by Simon Clark
‘This is going to be one of the biggest things we’ve done,’ Benjay tells me. ‘What’s more it will be a serious exclusive.’ He twists a grin. ‘You see, the backers want the magazine to gain a little more gravitas.’
‘Gravitas? Does this mean the end of rock star poop scoops?’
‘For now, Jack. Because you are going to provide us with a serious, newsworthy article.’
‘On this.’ I nod at the photographs of the bleeding faces. ‘Or about someone connected to this?’
‘Bull’s-eye, Jack.’ He picks up his drink. ‘You remember Cuspidor?’
‘Sure. A five-piece cult band. All Gothic fugues, doom-laden lyrics.’
‘That’s the one.’
‘And they took the name Cuspidor from the pot that people spat into. Picturesque, don’t you think? Their singer-songwriter Katrice Bryden faked her own suicide in Paris. But that was five years ago, Benjay. Who the hell gives a crap about them now?’
‘Because,’ Benjay says, tapping the photographs with his finger, unconsciously hinting at what he’s building up to, ‘Cuspidor are going to have a massive posthumous hit with their best-of album. I’ve got inside word on the pre-orders – they are phenomenal.’
‘Record company hype.’
‘You think so? Just tap the name Cuspidor into any search-engine and you’ll come up with two thousand or more hits. Kids are going ape about Cuspidor.’
‘So how do these pair of face biters fit in?’
‘I’ve done some digging around just to make sure this is an article worth commissioning.’ He pulls neatly folded sheets from his jacket pocket. ‘These are the names, addresses and backgrounds of the band members. I downloaded that little horror movie we saw this morning from a Cuspidor website. There are more of them. Lots of weird stills as well.’
‘All peeping-tom stuff?’
‘Some – not all. If anything, the overriding theme is that all the footage was shot in cemeteries. Particularly the big old Victorian boneyards like Highgate and Kensal Green.’
‘And their significance to Cuspidor?’
‘We can’t get official confirmation through the agency that handle the band’s material but …’ Again he smiles. ‘Let’s put it like this. Legend has it that the films were shot by Cuspidor’s singer, Katrice Bryden.’
‘She filmed this?’ I look at the photograph of the face biters, with gory red holes in their cheeks. ‘Why?’
‘To use an old cliché: that, Jack Constantine, is what you need to find out.’
‘Is that all?’
‘That’s all. Oh, by the way, I need the article a week today. Five thousand words on the nail.’
‘With side-bar?’
‘With side-bar, Jack.’ He twists that wry grin of his, then raises the bottle. ‘Cheers.’
The Tube train carries me home. I’m one of those people who looks Out through the carriage window rather than In. Of course, there’s nothing to see other than a blurred wall as we shoot a hundred feet beneath London’s frozen streets. Only sometimes you catch a glimpse of a tunnel branching away to run into darkness. Then you might see the spectral blue-white flash of another train as contacts brush the live rail. For me, it lends a hint of mystery to an otherwise drab as dust journey.
I step off the train to find myself alone on the platform. The train thunders away, drawing the air after it, which tugs at my hair and sends wrappers and paper cups scuttling along the platform. It’s the sound of claws scraping at stone.
As I walk to the exit I feel the phantom blast of air that signals the approach of another train. Only instead of the rush of warm air that I’ve felt a million times before, this blast is damp and its so cold it makes me bunch my fists and grit my teeth as it rips into my hair, raking my ears and setting my nerves on edge. For one mad moment I think the Thames has broken through the roof of the tunnel somewhere, and that it’s roaring towards me ready to engulf my body and dash me into eternity.
I pause for a moment. Watching. Feeling grit carried on the cold air sting my face and hearing the lunatic scratching of litter racing out of the tunnel to become white flapping creatures; albino bats driven from their roosting place by the flood.
Then … it’s gone as quickly as it came. The breeze dies. Newspapers mixed with chocolate wrappers flutter dead to the ground.
With a backward glance into the liquid darkness of the tunnel I head for the station lift.
Cuspidor. I enter the name into the search engine beside Jeeves’ obsequious mug and wait….
With the time coming up to nine in the evening it’s as gloomy as a crypt. Through my double-glazed window in this warehouse of yore I see the waters of the dock lying in a viscous pool; it’s poisonous looking in this morbid light of reflected streetlamps. Old cargo cranes stand monstrous against the night sky, like the skeletons of giants frozen for all eternity.
A mist is sliding in from the river. Once I looked out of this very window to see a drowned prostitute in the water, her yellow hair floating out around her in a huge smudgy halo. She drifted there in rainbow colours generated by a slick of diesel. Her eyes were open. She looked up at me … and this was the really strange thing – I couldn’t get the image out of my head for weeks – she was smiling. I watched as a fireman retrieved the corpse with a boat hook, then I went out and got drunk.
The screen changes in front of me. I see the ever servile Jeeves is offering me streams of Cuspidor websites. Taking a sip of cognac I begin my trawl.
Most offer the usual stuff. Discography. Biographies of band members, loads of photographs of performances, sound-checks, recording sessions, riding tour buses. Most feature Katrice Bryden. A beautiful Goth, she’s awash with raven hair. Thick black kohl around her eyes lends her an Egyptian deathmask look that’s uncannily beguiling. She wears funeral black clothes of satin, tightly laced black boots; studs in her tongue, nose, eyebrows and ears. And here is the famous ear-ring ripping sequence of fifteen photographs. During Cuspidor’s last gig in Paris she tears out her ear-rings, leaving her with a dozen splits in the edges of her ears that send streams of blood down her neck. She wets her fingers with blood then daubs her face in a war paint pattern before exiting the hall. She does this by walking over the tightly packed mess of heads clustering at the front of the stage. After that, Katrice disappears into the Parisian night. For a time the world believes she killed herself. Nothing is seen of her. Then photographs are sent anonymously to the webmasters and mistresses of Cuspidor websites.
The photographs are of cemeteries. In the background among the graves, or partly out of shot each contains a figure in black with the face turned away. It’s not long before fans claim this is Katrice Bryden, the dark phantom of the graveyard. As months pass the photographs show a greater sophistication with an adept use of light, shade, depth and varying kinds of focus. In turn these give way to video clips of cemeteries: they are either shot at dusk or in the dead of night. In the Diary Of A Cuspidor Troubadour on one site the webmistress helpfully describes how the video clips arrived in the post, bearing no return address. At first the films were recorded on domestic VHS tapes, later they graduated to disk for ease of transfer to computer.
As the brandy level in the bottle falls and the mist thickens outside my window I learn more. Message boards record the opinions of fans as to who filmed the graveyard scenes (unequivocally Katrice Bryden); how they were filmed (video cameras and concealed cameras of the kind used in security operations – either triggered by timer or infra-red sensor). The ‘how’ posed no real meat for discussion it was the ‘why’ that Cuspidor’s fans (or more properly Bryden’s fans) find fascinating. Message boards run to several thousand pages. Messages are rational, quirky or downright lunatic.
So why does a rock star runaway spend her time video taping cemeteries? With ultra close-ups of gravestones where chiselled letters look like valleys on the surface of Mars, where mossy growths form green mountain ranges and a strand of leafless ivy becomes some eldritch tentacle
. Then cutaways to whole armies of headstones that mass on hillsides waiting for the signal to attack the world of the living beyond the cemetery gate.
Again why?
DRUGS. Alcohol. Schizophrenia. Neurosis. Mum and Dad FUCKED her up. STAR struck. Inverted conceit. Boredom. Renewed LUST for the limelight. Creative bankruptcy masquerading as ENIGMA. Fear of DEATH. Love of DEATH.
Take a pin and stick it in … as the saying goes. Certainly fans leaving their comments on the message boards mention all these and more. I realize, also, that any one of those messages could be an anonymous note from the elusive, maybe even allusive, Katrice Bryden. After reading these for two hours my eyes feel as if I’ve had sand rubbed in them. I drain my glass of brandy, register surprise that half a bottle’s gone, then go wash my face in the bathroom.
The place is so quiet I can feel the weight of all that silence pressing down into the back of my neck. Even the cat sleeps like it’s dead, not wanting to go out on a cold, fog-bound night like this.
And as I sit down at the computer again it happens like it sometimes does. The hundred-year-old floorboards together with exposed roof beams suddenly exhale. The room fills with the aromatic odours of spices – wormwood, frankincense, capsicum, cinnamon and coriander – accompanying it or perhaps even driving it, is a breath of deadly cold air and I wonder if a window has been opened. A wave of ice rolls at me. I shiver. I feel as if the cold hasn’t flowed around me but glided through me in a way that’s somehow unearthly.
I check the windows. All closed. Skeletal cranes prowl the docksides. Unaccountably, I think there are more of them out there in the fog than the last time I looked.
Perfidious brandy, I tell myself.
Back at the computer I down the spirit while I navigate yet more Cuspidor websites.
Cuspidor Conquistador. More rhyming headings. These are a list of video clips. I download. Gothic chimes shimmer from the speakers, the sound of water dripping in dark, underground places. Spectral murmurs overlay the chimes. Rambling prayers for dying children. A dark hymn for the soon-to-be-dead. Hmm … Mandrake Mantra. This is a track from Cuspidor’s first album: Omnia Exeunt In Mysterium.
Music coils round the room to melt gracefully into the scents of those exotic spices. Katrice’s vocals slide over my skin with the sensuous caress of warm oil. She doesn’t so much sing as exhale the lyric, allowing those blood-red lips to shape the words.
They are strange, those films appearing on the screen before me. Strange because nothing happens in those views of bleak graveyards. Nothing happens. Yet they manage to exude an air of tension. Images of a thousand staring gravestones, that say ‘We are waiting … we are waiting …’ Nothing happens. But there’s a sense of pressure building; water backing up behind a dam wall that crazes with hairline cracks. And I think of the time I was ten; that moment just before the house was struck by lightning. When my family suddenly looked at each other as we sensed the voltage rise inside the room, the hairs rose on our arms, our scalps tingled just before the electric bolt melted the heart of the television set and tore the front door in two. These clips were perpetually that second before the bomb goes boom, before lightning strikes, before the dam wall collapses.
Nothing moves on screen. Winter trees stretch up; fleshless hands reaching out of graveyard soil. Forbidding skies. Stone angels in sombre poses.
I stare at film after film until the gravestones loom out of the screen at me; stubby fingers of eternally cold stone. Eager to seize me and take me down into grave soil to lie there in a tangle of black bones and coffin wood.
Perfidious brandy. I push the glass away from me.
It’s two in the morning. My eyes feel dry-welded to the screen. The ghostly sounds of Cuspidor roam around the place; dark sounds in a gloom-filled space that seethes with shadow. The mist presses face-shapes to the window. ‘The last one,’ I tell the computer as I hit ‘enter’. The computer groans as it downloads another video clip. I notice it bears yesterday’s date.
Like the film I saw this morning of the naked couple who gnawed lumps from their faces this is a surveillance camera concealed in a tree. I look down through twigs to a gloomy area of grass that bristles with gravestones. Directly below, carved sphinxes flank a tomb.
‘Nothing will happen….’
I tell myself this as the music fades. I’m wrong. It does.
As if it’s me sitting on the branch looking down I see a figure walk beneath. I see the top of a head, shoulders, a pair of feet nothing more.
The figure disappears briefly then returns. For a second it glances round as if to make sure there’s no one else in the cemetery. Then it looks up. I flinch back as two blazing eyes lock onto mine. Hell, it’s as if the computer screen has become a two-way eye: he can see me as well as I see him.
The stranger’s aged around thirty, has neatly combed black hair; he’s wearing a shirt and tie. A city trader taking a short cut through a cemetery? Maybe. But why leer up into the tree like that?
He has something in his hand. A coiled rope; it’s a day-glo yellow that a rock monkey might use. With his eyes blazing into mine he throws the rope straight up at the camera. I see what he’s doing. He’s lobbing the line over the branch where the camera has been fixed. Maybe he’s not seen it? Or if he has he doesn’t care. His mind’s fixed on the job in hand. Shortening one end of the rope he ties the other round the head of the carved animal that guards the tomb.
Continue?
I hit ‘enter’. It takes forever to download. Waiting, I glance through the window at tidal waves of mist rolling against the glass. At last, the screen blazes with light.
Out of focus, a blazing skull fills the screen. The jaw works; I hear a throaty sound vibrating the speaker. A lusty sound; his excitement’s getting the better of him.
I decide that the face I’m seeing is the sharp-dressed man in ultra close up as he (I guess) stands on the tomb below the tree and looks up as he makes final adjustments to the rope he’s flung over the branch. As the skull-face recedes the lens finds its focus automatically and the image is sharp again.
Yes, I see now. The man stands on the tomb; his hair is still immaculate; he’s removed his jacket to reveal a crisp shirt and blue tie.
I can still hear his excited breathing; his eyes twinkle like he’s found a new lover. His hands work at the short end of the rope.
He’s making a noose, I tell myself, feeling cold. He’s going to hang himself.
Ah. If only it was that simple.
He looks up, perhaps little more than a metre from the camera, his head and upper-body filling the screen. I see him raise his hands to his face. In those hands isn’t a noose. It’s a hook, a large shining steel hook, with a shank that’s as thick as my thumb; the same they use to hang pigs in slaughterhouses. Face beaming like he’s the cleverest sod in London he grips the hook in both hands, the point gleaming absurdly bright. Then he pushes the point into the soft skin under his chin. It doesn’t give way easily. I watch as he pushes with all his might, his arms shaking, his teeth gritted, his pulse beating in his neck, his eyes blazing with excitement.
Pop! The skin breaks and suddenly with the surface resistance gone it looks so easy. The steel hook penetrates the underside of his jaw – in, in, in.
I watch, and his eyes seem to watch mine as the hook goes through the jaw, through the floor of the mouth. A second later the hook slips out between his lips – a silver tongue to point at me.
Then he steps back, his arms out straight. It’s not a long fall before the rope snaps tight, shaking the branch and the camera lashed to it, so the image explodes into a shrapnel burst of darting colours before it’s still again.
Like a circus stunt, he spins there, arms out, his face straight up into the camera. Blood sprays fine like an aerosol, misting the air crimson, drenching the head of the statue. And all the time he’s staring up at me and giggling like it’s the funniest trick in the world.
Continue?
This time I close do
wn, and go to bed.
In the morning the mist lies like death on the water. Radio news talks of the bizarre suicide of a thirty-three year old man in a London cemetery. I pull the duvet over my head, and try to sleep some more.
Match this soundtrack: Hendrix’s indigo-hued Third Stone From The Sun powers the earthward plunge out of the sky down toward that crust of cold brick and even colder stone. Imagine the picture mated to those sounds wrought by the Electric God. Descending guitar notes, the death-cry of feedback. See through a phantom’s eye as we come ghosting down through roof tiles, through a cobwebbed attic where in 1972 a boy locked himself into a trunk and was never seen again; down through bedrooms where lovers lived and died. Continue down through the kitchen where an acolyte of Jack The Ripper played his own gory games in 1923. With ghost music rolling like thunder dive deeper into the cellar where erect Victorian gentlemen met for dark entertainments. Plunge down through the brick-floor, down past the wrinkled carcass of a V2 Nazi missile that still oozes toxic fluids into the soil, and where it awaits its own bone-shattering appointment with destiny three years from now. Slip deeper and deeper down to the iron gut of the Tube. Now seep through the tunnel wall to board the train thundering through a bellyful of darkness.
And there I am. Riding the Tube beneath this Goblin City. The time’s approaching three in the afternoon. It’s the day after I watched the death-by-hooking on the internet. From the radio news, I learnt that the man hanged himself from the hook in the graveyard around three days ago and that the body was only recently found. So that gave Katrice Bryden time to retrieve the concealed video camera from the tree, transfer the footage to a computer of the man hanging there like hooked fish. Then send it anonymously to half-a-dozen Cuspidor websites, where no doubt webmasters copied the video sequence before transmitting it to other websites. Like a plague bug, film of the suicide would go on duplicating itself worldwide.