by Kim Newman
Jeperson came up with and rejected a few more outlandish names, Buck Breakfast, ‘Corporal Punishment’ (the Right Wing Tory superhero), Constant Drache, Harald Kleindeinst. There were even a few women on the list: Mimsy Mountmain, Jenny Godgift. Orlando knew who some of these people were and had vaguely heard of others. A couple came as complete surprises, since he’d have sworn them to be crooked through and through and not even remotely reliable. Then, Jeperson shut the book.
‘Should have burned it, after all. Less depressing.’
‘So we’re stuffed?’ Orlando said.
‘Stuffed-ish, rather. There are the usual channels, the police and the law courts and dull fellows like that. The likes of which you must have to deal with on a depressingly regular basis, Goodman Boldt. Then, there are the extraordinary channels, essentially us and them—the Diogenes Club and other Secret Organisations, and the conspirators we find ourselves facing. Unevenly matched at present, but still a game we can all play and understand.’
Orlando was getting fed up with the lectures.
‘And after the usual channels and the extraordinary channels, things get pretty hairy. That’s when we have to send up the Black Rocket.’
Lytton’s hands became fists and he drew in his breath.
That reaction told Orlando more than he knew.
‘Desperate times, Captain,’ said Jeperson, ‘desperate remedies.’
‘Excuse me, but “the Black Rocket”? I’ve never heard of him.’
‘It’s not a him, it’s a signal. On the roof. It’s been there for years, never fired. But it’s been maintained. It’s a last resort.’
‘He can’t still be alive,’ said Lytton.
Jeperson shrugged.
‘Who are you talking about?’
‘Shade,’ said Lytton.
‘The one and only, the original, accept no substitutes,’ said Jeperson.
‘Doctor Shade?’
They had to be spoofing him. The man, if Dr Shade were a man, was a myth, like Spring-Heel’d Jack, the Rat King or the Monk of Mitre Square, like the angel chariots the yokels said made crop circles. Dr Shade had never been real, even if he had been seen over the years; he came from an old wireless serial, hundreds of comic papers, a music hall illusionist act. All the stories Orlando had heard of him were just stories.
‘Let’s go up to the roof,’ said Jeperson.
* * *
The fog was thin up here, the air almost breathable. Orlando saw the hulks of the taller buildings rising from yellow-ochre swamp, rooftops like islands, spires like masts. Over to the north, the BBC’s weather dirigible was gliding through clouds.
Jeperson expertly dismantled a fake pigeon-coop, tossing aside decoy birds. A sleek, razor-finned dart, about four feet long, stood upright, supported by a wicker gantry. Jeperson unsheathed a length of twisted blue touch-paper and checked that it was dry.
‘All in order,’ he said, producing a silver box of lucifers. He struck one and lit the paper. ‘We should get out of the way,’ he said. ‘Probably should have mentioned that earlier. This has never been fired before, so I don’t know how forceful the blast is likely to be.’
The paper fizzed and burned.
Orlando, Lytton and Jeperson backed away.
Infernal flame spurted from the rocket’s fundament, belching thick black smoke in a radius of ten feet. For seconds, Orlando thought the firework was going to explode before taking off, but it rose slowly from the gantry, farted out another flower of fire—and an invisible cloud of heat which washed over them—and streaked upwards. The BBC’s dirigible should be grateful not to be in the way.
‘Lord God Almighty,’ said Jeperson. ‘It really is black.’
The rocket left a thick trail. It seemed not to be smoke, but actual black flame, which Orlando had never seen before and couldn’t understand.
High above the city, the rocket exploded, leaving a black cloud shaped vaguely like a skull.
‘Someone will have seen that,’ said Jeperson. ‘Let’s hope the Good Doctor is in.’
‘Good?’ queried Lytton.
‘Figure of speech, old fellow.’
Half the stories of Dr Shade had him as a heroic saviour, but the rest had him as a fiend incarnate. Orlando worried that the man might be both.
They waited, and nothing happened. A faint disappointment, but not unexpected. It wasn’t as if they were summoning a demon from Hell; if Dr Shade was real, he had to live somewhere, and would take a while to get to the Diogenes Club. He might be in the bath, or something. Or listening to The Archers.
‘Look,’ said Lytton, pointing towards the Palace of Westminster, at St Stephen’s Tower. There, Benjamin Vulliamy’s clock—named after the bell that used to hang in the tower, Big Ben—kept time in sync with the Royal Observatory. Until now.
‘The clock-face,’ Lytton elaborated.
The hands of Big Ben spun too swiftly, like a watch being set. The chimes, imitating those of St Mary’s church in Cambridge, sounded. The notes were familiar, but there was a different quality, a strength, to the bell-chimes. It was as if Orlando were hearing them for the first time.
‘Of course,’ said Jeperson. ‘Where else would the Shadow-Lair be?’
The hands of all the faces stood straight up. A bell sounded twelve midnight, in the middle of the morning. The black skull in the sky came apart and spread, like a carpet of night, over the city.
The nearest face of the clock irised open, and a buzzing black metal insect emerged, hovering momentarily over the Palace, doubtless attracting the interest of Assemblymen and their hangers-on, then came straight towards the Diogenes Club. The insect was an autogiro, its shrouded black blades whipping through the fog-trails.
As it neared, Orlando saw the vehicle’s passenger.
A man all in black: a cloak-like gloss-black coat over jet-black surgeon’s vestments, beetle-black goggles under a matt-black broad-brimmed felt hat. He seemed to carry blackness with him like an aura, absorbing all imaginable light.
Jeperson whistled. Orlando suppressed an urge to run away.
The autogiro touched down on the roof. Dr Shade flowed off its saddle-like seat. His boots made no sound on the shingle, his clothes didn’t rustle. He seemed to glide towards them.
Orlando’s heart was ice. He was grateful for the Doctor’s goggles, for he dreaded to think what this man’s—this creature’s—eyes might be like.
‘Richard Jeperson,’ said the Master of the Diogenes Club, extending a very white-looking hand towards the black figure. ‘As you must have gathered from our deployment of the Black Rocket, things have come to a pretty pass.’
Dr Shade said nothing but a thought-groove appeared in his brows, between goggles and hat-brim. He took Jeperson’s hand in his black leather glove. His mouth was a thin white line which gave nothing away.
‘It falls, I’m afraid, to us,’ continued Jeperson, ‘to save a man, the city, the country. All that is enlightened and clear and decent has failed. Now, we must turn to the dark, the night, the shade.’
The black figure gave nothing away.
‘I know you,’ said Dr Shade. His human voice sounded artificial, as if the sounds of the Big Ben chimes were scrambled and processed to make words. ‘I know you all three. Richard Jeperson, of the Ruling Cabal. Captain James Lytton. Goodman Orlando Boldt.’
Absolute terror clawed at Orlando: this walking embodiment of night knew his name, probably his address and every rotten thing he’d ever done. If got off this roof alive, he’d become a Sally Army singer.
‘I understand the situation. I have been observing it all.’
‘You know?’ said Lytton, in disbelief. ‘Why haven’t you done anything about it?’
Dr Shade showed empty hands.
‘Nothing escapes my ken, but it would be a wearisome task to prevent all evil. In the past, my methods have proved unpopular. Too often, society wishes for an evil to continue, even to thrive. Even now, many might deem good the conspiracy you stand ag
ainst, and consider you—an indulgent decadent, a bloody-handed warrior and a denizen of the lowest stratum of the city—of the Devil’s Party.’
‘Enough,’ snapped Lytton. ‘Will you help us, yes or no?’
‘All you have to do is ask, and accept the consequences.’
Lytton was given pause. He stood as tall as the Doctor, and was less awed by the man inside the blackness. Beside Lytton, it was clear—as it was not if Orlando looked away—that the Doctor was a man, that there was someone inside the costume. Was this the same Dr Shade whose exploits Orlando had read of in British Pluck as a shaver? Or some new inheritor of the name and role? It was impossible to guess the Doctor’s age.
‘I ask,’ said Jeperson. ‘I am prepared.’
‘All of you?’
‘Yes,’ said Lytton. ‘I ask too.’
Dr Shade looked into Lytton’s eyes, and nodded. Then he swivelled and looked at Orlando. The eyes behind the goggles were faintly visible, burning with a black light beyond ordinary black, a violet so rich it was poison.
‘You have to say it,’ Jeperson said.
Once let loose, what would Dr Shade not do?
Orlando remembered the Man on the Clapham Omnibus, and all he had promised for the city. And that he was wanted for a hanging offence.
He swallowed. ‘All very well, lads, but what’s in it for me?’
‘I let you live,’ said Lytton.
Orlando’s hands were trembling.
‘No fair, guv. Look at you, you’re all great men, part of the big story. I’m not. I’m what Dark-Doc said, “a denizen of the lowest stratum of the city”. I don’t want too much law and order, just as I don’t want too much blood and thunder. I’ve gone against my gut and done my duty, by coming here, by telling you what I saw. I could have sold the information, you know. All over the show. I could have been owed favours by Daine, which would open doors for me. I’ve dodged the gallows before, and can do it again. No, I’ve already played your game. It’s time for me to pack up and go home, to let you get on with rescuing the princess and restoring democracy or whatever it is you people get off on. I’m not stopping you, but I’m not being a part of it either. I’m not being Squire to any Noble Knight.’
Dr Shade said nothing, made no argument. He turned towards his autogiro.
Lytton’s eyes blazed fury. Jeperson was aghast, unable to understand Orlando’s point.
Dr Shade slid onto the saddle, and checked switches. The blades lazily began to revolve, which made tall men like Lytton and Jeperson duck.
As he completed the start-up protocol, Dr Shade looked a last time at Orlando. His goggles were transparent, it seemed. Twin ultra-black beams shone through.
Orlando’s tricorn was whipped from his head by bladewash and skipped over the side of the roof, spinning like a plate.
An abyss opened in his heart. It was not imposed on him, but came from within. He made a choice, a hard choice.
‘I ask,’ he said, squeaking. ‘I ask Dr Shade to help.’
Relief and dread commingled. His trick knees were knocking. He still didn’t know if what he had just done was for the best, or even for the right. But he had done it, and he would stand by it.
The blades of the autogiro slowed to a halt.
‘Very well,’ said Dr Shade. ‘Let us consider our course of action.’
* * *
Two nights later, Orlando rowed a small boat through Traitors’ Gate. At least, he was confident it was the gate he was passing through. Night and fog made it impossible to confirm that by his eyes.
Dr Shade, in one of his habitual mysterious pronouncements, had said they would find the True Lord Mayor Elect where the fog was thickest. The BBC Home Service, with its roving dirigible, reported that the pea-soup was unusually concentrated around the Tower of London. Further enquiries, as Jeperson pestered his few remaining government contacts, revealed that Strawjack Crowe had recently taken over the public commission on the administration of the Tower, instituting a purge of the Yeoman Warders and bringing in a new breed of beef-eater. Bush telegraph had it that these fellows were not the Puritans one might expect, but double-dyed ruffians of the sort most associated with the fog’s master, Truro Daine.
The Doctor was up in the air somewhere, ravens flapping around his whirlybird. Jeperson was leading a cadre of Diogenes loyalists along the river-banks. But it had fallen to Orlando and Lytton to make covert approach to the Tower from the Thames itself. This was not the first time he had been on the river at night, rowing with muffled oars. Much of the black economy was conducted this way, in midnight exchanges between boats floating between the ships at dock.
Orlando was disguised with an enormous false beard and a Yeoman Warder uniform that hung loose on him, while Lytton wore an executioner’s hood, doublet and tights. The fog was so thick here that dressing up as anything was beside the point, but Jeperson had insisted the full resources of the Diogenes Club’s fancy dress department be called upon. Lytton even carried a headsman’s axe, with a wicked half-moon blade.
‘Who goes there?’ boomed a voice.
‘Good men and true,’ responded Orlando.
For a queasy second, he was sure Jeperson’s sources had secured the wrong passwords.
‘Pass, good men and true.’
‘That we will,’ he muttered, and rowed harder.
The tooth-like projections of the raised portcullis loomed through the fog. Lytton had to duck as the boat passed under the spears and through the mouth-like gate. The river was high.
Under his hood, Lytton wore a breather. Orlando had to rely on nose-plugs and goggles.
Orlando put his oars up and they drifted into the sunken courtyard. Stone walls rose all around, enclosing and containing. A hefty beef-eater awaited at the mooring-quay, face red as his tunic.
‘What’s all this? There’ve been no orders.’
Orlando waved an oilskin packet.
‘Most confidential,’ he said. ‘From the top. It’s about Little Ease.’
The beef-eater stiffened at the phrase. Another victory for Dr Shade’s mysterious intelligence sources. Little Ease was the oldest, smallest cell in the Tower—a four-foot square stone cube in which it was impossible to stand or lie comfortably. At present, it was home to a masked man.
Orlando hopped out of the boat, and Lytton climbed carefully onto the stone dock, hefting his axe. The warder looked at the black-edged packet and the executioner, and shrugged as if he had been expecting this all along.
‘We’ve a pole ready for his head, sirrah,’ he said.
‘Good man,’ Orlando commented.
Up close, he recognised the warder. Benjamin Crude, a cut-purse and battery man from Cheapside. His uniform didn’t fit either. The last Orlando heard, Crude was working for Truro Daine, duffing up club DJs for protection money.
Crude led the way into the Tower, a thousand-year-old fortress keep of Caen limestone, Kentish ragstone and baked Thames mud. Braziers burned in the corridors at regular intervals, but this was an impossible place to warm. Through his shoe-soles, Orlando felt icy flags. The black walls were wet. The fires were yellowish, fog-coloured. Threads of fog hung up to knee-height, like mustard gas.
Orlando’s cheek tickled as spirit gum gave way. He slapped his face, sticking his beard back with little more than sweat. Crude turned and looked at him.
‘Mosquito,’ he said. ‘Bastards.’
The beef-eater accepted it.
‘We’re to be quick about this,’ Orlando said. ‘Whip him out sharpish and into the boat, then off to the chopping block.’
Crude held the sealed packet, which he hadn’t yet examined. Inside were authentic-looking orders, full of the correct codewords and euphemisms. The envelope was even impregnated with gunpowder for instant disposal. A touch of a lucifer, and all the evidence was gone—just the way Crowe and Daine liked it.
‘I’ll have to get confirmation over the phone,’ said Crude. ‘There’s one by the cell.’
Orla
ndo bit a mouthful of beard.
By the door of Little Ease, a cupboard-like hatch, stood two more warders, otherwise Oisin Murphy-Lawless, the three-fingered Kentish Town safecracker, and Con Williams, the Hoxton Bruiser (Undefeated By Fair Means or Foul). Crude unsealed the orders, looked them over by the light of a sconced electric bulb, then went to a stand and began the business of putting a phone call through channels.
Orlando was sure his beard was coming off.
‘Lovely weather, eh, lads?’ he ventured.
Murphy-Lawless looked at him as if he were scum, which was at least comfortingly familiar. The Irishman was famous as the worst karaoke performer in North London: his rendition of ‘I Met Her in the Garden Where the Praties Grow’ could clear out the Assembly Rooms before he got to the chorus. The Bruiser’s gently vacant smile didn’t waver. His brains were so scrambled that little got through to him; you could saw his leg off and he wouldn’t remember to feel pain until after he’d tied you in a hitch-knot and pulled you so tight your eyes popped out.
Lytton heaved his axe from one shoulder to the other.
Orlando wondered when the Captain would move.
‘Daine is coming down,’ said Crude.
‘Better tidy up before he gets here,’ Orlando suggested, nodding at the ‘orders’.
Crude accepted the idea and fished a fag-lighter out of a pouch under his bloomers. Behind his fog-goggles, Orlando shut his eyes.
Flame touched the packet and the whole thing went up in a noxious magnesium flare that burned light even through Orlando’s goggles and eyelids.
The three beef-eaters coughed and stumbled. Opening his eyes, Orlando saw them flailing, the door guards reaching for pikes, and got out of the way.
Lytton held the axe like a golf-club and swung it through a powerful arc. The blade lodged in the door of Little Ease, splitting it in two. He pried it out and chopped again, smashing the thick, solid wood to fragments and splinters.
