by C Harrison
PART 3: THE FALL
26 (June)
The excesses of the trip to New York were over. The band were back in Europe and taking time out at a rented house in Yvoire, overlooking Lake Geneva. Rob Wallet suggested the band lie low for a while and adjust, take stock, reflect on the process. He thought he'd done all right delivering Moencker (in a roundabout way), who had himself delivered Sony (in a less than satisfactory way), who had in their own peculiar and excessive way, delivered a plan. Not The Plan, mind, the mysterious secret arrangement that Almer should have explained, but never did thanks to an impromptu performance that put his bar on the map for a whole seventy two hours. No, a plan, which may have some influence on The Plan. But anyway, Wallet wasn't sure about either and so spent his time gazing like a piece of classical sculpture across the sunless waters of Lake Geneva. Besides, the public needed time to replenish its capacity to be shocked. There are only so many songwriters who can be devoured before people switch off and start talking about bread and cheese again.
For Elaine, adjusting and taking stock were bywords for boredom and spent her time surfing channels on French television and the internet. One evening, having come down from the mountains to the south of the village, she found Wallet with his feet up, monopolising the television and watching some catch up rubbish: a subtitled interview with an Englishman calling himself Terence Pearl.
"He says we're gods," Wallet said as Elaine wandered in to the lounge.
"Goddesses, surely," she said dropping onto the settee next to him. Wallet could smell the forest on her clothes; the aroma of bark and berries made more pungent and sweet by the moistening of light rain that had been falling all day.
On screen, in a shiny transparent television studio a smartly dressed, slightly balding man was explaining why Toten Herzen were a suicide cult. "That's Susan's favourite word at the moment," Elaine said.
"He's mad as a meringue," said Wallet. "He talks like a Victorian. All thee and thy and thouest. Ex-grammar school teacher, I reckon."
"Sounds local too. That's a Suffolk accent."
Wallet listened more closely as the interview cut to a film of Terence Pearl walking down the quiet high street of a small English town. He jauntily passed the wool shop and a store selling preserves and home made jams, resisting the urge to doff his hat at the local maiden aunts inside, before springing into a bookshop. In the mullioned bay window was a small stack of books: Pearl's books. 'In League with Nosferatu: The Record Industry's Secret Vampire Conspiracy.'
-
Pearl
"There's no shame in admitting that it's difficult trying to find a publisher who is prepared to take my work seriously. These are challenging times for the publishing world. If I wanted to sell my book in an ironic jokey way like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, no problem. But In League with Nosferatu isn't that type of book, I fear."
Voiceover
"Eventually, a local publisher was prepared to print a limited run of Terence Pearl's book. And here in Stow on the Wold, Peerview's is the bookshop utilising the power of technology to spearhead a new printing technique."
Will Peerview
"It's available on our website and we print it on demand when an order is received. These new ways of printing are helping small independent bookshops like this and we're finding we can be both retailer and publisher which is giving us a much needed second income stream."
Voiceover
"The book is also available as an ebook, in a range. . . ."
-
"What the fuck! Look at that guy there." Elaine sat forward to get a closer look at the television. Onscreen, as the camera panned around Peerview's bookshop Terence Pearl was visible in the background talking to a customer. "Get over yourself. That guy is spitting image of Pete. Hey, quick get a load of this." Elaine shouted to the others to come through to the lounge, but by the time they appeared the camera was looking somewhere else and the mysterious customer was gone in a breath. Pearl was shown buying a copy of his own book and leaving the shop.
"What?" Susan recognised the alarm and appeared first.
"You missed it," said Elaine slapping the settee. "This guy here was in a bookshop and he was talking to someone. . . ."
"What's so odd about that?" said Susan.
"Pete!" Elaine repeated. Wallet wasn't in on the secret yet.
"What do you mean?" asked Susan.
"It obviously wasn't him, but there was a guy talking to this Terence Pearl character who was the spitting image of Peter Miles." Dee arrived expecting more information than she was given.
There were no further clues to the mystery shopper. Why he was around Terence Pearl (whose own name meant nothing)? What he was doing in a bookshop in Stow in the Wold (nowhere near Ipswich)? Why he should show up in an article about Nosferatu's biography or whatever hokum this Pearl guy had found under his hat?
"Pete was always a plain looking guy though," said Dee. "Half the world could have passed for his brother."
Elaine grimaced her disapproval. "There's similarity and there's spitting image and then there's uncannily alike," she said.
"The guy being interviewed. Who was he?" asked Susan.
"Terence Pearl," said Wallet. The aroma wafting off Elaine was filling his head as she squirmed on the settee. "He's written a book about vampires in the record industry."
"Right," said Susan. "Another crank." She shook her head and followed Dee out of the house.
Elaine's face had solidified into an intense hypnotic stare as if willing the doppelganger to step out of the television, identify himself and explain what was going on.
"I'll try to find the interview again on the net. See if we can freeze the picture. Get a better look at him."
"It was him," she whispered.
"I'm not arguing with you. If we can get the video we can identify him properly."
Elaine vanished, but the forest left its scent behind with a softly pungent suggestion scattered on the atmosphere like incense. Inspired by it, Wallet took a walk outside and sniffed the late night air around the stony beach of the lake. He was drawn towards Susan's lonely silhouette on the edge of the lake. Her outline was more classical than his, crafted by a much finer sculptor.
"No reflection here either," he said crunching across the gravel. She shook her head and continued looking out at the distant lights of Nyon on the opposite shoreline. With the lake surface so calm, the lights looked close enough to walk to. "Somewhere over there Byron and Shelley, Mary Godwin and Polidori shared a house writing ghost stories and Frankenstein."
"Is that supposed to comfort me?" asked Susan.
"No. I just thought it was a nice coincidence. Polidori over there writing a vampire novel."
Susan gasped. "You're impossible, do you know that?"
"No, I didn't know that. Has that character freaked you out as well? Elaine looks like she's seen a ghost."
"Well maybe she has. Maybe we all did. And the Villa Diodati is that way." Susan jabbed her thumb over her left shoulder before turning back to the house.
If reflections had still been possible Wallet's would have been the only one floating on the weird waters of Lake Geneva where Polidori prematurely wrote his vampire novel. But then, no he didn't write it here, it only came later on. They all gave up except for Shelley's better half who saw a monster and conjured up a tale that floored the rest of them. He found a flat stone and lobbed it, low down, across the surface of the lake, watching it kiss the water five times before sinking. The ripples radiated towards him then silently disappeared into the evening.
The Independent
Sony Deal Collapses
Music industry gives up on Toten Herzen. Final nails in the coffins
Rock band Toten Herzen have been informed by Sony that they will not be offered a lucrative reunion contract following the deaths of their songwriting team and a murder charge against their marketing strategist, Linda Macvie. In a statement issued to the media from their New York headquarters, Sony's Acting Ch
ief Commissioning Officer Todd Moonaj described the band as 'cursed', uncooperative and lacking remorse following the gruesome murders of two of their management team.
"Since day one," Moonaj said in a charged press conference, "Toten Herzen have been a difficult act to manage. They had come to Sony with unrealistic expectations considering they had been away from the music scene for so long, they were still in a nineteen seventies mindset and expected everyone around them to put aside the realities of the day and join them in a fantasy world of their own making."
The deaths of their songwriting partners, Grammy nominated Torque Rez and Mike Flambor, followed by the arrest of Linda Macvie for the alleged murder of Leo Travner, a freelance pilot, persuaded Moonaj to pull the plug on a recording deal and concert tour that was rumoured to be worth around thirty million dollars.
It isn't the first time the band have been surrounded by violent behaviour and strange deaths. In the seventies, they were the victims of their own publicity stunt when an alleged fan killed them all in a vampire styled ritualistic slaying in Highgate Cemetery in north London. In the same year, the band's manager Micky Redwall was killed by his own dogs at his home near Ipswich, but rumours persisted that he may have been murdered by someone acting on behalf of the band. Last month the fan at the centre of Toten Herzen's faked deaths in 1977, Lenny Harper, was found decapitated by police in Germany. (The murder of 14 yr old Anthony Rawls in Boston in a similar style, whose head was left at the scene of the Rez and Flambor slaying, has not yet been linked to the band according to the NYPD.)
A spokesman for the band, ex-music journalist Rob Wallet, confirmed that Toten Herzen were disappointed by the news and that they would still be looking for another deal and continue with their planned comeback. He also quashed rumours that the band were being framed for the murder of the pilot of the plane. "The rumour is coming from the accused. You can draw your own conclusions from that," said Wallet.