“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Icarus hunched himself up and glanced towards the handle of the door.
“Central locking,” said the creature that was Cormerant. “A new innovation. All the doors and windows are locked. You have nowhere to run.”
Without, the storm raged madly on. Within the car, Icarus Smith sat trembling.
The Ministry of Serendipity is situated beneath Mornington Crescent underground station. Much legend is attached to the station, which for many years was closed to the public and which now does not remain open later than nine thirty at night. The belief amongst conspiracy theorists is that the Ministry of Serendipity is the English Area 51. That a vast tunnel network and massive underground complex exists beneath Mornington Crescent station. And that dirty deeds, involving alien spacecraft and back-engineering and indeed those little grey blighters with the Ray-Ban eyeballs, are done there, whilst Londoners walk blissfully unknowing on the pavements far above.
Icarus knew of such theories, but had paid them scant attention, according them the disbelief he’d always considered they deserved. Such nonsense had always been, in his opinion, more the province of his barking mad brother.
The storm-ravaged automobile turned left at the Station Hotel, crossed the road, and somehow entered the station opposite. Exactly how this happened, Icarus never understood. For at one moment the car was above ground in the wind and the rain and the next it had entered a tunnel and was purring along down a tube of darkness bound for no place pleasant.
The journey time was short, but as to the distance covered, Icarus could only wonder. But he was presently in no mood to wonder. His thoughts centred on a single goal, this being one of escape.
The automobile cruised out of the tunnel and into a great cathedral of a place. It was clearly the work of Victorian artisans, having all those wondrous soaring cast-iron roof-ribs, rising from those marvellous fluted columns, with the rivets and the rusty bits, where pigeons love to roost.
Icarus and Johnny Boy were encouraged to leave the car by the gun-toting chauffeur, who explained to them that hesitation would be rewarded by death. And Icarus found some relief in this, as his nearness to the creature that was Cormerant had troubled him no little bit.
Johnny Boy looked out and up and all around. “From down here where I am,” he observed, “this is one bloody big building.”
“And one very deep in the ground,” said Cormerant, climbing from the car. “Welcome to the Ministry of Serendipity. Take care with all those papers, young man. We wouldn’t want any to get lost on the way, now would we?”
Icarus felt that indeed, yes he would. And had been hoping at least to toss the lot out of the window while the car was in motion. As far as he was aware, there were only two men living on the planet who had taken the Red Head drug and knew the truth about what was really going on in the world. And those two men were himself and Johnny Boy and it looked to be a terrifying likelihood that the secret would shortly die with them. “Go on,” said the chauffeur, “move.”
Icarus and Johnny Boy were steered across a massive concourse. There were wooden crates and boxes, many bearing enigmatic symbols and letterings, stacked in mighty bulwarks. And thousands and thousands of barber’s chairs, all wrapped up in plastic. And on and on, beneath these and between, the two men plodded. Urged at the point of a gun and followed by the loathsome being that was Cormerant.
Icarus did take time to wonder over Cormerant. When first he had encountered him, in his guise as a man in the shop of Stravino, he had seemed a meagre creeping nervous body. Just some put-upon clerk in a city-gent’s rig-out, that few would have noticed at all.
And Icarus wondered whether this was what the chauffeur was seeing even now. Whether the chauffeur could hear the cold cruel edge to the creature’s voice, or see the arrogant, bombastic manner of its movements.
Evidently not, thought Icarus.
Although, possibly so.
Which didn’t really help much at all. So Icarus thought on hard regarding the matter of his escape.
“Down there,” urged the chauffeur. “Through that door.”
Through that door led them into a hallway. It was a long carpeted hallway. High-ceilinged, papered in richly patterned silk, ornamented with red circles and beryl coronets. Marble busts stared blindly from niches in the walls. Icarus counted six of Napoleon, three of Wellington, one of Churchill and none at all of Noel Edmonds. Icarus didn’t count these busts for fun. He was passing many doors and Icarus counted these also. He wanted to remember exactly where the way out was, when he chose to make a run for it.
At length he was brought to a halt before door twenty-three. Just beside the empty niche that awaited Noel Edmonds.
Cormerant knocked and a voice called, “Enter.”
Cormerant turned the handle and opened the door. “In,” said he to Icarus.
As Icarus harboured no preconceptions as to what might lie beyond the opening door, he was neither surprised nor disappointed by the sight that met his troubled gaze. But neither was he impressed.
Baffled, yes.
But not impressed.
Beyond the doorway lay a barber’s shop.
It was a regular ordinary down to earth, spit and proper barber’s shop. It might well have been that of Stravino, but it wasn’t. For this one was way deep down in the ground and this one had smarter barber’s chairs.
But all the rest was very much the same. The same fag-pocked linoleum on the floor. The same yellow nicotine up on the ceiling. Same pitted mirror with its souvenirs and whatnots. A row of faded cinema seats and even a brown envelope.
Of the smarter barber’s chairs, there were three. Stravino had only two in his shop. The second one, he’d told Icarus, was for the son who would one day succeed him. But that particular chair remained for ever empty, as Stravino had fifteen daughters, but no son.
But that is by the by, for we are here. In this subterranean barber’s shop, which has three chairs. And leaning against the furthest and smoking a cigarette, there stood … a barber.
This barber, like Stravino, was obviously a Greek. He had the complicated cookery thing that they always wear above the left eyebrow and the shaded area on the right cheek that looks a bit like a map of Indo-China. And he stood and he grinned and he dished out a welcome.
“Welcome,” he said, “and come in.”
Johnny Boy edged nervously forward. “I don’t want a haircut,” he muttered to Icarus. “I do my own. I have a four-in-one home hairdressing set.”
“Shut it, squirt,” said Cormerant.
“Come sit here,” said the barber.
Johnny Boy shook his tiny head.
“No, not you, dolly man. The big boy. The one with all the presents. Someone take his presents, please. And has someone had a look-see in his pockets?”
Cormerant shook his hideous head.
“You no search this boy at all?” The barber raised his unencumbered right eyebrow. “You no check to see whether he carry big bomb that blow our bottom parts off?”
Cormerant shook his hideous head a second time.
“Then perhaps you’d better do it now, damned clerk with runny nose.”
The chauffeur wrenched the papers and the boxes and the spectremeter from the grip of Icarus. Cormerant reached forward to go through his pockets. Icarus bit hard upon his bottom lip as the creature’s terrible scaly hands probed about his person.
“My wallet,” said Cormerant. “And where is my watch fob and where is my briefcase?”
“All in the time that’s good,” said the barber. “The boy will tell it all to us.”
Icarus eyed the barber. Here indeed lay a mystery. He was not a wrong’un. Not some demon. He was a man, as Icarus. And he was not a bad man. Icarus could see the man within the man and what Icarus could see was loyalty. This man was honest and loyal. He believed in what he was doing. He thought that what he was doing was right. Icarus shuddered. That was how it worked, of course. That was how it all worked. People mostly did believe that what they did was for the best. For the good of others. This man worked here. In this evil Ministry, run by demons in the guise of men. And he believed he was doing the right thing. For queen and country, perhaps? For national security?