Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

He rather admired himself in the polished black marble of the hallway pillars. The whole look took hours to achieve. His face no longer erupted as it had done a few years earlier, but the odd plague-rose blemish surfaced, requiring attention.

Escorted by a silk-jacketed servant beyond the famously noiseless public rooms of the Club, he puffed with pride. Ordinary Members mimed harrumphs , seconding the Doorman’s opinion of him. The servant opened an Inner Door, and stood aside to let Richard pass. He had not been this deep into the building since childhood. Then, he had almost been a possession, shown off by his father. Now, he was entitled to pass on his own merit. He could walk the corridors, consult the archives, visit the private collections, accept commissions. He was not merely a Life Member, inheriting that status from Major Jeperson, but an Asset, whose Talent suited him to act for the Club in Certain Circumstances.

He was treading in the footsteps of giants. Mycroft Holmes, the mid-Victorian civil servant who was instrumental in founding what was ostensibly a “club for the unclubbable” but actually an auxiliary extraordinary to British intelligence and the police. Charles Beauregard, the first Most Valued Member – the great puzzle-chaser of the 1880s and ’90s and visionary chairman of the Ruling Cabal through the middle-years of the current century. Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder. Several terrifying individuals who operated covertly under the goggles of “Doctor Shade”. Adam Llewellyn de Vere Adamant, the adventurer whose disappearance in 1903 remained listed on the books as an active, unsolved case. Catriona Kaye, Winthrop’s life-long companion, the first woman to accept full membership in the Club. Flaxman Low. Sir Henry Merrivale. Robert Baldick. Cursitor Doom.

He was ushered upstairs. In an underlit Ante-Room, his coat was taken by a turbaned orderly. He had a moment before a two-way mirror to be awed by the great tradition, the honour to which he would ascend in the presence of the Ruling Cabal. He patted his pockets, checked his fly and adjusted his tie. The weight of the razor was gone from his sleeve. Somewhere between the street and the Ante-Room, he had been frisked and defanged.

A baize door opened, and a tiny shove from the silent Sikh was necessary to propel him along a short dark corridor. One door shut behind him and another opened in front. Richard stepped into the windowless Star Chamber of the Ruling Cabal.

“Good Gravy, Edwin,” said someone sour, “is this what it’s come to? A bloody teddy boy!”

Some of Richard’s puff leaked out.

“I think he’s sweet ,” purred a woman with a whisky-and-cigarettes voice, like Joan Greenwood or Fenella Fielding. “Winner of the Fourth Form fancy dress.”

The last of his self-esteem pooled on the floor.

“Cool, man,” said another commentator, snapping his fingers. “Straight from the fridge.”

He didn’t feel any better.

Edwin Winthrop sat at the big table that had been Mycroft’s desk, occupying one of three places. He had slightly hooded eyes and an iron-grey moustache. Even if Richard weren’t attuned to “vibrations”, he’d have had no doubt who was in charge. Next to him was Catriona Kaye, a compact, pretty woman as old as the century. She wore a dove-grey dress and pearls. The only one of the Inner Circle who had treated him as a little boy, she was now the only one who treated him as a grown-up. She was the heart and conscience of the Diogenes Club. Edwin recognised his own tendency to high-handedness, and kept Catriona close – she was the reason why he wasn’t a monster. To Edwin’s right was an empty chair. Sir Giles Gallant, make-weight on the Ruling Cabal, was absent.

“If we’ve finished twitting the new boy,” said Edwin, impatiently, “perhaps we can get on. Richard, welcome and all that. This is the group . . .”

Edwin introduced everyone. Richard put faces to names and resumés he already knew.

Dr Harry Cutley, the pipe-smoking, tweed-jacketed scowler held a chair of Physics at a provincial redbrick university. He had unexpectedly come under the Club’s remit, as Quantum Mechanics led him to Parapsychology. When Edwin vacated the post of Most Valued Member to run the Ruling Cabal, Sir Giles recruited Cutley to fill his roomy shoes. The academic finally had funds and resources to mount the research programme of his dreams, but was sworn not to share findings with his peers, turning his papers over instead to the Cabal. They then had to root out others capable of understanding Cutley’s work and determining what should leak onto the intellectual open market and what the world was not yet ready to know. In practice, Cutley had exchanged one set of grumbling resentments for another. He knew things no-one else on the planet did, but colleagues in the real world wrote him off as a dead-ended time-server whose students didn’t like him and whose ex-wife slept with other faculty members. Cutley had a boozer’s red-veined eyes, hair at all angles and a pulsing, hostile aura – the plainest Richard had ever sensed, as if inner thoughts were written on comic strip bubbles.

The husky-voiced blonde in the black leotard and pink chiffon scarf was Annette Amboise, of Fitzrovia and the Left Bank. She wore no lipstick but a lot of eye make-up and had hair cropped like Jean Seberg as Joan of Arc. She smoked Gauloises in a long, enamel holder. Of Anglo-French parentage, she’d spent her mid-teens in Vichy France, running messages for the Resistance and Allied Intelligence. She came to the Club’s notice after an unprecedented run of good fortune, which is to say she outlived all other agents in her district several times over. Catriona diagnosed an inbuilt ability to intuit random factors and predict immediate danger. Annette thought in knight moves – two hops forward, then a kink to the side. Since the War, she’d been doing other things. A retired interpretive dancer, past thirty with too many pulled muscles, she was authoress of a slim volume, Ectoplasm and Existentialism . Knowing what would probably happen next gave her a peculiarly cheerful fatalism. She had no accent, but showed an extremely French side in occasional “ ça va ” shrugs.

The tall, thin hipster was Danny Myles, whom Richard recognised as “Magic Fingers Myles”, piano-player in a modern jazz combo famous for making “I Can’t Get Started With You” last an entire set at Ronnie Scott’s. He wore a green polo-neck and chinos, and had a neatly-trimmed goatee. His fingers continually moved as if on an infinite keyboard or reading a racy novel in Braille. Born blind, Myles developed extra senses as a child. Gaining sight in his teens, Myles found himself in a new visual world but retained other sharpnesses. Besides his acute ear, he had “the Touch”. Richard and Annette took the psychic temperature of a room with invisible antennae (Catriona called them “mentacles”), but Myles had to lay hands on something to intuit its history, associations or true nature. The Magic Fingers Touch worked best on inanimate objects.

“This is Geoffrey’s boy,” explained Edwin. “We expect great things from him.”

From Magic Fingers, Richard gathered non-verbal information: he understood how everyone related to each other, where the frictions were, whom he could trust to come through, when he’d be on his own. Cutley was like a football manager required to play a board member’s nephew in goal. He hated “spook stuff” and wanted to haul paraphenomena back to measurable realities. Annette was emotionally off on another plane, but mildly amused. She had vague, not-related-by-blood auntie feelings for Richard and a nagging concern about his short-term future that did little for his confidence. Richard thanked Myles with a nod no one else noticed.