The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 19

awarded not for correct answers, but for matching whatever was decided — right or wrong — by the majority vote of a 'randomly-selected panel of ordinary Britons'. Contestants had taken home fridge-freezers and fondue sets by identifying Sydney as the capital of Australia or categorizing whales as fish. Richard could imagine what Bernard Levin and Charles Shaar Murray thought of that.

Richard opened the boot of his Rolls and hefted out a holdall which contained stout wicker snowshoes, extensible aluminium ski-poles and packs of survival rations. Leech had similar equipment, though his boot- attachments were spiked black metal and his rucksack could have contained a jet propulsion unit.

'I'd have thought DLI could supply a Sno-Cat.'

'Have you any idea how hard it is to come by one in July?'

'As it happens, yes.'

They both laughed, bitterly. Fred Regent, one of the Club's best men, had spent most of yesterday learning that the few places in Great Britain which leased or sold snow-ploughs, caterpillar tractor bikes or jet-skis had either sent their equipment out to be serviced, shut up shop for the summer or gone out of business in despair at unending sunshine. Heather Wilding, Leech's Executive Assistant, had been on the same fruitless mission — she and Fred kept running into each other outside lock-ups with COME BACK IN NOVEMBER posted on them.

Beyond this point, the road to Sutton Mallet — a tricky proposition at the best of times — was impassable. The hamlet was just visible a mile off, black roofs stuck out of white drifts. The fields were usually low-lying, marshy and divided by shallow ditches called rhynes. In the last months, the marsh had set like concrete. The rhynes had turned into stinking runnels, with the barest threads of mud where water usually ran. Now, almost overnight, everything was deep-frozen and heavily frosted. The sun still shone, making a thousand glints, twinkles and refractions. But there was no heat.

Trees, already dead from dutch elm disease or roots loosened from the dry dirt, had fallen under the weight of what only Richard wasn't calling snow, and lay like giant blackened corpses on field-sized shrouds. Telephone poles were down too. No word had been heard from Sutton Mallet in two days. A hardy postman had tried to get through on his bicycle, but not come back. A farmer set off to milk his cows was also been swallowed in the whiteness. A helicopter flew over, but the rotor blades slowed as heavy ice-sheaths grew on them. The pilot had barely made it back to Yeovilton Air Field.

Word had spread through «channels». Unnatural phenomena were Diogenes Club business, but Leech had to take an interest too — if only to prove that he wasn't behind the cold snap. Heather Wilding had made a call to Pall Mall, and officially requested the Club's assistance. That didn't happen often or, come to think of it, ever.

Leech looked across the white fields towards Sutton Mallet.

'So we walk,' he said.

'It's safest to follow the ditches,' advised Richard.

Neither bothered to lock their cars.

They clambered — as bulky and awkward as astronauts going EVA — over a stile to get into the field. The white carpet was virginal. As they tramped on, in the slight trough that marked the rime-filled rhyne, Richard kept looking sidewise at Leech. The man was breathing heavily inside his polar gear. Being incarnate involved certain frailties. But it would not do to underestimate a Great Enchanter.

Derek Leech had popped up apparently out of nowhere in 1961. A day after Colonel Zenf finally died in custody, he first appeared on the radar, making a freak run of successful long-shot bets at a dog track. Since then, he had made several interlocking empires. He was a close friend of Harold Wilson, Brian Epstein, Lord Leaves of Leng, Enoch Powell, Roman Polanski, Mary Millington and Jimmy Saville. He was into everything — newspapers (the down-market tabloid Daily Comet and the reactionary broadsheet Sunday Facet), pop records, telly, a film studio, book publishing, frozen foods, football, road-building, anti-depressants, famine relief, contraception, cross-channel hovercraft, draught lager, touring opera productions, market research, low-cost fashions, educational playthings. He had poked his head out of a trapdoor on Batman and expected to be recognized by Adam West — 'it's not the Clock King, Robin, it's the English Pop King, Derek Leech'. He appeared in his own adverts, varying his catch- phrase — 'if I didn't love it, I wouldn't…' eat it, drink it, watch it, groove it, use it, wear it, bare it, shop it, stop it, make it, take it, kiss it, miss it, phone it, own it. He employed 'radical visionary architect' Constant Drache to create 'ultra-moderne work-place environments' for DLI premises and the ranks upon ranks of 'affordable homes for hard-working families' cropping up at the edges of conurbations throughout the land. It was whispered there were private graveyards under many a 'Derek Leech Close' or 'Derek Leech Drive'. Few had tangled with Derek Leech and managed better than a draw. Richard counted himself among the few, but also suspected their occasional path-crossings hadn't been serious.

They made fresh, ragged footprints across the empty fields. They were the only moving things in sight. It was quiet too. Richard saw birds frozen in mid-tweet on boughs, trapped in globules of ice. No smoke rose from the chimneys of Sutton Mallet. Of course, what with the heat wave, even the canniest country folk might have put off getting in a store of fuel for next winter.

'Refresh my memory,' said Richard. 'How many people are at your weather research station?'

'Five. The director, two junior meteorologists, one general dogsbody and a public relations-security consultant.'

Richard had gone over what little the Club could dig up on them. Oddly, a DLI press release provided details of only four of the staff.

'Who's the director again?' he asked.

'We've kept that quiet, as you know,' said Leech. 'It's Professor Cleaver. Another Dick, which is to say a Richard.'

'Might have been useful to be told that,' said Richard, testily.

'I'm telling you now.'

Professor Richard Cleaver, a former time-server at the Meteorological Office, had authored The Coming Ice Age, an alarmist paperback propounding the terrifying theory of World Cooling. According to Cleaver, natural thickening of the ozone layer in the high atmosphere would, if unchecked, lead to the expansion of the polar icecaps and a global climate much like the one currently obtaining in Sutton Mallet. Now, the man was in the middle of his own prediction, which was troubling. There were recorded cases of individuals who worried so much about things that they made them happen. The Professor could be such a Talent.

They huffed into Sutton Mallet, past the chapel, and went through a small copse. On the other side was the research station, a low-lying cinderblock building with temporary cabins attached. There were sentinels in the front yard.

'Are you in the habit of employing frivolous people, Mr Leech?'

'Only in my frivolous endeavours. I take the weather very seriously.'

'I thought as much. Then who made those snowmen?'

They emerged from the rhyne and stood on hard-packed ice over the gravel forecourt of the DLI weather research facility. Outside the main doors stood four classic snowmen: three spheres piled one upon another as legs, torso and head, with twigs for arms, carrots for noses and coals for eyes, buttons and mouths. They were individualized by scarves and headgear — top hat, tarn o'shanter, pith helmet and two toy bumblebees on springs attached to an Alice band.

Leech looked at the row. 'Rime-men, surely?' he said, pointedly. 'As a busybody, you appreciate accuracy.'

There were no footprints around the snowmen. No scraped bare patches or scooped-out drifts. As if they had been grown rather than made.

'A frosty welcoming committee?' suggested Leech.

Before anything happened, Richard knew. It was one of the annoyances of his sensitivity — premonitions that come just too late to do anything about.

Top Hat's headball shifted: it spat out a coal, which cracked against Richard's visor. He threw himself down, to avoid further missiles. Top Hat's head was packed with coals, which it could sick up and aim with deadly force.

Leech was as frozen in one spot as the snowmen weren't. This sort of thing happened to others, but not to