Elric to Rescue Tanelorn - Michael Moorcock [80]
The music echoed over the water. Although he was careful not to show any lights, Jerry could be heard half a mile away; but when he saw the faint outline of the coast ahead, he switched off the radio.
After a while his father’s fake Le Corbusier château came in sight, a large six-storey building with that quaint, dated appearance that all the “futuristic” buildings of the twenties and thirties had. This château had a dash of German expressionism in its architecture to boot.
To Jerry the house symbolized the very spirit of transience, and he enjoyed the feeling he got from looking at its silhouette, much as he sometimes enjoyed listening to last year’s hits. The house stood, in its corny old way, on the very edge of a cliff that curved steeply above the nearest village, some four miles distant. A searchlight was trained on the house, making it look rather like some grotesque war memorial. Jerry knew the house was staffed by a small private army of German mercenaries, men who were as much part of the past as the house and yet intratemporally reflected something of the spirit of the 1970s.
It was November 196–, however, as Jerry cut the engine and drifted on the current he knew would carry him towards the cliff beneath the house.
The cliff was worse than sheer. It sloped outward about a hundred feet up and was loaded with alarm devices. Not even Wolfe could have taken it. The nature of the cliff was to Jerry Cornelius an advantage, for it hid his boat from the TV scanners in the house. The radar did not sweep low enough to find his launch, but the TV cameras were trained on any likely place where someone might attempt a landing. But Jerry’s brother Frank didn’t know of the secret entrance.
He moored the boat to the cliff by means of the powerful suction cups he’d brought for the purpose. The cups had metal rings in them, and Jerry tied his mooring lines to the rings. He would be away again before the tide went out.
Part of the cliff was made of plastic. Cornelius tapped lightly on it, waiting a couple of moments as it inched inward and a gaunt, anxious face peered out at him. It was the face of a lugubrious Scot, Jerry’s old servant and mentor, John Gnatbeelson.
“Ah, sir!”
The face retreated, leaving the entrance clear.
“Is she all right, John?” Jerry asked as he eased himself into the metal-walled cubicle behind the plastic door. John Gnatbeelson stepped backward and then forward to close the door. He was about six feet four, a gangling man with almost non-existent cheekbones and a wisp of chin whiskers. He wore an old Norfolk jacket and corduroy trousers. His bones seemed barely joined together, and he moved loosely like a badly controlled puppet.
“She’s not dead, sir, I think,” Gnatbeelson assured Jerry. “It’s fine to see you, sir. I hope you’ve returned for good this time, sir, to kick that brother of yours out of our house.” He glared into the middle distance. “He has…had…” The old man’s eyes filled with tears.
“Cheer up, John. What’s he been doing now?”
“That’s what I don’t know, sir. I just haven’t been allowed to see Miss Catherine for the past week. He says she’s sleeping. Sleeping. What kind of sleep lasts for a week, sir?”
“Could be a number of kinds.” Jerry spoke calmly enough. “Drugs, I expect.”
“God knows he uses enough of them himself, sir. He lives on them. All he ever eats is bars of chocolate.”
“Catherine wouldn’t use sleepers voluntarily, I shouldn’t think.”
“She never would, sir.”
“Is she still in her old rooms?”
“Yes, sir. But there’s a guard on