The Gaudy Shadows

by John Brunner

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

Tileman could make our fantasies come true - create reality from your dreams - for a very high fee. Catering to the desires of London's most powerful - and decadent - figures, Tileman had top-level connections to guarantee him protection and influence. But he had killed Laird Walker's best friend - and Walker, the dead man's sister, and a bizarre nightclub entertainer began a private war on Tileman...a war whose final battle was unimaginable horror.

Release date: July 25, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 222

Sample

In the would-be with-it club Bitchy Legree shook back the tresses of tonight’s wig (platinum blonde), touched the keys of the white and gold piano, and sang to a cousin tune of Jesse James:

‘Sammy Logan was a guy richer far than you or I—

He’d a fortune that he’d built up by his wits.

He gave pieces of his heart to a dozen Mayfair tarts,

And one night that poor old ticker fell to bits.’

Someone complained that the song was in bad taste. Someone else suggested that anybody who didn’t like it could leave the club. The complainant thought it over and-stayed put.

‘Did you know Sammy?’ the girl asked. The detective inspector shook his head and gave a faint smile.

‘No. We didn’t exactly move in the same circles.’

‘Oh, but you still might have known him. He had some awfully funny friends.’ The girl was very young—nineteen at most. She knocked the ash off her cigarette, apparently unaware of the way she had phrased her comment.

A little put out, the inspector said, ‘You knew him rather well, though. Didn’t you?’

‘I don’t think anybody knew him terribly well, least of all his girl friends.’ She gave a quick artificial laugh and her gaze swooped like a bird towards him. ‘Of course—well, this will sound awful, I suppose! But I did think of ringing the papers and telling them about my great affaire du coeur with him. Making like a tragic heroine.’

‘You’d have made a packet,’ the inspector said sourly. ‘Dead or alive, anything he did seemed to be news.’

‘Yes … But I decided in the end it wouldn’t be fair. Do you know what I mean?’

Sammy Logan ran his famous matt-silver Jensen into the narrow garage. Listless, he closed its up-and-over door. He slid back the panel giving access to his palatial mews home and went upstairs.

In the two-knocked-into-one living area, with the genuine Braque and the genuine Brancusi for witnesses, Sammy Logan met a very horrible end.

Bitchy Legree sang:

‘He would drink and dance till three, he’d play polo, shoot and ski,

    But the she’s he really liked he took to bed.

He lived his life so fast people claimed he wouldn’t last,

    And they’re saying, “Told you so!”—because he’s dead.’

‘You were with him at the Flanceaus’ party,’ said the inspector. ‘Most of the time?’

‘Oh—half the time, maybe.’ She stubbed her cigarette. ‘It was never any good trying to monopolise him at a party. He had far too many friends, all wanting to book him for their own parties or hear his latest dirty story, or invite him shooting, or—oh, goodness! You must know what he was like!’

Sammy Logan spent money. He had it to spend. The house was his and paid for. The car was his and paid for. The presents to girls—many of them—were paid for. This was no playboy living on charm and credit even though he had never been on the Palace list. (Many of his friends were. To know Sammy Logan was hardly a handicap.)

The Jensen wasn’t for show. Invited to a villa party at Torremolinos, he arrived in a day and a half from London. Water-skiing. Winter sports. Big game. Grouse. Pilot’s licence—no plane at present. He’d crashed the last one in a thunderstorm, a Beechcraft Bonanza.

Sammy Logan drank, but not, it seemed, immoderately. Sammy Logan had occasionally smoked opium, but not, it seemed, closer to home than Marrakesh. Sammy Logan lived high, looked for kicks, but kept a clean nose.

Oddly, he wasn’t a gambler. He bet only on horses, at Epsom or Aintree, and on the course, not on credit. He lost, three times out of four.

Bitchy Legree sang:

‘Sammy Logan quit the fun at the early hour of one,

    He got his car and went away to bed.

But when he reached his home he found he’d come alone,

    And that gave him such a shock he fell down dead!’

Sammy Logan stood in the centre of his immaculate home’s immaculate fitted carpet. He took out his platinum cigarette case and lit the night’s last cigarette. The room felt dark and oppressive. He put on more lights. The air was stuffy, too, despite the conditioner.

I left a window open—surely.

But all the windows were closed, and it was June, and a hot night, and the room smelt rank and stifled him. He put down his cigarette and went slowly to the window. Slowly, because the room was growing darker yet.

Without having reached the window he stopped and swung around. At the corner of his vision something had moved. Little hard claws had skittered on bare boards. There were no bare boards. There was carpet everywhere.

Even so, the noise had been so distinct that he went to look, not yet engaged by the oddness of what was happening. And it was dark in the place where he had imagined the movement. But he had put on more lights.

Or not?

He was confused. It was like thinking he had left the window open. What for, with an air-conditioner?

The memory would not focus. He shivered. That was equally absurd. How could he be cold?

For the first time he felt a spasm of wonder. It wasn’t yet alarm because his mind was on something else—the problem that had preoccupied him all evening.

‘Had he behaved in any way—well—oddly?’

The girl shrugged as though to shed a burden of self-consciousness. ‘I’d expected to go home with him afterwards, if you must know. And when he said he’d rather not, I realised he had been quieter than usual during the party. I asked why and he said it was none of my business. He was quite sharp.’

He drew himself up to his full height. He was five eleven tall. He turned. He looked at the darkness gathering in the corners of the room. It was damp: stale and yellow and foul, and there was the stench of rot in his nostrils. On one of the dark moist patches where two walls and ceiling met, a fungus bulged obscenely. On another a spider listened like a telephone-tapper to the long strands of its dusty web.

He took a pace forward and the heel of his shoe echoed on the hollow of a plank floor. Appalled, he went down on his knees and touched: dust on wood, splinters, the heads of ill-driven nails convincing to his fingers.

Behind him the skittering thing became bolder. It was a rat. Without seeing it he knew it was a rat. And there was a better reason for shivering than because he was frightened. He was cold. He was wearing only a shirt and a pair of trousers, both grimy, both in rags. Around him, where had stood hi-fi set and television, magazine rack and coffee-table, junk in heaps breathed at him a chill dank odour of decay.

‘All right, Doc,’ the superintendent said. ‘Let’s have it. We know he was preoccupied the night of his death, and he told some people who inquired it was because he wasn’t well. So our best guess is that he was worried about his health. What did you find—cancer?’

‘Nothing,’ said the pathologist.

‘But—’

‘I said nothing. He wasn’t even overweight to speak of. Oh, he could have sweated off five pounds with a little effort. But for all that he was supposed to be a dissipated playboy, he was in excellent shape for a man his age.’

Sammy Logan’s mind was darkening now, as the room had darkened. He had the sense of helpless terror that had gone with childhood nightmares, locking his jaw tight against the chance of screaming and waking himself.

Reason shrugged, drowning, in the sea of fear. He looked at things he knew were there in front of him and found he was looking for them. He reached to touch a table and heard it creak to his weight: a rickety affair of planks on trestles, the only light to see it by a candle guttering in the neck of a bottle. He looked for his picture, his beloved painting, his original Braque, and there was the frame, there it was, it was real still and clinging to it he could float amid the pounding of the ocean of terror.

He seized the candle in the bottle and felt hot wax sting his fingers. Shaking, he put the flame close to the canvas and saw a new red mouth scorning him. It was a valuer’s label and he read the words: FAKE, SELL IT TO LOGAN, the name of the dealer he had bought it from.

At that, crying began. Impossible for Sammy Logan to weep, yet this was all impossible, and the tears came soundlessly. The room swam and the world swam. He raced to the door of the bedroom, snatched to open it. It was open, hanging ajar off one hinge. The bed, big soft, welcome warm, where? To the shifting of candle-flame there moved shadows across a heap of dirty sacks, leaking straw. A rat sat up on the pile and chittered a laugh at him. In the cupboards, built-in, concealed catches, best tailors London Rome. Hand swept a wall-propped pole, touched mouldering nothing, came draped away with the grey shroud of spiders’ webs.

‘Well, if it wasn’t his health bothering him, what can it have been?’ The superintendent tapped his teeth with a pencil. ‘Money? Absurd on the face of it. He was worth half a million clear if he was worth a penny. That extraordinary loan company of his is doing all right, apparently—and he paid cash for his home—and he didn’t gamble … He could have raised a quick ten thousand just by asking one of his society friends, or sold that silver-plated car, for heaven’s sake!’

He saw his own hand calloused, with dirt ingrained beneath the little there was left of the nail-tips; the red thread tied around the wrist, symbol of the navvy’s bracer, industrial magic. He whimpered and choked. Candle-grease burned his hand. Rats crept from the walls, gnawing the last of sanity to shreds.

He stumbled blindly back the way he had come, willing that this not be the reality, only dream-terror come to haunt him again, the fearfulness hoped lost with the youthful past. Squalor and dirt engulfed him. A missing board opened the maw of a trap to his foot. He stepped into it, twisted his ankle, felt the shock of muscle tearing, real pain, and could no longer deny that this was the truth, the other—luxury, money, women with clean and scented bodies—the other was the dream and now was time to wake.

Sammy Logan lay face down, hands curled like claws, on the wall-to-wall carpeting of his paid-for Mayfair home, and died.

With a sudden modulation into the chorus of Wake Nicodemus:

‘That’s a good guy going but you don’t much care!

If I ask you a week from today,

“What about Sammy Logan?”—you will say to me, “Who?”

You’ll forget he was a man you were proud that you knew!

Sammy Logan who died yesterday (was it really?)—

Sammy Logan who died yesterday!’

The pathologist made an impatient sound. The superintendent came back to the matter in hand apologetically.

‘All right, since he was in such splendid health, I’d like to know what you’re going to put on the certificate.’

‘Vagal inhibition,’ said the pathologist.

The superintendent scowled. ‘Yes! And I quote: all death is heart failure of some kind! We have to face an inquest, you know. Come out from behind that smokescreen of jargon.’

‘Very well,’ said the pathologist after a momentary hesitation. ‘But I warn you, you won’t be any the wiser. As far as I can tell, the condition of Logan’s body is that of a man who was literally scared to death.’

This year the English summer was living up to its name; the misty blue August sky was clear as a crystal bowl, the sun like a hot white coin against it, the lime and plane trees barely stirring their leaves in a less-than-breeze of wind. Laird Walker decided accordingly to live up to his name, too, and go around to Paymaster Mews on foot. From his hotel it would take him about twenty-five minutes. But there was no hurry. He didn’t even know whether Sammy Logan was in town. If he was, not calling up to check would ensure maximum surprise, and he looked forward to seeing the expression on Sammy’s face when presented with the gift weighing heavy in the pocket of his Moygashel summer jacket. If not, too bad—it was a fine day for a stroll, and he could wander on to the Grenadier in Wilton Row and take his first pint of English bitter beer in two years, sitting outside and listening to the distant drone of traffic.

In any case, he liked to walk himself back into the feel of a place he hadn’t visited for some time.

Eyes dark-glass-panelled, he noted details as he went. In the racetrack stream of cars southbound along Park Lane, a very pretty girl driving a stark home-made Lotus. The London Hilton sneering down on those who had protested that it invaded the privacy of Buckingham Palace by overlooking the walled grounds. A quirk came to his mouth. This crazy country!

But swinging—in patches. This trip he planned to stay two or three months at least. Just before he left, exactly two years ago, Sammy had told him he was missing the best part of the year in England, and he intended to put that right.

Now: Paymaster Mews. He looked for the boutique by which he had formerly located the correct turning, its windows full of way-out clothes, and found its place had been taken by an equally way-out hairdresser. Nylon wigs in purple and pale green loomed behind the glass now. A girl emerged as he passed, soothing a yappy poodle which had been dyed mauve to match its mistress’s trouser suit.

But this was the right street, the one from which Paymaster Mews branched off between two solid Georgian houses. There was a sort of alley entrance, then a right-angle turn which was hard going for cars, and that was the mews, originally stables for the carriage-owning occupants of the larger houses fronting the main street but long ago dragged into the automobile age. As a concession to the vanished past, however, the exclusive car-sales firm with a showroom facing Park Lane, which used the first three cottages in the mews as workshops, still called itself Carriage Trade Limited. The double doors of the middle garage were open to the summer air and he glimpsed a smart young salesman sitting on the wing of an Alvis, waiting for the phone he held to say something. A mechanic was mopping at the brightwork of a Bentley.

After that, a standard pattern: at street-level, garages, with tiny side entrances giving access to the upper floors and also, via narrow passageways, to patios behind hived off from the gardens of the big houses the mews had been intended to serve. Most of the doors were gaudily painted and some were ornamented with brass coach-lamps or plants hanging from wrought-iron brackets. Number sixteen, which had neither, belonged to Sammy Logan.

Its street door was open. From upstairs there came the sound of music and light footsteps. The surprise would be greater, Laird thought, if he didn’t ring the bell. He stepped across the threshold and glanced to his left, into the garage.

Hmmm! So that’s it, is it?

There stood Sammy’s matt-silver custom-trimmed Jensen, about which he’d received clippings when he was in Caracas last year. The one visible tyre looked dangerously soft, as though it had picked up a splinter of glass.

Cat-silent despite his rangy tallness and solid bones, he made his way up the staircase. At the top there was a secondary front door. It was locked. He sighed, gave a firm bang with bunched knuckles, and stood back, taking out his present and displaying it on his palm. It had cost him comparatively little money, but a good deal of trouble and time. It was a pottery statuette, a copy of a famous Inca original, showing a man and his wife resorting to a primitive form of family planning. He had felt sure it would delight Sammy the moment he spotted it.

The door opened and the full light of the living-room fell on him and his gift. And it wasn’t Sammy facing him.

It was in fact a girl—rather, a young woman, at a guess in her late twenties. But she didn’t strike Laird as being what he would have expected: the latest of Sammy’s uncountable conquests. She looked so out of place.

Physically she was perfect. Her face was tiny and heart-shaped under a mop of curly chestnut hair, her skin tanned gold and almost bare of makeup except for a touch of pale lipstick. Her arms and legs tapered gracefully to slim long hands and narrow high-arched feet.

But she was wearing the wrong clothes. No one under forty had worn a skirt like that in London for years—it drooped to below the knee and what was more it had seated. She had on a sleeveless nylon blouse from some inexpensive chain-store, and shoes which had been meticulously polished in a vain attempt to disguise scuff-marks resulting from long hard use.

She said one word in a diffident, musical voice: ‘Yes?’ And recognised the subject of the statuette.

The blush and the look of anger came over her face simultaneously. Too late, Laird closed his large spade-tipped fingers over the figurine. Within instants of seeing him, the girl had decided she disapproved of him one hundred and one per cent.

Too bad.

Shrugging, he slipped the gift back in his pocket. ‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured. ‘I took it for granted that Sammy would open the door.’ He scanned the room behind her as he spoke, noting how much was out of keeping: on the floor an old suitcase tied with rope, on a table two magazines which didn’t look like anything Sammy would buy. And dust on all the polished furniture. The music he had heard came from a radio playing a morning programme of requests.

Most things, however, were as they had been. The beloved Braque was still in its place of honour, and so was the Brancusi, that curious shining form like a fish seen through deep water.

‘Mr. Logan isn’t here,’ the girl said tartly. ‘Nor will he again. So take that—that thing somewhere else, and yourself with it!’ The words had a strong Lowland Scots inflection, and Laird was reminded of Sammy’s own accent, though living in Southern England had filed the edges off his original burr.

She made to close the door. He placed a foot in the way.

‘Now just a second!’ he snapped. ‘That’s Sammy’s car down below—I know because he sent me an article about it, with pictures. This is still his home! I recognise that Braque, and I’m damned sure he was too fond of it just to leave it hanging on the wall and move away. I want to know what’s going on. And in particular, who the hell are you?’

She didn’t flinch. Her deep brown eyes fixed on his foot, as though with her gaze she could spear the flesh and make him withdraw it. ‘What business is it of yours?’ she countered.

Laird took a deep breath. ‘My name’s Laird Walker. I’m a good friend of Sammy’s. I met him when I was last in London, two years ago. I flew in yesterday from the States and he’s the first person I decided to look up. Okay?’

The girl hesitated. Her frozen attitude thawed a trifle. She said, ‘You’ve been in America all the time since you saw him last?’

‘No, mostly I’ve been in Mexico and Venezuela. Why?’

‘Ah. That’ll be why you didn’t hear about his death.’

All the heat went out of the August day. Laird said. . .