The Quorum

by Kim Newman

  ‘Blessed be,’ Drache breathed, bowing in wonderment. ‘Hail Sathanas, Ba’alberith, Jibbenainosay...’

  Leech was tolerant of Drache’s diabolism. Only with Rhodes and Martin present, did he find it embarrassing.

  ‘It’s me,’ Martin said, recognising.

  In his dark, Leech felt a stirring. To be so close to the Perfect Sacrifice was exhilarating. Ever since the river, his options had been narrowing. He laid a hand on Martin’s shoulder, easing him forwards, draping him with his cloak. Firelight illuminated Martin’s tired face, gave a red shine to his eyes.

  ‘He said the magic words,’ Leech explained.

  ‘I give up,’ Martin confirmed.

  The girl watched, disgust in her mind. She’d never have given up; not, in this case, a survival trait. Those who refuse to yield lock themselves into fruitless, destructive patterns.

  Leech and Martin walked in the shadow of the Device. Its heat and sweat engulfed them. Components meshed and ground, waste products spurted, fuel was consumed.

  ‘All I had to do was give up?’

  Leech nodded.

  Martin slipped out of Leech’s cloak and walked alone to the Device. Leech respected his new determination. Rhodes called to Martin. Leech raised a hand and Drache held her wrists from behind. The communion would not be interrupted.

  A siren shrilled near Martin, making him jump and laugh. The noise set the steer mooing. Martin tentatively touched a metal wall, finger-tracing a jagged weld-scar. He laid a side of his face to the Device, hugging a barrel that supported a screen. Fractals wove on the monitor.

  Leech returned to the others. He had Drache release Rhodes.

  ‘Martin built this,’ he explained. ‘It is his’.

  She didn’t understand. How could she?

  ‘Who are you?’ Rhodes asked.

  ‘Leech,’ he replied.

  ‘Dr Shade?’

  He was a little embarrassed by his costume. ‘An aspect. A melodramatic convenience. It is hard to live without toys and games.’

  ‘Very mature.’

  He ignored her taunt.

  ‘You’re what he calls the Norwegian Neil Cullers, right? You’ve persecuted him for years. I don’t know how or why, but you’ve systematically wrecked everything he ever tried to make of himself.’

  Leech said nothing.

  ‘Do you know what he did this year? He collaborated, paid to have himself beaten. He thought if he hurt himself, you’d hold off hurting him worse.’

  She understood Martin. Better if truth be said, than he did. But she had the Deal and the Device mixed up.

  ‘His friends were on to you. I guess they all tie in to you somewhere. You own a part of everything. They hired me to watch over him. That’s why it’s all off, isn’t it? His unknown enemy has a face, a name. The toys and games are over.’

  ‘Miss Rhodes, you are a very clever woman, but not, in truth, much of a detective. I am a neutral component. I don’t do anything, I’m just here. I did nothing to Martin. I never have and never would. The Device has accepted his offerings gratefully.’

  Her jaw flexed.

  ‘It was his friends. Anything that was done to Martin was done by your employers.’

  With that puzzle-piece, she could disassemble her wonky theory and put it back together perfectly.

  He spelled it out. ‘Dixon, Amphlett, Yeo. They call themselves the Quorum. I showed them the Deal but I did not coerce them. Indeed, I’ve been consistently surprised by their invention. To me, this is not personal.’

  She looked across the floor to Martin. A chairlift contraption had lowered for him. A hairdrier helmet descended around his head. Safety belts criss-crossed his chest.

  ‘People like you,’ Leech said, pointing, ‘they call footsoldiers. Ever since they could afford it, they’ve employed people like you.’

  She was thinking, trying to negotiate a way around guilt. ‘You rewarded them, though. He was a sacrifice. You made them... what? Rich, successful, famous?’

  On rails, Martin’s chair trundled upwards and into the Device. Gates opened and closed for him. A shower of sparks fell from an arc. A steam whistle fanfare celebrated his ascendance.

  ‘What’s the Deal?’

  ‘A great man once asked us what if there was no Heaven, no Hell,’ Drache said, ‘well, imagine... the freedom that gives us. The freedom to do anything, to be anything.’

  ‘Everything is answerable,’ Rhodes said.

  ‘Where have you been living this century?’ the architect asked, unkindly. ‘Nothing is answerable. Everything is possible. We have opened up a whole world of possible rewards.’

  ‘Isn’t it hard to be an architect without a sense of perspective?’ she asked. ‘You don’t see many two-dimensional buildings.’

  Drache touched his half-mask, and smiled. ‘I didn’t say anything was free. I’ve made sacrifice, as must we all. The universe is a capitalist system. The things we want we must pay for. If pain is the only valid currency, then we must acquire pain. No one man could suffer enough to earn the things I want, so I need the pain of others.’

  ‘No one man,’ she said. ‘I know a man who has certainly tried to suffer enough.’

  Rhodes and Drache faced each other off, her grim frown against his easy smile. She broke the staring contest by winking first one eye, then the other. The architect swallowed disgust.

  ‘He’s your footsoldier, isn’t he?’ she asked, nodding at Drache. ‘More fancy dress.’

  ‘Miss Rhodes, I have no wish to upset you further,’ Leech said. ‘You’ve conducted yourself with unusual integrity. You and I are the only honest players in this game. Your loyalty had to be earned, not bought. If the Quorum had tried to use you to harm Martin, you’d have balked. Amphlett had already realised that. He is strangely keen on you.’

  ‘What about him?’ she said, nodding at Martin, still visible inside the Device. ‘Isn’t he innocent? Isn’t that the point?’

  He admired her adaptability. She had been plucked from the world she always imagined, the world without rules where people muddled along and did their best. Exposed to the secret workings of the universe, she was still capable of debating moral points.

  ‘Innocent, who can say? They didn’t choose him, he chose himself. Do you know why he’s here? He wanted to chat up his best friend’s girlfriend. There’s no real difference between him and the others. It could as easily have been any of them. You don’t know the circumstances. The decision was entirely random. I took no part in it. Martin wasn’t even the most likely choice. That was your friend, Amphlett.’

  ‘He’s not my friend,’ she said, vehemently.

  ‘If it’d been Amphlett,’ Leech posited, ‘the working-class Catholic, the serious scholar, the premature adult... if Amphlett had been on the outside and Martin one of the Quorum, do you think Martin would have acted any differently? They all came from the same pot.’

  ‘If it had been me,’ she began.

  ‘Not a relevant argument. You never cared enough about anyone to do for them what the Quorum have done for Martin. Never cared enough either way.’

  That stung her.

  ‘Until now,’ he added, soothing. ‘You care for your child. I don’t doubt that.’

  Martin was inside the Device. It calmed, its heart secure.

  ‘Being a mother has given you strength,’ he told her, spreading his arms. ‘By my own rules, I can’t hurt you. There are rules, you know.’

  ‘Who...’

  ‘Who am I?’ he anticipated, mocking. ‘Who am I really? Drache thinks I’m the devil...’

  Drache was on his knees, forehead pressed to bare earth. On the back of his robes was picked out in gold thread a five-pointed star containing the horned face of a goat.

  ‘The Quorum call me their Sponsor. You thought I was a comic strip come to life. The government either want to give me a knighthood or put me in jail. Martin can’t help but see me as his deliverer. My former wife said I was the Blues Walking Like a Man
. None of that matters. I can be whoever and whatever people want of me. That’s my gift.’

  From nowhere, she laughed. A single, astonished bark of laughter. She looked away from his dark glasses, then looked back.

  ‘What do you want me to be?’ he asked.

  ‘Better.’

  ‘Miss Rhodes, even if, to take the worst case scenario, I’m what Drache thinks I am, if I’m the Prince of Fire and Darkness, then I’m still not as terrible as all that. For instance, I’m not as bad as the Quorum. I am incapable of the kind of quixotic malice they have shown. I can’t feel like that. And, make no mistake, the Quorum are no worse than the general run of people. If anything, they’re a little above average. In their public lives, they entertain and stimulate more people than they annoy and bore. Otherwise, they don’t kill people, they are reasonably honest. You alone have seen only the worst of them. These are not unredeemed monsters.’

  ‘They do a lot of work for charity, right?’

  ‘Mickey Yeo was on the bill at Live Aid.’

  She shook her head. For a moment, Leech thought he missed something. Then, it was over. Whatever either could derive from the interview had come and gone.

  ‘Martin must stay for a while,’ he explained. ‘He’ll be looked after. It may seem disturbing from the outside but you have my word he won’t be further hurt. The Device will cherish him. It can hardly do otherwise.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘You’ll be driven wherever you wish. If money would help, call my executive secretary.’

  Together, they walked back to Drache, to the car. The Device rejoiced with fire and music.

  For a long while, Rhodes thought.

  ‘Bastards,’ she said finally, with feeling.

  ‘Which do you mean?’ Leech asked, interested.

  ‘Take your pick,’ she said, eyes hard, ‘take your pick.’

  BOOK

  3

  DEVICES

  ‘Life is short, but long enough to get what’s coming to you.’

  JOHN ALTON, Painting With Light

  1

  11 JANUARY, 1993

  A sledgehammer woke him. He felt his skull shattering as he groped the bedside clock. Four-thirty in New York City. He’d been in bed two hours, asleep for ninety minutes. Next to him, Heather breathed heavily (only the unchivalrous would say snoring). It was past nine a.m. in London. His mental gyroscope had faltered. For the first time in his ocean-hopping life, Mickey was jet-lagged. He tried to squeeze the fog from his brain. Thumbs of ache pushed the hammer wound, pressing broken bone plates into grey matter.

  Unbelievably, he was completely awake. Too tired to sleep, he lay on the bed. Water wobbled under thin plastic. The silk sheet was slippery. Above him, through the skylight, he saw no stars. Grit had worked its way behind his eyes. He found a remote control and turned on the large-screen TV. A pale glow preceded the picture.

  He remembered being in a TV studio yesterday or the day before, demolishing a humourless feminist. Nancy Lucey Kunst stammered terribly, leaving him to toss in snappy replies, to work the studio audience. She’d burbled about the need for positive role models. His base line was that ‘Amazon Queen ain’t exactly Hedda Gabler.’

  He zapped through dozens of channels. As a kid, he’d imagined American all-night TV a wonderland of the movies the BBC never showed: Italian musclemen, the Bowery Boys, Hells’ Angels, Japanese monsters. All he found now was news in Esperanto, shopping for fake jewellery, The Dukes of Hazzard in Spanish and public access transvestite gossip. He settled for Cloud 9, which he could get in Camden Town.

  He caught the tail-end of British news. John Major was dithering over Maastricht and there’d been a riot in North London. About fuckin’ time. He was astonished Brits put up with so much before shooting policemen, liberating electrical goods and burning down cornershops. Americans were more combustible: You want a riot, sir? Jeepers, what a marvy idea! Let’s have the riot RIGHT HERE!

  Heather murmured in her sleep and turned, curtaining her face with hair that still looked as if someone else had spent two hours on it. She had a sister working in London and might visit. Something in him stirred at the idea of two Wildings, working together for his personal ease and convenience. But something else reminded him he was only in town for a few more days. Shag-hags never last. After a while, they cross the line and become fuck-pigs. Then, there’s only the long walk to the door.

  Coming next on Cloud 9, according to the announcer was ‘the sci-fi classic, City Hammer. He owned his film on video cassette, laser disc, computer game, comic tie-in, soundtrack album on vinyl and CD, novelisation and bound original script autographed by the entire cast and crew. But the pre-credits sequence always worked for him. Dentata, warrior queen of the wasteland, ground Cameron Mitchell under the spiked wheels of her Chevvy chariot.

  As he watched, for maybe the fiftieth time, he noticed a continuity error between the first and second shots. Dentata’s scorpion armlet changed from her right to left arm. Funny nobody had ever mentioned it. Too many lines of nose candy in the edit suite. After a burst of ultra-violence, The Mothers of Pain delivered a crash of thrash and opening titles ripped across the screen in red. ‘Scream queen’ Breeze Brasselle, who had given him one of the five best blow jobs of his life, froze in the frame as her credit came up. She played Dentata, a career step between X-rated cheerleaders and daytime soaps.

  The print was worn and splicy, unusual on Cloud 9. A few frames were missing every couple of seconds, so individual credits came and went faster than the eye could scan. When it came to ‘Story and Screenplay by Mickey Yeo,’ there was a lurch; his own credit was swallowed completely. He felt like telephoning a complaint to the duty officer. It had been a long weekend, turning out the script.

  Then the final credit exploded in letters of molten steel. ‘Written and Directed by Allan Keyes’. A nail of rage shot into his brain. Allan Keyes! Mickey had, without credit, directed any sequences of City Hammer not involving exploding cars. Confronted with Breeze in leather thongs and keloid nipples, the film school wanker flushed scarlet and went off to play with miniatures. Only charity, and an uneasy feeling the project was doomed to the ‘ex-rental tapes from £2.99’ bin, prompted Mickey to let Keyes take solo credit.

  ‘Written and Directed...’ He wanted to wake Heather and have her arrange the termination of Allan Keyes. He shouldn’t be difficult to find; after the fluke success of a franchise horror film, Where the Bodies Are Buried, he had nosedived with a ruinously expensive fairy tale cop movie, Pixie Patrol. Keyes was probably doing episodic TV or scrabbling to direct a Friday the 13th sequel. On how many prints had Keyes usurped his credit?

  The film ground on. Then, as Breeze established telepathic contact with her unborn mutant, the scene shifted to a cardboard space station where a fat comedian with green antennae made wise-ass jokes.

  ‘Great movie, huh?’ he said to the camera, addressing Mickey directly. ‘NOUGHT!’

  An ident crawl gave the name of the show. Melvin the Martian’s Tube Trash Theater.

  ‘If this flick sucked any more you could use it as a vacuum cleaner,’ the Martian ranted. ‘Let’s face it, this specimen is the sort of motion picture you’d walk out if it were playing as an in-flight movie. What about that snappy script? Did you catch “suck my sump, you mutoid filth-breather!” No wonder William Faulkner didn’t want to take that additional dialogue credit...’

  Mickey was appalled. Hadn’t City Hammer been registered with the Museum of Modern Art to preserve it from this sort of idiocy? If High Noon was protected from colourisation, wasn’t he protected from asinine interruption? Only this wasn’t his. It was un film de Allan Keyes.

  ‘And Breeze Brasselle, eh? What an actress! I bet Meryl Streep has nightmares about her around Academy Awards time. NOUGHT! I understand she’s a graduate of the Producer’s Girlfriend School of Dramatic Arts. For that scene where she gets raped with a broomstick, she studied with Lee Strasberg so she wouldn’t be upst
aged by her co-star. It was a great injustice that the stick walked off with all the reviews.’

  The comedian’s face shrank, matted into a screen within the frame of the film. City Hammer continued where it had left off, with Dentata kidnapped by the Eco-Fascists of Futuria. Mickey put his hand on Heather’s warm shoulder and shook. He had to stick something to someone or explode. For the first time, she refused to be roused from sleep. Heather buried her face in a pillow and went comatose, even when his fingers squeezed her ass hard enough to leave marks.

  Breeze stuck out her tongue in close-up and bore down on Brock Daves, the surfer hunk she’d later kill and eat. Daves was as queer as a nine-bob note but Breeze prevailed on him to give a natural performance in the sweatbox sex scene. Irrevocably awake and pissed off, Mickey watched the movie, gritting his teeth against the next unavoidable interruption by Melvin the Martian. Tomorrow, he’d find out which fuckwit sold the rights to Tube Trash Theater and have them disemployed.

  * * *

  Next morning, Raimundo was driving a different car: a perfectly adequate four-door sedan, but not a limousine. The back seat stank vaguely, as if the last passenger had been a chain smoker.

  There were even more picketing fudge-packers in the Pyramid Plaza forecourt than there had been last week. The S&M community was well-represented; Mickey saw a protester in a PVC and leather reproduction of the Streak’s skintight leotard. Pink Swastika premiered on 1,000 screens across the country this Friday.

  ‘Urgh,’ he said, ‘WoFBReIGN.’

  ‘Pardon?’ Heather said.

  ‘This is the first time I’ve run the lobby gauntlet since I did for Nancy Loose Cunt. Her groupies will have sharp sticks and pots of paint.’

  ‘You intuit physical danger?’ Heather was concerned. ‘I’ll reconnoitre.’

  She decided it’d be best to drop Mickey off and go ahead to the Plaza then come back for him.