I went up to the perfectly ordinary front door and knocked politely. A concealed sliding panel opened, and a pair of scowling eyes studied me silently. I gave them the password I’d received on the phone, and that was enough to gain me entry. The sliding panel slammed shut, and the door opened just enough to let me in. I had to turn sideways to squeeze through, and the door was immediately locked behind me.
The security man leaned over me. He was big as a wardrobe, with muscles on his muscles. I could tell this because he was entirely naked, apart from enough steel piercings in painful places to make him a danger to be near during thunderstorms. He wanted me to take my clothes off too (house rules), or at the very least submit to a thorough frisking. I gave him my best hard look, and he decided to pass the question upward. I told him I was here to see the founding quartet, and he raised a pierced eyebrow. I gave him their actual names, which impressed him, and after nodding slowly for a moment, he lumbered off to find them.
I stayed put, by the door. I hadn’t been entirely sure what to expect. I mean, I’ve been around, comes with the job, but the Chelsea Lovers were a whole new area of depravity to me. The entire building had been hollowed out to form one large, open, and cavernous room. The Kit Kat Club was lit by rotating coloured lights, giving the scene a kaleidoscopic, trippy feel. Very fitting for a group whose origins lay in the sixties. Pretty much everywhere I looked there were naked people, or people dressed in the kinds of dramatic fetish gear that makes you look even more naked than naked. Leather and rubber, plastic and liquid latex, collar and chains, spikes and masks and every kind of restraint you’d rather not think about. There were no wallflowers here; everyone was involved with someone or something. They moved smoothly together, all across the huge room, flesh rising and falling, skin sliding over sweaty skin. There were no words, only moans and sighs and the sounds of a language older than civilisation. The faces I could see held a self-absorbed, animal look; all wide eyes and bared teeth.
Men and women everywhere, tangled together on the floor, up the walls, and on the ceiling, and even floating in midair. Sex beat on the air in an overpowering presence, hot and sweaty and pumped full of pheromones. I could smell sweat and perfumes and a whole bunch of psychotropic drugs. I wasn’t worried. My torc would filter them out. Even quiescent around my throat, my armour still protected me.
So much nakedness, so much sex, so much harnessed passion; but I couldn’t say I found it arousing. It was scary. They were working magic here, invoking strange and potent energies produced by people who had willingly driven themselves out of all control, people who would do anything, receive anything, and not give a damn. There was no love here, no tenderness; nothing but indulgence and transgression.
The wide cavernous room seemed much larger than the building should have been able to contain. This was spatial magic, fuelled by the tantric energies. The room expanded to contain the passion within. The walls, floor, and ceiling had taken on a puffy, organic look. All pinks and purples and bloody shades, patterned with long traceries of pulsing veins. The wall nearest me was sweating, as though turned on by the never-ending sex. The Kit Kat Club was alive and part of the proceedings. Where men and women bumped against the floor or walls or ceiling, they sank into the fleshy embrace as though into the arms of another partner.
I shifted my feet uncomfortably, and the floor beneath me gave subtly, as though I were standing on a water bed. People were drifting towards me, reaching out with inquiring hands. There was something in their faces that wasn’t entirely human; or perhaps more than human. Transformed by an emotion or desire so extreme I had no name for it. I was way out of my depth. So of course I put on my most confident face, and even sneered a little, as though I’d seen it all before and hadn’t been impressed then. I glared at anyone who came too close, and they turned away immediately, losing interest.
As my eyes adjusted to the flaring lights and colours, I began to recognise faces in the roiling throng: celebrities, footballers, politicians, even a few respectable businessmen from the City that dear prudish Matthew would probably have been horrified to discover in a place like this. I filed the faces away in my memory, for future thought. And perhaps a little blackmail, if money became tight.
The walking wardrobe returned with the four founding members of the Chelsea Lovers. They strolled with almost supernatural grace through the heaving crowds, which opened before them and closed after them without once stopping or even slowing what they were doing. The four founders walked on air, masters of their own space, touching nothing but each other. Their hands wandered constantly over each other’s bare flesh. They sank slowly down to hover before me, and the bouncer went back to his door. The four original Chelsea Lovers: Dave and Annie, Stuart and Lenny. Two men and two women, but far beyond anything so human now; instead they were as alien and other as anything I ever encountered from another dimension. They had to be in their late sixties, but they still had the smooth bodies of twenty-year-olds. Perfect as statues, lean and hungry, burning with unnatural energies, sustained by an endless appetite that had nothing to do with food.
They looked much as they must have done when they first met in Chelsea, back in the swinging sixties, when London swung like a pendulum. Two young couples, then, out on the town and hungry for new experiences. They found something, or it found them, and they were never the same afterwards. They started their first club in a little place just off Carnaby Street, and what they did there shocked even the most hardened souls of the permissive generation. The Chelsea Lovers hadn’t seen daylight since. They moved from location to location, known only to those in the know, travelling the secret subterranean routes beneath the city streets, flitting silently through the shadows of the undertown, with its ancient Roman arches, where all the bad things congregate, for fun and profit. Nothing ever touched the Chelsea Lovers. Even then, they were far too dangerous.
They stood before me, skin like chalk, eyes like pissholes in the snow. Colourless flyaway hair, purple lips, and endless smiles that meant nothing, nothing at all. They were entirely naked, untouched by piercings or tattoos or any such trappings. Such lesser things were not for them. Just hanging on the air before me, silent and inviting, they were still the most blatantly sexual things I had ever seen. They had all the impact of the first nude photos you ever saw, the first object of desire, the first boy or girl you ever wanted, and the first you ever lost. I wanted them and I was afraid of them, and God alone knows what I would have done if my torc hadn’t been there to protect me from the worst of their influence.
I knew the four names, but not which was who. I don’t think anyone does anymore. Perhaps not even them. One of the women spoke to me. Her voice sounded like she had ice in her veins and a fever in her head.
"What do you want here? What’s your pleasure?"
I had to clear my throat before I could speak, and even then my voice wasn’t as steady as I would have liked. "I need to consult your computers. I need information, the kind only you might possess."
"What do you offer in payment?" said one of the men. His voice was calm, cheerful, confidential, and about as human as a spider scuttling across your arm. "Information in return, perhaps; or money, or your seed? You’d be surprised what we could make from your seed, freely given."
"Information," I said quickly. My mouth was very dry, and my legs were shaking. "First, a secret location used by a Drood field agent, on the outskirts of London." And I gave them the address of the garage I’d just abandoned. "Second, the name of the Drood field agent who’s just been declared rogue and is on the run here in London: Edwin Drood."