I hurried down the corridor, trying every door I came to. None of them would budge; the door handles wouldn’t even turn in my hand, no matter how much strength I used. I beat on each door with my fist, but no one answered. I ran on, rounding another corner, and then I stopped abruptly before a huge grandfather clock. Tall and solid in its ornate oakwood case, it had a wide face and hanging brass weights. It was utterly silent, not a tick or a tock, and after a moment I realised the face didn’t even have any hands. I checked my wristwatch. The digital display was completely blank. Had I come to a place where time had stopped, where there was no time left?
Farther down the corridor I came across a full-length mirror set in a filigreed silver frame, shining bright in the blue moonlight. I stood before the mirror, and it reflected everything in the corridor except me. My heart pounded in my chest, and my breath rasped harshly in my throat. I pressed one hand hard against the cold glass, but the mirror refused to acknowledge any part of me.
I fell back from the mirror and turned to run again, pounding down the corridor, though my feet made no sound at all and I didn’t slip or slide on the icy carpeting as I should have. I threw myself round the next corner, and then came to a sudden halt as I found myself down on the ground floor, in the entrance hall, facing the great double doors that led outside. I stood very still, not even breathing hard, staring at the doors. This was wrong. An upstairs corridor couldn’t connect directly to a downstairs hall without benefit of stairs. But right then I didn’t care. The way out was in front of me, and I’d had enough of this empty house. I ran to the doors and tried the handles, and of course they wouldn’t move. I rattled the handles so hard that it shook the double doors, but they wouldn’t open. I slammed my shoulder against them, again and again, but I couldn’t even feel the impacts on my shoulder. I finally stopped and leaned against the doors, hot tears of frustration burning my eyes. And then a voice behind me said:
“You can’t leave, Eddie. There’s no way out for you. You’re confined here, a prisoner in Drood Hall.”
I spun round, and there, standing in the hall, calm and civilised and immaculate as always, was Walker. The man who ran London’s Nightside in every way that mattered. Dressed like someone Big in the City, smartly and expensively tailored, right down to the bowler hat and the rolled umbrella he was leaning on. A man past his best days, perhaps, but still the ultimate authority figure, with a polite smile and cold, cold eyes. I knew him immediately, and suddenly a whole bunch of my memories came flooding back. I was Eddie Drood, also known as Shaman Bond, the very secret agent. Field agent for that most ancient and powerful family, the Droods; trained from childhood to protect Humanity from all the dark forces that threatened it.
This was my home, Drood Hall. Though I’d never known it so deserted, so abandoned. I remembered a lot of things now, but not how I came to be here, or what the hell was going on. So I struck my most comfortable and assured pose and gave Walker a cold glare of my own.
“A prisoner?” I said. “In my own home? I don’t think so, Walker. And how the hell did you get in? We’re really very particular about who we allow into the Hall.”
“Ah,” said Walker. “Let’s say . . . I am here representing certain powerful and vested interests who have questions they want me to put to you. There are things they want to know about you and your family. The things you’ve done and intend to do. All the secrets you and your family have kept from the world. They want to know . . . everything. Just tell me, Eddie, and all of this will be over. You must realise there’s no point in fighting me, or those I represent. You’re a reasonable man. . . .”
“No, I’m bloody not,” I said. “I’m a Drood field agent, licensed to take names and kick supernatural arse, and being reasonable never gets you anywhere against the forces of evil. I’ve got questions of my own, Walker. Starting with, what’s happened to Drood Hall? And where the hell is everybody? Did I miss a fire drill?”
I felt the need to back up my questions with a little authority of my own, and so I subvocalised the activating Words that would call up my armour, the special golden armour that was my family’s greatest secret and most powerful weapon. But to my surprise and shock nothing happened. My hand went to my throat, and the golden torc wasn’t there. I think I cried out then, as though part of my soul had been ripped away. Droods receive their torcs shortly after birth, and are never without them. I clawed at my throat with both hands, but it stayed bare. For a moment I couldn’t breathe, and then I clamped down on my racing thoughts with an iron will. I was a trained field agent, and I was damned if I’d panic in the face of the enemy. Even if I had never felt so helpless in my life, so vulnerable, so . . . unmanned.
For the first time I knew how the rest of my family had felt when I took their torcs away.
I glared at Walker. “How dare you? How dare you steal my torc? And what’s happened to my family? What have you done with them?”
Walker smiled calmly back at me. “I’m here to ask questions, Eddie, not answer them. My current lords and masters require your obedience. Tell me your secrets, Eddie. Every last one of them. And then this nightmare can end.”
I stood my ground and considered him thoughtfully. Losing my temper with Walker would get me nowhere. You can’t run a spiritual cesspool like the Nightside with a reasonable manner and good intent. Walker believed in the iron fist in the iron glove, and had always been a very dangerous man. Certainly I couldn’t hope to intimidate him without my armour. But the day I couldn’t think rings round a soulless functionary like Walker, I’d retire from the field and raise bees. According to the media there’s a shortage these days. . . . I gave Walker my best cocky, crafty grin, the one that says,
I know something you don’t know. . . .
“Haven’t seen you since that nasty business with the independent agent,” I said. “So, still keeping the lid on the Nightside, are you? Running back and forth trying to make all those gods and monsters play nicely together?” And then I stopped, and frowned, and looked closely at Walker. “Didn’t someone tell me . . . you’d been killed?”
Walker shrugged. “Comes to us all, in the end. No one gets out of life alive. All that matters here and now is that I serve new masters; and they want information from you. Past cases, victories old and new, everything there is to know about the notorious Drood family.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’ll be the day. So, new lords and masters, is it? And who might they be, exactly?”
“You don’t need to know,” said Walker. “It doesn’t matter; we all have to serve someone, in the end. It’s all right for you to talk to me, Eddie. The secrets we hold in life aren’t important anymore, once we’re dead.”
I stared at him. “Someone really did kill you? I didn’t believe anyone could take down the legendary Walker.”
“I got old,” said Walker, “and perhaps a little careless with someone I trusted. Still, he’ll make a good replacement.”
“And . . . I’m dead?”
“Of course. Don’t you remember the disguised Immortal stabbing you? No? Well, I’m sure it’ll come back to you. You’re probably still in shock.”
“I am not dead! I’m breathing; I can feel my heart pounding. . . . I can’t be dead!”
“You must be,” said Walker. “Or you wouldn’t have come here among dead people.”
A sudden shudder went through me, and I looked quickly about the entrance hall, splashed with deep shadows and blue moonlight.
“There are dead people here?”
“Oh, yes,” said Walker. “Old enemies and older friends: some you may remember, some not. The past is full of strangers with familiar faces. People whose lives you touched in passing, for good or bad. The lives you saved and the lives you ended. And all of them want what I want. Answers. Secrets. Information. You must tell me what I need to know, Eddie. Tell me.”
“I’m damned if I’ll tell you anything!”
“You’ll be damned if you don’t,” Walker said calmly.
I looked past him suddenly, as I glimpsed a familiar face. Standing quietly in the blue moonlight as though he wasn’t sure he ought to be there, a tall, thin figure stared sadly back at me. Wrapped in a long grey coat, with a thick scarf wrapped round his neck to keep out the cold, Coffin Jobe nodded sorrowfully in my direction. Jobe was a necroleptic; he kept falling down dead and then getting over it. We knew each other, but I wouldn’t call us friends. And he certainly had no business in Drood Hall.
He approached me in a reluctant sideways sort of way, and came to a halt beside Walker, who moved away to one side, as though afraid he might catch something. Lot of people felt that way about Coffin Jobe. I always thought it was the coat; it looked like it could start a new plague all on its own.
“Hello, Jobe,” I said. “Is this where you go to when you’re being dead?”
“I don’t know,” said Jobe. “I never remember where I’ve been once I’m alive again. There are rules, apparently. But I don’t think I’ve ever been here before. In fact, I’m getting the distinct feeling I shouldn’t be here. Of course, I get that feeling in a lot of places when I’m being alive. . . .” He looked at me accusingly. “I liked you better when you were being Shaman Bond. I always knew where I was with Shaman. Just another face on the scene, another chancer, like me. Not important at all. But it turned out you were a Drood all along. Laughing at us from behind your Shaman Bond mask.”
“No,” I said. “That’s not how it was, Jobe. . . .”
But he was already gone, disappeared in a moment, back in the land of the living again.
A door opened to one side, and out of his private office stepped the Drood family’s Sarjeant-at-Arms. The previous Sarjeant, who’d died so very bravely on the Damnation Way, buying the rest of us time to escape. Big and muscular and brutal, exactly as I remembered him, with half his face still a mass of scars from where my girlfriend, Molly Metcalf, wished a plague of rats on him. He’d deserved worse. He stood beside Walker and looked at me coldly, his gaze as inflexible and judgemental as always.
“You were a thug and a bully when you were alive, Sarjeant,” I said. “And it would appear death hasn’t mellowed you.”
“You never did understand duty, Edwin,” said the Sarjeant. “You should never have been allowed to run the family. You took away our torcs. You made us weak.”
“The family had become corrupt,” I said. “Drifted too far from who and what we were supposed to be. I did what I had to do to save the family from itself.”
“By destroying its Heart.”
“The Heart was rotten. It lied to us. I was the only one left who cared about what the family was supposed to stand for. What did you ever care about, except disciplining those weaker than yourself?”
“You never understood duty,” said the Sarjeant-at-Arms. “The family has to be strong to do the things it has to do. I tried to make you strong by beating the weakness and rebellion out of you.”
“Weakness?” I said. “You mean things like compassion, and honour, and doing the right thing?”
“Yes,” said the Sarjeant. “Everything the family does is right, because we’re Droods. Nothing else matters.”
“We’re supposed to protect Humanity, not rule them!”
“Sheep need shepherds,” said the Sarjeant. “And a little culling now and then, to improve the stock.”
I strode right up to him and punched him in the face. But my hand passed straight through him, as though he were only a vision or a ghost. I snatched my hand back, and the Sarjeant looked at me almost sadly.
“Good punch, Edwin. Just like I taught you. But that won’t help you here. You can’t fight us. You can’t stop us. Tell us what we want to know. Tell us all your secrets. It’s the only way you’ll ever be free of this place.”
“You’re not the Sarjeant-at-Arms,” I said. “He’d die before he betrayed a single Drood secret to an outsider.”
“You can’t escape us,” said Walker.
“Yeah?” I said. “Kiss my arse.”
I sprinted past him, up the stairway and onto the next floor. Only the next floor wasn’t there; instead I stumbled to a halt inside the War Room, the nerve centre of the family, where all the really important decisions are made: looking after the hundreds of field agents out in the world, stamping out supernatural brush fires and slapping down the bad guys. Brown-trousering the ungodly, as my uncle James liked to put it. The War Room was usually packed with people at their work, full of sound and fury; but now it was deserted, silent. All the workstations were empty, the computer monitors and the scrying balls left unattended. All the lights were out on the great world map, and all of the clock faces, showing the time in every country in the world, were blank, without hands. Time had stopped here, too.
The work surfaces were layered with frost, and the communication systems were thickly coated with ice. (Part of me wondered where the blue moonlight was coming from to illuminate the War Room, but I’d made a conscious decision to worry only about those things that mattered immediately.) I wrote my name with my fingertip on the frost covering one monitor screen, but I couldn’t feel the cold of the ice. I looked up sharply, as one by one the monitor screens on the walls that should have shown trouble spots across the world turned themselves on, and vaguely familiar faces appeared on the screens, looking down at me, watching me with cold, angry, judgemental eyes. When I looked at any face directly it vanished, reappearing when I looked somewhere else. I was surrounded by a sea of faces, grim and condemning, but none of them could face me directly. I looked quickly back and forth, but all I could do was catch glimpses of my accusers out of the corners of my eyes. Glimpses of cold, scowling faces watching me with bad intent.
I almost jumped out of my skin when I suddenly realised there was someone in the War Room with me. I spun round, putting my back against the nearest workstation, and there facing me was the Blue Fairy. Half elf, thief, traitor . . . sometimes a friend, and sometimes not. That’s often how it is, out in the field. He looked very smart, almost fashionable, in his own ratty way; but his face was ravaged by time and far too much good living. He looked at me and shook his head sadly.