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

by By Kim Newman

  He’d been doing these gigs for years. In ‘53, he’d unmasked the Phantom of the Festival of Britain. Then, he’d busted the Insane Gang. Defused the last of Goebbels’ Psychic Propaganda Bombs. Rid London Zoo of the Ghost Gorilla and his Ape Armada. It was a sideline. Also, he knew, an addiction. Some jazzmen popped pills, mainlined horse, bombed out on booze, chased skirts—he went after spooks. Not just any old sheet-wearers, but haints that could turn about and bite. Heart-eaters. Like 3473-S. This was a bad one, worse than the Phantom, worse than the Ghost Gorilla. He knew it. Annie and the Kid knew it too, but they hadn’t his extra senses. They didn’t know enough to be properly wary. Hell, not wary—terrified.

  “You’re doing it again,” Annie chided him.

  He realised he’d been drumming his fingers. “Stella By Starlight.” A song about a ghost. He stopped.

  His hands hurt. That snap from the piano lid was coolly calculated to show him who was boss. The sides of his thumbs were numb. His knuckles were purple and blobby. He spread his fingers on the tablecloth.

  “Like, ouch, man,” he said.

  Annie giggled.

  “It hurts, y’know. How’d you like it if your face fell off?”

  She was shocked for a moment.

  “Not a lot,” she said.

  “These hands are my fortune, ought to be wrapped in cotton wool every night. If I could spring for payments, I’d insure them for lotsa lettuce. This ... this train went for them, like a bird goes for the eyes. Dig?”

  “The Worst Thing in the World.”

  “On the button, Mama.”

  “Less of the ‘Mama.’ I’m not that much older than you.”

  The Kid ought to be back by now. But he was a no-show. And Harry Cutley was far out there, drowning.

  Magic Fingers cast his peepers over the dining car. There’d been an elderly frail strapping on the feed-bag down the way. She’d skedaddled, though he didn’t recall her getting up. Arnold—the conductor-waiter-majordomo-high priest—was gonesville also. He and Annie were alone.

  Man, the rattle and shake of the train were fraying his nerves with bring-down city jazz! It was syncopation without representation! All bum notes and missed melodies.

  At first, movement had been smooth, like skimming over a glassy lake. Now, the waters were choppy. Knives and forks hopped on the tables. Windows thrummed in their frames. The cloth slid by fractions of an inch and had to be held down, lest it drag plates over the edge and into the aisle.

  He felt it in his teeth, in his water, in his guts, in the back of his throat.

  Speed, reckless speed. This beast could come off the rails at any time.

  The windows were deep dark, as if the outsides were painted—or blackout curtains hung over them. Even if he got close to the cold glass, all he saw was a fish-eye-distorted, darked-up reflection.

  They weren’t in a tunnel. They could have been on a trestle stretched through a void, steaming on full-ahead, rails silently coming to pieces behind them. Alone in the night.

  He raised his hand and fingertipped the glass, getting five distinct icy shocks. He’d been leery of using his touching, but now was the time.

  “Anything?” asked Annie.

  He provisionally shook his head, but felt into the glass. It was thick, like crystal, and veined. He felt the judder of pane in frame, and caught the train’s music, a bebop with high notes, warning whistles and a thump of dangerous bass. 3473 had a heartbeat, a pulse.

  A shock sparked into his fingers, pain outlining his hand bones.

  He was stuck to the window, palm flat against the glass, fingers splayed. Waves of hurt pulsed into him, jarring his wrist, his arm ... up to the elbow, up to the shoulder.

  Annie sat, mouth open, not moving. Frozen.

  No, he felt her gloved fingers on his wrist, pulling. He scented her perfume, close. The brush of her hair, the warmth of her, near him.

  But he saw she sat still, across the table.

  It was if his eyes had taken a photograph and kept showing it to him, while his extra senses kept up with what was really happening. He moved his head: the picture in front of him didn’t change.

  Annie was speaking to him, but he couldn’t make it out. Was she talking French? Or Welsh? He had the vile taste of lava bread in his mouth. He heard the train rattle, the music of 3473, louder and louder.

  The picture changed. For another still image.

  Annie was trying to help, one knee up on the table, both hands round his wrist, face twisted in concentration as she pulled.

  But he couldn’t feel her hands anymore, couldn’t smell her.

  In his eyes, she was with him. But every other sense told him she’d left off.

  His vision showed him still images, like slides in a church hall. It was as if he were in a cinema where the projector selected and held random frames every few seconds while the soundtrack ran normally.

  A scream joined train noise.

  Annie was in the aisle, arms by her sides, hands little fists, mouth open. Dark flurries in the air around her. Birds or bats, moving too fast to be captured by a single exposure.

  The scream shut off, but Annie was still posed in her yell. Something broke.

  In the next image, she was strewn among place settings a few booths down, limbs twisted, dress awry. The frosted glass partition was cracked across.

  The window let go of him. His hand felt skinless, wet.

  Someone, not Annie, was talking, burbling words, scat-singing. No tune he could follow.

  He waited for the next picture, to find out who was there. Instead the frame held, fixed and unmoving no matter how he shook his head. He stood and painfully caught his hip on the table edge. He felt his way into the aisle, still seeing from his sat-by-the-window position. He tried to work out where he was in the picture before him, reaching out for chair backs to make his way hand-over-hand to Annie, or to where Annie was in his frozen vision.

  A heavy thump, and a hissing along with the gabble.

  He stood still in the aisle, bobbing with the movement of the train, like the hipsters who didn’t dance but nodded heads to the bop, shoulders and hands in movement, carried by jazz. He guesstimated he was three booths away from his original viewpoint.

  Then the lights flared and faded.

  The picture turned to sepia, as if there were an even flame behind the paper, and the brown darkened to blackness.

  He shut and opened his sightless eyes.

  His hands were on chair backs, and he had a better sense of things than when treacherous eyes were letting him down. He heard as acutely as before. The gabbling was a distraction. Just noise, sourceless. There was no body to it—nothing displacing air, raising or lowering temperature, smelling of cologne or ciggies. There was one breathing person in the carriage—Annette Amboise, asleep or unconscious. Otherwise, he was alone, inside the beast.

  This was different; blindness, with the memory of sight. It was as if there had been white chalk marks around everything, just erased but held in his mind as guidelines.

  It wasn’t like seeing, but he knew what was where.

  Tables, chairs, roses in sconces, windows, connecting doors, the aisle. Under him was carpet. Under that was the floor of the carriage. Under that hungry wheels and old, old rails.

  Now there were shapes in the dark. Sat at the tables. White clouds like human-sized eggs or beans, bent in the middle, limbless, faceless.

  He heard the clatter of cutlery, grunts and smacks of swinish eating. In the next carriage, the piano was assaulted. Someone wearing mittens plunked through “Green Grow the Rushes-Oh,” accompanied by a drunken chorus. This wasn’t now. This was before the war.

  This was the Scotch Streak of Lord Killpassengers.

  How far off was the In-for-Death Bridge?

  He couldn’t smell anything. It was worse than being struck blind. He knew he could cope without eyes. He’d made it from Wales to London, once. He had the magic fingers.

  Someone called him, from a
long way away.

  All he could taste was dry, unbuttered lava bread. Butter wasn’t to be had in London, what with rationing—his Mum used some sort of grease that had to be mixed up in a bowl. In Wales, with farms all about, there was all the butter in the world and no questions asked, but Mr. and Mrs. Jones didn’t believe in it. Like they didn’t believe in hot water. Or sheets—thin blankets of horsehair that scratched like a net of tiny hooks would do. Or music, except the wheezing chapel organ. When Danny drummed his fingers, he’d get a slap across the hand to cure him of the habit. He was not to get up from the table, even if he needed to take the ten steps across the garden to the privy, until he’d cleared his plate and thanked the Good Lord for His Bounty. Most nights, he’d sit, fighting his bladder and his tongue, struggling to swallow, trying not to have acute taste buds, ignoring the hurt in his mouth until the lump was solid in his stomach. “There’s lovely,” Mrs. Jones would say. “Bless the bread and bless the child.”

  In the dining carriage, there was lava bread on every table.

  The communicating door opened. The racket rose by decibels, pouring in from the canvas-link between carriages where the din was loudest. A cold draught dashed into his face. Someone entered the dining car, someone who shifted a lot of air. The newcomer moved carefully, like a fat man who knows he’s drunk but has to impress the Lord Mayor. A grey-white shape appeared in the dark and floated towards Danny, scraps of chalk-mark and neon squiggles like those sighted people have inside their eyelids coalescing into a huge belly constrained by vertically striped overalls, an outsize trainman’s hat, a pitted moon face. Danny saw the wide man as if he were spotlit on a shadowed stage, or cut out of a photograph and pasted on a black background.

  He recognised the face.

  A huge paw, grimy with engine dirt, stack out.

  “Gilclyde,” boomed the voice, filling his skull. “Lord Kilpartinger.”

  Not knowing what else to do, Magic Fingers offered his hand to be shaken. Lord Killpassengers enveloped it with his banana-fingered ape-paws and squeezed with nerve-crushing, bone-crushing force.

  Agony blotted out all else—he was in the dark again, feeling the vise-grip but not seeing His Lordship dressed up as Casey Jones. Burning pain smothered his hand.

  It was a bad break. At the end of his wrist hung a limp, tangled dustrag.

  Then he felt nothing—no pain. No sound. No smell. No taste. No feeling.

  For the first time in his life, he was completely cut off.

  * * * *

  VI

  Even beyond the usual assumption that quiet English children were aliens, there wassomething about Vanessa.

  She made Richard feel the way grownups, even those inside the Diogenes Club, felt around him when he was a boy, the way a lot of people still felt when he was in the room. At first, they were on their guard because he dressed like the sort of youth the Daily Mail reckoned would smash your face in—though, in his experience, teds were as sweet or sour as anyone else, and the worst beatings he’d personally taken came from impeccably uniformed school prefects. Once past that, people just got spooked—because he felt things, saw things, knew things.

  Now he knew about Vanessa.

  He was almost afraid of her. And this from someone who accepted the impossible without question.

  Sherlock Holmes, brother of the Club’s founder, said “when you have eliminated the impossible, what remains, no matter how unlikely, must be the truth.” Less frequently quoted was Mycroft’s addendum, “and when you can not eliminate the impossible, refer the matter to the Diogenes Club.” It was recorded in the Club’s archives, though not in the writings of John Watson, that the Great Detective several times found himself stumped, and fielded the case to his contemporary Carnacki the Ghost-Finder.

  It was barely possible that a gigantic conjuring trick could rearrange, or seem to rearrange, the carriages while the train was steaming through the darkened countryside. The archives weren’t short of locked-room mysteries and like conundra. For some reason, especially from the 1920s and early 1930s. The Scotch Streak dated from then, so it could have been built to allow baffling disappearances. However, an uncanny explanation required less of a stretch of belief. Richard couldn’t see a point to the carriage substitution, and pointlessness was a frequent symptom of the supernatural. Haunted houses often had “treacherous” doors, opening to different rooms at different times. It should have been expected, by know-it-all Harry Cutley for instance, that a haunted train would have something along these lines. However, the switcheroo wasn’t on the train’s list of previously recorded phenomena.

  Where was everybody? Harry was downwind, last seen heading towards Second and Third Class. Annette and Myles were in the misplaced dining car. Arnold the Conductor, omnipresent earlier, was nowhere to be seen.

  Were the other passengers where they should be? Though it was easy to get distracted by fireworks, this investigation was supposed to be about protecting the American couriers.

  Three compartments had blinds drawn and Do Not Disturb signs hung. One was Annette’s, and she wasn’t there. Another was Vanessa’s, and she was with him.

  That was a puzzle. Besides the couriers, Mrs. Sweet and the sinister vicar (one of whom must be a spy) should be here. They couldn’t all be crammed into one compartment playing whist with nuclear missiles. In theory, the British Government had other agents to deal with that sort of mess, kitted out with exploding cufflinks and licenses to kill. In a pinch, Richard could muddle in. The Club had been dabbling in “ordinary” espionage since the Great Game of Victoria’s reign. Edwin had served as an Intelligence Officer in the RFC during the First World War (“No, I didn’t shoot down the Bloody Red Baron; what I shot was a lot of photographs from the back of a two-seater—if it matters, each exposure got more Huns killed than all the so-called flying aces put together”) before taking over Carnacki’s ghost-finding practice.

  “Have you seen any Americans?” he asked the child.

  She solemnly shook her head and stuck out her lower lip. She wanted more attention paid to her.

  He looked again at her label.

  “Who is Lieutenant-Commander Coates?”

  She gave a “don’t know” shrug.

  “Not your Dad, you said. Where are your parents?”

  Another shrug.

  “Lot of that about,” he said, feeling it deeply. “Where do you live, usually?”

  A small sound, inaudible—as if the girl weren’t use to speech, like a well-bred, upper-middle-class Kaspar Hauser in spaceman pyjamas.

  “Come again, love?”

  “Can’t remember,” she said.

  Richard had a chill, born of kinship. But he was also wary. This was too close to where he came from. If the train could come up with Worst Things to get under Annette’s or Harry’s skin, it could sidle up close to him and bite too.

  “Vanessa What?”

  Another “can’t remember.”

  “It must be Vanessa Something. Not Coates, but Something.”

  She shook her head, braids whipping.

  “Just Vanessa, then. It’ll have to do. Nothing wrong with ‘Vanessa.’ Not a saint’s name, so far. Not forged in antiquity and refined through passage from language to language like mine. Richard, from the Germanic for ‘Rule-Hard,’ also ‘Ricardo,’ ‘Rickard,’ ‘Dick,’ ‘Dickie,’ ‘Dickon,’ ‘Rich,’ ‘Richie,’ ‘Clever Dick,’ ‘Dick-Be-Quick,’ ‘Crookback Dick.’Your name—like ‘Pamela,’ ‘Wendy’ and ‘Una’—was invented within recorded history. By Jonathan Swift, as it happens. Do you know who he was?”

  “He wrote Gulliver’s Travels.”

  So she remembered some things.

  “Yes. He coined the name ‘Vanessa’ as a contraction—like ‘Dick’ for ‘Richard’—for an Irish girl called ‘Esther Vanhomrigh.”‘

  “Who was she?”

  “Ah, she was a fan of Dean Swift, you know, like girls today might be fans of Tommy Steele.”

  “Don’t lik
e Tommy Steele.”