by Kim Newman
The eyes were blue, not hazel: they were taxidermist’s glass, a detail mistaken by whoever prepared the head for display.
Staring into Fred’s wrong eyes made Richard queasy.
But determined. Being shut up, inside himself, inside his home, had been a mistake.
If this was out here all along, he should have been in the world.
Skerra was his problem.
V.
They were in a control room.
Yoland whistled in astonished amusement.
‘Vintage,’ he declared.
Banks of computers were stacked against a wall – bulky cabinets wired together, each the size of a fridge-freezer, with exposed spools of tape and letterbox slots for punchcards and print-outs.
‘Pre-silicon chip,’ said Yoland, stroking a machine. ‘Installed in the late 1960s, maybe early 1970s.’
Richard picked up a Pirelli calendar from a strew of papers on the floor. A naked woman snarled, holding a scary African mask next to her face. The photograph was manipulated to shade into a drawing at the extremities.
‘Might I take a wild guess and suggest this facility was abandoned sometime in February 1973?’
‘That sounds about right,’ said Yoland. ‘What was happening then?’
‘Oil crisis. Power cuts. Television shut down at half past ten. IRA bombing campaign.’
‘All that never happened,’ said Miss Gill, born 1983. ‘He’s getting the seventies confused with the War. People his age were all on drugs.’
Richard was more amused than offended.
Yoland twiddled some knobs on a console.
‘Does it still work?’ asked Stacy.
‘Unlikely,’ said the weapons inspector. ‘These old jobs were as dicky as Christmas tree lights.’
One wall was given over to a grey and dead display screen, a stitching of bullet-holes across the glass.
There had been fighting in here. Some cabinets were overturned and ruptured, bleeding wires and circuit-boards.
‘I told a lie,’ said Yoland, holding up a component. ‘This is a silicon chip. Or some sort of prehistoric ancestor. Ceramic, micro-printed. It’s the size of my thumb, but it’s definitely a chip. Whoever put this together was way ahead of the game.’
The tile floor was patchwork-quilted with spilled files, strews of punchcards and streamers of magnetic tape.
This, Richard knew, was where his coat had been found.
Head walked up to a black swivel chair on a dais. He sat in it and whirled around like a child, legs pointing out. As the chair revolved, gears clicked. The big screen hummed and warmed up. Behind spiderweb of cracks, static buzzed. Richard’s attention was drawn to it for a moment, but he forced himself to look away. It was too easy to see shapes in static.
‘Clock this,’ said Stacy.
She picked up a cardboard file-folder, embossed with the familiar H. Under the oval, in a retro-futurist typeface, were the words ‘Sewell Head Industries’. Yoland took it and passed it around.
‘You’re a captain of industry, Swellhead?’ said Miss Gill. ‘I thought you worked in a sweet shop.’
Head found a control panel in the arm of his chair. The designer must have been a Star Trek fan. Head pressed a button: lights came on at the base of his dais and in a circle overhead, catching him in a shaft of brightness.
‘This is all new to me,’ he said.
‘But you know where the light-switches are,’ said Yoland.
‘Which button opens the trapdoor to the alligator pits?’ asked Miss Gill. ‘Or do you prefer piranhas?’
Head was thoughtful. He stabbed another button.
A section of the floor flapped downwards. Richard was suddenly at the edge of a hole. A foul smell wafted up. Richard tottered but Stacy pulled him back from the brink. He slipped. A sharp stab of terror went through him as he felt Stacy going over too.
‘Got you, miss,’ said Kydd. He had stepped in to grab her around the waist.
It took some doing, but they were all restored to safety.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Head. ‘I didn’t think.’
The bottom of the pit was dark and liquid. And inhabited.
‘Best not fiddle with the toys any more,’ said Richard.
‘Quite right,’ said Head, mildly.
He didn’t get out of his chair, though. More and more, he looked comfortable.
‘What is this place?’ asked Miss Gill.
‘Head Office,’ said Head.
‘Very clever,’ said Richard. ‘But you’d have to be clever, wouldn’t you?’
Head sat, impassive.
‘There is no Sewell Head Industries,’ said Yoland. ‘At least not off this island. Never has been.’
Head nodded.
‘That’s what puzzled us when Vernon’s report came in,’ said Onions. ‘We found Mr Head very easily. He’s in the phone book. There’s only one of him.’
Richard wondered if that was strictly true.
‘And we know, in exhaustive detail, what he’s done with his life. There just isn’t any gap in which he could have done this…’
Onions spread his hands, indicating everything in this complex.
‘Some obsessive trivia quiz fan did all this for him?’ said Miss Gill. ‘I find that impossible to believe.’
Head’s fingers hovered over buttons.
Kydd stood by the dais, de Maltby’s gun tucked into his belt, at attention.
‘What’s it all for?’ asked Stacy.
‘That’s an interesting question,’ said Yoland, ‘and I can make a range of guesses. But the big question is, “How’s it all here?”’
The techie was in his element, getting up to speed.
‘This couldn’t have been built in secret,’ said Yoland. ‘It’s a major construction project. Hundreds, maybe thousands of men would have had to work on it. Think of all the raw materials that must have been transported here, to an abandoned island. There’d have had to be a non-stop back-and-forth on the sea-lanes. Where are the ships’ logs, flight-plans, invoices, bills of lading, pay-slips? This is a small underground city. Supplying must have been a mammoth operation. It would all have gone on in the public eye. Millions of pounds must have been spent. Multiples of millions. There may be no Sewell Head Industries, but something wealthier than most countries created this place.’
Richard remembered how he had felt when he saw the apported coat, how he had instinctively avoided touching it, how it had been an affront to his sense of the way the universe fitted together. He was feeling the same thing again, on a colossal scale.
This whole place was wrong.
VI.
They made camp three levels above the control room, in a block Richard guessed was accommodation for SHI executives. Spartan barracks and dormitories were provided for jumpsuit drones, but this sector offered rooms arranged like an American motel, in balconied tiers. Instead of sky, the central courtyard had naked rock. Garden furniture was scattered around, but there were no corpses.
Stacy and Kydd had gone topside, to fetch supplies from the Sea King.
De Maltby was in drugged sleep, but otherwise stable.
Richard checked the room he had staked for himself. It was anonymous Scandinavian moderne, with clown paintings in place of windows and piped-in dabba-dabba-dabba muzak. A duvet lay on the drum-tight fitted sheet of the single bed. At first, he thought the bedding a uniform grey, but his touch disturbed a thin layer of dust. The duvet cover and pillowcase were white, imprinted with the bright yellow H logo.
The door had an airtight seal. Ventilation and heat came through grilles in the walls. Besides clown paintings, decor extended to a framed photograph of a young, Kupperberg-suited Sewell Head with his arms around a couple of sweaty Americans who proved, on close examination, to be Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley. The Prezz and the King both looked up to Zen Master of Quantum Cleverness.
An en-suite bathroom offered a Plexiglas shower booth and stainless-steel toilet and washstand. He r
an the taps and got hot and cold water. After bursts of rusty-red, the flow ran clean. He tasted the cold and found it drinkable. He assumed there was a desalination plant somewhere in the complex, converting seawater. A bathroom cabinet contained a solidified tube of unbranded toothpaste, a blister-pack of contraceptive pills and a bottle of Breck shampoo. A H-logoed sampler kit contained syrettes, vials of powder marked ‘heroin’ and ‘cocaine’, and purple lozenges stamped ‘Lovely Shining Dream’.
The muzak – José Feliciano playing the Doors’ greatest hits – came through the speakers of a large telescreen inset into the wall opposite the bed. There were no on-off or channel controls, and no handset. Whoever lived here listened to and watched whatever the master programmer gave them.
A wardrobe contained three identical lab coats and dispenser-packs of disposable plastic bootees and mittens. A bedside table had unread paperbacks of Valley of the Dolls and Airport with early seventies covers. He also found the 2001 movie tie-in, and raised an eyebrow to see Ray Bradbury and Stanley Kubrick listed as coauthors. The first chapter began ‘When Heywood Floyd was a boy in the Midwest he used to go out and look at the stars at night and wonder about them.’ Reluctantly, he closed the book and slipped it into his pocket. A drawer that pulled out from under the bed had an array of gleaming silver-steel, H-stamped weapons – automatic pistols, clips of ammunition, combat knives, a samurai sword.
A fizzing cut through the muzak.
He looked at the telescreen. It had come to life, or at least static.
The swirls resolved into a blurry H logo, then the letter faded and the oval shield grew brighter. Richard fancied eyes and a smile.
He picked out one of the pistols, rammed a clip into the butt, slipped off the safety and shot the screen. The tube imploded with a cough of smoke. In the sparking wreckage, a necklike attachment craned – it ended in a blinking lens.
There was a sharp rap at his door.
‘Come in, it’s not locked.’
Onions, free of his gadget belt, tentatively looked round the door.
‘I shot the screen, Adam. A pre-emptive strike. It was trying to get to me.’
Onions humoured him and pressed on.
‘Meeting in the courtyard in five minutes, Jeperson. We need to hash out a schedule for the investigation.’
Onions withdrew.
Richard hefted the automatic pistol. As a rule, he disliked guns, but this had a satisfyingly heavy feel. It hadn’t kicked when fired, and the noise – the thing he hated most about using firearms – had been damped somehow. His ears still rang from the shot de Maltby had fired in the trophy hall, but his own more recent discharge had wiped itself out. He turned the gun over in his hands, getting the heft of it.
Then he put it down and went to wash his hands.
He didn’t even like using the water in this room, let alone the weaponry. The gun had been on its best behaviour, endeavouring to win his confidence, wheedling to get holster-close to his heart. He had no doubt that if he trusted the thing, it would turn traitor. Worse still was the 2001 paperback, which whispered, ‘Read me, read me,’ in his ear. He would happily burn the negatives of every movie Steven Spielberg ever directed to get into a screening of this Space Odyssey.
Somewhere under Skerra, there must be a cinema.
He killed the thought and looked at the mirrored cabinet.
Behind his old eyes, there were lacunae. Maybe Ray Bradbury had written 2001, and it had slipped his mind, liquid misinformation rushing in to fill the hole. Maybe Sewell Head had mounted Fred Regent’s head on a board thirty years ago, and the decades Richard remembered were a protracted psychotic episode, born of guilt at being unable to keep his friend alive.
He took the vial of cocaine from the drugs kit and thought about it.
Circles, he realised. He was beginning to think in circles.
But there was something else. The sense of wrongness was still there, but other senses crowded in. He was thinking more clearly, with fewer of his memory lapses. He even felt better, long-settled aches lifting from his limbs. The air down here was good for him. He had not expected that.
Was this another trap?
He left the room, sealed it behind him, and walked along the balcony to a white filigree spiral staircase.
Assuming that Stacy and Kydd were not back and de Maltby excused, Richard was the last to make it to Onions’s meeting.
They were assembled in a gazebo affair at the centre of the court, sitting on folding chairs around a wrought-iron table under a giant candy-striped umbrella. Yoland had a laptop computer fired up. Miss Gill had changed into a Skerra tartan designer skirt with matching sash. Onions had an agenda drawn up and was checking it over.
Sewell Head stood a few feet away, his back to the others, looking up.
‘I was listing the types of phenomenon observed here,’ said Onions. ‘Spectral figures, ectoplasmic spores, hot spots, cold spots, cyclic apparitions, aural and visual manifestations…’
‘Apports,’ prompted Richard.
‘Of course, apports.’
‘Lots of ’em. Adam, who wrote 2001?’
Onions frowned.
‘I know that one,’ said Miss Gill. ‘George Orwell.’
Richard felt his mind crack again.
‘No, that’s Nineteen Eighty-Four,’ put in Yoland. ‘2001 is… it’s on the tip of my tongue. Wait a minute, we’ve got the triviameister here. Swellhead, who wrote 2001?’
‘Arthur C. Clarke,’ said Head, dully, not turning round.
The world settled again, and Richard nodded.
‘That’s decided then.’
‘What are you on about, Jeperson? This is no time…’
Richard produced the book. Onions looked at it, puzzled. Then saw the names on the cover. He passed it to Yoland, whose instinct was to turn to the last page.
‘How does it end?’ Yoland asked Head.
‘“For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next,”’ recited Head. ‘“But he would think of something.”’
‘Wrong-g-g-g!’ said Yoland. ‘“Then, as the moon watched, the Star Child left the wilderness behind and walked into the town.’”
Head turned, almost angry.
Richard realised the little man could not bear to be mistaken.
‘Let me see that,’ he said.
Yoland tossed him the book. He looked through it roughly, breaking the thirty-five-year-old spine.
‘This isn’t right,’ he said.
He tore the book in half and threw the pages away.
Richard had a pang of loss and fury. Then he remembered the insinuating gun. The book was best out of reach. It had been a dangerous temptation.
There must be books in all the rooms. Maybe LP records.
Best not think of that.
‘Nothing is right here,’ said Richard. ‘This is not a natural place.’
‘If there’s a prize for speaking the bloody obvious,’ said Miss Gill, ‘the old hippie just took it home.’
‘Just because a thing is bloody obvious doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be spoken.’
‘Could you please stop bickering,’ said Onions. ‘And pay attention.’
Onions slapped his agenda on the table.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘observations, please.’
‘This is treasure trove, right?’ said Miss Gill. ‘But on my land. So I own it.’
No one wanted to debate that. Yet.
‘Yoland, can you give us your preliminary report?’ said Onions. ‘You’ve a different remit here.’
Richard had wondered about that. What did Morag Duff and Really-a-Good-Bloke Rory expect to get out of this expedition? People like them always thought of ‘practical applications’. I-Psi-T was Min of Def-funded, too.
Yoland shut his computer. ‘Too early to say, but I think there are things here of immense worth.’
Miss Gill clapped her hands and threatened to laugh again.
‘Yes, monetary worth,
’ said Yoland. ‘But more than that. Mr Jeperson, you asked about the power source. I’ve ferreted about a bit and it’s definitely tidal. We have nothing like it. And the equipment we’ve seen is a paradox. A lot of it is bakelite and solder antique, but there are shortcuts I don’t understand. This place is thirty years old, but whoever built it was forty or fifty years ahead of their time. Handicapped by the tools available, but spooky brilliant. My guess is that a handful of circuit-boards from the control room could yield patents that would bring in millions of euros a year. You know my field. Weapons. I’ve been tinkering with one of those machine-pistol jobbies, the things with funny magazines. It’s not like any small arms I’ve ever seen. Recoilless, silenced, and fires pellets that expand in the air. And we haven’t cracked the puzzle of the big dish. I reckon it does something interesting. Whoever ends up with ownership is going to be, ah, enormously at an advantage.’
‘“Whoever?”’ protested Miss Gill. ‘Daddy paid good money for Skerra.’
‘For the island, not for what’s under it.’
‘So, who else’s is it? The Skerrans are all gone. And this isn’t Britain. It’s an independent country and I can make up my own laws.’
Richard saw Yoland and Miss Gill were being seduced. Knowledge, money, power, justification, intrigue. Even Onions, with quantifiable results that could not be dismissed, was half in love with the complex.
He wondered when Stacy and Kydd would get back. Of the party, they were the two he trusted most.
‘You’re forgetting something,’ said Head.
‘What?’ asked Miss Gill and Yoland, together.
‘Whose name is on everything here. Whose initial marks everything.’
Head thumped his chest. The place was getting to him too. It could be that he had the most to gain from it.
‘We’ll come to that in a minute,’ said Onions.
‘Can I be the one to talk about the impossible?’ said Richard.
‘I think that falls under the “bloody obvious” category, Jeperson,’ said Onions. ‘The impossible is our daily bread, remember? Even for the amateur dabblers of the Diogenes Club.’
‘I don’t mean the unexplained, the supernatural. Ghosties and ghoulies. I mean evidence of things we know did not happen. Fred Regent was not decapitated in 1972. Ray Bradbury did not write 2001. Sewell Head did not broker the meet between Nixon and Elvis.’
