My family would make apologies to the Wulfshead management. And they would accept, because we all have to do business together sometime.
We’d arrived in Ashtree’s outer office: fairly old, maybe even Victorian originally, with lots of heavy wood panelling on the walls, and really quite ugly furniture. The only modern touch was the highly efficient computer on the secretary’s desk. There was no one around. It was all very peaceful and quiet, and therefore worrying.
“I’ve been here before,” I said to Molly. “I’m sure Sir Terrence will remember me. Still . . . this is odd.”
“Odd?” Molly said immediately. “How odd?”
“This is the outer office, where the secretary makes you wait till Terry the Toad is ready to see you,” I said. “And like all bosses’ secretaries, she’s there to guard his privacy and her territory like an attack dog. So . . . where is she?”
We both looked at the empty desk. The computer was turned off; everything was neat and tidy, not even a half-finished cup of coffee.
“Let’s go see if Terry the Toad is in,” said Molly. “Since we’ve come all this way.”
“Yes,” I said. “Let’s do that. I’m sure we’ve got lots to talk about.”
The heavy door that led into Ashtree’s very private office wasn’t locked. I tried the handle carefully, mindful of booby traps, but it turned easily in my hand. I slammed the door all the way open with my shoulder, and Molly and I strode in. Ashtree was sitting quietly behind his desk, a tired old man in a crumpled suit, his face drawn, haggard. He didn’t so much as flinch when Molly and I made our entrance. He nodded to both of us slowly.
“I’ve been waiting for someone,” he said. “I knew somebody would come eventually. But I can’t say I recognise either of you.”
“Edwin Drood,” I said. “And Molly Metcalf.”
“Ah. Yes. Isabella’s sister. Please come in; make yourselves comfortable. I have so many things to say to you.”
I had a good look round his office, but there didn’t seem to be any hidden assassins crouching in the corners, so I pulled out a chair for Molly and then dropped easily into one beside her. Ashtree didn’t move at all, looking us over with tired curiosity.
“Edwin . . . Yes. I do remember you. . . . I was actually pleased to see you, you know. I never did get on with Matthew.”
“Not many did,” I said. “Do you know why we’re here?”
Of course. I’m surprised it’s taken you this long. I left a clear enough trail. I’m glad you’re here, so I can get this over with. I never wanted any of this, you know. It was . . . I’d struggled so long, trying to be the success in business I was supposed to be, even though I never had any taste for it. . . . But it was what my family wanted, so I went along. . . . You’d know all about that, Edwin. But I never got anywhere that mattered, or achieved anything of note, no matter how hard I tried. So when this new satanic conspiracy came looking for me, head-hunted me . . . I jumped at the chance. You do know about the . . . Of course you do. I didn’t think they were real, you see. . . . I mean, who believes in satanic conspiracies in this day and age? I thought it was like the old Hellfire Club, a chance to dress up and play games. . . .
Suddenly everything I touched was golden. I was the big man in the city my family had always wanted me to be. I had everything I’d ever wanted. I was happy, you see. Such a long time since I’d been happy . . . So when they told me to pass some information on to Charlatan Joe, I thought . . . Why not? Who’s Isabella Metcalf to me? I had to do it in a certain way, using some rather unpleasant magics, but . . . it was all playing the game; you see? I should have known better. Nothing’s ever simple or straightforward in the conspiracy. It’s all plans within plans, traps within traps. . . .
I was there when the conspiracy kidnapped Isabella. Snatched her right out of her own teleport spell. They have very powerful people working for them. She put up one hell of a fight. I was impressed. But the conspiracy people had all kinds of weapons and dirty tricks at their command, and they . . . wore her down. And when she was helpless, stripped of all her magics, they . . . did things to her. They hurt her horribly, broke her spirit, defiled and abused her . . . and laughed while they did it. They let me watch. It was their idea of a reward. They thought I’d enjoy it.
It sickened me.
“I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I thought I was a hard man, up for anything . . . but to my surprise, it seems there was a good man inside all along, struggling to get out. There was a line I wouldn’t cross. I couldn’t help Isabella, but I couldn’t stand by and watch. They saw the weakness in me; they knew I wasn’t one of them anymore. So I came here to wait for whoever found me first. I could have run, could have hidden, but . . . I think I need to be punished for what I’ve done.”
“Is she alive?” Molly said harshly. “My sister? Is Isabella still alive?”
“As far as I know,” said Ashtree. “They took her away with them. Dragged her off . . . So much blood. I’d never seen so much blood before. They said they had a use for her, you see. I didn’t know any of that was going to happen! You must believe me; I didn’t know. . . . I never understood what I was getting into. Or maybe . . . I didn’t want to understand, because I was having such a good time. . . . I didn’t believe in Devil worshippers. Didn’t believe in the Devil. But it turns out he believed in me. . . . I’m not a bad person, Eddie, Molly. . . . Not really. I’ve done bad things, I know, things I’m not proud of, but it was just to get on. . . . Nobody ever really got hurt.”
“If you want to atone,” I said, “help us find Isabella. And the mind-influencing machine. And the leaders of the conspiracy.”
“You don’t understand,” said Ashtree. “I never dealt with people on that level, never worked with anyone that high up. I was never that important to the conspiracy.”
“Did you know about the Great Sacrifice?” I said.
“No!” said Ashtree. “I never dreamed . . . I had no idea. I was just in charge of raising money! Moving numbers around . . .”
“You must know something,” I said. “Something that can help us. That’s why you stayed, isn’t it?”
“Of course,” said Ashtree. “That’s why I’m glad you found me first. I was at Lightbringer House, you see, to make a report, and I happened to pass by a door that was a little ajar. Curiosity got the better of me, and I peeked. And there he was, the great leader of the satanic conspiracy, holding a private meeting. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it was him! I knew him; I’d had dealings with him in the past. I couldn’t believe such a small man could be the leader of the conspiracy. But then, I suppose it’s always the small men with big ambitions. . . .”
“Who?” I said. “Tell us his name!”
“I can’t,” said Ashtree. “I can’t say his name to anyone outside the conspiracy. No one can. They found me listening, you see, and they put a geas on me, a binding burned right into my soul. . . . It hurts even to think the name. . . . But I can tell you where to find Isabella Metcalf. I wasn’t supposed to know that either; but people will talk in front of me, you see. Because I’m not important. They’ve taken her to the conspiracy’s most secret place, their hidden fortress, where the leader sits and gloats among his treasures and his prisoners and makes all the decisions that matter. I can’t tell you how to get there. But that’s where you have to go.”
“Where?” said Molly. “Where do we have to go? Where is my sister?”
“They’re holding her in the Timeless Moment,” said Sir Terrence Ashtree, never again to be Terry the Toad.
And then he screamed horribly, convulsing in his chair as his flesh began to rot and corrupt. Roger said, They’re always listening. . . . I pushed the heavy desk out of the way to get to Ashtree, but it was already too late. The conspiracy was taking its revenge on him for having dared betray them. Ashtree screamed and screamed again, whipping back and forth in his seat as his flesh melted and ran away in thick streams of putrescent liquids. He should have died
from the shock of it, but the same dark magic that was killing him kept him alive to suffer, to know horror . . . to be punished. His head snapped back and forth in agony, and thick gobbets of suppurating flesh flew off to spatter and stain the floor. I heard his bones snap and break and splinter inside him, torn apart by savage forces. There was nothing I could do to save him. I looked at Molly, but she shook her head helplessly. I looked at Ashtree, with his melting face and empty eye sockets. The timbre of his screams was changing as his vocal cords rotted and ran away down his throat.
I armoured up, extended a golden blade from my hand and cut his head off. It was the only mercy I could give him. The head fell away as the body collapsed in upon itself, and in a few moments he was gone, leaving nothing behind but thick, greasy stains on and around his desk. The stench was so bad it drove Molly and me from the room, and I slammed the door shut to contain it. Molly glared at me.
“Where the hell is the Timeless Moment? You know, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, what is it?”
“Just what you’d think,” I said. “The perfect hiding place.”
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. . . .
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