Waiting for Godalming

11

When the hurricane hit, Icarus was in a long dark automobile, sitting next to a creature of Hell and being driven to an unknown destination.

“Where are you taking us?” Icarus asked, when he could find his voice to do so.

The creature that was Cormerant flickered its quills and moved its terrible mouthparts. “To the Ministry,” it said. “Where you will be interviewed.”

“I have nothing to say.”

“But you will. You will tell us everything we need to know.”

The car took a sudden lurch to the left.

“Drive carefully, damn you!” shouted Cormerant.

“I’m trying.” The chauffeur glanced back across his shoulder. “The weather’s gone mad. A storm’s come out of nowhere.”

“Always the weather,” said Cormerant. “Gets blamed for everything, the weather does. Have you ever thought about that, young man? The way the weather affects everything that people do? The wrong kind of leaves blown onto the track and the trains can’t run. The trains can’t run, so some man is late for an important meeting. The meeting is cancelled, a business goes bust. Its shares are wiped out on the stock exchange. A shareholder loses everything, goes mad, hangs himself. Leaving a wife who might have given birth to a child who would have one day become the President of the United States and saved the world from terrible war that would wipe out half of mankind. All because of some leaves blown onto the track by weather. Is it fate, or is there a purpose behind it? What do you think, young man?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Icarus hunched himself up and glanced towards the handle of the door.

“Central locking,” said the creature that was Cormerant. “A new innovation. All the doors and windows are locked. You have nowhere to run.”

Without, the storm raged madly on. Within the car, Icarus Smith sat trembling.

The Ministry of Serendipity is situated beneath Mornington Crescent underground station. Much legend is attached to the station, which for many years was closed to the public and which now does not remain open later than nine thirty at night. The belief amongst conspiracy theorists is that the Ministry of Serendipity is the English Area 51. That a vast tunnel network and massive underground complex exists beneath Mornington Crescent station. And that dirty deeds, involving alien spacecraft and back-engineering and indeed those little grey blighters with the Ray-Ban eyeballs, are done there, whilst Londoners walk blissfully unknowing on the pavements far above.

Icarus knew of such theories, but had paid them scant attention, according them the disbelief he’d always considered they deserved. Such nonsense had always been, in his opinion, more the province of his barking mad brother.

The storm-ravaged automobile turned left at the Station Hotel, crossed the road, and somehow entered the station opposite. Exactly how this happened, Icarus never understood. For at one moment the car was above ground in the wind and the rain and the next it had entered a tunnel and was purring along down a tube of darkness bound for no place pleasant.

The journey time was short, but as to the distance covered, Icarus could only wonder. But he was presently in no mood to wonder. His thoughts centred on a single goal, this being one of escape.

The automobile cruised out of the tunnel and into a great cathedral of a place. It was clearly the work of Victorian artisans, having all those wondrous soaring cast-iron roof-ribs, rising from those marvellous fluted columns, with the rivets and the rusty bits, where pigeons love to roost.

Icarus and Johnny Boy were encouraged to leave the car by the gun-toting chauffeur, who explained to them that hesitation would be rewarded by death. And Icarus found some relief in this, as his nearness to the creature that was Cormerant had troubled him no little bit.

Johnny Boy looked out and up and all around. “From down here where I am,” he observed, “this is one bloody big building.”

“And one very deep in the ground,” said Cormerant, climbing from the car. “Welcome to the Ministry of Serendipity. Take care with all those papers, young man. We wouldn’t want any to get lost on the way, now would we?”

Icarus felt that indeed, yes he would. And had been hoping at least to toss the lot out of the window while the car was in motion. As far as he was aware, there were only two men living on the planet who had taken the Red Head drug and knew the truth about what was really going on in the world. And those two men were himself and Johnny Boy and it looked to be a terrifying likelihood that the secret would shortly die with them. “Go on,” said the chauffeur, “move.”

Icarus and Johnny Boy were steered across a massive concourse. There were wooden crates and boxes, many bearing enigmatic symbols and letterings, stacked in mighty bulwarks. And thousands and thousands of barber’s chairs, all wrapped up in plastic. And on and on, beneath these and between, the two men plodded. Urged at the point of a gun and followed by the loathsome being that was Cormerant.

Icarus did take time to wonder over Cormerant. When first he had encountered him, in his guise as a man in the shop of Stravino, he had seemed a meagre creeping nervous body. Just some put-upon clerk in a city-gent’s rig-out, that few would have noticed at all.

And Icarus wondered whether this was what the chauffeur was seeing even now. Whether the chauffeur could hear the cold cruel edge to the creature’s voice, or see the arrogant, bombastic manner of its movements.

Evidently not, thought Icarus.

Although, possibly so.

Which didn’t really help much at all. So Icarus thought on hard regarding the matter of his escape.

“Down there,” urged the chauffeur. “Through that door.”

Through that door led them into a hallway. It was a long carpeted hallway. High-ceilinged, papered in richly patterned silk, ornamented with red circles and beryl coronets. Marble busts stared blindly from niches in the walls. Icarus counted six of Napoleon, three of Wellington, one of Churchill and none at all of Noel Edmonds. Icarus didn’t count these busts for fun. He was passing many doors and Icarus counted these also. He wanted to remember exactly where the way out was, when he chose to make a run for it.

At length he was brought to a halt before door twenty-three. Just beside the empty niche that awaited Noel Edmonds.

Cormerant knocked and a voice called, “Enter.”

Cormerant turned the handle and opened the door. “In,” said he to Icarus.

As Icarus harboured no preconceptions as to what might lie beyond the opening door, he was neither surprised nor disappointed by the sight that met his troubled gaze. But neither was he impressed.

Baffled, yes.

But not impressed.

Beyond the doorway lay a barber’s shop.

It was a regular ordinary down to earth, spit and proper barber’s shop. It might well have been that of Stravino, but it wasn’t. For this one was way deep down in the ground and this one had smarter barber’s chairs.

But all the rest was very much the same. The same fag-pocked linoleum on the floor. The same yellow nicotine up on the ceiling. Same pitted mirror with its souvenirs and whatnots. A row of faded cinema seats and even a brown envelope.

Of the smarter barber’s chairs, there were three. Stravino had only two in his shop. The second one, he’d told Icarus, was for the son who would one day succeed him. But that particular chair remained for ever empty, as Stravino had fifteen daughters, but no son.

But that is by the by, for we are here. In this subterranean barber’s shop, which has three chairs. And leaning against the furthest and smoking a cigarette, there stood … a barber.

This barber, like Stravino, was obviously a Greek. He had the complicated cookery thing that they always wear above the left eyebrow and the shaded area on the right cheek that looks a bit like a map of Indo-China. And he stood and he grinned and he dished out a welcome.

“Welcome,” he said, “and come in.”

Johnny Boy edged nervously forward. “I don’t want a haircut,” he muttered to Icarus. “I do my own. I have a four-in-one home hairdressing set.”

“Shut it, squirt,” said Cormerant.

“Come sit here,” said the barber.

Johnny Boy shook his tiny head.

“No, not you, dolly man. The big boy. The one with all the presents. Someone take his presents, please. And has someone had a look-see in his pockets?”

Cormerant shook his hideous head.

“You no search this boy at all?” The barber raised his unencumbered right eyebrow. “You no check to see whether he carry big bomb that blow our bottom parts off?”

Cormerant shook his hideous head a second time.

“Then perhaps you’d better do it now, damned clerk with runny nose.”

The chauffeur wrenched the papers and the boxes and the spectremeter from the grip of Icarus. Cormerant reached forward to go through his pockets. Icarus bit hard upon his bottom lip as the creature’s terrible scaly hands probed about his person.

“My wallet,” said Cormerant. “And where is my watch fob and where is my briefcase?”

“All in the time that’s good,” said the barber. “The boy will tell it all to us.”

Icarus eyed the barber. Here indeed lay a mystery. He was not a wrong’un. Not some demon. He was a man, as Icarus. And he was not a bad man. Icarus could see the man within the man and what Icarus could see was loyalty. This man was honest and loyal. He believed in what he was doing. He thought that what he was doing was right. Icarus shuddered. That was how it worked, of course. That was how it all worked. People mostly did believe that what they did was for the best. For the good of others. This man worked here. In this evil Ministry, run by demons in the guise of men. And he believed he was doing the right thing. For queen and country, perhaps? For national security?

“You come sit down here my boy,” said the barber, indicating the middle chair. “You look like you need a haircut. What shall it be, do you think? Perhaps a Tony Curtis?”

“No thanks,” said Icarus.

“But you sit here all the same.”

Icarus saw the flicker of colour darting round the barber’s head. Dark blue for determination. Not a man to be argued with.

Icarus made his way to the chair and sat down hard upon it. The barber flourished a Velocette and swung it over the lad’s shoulders.

“We don’t have time for this pantomime.” The cold cruel tone of Cormerant’s voice jarred in the relocator’s ears. “Call her out, make her get on with it.”

Her? Icarus glanced into the mirror. The barber’s expression was grave. The colour of his thoughts was yellow. Fear, that colour was.

“She come soon,” said the barber. “She out clubbing it up, you know what young ladies are. I just give this boy a Tony Curtis, make him look a regular back street prince.”

“No need for that.” Icarus turned his head at the voice. A woman had entered the barber’s shop. She was a most attractive woman. Five feet two and eyes of blue, in a black leather dress and a high-heeled shoe. Golden hair, wide-lipped smile, she moved with elegance and style. Beyond the beauty and the grace, Icarus could see a brooding menace.

“Miss O’Connor,” said the barber.

“Introduce me properly,” said Miss O’Connor.

“Boy in chair, this is Miss Philomena Christina Maria O’Connor. She is an exo-cranial masseuse. She massage your head all nice. Make you feel all dreamy dreamy. Very good for the scalp. Make follicles spring up like little lambs eat ivy.”

“No thank you,” said Icarus.

“Yes thank you,” said Philomena.

“It not hurt a bit,” said the barber. “You feel grand, I promise.”

Icarus could see the lie and Icarus wanted out. He gripped the arms of the barber’s chair, prepared to spring and make a fight of it.

Click and click went the arms of the chair and two steel bands curled to fasten his wrists. Icarus wrenched and twisted, but the steel bands held him captive.

“Just relax,” said Philomena, approaching the chair. “It really won’t hurt much. It’s just a little massage.”

Icarus fought to keep his head down, but her hands were suddenly in amongst his hair. “My mother taught me this,” said Philomena. “Back in the old country. She was a hairdresser, but she’d studied phrenology. She could tell people’s fortunes by feeling the shape of their heads. She became very good at it; she had the gift, you see. And she could see a potential in it that few people ever sought to realize. That by applying subtle pressure to precise areas on the skull, you can actually cause changes to occur within the human brain. It’s a bit like acupuncture, or acupressure. Once you know exactly where to press and how hard and for how long, you can achieve the most remarkable effects. Here, for instance.”

Philomena pressed a finger down upon the crown of the captive’s head. Icarus gasped as a sensation of absolute joy overwhelmed him. A feeling of pure happiness.

“Nice, isn’t it?” said Philomena. “My mother used to get really big tips from her clients when she pressed their heads like that. And yet …” Icarus felt a pressure over his right temple.

“Aaaaaagh!” Knives of pain tore through his body. Knives of burning pain.

“That one really hurts, now doesn’t it?”

Icarus groaned and tears ran down his cheeks.

“You do have to be very precise, though,” said Philomena, stroking the head of Icarus Smith. “Just a little bit off and the effects can be devastating. Blindness, paralysis, permanent incontinence, or a total vegetative state. It takes a lot of practice to get it just right. I have a lot of ex-boyfriends who can’t do much nowadays but dribble. Shame, but there you go.”

Icarus was shaking now. His eyes rolled and his lips were turning blue.

“So let’s see,” said Philomena. “Let’s just see what you have to tell us.”

Icarus awoke in a sweat from a terrible terrible dream. He clutched at his head and blinked his eyes and let out an awful scream.

“Calm down, please, calm down.”

The eyes of Icarus focused on the face of Johnny Boy.

“Can you move?” asked the midget. “Are all your body parts still working?”

Icarus twitched; his hands were numb. He tried to rise, but his legs offered little support.

“What happened?” he managed to ask. “Where are we?”

“That evil bitch played havoc with your brain. You told her everything. Where you’d hidden the briefcase. How you mailed the key to yourself. Your address.”

“Oh God, no.”

“I’m sorry,” said Johnny Boy. “There was nothing I could do to stop her. They flushed all the tablets down the sink and burned the professor’s notes. They’d have smashed up the spectremeter too, if you hadn’t told them what it did.”

“I don’t remember anything.” Icarus rubbed at his knees.

“No, she said that you wouldn’t. They made me drag you here and they locked us in. You’ve been unconscious for hours.”

“Oh God, I’m shaking all over. I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Please don’t,” said Johnny Boy. “This is only a very small cell.”

“A cell.” Icarus looked up and around and about.

“Death cell, I should think,” said Johnny Boy. “I’m really sorry, Icarus. It’s all my fault that you got into this.”

“Don’t blame yourself. We’re in it now and we have to get out of it and quick.”

Johnny Boy sighed a little sigh, “We’ve lost,” said he. “They’ve destroyed the tablets and the formula. They win, we lose.”

“Oh no we don’t,” said Icarus and he opened his right hand. On his palm lay a dozen tablets, all very sweaty and rather crunched up, but a dozen tablets, none the less. “I relocated these while we were in the car. We can get some chemist to analyse them. We’re not done for yet.”

“Smart lad,” said Johnny Boy. “But how do we get out of here?”

“Getting out of this cell is no problem,” said Icarus. “It’s what we do when we’re out that worries me.”

Johnny Boy had not counted doors, or busts in little niches. And when Icarus (using certain instruments which he kept in the heels of his shoes) had opened the cell door and glanced up and down a strange corridor, and asked Johnny Boy which way it was to the barber’s shop, the small man could only shrug his shoulders and say it was perhaps this way or perhaps the other.

“Best leave it to fate, then,” said Icarus. “Follow me.”

This corridor had a stone-flagged floor and walls of echoing stone. This was your standard prison corridor, the one along which the cries of tortured souls are wont to echo.

“Your heels really click, don’t they?” said Icarus.

“Tap-shoes,” said Johnny Boy. “I used to do a bit of the old Fred and Ginger.”

“Perhaps you’d like to take them off, or walk on tiptoe or something.”

Johnny Boy stopped and took off his shoes and tucked them into his trouser pockets.

“What happened to your socks?” asked Icarus. “They look all singed.”

“I suffer from spontaneous human combustion. If I eat too much coleslaw.”

“Well I’ll be damned,” said Icarus. “My mad brother says that he suffers from that. But I never believed him. I thought he was making it up.”

“It’s a common complaint,” said Johnny Boy. “I’d like to meet your brother.”

“No, you wouldn’t. He’s a nutter. Lives in a world of fantasy.”

“Unlike us,” said Johnny Boy.

“Exactly,” said Icarus Smith. “But he’s one of the reasons that we have to get out of here fast. Cormerant has my address; he’ll go there to get the luggage locker key. I don’t want any harm to come to my family.”

“Shame,” said a voice.

“Oh dear,” said Johnny Boy.

“Just put your hands up,” said the voice. It was the voice of the chauffeur.

Icarus raised his hands and turned around. Johnny Boy did likewise.

“You’re very nifty with locks, aren’t you?” said the chauffeur. “I just missed you. Happily I heard your little mate’s heels clicking down the corridor.”

“Sorry,” said Johnny Boy.

“Never mind,” said Icarus.

“Yeah well, never mind,” said the chauffeur. “I wasn’t coming to bring you your breakfast, or anything. I was coming to put a bullet through each of your heads. And I can do it as easily here as back in the cell.” The chauffeur raised his gun and pointed it at the head of Icarus Smith.

“No,” said Icarus, “don’t. You don’t understand what’s going on here. You don’t understand who you’re working for. What you’re working for. Cormerant isn’t a human, he’s a—”

“Forget it,” said the chauffeur. “You’re dead, the two of you.”

And he cocked his pistol and squeezed the trigger.

“No, please …” Icarus covered his face. “No, please don’t …”

But.

There was a flash and a bang.

Icarus gasped and clutched at his head.

And then he heard the screaming.

His eyes, which had been tightly closed, flashed open.

To see before him a terrifying sight.

The chauffeur was squirming, his arms flailing and his head twisting backwards on his neck. From his chest projected a golden crescent. His feet were some twelve inches from the flagstoned floor and kicking violently. The chauffeur contorted in a paroxysm of pain and then went limp and sagged like a broken doll.

The golden crescent swished away. The chauffeur fell to the floor and lay there dead.

And then Icarus saw him. The man who now stood over the chauffeur’s body. The man who had driven the blade through his body and lifted him off his feet. The man just stood there, calmly sheathing his golden blade. He was a man, but he was more than a man. A golden aura glowed about him. Bright white light was haloed all around his head.

Icarus stared at the glowing man, then down at the lifeless carcass of the chauffeur and then Icarus did what any reasonable man would do.

He was violently sick.

“How are you feeling now?” asked the saviour of Icarus Smith when the lad had recovered what senses he had.

“Not good,” said Icarus, “but you. I know you, don’t I?”

“You saw me today and I saw you. We were both after the same thing. The briefcase. I’ve been following you ever since. I hid in the boot of the long dark automobile.”

“In the barber’s shop,” said Icarus. “I saw you in Stravino’s barber’s shop.”

“Captain Ian Drayton, at your service.” The captain saluted.

“But you’re …”

“Don’t say the word,” said Captain Ian.

“Angel,” said Johnny Boy. “He’s an angel. Only the third one I’ve ever seen.”

“So both of you know. You’ve both taken the professor’s drug.”

“You know all about that, do you?” said Johnny Boy.

“We’ve had this place under surveillance for a very long time. We know most of what goes on in here.”

“The professor’s dead,” said Johnny Boy. “They killed him.”

“I feared as much.”

“Hold on,” said Icarus. “I want to know what is going on here.”

“There’s no time now,” said Captain Ian. “But I’ll tell you everything you need to know. There is someone else I have to rescue first. I was hoping that you might assist me in this.”

“I think we owe you one,” said Icarus. “Who needs rescuing?”

“A detective,” said Captain Ian. “A very famous detective.”

“Sherlock Holmes?” said Johnny Boy.

“Lazlo Woodbine,” said Captain Ian.

“Lazlo Woodbine?” Johnny Boy scratched at his little dolly head. “Lazlo Woodbine is here?”

“He was brought in unconscious this evening. They’re holding him in the medical facility. There’s a doctor interviewing him now.”

“I don’t like the way you said doctor,” said Johnny Boy.

“The doctor is, as you might say, a wrong’un.”

“Hold on,” said Icarus. “This Woodbine character. How was he dressed? Was he wearing his now legendary trenchcoat and a fedora?”

“No, actually he was wearing an old tweed jacket.”

Icarus let out a plaintive sigh.

“That was one hell of a plaintive sigh,” said Johnny Boy. “Why did you let that out?”

“Because of the old tweed jacket. That’s the disguise he likes to wear. He believes that it fools people into believing he’s a reporter for the Brentford Mercury.”

“I didn’t know Lazlo Woodbine ever wore a disguise,” said Johnny Boy.

“He doesn’t,” said Icarus. “Because the man who is here is not the real Lazlo Woodbine. The man who is here is my barking mad brother.”

“What?” went Johnny Boy.

“My brother,” said Icarus. “The one with the smouldering socks. The one who I told you was a nutter. The one who lives in a world of fantasy. The one who believes that he’s Lazlo Woodbine. That’s not the real Lazlo Woodbine they’ve brought in here. That’s my lunatic brother.”