Simon Green - The Spy Who Haunted Me

“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.”

Honey was frowning. “I never heard of Grendel Rex before this. And I certainly never read about any such takeover in the history books.”

“We wiped all trace of him from history,” I said. “Destroyed every account, burned every book and manuscript, shut up everyone who tried to talk. We could do that, in those days. Only myth and legend remained, and we could live with that. Scrubbing the moon clean was a bit more difficult, but we managed.

“Do you understand now? Why I’m so reluctant to do something that might reawaken the Unforgiven God and let him loose on the world again?”

“Hell,” said Peter. “If the Tunguska Event didn’t wake him . . .” He paused. “Or was it supposed to, and failed?”

“A lot of my family wondered about that,” I said. “But . . . he slept on. Our ancestors did good work. That’s what gives me the confidence to try this. But . . . if I accidentally break the bonds that hold him, he will rise up. And perhaps this time not even the efforts of all the Droods and all our allies and all our weapons would be enough to put him down again.”