Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 19

Through the shapes it created he could almost imagine he could see the muscular City architecture, the Gherkin, the old Nat West tower and, further afield, Canary Wharf. The aircraft warning lights they pulsed might shine in the tubing outside this very window, but also, deep within him, matching the insistent thrum of his own heart. He heard the creak of the broken door behind him and he acted upon it, not wanting to turn to see what had followed him up here. Falteringly, he clambered out on to the platform and edged along it until he had reached the end. His hands, coated with the dust of a book he could still smell, clawed at the brackets that kept the entire structure married to the block. They were so cold they scorched his skin.

He heard something struggle out of the window frame and on to the duckboards. Whatever it was had no grace, no balance. Its weight sent stresses and strains along the planks to his own feet, lifting them a little. The song of the wood might have been the keening that played in his throat. He smelled the high, narcotic smell of burned plastic. There were no books. There were no notes. No text messages. No Heaton. No wallet filled with cash. No Mrs Greville. No Mick Bett. No Gherkin. No past, no future. No nothing. Mantle's love of books was desperate, a wish never to be fulfilled. He reached up to his eyes and pressed his fingers against the dry membrane that filmed them. Pockets of interior colour exploded. He could never know what it meant to be able to read a story, no more than he would ever learn what colour his own eyes were.

The lie these books contained. The fictions. It had a face, it had a fury. They infected your life, it was a contagion. You built up your own monster from the deceptions you invented. And Mantle was all about deceit. He'd managed the most horrid of them all, tricking himself. It was second nature, now. The blind leading the blind. Fear unfolded in every pore of his being. Nevertheless, he turned to confront what had chased him all this way, all these years. Not being able to see him gave Mantle a Pyrrhic victory of sorts. He was able to smile, his mouth finding an unusual cast even as the sum of his trickery leaned in close. The hand over his mouth was little more than crisped talons. He felt as if he were becoming infected by that alien flesh, growing desiccated, so sucked dry of moisture that his face might disintegrate. His chest muscles ruptured with the strain of trying to draw a breath. Millions of capillaries burst, flooding his inner sight with red. He heard the stutter and gargle of his own breath, or of the thing silencing him. White noise. Explosions of crumpled paper. In extremis, he managed to kiss the hand, to reach out and hold tight, to imagine that this was the hug he had craved for so long.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Mycroft Holmes and others as yet unidentified found the Diogenes Club, ostensibly a club for the most unsociable men in London. It is actually a cover for a body charged with handling delicate and often supernatural matters of state. Among its most notable operatives are Charles Beauregard, who succeeds Mycroft as Chair of the Club's Ruling Cabal, and Genevieve Dieudonne, a long-lived vampire lady; in another continuum (the Anno Dracula series), they are lovers — here, they are unaware of each other until the 1930s (for that story, see "Sorcerer Conjurer Wizard Witch" in Marvin Kaye's forthcoming A Book of Wizards).

The Club serves Britain's interests — and, often, humanity's — in a series of crises kept out of the history books: including an incursion from faerie in the 1890s ("The Gypsies in the Wood"), a rise of the Deep Ones in the 1940s ("The Big Fish"), a railway disaster which threatens the world in the 1950s ("The Man Who Got Off the Ghost Train"), a timeslip on the South Coast caused by the psychic dreamer Paulette Michaelsmith in the 1970s ("End of the Pier Show") and the centuries-spanning "Duel of the Seven Stars" (Seven Stars).

In 1903, an ab-human entity comes close to committing the most colossal crime ever contemplated — the murder of space and time. No fewer than fifteen of the world's premier magicians, occult detectives, psychic adventurers, criminal geniuses and visionary scientists set aside profound differences and work under Mycroft's direction to avert the rending-asunder of the universe. Yet the only allusion to the affair in the public record is an aside by the biographer of Mycroft's more-famous, frankly less perspicacious brother, concerning the "duellist and journalist" Isidore Persano, found "stark staring mad with a match box in front of him which contained a remarkable worm said to be unknown to science."

In the 1920s, Diogenes Club members Edwin Winthrop and Catriona Kaye encounter a shape-shifting creature who takes the default form of Rose Farrar, a long-missing little girl. It is taken into custody by the Undertaking, a rival organization to the Club who maintain the Mausoleum, a prison/storehouse for unique and dangerous individuals and objects. (See: "Angel Down, Sussex".)

Later, Catriona conducts a murder investigation, which prompts Charles Beauregard, the Chair of the Ruling Cabal of the Diogenes Club, to take covert steps to end the careers of the Splendid Six, a collection of arrogant and self-involved aristocratic adventurers whose number includes Richard Cleaver (aka "Clever Dick"), a child prodigy. (See: "Clubland Heroes".)

In the 1960s, the position of Great Enchanter — loosely, the commander of forces arrayed against goodness and decency — passes from Colonel Zenf, who had succeeded Isidore Persano, to Derek Leech, an entrepreneurial, Mephistophelean fellow who springs out of the mud of Swinging London and amasses a great deal of temporal power. Leech's history can be found, between the lines, in "Sorcerer Conjurer Wizard Witch", "Another Fish Story", "Organ Donors" and The Quorum.

A foundling of the World War II, Richard Jeperson is raised by the men and women of the Diogenes Club to become the successor to Charles Beauregard and Edwin Winthrop. With his allies Fred Regent, a former policeman, and Vanessa, a mystery woman, he has fought evil and investigated strangenesses throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. Their adventures are recounted in The Man from the Diogenes Club.

A legacy is passed down among the Chambers family — who have certain abilities after nightfall, and have waged their own night-time wars. From the 1920s to the 1960s, Jonathan Chambers wore goggles and a slouch hat and operated as the scientific vigilante "Dr Shade" in partnership with the ladylike "Kentish Glory", while his sister Jennifer practised unorthodox medicine. Jonathan's son Jamie is, as yet, unsure of his inheritance.

Now, it's the summer of 1976. Great Britain swelters under the Heat Wave of the Century…

"Nice motor," said Richard Jeperson, casting an appreciative eye over Derek Leech's Rolls Royce ShadowShark.

"I could say the same of yours," responded Leech, gloved fingertips lightly polishing his red-eyed Spirit of Ecstasy. Richard's car was almost identical, though his bonnet ornament didn't have the inset rubies.

"I've kept the old girl in good nick," said Richard.

"Mine has a horn which plays the theme from Jaws," said Leech.

"Mine, I'm glad to say, doesn't."

That was the pleasantries over.

It was the longest, hottest, driest summer of the 1970s. Thanks to a strict hosepipe ban, lawns turned to desert. Neighbours informed on each other over suspiciously verdant patches. Bored regional television crews shot fillers about eggs frying on dustbin lids and sunburn specialists earning consultancy fees in naturist colonies. If they'd been allowed anywhere near here, a considerably more unusual summer weather story was to be had. A news blackout was in effect, and discreet roadblocks limited traffic onto this stretch of the Somerset Levels.