Robert Rankin - Necrophenia

‘They did in Croydon,’ said Neil.

‘And what about the doctor who looked like Elvis?’ said Andy.

‘I think she added that into the story later,’ said Neil. ‘She met the real Elvis, you see, and realised that he was the dead spit of the doctor that she had met twenty years before. Which is kind of weird, isn’t it?’

Andy grunted that it was and had another strawberry.

And Neil continued, ‘So Clara became an outsider, an eccentric, a bogus bag lady, to avoid the attentions of the Men from the Ministry. But she could see who was who. And she published her findings in all kinds of off-the-wall publications. And some folk took her seriously, these folk being those whose own mental-meshes were either damaged, or missing.’

‘And Shadow Night at Club Twenty-Seven?’ I asked.

‘She founded Club Twenty-Seven,’ said Neil, ‘as a means of Purging the Taint.’

And I knew that expression. I had heard it used to describe what went on when the helicopter gunships strafed that Hanwell cemetery.

‘How does this work?’ I asked Neil.

‘They are lured into the club,’ said Neil, ‘the others, those casters of the double shadow. They are reanimated corpses, you see. Clara eventually figured it all out. They have their own shadow, but also another – the shadow of the ungodly thing that has been inflicted into them. Shadow Night sorts them out.’

‘How?’ I enquired. Although, in truth, I wasn’t particularly caring too much by then, because I had by that point eaten my way through about half a pound of snowily dusted strawberries.

‘Well, you didn’t know what Shadow Night meant until I explained it to you,’ said Neil. ‘So neither do they, and no one explains it to them. They come into the club, looking for a good time, but they never leave. There’s a hotel over on the West Coast, also founded by Clara, where the same thing goes on.’

‘The Hotel California?’ I said.

‘You know of it?’

‘Only a lucky guess.’

‘So they get exterminated. And it’s really entertaining to watch, apparently.’

I registered the looks upon the faces of the other guys in the band. Apart from Toby, who appeared altogether keen, the other guys, even though now buoyed-up considerably by copious quantities of coke, didn’t look altogether enthusiastic.

‘It’s one of those rich people things,’ Neil explained. ‘Those exclusive things that only the rich are privy to. We can watch because we are rock musicians. I’m up for it – what about the rest of you?’

‘How do they do the actual butchering?’ Andy asked.

‘I think you can have your choice of weapons.’

‘What? ’ I said to Neil. ‘What did you say?’

‘Oh, I forgot to mention that. If you bung a contribution into the Extermination of the Undead Fund, you can butcher one of the blighters yourself. With your choice of weapons.’

I did shakings of my head. This was all a bit sudden. And a bit unexpected.

‘Well, I’m up for it,’ said Toby. ‘Can I choose one of those General Electric miniguns? They look like a lot of fun.’

‘Well, I’m not up for it,’ said Rob. ‘It all sounds most dubious to me. What if they’re not undead? And frankly I don’t think I believe in the concept of the undead. It sounds rather cheesy to me. You might kill some innocent party instead.’

And so we did not attend Shadow Night. It was a group decision. A band decision. And I for one am glad that we took it. It wouldn’t have been right if we’d got involved in something like that and butchered an innocent party.

So we all went back to the hotel and to our original plan for the evening: to live the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle and set the standard by which other rock bands would be judged in years to come.

Yes, follow our original plan.

And eat one of the groupies.

We didn’t eat all of the groupie.

We left the trotters and the snout.

I really took to New York, which, I learned, was so good they had named it twice. It was midsummer, but as this was New York, it was snowing heavily and folk were skating about on various outdoor ice rinks. All the women looked like Barbra Streisand and the blokes like Elliott Gould. Which meant very little to me, because I was English.

I had no idea just how much kudos being English held in America. Folk just ‘love that English accent’, and we were asked repeatedly whether we owned bowler hats and regularly had the Queen round to tea. Which was handy for Toby because, apparently, he did!

This was nineteen sixty-nine and New York was in the throes of a big Jewish craze. Being Jewish was the in thing and people who did not look even the remotest bit Jewish were adopting yarmulkes and Jewish accents, greeting each other with oy veys and catching gefilte fish. The year before it had been fashionable to be Irish. And in the early seventies you weren’t anyone in New York if you weren’t black and didn’t sport an afro. I don’t know what the present fashion is in New York, but I have heard talk of cross-dressing.

But as Jewish was the look, we trooped into a downtown boutique and got ourselves kitted out. Black. All black. Black suit, black coat, black shoes, black homburg. It was a really cool look, and we took it with us back to England and unwittingly started the Goth movement.

And there’s something about black, isn’t there? There’s really nothing cooler to wear than black. You can go anywhere in a black suit and folk will always show you respect. Because you will always look sophisticated. We didn’t wear black onstage in America, though, because after all, we had invented Glam Rock and we wanted the American public to appreciate our glamour. Before they got too deeply into our sophistication. We did have an ingrained natural sophistication, though, which is why we didn’t eat the snout, or the trotters.

Andy just loved New York. He acquired an all-black police uniform, augmented with silver trimmings and badge, and took to performing random stop-and-searches on young women and issuing on-the-spot fines for breaches of style. Andy adored New York, and in its turn New York, it appeared, loved Andy.

Neil loved New York also and hung around the recording studios, mixing with the big stars of the day. Rob checked out Madison Avenue, home of advertising, and found favour in all that he met with there.

Toby engaged in all manner of wheelings and dealings, some of which, I felt certain, had to be legal.

Which left only me.

And I suppose that I loved New York also, even though it was so cold. But I had so many things on my mind that I could not concentrate on looking cool and having a really good time.

This whole undead business was really getting me down. I just didn’t know what to make of it. I’d seen it with my own eyes – the zombies in the cemetery and the undead at the Hyde Park gig. And the knowledge that Shadow Night really existed at Club 27 meant that it was not just me, Mr Ishmael and the mysterious crew at the Ministry of Serendipity who knew about it. This thing was big and growing ever bigger.

What I didn’t know, but really wanted to know, was who or what was behind it. Was it some evil necromancer? Or a black magician, or perhaps the Homunculus himself? It was definitely a baddy of some big-time description. A super-baddy. And whether Mr Ishmael had been telling me all of the truth, or indeed any of it, I had no way of knowing.

So I really truly did want to talk to Mr Ishmael.

But Mr Ishmael was nowhere to be found.

I still had his telephone number – I’d found it in the lining of my mother’s trench coat – and I called several times, using the special trans-Atlantic prefix and everything. But there was no answer. And thinking about that scrap of paper and the trench coat had me feeling all nostalgic and gave me a crinkly mouth. I quite missed my mum and dad, and even though I was now a rock ’n’ roll star, on the way up with a glorious future ahead of me, I actually missed being a private detective.