The Man From the Diogenes Club Page 39

  ‘Come on up, lads, the water’s l-lovely,’ she said.

  Jamie, Keith and Head managed, with helping hands and a certain amount of swearing, to clamber up beside the girls.

  Ahead was a snowscape – thickly carpeted white, trees weighed down by ice, a few roofs poking up where cottages were trapped. Snow wasn’t falling, but was whipped up from the ground by cold winds and swirled viciously. Jamie put on his goggles, protecting his eyes from the spits of snow. The flakes were like a million tiny fragments of ice shrapnel.

  Gené pointed across the frozen moor, at a tower.

  ‘That’s Sutton Mallet chapel. And, see, beyond that, where the hill rises… that’s Alder.’

  It ought to have been an hour’s stroll. Very pleasant, if you liked walking in the country. Which Jamie didn’t, much. Now, it seemed horribly like a death march.

  Susan, he noticed, stopped shivering and chattering. She was padding, carefully across the powder, leaving deep footprints.

  Gené applauded. ‘Now that’s thinking,’ she said.

  Jamie didn’t know what she meant.

  ‘She’s a pyrokinetic, remember?’ explained Gené. ‘That’s not just setting fire to things with your mind. It’s control over temperature. She’s made her own cocoon of warmth, inside her coat. Look, she’s steaming.’

  Susan turned, smiling wide. Hot fog rose from her shoulders, and snowflakes hissed when they got near her as if falling onto a griddle.

  ‘Are my ears burning?’ she asked.

  ‘Never mind your ears,’ said Keith. ‘What about everything else?’

  Susan’s footprints were shallow puddles, which froze a few seconds after she had made them.

  ‘I’m not a proper pyro,’ she said. ‘I don’t set fires. I just have a thing with warmth. Saves on coins for the meter. Otherwise, it’s useless – like wiggling your ears. It takes me an hour to boil enough water for a cup of tea, and by then I’m so fagged out I have to lie down and it’s cold again when I wake up. That’s the trouble with most of my so-called Talents. Party pieces, but little else. I mean, who needs a drawer full of bent spoons?’

  ‘I think it’s amazing,’ commented Keith. ‘Mind over matter. You could be on the telly. Or fight crime.’

  ‘I’ll leave that to the professionals, like Jamie’s dad. You’re not seeing me in a Union Jack bikini and one of those eye-masks which aren’t really disguises.’

  ‘You’d be surprised how well those masks work,’ said Jamie. ‘When she was Kentish Glory, Mum wore this moth-wing domino. Even people she knew really well didn’t clock it was her.’

  ‘I like a quiet life,’ said Susan. ‘So, enough about me being a freak. Gené, what’s your secret?’

  The blonde shrugged, teasing. ‘Diet and lots of sleep.’

  ‘Come on, slowcoaches,’ said Susan, who was getting the hang of it. ‘Last one there’s a rotten—’

  The snow collapsed under her and she sank waist-deep, coat-skirts spreading out around her.

  ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Pardon my Burgundian.’

  ‘Didn’t Gené say you could levitate?’ said Keith, going to help her.

  ‘She’s not the one who knows everything,’ said Susan. ‘That was only once, and I was six. I’ve put on weight since then.’

  Keith took her hands – ‘She’s all warm!’ – and hauled her out of her hole.

  ‘Abracadabra,’ he said, flapping the cloak.

  ‘It doesn’t do to get overconfident,’ cautioned Gené.

  Susan made a rude gesture behind the other girl’s back.

  Jamie felt something. Deeper than the cold. He looked around. The whirling blizzard was thickening. And something was different.

  ‘Hey, gang,’ he said. ‘Who made the snowmen?’

  VII.

  ‘I know the Cold is spreading,’ Catriona Kaye told Derek Leech. ‘It’s here, in Alder. We’re three miles from you. Now put Richard on, would you?’

  In the manor house, the telephone was on a stand near the front door. She had to leave her guests in the drawing room to take Leech’s call. The hallway was still cluttered from Edwin’s days as lord of this manor: hats and umbrellas (and Charles Beauregard’s old swordstick) in a hideous Victorian stand, coats on hooks (she liked to use Edwin’s flying jacket – still smelling of tobacco and motor-oil – for gardening), framed playbills from the 1920s, shotguns (and less commonplace armaments) in a locked case. Since Edwin’s death, she’d tidied away or passed on most of his things, but here she let his ghost linger. Upstairs, on the landing, his shadow was etched permanently into the floorboards. After a lifetime in service to the Diogenes Club, it was all he had for a grave. She supposed she should throw a carpet over it or something.

  As she waited for Leech to pass the phone to Richard, Catriona caught sight of herself in the tall, thin art deco mirror from the Bloomsbury flat she had shared with Edwin. At a glance, she was the girl she recognised – she had the same silhouette as she had in her, and the century’s, twenties. If she looked for more than a few seconds, she saw her bobbed hair was ash-grey, and even that was dyed. Her wrists and neck were unmistakably a seventy-six-year-old’s. Once, certain Valued Members had been grumpily set against even admitting her to the building in Pall Mall, never mind putting her on the rolls. Now, she was practically all that was left of the Diogenes Club as Mycroft Holmes would have recognised it. Even in the Secret World, things were changing.

  ‘Catriona,’ said Richard, tinny and distorted as if bounced off a relay station in the rings of Saturn. ‘How are you? Is the Cold—?’

  ‘In the village? Yes. A bother? No. We’ve enough lively minds in the house to hold it back. Indeed, the cool is misleadingly pleasant. What little of the garden survived the heatwave has been killed by snow, though – which is really rather tiresome.’

  Richard succinctly explained the situation.

  ‘“The planet’s first evolved intelligence”?’ she queried. ‘That has a familiar ring to it. I shall put the problem to our little council of war.’

  ‘Watch out for snowmen.’

  ‘I shall take care to.’

  She hung up and had a moment’s thought, ticking off her long string of black pearls as if it were a rosary. The general assumption was that they had been dealing with an unnatural phenomenon, perhaps a bleed-through from some parallel wintery world. Now, it seemed there was an entity in the picture. Something to be coped with, accommodated or eliminated.

  The drawing room was crowded. Extra chairs had been brought in.

  Constant Drache, the visionary architect, wanted news of Derek Leech. Catriona assured him that his patron was perfectly well. Drache wasn’t a Talent, just a high-ranking minion. He was here with the watchful Dr Lark, corralling the persons Leech had contributed to the council and making mental notes on the others for use after the truce was ended. That showed a certain optimism, which Catriona found mildly cheering. She had told Richard’s team not to call Leech’s people ‘the villains’, but the label was hard to avoid. Fred and Vanessa were still in London, liaising with the Minister.

  Anthony Jago, wearing a dog-collar the Church of England said he was no longer entitled to, was Leech’s prime specimen – an untapped Talent, reputed to be able to overwrite reality on a large scale. The former clergyman said he was looking for property in the West Country and had taken a covetous liking to the manor house. The man had an understandable streak of self-regarding megalomania, and Lark was evidently trying to keep him unaware of the full extent of his abilities. Catriona would have been terrified of Jago if he weren’t completely trumped by Ariadne (‘just Ariadne’). The white-haired, utterly beautiful creature had made her way unbidden to the Club and offered her services in the present emergency. She was an Elder of the Kind. Even the Secret Files had almost nothing on them. The Elders hadn’t taken an interest in anything in Geneviève Dieudonné’s lifetime, though some of their young – the Kith – had occasionally been problematic.

  Apart from Jago, n
one of Leech’s soldiers were in the world-changing (or -threatening) class. The unnaturally thin, bald, haggard Nigel Karabatsos – along with his unnaturally small, plump, clinging wife, Joan – represented a pompous Neo-Satanic sect called the Thirteen. Typically, there weren’t thirteen of them. Maureen Mountmain was heiress to a dynasty of Irish mystics who’d been skirmishing with the Club for over eighty years. Catriona would gladly not have seen the red-headed, big-hipped, big-busted Amazon in this house again (she’d been there when the shadows took Edwin). Maureen and Richard had one of those complicated young persons’ things, which neither cared to talk of and – Catriona hoped – would not be resumed. There were enough ‘undercurrents’ in this council for several West End plays as it was. Jago and Maureen, comparatively youthful and obnoxiously vital, pumped out more pheromones than a beehive. They took an interest in each other which Dr Lark did her best to frustrate by interposing her body. Leech obviously had separate plans for those two.

  The mysterious Mr Sewell Head, the other side’s last recruit for the Winter War Effort, was out in a snowfield somewhere with Geneviève’s party. Catriona suspected they’d have a hard time getting through. Fair enough. If this council failed, someone needed to be left alive to regroup and try a second wave. Geneviève had young Dr Shade and the interesting Rodway girl with her – they had the potential to become Valued Talents, and the Cold crisis should bring them on. Still, it didn’t do to think too far ahead. In the long run, there was always an unhappy outcome – except, just possibly, for Ariadne.

  Watching Jago and Maureen flex and flutter, attracting like magnets, Catriona worried that the Club’s Talents were relics. Swami Anand Gitamo, formerly Harry Cutley, was only here for moral support. He had been Most Valued Member once, but had lately taken a more spiritual role. Still, it was good to see Harry again. His chanted mantras irritated Jago, a point in his favour. Paulette Michaelsmith had even more obviously been hauled out of retirement. She could only use her Talent (under the direction of others) when asleep and dreaming, and was permanently huddled in a bath-chair. Catriona noted Dr Lark wasn’t too busy playing gooseberry to take an interest in poor, dozy Paulette. Dr Cross, the old woman’s minder, was instructed to ward the witch off if she made any sudden moves. Louise Magellan Teazle, one of Catriona’s oldest friends, always brought the sunshine with her – a somewhat undervalued Talent this summer, though currently more useful than all Karabatsos’s dark summonings or Jago’s reality-warping. It was thanks to Louise that the Cold was shut out of the manor house. She was an author of children’s books, and a near neighbour. In her house out on the moor, she’d been first to notice a change in the weather.

  While Catriona relayed what Leech and Richard had told her, Louise served high tea. Paulette woke up for fruitcake and was fully alert for whole minutes at a time.

  ‘This Cold,’ Drache declared. ‘Can it be killed?’

  ‘Anything can be killed,’ said Karabatsos.

  ‘Yes, dear, anything,’ echoed his wife.

  ‘We know very little about the creature,’ admitted Catriona. ‘The world’s leading expert is Professor Cleaver, and his perceptive is – shall we say – distorted.’

  ‘All life is sacred,’ said Anand Gitamo.

  ‘Especially ours,’ said Maureen. ‘I’m a mum. I don’t want my girl growing up to freeze in an apocalypse of ice and frost.’

  Catriona had a minor twinge of concern at the prospect of more Mountmains.

  ‘How can all life be sacrosanct when some life forms are inimical, hein?’ said Drache. ‘Snake and mongoose. Lion and gazelle. Humanity and the Cold.’

  ‘Tom and Jerry,’ said Paulette, out of nowhere.

  ‘I did not say “sacrosanct”,’ pointed out Anand Gitamo.

  ‘The Cold can die,’ said Ariadne. Everyone listened to her, even Jago. ‘But it should not be killed. It can kill you and live, as you would shrug off a virus. You cannot kill it and expect to survive, as you cannot murder the seas, the soil or the great forests. The crime would be too great. You could not abide the consequences.’

  ‘But we do not matter?’ asked Drache.

  ‘I should miss you,’ admitted Ariadne, gently. ‘As you cannot do without the trees, who make the air breathable, the Kind cannot do without you, without your dreams. If the Cold spreads, we would outlive you – but eventually, starved, we would fade. The Cold has mind, but no memory. It would retain nothing of you.’

  ‘The world doesn’t end in ice, but fire,’ said Jago. ‘This, I have seen.’

  ‘The Old Ones will return,’ said Karabatsos.

  ‘Yes, dear, Old,’ echoed his wife.

  It seemed to Catriona that everyone in this business expected a personal, tailor-made apocalypse. They had enlisted in the Winter War out of jealousy – a pettish wish to forestall every other prophet’s vision, to keep the stage clear for their own variety of Doom. The Cold was Professor Cleaver’s End of the World, and the others wanted to shut him down. Derek Leech, at least, needed the planet to stay open for business – which was why Catriona had listened when he called a truce with the Diogenes Club.

  The doorbell rang. Catriona would have hurried back to the hall, but David Cross gallantly went for her. Louise poured more tea.

  It was not Geneviève and her party, but Mr Zed, last of the Undertakers. He brought another old acquaintance from the Mausoleum, their collection of oddities (frankly, a prison).

  Mr Zed, eyes permanently hidden behind dark glasses, stood in the drawing room doorway. Everyone looked at him. The brim of his top hat and the shoulders of his black frock coat were lightly powdered with snow. Many of the council – and not only those on Derek Leech’s side of the room – might once have had cause to fear immurement in the Mausoleum, but the Undertaking was not what it had been. Mr Zed politely took off his hat and stood aside.

  Behind him was a little girl who could have stepped out of an illustration from one of Louise’s earliest books. She had an Indian braid tied with a silver ribbon, and wore a neat pinafore with a kangaroo pouch pocket. She looked like Rose Farrar, who disappeared from a field in Sussex in 1872, ‘taken by the fairies’. This creature had turned up on the same spot in 1925, and come close to delivering an apocalypse that might have suited Jago’s biblical tastes. At least she wasn’t playing Harlot of Babylon any more.

  ‘Good afternoon, Rose.’

  Catriona had not seen the girl-shaped creature since the Undertaking took her off. She still had a smooth, pale patch on her hand – where Rose had spat venom at her.

  The creature curtseyed. When she looked up, she wore another face – Catriona’s, as it had been fifty years ago. She used the face to smile, and aged rapidly – presenting Catriona with what she looked like now. Then, she laughed innocently and was Rose Farrar again.

  The procedure was like a slap.

  The thing that looked like Rose was on their side, for the moment. But, unlike everyone else in the room – good, bad or undecided – she didn’t come from here. If the Cold won, Rose wouldn’t necessarily lose a home, or a life, or anything she put value on.

  Catriona wasn’t sure what Rose could contribute, even if she was of a mind to help. Ariadne, Louise and, perhaps, the Rodway girl were Talents – they could alter reality through sheer willpower. Jago and Paulette were ‘effective dreamers’ – they could alter reality on an even larger scale, but at the whim of their unconscious minds. Rose was a living mirror – she could only change herself, by plucking notions from the heads of anyone within reach. She resembled the original Rose because that’s who the people who found her in Angel Field expected her to be. She had been kept captive all these years by confining her with people (wardens and convicts) who believed the Mausoleum to be an inescapable prison – which wasn’t strictly true.

  ‘What a dear little thing,’ said Ariadne. ‘Come here and have some of Miss Teazle’s delicious cake.’

  Rose meekly trotted over to the Elder’s side and presented her head to be stroked. Jago tu
rned away from Maureen, and was fascinated. Until today, he hadn’t known there were other Talents in the world. Paulette perked up again, momentarily – the most powerful dreamer on record, now in a room with at least two creatures who fed on dreams.

  End of the world or not, Catriona wondered whether bringing all these big beasts together was entirely a bright idea.

  ‘More tea, Cat,’ suggested Louise, who had just given a steaming cup to the Undertaker.

  Catriona nodded.

  VIII.

  Jamie wasn’t surprised when the snowmen attacked. It wouldn’t be a war if there weren’t an enemy.

  The frosties waited until the five had tramped a hundred difficult yards or so past them, committing to the path ahead and an uncertain footing. They were in Sutton Mallet. It wasn’t much of a place. Two Rolls-Royces were parked by the path, almost buried, icicles dripping from the bonnet ornaments. Nice machines. His dad drove one like them.

  ‘What’s that thing called again?’ he muttered, nodding at the dancers.

  ‘The Spirit of Ecstasy,’ said Sewell Head. ‘Originally, the Spirit of Speed. Designed by Charles Sykes for the Rolls-Royce Company in 1911. The model is Eleanor Velasco Thornton.’

  ‘Eleanor. That explains it. Dad always called the little figure “Nellie in Her Nightie”. I used to think she had wings, but it’s supposed to be her dress, streaming in the wind.’

  Everyone had fallen over more than once. It stopped being remotely funny. Each step was an uncertain adventure which only Gené was nimble enough to enjoy. Then, even she skidded on a frozen puddle and took a tumble into a drift.

  She looked up, and saw the four snowy sentinels.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’ she shouted.

  At that, the snowmen upped stumps and came in a rush. When they moved, they were localised, roughly human-shaped blizzards. They had no problem with their footing, and charged like touchy rhinos whose mothers had just been insulted by howler monkeys.

  ‘There are people inside,’ yelled Keith. ‘I think they’re dead.’