Live and Let Drood

Jack or his assistants working on some new way to blow themselves and everybody else up. It’s eerie.…”
    I walked slowly between deserted workstations and abandoned testing grounds that should have been full of loud noises and general excitement as Uncle Jack’s technicians happily risked their own lives and others’ testing appalling new weapons of mass disturbance. Nothing had been destroyed in the Armoury, unlike in the War Room or the Operations Room, but the enemy had stripped the place clean. They hadn’t been interested in precious pieces of art that would have sold for millions, but state-of-the-art weapons? Those were different. I checked everywhere, but there were no golden-armoured bodies, no heads on spikes, not even a splash of dried blood. A few things had been overturned here and there, but no signs of any struggle. Which was just…wrong. No matter what the odds or the threats, Uncle Jack and his lab rats would have fought to the last to keep the Armoury out of the hands of our enemies. Hell, Uncle Jack would have blown the whole place up before he’d risk letting Drood weapons fall into the wrong hands. So why didn’t he?
    I stopped and looked about me in frustration. “This would have broken Uncle Jack’s heart,” I said finally. “To see his precious Armoury stripped bare…”
    Molly nodded understandingly. “The Armoury was always his pride and joy. Eddie, the information in his head would have made him invaluable. Do you think… ?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what to think anymore. Hello. What’s this?”
    I knelt down beside a workstation. Something had caught my eye, but I wasn’t sure what. It turned out to be a small black blob on the floor. Molly crouched down beside me, looked at the blob and then looked at me.
    “All right; I’ll bite. What’s so significant about a small black blobby thing? What is it?”
    “It’s a portable door,” I said. “Uncle Jack used to hand them out liketravel-sickness pills to every agent going out in the field. Just slap one of these against any flat surface, and hey, presto! Instant door!”
    “So why did he stop handing them out?” said Molly, instantly cautious.
    “Something about unacceptable side effects,” I said, weighing the blob in my hand. “And if the Armourer thought they were unacceptable…This must have been overlooked.”
    “Take it anyway,” said Molly. “We’re going to need all the help we can get.”
    “Damn right, I’m taking it,” I said. I slipped the thing into my pocket, straightened up and looked around me. “It’s useful, but it’s not a weapon. I want something that goes bang! in a horribly destructive and disturbing way.”
    And then my head snapped round suddenly as a Voice said Eddie! I looked back and forth, but there was no one else in the Armoury. I looked at Molly.
    “Tell me you heard that, too.”
    “Of course I heard it! Someone said your name in a seriously spooky way. But I scanned the whole place before we came in here, and I am telling you we’re the only ones here. No other life signs anywhere, and that includes lab specimens. So who…Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I’m getting something.…”
    She moved slowly between the empty workstations, turning her head back and forth, scowling fiercely as she searched for something she could sense but not see. I was concentrating on the Voice. It had definitely sounded familiar but I couldn’t place it. I knew I’d heard someone call me by my name in just that tone of voice before, but…Molly stopped suddenly before a pile of junk on the floor and cried out triumphantly. She knelt down and stuck both hands into the pile before I could stop her, and pulled out the Merlin Glass. She jumped up to show it to me, brandishing the small silver-backed hand mirror.
    “Result! This is more like it, Eddie!”
    “Could you please stop waving it around so…heartily,” I said carefully. “That is a very powerful and very dangerous object, and this is theArmoury, after all. The Glass was worrying enough as it was, before it got broken in Castle Shreck, and God alone knows what state it’s in now after Uncle Jack’s been tinkering with it.”
    Molly sniffed airily but wasted no time in pressing the Glass into my hands. I accepted it cautiously and looked it over. The Glass had been created for the Drood family by Merlin Satanspawn, way back in the day, and it had many useful properties. But it had been very badly