“I can feel it,” said Walker. “Like the tension in the air before a storm breaks. Like the pause before the ax falls . . .”
“Will you shut up?” said Honey. “All of you: pull yourselves together! We’re professionals; we can handle this.”
“Are you crazy?” Peter’s voice was shrill, almost hysterical, all the colour gone from his face. It was the first time I’d seen him really scared. “We have to get out of here! The city’s coming alive, and the nightmares are coming back. All the bad dreams you ever had. There are things in dreams no man can face!”
“Get ahold of yourself, Peter,” said Walker, but his voice lacked its usual authority and conviction.
“Hush,” said Honey, and something in her voice stopped us all dead. “I think . . . it’s here.”
The video recorder turned itself back on. The television screen came to life again. We all turned unwillingly to look. Grigor was back sitting in his chair, hacked apart but still alive. The two bloody messes that had been Sergei and Ludmilla were spread out on the floor before him like sacrifices to an unforgiving god. From outside the room, from the surrounding streets, came terrible sounds. Screaming and shouting and the roaring of what might have been maddened animals. Grigor turned his bloody head and looked right through the one-way mirror at us. He smiled at us, and there was little humanity in that smile, and less compassion. It was the smile of a man who had looked beyond the gates of Hell and seen what they did there; what was waiting for him.
You have to die,
he said.
You all have to die.
“Why?” I said. “We never hurt you.”
Of course he couldn’t hear me. Grigor was dead, long dead. This was just a recording of his last message to mankind.
We’re not who we think we are,
he said.
We never were. You have to die. Because no one must ever know the truth.
“What truth?” said Honey.
“Why nightmares?” said Walker. “Why kill all the people of this city in such a terrible way?”
Because we deserve it.
The tape snapped to a halt, and the television screen went dead again.
“Well,” I said, putting a lot of effort into sounding calm and casual. “That was . . . worrying. And more than a bit spooky.”
“What did he See in our DNA?” said Honey.
“Probably best we don’t know,” I said.
“Could Grigor still be alive somewhere, do you think?” said Walker. “Hiding, perhaps, transmitting these . . . images to us?”
“No,” I said. “If there was anyone else alive in this whole damned city, I’d know. Nothing’s lived here for years. Even the animals have enough sense not to come in here. I don’t think anyone could live here for long, not after what happened here. This is a city of memories. Stored memories, gone feral.”
It was getting colder and darker. The room on the other side of the one-way mirror was almost gone now, consumed by shadows. The lights in our room were dimming, as though the power was being sucked out of them. Our breath began to steam on the air, and we all buttoned up our coats again. There was a growing atmosphere of imminence, of something about to happen. The four of us moved together, and then moved away again, driven by a need to be able to look in all directions at once. From outside the building there came noises. Voices . . . almost human. First as scattered individuals, then in growing numbers, until finally it was the voice of the crowd and the mob, driven mad by horror and bloody slaughter.
The sound of an entire city maddened and murdered by its fears.
“What is that?” said Honey, clapping her hands uselessly to her ears. “What’s making that noise? There’s no one here; this city is empty! It is! There can’t be anybody out there!”
“The dead don’t always stay dead,” said Walker. He looked confused, as though someone had just hit him.
“No,” I said quickly. “There’s no one out there. Not as such.
It’s . . . the memory of nightmares. When the people here died, when the city died, when all the men and women and children trapped in this place fell victim to their own nightmares, that out-pouring of emotion and trauma completed what Grigor started. Everything they experienced was psychically imprinted into the stone and brick and cement of X37. The whole place is one gigantic stone tape. And by entering the city, we’ve started it up again.”
“So, it’s not real?” said Peter.
“Real enough,” I said. “Real enough to kill us, if we let it.”
“But where’s the energy coming from to fuel that kind of manifestation?” said Walker. “What’s powering the playback?”
“We are,” I said. “Whatever happened here is still happening and always will be. Grigor started this by drawing on the power of the human mass mind, and we’re part of the mass mind. Just by being here, we’ve reactivated the recording and powered it at the same time. X37 is a trap: Grigor’s revenge on a world that would allow such awful things to be done to him.”
“We’ve got to get out of here!” Peter was shouting now, his voice strident and ugly.
“Where can we go?” said Walker. “There’s nothing else out there! Just the woods, the cold, and certain death. So suck it in and be a man.”
“Something’s in the building with us,” said Honey. “I can hear it, coming up the stairs. It doesn’t sound . . . human.”
“We’ll all start hearing things soon,” I said. “Whatever scares us.”
“There must be something we can do!” said Peter. “You’re a Drood! Do something!”
“I think Grigor’s still here, in this building, in some form,” I said. “He’s the origin and the focus for the stone tape. We have to find what’s left of him and shut him down.”
“How?” said Walker.
“I’m open to suggestions,” I said. “I’m just jumping from one educated guess to another.”
“You’ve got the Sight,” said Honey. “And the armour. Find him for us, Eddie. Before our nightmares find us.”
“It’s not that simple,” I said.
“I just knew he was going to say that,” said Peter. “Didn’t you just know he was going to say that?”
“Shut up, Peter,” said Walker. “What’s the problem, Eddie?”
“The stone tape recorded what Grigor originally Saw,” I said carefully. “If I go looking for Grigor, I might See it too. If that should happen, kill me.”
“No problem,” said Honey.
I armoured up, and the golden strange matter flowed out and around me in a moment, insulating me from the city’s psychic assault. I hadn’t realised just how close to the edge I’d come until the armour brought me back. Everything in the city was now dedicated solely to the destruction of the human mind and soul. I took a deep breath to steady myself, and then looked out over the city through my featureless golden mask, my Sight sending my mind soaring over the broken city streets, searching for a single pattern: the last remaining traces of the man called Grigor. There were other patterns, strange and awful, surging through the streets and closing in on the building where I and my associates were hiding, but I couldn’t look at those patterns too closely. Man was not meant to stare upon the Medusa.
Something tugged at my mind, half a warning and half a summons, and I turned my Sight in that direction. Grigor looked back at me, nailed to a cross made of intertwined technology. The computer leads trailing from his head had wrapped themselves around his brow in a crown of thorns. He smiled at me, a cold and pitiless smile. His face was full of something more than just insanity, as though he had gone through madness and found something else on the other side.
Don’t fight me,
he said.
“I must,” I said.
You need to See. To know, to understand why this is necessary. Why you have to die, for your own and humanity’s sake. When you know what I know, what I was made to know, you’ll want to die.
I couldn’t tell exactly who or what I was talking with. It wasn’t just the stone tape, a recording of past events. Something of Grigor himself had been stamped into the stone and concrete of X37. I could feel his presence, the ghost in the machine. It took every bit of willpower I had to turn my head away and shut down my Sight. I didn’t dare See what Grigor had Seen. A madman in Drood armour would be more dangerous to the world than any nightmare currently running through the streets of X37. Grigor’s presence receded into the distance, still trying to latch onto me, as I fell back into my head and shut down my armour. I was breathing hard, as though I’d just run a race and come scarily close to losing. My knees buckled, and I think I would have fallen if Walker hadn’t got a chair under me. Honey leaned in close, pushing her face right into mine, holding my eyes with hers.
“What is it?” she said. “What did you see, Eddie?”
“Grigor is quite definitely dead,” I said. “But unfortunately, not entirely departed. He’s the key to all this. Stop him, and we stop the nightmares, the city, everything.”
“All right; what do we do?” said Peter.
“Only thing we can do,” I said. “Grigor’s part of the stone tape, which exists through the city. So the whole city has to be destroyed. Reduced to ashes, and less than ashes. A physical and a psychic strike, to destroy Grigor and X37 on all the levels they currently inhabit. This entire city has become spiritually corrupt, a real and present danger to the whole of humanity. Body and soul.”
“How the hell are we supposed to take out an entire city?” said Honey.
“He’s lost it,” said Peter. “He’s raving.”
“No,” said Walker. “He’s right. Destroy the city and seed the ground with salt.”
“Wonderful!” said Peter. “Anyone got an exorcist on speed dial? Preferably one with side interests in nuclear devastation?”
“Shut up, Peter,” said Walker. “You’re becoming hysterical.”
“Even if I could contact Langley, which I can’t,” said Honey, “and call in a dozen long-range bombers armed with city busters . . . Langley would never authorise it. An unprovoked attack on Russian soil? We’re talking World War Three, and
Hallelujah! The missiles are flying!
”
“If we could contact the Russian authorities and explain . . .” said Walker.
“We can’t,” said Honey. “And anyway, what makes you think they’d believe a CIA agent, a Drood, and someone from the Nightside?”
“Good point,” said Walker.
“Bombs wouldn’t be enough anyway,” I said. “Not even thermonukes. You could reduce the whole city to one big crater that glowed in the dark, and the imprinting would still remain, bound to this specific location. Genius loci. Grigor’s revenge has been stamped on space itself.”
“So what do we do?” said Honey. “Could your family help?”
“That’s . . . what I’ve been considering,” I said slowly. “A psychic strike that would wipe the area clean. But you’d need an incredible amount of power for that; enough energy to burn out any human mind or combination of minds. Even if I could call home, which I can’t, no one there could help me with this. But there is a power source nearby . . . that I might be able to draw on. More than enough to do the job. But it means disturbing what lies sleeping under the permafrost. I think . . . I can tap into his power without waking him. But if I’m wrong . . . if he wakes up . . . We could end up worse off than we are now.”
“Worse?” said Peter, waving his arms around. “The whole city’s come alive and wants to kill us horribly with our own nightmares! What could be worse?”
“It’s time for the truth, Eddie,” said Walker. “We need to know. Who, or what, did your family bury here, all those years ago?”
“One of us,” I said. “He’s family. A Drood, put to sleep like a dog that’s gone bad, buried so deep he’s already halfway to the Hell he belongs in. Bound with iron chains, wrapped in potent spells and curses, left to sleep till Judgement Day and maybe even longer. Our greatest shame, our greatest failure. The Drood who tried to eat the world.
“Our torcs and our armour make us powerful beyond anything you’ve ever imagined, but for one of us, one Gerard Drood of the eleventh century, that wasn’t enough. He explored the possibilities of the torc, studied its nature more deeply than any of us had ever done before. He . . . upgraded his torc, using certain forbidden techniques and ancient machines, and used his torc to absorb the torcs of others. Hundreds of them: men, women and children. He became . . . unspeakably powerful. An eater of souls. A living god.
“Having defeated and subjugated the family, he set out to subdue all humanity to his will and remake the world in his own image. He very nearly succeeded. Whole countries fell beneath his influence; millions of people bent the knee and bowed the head and praised his unholy name. He carved his features into the surface of the moon so that the whole world could look up and see him smiling down on them.
“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 tunnels into Silbury Hill forever and a day and never find anything.”