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“But there have always been more Droods than are officially acknowledged; field agents and . . . the like. The Matriarch called them in, all the Droods who still held out against the traitor’s will. She bound them into a Drood mass mind, hundreds of torcs working together against Gerard’s stolen torcs. And in the end, even that wasn’t enough to defeat him. All that power, and all they could do was put him to sleep, bind him tight, and bury him deep.
“Gerard Drood. Grendel Rex. The Unforgiven God.”
“I’ve heard of him!” said Peter. “He’s buried under Silbury Hill, in the southwest of England!”
“Actually, no,” I said. “We let that rumour get out as a distraction. Silbury Hill is a burial mound from Celtic times with so many legends wrapped around it that one more slipped in easily enough. No; we brought him here, to what in the eleventh century was the ends of the earth. A harsh and bitter place where no one with any sense would want to live. Where nobody would disturb him.”
“If he isn’t buried under Silbury Hill,” said Walker, “who is?”
I managed a small smile. “You can’t expect me to tell you all my family’s secrets.”
“Why let the rumour out anyway?” said Peter.
“Because Grendel Rex had followers,” I said patiently. “His kind always does. They can dig their tu
Honey was frowning. “I never heard of Grendel Rex before this. And I certainly never read about any such takeover in the history books.”
“We wiped all trace of him from history,” I said. “Destroyed every account, burned every book and manuscript, shut up everyone who tried to talk. We could do that, in those days. Only myth and legend remained, and we could live with that. Scrubbing the moon clean was a bit more difficult, but we managed.
“Do you understand now? Why I’m so reluctant to do something that might reawaken the Unforgiven God and let him loose on the world again?”
“Hell,” said Peter. “If the Tunguska Event didn’t wake him . . .” He paused. “Or was it supposed to, and failed?”
“A lot of my family wondered about that,” I said. “But . . . he slept on. Our ancestors did good work. That’s what gives me the confidence to try this. But . . . if I accidentally break the bonds that hold him, he will rise up. And perhaps this time not even the efforts of all the Droods and all our allies and all our weapons would be enough to put him down again.”
“Oh, come on!” said Honey. “Get over yourself, Drood! The world’s come a long way since the eleventh century. We have access to weapons and resources unheard of in those days. I speak for the CIA: we’ve put down living gods before in our time.”
Walker looked at her, and then at me. “Eddie, what is the worst that could happen if he did rise again?”
“He’d finish what he started,” I said. “Subjugate all humanity, reshape the continents according to his whim, absorb the souls of every living thing into himself, and leave us just enough of our minds to love and worship him. Hell on earth, forever and ever and ever. That’s what could happen, if I get this wrong.”
“Well,” said Walker. “Try not to do that, then.”
The bedlam in the street outside was growing louder all the time. Screams and howls that had as much of the beast in them as anything human. They came from all sides, surrounding the building. We were under siege by the reawakened ghosts of old horrors. The room seemed colder than ever; a spiritual cold, a bleakness of the soul. The shadows were very dark, like holes that could swallow you up, or down which you could fall forever. They moved sometimes, when you weren’t looking at them directly. The room was changing all the time in small, subtle ways. Growing larger or smaller or deeper, while the corners seemed to have too many angles.
I could feel my breathing coming fast and hard. I could feel my pulse racing and a vein throbbing almost painfully in my temple. I’ve been scared before; being a Drood doesn’t make you immune to pain or death or failure . . . but this was different. A different kind of fear: primal, almost pure. We were surrounded by nightmares crossed over into the waking world and closing in. Despite myself I remembered ru
Anything can happen in dreams; in bad dreams. The dead can walk again and say unforgivable things. Physical shapes lose their integrity, become uncertain, their edges loose and slippery, no longer tied down to shapes you can cope with. I could feel a whimper building in the back of my throat. Honey had a hand at her mouth, gnawing on a knuckle. Walker had his back against a wall, lashing his umbrella back and forth before him like a sword. Peter’s bulging eyes were darting this way and that, anticipating the coming of something awful that always seemed to be coming from somewhere else.
Soon we’d start to see each other as nightmares. Maybe even attack each other, because you couldn’t trust anything or anyone in a dream. Shadows were rising up everywhere, taking on u
Heavy hands slammed against the closed laboratory door. It shook in its frame, the wood bulging u
That’s the real horror of nightmares.
Lethal Harmony of Kathmandu and the Blue Fairy walked through the closed door as though it wasn’t there. I backed away. They looked at me accusingly, heads lolling limply on their broken necks. Honey saw them too. She opened fire with her shimmering crystal weapon. The energy blast shot right through the figures and blew up the door behind them. And then the weapon wilted and twisted in Honey’s hands, curling and coiling slowly and deliberately like a snake. Honey threw it away from her in horror.
Katt and Blue turned into my mother and my father and advanced slowly on me. They didn’t look like zombies, or the living dead, or two people who’d been in their graves for most of my life. They looked just the way they always did, when I thought of them: the way they looked in the last photograph taken, before they went off on the mission that killed them. Except they weren’t smiling now. I backed away, and they came after me. They didn’t say anything. They didn’t have to. They looked accusing, disappointed, damning.
“No!” I yelled so loudly it hurt my throat. “My parents wouldn’t think that of me! They know better! They wouldn’t do this! You’re not them! ”
And in the face of my certainty, they faded softly and silently away.
Honey grabbed my golden arm with a shaking hand. “How did you do that?” she said shrilly.
“I have worse things than that on my conscience,” I said.
“Then do something!” shouted Walker. “Before the worse things show up!”
Peter was spi