The Quorum (54 page)

Greg got bored with the autopsy footage and the jumpy images, and looked around to see if anyone he knew was there. The audience were gazing at the screen like communicants at mass, the video mirrored in their spectacles, providing starlike pinpoints in the darkness.

He had been drawing a lot of darkness recently, filling in the shadows around Dr Shade, only the white of his lower face and the highlights of his goggles showing in the night as he stalked Dominick Dalmas through the mean streets of East London. His hand got tired after inking in the solid blacks of the strip. Occasionally you saw Dr Chambers in the daytime, but 95 per cent of the panels were night scenes.

There was a glitch on the videotape and the film vanished for a few seconds, replaced by Nanette Newman waving a bottle of washing-up liquid. Nobody hooted or complained and the mad doctor’s gorilla-man came back in an instant. A tomatolike eyeball was fished out, gravyish blood coursing down the contorted face of a bad actor with a worse toupee. Stock music as old as talking pictures thundered on the soundtrack. If it weren’t for the violence, this could easily have been made in the ’30s, when Donald Moncrieff’s Dr Shade was in the hero business, tossing mad scientists out of tenth-storey windows and putting explosive airgun darts into Bolshies and rebellious natives.

Although his eyes were used to the dark, Greg thought he wasn’t seeing properly. A corner of the room, behind the video, was as thickly black as any of his panels. To one side of the screen, he could dimly see the walls with their movie posters and fan announcements, a fire extinguisher hung next to a notice. But the other side of the room was just an impenetrable night.

He had a headache and there were dots in front of his eyes. He looked away from the dark corner and back again. It didn’t disappear. But it did seem to move, easing itself away from the wall and expanding towards him. A row of seats disappeared. The screen shone brighter, dingy colours becoming as vivid as a comic book cover.

Greg clutched his
Dr Shades,
telling himself this was what came of too much beer, not enough food and too many late nights in the convention bar. Suddenly, it was very hot in the video room, as if the darkness were burning up, suffocating him...

A pair of glasses glinted in the dark. There was someone inside the shadow, someone wearing thick sunglasses. No, not glasses. Goggles.

He stood up, knocking his chair over. Somebody grumbled at the noise. On the screen, the Mexico City cops had shot the gorilla man dead and the mad doctor - his father - was being emotional about his loss.

The darkness took manshape, but not mansize. Its shadow head, topped by the shape of a widebrimmed hat, scraped the ceiling, its arms reached from wall to wall.

Only Greg took any notice. Everyone else was upset about the gorilla man and the mad doctor. Somewhere under the goggles, up near the light fixtures, a phantom white nose and chin were forming around the black gash of a humourless mouth.

Greg opened the door and stepped out of the video room, his heart spasming in its cage. Slamming the door on the darkness, he pushed himself into the corridor and collided with a tall, cloaked figure.

Suddenly angry, he was about to lash out verbally when he realised he knew who the man was. The recognition was like an ECT jolt.

He was standing in front of Dr Shade.

The Jew fled through the burning city, feeling a clench of dread each time a shadow fell over his heart. There was nowhere he could hide. Not in the underground railway stations that doubled as bomb shelters, not in the sewers with the other rats, not in the cells of the traitor police. The doctor was coming for him, coming to avenge the lies he had told, and there was nothing that could be done.

The all-clear had sounded, the drone of the planes was gone from the sky, and the streets were busy with firemen and panicking Londoners. Their homes were destroyed, their lilywhite lives ground into the mud. The Jew found it in his heart to laugh bitterly as he saw a mother in a nightdress, calling for her children outside the pile of smoking bricks that had been her house. His insidious kind had done their job too well, setting the Aryan races at each other’s throats while they plotted with the Soviet Russians and the heathen Chinee to dominate the grim world that would come out of this struggle. Germans dropped bombs on Englishmen, and the Jew smiled.

But, in this moment, he knew that success of the Conspiracy would mean nothing to him. Not while the night still had shadows. Not while there was a Dr Shade...

He leaned, exhausted, against a soot-grimed wall. The mark of Dr Shade was on him, a black handprint on his camelhair coat. The doctor’s East End associates were dogging him, relaying messages back to their master, driving him away from the light, keeping him running through the night. There was no one to call him ‘friend’.

A cloth-capped young man looked into the alley, ice-blue eyes penetrating the dark. He put his thumb and forefinger to his mouth and gave a shrill whistle.

’Ere, mateys, we gots us a Yid! Call fer the doc!’

There was a stampede of heavy boots. Almost reluctant to keep on the move, wishing for it all to be over, the murdering filth shoved himself away from the wall and made a run for the end of the alley. The wall was low, and he hauled himself up it onto a sloping roof. The East End boys were after him, broken bottles and shivs in their hands, but he made it ahead of them. He strode up the tiles, feeling them shift under his feet. Some came loose and fell behind him, into the faces of Shade’s men.

Using chimneys to steady himself, the stinking guttershite ran across the rooftops. He had his revolver out, and fired blindly into the darkness behind him, panic tearing him apart from the inside. Then, he came to the end of his run.

He stood calmly, arms folded, his cloak flapping in the breeze, silhouetted sharply against the fiery skyline. The thin lips formed a smile, and the child-raping libellous Israelite scum knew he was justly dead.

‘Hello Harry,’ said Dr Shade.

D
ONALD
M
ONCRIEFF
, ‘Dr Shade, Jew Killer’ (unpublished, 1942)

‘Hello, Harry,’ said Greg, jiggling the phone in the regulation hopeless attempt to improve a bad connection, ‘I thought we’d been cut off...’

Harry sounded as if he were in Jakarta, not three stops away on the District Line. ‘So there I was, face to goggles with Dr Shade.’

He could make it sound funny now, hours later.

‘The guy was on his way to the masquerade. There are always people in weird outfits at these things. He had all the details right, airgun and all.’

Greg had called Harry from his hotel room to tell him about all the excitement the Return of Dr Shade was generating with the fans. Kids whose
parents
hadn’t been born when the
Argus
went out of business were eagerly awaiting the comeback of the cloaked crimefighter.

‘Obviously, the doc has percolated into our folk memory, Harry. Or maybe Leech is right. It’s just time to have him back.’

His panel had gone well. The questions from the audience had almost all been directed to him, and he had had to field some to the other panelists so as not to hog the whole platform. The fans had been soliciting for information. Yes, Penny Stamp would be back, but she wouldn’t be a girl reporter any more. Yes, the doctor’s Rolls Royce ‘Shadowshark’ would be coming out of the garage, with more hidden tricks than ever. Yes, the doctor would be dealing with the contemporary problems of East London. When someone asked if the proprietor of the paper would be exerting any influence over the content of the strip, Greg replied ‘well, he hasn’t so far,’ and got cheers by claiming, ‘I don’t think Dr Shade is a
Comet
reader, somehow.’ Somebody even knew enough to ask him to compare the Donald Moncrieff Rex Cash with the Harry Lipman Rex Cash. He had conveyed best wishes to the con from Harry and praised the writer’s still-active imagination.

At the other end of the line, Harry sounded tired. Sometimes, Greg had to remind himself how old the man was. He wondered whether the call had woken him up.

‘We’ve even had some American interest, maybe in republishing the whole thing as a monthly book, staggered behind the newspaper series. I’m having Tamara investigate. She thinks we can do it without tithing off too much of the money to Derek Leech, but rights deals are tricky. Also, Condé Nast, the corporate heirs of Street and Smith, have a long memory and still think Moncrieff ripped off The Shadow in the ’30s. Still, it’s worth going into.’

Harry tried to sound enthusiastic.

‘Are you okay, Harry?’

He said so, but somehow Greg didn’t believe him. Greg checked his watch. He had agreed to meet Neil and a few other friends in the bar in ten minutes. He said goodnight to Harry, and hung up.

Wanting to change his panelist’s jacket for a drinker’s pullover, Greg delved through the suitcase perched on the regulation anonymous armchair. He found the jumper he needed, and transferred his convention badge from lapel to epaulette. Under the suitcase, he found the bundle of
Dr Shade Monthly
s he had bought for Harry. He hadn’t mentioned them on the phone.

Harry couldn’t have got back to bed yet. He’d barely be in the hall. Greg stabbed the redial button and listened to the clicking of the exchange. Harry’s phone rang again.

The shadows in the room seemed longer. When Harry didn’t pick up immediately, Greg’s first thought was that something was wrong. He imagined coronaries, nasty falls, fainting spells, the infirmities of the aged. The telephone rang. Ten, twenty, thirty times.

Harry couldn’t have got back to bed and fallen into a deep sleep in twenty seconds.

You also couldn’t get a wrong number on a phone with a redial facility.

The phone was picked up at the other end.

‘Hello,’ said a female voice, young and hard, ‘who’s this then?’

‘Harry,’ Greg said. ‘Where’s Harry?’

‘’E’s got a bit of a problem, mate,’ the girl said. ‘But we’ll see to ’im.’

Greg was feeling very bad about this. The girl on the phone didn’t sound like a concerned neighbour. ‘Is Harry ill?’

A pause. Greg imagined silent laughter. There was music in the background. Not Harry Lipman music but tinny Metal, distorted by a cheap boombox and the telephone. Suddenly, Greg was down from his high, the good feeling and the alcohol washed out of his system.

‘Hello?’

‘Still here,’ the girl said.

‘Is Harry ill?’

‘Well, I’ll put it this way,’ she said, ‘we’ve sent for the doctor.’

Evidence has come to light linking Derek Leech, the man at the top of the pyramid, with a linked chain of dubious right-wing organisations here and abroad. A source inside the Leech organisation, currently gearing up to launch a new national evening paper, revealed to our reporter, DUNCAN EYLES, that while other press barons diversify into the electronic media and publishing, Derek Leech has his eye on a more direct manner of influencing the shape of the nation.

‘Derek has been underwriting the election campaigns of parliamentary candidates in the last few by-elections,’ the source told us. ‘They mostly lost their deposits. Patrick Massinghame, the Britain First chairman who later rejoined the Tories, was one. The idea was not to take a seat but to use the campaigns to disseminate propaganda. The
Comet
has always been antiimmigration, pro-law-and-order, anti-anything-socialist, pro-hanging-and-flogging, pro-military spending, pro-political-censorship. But the campaigns were able to be rabidly so.’

Leech, who has regularly dismissed similar allegations as ‘lunatic conspiracy theories’, refused to comment on documents leaked to us which give facts and figures. In addition to funding Patrick Massinghame and others of his political stripe, Leech has contributed heavily to such bizarre causes as the White Freedom Crusade, which channels funds from British and American big business into South Africa, the English Liberation Front, who claim that immigrants from the Indian Sub-Continent and the Caribbean constitute ‘an army of occupation’ and should be driven out through armed struggle, the Revive Capital Punishment lobby, and even Caucasian supremacist thrash metal band Whitewash, whose single ‘Blood, Iron and St George’ was banned by the BBC and commercial radio stations but still managed to reach Number 5 in the independent charts.

Even more disturbing in the light of these allegations, is the paramilitary nature of the security force Leech is employing to guard the pyramid that is at the heart of his empire. Recruiting directly from right-wing youth gangs, often through advertisements placed in illiterate but suspiciously well produced and printed fanzines distributed at football matches, the Leech organisation has been assembling what can only be described as an army of yobs to break the still-continuing print union pickets in docklands. Our source informs us that the pyramid contains a well-stocked armoury, as if the proprietor of the
Comet
and the forthcoming
Argus
were expecting a siege. Rumour has it that Leech has even invested in a custom-made Rolls Royce featuring such unusual extras as bullet-proof bodywork, James Bond-style concealed rocket launchers, a teargas cannon and bonnet-mounted stilettos.

Derek Leech can afford all the toys he wants. But perhaps it’s about time we started to get worried about the games he wants to play...

Searchlight,
August 1991

The minicab driver wouldn’t take him onto the estate no matter what he offered to pay and left him stranded him at the kerb. At night, the place was even less inviting than by day. There were wire-mesh protected lights embedded in concrete walls every so often, but skilled vandals had got through to them. Greg knew that dashing into the dark maze would do no good, and forced himself to study the battered, graffiti-covered map of the estate that stood by the road. He found Harry’s house on the map easily. By it, someone had drawn a stickman hanging from a gallows. It was impossible to read a real resemblance into the infants’ scrawl of a face, but Greg knew it was supposed to represent Harry.