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“Typical Drood arrogance!” said Honey. “You never thought to mention this before, because . . . ?”
“I thought you knew,” I said. “You’re CIA. You know everything.”
“Don’t hit him,” Walker said to Honey. “You’d only hurt your hand. Wait till he’s armoured down; then hit him.”
“My turn to say, Hold everything,” I said. “I See something.”
Focused through my golden mask, my Sight forced its way through the mass of information to show me ghost images of the final voyage of the USS Eldridge. The long ship came out of the docks on a gray afternoon in 1943, not knowing it was sailing out of history and into legend. The Eldridge was travelling severely low in the water, as though carrying far more weight than it was designed for. Every square inch of the open decks was covered with bulky equipment trailing wires and cables all fussed over by uniformed sailors dashing frantically back and forth. Tall spiky ante
Up till then, it was just a weirder than usual scientific experiment, but that all changed abruptly with the arrival of the green fog. It appeared out of nowhere: no warning, no clue, just thick green mists boiling up around the ship and enveloping it from stem to stern. A green fog thick with otherworldly magic, merging with and then suffusing the Eldridge’s energy field. Magic and science combining, producing an effect neither could achieve on their own.
I could hear the sailors screaming faintly, all the way back in 1943. The green fog rose up, swallowing the ship, and then both fog and ship were gone in a moment, and nothing at all remained. No invisible ship, no depression in the water. Just . . . gone. Snatched away. The other ships sent out to observe the effects of the experiment sailed back and forth across the empty waters, to no avail. Back on shore, scientists and navy brass shouted hysterically at each other.
And then the fog returned, thick and pulsating, glowing with its own sick bottle green light. The colour and the texture of the fog was subtly different now; it looked . . . rotten, corrupt, poisonous. The Eldridge burst out of the green mists, as though forcing its way out, and headed jerkily for the shore. The green mists faded away almost reluctantly, revealing a ship that had been to war. All the ante
Blood everywhere.
I concentrated, focusing my Sight still further, closing in on the ghost image of the ship to get a better look at what had happened. Because I had a horrid feeling I knew where the Eldridge had been, and who and what had done this to her and her crew. And it had nothing at all to do with invisibility or teleportation.
The green fog had been the first clue, and the unearthly lights that burned within it. I had Seen the colours of magic, interfering and then combining with the ship’s science, heard the great sound of a door opening between dimensions. The Eldridge’s brand-new machines had inadvertently opened a portal to outside, and something had reached into our world and taken the ship and its crew as casually as a hand removes a goldfish from its bowl.
Up close, it was clear the Eldridge had fought a major battle. Hours or even days had passed for the ship in those few moments it had been away. Solid steel bulkheads had split like paper, compartments were crushed, and the crew . . . Torn and broken, crushed, ripped apart, the pieces scattered over the blood-soaked deck. And yes, some caught up in the misfiring energies of teleportation: merged horribly with steel walls and doors, trapped in bulkheads, rematerialised inside metal, flesh fading seamlessly into steel. Screaming for help that would never come. This crew had fought one hell of a battle, and only some of them had come home to tell of it.
I shut down my Sight, put away my armour, and looked at the others. “Bad news, people. I’m pretty sure I know what happened to the Eldridge back in 1943, and it has nothing at all to do with Project Rainbow or any other of the myths and stories of the Philadelphia Experiment. I don’t know what all that technology they put on board was supposed to do, but something about it interfered with a soft spot, a weak place in reality, and opened up a long-dormant portal to another place. Somewhere . . . outside our reality. And something in that other place reached out and dragged the Eldridge through the gateway.
“Something bad happened in that other place, and the Eldridge had to fight her way out. She got home again, but her crew paid a terrible price. Hundreds dead, and worse than dead. No wonder the navy hushed all this up. No wonder they never experimented with that equipment again. They couldn’t risk opening the portal again. Something might come through, from the other side.”
The others looked at me for a long moment. They all wanted to ask questions, but something in my face and in my voice stopped them. In the end, it was the old soldier Walker who nerved himself to ask the obvious question.
“Do you know where the Eldridge went?” he said. “Do you know who took them?”
“Yes,” I said. “They went to the Land Beneath the Hill. To the Sundered Lands. The Faerie Kingdoms. To the place the elves went, when they walked sideways from the sun and left this world behind them. The elves did this.”
Honey pursed her mouth as though she wanted to spit. “I’m supposed to tell my superiors at Langley that the Eldridge was abducted by fairies?”
“I’ve never known what the big deal was with elves,” said Peter. “Elves aren’t scary. Pointy-eared losers in period costumes, playing stupid jokes on mere mortals . . . Elves aren’t hard. Wouldn’t be even if they wore black leather and drank cider. I mean, look at the Blue Fairy.”
“Blue was only half-elf,” I said. “And he could still have taken you with one hand on the best day you ever had.”
“Oh, come on . . .”
I glared at him till he stopped talking. “The only ones you ever see in this world are the broken-spirited ones. The ones who stayed behind or got left behind because they weren’t good enough. The beachcombers of Faerie, wasting their remaining energies in screwing over humans, because that’s all they’ve got. The real thing . . . is so much more. Monsters . . . Inhuman, soulless, immortal, or at least so long-lived it makes no difference. They breathe magic and sweat sorcery. They can bend the rules of reality just by thinking about it.
“We stole this world from them. Not by defeating them or bettering them but by outbreeding them. Do you wonder they still hate us, after all this time? In the Faerie Kingdoms, they are powerful and potent. They can do things we can’t even dream of, with magics and technologies beyond our comprehension. They were here first, and they still dream of returning and delivering a terrible revenge upon us. And we’re going to have to go there, to the Elven Lands, to the Unseeli Court, to get the truth about what happened to the Eldridge and her crew.”
“I don’t think I want to know that badly,” said Walker. “I’ve had . . . experience with elves, in the Nightside. The real thing. They’re always bad news.”
“Is it true they don’t have souls?” said Honey. “And that’s why they’re immortal?”