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

Bugs had either legged it or melted into the ground.

Jamie had purple vision. It was like night-sight, but in the daytime. With the Fang of Night, he could think faster. He didn't feel the cold. He could take anyone, any day of the week. He could only imagine what he would sound like if he used this onstage.

Keith plucked the jewel from his grasp, holding it between thumb and forefinger as if it were radioactive, then magicked it away with a conjurer's flourish.

"You of all people should know to treat those things carefully," said Keith.

For an instant, Jamie wanted to batter the kid's face and take back the jewel. Then, he understood. Use it, but don't let it get its hooks in you. Dad had said that all the time.

"So, which Keith is this?" said Gene, tugging on the kid's wrist-tag. "What school do you go to?"

"School? There hasn't been any school since the Spiders came. Good job too. They don't teach you anything useful. You have to learn survival, and resistance, on the job."

This Keith had a firmer jaw, healed-over scars, and a steady, manly, confident gaze. People snapped in line when he spoke and threw themselves under trains if there was a tactical advantage in it.

"He told us about this before we met you," Gene explained. "Some other Keith lives on an Earth overrun by arachnoid aliens. He's a guerrilla leader. He also plays opening bat for Somerset and has three girlfriends. Opinion is split as to whether it's a viable alternate timeline or some sort of Dungeons and Dragons wish-fulfilment fantasy. At the moment, I don't really care."

She kissed Keith on the mouth. He took it as if it were his right, and then started struggling.

"What happened?" he asked, shaking free of Gene. "Who was here?"

Gene let the familiar — the original? — Keith go, and edged away from him. He still looked confused. The other Keith had been useful in a pinch, but Jamie couldn't say he missed him.

Putting Professor Cleaver to sleep hadn't brought back the summer, but did shut him up — which was a relief.

Richard looked through the heavily-frosted window. There was proper snow, now. Precipitation. It dropped like the gentle rain from Heaven, fluttering down picturesquely before being caught in erratic, spiralling winds and dashed hither and yon. The Cold's sphere of influence scraped the upper atmosphere, where it found clouds to freeze.

According to Catriona, the white blanket was gaining pace, spreading across the moors and fields. Soon, the perimeter of exclusion would be breached. So far, three villages had been evacuated on a flimsy cover story. When the Cold gripped fair-sized towns like Yeovil and Sedgwater, the domesticated feline would be well and truly liberated from the portable container.

Cleaver snorted in his sleep, honking through his broken nose. Not content with tying the Professor to a swivel chair, Leech had shoved a sock in his mouth and bound a scarf around his jaws. Richard loosened the gag, so he wouldn't asphyxiate on bri-nylon and his own false teeth.

Leech shot him a pitiful look. He was picking through Clever Dick's papers.

"The man couldn't maintain an orderly file if his soul depended on it," he said, in exasperation. "From now on, every scientist or researcher who works for me gets shadowed by two form-fillers and a pen-pusher. What's the use of results if you can't find them?"

"He wasn't working for you," said Richard.

"Oh yes he was," insisted Leech. "He drew his pay-packet and he signed his contract. Derek Leech International owns his results. If this Cold creature is real, then we own her. The Comet has exclusive rights to her story. I could put her in a zoo, hunt her for sport, license her image for T-shirts, or dissect her crystal by crystal to advance the progress of science and be entirely within my legal rights."

"Tell her that."

Leech turned a page and found something. "I just might," he said.

He tore out a sheaf of papers covered in neat little diagrams. Richard thought it might be some form of cipher, then recognized the hexagonal designs as snow crystals. Under each was a scrawl — mirror-written words, not in English.

"Backwards in Latin," mused Leech. "Paranoid little boffin, wouldn't you say? This is Cleaver's Rosetta Stone. Not many words, no subtleties, no syntax at all. But he received instructions. He made and used his Box. He broke the Zero Barrier, and violated the laws of physics."

"All because he could grow snowflakes?"

"Yes, and now I own the process. There might not be applications yet, but things get smaller. Transistorization won't stop at the visible. Imagine: trademarked weather, logos on bacteria, microscopic art, micro-miniaturized assassins…"

"Let's ensure the future of mankind on the planet before you start pestering the patent office, shall we?"

Leech bit down, grinding his teeth hard. Richard thought something had snapped in his mouth.

"You should watch that," he advised.

Leech smiled, showing even, white, perfect gnashers. Richard suspected he had rows of them, eternally renewed — like a shark.

All rooms have ghosts. Acts and feelings and ideas all have residue, sometimes with a half-life of centuries. Richard took his gauntlets off and began to touch things, feeling for the most recent impressions. His fingertips were so numb that the cold shocks were welcome. His sensitivity was more attuned to living people than dead objects, but he could usually read something if he focused. He scraped a brown stain on the wall, and had a hideous flash: Cleaver, with a knife, smiling; a red-haired man in a white coat, gouting from an open throat.

"What is it?" Leech asked.

Richard forced himself to disconnect from the murder. "The staff," he said. "I saw what happened before they were snowmen."

"Where are they, by the way?" asked Leech.

"Wandered off. Didn't seem to be the sorts to listen to reason. I doubt if you can negotiate with them."

The memory flashes floated in his mind, like neon after images. He blinked, and they began to dispel. Cleaver had made four sacrifices to the Cold. McKendrick, Kellett, Bakhtinin, Pouncey.

"Were the staff dead before or after they got snow-coated?" asked Leech.

"Does it matter?"

"If the Professor killed them to give the Cold raw material to make cat's paws, they were just unused machines when she got them. If they were alive when the Cold wrapped them up, she might have interfaced with minds other than Clever Dick's."

Richard didn't approve of Leech's use of «interfaced» as a verb-form, but saw where he was going.

"He killed them first," he confirmed- Leech didn't ask him how he knew. "They aren't even zombies. The dead people are more like armatures. The only traces of personality they have…"

"The hats."

"… were imposed by Professor Cleaver. I think he was trying to be funny. He's not very good at humour. Few solipsists are."

Richard proceeded to the remains of the Box. The Cold had come through this doorway. He doubted it could be used to send her back, even if it were repaired. Banishing was never as easy as conjuring. Sometimes performing a ritual backwards worked, but not in a language with six planes of symmetry. You would always get hexagonal palindromes.

Pressing his palm to a frost patch on the surface of a workbench, he felt the slight bite of the crystals, the pull on skin as he took his hand away. He didn't sense an entity, not even the life he would feel if he put his naked hand against the bark of a giant redwood. Yet the Cold was here.

"When the Cold broke through the Zero Barrier," said Leech, "the Professor's Box blew up. After that, he couldn't make his little tiny ice sculptures, but they still talked. She turned the others into snowmen, but spared him. How could he make her understand he was a sympathizer?"