“Far out,” said the other boy. His black-rimmed lips barely moved.
“She was only fifteen, you know?” said the tall boy as he zipped his ragged trousers.
“She was a cunt anyway.”
They turned away from the urinal and started talking about the band—Ritual Sacrifice, I gathered, whose name was scrawled on the walls of the club. As they went out, the boys glanced at the mirror and the tall one’s eyes met mine for an instant. Nose like a haughty Indian chief’s, eyelids smudged with black and silver. Louis would approve, I thought—but the night was young, and there were many drinks yet to be had.
When the band took a break we visited the bar again. Louis edged in beside a thin dark-haired boy who was bare chested except for a piece of torn lace tied about his throat. When he turned, I knew his was the androgynous and striking face I had glimpsed before. His beauty was almost feral, but overlaid with a cool elegance like a veneer of sanity hiding madness. His ivory skin stretched over cheekbones like razors; his eyes were hectic pools of darkness.
“I like your amulet,” he said to Louis. “It’s very unusual.”
“I have another one like it at home,” Louis told him.
“Really? I’d like to see them both together.” The boy paused to let Louis order our vodka gimlets, then said, “I thought there was only one.”
Louis’s back straightened like a string of beads being pulled taut. Behind his glasses, I knew, his pupils would have shrunk to pinpoints: the light pained him more when he was nervous. But no tremor in his voice betrayed him when he said, “What do you know about it?”
The boy shrugged. On his bony shoulders, the movement was insouciant and drop-dead graceful. “It’s voodoo,” he said. “I know what voodoo is. Do you?”
The implication stung, but Louis only bared his teeth the slightest bit; it might have been a smile. “I am conversant in all types of magic,” he said, “at least.”
The boy moved closer to Louis, so that their hips were almost touching, and lifted the amulet between thumb and forefinger. I thought I saw one long nail brush Louis’s throat, but I could not be sure. “I could tell you the meaning of this vévé,” he said, “if you were certain you wished to know.”
“It symbolizes power,” Louis said. “All the power of my soul.” His voice was cold, but I saw his tongue dart out to moisten his lips. He was beginning to dislike this boy, and also to desire him.
“No,” said the boy so softly that I barely caught his words. He sounded almost sad. “This cross in the center is inverted, you see, and the line encircling it represents a serpent. A thing like this can trap your soul. Instead of being rewarded with eternal life . . . you might be doomed to it.”
“Doomed to eternal life?” Louis permitted himself a small cold smile. “Whatever do you mean?”
“The band is starting again. Find me after the show and I’ll tell you. We can have a drink . . . and you can tell me all you know about voodoo.” The boy threw back his head and laughed. Only then did I notice that one of his upper canine teeth was missing.
The next part of the evening remains a blur of moonlight and neon, ice cubes and blue swirling smoke and sweet drunkenness. The boy drank glass after glass of absinthe with us, seeming to relish the bitter taste. None of our other guests had liked the liqueur. “Where did you get it?” he asked. Louis was silent for a long moment before he said, “It was sent over from France.” Except for its single black gap, the boy’s smile would have been as perfect as the sharp-edged crescent moon.
“Another drink?” said Louis, refilling both our glasses.
When I next came to clarity, I was in the boy’s arms. I could not make out the words he was whispering; they might have been an incantation, if magic may be sung to pleasure’s music. A pair of hands cupped my face, guiding my lips over the boy’s pale parchment skin. They might have been Louis’s hands. I knew nothing except this boy, the fragile movement of the bones beneath the skin, the taste of his spit bitter with wormwood.
I do not remember when he finally turned away from me and began lavishing his love upon Louis. I wish I could have watched, could have seen the lust bleeding into Louis’s eyes, the pleasure wracking his body. For, as it turned out, the boy loved Louis so much more thoroughly than ever he loved me.
When I awoke, the bass thump of my pulse echoing through my skull blotted out all other sensations. Gradually, though, I became aware of tangled silk sheets, of hot sunlight on my face. Not until I came fully awake did I see the thing I had cradled like a lover all through the night.
For an instant two realities shifted in uneasy juxtaposition and almost merged. I was in Louis’s bed; I recognized the feel of the sheets, their odor of silk and sweat. But this thing I held—this was surely one of the fragile mummies we had dragged out of their graves, the things we dissected for our museum. It took me only a moment, though, to recognize the familiar ruined features—the sharp chin, the high elegant brow. Something had desiccated Louis, had drained him of every drop of his moisture, his vitality. His skin crackled and flaked away beneath my fingers. His hair stuck to my lips, dry and colorless. The amulet, which had still been around his throat in bed last night, was gone.
The boy had left no trace—or so I thought until I saw a nearly transparent thing at the foot of the bed. It was like a quantity of spiderweb, or a damp and insubstantial veil. I picked it up and shook it out, but could not see its features until I held it up to the window. The thing was vaguely human shaped, with empty limbs trailing off into nearly invisible tatters. As the thing wafted and billowed, I saw part of a face in it—the sharp curve left by a cheekbone, the hole where an eye had been—as if a face were imprinted upon gauze.
I carried Louis’s brittle shell of a corpse down into the museum. Laying him before his mother’s niche, I left a stick of incense burning in his folded hands and a pillow of black silk cradling the papery dry bulb of his skull. He would have wished it thus.
The boy has not come to me again, though I leave the window open every night. I have been back to the club, where I stand sipping vodka and watching the crowd. I have seen many beauties, many strange wasted faces, but not the one I seek. I think I know where I will find him. Perhaps he still desires me—I must know.
I will go again to the lonely graveyard in the bayou. Once more—alone, this time—I will find the unmarked grave and plant my spade in its black earth. When I open the coffin—I know it, I am sure of it!—I will find not the mouldering thing we beheld before, but the calm beauty of replenished youth. The youth he drank from Louis. His face will be a scrimshaw mask of tranquility. The amulet—I know it; I am sure of it—will be around his neck.
Dying: the final shock of pain or nothingness that is the price we pay for everything. Could it not be the sweetest thrill, the only salvation we can attain . . . the only true moment of self-knowledge? The dark pools of his eyes will open, still and deep enough to drown in. He will hold out his arms to me, inviting me to lie down with him in his rich wormy bed.
With the first kiss his mouth will taste of wormwood. After that it will taste only of me—of my blood, my life, siphoning out of my body and into his. I will feel the sensations Louis felt: the shriveling of my tissues, the drying up of all my vital juices. I care not. The treasures and the pleasures of the grave? They are his hands, his lips, his tongue.
KIM NEWMAN
The Original Dr Shade
KIM NEWMAN is fast building a reputation as a writer, with his acclaimed short stories published in Interzone, Fantasy Tales and New Worlds, amongst other titles, and regular appearances in various “Year’s Best” anthologies.
His first novel, The Night Mayor, was recently optioned by Hollywood, and two subsequent books, Bad Dreams and Jago look set to be equally successful. As “Jack Yeovil” he has published a number of gaming novelisations set in offbeat fantasy and futuristic milieus.
In 1990, he won the Horror Writers of America Award for Horror: 100 Best Books, which he co-edited
with Stephen Jones, and other non-fiction books under his byline include Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Neil Gaiman), Nightmare Movies and Wild West Movies. He is currently working on an original anthology with Paul J. McAuley.
“The Original Dr Shade” is a darkly downbeat novella that mixes Thatcherite Britain, comics fans, and an unusual type of haunting into a highly original horror tale. However, that didn’t stop it winning the 1991 British Science Fiction Award for Best Short Story.
Like a shark breaking inky waters, the big black car surfaced out of the night, its searchlight headlamps freezing the Bolsheviks en tableau as they huddled over their dynamite. Cohen, their vile leader, tried to control his raging emotions, realizing that yet again his schemings to bring about the ruination of the British Empire were undone. Borzoff, his hands shaking uncontrollably, fell to his ragged-trousered knees and tried one last prayer to the God whose icons he had spat upon that day in the mother country when he had taken his riflebutt to the princess’ eggshell-delicate skull. Petrofsky drooled into his stringy beard, his one diseased eye shrinking in the light like a slug exposed to salt, and uselessly thumb-cocked his revolver.
The canvas top of the Rolls Royce “Shadowshark” raised like a hawk’s eyelid, and a dark shape seemed to grow out of the driver’s seat, cloak billowing in the strong wind, twin moons reflected in the insectlike dark goggles, wide-brimmed hat at a jaunty angle.
Petrofsky raised his shaking pistol, and slammed back against the iron globe of the chemical tank, cut down by another silent dart from the doctor’s famous airgun. In the distance, the conspirators could hear police sirens, but they knew they would not be taken into custody. The shadowman would not allow them to live out the night to further sully the green and fruitful soil of sacred England with their foul presence.
As the doctor advanced, the headlamps threw his expanding shadow on the Bolsheviks.
Israel Cohen, the Mad Genius of the Revolution, trembled, his flabby chins slapping against his chest, sweat pouring from his ape-like forehead down his protuberant nose to his fleshy, sensual lips. He raised a ham-sized fist against the doctor, sneering insane defiance to the last:
“Curse you, Shade!”
—Rex Cash, Dr Shade Vs the Dynamite Boys (1936)
THEY ATE AN EXPENSIVELY minimalist meal at Alastair Little’s in Frith Street, and Basil Crosbie, Leech’s Art Editor, picked up the bill with his company card. Throughout, Tamara, his agent, kept reminding Crosbie of the Eagle awards Greg had gained for Fat Chance, not mentioning that that was two years ago. As with most restaurants, there was nowhere that could safely accommodate Greg’s yardsquare artwork folder, and he was worried the sample strips would get scrunched or warped. He would have brought copies, but wanted to put himself over as sharply as possible. Besides, the ink wasn’t dry on the pieces he had finished this morning. As usual, there hadn’t been time to cover himself.
Whenever there was dead air in the conversation, Tamara filled it with more selected highlights from Greg’s career. Greg guessed she had invited herself to this lunch to keep him under control. She remembered, but was carefully avoiding mention of, his scratchy beginnings in the ’70s—spiky strips and singletons for punk fanzines like Sheep Worrying, Brainrape and Kill Your Pet Puppy—and knew exactly how he felt about the Derek Leech organization. She probably thought he was going to turn up in a ripped rubbish bag, with lots of black eyeliner and safety-pins through his earlobes, then go for Crosbie with a screwdriver. Actually, while the Sex Pistols were swearing on live television and gobbing at gigs, he had been a neatly-dressed, normal-haired art student. It was only at the easel, where he used to assemble police-brutality collages with ransom note captions, that he had embodied the spirit of ’77.
If Tamara would shut up, he thought he could get on with Crosbie. Greg knew the man had started out on the Eagle, and filled in on Garth once in a while. He had been a genuine minor talent in his day. Still, he worked for Leech, and if there was one artefact that summed up everything Greg loathed about Britain under late Thatcherism, it was Leech’s Daily Comet. The paper was known for its Boobs ’n’ Pubes, its multi-million Giveaway Grids, its unflinching support of the diamond-hard right, its lawsuit-fuelled muckraking, and prose that read like a football hooligan’s attempt to imitate the Janet and John books. It was Britain’s fastest-growing newspaper, and the hub of a communications empire that was putting Leech in the Murdoch-Maxwell bracket. In Madame Tussaud’s last annual poll, the statue of Derek Leech had ranked eighth on the Most Admired list, between Gorbachev and Prince Charles, and second on the Most Hated and Feared chart, after Margaret Thatcher but before Adolf Hitler, Colonel Quadaffi, Count Dracula and the Yorkshire Ripper.
Crosbie didn’t start talking business until eyedropper-sized cups of coffee arrived. With the plates taken away, the Art Editor opened his folder on the table, and brought out a neatly paperclipped set of notes. Tamara was still picking at her fruit salad, five pieces of pale apple and/or pear floating in a steel bowl of water with a solitary grape. She and Crosbie had been drinking dry white wine with the meal, but Greg stuck to mineral water. The gritty coffee gave him quite a punch, and he felt his heart tighten like an angry fist. Since Fat Chance, he hadn’t done anything notable. This was an important meeting for him. Tamara might not dump him if it didn’t come out right, but she might shift him from her A-list to her B-list.
“As you probably know,” Crosbie began, “Leech United Kingdom is expanding at the moment. I don’t know if you keep up with the trades, but Derek has recently bought up the rights to a lot of defunct titles with a view to relaunch. It’s a lot easier to sell something familiar than something new. Just now, Derek’s special baby is the Evening Argus.”
“The Brighton paper?” Greg asked.
“No, a national. It folded in 1953, but it was very big from the ’20s through to the War. Lord Badgerfield ran it.”
“I have heard of it,” Greg said. “It’s always an Argus headline in those old films about Dunkirk.”
“That’s right. The paper had what they used to call ‘a good War’. Churchill called it ‘the voice of true democracy’. Like Churchill, it was never quite the same after the War . . . but now, what with the interest in the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Britain and all that, we think the time is right to bring it back. It’ll be nostalgia, but it’ll be new too . . .”
“Gasmasks and rationing and the spirit of the Blitz, eh?”
“That sort of thing. It’ll come out in the Autumn, and we’ll build up to it with a massive campaign. ‘The voice is back.’ We’ll cut from this ovaltine-type ’40s look to an aggressive ’90s feel, yuppies on carphones, designer style, full-colour pages. It’ll be a harder news paper than the Comet, but it’ll still be a Leech UK product, populist and commercial. We aim to be the turn-of-the-century newspaper.”
“And you want a cartoonist?”
Crosbie smiled. “I liked your Fat Chance work a lot, Greg. The script was a bit manky for my taste, but you draw with clean lines, good solid blocks of black. Your private eye was a thug, but he looked like a real strip hero. There was a bit of Jeff Hawke there. It was just what we want for the Argus, the feel of the past but the content of the present.”
“So you’ll be wanting Greg to do a Fat Chance strip for the new paper?”
Greg had made the connection, and was cracking a smile.
“No, Tamara, that’s not what he wants. I’ve remembered the other thing I know about the Argus. I should have recognized the name straight off. It’s a by-word . . .”
Crosbie cut in, “that’s right. The Mirror had Jane and Garth, but the Argus had . . .”
Greg was actually excited. He thought he had grown up, but there was still a pulp heart in him. As a child, he had pored through second- and third-hand books and magazines. Before Brainrape and Fat Chance and PC Rozzerblade, he had tried to draw his other heroes: Bulldog Drummond, the Saint, Sexton Blake, Biggles, and . . .
“Dr Shade.”
“You may haff caught me, Herr Doktor Schatten, but ze glory off ze Sird Reich vill roll over zis passetic country like a tchuggernaucht. I die for ze greater glory off Tchermany, off ze Nazi party and off Adolf Hitler . . .”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Von Spielsdorf. I wouldn’t dirty my hands by killing you, even if it is what you so richly deserve.”
“Ain’t we gonna ice the lousy stinkin’ rat, Doc?” asked Hank the Yank. The American loomed over the German mastermind, a snub-nosed automatic in his meaty fist.
“Yours is a young country, Henry,” said Dr Shade gently, laying a black-gloved hand of restraint upon his comrade’s arm. “That’s not how we do things in England. Von Spielsdorf here may be shot as a spy, but that decision is not ours to make. We have courts and laws and justice. That’s what this whole war’s about, my friend. The right of the people to have courts and laws and justice. Even you, Von Spielsdorf. We’re fighting for your rights too.”
“Pah, decadent Englische Scheweinhund!”
Hank tapped the German on the forehead with his pistol-grip, and the saboteur sat down suddenly, his eyes rolling upwards.
“That showed him, eh, Doc?”
Dr Shade’s thin, normally inexpressive lips, curled in a slight smile.
“Indubitably, Henry. Indubitably.”
—Rex Cash, “The Fiend of the Fifth Column”,
Dr Shade Monthly No 111 [May, 1943]
The heart of Leech UK was a chrome-and-glass pyramid in London docklands, squatting by the Thames like a recently-arrived flying saucer. Greg felt a little queasy as the minicab they had sent for him slipped through the pickets. It was a chilly Spring day, and there weren’t many of them about. Crosbie had warned him of “the Union Luddites” and their stance against the new technology that enabled Leech to put out the Comet and its other papers with a bare minimum of production staff. Greg hoped none of the placard-carriers would recognize him. Last year, there had been quite a bit of violence as the pickets, augmented by busloads of radicals as annoyed by Leech’s editorials as his industrial relations policies, came up against the police and a contingent of the Comet-reading skinheads who were the backbone of Leech’s support. Now, the dispute dragged on but was almost forgotten. Leech’s papers had never mentioned it much, and the rest of the press had fresher strikes, revolutions and outrages to cover.
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