For Heaven's Eyes Only

needed. The one place we couldn’t hope to find it. They need only to wheel it out when it’s time to prepare people for the Great Sacrifice.”

“Same for the kidnapped townspeople of Little Stoke,” said Molly. “And the abducted weapons makers from the Supernatural Arms Faire. And Isabella! The one place they could hold her from which even she couldn’t escape!”

“If she’s still alive,” I said carefully.

“Of course she’s still alive!” Molly glared at me, her hands clenched unknowingly into fists. “She has to be alive. I’d know if she were dead.”

I considered her thoughtfully. “You once said to me . . . that the Metcalf sisters come as a package. Which is why Isabella can keep getting in and out of the Hall so easily.”

“It is?” said the Armourer.

“Molly,” I said, “could you use that link to find your sister, and establish a connection between this reality and the Timeless Moment?”

“It’s not as simple as that,” Molly said reluctantly. “The conspiracy wouldn’t be able to detect the link, so they couldn’t block it; but even so, the best I could do would be to point you in the right direction. Metaphorically speaking.”

“I have an idea on how to take it from there,” I said. “Not a very safe or even particularly sane idea, but . . . Uncle Jack.”

“This is going to be really bad, isn’t it?” said the Armourer. “I always know it’s going to be something really bad when you start calling me Uncle Jack instead of Armourer. What do you have in mind, Eddie?”

“Back when the Hall was under attack by the Accelerated Men,” I said carefully, “the Sarjeant-at-Arms mentioned a last-resort defence called Alpha Red Alpha.”

“What’s that?” Molly said immediately. “I’ve never heard of it before. And from the way you said it, it sounds like something I very definitely ought to have been told about.”

“Alpha Red Alpha,” the Armourer said heavily, “is Drood Hall’s very last and scariest line of defence. A powerful dimensional engine buried deep under the Hall. Most of the family don’t even know it’s there, on the grounds that if they knew there was a very powerful and largely untested dimensional engine right under where they lived, they wouldn’t want to live here anymore. And quite rightly, too. Powered up, Alpha Red Alpha can rotate the entire Hall and everyone in it out of this reality and into another one. The idea being that we could escape a real catastrophe by disappearing into another dimension, and staying there until the danger was past. The engine would bring everyone back when it was safe. However . . .”

“I just knew there was going to be a however,” Molly said to me. “Didn’t you just know there was going to be a however?”

“The engine has never been properly tested,” said the Armourer. “Most of us aren’t even sure it will work. It was only ever activated once; and after what happened on the trial run . . .”

“Did you build this engine?” said Molly.

No! No . . . that was the Armourer before me. Your great-uncle Francis, Eddie. Grandfather Arthur’s younger brother. A brilliant mind, but I think he must have been dropped on his head as a baby. Repeatedly. Francis Drood was an excellent designer and weapons maker, no doubt about it. But unfortunately, he was what these days we would call an extreme lateral thinker. . . . Or completely off his bloody head, as we said at the time. He produced a lot of really useful equipment, which field agents still use today; and he designed three of the forbidden weapons locked away in the Armageddon Codex. Weapons so powerful and potentially destructive that we’ve never dared use them. Simply reading the instruction manual is enough to bring you out in a cold sweat. . . . I’ll say this for the man: He never had any problems thinking big. Thinking rationally and responsibly, yes, major problems there . . .

He created Alpha Red Alpha after the Chinese tried to nuke the Hall back in 1964. Bit of an overreaction, I always thought. . . . Anyway, Francis talked the then Matriarch into setting the engine up for a trial run. We moved most of the family out into the grounds, just in case. . . . We were all very interested to see what would happen, but preferably from a safe distance. Your uncle James came home specially from East Germany, I came back from Nepal and your parents came back from Peru. Then the Matriarch asked for volunteers from among the field agents to accompany and protect the Hall wherever it went, just in case. We tended to use those three words quite a lot, whenever Francis was involved. . . . So the four of us, and four more, volunteered, and we were all there inside the Hall when Francis fired up Alpha Red Alpha for the first time. We had no idea where we were going, where we’d end up. All Francis had was a whole bunch of mathematics that made sense only to him, and assurance that his engine would most definitely send the Hall away. . . .

At first, everything seemed to go fine. The actual transition was a bit . . . disturbing when the Hall dropped out of the world, but it did very definitely reappear Somewhere Else. Not an alternate Earth, or even another reality, but an entirely alien world. Once we came up from the basement and looked out the front windows, the first thing we saw was two suns, blazing impossibly bright in a sick green sky, and when we opened the front door, the air was so packed with excess oxygen and really nasty trace gases that we couldn’t breathe it. We had to armour up to survive in the strange new world that Francis’s engine had brought us to. We’d been dropped right into the middle of an alien jungle full of plants and animals and . . . creatures we’d never seen before. Some of them so different and disturbing they hurt your head to look at them. Everything was wrong . . . a living nightmare packed with horrible things everywhere we looked.

And while we were still getting our heads round that, the whole jungle rose up at once and attacked us. Not only the awful things that lived in the jungle, but the plants themselves. Raging, thrashing, whipping long tendrils at us . . . Everything was alive and angry and utterly antagonistic. Thousands of creatures hit the Hall at once, from every direction, smashing through the windows, hammering against the closed doors, rising up to try to break in through the roof. We fought them off as best we could, sending Francis back down to fire up the engine and get us all home again. It couldn’t have taken him long, but it seemed to take forever. It was like fighting in a nightmare against horrible things that keep coming at you, no matter how hard you fight. I saw young Alice fall with a hundred thorns blasted through her armour. I saw Oliver pulled down and ripped apart by thrashing plants that crawled all him, his armour no more protection than tinfoil. I saw plants eat them both, and drink their blood.

I still have nightmares sometimes. . . .

“But finally Alpha Red Alpha kicked in again and we came home. The Hall was a mess: battered and broken and infested with all kinds of alien life-forms that had forced their way in. Luckily they couldn’t live in our air, so we stood well back and watched them die. They didn’t understand what was happening to them, but they still tried to kill the few Droods who tried to help. There’re always a few who do the ‘if only we can communicate with them’ thing. . . . I would have taken a flamethrower to the lot of them. We waited till we were sure everything was dead, and then Droods in their armour dragged them all out of the Hall, chopped them up fine, to make sure, burned them in great piles and then buried what was left in a far corner of the grounds. To this day nothing else will grow there.

“It took weeks to reopen the Hall. And fumigate it, because some of the little bastards had left spores to be breathed in by the unsuspecting. . . . After the Matriarch got a good look at what had come back with us, and listened to our story, she told Francis to his face that he was never to use the engine again until he could be sure of where he was sending the Hall. And that Alpha Red Alpha was only ever to be used as a very last resort, after we’d tried everything else, including prayer and closing our eyes and hoping it would all go away. Francis spent the rest of his life, as Armourer and after, in retirement, trying to figure out how to control what he’d created, but he never did. The family buried the engine deep under the Hall, called it Francis’s Folly and wiped it from the official records.

“For everyone’s peace of mind.”

“But,” I said, “could it get us into the Timeless Moment?”

“Somehow I knew you were going to say that,” said the Armourer. “I tell you the most cautionary story I know that doesn’t involve sex, and it didn’t even slow you down. Technically, yes, I suppose it’s possible. But . . . all I could do would be to turn the bloody thing on. And hopefully off again. I have absolutely no idea of how to steer the damned thing, and neither does anyone else.”

“But I can help with that!” said Molly. “My link with Isabella will point us in the right direction. . . .”

“And I can focus that link through the Merlin Glass to take us where we need to go!” I said. “You start the engine up, Uncle Jack; Molly will aim it, and I will steer it. Right into the Timeless Moment.”