From a Drood to a Kill - Simon R. Green Page 0,161

see. Maybe I can find a few useful items small enough to fit into my pockets.”

I suddenly realised Molly was holding the gun she’d acquired in the Nightside. “Why have you still got that gun, Molly?”

“They took away my magics,” she said, not looking at me. “I have to have something.”

I felt as though I should say something, but I couldn’t think what. In the end, I just nodded. She had a point.

I strode off down the hallway, Molly trotting along beside me. Taking a close look at everything that seemed as though it might be valuable. I thought about fairy gold, which turns to leaves when returned to the real world, but I said nothing. The more I saw, the less the Hall felt right. I checked to see that we both had shadows, and that our feet were making the right kind of sounds on the waxed and polished wooden floor. Everything was as it should be . . . but I couldn’t escape the feeling that something wasn’t right.

When you know you’re in a trap, the Devil is always going to be in the details.

And while I knew this wasn’t the real Hall, there was no getting away from the fact that part of me wanted it to be real. To put all this madness behind me, and be home again.

I glanced at the line of portraits of old, dead Droods, the honoured departed, that stretched all the way down the long wall, from our oldest paintings to the most recent photographs. When seen out of the corner of my eye, they all seemed strangely blurred, only to snap into sharp focus whenever I looked at one directly. And sometimes it seemed to me that a face here and there would turn to follow me as I passed. Everything else seemed dependably real and solid, and properly detailed. But I couldn’t shake the suspicion that something important was missing.

On a sudden impulse, I moved quickly over to a side door and slammed it open, and there on the other side was the room I’d been heading for. But it shouldn’t have been there, behind that door. I ran down the hallway, with Molly hurrying to keep up, loudly demanding to know what was wrong. I kicked open the door at the end of the hallway, and there was the room again. Only this time, it was where it should have been. Molly looked back down the hall, and then back at the end room, and shuddered briefly.

“Okay, that is spooky. Someone is playing games with us, Eddie.”

“Of course they are!” I said. “That’s the point!”

“Well, pardon me for breathing! Don’t you snap at me, Eddie Drood, or I will slap you one and it will hurt!”

“Sorry,” I said. “I really don’t like being messed with, in what looks like my own home. It’s like someone is meddling with my memories. Sniping at me from behind the scenes.”

I looked out the window opposite, and for a moment I saw faces looking in. Strangely familiar faces, though they were come and gone so quickly I couldn’t place them or put a name to them. I hurried over to the window and looked out, but nobody was there. Molly quickly forced her way in beside me and studied the sweeping green lawns.

“What? What did you see, Eddie?”

“You didn’t see them?”

“See who? I wasn’t looking.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

I turned my back on the window and scowled at the room around us. The almost exact familiarity of the Hall was giving me the creeps. Like a monster hiding behind the mask of a friendly face.

“We didn’t choose this setting,” I said. “Someone else did. Which means this is a trap. I think we need to get the hell out of here.”

“Are you sure?” said Molly. “If we keep going, we might flush out our hidden enemy, force him to reveal himself.”

“We’re going,” I said. “I won’t play their Game.”

But of course it was never going to be that easy. Whichever way I went, whichever route I chose, it never led us outside. When I strode back down the hallway and out the main entrance, I found myself walking back into the hallway through the end door. I tried a dozen different ways out, running up and down side corridors and kicking open side doors, but somehow Molly and I always ended up back in the hallway. And when I finally lost my temper and tried to dismiss the whole setting by