Ariadne had taken Rose with her. Mr Zed, round weal on his temple, didn’t even complain. The Undertakers were a spent force, but even in their prime they couldn’t have stood against an Elder of the Kind. Rose would be safe with Ariadne, and - more to the point -the world would be safe from her. Catriona assumed that Ariadne could pack Rose off to where she came from, just as - eighty years ago - Charles Beauregard sent Princess Cuckoo home. However, the Elder might choose to raise the creature who usually looked like a little girl as her own. At this stage of her life, Catriona doubted she’d live to find out. Charles wasn’t here. Edwin wasn’t here. At times, Catriona wondered if she were really here. She knew more ghosts than living people, and regretted the rasher statements made about spirits of the unquiet dead in books she had published in her long-ago youth. Occasionally, she welcomed the odd clanking chain or floating bed-sheet.
Maureen Mountmain, clearly torn, had wanted to stay and see Richard - she babbled a bit about having something to tell him - but Leech had ordered her to rally a party of Mr and Mrs Karabatsos, Myra Lark, Jago and leave. Jago, well on the way to replacing Rose as Catriona’s idea of the most frightening person on the planet, took a last look around the Manor House, as if thinking of moving in, and slid off into the evening with Maureen’s group. They wouldn’t be able to keep him for long. Jago had his own plans. Leech had picked up Sewell Head, too - though Catriona had looked over his file, and concluded it would take a lot to lure him out of his sweet shop and away from his books of quiz questions.
On the plus side, the Club had tentative gains. Susan Rodway and Jamie Chambers - the new Dr Shade! - were hardly clubbable in the old-fashioned sense, but Mycroft Holmes had founded the Diogenes Club as a club for the unclubbable. Even Keith Marion, in a reasonable percentage of his might-have-been selves, was inclined to the good - though finding a place for him was even more of a challenge. Genevieve reported that the Chambers Boy showed his father’s dark spark, tempered with a little more sympathy than habitually displayed by Jonathan Chambers. Derek Leech must want to sign up Dr Shade. The Shades wavered, leaning towards one side or the other according to circumstance or their various personalities. The boy could not be forced or wooed too strongly, for fear of driving him to the bad. Leech would not give up on such a potent Talent. There might even be a percentage in letting Jamie get close to Leech, putting the lad in the other camp for a while. Susan was reluctant to become a laboratory rat for David Cross or Myra Lark, but was too prodigious to let slip. Without her warm hands, Richard would not have lived through this cold spell. Susan needed help coping with her Talent, and had taken Catriona’s card. If Jamie could be a counter for Leech, Susan was possibly their best hope of matching Jago. It chilled Catriona that she could even consider sending a girl barely in her twenties up against an Effective Talent like Anthony Jago, but no one else was left to make the decisions.
She was thinking like Edwin now, or even Mycroft. The Diogenes Club, or whatever stood in its stead, had to play a long game. She had been a girl younger than Susan or Jamie when this started for her. The rector’s daughter, not the lady of the manor. At eighteen, with Edwin away at the front, she had been escorted by Charles to Mycroft’s funeral. That had been a changing of the guard. Some of the famous names and faces of generations before her own seemed like dinosaurs and relics in her eyes. Even Mycroft’s famous brother was a bright-eyed old gaffer with a beaky nose, fingers bandaged from bee-stings and yellow teeth from decades of three-pipe problems. Richard Riddle had been there, with his uncle and aunt. In his RFC uniform and jaunty eye-patch, the former boy detective was impossibly glamorous to her. She had a better idea than most where he had flown to in 1934, and still expected him to turn up again, with his chums Vi and Ernie.
Charles had pointed out Inspector Henry Mist, Thomas Carnacki, Sir Henry Merrivale, Winston Churchill, General Hector Tarr, John Silence, Sir Michael Calme, Mansfield Smith-Cumming, Margery Device, the Keeper of the Ravens, and others. Now, Catriona knew Genevieve had been there too, spying through blue lenses from the edge of the crowd - Mycroft’s most secret secret agent and, contrary to the public record, the first Lady Member of the Diogenes Club. After all the fuss, Catriona turned out not to be the first of her sex to be admitted to the Inner Rooms - though she was the first woman to chair the Ruling Cabal.
It had been a busy sixty years. Angel Down, Irene Dobson, the Murder Mandarin, the Seven Stars, the last flight of the Demon Ace, Spring-Heel’d Jack, Dien Ch’ing, the Splendid Six, Weezie’s Hauntings, the Rat Among the Ravens, the Crazy Gang, Parsifal le Gallois, the Water War, Adolf Hitler, Swastika Girl, the Malvern Mystery, the Scotch Streak, the Trouble with Titan, Castle De’ath, the Drache Development, Paulette’s dream, the Soho Golem, the Ghoul Crisis, the Missing Mythwrhn, and so many others. And now the Cold. There was more to come, she knew. Richard Jeperson’s work wasn’t done. Her work wasn’t done. The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club remained open.
She felt a whisper against her cheek.
* * * *
XV
The garden was Disneyfied: white pools of melting ice, nightbirds singing. Light spilled onto the lawns from the upstairs windows of the Manor House. Glints reflected in dwindling icicles. Jamie saw activity streaks in the shadows. With the Cold drawn in, the land was healing.
No one had to worry about World Cooling any more.
Richard Jeperson, the Man from the Diogenes Club, tried to explain what he had done. It boiled down to getting the attention of a vast, unknowable creature and asking it very nicely not to wipe out all lifeforms that needed a temperature above freezing to survive. Jamie realized how lucky they had been. Only someone who could ask very politely and tactfully would have got a result. A few bumps the other way, along one of Keith’s paths, and it could have been Derek Leech under the snow.
* * * *
Leech had left Jamie his card, and he hadn’t thrown it away.
Many of the people drawn to the Winter War had melted away like the ice. Some were sleeping over in the house. Jamie’s van was parked next to Richard’s ShadowShark in the drive.
He sat on a white filigree lawn-chair, drinking black coffee from an electric pot. The hostess, an elderly lady who had not joined them outside, provided a pretty fair scratch supper for the survivors and their hangers-on. Now, there were wafer-thin mints. Gene was in a lawn-swing, drinking something red and steaming that wasn’t tomato soup. Richard, still glowing with whatever Susan had fed into him, smoked a fat, hand-rolled cigarette that wasn’t a joint but wasn’t tobacco either. Considering what he’d done, Jamie reckoned he could demand that the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Prime Minister hand-deliver an ounce of Jamaican, the Crown Jewels and Princess Margaret dressed up in a St Trinian’s uniform to his room within the next half-hour and expect an answer of “right away, sir”.
“How was your first day on the job?” Gene asked him.
“Job?”
“Your Dad called it a practice. Being Dr Shade.”
“Not sure about the handle. I thought I’d just go with ‘Shade’ for a bit. ‘Jamie Shade’, maybe? I’d use it for the band, but it sounds too much like Slade.”
“I quite like Slade,” said Richard.
“You would,” said Jamie. “What a year, eh?”
“It has had its meteorological anomalies.”
“No, I mean the charts. Telly Savalas, Real Thing, The Brotherhood of Man, Abba, the Wurzels, J. J. Barrie, Demis Roussos. ‘Brand New Combine Harvester’, ‘Save Your Kisses for Me’, bloody ‘No Charge’. It has to be the low-point in music since forever. It’s like some great evil entity was sucking the guts out of our sounds. Some other great evil entity. You can’t blame Leech for all of it. Even he wouldn’t touch the Wurzels. Something’s got to change. Maybe I’ll stick with the band, leave monsters and magic to other folk. Kids are fed up, you know. They want to hear something new. And you lot are getting on.”
“Do you feel ‘long in the tooth’, Genevieve?” Richard ask
ed.
Gene bared teeth that Jamie could have sworn were longer than they had been earlier.
“It’s not about how old you are,” said Susan, who had been quietly sipping a drink with fruit in it. “It’s about what you do.”
“Here’s to that,” said Richard, clinking his glass to hers.
* * * *
Keith was sitting quietly, not letting on which of his selves was home. The primary Keith had reluctantly given Jamie back the Great Edmondo’s cloak and its hidden tricks. He had asked if Dr Shade needed an assistant, and started shuttling through selves when Jamie told him he really needed a new drummer. Now, despite what he’d said, he wasn’t sure. Being Dr Shade meant something, and came with a lot of baggage. He half-thought Vron was only with him because of who his Dad was. These people kept calling him “Junior Shade”, “Young Dr Shade” or “the New Dr Shade”. Perhaps he should take them seriously. He was already a veteran of the Winter War, if something over inside two days counted as a war.
Like Dad, he wasn’t much of a joiner. He couldn’t see himself putting a tie on to get into some fusty old club. But he played well with others. How randomly had his vanload of raw recruits been assembled? Even Sewell Head, now lost to Leech, had come in handy. Maybe, he’d found his new band. Susan, Gene and Keith all had Talents. Perhaps the old hippie with the ringlets and the ‘tache could take the odd guest guitar solo. One thing was for certain, they wouldn’t sign with a Derek Leech label.
In the house, the lights went off, and the garden was dark. Jamie didn’t mind the dark. From now on, he owned it.
“Catriona’s gone to bed,” said Richard.
Gene, another night person, stretched out on the grass, as if sunning herself in shadows.
“Some of us never sleep,” she said. “Someone has to watch out for the world. Or we might lose it.”
“We’re not going to let that happen,” said Richard.
<
* * * *
Notes
Al Adamson. Adamson and Sam Sherman were a director-producer team responsible for, among others,Satan’s Sadists (with Russ Tamblyn), Blood of Dracula’s Castle, Five Bloody Graves, and Dracula vs. Frankenstein (with Lon Chaney Jr. as Groton the Mad Zombie). Tamblyn and Chaney Jr. both appeared in The Female Bunch (1969), which was shot on the Spahn Ranch, then home to the Manson Family. In 1995, Adamson was murdered by an odd-job man named Fred Fulford, who buried his body under concrete in a jacuzzi. Sherman is rereleasing all their old films on DVD with commentary tracks.
the Angel of Mons.The rumoured appearance of angels above the British lines during the battle of Mons in 1914. It seems the legend arises from Arthur Machen’s short story “The Bowmen,” in which spectral longbowmen from Henry V’s era help out their descendants against another foreign foe. The tale escaped its creator and circulated in many variant versions, with warrior angels, phantom cavalrymen, and St. George smiting the Hun.
apple-scrumpers. Children who steal apples from farmers’ trees, or—with a certain assumption that it’s a less serious offence—from the ground underneath farmers’ trees. Opinions vary as to whether it’s a harmless, healthy, mildly amusing aspect of a country childhood or the first step on a road that leads to the gallows.
ash-can. Dustbin
Barbara. Professor Barbara Corri. See: “The Serial Murders” in The Man From the Diogenes Club.
the bee’s roller-skates.Colloq: pretty darned impressive.
Wedgy Benn. Anthony Wedgwood Benn, Lord Stansgate—who gave up his title and spent decades trying to get the media to call him Tony Benn. A minister in the Wilson government of the 1960s, later a left-wing gadfly.
blower. Colloq: telephone.
Boney was a warrior way-aye-aye.The first line of a sea-chanty, which exists in almost as many versions as “Louie Louie.” The first verse usually goes: “Boney was a warrior way-aye-aye/A warrior, a terrier, John Fran-Swah!”
Brain of Britain. A radio quiz program. It’s still running.
Laird Brunette. See:Farewell, My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler.
Billy Butlin. The founder of Butlins Holiday Camps.
century of centuries. In cricket, a century means scoring a hundred runs. If you do that a hundred times, you’ve scored a century of centuries.
charabanc. A kind of open-topped omnibus, much used for holiday excursions, works outings, and the like in early 20th Century Britain. The name comes from the French char-a-bancs (carriage with benches).
cipher. The key-word for the R.R.D.A. cipher is ‘dinosaur’
the Cobb. The distinctive stone harbour wall of Lyme Regis. It’s the setting for an important scene in John Fowles’s novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and can be seen in the film.
the Common Market.Forerunner of the European Union.
Crystal Palace Park. The dinosaur statues were sculpted by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, with advice from the palaeontologist Sir Richard Owen. They were commissioned in 1851 and gradually completed over the next fifty years—only the Crystal Palace Company’s decision to cut funding in 1895 ended the project. Now of more historical than scientific interest, they are still there in South London, renovated in 2002, and well worth a visit.
Harry Cutley. See: “The Man Who Got Off the Ghost Train” in The Man From the Diogenes Club.
Leo Dare, Isidore Persano, Colonel ZenfStories for which the world is not ready, but see “A Drug on the Market” for Dare and “Sorcerer Conjurer Wizard Witch” for Persano and Zenf.
dead cert. A dead certainty. Often, a horse-racing expression.
“Derek Leech had popped up apparently out of nowhere in 1961. “ In the first chapter of The Quorum, actually.
Zuleika Dobson. Title character of a 1911 novel by Max Beerbohm.
Ivan Dragomiloff.See: The Assassination Bureau, Ltd., by Jack London (completed by Robert L. Fish). The film, with Oliver Reed as Dragomiloff, is fun, but the book is much better.
Duel of the Seven Stars.See: Seven Stars.
dustbin. Ash-can.
eggplant. Here’s a rare note for British readers: aubergine.
Brian Epstein. The Beatles’ manager.
The Esoteric Order of Dagon.See: “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” by H.P. Lovecraft.
florin. A two-shilling coin. In modern British money, ten pence.
Fred perry. A type of shirt, named after a tennis player.
Girls ‘Paper.Properly, Girls’ Own Paper, sister publication to the better-knownBoys’ Own Paper.
Gary Glitter. UK pop performer, prominent in the early 1970s “glam rock” trend with hits like “Rock and Roll, Parts 1 and 2” and “I’m the Leader of the Gang (I Am).” In 2005, he was convicted of child sexual abuse in Vietnam. In current rhyming slang, “the Gary” means “rectum” (Gary Glitter = shitter).
Gosse. Philip Henry Gosse (1810-88), author of Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot (1857). Best known now thanks to his son Edmond Gosse’s memoir Father and Son (1907).
Gower Gulch. The intersection of Sunset Blvd. and Gower Street in Hollywood, so named because out-of-work cowboys would gather there, hoping to land jobs in the many Westerns made in the nearby studios. Derek Leech is very happy that today, a mall which calls itself Gower Gulch stands on the site.
the Great Edmondo.Robert Edmond Stone; see “Sorcerer Conjurer Wizard Witch.” Edmondo was the Conjurer.
the Great Game. The phrase was first used by Arthur Conolly, referring to the diplomatic and espionage stratagems and counterstratagems of the British and Russian Empires in Central Asia in the late 19th Century. It was popularised by Rudyard Kipling in Kim, which—incidentally—was my mother’s favourite novel.
Frank Harris.Irish-born editor, author of the scandalous My Life and Loves (1922-27).
Dr. Martin Hesselius.See: In a Glass Darkly, by J. Sheridan LeFanu.
the Hindu Kush. A mountain range in Afghanistan.
Home Rule. The movement for Irish self-government.
“If you wa
ke at midnight, and hear a horse’s feet... “ “A Smuggler’s Song” by Rudyard Kipling.
IT. The International Times, an “underground” paper published from 1966.
Janet and John. The UK equivalent of Dick and Jane—much better brought-up, they wouldn’t dream of running after Spot but would walk politely after the dog.
Jubilee. Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, celebrating 50 years on the throne, was in 1887. Her Diamond Jubilee came ten years later.
Jutland. The Battle of Jutland, largest naval engagement of WWI.
Nigel and Joanne Karabatsos.See: “Mother Hen.”
Jean-Claude Killy. French ski champion.
Kingstead Cemetery. Last resting place of Lucy Westenra, Mycroft Holmes, and George Oldrid Bunning. See: “Egyptian Avenue,” in The Man From the Diogenes Club.
The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 02] Page 44
