The Spy Who Haunted Me

by Simon R. Green

  “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 a
chieve? 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.”