“Ethel! I need to talk to you!”
Her voice issued immediately out of the air before us, and I relaxed a little. Molly gave my hand one last squeeze, and let it go.
“I’m here, Peter,” said Ethel. “You need to find Edmund. Quickly.”
“Why?” I said. “What’s he done?”
“The interior of the Hall has changed,” said Ethel. “Edmund has shut down the spatial suppressor fields.”
Molly looked at me and then at Peter.
“Which fields? What does that mean? And why are you both looking like someone just cut you off at the knees?”
“It means we’re in real trouble,” I said. “If the suppressor fields are down, all the secret rooms and forbidden areas will have unfolded out of their enforced exile and burst back into reality. All the really bad places we had to get rid of, for our own safety. So now the interior of the Hall is a lot bigger than it used to be, to make room for all the extra locations.”
“Ethel!” said Peter. “How was Edmund able to shut down the suppressor fields? How did he get past all the safety protocols?”
“I don’t know,” Ethel said calmly. “I can’t see him. And you have no idea just how annoying that is. Presumably it’s something he learned in his world. I think you should be concerned as to whether he’s done this to achieve some particular purpose, or . . . to distract you from something else he’s up to. I couldn’t say. Anyway, please find him and stop him and put everything back where it was, because this new state of affairs is proving very distracting to my rarefied senses.”
“Can’t you do something to put things right?” said Molly.
“No,” said Ethel. “The problem for me is, technically speaking, there’s nothing wrong. The Hall is the way it should be: complete at last. Except . . . it’s come back all cobbled together. I’m seeing overlapping locations, spaces wrapped around each other, and rooms full of other rooms. It’s intriguing, I’ll give you that, but it’s starting to get on my nerves. I think I’d have a headache if I had a head to have it in.”
“This day just keeps getting better and better,” said Molly. “Look, I can see this new situation complicates things, but why are you all sounding so concerned?”
“The excluded rooms and settings were forced out of our reality for a reason,” said Peter. “To protect us from what was in them. We have to deal with this before we can deal with Edmund. Let’s go, children.”
“Go where?” said Molly.
“I’m thinking!” said Peter. “I feel like an explorer who’s just discovered he can’t trust his map.”
He looked up and down the hallway, chose one direction apparently at random, and plunged off down it. I hurried after him, for want of anything better to do. Molly stepped out beside me, grumbling under her breath. Our footsteps sounded strangely muffled and inexact. All around us directions and dimensions felt tentative and uncertain. As though Space itself wasn’t as tightly nailed down as it used to be. Peter chose a sharp right turn at the last moment, but when we rounded the corner we all slammed to a halt. Because it wasn’t safe to go any farther.
The architecture of the Hall had become dangerously warped and twisted. Different styles from different periods were mixed together, as though they’d been superimposed on top of one another. Corridors criss-crossed at insane angles, bursting out of floors and ceilings, defying gravity and common sense. Rooms protruded from cracked-open walls, and some of their returned contents looked centuries old.
In the end I took the lead, because Peter wasn’t in any state to. He just stood there, shaking his head and muttering. I had to yell at him just to get him moving again. Not because he was afraid, but because it was all simply too much for him. He wasn’t as adaptable as he used to be. I led the way down the corridor, steering well clear of anything unfamiliar. Doors hung open to every side, giving glimpses into rooms whose contents clashed violently. The old and the new had been jammed together, forced to share the same space. Fixtures and furnishings from different historical periods had materialised inside one another. Chairs thrust out of tabletops, a chandelier protruded from the side of a wardrobe, and half a classical statue rose up out of the floor like a swimmer surfacing from a lake. I could see candles and oil lamps, gas fittings and Art Deco electric lights. And a classical stone fountain that dripped blood.
We kept going. Stairways rose before us, only to end abruptly because the floors and landings they once led to had been replaced or remodelled. There were doors in the floor, ready to drop open like trapdoors, and windows within windows, showing fragmented views. Molly was fascinated. She kept wanting to stop and examine everything, until she took in just how worried Peter and I were.
“What’s the big problem?” she said. “All right, the Hall’s a bit more crowded now, but it’s much more interesting!”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “It’s like . . . the Hall was under siege long ago, and all the things and places that threatened it were made to go away. All the rooms and spaces too dangerous to be allowed, or too dreadful to be contemplated.”
“And now they’ve come home again,” said Peter. “All our sins returned.”
“You know, Eddie,” said Molly, “the more I learn about your family and its history, the more I think you should all have been throttled at birth.”
“You’re not the first to think that.” I glowered. “On top of everything else, this new arrangement doesn’t look too stable. Like it could all collapse in on itself at any moment, and drag everything else in after it.”
“Are we talking about a black hole?” said Molly.
“I’m trying very hard not to,” I said.
“We have to put the hidden rooms back!” said Peter. “While we still can. The longer it takes us, the more firmly established the returned spaces will become, and the more power it will take to force them back out of the world again.”
“Why did Edmund do this?” I said. “Could he be trying to undermine the basic stability of the Hall and bring everything down?”
“You heard Ethel,” said Peter. “He could have done this just to keep us occupied, so he could concentrate on setting up something even worse.”
“What do you think, Ethel?” I said. “Are you seeing anything else happening inside the Hall?”
We waited, but there was no response.
“Don’t say she’s started sulking now,” said Molly.
“Maybe she’s got something else on her mind,” I said. “Who can say with Ethel? Let’s go find Edmund.”
“And then shut him down with extreme prejudice,” said Molly.
“I like her,” said Peter. “I don’t care what everyone else says.”
We pressed on through the transformed Hall, avoiding the architectural distortions and distractions as best we could, until we turned another unfamiliar corner and slammed to another sudden halt. Peter and I exchanged a worried look.
“I wish you’d stop doing that!” Molly said sharply. “What is it now?”
“Even allowing for all the new intrusions, the route we’ve been following should have brought us to the Ghost Gallery,” said Peter. “But it doesn’t seem to be here any more. Something else has taken its place.”
Molly looked at me. “Ghost Gallery?”
“Just a name now,” I said. “It used to be where the ghosts of all the family members who’d died fighting honourably were allowed to walk. The practice was shut down long ago.”
“Why?” said Molly.
“It got too crowded,” said Peter.
Where the long stone gallery should have been, with its rows of tall, elegant pillars and comfortable seats, we were now looking at a great open space . . . and the huge, intricate mosaic that covered the entire floor. A brightly coloured and insanely detailed scene depicting two great armies at war. Knights in medieval armour, bearing longswords and battle-axes,
going head-to-head with golden-armoured Droods armed with strange glowing weapons. It was clear the fighting had been going on for some time. Dead bodies lay everywhere, half-sunk in the bloody, churned-up mud of the battlefield. Shattered steel, and ruptured gold. Weapons clashed and men struggled, while blood and gore flew on the air. Vivid colours flared in the night sky, suggesting magics at work, or strange sciences. The sheer savagery on view was almost overwhelming, with every fight to the death and no quarter asked or given.
“When did this happen?” Molly said quietly.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I never saw this before. Never even heard of anything like it. But those have to be King Arthur’s knights. I recognise the armour.”
“From Camelot?” said Molly.
“No,” said Peter. “Later than that. Those are London Knights at war with the Droods. A vicious and bloody affair, by all accounts. Sixteenth Century, I think.”
“How come you’ve heard about this and I haven’t?” I said.
“Because I trained to be a family historian as a young man,” said Peter. He smiled briefly, sadly. “I dug up all kinds of interesting things that the family had forgotten. My mistake lay in thinking someone would be grateful. You see, the very-secret agents didn’t pick me to be one of them; the Matriarch insisted they take me, to shut me up. And then she burned every book I’d found and everything I’d written. So no one could follow in my footsteps.”
He strode forward across the huge mosaic. Staring straight ahead. Molly and I went after him. I couldn’t help but look down at the destruction and the slaughter. The blood, the horror, and the death of so many good men on both sides.
“This is the Sequestered Square,” said Peter. “Commemorating a rather nasty quarrel between our two houses. Hundreds died on both sides, before wiser heads prevailed. It took a long time before the London Knights and the Droods would talk to each other again, or even recognise each other’s existence.”
I remembered the bad feelings I’d encountered when I had clashed with the London Knights a while back. They made a lot more sense now.
“Peace, or at least somewhat better relations, was finally reestablished at the end of the Nineteenth Century,” said Peter. “After both sides were forced to work together against a common enemy. I don’t know who. Just another thing that’s lost to us . . . That’s when the Matriarch got rid of this Square, so we could pretend it never happened. Official Drood history is full of these lacunae; deliberate gaps no one will ever talk about, because pulling on one thread could unravel everything. So many secret and shameful things have been removed from the records and driven physically out of our reality.”
“The very-secret histories . . . ,” I said.
“It might do the family good,” said Molly, “to be forced to acknowledge all of this. Maybe you should just . . . let it stay.”
“You don’t understand,” said Peter. “Not all the places we forced out of this world were empty. Some were inhabited.” He stiffened suddenly, and a look of sheer horror swept over his face. “If Edmund’s let everything loose . . .”
He set off again, moving at a surprisingly fast pace for a man of his years. I hurried after him, with Molly dogging my heels. I didn’t want to lose my way in this strange new version of Drood Hall. We left the Square and hurried on through a series of empty corridors and deserted galleries, only some of which were familiar to me. I wasn’t even sure which wing we were in any more. It felt . . . disconcerting to be lost in my own home. I stuck close behind Peter, and just hoped he knew where he was going.
We passed through rooms that had been turned inside out, and followed stairways that led up and along the walls. Space itself seemed to stretch and twist, like the passageways we run down in dreams that seem like they’re never going to end. Gravity became distorted in places—the result of too many locations crammed into one setting—so that we had to struggle up steep hills while following perfectly level corridors. I wasn’t thrown; such things were not uncommon in my family home. Molly thought they were fun.
Windows looked out on views from centuries past. Roughly clad peasants worked the fields, gathering in the harvest. Armoured knights rode brightly caparisoned horses through a howling storm. Men in animal skins danced and caterwauled inside rings of standing stones. Men practised their archery after church, and soldiers drilled with flint-lock muskets. And sometimes things that weren’t men at all looked back at us through the windows.
Doors opened onto rooms full of forgotten trophies, spoils from wars no one was allowed to remember. THE FIGHTING SHIPS OF THE CANNIBAL CORSAIRS, read one sign. In a great open hangar of a room, huge sailing ships had been mounted proudly on display, with sails fashioned from tightly stretched human skin. Their bulkheads sweated blood, and rotting strands of rigging looked like skeins of nerves. The ships were breathing. Slowly, heavily, as though troubled by bad dreams. Heavy iron spikes had been driven through their hulls and deep into the stone floor, to hold them in place.
“Where are their crews?” I said to Peter.
“There are prisons within prisons,” he said, not stopping.
THE CURSED JEWELS OF OPAR-LENG, proclaimed a sign on another open door. Apparently the jewels had been surgically implanted in the chests and bellies of dead men and women. They sat slumped in rows of chairs, held in place by lengths of silver barbed wire wrapped round and round them, as though someone had been afraid the dead might rise and walk away. The jewels shone with a sick, feverish intensity.
Another room was full of stuffed and mounted elves with empty eye sockets. Just standing around, in realistic poses, like an interrupted garden party. There was no sign on the door.
“Why would anyone do that?” said Molly.
“Remember the scarecrows we make out of our enemies, to act as guardians against intruders?” said Peter. “Droods bear grudges like no one else.”
One room was full of severed hands. Hundreds of them, scrabbling and scuttling across the bare wooden floor. Clambering endlessly over each other, like so many pallid crabs or spiders. Making low, quiet skittering sounds. Molly looked at me, and all I could do was shrug helplessly.
None of what we saw seemed to surprise Peter. It just made him angrier and more concerned, driving him on. Even when Molly and I would have liked to stop for a better look. Or just to close the doors.
• • •
We finally ended up hurrying through a section of the Hall I vaguely recognised. We were in the North Wing now, not far from the main conference rooms. Things seemed calmer, more settled. Several corridors went by without showing us anything upsetting. I moved in beside Peter for a quiet word.
“I’ve never met a Drood who knew as much about our secret past as you. Especially the parts that aren’t supposed to exist. All the dirty linen and suppressed secrets of our family. You’re not just a very-secret agent or a failed historian. What are you, really?”
“Later,” growled Peter. He was seriously out of breath now, but he wouldn’t slow his pace.
We passed through a great open hall full of armoured Droods, standing utterly still. Not posed; more like a group of people caught in mid-action, forever. Caught off guard, caught by surprise, like insects trapped in amber.
We threaded our way through the silent golden figures, careful not to touch any of them. Molly frowned about her and then at me.
“Casualties of the first Time War,” I said.
“The first Time War?” said Molly.
“We made it never happen,” I said. “But there was some fall-out.”
“You knew about this,” Molly said accusingly.
“We all do,” I said. “It’s one of our great cautionary tales about using weapons you don’t properly understand.”
“So all of this wasn’t forced outside,” said Molly. “It’s always been here?”
“Yes,” I said.
“T
hen why haven’t I seen it before?”
“Because I never brought you here,” I said. “There are parts of my home that no one should know about unless they have to.”
Molly scowled about her. “Who were you fighting?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “We made them never happen too.”
“Your family . . . ,” said Molly. “I swear, if we run into a big statue of Kali . . .”
“What?” said Peter.
“Nothing,” I said. “Keep going.”
• • •
We left the Time-stopped Droods behind, and Peter slowed to a walk. His strength was fading, for all his sense of urgency. I kept expecting him to summon up his armour and rely on its speed and strength to keep him going, but he didn’t. Perhaps because he was afraid it might alert Edmund to our presence. And perhaps because he wasn’t ready to admit his own weakness just yet.
“Can I ask, where exactly are we going?” said Molly. “And if it’s as bad as the look on Peter’s face suggests, why are we in such a hurry to get there?”
“Because we need to get to the Demon Droods before Edmund can,” said Peter.
“The what?” I said.
Peter sighed, and looked at me with heavy patience. “In the beginning, the family made a series of pacts and agreements with Heaven and Hell, so we could be sure we would always have the power we needed to do all the things that needed doing. You were taught that at school, right? What you don’t know, what it was decided long ago that most of the family didn’t need to know, is that some of those early Droods were required to enter into alchemical marriages to seal the deal. With angels and with demons. Resulting in Angelic Droods and Demon Droods.”
“You mean half-breeds, like Roger Morningstar?” said Molly.
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