by Kim Newman
One room contained nothing but ghosts, row upon row of clothes-hangers draped with the white jumpsuits. She knuckle-punched a pad by the door, which opened noiselessly. She found a large suit and wriggled into it. A groin-to-throat seal had to be pressed closed with a toggle-zip affair of unfamiliar design. The garment bulged everywhere, but could be belted in. Plastic bootees went over her boots. She replaced her gloves with gauntlets that clipped easily to the sleeves. The helmet screwed into a collar-ring.
Though opaque from outside, the faceplate was transparent for the wearer.
Cool.
As the helmet locked, a red display lit up at the lower right of her vision. The H logo hatched, and figures she didn’t understand scrolled.
All she needed was one of those machine gun things.
The weapons weren’t stored here, though.
Returning to the corridor, she strode on, trying to project purposefulness.
She thought she was walking into a mirrored barrier. It was only an identically dressed figure coming the other way.
The ghost made a salute, a fist pressed to the forehead.
Inside her helmet, Stacy struggled not to laugh. On her manor, the gesture was slang for ‘knob-head’.
She returned the salute, Harpo mirroring Groucho.
The other whitesuit stepped aside to let her pass.
Another jogging platoon passed. They all turned and gave her the knob-head salute, which she returned.
When they were out of sight, she stopped, bent over and grabbed her knees, painful spasms in her gut. She had to laugh. An odd out-of-body feeling suggested remotely that she was on the point of genuine hysterics.
Tears leaked down her face. She clanged a gauntlet against her faceplate trying to wipe them.
Her own barking laughs filled her helmet.
She realised she was shaking with terror.
IV.
The Big Dish was healed. Its H shone as if new-painted.
The soot-patches on the walls had shrunk. They were disappearing like condensation on a warm morning.
Richard was not surprised.
The dead bodies were all up and about, flesh on their bones. Some had dwindling red stains or contracting black holes in their jumpsuits. One passed by: a network of cracks in his faceplate disappearing as if the film were running backwards at double-speed.
As Swellhead stepped off the lift-platform, the white ghosts turned and thumped their foreheads in salute.
Respectfully, he returned the gesture.
Activity all around. Busy, busy ghosts. Technicians, lab coats flapping, ran silent diagnostic tests at banks of controls. White jeep-cum-golfcart vehicles trundled without colliding, like well-controlled model trains, some dragging trailers of white, H-logoed barrels. Mechanics with dark stains on their uniforms oiled the rails on which the Big Dish ran.
‘All very satisfactory,’ said Swellhead.
A pipeline burst across the floor, slithering like a serpent, coughing out thick black liquid. A clean-up crew descended automatically, spraying foam on the spill, tethering and repairing the line.
This crisis did not impinge on Swellhead’s calm.
Richard looked up, towards the Blowhole…
…a hundred black figures rappelling down, firebursts in the air all around, the roar of attack choppers…
He could not count on that this time.
In the 1973 of his phantom memory, Edwin Winthrop was waiting at the Club, monitoring all frequencies. An SAS strike force was scrambled and at the ready in a secret base in Orkney. At Richard’s signal, Swellhead’s complex would be attacked, breached and overwhelmed.
Here and now, Really-a-Good-Bloke Rory was snug in bed waiting for a report about intellectual salvage rights that would win him bonus points with his minister. Morag Duff could no more authorise a military attack on Skerra than she could get reform of the Common Agricultural Policy through the EU.
Soon, the government would be irrelevant.
All governments. All churches. All beliefs. All aesthetics.
Everything.
The whole world would be living inside Sewell Head’s head.
V.
Stacy tried to imagine a cutaway diagram of Skerra, but found the mental map of the complex made her head hurt. It probably didn’t add up anyway. She wasn’t sure there was room under the island for all this.
She found herself back in the sculpture garden.
Something was missing.
By the Easter Island-look Sewell Head lay the elegant skeleton, black-handled blade stuck in its skull. The mask it had worn was missing.
Stacy plucked out the knife. It was about three inches long. Whisper-touching her thumb to the blade, she sliced open her gauntlet.
It wasn’t a machine gun, but it was something.
She’d only had an afternoon of firearms training, anyway. A knife ought to be more use. She had taken, and now taught, an evening class in women’s self-defence. To demonstrate the proper counter-move for knife-attack, twisting a wooden sticker out of a volunteer’s grip, she’d picked up dirty-fighting skills. She usually had to cheat on the final exams, letting pupils take the sticker away from her when she knew she could easily get it against their throats.
Blade out, she entered the hallway of heads.
Stalking past, she tried to conquer the impression that the trophies were looking at her.
She was at the point of peering into the control room, when a bloody stare caught her attention.
There was a new trophy, crudely hacked and inexpertly mounted.
Aircrewman Victor Kydd, Skerra, 2003, machete.
She swore, furious and grief-shocked.
VI.
‘But what’s it for?’ asked Onions. ‘What does it do?’
Richard wondered if Swellhead would go back on his word and explain his grand design. Possibly, he was as trapped as all other players and had to act out the role of diabolical mastermind. That was a chink of hope – villains always lose.
‘It’ll make things neat and tidy,’ said Swellhead.
‘In your terms, it’ll amplify his Talent,’ Richard told Onions.
‘Very perceptive,’ said Swellhead.
‘He’s going to overwrite reality.’
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘Look around, Adam. It’s been ridiculous all along, but here it is. In an infinite number of possibles, many of them will be extremely improbable. Is this that much stranger than regular reality?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you haven’t been paying attention.’
‘I’m a scientist, not some cracked guru.’
‘An old argument.’
As Richard and Onions squabbled, Swellhead beamed.
Richard tried to reserve part of his mind for thinking this through. There was still Stacy.
‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten Sergeant Cotterill,’ said Swellhead. ‘I’m sure she’ll pop up eventually. Miss Kill and Viscount de Maltby will see to her. She’ll make a fine addition to my Head Room.’
Richard told himself it was not a mind-link, like the one he was forging with Stacy. Swellhead had a knack for following thought processes through deduction and inference.
The Big Dish moved. Ancient gimbals screamed.
Slowly, the array trundled on its railbed, dish angling upwards. The rails sloped down, into a tunnel under the sea-bed. A mini-jeep drove up, and Swellhead took the front passenger seat. De Maltby indicated that Richard and Onions should get up on the rear section, and prodded Onions with his inert hand to hurry him along. The man from I-Psi-T had a slight shock and hopped up on the trolley. Richard needed a hand to clamber up. His back and legs were giving him severe gyp.
After the exertion, he suffered from cold caresses and whisper kisses and was tempted just to drift away. It took several moments to get his mind back on track. When he was able to pay attention again, the mini-jeep was apace with the dish. Crews with big brooms swept the rails ahead of the array.
Wire-strung whitesuits clambered monkey-like on the face of the dish, checking and cleaning. Trundling the vast device about a quarter of a mile, deeper into the Earth, was a major operation.
A whitesuit was caught in the machine, turned to a red smear. No one commented. Richard had flash-visions: slaves hauling pyramid blocks, worshippers ground under the juggernaut.
The deeper they went, the colder and wetter it was. Bare rock walls cascaded with water, which sluiced away through new-carved streams. Great crude wheels turned to keep the system flushing. Gusts of steam periodically escaped from a valve, with a dreadful whistling.
In addition to the grinding of the wheels on rails, a greater roaring filled the cavern. The air tasted of salt.
‘We are directly under the Kjempestrupe,’ announced Swellhead.
A goon handed out white, H-logoed sou’westers. Swellhead, Richard and Onions put them on.
Richard looked up at the rock ceiling. A hole appeared, water falling through, and then irised open.
He gasped, expecting a heavy gush as sea flooded in. The black hole expanded. Then Richard saw night sky. Above the dish was a big liquid funnel. The sea was kept from pouring through the hole by the mighty force of the whirlpool, augmented by Swellhead’s mightier self-belief. Water fell, but no more than a heavy rainfall.
At Swellhead’s command, banks of switches were thrown. The dish lit up.
Richard felt heat. Water on the face of the dish sizzled and evaporated. Then the fall stopped. Richard doffed the sou’wester.
‘You’ve turned off the rain,’ said Onions, awed.
‘Merely bored a hole in the cloud cover,’ explained Swellhead. ‘A necessary preliminary.’
A shilling-bright full moon shone. A thousand points of starlight were caught and reflected in the revolving rings of the Kjempestrupe. Flashing marker buoys whizzed around on their swift courses, held by centrifugal force against the vertical surfaces.
‘What are you using to rebroadcast?’ Richard asked. ‘A ring of satellites?’
‘Another dish, on the moon. I’ve run a covert space programme to set up the installation.’
Onions snorted disbelief.
‘Yes, without anyone noticing,’ Swellhead answered the unasked question. ‘Clever, isn’t it?’
A technician came up, thumped his forehead, and gave a silent report.
‘It will take some minutes to align our dish with the one on the moon,’ said Swellhead. ‘We should go to the control room. You’ll find the next phase of the process fascinating.’
Richard looked up at the stars.
Then at the man he was afraid could change their alignments.
‘He’s a Talent,’ Onions had said. ‘Off the scale.’
VII.
She stood at a console in the control room and tried to look busy. It wasn’t too difficult, since ghost activity consisted mostly of silently checking dials and read-outs.
The room had changed. The computers were all back in place, and working. Big reels whirred back and forth. Tickertape stuttered out of slots. Lights flashed and beeped.
The big screen was uncracked and showed a televised picture.
Stacy saw the dish hauled into position and the ceiling open. Tiny white figures watched. It looked like an outtake from Thunderbirds. An amazingly detailed miniature, imperfect because of the impossibility of scaling down water.
The screen split into quadrants: one showed the dish; two had postcard views of the White House and Number Ten Downing Street; and one was a complicated animated diagram showing the Big Dish, the Earth and moon, some sort of moon complex and a lot of dotted lines for trajectories. The White House was replaced by scrolling numbers, like logarithm tables. A giant H-egg logo appeared in the middle of the screen, expanding to overlay all four quadrants.
A digital clock flashed on at 15:00:00 and began to count down.
She looked around, hoping to see a plug she could pull.
Doors shushed open and Sewell Head walked in. No, someone who looked like Sewell Head walked in. This man had a different presence.
Jeperson and Onions were with him, and de Maltby and the Droning. The first two were prisoners, the latter guards. The Viscount had a strange shining mechanical glove. Persephone Gill wore a wax mask. They weren’t completely changed (like Head), but they were different – redressed and redirected.
She didn’t risk signalling Jeperson, but he looked directly at her.
She remembered he could sometimes tell what she was thinking.
What the…? she thought, hard.
Meet Swellhead, thought Jeperson, clearly in her mind. And watch out for Miss Kill.
Stacy had a panic stab that Persephone – Miss Kill! – was staring straight through her faceplate, but it passed.
Sewell Head – Swellhead – climbed into his favourite chair.
13:34:01.
Whatever was due to happen at 00:00:00 was unlikely to be good.
She had flashes of the possibilities: all the world’s nuclear arsenals activated at once, space weapons searing every patch of arable land on the planet, the activation of super-anthrax engineered to wipe out all non H-logoed life forms, fomented tidal waves and cyclones washing over continents. War, famine, pestilence and death.
12:43:00.
Swellhead fisted his forehead.
All the drones returned the salute – de Maltby even raising his unwieldy prosthetic. Stacy was a moment out of sync, and mashed the rim of her faceplate painfully against her nut.
‘Friends,’ began Swellhead. ‘We are on the brink of a great venture. In less than a quarter of an hour, the world will be neat and tidy. I should like you all to take a moment to pray…’
She wasn’t surprised he turned out to be some species of religious crank.
‘…to me.’
Good grief! she thought.
It’s worse than that, came Jeperson’s mind-voice.
The drones all took off their helmets and bowed their heads.
Stacy had no choice but to follow suit and hope not to be noticed. The unfamiliar helmet arrangement didn’t unscrew easily. She made a comical bumble of the business of getting loose, then got her hair in her eyes.
The other whitesuits had colourless faces and hair. Ghosts.
‘Detective Sergeant,’ said Swellhead, ‘so kind of you to join us. You are our final guest.’
11:50:01.
Hands, unghostly, gripped her arms.
Jeperson looked at her, with sympathy.
If you get a chance, he thought, kill him.
VIII.
If you can, Richard added, damping the thought so Stacy would not pick it up. It was horribly possible that Swellhead had such control over the situation that any holes in him would heal instantly.
11:34:00.
He felt something cold against his palm. No, he was feeling through Stacy, something cold against her palm.
A blade.
Such a small thing.
‘Isn’t this about the time when you call up the Prime Minister or the President of the United States or the Secret Ruling Council of the League of Pata-Nations to make your demands?’
‘This isn’t extortion, Mr Jeperson. This is inevitability.’
Richard was worried. The many memories that had plagued him earlier were like dreams, almost forgotten on waking, leaving only incoherent images and impressions. He had no idea what Fred Regent looked like as an older man.
The past was a blank.
Only this countdown was real.
The muzak began to play ‘Welcome to My World’, the Jim Reeves recording with psychedelia mixed in.
10:56:00.
‘Listen, Head,’ he said, trying to get through, ‘even you aren’t big enough to do this. I’ve no doubt you can rearrange all of us here, perhaps even all over the world, but you’ll be spread too thin. Where you are, in your mind empire, it’ll be a satisfying illusion, cartoonish but still convincing. But the further away from you, the sketchier the
effect will be. No one can encompass the universe in his skull. You know a great deal in theory, but you can’t really imagine, say, the life of a South American tribesman or a market-trader in Kuala Lumpur or a teenage girl in California. The vast bulk of humanity will be milling extras, barely templates, low-resolution, bad painted backdrops. Most of your world won’t be real enough.’
09:34.00.
‘I know best,’ said Swellhead, almost benignly.
‘Penny in the slot, Trivia Man,’ said Richard. ‘Alfonso the Wise, King of Castille—’
‘1221–1284.’
‘That’s the fellow. Most famous saying of…?’
‘“If I had been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better arrangement of the Universe.”’
‘Alfonso wasn’t being the Wise when he said that, he was being the Funny. Alfonso the Wise-Cracker. It’s supposed to be a joke, to expose hubris.’
‘That’s not fact, that’s opinion. Too debatable for a quiz question.’
08:57:01.
‘Not in nine minutes it won’t be. There’ll be only one Opinion. Do you really want to live in that world?’
‘So long as it’s the right Opinion.’
‘Yours.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘You’ll be on your own. Despite all these masks and ghosts and puppets, completely alone.’
A tiny glimpse of Sewell Head came through.
‘I’m used to it,’ he said.
08:02:01.
So much for Reason. His only back-up plan was Violence.
Stacy, he thought, loud enough for all the ghosts to hear, now!
IX.
07:54:01.
She pulled off her transparent gauntlet and gripped the knife.
As she shrugged, ghostfingers sank through her arms, giving her a bone-scraping tingle she hoped never to feel again.
She hadn’t followed Jeperson’s argument.
And she wasn’t sold on being an assassin. That hadn’t been what Fred Regent hauled her off shift for. She’d never signed up for that. Whenever it came up at the Police Federation, she voted against ordinary coppers carrying firearms or even stun-guns. That wasn’t how she wanted the world to be.
But no one was listening to her now.
07:36:00.
She waded through ghosts. They moved slowly. Guns spat floating, easily dodgeable blobules.