“It’s complicated… But I suppose you could say I’m with Barbara.”
“Unbelievable! We have one tiny disagreement and you’re out with another woman.”
“Abbey, please. It’s not really like that.”
“You’d better hope you’ve got a really, really good explanation for this.” There was a strange shattering sound from the other end of the line. “Christ.”
“What was that? What’s happened?”
“Your friend. She’s just put her foot through our TV.”
“What?”
“Goodbye, Henry.”
I suppose she just have put the phone down then.
I left the stall and stepped over to the sink. There was a man there, a Diabolism employee who squirted soap at my palms before guilt-tripping me into paying him a pound for the privilege.
“You chatting to your lady?” he asked, and I realized that he must have overheard the whole of my conversation. “You talking to your woman?”
“Yes,” I said stiffly. “I suppose I was.”
“Giving you grief, was she?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“You want my advice?”
“Not particularly,” I said, but the man didn’t seem to hear me.
“Forget her. Have a good time. What your lady don’t know won’t hurt her. What happens in Diabolism stays in Diabolism.”
“Thanks for that,” I said, and, just about resisting the urge to snatch back my pound, strode back out into the heart of the club.
The hours which followed were amongst the longest of my life. I patrolled every inch of the dance floor. I scrutinized the faces of lip-locked couples. I stepped over pools of vomit, drank three cocktails, two bottles of beer and a pint of tap water into which I’m certain I saw the barman spit. I tried to blend in by dancing.
It was late, well into the small hours of the morning, when I saw them. After the inaugural chords of Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” were greeted by whoops of delight from the regulars, I’d retreated to the bar, where I stood half-watching a couple overenthusiastic young men whirl themselves around the firemen’s poles. Then, caught in a lightning flash of strobe, I saw their faces and my insides turned to water. I started to move across the floor and searched around desperately for Barbara but she seemed to have disappeared. When I looked again at the pole, the Prefects had vanished, their places taken by a couple of paunchy men who I’d never seen before in my life. I was starting to wonder if I hadn’t imagined it when someone slapped me hard on the back.
As I turned to face them the incessant music of the place seemed to recede into the background and I could hear them both perfectly, like voices in my head.
“Crikey! If it isn’t old lamb chop,” said Hawker.
“Hello, old man,” said Boon.
“What are you doing here?” I said. “You promised you’d lead us to Estella.”
“And we will, sir.”
“Keep following, sir. We’ll see you right.”
“We’re just having a bit of fun first.”
“Only larks, sir.”
“We’re stretching our legs, sir.”
“Getting a breath of fresh air.”
“Going the scenic route, sir. Taking the dog for a walk and getting a dashed good yomp in the bargain.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“I’d get out now, sir, if I was you.”
“I’d cut.”
“Why? What are you planning?”
“We’ve just time for one more prank before the end, sir.”
“Just time for a damned good bibbling.”
“Don’t look so worried, old man.”
“Trust the Process, Mr. L.”
“No!” I shouted. “Please-”
I was interrupted by a drunken quartet of middle-aged men in nylon skirts and sweat-soaked blouses dancing past me in an inebriated attempt at a conga line. By the time they’d staggered past, the Prefects had vanished again.
I struggled through the crowd, looking for Barbara, but it was already too late.
A minute later, all the lights in the building went out.
And a minute after that, the sneezing began.
Blissed out on the contents of another syringe and succeeding in holding back the tides of his suspicion, there were times, as he hunkered down in the passenger seat of Mr. Streater’s Nova, that the Prince of Wales felt almost content. Then, a moment later, everything would crowd back around him, he would remember the appalling details of the past few days and life became bleak and impossible again. This was the rhythm to which he was already growing accustomed, this awful see-saw of emotions, the heaven and hell of the drug called ampersand.
For a few minutes, he drifted into an uneasy sleep and had the dream again. When he woke, the man behind the wheel was swearing noisily at a passing motorist.
“Mr. Streater?”
“What?”
“Why is his grandfather to blame?”
“What are you on about?”
“I keep having this dream-”
“Christ.” Streater tugged an Evening Standard from the car floor and tossed it over to him. “Do the crossword or something.”
Arthur shuffled in his seat and stared blankly at the print but the words swam persistently away from him.
“How long will it be?” he asked.
One of Streater’s hands was on the steering wheel, the other was engaged in teasing his hair back into its usual spikes. “What’s that, chief?”
“How long before Leviathan is let loose?”
“Not long now. It’s all going according to plan. The beauty of it is we hardly need to lift a finger. The enemy is doing all the hard stuff for us.”
Arthur seemed to be having great difficulty forcing out his words. “And what will happen once it’s freed?”
“Things are gonna get a lot more interesting around here. Take it from me, everything’s gonna change for the better.”
The prince groaned, flailed in his chair and gave in to despair again, sinking gratefully into darkness.
When he opened his eyes there were two men sitting in the back of Streater’s car. One of them leant forward.
“Remember us, guv? DCI Virtue and DS Mercy?”
Both were eating kebabs and they held aloft their supper in congealed greeting. They smelt, as before, of grease and animal fat.
When the prince glanced up into the rearview mirror, he was somehow not completely surprised to see that Virtue and Mercy were not reflected there, that the spotty glass showed only empty seats.
“What’s happening?” he asked numbly. “Where are we heading?”
“Nearly there,” said Mr. Streater.
As Arthur peered out of the window, the lights of a tube station slithered by and the prince reflected sadly that he had ridden only twice on the city’s underground system, both occasions engineered by his squad of experts in public relations. This seemed to him to be a pity since these places had always felt so welcoming and full of cheer.
Streater drove away from the main road and down a couple of side streets, eventually emerging in a small patch of concrete dappled with junk and debris, round the back of what appeared to be some kind of pub or nightclub. There were a couple of cars already there, a motorbike, an abandoned shopping trolley and a stack of soggy boxes. There was also the faint, disagreeable rumble of popular music.
“What are we doing?” Arthur asked plaintively. “What is this place?”
Virtue and Mercy rolled out the back of the car, short of breath even at this mild exertion, their exhalations fogging the air, their boulder bellies swaying in sweaty sympathy.
“I’m going into the club for a bit,” Streater said. “Gonna do a bit of business. Gotta shift the last of the ampersand.”
“The last of it?” Arthur despised himself for not being able to keep the panic from his voice. “Surely it hasn’t run out?”
“Don’t worry, chief. Not long
now and everyone’s gonna have more of the stuff than they know what to do with. That sound good to you?”
Poleaxed by another surge of pain and self-pity, the prince was unable even to gasp out a reply before the door was slammed in his face. Mr. Streater took out his key ring and pointed it at the car. All the locks on all the doors slammed down. Arthur struggled with the handles to no effect.
His window was open a little and he called out to his tormentor: “Let me out.”
Streater strode away but one of the fat men turned back.
“Stay here, son!”
The other one growled. “Keep an eye on the motor.”
The next few hours passed like a fever dream, in a whirl of lucid hallucinations, fantasies of sexual envy and sporadic, doomed assaults a the Standard crossword.
The prince was interrupted twice — first by a gaggle of revelers teetering past, all of them dressed, improbably, in some strange parody of school dress. This Arthur shrugged off merely as ampersand phantasmagoria and returned to his descent.
The second time he was disturbed by the car being noisily unlocked. Virtue and Mercy clambered in the back, settled into their seats, greeted Arthur with a belch and began to munch anew of the remnants of their kebabs.
“Where’s Streater?” Arthur asked.
The fat men gave their answer through mouths full of pita bread.
“Still inside,” one of them said. “You know how he gets when he’s shifting that stuff…”
The other one sniggered. “Birding it up.”
After this, for a long time, there was just the sound of mastication — rhythmic chomping echoing in the prince’s ears like the approaching stamp of some still-distant army — until:
“Oi oi!” Vince Mercy wore the look of a gambler whose horse has just romped home to an easy victory.
A young couple, dressed like the others in a lascivious parody of school uniform and in the latter stages of inebriation, had tottered up to the car, leant against the bonnet and proceeded to extravagantly grope one another. The girl’s skirt rode up almost to her hips and the policeman was whooping his appreciation when the lady (who seemed to the prince to be placing herself at serious risk of hypothermia) pushed away her beau, stumbled a few steps and let fly a stream of lumpen vomit. Her companion merely laughed and hit her joshingly on the back, and as soon as she was done, the girl joined in the laughter. The pair wandered away into the night, spattered with puke yet still cackling.
In the back of Mr. Streater’s Nova, Virtue and Mercy were laughing with them.
One of them jabbed a sausagey finger in Arthur’s face. “Reminds me of your missus!”
“Way I hear it, she wouldn’t even brush her teeth afterwards. She’d just get straight back down to it.”
“Please…,” whimpered the prince. “Please don’t…” But this only made the detectives laugh all the harder, their flabby bodies shaking with hilarity, halted only when someone smacked down hard on the car roof.
A couple of middle-aged men stood outside, both grinning wildly. They too were dressed as schoolboys.
“Good Lord!” one of them was shouting. “I know that face!”
“It’s the best boy!” the other man called back. “It’s teacher’s pet.”
Desperately, Arthur turned around to his companions, but, impossibly, both Virtue and Mercy had disappeared.
Arthur quivered in his seat, wondering what fresh indignity was about to be visited upon him, when there came a righteous cry from the other side of the parking lot.
“Abominations!” A disheveled man in a brown raincoat was pointing a gun in the direction of the schoolboys. “Wretched pieces of putrescence!”
“I say, Boon,” said one of the men in a tone of mild, pleasurable surprise, like one trainspotter to another on noticing a particularly uncommon diesel chugging toward them up the track. “Do you think that’s us he’s talking about?”
“I rather think it might be, Hawker. Anyway, isn’t that old Barnaby?”
The grizzled man gestured at them with the gun. “Get on your knees!”
The schoolboys laughed. “Do you ever go back, sir?”
“Go back?” said the man they had referred to as Barnaby. “What do you mean?”
“Back to your old college, sir.”
“Back to your alma mater.”
“Don’t suppose they’d let you in now, sir. Not after what happened.”
“Cruel, wasn’t it, Mr. B? The things they said.”
“They must have really hated you, sir, to make up all those stories.”
“And they were stories, weren’t they, sir?”
“There wasn’t any truth in them?”
Barnaby shouted: “Shut up! Just shut up, you lying monstrosities!” But even as Arthur slunk down in his seat, trying his best not to be noticed, he could see that the man was severely rattled, tripping and stammering over his words.
It was no great surprise, then, that as the schoolboys ambled over to the stranger he did nothing to halt their progress. They walked so close to him that they were almost touching, as though, under different circumstances, they might be on the precipice of a kiss, a tender and mutually respectful exchange of saliva.
“Still collecting stamps?” the little man shouted, and stamped brutally down on Barnaby’s foot. This shouldn’t have hurt all that much but Barnaby winced, gasped and staggered backward, his arms windmilling uselessly in the air. Boon stamped down again whilst Hawker shouted out encouragement.
“Still collecting stamps, sir?”
“Still collecting stamps?”
The bigger of the two schoolboys grabbed the man by the ears and stretched them out. “Haven’t seen you for ears and ears!” He cackled and the ginger-haired one joined in.
“Ears and ears and ears!”
Pinioned to his seat in terrified fascination, the prince nonetheless found time to ensure the doors were really locked.
Outside, as Barnaby fell to his knees, the schoolboys were laughing.
One of them thrust his hand into his blazer pocket, tugged out a fistful of black, faintly volcanic-looking powder and flung the lot of it in Barnaby’s face. The man looked up in bafflement. His nose twitched cartoonishly for a second or so before he unleashed a gargantuan sneeze. Then another. Then, inevitably, another.
Barnaby mewled. “What have you done?”
The ginger-haired man released him, gave him a hearty slap on the back and bellowed: “Keep up, sir! It’s sneezy powder.
The other one snickered in complicity. “Wizard Wheeze!”
Barnaby was still sneezing. One of the schoolboys produced a grimy handkerchief and passed it to him. He clamped it to his face and sneezed and sneezed and sneezed. When the rag was taken from his face it was splattered with red.
“Please…,” he stammered. “Stop this…”
Blood had started to streak its way like lava from his nose, flowing across his lips, down his chin, dribbling onto the ground.
Hawker sniggered. “Why would we stop, sir, when we’re having such fun?”
Barnaby’s body had passed the point of total exhaustion and was barreling toward total shutdown. When he sneezed again, a pink strip of gristle was borne out on a sea of snot. “What’s your plan?” he gasped, with helpless pleading in his eyes. “What is this leading toward?”
The schoolboys laughed. “Plan, sir?”
“Gosh, whatever makes you think we’ve got anything so hoity-toity as a plan?”
“This is our glory, sir!”
“Our bally glory!”
Then, with the Prefects cheering him on, Barnaby gave a final nasal eruption and toppled face-first onto the tarmac. He landed with the same crack a hardcover book makes when one bends it back too far and snaps the spine.
“Well, that sneezy powder certainly works, doesn’t it, Boon?”
“Jolly well does, old chum. Most efficacious.”
Boon turned toward the car. Arthur tried to slide further down into his
seat but it was too late. The schoolboy grinned.
“Good evening to you, sir!”
Hawker looked across and raised his hand in salute. “What ho, Arthur!”
“Sorry we can’t stay for a powwow but we’re already running late.”
“’Fraid we’ve got to cut, old man.”
“See you anon, sir!”
“Tinkety-tonk!”
The schoolboys ran into the building and Arthur was left alone in the car with only a dead body cooling on the tarmac for company.
Seconds later, the door to the warehouse clanked open and Mr. Streater emerged, accompanied by the opening chords of some pop track or other.
“School’s out for summer…”
He stepped adroitly over the corpse and got into the car. “All right, chief?”
The prince wasn’t listening. “They killed him…,” he murmured.
Streater shrugged. “Looks like.”
“Your friends were useless. They vanished. They disappeared.”
“Who are you talking about. What friends?”
“The detectives. Virtue and Mercy.”
Streater smirked as he twisted the key in the ignition. “Never heard of them. I expect that’ll be the ampersand, squire. Hallucinations come as standard. They’re often personifications of whatever parts of yourself you keep repressed. I saw ballerinas, believe it or not. But I wouldn’t worry about it if I was you.” He reversed the car quickly on the tarmac, turned and headed swiftly out of Islington, toward home. “Whichever way you slice it — it’s all going according to plan.”
Chapter 22
It was the last night of the Diabolism Club. After what unraveled there, I don’t suppose anyone had the stomach to carry on. The building was demolished, the ground concreted over, and I understand that there are currently plans to build some kind of monument, a memorial or a tombstone, on the spot where Diabolism used to stand.
It happened two minutes after Hawker’s salute and sixty seconds after all the lights in the building had flickered off. When someone eventually managed to get a couple of them going again, it was already too late. The place had turned insane. Adults dressed as children were screaming, sobbing, trying to escape; hundreds of liquored-up revelers frightened for their lives were charging for the doors in a stampede born of mortal desperation. Every one of them was sneezing. There was a cacophony of nasal distress. The air was filled with saliva, snot and tears, with mucus, spit and foam.
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