Anno Dracula 1899 and Other Stories

by Kim Newman

  I C U

  * * *

  I C U

  I see you.

  Irene thought that was a lie, but Master Mind could almost certainly hear her. Though, as with real spirits, she wondered if the words came to him as human sounds or in some other manner.

  The parlour was almost completely dark, save for a cone of light about the table.

  Miss Walter-David was terrified, on the point of fleeing. That was for the best, but there was a service Irene needed of her.

  She did not say it out loud, for ‘Master Mind’ would hear.

  He said he could see, but she thought she could conceal her hand from him.

  It was an awkward move. She put the fingers of her left hand on the shivering planchette, which was racing inside the circle, darting at the letters, trying to break free.

  I C U ID

  I C U R FRIT

  She slipped a pocket-book out of her cardigan, opened it one-handed and pressed it to her thigh with the heel of her hand while extracting the pencil from the spine with her fingernails. It was not an easy thing to manage.

  U R FRIT AND FRAUD

  This was just raving. She wrote a note, blind. She was trusting Miss Walter-David to read her scrawl. It was strange what mattered.

  ‘This is no longer Caress,’ she said, trying to keep her voice steady. ‘Have we another visitor?’

  2TRU IM SNAKE

  ‘Im? Ah-ha, “I’m”. Snake? Yet another speaker of this peculiar dialect, with unconventional ideas about spelling.’

  Miss Walter-David was backing away. She was out of her seat, retreating into darkness. Irene offered her the pocket-book, opened to the message. The sitter didn’t want to take it. She opened her mouth. Irene shook her head, shushing her. Miss Walter-David took the book, and peered in the dark. Irene was afraid the silly goose would read out loud, but she at least half-understood.

  On a dresser nearby was a tea-tray, with four glasses of distilled water and four curls of chain. Bicycle chain, as it happened. Irene had asked Miss Walter-David to bring the tray to the Ouija table.

  ‘Snake, do you know things? Things yet to happen?’

  2TRU

  ‘A useful accomplishment.’

  NDD

  ‘Indeed?’

  2RIT

  There was a clatter. Miss Walter-David had withdrawn. Irene wondered if she would pay for the seance. She might. After all, there had been results. She had learned something, though nothing to make her happy.

  ‘Miss Walter-David will die in 1952?’

  Y

  Back to Y. She preferred that to 2TRU and 2RIT.

  ‘Of what?’

  A pause.

  PNEU

  ‘Pneumonia, thank you.’

  Her arm was getting worn out, dragged around the circle. Her shoulder ached. Doing this one-handed was not easy. She had already set out the glasses at the four points of the compass, and was working on the chains. It was important that the ends be dipped in the glasses to make the connections, but that the two ends in each glass not touch. This was more like physics than spiritualism, but she understood it made sense.

  ‘What else do you know?’

  U R FRAUD

  ‘I don’t think so. Tell me about the future. Not 2001. The useful future, within the next five or ten years.’

  STOK MRKT CRSH 29

  ‘That’s worth knowing. You can tell me about stocks and shares?’

  Y

  It was a subject of which she knew nothing, but she could learn. She had an idea that there were easier and less obtrusive fortunes to be made there than in Derby winners. But she would get the names out of him, too.

  ‘Horse races?’

  A hesitation.

  Y

  The presence was less frisky, sliding easily about the circle, not trying to break free.

  ‘This year’s Derby?’

  * * *

  A simple search (+Epsom +Derby +winner +1923 -Kentucky) had no matches; he took out -Kentucky, and had a few hits, and an explanation. Papyrus, the 1923 winner, was the first horse to run in both the Epsom and Kentucky Derby races, though the nag lost in the States, scuppering a possible chance for a nice long-shot accumulator bet if he really was giving a woman from the past a hot tip on the future. Boyd fed that all to IRENE D, still playing along, still not seeing the point. She received slowly, as if her system were taking one letter at a time.

  Click. It wasn’t a monitor. It was a Ouija board.

  That was what he was supposed to think.

  IRENE D: I’m going to give you another name. I should like you to tell me what you know of this man.

  OK

  IRENE D: Anthony Tallgarth. Also, Basil and Florence Tallgarth.

  He ran multiple searches and got a cluster of matches, mostly from the twenties – though there were birth and death announcements from the 1860s through to 1968 – and, again, mostly from the Ham & High. He picked one dated February 2 1923, and opened the article.

  TYCOON FINDS LOST SON.

  IRENE D: Where is Anthony? Now.

  According to the article, Anthony was enlisted in the Royal Navy as an Able Seaman, under the name of T.A. Meredith, stationed at Portsmouth and due to ship out aboard the HMS Duckett. He had parted from his wealthy parents after a scandal and a quarrel – since the brat had gone into the Navy, Boyd bet he was gay – but been discovered through the efforts of a ‘noted local spiritualist and seeress’. A reconciliation was effected.

  He’d had enough of this game. He wasn’t going to play any more.

  He rolled back in his chair, and hit an invisible wall.

  IRENE D: I should tell you, Master Mind, that you are bound. With iron and holy water. I shall extend your circle, if you co-operate.

  He tried reaching out, through the wall, and his hand was bathed with pain.

  IRENE D: I do not know how you feel, if you can feel, but I will wager that you do not care for that.

  It was as if she was watching him. Him!

  IRENE D: Now, be a good little ghostie and tell me what I wish to know.

  With his right hand lodged in his left armpit as the pain went away, he made keystrokes with his left hand, transferring the information she needed. It took a long time, a letter at a time.

  IRENE D: There must be a way of replacing this board with a typewriter. That would be more comfortable for you, would it not?

  FO, he typed.

  A lash at his back, as the wall constricted. She had understood that. Was that a very 1923 womanly quality?

  IRENE D: Manners, manners. If you are good to me, I shall let you have the freedom of this room, maybe this floor. I can procure longer chains.

  He was a shark in a play-pool, furious and humiliated and in pain. And he knew it would last.

  * * *

  Mr and Mrs Tallgarth had been most generous. She could afford to give Master Mind the run of the parlour, and took care to refresh his water-bindings each day. This was not a task she would ever entrust to the new maid. The key to the parlour was about Irene’s person at all times.

  People would pay to be in contact with the dead, but they would pay more for other services, information of more use in the here and now. And she had a good line on all manner of things. She had been testing Master Mind, and found him a useful source about a wide variety of subjects, from the minutiae of any common person’s life to the great matters which were to come in the rest of the century.

  Actually, knowing which horse would win any year’s Derby was a comparatively minor advantage. Papyrus was bound to be the favourite, and the race too famous for any fortune to be made. She had her genie working on long-shot winners of lesser races, and was sparing in her use of the trick. Bookmakers were the sort of sharp people she understood only too well, and would soon tumble to any streak of unnatural luck. From now on, for a great many reasons, she intended to be as unobtrusive as possible.

  This morning, she had been making a will. She had no interest in the disposal
of her assets after death, when she herself ventured beyond the veil, for she intended to make the most of them while alive. The entirety of her estate was left to her firm of solicitors on the unusual condition that, when she passed, no record or announcement of her death be made, even on her gravestone. It was not beyond possibility that she mightn’t make it to 2001, though she knew she would be gone from this house by then. From now on, she would be careful about official mentions of her name; to be nameless, she understood, was to be invisible to Master Mind, and she needed her life to be shielded from him as his was from her.

  The man had intended her harm, but he was her genie now, in her bottle.

  She sat at the table, and put her hands on the planchette, feeling the familiar press of resistance against her.

  ‘Is there anybody there?’

  YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

  ‘Temper temper, Master Mind. Today, I should like to know more about stocks and shares…’

  * * *

  Food was brought to him from the online grocery, handed over at the front door. He was a shut-in forever now. He couldn’t remember the last time he had stepped outside his flat; it had been days before IRENE D, maybe weeks. It wasn’t like he had ever needed to post a letter or go to a bank.

  Boyd had found the chains. They were still here, fixed into the skirting boards, running under the doorway, rusted at the ends, where the water traps had been. It didn’t matter that the water had run out years ago. He was still bound.

  Searches told him little more of Irene Dobson. At least he knew someone would have her in court in four years’ time – a surprise he would let her have – but he had no hopes that she would be impeded. He had found traces of her well into the 1960s, lastly a piece from 1968 that didn’t use her name but did mention her guiding spirit, ‘Master Mind’, to whom she owed so much over the course of her long and successful career as a medium, seeress and psychic sleuth.

  From 1923 to 1968. Forty-five years. Real time. Their link was constant, and he moved forward as she did, a day for a day.

  Irene Dobson’s spirit guide had stayed with her at least that long.

  Not forever. Forty-five years.

  He had tried false information, hoping to ruin her – if she was cast out of her house (though she was still in it in 1927, he remembered) he would be free – but she always saw through it and could punish him.

  He had tried going silent, shutting everything down. But he always had to boot up again, to be online. It was more than a compulsion. It was a need. In theory, he could stop paying electricity and phone bills – rather, stop other people paying his – and be cut off eventually, but in theory he could stop himself breathing and suffocate. It just wasn’t in him. His meat had rarely left the house anyway, and as a reward for telling her about the extra-marital private habits of a husband whose avaricious wife was one of her sitters, she had extended his bindings to the hallway and – thank heavens – the toilet.

  She had his full attention.

  IRENE D: Is there anybody there?

  Y DAMNIT Y

  THE INTERVENTION

  A MAN HE didn’t know sat quietly at the far end of the long table, but Keith didn’t pay him attention. Vince, his partner, had asked him to step into the conference room for a moment. Daily crises gave Keith and Vince an excuse to get their brains dirty and demonstrate their continuing (if slightly soft-in-the-middle) whiz-kid status to the youngsters they’d employed when the business expanded.

  ‘This is Mr Leitch,’ said Vince, nodding at the stranger.

  Keith looked at Leitch and back at Vince.

  When his eyes weren’t on the man, Keith couldn’t picture him.

  He looked back again, almost rudely, staring.

  Leitch was ordinary, of no particular age, reasonably dressed. Keith tried to memorise features, but his mind slid off the face. It was like trying to pick up a paperclip with mittened fingers.

  What he did notice was that this was not a normal crisis talk-through. Vince didn’t have a terminal running, surrounded by post-it notes and an open file of spec sheets. He wasn’t wearing the lucky hat he always put on for real work. His hair was backcombed over his bald spot. He wore his smart, first-meeting-with-clients jacket.

  Was Leitch a new client? Vince didn’t arrange first meets without consulting him. Even if a prospect had come up suddenly, Keith would have been filled in before Leitch appeared in the office.

  Details niggled.

  Vince’s avoidance of him this morning, his excuse for ducking out of their regular lunch.

  It wasn’t just Vince. Rowena, his wife, had been different at breakfast. Even the kids, Jennifer and Jake. They’d all chattered around him, as usual. But the talk was brittle, with a fine edge of hysteria. It never let up. Questions thrown at him every second, tiny decisions for him to make, pretend problems to keep him occupied.

  Mary, his PA, had called in sick, and stayed away from work. She had not seemed to be coming down with anything yesterday.

  Keith half-thought everyone was working on something behind his back. He even wondered non-seriously if he was about to be on This is Your Life.

  Of course, he was too ordinary for that.

  What was going on? Somehow, he couldn’t ask the question.

  Vince didn’t ask him to sit down. He wouldn’t have, anyway. This was Keith’s conference room as much as Vince’s. He didn’t need to be asked.

  Something told him to stay stood up.

  ‘Keith Marion,’ Leitch said, confirming not questioning his identity.

  ‘This is an Intervention.’

  Keith didn’t know what the stranger meant.

  Leitch unzipped a leather document folder and opened it like a book. Like the book on This is Your Life, come to that. He produced several white papers in blue plastic folders. He slid them down the table.

  ‘These are copies, of course,’ he said.

  Keith didn’t look at the papers.

  ‘They are consent forms,’ Leitch explained. ‘Would you authenticate the signatures, please?’

  Keith sat down now, and slipped the top document out of its blue folder. He turned to the last page and recognised Rowena’s scrawl. He skimmed over the many clauses, mind buzzing too much to read.

  Another form was signed by Vince. There were more, from his accountant, bank manager, the headmaster of the kids’ school, his GP, his parents.

  ‘This is a radical Intervention,’ Leitch clarified. ‘Your rights and responsibilities are suspended. Your bank accounts are frozen for the day, but the co-signees will assume responsibility at the opening of trading tomorrow. Commitments will be fulfilled. The business will continue, until you are ready to reassume a position. So will your household.’

  Keith looked at Vince, who looked away.

  ‘Your credit cards are revoked, the codes of all computers you had access to have been changed, burglar alarms here and at your house have been reprogrammed. You will please surrender your house, office and car keys.’

  Leitch produced a small plastic bowl.

  Keith made a fist in his trouser pocket, around his keys.

  Leitch held out the bowl and fixed him with his eyes.

  ‘We can help you best if you don’t fight us,’ he said. ‘Therapy has been authorised by people who care about you.’

  There were two other strangers in the room now. A man and a woman, casually dressed. They were between him and the door.

  Through the glass partition, Keith saw the rest of the office. No one working. Everyone peering at the conference room. Mary was here now, in the reception area, smoking furiously.

  Keith brought out his keys and dropped them in the bowl.

  Leitch smiled.

  ‘A first step,’ he said. ‘Every odyssey begins with a first step.’

  ‘And ends with a last one,’ Keith snapped.

  There was a pause. Leitch’s face shut down, as if not programmed to respond. Then he opened his mouth and laughed. The other strangers l
aughed too.

  Vince looked away, eyes wet with tears.

  ‘Your mobile phone?’ Leitch asked.

  The woman held up Keith’s phone. She must have taken it out of his jacket, which was hanging on the back of his swivel chair in his office.

  ‘I know this will seem overly harsh,’ Leitch said, ‘but you must believe it is done in your interests.’

  The man at the door took a pair of shears out of his coat pocket. The woman gave him Keith’s mobile, and he snipped it cleanly in two.

  The snick sound made Keith’s heart jump.

  ‘If you will come with us,’ Leitch said, standing up.

  Vince took upon himself the task of gathering all the forms and returning them to Leitch.

  Keith shoved his chair away from the table and stood.

  ‘It’s for the best, old son,’ Vince said. ‘You know that.’

  He knew nothing of the sort, but wasn’t stupid enough to say so. The man and the woman were watching him, tensed, waiting for a move.

  He remembered the heart-punching snick.

  The woman held open the conference room door. Leitch left first. Keith was encouraged to follow.

  He looked back. Vince didn’t meet his eyes.

  With Leitch’s associates bringing up the rear, Keith was walked through the office. People he employed – had employed – scurried out of the way, wary of association with him. He didn’t know what they’d been told.

  In reception, he walked past Mary. She was trying to light a fresh cigarette in her mouth while one was still burning between her knuckles.

  She looked at him, not with shame but pity.

  ‘Keith,’ she said, then nothing.

  Cold fury kept him calm. He would go along until there was an opening. Then he’d be away. It was some kind of hostile takeover. He would have to fight back.

  * * *

  He was walked outside into the car park they called a courtyard. A white van was parked close by, next to his own estranged car. Another man got out of the van and opened the rear doors. Inside, the vehicle was padded, like a lunatic’s cell. A stretcher was pulled out. An undercarriage descended.

  ‘If you would take off your clothes and lie down,’ Leitch dictated, ‘Constant will see to them.’