The Man with the Golden Torc sh-1

by Simon R. Green

  Bert led me out the back of the church and into a large antechamber packed with men and women sitting around long tables. They all wore bright red robes, complete with hoods. They were reading newspapers, magazines, and books, and making careful notes in their laptops. A few looked up and nodded to Bert before returning to their work. All four walls were lined with bookshelves crammed full of books and bound magazines from floor to ceiling.

  "Here is where we study the world," Bert said grandly. "Through its media, its history books, and every up-to-date commentary. There’s another room where they do nothing but watch every single news channel, all day long. We have to rotate those people on a regular basis, or they start developing conspiracy theories, and next thing you know you’ve got a schism on your hands. And of course there’s our wide-ranging net of supporters and fellow travellers tucked away in governments and religions and big businesses all across the world, keeping us aware of what’s really going on. If you knew what Bill Gates was planning to do next, you’d shit yourself. We’re always looking for that crucial factor, that pivotal moment, when tipping over one small domino will set all the others toppling…Come on, come on; lots more to see."

  He led the way down a long wooden spiral stairway that creaked alarmingly under our weight and finally gave out onto a low-ceilinged stone chamber deep beneath the church, full of bubbling chemical vats almost as tall as I was and a lot broader. Garishly coloured liquids surged up out of the vats and along through what seemed like miles of thick rubber tubing stapled to the walls and ceiling. All around there were gauges and valves and wheels and some fairly primitive filtering systems. I’d seen stills that were more complicated. Bert darted back and forth across the chamber, fussing over the equipment, adjusting a valve here and turning a wheel there. He tapped one gauge with a knuckle, sniffed at the reading, and then turned to smile proudly at me.

  "It’s a very delicate setup," he said, patting a nearby vat affectionately. "Needs constant monitoring, of course. The founders put all this together, years ago, and they won’t let me change anything. Even though they’re far too intellectual to actually come down here and get their hands dirty on a regular basis. Not that I want them messing about with things, now that I’ve got everything running just right."

  He looked at me, inviting me to say something. I hadn’t a clue what to say about his precious setup, so I retreated to something else that had been bothering me.

  "If the church’s sanctity is enough to hide you from the Devil, why do you need the uncertainty spell as well?"

  Bert looked distinctly disappointed in me but soldiered on with his answer. "That’s not exactly a spell, as such. More what you’d call a side effect, really. Comes from the Red King, down in the dream chamber. Or Professor Redmond, as he was. We call him the Red King after the character in Through the Looking-Glass. Remember him? He was fast asleep and dreaming, and everyone was afraid to wake him, because they believed he was dreaming the world and everything in it. So if he did wake up, they’d all cease to exist. Would you like to meet him? We don’t normally show him off to visitors, but then you’re special, aren’t you?"

  I was still trying to form an answer to that one when we were interrupted by the arrival of a man and a woman through the door on the far side of the chamber. They were both wearing the ubiquitous long red robes, and they both carried a definite air of authority about them. They were middle-aged, with long, ascetic faces and severe expressions. Bert just nodded to them, conspicuously unimpressed.

  "Thank you, Bert," said the man. "We’ll take it from here." He gave me a cold smile. "I’m Brother Nathanial, and this is Sister Eliza. Welcome to the Sceneshifters, Edwin Drood."

  I nodded coolly in return. I didn’t like his eyes, or hers. They both had that look; that certainty beyond any doubt, inhumanly focused, merciless in their logic. Fanatic’s eyes.

  "I’m here looking for some answers," I said.

  "Aren’t we all?" said Nathanial. "Come; ask us anything. We shall conceal nothing from you. Bert, there’s been a spillage in the secondary systems. If you wouldn’t mind…"

  "All right, all right, I’ll go and clean up your mess while you give Edwin the old pep talk." He nodded easily to me. "Have fun with the Red King, and his dreams. Don’t have nightmares afterwards." He gave me one last cocky wink and left the room.

  "Marvellous fellow," said Nathanial. "An invaluable member of our staff, though I’d never tell him that. He might want paying more. Now then, Edwin; Sister Eliza and I run things here, in as much as anyone does. We like to think of ourselves as a cooperative. Don’t expect dear Eliza to say anything. She has no tongue anymore. Sometimes the small changes we make have the most unexpected repercussions…"

  "Bert said something about founding members," I said, just to be saying something.

  "Oh, yes, that’s us. There were six, originally, but now there’s seven. Another side effect…"

  "How many people are there in the Sceneshifters?" I said, trying for a question that might possess even a slim chance of having a definite answer.

  "Oh, more than you’d think," said Nathanial, smiling coolly. "Certainly far more than your family thinks. You’d be surprised, Edwin. Our ranks are growing all the time, as we open people’s eyes to the terrible truth. We’re the real salvation army, fighting a holy war against the Devil and all his works. Bert has filled you in on the basics, hasn’t he? Good, good…I think it’s time for you to meet the centre of our operations, our very own Red King, Professor Redmond. We’re all very proud of him. This way, please…"

  "But there are questions I need to ask you," I said. "About my family, and why I was declared a rogue…"

  "Yes, yes," said Nathanial. "All in good time. You really can’t appreciate what we’re doing here until you’ve met the Red King."

  He and the silent Sister Eliza ushered me politely but firmly through the maze of chemical vats and looping tubes to a door at the back of the chamber, and then through it into a long stone corridor that stretched away before us, sloping down into the earth. Thick pulsing tubing was stapled to the rough stone walls, while from the ceiling hung a series of bare electric bulbs. We followed the tubes down the corridor, descending for some time, until I lost track of just how deep we were under the church and the London streets. The air was chill and damp, and water ran down the walls.

  "Don’t you have any security down here?" I said after a while, just to break the silence.

  Nathanial shrugged easily. "The uncertainty effect keeps out the riffraff, while the church’s sanctity hides us from the Devil and his disciples. And the Red King dreams he’s safe, so he is…"

  "How does this all work?" I said just a little desperately. "This whole…sceneshifting business?"

  "It’s really very simple," said Nathanial in that smug kind of way that tells you it isn’t going to be at all simple. "While the Red King sleeps, he dreams. Constantly. And while in that state he is able to see behind the scenes of reality, as it were. How things really work, and how they’re put together. We can influence his dreams and persuade him to make small changes. And the alterations he makes there, affect things here. In reality. We only deal in small changes, never big ones, no matter how tempting. They might be noticed by…You Know Who.

  "I often wonder what it is the professor sees, exactly, in his dreams. We can only guess. And whisper the odd suggestion in his ear. He’s in a very suggestive state. Though you have to be very careful what you ask for; very specific. Did you know there used to be pyramids in Scotland? Oh, yes; a huge tourist attraction, in fact. But the Red King dreamed them away, and now they’re gone, and no one remembers them but us. Your family missed that one, which I sometimes think is rather a shame…Still, enough small changes add up, when your family doesn’t interfere. We’re so glad you’ve come to join us, Edwin."

  "I haven’t decided anything yet," I said.

  "But you will," said Nathanial. "You will."

  Sister Eliza chuckled abruptly. The sound
she made without a tongue was ugly, disturbing. Even Nathanial flinched a little. The corridor turned around suddenly and spilled us out into a small stone chamber, barely twelve feet in diameter, gloomily lit just enough to be restful on the eyes. The walls had been roughly painted to resemble night skies, with whorls of stars and a procession of moons in all its phases. In the centre of the room stood a marble pedestal, and on top of that, held in place by an ornate latticework of copper wire, was a severed human head. Male, middle-aged, slack features. From the look of the ragged stump of the neck, whoever had cut it off hadn’t had much practice. Someone had placed a fresh laurel wreath around the heavily lined brow. The head wasn’t breathing, but behind the closed eyelids the eyes darted back and forth in the rapid eye movements of the dream state. Around the base of the pedestal someone had drawn a traditional pentagram with mathematical precision. And around that someone had traced a series of ceremonial circles containing signs and pictograms from half a dozen forgotten cultures. Someone had done their homework.

  Nathanial gestured for me to examine the back of the head, so I walked around to take a look. Thick rubber tubes had been plugged roughly into the back of the man’s head, trailing away across the floor and out the door into the corridor, presumably all the way back up to the chemical vats. I leaned forward for a better look and winced at the crude holes where the tubes entered. No surgeon had done this. Someone had just drilled into the back of the skull, and then pushed the tubes through into the exposed brain. I came back around to study the face. It didn’t look happy or unhappy. If not for the eye movements, I’d never have known it was still alive.

  "Why just a head?" I said finally.

  "Well," said Nathanial, "it wasn’t as if we really needed the rest of him, and keeping a whole body alive and preserved would have added greatly to our expenses. We were quite a small operation, when we started out. Just the professor and half a dozen of his finest students…The tubes keep the head going, and the wires trickle a constant slow current across the frontal lobes, ensuring that he remains asleep and deep in the dream state. The tubes feed him certain preservatives and all the necessary drugs. He could last forever, theoretically. Ah, yes, the drugs. We haven’t explained about those yet, have we? We’re feeding the professor a rather special cocktail of powerful psychotropic chemicals, everything from acid to taduki to datura. All according to the professor’s own theories. The drugs push his mind up and out while he dreams, blasting the doors of perception right off their hinges so he can see what lies behind, and beyond."

  "Who was he, originally?" I said. "How did he come to this?"

  "Well, it was all his own idea, originally," Nathanial said, smiling in a rather self-satisfied way. "He was our professor at Thames University, back then. Remarkable mind; quite remarkable. He became our leader, our inspiration. He gave us these fascinating lectures, you see; all about shamanic drugs, and dream states, and how they could be combined to access different levels of reality. He also talked a lot about something called experimenter’s intent, where the scientist’s intent could actually change the outcome of the experiment he was performing. It wasn’t that great a step to combine those ideas…

  "The professor was really quite surprised when we finally went to him, all six of his favourite students, and told him we’d found a way to translate his theories into a workable, practical solution to all the world’s problems. He was even more surprised when we brought him down here, showed him what we’d done, and explained to him that he had been granted the singular honour of being our Red King. The man who would change the world and save us all from the Devil. In fact, when we told him exactly what we intended to do, he reacted very negatively. Actually started to cry when we showed him the bone saw and held him down…

  "But that was all long ago. He’s done such good work since, sleeping and dreaming for all these years, without interruption. The longer you sleep, you see, the more deeply you dream, and the further the drugs can take you. He dreams very deeply and very powerfully these days. I just know he’d be so proud of what we’ve done with his help…"

  "I wouldn’t bet on it," I said. "After what you did to him, if he ever does wake up, it’ll be the end of your world."

  "You don’t know him like we did," said Nathanial. "He’d understand. He was always telling us it was our duty to go out and change the world. And how we always had to be prepared to make sacrifices for the greater good. And we did. We sacrificed him. You know, we’re still struggling to understand the significance of just what it is we’re doing here. We don’t just sit on our laurels, oh no! I sometimes wonder if perhaps the whole world, and everything in it, is just a dream. The Devil’s dream. And that’s why the professor is able to access it and change bits of it. If that is the case, we must be very careful not to disturb the Devil with our changes, in case we wake him…"

  "All right," I said. "That’s it. You’re a loony. You people don’t know anything for sure, do you? It’s all theories and guesses and half-baked stolen philosophy."

  "We’re learning by doing," said Nathanial more than a little smugly.

  "Because anything has to be better than the world we’re forced to live in. That’s why you have to join us, Edwin. Because we’re not the enemy your family says we are. We’re the good guys. We’re humanity’s last hope."

  "I don’t think so," I said. "I’ve read the family’s reports on what you’ve done and tried to do. The changes you’ve tried to bring about. Every single one of them was concerned with remaking the world in your image, not God’s. Changes to further your beliefs, your wishes, your needs. To make the Sceneshifters powerful and important and a mighty voice in the affairs of man."

  "Of course," said Nathanial. "How else can we bring about real change? Permanent change?"

  "Your dreams are so small," I said. "So petty. No wonder you never achieved anything that mattered. I’ll never join you."

  "Of course you will," said Nathanial. "In fact, you already have. All the time you were chatting so pleasantly with Bert, we were down here murmuring in the professor’s ear, and the Red King dreamed his little dream and made the change so smoothly you didn’t even feel it happening. You’re one of us, Edwin. You’ve always been one of us."

  I looked down, and I was wearing a long red robe, just like him. Just like Sister Eliza. Of course I was wearing it. It was the same robe I always wore when I came here to visit my dear friends in the Sceneshifters. I’d been working for them for years, ever since I first came to London, their very own mole in the Drood family. It was good to be back among my friends, in my old familiar robes, in this familiar place. I smiled at Nathanial and Eliza, and they smiled back at me. It was good to be home again.

  The only thing that seemed out of place…was my wristwatch. I looked at it stupidly. Something about it nagged at my mind. Nathanial spoke to me, but I wasn’t listening. There was something about the watch, something important, something…special about it that I was supposed to remember. My torc burned coldly around my throat, as though trying to protect me, though I couldn’t think from what. I touched the wristwatch with my right hand, trailing my fingertips across it, ignoring Nathanial’s increasingly angry words. The watch the Armourer gave me, before I left the Hall. The reverse watch, that could rewind time…

  I hit the button, and time stopped in its tracks and shifted into reverse. Light and sound strobed painfully around me as the watch reversed recent time, taking me back to just before Nathanial told me I’d been changed. And in that moment, while the future was still pliable and in flux, I drew my Colt Repeater and shot Professor Redmond right between the eyes.

  The bullet slammed through his head, blowing bits of broken tubing and spattered brains out the back of his skull. His eyes snapped open, and for the first time in years the Red King was awake at last. His mouth stretched wide in a soundless scream of rage and horror, and it was clear from his face and from his eyes that he knew what had been done to him, and with him. And in the last few moments of his u
nnaturally extended life, using power brought back from some terrible other place, the professor set himself to wiping out everything that had been done in his name. He looked at Brother Nathanial with his awful eyes, and Nathanial disappeared. Winking out of existence, not real, never had been. Sister Eliza turned to flee, but the professor looked at her, and she was gone too.

  I was already heading out the door when the dream chamber started to disappear around me. The walls painted to look like the night skies became transparent and faded away, and I could feel the professor’s power following me as I sprinted up the long stone corridor. There was something behind me, but I didn’t dare look back. I burst out into the room of chemical vats, and Bert looked around sharply in surprise. He cried out in shock as the great vats began to fade away, but I was already out of the room and scrambling back up the spiral staircase. Behind me, Bert’s voice cut off abruptly.

  The wooden steps began to feel increasingly soft and insubstantial under my feet, but I made it to the top, gasping for breath. I couldn’t spare the time it would take to call up my armour, and I didn’t believe it could protect me from Professor Redmond’s wrath anyway. I just kept running, through the library and on into the church. The medieval stained-glass windows had already faded away to ordinary glass. The walls were disappearing too, revealing something behind them too terrible to look at. There were great gaps in the floor, and I jumped desperately over them, racing for the door.

  I crashed through and out into the street, panting harshly for breath, and only then turned and looked back. The church was gone; nothing left but a hole between the two modern buildings, like a pulled tooth. The Sceneshifters were gone, never had been. The Red King had woken at last from his long sleep; and he had not woken up in a good mood.