Live and Let Drood: A Secret Histories Novel Read online

  I moved slowly down the dark hallway, through ruin and devastation, and forced myself to be calm and collected, practical and professional. Just from looking around me at the nature of the destruction, I could see they must have used grenades and flamethrowers. No other way to do this much damage in a hurry. Probably some magical and superscience weapons, as well. Someone had been intent on doing a really thorough job here.

  I considered all the possibilities as I made my way down the hallway, broken floorboards groaning warnings under my weight. Molly was careful to keep distance between us, to spread the weight out as much as possible. Could there have been sabotage, or even an invasion of the family Armoury—our own weapons turned against us? It didn’t seem likely. An enemy who’d planned such a thorough assault wouldn’t have gambled on finding enough weapons here to do the job. They’d have brought their own. Could the enemy have teleported inside the Hall if all our shields were down? That would explain how they were able to take all of us by surprise so easily. Maybe even suicide bombers? So many possibilities, so many questions, and no answers anywhere. Molly stepped deftly over the rubble on the floor, looking at everything, touching nothing.

  “There wasn’t any damage out in the grounds,” she said, after a while. “All the fighting took place indoors. Look at the bullet holes in these walls. And scorch marks from energy blasts, which implies energy weapons or offensive sorceries. Do you suppose…there could be any survivors, maybe trapped somewhere in the Hall?”

  “No,” I said. “We would have fought to the last man rather than let this happen to the Hall.” I stopped abruptly, glancing about me, hands clenched into fists at my sides. “But you were right earlier. We can’t afford to spend too long here. If all our defences are down, then the shields that hide our presence are down, too. The whole world can see exactly where Drood Hall is, for the first time, and that makes us vulnerable. The vultures will be gathering. They’ll descend on us in their hordes to search for loot and overlooked secrets. But I can’t leave, Molly. Not yet. I have to know.…”

  “Of course you do,” said Molly. “Every clue the enemy left behind is ammunition we can use to identify and then nail the bastards who did this.”

  I had to smile at her. “There was a time the Droods were your enemies. Not that long ago, you would have been overjoyed by all this. You’d have danced on these ruins.…”

  “Danced, hell,” said Molly. “I’d have hiked up my skirts and pissed on them, singing hallelujah. But that was then; this is now. Everything changed when I met you. Now an attack on your family is an attack on you. And no one messes with my man and gets away with it.”

  She struck a witch’s pose, and her hands moved through a sinuous series of magical gestures. A slow presence gathered on the air around us and all the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. A sudden cold wind came gusting down the hallway, disturbing the ashes. Molly spoke a single Word, almost too much for human vocal cords to bear, and the echoes of it trembled and shuddered all through the enclosed space.

  “There,” said Molly, relaxing just a little. “I’ve put some temporary shields in place: a No See zone over the Hall and serious avoidance spells around the perimeter. Low-level stuff, easily broken by anyone who knows what they’re looking for, but enough to buy us some time, so we can make a proper investigation. Where do you want to start, Eddie?”

  I didn’t thank her. It would only have embarrassed her.

  I looked up and down the gloomy hallway. It was all so still, so quiet. The only sounds had been our careful footsteps and the quiet shifting noises of broken stone and brickwork. The ceiling made constant ominous noises as the collapsed upper floors settled and pressed down. There was still a little smoke, farther in, curling unhurriedly on the still air, and the odd cloud of soot and ashes drifting this way and that. Molly sneezed explosively, and I jumped despite myself. I looked at her reproachfully, and she stared haughtily down her nose at me, as though she’d meant to do it. She raised one hand and snapped her fingers imperiously. A sharp breeze blew in from the open doors and rushed down the hallway, dispersing the smoke and blowing away the soot and ashes. The breeze died away quickly, before it could disturb anything precarious.

  Most of the interior walls had been riddled with gunfire and then smashed and burnt and blown apart. There were great holes in the old stonework, and the wood panelling had been almost completely burnt away by fierce heat. It was hard to find anything I recognised. The great statues and important works of art, the wall hangings and the family portraits: gone, all gone. I realised Molly had stopped to look up at the ceiling, and I followed her gaze, checking it quickly for spreading cracks.

  “No,” she said, without looking round. “It’s just…our room was up there, on the top floor. Is it possible… ?”

  “No,” I said. “All the upper floors have fallen in on themselves. There’s not a few feet of roof left intact anywhere. Everything we had up there is gone.”

  “Everything you had,” said Molly. “I kept most of my stuff in the woods. Oh, Eddie…I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s just things,” I said. “You can always get more things. What matters is I still have you.”

  “Forever and a day, my love,” said Molly, slipping her arm through mine again and briefly resting her head on my shoulder.

  We moved on into the gloom and the shadows. The sounds of our slow progress seemed to move ahead of us, as though to give warning we were coming. All the great paintings that used to line the walls, portraits and scenes of the family by all the great masters, were gone forever. Generations of Droods, great works of art preserved by the family for generations, reduced to ash, and less than ash. Even the frames were destroyed. Someone had swept the walls clean with incandescent fires, probably laughing as they did. I crouched down as I spotted a scrap of canvas caught between two pieces of rubble from a shattered statue. Molly peered over my shoulder.

  “What is it, sweetie?”

  “I think…this was a Botticelli,” I said. “Just a few splashes of colour now, crumbling in my hand.” I let it drop to the floor, and straightened up again. “Why would the enemy take time out from fighting the Droods to destroy so many important works of art? These paintings were priceless, irreplaceable. Why not…take them and sell them?”

  “Because whoever did this was only interested in destruction and revenge,” said Molly. “I used to be like that. I would have torched every painting in every museum in the world to get back at your family for killing my parents. The Droods have angered a lot of people in their time, Eddie. Sometimes hurting the one you hate can be far more important than profiting from them.”

  “Are you saying we deserved this? That we had it coming? That we brought all this on ourselves?”

  “Of course not! I’m just making the point…that really angry people often don’t stop to think logically.”

  “I liked the paintings,” I said. “And there were photographs, too, towards the end of the corridor. A whole history of my family. And the only photograph I ever saw of my mother and my father…How am I ever going to remember what they looked like, with the only photo destroyed?”

  “I don’t have any photos of my parents,” said Molly. “But I still think of them every day. You’ll remember them.”

  We moved on. All the statues and sculptures had been blown apart or just smashed to pieces. So much concentrated rage…I couldn’t even tell which piece was which from just looking at the scattered parts, though here and there I’d glimpse some familiar detail. The rich carpet that had stretched the whole length of the hallway was gone; just a charred and blackened mess that crunched under our feet.

  It was like walking through the tomb of some lost civilisation and trying to re-create its original glory and grandeur from what small broken pieces remained.

  “This wasn’t just the side effects of fighting,” I said, finally. “It isn’t even vandalism, smashing things up for the fun of it. This was the complete destruction of everything we beli
eved in and cared for. They wanted to rip out every memory, every meaning of Drood Hall. To spit in the face of our long tradition, and wipe it from the memory of the world. Our enemy wanted to make sure there would be nothing left to remember us by.”

  We moved on, out of the hallway and into what remained of the ground floor—through ragged spaces where doors or walls should have been, through wreckage and destruction, through what had been my home and refuge from the world—moving deeper and deeper into the Hall. Into my past. It didn’t get any better. The destroyers had been very thorough. Finally I just stopped, weighed down by guilt and responsibility and the burden of memories. I’d spent so much of my younger life trying to escape from Drood Hall and my family and their hold over me, but I’d never wanted this. I might have dreamed it a few times, but I never really wanted it.…Molly looked at me impatiently.

  “Where are we, Eddie? I don’t recognise anything here.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t tell. I lived most of my life in this place. I knew all its rooms and corridors, all its nooks and crannies and secret hiding places, like the back of my hand, but now…I think we’re in one of the open auditoriums where people could come to just sit and think, or drink tea and chat or simply rest their troubled souls for a while. Look at it now.…”

  Sunlight streamed in through holes in the outer wall like slanting spotlights, full of listlessly turning dust motes. Ruin and rubble; shadows and darkness. Not one scrap or stick of furniture left intact. As though the enemy had taken time out from bloodshed and slaughter to go through here with sledgehammers, smashing everything that might have been useful or valuable or just pleasant to look at. Or even just fondly remembered by my family. Who could hate us this much? Even the wooden floor had been torn up and split apart, with jagged splinters sprouting up everywhere, as though some great vicious animal had chewed on it.

  “What do you see, Eddie?” Molly said softly.

  “I see scorch marks on the walls from energy blasts,” I said steadily. “And a hell of a lot of bullet holes. A lot of fighting went on here, before they blew the place up and set fire to it. I wonder…how much blood there is under all this mess. From all those who fell here…I don’t see any armoured bodies or enemy dead. Did they take them all with them when they left? I can see the enemy taking their own fallen, so as not to leave any clues as to their identity. But why take the Drood dead? I’ve seen only one golden body so far. The place should be littered with them.…And why was the armour melted like that? As though it had been hit by a nuclear blast?”

  Molly didn’t say anything. She knew I wasn’t talking to her.

  I turned and went quickly back the way we’d come, hurrying back to the front doorway and the armoured body lying there. I crouched down beside it, studying the gleaming golden surface thoughtfully. It was covered with great spiderwebs of cracks, as though from a series of unimaginable impacts. The golden metal had become scored and distorted in places, touched by some incredible heat. The arms were fused to the torso, the legs fused together.…And yet the armour, as a whole, was still intact. They hadn’t broken through to reach the man inside. I tapped the blank featureless mask with a single knuckle, and the sound was soft, flat, dead.

  “Can you override the torc?” said Molly. “Make the armour withdraw so we can see who this was?”

  “No,” I said. “Only the wearer has control over his torc. Basic security measure, in case of capture.”

  “Is there any chance he might be alive in there? Trapped, unconscious, maybe? The armour’s damaged but it’s still in one piece. It might have protected the wearer, preserved him.…”

  “No,” I said. “Thanks for the thought, but no. To damage the armour this thoroughly, the sheer force involved must have been horrific. The impact alone would have…I don’t even want to think about the condition of the body inside this armour.” I leaned in close to stare at my own distorted reflection in the featureless golden mask. “Who were you? Did I know you? Did you die bravely? Of course you did. You were a Drood.”

  We went back inside and I tried another direction. Still looking for something I couldn’t put a name to. I knew only that I’d know it when I saw it. We rounded a corner and found ourselves facing a tall and very solid-looking door. Somehow still intact, somehow still standing firm and upright in its frame. The walls on either side were gone. Reduced to piles of rubble. I put one hand to the door and it just fell apart, crumbling and falling away, collapsing into sawdust. The doorframe still held its shape. I walked through it, into the room beyond. Most of the outer wall was missing, giving an almost uninterrupted view of the grounds outside. But there was still enough of the room left to stir an unexpected memory. The left-hand wall had shelves full of books with charred and fire-blacked spines. When I touched one, the whole row of books fell in on themselves, disintegrating and falling to the floor.

  “Eddie, look at this.”

  I moved over to join Molly. She’d found a tall mirror on the right-hand wall. Completely untouched by the destruction all around it. In the mirror I hardly recognised the man standing beside Molly. I’ve been trained to be a field agent, trained to blend in anywhere and not be noticed, to look like no one in particular. The man before me looked damaged and angry and dangerous. Anyone sensible would run a mile from such a man. Molly was still a delicate china doll of a woman, with big bosoms, bobbed black hair, huge dark eyes and a mouth as red as sin itself. She looked as beautiful as ever to me, in her own eerie, threatening and subtly disturbing way. Right now she was looking at me…as though wondering where I’d come from.

  I turned away from the reflection to look at Molly. I did my best to smile normally. “I know,” I said. “But it’s still me, Molly. You can have your Eddie back when this is all over.”

  “When will it be over, Eddie?”

  “When everyone who had any hand in this is dead,” I said.

  I looked around the room. Something about it…troubled me.

  “I think…I remember being here before when I was just a child. If this is the room I think it is. I would have been very small, maybe four or five years old.…I’d been brought here to meet my grandfather Arthur. Martha’s first husband. I can’t remember who brought me here, though. Isn’t that odd? I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Martha. I can remember being brought into this room and meeting Grandfather Arthur, but not who brought me here or why.

  “Arthur Drood—he seemed very old to me then, though he couldn’t have been more than fifty or sixty. I remember he poured himself a cup of tea but it was too hot to drink, so he poured some of it into the saucer to cool it and sipped his tea from the saucer. Yes. I thought that was a great trick, and demanded to be allowed to try some. He smiled and offered me the saucer, and I took a sip, but I didn’t like it. I pulled a face, and everyone laughed. Who laughed? Who else was in the room with me? Why can’t I remember them? As though I’m not supposed to, not allowed to…”

  “Wait a minute,” said Molly. “Hold everything. Go previous. I thought you said your grandfather Arthur died back in the fifties. You weren’t even born then.”

  “That’s right,” I said, frowning. “He died in 1957, in the Kiev Conspiracy.”

  “What was that?” said Molly. “Some old Cold War thing? Well before my time. And yours.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I was frowning so hard it hurt my forehead. There was something I couldn’t quite remember, something just out of my reach. Something important. “I don’t know the details of how he died. No one ever told me. It was just…1957, and the Kiev Conspiracy. Why did I never ask more about that? Why did I just accept it? I never used to accept anything they just told me.…But I am sure I’ve been here, in this room, before.…”

  And then the ceiling came crashing down on us. No warning, not a sound; the ceiling just bulged suddenly out above us and then broke apart, everything coming down on our heads at once. I subvocalised my activating Words and called for my armour, but nothing happened. The armour d
idn’t come. I froze where I was. I couldn’t believe it. Molly threw an arm around me and thrust her other hand up at the descending ceiling. She said a very bad Word, and a shimmering protective shield appeared around us. The broken ceiling fell down, hit the shield and fell away, unable to touch us. The whole room shook as the entire ceiling came down in heavy chunks and pieces, followed by parts of the compressed floors above. Molly grabbed my arm and hauled me through the doorframe and out into the corridor. The shield came with us, still protecting us. Safely outside the room, Molly held me close as smoke and dust billowed out of the room after us. The room was filling up with wreckage from above, hammering loudly together as though annoyed it had missed its chance at us.

  Molly dismissed the shimmering shield with an impatient wave of her hand and looked at me anxiously.

  “Eddie? Are you okay? What happened in there?”

  I raised a trembling hand to the golden torc at my throat. It was still there. It felt warm and alive, just like always. So why hadn’t my armour come when I called it?

  “How long?” I said numbly to Molly. “How long have I been walking around with a useless torc at my throat? How long have I been naked and defenceless in the face of my enemies?”

  “Eddie, take it easy.…”

  “You don’t understand!” I shouted at her. “I’ve never been separated from my armour! It’s been with me my whole life, in one form or another. First from the Heart and then from Ethel…How can I be a Drood if I don’t have my armour?”

  And just like that I was off and running, ignoring Molly as she called out behind me. I sprinted down rubble-strewn corridors, jumped over piles of collapsed brickwork, ignoring the angry sounds of shifting stonework all around me and heading for the one place in the Hall where I thought I might still find some answers. The one room you could always count on. The Sanctity. The heart of the Hall and of the family. I raced down broken corridors that were little more than death traps of holed floors and collapsed walls, staring straight ahead, thinking of nothing but where I needed to be. Running so hard my leg muscles ached, so fast I could barely get my breath. I could hear Molly running behind me, calling after me, but I didn’t look back once. After a while she just concentrated on running and keeping up with me. I like to think it was because she trusted me to know what I was doing.