Simon Green - The Spy Who Haunted Me

“Oh, come on!” said Honey. “Get over yourself, Drood! The world’s come a long way since the eleventh century. We have access to weapons and resources unheard of in those days. I speak for the CIA: we’ve put down living gods before in our time.”

Walker looked at her, and then at me. “Eddie, what is the worst that could happen if he did rise again?”

“He’d finish what he started,” I said. “Subjugate all humanity, reshape the continents according to his whim, absorb the souls of every living thing into himself, and leave us just enough of our minds to love and worship him. Hell on earth, forever and ever and ever. That’s what could happen, if I get this wrong.”

“Well,” said Walker. “Try not to do that, then.”

The bedlam in the street outside was growing louder all the time. Screams and howls that had as much of the beast in them as anything human. They came from all sides, surrounding the building. We were under siege by the reawakened ghosts of old horrors. The room seemed colder than ever; a spiritual cold, a bleakness of the soul. The shadows were very dark, like holes that could swallow you up, or down which you could fall forever. They moved sometimes, when you weren’t looking at them directly. The room was changing all the time in small, subtle ways. Growing larger or smaller or deeper, while the corners seemed to have too many angles.

I could feel my breathing coming fast and hard. I could feel my pulse racing and a vein throbbing almost painfully in my temple. I’ve been scared before; being a Drood doesn’t make you immune to pain or death or failure . . . but this was different. A different kind of fear: primal, almost pure. We were surrounded by nightmares crossed over into the waking world and closing in. Despite myself I remembered running from things in dreams: unspeakable, unbearable, implacable things that I could only escape from by waking up. And I couldn’t wake up from this.

Anything can happen in dreams; in bad dreams. The dead can walk again and say unforgivable things. Physical shapes lose their integrity, become uncertain, their edges loose and slippery, no longer tied down to shapes you can cope with. I could feel a whimper building in the back of my throat. Honey had a hand at her mouth, gnawing on a knuckle. Walker had his back against a wall, lashing his umbrella back and forth before him like a sword. Peter’s bulging eyes were darting this way and that, anticipating the coming of something awful that always seemed to be coming from somewhere else.

Soon we’d start to see each other as nightmares. Maybe even attack each other, because you couldn’t trust anything or anyone in a dream. Shadows were rising up everywhere, taking on unnerving shapes rich with terrible personal significance. The floor beneath my feet was soft and spongy, and the walls were leaning inward, slumping forward like tired old men. Cracks in the walls took on the shape of human faces, smiling at what was to come.

Heavy hands slammed against the closed laboratory door. It shook in its frame, the wood bulging unnaturally under the force of the blows. Dreadful voices from outside, crying, Let us in! Let us in! I armoured up, but it didn’t help. Even that couldn’t protect me from the unleashed power of my own nightmares. I grabbed the nearest piece of heavy equipment and hauled it over to the door to make a barricade, but the solid metal turned soft and putrid and fell apart in my armoured hands. I couldn’t depend on anything anymore.

That’s the real horror of nightmares.

Lethal Harmony of Kathmandu and the Blue Fairy walked through the closed door as though it wasn’t there. I backed away. They looked at me accusingly, heads lolling limply on their broken necks. Honey saw them too. She opened fire with her shimmering crystal weapon. The energy blast shot right through the figures and blew up the door behind them. And then the weapon wilted and twisted in Honey’s hands, curling and coiling slowly and deliberately like a snake. Honey threw it away from her in horror.

Katt and Blue turned into my mother and my father and advanced slowly on me. They didn’t look like zombies, or the living dead, or two people who’d been in their graves for most of my life. They looked just the way they always did, when I thought of them: the way they looked in the last photograph taken, before they went off on the mission that killed them. Except they weren’t smiling now. I backed away, and they came after me. They didn’t say anything. They didn’t have to. They looked accusing, disappointed, damning.

“No!” I yelled so loudly it hurt my throat. “My parents wouldn’t think that of me! They know better! They wouldn’t do this! You’re not them! ”

And in the face of my certainty, they faded softly and silently away.

Honey grabbed my golden arm with a shaking hand. “How did you do that?” she said shrilly.

“I have worse things than that on my conscience,” I said.

“Then do something!” shouted Walker. “Before the worse things show up!”

Peter was spinning around and around now, convinced there was something sneaking up on him from behind, no matter which way he looked. Walker began to shrink, in sudden jerks and shudders, until he was just a child again, swamped in a man’s suit. He tried to say something but couldn’t get the words out, and he began to cry helplessly. Honey dropped down abruptly, sinking into a floor that had taken on the consistency of quicksand, sucking her down in slow, purposeful gulps. I grabbed her arm and tried to haul her out, but the drag of the quicksand was too great. I pulled harder, and Honey screamed in agony.

“Let go, Eddie! You’ll pull my shoulder out of my socket before it’ll let me go! You have to risk waking your sleeping god! Nothing could be worse than this. At least he’s real!”

And so I let her go. Turned my back on them all, drew on the power of my torc and my armour, and made contact with Grendel Rex, the Unforgiven God. The devil in his cold dark Hel, deep and deep under the permafrost.

Finding him was easier than I expected. My mind shot across the miles separating us in a moment, my Sight drawn like a magnet by the bond we shared. Of family. My vision sank down into the frozen earth, and immediately I was hit by the impact of his ancient presence, huge and forbidding and still impossibly powerful. I felt like a scuba diver, swimming through the cold night of the ocean and coming unexpectedly upon a blue whale or a giant squid. I felt so small, overwhelmed by the sheer size and scale of him. Just a mote in his eye.

I carefully reached out and touched his power. It was like sticking a drinking straw into an ocean or dipping a bucket into a bottomless well. The power surged into me, rich and raging, all I needed and more. And one great eye slowly opened in the dark and looked at me.

Well, now. Who disturbs me at this time?

I stopped where I was, absolutely frozen by fear. “I’m Edwin Drood,” I said finally. “Just . . . doing my job. Trying to save humanity from destruction.”

So the sheep still have their shepherds. Why come to me, the old pariah, for help?

“Because what I’m doing is important and necessary. Because I’ve nowhere else to go. And because . . . I’m family.”

Ah, yes. Of course. Anything for the family. What is this threat you fear so much that you’re prepared to make a deal with the devil?

I started to explain, but he pushed effortlessly past my defences and took what he needed from my mind.

Yes. I see. Very well, little Drood. Take what you need.

I should have just taken the energy and left, but I had to know. “What did Grigor see in the depths of our DNA? What could he have seen to terrify him so completely? Do you know?”