Hoodwink

By Guy Arthur Simpson

Steven and Yvonne visit a London hospital only to find themselves trapped in the headquarters of an ancient Newtonian society.

Their escape with a secret book sets them on a perilous adventure up the canals of England pursued by the society's leaders, a remorseless Archbishop and an unimaginable éminence grise.

The best they can do for allies are a batty Marquis and his wife, ex-convicts and an unreliable demon.

 

urban fantasy novel ~ 540 pages

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guy Arthur Simpson
• Release date: Feb 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393819172

Guy Arthur Simpson

Guy Arthur Simpson writes contemporary thrillers and novels of mystery and curious adventure. He graduated from Oxford and went backpacking in the Americas and India before settling in Spain. He lives in the mountains of La Alpujarra in Andalucia.

Book preview

Chapter One

Locked in

Maximilian Pierce was sitting in his hospital bed, about to bite into a Big Mac, when his friend, Steven Moon, walked into the room.

What are you doing here? he said, lowering the hamburger to the dinner tray. His fingers went to a linen napkin, but his spectacled eyes stayed where they were.

Fine way to greet a visitor, said Steven, hanging up his cap on a brass hook on the door.

I mean it. How did you get in?

What makes you think I’m not allowed in?

Ah, nothing, I’m... just surprised, that’s all, said Maximilian. I never imagined... Good Lord, I mean, I knew there would be Visitors, but you of all people!

Well, Steven tried not to sound put out by the ill-mannered welcome. I am one. I thought you’d be pleased. Can I use your bathroom?

Yes, of course, mumbled Maximilian, suddenly compliant. He propped himself up against the pillows and put away the dinner tray. A Visitor was an honour. But Steven?

Steven sat on the closed lid of the WC in the private room’s cubicle and tried to control his queasiness. Hospitals. They always affected him like this. He had only just walked into St Eloysius from the streets of central London, passing the close scrutiny of a hirsute porter on the door, and was taking the oversized lift up when the place had suddenly felt wrong. A bad place to be. He hadn’t been inside a hospital in years and thought his aversion would have worn off, but now his head felt twice its normal size and the blood in it thumped audibly. Max’s peculiar reaction had done nothing to improve his disposition. Why on earth wouldn’t he come and see him? As university contemporaries and flatmates they’d been friends, if only on and off, and in a low-key kind of way, for years, and when Max had fallen ill on his return from Central America, he’d been staying as a guest in the house that his cousin, Yvonne, and Steven shared.

Steven took a few shallow breaths as he sought to focus his thoughts.

Perhaps Max’s manner had to do with this rare tropical disease he’d picked up. He seemed well enough, not feverish or drawn, or even pale. Just grouchy. But what if this thing he’d been incubating was subtle but nasty? He must be anxious about it. That would explain why he was so prickly. Was it something that ate you up inside and you looked normal, until one day you collapsed as a bag of skin and bones? Steven shook the image away as he heard the ward door open.

Time for your medication, Maximilian. Roll up your sleeve.

I’ll give this one a miss, thought Steven, who had a horror of injections. He closed his eyes to wait it out and felt his head rock slowly side to side, as if expressing a reiterated admonition not to be there. An image intruded of his friend’s flabby, uneaten hamburger. Did McDonald’s now supply hospital wards? Was that possible?

It turns out that one of the Visitors is a personal acquaintance of mine, he heard Max tell the nurse.

Keeping a friendly eye on you, I’m sure, said a mellifluous voice. There was a flick of fingernail against syringe and a rustle of bedclothes. Very few people know who the Visitors are going to be. It often comes as a surprise.

Steven didn’t emerge from the cubicle until he heard the nurse leave. Max was lying on his side, with a wry look on his face that seemed to originate in his moustache. His lightweight spectacles were askew. On the bedside table there was an empty pill cup and a glass phial that hadn’t been there before. Steven picked it up and read the label: Antimony. Max’s cousin, Yvonne, had said that the infection was something he could have picked up from the bite of a sandfly on his travels. Unusual but treatable. With antimony? It rang a distant bell from chemistry lessons at school. Wasn’t it poisonous?

What are my instructions, zir? Max slurred, looking at a spot over Steven’s shoulder.

Are you alright? Steven asked. Do you know who I am?

Max’s eyes had a glassy look. That had to be pretty powerful medicine they had him on.

You are the one I must obey. He was delirious.

Is that right? Well, I’m stoney broke so lend Master ten quid then. Be a good dog, waggum tail and all that. I think you’d best start by sleeping off this narcotic nonsense—but you will always obey my orders, is that clear?

Yez, zir.

Hey, Max, I’m sorry. They may not have been the closest of buddies, but Steven still regretted making fun of the earnest young man in his drugged state. Are you sure you’re alright?

Of course. They are making me better, Max said weakly. He shifted slightly and closed his eyes.

Steven couldn’t help observing that Yvonne’s cousin had been in a much better condition before the pills and jab had been administered. Hospitals bad, said an ineradicable memory that underlay Steven’s uneasiness. He needed to get out of there, back to a reality that didn’t crowd in on his head. If Yvonne was home, he could work on the new sound track with her. But before he left, he had some remarkably encouraging news to deliver.

"That’s the spirit. You found yourself the right place, alright. St Eloysius, a hospital with tropical medicine doctors right here in the centre of London: who would have thought it? And when you get out—listen to this. One, your car: it’s been redelivered. It’s back at the house. The driver for the repossession company said the debt has been written off. I looked over the papers he left and it checks out. Next, your bank phoned to say your account’s reinstated and in credit. You must have a financial fairy godmother balancing out your ill luck with the lurgy. And the electric at the house has been reconnected, too, so we can treat you like a proper guest again, hot water and all. The electric company even apologized for the mistake. That makes three: Peugeot, Lloyd’s and Capital Power all love you. Fortune is clearly on your side, so all you have to do is get well and out of here.

"Even the bloody graffiti artist seems to have buggered off at last. We painted over the last one four days ago. INFECTED. Sounds like a nineties grunge band. Although no clues as to the spray painter. Yvonne says the finger of suspicion points at you ’cause it all started with your return from Costa Rica and stopped since you left and admitted yourself here.

I expect Yvonne, and maybe Roger as well, will come... Steven Moon looked over to see that his old flatmate was fast asleep, a smile lingering on his lips. He gave Max a little wave goodbye and went to the door, only to find it was locked.

He rattled the handle. Definitely locked.

He knocked lightly on the door, not wanting to wake Max, and listened for a response.

Nothing.

He knocked louder. Then banged his fist twice and shouted, Hey! He waited, listening for a few seconds, then walked over to the bedside, found the call button and pressed it.

What is it?

I’m locked in.

Lie down and go to sleep.

I’m not a patient. You don’t und—

Do as you’re told. Doctor’s orders. The intercom clicked off. He buzzed again. There was no answer.

Thanks, matron, he said to himself. OK, a phone. He looked in all the obvious places, but no, there wasn’t one. He knew his mobile credit wasn’t enough for a call. He could send one text, but that was it. He went to the fifth floor window for better reception and looked out at the city below.

Steven’s hospital mood suddenly weighed upon him again. He felt cut off from the urban scene like a spy or a ghost. Outside a wholesale import agency two Asian girls were talking animatedly in the early night, but only in confrontation. A drunk in an expensive-looking suit leaned back on a bent steel barrier and a hooded youngster, his hands slipped into the high pockets of a grey top, strutted past him. Further down the street, a wastepaper bin had spilled its guts before the depressing wit of an advertising poster and half a bicycle hung padlocked from a lamppost. Concrete and metal, avoidance and exclusion. It was an unforgiving city, conspiratorial and crass. Cabs and kebabs and traffic going nowhere.

His heart sweated at the dissatisfaction of the car horns. It was as if he could predict them before they sounded, dulled by the thick glass of the window but arriving loud in his mind. All around, the maggot-white gleam of high-rise offices betrayed the sorriness of the metropolis. At this time of night, people in offices were either addicts to the cause or had no place to go that they didn’t fear. They remained, preferring a shallow illusion of purpose and companionship to the glows and glowerings of their own apartments and brains.

Steven felt an urge to bash the window, but his own reflection stayed his hand. It’s the hospital, he thought. Or me and hospitals. I shouldn’t have come. It has distanced me. Making me experience everything at one remove, like ill people do.

The city out there might be lost, but it was the world as he knew it and he didn’t want to abandon it, or be abandoned by it.

He felt his corporeality return with a shiver. He took a white lab coat hanging on the wall and wrapped himself in it before messaging Yvonne. In a bit of a fix. Pls call me. Steven slumped down in the only chair and then, overcome by the soporific atmosphere, slumped some more. Eventually, he rolled under Maximilian’s bed, where rhomboid, black-and-white tiles, he noted dozily, decorated the floor in a vaguely familiar pattern. He dreamed of existing simultaneously in three universes. Two of his selves were pulling at a distance on the arms of the third, who was the himself he knew, wanting to drag him into their worlds so that he could plait their hair. Their tugging made him flip over like a toy monkey on a stick.

He awoke to the sound of soft footsteps that stopped at the bedside. A pair of white ankles was exposed as the nurse bent over to check on Max. It was a chance to extricate himself from the room, but he felt too embarrassed to call attention to himself. The nurse left and the door clicked shut. He wanted to sink back into sleep, but sleep wasn’t there anymore. The cold, hard floor edged him out from under the bed and he got up and stretched in the semi-darkness. Max was snoring gently, ejecting an unvoiced pooh on the out-breath under his moustache. He still had on his little round glasses.

Steven checked his mobile. Yvonne hadn’t replied to his message and it was now half twelve. Too late for the Tube and he couldn’t afford a cab. He padded over to the door and tried the handle. This time it was unlocked. He pulled the door open and peered out both ways to make sure nobody was around. Then he put on the cap advertising his and Yvonne’s band, checked the room number so that he could find his way back, and wandered off.

Several hours later, Steven was startled by his mobile. He was sitting at a desk in what appeared to be a consultant’s office, all leather armchairs and wood panelling. Against the wall, a padded chaise longue offered itself for languorous repose, but Steven’s mind was awake and busy.

I just woke up and got your message. It was Yvonne.

I’m at Max’s hospital. St Eloysius. I got locked in. What time is it?

Seven o’clock. I was thinking of visiting myself yesterday and then Roger told me they wouldn’t let him in. But if they’re allowing friends now, they’ll let his cousin in. How about I come over? Ask if you’re allowed out?

There’s a canteen. We could have breakfast.

OK, fine. How’s Max?

Hard to tell. Alright, I think. I’ll tell you about it when you get here.

See you in the hospital caff, then. Be there about nine.

Steven was glad she was coming. He hoped she would make more sense than he could of the entry in the Visitors’ Book on the desk in front of him. He had been leafing back and forth through the ledger ever since the Porter had opened the door to the room for him and more or less seated him at it. Now his head was ringing.

With overtiredness? Or alarm?

Chapter Two

A sulky baby and a Victorian tart

Yvonne pressed her face against the window and smiled at the hefty young Porter. His eyes, sunk deep into cavernous sockets in an oversized head that rocked involuntarily up and down, were transfixed on her cap. The intimidating fellow had initially waved her away, but she hadn’t given up and he had kept on looking back until his own slow, heavy nod seemed to convince him. He emerged from his lodge and opened the hospital’s Visitors’ Entrance to her. He raised a great, knuckled hand to dangle long keys that seemed out of place here and showed her, across the back of his hand, a blue tattoo of the same barbed wire-like motif as her cap, whose day-glo logo announced her as a member of Banged-Up Barbie, not that she expected anyone outside the club scene to have heard of them.

I like these, he said confidentially, eyeing her headgear. Another Visitor had one yesterday. Very good.

Here, for you, Yvonne doffed it and held it out to him.

Best if you keep it on, ma’am, he said courteously. And, when she looked confused, So as they know you’re a Visitor.

Didn’t a pink T-shirt with the glittered lettering LOVING IT, KEN? and a leather miniskirt suggest she might not be on the hospital staff? Maybe not, thought Yvonne.

I’m in the band, she said.

I know, ma’am. All the same.

You know best, Yvonne shrugged. You’re the Porter.

I am, he said to the early morning in the lobby and returned to the solitude of his lodge, pulling its old oak door ceremoniously to.

She spotted Steven at a corner table of the first floor cafeteria. He was nursing a styrofoam beaker and wearing a white lab coat, somewhat creased and grubby, beneath his own Barbie cap. He started to mouth something, but she pointed to the counter to suggest that he might wait until she fetched herself some breakfast.

How’s the patient? she asked, sitting down with a tea and a bun. Did they charge you for your coffee, by the way? All mine was free.

No, they wouldn’t let me pay. The serving lady just pointed up at my cap. Don’t ask me, they seem to have a thing about them. I found Max a bit testy. Then completely out of it—some weird sedatives they’re giving him. He told me he’s on the mend.

You sound like you don’t believe him.

I don’t know. Steven looked at the plastic coffee stirrer sticking up between his thumb and forefinger.

He’s got leishmaniasis. After you left to come here yesterday, I thought, hey, why not just ask them on the phone what’s wrong with him and they actually told me. I looked it up, Yvonne said, sipping her tea. He should be fine, but I’m really glad he’s here because it’s not nice. As long as you catch it in good time and treat it, it’s not serious or life-threatening, but not everyone’s lucky enough to have a specialist hospital for tropical diseases down the road . It makes you feverish and anaemic for starters. The only way to cure it is with intramuscular injections of stuff called antimony, some poisonous metal. Sounds medieval and barbaric, like using mercury. The combined effects of the disease and the treatment must be pretty awful, so if he’s being positive that’s encouraging. Anyhow, let’s hear it, how does one get stuck in a hospital? she enquired with merry eyes.

Antimony, yeah, they’re giving him that and some heavy medication besides, Steven said. "I couldn’t get out of the bloody place. The nurse didn’t realize that I was in Max’s room and locked the door until he fell asleep. By the time she opened it again, it was so late that I decided to stick around till morning. After all, it was warmer than our house has been the last couple of weeks with no electric. I kind of meandered around.

It’s a curious building. I guess it comes from being a teaching hospital as well. The third floor has a library with these really old medical texts in Latin and a machine that dispenses Kit-Kats outside. That’s all I’ve eaten since lunchtime yesterday. On the second floor there’s a mock-up antiquarian laboratory with waxwork figures. It gave me the creeps when I looked inside, saw all these people standing still in the dark. There’s more peculiar stuff, too. There are six floors, but the lift doesn’t go up to the top floor, it stops at the fifth, where Max is. And I couldn’t find any stairs going up there either.

Steven. What’s wrong?

Although they had a house and a band and Max in common, Yvonne and Steven hadn’t known each other that long. Recently, however, they had found themselves at the stage where they had been looking at each other somewhat more. Furtively, but deliberately, starting to see each other. But today Steven hadn’t made eye contact with her once.

Yvonne felt attractive. Hell, she felt positively foxy. The canteen was filling up and she was aware that he was just about the only male not to be noticing her. Alright, so she should be saving her allure for Bruno, her boyfriend, but Steven brought something out in her. The strange thing was that she was intrigued by the way he was so unexcitable. He was sort of average and she liked it; a fact which both surprised and irritated her. He had been selling CDs on a market stall before shifting gear to study and get himself into college for a degree in electrical sound engineering. But then only to drift along, jobless and apparently contented, afterwards. How could he be satisfied that way? Everyone had a drive to achieve something, or so she believed. So where was his? He was unremarkable, but he was different. Or was he indifferent?

I think this place is wrong, Steven frowned.

Yvonne put her hand on his. That story you told me about looking up at the top floor of the hospital and seeing your mother waving to you...

That has nothing to do with it, he said, taking his hand away.

To do with what? Yvonne thought he looked terribly unhappy. Had night and the hospital played on his mind to cast him back to when he was just six years old? His mother dying of mouth cancer, waving from the high hospital window as his father held him up in the street. The last sight he had had of her. Steven had told Yvonne about it when she had pressed him about his habit of gazing up at high buildings. Had he gone looking for a ghost after visiting Max? Was he imagining things? After all, what kind of hospital locked its patients up?

Yvonne, I found something really odd. Finish your breakfast and I’ll show you. When I was wandering around last night, I nearly walked straight into the Porter. You met him?

She nodded over her tea.

For a strange moment I thought he was going to tear me apart like a wild animal. He was—he is—a formidable piece of security.

He was friendly enough to me, said Yvonne, recalling the sombre, correct manner of the brutish doorman.

And so he was to me. An unauthorized stranger roaming the hospital at five o’clock in the morning. Respectful, even.

Yes, respectful, she agreed.

But only after inspecting my cap. ‘Beg your pardon, sir,’ he said, giving it me back, ‘I’m not familiar with all the visitors.’ Then he unlocked the door to a consultant’s room and left me in there with a big, thick book as if he assumed I would want to study it. That’s what I need to show you. The Visitors’ Book.

Yvonne didn’t know what to say. She now felt more worried about Steven than she did about her cousin. She had never seen him so distracted, so disconcerted.

We’ll go and see Max, right? she said at last.

Yes, sure, of course, he responded. But she could see that his mind was elsewhere.

Max had become Yvonne’s step-cousin when her mother remarried with his uncle. She didn’t treat him as family much and he acted too hoity-toity for her liking, but they were of the same age, early twenties, with a shared culture, whatever that meant, and they shared friends, too. She had met his old university companion, Steven, at the flat where Max and he lived just south of the river in Wandsworth.

Yvonne made good money during the week cleaning the windows of high-rise offices and tower blocks, and very little at weekends as a human statue in shopping precincts. She had two statue characters, a sulky baby and a Victorian tart, which attracted an equal amount in contributions. Young children dragged their mums over to see the oversized, petulant baby, while the tired but brazen look on the streetwalker’s face seemed to strike a common chord in female shoppers of all ages. Men just joked stupidly and never pressed a coin into her upturned palm.

For Yvonne, the extra cash was irrelevant, it was simply another experience and challenge to master. Something else she could do on her own, without anybody’s help.

One weekend, she took her window cleaner’s head for heights to Harrison’s Rocks on the Kent-Sussex border and learned how to scale sandstone rock faces. After that, she joined experienced climbers on trips to the Peak District, where she fell in love with the thrill of limestone crags. Her first instructor’s admiration of her technique was tempered by an unusual caveat. Yvonne’s self-confidence, she told her, was almost too complete.

That’s just your idea, Yvonne told the girl. I know what you’re saying, but look, I can do this, the same as you can. The rest of the world can worry and fret. Let’s just hit the rocks and enjoy it! But she agreed not to indulge her predilection for illicit joints until after the climbs.

Yvonne occasionally joined her cousin and his flatmates, Steven and Roger, for the innovative gigs at the Heads It Is club on Diamond Street. Staid old Max, as his cousin thought of him, had clearly been less and less comfortable with their bohemian set, and proudly upped and left them all one day. To take up a privileged offer had been his story; to escape the thumping music sessions at home was Yvonne’s best guess. For her, they were an attraction, and she had taken over his room.

Once she discovered that Steven could not only mix stylish music, but knew how to put together a sophisticated sound system, she gave him no peace until he had made a decent one. And soon they were making forays into chunky dance with voice-overs in their own band. They called themselves Banged-Up Barbie. Their publicity posters featured a pregnant blonde doll wearing a barbed wire tiara.

Bruno, a short-order cook from Milan, had turned up one day at a gig and become their number one fan. Yvonne took a mad fancy to him and he responded with gusto. She had passions that were like works of art. The one that occupied her now meant everything to her and filled her heart, and yet, when it was done, she would leave it to occupy its place in the world. Not many men understood when it was through—saw, as she did, that it was finished and that any further input would only spoil it. Bruno was pretty laid back, though, he might be cool about it. Why she couldn’t imagine doing the same with Steven, she didn’t know.

I meant to tell you, Yvonne remembered. We have a session confirmed for tonight at ‘The Out Back.’ You’d better get a good afternoon’s sleep. Can you lend me your mobile? I need to let Bruno know and my battery’s out.

Sorry, no money on it. But that’s great news, it’s a good venue. Steven nearly met her eye, but he was looking just above her face at her cap. At their band’s logo, to be precise, which took the form of Barbie’s triple-stranded, barbed-wire tiara.

What’s with the white coat, by the way? Trying it on with the nurses?

By way of answer, Steven took Yvonne’s breakfast bun from her plate, held it aloft and pulled apart the plaits of baked dough. Gently and wordlessly tearing limb from limb, with an air of fascination. With one hand, he dangled his three-legged victim before his friend’s eyes, and with the other, twisted it back together.

Guess what? I just lost my appetite, she said.

Come with me, Steven said.

Yes, doctor, she replied meekly.

Steven strode along ahead of Yvonne. His sense of discovery coupled with the white lab coat gave him the swashbuckling air of a young doctor on his rounds. They were marching down a long corridor with few doors.

Look at that, he said, indicating the plaster fretwork along the top of the wall. It’s the same pattern. On the wall, in your breakfast, on the floor under Max’s bed...

Yeah, right, said Yvonne, unimpressed by the impromptu tour and rooting in her bag for cigarettes. Where was this leading? OK, there it was on the wall, a triple-plaited pattern that matched the Banged-Up Barbie symbol on their caps. So what? She took hers off in the hope that it might pull the plug on Steven’s obsessive rant. All she wanted was to check in on Max and check out again. She had things to do.

And the curious thing, Steven continued, turning right just as a tall woman and a huddle of white-coated staff came around the same corner, is that just when you think the pattern has disappeared and don’t notice it anywhere, it crops up again somewhere else. It’s even there in the structure of the hospital itself!

He waltzed on through a series of small turns, right, right, and left, left, right then left, towards the unobtrusive side room, where he knew that the Visitors’ Book lay, its extraordinary revelations held within a thick, hardback cover bearing the symbol that Steven was now seeing everywhere.

When he had first opened the ledger, he was met by a series of documents prepared for Visitors to the Hospital concerning recent developments. Steven couldn’t make any sense of them, hadn’t tried and had skipped over them. Once he had found it, he had simply read, and reread, the incredible report on Max.

That was what Yvonne had to see.

Maximilian Pierce wasn’t registered as a patient. Instead, he was inscribed as a Candidate. If it was for a job, then they had a very peculiar recruitment procedure. The report chronicled an uninterrupted personal history from Max’s identification as suitable and susceptible, to his recruitment while still an undergraduate and up to the present day.

Pierce was described as an incisive decision-maker, loyal but easily led, tall, intellectually average: good officer material. He had attended induction in London on being summoned, but had subsequently sought to withdraw from training while still a Student. After an absurd attempt to flee to Central America, where the Order had made its presence known, he had returned to London. But he had taken refuge with known associates and ignored instructions to report to St Eloysius.

The record went on to state that Level 1 Activity / Harrassment only: financial account cancellation, denial of utility access, vehicle seizure had been stepped up to Level 3 Activity / Persuasion: administration of life-threatening parasitical infection and eventually proved effective. Pierce had voluntarily admitted himself to St Eloysius’ Hospital. Subject was currently responding very positively to treatment, displaying negligible residual resistance. Thus, the report had concluded, despite initial refractoriness, the subject was expected to be promoted to active Candidacy rapidly.

Max, the Visitors’ Book informed in its blunt, unapologetic tone, had been harrassed and then infected. INFECTED, Steven’s mind repeated. The last of the single-word graffiti that had appeared opposite their house’s front door just before Max’s hospitalization. Following on from WALK, FREEZE and STARVE. The stark, minatory words now took on meaning in Steven’s admittedly turbulent mind. Walk, freeze and starve corresponded neatly to Max’s successive losses: car, electricity, banking. And then: infected. The graffiti had been warnings. Threats.

Now being in the hospital had made Steven’s head swim, but he couldn’t have imagined all that, could he? It hadn’t been a dream. But if it wasn’t... He stopped and looked back.

Yvonne?

Steven listened. He had lost her. It took him a while to go back to where the corridor had started to switch back and forth on itself, but there she was.

Yvonne lay gracefully crumpled on the floor, ringed by the woman and the white-coated staff he had passed. It looked as though she must have walked straight into them coming round the corner and knocked herself out. The tall woman was crouched by her side. One of the staff looked round at Steven as he appeared, seemed to acknowledge his cap, and said, She had a cigarette in her hand. The other white coats nodded at Steven in corroboration and looked stern. It counteracts the medication. She resisted just now, which just goes to prove it.

She was going to smoke a cigarette—so now she’s unconscious? What medication? Steven’s head whirled. His eyes went to Yvonne’s Gauloises, scattered from their pack on the floor near her outstretched hand, together with other contents of her bag, eyeliner, tweezers, purse, tissues, a lighter and the crimson-and-black bodice of her street act. Nobody moved. Steven wanted to bend down to help her, but something about the nature of the student doctor’s comment had somehow paralysed him. He couldn’t think. Then he saw the hypodermic in the long-limbed woman’s hand. She was still on her haunches, and now rolled back Yvonne’s eyelid. Steven noted that the woman wore a broad mother-of pearl hairclip in the design of a triple plait.

He drew back with a silent breath. Still unthinking, he turned and started walking back the way he had come, this way and that, and a little faster all the time.

Chapter Three

Maximilian the Great

When Maximilian, Steven and four other college friends had shared digs in their final year at Cumbria University, their principal activity had been piecing together the previous drunken night and pouring scorn on any alternative occupation. Unlike his nihilist colleagues, however, Max was aware of cherishing a certain worldly ambition to which he felt entitled.

One Friday afternoon, the day before the College Fair at which young hopefuls panted to be headhunted for city jobs, the lackadaisical friends were seeing off the last of the week’s compulsory seminars when their tutor invited them to have an informal chat afterwards with a man called Osman, from a think-tank associated with arts and sciences in the civil service.

Charming fellow, glass of sherry, and who knows, a job? he enounced with a pout.

A couple of excited girls peeled off to the adjoining room and Emile St. Père and Max Pierce sauntered after them. The others went back to the student Junior Common Room for a hand of cards.

Maybe we should have gone, too, Malcolm Renshaw said after a while, noting himself two pounds down. We have to think about the future some time.

How can I be sure, Steven Moon sang Dusty Springfield, his boots resting on a chair back, in a world that’s constantly changing?

You were quick. You could have nabbed a bottle of sherry for us, said Chris Perry, as the JCR door opened and Max rejoined them.

I’ve put my name down, said Max, ignoring the remark and grabbing a newspaper from one of the plastic-covered armchairs.

For what? queried Malcolm.

A position at the Department of Developmental Human Sciences in London.

You mean it’s as simple as that? You walked in and got a job?

Not exactly. I had to sign a form with a disclaimer to do with the Official Secrets Act and Mr Osman explained that you start off with in-depth training.

Doing what?

He didn’t say precisely. But he assured us that we would be ‘groomed for greatness.’ He regretted quoting the words the moment they left his lips.

Ooooh! came a chorus, followed by cackling laughter.

Christine Perry got down on her knees and prostrated herself. Hail, Maximilian the Great, she said adoringly, feeling with her fingers up his trouser legs into his crotch.

Get off! Max, who was tall and shy, swung his long legs away and swatted her with The Daily Express.

Naturally, he was not allowed to live down the comment and was stuck with The Great epithet until he graduated with a very ordinary degree. Told on the phone by Mr Osman’s people to do nothing and to wait until called, he moved down to London to be on hand when they did so.

As a stop-gap arrangement, he rented a room in the same large, run-down Wandsworth flat as his college friend, Steven Moon, which they shared with a fiercely humourless food technician called Pauline and Roger Cale, a hairy zoology graduate whose inattention to personal grooming and hygiene would have shamed any fauna he studied. All but Pauline were on the dole. Max was still unmistakeably undistinguished, but maintained a blind faith in the Department for Developmental Human Sciences’ promise to lead him on to greatness. Even though Mr Osman wasn’t answering his phone messages or emails, Max turned down a well-paid job in computer sonics and waited for The Call.

Steven, to Max’s disappointment, had no apparent ambition beyond playing a dreadful, repetitious din on the cheap mixing system he had rigged up and exporting it to a local pub that had no customers worth keeping. Steven weirded the place out with suggestive musical phrases and crinkly beats.

At university, they had grown up musically on indie rock, roots reggae and blues. Max was damned if he could recognize their influence, but Steven insisted they were all in there. Max secretly preferred Elton John and Fleetwood Mac. He also preferred meat and gravy to the stark salads and steamed vegetables with brown rice that Pauline insisted on making for them all, for their own good and four pounds each. Max only went along to Steven’s gigs rather than be left at home with a blurred TV, low-wattage bulbs, Pauline’s moaning on the phone to her friends in Bolton, and an ash-and-beer-stained carpet that curled up at the edges. Four pints of Stella Artois and he was impervious to the narcotic beat.

Do you actually like this? he questioned Roger Cale.

Huh, right! the zoologist waved his arms and sent a miasma of body odour Max’s way.

Steven and his calm smile moved around to juggle rhythms into the night, and when he advertised locally with a handful of posters, an influx of clerks, off-duty kitchen staff, under-age cyberpunks, mechanics and a bevy of secretaries doubled the week’s takings in one night at The Railway Bridge. They proved to be the forerunners for a deluge one Friday, when Gordon, the landlord and sole barman, found himself helplessly barricaded in behind his own bar by oddly dressed individuals with thirsty mouths and revolving eyes. It left him the next day, after accounting for breakages, damage to the ceiling, dry-cleaning of peed-on curtains and a stolen cigarette machine, one thousand two hundred pounds richer. And looking forward to having his seven regulars back again.

Out, he pleaded to Steven, who took this endorsement, along with his decks and records, in Roger Cale’s Hillman Imp over the bridge to Fulham, where two girls called Jill and Fuzz ran the late-night club Heads It Is. Jill offered him Wednesday as a live audition and a hundred quid if he came through it unscathed. Uninspired by their suggestions for a stage name, Steven debuted as DJ Hillman and rode the previous Friday’s wave to a spanking success.

When it became clear that the throbbing practice sessions at home were only set to increase, Pauline, to Max’s relief, insisted on a early morning house meeting about it. She declared that she was sexually molested by the music and that the male-dominated idiom in which it was couched meant that it had to stop.

But there’s no lyrics, Steven said.

You don’t need words to hear rampant penile penetration, Pauline stood with a hand on her hip.

What do you think, Max? asked Steven.

Maximilian said nothing. He was deep in a letter that had just been delivered and seemed to be missing out on the proceedings.

Roger?

Hey, yeah, the zoologist offered.

It’s clearly irrelevant what another man thinks, Pauline cut him short.

Pauline, Roger surprised them all with a complete sentence, does not deserve to be fucked by the music.

Pauline stiffened at the ambiguity and her eyes bulged a little.

This won’t do, Max interrupted. Something has to give, and it will be me. He waved the letter in the air. I shall be going to a better place. My cousin, Yvonne, can have my room if she wants it. She will not only even out the genders in the house by number, two and two, but will inevitably feminize Steven’s sound to Pauline’s satisfaction. She is, you see, a complete freak about this kind of stuff. I’ll be leaving in the morning.

Pauline beat Max to it by a matter of seconds. She even nabbed the taxi he had ordered. Her place was taken by Clarissa, who worked nights as an operator for a mobile phone company, slept until two p.m. like the others and then disappeared round her boyfriend’s when the newer, louder sound system got plugged in around five. Red-haired Yvonne also moved in, just as Max had predicted, attracted by the cheap rent and the openness to musical creativity that the house offered.

Steven was unqualifiedly glad at the way everything had panned out, especially since he had already met Max’s cousin and knew her as a smart girl who wanted to experiment with dance sounds. Moreover, now that meals no longer needed to be dominated by carrots, Britain’s national dish, chicken tikka masala, became the new staple and the house took on a happier hum. All the same, Steven remained bemused and a touch worried by Max’s sudden and somewhat melodramatic departure.

I mean, what was that about ‘going to a better place?’

Well, take a look at this dump, said Roger.

Rhetoric. You know Max, said Yvonne. He loves that kind of thing. When he called me he hinted at something about a privileged offer that he wasn’t at liberty to talk about. He probably got an invitation from an old school chum to stay somewhere meretricious and dead, like Bath. As if somebody else’s fancy house could emit a kind of architectural meaning to your life. The cachet of where we live breeding geographical envy. We’re taught to aspire to trample those around us to secure their goodies and even their postcode.

Insects, said Roger.

You could say that, said Yvonne.

I mean, there are insects that do the same thing, in addition to mammals. The strength and desirability of a particular vantage point. It doesn’t always matter if it really is advantageous. It matters simply because the others want it.

Max confirmed their suspicions by leaving a message on their answer machine a week later, asking them to forward his mail to an expensive address in London’s Bloomsbury.

A posh girlfriend with a penchant for losers? dreamed Roger.

A Bloomsbury girl falling for Max? My money’s on one of the mummies at the British Museum, said Steven.

Nah, he probably just got a job at the Holiday Inn, said Yvonne.

Little did they guess how right they would all turn out to be.

Chapter Four

White coats

Steven wanted very much to find a window to open so that he could breathe fresh air, but the hospital corridor only led him deeper on into the building. He came to a set of stairs, climbed to the fifth floor, and moved quickly past apparently wards towards where he remembered Max’s room to be. Was this the number? He tried a handle and went inside.

The room was empty and the bed made up. On the bedside table was an orange post-it that bore Steven’s name in Max’s handwriting, holding in place a ten-pound note. It was Max’s room alright, but where was Max? Steven had to think. And also to crap. He needed to do both right now.

Five minutes later, he zipped up his trousers and returned to the bedroom. There was Max, looking at him from the open doorway.

Here he is, said Max.

Three doctors in white coats walked smartly in and two of them took a firm hold of Steven while the third checked his pockets.

Nothing, said the doctor. What shall we do with him?

Steven realized with astonishment that he was asking Max.

Let the dogs have him, his friend said.

Max? said Steven. What—

But first we’ll pop him. I’ll do it myself. Let’s walk.

The doctors barged Steven out into the corridor.

Oh, and take that bloody white coat off him. He nearly got away because they thought he was a guard. Some people even thought he was a Visitor, on account of this... Max lifted the cap from Steven’s head, peered through his round spectacles at the emblem on it and tossed it to the floor.

As he was frogmarched down the corridor, Steven felt the coat being ripped away and wrenched down over his arms. His mind had no possible chance of computing what was going on. The entire logic of his life, all that he had ever taken for granted, suddenly no longer applied. It was very clear that in a matter of minutes or even seconds his friend was going to shoot him and then feed him to some dogs kept for the purpose. 

His head was thrust forward and the white coat came free of his arms. Two of the three doctor-guards grabbed hold of him again and forced him forward, while the other led the way. Max, apparently in perfect health—and perfect control of the situation—walked behind them.

Max, what are you doing? Are you totally mad? Have you forgotten who I am? Steven shouted.

Oh dear. Sorry, master, he heard Max say with what sounded like cruel irony. Stop.

The convoy stopped. There was a silence and Steve stiffened in tense anticipation. Would he respond to the insult by killing him here and now?

Aha, aha, aha, aha! Steven and his escorts turned round and all of them stared in disbelief as Max panted loudly, his tongue hanging out, face contorted into a ridiculous smile. He was wiggling his bottom in an excited fashion.

Woof woof! Woof woof! Max went happily, jumping up and down.

Steven almost recalled something from the previous evening, something about waggum tail, but there was no time to think. This was his chance. He yanked free from the loosened grip of his confused guards, elbowing one of them in the ear, and ran.

Chapter Five

Trapped

Aturgid voice intoned like a bell in the darkness.

Sir Isaac’s legacy was destined to be the lynchpin in our nation’s struggle against ignorance and disorder through the ages. The ancient Order of the Doves of Diana was founded in 1729 to safeguard the true knowledge of its practitioners and perpetuate its inestimable teachings for future generations, in the trusted hands of men of philosophy.

Banged-Up Barbie was formed last year to wangle free drinks out of pubs and offend the sensibilities—

You will refrain from interrupting.

Do you give this spiel to everyone? asked Yvonne. She was lying on her back and had lost the use of her limbs. The man’s pompous voice sounded to vibrate like brass. As did her own.

To all who need to be apprised of it, yes.

Like a bloody museum guide.

Speaking once more and anew of the works makes glow the truth of the secret practice.

Make that ‘a bloody loony.’

You will understand, my dear, or I’m afraid we will have to lose you.

You lost me a while back, pal.

"A little more libation and we’ll