The smell wasn’t getting any easier to take.
There were rats everywhere, scuttling and scurrying and pausing now and then to bare their yellow teeth at us. Many were bigger by far than any rat had a right to be, and they didn’t seem nearly scared enough of us to suit me. I’ve got a bit of a thing about rats. Most just watched us pass from their holes and lairs, dark beady eyes gleaming malevolently. Molly amused herself by pointing her finger at those who got too close, whereupon they immediately exploded wetly in all directions at once. Girl Flower squeaked loudly every time this happened and finally stopped to pick up most of a dead rat and hold it close to her bosom.
"Poor little ratty."
"Oh, ick," said Molly.
"I am flowers, darling," Girl Flower said stubbornly. "And all dead things are compost to my pretty petals."
She slipped the rat carcass inside the front of her dress, and it immediately disappeared. Molly looked at me. "Think about that, the next time she invites you to unbutton her blouse."
I looked determinedly in another direction. "If she starts coughing up owl pellets, she’s going back."
We moved on, into the darkness. Tunnel led to tunnel, twisting and turning deep under London’s streets. Others had been here before us, leaving their marks upon the brick walls. Some were hopeful; some were despairing messages to loved ones they never hoped to see again. There were arrows, pointing in varying directions, and even the occasional crude map scratched into the brick. Masonic symbols, odd phrases in old forgotten languages…I half expected to find Arne Saknussemm’s initials. Or Cave Carson’s. We pressed on, following Molly’s glowing arrow. Her protective field kept the filth at bay, even when we occasionally had to wade through the revolting waters to get to another tunnel. Pity it couldn’t do anything about the smell.
We stopped abruptly as Mr. Stab broke away from us to study a particular section of brick wall close up. I moved in beside him for a look, but it seemed no different from any other wall we’d passed. The curving surface ran with damp, as though sweating in the uncomfortable heat, and the original colour of the brick was lost under layers of accumulated filth and clumps of bulging white fungus. Mr. Stab ran his fingers caressingly over the surface, ignoring the thick residue that appeared on his expensively tailored gloves. My first thought was that it seemed there were definite limits to Molly’s protective field, and not to touch anything with my hands, but I was quickly distracted by the look on Mr. Stab’s face. He was smiling, and it wasn’t a very nice smile.
"I remember this place," he said, and something in his soft voice raised all the hackles on the back of my neck. "It’s been a long time since I was down here. I think they were still building this section then…I used to come here all the time, to get away from the bustle and noise of Humanity…Yes, I remember this place."
He pressed a particular brick, and it sank inwards with a loud click. Mr. Stab put all his weight against the wall, and a large section swung slowly inwards on concealed hinges. Only darkness lay beyond, and silence. Mr. Stab gestured sharply for Molly to come forward, and she thrust her illuminated hand into the new opening. We all crowded around, to see what was to be seen, but Mr. Stab couldn’t wait. He took Molly by the shoulder and urged her inside. They moved forward into the gloom, and Girl Flower and I followed close behind.
There was a room behind the brick wall, a very secret room. I stood still, just inside the entrance, held there by what I saw. I felt appalled, and sickened, and terribly angry. My first thought was that it looked like a ghastly doll’s house. The room had been fitted out as an old Victorian parlour. Heavy furniture, thick carpeting, stiff-backed chairs on either side of a long dining table, complete with heavy tablecloth, silver settings, and candlesticks. Even framed portraits on the walls.
Dead women sat in the chairs on either side of the long table, dressed in the fashions of widely varying times, all of the bodies in varying stages of decay. The enclosed setting had preserved them to some degree, but that only added to the horror. The dead women stared across the table at each other. Some had eyes; some did not. Some had faces; some did not. They all carried their death wounds openly, and there were so many of them…Some had the front of their dresses cut open, revealing bodies that had been hollowed out. A few held teacups in their clawed hands, as though they were all attending some hideous tea party.
"Hi, honey," said Mr. Stab. "I’m home."
Molly looked back at me. "I never knew about this, Eddie, I swear."
I stepped forward to stand between her and Mr. Stab. "This is sick! Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you right now!"
"How many have you killed down the years, young Drood?" said Mr. Stab, not even looking at me. He moved slowly down the line of corpses, smiling slightly, trailing his fingers above the bowed heads, not quite touching them. "Could a room this size even contain all those you’ve cut down? I know; you were only obeying orders. You did what you did out of cold duty; at least I’m honest enough to enjoy what I do." He leaned over one gray shoulder to peer into a desiccated face. "I keep stashes of my victims all over London. In my secret hidden places, where no one will ever find them. I like to visit them, and…play with them. I enjoy the ambience, and the smell…Like coming home."
I looked at Molly. Her face was taut and strained, but the illuminated hand she held aloft was still steady. "What was that you said?" I murmured. "About monsters not being monsters all the time?"
"I never knew," she said. "Never even suspected…"
"You know nothing about me," said Mr. Stab.
He stood at the far end of the table, tall and proud like a typical Victorian patriarch, his chin held high and his eyes alight with a terrible regard. "You know nothing about what drives me to do the things I do. Once women fascinated me, and then they horrified me. Teasers, liars, betrayers. I took a proud vengeance upon them, hurting them as I had been hurt, and gained much in return…But now the only intimacy I can ever know is with my victims. That moment when their eyes meet mine, that little sigh as the blade penetrates…is all I have, now. When I was just beginning, when everyone called me Jack, I had no way of knowing that the immortality I bought would be as an immortal killing machine. Driven to kill and kill, and never know peace or rest. I go on and on, in a world that makes less and less sense to me, and all that is left to me is to take what pleasure I can, from my endless work…"
"You can’t kill him, Eddie," Molly said quietly. "You can’t. Not even your armour could undo what he did to himself."
"What about your magic?" I said.
"Don’t ask me that, Eddie. He has been my friend. He has done…good things, because I asked him to."
"Enough to make up for this? And all the other stashes we don’t know about?"
"Don’t ask me that. Not here."
Girl Flower floated prettily around the room, bending over withered shoulders to stare into corrupt faces, humming a happy song to herself.
"You shouldn’t let this get to you, darlings. All living things have their roots in dead things. It’s the way of the world." She slipped a hand inside her dress and frowned prettily for a moment, and when she brought her hand out again it was piled high with seeds. She walked up and down both sides of the long table, dropping a few seeds into the gaping mouths and empty eye sockets of every corpse. "Let new life bloom," she said. "It’s nature’s way."
Mr. Stab looked at her, and Girl Flower smiled happily back at him, entirely unafraid. And the man who was once called Jack by a whole horrified city nodded slowly.
"Perhaps I’ll come back, in some future time," he said. "To see what strange new life has blossomed here."
I didn’t kill him. As an agent in the field, you learn that sometimes you have to settle for little victories.
Mr. Stab sealed up his private place, and we moved on through the sewers until finally we came at last to Manifest Destiny’s hidden domain, their underground kingdom. I’d come a long way in search of a credible resistance to my fa
mily’s newly exposed tyranny, and they had better not disappoint me. I needed them to be something I could depend on in this treacherously changing world. I needed them to be a weapon I could throw at the family who’d betrayed me. The entrance point was a huge circular portal of solid steel set flush with the old brick wall. Four very large and muscular men stood before the portal, wearing stark black uniforms with discreet silver piping and covering us with heavy automatic weapons as we approached.
"Cold iron," said Molly, indicating the portal. "Keeps magic out. They’re very security conscious."
Mr. Stab sniffed loudly. "It would take more than that to keep me out, if I wanted in."
"Oh, get over your bad self," said Girl Flower, and Mr. Stab surprised us all with a brief bark of laughter.
I armoured up as we approached the armed guards. I wasn’t ready yet to trust Manifest Destiny with the secret of my Shaman Bond identity. The guards were visibly impressed at the sight of my armour, gleaming golden in the gloom, and they quickly got on their radios to check for instructions from someone higher up. Whatever they heard through their earpieces clearly impressed them even more, and then they couldn’t open the portal fast enough for me. I strode up to them as though I expected such treatment as my right, and they fell back, raising their weapons in salute. All except for one, still blocking the way but not looking especially happy about it.
He smiled nervously at my featureless golden mask, his eyes darting back and forth. The lack of eyes on the mask really throws people. The guard swallowed hard. "Your pardon, sir, Sir Drood, but…We have orders to admit you and the witch Molly Metcalf, but no one said anything about your…companions. Perhaps they could wait here while you—"
"No," I said. "I don’t think so. This is Girl Flower and Mr. Stab. Upset them at your peril."
"Get out of my way or I’ll fillet you," said Mr. Stab in his most cold and sepulchral voice. The watching guards retreated even farther, one of them making small squeaking noises. The guard before us looked like he’d like to make some noises of his own. I gestured for him to lead us in, and he nodded jerkily. Molly extinguished her witchfire, and the four of us strode into Manifest Destiny’s most secret headquarters as though we were thinking of buying the place. Of course Girl Flower had to spoil the moment by giggling.
A short tunnel led into a vast chamber whose walls and high ceiling were covered entirely with gleaming steel. Presumably originally added to protect against the effects of atomic blast, but useful now to keep magic at bay. No wonder my family had never suspected their existence. You couldn’t hope to scry or remote view through this much cold iron. The guard led us on through more gleaming steel corridors and chambers, and everything bristled with urgent efficiency. There were banks of computers and monitor screens, maps and clocks and operations tables, and any amount of cutting-edge communications equipment. It reminded me of the Drood War Room, on a somewhat smaller scale. And everywhere there were tall and splendid men and women in their black uniforms, sitting at workstations or crowded around tables or just striding back and forth with important messages. The men were all perfect masculine specimens, glowing with health and vitality and purpose. Perfect soldiers. The women were tall and lithe, and just as heavily armed as the men. Valkyries, warrior women. They all nodded respectfully to me as I passed. A few nodded familiarly to Molly. None of them so much as looked directly at Mr. Stab or Girl Flower. I glanced across at Molly. She didn’t seem very happy.
"Have you ever been here before?" I asked quietly.
"No. I was never important enough to be invited here. And I have to say…it isn’t what I thought it would be. I don’t like the feel of this place…"
The guide led us on and on, through endless branching corridors, escorting us deeper and deeper into this unexpected labyrinth far below the streets of London. A steel maze, with the head of Manifest Destiny at its unknown heart.
"What do you know about this man we’re going to see?" I said quietly to Molly.
"Not much," she said just as quietly. "His name is Truman. Never met him. Don’t know anyone who has. You should feel honoured, Eddie."
"Oh, I do," I said. "Really. You have no idea. How did you hook up with these people in the first place?"
"I was recruited four years ago," said Molly. "By Solomon Krieg."
"Now him I have heard of," I said. "The Golem with the Atomic Brain, right? A Cold War attempt at combining magic and science, to produce a Cold War supersoldier. Deadly in his time, and a legend in those secret wars the public never get to hear about; but last I heard, he’d been retired from the field."
"He was," Molly said. "Over ten years ago. His old masters didn’t need him anymore, but he couldn’t be allowed to run loose, so they sent him down here to guard the bunkers. Word is, they locked him in here and then changed all the combinations, just in case. Manifest Destiny found him when they moved in, still standing guard, and Truman took him in and gave him a new purpose. The Golem with the Atomic Brain has a new cause and a new faith, and he’d die for Truman. You can’t buy loyalty like that.
"So now Solomon Krieg walks abroad in the world’s hidden places, its secret haunts and clubs, recruiting people like me as allies to his new cause. He found me at the Wulfshead. He can be…very persuasive. And there he is, right ahead, guarding his master’s lair."
Our soldier guide handed us over into Solomon Krieg’s care with visible relief and not a little haste, barely managing a sketchy salute before hurrying back to his post at the entrance portal. I studied Krieg openly. A legend in his own right, the most terrible secret weapon the British Secret Service ever produced. The English Assassin, the British Bogeyman: Solomon Krieg had many such names down the years. But there was nothing romantic about the Golem with the Atomic Brain. In his own way, he was almost as disturbing as Mr. Stab. A killer with no conscience, no compassion, and, many said, no soul. The greatest secret agent of all, because he would do absolutely anything and never once question his orders. He was a terror weapon from the coldest part of the Cold War, designed to scare the shit out of whomever he was up against.
It was a very cold Cold War. Everyone did terrible things, then.
Krieg was a little over six feet tall, with jet-black hair and pale colourless skin that contrasted eerily with his black uniform. He was muscular but not to any unusual extent. That wasn’t where his strength came from. Krieg was carved from clay, made flesh with ancient magics, and then supercharged with implanted mechanisms. The best technology of his day. Right across his forehead ran a long deep scar, usually hidden by makeup in the old photos I’d seen. It looked like they’d just sawed the top of his head off, popped in their amazing atomic brain, and then jammed the top back on again. It wasn’t a subtle age, back then.
Just standing before us, calm and collected, his pale face empty of all emotion, Krieg looked dangerous. Like a coiled snake or a crouching tiger, ready to strike out and kill at any moment, without warning. I only had to look at him, and I believed every terrible story I’d heard about him. When he finally did speak, his voice was a harsh whisper, uninflected and uncaring.
"Edwin Drood," he said, and just hearing my name in such a cold voice was like listening to my own death warrant. "It is right that you should come to us. Now that you’re rogue. You understand what it is, to be betrayed by those you gave your life to. You must meet Mr. Truman. He is a man of vision and destiny. You can trust him."
"Well," I said. "That’s good to know. Can my companions come too?"
Solomon Krieg looked them over with his cold, unblinking gaze. "If they behave themselves. You understand: if they step out of line, I may have to spank them."
"Go right ahead," I said. "I’ll hold your coat."
"Come on, Solomon," said Molly. "You must remember me. You were the one who brought me into Manifest Destiny, four years ago. At the Wulfshead. Remember?"
"No," said Solomon Krieg.
He led us down yet another steel corridor, around a corner, and into a sim
ple, private office. And there behind a simple desk sat the head of Manifest Destiny. Leader of the resistance against the old and mighty power of the Droods. He sat in his swivel chair with his back to us, watching as a dozen monitor screens blazed information at him. From the way he moved his head slowly back and forth, it seemed he was taking it all in, though it was just a babble of mixed-up noise to me. He made us wait a while, just to remind us who was in charge here, and then he waved one hand at the screens, and they all shut down at once. He turned slowly around to face us, while Solomon Krieg took up a place at his side. Truman had a broad, kindly face, but that wasn’t what I was looking at. I’d seen some strange sights in my time, but what Truman had done to himself was truly extraordinary.
Long steel rods thrust out of his shaven head at regular intervals, radiating out for over a foot in length, connected by a wide steel hoop, like a great metal halo. The way the skin puckered around the base of the rods suggested they’d been there for some time. The combined weight must have been appalling, but Truman showed no sign of any strain. My first thought was that he’d been in an accident, and this was some kind of head brace, but the pride in his eyes and in his bearing suggested differently.
Look at what I have done to myself, his face said. Isn’t it magnificent?
"Yes," he said, in a deep authoritative voice. "It’s all my own work. I drilled the holes in my skull myself, inserted the steel rods one at a time, forcing them a specific distance into my brain, following my own very careful calculations. And then all I had to do was connect them up with a reinforcing ring, and I became the first man to realise the true potential of the human brain. Oh, yes, my friends, this crown of thorns serves a definite purpose."
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