“Okay, I’ll go,” he said. “Gene, Susan, stay here. Give Mr Leech any help he needs.” That is, keep a bloody eye on him! Gene, though worried for her friend, picked that up.
Leech was bland, mild, innocent.
“Keith,” said Jamie, at last. “Find a shovel or something, and come with me.”
Keith, infuriatingly, looked to Leech - who gave him the nod.
“Come on, find someone useful inside you. Let’s get this rescue party on the road!”
Keith gulped and said, “O-okay, Jamie.”
* * * *
XI
Derek Leech was on the telephone again. Really, the man had the most terrible manners. He had some minion bother Catriona, then brushed her aside because he wanted to talk with Maureen Mount-main, of all people. Catriona passed the receiver to the woman, who listened - to her master’s voice? - and clucked. Yes, Mr Leech, no Mr Leech, three bags bloody full, Mr Leech. Catriona caught herself: this was no time to be a cranky old woman.
The Cold was getting into the Manor House, overwhelming Louise Teazle’s bubble of summer. Frost grew on the insides of the windows. Sleet and snow rattled against the panes.
* * * *
In the gloom of the gardens, drifts and banks shifted like beasts.
Catriona had pain in her joints, and was irritated. She could list other age-related aches and infirmities, exacerbated by the Cold.
Only Rose Farrar and Ariadne were immune. Rose skipped around the drawing room, exhaling white clouds. Ariadne stood by the fireplace - where the wood wouldn’t light, and shivers of snow fell on tidy ashes - and smoked a cigarette in a long, elegant holder.
Paulette Michaelsmith shivered in her sleep, and Louise rearranged her day-blanket without any effect. Karabatsos and his wife huddled together. Mr Zed was white. Swami Anand Gitamo chanted mantras, but his nose was blue. Lark and Cross, the white-coats, passed the china teapot between them, pressing their hands against the last of its warmth. Even Anthony Jago, who feared not the ice and fire of Hell, had his hands in his armpits. The house itself creaked more than usual.
“Richard?” exclaimed Maureen. “Are you sure?”
Catriona, who had been trying not to listen, had a spasm of concern. Maureen had blurted out the name in shock. She and Richard had.
Maureen hung up, cutting off Catriona’s train of thought. The room looked to Maureen for a report.
“Derek needs us all,” she said. “He needs us to hurt the Cold.”
A lot of people talked at once, then shut up.
“Catriona,” said Maureen, fists pressed together under her impressive bosom, “your man Richard Jeperson is lost.”
“Lost?”
“Probably dead. I’m sorry, truly. Derek says he tried to reach the Cold, and it took him. It’s a monster, and wants to kill us all. We have to hit it with all we’ve got, now. All our big guns, he says. Maybe it can’t be killed, but can be hurt. Driven back to its hole.”
A tear dribbled from Maureen’s eye.
“Reverend Jago, Lady Elder, Rose. you’re our biggest guns. Just tear into the Cold. Miss Teazle, work on Mrs Michaelsmith -direct her. Think of the heat-wave. Karabatsos, clear a circle and make a summoning. A fire elemental. The rest of you, pray. That’s not a figure of speech. The only way we can beat this thing is with an enormous spiritual attack.”
The news about Richard was a terrible blow. Catriona let Maureen go on with her “to arms” speech, trying to take it in. She was not a sensitive in the way any of these Talents were, but she was not a closed mind. And Maureen had said Richard was only probably dead.
* * * *
Mr and Mrs Karabatsos were the first to act. They rolled aside a carpet and began chalking a circle on the living room floor.
“Excuse me,” said Catriona. “Is this your house?”
Karabatsos glared at her, nastily triumphant. Catriona would not be looked at like that in her home.
“No need to bother with that,” said Anand Gitamo.
“Summoning a fire elemental requires a circle, and a ritual,” said Karabatsos. “Blood must be spilled and burned.”
“Yes dear, spilled and burned,” echoed his wife.
“In normal company, maybe,” said the Swami, sounding more like plain old Harry Cutley. “But we’ve got extraordinary guests. We can take short cuts. Now, you two sorcerers shut your eyes and think about your blessed fire elemental. Extra-hot and flaming from the Pits of Abaddon and Erebus and all that. Think hard, now think harder. Imagine more flames, more heat, more burning. Take your basic fire elemental, add the Japanese pikadon, the Norse Surtur, Graeco-Roman Haephaestus or Vulcan, the phoenix, the big bonfire at the end of The Wicker Man, that skyscraper from The Towering Inferno, the Great Fire of London in 1666, enough napalm to deforest the Republic of Vietnam and the eternal blue flame of the lost city of Kor.”
Nigel Karabatsos and his wife shut their eyes and thought of fire.
“Rose dear,” said Gitamo. “Peek into those tiny minds.”
Rose Farrar caught fire and expanded. She grew into a nine-foot-tall column of living flame, with long limbs and a blazing skull-face. Though she was hard to look at and her radiant heat filled the room, she didn’t burn the ceiling or the carpet. She was Fire.
“Reverend Jago,” said Gitamo, “would you open the doors. Rose needs to go outside.”
The man in the dog-collar was astonished by what the apparent little girl had become. Anthony Jago didn’t know whether to bow down before a fiery angel of the Lord or cast out a demon from Hell. His already-peculiar belief system was horribly battered by this experience. Catriona feared no good would come of that.
But, if anything could hurt the Cold, it would be Fire Rose.
Louise Teazle reported that the snow outside was melting. Fire Rose was radiating, beyond the walls.
“No,” said Ariadne, snapping her fingers. “I think not.”
Fire Rose went out. Spent-match stink filled the room. The little girl, unburned and unburning, sat on the floor exactly as she had been. She was bewildered. No one had ever switched her off like a light before.
* * * *
Jago was enraged. All the cups, saucers and cutlery on the table near him and all the books on the shelves behind him leaped at once into the air, and hovered like projectiles about to be slung. Catriona had known he was a telekinetic, but this was off the scale. In any other drawing room, parapsychologists like Cross and Lark would be thinking of the book deals and the lecture tour - though, after Fire Rose, this little display scarcely made the needle tick. Jago’s eyes smouldered.
Ariadne shook her head, and everything went neatly back to its place. Not a drop of tea spilled or a dust jacket torn. Jago knitted his brows, blood vessels pulsing, but not so much as a teaspoon responded.
Mr Zed took out a gun, caught Ariadne’s gaze, then pointed it at his own head. He stood still as a statue.
“If we’re not going off half-cocked,” said the Elder of the Kind, “let us review our plan of action. In dealing with the Cold, do we really want to do what Derek Leech says.”
Exactly. Ariadne had said what Catriona felt.
“You can’t win a Winter War with fire,” she said. “Fire consumes, leaves only ashes.”
“Then what?” said Maureen, frustrated, red-eyed. “If not Derek’s plan, what? I’d really like to know, ladies. I’m freezing my tits off here.”
“There there,” said Catriona, touching Maureen’s shoulder. “Have faith. He’ll be all right.”
Maureen didn’t ask who she meant.
“He’ll see us through,” Catriona said.
Richard.
* * * *
XII
On some other path in life, an expert outdoorsman Keith had loads of survival training in extreme weather conditions. Probably, Keith had to weed out a couple of dozen plonkers who didn’t know how to tie their own shoelaces, but he’d found the useful life in seconds. Not a bad trick. While Jamie scanned for tracks or
a human shaped bump in the snow, Keith barked instructions - keep moving, breathe through your nose, turn your shoulder to the wind.
One good thing: in all this mucky weather, Richard Jeperson couldn’t have gone far.
Any footprints were filled by new snow. The marks they had made coming from the thicket to the buildings were already gone. Jamie looked for dark traces, the shadows of shadows. It was Dad’s game, and he wasn’t expert in it yet - but he could usually see shadow-ghosts, if he caught them in time.
He found a discarded fur boot. And another.
A shaggy clump a little past the boots turned out not to be the missing man, but an abandoned coat. A fold of dayglo green poking up from the snow was a cast-off balaclava. Leech had said Jeperson went out naked. That was not true. Jeperson had gone outside, then taken his clothes off. Leech wouldn’t have got that wrong unless he were deliberately lying. If Jeperson knocked Leech out and left him inside, Leech would not have known what Jeperson did next - but he had said Jeperson took his clothes off, went out and lay down in the show. Had Leech attacked Jeperson, stripped him, and left him to freeze to death, cooking up a story to exonerate himself? Jamie should have checked at once - tried to replay the shadows in the building. He had an inkling it wouldn’t have worked. There was something wrong with Leech’s shadow.
He hoped Gene and Susan could take care of themselves. Derek Leech was dangerous.
They were near Bugs, the mammoth snowman. It had lost human shape and become a mountain. Novelty insects still bobbed on its summit like the Union Flag on top of Everest.
Jamie saw the shadow lying at the foot of Mount Bugs. A man, stretched out. Jeperson was under here.
He pointed to the spot and told Keith, “Dig there, mate. There.”
“Where?”
Keith didn’t have the Shade-sight. Jamie knelt and began scooping snow away with gloved hands. Keith used a tray from the cafeteria as a spade, digging deep.
A face emerged, in a nest of long, frozen hair. Thin, blue, hollow-cheeked, jagged-moustached and open-eyed.
“Hello,” said Jeperson, smiling broadly. “You must be the new boys.”
* * * *
XIII
Suddenly, Richard felt the cold. Not the Cold - he was disconnected, now. The little crystals were out of his brain. He hoped he had given the Cold something to think about.
“Would you happen to have seen some clothes in your travels?” he asked the two young men. One wore a long dark greatcoat and goggles, the other a red-lined magician’s cloak.
* * * *
They dragged his fur coat along and tried to wrap him in it. What he could see of his skin was sky-blue.
“It’s stopped snowing,” he observed.
The wind was down too. And sun shone through, low in the West. It was late evening. Long shadows were red-edged.
The Cold was responding to his plea, drawing in its chill. It could live on in perpetuity as a sub-microscopic speck inside a rock, or confine itself to the poles, or go back to the void below absolute zero. Without Cleaver telling it what it wanted, it had its own choices. Richard hoped he had persuaded the Cold that other life on Earth was entertaining enough to be put up with.
Now, he would probably die.
He hoped he had done the right thing. He was sorry he’d never found out who his real parents had been. He wished he’d spent more time with Barbara, but - obviously - he’d been busy lately. His personal life hadn’t been a priority, and that was a regret. He could trust Fred and Vanessa to keep on, at least for a while. And, if these lads were anything to judge by, the Diogenes Club, or something like it, would continue to stand against Great Enchanters present and future, and all manner of other inexplicable threats to the public safety.
The boy in the goggles tried rubbing Richard’s hands, but his friend - who knew something about hypothermia treatment - told him not to. Friction just damages more blood vessels. Gradual, all-round warmth was needed. Not that there was an easy supply around here.
He tried to think of quotable last words.
Some people came out of the building. Leech, and two women. One flew to him. Genevieve. Good for her. They’d not worked together much, but the old girl was a long-standing Valued Member.
“Richard, you won’t die,” she said.
“I think I’ll need a second opinion,” he muttered. “A less optimistic one.”
“No, really,” she insisted.
Leech hung back, shiftily. Richard expected no more. Genevieve pulled the other woman - a brown-haired girl who kept herself to herself - to help, and got her to press her hands on Richard’s chest.
Warmth radiated from her touch.
“That’s very. nice,” he said. “Who are you?”
“This is Susan,” said Genevieve. “She’s a friend.”
Richard had heard of her. Susan Rodway. She was on Catriona’s list of possibles.
* * * *
He felt as if he were sinking into a hot, perfumed bath. Feeling returned to his limbs. He heard hissing and tinkling, as snow and ice melted around them. A bubble of heat was forming. Susan took it slowly, not heating him too fast. His temperature came up like a diver hauled to the surface in stages to avoid the bends.
He tactfully rearranged a flap of fur to cover his loins. Susan’s magic warmth had reached there, with an unshrivelling effect he rarely cared to share on such brief acquaintance.
“What did you do?” asked Genevieve. “Are we saved?”
Richard tried to shrug. “I did what I could. I think the Cold is getting a sense of who we are, what we’re about and why we shouldn’t just be killed out of hand. Who knows what something like that can really feel, think or do? You have to call off the blitzkrieg, though. Any smiting with fire and sword is liable to undo the work of diplomacy and land us back in the big fridge.”
Leech was expressionless. Richard wondered how things would be if he’d had his way.
Genevieve looked back and said, “Make the call, Derek.”
He made no move. Genevieve stood. Leech nodded, once, and walked back to the building.
“I see you’ve met Dr Shade and Conjurer Keith,” said Genevieve. “They’ve done all right too.”
Susan took her hands away. Richard regretted it, but knew her touch couldn’t last. Everyone looked at the huge, liquefying snow-giant as he stood up and got dressed as best he could. Sharon Kellett would be inside that glacier. The others would be strewn around the fields.
This patch of Somerset would be better irrigated than the rest of Britain - for a few days.
“Who else turned up for the ice age?” Richard asked.
“There’s a knowledgeable little fellow you don’t need to meet just now,” said Genevieve. “He didn’t even waver, like some folks. Went straight to Leech. He’s inside the weather station. At the Manor House, Catriona has a whole tea party. Old friends and new. Including a strong contingent from the Other Side.”
“I can imagine.”
“Maureen Mountmain’s here,” she said, pointedly.
Richard was glad to be warned of that potential complication. Genevieve let the point stick with a needling glance.
“It was a ritual,” said Richard, knowing how weak the excuse was.
“It was still.” she mouthed the word “sex”.
* * * *
Richard knew he was being ribbed. Now they were less doomed, they could start squabbling, gossiping and teasing again.
Leech came back.
“We’re invited to supper at the Manor House,” he said. “It’s only nine o’clock, would you believe it? You’ll have to make my excuses, I’m afraid. I have to get back to London. Things to do, people to buy. Give my best to Miss Kaye. Oh, Cleaver’s dead. Choked on his false teeth. Pity.”
The blotch on his forehead was already gone. Leech recovered quickly.
“See you soon,” he said, and walked away.
Richard knew an autopsy wouldn’t show anything conclusive. Professor Cleaver
would be listed as another incidental casualty.
“I feel much warmer now he’s gone,” said Genevieve. “Didn’t he say something about supper?”
* * * *
XIV
Most of the company had scurried back to their holes. Catriona was relieved to have them out of the house.
She sat in her drawing room. Paulette Michaelsmith was upstairs, tucked up and dreaming safely. Louise Teazle had walked home to the Hollow, her house on the moor. Genevieve was outside in the garden, with the young people. She was the last of the old ladies.
The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 02] Page 43
