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

Fred thought it through.

He did know most of the stories, but not all. Despite ten years’ involvement with the Diogenes Club, with Richard and Vanessa, there were mysteries. They could both still surprise him. Once, in a close, tense, unexpected moment, before Fred met Zarana, he and Vanessa had kissed, deeply and urgently. She said, “You do know I’m a man,” and, for dizzying seconds, he had believed her. Then she giggled, they were back in danger, and anything further between them cut off.

After a decade, he still didn’t know if Richard and Vanessa had ever been a couple. Everyone else assumed, but he didn’t. Now, knowing about the Ghost Train, he saw how complex their entanglement was: a kinship of siblings, raised under the aegis of a unique institution, but also guardianship, as Richard brought Vanessa into the circle the way his adoptive father had brought him. The only thing he really knew now that had been mystifying before was how Vanessa had got her eyebrow scar. Richard had given it to her.

Lately, Vanessa had been absent a great deal. So had Fred, of course – with Zarana, or at the Yard. But Vanessa had been on missions, cases, sealed-knot and under-the-rose business. A change was coming in the Club – when Richard took a seat on the Cabal, as seemed inevitable, Vanessa was in line to become Most Valued Member? There was a woman Prime Minister, so no reason why a woman couldn’t hold that title. If she wanted it – which, Fred realised, he didn’t know she did.

For three months, there’d been no word. While Richard and Fred were tracking cornflakes cultists, she was somewhere else, unavailable. Fred could tell Richard was concerned, though confident in the woman. She’d survived a lot since throwing off the Gecko. Now, this summons.

. . . to Portnacreirann.

“It’s not over, is it?” said Fred. “It can’t be coincidence that it’s the same place.”

Richard gave a non-committal pfui .

“We’re at Inverdeith,” he said. “And that’s a Portnacreirann train on the other side of the platform.”

They were off one train before it had completely stopped and on another already moving out.

And then Inverdeith Bridge. Sun glinted on the surface of Loch Gaer.

“This is where the Gecko was born,” said Richard. “Between Nick Bowler and Donald McRidley and 3473-S. And that ‘stoon o’ fire spat out frae hell’, if I’m any judge – which I am. The stoon was an egg, waiting for the right circumstances to hatch. All the other bloody business around the loch was influenced by the unborn thing. Maybe it was an alien, not a demon. The stoon was what we’d now call a meteorite, after all. From outer space. Witch-drownings and human haggis kept the embryo on a drip-feed for centuries, but it awaited a vehicle – literally. The shell-shards might still be down there. Maybe it was a clutch of eggs.”

Fred looked at untroubled waters. This local train proceeded slowly over the bridge. He saw rust on the girders where paint had flaked away, missing rivets, spray-can INDEPENDENT SCOTLAND graffiti, scratched swear-words.

“In-for-Death,” he said.

“Think calm thoughts, Frederick. And we’ll be safe.”

This was where it had happened. With that thought, Fred had a chill. He didn’t only mean this was where the Gecko was born and defeated, but this was where Richard and Vanessa had started. When Richard got on the Ghost Train, he’d been a kid himself. When he got off . . .

Past the bridge, with Portnacreirann in sight and passengers taking luggage down from overhead racks, Fred’s insides went tight. They had been delayed. What if they were too late? What was so urgent anyway? He had learned to be ready for anything. But what kind of anything was there at Portnacreirann?

“Did you bring your elephant gun, guv?”

Richard snorted at that.

They got off the train, carrying their bags.

They walked along the platform and into the station. It was busier than Culler’s Halt, but emptied quickly.

A centrepiece of the station was an old steam engine, restored and polished, with a plaque and a little fence around it.

Richard froze. It was 3473-S, the locomotive that had pulled the Scotch Streak, the Ghost Train, the favoured physical form of the Gecko. Now, it was just a relic. No danger at all. A youth in naval dress uniform admired it. He turned and saw them.

“Mr Jeperson, Mr Regent,” he said. “Glad you made it in time. Cutting it close, but we’ll get you to the base by breaking petty road safety laws. Come on.”

The officer trotted out of the station. Fred and Richard followed, without further thought for 3473-S.

A jeep and driver waited on the forecourt. The officer helped them up. Fred had a pang at being treated as if he were elderly when he was only just used to thinking of himself as “early middle aged”. It happened more and more lately.

“I’m Jim,” said the boy in uniform. “Al’s cousin. We’re a navy family. Put down for ships at birth like some brats are for schools. In the sea-scouts as soon as we’re teething. I hope your lady knows what she’s getting into.”

Fred and Richard looked at each other, not saying anything.

“We all think she’s rather super, you know. For her age.”

“We admire her qualities, too,” said Richard.

Fred had a brief fantasy of tossing Jim out of the jeep to watch him bounce on the road.

They travelled at speed down a winding lane. Three cyclists with beards and cagoules pedalling the other way wound up tangled in the verge, shaking fists as Jim blithely shouted out “sorry” at them. “Naval emergency,” he explained, though they couldn’t hear.

Whatever trouble Vanessa was in, Fred was ready to fight.

The jeep roared through a checkpoint. The ratings on duty barely lifted the barrier in time. Jim waved a pass at them, redundantly.

They were on the base.

It had been a fishing village once, Fred saw – the rows of stone cottages were old and distinctive. Prefab services buildings fit in around the original community. The submarine-launched “independent deterrent” was a Royal Navy show now. NATO – i.e. the Yanks – preferred intercontinental ballistic missiles they could lob at the Soviets from their own backyards in Kansas, or bombs dropped from the planes that could be scrambled from the protestor-fringed base at Greenham Common. There would still be Go-Codes, though.

The base was on alert. Sailors with guns rushed about. There were rumours of trouble in the South Atlantic. Naval budget cuts had withdrawn forces from the region so suddenly that a South American country, say Argentina, could easily get the wrong idea. It might be time to send a gun-boat to remind potential invaders that the Falklands remained British. If there were any gun-boats left.

The jeep did a tight turn to a halt, scattering gravel in front of a small building. Once the village church, it was now the base chapel.

“Just in time,” said Jim, jumping down.

He opened the big door tactfully, so as not to disturb a service inside, and signalled for Fred and Richard to yomp in after him.

Fred remembered Richard leading him into a deconsecrated church at dead of midnight to stop a then-cabinet minister intent on slitting the throat of a virgin choirboy in a ritual supposed to revive the British moulded plastics industry. The Minister was resigned through ill-health and packed off to the House of Lords to do no further harm. The choirboy was now in the pop charts dressed as a pirate, singing as if his throat really had been cut. This wasn’t like that, but a ritual was in progress.

No one in the congregation gave the newcomers a glance. Jim led Fred and Richard to places in a pew on the bride’s side of the church. They found themselves sitting next to Catriona Kaye, and her nurse. All the others from her day – Edwin, Sir Giles – were gone. Barbara Corri was here too, in a cloud of ylang-ylang with her hair done like Lady Diana Spencer’s. Even Inspector Price of the Yard, sporting a smart new mac. Fred looked around, knowing the other shoe would drop. Yes, Zarana, in some incredible dress, was at the front, clicking away with a spy camera lifted from Fred’s stash of surveillance equipment.