Simon Green: For Heaven's Eyes Only

“No,” I said. “That’s not how it was, Jobe. . . .”

But he was already gone, disappeared in a moment, back in the land of the living again.

A door opened to one side, and out of his private office stepped the Drood family’s Sarjeant-at-Arms. The previous Sarjeant, who’d died so very bravely on the Damnation Way, buying the rest of us time to escape. Big and muscular and brutal, exactly as I remembered him, with half his face still a mass of scars from where my girlfriend, Molly Metcalf, wished a plague of rats on him. He’d deserved worse. He stood beside Walker and looked at me coldly, his gaze as inflexible and judgemental as always.

“You were a thug and a bully when you were alive, Sarjeant,” I said. “And it would appear death hasn’t mellowed you.”

“You never did understand duty, Edwin,” said the Sarjeant. “You should never have been allowed to run the family. You took away our torcs. You made us weak.”

“The family had become corrupt,” I said. “Drifted too far from who and what we were supposed to be. I did what I had to do to save the family from itself.”

“By destroying its Heart.”

“The Heart was rotten. It lied to us. I was the only one left who cared about what the family was supposed to stand for. What did you ever care about, except disciplining those weaker than yourself?”

“You never understood duty,” said the Sarjeant-at-Arms. “The family has to be strong to do the things it has to do. I tried to make you strong by beating the weakness and rebellion out of you.”

“Weakness?” I said. “You mean things like compassion, and honour, and doing the right thing?”

“Yes,” said the Sarjeant. “Everything the family does is right, because we’re Droods. Nothing else matters.”

“We’re supposed to protect Humanity, not rule them!”

“Sheep need shepherds,” said the Sarjeant. “And a little culling now and then, to improve the stock.”

I strode right up to him and punched him in the face. But my hand passed straight through him, as though he were only a vision or a ghost. I snatched my hand back, and the Sarjeant looked at me almost sadly.

“Good punch, Edwin. Just like I taught you. But that won’t help you here. You can’t fight us. You can’t stop us. Tell us what we want to know. Tell us all your secrets. It’s the only way you’ll ever be free of this place.”

“You’re not the Sarjeant-at-Arms,” I said. “He’d die before he betrayed a single Drood secret to an outsider.”

“You can’t escape us,” said Walker.

“Yeah?” I said. “Kiss my arse.”

I sprinted past him, up the stairway and onto the next floor. Only the next floor wasn’t there; instead I stumbled to a halt inside the War Room, the nerve centre of the family, where all the really important decisions are made: looking after the hundreds of field agents out in the world, stamping out supernatural brush fires and slapping down the bad guys. Brown-trousering the ungodly, as my uncle James liked to put it. The War Room was usually packed with people at their work, full of sound and fury; but now it was deserted, silent. All the workstations were empty, the computer monitors and the scrying balls left unattended. All the lights were out on the great world map, and all of the clock faces, showing the time in every country in the world, were blank, without hands. Time had stopped here, too.

The work surfaces were layered with frost, and the communication systems were thickly coated with ice. (Part of me wondered where the blue moonlight was coming from to illuminate the War Room, but I’d made a conscious decision to worry only about those things that mattered immediately.) I wrote my name with my fingertip on the frost covering one monitor screen, but I couldn’t feel the cold of the ice. I looked up sharply, as one by one the monitor screens on the walls that should have shown trouble spots across the world turned themselves on, and vaguely familiar faces appeared on the screens, looking down at me, watching me with cold, angry, judgemental eyes. When I looked at any face directly it vanished, reappearing when I looked somewhere else. I was surrounded by a sea of faces, grim and condemning, but none of them could face me directly. I looked quickly back and forth, but all I could do was catch glimpses of my accusers out of the corners of my eyes. Glimpses of cold, scowling faces watching me with bad intent.

I almost jumped out of my skin when I suddenly realised there was someone in the War Room with me. I spun round, putting my back against the nearest workstation, and there facing me was the Blue Fairy. Half elf, thief, traitor . . . sometimes a friend, and sometimes not. That’s often how it is, out in the field. He looked very smart, almost fashionable, in his own ratty way; but his face was ravaged by time and far too much good living. He looked at me and shook his head sadly.

“Eddie, dear boy, what are you doing here, pursued by the dead, at the mercy of old friends and enemies? So much bitterness and unpleasantness, and all for a few secrets that probably never mattered that much, even when we were alive.” He looked about him. “Terrible place, no sense of style. Tell them what they want to know, Eddie, and then we can both get the hell out of here. I don’t like this place. Don’t like being dead, for that matter. When I first discovered what being dead was like, I cried and I cried and I cried. . . .”

“There has to be a way out of here,” I said. “Help me. I helped you. . . .”

“Did you, Eddie? Did you really? Yes, you rescued me from the depths of depression and disgrace, gave me new life and purpose . . . but did you think I’d be grateful? You should have left me as I was: a broken man, dying by inches and not giving a damn. You woke me up, gave me hope . . . just so I could die anyway a few years later in one of your stupid spy games. You should have left me as I was. It would have been kinder.”

“You always did make bad decisions, Edwin,” said another familiar voice.

And out of the deep, dark shadows of the War Room came my grandmother, Martha Drood, Matriarch of the family. She stood tall and stiff and proud before me in her neat grey twinset and pearls. Looking at me with her cold eyes and colder face. No sign of the awful wound that killed her in her own bed, soaking the whole front of her in blood. She looked me up and down and sniffed briefly. Another familiar sound. It tore at my heart. I hadn’t realised I’d missed it so much.

“You ran away from the Hall to be a field agent, and what good did that do you? All because you didn’t have the discipline to buckle down and do what you were told, like everyone else. I was grooming you to take a high position in the family, but you turned your back on us. You were always such a disappointment to me, Edwin.”

“I avenged your murder,” I said steadily. “I caught your killer, the Immortal disguised as your husband, Alistair. I killed him for you, Grandmother.”

“I’m still dead,” she said. “All because you weren’t paying attention. Too caught up with your new girlfriend. I never approved of her.”

“You never approved of me, Edwin,” said Alistair Drood, stepping forward to stand beside Martha. “You were responsible for my death too. I was only trying to do the right thing and protect my wife. You watched me burn in hellfire, and did nothing to save me. Tell them what they want to know, Edwin. Let your grandmother and me know peace, and rest at last.”

“Tell them,” said Martha Drood. “Tell them everything, Edwin.”

“Tell them,” said the Blue Fairy. “Or we’ll never leave you alone.”

“None of your deaths were my fault!” I yelled at them, and then I turned and ran out of the War Room.