“I’m going to Little Stoke,” I said. Because it needed doing, and because I knew a trip into that disturbed place would destroy Harry. So, tired as I was after the arms fair and Ammonia Vom Acht, it was all down to me. Again.
“You are not going in on your own,” Molly said firmly. “I’m going with you.”
“Not a good idea . . .” I said carefully.
“You never take me anywhere,” Molly said cheerfully. “You wouldn’t last ten minutes in that place without me to watch your back, and you know it.”
“We do have other field agents in the family,” said the Sarjeant. “You don’t have to do this, Edwin.”
“I’m the only field agent who’s right here, right now, with experience operating inside ghoulvilles,” I said. “Who else is there?”
The Sarjeant-at-Arms looked at Callan, who shrugged uncomfortably. “We have five field agents currently operating in England, but none of them could get back to the Hall inside three or four hours.”
“And even then, you’d still have to wait for the Armourer to find a way into the dark circle,” I said. “Whereas I . . . have the Merlin Glass.”
“Hold hard,” said the Armourer, looking up from his work. “There’s always the chance that if you use the Glass to open a door between here and there, what’s inside the town might burst through into Drood Hall!”
“I would never let that happen,” said Ethel, a touch haughtily. “I guarantee the integrity of Drood Hall against any and all threats. Trust me. I’m a doctor.”
“I still think you should rest, Eddie,” said the Armourer. “Let me design something to protect you, give you an edge. . . .”
“There isn’t time, Uncle Jack,” I said. “We have to sort this mess out before it starts spreading.”
“You’re right,” said the Armourer. “Get us all the information you can. And, Molly, don’t let him do anything too dumb in there.”
“Damn right,” said Molly.
“I don’t have anything useful to offer you,” said the Armourer. “And this bloody thing is taking a lot longer than I thought it would. . . . Remember your armour is equipped to study your surroundings and record everything it encounters. Knowledge can be ammunition in a situation like this. So bring back as much data as you can.”
I looked at him for a moment. “Do you have anything, any weapon that could do what the Satanists did in Little Stoke?”
“No,” said the Armourer. “Not a damned thing. Not even in the Armageddon Codex. What has been done in that town is a crime against reality itself.”
“How long before you could come up with some kind of defence?” said the Sarjeant.
“Depends on what kind of information Eddie brings back,” said the Armourer. “So let’s stop wasting his time with unnecessary chatter. Eddie, go.”
“Got it, Uncle Jack,” I said. But I still hesitated and looked at Molly. “You’ve seen what’s happening in the town. There’s no guarantee that Drood armour will be enough to protect me. And you don’t even have that.”
“I have been to Heaven and Hell and Limbo,” said Molly. “And a whole bunch of other really extreme places not even dreamt of in your limited philosophies. I can survive this.”
“Of course you can,” I said. “I’d bet on you against the whole damned universe.”
“You say the sweetest things sometimes,” said Molly.
I activated the Merlin Glass and opened up a doorway into what remained of Little Stoke, while everyone else retreated to what they hoped was a safe distance. A lot of people hid behind things. Like that would make any difference. A series of violent images swept across the full-size Glass, flashing by so fast I couldn’t keep up with them. Stars and flames and blindingly bright lights; dark, monstrous shapes rearing up to look in my direction; the whole physical world grown hideously soft and leprous; all of it under a sky the colour of dried blood. I looked away for a moment, to rest my eyes, and found Harry hadn’t retreated with the others.
“You don’t have to do this, Eddie.”
“Yes, I do, Harry,” I said. “It’s the job.”
He nodded briefly. I turned to Molly, who was peering into the Merlin Glass, fascinated.
“You ready, girl?”
“I came out of the womb ready.”
“I can believe that. Probably demanding a stiff drink and a harsh word with the midwife. Let’s do this, before one of us gets a rush of common sense to the head.”
“When has that ever happened?”
We laughed briefly, I armoured up and we both stepped through the Merlin Glass. Out of the sane and sensible world into a place where reality had been broken. With malice aforethought, the bastards.
Stepping into what was left of Little Stoke was like being clubbed around the head with a baseball bat soaked in LSD. Everything was wrong, different, corrupted . . . and constantly changing. The ground surged and rocked under my feet, rising and falling like a ship at sea. I glared about me, but it was hard to see anything clearly through the disturbed air. My armour was doing its best to protect and insulate me from my surroundings, swiftly adapting to cope with this new, ever-changing world. I could actually feel my armour straining as it thickened and improved itself, moment by moment. My second skin was under constant assault from a world that hated it.
Gravity came and went, fluctuating wildly, so that I felt light as air one moment, and as though I had a mountain on my back the next. Nothing was constant or dependable. Except my armour. It pushed back at the world, refusing to be affected or altered in any part, and I stood straight and tall under a bloody sky, safe and solid and untouched by anything Little Stoke could throw at me.
I looked around for Molly and found she was standing right beside me, but now floating quite happily in midair. She stood on nothing, defying the uncertain ground, surrounded by a shimmering field of unnatural forces. She looked down at me and I nodded briefly. She gave me a thumbs-up, and I went back to studying the surroundings. It was hard to get a hold on anything. Whichever way I looked, nothing made sense. Directions seemed to snap back and forth, so that left and right changed places or swirled around, and even up and down weren’t always where I thought they should be. Little Stoke did remind me of a ghoulville, as I’d expected; but this town was worse, much worse. Someone had studied ghoulvilles, and learned from them, improved on them. The sheer psychic pressure of not being able to depend on anything was almost overwhelming. All I could feel was loss, and horror, and growing hysteria. My sanity was taking a real beating. Part of me wanted to fall to the ground, curl up in a foetal ball and pray for it all to go away. But I couldn’t do that. I was a Drood, and I had a job to do.
I looked up. “Molly, is this Hell?”
“Not even close,” she said flatly. “Hell is worse. This is chaos. Hell has purpose.”
“You’d know,” I said. “Hello, War Room? Hello? Callan? Edith? Can anyone hear me? Anyone?”
“Well?” said Molly, after a moment.
“Apparently not,” I said. “I’m reaching out through my armour, but no one’s answering. We’re on our own, Molly.”
“Best way,” she said briskly. “We know what we’re doing.”
“Since when?”
“Hush, lover; think positive. Okay, this is a seriously nasty place. I’m not sure we’re even on Earth anymore.”
“Technically, I suppose we’re not,” I said. “Local conditions have been . . . rewritten.”
“I’m not picking up any traces of major magical workings,” said Molly. “You couldn’t do something this big without leaving serious handprints all over everything.”
I remembered the Armourer’s advice, and had my armour probe and investigate my immediate surroundings. I concentrated in a certain way, and the armour’s findings appeared on the inside of my mask, floating before my eyes. All kinds of readings and graphs and scales, half of which meant nothing to me. My uncle Jack is the scientist. It’s all I can do to program my TiVo. But . . .
; “No radiation,” I said to Molly. “No toxins, none of the usual dangerous energies . . . Everything else . . . doesn’t make sense. I’ve never encountered anything quite like this.”
“Your armour is smoking,” said Molly.
“What?”
“Smoking! There’s steam or something boiling right off your armour. Is everything all right inside there?”
I felt fine. I felt great. I felt sharp and strong and totally alive, as I always did when wearing my armour. It was all that was keeping me sane. I looked down at myself, and sure enough thick curls of smoke were rising up off my golden torso and arms.
“I think my armour is reacting to the new environment,” I said to Molly. “Or possibly . . . the other way round. The town is trying to break through my armour to get to me, and my armour is fighting it off. You could say there’s a war going on between the stability of the strange matter and the changing conditions of the town. And so far, my armour is kicking the town’s arse. I think strange matter is too weird even for here. I think . . . reality here is breaking up on contact with my armour. How cool is that? The one true thing in this crazy new world. Though how long it will last is anybody’s guess. I say we get this job done as quickly as possible, and then get the hell out of here.”
“Best idea you’ve had so far,” said Molly.
I looked up at her. “Are you okay inside that spangly bubble of yours?”
“This is a spiritual force shield,” Molly said firmly. “I am maintaining Earth-normal conditions around me by sheer effort of will. Anyone else would have the sense to be impressed.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t do impressed.”
“I know. It’s one of your better qualities.”
“How long can you maintain that bubble?”
“I think we should get moving. Right now.”
But still, something held me in place as I looked around me. “Why did the Satanists do this? What’s the point?”
“A demonstration, probably,” said Molly. “A show of power. ‘Look what we can do. We can smash reality. Break all the rules and let chaos thrive. Better not stand against us, or else . . .’ Standard Satanist bullying. This is as much a psychological weapon as anything else. They’re saying, ‘We can destroy everything you believe in and depend on.’ ”
I had my armour scan the town for life signs, for any traces of human survivors, but my armour’s sensors were overloaded and confused by the weird conditions. I was picking up life signs all over the place, but none of them made any sense. I said as much to Molly, and she nodded thoughtfully, concentrating. She pointed in one direction, hesitated, and then pointed in another.
“People. Definitely people. Unaffected, unharmed. I can See them in a safe place, shining like diamonds in the dark. Maybe . . . fifty of them. They’re protected by something I can’t quite get a handle on. I think perhaps they were overlooked, or left behind. . . .”
“Fifty people?” I said. “Out of a town of some eight thousand? Left behind, abandoned, trapped in this horror . . .” I could feel the anger building within me, cold and raging. “I will not stand for this. I won’t see innocent people treated like this! Lead the way, Molly. We are going to find these people, get them out of this bloody mess and take them home. . . . And when I find the bastards who did this to them, I will put the fear of God and Droods into them!”
Molly smiled fondly at me. “I think that’s what I like best about you, Eddie. You always get really angry about the right things.”
I nodded. I was too angry to speak.
Molly headed deeper into what remained of the small country town of Little Stoke. She strode along, her feet hammering on the disturbed air like the drumbeats of an approaching army. I followed her, trusting to her witchy Sight to guide us, even though every direction felt the same to me. It was hard to make progress in a place where streets had no beginning and no ending, as though the world moved under our feet and we stayed put. We walked down one street several times before we realised what was happening: that its far end was attached to its beginning, like an endless Möbius strip. I lost my patience and my temper and applied a lateral thinking solution to the problem by turning abruptly sideways and smashing my way through one of the buildings. Bricks broke and shattered stickily under my hammering golden fists, some of them cracking into moist fragments, like exploded fruit. I broke through the wall and strode through the house, bludgeoning my way through room after room, rubble raining down on my armoured shoulders, until finally I burst out the other side and into a new street. Molly followed close behind me. We set off down the street, one that had sense enough not to piss me off, and Molly quickly picked up the trail again.
I couldn’t trust anything I saw, even through all the filters and protections built into my golden mask. Not everything I saw was actually there, or acted the way it should act, and things became other things became things I had no name for. I kept slogging doggedly on after Molly, trusting her to guide me through the ever-shifting chaos, kept on slamming my heavy feet down, forcing my way through anything the town could send at me, fuelled by willpower and a stubborn refusal to be beaten. There were people depending on me.
Often it seemed to me that Molly was changing direction again and again, choosing ways that made no sense at all, going up and down and back and forth and not getting anywhere. But I trusted her, and I didn’t trust the world, so I kept going.
My armour was still smoking and steaming as the rotten world fought to get through the strange matter and get at me.
Cars parked in the street were now strangely alive: no longer metal, but made up of meat and bone and cartilage. Ghastly red striations of muscle all along their length, with eyes instead of lights and snapping fanged mouths where radiator grilles should have been. The tyres were pink and sweaty, like internal organs pushed out into the light. The cars made sounds like children crying as they lurched up and down the streets, attacking one another, tearing and rending, their glistening hides oozing sweat and blood and musk. One of the cars came right at us, howling like some jungle creature, and I stood my ground and let it crash into me. For all its speed and weight it slammed to a halt immediately, its fleshy hood crumpled against my armour, torn meat leaking blood and pus. It backed away, crying miserably, hawking up blood, and every other car fell on it and ate it alive. Molly and I kept going and didn’t look back.
Time couldn’t be trusted in this broken place any more than space. Linear time, cause and effect, past and present and future came and went, following strange new patterns and connections. Sometimes it seemed like I was leading Molly, or that we were already on the way back from wherever we were going, so that even talking became difficult.
“Still heading for the survivors,” said Molly.
“How should I know?” I said.
“I don’t think before means what it used to.”
“I’m sure we’ve been this way before.”
“Where are we going?”
“Is any of this making sense to you?”
“Are we nearly there yet?”
“I think time is out of joint.”
“What?” said Molly.
“What?” I said.
After that, Molly dropped down so that she drifted along only a few inches above the uncertain ground, and I held her hand firmly in mine. I could feel it even through my armour. With our hands held tight together, we couldn’t be separated.
Buildings seemed to crawl and seep and run away like slow liquids, surging out across the street like plastic tides. I fought my way through them, tearing horrid sticky substances apart with my armoured hands. Molly followed after me, one of her hands resting on my golden shoulder, until I had a hand free for her to take hold of again. Several buildings all melted away in a moment and surged along the street towards us like a creeping tidal wave, with bits of brick and broken window and shattered doors still protruding. I ran straight at the wave, golden fists clenched. I wouldn’t be slowed and I wouldn’t be stopped, no
t while people here still needed my help. Molly blasted the creeping wall with lightning bolts from her outstretched fingertips, and the tidal wave soaked them up. I hit the wave hard, smashing my way through by brute strength. The wave tried to cling to my armour, but couldn’t get a hold. I burst out the other side and kept going, while Molly rose majestically over the wave and then dropped gracefully down to join me again.
We both felt safer, saner, more real . . . when we could feel each other’s hand.
I had no idea how long we’d been in the town. Hours, days, years . . . It was like one of those dreams that seem to go on forever, one thing after another, until you know you’re dreaming and struggle to wake up, and can’t.
Sometimes the houses on either side of the road changed into things. Living things. Molly and I stuck to the middle of the road to avoid them. Brick and stone became plant and fungus, windows were eyes, and doors swung slowly open to reveal sweaty organic passageways, pulsing throats lined with teeth like rotating knives. Some of the changed houses roared like dinosaurs, or howled like souls newly damned to Hell. Some slumped together, becoming bigger, greater creatures, with alien shapes and impossible angles that hurt to look at with merely human eyes. They didn’t bother with Molly or me. They had their own unknowable concerns.
Bright lights went streaking up and down the street like living comets, shooting this way and that and bouncing off buildings, laughing shrilly. Low voices boomed deep under the ground, saying terrible things. The sky was red and purple, like clotting blood, and the sun was a dark cinder giving off unnatural light. Awful shapes came and went, monstrous things, big and small. Some of them walked through the shifting world as though only they were real and everything else mere phantoms. Molly and I gave them plenty of room. When the Satanist conspiracy broke reality in this place, they blasted doors open that had been closed for millennia. Things from Outside had found a way in; things that would still have to be tracked down and dealt with even after this particular mess had been cleaned up. The family would have to keep an eye on this area for centuries to come.
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