by Simon Clark
Exhausted, she toiled up the same steps the long dead Bram Stoker and his long dead wife and children had climbed to their holiday apartment all those years ago. It seemed as if the mist had followed her here, it swirled up the stairwell like water flooding the building.
Too tired to raise her arms to switch on the lights, she climbed the well of darkness to the white painted door. But where was the key? She’d swear it had been in her jacket pocket. ‘Well, it’s gone now,’ she told herself wearily. ‘Must have dropped it.’
Maybe Ben had found his way back here before her after his insane game of hide-and-seek on the beach. Yes, that’s it, she thought her spirits rising a little. He’s back. There was a strip of light showing beneath the door.
Feeling a renewed burst of energy she rapped sharply on the door. Then she rapped again.
Her heart gave a leap as she heard the bolt slide back and saw the handle turn. He’s home, thank God. She stood back as the door opened a few inches and a pair of eyes beneath a yellow fringe looked out. Strangely the eyes looked straight through her, then to the back of her and down the stairs. Then the female voice called out softly. ‘Ben … Ben? Is that you?’
She woke with a massive thumping headache. God, what a dream … and why was she so cold?
That was the moment she opened her eyes to see them lowering the stone lid back over her, sealing her into darkness – they were singing out in their high children’s voices: ‘Trick or treat, trick or treat, trick or treat …’ Those misshapen, long drowned boys and girls with pink, sea-anemone eyes, starfish mouths, barnacle-encrusted jaws, and brown, leathery, seaweed hair that spilt from their rotting skulls. Those no longer little children, suffocated by seawater, and saturated with a post-mortem mischief, who’d tricked her out here. And who’d laid her in the coffin with bare-bone hands … ‘Trick or treat, trick or treat …’ Even now she thought: Good God, the idiots; why can’t they get it right?
Dazed from the blow on her head, she laughed deliriously: they’d got it all wrong; you only play the trick if the victim doesn’t offer the treat … All wrong … all wrong, wrong, wrong….
She still laughed (with a crimson note of hysteria) when she remembered seeing Ben lying in the stone coffin nearby with his face gouged like some pumpkin mask, the thick, white church candles driven deep into his empty eye sockets; the wicks burning with a greasy yellow flame in the damp sea-air. ‘They can’t even get that right!’ She sobbed with laughter. ‘The candles go inside the pumpkin head! Not through the eyes! It’s all wrong. All wrong!’ Her laughter rose into great, wailing shrieks.
As a matter of fact, she only stopped laughing when the first wave hit the end of the stone coffin, and she realized that, at long last, the tide had turned.
GOBLIN CITY LIGHTS
We’re looking down on the couple just before it happens. The camera is mounted in a tree. Stark branches frame the shot. It’s night. We see gravestones – old gravestones, and angels long since eroded to demons; a rash of sulphur leprosy across distorted faces.
The couple lying on the grass are naked. They’re fucking with such determination that their eyes are puckered tight and the microphone catches their gasps. From the look of bliss on their faces they’ve probably even forgotten that they’re fucking in a graveyard, on a mattress that’s nothing but soil, bones and rotting faces. He’s a stocky man with muscular thighs and a tattooed snake that coils down his spine. She has short-cropped dark hair, small pointed breasts. We notice she’s shaved her pubic hair and we exchange glances, our eyebrows rising, then look back.
‘Is this what you wanted me to see?’ I ask.
‘Patience, Jack.’
‘Porn movies at eleven in the morning? It’s a mite too early for me, Benjay.’
‘Shh … it’s nearly here.’
‘Gary – Gary – Gary – Gary!’ The woman pants the man’s name from the speaker. Then she climbs on top of him to impale herself on him with a deep throaty ‘Oh….’
The man’s eyes look over her bare shoulder toward the camera, not directly into the lens but close. They narrow. He’s seen something that puzzles him. Then his eyes widen in shock.
The woman notices his expression. ‘Shit!’ she snaps. ‘Someone’s watching us, aren’t they?’
She looks back. There, in the low light, her face flares strangely, almost as if it shoots out light rays. Then her own eyes go huge. She’s seen something that terrifies her. Her mouth yawns wide into a scream.
That’s the moment the screen goes dark.
I smile at Benjay who sits there, his boyish Asian face now the picture of mature gravity. ‘And fade to black, crash in music. The bog-standard cliffhanger – or is the hook at the start of an episode still known as the cow-catcher?’
‘Patience, Jack,’ he replies. But he’s not smiling. He’s seen this before (many times I guess) and he knows what’s next. On screen is a one-word question. Continue? With the hand that holds the cigar he hits enter on the keyboard.
‘It’ll take a minute to download.’
He’s good to his word. Sixty seconds later the picture returns to the screen. The man and woman are still there on the grass; they’re still naked. Gravestones that are dwarfish from this camera angle surround them.
‘What do you make of that, Jack?’ Benjay asks, pointing at the screen with his cigar as if not wanting to bring his finger too close to the figures writhing on the grass.
‘They’ve been attacked,’ I tell him, my blood running cold, not liking this one bit. Especially the sobbing sound coming from the speaker.
‘Attacked? Yes and no.’ Benjay swallows as if something he ate no longer agrees with him. ‘Keep watching.’
Leaning forward now, my hand resting on the monitor, I focus on the two figures. Slowly, they’re worming across the turf on their bellies. Their bare feet are green from grass stains; they moan like they’re hurting from head to toe. I look for signs of violence on their bodies. There are none. I try to make out the groaned words. There’s nothing coherent.
‘What are they saying?’ I ask.
‘Shh. Keep watching. See what happens next.’
Like human slugs, they slither toward a tomb slab that lies flat against the ground. Another metre or so and they’ll leave the edge of the shot. Already the man’s arms are out of the frame. That sobbing comes softly and utterly heart-broken through the speaker … crash to black.
Continue?
Again the film clip has finished and again the prompt. Benjay taps enter. The disk makes its churning sound inside the computer as the next clip downloads.
I stand there, ready to wait for another sixty seconds or so but the screen flares into life with a suddenness that’s as shocking as it is vivid. Now the two are in close up from the same overhead shot. They are laughing and screwing with a frenzy that’s nothing less than fucking maniacal. The focus isn’t quite right; images are fuzzed, the figures flare; the exposure is shot. But it is the same man and woman. This time they fuck on the gravestone with enough force to shake the bones in the ground below. Now the voices are guttural, I catch words that are foreign. A name? A plea for mercy? An orgasmic celebration?
Christ knows. But you’ve heard the phrase hammer and tongs? Well this was it in spades.
‘And they all lived happily ever after,’ I say.
‘Don’t you see?’ Benjay points at the two as, laughing, they kiss each other with a passion that thunders into the furious.
Yes, I do hear them laughing … and they’re laughing like lovers do … giggly, breathless. But I see they aren’t kissing after all. They are biting lumps – bloody lumps at that – out of each other’s faces.
Picture this with a soundtrack – Jim Morrison’s Riders Of The Storm works. But Joy Division’s doom-laden, yet monstrously beautiful Love Will Tear Us Apart will illuminate the scene with witchfire. London, Charing Cross Road on a January day. Picture it through the eyes of a hovering bird of prey. Traffic lumbering in the depths of the
canyon formed by buildings that loom over everything; cold slate; cold stone; cold pavement; cold air sliding up from the river to weep around the faces of demons carved in more cold stone. Those demons are so high above the street no one can see them. No one that is, except a suicide, sliding through an upper storey window who will soon kiss the pavement at 200 feet a second.
Now sweep down between the buildings, with their windows that have all the lustre of dead eyes. The breeze whispers like a man sighing over the tomb of his lover, and London lumbers through another dark, winter day; city sounds are its ponderous heartbeat. Beneath its surface crust of shops, office blocks and asphalt, Tube trains slide: fat iron worms that pass through the dead clay and bones of earlier ages, earlier people.
Continue this image, slipping lower until we’re face to face with London man and woman. Down here a thousand eyes scowl against wind-blown grit; the cold pierces them to the bone. The door of a pub swings open, taking us inside where a dwarf stands on a table to play the slot machine; here a woman in thigh boots and furs walks into a toilet and slams a much-craved needle into her arm. This is the place where you’d find a stillborn baby stuffed up a chimney. Back in 1959 Tom ‘Turn-Out-Your-Pockets’ Frazer and sidekick Bunny Warren were drowned in a tin bath in the cellar. Rumours have it that Warren cried out in a childish voice, ‘I’ll tell! I’ll tell!’ as they forced his head down toward the water. Scroll further back. In 1898 the young playwright Augustus Trayling, cousin and failed blackmailer of Bram Stoker, hanged himself in the stairwell. The constable who found the body burnt the photographs found in Trayling’s pocket – right here on the tiled floor of the bar. The burn mark is still there for everyone to see.
This pub is just one component of the great, oozing Goblin City that is London. For fifty, sixty, seventy years, maybe a bit more, London allows you to run through its maze of buildings, collide with other lives, change them a little, or a lot in the case of the gangsters that drowned the pair of crooks in the bath. Then your time is up: you’re bundled into one of its cemeteries, or you vanish in a blaze of glory up some crematorium chimney. Another boy or girl takes your place and dum-dee-dum-dee-dum life goes on.
It’s human beings that soak this Goblin City to saturation point. But there are other things, too. It’s just you tend not to see them – the urban foxes, the sewer rats, the mice (especially those sooty little beasties you see hopping beneath the rails in the Tube). And I’m sure there are other things. Those you glimpse out of the corner of your eye. They haunt the underground places. Or the alleyways that run behind galleries and museums. Perhaps deep down I’ve known they were always there. Things sensed rather than seen. Like on a winter’s night and you walk through a subway alone. Someone’s hurrying up behind you. You turn round ready to fight or run (or beg) but there’s no one there. The tunnel’s deserted. Nevertheless, a cold presence seems to pass right through you, chilling your gut, filling your veins with ice, and you clench your fists as if you’ve just woken to the realization that someone’s violated you in your sleep.
London’s like that. Not that I think about it constantly. Just now and then when the icy draughts blow across the back of my neck, and the sensation comes that someone’s just walked over my future grave.
So. Picture this. The door of the pub swings shut. The dwarf pumps his last coin into the bandit. Lemons, melons and oranges spin before his eyes.
I sit with Benjay, a good-looking brown-eyed man, born in Sri Lanka. Now he’s a paid up citizen of the old Imperial Capital with a nice apartment in Holland Park. And that’s me in the corner: Jack Constantine; thirty-five years old; in cowboy boots and wearing a leather jacket that’s a soft, liquorice black. Home for me is a riverside loft conversion with century-old timbers that still exude scents of the Oriental spices once stored there.
We’re sitting hunched over a set of colour prints that have been piped off the video clips we saw earlier in the day. Around us, the pub is buzzing as people take lunch – either solid or liquid. Benjay and I are both drinking bottled beer, or rather allowing the liquor to become tepid as we fix our eyes on the stills.
‘I thought that both were wearing lipstick,’ Benjay said.
‘Kinky.’
‘But you can see that even though they leave something that looks like lipstick marks from a kiss, they actually start to pour blood.’
‘So they really were biting chunks out of their faces as they had sex?’
‘Yes.’
‘These people take their S&M extremely seriously.’
‘But it doesn’t add up, does it?’
‘No?’
‘We watched the first clip with two people making love.’
‘Making love? You’re turning sentimental in your old age, Benjay.’
‘Listen, they were making love in the first clip. Then they were frightened by something that was out of shot on the screen. In the second clip they were squirming on the floor having some kind of …’ he shrugs. ‘Episode? Fit? Seizure? You tell me. Then in the third sequence they had sex. And they were trying to mutilate each other’s faces with their teeth.’
‘And they were laughing all the time.’ I focus on the man’s face. Part of the soft flesh beneath the eye is missing. From a crescent shaped wound blood trickles. ‘Drugs?’
‘Maybe, but we didn’t see them swallow or inject, did we?’
‘It was edited out.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘That’s the danger of wandering through cyber-space, Benjay. You never know what all that surfing’s going to bring up.’
Benjay takes a swallow of beer and grimaces. Those photographs have painted a bad taste across his tongue that just won’t go. ‘There is a point to all this, Jack.’
‘I hoped there would be. You were going to give me a new assignment, weren’t you?’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘And it has something to do with those internet films we saw this morning?’
He nods.
‘But,’ I give a panto shrug, ‘how do horror movies dovetail into a three thousand word article about a has-been rock band?’
‘It does dovetail. Damn neatly, too.’ He takes another mouthful of beer. ‘OK, let’s cut to the chase. You’ve written four—’
‘Five.’
He assents with a smile. ‘Five Where-Are-They-Now articles for the magazine.’
‘Complete with side-bar.’
‘Which we’ve placed in the back quarter of the magazine—’
‘Because they weren’t exactly basking in the white heat of topicality. But then I’m a loveable old hack, not one of your young newshounds who are deliriously happy to camp out at Heathrow waiting for Madonna, or trying to catch what goodies come slipping into the sewer whenever some rockstar flushes his toilet.’
Benjay’s obscenely young face lights up with a grin when he remembers a well-publicized court wrangle over custody of ‘objects’ found in a sewer. WHO OWNS LIAM’S POO? was one memorable headline. But then, eighteen months ago Click This was a new music magazine fighting glossy, voracious competitors for shelf space. Benjay Sittri’s publicity grabbing talents included the famous – or should that be notorious? – Rockstars And Their Turds feature. The cover of the second issue bore a proud rhino horn-shaped spoor above blazing type that declaimed: THERE’S NO BIZ LIKE SHOW BIZ! The match-the-turd-to-the-star series ran for months. It generated court cases, plus an unsolicited deluge of shit in shoeboxes from popstar wannabes who forced themselves to eat unfeasible objects and ingest food dyes to produce the most spectacular bottom loaves known to man. Magazine sales went supernovae.
I came in stuck to the sole of this publicity miracle. Benjay, the boy editor, needed some articles about rock bands like yesterday. So he commissioned me to write a series of filler Where-Are-They-Now articles. You know the sort of thing: library photographs alongside a few hundred words about an eighties’ sex siren who’s now that lollipop lady at the school down the road, or punk drummer turned Franci
scan monk, or which progenitor of hip-hop now teaches choral music at the University of Vienna. People love the rags to riches story. They love the dark side, too – those riches to rags tales … of the beautiful becoming the damned … and the famous who sang to thousands now reduced to asking an audience of one what kind of drink they want with their hamburger meal.
So, in that Charing Cross Road pub I sit chatting to the editor of Click This over photographs of a couple who’ve bitten bloody chunks out of each other’s faces. It seems to have bugger-all to do with music. I sense another Marvel All Ye On The Excrement Of The Famous kind of story in the pipeline. To be candid, I didn’t particularly want to be part of it.
And, yeah, shit again, I could be at home working on the love of my life – a biography of Tod Browning; he of The Unknown, Freaks and Dracula fame. A book bundled with a DVD package that would include clips, out-takes, and best of all a CGI sequence that replaces Lugosi with Lon Chaney (Browning’s original choice) in the role in Dracula. Of course, a little thing like cancer leading to a not-to-be-missed appointment with the Grim Reaper obstructed Chaney’s career advancement. OK, yes, that book is my private obsession. My Eldorado. The quest for my Holy Grail. So what if I have spent the last five years working on it? So what if I take hack jobs like this to pay the rent and feed the cat while I write it?
With the knowledge shining bright in my head that I really need this job I say to Benjay, ‘I take it we know the identity of these love birds in the photographs?’
‘We do. But they’re not important.’
‘Oh?’
‘That is, not important as such to this assignment.’
‘Then why are we lovingly gazing at their photographs over lunch?’
‘Because I want you to write the lead article for the March issue.’
‘Thank you, Benjay. That’s nice of you to invite me to take centre stage.’
He shoots me a little look as if to ask if I’m taking the piss but he sees I’m genuinely grateful. This will be good money. This might buy as much as three months’ writing time on the Tod Browning book. I can even see chapters twelve through sixteen taking up residence in my computer.