The Man with the Golden Torc

CHAPTER ONE Everything but a Bunch of Grapes

It started out as just another everyday mission. A certain Very Important Politician, whose face and name you’d recognise, had come, very secretly, to Harley Street in London. Home to some of the most expert, and certainly some of the most expensive, specialised medical care in the whole of the civilised world. This politician, let’s call him Mr. President, and no not the one you’re thinking of, had himself booked into the Hospice of Saint Baphomet under an assumed name after contracting a supernatural venereal disease during a goodwill tour of Thailand. He was stupid enough to slip his handlers’ leash and go looking for a little fun in the backstreet bars of Bangkok, and unlucky enough to end up getting it on with an agent of darkness masquerading as a ladything. As a result of which, Mr. President was now very heavily pregnant with something the very opposite of a love child. I had been ordered to terminate this unnatural pregnancy with extreme prejudice. The offspring was not to be born, or if born, not allowed to run loose in the material world.

I’d been supplied with a gun, and I was expected to use it.

(How did we find out about this? My family knows everything. That’s its job. And when you’ve been fighting the good fight for as many centuries as we have, you can’t help but accumulate an extensive network of sources and informers.)

I strolled casually down Harley Street, hiding in plain sight. No one looked twice at me; no one ever does. I’ve been trained to blend in, to be just another face in the crowd. I was wearing a nicely anonymous three-piece suit, expensive enough to fit in but not stylish enough to draw attention. I strode down Harley Street like I had every right to be there, so everyone else just assumed I did. It’s all about attitude, really. You can fit in anywhere with the right attitude. It helps that I have the kind of face that always reminds you of someone else: average, pleasant, nothing to jog your memory afterwards. An agent’s face.

It’s all in the training. You too could learn to look like nobody in particular, if you wanted to.

It was the lazy end of a summer afternoon in London. Pleasantly warm under a pale blue sky, with just a hint of breeze. Traffic roared by in the background, but the street itself was relatively calm and quiet. There were taxis, squat black London cabs, dropping people off and picking them up, men and women of all nationalities carefully minding their own business. And a large percentage who weren’t men or women or anything like it. You’d be surprised how many monsters walk plainly in open sight every day, hidden from mere mortal gaze by only the flimsiest of illusions. But I’m a Drood, and I wear the golden torc around my throat, so I can use the Sight to see everything, for as long as I can stand it.

An elf lord was getting out of a taxi just a few feet away, looking tall and regal in his glowing robes. He had pointed ears, all-black eyes, and a look on his face of utter contempt for all humankind. He paid off the taxi driver with a large denomination note, waving away the change with aristocratic disdain. The driver had better bank that note quickly, before it touched cold iron and turned back into a leaf or something. Elves live to screw over humanity; it’s all they’ve got left.

Up and down the street, ghosts walked in and out of walls that weren’t there when they were alive, trapped in their repetition like insects in amber. Just echoes in time. Demons rode unsuspected on people’s backs, their spurred heels dug deep into shoulder and back muscles, whispering into their mount’s ears. You could always tell which mounts were listening; their demons were fat and bloated. One man had the beginnings of a halo. He was escorting a friend with stigmata. It’s moments like that which give you hope. An alien with gray skin and big black eyes appeared out of nowhere, clutching a London A-Z in a three-fingered hand. Harley Street’s reputation stretches farther than you’d think.

None of them paid me any attention. I told you; I’ve been trained.

There are times when I wonder if it might not be nice to live a normal life, with only normal worries and responsibilities, and not have to know all the things I know. Not to have to see all the darkness in the world. To be one of the sheep, and not the shepherd. But, on the other hand, I get to know what’s really going on and who the real bad guys are, and I get to kick their nasty arses on a regular basis. Which makes up for a lot.

Harley Street is still mostly a long row of Georgian terraces with expensively bland anonymous facades. There are hardly any names on display; either you know where you’re going, or you don’t belong there. The heavy, secretly reinforced doors only open to buzzers when you know the right words to say, you can’t see in through any of the windows, and many of these venerable establishments are guarded and protected in ways you don’t even want to think about.

Those were the ones that interested me.

I studied the Hospice of Saint Baphomet from a safe distance while apparently listening to my mobile phone. Wonderful things; the perfect excuse for just standing around with a blank look on your face. There wasn’t any point in even approaching the hospice’s front door. I could See layer upon layer of seriously hard-core defences set in place. The kind that don’t even leave a body to identify. Imagine oversized magical man-traps with really big teeth and a built-in mean streak. The sort of defences you’d expect around a hospital that specialised in weird and awful diseases; the kind you really don’t want the rest of the world to know about.

So I decided to break into the building next door to Saint Baphomet’s, a smaller and even more specialised practice, Dr. Dee & Sons & Sons. They dealt strictly with exorcisms; very strictly, by all accounts. (Their motto: We Get the Hell Out.) Their defences were just as strong but more concerned with keeping things in, than keeping people out, on the perfectly logical grounds that only a madman would want to get in. Most people had to be dragged in, kicking and screaming all the way. But then, I’m not most people. I put away my mobile phone and glanced up and down the street, but as always everyone else was far too caught up in their own important business to spare any interest for a nobody like me. So I just slipped into the deserted narrow alleyway beside Dr. Dee’s and activated my living armour.

Most of the time it lies dormant as a golden circlet around my throat. A torc, in the old language. Invisible to anyone who’s not a member of the Drood family or at the very least a seventh son of a seventh son. (There don’t seem to be many of those around anymore. I blame family planning.) I subvocalised my activating Words, and the living metal in the torc spread out to cover my whole body, embracing me in a moment from head to toe. It’s a warm, refreshing feeling, like pulling on an old familiar coat. As the golden mask covered my head and face, I could see even more clearly, including all the things that are normally hidden from even gifted humans like me. I felt stronger, sharper, more alive, like waking from a pleasant doze into full alertness. I felt like I could take on the whole damned world and make it cry like a baby.

The armour is the secret weapon of the Drood family. It makes our work possible. The armour is given to each of us right after we’re born, bonded forever to our nervous systems and our souls, and while we wear the armour we’re untouchable, protected from every form of attack, scientific or magical. It also makes us incredibly strong, amazingly fast, and utterly undetectable. Most of the time.

With the armour on I look like a living statue, golden and glorious, with no joints or moving parts and not a weak spot anywhere in its whole smooth, gleaming surface. There aren’t even any eye or breathing holes in the golden mask that covers my face. I don’t need them. While I wear it, the armour is me. It’s a second skin, insulating me from a dangerous world.

Looking through the mask, I could now clearly see the huge demon dog guarding the back door to Dr. Dee’s. Night dark, big as a bus, and bulging with muscles, it sprawled across the cobbled square, glaring suspiciously about it with a flat brutal face and flaring hellfire eyes. It was gnawing lazily on a human thighbone that still had some meat left on it. More bones lay scattered before the dog, broken open to get at the marrow. I had a fleeting but very real temptation to grab one of the bones, throw it, and shout Fetch! just to see what would happen. But I rose above it. I am, after all, a professional.

I walked right up to the demon dog, and it couldn’t see or hear or smell me. Which was just as well, really. I wasn’t looking for a fight. Not with anything that big and infernally nasty, anyway. I eased past the dog, careful not to touch it. The armour does have its limitations. I studied the locked back door. Very old, very intricate, very secure. Piece of cake. I reached through my golden side with my golden hand, easy as plunging my hand into water, and took out the Hand of Glory I’d been sent by the family Armourer, just for this mission. The Hand of Glory is a human hand cut off a hanged man right after he’s died, and then treated in certain unpleasant ways so that the fingers become candles. Light these candles, in the right way and with the right Words, and the Hand of Glory can open any lock, reveal any secret. The family makes these awful things out of the bodies of our fallen enemies. We do other things with the bodies too, really quite appalling things. Just another reason not to get us mad at you.

I lit the candles and subvocalised the Words, and the demon dog raised its blunt head and sniffed suspiciously at the still air. I froze, and the dog slowly lowered its brutal head again. The lock had already opened itself, so I pushed the door gently inwards. The dog didn’t even look around. I eased inside and pulled the door softly shut behind me. It locked itself again, and I relaxed a little. I could probably take a demon dog, with my armour, but I didn’t feel like testing that probably unless I absolutely had to. Demon dogs are trained to go for the soul.

I tucked the Hand of Glory away and studied my new surroundings. Dr. Dee’s was dark and gloomy, and the bare stone walls of the hallway ran with damp and other fluids. There were rusted iron grilles in the bare stone floor, to carry them away. I headed forward, and it was like walking into a slaughterhouse of the soul. This was a place where bad things happened on a regular basis. A place where really bad things happening was just business as usual.

I moved silently down the long stone hallway, reached the blunt corner at the end, and emerged into a cavernous hall filled with row upon row of boxlike cages, each just big enough to hold one man, or woman, or child. The bars of the cages were solid silver, as were the heavy shackles that held their prisoners secure. The only light came from a great iron brazier at the far end of the hall, glowing bloodred in the gloom around the long-handled instruments of instruction that the brazier was heating. I moved steadily down the narrow central aisle between the two rows of cages, carefully not looking to the left or to the right. There were no innocents here. These were the possessed, Hell’s playthings, brought here to be freed of their burden. One way or another.

Most of them couldn’t see me, so they didn’t bother to put on an act. But one dark hulking figure raised its mutilated head and stared right at me with eyes that glowed as golden as my armour. It spoke to me, and I shuddered at the sound. Its voice was like an angel with syphilis, like a rose with a cancer, like a bride with teeth in her vagina. It promised me things, wonderful awful things, if only I would set it free. I kept on walking. It laughed softly in the darkness behind me, like a small child.

Following the layout I’d memorised earlier, I moved on up a floor into the residential part of the building, where recovering patients were coaxed back to sanity. Everywhere I looked I could see ghost images of hidden defence systems, ready to spring into action at just the hint of an intruder. Only my armour prevented Dr. Dee’s security from setting off any number of alarms and retributions. There were cameras everywhere, of course, including infrared, and they were tied into the holy-water sprinkler system, but my armour redefines the word stealth. No one sees me unless I want them to.

Soon enough I came to the wall connecting Dr. Dee’s to Saint Baphomet’s, and all I had to do was take out the portable door the Armourer had sent me and slap it against the wall. It spread quickly out to form a perfectly normal-looking door complete with brass handle. I opened it, stepped through into the next building, and then peeled the door off the wall. It shrank quickly back into a small rubbery ball of something far too complicated for me to understand, and I put it back in my pocket. My family has the best toys. All I had to do then was follow the layout of Saint Baphomet’s I’d memorised to take me straight to Mr. President’s room.

(No, not the one you’re thinking of. Definitely not. You must trust me when I tell you these things.)

The hospice was all bright lights and walls painted in cheerful colours, but the magical protections were just as strong as Dr. Dee’s. There were cameras everywhere, whirring officiously to themselves as they turned back and forth, and motion detectors blinked redly at ankle height. But I was walking unseen, the ghost in the machine. No one sees us—unless we want them to. The air smelt of disinfectant and something rotten not quite buried under expensive flowery scent.

I made my way unchallenged up to the ward on the top floor, where they kept all the really interesting patients, and padded silently down the starkly lit corridor, pausing now and again to peek in through some of the windows in the doors I passed, just out of curiosity. Well, wouldn’t you? I’d already been briefed on what everyone was in here for, and I just had to take a quick look.

A celebrity chef with his own television show was in to have a tattoo removed the hard way. Seems the tattooist’s hand had slipped at just the wrong moment while inking an ancient Chinese phrase, turning a simple invocation for good luck into an open invocation for really bad luck. As a result, the chef’s famous West End restaurant had burned down during an outbreak of food poisoning. He’d had explosive diarrhea during his live show, all his best recipes had turned up on the Net, and he’d been struck by lightning seventeen times. In his own kitchen. You don’t shift a tattoo like that with just a laser, so they were flaying his back an inch at a time to get rid of it. The famous chef was currently lying facedown on his bed, sobbing like a baby. Next time he’d settle for Mom, or his favourite football team.

Next door to him, a woman was suffering from a severe lack of gravity. The staff had had to strap her to the bed to keep her from floating away. Her long hair streamed upwards. The next room held some poor unfortunate who’d made the mistake of walking into a séance with a really open mind, and now he was possessed by a thousand and one demons. He ricocheted around his room in his straitjacket, screaming in tongues as he bounced off the rubber walls, while the demons fought it out for dominance. They didn’t seem to care that they were making a right mess of their host in the process. He really should have gone to Dr. Dee’s. You get what you pay for.

The next few rooms held a severed hand that was trying to grow itself a new body; a Time Agent whose latest regeneration had gone terribly wrong, turning him inside out; and a sorry-looking werewolf with mange. Takes all sorts, I suppose.

I peered cautiously around the end of the corridor, and there was Mr. President’s room. An armed guard was sitting right outside his door, for the moment concentrating totally on his muscle man magazine. I checked carefully, but that was it. One armed guard. They weren’t even trying, really. I walked straight up to the man, and he didn’t even know I was there until I squeezed a particular nerve cluster in his neck, and he went straight to sleep. I sat him back in his chair, after moving it away from the door. I peered in through the window, and there was Mr. President, sleeping fitfully on his back, his swollen belly pushing up the bedclothes. Pregnancy can be very tiring, or so I’m told. Mr. President’s wife was snoozing in a chair beside his bed. How very understanding and supportive of her.

I reached under my armour for the gun holstered on my hip. The Armourer has supplied me with many different guns down the years, but this one really was rather special. A needle gun with a pressurised gas cylinder that fired slivers of frozen holy water. Very quiet, very efficient.

I didn’t bother with the Hand of Glory for the locked door, just kicked it in with one golden foot. It crashed open, and Mr. President sat up in bed and looked right at me. The baby he was hosting must have boosted his senses. He took one look at me in my golden armour and started screaming that I was there to assassinate him. I aimed my gun carefully and shot his wife while she was still half up out of her chair. The ice needle hit her square in the jugular vein, entered her bloodstream, and melted down into holy water; and Mr. President’s wife convulsed as the demon possessing her was forced out.

She’d been my target all along. The demon had hidden itself inside her while her husband was out playing patty-cake with the ladything, and then waited undetected for Mr. President’s baby to be born through a caesarean. The demon could then possess the unnatural baby and assume a permanent physical form, safe from all attempts at exorcism. Who knows what its plans were after that? My family hadn’t felt like waiting around to find out.

We’d all seen The Omen.

The wife went down on all fours, shuddering and convulsing, while her husband looked on, shocked into horrified silence. Black slime burst out of her mouth and nose and ears and even ran down her face as viscous black tears. More and more of the stuff spilled out of her, faster and faster, forming a widening pool of black tarry stuff on the floor before her. And from this dark ectoplasm the demon made itself a new body, its last desperate attempt to assume a physical form in the material world.

A squat, powerful shape thrust up out of the black pool; first long, muscular arms, then a broad chest and shoulders, and finally a horned head with coal red eyes. I shot it with another holy-water needle, and it howled horribly but kept on growing. Determined little fellow. It pulled itself up out of the black pool, towering above me now. It grew long claws on its hands, and a wide smile split the dark face to show me row upon row of needle teeth. It looked like what it was: vile and evil and terribly strong. I put away my gun and grew thick golden spikes on my armoured fists. Some days you just have to do things the hard way.

The demon surged forward, lashing out at me with a clawed hand. Sparks flew as the claws skittered harmlessly across my armoured chest. I punched the demon in the head, and thick chunks of black ectoplasm flew away as my spiked knuckles ripped through its pseudoflesh. I hit it again and again, beating it down and driving it back, while all its strongest blows slipped harmlessly off my armoured form. I grabbed hold of one flailing black arm, braced myself, and ripped it right off. The demon howled and its body just started falling apart, unable to maintain itself in the face of such punishment. The dark form collapsed into thick pools of stinking, rotting ectoplasm, and the demon fell screaming back into Hell.

I shook dripping black slime from my armoured fists and took a moment to get my breath back. One good thing about beating the crap out of demons from Hell is that you don’t have to feel the slightest bit guilty afterwards.

I looked around for Mr. President. He was out of his bed and cowering in the farthest corner of the room. He saw me look at him and whimpered feebly. I took out my needle gun and shot him too. The holy water would ensure that whatever was finally taken out of him would be stillborn and no threat to anyone. He gasped, his eyes widening as he felt the changes happening within him. He looked away then and cursed me feebly, but I was used to that.

"Did you really think you could hide this from us, Mr. President?" I said. "Next time, forget your pride and come to us first. Or better yet, stay away from the ladythings."