Simon Green - For Heaven's Eyes Only

I looked at the Sarjeant, leaving it up to him, and he sighed quietly. “You’re going to have to look after him, Edwin. I am going to be too busy killing Satanists.”

“Hold hard,” I said. “Back up and go previous. You need to understand we’re not just going in there to kill everything that moves that isn’t us. There are people in this castle who need rescuing. The townspeople of Little Stoke, Molly’s sister Isabella and, most probably, Ammonia Vom Acht. Maybe even some of the abducted weapons makers from the Supernatural Arms Faire. Some of them might have refused to work for Satanists, and some of them are old friends of the Armourer. This can’t be only an extermination run, Sarjeant; it’s a rescue mission, too.”

“We’ll do what we can for those people,” said the Sarjeant. “Bring them all safely home if we can. But our first priority has to be putting the conspiracy out of business before they can start the Great Sacrifice. All the children in all the world are depending on us. The Satanists aren’t going to surrender or negotiate; either we kill all of them or they’ll kill all of us. They have to be wiped out to the last man, very definitely including this mysterious leader of theirs, or it could all start up again. This is war, Edwin, to the last man, or the last Drood, if need be.”

“Understood, Sarjeant,” I said. “When will your army be ready to go?”

The Sarjeant looked at Howard, who nodded quickly. The Sarjeant smiled. “Ready when you are, Eddie. Everyone’s in place; everyone knows what to do. Callan’s ready in the War Room. All defences are on high alert.”

“Then let’s do it,” I said.

I contacted the Armourer through my torc and told him to fire up Alpha Red Alpha. He agreed immediately, with a little too much enthusiasm for my liking. He does so love a new toy. I took out the Merlin Glass and instructed it to lock onto the Timeless Moment. Molly put one hand on mine and the other on the Glass, and added her link to Isabella to the mix. A slow, steady vibration ran through the floor. Heads came up all over operations as everyone felt it. My skin began to crawl.

“I’m not sure what will happen once the dimensional engine has done its stuff,” Ethel murmured quietly in my ear. “I might get to go with you, or I might not. This is all new territory to me.”

“But you’re a dimensional traveller,” I said.

“Yes, but I do it naturally. What your Alpha Red Alpha does is, quite frankly, an abomination, and wouldn’t be allowed in a sane universe. If I’m not there with you, in the Timeless Moment, I’ll be waiting for you here when you get back.”

“And if we don’t get back?” I said.

“Then I’ll go home,” said Ethel. “I wouldn’t want to stay here if you weren’t here, too. It was nice knowing you, Eddie, you and all your family. I will remember you. It’s all been such fun.”

The vibrations had grown strong enough to shake the whole room. Equipment was jumping and rattling, and the technicians hung onto their workstations with both hands. The lights flickered and flared, and shadows leapt all over the place. Strange sensations crawled across my skin, and my teeth chattered. I hung on grimly to the Merlin Glass, whose mirror was utterly blank, and Molly hung onto the Glass and to me with a grip so strong I knew nothing in this world would ever shake it loose. Everything around me seemed vague and uncertain, the people around me ghostly. The vibrations shook my bones and shuddered in my flesh, and it felt like I was being torn apart and put back together again, over and over. It reminded me of my time in Limbo, neither living nor dead, and I couldn’t trust anything. I concentrated on Molly, and something like a hand gripped firmly onto what I thought was my hand. And then everything snapped back into focus, as though the whole Hall had been picked up and slammed down again somewhere else. Molly and I relaxed our grip and laughed aloud, glorying in being alive.

I looked into the Merlin Glass. The image was still only a blur. I carefully didn’t shut it down, but put it away for the time being. Howard was already moving among his people, talking to them quietly, getting them over the shock and back to work. Display screens everywhere were blank, showing nothing but a shimmering silver void all around the Hall.

“There’s nothing out there, ” said one of the technicians, his voice rising. “Nothing! No matter, no energy; that’s not even light as we understand it. This is what the end of the universe will look like, when the game’s finally over and the doors have been shut and the chairs piled up on the tables. . . .”

“Somebody give that man a stiff drink,” said Howard. “And a slap round the head. This is no time to be going to pieces, people. Which part of ‘we are going to a whole different reality’ did you not understand? Now get working; there has to be something out there. Even if it’s only this Castle Horror the Satanists are hiding out in. Come on, people; how can you miss a whole castle?”

The technicians busied themselves at their work, and a certain calm fell across the ops room as they concentrated on familiar tasks. The Sarjeant moved in beside Howard.

“No matter, no energy?” he said quietly. “What about gravity, and heat and . . . things like that? Everything seems normal enough in here.”

“The Hall’s many defences and protections are still running,” said Howard, just as quietly. “I made sure of that before the Armourer activated that bloody machine. I had to be sure we would survive under whatever conditions, or lack of them, we ended up in. The shields preserve our reality inside the Hall. Of course, what happens to us when we go outside . . .”

“Hold everything,” said the no-longer-panicking technician. “New readings coming in. We seem to have stabilised. I’m getting . . . no damage reports from anywhere in the Hall. According to the long-range sensors, conditions outside the Hall are . . . surprisingly Earth normal. Air, gravity, temperature . . . all within acceptable limits. That can’t be a coincidence. I don’t think this place just happened. . . . I think somebody built it.”

“I don’t know whether that’s more or less worrying,” I said.

“Could it be the conspiracy?” said Molly. “The original one, I mean, back in the nineteen forties.”

“No way in hell,” said the technician. “This is far beyond their abilities. Far beyond ours . . . More likely they found it, somehow, and then moved in. And built their castle. This isn’t just a pocket dimension; it’s a whole other reality.”

“Could we survive outside the Hall without our armour?” said the Sarjeant.

“Probably,” said Howard, moving quickly from workstation to workstation, studying display screens over his people’s shoulders. “But I wouldn’t try it. Armour up and stay armoured up until we’re all safely out of here. Ah! Castle, ho! The Hall appears to be calmly floating in this silver void, and roughly half a mile below us is a castle floating in the void! Put it up on the main display screen.”

The big screen flashed a few times, ghosting in and out as though having trouble doing what it was being asked to do, and then the view cleared to show a massive medieval castle hanging in the silver-grey. It was hard to judge the scale with nothing to compare it to, so a stream of sensor information flowed along the bottom of the screen. The castle was huge, some twenty times larger than Castle Frankenstein, home to the now defunct Immortals. Massive stone walls, huge towers, long crenellated battlements, and everywhere, flags and banners of a familiar black and red, dominated by the swastika. Nazi flags. All of them stiff and still, untroubled by any breeze.