Live and Let Drood Read Free Page A

of soot and ashes drifting this way and that. Molly sneezed explosively, and I jumped despite myself. I looked at her reproachfully, and she stared haughtily down her nose at me, as though she’d meant to do it. She raised one hand and snapped her fingers imperiously. A sharp breeze blew in from the open doors and rushed down the hallway, dispersing the smoke and blowing away the soot and ashes. The breeze died away quickly, before it could disturb anything precarious.
    Most of the interior walls had been riddled with gunfire and then smashed and burnt and blown apart. There were great holes in the old stonework, and the wood panelling had been almost completely burnt away by fierce heat. It was hard to find anything I recognised. The great statues and important works of art, the wall hangings and the family portraits: gone, all gone. I realised Molly had stopped to look up at the ceiling, and I followed her gaze, checking it quickly for spreading cracks.
    “No,” she said, without looking round. “It’s just…our room was up there, on the top floor. Is it possible… ?”
    “No,” I said. “All the upper floors have fallen in on themselves.There’s not a few feet of roof left intact anywhere. Everything we had up there is gone.”
    “Everything you had,” said Molly. “I kept most of my stuff in the woods. Oh, Eddie…I’m so sorry.”
    “It’s just things,” I said. “You can always get more things. What matters is I still have you.”
    “Forever and a day, my love,” said Molly, slipping her arm through mine again and briefly resting her head on my shoulder.
    We moved on into the gloom and the shadows. The sounds of our slow progress seemed to move ahead of us, as though to give warning we were coming. All the great paintings that used to line the walls, portraits and scenes of the family by all the great masters, were gone forever. Generations of Droods, great works of art preserved by the family for generations, reduced to ash, and less than ash. Even the frames were destroyed. Someone had swept the walls clean with incandescent fires, probably laughing as they did. I crouched down as I spotted a scrap of canvas caught between two pieces of rubble from a shattered statue. Molly peered over my shoulder.
    “What is it, sweetie?”
    “I think…this was a Botticelli,” I said. “Just a few splashes of colour now, crumbling in my hand.” I let it drop to the floor, and straightened up again. “Why would the enemy take time out from fighting the Droods to destroy so many important works of art? These paintings were priceless, irreplaceable. Why not…take them and sell them?”
    “Because whoever did this was only interested in destruction and revenge,” said Molly. “I used to be like that. I would have torched every painting in every museum in the world to get back at your family for killing my parents. The Droods have angered a lot of people in their time, Eddie. Sometimes hurting the one you hate can be far more important than profiting from them.”
    “Are you saying we deserved this? That we had it coming? That we brought all this on ourselves?”
    “Of course not! I’m just making the point…that really angry people often don’t stop to think logically.”
    “I liked the paintings,” I said. “And there were photographs, too, towards the end of the corridor. A whole history of my family. And the only photograph I ever saw of my mother and my father…How am I ever going to remember what they looked like, with the only photo destroyed?”
    “I don’t have any photos of my parents,” said Molly. “But I still think of them every day. You’ll remember them.”
    We moved on. All the statues and sculptures had been blown apart or just smashed to pieces. So much concentrated rage…I couldn’t even tell which piece was which from just looking at the scattered parts, though here and there I’d glimpse some familiar detail. The rich carpet that had stretched the whole length of the