I stared at him. “Someone really did kill you? I didn’t believe anyone could take down the legendary Walker.”
“I got old,” said Walker, “and perhaps a little careless with someone I trusted. Still, he’ll make a good replacement.”
“And . . . I’m dead?”
“Of course. Don’t you remember the disguised Immortal stabbing you? No? Well, I’m sure it’ll come back to you. You’re probably still in shock.”
“I am not dead! I’m breathing; I can feel my heart pounding. . . . I can’t be dead!”
“You must be,” said Walker. “Or you wouldn’t have come here among dead people.”
A sudden shudder went through me, and I looked quickly about the entrance hall, splashed with deep shadows and blue moonlight.
“There are dead people here?”
“Oh, yes,” said Walker. “Old enemies and older friends: some you may remember, some not. The past is full of strangers with familiar faces. People whose lives you touched in passing, for good or bad. The lives you saved and the lives you ended. And all of them want what I want. Answers. Secrets. Information. You must tell me what I need to know, Eddie. Tell me.”
“I’m damned if I’ll tell you anything!”
“You’ll be damned if you don’t,” Walker said calmly.
I looked past him suddenly, as I glimpsed a familiar face. Standing quietly in the blue moonlight as though he wasn’t sure he ought to be there, a tall, thin figure stared sadly back at me. Wrapped in a long grey coat, with a thick scarf wrapped round his neck to keep out the cold, Coffin Jobe nodded sorrowfully in my direction. Jobe was a necroleptic; he kept falling down dead and then getting over it. We knew each other, but I wouldn’t call us friends. And he certainly had no business in Drood Hall.
He approached me in a reluctant sideways sort of way, and came to a halt beside Walker, who moved away to one side, as though afraid he might catch something. Lot of people felt that way about Coffin Jobe. I always thought it was the coat; it looked like it could start a new plague all on its own.
“Hello, Jobe,” I said. “Is this where you go to when you’re being dead?”
“I don’t know,” said Jobe. “I never remember where I’ve been once I’m alive again. There are rules, apparently. But I don’t think I’ve ever been here before. In fact, I’m getting the distinct feeling I shouldn’t be here. Of course, I get that feeling in a lot of places when I’m being alive. . . .” He looked at me accusingly. “I liked you better when you were being Shaman Bond. I always knew where I was with Shaman. Just another face on the scene, another chancer, like me. Not important at all. But it turned out you were a Drood all along. Laughing at us from behind your Shaman Bond mask.”
“No,” I said. “That’s not how it was, Jobe. . . .”
But he was already gone, disappeared in a moment, back in the land of the living again.
A door opened to one side, and out of his private office stepped the Drood family’s Sarjeant-at-Arms. The previous Sarjeant, who’d died so very bravely on the Damnation Way, buying the rest of us time to escape. Big and muscular and brutal, exactly as I remembered him, with half his face still a mass of scars from where my girlfriend, Molly Metcalf, wished a plague of rats on him. He’d deserved worse. He stood beside Walker and looked at me coldly, his gaze as inflexible and judgemental as always.
“You were a thug and a bully when you were alive, Sarjeant,” I said. “And it would appear death hasn’t mellowed you.”
“You never did understand duty, Edwin,” said the Sarjeant. “You should never have been allowed to run the family. You took away our torcs. You made us weak.”
“The family had become corrupt,” I said. “Drifted too far from who and what we were supposed to be. I did what I had to do to save the family from itself.”
“By destroying its Heart.”
“The Heart was rotten. It lied to us. I was the only one left who cared about what the family was supposed to stand for. What did you ever care about, except disciplining those weaker than yourself?”
“You never understood duty,” said the Sarjeant-at-Arms. “The family has to be strong to do the things it has to do. I tried to make you strong by beating the weakness and rebellion out of you.”
“Weakness?” I said. “You mean things like compassion, and honour, and doing the right thing?”
“Yes,” said the Sarjeant. “Everything the family does is right, because we’re Droods. Nothing else matters.”
“We’re supposed to protect Humanity, not rule them!”
“Sheep need shepherds,” said the Sarjeant. “And a little culling now and then, to improve the stock.”
I strode right up to him and punched him in the face. But my hand passed straight through him, as though he were only a vision or a ghost. I snatched my hand back, and the Sarjeant looked at me almost sadly.
“Good punch, Edwin. Just like I taught you. But that won’t help you here. You can’t fight us. You can’t stop us. Tell us what we want to know. Tell us all your secrets. It’s the only way you’ll ever be free of this place.”
“You’re not the Sarjeant-at-Arms,” I said. “He’d die before he betrayed a single Drood secret to an outsider.”
“You can’t escape us,” said Walker.
“Yeah?” I said. “Kiss my arse.”
I sprinted past him, up the stairway and onto the next floor. Only the next floor wasn’t there; instead I stumbled to a halt inside the War Room, the nerve centre of the family, where all the really important decisions are made: looking after the hundreds of field agents out in the world, stamping out supernatural brush fires and slapping down the bad guys. Brown-trousering the ungodly, as my uncle James liked to put it. The War Room was usually packed with people at their work, full of sound and fury; but now it was deserted, silent. All the workstations were empty, the computer monitors and the scrying balls left unattended. All the lights were out on the great world map, and all of the clock faces, showing the time in every country in the world, were blank, without hands. Time had stopped here, too.
The work surfaces were layered with frost, and the communication systems were thickly coated with ice. (Part of me wondered where the blue moonlight was coming from to illuminate the War Room, but I’d made a conscious decision to worry only about those things that mattered immediately.) I wrote my name with my fingertip on the frost covering one monitor screen, but I couldn’t feel the cold of the ice. I looked up sharply, as one by one the monitor screens on the walls that should have shown trouble spots across the world turned themselves on, and vaguely familiar faces appeared on the screens, looking down at me, watching me with cold, angry, judgemental eyes. When I looked at any face directly it vanished, reappearing when I looked somewhere else. I was surrounded by a sea of faces, grim and condemning, but none of them could face me directly. I looked quickly back and forth, but all I could do was catch glimpses of my accusers out of the corners of my eyes. Glimpses of cold, scowling faces watching me with bad intent.
I almost jumped out of my skin when I suddenly realised there was someone in the War Room with me. I spun round, putting my back against the nearest workstation, and there facing me was the Blue Fairy. Half elf, thief, traitor . . . sometimes a friend, and sometimes not. That’s often how it is, out in the field. He looked very smart, almost fashionable, in his own ratty way; but his face was ravaged by time and far too much good living. He looked at me and shook his head sadly.
“Eddie, dear boy, what are you doing here, pursued by the dead, at the mercy of old friends and enemies? So much bitterness and unpleasantness, and all for a few secrets that probably never mattered that much, even when we were alive.” He looked about him. “Terrible place, no sense of style. Tell them what they want to know, Eddie, and then we can both get the hell out of here. I don’t like this place. Don’t like being dead, for that matter. When I first discovered what being dead was like, I cried and I cried and I cried. . . .”
“There has to be a w
ay out of here,” I said. “Help me. I helped you. . . .”
“Did you, Eddie? Did you really? Yes, you rescued me from the depths of depression and disgrace, gave me new life and purpose . . . but did you think I’d be grateful? You should have left me as I was: a broken man, dying by inches and not giving a damn. You woke me up, gave me hope . . . just so I could die anyway a few years later in one of your stupid spy games. You should have left me as I was. It would have been kinder.”
“You always did make bad decisions, Edwin,” said another familiar voice.
And out of the deep, dark shadows of the War Room came my grandmother, Martha Drood, Matriarch of the family. She stood tall and stiff and proud before me in her neat grey twinset and pearls. Looking at me with her cold eyes and colder face. No sign of the awful wound that killed her in her own bed, soaking the whole front of her in blood. She looked me up and down and sniffed briefly. Another familiar sound. It tore at my heart. I hadn’t realised I’d missed it so much.
“You ran away from the Hall to be a field agent, and what good did that do you? All because you didn’t have the discipline to buckle down and do what you were told, like everyone else. I was grooming you to take a high position in the family, but you turned your back on us. You were always such a disappointment to me, Edwin.”
“I avenged your murder,” I said steadily. “I caught your killer, the Immortal disguised as your husband, Alistair. I killed him for you, Grandmother.”
“I’m still dead,” she said. “All because you weren’t paying attention. Too caught up with your new girlfriend. I never approved of her.”
“You never approved of me, Edwin,” said Alistair Drood, stepping forward to stand beside Martha. “You were responsible for my death too. I was only trying to do the right thing and protect my wife. You watched me burn in hellfire, and did nothing to save me. Tell them what they want to know, Edwin. Let your grandmother and me know peace, and rest at last.”
“Tell them,” said Martha Drood. “Tell them everything, Edwin.”
“Tell them,” said the Blue Fairy. “Or we’ll never leave you alone.”
“None of your deaths were my fault!” I yelled at them, and then I turned and ran out of the War Room.
And straight into the Armoury, even though it was located in a whole other wing of Drood Hall. I looked quickly behind me, but no one had followed. I moved slowly forward, checking every dark shadow for a new accusing face. The huge stone chamber seemed strange and unsettling, far too quiet without the usual hustle and bustle of the Armourer and his lab assistants. Always busy working on new weapons and devices of appalling destruction. Or raising hell and getting themselves into trouble for the fun of it. It isn’t a successful day in the Armoury unless someone’s been transformed into something distressing, or exploded, or committed some brave new crime against nature. But the workstations were empty, and the weapons-testing ground was unnaturally quiet. I moved quickly through the Armoury, looking for something I could use as a weapon. There were always nasty destructive things lying about in the Armoury. But the few dark shapes I could make out were welded to surfaces by the extreme cold, buried under thick layers of ice. I tried to pry a few of them loose, but no amount of effort would budge them. I beat at the crusted ice with my fist, but couldn’t even crack or splinter it.
A sound behind me spun me round, hands up to defend myself, half expecting Uncle Jack, the Armourer. But instead it was my uncle James. The greatest field agent the family ever produced: the legendary Grey Fox. Dead, because of me. He stood there smiling, tall and dark and handsome in his splendid tuxedo. Every inch the master spy I never was. Looking just as he had before I got him killed.
“No,” I said. “Please. No. Not you, Uncle James. I can’t stand it. . . .”
“Relax,” said Uncle James. “It’s all right, Eddie. I forgave you long ago.”
For a long moment, I couldn’t say anything. Uncles James nodded understandingly.
“It’s good to see you again, Eddie. I understood why you did what you did, even when I was alive. Ah, the things we do for the family . . . I don’t hold grudges. You see things a lot more clearly once you’re dead. You did for the family what I should have done long before.”
“Why are you here?” I said. “Are you a prisoner in this place, like me?”
“No. I was called here, like the others. But unlike most of them, I’m on your side.”
“Do you think I should tell Walker what he wants to know?” I said. “Tell him all my secrets, and those of the family?”
“Of course not,” said Uncle James. “Walker always was too ready to bow down to authority, or to anyone with a public-school accent. Tell him to go to hell, Eddie.”
I had to grin. Death had not mellowed Uncle James. “Do you know whom Walker’s working for? Who it is who wants my secrets?”
Uncle James frowned. “It’s hard to be sure of anything here. Hardly anyone or anything is necessarily what they appear to be.”
“Even you?” I said.
He shrugged easily. “Hard to tell. I think I’m me, but then I would, wouldn’t I?”
I put out my hand to him, but when he went to shake it, our fingers drifted through one another.
“Am I a ghost?” I said. “Give it to me straight; I can take it.”
“Not even close,” snapped another familiar voice. “You shouldn’t be here, boy.”
And suddenly standing next to my uncle James was Jacob Drood, the family ghost. He wore a battered Hawaiian shirt over grubby shorts, looking older than death itself. His face was a mass of wrinkles, his big, bony skull graced with a few flyaway hairs. But his eyes were as sharp and fierce as ever. He nodded brusquely to Uncle James, and then fixed me with his glare. “I’m the only ghost here, Eddie; but I can’t help you. There are rules even the dead have to obey. Perhaps especially the dead.”
I studied him carefully. He looked more solid and more real than anyone else I’d met in this empty Hall. “Are you really here, Jacob?”
“Yes. But not everyone else is.” He looked at Uncle James, who smiled easily back. Jacob sniffed loudly and glared about him before piercing me with his sharp gaze again. “Someone’s running a game on you, Eddie. Even I can’t tell who the players are, for sure. You need to get out of here, boy. You don’t belong here. Bad things are on their way, attracted by the light.”
“The blue moonlight?”
“Your light, boy! Get out of here! Run, while you still can!”
I looked at Uncle James, and he nodded quickly. That was enough for me. I turned and ran back through the Armoury, and almost immediately found myself in the Sanctity, the great open chamber that served as a meeting place for the ruling council of the family. Once it was home to the Heart, the huge other-dimensional diamond that gave the family its power, and its original armour. As long as we fed it the souls of our children. I put a stop to that and destroyed the Heart, and now the Sanctity was only a room. But there was no trace of the rose red glow that usually suffused the chamber, the physical manifestation of the other-dimensional traveller called Ethel, who came to the Hall to replace the Heart and supply our new armour. The good angel I’d found to replace the bad. Except that angels always have their own agenda, and don’t always give a damn for merely human concerns. . . .
The Sanctity felt cold and desolate without Ethel’s comforting glow. I called out to her, but no one answered. I nodded quietly to myself. One final proof that this place wasn’t, couldn’t be, the real Drood Hall. No one could have kept Ethel from answering me in the real Hall.
“Always running, Eddie,” said yet another familiar voice. “Never staying in one place long enough to take responsibility for your actions.”
I took my time turning around, and there was Penny Drood, tall and slender in her usual white sweater and slacks. She looked at me with cold, desperate eyes.
“You let him kill me. That old monster from old London town. My blood is on your hands. You must make amends, Eddie. Te
ll Walker what he needs to know.”
“I did warn you about Mr. Stab,” I said. “I told you what he was, but you were so sure you knew better.”
“You’ve always got an answer, haven’t you, Eddie?” said Alexander King, the independent agent, stepping forward to stand beside Penny. “Typical Drood. Always ready to blame the bad things in the world on someone else.”
“In your case, I was right,” I said. “Nasty old man, squatting on your stolen secrets, guarding your hoard like a dragon in its cave. Yes, I killed you. Do it again in a minute. After everything you were responsible for, you deserved your death.”
“Tell them what they want to know,” said King. “You can’t keep anything from Walker or those he serves. They have all the power here. They know where all the bodies are buried.”
Suddenly the entire great chamber of the Sanctity was full of people crowding in around me. Matthew and Alexandra Drood, who did their best to have me killed in the name of Zero Tolerance, and died trying to stop me from saving the family. And more faces, and more: all the men and women who’d died at my hands, or because of me, because I was an agent of the Droods. All the bad guys, and those who thought they were good guys but chose a bad cause to follow, and all those in between. All the Accelerated Men, who died trying to storm Drood Hall and kill the family. All the teenage Immortals, who died trying to rule Humanity, or because they planned to unleash the forces of Hell by opening the Apocalypse Door. All those I’d fought to save the world from. I hadn’t realised there were so many of them. Hundreds of dead men and women surrounding me with cold, pitiless eyes, many of them with their death wounds still fresh and bloody. I stood my ground, glaring around me, refusing to accept the guilt they were trying to impose on me.
“There isn’t one of you here who didn’t deserve your death,” I said. “I did my duty. To the family, and to Humanity. You all needed killing.”