The Man From the Diogenes Club Page 5

  * * *

  The dawn was beginning to pink the horizon, outlining the sea beyond the pier.

  ‘What year is it, soldier?’ Jeperson asked Twitch.

  The skinhead couldn’t remember.

  ‘Don’t say 1941,’ Jeperson prompted.

  Twitch looked from Jeperson to the Committee.

  The street lamps came on, two by two, lighting up the seafront. Twitch’s eyes widened.

  Brigadier-General Sir Giles Gallant wore pink loon pants, a paisley tie the shape of a coat-hanger and a rainbow-knit tank top. Marshall Michaelsmith was squeezed into a pair of ripped drainpipe jeans held up by wide tartan braces, a T-shirt with Bob Marley’s face on it, and an oversize flat cap with a swirl pattern.

  The rest of the Committee, and their wives, were similarly kitted up. It was uncomfortably like fancy dress, a ridiculous pantomime vision of mock trendiness.

  But it rang bells.

  Twitch remembered, a trace of his old viciousness cutting through his artificial politeness.

  ‘Gits,’ he spat.

  Ending this casting wouldn’t be entirely a good thing.

  ‘It’s not then,’ Twitch said. ‘It’s now.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Jeperson. ‘The War’s been over for twenty-five years.’

  Twitch undid his uniform. Rupert Scarf and Shoulders looked bewildered at their posts, but caught on slowly.

  ‘You may not like these people,’ Jeperson said to the Committee. ‘In fact, I can almost guarantee you won’t. But you had no right to take their personalities away. Besides, a lot of tommies were more like them than you want to think. You tried to bring back the War as you remembered it, not as it was. Just imagine what would have happened if I had been your focus. Just think what the War I can’t remember – which is still inside my skull – would have been like spread over your whole town. The pier wouldn’t have been an impurity. It would have been the whole show.’

  Sir Giles looked chastened, and not a little ridiculous. Fred guessed that was part of the idea.

  ‘This is the future,’ Jeperson announced. ‘Learn to live with it. Come on, Fred.’

  He started walking down the pier.

  * * *

  ‘The point is to undo the casting from the inside,’ Jeperson said. ‘Just think of the 1970s. Fix in your mind all the things that furnish the present.’

  They stood outside the Emporium. A swastika flag flew from the summit.

  ‘Colour television, Post Office Tower, frozen peas, Milton Keynes,’ Fred chanted.

  Jeperson shook his head. ‘I hope we’re doing the right thing.’

  ‘Multi-storey car parks, inflatable chairs, Sunday supplements, Top of the Pops…’

  Jeperson sighed and kicked the door open.

  ‘Wakey-wakey, Nazis!’

  * * *

  They passed undisturbed through the exhibition and found the theatre. A miniature Nuremberg rally was in process. Columns of light rose from the stage. Half-Hitler was propped up on an upended dustbin, ranting in German. His monster ministers stood at attention. Eva-Vanessa stood beside her Führer, eyes blank with fanaticism. A map of Seamouth was lit up on the wall, with red swastika-marked arrows on it. An audience of Nazi zombies was arranged before the stage.

  ‘We’re just in time,’ Jeperson whispered. ‘They’re planning an invasion.’

  The zombies were rapt, intent on their leader’s speech.

  ‘They must intend to attack at dawn. How traditional.’

  Half-Hitler seemed stronger than before, more substantial. It wasn’t growing legs, but was secure in its perch. The more followers it had, the more power gathered in its hateful torso. The homunculus’s voice was deeper, more purposeful.

  The swastika arrows moved on the map, stabbing into the town.

  This mob looked grotesque, but Fred had a sense of the enormity of the damage it could do. The map suggested that this ‘casting’ was out of the control of Sir Giles’s Committee, and that these creatures would soon be able to manipulate the spell, and spread it along the coast and inland, striking towards London like the Nazi invasion that hadn’t come in 1940. What was wrong here, at the end of the pier, could blanket the country, drawing strength from the millions sucked into what Jeperson had called a ‘vortex of evil’.

  Today the pier; tomorrow the world.

  Jeperson strode into the audience, down the central aisle. He was apparently calm, but Fred caught the wiry intensity under his languid pose. This man was a warrior. The Nazis noticed the intruder, and with a liquid motion turned to look. Guns were raised.

  Jeperson held up a small, shiny object.

  ‘By this totem, I banish you,’ he said.

  The tiny light caught the audience’s attention.

  It was a seven-sided coin, one of the new fifty-pence pieces. And it shone like a star.

  Half-Hitler snarled. The map shrivelled like ice on a griddle.

  ‘All of you, turn out your pockets,’ Jeperson barked. Nazis were used to obeying orders. ‘If you find one of these, you’ll know you’ve been fooled. These creatures lost their chance years ago. And a good job too. You have been sucked into someone else’s nightmare.’

  Goebbels chittered. Himmler-and-Hess fought over their single side-arm. Mussolini leaked jelly at his uniform neckline.

  The zombies were exploring their own pockets. Fred did the same and found a fifty-pence piece. He gripped the emblem of modernity.

  ‘Simon Dee, Edward Heath, Germaine Greer, George Best, Cilla Black,’ he shouted.

  More than one of the zombies had found new money in his pockets. Jaffa tore open his uniform to reveal his scorched Fred Perry. He roared.

  ‘Rise up,’ Jeperson said, ‘and be free!’

  Music began to play from an ancient horn Victrola. ‘The Horst Wessel Song’. It quieted the zombies for a moment. The Nazi freaks stood at attention.

  Half-Hitler pulled out a pistol, settled on its waist-stump, and shot at Jeperson’s hand. A squirt of slow flame lashed out, and tore the fifty-pence piece away, robbing Jeperson of his totem.

  Jeperson held his stinging hand. Half-Hitler managed a smug smile. With the Nazi anthem filling the room, it seemed to swell, to float above its bin on a carpet of air.

  Jeperson closed his eyes, and began to hum.

  Then another sound obliterated the marching band.

  It was the Beatles, singing ‘Let It Be’.

  Half-Hitler dropped its pistol and covered its ears.

  The air-raid siren PA was broadcasting at a million decibels.

  The song filled the theatre.

  Fred saw Vanessa’s eyes register reality. The Beatles reached inside and got to her.

  She kicked Half-Hitler’s bin out from under it.

  ‘Oh Lord,’ Fred yelled, ‘let it be…’

  The zombies swayed with the all-pervasive, all-powerful sound of the 1970s. Jaffa and the Boys wouldn’t have liked this music when they were alive, but it was a part of them, imprinted on their minds and on the minds of everyone who had paid attention for the last ten years.

  Fred thought the Fab Four had been going downhill since Revolver, but for just this once conceded that there might be something in the Maharishi music-hall stuff.

  The zombies began firing their guns. At the stage. The Nazi freaks exploded like ectoplasm balloons. Mussolini went off like a hydrogen bomb, fountaining gallons of green froth that washed off the stage and into the audience.

  The song changed to ‘Here Comes the Sun’.

  Dawn broke over the sea, pouring daylight into the Emporium. Goebbels was smoking, and burst into blue flames, screeching like a dying rodent.

  Vanessa, herself again, picked her way elegantly through the gunfire and the deliquescing phantoms.

  Though most of the Boys were struck by the music, Jaffa was apparently immune – were his ears burned away? He reached out for Jeperson, snarling.

  Fred leaped on the zombie’s back, getting an armlock round his neck
, and pulled him back. Jaffa’s clutching hands failed to get a grip on Jeperson’s hair. Fred felt the zombie’s skull loosening on his neck.

  Jeperson got up on the stage, borrowed rifle in his hands, and stuck a bayonet through Half-Hitler, pinning the homunculus to the boards. The creature deflated, leaking ecto-ichor through gashes in its uniform tunic.

  As their Führer fell apart, the others were sucked out of the world, leaving behind only a scatter of medals and coins.

  The zombie twisted in Fred’s grip, eyes sparking with the last of life. Then he was gone, just a corpse dressed up in an old uniform. At the very last, Fred fancied Kevin Jaffa, King Skin, was briefly himself again, not ungrateful to be set free from the casting.

  He didn’t know how to feel.

  The struggle was over.

  Jeperson left the rifle stuck into the stage, pinning the empty jacket. He took Vanessa’s hands, and kissed her. She turned her face up to the light, reborn as a sun goddess, hair loose and shining like burnished copper.

  * * *

  They sat on the beach. The Committee were still broadcasting, condemned to play every single in Sir Giles’s eleven-year-old granddaughter’s collection. Currently, Sergio Mendes was doing Joni Mitchell’s ‘Chelsea Morning’. Clean sunlight shone on the beach, as if it were newly sown with fresh sand.

  They were still taking bodies off the pier, those who had been dead for days. All that was left of the freaks was the occasional streak of drying slime. They were phantasms, Jeperson explained, conjured up with the casting.

  ‘They weren’t real, but they would have been.’

  Twitch and his cronies, themselves again with blank spots in their short-term memories, were playing football on the beach, slamming into each other, swearing loudly.

  Jeperson looked down, ashamed for the skinheads.

  ‘Welcome back to the seventies,’ Fred said.

  ‘We can’t pick and choose what we accept from the present,’ Jeperson admitted, tossing a pebble at the sea.

  ‘White Horses’, by Jacky, was playing.

  Vanessa had taken her shoes off, and was wiggling her toes in the sand. She seemed unaffected by her brief spell with the End of the Pier Show.

  ‘Young Fred,’ Jeperson said, ‘you did well when things got weird. You might have an aptitude for this line of strangeness. I’ve requested you be transferred off the beat. I think you might come in handy at the Diogenes Club. Interested?’

  Fred thought about it.

  MOON MOON MOON

  ‘Tell you one thing,’ said Major Gilbert Took-Flemyng, ‘this will bloody kill science fiction stone dead.’

  Richard Jeperson glanced away from the television set.

  Wednesday, 16 July 1969. London: about half past two in the afternoon; Cape Kennedy: oh-nine-thirty-two hours.

  The Major quaffed from a brandy balloon the size of a honeydew melon. He was an Ordinary Member, one of a necessary rump of blimps who camouflaged the Diogenes Club as a refuge for the hidebound and unsociable. OMs were selected for lack of perspicacity and absence of curiosity. If they noticed the comings and goings of Extraordinary Members, they never mentioned it. For over a century, OMs had filled capacious armchairs, as much a part of the decor as the cushions under their bottoms and the pipe-fumes above their heads. They radiated unwelcome and disapproval with such wattage the casual visitor – not that there were many – was dissuaded from wondering whether the musty, cavernous building in Pall Mall was home to Great Britain’s most secret intelligence agency. Which, of course, it was.

  ‘So this is the teleovision, eh?’ muttered the Bishop of Brichester. ‘Can’t say I’m impressed. It’s wireless with lantern slides.’

  A newly purchased colour television stood in the hearth of the Informal Room, replacing the grate removed after the 1956 Clean Air Act abolished London’s poisonous yellow fog. Several OMs had resigned over the appearance of ‘this infernal contraption’, and a vote of the full membership was necessary each time it was switched on. It would never be tuned to ITV, lest the sanctum be violated by the Devil’s adverts.

  The ostentatious 22-inch screen showed a Saturn V rocket rising over the coastal swamps of Florida on a column of white smoke.

  The Bishop nodded off. Like the Major, he’d recently sat in silence to a heavy meal in the club’s famously unpleasant restaurant room. Richard had opted to nip out to Crank’s in Seven Dials for a salad.

  A BBC commentator, in tones of muted enthusiasm usually heard during orchestra tuning of a mid-season proms concert, informed viewers that Apollo 11 would enter Earth orbit in twelve minutes. After a turn and a half around the world, the S-IVB third-stage engine would fire, setting Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins on course for the moon.

  ‘It’s curtains for Dan Dare and Jet Morgan,’ said the Major.

  Richard had heard Took-Flemyng’s argument before. Robots had been there, and Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 had orbited the moon, but – until today – manned expeditions to the moon had been taken only in fancy: Lucian on a waterspout, Francis Godwin’s Gonsales in a chariot pulled by geese, Cyrano de Bergerac on a firework, Baron Munchausen on a silver hatchet, Edgar Allan Poe’s Hans Pfaall in a balloon, Jules Verne’s Baltimore Gun Club in a capsule fired from a giant cannon, H.G. Wells’ First Men in the Moon in a diving bell coated with anti-gravity paint, Hergé’s Tintin in a red-and-white chequered rocket and Arthur C. Clarke’s Heywood Floyd on a Pan-Am lunar shuttle. Once NASA boot-prints scarred lunar dust, would the memory of these shadow-pioneers fade? Clarke, still alive to see how close his guesses would turn out, did not seem unduly concerned he was about to be out of a job.

  The city streets were empty and traffic stilled, in a way not seen since England fought Germany in the World Cup Final. Even Crank’s, a vegetarian café haunted by hippies who’d rather immolate themselves than suffer the haircuts sported by the military men of the Apollo mission, had a transistor set up so customers could listen to launch coverage. US troop withdrawals from Vietnam, Rod Laver’s Wimbledon win, a potential Sino-Soviet conflict and an actual El Salvador-Honduras war were relegated to the deep insides of the newspapers, squeezed in after pages of moon stories. Toyshops were filled with Airfix rockets and child-safe space helmets. People looked up at the skies and claimed they saw rocket-trails. Comedians told jokes about the cow-powered Irish moon mission.

  Every magazine in W.H. Smith’s had a rocket or a moon or an astronaut on the cover. The same images were silk-screened on the T-shirts sported in the summer weather by everyone under thirty. Richard’s one-off tee from Stanley ‘Mouse’ Miller was an orange psychedelic explosion laid over a still from Georges Méliès’ 1903 Voyage dans la lune, with a bullet-shaped spaceship lodged in the eye of an irascible man in the moon. Today, he also wore purple bell-bottoms, red-dyed Chelsea boots, a crushed velvet jacket carried over the shoulder à la Johnny Hallyday, a variety of peace sign lapel badges, a shiny-peaked Victorian band-leader’s cap and wire-frame mint-green sunglasses which folded into a pocket-clip case that looked like a fat fountain pen.

  Moon songs played everywhere – Frank Sinatra’s ‘Fly Me to the Moon’, Jonathan King’s ‘Everyone’s Gone to the Moon’ (which set Richard’s teeth on edge – as a ‘sensitive’, he knew something was badly off about Jonathan King), the Marcels’ ‘Blue Moon’ (he couldn’t get that ‘moon moon moon’ backing vocal out of his head), Mel Tormé’s ‘Swingin’ on the Moon’, Captain Beefheart’s ‘Moonlight in Vermont’ (from Trout Mask Replica, the double album Richard agreed with John Peel in rating higher than any Beatles LP), the Bonzo Dog Band’s ‘Tubas in the Moonlight’. David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ was climbing the charts. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was still on in the West End. The opening chords of Richard Strauss’s ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’, featured in the film, were heard over and over, used by the BBC as a signature tune for its moon coverage.

  On television, Patrick Moore and James Burke explained what a trans-lunar injection burn was. A diagr
am anatomised the stages of the Saturn V already shed by the Apollo 11. The spacecraft now looked surprisingly like the bullets of Verne or Méliès, though sleek aluminium-steel-glass-phenolic rather than rivet-studded brass. ‘Phenolic’ and ‘trans-lunar’ were among the new words everyone had learned lately.

  A discreet cough sounded behind Richard. Hills, the first steward in the Diogenes Club to wear his hair an inch longer than his collar, had appeared at the door of the Informal Room. Ignoring the fretful glares of Major Took-Flemyng and the few other OMs goggling the box, Richard stood.

  ‘Miss Kaye would like to see you, sir,’ said Hills, almost subaudially.

  Even today, someone had to think about the Earth. Catriona Kaye, Acting Chair of the Ruling Cabal, was holding the fort. Edwin Winthrop, Richard’s usual handler, was in Houston with a small party of British ‘observers’ at Mission Control. The Club usually had a presence at epochal events.

  Richard assumed Catriona wanted his report on Brian Jones. He had spent the past fortnight investigating an instant myth. When the ex-Rolling Stone was found at the bottom of his swimming pool, a lunatic magician who called himself ‘the Elder Mage of Elgin Crescent’ raised a fuss in sorcerous circles, alleging that all currently successful pop groups had contracts with the Devil which required the sacrifice of a key member to stay on top. Richard only hoped someone who was in a band with Jonathan King had the same deal. The whisper was all over the place, which did not necessarily lend it special credence. Most pop stars had contracts with EMI, Decca or Colonel Tom Parker which even the Devil’s lawyers might deem excessively weighted against the talent. When it came to the Devil’s music, Richard thought Hell more likely to exacerbate the torments of the damned by piping in ‘Donald, Where’s Yer Troosers?’ or ‘How Much is that Doggie in the Window? (Ruff Ruff)’ than ‘Paint It Black’ or ‘Sympathy for the Devil’.

  The case had taken him from Cotchford Farm in East Sussex, former home of A. A. Milne, to Hyde Park, where Mick Jagger mangled a fragment of Shelley before the Stones played a free concert. A cloud of white butterflies was supposed to be released in a memorial tribute, but – it being a very hot day – most of them died in their boxes. Careful dowsing of the farm turned up nothing suspiciously satanic, though Richard wouldn’t soon forget the inside of Brian Jones’ bathroom cabinet. A casual glance at the NME showed the line-ups of the Who, the Doors, the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Wurzels unaltered by recent suspicious death – though an underground magazine alleged the Beatles had ritually murdered Stuart Sutcliffe and implanted a coded confession of the magickal crime in Rubber Soul. Richard was prepared to close the docket, though the original complainant was noisily foretelling another significant drowning before the month was out.