The Man From the Diogenes Club Page 12

  Chalfont raised his flaming taper.

  The Eagle was in his sights, a multi-faceted form descending towards lunar ground, landing-pads extended. What did the astronauts see below them? Not Moondew Manor and the populated jungles. The undisturbed dust of the Sea of Tranquillity.

  Chalfont touched the taper to the fuse, which began to fizz.

  The ghosts swirled around the cannon. Some passed through each other.

  Whitney thumped Chalfont with her stick, cracking his coronet and knocking him to the floor.

  ‘Too late,’ he murmured.

  ‘No,’ said Richard. ‘It’s not.’

  Munchausen – who knew the worth of a good story and a grand gesture – was first. He clambered up into the barrel of the cannon, as was his habit. A Cat-Woman was next, the zip up the back of her leotard sparkling as she curled beside the Baron.

  Then Floyd, letting a slide-rule float away from him.

  And Haddock, bright blue hair grown past his knees. Lucian. Cyrano. The Russian robot. A two-dimensional square-jawed comic book spaceman. The Grand Lunar. Georges Méliès. Dick Tracy. The Cyberman. All of them.

  A conglomeration of ghosts stopped up the cannon.

  The fuse burned down, and the tower room filled with light.

  * * *

  The manor was falling like the House of Usher. Sublunar tremors shook its foundations. Richard and Whitney made their way down from the tower in a hurry.

  ‘Great speech,’ said Whitney. ‘Off the top of your head?’

  ‘I knew they were better than Magister Rex wanted them to be. The moon-ghosts have more in common with the astronauts than the Chalfont Group. The Eagle is their validation. It means we weren’t wasting time dreaming them up…’

  ‘It’s all right, you can stop now. We should probably shut up and run.’

  When the cannon imploded, Chalfont seemed to have been vaporised. The room was empty, even of ghosts. The Eagle was safe, and this dream-moon would change.

  Richard believed that when the LEM touched down, this moon would pass away, or withdraw deeper into the realm of imagination, a bywater of dreams rather than a river. That meant there’d be nothing here to breathe.

  They had to get back through the Shimmer.

  ‘We should take Anemone,’ said Richard.

  ‘If we must,’ responded Whitney.

  Anemone was still fuming. Richard unstrapped her. Claws came for his face. Whitney stepped in and administered a right jab to the authoress’ chin, putting her in a cooperative daze.

  They carried Anemone Zyle out of Moondew Manor between them.

  The moonscape was melting. Animals had become grey statues. A moth-cow was downed nearby, cocoon forming around her.

  Richard saw the Eagle.

  Toting Anemone, Richard and Whitney ran for the Shimmer. It still sparkled.

  They reached the spot where they had arrived. Anemone came round, broke free…

  ‘Come with us,’ said Richard.

  ‘You’ll die.’

  Anemone tore off her gag, and said, ‘Don’t care.’

  ‘Jump, you silly woman,’ said Whitney.

  The Shimmer was contracting. Richard reached for Anemone, but she darted away. Whitney took his arm, and they stepped into the Shimmer…

  * * *

  …unscrambled again, they were back on Earth, in the Great Hall at Mildew Manor. The Shimmer, a hole in space, gave a clear view of the dying moon.

  They watched as Anemone looked up. In the distance, the LEM descended.

  A wireless was on somewhere nearby, loud…

  ‘Contact light!’ crackled an astronaut. ‘Okay, engine stop. ACA – out of detent.’

  ‘Out of detent,’ acknowledged another astronaut.

  ‘Mode control… both auto. Descent engine command override off. Engine arm… off. Four-thirteen is in.’

  The rich jungle was gone, replaced by grey desert.

  ‘Houston, Tranquillity Base here,’ said Neil Armstrong. ‘The Eagle has landed.’

  Anemone Zyle collapsed, sank into dust.

  ‘What happens if they find her?’ Whitney asked.

  ‘She’s miles from the landing point,’ he said. ‘She won’t be found for years. Not until the moon is covered with colony bases and cities and starship ports. Then she’ll be a mystery.’

  The Shimmer winked shut.

  Captain Maitland came into the room, with an American officer who had finally found his way. They had been following the moon-landing on television.

  ‘We cordoned off the place, sir,’ said Maitland. ‘Stayed well away from the big blue thing.’

  ‘Very wise,’ said Richard.

  ‘They’ve landed safely on the moon,’ said Maitland. ‘Just thought you’d like to know.’

  ‘Glad to hear it.’

  ‘Any sign of the hostiles?’

  ‘They’re no longer a problem, Captain. Mission: accomplished.’

  * * *

  Teams from an alphabet soup of British and American scientific, paranormal and intelligence agencies were going over Mildew Manor in minute detail, examining every rune and algorithm. Richard suspected they wouldn’t work for anyone but the vanished Magister Chalfont. And that there was little use in a magic portal to a wiped-away potential realm.

  He’d reported to Catriona, who was politely telling Spilsby to give Whitney Gauge a permanent promotion to fieldwork. She’d probably also be offered a congressional medal or a free ticket to Disneyland or some other honour she’d now feel obliged to turn down in the Diogenes Club tradition. Eventually, someone would pass on the news to Senator Kennedy, if he was still interested.

  In Houston, arguments had continued until the last moment. The official story was a ‘1202 Executive Overflow Alarm’ had put the landing in jeopardy, and a technician named Bales was forced to make a snap decision about whether or not to go ahead. The LEM missed its designated landing site, and Armstrong had to fly it sideways, with only a few seconds’ fuel, to find a flat, safe spot between craters and a boulder field. Catriona had said everyone was impatient. Armstrong and Aldrin were supposed to take a rest period before the historic moment, but even NASA training couldn’t turn people into robots who could sleep at a time like this – so man set foot on the moon earlier than advertised, presumably to the fury of US TV networks.

  Early in the morning, the garden was ghostly in cold pre-dawn light. Richard sat with Whitney on a bench by the moondial. The silver, conquered satellite was still bright.

  The Man in the Moon didn’t have a rocket stuck in its eye. But Richard thought the face looked like a startled, apoplectic Rex Chalfont. Perhaps that was what had happened to Magister.

  ‘I miss the moth-cows,’ said Whitney.

  ‘They’re still there, somewhere. Harder to reach. Like the monolith, and the ice-pools, and the spider on strings. We can’t go there any more.’

  ‘What would it take to find them again?’

  ‘Time. I daresay if we left the moon alone for fifty years or so, the Selenite forests would grow back – but that’s not going to happen, is it? Armstrong took his “small step”. Man is on the moon now. There’ll be more missions. Mines. Colonies. Probably missiles. That’s the moon-dream of 1969.’

  ‘Hooray for us,’ she said, a little regretful.

  ‘By the way, congratulations,’ he said. ‘You beat Armstrong. You were the first American on the moon. That’s showing NASA they’re wrong about girls.’

  ‘Cool. Will my first words get in the books? What were they?’

  Richard laughed.

  ‘You said, “Look at meeeee…”’

  ‘Okay,’ said Whitney, smiling wickedly. ‘I’ll stand by that.’

  YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE MAD…

  PROLOGUE: A GRADUATE OF THE LAUGHING ACADEMY

  He arrived bright and early in the morning. At eight o’clock, the entire workforce was assembled in the open air. The managing director introduced him as an outside consultant with bad news to deliv
er and handed him the loud-hailer. Barely restraining giggles, Mr Joyful announced the shipyard would close down at the end of the year and they were all sacked.

  Escorted off site by armed guards, ignoring the snarls and taunts of to-be-unemployed-by-1973 workmen, he was back in his bubble car, stomach knotted with hilarious agony, by eight-fifteen. He managed to drive a few miles before he was forced to pull over and give vent to the laughter that had built up inside him like painful gas. Tears coursed down his cheeks. The interior of his space-age transport vibrated with the explosions of his merriment.

  At nine o’clock, chortling, he told a young mother that her son’s cancer was inoperable. At ten, snickering, he personally informed the founder of a biscuit factory that he’d been unseated in a boardroom coup and would be lucky to escape prosecution over a series of mystery customer ailments. At eleven, in full view of a party of schoolboys, he wielded a length of two-by-four to execute an aged polar bear that a small zoo could no longer afford to feed. At twelve, almost unable to hold the saw steady for his shaking mirth, he cut down a seven-hundred-year-old oak tree on the village green of Little Middling by the Weir, to make way for a road-widening scheme. The chants of the protesters were especially rib-tickling.

  From one until two, he had a fine lunch in a Jolly Glutton motorway restaurant. Two straight sausages and a helping of near-liquid mash. An individual apple pie with processed cream. It was a privilege to taste this, the food of the future. Each portion perfect, and identical with every other portion. That struck him as funny too.

  At two-thirty, controlling himself, he murdered three old folks in a private home, with the hankie-over-the-mouth-and-nose hold. Their savings had run out and this was kinder than turning them loose to fend for themselves. His five o’clock appointment was something similar, a journalist working on a news item about hovercraft safety for the telly programme Tomorrow’s News.

  ‘I’ve got some bad news for you,’ he told the surprised young woman.

  ‘Who are you?’ she demanded.

  ‘I’m Mr Joyful. Aren’t you interested in my news?’

  ‘Why are you grinning like that? Is this a joke?’

  He was about to go off again. Amused tears pricked the backs of his eyes. Laughter began to scream inside his brain, clamouring for escape.

  ‘Your contract is cancelled,’ he managed to get out.

  It was too, too funny.

  He produced the silenced pistol. One quick phut in the face and he could knock off for the day.

  He was laughing like a drain.

  What this woman didn’t know – but would find out unless stopped – was that the Chairman of the Board of Directors of her employer, Greater London Television, was also responsible for Amalgamated British Hoverlines, and had personally authorised the cost-cutting scheme that resulted in the deaths of twenty-eight day-trippers.

  His gun barrel shook as it pointed.

  The look on the woman’s face was too much. He barked laughter, like the policeman on the comedy record. His sides literally split, great tears running down from his armpits to his hips.

  His shot creased the woman’s shoulder.

  That was funny too. People held him down, wrestling the gun out of his grip. Someone even kicked him in the tummy. It was too much to bear.

  He kept on laughing, blind with tears, lances of agony stabbing into his torso. Then he stopped.

  ACT I: VANESSA IS COMMITTED

  She was comfortably lotused among orange and purple scatter-cushions in the conference room of the Chelsea mansion, rainbow-socked feet tucked neatly into the kinks of her knees. Vanessa wore a scarlet leotard with a white angora cardigan. Her long red hair was in a rope-braid, knotted end gripped in a giant turquoise clothespeg. Fred Regent sat nearby, on a wire-net bucket chair, in his usual jeans and jean jacket, square head almost shaven.

  Jazz harpsichord tinkled out of the sound system concealed behind eighteenth-century wood panelling. Matched Lichtenstein explosions hung over the marble mantelpiece. A bundle of joss sticks smoked in a Meissen vase on a kidney-shaped coffee table.

  Richard Jeperson, silver kaftan rippling with reflected light, nested cross-legged in a white plastic chair that hung from the ceiling on an anchor chain. It was shaped like a giant egg sliced vertically, with yolk-yellow padding inside.

  He showed them a photograph of a happy-looking fat man. Then another one, of the same man, lying on the floor in a pool of mess.

  ‘Jolyon Fuller,’ he announced.

  Vanessa compared the shots. Fuller looked even happier in the one where he was dead.

  ‘He made his living in an interesting way,’ Richard said. ‘He delivered bad news.’

  ‘I thought that was Reginald Bosanquet’s job,’ put in Fred.

  ‘Fuller doesn’t look gloomy,’ Vanessa ventured.

  ‘Apparently, he wasn’t,’ Richard said. ‘He laughed himself to death. Literally. Matters you or I would consider tragic were high comedy to him. His wires were crossed somewhere up here.’

  He tapped his head.

  Taking back the pictures, hawkbrows momentarily clenched, he gave them consideration. Shoulder-length black ringlets and the mandarin’s moustache gave his face a soft, almost girlish cast, but the piercing eyes and sharp cheekbones were predatory. After all they’d been through together, Vanessa still hadn’t got to the bottom of Richard Jeperson.

  It had been weeks since the last interesting problem had come along – the business of the Satanist Scoutmaster and his scheme to fell the Post Office Tower. Richard had summoned his assistants to announce that they were to investigate a string of strangenesses. This was often the way of their affairs. At the Diogenes Club in Pall Mall, a group of clever and wise minds – under the direction of Edwin Winthrop, Grand Old Man of the Ruling Cabal – constantly sifted through court records, police reports, newspapers and statements from members of the public, ear-marking the unusual and red-flagging the impossible. If the inexplicabilities mounted up, the matter was referred to one of the Club’s Valued Members. Currently, Richard was reckoned the Most Valued Member.

  ‘Here’s another pretty fizzog. Harry Egge.’

  Richard showed them a glossy of a boxer, gloves up, bruises on his face.

  ‘He was supposed to be the next ’Enery Cooper,’ said Fred, who followed sport. ‘He could take the Punishment for fifty rounds. Couldn’t feel pain or didn’t care about it. No matter how much battering he took, he kept on punching.’

  ‘I read about him,’ Vanessa said. ‘Didn’t he die?’

  ‘Indeed he did,’ Richard explained. ‘In his home, in a fire caused by faulty wiring.’

  ‘He was trapped,’ she said. ‘How horrible.’

  ‘Actually, he wasn’t trapped. He could have walked away, easily. But he fought the fire, literally. He punched it and battered it, but it caught him and burned him to the bone. Very odd. When you put your hand in flame, you take it out sharpish. It’s what pain is for, to make you do things before you think about them. Nature’s fire alarm. Harry Egge kept fighting the fire, as if he could win by a knock-out.’

  ‘Was he kinky for pain?’

  ‘A masochist, Vanessa? Not really. He just wasn’t afraid of being hurt.’

  ‘And that makes him barmy?’

  ‘Quite so, Fred. Utterly barmy.’

  Vanessa wondered what Jolyon Fuller and Harry Egge had in common, besides being mad and dead.

  ‘There are more odd folk to consider,’ Richard continued, producing more photographs and reports. ‘Nicholas Mix-Elgin: head of security at a multi-national computer firm. He became so suspicious that he searched his children’s pets for listening devices. Internally. Serafine Xavier: convent school teacher turned high-priced call girl, the only patient ever hospitalised on the National Health with “clinical nymphomania”. We only know about her because several male patients on her ward died during visits from her. Lieutenant Commander Hilary Roehampton: a naval officer who insisted on volunteering for a serie
s of missions so dangerous only a lunatic would consider them.’

  ‘Like what?’ asked Fred.

  ‘Sea-testing leaky submarines.’

  ‘Cor blimey!’

  Vanessa had to agree.

  ‘These people held more or less responsible positions. It’s only by chance that their files were passed on to us. The services of the grande horizontale were, I believe, retained by the FO for the intimate entertainment of visiting dignitaries.’

  ‘They all sound like loonies to me,’ Fred said.

  ‘Ah yes,’ Richard agreed, extending a finger, ‘but their lunacies worked for them, at least in the short-term. You are familiar with that allegedly humorous mass-produced plaque you see up in offices and other sordid places? “You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here” – asterisk – “But it Helps.” Sometimes being mad really does help. After all, a head of security should be a bit of a paranoiac, a boxer needs to have a touch of the masochist.’

  ‘Don’t most firms and all government agencies make prospective employees take a battery of psychiatric tests these days? To weed out the maniacs?’

  ‘Indeed they do, my dear. I have copies here.’

  He indicated a thick sheaf of papers. She reached out.

  ‘Don’t bother. All our interesting friends were evaluated within the last three years as one hundred per cent sane.’

  ‘The tests must be rigged,’ Fred said. ‘You don’t just go bonkers overnight. This lot must have been in and out of nuthatches all their lives.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, they were all rated with clean certificates of mental health.’

  Fred didn’t believe it.

  ‘And who gave out the certificates?’ she asked.

  Richard arched an eyebrow. She’d asked the right question. That was the connection.

  ‘Strangely enough, all these persons were certified as sane by the same practitioner, one Dr Iain Menzies Ballance. He is director of the Pleasant Green Centre, near Whipplewell in Sussex.’

  ‘Pleasant Green. Is that a private asylum?’

  ‘Not officially,’ he told her. ‘It offers training courses for executives and other high-earners. Like a health farm for the mind. Sweat off those unsightly phobias, that sort of thing.’