Secret Histories 10: Dr. DOA (36 page)

“You’re not bothered by snakes, are you?”

“Maybe just a bit.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll protect you.”

She sniffed loudly, and stabbed one finger at the snakes still crawling all over me. Half of them disappeared, and the others jumped off, hit the ground, and streaked away as fast as they could go. Molly smiled smugly. I turned my featureless golden face to the Fury, who glared defiantly back at me. She held out an open hand, revealing a palm full of small ivory pieces.

“I will show you fear in a handful of teeth,” she said. “Behold the Hydra’s children . . .”

She scattered them across the floor between us with one sweep of her hand. And everywhere a tooth hit the stony ground, a human skeleton sprang up. More and more of the bony things just appeared out of nowhere, standing straight and tall; a complete collection of bones with nothing connecting them but the will of the Fury. The bones were old and brown, cracked and pitted, as though they’d been in the ground a long time. The grinning skulls turned slowly to orientate on me, fixing me with their dark, empty eye sockets.

“Molly?” I said, not taking my eyes off the skeletons for a moment. “What am I looking at? Exactly?”

“I think . . . those are the remains of all the miners who ever died in this mine,” said Molly. “They have that feel about them.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I said.

More and more appeared, until there were dozens of them; a skeletal army for the Fury, packing the tunnel from wall to wall. Bony feet clattered noisily on the stony ground as they stirred restlessly in place. And then the Fury spoke a single Word, and they all came charging forward at once, smiling their death’s-head grins and reaching out
for me with clawed, bony fingers. And I had a sudden flashback to being terrified by a similar scene in a movie I saw as a kid,
Jason and the Argonauts.
I grinned behind my golden mask. Time for some payback, and just maybe a little serious therapy.

I launched myself right into the midst of the skeleton army, and hit them so hard with my golden fists that skulls shattered, bones flew on the air, and splintered pieces fell to clatter on the floor. I scattered the skeletons with great sweeps of my golden arms, breaking them up and throwing them this way and that. But the bones just leapt up off the floor and re-formed themselves, while the ones I threw away came swarming back, driven on by the Fury. They hit me from every direction at once, swarming all over me, bony hands pounding and clawed fingertips scratching harmlessly across my armour. Just the sound sent hackles rising on the back of my neck. The skeletons beat at me with their bony fists, tried to crush me in their skeleton arms, even tried to bite me with their bared teeth. Doing their best to drag me down through sheer strength of numbers.

The overwhelming proximity of so much death had a cold, numbing effect, even past my armour’s protection. Everywhere I looked, fleshless faces grinned back at me. A sudden panic rushed through me as I thought,
Is this what death is? Is this what’s waiting for me?
And then, just as quickly, anger rose up to push back the panic.
Hell with that. I’m not ready to die. Not yet.

Molly jumped back and forth behind me, blasting skeletons to pieces with quick mystical gestures. And the ones she blasted didn’t get back together again. But she could only take out one at a time while her magical resources were limited, and there were so many of them. I could hear her language getting worse. And Angelica Wilde just stood and watched, smiling. Savouring the thought of my death.

I raised my Sight, and immediately made out a network of shimmering threads hanging on the air and connecting the skeletons to the Fury. I reached out, ignoring the bony things as they swarmed all over me,
and it was the easiest thing in the world for me to break all the threads with one swift gesture. But nothing happened. I was so outraged, I just stood there for a moment. It should have worked. It worked the last time. It felt like the universe had cheated. The Fury laughed at me.

“I filled my children with the power of the Fury, with my rage for revenge. Nothing can stop them now but your death, Drood. They’ll never stop coming for you, wherever you are. An army that will never grow tired, never give up; an army that can’t be killed because it’s already dead!”

“Hell with that!” Molly said loudly. “Eddie, the power’s not in her; it’s in the teeth! The Hydra’s teeth!”

She gestured sharply at the ivory pieces lying scattered across the stone floor, and every one of them glowed brightly in the tunnel’s gloom. With one great shrug, I threw off the skeletons still hanging on to me, and hurried forward before they could come at me again. I stamped on each glowing tooth as I came to it, crushing them to dust in a moment. The skeletons began snapping out of existence. I danced up and down the tunnel, my golden boots slamming against the stone, and when the last tooth was gone, so was the skeleton army. Angelica Wilde was so mad, she actually stamped her foot on the floor.

“I have other weapons!” she screamed. “Other traps! You’ll never see them coming! And you’ll never get out of here alive!”

She turned suddenly and ran off down the tunnel, disappearing into the darkness. By the time Molly could generate a handful of light, the Fury was gone. I started after her anyway, ready to pursue her into the dark, but Molly stopped me with a hand on my golden arm.

“No, Eddie. We booby-trapped the hell out of these tunnels back in the day. Remember?”

“I’m in my armour,” I said.

“Some of these traps were designed with Droods in mind,” she said. “They’re seriously powerful and seriously nasty. We all had a lot of enemies in those days, and a lot of time to sit around, thinking up
new ways to maim and murder anyone dumb enough to come bother us where we lived. Angelica wants you to go chasing after her, straight into whatever she’s got waiting.”

“She can’t have done much,” I said. “She hasn’t been here long.”

“Time doesn’t mean anything where the Fury’s concerned,” said Molly. “She can bend the whole world to her will. If she stops being mad long enough to concentrate.”

“If she was that powerful,” I said, “you and I would be dead by now.”

“If you weren’t a Drood,” Molly said steadily, “and I weren’t the wild witch of the woods. Our basic natures protect us from the Fury’s gods-given abilities. You might say, when they look at us, they recognise one of their own. That’s why Angelica has been using snakes and skeletons, and possessing other people.”

“She made weapons out of people,” I said. “Including one man I genuinely respected. She made me kill innocent bystanders . . .”

“Try not to hold that against her,” said Molly. “You’ve seen her eyes, heard her speak. Losing her husband drove her crazy.”

“I know,” I said. I armoured down so she could see my face. “She’s your friend. We could just leave. She’s not why we’re here, and if no one else is coming, we have no reason to stay. I feel . . . a certain responsibility for the way she is. You get used to feeling like that, with my family.”

“No. We can’t do that,” said Molly. “She’ll never stop trying to kill you. She’d just find more innocents to possess and send after you. What happened with her husband? Why did your family kill him?”

“We didn’t,” I said. “It’s a long story . . .”

“We have time,” said Molly. “I need to know, Eddie.”

“Armin del Santos called himself the Rage,” I said. “Because he hated all forms of authority. Good or bad. As a young man, he went walkabout in Australia and ended up at Ayers Rock. He fell asleep on top, and entered the Dreamtime. The underverse. When he came out again, he was changed, charged with old-time power. Determined to tear the world down, so he could replace it with something better.

“As long as he stuck to the usual targets, my family had no problem with that. He brought down a few Big Bads even my family had been having trouble with. But then he moved on, to radical politics. Fighting the system was one thing; deciding to kill everyone involved in it, no matter what side they were on, was never going to be acceptable.”

“So Armin was a supernatural terrorist?” said Molly.

“Nothing more terrifying than a good man who chose to embrace extreme solutions,” I said. “And then he met up with Angelica Wilde, and radicalized her.”

“The Rage and the Fury,” said Molly. “They were made for each other.”

“Unfortunately, yes,” I said. “And they became far more dangerous together than they’d ever been on their own. Anyway; while she was away, massacring a group of slavers who specialized in abducting children left orphaned by natural disasters . . . the Rage decided to do something really big. His wedding present to her; something big enough to impress the whole world. He was going to destroy the city of London. The politicians, the businesspeople, all the Government apparatus . . . and everyone else along with them. His plan was to open up a new entry point into the Dreamtime, and drop the whole city into it. But it never occurred to him that a door opens both ways. And that the Dreamtime contains a lot of things that have no place in the waking world. My family received a warning from someone or something inside the Dreamtime. Six field agents were sent to shut Armin down, and of course he fought them, every inch of the way.”

“Did they really have to kill him, to stop him?” said Molly.

“They didn’t kill him!” I said. “I’m not entirely sure they could have. Whoever or whatever came back from the Dreamtime, looking like Armin del Santos, wasn’t exactly human any more.”

“Human enough to love Angelica,” said Molly.

“Yes . . . In the end, the field agents opened up their own entry point, with the help of our unknown friend on the other side, and pushed Armin back into the Dreamtime. To learn a better way.”

“So he’s not dead?”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “Though he’s never come back out . . .”

“If you told Angelica this . . .”

“We have, many times! She refuses to believe anything that comes from a Drood.”

“She might believe me,” said Molly.

“If you can get her to listen,” I said. “You’re the one who betrayed the Cause, by loving a Drood.”

“We have to try, Eddie. She was my friend.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s go find her. See if we can stop this madness from going any further.”

“You’d do that?” said Molly. “After everything she’s done?”

“She’s not entirely responsible,” I said. “I get that. And besides, she’s your friend.”

Molly placed a gentle hand on my chest, and I put my hand on hers.

“You’re a good man, Eddie,” Molly said quietly.

“I can be,” I said. “For you.”

*   *   *

We made our way quietly and cautiously through the interconnecting tunnels of the Deep Down Pit, which were lit only by Molly’s magical light. She sent a ball of the stuff bobbing along on the air ahead of us, leaving her free to sweep one hand back and forth before her like a glowing metal detector. Searching out hidden traps and nasty surprises. But much to her surprise, she couldn’t find anything. Not because it was so well hidden, but because there wasn’t anything there to be found.

“There really were some nasty things hidden away here,” she said, scowling so hard, it must have hurt her face. “I put some in place myself. And I discussed the merits of a lot of the others with my friends and colleagues. It was something to do, to pass the time. To see who could be the most extreme, and ingenious, and thoroughly unpleasant. You know what I can be like when I get competitive.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s not a pretty sight. Don’t hit! What sort of things did you come up with?”

“Oh . . . floating transformation curses, invisible trapdoors over infinite drops, concealed teleport pads to send the unwary somewhere unwelcoming. The usual . . .”

“And you didn’t tell me about any of this before you brought me down here, because . . . ?”

“Because I knew you’d whine like a little girl! And I never thought I’d be taking you on a guided tour.” She stopped suddenly and shook her head. “They’re all gone. No trace of a trap or an ambush anywhere. It’s like someone just . . . tidied up and removed them all.”

“Who would do that?” I said.

“I don’t know. They’d have to know where everything was, and the only proper ways to defuse them . . . and we were the only people who knew that.”

“It’s clear someone else has been living here,” I said. “Given the working generator, and the food in the cupboard, maybe they did it so they could move around safely.”

“But they’d still have to know how! And none of us ever intended to remove the traps, in case we might need them again!”

“Things change,” I said.

We headed deeper into the mine, through endlessly branching tunnels and passageways, walking in the pool of light provided by Molly’s floating sphere. With darkness ahead, and darkness behind. The air was starting to get really stale now, and worryingly cold. Now and again I patted my pocket to reassure myself that the Merlin Glass was still there, if we did ever need an emergency route to the surface.

“Are you sure we’re going the right way?” I said finally.

“It’s been a long time since I was last here,” said Molly. “But don’t worry; there are signs on the walls only those of us who put them there can see. No one’s messed with them. As far as I can tell.”

And then she stopped, and looked around, frowning. I looked quickly up and down the tunnel, but couldn’t see anything.

“I’ve been assuming Angelica would follow the old signs, like me,” said Molly. “But that side tunnel she appeared from; that was new. She made it. Maybe she doesn’t need the signs to navigate . . . Put on your mask, Eddie. Look for signs of Angelica’s work.”

I set my golden mask in place, and boosted my Sight and hearing as much as I could stand. But the dark was just as dark, and there wasn’t a sound anywhere. As though the whole mine were holding its breath. I armoured down, and gave Molly the bad news.

“If someone with Angelica’s power wants to stay hidden,” I said, “it’ll take more than Sight to find her. She could be hiding inside one of the walls, in her own personal tunnel. But to attack us, she’ll have to reveal herself.”