by Kim Newman
He felt newly awake, as if he had dreamed pleasantly for a year.
Several people stood at the foot of a spiral staircase, ready to start up and help him.
‘No,’ Leech said. ‘He can get down on his own two feet.’
‘I’m fine,’ Neil reassured.
Carefully, he climbed out of the Device.
* * *
A Ford Escort stopped and the driver called over, ‘Wanna lift, mate?’
Mickey stepped from grassed verge to damp asphalt.
‘Fab gear, pal,’ the driver said, chuckling. ‘Who does your hair, Stevie Wonder?’
He trudged to the door and put a hand to the handle.
‘Hahhahhahhah,’ the driver laughed, and drove off.
The next car stopped and the door was opened for Mickey to get in. The driver told him to belt up.
‘Michael Yo?’
* * *
Alone in the back of the cab that had been sent, Mark was tense. He didn’t like to be away from the telephone. Sally might call. The machine was on but she might not want to leave a message. Many people didn’t like to pour out their souls to machines.
He had to talk with Sally. He had to explain. In the end, it had been Sally. She was the keystone.
‘Sally, I love you.’
‘Mark,’ she said, softly, ‘yes.’
The cab drove through empty streets. It was Sunday evening in winter. Everyone else was indoors. He might have been all alone in the city.
Where was Sally? He thought of her face, trying to interpret every feature, every expression. She must understand.
* * *
‘Darling,’ Ginny said, ‘you should see your face.’
Michael had no speech. Inside, he burned.
The Pyramid ballroom was crowded. He recognised most faces. Some had worked on Colin Dale. Others were familiar from earlier projects. He saw the producer of I Scream, even.
‘Zh-you,’ he said to his wife, ‘zh-you were a collaborator.’
‘Of course, dear,’ she giggled. ‘We’ve been creeping around for weeks. It’s been such fun.’
Melanie asked if there were any sprouts.
‘Even Melly helped.’
His daughter gave him a gap-toothed grin.
‘But it’s been worth it,’ Ginny said.
One in five of the guests had dyed (or real?) white hair. Ginny took off her turban to reveal a milky fuzz-cut.
‘Do you like it?’ she said. ‘I’ve decided to go natural.’
Melanie mimicked her mother. She had the same hair.
‘Look at this,’ Ginny said, popping her contacts. She opened pink eyes and snorted like a rabbit.
Melanie followed suit.
* * *
In the foyer of the Pyramid, Mickey ran into another of the walking dead. They didn’t recognise each other for moments. They were both too weary to conceal their shock.
Mark’s bald blotch had spread. His face was deeply grooved with pain. His clothes were assembled at random.
‘Don’t tell me,’ Mark said. ‘I can imagine.’
So could Mickey.
Attendants helped them through into the ballroom. They both looked for the third ravaged face.
Michael, lost like a child dressed in his father’s dinner suit, was standing a little way from his wife and daughter.
In the crowd, they were alone.
They were seated together at a strange table shaped, Mickey realised, like a Q. They had nothing to say to each other.
* * *
Neil, comfortable in the clothes provided, followed Leech along the corridor to the lift-cage.
It was as if he’d dozed off in 1978 and dreamed a life that didn’t matter.
The doors hissed open and they stepped in.
The glass lift, suspended under the roof of the Pyramid, was a balcony in the sky. Below, in a sea of light and darkness, swam hundreds.
‘From up here, they look like one beast,’ Leech said. ‘So many, with one purpose.’
‘Me?’ Neil asked.
Leech said, ‘This is your night, Neil. Enjoy it.’
* * *
Was Sally here?
Mark looked around. He recognised many of the guests. There was his cellmate Dolar, with Janet of the Planet and two young girls. A woman with a striking white dash in her black hair was Anne Nielson of The Scam, ten years on. There was a table flagged with a Union Jack for the ELF, who sat with stiff backs as if stranded in enemy territory. Next to them were a couple of black guys, one with an absurd 1972 hat, and a white guy in a shell-suit, all wondering what they’d done to get here. Michael told him a nervous-looking family group were the Gregorys of Cranley Gardens. The guitarists in the house band were Denny Wolfe and Karl Garr, the singers were Grattan and Tamsin.
‘Where did they get all these people?’ he asked.
At a table alone, Tanya Gorse chain-smoked. Pippa gaggled with a cluster of Mickey’s shag-hags, avoiding Mark’s eyeline. Others: Hunt Sealey and Allan Keyes, Penny Gaye and Brie Simon, Kendra and Gwen, Farhad Z-Rowe and Timmy Chin, Ayesha McPherson and Laura-Leigh, April Treece and Richard Pierpoint, Trevor Skelly and Fats Waller, Raimundo and Father Menzies, Desmond Dennett and Candy Dixon, Carole Wolley and the aged remains of Chimp, Dick Karsch and Eivol Manoogian, Morag Duff and Barry Gatlin, Eugene Reilly and Steve Dass, Zafir Azmi and Pel, Rachael Rosen and Ingrid Tell, Constant Drache and Heather Wilding. A fancy-dress corner was packed with heroes and villains: Amazon Queen, the Streak, Blubber Boy, the Riddler, a smaller Dr Shade, Max Multiple, Dead Thing, some Gorilla Guerillas.
At one quiet table was an elderly couple it took Mark a full minute to recognise as Neil’s parents. The actors who played Colin Dale and Ken Sington were in their telly costumes, chatting up Ginny Moon and her mother. There were others: footsoldiers, minions, bystanders, associates, victims, celebrities, lords and ladies.
Sally, alone, wasn’t here. That made the evening meaningless.
The scenic lift began its slow crawl down the inside of the Leech Pyramid. Inside, Mark saw two figures, faces in darkness.
The lift landed like a space capsule and opened. Derek Leech and Neil Martin emerged. Balloons went up and sparkle-dust flew into the air.
* * *
Michael noticed TV cameras perched around the ballroom like machine gun nests. There was no escaping.
Gary Gaunt was in charge. The world was lost. The conspiracy prevailed.
Red dots glowed on the cameras. It was all live. The house band performed a Nina Simone number, ‘You’ll Go to Hell’.
Pris Wilding wound through hushed crowds, carrying a remote mike. Spotlights followed her course. Her hair, under a pearl-dotted mantilla, shone whiter than the sun. She wore nouveau Elizabethan costume, with a breathstopping bodice and taste-gagging flamenco sleeves.
Looking to camera, she smiled...
‘Hello, lovelies everywhere. Tonight, we have a very special triple edition of the show everyone’s gabbing about. Taking the Grunge Plunge are three young men who’ve been together for many, many years. Ahhhhh. They thought they were gathering here for a testimonial, but we knew different.’
She worked her way to the ‘Q’ table.
‘We’ve gone back further than you’d believe into the pasts of these pesky personalities, and some of the slimy sleaze our daring dirt-diggers have surreptitiously unshovelled will make your hair go white as a nun’s conscience. Everyone has a teensy-tiny smidgen of sordid sin in their deepest past that shames them to the quivering core of their being. But these famousoid fellers don’t seem to have anything but shame on their collective CV.’
* * *
Mark looked at Michael and Mickey. Finally, they understood the Deal. Truly, they had presented themselves as Perfect Sacrifices.
‘It’s us,’ Mark said. ‘Not Neil.’
‘How long?’ Michael asked.
‘Leech said we’d all live past ninety.’
He saw a future stretching past the middle of the
twenty-first century.
‘Sally,’ he said to himself. The name no longer meant anything. It was not attached to a person but to a condition, an absence in himself. He wound down.
‘Lovelies, lovelies,’ the strange American woman gasped. On a monitor, her breasts were positioned behind Michael’s head like Mickey Mouse ears.
Between them, the Quorum had the whole story. Michael made angry fists, while Mickey was slumped in resignation.
‘Hold this moment,’ Mark told them. ‘This may be the last time we understand anything. Tomorrow, it’s back to the trenches.’
Mark looked up at the American. He was ready to take his medicine.
‘Tonight,’ Pris Wilding said, ‘we look at Michael Dixon, Mark Amphlett and Mickey Yeo, celebright cephalopods who have achieved so much in so many fields. Tonight we look at these three and say...’
Everyone in the room shouted.
‘...What a Grunge!’
* * *
The show continued without Leech. He had no appetite for it. The Device was earthed, the fires feeding into the ground. Its purpose was fulfilled. Nothing forced him to watch the knives descend.
He walked away from the Pyramid. Just out of sight, Cardinal Wolsey Street was evacuated. The Device would go its own way. Tonight, its accumulated power was directed into the earth. By tomorrow’s dawn, the machine would be useless metal and decaying meat. The fires it contained would seed the ground.
If he looked from the right angle through his dark lenses, he saw hard bubbles in the night sky, the outlines which would be filled by the city’s bulk. Winged shapes flew between the minarets, talons dangling, beaks agape.
The Perfect Sacrifices would continue. Tonight had seen the turn of the cards for only three of innumerable Deals. Their lifelong acts of devotion would feed the new city.
He walked across the rubble-strewn wasteland as if it were smooth as still water.
The cycle had been interesting. Many movements of the Device surprised him. He learned there were some people - infinitely rare - he couldn’t touch. His city would be walled against them.
In the distance, Cardinal Wolsey Street shook. Its hollow shell collapsed quietly around the final throes of the Device. Its last glow lit the sky.
He walked onto the old dock, its timbers briefly crimsoned. This would be cleared soon, like everything else, swept into the river and borne away. He heard the current running. For the first time, he was allowed to smell the water, the mud, the sewage.
His foot strayed into a mulchy depression in the wood. He bent down and cupped water from the puddle in his gloved palm, then sucked the liquid into his mouth. His tongue exploded.
Taste!
Rewarded, he stood and turned. The Derek Leech International Building was illuminated from inside by the rite of sacrifice. Black facets took colourful tints as light-beams struck up into the skies. His Pyramid was a jewel in the night.
VALENTINE’S DAY, 1993
‘You missed the party,’ Neil said. ‘It was massive. You’d never believe who was there.’
‘I was invited,’ she said. ‘Leech even sent a car. But I didn’t have anything to wear.’
They were in the garden of the Tin Woodsman. He’d sent a note asking her out to Sunday lunch. Sally had been glad to hear from him. He had answers for her and she had pieces for him.
‘I missed you,’ he said, touching her wrist. ‘It wasn’t complete without you. Mark said as much.’
She could imagine.
‘I don’t have luck with parties. I met Connor at a party.’
‘Who?’
‘The father,’ she said, thumbing at the Invader. ‘He’s not around any more.’
‘In town?’
‘On Earth.’
‘You met me at a party,’ he said. ‘Remember?’
‘I rest my case.’
He grinned. It was an easy, un-neurotic grin. Now he was willing to stand up straight, Neil seemed taller.
They were the only souls hardy enough to be outside. As they drank, Neil trundled the stroller back and forth over a little hump in the grass, exciting the baby to produce delighted gurgles.
‘Good kid,’ he commented.
‘Sometimes. Mainly a darling nuisance, though.’
Wrapped in a coat and hood, the Invader mumbled. Occasional words were recognisable. Steps had been known. A little personality was coalescing.
‘No, this is really a good kid. What’s her name.’
‘It’s a he,’ she said. ‘Jerome.’
She was glad to be out in the cold. She didn’t want to be in the flat with long-past-comprehensible Valentines pouring from her fax. She’d changed her phone number at great inconvenience, but forgotten the fax line.
She was working steadily if unspectacularly. At a discount, she’d surveyed the wrecked Planet Janet for Dolar and suggested features to improve security. She was making a speciality of protecting small businesses from pilfering and vandalism. And a Community Action Group in Tottenham had her teaching a course, training bar and door staff to run social events resistant to attacks by racist groups. The night would come when one of her graduates would dole out lumps to the ELF thug with the screwdriver.
‘Did you even see the show?’
She shook her head. She’d had Cloud 9 disconnected. With Jerome in the flat, she wanted to minimise TV. With the money she saved on cable, she bought books. TinTin, Asterix, dinosaurs, Winnie the Pooh.
‘What went out was strange. It must have been impossible to follow if you didn’t know the backstory. What a Grunge! is a cringingly embarrassing programme. That’s probably why it’s such a hit.’
‘Can you follow the backstory now?’
‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘most of it. Strange, I used to think I had friends and enemies. Now, it looks as though I only had a conspiracy.’
She was surprised at his even tone. ‘Aren’t you angry?’
‘I was. Believe me, in that contraption, I went through anger. And fear and awe and Epiphany and holocaust and a whole lot else. I’d wasted so much paranoia on Norwegian Neil Cullers, certain I was fantasising and rationalising my own inadequacies, that it was a facer to find out the worst dream was not only true but an underestimation. But I get off easy. Nothing was my fault. Nothing at all.’
‘Leech said you got picked because you wanted to chat up Mark’s girlfriend.’
‘Philippa? Other way round, I think. It’s so long ago, I can’t remember.’
That was an evasion, but she let it pass. There was no point in being entirely truthful. She didn’t want to talk about Connor, so she’d let him off Pippa.
‘If it hadn’t been you, if you’d been one of the Quorum, what do you think you’d have done?’
He sat for a while, hand around a pint he’d paid for and shook his head.
‘That’s not a question anyone should have to answer,’ he said.
She’d asked it of herself many times.
‘I think I’d have gone along with the Deal,’ she said now. ‘If it had been me, I’d have done it. Up to a point.’
‘What point?’
She shrugged. ‘Some point. I wouldn’t have gone as far as they did. I hope.’
‘I think it got more and more difficult to pull out. One year Mark tried, apparently.’
‘“Tried”.’
Neil disapproved of her tone of moral superiority, she could tell. She must look like a witch-burner.
‘Sally, I don’t resent or hate them. We go back too far for that. In the beginning, we were all just kids. I went through a break-their-fucking-necks phase, but we always had those. There was a time with Mickey, just when we went Comprehensive, when I wanted to strangle him with his guts. Ancient history.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘You don’t have to.’
She wanted to talk about something else.
‘Where are you living?’
He grinned again. ‘Not in Cranley Gardens. I stayed with my parents
for a few weeks. I can’t tell you how much that means, to be back in touch with them. Now, I’m looking at flats. They gave me quite a bit of money.’
‘Who?’
‘Them, I guess. The Quorum. It was an anonymous parcel of cash. Big bills. An offering of atonement.’
She was disgusted.
‘I took their money too,’ she said. ‘I didn’t give it back.’
‘I should think not. That’d be bloody stupid.’
‘Can they atone?’
He was thoughtful. ‘I don’t know. I’m not really ready to forgive them. I mean, philosophically is one thing, but it was my life that got demolished. It’s not so much me, as the people who got in the crossfire. My Mum and Dad; they’ll never understand what it was about. Anne; she’s not had a happy decade. Dolar; he’s landed with a criminal record, well, more of a criminal record. You.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you. You’re stuck with Mark.’
‘He’s stuck with me. Not me, the idea of me.’
Sometimes he loitered outside the flat like a scarecrow. He was becoming more insubstantial. The Shape had interrupted publication, but the staff had bought out the title and a relaunch was announced. The Crush was continuing. She had looked into restraining orders, but the hassle was tailing off. She had the idea he could as easily obsess on her from afar as get close.
‘Is it bad?’
‘Not any more. Just embarrassing. How long can it go on?’
With chilling certainty, he said, ‘Years.’
She’d tracked down Mark’s ex and talked with her about the problem. She said Mark was the world’s champion at denial. He could ignore anything that contradicted his vision of his life.
Oddly, she had walked past Mark in the street in Wood Green and he had not recognised her. She realised the Crush was an abstract. Mark’s ‘Sally Rhodes’ was not real. The connections with her were fading.
‘What about the others?’ she asked.
‘Michael is moving to Basildon. He has most money left, but it’s rupturing away rapidly. His wife baled out and his show was cancelled. He’s involved in some labyrinthine lawsuit. Private Eye says he wanders the streets harassing people with white hair. Mickey’s working in Planet Janet. My old job, I suppose. No one’s heard of him, not even comics fans. I don’t know if he remembers his other life or thinks it was a dream. I was in there the other day, and we had a talk about comics. Neither of us reckon much to this whizzkid Farhad Z-Rowe.’