and lovingly maintained fuselages were raked with bullets. Many of them burst into flames. Golden pilots were flung from their doomed craft, clutching helplessly at nothing as they fell into a void without end. They were still alive, but we had no way of reaching them. I wondered how long they’d fall, and how long they’d live. . . .
The Spitfires banked and rolled at incredible speed, blasting away at the gun emplacements, but they were too few against too many guns. The bullets couldn’t broach the planes’ force shields, so the castle produced guns that fired strange energies that crawled all over the Spitfires, opening up holes in the shields for the guns to fire through. Some exploded, some lost power and some spiralled away into the void like wounded birds. The remaining Spitfires saw there was no point in pressing the fight any longer and turned away, plunging into the void to rescue the fallen. Strictly speaking, they shouldn’t have done that, but family looks after family.
The energy guns then targeted the flying saucers, and they exploded silently one after another in sudden outbursts of unnatural colours.
The rest of us fell on Castle Horror, drawing in our wings to add more speed, but bullets and vicious energies still found us, beating against our armoured breasts, unable to break through. We fell like Furies and hit the castle roof like a rain of golden ammunition. Solid stone shattered under the impact of our golden feet, and many of us ploughed right through to whatever lay below. Some manoeuvred sideways at the last moment and swung round to hit the castle walls dead-on. There were huge stone gargoyles and stylised stone eagles everywhere, and they made good handholds. Soon we were swarming all over Schloss Shreck, opening up holes in the roof with our golden fists, scrambling over the walls like golden beetles, ripping guns out of their emplacements and throwing them into the void.
New weapons fired up through the roof, hitting us with unfamiliar energies. Some were blasted up into the air by the impact; others were knocked off their feet. Droods staggered this way and that as vicious energies crawled all over us, fighting to get in. But our armour held.
I smashed a hole through the roof until I had an opening big enough to drop through. I jumped down into the dark, and I was inside Schloss Shreck. Molly dropped down beside me. None of the attacks had even come close to touching her. We’d arrived in an attic full of junk, most of which I kicked out of the way as I hurried through it, looking for a way down into the castle proper. I could hear more Droods forcing their way in. Molly grinned at me like a naughty child trespassing somewhere she knew she wasn’t allowed. Behind my mask, I couldn’t help smiling, too. It felt good to be striking back at the enemy at last.
I found a trapdoor and a ladder that led down into a wide stone corridor, and soon we were moving swiftly along the castle’s upper floor. Solid stone walls, marble floors, all on a big enough scale to make mere humans feel small. A heavy quiet hung over everything like a shroud. Everywhere I looked there was Nazi regalia: huge flags and hanging banners, blocky black swastikas, eagles with grasping clawed feet, even giant portraits of stylised Aryan youth and soldiers from the 1940s. It was like moving through a museum to history’s worst nightmare, a paean of praise to Hitler’s Nazi Germany: the centre for a celebration that never happened. Molly sniffed loudly.
“Been a while since anyone redecorated here.”
“Nothing’s changed, because this is when the Satanists were a real power in the world,” I said. “This has all been preserved from when they last had a chance of winning. Satanists have always been strangely sentimental. They love the past because that’s when they were what they think they should be. Do me a favour, Molly. All this Nazi shit is getting on my nerves. Do something destructive about it.”
“Love to,” said Molly.
She snapped her fingers, and every single flag and banner burst into flames. The sound of crackling fires was pleasantly loud in the quiet as Molly and I strode cheerfully down the burning corridor.
We descended through stone galleries, wide passageways and long, curving stairs, until finally we found ourselves in a great open hall. Still no sign of anyone. We moved slowly forward, my golden feet hammering on the marble floor. In the middle of the hall lay a large circular table surrounded by what could only be described as thrones. The walls were hung with idealised portraits of men in medieval armour, in symbolic settings. All of them bore swastikas on their breastplates and shields.
“Hitler and his inner circle always did have this strange fascination with tales of King Arthur and his knights,” I said. “Surprising, really, given they had absolutely no understanding of chivalry. Der Führer was supposed to have a layout like this somewhere under the Berchtesgaden . . . like a twisted Camelot. Which would actually be a really cool name for a new indie band.”
“We need to keep moving,” said Molly. “I can feel Isabella’s presence not too far from here . . . but I’m starting to feel something is terribly wrong.”
“Then let’s go find her,” I said. “Lead the way, Molly.”
She turned back the way we’d come, leaving the hall behind us, chose a new direction without hesitation and started down it. She set off at a fierce pace, her face creased with worry, and soon she was running down the corridor, her arms pumping at her sides. Driven on by an urgency only she could feel. I ran alongside her, my armoured feet scarring the marble floor. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen another Drood since I entered the castle, and I couldn’t even hear any sound of fighting or destruction. I reached out to the Sarjeant-at-Arms through my torc, but couldn’t get an answer. Presumably the castle was jamming our communications. I tried Ethel, but I hadn’t heard a word from her since we entered the Timeless Moment. Presumably she was still back on Earth, haunting the place where the Hall had been, waiting for our return. I wondered how long she’d wait. . . .
We went down and down, from floor to floor, until we were forced to a sudden stop by two massive solid- steel doors that blocked our way, twenty feet high if they were an inch, and almost as wide. I pulled at one of the doors, and it didn’t budge at all. There were three separate locks, each the size of my head. I grinned behind my mask, placed both golden hands flat against the doors and pushed hard, till my golden fingers sank deep into the steel. And then I pulled. . . . The three locks exploded, one after another, and Molly had to duck behind me to avoid the pieces that flew through the air like shrapnel. The doors surged outwards under my implacable strength, and when I finally had a big enough gap I let go and walked between them into a hall greater than any I’d seen so far, overwhelmingly huge, hundreds of feet long, full of the strangest collection of weapons and machines of war I’d ever seen.
“I thought we’d come across something like this,” said the Armourer.
I spun around, startled. Molly jumped and made a loud squeak of surprise, and then tried terribly hard to pretend she hadn’t. The Armourer was standing there, in his armour shaped like a lab coat, of all things, looking around the hall with great interest. I slapped him hard across the shoulder, and the sound echoed loudly.
“Sorry,” said the Armourer. “Impossible to communicate in this unnatural place. Still, you have to admit this is really impressive. This is where the Nazis stored all their secret superweapons that were going to win the war for them. All the things they never got a chance to use, because Laurence shut the place down and trapped it here. Look at it all. . . . I’ve read about some of this, but never expected to see it with my own eyes. Prototype flying saucers, massive drilling machines to enter a city from underneath, tanks the size of railway engines, and look at that! A lightweight wooden airplane, to cross the Atlantic and drop their crude nuclear bombs on New York and Washington.”
“A balsa-wood airplane?” said Molly. “Oh, come on . . .”
“Howard Hughes built something similar for the Americans,” I said. “The Spruce Goose. Never put into production, but it did fly. . . .”
“All right, I’ll give you a wooden plane,” said Molly. “But Nazi flying saucers, in the forties?”
“Word was the Nazis had access to a crashed alien starship,” said the Armourer. “Some of the best Nazi minds broke their hearts trying to reverse-engineer it. Imagine trying to build a stardrive with vacuum tubes and slave labour. . . . Still, who knows what they might have achieved, given time? They nearly had the atomic bomb before we did. They were getting desperate enough to try anything towards the end. I don’t even recognise some of the things they’ve got here. Oh, Eddie, we have got to take this back with us! This is all of major historical importance!”
“First things first, Uncle Jack,” I said.
“I have to find Isabella!” said Molly. “She’s in trouble; I know she is. . . .”
“Of course you must,” the Armourer said immediately. “Lead the way, my dear.”
And so off we set again, hurrying through one oversize passageway after another, all of them built to impress or at least intimidate, until finally we found ourselves facing another closed door. More solid steel, with the word
