The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 19

'I hope someone's writing this down.'

'No need, Jamie,' said Gene. 'Tell him, Susan.'

'It's called eidetic memory,' said Susan. 'Like photographic, but for sounds and the spoken word. I can replay what he said in snippets over the next few hours. I don't even need to understand what he means. Now, 'turn left into New Cavendish Street, and drive towards Marylebone High Street…''

Relaying Sewell Head's directions, Susan imitated his monotone. She sounded like a machine.

'One day all cars will have gadgets that do this,' said Keith.

Jamie doubted that, but started driving anyway.

V

An hour or so into Professor Cleaver's rhotacist monologue, Richard began tuning out. Was hypothermia setting in? Despite thermals and furs, he was freezing. His upper arms ached as if they'd been hit with hammers. His jaws hurt from clenching to prevent teeth-chattering. He no longer had feeling in his fingers and toes. Frozen exhalation made ice droplets in his moustache.

Cold didn't bother Clever Dick. He was one of those mad geniuses who never outgrew a need for an audience. Being clever didn't count unless the people who he was cleverer than knew it. The Professor walked around the room, excited, impassioned, frankly barking. He touched ice-coated surfaces with bare hands Richard assumed were freezer-burned to nervelessness. He puffed out clouds of frost and delighted in tiny falls of indoor hail. He constantly fiddled with his specs — taking them off to scrape away thin film of iced condensation with bitten-to-the-quick thumbnails, putting them back on until they misted up and froze over again. And he kept talking. Talking, talking, talking.

As a child, Dick Cleaver had been indulged — and listened to — far too often. He'd been an adventurer, in the company of immature grownups who didn't take the trouble to teach him how to be a real boy. When that career ended, it had been a mind-breaking shock for Clever Dick. Richard had read Catriona Kaye's notes on the Case of the Splendid Six. Her pity for the little boy was plain as purple ink, though she also loathed him. An addendum (initialled by Edwin Winthrop) wickedly noted that Clever Dick suffered such extreme adolescent acne that he'd become known as 'Spotted Dick'. Angry pockmarks still marred the Professor's chubby cheeks. As an adult, he had become a champion among bores and deliberately entered a profession that required talking at length about the most tedious (yet inescapable) subject in Great British conversation — the weather. Turned out nice again, eh what? Lovely weather for ducks. Bit nippy round the allotments. Cleaver's bestselling book was impossible to read to the end, which was why many took The Coming Ice Age for a warning. It was actually a threat, a plan of action, a promise. To Professor Cleaver, the grip of glaciation was a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Behind his glasses, Cleaver's eyes gleamed. He might as well have traced hearts on frozen glass with a fingertip. He was a man in love. Perhaps for the first time. A late, great, literally all-consuming love.

Derek Leech, who rarely made the mistake of explaining his evil plans at length, had missed the point when he funded Cleaver's research. That alarmed Richard — Leech might be many things, but he was not easily fooled. Cleaver came across as a ranting, immature idiot with a freak IQ, but had serious connections. If anything could trump a Great Enchanter, it was the Cold.

'The Cold was here first,' continued Cleaver. 'Before the dawn of man, she weigned over evewything. She was the planet's first evolved intelligence, a giant bwain consisting of a near-infinite number of ice cwystals. A gweat white blanket, sewene and undying. When the glaciers weceded, she went to her west. She hid in a place out of weach until now. Humanity is just a blip. She'd have come back eventually, even without me. She was not dead, but only sleeping.'

'Lot of that about,' said Leech. 'King Arthur, Barbarossa, Great Cthulhu, the terracotta warriors, Gary Glitter. They'll all be back.'

Cleaver sputtered with anger. He didn't like being interrupted when he was rhapsodizing.

'You won't laugh when blood fweezes in your veins, Mr Leech. When your eyes pop out on ice-stalks.'

Leech flapped his arms and contorted his face in mock panic.

'How many apocalypses have come and gone and fizzled in this century, Jeperson?' Leech asked, airily. 'Four? Five? Worm War, Wizard War, Water War, Weird War, World War… and that's not counting Princess Cuckoo of Faerie, Little Rosie Farrar as the Whore of Babylon, the Scotch Streak and the Go-Codes, the Seamouth Warp, six alien invasions counting two the Diogenes Club doesn't think I know about, two of my youthful indiscretions you don't think I know you know about, and the ongoing Duel of the Seven Stars.'

'Don't the Water War, the Scotch Streak and the Egyptian Stars count as alien invasions?' asked Richard. 'I mean, technically, the Deep Ones are terrestrial, but your Great Squidhead Person is from outer outer space. And the other two bothers were down to unwelcome meteorites.'

'You've a point. Make that eight alien invasions. The Water War was a local skirmish, though. Extra-dimensional, rather than extraterrestrial…'

Cleaver hopped from one foot to the other. The little boy in him was furious that grown-ups were talking over his head. If he hadn't been chucked off his course in life — by Catriona, as he saw it — he might have been in on the Secret History. The Mystic Maharajah, oldest of the Splendid Six, had carried a spear (well, an athane) in the Worm War. Captain Rattray (Blackfist), another Splendid, emerged from disgrace to play a minor role in the Wizard War. Teenage Clever Dick was too busy squeezing pus-filled blemishes to get involved in that set-to. Child sleuths, like child actors, seldom grew up to be stars. Richard was named after Richard Riddle, the famous Boy Detective of the turn of the century (so was Cleaver, probably). Few knew what, if anything, happened to Riddle in later life.

'You won't listen, you won't listen!'

'Have you considered that the Cold might be extra-dimensional rather than antediluvian?' asked Leech, offhandedly. 'Seems to me a bright young man of my acquaintance reported something similar in a continuum several path-forks away from our own. It cropped up there in 1963 or so, during the Big Freeze. Didn't do much harm.'

'You can't say anything about her,' insisted Cleaver, almost squeaking.

'Interesting that you see the Cold as a her,' continued Leech. 'Then again, I suppose women have been 'cold' to you all your life. You made a poor impression on Miss Kaye, from all accounts. And she's always been generous in her feelings.'

Cleaver's face tried to burn. Blood rose in his blueing cheeks, forming purplish patches. He might break out again.

'I know what you're twying to do, you wotter!'

Leech laughed out loud. Richard couldn't help but join in.

'I'm a 'wotter', am I? A wotten wetched wight woyal wascally wotter, perhaps?'

'You're twying to get me angwy!'

'Angwy? Are you succumbing to woawing wed wage?'

Cleaver couldn't help sounding like a toffee-nosed Elmer Fudd. It was cruel of Leech to taunt him Fourth Form fashion. Richard remembered bullies at his schools. With him, it had been his darker skin, his literal lack of background, the numbers tattooed on his wrist, his longer-than-regulation hair, his eyelashes for heaven's sake. He had learned early on to control his temper. If he didn't, people got hurt.

'You missed one off your list of apocalypses,' said Cleaver, trying to be sly again. 'Perfidious Albion. That was an extwa-dimensional thweat. An entire weality out to oblitewate the world. And we stopped it. In 1926! Not your Diogenes Club or those Undertaker fellows, but us! The Splendid Six! Clever Dick, yes. They first called me that to poke fun, but I pwoved it was a wightful name. I stood with the gwown-ups. Blackfist and Lord Piltdown and the Blue Stweak…'

'… and Aviatrix and the Mystic Maharajah,' footnoted Richard.

'Should never have let girls and foreigners in,' muttered Cleaver. 'That's where the wot started.'