For Heaven's Eyes Only

CHAPTER ELEVEN What We Do in Heaven’s Gaze

Sometimes even the strangest of journeys begins with a single step. Molly and I stepped through the Merlin Glass and passed instantly from the dead man’s office to the Armoury at Drood Hall. It was the usual chaos of lab assistants running wild, explosions, transformations and brief outbreaks of spontaneous combustion. Strange machines doing things the laws of physics never allowed for, and even stranger contraptions doing things nature never intended. And one lab assistant with two heads, arguing furiously with himself as to whose fault it was. And, indeed, which was the original head, and which needed pruning. Business as usual, in the Drood family Armoury. Molly looked at me darkly as I shut the Merlin Glass down and put it away.

“Okay, what are we doing here? Why aren’t we in the War Room, which is where I thought we were going? You know I don’t like surprises. And there had better be a really good reason for this. . . . Why are we in the far more dangerous and unnervingly arbitrary science lab from hell?”

“Because you want to know what the Timeless Moment is,” I said. “And I know enough to know I don’t know nearly enough about it. So we are here to talk with my uncle Jack, because as the Armourer he understands six impossible things before breakfast. This is, after all, the man who invented a time machine to go back in time and tell himself not to build time machines, because they’re far more trouble than they’re worth. You have to be impressed by lateral thinking like that. Ah, here he is.”

I led Molly through the bedlam of unrestrained genius at work, to where the Armourer was sitting unusually quietly in his favourite chair. The one with all the chemical stains and blast marks, and the sign on the back saying, SUDDEN EXPERIMENTS MAKE GOD JUMP. The Armourer was sitting pensively, his eyes far away, completely untroubled by loud noises and the occasional outburst of harsh language. He had a fresh cup of hot, steaming tea to hand, along with a plate full of Jaffa Cakes and a packet of chocolate HobNobs. Brain food, if ever there was. He ignored Molly and me, completely lost in thought. There are those who have been known to say that the Armourer is never more dangerous than when he’s thinking. I had to say his name several times, increasingly loudly, before he looked up.

“Ah, Eddie,” he said vaguely. “And Molly, too. How nice. Yes. I was thinking about the best way to counter the satanic conspiracy’s new influence machine. It seems to me the best way to do it would be to build one of my own, and then figure out how to stop that.”

“We have had this talk before, Uncle Jack,” I said carefully. “The family exists to serve Humanity, not rule them. And most especially, we are not here to make up their minds for them.”

“I’m not talking about direct mind control,” said the Armourer. “Not as such . . . But would it really be such a bad thing to nudge Humanity in the right direction now and again? Whisper in their ear things like, ‘Make war no more’? ‘Feed the hungry, house the homeless, bring back proper Coke in the original bottles and stop making crap film versions of perfectly good television shows’?”

“You see?” I said. “It’s not where you start, but where you end up. It’s all too tempting to stop helping and start meddling. Put the whole idea out of your mind, Uncle Jack.”

“Oh, all right, all right,” said the Armourer, pouting. “Consider it done. You young people today don’t know how to have fun. . . . So, what are you doing down here, Eddie? I know I’m your favourite uncle, and I do enjoy our little chats. . . . Oh, would you like a biscuit? That’s real chocolate, you know.”

“Not right now,” I said.

“But the fact is, you only ever come down here when you want something,” said the Armourer, fixing me with a hard gaze from under his bristling white eyebrows. “What is it, having trouble with your TiVo again?”

“If we could return to the subject at hand,” I said patiently. “Why have you given up on trying to block the influence machine? You don’t usually give up so quickly. What’s wrong? Something’s wrong; I can tell.”

The Armourer sighed briefly and nodded reluctantly. “Sit down, both of you.”

Molly and I looked around. There weren’t any other chairs. So we stole a couple from some lab assistants who weren’t actually using them, and sat down facing the Armourer. He made a big deal of pouring some tea into his saucer to cool it, and then sipping it loudly, but we all knew he was putting off the moment, so he put the tea down and gave us his full attention.

“It’s Harry and Roger,” he said heavily. “Their deaths . . . hit me hard. Harder than I expected, given that I couldn’t stand the pair of them half the time. My poor nephews . . . They tried so hard to do the right thing. Old men shouldn’t have to see young men die before them. Uncles shouldn’t have to bury nephews. My generation hasn’t done too well with its children. Harry was James’s only legitimate child. And yes, I know there are many other bastards like Roger . . . some good, some bad, most somewhere in between, scattered across the world. All of them thrust outside the family because we didn’t approve of their mothers. Many of them have made names for themselves, but I can’t help wondering how much more they might have achieved if only we’d embraced them, brought them up and trained them as Droods. There will have to be a funeral after this mess is over. And I think we should invite all of James’s numerous progeny. Bring them all home. We’ve left them out in the world alone for far too long. Open to too many bad influences and temptations. They must feel as though we abandoned them, as though we didn’t care, and they’d be right. So bring them all home, because they’re family and we owe them.”

“Harry and Roger came back to the Hall,” I said carefully. “And it didn’t work out too well for them. We kept sending them out on missions until it killed them.”

The Armourer looked at me sharply. “That’s not how it was, Eddie, and you know it.”

“Do I?” I said. “That’s how it feels. . . .”

“Timothy was my only child,” said the Armourer. “I can’t help wondering whether, if I’d spent more time with him, he might not have grown up to become Tiger Tim. But I always had so much work to do, so many responsibilities . . . and I never was any good with children. Never knew what to say to them . . . I only got to know you, Eddie, because you were a teenage troublemaker, cutting lessons to sneak down here and badger me with endless questions about life out in the field. . . . Because you were already plotting on how best to get the hell out of the Hall, and as far away from the family as you could.”

“And here I am, back where I belong,” I said. “Funny how life works out sometimes.”

The Armourer nodded slowly. “Charles and Emily’s only child. The only surviving descendent of my generation. Only you and me left now of the Matriarch’s direct line.”

He scowled brusquely and looked away, his gaze the thousand-yard stare of a soldier who’s seen too many die in too many wars. I wondered if I should tell him what Walker had said to me during my time in Limbo. That my parents might not be dead after all . . . But there were already too many important things happening at once, and I couldn’t afford for him to become distracted. Not when there were still so many things I needed him to do. His attention snapped back to me as though it had never been away.

“What are you doing here, Eddie?”

I gave him a quick rundown on what had happened at the Wulfshead, and then at Sir Terrence Ashtree’s office. Leaving out all the bits that made me look like a monster. I told him that the upper echelons, and possibly even the leader himself, of the new satanic conspiracy were probably holed up in the Timeless Moment, and he nodded thoughtfully.

“Yes . . . Yes, that would make sense, actually.”

“Why?” Molly said loudly, unable to hold her peace any longer. “Why does it make sense, and what is the Timeless bloody Moment?”

“The headquarters, hideout and last retreat of the previous satanic conspiracy, back in the nineteen forties,” said the Armourer, leaning back in his chair and lacing his fingers together in his lap as he slid effortlessly into lecture mode. My uncle Laurence was a field agent back then—your great-uncle, Eddie, Grandmother Martha’s elder brother—and he told me all kinds of yarns about battling Satanists in occupied France. They were at the peak of their influence back in 1943, and plotting all kinds of black-magic attacks against England, from what they foolishly thought were safe bases along the French coastline. Safe and secure . . . Uncle Laurence showed them! Moving from city to city and town to town, arranging all kinds of unfortunate accidents to screw up their progress. You couldn’t blow everything up, or kill all the people who needed killing, because the Nazis would take reprisals on the local populations. Always very keen on executions, the Nazis. It must have felt so fine to be out in the field in those days, fighting the last good war. . . . I couldn’t wait to be a field agent, but all I got for my troubles was the Cold War. . . .

“Sorry, drifting . . . 1943. October. Uncle Laurence was checking out a particularly nasty coven down in Nantes when he stumbled over information about the Satanists’ secret bolt-hole and weapons depository, tucked away in the Timeless Moment. I’m not sure whether the Satanists created the place, or discovered it, or moved in and took it away from someone else. . . . Either way, it was the perfect hiding place. The Satanists established their main headquarters there, where none of their enemies could reach them. All right, Molly, don’t be so impatient; I’m getting there. The Timeless Moment was, and presumably still is, a pocket dimension of a kind, outside time and space as we know them. A strange alternate dimension tucked away between the tick and tock of linear time. Very hard to locate, and even harder to get into. Uncle Laurence led the mission to destroy the dimensional doorway the Satanists used to access the Timeless Moment, cutting the rank and file off from their headquarters, their leader and all the secret superweapons they’d been hoarding there to present to Hitler to help him win the war. Without all this, the rank and file were fatally weakened. Most of them legged it for the nearest horizon and disappeared. The few who stuck it out lost all their influence with Nazi High Command once it became clear they couldn’t deliver all the marvellous things they’d promised. That was the end for them as a vital force in the war. Which helped us win the war, no doubt about it.”

“This must be what rejuvenated the conspiracy again!” said Molly. “Someone must have regained access to the Timeless Moment!”

“Seems likely,” said the Armourer.

“Presumably this mysterious new leader of theirs,” I said. “Whose name we still don’t know. Why are all his people put under a geas, never to use his name outside the conspiracy? What’s the big deal about his name? Why make it such a secret?”

Molly looked at the Armourer. “Apparently because we’d recognise it. Apparently we know him.”

“Oh, bloody hell,” said the Armourer. “Not a Drood?”

“No,” I said quickly and very definitely.

“Good,” said the Armourer. “I suppose that’s something. If I have to announce I’m scanning everyone in the family again, I think we can expect some very unfortunate responses.”

“The influence machine must be inside the Timeless Moment,” I said. “It’s the only safe place for it until it’s needed. The one place we couldn’t hope to find it. They need only to wheel it out when it’s time to prepare people for the Great Sacrifice.”

“Same for the kidnapped townspeople of Little Stoke,” said Molly. “And the abducted weapons makers from the Supernatural Arms Faire. And Isabella! The one place they could hold her from which even she couldn’t escape!”

“If she’s still alive,” I said carefully.

“Of course she’s still alive!” Molly glared at me, her hands clenched unknowingly into fists. “She has to be alive. I’d know if she were dead.”

I considered her thoughtfully. “You once said to me . . . that the Metcalf sisters come as a package. Which is why Isabella can keep getting in and out of the Hall so easily.”

“It is?” said the Armourer.

“Molly,” I said, “could you use that link to find your sister, and establish a connection between this reality and the Timeless Moment?”

“It’s not as simple as that,” Molly said reluctantly. “The conspiracy wouldn’t be able to detect the link, so they couldn’t block it; but even so, the best I could do would be to point you in the right direction. Metaphorically speaking.”

“I have an idea on how to take it from there,” I said. “Not a very safe or even particularly sane idea, but . . . Uncle Jack.”

“This is going to be really bad, isn’t it?” said the Armourer. “I always know it’s going to be something really bad when you start calling me Uncle Jack instead of Armourer. What do you have in mind, Eddie?”

“Back when the Hall was under attack by the Accelerated Men,” I said carefully, “the Sarjeant-at-Arms mentioned a last-resort defence called Alpha Red Alpha.”

“What’s that?” Molly said immediately. “I’ve never heard of it before. And from the way you said it, it sounds like something I very definitely ought to have been told about.”

“Alpha Red Alpha,” the Armourer said heavily, “is Drood Hall’s very last and scariest line of defence. A powerful dimensional engine buried deep under the Hall. Most of the family don’t even know it’s there, on the grounds that if they knew there was a very powerful and largely untested dimensional engine right under where they lived, they wouldn’t want to live here anymore. And quite rightly, too. Powered up, Alpha Red Alpha can rotate the entire Hall and everyone in it out of this reality and into another one. The idea being that we could escape a real catastrophe by disappearing into another dimension, and staying there until the danger was past. The engine would bring everyone back when it was safe. However . . .”

“I just knew there was going to be a however,” Molly said to me. “Didn’t you just know there was going to be a however?”

“The engine has never been properly tested,” said the Armourer. “Most of us aren’t even sure it will work. It was only ever activated once; and after what happened on the trial run . . .”

“Did you build this engine?” said Molly.

No! No . . . that was the Armourer before me. Your great-uncle Francis, Eddie. Grandfather Arthur’s younger brother. A brilliant mind, but I think he must have been dropped on his head as a baby. Repeatedly. Francis Drood was an excellent designer and weapons maker, no doubt about it. But unfortunately, he was what these days we would call an extreme lateral thinker. . . . Or completely off his bloody head, as we said at the time. He produced a lot of really useful equipment, which field agents still use today; and he designed three of the forbidden weapons locked away in the Armageddon Codex. Weapons so powerful and potentially destructive that we’ve never dared use them. Simply reading the instruction manual is enough to bring you out in a cold sweat. . . . I’ll say this for the man: He never had any problems thinking big. Thinking rationally and responsibly, yes, major problems there . . .

He created Alpha Red Alpha after the Chinese tried to nuke the Hall back in 1964. Bit of an overreaction, I always thought. . . . Anyway, Francis talked the then Matriarch into setting the engine up for a trial run. We moved most of the family out into the grounds, just in case. . . . We were all very interested to see what would happen, but preferably from a safe distance. Your uncle James came home specially from East Germany, I came back from Nepal and your parents came back from Peru. Then the Matriarch asked for volunteers from among the field agents to accompany and protect the Hall wherever it went, just in case. We tended to use those three words quite a lot, whenever Francis was involved. . . . So the four of us, and four more, volunteered, and we were all there inside the Hall when Francis fired up Alpha Red Alpha for the first time. We had no idea where we were going, where we’d end up. All Francis had was a whole bunch of mathematics that made sense only to him, and assurance that his engine would most definitely send the Hall away. . . .

At first, everything seemed to go fine. The actual transition was a bit . . . disturbing when the Hall dropped out of the world, but it did very definitely reappear Somewhere Else. Not an alternate Earth, or even another reality, but an entirely alien world. Once we came up from the basement and looked out the front windows, the first thing we saw was two suns, blazing impossibly bright in a sick green sky, and when we opened the front door, the air was so packed with excess oxygen and really nasty trace gases that we couldn’t breathe it. We had to armour up to survive in the strange new world that Francis’s engine had brought us to. We’d been dropped right into the middle of an alien jungle full of plants and animals and . . . creatures we’d never seen before. Some of them so different and disturbing they hurt your head to look at them. Everything was wrong . . . a living nightmare packed with horrible things everywhere we looked.

And while we were still getting our heads round that, the whole jungle rose up at once and attacked us. Not only the awful things that lived in the jungle, but the plants themselves. Raging, thrashing, whipping long tendrils at us . . . Everything was alive and angry and utterly antagonistic. Thousands of creatures hit the Hall at once, from every direction, smashing through the windows, hammering against the closed doors, rising up to try to break in through the roof. We fought them off as best we could, sending Francis back down to fire up the engine and get us all home again. It couldn’t have taken him long, but it seemed to take forever. It was like fighting in a nightmare against horrible things that keep coming at you, no matter how hard you fight. I saw young Alice fall with a hundred thorns blasted through her armour. I saw Oliver pulled down and ripped apart by thrashing plants that crawled all him, his armour no more protection than tinfoil. I saw plants eat them both, and drink their blood.

I still have nightmares sometimes. . . .

“But finally Alpha Red Alpha kicked in again and we came home. The Hall was a mess: battered and broken and infested with all kinds of alien life-forms that had forced their way in. Luckily they couldn’t live in our air, so we stood well back and watched them die. They didn’t understand what was happening to them, but they still tried to kill the few Droods who tried to help. There’re always a few who do the ‘if only we can communicate with them’ thing. . . . I would have taken a flamethrower to the lot of them. We waited till we were sure everything was dead, and then Droods in their armour dragged them all out of the Hall, chopped them up fine, to make sure, burned them in great piles and then buried what was left in a far corner of the grounds. To this day nothing else will grow there.

“It took weeks to reopen the Hall. And fumigate it, because some of the little bastards had left spores to be breathed in by the unsuspecting. . . . After the Matriarch got a good look at what had come back with us, and listened to our story, she told Francis to his face that he was never to use the engine again until he could be sure of where he was sending the Hall. And that Alpha Red Alpha was only ever to be used as a very last resort, after we’d tried everything else, including prayer and closing our eyes and hoping it would all go away. Francis spent the rest of his life, as Armourer and after, in retirement, trying to figure out how to control what he’d created, but he never did. The family buried the engine deep under the Hall, called it Francis’s Folly and wiped it from the official records.

“For everyone’s peace of mind.”

“But,” I said, “could it get us into the Timeless Moment?”

“Somehow I knew you were going to say that,” said the Armourer. “I tell you the most cautionary story I know that doesn’t involve sex, and it didn’t even slow you down. Technically, yes, I suppose it’s possible. But . . . all I could do would be to turn the bloody thing on. And hopefully off again. I have absolutely no idea of how to steer the damned thing, and neither does anyone else.”

“But I can help with that!” said Molly. “My link with Isabella will point us in the right direction. . . .”

“And I can focus that link through the Merlin Glass to take us where we need to go!” I said. “You start the engine up, Uncle Jack; Molly will aim it, and I will steer it. Right into the Timeless Moment.”

The Armourer smiled suddenly. “You know, it’s a crazy idea, but it just might work!”

I looked at Molly. “It always sounds so much worse when he says it.”

The Armourer looked at Molly. “If all you Metcalf sisters are linked to one another . . . does that mean the dreaded Louisa knows what’s happening?”

“Almost certainly,” said Molly. “But don’t worry; it’ll take even her a long time to get back from Mars.”

The Armourer’s face twitched. “I’m not even going to ask what she’s doing on Mars.”

“Best not to,” I said. “Now, where is Alpha Red Alpha, exactly? You said you buried it under the Hall?”

The Armourer’s mouth winced, as though he’d tasted something bitter. “I had hoped I’d never have to go down there again. Or at the very least, that I’d be very old and safely retired before some other poor bastard had to do it . . . Come with me.”

He got up out of his chair with a certain amount of effort and the usual pained noises, and led Molly and me to the very back of the Armoury, out beyond the firing range and the corrupt-spell dumps. Three lab assistants were standing around the sparkling watercooler, commenting excitedly on the miniature mermaid they’d dropped into it. The Armourer drove them back to their workstations with barked commands and harsh language. He finally stopped before a large, hulking piece of machinery of no immediate significance. It didn’t even have a nameplate.

“Armour up, Eddie,” said the Armourer. “I need you to move this machine two feet to the left. My left, not yours. And be careful. It’s heavier than it looks.”

“What is it?” I asked after I’d armoured up. Molly was already poking and prodding and kicking at the machine’s solid steel sides in an experimental sort of way.

“It was supposed to be a food synthesiser,” said the Armourer. “The idea was all the rage back in the seventies. And it would have helped to take the strain off feeding a family of our size. But we never could get it to work right. Francis tried, I tried, and now and again one of the more than usually ambitious lab assistants will take a crack at it, but even though the theory works out to a thousand decimal places . . . no matter what settings we try, all the machine ever produces is a kind of glowing green porridge that looks bad and smells worse.”

“What did it taste like?” said Molly, ever the practical one.

“We never found out, because if you got too close to the stuff, it ate you,” said the Armourer. “And once we had the stuff, we couldn’t get rid of it. We tried everything, including fire and acid and beating it with sticks, but it was a stubborn little organism. . . . In the end, we teleported every last bit of it to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Where for all I know it still is, crawling across the ocean floor and scaring the crap out of the giant squids that live down there.” He paused for a moment. “The numbers do seem to be dropping off of late. . . .”

“Then . . . why haven’t you destroyed the machine?” I said.

“Oh, really, Eddie, you should know the answer to that. Because someday the family might have a need for really vicious green porridge that eats people,” the Armourer said. “The family never wastes anything. And the machine does serve a useful purpose in itself, as you’ll discover when you stop arguing and move the bloody thing two feet to the left. My left, not yours.”

I put my golden shoulder to the huge machine and applied a steady pressure. The machine didn’t budge an inch. I settled myself, dug my feet in and threw the whole of the armour’s strength against the damned thing. For a long moment nothing happened, except that the steel section under my shoulder began to buckle from the pressure; and then the machine jerked a few inches to the left. Reluctantly, and fighting me all the way, the stubborn machine moved two feet to the left, revealing a solid wooden trapdoor in the rough stone floor. I stood up slowly, stretching my aching back, while Molly crouched down to take a good look at the trapdoor.

“I’m not sensing any protections or defences,” she said.

“Of course not,” said the Armourer. “They would only have drawn attention. And besides, if we ever do need to get to the engine we’ll probably need to do it in a hurry.”

He knelt down beside the trapdoor, his knees complaining loudly. He picked up a solid steel padlock and hefted it in his hand for a moment before concentrating and armouring up his left hand. He then extended a complex golden key from his index finger and inserted it carefully into the padlock. The key turned easily, and the padlock opened. The Armourer removed the padlock, placed it carefully to one side and retracted the golden key into his fingertip. Then he hauled the heavy trapdoor open, the great wooden slab swinging back easily and silently, as though its massive brass hinges had been oiled only the day before. We all stared down into the dark hole in the floor.

All I could see was darkness, and the first few rungs of an iron ladder heading down into it. Even the overbright lighting of the Armoury couldn’t penetrate the darkness more than a few inches. I studied the opening through my armoured mask, using infrared and ultraviolet, and finally my Sight, and none of it helped. The darkness remained absolute, holding secrets within. I checked for electromagnetic radiation, and half a dozen other warning signs, but still, nothing. My armour couldn’t detect a single thing about what was down there. Which should have been impossible.

“I know the details of the key,” the Armourer said quietly. “So does the Sarjeant-at-Arms. No one else. Not even the Matriarch knew how to access Alpha Red Alpha, by her own command. It’s too dangerous. Eddie, you’re always complaining the family keeps secrets from you . . . this should cure you of that. Follow me down the ladder. Mind your step, don’t crowd me and when we get to the bottom don’t wander off and don’t touch anything.”

He went down the iron steps with an ease and agility that belied his years. The show-off. I followed him down more cautiously, and Molly brought up the rear, sticking so close to me she practically trod on my fingers. The trapdoor slammed shut over us the moment we were all inside. I was still in my armour. I have a tendency to do that when descending into complete darkness containing unknown threats. The steps seemed to fall and fall away below me, going down and down until my leg and back muscles began to cramp from the strain. The only sounds were the clanging of our feet on the iron steps, and the Armourer’s loud breathing below.

“It’s all right!” he yelled back up cheerfully. “The trapdoor’s supposed to do that! Safety feature. Not so much to keep lab assistants out as to keep anything here from coming up into the Hall.”

“Like what?” Molly said immediately.

“No idea,” said the Armourer. “But it’s best not to take chances.”

After enough descending that I was getting really fed up with it, I finally reached the end of the ladder, and my armoured feet found a rough stone floor. I stepped away from the ladder to get out of Molly’s way, and lights suddenly flared up, dazzling me for a moment. My mask quickly compensated for the glare, and I looked round a massive stone cavern stretching away in all directions. My first impression was that the cavern had to be bigger than the Hall itself, but that couldn’t be right, or the Hall would have collapsed into it long ago. Even so, it was really big. . . . The stone walls were covered with line after line of carefully delineated mathematical symbols, none of which meant anything to me. I looked at Molly, and she shrugged.

“Mathemagics,” the Armourer said cheerfully. “Designer theory, only supercharged. Don’t look at them too long, or your eyes will start to bleed.”

He had more to say on the subject, but I wasn’t listening. I was looking at what the huge cave contained, packing it from wall to wall and from floor to ceiling, with only narrow walkways between: strange machines and intricate technology, and weird objects that might have been really high-tech or particularly worrying examples of abstract art. No flashing lights, no obvious control panels; often one piece would seem to slide or evolve into the next. Some parts were actually blurred or indistinct, as though my eyes couldn’t properly understand what they were seeing. Mile upon mile of colour-coded cables stretched back and forth across the cavern, linking everything together, and hung in a complicated web between the upper heights and the ceiling. I moved slowly forward into what I reluctantly recognised as one big machine. It was like walking through a technological jungle. Molly stuck close by my side. The Armourer was, of course, already ahead of us, bumbling along with his hands in his coat pockets, muttering happily to himself.

Things were constantly moving, rising and falling, or turning this way and that. Other parts leaned and slumped and sort of merged into one another. Some were slowly changing shape, as though unable to settle, humming loudly to themselves in an important sort of way. There were even things that seemed to be watching me thoughtfully. I couldn’t make sense of any of it. Except that for a machine that hadn’t been used in years, an awful lot of it seemed to be very busy. . . . All I knew for sure was that being down here creeped the hell out of me. It didn’t feel like a place where people should be, where anything as limited and fragile as people had any business being.

All my instincts were yelling at me to get the hell out while I still could, or at the very least give the machine a good kicking to make sure it knew its place.

“Armour down, Eddie,” the Armourer said quietly. “We don’t want to start anything.”

I did so, reluctantly. The first thing that hit me was how warm the cavern was, almost uncomfortably hot and humid. There was bristling static in the air, which smelt of iron filings and something burning. Molly slipped her arm through mine, and I patted her hand absently.

“Try not to be so impressed,” the Armourer said dryly. “It’s only a machine. All right, there’s a lot here I don’t understand as yet, but that doesn’t mean it can’t still be useful to the family. Your great-uncle Francis was a brilliant man, Eddie, and only occasionally seriously disturbed. Yes . . . I can handle this. Turn it on. And off. Everything else should run itself, I think.”

“Given how seriously wrong your first little trip went,” said Molly, “why keep this around? I know something really potentially dangerous when I see it, and I’m looking at it right now.”

“Because Francis always had a reason for everything he did,” the Armourer said patiently. “Not always an obvious reason . . . Alpha Red Alpha was never intended to be just a bolt-hole for us to hide in; he had all sorts of ideas for it. He wrote them down in his workbooks, and one day we’re going to break that code, and then, my word, we’ll know a thing or two. No, Molly, Droods never throw anything away that might be useful someday. And this would appear to be Alpha Red Alpha’s day. I do see what you mean, though. To be honest, being down here after all these years is disturbing the piss out of me.”

He came to a sudden halt before one huge machine as big as a house, rising all the way up to the high ceiling. It was like a plunging waterfall frozen into solid crystal, with glowing wires running through it like multicoloured veins, etched with row upon row of strange symbols and studded with pieces of clearly alien-derived technology. It all surrounded a massive hourglass some twenty feet tall, fashioned from solid silver and glass so perfect you could barely see it was there. The top section of the hourglass was full of shimmering golden sand, all of it in place, with not one golden mote falling down into the chamber below.

“When I activate Alpha Red Alpha,” said the Armourer, “the golden sands will start to fall. And the engine will rotate us out of this reality and into another. When the bottom section is full, it means we’ve arrived. Upon return, the golden sands will fly back up again. As I recall, it’s really quite . . . unnatural to look at.”

“All of this?” I said. “Built around an hourglass?”

The Armourer nodded unhappily. “Your great-uncle Francis was a seriously weird person.”

Molly and I went back up into the Armoury, leaving Uncle Jack with the dimensional engine. He said he needed some quality time with it. The trip back up the iron ladder didn’t seem to take nearly as long as the trip down; perhaps that was a safety feature, too. Once we were both back in the Armoury, I shut the trapdoor and contacted Ethel to ask where the Sarjeant-at-Arms was.

“He’s in the ops room, Eddie, being very in charge. And can I just say, whatever it is you’ve got down in that hole, I don’t like it. It’s far too complicated for its own good, and it puts my teeth on edge. And I don’t even have teeth.”

There didn’t really seem to be any answer to that, so Molly and I stepped through the Merlin Glass into the operations room. We could have walked, but the ops room is all the way across the Hall, in the south wing, and I didn’t think we had the time. Besides, people would have wanted to stop me and ask questions, and I wasn’t in the mood. The guards on duty in the operations room nodded brusquely to Molly and me as we appeared out of nowhere, which was a sign of how much things had changed. The leader of the ops room is Howard, a buttoned-down man in a buttoned-down suit that doesn’t suit him. He nodded quickly to me and went back to studying his display screens. Howard has incredible organisational skills and a very real sense of passion where the family’s security is concerned. He used to be one of the Armourer’s finest lab assistants, but he turned out a bit too serious for that, so the Matriarch kicked him upstairs, where he could work out his basic vindictiveness against the family’s enemies in a more useful way.

The operations room is our really high-tech centre, designed to oversee all the Hall’s defences, from force shields to weapons systems to really powerful long-range sensors. The surprisingly reasonably sized room was always packed full of the very latest equipment and the besttrained technicians to run it all. But there was none of the hustle-bustle and basic urgency that always characterise the War Room. These people knew their job and performed their various tasks calmly and expertly, standing between the family and all the outside forces that would threaten us. They sat in comfortable chairs before technology they knew better than the backs of their own hands, and everything they might need was always within reach. There was a really long waiting list to work in the ops room.

The Sarjeant-at-Arms turned away from the communications people to talk briefly with Howard, and then moved over to join Molly and me.

“I’ve put together the army you wanted, Edwin. Nearly eighty percent of the family are ready to go to war. Those too young or too old to fight will make up a skeleton staff, to run all the necessary systems in our absence. No one wanted to be left out.”

“Maybe we should leave some behind,” I said. “In case we don’t make it back.”

The Sarjeant shook his head firmly. “They all know what’s at stake, and they all want to be a part of the fight. The Satanists can’t be allowed to win, or there’d be no point in coming back. Everyone’s ready; we’re waiting for you to provide us with a target.”

So I told him about the Timeless Moment, and Alpha Red Alpha, and the Sarjeant took it all in his stride. Right up to the point where William the Librarian suddenly appeared in the ops room wearing a flak jacket and jeans and a Rambo-style headband, demanding loudly to be allowed to join the attack force. I couldn’t help noticing he was still wearing his bunny slippers. He strode up to us, looking awkward but determined, and the technicians he passed stopped what they were doing to look at him with surprise and something very like awe. They’d all heard of the Librarian, and his story had only grown in the telling. None of them had ever seen him before. In fact, this was the first time that I knew of that he’d left the Old Library, except to appear very reluctantly for the occasional council meeting. I was surprised he could even find operations without a ball of string to follow. I nodded easily to the Sarjeant as the Librarian joined us.

“Oh, yes, I forgot to mention. The Librarian says he wants to go into battle, too.”

“No, Uncle William,” the Sarjeant said very firmly. “You can’t join the actual fighting. You’re far too valuable to the family.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere, young Cedric,” said the Librarian. “I have to do this. Those Satanist arse-wipes are holding Ammonia prisoner, and I have to rescue her. I have to. I owe her.”

The Sarjeant looked at me. “Is he . . . ?”

“Apparently,” I said. “When she made contact with his mind, it seems she made quite an impression on him.”

“But she looks like . . .”

“Looks aren’t everything, Cedric,” I said sternly.

“She has a magnificent mind,” said William dreamily. “Really. You have no idea. I’m sure we’ve got a lot in common.”

We all looked at one another, but none of us felt like saying anything. There was always the chance that Ammonia had put something inside the Librarian’s head, something to make herself attractive to him . . . but would William’s friend Pook have stood for that? I didn’t think so. Still, Ammonia and the Librarian . . . I hadn’t seen that one coming. Maybe it was the meeting of two minds. . . .

And, of course, she was already married. But then, the course of true love never did run smooth. I didn’t say any of this out loud. I didn’t want Molly laughing at me. She always says I’m far too romantic for my own good. And this from a woman who reads one bodice ripper after another.

“You have to let me in on this,” William said stubbornly, “because I know where we’re going—into the Timeless Moment. Laurence wrote a whole book about what he found inside that unnatural place. Ah, you didn’t know he’d actually gone in there, did you? He led a team of local resistance fighters in, to attack the satanic conspiracy in their headquarters. Seems the Satanists built themselves a very special home away from home inside the Timeless Moment. A castle, Schloss Shreck—or, more properly, Castle Horror. He had a lot to say about it, and I’ve read every word of it. So I’m going with you, Cedric. Because you’re going to need what I know.”

I looked at the Sarjeant, leaving it up to him, and he sighed quietly. “You’re going to have to look after him, Edwin. I am going to be too busy killing Satanists.”

“Hold hard,” I said. “Back up and go previous. You need to understand we’re not just going in there to kill everything that moves that isn’t us. There are people in this castle who need rescuing. The townspeople of Little Stoke, Molly’s sister Isabella and, most probably, Ammonia Vom Acht. Maybe even some of the abducted weapons makers from the Supernatural Arms Faire. Some of them might have refused to work for Satanists, and some of them are old friends of the Armourer. This can’t be only an extermination run, Sarjeant; it’s a rescue mission, too.”

“We’ll do what we can for those people,” said the Sarjeant. “Bring them all safely home if we can. But our first priority has to be putting the conspiracy out of business before they can start the Great Sacrifice. All the children in all the world are depending on us. The Satanists aren’t going to surrender or negotiate; either we kill all of them or they’ll kill all of us. They have to be wiped out to the last man, very definitely including this mysterious leader of theirs, or it could all start up again. This is war, Edwin, to the last man, or the last Drood, if need be.”

“Understood, Sarjeant,” I said. “When will your army be ready to go?”

The Sarjeant looked at Howard, who nodded quickly. The Sarjeant smiled. “Ready when you are, Eddie. Everyone’s in place; everyone knows what to do. Callan’s ready in the War Room. All defences are on high alert.”

“Then let’s do it,” I said.

I contacted the Armourer through my torc and told him to fire up Alpha Red Alpha. He agreed immediately, with a little too much enthusiasm for my liking. He does so love a new toy. I took out the Merlin Glass and instructed it to lock onto the Timeless Moment. Molly put one hand on mine and the other on the Glass, and added her link to Isabella to the mix. A slow, steady vibration ran through the floor. Heads came up all over operations as everyone felt it. My skin began to crawl.

“I’m not sure what will happen once the dimensional engine has done its stuff,” Ethel murmured quietly in my ear. “I might get to go with you, or I might not. This is all new territory to me.”

“But you’re a dimensional traveller,” I said.

“Yes, but I do it naturally. What your Alpha Red Alpha does is, quite frankly, an abomination, and wouldn’t be allowed in a sane universe. If I’m not there with you, in the Timeless Moment, I’ll be waiting for you here when you get back.”

“And if we don’t get back?” I said.

“Then I’ll go home,” said Ethel. “I wouldn’t want to stay here if you weren’t here, too. It was nice knowing you, Eddie, you and all your family. I will remember you. It’s all been such fun.”

The vibrations had grown strong enough to shake the whole room. Equipment was jumping and rattling, and the technicians hung onto their workstations with both hands. The lights flickered and flared, and shadows leapt all over the place. Strange sensations crawled across my skin, and my teeth chattered. I hung on grimly to the Merlin Glass, whose mirror was utterly blank, and Molly hung onto the Glass and to me with a grip so strong I knew nothing in this world would ever shake it loose. Everything around me seemed vague and uncertain, the people around me ghostly. The vibrations shook my bones and shuddered in my flesh, and it felt like I was being torn apart and put back together again, over and over. It reminded me of my time in Limbo, neither living nor dead, and I couldn’t trust anything. I concentrated on Molly, and something like a hand gripped firmly onto what I thought was my hand. And then everything snapped back into focus, as though the whole Hall had been picked up and slammed down again somewhere else. Molly and I relaxed our grip and laughed aloud, glorying in being alive.

I looked into the Merlin Glass. The image was still only a blur. I carefully didn’t shut it down, but put it away for the time being. Howard was already moving among his people, talking to them quietly, getting them over the shock and back to work. Display screens everywhere were blank, showing nothing but a shimmering silver void all around the Hall.

“There’s nothing out there,” said one of the technicians, his voice rising. “Nothing! No matter, no energy; that’s not even light as we understand it. This is what the end of the universe will look like, when the game’s finally over and the doors have been shut and the chairs piled up on the tables. . . .”

“Somebody give that man a stiff drink,” said Howard. “And a slap round the head. This is no time to be going to pieces, people. Which part of ‘we are going to a whole different reality’ did you not understand? Now get working; there has to be something out there. Even if it’s only this Castle Horror the Satanists are hiding out in. Come on, people; how can you miss a whole castle?”

The technicians busied themselves at their work, and a certain calm fell across the ops room as they concentrated on familiar tasks. The Sarjeant moved in beside Howard.

“No matter, no energy?” he said quietly. “What about gravity, and heat and . . . things like that? Everything seems normal enough in here.”

“The Hall’s many defences and protections are still running,” said Howard, just as quietly. “I made sure of that before the Armourer activated that bloody machine. I had to be sure we would survive under whatever conditions, or lack of them, we ended up in. The shields preserve our reality inside the Hall. Of course, what happens to us when we go outside . . .”

“Hold everything,” said the no-longer-panicking technician. “New readings coming in. We seem to have stabilised. I’m getting . . . no damage reports from anywhere in the Hall. According to the long-range sensors, conditions outside the Hall are . . . surprisingly Earth normal. Air, gravity, temperature . . . all within acceptable limits. That can’t be a coincidence. I don’t think this place just happened. . . . I think somebody built it.”

“I don’t know whether that’s more or less worrying,” I said.

“Could it be the conspiracy?” said Molly. “The original one, I mean, back in the nineteen forties.”

“No way in hell,” said the technician. “This is far beyond their abilities. Far beyond ours . . . More likely they found it, somehow, and then moved in. And built their castle. This isn’t just a pocket dimension; it’s a whole other reality.”

“Could we survive outside the Hall without our armour?” said the Sarjeant.

“Probably,” said Howard, moving quickly from workstation to workstation, studying display screens over his people’s shoulders. “But I wouldn’t try it. Armour up and stay armoured up until we’re all safely out of here. Ah! Castle, ho! The Hall appears to be calmly floating in this silver void, and roughly half a mile below us is a castle floating in the void! Put it up on the main display screen.”

The big screen flashed a few times, ghosting in and out as though having trouble doing what it was being asked to do, and then the view cleared to show a massive medieval castle hanging in the silver-grey. It was hard to judge the scale with nothing to compare it to, so a stream of sensor information flowed along the bottom of the screen. The castle was huge, some twenty times larger than Castle Frankenstein, home to the now defunct Immortals. Massive stone walls, huge towers, long crenellated battlements, and everywhere, flags and banners of a familiar black and red, dominated by the swastika. Nazi flags. All of them stiff and still, untroubled by any breeze.

“I read all the books,” said William, and I jumped a little to find him standing right beside me. “But I never expected . . . You couldn’t build a castle that big on Earth; it would collapse under its own weight. The old conspiracy must have brought all its requirements through a bit at a time, and then assembled them here. But why did they need a castle that big? What was it built to hold, to contain? Or is there something else here, in this void that isn’t a void, that they had to defend themselves against? There was nothing about that in Laurence’s account. . . . And why did they name it Schloss Shreck? Castle Horror?”

The Sarjeant leaned over the comm systems and called down to the Armourer: “Is Alpha Red Alpha okay? Can you get us home safely? Answer the second question first.”

“Everything’s fine,” said the Armourer. “As far as I can tell. I did everything the way I was supposed to, and the engine did everything it was supposed to. If not exactly in the manner I expected . . . So do what you have to do, Sarjeant, and then let’s go home again. Because the sooner we’re out of this unnatural place, the better.”

“Can you get us safely home again?” said the Sarjeant.

“Ah,” said the Armourer. “Now you’re asking. Technically speaking, yes. Settle for that. I would.”

“I think we should get out of here as soon as possible, too,” said Howard. “I don’t care if the conditions are as near Earth normal as makes no difference; there’s no telling what long-term exposure could do to us. All my sensors are telling me this is a really bad place to be. I don’t think people are supposed to exist here. I’d almost say the Timeless Moment is straining itself to tolerate our presence. The Hall’s shields are holding steady . . . but the energy drain is enormous, far higher than it should be. Which means we have a deadline, Sarjeant. I’d say we’ve got twelve hours, tops, before the generators go down and the shields fall.”

“What are your scanners telling us about Schloss Shreck?” said William. “Can you tell if there’s anybody in there?”

“They’ve got heavy-duty protections of their own,” said Howard. “We’ve no way of telling what’s going on in there. I’m not seeing any signs of force shields, as such. . . . Nothing to stop us from walking right in. But I don’t like it.”

“Why would they need force shields?” I said. “What is there here that they would need to defend themselves against?”

“A really interesting question, and one that we should definitely look into somewhen else,” said Molly. “Look at the castle. There’re lights on in some of those windows. Somebody’s home. So let’s go pay them a visit and bash some Satanist heads in.”

“To the point, as usual,” I said. “Enough talking. We’re going in.”

“Damn right,” said the Sarjeant-at-Arms.

Up on the roof of the Hall, the Drood army gathered. Hundreds of golden figures gleaming bright as they scrambled across the slanting tiles, forming groups around gables and cupolas and preparing the flying machines on the landing pads. As more and more of us came up onto the roof, it became increasingly crowded, until it was a wonder we didn’t end up pushing one another off the edges to test the water, like penguins on an ice floe. Molly and I hung off both sides of an outcropping gable, me in my armour and her in her best let’s-go-arse-kicking white dress, looking down at Schloss Shreck, floating in the silver void some distance below. It really was huge, like a medieval city carved in stone and wrapped in Nazi flags and banners. Lighted windows stared back at us like watchful eyes.

“Good thing they’re down there, and we’re up here,” said Molly, after a while. “We can just drop in on them. Death from above!”

“They must know we’re here,” I said. “Must know who we are. Must know we’re coming . . .”

“Good,” said Molly. “Let them panic.”

“There’s no telling how many of the bastards there are,” I said. “Could be a whole army . . . Could be the army we never got to face at Cathedral Hall.”

“You have got to stop obsessing over that,” said Molly. “None of it was your fault.”

“I have unfinished business.”

“You know more ways to feel guilty about things that you’re not responsible for than anyone I know,” said Molly. “I’ve never felt guilty about anything. You should try it. It’s remarkably liberating.”

More and more golden figures spilled up onto the roof, emerging from attics and trapdoors and other less official openings, and were quickly harangued into groups by the Sarjeant-at-Arms. I’d never seen so many armoured Droods in one place before, not even when we were defending ourselves against the invading Accelerated Men. A lot of them were carrying weapons, courtesy of the Armourer. Normally the golden armour is all the weapon a Drood needs in the field, but this was different. We were going to war.

One by one the various flying machines powered up, their cheerful roar and clatter a reassuring presence in the uncanny quiet of the Timeless Moment. There were skeletal autogyros, coughing out black clouds of smoke and steam; carefully preserved Spitfires from the 1940s, with supercharged engines, really nasty guns and their own personal force shields (the Armourer got the idea from some television show); and dozens of different kinds of flying saucers. Not actual alien craft; rather reverse-engineered alien tech made into saucers . . . simply for the fun of it. Some Droods have the strangest hobbies. . . . All of which are encouraged, because you never know when they might lead to something useful.

The Sarjeant-at-Arms came over to join me, striding across the rising and falling tiles with calm assurance. You can always recognise the Sarjeant in his armour; he’s modified it to look as blunt and businesslike as a golden bullet.

“The flying machines are ready to go,” he said. “I’ve ordered them to take a first look at the castle, sound out any defences and maybe even try a few strafing runs to put the wind up whoever’s at home. I’d feel happier if I knew how many we were facing; could be anything in there from a skeleton staff to a full army.”

“Eddie said that,” said Molly.

“Really?” said the Sarjeant. “Some of me must be rubbing off on you, Eddie.”

“What a terrible thought,” I said.

“And a mental image I could really have done without,” said Molly.

“It doesn’t matter how many there are,” I said. “We’re going in. We have people to rescue, and punishments to hand out. Send in the first wave, Sarjeant.”

He turned and waved one golden hand at the landing pads, and all the flying machines rose up. The autogyros sprang into the air like startled birds, banking away from the Hall and then plunging down towards the castle. The Spitfires threw themselves off the edge of the roof and curved smoothly round to swoop down on the castle like angry eagles, force shields shimmering and sparking where their edges made contact with the void. The flying saucers rose up in ones and twos, silent and serene, glowing all kinds of colours, some of them never meant for human eyes. They dropped down towards the castle like so many gaudy ghosts.

They all took it in turns to overfly the castle and then buzz it again and again, increasingly close each time, trying to provoke a response. They hit it from every side at once, pulling away only at the last moment, but the castle didn’t react. The lights were still very definitely on in many of the windows, but no force shields sprang up, and no weapons appeared. One Spitfire flew in so close its passing actually rippled one of the Nazi banners hanging down from the battlements. Another Spitfire roared right across the castle roof, opening up with all its guns. A loud series of explosions rocked the castle battlements as bullets chewed up old stone and sent heavy fragments flying . . . but still no response. I looked at the Sarjeant.

“Give the signal. We’re going in.”

And I let go of the gable and jumped off the Hall. My armoured legs pushed me out and away, and I dropped into the silver void like a stone, aiming for the castle below. Even inside the protection of my armour, I seemed to feel a chill wind caressing my flesh and shuddering in my bones. Air and light and gravity be damned; there was nothing Earth-like about this place. I plummeted towards the castle, arms and legs stretched out wide, and then I concentrated and great golden wings erupted out of my back. They slowed my fall appreciably, and I soon got the hang of tilting them this way and that to steer me in towards the castle roof. More golden figures appeared beside me as we fell on Schloss Shreck like avenging angels.

This would never have worked on Earth, of course, but we were all a long way from home.

Molly swooped in to join me, flying under her own power, her long white dress rippling around her. She was laughing and whooping with glee, her face alive with uncomplicated joy. She always was a great one for being in the moment, and also clearly happy to finally be doing something. She moved in close beside me, grinning widely, and then rolled over onto her back and crossed her legs casually.

“Show-off,” I said.

I glanced to my left and to my right. Droods filled the silver void all around me, falling at increasing speed on their various wings. Some had golden support struts like living biplanes, while others had formed actual birds’ wings with sculptured golden feathers. Some hadn’t bothered with wings at all; they streamlined their armour and threw themselves at the castle like projectiles. They were already far ahead of the rest of us, and at the speed they were going it seemed to me there was a good chance they’d punch right through the roof, through the castle and out the other side. I admired their ambition, but I was determined to be more cautious. If only because I couldn’t believe the castle was utterly without defences.

The flying machines were all over Schloss Shreck now, sweeping back and forth and opening up with every weapon they had, blowing holes in the outer walls and whole chunks off the battlements. They buzzed the castle like angry wasps while the golden Drood army closed inexorably in on its target. We got in really close . . . before gun emplacements opened up the length of every wall, and huge guns with terrible long barrels took aim on us, all of them blasting away in a massive broadside, slamming into the targets laid out before them. They’d been waiting for enough of us to come within range. Droods in their armour were protected; but the flying machines weren’t.

The autogyros went first, blown out of the void. Their engines exploded in clouds of black smoke and steam, and lovingly maintained fuselages were raked with bullets. Many of them burst into flames. Golden pilots were flung from their doomed craft, clutching helplessly at nothing as they fell into a void without end. They were still alive, but we had no way of reaching them. I wondered how long they’d fall, and how long they’d live. . . .

The Spitfires banked and rolled at incredible speed, blasting away at the gun emplacements, but they were too few against too many guns. The bullets couldn’t broach the planes’ force shields, so the castle produced guns that fired strange energies that crawled all over the Spitfires, opening up holes in the shields for the guns to fire through. Some exploded, some lost power and some spiralled away into the void like wounded birds. The remaining Spitfires saw there was no point in pressing the fight any longer and turned away, plunging into the void to rescue the fallen. Strictly speaking, they shouldn’t have done that, but family looks after family.

The energy guns then targeted the flying saucers, and they exploded silently one after another in sudden outbursts of unnatural colours.

The rest of us fell on Castle Horror, drawing in our wings to add more speed, but bullets and vicious energies still found us, beating against our armoured breasts, unable to break through. We fell like Furies and hit the castle roof like a rain of golden ammunition. Solid stone shattered under the impact of our golden feet, and many of us ploughed right through to whatever lay below. Some manoeuvred sideways at the last moment and swung round to hit the castle walls dead-on. There were huge stone gargoyles and stylised stone eagles everywhere, and they made good handholds. Soon we were swarming all over Schloss Shreck, opening up holes in the roof with our golden fists, scrambling over the walls like golden beetles, ripping guns out of their emplacements and throwing them into the void.

New weapons fired up through the roof, hitting us with unfamiliar energies. Some were blasted up into the air by the impact; others were knocked off their feet. Droods staggered this way and that as vicious energies crawled all over us, fighting to get in. But our armour held.

I smashed a hole through the roof until I had an opening big enough to drop through. I jumped down into the dark, and I was inside Schloss Shreck. Molly dropped down beside me. None of the attacks had even come close to touching her. We’d arrived in an attic full of junk, most of which I kicked out of the way as I hurried through it, looking for a way down into the castle proper. I could hear more Droods forcing their way in. Molly grinned at me like a naughty child trespassing somewhere she knew she wasn’t allowed. Behind my mask, I couldn’t help smiling, too. It felt good to be striking back at the enemy at last.

I found a trapdoor and a ladder that led down into a wide stone corridor, and soon we were moving swiftly along the castle’s upper floor. Solid stone walls, marble floors, all on a big enough scale to make mere humans feel small. A heavy quiet hung over everything like a shroud. Everywhere I looked there was Nazi regalia: huge flags and hanging banners, blocky black swastikas, eagles with grasping clawed feet, even giant portraits of stylised Aryan youth and soldiers from the 1940s. It was like moving through a museum to history’s worst nightmare, a paean of praise to Hitler’s Nazi Germany: the centre for a celebration that never happened. Molly sniffed loudly.

“Been a while since anyone redecorated here.”

“Nothing’s changed, because this is when the Satanists were a real power in the world,” I said. “This has all been preserved from when they last had a chance of winning. Satanists have always been strangely sentimental. They love the past because that’s when they were what they think they should be. Do me a favour, Molly. All this Nazi shit is getting on my nerves. Do something destructive about it.”

“Love to,” said Molly.

She snapped her fingers, and every single flag and banner burst into flames. The sound of crackling fires was pleasantly loud in the quiet as Molly and I strode cheerfully down the burning corridor.

We descended through stone galleries, wide passageways and long, curving stairs, until finally we found ourselves in a great open hall. Still no sign of anyone. We moved slowly forward, my golden feet hammering on the marble floor. In the middle of the hall lay a large circular table surrounded by what could only be described as thrones. The walls were hung with idealised portraits of men in medieval armour, in symbolic settings. All of them bore swastikas on their breastplates and shields.

“Hitler and his inner circle always did have this strange fascination with tales of King Arthur and his knights,” I said. “Surprising, really, given they had absolutely no understanding of chivalry. Der Führer was supposed to have a layout like this somewhere under the Berchtesgaden . . . like a twisted Camelot. Which would actually be a really cool name for a new indie band.”

“We need to keep moving,” said Molly. “I can feel Isabella’s presence not too far from here . . . but I’m starting to feel something is terribly wrong.”

“Then let’s go find her,” I said. “Lead the way, Molly.”

She turned back the way we’d come, leaving the hall behind us, chose a new direction without hesitation and started down it. She set off at a fierce pace, her face creased with worry, and soon she was running down the corridor, her arms pumping at her sides. Driven on by an urgency only she could feel. I ran alongside her, my armoured feet scarring the marble floor. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen another Drood since I entered the castle, and I couldn’t even hear any sound of fighting or destruction. I reached out to the Sarjeant-at-Arms through my torc, but couldn’t get an answer. Presumably the castle was jamming our communications. I tried Ethel, but I hadn’t heard a word from her since we entered the Timeless Moment. Presumably she was still back on Earth, haunting the place where the Hall had been, waiting for our return. I wondered how long she’d wait. . . .

We went down and down, from floor to floor, until we were forced to a sudden stop by two massive solid-steel doors that blocked our way, twenty feet high if they were an inch, and almost as wide. I pulled at one of the doors, and it didn’t budge at all. There were three separate locks, each the size of my head. I grinned behind my mask, placed both golden hands flat against the doors and pushed hard, till my golden fingers sank deep into the steel. And then I pulled. . . . The three locks exploded, one after another, and Molly had to duck behind me to avoid the pieces that flew through the air like shrapnel. The doors surged outwards under my implacable strength, and when I finally had a big enough gap I let go and walked between them into a hall greater than any I’d seen so far, overwhelmingly huge, hundreds of feet long, full of the strangest collection of weapons and machines of war I’d ever seen.

“I thought we’d come across something like this,” said the Armourer.

I spun around, startled. Molly jumped and made a loud squeak of surprise, and then tried terribly hard to pretend she hadn’t. The Armourer was standing there, in his armour shaped like a lab coat, of all things, looking around the hall with great interest. I slapped him hard across the shoulder, and the sound echoed loudly.

“Sorry,” said the Armourer. “Impossible to communicate in this unnatural place. Still, you have to admit this is really impressive. This is where the Nazis stored all their secret superweapons that were going to win the war for them. All the things they never got a chance to use, because Laurence shut the place down and trapped it here. Look at it all. . . . I’ve read about some of this, but never expected to see it with my own eyes. Prototype flying saucers, massive drilling machines to enter a city from underneath, tanks the size of railway engines, and look at that! A lightweight wooden airplane, to cross the Atlantic and drop their crude nuclear bombs on New York and Washington.”

“A balsa-wood airplane?” said Molly. “Oh, come on . . .”

“Howard Hughes built something similar for the Americans,” I said. “The Spruce Goose. Never put into production, but it did fly. . . .”

“All right, I’ll give you a wooden plane,” said Molly. “But Nazi flying saucers, in the forties?”

“Word was the Nazis had access to a crashed alien starship,” said the Armourer. “Some of the best Nazi minds broke their hearts trying to reverse-engineer it. Imagine trying to build a stardrive with vacuum tubes and slave labour. . . . Still, who knows what they might have achieved, given time? They nearly had the atomic bomb before we did. They were getting desperate enough to try anything towards the end. I don’t even recognise some of the things they’ve got here. Oh, Eddie, we have got to take this back with us! This is all of major historical importance!”

“First things first, Uncle Jack,” I said.

“I have to find Isabella!” said Molly. “She’s in trouble; I know she is. . . .”

“Of course you must,” the Armourer said immediately. “Lead the way, my dear.”

And so off we set again, hurrying through one oversize passageway after another, all of them built to impress or at least intimidate, until finally we found ourselves facing another closed door. More solid steel, with the word Verboten etched deeply into the metal. I kicked it open and we hurried in . . . to find ourselves standing at one end of a long, narrow hallway full of strange equipment, all of it covered in a thick layer of ice. Row upon row of tall glass cylinders stretched away before us, disappearing into the gloom, each thickly crusted with frost. The overhead lights came on one by one as we stood there, revealing more and more cylinders fading off into the distance. Each one had a blocky equipment panel at its base, sparkling with its own layer of hoarfrost. I moved in close for a better look. It was all blinking lights and heavy levers, and handwritten labels in German. The Armourer moved slowly down the centre aisle, trying to look at everything at once. Molly stayed with me, shivering and hugging herself.

“It’s freezing cold in here. Even after all these years. What were they doing?”

“Storing something,” the Armourer said cheerfully. “I wonder what. . . .”

“Specimens of some kind?” said Molly, fascinated despite herself.

“Cryogenics chambers!” said the Armourer. “Crude, but functional.” He leaned in close to one cylinder, brushing the ice away with his forearm. “Animal species . . . of a kind.” He looked at the control panel. “My German’s a bit rusty, but if I’m translating these labels correctly, what we have in these cylinders are . . . werewolves, Nosferatu, dragonkind, changelings . . . and a whole row of cylinders marked ‘Alien.’ I think this was some crude first attempt at bioengineering, presumably inspired by whatever they discovered in that crashed alien starship.”

“Can you tell what species the aliens belong to?” I said. “We may need to contact someone’s embassy.”

The Armourer cleared more ice from a cylinder and took a good look at what was inside. “No,” he said finally. “I don’t recognise this. Which is interesting . . . because I could have sworn I knew all the aliens allowed access to this world.”

“They were creating monsters in here,” I said. “Typical Nazis. Were they trying to create some new form of shock troops, perhaps?”

“Maybe,” said the Armourer. “Or perhaps they were . . . experimenting. They did so love to experiment. On things, and people . . . Welcome to the House of Pain, Dr. Moreau.”

“Can you make any sense of the control panels?” I said.

“No,” said the Armourer regretfully. “Too technical.”

“Hold it,” said Molly. “You want to wake these things up?”

“I was thinking more about putting them out of their misery,” I said.

And that was when the whole place shook, and the lights flared up brilliantly as though hit by a power surge. All the cylinders began to moan and vibrate in place, humming loudly like so many glass tuning forks. Whole chunks of ice fell away to shatter noisily on the floor. Frost on the instrument panels began to steam and melt and run away. It became increasingly possible to see what was inside the cylinders, and I soon wished I couldn’t. Too many things that should never have existed, made from pain and horror. This was nothing natural about any of them; they were patchwork things, horrible combinations of man and animal, shaped into living nightmares. All slowly waking up. Mouths opened, revealing jagged teeth. Fingers opened and closed, clutching at nothing, or tapped and clattered against the inside of the cylinders. Eyes opened, full of pain and rage and madness.

“They’re all coming back to life!” said Molly. “Armourer, what did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything!” said the Armourer, looking wildly about him. “I didn’t touch anything! We have must have restarted the systems when we walked in here.”

“We don’t have time for this,” I said.

I smashed the nearest equipment panel with one blow of my golden fist. The light inside the cylinder snapped off, and the contents stopped moving. I made my way steadily up and down the rows, smashing each control panel in turn, until my arm ached even inside my armour. There was a series of small explosions, a few fires, some drifting smoke . . . and one by one the systems shut down. The ice was still melting and running away in streams, but inside the cylinders, eyes closed, mouths closed, fingers stopped moving.

“Are they all back to sleep now?” said Molly, when I finally finished my work and returned to her.

“They’re all dead, Molly,” the Armourer said quietly. “We put them out of their suffering. Sometimes that’s the only mercy we have to offer.”

Molly put a comforting hand on my golden arm. “You did what you had to, Eddie.”

“I know,” I said. “Lot of that happening recently.”

I looked round suddenly. Off in the distance, I could hear sounds of fighting, conflict, gunfire and explosions. It seemed the Droods had come to grips with the enemy at last. But whom were they fighting? I moved back to the open door to find out, and that was when one of the largest cylinders suddenly exploded, shooting vicious glass shards through the air.

The Armourer and I moved quickly to shelter Molly, and when we looked round it was to see freezing gases boiling out of the shattered cylinder, falling to crawl along the floor like heavy ground fog. And out of the remains of the cylinder stepped a massive apelike creature. I have to say apelike, because it was another patchwork creature, roughly stitched together from a dozen different species, not all of them apes. It was huge, a giant, nine to ten feet tall and broadly built, its piebald skin stretched tautly over bulging muscles. Its fur had fallen out in great patches. So much time and effort, just so Nazi scientists could create the killer ape of myth and legend. Its head had been shaved, and jagged scars ran across the bulging augmented forehead. Steel bolts circled the skull, sparking static electricity. Its eyes were wild, full of suffering and the knowledge of what had been done to it.

It advanced slowly towards us, as though uncertain whether to walk upright or lower its huge knuckles to the floor. The oversize muscles swelled with every movement, threatening to split the overtaut skin. I didn’t want to hurt it. Poor bastard had already been hurt so much. And even the biggest ape was no match for Drood armour, after all. So I moved forward to meet it, my arms stretched wide in a gesture of welcome. The ape grabbed one golden forearm and threw me the length of the hall with one snap of its overlong arm. I tumbled through the air, smashing through the standing cylinders, and finally slammed to a halt against the far wall. I was quickly back on my feet again, and scrambling through the wreckage. The ape was advancing steadily on Molly, the only one of us without armour.

She tried some basic magics, but none of them could get a hold. The ape had its own built-in protections. It kept advancing on her, shaking its head from side to side as though bothered by some pain it couldn’t reach, and Molly kept backing away. The ape growled at her, and there was nothing sane in that low rumbling sound, only rage and pain and horror. And then the Armourer stepped out of the shadows to stand behind the ape and punch it in the back with all his strength. It screamed, loud as any fire siren. The Armourer’s golden hand sank deep into the muscled back, and then he ripped its spine out in one swift movement. A great gout of blood splashed across his armour and quickly ran away. The ape crashed to the floor, twitched a few times and lay still. The Armourer looked at the bloody thing in his hand and opened his golden fingers to let it fall to the floor. Molly stared at him. I came over to join them.

“People tend to forget I was once a field agent,” the Armourer said calmly.

“You didn’t have to kill it,” said Molly.

“It would have killed you,” said the Armourer.

“You don’t know that!” Molly seemed suddenly on the brink of tears. “We could have saved it. . . . Taken it out of here . . .”

“Some things aren’t meant to be pets,” said the Armourer. “Come on; let’s go find your sister.”

But first, we went to see what the fighting was, in case we were needed. Didn’t take us long to find it. The Satanists had found and closed with the Drood forces, and the war was under way. Not that the Satanists had come in person; instead they sent something they must have found in Schloss Shreck when they first reopened it. Perhaps standing in rows of icy cylinders. A whole army of blond Aryan supermen in Nazi SS uniforms, all of them with the same arrogantly handsome face. Clones. Hundreds and hundreds of perfect soldiers, all made from the same man. Made to fight in a war long past. The Satanists had sent them out against us to see what they could do. And maybe soften us up a little. I wondered what the Satanists had told the clones; wondered whom they’d been told we were. Whatever it was, it seemed to have motivated them; their handsome faces were flushed with rage and fury.

They closed on us with every kind of weapon, moving inhumanly fast. They had everything from standard-issue Lugers to modern machine pistols to strange-energy weapons, none of them any use against Drood armour. Still, the sheer number of them slowed the Drood advance almost to a halt. We had to smash our way through them, striking them down and advancing over the fallen bodies. Two great forces went head-to-head in the massive stone hall, filling it with lunging bodies from end to end and wall to wall. Both sides strove against each other, no mercy sought or shown. Molly, the Armourer and I joined the fight to do our bit. We had no problem killing the clones; they might not be Satanists, but they were quite definitely Nazis.

The Sarjeant-at-Arms urged his people on, leading from the front, as always. I knew he had to be worrying that the clones were a distraction, there only to slow us down while the Satanists made their escape. They must have teleport capability, to get in and out of the Timeless Moment. We’d have to do something about that. . . . The fighting went on and on, golden fists and swords and axes striking down Nazi clones, while bullets and explosives and vicious energies strove in vain to pierce strange-matter armour. Blood spurted and bones shattered, and the same arrogant, hateful face fell before us again and again. Until finally . . . I ran out of Nazis to kill. I stopped and looked around, blood and gore dripping thickly from my spiked golden fists. I was breathing hard inside my armour, but it had felt good, so good to get my hands on the enemy at last. Or at least an enemy.

Molly was right there at my side, harsh magics spitting and sparking round her hands. And not one single bloodstain on her long white dress. The Armourer was nowhere to be seen, swept away from us by the tides of battle. There were Droods everywhere, up and down the hall, surrounded by the piled-up bodies of the dead. They might have been Nazis; they might have been hateful, hate-filled, hate-fuelled Nazi clones, urged on by a hateful philosophy . . . but they never stood a chance against us, not really.

A golden figure in smooth traditional armour worked his way over to join Molly and me. I knew it was William. His feet were still encased in golden bunny slippers.

“You have to help me,” he said. “Ammonia’s not far from here. I can sense her presence.”

“Isabella, too,” said Molly. “We must be close to where they keep the prisoners.”

I nodded. The Sarjeant was already calling his troops back to order, ready to press on. There were enough of them; they didn’t need me. And I was the one who’d come here to free prisoners, not get caught up in the killing. So I gestured for Molly and William to lead the way. I needed to feel that I hadn’t come here to kill people.

We found Ammonia Vom Acht first, sitting on her own in the middle of a surprisingly sophisticated laboratory dominated by a single huge machine that filled the whole room, spilling out from its central core to crawl across the floor and halfway up the walls. Growing and spreading like some malignant hothouse plant. Ammonia had been made a part of the machine, strapped firmly to a chair in the very centre of the thing, stripped naked so that tubes could be thrust into her mottled flesh, her head shaved so holes could be drilled into her skull to allow a great many wires access to her brain. The wires curled up into the higher parts of the machine, where softly glowing colours came and went like passing thoughts. Ammonia sat perfectly still, her face blank and empty, her eyes staring straight ahead. I don’t think she saw anything.

William armoured down and ran forward, forcing his way through the mess of cables and equipment to kneel before her. He put his face right before hers and said her name several times, but she didn’t know he was there. Molly and I looked thoughtfully at the single technician in the room, who’d retreated to the far end of the laboratory the moment we forced our way in. He wore the traditional white lab coat, with white latex gloves, and he was doing his best to hide behind the farthest reaches of the machine. He looked like he wanted to run, but we were between him and the only exit. I beckoned for him to come forward, but he wouldn’t. William raised his head and looked at the technician, who actually whimpered at what he saw in William’s face.

“Come here,” said William, and the technician came out from behind the machine and stumbled forward, almost against his will. He stopped behind Ammonia in her chair, trembling in every limb, his face wet with sweat. William nodded slowly.

“Talk to me. Tell me what’s happening here. What is this machine? And what have you done to Ammonia Vom Acht?”

“I’m Stefan Klein. I’m in charge of this—”

“I don’t care,” said William. “What have you done to her?”

“She’s been made a part of the great plan,” said Klein, swallowing hard. “There never was an influence machine. I can’t believe anyone ever believed that we had such a thing. I mean, a single machine that could influence every single mind in the world simultaneously? Hardly likely, was it? If we had such a thing, we wouldn’t have needed the Great Sacrifice; we’d have taken over. No, no . . . this is much better. Take the most powerful telepathic brain in the world, wire it up to the most complex mental amplifier ever and then let her do all the heavy lifting. Ammonia Vom Acht was always far more powerful than she ever allowed herself to be. That’s what ethics does for you.”

“And I led you people right to her,” I said, “when I tracked her down to her hiding place in Cornwall.”

“Hardly, old thing,” said a familiar voice. “That was all down to me.”

We all looked round, and there, slouching elegantly in the doorway, with a really big drink in his hand, was Ammonia’s husband, Peter. His smile was as vague as ever, but his eyes were clear and sharp. He smiled benevolently on us all, toasted us with his glass and took a long drink, deliberately making us wait to hear what he had to say. When the glass was empty he tossed it casually to one side, and didn’t even look round when it smashed on the floor.

“I’m afraid I got rather tired of the old girl,” said Peter. She really was very needy, very clingy, and she was such hard work: always having to comfort her, and look after her and be a shoulder for her to cry on. I never used to drink, you know, before I met Ammonia Vom Acht. And look at me now. . . . It’s the only thing that helps, so I’m able to stand her overbearing presence, her never-ending needs. And never any money for me! Oh, no, no . . . Not a penny for poor old Peter.

“She made millions, but I had to remind her to hand over my allowance! And we had to live like hermits, at the end of the world. I used to have friends; I used to go out; I used to have fun! Finally it all got a bit too much. So I contacted the satanic conspiracy. They weren’t difficult to find; the Internet is a wonderful thing. . . . And they were very understanding. So I needed to wait for the right moment to set her up—too soon and people like you might figure out what they wanted with her, and try to stop them. But once you’d come sniffing around, it was clear we couldn’t wait any longer. So when she came back from Chez Drood, all tired and worn-out, there I was with a very special nice hot drink waiting for her. And once she was safely snoring in her chair, I shut down the defences and told the nasty old Devil worshippers to come and get her.

“She sort of woke up when they were manhandling her out of the house. She looked at me, wondering why I was doing nothing to stop them, and when she understood, she cried and cried and cried. Ah, you have no idea how good it feels to be free of the old bat at last.”

“You utter shit,” said William, and his voice was cold and collected and quite deadly. He rose to his feet to glare balefully at Peter, who didn’t seem to give even the smallest of damns. William headed straight for him. “She had a magnificent mind!”

“Oh, boo-hoo,” said Peter. He took a gunmetal flask from inside his jacket. “Sorry, old sport; do I know you? Do I care? No, I don’t think I do, actually.”

William armoured up, the golden skin sweeping over him in a moment. “You can be made to care, for what you’ve done.”

“No,” said Peter. “I don’t think so.”

He held up his other hand and showed us a simple metal clicker like the one Roger Morningstar had back at the Cathedral Hotel. And before any of us could even react, Peter clicked the thing, a sharp, metallic sound in the quiet, and William’s armour disappeared, driven back into his torc by an irresistible command. My armour disappeared, too, and I was suddenly exposed and shivering in the cold of the laboratory. Molly stepped quickly forward, but when she raised her hands to unleash her magics, nothing happened. She tried a few simple chants, but the words fell awkwardly into the quiet, doing nothing. Peter smiled patronisingly at her.

“Magic won’t work here, dearie. All such subtle energies had to be suppressed, so the machine could do its work.”

“I don’t need my armour to beat the crap out of a treacherous little tit like you,” said William.

“Just as well I’ve got a gun, then,” said Peter. He shook his gunmetal flask once, and suddenly it was a Luger. Peter giggled happily. “Now, that’s what I call a transformer. Marvellous little toy, isn’t it? My new masters have been very generous.” For all his studied vagueness, his hand was very steady as he covered the three of us with the Luger. We all stood very still. None of us doubted he’d use it.

“I’ve already summoned security,” said Peter. “Oh, dear, now that my flask is gone I don’t have any booze anymore. I should have told them to bring a bottle. . . .” He smiled at us all easily. “We’ve all got clickers here, you know. Lots and lots of them. The rest of your people are in for a really nasty shock, once they’ve got past those Nazi bullyboy clones and encountered the real armed forces. And the best part is, we got the formula for the clicker from inside your own family! Isn’t that delightful? It’s based on the very device your Armourer created all those years ago. One of your own is a traitor, but then, I think you already knew that, didn’t you? He’s sold you out again, I’m afraid. Or she! Far be it from me to give anything away! Please don’t move, Eddie. I really don’t think I can allow any of you to get any closer to me. I’m not a physical person. But don’t think I won’t shoot if I have to. In fact . . . I think I’d quite like to. Could be fun . . . So, whom should I start with?”

I glanced at William, our eyes met briefly, and we were off and moving. There’s a lot more to a Drood than his armour. We’re trained to fight, with and without weapons, from early childhood, and one of the first things we’re taught is what to do if our armour isn’t available. I moved abruptly to the left while William dived to the right, and while Peter hesitated, unable to decide which of us to go after . . . Molly stepped smartly forward and kicked him full in the balls. There was an awful lot of strength and vindictiveness in that kick, and Peter bent sharply forward, tears flying from his bulging eyes. He crashed to his knees, shaking and shuddering, trying to get enough air into his lungs for a decent scream. Molly snatched the gun out of his nerveless hand and pressed the barrel to the side of his head. I didn’t think he even knew it was there. I took the clicker away from him, threw it on the floor and stamped on it. It shattered, and immediately William and I were both wrapped in our armour again. William moved over to Molly, took the Luger from her hand and shot Peter in the head, twice. The side of his skull exploded, blood and brains and bone fragments flying in the air, and he fell backwards and lay still. William then turned and shot Stefan Klein, once in the heart and once in the head, and the technician fell sprawling across his machine. William gave the gun back to a somewhat startled Molly.

“Some shit I just don’t put up with,” he explained, before going back to Ammonia. He leaned in close to study the wires connecting her mind to the machine. “I can deal with this. It’s not rocket science. You two go and look for Isabella. I’ll free Ammonia from this . . . thing and take her back to the Hall.”

“Will you be all right here on your own?” I said cautiously.

“I only came here for Ammonia,” said William. “She really is a most remarkable lady. That little shit never was worthy of her.” He looked back at me. “I saw her mind when she made contact with mine. You should see what she’s really like, Eddie. She glows like a star, burns like a brilliant fire. . . .”

“You really think she can come back, after what’s been done to her here?” I said.

“Why not?” said William. “I did.”

Molly moved in close beside me. “He doesn’t need us, Eddie. And I’m getting really worried about Iz.”

“Is she far from here?” I said.

“Not far, no.”

“Then let’s go. Catch you later, William.”

But he was already lost in admiration of his Ammonia, murmuring comforting words to her as he removed the wire connections one by one.

We found the Satanists’ prisoners, or what was left of them, holed up in a series of small stone cells that were little more than kennels, with stout locks on the doors. Molly made a sharp gesture with one hand, and all the doors exploded right out of their frames and into the corridor. The smell hit me first: filth and decay and foulness so bad I had to order my mask to fade it out. Molly and I moved forward to check out the cells. No windows, no furniture, not even straw on the floor or a bucket for waste. The prisoners had been thrown into their cells and left there. Half-blinded, half-starved men and women emerged painfully slowly into the corridor, shielding their eyes from the everyday light they were no longer accustomed to, asking pitifully if they were being rescued at last. Of the thousands of townspeople who’d been kidnapped from Little Stoke, it turned out only over a hundred had survived. The rest had been . . . used up in experiments. Over a hundred people crammed into a dozen windowless cells. And twenty-two weapons makers from the Supernatural Arms Faire who’d refused to cooperate with the Satanists. Because sometimes even merchants of war have a line they won’t cross. Molly and I reassured them all as best we could, and sent them to William, so he could lead them back to the Hall.

Sounds of conflict were still continuing on the floors above. Cries of rage and pain and horror, gunshots and explosions. How many Nazi clones did the Satanists have? I had to wonder whether my family had encountered Satanists with clickers yet, and whether I should go back to join them. Or whether I should accompany the prisoners, make sure they got out of the castle safely. But Molly still hadn’t found Isabella, and I couldn’t leave her here on her own. She was growing increasingly disturbed the closer she got to her sister, convinced something terrible had happened to her. So we moved on, deeper into the cell block.

We found her in the very last cell, set round the corner. A single cell with the door already standing open. No number on the door, no identification, nothing to mark it as any different, but Molly knew. She stormed into the cell with her sister’s name on her lips, and then she went suddenly quiet. I hurried in after her, and that was when I saw what the Satanists had done to Isabella Metcalf.

They’d crucified her, hung her upside down on an inverted wooden cross suspended from a single coarse rope, her head a few feet from the floor. Cold iron nails had been hammered through her wrists and ankles, and heavy steel bolts had been thrust through her broken arms and legs. One eye had been gouged out of her head, and the ear next to it had been raggedly cut away. Her face had been beaten to such a pulp I barely recognised her. Blood dripped steadily down from her many wounds, forming a great half-dried pool under the inverted cross. Her clothes were tatters, her skin cut and burned and bruised. Because she defied them.

She was still alive, because she was a witch and kept her heart somewhere else. So she couldn’t die, no matter how much they hurt her.

It took me a moment to realise there was a man standing next to her. I turned slowly to look at him, and it was Philip MacAlpine, of MI-13. He had both hands on the tied-off rope supporting the inverted cross. He glared at me.

“Well, don’t stand there, Drood! Help me get her down! I didn’t come all this way to rescue her just to watch her die!”

I moved quickly over to help him untie the rope, and between us we lowered the inverted cross carefully to the floor. Molly was right there with the cross, taking as much of the weight as she could, murmuring comfortingly to her sister. Isabella never opened her remaining eye, never made a sound. I don’t think she knew where she was or what was happening to her. Or at least I hoped not. Between the three of us, we got the cross laid out on the floor, and I armoured down so Isabella would know my face if she did wake up. MacAlpine cried out.

“Eddie Drood! I should have known you’d be here.”

“Never mind me, Phil; what are you doing here?”

He sniffed haughtily. “You Droods aren’t the only ones who’ve been investigating the new satanic conspiracy. MI-13 has had its best people all over this case for ages, ever since we discovered how badly they’d infested the current British government. You aren’t the only ones with your ears to the ground, you know. All that talk about the Great Sacrifice was the last straw; we knew we had to do something. Luckily, we’ve had agents in deep cover in London Undertowen for years, so it was easy enough to snatch some low-level Satanists and sweat the information out of them. I wondered why you were suddenly so keen to get into Under Parliament, so I had my people keep an eye on you when you crashed that Satanist tea party. Once we found out what went down there, that they’d run you off and snatched Isabella, we decided it was time to get involved. Isabella had done some work for us in her time, and we always pay our debts. So I came in here first, using the teleport system we found in London Undertowen, to spy out the lay of the land and look for Isabella. And pick up any interesting trinkets that happened to be lying around, of course.”

“Of course,” I said. “Typical MI-13: always an ulterior motive. Still, I’m glad you’re here, Phil. Where’s your backup?”

“A whole brigade of SAS combat sorcerers, just waiting for my word,” Phil said smugly.

“Let’s see what my people can do first,” I said. I had a strong feeling a whole bunch of SAS roughnecks would come in very handy if the Satanists did use their clickers against my family, but I didn’t want to call them in yet. Couldn’t have word getting out that the Droods had to yell for help . . . I clapped MacAlpine on the shoulder. “Good to see you, Phil. We’ll take all the help we can get. We’re not proud.”

“Not what I’ve heard,” said MacAlpine, and we both laughed briefly. Molly looked round, her pale face empty of all expression.

“Help me. I need help for Isabella.”

I crouched down beside her, and MacAlpine moved in closer, frowning at Isabella’s wounds.

“How are we going to get all those nails out?” he said. “And the steel bolts? I haven’t got a crowbar, and even if I did, the shock of digging them out would probably finish her off. . . .”

While he was still talking, Molly gestured sharply with one hand, and every single nail and bolt shot up out of Isabella’s flesh with such force and velocity they buried themselves in the stone ceiling overhead. Isabella’s body jerked once, but she still didn’t make a sound. Molly crouched down beside her, stroking her sister’s pulped and bloody face with one hand, crooning ancient healing chants. The gaping wounds left by the dislodged nails were already beginning to close. I didn’t know how long it would take Molly to repair the major damage, or even if Isabella would be able to move afterwards; I just knew I couldn’t wait around while she did it. There was still a lot of work to be done here at Schloss Shreck. Castle Horror.

“I thought witches couldn’t handle cold iron?” MacAlpine murmured in my ear.

“Depends how mad they get,” I said quietly.

“I’m amazed Isabella’s still alive,” said MacAlpine. “After everything that’s been done to her. Must have the constitution of an ox. No offence.”

“Metcalf sisters are very hard to kill,” I said. I could have told him about the hidden heart, but he was MI-13, after all, and he had tried to kill me and Molly more than once. Some secrets should stay in the family.

Molly looked up at me. “I can’t leave her, Eddie. She needs me. Look what they’ve done to her. . . .”

“Do what you can,” I said. “Get her stable. Then get her out of here and back to the Hall. They’ve got specialists; they’ll know what to do.”

“I don’t want to leave you here on your own,” said Molly.

“You won’t be,” I said. “I’ve got Philip MacAlpine with me to watch my back.”

“Indeed,” MacAlpine said quickly. “I know a common enemy when I see one.”

Molly studied MacAlpine. “Thank you. For trying to help my sister. Look after my Eddie.”

“Trust me,” said MacAlpine. “I wouldn’t dare let anything happen to him.”

Outside in the corridor, I reached out to the Sarjeant-at-Arms through my torc. And much to my surprise and relief, I managed a brief if variable contact. He sounded very far away, and his voice kept fading in and out, but we could hear each other. I made MacAlpine stand and wait while I brought the Sarjeant up to speed.

“Where are you, Sarjeant?”

“Damned if I know! We’ve fought our way in from the outside, down through the roof and in through the walls, heading for the centre of the castle, and waded through a whole army of Nazi clones in the process. We’ve been destroying anything that even looked dangerous along the way, including the conspiracy’s teleport gates! The Satanists aren’t going anywhere, Eddie. They’re trapped in here with us. Where are you?”

“Just leaving the cells, along with an agent of MI-13 I picked up along the way. He says he can call in a whole brigade of SAS combat sorcerers, if you feel the need. . . .”

“Good to hear,” said the Sarjeant unexpectedly. “We’ve taken casualties, Eddie. I’ll take all the help we can get.”

“I take it you’ve encountered the clickers, Sarjeant. How are you coping?”

“After a few fairly disastrous close encounters, when it all came down to hand-to-hand fighting and every nasty trick we could spring on them, we learned to scoop up every weapon we came across and shoot the nasty bastards at a distance, before they could even use their clickers. But it’s slowing our advance right down, Eddie. I think the leader and his inner circle have run out of clones to throw at us, but we’re no nearer to getting our hands on them.”

MacAlpine kept crowding me and demanding to know what was going on, so I broke contact with the Sarjeant and filled MacAlpine in on the high spots.

“I think I know where we can find the conspiracy leader,” he said immediately. “We’ve had one of our people close to him for some time, in really deep cover. He told us a lot about the layout of this place. Follow me.”

I let him lead me through the brightly lit stone corridors and passageways, most of them still lined with burning Nazi flags and banners from where Molly had expressed her displeasure earlier. No sprinkler systems in medieval castles. I could still hear signs of fighting, but way off in the distance. The main party of Droods hadn’t caught up with me. MacAlpine warned me not to armour up just yet; golden feet make a hell of a racket on marble floors, and he didn’t think we should advertise our approach. If the leader thought the Droods were almost upon him, he’d probably run. As we drew closer, small groups of Satanists would run past, heading for the battle, and MacAlpine would give them the proper password and they’d keep going.

“You’re a useful person to have around after all, Phil,” I said.

“You have no idea,” he said. “Really.”

I was starting to be seriously impressed with him. It was too easy to forget that this middle-aged, passed-over man had been a pretty decent spy in his day, and had worked with both my uncle Jack and uncle James. The fact that he’d tried to kill me and failed shouldn’t be held against him. A lot of people came into that category.

“Droods may be flashy,” said MacAlpine, “but MI-13 is thorough. You never even knew we were investigating the conspiracy, did you? I always was a better field agent than you ever gave me credit for.”

“Stop fishing for compliments,” I said. “I’m impressed, all right?”

“Not yet,” he said. “But you will be.”

Finally we came to a great oaken door with a huge Nazi swastika carved into it in brutal bas-relief. MacAlpine eased up to the door, listened for a moment and then carefully turned the handle and opened it a crack. He slipped me a quick wink and then pushed the door all the way open. He strode in, and I moved quickly in after him. Beyond the door was a great auditorium packed with people sitting in row upon row of raked seating, facing an open stage. The door closed quietly behind me.

“All the upper echelons of the new satanic conspiracy,” MacAlpine murmured. “Safe and protected here behind layer upon layer of defences too strong for even Droods to break through.”

I stayed by the door, studying the people in the raked seating, surprised at how many I recognised. Familiar faces from politics, big business, the media, and all kinds of celebrities. And there on the stage was Alexandre Dusk himself, smiling broadly and looking right at me. He made a welcoming gesture in my direction, and everyone in the auditorium turned to look at me and smile. Except they weren’t looking at me. They were looking and smiling at Philip MacAlpine. And when I turned to look at him, he smiled at me and held up one hand. With a clicker in it. He snapped it sharply. I tried to call my armour and couldn’t. MacAlpine gestured to two waiting guards, big muscular types in SS uniforms, and they moved quickly forward to take me by the arms. I didn’t struggle. I had my pride.

“Typical Drood,” said MacAlpine. “Always ready to believe the best of people. I thought I’d had it when you burst in and found me with Isabella, but I always could think on my feet. And you couldn’t believe a small man like me could put one over on a big man like you.”

“I couldn’t believe you’d sink this low,” I said.

“How does it feel?” he said. “To be alone and helpless, naked without your armour, among your worst enemies? How does it feel to know that all the things we did to Isabella Metcalf are nothing compared to what we’re going to do to you?”

I said nothing. Why give him the satisfaction? MacAlpine laughed in my face and walked down the main aisle to take his place on the stage, the guards hustling me along behind him. MacAlpine nodded to Alexandre Dusk, who moved aside to let MacAlpine take centre stage. The guards held me securely to one side, where everyone could get a good look at me. There was no booing or taunts; they looked at me with hot, greedy eyes. MacAlpine smiled out over the assembled Satanists, and then grinned happily at me.

“Yes,” he said. “I am the leader of the new satanist conspiracy. I put it all together, arranged the Great Sacrifice and led you poor old Droods around by the nose. You never saw this one coming, did you? Even when you found me tormenting poor Isabella, you couldn’t believe what you were seeing. You believed everything I told you, even though it must have been clear I was making it all up as I went along.”

He looked out over the auditorium, at his people hanging on his every word. “Let the Droods have Schloss Shreck! Let them waste their time wading through all the defences and booby traps we set in place! We don’t need this castle anymore. I’ve already given the orders to activate the influence machine, powered by dear Ammonia’s amazing brain. What was that, Eddie? Did you want to say something? No? Then shut up and listen. You’ll find this both interesting and informative.” He turned back to the audience. We’ll leave here through the teleport gates, taking the machine and its room with us, and then we’ll seal all the entrances to the Timeless Moment. Leave the Droods locked in here. What could be a better revenge? While out in the world we shall set the Great Sacrifice in motion and watch and laugh as the adult populations of the Earth slaughter their own children and damn themselves forever. And then we shall break down the doors of Hell, and our lord Satan shall rise up with all his fallen, and we shall be made kings of the Earth!

“We can always come back here when we feel the need for fresh meat to torment. Why should the Droods miss out on Hell on Earth?”

He broke off then, because I couldn’t keep the grin off my face any longer. The guards forced my arms up painfully behind my back, but I laughed at them, and at Philip MacAlpine, and all the sheeplike faces in the auditorium.

“Typical MacAlpine,” I said loudly. “Too busy boasting about the things you’re planning to do to concentrate on the job at hand. We’ve already found Ammonia Vom Acht and freed her from the machine, and smashed all the teleport gates. My family is coming here, and you’re not going anywhere. You’re trapped in here with us.”

There was commotion then amongst the assembled Satanists; famous men and women jumped to their feet, shouting and arguing, yelling to MacAlpine to do something. He turned away to talk quietly with Alexandre Dusk, and then turned back to stare and shout his people down.

“It doesn’t matter!” he said. “The influence machine was never necessary; it was something to give us an edge! We don’t need it. What we’ve set in motion in the world can’t be stopped now. The Great Sacrifice will go ahead anyway, as planned. And I doubt very much that the Droods have found all our teleport gates. However, I do think that before we take our leave, we should take time out for a little entertainment, and express our displeasure at this poor, helpless Drood in our midst. Because I think we’ve all had quite enough of his meddling and interference in our affairs!”

The audience cheered. They liked the sound of that.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “You know you’re dying to tell me. How did a little nobody like you end up leader of the satanic conspiracy?”

“Because of you, Eddie,” said MacAlpine. This is all your fault. None of it would have happened if it hadn’t been for you. I was happy in my job, away from the field, coasting along. I’d had a good career, if somewhat unappreciated, and was actually looking forward to an early retirement. Go down to the coast, somewhere quiet, grow roses . . . And then you ruined all that by screwing up what was left of my career and humiliating me in front of my bosses! You made me look old and useless, and that . . . kicked me awake. Made me realise that my life wasn’t over until I said it was over, and that if I wanted to be great I’d have to make myself great.

“So I used my old contacts to make a new life for myself, and let my ambitions run wild. I had access to all kinds of information at MI-13, and I used it to hunt down the last vestiges of the old satanic conspiracy. There were still quite a few of them around, deep underground, waiting for someone to provide them with a new vision. Britain’s ruling classes have always had a dark side. . . . And so over the past few years, while you and your precious family were busy with the Hungry Gods and the Immortals, I quietly used the contacts I’d made through a long and mostly successful career to put like-minded people together. It was actually remarkably easy to assemble a new satanic conspiracy; I’ve always known people on every side of the fence. All part of doing business in the spy trade. Of course, I had help. Alexandre Dusk was the last of the old-school Satanists, and a bit wary until I explained my remarkable new scheme to him. And then he couldn’t get on board fast enough. He was happy to be the public face of the new conspiracy, while I put everything together beside the scenes. Until I was ready to launch my revenge on a world that never properly appreciated or rewarded me, despite everything I’d done to protect it.”

“Molly was right,” I said, when he finally paused for breath. “It’s always the sad, embittered little men you have to watch out for. . . . I think counselling would probably have helped.”

He glared down from the stage at me. “You don’t get it, do you? Everything you and your fellow Droods have been put through was done at my command. Planned, designed to push you to the edge, provoke you into more and more extreme reactions, to drive you step by step out of the Light and into the Dark. Everything we did was intended to provoke increasingly extreme reactions from you, until you . . . were as bad as us. Look back at everything you’ve done since you started fighting us, Eddie; were you ever so vicious, so violent before? I think that’s what’s pleased me so much about all this: watching the prim and proper Droods become another bunch of thugs.”

I remembered Molly saying, You can’t fight evil with evil methods. Fighting evil is supposed to bring out the best in us, not the worst. And I remembered all the things I’d done to the Indigo Spirit and to Charlatan Joe, two of my oldest friends . . . all in the name of revenge.

“You see?” said MacAlpine. “You’ve all done questionable things in your quest to stop us. You’ve used torture and intimidation; you’ve killed people to make yourselves feel better. You’ve demeaned yourselves, Drood. Oh, we went to a lot of trouble to work out schemes best suited to bring out your dark side. . . . And do you know why, Eddie? Because only those who stand in Heaven’s gaze have Heaven’s strength, and can hope to stand against the forces of Darkness. And you and your family aren’t qualified anymore.”

“You came close,” I said steadily. “But not close enough. We didn’t come here to fight evil men; we came here to rescue your prisoners. We didn’t come here to punish you for what you’ve done, but to prevent the Great Sacrifice and save a generation of children. It isn’t what you do, Phil; it’s why you do it.”

“You keep telling yourself that, Eddie,” said MacAlpine, smiling easily. “And try to remember which particular road is paved with good intentions.”

“That really was you in Limbo, wasn’t it?” I said. “That’s why I was able to hit you, when I couldn’t touch anyone else there.”

“Oh, yes,” said MacAlpine. “That was me. Once we discovered how vulnerable you were, I couldn’t resist taking a shot at you. A chance to know all your secrets . . . It would have made this all so much easier.”

“How did you get Walker to represent scum like you?” I said. “He spent most of his life shutting down operations like yours.”

“Walker?” said MacAlpine. “You saw Walker in there? I did hear he was dead. . . .”

And while he was thinking about that, I broke free from my guards with a few old and very unpleasant tricks every Drood learns from an early age. Both of them went crying and moaning to the floor, and I sprinted for the doorway. A great cry went up from the assembled Satanists as they rose up from their seats and scrambled after me. I could hear MacAlpine yelling at them, driving them on. I got to the door, hauled it open, stepped out into the corridor and then turned and stopped there, inside the doorway, and smiled nastily at the approaching Satanists. They all quickly stumbled to a halt, holding back. I was a Drood, after all. Even with so many of them and only the one of me, none of them wanted to go first. In fact, they all seemed very keen for someone else to have the honour of going first.

“What do you think you can achieve, Eddie?” said MacAlpine from the stage. “One unarmed Drood against an army of us?”

“This is the only way out of here,” I said loudly, so they could all hear me and understand. “This is the only exit, and I’m guarding it. Because there might still be some teleport gates my family missed, and I can’t risk your getting to them before my family gets here. So you’re going to have to get through me to get away, and as long as I’m standing in the doorway, you can come at me only a few at a time. So all I have to do is hold you here until the rest of my family turns up. They can’t be that far away; I heard fighting. And once they arrive and see what you’ve done to me . . . Oh, the things they’ll do to you . . .”

“Will somebody please shoot this arrogant little turd?” said MacAlpine.

“Guns won’t work in here,” said Alexandre Dusk.

MacAlpine looked at him. “What?”

“No guns, no weapons, no magics! It’s all part of the defences you had me put in place to keep out the Droods! You said you wanted every possibility covered!”

“Well . . . lower the protections!”

“I can’t! Not like that! It’ll take two, maybe three hours. . . .”

“You’re an idiot, Dusk.” MacAlpine looked back at me. “You can’t stand against us all, Eddie! Without your armour, you’re only one man.”

“One very specially trained man,” I said. “One Drood is a match for any number of amateur-night bottom-feeding scum like you.”

“We’ll drag you down and tear you apart!”

“What we do in Heaven’s name has Heaven’s strength,” I said carefully. “I might have strayed from the path, but I think I’ve found a way back. I choose to stand in Heaven’s gaze again, and pay in blood for what I did in blood. I think . . . when you know you’re going to die anyway, it’s all about being able to look God in the eye. I know you’ll drag me down eventually; enough jackals can always pull down a lion. . . . But all I have to do is hold you here long enough and then my family will avenge me. By slaughtering every one of you. Not for revenge or even for justice. But to make sure none of you can ever harm Humanity again. So here I stand. One last chance for atonement. And you’re right, Phil; I do have so much to atone for.”

Alexandre Dusk had come down from the stage. He pushed his way through the crowd to address me, though he was careful to maintain a safe and respectful distance.

“Don’t talk about God and Heaven here, Drood. They have no place in Schloss Shreck, not after all the awful things we’ve done. This is our place, our game, our rules. Were you perhaps expecting some great beam of light to shine down from above, and empower you, because you stand against us? ‘My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure’? It doesn’t work that way, Drood.”

“Never thought it did,” I said. “I don’t expect anything. Except to stand and fight, and hold you here, for as long as I can.”

“If you stay we’ll kill you,” said Alexandre Dusk.

“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” I said.

And I drew the Colt repeater from my back holster and shot Dusk in the head. He fell backwards, blood flying in the air as he crashed into the Satanists behind him. They fell back, making loud shocked noises, and Dusk was dead before he hit the floor. The crowd fell quiet, looking on with startled, disturbed eyes. They looked at the body and then back at me. I smiled easily at them.

“I got caught without my gun earlier on this case,” I said. “So I made a point of bringing it with me this time. Had a hunch it might come in handy. And as long as I’m standing here, on the other side of the door, it works fine. You didn’t think I was just going to stand here, did you?”

“Take him down!” yelled MacAlpine from the stage, his voice almost hysterical with rage and frustration.

“This is a Colt repeater,” I said. “Never misses, never needs reloading. Usually. But with all the protections on this place, it’s probably only a gun. With a handful of bullets. Which means I can kill only a limited number of people. So come on! Who’s willing to die so others can have the honour of dragging me down?”

I kept trying to reach out to the Sarjeant-at-Arms through my torc, to tell him where I was, and to get a bit of a move on. But if he could hear me, I couldn’t hear him. So it was down to me: one man against a horde of Satanists. I looked about me, and they all stared silently back with sullen, snarling faces and hot, hateful eyes. As long as I was careful to stay in the doorway and not let them draw me forward, they could come at me only a few at a time, and none of them wanted to be the first to die. Even though MacAlpine was yelling himself hoarse up on the stage, screaming at them to do something, no one did. A few actually yelled back at him, saying that if he was so damned keen, he should come down there and try something himself.

And then even these few voices fell silent as Alexandre Dusk sat up. A few drops of blood rolled down his face from the great wound in his forehead, and then stopped. He rose slowly to his feet, brushed himself down and then turned to smile at me. A very cold, very knowing smile.

“Witches aren’t the only ones with the good sense to hide their hearts somewhere safe,” he said. “Like Phil told you: I’m old-school, and I know all the old tricks.”

He came straight at me, and I shot him in the chest. He staggered but kept on coming, and I had no choice but to keep on shooting. I used up every bullet in the gun, and he wouldn’t go down again. He stopped and smiled at me.

“So,” said MacAlpine from the stage. “One man, without a gun.”

“One Drood,” I said, tossing the empty gun behind me. “And you bottom-feeding scumbags shall not pass.”

They came at me then, rushing past the smiling Alexandre Dusk, hands outstretched like claws in their eagerness to get at me. There were a hell of a lot of them, and some of them looked to be really big bastards, but I’d been right: As long as I held my position, they could come at me only two or three at a time. I struck them down with hard, pitiless, practiced moves before they could even lay a hand on me. They crashed to the floor, and those behind trampled right over them to get to me. Their faces were flushed and distorted with rage; they were desperate to drag me down and get away before the rest of my family arrived. But in the end they were amateurs, facing one very well-trained Drood.

I hit them hard and I hit them often, and I hit them with practised skill, not wasting a single movement or using the least bit more energy than I had to. I was in this for the long run. It felt good; it felt really good to punch a Satanist in the face or the throat, to break their ribs and smash their kneecaps, to feel my fists jar on bone and send blood flying. All I had to do was think of the cells, and the prisoners I’d found there. But I was still careful to pace myself. I held my ground, let them get in one another’s way and enjoyed the opportunity to dispense some very basic justice to some very bad people.

Of course, that didn’t last long. First my hands hurt, and then they began to bleed. I’d got too used to fighting inside my armour. My fists jarred every time I hit bone, and my hands and arms began to ache. I was getting short of breath, and despite myself I was starting to slow down. Then my legs and back began to hurt, because I was constantly moving and couldn’t stop even for a moment. Sweat ran down my face, stinging my eyes and leaving salt on my lips. And my lungs began to labour, because I couldn’t stop to get my breath.

I fought on, and still they came at me, an endless tide of cruel, vicious faces, flying fists, clawed hands and improvised weapons. Blunt instruments, stiletto heels, even keys jammed between the fingers of a fist. They kept coming at me, scrambling over the bodies of their own fallen to get at me, and I stood my ground and would not back away. Inevitably, the attacks started getting through. Because in the end I was only one man, against so many. They hit me and cut me, desperate to hurt me and drag me down. And all I could do was stand my ground and take it.

Because of Harry and Roger, left to face their enemies and their deaths alone, because I couldn’t get reinforcements to them in time. Because of the Indigo Spirit and Charlatan Joe, my old friends, and what I’d done to them in the name of a good cause. And all I could think was, Payback’s a bitch.

I was deadly tired now, every movement a struggle, every blow an effort. Blood ran down my face and dripped from my nose. I’d never taken a beating like it. Didn’t know you could take a beating like it and still stay on your feet. The things we do for guilt’s sake . . . And while I might finally be standing in Heaven’s gaze, I certainly didn’t feel any stronger. My muscles ached; my hands blazed with agony every time I hit someone; my lungs strained with the effort of sucking in air. I felt like shit. More and more of the blows were getting through, and fewer and fewer of mine were doing real damage. Fists jarred against the bones of my face, slammed into my ribs, hammered against a defending arm. Sharp edges cut at me, darting in and out. And still, somehow, I held my ground. Though the floor at my feet was getting slippery with my blood.

Heaven always did have a thing for martyrs. . . .

I didn’t have to do this. I could turn and run, let the Satanists follow me. I could lead them to the Sarjeant’s forces. No. I couldn’t do that. I had no idea where the rest of my family was. And if the Satanists got out of this room . . . I couldn’t take the risk that they did have some last hidden teleport gate to let them escape the castle and the Timeless Moment. Let them escape back to Earth, and the Great Sacrifice . . . And all the children in the world. No. I had to hold them here for as long as I could. And hope my family got here in time.

I was reeling on my feet now. I hurt everywhere. One eye was puffed shut, and there was so much blood in my mouth I had to keep spitting it out. The agony in my sides was cracked ribs, maybe broken. It was an effort to raise my arms now. I was a ragged, bloody thing, all out of strength, held up by only a simple determination not to fall to scum like this. I wasn’t fighting anymore, just trying to protect myself as best I could, spraying blood into the faces of my enemies with every breath, because my nose was broken. The only reason they weren’t landing more punches was because I was swaying so much. I kept my head down and my hands up, and laughed at them with crushed and bloody lips.

They finally got close enough to grab me, fastening onto my arms and shoulders with clawed hands, trying to drag me forcibly from the doorway, and I fought them with all the strength I had left. Making them fight for every inch. Not for pride’s sake. Not even for my family’s sake, but because I couldn’t let them do what they planned. I had to save the children.

Because there was no one there to fight for me when I was a child, and my parents left me in the cold arms of the family.

And then suddenly they all let go of me and backed away. I almost fell without their fierce hands to hold me up. I stood swaying in the doorway, peering at my enemy with my one good eye, and then, dazed as I was, I heard the pounding of golden feet on the marble floor behind me. The Satanists were backing away into the auditorium now, yelling at one another. I watched them numbly, half-blind and half-dead, while Philip MacAlpine screamed instructions from the stage, trying to rally his people. I managed a small smile then. I was having a little trouble accepting the fact that I was still alive, but you couldn’t be dead and still hurt this much. I slowly realised that MacAlpine had descended from the stage and was ploughing through his own people to get to me.

“You’ve spoiled it all!” he screamed at me. “You always have to spoil everything! You’ve destroyed my career and my life and my wonderful plan, but I’ll still see you dead!”

He lunged forward, a small ceremonial dagger in his hand, reaching for my heart. I vaguely remembered something like that happening before, back in the Hall, so I waited till the last moment, till he was almost upon me, and then I spit a mouthful of my blood into his eyes. He cried out, staggering to a halt, suddenly blinded and confused. And it was the easiest thing in the world for me to step forward and take the knife away from him. I could barely feel the smooth bone handle in my swollen hand. MacAlpine fell back into the crowd, fighting his own people as he tried to get away from me. I slowly opened my hand and let the knife fall to the floor. It wasn’t like I had enough strength left to use it. I was amazed I was still on my feet. So I stood there and watched the upper echelons of the new satanic conspiracy panic and scream at one another, while from behind me came the sound of my family racing to my rescue.

Golden figures were suddenly all around me, and golden hands held me up, supporting my weight. The relief was so great I almost cried. More golden figures streamed past me into the auditorium, and the Satanists scrambled back through the raked seating, fighting one another in their desperate need to get away. Blank golden faces loomed up before me. I really didn’t like the way my reflection looked in those golden masks. I heard the Armourer’s voice.

“Dear God . . . Eddie, my boy, what have they done to you?”

One figure armoured down, and there was the familiar face of my uncle Jack, filled with shock and horror and rage at what he saw. His strong engineer’s hands took hold of me and supported me. I tried to smile at him, and blood ran down my chin from my ruined mouth.

“They have a clicker,” I said, speaking as clearly as I could. “Like yours. Took my armour away. But I still fought them.”

“Of course you did,” said Uncle Jack. “You’re a Drood.”

He produced his own clicker and snapped it before me. My armour flowed out of my torc and encased me from head to toe in a moment. I sighed blessedly as all the pain washed away, soothed by the armour. I felt strong and sharp again. My armour couldn’t heal me, but it could hold me up. I took a deep breath and straightened up. My head was clear again. I looked quickly round the auditorium.

“Close the door,” I said. “And set a guard outside. No one leaves this room.”

The Armourer gestured urgently, and half a dozen Droods went back out into the corridor and shut the door firmly. The Sarjeant-at-Arms came over to stand before me.

“We’ve evacuated all the surviving prisoners back to the Hall. William’s there with Ammonia, and Molly’s there with her sister. Everyone else in the castle is dead. All the Nazi clones, all the Satanists—though we lost some good people doing it. Their names will be remembered.”

“I see you got your armour back,” I said.

“You didn’t think I’d invent something as important as the clicker and not have something to overrule it if necessary, did you?” said the Armourer.

“Did you get all of the teleport gateways?” I said. “Are you sure you didn’t miss any hidden ones?”

“We’ve got people checking,” said the Armourer. “But, Eddie, listen, I have to tell you—”

“No,” I said. “This is more important. This room contains the upper echelons of the conspiracy, and their leader. Philip MacAlpine.”

“Never liked him,” said the Sarjeant, after a pause. “Good at his job, but never for the right reasons.”

The Armourer shook his head slowly. “He did good work with James and me. But his heart was never in it.”

The Sarjeant-at-Arms looked out over the quiet crowd of Satanists, who were cowed by the presence of so many Droods in their armour. There were still a lot of defiant faces, but none of them was stupid enough to try anything. The Sarjeant nodded once.

“This is the last of them. We have to deal with them, here and now.”

“Deal with them?” I said.

The Sarjeant turned his featureless mask back to me. “Kill them, Eddie. Kill every single one of them. Do you have a problem with that?”

“No,” I said. “They have to die. Not for justice, or revenge, or even for the awful thing they planned to do. But because if we let them live, they’d try to do it again. That or something worse. They have to die here, and their dreams and plans and bad intentions with them. No mercy. Not for them.”

“Couldn’t agree more,” said the Sarjeant-at-Arms.

He used his gift to call two heavy machine guns into his hands, and then he walked towards the waiting Satanists and opened fire on them. He moved the guns smoothly back and forth, cutting the Satanists down in rows, and stepped calmly over the dead bodies of the fallen to get at the next. Most tried to run, but the golden figures were there to stop them, striking them down with cold armoured fists. There was screaming, pushing and shoving, people trying to use one another as human shields. Cries for mercy, promising to do anything we wanted, make any reparations we wanted, inform on all their contacts, do anything for their lives . . . but mostly they screamed. None of us had anything to say to them. How could they hope to be forgiven, to be shown mercy, after what they’d done and planned to do? Let them go to God, and see if he had any mercy for them.

They had to die, because it was our duty to make sure they could never harm anyone again.

It didn’t take all that long. The Sarjeant-at-Arms’ guns finally fell silent, and only Droods were left standing. A few armoured figures moved carefully among the fallen bodies, but there were no merely wounded. The Sarjeant was very efficient. He looked round him at all the bodies lying slumped and piled across one another and nodded once, contemplating a job well-done. The guns disappeared from his hands. And then we all turned to look at the only two people left standing in the room who weren’t us. Philip MacAlpine and Alexandre Dusk stood together on the stage, looking defiantly back at us. I started toward them, and the Sarjeant and the Armourer came with me. MacAlpine looked quickly around, but there was nowhere for him to go. Alexandre Dusk smiled smugly at me. The bullet wound in his forehead was almost completely healed. He lifted his hands, and dark energies spit and swirled around them.

“I have my power, and I have my shields,” he said. “You can’t kill me, and you can’t stop me.”

“Wrong,” said the Armourer. He raised his clicker, snapped it once, and the magics surrounding Dusk’s hands disappeared. He looked at his hands dumbly for a moment, and then looked back at us. The Armourer smiled. “There are all kinds of clickers. Eddie, would you care to . . . ?”

I stepped forward and jumped up onto the stage. MacAlpine backed quickly away, but Dusk was still too stunned to move. He opened his mouth to say something, and I grew a long golden sword from my right hand and cut off his head. The body slumped to the stage, gouting blood. The head fell to the stage, rolled over the edge and ended up at the Sarjeant’s feet. The mouth was still moving, until the Sarjeant stamped on it. And that was the end of Alexandre Dusk.

I looked at Philip MacAlpine and he snarled back at me. “You can’t have me!” he said, his voice high and ragged. “I don’t care what you’ve got. I made a deal! It was promised to me that nothing in the world can harm me.”

“Hell always lies,” I said. “Except when a truth can hurt you more. You should know how deals with the Devil always work out.”

“I can’t be harmed! My own people tried to kill me in a hundred different ways, hoping to replace me as leader. I have drunk poison, soaked up bullets, laughed at curses! Nothing can touch me anymore. Your armour is worthless against me.”

“Yeah, right,” said the Sarjeant, behind me. He strode forward across the stage and launched a golden fist at MacAlpine’s head with enough force to tear it clean off the man’s shoulders. Except suddenly, impossibly, MacAlpine’s hand came up to intercept it. The golden fist slammed harmlessly into MacAlpine’s palm, stopped dead. And while everyone watched, MacAlpine closed his hand hard and crushed the serjeant’s hand inside his armour. He couldn’t break the golden strange matter, but he could destroy the hand inside it. We all heard the bones break and shatter. The Sarjeant grunted once. MacAlpine let go, and the Sarjeant fell back a step, nursing his injured hand to his chest. He didn’t cry out.

The Armourer looked at MacAlpine thoughtfully. “I wonder what a golden ax would do to his neck?”

“Don’t,” I said. “He really is protected. Sarjeant, have all the wounded been evacuated? Is there anyone else left in the castle?”

“All gone,” said the Sarjeant.

“Then let’s get the hell out of Schloss Shreck, and leave MacAlpine here. Sealed inside the Timeless Moment forever.”

“Ah,” said the Armourer. “We have a slight problem there. As I tried to tell you . . .”

I looked at him. “What?”

“When we smashed the teleport systems, we accidentally set off a self-destruct mechanism,” said the Armourer. “Designed to seal off the Timeless Moment so nothing could get in or out. One last dog-in-the-manger stratagem . . . We found the destruct mechanism, but its workings are protected by powerful shields. We can’t get at it. The best we can do is keep resetting the timer every sixty seconds. There’s a Drood doing that right now. The trouble is . . . the self-destruct mechanism is so powerful it’s affecting Alpha Red Alpha. Basically, if the destruct mechanism goes off, our machine will be destroyed, too. And Alpha Red Alpha takes a lot more than sixty seconds to fire up. We’d be stuck in here forever. Which means . . .”

“One of us has to stay here,” said the Sarjeant. “To keep resetting the timer until after the Hall has safely gone.”

Some days, the hits just keep on coming.

“I’ll stay,” the Sarjeant said. “I know my duty. My job is to protect the family.”

“No,” I said. “It has to be me.”

“Why?” said the Armourer. “Why does it always have to be you, Eddie?”

“Because I led us in here,” I said. “I know my duty. Anything for the family. Take me to the self-destruct mechanism, Uncle Jack. Sarjeant, get everyone else out of here.”

“Fair enough,” said the Sarjeant.

“No!” said MacAlpine. “You’re not going anywhere!”

He surged forward, his hands reaching for my throat. I whipped out the Merlin Glass, activated it and slapped it over MacAlpine. And the Glass sent him away.

“Where did you send him?” said the Sarjeant.

“Back to the cryogenic chambers,” I said. “To play with the other monsters.”

“The Glass!” said the Sarjeant. “You could wait till the last minute, then use it to transport you to the Hall just as we’re leaving!”

“No,” said the Armourer. “I’ve shut down the shields here, but the castle’s main protections still hold. They won’t let the Glass transfer anything out of the castle. I’m sorry, Eddie, if that’s what you were counting on. . . .”

“I wasn’t,” I said. “But we can use it to jump to the mechanism, can’t we?”

“Of course,” he said. “Take the family home, Sarjeant. Prepare Alpha Red Alpha. As soon as I return, we’re leaving.”

The Merlin Glass followed the Armourer’s instructions and delivered the two of us to a small back room full of strange old-fashioned equipment: great bulky stuff, with lots of vacuum tubes and heavy wiring. One large grey box was ticking down the seconds. The armoured Drood standing next to it hit the reset button, and the timer returned to counting down the minute. The Armourer gave the Drood his marching orders, and sent him back to the Sarjeant through the Glass. Which left him and me and the box.

“Don’t ask me what it is, or how it interferes with Alpha Red Alpha,” said the Armourer. “The people who worked here originally let their minds run in some pretty strange directions. I could spend months here taking things apart. . . . But we haven’t got months.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I know what to do. Time for you to go, Uncle Jack.”

He armoured down to show me his face. He looked like someone grieving at a funeral. “It isn’t fair, Eddie. You’ve done so much for the family. . . . I’m an old man. I should stay.”

“No,” I said immediately. “They need you to work Alpha Red Alpha. And besides, you’re far too valuable to the family. What would the Droods do without their Armourer? Someone has to do this. And I need to do it.”

“Why?”

“Penance,” I said. “And no, you don’t get to ask what for.”

“You were always my favourite nephew,” said the Armourer. “I don’t . . . I don’t know what to say to you, Eddie.”

“Say good-bye to Molly for me,” I said. “Make sure she knows how much I always loved her.”

“She knows,” said Uncle Jack. “Eddie . . .”

“Yes?” I hit the reset button.

“I have to take the Merlin Glass with me. It’s no use to you here, and it’s far too valuable to the family to leave behind.”

“Of course,” I said. “Molly will be able to use it to help Alpha Red Alpha get you home safely.”

I handed the Glass over. The Armourer took it reluctantly.

“It was the best toy you ever gave me, Uncle Jack,” I said.

He looked like he desperately wanted to say something, but couldn’t. So we shook hands, very formally.

“You did good, Eddie,” he said. “You’re a credit to the family. You will be remembered.”

“Then make sure they remember the real me,” I said.

The Armourer nodded quickly, activated the Merlin Glass, stepped through it and was gone. I finally got to see what that looked like, as an observer, and it was every bit as freaky and disturbing as people said it was. And I was left alone in Schloss Shreck. Castle Horror.

I pulled up a chair and sat down beside the stubbornly counting self-destruct mechanism. I wondered how I’d know when the Hall was gone. . . . Best give it an hour, and then . . . What we do in Heaven’s gaze matters most. And one time pays for all.

I sat in my chair, looking round the room. I didn’t armour down; its strength was all that was holding me together. I kept an eye on the descending countdown, making a little game out of how late I could leave it, and looked back over my life. Enjoying my triumphs, cataloguing my sins, regretting all the things I’d meant to do but never got round to doing. I wished I’d made a better fist of running the family, while I had the chance. Wished so many good Droods hadn’t died in action, following my plans. And then there were all the many things I’d meant to say to so many people, because you always think you’ll have more time. Molly and I never talked enough. Not about the things that really mattered. I’d always meant to marry her, eventually, but it never seemed to be quite the right moment. I hoped she’d understand why I had to do this. Probably not. She never did have much time for guilt or penance.

I wished I’d taken more time to talk with Uncle Jack about all the marvellous things he and Uncle James did. I could have talked with him about my parents . . . but I never did.

I thought about Philip MacAlpine. No doubt running screaming through the stone galleries, trying to find me and stop me before the Hall could leave the Timeless Moment. Fat chance. Would he die when the castle finally blew up, or would Satan’s little gift let him survive to drift endlessly in the silver void forever? I smiled, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a pleasant smile.

I kept hitting the reset, and the seconds kept on counting down.

The door slammed open, and Philip MacAlpine burst into the room. I stood up, keeping my place by the mechanism. He stood swaying before me, grinning broadly, his eyes blazing. He had something very like my Colt repeater in his hand, aimed right at my head.

“Get away from the machine, Eddie. If I’m going down, I’m taking all of you with me.”

“Sorry, Phil,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Took me a while to find this,” he said, brandishing the gun. “One of the first things I had my people put together for me. A Colt repeater that fires strange-matter bullets. Punch right through that flashy armour of yours. The traitor inside your family really was very helpful. He could provide only a few strange-matter bullets, but I’ve got enough here to do the job.”

“Better not miss,” I said.

“I won’t,” said Philip MacAlpine.

And that was when Molly Metcalf teleported into the room. She appeared right beside MacAlpine, saw what he was doing and, while he was still startled by her sudden arrival out of nowhere, she snatched the gun out of his hand and threw it to me. I caught it easily and turned it on MacAlpine, while Molly moved over to join me. I hit the reset button. MacAlpine glared at me defiantly.

“I’m not sorry. I’m not sorry for any of it. It would have been glorious. . . .”

“No, it wouldn’t,” I said.

He laughed at me. “You can’t hurt me. Nothing in this world can hurt me. I was promised!”

“Yes,” I said. “But strange matter isn’t from this world.”

I shot him twice in the head, and he crashed to the floor and didn’t move. I looked at Molly.

“How . . . ?”

“Did you really think I’d leave you here? I told you: I’ve been to Heaven and Hell and Limbo! Getting into the Timeless Moment was nothing compared to that! Come on; everyone got back home safely, so we can leave this awful place to its own mercy. Time to go home, Eddie.”

“Damn right,” I said.