by Kim Newman
ALSO BY KIM NEWMAN
AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS
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Anno Dracula: The Bloody Red Baron
Anno Dracula: Dracula Cha Cha Cha
Anno Dracula: Johnny Alucard
Professor Moriarty: Hound of the D’Urbervilles
Jago
COMING SOON
Life’s Lottery
An English Ghost Story
TITAN BOOKS
THE QUORUM
Print edition ISBN: 9781781165546
E-book edition ISBN: 9781781165553
Published by Titan Books
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First edition: October 2013
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Kim Newman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Copyright © 1994, 2013 Kim Newman
“The Original Dr Shade” © 1990, 2013 Kim Newman
“The Man Who Collected Barker”’ © 1990, 2013 Kim Newman
“Gargantuabots vs the Nice Mice” © 1990, 2013 Kim Newman
“Mother Hen” © 1991, 2013 Kim Newman
“Organ Donors” © 1992, 2013 Kim Newman
“Going to Series” © 2000, 2013 Kim Newman
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for Cindy
Contents
PROLOGUE: ORGAN DONORS
LEECH
BOOK 1
OFFERINGS
1
2
3
LEECH
BOOK 2
DEALS
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
LEECH
BOOK 3
DEVICES
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
VALENTINE’S DAY, 1993
...AND OTHER STORIES
SALLY RHODES: MOTHER HEN
THE MAN WHO COLLECTED BARKER
GARGANTUABOTS VERSUS THE NICE MICE
DEREK LEECH: THE ORIGINAL DR SHADE
GOING TO SERIES
AVAILABLE NOW FROM TITAN BOOKS
MEPHISTOPHILIS:
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib’d
In one self place, but where we are is hell,
And where hell is, there we must ever be;
And, to be short, when all the world dissolves
And every creature shall be purify’d,
All places shall be hell that is not heaven.
FAUSTUS:
I think hell’s a fable.
MEPHISTOPHILIS:
Ay, think so still, till experience change thy mind.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE
The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus
PROLOGUE
ORGAN DONORS
She came out of the lift into Reception and heard there’d been another accident outside. Beyond sepia-tinted doors, a crowd gathered. People kneeled, as if pressing someone to the pavement. Heidi was phoning an ambulance. A man crouched over the fallen person, white shirt stained red, head shaking angrily. The picture was silent, a gentle whir of air conditioning like the flicker of a projector. Sally walked to the doors, calmly hugging file folders to her chest. She looked through heavy brown glass.
Without shock, she knew it was Connor. She could only see feet, still kicking in the gutter. White trainers with shrieking purple-and-yellow laces. His furry legs were bare. Tight black cycle shorts ripped up a seam, showing a thin triangle of untanned skin.
A gulp of thought came: at least their where-are-we-going? lunch was off. She choked back relief, tried to unthink it to limbo. Then craziness kicked in. She dropped her folders and waded through paper, pushing apart the doors. Outside in Soho Square, noise fell on her like a flock of pigeons. Everyone shouted, called, talked. A siren whined rhythmically.
A dozen yards away, a van was on its side, a dazed and bloody man being pulled free. The bicycle was a tangle of metal and rubber. In the broken frame, she saw, squashed, the yellow plastic drinks container she’d bought him. A satchel of video tapes lay in the gutter.
‘Connor,’ she said, ‘Connor!’
‘Don’t look, love,’ someone said, extending an arm across her chest.
People shifted out of her way, parting like stage curtains. Heat burst in her head, violet flashes dotted her vision. Her ankles and knees ceased to work. The ground shifted like a funhouse ride. Connor’s head was a lumpy smear on the pavement, tyre track of patterned blood streaking away. She was limp, held up by others. Her head lolled and she saw angry blue sky. Buildings all around were skyscrapers. She was at the bottom of a concrete canyon. Darkness poured in.
* * *
At her first interview, Tiny Chiselhurst had been chuffed by her curriculum vitae. Like everyone for the last twelve years, he didn’t expect a private investigator to look like her. She told him yes, she still had her licence, and no, she didn’t own a gun. Not any more.
Her independence was a Recession casualty. She wound up the Sally Rhodes Agency and escaped with no major debts, but there was still the mortgage. None of the big security/investigation firms were hiring, so she was forced to find another job her experience qualified her for. Being a researcher was essentially what she was used to: phoning strangers, asking questions, rushing about in heavy traffic, rummaging through microfiche. There were even seductive improvements: working in television, she could rush about in minicabs and retire her much-worn bus-train-tube pass.
On her first day, she was ushered into the open-plan Survival Kit office and given a desk behind one of the strange fluted columns that wound their way up through the Mythwrhn Building. Her work station was next to April Treece, an untidy but well-spoken redhead.
‘Don’t be surprised if you find miniature bottles in the drawers,’ April told her. ‘The previous tenant went alky.’
Sally had little to move in. No photographs, no toys, no gun. Just a large desk diary and a contacts book. Her mother had given her a Filofax once, but it was somewhere at home unused.
‘Welcome to the TV Trenches,’ April said, lighting the next cigarette from the dog-end of the last, ‘the business that chews you up and spits you out.’
‘Why
work here, then?’
‘Glamour, dahling,’ she said, scattering ash over the nest of post-it notes around her terminal. The other woman was a year or so younger than Sally, in her early thirties. She wore a crushed black velvet hat with a silver arrow pin.
‘They put all the new bugs next to me. Like an initiation.’
Their desks were in a kind of recess off the main office, with no window. Sally hadn’t yet worked out the building. It seemed a fusion of post-modern neo-brutalism and art deco chintz. In Reception, there was a plaque honouring an award won by Constant Drache for the design. She suspected that, after a while, the place would make her head ache.
‘Need protection?’ April said, opening the cavernous bottom drawer of her desk. ‘We did an item last series and were deluged with samples. Have some Chums.’
She dumped a large carton of condoms on Sally’s desk. Under cellophane, Derek Leech, multi-media magnate, was on the pack, safe sex instructions in a speech balloon issuing from his grin.
‘Careful,’ she warned. ‘They rip if you get too excited. We had the brand thoroughly road-tested. The office toy boy was sore for months.’
Sally looked at the carton, unsure how to react. Naturally that was when Tiny Chiselhurst dropped by to welcome her to the team.
* * *
She woke up on a couch in Reception. She saw the painted ceiling, a graffiti nightmare of surreal squiggles and souls in torment. Then she saw April.
‘Bender tried loosening your clothes,’ she said, referring to the notorious office lech, ‘but I stopped him before he got too far.’
April’s eye-liner had run but she’d stopped crying.
Sally sat up, swallowing a spasm. Her stomach heaved but settled. April hugged her, quickly, then let her go.
‘Do you want a cab? To go home?’
She shook her head. She buttoned up her cardigan and waited for a tidal wave of grief-pain-horror. Nothing hit. She stood, April with her. She looked around Reception. Plants spilled out of the lead rhomboid arrangement that passed as a pot. Framed photographs of Tiny and the other presenters, marked with the logos of their programmes, were arranged behind Heidi’s desk.
‘Sal?’
She felt fine. The buzz of worry-irritation which usually cluttered her head was washed away. All morning, she’d been picking through viewing statistics. Her impending Connor discussion prevented concentration; she’d had to go through the stats too many times, filling her mind with useless figures.
She remembered everything but didn’t feel it. She might have had total amnesia and instantly relearned every detail about her life. Her memory was all there but didn’t necessarily have anything to do with her.
‘Connor is dead?’ She had to ask.
With a nod, April confirmed it. ‘Tiny says so long as you’re back to work tomorrow afternoon for the off-line, you’re free.’
‘I don’t need time away,’ she said.
April was startled. ‘Are you sure? You’ve had a shock, lovie, you’re entitled to be a zombie.’
Sally shook her head, certain. ‘Maybe later.’
* * *
Although April introduced Connor as the ‘office toy boy’, it was a joke. He was tall, twenty-one, and trying to earn enough as a bike messenger to go back to college. Like everyone (except Sally), he wanted a career in television. Zipping in and out of Soho gridlock biking memos, sandwiches, video-tape and mysterious parcels between production companies was his way of starting at the bottom. He was one of the lean young people in bright lycra who congregated in Soho Square, ever alert for a walkie-talkie call. He was freelance but Mythwrhn was his major employer. There were a lot like him.
Sally first slept with him on a Friday night, after a party to mark the first transmission of the series. It had been a long time for her and she was flattered by his enthusiasm. Besides he was kind of fun.
As he poked about her flat early next morning like a dog marking territory, she wondered if she’d made a mistake. She hid under the duvet as he wandered, unselfconsciously and interestingly naked, in and out of the room, chattering at her. He said he was ‘looking for clues’. April had told everyone Sally used to be a private eye, and the Philippa Marlowe jokes were wearing thin.
She checked the bedside clock and saw it was before seven. Also on the table was the carton of Chums, one corner wrenched open. They’d come in handy after all. It’d have been hard to get aroused if she’d thought of Derek Leech leering off the pack at her. She turned the pack, putting Leech’s face to the wall.
Connor jumped on her bed, eager to get to it again but she had to get up to pee. As she left the bedroom, she realised he must be looking at her as she had looked at him. Last night, it had been dark. Putting on a dressing gown would kill the moment, so she went nude into the bathroom. After relieving herself, she looked in the long mirror and wasn’t too disappointed. When she was Connor’s age, she’d been almost chubby; with the years, she’d exercised and worried away the roundness. April said she envied Sally her cheekbones.
When she got back to the bedroom, Connor had already fit another condom over his swelling penis.
‘I started without you,’ he said.
* * *
Tiny told her she didn’t have to come to that week’s production meeting, but didn’t mean it. Sally was still waiting to wake up an emotional basket case but it hadn’t happened yet. She slept through the alarm more often and had stomach troubles, as if suffering from persistent jet-lag, but her thoughts were clear. She even dealt with mental time-bombs like the travelling toothbrush left in her bathroom. Perhaps after all these years, she was used to weirdness. Maybe she couldn’t survive without a stream of the unexpected, the tragic, the grotesque.
Networked on ITV at eight on Friday evenings, Survival Kit was an aggressive consumer show, proposing that life in the late twentieth century was frighteningly random and unspeakably dangerous. Tiny Chiselhurst was at once editor and presenter, and the show, in its fifth season, was the cash-cow that kept Mythwrhn Productions, a reasonably-successful independent, listed as rising. This series, Sally had helped Tiny, whose sarky humour was what kept viewers watching, expose a crooked modelling agency run on white slavery lines. Now she was switched to something that had little to do with the show itself and so was primarily an ornament at these meetings, called upon to report privately afterwards.
Tiny sat in the best chair at the round table as researchers, assistants, producers, directors and minions found places. He seemed to be made entirely of old orange corduroy, with a shaggy seventies mop and moustache. The meeting room was a windowless inner sanctum, eternally lit by grey lights, a crossbreed of padded cell and A-Bomb shelter. After reviewing last week’s programme, doling out few compliments and making Lydia Marks cry again, Tiny asked for updates on items-in-progress. Useless Bruce, fill-in presenter and on-screen reporter, coughed up botulism stats. Tiny told him to keep on the trail. The item hadn’t yet taken shape but was promising. What that meant, Sally knew, was that no sexy case - a ten-year-old permanently disabled by fish fingers, say - had come to light. When there was a pathetic human face to go with the story, the item would go ahead.
Finally there was the slot when people were supposed to come up with ideas. This was where performance could be best monitored, since ideas were the currency of television. She’d begun to realise actual execution of an item could be completely botched; what Tiny remembered was who had the idea in the first place. Useless Bruce was well known for ideas that never quite worked.
‘I was talking to a bloke at a launch the other night,’ said April. Someone said something funny, and she stared them silent. ‘He turned out to be a corporate psychiatrist at one of the investment banks, talks people out of jumping off the top floor when they lose a couple of million quid. Anyway, he mentioned this thing, “Sick Building Syndrome”, which sounded worth a think.’
Tiny gave her the nod and April gathered notes from a folder.
‘There are compan
ies which suffer from problems no one can explain. Lots of days lost due to illness, way above the norm. Also, a high turn-over of staff, nervous breakdowns, personal problems, sturfe like that. Even suicides, murders. Other companies in exactly the same business with exactly the same pressures breeze through with pas de hassles. It might be down to the buildings they work in, a quirk of architecture that traps ill feelings. You know, bad vibrations.’
Sally noticed Tiny was counterfeiting interest. For some reason, he was against April’s idea. But he let her speak.
‘If we found one of these places, it might make an item.’
‘It’s very visual, Ape,’ said Bender, an associate producer, enthusiasm blooming. ‘We could dress it up with Poltergeist effects. Merchant bank built over a plague pit, maybe.’
Tiny shook his head. This was the man who’d stayed up all night with a camera crew waiting for the UFOs to make corn circles.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think that suits us.’
‘Completely over-the-top,’ Bender said, enthusiasm vanishing. ‘We’re a serious programme.’
‘Thank you, April,’ Tiny said. ‘But Bender has a point. Maybe last series, we could have done this paranormal hoo-hah...’
‘This isn’t a spook story,’ she protested. ‘It’s psychology.’
Tiny waved his hand, brushing the idea away. ‘Remember the big picture. With the franchise bid, we mustn’t do anything to make the ITC look askance. It’s up to us to demonstrate that we pass the quality threshold.’
April sat back, bundling now-useless notes. Sally was used to this: it was all down to Tiny and he could be as capricious as any Roman Emperor at the games.
Roger the Replacement, one of the directors, had noticed a dry piece in the Financial Times about a travel firm considered a bad investment, which suggested further digging might turn up something filmable. British holidaymakers sent to unbuilt hotels in war zones. Tiny gave him a thumbs-up, and, since April wasn’t doing anything, assigned her to work the idea. The meeting was wound up.
In the Ladies, Sally found April gripping a sink with both hands, staring down at the plug, muttering ‘I hate him I hate him I hate him hate hate hate hate’.