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

"Your book convinced me it could happen. World Cooling. And only drastic action can forestall the catastrophe. With the full resources of DLI at your disposal, I was expecting happier results. Not this… this big fridge."

Cleaver smiled again.

"If you'd actually wead my book, you wouldn't be so surprised. Tell him, Jeperson."

Leech looked at Richard, awaiting enlightenment.

"Professor Cleaver writes that an imminent ice age will lead to world-wide societal collapse and, in all probability, the extinction of the human race."

"Yes, and…?"

"He does not write that this would be a bad thing."

Realization dawned in Leech's eyes. Cleaver grinned broadly, showing white dentures with odd, cheap blue settings.

Derek Leech had given his weather control project to someone who wanted winter to come and freeze everything solid. Isidore Persano and his worm would be proud.

"What about the snowmen?" Leech asked.

"I was wondewing when you'd get to them. The snowmen. Yes. I'm not alone in this. I have fwiends. One fwiend, mainly. One big fwiend. I call her the Cold. You can call her the End."

He was supposed to park outside the Post Office Tower and wait for the other recruits. One of the group would have further instructions and, he was promised, petrol money. Jamie was off to the Winter War.

Now he'd (provisionally) taken the Queen's Shilling, he wondered whether the Diogenes Club just wanted him as a handy, unpaid chauffeur, ferrying cannon fodder about. Dad wouldn't have thought a lot of that. Still, Jamie only wanted to dip a toe in the waters. He was leery about the shadow life. The Shade Legacy hadn't always been happy, as Mum would tell him at the drop of a black fedora with razors in the brim. At the moment, he was more interested in Transhumance — especially if they could find a better, preferably celibate drummer… and a new bass-player, a decent PA and enough songs to bump up their set to an hour without reprises. Vron had been promising new lyrics for weeks, but said the bloody heat made it hard to get into the proper mood. Perhaps he should scrub Transhumance and look for a new band.

The GPO Tower, a needle bristling with dish-arrays, looked like a leftover design from Stingray. The revolving restaurant at the summit, opened by Wedgy Benn and Billy Butlin, stopped turning in 1971, after an explosion the public thought was down to the Angry Brigade. Jamie knew the truth. His father's last «exploit» before enforced retirement had been the final defeat of his long-time enemies, the Dynamite Boys. The Tower was taken over by the now-octogenarian Boys, who planned to use the transmitters to send a coded signal to activate the lizard stems of every human brain in the Greater London area and turn folks into enraged animals. Dad stopped them by setting off their own bombs.

Jamie found a parking space in the thin shadow of the tower, which shifted within minutes. Inside the van, stale air began to boil again. Even with the windows down, there was no relief.

"Gather, darkness," he muttered. He hadn't Dad's knack with shadows, but he could at least whip up some healthy gloom. The sky was cloudless, but a meagre cloud shadow formed around the van. It was too much effort to maintain, and he let it go. In revenge, the sun got hotter.

"Jamie Chambers," said a girl.

He looked out at her. She was dressed for veldt or desert: leather open-toe sandals, fawn culottes, baggy safari jacket, utility belt with pouches, burnt orange sunglasses the size of saucers, leopard-pattern headscarf, Australian bush hat. In a summer when Zenith the Albino sported a nut-brown suntan, her exposed lower face, forearms and calves were pale to the point of colourlessness. People always said Jamie — as instinctively nocturnal as his father — should get out in the sun more, but this girl made him look like an advert for Air Malta. He would have guessed she was about his own age.

"Call me Gene," she said. "I know your aunt Jenny. And your mother, a bit. We worked together a long time ago, when she was Kentish Glory."

Mum had stopped wearing a moth-mask and film-winged leotards decades before Jamie was born. Gene was much older than nineteen.

He got out of the van, and found he was several inches taller than her.

"I'm from the Diogenes Club," she said, holding up an envelope. "You're our ride to Somerset. I've got maps and money here. And the rest of the new bugs."

Three assorted types, all less noticeable than Gene, were loitering.

"Keith, Susan and… Sewell, isn't it?"

A middle-aged, bald-headed man stepped forward and nodded. He wore an old, multi stained overcoat, fingerless Albert Steptoe gloves and a tightly wound woolly scarf as if he expected a sudden winter. His face was unlined, as if he rarely used it, but sticky marks around his mouth marked him as a sweet-addict. He held a paper bag, and was chain-chewing liquorice allsorts.

"Sewell Head," said Gene, tapping her temple. "He's one of the clever ones. And one of theirs. Derek Leech fetched him out of a sweet shop. Ask him anything, and he'll know."

"What's Transhumance?" asked Jamie.

"A form of vertical livestock rotation, practised especially in Switzerland," said Sewell Head, popping a pink coconut wheel into his mouth. "Also a London-based popular music group that has never released a record or played to an audience of more than fifty people."

"Fifty is a record for some venues, pal."

"I told you he'd know," said Gene. "Does he look evil to you? Or is Hannah Arendt right about banality. He's behaved himself so far. No decapitated kittens. The others are undecideds, not ours, not theirs. Wavering."

"I'm not wavering," said the other girl, Susan. "I'm neutral."

She wore jeans and a purple T-shirt, and hid behind her long brown hair. She tanned like most other people and had pinkish sunburn scabs on her arms. Jamie wondered if he'd seen her before. She must be a year or two older than him, but gave off a studenty vibe.

"Susan Rodway," explained Gene. "You might remember her from a few years ago. She was on television, and there was a book about her. She was a spoon bender. Until she stopped."

"It wore off," said the girl, shrugging.

"That's her story, and she's sticking to it. According to tests, she's off the ESP charts. Psychokinesis, pyrokinesis, psychometry, telepathy, levitation, clairvoyance, clairaudience. She has senses they don't even have Latin names for yet. Can hard-boil an egg with a nasty look."

Susan waved her hands comically, and nothing happened.

"She's pretending to be normal," said Gene. "Probably reading your mind right now."

Irritated, Susan snapped. "One mind I can't read, Gene, is yours. So we'll have to fall back on the fount of all factoids. Mr Head… what can you tell us about Genevieve Dieudonne?"

Sewell Head paused in mid-chew, as if collecting a ledger from a shelf in his mental attic, took a deep breath, and began "Born in 1416, in the Duchy of Burgundy, Genevieve Dieudonne is mentioned in…"

"That's quite enough of that," said Gene, shutting him off.

Jamie couldn't help noticing how sharp the woman's teeth were. Did she have the ghost of a French accent?

"I'm Keith Marion," said the kid in the group, smiling nervously. It didn't take ESP to see he was trying to smooth over an awkward moment. "Undecided."

He stuck out his hand, which Jamie shook. He had a plastic tag around his wrist. Even looking straight at Keith, Jamie couldn't fix a face in his mind. The tag was the only thing about him he could remember.

"We have Keith on day-release," said Gene, proudly. He has a condition. It's named after him. Keith Marion Syndrome."

Jamie let go of the boy's hand.