"Did they treat you badly?" said Rafe.
"It's more like… it worried me, how much at home I felt. Like I belonged there… Far more than I ever did here. I'll think about Molly, Eddie. I'm sure she'll come back to me… What did you come here looking for? No one ever comes down here just to see me, for which I am inordinately grateful. So, what do you want? All the knowledge in the world is on these shelves, somewhere. Try me. My thoughts are clear, even if my memory isn't what it was. If it ever was… Who can tell? I like butterscotch."
"I need to know about the Immortals," I said. "And the Apocalypse Door."
"The Immortals are just a legend!" said Rafe. "Everyone knows that. There are a number of technically immortal individuals out there, or at least, very long-lived… but you're probably already familiar with most of those. Mr. Stab, of course. The Djinn Jeanie. The Griffin…"
"No, he died just recently, in the Nightside," said William. "And his appalling wife. I got a letter from the chap who runs the Nightside… Walker! That's the fellow! Yes. Apparently Satan turned up personally, just to drag the Griffins down into the Pit. Well, that's the Nightside for you. Terrible place. I don't know why we don't just go in there in force, and Do Something about it."
"I said that," I said. "It seems there's an old and very binding pact: no Droods allowed in the Nightside."
"Really?" said Rafe. "And what do we get out of it?"
"I did ask the Matriarch," I said. "And she made a point of changing the subject." I looked at William. "Why would Walker be writing letters to you? Do you and he know each other?"
"Who can say?" said William. "Immortals… There's the Lord of Thorns, Old Father Time, Jimmy Thunder God For Hire, the Regent of Shadows…"
"We don't talk about him!" Rafe said immediately.
"Well pardon me for breathing," William said testily. "Even when my mind was working perfectly, I never could be bothered remembering who was In and who was Out. The important thing is, there are any number of individual immortals running around, making nuisances of themselves, and always have been. Not all of them human, of course. I once met a Lamia in Liverpool…" William grinned nastily. "Big teeth…"
"But never a family of Immortals," said Rafe. "Not organised, like us…"
William frowned suddenly. "There are at present two hundred and seventeen books missing from the Old Library, not including folios, bound manuscripts and collected letters. No doubt more absences will make themselves known. With no Index to consult, we can only deduce what these titles might have been from gaps on the shelves, and references in other books. It's always possible some of these books were removed because they contained information on the Immortals. Or the Apocalypse Door. Lots of people have been bothering me about that Door, just recently."
"Interesting items have turned up in Alexander King's secret files, removed from Place Gloria," said Rafe. "The Independent Agent hoarded all kinds of secret knowledge and lost information. We've uncovered strange and wonderful stuff, including a whole crate of books from alternate Earths, where history had taken very different turns. One was written in Martian. With very unpleasant illustrations. New material is turning up all the time, in truck loads. They just dump it here, once a week, and leave it for us to sort out. As if we didn't have enough on our plate already. Just identifying, sorting and indexing the Old Library's contents is taking us forever."
"And the Matriarch won't allow us any extra help, because so much of the material is sensitive," said William, disparagingly. "Silly cow. If you can't trust a Drood, who can you trust?"
"The Matriarch is dead, William," said Rafe.
"Oh all right, I'll have a word with her later. You know, I'm almost sure I saw something about the Apocalypse Door just recently…"
He tottered away and started rummaging through an old tea chest full of papers.
"How is he?" I said quietly to Rafe. "Really?"
"Not good," Rafe admitted. "Better some days than others. He still has a brilliant mind, when it's working. But there's no doubt all those years in the madhouse put their mark upon him."
"And there's no telling how much damage the Heart did to his mind, before he fled the Hall." I frowned. "I think we need to put up the money and hire a major-league telepath, and have them dig around inside his head."
"I have suggested that, on more than one occasion, but the Matriarch was always very firm," said Rafe. "She wouldn't allow it. Apparently William knows far too much about this family, too many dirty little secrets. Things no outsider can be allowed to know. Even if William can't remember them. We do have a few telepaths in the family…"
"You have got to be kidding," I said. "I wouldn't trust that bunch to guess my weight. I certainly wouldn't let them trample around inside a mind that's been messed about with as much as William's has… They might never get out again. The Armourer did say he'd come up with some kind of mind-scanning device… but his methods aren't exactly subtle, either."
"You just have to give William some time," said Rafe. "He'll recover, eventually."
"What can you tell me about the rogue Drood known as Tiger Tim?" I said, deliberately changing the subject. "His name came up in connection with the LA auction and, surprisingly, with Doctor Delirium."
William looked up suddenly from his tea chest. "Now there's a name from the past! Timothy Drood… Yes. Nasty little man. Nice enough when you had something he wanted, but it was always him first and everyone else second. What we used to call a bad seed, in my young days. I can't believe someone hasn't killed him yet, if only on general principles… He was hiding out somewhere in South America, last I heard. Peru?"
"He's moved, since then," said Rafe. "Just ahead of being kicked out, as usual. He's holed up deep in the Amazon rain forest these days."
"The same area as Doctor Delirium," I said.
"Well yes, technically," said Rafe. "But the Amazon rain forest does cover a hell of a lot of ground. They're not exactly neighbours."
"Doctor Delirium and Tiger Tim," said William. "The team-up you never expected! The horror, the horror…" He got the giggles, waved a careless hand and turned back to his tea chest. He grabbed something, studied it closely, and then straightened up waving a dusty file triumphantly. "Here it is! Knew it was somewhere near the top… The Shudder File. Carefully annotated in the Independent Agent's own handwriting. And according to this Post-it note on the cover, from the Drood cleanup team, Alexander King kept this particular file inside a locked box, inside a wall safe. So it must be worth looking at…" He opened the file and leafed quickly through it. "Yes… Oh, this is bad and nasty stuff, all right. A lot of supernatural and super-science weapons and devices, all of them banned by any number of international treaties. The Speaking Gun, The Ubershreck Device, Mephisto's Minuet… All the kind of thing no one in their right mind would want to mess with."
"Did Alexander King actually possess these things?" I said, reaching for the file. Walker pulled it away, glaring at me as I held my hands up in surrender. "I just meant," I said, "that if some of these things are still lying around Place Gloria, we need to warn the people working there."
"Oh no," said William. "This is more of a wants list-items he was interested in acquiring. If only so other people couldn't use them against him. Ah! Yes, here we are! The Apocalypse Door!"