From Hell With Love: A Secret Histories Novel (45 page)

Read From Hell With Love: A Secret Histories Novel Online

Authors: Simon R. Green

BOOK: From Hell With Love: A Secret Histories Novel
9.3Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“You okay?” I said finally.
“Down, but not out,” she said. “You?”
“Shaken, but not stirred. What the hell were they?”
“Beats the hell out of me,” said Molly. “Some kind of demon. Clearly someone at Area 52 didn’t place all their faith in science.”
“Magical attack dogs,” I said. “Hate to think what Area 52 paid for their services . . .”
“Come on,” said Molly. “We have to get out of here. There’s always the chance the fog could re-form, and then the demons would be back again.”
“Moving right along,” I said. “Moving right bloody along.”
Finally, at a point in the snowy landscape that looked just like every other, the Merlin Glass appeared in my hand without waiting to be summoned, and shook and shuddered like a divining rod in the presence of an underground lake. I held it firmly, and the scene in the hand mirror exactly matched the scene before me. Molly peered over my shoulder into the Glass, and sniffed loudly.
“I’m starting to think that thing’s alive.”
“Funny you should say that,” I said. “The Armourer thinks there’s someone trapped inside the Glass, hiding in the background of its reflections.”
“Okay, seriously creeping me out now,” said Molly. “As long as it doesn’t turn out to be a young Victorian girl with long blond hair.”
“I said that!”
“You would.”
I put the Glass away, and studied the scene before me with my Sight. And there, buried deep under the snow, was a circular steel door, maybe ten feet in diameter. I pointed it out to Molly, and she whooped loudly as she confirmed it. I dug away the snow with great handfuls, and then looked back to see Molly watching me.
“You could help, you know,” I said.
“I just like watching you work,” she said. “Or maybe I just like the thought of you all sweaty.”
“Oh good,” I said. “I knew there had to be a reason. Want me to build you a snowman, when I’m done here?”
“Did you bring any carrots?”
“Damn,” I said, clearing the last of the snow away. “Knew I forgot something.”
“Why did they bury the entrance so deep?” said Molly, coming in close for a better look. “It’s like no one’s used it for years.”
“From the look of it, this was never intended for use as an entrance,” I said. “This has all the appearances of an emergency exit. For getting out of Area 52 in a hurry, when the brown stuff is hitting the revolving blades.”
I crouched down in the hole I’d made, and studied the steel door carefully. Molly pressed in close, peering over my shoulder. The door was solid steel, inches thick, with a really complicated locking system. Reminded me very much of an airlock.
“I could probably smash through this,” I said finally. “It’s only steel. But given the sophistication of the locking systems, I’d bet good money that any break in the door’s integrity would result in a complete shutdown of the access systems. Not to mention setting off all sorts of alarms and security systems. Which means . . . either we figure out how to open all those locks, or we don’t get in.”
“When in doubt, cheat,” Molly said cheerfully. “Lend me that Chameleon Codex thing of yours, for a minute.”
I reached through my golden armour at the wrist, carefully undid one of my cuff links by touch, brought it out and handed it to Molly. I watched interestedly as she pressed the cuff link carefully against the various sensors, picking up the latent DNA traces left by whoever touched them last, preserved, hopefully, by the snow and the cold. She then held the cuff link up, muttered over it for a while, and suddenly a small cloud of dust motes was flying around her hand. They leapt up and coalesced into a vaguely human shape, becoming gradually clearer and more distinct as Molly shaped them with her muttered Words. She was putting together what we in the trade call a smoke ghost: a mindless, soulless re-creation of a human body, made from discarded DNA, skin flakes and other human remnants, mixed with whatever happened to be floating about in the air at the time. Not real, not even the memory of a person, just a flimsy spectre created from what men leave behind them. They don’t tend to last long, but you can do all kinds of interesting things with them.
Molly’s first few attempts at smoke ghost sculpting weren’t too successful—deformed and misshapen, bits missing or wildly out of proportion . . . but eventually she put together something that would pass. It crouched in the hole with us, bent over the steel door, made of shades of grey so fine it was hardly there. It had no sense of presence, of anyone actually being there with us, which was actually quite disturbing. I gestured sharply for Molly to get a move on, and the smoke ghost moved jerkily as Molly moved it with her mind. It presented its grey eye to the retina scanner, touched the fingerprint lock with a grey fingertip, and even managed a few words for the voice recognition circuits. And then it collapsed, returning to the dust from which it was made.
“Freaky,” I said.
“Lot you know,” said Molly. “I knew this guy who used to put together smoke ghosts just so he could have sex with them . . .”
“Far too much information,” I said.
The steel door revolved slowly beneath us, making low grinding noises, and then fell away, revealing a bleak steel chamber below. A light snapped on, illuminating the chamber. It had no details, no controls, just a single red button on one wall. Molly drew back, shaking her head.
“No way. There is no way on this good earth that I am trusting myself to
that
. I mean, come on; it looks like a coffin!”
“Emergency escape capsules are not usually noted for their frills and fancies,” I said patiently. “It’s the only way in, Molly.”
She scowled. “Damn thing hasn’t been used for years. Suppose it gets stuck halfway down? Or we can’t open the door at the other end?”
“Then you’ll just have to teleport us the rest of the way.”
“Jump blind? In a base crawling with all kinds of shields and protections?
Are you crazy?
”
“I was hoping for a rather different response,” I said. “Look—this is the only way into Area 52 that we know of. And time, as you have already pointed out, is getting tight.”
“I
really
don’t want to get into that thing,” muttered Molly.
“I’ll hold your hand,” I said. “You’ll be fine. Come on, be a brave little soldier and you can have a sweetie afterwards.”
“You want a slap?”
We helped each other down into the steel chamber. It was big enough to hold maybe half a dozen people, if they were all on really friendly terms. It was the lack of details that made it so claustrophobic; this wasn’t a place people were supposed to be in, unless they absolutely had to. I pressed the red button firmly, and the heavy steel door lifted back up into place, revolved a few times, and was still. For a worryingly long moment nothing happened, and then the chamber descended slowly into the depths. There was no sound of any motor, no sense of speed, only the sense of falling into an unknowable pit.
The descent went on for rather longer than was comfortable, and I had to wonder just how deep they’d buried Area 52, under the concealing snow and ice of the Antarctic. Just what were they hiding here, that needed to be imprisoned so deep in the earth? Were they worried about something getting in, or something getting out?
“They built this place
deep
,” said Molly, echoing my thoughts.
“Well, wouldn’t you?” I said reasonably. “Given some of the truly dangerous things they’re supposed to have stored away here?”
“Like what?” Molly said immediately. “Come on; you’re the one who’s read all your family’s files on this place; what exactly are they sitting on here?”
“Ah,” I said. “Nothing too important or frightening, of course, because we always get to those first. But they are supposed to have squirreled away a fair collection of very interesting pieces . . .”
“You don’t know!” said Molly. “You haven’t got a clue what’s down here, have you?”
“Be fair,” I said. “No one in my family has even been to Area 52 before. Never felt the need, until now. We’ve always relied on reports from people on the inside. But don’t worry, sweetie, I’m sure we’ll find something nice you can take home as a souvenir.”
The steel chamber finally came to a halt deep underground, and a door opened that I would have sworn wasn’t there a moment before. I stepped quickly out and looked around, ready for any response. Molly was right there with me; but the shining steel corridor was completely empty. The door slid shut behind us, and then the corridor was utterly still and silent. Fierce electric light meant there were no shadows, and there wasn’t even a whisper of air-conditioning. Nothing moved. The steel corridor stretched away in both directions, empty and deserted.
“You know, I thought for sure someone would be expecting us,” said Molly. “I had some really unpleasant transformation spells lined up, just waiting to be unleashed on the wicked and deserving.”
“I thought those took a lot out of you,” I said.
Molly smiled. “The look on people’s faces makes it all worthwhile. Your trouble is, you just don’t know how to have fun.”
“I have a really bad feeling about this,” I said.
“You always have a really bad feeling,” said Molly.
“And I’m usually right.”
Molly looked up and down the long steel corridor. “So, which way do we go?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Your guess is as good as mine. I told you—no one in my family has ever seen the inside of this place. Even the floor plans in our files are years out of date. And the regular reports we get usually just consist of
Everything’s fine, nobody panic.
I have to say, I’m not entirely sure we’re getting value for money there.”
“And there’s no one here to ask,” said Molly. “Funny, that. There ought to be somebody around. Especially as we’ve just arrived out of nowhere, riding an emergency exit in reverse. You’d have thought someone would have noticed that.”
“Yes,” I said. “Spooky, isn’t it?”
I armoured down. There was always the chance Doctor Delirium, Tiger Tim, Methuselah, or any of the base’s security people might be able to detect the presence of strange matter. I turned to look at Molly, and she actually gasped, her hands rising to her mouth.
“Oh Eddie, what have they done to you?”
I looked at my blurred reflection in the steel wall. Even in that distorting surface, I looked pretty bad. I raised a hand to my face, and winced as I touched swollen eyes and nose, and a pulped mouth. When I took my hand away, there was blood on my fingers. As though seeing made it suddenly real, my whole face pulsed with pain. Those dark shapes really had done a number on me, even inside my armour. Suddenly it was all I could do to stand up straight, as the pain kicked in; all the damage, from torn muscles to cracked ribs, the sharp aches flaring up from a hundred injuries, inside and out. Molly must have seen something of it in my bloodied face, because she stepped forward and placed a gentle hand on my chest.
“My hero,” she said. “My knight in shining armour. Sometimes I forget how brave you are, Eddie. Because you try so hard to seem as strong and invulnerable as your armour. Look at what they’ve done to you . . .”
“Don’t fuss,” I said. “I’ve had worse. Comes with the job, and the territory.”
“Not while I’m around,” said Molly. “Hush. Hush, my darling.”
She pressed her hand hard against my chest, and a subtle thrilling energy ran through me. I cried out despite myself as the pain blazed up, and then was suddenly gone. I could move without wincing, breathe without hurting, and when I put my hands to my face all the damage was gone.
“There,” said Molly. “All better now.”
She produced a clean handkerchief and dabbed at the blood on my face. But her voice hadn’t been entirely steady, and neither was her hand, and there was a grey cast to her face that hadn’t been there before. The healing had taken a lot out of her.
“I know,” she said, before I could say anything. “But it’s my choice to pay the price, instead of you. If I’d told you what it would cost me, you wouldn’t have let me do it, so I didn’t ask. You can be too bloody noble for your own good, sometimes.”
I just nodded, kissed her briefly, chose a direction at random and set off down it. Molly bounced along beside me, smiling hap pily, quite ready to lash out at someone she didn’t know and do terrible things to them. After a while the corridor branched out into junctions and side turnings, and I just kept changing directions at random. But even as we penetrated deeper and deeper into Area 52, we never saw another living soul. The whole base gave every indication of being deserted, abandoned. No sign of any struggle, or violence, nothing to suggest any sudden emergency. It was as though everyone had just . . . walked out. Except there was nowhere to walk out to—just the bitter and unforgiving cold of the Antarctic above. So where had everybody gone?
I remembered Tiger Tim boasting that all the Base personnel were dead; but where were Doctor Delirium’s people?
We found a canteen. The door was wide open, and when we looked in the long tables had all been set out for a meal. Plates and cutlery, jugs and glasses of water; but no food. And no one there to eat it. We kept on walking, pushing open doors along the way that led to offices and living quarters, and there was every sign of life except people.

Other books

Pray for Dawn by Jocelynn Drake
The September Girls by Maureen Lee
Two Time by Chris Knopf
Indiscretion: Volume One by Elisabeth Grace
The Doubter's Companion by John Ralston Saul
Ransom by Danielle Steel
The Benefits of Passion by Catherine Fox
Lipstick and Lies by Margit Liesche