“You come sit down here my boy,” said the barber, indicating the middle chair. “You look like you need a haircut. What shall it be, do you think? Perhaps a Tony Curtis?”
“No thanks,” said Icarus.
“But you sit here all the same.”
Icarus saw the flicker of colour darting round the barber’s head. Dark blue for determination. Not a man to be argued with.
Icarus made his way to the chair and sat down hard upon it. The barber flourished a Velocette and swung it over the lad’s shoulders.
“We don’t have time for this pantomime.” The cold cruel tone of Cormerant’s voice jarred in the relocator’s ears. “Call her out, make her get on with it.”
Her? Icarus glanced into the mirror. The barber’s expression was grave. The colour of his thoughts was yellow. Fear, that colour was.
“She come soon,” said the barber. “She out clubbing it up, you know what young ladies are. I just give this boy a Tony Curtis, make him look a regular back street prince.”
“No need for that.” Icarus turned his head at the voice. A woman had entered the barber’s shop. She was a most attractive woman. Five feet two and eyes of blue, in a black leather dress and a high-heeled shoe. Golden hair, wide-lipped smile, she moved with elegance and style. Beyond the beauty and the grace, Icarus could see a brooding menace.
“Miss O’Connor,” said the barber.
“Introduce me properly,” said Miss O’Connor.
“Boy in chair, this is Miss Philomena Christina Maria O’Connor. She is an exo-cranial masseuse. She massage your head all nice. Make you feel all dreamy dreamy. Very good for the scalp. Make follicles spring up like little lambs eat ivy.”
“No thank you,” said Icarus.
“Yes thank you,” said Philomena.
“It not hurt a bit,” said the barber. “You feel grand, I promise.”
Icarus could see the lie and Icarus wanted out. He gripped the arms of the barber’s chair, prepared to spring and make a fight of it.
Click and click went the arms of the chair and two steel bands curled to fasten his wrists. Icarus wrenched and twisted, but the steel bands held him captive.
“Just relax,” said Philomena, approaching the chair. “It really won’t hurt much. It’s just a little massage.”
Icarus fought to keep his head down, but her hands were suddenly in amongst his hair. “My mother taught me this,” said Philomena. “Back in the old country. She was a hairdresser, but she’d studied phrenology. She could tell people’s fortunes by feeling the shape of their heads. She became very good at it; she had the gift, you see. And she could see a potential in it that few people ever sought to realize. That by applying subtle pressure to precise areas on the skull, you can actually cause changes to occur within the human brain. It’s a bit like acupuncture, or acupressure. Once you know exactly where to press and how hard and for how long, you can achieve the most remarkable effects. Here, for instance.”
Philomena pressed a finger down upon the crown of the captive’s head. Icarus gasped as a sensation of absolute joy overwhelmed him. A feeling of pure happiness.
“Nice, isn’t it?” said Philomena. “My mother used to get really big tips from her clients when she pressed their heads like that. And yet …” Icarus felt a pressure over his right temple.
“Aaaaaagh!” Knives of pain tore through his body. Knives of burning pain.
“That one really hurts, now doesn’t it?”
Icarus groaned and tears ran down his cheeks.
“You do have to be very precise, though,” said Philomena, stroking the head of Icarus Smith. “Just a little bit off and the effects can be devastating. Blindness, paralysis, permanent incontinence, or a total vegetative state. It takes a lot of practice to get it just right. I have a lot of ex-boyfriends who can’t do much nowadays but dribble. Shame, but there you go.”
Icarus was shaking now. His eyes rolled and his lips were turning blue.
“So let’s see,” said Philomena. “Let’s just see what you have to tell us.”
Icarus awoke in a sweat from a terrible terrible dream. He clutched at his head and blinked his eyes and let out an awful scream.
“Calm down, please, calm down.”
The eyes of Icarus focused on the face of Johnny Boy.
“Can you move?” asked the midget. “Are all your body parts still working?”
Icarus twitched; his hands were numb. He tried to rise, but his legs offered little support.
“What happened?” he managed to ask. “Where are we?”
“That evil bitch played havoc with your brain. You told her everything. Where you’d hidden the briefcase. How you mailed the key to yourself. Your address.”
“Oh God, no.”
“I’m sorry,” said Johnny Boy. “There was nothing I could do to stop her. They flushed all the tablets down the sink and burned the professor’s notes. They’d have smashed up the spectremeter too, if you hadn’t told them what it did.”
“I don’t remember anything.” Icarus rubbed at his knees.
“No, she said that you wouldn’t. They made me drag you here and they locked us in. You’ve been unconscious for hours.”
“Oh God, I’m shaking all over. I think I’m going to be sick.”
“Please don’t,” said Johnny Boy. “This is only a very small cell.”
“A cell.” Icarus looked up and around and about.
“Death cell, I should think,” said Johnny Boy. “I’m really sorry, Icarus. It’s all my fault that you got into this.”
“Don’t blame yourself. We’re in it now and we have to get out of it and quick.”
Johnny Boy sighed a little sigh, “We’ve lost,” said he. “They’ve destroyed the tablets and the formula. They win, we lose.”
“Oh no we don’t,” said Icarus and he opened his right hand. On his palm lay a dozen tablets, all very sweaty and rather crunched up, but a dozen tablets, none the less. “I relocated these while we were in the car. We can get some chemist to analyse them. We’re not done for yet.”
“Smart lad,” said Johnny Boy. “But how do we get out of here?”
“Getting out of this cell is no problem,” said Icarus. “It’s what we do when we’re out that worries me.”
Johnny Boy had not counted doors, or busts in little niches. And when Icarus (using certain instruments which he kept in the heels of his shoes) had opened the cell door and glanced up and down a strange corridor, and asked Johnny Boy which way it was to the barber’s shop, the small man could only shrug his shoulders and say it was perhaps this way or perhaps the other.
“Best leave it to fate, then,” said Icarus. “Follow me.”
This corridor had a stone-flagged floor and walls of echoing stone. This was your standard prison corridor, the one along which the cries of tortured souls are wont to echo.
“Your heels really click, don’t they?” said Icarus.
“Tap-shoes,” said Johnny Boy. “I used to do a bit of the old Fred and Ginger.”
“Perhaps you’d like to take them off, or walk on tiptoe or something.”
Johnny Boy stopped and took off his shoes and tucked them into his trouser pockets.
“What happened to your socks?” asked Icarus. “They look all singed.”
“I suffer from spontaneous human combustion. If I eat too much coleslaw.”
“Well I’ll be damned,” said Icarus. “My mad brother says that he suffers from that. But I never believed him. I thought he was making it up.”
“It’s a common complaint,” said Johnny Boy. “I’d like to meet your brother.”