“That was the theory, yes,” said Rafe, coming over to join me. “But it appears that there’s stable, and then there’s stable. He knows who he is, and where he is, and his work is impeccable; everything else tends to vary from day to day.”
“I like it down here,” William said loudly. “I’m not ready to live in the Hall. Too many people. Had enough of that living in the asylum. No, no, I’m not at all ready for people . . . I’m fine down here. Fine.” He broke off, and looked carefully left and right. “Though I’m not entirely alone, down here. Not strictly speaking. There’s Someone in here with me. Someone, or Something. It watches me. Or watches over me . . . hard to tell.”
I raised an eyebrow to Rafe, who shook his head firmly. “I heard about what happened to the Matriarch, Eddie, and to Molly. I’m so sorry. I can’t believe it. It’s been years since there was a murder in the Hall, let alone two in one night.”
“Eighteen fifty-two,” said ˚ William, unexpectedly. “And that was a murder/suicide. We were a lot tougher about cousins marrying, in those days.”
“I popped up for a quick look,” said Rafe. “Everyone was running around, shouting and screaming like mad things. Couldn’t get a straight answer out of anyone. Everyone’s looking for you, Eddie. Either because they think you’re guilty, or because they want you to tell them what to do. You did lead the family once, after all.”
“Once was enough,” I said. “Let the Sarjeant-at-Arms run his investigation. He knows what he’s doing.”
“Never thought I’d hear you saying good things about the Sarjeant,” said Rafe. “What have things come to?”
“In a situation like this, a merciless thug and bully is just what we need,” I said. “If there are answers to be got, he’ll get them. But I can’t help feeling . . . there won’t be anything left behind for him to find. This was a professional hit. Someone put a lot of time and effort into planning it . . .”
William slammed his book shut, and spun round to smile cheerfully at me. “It’s really quite fun, having everyone as paranoid as me, for as change.”
“William,” said Rafe. “The Matriarch is dead. Murdered.”
“Never liked her,” William said briskly. “She never liked me. She was a real cow when she was younger, and age did not mellow her. Oh, I’ll stand up to see her avenged; she’s family. But I’m too old, too talented, and too crazy to bother with crocodile tears.”
“Molly’s dead too,” I said.
William looked at me. “Who?”
“Molly! Molly Metcalf! She used to come and visit you, while you were in the madhouse! You met her dozens of times; you must remember her!”
The Librarian’s lower lip trembled, and he looked down at his hands, crestfallen. “I’m sorry, Eddie. I try not to remember anything about that place.”
“Did they treat you badly?” said Rafe.
“It’s more like . . . it worried me, how much at home I felt. Like I belonged there . . . Far more than I ever did here. I’ll think about Molly, Eddie. I’m sure she’ll come back to me . . . What did you come here looking for? No one ever comes down here just to see me, for which I am inordinately grateful. So, what do you want? All the knowledge in the world is on these shelves, somewhere. Try me. My thoughts are clear, even if my memory isn’t what it was. If it ever was . . . Who can tell? I like butterscotch.”
“I need to know about the Immortals,” I said. “And the Apocalypse Door.”
“The Immortals are just a legend!” said Rafe. “Everyone knows that. There are a number of technically immortal individuals out there, or at least, very long-lived . . . but you’re probably already familiar with most of those. Mr. Stab, of course. The Djinn Jeanie. The Griffin . . .”
“No, he died just recently, in the Nightside,” said William. “And his appalling wife. I got a letter from the chap who runs the Nightside . . . Walker! That’s the fellow! Yes. Apparently Satan turned up personally, just to drag the Griffins down into the Pit. Well, that’s the Nightside for you. Terrible place. I don’t know why we don’t just go in there in force, and Do Something about it.”
“I said that,” I said. “It seems there’s an old and very binding pact: no Droods allowed in the Nightside.”
“Really?” said Rafe. “And what do we get out of it?”
“I did ask the Matriarch,” I said. “And she made a point of changing the subject.” I looked at William. “Why would Walker be writing letters to you? Do you and he know each other?”
“Who can say?” said William. “Immortals . . . There’s the Lord of Thorns, Old Father Time, Jimmy Thunder God For Hire, the Regent of Shadows . . .”
“We don’t talk about him!” Rafe said immediately.
“Well pardon me for breathing,” William said testily. “Even when my mind was working perfectly, I never could be bothered remembering who was In and who was Out. The important thing is, there are any number of individual immortals running around, making nuisances of themselves, and always have been. Not all of them human, of course. I once met a Lamia in Liverpool . . .” William grinned nastily. “Big teeth . . .”
“But never a family of Immortals,” said Rafe. “Not organised, like us . . .”
William frowned suddenly. “There are at present two hundred and seventeen books missing from the Old Library, not including folios, bound manuscripts and collected letters. No doubt more absences will make themselves known. With no Index to consult, we can only deduce what these titles might have been from gaps on the shelves, and references in other books. It’s always possible some of these books were removed because they contained information on the Immortals. Or the Apocalypse Door. Lots of people have been bothering me about that Door, just recently.”
“Interesting items have turned up in Alexander King’s secret files, removed from Place Gloria,” said Rafe. “The Independent Agent hoarded all kinds of secret knowledge and lost information. We’ve uncovered strange and wonderful stuff, including a whole crate of books from alternate Earths, where history had taken very different turns. One was written in Martian. With very unpleasant illustrations. New material is turning up all the time, in truck loads. They just dump it here, once a week, and leave it for us to sort out. As if we didn’t have enough on our plate already. Just identifying, sorting and indexing the Old Library’s contents is taking us forever.”
“And the Matriarch won’t allow us any extra help, because so much of the material is sensitive,” said William, disparagingly. “Silly cow. If you can’t trust a Drood, who can you trust?”
“The Matriarch is dead, William,” said Rafe.
“Oh all right, I’ll have a word with her later. You know, I’m almost sure I saw something about the Apocalypse Door just recently . . .”
He tottered away and started rummaging through an old tea chest full of papers.
“How is he?” I said quietly to Rafe. “Really?”
“Not good,” Rafe admitted. “Better some days than others. He still has a brilliant mind, when it’s working. But there’s no doubt all those years in the madhouse put their mark upon him.”
“And there’s no telling how much damage the Heart did to his mind, before he fled the Hall.” I frowned. “I think we need to put up the money and hire a major-league telepath, and have them dig around inside his head.”
“I have suggested that, on more than one occasion, but the Matriarch was always very firm,” said Rafe. “She wouldn’t allow it. Apparently William knows far too much about this family, too many dirty little secrets. Things no outsider can be allowed to know. Even if William can’t remember them. We do have a few telepaths in the family . . .”
“You have got to be kidding,” I said. “I wouldn’t trust that bunch to guess my weight. I certainly wouldn’t let them trample around inside a mind that’s been messed about with as much as William’s has . . . They might never get out again. The Armourer did say he’d come up with some kind of mind-scanning device . . . but his methods aren’t exactly subtle, either.??
?
“You just have to give William some time,” said Rafe. “He’ll recover, eventually.”
“What can you tell me about the rogue Drood known as Tiger Tim?” I said, deliberately changing the subject. “His name came up in connection with the LA auction and, surprisingly, with Doctor Delirium.”
William looked up suddenly from his tea chest. “Now there’s a name from the past! Timothy Drood . . . Yes. Nasty little man. Nice enough when you had something he wanted, but it was always him first and everyone else second. What we used to call a bad seed, in my young days. I can’t believe someone hasn’t killed him yet, if only on general principles . . . He was hiding out somewhere in South America, last I heard. Peru?”
“He’s moved, since then,” said Rafe. “Just ahead of being kicked out, as usual. He’s holed up deep in the Amazon rain forest these days.”
“The same area as Doctor Delirium,” I said.
“Well yes, technically,” said Rafe. “But the Amazon rain forest does cover a hell of a lot of ground. They’re not exactly neighbours.”
“Doctor Delirium and Tiger Tim,” said William. “The team-up you never expected! The horror, the horror . . .” He got the giggles, waved a careless hand and turned back to his tea chest. He grabbed something, studied it closely, and then straightened up waving a dusty file triumphantly. “Here it is! Knew it was somewhere near the top . . . The Shudder File. Carefully annotated in the Independent Agent’s own handwriting. And according to this Post-it note on the cover, from the Drood cleanup team, Alexander King kept this particular file inside a locked box, inside a wall safe. So it must be worth looking at . . .” He opened the file and leafed quickly through it. “Yes . . . Oh, this is bad and nasty stuff, all right. A lot of supernatural and super-science weapons and devices, all of them banned by any number of international treaties. The Speaking Gun, The Ubershreck Device, Mephisto’s Minuet . . . All the kind of thing no one in their right mind would want to mess with.”
“Did Alexander King actually possess these things?” I said, reaching for the file. Walker pulled it away, glaring at me as I held my hands up in surrender. “I just meant,” I said, “that if some of these things are still lying around Place Gloria, we need to warn the people working there.”
“Oh no,” said William. “This is more of a wants list—items he was interested in acquiring. If only so other people couldn’t use them against him. Ah! Yes, here we are! The Apocalypse Door!”
“What does it say?” I said, trying to peer over his shoulder. He hurried around the other side of the chest, so I couldn’t.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute, I’m ˚ reading!” he said testily. “Hmmm. Not a lot, actually. It’s not just another hell gate, however. A hell gate is just a rather dramatic name for a dimensional door that allows limited travel between the various planes of existence. The Apocalypse Door . . . is far more than that. Oh yes. It opens the Gates of Hell, and lets out all that may be found there. The Dukes of Hell, all the major and minor demons, all of the fallen and all of the damned, from the very beginnings of Time. To do what they will upon the Earth. Even Satan himself will come forth, the ancient Enemy, to trample the cities of man beneath his cloven hooves . . .”
“Hell on Earth,” I said. “Forever, and ever, and ever . . .”
“How is that even possible?” said Rafe, snatching the file out of William’s hands, and studying it himself. “How could any material being release those imprisoned by God?”
“A disturbing thought, I’ll grant you,” said William, sneaking up on Rafe and grabbing the file back again. He pulled a face at Rafe. “No one knows how old the Apocalypse Door is, but it says here . . . that the Door was possibly created by one Nicholas Hobb, the Serpent’s Son. Oh, we are definitely into legend here, rather than history. According to these handwritten notes . . . the Door has been passed back and forth for centuries, from one careful owner to another, its true nature largely forgotten. Most of its owners thought of it as little more than a curiosity, a charming fake, or just a conversation piece. The last known owner was . . . the Collector! I did hear he was dead; maybe that’s how the Door came up for auction in Los Angeles.”
“I don’t think the Really Old Curiosity Shoppe people realised just how important the Door was,” I said, just to show I was keeping up. “If they had, they’d have held a separate auction just for the Door, under much heavier security.”
“Now this really is interesting!” said William, sitting precariously on the edge of the tea chest. “It’s not just enough to own the Door, you see. Oh no! You need very specific and powerful magics to open it. Or it’s just a door. There’s nothing here, unfortunately, as to what those items might be . . . but I’m guessing they’d be very hard to come by. Don’t look at me like that! I’m just curious!”
“Magic isn’t really Doctor Delirium’s area of expertise,” I said.
“No,” said Rafe. “But I did hear something about Tiger Tim breaking into the Infernal Museum in Vienna last year, and making off with a whole bunch of rare and restricted grimoires . . .”
“It’s all coming together, isn’t it?” I said. “And not in a good way. Presumably, Doctor Delirium will threaten to open the Door, unless all the governments of the world give him . . . well, everything he asks for. And he could ask for anything, because who would dare say no?”
“What if the world calls his bluff?” said Rafe. “How can it profit the Doctor, or Tiger Tim, to actually open the Apocalypse Door?”
“Indeed,” said William, dropping the file carelessly back into the tea chest. “There’s absolutely nothing in there about closing the Door again, or compelling the damned to go back through it into Hell again.” He sniffed loudly. “Bit of a design fault there, if you ask me. Unless the Door’s designer was having a bit of a down day. I get those.”
“And if Doctor Delirium is pissed off enough at being laughed at and not taken seriously all these years . . .” I said. “Oh, we have got to get the Door back from him, before he does something silly that we’ll all regret.”
“Would Tiger Tim really let Doctor Delirium open the Door?” said Rafe. “I mean, he may be rogue, but he’s still a Drood. Would he really allow the end of the world?”
“Probably,” I said. “When we go bad, we go all the way.”
“And Timothy was always so much more than just a rogue,” said William. “I remember him, though I really wish I didn’t. Not actually a sociopath, as such, but a long way down that road. When he set his mind to something, he wouldn’t let anyone or anything get in his way. He tried to force the Armourer to open the Armageddon Codex for him once, so he could make off with the forbidden weapons. Half killed the old boy in the process. If Timothy hadn’t been interrupted and driven out . . . He has no reason to love this family, or the world, or anything but himself.”
“Janissary Jane once told me about a dimension where demons ran loose in the material plane,” I said. “Hell got out, and slaughtered everything in its path, destroying civilisation after civilisation. Jumping from planet to planet, leaving worlds burning like cinders in the dark, and suns screaming as they died. Jane and the people she was with ended up having to destroy everything, to stop the demons. They used the Deplorable End, and wiped out a whole universe.”
“Isn’t that what you used?” Rafe said carefully. “To destroy the Hungry Gods?”
“Yes,” I said. “And I don’t have another one.”
“I’m not sure whether I feel relieved or not,” said Rafe.
William looked around abruptly, his eyes darting, listening to something only he could hear. The tension in his face and body was written so clearly it raised all the hackles on my neck. I glared around me into the golden glow, but nothing moved among the stacks, and the shadows seemed entirely still and empty.
“It’s here,” whispered William, standing very still. “I just catch glimpses of it, sometimes, out of the corner of my eyes. I can feel its presence, like a pressure on my soul. Feel
it watching me . . . I think it wants to tell me something. Something I don’t want to know . . .”
I looked at Rafe, but he just shook his head helplessly.
And then we all looked round, at the sound of approaching footsteps. Perfectly normal, human footsteps, making no attempt to hide themselves. We all relaxed, though not entirely, when Harry Drood appeared at the end of the stacks, accompanied by his partner, the half human, half demon hellspawn, Roger Morningstar. Harry smiled smugly at us, as though he’d done something clever. Roger’s smile was rather more disturbing.
The hellspawn was tall, ˚ slender, but powerfully built, looking entirely at home in an expensive Armani suit. He had an unnaturally pale face, dark hair, thin lips, and a gaze you didn’t like to meet for more than a few seconds. Roger was an infernal creature, and it showed. He strolled towards us, following Harry, moving with almost inhuman grace, like a predator that had escaped from the zoo, and had absolutely no intention of ever going back.
I knew up close he would smell of sulphur and blood and sour milk, like all hellspawn. And as he sauntered along between the stacks to join us, he left dark scorch marks behind him on the wooden floor. (Though I couldn’t help noticing that the burn marks quickly disappeared, as though the floor was healing itself. There’s a lot about the Old Library we don’t understand yet.) Rafe scowled at Roger and Harry with equal disapproval.
“We really are going to have to install some better security. And just possibly some flashing lights, warning sirens, and a whole bunch of concealed mantraps. It’s getting so just anyone can walk in here these days.”
Harry ignored him, and nodded briefly to me. “Thought I’d find you hiding out down here, Eddie.”
I ignored him, to glare at Roger. “What are you doing here, Morningstar? I thought you were safely abroad, on some terribly important mission that kept you well away from the rest of us?”
“Harry contacted me,” said Roger, in a voice that chilled the blood without even trying. “He told me about the Matriarch, and the witch. So I made a swift return, via the infernal underground. To support my dear Harry, in the hour of his family’s need.”