Hell Train

by Christopher Fowler

  HELL TRAIN

  Christopher Fowler

  SOLARIS

  For Kim Newman,

  who unwittingly set the

  train in motion.

  First published 2012 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN (ePUB): 978-1-84997-317-5

  ISBN (MOBI): 978-1-84997-318-2

  Copyright © 2012 Christopher Fowler

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  Also by Christopher Fowler

  Roofworld

  Rune

  Red Bride

  Darkest Day

  Spanky

  Psychoville

  Disturbia

  Menz Insana

  Soho Black

  Calabash

  Plastic

  Breathe

  Paperboy (Autobiography)

  BRYANT & MAY

  Full Dark House

  The Water Room

  Seventy Seven Clocks

  Ten Second Staircase

  White Corridor

  The Victoria Vanishes

  Bryant & May On the Loose

  Bryant & May Off the Rails

  The Memory of Blood

  COLLECTIONS

  The Bureau of Lost Souls

  City Jitters

  More City Jitters

  Flesh Wounds

  Sharper Knives

  Personal Demons

  Uncut

  The Devil in Me

  Demonised

  Old Devil Moon

  ‘There is little chance for a

  person to exercise the imagination

  today in this complex, programmed

  society we have.’

  Peter Cushing

  ‘For a while,

  we really were a family.’

  Christopher Lee

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE SCRIPT

  IT LOOKED LIKE a house from a horror film, and it was.

  As the red MG bounced along the narrow country lane, Shane Carter cleared condensation from the windscreen and Down Place appeared before him like a slightly down-at-heels fairytale castle.

  The damp A-Z in the glove box had been missing the page he’d needed most. The secluded track that led away from Windsor and the A4 had been un-signposted and a devil to find, but at its end appeared an extraordinary bow-fronted 17th century mansion that sat by the banks of the Thames, surrounded by elms and willows, encircled by curlews and crows and geese. Its crenelated battlements had received a fresh coat of white paint some while back and the building had been renamed Bray Studios—apparently Hammer was once again looking for ways to save money, and had turned it into a sound stage.

  Lately the grand house had stood before cameras so often that it was a wonder cinema audiences didn’t greet it as an old friend when they watched unsuspecting victims clatter up its drive, peering nervously at its darkling windows, framed against thunderstruck skies. He’d heard that Hammer was good at this sort of thing, re-dressing buildings so that they could be used over and over again.

  He took the approach slowly, savouring the appearance of the building through his windscreen. Bernard Robinson, the studio’s production designer, was a master at using the mansion’s rooms for each of his films, lightly making them over with new drapes and furniture. Staircases were covered and corridors cut in half, gardens were sown with gravestones and transformed into cemeteries, bedrooms became morgues and libraries, cellars and mausoleums were turned into laboratories and surgeries. Within a few hours, an ordinary sitting room could be reshuffled, ready to go before the cameras as a Gothic asylum. The men and women who worked at the Hammer Film Studios made small marvels.

  But Hammer, he’d also heard from friends over at Universal in Los Angeles, wasn’t the studio it had once been. The writing was on the wall. The horror boom was coming to an end. Kids were getting wise to all the old tricks. They were laughing instead of gasping. Even the critics had stopped throwing up their hands in horror, and were dismissing the films within a few bored lines.

  Shane drove his rented MG into the gravelled courtyard, respectfully avoiding a spray of stones, and ratcheted up the handbrake. He swung his leather briefcase from the passenger seat and headed for the building’s main entrance.

  Only in England, he thought, tilting his head. Hollywood had the brash frontage of MGM, but one of Britain’s leading film studios—at least, now that Rank appeared to be gearing down production—had found a home within an old country house. And not—he liked this part—through any sense of heritage or its own inflated self-importance, but simply because it was cheaper to be based here, and its bosses could motor from their Knightsbridge homes in under an hour. Out here it feels like 1935, he thought, not the Fall of 1966. The world is changing, but not in jolly old England.

  For a working studio, the place seemed oddly quiet. There was no sound other than the patter of falling rain and the racket of crows. There was no-one to meet him in the chilly wood-panelled reception hall, so he made his way to the first floor. Security was non-existent. Here he was greeted by an awkwardly tall young woman who rose from her desk to shake his hand with excessive vigour.

  ‘You must be Mr Carter, such a pleasure to meet you. We’re enormous admirers of your films. Please do come in. I’m Emma Winters, Mr Carreras’ assistant. You’re a little earlier than we expected. Can we get you a cup of tea?’

  He had heard it was rude to refuse tea in England. ‘Thank you,’ he said, sitting down. Odd that she used the plural when mentioning the company, as if they were an ordinary English family and he had simply come for an afternoon visit to their house. It made a refreshing change from schlepping through the backlot to the icebox air-conditioning of Hollywood studios, exchanging false pleasantries with men who wished him dead.

  Walking around the oak-beamed room, he found himself standing before a set of framed monochrome photographs, each one featuring a familiar face. Peter Cushing as Doctor Frankenstein, Christopher Lee as Dracula, and beside these kings of horror a royal gallery of character actors and starlets: Nigel Hawthorne, Andre Morell, Ingrid Pitt, Veronica Carlson, Barbara Shelley and the ubiquitous, endearing Michael Ripper, who seemed to play every servant and innkeeper in the Hammer world, here seen in a ludicrous piratical costume in Devil Ship Pirates. Shane imagined walking into the studio canteen and finding them, all these familiar faces assembled in the morning, ready to start work on another mummy, werewolf or vampire film.

  Shane had grown up on the monster movies of the nineteen fifties and had eventually worked as a script editor on Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations for AIP, who copied the idea of reusing lush widescreen sets and creating a stable of stars from Hammer. In place of the avuncular Cushing they had the eye-rolling Vincent Price, and for Hammer’s straight man, Francis Matthews, they had chosen the newcomer Jack Nicholson.

  Like Hammer, AIP employed a regular roster of directors, lighting cameramen, set designers, makeup artists, prop-builders and wardrobe mistresses to give their films a distinctively familiar look. The two studios were virtual mirror-images of one another, so it made sense to come here, especially since he was out of Corman’s company now. He’d complained about the studio’s cost-cutting techniques once too often, and found himself to be less irreplaceable than he’d im
agined.

  He’d been meaning to take a trip to England to see his sister, who had married an English architect and was living in Hampstead, and had hit upon the idea of calling on Hammer to see if there was any chance of finding work with them. It was a notoriously closed shop, but he had talked to an old girlfriend who worked as a stenographer in Wardour Street, and she had put him directly in touch with Michael Carreras, who seemed to be the most senior production executive, although nobody could remember his actual job title.

  ‘My dear fellow, so sorry to keep you waiting!’ Jovial and rubicund, with heavy black glasses, a shock of thick greying hair and a black moustache that made him look slightly disreputable, Carreras was nattily dressed in a grey striped suit and silk tie, and strode cheerfully toward him with an outstretched hand. In the other he was holding a fat cigar. ‘We’ve been having a bit of a to-do with the censor this morning—but when are we not?’

  ‘I’ve heard a few stories about British censorship,’ said Shane. ‘We have the same kind of problems, I assure you.’

  ‘Yes, our chief censor John Trevelyan is a lovely man, utterly starstruck although he’d be the last to admit it, but we’re forced to play a rather absurd game with the board. They’re forever on about the amount of blood we use, the viscosity, colour and so on. John absolutely refused to budge on Plague Of The Zombies, and he’s been getting twitchier than ever lately. Ministers are probably breathing down his neck. So I’ve been looking at some revised sequences.’

  ‘What are you working on?’ asked Shane, following Carreras to his office.

  ‘It’s been a busy year for us. We finished Frankenstein Created Woman a couple of months back and should be wrapping The Mummy’s Shroud next week. Having a bit of difficulty getting the final sequence right. How to crush a mummy head. We’ve been experimenting for weeks. We’ve made quite a mess of the workshop, I can tell you. Come on, grab yourself a seat. Has anyone offered you tea?’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’

  ‘Jolly good.’ Carreras seated himself opposite. ‘We’re trying to produce four horrors a year, but scheduling is always tricky and right now we seem to have a full stable and no riders, as it were.’

  Shane was unfamiliar with such oblique sporting metaphors, and Carreras was forced to translate. ‘Everyone’s here, raring to go. Freddie Francis is itching to direct something new, Peter and Chris are pretty much twiddling their thumbs—Peter’s in Whitstable, but that’s just a few hours away, and we’ve some lovely girls lined up for the screamers; the female roles. Alas, there’s no script. Hence my pleasure in seeing you today.’

  Have I misheard? Shane wondered. Am I being offered the chance of a job just like that?

  ‘I don’t know whether you’re familiar with any of my work,’ he began. ‘I haven’t had a chance to update my CV.’

  ‘But of course,’ said Carreras. ‘We’re huge admirers of the Poe adaptations. All those lovely rich colours, quite startling. Roger’s a man after our own hearts, frightfully clever at cutting corners and making money.’ It sounded rather a backhanded compliment. ‘I’m never quite sure where those films are meant to be set—Italy, possibly? The set designs seem to be Verona meets Vegas.’

  ‘I was really only a script doctor on those,’ Shane admitted. ‘But I wrote a couple of other films that I’m kind of pleased with.’

  ‘Ah yes, Edge Of Night and The Creature In The Lighthouse. Both jolly good, I thought. Shame you had to show the creature in that last one.’

  Shane was amazed that anyone had heard of them. They had shown in a handful of cinemas, and only in the less particular states. He was pretty sure there had been no international distribution. ‘I agree, we should never have revealed him,’ he said apologetically. ‘The lighting was too bright. And Laurel Canyon makes a crummy substitute for the Spanish coast. You could see the joins in his rubber suit. I still cringe in the last reel.’

  ‘Oh come now, my dear fellow, you’re being too modest. We spent years scraping by with the most frightful monsters. We’ve always been bailed out by clever sets and lighting. We reuse absolutely everything, make no secret of it. Roy Ashton, our make-up man, has pulled us through by the skin of our teeth, although I felt he never really got The Gorgon right. All those silly rubber snakes bobbing about. A shame, because I thought it was a terribly good script. Then we have the benefit of James Bernard’s marvellous music.’

  ‘And actors who can lift the flattest dialogue,’ Shane said, adding hastily, ‘not that the dialogue—’

  Carreras raised a hand. ‘I know, dialogue is sometimes our weak point. It rather lacks poetry, I feel. Freddie would shoot scripts without any dialogue in them at all if he could. I’m sure he thinks it just gets in the way. That’s why he’s so marvellous with suspense. There’s no-one to touch him when it comes to constructing a tense sequence. But I’m the first to admit that he has a bit of a tin ear when it comes to conversation. And we’ve another problem.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  Carreras exhaled smoke and studied the ceiling. ‘Come now, you’re an insider, I’m sure you’ve heard things.’

  ‘Well, I did hear you’ve kind of become victims of your own success. Spawning imitators and the suchlike.’

  ‘God, yes. So you probably know about our biggest rival, Amicus.’

  ‘Didn’t they do Dr Terror’s House Of Horrors a couple of years back?’

  ‘Yes, and they had quite a success with it. Terribly flat, some of the stories, awfully hammy acting, but an appealing idea. We rather foolishly loaned them some of our brightest stars. Milton Subotsky has some very fixed ideas about how such films should work. He makes them very cheaply.’

  ‘Right, the portmanteau thing.’

  ‘Purely an economic expedient, I assure you. If you shoot four or five stories of about fifteen or twenty minutes each and link them together with a wraparound segment, you don’t need your stars to attend the entire shoot, just the portion in which they appear. Very easy to schedule, and of course you can pay most of them cash in hand at the end of the week. But you know—’ He made a sour face, ‘handing out grubby fivers in an envelope and gluing the resulting footage together in the editing suite, that’s not at all our style. We like to think we’re several cuts above that. Then there’s Tony Tenser’s little company, Tigon. Using our business model but shooting on real locations to save a bob or two. Some of his stuff is quite good. We’re having to look to our backs a bit more than we used to.’

  ‘But you still lead the pack.’

  ‘Yes, but for how much longer? The truth of the matter is, we’ve run out of monsters. Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy, Dr Jekyll, the Phantom Of The Opera, the Wolfman—well, that one never really flew in my opinion, although Ollie Reed was terribly good in Curse Of The Werewolf—but you can’t keep doing them forever. I do feel we’re rather stuck in a rut.’

  ‘Surely there are other Victorian horror classics that haven’t been filmed?’

  ‘Yes, but this is 1966. Nobody wants to see films based on the kind of books their grandparents used to read. The Beatles have changed the playing field somewhat. Milton has this idea that a teenaged horror film would make money—he’s touting around some dreadful treatment involving an undead pop group—but we’re committed to a more polished product. What do you think of our films?’

  ‘I guess I’ve always thought of them as fables. They have a kind of graceful quality.’

  ‘Exactly so. Have you ever read proper fairy tales? I mean Hans Anderson, Grimm and the suchlike. They’re incredibly gruesome, birds plucking out eyeballs, girls cutting off their toes to fit slippers. The only reason why John Trevelyan allows us to get away with so much Kensington Gore is because we bring a bit of class to the proceedings. And of course we’re usually careful not to set the stories in England. It takes the edge off all the nastiness if you set your tale somewhere on the other side of Europe, where most cinemagoers have never been.’

  ‘Why don’t you take something from your ri
vals and add new monsters? Do it in the style you’ve become famous for.’

  ‘Easy to say, dear chap, rather harder to pull off I fear.’

  ‘It’s something I’ve been thinking about tackling for a while now.’

  Carreras removed the cigar from his mouth and examined the end to make sure that it was still aglow. ‘Really? What do you think, then? Is this sort of thing up your street? It takes a certain kind of mind to come up with it. Would you be up for the job?’

  ‘You mean write a script? Would I? Hell, yes.’

  ‘Nice to hear a bit of keenness around here. We’re a close-knit band, but it can get a tad oppressive at times. In each other’s pockets, as it were. There’s one snag, though.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘We have a couple of projects in development and two films set to go between winter and spring, but Peter and Chris like to be at home for Christmas, so we tend to shut down around then. Which leaves us with nothing right now.’

  ‘I’m not working on anything in particular at the moment,’ said Shane. ‘I could start immediately.’

  Carreras checked the production calendar on his desk. ‘Well, it’s Monday now, so if we said Friday?’

  Shane was puzzled. ‘For what?’

  ‘The finished script.’

  ‘Five days?’ Four and a half if you count this morning, he thought, panicked.

  ‘Then we could get it off to Freddie and the cast over the weekend, get some feedback—we’d have to submit it to John at Soho Square in advance of shooting, just to make sure we don’t waste any time covering sequences that have to be cut out, although you might like to include a few extra-gruesome scenes for him to get his scissors around—let him think he’s guarding the nation’s morals. Then we take it over to the artists in Wardour Street to see what they can come up with in the way of marketing. We like to get the posters sorted out first, just to get everyone on the same page. Often our artists will come up with something quite outrageous that ends up in the film. Oh, and there are the Americans to keep happy, but if they like the idea they’ll give us approval over the phone.’