Live and Let Drood: A Secret Histories Novel Read online

  Why were there no winged unicorns anywhere? I hadn’t got around to checking out the stables at the rear, but I couldn’t see them just flying off.…Where were any of the dozen or so magical creatures that had taken up residence in and around the Hall for as long as I could remember? You were never short of choice for an unusual pet, when I was a kid, though you had to be very careful about which ones you could turn your back on safely. I’d never known the grounds to be this still, this silent…and I didn’t care for it one bit.

  I led the way down to the great ornamental lake, a wide expanse of cool blue waters spread out before us like a modest inland sea. Long and wide enough that you had to pack a picnic lunch if you felt like taking a walk round it, and deep enough that the family once lost a small submarine in it. It was all very peaceful down beside the lake, as though nothing at all had happened. Though there was something…wrong with the view. It took me a moment to realise that there weren’t any swans sailing majestically back and forth on the calm blue surface, and there were always swans on our lake. I stood at the water’s edge with Molly beside me, looking out across the calm blue-green surface at the cool dark copse of beech trees on the other side. Nothing moved anywhere. It was all very still, not even a breath of a breeze.…

  Like a ghost town at midnight. Like a museum after closing time. Like…what the whole world will be like after Humanity has finally left and closed the door behind them.

  “It is beautiful,” said Molly, after a while. “Everything a lake should be.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “It’s artificial, of course.”

  Molly looked at me. “What?”

  “Oh, the whole thing was designed and created by a head gardener to the family, Capability Charlotte. This was back during Victorian times, when you were nobody if your country manor house didn’t have its very own artificial lake. So we had one put in. Complete with its own waterfall feature at the far end, and a small family of selkies specially imported from the Orkney Isles to live in the lake and keep it clean and tidy. It does look good, doesn’t it?”

  “What was here before?” said Molly. “What did you get rid of to make the lake? How many perfectly good trees did you cut down, how much natural vegetation did you dispose of, how much wildlife did you kill…just so you could have a lake exactly where you wanted it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I wasn’t here then. I’m sensing disapproval from you, Molly. This isn’t the wild woods; it’s a garden. We’re always changing things in the grounds, because you can get bored of anything if you have to look at it long enough. Wouldn’t surprise me if all this was gone some years or decades or centuries from now, replaced with something completely different. Maybe an equatorial rain forest…”

  “I am changing the subject now,” said Molly. “Before hitting happens. I remember there being swans on this lake. Or did someone get bored with them, too?”

  “No,” I said. “Whatever happened to the swans, it wasn’t us. Come on. Let’s go take a look at the waterfall.”

  “An artificial waterfall?”

  “Of course! It was all the fashion.…”

  “Words fail me.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m sure you’ll get over it.”

  I walked her down the side of the lake to the jagged stone cliff that towered over the farthest end, where heavy flowing waters cascaded down the craggy surface with endless noise and fury. A gentle mist of water drops gave a hazy, mystical look to the waterfall, and slow steady tides pulsed out from the water’s impact, pushing across the lake’s surface. There was even a dainty little cave cut into the cliff face, tucked away behind the tumbling waters. Very popular with courting couples. Nothing like a dark womblike setting to loosen clothes and dissolve inhibitions. Molly looked over the waterfall coolly.

  “Your family built a whole cliff face here, out in the middle of the grounds, just so you could drive a waterfall over it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You didn’t think views like this just happened, did you? Does look rather fine, doesn’t it?”

  “Where does the water come from?”

  “The lake,” I said. “We recycle it, through a Möbius loop, so the water just goes round and round forever. This whole thing, the lake and the cliff and the waterfall, are what used to be called a folly back in Queen Victoria’s time. They were great ones for re-creating all the grandeur of nature in their own back gardens, so they wouldn’t have to travel to see them.”

  “And you Droods had to have a lake and a waterfall, because you were no one if you didn’t?”

  “Exactly!”

  “But these are private grounds!” said Molly, just a bit loudly. “No one else is allowed in! Only your family would ever get to see them! No one else would ever know you didn’t have them!”

  “We’d know,” I said. “Don’t get so overexcited, Molly. You know it’s bad for your blood pressure.”

  “Sometimes your family makes no sense at all,” said Molly.

  “I know!” I said. “Why do you think I left home the first chance I got and ran away to London?”

  “Because you’ve always had a problem with authority figures,” said Molly. “Even when you were one.”

  “Well, yes. That, too,” I said. “But mostly because my family could provoke the Dalai Lama into a kickboxing duel while drinking gin straight from the bottle.”

  “Why are we here, Eddie? You didn’t walk me all this way across the grounds just to admire the artificial scenery.”

  “We’re here because there’s an undine in the waterfall,” I said grandly. “No one else has got an undine in their waterfall. She’s been here for ages; keeps herself to herself, mostly. But whatever happened here, she must have seen it. Hell, she’s got the best view of the Hall and most of the grounds. We know what must have happened, but there are still far too many unanswered questions for my liking. Like: Where’s all the wildlife that should still be running round the place?”

  “You’ve always had a soft spot for animals,” said Molly. “Anything soft and cuddly turns up, and your heart just melts.”

  I looked at her and started to say something, and she raised a hand to stop me.

  “Do not even go there, Eddie. Talk to your waterfall.”

  I grinned briefly, stepped forward and called out just a bit self-consciously to the rushing waters. There was no response. I hadn’t expected it would be that easy, but you have to try. The undine hadn’t been on a talking basis with anyone in my family for generations. Except for Jacob…and she only talked to him because he was dead. I said as much to Molly.

  “If she’s so mad at your family, why is she still here?” said Molly, getting right to the heart of the matter, as always.

  “Good question,” I said. “The undine is another of the Drood family’s many little secrets. Rumour has it, she was once married to one of us. Always a bad idea when mortal loves immortal, when nature loves supernature…Bound to end in tears. They say love doesn’t last, but sometimes love really is forever. After he died, the undine stayed on here because…there was nowhere else she wanted to go.”

  “I take it there are other versions, other stories,” said Molly.

  “Oh, like you wouldn’t believe,” I said. “Some of them quite appallingly nasty and violent. I prefer to stick with the love story because…”

  “Because you’re a soppy old romantic?”

  “Yes, but also because it enables me to forget all the other unpleasant stories and try to talk to the undine without filling my trousers.”

  I tried again, calling out at the top of my voice, but the waters just kept falling and the undine did not appear. Molly started to get angry.

  “I’m not having her ignore you like this! You stand back and let me work on her, Eddie. I’ll get her out. I am the wild witch of the woods, after all, and all the elements are mine to command. And I could do with a good stretch of my powers.”

  She struck her usual impressive witchy pose and then undermine
d it just a bit by dropping me a swift wink. She ran through a quick series of slashing hand and arm gestures while chanting something in debased Celtic. The waterfall poured down the craggy cliff face entirely unmoved…and then slowed and stopped. And then rose slowly upwards, reversing its path.

  There was still no response from the undine. Molly glared at the reverse waterfall, rolled up her sleeves and ran through a whole new series of gestures, throwing in half a dozen really unpleasant Words. The waterfall stopped again and resumed its normal downward path. But even as the waters thundered down the cliff face, they were already starting to steam, becoming boiling hot. The gentle haze at the foot of the fall disappeared, replaced with thick clouds of scalding steam. I backed away a few steps. Molly didn’t.

  Still no sign of the undine.

  Dark brooding thunderclouds appeared out of nowhere in the pleasant summer sky. A shadow fell across the great lake and nowhere else. Thunder roared and lightning stabbed down. Great gusting winds moved across the surface of the waters, raising massive waves that slammed back and forth, sending blasts of disturbed water splashing high over the sides of the lake. And still the undine wouldn’t answer.

  Molly was breathing harshly now and not just from the effort of so much hard conjuring. She kicked off her boots so she could dig her bare feet deep into the grassy lawn. Molly had a lot to say about being one with nature, but that usually meant nature doing what it was told, where Molly was concerned. She shot me a dark look, flicking her dark hair out of her sweaty face.

  “Give me a minute. I’m just getting started. I’m damned if I’m being ignored by a bloody jumped-up water elemental. Soon as I get my breath back, I’ll call up something so impressive and unnerving it’ll blast all the water out of this lake, crush the whole cliff face into rubble and tie the waterfall in a knot!”

  “Let me try something else first,” I said, soothingly. “Just…while you get your breath back.” I walked up to the water’s edge and addressed the steaming waterfall politely.

  “Hello. Sorry about all that.…Look. I’m Eddie Drood. I really do need your help. Please…talk to me.”

  The waterfall seemed to pause, halting itself in midfall while it considered the matter, and then slowly the undine appeared, forming herself out of the falling waters themselves. The whole waterfall bulged out here and there, taking on a human shape some thirty feet tall. She stood before the cliff face, looking down at Molly and me, towering over us. A force of nature made woman by an act of will. I made a point of standing as tall as I could while still remaining respectful, just to show I wasn’t in any way intimidated. Molly stuck both hands on her hips and glared right up at the undine. I don’t think Molly’s ever been intimidated by anything in her entire life. The undine was now a huge naked female shape composed entirely of water, and oddly proportioned. As though the human shape was something she only vaguely remembered. Her face was a smooth blur, more an impression of human features than anything fixed. And when she finally spoke, her voice sounded like gurgling waters.

  Who disturbs me at this time? Did I not make my wishes clear and explicit? Let me sleep, sleep and dream, of better times.…

  “I need to know what happened here,” I said steadily. “I need to know what happened to the Hall and to my family and all the things that used to live here on the grounds.”

  They went away. A storm rose around the Hall, reaching out across the grounds…and when it was gone, so was everything else. Let me sleep, sleep and dream…till I forget.

  The last few gurgling sounds were almost unintelligible. Her body lost all shape and definition, washed away by falling waters, and her face sank back into the waterfall and was gone. The steam disappeared as the waters cooled, and the hazy mist slowly reestablished itself. Molly sniffed loudly.

  “Demon lady wailing for her human lover. Your family really does have a gift for messing up lives. Doesn’t it?”

  “You women always stick together,” I said.

  The conversation with the undine having proved rather less helpful than I’d hoped for, Molly and I walked on across the grounds, leaving the lake behind us and heading towards the small copse of beech trees. Not an area I’d ever approached by choice before. The grassy lawns blazed a brilliant green under our feet, and the sky was almost painfully blue. A perfect summer’s day. No clouds, no birds, not even the buzz of insects going about their business. The grounds were as still and silent as a graveyard. Someone or something had reached out and stripped the grounds of every living thing that should have been there.

  “Why didn’t our outer defences kick in automatically?” I said to distract myself. “I mean, this whole place is lousy with built-in protections. Robot guns, sonic weapons, nerve gasses, stroboscopic lights and hallucinogenic mists, and a whole bunch of things the Geneva Convention’s never even heard of. Not to mention all the magical protections, the shaped curses and invisible flying hexes…They couldn’t have been off-line; they weren’t linked to the other Hall’s Operations and War rooms.”

  “You’re not thinking it through,” said Molly. “The Hall, your Hall, disappeared the moment Alpha Red Alpha was activated. There was no detectable attack from outside, so your protections never knew anything was wrong till it was all over.”

  “All right, then, clever boots. What has happened to all the local wildlife? The gryphons and the unicorns? The birds and the bees?”

  “Your enemy must have boosted Alpha Red Alpha’s field when they activated it by remote control,” said Molly. “To make sure they didn’t miss any Droods who might be out and about in the grounds. So everything living here went…where the Hall went. It’s what I would have done.”

  I had to smile, just a little. “You don’t miss a trick, do you, when it comes to death and destruction?”

  “Years of practice,” Molly said blithely. “Eddie…why have we stopped here? I am looking around me and all I see is trees. Really quite boring trees.”

  I looked carefully around me. “We’re not alone here. It’s just…I haven’t called them yet. I’m going to have to ask you to trust me here, Molly. Trust me to know what I’m doing.”

  “Oh, that’s always dangerous,” said Molly. “Why are you looking so upset, Eddie?”

  “You don’t remember this part of the grounds, do you?” I said carefully. “We have been here before, in these trees.”

  “No,” said Molly, scowling around her. “Should I remember?”

  “Yes,” I said. “We came through here when we broke into the grounds together. This…is where the family keeps its scarecrows.”

  I called to them silently, reaching out through the authority still built into my torc, and one by one they materialised out of nowhere, appearing all around us. I knew some of them. Laura Lye, the water elemental assassin, also known as the Liquidator. She drowned three Drood children before we brought her down. Mad Frankie Phantasm, who drifted through bedroom doors to murder innocents in their sleep. Roland the Headless Gunner, who should have stayed dead in Africa. And many more infamous names. One by one they blinked into existence, acknowledging the power I had over them as a Drood. Scarecrows, all of them, made from the bodies of our fallen enemies. Held back from the release of death to guard our grounds for us, forever and a day, or until they wore out.

  They formed circles and then rows around us, filling the copse of trees. They wore battered clothes from many periods of history. Dead but not departed, because my family wouldn’t let them go. Just enough life left in them to torment them. Because no one threatens us where we live and gets away with it.

  Molly moved in close beside me. She remembered the scarecrows now.

  My family makes scarecrows out of the bodies of our most hated enemies. Because we can, and because we believe in making the punishment fit the crime. Their faces are weather-beaten skin, stretched taut as parchment and just as brittle, cracked here and there by exposure to the elements. Thick tufts of straw protrude from their ears and mouths, but we leave their eyes.
So we can see their suffering. Our enemies may hate us, but my family hates harder and longer. If you listen in on the right supernatural frequency, you can hear the scarecrows screaming.

  “I thought we destroyed them…” said Molly. Her voice was little more than a whisper.

  “They can’t be destroyed,” I said. “That’s the point. Tear them to pieces, burn them up; they just come back again. For as long as they’re needed. They’ll endure for as long as their scarecrow bodies last, and my family makes them well, to last centuries.”

  “Where are they?” said Molly. “When they aren’t here?”

  “Close by,” I said. “Hanging on their scarecrow crosses, waiting to be called. Don’t look at me like that, Molly. These are my family’s worst and most vicious enemies. They deserve this.…”

  “Do they? What about him?”

  She stabbed a hand shaking with emotion at one of the more recent scarecrows. The straw-stuffed thing we’d made out of the Blue Fairy’s body.

  Half elf, half Druid, we took him in and made him part of the family. Even though we knew what he was and what he’d done in the past. I vouched for him. And then we went to war together, against the Loathly Ones, and he struck down a Drood in the middle of battle, from behind, and stole his torc. I trusted him, and he betrayed me. I forgave him eventually. Just before he died in the great spy game of the Independent Agent, Alexander King.

  “He isn’t in there,” I said to Molly. “He was already dead when I sent him back to the Hall. That’s just his body.”

  “But why is he here? He was your friend! How could you allow your family to make him over into…that?”

  “Because he stole a torc,” I said steadily. “There is no greater crime against the Droods. Punishment, like justice, must be seen to be done. The scarecrows aren’t just our defenders; they’re a warning to our enemies.”

  “He was your friend,” Molly said coldly.