“Still heading for the survivors,” said Molly.
“How should I know?” I said.
“I don’t think
before
means what it used to.”
“I’m sure we’ve been this way before.”
“Where are we going?”
“Is any of this making sense to you?”
“Are we nearly there yet?”
“I think time is out of joint.”
“What?” said Molly.
“What?” I said.
After that, Molly dropped down so that she drifted along only a few inches above the uncertain ground, and I held her hand firmly in mine. I could feel it even through my armour. With our hands held tight together, we couldn’t be separated.
Buildings seemed to crawl and seep and run away like slow liquids, surging out across the street like plastic tides. I fought my way through them, tearing horrid sticky substances apart with my armoured hands. Molly followed after me, one of her hands resting on my golden shoulder, until I had a hand free for her to take hold of again. Several buildings all melted away in a moment and surged along the street towards us like a creeping tidal wave, with bits of brick and broken window and shattered doors still protruding. I ran straight at the wave, golden fists clenched. I wouldn’t be slowed and I wouldn’t be stopped, not while people here still needed my help. Molly blasted the creeping wall with lightning bolts from her outstretched fingertips, and the tidal wave soaked them up. I hit the wave hard, smashing my way through by brute strength. The wave tried to cling to my armour, but couldn’t get a hold. I burst out the other side and kept going, while Molly rose majestically over the wave and then dropped gracefully down to join me again.
We both felt safer, saner, more real . . . when we could feel each other’s hand.
I had no idea how long we’d been in the town. Hours, days, years . . . It was like one of those dreams that seem to go on forever, one thing after another, until you know you’re dreaming and struggle to wake up, and can’t.
Sometimes the houses on either side of the road changed into things. Living things. Molly and I stuck to the middle of the road to avoid them. Brick and stone became plant and fungus, windows were eyes, and doors swung slowly open to reveal sweaty organic passageways, pulsing throats lined with teeth like rotating knives. Some of the changed houses roared like dinosaurs, or howled like souls newly damned to Hell. Some slumped together, becoming bigger, greater creatures, with alien shapes and impossible angles that hurt to look at with merely human eyes. They didn’t bother with Molly or me. They had their own unknowable concerns.
Bright lights went streaking up and down the street like living comets, shooting this way and that and bouncing off buildings, laughing shrilly. Low voices boomed deep under the ground, saying terrible things. The sky was red and purple, like clotting blood, and the sun was a dark cinder giving off unnatural light. Awful shapes came and went, monstrous things, big and small. Some of them walked through the shifting world as though only they were real and everything else mere phantoms. Molly and I gave them plenty of room. When the Satanist conspiracy broke reality in this place, they blasted doors open that had been closed for millennia. Things from Outside had found a way in; things that would still have to be tracked down and dealt with even after this particular mess had been cleaned up. The family would have to keep an eye on this area for centuries to come.
In one place we encountered things like mutated children, with insect eyes and bulging foreheads, scrabbling through the streets in packs. Naked, vicious, feral. I studied them carefully through my mask to be sure they weren’t in any way human and never had been. Molly wasn’t fooled for a moment. She threw fireballs at them, and they scuttled away, spitting and snarling at us. After them came horrid shapes made up of shimmering phosphorescence, as though burned onto the surface of the world. Passing through walls like smoke, leaving dark stains behind them on the brickwork. A great clump of bottle green maggots crusted around a huge alien eye sailed silently down one street, watching everything with a terrible malevolent joy. Great balloon shapes of rotting leather stalked the streets on long, spindly legs like stilts, slamming into one another endlessly, like stags in rut, trampling the fallen underfoot. And a storm wind full of razor blades swept down the street with vicious speed, the razors clattering harmlessly against my armour, and unable to pierce Molly’s shields.
I was starting to take such things for granted. You can’t be shocked and horrified and appalled all the time. It wears you out. So you become numb to the atrocities, untouched by the horror shows. Maybe that’s how you know when you’re going mad: when such sights no longer bother you. Madness is when all your nightmares have come true and you just don’t care anymore. I clung to Molly’s hand, and she held on to mine. As long as we still had each other and wouldn’t give up . . . the town hadn’t won.
Sometimes it seemed to me that I was someone else, a whole different person with a new purpose. And sometimes it seemed to me that Molly was someone else, someone I’d always known. There were times when we looked at each other and didn’t recognise the person looking back. Sometimes I walked alone, had come in alone, had always been alone in this awful place. And sometimes it seemed to Molly and to me that there was someone else with us. That there were three of us walking down the street together. He walked between us, his face always turned away, and I was afraid that if ever that face turned to look at me, I would see someone or something too horrible to bear.
But that didn’t last.
Whatever happened, the armour kept pulling me back to reality. The one truly solid thing in this place, it would not change and would not allow me to be changed. And Molly . . . was probably too stubborn to accept any reality other than her own for long. I don’t know if she experienced all the things I did. I didn’t ask.
Living cobwebs fell on us from above, crawling all over my armour, trying to hold me down and eat their way in. I pulled them off me in handfuls, crushing them in my hands and throwing them down to trample underfoot. My sanity was starting to get its second wind. Though I had to wonder what state the town’s survivors would be in when we finally got to them. The human mind was never meant to endure under conditions like these. The shattered reality of Little Stoke didn’t even have dream logic to hold it together. Being in the town now was like suffering an endless series of hammer blows to the mind. But Molly had said they were safe, protected for the moment, and I trusted Molly.
When there was nothing else left in the world to depend on, I would still trust my Molly.
Finally, despite everything the broken world could do to stop us, we came at last to the Old Market Hall. It was set right in the middle of the town, I was told afterwards, though such spatial references had become meaningless in Little Stoke. Molly and I had no trouble spotting the old hall; it was the only building that still looked like an ordinary, everyday building. It stood tall and proud, firm in all its details, inside a circle of normality: a sharply defined circle of normal conditions, surrounded by madness. The moment Molly and I crossed that boundary, it was as though a great spiritual weight had been lifted off us. I stopped and sighed heavily, stretching as luxuriously as any cat, enveloped in a palpable sense of pure relief. Molly laughed out loud and hugged me tightly. I hadn’t realised how much of a struggle it had been, how much strength it had taken to keep going and stay sane, until I didn’t have to fight any longer. My mind cleared in a moment, as though someone had thrown a bucket of ice-cold water in my mental face.
“I think this is the place,” said Molly.
“I think you’re right,” I said.
We both looked back the way we’d come, but the way we’d come wasn’t there anymore. The town had devolved into utter chaos, with nothing holding sure or certain even for a moment. We both shuddered at the thought of how long we’d spent fighting our way through madness. And then I drew a deep breath, and so did she, and we straightened our backs and held up our heads and marched right up to the Old Market Hall. The front door was wonderfully, reassuringly ordinary. I knocked politely, and we waited.
“There are quite definitely people in there,” Molly said quietly. “I can hear them. They sound like . . . people. That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”
“It’s a bloody miracle in this place,” I said. I knocked again, a little louder. “Hello? People inside? We are people, too. We’re here to help.”
I could hear raised voices inside the old building, but the door remained closed. I was pretty sure I could kick it in if I had to, but that wouldn’t make the kind of first impression I was hoping for. So I moved away from the door and peered in through a window.
“A face! A golden face!”
“Don’t let it in! Monsters!”
“Don’t be silly; monsters wouldn’t bother to knock, would they?”
“He’s got a point.”
“Oh, you always agree with him! We can’t risk opening the door. We can’t risk letting the outside in!”
“We can’t hide in here forever, either!”
There was a long pause, and then I heard the sounds of heavy bolts being drawn back, and a lock turning. I moved back to stand beside Molly, and the moment the door opened we hurried forward into the old hall. The door immediately slammed shut behind us, and people busied themselves with the bolts again. The inside of the old building looked perfectly normal. The floor was solid wood that hadn’t had a decent waxing in quite a while; the walls were reassuringly straight and upright; and the high ceiling stayed where it was supposed to be. A perfectly ordinary, very human last resort. Packed full of people staring at Molly and me with wide eyes. They huddled together, looking very uncertain, as though they half expected Molly and me to turn into monsters at any moment. A lot of them didn’t look too happy at the sight of me in my armour. They knew nothing of Droods. Since the hall seemed such an ordinary place, I armoured down so everyone could see I was human. Molly dropped her force shield and beamed around her.
“The worst is over now,” she said to the crowd of survivors. “We’re here to get you out of this mess.”
They all cried out in relief or simple joy. Many hugged one another. Several came forward to shake me by the hand, smiling widely as my hand remained an ordinary, everyday hand. But a lot of them still looked shocked, hanging on by only their mental fingernails, not quite daring to believe the nightmare could finally be over. A spokesman came forward, a bluff, hearty type in a battered tweed suit. He smiled at Molly and me and shook our hands, the beginnings of hope in his eyes.
“I’m Geoffrey Earl, local vicar. Good to see you! Welcome to the Old Market Hall. You really are very welcome, oh, yes! We are the last survivors of . . . whatever it is that’s happened here.”
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Eddie Drood; this is Molly Metcalf; we’re the rescue party.”
“I wasn’t sure there’d be one,” said the vicar. “Do you know what’s happened here?”
“Tell us the truth! Are we in Hell?” said a large, red-faced woman who’d pushed her way to the front of the crowd. She looked like she’d been crying a lot.
“No,” Molly said immediately. “You’re all still in the land of the living. So to speak. What you see out there is . . . local conditions. Outside the town, everything is still as it should be. The world goes on as it always has. We were rather hoping you could tell us what happened here.”
The vicar shook his head. “It was just another day; we were in here planning the next harvest Sunday, and then . . . we heard this great sound outside, and when we went to the windows to look, we found the world had gone mad.”
“What kind of sound?” I said.
“A great scream,” said the vicar. “As though something had wounded the world. A few of us went outside to see what was going on; we saw what happened to them through the windows. None of us dared leave after that. We stuck close together. Praying. Waiting to be rescued. Hoping to be rescued . . . We were beginning to think we’d been forgotten. Can you tell us anything about what’s happened?”
“We believe this town was made the target of some appalling new weapon,” I said carefully. “Terrorists. We’re still working on the details. Do you have any idea why you survived, when so many didn’t? Why this building is . . . protected?”
“We believe it to be God’s will,” the vicar said steadily. “We all have faith in Him.”
Molly looked like she was about to say something unwise, so I quickly cut in. “As good an answer as any, I suppose.”
“Did you encounter any other . . . survivors, on your way here?” said the vicar, trying not to sound too hopeful.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re all that’s left.”
“Dear God,” said the red-faced woman. “Everyone’s gone? Everyone?”
“Hush, Margaret,” said the vicar. “Are you sure, Mr. Drood? There couldn’t be another refuge like this somewhere else?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I looked around the hall. “There’s some kind of protection operating here. . . .”
“And a pretty damned powerful one, at that,” said Molly.
“Don’t use such language here!” said Margaret. Molly looked at her, and Margaret faded back into the crowd. Molly looked slowly round the hall, and people gave way before her. She stopped abruptly, bent over and stared hard at the floor.
“Got it!” she said. “I can See it! There’s an object of power, really old and incredibly powerful, laid down under the floorboards. Eddie, we need to take a close look at it.”
“I really don’t think we should disturb it,” the vicar said quickly. “We are protected here; we can all feel it.”
“It’s got to be done,” I said. “We need to know what’s kept the madness out of here, in case this happens somewhere else.”
“Of course,” said the vicar. “I’m sorry. We’re all a bit . . . shellshocked. Do what you have to.”