So, strangely, this was a truce.
As a sensitive – a Talent, as the parapsychology bods had it – Richard was used to trusting his impressions of people and places. He knew in his water when things or folks were out of true. If he squinted, he saw their real faces. If he cocked an ear, he heard what they were thinking. Derek Leech seemed perfectly sincere, and elaborately blameless. No matter how furiously Richard blinked behind his visor, he saw no red horns, no forked beard, no extra mouths. Only a tightness in the man’s jaw gave away the effort it took to present himself like this. Leech had to be mindful of a tendency to grind his teeth.
They had driven west – windows rolled down in the futile hope of a cool breeze – through parched, sun-baked countryside. Now, despite thermals and furs, they shivered. Richard saw Leech’s breath frosting.
“Snow in July,” said Leech. “Worse. Snow in this July.”
“It’s not snow, it’s rime. Snow is frozen rain. Precipitation. Rime is frozen dew. The moisture in the air, in the ground.”
“Don’t be such an arse, Jeperson.”
“As a newspaperman, you appreciate accuracy.”
“As a newspaper publisher, I know elitist vocabulary alienates readers. If it looks like snow, tastes like snow and gives you a white Christmas, then . . .”
Leech had devised So What Do You Know?, an ITV quiz show where prizes were awarded not for correct answers, but for matching whatever was decided – right or wrong – by the majority vote of a “randomly-selected panel of ordinary Britons”. Contestants had taken home fridge-freezers and fondue sets by identifying Sydney as the capital of Australia or categorizing whales as fish. Richard could imagine what Bernard Levin and Charles Shaar Murray thought of that.
Richard opened the boot of his Rolls and hefted out a holdall which contained stout wicker snowshoes, extensible aluminium skipoles and packs of survival rations. Leech had similar equipment, though his boot-attachments were spiked black metal and his rucksack could have contained a jet propulsion unit.
“I’d have thought DLI could supply a Sno-Cat.”
“Have you any idea how hard it is to come by one in July?”
“As it happens, yes.”
They both laughed, bitterly. Fred Regent, one of the Club’s best men, had spent most of yesterday learning that the few places in Great Britain which leased or sold snow-ploughs, caterpillar tractor bikes or jet-skis had either sent their equipment out to be serviced, shut up shop for the summer or gone out of business in despair at unending sunshine. Heather Wilding, Leech’s Executive Assistant, had been on the same fruitless mission – she and Fred kept running into each other outside lock-ups with COME BACK IN NOVEMBER posted on them.
Beyond this point, the road to Sutton Mallet – a tricky proposition at the best of times – was impassable. The hamlet was just visible a mile off, black roofs stuck out of white drifts. The fields were usually low-lying, marshy and divided by shallow ditches called rhynes. In the last months, the marsh had set like concrete. The rhynes had turned into stinking runnels, with the barest threads of mud where water usually ran. Now, almost overnight, everything was deep-frozen and heavily frosted. The sun still shone, making a thousand glints, twinkles and refractions. But there was no heat.
Trees, already dead from dutch elm disease or roots loosened from the dry dirt, had fallen under the weight of what only Richard wasn’t calling snow, and lay like giant blackened corpses on field-sized shrouds. Telephone poles were down too. No word had been heard from Sutton Mallet in two days. A hardy postman had tried to get through on his bicycle, but not come back. A farmer set off to milk his cows was also been swallowed in the whiteness. A helicopter flew over, but the rotor blades slowed as heavy ice-sheaths grew on them. The pilot had barely made it back to Yeovilton Air Field.
Word had spread through “channels”. Unnatural phenomena were Diogenes Club business, but Leech had to take an interest too – if only to prove that he wasn’t behind the cold snap. Heather Wilding had made a call to Pall Mall, and officially requested the Club’s assistance. That didn’t happen often or, come to think of it, ever.
Leech looked across the white fields towards Sutton Mallet.
“So we walk,” he said.
“It’s safest to follow the ditches,” advised Richard.
Neither bothered to lock their cars.
They clambered – as bulky and awkward as astronauts going EVA – over a stile to get into the field. The white carpet was virginal. As they tramped on, in the slight trough that marked the rime-filled rhyne, Richard kept looking sidewise at Leech. The man was breathing heavily inside his polar gear. Being incarnate involved certain frailties. But it would not do to underestimate a Great Enchanter.
Derek Leech had popped up apparently out of nowhere in 1961. A day after Colonel Zenf finally died in custody, he first appeared on the radar, making a freak run of successful long-shot bets at a dog track. Since then, he had made several interlocking empires. He was a close friend of Harold Wilson, Brian Epstein, Lord Leaves of Leng, Enoch Powell, Roman Polanski, Mary Millington and Jimmy Saville. He was into everything – newspapers (the down-market tabloid Daily Comet and the reactionary broadsheet Sunday Facet), pop records, telly, a film studio, book publishing, frozen foods, football, road-building, anti-depressants, famine relief, contraception, cross-channel hovercraft, draught lager, touring opera productions, market research, low-cost fashions, educational playthings. He had poked his head out of a trapdoor on Batman and expected to be recognized by Adam West – “it’s not the Clock King, Robin, it’s the English Pop King, Derek Leech”. He appeared in his own adverts, varying his catch-phrase – “if I didn’t love it, I wouldn’t . . .” eat it, drink it, watch it, groove it, use it, wear it, bare it, shop it, stop it, make it, take it, kiss it, miss it, phone it, own it. He employed “radical visionary architect” Constant Drache to create “ultra-moderne work-place environments” for DLI premises and the ranks upon ranks of “affordable homes for hard-working families” cropping up at the edges of conurbations throughout the land. It was whispered there were private graveyards under many a “Derek Leech Close” or “Derek Leech Drive”. Few had tangled with Derek Leech and managed better than a draw. Richard counted himself among the few, but also suspected their occasional path-crossings hadn’t been serious.
They made fresh, ragged footprints across the empty fields. They were the only moving things in sight. It was quiet too. Richard saw birds frozen in mid-tweet on boughs, trapped in globules of ice. No smoke rose from the chimneys of Sutton Mallet. Of course, what with the heat wave, even the canniest country folk might have put off getting in a store of fuel for next winter.
“Refresh my memory,” said Richard. “How many people are at your weather research station?”
“Five. The director, two junior meteorologists, one general dogs-body and a public relations-security consultant.”
Richard had gone over what little the Club could dig up on them. Oddly, a DLI press release provided details of only four of the staff.
“Who’s the director again?” he asked.
“We’ve kept that quiet, as you know,” said Leech. “It’s Professor Cleaver. Another Dick, which is to say a Richard.”
“Might have been useful to be told that,” said Richard, testily.
“I’m telling you now.”
Professor Richard Cleaver, a former time-server at the Meteorological Office, had authored The Coming Ice Age, an alarmist paperback propounding the terrifying theory of World Cooling. According to Cleaver, natural thickening of the ozone layer in the high atmosphere would, if unchecked, lead to the expansion of the polar icecaps and a global climate much like the one currently obtaining in Sutton Mallet. Now, the man was in the middle of his own prediction, which was troubling. There were recorded cases of individuals who worried so much about things that they made them happen. The Professor could be such a Talent.
They huffed into Sutton Mallet, past the chapel, and went through
a small copse. On the other side was the research station, a low-lying cinderblock building with temporary cabins attached. There were sentinels in the front yard.
“Are you in the habit of employing frivolous people, Mr Leech?”
“Only in my frivolous endeavours. I take the weather very seriously.”
“I thought as much. Then who made those snowmen?”
They emerged from the rhyne and stood on hard-packed ice over the gravel forecourt of the DLI weather research facility. Outside the main doors stood four classic snowmen: three spheres piled one upon another as legs, torso and head, with twigs for arms, carrots for noses and coals for eyes, buttons and mouths. They were individualized by scarves and headgear – top hat, tarn o’shanter, pith helmet and two toy bumblebees on springs attached to an Alice band.
Leech looked at the row. “Rime-men, surely?” he said, pointedly. “As a busybody, you appreciate accuracy.”
There were no footprints around the snowmen. No scraped-bare patches or scooped-out drifts. As if they had been grown rather than made.
“A frosty welcoming committee?” suggested Leech.
Before anything happened, Richard knew. It was one of the annoyances of his sensitivity – premonitions that come just too late to do anything about.
Top Hat’s headball shifted: it spat out a coal, which cracked against Richard’s visor. He threw himself down, to avoid further missiles. Top Hat’s head was packed with coals, which it could sick up and aim with deadly force.
Leech was as frozen in one spot as the snowmen weren’t. This sort of thing happened to others, but not to him.
Pith Helmet, who had a cardboard handlebar moustache like Zebedee from The Magic Roundabout, rose on ice-column legs and stalked towards Leech, burly white arms sprouting to displace feeble sticks, wicked icicles extruding from powdery fists.
Tarn and Bee-Alice circled round, making as if to trap Richard and Leech in the line of fire.
Richard got up, grabbed Leech’s arm, and pulled him away from Pith Helmet. It was hard to run in polar gear, but they stumped past Tarn and Bee-Alice before the circle closed, and legged it around the main building.
Another snowman loomed up in front of them. In a postman’s cap, with a mailbag slung over its shoulder. It was a larger and looser thing than the others, more hastily made, with no face coals or carrot. They barrelled into the shape, which came apart, and sprawled in a tangle on the cold, cold ground – Richard felt the bite of black ice through his gauntlets as the heel of his hand jammed against grit. Under him was a dead but loose-limbed postman, grey-blue in the face, crackly frost in his hair. He had been inside the snowman.
The others were marching around the corner. Were there people inside them too? Somehow, they were frowning – perhaps it was in the angle of their headgear, as if brows were narrowed – and malice burned cold in their eye-coals.
Leech was on his feet first, hauling Richard upright.
Snow crawled around the postman again, forming a thick carapace. The corpse stood like a puppet, dutifully taking up its bag and cap, insistent on retaining its identity.
They were trapped between the snowmen. The five walking, hattopped heaps had them penned.
Richard was tense, expecting ice-daggers to rip through his furs and into his heart. Leech reached into his snowsuit as if searching for his wallet – in this situation, money wasn’t going to be a help. A proper Devil would have some hellfire about his person. Or at least a blowtorch. Leech – who had recorded a series of anti-smoking adverts – managed to produce a flip-top cigarette lighter. He made a flame, which didn’t seem to phase the snowmen, and wheeled around, looking for the one to negotiate with. Leech was big on making deals.
“Try Top Hat,” suggested Richard. “In cartoon terms, he’s obviously the leader.”
Leech held the flame near Top Hat’s face. Water trickled, but froze again, giving Top Hat a tear-streaked, semi-transparent appearance. A slack face showed inside the ice.
“Who’s in there?” asked Leech. “Cleaver?”
Top Hat made no motion.
A door opened, and a small, elderly man leaned out of the research station. He wore a striped scarf and a blue knit cap.
“No, Mr Leech,” said Professor Richard Cleaver, “I’m in here. You lot, let them in, now. You’ve had your fun. For the moment.”
The snowmen stood back, leaving a path to the back door. Cleaver beckoned, impatient.
“Do come on,” he said. “It’s fweezing out.”
Richard looked at Leech and shrugged. The gesture was matched. They walked towards the back door.
The last snowman was Bee-Alice. As they passed, it reared up like a kid pretending to be a monster, and stuck out yard-long pseudo-pods of gleaming ice, barbed with jagged claws. Then it retracted its arms and silently chortled at the shivering humans.
“That one’s a comedian,” said Cleaver. “You have to watch out.”
Leech squeezed past the Professor, into the building. Richard looked at the five snowmen, now immobile and innocent-seeming.
“Come on, whoever you are,” urged Cleaver. “What are you waiting for? Chwistmas?”
Richard slipped off his sun-visor, then followed Leech.
II
“You in the van, wakey wakey,” shouted someone, who was also hammering on the rear doors. “The world needs saving . . .”
“Again?” mumbled Jamie Chambers, waking up with another heat-headache and no idea of the time. Blackout shields on the windows kept out the daylight. Living in gloom was part of the Shade Legacy. He didn’t even need Dad’s night-vision goggles – which were around here somewhere – to see well enough in the dark.
He sorted through stiff black T-shirts for the freshest, then lay on his back and stuck his legs in the air to wriggle into skinny jeans. Getting dressed in the back of the van without doing himself an injury was a challenge. Sharp metal flanges underlay the carpet of sleeping bags, and any number of dangerous items were haphazardly hung on hooks or stuffed into cardboard boxes. When Bongo Foxe, the drummer in Transhumance, miraculously gained a girlfriend, he’d tactfully kicked Jamie out of the squat in Portobello Road. The keys and codes to Dad’s old lair inside Big Ben were around somewhere, but Jamie could never get used to the constant ticking. Mum hated that too. Between addresses, the Black Van was his best option.
“Ground Control to Major Shade,” called the hammerer, insistent and bored at the same time. Must be a copper.
“Hang on a mo,” said Jamie, “I’m not decent.”
“Hear that, Ness?” said the hammerer to a (female?) colleague. “Shall I pop the lock and give you a cheap thrill?”
One of the few pluses of van living, supposedly, was that gits like this couldn’t find you. Jamie guessed he was being rousted by gits who could find anybody. For the second time this week. He’d already listened to Leech’s twist, Heather Wilding. This’d be the other shower, the Diogenes Club. One of the things Jamie agreed with his father about was that it made sense to stay out of either camp and make your own way in the night.
Even parked in eternal shadow under railway arches, the van was like a bread oven with central heating. The punishing summer continued. After seconds, his T-shirt was damp. Within minutes, it’d be soaked and dried. This last six weeks, he’d sweated off pounds. Vron was freaked by how much his skeleton was showing.
He ran fingers through his crispy shock of raven hair (natural), checked a shaving mirror for blackheads (absent), undid special locks the hammerer oughtn’t have been able to pop, and threw open the doors.
A warrant card was held in his face. Frederick Regent, New Scotland Yard (Detached). He was in plainclothes – blue jeans, red Fred Perry (with crimson sweat-patches), short hair, surly look. He couldn’t have been more like a pig if he’d been oinking and had a curly tail. The girlfriend was a surprise – a red-haired bird with a Vogue face and a Men Only figure. She wore tennis gear – white plimsolls, knee-socks, shorts cut to look like a skirt
, bikini top, Cardin cardigan – with matching floppy hat, milk-blank sunglasses (could she see through those?) and white lipstick.
“I’m Fred, this is Vanessa,” said the Detached man. “You are James Christopher Chambers?”
“Jamie,” he said.
Vanessa nodded, taking in his preference. She was the sympathetic one. Fred went for brusque. It was an approach, if tired.
“Jamie,” said Fred, “we understand you’ve come into a doctorate?”
“Don’t use it,” he said, shaking his head. “It was my old man’s game.”
“But you have the gear,” said Vanessa. She reached into the van and took Dad’s slouch hat off a hook. “This is a vintage ‘Dr Shade’ item.”
“Give that back,” said Jamie, annoyed.
Vanessa handed it over meekly. He stroked the hat as if it were a kitten, and hung it up again. There was family history in the old titfer.
“At his age, he can’t really be a doctor,” said Fred. “Has there ever been an Intern Shade?”
“I’m not a student,” he protested.
“No, you’re one of those dropouts. Had a place at Manchester University, but left after a term. Couldn’t hack the accents oop North?”
“The band was taking off. All our gigs are in London.”
“Don’t have to justify your life-choices to us, mate. Except one.”
Fred wasn’t being quite so jokey.
“I think you should listen,” said Vanessa, close to his ear. “The world really does need saving.”
Jamie knew as much from Heather Wilding. She’d been more businesslike, drenched in Charlie, her cream suit almost-invisibly damp under the arms, two blouse buttons deliberately left unfastened to show an armoured white lace foundation garment.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 19 Page 66