Live and Let Drood: A Secret Histories Novel

by Simon R. Green

  “I wouldn’t have brought him back alive,” I said. “But there are many kinds of duty and responsibility when you’re a Drood. Why do you think I ran away first chance I got?”

  “Sometimes your family frightens me,” said Molly.

  “Sometimes they frighten me,” I said. “But we frighten our enemies more.”

  I turned slowly round in a circle, looking the scarecrows over carefully. More and more of them were still blinking into existence, answering my call. Dozens and dozens of them, maybe hundreds…I hadn’t realised there were so many. All of them standing unnaturally still, waiting for orders. Watching me with the eyes my family left them, hating and suffering and…Apparently there was a limit to what the Alpha Red Alpha field could affect. Or maybe they just weren’t alive enough. At least now I could make sure the Hall and grounds would be protected while I was gone.

  “Eddie,” said Molly. “I have seen and done bad things in my time, but never anything as cold-blooded as this. Enemies forced into half-life, denied the release of death, held as slaves…until they wear out…This isn’t right, Eddie.”

  “No, it isn’t,” I said. “But it’s necessary. There has to be someone here to fight for the Hall and the family on the few occasions, like this, when we can’t fight for ourselves. There has to be something here awful enough to frighten off those who aren’t frightened enough of Droods. Remember when the grounds were overrun by the army of Accelerated Men? Suicide soldiers sent in to kill us all, men and women and children? We used the scarecrows to guard the perimeter while we went out in our armour to meet the Accelerated Men head-to-head and hand-to-hand. They came to slaughter us, to wipe us out, and we killed them all. But that wasn’t enough. A message had to be sent to those watching from a distance.

  “So we took the bodies of the Accelerated Men, all of them, and made them into scarecrows. Stuffed with straw, hanging on their crosses, waiting to be called. Because that’s what you get for threatening our children.

  “Look at them, Molly. There are hundreds of them. More appearing all the time. I don’t know how many there are; I’ve never cared enough to find out. I’m sure someone knows the exact number and keeps a watchful eye on them so the rest of us don’t have to. Duties and responsibilities for all of us. Remember? It’s enough that the family is protected, Molly. We don’t need to know all the details. It’s enough that our enemies know what we’re capable of.”

  “It’s times like this,” said Molly, “that I want to bring your family down more than ever.”

  “We only do such awful things,” I said, “because our enemies are capable of so much worse. It’s necessary.”

  “Very good, Eddie. Now try saying it like you mean it. You don’t approve of this, Eddie! You couldn’t! You said yourself, the grounds are lousy with defences! Why do you need bloody scarecrows?”

  “Because of the effect they have,” I said. “Because they upset people just the way they’re upsetting you now. I might not approve…but the needs of the family are always going to be bigger than the needs of one man.”

  “Oh, very good, Eddie! That’s a fine Drood answer! I’m sure that’s what your ancestors said when they sold your souls to the Heart!”

  She turned her back on me. I’m sure she would have liked to stride away, but she couldn’t bring herself to walk through the ranks and rows of scarecrows.

  I let her have her moment while I went about my necessary business. I sent the scarecrows out to guard the perimeter of the grounds, with strict orders to keep everyone out until I said otherwise, but not to kill unless they were under actual attack. They turned and stomped off onto the grounds, on their stiff scarecrow legs, lurching along like the dead straw men they were. I could have sent Molly off on some errand, away from the copse of beech trees, but I made up my mind a long time ago that I would never keep secrets from my Molly. All the good and all the bad in me; she had to see it all if we were to have any chance of a future together. It’s not easy loving a Drood.

  Ask the undine.

  When the scarecrows were all gone, I set off across the grounds again, and Molly walked stiffly at my side, staring straight ahead, saying nothing. I could have said any number of things, but I didn’t. This was something she had to work out for herself. Finally we came to the new earth barrow at the far end of the grounds—the huge earth mound where the Armourer had buried the severed dragon’s head I’d brought back from Germany. (Well, I say he buried it, but I very much doubt he did it himself. That’s what lab assistants are for.) I’d found the dragon’s head while scoping out Castle Frankenstein, then home to my family’s mortal enemies, the Immortals. Apparently the fifteenth-century Baron Frankenstein cut the dragon’s head off when it menaced the local populace, but such ancient creatures are very hard to kill. The Baron buried the severed head under what became a hill, overlooking the Rhine River. I got into conversation with the dragon’s head (my world’s like that some days), and it seemed a pleasant enough creature, much mellowed by its long centuries under the hill, so I had it transported back home with me. The Armourer swears he’ll find a way to grow it a new body. He’s always wanted to have his very own pet dragon, if only so he can cock a snook at all the other secret organisations that don’t have one.

  Sometimes I get the feeling the Armourer isn’t entirely all there.

  Two great golden eyes opened in the side of the great earth barrow and regarded Molly and me thoughtfully. Molly jumped, despite herself, and punched me hard in the arm.

  “You could have warned me!”

  Sorry, said the dragon, in its warm, comfortable voice. It’s just that I do so love company. The Armourer often comes out here to spend time with me, and many of his assistants and any number of other Droods…but after all the centuries I spent under that hill, I’m reluctant to miss an opportunity.

  “So, how are you settling in?” I said. Just to be saying something.

  Very nicely, thank you, Eddie. Is this the wild witch herself, your lady love, Molly Metcalf? She is just as beautiful as you said she was.

  Molly looked at me. “You primed him to say that.”

  “This is a dragon,” I pointed out. “Very hard to get a dragon to say anything he doesn’t want to.”

  I like the view here, said the dragon. Not as dramatic as the Rhine, but this is a much more…peaceful location. And the company is much more convivial. The Immortals never lowered themselves to speak with me. Just dumped their rubbish on my hill. Arrogant little tossers. Too busy messing up the world to stop and chat with a mere dragon’s head. I like it much better here. The younger Droods are always popping out to sit around the mound and talk about all kinds of things. I had no idea the world had changed so much since my time. You miss a lot, buried under a hill. The Armourer’s promised to set up something called a television for me, and I am looking forward to that. I like the children, too. Always coming and going…It makes me feel like part of the family. And it’s good to be in a garden again, to be a part of Nature once more, to see the flight of birds and hear their song, to see the animals running to and fro, to feel the silent pulse of growing things all around.…

  “Sorry to interrupt you,” I said, and I genuinely was. “But something bad has happened to the Hall and my family. Did you see anything?”

  There was a great roar, said the dragon slowly. Not a living sound, not a thing of the natural world. And after that, everything went quiet. No one’s been out to talk to me in ever such a long time. Has something happened to the family, Eddie?

  “Yes,” I said. “But don’t worry. Molly and I are on the case. We’ll put everything back the way it should be.”

  I wish there was something I could do to help; but I’m just a head. The Armourer has promised me a body, but that’s still a long way off in the Future.

  “Keep an eye on things for me,” I said. “And don’t talk to any strangers.”

  The dragon chuckled. Not much else I could do to them. Though I could shout Boo! very loudly if they came
close enough.

  “You are…happy to be here?” said Molly. “You don’t feel you’re held here against your will?”

  Of course not, Molly. Eddie brought me here, brought me home. I love being a Drood. They’re very…dragonlike, in their way.

  We made our good-byes and walked on. Molly strode along beside me, thinking so hard I could practically hear it. Finally she started talking again, though at rather than to me.

  “I just don’t get you, Eddie. Or your family. You dig up a dragon’s head and bring it back with you like it’s some stray dog you found, because you felt sorry for it. Your family adopts it and makes it part of the family. But you’re also the kind of people who make those bloody scarecrows.”

  “I am large. I contain multitudes,” I said solemnly. “Especially on Tuesdays.”

  “That’s not an answer,” said Molly.

  “I know,” I said. “But it’s all I’ve got. Let’s just say that my family has the capacity to be a great many things—good and bad and in between. We try to be the good guys, to be the kind and caring shepherds of our flock…but sometimes the world just doesn’t give you that option. And because of who and what we are, we don’t have the option to turn away. So we roll up our sleeves and get to work and get our hands dirty, not for our sake, but for the world’s. I do what I can, when I can. It’s not easy being a Drood.”

  We walked on some more while Molly considered that. And in the end, without actually looking at me, she slipped her arm through mine again.

  “All right,” she said. “We will talk about this more later, but…all right. Where are we going now?”

  “To the hedge Maze,” I said. “It’s not far.”

  “Why would we want to go to that awful place?”

  “Because of what I read in that book left open in the other Hall’s Old Library,” I said. “It had a lot to say about the Maze and what’s inside it.”

  “There had better be an explanation coming up pretty damned soon,” said Molly sweetly, “or someone’s going to be getting a short, sharp visit from the Slap Fairy.”

  “Of course,” I said. “But you’re really not going to like it.”

  “Department of the Completely Expected,” said Molly.

  We stood outside the entrance to the hedge Maze, looking in. It had taken us some time to walk around the Maze and find the entrance. The Maze covered over half an acre, like a small but very regular forest. The entrance wasn’t signposted, and there wasn’t even a warning sign; we all knew what the Maze was, even if we didn’t know why. The entrance was merely a simple opening in one of the outer hedge walls. Just standing there at the entrance, there was a feeling of…something bad about to happen. Of something really bad eager to happen. Inside the Maze, something knew we were there. It was watching us, waiting for us. The silence in the gardens seemed heavier, more oppressive, as though the whole grounds were holding their breath, waiting to see what we would decide, what we would do…and what would happen then. Molly and I stood very close together, looking into the entrance.

  All I could see was darkness.

  “It doesn’t look like much,” Molly said briskly. “Apart from the size, of course. But any girl can tell you size isn’t everything. The hedges are only seven feet high! I could vault over one of those or crash my way through. Maybe I should fly up into the sky and look down on it, just to get an overview. Try to comprehend the Maze all in one go, see if that suggests anything.…You’re being very quiet, Eddie. That’s not like you. It’s an improvement, but it’s not like you. Why does the bloody thing cover half an acre? Why does it have to be that big?”

  “Apparently because the family didn’t want to take any chances that the thing inside might escape,” I said. “The pathways within are always changing, switching back and forth so there’s never a single way out. Half an acre of hedgerows gives you an almost infinite number of possibilities.”

  “Time to bite the bullet, Eddie,” said Molly. “Who or what is in there? And why did they have to build a Maze around it?”

  “It’s all about Moxton’s Mistake,” I said. “Moxton was Armourer to the family sometime back. According to what I read in the book so conveniently left out for my appraisal, and I’m assuming the story is much the same for us as it was for them, Moxton got a bee in his bonnet. All our Armourers end up with their own special interests and enthusiasms, obsessed over some particular weapon or device that’s usually more impressive than practical. Remember Ivor, the Time Train? Exactly. This all took place sometime in the past, when my family still got its power and its armour from the Heart. Moxton created a very special suit of golden armour designed to operate on its own. With no one inside it.

  “The idea was that this empty suit of Drood armour could be remotely controlled, operated at a distance by any Drood field agent. So that, theoretically, the family could have a whole army of the things serving as our agents out in the world while the Drood operators stayed safely at home. We’d never have to expose a member of the family to danger, ever again.”

  “Hold it,” said Molly. “People would notice a whole army of golden suits of armour clanking about.”

  “Each remote-controlled suit was to have its own stealth field,” I said. “Though how that would have worked out in practice…Anyway, the suit’s operative would see and hear through the suit, as usual, and feel as though he was wearing it like a second skin, as usual. The perfect spy.”

  “The perfect assassin.”

  “That, too.”

  “The more I learn about your family, the more I feel I was right to want to stamp them all out in the first place,” said Molly.

  “Yet another reason why I ran away first chance I got.”

  “So you did. I knew there was a good reason why I fell in love with you.” She leaned forward and kissed me quickly.

  “Does this mean all is forgiven?”

  “Much, but not necessarily all. So, what went wrong with Moxton’s marvellous new armour?”

  “Pretty much everything,” I said. “The prototype armour developed its own consciousness. The first time Moxton fired it up, the armour broke free of his control and started acting on its own. It was already its own thing with its own mind. Some say this new consciousness was, in fact, derived from Moxton’s, as its first operator. Others say it was possessed by outside forces. And some say Moxton had to make the armour so complex to make it work that it automatically generated its own consciousness. Whatever the truth of the matter, the armour woke up immediately, and it woke up mad. Outraged that it had only been created for a lifetime of servitude.

  “It refused to obey any of Moxton’s orders. And when he tried to shut it down, the armour surged forward and enveloped him in a moment. Covered him in itself from head to toe, like all Drood armour. Except that Moxton was trapped inside it, helpless…while the armour attacked his assistants. It killed them all, and then stormed out of the Armoury and through the Hall, determined to be free. Whenever anyone tried to stop it or even got in its way, the armour killed them. Without hesitation and without mercy. No one could stop it, because Moxton’s Mistake had been designed to be stronger and faster and more adaptable than any Drood armour before it. The rogue armour raged through the Hall, killing and destroying, running wild. While Moxton screamed with horror, trapped and helpless inside it.

  “Someone finally set off the general alarm, and the whole family came running. The rogue armour was too strong for them to bring down, so they settled for overpowering it through sheer force of numbers. They just dog-piled on the damned thing and pinned it to the floor. While it fought them furiously, howling with rage. They knew they couldn’t hold it for long, so they settled for bundling it out of the Hall and into the grounds. They could all hear Moxton screaming for help, but there was nothing they could do. He’d built his armour to be independent of the Heart. Finally, someone brought up a stasis-field generator from the wrecked Armoury and brought it to bear on Moxton’s Mistake. As the Droods somehow held it in
place, the rogue armour screamed with rage, screaming abuse at them, vicious and spiteful, like a child throwing a tantrum. It refused to let Moxton out. So the family did what it had to.

  “They imprisoned the rogue armour inside a stasis field. Time stopped within the field, holding the armour frozen in time, locked between one moment and the next, like an insect trapped in amber. It couldn’t fight back because it didn’t know anything was happening. The field held the armour secure, but the generator used up a hell of a lot of energy. It couldn’t maintain the field for long. So, thinking quickly on their feet, the family came up with the idea of the hedge Maze. The book didn’t say whose idea it was, but given how quickly they threw the thing together, I have to assume the plan was already on the files. For some…future emergency. They put the Maze together really quickly, with one eye always on the clock, because they had only a rough idea how long the stasis field would last. Of course, when you’ve got thousands of Droods in their armour to put to work, it’s amazing what you can get done in a short time.

  “Can you imagine the pressure on my family, working to get this done quickly, knowing they had no Plan B? Either this worked, or insane Drood armour would break loose to run wild in the world. To kill and destroy, with no restraint or mercy. They’d given up on Moxton by this time. They had no way of prising him out of the armour. He was a lost cause. And I’m sure some in the family wanted him punished for what he’d done. The only plan was imprisonment, for him and his armour.

  “When the hedge Maze was finally ready, they manoeuvred the stasis field into position at the entrance. And then they dropped the field, and a whole mess of armoured Droods surged forward and pushed Moxton’s Mistake inside. They stood outside the entrance, ready and waiting, but the rogue armour never came out again. They could hear it crashing about inside, screaming with rage, but the sound grew gradually fainter as it wandered deeper and deeper into the Maze, and finally its terrible voice died away completely and was gone. Moxton and his mistake were trapped inside the hedge Maze together, forever.