The Man from the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 01] Page 5

  Fred rolled over on the sand, and water poured out of him.

  Looking out to sea, Fred saw that the Emporium at the end of the pier was lit up with fairy lights. It seemed like a jewelled palace in the darkness.

  “The ARP won’t like that,” Jeperson commented.

  “What is going on here?” Fred asked.

  “A very bad business,” Jeperson said, concerned. “Very bad business indeed.”

  People stood around, with rifles.

  A man came forwards, wearily. Sir Giles.

  “Oh dear,” he said. “We shall have to get you two dried off.”

  Fred was picked up. He recognised the ARP man he had shoved earlier. He was too weak to resist.

  “A cup of tea might help,” said Sir Giles.

  * * * *

  They were back in the study at The Laurels. All that could be found for Fred was a naval uniform, left behind by Michaelsmith’s brother. Jeperson had a change of clothes (or a dozen) in the Rolls. He now wore a tiger-striped frock coat and aquamarine knee-britches, a violet kaftan shirt, and red riding-boots. His hair was still damp.

  Sir Giles sat in his favourite armchair while Marshall Michaelsmith, in an orderly’s uniform, served mugs of hot tea. Fred was grateful for that. Jeperson leaned forwards, eyes blazing, fixing Sir Giles with a stern schoolmaster’s gaze.

  “What were you thinking of, Giles?”

  The old soldier shriveled in his chair.

  Finally, feebly, he said, “It was decimalisation.”

  “What?” Jeperson shouted.

  Sir Giles was embarrassed, but a little defiant.

  “Decimal coinage, you know. The new money. I can never get it straight, all these pence and no shillings. The new coins don’t mean anything. They’re like counters in a child’s game. That was the last straw. Not just changing the money, of course. But everything it meant. All the other changes. The Common Market coming up. Motorways. Everything plastic. High-speed inter-city trains. Racialist violence. Hot-pants. Instant soup. Hire purchase. Everything’s cheapened, somehow. Since the war.”

  “Regrettable, perhaps. But what about heart transplants? A man on the moon?”

  “The pill?”

  Jeperson sat back, and shook his head. “Have you forgotten how you felt in 1930? That deadening weight of history, of the way things have always been. Why do you think Mr. Jeperson chose me, passed on the responsibilities? Because I can still embrace the change, the chaos. I can still accommodate.”

  “This is different,” Sir Giles said.

  “No, it’s the same. It’s just that you have resources. How wide is the casting?”

  “Just the town.”

  “Who is the focus?”

  Sir Giles hesitated. But Michaelsmith said, “The missus.”

  Jeperson looked at the man.

  “She dreams of the old times,” Michaelsmith explained.

  “Effective dreams? Reality-changing dreams?”

  Sir Giles nodded.

  “You know how dangerous that game is. And you had to pick the war.”

  “Why not?” Sir Giles’ defiance was growing. He needed to defend himself. “We were all working together, all differences set aside. Everyone was prepared to sacrifice for everyone else. It was our finest hour.”

  Jeperson thought for a moment.

  “And what about the air raids? The pier?”

  “An impurity in the casting,” Sir Giles said. “It will be rectified.”

  “No,” Jeperson said. “Not an impurity, not a mistake. It was inevitable. You can’t just have back the things you liked about the war. You want ITMA on the wireless and duchesses cosying up to shopgirls in the shelters, but that means you have to have the monsters. Can you really have forgotten what the war was like for most of Europe? For Britain, even.”

  Jeperson rolled up his cuff to show his camp tattoo.

  Sir Giles looked down at the carpet, ashamed.

  Jeperson was contemptuous. “And all because you didn’t want to learn decimal coinage?”

  Fred thought of Vanessa, transformed and perhaps lost.

  “Couldn’t we just wake his wife up,” he suggested.

  Sir Giles, Michaelsmith and Jeperson looked at him, surprised that he had spoken.

  “That might seem on the surface to be the best bet,” said Jeperson, “but there are people alive in the vortex of evil at the end of the pier. We can banish the dream with a hearty breakfast, but they’ll all be sucked back into whatever netherworld Giles and his Committee called the war up from.”

  Fred could well do without Jaffa and the Boys.

  But Vanessa?

  “I’m very much afraid that we’re going to have to go back to the Emporium.”

  “We got hammered last time.”

  “That was an exploratory mission. This time, we’ll be prepared.”

  Sir Giles looked up.

  “We’ll do what we can, Richard.”

  “I should think you will,” said Jeperson, chipper but stern. “First, you must have some young persons about town?”

  Sir Giles nodded.

  “Excellent. You Committee men will need to loot your sons’ wardrobes. And you’ll have to hook up the air-raid sirens to a gramophone. Oh, and no Vera Lynn.”

  * * * *

  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 sea-front. 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.”

  “Multistorey car parks, inflatable chairs, Sunday supplements, Top of the Pops ...”

  J
eperson 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’ voice was deeper, more purposeful.

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

  This mob looked grotesque, but Fred had a sense of the enormity of the damage they could do. The map suggested that this “casting” was out of the control of Sir Giles’ 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 centre 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, Cilia 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 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’ 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, 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 ‘70s,” 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.

  <>

  * * * *

  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 cons
ultant with bad news to deliver 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-1971 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.