“I blow, Charles.”
Charlie looked at the faces of Ouisch and Squeaky, American girls, unquestioningly loyal, endlessly tiresome.
“No, Mr. Fish,” he said, indicating the mural. “This is what I want. This is what I want to do.”
“I brought you here. I showed you this.”
“I know. You’re part of the story too, aren’t you? If the Mummy Man is the One Who Will Open the Earth, you’re the Mysterious Guide.”
“I’m not so mysterious.”
“You’re a part of this, you don’t have a choice.”
Charlie was excited but wheedling, persuasive but panicky. Having seen his preferred future, he was worried about losing it. Whenever the torch was away from the mural, he itched lest it should change in the dark.
“I promise you this, Charles, you will be famous.”
Charlie thumped his chest. “Damn right. Good goddamn right!”
“But you might want to give this up. Write off this scripted Armageddon as just another fish story. You know, the one that got away. It was this big. I have other plans for the end of this century. And beyond. Have you ever noticed how it’s only Gods who keep threatening to end the world? Father issues, if you ask me. Others, those of my party, promise things will continue as they are. Everyone gets what they deserve. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet because what you give is what you get.”
Charlie shook his head. “I’m not there.”
Squeaky and Ouisch were searching the mural, trying to find themselves in the crowded picture.
Charlie’s eyes shone, ferocious.
“Our deal was to bring you here,” said Leech, “to this sea. To this place of revelation. Our business is concluded. The service you requested has been done.”
Junior raised a modest flipper, acknowledging his part.
“Yeah,” said Charlie, distracted, flicking fingers at Junior, “muchas grassy-asses.”
“You have recompensed our friend for his part in this expedition, by ensuring that his employers finish their shoot unimpeded. That deal is done and everyone is square. Now, let’s talk about getting out of the mountain.”
Charlie bit back a grin, surprised.
“What are you prepared to offer for that?”
“Don’t be stupid, man,” said Charlie. “We just go back on ourselves.”
“Are you so confident? We took a great many turns and twists. Smooth rock and running water. We left no signs. Some of us might have a mind to sit by the sea for a spell, make some rods and go fishing.”
“Good idea, George,” said Junior. “Catch a marlin, I bet. Plenty good eating.”
Charlie’s eyes widened.
After a day or so, the torch batteries would die. He might wander blindly for months, years, down here, hopelessly lost, buried alive. Back at the Ranch, he’d not be missed much; Tex, or one of the others, maybe one of the girls, could be the new Head of the Family, and would perhaps do things better all round. The girls would be no use to him, in the end. Squeaky and Ouisch couldn’t guide him out of this fish city, and he couldn’t live off them for more than a few weeks. Charlie saw the story of the Lost Voyager as vividly as he had the Drowning of Los Angeles. It ended not with a huge face carved on a mountain and feared, but with forgotten bones, lying forever in wet darkness.
“I join you in fishing, I think,” said Constant.
Charlie had lost Constant on the mountain. Later, Leech would formalise a deal with the boy. He had an ability to put things together or take them apart. Charlie had been depending on that. He should have taken the trouble to offer Constant something of equal value to retain his services.
“No, no, this can’t be right.”
“You show Charlie the way out, meanie,” said Ouisch, shoving Junior.
“If you know what’s good for you,” said Squeaky.
“One word and you’re out of here safe, Charles,” said Leech. “But abandon the deluge. I want Los Angeles where it is. I want civilisation just where it is. I have plans, you dig?”
“You’re scarin’ me, man,” said Charlie, nervy, strained, near tears.
Leech smiled. He knew he showed more teeth than seemed possible.
“Yes,” he said, the last sound hissing in echo around the cavern. “I know.”
Minutes passed. Junior hummed a happy tune, accompanied by musical echoes from the stalactites.
Leech looked at Charlie, outstaring his Satan glare, trumping his ace.
At last, in a tiny voice, Charlie said, “Take me home.”
Leech was magnanimous. “But of course, Charles. Trust me, this way will suit you better. Pursue your interests, wage your war against the dream factory, and you will be remembered. Everyone will know your name.”
“Yeah, man, whatever. Let’s get going.”
“Creighton,” said Leech. “It’s night up top. The moon is full. Do you think you can lead us to the moonlight?”
“Sure thing, George. I’m the Wolf Man, ahhh-woooooo!”
* * * *
Janice Marsh had died while they were under the mountain. Her room stank and bad water sloshed on the carpets. The tarpaulin served as her shroud.
Leech hated to let her down, but she’d had too little to bring to the table. She had been a coelacanth, a living fossil.
Charlie announced that he was abandoning the search for the Subterranean Sea of California, that there were other paths to Helter Skelter. After all, was it not written that when you get to the bottom you start again at the top. He told his Family that his album would change the world when he got it together with Dennis, and he sang them a song about how the pigs would suffer.
Inside, Charlie was terrified. That would make him more dangerous.
But not as dangerous as Derek Leech.
* * * *
Before he left the Ranch, in a requisitioned buggy with Constant at the wheel, Leech sat a while with Junior.
“You’ve contributed more than you know,” he told Junior. “I don’t often do this, but I feel you’re owed. So, no deals, no contracts, just an offer. A no-strings offer. It will set things square between us. What do you want? What can I do for you?”
Leech had noticed how hoarse Junior’s speech was, gruffer even than you’d expect after years of chili and booze. His father had died of throat cancer, a silent movie star bereft of his voice. The same poison was just touching the son, extending tiny filaments of death around his larynx. If asked, Leech could call them off, take away the disease.
Or he could fix up a big budget star vehicle at Metro, a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award, a final marriage to Ava Gardner, a top-ten record with the Monkees, a hit TV series...
Junior thought a while, then hugged Leech.
“You’ve already done it, George. You’ve already granted my wish. You call me by my name. By my Mom’s name. Not by his, not by ‘Junior.’ They had to starve me into taking it. That’s all I ever wanted. My own name.”
It was so simple. Leech respected that; those who asked only for a little respect, a little place of their own—they should get what they deserve, as much as those who came greedily to the feast, hoping for all you can eat.
“Goodbye, Creighton,” he said.
Leech walked away from a happy man.
<
* * * *
Cold Snap
I
“Nice motor,” said Richard Jeperson, casting an appreciative eye over Derek Leech’s Rolls Royce ShadowShark.
“I could say the same of yours,” responded Leech, gloved fingertips lightly polishing his red-eyed Spirit of Ecstasy. Richard’s car was almost identical, though his bonnet ornament didn’t have the inset rubies.
“I’ve kept the old girl in good nick,” said Richard.
“Mine has a horn which plays the theme from Jaws,” said Leech.
“Mine, I’m glad to say, doesn’t.”
That was the pleasantries over.
It was the longest, hottest, driest summer of the 1970s.
Thanks to a strict hosepipe ban, lawns turned to desert. Neighbours informed on each other over suspiciously verdant patches. Bored regional television crews shot fillers about eggs frying on dustbin lids and sunburn specialists earning consultancy fees in naturist colonies. If they’d been allowed anywhere near here, a considerably more unusual summer weather story was to be had. A news blackout was in effect, and discreet roadblocks limited traffic onto this stretch of the Somerset Levels.
The near-twin cars were parked in a lay-by, equidistant from the seemingly Mediterranean beaches of Burnham-on-Sea and Lyme Regis. While the nation sweltered in bermuda shorts and flip-flops, Richard and Leech shivered in arctic survival gear. Richard wore layers of bearskin, furry knee-length boots with claw-toes, and a lime green balaclava surmounted by a scarlet Andean bobble hat with chinchilla earmuffs - plus the wraparound anti-glare visor recommended by Jean-Claude Killy. Leech wore a snow-white, fur-hooded parka and baggy leggings, ready to lead an Alpine covert assault troop. If not for his black Foster Grants, he could stand against a whitewashed wall and impersonate the Invisible Man.
Around them was a landscape from a malicious Christmas card. They stood in a Cold Spot. Technically, a patch of permafrost, four miles across. From the air, it looked like a rough circle of white stitched onto a brown quilt. Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone. snow had fallen, snow had fallen, snow on snow. The epicentre was Sutton Mallet, a hamlet consisting of a few farmhouses, New Chapel (which replaced the old one in 1829) and the Derek Leech International weather research facility.
Leech professed innocence, but this was his fault. Most bad things were.
Bernard Levin said on Late Night Line-Up that Leech papers had turned Fleet Street into a Circle of Hell by boasting fewer words and more semi-naked girls than anything else on the news-stands. Charles Shaar Murray insisted in IT that the multi-media tycoon was revealed as the Devil Incarnate when he invented the “folk rock cantata” triple LP. The Diogenes Club had seen Derek Leech coming for a long time, and Richard knew exactly what he was dealing with.
* * * *
Their wonderful cars could go no further, so they had to walk.
After several inconclusive, remote engagements, this was their first face-to-face (or visor-to-sunglasses) meeting. The Most Valued Member of the Diogenes Club and the Great Enchanter were expected to be the antagonists of the age, but the titles meant less than they had in the days of Mycroft Holmes, Charles Beauregard and Edwin Winthrop or Leo Dare, Isidore Persano and Colonel Zenf. Lately, both camps had other things to worry about.
From two official world wars, great nations had learned to conduct their vast duels without all-out armed conflict. Similarly, the Weird Wars of 1903 and 1932 had changed the shadow strategies of the Diogenes Club and its opponents. In the Worm War, there had almost been battle-lines. It had only been won when a significant number of Persano’s allies and acolytes switched sides, appalled at the scope of the crime (“the murder of time and space”) planned by the wriggling mastermind (“a worm unknown to science”) the Great Enchanter kept in a match-box in his waistcoat pocket. The Wizard War, when Beauregard faced Zenf, was a more traditional game of good and evil, though nipped in the bud by stealth, leaving the Club to cope with the ab-human threat of the Deep Ones (“the Water War”) and the mundane business of “licking Hitler”. Now, in what secret historians were already calling the Winter War, no one knew who to fight.
So, strangely, this was a truce.
As a sensitive - a Talent, as the parapsychology bods had it -Richard was used to trusting his impressions of people and places. He knew in his water when things or folks were out of true. If he squinted, he saw their real faces. If he cocked an ear, he heard what they were thinking. Derek Leech seemed perfectly sincere, and elaborately blameless. No matter how furiously Richard blinked behind his visor, he saw no red horns, no forked beard, no extra mouths. Only a tightness in the man’s jaw gave away the effort it took to present himself like this. Leech had to be mindful of a tendency to grind his teeth.
They had driven west - windows rolled down in the futile hope of a cool breeze - through parched, sun-baked countryside. Now, despite thermals and furs, they shivered. Richard saw Leech’s breath frosting.
“Snow in July,” said Leech. “Worse. Snow in this July.”
“It’s not snow, it’s rime. Snow is frozen rain. Precipitation. Rime is frozen dew. The moisture in the air, in the ground.”
“Don’t be such an arse, Jeperson.”
“As a newspaperman, you appreciate accuracy.”
“As a newspaper publisher, I know elitist vocabulary alienates readers. If it looks like snow, tastes like snow and gives you a white Christmas, then.”
Leech had devised So What Do You Know?, an ITV quiz show where prizes were awarded not for correct answers, but for matching whatever was decided - right or wrong - by the majority vote of a “randomly-selected panel of ordinary Britons”. Contestants had taken home fridge-freezers and fondue sets by identifying Sydney as the capital of Australia or categorizing whales as fish. Richard could imagine what Bernard Levin and Charles Shaar Murray thought of that.
Richard opened the boot of his Rolls and hefted out a holdall which contained stout wicker snowshoes, extensible aluminium ski-poles and packs of survival rations. Leech had similar equipment, though his boot-attachments were spiked black metal and his rucksack could have contained a jet propulsion unit.
“I’d have thought DLI could supply a Sno-Cat.”
“Have you any idea how hard it is to come by one in July?”
“As it happens, yes.”
They both laughed, bitterly. Fred Regent, one of the Club’s best men, had spent most of yesterday learning that the few places in Great Britain which leased or sold snow-ploughs, caterpillar tractor bikes or jet-skis had either sent their equipment out to be serviced, shut up shop for the summer or gone out of business in despair at unending sunshine. Heather Wilding, Leech’s Executive Assistant, had been on the same fruitless mission - she and Fred kept running into each other outside lock-ups with COME BACK IN NOVEMBER posted on them.
Beyond this point, the road to Sutton Mallet - a tricky proposition at the best of times - was impassable. The hamlet was just visible a mile off, black roofs stuck out of white drifts. The fields were usually low-lying, marshy and divided by shallow ditches called rhynes. In the last months, the marsh had set like concrete. The rhynes had turned into stinking runnels, with the barest threads of mud where water usually ran. Now, almost overnight, everything was deep-frozen and heavily frosted. The sun still shone, making a thousand glints, twinkles and refractions. But there was no heat.
Trees, already dead from dutch elm disease or roots loosened from the dry dirt, had fallen under the weight of what only Richard wasn’t calling snow, and lay like giant blackened corpses on field-sized shrouds. Telephone poles were down too. No word had been heard from Sutton Mallet in two days. A hardy postman had tried to get through on his bicycle, but not come back. A farmer set off to milk his cows was also been swallowed in the whiteness. A helicopter flew over, but the rotor blades slowed as heavy ice-sheaths grew on them. The pilot had barely made it back to Yeovilton Air Field.
Word had spread through “channels”. Unnatural phenomena were Diogenes Club business, but Leech had to take an interest too - if only to prove that he wasn’t behind the cold snap. Heather Wilding had made a call to Pall Mall, and officially requested the Club’s assistance. That didn’t happen often or, come to think of it, ever.
Leech looked across the white fields towards Sutton Mallet.
“So we walk,” he said.
“It’s safest to follow the ditches,” advised Richard.
Neither bothered to lock their cars.
They clambered - as bulky and awkward as astronauts going EVA - over a stile to get into the field. The white carpet was virginal. As they tramped on, in the slight trough that marked the rime-filled rhyne, Richard kept looking sidewise at Leech. The m
an was breathing heavily inside his polar gear. Being incarnate involved certain frailties. But it would not do to underestimate a Great Enchanter.
Derek Leech had popped up apparently out of nowhere in 1961. A day after Colonel Zenf finally died in custody, he first appeared on the radar, making a freak run of successful long-shot bets at a dog track. Since then, he had made several interlocking empires. He was a close friend of Harold Wilson, Brian Epstein, Lord Leaves of Leng, Enoch Powell, Roman Polanski, Mary Millington and Jimmy Saville. He was into everything - newspapers (the down-market tabloid Daily Comet and the reactionary broadsheet Sunday Facet), pop records, telly, a film studio, book publishing, frozen foods, football, road-building, anti-depressants, famine relief, contraception, cross-channel hovercraft, draught lager, touring opera productions, market research, low-cost fashions, educational playthings. He had poked his head out of a trapdoor on Batman and expected to be recognized by Adam West - “it’s not the Clock King, Robin, it’s the English Pop King, Derek Leech”. He appeared in his own adverts, varying his catch-phrase - “if I didn’t love it, I wouldn’t.” eat it, drink it, watch it, groove it, use it, wear it, bare it, shop it, stop it, make it, take it, kiss it, miss it, phone it, own it. He employed “radical visionary architect” Constant Drache to create “ultra-moderne work-place environments” for DLI premises and the ranks upon ranks of “affordable homes for hard-working families” cropping up at the edges of conurbations throughout the land. It was whispered there were private graveyards under many a “Derek Leech Close” or “Derek Leech Drive”. Few had tangled with Derek Leech and managed better than a draw. Richard counted himself among the few, but also suspected their occasional path-crossings hadn’t been serious.
The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 02] Page 35
