The Man From the Diogenes Club Read online

  Then a regular-speed kick winded her.

  Her knife skittered off on the floor.

  She bent double, trying not to retch.

  Miss Kill, the masked Persephone Gill, walked around her. She wore a long dress slit to the thighs, and the gold spike-heeled pumps modelled by a well-dressed skeleton. Above her mask, her hair was done in a topknot with a flowing tail.

  Stacy tensed, anticipating the kick at her side.

  Miss Kill looked to Swellhead. For applause?

  Stacy braced both hands against the floor and swept-kicked Miss Kill’s legs out from under her. A simple, textbook self-defence move.

  The masked girl went up arse over tit.

  In mid-air, she flipped, regained balance on her points. She wheeled round, ponytail whipping out.

  Stacy was on her feet now.

  A lot of her pupils expected Crouching Tiger business, which she always patiently explained required a team of effects experts and hidden wires – hardly practical when a yob shoves you against a wall by a cash machine.

  Miss Kill might actually have been on wires. She tucked one foot against her knee and flew straight at Stacy’s face like Peter Pan, arm stretched out, fingers pyramided into a killing point.

  06:32:01.

  Stacy ducked and thumped upwards at Miss Kill’s silk-covered stomach. She couldn’t get the leverage for a forceful blow, but had the satisfaction of connecting.

  Miss Kill touched down and slapped Stacy, open-handed, contemptuous.

  It smarted and kinked her head almost off her neck. She responded with rib-punches that had no effect.

  The mask made it impossible to tell whether Miss Kill was hurt.

  Stacy tasted her own blood.

  She got close to Miss Kill, pressing her body against her opponent – it’s hard to hit someone who’s practically hugging you – and getting a hold on her hair, which she yanked hard. Any woman who remembered playground scraps knew how effective a solid hair-pull could be at disabling a trouble-maker. She always advised her pupils that it was better to be mugged by someone with crustylocks than a baldie (for skinheads, she recommended a nailfile across the scalp – those cuts bleed like fountains).

  Miss Kill’s head went back as Stacy pulled, but no scream came through the mask.

  Pincer-grips came at Stacy’s sides, long-nailed thumbs stabbing between ribs, vice-pressure fingertips digging into her back. She was lifted off her feet and held out at arms’ length.

  She tried battering Miss Kill’s hands, but only bruised her own fists.

  06:00:00.

  She was sure Miss Kill’s thumbs were knuckle-deep in her torso.

  She looked down at the impassive pretty-doll face. Red and black blotches swarmed across her vision. Whatever happened at 00:00:00, she wouldn’t be here to go through it.

  Probably a mercy.

  Miss Kill’s stiff lips might have smiled.

  Furious, using a move she only ever recommended with caution (‘tends to hurt you as much as him’), she executed the classic Glasgow kiss, known in London as ‘nutting’. She rammed her forehead against the bridge of Miss Kill’s nose. The argument for this is that bony skull bests nose-cartilage as often as paper wraps stone. It might not apply to a mask.

  An almighty crack! sounded through her head.

  She was let go, and Miss Kill staggered back. Stacy had blood in her eyes, mostly her own.

  Miss Kill held her mask to her face. It was split across.

  ‘Percy,’ shouted Jeperson.

  The mask fell away. Persephone Gill looked as if she’d woken suddenly from a bad dream. Her bloody face wasn’t a mask, but mobile with an incipient scream.

  05:32:00.

  ‘Congratulations,’ said Jeperson. ‘The iron crown is yours.’

  Having defeated Persephone Gill in single combat, Stacy supposed she had the right, for the next five and a half minutes, to call herself the Droning of Skerra.

  She didn’t feel like a princess.

  X.

  05:31:01.

  Though Swellhead looked unconcerned, Richard saw a crack.

  De Maltby, silver fist whirring with knives, stepped past Miss Gill and squared up to Stacy.

  Stand down, Richard thought.

  Stacy – good girl! – held her empty hands out and backed off.

  De Maltby lowered his deadly gauntlet.

  Swellhead settled in his chair and tapped a series of buttons. He smiled serenely as a helmet descended from the ceiling on a thick rope of wires and settled around his dome. A rim of lights on the helmet began to flash.

  04:52:01.

  Richard gathered Swellhead was charging the machine. His brain was a key component. Anything powerful enough to will a moonbase into existence ought to be subject to the strictest international controls.

  Whatever happened, Richard did not intend this apported apparatus, or this unmatched Talent, to be put at the disposal of Really-a-Good-Bloke Rory and the Deputy Minister for Heritage and Sport. Their overwhelming Opinion, shaped by focus groups and policy studies and target figures and budget assessments, would probably make for a worse world than the supervillain fantasy hatching inside Swellhead’s egg-dome skull.

  04:26.00.

  Adam Onions had been close to boiling over for hours. Now, he stepped forward.

  ‘Really, Mr Head, what do you think you’re doing?’

  Swellhead swivelled his chair to look at Onions, umbilical wires stretching.

  ‘Sod this for a game of tin soldiers,’ said the man from I-Psi-T, turning to leave the control room. ‘I’m radioing in from the helicopter.’

  Onions walked across the room.

  Swellhead flipped a tiny switch.

  The floor opened up under Onions. With a look of resigned irritation, he fell into the chasm. A splash, thrashing, screams.

  ‘I enjoyed that,’ said Swellhead.

  03:46.01.

  The hatch sprang closed.

  Richard walked onto the trapdoor section of the floor.

  ‘Stacy, if you’d help me,’ he said. ‘I need to sit down.’

  She was by his side, holding his arm as he sank. His back spasmed and he felt his joints creak. She helped him to the floor.

  ‘This will be tricky. I need to lotus.’

  She pulled off his boots – he wore wasp-striped socks – and helped him tuck his feet into the crooks of his knees. He pressed his palms together and settled, trying to find a focus.

  Swellhead observed all this, almost with interest.

  02:55:00.

  ‘What do you plan now, Mr Jeperson? Have you reached the stage of acceptance?’

  Richard chuckled.

  ‘No, I intend to out-think you.’

  Richard sub-vocalised a mantra. Not very fashionable these days, but still effective.

  He thought of a spiral, let it whirl around him.

  Pains and aches faded, a pleasant side-effect. The whitesuits were wispier, more ghostly. He could tell which ones had Captain Vernon’s team inside, and which were made up from whole cloth.

  He gained a precise sense of where he was in relation to the complex, to the living and half-living things all around.

  He had a Talent too.

  02:02:01.

  He was nothing compared to Swellhead, but at least he knew what he was doing. If the late Adam Onions had put the possibly late Sewell Head through the full battery of tests, or let the Americans or Tibetans have a crack at him, then Swellhead might have had even more control. As it was, Richard’s earlier criticism held: the illusion didn’t have enough detail.

  Too many ghosts.

  A comparatively weak lever can unseat a monument.

  02:00:00.

  But maybe not within two minutes.

  He finished chanting.

  Everything was clear.

  ‘Sewell,’ he asked, ‘why did you choose to be a diabolical mastermind?’

  Swellhead had no answer.

  ‘Villains have more fun
, I suppose?’ ventured Richard. ‘But you must have seen the flaw? Remember the coat? It’s what brought us all here. Our blood was on it, and this place was a ruin. This happened before, and you were thwarted. Good word, that. “Thwarted”. Has the old melodramatic tone. Like “foiled”, “bested”, “vanquished”.’

  01:39:01.

  The faintest line of concern appeared between Swellhead’s brows. His helmet-lights flashed faster, in more complex patterns.

  ‘That was somewhen else,’ Swellhead said.

  He gestured.

  De Maltby, deadly hand raised to swipe off Richard’s head, stepped forward.

  At the same time, just to make doubly sure, or perhaps through a split-second indecision, Swellhead flicked his switch.

  A wasteful gesture. Counter-productive.

  The floor opened. De Maltby tumbled into the darkness.

  Cold wafted up, but Richard hung suspended in the air.

  01:02:01.

  ‘Didn’t I mention I could do this?’

  It was not easy. Richard felt a strain in his back-brain far worse than anything he had put his spine through.

  He unlotused in mid-air, letting his legs dangle, extending his arms crucifashion.

  Beneath him, there was a whirring and screeching. De Maltby’s prosthetic killing arm outlived him by seconds, cutting through something from the inside, parting black slime, spilling knotty gut. The rising stench was dreadful.

  Richard tried to make his pose seem effortless.

  Actually, he had never levitated before.

  He was siphoning Swellhead’s Talent, the villain’s belief in the worthiness of his foe. It was why Richard had actually felt stronger, sharper in the complex. Swellhead needed an antagonist who could put up a fight. This story needed a hero, and Richard was elected.

  Given time, Swellhead would notice.

  00:55:01.

  But there was not much time.

  00:55:00.

  ‘You know how the story goes…’ said Richard.

  Klaxons were sounding.

  ‘…the villain is always thwarted…’

  00:50:00.

  ‘…in the last minute.’

  XI.

  No one had told her Richard Jeperson could fly. All her doubts vanished: this was a man to follow into the jungle.

  00:45:01.

  She found her knife and threw it at Swellhead. It struck an invisible barrier feet away from him and bounced, falling into the trap along with Adam Onions and Viscount de Maltby.

  00:40:00.

  Jeperson floated upwards. She saw strain in his face. A trickle of black sweat ran beside his eye, slid down a groove in his cheek, dropped from his chin. The black, she realised, was hair dye.

  00:35:01.

  On the big screen, the dish transmitted a preliminary signal skywards, visible waves of radiant force emanating from its centre.

  00:30:00.

  ‘In the last minute,’ Jeperson had said. Not ‘at the last minute’. She’d instinctively grasped what the man from the Diogenes Club meant. Somehow, Sewell Head had cast himself in his own movie. She knew from experience that every neighbourhood drug peddler and receiver of stolen DVD players fancied himself as a Bond villain. Head just had the brain-juice to make it so.

  But this could be a post-modern, ironic story. A despairing, millennial vision in which the baddie triumphs.

  00:25:01.

  Swellhead was radiant. His muzak was playing ‘All You Need is Love’, whale-songs, a football crowd version of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ and the ‘1812 Overture’ all at once.

  00:20:00.

  ‘Trivia Man, what is transhumance?’ asked Jeperson.

  ‘A form of Swiss crop rotation,’ he responded.

  00:15:01.

  You ask him one, Jeperson thought to her.

  She didn’t think that would work. Everything was in Head’s head. Everything. History, geography, maths, physics, mythology, archaeology – the whole core syllabus.

  ‘His specialist subject is Popular Music Since 1973…’

  00:10:00

  A beam rose from the dish, so intense that the video hookup couldn’t handle it. It whited across the screen. It was on its way to the moon, and then would come back to break against the whole world.

  Head’s lips twitched. She’d seen that before, in Really-a-Good-Bloke Rory’s office. She recognised the look from hours of suspects lying to her, the ‘tell’ that meant she’d found a button she should press again.

  00:05:01.

  ‘Who had a hit with “I Should Be So Lucky”?’ she asked, praying.

  00:04:00.

  No instant response.

  00:03:01.

  ‘Come on,’ said Richard, ‘even I know that! She was in Moulin Rouge!’

  00:03:00.

  ‘No clues,’ shrieked Sewell Head, furious.

  00:02:01.

  The big picture fragmented and fell. A glimpse of Kylie Minogue’s face appeared and disappeared in the white static.

  00:01:01.

  Only the numbers, now in black on white, remained. There was a rumbling in the earth, shaking the floor and the walls.

  00:01:00.

  Not in the last minute, the last second!

  00:00:01.

  Swellhead was stricken, Sewell Head looking through his eyes, under his Heath Robinson–Jack Kirby hair-dryer. She could tell he was aware of his own absurdity.

  ‘Kylie,’ she said, putting him out of his misery.

  With a sad, should-have-known look, Head slumped. His head exploded in a shower of red fragments.

  00:00:00.

  Jeperson fell, landing on the edge of the trap, falling the right way, away from the hole.

  00:00:00:00:00:00.

  The zeroes were egg shapes.

  Stacy looked for Persephone Gill, and found her dead, a dagger-wedge of Sewell Head’s skullbone stuck in her eye, spearing into her brain.

  The tremors were more sustained. The floor was bucking under her. She scrabbled to help Jeperson to his feet.

  He was looking around, confused.

  ‘It’s all still here,’ he said. ‘I thought it’d just go pop and be gone.’

  The computers kicked their spools, unreeling tape across the control room, and sparked showers that set many little fires. The whitesuits were phantoms, coming apart and forgotten, or slumped corpses.

  ‘It won’t be here much longer,’ she said.

  Somewhere in the complex was an almighty crash. Everything shook, and there was a huge roaring.

  A spout of saltwater rose gusherlike from the trapdoor, tossing remnants of Onions and de Maltby, along with sleek black toothy things, up against the ceiling of the control room, battering away asbestos tile to show bare rock. Water showered all around. Stacy had to fight to keep her footing and hold of Jeperson.

  ‘The Kjempestrupe just poured in,’ he said. ‘Head was keeping it out through force of will.’

  She dragged him from the control room, a wash of water around their feet, into the Head Room.

  The trophies on the walls were fake now, moulting papier mâché.

  The walls themselves slumped, running down in waves like a dropped curtain. Glistening rock showed through.

  They had to get to the Blowhole.

  XII.

  Sewell Head was dead and Swellhead sucked back into the void from which he had come, but the Talent was still here. Breaking a pot doesn’t make the jam disappear. The complex, the huge apport, was collapsing, resolving itself to its physical components – salt and water, mostly – but it would take time. Perhaps traces would remain for ever.

  In a way, Richard hoped so.

  Without Swellhead’s belief, rigidly suppressed but devout, that every villain must be bested by an arch-nemesis, Richard felt again like a broken old man. He was sure bones had snapped inside him, but the soaking chilled him so much that he could not yet tell how badly he was hurt.

  He was back in the world again.
>
  Perhaps Fred was right and he never should have left. If he had stayed in the game, knocking heads with dolts like Onions, perhaps this would have been handled differently. Good people and bad might still be alive, including Adam Onions. There might have been a place for a Talent like Sewell Head, even if it was as the cleverest shop assistant in the universe.

  His feet kept working as Stacy helped him through corridors. The lighting was uniformly dim and dying. The carpeting was sludge.

  They made it to the lift-platform.

  ‘If you can still fly, it’d be a useful back-up,’ she said, hammering the up control.

  He shook his head, too racked to explain.

  The platform rose.

  Stacy gasped.

  Richard shifted – agonies shooting through him – to look.

  Beyond the guardrail, he saw the great cavern. The big dish was bent out of shape like an origami structure trampled by Godzilla, and washed back up its tunnel by waters that still poured into the guts of Skerra. White shreds that might have been ghost-goons were whipped around inside the torrent. A mini-jeep was tossed out of the maelstrom like a dinky toy, smashing against the cave-wall.

  Water got under the lift-platform and raised it higher.

  Stacy yelled as if on a fairground ride.

  The guardrails were like liquorice sticks pulled out of shape.

  The platform itself felt rubbery and melted in patches.

  Richard took Stacy’s hand and held fast.

  He tried to believe again in Swellhead’s world. Where a hero might survive something like this. Where the valiant were rewarded.

  Not only was Stacy Droning of Skerra but she was also the new trivia champion. She had remembered, no, intuited, that Head hadn’t known the answer to the easy pop-music question Really-a-Good-Bloke Rory had raised.

  Of course, he could have been peeved enough to look it up in his Guinness Book of Hit Singles in the meantime. Then, things would have been different.

  The Blowhole grew bigger as they were forced up at it.

  He patted her hand, well done.

  The platform threw them up into the open air.

  They tumbled down the hillside, away from the water-spout that rose high as if geysered, demonstrating how the Blowhole got its name.

  Jagged stone scraped his side. He heard Stacy swear.

  It was not too late in the day to break his neck.

  He came to rest in a tangle of limbs, wet clothes twisted, and looked up at pre-dawn sky. Dramatic clouds were incarnadine as red washed over his vision.