Bronte's Inferno XXIII (The Full Vincent)

I must have been sleeping like a whole cabin of logs, for when I went over to the ancient wash-stand, the porcelain had been replaced with much newer pieces. And the water in the jug was still hot, too. I'd heard no-one enter, perhaps I'd heard them leave, but the balsa-wood door to the room was hardly going to make much noise, unless it actually broke.

Taking the water's temperature as a hint, I made an attempt at a submariner's shower and rearranged my clothing thereafter, thinking the creases in my shirt gave it quite the unstructured look. Scruffy, some people call it.

The cricket pitch corridor had about five doors to each side, leading off it. Most were locked and these were of traditional construction, meaning that they were not made of balsa wood. The 9th door was not locked, but was made of enough balsa to make an architectural model of Whitby Abbey, before it was a ruin.

I went through the ninth portal.

The room was off, I saw that straight away. A door should have been to my left about nine feet from the one through which I had entered. There was no other door into the room but the one on an adjacent wall that was an improbable distance away. Again the ceiling seemed to be making a lie of the building's roof. A long table was set for twelve diners, but there was no-one seated. An enormous fireplace was on the wall opposite, which was also at an unlikely distance. Before the fire were three high-backed club chairs of the type in which Vincent Price or Elvira might be sitting to introduce some old black-and-white monster movie.

The chair backs faced me. I could see one was occupied. The person seated was singing a song

I knew, but in a language I didn't. He finished his performance and stood. As I should have guessed, it was The Editor-At-Large. He did have a velvet-smoking jacket on, but it didn't make him look much like Vincent – or Elvira, for that matter.

'Do you like London? I love London,' he said, with a cigarette holder clamped between his teeth. 'It's so full of rotters, cads and scoundrels. Especially, in publishing. It's just hea – perfect, for someone like me.'

He gave a yakking laugh and if he'd been trying to channel Terry Thomas, I'd have given it a nine out of ten.

'Now, I'm not offended that you have misplaced the package, oh no, don't worry. It's quite safe.'

He took another draw on the holdered cigarette and blew the smoke out of the side of his mouth.

'I'm not doing a deal with you or Charnel House,' I said.

'Oh Mickey! I can call you Mickey, can't I? Or Mihkail? You'd like that wouldn't you? Even your pseudonym's namesake did a deal in the end, you know.'

'Russian!' I pointed a finger at him. 'You were singing in Russian!'

'Da,' he said, 'What else?'

'Samizdat!' I shouted the only Russian word I knew. 'No deals for Mikey. The Stalinists didn't like him! Everyone knows that.'

'Do they? Do they really?'

'I'm going to self-publish too, actually.' I sneered.

This time it wasn't a yakking laugh. This time it was the full Vincent, I half-expected Michael Jackson to start singing.