I dropped back into my head, shut down my Sight, and sent my armour back into my torc. The cold oppressive gloom of the city weighed down on me again. It was actually harder to think clearly . . . I told the others what I’d seen and pointed out the direction, and we all set off immediately, glad to leave the street of blood behind us.
The atmosphere of the city seemed to change subtly as we closed in on its secret heart. There were shadows everywhere I looked, dark and deep and threatening. The light seemed to be fading, even though the painfully bright sun was still directly overhead. The streets became narrower, closing in on us, and the buildings all leaned inwards, as though the brick and stone walls might bulge forward and engulf us at any moment. There was something in this city that didn’t want to be found. I increased the pace, striding down the increasingly narrow streets with a confidence I wasn’t sure I felt. I’ve always been happiest with menaces I could hit. The sooner we got to the heart of this mess and did something about it, the better.
“What’s the hurry?” Peter complained. “Whatever happened here, it’s over and we missed it.”
“No,” I said. “It isn’t over. It’s still happening. The beast is waiting for us to come to it. I think it wants to show us things.”
“Beast?” said Honey. “No one said anything to me about a beast.”
“Oh,” I said, “there’s always a beast. Come along, Peter. Don’t lag behind. That’s a good way to get picked off. Besides, the exercise will do you good.”
“Oh, God,” said Peter. “Someone shoot me now and put me out of my misery.”
“Don’t tempt me,” said Honey and Walker, pretty much in unison.
I looked at Honey, and she caught my eye and inclined her head slightly. I fell back to walk beside her, letting Walker take the lead. Peter just trudged along, head down. Honey started talking without looking at me directly.
“I always knew there were places like this. Hidden places, secret cities, where the Soviets did terrible, unspeakable things to their own people, in the name of patriotism and the all-powerful State. It never occurred to me, until now, to wonder if there might have been secret cities in other countries. If everyone had them, including America. I never even heard a whisper that there were, but we all did terrible things in the Cold War, in the name of security. Not just my people, the Company; there was a whole alphabet soup of secret departments in those days. Very covert, very specialised agencies, doing necessary, unspeakable things that were always strictly need-to-know. Officially they were all shut down after we won the Cold War. But in these days of terrorist atrocities and rogue nations . . . who’s to say someone hasn’t set up an X37 in America? What monsters might we be producing right now just so we can feel a little bit safer?
“Eddie, if there were such places, cities like this, on American soil . . . You’d know, wouldn’t you? You’d tell me, if there were?”
“I don’t know,” I said carefully. “Not my territory. For years I was just a field agent based in London. Hardly ever left the city, never even went abroad till the Hungry Gods War. Field agents are only ever told what they need to know, when they need to know it. It’s your country, Honey. What do you think?”
“I don’t know, Eddie. It seems to me . . . the more I learn from solving these mysteries, the less sure I am of anything.”
She leaned in against me, and I put an arm around her. Our heavy furs rather muffled the gesture, but she cuddled up against me anyway. For warmth, or comfort. Or perhaps something else entirely. We were both professionals, after all.
We came at last to the building blasting psychic fire into the heavens. The street seemed very dark, the shadows deep and furtive. We stood close together, alert and ready for a covert attack that never quite seemed to materialise. From the outside, the building we’d come so far to find didn’t look very different from all the others in the street. Stark and brutal, smoke-blackened and bullet-holed, but the front door was still firmly in place, and the windows were unbroken. There were no signs anywhere to tell us what went on inside.
Presumably because either you already knew, or you had no business asking.
“Are you sure this is it?” said Honey. At some point in the journey she’d pushed herself away from me and made a point of walking alone. Whatever moment of humanity or weakness or affection had moved her, she was over it now.
“Something bad happened here,” said Walker. “I can feel it so strongly I can almost smell it. What were they doing in this place?”
“Beats me,” I said. “But it left a hell of a strong impression on its surroundings. Bad things linger; really bad things sink in. And they can take a hell of a lot of shifting.”
I moved forward for a closer look at the ordinary, everyday door that was the only entrance to the building. A big block of badly stained wood with a surprisingly complicated electronic lock.
“Primitive stuff,” sniffed Honey. “I can crack that, easy.”
I armoured up and kicked the door in. Honey glared at me as I armoured down.
“Will you stop doing that, Eddie! The rest of us do like to contribute something now and again!”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Men like kicking things in,” Peter explained to her. “It’s a guy thing.”
The lobby was a mess, with overturned furniture and scattered papers everywhere, none of them in any condition to be deciphered. There were no signs on the wall, no arrows pointing out various departments. Again, either you worked here and knew where your place was, or it was none of your business. The first surprise was that the building’s heating system was working, and the place was warm enough for us to undo our coats. The second surprise came when the lights snapped on without anyone even touching a switch. The lobby immediately looked a lot less gloomy and threatening.
“First time I’ve felt human since I arrived in this godforsaken wilderness,” said Peter. “This ugly pile must have its own generators in the basement. Though I’m surprised the activation sensors are still working after all these years.”
“Russians built things to last,” Walker murmured, peering about him in an absentminded sort of way. “I wonder what else has survived here . . .”
I armoured up and looked around through my golden mask. The others backed away a little.
“Eddie?” Honey said carefully. “What are you doing?”
“Checking for things that might have survived,” I said. “Radiation, hot spots, chemical or bacterial spills . . . But I don’t see anything. Until I use my Sight, and then . . . The whole building’s a repository of past events: ghosts and echoes and memories. Just memories, though; no living presence I can detect. Just a lot of bad feelings. Pain and horror and death. And something very like despair.”
I armoured down. The others made a point of being very interested in something else to show they weren’t impressed by my transformation anymore.
“The generators worry me,” Honey said abruptly. “They shouldn’t still be working after being down for so many years. Soviet technology, for the most part, was never that efficient or reliable. If the city’s designers spent serious money on top-of-the-line machinery . . . what the scientists were doing here must have been really important.”
“The psychic energy source is very definitely upstairs,” I said. “It’s so strong it’s blasting out through the roof. So let’s pop upstairs, people, and see if we can scare up a few ghosts.”
“I never know when he’s joking,” said Peter.
We found the laboratory on the top floor easily enough by following the heaviest electrical cables along the walls. Extra cables had clearly been added later, and somewhat clumsily too, as though the work had been done in a hurry. The whole place seemed strangely clean. No dust, no cobwebs, nothing to mark the passing of so many years’ neglect.
The laboratory itself turned out to be just a great open room cut in two by a huge one-way mirror so someone could observe the scientists. Without being seen themselves. And there you had Soviet Cold War thinking in a nutshell. They even spied on each other. We stayed in the observation room, looking through the one-way glass. I had a really bad feeling about the other room, and others were so jittery by now, they were quite happy to accept that.
The laboratory was packed with bulky, old-fashioned computer equipment, powerful enough in a brutal sort of way. Old and new models were crowded together and sometimes even connected to each other. A single skylight let in a dim glow from outside. And directly under this natural spotlight was set something very like a dentist’s chair: all cold steel and black leather, complete with heavy arm and leg restraints. The chair was bolted to the floor. It didn’t look like the kind of chair anyone would sit down in by choice.
The room we were in was mostly full of recording equipment. Old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorders, bulky videotape recorders, and a single large television set to play them back on. It all looked very neat and organised, as though nothing had been disturbed for years. And again, not a speck of dust anywhere. Someone, or something, was preserving this room just as it had been, before . . . whatever had happened here, happened. Honey bent over a pile of videotapes, her lips moving slowly as she worked her way through the handwritten Cyrillic labels.
“Anything?” I said, trying hard to sound calm and casual.
“Mostly just dates and names. Nothing to indicate what they were up to.”
“That chair does not inspire confidence,” said Peter. “What did they do in that room . . . that they needed bulletproof one-way glass to protect the observers from what they were observing?”
We all looked at him. “How did you know that was bulletproof glass, Peter?” said Walker.
“I just . . . felt it,” Peter said, frowning. “Ever since I came in here, it’s been like . . . remembering someone else’s memories. Creepy . . .”
In the end, we just took a video from the pile at random and stuck it in the nearest machine. The old television set took a while to warm up, and when the picture finally arrived it was only black-and-white. The recording showed exactly what the scientists had been doing in the other room. Experimenting on unwilling human subjects, and testing them to destruction. We watched as the subjects yelled and screamed and shouted obscenities, straining desperately against the heavy restraining straps while blank-faced men and women in grubby lab coats stuck them with needles, or exposed them to radiation, or just cut them open, to see what was happening inside.
It was bad enough in black-and-white. In colour, it would have been unbearable.
We ran quickly through the tapes, just checking a few minutes from each. A few minutes was all we could stand. They were all pretty much the same. Cold-blooded glimpses of Hell.
One man’s head exploded, quite suddenly, blood and brains showering wetly over the attending scientists. Another man melted right out of the chair, his body losing all shape and cohesion, his flesh running through the restraining straps like thick pink mud. He screamed as long as he could, until his vocal cords fell apart and his jaw dropped away from his face. He ended up a pink frothing mess on the floor. One of the scientists stepped in it by accident, had hysterics, and had to be led away.
A middle-aged woman sat on the floor, wearing nothing but a stained oversized nappy. She had a huge bulging forehead held together with heavy black stitches and crude metal staples. She was assembling a strange machine, whose shape and function made no sense at all. When the scientists expressed displeasure at what she’d built and gestured at the chair, the woman calmly picked up a sharp piece of metal and stuck it repeatedly into her left eye, until she died.
And one man, with a Y-shaped autopsy scar still vivid on his chest and rows of steel nozzles protruding from his abdomen from implanted technology, burst all the straps holding him to the chair and killed three scientists and seven of the soldiers sent in to restrain him before one of them got close enough to shoot him repeatedly in the head.
We watched as much of it as we could stand, and then I told Honey to check the dates and find us the tape from the last experiment. The very last thing the scientists were working on before it all went wrong.
“Whatever happened here,” said Walker, “they deserved it. This isn’t a scientific laboratory; it’s a torture chamber.”
“What did they think they were doing?” said Peter. “What were they trying to achieve?”
“I think they were all quite mad,” said Honey. “If they weren’t when they started out, what they did here drove them mad.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think they had that excuse. I think . . . they just did what they were told. Perhaps because if they didn’t, they’d end up in the chair themselves.”
“We should burn this city to the ground,” said Walker. “And seed the earth with salt.”
“Play the tape,” said Peter. “The sooner we’re out of here the better.”
We stood before the television screen, standing shoulder to shoulder for mutual comfort and support. For a long time there was just static, as though an attempt had been made to wipe the tape, and then the picture cleared to show a man sitting in the chair. He was naked, the leather straps cutting deeply into his flesh. He sat stiffly upright, unable to move a muscle. He looked tired, and hard used, and severely undernourished, but there was nothing visibly unusual about him. Except for what they’d done to his head.
Two scientists, a middle-aged man and a somewhat younger woman, watched the man in the chair from a safe distance. They looked tired too, and from the way they kept glancing at the one-way mirror, I sensed they were under pressure to get results. The woman had a clipboard and a pen and ugly heavy-framed glasses. The man was smoking a cigarette in quick, nervous puffs and dictating something to the woman. He didn’t even look at the man in the chair. They had a job to do, and they were getting on with it. The man in the chair was of no importance to them except as the subject of their current experiment.