Fool. “Not even close.”
“Drood,” said Coffin Jobe in his gray, deathly voice. “Bad enough that you betrayed us, Shaman . . . But you’re a Drood too?”
“You have to admit,” said Walker, “this is an excellent defence stratagem. Making you fight your way through your own colleagues to get to him. Alexander King made his legend by always being one step ahead of everyone else . . . It’s almost an honour to see such talent at work.”
None of us were listening to him.
“I saved your lives!” I said to all three of them. “Big Aus was planning to kill all of us once he’d got his hands on what he was really after. You didn’t seriously buy into that nonsense about the ravens, did you? He was after the Crown Jewels!”
“Yeah, right,” said Strange Chloe. “And my arse plays the banjo. You’d say anything to save your own skin, wouldn’t you?”
“I thought you were my friend, Shaman,” said Coffin Jobe. “And now you’re a Drood?”
“How could you turn out to be one of them?” said Strange Chloe. “The professional killjoys, the bullies and spoilsports, dedicated to taking all the fun out of life! You pretended to be one of us when you were really one of them . . . Well, here’s where you get yours, Drood.”
“Alexander brought us here so we could take our revenge on you,” said the Dancing Fool. “He knew you’d try to smash in here to steal the prize you couldn’t win honestly. Typical Drood. And we all jumped at the chance for a little justified payback!”
“You don’t know what’s going on here,” I said as steadily and calmly as I could. “He’s using you, just like Big Aus. You’re only here as another way to hurt me, by making me fight my way through my friends to get to him.”
“This isn’t about you!” Strange Chloe shouted, all but stamping her foot. “Not everything is about you just because you’re a bloody Drood!”
“This is,” I said, and something in my voice stopped her. I looked at the three of them and felt more tired than anything. “Do you really think you can stop me?” I said. “I’m a Drood, with a Drood’s armour and a Drood’s training. You know what that means.”
The three of them looked at each other, uneasy for the first time. They knew what a Drood can do.
“Always wanted a chance to show what I could do against a Drood,” the Dancing Fool said finally.
“Always wanted a chance to stick it to a Drood, the way they’ve always stuck it to me,” said Strange Chloe.
“I thought you were my friend, Shaman,” said Coffin Jobe. “Friends are all I’ve got left . . .”
I could see the confidence growing in them as they talked themselves into it. The Dancing Fool was actually smiling.
“When word gets out I’ve taken down a Drood . . . I’ll be able to double my fees,” he said.
“And have my family come after you?” I said. “You never were the brightest button in the box, Nigel.”
Coffin Jobe and Strange Chloe turned their heads to look at the Dancing Fool.
“Nigel?” said Coffin Jobe.
“That’s your name?” said Strange Chloe. “You real name? Bloody Nigel?”
The Dancing Fool glared at me, so angry he could barely speak. “You bastard,” he said finally. “You promised you’d never tell.”
“Sorry, Nigel,” I said. “But needs must when the Devil’s in the driving seat. And it’s not as if you’re a genuine martial arts master, either. Hell, you’re not even Scottish! You just added a minor talent for precognition to some moves you picked up watching Bruce Lee movies. Whereas I . . . really am a Drood. I’m here to kill the Independent Agent, for good reason. If you knew half the things he’s done, you’d help me do it. Don’t let him screw you over like he did me. I will walk right through you to get to him.”
“Typical Drood,” said Strange Chloe. “Think you can talk your way out of anything. Well, Nigel here may not be the real deal, but I bloody well am. I’m going to hate you right out of the world, Drood; I’m going to stare you down until there’s not one little bit of you left to remind me how much I hate you.”
“Friends of yours?” murmured Walker. I’d forgotten he was there.
“Sometimes,” I said. “More like colleagues. People I work with on occasion. You know how it is . . .”
“Only too well,” said Walker.
“Do you know who everyone is?” I said. “I could introduce you . . .”
“No need,” said Walker. “I know them all by name or deed or reputation.” He studied them with his calm, cold gaze, and they all shifted uneasily. “Small-time operatives with minor talents. Their kind are always turning up in the Nightside, looking to make a reputation for themselves. They don’t usually last long. Most of them end up like this, crying into their beer because the big boys play too roughly.”
“You bastard,” said Strange Chloe. “I’ll show you who’s small-time!”
“You stay out of this, Walker,” said the Dancing Fool, stabbing a finger at him. “Our business is with the Drood. Don’t get involved, if you know what’s good for you.”
“And if I do choose to get involved?” said Walker, smiling just a little.
Strange Chloe sneered at him. “You don’t have your Voice anymore. Everyone knows that.”
“And without the Voice, you’re just another killjoy in a suit,” said the Dancing Fool. “So stay out of it.”
“Whatever you say, Nigel,” murmured Walker.
“Guys, please, don’t do this,” I said. “Don’t make me do this. I’ve already lost three colleagues to Alexander King; I don’t want to lose any more.”
“See, we were never friends,” said the Dancing Fool. “Just colleagues.”
“Then why are you so upset over the thought of being betrayed?” said Walker.
“Shut up! Shut up, Walker! You don’t scare me anymore!” The Dancing Fool’s face was dangerously red with rage. “Without your Voice you’re no better than us . . .”
“I don’t have my Voice,” said Walker. “But I do have other things.”
“Oh, please,” said Strange Chloe. “I could put you through a wall with my eyelashes.”
“Chloe,” I said. “You don’t want to do this. I’m the one who persuaded you out of that grubby one-room flat, found you work, found you friends.”
“You didn’t do it for me,” she said. Her voice was flat, cold, emotionless. “It’s all shit. Everything. Just like I always said. Why should you have been any different? Everyone lies.”
“That’s the Goth talking,” I said. “I liked you better when you were a punk. You had more energy. And the pink mohawk suited you.”
“Bastard,” said Strange Chloe.
“You were a punk?” said Coffin Jobe.
“Shut up, Jobe.”
“We all have our secrets,” I said. “Get over yourself, Chloe. This is more important than your hurt feelings.”
“Nothing is more important than my feelings,” said Strange Chloe.
She stepped forward and glared at me. I could feel power building around her. I hastily subvocalised my activating Words and armoured up. Coffin Jobe and the Dancing Fool gaped at me; they’d never seen a Drood take on his armour before. Not many have and lived to tell of it. Strange Chloe didn’t care. Her rage seethed and crackled on the air between us as she took another step forward. The impact of her gaze hit me like a fist. That was her gift and her power and her curse: to make anything disappear that dared not to love her. Strange Chloe’s stare slammed against my armour, terrible energies filling the space between us as she concentrated, the unyielding power of her fury straining to find some hold, some purchase, against the impenetrable, more than normal certainty of my strange matter armour. I took a step forward, towards her, and her face became almost inhuman in its concentrated rage.
Things close to us began to disappear, driven out of reality by the overspilling energies of Strange Chloe’s stare. Objects and trophies and pieces of furniture just vanished, one after the other, air rushing in to fill the gaps left behind. Rich deep carpet faded away and was gone, leaving a slowly widening swath of bare boards between us. Strange Chloe glared at me, scowling so hard it must have hurt her face, but all I had to show her in return was my featureless gold mask. I was almost close enough to reach out and touch her when her power broke against my armour and blasted back at her. The full force of her gaze was reflected by my unyielding armour, and Strange Chloe screamed silently as she faded away and was gone.
I armoured down.
“Sorry, Chloe,” I said to the empty air where she’d been. “I hope you’re happy now, wherever you are.”
“You killed her,” said the Dancing Fool.
“Her own power turned against her,” I said. “And don’t you dare sound so outraged, Nigel. You know damn well you never liked her. Not really. Don’t you dare pretend she was ever your friend. You just let her hang around because she was useful: a big gun you could pull on people who weren’t impressed by your fighting skills. She was always more my friend than yours.”
“You were never her friend,” said the Dancing Fool.
“Sometimes . . . you just don’t have the time,” I said.
The Dancing Fool laughed briefly. There wasn’t any humour in the sound. “You’ve robbed me of one of my colleagues. Seems only fair I should rob you of one of yours. Never did like you, Walker.”
His long lean body snapped into a martial arts stance as he turned on Walker, clearly expecting to take him by surprise, but Walker was already waiting, gun in hand. He smiled briefly and kneecapped the Dancing Fool, shattering his left kneecap with a single bullet. The Dancing Fool made a shocked, surprised sound as the impact punched his leg out from under him, and he fell to the floor. Tears streamed down his face as he clutched his bloody knee with both hands as though he thought he could hold it together by sheer force. His breathing came short and hurried as the pain hit him in waves, each one worse than the one before.
“How did you do that?” he said to Walker, forcing the words out. “I’m fast. I can dodge bullets. And I always know what’s coming! How could you do that?”
“Because you never met anyone like me before,” Walker said calmly.
I moved over to join him, giving the crippled Dancing Fool plenty of room. “Was that really necessary, Walker?”
“I thought so, yes,” he said. “We don’t all have suits of armour to protect us.”
“Sorry, Nigel,” I said to the Dancing Fool.
“Shove it!” he said. Both his hands were slick with blood now, and his ruined leg trembled violently from shock and nerve damage. “I’ll get you for this. Get you both! I’ll never stop, never give up. You’ll spend what’s left of your lives looking back over your shoulder, waiting for me to be there. And I will! I’ll kill you both for this!”
“No, you won’t,” said Walker. And he put a bullet through the Dancing Fool’s other kneecap.
There was only the briefest of screams, and then the Dancing Fool passed out from pain and shock and horror. I looked at him, and then at Walker.
“It was a mercy, really,” said Walker, putting away his gun. “Revenge is such a waste of life. Besides, it’s never wise to leave an enemy in shape to come after you.”
“There is that,” I said. “At least they won’t call him the Dancing Fool anymore.”
We both looked around for Coffin Jobe. He was lying dead on the floor. I got Walker to help me pick him up and settle him in a chair, so at least he’d be comfortable when he came back to life again. I left Nigel where he was; I didn’t want to risk waking him.
“Well,” said Walker. “This was all very distracting, but it doesn’t get us any closer to Alexander and Peter. In fact, after this I think we have to assume that they’ve been observing us ever since we got here and are therefore probably heading for the nearest exit or locking themselves inside a reinforced secret bunker.”
“No,” I said. “They won’t leave. Not with so much unfinished business left between us. They know they haven’t won until they’ve beaten me. Beaten me fair and square, to keep my family from coming after them. Because the other side of Anything for the family is Anything for any member of the family. And the Kings’ best chance for winning is here on their home territory, where they have all the advantages.”
“Would you still be willing to make a deal?” said Walker. “Hands off, leave safely, in return for the Independent Agent’s secrets?”
“No,” I said. “But they’ll think they can persuade me to settle for that. Because that’s how they think.” I raised my voice. “I know you can hear me, Alexander! Talk to me! Tell me where you are so we can sort this out face-to-face. You know you want to.”
A vision of Alexander King sitting at his ease on his great wooden throne appeared on the air before us. He looked exactly as he had before: an aged rogue in flamboyant clothes. But his smile was cold and calculating now, and it added years to his shrunken face.
“Just walk straight ahead,” he said. “I’m waiting.”
The vision snapped off. I looked at Walker, and then leaned in close to murmur in his ear.
“Don’t stand on ceremony. If you get the chance, kill him.”
“Glad to,” murmured Walker.
We walked on through the Independent Agent’s monument to his own genius, through room after room full of trophies and mementos, the museum he’d made of his life. Endless photos from his extensive career, from all places and periods, showing Alexander King as a young man, growing steadily older . . . but not beyond a certain point. No photos of a more than middle-aged man, past his best, or of an old man limping into retirement. Just portraits of the legendary Independent Agent with famous faces from politics and religion, along with movie stars and celebrities, and even a few gods and monsters. (Though those last tended not to photograph well.) Alexander King really had got around in his day.
I paused before one photo, nicely framed, but just one more set among so many . . . A young and handsome Alexander stood with his arm around the waist of a very young Martha Drood. A simple snapshot of a warm moment in the Cold War. Martha, when she was just a field agent, like me. She wasn’t even as old as I was. She was beautiful, just like everyone said.
Another photograph showed a middle-aged but still stylish Alexander standing next to a young Walker dressed in what looked like his very first good suit. I looked at Walker, and he shrugged easily.
“When you have work that needs doing, you go to the best man for the job. And for many years, that man was Alexander King.”
“Have you noticed?” I said, indicating a whole wall of photos with one wave of my hand, “all these photos of the man himself and his world, and all the people he knew . . . but not one of his family. Not one of Alexander with his wife, whoever she was, or his daughter. Or Peter. What kind of a man has no family photos?”
“A man who lives for his work,” said Walker. “You don’t get to be the greatest agent of all time by allowing yourself to be . . . distracted.”
Soon after, we passed through a room full of evidence of Alexander King’s more ruthless side. Stuffed and mounted exhibits of men and women from his past. Enemies he’d overcome, and then kept as trophies. At first I thought they were waxworks, but up close I could see the treated skin and smell the preservatives. I tapped a fingertip against one eye, and it was glass. The exhibits were dressed in the very height of fashion from their times, from the 1920s onwards. Their faces were taut, emotionless, damned forever to stand around the room in casual poses, as though at some awful cocktail party that would never end.
A museum to murder.
“Old enemies,” said Walker, striding casually through the carefully posed figures and occasionally peering closely at certain faces. “And maybe just a few friends and allies who got above themselves. What better way to celebrate your victory, when you can’t tell the world . . . than to be able to walk among your defeated foes and gloat as you please? I wonder if he talks to them. Probably . . . Probably the only people he can talk to, these days . . .”
“Anyone here you recognise?” The place was creeping me out big-time, but I was damned if I’d show it in front of Walker.
“No one I know personally,” he said. “I’ve only ever operated on the fringes of the intelligence field. How about you?”
“Jesus!” I said suddenly, striding forward. “This one’s a Drood! He’s still wearing his torc!”
I reached out to take the torc, and Walker grabbed my arm at the last moment and pulled me back.
“No, Eddie. Really bad idea. Booby traps, remember?”
I stopped, breathing hard, and then nodded curtly to Walker to show him I was back in control again. He let go of my arm.
“Later,” I said. “I’ll see to this later.”
“Yes,” said Walker. “There will be time for many things, later.”
Finally, we ran out of rooms. I pushed open one last oversized door, and there before us was the room I’d seen in the background of Alexander’s floating vision. A bare room, with bare walls, nothing in it but a great wooden throne with its back turned to me. I stopped just inside the door and took a good look around, but there was no one else in the room. Walker mouthed the word Peter? at me, and I shrugged. We strode forward into the room, and the door closed slowly but firmly behind us. The throne began to turn spinning silently on some unseen mechanism, and there, sitting on the Independent Agent’s throne, was Peter King. He smiled easily at me and nodded to Walker.
“Welcome to my home, both of you. Well, have you nothing to say to the legendary Independent Agent at the moment of his greatest triumph? I’ve been running rings around people like you for the best part of a century, but you have to admit, this is one of my best! Oh, come on; surely you guessed before now? Surely two agents of such vaunted skill and experience had just the merest suspicion at some point that I wasn’t who I appeared to be; that it was in fact me?”
“You’ve been masquerading as your own grandson,” I said, feeling numb and stupid. “It was you all along, Alexander.”
“Of course, of course!” he said cheerfully. “It was my game, my rules, and you never stood a chance.”
“Was there ever a real grandson?” said Walker. “A real Peter King?”
“Oh, yes,” the Independent Agent said easily. “Pitiful little fellow. No use to anyone, not even himself. No drive, no ambition, and not a single achievement of worth to his name. A dreary little man in a dreary little job. Industrial espionage; is there anything lower for such as us? I didn’t really kill him, not as such. Just relieved him of a life he wasn’t using anyway. I took his life energy and used it to make myself young again. Gave myself a few nips and tucks here and there and a new face. It’s not difficult, if you know what you’re doing. An expensive process, certainly, but worth every penny. As a great man once said, What good is wealth, if you don’t have your health? I feel so young! So alive! I feel . . . like myself again!”
He swung one leg elegantly over the other and smiled condescendingly. I could feel my hands knotting into fists at my sides. I wanted to haul him down off his stupid throne and beat him to death with my bare hands. But I didn’t. I made myself wait. He had more to say, more secrets to spill, and I needed to hear them.
“You didn’t really think the legendary Independent Agent would give up his role and his secrets just because he was getting old, did you?” said Alexander through Peter King’s face. I decided to think of him as Alexander. It made it easier to hate him. “The world needs me, needs the Independent Agent, needs my knowledge and experience and skills now more than ever. Too many damned amateurs running around out there, screwing things up for everyone. When you’ve got a real problem, you need a professional. Someone who knows what he’s doing.
“And don’t get me started on the state of the official organisations! Bloody accountants have taken over, more concerned with balancing their budgets than actually achieving anything. And as for the Droods . . . I am lost for words, Eddie. You never should have meddled. All right, your family were corrupt; so what? They got the job done, didn’t they? Did you know I offered to help you out during the Hungry Gods War, and some damned fool turned me down?” He leaned forward on his throne to glare at me. “Did you really think I’d give it all up and go quietly into the long night? Just lie down and die, because I got old? I didn’t spend my whole life saving the world and putting it to rights just to grow old and feeble and die! People like me aren’t supposed to die! The world needs me! I still have important things to do! Dying is for small people, for the little people who don’t matter!”
“You’re shouting, Alex,” said Walker.
“Ah. Yes. Sorry about that,” said the young Independent Agent, sitting back on his wooden throne. “This new body is packed full of hormones. I’m still getting used to it.”
“The game never was what we thought it was,” I said. “You set the contest up specifically so you could be in it and win it. So you could beat us all, in front of the whole world. You needed to prove to yourself, and everyone else, that you were still the best. By taking on the greatest agents the world had to offer and beating them all.”
“Oh, please; you were hardly the best,” said Alexander. “You were just the five best up-and-comers. The ones most likely to be my competition as I started life again. The ones most likely to get in my way as I built my new career as Peter King. I brought you into this game to show everyone I could beat you, yes; but mostly so I could kill you all off before you became a nuisance.”
“Excuse me,” said Walker. “But . . . why me? I’m hardly an up-and-comer. I’m barely an agent. Why not choose the current champion of the Nightside, John Taylor?”
“You . . . were my one indulgence,” said Alexander, beaming down on Walker. “I wanted someone who could put up a good fight. Someone worth beating. And I wanted someone there who knew the old me, to see if they could identify me inside this new identity. And you didn’t! I fooled you completely!”
“All that young blood is going to your head,” said Walker.
“I know,” said Alexander. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
“If all you wanted was to become young again,” I said slowly, “there are any number of ways you could have become a young Alexander King. Not very nice ways, most of them, but that wouldn’t have stopped you. The Independent Agent, rejuvenated! Such things have been known to happen in our field. Rarely, and usually frowned upon, but not unknown. However, you didn’t do that. You couldn’t afford to do that. You’ve made too many enemies down the years, Alexander. Really powerful, really nasty enemies. You couldn’t kill all of them and put them on display. No, they’re out there, sensing weakness in your old age: jackals and vultures circling the dying lion.
“The only way you could hope to shake them off was by spreading rumours of your impending death, and then reappearing as your own grandson. Winning the game you set up would establish Peter King as a major player in his own right, and then you’d use the secrets gained from the contest as currency to get you back in the great game. You would become the new Independent Agent, with none of your old enemies any the wiser.”
“But why this desperate need for new secrets?” said Walker. “Why play the game at all? Unless . . .”
“Exactly,” said Alexander. “Knew you’d get there, in the end. There is no great hoard of hidden secrets. Hasn’t been for some time. There was once, along with whole vaults full of objects of power and forbidden weapons and the like. But I sold them all off, down the years, to fund my wonderfully extravagant lifestyle. One at a time and very discreetly, of course, but they all went. Sometimes I even sold things back to the very people I’d taken them from in the first place! Through a whole series of trusted intermediaries, of course; I couldn’t risk any rumours getting out. Oh, I get almost giddy, thinking of how clever I’ve been . . . The last few items went in payment for my new youthfulness. Can’t say I miss them. They were the past, and I must concentrate only on the future now.
“As befits a young man, with his whole life ahead of him.
“I shall be the new sensation of the age and astonish everyone! After I’ve blown up Place Gloria to establish Alexander’s death. And yours too, naturally. A pity to have to blow up the old place; it’s been good to me . . . But the world must believe the Independent Agent is dead, if the new one is to rise from his ashes. And you have to die so you can’t tell anyone what you know. Nothing personal; just business.”
“Wrong,” I said. “This is personal.”
“You don’t really think it’s going to be that easy, do you?” said Walker.
“Oh, yes . . . I think so,” said Alexander. “If you hadn’t found your way here so quickly, I was planning to lay out a trail of bread crumbs. I needed you to come find me on your own, without calling in reinforcements. How did you find me so quickly . . . ? No. It doesn’t matter. I haven’t got where I am today by worrying over unimportant details. You’re here, as I meant you to be. You know, you’re very easy to manipulate, Eddie. I just knew killing Honey right in front of you would make you so angry you’d come charging after me without bothering to bring in any more of your annoying family.”
“That’s it?” I said. “That’s why you killed Honey? Because of me?”
“Because of you, yes,” said Alexander. “No, Eddie! Not everything is about you! She had to die, just as all of you had to die. It’s necessary. My game, my outcome, and no one left to contradict me. I killed her because of me, Eddie. This has all been about me. Get used to it.”
“You really think you can take me in my armour?” I said. “I’ve fought evil organisations, Hungry Gods, and my own damned family and still come out on top, you stupid little turd. All of this, for your ego. You may be young again, Alexander, but you’re still just a man, and I’m a Drood.
“I sentence you to death, by my hand, for the murder of Honey Lake, the Blue Fairy, and Lethal Harmony of Kathmandu. And for the betrayal of your own legend. Because you were a great man once.”
My voice was so cold even Walker looked at me uneasily. Alexander lounged on his throne, still smiling. He held up his left hand to show me a simple clicker in the shape of a small golden frog.
“Recognise this, Eddie? A simple device created by your own family Armourer. Designed to shut down your armour and hold it inside your torc. An on/off switch whose whole purpose is to give someone else outside control over a Drood’s armour. Your uncle Jack felt it necessary to design such a thing to be sure no rogue Drood could use their armour for evil, as did Arnold Drood, the Bloody Man. He really did go bad, didn’t he? Who would have thought such a well brought-up Drood could do such terrible things?”
“I know about Arnold,” I said. “I killed him.”
Alexander looked at me. He hadn’t known that. He recovered quickly, brandishing the golden frog in my face. “I persuaded your uncle Jack to give me one of his duplicates. Partly so I could be there to take down a really bad Drood if he couldn’t, and partly in return for something he wanted so very badly that the family wouldn’t let him have.”
“Like what?” I said. “What could you possibly have that the whole Drood family couldn’t get for him?”
“The Merlin Glass,” said Alexander. “And if you knew why your dear old uncle Jack wanted it so badly . . . you’d shit yourself.”
I took a step forward, and he held up the golden frog admonishingly. “Ah-ah, Eddie! One little click, and your armour is trapped inside your collar, and then what will you do?”
I took another step forward. He frowned, confused. This wasn’t the scenario he’d written in his head for this occasion. He clicked the golden frog once with a large dramatic gesture. The small sound was very loud in the quiet. I subvocalised my activating Words, and my golden armour flowed out of my torc and covered me completely in a moment. Alexander King sat up straight on his throne, looking at me dumbly. He clicked the frog again and again, as though he could make it work through sheer vehemence. As though he could make my armour go away through sheer force of will. He opened his mouth to say something, to call for help or activate some hidden defence. I didn’t give him the chance. I lunged forward and punched him hard in the chest with my golden fist, crushing his heart. He slammed back against his throne, my right hand buried in his chest up to the golden wrist, and the last thing he saw with his dying eyes was his own horrified face reflected in the featureless golden face mask of a Drood.
I watched the light go out of his eyes. When I was sure he was dead, I leaned in close and whispered in his ear. “New torc,” I said. “New armour. Different rules. You really should have kept up-to-date, Alexander.”
Walker and I took our time, wandering back through the many trophied rooms and halls of Place Gloria. I’d already used my Sight to locate the hidden bomb and turn off the timing mechanism.
“I think I’ll take a good look around before I leave,” said Walker. “Bound to be something here I can use to get my Voice up and running again.”
“Can you do that?” I said. “With the Authorities gone?”
Walker smiled. “The Voice isn’t something the Authorities gave me, Eddie; it’s something they did to me. All I have to do is find the right power source, and I can recharge it. Just like the Portable Timeslip.”
“Be my guest,” I said. “I don’t want anything. Not from him.”
“What could he have that the Droods wouldn’t already have?” said Walker generously.
“Still,” I said. “Don’t take too long. When I leave, I’m resetting the timer on the bomb. So no one ever has to know about . . . all this. Alexander King was a good man in his time. A real legend. No one needs to know what he was like at the end. A scared old man, in an empty treasure house. Our field needs legends like the Independent Agent.”
“So he can inspire others to become rogue agents like you?” said Walker. “Standing alone and valiant against the corruption of established organisations?”
“Something like that,” I said.
Walker shook his head. “Heroes. Always more trouble than they’re worth.”
“Somebody has to keep the big boys honest,” I said.
Why be an agent? To protect the world from all the other agents.
EPILOGUE
Walker went back to the Nightside. I went home.
I told the Matriarch what happened. Made a full re-port. She just nodded. She did, after all, know Alexander King better than any of us.
I went to see the Armourer. I told him I killed the Independent Agent. He was pleased. He asked how I got on with all the new toys he’d given me: the Chameleon Codex, the Gemini Duplicator, the new skeleton key. I told him I hadn’t used any of them. I’d been so busy, I’d forgotten all about them.
His face went a colour not normally seen in nature, and I had to call some of his assistants to bring him a nice soothing drink.
And finally, I went home, to Molly. She was back in the wood between the worlds, back from her mission. We lay down on a grassy bank together. She didn’t tell me about her mission, and I didn’t tell her about mine. We just lay there, side by side, happy to be with each other again.
I never did tell her about Honey Lake. The woman I didn’t love, and who didn’t love me. Who died in my arms. But I will always remember her, and the time we had together, and how things might have gone differently, if only . . .
Shaman Bond
will return
in
FROM HELL WITH LOVE
ROC
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First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Printing, June
Copyright © Simon R. Green, 2009
All rights reserved
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
Green, Simon R., 1955-
The spy who haunted me/Simon R. Green.
p. cm.—(Secret histories; bk. 3)
eISBN : 978-1-101-05367-6
PR6107.R44S’.92—dc22 2008055589
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