The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 19

by Stephen Jones

  “The other lot offered a retainer,” he said. “Enough for a new amp.”

  “We heard you’d been approached,” said Vanessa. “And were reluctant. Very wise.”

  Wilding hinted Transhumance might be signed to a Derek Leech label. They didn’t only put out moaning hippie box sets and collected bubblegum hits.

  “You won’t need an amp in the ice age,” said Fred. “They’ll be burning pop groups to keep going for a few more days.”

  “Yeah, I’m already shivering,” said Jamie, unpicking wet cotton from his breastbone. “Chills up my spine.”

  “All this heat is a sign of the cold, they say.”

  “You what?”

  Fred cracked a laugh. “Trust us, there could be a cold spell coming.”

  “Roll on winter, mate.”

  “Careful what you wish for, Jamie,” said Vanessa.

  She found his Dad’s goggles in a box of eight-track tapes, and slipped them over his head. He saw clearly through the old, tinted glass.

  “Saddle up and ride, cowboy,” she said. “We’re putting together a posse. Just for this round-up. No long-term contract involved.”

  “Why do you need me?” he asked.

  “We need everybody,” said Fred, laying a palm on the van and wincing – it was like touching a griddle. “Especially you, shadowboy. You’ve got a licence to drive and your own transport. Besides standing on the front lines for democracy and decent grub, you can give some of your new comrades a lift to the front. And I don’t mean Brighton.”

  Jamie didn’t like the sound of this. “What?” he protested.

  “Congratulations, Junior Shade. You’ve got a new backing group. Are you ready to rock and – indeed – roll?”

  Jamie felt that a trap had snapped around him. He was going into the family business after all.

  He was going to be a doctor.

  III

  Inside the research station, crystals crunched underfoot and granulated on every surface. White stalactites hung from doorframes and the ceiling. Windows were iced over and stunted pot-plants frost-bitten solid. Even light bulbs had petals of ice.

  Powdery banks of frost (indoor rime? snow, even?) drifted against cabinets of computers. Trudged pathways of clear, deep footprints ran close to the walls, and they kept to them – leaving most of the soft, white, glistening carpet untouched. Richard saw little trails had been blazed into the rooms, keeping mainly to the edges and corners with rare, nimbler tracks to desks or workbenches. The prints had been used over again, as if their maker (Professor Cleaver?) were leery of trampling virgin white and trod carefully on the paths he had made when the cold first set in.

  The Professor led them through the cafeteria, where trestle tables and chairs were folded and stacked away to clear the greatest space possible. Here, someone had been playing – making snow-angels, by lying down on the thick frost and moving their arms to make wing-shapes. Richard admired the care that had been taken. The silhouettes – three of them, with different wings, as if writing something in semaphore – matched Cleaver’s tubby frame, but Richard couldn’t imagine why he had worked so hard on something so childish. Leech had said he didn’t employ frivolous people.

  If anything, it was colder indoors than out. Richard felt sharp little chest-pains when he inhaled as if he were flash-freezing his alveoli. His exposed face was numb. He worried that if he were to touch his moustache, half would snap off.

  They were admitted to the main laboratory. A coffee percolator was frosted up, its jug full of frothy brown solid. On a shelf stood a goldfish bowl, ice bulging over the rim. A startled fish was trapped in the miniature arctic. Richard wondered if it was still alive – like those dinosaurs they found in the 1950s. Here, the floor had been walked over many times, turned to orange slush and frozen again, giving it a rough moon-surface texture. Evidently, this was where the Professor lived.

  Richard idly fumbled open a ringbinder that lay on a desk, and pressed his mitten to brittle blue paper.

  “Paws off,” snapped Cleaver, snatching the file away and hugging it. “That’s tip-top secwet.”

  “Not from me,” insisted Leech, holding out his hand. “I sign the cheques, remember. You work for me.”

  If Derek Leech signed his own cheques, Richard would be surprised.

  “My letter of wesignation is in the post,” said Cleaver. He blinked furiously when he spoke, as if simultaneously translating in Morse. Rhotacism made him sound childish. How cruel was it to give a speech impediment a technical name that sufferers couldn’t properly pronounce? “I handed it to the postman personally. I think he twied to deliver it to you outside. Vewy dedicated, the Post Office. Not snow, nor hail, and so on and so forth.”

  Leech looked sternly at the babbling little man.

  “In that case, you’d better hand over all your materials and leave this facility. Under the circumstances, the severance package will not be generous.”

  Cleaver wagged a shaking hand at his former employer, not looking him in the eye. His blinks and twitches shook his whole body. He was laughing.

  “In my letter,” he continued, “I explain fully that this facility has declared independence from your organization. Indeed, fwom all Earthly authowity. There are pwecedents. I’ve also witten to the Pwime Minister and the Met Office.”

  Leech wasn’t used to this sort of talk from minions. Normally, Richard would have relished the Great Enchanter’s discomfort. But it wasn’t clear where his own – or, indeed, anybody’s – best interests were in Ice Station Sutton Mallet.

  “Mr Leech, I know,” said Cleaver, “not that we’ve ever met. I imagine you thought you had more important things to be bothewing with than poor old Clever Dick Cleaver’s weather wesearch. Jive music and porn and so forth. I hear you’ve started a holiday company. Fun in the sun and all that. Jolly good show. Soon you’ll be able to open bobsled runs on the Costa Bwava. I’m not surprised you’ve shown your face now. I expected it and I’m glad you’re here. You, I had planned for. No, the face I don’t know . . . don’t know at all. . . is yours.”

  Cleaver turned to Richard.

  “Richard Jeperson,” he introduced himself. “I’m from . . .”

  “. . . the Diogenes Clubl” said Cleaver, viciously. “Yes, yes, yes, of course. I see the gleam. The wighteous gleam. Know it of old. The insuffewability. Is that fwightful Miss Cathewina Kaye still alive?”

  “Catriona,” corrected Richard. “Yes.”

  Currently, Catriona Kaye was Acting Chairman of the Ruling Cabal of the Diogenes Club. She had not sought the position. After the death of Edwin Winthrop, her partner in many things, no one else had been qualified. Richard was not yet ready to leave active service, and had a nagging feeling he wouldn’t be suited to the Ruling Cabal anyway. There was talk of reorganizing – “modernizing” – the Club and some of their rivals in Whitehall were bleating about “accountability” and “payment by results”. If it weren’t arcanely self-financing, the Club would have been dissolved or absorbed long ago.

  “If it weren’t for Cathewina Kaye, and a disservice she did me many many years ago, I might have taken a diffewent path. You know about this, Mr Jeperson?”

  A penny, long-teetering at the lip of a precipice, dropped – in slow motion, setting memory mechanisms ticking with each turn.

  “Richard Cleaver? Clever Dick. You called yourself Clever Dick. That’s who you are!”

  “That’s who I was . . . until that w-woman came along. She hates people like me . . . like both of you, pwobably . . . she only likes people who are n-normal. People who can’t do anything. You know what I mean. Normal.”

  He drew out the word, with contempt. Richard remembered a time – at school, as a young man – when he might have given the word such a knife-twist. Like Dick Cleaver, he had manifested a Talent early. While Cleaver demonstrated excess brain capacity, Richard showed excess feeling. Insights did not always make him happy. Ironically, it was Catriona – not his father or Edwin Winthro
p – who most helped him cope with his Talent, to connect with people rather than become estranged. Without her, he might be a stuttering, r-dropping maniac.

  “It was never about who you were, Cleaver,” said Richard, trying to be kind. “It was about what you did.”

  Fury boiled behind Cleaver’s eyes.

  “I didn’t do anything! We were the Splendid Six, and she took us apart, one by one, working in secwet with your dwatted Diogenes Club. We were heroes . . . Blackfist, Lord Piltdown, the Blue Stweak . . . and sh-she made us small, twied to make us normal. I’m the last of us, you know. The Splendid One. The Bwightest Boy in the World. The others are all dead.”

  Cleaver was coming up to pensionable age, but he was as frozen inside as his goldfish – still eleven, and poisonous.

  “If I suffered a speech impediment like yours, I’d avoid words like ‘dratted’,” commented Leech. “All this ancient history is fascinating, I’m sure. I know who you used to be, Professor. I don’t hire anyone without knowing everything about them first. But I don’t see what it has to do with all this . . . this cold business.”

  A sly look crept into Cleaver’s eye. An I-know-a-secret-you’re-not-going-to-like look.

  “I wather think I’ve pwoved my point, Mr Leech. You’ve wead my book, The Coming Ice Age?”

  “I had someone read it and summarize the findings for me,” said Leech, offhandedly. “Very convincing, very alarming. It’s why you were head-hunted – at a salary three times what you got at the Met – to head my weather research program.”

  What exactly had Derek Leech been doing here? Scientific weather control? For reasons which were now all too plain, Richard did not like the notion of a Great Enchanter with command over the elements.

  “I employ the best, and you were the best man for this job. What you did as a schoolboy was irrelevant. I didn’t even care that you were mad.”

  Clever Dick Cleaver sputtered.

  “Sorry to be blunt, pal, but you are. I can show you the psych reports. Your insanity should not have hindered your ability to fulfil your contract. Quite the contrary. Derek Leech International has a policy of easing the lot of the mentally ill by finding them suitable positions. We consider it our social service remit, repaying a community that has given us so much.”

  Richard knew all about that. Myra Lark, acknowledged leader in field of shaping minds to suit the requirements of government and industry, was on Leech’s staff. Some jobs you really had to be mad to take. Dr Lark’s, for instance.

  “Your book convinced me it could happen. World Cooling. And only drastic action can forestall the catastrophe. With the full resources of DLI at your disposal, I was expecting happier results. Not this . . . this big fridge.”

  Cleaver smiled again.

  “If you’d actually wead my book, you wouldn’t be so surprised. Tell him, Jeperson.”

  Leech looked at Richard, awaiting enlightenment.

  “Professor Cleaver writes that an imminent ice age will lead to world-wide societal collapse and, in all probability, the extinction of the human race.”

  “Yes, and . . . ?”

  “He does not write that this would be a bad thing.”

  Realization dawned in Leech’s eyes. Cleaver grinned broadly, showing white dentures with odd, cheap blue settings.

  Derek Leech had given his weather control project to someone who wanted winter to come and freeze everything solid. Isidore Persano and his worm would be proud.

  “What about the snowmen?” Leech asked.

  “I was wondewing when you’d get to them. The snowmen. Yes. I’m not alone in this. I have fwiends. One fwiend, mainly. One big fwiend. I call her the Cold. You can call her the End.”

  IV

  He was supposed to park outside the Post Office Tower and wait for the other recruits. One of the group would have further instructions and, he was promised, petrol money. Jamie was off to the Winter War.

  Now he’d (provisionally) taken the Queen’s Shilling, he wondered whether the Diogenes Club just wanted him as a handy, unpaid chauffeur, ferrying cannon fodder about. Dad wouldn’t have thought a lot of that. Still, Jamie only wanted to dip a toe in the waters. He was leery about the shadow life. The Shade Legacy hadn’t always been happy, as Mum would tell him at the drop of a black fedora with razors in the brim. At the moment, he was more interested in Transhumance – especially if they could find a better, preferably celibate drummer . . . and a new bass-player, a decent PA and enough songs to bump up their set to an hour without reprises. Vron had been promising new lyrics for weeks, but said the bloody heat made it hard to get into the proper mood. Perhaps he should scrub Transhumance and look for a new band.

  The GPO Tower, a needle bristling with dish-arrays, looked like a leftover design from Stingray. The revolving restaurant at the summit, opened by Wedgy Benn and Billy Butlin, stopped turning in 1971, after an explosion the public thought was down to the Angry Brigade. Jamie knew the truth. His father’s last “exploit” before enforced retirement had been the final defeat of his long-time enemies, the Dynamite Boys. The Tower was taken over by the now-octogenarian Boys, who planned to use the transmitters to send a coded signal to activate the lizard stems of every human brain in the Greater London area and turn folks into enraged animals. Dad stopped them by setting off their own bombs.

  Jamie found a parking space in the thin shadow of the tower, which shifted within minutes. Inside the van, stale air began to boil again. Even with the windows down, there was no relief.

  “Gather, darkness,” he muttered. He hadn’t Dad’s knack with shadows, but he could at least whip up some healthy gloom. The sky was cloudless, but a meagre cloud-shadow formed around the van. It was too much effort to maintain, and he let it go. In revenge, the sun got hotter.

  “Jamie Chambers,” said a girl.

  He looked out at her. She was dressed for veldt or desert: leather open-toe sandals, fawn culottes, baggy safari jacket, utility belt with pouches, burnt orange sunglasses the size of saucers, leopard-pattern headscarf, Australian bush hat. In a summer when Zenith the Albino sported a nut-brown suntan, her exposed lower face, forearms and calves were pale to the point of colourlessness. People always said Jamie – as instinctively nocturnal as his father – should get out in the sun more, but this girl made him look like an advert for Air Malta. He would have guessed she was about his own age.

  “Call me Gené,” she said. “I know your aunt Jenny. And your mother, a bit. We worked together a long time ago, when she was Kentish Glory.”

  Mum had stopped wearing a moth-mask and film-winged leotards decades before Jamie was born. Gené was much older than nineteen.

  He got out of the van, and found he was several inches taller than her.

  “I’m from the Diogenes Club,” she said, holding up an envelope. “You’re our ride to Somerset. I’ve got maps and money here. And the rest of the new bugs.”

  Three assorted types, all less noticeable than Gene, were loitering.

  “Keith, Susan and . . . Sewell, isn’t it?”

  A middle-aged, bald-headed man stepped forward and nodded. He wore an old, multi-stained overcoat, fingerless Albert Steptoe gloves and a tightly wound woolly scarf as if he expected a sudden winter. His face was unlined, as if he rarely used it, but sticky marks around his mouth marked him as a sweet-addict. He held a paper bag, and was chain-chewing liquorice allsorts.

  “Sewell Head,” said Gene, tapping her temple. “He’s one of the clever ones. And one of theirs. Derek Leech fetched him out of a sweet shop. Ask him anything, and he’ll know.”

  “What’s Transhumance?” asked Jamie.

  “A form of vertical livestock rotation, practised especially in Switzerland,” said Sewell Head, popping a pink coconut wheel into his mouth. “Also a London-based popular music group that has never released a record or played to an audience of more than fifty people.”

  “Fifty is a record for some venues, pal.”

  “I told you he’d know,” said
Gene. “Does he look evil to you? Or is Hannah Arendt right about banality. He’s behaved himself so far. No decapitated kittens. The others are undecideds, not ours, not theirs. Wavering.”

  “I’m not wavering,” said the other girl, Susan. “I’m neutral.”

  She wore jeans and a purple T-shirt, and hid behind her long brown hair. She tanned like most other people and had pinkish sunburn scabs on her arms. Jamie wondered if he’d seen her before. She must be a year or two older than him, but gave off a studenty vibe.

  “Susan Rodway,” explained Gene. “You might remember her from a few years ago. She was on television, and there was a book about her. She was a spoon-bender. Until she stopped.”

  “It wore off,” said the girl, shrugging

  “That’s her story, and she’s sticking to it. According to tests, she’s off the ESP charts. Psychokinesis, pyrokinesis, psychometry, telepathy, levitation, clairvoyance, clairaudience. She has senses they don’t even have Latin names for yet. Can hard-boil an egg with a nasty look.”

  Susan waved her hands comically, and nothing happened.

  “She’s pretending to be normal,” said Gene. “Probably reading your mind right now.”

  Irritated, Susan snapped. “One mind I can’t read, Gene, is yours. So we’ll have to fall back on the fount of all factoids. Mr Head . . . what can you tell us about Geneviève Dieudonné?”

  Sewell Head paused in mid-chew, as if collecting a ledger from a shelf in his mental attic, took a deep breath, and began “Born in 1416, in the Duchy of Burgundy, Geneviève is mentioned in . . .”

  “That’s quite enough of that,” said Gene, shutting him off.

  Jamie couldn’t help noticing how sharp the woman’s teeth were. Did she have the ghost of a French accent?

  “I’m Keith Marion,” said the kid in the group, smiling nervously. It didn’t take ESP to see he was trying to smooth over an awkward moment. “Undecided.”

  He stuck out his hand, which Jamie shook. He had a plastic tag around his wrist. Even looking straight at Keith, Jamie couldn’t fix a face in his mind. The tag was the only thing about him he could remember.