Chapter 1

 The robbery itself had been a joke, a bit of fun.  It was Friday the 13^th after all, so why not…

  Norbert Bentinck and Larson Lee had been having their usual Friday afternoon, the weekend starts here, drink in the back room of the Blue Bottle Inn, when Stanley Havershaw had sloped, morosely, into the pub and muttered a rich and complex variety of oaths into his pint. 

  ‘What’s up now, Stan?’ asked Bentinck, ‘you look like you found sixpence and lost half a crown.’

  ‘Oh, it’s all right for you,’ he muttered, ‘you go on and have a good time, I’ve got to go back to work tonight and tomorrow night to stand guard over this bloke’s bloody diamonds.  Why couldn’t he have broken down in Fishpool for god's sake?’

  ‘Diamonds?’ asked Larson Lee.

  ‘Yes, diamonds. Some silly bugger called Farnaby has broken down on his way to London and he’s put a box full of diamonds in the strong room at the bank.  Of course our esteemed manager, Brian bloody Timms has decided that there is a going to be a queue of people a mile long wanting to steal them, and I’ve been volunteered to stay up all night tonight and tomorrow night to make sure they’re safe.’

  After a couple more pints and a lot more swearing, Stanley Havershaw bought a packet of potato crisps, two bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale, and walked off into his place in history.

  After laughing at his misfortune for a little while longer, Larson Lee and Norbert Bentinck started to talk in broader, and slightly more expansive, drunken terms about the robbery that Brian Timms, small, round and bald manager of the Starlings Bank was convinced would happen.

  ‘I wish we could make his nightmares come true,’ said Bentinck, who had no time for Timms, after he had refused to loan him the money he needed to start up his small publishing company.

  ‘Well, we can’t,’ said Larson Lee, but I know some people who can.’

   Over several more pints and a lot more outrageous plotting, they decided that it would be fun to create a special issue of ‘Detective Tales’, an issue in which the diamonds would be stolen from the bank, stolen by a crack team of thieves, led by Jack Stiletto, private eye.  It would be the perfect robbery.  There would be no witnesses, no clues, and no chance of the bank ever seeing the diamonds again.

  ‘Make Timms look like a real pratt,’ said Bentinck, raising his glass.

  ‘Couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke,’ agreed Larson Lee.

  They would create it over the weekend and distribute it on Sunday morning, to give people a chance to read the story before the bank opened again, and, even more importantly, to give Brian Timms at least one sleepless night waiting for the timelock to open the vault on Monday morning.  They would make Monday, August 16^th 1965 a date to remember.

They could see Timms now, standing in front of the vault door and wiping, ever so gently, the tiny beads of sweat from the palms of his pudgy hands, a copy of issue 21 of Detective Tales stuffed neatly, but in a very slight panic, into his jacket pocket.

  They had the confidence by now, the ability to just create something off the cuff.  They had been a successful team, creating Detective Tales from scratch, and making it a money spinner for them both.  Why not have a bit of fun for a change, why not do something a bit more dramatic, close to the knuckle, dangerous, even.

So they had done it.  There would be no real harm in it.    The bank would open on Monday and the diamonds would still be there. 

  It’s not as if it would be a real robbery.  It’s not as though these comic book characters were going to come to life, jump off the page and really steal anything.

  Start thinking like that and you start to wonder if you are going to be injured when the toy aeroplanes on your baby son’s bedroom wallpaper fly off the paper and into the room.  That way lies madness.

  The robbery was planned and executed over the weekend.  Jack Stiletto, Wonder Lad and a new character, still unpublished, called Delphine - Mind Queen, would form the perfect team.  They would arrive at the bank at 3 am on Saturday morning.  Chumfargit town centre had no late night entertainments in those days, so the streets would be pretty much deserted.

  Wonder Lad would dissolve away the outer wall of the bank, using his x-ray vision, and remove the inner metal shielding, then telepathically lift the box, without disturbing so much as a mote of dust, out to Stiletto.  He would hold the box, while Delphine, using her mystical powers, would open the lock without even having to touch it.  She would remove the diamonds and wrap them in a black velvet bag, which she would just happen to have with her at the time, despite everything else she owned being made of flame red leather.

  Once she had the stones she would close the box and relock it, Stiletto would hand it back to Nick and he would replace the box, back in its own square of dust on the table,  and rebuild the inner metal casing and the outer brick wall, exactly as it had been before they arrived.

  No-one would know the diamonds had gone until the box was opened on Monday morning, after the timelock went off in the vault.

They knew the guard would almost certainly be asleep at that time in the morning, but Delphine would project a sleeping field inside the building just in case. 

  The work on creating issue 21 was done over a frenzied, and alcohol fuelled, Saturday night and Sunday morning.  The machines at NB Press rolled all through Sunday afternoon, and they distributed the new issue late on Sunday night. 

  Issue 21, starring Jack Stiletto, Wonder Lad and featuring the hitherto unseen new character, Delphine - Mind Queen, in a story called ‘The Farnaby Diamonds Affair’.

  It was in the early hours of Monday morning when things started to go wrong. 

  Larson Lee was awoken by a sudden chill, as though he had been walking across a frozen pond, and had fallen through a hole in the ice for a split second.  It was still coffin dark outside, and the air was warm for an autumn night, but the chill sat inside his centre like a cold, thin needle.

  He sat up and looked around his bedroom at Pen House, the rather arty name he had decided to call his small cottage at 17, Dunn Lane, as part of the ongoing tide of creative foolishness, the tide that he was now seeing and feeling as possibly a threat for the first time.

  Something was wrong, somewhere, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was. 

  His wife and their infant son, Brett, were away visiting her family, so he knew that it wasn’t the baby crying in the night, or his wife’s sudden movement that had woken him.

   It was something altogether more nasty that Larson Lee felt that night. 

  He climbed blearily out of his bed, shaking, as best he could, the last of the alcohol fog from his mind.  He heard the noise again, and realised it was coming from outside the back door of the house.  It was a groaning, whimpering sound, accompanied by a squeaking slither.  At first he was afraid to open the door and face whatever it was, but when he heard the groaning noise form the sound of his own name, he knew he had no choice but to open the door and see who, or what, was there.

  He pulled the door open just the slightest crack, foot pressed against the bottom edge, so that he could, at least in his mind, slam it shut quickly if he needed to, if he didn’t like what he saw.

  A blood covered hand, wearing a flame red leather jacket, slipped down the door, wet leather squeaking, and across the threshold of the door splashing blood onto the worn wood of the kitchen floor.

  As the hand hit the floor it cracked open and released a small bundle, which bumped across Larson Lee’s left foot, before coming to rest.

  He pulled back a desire to throw up, even feeling the bitter gorge rise in his neck.  He had never seen this much blood before, and he had worked in a butcher’s shop in his summer vacation from college, so he knew that something very badly damaged was moaning in the shadow outside his door that night.

  The hand, as if noticing that the bundle had gone from its grasp, twitched a little and Larson Lee pulled the door open a little further.  He looked at the face, though covered in blood at least recognisable, and he was immediately thrown completely outside the realms of reality. 

  He stared for a long moment.  The eyes on the blood stained face opened, and called his name. 

  ‘Larson, help me.’

  In a numb, dream state he half pulled and half carried the figure gently inside the house and leaned it up against the back of the door.  In the dim light of the kitchen he could now see that it was what he had feared it was.  It was an impossibility, a phantom, a signal that his sanity had gone out of the door when he had opened it to let this nightmare come in.

  He stared for a long time into they eyes of Delphine – Mind Queen.  He stared into the eyes of a comic book character that he had created in a drunken weekend.  He stared for a long time into what, he was certain, was the beginnings of his own insanity.

  ‘You have to get away, Larson.  Stiletto has gone insane.  He wants the diamonds.’  She coughed and brought up dark red clumps of her own blood.  She had been stabbed in the stomach and chest, and it was a miracle that she had survived as long as she had, but then, as she didn’t really exist at all anyway, maybe it wasn’t quite so surprising.

   ‘I don’t understand,’ stammered Larson Lee, ‘I don’t understand how this is possible, or what it means.’

  ‘Just take the diamonds and give them back.’ Delphine said, between spitting metallic tasting spurts of her own impossible blood.  ‘If Stiletto gets his hands on them, god only knows what he will do.  He is pure evil, Larson, but it’s not your fault.’

  The question of fault had not crossed his mind before, but now it stole into his mind and soul with an icy cold reality.  It was his fault, of course it was.  He had created these people.  One of them evil and prepared to kill for a handful of diamonds, the other now lying, bloodied and seemingly dying in his own home.

  ‘Get away, Larson, get away now, and don’t come back.  Nick is safe, and I think I’m finished but you can still escape.’

  She coughed once more and fell silent.  Just like that.  No great scenes, no prolonged drifting into and out of the world.  No whispering last wishes or desires.  Just a cough, and a shallow rattle and she was still and silent. 

  Larson Lee was convinced that he would wake up soon, and he was equally convinced that he would never wake up again, that he would live in this nightmare, this nightmare made worse, as all nightmares are, by being of his own making, for the rest of his days.  Nowhere in his mind did he come to the right conclusion, that he was already awake and this, for all its insanity and impossibility, was now the state of play, the state of reality, in his life from this point forward.

  He laid Delphine’s head down gently onto the kitchen floor and picked up the black package that had been worth so much to her that she had been prepared to die rather than surrender it.

  He rolled it open.  It contained a shower of small diamonds; even in the dim kitchen light they glistened like a full night sky against the blackness of the velvet.  Worth a fortune he was certain, but his thoughts centred on how to get them back to the bank and out of his hands.

  He didn’t get a lot of time to think, however, because at that moment he heard a loud crash at the front of the house, as something large and angry kicked and punched at the front door.

  ‘Come. Out. Here.’

  It was the voice of Jack Stiletto.  The voice of Jack Stiletto that Larson Lee had never heard, mainly because Jack Stiletto was a cartoon character, an imaginary being in a graphic novel story about an impossible bank robbery.  But he knew the voice, because he knew what it would have sounded like, just as he now knew he had recognised the voice of Delphine as she moaned and whimpered outside his back door a few minutes earlier.

  He had created the voice as he had created the man, and he shivered for a moment as he realised just how much bitterness and bile he had put into this character.  How much of his own hate, his disappointments in life, his own unpaid bills of anger had gone into making Jack Stiletto a figure of utter, desolate fear and bitterness.

  The front door cracked under the pounding, and as it did so Larson Lee departed his home, for the last time. He gently moved Delphine to one side, slipped open the kitchen door as far as he could without feeling that was doing something unspeakable to her bloodied body as it lay there, slipped into the garden at the back of the house, and was gone, just as Stiletto seared through the door frame and into his house.

 As he climbed the garden wall into Brown Lane, Larson Lee heard the ranting and crashing of Jack Stiletto searching his home for him, and the diamonds.  He turned, gripped the small velvet pouch tightly, and ran all the way, lungs bursting, head aching, down the hill into the town. 

  He would, some days later, telephone his friend Clive Murdo, and ask him to go round to his house and check that he locked the door.  He would make up some excuse, he would say that he left on a wild impulse, as creative people do, and couldn’t remember if he had secured his property correctly.

  Larson Lee would then hold a long breath waiting for the return call, or worrying that the call would not be returned, and his next contact with Chumfargit would be from the police, wanting to talk to him about a dead unknown female, stabbed to death on his kitchen floor.

  Murdo, though, reported back that all was well, and his home was secure.  No damage to any of the doors or windows, and certainly no dead bodies or pools of blood on the kitchen doorstep or floor were mentioned. 

  Were it not for the small, black velvet roll filled with diamonds that Larson Lee held in his hand as he took that phone call, he might have put the whole episode down to exhaustion and alcohol, and returned to his home immediately.

  But he held the roll, and he knew he could never return, but he also knew that he had to find a way of getting the diamonds back to Farnaby, or the bank, or anyone, before Stiletto could get back to him.

  And so it went on, this game of cat and mouse, for almost 40 years.  Each time Larson Lee tried to get the diamonds back to the bank, or to their rightful owner, Stiletto would appear and Lee’s plans would come to nothing.

  In the end, Larson Lee decided to hide the diamonds, in a place that no-one would ever look, until either he could figure out how to get them back to where they should be, or until someone, or something, dealt with Stiletto, and he would be free to return to Chumfargit and put things right.

  No-one knew where he was, except Clive Murdo, and he was a good friend, was sworn to secrecy, even though he doubted the sanity of both Larson Lee and his story, and had carried on doubting, right up until the moment that Stiletto had appeared in his office and shattered his desk into a million fragments 40 years later.