Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales

by Orrin Grey

  “Kirby,” Drake called out in greeting as he approached the car, skipping all the Cheerses and What-hos and other Britishisms that would have, once again, helped to better sell the whole scene. Perhaps that’s what almost a decade of schooling abroad did to a fellow. Kirby stepped forward to meet him, swinging his arm around to clasp Drake’s handshake, only to be pulled into a half-hug. “It’s been too long, old chap.” At least there was that, “old chap.” It would have to do.

  “Drake,” Kirby said when the hug was broken and both men had stepped back, “how’d you get yourself roped into this dump?” With a gesture that encompassed the entirety of the sprawling and ancient pile, he added, “Do you want me to help you sell it, or just rent a bulldozer?”

  “It’s the family homestead, don’t you know. I grew up in this ridiculous acropolis, if you can imagine that.”

  “I really can’t,” Kirby replied, and he meant it, remembering the two-room apartment in Brooklyn that had dominated much of his own childhood. “Did you get all your exercise just hiking to the commode every morning?”

  Laughing, Drake turned to look up at the house, maybe trying to see it through Kirby’s eyes. “It’ll be perfect for what you’re looking for, though, don’t you think? Anyway, come on inside, it’s too damned hot and bright out here. I know that you’re from California, but we English aren’t accustomed to this sort of weather.”

  Which was also true enough. Kirby had been to England several times before, and every previous visit it had been either raining or choked with clouds from dawn til dusk. This trip had been nothing but balmy weather and bright sunshine from the moment the plane touched the tarmac, in spite of the fact that they were headed into fall. Was that some sort of omen, he wondered, and if so, was it good or bad? Was this the British equivalent of the clichéd “dark and stormy night?” Unseasonable sunshine and warm breezes?

  Had he found the weather outside too clement for his tastes, as Drake seemed to, then the inside of the house held the cure. The first thing Kirby noticed was the dimness, which forced him to remove his sunglasses as soon as they stepped through the big wooden front doors, all carved with creeping vines and bunches of grapes and grotesque figures like the ones in cathedral carvings peering out from amid the faux foliage.

  Those few windows that Kirby could see were small and leaded, and the walls seemed to suck up what little light they admitted. Everything within the manor was cool shade, even in the middle of the afternoon. His first thought was, “great atmosphere.” His second: “We’ll have to light the piss out of this place if we’re ever going to film here.”

  There was also a smell, not exactly unpleasant, but some odd combination of dusty and damp. The smell, Kirby imagined, of an old house that hadn’t been used much or aired out often in decades.

  “Shouldn’t you have servants to open doors and wipe your ass for you or something?” he asked his host as they descended deeper into the dim interior of the house.

  “We still keep a few servants around, but I prefer to do things myself when I can. I’m not my father, thank Christ.” Drake said it over his shoulder as he led the way through the front hall, and Kirby had to admit to himself that it was a fact. Though he had never actually met the previous Lord Whitley, Kirby had seen enough pictures of him to know that he had been all good old English stock, with high-collared suits and shining cufflinks and carefully knotted ties, his features pale and bloodless compared to his vivacious offspring.

  Kirby followed his host deeper into the house, past a sweeping staircase of the kind that would nicely showcase expensive gowns—on loan, of course—and also throw ominous shadows with the proper lighting setup. They stopped in a sitting room where booze had been placed in crystal bottles on the sideboard, Drake keeping up a steady stream of light chatter throughout. His voice was as jocular and cheerful as it had been when Kirby had known him years ago, but there was a touch of brittleness in it, too. Well hidden, but there for Kirby to spot because, when you stripped away all the glitz and glamor, Kirby’s whole job pretty much boiled down to dealing with phonies all day.

  But Kirby didn’t say anything about it, not yet. Instead he accepted Drake’s offer of Scotch and made small talk while looking around the room, peering out the windows at what he could see of the grounds, mentally sizing everything up, Drake included.

  His old friend wasn’t wrong. The house was perfect, exactly what Kirby was looking for, a gift dropped right into his lap at the moment he needed it most. And Kirby hadn’t gotten to where he was by looking gift horses in the mouth, though he also hadn’t gotten there without learning that nothing in this world came for free, or without a lot of strings to get tangled up in. There was something Drake wasn’t telling him, but that was okay, he’d figure it out in time, and there were things he wasn’t telling Drake, too.

  Like the creditors that he’d left behind in the States, or the fact that he hadn’t much more than a penny to his name. Natty or not, the suit he was wearing was one of only two suits he still had on hand, and his dry cleaning was being done for free by one of the girls at the hotel because she had recognized his name and he had promised her a part in his next picture. Like the borrowed car, these weren’t the things that really mattered. Kirby had learned that a long time ago, too. It didn’t matter what you really had, or who you really were. What mattered were appearances, and those he always had a way of keeping up.

  So he sat in the gloomy sitting room—because that’s what it’s for, it’s right there in the name—under the disapproving portrait of some pale, long-dead relative and drank expensive Scotch and reminisced with Drake about old times while waiting for the other shoe to drop. Eventually Drake asked, “Do you want the grand tour?”

  And Kirby said “sure,” partly because he did, and partly because he’d been to enough fancy houses over the years to know that the grand tour was where things happened, whether those were handshake deals for financing, steamy trysts in back bedrooms, or unfortunate revelations about your host’s ulterior motives.

  The house was bigger inside even than it had appeared from without, and before they got to the unfortunate revelations part of the tour they passed through innumerable dimly-lit corridors hung with creepy portraits which seemed to loom up suddenly from the shadows, and tapestries where furtive shapes cavorted. After several twists and turns that Kirby could never have retraced, they came out one of the manor’s many doors and into the family cemetery, a garden-like patch of dirt on a slight rise out behind the house, bordered by holly trees and overgrown with creeping vines.

  The river could be seen flowing off in the distance, and closer to hand headstones canted at odd angles around the central figure of the family crypt, a squat, gray temple to the dead. Kirby couldn’t have framed the shot better if he’d had the set built himself.

  “I’d offer to show you the inside of the crypt,” Drake said, “it seems like it’d be right up your alley, lots of cobwebs and candle sconces, but I’m afraid that it’s padlocked, and the key seems to have gone missing ever since Dad’s funeral. Thus far, I haven’t had the heart to take the bolt cutters to it.”

  “I can see why,” Kirby said with a low whistle. The doorway to the crypt was huge, wide and tall enough to drive a camera truck through, blocked by an enormous iron door decorated with rivets and the wrought shapes of some sort of creeping ivy. A chain wound round the handles of the door, secured with an ancient padlock the size of a human head, the sort that looked like it probably took a real-life skeleton key.

  “So did they bury your whole damn clan in this barn?” Kirby asked. Though he was, of course, familiar with the concept, he found it difficult to imagine, his own father little more than a dim memory of a loud, angry voice and the scent of whiskey and cheap cigars. His mother’s grave he had moved to Colma when he still had money, and given her a much nicer headstone than the spare, small one she’d had in Jersey.

  “Well, mostly,” Drake replied. “Everyone’s got a plot, anyway, even if
a few of the bodies are currently missing somewhere over in the Holy Land or some such place. In those cases, there’s just an empty box in the slot. But everybody who had a body to bury is buried right here, or stuck in that tomb. I guess I’ll be the last, unless some bird comes along and makes me respectable. That’s always assuming that I’ve still got the place by then…”

  So there it was, that other shoe. “Thinking of selling?” Kirby asked, already knowing the answer, but knowing also that Drake needed to come at it in his own time, his own way.

  Drake smiled, as if he knew that Kirby knew, and shook his head. “Thinking of losing. Kirby, old sport, I’ve got a confession to make. When I asked you to come stay here for a bit, it wasn’t just because I thought the old homestead would fit right into your pictures. It was, in fact, because I was rather hoping that it would. You see, when the old man passed on, I inherited more than this place and his title. I’m afraid I also got a look at his books for the first time and, well, not to put too fine a point on it, I’m flat broke.”

  That was something of an onion in Kirby’s particular ointment, as he had rather been counting on talking some funding out of his high-born friend, and yet he almost smiled himself at the irony of the situation. Most people would probably find it hard to imagine someone being broke while still occupying such a sprawling mansion, but Kirby understood it all too well. Appearances, again, mattered more than truth, and always had, and always would.

  “So,” Kirby said, “you’re thinking we film a picture here—or, hell, why not make it two or three or four, film them back to back, use the same setups where we can—and then you get to keep the family home, and I get a few more movies under my belt? Is that the plan?”

  “Well, plan might be too strong a word, but that’s certainly the idea, yes.”

  Kirby looked around once again, turning the new information over in his mind. “The place has certainly got the right mood,” he said. “We’d hardly have to do any set dressing at all to make it passable, and hell, there should be plenty of crew available to hire out from under those chaps at Ealing and Bray.”

  “They’ve probably already been making your kinds of movies, from what I hear.”

  “Well, maybe not exactly the same,” Kirby replied. “My films haven’t always been as classy as the stuff your countrymen have been turning out up to now. But times change, and I didn’t weather them this far without learning how to change with them.”

  It was part of the reason he had agreed to come to England in the first place, besides the creditors and everything else. The British film companies were producing smart science fiction films and Gothic chillers with low-cut blouses and bright red blood, while he was still churning out black-and-white flicks about giant mollusks and dragstrip kids finding trash bag monsters in haunted shacks and haunted caves, and he knew that couldn’t last. The days of atomic panic and kids in hot rods ruling the drive-ins were coming to a close, and while the Sixties had only just started to swing, Kirby could taste the change coming in the air, and he planned to get out in front of it, rather than be left behind.

  There were some logistical hurdles to get by before they could start filming. The first one—and the one most likely to trip them up completely—was funding. Kirby admitted that he was every bit as cash-strapped as Drake himself, and that he had been planning to hit his old friend up for funding to finance the first couple of pictures, and then using the money they made to get the next ones rolling.

  “Since you’re a bit flat yourself, though,” he said, “we’ll have to look elsewhere. Fortunately, while you might be broke, I figure that being the Eighth or Ninth Lord Whitley ought to carry a certain social cachet that can get us both into some of the right parties. The kind where there are plenty of people with money to spend. And if you don’t mind using your family name to get our foot in the door, I like to think that I’ve got a certain charm—or at least a way of parting fools and their money—that should be enough to get someone to pony up the dough.”

  According to Drake, the next party where the “right sort” would be in attendance wasn’t for a couple of days, so that first night the two of them ate an exceedingly bland dinner in the manor, one that would have tipped Kirby off as to the absence of many servants on the premises, even if Drake hadn’t already told him as much. They didn’t eat alone, though. That was where Kirby met the Professor.

  Drake introduced him by name, something suitably unassuming and British. Professor Edward Mosby, something like that. But after that first introduction, Drake just called him the Professor, and so Kirby did, too.

  He had been a friend of Drake’s father since their college days in Eton or wherever they had gone, and the two men had served together during the war. The previous Lord Whitley had always bankrolled the Professor’s various expeditions, and it had been included in his will that the Professor would retain his living space and laboratory in the old carriage house out beyond the family cemetery until his own demise, which didn’t seem like it could be all that long in coming.

  “He was never the same after the war,” Drake confided. “At least that’s what I’m told. Can’t say I really remember much from beforehand.”

  The Professor was an older man, balding, which made his head seem somehow small for his body. Or perhaps it was that, though skeletally thin at the wrists and ankles, he was nonetheless surprisingly broad of shoulder and chest. His hands and face had that waxy pallor that one associates with corpses and small, bookish men who seldom see any natural light, and when Kirby shook his hand upon being introduced, it was as chilly as the handle of a cold spoon. He wore his collar buttoned all the way up to the neck, and a black silk bowtie speckled with matte black spots.

  He appeared perpetually startled and distracted—as though he was listening for something, or, whenever he wasn’t speaking himself, he forgot that a conversation was going on around him, and each exchange came to him like a gunshot in darkness—but his voice wasn’t the thin, reedy thing that Kirby would have expected. Instead it sounded deep and hollow, like he was speaking to them from deep inside a barrel, a trait that was only enhanced when Kirby asked about his work.

  Apparently some sort of anthropologist, the old man initially declined to talk about it, bobbing his too-small head and raising a pallid hand to ward off the question, warning that Kirby would find it “frightfully dull.” But Drake was having none of it. “Oh come now, don’t be modest, old man!” he said, putting down his own fork. “The Professor has been all over the world. He and my father even discovered some island during the war, down near… Borneo, was it?”

  “No, not quite,” the Professor replied. “It’s a little South Seas island; we never gave it a name. In the dialect of the nearby islanders it’s called the Island of the Headless Men, roughly translated.”

  “That could be the name of one of Kirby’s films,” Drake laughed, pointing out just what Kirby had been thinking.

  “Oh, it gets better,” the Professor said, suddenly warming to his subject, as Kirby imagined he must do when lecturing, if, indeed, he was the sort of professor who lectured. “The natives who dwell on this particular island are uniquely feared and shunned by their nearest neighbors. They have no name for themselves, for from their perspective they are the only people, and all other human animals are simply a food source. To some of the neighboring islanders, they are known as Tcho-Tcho. What this name signifies, I have so far been unable to ascertain, but it is said always with a certain dread and awe. These men have been my primary field of study since the war, and I believe I am near to publishing the first scientific treatise on their culture. Mr. William Seabrook wrote of them briefly, but he had heard of them only through hearsay.”

  “Now that’s a name I know,” Kirby said, gesturing to Drake with his fork. “He’s the fellow who wrote that book about Haiti that popularized voodoo and put so many zombie pictures into production back in the ’30s and ’40s. Hell, I even made a couple. I Married a Zombie was probably the biggest
, though I don’t think it ever made it over here.”

  He turned back to the Professor, “So these natives, they’re cannibals, right? That does sound like one of my movies. But why the ‘Headless Men’ thing?”

  “That remains unclear,” the Professor said. “It’s possible that the Tcho-Tcho are headhunters, whose witch doctors make and keep the shrunken heads of their enemies. I also believe that their warriors may paint their bodies with a kind of chalk made from the ground bones of their victims and dyes they extract from local plants, drawing crude, demonic visages on their naked torsos. In the pictographs of the neighboring islanders, the Tcho-Tcho are always depicted as monsters, men without heads but with faces in their chests and mouths in their stomachs.”

  “That seems familiar somehow,” Kirby said.

  “I remember Sir Walter Raleigh writing about a similar tribe in Guiana, if I’m not mistaken,” Drake said, glancing at the Professor, who nodded.

  “Yes, he called them the Ewaipanoma. But he was certainly not the first. Herodotus and Pliny the Elder both tell us of the Blemmyes, headless men whose faces are in their chests.”

  “Didn’t the Hindus have a headless demon, too?” Kirby asked.

  Again, the Professor nodded. “Kabandha, whose single eye and mouth are in his torso. And contemporary students of the occult have long whispered of a headless deity known as Y’Golonac, god of perversion and depravity. Even the Bard himself spoke of ‘the Anthropophagi, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.’”

  At that moment there was a sound from outside, an echoing clang, like metal crashing against metal. The lights in the house all dimmed momentarily before resuming their usual brightness. “What the hell was that?” Kirby asked, and Drake shook his head.

  “It happens sometimes. I haven’t yet been able to pin it down.”

  Whatever it was, it had shaken the Professor. He seemed even paler than he had before, if that was possible, and his eyes were wide, the whites around them showing like a frightened horse. His mouth gawped open and closed like a fish for a moment, and a sound came from his throat, something hideous and creaking. Drake leapt up and slapped the old man on the back, and the Professor coughed, drew in a long, shuddering breath, and then lifted his napkin with a shaking hand, holding it over his mouth.