The Man from the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 01]

by By Kim Newman

  “I believe that’s mine,” she said, reaching out for her cocktail. She tossed it back at a single draught. Her head cleared at once. She replaced the empty glass on Arnold’s tray. “Another would be greatly appreciated.”

  Arnold nodded. Everyone else had to take their drinks from the tray before he could see to her request. They sorted it out—a screwdriver for Myles, whisky and water for Harry, a virgin mary for Richard. Arnold, passing no comment on her funny turn, withdrew to mix a fresh gimlet.

  “Case of the horrors?” diagnosed Myles.

  She held her forehead. “In spades.”

  “A bad dream,” said Harry, disappointed. His pen hovered over a blank sheet in his folder. “Hardly amanifestation.”

  “To dream, wouldn’t she have to be asleep?” put in Richard. “She went into it standing up.”

  “A fugue, then. A fit.”

  Harry erred on the side of rational explanation. Normally, Annette admired that. Harry kept an investigation in balance, stopped her—and the rest of the spooks—from running off with themselves. Usually, ghosts were only smugglers in glow-in-the-dark skeleton masks. Flying saucers were weather balloons. Reanimated mummies were rag week medical students swathed in mouldy bandages. Now, his thinking was just blinkered. There were angry spirits on the Scotch Streak. And, for all she knew, little green Martians and leg-dragging Ancient Egyptians.

  “Have you had fits before?” asked Richard.

  “No, Richard,” she said patiently. “I have not.”

  “But you do get, ah, ‘visions’?”

  “Not like this,” she said. “This was a new experience. Not a nice one. Trust me. It reached out and hit me.”

  “‘It’?” said Harry, frowning. “Please try to be more scientific, Annie! You must specify. What ‘it’? Why an ‘it’ and not a ‘them’?”

  Her heartbeat was normal now. She knew what Harry—irritating man!—meant. She tried to be helpful.

  “Just because it’s an ‘it’ doesn’t mean there’s no ‘them’? An army is an ‘it,’ but has many soldiers, a ‘them.’“

  Harry angry, at something Richard called him.

  “What came for me wasn’t one of my usuals,” she continued. “I see what might happen. And not in ‘visions,’ as Richard put it. I don’t hear ‘voices’ either. I just know what’s coming, or might be coming. As if I’d skipped ahead a few pages and skim-read what happens next.”

  Harry, Richard and Myles backing away from her.No, they were still close—they wouldn’t back away for a few minutes.

  “I see round corners. Into the future. This was from somewhere else.”

  “The past?” prompted Richard. “A ghost?”

  “The past? Yes. A ghost? Not in the traditional sense. More like an incarnation, an embodiment. Not a personality. My idea of the Worst Thing. It reached into me, found out what my Worst Thing was, and played on it. But there was still the train. I was on the train. It lives here. The Worst Thing. The Worst Thing Ever. The Worst Thing in the World.”

  “Dramatic, Annie, but not terribly helpful.”

  Harry put the top back on his biro.

  “Listen to her,” said Richard, slipping an arm around her shoulder—a mature gesture for such a youth. “She’s not hysterical. She’s not imagining. She is giving you a report. Write down what she’s said.”

  Harry was not inclined to pay attention to the Jeperson boy.

  “I can’t,” he said. “It’s static. It’ll cloud the issue. We need observable phenomena. Incidents that can be measured. Traced back to a source. I’ll get the instruments.”

  “We have instruments,” said Richard. “Better attuned than your doodads, Daddy-O. We have Annette and Magic Fingers.”

  He didn’t include himself, but should have.

  A burst of indignant fury belched from Harry as Richard called him “Daddy-O.” She flinched at the psychic outpouring, but less than she would if she hadn’t known it was coming.

  The lad was pushing with Harry. He couldn’t help himself.

  Myles laid a hand on her forehead, nodded.

  “Something’s been at her,” he said. She didn’t like the sound of that. “Left claw marks.”

  “Will everybody please stop talking as if this were my autopsy,” she said. “I have been attacked, affronted, shaken. But I am not a fragile flower you need to protect. I can take care of myself.”

  Like she did in the war.

  The curve under the SS cap came back to her. If questioned, she would have talked. Everyone did, eventually. It had never come to it, because of her trick, her way of putting her feet right, of avoiding situations. Others— the names that had come back to her—had been less fortunate. As far as she knew, they were dead or damaged beyond repair. Most had been caught—talking made no difference in the end, and they were still killed.

  Ever since, she had been putting her feet right. Walking near peril, not into it. Here, she was on a train—a row of linked boxes on wheels. There might be no right steps here. There might only be danger. Her gift was often knowing where not to be. Here, knowing where not to be did not mean she could avoid being there.

  She trusted her instincts. Now, they were shouting Pull the communication cord! She could afford the fine for misusing the emergency stop signal. One swift tug, and brakes would be thrown. The Scotch Streak would scream to a halt. She could jump onto the tracks, head off over the fields.

  Harry, Richard and Myles backed away from her. Just as she’d known they would. She ticked off the moment, grateful there wasn’t anything more to it.

  She was pulling the communication cord.

  She suppressed the instincts. The red cord—a chain, actually—still hung, above a window, unbothered in its recess. She would ignore it.

  Would she pull the cord in the future or was she imagining what it would be like? No way to tell. She saw herself in the dock, being lectured, then paying five one-pound notes to a clerk of the court—but the clerk had no face. That usually meant she was imagining. If this was going to happen, she would see a face, and recognise it later.

  Then, her brain buzzed. She couldn’t mistake this for wandering imagination. Before the war, a child psychiatrist labelled Annette’s puzzling malaise as “acute déjà vu.” Catriona Kaye modified the diagnosis and coined the term “jamais vu.” Annette did not have “I have been here before” memories of the present, but “I will be here soon” memories of the future.

  An open exterior door, nighttime countryside rushing past. Someone falling from the train, breaking against a gravel verge. And someone coming for her, from behind.

  If that was a few pages ahead, she’d rather fold the corner at the end of this chapter, put the book on her bedside table and never open it again. But that wasn’t how the world worked.

  Arnold came with her second gimlet. This one she sipped.

  “Perfect,” she told the conductor, suppressing shivers.

  * * * *

  II

  Annette’s recovery impressed Richard. Two gimlets and a nip to her compartment to fix her face, and she was set. Her strings were notches too tight, but so were everyone else’s. She flirted, presumably on instinct, flitting among her colleagues, seeming to offer equal time. Only Richard noticed he was getting marginally more serious attention than Harry Cutley or Danny Myles. She already knew them but needed to puzzle out the new boy, fix him in her mind the way Harry fixed names, by rolling him around, pinching and fluffing, testing reactions. Which, as ever, were warm and, he thought, horribly obvious.

  Harry sourly made shorthand notes in his folder.

  The frightening vicar gently enquired as to the lady’s condition. Annette said she was fine, and he retreated, satisfied. Richard still wondered if the man was faking his aura. His killer’s hands seemed made to be gloved in someone else’s blood.

  Standing nearby, Annette was carefully not looking at the communication cord. Of course. Anyone who travelled by train knew that imp of the perverse which pop
ped up at the sight of a “penalty for improper use—£5” notice—-pull the chain, see what happens, go on, you know you want to. On the Scotch Streak, the imp was a bullying, nagging elemental.

  Annette felt Richard’s lapel between thumb and forefinger.

  “Real,” she said. “Sometimes I can’t tell anymore.”

  He didn’t know where to put his hands.

  “Put the boy down, Annie,” said Harry. “Come fill in this incident form. Since you’re convinced you wereassaulted, we must have a first-person account before memories fade.”

  She shuddered and joined Harry. He gave her a sheet of paper and a pencil, which she proceeded to use as if sitting an exam, producing neat, concise notations in the spaces provided.

  Danny Myles sat at the piano, fingers tapping the closed lid. His bruises were rising. He smiled, did a little two-finger Gene Rrupa solo on the polished wood.

  “Me next, you think?” Richard asked.

  Myles lifted his shoulders.

  “Watch your back, Jack.”

  The carriage windows were ebony mirrors. If Richard got close to the glass and strained, he could make out the rushing countryside. A late supper would soon be served in the dining carriage. The train didn’t stop until Edinburgh, at half-past one; then, after a twenty-minute layover, it would continue to Portnacreirann, arriving with the dawn.

  The overnight express felt more like an ocean liner than a train. Safe harbour was left behind and they were alone on the vast, deep sea.

  Though they had compartments, none of them would sleep.

  Richard took out his father’s watch, checked it against the clock above the connecting door. He had ten past nine, the train clock had ten to. He’d wound the watch at Euston, setting the time against the big station clock.

  Myles saw what he was doing, rolled his sleeve back and felt a glassless watch—a holdover from his blind days. “Stopped, man,” he said. “Dead on the vine. Seven seven and seven seconds. That’s a panic and a half.”

  “I won’t have one of those things,” said Annette, looking up from her form. “Little ticking tyrants.”

  “Prof?” Myles prompted Harry.

  Harry pulled a travel clock out of a baggy pocket and held it next to his wrist-watch.

  “Eight thirty-two. Ten oh six.”

  “Want to take a stab at which is the real deal?” asked Magic Fingers.

  They all looked at the train clock, ticking towards suppertime.

  “What I thought,” said the jazzman.

  Harry Cutley riffled through his folder and dug out more forms. He handed them out. Myles got on with it, turning out a polished paragraph. Richard simply wrote down “watch fast.”

  “Perhaps now you’ll stay away from mechanical instruments and rely on people,” said Annette. “You know clocks run irregularly in haunted places, so why do you trust thermometers, barometers, wire recorders and cameras?”

  “People run irregularly too,” said Harry reasonably. “Even—no, especially—Talents.”

  Richard was piqued. His watch was no ordinary timepiece. His father had inherited it from his grandfather, who had sat with Mycroft Holmes on the first Ruling Cabal. Geoffrey Jeperson had carried the watch all through the war. The Major, thinking his business done in a refugee camp, had been checking the time when he and a large-eyed, hollow-bellied child noticed one another. The watch brought them together. The boy who would become Richard Jeperson reached for the bauble, taking it reverentially when the Major, on instinct, trusted it to him. He had solemnly felt its weight, listened to its quiet tick, admired its Victorian intricacy through a panel in the face. Inside gears and wheels were tiny fragments of unknown crystal, which sparkled green or blue in certain light. The roman numerals were lost in tiny engravings of bearded satyrs and chubby nymphs.

  Those first ticks were where Richard’s memory began. Before now, the watch had never betrayed him.

  If Jeperson’s watch wasn’t to be trusted, what else in the life furnished for him by the Diogenes Club was left? The watch wound with a tiny key, which was fixed to the chain—it could also stop the mechanism, and Richard did so. If the watch could not run true, it should not run at all. He felt as if a pet had died, and he’d never had pets. He unhooked the chain and wondered if he’d ever wear it again. He slipped watch and chain into a pocket and handed back the incident form.

  Arnold, who obviously had no trouble with his watch—a railway watch, as much a part of the Scotch Streak as the wheels or the windows— announced that supper was served. According to the train clock, it was nine o’clock precisely.

  Harry reset his watch and clock against the train time. He made a note in his folder.

  “I foresee you’ll be at that all night,” said Annette. “Without using a flicker of Talent. It’s Sod’s Law.”

  Harry smiled without humour, not giving her an argument.

  It hit Richard that something had gone on between Harry Cutley and Annette Amboise, not just an investigation into a Puma Cult. Harry took teasing from her he wouldn’t from anyone else. He sulked like a boy when she paid attention elsewhere. She’d told Richard not to underestimate the Most Valued Member.

  Now, in a way that annoyed him, he was jealous.

  “Should we sample the Scotch Streak fare?” said Annette. “In Kilpartinger’s day, the cuisine was on a par with the finest continental restaurants.”

  “I doubt British Rail have kept up,” said Harry. “It’ll be beef and two veg, pie and chips or prehistoric bacon sarnies.”

  “Yum,” said Magic Fingers. “My favourite.”

  “Come on, boys. Be brave. We can face angry spirits, fire demons, Druid curses and homicidal lunatics. A British Rail sandwich should hold no horrors for us. Besides, I’ve seen the menu. I rather fancy the quail’s eggs.”

  Annette led them to the dining carriage. Wood-panel and frosted-glass partitions made booths. Tables were laid for two or four.

  As he passed under the lounge clock, Richard looked up. For a definite moment, he saw a face behind the glass, studded with bleeding numbers, clock-hands nailed to a flattened nose, cheeks distended, eyes wide, clockmaker’s name tattooed on stretched lips.

  “That’s where you’ve got to,” he mused, recognising Douglas Gilclyde. “Lord Killpassengers himself.”

  The face was gone. Richard thought he should mention the apparition, then realised he’d only have to fill in another form and opted to keep stumm. There’d be plenty more where that came from.

  * * * *

  III

  They were all laughing at him, the bastards!

  Harold Cutley tasted ash, bile and British Rail pork pie. He wanted to tell the bastards to shut up. The only noise he produced was a huffing bark that made the bastards laugh all the more.

  “Gone down the wrong tube,” said the insufferable Jeperson Boy.

  The French tart slapped him on the back, not to clear the blockage— taking an excuse to give him a nasty thump.

  “Get Prof a form to fill in,” snarked the beatnik. “See how he likes it.”

  Cutley stood and staggered away from the table. He honked and breathed again. He could talk if so inclined. As it happened, he bloody well wasn’t.

  He’d known they’d all gang up on him!

  That was how it always was. At Brichester, no one understood his work and he was written off as “the Looney.” Muriel hadn’t helped, betraying him with all of them. Even Head of Physics, Cox-Foxe. Even bloody students! He was with the Diogenes Club toffs on the sufferance of Ed Winthrop, who habitually overruled and sidelined and superseded. Ed had saddled Harry with this shower so he couldn’t get anywhere, would never have any findings to call his own.

  No one was coming after him. He shot a glance back at the booth, where Annette was canoodling with the teddy boy. The bitch, the bastard! Magic Fingers was tapping the table, probably hopped up on “sneaky pete.” If there were results to be had, he’d have to find them on his own.

  He would show
them. He would have to.

  The conductor—what was his name? why hadn’t he fixed it?—was in his way, blocking the narrow aisle. Cutley got past the man, shrinking to avoid touching him, and strode towards the dark at the end of the carriage.

  “Well, really,” said the frumpy bat who was the only other diner, the old girl with the guns. She’d spilled claret on her gammon and pineapple and was going to blame Harold Cutley. “I must say. I never did.”

  Cutley thought of something devastating to snap back at the pinch-faced trout, but words got mixed up between his brain and his pie-and-bile-snarled tongue and came out as spittle and grunts.