Only a Monster(Monsters #1)(71)

‘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.

An animal padded into view, tiger-like, with enormous arcing fangs. It was as big as a horse, and solidly built. The huge muscles of its legs shifted as it walked.

Joan gasped, and the animal turned as if it had heard. It looked right at Joan, seeming as shocked as she felt. Could it see her? She got her answer a second later. It snarled at her and leaped.

Joan heard herself shout. She twisted to run. But there were no claws or fangs. Instead, someone had caught her and steadied her. Aaron. ‘Careful,’ he said shakily. ‘Or you’ll fall.’

The creature circled back, snarling, tail lashing. Joan shuddered.

‘That’s a sabre-toothed tiger,’ Aaron said disbelievingly.

‘That’s not just winter in there,’ Ruth said, sounding just as shaky. ‘That must be a hundred thousand years ago at least.’

Tom reached into his pocket absently and took a gulp from a flask. ‘Shhh,’ he said as Frankie yapped frantically under his arm and squirmed, trying to get at the tiger. Frankie subsided to a low growl.

As the tiger padded out of sight, Joan put her hand out again. The barrier seemed slightly rounded, as if it was shaped like a sphere. She pictured this slice of winter as the thick wall of a bubble that surrounded the archive completely.

‘It’s like a moat,’ Ruth said. ‘A piece of another time standing between us and the archive.’

‘You really didn’t know this was here?’ Aaron said to Tom.

‘I would have told you,’ Tom said, annoyed.

‘What are we going to do?’ Ruth said. ‘We can’t travel through that. It would be a hundred thousand years just to walk into the Palaeolithic period, and then another hundred thousand years to walk out.’

‘I think that’s the point,’ Aaron said. ‘It can’t be traversed.’

Joan hoped no one had ever walked through it. Because a round trip—through the moat to the archive and back—would cost four hundred thousand years of human life. Had the King ever stolen that much? She felt ill at the thought.

‘We need to go back,’ Aaron said.

‘No,’ Joan said. ‘No. Wait.’ She needed to think.

‘There’s no way in. We need to cut our losses,’ Aaron said.

‘The new guards will be here soon,’ Tom said.

Joan could see the archive’s door across the strip of snow. It was so close. She could hardly bear it. Behind that door, there was a device that could bring her family back to life. The transformatio, Gran had called it. And Joan was standing a few feet away, unable to even touch the door. She couldn’t leave.