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

by By Kim Newman

  “Just for the record, Onions,” said Swellhead. “There are no ghosts.”

  The pain in Richard’s head kinked, then shut off.

  “That’s not strictly true,” he said. “This whole complex is a ghost, not of a person but a thought. An idea you had, Mr. Head. Maybe you had it in another place, where you were an international mastermind with a cadre of loyalist goons at your command. Maybe you had it while you stood behind the confectionary counter, your wonderful brain switched onto another track by years of breathing in chocolate dust. Dreams can come true. That’s what magic does. And you’re not one of the Talents of ‘Pronounced “Eyesight.”‘ You’re a natural-born magician. Onions would say it was all down to chemicals in your brain. Others would give you a pointy hat and call you a wizard. We both know it doesn’t matter what you are.”

  Swellhead clapped, slowly.

  “Quite right, Mr. Jeperson. What matters is what I can do.”

  “Which is ...?” demanded Onions.

  Swellhead nibbled the corner of a bon-bon, almost flirtatiously. “Ah, wouldn’t you like to know?”

  “Will you get someone to write you a theme song?” Richard asked. “‘Swellhead’ Swellhead, on sweeties fed, he’ll leave you dead...” Or how about: ‘You should have stayed in bed, it’s got to be said, you’ll fear to tread, after ... The Man With the Swollen Head.”‘

  “You know, that’s not a bad idea. Miss Kill, who should I hire? John Barry? Burt Bacharach? Stephen Sondheim?”

  Swellhead took music seriously. Richard remembered Ken Dodd, slaughtered and mounted for hogging the number-one spot with a dreadful ballad.

  “Percy is twenty-one years old,” he said. “She’d want N’Sync or Robbie Williams or Eminem.”

  Swellhead’s brows contracted, then relaxed.

  “Trivia Man, are you still in there?” Richard asked. “Your specialist subject is popular music since 1973....”

  “Soon, all that will be forgotten. In my reality, we have proper music.”

  “You can hear the lyrics and hum the tunes, eh?”

  Swellhead looked almost offended. “Yes, why not?”

  “Don’t ask me. I’m probably sixty-five. I haven’t liked a chart-topper since Mary Hopkin. That’s the point of pop music. It’s irrelevant to us oldies, just as we’re irrelevant to it. No matter what you do to the world, you won’t change that.”

  Swellhead was a little flustered.

  De Maltby’s silver hand began to whirr. Revolving needles protruded from the knuckles.

  Swellhead calmed down and wagged a finger.

  “Very clever, but you can’t distract me.”

  He snapped his fingers. The Muzak billowed “These Boots Were Made for Walking.”

  Miss Kill danced, mask making her seem like a robot.

  She wound around the impassive Swellhead, then de Maltby, then took a solo spot. She was very good, had all the moves, and each air kick had a force that could have broken bones. At the end of every chorus, she broke something: arm crushing through a wrought-iron table, heel battering a chair out of shape.

  ... one of these days, these boots are gonna ...

  Richard’s old wounds ached just to watch her.

  ... walk all over you!

  She finished her routine. Swellhead applauded. So did de Maltby, very carefully.

  Sincerely, Richard joined in.

  “I think it’s time to go up and visit the Big Dish,” said Swellhead. “What do you think?”

  Richard nodded.

  Endgame. With people pieces.

  * * * *

  3

  The complex had changed while she was topside.

  Now, it was fully operational. If Stacy touched the walls, she felt vibration. As she’d guessed, vast machines buried below Skerra were turning over. Energy thrummed throughout Head Office.

  And there were staff.

  She pressed into an alcove as white-suited soldiers jogged by.

  Ghosts? Or woken from deep-freeze?

  She was in an area of the complex they hadn’t toured earlier. Corridors curved but had no corners. Through glass doors, she saw illuminated rooms where scientific processes were being carried out. Most involved large, bubbling tanks of different-coloured liquids.

  One room contained nothing but ghosts, row upon row of clothes hangers draped with the white jumpsuits. She knuckle-punched a pad by the door, which opened noiselessly. She found a large suit and wriggled into it. A groin-to-throat seal had to be pressed closed with a toggle-zip affair of unfamiliar design. The garment bulged everywhere, but could be belted in. Plastic bootees went over her boots. She replaced her gloves with gauntlets that clipped easily to the sleeves. The helmet screwed into a collar-ring.

  Though opaque from outside, the faceplate was transparent for the wearer.

  Cool.

  As the helmet locked, a red display lit up at the lower right of her vision. The “H” logo hatched, and figures she didn’t understand scrolled.

  All she needed was one of those machine-gun things.

  The weapons weren’t stored here, though.

  Returning to the corridor, she strode on, trying to project purposefulness.

  She thought she was walking into a mirrored barrier. It was only an identically dressed figure coming the other way.

  The ghost made a salute, a fist pressed to the forehead.

  Inside her helmet, Stacy struggled not to laugh. On her manor, the gesture was slang for “knob-head.”

  She returned the salute, Harpo mirroring Groucho.

  The other whitesuit stepped aside to let her pass.

  Another jogging platoon passed. They all turned and gave her the knob-head salute, which she returned.

  When they were out of sight, she stopped, bent over and grabbed her knees, painful spasms in her gut. She had to laugh. An odd out-of-body feeling suggested remotely that she was on the point of genuine hysterics.

  Tears leaked down her face. She clanged a gauntlet against her faceplate trying to wipe them.

  Her own barking laughs filled her helmet.

  She realised she was shaking with terror.

  * * * *

  4

  The Big Dish was healed. Its “H” shone as if new-painted.

  The soot-patches on the walls had shrunk. They were disappearing like condensation on a warm morning.

  Richard was not surprised.

  The dead bodies were all up and about, flesh on their bones. Some had dwindling red stains or contracting black holes in their jumpsuits. One passed by: a network of cracks in his faceplate disappearing as if the film were running backwards at double-speed.

  As Swellhead stepped off the lift platform, the white ghosts turned and thumped their foreheads in salute.

  Respectfully, he returned the gesture.

  Activity all around. Busy, busy ghosts. Technicians, lab coats flapping, ran silent diagnostic tests at banks of controls. White jeep-cum-golfcart vehicles trundled without colliding, like well-controlled model trains, some dragging trailers of white, “H”-logoed barrels. Mechanics with dark stains on their uniforms oiled the rails on which the Big Dish ran.

  “All very satisfactory,” said Swellhead.

  A pipeline burst across the floor, slithering like a serpent, coughing out thick black liquid. A cleanup crew descended automatically, spraying foam on the spill, tethering and repairing the line.

  This crisis did not impinge on Swellhead’s calm.

  Richard looked up, towards the Blowhole.

  ... a hundred black figures rappelling down, firebursts in the air all around, the roar of attack choppers ...

  He could not count on that this time.

  In the 1973 of his phantom memory, Edwin Winthrop was waiting at the Club, monitoring all frequencies. An SAS strike force was scrambled and at ready in a secret base in the Orkneys. At Richard’s signal, Swellhead’s complex would be attacked, breached and overwhelmed.

  Here and now, Really-a-Good-Bloke Rory was sn
ug in bed waiting for a report about intellectual salvage rights that would win him bonus points with his minister. Morag Duff could no more authorise a military attack on Skerra than she could get reform of the Common Agricultural Policy through the EU.

  Soon, the government would be irrelevant.

  All governments. All churches. All beliefs. All aesthetics.

  Everything.

  The whole world would be living inside Sewell Head’s head.

  * * * *

  5

  Stacy tried to imagine a cutaway diagram of Skerra, but found the mental map of the complex made her head hurt. It probably didn’t add up anyway. She wasn’t sure there was room under the island for all this.

  She found herself back in the sculpture garden.

  Something was missing.

  By the Easter Island-look Sewell Head lay the elegant skeleton, black-handled blade stuck in its skull. The mask it had worn was missing.

  Stacy plucked the knife. It was about three inches long. Whisper-touching her thumb to the blade, she sliced open her gauntlet.

  It wasn’t a machine gun, but it was something.

  She’d only had an afternoon of firearms training, anyway. A knife ought to be more use. She had taken, and now taught, an evening class in women’s self-defence. To demonstrate the proper countermove for knife attack, twisting a wooden sticker out of a volunteer’s grip, she’d picked up dirty-fighting skills. She usually had to cheat on the final exams, letting pupils take the sticker away from her when she knew she could easily get it against their throats.

  Blade out, she entered the hallway of heads.

  Stalking past, she tried to conquer the impression that the trophies were looking at her.

  She was at the point of peering into the control room when a bloody stare caught her attention.

  There was a new trophy, crudely hacked and inexpertly mounted.

  Aircrewman Victor Kydd, Skerra, 2003, machete.

  She swore, furious and grief-shocked.

  * * * *

  6

  “But what’s it for?” asked Onions. “What does it do?”

  Richard wondered if Swellhead would go back on his word and explain his grand design. Possibly, he was as trapped as all other players and had to act out the role of diabolical mastermind. That was a chink of hope—villains always lose.

  “It’ll make things neat and tidy,” said Swellhead.

  “In your terms, it’ll amplify his Talent,” Richard told Onions.

  “Very perceptive,” said Swellhead.

  “He’s going to overwrite reality.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Look around, Adam. It’s been ridiculous all along, but here it is. In an infinite number of possibles, many of them will be extremely improbable. Is this that much stranger than regular reality?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you haven’t been paying attention.”

  “I’m a scientist, not some cracked guru.”

  “An old argument.”

  As Richard and Onions squabbled, Swellhead beamed.

  Richard tried to reserve part of his mind for thinking this through. There was still Stacy.

  “Don’t think I’ve forgotten Sergeant Cotterill,” said Swellhead. “I’m sure she’ll pop up eventually. Miss Kill and Viscount de Maltby will see to her. She’ll make a fine addition to my Head Room.”

  Richard told himself it was not a mind-link, like the one he was forging with Stacy. Swellhead had a knack for following thought processes through deduction and inference.

  The Big Dish moved. Ancient gimbals screamed.

  Slowly, the array trundled on its railbed, dish angling upwards. The rails sloped down, into a tunnel under the seabed. A mini-jeep drove up, and Swellhead took the front passenger seat. De Maltby indicated that Richard and Onions should get up on the rear section, and prodded Onions with his inert hand to hurry him along. The man from I-Psi-T had a slight shock and hopped up on the trolley. Richard needed a hand to clamber up. His back and legs were giving him severe gyp.

  After the exertion, he suffered from cold caresses and whisper kisses and was tempted just to drift away. It took several moments to get his mind back on track. When he was able to pay attention again, the mini-jeep was apace with the dish. Crews with big brooms swept the rails ahead of the array. Wire-strung whitesuits clambered monkeylike on the face of the dish, checking and cleaning. Trundling the vast device about a quarter of a mile, deeper into the Earth, was a major operation.

  A whitesuit was caught in the machine, turned to a red smear. No one commented. Richard had flash-visions: slaves hauling pyramid blocks, worshippers ground under the juggernaut.

  The deeper they went, the colder and wetter it was. Bare rock walls cascaded with water, which sluiced away through new-carved streams. Great crude wheels turned to keep the system flushing. Gusts of steam periodically escaped from a valve, with a dreadful whistling.

  In addition to the grinding of the wheels on rails, a greater roaring filled the cavern. The air tasted of salt.

  “We are directly under the Kjempestrupe,” announced Swellhead.

  A goon handed out white, “H”-logoed sou’westers. Swellhead, Richard and Onions put them on.

  Richard looked up at the rock ceiling. A hole appeared, water falling through, and then irised open.

  He gasped, expecting a heavy gush as sea flooded in. The black hole expanded. Then Richard saw night sky. Above the dish was a big liquid funnel. The sea was kept from pouring through the hole by the mighty force of the whirlpool, augmented by Swellhead’s mightier self-belief. Water fell, but no more than a heavy rainfall.

  At Swellhead’s command, banks of switches were thrown. The dish lit up.

  Richard felt heat. Water on the face of the dish sizzled and evaporated. Then the fall stopped. Richard doffed the sou’wester.

  “You’ve turned off the rain,” said Onions, awed.

  “Merely bored a hole in the cloud cover,” explained Swellhead. “A necessary preliminary.”

  A shilling-bright full moon shone. A thousand points of starlight were caught and reflected in the revolving rings of the Kjempestrupe. Flashing marker buoys whizzed around on their swift courses, held by centrifugal force against the vertical surfaces.

  “What are you using to rebroadcast?” Richard asked. “A ring of satellites?”

  “Another dish, on the moon. I’ve run a covert space program to set up the installation.”

  Onions snorted disbelief.

  “Yes, without anyone noticing,” Swellhead answered the unasked question. “Clever, isn’t it?”

  A technician came up, thumped his forehead, and gave a silent report.

  “It will take some minutes to align our dish with the one on the moon,” said Swellhead. “We should go to the control room. You’ll find the next phase of the process fascinating.”

  Richard looked up at the stars.

  Then at the man he was afraid could change their alignments.

  “He’s a Talent,” Onions had said. “Off the scale.”

  * * * *

  7

  She stood at a console in the control room and tried to look busy. It wasn’t too difficult, since ghost activity consisted mostly of silently checking dials and readouts.

  The room had changed. The computers were all back in place, and working. Big reels whirred back and forth. Tickertape stuttered out of slots. Lights flashed and beeped.

  The big screen was uncracked and showed a televised picture.

  Stacy saw the dish hauled into position and the ceiling open. Tiny white figures watched. It looked like an outtake from Thunderbirds. An amazingly detailed miniature, imperfect because of the impossibility of scaling down water.

  The screen split into quadrants: one showed the dish; two had postcard views of the White House and Number Ten Downing Street; and one was a complicated animated diagram showing the Big Dish, the Earth and Moon, some sort of moon complex and a lot of dotted lines for traj
ectories. The White House was replaced by scrolling numbers, like logarithm tables. A giant “H”-egg logo appeared in the middle of the screen, expanding to overlay all four quadrants.

  A digital clock flashed on at 15:00:00 and began to count down.