Live and Let Drood

you find out they’re still alive.…Don’t you feel anything?”
    I laughed then, grabbed her in my arms and whirled her around, roaring my happiness so loud it hurt my throat. Molly whooped and cheered in my arms, tilting back her head to yell out loud along with me, then hugging me so tight I could barely breathe. After a while we both calmed down and I put her down again, and we leaned tiredly on each other till we got our breath back. I grinned at Molly.
    “This is still very sad,” I said. “A whole other family of Droods has been butchered and their Hall destroyed. But that can wait. My family is out there somewhere, and it’s up to me to track them down.”
    “Such a different family,” said Molly. “So many differences in such a short message. They had a whole different history from you.…But what is their Hall doing here, in our world?”
    “It all comes down to the dimensional engine, Alpha Red Alpha,” I said. “Has to. That damned machine was created to be used only as a last-ditch defence. To save the Hall in a time of crisis, by rotating it out of this dimension, this Earth, and dropping it down in some other dimension, some other Earth, where it could wait safely until the threat here was over. The Armourer, our Armourer, told me that the first and only time it was used before, the Hall ended up materialising in someutterly alien Earth, surrounded by a whole jungle of vicious killer plants. They were lucky to get back alive. That’s why Alpha Red Alpha was never used again, until I persuaded my family to wake it up, to give us access to Castle Shreck in the Timeless Moment. What’s happened here has to be the result of our using Alpha Red Alpha.…”
    “Okay, hold the lecture. I get it,” said Molly. “How about this: Someone found a way to override the machine from outside, and use it to send the Hall somewhere else. And this Hall, this other Hall, was rotated here to take its place. It was vulnerable because all its shields were down! Whoever’s behind this…must have seen it as the perfect way to get rid of your family and cover up what they’d done! No one would even think your family was missing, with this ruined Hall to look at. Even you wouldn’t have known if you hadn’t accidentally activated that recording.”
    “At least Uncle James was still alive in that family,” I said. “We didn’t kill him there. Maybe…because we never met in that world? It was good to see him, to hear his voice again.…”
    “Life is too short to sweat the small shit,” Molly said briskly. “Given a potentially infinite number of other dimensions, an infinite number of choices and outcomes is always going to be possible. If it comforts you to think of that two-faced, treacherous bastard being still alive somewhere else, feel free to do so. After everything that man did and would have done to you, I don’t give a rat’s arse. We’re all alive, we’re all dead and everything in between, on the Wheels of If and Maybe.”
    “Strangely, I don’t feel at all comforted,” I said. “You’re weird sometimes, Molly.”
    She shrugged. “Just trying to be helpful.”
    “So,” I said. “Questions…Where is my family now? And who was responsible for their…abduction? And if they are trapped in…some other place, how can I find and rescue them and bring them home? We need information, Molly. And where better to find that than in a library?”
    Molly laughed and clapped her hands together. “Or, more exactly, an old library! The secret, carefully hidden and very thoroughly protectedOld Library! Do you suppose this family even knows it exists? Your family didn’t until you found it for them.”
    “Let’s go take a look,” I said.
    We found the official Drood Library easily enough and exactly where it should be, but there wasn’t much left of it. The door had been broken in, and all the shelves were empty. Ransacked, stripped clean. The Immortals had done their best to torch the place when they left, but the flames hadn’t taken much of a hold. Molly and I walked between smoke-blackened and half-charred wooden stacks, with the blackened and twisted remains of unwanted books left lying here and there on the floor. But finally, right at the far end of the library, there it was: hanging untouched on the wall, protected by ancient and unsuspected defences, a very old painting of the Old Library. I let go of a breath I hadn’t realised I’d been holding as I saw the flames hadn’t