The Quorum

by Kim Newman

  After the soap came a commercial for the serialisation of Josef Mengele’s Auschwitz diaries in the Argus, Leech’s heavy paper. Then a caring, sensitive ad for Chums.

  Sally undid the ribbon and didn’t find a security survey. The first item was familiar: a glossy Mythwrhn press release, dated three years ago, about the redesign of their Soho Square premises. She paged through and found quotes from critics praising the features of the building that now drove people mad. The brochure also profiled Constant Drache, the award-winning architect entrusted with the commission. He’d been an unknown until Derek Leech chose him to construct the DLE pyramid, the black glass creation that now dominated Docklands. In a broody shot, Drache posed in black like the lead singer of a Goth group. A wedge of gibberish about his intentions with the building was printed white on black. It was silly, considering that a lot of Drache’s ‘severe edges’ were now best known for ripping the clothes of passing people, but hardly worth Quilbert’s search-and-destroy mission. Drache referred to buildings as ‘devices’, insisting each have its own purpose and be designed to concentrate ‘human energies’ towards the fulfilment of that purpose. Cathedrals, for instance, were designed to concentrate prayer upwards. Sally wondered what low ceilings and floor-level lighting were supposed to concentrate you towards, and, before she could stop herself, guessed Bender had probably worked it out.

  She zapped to the Leech channel and found a scary scene from one of the Where the Bodies Are Buried sequels. A teenager screamed silently as Hackwill, the monster, slashed him with a cake-slice.

  Under the brochure was a clipped-together batch of articles from a psychology journal. April hadn’t abandoned her ‘sick building syndrome’ idea, or at least had got Bender to retrieve materials from the files before Tiny pulled the plug. Sally skimmed until her head hurt with jargon. Respectable psychology segued into the Fortean Times and even weirder quarters. She found pieces, with significant passages underlined in violet, on ‘curses’ and ‘hauntings’.

  The television monster laughed loud enough to be heard even with the sound down. The camera pulled back from a graveyard through which a girl was running to reveal that the tilted tombstones constituted a giant face.

  The last items were thin strips of word-processed news copy. A fine print tag at the bottom of each page identified the copy as having been generated for the Comet. Sally guessed that for a tabloid these pieces would constitute a heavyweight Sunday section article. She read them through, recognising the style and concerns of the Leech press. Dated a year ago, the article celebrated a major police infiltration of a nest of Satanic Child-Abusers. Naming a few names, the piece was about decadent high society types turning to black magic to advance themselves. A 23-year-old stockbroker was purported to have made a million on Market Tips From Hell. A top model, whod doubtless have posed nude for the illo, claimed drinking goat blood landed her international assignments.

  It was typical Comet drivel but had never appeared in the paper. Each strip of prose was individually stamped in red with a large ‘NO’ design that contained, in tiny letters, the initials ‘DL’. She supposed this was Leech’s personal veto. Why hadn’t the piece appeared? It seemed a natural for the Comet. So, most likely, Leech had an interest in its suppression. She read everything through again and found it. The reference in the copy was to the ‘£3.5 million modern home’ which was the gathering point for the cult. In the margin, in faded pencil that looked as if it had been almost rubbed out, were the words ‘Drache Retreat’.

  * * *

  ‘Where’s the goon?’ Sally asked Heidi. The security man wasn’t at his post.

  ‘Caught his hand in the lift,’ the receptionist said. ‘Dozens of little bones broken.’

  Sally raised an eyebrow. A workman was examining the lift door, screwdrivers laid out on a dustcloth like surgical instruments.

  ‘There was blood all over the floor. Disgusting.’

  Carefully, she climbed the stairs, trying to keep her elbows away from Drache’s ‘severe edges’. If the architect had chosen to inset razor-blades into all the walls, the effect might have been more obvious.

  The Survival Kit offices were depopulated. Pomme told her everyone was off with a bout of the flu. Pomme’s perfect complexion was marred by eruptions.

  ‘Bleedin’ worry, I reckon,’ she said, scratching her blood-dotted chin.

  April’s desk had been put together again but was stripped clean. There was a padded envelope on Sally’s desk, with her name printed on it. She opened it and found a bundle of £20 notes. There was no ‘compliments’ slip.

  She took a giant-size bag of Kettle Chips out of her case and, after a furtive glance-around, ate them rapidly, one by one. She was eating for two. The cash was for Roebuck’s papers, she understood. A bonus, blood money.

  She had just scrunched up the crisp packet and buried it in her waste-bin when Pomme slid her head into the alcove.

  ‘Remember Streaky?’ she said, referring to the office cat who’d disappeared three months ago.

  Sally nodded.

  ‘The lift-repair man just found the bones at the bottom of the shaft. Ugh.’

  * * *

  All the black magicians she knew were dead, which was not something she usually found upsetting. She couldn’t ask anyone to explain things to her. Nevertheless, she thought she’d worked it out.

  It was possible to climb past the Penthouse and get onto the roof. The original idea had been to make it a party area but Drache insisted on a rubbery-leathery species of covering that made the slight slope dangerously slippery.

  Sally sat carefully and looked out at Soho Square, thinking. Her hair was riffled by the slight breeze. She wished she had more crisps. Down in the world, the organ donors were waiting to be sent out. Today, things had ground to a halt in the business. It was an Armistice, a pause before the putsch of the franchise auction. Thousands would go under the mud in that armageddon, leaving the map of Media London dotted with crushed corpses.

  It was almost peaceful. Above the building, she felt a calm which was elusive inside it. The knot of worry which she’d got used to eased away.

  ‘Chim-chim-a-nee,’ she hummed. ‘Chim-chim-a-nee, chim-chim-cha-roo...’

  She decided she’d have her baby. And she’d leave Mythwrhn. There, two decisions and her life was solved.

  Hours might have passed. The sun came out from behind a cloud and the roof heated. Should she give her blood bonus away? She’d been taking tainted money so long, she might as well keep this too. Soon she’d have to buy cribs and baby clothes and nappies. Leech’s money was no worse than anyone else’s.

  A few of the rubberised tiles nearby had been dislodged, and a dull metal was exposed. Beneath was a thick layer of lead, its surface covered in apparently functionless runes. She assumed they were symbolic. She picked free a few further tiles, disclosing more and more lead plates, all etched with hieroglyphs, incantations, invocations.

  It confirmed what she had guessed. A cathedral was designed to direct upwards; the Mythwrhn Building was designed to capture and contain. In psychic terms, it was earthed. She hoped she wasn’t succumbing to the New Age now life was developing inside her. But for the past few months, she had worked among enough negative energy to blacken anybody’s crystal.

  No wonder everyone in Mythwrhn was miserable. They were supposed to be. Misery was the cake, she supposed; all the blood was icing. Drache’s Design must extend under the pavement into the street, to catch the drippings from Connor. If Bender had jumped from the roof rather than the Penthouse, would he have escaped?

  The Device worked like a scale. All the misery weighed one pan down, thrusting the other upwards. She could guess who would be sitting on the other pan. And what the uplift was for.

  Under her crossed legs, the building thrummed with pent-up unhappiness. She was above it all. At once, she was centred. In her condition, she had power.

  * * *

  Over the years, shed collected a library, mainly by
ordering from the Amok Bookstore in Los Angeles, which was dedicated to ‘extremes of information in print’. She skipped past William B. Moran’s Covert Surveillance and Electronic Penetration, G.B. Clark’s How to Get Lost and Start All Over Again and Colonel Rex Applegate’s Kill or Get Killed: For Police and the Military, Last Word on Mob Control, paused for an amused flick through one of John Minner’s seven-volume How to Kill series, then selected Kurt Saxon’s The Poor Man’s James Bond.

  Saxon, an extreme right-winger and authority on explosives, had authored a guide for the defence of the USA in the event of a Russian invasion, compiling information on sabotage, home-made weaponry and sundry guerilla tactics. Although Saxon declared himself ‘very pro-establishment and pro-law enforcement’ and that he would ‘not knowingly sell his more sensitive books to any left-wing group or individual’, given the ever-decreasing likelihood of a Soviet invasion, the only conceivable purpose of his work was as a manual for the criminal.

  Along with more conservative texts - Seymour Lecker’s Deadly Brew: Advanced Improvised Explosives, the CIA’s Field Expedient Methods for Explosives Preparations - Saxon’s book gave Sally a wide variety of recipes to consider. She made a shopping list and went out to the chemist’s, a DIY shop, a tobacconist’s, Sainsbury’s and Rumbelow’s to buy the easily available ingredients she now knew how to convert into a functioning infernal device. The most hard-to-obtain items were the steel buckets in which she wanted to place her home-made bombs, to direct the blasts upwards. Everyone had plastic these days.

  She was in her kitchen, attempting to distil a quantity of picric acid from ten bottles of aspirin, when her mother telephoned to see how she was getting on.

  ‘I’m cooking, Mum.’

  ‘That’s nice, dear. Having a guest for dinner?’

  ‘No, just practising.’

  * * *

  ‘What’s in the buckets?’ Heidi asked.

  ‘Live crabs,’ she claimed. ‘We’re doing an item on the crooked pet racket.’

  ‘Ugh.’

  ‘You’re telling me.’

  The security guard was back at his post, hand mittened with plaster. Sally held up a bucket and he avoided looking into it.

  ‘Careful,’ she warned, ‘the little bastards don’t half nip.’

  She was nodded through. On her lunch-hour she went back to Muswell Hill to fetch the other two buckets from her flat and went through the whole thing again.

  That afternoon, there was enough blast-power under her desk to raise the roof. She hoped.

  * * *

  There was a confab going on up in the Penthouse, a long-term post-franchise planning session. Sally would have to wait until everyone left. The idea of detonating some of the consortium along with the building was tempting, but she was more likely to get away with what she intended if no one was hurt. If the roof was blown off the Device, the energy should dissipate. She couldn’t bring Connor or Bender back or restore April’s mind or Pomme’s complexion but she could spoil the nasty little scheme.

  As the afternoon dragged on, she pretended to work. She ate three packets of Kettle Chips, shuffled papers around on the desk, phoned people back. She guessed this would be her last day. It’d be a shame to do without the leaving party and the whip-round present. She’d probably have qualified for paid maternity leave, too. Actually, she’d be lucky to stay out of jail.

  She had the idea, however, that Leech would not want her talking too much about the motive for her terrorist atrocity. A Comet think piece about how pregnancy drives women up the walls wouldn’t serve to explain away her loud resignation notice.

  The few Kit staff around drifted off about tea-time. Pomme invited her out for a drink but Sally said she wanted to get something finished before leaving.

  ‘You look a bit peaky, Sal,’ Pomme said. ‘You should get a good night’s kip.’

  Sally agreed.

  ‘You’ve been driven to smoking?’

  There was a packet of cigarettes on her desk. Sally coughed and smiled.

  ‘Your face looks better, Pomme.’

  ‘Fuckin’ tell me about it, Sal.’

  The girl shrugged and left. Sally realised she’d miss some of the others. Even Useless Bruce. She’d never worked much with people before, and there were nice things about it. From now on, she’d be alone again. Perhaps she would re-start the Agency.

  Alone in the office as it got dark outside, she ate more crisps, made herself tea and sat at her desk with a new-bought occult paperback. She gathered the building was a magical pressure cooker and the accumulation of ‘melancholy humours’ was a species of sacrifice, a way of getting someone else to pay your infernal dues. It was capitalist black magic, getting minions to pay for the spell in suffering while the conjurers got ahead on other people’s sweat. Obviously, some people would do anything to get a television franchise. Since catching on, she had been noticing more and more things about the Mythwrhn Building: symbols worked into the design like the hidden cows and lions in a ‘How Many Animals Can You See in This Picture?’ puzzle; spikes and hooks deliberately placed to be hostile to living inhabitants; numerical patterns in steps, windows and corners.

  Sally divided the cigarettes into five sets of three. Pinching off the filters, she connected each of the sets into six-inch-long tubes, securing the joins with extra layers of roll-up paper. Then she dripped lighter fluid, letting the flammable liquid seep through the tobacco cores. One test fuse she stood up in a lump of blu-tak and lit. It took over five minutes to burn down completely. Long enough.

  At eight o’clock, she put an internal call up to the Penthouse and let it ring. After an age, Tiny’s answering machine cut in asking her to leave a message. She double-checked by opening a window in the office and leaning out as far as possible into the well, looking up. No light spilled out of the Penthouse.

  The lift was still out of order, so she had to take the works up the stairs. First she went up and circumvented the suite’s personal alarm. With some deft fiddling and her electronic key, she got the doors open. The Penthouse was dark and empty. It took three quick trips to get everything into Tiny’s office and she arranged it all on his desk, working by the streetlight.

  She felt ill. Since realising what was going on, she’d been more sensitive to the gloom trapped within the walls of the Mythwrhn Building. It was a miasma. The water in the pipes smelled like blood.

  Had Bender been trying to break the Device when he smashed the windows? If so, he’d made a mistake.

  There was a hatch directly above the desk, just where it was indicated on the plans she’d borrowed. Above would be a crawlspace under the lead shield. She put a chair and the now-untenanted statuette stand on the desk, making a rough arrangement of steps, and climbed up to the ceiling. A good thump dislodged the hatch and she stuck her head into smelly dark.

  She’d assumed this was where all the energies would gather. The cavity didn’t feel any worse than the rest of the building and she had a moment of doubt. Was this really crazy?

  After ferrying up the four buckets and the other stuff, she jammed through into the crawlspace. Here she could turn on the bicycle lamp Connor had left in her flat. She shone the beam around. She almost expected to find screaming skeletons and the remains of blood sacrifices, but the cavity was surprisingly clean. Meccano struts shored up the lead shield and criss-crossed the plastered ceiling. There was a slope to the roof, so the crawlspace grew from a two-foot height at the street edge of the building to four feet at the rear. If she placed her buckets near the rear end, the blast should neatly slide off the lead shield and dump it into the square. With luck, not on the heads of innocent passersby.

  She crawled carefully but still opened her palm on a protruding nail. The floor was studded with spikes, either one of Drache’s devilish frills or a defensive feature. Crouching at the rear of the building, she pushed up, testing the shield. It was unresisting. Prominent bolts were spaced around the walls. With a monkey-wrench, she loosened as many as she c
ould reach. She banged her elbows constantly and skinned her right knuckles. Her hair was stuck to her face by sweat. This was not usually prescribed for expectant mothers.

  With enough bolts loosened, she tried to push the shield again. It creaked alarmingly and shifted. Sally found she was shaking. She thought she could almost dislodge the lead without the bombs. But it was best to be safe.

  She’d hoped the joists would be wooden, so she could screw in hooks to hang the buckets from. However, the metal struts came equipped with handy holes, so she was able to rig up the hanging bombs with stout wire. In each bucket of packed-down goo, she’d used Sexton’s recommended dosage for disabling a Russian tank. She stuck the long cigarettes in each bucket and flicked a flame from her disposable lighter.

  Once the fuses were burning, she intended to get down to her desk and alert the skeleton overnight staff. She’d say she’d seen smoke pouring down the stairs. With five minutes, she should be able to evacuate the building.

  She lit the four cigarettes and wriggled back towards the hatch. Down in the Penthouse, lights came on and voices exclaimed surprise. Knowing she was dead, she dangled her legs through the hatch and dropped into the office.

  * * *

  ‘What, no Leech?’ she said.

  Tiny was between the others, shaking and pale. The Device had been eating at him as much as his employees. Sally guessed he was only in the consortium as a judas goat.

  Quilbert was in charge, Drache was along for the ride, and the non-descript man holding Tiny up was the muscle. He was also the van driver who’d knocked down Connor and the balls-squeezer who’d pressured Roebuck. He looked more like a plumber than Satan’s Hit Man.

  ‘Ms Rhodes, what are you doing?’ Quilbert asked.

  ‘Raising the roof.’

  Tiny shook his head and sagged into his chair. Drache strode around the office, examining his handiwork. He had a black leather trenchcoat and showy wings of hair like horns.

  ‘The stand should be here,’ he said, pointing to the dust-free spot where it had stood. ‘For the proper balance. Everything is supposed to be exact. How often have I told you, the patterns are all-important?’