“Not even close,” she said flatly. “Hell is worse. This is chaos. Hell has purpose.”
“You’d know,” I said. “Hello, War Room? Hello? Callan? Edith? Can anyone hear me? Anyone?”
“Well?” said Molly, after a moment.
“Apparently not,” I said. “I’m reaching out through my armour, but no one’s answering. We’re on our own, Molly.”
“Best way,” she said briskly. “We know what we’re doing.”
“Since when?”
“Hush, lover; think positive. Okay, this is a seriously nasty place. I’m not sure we’re even on Earth anymore.”
“Technically, I suppose we’re not,” I said. “Local conditions have been . . . rewritten.”
“I’m not picking up any traces of major magical workings,” said Molly. “You couldn’t do something this big without leaving serious handprints all over everything.”
I remembered the Armourer’s advice, and had my armour probe and investigate my immediate surroundings. I concentrated in a certain way, and the armour’s findings appeared on the inside of my mask, floating before my eyes. All kinds of readings and graphs and scales, half of which meant nothing to me. My uncle Jack is the scientist. It’s all I can do to program my TiVo. But . . .
“No radiation,” I said to Molly. “No toxins, none of the usual dangerous energies . . . Everything else . . . doesn’t make sense. I’ve never encountered anything quite like this.”
“Your armour is smoking,” said Molly.
“Smoking! There’s steam or something boiling right off your armour. Is everything all right inside there?”
I felt fine. I felt great. I felt sharp and strong and totally alive, as I always did when wearing my armour. It was all that was keeping me sane. I looked down at myself, and sure enough thick curls of smoke were rising up off my golden torso and arms.
“I think my armour is reacting to the new environment,” I said to Molly. “Or possibly . . . the other way round. The town is trying to break through my armour to get to me, and my armour is fighting it off. You could say there’s a war going on between the stability of the strange matter and the changing conditions of the town. And so far, my armour is kicking the town’s arse. I think strange matter is too weird even for here. I think . . . reality here is breaking up on contact with my armour. How cool is that? The one true thing in this crazy new world. Though how long it will last is anybody’s guess. I say we get this job done as quickly as possible, and then get the hell out of here.”
“Best idea you’ve had so far,” said Molly.
I looked up at her. “Are you okay inside that spangly bubble of yours?”
“This is a spiritual force shield,” Molly said firmly. “I am maintaining Earth-normal conditions around me by sheer effort of will. Anyone else would have the sense to be impressed.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t do impressed.”
“I know. It’s one of your better qualities.”
“How long can you maintain that bubble?”
“I think we should get moving. Right now.”
But still, something held me in place as I looked around me. “Why did the Satanists do this? What’s the point?”
“A demonstration, probably,” said Molly. “A show of power. ‘Look what we can do. We can smash reality. Break all the rules and let chaos thrive. Better not stand against us, or else . . .’ Standard Satanist bullying. This is as much a psychological weapon as anything else. They’re saying, ‘We can destroy everything you believe in and depend on.’ ”
I had my armour scan the town for life signs, for any traces of human survivors, but my armour’s sensors were overloaded and confused by the weird conditions. I was picking up life signs all over the place, but none of them made any sense. I said as much to Molly, and she nodded thoughtfully, concentrating. She pointed in one direction, hesitated, and then pointed in another.
“People. Definitely people. Unaffected, unharmed. I can See them in a safe place, shining like diamonds in the dark. Maybe . . . fifty of them. They’re protected by something I can’t quite get a handle on. I think perhaps they were overlooked, or left behind. . . .”
“Fifty people?” I said. “Out of a town of some eight thousand? Left behind, abandoned, trapped in this horror . . .” I could feel the anger building within me, cold and raging. “I will not stand for this. I won’t see innocent people treated like this! Lead the way, Molly. We are going to find these people, get them out of this bloody mess and take them home. . . . And when I find the bastards who did this to them, I will put the fear of God and Droods into them!”
Molly smiled fondly at me. “I think that’s what I like best about you, Eddie. You always get really angry about the right things.”
I nodded. I was too angry to speak.
Molly headed deeper into what remained of the small country town of Little Stoke. She strode along, her feet hammering on the disturbed air like the drumbeats of an approaching army. I followed her, trusting to her witchy Sight to guide us, even though every direction felt the same to me. It was hard to make progress in a place where streets had no beginning and no ending, as though the world moved under our feet and we stayed put. We walked down one street several times before we realised what was happening: that its far end was attached to its beginning, like an endless Möbius strip. I lost my patience and my temper and applied a lateral thinking solution to the problem by turning abruptly sideways and smashing my way through one of the buildings. Bricks broke and shattered stickily under my hammering golden fists, some of them cracking into moist fragments, like exploded fruit. I broke through the wall and strode through the house, bludgeoning my way through room after room, rubble raining down on my armoured shoulders, until finally I burst out the other side and into a new street. Molly followed close behind me. We set off down the street, one that had sense enough not to piss me off, and Molly quickly picked up the trail again.
I couldn’t trust anything I saw, even through all the filters and protections built into my golden mask. Not everything I saw was actually there, or acted the way it should act, and things became other things became things I had no name for. I kept slogging doggedly on after Molly, trusting her to guide me through the ever-shifting chaos, kept on slamming my heavy feet down, forcing my way through anything the town could send at me, fuelled by willpower and a stubborn refusal to be beaten. There were people depending on me.
Often it seemed to me that Molly was changing direction again and again, choosing ways that made no sense at all, going up and down and back and forth and not getting anywhere. But I trusted her, and I didn’t trust the world, so I kept going.
My armour was still smoking and steaming as the rotten world fought to get through the strange matter and get at me.
Cars parked in the street were now strangely alive: no longer metal, but made up of meat and bone and cartilage. Ghastly red striations of muscle all along their length, with eyes instead of lights and snapping fanged mouths where radiator grilles should have been. The tyres were pink and sweaty, like internal organs pushed out into the light. The cars made sounds like children crying as they lurched up and down the streets, attacking one another, tearing and rending, their glistening hides oozing sweat and blood and musk. One of the cars came right at us, howling like some jungle creature, and I stood my ground and let it crash into me. For all its speed and weight it slammed to a halt immediately, its fleshy hood crumpled against my armour, torn meat leaking blood and pus. It backed away, crying miserably, hawking up blood, and every other car fell on it and ate it alive. Molly and I kept going and didn’t look back.
Time couldn’t be trusted in this broken place any more than space. Linear time, cause and effect, past and present and future came and went, following strange new patterns and connections. Sometimes it seemed like I was leading Molly, or that we were already on the way back from wherever we were going, so that even talking became difficult.
“Still heading for the survivors,” said Molly.
“How should I know?” I said.
“I don’t think
