Simon Green - The Man with the Golden Torc

I turned to the Armourer, and we shook hands just a bit awkwardly. It wasn’t something we did, as a rule. But we both knew we might not get a chance to do it again.

"Good-bye, Eddie," the Armourer said, meeting my gaze squarely. "I wish…there was more I could do for you."

"You’ve already done far more than I had any right to expect," I said.

"Good-bye, Uncle Jack."

He smiled at Molly and shook her hand too. "I’m glad Eddie’s taste in women finally improved. It was a pleasure to meet you, Molly. Now get out there and give them all hell."

"Damn right," said Molly.

Molly and I left the Armoury and carefully shut the blast-proof doors behind us. No point in advertising that the Armoury had been left open to casual visitors. I couldn’t allow the Armourer to come to harm for helping me. I could already hear my family coursing through the outer sections of the Hall, searching for intruders. They were drawing steadily closer, shouting instructions and findings and comments back and forth in loud and excited voices. It sounded like the whole damned family had been mobilised. The Matriarch wasn’t taking any chances. The lab coats would get us past a few people, but not crowds like these…All it would take was a moment of recognition, one raised voice…

Fortunately, there was another option. Just not a very nice one.

"Back when I was a kid," I said conversationally to Molly as we hurried down an empty corridor, "I worked out various ways of getting around the Hall without being seen. Because if you got caught in places where you weren’t supposed to be, you got punished. Often severely punished. But luckily the Hall is very old, and down the years certain very useful hidden doors and secret passages became lost, forgotten, displaced. And because I did a lot of reading in the library, especially in sections I wasn’t supposed to have access to, I was able to turn up certain old books describing the exact locations of these very useful shortcuts.

"There are doors that can take you from one room to another, from one wing to another, without having to cross the intervening space. There are narrow passages within thick, hollow walls that used to be part of the old central heating and ventilation processes. There’s a trapdoor in the basement that opens out into the attic and some rooms that are only there on certain dates. I must have used them all, at one time or another, in my never-ending quest to discover things I wasn’t supposed to know about."

"Didn’t your family ever suspect?" said Molly.

"Oh, sure. Finding these old passages is a sort of rite of passage for young Droods; tacitly permitted, if not actually encouraged. The family likes to see initiative in its children. As long as they follow the accepted rules and traditions. But I found some very odd ways that no one else even dreamed existed, and I never told anyone. I needed something that was mine, back then, and not the family’s."

"Am I to take it that you know a shortcut to the library?" said Molly.

"Yes. There’s an opening into a crawl space within the wall not far from here."

"Then why didn’t you say so before?"

"Well," I said.

"There’s bad news, isn’t there? Somehow I just know there’s bad news."

"It’s dangerous," I said.

"How dangerous?"

"The crawl space is…inhabited. You see, the Hall has to put its electrical cables and gas pipes and so on somewhere out of sight, but for security purposes they can’t just be hidden away inside the walls; they have to be protected. Against sabotage and the like. So all our crawl spaces and hidden maintenance areas are located in attached pocket dimensions. Like the Armageddon Codex and the Lion’s Jaws, but on a much smaller and less dramatic scale. And a lot easier for people to get into, obviously. Anyway, some of these pocket dimensions have been around so long they’ve acquired their own inhabitants. Things that wandered in and…mutated. Or evolved."

"What exactly inhabits this particular crawl space?" said Molly.

"Spiders," I said unhappily. "Big spiders. And I mean really big spiders; things the size of your head! Plus a whole bunch of other really nasty creepy-crawly things that the spiders feed on."

"Spiders don’t bother me," said Molly. "That’s more a boy thing. It’s slugs that weird me out. And snails. Do you know how snails have sex?"

"These spiders will bother you," I said firmly, refusing to be sidetracked. "Hopefully they’re not actually as big and nasty as my childhood memories insist, because there’s no way of avoiding them. Their webs are everywhere. I still have nightmares, sometimes, about all the times they chased me through the crawl space…with their scuttling legs and glowing eyes…"

"Then why did you keep using that particular shortcut?" said Molly.

"Because I’ve never let anything stop me from doing what I need to do," I said. "Not even my own fear. Perhaps especially not that."

"And there’s no other way of getting to the library?"

"Not safely."

Molly sniffed. "You have a really weird idea of what’s safe and what’s not, Drood."

I led her down a shadowy side corridor, past a long row of tall standing vases from the third Ming dynasty and then past a glass display case full of exquisite Venetian glass, until I came to a wood-panelled wall that stretched away into the distance. I had to keep pulling Molly along, as she got distracted by so much wealth within easy snatching distance. I counted off the panels until I came to a particular carved wooden rose motif, and then I turned it carefully left and right the correct number of times until the primitive combination lock reluctantly fell into place. The rose clicked loudly, and a panel in the wall slid jerkily open. The ancient mechanism must be wearing out. Beyond the panel and inside the wall, there was only darkness.

The opening that had been more than ample for a child was only just big enough to let Molly and me squeeze through. We crouched down before the opening and peered into the darkness. A slow cold breeze came out of the dark, carrying a dry, dusty smell. Molly wrinkled her nose but said nothing. Thick strands of cobweb hung down inside the opening, swaying heavily on the breeze. There was no sign that anybody had been in the crawl space in years. I listened quietly, gesturing sharply for Molly to keep still when she fidgeted. I couldn’t hear anything. For the moment. I took a deep breath, braced myself, and then squeezed quickly through the cramped opening before I could change my mind. Molly followed me in, crowding right behind me, and the wooden panel slid jerkily back into place.

The darkness was absolute. Molly quickly conjured up a handful of her trademark witchfire, and the shimmering silver light showed us a narrow stone tunnel, the rough gray walls all but buried under accumulated layers of colour-coded wiring, cables, and copper and brass tubing. Thick mats of webbing crawled across the surface of both walls. I grimaced despite myself, even though I was careful not to touch or disturb any of it. Molly’s witchlight showed the tunnel stretching away before us, but if there was a ceiling, the light couldn’t reach high enough to find it. A thick streamer of webbing blew away from one wall, carried on the gusting breeze, and I flinched away from it.

"You big baby," said Molly, grinning broadly.

"Isn’t that a slug by your foot?" I said, and grinned as Molly made a loud eeking noise.

I led the way down the tunnel. Pride would allow no less. The floor was thick with undisturbed dust. Even the smallest sounds we made seemed to echo on forever; the only sounds in that endless eerie silence. The tunnel steadily widened until it seemed the size of a room, and then a hall, and then abruptly it widened out still farther until I could no longer tell how big a space we were moving in. I stuck close to the right-hand wall, its familiar man-made cables and piping a comfort to me. Until they became so thickly buried under webbing I could no longer see them clearly.