End of the Century (27 page)

“My home,” Stillman said, hitting the Frankenstein's lab switch on the wall, turning on the lights.

They had to be hundreds of feet underground.

Stillman tucked the Hostpur pistol into the pocket of his slacks, and then shucked off his trench coat and suit jacket.

“I'd offer you something to drink, but you look like you've had enough, love.”

The walls and ceiling were an unbroken curve, with the floor flat, the large space like a long cylinder with one side cut off. It was just like the Underground stations Alice had gone through. Had it only been that morning?

“This is a subway station, isn't it?”

Stillman nodded. “For a few minutes, at least. On the Metropolitan Line. Opened in 1882, and closed two years after that.” He pointed over Alice's head, and she looked up to see the sign.

T
OWER OF
L
ONDON
.

“They built Mark Lane, later Tower Hill, just a little ways off, and shut this one down. It was just an empty hole until the Second World War. Lots of the old stations got used for the effort. Churchill and his War Time Cabinet used Down Street Station in a pinch, when they couldn't use the War Rooms in Whitehall and Paddock was still being built. The SOE used this one for sensitive records storage. Then after the war, it ended up MI8's patch, and that was that.”

Alice was sure she must look as confused as she felt. “What?”

Stillman quirked her a smile. “Can you keep a secret, love?” He winked. “I'm a
spy
.”

Stillman's home was a kind of H shape, two long tunnels connected by a narrow hallway. The first tunnel, the one behind the door at the bottom of the stairs,
was like some kind of insane subterranean yard sale, all sorts of furniture and filing cabinets and desks and chairs strewn across the floor in no discernible order. In one corner was an elephants' graveyard of ancient computers, typewriters, telex machines, and telephones. There was a world map on the right-hand wall, enormous, like something from a NASA control room, or maybe a mad scientist's lair, only partially obscured by the towers of junk before it. The map was decades out of date, as near as Alice could tell, with pushpins marking positions in the USSR and other nations forgotten to history.

Opposite the map was some kind of crest, a black raven atop a castle tower, that on second glance looked more like a chess piece, with the initials S.I.D. and a Latin motto in a scroll.
PERICULA OCCULTA, DEFENSOR ARCANUS
. Something like “hidden dangers, secret defender.”

“S.I.D.?” Alice read aloud.

“Signals Intelligence Directorate, originally.” Stillman had his jacket and trench coat draped over his arm. “Special Intelligence Directorate, eventually.” He smiled. “Don't know what they call it, nowadays, but it hardly matters. It was always MI8 when anyone came calling.”

The man started toward the narrow hallway that opened off of the middle of the tunnel. Alice didn't know where the tunnel went yet and wasn't sure she wanted to.

“Come along, girl. Let's get some coffee in you, sober you up a bit. Then maybe you can tell me why the Huntsman and his Gabriel Hounds are after you.”

Huntsman? Alice nodded absently and followed along behind.

On the other end of the hallway was another tunnel, which must have originally been the same size and shape as the first—and both of them, she realized, must have had trains running through at some point, the tracks buried somewhere under the floor—but where the first tunnel had been a big unbroken space, this second tunnel had been sectioned up into smaller rooms. The center section was probably the largest, with carpet on the floor, a large sofa flanked by recliners on either side, an ancient television atop a stand, and a big coffee table. On the wall was a smaller version of the crest from the other room, with the raven atop the tower and the Latin motto scrolling beneath. Opening off this large room was a kitchen, and opposite it a bathroom. Doors on either wall, one to the left of the kitchen and one to
the right of the bathroom, led to a narrow hallway that seemed to run the length of the tunnel. At one end, Alice would later learn, was a bedroom, at the other a library.

Stillman left Alice on the couch, her backpack in her lap, and returned a short while later with a steaming pot of coffee and a pair of mugs. Alice wasn't much of a coffee drinker, but she was glad for something to wash the taste of stale smoke and beer from her mouth, and accepted the proffered mug with thanks.

“So, wait,” Alice said, trying to get her bearings. “Why'd you say you're a spy? What's
that
about?”

“Well.” Stillman shrugged. “I suppose it's because I
am
a spy.” He chuckled. “Or was, at any rate.”

Alice tugged the pack of cigarettes from her jacket pocket. She had one of the butts between her lips before she thought to ask, “Mind if I smoke in here?”

“Those things'll kill you, you know.” Stillman smiled. “But I'll allow it if you'll spare one for me. It's been too many years since I indulged.”

Alice shook a cigarette out of the pack for him and handed it over.

“Might I trouble you for a light?” Stillman asked.

It took a moment, but Alice managed to fish the match case from her pocket.

“Mmm.” Stillman studied the case, his brows knit. “How
oddly
familiar.” Then he shook his head, struck a match, and held it up, first for Alice, then himself. Then, coffee and cigarettes in hand, the two of them settled back onto the couch.

“So you're a spy,” Alice said, a statement and not a question. “Like James Bond?”

“I hope not.” Stillman sneered. “No, we were of a different sort, I suppose you'd say. Didn't do all the regular sort of cloak-and-dagger cat-and-mouse like the lads and ladies of Five and Six—that's the Security Service and Secret Intelligence Service, if you want to be pedantic, but everyone always called them MI5 and MI6. Just like our lot was the Special Intelligence Directorate, but everyone called us MI8. We'd picked the name up during the war, back when Eight was just signals intelligence for the Special Operations Executive. MI8, or Military Intelligence Section 8, in charge of signals intelligence and cryptography. That's how we got in this business, you understand.
See, the Y Services of the armed forces, along with the SID, began to intercept German wireless traffic encrypted with some new code. Ultimately, the SID and Alan Turing and the rest of the cryptographers at Bletchley Park were able to decode these transmissions, which turned out to be information about top-secret investigations carried out by the SS Ahnenerbe.”

“The what?” Alice wasn't sure if it was the residual drunk, or if he was really just talking nonsense.

“The Ahnenerbe. Supposedly some sort of cultural heritage group set up by Himmler and his goons, but they were much dirtier than that. The Nazis believed all sorts of crazy things—that the world was hollow and we lived on the inside, that the ancient Egyptians had nuclear power, that Atlantis was real and was where flying saucers came from, you name it—but the job of the Ahnenerbe was to go out and prove this malarkey. Well, these transmissions we'd picked up said that the mad buggers were attempting to establish communications with intelligences in another plane of existence. Another universe altogether.”

“Another
universe
?” Alice wasn't sure they even had long-distance
telephone
calls back then, much less person-to-person in another universe.

Stillman nodded. “It was all immediately classified Above Top Secret and put on a strictly need-to-know basis. And since we in the SID, along with Turing and the gang at Bletchley, already knew, it was quickly decided that no one else needed to know anything. Operatives of the SOE were dispatched to interfere with the Ahnenerbe's plans, and from that point on the SID was in the occult business.”

Alice didn't believe a word of it. She was trapped in a hole, deep below the street, with a crazy man. Who, unless she was mistaken, was very definitely gay. So what did he want with
her
?

On the other hand, she
had
recognized this guy from her visions, and even knew his name, kinda-sorta, though in a rebus-in-
Highlights
-magazine sort of way. A lake's still waters for Stillman Waters. So what did she know?

There were three options, as she saw it. Either she was crazy, or he was crazy, or neither of them were crazy and everything he was saying was the truth.

“So let me get this straight. Not only are there ghosts and ghouls and monsters and such, but there are secret agents who keep tabs on them?”

“Well, not precisely, love, but that's the general gist of it, I suppose.”

“And the secret agents got their start eavesdropping on Nazis'
phone
calls?”

Stillman laughed and took a sip of his coffee. “You think that's bad, you Yanks have your own bunch who muck about in the dark corners, but they were originally part of the post office!” He set his coffee cup down and took a long drag of his cigarette. “My hand to God, if you believe that sort of thing. The offices of Bureau Zero are still under the old Post Office Building in Washington. And the French Cabinet Noir, come to that, got their start snooping in people's mail, so were postal, too, of a sort.”

Seeing Alice's expression, Stillman crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray he'd dug up, and continued, somewhat more seriously.

“Look, don't get me wrong. I'm not talking about fantasy here. What I'm saying is that there is often a verifiable phenomenon behind supposed supernatural occurrences. If you dig deep enough into myths and fairy tales and legends, like as not you'll come up with something really going on back there that doesn't fit with the everyday view of things. And it
is
supernatural, but only in the dictionary definition of a realm or system higher than nature. There are worlds beyond this one, love, other planes of existence that sometimes intersect with our own. And it's guys like me who see that those intersections don't mean curtains for the rest of you.”

“And it was the Nazis that discovered this, I take it?” Alice was sobering by the minute, but finding this no easier to swallow.

“Well, no. That is, they did, but others already knew. See, there's always been guys like me, standing at the borders. Back in Queen Elizabeth's day there was the School of Night, John Dee and that crowd, that had worked it out from first principles. They had their own agents, Lord Strange's Men, who came to be known as the Strangers further down the line. There's your Bureau Zero over in Washington, who've been knocking about since the early 1800s. The Soviets had a mob of them, as did the Japanese in the old days. As did the Chinese. There've never been too many, you understand, on-the-job mortality being pretty high in this business, but we've always been around.”

“So why don't people know about this stuff?”

“Well, it was my job to see that they didn't, wannit? Which isn't to say that stories don't leak out, here and there. But most people just believe what they want to believe, so it's pretty easy to pass off a projection from a faster universe as swamp gas, or a probe from another continuum as a weather balloon, if need be.”

Alice narrowed her eyes. “So what's this Huntsman about, then? Is he one of you guys?”

“See, perfect example!” Stillman snapped his fingers. “Near as we can figure, he's a regular human who was affected by exposure to a reality incursion, long time ago.” He took in Alice's confused expression. “By a little bit of another universe impinging on our own. Happens from time to time. Scientists are starting to talk about it in the open, nowadays. About quantum interactions between different universes. Happens all the time but we hardly notice, since most of the encounters are with universes too small to make a difference. But if our universe were to collide with a much bigger one, we could all find ourselves living in a world where the boiling point of water had dropped to zero, or gravity was the strongest force, or some such.” He mused. “Course, when I was D and in charge of MI8, we'd put a stop to scientists publishing talk like that. Hell, when I was a Rook the old D authorized sanctions, a time or two, on just such an occasion. But after I put myself out to pasture, years ago, they moved the shop across the river, and I guess they're using a different playbook nowadays.”