For the stage he penned a segment of Kim Newman and Sean Hogan’s The Hallowe’en Sessions, and his play The Chapel of Unrest was performed at London’s Bush Theatre in 2013, starring Jim Broadbent and Reece Shearsmith.
Volk’s short stories have been selected for The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Best British Mysteries and Best British Horror, and he has been a finalist for the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Awards. His first single-author collection, Dark Corners, was published in 2006, and it was followed by Monsters in the Heart in 2013, both from Gray Friar Press.
“Sometimes ideas come in one fell swoop, and so it was with ‘Whitstable’,” explains the author. “I woke up one morning and said to my wife that I had an idea for a story: Peter Cushing is approached by a young boy who mistakenly thinks he is the great vampire-hunter Van Helsing of the Hammer films, and the boy needs his help because he thinks his stepfather is a vampire.
“My wife said, ‘And of course, he isn’t.’ And I immediately thought, ‘You’re right. He isn’t. That is much more interesting!’ And so it became about a Cushing who feels sorely inadequate to rise to the challenge of being the kind of hero the boy needs so desperately. Facing monsters when you have a screenplay, he finds, is much easier than facing one who exists in real life.
“From the beginning, I knew instinctively this had to happen at the lowest ebb of Peter’s life, after his wife and soulmate Helen died – when he was grief-stricken and turning down all offers of work. In time, as we know, he threw himself back into acting, but I couldn’t help wondering what had happened to change his mind, to enable him to go on? That developed and possibly became the most important thematic strand in the story, in the end.
“But if ‘Whitstable’ is in any way a tribute to the ‘Gentle Man of Horror’, as some have said, I am more than honoured.”
Smile for the camera.
—Old Saying
HE COULDN’T FACE going outside. He couldn’t face placing his bare feet into his cold, hard slippers. He couldn’t face sitting up. He couldn’t even face opening his eyes. To what? The day. Another day without Helen in it. Another day without the sun shining.
For a moment or two before being fully awake he’d imagined himself married and happy, the luckiest man on earth, then pictured himself seeing her for the first time outside the stage door of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane: she a shining star who said a platypus looked like “an animal hot-water bottle” – he in his vagabond corduroys, battered suitcase, hands like a Dürer drawing, breath of cigarettes and lavender. Then as sleep receded like the waves outside his window, he felt that dreadful, dreaded knot in his stomach as the awareness of her no longer being there – her non-presence – the awful, sick emptiness, rose up again from the depths. The sun was gone. He might as well lie there with his eyes shut, because when his eyes opened, what was there but darkness?
Habitually he’d rise with the light, drink tea, take in the sea-view from the balcony, listen to the wireless and sometimes go for a swim. He did none of these things. They seemed to him to be activities another person undertook in a different lifetime. Life. Time. He could no more picture doing them now than he could see himself walking on the moon. The simplest tasks, the very idea of them, seemed mountainous. Impossible.
Yet it was impossible, also, to lie there like a dead person, greatly as it appealed to do so. It was something of which he knew his darling would so disapprove, her reprimand virtually rang in his ears and it was this that roused him to get up rather than any will of his own.
His will was only to …
But he didn’t even have the strength for that.
She was his strength, and she was gone.
Helen. Oh, Helen …
Even as he sat hunched on the edge of the bed, the burden of his loss weighed on his skinny frame. He had no choice but to let the tears flow with the same cruel predictability as his dream. Afterwards, weaker still, he finally rose, wiping his eyes with now-damp knuckles, wrapping his dressing gown over baggy pyjamas and shambling like something lost and misbegotten towards the landing. A thin slat shone between the still-drawn curtains onto the bedroom wallpaper. He left the room with them unopened, not yet ready to let in the light.
A half-full milk bottle sat on the kitchen table and the smell hit him as soon as he entered. The sink was full to the brim, but he poured the rancid liquid in anyway, not caring that it coated a mound of dirty plates, cups, saucers and cutlery with a viscous white scum.
He opened the refrigerator, but it was empty. He hoped the milkman had left a pint on the doorstep: he hated his tea black. Then he remembered why he had no groceries. Joycie did it. Joyce, his secretary, did everything for “Sir”. He pictured again the hurt in her eyes when he’d told her on the telephone she would not be needed for the foreseeable future, that she needn’t come to check that he was all right because he was all right. He’d said he needed to be alone. Knowing that the one thing he didn’t want to be was alone, but that was not the way God planned it.
Nasty God.
Nasty, nasty God …
He shut the fridge. He didn’t want food anyway. What was the point? Food only kept one alive and what was the point of that? Sitting, eating, alone, in silence? What was the point of that?
He put on the kettle. Tea was all he could stomach. The calendar hung facing the wall, the way he’d left it.
The letterbox banged, startling him, shortly followed by a knock on the wood. It was Julian the postman, he thought, probably wanting to give his condolences in person. He held his breath and had an impulse to hide. Instead he kept quite still. Julian was a sweet chap but he didn’t want to see him. Much as he knew people’s wishes were genuine, and appreciated them, his grief was his own, not public property. And he did not want to feel obliged to perform whenever he met someone from now on. The idea of that was utterly repellent. How he dealt with his inner chasm, his utter pain and helplessness, was his own affair and other people’s pity or concern, however well-meaning, did not make one iota of difference to the devastation he felt inside.
He stood furtively by the doorway to the hall and watched as a package squeezed through and fell onto the welcomemat, and beyond the glass the silhouette of the postman departed.
It had the unmistakable shape of a script.
His heart dropped. He hoped it was not another one from Hammer. He’d told them categorically via his agent he was not reading anything. He knew Michael had newly found himself in the chair as Managing Director, and had a lot on his plate, but could he really be so thoughtless? Jimmy was a businessman, but he also counted him a friend. They all were. More than friends – family. Perhaps it was from another company, then? Amicus? No. Sweet Milton had his funny American ways, but would never be so callous. Other companies were venal, greedy, but not these. They were basically gentlemen. They all knew Helen. They’d enjoyed laughter together. Such laughter, amongst the gibbets and laboratories of make-believe. Now, he wondered if he had the strength in his heart to meet them ever again.
He picked up the package and, without opening it, put it on the pile of other unread manuscripts on the hall-stand. Another bundle sat on the floor, a teetering stack of intrusion and inconvenience. He felt no curiosity about them whatsoever, only harboured a mild and uncharacteristic resentment. There was no small corner of his spirit for wonder. They were offers of work and they represented the future. A future he could not even begin to contemplate. Why could they not see that?
He sighed and looked into the mirror between the hathooks and what he saw no longer shocked him.
Lord, the make-up job of a master. Though when he sat in the make-up chair of late he usually had his hairpiece to soften the blow. Never in public, of course: he abhorred that kind of vanity in life. Movies were different. Movies were an illusion. But – fifty-seven? He looked more like sixty-seven. What was that film, the part written for him but one of the few he turned down? The Man Who Could Che
at Death. But he couldn’t cheat death at all, could he? The doctors couldn’t, and neither could he. Far from it.
Dear Heavens …
The old swashbuckler was gone now. Fencing in The Man in the Iron Mask. The Sheriff of Nottingham. Captain Clegg of Romney Marsh … He looked more like a Belsen victim. Who was it said in a review he had cheekbones that could cut open letters? He did now. Cheeks sucked in like craters, blue eyes sunk back in deep hollows, scrawny neck, grey skin. He was positively cadaverous. Wishful thinking, he thought. A blessing and a curse, those gaunt looks had been his trademark all these years, playing cold villains and erudite psychopaths, monster-hunters and those who raised people from the dead. Yet now the only person he desperately craved to bring back from the grave he had no power to. It was the one role he couldn’t play. Frankenstein had played God and he had played Frankenstein playing God. Perhaps God had had enough.
The kettle whistled and the telephone rang simultaneously, conspiring to pierce his brain. He knew it was Joycie. Dear Joycie, loyal indefatigable Joycie, who arrived between dry toast and correspondence every day, whose concern persisted against all odds, whose emotions he simply couldn’t bear to heap on his own. He simply knew he could not speak to her, hear the anguish in her voice, hear the platitudes even if they weren’t meant as platitudes (what words could not be platitudes?) and, God knows, if he were to hear her sobs at the end of the line, he knew it would tip him over the edge.
Platitude:
An animal that looks like a hot-water bottle.
Hearing Helen’s laughter, he shut his eyes tightly until the phone stopped ringing, just as it had the day before. And the day before that.
Quiet loomed, welcome and unwelcome in the mausoleum of his house.
He stared at the inert typewriter in the study, the signed photographs and letter-headed notepaper stacked beside it, the avalanche of mail from fans and well-wishers spilling copiously, unattended, across the floor from the open bureau, littering the carpet. He pulled the door shut, unable to bear looking at it.
Hardly thinking what he was doing, he re-entered the kitchen and spooned two scoops of Typhoo into the teapot and was about to pour in boiling water when he froze.
The sudden idea that Joyce might pop round became horrifically possible, if not probable. She wasn’t far away. No more than a short car journey, in fact, and she could be here and he would be trapped. Heavens, he could not face that. That would be unbearable.
Instantly he realized he had to get out. Flee.
Unwillingly, sickeningly, he had no choice but to brave the day.
Upstairs he shook off his slippers, replacing them with a pair of bright-yellow socks. Put on his grey flannel slacks, so terribly loose around the waist. Needing yet another hole in the belt. Shirt. Collar gaping several sizes too big now, too. Tie. No time for tie. Forget tie. Why was he forced to do this? Why was he forced to leave his home when he didn’t want to? He realized he was scared. The scaremonger, scared. Of this. What if he saw somebody? What if they talked to him? Could he be impolite? Unthinkable. Could he tell them how he really felt? Impossible. What then?
He told himself he was an actor. He would act.
Back in the hall he pulled on his winter coat and black woollen hat, the kind fishermen wear, tugging it down over his ears, then looped his scarf around his neck like an overeager schoolboy. February days could be bright, he told himself, and he found his sunglasses on the mantelpiece in the living room sitting next to a black and white photograph of his dead wife. At first he avoided looking at it, then kissed his trembling fingertips and pressed them gently to her cheek. His fingerprints remained on the glass for a second before fading away.
He walked away from 3 Seaway Cottages, its curtains still drawn, giving it the appearance of a house in slumber. As a married couple they’d bought it in the late 1950s with money he’d earned from The Hound of the Baskervilles, because having a place by the sea – especially here, a town they’d been visiting for years – would be good for Helen’s breathing. “You have two homes in life,” she’d said, “the one you’re born in and another you find,” and this one they’d found, with its big, tall windows for painting under the heavens and enjoying the estuary views across Shell Ness, clapboard sides like something from a whaling port in New England. They were blissfully happy here, happier than either of them could have dreamed. Now it seemed the house itself was dreaming of that happiness.
He paused and breathed in deeply, tasting brine at the back of his tongue.
Good, clean fresh air for her health.
The mist of his sighs drifted in short puffs as he trudged along the shingle, patchy with errant sprigs of grass, in the direction of the Neptune pub, the wind buffeting his fragile frame and kicking at the ends of his dark, long coat. Above him the sky hung Airfix blue, the sky over a cenotaph on poppy day, chill with brisk respect, and he was small under it.
Automatically he’d found himself taking the path he and Helen had taken – how many times? – arm in arm. Always arm in arm. His, muscular and taut, unerringly protective: hers light as a feather, a spirit in human form, even then. If he had grasped and held her, back then … stopped her from … Stupid. Foolish thoughts. But his thoughts at least kept her with him, if only in his heart. He was afraid to let those thoughts be blown away. As he placed one foot in front of the other he felt that stepping from that path would be some sort of blasphemy. That path was his path now, and his to tread alone.
His heart jumped as he noticed two huddled people coming towards him, chequered green and brown patterns, their scarves fluttering. A man and wife, arm in arm. He felt frightened again. He did not want to see their faces and fixed his eyes past them, on the middle distance, but in his peripheral vision could tell they had already seen him and saw them look at each other as they drew unavoidably closer. His chest tightened with dread.
“Mr Cushing?”
He had no alternative but to stop. He blinked like a lark, feigning surprise. Incomprehensibly, he found himself smiling.
“Sorry.” The man had a local accent. “Bob. Bob and Margaret? Nelson Road? I just wanted to say we were really sorry to hear about your wife.”
He took Bob’s hand in both of his and squeezed it warmly. He had no idea who Bob was, or Margaret for that matter.
“Bless you.”
The man and woman went on their way in the direction of West Beach and Seasalter and he walked on towards the Harbour, still smiling. Still wearing the mask.
He was an actor. He would act.
Act as if he were alive.
The sky had turned silver-grey and the wind had begun whipping the surface of the water. After passing the hull of the Favourite, that familiar old oyster yawl beached like a whale between Island Wall and the sea, he sat in his usual spot near Keam’s Yard facing the wooden groynes that divided the beach, where he was wont to paint his watercolours of the coast. But there was no paint box or easel with him today. No such activity could inspire, activate or relax him and he wondered if that affliction, that restless hopelessness, might pass.
If it meant forgetting Helen, even for an instant, he hoped it would not.
Usually the music of the boats, the flag-rustling and chiming of the rigging, was a comfort. Today it was not. How could it be? How could anything be? When there was nothing left in life but to endure it?
He took off his sunglasses and pulled a white cotton glove from his pocket onto the fingers of his right hand, momentarily resembling a magician, then lit a John Player unfiltered. It had become a habit during filming: he said, often, he didn’t want to play some “Nineteenth-Century Professor of the Nicotine Stains”. As he smoked he looked down at his bare left hand which rested on his knee, lined with a route-map of pronounced blue veins. He traced them with his fingertips, not realising that he was enacting the gentle touch of another.
He closed his eyes, resting them from the sun and took into his smoker’s lungs the age-old aroma of the sea. Of all the senses
, that of smell more than any other is the evoker of memories: and so it was. He remembered with uncanny clarity the last time he and Helen had watched children building “grotters” – sand or mud sculptures embellished imaginatively with myriads of oyster shells – only to see the waves come in and destroy them at the end of a warm and joyful Saint James’ Day. Clutching his arm, Helen had said, “Such a shame for the sea to wash away something so beautiful.” He’d laughed. His laughter was so distant now. “Don’t worry, my dear. They’ll make more beautiful ones next year.” “But that one was special,” she’d said, “I wanted that one to stay.”
The fresh salt air smarted in his eyes.
“I know who you are,” said a disembodied young voice..
Startled, he looked up and saw a boy about ten years old standing at an inquisitive distance, head tilted to one side with slats of cloud behind him and a book under his arm. He and Helen had no children of their own, or pets for that matter, but felt all the children and animals in the town were their friends. He remembered talking to the twins next door and asking what they wanted to be when they grew up – clergyman, sailor – and them innocently turning the question back at him, albeit that he was already in his fifties: What do you want to be when you grow up? Good question, for an actor. But this one, this boy, he didn’t recognize at all.
“You’re Doctor Van Helsing.”
The man’s pale-blue eyes did not waver from the sea ahead of him.
“So I am.”
The boy threw a quick glance over his shoulder, then took a tentative step nearer. He wore short trousers, had one grey sock held up by elastic and the other at half-mast. Perhaps the other piece of elastic had snapped, or was lost.
Best New Horror, Volume 25 Page 41