Casino Infernale Read Free Page B

or melted, so that the famous faces seemed strange and monstrous. Perhaps that was how they’d looked after one too many parties in this awful place. There’s no hell so savage as the one we make for ourselves.
    “This isn’t how I remembered the house,” said Molly. Her voice sounded small, and lost. “I remember it as being full of light, and life, and laughter. I don’t remember any of this.”
    “You want me to take you out of here?” I said.
    “Hell with that!” she said immediately. “I never ran from a fight in my life, and I’m not about to start now. Though whether it’s a fight with this house, or my memories . . . this is weird, Shaman. I don’t remember
anything
of this.”
    We pressed on. The portraits changed, to show all the pretty people doing things of an increasingly nasty nature . . . including sex with things that weren’t in any way people. After a while I stopped looking. You can’t keep on being shocked; it wears you out. I couldn’t shake off a vague but definite feeling of being watched by nearby, unseen eyes. Molly stopped abruptly, and I stopped with her. She looked up at the heavy brass chandeliers overhead, still stuffed with the stumps of old candles. She snapped her fingers smartly, and all the candle stubs burst alight at once, shedding a comforting butter-yellow light down the length of the hallway. The light pressed back the shadows, but couldn’t dispel them. Or do much to improve the general uncomfortable atmosphere.
    Molly cried out suddenly, and pointed a shaking hand at a mirror mounted on the left-hand wall. I moved quickly forward to stand between her and whatever had alarmed her, and it was a measure of how unnerved she was that she let me do it. I glared about me, but couldn’t see anything immediately threatening. I looked at Molly, and she pointed again at the mirror on the wall. I strode over to stand before it, Molly sticking close to my side. I was becoming increasingly worried about Molly. This wasn’t like her. I studied the mirror carefully, ready to smash it to bits if necessary and to hell with the seven years bad luck, but nothing looked back at us except our own reflections.
    It doesn’t matter whether I’m being Eddie Drood or Shaman Bond, I always look like an ordinary, everyday kind of guy. Just another face in the crowd—no one you’d look at twice. Average height, average weight, the kind of nondescript features you’d forget in a moment. Best kind of look for a secret agent. It takes a lot of training, and a lot of practice, to look this forgettable, like no one in particular.
    Molly looked like a china doll with big bosoms, bobbed black hair, dark eyes in a sharply defined face, and a rosebud mouth red as sin itself. Normally, Molly took pride in appearing arrogant and assured enough to stare Medusa in the eye, and ask who the hell the Gorgon thought she was looking at. Molly Metcalf was a fighter and a brawler, ready to take on the whole damned world at a moment’s notice. Only . . . not here, not in this place that wasn’t at all what she remembered. Her face was pale and her eyes were wide, and in the mirror’s reflection she looked like a frightened little girl. I didn’t like that.
    What had really happened to Molly here, all those years ago?
    “What is it?” I said quietly. “What did you see in the mirror?”
    “A face,” she said, forcing the words out. “A great white face. Not human. Looking at me.”
    “Nothing there now but us,” I said, carefully. “It’s not like you to be . . . jumpy, Molly.”
    “No,” she said. “It isn’t.” She stood up a little straighter, gathering some of her old arrogance around her like familiar armour. “Eddie . . . yes, I know, I should say Shaman, but there’s no one else here, I can tell. . . . Can you see ghosts, through your armoured mask?”
    “Sure,” I said. “I can See pretty much anything when I’m in my armour. If there’s anything to be seen.