SWELLHEAD

By Kim Newman

 

 

ACT I: “ARNE SAKNUSSEMM, HIS SIGN”

 

1

 

“Bloodybuggerinmixmaster ...,” said Richard Jeperson.

 

Detective Sergeant Stacy Cotterill looked across the troop compartment at the Man from the Diogenes Club. Since takeoff from the Air-Sea Rescue helipad, he’d been sitting quietly, secured by webbing that reminded her of a straitjacket. He wore a Day-Glo orange oilskin poncho with reflective road safety trim, folded newspaper hat that was actually a PVC sou’wester with a novelty design, padded plaid jumpsuit with multiple pockets and pouches, and lemon-yellow moon boots with chemical lights in the heels.

 

For his first enigmatic pronouncement in hours, Jeperson didn’t seem to need to raise his voice. Stacy heard him clearly over the chopping whirr of rotors, through the big blue baffles everyone wore to protect their ears.

 

“... blong Jesus Christ,” Jeperson added, emphatically.

 

She wondered if, in addition to everything she’d been briefed on, the old man had Tourette’s Syndrome.

 

Onions (“O-nye-ons,” he had insisted, understandably) looked up, as if jolting awake inside his expensive parka. Stacy noticed he always kept half an eye on Jeperson, like a bear sharing a cave with a languid adder. Onions adjusted his baffles, exposing an ear.

 

She glanced around. None of the others were interested.

 

Mr. Head munched a Lion bar, fixated on Petesuchis, a high-end crossword magazine. The little man, whose boiled egg baldpate and wide watery eyes suggested something without bones, did not fill in a puzzle, just solved all the clues mentally, left the grid virginal, and proceeded to the next, more challenging page. Onions had told her Petesuchis scorned newsstand distribution. The publishers set an entrance exam for the subscription list, charging on a sliding scale, lower price for higher grades. Adam Onions paid a thousand pounds a year for thirteen slim numbers; Sewell Head got his for free.

 

Persephone Gill, the Droning of Skerra, wore tiny Walkman earclips under her baffles, nodding serenely to something bland. Once she got past the notations in “Percy” Gill’s file (“21 years old, inheritrice of the most unearned wealth in the United Kingdom, no educational qualifications”), Stacy was still venomously glad the girl had been voted out of the mansion at the first cull of Channel 4’s Posh Big Brother.

 

Franklin Yoland, the tech guy, gripped his webbing, white-faced and praying for deliverance. He suffered from airsickness and flight terrors, perhaps not ideal qualities in an editor of Jane’s Book of Air-Launched Weapons.

 

“I’d been trying to remember,” Jeperson explained to Stacy. “You know what it’s like when you have something in your head but can’t fish it out. The name of a tune you hear in a fresh arrangement. The new capital city of a country that’s changed its name. Whether Dante ranks virtuous pagans above or below Christian hypocrites in Hell. Pidgin English for ‘helicopter.’“

 

Through a floor-set Plexiglass bubble that sealed a gunport, she saw the arrowheaded shadow of the Royal Navy Sea King Mk4 rushing across the Norwegian Sea at 100 knots. Crescents of sun-glint flashed on roof-slate grey waters. Lieutenant de Maltby, the pilot, flew almost at wave-level, under radar.

 

“Bloodybuggerinmixmaster blong Jesus Christ.”

 

Jeperson nodded to himself, happy that his pidgin vocabulary was filed away neatly. In London, Chief Inspector Regent had told her Richard Jeperson knew more arcane facts than anyone alive, but that whole years were missing from his memory banks. Stacy supposed that if she lost her primary school years or Thatcher’s second term, she’d be as concerned as Jeperson with accessing what was left in her skull. Still, he wasn’t someone she was comfortable around. She wondered again why she’d drawn this duty.

 

“What’s that?” asked Onions, voice raised.

 

“Nothing important,” said Jeperson, dismissing the inquiry with a flutter of long fingers. “Are we there yet?”

 

Jeperson perfectly mimicked the stereotypical whine of a bored child on a long car journey. His prog rock moustache, coal-black but flashed white at the corners, twitched with amusement.

 

It took Onions long seconds to tumble that he was being spoofed. He looked at the plastic-wrapped chart in his mittened paws before he got the joke, then made a sour face.

 

“Very mature,” he commented.

 

Jeperson gave Stacy a private eyebrow wiggle. She almost warmed to him.

 

Onions detached himself from the webbing and, unsteady as an astronaut going EVA, hauled himself down the compartment to confer with (i.e., nag) Lieutenant de Maltby.

 

“Cuppa char, sir?” asked Aircrewman Kydd, a cockney gnome. His duties obviously included keeping the passengers from distracting the driver while the bus was in motion.

 

Kydd held out a Thermos, face arranged into a feral smile.

 

Onions hung from handholds, unsure.

 

“I’d care for some tea, if that’s all right,” said Jeperson. “And maybe the ladies ...”

 

Kydd, who knew a proper gent when he saw one, delivered a real smile and a salute. He had different flasks for English breakfast, orange pekoe and lapsang souchong.

 

“Best not bother the Viscount,” Jeperson told Onions. “He probably has a lot on his mind, what with avoiding diplomatic offence to our esteemed allies in Oslo or Reykjavik. Last thing we need is another Cod War.”

 

Lieutenant de Maltby was Viscount Henry de Maltby, somewhere in the midthirties in line of succession to the throne. He had the House of Windsor habit of being unable to string together a sentence without saying uhhhm. It was not settled whether Debrett (or Dante) reckoned the Viscount more or less royal than the Droning of Skerra, but in this party of geniuses and idiots he was the one Stacy felt herself level with in the middling cleverness bracket. Shame his Hapsburg lip was so developed that it resembled a facial foreskin.

 

With a wink, Kydd handed her a mug of English breakfast. It was a plastic beaker with a childproof top. She nodded thanks and drank.

 

The tea hit the spot.

 

“Perhaps you should look out your big orange suitcase,” Jeperson suggested to Onions. “Check if your anemometers are all in order.”

 

After consideration, Onions got back to his seat. He was most particular about his kit, which indeed came in a big orange suitcase. Jeperson said it was full of ghost-hunting gear.

 

They shared the troop compartment with an all-terrain vehicle, weighted down by neatly stowed supplies and equipment. The ATV occasionally shifted on its tethers. If it got loose, it would crush them all.

 

The intercom crackled.

 

“Skerra up ahead,” said de Maltby, sounding uncannily like his great-great-uncle abdicating from the throne. “We should be aground in ... uhhhm ... about ten minutes.”

 

Yoland thanked the gods but had to gulp back his silent words. He waved away Kydd’s tea.

 

“Exciting, isn’t it?” Jeperson said to her. “Venturing into unknown territory.”

 

She wasn’t exactly sure how she felt.

 

“Look, sir, you can see the island.”

 

Kydd pointed out of a window. Jeperson casually turned to glance at Skerra. Onions lurched from his seat, again hanging apelike from strap-holds, and peered at the seascape, searching for their destination.

 

“There,” said Jeperson. “Such a tiny scrap of rock.”

 

The only thing this assignment had in common with regular police-work was that Stacy had the usual feeling of coming in late and having to pick up story threads before she could make any progress.

 

If she was to cope with Skerra, she needed to catch up.

 

* * * *

 

2

 

Two days earlier, DS Cotterill had learned she was to be despatched to the blue plaque jungle of London, SW3. In New Scotland Yard, CI Frederick Regent ran off a list of who else had lived in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea.

 

“Isambard Kingdom Brunei, George Eliot, Turner, Mrs. Gaskell, Whistler (of’s Mother fame), Dante Gabriel Rosetti, a bunch of other pre-Raphs, Thomas Carnacki, Henry James. With Carlyle round the corner in Cheyne Row.”

 

Stacy said she’d heard of them all, except Carnacki.

 

“Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, Cotterill,” her guv’nor said. “Secret history. Bone up on it.”

 

Easier said than done.

 

It struck her that the guv’nor either wished he was going out on this call himself or was profoundly grateful seniority kept him snug in his office. Or both at the same time. Regent was a funny specimen of top cop. Higher-ups didn’t often let him do telly interviews. Gossip at the Met was that he was the only senior officer ever to turn down a CBE, nearly get married to Diana Rigg and earn the honour of laying the wreath on Joey Grimaldi’s grave at the annual Clowns’ Service at Holy Trinity Church in Dalston.

 

Stacy didn’t fully realise how out of the ordinary the errand was until Regent told her to take a chit to Sergeant Ellbee, who would scare her up a driver and car. That luxury was a first in her career.

 

Ellbee recognised the address and laughed.

 

“Haven’t seen that one in an age, Stace,” said the Sergeant, who had a London Welsh accent. “Surprised Jeperson is still alive, what with all he went through. Put the guv’nor through, too. How do you think Fred Regent lost his hair?”

 

It wasn’t something she’d ever considered.

 

“The famous Richard Jeperson,” clucked Ellbee. “Name from the seventies. Sixties, even. Fab crazy gear, man. Austin Powers era. Watch out he doesn’t try to shag you, baby.”

 

“Was he a copper?”

 

“Not with his haircut. Richard Jeperson was a private consultant. A spook. The spooks’ spook, in fact. Ever hear of the Diogenes Club?”

 

She hadn’t.

 

“Read your Sherlock Holmes, girl.”

 

She had the feeling everyone knew more than she did. Regent had given her the bare bones and a large brown-paper parcel tied with pink string.

 

“Diogenes wasn‘t a club, really,” continued Ellbee. “It was a Department of Dead Ends. Like our old, pre-PC Bureau of Queer Complaints. That was nothing to do with policing Gay Pride marches. Know why the CI’s thrown you this scrap? Fred’s had an eagle eye on you ever since the Maudsley murders.”

 

Stacy didn’t think the case was her finest hour. It had seemed a simple, if gruesome triple homicide. A middle-aged man found in a fugue state in his own home, sitting amid the remains of three diced street kids. Evidence indicated that the vics, all well known to the courts, had entered the premises with unlawful intent and received something very like just desserts. A history of ill-will existed between the district’s druggies and the reclusive householder, Mantan “Misery” Maudsley.

 

Before the likely perpetrator could be roused enough to understand formal charge, Maudsley perished in his cell. Not just died, perished. Autopsy suggested he’d been dead for three weeks at the time of arrest. When Stacy had met Maudsley, he wasn’t speaking much or smelling fresh but had been capable of walking about. The file was still open.

 

“Some plods go through a whole career without anything like ‘Misery’ Maudsley,” said Ellbee. “Others clock Scooby-Doo cases every week but never tumble to the way the world really works. You took it in, Stace. Adjusted to accept it. When he was with Diogenes and Richard Jeperson, that was Fred Regent’s special knack. He thinks you’ve got something similar.”

 

She remembered the sick, clear atmosphere after the Maudsley case, the way station-mates treated her differently, the eagerness of her shift commander to get her onto something else quickly. It wasn’t something she had enjoyed at all. She didn’t relish the prospect of anything more in that line.

 

“Come off it, Ellbee,” she said. “I happened to be in the office with a clearish desk when the guv’nor wanted a parcel delivered to Chelsea. End of story.”

 

“Mind how you tread in the dark, Stace.”

 

Somebody else who had lived in Cheyne Walk was Bram Stoker. Stacy remembered the peasant pressing her crucifix on the young man on his way to Castle Dracula.

 

This wasn’t how she usually thought of Sergeant Ellbee. She put his theory into practice and adjusted to accept it.

 

In the car on the way to Chelsea, the driver didn’t speak to her.

 

The only thing Maudsley had said as she was bringing him in was “a cavern, far north.” She had thought it random sparking in a broken brain, not even addressed to her.

 

Now, she wondered if Misery had known about Skerra.

 

* * * *

 

3

 

At first sighting, the island was a greenish thumbnail barely stuck out of the sea. Then, as the helicopter neared, Skerra looked more like a sinking aircraft carrier: an oblong wedge rising steeply, sloping deck sliding into the ocean, barnacled stern lifted clear of the water.

 

They circled. Stacy got a good look at the place.

 

Skerra was a British Isle, but only for cartographers’ convenience. Too far north to be a Shetland (let alone an Orkney), the outcrop lay alone and desolate in cold grey water between Iceland and the Norwegian coast. As much, or as little, Scandinavian as Scots, a case could be made for calling it the Easternmost Faroe. In the reign of Macbeth (yes, that one), Skerra had been gifted to Scotland among the dowry of the Princess of Denmark. An agreed reciprocal tribute went unpaid, so the transfer of sovereignty was moot. If either crown had regarded it as a possession rather than a dependency, Skerra might have become a mediaeval Schlesweig-Holstein Question. As it was, Dunsinane and Elsinore remained barely aware that such a place existed. The islanders looked to their own matrilineal monarchy.

 

The title of Droning still existed, but the Skerrans didn’t.

 

The hardy, vicious flocks of goats that supported the local economy and ecosystem (and fashion statements) declined over the centuries and were all but extinct by 1932, when the last remaining islanders were evacuated to unimaginable Southlands. This emergency measure led to the dumping of a knot of insular, Innsmouth-featured folk in a Glasgow slum. Their descendants were allegedly the city’s most violent criminal gang. One of the few surviving words of the Skerran tongue was “dreep,” underworld slang for an especially horrific form of murder-by-torture.

 

Sir Piers Gill (ne Paddy Kill) had bought Skerra from another private owner when Persephone was six, so his daughter could legitimately call herself a Princess. This was the first time the Droning had come within five hundred miles of her island realm.

 

Stacy saw where waves washed the incline. Rising seas had swallowed the harbour decades ago. Choppy waters swirled around the few stone skeletons that remained of Skerra Landsby, the abandoned village.

 

“Look,” said Onions, “the A-Boat.”

 

It was caught in among the shattered buildings, on its side, mostly underwater. If the hull hadn’t been rust-red, the boat would have passed for a reef.

 

Onions whistled.

 

“How the hell did that happen?”

 

“Strange waters,” commented Richard Jeperson. “Look at the whirlpools.”

 

There were three around the village end of Skerra, spinning like submarine Tasmanian Devils, and a far larger maelstrom to the North.

 

“The Kjempestrupe,” said Jeperson. “It’s as if God pulled the plug.”

 

For the first time, Mr. Head took an interest. He closed his Petesuchis and peered out the window.

 

The Kjempestrupe was a funnel in the sea. It seemed bottomless, spiral walls of whirling water keeping open an impossible chasm.

 

“Any man who wants to marry you is supposed to brave that in a coracle,” Jeperson told Persephone. “Otherwise he’s not fit to be consort to the Droning of Skerra.”

 

Persephone looked as if she had heard the legend so many times it wasn’t even worth commenting on.

 

Being a Princess evidently wore thin.

 

“And any woman who wants to challenge for the iron crown has to face you in single combat,” Jeperson added.

 

“They’re welcome to try.”

 

The Sea King circled the whirlpool, clockwise to its anticlockwise. It was too much for Yoland, who finally spewed. Aircrewman Kydd tactfully provided a paper bag.

 

“Does he have to?” asked Persephone, infinitely weary.

 

“Yes, love, he does,” said Kydd.

 

The Droning of Skerra didn’t care to be addressed as “love.” Kydd was too busy tidying up after Yoland to notice her moue of annoyance.

 

“Better out than in, sir,” said Kydd, with cheery deference.

 

Yoland nodded something like thanks.

 

The helicopter passed over the Kjempestrupe and approached the island. Skerra was a volcanic extrusion, originally expelled through a hernia in the planet’s crust, bursting molten above the seas to solidify like an igneous loaf, then shaped and sculpted by unrelenting wind and water. When the satellite pictures came in, the first theory was that the volcano was active again. Met office wags nicknamed it “McKrakatoa.”

 

The squared-off cliffside had been gouged out by millennia of brutally battering waves. A torrent poured into the vast cave-mouth, and washed back out again as froth. The island was hollow, like a decayed tooth. It should eventually collapse on its caverns and become rocks strewn across the seabed, lamented by no one but map-maintainers and reduced-to-commoner female Gills.

 

The ridge of the cliff whizzed below.

 

There wasn’t a tree on the island, though its upper slopes were infested with long, thick grass. Survivalist goats had persisted after the people left, the toughest specimens emerging from some cave-shelters to reclaim the surface. Their savage descendants looked to the sky as the helicopter passed overhead, but did not abandon tussock-chewing to run for cover. DeMaltby and Kydd had been issued small arms, but Stacy fancied Skerran goats likely resistant to everything this side of depleted uranium shells. They were a prison population: faces smashed by head-butting horn fights, flanks ripped by scars like tattoos, each lifer the perpetrator of a multiple rapes and dreeps.

 

As the Sea King descended, propwash whipped grass into crop circles. De Maltby searched for a likely landing spot.

 

Onions waved downwards, indicating to the pilot the urgency of making ground.

 

Even as they hovered, the island slipped out from under the Sea King. De Maltby had to fight strong winds to avoid dipping in the drink. An intermittent stone wall rimmed what had once been a field. De Maltby put the Sea King down by it. After the rotors stopped, there was still whirring—the wind, trying to wipe the island into the sea.

 

“I own this carbuncle,” said Persephone Gill. “Any offers? I’d have to abdicate, but I think I could be persuaded by any convincing bid. A bean and a button?”

 

Stacy wasn’t tempted. Even if owning Skerra meant being able to call herself a Princess.

 

“Let’s get out and find camp,” said Onions. “It’ll be dark soon.”

 

It wasn’t quite lunchtime, and night was about to fall.

 

No wonder Princess Percy wasn’t surprised by the lack of potential buyers.

 

* * * *

 

4

 

In Chelsea, Stacy told her driver to wait in the car and searched for the address she’d been given. She had the brown-paper parcel under her arm.

 

The house didn’t show a street number. Inset in the front door, where neighbours had number plates, was an art nouveau stained-glass panel with an Ancient Egyptian eye motif.

 

When Stacy thumbed the button, a bell jangled inside the house. Shadows shifted.

 

She noticed the milk—eight bottles—hadn’t been taken in. A rain-eaten roll of free newspaper was rammed into the letter-slit, drooping like a fag from the mouth of a charlady in a 1970s ITV sitcom. Freesheets were the burglars’ friend—you couldn’t stop them when you went on holiday. From the looks of this place, the home-owner never went on holiday. She wondered why CI Regent thought he’d stir himself now.

 

The clear glass pupil of the Egyptian eye darkened. A real eye looked out at her: startling silver-flecked blue-grey iris trapped in veinous cobweb.

 

She held up her warrant card.

 

“Come on in,” boomed a voice. “S’not locked.”

 

She took the handle and pushed the door, which resisted. A small avalanche of newspapers, pizza menus, minicab cards, AOL start-up discs, estate agent’s brochures and letters from the council shifted, was ground under, then stopped the door dead at half-open.

 

Stacy turned sideways and slipped into the house.

 

She smelled incense, sweet and heavy. The long, narrow, crowded foyer rose three storeys to a murky glass roof. Potted plants exploded from tubs and grew up banisters, reaching tendrils toward the distant sun. Odd objects were piled at random: books of all formats and thicknesses, primitive masks, fancy dress finery, dissected animals under glass domes, unsleeved vinyl records, unnameable musical instruments, ancient valve wirelesses in various states of dismantlement, obscure statuary. And multiple cats—which explained the milk. They roamed free, clambering and searching.

 

“You must be from Fred.”

 

Richard Jeperson stood before her: tall, thin and gaunt. He could have been any age, but working it out from the backstory—child in the war, career in the 1970s—Stacy knew he must be in his midsixties. When younger, he’d looked older; now, he just looked himself. Dramatic streaks ran through the Zapata moustache, but the long fall of tight curls was glossily black. He had the pale skin of someone who’s stayed indoors for decades, deep-etched around those silver-flashing eyes but unslack under the chin, unspotted on the backs of his hands.

 

A Persian kitten peeped out of a pocket, and a Siamese cat perched on his shoulder like Long John Silver’s parrot. He wore suede winkle-picker shoes, pinstripe city gent trousers, a turquoise kaftan tunic belted with a sash, and, as if to offset the Siamese, a gold-frogged green velvet greatcoat over his other shoulder, pocket unflapped so the kitten could breathe.

 

“You expected Howard Hughes fingernails and a Ben Gunn beard?”

 

He spoke like a theatrical knight, but his eyes were lively. She could imagine him headlining the Glastonbury Festival in 1972 or playing Don Quixote in a silent movie.

 

She introduced herself as DS Cotterill.

 

“Stacy,” he said, surprising her. “Interesting career.”

 

She was surprised he kept up with New Scotland Yard.

 

“Teenage model, then policewoman. Why the change?”

 

Almost no one mentioned it anymore. At Hendon Police College, she had done extreme things to blokes who thought it funny to go on about her after-school job. Jeperson had wrong-footed her, though he seemed genuinely interested rather than attempting a put-down.

 

“It’s no life for a grown woman without an eating disorder,” she said, uncomfortable. “And the agency dropped me when I refused to have my back teeth pulled. It was supposed to make my face look thinner.”

 

He cocked his head to one side, then the other, considering her face.

 

“I bet they wanted to keep the teeth.”

 

“As a matter of fact they did. All the girls’ teeth. In jam jars in a cupboard, individually labelled. In solutions of brine.”

 

“Better than a contract. You’re well out of that.”

 

Jeperson looked at her face first and last. Which made him different from 95% of men. That shouldn’t be a surprise; everything about him was different. She found herself almost disarmed, then remembered he was mad.

 

“Come through to the study,” he said, dislodging the Siamese, who streaked squirrel-fast up branches to the second-floor landing. The plant was a spreading green apocalypse, a tree that became a vine when it suited. It was stapled to the wall in several crucial places.

 

“Would you believe this began as a cutting? From yggdrasil, the Norse world-tree. A gift to the Diogenes Club from William Morris in the days of gaslight and pea-soup fogs. When Mycroft Holmes sat on the Ruling Cabal. Brother of the more famous. Charles Beauregard lived in this house then. You wouldn’t have heard of him, though some scholar has been struggling to research a biography for years. I met Beauregard once, when I was a little lad. Nearly a hundred, but kept au fait with the comings and goings. A very interesting Englishman. Unlike me. I’m foreign, you know. Nonspecific, but foreign.”

 

He slipped back the cuff of his kaftan, to show a blue tattooed number.

 

“Adopted by an Englishman, adopted by the Club. Raised for the position, as it were. I’m a foundling of war. I must have had a name and a nationality before 1945, but the cylinders don’t fire up here.”

 

He tapped his temple.

 

“Nothing before the Liberation. A few other gaps, sadly. It’s been a crowded life, so I have had to forget things to make room. Wish I could have planned better. I remember a great many things it would make sense to forget. But not...”

 

He let the thought dangle and opened a door.

 

The white study was strip-lit. Windowpanes were whitewashed to match the walls, ceiling and carpet. A large picture hung opposite, canvas as blankly white as the frame. A milk-white shelving unit contained books with white, featureless spines. Soft white plastic cubes formed a settee along one wall and chairs around the room. Hard white plastic boxes made a desk and tables. A perfect-bound magazine for the blind, glossy pages stamped with Braille, lay open on a low table. A towering sound system, white as a fridge, played “Happiness is a Warm Gun.” The almost-invisible CD jewel case on the floor reminded her the song was from The White Album.

 

“This is a visually sterile environment,” Jeperson explained. “I need it sometimes. There is too much information out there to process comfortably. I have an open mind. That’s my gift and curse.”

 

Jeperson sat, arms laid along the back of the settee, shrugging out of his coat, long legs crossed. He motioned her to do make herself comfortable. She put her parcel on the low table, a violent intrusion of brown, and sat on a stool.

 

“Is that a present? For me?”

 

“CI Regent asked me to bring it to you.”

 

“Ah-ha. It’s evidence, isn’t it? This is a case. You know I’m retired? I don’t consult or sleuth or intuit or adventure. Not my decision. Things changed. Certain elements among our rulers made judgements. The Diogenes Club closed its doors. I am given to understand that some quango took over our duties. You can probably reach them in a unit on an industrial estate in Wolverhampton. Whatever threatens the fabric of our reality will prove a nice change from playing solitaire with Rhine cards or theorising undetectable assassinations or whatever Adam Onions’ little helpers do to justify their expenses claims.”

 

She waved him to a halt.

 

“This is too much for me, Mr. Jeperson....”

 

“Richard, please.”

 

“This is too much for me, Richard. Until this morning, I’d never heard of you or the Diogenes Club and I’m really not up to speed. CI Regent—

 

“Fred...”

 

“CI Regent has requested that I work with you.”

 

“Very clever. Chuck the old dog a dolly-mixture and creep up with the muzzle.”

 

Hot-cheeked, she stood up.

 

“You resent that,” he said.

 

“They told me you were perceptive.”

 

He was up too, close to her, hands around hers, radiating sincerity.

 

“I apologise. I forget myself. As I mentioned.”

 

She damped her momentary anger. But she wasn’t ready to trust this dinosaur.

 

“Fred Regent wouldn’t have sent you round if you were only blonde. You collared ‘Misery’ Maudsley, did you not? Fred must have fought hard to keep that little brouhaha out of Onions’ remit. Tell me, it wasn’t in any of the papers, but ... when you slapped the cuffs on him, was Maudsley doing something with his eyes, something more than looking at you?”

 

She remembered. A squirming. Like REM dream twitches, but with the eyes wide open.

 

“I thought so,” said Richard, wheeling across the room. “Maggots. Little tiny maggots, hatched and hungry. An inconvenience, at the least.mAlways the problem with reanimation by force of will. Any qualified houngan cures the corpse before raising the zombi. Still, Maudsley got his job done. What happened to his books? Mislaid in the evidence room as usual?”

 

“Everything from the house went. There was no court case pending, so the coroner brought in an open verdict. Maudsley’s stuff got tossed into a skip.”

 

Jeperson shook his head.

 

“So anyone could breeze along and filch the tomes? That’s like tossing a sackful of loaded revolvers into a playgroup. Never have happened in my day.”

 

He was enthused for a moment. Then he stopped.

 

“But I’m out of it. As you’ll have gathered.”

 

She said nothing. Jeperson wandered around his white room, touching things, looking away from her.

 

“It’s all parapsychology now,” he said. “Target figures and year-end reports and jolly-promising-results-minister. We had mysteries, Stacy. Riddles of the sphinx, conundrums of the incalculable. Not parapsychology, but parapsychedelia. Not phenomena, not anomalies, not quantum metaphysics, but magic ... enchantment... deviltry!”

 

He stood by the table, fingers drumming on brown paper.

 

He looked at her, eyes piercing, looked at the package, bit the end of his moustache, looked at her again.

 

“What’s in the parcel?”

 

“I thought you said you were out of it.”

 

“Minx! What’s in the parcel?

 

“You of all people should know what they say about cats and curiosity.”

 

Jeperson picked up the parcel, like a six-year-old with a present on Christmas Eve. He shook it, and held it to his ear.

 

“Very light for its size. Not a case of wine or an occasional table, then.”

 

He squeezed and crackled.

 

“Feels fabricky. Like a blanket. Or a party frock.”

 

He tweaked something through the paper.

 

“Brass buttons. It’s a coat. I’ve guessed. I’m right, aren’t I? A coat, found in evidence. Bullet holes and bloodstains.”

 

His mood switched, from playful to serious. She felt a chill.

 

“I’m right about that, too,” he said, sober.

 

“Open it,” she urged.

 

“Very well,” he decided. “For you. Because you told me about Maudsley’s eyes. But no commitment. This is not going to be Richard Jeperson Rides Again.”

 

He slipped a tiny blade out of his sleeve and snipped the string. The paper fell away and he held a stiff, greyish green coat. There were bullet holes in the left sleeve and the hip pocket. And old blood.

 

The sound system was playing “Rocky Raccoon.”

 

Jeperson looked at the makers’ label. He held the coat against himself, mouth open in astonishment.

 

“This is ...”

 

“Yours. We traced it through your tailor. They had the record on a handwritten card in a box in the basement. You bought it in 1968, about the time this album came out.”

 

Jeperson shook his head. He was trembling, garment shaking in his grip. She thought he might have the beginnings of a seizure.

 

“It’s the same cut as that one there,” she added, nodding at the settee.

 

The kitten had escaped from its pocket and was trying claws out on the silk lining.

 

“I don’t own two of anything. This is that coat over there. Where was this found?”

 

“You’d better come with me to the Yard.”

 

Jeperson laid the coat down next to its identical twin.

 

“To help you with your enquiries,” he said, frowning hard. “I think I better had. This, Stacy, is serious. This makes ‘Misery’ Maudsley look like a purse-snatching in Safeway’s car park. There isn’t room in the world for two of this.”

 

“I have a car waiting,” she said.

 

He picked up his coat, the one she hadn’t brought, dislodging the kitten. It nosed the doppelgarment, thought better of it, and dashed from the room. Jeperson slipped an arm into one sleeve, but needed her help with the other. His shoulder shook, almost spasming.

 

For a moment, he did look his age.

 

“You’d better bring that” he said, finger aimed at the surplus coat. “Wrap it up again. It should be sealed in lead, but sturdy brown paper will have to do.”

 

She knew she was not suggestible. But she no more wanted to touch the coat than the kitten had, or Jeperson did.

 

Still, she picked up the paper, using it like an oven-glove, and took hold of the coat, wrapping it tight against the possibility that its arms might come to life and throttle her.

 

At the doorstep, Jeperson hesitated.

 

“It’s been a very long time,” he said weakly. “I don’t know if I can...”

 

He seemed to flinch from daylight, from the outside world. Then he looked at her parcel.

 

“No choice,” he said, striding through the doorway.

 

They left the house. Jeperson did not lock up behind them.

 

* * * *

 

5

 

“It’s your island, Miss Gill,” Jeperson said to Persephone. “You be Neil Armstrong.”

 

Stacy noted Onions sulking whenever Jeperson acted as if he were in charge. The Man From I-Psi-T needed to feel he was tour operator for this jaunt.

 

At Jeperson’s nod, Kydd hauled the handle and swung open the door. The temperature in the back of the Sea King plunged.

 

“Best not,” said Onions.

 

Persephone had unstrapped herself. Ignoring Onions, she slid across the floor and out of the helicopter.

 

“Mind the goats,” Stacy advised.

 

Through the door, Stacy watched the Droning of Skerra stamp around, doing the hunting set version of t’ai chi—thumping the heels of her green Wellies against grassy sod, flexing her back and thighs as if she were on horseback, and struggling against the wind to tie a Hermes scarf around her hair. She lost the scarf, which was sucked upwards by an invisible Kjempestrupe.

 

Nothing killed Persephone, so Stacy assumed it was all right to get out of the transport. She took off her ear-baffles and undid all the straps.

 

Jeperson made a “ladies first” bow. Stacy dangled her legs out of the helicopter, then took the jump. She realised how stiff she’d become and uncrooked her back.

 

Wind slashed her face.

 

Onions thumped onto the turf beside her, and strode off purposefully. Kydd helped the others leave the Sea King. De Maltby clambered down, snug in his flight suit and helmet.

 

Yoland was on his knees, grateful for solid ground under him, grasping handfuls of Skerra.

 

“I wouldn’t do that again in a hurry,” he said, smiling.

 

Stacy didn’t point out that unless he wanted to become Persephone’s sole subject he’d have to take the return trip.

 

“Should I get some grub up?” Kydd asked Jeperson.

 

“A very civilised notion.”

 

“No time for that,” said Onions, coming back. “We need to find Captain Vernon. I don’t mind saying I’m worried about the A-Boat.”

 

“Lost with all hands,” said Jeperson.

 

“You can’t know that.”

 

“Quite right, Onions. I can’t. But I do.”

 

“Vernon had a six-man team.”

 

“They’re gone. Forget them.”

 

Onions frowned. Jeperson lost interest and drifted away, towards Sewell Head. The little man hadn’t brought a hat, and was trying to protect his bald dome with his hands. Jeperson gave him a knit cap he had spare. Head smiled weak thanks.

 

Stacy noticed Jeperson was the only one who could talk with Sewell Head. She worried that they shared more with each other than anyone else here.

 

“We should get to the village,” said Onions.

 

“The Blowhole, surely,” ventured Jeperson.

 

Onions ignored him and strode downslope, expecting to be followed. Jeperson gave Stacy a look, then shrugged and plodded carefully after the man from I-Psi-T. Stacy let the others get moving before taking up the rear.

 

De Maltby stayed with the Sea King, but Kydd came along.

 

A mean-eyed goat peered through a hole in the wall, cynically examining the newcomers. If war came, it’d be a toss-up who’d get eaten and who’d get to eat.

 

After only a few steps into merciless wind, down a field that inclined enough for a ski slope, Stacy couldn’t feel her face but was hobbled by pain in her ankles. She wished she had a city around her.

 

Onions paused to look at his flip-book.

 

A large blue bat attacked him, all spiny frame and enveloping membranes. He was wrapped in an instant, and spun off balance.

 

Sewell Head threw himself facedown in the dirt. Maltesers bled from his pockets.

 

Onions yelled from inside his blue cocoon.

 

“Shoot it, shoot it.”

 

Stacy jogged down, miraculously avoiding a twisted ankle. She joined Jeperson in hauling the “bat” off Onions. It was a tent, trailing guy-ropes and skewers, poles snapped.

 

Kydd had drawn his revolver and assumed the stance. Now, with Onions free of the tent and sat on the ground, Kydd’s gun was aimed at his head. He waved it aside, red-faced, hair stuck up in an undignified crown.

 

“You have been attacked by an item of rogue camping equipment,” said Jeperson.

 

He helped Onions stand up.

 

The wind caught the tent again. It hurtled off like a crooked kite, chasing after Persephone’s scarf.

 

Onions patted his hair and twisted inside his anorak, realigning the hip pockets with his hips.

 

“Vernon was supposed to set up camp,” he said.

 

Jeperson laid a hand on Onions’ shoulder.

 

“Vernon is gone, Adam.”

 

“We have to look.”

 

Jeperson nodded and let Onions continue.

 

“Don’t know what they’re talking about half the time,” Persephone said to her.

 

Stacy thought that was a fair average.

 

Onions had been right about one thing. It was getting dark.

 

* * * *

 

6

 

The briefing was not at the Yard, but in Whitehall. From the yellowed ceiling, Stacy guessed the panelled, windowless committee chamber had been one of the legendary “smoke-filled rooms.” New Labour had taken out the ashtrays and put up “Thank you for not smoking” signs.

 

Notional chairperson was Morag Duff, Deputy Minister for Heritage and Sport, who didn’t actually appear. A sound-activated minidisc recorder lay on her blotter at the head of the table. A tartan tam-o’-shanter perched on the back of a chair, suggesting that the Deputy Minister had been here but just popped out.

 

Stacy looked at the Walter Sickert on the wall—saved from Patricia Cornwell by public subscription—and wondered if Duff was behind it, peeking through hidden eyeholes. This was the apparatus of the secret state, and spooks loved these games.

 

Jeperson was a study in suppressed excitement, alert to the point of hypertension, given to chewing on a knuckle. He had been in deep thought during the drive over.

 

Now, he took in the room. Three men sat like wise monkeys.

 

“Adam,” Jeperson acknowledged the alpha ape, hear-no-evil.

 

“Richard Jeperson,” grunted the bearish man. “We are calling out the reserves.”

 

Stacy pulled out a chair for Jeperson, who insisted she take it. She ended up sitting across from the big man. He looked like a rugby player five years into beery middle age, a slackening mountain in a baggy suit.

 

“This is Adam Onions,” said Jeperson.

 

“O-nye-ons,” he corrected. “Nothing to do with the vegetable. A whole different etymology.”

 

“He is from the Institute of Something Trickology.”

 

“I-Psi-T. Pronounced ‘Eyesight.’ The Institute of Psi Tech. Director of same.”

 

Onions’ eyes took in her chest. She didn’t need to be psychic to know what he thought of her.

 

“I’m Stacy Cotterili. Detective Sergeant.”

 

Onions did a “not a secretary then” take. She’d seen that before.

 

“I don’t know these other fellows, I’m afraid,” said Jeperson.

 

“Call me Rory,” said see-no-evil, a chunky cardigan chap who reminded her of an eager young vicar she’d arrested for molesting elderly parishioners. “I’m a civil servant, but don’t hold it against me. I’m really a good bloke.”

 

Rory smiled, delivering what Stacy recognised from her modelling days as Benign Variant Two. She wondered if he was working from the book they’d had at her agency, 101 Expression for All Occasions.

 

“And this is Franklin Yoland ...”

 

Say-no-evil put up his hand. He had a tan and lush lips.

 

“He’s one of those Weapons Inspectors you hear so much about. Nothing he doesn’t know about whizz-bangs, nerve gases and anthrax spores. Up on all the latest euphemisms. Made us laugh earlier... what was it, Frank? Yes, he was describing missiles as ‘delivery systems for’—how did you put it?—’geography parcels and history parcels’?”

 

Yoland shook his head. ‘“Physics packages, chemistry packages or biology packages.’“

 

“In the long run, you’re more right than you know,” Jeperson told Rory. “It comes down to geography and history.”

 

“Very true. Take a pew.”

 

Jeperson walked round the room. He picked up the tam-o’-shanter and put it down again.

 

Yoland looked at the Man from the Diogenes Club as if he might detonate.

 

At the opposite end of the table, a secretary sat with an open laptop, fingers poised over the keyboard. Jeperson smiled at her, acknowledging her presence with a little wave. She did not respond.

 

Jeperson found an odd little old man sat in the corner, away from the table, reading a book. A strange look arced between them.

 

“Don’t mind him,” said Rory. “That’s Sewell Head.”

 

“Swellhead,” mumbled the little man.

 

Jeperson shook his hand, warmly.

 

Head was bald, with an odd, dome-shaped skull, no chin to speak of and flattish wet eyes. The sleeves of his shabby overcoat were too long for his childish hands. A knit scarf was wrapped several times around his neck, so his head nestled like an Easter egg in its presentation bow.

 

“He was Brain of Britain a while back,” said Rory.

 

Head gave a puzzling smile, one Stacy had never seen demonstrated in a photograph. Almost lipless, he had a lot of extra teeth. He had eaten chocolate recently.

 

“Mr. Head is Adam’s discovery,” said the civil servant.

 

“What’s your IQ, Jeperson?” asked Onions. “Off the scale? Next to Sewell Head, you’re a cretin. So am I. Technically, he’s the cleverest man in England. Top five in the world.”

 

“Barred from pub trivia contests throughout the home counties,” put in Rory. “You used to hustle, didn’t you, old son? Guys, he would go in alone on quiz night, nurse a gin and it, then bungle a couple of easy ones. ‘Who won the World Cup in 1966?’ ‘Was that perhaps Italy?’ Big laughs. Then he’d get a bit tipsy. Apparently, tipsy. Come over all shirty, insist on a big money bet with Local Hero. You know the type, Captain Know-It-All, memorised his Guinness Book of Uninteresting Facts. Fifty, a hundred quid on the table. Side bets with everyone in the bar to bump up the total stake. Quiz gets serious, one-on-one, ‘make your mind up’ time. Our Mr. Head suddenly switches on like a toaster, goes from wondering if ‘Lucky Lucky Lucky’ was a hit for Bananarama ...”

 

Head’s lips twitched, a downturn at one side, peculiar pain in his glassy eye.

 

“...to rattling off the fifth paragraph of Article Ten of the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713....”

 

‘“And Her Britannic Majesty,” said Sewell Head, conquering panic and rising to the occasion, “at the request of the Catholic King, does consent and agree, that no leave shall be given under any pretence whatsoever, either to Jews or Moors, to reside or have their dwellings in the said town of Gibraltar; and that no refuge or shelter shall be allowed to any Moorish ships of war in the harbour of the said town, whereby the communication between Spain and Ceuta may be obstructed, or the coasts of Spain be infested by the excursions of the Moors.’“

 

Rory laughed and pointed.

 

“I love this guy. Penny in the slot. He knows the answer. Anyway, by the end of the evening, Local Hero is bleeding from the arse, fallen faces all round the room. Our Mr. Head is off with a fistful of notes. And that’s another pub off the list. They call him the Triv Terminator.”

 

“It’s not a memory trick,” said Onions, warming. “He’s not some autistic savant with a set of encyclopaedias. He’s a puzzle solver. We’ve never tested anything like him. He’s a Talent. Off the scale.”

 

Head shrugged modestly.

 

“I like to think things through,” he said. “Make everything neat and tidy.”

 

“Call him the Zen Master of Quantum Cleverness,” said Rory.

 

“Duke have offered the dean’s left nut for a free run at him,” said Onions. “The Tibetans have their antennae a-twitch. He could take the field up to the next level. Scientifically verifiable. None of your ‘feelings’ and ‘intuitions,’ Jeperson. Cold, hard, steely data. And he can do it every time, under laboratory conditions.”

 

Jeperson looked down at the little man.

 

“He works in a sweetshop,” said Rory.

 

Onions gave a what-a-waste sigh.

 

“Nothing in the constitution says everyone should be ambitious,” continued Rory. “We dug out his old report book from Coal Hill Secondary Modern. Min Inf keeps copies of those, you know. I burned mine. Forgotten what your netball teacher thought of you, Detective Sergeant? We could find out. Any guesses which phrase came up all the time in young Sewell Head’s reports? All his teachers said it. Over and over.”

 

Jeperson stroked his moustaches. He nodded to Stacy.

 

‘“Could do better if he tried,’“ she said flatly.

 

Rory thumped the desk in delight.

 

“Spot-bloody-on. Give Juliet Bravo a cuddly panda. Cripes, the brainpower in this room! Find a way to harness it, and we could light up Blackpool’s Golden Mile.”

 

Jeperson gave Rory a penetrating look, then left Head in his corner.

 

He took off his coat and threw it on the table. It flopped over Morag Duff’s minidisc recorder, and lay like the king’s deer tossed dead onto Guy of Gisborne’s table by Robin Hood.

 

“Adam,” said Jeperson seriously, “tell me about the apport.”

 

Rory tried a “now we come to brass tacks” chuckle, but it died.

 

Onions looked at the coat. Stacy unrolled the brown paper and let the other coat (the same coat?) lie next to the original (copy?).

 

Onions bit his lower lip.

 

“Yes,” said Jeperson insistently, “they’re the same. Not in the way two peas in a pod are the same, but in the way one unique special never-to-be-repeated, once-in-a-lifetime pea is the same as itself.”

 

“What’s an apport?” Stacy asked.

 

“A physical object manifested supernaturally,” said Sewell Head.

 

“Rabbit out of a hat,” footnoted Jeperson.

 

“At I-Psi-T, we’ve documented the phenomenon extensively,” said Onions. “Apports are often household items. Inanimate. We have a collection. Hairbrushes, fireplace pokers, a clock with mangled guts. One theory is that they slip through wormholes, travel in time. Miss 1893 loses her garter and it pops up a hundred years later, to the bewilderment of all concerned. Others don’t obviously come from the past or future but from somewhere else.”

 

“Dimension Xxxx,” said Jeperson in a hollow, echoey, radio announcer voice.

 

“We discourage that sort of talk, but yes ... some other continuum, where things are put together differently That clock is interesting. Turned up in a bus station in Eastbourne. We have it on the surveillance camera. Not there one instant, there the next. Its insides are the bones of small animals we can’t identify, fit together with sticky gum we can’t analyse, generating a small but quantifiable electric current. Because it didn’t keep very good time, we thought it was something disguised as a clock. Then Mr. Head worked out that it keeps perfect time, if hours were to ebb and flow like the tides, getting longer then shorter again. The cycle is beyond me but he says it makes perfect sense.”

 

Head nodded.

 

“So this is pretending to be your coat?” she asked Jeperson.

 

“No, this isn’t like the clock. This is my coat. Messrs. Drecker and Coote, Savile Row and Carnaby Street. Made to my order in 1968. And this is my coat too. It has just come here by a different route.”

 

“A rough route, by the looks of it,” said Rory. “We DNA-tested the blood.”

 

“Some of it’s yours,” said Onions, enjoying the thought.

 

“And the rest of it’s mine,” put in Sewell Head.

 

* * * *

 

7

 

Skerra Landsby barely qualified as a ruin. All the buildings were roofless, and most of the walls had fallen. A war memorial (Boer, 1914-18) was a brass plaque, names unreadable, plinth aswarm with bubble-wrap seaweed. Stacy remembered mindlessly happy childhood days at Southend-on-Sea, bursting the little brown bags between thumb and forefinger, jimmying whelks off rocks with her Swiss army knife.

 

More collapsed tents flapped in the wind, tethered by skewers.

 

Onions’ torch was the only light.

 

There was supposed to be a Royal Navy assault team here, despatched under cover of a training exercise, kitted out with arms to last through a small war. Her understanding was that the boffins’ security would be provided by Captain Vernon’s mob, who had been here before and scoped out the potential dangers. That was out the window.

 

“What do you suppose happened?” Persephone asked her.

 

“Nothing good.”

 

The Droning of Skerra chewed that over. As the expedition’s volunteer, she must be kicking herself. Really-a-Good-Bloke Rory had decided they ought to ask Persephone before camping out on her island. She’d given in to a whim, insisting she be taken along to check out her realm. Ascot was a wash this year, evidently.

 

Onions and Yoland climbed a wall that extended into the sea, and walked out across the waves. Onions shone his torch at the A-Boat, which was in a sorry state, hull shattered below the waterline.

 

“We should be below,” said Jeperson.

 

“Out of this bloody weather,” put in Persephone. “Too right.”

 

Head skinned the wrapper from a Twix and bit off both biscuit fingers at once.

 

“My understanding,” said Jeperson, calling out to Onions, “was that all the observed manifestations were in the caverns. Up here, it’s just wind and goats.”

 

Yoland and Onions stuck out their arms like tightrope walkers and came back to shore, footing wobbly on none-too-secure stones. Yoland took a run at the last few feet and jumped onto dry land.

 

Onions made a show of coming to a decision.

 

“We should make our way to the Blowhole,” he said.

 

Jeperson refrained from pointing out that he had made that suggestion when it was still light.

 

“Lead on,” said Stacy.

 

Onions looked at his map and strode uphill.

 

Before his light got too far away, everyone fell in behind him.

 

* * * *

 

8

 

CI Regent had turned up at Euston to see the party off on the midnight sleeper for Edinburgh. While Really-a-Good-Bloke Rory issued “nonoptional suggestions” to the man from “Pronounced ‘Eyesight’“ and Sewell Head filled a carrier-bag with sweeties, Regent had a moment with Richard Jeperson. Stacy gathered they hadn’t talked in over ten years. She hung back tactfully and wondered if she’d packed enough warm clothes. Before she’d boarded the train, her guv’nor had taken her aside, nodded at Jeperson, and said, “He’s special. Take care of him.” She agreed he was and promised she would.

 

The first leg hadn’t even got them halfway to Skerra. At Edinburgh Airport, they breakfasted and Persephone Gill joined the party, with luggage. A private jet, a luxurious waiting room with wings, flew them to Thurso, almost as far north on the mainland as John O’Groats. Stacy had never been to Scotland before. Edinburgh seemed essentially London with different accents. Only after flying over green glens and glinting thin lochs for tedious hours did she have a real sense of being hideously off her patch.

 

If she’d been asked yesterday where Thurso was, she’d have ventured a guess at Antarctica; she wasn’t sure now that she’d have been wrong. At home, whether in her flat or on duty, she knew how to get Tampax, small-arms ammunition or last Thursday’s daily papers at three in the morning. Here, she wasn’t even sure what to ask for when she needed directions to the Ladies.

 

In Thurso, midafternoon, they all had complete medical checkups at the Air-Sea Rescue station clinic. She got a five-minute once-over, and a nurse congratulated her on not being pregnant and having all her limbs. Jeperson was in with the woman for an hour and a half. Everyone else sat around a reception area. Sewell Head offered round Fisherman’s Friends, and hers went tasteless during the wait. When let free, Jeperson shrugged an apology. He kissed the nurse’s hand; she gave him a seal approval that struck Stacy as a lot more personal than the one everyone else in the party had stamped on their file.

 

Then they were all put in a “guest house,” opened especially out of season. Before dinner, Viscount Henry de Maltby made himself known. He looked with disdain down Persephone’s dress, said “uhhhm” several times, then had a huddle with Adam Onions to go over charts and reports. Aircrewman Kydd was there, too; rubber-faced and cheery, Falklands and Gulf War I insignia on his jersey shoulder.

 

“Better get an early night,” suggested Onions.

 

That made Jeperson decide to stay up by the fire in the snug. Stacy’s prime directive was to be his minder, so she did too. Onions frowned a little, but plodded off up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire without complaint.

 

This was the first time she had been alone with her charge since leaving his house thirty hours previously.

 

She still didn’t know what to make of him.

 

“And who might you be, my dear?” he asked.

 

The snug was warm, but the question chilled her.

 

“Ah,” said Jeperson. “We’ve met. Pardon me....”

 

He shut his eyes and massaged his temples. Then, he clicked his fingers.

 

“All present and correct, Stacy. Fearfully sorry to give you a fright.”

 

The knot inside her relaxed. Jeperson was so spry and mercurial it was too easy to forget his fragilities.

 

He insisted on killing a bottle of thirty-year-old Scotch. After two busy days, a single tot made her head swim and she was seeing shapes in the fire. But he drank steadily without seeming more or less affected.

 

By firelight, his face was dramatic, almost pantomimish.

 

“CI Regent told me to catch up on my secret history,” she ventured.

 

“Sound advice.”

 

“But if it’s secret...”

 

“I see your problem. Don’t you have that “welcomed to the Inner Circle” feeling yet? Corridors of power, meetings with mandarins, transport laid on, royals and nobs, accommodation to order. It’s very different from chasing villains and making court dates.”

 

“I still get the impression I’ve not been told anything.”

 

Jeperson chuckled. “I’ve been in this game as long as I can remember, and I mean literally, and I feel like that too. Of course, I’m supposed to be supersensitive. I don’t need to be told, because I have to keep on proving that I’m still sharp. I have to intuit, feel, say ...”

 

He waved his fingers.

 

“You and CI ... you and Fred ... used to work like this? In the seventies?”

 

“Not quite like this, though he also came to the Diogenes Club from the Met. Only just out of uniform. Shaved his head to go undercover with a bower gang.”

 

So that was how he lost his hair!

 

“Diogenes was the philosopher who lived in the barrel,” she said. “Told Alexander to get out of his light.”

 

Jeperson raised an eyebrow.

 

“I’ve been on trivia teams too,” she said. “But what is the Diogenes Club? Everyone goes on as if it were famous, but I’d never heard of it.”

 

“The original idea was to be obscure. It was a club for the unclubbable. Also, a trunk of our family tree of intelligence agencies. It was there for all the business the other plods weren’t comfy with. Businesses like Misery Maudsley. That’d have been a Diogenes show in my day. Angel Down, Sussex. Tomorrow Town. The Seven Stars. Many other matters mysterious and malign. Few of which mean anything to the general public. Part of the game has always been protecting the Great British from knowledge deemed likely to send them off their collective nut.”

 

“In my experience, the general public can cope with a lot.”

 

“Maybe so,” he said, swivelling his eyes to peer at her, thinking. “However, for more than a hundred years, the Diogenes Club was a court of last resort. The Ruling Cabal were the original ‘spooks.’ Before me, the Club harboured others with special interests. Mycroft Holmes, Charles Beauregard, Henry Merrivale. Women, too: the Diogenes was the first gentleman’s club to go coed. Katharine Reed, Catriona Kaye, Dion Fortune. My immediate sponsors were my adoptive father, Geoffrey Jeperson, and Beauregard’s protégé, Edwin Winthrop. My intention was that Fred and ... and another person, unknown to you ... should succeed me. It didn’t work out like that.”

 

“What happened?”

 

“Nothing dramatic. Drip-drip-drip of history. Some might blame Arthur Conan Doyle. He let Dr. Watson put in print the observation that Mycroft Holmes not only worked for the British Government but ‘on some occasions, was the British Government.’ Naturally, that earned a black demerit in Whitehall. Steps were taken to ensure that those occasions never reoccurred. Winston Churchill spent years trying to set limits on the remit of the Diogenes Club. He was a man for fixations, hanging onto Hitler, standing up to India (pardon me, t’wixt and about) and curbing that blasted Club.”

 

Jeperson frowned and somehow made his face Churchillian. He laughed, breaking the illusion, and refilled his glass.

 

“When I was under Winthrop, adventuring with Fred, successive governments were fractious. This is what happens when you become Prime Minister, or used to anyway. Just after you’ve had tea with the Queen and been given the launch codes for the independent nuclear deterrent, the Man from the Diogenes Club presents you with irrefutable evidence that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than came up on Any Questions? during the election campaign. If you’re very polite, the Man tells you who Jack the Ripper was, what happened to the Mary Celeste and where that thing at Roswell the Yanks are so bloody sure is an alien spacecraft actually comes from. PMs shudder and stick their heads in the sand. The Diogenes Club is then left to get on with defending the realm from ghosties and ghoulies.”

 

She thought of pressing him on the identity of Jack the Ripper, but the moment passed.

 

“Winthrop did Wilson and Heath. Your darlin’ Harold grumbled a bit but sat up straight when he was shown a genuine fifteenth-century manuscript describing the course late twentieth-century history would take if British troops were committed to fight in Vietnam. Ted Heath got very enthusiastic and interested in curses and banes in the context of industrial relations, then bothered Winthrop with ‘suggestions.’ By the time Jim Callahan took over, Winthrop was gone and I wound up with the thankless task. Actually, that’s inaccurate. Callahan said thank you very much. I told him that the chicken entrails suggested it might be an idea to keep a gunboat or two near the Falklands, and he said right-o. Otherwise, he continued as if we didn’t exist. Which was as it should be. Then, in 1979 ... I bet you can guess the rest.”

 

“Margaret Thatcher.”

 

Jeperson raised his glass in toast.

 

“Got it in one, Stacy. Margaret Hilda Roberts Boadicca Thatcher. Not so much a new broom as a new defoliant.”

 

“She refused to believe in anything?”

 

Jeperson smiled.

 

“Oh no. She knew it all beforehand. She had associations. The Club was never alone in its interests. It always had powerful rivals, and Mrs. Empty ... Mistress M. T. ... was a sponsee of the worst of ‘em. There was talk of privatisation, but in the end she went for dismantling us, tearing up the historic charter, boarding up the premises in Pall Mall. Those who could be pensioned off, were. Some others were kept out of it with the threat of prosecution or worse. Fred was seconded back to his original job and began his long slow climb at the Yard. I, ah, had several episodes that did me no credit. There is such a thing as feeling too deeply. Mrs. Empty, you’ll gather, scrapped the South Atlantic gunboats too. You know how that played out.”

 

“Where does Onions come into it?”

 

“O-nye-ons? He’s a scientist, you know. Not a crackpot. Well, just because the Diogenes Club was out of commission didn’t mean that the vast and strange forces of the world slacked off. There were still ghosties and ghoulies. And some official response was required. ‘Pronounced “Eyesight”‘ was a typical Thatcher body—not responsible to parliament, a huge drain on public money, and with barely a result to show for it. But it is scientific. It’s a wonder they didn’t try to sell shares. Onions publishes enough to keep tenure and submits reports on the practical applications of the paranormal. John Major’s man originally, he’s very New Labour now. The woman who left her cap at that meeting is covertly the Minister for All Things Weird. ‘Heritage and Sport’ is a euphemism, of course. The last Big Idea was that economic blackspots were under ancient curses. Focus groups were quizzed as to how to lift the gloom. They came up with the Millennium Dome. One could be forgiven for weeping. The whole apparatus trundles along, most of the time. It has managed tolerably without me.”

 

“And you? You left it all behind?”

 

“Took my bat and ball and repaired to Cheyne Walk. It was a relief, really—not having to feel anything anymore.”

 

He made her angry again. It was all very well to sneer at Onions and the government and the bloody dome. If he’d done anything in the last twenty-five years except stare at white walls and feed the cats, she might have been more inclined to sympathise.

 

“Good point,” he said.

 

He had picked up her thoughts. It was like ice-points in her heart.

 

“I’m sorry,” he said genuinely. “We’re just in tune. Fred knew we would be. You haven’t tumbled yet.”

 

“But I will?”

 

“Don’t be peeved. It’s not so terrible. What harm can I be? I’m a bitter old recluse, totally ineffectual and probably on drugs.”

 

She didn’t want to laugh, but his boyish look of querying innocence tickled her.

 

“That’s better. You were a smiler, not a pouter.”

 

It was true. She had always been photographed showing her teeth. She thought that was why the agency made a fuss about them.”

 

“Besides, I’m here, aren’t I?” said Jeperson. “I could have thrown a pillow over my head, but I’m on the way to Skerra like the rest of our merry band.”

 

“Have you been to the island before?”

 

“I don’t know. Possibly.”

 

* * * *

 

9

 

The Blowhole was the highest point on Skerra. It looked like a volcanic crater, but the file said it was man-made, a vertical shaft sunk from the levelled-off plateau abutting the cliff into the water-carved caverns below. Steps hewn into the rock wound around the hole, though a Post-it note on the page advised against attempting any descent without climbing gear.

 

Adam Onions, big orange suitcase fetched from the Sea King, stood at the lip of the Blowhole and pointed his torch down.

 

The “steps” were a wet-looking groove around the shaft. However, a ladder—orange rope and silver treads—dangled, secured to the rock by pitons.

 

‘“Arne Saknussemm, His Sign,’“ quoted Jeperson.

 

“Beg your pardon?” said Onions.

 

“Voyage au centre de la terre, Jules Verne,” explained Sewell Head, the trivia champion, “1863, expanded 1867; translated, anonymously, into English as Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 1872.”

 

“Also a film with James Mason,” Kydd added.

 

“I’m so glad that’s cleared up,” said Onions.

 

Head scrunched the wrapper from a large bar of Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut, held it over the Blowhole, and dropped it. Weighted by silver foil, it spiralled downwards; then an underground gust caught it and disappeared. For a moment, Stacy didn’t know why her spine prickled. Then she realised the chocolate wrapper had been sucked rather than blown.

 

It had started to rain. The wind was so fierce that pellets of water came at them horizontally, or even from below.

 

“We should get out of this weather,” said Persephone Gill. “Seriously.”

 

“So speaks the classical Queen of the Underworld,” said Jeperson.

 

“Also known as ‘Proserpina’,” footnoted Head.

 

“Our business is down there, Adam,” said Jeperson. “It is why we’re here.”

 

Onions made show of thinking it over.

 

“Until we find out what happened to Captain Vernon’s team, I don’t think we should risk—”

 

“We won’t find out by standing up here catching our deaths,” said Jeperson. “I deduce from this ladder that the estimable Captain and his hardy tars are quite likely down below.”

 

“They were ordered to stay—”

 

Jeperson silenced him with a look.

 

“In case you’d forgotten, we’re the professionals in this field. We’re the psychic detectives, the occult adventurers, the ghost-hunters. And this hole leads to a haunted place. It’s where we should be.”

 

Jeperson bent to grasp the ladder and get his foot on a rung. His moon boot slipped, and Kydd grabbed his arm.

 

“Thank you,” said Jeperson. “Nearly a nasty accident.”

 

With Onions’ torchlight on him, Jeperson made his way down the Blowhole. The reflective strips on his poncho shone red.

 

Kydd followed.

 

Onions reluctantly surrendered his torch to Stacy, which meant she’d have to go last. Before descending, Onions fastened a rope to his suitcase and lowered it to the temporary custody of Kydd. Once the others had touched bottom, she dropped the torch, which Onions managed to catch.

 

By the time she was at the foot of the ladder, the others were arguing about underground breezes. Though shielded from the worst of the rain and wind, there was a definite air current.

 

Onions played torchlight across ancient rock.

 

For a moment, Stacy assumed Captain Vernon’s initial report had been a complete wind-up. This was just a hole in an island.

 

Then Sewell Head coughed.

 

And the rock walls parted with a metallic clang.

 

Bright, artificial light struck them blind.

 

* * * *

 

ACT II: HEAD OFFICE

 

1

 

After the murderous wind and rain topside, the cavern was pleasantly temperate.

 

Though rusty on cutting edge high-tech, Richard Jeperson had seen the inside of enough military-industrial complexes to recognise the installation under Skerra as private enterprise rather than government. It was designed first to impress visiting shareholders, then to be a work environment.

 

Once the party had stopped exclaiming and clattering, he heard the thrum of big engines somewhere below.

 

“Just heating and lighting this must suck an enormous wattage,” he mused. “And we’re well off the national grid. What d’you reckon, Yoland?”

 

The weapons inspector was thinking it through. “Geothermal, from the volcanic fault? That’d be extremely high risk. Ask the Pompeiians. My gut says it’s the sea.”

 

“Waves?”

 

“Could be. If they’ve found a way to harness the big whirlpool, that’d be something ... exciting.”

 

Huge banks of Wembley floodlights hung under the bare rock roof.

 

The entrance doors had led them onto a railed-off metal platform that was also a lift.

 

“Don’t touch any controls....”

 

Onions issued his order while on his knees. He was entering the code to open his suitcase. Yoland ignored the dictate and picked up a plastic handset at the end of a python of insulated wire. He thumped the big button with the down arrow. Smoothly, without a lurch, the platform began to descend.

 

The cavern was of a size that would suit a collector of fully-inflated antique zeppelins. Natural rock formations had been shaped to accommodate the base. The floor was levelled and metalled, marked off like a runway or a launchpad. The place was littered with white mini-jeeps, uniformed bodies and hard-to-identify machines. Concrete bunkers and blockhouses surrounded the ruin of a large, rail-mounted device with a Jodrell Bank-sized circular array. There had been a major fire here—a thick layer of soot blackened a swathe of wall and roof, and half the big dish was burned through to the frame. A forklift truck had been driven into a gantry and brought the structure down.

 

Déjà vu made Richard’s knees and ankles weak.

 

He saw shadows flitting about the cavern floor, from cover to cover. Distant alarums of machine-age battle sounded: klaxons, automatic weapons fire, warning bells and whistles, shouts of pain.

 

The others were immune to such phenomena. For now.

 

His coat had been found here, covered with his blood. Any déjà vu could be down to the circumstance that he really had been here before. No, it would not wash. He was used to holes in his memory, but here there was a hole in everyone’s memory. If he had been here before, it would have made the secret history books. Limiting the circulation of information on an eyes-only basis paradoxically means preserving it.

 

Richard gripped the guardrail for support. He missed his white room, the neutral calm. This trip had disturbed his carefully maintained equilibrium. He had been preserved in his home; exposed to open air, he worried the decay he had staved off would catch up with him.

 

Everything hurt.

 

A colophon appeared all over the place: a yellow capital “H,” bent in at the corners to fit a white oval shield. It was huge, if half-burned, on the face of the array, and in miniature on everything else. The oviform pommels on the guardrails were three-dimensional versions of the same logo.

 

“What’s the ‘H’ for?” asked Stacy. “Hers?” she suggested, thumbing at the awestruck Miss Gill. “Hellfire Club? Hugeness? Hidey-Hole?”

 

“H’egg?” suggested de Maltby.

 

“Head,” said Head, touching one of the egg-shapes.

 

The doors had opened at the sound of Sewell Head’s cough. Had anyone else noticed that?

 

Yes. Head had. Naturellement.

 

Richard perceived he had not been entirely right about the immunity of the rest of the party. This place affected Head. Onions spent far too little time thinking about the problem of Sewell Head.

 

If only it were easier to concentrate.

 

Onions had his suitcase open. Instruments nestled in foam-rubber padding. He took off his anorak to reveal a utility belt and braces, tailored to fit when he had been a stone or two lighter. He had home-bored a frayed extra buckle-hole to loosen a harness that still cut into his tummy. Expertly, the man from I-Psi-T transferred his precious gadgets from compartments in the case to holsters on the harness. A complex doodad that resembled the universal remote for a multifunction entertainment system strapped watchlike to his wrist. Onions entered a code on the keypad, and the doodad beeped to life. Green, orange and red LEDs lit up.

 

“Prepared for the unknown, Adam?”

 

“It’s only the as-yet unqualified.”

 

Richard looked out at the cavern.

 

The wrongness of it all was nauseating, an electric thrill. With his gadgets, Onions could doubtless measure the condition as an increase in ozone levels or ambient charge or some such jargon. Richard did not doubt the physical effects were quantifiable. He just thought figures did not really help.

 

As they neared the bottom, he saw bullet pocks on rock and concrete.

 

“This was a battlefield,” he announced.

 

Under the thrum of the generators and the grind of the lift platform, he again heard ghost gunfire, shouts. An explosion, midair, very near.

 

Spectre shrapnel shot through his mind.

 

Stacy was at his side, holding him up. He was momentarily riddled with scraps of hot pain. Then it was gone.

 

“You felt something?” she asked.

 

“Is it all coming back?” demanded Onions.

 

“Not a memory,” Richard said. “Ghosts. Everywhere, ghosts.”

 

The others could not feel anything yet.

 

“I don’t have any readings,” said Onions, tapping his doodad. A lone light flashed red. “Except that. Variation in atmospheric pressure. Entirely natural phenomenon in a cave this size.”

 

It was what Richard had expected.

 

Onions cooed over his gizmo. Richard had a flash of Professor Calculus in the Tintin books—swinging his plumb bob and muttering “a little more to the west.” Of course, he turned out to be right.

 

Everyone else—except Head, who was chewing placidly on a cud of fudge—craned over the low guardrail and peered out at the cavern, looking for movement where there was none.

 

“What’s that thing?” Stacy asked. “The giant satellite dish?”

 

“A transmitter,” said Yoland. “It was gimbal-mounted, and on those rails. A nice bit of workmanship, if obsolete. Now, nanotech is sexy. Next generation isn’t worth gasping at unless it’s tinier than the last. But once upon a time, your equipment had to be monumental to attract funding.”

 

“What did it transmit?” asked Stacy.

 

“Two-year-old episodes of sitcoms you didn’t watch on their first run,” suggested Richard. “Championship dwarf-tossing from Glamorgan? Those radio broadcasts that teach alien invaders to speak English with BBC accents?”

 

Yoland shook his head, but did not venture an opinion.

 

As they neared the cavern floor, the corpses were more obvious. Skeletons in white “H”-on-the-left-tit jumpsuits. “H”-logoed dome hardhats chin-strapped to clean skulls.

 

Kydd whistled. The aircrewman was the only one among them who had served in a shooting war.

 

“Those people have been dead for a long time,” said Stacy.

 

“Decades,” Richard agreed.

 

The skeletons had died clutching automatic weapons with foldout tube-frame “H”-stamped stocks and unfamiliar horizontal magazines.

 

“Did they turn on each other?” asked Stacy. “I see only one type of uniform.”

 

Among the jumpsuits were a few dead people in lab coats, full-skirted like spaghetti western dusters, and oversized peaked caps. Not officers, but technicians, scientists, supervisors.

 

“The other side took away their dead,” deduced Richard.

 

“The winners,” said Yoland.

 

“Not necessarily. Whatever happened here isn’t finished. If it were, our presence wouldn’t be required.”

 

“That’s what I like about you, Jeperson,” said Onions. “Always reasons to be cheerful.”

 

“If you think I like making ominous pronouncements ...”

 

Onions’ belt beeped an interruption. He examined himself to find the gadget that had sounded out of turn.

 

The lift platform was level with the cavern floor. The dish towered hundreds of feet above them, lights shining through holes where plates were missing. Fighting had been fierce around the lift-bed. Many skeletons were spilled about, dusty brown-black stains on their uniforms, obvious bullet holes in skulls.

 

“It’s a mess,” said Head intently. “It should be tidied.”

 

For Head, Richard realised, “H” stood for “Home.”

 

The lift sank below the floor. Yoland looked at the control handset and found nothing besides simple up and down buttons.

 

They descended several further levels.

 

Suddenly, it was dark. Then light again. As the lift sank, circuits connected. Overhead strip lights tried to come on. Some panels buzzed and flashed and died; others sparked dangerously. Whole sections lit up perfectly, as if installed yesterday.

 

Richard had a sense of corridors winding into successive layers of labyrinth. Admin offices, supply areas, living quarters, cafeterias, recreation facilities, laboratories, lecture halls, testing grounds, museums, toilet facilities, information storage. No bare rock, but metalled walls, rubberised floor, heating and ventilation ducts (note to infiltrators: suitable for crawling through). Framed pictures were designed to seem like windows, the sort of touch you only got after expensive consultation.

 

They were deep underground, deep under the sea. Below the seabed, probably. He had a sense of enormous weight pressing in.

 

Without so much as a judder, the platform stopped.

 

Here, it was more than warm. The atmosphere was humid, tropical. Richard doffed his sou’wester and poncho, then unzipped his flight suit, which came away in sections. Underneath, he wore thigh-flied scarlet buccaneer britches and a lemon-yellow bumfreezer jacket buttoned to the throat, with an explosive cravat of red lace. He plumped the black silk rose in his lapel.

 

“Fab threads,” said Stacy satirically.

 

Others followed his example and took off their heavy-weather gear.

 

The Detective Sergeant wore brown corduroy trousers and a zip-up matching waistcoat.

 

“Very practical,” he commented.

 

She took an onion-seller’s beret from a pocket and tucked her hair into it.

 

“This is my arresting outfit,” she said. “Your average villain tends to leg it if a bloke with size eleven boots gets within spitting distance, but he’ll hang about like a prat if someone blonde asks him the way to Acacia Avenue. Most bollockbrains still give out bullshit directions after they’re cuffed and in the van.”

 

The guardrail automatically folded into the floor of the platform.

 

Ahead was a plate-glass barrier, studded with white star-shaped opacities. Beyond was a reception area and a corridor. With a hiss, the glass was withdrawn into the ceiling. No one wanted to step under it—the glass would make a very serviceable guillotine.

 

A concealed sound system began to tinkle; “Aquarius” from Hair played in the style of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.

 

Miss Gill mewed surprise, then said “It’s not exactly Chris de Burgh.”

 

“Why did Chris de Burgh cross the road?” asked Stacy. Miss Gill shook her head. “To get to the middle. Boom-boom.”

 

Yoland and de Maltby laughed, and Onions looked impatient. Miss Gill took the joke as a personal dig, which Richard assumed Stacy intended. Head, he noted, was puzzled. That was worth filing away.

 

It was Onions’ place to press on. Richard waited for him.

 

The man from I-Psi-T was fazed, not eager to venture further. Richard heard susurrus under the Muzak.

 

Ghosts.

 

Head made the first move and wandered off the lift-bed platform.

 

That jolted Onions out of his reverie. He nodded to de Maltby and followed Head.

 

Richard saw the pilot had his sidearm out.

 

“I’d put that away if I were you,” cautioned Richard. “Someone’ll only get hurt.”

 

“Uhhhhm,” said de Maltby, affecting not to hear the advice.

 

Richard shrugged. “Just trying to help,” he told Stacy.

 

Yoland, Kydd and Miss Gill padded after the others.

 

Richard hung back, mind open, all receivers alert. The place was shrieking at him now. Stacy touched his shoulder carefully.

 

“We’ll be left behind,” she said gently.

 

He looked into her face, glimpsing skull under skin. He saw for an X-ray instant the back teeth she would not sacrifice for a career, sensed the sparking synapses of her admirable brain. Fred had not assigned his minder casually. He had a spasm of fear for her. This place was dangerous.

 

Between seconds, he had a flash—more than a vision, it came with sound, smell, temperature. The corridor was swept by a blossom of fire. The stutter of gunfire was tinnitus, cutting through his skull. His skin broiled; his hair crisped.

 

“Richard,” Stacy said, snapping her fingers under his nose, “come out of it.”

 

He did. His face tingled; his ears rang. Otherwise, he was fine.

 

“Who am I?” she asked.

 

He knew who he was. He knew who she was. He knew where this was.

 

Though exposed, he was growing stronger again.

 

“You are an arresting woman,” he said, startling a smile out of her.

 

The sound system burbled “Let the Sunshine In” scrambled with “Spanish Flea.”

 

At least she was starting to trust him. Refreshing as it was to be treated bluntly like a mad old relic, the tonic lost its effectiveness after a few doses.

 

“Flaming Nora!” screamed Miss Gill.

 

The others were out of sight, beyond a turn in the corridor.

 

“That’s a call to investigate,” he told Stacy. “A good many dramatic situations begin with screaming.”

 

“That’s from Barbarella,” she said, making him feel younger. “My Dad’s favourite film,” she added, rubbing it in that he was ancient.

 

Miss Gill’s scream segued into a “nails down a blackboard” laugh.

 

At a trot, they rounded the corner. The floor was lush as an executive suite, though the nap was moistly squishy, mouldy in patches. The carpet pattern consisted of tiny interlocking “H” symbols.

 

They found the others, gaping up as if at an art exhibit.

 

Miss Gill honked astonished laughter. You had to have unearned wealth to get away with a bray like that.

 

On a brushed steel plinth was an eight-foot-tall marble egg, carved with Humpty Dumpty features.

 

It was a monumental bust of Sewell Head.

 

* * * *

 

2

 

“Someone’s got some bloody explaining to do!” said Miss Gill, through snorts of aghast hilarity. “I mean, whose island is this?”

 

Head looked up at his own face, curious. Richard could tell the little man wanted to touch the marble but was afraid to. He had chocolate on his fingers and did not want to spoil the surface.

 

“You’re the pub quiz king, Head,” said Onions. “Any answers?”

 

Head said nothing. Onions pointed his doodad at the sculpture and pressed buttons.

 

“He doesn’t remember,” said Richard.

 

Onions wheeled on him, hostile.

 

“He doesn’t want to remember. Like you, Jeperson.”

 

“Back off,” said Stacy, protective, eye on de Maltby’s gun.

 

Onions, surprised, did. He wasn’t handling this well.

 

“I don’t remember,” admitted Richard. “It’s not a choice. It’s a condition. There is more here than we see. More than you can quantify, Adam.”

 

Onions huffed. An old argument was in the offing.

 

Stacy had stepped in for him. He squeezed her arm as silent thanks. They had an understanding now.

 

With her strength, he wasn’t so feeble.

 

Beyond the monumental bust was a sculpture garden, with Astroturf for grass and subdued lighting. A path wound between a dozen pieces, all representing the same subject—Sewell Head. Some were naturalistic, showing a younger man than the shuffling original, crudely attempting to convey dynamic presence; some were completely stylised, just “H”-stamped ovals; one was a mobile on which twenty or so transparent crystalline eggs were arranged to represent the atomic structure of an element unknown to science; another was a parody Easter Island head, egg-skull elongated and eyes exaggerated.

 

“I should say somebody has a big head,” said Miss Gill, more pettish than amused now.

 

Sewell Head said nothing. Next to these three-dimensional images of himself, he seemed insubstantial, as if he were the third-generation copy and the artworks the original.

 

At the base of a Soviet-style statue of Head heroic in overalls and hardhat was the skeleton of a woman, laid out like a sacrifice. A long white evening dress clung to bones. At first, Richard assumed her head was miraculously intact; then he realised she had worn a wax mask. The doll-face was cracked across, pinned to the skull by a black-handled throwing knife.

 

“I’d kill for those shoes,” said Miss Gill.

 

The spike heels were at least six inches. Gold filigree bands wound up almost to the knees; they curled slackly around unclad shinbones.

 

“Feel free,” said Head. “They’re your size.”

 

Miss Gill looked at the little man as if seeing him for the first time. He was past his insubstantial phase. The likenesses reflected back on the original, lending him a charisma that had gone unnoticed.

 

Richard knew Onions wasn’t pointing his doodad in the right direction.

 

At the end of the path, doors opened.

 

Head passed through, followed by Miss Gill and de Maltby.

 

There had been an uneasy shift of authority within the group.

 

“Adam,” he said. “Don’t let this get away from you.”

 

Onions had been looking at the dead woman. He reacted to Richard as if slapped.

 

“I don’t know what you mean, Jeperson. I am in complete control.”

 

Could have fooled me, thought Stacy.

 

“What are you smiling at?” snapped Onions.

 

Richard did not explain. There were so many voices in his head here that it was a delight that at least one was friendly.

 

Onions, grumpy, stamped off towards the open doors.

 

* * * *

 

3

 

The hallway was lined with heads, mounted on shields fixed to the walls. Some were skulls, ancient and cracked. Others were poorly preserved, features dripping like wax. A few were disturbingly lifelike.

 

Under each trophy, museum plates gave details. Richard looked at the prize of the collection.

 

Australopithecine, Stirkfontein Caves, c. 3m B.C., axe-bite.

 

It was just a partial cranium, with a jagged gash. Most of the others were of far more recent vintage.

 

He considered the next trophy.

 

R. J. Tuomey-Rees, MA Cantab, 1953, six-inch nail embedded.

 

“Six-inch nail embedded,” said Miss Gill. “It bloody is, too. Gruesome!”

 

Tuomey-Rees was one of the incompletes, flaps of dried meat over grey bone. A lot of goldwork in his teeth.

 

‘“Could do better if he tried,’“ said Sewell Head.

 

The little man looked into the empty eye sockets.

 

Everyone stared at Head.

 

“My Second Year form-master at Coal Hill Secondary Modern was called Tuomey-Rees,” Head explained.

 

“He didn’t happen to disappear in 1953, did he?” asked Stacy.

 

“Not at all,” said Head, missing any accusation. “He was still flapping about in his blessed mortarboard and gown in ‘57, when I left school. Tuomey-Rees was a most humorous fellow. ‘With your name, young Sewell, you should be, ahem, Head of the Class.’ He gave me my nickname. He would say, ‘don’t get a swellhead, Sewell Head!’ Soon they were all calling me ‘Swellhead.’ Very amusing.”

 

It was the longest speech Richard had heard from Head.

 

“Happy days,” mused Head. “The tuck shop, playground japes, nurse dosing for nits. And ‘Whacker’ Tuomey-Rees. That was his nickname, ‘Whacker.’“

 

Head made a swishing motion, whipping an imaginary cane.

 

“The strange thing was that I was an obedient boy, got my homework in on time, never ran in the quad or talked out of turn. But, every few weeks, ‘Whacker’ found reason to chastise me. ‘Six of the best, Swellhead, six of the best!’ Looking back, I think he was one of those sad fellows who got pleasure from caning small boys. It wouldn’t be allowed these days.”

 

The nail had been pounded into the skull in the centre of the forehead. Dents around the nail head showed that a few hammer blows had missed.

 

Richard looked from the Tuomey-Rees trophy to the others.

 

“Do any other names mean anything to you, Mr. Head?”

 

Head scuttled down the hallway, examining plates.

 

Morris “Basher” Cropshaw, Holly Nook Recreation Grounds, 1954, penknife in occipital hollow.

 

“There was a boy called Basher Something. Lived three doors down. Always hanging about on the corner when I was coming home from school. Very high-spirited, boisterous, got into scrapes. He took my satchel once and never gave it back. My homework was in it. ‘Whacker’ striped my bottom for that.”

 

Head came to a trophy with fine red hair done up in a topknot with a big blue bow. The face was shrivelled.

 

“Here’s another old friend,” said Head.

 

Melanie Potter, Holly Nook Youth Club, 1956, crushed hyoid.

 

“Pretty girl, but not very friendly. She danced with me once. To win a bet with Mavis Bryant. Oh, how funny!”

 

Mavis Bryant, “Bryant the Tyrant,” Holly Nook Youth Club, 1956, multiple simple fractures.

 

“Have you noticed how that happens? You don’t think of someone in nearly fifty years and then when you do their name comes up in some completely unconnected manner.”

 

Richard noticed stricken looks among the party. Even Onions was taken aback.

 

Sewell Head was getting excited by his nostalgia wallow. He came to a nearly preserved head wearing an army cap.

 

Sergeant Arthur Grimshaw, Walmington-on-Sea Barracks, 1960, .303 bullet in cranium.

 

“When I did my National Service, there was a very loud Sergeant called ‘Grimmy.’ Used to get into a lather about close-order drill. Said I had two left feet. Always had me peeling mountains of blessed spuds. You know, I think this really is ‘Grimmy.’ He’s still frowning, and red in the face.”

 

Stacy tugged Richard’s sleeve.

 

“Richard,” she whispered urgently, “I went through the files on Head. School, family background, National Service, employment history, the lot. Boring as Bognor on a wet bank holiday. If his past were littered with headless corpses, it’d show up. Surely?”

 

After Grimshaw in 1960, the names meant less to Head.

 

“Professor Etienne Bolin, the particle physicist. I’ve heard of him, but who hasn’t? Ken Dodd, the comedian. I always found him more irritating than funny. Scary clowns were a phobia of mine when I was little. And do you remember that ghastly pop song that was on everywhere you listened for months in 1965? ‘Tears for Souvenirs.’ Put me off Top of the Pops for life.”

 

Yoland gave a sympathetic “ugh.”

 

Richard and Stacy looked at the preserved pop-eyed, crooked-teethed Ken Dodd trophy.

 

“Now he’s not beheaded,” said Stacy. “He was in that Kenneth Branagh Hamlet film.”

 

“This does look like him, circa 1965, though. As if he were cut off in his prime.”

 

‘“Tears for Souvenirs.’ Can’t say I’ve heard of it.”

 

“You haven’t missed much.”

 

They were nearly at the end of the trophy hall.

 

“And this fellow means nothing to me,” announced Head.

 

Frederick Regent, The Diogenes Club, 1972, decapitation via monofilament.

 

Richard heard the ghost of a scream.

 

His hands knotted into fists.

 

Time passed inside his mind.

 

He forced himself out of fugue, and realised everyone else had heard the scream, which still echoed.

 

No, not echoed—continued.

 

Another dramatic situation.

 

* * * *

 

4

 

“It’s in here,” said Onions, his LED readings flashing angry red.

 

The scream careened about the hallway like a pinball. There was an associated visual phenomenon, a ragged free-form shadow that darted in a zigzag. It caught Kydd out in the open and passed through him with a ripping sound. The aircrewman patted his chest.

 

“That wasn’t half a funny feeling,” he said. “Warm and wet.”

 

Richard was pressed against the wall, Stacy by him. He tried to follow the shadow, but it flickered too swiftly.

 

“Nothing to be afraid of,” announced Onions. “It’s an afterimage. It’s not happening now. It’s long gone. Just a recording on the stone tape.”

 

The wall was trembling. Richard wondered how dormant that volcano was.

 

At the end of the hallway a door flapped open and a figure lurched in view, like a target at an army shooting range. A person of indeterminate sex in a white coat and hard hat, opaque white visor over the face, loose white polythene bootees and mittens tied over the extremities. It held one of the unfinished-looking guns that had been in the hands of the corpses in the cavern.

 

The apparition moved at half-speed and was silent.

 

Onions pointed his doodad at the white figure. Its edges blurred, and Richard saw the knees kink as if the thing were a hologram projected on drifting mist.

 

“Now, that’s a ghost,” said Stacy.

 

The figure’s movements slowed. It was wheeling about, bringing its gun to bear on the hallway. The outlines were smeared completely now, bleeding into the background. Even the gun was soft, barrel and magazine floppy.

 

Stacy made a gun finger and popped her mouth.

 

A red wound flowered on the ghost’s chest, unfolding like one of those pellets that become roses when dropped into water. It was knocked off its feet and floated upwards, legs trailing and dissipating.

 

Stacy, astonished, raised her finger and blew on the tip.

 

“Temperature is down ten degrees centigrade,” said Onions. “It’s sucking heat, converting it to matter.”

 

The ghost’s phantom gun kicked. Black blobules coughed from the barrel and lobbed through space. Yoland bent out of their path, knocking Miss Gill down, covering her against the floor.

 

Sewell Head, fascinated, turned, watching ghost bullets pass by him. They left visible ripples in the air. Head prodded one of the wakes with a long finger, and twirled it into a nebula-shape.

 

Stacy drew both index fingers and popped like Wyatt Earp emptying his six-shooters into Old Man Clanton. The ghost jittered and staggered.

 

The blobules still swam through thick air.

 

De Maltby fired his real gun. The report was appallingly loud, but the shot did less to the ghost than Stacy’s pretend bullets.

 

De Maltby stuck out a hand to steady himself as he took aim again. One of the blobules collided with his palm.

 

Everything sped up. The ghost stuff fell like rain, splashing the carpet in a splatter, leaving a Hiroshima blast shadow.

 

The single shot still resounded, an assault on the ears.

 

Another scream exploded, not ghostly.

 

De Maltby’s left hand was a red ruin, fingers stiff and shaking, blood welling from a ragged black hole. He dropped his gun.

 

“Now that was bloody stupid,” said Richard.

 

The Viscount gripped his wrist and fell, swallowing yelps of pain. He thrashed a little and swore a lot. The barracks vocabulary sit ill with his plummy accent. Kydd got to the pilot’s side with a battlefield med-kit. Richard helped Stacy pin de Maltby down as the aircrewman prepared a syringe, drawing from an ampoule of morphine. Stacy skinned de Maltby’s sleeve and held his arm steady so Kydd could get the shot in him.

 

Yoland had picked up de Maltby’s dropped gun; he aimed at the doorway. Head still stood out in the open, puzzled. Miss Gill was in a crouch by Yoland, presenting a small target. Onions was flat against a wall, Ken Dodd gurning over his shoulder as he fiddled with his doodad.

 

De Maltby stopped kicking, and Kydd got a proper tourniquet around his arm. The blobule hadn’t gone through the pilot’s hand, but dissipated on impact, turning to nasty black gunge. Kydd washed out the wound with bottled water and slapped on a pressure bandage.

 

“... uhhhm ... hurts,” said de Maltby redundantly. He shook his head and grit his teeth.

 

The pilot was in no shape to fly them off Skerra. Richard hadn’t qualified on a helicopter in twenty-five years. Unless someone else in the party had hidden talents, they were stuck here until they could be rescued.

 

De Maltby relaxed, eyes fluttering shut.

 

If the Viscount had shifted a bit more to the left, his lesser relations would have bumped up in the line of succession. The Royal Navy would have had to do some embarrassing explaining to the Royal Family.

 

Miss Gill got up and angrily aimed a finger at Onions.

 

“You said it was an afterimage! You said it couldn’t harm us!”

 

Onions tried to show her a readout. She wasn’t interested.

 

“Where are the proper experts who’re supposed to protect us?” she demanded. “I was promised a crack team of up-for-anything sailors armed to the teeth and ready to throw up a ring of fire and steel around us. All I’ve got are useless old weirdoes and a bloody meter maid. I didn’t come here to be shot at.”

 

Stacy, the “meter maid,” cocked her gun finger and pointed it at the back of Miss Gill’s head. Richard gave her the nod and she put it away.

 

“It’s extremely rare that a manifestation causes injury.”

 

“Tell him that.”

 

De Maltby was smiling now, morphine kicking in.

 

Miss Gill and Onions glared at each other.

 

“Listen to me,” announced Richard. “This is a haunted house. Bigger than most, but still a haunted house. Adam’s little gadgets are all well and good, but what is going on here isn’t just an atmospheric phenomenon, like weather. It’s reactive and it’s directed. A show is being put on for us. But we aren’t just an audience; we’re targets. The place is inhabited, ensouled. Make no mistake, the stone tape isn’t a medium of recording but of transmission. Whatever haunts here will try to affect us, to work on our weaknesses. It’s already begun, subtly and, ah, not so subtly. From now on, be alert, open, on your guard. I needn’t say we shouldn’t go wandering off alone. Always know where everyone else is. Fix on that. It’ll help you when there are others among us. Beware of circles—physical circles, mental circles. The place would like us to go round on its little rails. Haunted houses are traps and tests. The bad ones, that is, and this is certainly one of those. Adam, give a heads-up whenever your needles twitch. It’d help if we knew something was coming before it arrived. We’ve seen what can happen. Let’s not let it happen again.”

 

Onions opened his mouth, as if he had a long, prepared answer.

 

“Let’s move on,” said Richard, cutting him off.

 

Kydd relieved Yoland of de Maltby’s sidearm with, “I’d best look after that, sir.” The aircrewman helped the doped pilot stand, making sure he could walk without falling over himself.

 

Before leaving the hallway, Richard looked at the Fred trophy. It was the best-preserved of the modern collection, as if curing methods had improved between 1953 and 1972. It was a real severed head, very deathlike, and was somehow really Fred, hair close-cropped, mouth open. Fred as he had been as a young plod in 1972, not the top cop Richard had seen two days ago at Euston.

 

The eyes were blue not hazel: they were taxidermist’s glass, a detail mistaken by whoever prepared the head for display.

 

Staring into Fred’s wrong eyes made Richard queasy.

 

But determined. Being shut up, inside himself, inside his home, had been a mistake.

 

If this was out here all along, he should have been in the world.

 

Skerra was his problem.

 

* * * *

 

5

 

They were in a control room.

 

Yoland whistled in astonished amusement.

 

“Vintage,” he declared.

 

Banks of computers stacked against a wall—bulky cabinets wired together, each the size of a fridge-freezer, with exposed spools of tape and letterbox slots for punch cards and printouts.

 

“Pre-silicon chip,” said Yoland, stroking a machine. “Installed in the late 1960s, maybe early seventies.”

 

Richard picked up a Pirelli calendar from a strew of papers on the floor. A naked woman snarled, holding a scary African mask next to her face. The photograph was manipulated to shade into a drawing at the extremities.

 

“Might I take a wild guess and suggest this facility was abandoned sometime in February, 1973?”

 

“That sounds about right,” said Yoland. “What was happening then?”

 

“Oil crisis. Power cuts. Television shut down at half-past-ten. IRA mainland bombing campaign.”

 

“All that never happened,” said Miss Gill, born 1983. “He’s getting the seventies confused with the war. People his age were all on drugs.”

 

Richard was more amused than offended.

 

Yoland twiddled some knobs on a console.

 

“Does it still work?” asked Stacy.

 

“Unlikely,” said the weapons inspector. “These old jobs were as dicky as Christmas tree lights.”

 

One wall was given over to a grey and dead display screen, a stitching of bullet holes across the glass.

 

There had been fighting in here. Some cabinets were overturned and ruptured, bleeding wires and circuit boards.

 

“I told a lie,” said Yoland, holding up a component. “This is a silicon chip. Or some sort of prehistoric ancestor. Ceramic, micro-printed. It’s the size of my thumb, but it’s definitely a chip. Whoever put this together was way ahead of the game.”

 

The tile floor was patchwork-quilted with spilled files, strews of punch cards and streamers of magnetic tape.

 

This, Richard knew, was where his coat had been found.

 

Head walked up to a black swivel chair on a dais. He sat in it and whirled around like a child, legs pointing out. As the chair revolved, gears clicked. The big screen hummed and warmed up. Behind a spiderweb of cracks, static buzzed. Richard’s attention was drawn to it for a moment, but he forced himself to look away. It was too easy to see shapes in static.

 

“Clock this,” said Stacy.

 

She picked up a cardboard file folder, embossed with the familiar “H.” Under the oval, in a retro-futurist typeface, were the words “Sewell Head Industries.” Yoland took it and passed it around.

 

“You’re a captain of industry, Swellhead?” said Miss Gill. “I thought you worked in a sweetshop.”

 

Head found a control panel in the arm of his chair. The designer must have been a Star Trek fan. Head pressed a button: lights came on at the base of his dais and in a circle overhead, catching him in a shaft of brightness.

 

“This is all new to me,” he said.

 

“But you know where the light switches are,” said Yoland.

 

“Which button opens the trapdoor to the alligator pits?” asked Miss Gill. “Or do you prefer piranhas?”

 

Head was thoughtful. He stabbed another button.

 

A section of the floor flapped downwards. Richard was suddenly at the edge of a hole. A foul smell wafted up. Richard tottered, but Stacy pulled him back from the brink. He slipped. A sharp stab of terror went through him as he felt Stacy going over too.

 

“Got you, miss,” said Kydd. He had stepped in to grab her around the waist.

 

It took some doing, but they were all restored to safety.

 

“I’m so sorry,” said Head. “I didn’t think.”

 

The bottom of the pit was dark and liquid. And inhabited.

 

“Best not fiddle with the toys anymore,” said Richard.

 

“Quite right,” said Head mildly.

 

He didn’t get out of his chair though. More and more, he looked comfortable.

 

“What is this place?” asked Miss Gill.

 

“Head Office,” said Head.

 

“Very clever,” said Richard. “But you’d have to be clever, wouldn’t you?”

 

Head sat, impassive.

 

“There is no Sewell Head Industries,” said Yoland. “At least not off this island. Never has been.”

 

Head nodded.

 

“That’s what puzzled us when Vernon’s report came in,” said Onions. “We found Mr. Head very easily. He’s in the phone book. There’s only one of him.”

 

Richard wondered if that was strictly true.

 

“And we know, in exhaustive detail, what he’s done with his life. There just isn’t any gap in which he could have done this....”

 

Onions spread his hands, indicating everything in this complex.

 

“Some obsessive trivia quiz fan did all this for him?” said Miss Gill. “I find that impossible to believe.”

 

Head’s fingers hovered over buttons.

 

Kydd stood by the dais, de Maltby’s gun tucked into his belt, at attention.

 

“What’s it all for?” asked Stacy.

 

“That’s an interesting question,” said Yoland, “and I can make a range of guesses. But the big question is, ‘How’s’ it all here?’“

 

The techie was in his element, getting up to speed.

 

“This couldn’t have been built in secret,” said Yoland. “It’s a major construction project. Hundreds, maybe thousands of men would have had to work on it. Think of all the raw materials that must have been transported here, to an abandoned island. There’d have had to be a nonstop back-and-forth on the sea-lanes. Where are the ships’ logs, flight plans, invoices, bills of lading, pay slips? This is a small underground city. Supplying must have been a mammoth operation. It would all have gone on in the public eye. Millions of pounds must have been spent. Multiples of millions. There may be no Sewell Head Industries, but something wealthier than most countries created this place.”

 

Richard remembered how he had felt when he saw the apported coat, how he had instinctively avoided touching it, how it had been an affront to his sense of the way the universe fit together. He was feeling the same thing again, on a colossal scale.

 

This whole place was wrong.

 

* * * *

 

6

 

They made camp three levels above the control room, in a block Richard guessed was accommodation for SHI executives. Spartan barracks and dormitories were provided for jumpsuit drones, but this sector offered rooms arranged like an American motel, in balconied tiers. Instead of sky, the central courtyard had naked rock. Garden furniture was scattered around, but there were no corpses.

 

Stacy and Kydd had gone topside, to fetch supplies from the Sea King.

 

De Maltby was in drugged sleep, but otherwise stable.

 

Richard checked the room he had staked for himself. It was anonymous Scandinavian moderne, with clown paintings in place of windows and piped-in dabba-dabba-dabba Muzak. A duvet lay on the drum-tight fitted sheet of the single bed. At first, he thought the bedding a uniform grey, but his touch disturbed a thin layer of dust. The duvet cover and pillowcase were white, imprinted with the bright yellow “H” logo.

 

The door had an airtight seal. Ventilation and heat came through grilles in the walls. Besides clown paintings, decor extended to a framed photograph of a young, Kupperberg-suited Sewell Head with his arms around a couple of sweaty Americans who proved, on close examination, to be Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley. The Prez and the King both looked up to the Zen Master of Quantum Cleverness.

 

An en-suite bathroom offered a Plexiglass shower booth and stainless-steel toilet and washstand. He ran the taps and got hot and cold water. After bursts of rusty red, the flow ran clean. He tasted the cold and found it drinkable. He assumed there was a desalination plant somewhere in the complex, converting seawater. A bathroom cabinet contained a solidified tube of unbranded toothpaste, a blister-pack of contraceptive pills and a bottle of Breck shampoo. A “H”-logoed sampler kit contained syrettes, vials of powder marked heroin and cocaine, and purple lozenges stamped “Lovely Shining Dream.”

 

The Muzak—Jose Feliciano playing the Doors’ greatest hits—came through the speakers of a large telescreen inset into the wall opposite the bed. There were no on-off or channel controls, and no handset. Whoever lived here listened to and watched whatever the master programmer gave them.

 

A wardrobe contained three identical lab coats and dispenser packs of disposable plastic bootees and mittens. A bedside table had unread paperbacks of Valley of the Dolls and Airport with early seventies covers. He also found the 2001 movie tie-in, and raised an eyebrow to see Ray Bradbury and Stanley Kubrick listed as coauthors. The first chapter began, “When Heywood Floyd was a boy in the mid-West he used to go out and look at the stars at night and wonder about them.” Reluctantly, he closed the book and slipped it into his pocket. A drawer that pulled out from under the bed had an array of gleaming silver-steel, “H”-stamped weapons— automatic pistols, clips of ammunition, combat knives, a samurai sword.

 

A fizzing cut through the Muzak.

 

He looked at the telescreen. It had come to life, or at least static.

 

The swirls resolved into a blurry “H” logo; then the letter faded and the oval shield grew brighter. Richard fancied eyes and a smile.

 

He picked out one of the pistols, rammed a clip into the butt, slipped off the safety and shot the screen. The tube imploded with a cough of smoke. In the sparking wreckage, a necklike attachment craned—it ended in a blinking lens.

 

There was a sharp rap at his door.

 

“Come in; it’s not locked.”

 

Onions, free of his gadget belt, tentatively looked round the door.

 

“I shot the screen, Adam. A preemptive strike. It was trying to get to me.”

 

Onions humoured him and pressed on.

 

“Meeting in the courtyard in five minutes, Jeperson. We need to hash out a schedule for the investigation.”

 

Onions withdrew.

 

Richard hefted the automatic pistol. As a rule, he disliked guns, but this had a satisfyingly heavy feel. It hadn’t kicked when fired, and the noise—the thing he hated most about using firearms—had been damped somehow. His ears still rang from the shot de Maltby had fired in the trophy hall, but his own more recent discharge had wiped itself out. He turned the gun over in his hands, getting the heft of it.

 

Then he put it down and went to wash his hands.

 

He didn’t even like using the water in this room, let alone the weaponry. The gun had been on its best behaviour, endeavouring to win his confidence, wheedling to get holster-close to his heart. He had no doubt that if he trusted the thing, it would turn traitor. Worse still was the 2001 paperback, which whispered “Read me, read me” in his ear. He would happily burn the negatives of every movie Steven Spielberg ever directed to get into a screening of this Space Odyssey.

 

Somewhere under Skerra, there must be a cinema.

 

He killed the thought and looked at the mirrored cabinet.

 

Behind his old eyes, there were lacunae. Maybe Ray Bradbury had written 2001, and it had slipped his mind, liquid misinformation rushing in to fill the hole. Maybe Sewell Head had mounted Fred Regent’s head on a board thirty years ago, and the decades Richard remembered were a protracted psychotic episode, born of guilt at being unable to keep his friend alive.

 

He took the vial of cocaine from the drugs kit and thought about it.

 

Circles, he realised. He was beginning to think in circles.

 

But there was something else. The sense of wrongness was still there, but other senses crowded in. He was thinking more clearly, with fewer of his memory lapses. He even felt better, long-settled aches lifting from his limbs. The air down here was good for him. He had not expected that.

 

Was this another trap?

 

He left the room, sealed it behind him, and walked along the balcony to a white filigree spiral staircase.

 

Assuming that Stacy and Kydd were not back and de Maltby excused, Richard was the last to make it to Onions’ meeting.

 

They were assembled in a gazebo affair at the centre of the court, sat on folding chairs around a wrought-iron table under a giant candy-striped umbrella. Yoland had a laptop computer fired up. Miss Gill had changed into a Skerra tartan designer skirt with matching sash. Onions had an agenda drawn up and was checking it over.

 

Sewell Head stood a few feet away, back to the others, looking up.

 

“I was listing the types of phenomena observed here,” said Onions. “Spectral figures, ectoplasmic spores, hot spots, cold spots, cyclic apparitions, aural and visual manifestations ...”

 

“Apports,” prompted Richard.

 

“Of course, apports.”

 

“Lots of ‘em. Adam, who wrote 2001?”

 

Onions frowned.

 

“I know that one,” said Miss Gill. “George Orwell.”

 

Richard felt his mind crack again.

 

“No, that’s Nineteen Eighty-Four,” put in Yoland. “2001 is ... it’s on the tip of my tongue. Wait a minute, we’ve got the triviameister here. Swellhead, who wrote 200I?”

 

“Arthur C. Clarke,” said Head, dully, not turning round.

 

The world settled again, and Richard nodded.

 

“That’s decided, then.”

 

“What are you on about, Jeperson? This is no time—”

 

Richard produced the book. Onions looked at it, puzzled. Then saw the names on the cover. He passed it to Yoland, whose instinct was to turn to the last page.

 

“How does it end?” Yoland asked Head.

 

‘“For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure of what to do next,’“ recited Head. ‘“But he would think of something.’“

 

“Wrong-g-g-g!” said Yoland. ‘“Then, as the moon watched, the Star Child left the wilderness behind and walked into the town.’“

 

Head turned, almost angry.

 

Richard realised the little man could not bear to be mistaken.

 

“Let me see that,” he said.

 

Yoland tossed him the book. He looked through it roughly, breaking the thirty-five-year-old spine.

 

“This isn’t right,” he said.

 

He tore the book in half and threw the pages away.

 

Richard had a pang of loss and fury. Then he remembered the insinuating gun. The book was best out of reach. It had been a dangerous temptation.

 

There must be books in all the rooms. Maybe LP records.

 

Best not think of that.

 

“Nothing is right here,” said Richard. “This is not a natural place.”

 

“If there’s a prize for speaking the bloody obvious,” said Miss Gill, “the old hippie just took it home.”

 

“Just because a thing is bloody obvious doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be spoken.”

 

“Could you please stop bickering?” said Onions. “And pay attention.”

 

Onions slapped his agenda on the table.

 

“Now,” he said, “observations, please.”

 

“This is a treasure trove, right?” said Miss Gill. “But on my land. So I own it.”

 

No one wanted to debate that. Yet.

 

“Yoland, can you give us your preliminary report?” said Onions. “You’ve a different remit here.”

 

Richard had wondered about that. What did Morag Duff and Really-a-Good-Bloke Rory expect to get out of this expedition? People like them always thought of “practical applications.” I-Psi-T was Min of Def-funded, too.

 

Yoland shut his computer. “Too early to say, but I think there are things here of immense worth.”

 

Miss Gill clapped her hands and threatened to laugh again.

 

“Yes, monetary worth,” said Yoland. “But more than that. Mr. Jeperson, you asked about the power source. I’ve ferreted about a bit, and it’s definitely tidal. We have nothing like it. And the equipment we’ve seen is a paradox. A lot of it is Bakeiite and solder antique, but there are shortcuts I don’t understand. This place is thirty years old, but whoever built it was forty or fifty years ahead of their time. Handicapped by the tools available, but spooky brilliant. My guess is that a handful of circuit boards from the control room could yield patents that would bring in millions of euros a year. You know my field. Weapons. I’ve been tinkering with one of those machine-pistol jobbies, the things with funny magazines. It’s not like any small arm I’ve ever seen. Recoilless, silenced, and fires pellets that expand in the air. And we haven’t cracked the puzzle of the big dish. I reckon it does something interesting. Whoever ends up with ownership is going to be, ah, enormously at an advantage.”

 

“‘Whoever?’“ protested Miss Gill. “Daddy paid good money for Skerra.”

 

“For the island, not what’s under it.”

 

“So, who else’s is it? The Skerrans are all gone. And this isn’t Britain. It’s an independent country and I can make up my own laws.”

 

Richard saw Yoland and Miss Gill were being seduced. Knowledge, money, power, justification, intrigue. Even Onions, with quantifiable results that could not be dismissed, was half in love with the complex.

 

He wondered when Stacy and Kydd would get back. Of the party, they were the two he trusted most.

 

“You’re forgetting something,” said Head.

 

“What?” asked Miss Gill and Yoland, together.

 

“Whose name is on everything here. Whose initial marks everything.”

 

Head thumped his chest. The place was getting to him too. It could be that he had the most to gain from it.

 

“We’ll come to that in a minute,” said Onions.

 

“Can I be the one to talk about the impossible?” said Richard.

 

“I think that falls under the ‘bloody obvious’ category, Jeperson,” said Onions. “The impossible is our daily bread, remember? Even the amateur dabblers of the Diogenes Club.”

 

“I don’t mean the unexplained, the supernatural. Ghosties and ghoulies. I mean evidence of things we know did not happen. Fred Regent was not decapitated in 1972. Ray Bradbury did not write 2001. Sewell Head did not broker the meet between Nixon and Elvis.”

 

“That photo’s in your room too?” said Yoland.

 

“A corporation that has never existed did not build an underground complex on Skerra in the late sixties. A small war was not fought here in February, 1973. Mr. Head and I did not bleed all over my third-best coat in that control room.”

 

Head said nothing.

 

“I know you’ll be thoroughly prepared,” said Richard. “You’ll have a record of everyone who has set foot on Skerra between the evacuation of ‘32 and our arrival this morning?”

 

Onions flinched minutely. Yoland looked at his computer screen.

 

“I see that information is available.”

 

Richard pulled Yoland’s laptop across the table.

 

“That’s interesting,” he said. “Miss Gill, when your father bought Skerra, did anyone tell him that Winston Churchill used it for anthrax experiments?”

 

Miss Gill was aghast. “Bloody hell they did!”

 

“Those Skerran goats must be the hardiest creatures on Earth. They were supposed to have been wiped out by bio-warfare in 1944. The spores were active and deadly in ‘57, when a trawler off its course ran aground. There were deaths. The team from Porton Down who visit every ten years reported nonlethal traces in 1964 and no danger at all in 1974, 1984 and 1994. No danger from anthrax that is. In ‘84, there was a fatality due to goat attack. I suppose this jaunt is incidentally supposed to take the place of the scheduled checkup?”

 

Yoland nodded. “It’s perfectly safe now.”

 

Richard scrolled down.

 

“I see there was a naval exercise here in 1996. We must have been thinking of invading an island. No, it’s the other way about. There was a worry that Spain might take the presence of Israeli or Moroccan tourists on Gibraltar as violation of the fifth paragraph of Article Ten of the Treaty of Utrecht and pull a Galtieri. It seemed like a sensible idea to play out a ‘liberation scenario.’ You’ll be relieved to learn we showed Johnny Spaniard he couldn’t hold the Rock for long.”

 

“Shouldn’t the navy have asked me first?” protested the Droning of Skerra.

 

“You might have a case for invoking a UN sanction against the British Crown for invading your sovereign territory, but I doubt you’d get very far.”

 

“All this is still classified, Jeperson,” said Onions. “You didn’t need to know.”

 

Head stood erect, hands behind him. For a moment, he wavered.

 

Something was different about his eyes. As if the taxidermist had the wrong reference.

 

“Jeperson?” said Onions, irritated.

 

“Yes, where was I? History of Skerra visitations: 1944 to the present day. Got it? Now, you may be right in that we didn’t need to know about the germ warfare or the relief of the Rock, but it is certainly relevant that, far from being an unvisited and forgotten protrusion in a far northern sea, Skerra has been only marginally less congested than Piccadilly Circus at ten o’clock on a Saturday night. You’ll have all the reports filed after the bioweapons tests and the naval exercise?”

 

Yoland nodded.

 

“And what don’t they say?”

 

Yoland frowned.

 

“Pardon me, that’s a confusing question form. But I’ll lay you a tenner in old money that no one who trod on Skerra before Captain Vernon’s team—and I haven’t forgotten them, Adam—ever reported a dirty great underground complex in the caverns. Not that easy to miss. And don’t tell me those thorough mad science wallahs or resourceful jack tars stayed topside and never so much as peeped down the Blowhole.”

 

“No,” said Onions.

 

“No, you won’t tell me? Or no, they never peeped? See, now I’m confusing myself.”

 

“According to reports, this place wasn’t here in 1974, 1984, 1994 or 1996.”

 

“Thank you for your directness, Mr. Yoland.”

 

“The reports must be wrong,” said Onions. “It’s not impossible to suborn officials.”

 

“Indeed it isn’t. But I’ll bet you checked out the names on the papers. Did extensive re-interviews? With persuasive methods? I’m right again, aren’t I? I could get used to this. Is it how you feel in quiz contests, Mr. Head? When you know all the answers. So, to return to the impossible factor, what we have is a vast installation that evidence suggests has been here for at least thirty years but which can’t have been here as recently as 1996? Do we agree?”

 

“Is this some sort of Omphalos argument, Jeperson?”

 

“The benefits of a classical education. Mr. Head, could you expand on Adam’s reference for those among us unfamiliar with the works of Philip Henry Gosse?”

 

Head was silent. He loomed, face craning forward.

 

His eyes were intense, wary, cunning. As if he had just awoken among strangers.

 

“Come on, Swellhead,” joshed Yoland. “Penny in the slot.”

 

“The Omphalos argument,” began Head, tone unfamiliar—not a blank recital, but impassioned, “was advanced in the nineteenth century by fundamentalist Christians in reaction to archaeological evidence that the world is older than the biblical date of 4004 BC. Gosse, among others, put forward the notion that God created the Earth complete with a fossil record of creatures that never existed just as He created Adam and Eve with belly buttons—the word ‘omphalos’ is classical Greek for navel—indicative of conventional birth.”

 

“You’re saying that this place was whipped up in the last few years,” said Yoland. “But faked to seem older? Pirelli calendar and all? It still doesn’t solve my problem. No matter when the complex was built, it’d have been impossible to do it in secret.”

 

Head was smiling at Richard, nastily.

 

The man was remembering. Something trickled inside Richard’s mind, trying to take shape.

 

“No, this isn’t fake old,” said Richard. “It was built in the 1960s, and it wasn’t here until this year. Both statements, irreconcilable as they are, hold water.”

 

“You’re raving, Jeperson. And you’re well off-topic. Next on the agenda—”

 

“Listen to me, Adam. It’s important. This whole place is an apport!”

 

* * * *

 

7

 

“As I said,” continued Onions, “next on the agenda—”

 

Richard tried to appeal to the others.

 

“We’re inside a big ghost. That’s not a safe thing.”

 

Yoland and Miss Gill did not seem bothered. This was so outside their experience that it didn’t sink in.

 

Head was thinking.

 

Richard really did not like that.

 

“I’ve drawn up a rota,” said Onions. “To keep watch for phenomena. Each should be logged and categorised.”

 

“Phenomena!” shouted Richard. “You’re sitting on a phenomenon”— he kicked the deck chair—”under a phenomenon”—he slapped the umbrella—”inside the fenomenoni di tuttifenomena, this whole place!”

 

Richard’s outburst echoed. He was breathing heavily.

 

Head walked towards the table, taking tiny steps.

 

He was craning, twisting his head from side to side as if trying to work a crick out of his neck. Or trying to get his skull to fit properly onto his spinal column.

 

“May I see that?” he asked, indicating Yoland’s laptop.

 

He took the gadget and peered at it.

 

“Have we missed something?” asked Yoland. “All the details of the visits to Skerra are in the memory. You can click on the reports and read what went into the secret files.”

 

Head was not scanning the information on the screen. He held the computer as if it was the first he had ever seen, turned it over to examine the ports in the case, brushed his fingers over the keyboard.

 

“Ingenious,” he smiled. “Compact.”

 

“If we might press on,” said Onions.

 

“Silence,” said Head firmly.

 

“I beg your pardon.”

 

Head struck Onions across the face with the laptop, cracking the casing, and knocking the man from I-Psi-T out of his chair.

 

Miss Gill’s mouth gaped in an O of surprise.

 

Onions was astonished, and bleeding from the scalp.

 

Head gave Yoland back his computer.

 

“Mr. Jeperson,” said Head, quietly, politely. “Would you care to try to kill me now?”

 

Richard knew he should. It would cut the Gordian knot.

 

Sewell Head—Swellhead—opened his hands and tilted his head back. A tiny bulge in the frog-fold between his mouth and collar was his chin. A forceful blow struck below the bulge would crush his larynx and end everything.

 

Long seconds stretched.

 

Richard made no move. The ghost of the pub quiz champion who was content to work in a sweetshop was still before him, displaced by an apported personality but perhaps not lost forever.

 

“I thought as much,” said Head, turning his back. “You are weak. It is why you will not win this day.”

 

Swellhead was acting as if he owned the place, which—of course—he did.

 

“Not killing people on the off chance it’ll solve a problem is just one of those habits,” Richard remarked. “Maybe it’s one of the things that makes me better than you.”

 

Head wheeled, eyes flashing fury.

 

“Yes, Mr. Swellhead, I said better.”

 

“Is that a challenge?”

 

“If you choose to deem so.”

 

Head was tempted, but decided against it.

 

“You’re a spent force, Mr. Jeperson, a distraction. Momentous business is being conducted. Maybe we shall settle things later.”

 

Onions got himself together and crawled back to his chair.

 

Yoland and Miss Gill were lost.

 

Head raised a hand in a signal.

 

Other people emerged from around the courtyard. They wore white jumpsuits and faceguards, and carried “H”-logo weapons. They were not phantoms like the thing in the hallway, but substantial, physical beings.

 

Perhaps they perceived Richard and the others as ghosts?

 

Guns were pointed at them.

 

“The place has been run on a skeleton staff,” said Head. “But that will change now.”

 

Miss Gill stood up and said, “It’s time you stopped playing silly buggers.”

 

Head walked over to her. She was inches taller, but could not look him in the eye.

 

“Who are all these people?” she demanded.”And where have they been hiding?”

 

Head took her hand and kissed it, bowing at the waist.

 

“The Droning of Skerra,” he said. “Miss Kill, you are my guest. Your every comfort will be seen to.”

 

He made a signal. One of his jumpsuited goons brought over an attaché case.

 

“This, my dear, is a gift,” said Head. “From me to you.”

 

He held the case and thumbed the catches. It sprung open, with a slight hiss.

 

Miss Gill folded back some translucent paper and picked up a mask. It was wax and bore her own face.

 

Richard had seen the like before, on the corpse in the sculpture garden.

 

“Let me help you,” cooed Head, raising the mask to her face.

 

Miss Gill didn’t struggle.

 

“It feels funny,” she said.

 

“Only for a moment.”

 

Head took his fingers away. The mask was fixed to Miss Gill’s face. She touched it herself. The wax fit perfectly around her eyes and mouth. She was disguised as herself, but without expression.

 

“There,” said Head. “That’s nice and tidy. You’ll always be pretty now, Miss Kill. You’ll always be a proper princess for this island.”

 

A giggle leaked through the mask, somehow terrifying.

 

“Oh, Swellhead,” said “Miss Kill,” girlish and imbecilic, “you aren’t half clever.”

 

Head stroked her stiff cheek.

 

Onions was still groggy, and thus more useless than usual. Richard wondered if he could count on Yoland. The weapons inspector showed signs of open-mindedness. He was quick enough to sense changes in the psychic temperature, and ought to be attuned to rapid reassessments of dangerous situations.

 

Head was busy making up to his Miss Kill, with an eye on Richard.

 

He was expecting trouble from Richard. He might not have considered Yoland. If nothing else, this was all the work of a monumental solipsist, someone who considers himself alone at the centre of the universe.

 

Yoland shifted, getting a good grip on his laptop, the only proven bludgeon to hand.

 

Onions blinked. Head saw.

 

Yoland launched himself from his seat with a war cry. Nimbly, elegantly, Head was out of the way.

 

Miss Kill kicked Yoland in the face, pirouetting like a dancer.

 

Yoland grabbed his laptop and ran across the courtyard, dodging the lumbering figures in white.

 

Head was mildly irritated.

 

Yoland whirled up the spiral staircase and made it to the landing.

 

Then a door opened and a man came out. It was de Maltby, wearing a white jumpsuit and milk-white goggles, an elaborate silver glove over his injured hand.

 

The glove buzzed and passed into Yoland’s chest.

 

The weapons inspector’s eyes reddened.

 

De Maltby raised his arm, lifting Yoland off his feet. He dangled the twitching man over the edge of the balcony. Bloody rain pattered onto the courtyard, along with one of Yoland’s shoes.

 

The pilot withdrew his gloved hand, which was lined with tiny whirring blades. Yoland slid off de Maltby’s arm and fell, landing with a thump. His body leaked.

 

De Maltby produced a large monogrammed handkerchief and fastidiously wiped his mechanical hand.

 

“Now, honoured guests,” said Swellhead, addressing himself to Richard and Onions, “let me give you some ground rules for maintaining my even temper and not abusing my hospitality.”

 

Richard had heard him say that before.

 

Head smiled, and nodded at him.

 

“Yes, that’s right,” he said. “Here we go again.”

 

* * * *

 

ACT III: A GAME OF TIN SOLDIERS

 

1

 

When Stacy and Kydd got back to the Blowhole, things were changed.

 

Kydd had driven the all-terrain vehicle up from the landing site. Powerful searchlights, fitted on the roll bar, lit up the area.

 

A rumbling, grinding noise came from the Blowhole.

 

Stacy peered into the cavity. Rings of jagged rock revolved at different speeds. The dangling rope ladder jounced around, shredded.

 

The Blowhole was working like a giant kitchen disposal device.

 

“A good thing that didn’t start up while we were on the ladder.”

 

“Yes, miss,” agreed Kydd, as unsurprised by this turn as everything else. Either the aircrewman had been more fully briefed or he’d learned to accept literally anything. It could be something the navy put in the tea.

 

Goats lurked in the dark, making low, threatening noises. She had no idea whether this was natural: she’d never seen a goat in the wild before, or even on a farm. It was about half past eight: she should either be two hours into a night shift or an evening in front of the telly. Maybe out at a film or a pub or club.

 

The searchlights made the grass a vivid yellow-green. Her breath frosted like steam. Beyond the light, everything was midnight dark. No sodium-orange streetlamps, passing car beams, curtained but lit-up windows, twenty-four-hour supermarkets, electric signage. Cloud cover must be thick, because there were no stars.

 

This was not ideal.

 

She checked her mobile. No signal and nobody to call anyway.

 

Among the gear on the ATV was a communications centre: headsets for the whole party, so the team could remain in constant touch with each other. Onions should perhaps have distributed the equipment before venturing below. She’d mention it at the official inquiry.

 

“There must be another entrance,” she said.

 

Kydd didn’t respond.

 

“I mean, the place is huge. The Mysterious They can’t just have used the Blowhole. There must be other ways in and out.”

 

Skerra Landsby was underwater. Any entrances there would be flooded.

 

That left the rock face.

 

Stacy climbed the ATV and directed the searchlights. White shaggy flanks were caught in beams. Goats hurried away. Kydd got into the driving seat, and they bumped across a hundred yards of grass, halting a safe distance from crumbling cliff edge.

 

She wasn’t looking forward to this.

 

Hopping down from the vehicle, she was surprised to find the rumbling persisted. They were well away from the Blowhole. She knelt and put her hand on the ground, pressing. The long grass was wet, cold and irritatingly scratchy. The earth was warmer and vibrating. She felt it in her fillings. A thrum, too low for human ears but still bone-rattling, goat-maddening. A big machine, she thought, buried deep.

 

Kydd unhooked the searchlights, which were on extensible flexes, and carried them to the cliff edge. He whistled.

 

Stacy joined him and looked down.

 

“Christ on a bike!”

 

“Yes, miss.”

 

Hundreds—thousands?—of feet below, the sea churned white. Foam swirled around black rock chunks. Mad waves hammered into eroded caves and frothed out again. It looked like God’s washing machine.

 

Kydd tried to play the light on the cliff itself.

 

It wasn’t sheer rock face but battered and broken, with many obvious paths and handholds. It was impossible to tell which were reliable, and which dangerously loose.

 

“There, miss,” said Kydd, pointing.

 

It was a metal door, flush with the rock. Once it had led to a natural balcony, but most of that was broken off, leaving only a vestigial ledge. The door was fastened by a chain.

 

Kydd fetched a reel from the ATV and fed blue nylon rope over the cliff. At first, the rope was caught by the wind and blown almost out of his hands. He tied a three-litre plastic carton of milk to the end, threading the rope through the handle and confidently tying a seaman’s knot. That gave enough weight. The carton bumped against rock as Kydd lowered the rope.

 

Stacy directed the lights, all too conscious that chunks of this cliff had been joining the seabed for millennia. Where she was standing would eventually fall, ten minutes or a hundred years from now.

 

The carton bounced against the door.

 

“Fifty-five feet,” said Kydd. The rope had red rings every five feet.

 

“No distance at all,” she said, not believing it.

 

Kydd gave Stacy the rope, then took the reel away, unspooling until he was back at the ATV. The reel fitted into a catch on the vehicle and fastened tight. The aircrewman cleated the rope to prevent further unspooling. He signalled, and Stacy let the rope go. It twanged and bit into the cliff edge, carving its own groove.

 

A big gust of wind came, staggering Stacy sideways. She heard an explosion.

 

Looking over, she saw the carton had burst. Milk splattered against the door, and dribbled in runnels. The rope caught in its groove, and whipped about.

 

“Never mind,” said Kydd. “We’ll weight it down.”

 

That wasn’t a comfort. Stacy imagined a red splatter against the cliff.

 

“I’ll go first, miss.”

 

“I’d rather you were up here keeping the rope secure,” she said.

 

“Fair enough.”

 

Kydd fetched bolt-cutters from the ATV. Stacy hooked them over her waistband.

 

She wished he’d argued more.

 

Ten feet below the edge of the cliff, she decided her gloves and boots weren’t thick enough. The bolt-cutters shifted, pressing an ice-cold metal handle against her thigh.

 

Twenty feet below the edge of the cliff, she remembered the Blowhole’s stone grinders and wondered if any sections of rock face were devices like that. She kept kicking at stones that fell.

 

Thirty feet below the edge of the cliff, she needed a rest and found a ledge. Rope wound around her arm, she leaned against wet rock. It was raining again. The wind aimed marble-sized drops at her eyes. Her beret was snatched away, which meant her face was now also lashed by her own wet hair. She’d liked that beret.

 

Forty feet below the edge of the cliff, with fifteen feet of rope flapping below the section pinched off between her boot insteps, she remembered an old school exercise about judging height by counting seconds as something fell and multiplying by ten. She clawed a rock free, held it out, and dropped it. After six seconds (sixty feet?), it bounced off an outcrop. If it splashed down, she couldn’t make out the individual noise amid the roar of surf. So she was no wiser.

 

Fifty feet below the edge of the cliff, with hands on fire and (she thought) ripped bloody inside her gloves, it occurred to her that the door might be locked as well as chained. With burglar tools it wasn’t especially legal for a policewoman to carry, she could crack most household locks. They’d done a seminar on it at Hendon. However, one-handed, in darkness, lashed by wind and rain, clinging to a precipice and pretty bloody fed up, she wasn’t confident that she could use what was in her pockets (tube of mints, some tissues, flat keys, coral lipstick, mobile) to effect an entry.

 

Fifty-five feet below the edge of the cliff, she found she was still not level with the door. She didn’t know how that was possible, but here she was—toes scraping the upper edge of the metal.

 

She tried shouting to Kydd, but couldn’t hear herself.

 

Looking up, she saw his face peering over, waving encouragingly. From his angle, he might not be able to see her problem.

 

Off to the side, beyond the light, she had a sense of other faces looking over the cliff at her, white-bearded, evil-eyed and horned. She decided she really hated goats.

 

All she needed was for Kydd to uncleat the rope and give her five more feet.

 

She waited, hoping the penny would drop. No such luck.

 

Her choices were: a) climb all the way back up and ask politely for a longer rope, then hope the door didn’t sneakily work its way down the cliff another five or ten feet; or b) go off-rope and make her own way down to the ledge, trusting her luck not to lose grip, rely unwisely on an unsafe hold or be plucked from the cliff by the elements and thoroughly battered against rock on her plunge to be sucked under whirling waves and marr-i-ed to a mer-my-id at the bottom of the deep blue sea. Neither appealed. Climbing down had been hard, and with no feeling at all in her hands, climbing up would be much harder. The thought of going untethered opened a cold wet anemone in the pit of her stomach that she recognised as stark terror.

 

She gave Kydd another wave, pointing down, shouting, “More rope.”

 

Kydd’s face disappeared as he stood up.

 

She thanked a power higher than the Chief Constable that her message had been received. She wound herself around the rope, entwining it with both arms, gripping with thighs, knees and heels.

 

A little give came and she lurched downwards.

 

Her cheek pressed against metal.

 

She lurched down again, way too fast, and scraped over rock. Her feet scrabbled for perches. The cliff sloped out a little, and she stopped falling. The rope was loose above her.

 

Had something happened to Kydd?

 

She tugged the rope. Yards of it came free.

 

If something had happened to Kydd, that something’s attention would be on her next.

 

She relaxed her grip on the rope, still keeping it between her and the cliff, and experimentally reached upwards. Her hand crested a ledge—the door ledge!—and she got a reasonable hold. She raised her other hand and let her whole weight hang from the ledge.

 

The bloody bolt-cutters shifted again, handle twisting her knickers, business end pressed into her belly. She thought for a moment she was gutted and bleeding, but it was just the freezing metal against her soft tummy.

 

Her first attempt at lifting herself was pathetic. Her elbows wouldn’t bend. She just succeeded in fraying pebbles from the ledge.

 

She couldn’t think of Kydd.

 

Ordering herself to do better, she hefted herself up, getting her torso over the ledge, then her bottom. She was sitting, looking out at the dark sea, getting another faceful of rain.

 

A dim white circle foamed on the waters. The Kjempestrupe. Never mind that; anyone who braved this cliff was a worthy consort for the Droning of Skerra. Not that she fancied Persephone Gill.

 

The rope was free. It whipped away, well out of reach.

 

She was on her own. The business of getting both feet firmly on the ledge was tricky enough, but then she had to stand up and turn around to face the door. She took a hold of the chain, which crumbled to rust-flakes and fell apart. Angrily, she extracted the bolt-cutters from her underwear, minded to toss the bloody tool into the sea.

 

Then, sense prevailed. She might need them as a bludgeon. Or nail clippers.

 

The door had a handle, like an old-fashioned freezer. She expected it to come off in her grip, but it was firm. There was no keyhole, so even if she’d had a full set of picks they’d be no use. She wrenched the handle, feeling a catch go free, and pushed.

 

The door didn’t move.

 

She pushed again and realised the door opened outwards. It wasn’t a convenient setup. In order to pull, she had to lean away from the cliff and risk the fall. In opening, the door swept the ledge she was standing on. She had to ease herself around it, dangling for horrible seconds. Hinges strained and complained. A blast of warm air shot out at her.

 

If the hinges broke, she was dead.

 

Clumsily and in a tangle, she managed it.

 

She wound up inside a dark place, looking out, with solid floor under her.

 

Peeling off her gloves, she found slight weals across her palms, but not the churning open wounds she expected. She pulled her shirt out of her waistband and bent to wipe rain out of her eyes. She ran her fingers through her hair, wiping runnels of cold water back across her skull and down her neck and spine.

 

She was inside, not exactly safe.

 

What about Kydd? She yelled his name.

 

No response.

 

Frustrated, she clanged on the metal door with the bolt-cutters, as if sounding a dinner gong.

 

She poked her head out and looked up.

 

All she got was wet again.

 

The fringe of light still shone, marking the cliff edge. Then, it shut off.

 

There was no reason for Kydd to turn out the lights.

 

Angry, guilty and scared, she knew she had to go farther into this dark place and find Jeperson and the others.

 

The prospect did not appeal.

 

* * * *

 

2

 

“Traditionally, I should explain everything to you,” said Swellhead. “But I am not one of those inadequates who needs the respect of his enemies. I don’t mind toiling in the dark. My achievements are their own satisfaction. I don’t demand that the whole world recognise how clever I am. Indeed, in the end, no one will know what I’ve done. Possibly, when the story is rewritten I will myself be unaware of how much I have accomplished. That’s still undetermined. Mr. Jeperson, how’s your memory? Giving you a headache?”

 

Swellhead was right.

 

It was increasingly hard to concentrate.

 

The gaps were filling in, but not comfortably. Now, Richard remembered...

 

... a briefing from Edwin Winthrop, in 1973, about the interest the Diogenes Club was being forced to take in Sewell Head Industries.

 

... a woman in a leotard and mask, leaping from the revolving restaurant of the Post Office Tower to an SHI advertising blimp, absconding with vital components of a communication satellite relay.

 

... a game of chess at a Surrey estate, played with real people and electrified board squares.

 

... Fred Regent ,’v headless body dumped on Richard’s Chelsea doorstep, with a note, “He lost his head over a girl. “

 

... wearing a white jumpsuit and faceplate, mingling with minions. ... black-clad SAS men abseiling down the Blowhole. ...a firefight around the Big Dish. ... duels, deaths ...

 

It was fragmentary and did not fit facts he was sure of. Fred Regent was not dead. The revolving restaurant shut down in 1971 after a bomb attack by the Angry Brigade. There had never been a Sewell Head Industries.

 

These were not his memories, but those of another Richard Jeperson.

 

Somewhen where Sewell Head was an industrial giant/diabolical mastermind (not a counter clerk in a sweetshop), Richard had been responsible for undoing his colossal schemes. At great personal cost.

 

Scalpels of pain slid behind his eyes.

 

The overlaps and contradictions hurt. From remembering too little, he switched to remembering too much. He was not struck by memories from two lives, but dozens ...

 

... the “Horst Wessel Lied” played over and over as German athletes won gold medal after gold medal at a 1956 London Olympiad.

 

... tracking a psychic assassin through the crowds at the Glastonbury Festival in 1969, saving the life of a future Prime Minister.

 

... arguing through an interpreter with an Okhrana man about screening the guests at a royal wedding in St. Petersburg in 1972.

 

... an embassy siege in 1980, negotiating with vampire terrorists demanding Transylvania as a homeland.

 

... a kidnapped London Mayor replaced by a perfidious impostor in 1999.

 

... under torture in 2001, compelled by arachnid overlords to betray a human resistance cell in Highgate.

 

... biplanes battling over a London of 2003, the city radiating out not from Buckingham Palace (which was missing) but from the Tower ...

 

In all the lives he had led, that other Richard Jepersons had led, there were no memories before 1945. The blank that had been with him all his adult life was a constant.

 

“Come back, Mr. Jeperson,” said Sewell Head, chuckling.

 

For a terrifying moment, he was not sure which Richard he was, which world this was.

 

“With concentration, I found I could compartmentalise continua. Of course, I have eighth-stage Asperger’s. As syndromes go, it’s one of the more useful ones. Your partial amnesia is not going to be an effective substitute.”

 

“What is all this nonsense?” demanded Onions, getting annoyed again. He had been in shock since Yoland’s death, hankie blotting his messy scalp-wound, sulking about the turn his expedition had taken, warily eyeing the mask-faced Miss Kill. Now, he was ready to reassert himself.

 

“You ‘re not part of the backstory, Onions,” said Swellhead, pronouncing the name like the vegetable.

 

“O-nye-ons,” corrected Onions, automatically.

 

“Do your feet suffer from bo-nye-ons?” snapped Swellhead. “As anyone who’s faced me in a pub quiz damn well understands, I know my onions!”

 

The little bald man was transformed. His forehead bulged, as if extra brains packed his cranial cavity. He still chewed, popping Belgian chocolates like a pep pill addict. He radiated the sort of confidence you get when you know fanatical devotees are on hand, prepared to murder at your whim or die to protect you.

 

Miss Kill and de Maltby were solid presences, as were some of the whitesuits—Vernon and his team?—but there were phantoms as well, coalescing, gaining substance. The complex was coming to life, each section getting noisier, busier as its inhabitants grew corporeal, purposeful. From Swellhead’s swollen head flowed a conviction that gave his world hard edges.

 

“I’m not sure where you fit in,” Swellhead told Onions. “But unless you give me reason to have you eliminated, it’ll be interesting to find out. As the world rearranges, everyone in it will be affected. Maybe you’ll fade, become one of the ghosts you’ve been chasing. That’d be an appreciable irony.”

 

Onions tried to stand, but Miss Kill laid a slim hand on his shoulder.

 

Richard could not see Persephone Gill any more. Just the woman in the mask whose fingers and feet were weapons as deadly as de Maltby’s silver-knived hand attachment.

 

He remembered Miss Kill.

 

... Thrown off balance by that revolving restaurant, he realised the thief hadn’t trapped herself by fleeing to the top of the tower, that she had a prepared exit....

 

And, later...

 

A struggle in the sculpture garden, taking blows to the chest and face, twisting on the Astroturf to roll out of the way of a stabbing spike-heel aimed at his eye, an accurately thrown knife ...

 

Did she remember? She would not leave that opening twice. And he was thirty years older, slower. Even a simple break-fall would probably throw out his back and leave him flapping like a fish, easy to skewer with a deliberate stab of a stiletto.

 

“Just for the record, Onions,” said Swellhead. “There are no ghosts.”

 

The pain in Richard’s head kinked, then shut off.

 

“That’s not strictly true,” he said. “This whole complex is a ghost, not of a person but a thought. An idea you had, Mr. Head. Maybe you had it in another place, where you were an international mastermind with a cadre of loyalist goons at your command. Maybe you had it while you stood behind the confectionary counter, your wonderful brain switched onto another track by years of breathing in chocolate dust. Dreams can come true. That’s what magic does. And you’re not one of the Talents of ‘Pronounced “Eyesight.”‘ You’re a natural-born magician. Onions would say it was all down to chemicals in your brain. Others would give you a pointy hat and call you a wizard. We both know it doesn’t matter what you are.”

 

Swellhead clapped, slowly.

 

“Quite right, Mr. Jeperson. What matters is what I can do.”

 

“Which is ...?” demanded Onions.

 

Swellhead nibbled the corner of a bon-bon, almost flirtatiously. “Ah, wouldn’t you like to know?”

 

“Will you get someone to write you a theme song?” Richard asked. “‘Swellhead’ Swellhead, on sweeties fed, he’ll leave you dead...” Or how about: ‘You should have stayed in bed, it’s got to be said, you’ll fear to tread, after ... The Man With the Swollen Head.”‘

 

“You know, that’s not a bad idea. Miss Kill, who should I hire? John Barry? Burt Bacharach? Stephen Sondheim?”

 

Swellhead took music seriously. Richard remembered Ken Dodd, slaughtered and mounted for hogging the number-one spot with a dreadful ballad.

 

“Percy is twenty-one years old,” he said. “She’d want N’Sync or Robbie Williams or Eminem.”

 

Swellhead’s brows contracted, then relaxed.

 

“Trivia Man, are you still in there?” Richard asked. “Your specialist subject is popular music since 1973....”

 

“Soon, all that will be forgotten. In my reality, we have proper music.”

 

“You can hear the lyrics and hum the tunes, eh?”

 

Swellhead looked almost offended. “Yes, why not?”

 

“Don’t ask me. I’m probably sixty-five. I haven’t liked a chart-topper since Mary Hopkin. That’s the point of pop music. It’s irrelevant to us oldies, just as we’re irrelevant to it. No matter what you do to the world, you won’t change that.”

 

Swellhead was a little flustered.

 

De Maltby’s silver hand began to whirr. Revolving needles protruded from the knuckles.

 

Swellhead calmed down and wagged a finger.

 

“Very clever, but you can’t distract me.”

 

He snapped his fingers. The Muzak billowed “These Boots Were Made for Walking.”

 

Miss Kill danced, mask making her seem like a robot.

 

She wound around the impassive Swellhead, then de Maltby, then took a solo spot. She was very good, had all the moves, and each air kick had a force that could have broken bones. At the end of every chorus, she broke something: arm crushing through a wrought-iron table, heel battering a chair out of shape.

 

... one of these days, these boots are gonna ...

 

Richard’s old wounds ached just to watch her.

 

... walk all over you!

 

She finished her routine. Swellhead applauded. So did de Maltby, very carefully.

 

Sincerely, Richard joined in.

 

“I think it’s time to go up and visit the Big Dish,” said Swellhead. “What do you think?”

 

Richard nodded.

 

Endgame. With people pieces.

 

* * * *

 

3

 

The complex had changed while she was topside.

 

Now, it was fully operational. If Stacy touched the walls, she felt vibration. As she’d guessed, vast machines buried below Skerra were turning over. Energy thrummed throughout Head Office.

 

And there were staff.

 

She pressed into an alcove as white-suited soldiers jogged by.

 

Ghosts? Or woken from deep-freeze?

 

She was in an area of the complex they hadn’t toured earlier. Corridors curved but had no corners. Through glass doors, she saw illuminated rooms where scientific processes were being carried out. Most involved large, bubbling tanks of different-coloured liquids.

 

One room contained nothing but ghosts, row upon row of clothes hangers draped with the white jumpsuits. She knuckle-punched a pad by the door, which opened noiselessly. She found a large suit and wriggled into it. A groin-to-throat seal had to be pressed closed with a toggle-zip affair of unfamiliar design. The garment bulged everywhere, but could be belted in. Plastic bootees went over her boots. She replaced her gloves with gauntlets that clipped easily to the sleeves. The helmet screwed into a collar-ring.

 

Though opaque from outside, the faceplate was transparent for the wearer.

 

Cool.

 

As the helmet locked, a red display lit up at the lower right of her vision. The “H” logo hatched, and figures she didn’t understand scrolled.

 

All she needed was one of those machine-gun things.

 

The weapons weren’t stored here, though.

 

Returning to the corridor, she strode on, trying to project purposefulness.

 

She thought she was walking into a mirrored barrier. It was only an identically dressed figure coming the other way.

 

The ghost made a salute, a fist pressed to the forehead.

 

Inside her helmet, Stacy struggled not to laugh. On her manor, the gesture was slang for “knob-head.”

 

She returned the salute, Harpo mirroring Groucho.

 

The other whitesuit stepped aside to let her pass.

 

Another jogging platoon passed. They all turned and gave her the knob-head salute, which she returned.

 

When they were out of sight, she stopped, bent over and grabbed her knees, painful spasms in her gut. She had to laugh. An odd out-of-body feeling suggested remotely that she was on the point of genuine hysterics.

 

Tears leaked down her face. She clanged a gauntlet against her faceplate trying to wipe them.

 

Her own barking laughs filled her helmet.

 

She realised she was shaking with terror.

 

* * * *

 

4

 

The Big Dish was healed. Its “H” shone as if new-painted.

 

The soot-patches on the walls had shrunk. They were disappearing like condensation on a warm morning.

 

Richard was not surprised.

 

The dead bodies were all up and about, flesh on their bones. Some had dwindling red stains or contracting black holes in their jumpsuits. One passed by: a network of cracks in his faceplate disappearing as if the film were running backwards at double-speed.

 

As Swellhead stepped off the lift platform, the white ghosts turned and thumped their foreheads in salute.

 

Respectfully, he returned the gesture.

 

Activity all around. Busy, busy ghosts. Technicians, lab coats flapping, ran silent diagnostic tests at banks of controls. White jeep-cum-golfcart vehicles trundled without colliding, like well-controlled model trains, some dragging trailers of white, “H”-logoed barrels. Mechanics with dark stains on their uniforms oiled the rails on which the Big Dish ran.

 

“All very satisfactory,” said Swellhead.

 

A pipeline burst across the floor, slithering like a serpent, coughing out thick black liquid. A cleanup crew descended automatically, spraying foam on the spill, tethering and repairing the line.

 

This crisis did not impinge on Swellhead’s calm.

 

Richard looked up, towards the Blowhole.

 

... a hundred black figures rappelling down, firebursts in the air all around, the roar of attack choppers ...

 

He could not count on that this time.

 

In the 1973 of his phantom memory, Edwin Winthrop was waiting at the Club, monitoring all frequencies. An SAS strike force was scrambled and at ready in a secret base in the Orkneys. At Richard’s signal, Swellhead’s complex would be attacked, breached and overwhelmed.

 

Here and now, Really-a-Good-Bloke Rory was snug in bed waiting for a report about intellectual salvage rights that would win him bonus points with his minister. Morag Duff could no more authorise a military attack on Skerra than she could get reform of the Common Agricultural Policy through the EU.

 

Soon, the government would be irrelevant.

 

All governments. All churches. All beliefs. All aesthetics.

 

Everything.

 

The whole world would be living inside Sewell Head’s head.

 

* * * *

 

5

 

Stacy tried to imagine a cutaway diagram of Skerra, but found the mental map of the complex made her head hurt. It probably didn’t add up anyway. She wasn’t sure there was room under the island for all this.

 

She found herself back in the sculpture garden.

 

Something was missing.

 

By the Easter Island-look Sewell Head lay the elegant skeleton, black-handled blade stuck in its skull. The mask it had worn was missing.

 

Stacy plucked the knife. It was about three inches long. Whisper-touching her thumb to the blade, she sliced open her gauntlet.

 

It wasn’t a machine gun, but it was something.

 

She’d only had an afternoon of firearms training, anyway. A knife ought to be more use. She had taken, and now taught, an evening class in women’s self-defence. To demonstrate the proper countermove for knife attack, twisting a wooden sticker out of a volunteer’s grip, she’d picked up dirty-fighting skills. She usually had to cheat on the final exams, letting pupils take the sticker away from her when she knew she could easily get it against their throats.

 

Blade out, she entered the hallway of heads.

 

Stalking past, she tried to conquer the impression that the trophies were looking at her.

 

She was at the point of peering into the control room when a bloody stare caught her attention.

 

There was a new trophy, crudely hacked and inexpertly mounted.

 

Aircrewman Victor Kydd, Skerra, 2003, machete.

 

She swore, furious and grief-shocked.

 

* * * *

 

6

 

“But what’s it for?” asked Onions. “What does it do?”

 

Richard wondered if Swellhead would go back on his word and explain his grand design. Possibly, he was as trapped as all other players and had to act out the role of diabolical mastermind. That was a chink of hope—villains always lose.

 

“It’ll make things neat and tidy,” said Swellhead.

 

“In your terms, it’ll amplify his Talent,” Richard told Onions.

 

“Very perceptive,” said Swellhead.

 

“He’s going to overwrite reality.”

 

“That’s ridiculous.”

 

“Look around, Adam. It’s been ridiculous all along, but here it is. In an infinite number of possibles, many of them will be extremely improbable. Is this that much stranger than regular reality?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Then you haven’t been paying attention.”

 

“I’m a scientist, not some cracked guru.”

 

“An old argument.”

 

As Richard and Onions squabbled, Swellhead beamed.

 

Richard tried to reserve part of his mind for thinking this through. There was still Stacy.

 

“Don’t think I’ve forgotten Sergeant Cotterill,” said Swellhead. “I’m sure she’ll pop up eventually. Miss Kill and Viscount de Maltby will see to her. She’ll make a fine addition to my Head Room.”

 

Richard told himself it was not a mind-link, like the one he was forging with Stacy. Swellhead had a knack for following thought processes through deduction and inference.

 

The Big Dish moved. Ancient gimbals screamed.

 

Slowly, the array trundled on its railbed, dish angling upwards. The rails sloped down, into a tunnel under the seabed. A mini-jeep drove up, and Swellhead took the front passenger seat. De Maltby indicated that Richard and Onions should get up on the rear section, and prodded Onions with his inert hand to hurry him along. The man from I-Psi-T had a slight shock and hopped up on the trolley. Richard needed a hand to clamber up. His back and legs were giving him severe gyp.

 

After the exertion, he suffered from cold caresses and whisper kisses and was tempted just to drift away. It took several moments to get his mind back on track. When he was able to pay attention again, the mini-jeep was apace with the dish. Crews with big brooms swept the rails ahead of the array. Wire-strung whitesuits clambered monkeylike on the face of the dish, checking and cleaning. Trundling the vast device about a quarter of a mile, deeper into the Earth, was a major operation.

 

A whitesuit was caught in the machine, turned to a red smear. No one commented. Richard had flash-visions: slaves hauling pyramid blocks, worshippers ground under the juggernaut.

 

The deeper they went, the colder and wetter it was. Bare rock walls cascaded with water, which sluiced away through new-carved streams. Great crude wheels turned to keep the system flushing. Gusts of steam periodically escaped from a valve, with a dreadful whistling.

 

In addition to the grinding of the wheels on rails, a greater roaring filled the cavern. The air tasted of salt.

 

“We are directly under the Kjempestrupe,” announced Swellhead.

 

A goon handed out white, “H”-logoed sou’westers. Swellhead, Richard and Onions put them on.

 

Richard looked up at the rock ceiling. A hole appeared, water falling through, and then irised open.

 

He gasped, expecting a heavy gush as sea flooded in. The black hole expanded. Then Richard saw night sky. Above the dish was a big liquid funnel. The sea was kept from pouring through the hole by the mighty force of the whirlpool, augmented by Swellhead’s mightier self-belief. Water fell, but no more than a heavy rainfall.

 

At Swellhead’s command, banks of switches were thrown. The dish lit up.

 

Richard felt heat. Water on the face of the dish sizzled and evaporated. Then the fall stopped. Richard doffed the sou’wester.

 

“You’ve turned off the rain,” said Onions, awed.

 

“Merely bored a hole in the cloud cover,” explained Swellhead. “A necessary preliminary.”

 

A shilling-bright full moon shone. A thousand points of starlight were caught and reflected in the revolving rings of the Kjempestrupe. Flashing marker buoys whizzed around on their swift courses, held by centrifugal force against the vertical surfaces.

 

“What are you using to rebroadcast?” Richard asked. “A ring of satellites?”

 

“Another dish, on the moon. I’ve run a covert space program to set up the installation.”

 

Onions snorted disbelief.

 

“Yes, without anyone noticing,” Swellhead answered the unasked question. “Clever, isn’t it?”

 

A technician came up, thumped his forehead, and gave a silent report.

 

“It will take some minutes to align our dish with the one on the moon,” said Swellhead. “We should go to the control room. You’ll find the next phase of the process fascinating.”

 

Richard looked up at the stars.

 

Then at the man he was afraid could change their alignments.

 

“He’s a Talent,” Onions had said. “Off the scale.”

 

* * * *

 

7

 

She stood at a console in the control room and tried to look busy. It wasn’t too difficult, since ghost activity consisted mostly of silently checking dials and readouts.

 

The room had changed. The computers were all back in place, and working. Big reels whirred back and forth. Tickertape stuttered out of slots. Lights flashed and beeped.

 

The big screen was uncracked and showed a televised picture.

 

Stacy saw the dish hauled into position and the ceiling open. Tiny white figures watched. It looked like an outtake from Thunderbirds. An amazingly detailed miniature, imperfect because of the impossibility of scaling down water.

 

The screen split into quadrants: one showed the dish; two had postcard views of the White House and Number Ten Downing Street; and one was a complicated animated diagram showing the Big Dish, the Earth and Moon, some sort of moon complex and a lot of dotted lines for trajectories. The White House was replaced by scrolling numbers, like logarithm tables. A giant “H”-egg logo appeared in the middle of the screen, expanding to overlay all four quadrants.

 

A digital clock flashed on at 15:00:00 and began to count down.

 

She looked around, hoping to see a plug she could pull.

 

Doors shushed open and Sewell Head walked in. No, someone who looked like Sewell Head walked in. This man had a different presence.

 

Jeperson and Onions were with him, and de Maltby and the Droning. The first two were prisoners, the latter guards. The Viscount had a strange shining mechanical glove. Persephone Gill wore a wax mask. They weren’t completely changed (like Head), but they were different—redressed and redirected.

 

She didn’t risk signalling Jeperson, but he looked directly at her.

 

She remembered he could sometimes tell what she was thinking.

 

What the... ?! she thought, hard.

 

Meet Swellhead, thought Jeperson, clearly in her mind. And watch out for Miss Kill.

 

Stacy had a panic stab that Persephone—Miss Kill!—was staring straight through her faceplate, but it passed.

 

Sewell Head—Swellhead—climbed into his favourite chair.

 

13:34:01.

 

Whatever was due to happen at 00:00:00 was unlikely to be good.

 

She had flashes of the possibilities: all the world’s nuclear arsenals activated at once, space weapons searing every patch of arable land on the planet, the activation of super-anthrax engineered to wipe out all non “H”-logoed life-forms, fomented tidal waves and cyclones washing over continents. War, famine, pestilence and death.

 

12:43:00.

 

Swellhead fisted his forehead.

 

All the drones returned salute—de Maltby even raising his unwieldy prosthetic. Stacy was a moment out of sync, and mashed the rim of her faceplate painfully against her nut.

 

“Friends,” began Swellhead. “We are on the brink of a great venture. In less than a quarter of an hour, the world will be neat and tidy. I should like you all to take a moment to pray ...”

 

She wasn’t surprised he turned out to be some species of religious crank.

 

“... to me.”

 

Good grief! she thought.

 

It’s worse than that, came Jeperson’s mind-voice.

 

The drones all took off their helmets and bowed their heads.

 

Stacy had no choice but to follow suit and hope not to be noticed. The unfamiliar helmet arrangement didn’t unscrew easily. She made a comical bumble of the business of getting loose, then got her hair in her eyes.

 

The other whitesuits had colourless faces and hair. Ghosts.

 

“Detective Sergeant,” said Swellhead, “so kind of you to join us. You are our final guest.”

 

11:50:01.

 

Hands, unghostly, gripped her arms.

 

Jeperson looked at her, with sympathy.

 

If you get a chance, he thought, kill him.

 

* * * *

 

8

 

If you can, Richard added, damping the thought so Stacy would not pick it up. It was horribly possible that Swellhead had such control over the situation that any holes in him would heal instantly.

 

11:34:00.

 

He felt something cold against his palm. No, he was feeling through Stacy, something cold against her palm.

 

A blade.

 

Such a small thing.

 

“Isn’t this about the time when you call up the Prime Minister or the President of the United States or the Secret Ruling Council of the League of Pata-Nations to make your demands?”

 

“This isn’t extortion, Mr. Jeperson. This is inevitability.”

 

Richard was worried. The many memories that had plagued him earlier were like dreams, almost forgotten on waking, leaving only incoherent images and impressions. He had no idea what Fred Regent looked like as an older man.

 

The past was a blank.

 

Only this countdown was real.

 

The Muzak began to play “Welcome to My World,” the Jim Reeves recording with psychedelia mixed in.

 

10:56:00.

 

“Listen, Head,” he said, trying to get through, “even you aren’t big enough to do this. I’ve no doubt you can rearrange all of us here, perhaps even all over the world, but you’ll be spread too thin. Where you are, in your mind empire, it’ll be a satisfying illusion, cartoonish but still convincing. But the farther away from you, the sketchier the effect will be. No one can encompass the universe in his skull. You know a great deal in theory, but you can’t really imagine, say, the life of a South American tribesman or a market-trader in Kuala Lumpur or a teenage girl in California. The vast bulk of humanity will be milling extras, barely templates, low-resolution, badly painted backdrops. Most of your world won’t be real enough.” 09:34.00.

 

“I know best,” said Swellhead, almost benignly.

 

“Penny in the slot, Trivia Man,” said Richard. “Alfonso the Wise, King of Castile...”

 

“1221 to 1284.”

 

“That’s the fellow. Most famous saying of...?”

 

“‘If I had been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better arrangement of the Universe.’“

 

“Alfonso wasn’t being the Wise when he said that; he was being the Funny. Alfonso the Wise-Cracker. It’s supposed to be a joke, to expose hubris.”

 

“That’s not fact; that’s opinion. Too debatable for a quiz question.”

 

08:57:01.

 

“Not in nine minutes it won’t be. There’ll be only one opinion. Do you really want to live in that world?”

 

“So long as it’s the right opinion.”

 

“Yours.”

 

“Absolutely.”

 

“You’ll be on your own. Despite all these masks and ghosts and puppets, completely alone.”

 

A tiny glimpse of Sewell Head came through.

 

“I’m used to it,” he said.

 

08:02:01.

 

So much for Reason. His only backup plan was Violence.

 

Stacy, he thought, loud enough for all the ghosts to hear, now!

 

* * * *

 

9

 

07:54:01.

 

She pulled off her transparent gauntlet and gripped the knife.

 

As she shrugged, ghost fingers sank through her arms, giving her a bone-scraping tingle she hoped never to feel again.

 

She hadn’t followed Jeperson’s argument.

 

And she wasn’t sold on being an assassin. That hadn’t been what Fred Regent hauled her off shift for. She’d never signed up for that. Whenever it came up at the Police Federation, she voted against ordinary coppers carrying firearms or even stun-guns. That wasn’t how she wanted the world to be.

 

But no one was listening to her now.

 

07:36:00.

 

She waded through ghosts. They moved slowly. Guns spat floating, easily-dodgeable globules.

 

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 midair, 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 troublemaker. She always advised her pupils that it was better to be mugged by someone with crustylocks than a baldie (for skinheads, she recommended a nail file 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, vise-pressure fingertips digging into her back. She was lifted off her feet and held out at arm’s 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.

 

* * * *

 

10

 

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 moon base 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 sprung 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 subvocalised 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 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. Counterproductive.

 

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 midair, 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.”

 

* * * *

 

11

 

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 postmodern, 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 ‘Lucky Lucky 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 skull bone 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.

 

* * * *

 

12

 

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 forever.

 

In a way, Richard hoped so.

 

Without Swellhead’s belief, rigidly suppressed but devout, that every villain must be bested by an archnemesis, 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 backup,” 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 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 waterspout 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 predawn sky. Dramatic clouds were incarnadine as red washed over his vision.

 

A bearded face, upside down, obtruded into his line of vision. And neighed rather nastily.

 

He shooed away the goat.

 

* * * *

 

13

 

After a bare five hours of morning, Skerra day was almost over.

 

The radio crackled, but neither Stacy nor Jeperson were inclined to climb back inside the Sea King to answer it.

 

A rescue chopper was on its way.

 

Soon, they would be lifted off this rock. She would abdicate, turn the iron crown over to the goats. Placating them with chocolate bars, which they ate wrappers and all, she had already come to a truce with her vicious subjects.

 

Jeperson was comfortable, not complaining of his injuries.

 

She supposed she was bruised and battered, too. Two of her fingers bent the wrong way and she couldn’t feel them.

 

Stacy sat by the Man from the Diogenes Club.

 

He handed her a Bounty. Sewell Head’s backup stash of sweets had been in the Sea King.

 

She ripped the paper and bit off a chunk. Chewing hurt. She thought she’d lost a filling—though not, Lord willing, any of her precious back teeth—while being knocked about.

 

“What’s down there now?” she asked.

 

“A mess. And dead people. Mostly water, though. The apports haven’t lasted in coherent form. Adam Onions missed his chance to study a unique set of phenomena.”

 

The rescue helicopter approached the island.

 

“It’ll be good to be back,” she said.

 

“It is good,” he responded, eyes flashing bright silver.