Simon Green - For Heaven's Eyes Only

“What are you doing here, Eddie?”

I gave him a quick rundown on what had happened at the Wulfshead, and then at Sir Terrence Ashtree’s office. Leaving out all the bits that made me look like a monster. I told him that the upper echelons, and possibly even the leader himself, of the new satanic conspiracy were probably holed up in the Timeless Moment, and he nodded thoughtfully.

“Yes . . . Yes, that would make sense, actually.”

“Why?” Molly said loudly, unable to hold her peace any longer. “Why does it make sense, and what is the Timeless bloody Moment?”

“The headquarters, hideout and last retreat of the previous satanic conspiracy, back in the nineteen forties,” said the Armourer, leaning back in his chair and lacing his fingers together in his lap as he slid effortlessly into lecture mode. My uncle Laurence was a field agent back then—your great-uncle, Eddie, Grandmother Martha’s elder brother—and he told me all kinds of yarns about battling Satanists in occupied France. They were at the peak of their influence back in 1943, and plotting all kinds of black-magic attacks against England, from what they foolishly thought were safe bases along the French coastline. Safe and secure . . . Uncle Laurence showed them! Moving from city to city and town to town, arranging all kinds of unfortunate accidents to screw up their progress. You couldn’t blow everything up, or kill all the people who needed killing, because the Nazis would take reprisals on the local populations. Always very keen on executions, the Nazis. It must have felt so fine to be out in the field in those days, fighting the last good war. . . . I couldn’t wait to be a field agent, but all I got for my troubles was the Cold War. . . .

“Sorry, drifting . . . 1943. October. Uncle Laurence was checking out a particularly nasty coven down in Nantes when he stumbled over information about the Satanists’ secret bolt-hole and weapons depository, tucked away in the Timeless Moment. I’m not sure whether the Satanists created the place, or discovered it, or moved in and took it away from someone else. . . . Either way, it was the perfect hiding place. The Satanists established their main headquarters there, where none of their enemies could reach them. All right, Molly, don’t be so impatient; I’m getting there. The Timeless Moment was, and presumably still is, a pocket dimension of a kind, outside time and space as we know them. A strange alternate dimension tucked away between the tick and tock of linear time. Very hard to locate, and even harder to get into. Uncle Laurence led the mission to destroy the dimensional doorway the Satanists used to access the Timeless Moment, cutting the rank and file off from their headquarters, their leader and all the secret superweapons they’d been hoarding there to present to Hitler to help him win the war. Without all this, the rank and file were fatally weakened. Most of them legged it for the nearest horizon and disappeared. The few who stuck it out lost all their influence with Nazi High Command once it became clear they couldn’t deliver all the marvellous things they’d promised. That was the end for them as a vital force in the war. Which helped us win the war, no doubt about it.”

“This must be what rejuvenated the conspiracy again!” said Molly. “Someone must have regained access to the Timeless Moment!”

“Seems likely,” said the Armourer.

“Presumably this mysterious new leader of theirs,” I said. “Whose name we still don’t know. Why are all his people put under a geas, never to use his name outside the conspiracy? What’s the big deal about his name? Why make it such a secret?”

Molly looked at the Armourer. “Apparently because we’d recognise it. Apparently we know him.”

“Oh, bloody hell,” said the Armourer. “Not a Drood?”

“No,” I said quickly and very definitely.

“Good,” said the Armourer. “I suppose that’s something. If I have to announce I’m scanning everyone in the family again , I think we can expect some very unfortunate responses.”

“The influence machine must be inside the Timeless Moment,” I said. “It’s the only safe place for it until it’s needed. The one place we couldn’t hope to find it. They need only to wheel it out when it’s time to prepare people for the Great Sacrifice.”

“Same for the kidnapped townspeople of Little Stoke,” said Molly. “And the abducted weapons makers from the Supernatural Arms Faire. And Isabella! The one place they could hold her from which even she couldn’t escape!”

“If she’s still alive,” I said carefully.

“Of course she’s still alive!” Molly glared at me, her hands clenched unknowingly into fists. “She has to be alive. I’d know if she were dead.”

I considered her thoughtfully. “You once said to me . . . that the Metcalf sisters come as a package. Which is why Isabella can keep getting in and out of the Hall so easily.”

“It is?” said the Armourer.

“Molly,” I said, “could you use that link to find your sister, and establish a connection between this reality and the Timeless Moment?”

“It’s not as simple as that,” Molly said reluctantly. “The conspiracy wouldn’t be able to detect the link, so they couldn’t block it; but even so, the best I could do would be to point you in the right direction. Metaphorically speaking.”

“I have an idea on how to take it from there,” I said. “Not a very safe or even particularly sane idea, but . . . Uncle Jack.”

“This is going to be really bad, isn’t it?” said the Armourer. “I always know it’s going to be something really bad when you start calling me Uncle Jack instead of Armourer. What do you have in mind, Eddie?”

“Back when the Hall was under attack by the Accelerated Men,” I said carefully, “the Sarjeant-at-Arms mentioned a last-resort defence called Alpha Red Alpha.”

“What’s that?” Molly said immediately. “I’ve never heard of it before. And from the way you said it, it sounds like something I very definitely ought to have been told about.”

“Alpha Red Alpha,” the Armourer said heavily, “is Drood Hall’s very last and scariest line of defence. A powerful dimensional engine buried deep under the Hall. Most of the family don’t even know it’s there, on the grounds that if they knew there was a very powerful and largely untested dimensional engine right under where they lived, they wouldn’t want to live here anymore. And quite rightly, too. Powered up, Alpha Red Alpha can rotate the entire Hall and everyone in it out of this reality and into another one. The idea being that we could escape a real catastrophe by disappearing into another dimension, and staying there until the danger was past. The engine would bring everyone back when it was safe. However . . .”

“I just knew there was going to be a however ,” Molly said to me. “Didn’t you just know there was going to be a however ?”

“The engine has never been properly tested,” said the Armourer. “Most of us aren’t even sure it will work. It was only ever activated once; and after what happened on the trial run . . .”

“Did you build this engine?” said Molly.

No! No . . . that was the Armourer before me. Your great-uncle Francis, Eddie. Grandfather Arthur’s younger brother. A brilliant mind, but I think he must have been dropped on his head as a baby. Repeatedly. Francis Drood was an excellent designer and weapons maker, no doubt about it. But unfortunately, he was what these days we would call an extreme lateral thinker. . . . Or completely off his bloody head, as we said at the time. He produced a lot of really useful equipment, which field agents still use today; and he designed three of the forbidden weapons locked away in the Armageddon Codex. Weapons so powerful and potentially destructive that we’ve never dared use them. Simply reading the instruction manual is enough to bring you out in a cold sweat. . . . I’ll say this for the man: He never had any problems thinking big. Thinking rationally and responsibly, yes, major problems there . . .