Page 80 of Only a Monster

‘He can’t,’ Joan whispered back, with more confidence than she felt. ‘Or we wouldn’t be here. We wouldn’t have got this far.’

Ruth shook her head. She was still looking out at the view. The window’s reflection made her face ghostly. ‘There’s something wrong about this,’ she whispered.

‘This place—’ Joan started.

‘Not just this place,’ Ruth said. ‘There’s something wrong about all of this. I feel as if we’ve got something wrong.’

‘What do you mean?’ Joan said.

‘I don’t know,’ Ruth said. ‘I don’t know. It’s just a feeling.’

Joan didn’t know what she meant. To her, this seemed right. Gran had given her a key to the Monster Court. And now they were here. Now they were achingly close to bringing their family back to life. ‘We can’t stop now,’ she said. ‘We’re almost there.’ She looked at Tom for confirmation.

He nodded. ‘We’re near to the lion’s den now.’

But Joan started to feel the wrongness too as Tom led them down a long stone gallery, half open to a formal garden. In the garden, there were statues of animals on pedestals—a chained leopard in carnival colours, a unicorn with a horn as sharp as a sabre—dozens of them, garishly painted and gilded.

‘Where is everybody?’ Joan asked him again. ‘Where are the people who live here? Where’s the King?’

‘The King is never seen,’ Tom said. When Joan turned to him, he said: ‘When he wants something done, he sends a member of the Monster Court in his place.’

Joan remembered the story Aaron told. ‘Like Conrad?’ she said. The man who’d executed Aaron’s cousin.

‘Conrad,’ Tom agreed. ‘Or Eleanor. Or the one we call the Giant. Those are the three members of Court who come near the vicinity of our time.’

‘I overheard someone mention Conrad in the halls,’ Ruth said. ‘He’s here tonight.’

The others visibly shivered. Tom looked over his shoulder. ‘We need to be quiet now,’ he whispered. ‘Guards patrol much more regularly closer to the Royal Archive.’

At the end of a stretch of smooth green lawn, they reached a staircase leading down. Joan stood there at the black mouth of it.

Tom left Frankie at the top of the stairs. He descended.

From below, there were startled sounds, then pained sounds, then no sounds. Tom reappeared and grabbed Frankie. ‘All clear,’ he said unnecessarily.

Tom led them down the flight of stairs. Joan’s heavy dress swept against her legs as she descended. She felt as if she were walking down to a bunker. The air began to smell of mud and brine. Joan imagined the frozen mountain of the river just beyond the thick stone wall.

At the bottom of the staircase, four guards lay sprawled on a dark rug. Joan looked at Tom, impressed. He’d taken out four armed men by himself.

Tom bent and unbuckled a wristwatch from one of the guards. ‘Eleven thirty,’ he said. The new guards would arrive on the hour.

‘Okay, let’s go,’ Joan said.

Beyond here, Tom had no idea of the archive’s security; he’d never been allowed to guard it. Ruth had hedged her bets by bringing a selection of tools. Joan was secretly hoping there wouldn’t be any more security. How much security could an archive in the Monster Court even need? The gates only opened every century or so.

Aaron led the way out of the alcove at the bottom of the stairs and into the passage to the archive. At his low gasp, Joan looked up.

The passage was only about twenty feet long, and it ended in a wooden door with a winged-lion insignia carved into it. The door to the archive. But there was something between them and the door. . . .

At first, all Joan could see was a patch of bright white on the passage floor. As she walked closer, the brightness resolved into a snowy landscape. She stared. There was a slice of winter in the middle of the passage.

‘What is that?’ she whispered. Light shone on the snow. She looked up and saw a piece of daytime sky, dazzlingly blue. It didn’t look like a London sky.

The stretch of snow was about ten feet across. Joan could almost imagine jumping over it. She put her hand out tentatively. The air pushed back. ‘There’s a barrier.’ It felt like magnetic repulsion.

Ruth came closer. ‘Did you see that?’

‘See what?’ Joan said. But now she saw it too. Inside the wintry landscape, a shadow was moving on the snow.

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