Pasty sensed the outsideness at the same time as Crow. He leapt across the room shouting: “Joe, Joe—for God’s sake, leave it alone … leave it alone!” Crow, on the other hand, spurred by no such sense of comradeship, quickly stood up and backed away. It was not that he was in any way a coward, but he knew something of Earth’s darker mysteries—and of the mysteries of other spheres—and besides, he sensed the danger of interfering with an action having origin far from the known side of nature.
Suddenly the corner was dimly illumined by an eerie, dappled light from the open panel; and Joe, his arm still groping beyond that door, gave a yell of utter terror and tried to pull back. The ticking was now insanely aberrant, and the wild sweeps of the four hands about the dial were completely confused and orderless. Joe had braced himself against the frame of the opening, fighting some unseen menace within the strangely lit compartment, trying desperately to withdraw his arm. Against all his effort his left shoulder abruptly jammed forward, into the swirling light, and at the same moment he stuck the barrel of his gun into the opening and fired six shots in rapid succession.
By this time Pasty had an arm round Joe’s waist, one foot braced against the base of the clock, putting all his strength into an attempt to haul his companion away from whatever threatened in the swirling light of the now fearsome opening. He was fighting a losing battle. Joe was speechless with terror, all his energies concentrated on escape from the clock; great veins stuck out from his neck and his eyes seemed likely at any moment to pop from his head. He gave one bubbling scream as his head and neck jerked suddenly forward into the maw of the mechanical horror … and then his body went limp.
Pasty, still wildly struggling with Joe’s lower body, gave a last titanic heave at that now motionless torso and actually managed to retrieve for a moment Joe’s head from the weirdly lit door.
Simultaneously Pasty and Titus Crow saw something—something that turned Pasty’s muscles to water, causing him to relax his struggle so that Joe’s entire body bar the legs vanished with a horrible hisss into the clock—something that caused Crow to throw up his hands before his eyes in the utmost horror!
In the brief second or so that Pasty’s efforts had partly freed the sagging form of his companion in crime, the fruits of Joe’s impulsiveness had made themselves hideously apparent. The cloth of his jacket near the left shoulder and that same area of the shirt immediately beneath had been removed, seemingly dissolved or burnt away by some unknown agent; and in place of the flesh which should by all rights have been laid bare by this mysterious vanishment, there had been a great blistered, bubbling blotch of crimson and brown—and the neck and head had been in the same sickening state!
Surprisingly, Pasty recovered first from the shock. He made one last desperate—fatal—grab at Joe’s disappearing legs—and the fingers of his right hand crossed the threshold of the opening into the throbbing light beyond. Being in a crouching position and considerably thinner than his now completely vanished friend, Pasty did not stand a chance. Simultaneous with Crow’s cry of horror and warning combined—he gave a sobbing shriek and seemed simply to dive headlong into the leering entrance.
Had there been an observer what happened next might have seemed something of an anticlimax. Titus Crow, as if in response to some agony beyond enduring, clapped his hands to his head and fell writhing to the floor. There he stayed, legs threshing wildly for some three seconds, before his body relaxed as the terror of his experience drove his mind to seek refuge in oblivion.
Shortly thereafter, of its own accord, the panel in the clock swung smoothly back into place and clicked shut; the four hands steadied to their previous, not quite so deranged motions, and the ticking of the hidden mechanism slowed and altered its rhythm from the monstrous to the merely abnormal …
*
Titus Crow’s first reaction on waking was to believe himself the victim of a particularly horrible nightmare; but then he felt the carpet against his cheek and, opening his eyes, saw the scattered books littering the floor. Shakily he made himself a large jug of coffee and poured himself a huge brandy, then sat, alternately sipping at both until there was none of either left. And when both the jug and the glass were empty he started all over again.
It goes without saying that Crow went nowhere near de Marigny’s clock! For the moment, at least, his thirst for knowledge in that direction was slaked.
As far as possible he also kept from thinking back on the horrors of the previous night; particularly he wished to forget the hellish, psychic impressions received as Pasty went into the clock. For it appeared that de Marigny, Phillips and Walmsley had been right! The clock was, in fact, a space-time machine of sorts. Crow did not know exactly what had caused the hideous shock to his highly developed psychic sense; but in fact, even as he had felt that shock and clapped his hands to his head, somewhere out in the worlds of Aldebaran, at a junction of forces neither spatial, temporal, nor of any intermediate dimension recognized by man except in the wildest theories, the Lake of Hali sent up a few streamers of froth and fell quickly back into silence.
And Titus Crow was left with only the memory of the feel of unknown acids burning, of the wash of strange tides outside nature, and of the rushing and tearing of great beasts designed in a fashion beyond man’s wildest conjecturing …
Richard Jeperson
SEVEN STARS EPISODE FOUR
THE BIAFRAN BANK MANAGER
by KIM NEWMAN
Richard Jeperson is an amnesiac who could be aged anywhere between thirty and fifty. A coal-black mass of ringlets spills onto his shoulders Charles II style, and he wears a pencil-line Fu Manchu moustache. His face is gaunt to the point of unhealthiness and dark enough to pass for a Sicilian or a Tuareg. Thin and tall and bony, he wears a fluorescent explosion of different multi-coloured outfits and has several rings on each finger. He looks as if he’d be just as happy on the foredeck of a pirate ship as in a coffee bar on Chelsea’s King’s Road.
Only slightly less striking is his associate Vanessa, who is in her early twenties and could be a model with her seamless mane of red hair down to her waist, Italian mouth painted silver, Viking cheekbones and unnaturally huge, green eyes. Along with ex-police constable Fred Regent, the trio travel around in Jeperson’s silver-grey Rolls-Royce ShadowShark, investigating the strange and bizarre as representatives of the Diogenes Club.
Kim Newman created Richard Jeperson in the early 1970s in his very first efforts at fiction. The character originally appeared in a short play called Dracula Returns, which is now lost, and the author wrote a series of stories and even a novel about him while still a schoolboy.
When Newman decided to write a series of 1970s-style occult adventures, in the tradition of Jason King, The Avengers and Peter Saxon, he pulled the character—along with sidekicks Fred and Vanessa—out of mothballs. Jeperson made his official debut with the novella ‘The End of the Pier Show’ in the anthology Dark of the Night (1997), and seven further tales were collected in The Man from the Diogenes Club (2006). The character also turns up in the stories ‘The Man on the Clapham Omnibus’ (The Time Out Book of London Short Stories Volume 2, 2000), ‘Cold Snap’ (The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club, 2007), ‘Moon Moon Moon’ (Subterranean Online, Summer 2009) and ‘Who Dares Wins: Anno Dracula 1980’ (Anno Dracula: Johnny Alucard, 2013).
ON THE ROAD to Somerset, Richard Jeperson drove into an anomaly. It was after midnight, a clear night in May. Behind the leather-covered wheel of his Rolls-Royce ShadowShark, he mulled over the urgent message that had brought him from Chelsea to the West Country.
Then the quality of the dark changed.
He faded the dashboard-mounted eight-track, cutting the cool jazz theme that had underscored his drive. He braked, bringing the wonderful machine to a dead halt within three yards.
He heard no night-birds.
“Weirdsville,” he mused.
After slipping his flared orange frock coat over a purple silk shirt, he got out of the car.
He was parked on a straight road that cut across the levels. The stars and the sliver of moon were bright enough to highlight the flat fields of the wetlands, the maze of water-filled rhynes that made a patchwork of the working landscape.
Nothing wrong there, on the dull earth.
But in Heaven?
Tossing his tightly curled shoulder-length hair out of his eyes, he looked up.
An unaccustomed spasm of fear gripped him.
He saw at once what was anomalous.
He skimmed the constellations again, making sure he had his bearings. The North Star. Cassiopeia, the seated woman. Orion, the hunter.
Ursa Major, the Plough, was gone.
A black stretch of emptiness in the universe.
He had chanced on wrongnesses before, but nothing on such a cosmic scale. This could not be a localised phenomenon. If the seven stars were really gone, then the whole universe had been altered. He found himself shivering.
*
The moment passed. He looked up, and the constellations were aright again. The Plough twinkled on, seven diamond-chips in the Heavens. Richard was cold, with a heart-chill that was more than the night. The world was not aright just yet.
He got back into the ShadowShark and drove on.
Two hours earlier, he’d been in the basement of his home in Chelsea, meditating. He was halfway through a ritual of purification involving a week of fasting. He had gone beyond the hunger that had chewed his stomach for the first three days. He had shifted up a plane of perception. Strength was pouring into him, and his mind was forming pearls of understanding around grits of mystery.
Against all his express orders, Fred—one of his assistants—had interrupted his meditation, calling him to the telephone. He didn’t waste time in protest. Fred had been selected for his reliability. He’d not have broken in unless it was something of supreme importance.
After exchanging a few words with Catriona Kaye, Richard had ordered Fred to get the Rolls out of the garage and despatched Vanessa, his other associate, to pick up three portions of cod and chips wrapped. Throughout the drive, he had been working the wheel and gear-shifts one-handed, while feeding himself with the other. He could not afford the physical weakness of fasting. His stomach knotted as he stuffed himself. He overcame the side-effects of such a sudden imposure on his body by mental force alone. By breaking off the ritual, he lost much. Wisdom leaked from his mind as fish and chips filled his belly.
It was a haunting. Normally, he’d have taken Fred or Vanessa with him. But this was not one of his usual exploits on behalf of the Diogenes Club, the venerable institution that referred many problems to him. This went to the heart of his whole life. Now, the Diogenes itself—or rather, its most respected elder statesman, Edwin Winthrop—was under siege from forces unknown.
He drove with both hands now. He had a sense of the enormity of the interests at stake.
Jeffrey Jeperson, the man who adopted him—a boy with no memories—from the rubble of war, had served on the Ruling Cabal of the Diogenes Club with Winthrop. Richard had been brought up with stories of Edwin Winthrop’s secret services to his country. He had taken his first tentative steps into the arcane as Winthrop’s most junior assistant. With old Mr. Jeperson dead and Brigadier-General Sir Giles Gallant retired, Winthrop was the last serving member of the Cabal that had seen the Diogenes through the tricky postwar years, when its many enemies had worked to see its ancient charter revoked and its resources dissipated.
Winthrop, nearly eighty, took little active part in the working of the club that was more than a club. He knew well enough to withdraw and let younger men have the reins, just as he had taken over from his own mentor.
Richard wondered if Winthrop entirely liked or trusted the people who now belonged to the club. The likes of Cornelius and King, who puffed kif in the smoking room, and toted transistor radios, where an inadvertent cough was once grounds for instant expulsion, to keep up with the cricket. The new generation, among whom Richard counted himself, seemed to dabble in the occult like dilettantes, rather than marching into the darkness like Victorian explorers or mapping plans for the conquest of the unknown like imperial generals.
But Winthrop had been a firebrand before he was a blimp. He still had his secrets.
Now those secrets were crawling into the open.
The anomaly convinced Richard the haunting was even worse than Catriona, Winthrop’s lifelong companion, had indicated.
The ShadowShark cruised into the village of Alder. All the farmhouses were dark. The Manor House was a little way out of the village, on its own grounds. Richard drove past the small church and the Valiant Soldier pub, then took the almost-hidden road out to Winthrop’s family home.
*
The car tripped an electric eye and the wrought-iron gates swayed open automatically. Lights burned on in the house, which seemed bigger after dark than Richard remembered it.
Catriona Kaye was waiting for him on the porch. A small, pretty woman, as old as the century, she seemed fragile, but Richard knew her to have a rugged constitution. Now, she seemed her age, nervous and worried.
“Richard, thank God you’ve come.”
“Peace, Cat,” he said, hugging her.
“It’s worse than you think.”
“I think it’s pretty much as bad as it can get. Sometimes, stars are missing.”
“You’ve noticed?”
They looked up, reassuring themselves. The Plough was there.
“How often?” he asked her.
“More and more.”
“Let’s go indoors.”
*
The paneled hallway was empty. Richard noticed at once that the Turkish carpet had been taken up and was rolled into a giant sausage against one wall, like a record-breaking draught excluder. The floor was polished wood tiles, in a herringbone pattern, discreet charms of protection carved in corners.
Catriona gasped in horror.
“It was here,” she said. “Moments ago.”
She scanned the floor, dropping down on her knees, and feeling the wood with gloved hands.
“Just here,” she said, almost at the foot of the main staircase. It was still carpeted, a claret weave held down by brass rails.
Catriona began tugging at the stair carpet, wrenching tacks loose. Richard went to her and helped her stand. Her knees popped as he got her upright. She was alarmingly light, as if she might drift away.
“Lift the carpet,” she said.
He took out his swiss army knife and used the screwdriver to extract the bottom five rails. Like a conjurer whipping a table-cloth out from under a complete dinner service, he pulled the carpet loose, popping tacks, and tossed it back in a great flap onto the upper stairs.
Catriona gasped again. Richard knew how she felt.
Burned into the bare wood of the stairs was the black shape of a man, like a shadow torn free and thrown away. It seemed to be crawling up to the landing, one hand reaching up, fingers outstretched, the other poised to overreach its fellow, pulling the bulk of the shadow upwards.
“It was on the ground floor just now,” Catriona said. “Before that, outside, a burnt patch on the lawns, the driveway—on gravel!—the front steps. It lay under the mats on the doorstep.”
“You’ve seen it moving?”
“Watched kettles, Richard. I’ve sat and stared for hours, keeping it still, keeping it at bay. But look away for a moment, and it shifts.”
He sat on the stairs, just below the man-shape. The outline was distinct. The light wood around the outline was unaffected, a little dusty, but the shape was matt black. It seemed like a stain rather than a brand. He touched it with his fingertips, then laid his flat palm where the small of the man’s back would have been.
“It’s warm,” he said. “Body temperature.”
It was as if someone with a high fever had lain there. He looked at his fingers. No black had come off on them. He flipped the longest blade out of his knife and scored across the ankle. The
black went into the wood.
“There are others, out on the moor, gathering.”
He turned to look at Catriona. The woman was strung taut, and he knew better than to try and soothe her. She’d been around the weird long enough to know how serious this was.
“It’s an attack,” he said, standing up, brushing dust from the knees of his salmon-coloured flared trousers. “But from what quarter?”
“Edwin won’t talk. But it’s to do with the War, I’m sure.”
When people said “the War”, depending on their age, they meant the First or Second World War. But Catriona meant a greater conflict that included both World Wars. It had started a great deal earlier, in the mid-19th century—nobody could agree quite when—but finished in 1945, with the defeat not only of Germany and Japan but of an older, not entirely human, faction that had used the axis powers as catspaws.
Outside of the Diogenes Club, almost no one understood that War. Richard, who had no memory of his childhood, had lived through the aftermath. He’d heard Edwin’s account of the War, had examined many of the documents kept in the secret library of the club, and saw all the time the lingering effects, written into the ways of the world in manners untraceable to most of humankind but as glaring as neon to the initiate.
“He says it’s not over. That we made a great mistake.”
Richard looked into Catriona’s pale blue eyes, struck breathless by their lasting loveliness, and sensed her controlled terror. He embraced her and heard her squeal of shock.
“We looked away,” she said.
He turned back, still holding Catriona by her shoulders.
An orange score-mark, where he had scratched the wood, shone in the stairs. The shape’s feet were on the next step up, its head and arms were under the still-attached carpet. “If it gets completely under the carpet, it’ll be able to move like lightning. Once it’s out of sight, it’s free.”
He left Catriona and started working on the stair-rails. In minutes, he’d exposed the shadow’s head and skinned the carpet up to the first-floor landing.
Dark Detectives Page 29