The Quorum (45 page)

Everyone in the room shouted.

‘...What a Grunge!’

* * *

The show continued without Leech. He had no appetite for it. The Device was earthed, the fires feeding into the ground. Its purpose was fulfilled. Nothing forced him to watch the knives descend.

He walked away from the Pyramid. Just out of sight, Cardinal Wolsey Street was evacuated. The Device would go its own way. Tonight, its accumulated power was directed into the earth. By tomorrow’s dawn, the machine would be useless metal and decaying meat. The fires it contained would seed the ground.

If he looked from the right angle through his dark lenses, he saw hard bubbles in the night sky, the outlines which would be filled by the city’s bulk. Winged shapes flew between the minarets, talons dangling, beaks agape.

The Perfect Sacrifices would continue. Tonight had seen the turn of the cards for only three of innumerable Deals. Their lifelong acts of devotion would feed the new city.

He walked across the rubble-strewn wasteland as if it were smooth as still water.

The cycle had been interesting. Many movements of the Device surprised him. He learned there were some people - infinitely rare - he couldn’t touch. His city would be walled against them.

In the distance, Cardinal Wolsey Street shook. Its hollow shell collapsed quietly around the final throes of the Device. Its last glow lit the sky.

He walked onto the old dock, its timbers briefly crimsoned. This would be cleared soon, like everything else, swept into the river and borne away. He heard the current running. For the first time, he was allowed to smell the water, the mud, the sewage.

His foot strayed into a mulchy depression in the wood. He bent down and cupped water from the puddle in his gloved palm, then sucked the liquid into his mouth. His tongue exploded.

Taste!

Rewarded, he stood and turned. The Derek Leech International Building was illuminated from inside by the rite of sacrifice. Black facets took colourful tints as light-beams struck up into the skies. His Pyramid was a jewel in the night.

‘Y
ou missed the party,’ Neil said. ‘It was massive. You’d never believe who was there.’

‘I was invited,’ she said. ‘Leech even sent a car. But I didn’t have anything to wear.’

They were in the garden of the Tin Woodsman. He’d sent a note asking her out to Sunday lunch. Sally had been glad to hear from him. He had answers for her and she had pieces for him.

‘I missed you,’ he said, touching her wrist. ‘It wasn’t complete without you. Mark said as much.’

She could imagine.

‘I don’t have luck with parties. I met Connor at a party.’

‘Who?’

‘The father,’ she said, thumbing at the Invader. ‘He’s not around any more.’

‘In town?’

‘On Earth.’

‘You met me at a party,’ he said. ‘Remember?’

‘I rest my case.’

He grinned. It was an easy, un-neurotic grin. Now he was willing to stand up straight, Neil seemed taller.

They were the only souls hardy enough to be outside. As they drank, Neil trundled the stroller back and forth over a little hump in the grass, exciting the baby to produce delighted gurgles.

‘Good kid,’ he commented.

‘Sometimes. Mainly a darling nuisance, though.’

Wrapped in a coat and hood, the Invader mumbled. Occasional words were recognisable. Steps had been known. A little personality was coalescing.

‘No, this is really a good kid. What’s her name.’

‘It’s a he,’ she said. ‘Jerome.’

She was glad to be out in the cold. She didn’t want to be in the flat with long-past-comprehensible Valentines pouring from her fax. She’d changed her phone number at great inconvenience, but forgotten the fax line.

She was working steadily if unspectacularly. At a discount, she’d surveyed the wrecked Planet Janet for Dolar and suggested features to improve security. She was making a speciality of protecting small businesses from pilfering and vandalism. And a Community Action Group in Tottenham had her teaching a course, training bar and door staff to run social events resistant to attacks by racist groups. The night would come when one of her graduates would dole out lumps to the ELF thug with the screwdriver.

‘Did you even see the show?’

She shook her head. She’d had Cloud 9 disconnected. With Jerome in the flat, she wanted to minimise TV. With the money she saved on cable, she bought books.
TinTin
,
Asterix,
dinosaurs,
Winnie the Pooh.

‘What went out was strange. It must have been impossible to follow if you didn’t know the backstory.
What a Grunge!
is a cringingly embarrassing programme. That’s probably why it’s such a hit.’

‘Can
you
follow the backstory now?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘most of it. Strange, I used to think I had friends and enemies. Now, it looks as though I only had a conspiracy.’

She was surprised at his even tone. ‘Aren’t you angry?’

‘I was. Believe me, in that contraption, I went through anger. And fear and awe and Epiphany and holocaust and a whole lot else. I’d wasted so much paranoia on Norwegian Neil Cullers, certain I was fantasising and rationalising my own inadequacies, that it was a facer to find out the worst dream was not only true but an underestimation. But I get off easy. Nothing was my fault. Nothing at all.’

‘Leech said you got picked because you wanted to chat up Mark’s girlfriend.’

‘Philippa? Other way round, I think. It’s so long ago, I can’t remember.’

That was an evasion, but she let it pass. There was no point in being entirely truthful. She didn’t want to talk about Connor, so she’d let him off Pippa.

‘If it hadn’t been you, if you’d been one of the Quorum, what do you think you’d have done?’

He sat for a while, hand around a pint he’d paid for and shook his head.

‘That’s not a question anyone should have to answer,’ he said.

She’d asked it of herself many times.

‘I think I’d have gone along with the Deal,’ she said now. ‘If it had been me, I’d have done it. Up to a point.’

‘What point?’

She shrugged. ‘Some point. I wouldn’t have gone as far as they did. I hope.’

‘I think it got more and more difficult to pull out. One year Mark tried, apparently.’

‘“Tried”.’

Neil disapproved of her tone of moral superiority, she could tell. She must look like a witch-burner.

‘Sally, I don’t resent or hate them. We go back too far for that. In the beginning, we were all just kids. I went through a break-their-fucking-necks phase, but we always had those. There was a time with Mickey, just when we went Comprehensive, when I wanted to strangle him with his guts. Ancient history.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘You don’t have to.’

She wanted to talk about something else.

‘Where are you living?’

He grinned again. ‘Not in Cranley Gardens. I stayed with my parents for a few weeks. I can’t tell you how much that means, to be back in touch with them. Now, I’m looking at flats. They gave me quite a bit of money.’

‘Who?’

‘Them, I guess. The Quorum. It was an anonymous parcel of cash. Big bills. An offering of atonement.’

She was disgusted.

‘I took their money too,’ she said. ‘I didn’t give it back.’

‘I should think not. That’d be bloody stupid.’

‘Can
they atone?’

He was thoughtful. ‘I don’t know.
I’m
not really ready to forgive them. I mean, philosophically is one thing, but it was
my
life that got demolished. It’s not so much me, as the people who got in the crossfire. My Mum and Dad; they’ll never understand what it was about. Anne; she’s not had a happy decade. Dolar; he’s landed with a criminal record, well, more of a criminal record. You.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you. You’re stuck with Mark.’

‘He’s stuck with me. Not me, the idea of me.’

Sometimes he loitered outside the flat like a scarecrow. He was becoming more insubstantial.
The Shape
had interrupted publication, but the staff had bought out the title and a relaunch was announced. The Crush was continuing. She had looked into restraining orders, but the hassle was tailing off. She had the idea he could as easily obsess on her from afar as get close.

‘Is it bad?’

‘Not any more. Just embarrassing. How long can it go on?’

With chilling certainty, he said, ‘Years.’

She’d tracked down Mark’s ex and talked with her about the problem. She said Mark was the world’s champion at denial. He could ignore anything that contradicted his vision of his life.

Oddly, she had walked past Mark in the street in Wood Green and he had not recognised her. She realised the Crush was an abstract. Mark’s ‘Sally Rhodes’ was not real. The connections with her were fading.

‘What about the others?’ she asked.

‘Michael is moving to Basildon. He has most money left, but it’s rupturing away rapidly. His wife baled out and his show was cancelled. He’s involved in some labyrinthine lawsuit.
Private Eye
says he wanders the streets harassing people with white hair. Mickey’s working in Planet Janet. My old job, I suppose. No one’s heard of him, not even comics fans. I don’t know if he remembers his other life or thinks it was a dream. I was in there the other day, and we had a talk about comics. Neither of us reckon much to this whizzkid Farhad Z-Rowe.’

‘So it goes on?’

‘I can’t do anything about it,’ he said. ‘It’s not a punishment, it’s a sacrifice. It’s part of the process they initiated, not a reaction to it. I’m thinking of writing about the mechanics of modern magic. In the Device, I learned a lot of things. Majorly millennial things.’

Derek Leech had announced an ambitious development in the Docklands. The Prime Minister hailed the scheme as a sign of imminent economic recovery and government subsidies were being made available. Constant Drache’s designs were already controversial enough to be condemned by the Prince of Wales. It was hard to connect what Sally knew of the spiritual groundbreaking with the prosaic business of throwing up geodesic skyscrapers. A feature of Leech’s mall-like entertainment complex would be the United Kingdom’s first Virtual Reality chambers. He also promised a sporting arena, an IMAX cinema, galleries, museums, theatres, a concert space, retail outlets, a theme park.

‘The future will be a party,’ Leech announced, ‘and you’re all invited.’

For a price.

In sunlight, Neil’s long, odd face was peaceful. He was funny-enthusiastic where he had been funny-cynical. He’d be hard not to like. In odd, almost creepy ways, he reminded her of Mark before the Crush, even of Connor in the Good Minutes.

‘What are you going to
do?’
she asked.

He shrugged. ‘Anything I want to. I have no past to anchor me. There’s nothing to stop me.
No one
to stop me.’

‘It’s not going to be that easy.’

‘I know,’ he said, ‘believe me, I know. I might go back and finish my degree.’

Fifteen years, she thought. Jesus Christ, what a waste!

‘Then there’s this book. I thought I might interview you for it. We’re the experts.’

She’d been allowed to see how the machine worked. Just a glimpse. She’d never be able to watch TV or read a newspaper without remembering Derek Leech was more than just a media magnate. She’d never see an
Amazon Queen
comic without recalling the sidetracked stretch of her career when a phantom named Mickey Yeo tried to suck her out of existence. She’d never flirt without remembering that ‘Sally, I love you’ can be the scariest sentence in the English language. In remainder bookshops, in old magazines, in trivia quizzes, the Quorum had left marks. They might be gone, but the scars would remain.

Of all the world, only she and Neil knew the truth behind the comet-like crashes of three burning lights. And Leech, if he counted. If they never shared anything again, Sally and Neil were bound by what they knew.

After their pub lunch, Sally wanted to trundle Jerome through the park. If Neil wanted to come along, maybe put his back into the stroller, that was fine by her. It was still cold, but it would get warmer.

A
lthough ‘Organ Donors’ is intended as a curtain-raiser to
The Quorum,
the other short stories included here aren’t quite in continuity with the novel. However, they afford a look at other aspects of its protagonists, private detective Sally Rhodes and media magnate Derek Leech. Both reappear in ‘Seven Stars’ (which does include a brief catch-up on what happened after
The Quorum)
and Derek pops up in some of the Diogenes Club series, which will feature in later Titan Books editions. Thanks to the various editors of the stories and to Neil Gaiman, Phil Nutman and Stefan Jaworzyn for input into ‘Mother Hen’ (more on this debt in the forthcoming Titan Books reissue of
Bad Dreams).
Thanks also to Martin Fletcher, the original editor of
The Quorum,
and Eugene Byrne, who provided helpful commentary.

W
hen the client came, Sally was scraping her scruples off the door. She had left
RHODES CONFIDENTIAL INVESTIGATIONS
, but the
NO DIVORCE WORK
footnote was going. She had lived with the Raymond Chandler Code of Chivalry for three years. And no thanks to an irregular procession of worried spinsters, she had never yet earned enough to make her accountant’s elaborate tax avoidance schemes worth the effort.

The spinsters were uniformly faded. They had lost pets, or imagined prowlers, or wanted to trace long-ago school sweethearts. Recently, Sally had protected a tycoon’s eminently kidnappable daughter during a weekend party. The girl had vomited liebfraumilch-flavoured porridge on her only decent dress, and Daddy still hadn’t settled the expenses claim.

She would have been able to coast through the quarter; but she had run her Cortina through a red light and into a parked Porsche. The repairs, the insurance, and the fine had vacuum-cleaned both her bank accounts. At this stage in her career, Sally would welcome a nice, messy, protracted divorce commission.