(To a Drood, it’s an illusion. To everyone else, it’s a solid stone wall. And if you crash into it, don’t come crying to us. Serves you right for trying to find us.)
Bright sunlight splashed over the car as I left the illusion behind me and followed the long gravel path between two long rows of elm trees and on into the extensive grounds of the Hall. There were perfectly laid out lawns, expertly trimmed and long enough to land a plane on. Sprinklers tossed their liquid bounty around, filling the summer air with a moist haze. Beyond the lawns there were hedge mazes and flower gardens, ornamental fountains in the grand Victorian style with water gushing tastefully from classical statues, and even our own lake with swans drifting on it.
As I approached the Hall, peacocks paraded across the manicured lawns, announcing my arrival with their harsh and raucous cries. An old wishing well stood to one side, its red roof rusting and flaking away. We filled it in with concrete for getting too cocky. Winged unicorns grazed outside the adjoining stables, tossing their noble heads at me, their coats so perfect a white they seemed almost to glow. Watchful gryphons patrolled around the Hall, keeping an eye on the near future, ready for any attack. The perfect guardians and watchdogs. Unfortunately, they only eat carrion, and they like to roll in it first, so no one ever pets them and they are never allowed inside.
My family home has always been colourful as all hell. The waterfall feature has an undine in it, the old chapel has a ghost (though my family isn’t on speaking terms with it), and there are occasionally faeries at the bottom of our garden. Though if you’re wise you’ll give them plenty of space.
The Hall loomed up before me like a dentist’s appointment; it might be necessary, but you just know it’s all going to end in tears. My feelings on seeing the old homestead again after so long were so mixed I didn’t even know where to start. Everywhere I looked, familiar sights leapt to my eyes, assaulting me with nostalgia for times past, when the world seemed so much simpler. This was the place of my childhood, my formative years. I remembered sailing across the lake in a boat made of cobwebs and sealing magics under the kind of blue sky and brilliant sun you only get in memories of childhood summers. I remembered being four years old, chasing the peacocks on my stubby legs and crying because I couldn’t catch them. I remembered dancing on the roof in elfin boots, and flying on the unicorns, and…just lying on the lawns with a good book, dozing through endless summer afternoons…
I also remembered endless lessons in crowded schoolrooms, endless harsh discipline and cold courtesy, and the silent sullen resistance of my teenage years as I stubbornly refused to be led and moulded and dictated to. The never-ending arguments with increasingly senior members of the family over the way my life should go, and the terrible feeling of being crushed and limited by their rigid expectations of who and what a Drood should be. My need to be my own man, in a family where that could never be permitted. In the end I didn’t so much leave as run away, and to the Matriarch’s credit, she let me go.
I remembered the beatings, the angry raised voices, and, worse, the cutting cold words of disappointment. The withholding of treats and privileges and affection, until I learned to do without them, just to spite the family. I learned to be self-sufficient the hard way. You temper a sword by beating the crap out of the steel; and I have one hell of a temper.
Now I’d been summoned back, without explanation or warning, and a cold knot of warning and paranoia twisted in the pit of my stomach. Nothing good could come of this. Nothing good for me, anyway. Part of me wanted to just crash the car to a halt, turn it around, and drive back out. Just keep driving and driving, leave England, and lose myself in the darker parts of the world, forget I ever was a Drood. But I couldn’t do that. The family wouldn’t forget. They would declare me rogue, apostate, security risk, and they would never stop until they had hunted me down.
And besides, even after all the arguments and disagreements, I still believed in what the family stood for. I still believed in fighting the good fight.
I turned the car through a long, drawn-out curve, and the Hall swung into place before me, dominating the scene. A huge sprawling old manor house, the Hall dated back to Tudor times originally, but had been much added to down the centuries. The central building still had the traditional black-and-white boarded frontage, with heavy leaded-glass windows and a jutting gabled roof. Surrounding it were the four great wings, massive and solid in the old Regency style, containing some fifteen hundred bedrooms, all of them currently occupied by family members. Everyone here is a Drood. The roof rose and fell like a gray tiled sea, complete with gables, gargoyles, and ornamental guttering. Not forgetting the observatory, the aerie, the landing pad, and more aerials and antennae than you could shake a gremlin at. There are many rooms in my family’s mansion, and there’s room for everyone. As long as you toe the line.
The Hall is also a real swine to heat, draughty as all hell in the winter, and the family doesn’t believe in central heating because they think it makes you soft. I grew up thinking wearing long underwear half the year was normal.
And in the Hall’s most secret chambers, my family decides the fate of the world. Seven days a week, no time off for good behaviour.
This isn’t my family’s first home, of course. The Droods were an old, old family even back in Tudor times. We moved on and moved up as we grew in size and status and influence. But the Hall has been our home and centre of operations for so long now it’s hard to think of us anywhere else. You won’t find the Hall on any official map, nor will you find any of the routes that lead to it. I’d felt the many layers of scientific and magical defences sliding aside to let me pass as I drove down the long graveled drive, rising and falling before me like a series of shifting veils, and then sealing themselves behind me again. Someone was watching me from the moment I passed through the stone wall, and would continue to watch until I left again. Robot guns actually rose up out of the lawns to track my car at one point before reluctantly burying themselves again. They were new. But of course, it’s always the defences you can’t see or sense that will really screw you over. Anyone who comes looking for us, uninvited and unexpected, risks being killed in any number of increasingly distressing ways.
The family has always taken its privacy very seriously. When you’ve been protecting and policing the world for as long as we have, you can’t help but accumulate serious enemies. The Hall and its extensive grounds are surrounded and suffused with layer upon layer of protections, including a whole bunch of scarecrows. We make them out of old enemies. If you listen in on the right supernatural frequency, you can hear them screaming. Don’t mess with the Droods. We take it personally. We get mad and we get even.
I brought the Hirondel to a crashing halt right before the front door, in a swirl and a spray of churned-up gravel, and parked right there just because I knew I wasn’t supposed to. I turned off the engine, and then sat there for a while, staring at nothing and tapping my fingertips on the steering wheel, listening to the cries of the peacocks and the slow ticking of the cooling engine. I didn’t want to do this. By not leaving the car I was putting off the moment when I would have to enter my old home and walk back into the cold, distant embrace of my family. But…sooner or later you have to walk into the dentist’s surgery and just get it over with.
I slammed the car door loudly, enjoying the echoes, and then locked it. Not because it was necessary, or even because it would stop whomever they sent to move it. I just wanted to make it clear to everyone that I didn’t trust anyone here. The Hall rose up before me like a tidal wave cast in stone. It looked even bigger than I remembered, up close, and even more forbidding. I could feel its mass, its centuries of accumulated duty and responsibility, trying to suck me in like a black hole, but I balked at the front door. I was supposed to walk straight in and present myself to the Matriarch, as custom and tradition demanded…but I’ve never been big on doing what I’m supposed to do. And since I was still more than a bit resentful at being summoned back so abruptly, I decided that the Matriarch could wait while I went for a little walk.