The Quorum

by Kim Newman

  ‘And those books to one side?’

  ‘Ah-hah, my special prizes,’ his eyes shone again, with all the fervour of a scientologist describing the earthly manifestation of L. Ron Hubbard. ‘These are all the special signed, numbered, limited 1985 Scream/Press edition, illustrated by J.K. Potter, bound by Kristina Anderson. Soon after, something horrible happened to the bookbinder and she hasn’t been heard from since. The edition is in full leather red Niger Oasis Goatskin and embossed with gold, signed and dated, with zombie doodle and personalised dead baby joke inscription. The underspine is veined manuscript calf vellum from Germany, dyed red. The signatures are sewn in red linen thread. The endpapers are hand-painted with a Roman horse and English carnival motif, the top edge is stained yellow and painted with a Grand Guignol clown’s head, the endbands are handsewn in red, yellow and black silk on linen cores, there are tissue overlays on all illustrations, and the title and copyright pages are splatted in human blood and red acrylic paint.’

  ‘Very nice.’

  ‘But there’s more. Look, here...’

  He pulled out yet another copy of the first Book of Blood, also leather bound, also embossed, presumably signed, dated, doodled and dead babied.

  ‘Something must have gone wrong there,’ she said. ‘It looks a little rough.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ he said, his eyes shining again, spittle clinging to the ends of his moustache. ‘This is a special special edition. It’s bound in human skin.’

  ‘Human skin? Isn’t that illegal?’

  ‘Not in Tijuana. The publishers found a doctor who could recommend locals who, although young enough to have unblemished skin, were dying of incurable diseases. By offering to pay a sum to the survivors of these poverty-stricken unfortunates, they were able to convince the patients to have the title, author’s name and publication information tattooed on their chests and backs while they were still alive. Then, after the inevitable took its course, the grateful families handed over the corpses for a surgical flaying, and a skilled bookbinder was brought in to prepare a special special edition of five sets of the Books of Blood.’

  This was beginning to sound both unhealthy and suggestive. He opened up the book at random, and she saw red printing on thick pages.

  ‘They found several reams of unmarked papyrus from the Museum of Antiquities in Cairo. They were reckoned to come from the tomb of a High Priest of Seth who was expected to write his memoirs in the afterlife. There’s supposed to be a curse on anyone who defiles its whiteness, but Clive Barker is a notorious iconoclast and the reams were used in the preparation of these volumes. The tooling is done in gold melted down from an Aztec sacrificial idol that miraculously survived the conquistadores. The top edge is stained with the hymenal blood of an Arab princess, kept fresh in a phial after her seduction by Sir Richard Burton, and traced with blasphemies in Sanskrit, Hebrew, Coptic script and Pig Latin. It’s signed, inscribed, and doodled on, of course...’

  ‘For the text, did they use...?’

  ‘Human blood? No, it clots too quickly. This, sadly, is just red ink. Although, funnily enough, by some strange coincidence, when he was signing his zombie drawing...’

  He turned to the page with the picture, and Sally saw the familiar stain.

  ‘Would you care...?’

  He handed the book to her. Gingerly, feeling it in the soft meat of her fingertips, she took it. The unique binding gave slightly as she squeezed. It was deeply tanned, and she saw a scattering of moles. The title and author’s name stood out. She expected it to smell, somehow, but it was perfectly cured.

  ‘The bookbinder unfortunately had his eyes put out shortly before the volumes were complete, and was therefore unable to appreciate the wonder he had created. One of life’s tragedies, Miss Rhodes.’

  ‘You have all five sets?’

  ‘No,’ he replied, ‘only three. The other two are in the hands of...’ he spat unconsciously, ‘another collector. Thus far, he has resisted all my offers. But I am certain that I shall eventually prevail on him to part with them.’

  ‘But I see five sets in that section.’

  ‘Ahh, yes. These two are different. An even more special special special edition.’

  She saw now that these two sets, three uniform volumes each, were lighter in colour.

  ‘What could be more special than human skin?’

  ‘Blood, Miss Rhodes, blood...’

  She remembered her research. ‘“Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we’re opened, we’re red.”’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Wringhim looked astonished.

  ‘The epigraph. The epigraph of the Books of Blood. Remember?’

  He looked faintly irritated. ‘Oh, yes, of course, I was forgetting.’

  ‘I’d have thought you would have known the books backwards by heart by now.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘sadly not. I have no reading copies of the Books of Blood. Each of these is unique, a collectible. I couldn’t risk reading them, turning the pages, breaking the spines. Ugh! I took the books out of the library once, and read most of the stories. Very good, I thought.’

  His fingers strayed along the shelves to the lighter volumes.

  ‘Blood,’ he whispered. ‘Blood.’

  Sally was shivering in the cold now. Even the dead skin of the book in her hand had gooseflesh. Being Mexican, the former owner probably wasn’t used to the chill. That organ she couldn’t hear was playing Tequila now.

  ‘This set, Miss Rhodes, is a unique prize, unique by virtue of blood.’

  ‘Go on,’ she said, knowing she couldn’t stop him, ‘tell me about it.’

  ‘A cousin of Clive’s, a distant connection, of course, but related by blood. I happened upon this fellow in a Cardiff pub one night. Evidently, he was something of a black sheep of the family. Always cadging drinks by the virtue of his name, and trying to impress barmaids with his relationship to a distinguished author. Clyde Barker, he was called. In his cups, he made the mistake of falling from a dock. He drowned.’

  ‘Drowned?’

  ‘From my point of view, most fortunate. If he had walked under a bus, he would have been no use at all, don’t you see?’

  ‘The skin...’

  ‘Would have been irreparably damaged, yes. Clyde Barker died without means, and so I took the liberty of arranging for his funeral. I had to settle outstanding bills with several bookmakers and drinking establishments. I saw to it that he went to his grave in as good a suit of clothes he could hope for. Of course, I wanted something in exchange. But the skin is perishable. It goes first. A good suit will outlast the skin in the ground, any week of the year. So, this edition is bound in the skin of a blood relative of the author’s, printed on the palimpsest parchment of a twelfth century black magician’s grimoire, signed in red ink, with a watercolour self-portrait of the author as a rotting zombie on the inside front cover, personally inscribed to me, an original still-unpublished sixty-line poem called ‘Rotting Love’ scribbled on the title page, endbands handsewn in hemp thread pulled from the noose used in the execution of Dr Crippen, a spine of weapons-grade plutonium sealed in lead, a book-lock that was once part of the famous Iron Maiden of Nuremberg and finally bled on in a Rorschach pattern by Clive Barker himself. The bookbinder accidentally had his hands severed in an accident with a printer’s guillotine, and will sadly never work again.’

  Sally had to take charge of the situation now. Wringhim was raving, too far gone for the police to deal with. She produced her licence. ‘I’m a private investigator,’ she said. ‘The Australian hired me. He’s expecting four more books and three movies...’

  He turned at last to the final set of the Books of Blood, edged in gold, bound in what she knew to be human skin.

  ‘...a lot of people want to know where Clive Barker is, Mr Wringhim...’

  He pulled out the first volume, and presented the cover to her. The nose was flattened, the lips and eyelids sewn shut with thick black thread, but the face was still recognisable.
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br />   ‘And this, is the special special special edition of the Books of Blood.’

  She pointed her little ladylike gun at him. He ignored it and opened the book to the redly blotched title page.

  ‘The hard part, Miss Rhodes,’ he said, ‘came after the books were bound. The hard part was getting the author to sign them.’

  GARGANTUABOTS VERSUS THE NICE MICE

  ‘A thousand a day,’ she told them. ‘And my train fare down from Victoria. Where else are you going to find a private detective with qualifications in child psychiatry?’

  They didn’t really have a choice. She leaned back in the hotel’s idea of an easy chair, and took a few tactical sips of Perrier water. They looked at each other. General Jones wanted to tough her price down, but R.J. Woolavington was more than ready to cave in.

  ‘Miss Rhodes, do you mind if we confer?’ snapped the General, waving a wet-end cigar. He still sounded like a US Marine Drill Instructor, although his gut would strain a dress uniform more than it was straining his lightweight tropical suit. He had never been more than a non-com in the service, but now he was in charge of the largest, most diversified private army in the world.

  ‘Not at all. Take your time. This meeting will be included in my bill. And there’s a wasting-my-time fee to cover even if you don’t want to hire me.’

  The General glared at her, and dragged Woolavington into the suite’s bathroom for a final browbeating. Sally looked at the glossy brochures on the coffee table. Gung-Ho Jones had an undersea outfit now, complete with spring-loaded speargun and an octopus whose arms could constrict automatically. On the cover of his pamphlet, Gung-Ho ($14.99) was grappling with the octopus ($19.99) in a sunken Spanish galleon ($74.99), grinning his one-sided grin (free, but copyrighted) and posing dramatically. Actually, thanks to the awkwardness of his hips and shoulder-joints, Gung-Ho could barely stand up straight, let alone assume a dramatic pose.

  Sally was more intrigued by the Woolavington Train Set she had seen downstairs. It was an idealised lay-out modelled on the Home Counties in the thirties, complete with genuine miniature steam engines, an entire village, a tunnel through a hill and over three miles of tracks. As a child, she would rather have had one of Woolavington’s trains, but her parents had given her a Sandie Doll (one of the General’s products) instead.

  The General and Woolavington were back, an agreement reached. Neither of them were happy: the General because he was going to have to accede to Sally’s terms, and Woolavington because the General was going to screw him into putting up more than half her fee.

  ‘One K is okay,’ growled the General, ‘but we’ll want results quickly. Before the convention is over.’

  ‘That gives me a week? Easy.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure, we’ve had our best men on it for a year. Nada.’

  ‘I’m better than most. Now, why don’t you and Mr Woolavington tell me your troubles.’

  ‘Well,’ grunted the General, ‘it’s...’

  ‘Mr Woolavington, you start.’

  The spinsterish English tycoon hadn’t been able to get out a complete sentence all afternoon. Sally thought she owed him a chance to say his piece.

  ‘Um, as you must know, General Jones and I are veterans of the trade. I inherited my business from my father, who had it from his father. We’ve been making model trains - not toy trains - for over one hundred years. Because we believe in craftsmanship, our prices are, um, high. In recent years, our market has mainly been among adult collectors. Still, we’ve been badly hit...’

  ‘Not as badly as some, Woolavington.’

  ‘Let him speak, General.’

  ‘The businesss changes, fluctuates, evolves. Woolavington and Company has stayed in business by staying the same. I’ve long been reconciled to the fact that our trains will never again be a majority force in the market, but I had thought we would be able to retain our grip on the customers we do have, but...’

  ‘But the Japs and the freaks are creaming us is what!’ shouted the General, fat face reddening, cigar ash falling unheeded on his lapels. ‘I ain’t like him, Miss Rhodes. I came into toys -toys, that’s what I call ’em, and I’m proud of ’em - when I was invalided out of the Corps. I got some extra bits and pieces in my leg on Iwo Jima. I put out the first Gung-Ho Jones in ’47. He was a Clean Marine then, like me. But I didn’t stick with that like Woolavington with his choo-choos. Gung-Ho Jones has kept up with the times. He’s been through all the services, plus he’s been a super-secret agent, an astronaut, a SWAT cop, counter-terrorist, you name it. A couple of years back, Gung-Ho was a barbarian swordsman on an alternate world. Now he’s a Blastmaster with the Universe Corps. Don’t ask me what that means. As far as I can tell, it’s a lot like being a Marine. Our strategy has been to stay in fashion, and, of course, to sell more and more units as the range of Gung-Ho Jones accessories, sidekicks and adversaries expands. It worked for thirty years, but these last couple of quarters, it’s been shot to shit...’

  The General picked up a handful of leaflets and shook them. He obviously took his business personally. Sally wondered what an adult psychiatrist would have made of his obvious identification with his nine-inch tall product. Had he left his guts on Iwo Jima, and built up his toy empire to make himself into a hero by proxy, the victor of a million bedroom-floor battles?

  ‘Last year, I did three million in deals on the first day of this show, Miss Rhodes. Yesterday, I barely managed to get five K and change from a few individual orders. The main chains don’t want to know. I believe in market forces, supply and demand, competition, all that stuff. But this isn’t capitalism, it’s genocide.’

  Sally wondered if the General realised that when he lost control his hands contorted like Gung-Ho Jones’ - one with an extended finger and a grip to (shakily) hold a gun, the other a tight fist with fingers fused like a deformity. The leaflets crumpled tight in the fist.

  ‘We’re not the only people affected,’ said Woolavington. ‘There are, um, over three hundred stands and displays in the halls downstairs. At this show, only two of them have been busy. And they’ve been very busy. They’re burying us.’

  ‘The Japs and the Freaks.’

  ‘So you said, General. Could you be more specific?’

  ‘The Gargantuabots and the Nice Mice. Take a look.’ The General took a boxed robot and a cuddly toy from the suite’s dressing table, and handed them to her. ‘They have TV shows, too.’

  The cuddly toy was a fat mouse, the size of a teddy bear. It had heart-shaped eyes, a perky little smile and adorable whiskers. Still in its cellophane, it looked as if it was in cryogenesis until someone found a cure for terminal cuteness. Sally found the robot more appealing, marginally. She’d been like that as a child, too. She wondered how much her Thunderbirds models would be worth if she hadn’t set fire to them with lighter fluid when she was eleven.

  ‘Oh, these are the robots that turn into different things, right? They look like dinosaurs, but twist into tanks or aeroplanes. I’ve seen kids with them. They must be popular.’

  ‘Unnaturally popular, Miss Rhodes. And the Nice Mice are equally successful. This year, the toy business is a duopoly.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re not overreacting to bad sales? I can see the appeal of both lines. I did my thesis on Playthings and Society. The Gargantuabots combine many aspects which would appeal to the stereotypical small boy: prehistoric monsters, giant robots, motor-vehicles, martial imagery. The transformation aspect is undeniably ingenious, and probably helps kids develop hand-eye coordination. Most popular toys have some subliminal educational value, I suppose. Even Gung-Ho Jones. And the Nice Mice are innocuous, almost calculatedly so. They aren’t to my taste, certainly, but pre-school children need fantasies of reassurance, not of mass destruction. What with the backlash against war toys, something like the Nice Mice was bound to come along eventually. I expect you only wish you’d thought of it first.’

  ‘We know all that, Miss Rhodes. Our toys are designed by shrinks too. G
ung-Ho Jones and Sandie cover the whole range of socio-economic and psycho-behavioural classes. We offer something for every kid there is. Every kid whose parents have $14.99, that is. Until AIDS, we were even going to give Sandie a homo best friend who could wear all her dresses. The demographics were right for it. We were doing great, then these crazies came on like gangbusters and kicked our asses. We had the same thing with computer games, but that fad boomed and bust over three seasons, and even at its height it never came close to hurting us as bad as we’re hurting now.’

  He balled the useless leaflets, and threw them in the general direction of a waste-paper basket. He missed. Woolavington fidgeted, cleaning his nails with an eyetooth. Sally wasn’t convinced these men were sane, but she could tell they were genuinely worried.

  ‘Okay, I’ll look into it,’ she said. ‘What can you tell me about the parent companies? And who they have here?’

  ‘Gargantuabots come out of Japan. The Sphere Corporation. Their top man is two floors down, in the Royal Suite. His name is Baron Toru Ghidrah. And the Nice Mice are headquartered in California, somewhere in Silicon Valley. They’re Buddhists or hippies or some shit. The parent company is registered as Cloud Incorporated. They don’t have executives or presidents, but the delegate who seems to be sort of in charge is called something stupid. Rainbow? Sunshine? Moonbeam? What is it, Woolavington?’

  ‘Cornfield. Cornfield Zwingli. I think he used to be Swiss.’

  Sally took it all in. ‘Ghidrah and Zwingli. I’ll look them up. Of course, if I unearth any unethical or illegal business practices you’ll want full details before you decide whether to blow the whistle on them or copy them, right?’

  ‘Very funny, Miss Rhodes. Did you have a Sandie when you were a little girl?’