Page 23 of Preaching to the Choir

She took her shoes off, held them in one hand with the dangling cuff-end stowed conveniently in one. With infinite care she padded, stocking-footed, past Uncle Jas and out.

The thing forcing its way from the mouth had angel wings still half-trapped, was clutching at the lips with too many little clawed hands. Its own face was gaping open, split wide below a caricature of a nose, and a smaller winged figure struggled to be free of it even as its own maw stretched around a miniature prisoner. For a moment Elena was frozen with vertigo, unable to tell if this was a succession of escapes, or if each figure was devouring even as it was devoured.

8.

As she’d feared, it was an entirely new part of the house. Not because the place was bigger on the inside or extended into other dimensions, but because she was underground. That, weirdly, was almost reassuring. That the hidden lab, the crypt, the satanic temple, whatever the heart of this business was, was buried beneath the house—that was the world working as she’d expect. The heart of the Enderby dream, as Ross had called it, was down here with her. And she didn’t know if she could escape, but just perhaps she could do something to destroy the thing that was breeding here.

And in the normal world, with the regular kind of critter, underground was where they belonged. It was where they spent their dormant years, waiting out the obscure mathematical cycles of their lives until the time came for them to erupt en masse, have their brief and noisy party at the expense of everyone’s ears, then die off again for another thirteen or seventeen or however many years. It was something every child learned.

And this was not. This was the secret of secrets, and she had no idea just how terrible it truly was, or how far it extended. Her ignorance burned her. Not just because her life might well depend on understanding what was going on around her, but because there was a whole extra world here, that she’d stumbled into. As though Ross had opened the door to Enderby and revealed a vast buried landscape extending into the Stygian gloom, a fairy kingdom, a mephitic underworld. The very foundations of her world had been shaken, and the only way she could set them straight was with knowledge that she’d surely never possess. All she could work with were the scraps: what she’d seen, chance mentions, the oddities of Godfrey’s attic shrine.

She crept down a dimly-lit hall where a succession of pale, indistinct Enderbough faces gleamed in frames on either side of her. At the far end, a much larger canvas depicted some ancestor done up like an admiral and she shrank back at first, seeing a living person. But it was just some old great-great-uncle who’d had a boat and a big hat and a lot of gold frogging to go around. And the same broad Enderbough build. And doubtless the same family money and influence. Although, apparently, back then a career in the military hadn’t been entirely out of the question. Perhaps he was the sort of admiral who only sailed a desk.

The thought of Melissa, of her thwarted ambitions and wasted life, brought a lump to Elena’s throat, and she fought it back down. Time for grief later. Grief for Melissa. Grief for Ross, because she’d already worked out that surely when she saw him next he wouldn’t be the man she’d known. They’d have done it to him, like they did with Will. Made him one of them. One of the family.

There were voices, but faint, and from above. That deep, carrying rumble all the older Enderboughs had, that would surely dominate a board room or a battlefield. She paused, listening. They were coming no closer, and she could hear only the resonance, not the words within. Go away, she willed, but they just kept chuntering on about God-knew-what. She retraced her steps to the big portrait and went the other way.

And stopped.

A hall receded into shadowy oblivion, but lights burned through an open door to one side. Old-fashioned wall brackets and a far more modern desk lamp. And on the wall, emblazoned with colour…

One of the things. Or its cast-off husk, meticulously pinned to a shield-shaped plaque over the ash of a long-dead fireplace, gleaming in its glorious heraldry. Not the blacks and greens and blues of the things she’d seen lampreyed onto the deer—at that moment when she’d finally understood what they were, though not how they could be—but red and gold and purple, like the standard of an emperor. Whoever had mounted the thing had done a good job, shown it with its stained-glass wings outspread, its legs clutching at the felt of the board it was fixed to. She stepped in, approached cautiously. The thought that she could have misread the situation, and it might be about to move, seemed entirely plausible.

It was two feet long, from its bulbous eyes and jointed beak to the tip of its segmented abdomen. Its wingspan was almost five feet. It wouldn’t have fit down Godfrey Enderbough’s throat, but then she guessed that emergent horror had been a juvenile, a nymph. This was presumably the final moulting. They must mature at a terrifying rate, she guessed. The things she’d seen feeding hadn’t been much smaller than this.

In shape and physical organisation, though, it seemed just like any other cicada she’d seen.

There was a big desk of ornately-carved black wood beside the fireplace, and the lamp there cast a fierce blaze of light over a stack of books, huge and leatherbound. One lay open and she crept forwards, finding photos: images of the insects, alive and dead. Annotated with neat handwritten numbers: perhaps measurements, population sizes. Something arcane but rational, obscure only because she didn’t know the notation. Leafing back through the book, she found more of the same, the writing shifting, veering into the overcalligraphied, the photos supplanted by beautifully hand-coloured sketches in a style familiar to her from natural history illustrations of two centuries back. At the top of each set of drawings and calculations was a date, and she followed them back in fascination, forty years back, eighty. One hundred twenty, one hundred sixty, two hundred—or not quite. Not four decades exactly. And the drawings showed her an alternation, the green-blue and then the red-gold and back again.

“Two broods,” she whispered to herself.

“Precisely,” Neera said, announcing her presence. “Well done.”

The woman was right there. Not even decently in the doorway but right behind Elena, within arm’s reach. A fistful of different and conflicting panic reactions struck. Run! Push past her! Hit her with your shoes! Threaten to destroy the books! So many different plans clamoured for Elena’s attention that she just stood there, staring, frozen with guilt and fear.

And there was that breadth to Neera. That solidity. A true daughter of the Enderboughs, born to the purple.

“You couldn’t resist,” the woman said simply. “Seeing what it was all about, I mean. This is the heart of it. Or at least it is since I became the secretary of the family.”

“Secretary?” Elena echoed, stumbling over the bizarrely mundane term.

“Meaning that I record,” Neera said. “Meaning that I keep the secret. It is, I suspect, a bit of a family joke.”

“Is this what you turned down the Nobel Prize for?” Elena demanded. In retrospect, a weird thing to fixate on, but the words were out there now.

“In a way.” A shrug of genuine regret. A little philosophical flip of the hand, about the loss, that made Elena bitterly sad that this woman was her enemy because how interesting she was! “It doesn’t do,” Neera said, “to be too in the public eye. We leave that to others. If it helps, the actual winner was a protégé of mine. Although they didn’t know, I think, where the prompting came from.”

“Why not the public eye?”

Neera’s smile veered into the patronising. “Do you think that the people you know, the ones who are famed for their wealth and power, are actually the richest and the most powerful? We have learned, this family and our peers, that a lightning rod is a useful thing to have, when the storms come. As they do. So why don’t you tell me what’s going on here?”

“What?”

“Elena Mendes. I’ve done my due diligence. I’ve seen your grades. I know every wish for your bright future that your family has ever expressed on social media. So why don’t you demonstrate to me just what you’ve understood.”

She wanted to say, I don’t understand anything, but she was far past the point where ignorance might save her. And Neera’s gaze was cool and measuring and entirely ready to be disappointed. And that patronising tone irked her.

“Eighty-three years,” she said.