For Heaven's Eyes Only

CHAPTER SEVEN The One True Thing

It was all happening at Drood Hall. I was saying good-bye to Ammonia Vom Acht when the next great steaming pile of ordure hit the fan. Or at least, I was trying to say good-bye. For someone who hadn’t wanted to come to Drood Hall in the first place, Ammonia was displaying a marked reluctance to leave. She stuck both fists on her hips, stuck out her chin, tilted her head back and did her best to glare right into my face.

“I am not leaving here without the psychic protection crown I was promised! I know all about you Droods; promise me the world and everything in it to get what you want, but the moment I’ve done your dirty work, it’s all, ‘Thank you kindly; we’ll be in touch!’ ”

“Let me contact the Armourer again,” I said, as patiently and politely as I could manage through gritted teeth. “See what he has to say.”

I used the Merlin Glass to contact my uncle Jack in the Armoury. His face appeared immediately, filling the hand mirror. “Eddie! Listen . . .”

“I’ve still got Ammonia here,” I said loudly, overriding him. “She’s saying she won’t leave without her crown.”

“She’ll have to wait,” said the Armourer. “We have an emergency on our hands, Eddie, and I mean a first-class, fire-in-the-hole, circle-the-wagons-and-call-in-the-reserves type emergency. Kick her out, and get your arse down here to the War Room.”

His face disappeared from the mirror, and I shut it down. I looked at Ammonia. She was opening her mouth to say something I knew I didn’t want to hear it, so I shook the Merlin Glass out to full size, locked it onto her house in Cornwall, grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and tossed her through. Some days you don’t have the time to be diplomatic. Ammonia spun round and glared back at me through the Glass, sputtering with rage and offended dignity.

“I want my crown!”

“We’ll mail it to you when it’s ready,” I said.

“You can’t just throw me out! I know things you need to know!”

“Thank you,” I said quickly. “Good-bye; write if you get work.”

“We’ll meet again! I’ve seen it!”

“Don’t you threaten me,” I said, and shut down the Merlin Glass.

I never like working with psychics. The trouble with telepaths is that they always want to tell you what’s going on in other people’s minds, and it’s nearly always things you’re better off not knowing. I certainly wouldn’t want anyone else knowing what was going on in my mind most of the time. Especially if it involved Helen Mirren in her prime. I looked at the Glass and frowned. Why did the Armourer want me to join him in the War Room? He never went there. In fact, I was a bit surprised he was able to find it without a sat nav. Must be a real emergency, after all. I opened up the Merlin Glass and stepped through into the Drood family War Room.

All hell seemed to have broken loose, accompanied by every manner of siren, alarm, ringing bells and flashing lights. People were running back and forth like someone had just announced the Second Coming and we’d forgotten to book our seats. Men and women at their workstations were yelling into comm mikes, or bent over their computers, and none of them looked at all happy at the answers they were getting. I spotted the Armourer, turning dazedly from one display screen to another and looking very out of place in his stained lab coat. I put the Glass away and moved over to tap him firmly on the shoulder. He almost jumped out of his skin, and when he turned to face me he looked drawn and tired, even shocked, like someone had hit him.

“What’s happened, Uncle Jack?” I said. “What’s the big emergency? And why didn’t you tell me something bad was happening until it got this out of control?”

“If I took the time to tell you everything I know that you don’t, we’d never get anything done,” snapped the Armourer, regaining some of his composure. “This is bad, Eddie, really bad. Very nasty, all-handsto-the-pump kind of bad. The Satanist conspiracy has made its first moves. One indirect but troubling, and one very direct and downright scary.”

“Never a moment’s peace,” I said resignedly. “And the pay’s lousy. I’ll bet the Satanists offer their people really wicked fringe benefits.”

“Will you listen, Eddie! We’ve lost an entire town! The whole population’s . . . gone!”

“You have my undivided attention,” I said. “How can the Satanists have taken out an entire town?”

The Armourer shook his head slowly, seemingly lost for words. Which wasn’t like him. “The family psychics all went crazy some twenty minutes ago. All of them saying Something Bad had happened. And then the details started coming in. . . . Hold on. Hold on a minute while I check something.”

And he was off, moving swiftly along the workstations, his gaze jumping from one monitor screen to another. I took the time to look around me. The War Room had never seemed this busy, not even when we were fighting the Loathly Ones in their nests during the Hungry Gods War.

The family War Room is a vast auditorium carved out of the solid stone under the north wing of Drood Hall. Normally you have to pass through a heavily reinforced steel door, a retina scan and a very thorough frisking before you’re even allowed to descend the old stone stairs that lead down to the vault. Which are in turn guarded by a whole bunch of cloned goblins noted for their utterly vile natures and a complete lack in the sense-of-humour department. The Merlin Glass had allowed me to bypass all that nonsense, which is one of the reasons the rest of the family keeps trying to take it away from me. They think it makes me too powerful. They are, of course, absolutely right. Which is one of the reasons I have no intention of ever giving it up.

All four walls of the War Room, tall and broad as they are, are covered with state-of-the-art display screens showing every country in the world, including a few that aren’t supposed to exist, but unfortunately do. All of them dotted with variously coloured lights to indicate trouble spots, ongoing missions, certain individuals on the family’s “of interest” list, and the current locations of every Drood field agent, active or not. The War Room was currently packed to bursting with family members of every rank and station, crowding round the workstations, darting back and forth with urgent messages, and shouting at one another with a complete lack of professional calm and composure. Much of the activity and commotion seemed to be gathered around the communication systems and the far-seeing stations. The family has raised remote viewing to something of an art form, using every kind of high tech and old magic the Armourer and his staff could come up with; but I’d never seen it reduce the War Room to such sheer chaos before. A chill ran down my spine. To panic the family this thoroughly, the emergency had to be something really special.

As I looked around I realised the Armourer wasn’t the only familiar face in the War Room. Cousin Harry was there, bent over a comm screen and peering intently through his wire-rimmed spectacles. He was discussing the situation with the Sarjeant-at-Arms, who was only half listening as he leafed through a thick handful of urgent memos, more of which were constantly being handed him by hurrying messengers. Both of them were so focussed on the situation they’d apparently forgotten how much they hated having to work together. And the head of the War Room, Callan Drood, stood at the conference table, reading through one important report after another and barking out a series of orders. And yet for all the deafening noise and hurried motion, there was a sense that things were being done. The family trained hard for emergencies, so that everyone would know what to do when the time came. Except me. I still hadn’t a clue what I was doing there. And then Molly emerged from the crowd and hurried over to join me. She gave me a quick hug to show all was forgiven, if not actually forgotten, and then she stepped back to look at me with real concern in her face.

“Tell me later,” she said. “Tell me everything later. Because you need to concentrate on what’s happening right now.”

“What is happening?” I said plaintively. “Why is everyone running around like their backsides are on fire?”

“The Satanist conspirators have launched their campaign,” said Molly. “Come with me; I’ll get you to Callan, and he can bring you up-to-date.”

She took me by the arm and led me to the conference table by the quickest route, which basically involved intimidating everyone else into getting out of our way. Molly’s always been very good at that. Callan looked up as I arrived and actually seemed glad to see me. Which wasn’t like him. He gestured sharply for his people to stand back and give us some room, and beckoned for me to stand next to him, so we wouldn’t have to shout to be heard over the general bedlam.

“It all started half an hour ago,” he said flatly. Came out of bloody nowhere. The comm stations began picking up television broadcasts from every country in the world. Government leaders, individual leaders, religious leaders . . . all preempting television time to make a special announcement. Often during prime time, which doesn’t come cheap. You can look at the recordings later, if you want, but they’re all singing the same tune: all of them talking a lot, but not actually saying much. Talking about the great future that’s coming for everyone, and not the usual pie-in-the-sky stuff. They’re talking about good times for all by the end of this year . . . as a direct result of the Great Sacrifice that the people of every country are going to make. No details as yet, not even a hint as to who or what is going to have to be sacrificed. Perhaps the conspiracy hasn’t told the leaders yet.

“Anyway, all the speeches sounded remarkably similar, once we’d translated them from the original languages. Almost as though they’d been written by the same person. And for all we know, they were. . . . You have to understand, Eddie; this is unprecedented. This kind of agreement and cooperation, from every country in the world, regardless of politics or religion . . . simply doesn’t happen. Even we couldn’t arrange something like this without years of planning, a hell of a budget and a whole lot of assassination threats. . . . It’s hard to believe the conspiracy could have this much influence over so many important people. . . . Hell, we didn’t even know the conspiracy existed this time last year. All right, we’ve been a bit busy, what with the Hungry Gods and the bloody Immortals, but even so . . . Could these bastards really have this much control over so many different kinds of government? I’d like to think most of them don’t actually know who and what they’re dealing with, but these are politicians we’re talking about, after all. . . . I have to wonder if it would make any difference if they did. . . . You should never have let them out from under our control, Eddie! The world was a lot safer when we still had our boot on their necks!”

“Except for when we didn’t,” I said. “Two world wars and an endless cold war; I don’t call that being in control. I have to believe that some good will come from giving Humanity their freedom. Or what’s the point of going on?”

“No one was at all clear about what this Great Sacrifice might involve,” said Molly, tactfully easing us onto a new subject. “Either their leaders think their people aren’t ready to be told yet, or their new lords and masters haven’t told them yet.”

“When we lost control of the world’s politicians, it was inevitable that someone would move in to take our place,” murmured Harry, casually joining us at the conference table. “So you could say this is all your fault, Eddie.”

“That’s what you say, Harry,” I said. “But then, that’s what you always say, isn’t it? Learn a new tune; that one’s getting old. Now, I can see this is all distinctly worrying, but why was I called here in such a rush? What’s the emergency?”

“I’m sure we could have coped without your help,” said Harry. “But . . . something else has happened. It would appear that a small country town in the southwest of England has been attacked by the Satanist conspiracy.”

“It could be the first part of their Great Sacrifice,” said Callan. “The news isn’t officially out yet. British authorities have slapped a D Notice on the whole affair. On the grounds of national security. Though God knows how long that will last in this electronic day and age . . .”

“But what’s happened, exactly?” I said. “What have the Satanists done?”

“The town of Little Stoke has vanished,” said Harry. “The whole population is just . . . gone.”

“It all happened so quickly,” said Molly. “I was killing some time down here, waiting for you. . . .”

“And pestering the life out of me,” said Callan.

“Shut up, Callan,” said Molly. “It must have happened pretty much instantaneously. Not a word of warning or a cry for help. There was this . . . massive energy surge that set off every alarm in the War Room, and by the time we’d zeroed in on the exact location, it was all over. There have been no communications in or out of where Little Stoke used to be, ever since.”

“We knew about it before the authorities,” said Harry. “But then, we’re Droods. We know everything. That’s our job.”

“Don’t you have a job you should be doing?” Callan said pointedly. “This is my War Room; I’ll do the briefings. Make yourself useful. Get me some tea. Milk, two sugars.”

Harry drifted away from the conference table as though he’d remembered somewhere he’d meant to be. Callan glared after him.

“And some Jaffa Cakes!” He sniffed loudly and turned his attention back to me. “Irritating little tit. Thinks he’s such a big deal because his dad was your uncle James. I could put together a brigade of the Grey Fox’s various bastards. . . . Anyway, as soon as we were sure something bad really had happened, we hacked into a CIA satellite orbiting over the area, and this is what we got. . . .”

He pushed his way through a crowd of messengers shifting impatiently from foot to foot with important-looking messages in their hands, opening up a path by sheer angry presence, and stopped before one particular display screen locked onto a set of coordinates in southwest England. Callan gestured angrily at the screen.

“See that black spot, that circle of impenetrable darkness exactly five miles in diameter . . . ? That’s where the small town of Little Stoke used to be. No light gets in or out, no communications in or out. Just . . . that.”

“What is it?” I said. “Oh, hell, it’s not a black hole, is it?”

“Of course it’s not a black hole!” snapped Callan. “Or the sheer gravitational pull would have sucked the whole country in by now. Am I the only one who paid attention during science lessons?”

“Probably,” I said. “You always were a science geek.”

“Science geeks are in!” Callan said defiantly. “Look at all those CSI television shows. Geek chic!”

“Boys, boys,” murmured Molly. “If we could concentrate on the matter at hand . . .”

“Ah . . . yes,” said Callan. “Little Stoke. Population under eight thousand. Nothing important or significant about any of them, as far as we can tell. Even the local history is particularly dull. But after the energy surge that caught our attention, and before the darkness set in . . . the entire population of Little Stoke vanished. Eight thousand men, women and children . . . all gone in a moment. The town buildings are still there, under the darkness. Don’t ask me how.”

“Look at the location,” I said. “Little Stoke is only up the road from the far more important and significant town of Bradford-on-Avon. Could the Satanists have been after that, and . . . missed?”

“I don’t think so,” said Callan. “Even they wouldn’t have the stones to attack that town. Not given who lives there.”

“I’ve been there,” Molly said brightly. “They do a lovely cream tea. . . .”

“Really?” said Callan. “How very nice. Now shut up; grown-ups are talking. No, Eddie, Little Stoke was quite definitely the target. The black circle covers the town’s boundaries exactly. What lies there now . . . is a little bit of Hell on Earth.”

I gave him a hard look. “How can you be so sure about what’s going on underneath all that darkness?”

Callan gave me a pitying look. “We’re not dependent on other people’s spy satellites; we’ve got the best far-seers in the business working right here in this room. They’ve been keeping an eye on everything that’s happened through their scrying pools and crystal balls. Come with me.”

He led Molly and me into the heart of the communications section. A harried-looking young man stood in Callan’s way and refused to move.

“We’ve been monitoring world communications for mentions of what’s happened in Little Stoke,” he said urgently. “And after the first flurry of rumours it’s all gone very quiet. No one’s talking about it, because word’s come down from on high that they’re not to talk about it. And there’s no sign at all that the British authorities are intending to do anything.”

“Well, that’s why we’re here,” I said. “Keep listening.”

We moved on, into the far-seeing section. The Armourer was there, building something complicated from the disassembled scraps of several important-looking machines. He nodded brusquely to us, intent on his work.

“They say modern technology won’t mix with traditional magics. I say they will, if you bang them together hard enough. Give me time, and I’ll give you something that will show you everything that’s happening inside that darkness. In high definition, with surround sound.”

Callan ignored him, peering over the shoulder of a fey young woman who was staring intently into her scrying pool, or magic mirror: an impossibly flat extrusion of compressed silver ectoplasm spread out on the bench before her. Images came and went in the pool too quickly for me to follow.

“You need the gift to be able to See the world through a magic mirror,” said Callan. “I specialised in far-seeing before I became a field agent. . . . Still got my crystal ball somewhere . . . Ah. Yes! There . . . Focus, Amelia, focus. . . .”

He squeezed the shoulder of the far-seer, adding his strength to hers, and they both concentrated. Just like that, I could See what they Saw in the scrying pool. A street, a perfectly normal small-town street. The buildings were all intact, though there were no people anywhere. But there was something subtly wrong about the image. It took me a moment to realise that the scene was too still, too sharp, too perfect.

“This is a cover image,” said Callan. “Meant to deflect anyone who did get a look in. It’s not safe to look underneath, not yet. We found that out the hard way. All the people are quite definitely gone . . . snatched away in a moment, kidnapped by unknown forces. But more than that, the whole area inside the town has been . . . changed. Horribly altered. Outside the five-mile radius of the dark circle, everything remains normal, as it should be. The world goes on, untouched, unaffected. But inside Little Stoke . . . We’ve had to put in a whole series of filters and safeguards to protect the far-seers. When they first broke through the circle and got a good look at what was happening, we lost nine good men and women almost immediately. They went mad from what they saw. But . . . I think we’re ready to try again, yes?”

The young woman, Amelia, nodded stiffly. The Armourer looked up sharply.

“I wouldn’t, Callan! Wait till I’m finished here, and I can give you some real protection. . . .”

“We don’t have time!” snapped Callan. “Go for it, Amelia.”

He beckoned forward a dozen other far-seers who’d been waiting nearby, and they all crowded in around Amelia. Linked together, that many far-seers should be able to See through anything. We’ve always had the best remote viewers in the world. The problem’s been to keep them out of the bedrooms of the rich and famous. They leaned in together, shoulder-to-shoulder, peering intently into the scrying pool. And then Amelia’s head exploded. Her skull shattered, blown outwards as though someone had buried a grenade inside her brain. Bone fragments and spatters of pink and grey meat shot across the scrying pool, and her headless body slumped forward, spouting blood in thick jets. Two more far-seers screamed shrilly as their eyes exploded, splashing the others with thick, viscous, bloody fluids. Another far-seer reached up and tore his own eyes out so he wouldn’t have to See what he was Seeing. Two more spontaneously combusted, burning fiercely with thick yellow sulphurous flames. They didn’t move; just stood where they were, burning right down to the bone. Another far-seer started laughing and couldn’t stop.

“Shut down the far-seers!” shouted the Sarjeant-at-Arms, running forward. “I told you to shut down the whole section!”

“Armour up!” Ethel’s voice said suddenly, out of nowhere. “Everyone armour up! My strange matter will protect you!”

We all put our armour on, and the whole War Room was full of gleaming golden figures. The golden man who had been the Sarjeant-at-Arms moved forward, pushing others out of his way, and smashed the scrying pool with one armoured fist. The silver ectoplasm lost coherence immediately and ran away down the legs of the workstation. We all waited a moment, but nothing else happened. The Sarjeant grabbed up a fire extinguisher and put out the two burning far-seers. Their charred and blackened bodies just stood there. Callan gestured for some of his people to come and take them away and escort the surviving far-seers out of the War Room to the nearest hospital ward. The Sarjeant-at-Arms glared around him.

“All right, everyone armour down! The danger’s over. But stay cautious! Callan, you and Eddie stay in your armour, with me. You’re always boasting about your old scrying skills, Callan; use that magic mirror on the next bench, and See what you can See.”

Callan nodded stiffly, and then glanced at Molly. “You’d better stay back. You won’t have armour to protect you.”

“Please,” said Molly. “Remember whom you’re talking to.”

“Ah. Yes . . . quite,” said Callan. “On your own head be it.” He nodded to the Sarjeant and me. “Let’s do this.”

He moved over to the next bench, still covered with its shimmering screen. The Sarjeant and I moved in on either side of him, and Molly leaned in. At first all I could see was a dark bloodred light, shining from some new and terrible kind of sun. The town buildings stood as they always had, but the air in the streets shook and trembled like some unearthly heat wave. There were great cracks and rents the whole length of the road, as though earthquakes had torn through the underlying strata. As I watched, some of the rents slammed back together again, and then reappeared, like doors opening and closing. Waiting for something to come through them. And there was something wrong about the buildings. In slow and subtle ways they seemed to slump, to seep, to fall in on themselves, as though they couldn’t quite be bothered to keep up the facade of normality. Some of the shop signs were misspelt, or garbled, or just plain gibberish. Or perhaps words from unknown languages. Doors and windows were set in the wrong places, or in the wrong proportions, or tilted at crazy angles. As though the madness in this place were infecting the very structure of the buildings.

“Have you ever seen anything like this?” I said quietly to Molly.

“Not on this earth,” she said.

I looked to Callan, and he shrugged uneasily. “We’re getting some information as to what’s happening inside the dark circle, but there’s no telling how dependable the readings are. . . . The very building blocks of reality have been compromised. No linear time, no cause and effect, everything changing for no purpose, from moment to moment. . . .”

“The Satanists have blown apart the very rules that hold everything together,” said Molly. “Dropped a whole town into chaos. That’s some bomb. . . .”

“We can’t be sure they’re behind this,” said Callan. “Not yet. More important, we haven’t a clue how they did this. That’s why I called in the Armourer.”

He looked hopefully at my uncle Jack, but the Armourer shrugged without looking up from whatever he was working on.

“Would even Drood armour be enough to protect me in such an environment?” I asked him.

Molly looked at me sharply. “You’re not thinking of going in there, are you?”

“There could be survivors,” I said. “People trapped in there. What do you think, Ethel? It’s your armour.”

“I don’t know!” Ethel’s voice sounded definitely troubled, issuing from somewhere above us. “It ought to, but this is all new to me. I can’t see inside the dark circle, but from what you’re seeing . . . I’ve never encountered such extreme conditions before; and I’ve been around. But I designed your armour to survive whatever your reality could throw at it. And since strange matter comes from my domain, not yours . . . Roll the dice, and see what happens! I can’t wait to find out!”

“Sometimes her endless enthusiasm can get a bit creepy,” murmured Molly.

“I heard that!”

“Somebody’s got to go in there,” said the Sarjeant-at-Arms, moving forward to glare at the images on the screen. “We have to figure out how this was done, before the conspiracy does it somewhere else. Next time they might go for a city. And yes, Edwin, we do need to check for possible survivors as well.”

“You’re all heart, Cedric,” I said.

“But . . . why pick a nowhere place like Little Stoke?” said Callan.

“To test their new weapon,” said the Armourer, looking up from doing something unnatural with a bunch of silicon chips and some mistletoe.

“Then why remove the people before they unleash the weapon?” said Molly.

“Maybe they want them for test subjects for other weapons,” said the Sarjeant.

“I don’t like the way we’re playing catch-up with the conspiracy,” I said. “Always one step behind. I say we storm Lightbringer House in force, use every field agent available. Smash through their defences, grab everyone there and ask them a whole bunch of really pointed questions.”

“Way ahead of you, as always.” The Sarjeant-at-Arms sniffed. “We sent our people in while you and the Armourer were off playing tourist at the Supernatural Arms Faire. But the Satanist conspiracy people were all long gone. Their files with them. And no, they didn’t leave a forwarding address. They stripped the place clean and vanished into the undergrowth the moment you and the Metcalf sisters left the premises. Some of our best people are currently tearing the whole building apart, in case they missed something, but right now there’s no sign anyone was ever there.”

“Hold it,” I said. “No booby traps?”

“They left in a really big hurry,” said the Sarjeant.

“Something must have frightened them,” Molly said artlessly. “But then, Iz and I always did believe in making an impression.”

“I’m surprised they didn’t leave skid marks,” I said solemnly.

“Try to be serious, Edwin,” said the Sarjeant. “This is a serious situation.”

“I know,” I said. “Someone has to go into Little Stoke and see if anyone survived.”

“Of course,” said the Sarjeant. “I’m sure survivors could provide us with valuable information as to what happened.”

“No,” I said flatly. “We go in and rescue them, because that’s what Droods do. We exist to stand between the innocents and the horrors of the hidden world.”

“Ah, Eddie,” said Harry, drifting over to join us. “Always intent on the small things, and missing out on the big picture. Anyone who got left behind in that town wouldn’t survive long under those conditions. It’s already too late for them. Which means we need to concentrate all our resources on working out how this appalling attack was orchestrated. Here’s your tea, Callan. They were all out of Jaffa Cakes.”

Callan accepted his tea with bad grace and sipped at it suspiciously before grudgingly nodding approval. “Always said you’d make a good tea boy, Harry.” And then he looked round sharply as a far-seer farther down the row called out to him urgently. We all hurried down to join the young man at his station, and he goggled for a moment, overwhelmed at having so many important members of the family all staring at him at once. But give the man credit; he recovered quickly and nodded jerkily at the monitor screen before him.

“Virgil Drood, at your service. Don’t blame the messenger. I picked this up off the feed we’re intercepting from the CIA satellite. What you’re looking at is a hill outside the dark circle. Conditions there are completely unaffected by . . . whatever’s happened in the town. It seems we have observers, just teleported in. Ten men, three women, some of them . . . familiar faces.”

We all crowded in around him, studying the screen. Thirteen people were standing on top of a grassy green hill overlooking what had been Little Stoke, chatting cheerfully among themselves. It was only a visual image—no sound. One of the men was Alexandre Dusk, leader of the Lightbringer House Satanists. And standing right next to him was Roger Morningstar, son of the legendary James Drood and a lust demon out of Hell. The half-breed hellspawn who fought alongside the Droods because he’d fallen in love with one of us. And now there he was, standing quite chummily with Dusk, nodding and smiling as they looked down on the dark circle below. They both seemed quite pleased with what they’d done. Harry turned to Callan.

“We need sound. We need to hear what they’re saying.”

“I’m sorry,” said Virgil. “We’re lucky to have visual under these conditions. Getting sound is going to take some time.”

“Then get a lip-reader in here! We must have one somewhere. We need to know what they’re saying!”

Alexandre Dusk looked round suddenly, and seemed to stare right out of the screen at us. I don’t think he could See us, but he knew someone could See him. He smiled a wintry smile, snapped his fingers, and the image disappeared from the screen. Virgil worked his controls fiercely and then sat heavily back in his chair with frustration.

“We’ve lost the feed.”

“Then get it back!” said Harry.

“You don’t understand! The feed is gone because the satellite is gone. It isn’t there anymore. Something blasted it right out of orbit. And according to my readings, the observers are gone, too. I suppose it’s too much to hope that they might have blown up, too.”

He tried an uncertain smile on us, but none of us was in the mood for even the slightest of jokes. We all looked at one another, and then we looked at Harry, who’d moved away a little to be on his own. He was rubbing his chin with jerky, shocked movements, thinking hard.

“I didn’t even know Roger had left the Hall,” he said almost plaintively. “He didn’t tell me he was going anywhere. Ethel, when did Roger Morningstar leave Drood Hall?”

“Right after the last council meeting, when you were all together,” said Ethel. “He left on his own, through a dimensional door he created on the grounds.”

“Didn’t you ask him where he was going?” said Harry.

“Not my place,” said Ethel. “You people do so value your privacy, even if I still don’t understand why.”

“Once a hellspawn, always a hellspawn,” the Sarjeant-at-Arms said heavily. “I did warn you, Harry. Everyone warned you. Never trust a hellspawn.”

“Roger’s been . . . different ever since he returned from Hell,” said Harry. “The trip you insisted he go on! Maybe they did something to him there. . . .”

“The question is,” said the Sarjeant, talking right over Harry as he addressed the rest of us, “how long has the hellspawn been working against us? How long has he been conspiring with our enemies, passing on secret information, including details of our missions?”

“No need to rub it in, Sarjeant,” I said.

“He was present at council meetings!” said the Sarjeant. “Because of you, Harry! Think of all the things he knows about this family! I’ll have to reset all the security measures, change all the codes and passwords, beef up our defences . . . and recheck every piece of information acquired from every mission he was involved with!”

“He fought alongside us against the Hungry Gods, and the Accelerated Men, and the Immortals!” said Harry. “He risked his life to fight in our cause, because of me! There must be a reason for this. . . . I have to go to Little Stoke.”

And then he stopped and couldn’t say any more. His face had gone pale and sweaty, and his hands were shaking. I knew why. We all did. He was remembering his time in the ghoulvilles, towns taken over by the Loathly Ones and removed into a separate reality. Terrible places. Sanity destroying. Soul destroying. We all knew Harry had been affected by what he’d seen there, what he’d had to do there. None of us said anything. A lot of Droods came back spiritually wounded from fighting in the ghoulvilles. Those who did come back.

“Roger’s not there anymore,” I said, carefully. “You heard Virgil; he and the others teleported out.”

“I have to know,” said Harry. “I have to be sure. I need to talk to him. . . .”

“Of course you do,” I said. “But there’ll be another time. I have to go into Little Stoke. You have to stay here. You’re needed in the War Room to help Callan and the Armourer work out how this was done. And there’s always the chance Roger might return here to the Hall. You need to be here for that.”

“Why would Roger come back?” said Callan, to show he was keeping up with the rest of us.

“Because Dusk doesn’t know who was watching him on the hilltop,” said the Sarjeant. “The hellspawn doesn’t know that we know he’s a traitor.”

“We don’t know that!” said Harry. “And Roger would know who was watching him. He’s always been very . . . gifted. He won’t come back here because he’d know I’d be waiting for him. I wouldn’t shoot him on sight, and I wouldn’t let anyone else do it. I’d want to talk to him. Hear his side. But if he really has joined the conspiracy . . . he hasn’t betrayed just me; he’s betrayed my family. His family, as much as mine.”

“No one would expect you to go up against Roger,” I said.

“I would,” said Harry. “If he has turned traitor . . . I will kill him. Anything for the family.”

Hell hath no fury like a lover scorned, I thought, but had enough sense not to say out loud.

“I’m going to Little Stoke,” I said. Because it needed doing, and because I knew a trip into that disturbed place would destroy Harry. So, tired as I was after the arms fair and Ammonia Vom Acht, it was all down to me. Again.

“You are not going in on your own,” Molly said firmly. “I’m going with you.”

“Not a good idea . . .” I said carefully.

“You never take me anywhere,” Molly said cheerfully. “You wouldn’t last ten minutes in that place without me to watch your back, and you know it.”

“We do have other field agents in the family,” said the Sarjeant. “You don’t have to do this, Edwin.”

“I’m the only field agent who’s right here, right now, with experience operating inside ghoulvilles,” I said. “Who else is there?”

The Sarjeant-at-Arms looked at Callan, who shrugged uncomfortably. “We have five field agents currently operating in England, but none of them could get back to the Hall inside three or four hours.”

“And even then, you’d still have to wait for the Armourer to find a way into the dark circle,” I said. “Whereas I . . . have the Merlin Glass.”

“Hold hard,” said the Armourer, looking up from his work. “There’s always the chance that if you use the Glass to open a door between here and there, what’s inside the town might burst through into Drood Hall!”

“I would never let that happen,” said Ethel, a touch haughtily. “I guarantee the integrity of Drood Hall against any and all threats. Trust me. I’m a doctor.”

“I still think you should rest, Eddie,” said the Armourer. “Let me design something to protect you, give you an edge. . . .”

“There isn’t time, Uncle Jack,” I said. “We have to sort this mess out before it starts spreading.”

“You’re right,” said the Armourer. “Get us all the information you can. And, Molly, don’t let him do anything too dumb in there.”

“Damn right,” said Molly.

“I don’t have anything useful to offer you,” said the Armourer. “And this bloody thing is taking a lot longer than I thought it would. . . . Remember your armour is equipped to study your surroundings and record everything it encounters. Knowledge can be ammunition in a situation like this. So bring back as much data as you can.”

I looked at him for a moment. “Do you have anything, any weapon that could do what the Satanists did in Little Stoke?”

“No,” said the Armourer. “Not a damned thing. Not even in the Armageddon Codex. What has been done in that town is a crime against reality itself.”

“How long before you could come up with some kind of defence?” said the Sarjeant.

“Depends on what kind of information Eddie brings back,” said the Armourer. “So let’s stop wasting his time with unnecessary chatter. Eddie, go.”

“Got it, Uncle Jack,” I said. But I still hesitated and looked at Molly. “You’ve seen what’s happening in the town. There’s no guarantee that Drood armour will be enough to protect me. And you don’t even have that.”

“I have been to Heaven and Hell and Limbo,” said Molly. “And a whole bunch of other really extreme places not even dreamt of in your limited philosophies. I can survive this.”

“Of course you can,” I said. “I’d bet on you against the whole damned universe.”

“You say the sweetest things sometimes,” said Molly.

I activated the Merlin Glass and opened up a doorway into what remained of Little Stoke, while everyone else retreated to what they hoped was a safe distance. A lot of people hid behind things. Like that would make any difference. A series of violent images swept across the full-size Glass, flashing by so fast I couldn’t keep up with them. Stars and flames and blindingly bright lights; dark, monstrous shapes rearing up to look in my direction; the whole physical world grown hideously soft and leprous; all of it under a sky the colour of dried blood. I looked away for a moment, to rest my eyes, and found Harry hadn’t retreated with the others.

“You don’t have to do this, Eddie.”

“Yes, I do, Harry,” I said. “It’s the job.”

He nodded briefly. I turned to Molly, who was peering into the Merlin Glass, fascinated.

“You ready, girl?”

“I came out of the womb ready.”

“I can believe that. Probably demanding a stiff drink and a harsh word with the midwife. Let’s do this, before one of us gets a rush of common sense to the head.”

“When has that ever happened?”

We laughed briefly, I armoured up and we both stepped through the Merlin Glass. Out of the sane and sensible world into a place where reality had been broken. With malice aforethought, the bastards.

Stepping into what was left of Little Stoke was like being clubbed around the head with a baseball bat soaked in LSD. Everything was wrong, different, corrupted . . . and constantly changing. The ground surged and rocked under my feet, rising and falling like a ship at sea. I glared about me, but it was hard to see anything clearly through the disturbed air. My armour was doing its best to protect and insulate me from my surroundings, swiftly adapting to cope with this new, ever-changing world. I could actually feel my armour straining as it thickened and improved itself, moment by moment. My second skin was under constant assault from a world that hated it.

Gravity came and went, fluctuating wildly, so that I felt light as air one moment, and as though I had a mountain on my back the next. Nothing was constant or dependable. Except my armour. It pushed back at the world, refusing to be affected or altered in any part, and I stood straight and tall under a bloody sky, safe and solid and untouched by anything Little Stoke could throw at me.

I looked around for Molly and found she was standing right beside me, but now floating quite happily in midair. She stood on nothing, defying the uncertain ground, surrounded by a shimmering field of unnatural forces. She looked down at me and I nodded briefly. She gave me a thumbs-up, and I went back to studying the surroundings. It was hard to get a hold on anything. Whichever way I looked, nothing made sense. Directions seemed to snap back and forth, so that left and right changed places or swirled around, and even up and down weren’t always where I thought they should be. Little Stoke did remind me of a ghoulville, as I’d expected; but this town was worse, much worse. Someone had studied ghoulvilles, and learned from them, improved on them. The sheer psychic pressure of not being able to depend on anything was almost overwhelming. All I could feel was loss, and horror, and growing hysteria. My sanity was taking a real beating. Part of me wanted to fall to the ground, curl up in a foetal ball and pray for it all to go away. But I couldn’t do that. I was a Drood, and I had a job to do.

I looked up. “Molly, is this Hell?”

“Not even close,” she said flatly. “Hell is worse. This is chaos. Hell has purpose.”

“You’d know,” I said. “Hello, War Room? Hello? Callan? Edith? Can anyone hear me? Anyone?”

“Well?” said Molly, after a moment.

“Apparently not,” I said. “I’m reaching out through my armour, but no one’s answering. We’re on our own, Molly.”

“Best way,” she said briskly. “We know what we’re doing.”

“Since when?”

“Hush, lover; think positive. Okay, this is a seriously nasty place. I’m not sure we’re even on Earth anymore.”

“Technically, I suppose we’re not,” I said. “Local conditions have been . . . rewritten.”

“I’m not picking up any traces of major magical workings,” said Molly. “You couldn’t do something this big without leaving serious handprints all over everything.”

I remembered the Armourer’s advice, and had my armour probe and investigate my immediate surroundings. I concentrated in a certain way, and the armour’s findings appeared on the inside of my mask, floating before my eyes. All kinds of readings and graphs and scales, half of which meant nothing to me. My uncle Jack is the scientist. It’s all I can do to program my TiVo. But . . .

“No radiation,” I said to Molly. “No toxins, none of the usual dangerous energies . . . Everything else . . . doesn’t make sense. I’ve never encountered anything quite like this.”

“Your armour is smoking,” said Molly.

“What?”

“Smoking! There’s steam or something boiling right off your armour. Is everything all right inside there?”

I felt fine. I felt great. I felt sharp and strong and totally alive, as I always did when wearing my armour. It was all that was keeping me sane. I looked down at myself, and sure enough thick curls of smoke were rising up off my golden torso and arms.

“I think my armour is reacting to the new environment,” I said to Molly. “Or possibly . . . the other way round. The town is trying to break through my armour to get to me, and my armour is fighting it off. You could say there’s a war going on between the stability of the strange matter and the changing conditions of the town. And so far, my armour is kicking the town’s arse. I think strange matter is too weird even for here. I think . . . reality here is breaking up on contact with my armour. How cool is that? The one true thing in this crazy new world. Though how long it will last is anybody’s guess. I say we get this job done as quickly as possible, and then get the hell out of here.”

“Best idea you’ve had so far,” said Molly.

I looked up at her. “Are you okay inside that spangly bubble of yours?”

“This is a spiritual force shield,” Molly said firmly. “I am maintaining Earth-normal conditions around me by sheer effort of will. Anyone else would have the sense to be impressed.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t do impressed.”

“I know. It’s one of your better qualities.”

“How long can you maintain that bubble?”

“I think we should get moving. Right now.”

But still, something held me in place as I looked around me. “Why did the Satanists do this? What’s the point?”

“A demonstration, probably,” said Molly. “A show of power. ‘Look what we can do. We can smash reality. Break all the rules and let chaos thrive. Better not stand against us, or else . . .’ Standard Satanist bullying. This is as much a psychological weapon as anything else. They’re saying, ‘We can destroy everything you believe in and depend on.’ ”

I had my armour scan the town for life signs, for any traces of human survivors, but my armour’s sensors were overloaded and confused by the weird conditions. I was picking up life signs all over the place, but none of them made any sense. I said as much to Molly, and she nodded thoughtfully, concentrating. She pointed in one direction, hesitated, and then pointed in another.

“People. Definitely people. Unaffected, unharmed. I can See them in a safe place, shining like diamonds in the dark. Maybe . . . fifty of them. They’re protected by something I can’t quite get a handle on. I think perhaps they were overlooked, or left behind. . . .”

“Fifty people?” I said. “Out of a town of some eight thousand? Left behind, abandoned, trapped in this horror . . .” I could feel the anger building within me, cold and raging. “I will not stand for this. I won’t see innocent people treated like this! Lead the way, Molly. We are going to find these people, get them out of this bloody mess and take them home. . . . And when I find the bastards who did this to them, I will put the fear of God and Droods into them!”

Molly smiled fondly at me. “I think that’s what I like best about you, Eddie. You always get really angry about the right things.”

I nodded. I was too angry to speak.

Molly headed deeper into what remained of the small country town of Little Stoke. She strode along, her feet hammering on the disturbed air like the drumbeats of an approaching army. I followed her, trusting to her witchy Sight to guide us, even though every direction felt the same to me. It was hard to make progress in a place where streets had no beginning and no ending, as though the world moved under our feet and we stayed put. We walked down one street several times before we realised what was happening: that its far end was attached to its beginning, like an endless Möbius strip. I lost my patience and my temper and applied a lateral thinking solution to the problem by turning abruptly sideways and smashing my way through one of the buildings. Bricks broke and shattered stickily under my hammering golden fists, some of them cracking into moist fragments, like exploded fruit. I broke through the wall and strode through the house, bludgeoning my way through room after room, rubble raining down on my armoured shoulders, until finally I burst out the other side and into a new street. Molly followed close behind me. We set off down the street, one that had sense enough not to piss me off, and Molly quickly picked up the trail again.

I couldn’t trust anything I saw, even through all the filters and protections built into my golden mask. Not everything I saw was actually there, or acted the way it should act, and things became other things became things I had no name for. I kept slogging doggedly on after Molly, trusting her to guide me through the ever-shifting chaos, kept on slamming my heavy feet down, forcing my way through anything the town could send at me, fuelled by willpower and a stubborn refusal to be beaten. There were people depending on me.

Often it seemed to me that Molly was changing direction again and again, choosing ways that made no sense at all, going up and down and back and forth and not getting anywhere. But I trusted her, and I didn’t trust the world, so I kept going.

My armour was still smoking and steaming as the rotten world fought to get through the strange matter and get at me.

Cars parked in the street were now strangely alive: no longer metal, but made up of meat and bone and cartilage. Ghastly red striations of muscle all along their length, with eyes instead of lights and snapping fanged mouths where radiator grilles should have been. The tyres were pink and sweaty, like internal organs pushed out into the light. The cars made sounds like children crying as they lurched up and down the streets, attacking one another, tearing and rending, their glistening hides oozing sweat and blood and musk. One of the cars came right at us, howling like some jungle creature, and I stood my ground and let it crash into me. For all its speed and weight it slammed to a halt immediately, its fleshy hood crumpled against my armour, torn meat leaking blood and pus. It backed away, crying miserably, hawking up blood, and every other car fell on it and ate it alive. Molly and I kept going and didn’t look back.

Time couldn’t be trusted in this broken place any more than space. Linear time, cause and effect, past and present and future came and went, following strange new patterns and connections. Sometimes it seemed like I was leading Molly, or that we were already on the way back from wherever we were going, so that even talking became difficult.

“Still heading for the survivors,” said Molly.

“How should I know?” I said.

“I don’t think before means what it used to.”

“I’m sure we’ve been this way before.”

“Where are we going?”

“Is any of this making sense to you?”

“Are we nearly there yet?”

“I think time is out of joint.”

“What?” said Molly.

“What?” I said.

After that, Molly dropped down so that she drifted along only a few inches above the uncertain ground, and I held her hand firmly in mine. I could feel it even through my armour. With our hands held tight together, we couldn’t be separated.

Buildings seemed to crawl and seep and run away like slow liquids, surging out across the street like plastic tides. I fought my way through them, tearing horrid sticky substances apart with my armoured hands. Molly followed after me, one of her hands resting on my golden shoulder, until I had a hand free for her to take hold of again. Several buildings all melted away in a moment and surged along the street towards us like a creeping tidal wave, with bits of brick and broken window and shattered doors still protruding. I ran straight at the wave, golden fists clenched. I wouldn’t be slowed and I wouldn’t be stopped, not while people here still needed my help. Molly blasted the creeping wall with lightning bolts from her outstretched fingertips, and the tidal wave soaked them up. I hit the wave hard, smashing my way through by brute strength. The wave tried to cling to my armour, but couldn’t get a hold. I burst out the other side and kept going, while Molly rose majestically over the wave and then dropped gracefully down to join me again.

We both felt safer, saner, more real . . . when we could feel each other’s hand.

I had no idea how long we’d been in the town. Hours, days, years . . . It was like one of those dreams that seem to go on forever, one thing after another, until you know you’re dreaming and struggle to wake up, and can’t.

Sometimes the houses on either side of the road changed into things. Living things. Molly and I stuck to the middle of the road to avoid them. Brick and stone became plant and fungus, windows were eyes, and doors swung slowly open to reveal sweaty organic passageways, pulsing throats lined with teeth like rotating knives. Some of the changed houses roared like dinosaurs, or howled like souls newly damned to Hell. Some slumped together, becoming bigger, greater creatures, with alien shapes and impossible angles that hurt to look at with merely human eyes. They didn’t bother with Molly or me. They had their own unknowable concerns.

Bright lights went streaking up and down the street like living comets, shooting this way and that and bouncing off buildings, laughing shrilly. Low voices boomed deep under the ground, saying terrible things. The sky was red and purple, like clotting blood, and the sun was a dark cinder giving off unnatural light. Awful shapes came and went, monstrous things, big and small. Some of them walked through the shifting world as though only they were real and everything else mere phantoms. Molly and I gave them plenty of room. When the Satanist conspiracy broke reality in this place, they blasted doors open that had been closed for millennia. Things from Outside had found a way in; things that would still have to be tracked down and dealt with even after this particular mess had been cleaned up. The family would have to keep an eye on this area for centuries to come.

In one place we encountered things like mutated children, with insect eyes and bulging foreheads, scrabbling through the streets in packs. Naked, vicious, feral. I studied them carefully through my mask to be sure they weren’t in any way human and never had been. Molly wasn’t fooled for a moment. She threw fireballs at them, and they scuttled away, spitting and snarling at us. After them came horrid shapes made up of shimmering phosphorescence, as though burned onto the surface of the world. Passing through walls like smoke, leaving dark stains behind them on the brickwork. A great clump of bottle green maggots crusted around a huge alien eye sailed silently down one street, watching everything with a terrible malevolent joy. Great balloon shapes of rotting leather stalked the streets on long, spindly legs like stilts, slamming into one another endlessly, like stags in rut, trampling the fallen underfoot. And a storm wind full of razor blades swept down the street with vicious speed, the razors clattering harmlessly against my armour, and unable to pierce Molly’s shields.

I was starting to take such things for granted. You can’t be shocked and horrified and appalled all the time. It wears you out. So you become numb to the atrocities, untouched by the horror shows. Maybe that’s how you know when you’re going mad: when such sights no longer bother you. Madness is when all your nightmares have come true and you just don’t care anymore. I clung to Molly’s hand, and she held on to mine. As long as we still had each other and wouldn’t give up . . . the town hadn’t won.

Sometimes it seemed to me that I was someone else, a whole different person with a new purpose. And sometimes it seemed to me that Molly was someone else, someone I’d always known. There were times when we looked at each other and didn’t recognise the person looking back. Sometimes I walked alone, had come in alone, had always been alone in this awful place. And sometimes it seemed to Molly and to me that there was someone else with us. That there were three of us walking down the street together. He walked between us, his face always turned away, and I was afraid that if ever that face turned to look at me, I would see someone or something too horrible to bear.

But that didn’t last.

Whatever happened, the armour kept pulling me back to reality. The one truly solid thing in this place, it would not change and would not allow me to be changed. And Molly . . . was probably too stubborn to accept any reality other than her own for long. I don’t know if she experienced all the things I did. I didn’t ask.

Living cobwebs fell on us from above, crawling all over my armour, trying to hold me down and eat their way in. I pulled them off me in handfuls, crushing them in my hands and throwing them down to trample underfoot. My sanity was starting to get its second wind. Though I had to wonder what state the town’s survivors would be in when we finally got to them. The human mind was never meant to endure under conditions like these. The shattered reality of Little Stoke didn’t even have dream logic to hold it together. Being in the town now was like suffering an endless series of hammer blows to the mind. But Molly had said they were safe, protected for the moment, and I trusted Molly.

When there was nothing else left in the world to depend on, I would still trust my Molly.

Finally, despite everything the broken world could do to stop us, we came at last to the Old Market Hall. It was set right in the middle of the town, I was told afterwards, though such spatial references had become meaningless in Little Stoke. Molly and I had no trouble spotting the old hall; it was the only building that still looked like an ordinary, everyday building. It stood tall and proud, firm in all its details, inside a circle of normality: a sharply defined circle of normal conditions, surrounded by madness. The moment Molly and I crossed that boundary, it was as though a great spiritual weight had been lifted off us. I stopped and sighed heavily, stretching as luxuriously as any cat, enveloped in a palpable sense of pure relief. Molly laughed out loud and hugged me tightly. I hadn’t realised how much of a struggle it had been, how much strength it had taken to keep going and stay sane, until I didn’t have to fight any longer. My mind cleared in a moment, as though someone had thrown a bucket of ice-cold water in my mental face.

“I think this is the place,” said Molly.

“I think you’re right,” I said.

We both looked back the way we’d come, but the way we’d come wasn’t there anymore. The town had devolved into utter chaos, with nothing holding sure or certain even for a moment. We both shuddered at the thought of how long we’d spent fighting our way through madness. And then I drew a deep breath, and so did she, and we straightened our backs and held up our heads and marched right up to the Old Market Hall. The front door was wonderfully, reassuringly ordinary. I knocked politely, and we waited.

“There are quite definitely people in there,” Molly said quietly. “I can hear them. They sound like . . . people. That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

“It’s a bloody miracle in this place,” I said. I knocked again, a little louder. “Hello? People inside? We are people, too. We’re here to help.”

I could hear raised voices inside the old building, but the door remained closed. I was pretty sure I could kick it in if I had to, but that wouldn’t make the kind of first impression I was hoping for. So I moved away from the door and peered in through a window.

“A face! A golden face!”

“Don’t let it in! Monsters!”

“Don’t be silly; monsters wouldn’t bother to knock, would they?”

“He’s got a point.”

“Oh, you always agree with him! We can’t risk opening the door. We can’t risk letting the outside in!”

“We can’t hide in here forever, either!”

There was a long pause, and then I heard the sounds of heavy bolts being drawn back, and a lock turning. I moved back to stand beside Molly, and the moment the door opened we hurried forward into the old hall. The door immediately slammed shut behind us, and people busied themselves with the bolts again. The inside of the old building looked perfectly normal. The floor was solid wood that hadn’t had a decent waxing in quite a while; the walls were reassuringly straight and upright; and the high ceiling stayed where it was supposed to be. A perfectly ordinary, very human last resort. Packed full of people staring at Molly and me with wide eyes. They huddled together, looking very uncertain, as though they half expected Molly and me to turn into monsters at any moment. A lot of them didn’t look too happy at the sight of me in my armour. They knew nothing of Droods. Since the hall seemed such an ordinary place, I armoured down so everyone could see I was human. Molly dropped her force shield and beamed around her.

“The worst is over now,” she said to the crowd of survivors. “We’re here to get you out of this mess.”

They all cried out in relief or simple joy. Many hugged one another. Several came forward to shake me by the hand, smiling widely as my hand remained an ordinary, everyday hand. But a lot of them still looked shocked, hanging on by only their mental fingernails, not quite daring to believe the nightmare could finally be over. A spokesman came forward, a bluff, hearty type in a battered tweed suit. He smiled at Molly and me and shook our hands, the beginnings of hope in his eyes.

“I’m Geoffrey Earl, local vicar. Good to see you! Welcome to the Old Market Hall. You really are very welcome, oh, yes! We are the last survivors of . . . whatever it is that’s happened here.”

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Eddie Drood; this is Molly Metcalf; we’re the rescue party.”

“I wasn’t sure there’d be one,” said the vicar. “Do you know what’s happened here?”

“Tell us the truth! Are we in Hell?” said a large, red-faced woman who’d pushed her way to the front of the crowd. She looked like she’d been crying a lot.

“No,” Molly said immediately. “You’re all still in the land of the living. So to speak. What you see out there is . . . local conditions. Outside the town, everything is still as it should be. The world goes on as it always has. We were rather hoping you could tell us what happened here.”

The vicar shook his head. “It was just another day; we were in here planning the next harvest Sunday, and then . . . we heard this great sound outside, and when we went to the windows to look, we found the world had gone mad.”

“What kind of sound?” I said.

“A great scream,” said the vicar. “As though something had wounded the world. A few of us went outside to see what was going on; we saw what happened to them through the windows. None of us dared leave after that. We stuck close together. Praying. Waiting to be rescued. Hoping to be rescued . . . We were beginning to think we’d been forgotten. Can you tell us anything about what’s happened?”

“We believe this town was made the target of some appalling new weapon,” I said carefully. “Terrorists. We’re still working on the details. Do you have any idea why you survived, when so many didn’t? Why this building is . . . protected?”

“We believe it to be God’s will,” the vicar said steadily. “We all have faith in Him.”

Molly looked like she was about to say something unwise, so I quickly cut in. “As good an answer as any, I suppose.”

“Did you encounter any other . . . survivors, on your way here?” said the vicar, trying not to sound too hopeful.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re all that’s left.”

“Dear God,” said the red-faced woman. “Everyone’s gone? Everyone?”

“Hush, Margaret,” said the vicar. “Are you sure, Mr. Drood? There couldn’t be another refuge like this somewhere else?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I looked around the hall. “There’s some kind of protection operating here. . . .”

“And a pretty damned powerful one, at that,” said Molly.

“Don’t use such language here!” said Margaret. Molly looked at her, and Margaret faded back into the crowd. Molly looked slowly round the hall, and people gave way before her. She stopped abruptly, bent over and stared hard at the floor.

“Got it!” she said. “I can See it! There’s an object of power, really old and incredibly powerful, laid down under the floorboards. Eddie, we need to take a close look at it.”

“I really don’t think we should disturb it,” the vicar said quickly. “We are protected here; we can all feel it.”

“It’s got to be done,” I said. “We need to know what’s kept the madness out of here, in case this happens somewhere else.”

“Of course,” said the vicar. “I’m sorry. We’re all a bit . . . shellshocked. Do what you have to.”

The crowd started to mutter, and a few protested, so I put on my armour again, and they all went very quiet. I flexed my golden arms, and some of the crowd gasped, and said prayers, and even crossed themselves. I moved over to where Molly indicated, and then smashed a hole through the floorboards with one golden fist. The old wood cracked and splintered as my fist drove through, and my arm followed it down as far as the elbow. I yanked my hand back, and that part of the floor exploded outwards, leaving a jagged great hole. And there, lying revealed in the dark earth, was a single stone tablet, some four feet long by three. I armoured down and hauled it up into the light, and then laid it carefully on a nearby table. Molly was immediately there by my side, crowding in for a good look. The vicar moved diffidently in on my other side. The tablet was covered with long lines of writing in half a dozen languages, carved deep into the surface of the stone.

“Do something, Vicar!” said a familiar voice. “Make them put it back! You’re putting all our lives at risk!”

“Hush, Margaret!” said the vicar.

“I will not hush! I have a right to be heard!”

“We’re here to help,” I said.

“But who are you?” said Margaret, pushing her way to the front of the crowd again. She glared at me, and especially at Molly. “We don’t know you! You’re not from around here. And that metal suit of yours isn’t natural! You walked through Hell to get here, and expect us to believe that you emerged untouched? No. You’re part of the Devil’s work. You’re here to give us false hopes, and then steal our only protection!” She drew herself up and looked around her for support. “I say we take the stone back from them, and then throw them out, back into the Hell they came from!”

“Like to see you try,” said Molly.

“We can get you out of here,” I said, in my most reasonable voice. “Anyone else want to shove your only hope for an escape out the door, and hope someone else will turn up to rescue you?”

There was a bit of muttering, but that was all. Margaret realised she was on her own and shut up, still glaring daggers at Molly and me.

“We’ve all been under a lot of strain,” said the vicar.

“Understood,” I said. “Hang on a bit longer. It’s almost over.”

“Can we please concentrate on these writings?” said Molly. “Before the natives start getting restless again?”

There were dozens of lines of writing, still perfectly clear after who knew how many years buried in the earth. The stone itself could have been any age, but there was something about it that made the hairs on my neck stand up. Somehow I knew this stone was ancient. . . .

“Latin,” said Molly. “Greek, old but not classical, and I’m pretty sure that . . . is Aramaic.”

“That’s a very significant combination of languages,” I said. “Put them all together and they suggest Roman Britain. Some two thousand years ago.”

“Can you read any of this?” said Molly. “I can probably bluff my way through the Latin, but the rest . . .”

“This is another of those occasions when I really wish I’d paid more attention at school,” I said.

“So you can’t read it either,” said Molly. “Typical.”

“Perhaps I can help,” the vicar said diffidently. “It’s been a long time since I studied ancient languages at Cambridge, but . . .”

“Who said the age of miracles is over?” said Molly.

The vicar smiled at her. “Get us all out of here and I’ll look it up for you. Now, then . . . Yes. Yes. Most of this is pretty obscure, but one name stands out. Joseph of Arimathea. Well, bless me. . . .”

“‘And did those feet in ancient times . . .’” I murmured. “The man who was supposed to have brought Jesus to visit Britain, during his gap year. But why would he have placed such a powerful protection stone here? Did he know something bad would happen, in this place, eventually?”

“Maybe a certain other personage told him,” said Molly. “I think we’re treading on dangerous ground, Eddie. All that matters is that we now know how, if not necessarily why, this place is protected. But I am telling you, the power contained in this stone is not limitless. Maintaining normal conditions against the pressure from outside is using up a lot of power and draining the stone dry. If we don’t get these people out of here soon . . .”

“What?” said the vicar. “What will happen?”

“Absolutely nothing,” I said. “Because we are leaving right now.”

Something banged on the locked and bolted door. A loud, aggressive sound. The door shuddered in its frame, but the lock and the bolts held. Everyone stood still and silent, staring at the door.

“Nothing’s ever been able to get that close before,” the vicar said quietly.

Something went running back and forth up on the roof: something heavy, with too many legs. It ran up and down, never pausing, never stopping. Something hit the door again, hard. The light outside was changing, the normal daylight darkening as though suffused with blood. The survivors cried out and huddled together again as strange, distorted shapes peered in through the windows.

“The circle of normality is shrinking as the stone uses up its power,” said Molly.

“I told you not to let them disturb it!” shrieked Margaret, her voice thick with imminent hysteria.

“I don’t think the conspiracy knew about the stone,” I said quietly to Molly.

“Seems likely, if even your family didn’t know,” said Molly.

“Conspiracy?” said the vicar. “Your people? What is going on here? Exactly who are your people, Mr. Drood?”

“We’re the good guys,” I said briskly. “Now hush—there’s a good vicar; we’re talking. I think the stone is a rogue element, Molly. No one knew it was here, because it didn’t activate until it was needed. The conspiracy didn’t mean to leave any survivors behind. The stone hid these people from the chaos, and the conspiracy . . . overlooked them.”

“How are we going to get all these people out of here, Eddie?” said Molly. “I can’t generate a field big enough to protect everyone if we have to walk them all the way back to the town boundary. And I sure as hell can’t teleport this many people out. So what are we going to do?”

“When in doubt,” I said cheerfully, “cheat! Or improvise, with extreme prejudice. The Merlin Glass got us in; with the stone’s power to draw on, I don’t see why it shouldn’t get us all out.”

Molly looked at me, and then at the stone. “Genius. You’re a genius! Have I told you lately that you’re a genius, Eddie? But . . . punching a doorway through all that chaos, and keeping it open, is going to take one hell of a lot of power. You could drain that stone really quickly. The hall would lose its protection, and the chaos would break in. . . .”

“Let’s not go there just yet,” I said. “Let us not even discuss it until we have to. Don’t want to panic the nice survivors, do we? Because there isn’t any other way to get everyone out of here. We could, of course, sneak off on our own and abandon all these good people. . . .”

“Well, I could,” said Molly, “but you couldn’t. You’re not made that way. Another of the things I love about you.”

“How do I love you,” I said. “Let me count the ways. . . .”

“Later,” said Molly.

She kissed me with sudden passion, and I hugged her to me, ignoring the scandalised mutterings from all sides. Then I sent her to watch the door and windows while I took out the Merlin Glass and activated it. It quickly sprang up to full size, to appreciative noises from the survivors, and I locked the doorway onto the grassy hill outside town. The image flickered unsteadily, coming and going in a very dangerous way. Not at all what you want to see in a teleport device. I took the Arimathea stone and placed it carefully under the Glass, and the image cleared and settled. The Glass had tapped into the stone’s power.

The vicar stepped forward and peered at what was on the other side of the Glass. His eyes were wide with simple wonder, and he smiled like a child.

“It’s real . . .” he said. “I can feel the wind blowing through, smell the grass. . . . What is this?”

“Your ticket home,” I said. “Gather your flock together, and let’s get the flock out of here. Molly and I will be right behind you.”

The vicar nodded quickly, rounded up his people and drove them through the Merlin Glass with encouragement, discipline and the occasional burst of harsh language. There’s no one like a vicar when it comes to organising people. He chivvied them from one side, inspired them from another and drove the rest through the Glass like a collie dog with a flock of sheep. A lot of people were nervous about the Glass and didn’t want to be rushed, but no one wanted to be left behind. I made several circuits of the hall as they filed through, checking for weak spots and the sound of anything breaking in. But it wasn’t until the last few survivors were queuing up that something large and bulky smashed the door in.

There was no warning. One moment the door was securely closed, and the next it was flying across the hall, blasted right off its hinges. The broken bolts flew through the air like shrapnel. Something dark and twisted filled the doorway, light glowing from sickly yellow eyes. I stepped quickly forward, armouring up as I went, and punched it in the head. I put all my strength into the blow, and I felt bone shatter under the impact. My golden hand drove on deep into its misshapen head. And something inside the head closed around my fist and held it there. I struggled to pull my hand free and couldn’t. Arms with too many joints unfolded from the creature’s sides, and clawed hands slammed against my armour, scrabbling against the strange matter as they tried to force their way in.

Since I couldn’t pull my hand out, I steadied myself and pushed it deeper in, until it burst out the back of the creature’s head. It squealed once, a high tremolo that pained my ears, and thick purple blood jetted from the back of the head. I put my other hand on its face, golden fingers thrusting deep into the yellow eyes, braced myself and yanked the other hand out. Then I shoved the creature hard on the chest, driving it backwards, and moved forward to fill the doorway, so nothing could get past me. Outside, the circle of normality was gone. The stone’s protection had retreated right back to the walls of the Old Market Hall, and soon it wouldn’t even reach them. I yelled for Molly to get the last of the survivors through the Glass.

Something smashed a hole in the roof and dropped down into the Hall. It hit the floor hard, old floorboards shattering under its weight, and then it turned on the last few survivors. Molly hit it with a lightning bolt, and the dark-haired creature burst into flames. It ran round and round in circles, the flames leaping higher and higher as the thing screamed in a disturbingly human way. Something else thrust up through the floorboards, sending splinters flying in all directions. It was white and wet and segmented, springing up out of the hole it’d made like a malignant, alien jack-in-the-box. Molly threw a fireball at it, and the blunt head snapped round and caught the fireball in its clacking multipart mouth. The flames didn’t seem to bother it in the least. Molly advanced on the thing, throwing shaped curses at it, and the segmented horror cracked and shattered under the impact of her Words, spouting a thick, creamy blood. I didn’t dare leave the doorway to help. A lot of things were heading my way, all of them really bad, and while the sight of my armour was giving them pause for the moment, I had no idea how long that would last. They’d seen the collapse of the protective field, and they wanted in.

“How many left?” I yelled to Molly. “How many more to go?”

“Last ones going through right now!” she yelled back. “It’s just you and me! Leave the doorway and let’s blow this joint! Eddie! Eddie . . . why are you still there?”

“Because you can’t see what I’m seeing,” I said steadily. “There’s a whole army of really unpleasant things out here, and I’m all that’s stopping them from storming the Hall. I can’t go. You go, Molly. Go through the Glass, and then shut it down from your side. So none of this madness can follow you through to infect the sane and normal world.”

“Hell with that,” said Molly. “I’m not leaving you! I’ll never leave you. I went all the way to Limbo to bring you back and I’m damned if I’ll give up on you now.”

By this time she was standing right beside me, looking out. She made a shocked, disgusted sound. I nodded.

“Nasty, aren’t they? And dangerous with it. We can’t risk their getting through the Merlin Glass.”

“Are you suggesting we shut the Glass now?” said Molly. “You are, aren’t you? You’re prepared to sacrifice both our lives to save a bunch of nobodies. Because they’re innocents.”

“It’s the job,” I said.

“That’s why I love you,” said Molly. “Because you’re the one true thing in my life.”

“No,” I said. “Together we’re one true thing. Hold everything.”

“What now?” said Molly.

“I mean, hold on; I have an idea.”

“I love it!” Molly said immediately. “It’s a wonderful idea and I want to have its babies. What is it?”

“If we can’t go to the Merlin Glass, we’ll bring the Glass to us.”

I concentrated, reaching out to the Glass through my armour. And the Glass surged forward and enveloped Molly and me in the doorway I’d opened; and then we were standing on the grassy hill outside town. Through the doorway I could see horrible things charging into the Hall, and I slammed the Glass shut in their awful faces. And finally it was over.

I shook the Merlin Glass down to normal size and put it away, and armoured down. A gusting breeze swept past me, smelling of grass and earth and flowers. I’d never smelt anything so deliciously normal. I sat down suddenly as the last of my strength went out of me. I hadn’t realised I’d been running on adrenaline for so long. Molly sat down beside me and cuddled up against me.

We were sitting on top of a pretty steep hill, looking down at the great dark circle where Little Stoke used to be. The rescued survivors were sitting or standing in small groups on the hillside below us, talking animatedly about what they’d been through. Several were lying on their backs on the grass, staring up at the perfectly normal sky with ecstatic faces. Happy to be in a world that made sense again. The vicar sat not far away from us, running his hands through the thick, tufty grass as though he’d never seen anything so wonderful.

And as Molly and I looked down the hillside at the dark circle, it suddenly began to shrink. It fell in upon itself, the sides rushing in faster and faster, until finally the whole thing collapsed and disappeared. The town was back, or at least the buildings were, looking for the most part untouched and untransformed. Made me wonder how much of what we’d experienced inside the town had been “real” in any sense.

“Such a bad place had to be inherently unstable,” said Molly. “It was always going to collapse in on itself, eventually. That was probably what the conspiracy intended all along. Leave nothing behind to show what they’d done. Only the Arimathea stone prevented that from happening: the one true thing in all that chaos. Once we removed that . . .”

“Excuse me,” said the vicar, moving diffidently forward to join us. “But can you tell me what just happened?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I could tell you, but then I’d have to excommunicate you. All details are classified. National security. You know how it is.”

“Ah,” said the vicar. “Yes . . .”

He turned away to round up the survivors and lead them off. Though hopefully not straight down into the returned town buildings. I wanted my family to check the place over thoroughly before we let people back in. No telling how much psychic contamination remained. . . . The survivors made it clear to the vicar that they weren’t ready to be moved yet. They were talking excitedly among themselves. Already the worst of their memories were fading. The untrained human mind isn’t equipped to deal with such things. Soon enough they’d be arguing over what they’d seen, or thought they’d seen, or experienced. In the end . . . all they’d be left with were some bad dreams.

Hopefully.

“They’re going to talk, some of them,” said Molly. “I would.”

“Let them,” I said. “See who believes them. With the dark circle gone and the buildings returned, they have no proof, no evidence. The rest of the townspeople are still missing . . . but the usual authorities will never find them.”

“You think they’re dead, don’t you?” said Molly.

“It seems likely,” I said. “The family will do everything it can to find them, but . . . the conspiracy is too far ahead of us. By the time we catch up . . . it’ll be too late for the poor people of Little Stoke.”

“What if the survivors go to the media?” said Molly.

“Let them,” I said. “It is, after all, a very cynical and disbelieving world. They might get a briefly bestselling paperback out of it, maybe a television movie, but that’s it. The best we can do for them . . . is make sure this never happens again. Ethel? Can you hear me now?”

“Of course,” her voice said, right in my ear. “I’m receiving all kinds of fascinating recorded information from your torc. Come home now, Eddie, Molly. You need some rest, both of you.”

“Rest,” I said. “That does sound good.”

“Time for bed,” said Molly.

“She said rest.”

“Eventually,” said Molly.