The Spy Who Haunted Me

CHAPTER SIX Out of Time

The Norsemen believed that Hel was a place of endless ice and freezing weather; a terrible cold to sear the soul forever The and ever. There are places on this earth that explain why.

This time, there were only four of us for the teleport bracelets to throw across the world. Myself, Honey Lake, Peter King, and Walker. Two missions down, and already two of us were dead. After we solved this new mystery, would there be only three of us left to travel on? Alexander King had said, There can be only one, and it looked like someone in our group was taking that very seriously.

The hot and sweaty woods of Arkansas disappeared, and the next moment we were standing in the middle of a large frozen forest. The fierce cold hit us like a hammer, and we all cried out involuntarily at the shock of it. Harsh dead ground underfoot, tall dark trees with leafless branches all around, and a bitter wind that cut to the bone. I thought Loch Ness was cold, but it was nothing compared to this. Everywhere I looked, I saw nothing but dead trees in a dead land under a harsh gray sky. The sun shone brightly directly overhead, but its warmth couldn’t reach us. The air burned in my lungs with every breath, and my bare face and hands ached horribly.

I shuddered helplessly and hugged myself as tightly as I could to hold in some warmth.

The four of us stumbled over to each other, feet dragging on the uneven and unforgiving frozen ground. We huddled together in a circle to share our warmth, driven by the same brute instinct for survival that makes sheep pack together on the moors. All our teeth were chattering loudly and uncontrollably now, and our breath steamed thickly on the bitter air. Honey made a soft pained sound with every breath she let out. She didn’t even know she was doing it. Peter made low moaning sounds, and while Walker was putting on his best stiff upper lip show, he was shaking and shivering just as badly as the rest of us. We huddled in close, shoulder to shoulder and face-to-face, heads bowed against the fierce chill of the gusting wind. And for a while that was all we did. The cold was simply overwhelming, freezing our thoughts as well as our bodies.

Eventually, I forced my head up and looked around me. We had to find shelter soon, or cold like this would kill us all. But I saw only the widely spaced trees and the harsh stony ground stretching away to the horizon in all directions. Miles and miles of nothing but forest. My face and hands were already numb, and I could see hoarfrost forming on the others’ faces, flecks of gray ice across blue-gray skin. Ice forming on my eyelashes made my eyes heavy.

“Where the hell has your grandfather dumped us this time?” said Honey, forcing the words past numb lips as she beat her hands together to keep the circulation going.

“Don’t ask me,” said Peter. “You’re the one with a computer in your head.”

“No wonder you put Area 52 in the Antarctic,” said Walker to Honey. “Safest place to store all that alien technology you’ve accumulated down the years and still didn’t know how to operate.”

“First things first,” I said quickly. “We need to find some kind of shelter, or just the windchill will finish us off. Anyone know how to build an igloo?”

“I think you need snow for that, don’t you?” said Peter.

“Contact Langley,” Walker said to Honey. “Have them find out where we are, and then have them drop us some survival gear.”

“I’ve been trying!” Honey said through teeth gritted together to stop them chattering. “They’re not answering. I’m not picking up any comm traffic. The best my diagnostics can suggest is that something is blocking the carrier signal. That would take a hell of a lot of power, so the source must be somewhere nearby.”

“Good,” said Peter. “Let’s go there right now and get warm. Before things I’m rather fond of start falling off me.”

“Look around,” I said. “There isn’t anything but trees. We’re on our own out here.”

“What?” Peter glared wildly about him. “There has to be something!”

“Try not to panic quite so loudly,” murmured Walker. “It’s bad enough being frozen to one’s marrow without being deafened in one ear.”

“Screw you!” said Peter. “I can’t feel my balls anymore!”

“If you’re looking for help there, you’re on your own,” said Honey.

“I think you’re supposed to rub snow on them to prevent frost-bite,” I said.

“Rub some on yours!” said Peter ungraciously. “Mine are cold enough as it is!”

“You just can’t help some people,” said Walker.

“Let me try something,” I said.

I forced myself away from the relative warmth of the group, subvocalised the activating Words, and armoured up. The golden strange matter slid over me in a moment, covering me from crown to toe, and it was like slipping into a well-heated pool. I gasped out loud as the armour insulated me from the cold and the wind, and already I could feel sensation flowing back into my numbed extremities. I gritted my teeth against the pins and needles of returning circulation, and through my featureless golden mask I looked slowly around me. The mask boosted my vision until I could see clearly for miles and miles, my eyes seeming to dart and soar over the dead and frozen ground. And still there was nothing until I raised my Sight as well, and then at last I detected faint emanations rising up in the distance. An energy source of such size and scale practically promised a good-sized city. But it was seven, maybe eight miles away, on foot, through cold dead wilderness.

Under normal conditions, an easy stroll. Here, just possibly a death sentence for some of us.

I armoured down, gasping as the shock and pain of the awful cold hit me again. I gestured northwest with a shaking hand.

“There’s a city . . . that way. I think. Can’t say what kind of welcome we’ll get, but it’s our best bet. Hell, it’s our only bet.”

“How far?” said Walker.

“Seven miles,” I said. “Maybe less.”

We all looked at each other. No one said anything. No one had to. We all knew what that meant.

“Let’s go,” I said. “Sooner we’re there, sooner we can lounge around in front of a great big fire with hot toddies and a steaming fondue.”

“Fondue,” Peter muttered disparagingly as we set off. “So bloody up itself. It’s only bread and cheese, when you get right down to it.”

I led the way through the trees, and the others stumbled after me. We couldn’t even huddle together for warmth anymore; the uneven ground kept shaking us apart. So for a long time we struggled along in silence, heads bowed to keep our vulnerable faces out of the cutting wind, conserving our energy as best we could. The unyielding ground made every step an effort, like walking along the bottom of the sea with chains around our ankles. There wasn’t a sound to be heard anywhere in the forest. No birds singing, not the slightest sound from any animal. As though we four were the only living things left in this dead deserted land. My feet grew so numb I had to crash them against the hard ground just to feel the impact, and then my legs grew so tired I couldn’t even manage that anymore. I kept going. Complaints wouldn’t help and would only take up energy I couldn’t spare. Besides, I was damned if I’d be the first one to stop and call for a rest.

Not least because if we did stop, I wasn’t sure all of us would be able to find the strength to start up again. Real cold is constant and unforgiving, and it kills by inches when you aren’t looking.

After a while, I realised Honey had moved forward to trudge along beside me. I raised my head just a little to look at her. Honey’s coffee skin had gone gray from the cold, and her eyes had a flat, exhausted, hurting look.

“Why aren’t you wearing your armour?” she said abruptly. “Then you wouldn’t feel the cold.”

“I chose not to,” I said. My mouth was so numb I had to concentrate on carefully forming each word. “Because . . . we need to work as a team. Working together, striving together. As equals, respecting each other. Because if we’re a team . . . maybe we’ll stop killing each other.”

“You didn’t believe Katt’s and Blue’s deaths were accidents for one minute, did you?” said Honey.

“No. You?”

“Of course not. I’m CIA. We’re trained to see the worst aspect of any situation and plan accordingly. And you heard the Independent Agent. Only one of us can return to claim the prize. Killing each other off was inevitable at some point.”

“Killing is never inevitable,” I said roughly. “I’m an agent, not an assassin.”

Honey shot me a heavy glance from under iced-up eyelashes. “You really think you can keep this group from each other’s throats?”

“Of course,” I said. “I’m a Drood. I can do anything. I have it in writing, somewhere.”

“You could put on your armour,” said Honey. “Run ahead to the city and send back help.”

“No telling how long that would take,” I said. “Or how many of you would still be alive when I got back.”

“You can’t worry about all of us.”

“Watch me.”

She chuckled briefly. “You’re a good man, Eddie Drood. How you ever got to be a field agent is beyond me.”

“I bribed the examiner.”

We strode on, fighting for every step and every breath, forcing our slowly dying bodies through the dead forest. I lost track of time. The sun seemed always overhead, the shadows never moved, and every part of the forest looked just like every other part. No landmarks, nothing to aim for, nothing to mark distance passed. We were all close to failing, the last of our hoarded strength draining away, only willpower and brute stubbornness keeping us going. No one complained, or cursed, or asked for help. We were, after all, professionals.

I could have armoured up. Gone on, and left them behind. But I couldn’t do that. Someone had to lead this group by example, and unfortunately it looked like it was down to me. Considering how much trouble I always have with authority figures, it’s amazing how often I end up being one. Sometimes I think this whole universe runs on irony.

And then, long after I’d reached the point where I just couldn’t take any more and couldn’t go on, and did anyway, the trees fell back and I stumbled to a halt at the top of a long gentle slope leading down to a city in the middle of a wide-open plain. There wasn’t much to see: just high stone walls surrounding blunt and functional buildings. Not much bigger than a decent-sized town, really, with only the one road leading in and out. Could have been any place, anywhere. No traffic on the road, no obvious signs of life. Could we have come all this way across a dead land just to reach a dead city?

It didn’t matter. It was shelter. And the mood I was in, I’d burn the whole place down just to build a fire.

The others crowded in beside me, looking down at the city on the plain, too cold and numb and exhausted to ask even the most obvious questions. I started down the gentle slope. No point in arguing anyway. There was nowhere else to go.

We followed the only road to the main gate set deep into the towering wall. The brickwork was seriously weather-blasted, but it still stood firm and strong, which was more than could be said for the massive main gate. Something had torn the gate right off its hinges and left it lying on the cold featureless ground outside the boundary wall. It could have happened yesterday or years ago. There was no way of telling. Inside the towering walls, the city lay still and open and utterly silent. The streets were deserted, with no signs of life in any of the buildings and not a sound anywhere of men or machines. A brief Cyrillic inscription had been carved deep into the stone above the gateway.

“Cyrillic!” said Walker. “We’re in Russia! Anybody read Cyrillic, by any chance?”

“I do,” said Honey.

“Of course you do,” I said. “Know thy enemy. Well, what does it say?”

“Probably Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” grumbled Peter.

“Well,” said Honey, trying to frown with her frozen forehead. “I can read one letter and two numbers. X37.”

“Oh, shit,” I said.

“Somehow it always sounds so much worse when he says it,” said Walker. “What’s wrong, Eddie? Are we to take it you know of this place?”

“If there was anywhere else to go, I’d go there,” I said. “Running. I know this city’s reputation. I know what it is and what it was for, and we shouldn’t be here.”

“I want to go home,” Peter said miserably.

“Russia,” Honey said thoughtfully. “I have contacts here, if I can just find a working comm system . . . What’s so bad about this place, Eddie?”

“Who cares?” said Peter. “It looks warm.”

“This is one of the old secret Soviet science cities,” I said. “Abandoned years ago. X37 means we’re in Tunguska territory, in northern Siberia.”

“Wait a minute,” said Peter. “As in, the Tunguska Event of 1908? That must be what we’re here for!”

“I hope so,” I said. “There’s a mystery in X37 too, but I really don’t think I want to know what it is. X37 was a bad place where bad things happened, and just maybe they still do.”

“It offers shelter and the possibility of warm clothes and food,” said Walker. “First things first.”

And so we became the first people to enter X37 for many years, lambs to the slaughter, walking its empty streets looking for a suitable store to break into. To keep all our minds off the cold and to keep the others from asking too many questions about X37 just yet, I did my usual Drood font-of-all-knowledge bit and filled them in on what I knew of the great Tunguska Event.

In 1908, at 7:17 a.m. on the 30th of June, something hit northern Siberia with enough force to shake the world. There was a huge explosion in the remote and largely uninhabited territory of Tunguska, later estimated to be between ten and twenty megatons—more powerful than any nuclear bomb ever exploded. The force of the explosion felled some eighty million trees, uprooting them and knocking them flat over a range of eight hundred and thirty square miles. The light generated by this impact was so bright and lasting that men in London were able to read a newspaper in the street at midnight.

But the event wasn’t properly investigated until some twenty years later. The First World War and the Russian Revolution got in the way, and the Soviet authorities consistently refused all offers of outside scientific help. In 1928, a team of Russian scientists made the long and difficult journey into the frozen heart of northern Siberia, to investigate, and that’s when the mystery began. Because what the scientists found there made no sense at all.

Everyone’s first thought was that a really big meteor had finally made its way down through the atmosphere and struck us what should have been a killing blow, but there wasn’t any crater. Nothing. Not even a dent in the ground. So it couldn’t have been a meteor. Next thought: a comet. Since comets are mostly composed of ice and gas, it was just possible that a really big comet had made its way down through the atmosphere and exploded at ground level. Such things had been known to happen, on a much smaller scale. But in every such case, the exploding comet had driven certain identifying chemicals and elements into the ground, and there weren’t any at Tunguska. So, not a comet.

Then someone came up with the idea of a great volcanic explosion from underground caused by accumulated pressure. Except that would have left a crater too. There have been more theories down the years: a crashing alien spacecraft, a miniature black hole just passing through, even an escape attempt from Hell. But my family would have known about those. A century after the Tunguska Event, the scientists are still arguing and getting nowhere.

“That’s all very well and groovy,” said Peter. “But that’s there, and we are here. What is this place? Why doesn’t it have a proper name? And, most important, why the Oh, shit?”

“All those old science cities had bad reputations,” I said. “But X37 was in a class all its own. And, it may be coincidence or it may not . . . but we’re not that far from one of the great Drood secrets. Some miles from here, something very old and unspeakably powerful lies sleeping, buried deep under the permafrost. We need to be really careful while we’re here that we don’t do anything that might waken it.”

“Just for the sake of argument,” said Walker, “what would happen if we did?”

“The end of everything,” I said. “The destruction of the world and humanity as we know it. Hell on earth, forever and ever.”

“Ah,” said Walker. “Let’s not do that, then.”

“Best not,” I said.

“You can be such a drama queen sometimes, Eddie,” said Honey. She looked at me suspiciously. “How is it you Droods know so much about this godforsaken area anyway?”

I smiled as much as my frozen mouth would allow. “Wouldn’t you like to know . . .”

We trudged on through the deserted city. Still no sign of anyone. The only sound in the streets was the tramp of our unsteady feet echoing back from blank, unresponsive walls. We were all deathly tired now, inside and out, every movement an effort. I felt like shouting out to challenge the quiet, to see if anyone might answer, but I didn’t. If anyone was still alive in this abandoned place, I was pretty sure they wouldn’t be the kind of people I’d want to meet. And even beyond that . . . this city was too still, too quiet. Like a crouching cat ready to jump out on its prey. It felt like we were being watched. From everywhere.

The streetlamps were out, and there wasn’t a single light burning in any of the windows. No sign of any power in any part of the city. Now and again we’d come across an old-fashioned boxy car with its doors open and its windows and windshield shattered. Great rusty holes gaped in the metalwork, as though it was rotting away. The buildings were all typical old Soviet architecture: massive concrete blocks and brutal stone edifices, with all the character and appeal of a slap round the face. No sign of occupation anywhere.

We finally found a clothing store. Behind the smeared glass there were heavy coats and hats on display. We gathered before the display like starving children confronted with an all-you-can-eat buffet. Walker tried the door, but it was locked.

“Let me beat some feeling back into my hands, and I’ll have that lock picked in under a minute,” said Honey.

I armoured up and kicked the door in. My golden foot slammed the heavy door right off its hinges and sent it flying back several feet into the store. I armoured down. The others were all looking at me. They still weren’t used to seeing me in my armour and all the things it could do. Good. Keep them respectful and off balance, and maybe they’d think twice about killing each other. Honey looked almost envious that I should have such a useful thing and she didn’t. Certainly beat the hell out of her yellow submersible. Walker looked thoughtful. Peter kept his distance and tried to pretend he wasn’t staring at the torc around my throat.

Inside the store, we grabbed the heaviest overcoats we could find from the display dummies and wrapped ourselves up in them, almost moaning with pleasure. We then spent some time just walking up and down, hugging ourselves with furry arms as warmth slowly returned to our frozen bodies. We swore and grimaced as feeling bit back into our numbed extremities, and when we could feel our hands again we clapped on lumpy hats and heavy leather gloves and long woollen scarves. We were out of the bitter wind at last, but our breath still steamed on the damp store air. Walker suggested breaking up the furnishings to make a fire, but I had to say no. I didn’t want us doing anything that might get us noticed. Not yet. Peter had all but buried himself under the biggest coat he could find, together with an oversized fur hat and half a dozen scarves. The colour had come back into his face, and the ice in his eyelashes had melted. He noticed me watching him and scowled.

“I’m still cold,” he said, his voice muffled behind a pulled-up scarf. “And very hungry.”

“And utterly unfashionable,” said Honey. Incredibly, she’d managed to find another long white fur coat to replace the one she’d left in Arkansas. And a white pillbox hat, white gloves, and white leather boots. Somewhere, a nude polar bear was shivering in his cave and cursing mankind.

Walker looked smart but casual, which was no mean feat when wrapped in old-fashioned Russian tailoring, which went in more for bulk than quality. He looked at the mechanical till on the counter, with its dusty brass keys, and frowned.

“Do you suppose we ought to leave . . . something? As payment? Feels a bit like stealing, otherwise.”

“Leave it to who?” said Honey. “Everyone’s gone.”

“Odd, that,” said Peter from deep inside his huge fur coat. “It’s like everyone just got up and left. Maybe they left some canned food behind. You got a can opener in that armour of yours, Drood?”

“How can you be hungry already?” said Walker. “You had some perfectly nice charred beaver only a few hours ago.”

“I am trying very hard to forget that,” said Peter. “Look, I am so hungry right now that if we should happen to come across a monster in this city, I am going to kill, skin, and eat the whole thing. Not necessarily in that order. In fact, someone had better find me a monster pretty damned soon, because you guys are starting to look increasingly edible.”

Strength returned with our new warmth, and we went back out into the street. One direction seemed as good as any other. I was still wondering what we were supposed to be looking for, which particular mystery Alexander King had sent us here to solve.

“What are we looking for, exactly?” said Walker.

I shrugged, though my heavy coat muffled most of the movement. “If we are where I think we are, we’re a long way from the impact site of the Tunguska Event. So I assume we’re here to find out what happened to this city, to X37. On the whole, I think I’d rather stick my dick in a light socket.”

“You still haven’t properly explained what the problem is with this city,” said Walker. “Why was it built all the way out here, in the middle of a wilderness? I thought the Soviets only used Siberia for forced labour camps. What happened here, Eddie? Where is everyone?”

“Well,” I said reluctantly, “X37 was one of a whole series of secret science cities, all of them without any official name, just a designation. Because none of them officially existed except on very secret maps, in very secret offices. The building programme began in the fifties, at the height of the Cold War. Scientists were soldiers then on both sides, their discoveries ammunition for the war. The science cities were built using forced labour from the camps, deliberately set miles from anywhere civilised. Partly for security, partly because some of the experiments being run were so extreme that even the Soviet people wouldn’t have stood for them, but mostly so that if anything did go severely wrong, no one else would be affected. Especially if the whole city had to be shut down or bombed into rubble to cover up what had happened. Which did happen more than once, to my certain knowledge.”

“So only scientists lived here?” said Peter.

“Scientists and their families and enough people and infrastructure to support them,” I said. “And a military presence, to keep an eye on everyone. Most of the people who lived here probably never knew what horrors were being perpetrated in the strictly off-limits laboratories. Curiosity was not an encouraged trait in Soviet Russia.”

“What kind of . . . experiments are we talking about, exactly?” said Walker.

“Nasty ones, from the few files I’ve seen,” said Honey. “Early organ-transplant technology, using criminals and dissidents as sub jects. I once saw some disturbing black-and-white film of a man with two heads, both of them very much alive and aware. Other subjects were exposed to radiation at varying doses, just to see what it would do to them. They were a long way from any kind of protection or cure in those days. They needed data to work with.”

“Then there was chemical warfare,” I said. “Biological, psychic, and supernatural: all the officially forbidden weapons of war. The Geneva conventions didn’t reach out here. But . . . as the years passed and the pressure of the Cold War intensified, the research in these completely deniable cities took stranger and more dangerous turns. City X17 was tasked with trying to open gateways into other dimensions. They must have had some success, because the whole city vanished in 1966. That did leave a crater. X35 specialised in making superhumans out of ordinary people, using drugs, radiation, tissue grafts, and implanted alien technology. All they got for their trouble was a series of very expensive monsters. Who broke loose, in the end. The military hit the whole area with a thermonuke in 1985. No one got out.

“X48 produced cloned duplicates of important personages, with organic bombs hidden in their bellies. The ultimate suicide bombers, and the very best unsuspected assassins. My uncle James terminated that programme with extreme prejudice back in 1973. But X37 . . . was the worst of all by far.”

“Did your family shut this city down?” Honey said suddenly. “Did you do this?”

“No,” I said. “The Soviets hid what they were doing very successfully, until it was too late. By the time we got a whisper of what they were trying to do, it had already blown up in their faces. All we could do was send in a couple of agents to watch from a safe distance and stand ready to contain it, if necessary. It wasn’t. X37 ate its own guts out.”

“What the hell did they do here that was so terrible?” said Peter.

“Yeah,” said Honey. “I’d like to know that myself, before I take one step farther.”

“X37 specialised in genetic research and manipulation,” I said. “Ripping human DNA apart to see what made it tick. Cutting-edge stuff, in the early 1990s. They were looking for secrets, for marvels and wonders, and they found them. Poor bastards.”

The others waited, but that was all I was prepared to say for the moment.

“If I remember correctly, most of these science cities were shut down or abandoned in the nineties,” said Honey. “Too expensive to run in the more austere days of the new order, with the economy crashing down around everyone’s ears. A lot of scientists weren’t being paid, so they voted with their feet and walked out. The soldiers didn’t try to stop them, because they hadn’t been paid in months either. A few cities survived for a while by switching over to commercial research, with corporate or mafiosa backing, but by the turn of the century all of these backwater places were deserted and abandoned. Expensive leftovers from the Cold War, pretty much forgotten in the new corridors of power. No one cared. No one even remembered what most of them had been working on.”

She stopped and looked at me. So did Peter and Walker. I sighed and reluctantly continued.

“X37. Genetic research and manipulation. And not the kind you stumbled across, Peter. No Frankenfood, no goldfish that glow in the dark, no mice with human ears growing out of their backs. And no alien intruders going skinny-dipping in our gene pool, either. No . . . the scientists here were exclusively interested in uncovering the secrets of human DNA. It makes us who and what we are, but we still don’t know what most of it does. What it’s for; what it was intended to do. The Soviet scientists approached the problem in their usual blunt and pragmatic way. They experimented on people. Criminals and dissidents, Jews and homosexuals, anyone who spoke out or just wouldn’t be missed. There was never any shortage of unpeople, in the bad old days of Soviet Russia. No one knows exactly how many people suffered and died in the secret laboratories of X37. Hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands . . . no one knows.”

“Why didn’t your family do something about it?” said Walker.

“Most of what we know, we only found out afterwards,” I said. “When it all went bad, and the Soviet military tried to shut the place down and failed. It’s a big world, and even the Droods can’t be everywhere at once. Though I understand we’re working on that . . .

“The scientists working here were struggling to identify, stimulate, and just plain poke with sticks every part of human DNA they didn’t understand. All this information coded into each and every one of us on the most basic level. If they could access and learn to control even a part of it, maybe they could produce something more than human. So . . . here they were, working blindly in the dark, pushing buttons pretty much at random. Like walking into a room full of gas and striking a match to see where the leak is.”

“What happened?” Peter said impatiently.

“We don’t know, exactly,” I said. “The first clue the Soviets had that something had gone terribly wrong was when X37 suddenly went quiet. No comm traffic at all. No answers to increasingly urgent inquiries. The Soviet authorities followed their usual procedure and sent in the military. And not just soldiers either; these were Spetsznaz, their equivalent of the SAS. Hardened veterans of hard fighting on the Afghanistan front. They were ordered to go in, restore order at any cost, and ask pointed questions until someone provided answers.

“But even they couldn’t deal with what was running loose in X37.

“Five hundred heavily armed men went in; nineteen came out. Broken, hysterical, traumatised. Screaming about . . . monsters. The Kremlin was preparing to nuke the city, but by then we’d picked up on what was happening, and we stepped in to stop them. It hadn’t been that long since Chernobyl, and there was no way the world would have stood still for another travelling radioactive death cloud. World War Three was a lot closer than most people realised, in those days. We were run ragged, stamping out bushfires and making people play nice. Anyway, we sent in two of our local agents to look the place over from a safe distance, but the city was, to all extents and purposes, quite dead. So we just declared the area off-limits to everyone, on pains of us getting really peeved at them, and let sleeping dogs lie.

“And now here we are, breaking every rule there is just by being here. If we had any sense we’d get the hell out while we still can.”

“And go where?” said Honey. “There is nowhere else.”

“And the teleport bracelets won’t move us on till we’ve solved the mystery,” said Peter.

“I don’t like this city,” said Walker. “It’s unsettling.”

We all looked at him. “Oh, come on,” I said. “You police the Nightside! One of the most dangerous and distressing locations in this or any other universe. And you’re . . . unsettled?”

“Something bad happened here,” said Walker. “I can feel it. I feel . . . vulnerable. Not something I’m used to feeling. It’s . . . invigorating, I think. Yes . . . Been a long time since I faced a real challenge, with no backup, no Voice, just . . . me. The fate of the whole world could be resting on our shoulders, depending on what we do next. Isn’t it marvellous?”

“You’re weird,” said Peter.

“No,” Honey said immediately. “That’s Eddie.”

“I am not weird!” I said. “I’m just differently normal.”

No one had much to say after that, so we moved on, pressing farther into the city. Like most Soviet-designed cities, the streets were set out in a simple grid, and each street was just wide enough to let a tank through in case of insurrection. No signs of life anywhere, past or present. But after a while we began seeing signs of fighting, of armed struggle and mass destruction. Doors kicked in, or out.

Windows with little or no glass left in them. Fire damage, smoke-blackened walls, burnt-out homes. Whole buildings blown apart, reduced to single walls and piles of rubble. Some gave indication of being blown out from the inside. And lots and lots of bullet holes.

“There was a major firefight here,” said Walker. “Lots of guns, all kinds of calibre. Grenades and incendiaries too. So why aren’t we seeing any bodies?”

“The few soldiers who staggered out of this place spoke of monsters,” I said. “That is, those who weren’t so traumatised that they never spoke again. So who, or what, were they firing at? There must have been bodies at some point, soldiers and civilians. So who moved them?”

None of us had any answers, so we just kept walking. We passed one building so weakened and precarious that just the rhythm of our footsteps was enough to bring it down. It slumped forward quite slowly, almost apologetically, giving us plenty of time to get clear. The walls just folded up and fell apart, and the whole thing slammed down into the street. A great cloud flew up, as much dust as smoke, but the sound of the collapse was strangely muffled, and the echoes didn’t last. The silence quickly returned, as though it resented being disturbed.

Honey had her shimmering crystal weapon in her hand, glaring around her, ready for an attack or a target, but nothing showed itself. Part of a wall crumbled forward unexpectedly, and Honey whirled around and shot it. The vivid energy blast blew the brickwork apart, sending fragments flying through the air. We all ducked, and then straightened up and looked at Honey accusingly. She gave us her best I meant to do that look and made the crystal weapon disappear.

“Well done,” said Walker just a little heavily. “That wall will never jump out at anyone ever again. And if there are any survivors here, they now know for certain that they have visitors. Visitors with guns and a complete willingness to use them. Perhaps you’d like to shoot one of us in the foot while you’re at it?”

“Don’t tempt me,” said Honey.

“In dangerous situations, self-control is a virtue,” said Walker.

“Don’t you patronise me, you stuck-up Brit,” said Honey. “Sometimes you just have to shoot something.”

“Typical CIA,” said Peter.

We headed deeper into the city, and the evidence of hard fighting became more extreme. Whole buildings blown apart, leaving gaps in street terraces like teeth pulled from a jaw. Those left standing had been gutted by fires left to burn until they died down naturally. We checked inside a few of the safer-looking ruins. Still no bodies. There were long straight cracks in the walls, almost like claw marks, and gaping holes like jagged wounds. There was something . . . off about it all. I’ve seen my share of fighting and the damage it causes, but this was different. The pieces of what had happened here wouldn’t fit together, no matter how I arranged them.

And then we came to a street covered and caked in dried blood. More black than red, the great stain ran the whole length of the street, rising up in long tidal splashes along the sides of buildings, as though a great raging river of blood had swept from one end of the street to the other.

“So much blood . . .” Honey said thoughtfully. “How many people died here?”

“And who killed them?” said Peter, looking quickly about him.

“Still no bodies,” observed Walker, leaning casually on his umbrella and studying the scene with professional interest.

“Maybe something ate all the bodies,” I said. “Monsters, remember? Something’s still here. I can feel it. Watching us.”

“Hope it’s not rats,” Peter said abruptly. “Can’t stand rats. Not too keen on mice, either.”

“Oh, mice are no bother,” I said. “When I was a youngster, part of my duties at Drood Hall was to do a round before breakfast and check all the mousetraps. Then I’d take the filled traps to the toilets and give the little bodies a burial at sea. Used to make quite a ceremony out of it, when I was in the mood.”

“You see?” said Honey. “Weird.” And then she broke off, looking at me thoughtfully. “Eddie, you said earlier there was something very powerful not far from here, sleeping deep under the permafrost. Could it have anything to do with what’s happened here?”

“No,” I said immediately. “First, we buried him over a hundred miles away. And second, if he had even stirred in his sleep, we’d have known about it long before this. If he’d been involved with what happened here, it would have been much worse.”

“How much worse?” said Walker, professionally curious.

“Apocalyptically worse,” I said.

Walker shrugged. “Been there, done that.”

I didn’t challenge him. He probably had. I did once think about visiting the Nightside . . . and then had a nice lie-down with a cold compress on my head till the idea went away.

“Could this . . . thing, person, whatever have had anything to do with the Tunguska Event?” said Peter.

“No,” I said. “My family planted him centuries before that.”

“Something or someone that dangerous,” Honey said accusingly. “And you never told anyone?”

I met her gaze steadily. “It was Drood business. No one else’s. It wasn’t like there was anything you could have done. Then, or now. There’s a lot we don’t tell anyone else. Because if you knew, you’d never sleep well again. Droods guard humanity, in all senses of the word.”

Honey looked like she wanted to argue the point, but she could tell this wasn’t the time. She settled for giving me her best hard look, and then ostentatiously turned her back on me and glared at the blood-soaked street.

“So,” she said. “What were the scientists of X37 trying to achieve? Something to do with unlocking the hidden secrets and potential of human DNA. Potential . . . perhaps that’s the key word. Could they have been trying to produce psychic gifts to order? During the Cold War both sides put a lot of time and money into psychic research, hoping to produce people they could use as weapons.”

“Yeah,” said Peter, sniggering. “I saw that documentary. Trying to produce soldiers who could make goats fall over just by staring at them. Then there was that general of yours who was convinced he could learn to walk through walls if he could only concentrate just right. And let us not forget the whole remote-viewing fiasco . . .”

“We were getting really good results with that, towards the end,” said Honey, still not looking around.

“Yeah,” I said. “I heard. Problem was, you couldn’t keep them out of Pamela Anderson’s bedroom. Or George Michael’s bathroom.”

Honey’s stiff back positively fumed, while Peter and Walker and I exchanged smiles. I didn’t have the heart to tell Honey that the Droods sabotage all such government programmes, as a matter of course. We have the best farseers and psychics in the world, and we’re determined to keep it that way. We didn’t interfere with the fainting goats thing, though. Didn’t need to.

“This city covers a lot of ground,” said Walker. “We could spend whole days just walking up and down in it. And we don’t have days.”

“And I’m still cold and I’m still hungry,” said Peter. We looked at him. He sniffed loudly. “Well, I am.”

“We should have left you in the car,” said Honey.

“There has to be some way we can cut to the chase,” said Walker. And then he gave me a hard look. So did Peter. Honey turned around, just so she could join in.

I sighed and armoured up. The golden armour slipped over me in a moment; immediately I felt sharper, stronger, better able to cope. I hadn’t realised how much the city was affecting me until my armour protected me from its malign influence. Interestingly enough, the armour still fit me like a second skin, with no sign of the bulky fur coat beneath. Interesting, but a thought for another day. I looked around me, focusing my Sight through my featureless golden mask.

At once, the street was full of ghosts. Men and women and children, running and screaming and dying from no obvious cause, all of them trapped in repeating loops of time. Images, echoes, from the past. People, terrified, howling like animals, dying . . . Images imprinted onto the surroundings, repeating over and over again. Even with the Sight, I couldn’t see what it was that scared them, what was killing them. Just . . . glimpses of something at the corner of my mental eye. Quick impressions of something unbearably awful hanging over the city like a storm, running wild in its streets, close and threatening and utterly unstoppable. Inside my armour, my skin was crawling.

As though the Devil himself had come to X37 and was standing right behind me.

I sent my Sight soaring up into the harsh gray sky and looked out over the woods, miles and miles away, to where the terrible old thing lay buried, deep and deep under the permafrost. I could feel his presence, like a wound in the world, but he was still sleeping soundly, hopefully till Judgement Day itself. I looked down at the city spread out below me, and my Sight immediately picked up strange emanations blasting up into the sky from one untouched research building only a dozen or so streets away from where we’d stopped. A shuddering, staccato glare of unnatural energies stabbing up into the sky like a stuttering searchlight. Pure psychic energy spiking up from a single location as though to say, Here I am! for anyone with the Sight to see it. So there was at least one survivor left in X37, after all.

I dropped back into my head, shut down my Sight, and sent my armour back into my torc. The cold oppressive gloom of the city weighed down on me again. It was actually harder to think clearly . . . I told the others what I’d seen and pointed out the direction, and we all set off immediately, glad to leave the street of blood behind us.

The atmosphere of the city seemed to change subtly as we closed in on its secret heart. There were shadows everywhere I looked, dark and deep and threatening. The light seemed to be fading, even though the painfully bright sun was still directly overhead. The streets became narrower, closing in on us, and the buildings all leaned inwards, as though the brick and stone walls might bulge forward and engulf us at any moment. There was something in this city that didn’t want to be found. I increased the pace, striding down the increasingly narrow streets with a confidence I wasn’t sure I felt. I’ve always been happiest with menaces I could hit. The sooner we got to the heart of this mess and did something about it, the better.

“What’s the hurry?” Peter complained. “Whatever happened here, it’s over and we missed it.”

“No,” I said. “It isn’t over. It’s still happening. The beast is waiting for us to come to it. I think it wants to show us things.”

“Beast?” said Honey. “No one said anything to me about a beast.”

“Oh,” I said, “there’s always a beast. Come along, Peter. Don’t lag behind. That’s a good way to get picked off. Besides, the exercise will do you good.”

“Oh, God,” said Peter. “Someone shoot me now and put me out of my misery.”

“Don’t tempt me,” said Honey and Walker, pretty much in unison.

I looked at Honey, and she caught my eye and inclined her head slightly. I fell back to walk beside her, letting Walker take the lead. Peter just trudged along, head down. Honey started talking without looking at me directly.

“I always knew there were places like this. Hidden places, secret cities, where the Soviets did terrible, unspeakable things to their own people, in the name of patriotism and the all-powerful State. It never occurred to me, until now, to wonder if there might have been secret cities in other countries. If everyone had them, including America. I never even heard a whisper that there were, but we all did terrible things in the Cold War, in the name of security. Not just my people, the Company; there was a whole alphabet soup of secret departments in those days. Very covert, very specialised agencies, doing necessary, unspeakable things that were always strictly need-to-know. Officially they were all shut down after we won the Cold War. But in these days of terrorist atrocities and rogue nations . . . who’s to say someone hasn’t set up an X37 in America? What monsters might we be producing right now just so we can feel a little bit safer?

“Eddie, if there were such places, cities like this, on American soil . . . You’d know, wouldn’t you? You’d tell me, if there were?”

“I don’t know,” I said carefully. “Not my territory. For years I was just a field agent based in London. Hardly ever left the city, never even went abroad till the Hungry Gods War. Field agents are only ever told what they need to know, when they need to know it. It’s your country, Honey. What do you think?”

“I don’t know, Eddie. It seems to me . . . the more I learn from solving these mysteries, the less sure I am of anything.”

She leaned in against me, and I put an arm around her. Our heavy furs rather muffled the gesture, but she cuddled up against me anyway. For warmth, or comfort. Or perhaps something else entirely. We were both professionals, after all.

We came at last to the building blasting psychic fire into the heavens. The street seemed very dark, the shadows deep and furtive. We stood close together, alert and ready for a covert attack that never quite seemed to materialise. From the outside, the building we’d come so far to find didn’t look very different from all the others in the street. Stark and brutal, smoke-blackened and bullet-holed, but the front door was still firmly in place, and the windows were unbroken. There were no signs anywhere to tell us what went on inside.

Presumably because either you already knew, or you had no business asking.

“Are you sure this is it?” said Honey. At some point in the journey she’d pushed herself away from me and made a point of walking alone. Whatever moment of humanity or weakness or affection had moved her, she was over it now.

“Something bad happened here,” said Walker. “I can feel it so strongly I can almost smell it. What were they doing in this place?”

“Beats me,” I said. “But it left a hell of a strong impression on its surroundings. Bad things linger; really bad things sink in. And they can take a hell of a lot of shifting.”

I moved forward for a closer look at the ordinary, everyday door that was the only entrance to the building. A big block of badly stained wood with a surprisingly complicated electronic lock.

“Primitive stuff,” sniffed Honey. “I can crack that, easy.”

I armoured up and kicked the door in. Honey glared at me as I armoured down.

“Will you stop doing that, Eddie! The rest of us do like to contribute something now and again!”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Men like kicking things in,” Peter explained to her. “It’s a guy thing.”

The lobby was a mess, with overturned furniture and scattered papers everywhere, none of them in any condition to be deciphered. There were no signs on the wall, no arrows pointing out various departments. Again, either you worked here and knew where your place was, or it was none of your business. The first surprise was that the building’s heating system was working, and the place was warm enough for us to undo our coats. The second surprise came when the lights snapped on without anyone even touching a switch. The lobby immediately looked a lot less gloomy and threatening.

“First time I’ve felt human since I arrived in this godforsaken wilderness,” said Peter. “This ugly pile must have its own generators in the basement. Though I’m surprised the activation sensors are still working after all these years.”

“Russians built things to last,” Walker murmured, peering about him in an absentminded sort of way. “I wonder what else has survived here . . .”

I armoured up and looked around through my golden mask. The others backed away a little.

“Eddie?” Honey said carefully. “What are you doing?”

“Checking for things that might have survived,” I said. “Radiation, hot spots, chemical or bacterial spills . . . But I don’t see anything. Until I use my Sight, and then . . . The whole building’s a repository of past events: ghosts and echoes and memories. Just memories, though; no living presence I can detect. Just a lot of bad feelings. Pain and horror and death. And something very like despair.”

I armoured down. The others made a point of being very interested in something else to show they weren’t impressed by my transformation anymore.

“The generators worry me,” Honey said abruptly. “They shouldn’t still be working after being down for so many years. Soviet technology, for the most part, was never that efficient or reliable. If the city’s designers spent serious money on top-of-the-line machinery . . . what the scientists were doing here must have been really important.”

“The psychic energy source is very definitely upstairs,” I said. “It’s so strong it’s blasting out through the roof. So let’s pop upstairs, people, and see if we can scare up a few ghosts.”

“I never know when he’s joking,” said Peter.

We found the laboratory on the top floor easily enough by following the heaviest electrical cables along the walls. Extra cables had clearly been added later, and somewhat clumsily too, as though the work had been done in a hurry. The whole place seemed strangely clean. No dust, no cobwebs, nothing to mark the passing of so many years’ neglect.

The laboratory itself turned out to be just a great open room cut in two by a huge one-way mirror so someone could observe the scientists. Without being seen themselves. And there you had Soviet Cold War thinking in a nutshell. They even spied on each other. We stayed in the observation room, looking through the one-way glass. I had a really bad feeling about the other room, and others were so jittery by now, they were quite happy to accept that.

The laboratory was packed with bulky, old-fashioned computer equipment, powerful enough in a brutal sort of way. Old and new models were crowded together and sometimes even connected to each other. A single skylight let in a dim glow from outside. And directly under this natural spotlight was set something very like a dentist’s chair: all cold steel and black leather, complete with heavy arm and leg restraints. The chair was bolted to the floor. It didn’t look like the kind of chair anyone would sit down in by choice.

The room we were in was mostly full of recording equipment. Old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorders, bulky videotape recorders, and a single large television set to play them back on. It all looked very neat and organised, as though nothing had been disturbed for years. And again, not a speck of dust anywhere. Someone, or something, was preserving this room just as it had been, before . . . whatever had happened here, happened. Honey bent over a pile of videotapes, her lips moving slowly as she worked her way through the handwritten Cyrillic labels.

“Anything?” I said, trying hard to sound calm and casual.

“Mostly just dates and names. Nothing to indicate what they were up to.”

“That chair does not inspire confidence,” said Peter. “What did they do in that room . . . that they needed bulletproof one-way glass to protect the observers from what they were observing?”

We all looked at him. “How did you know that was bulletproof glass, Peter?” said Walker.

“I just . . . felt it,” Peter said, frowning. “Ever since I came in here, it’s been like . . . remembering someone else’s memories. Creepy . . .”

In the end, we just took a video from the pile at random and stuck it in the nearest machine. The old television set took a while to warm up, and when the picture finally arrived it was only black-and-white. The recording showed exactly what the scientists had been doing in the other room. Experimenting on unwilling human subjects, and testing them to destruction. We watched as the subjects yelled and screamed and shouted obscenities, straining desperately against the heavy restraining straps while blank-faced men and women in grubby lab coats stuck them with needles, or exposed them to radiation, or just cut them open, to see what was happening inside.

It was bad enough in black-and-white. In colour, it would have been unbearable.

We ran quickly through the tapes, just checking a few minutes from each. A few minutes was all we could stand. They were all pretty much the same. Cold-blooded glimpses of Hell.

One man’s head exploded, quite suddenly, blood and brains showering wetly over the attending scientists. Another man melted right out of the chair, his body losing all shape and cohesion, his flesh running through the restraining straps like thick pink mud. He screamed as long as he could, until his vocal cords fell apart and his jaw dropped away from his face. He ended up a pink frothing mess on the floor. One of the scientists stepped in it by accident, had hysterics, and had to be led away.

A middle-aged woman sat on the floor, wearing nothing but a stained oversized nappy. She had a huge bulging forehead held together with heavy black stitches and crude metal staples. She was assembling a strange machine, whose shape and function made no sense at all. When the scientists expressed displeasure at what she’d built and gestured at the chair, the woman calmly picked up a sharp piece of metal and stuck it repeatedly into her left eye, until she died.

And one man, with a Y-shaped autopsy scar still vivid on his chest and rows of steel nozzles protruding from his abdomen from implanted technology, burst all the straps holding him to the chair and killed three scientists and seven of the soldiers sent in to restrain him before one of them got close enough to shoot him repeatedly in the head.

We watched as much of it as we could stand, and then I told Honey to check the dates and find us the tape from the last experiment. The very last thing the scientists were working on before it all went wrong.

“Whatever happened here,” said Walker, “they deserved it. This isn’t a scientific laboratory; it’s a torture chamber.”

“What did they think they were doing?” said Peter. “What were they trying to achieve?”

“I think they were all quite mad,” said Honey. “If they weren’t when they started out, what they did here drove them mad.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think they had that excuse. I think . . . they just did what they were told. Perhaps because if they didn’t, they’d end up in the chair themselves.”

“We should burn this city to the ground,” said Walker. “And seed the earth with salt.”

“Play the tape,” said Peter. “The sooner we’re out of here the better.”

We stood before the television screen, standing shoulder to shoulder for mutual comfort and support. For a long time there was just static, as though an attempt had been made to wipe the tape, and then the picture cleared to show a man sitting in the chair. He was naked, the leather straps cutting deeply into his flesh. He sat stiffly upright, unable to move a muscle. He looked tired, and hard used, and severely undernourished, but there was nothing visibly unusual about him. Except for what they’d done to his head.

Two scientists, a middle-aged man and a somewhat younger woman, watched the man in the chair from a safe distance. They looked tired too, and from the way they kept glancing at the one-way mirror, I sensed they were under pressure to get results. The woman had a clipboard and a pen and ugly heavy-framed glasses. The man was smoking a cigarette in quick, nervous puffs and dictating something to the woman. He didn’t even look at the man in the chair. They had a job to do, and they were getting on with it. The man in the chair was of no importance to them except as the subject of their current experiment.

I wondered who he was, what he did, what his life had been like before they brought him here and took away his name in favour of an experiment number. I wondered if they tattooed the number on his forearm.

The man’s head had been shaved, and there were signs of recent surgical scars. Holes had been drilled through his skull at regular intervals so electrical cables could be plugged directly into his brain. Recently clotted blood showed darkly around the holes. The cables, carefully colour-coded, trailed away to a bunch of machines on the far side of the room. I didn’t recognise any of them.

Without quite knowing how or why, I began to understand what was happening. I just . . . seemed to know. The scientists were sweating, nervous, under intense pressure to produce results, to justify all the money that had been spent so far. Practical results that the military overseers could present to the Party to ensure further funding and preserve their own precious skins. So . . . certain shortcuts had been taken.

X37’s scientists had been studying the mysteries of human DNA for eleven years now and had nothing useful to show for it. Just a hell of a lot of dead ends and almost as many dead experimental subjects. Not that that mattered; they could always get more. Still, everyone was getting just a bit desperate. This particular experiment involved exposing selected genetic material to certain radioactive elements, and then grafting the new material directly onto the brain of the test subject. So far, so good. The subject had survived the operation. Now the scientists were electrically stimulating certain areas of the brain to see if they could make something happen.

The two scientists, the man and the woman, talked nervously together; sometimes clearly for the record, and sometimes talking across each other as they studied the monitor displays and argued over what was happening. I seemed to understand what they were saying, even though I knew only a handful of words in Russian.

(What was going on? Where was all this information coming from? Was the past sunk so deeply into its surroundings that just playing the tape was enough to evoke it all again, in all its details? Was the laboratory . . . waking up?)

The male scientist spoke of those parts of human DNA that resisted explanation. Whole areas whose purpose and function remained a mystery. Both scientists were convinced hidden talents lay buried in human DNA, just waiting to be forced to the surface. Old talents, long forgotten by civilised man. The male scientist’s name was Sergei. He spoke of old DNA, ancient genetic material, from before man was really human. He talked about the earliest civilisations, where men talked directly with their gods. They saw this as an ordinary, everyday thing: quite commonplace and not remarkable at all. Gods and devils, monsters and angels walked openly among mankind, their conversations described in great detail in all the oldest written records. Gods walked and talked with men. No big deal at all; just the way things were, back then. If you believed the written records, said the female scientist, whose name was Ludmilla. If these records were accurate, said Sergei, as accurate as everything else they described, who or what were these early humans talking to? Not gods, obviously; both scientists were good Party members and did not believe in such things. But . . . something powerful, certainly. Could it be that these gods and devils still walked among us, but we had lost the ability to see them?

I thought about that. They were talking about the Sight: the ability of specially trained people to See the whole of the world, and not just the limited part most people live in. (Just as well, really; if most people knew who and what they were sharing their world with, they’d shit themselves.) But though the Sight had shown me many strange and wonderful and dangerous things, it had never once shown me anything like a god.

I said some of this to the others, and Walker nodded slowly.

“There are things very like gods, in the Nightside. They have a whole street set aside for them, so they can show off for the tourists. But I am here to tell you that most of them are just supernatural creatures with delusions of grandeur and not worth the breath it takes to damn them. Godly pretenders and wannabes are one of the oldest con tricks humanity has had to endure.”

“I talked with the Wizard of Northampton once,” Peter said diffidently. “He said gods and demons are just artificial constructs of the deeper recesses of the human mind. We create these subpersonalities so that the conscious mind can communicate more easily with the subconscious. Or maybe . . . so that an individual could make contact with the human mass mind, Jung’s collective unconscious. The wizard said gods and demons were just two sides of the same superluminal coin.”

“Yeah, well, writing comic books for twenty years will do that to you,” growled Walker.

“I’m picking up all kinds of information from this room,” Honey said abruptly. “I know things I have no way of knowing. It’s like . . . suddenly remembering a book I read long ago that I know for a fact I never read. My head hurts.”

“It’s the psychic imprinting,” I said. “What happened here was so powerful, so traumatic, it literally soaked into its surroundings. Genius loci, and all that. A stone tape. And now, just by being here, we’ve started the tape playing again. I know things too. The man in the chair is mentally ill. His name is Grigor, and he hears voices in his head. Almost certainly paranoid schizophrenic, though no one’s bothered to accurately diagnose him. Apparently Sergei and Ludmilla there believed that people who hear voices and speak to people who aren’t actually there are being dominated by ancient DNA that’s been accidentally reactivated. So they’ve been experimenting exclusively on the mentally ill to try to locate and control that particular part of human DNA. Just in case they are seeing gods and devils . . .”

“That’s crazy,” said Peter.

“Bastards,” Walker said succinctly.

“Bad idea either way,” said Honey, staring fascinated at the flickering black-and-white images on the television screen. “If the old gods and monsters really are just projections from the subconscious, they might not take kindly to being forced out into the light. We keep things locked away in our heads for a reason.”

“Let sleeping gods lie,” said Peter.

“Well, quite,” said Walker.

“This conversation is getting seriously strange,” I said. “What does any of this have to do with what happened out in the city?”

“It’s something to do with the man in the chair,” Honey said flatly. “With Grigor. I can feel it. Can’t you feel it?”

“Could we be talking about Jungian archetypes here?” said Walker. “They were all the rage in my young days. Ideas and concepts given shape and form and even identities. Dark dreams from the depths of the human mass mind, driving people in directions they would never have chosen otherwise . . . Fads and fancies, politics and religions . . . Things are in the saddle and ride mankind. Pardon me; I’m rambling, I know. But we are on very dangerous ground here, and I think it behooves us to tread carefully. Remember that film Forbidden Planet? Monsters from the id? Unbeatable and unstoppable, rage and horror and all our most unspeakable lusts, given form and let loose on the world? Like the Hyde, only more so. Is that what happened here, in X37?”

“You’re right, Walker,” said Honey. “You are rambling.”

I was still studying the man in the chair and the two scientists. Grigor and Sergei and Ludmilla. Whatever information I was picking up, it wasn’t coming from the video recording. It was coming from the other room. Haunted, stained by what these people had done in it. The scientists had wanted to access the old DNA so they could learn to talk with gods again and bend them to the State’s will.

Children, playing with nuclear weapons.

Grigor suddenly convulsed, his scrawny naked body fighting the leather straps that held him in place. The chair creaked and groaned, but the straps held. (I was right there with them now. I could hear and see everything. Smell Grigor’s sweat, feel the static charge building on the air.) Sergei checked the readings on his instruments, and Ludmilla scribbled frantic notes on her clipboard. The cameras recorded everything. Grigor’s face writhed, his eyes bulged, his breathing grew faster and faster. The cables leading from his shaven head lashed back and forth.

And then he stopped moving. He held himself unnaturally still, as though afraid of drawing something’s attention. Sweat ran down skin flushed bright pink from exertion. Grigor was barely breathing now, his expression set and fixed. He was Seeing something; I could sense it. Something not present or evident to normal human senses. He Saw it, and I think it Saw him. His face twisted with horror and revulsion, racked by a terror beyond bearing. He screamed like a small child, like a wounded animal, like a soul newly damned to Hell.

I knew what was happening, even though I couldn’t see it. Information was pouring into my head, forcing its way in despite everything I could do to keep it out.

The scientists had done it. The old DNA was awake again on-line and up and running. Grigor’s eyes were full of the Sight. But he hadn’t looked outward, as intended, beyond the fields we know into other worlds and dimensions or the many overlapping layers of our complicated reality. Instead, his Sight had turned away from the world that had hurt him so very much, turned away and turned inward. He looked deep into himself, into humanity, into all the hidden secrets of our DNA. And he found something there, something buried deep in the genetic material of us all, something so awful in its significance that he couldn’t stand it.

His mind broke, leaping up and out, his artificially augmented thoughts tapping into the human mass mind, the shared unconscious that linked all the people of X37. He drew upon the power he found there, took it and shaped it and sent it out to destroy every living thing in the city. So that the vile experiments would finally stop, and the awful knowledge Grigor had stumbled across would die with him.

Let them all die, he said. They’re all guilty. They all knew what was happening.

Grigor called up nightmares. All the things we’re really afraid of. Monstrous shapes, terrible archetypes, all the private and personal horrors that have power over us in the dark, in the early hours of the morning, when we dream awful dreams, of things we can only escape from by waking up and leaving them behind. Grigor summoned them up from the mass mind, gave them material shape and form, and turned them loose on the people of X37.

And the city screamed.

The scientists realised something had gone terribly wrong with their experiment. Grigor wasn’t crying out or straining against his straps anymore. He sat perfectly still. Sergei and Ludmilla approached him cautiously. He slowly turned his tortured head to look at them. Blood ran in endless tears from his unblinking eyes. Having finally Seen the truth, he could not look away, even though it was killing him. But he still managed a smile for his tormentors.

They’re coming, he said. They’re coming for you. Every single one of them, and they all want a piece . . .

He sounded like a dead man speaking. A man who can speak unbearable truths because he has nothing left to lose. Sergei backed away, calling hysterically for help. Ludmilla threw her clipboard aside, ran to the control board, and hit the abort button. It should have killed Grigor instantly, frying him with a massive electrical charge, but he wasn’t ready to let go just yet. Huge sparks spat and sputtered on the air, discharging into the surrounding equipment. Ludmilla grabbed a fire ax from the wall and chopped at Grigor in his chair with hysterical strength. The heavy steel blade bit into his flesh again and again, but he didn’t cry out, and he wouldn’t die.

Sergei tried to escape, but the door wouldn’t open. Security guards were pounding on it from the other side, but it wouldn’t budge. Ludmilla backed away from the bloody mess in the chair that was still smiling at her, and she laughed shrilly past the dishevelled hair falling into her stark white face. The ax head trailed a bloody path across the floor, as though it had grown too heavy for her to hold up.

They came through the walls, and up through the floor, and down from the ceiling. Real and solid, not alive, still bearing the wounds that had killed them. All the subjects who’d been experimented on, who’d suffered and died in the chair, screaming for help and mercy and simple compassion that never came. They came for Sergei and Ludmilla, who died slowly and who died screaming at the hands of those they’d wronged. And when the dead were finally finished with them, they left the bloody messes behind on the floor and went out of the room and into the city to do even worse things.

The tape stopped. I looked around, startled. I’d forgotten who and when I was. The room, what had happened in it, had filled my head. I took a deep breath and wiped sweat from my mouth with the back of my hand. Honey had shut the tape machine down. She was breathing hard. I wondered if she’d seen all the things I had. Walker was looking at the floor. Peter had his back to us. I looked through the one-way mirror into the next room. It was empty, and so was the chair.

“How much of it did you pick up?” I said after a while. It didn’t sound like my voice. It sounded . . . shocked, uncertain. Lost.

“Enough,” said Walker. “Monsters from the id. The city’s id.”

“He killed a whole city with their own nightmares,” said Honey. “A whole city . . .”

“The one thing no one can face,” said Peter. He turned around but looked past us to stare into the other room.

“Good thing the crazy bastard’s dead and gone, then,” said Honey, trying for a brisk, professional tone and not quite managing. “No telling how much damage he might have done otherwise. No wonder the Soviets couldn’t cope . . .”

“They wanted a weapon,” said Walker. “They got one.”

“I think he’s dead,” I said. “No one could See what he did, and survive. But I don’t think he’s gone. What he did was so powerful, the psychic energies stamped themselves into the physical surroundings. Ready to emerge again at any time. Why isn’t Grigor’s body still in the chair? Why aren’t the scientists’ bodies still on the floor, or at least, what was left of them? Why didn’t we discover a single corpse in the whole damned city? Because the nightmares are still here. Still active. Still hungry.”

“I can feel it,” said Walker. “Like the tension in the air before a storm breaks. Like the pause before the ax falls . . .”

“Will you shut up?” said Honey. “All of you: pull yourselves together! We’re professionals; we can handle this.”

“Are you crazy?” Peter’s voice was shrill, almost hysterical, all the colour gone from his face. It was the first time I’d seen him really scared. “We have to get out of here! The city’s coming alive, and the nightmares are coming back. All the bad dreams you ever had. There are things in dreams no man can face!”

“Get ahold of yourself, Peter,” said Walker, but his voice lacked its usual authority and conviction.

“Hush,” said Honey, and something in her voice stopped us all dead. “I think . . . it’s here.”

The video recorder turned itself back on. The television screen came to life again. We all turned unwillingly to look. Grigor was back sitting in his chair, hacked apart but still alive. The two bloody messes that had been Sergei and Ludmilla were spread out on the floor before him like sacrifices to an unforgiving god. From outside the room, from the surrounding streets, came terrible sounds. Screaming and shouting and the roaring of what might have been maddened animals. Grigor turned his bloody head and looked right through the one-way mirror at us. He smiled at us, and there was little humanity in that smile, and less compassion. It was the smile of a man who had looked beyond the gates of Hell and seen what they did there; what was waiting for him.

You have to die, he said. You all have to die.

“Why?” I said. “We never hurt you.”

Of course he couldn’t hear me. Grigor was dead, long dead. This was just a recording of his last message to mankind.

We’re not who we think we are, he said. We never were. You have to die. Because no one must ever know the truth.

“What truth?” said Honey.

“Why nightmares?” said Walker. “Why kill all the people of this city in such a terrible way?”

Because we deserve it.

The tape snapped to a halt, and the television screen went dead again.

“Well,” I said, putting a lot of effort into sounding calm and casual. “That was . . . worrying. And more than a bit spooky.”

“What did he See in our DNA?” said Honey.

“Probably best we don’t know,” I said.

“Could Grigor still be alive somewhere, do you think?” said Walker. “Hiding, perhaps, transmitting these . . . images to us?”

“No,” I said. “If there was anyone else alive in this whole damned city, I’d know. Nothing’s lived here for years. Even the animals have enough sense not to come in here. I don’t think anyone could live here for long, not after what happened here. This is a city of memories. Stored memories, gone feral.”

It was getting colder and darker. The room on the other side of the one-way mirror was almost gone now, consumed by shadows. The lights in our room were dimming, as though the power was being sucked out of them. Our breath began to steam on the air, and we all buttoned up our coats again. There was a growing atmosphere of imminence, of something about to happen. The four of us moved together, and then moved away again, driven by a need to be able to look in all directions at once. From outside the building there came noises. Voices . . . almost human. First as scattered individuals, then in growing numbers, until finally it was the voice of the crowd and the mob, driven mad by horror and bloody slaughter.

The sound of an entire city maddened and murdered by its fears.

“What is that?” said Honey, clapping her hands uselessly to her ears. “What’s making that noise? There’s no one here; this city is empty! It is! There can’t be anybody out there!”

“The dead don’t always stay dead,” said Walker. He looked confused, as though someone had just hit him.

“No,” I said quickly. “There’s no one out there. Not as such.

It’s . . . the memory of nightmares. When the people here died, when the city died, when all the men and women and children trapped in this place fell victim to their own nightmares, that out-pouring of emotion and trauma completed what Grigor started. Everything they experienced was psychically imprinted into the stone and brick and cement of X37. The whole place is one gigantic stone tape. And by entering the city, we’ve started it up again.”

“So, it’s not real?” said Peter.

“Real enough,” I said. “Real enough to kill us, if we let it.”

“But where’s the energy coming from to fuel that kind of manifestation?” said Walker. “What’s powering the playback?”

“We are,” I said. “Whatever happened here is still happening and always will be. Grigor started this by drawing on the power of the human mass mind, and we’re part of the mass mind. Just by being here, we’ve reactivated the recording and powered it at the same time. X37 is a trap: Grigor’s revenge on a world that would allow such awful things to be done to him.”

“We’ve got to get out of here!” Peter was shouting now, his voice strident and ugly.

“Where can we go?” said Walker. “There’s nothing else out there! Just the woods, the cold, and certain death. So suck it in and be a man.”

“Something’s in the building with us,” said Honey. “I can hear it, coming up the stairs. It doesn’t sound . . . human.”

“We’ll all start hearing things soon,” I said. “Whatever scares us.”

“There must be something we can do!” said Peter. “You’re a Drood! Do something!”

“I think Grigor’s still here, in this building, in some form,” I said. “He’s the origin and the focus for the stone tape. We have to find what’s left of him and shut him down.”

“How?” said Walker.

“I’m open to suggestions,” I said. “I’m just jumping from one educated guess to another.”

“You’ve got the Sight,” said Honey. “And the armour. Find him for us, Eddie. Before our nightmares find us.”

“It’s not that simple,” I said.

“I just knew he was going to say that,” said Peter. “Didn’t you just know he was going to say that?”

“Shut up, Peter,” said Walker. “What’s the problem, Eddie?”

“The stone tape recorded what Grigor originally Saw,” I said carefully. “If I go looking for Grigor, I might See it too. If that should happen, kill me.”

“No problem,” said Honey.

I armoured up, and the golden strange matter flowed out and around me in a moment, insulating me from the city’s psychic assault. I hadn’t realised just how close to the edge I’d come until the armour brought me back. Everything in the city was now dedicated solely to the destruction of the human mind and soul. I took a deep breath to steady myself, and then looked out over the city through my featureless golden mask, my Sight sending my mind soaring over the broken city streets, searching for a single pattern: the last remaining traces of the man called Grigor. There were other patterns, strange and awful, surging through the streets and closing in on the building where I and my associates were hiding, but I couldn’t look at those patterns too closely. Man was not meant to stare upon the Medusa.

Something tugged at my mind, half a warning and half a summons, and I turned my Sight in that direction. Grigor looked back at me, nailed to a cross made of intertwined technology. The computer leads trailing from his head had wrapped themselves around his brow in a crown of thorns. He smiled at me, a cold and pitiless smile. His face was full of something more than just insanity, as though he had gone through madness and found something else on the other side.

Don’t fight me, he said.

“I must,” I said.

You need to See. To know, to understand why this is necessary. Why you have to die, for your own and humanity’s sake. When you know what I know, what I was made to know, you’ll want to die.

I couldn’t tell exactly who or what I was talking with. It wasn’t just the stone tape, a recording of past events. Something of Grigor himself had been stamped into the stone and concrete of X37. I could feel his presence, the ghost in the machine. It took every bit of willpower I had to turn my head away and shut down my Sight. I didn’t dare See what Grigor had Seen. A madman in Drood armour would be more dangerous to the world than any nightmare currently running through the streets of X37. Grigor’s presence receded into the distance, still trying to latch onto me, as I fell back into my head and shut down my armour. I was breathing hard, as though I’d just run a race and come scarily close to losing. My knees buckled, and I think I would have fallen if Walker hadn’t got a chair under me. Honey leaned in close, pushing her face right into mine, holding my eyes with hers.

“What is it?” she said. “What did you see, Eddie?”

“Grigor is quite definitely dead,” I said. “But unfortunately, not entirely departed. He’s the key to all this. Stop him, and we stop the nightmares, the city, everything.”

“All right; what do we do?” said Peter.

“Only thing we can do,” I said. “Grigor’s part of the stone tape, which exists through the city. So the whole city has to be destroyed. Reduced to ashes, and less than ashes. A physical and a psychic strike, to destroy Grigor and X37 on all the levels they currently inhabit. This entire city has become spiritually corrupt, a real and present danger to the whole of humanity. Body and soul.”

“How the hell are we supposed to take out an entire city?” said Honey.

“He’s lost it,” said Peter. “He’s raving.”

“No,” said Walker. “He’s right. Destroy the city and seed the ground with salt.”

“Wonderful!” said Peter. “Anyone got an exorcist on speed dial? Preferably one with side interests in nuclear devastation?”

“Shut up, Peter,” said Walker. “You’re becoming hysterical.”

“Even if I could contact Langley, which I can’t,” said Honey, “and call in a dozen long-range bombers armed with city busters . . . Langley would never authorise it. An unprovoked attack on Russian soil? We’re talking World War Three, and Hallelujah! The missiles are flying!”

“If we could contact the Russian authorities and explain . . .” said Walker.

“We can’t,” said Honey. “And anyway, what makes you think they’d believe a CIA agent, a Drood, and someone from the Nightside?”

“Good point,” said Walker.

“Bombs wouldn’t be enough anyway,” I said. “Not even thermonukes. You could reduce the whole city to one big crater that glowed in the dark, and the imprinting would still remain, bound to this specific location. Genius loci. Grigor’s revenge has been stamped on space itself.”

“So what do we do?” said Honey. “Could your family help?”

“That’s . . . what I’ve been considering,” I said slowly. “A psychic strike that would wipe the area clean. But you’d need an incredible amount of power for that; enough energy to burn out any human mind or combination of minds. Even if I could call home, which I can’t, no one there could help me with this. But there is a power source nearby . . . that I might be able to draw on. More than enough to do the job. But it means disturbing what lies sleeping under the permafrost. I think . . . I can tap into his power without waking him. But if I’m wrong . . . if he wakes up . . . We could end up worse off than we are now.”

“Worse?” said Peter, waving his arms around. “The whole city’s come alive and wants to kill us horribly with our own nightmares! What could be worse?”

“It’s time for the truth, Eddie,” said Walker. “We need to know. Who, or what, did your family bury here, all those years ago?”

“One of us,” I said. “He’s family. A Drood, put to sleep like a dog that’s gone bad, buried so deep he’s already halfway to the Hell he belongs in. Bound with iron chains, wrapped in potent spells and curses, left to sleep till Judgement Day and maybe even longer. Our greatest shame, our greatest failure. The Drood who tried to eat the world.

“Our torcs and our armour make us powerful beyond anything you’ve ever imagined, but for one of us, one Gerard Drood of the eleventh century, that wasn’t enough. He explored the possibilities of the torc, studied its nature more deeply than any of us had ever done before. He . . . upgraded his torc, using certain forbidden techniques and ancient machines, and used his torc to absorb the torcs of others. Hundreds of them: men, women and children. He became . . . unspeakably powerful. An eater of souls. A living god.

“Having defeated and subjugated the family, he set out to subdue all humanity to his will and remake the world in his own image. He very nearly succeeded. Whole countries fell beneath his influence; millions of people bent the knee and bowed the head and praised his unholy name. He carved his features into the surface of the moon so that the whole world could look up and see him smiling down on them.

“But there have always been more Droods than are officially acknowledged; field agents and . . . the like. The Matriarch called them in, all the Droods who still held out against the traitor’s will. She bound them into a Drood mass mind, hundreds of torcs working together against Gerard’s stolen torcs. And in the end, even that wasn’t enough to defeat him. All that power, and all they could do was put him to sleep, bind him tight, and bury him deep.

“Gerard Drood. Grendel Rex. The Unforgiven God.”

“I’ve heard of him!” said Peter. “He’s buried under Silbury Hill, in the southwest of England!”

“Actually, no,” I said. “We let that rumour get out as a distraction. Silbury Hill is a burial mound from Celtic times with so many legends wrapped around it that one more slipped in easily enough. No; we brought him here, to what in the eleventh century was the ends of the earth. A harsh and bitter place where no one with any sense would want to live. Where nobody would disturb him.”

“If he isn’t buried under Silbury Hill,” said Walker, “who is?”

I managed a small smile. “You can’t expect me to tell you all my family’s secrets.”

“Why let the rumour out anyway?” said Peter.

“Because Grendel Rex had followers,” I said patiently. “His kind always does. They can dig their tunnels into Silbury Hill forever and a day and never find anything.”

Honey was frowning. “I never heard of Grendel Rex before this. And I certainly never read about any such takeover in the history books.”

“We wiped all trace of him from history,” I said. “Destroyed every account, burned every book and manuscript, shut up everyone who tried to talk. We could do that, in those days. Only myth and legend remained, and we could live with that. Scrubbing the moon clean was a bit more difficult, but we managed.

“Do you understand now? Why I’m so reluctant to do something that might reawaken the Unforgiven God and let him loose on the world again?”

“Hell,” said Peter. “If the Tunguska Event didn’t wake him . . .” He paused. “Or was it supposed to, and failed?”

“A lot of my family wondered about that,” I said. “But . . . he slept on. Our ancestors did good work. That’s what gives me the confidence to try this. But . . . if I accidentally break the bonds that hold him, he will rise up. And perhaps this time not even the efforts of all the Droods and all our allies and all our weapons would be enough to put him down again.”

“Oh, come on!” said Honey. “Get over yourself, Drood! The world’s come a long way since the eleventh century. We have access to weapons and resources unheard of in those days. I speak for the CIA: we’ve put down living gods before in our time.”

Walker looked at her, and then at me. “Eddie, what is the worst that could happen if he did rise again?”

“He’d finish what he started,” I said. “Subjugate all humanity, reshape the continents according to his whim, absorb the souls of every living thing into himself, and leave us just enough of our minds to love and worship him. Hell on earth, forever and ever and ever. That’s what could happen, if I get this wrong.”

“Well,” said Walker. “Try not to do that, then.”

The bedlam in the street outside was growing louder all the time. Screams and howls that had as much of the beast in them as anything human. They came from all sides, surrounding the building. We were under siege by the reawakened ghosts of old horrors. The room seemed colder than ever; a spiritual cold, a bleakness of the soul. The shadows were very dark, like holes that could swallow you up, or down which you could fall forever. They moved sometimes, when you weren’t looking at them directly. The room was changing all the time in small, subtle ways. Growing larger or smaller or deeper, while the corners seemed to have too many angles.

I could feel my breathing coming fast and hard. I could feel my pulse racing and a vein throbbing almost painfully in my temple. I’ve been scared before; being a Drood doesn’t make you immune to pain or death or failure . . . but this was different. A different kind of fear: primal, almost pure. We were surrounded by nightmares crossed over into the waking world and closing in. Despite myself I remembered running from things in dreams: unspeakable, unbearable, implacable things that I could only escape from by waking up. And I couldn’t wake up from this.

Anything can happen in dreams; in bad dreams. The dead can walk again and say unforgivable things. Physical shapes lose their integrity, become uncertain, their edges loose and slippery, no longer tied down to shapes you can cope with. I could feel a whimper building in the back of my throat. Honey had a hand at her mouth, gnawing on a knuckle. Walker had his back against a wall, lashing his umbrella back and forth before him like a sword. Peter’s bulging eyes were darting this way and that, anticipating the coming of something awful that always seemed to be coming from somewhere else.

Soon we’d start to see each other as nightmares. Maybe even attack each other, because you couldn’t trust anything or anyone in a dream. Shadows were rising up everywhere, taking on unnerving shapes rich with terrible personal significance. The floor beneath my feet was soft and spongy, and the walls were leaning inward, slumping forward like tired old men. Cracks in the walls took on the shape of human faces, smiling at what was to come.

Heavy hands slammed against the closed laboratory door. It shook in its frame, the wood bulging unnaturally under the force of the blows. Dreadful voices from outside, crying, Let us in! Let us in! I armoured up, but it didn’t help. Even that couldn’t protect me from the unleashed power of my own nightmares. I grabbed the nearest piece of heavy equipment and hauled it over to the door to make a barricade, but the solid metal turned soft and putrid and fell apart in my armoured hands. I couldn’t depend on anything anymore.

That’s the real horror of nightmares.

Lethal Harmony of Kathmandu and the Blue Fairy walked through the closed door as though it wasn’t there. I backed away. They looked at me accusingly, heads lolling limply on their broken necks. Honey saw them too. She opened fire with her shimmering crystal weapon. The energy blast shot right through the figures and blew up the door behind them. And then the weapon wilted and twisted in Honey’s hands, curling and coiling slowly and deliberately like a snake. Honey threw it away from her in horror.

Katt and Blue turned into my mother and my father and advanced slowly on me. They didn’t look like zombies, or the living dead, or two people who’d been in their graves for most of my life. They looked just the way they always did, when I thought of them: the way they looked in the last photograph taken, before they went off on the mission that killed them. Except they weren’t smiling now. I backed away, and they came after me. They didn’t say anything. They didn’t have to. They looked accusing, disappointed, damning.

“No!” I yelled so loudly it hurt my throat. “My parents wouldn’t think that of me! They know better! They wouldn’t do this! You’re not them! ”

And in the face of my certainty, they faded softly and silently away.

Honey grabbed my golden arm with a shaking hand. “How did you do that?” she said shrilly.

“I have worse things than that on my conscience,” I said.

“Then do something!” shouted Walker. “Before the worse things show up!”

Peter was spinning around and around now, convinced there was something sneaking up on him from behind, no matter which way he looked. Walker began to shrink, in sudden jerks and shudders, until he was just a child again, swamped in a man’s suit. He tried to say something but couldn’t get the words out, and he began to cry helplessly. Honey dropped down abruptly, sinking into a floor that had taken on the consistency of quicksand, sucking her down in slow, purposeful gulps. I grabbed her arm and tried to haul her out, but the drag of the quicksand was too great. I pulled harder, and Honey screamed in agony.

“Let go, Eddie! You’ll pull my shoulder out of my socket before it’ll let me go! You have to risk waking your sleeping god! Nothing could be worse than this. At least he’s real!”

And so I let her go. Turned my back on them all, drew on the power of my torc and my armour, and made contact with Grendel Rex, the Unforgiven God. The devil in his cold dark Hel, deep and deep under the permafrost.

Finding him was easier than I expected. My mind shot across the miles separating us in a moment, my Sight drawn like a magnet by the bond we shared. Of family. My vision sank down into the frozen earth, and immediately I was hit by the impact of his ancient presence, huge and forbidding and still impossibly powerful. I felt like a scuba diver, swimming through the cold night of the ocean and coming unexpectedly upon a blue whale or a giant squid. I felt so small, overwhelmed by the sheer size and scale of him. Just a mote in his eye.

I carefully reached out and touched his power. It was like sticking a drinking straw into an ocean or dipping a bucket into a bottomless well. The power surged into me, rich and raging, all I needed and more. And one great eye slowly opened in the dark and looked at me.

Well, now. Who disturbs me at this time?

I stopped where I was, absolutely frozen by fear. “I’m Edwin Drood,” I said finally. “Just . . . doing my job. Trying to save humanity from destruction.”

So the sheep still have their shepherds. Why come to me, the old pariah, for help?

“Because what I’m doing is important and necessary. Because I’ve nowhere else to go. And because . . . I’m family.”

Ah, yes. Of course. Anything for the family. What is this threat you fear so much that you’re prepared to make a deal with the devil?

I started to explain, but he pushed effortlessly past my defences and took what he needed from my mind.

Yes. I see. Very well, little Drood. Take what you need.

I should have just taken the energy and left, but I had to know. “What did Grigor see in the depths of our DNA? What could he have seen to terrify him so completely? Do you know?”

Perhaps. Here is the truth, for those that have the strength to hear it.

We can all be gods, or devils. We can all shine like the stars. We were never meant to stay human. We’re just the chrysalis from which something greater can emerge. I think perhaps your Grigor caught a glimpse of what we really are, and could be, and he couldn’t cope. There is so much more to reality than man and woman, gods and devils. So much more.

The great eye slowly closed, like an eclipse moving across the face of the sun. I’m tired. It’s not time to wake up yet. Tell the family . . . I’ll be seeing them.

I ran, holding myself together through sheer force of will. The power I’d taken burned inside me, demanding release. Already it was consuming me from within. If I didn’t let it loose soon, it would consume me. I left the permafrost behind, my mind streaking over the frozen forest, and the city loomed up before me like a bug on a windshield. The streets were full of unspeakable things. Buildings rose and fell or melted into each other. A tidal wave of screaming faces swept down a street like so many possessed and terrified masks.

The sun was a giant face, screaming with rage. Grigor’s face.

I called up all the power I’d taken and bent it to my will. I held it in one hand, spitting and fizzing like a million lightning bolts, and then I threw it at the city. A great cry went up from the milling streets of rage and defiance and soul-deep horror, but I was riding the lightning with my mind. I slammed it down into the dark heart of X37 and drove the nightmares out; up and out, into the sun with Grigor’s face. For a moment I held all the writhing horror of X37 in one place, every last bit of Grigor’s revenge . . . and then I sent it away. Threw it in the one direction it could never return from.

Into the past.

I watched with godlike eyes as the compressed psychic energy shot back through time, screaming and howling all the way, until finally it couldn’t hold itself together any longer and it exploded into nothingness over the empty plain of Tunguska, on 7:17 a.m., June 30, 1908.

I woke up back inside my own head, lying on the laboratory floor. The power was gone, and I didn’t feel like a god anymore. I was exhausted, I hurt all over, and my eyes felt like they’d been sand-papered. I sat up slowly, wincing all the way. I wasn’t wearing my armour anymore. I looked around me. The floor was hard and certain beneath me, the walls were just walls, and the building and the street outside were silent again. X37 was no longer haunted by the ghosts of its own atrocities.

The floor had spat Honey out. She was sitting on a chair, shaken and trembling, but already bringing herself back under control. Walker was himself again, calm and collected and giving all his attention to adjusting his cuffs. Peter was trying very hard to look as though nothing had happened. I rose slowly to my feet, and they all turned to look at me.

I told them what had happened and what I’d done. I didn’t tell them what Grendel Rex had said concerning human DNA. He was a devil, and devils always lie. Except when the truth can hurt you more.

“So, you’re the cause of what happened in 1908?” said Peter. “You’re responsible for the Tunguska Event?”

“A Drood did it,” said Honey. “I should have known.”

“Proving it to my grandfather is going to be a tad difficult, though,” said Peter.

“Are you kidding?” I said. “You can’t hide something like this! Psychics and telepaths across the world will have been deafened by what I just did. You won’t be able to stop them talking about it, though my family will undoubtedly try. Luckily only the four of us know the details, and I think it’s better we keep it that way.”

“Or the Droods will come and make us forget, like they did over Grendel Rex?” said Honey.

“Yes,” I said.

“Just another reason why we don’t let you people operate in the Nightside,” murmured Walker. “Only I am allowed to be that arbitrary.”

“Can we please go out and find a food store now?” said Peter. “There must be some canned goods here somewhere. If I was any hungrier, my stomach would leap up my throat and eat my head.”

“You know, I think I’d pay good money to see that,” said Honey.

We left the laboratory and the building and set off through the deserted streets. I hung back a bit, considering the others thoughtfully while they were still relatively open and vulnerable. Peter interested me the most. I’d never seen him really scared before. In fact, for all his youth and inexperience with the greater world, he’d taken the Loch Ness monster and the Hyde pretty much in his stride. He was interested, even impressed, but when the time came for action he didn’t hesitate, just got stuck in with the rest of us. Rather more than you’d expect from a man whose only experience of spycraft was in industrial espionage.

So; he was Alexander King’s grandson, after all.

But it was useful to know he had his limits. The nightmares had shattered his self-control, reduced him to hysterics. Perhaps because they were so clearly outside of his control. In fact . . . when it came to fighting the Loch Ness monster and the Hyde, he’d taken the first opportunity to fall back and let the rest of us do the hard work while he filmed it all with his precious camera phone.

Whatever happened, I had to get my hands on that phone.

Walker fell back to walk with me, and we talked quietly together. He deliberately slowed our pace, allowing some distance to develop between us and Honey and Peter.

“While you were gone,” he said, quietly and entirely matter-of-fact, “someone tried to kill me. Even in the midst of all that was happening. With so much madness running loose it’s hard to be sure, but someone quite definitely tried to remove my head from my shoulders from behind. Would have succeeded with anyone else, but fortunately my years in the Nightside have made me very hard to kill.”

“Even with the Authorities gone?” I said.

“Especially now they’re gone. I’m protected in ways you can’t imagine. But the point is, we now know who killed Lethal Harmony and the Blue Fairy. It has to be either Honey or Peter.”

“Always assuming,” I said, “that you’re telling the truth.”

“Ah,” said Walker. “There is that, yes.”

“None of us can be trusted,” I said. “We’re all agents.”