Simon Green - The Man with the Golden Torc

As my eyes adjusted to the flaring lights and colours, I began to recognise faces in the roiling throng: celebrities, footballers, politicians, even a few respectable businessmen from the City that dear prudish Matthew would probably have been horrified to discover in a place like this. I filed the faces away in my memory, for future thought. And perhaps a little blackmail, if money became tight.

The walking wardrobe returned with the four founding members of the Chelsea Lovers. They strolled with almost supernatural grace through the heaving crowds, which opened before them and closed after them without once stopping or even slowing what they were doing. The four founders walked on air, masters of their own space, touching nothing but each other. Their hands wandered constantly over each other’s bare flesh. They sank slowly down to hover before me, and the bouncer went back to his door. The four original Chelsea Lovers: Dave and Annie, Stuart and Lenny. Two men and two women, but far beyond anything so human now; instead they were as alien and other as anything I ever encountered from another dimension. They had to be in their late sixties, but they still had the smooth bodies of twenty-year-olds. Perfect as statues, lean and hungry, burning with unnatural energies, sustained by an endless appetite that had nothing to do with food.

They looked much as they must have done when they first met in Chelsea, back in the swinging sixties, when London swung like a pendulum. Two young couples, then, out on the town and hungry for new experiences. They found something, or it found them, and they were never the same afterwards. They started their first club in a little place just off Carnaby Street, and what they did there shocked even the most hardened souls of the permissive generation. The Chelsea Lovers hadn’t seen daylight since. They moved from location to location, known only to those in the know, travelling the secret subterranean routes beneath the city streets, flitting silently through the shadows of the undertown, with its ancient Roman arches, where all the bad things congregate, for fun and profit. Nothing ever touched the Chelsea Lovers. Even then, they were far too dangerous.

They stood before me, skin like chalk, eyes like pissholes in the snow. Colourless flyaway hair, purple lips, and endless smiles that meant nothing, nothing at all. They were entirely naked, untouched by piercings or tattoos or any such trappings. Such lesser things were not for them. Just hanging on the air before me, silent and inviting, they were still the most blatantly sexual things I had ever seen. They had all the impact of the first nude photos you ever saw, the first object of desire, the first boy or girl you ever wanted, and the first you ever lost. I wanted them and I was afraid of them, and God alone knows what I would have done if my torc hadn’t been there to protect me from the worst of their influence.

I knew the four names, but not which was who. I don’t think anyone does anymore. Perhaps not even them. One of the women spoke to me. Her voice sounded like she had ice in her veins and a fever in her head.

"What do you want here? What’s your pleasure?"

I had to clear my throat before I could speak, and even then my voice wasn’t as steady as I would have liked. "I need to consult your computers. I need information, the kind only you might possess."

"What do you offer in payment?" said one of the men. His voice was calm, cheerful, confidential, and about as human as a spider scuttling across your arm. "Information in return, perhaps; or money, or your seed? You’d be surprised what we could make from your seed, freely given."

"Information," I said quickly. My mouth was very dry, and my legs were shaking. "First, a secret location used by a Drood field agent, on the outskirts of London." And I gave them the address of the garage I’d just abandoned. "Second, the name of the Drood field agent who’s just been declared rogue and is on the run here in London: Edwin Drood."

All four of them actually shivered with delight at the prospect of getting their hands on a new rogue Drood, the first in years. They rose and fell on the air, laughing silently, their chalk white skin shimmering brightly. If they could seduce and corrupt the rogue to their cause, they would have access to secrets and information no one else had. They commanded me to follow them and floated off towards the centre of the room, descending slowly until they walked on the bodies that moved unstoppably beneath them. I struggled after them, my feet slipping and sliding on the sweat-covered bodies. I stared straight ahead. You can’t keep glancing down and apologising. And finally, in the exact centre of the cavernous room, the four founding Chelsea Lovers impersonally levered people out of the way to reveal a large puckered orifice in the floor. They gestured, and it dilated open, revealing only darkness and a sudden pungent smell on the air, like supercharged cinnamon. One by one the four of them floated down into what lay below the floor, disappearing into darkness, until only I was left hesitating on the rim. In the end, I just shrugged and jumped in after them. This was what I’d come for, after all.

And found myself suddenly in a brightly lit, high-tech environment that was the complete antithesis of everything above. It was a circular room barely twenty feet in diameter, crowded with all the latest computer equipment. But the computers had burst open, their silicon contents spilling out like fruiting bodies, spreading themselves up the walls and across the ceiling like silver ivy, even dropping down in encrustations like silicon stalactites. The computers here were living things, growing things, fuelled by the sexual energies from above. Self-centred, self-perpetuating. The air-conditioning gusted like heavy breathing, and the monitor screens all around me could have been eyes or mouths or other orifices. The four Chelsea Lovers stood together in the middle of it all, looking at me expectantly.

"Word is, there’s a traitor inside the Drood family," I said. "I want to know everything you know about that."

They nodded in eerie unison, and one of them ran a hand caressingly over a computer console. It was a slow, sensuous lover’s touch. I could feel beads of sweat popping out on my forehead. Normal people weren’t supposed to be exposed to things like the Chelsea Lovers. Just their presence was toxic to ordinary humans. The computers hummed thoughtfully to themselves. The Chelsea Lovers stood together, in the same stance, even breathing in unison. Their eyes didn’t blink as they considered me. I could feel a presence, a pressure, forming in the room. A desire, a need, a physical imperative…

"What’s it all for?" I said abruptly. "I mean, all of this. The Chelsea Lovers. The Kit Kat Club. The sex magic and the computers. What’s the point of it all?"

"Apocalypse," said one of the women, and they all smiled a little more widely. "The real sexual revolution, come at last. We want to turn the whole world on. Using sex magic, computer magic, ritual and passion, instinct and logic, flesh and silicon bonded together in unthought-of ways, to work a tidal change in reality itself. We will make the whole world sexual. Fetishize everything in it, the living and unliving, suffusing the whole world with a passion and an appetite that will never end. A great joyous sexual apocalypse, the climax of history. The biggest bang of all. Endless sensation, endless pleasure…And we shall all worship the new flesh, forever and ever and ever…"

She broke off as a face appeared on all the monitor screens at once. The computers had discovered the identity of the new rogue Drood, and it was me. My face was on every wall, with my real name beneath it. The family had released my true identity to the world. The Chelsea Lovers turned as one to orientate themselves on me. They weren’t smiling anymore. They each thrust one hand out at me, and sex hit me like a fist. I cried out, convulsing helplessly as passion burned in me like a fever, like the nightmares you have when your temperature rises and your blood boils in your brain. I wanted to go to them, on my hands and knees if necessary, and worship their flesh with my own. I would have begged, would have died, for their lightest touch, for the pleasure of their favour.