He returned home to fetch his bicycle, the Jaguar of more joyful days secreted in the garage these many months: memories preserved in aspic, too painful to be given the light of day. He swapped his woollen fisherman’s hat for a flat cap, grabbed a heavier scarf, and, with the library book in his pannier, rode via Belmont Road and Millstrood Road to the boy’s house – what appeared to be a two-bedroom bungalow on the far side of the railway track.
The February sun was low by now and the sky scrubbed with tinges of purple and ochre. He chained his cycle to a lamp post opposite and stayed in the protective shadow between an overgrown hedge and a parked white van (FOR ALL YOUR BUILDING NEEDS) as he scrutinized the place from afar.
The garage had a green up-and-over door with a dustbin in front of it on the drive. The lawn grass was thin and yellowing. He could see no garden ornaments and the flatness of the red brick frontage was broken only by a plastic wheel holding a hosepipe fastened to the wall. Two windows matched, a third didn’t and the door, frosted glass and flimsy, was off-centre.
He looked at his watch – Helen’s ring tinkled against the glass face – and placed it back in his pocket. He blew into his hands, preparing himself for a long wait, hoping he had enough cigarettes left in his packet and, no doubt because of the worry this engendered, lit one, no doubt the first of many. He might of course smoke the lot and find this turned out to be a fruitless enterprise. There was no guarantee the man went out on a Saturday night, though a lot of men normally did. He was not dealing with, perhaps, the most normal of men.
After fifteen minutes or so a dog-walker in a quilted “shortie” jacket passed and Cushing pretended he was mending a puncture with his bicycle pump, never more conscious that his acting had to be as naturalistic as possible. Believability was all. The Labrador sniffed his tyres but the dog-walker, who resembled the sports commentator Frank Bough, yanked the lead and progressed on his way with only the most cursory of nods.
Cushing fixed his bicycle pump back into place and looked over at the house.
Hello. The light was on in the hall now, beyond the frosted glass. Shapes were donning coats. The door opened. He ducked down behind the white van, craning round it to watch a man in a donkey jacket tossing his car keys from hand to hand, a few steps behind him a boy in a football strip following him to a parked Ford Zephyr. Reflections in the windscreen stopped him from getting a good look at the man’s face.
Cushing quickly hid in case Carl, whose eyes were on the road ahead, saw him. He listened for the engine to start and waited for it to sufficiently fade away.
As soon as it had, he crossed the road and knocked on the front door. He could hear the television on inside, so rapped again slightly harder. “All right, all right, keep your hair on …” A woman approached the glass and he could already make out she wore a red and white striped top, a big buckle on a wide belt and bell-bottomed jeans.
The door opened to reveal someone who, he imagined, thought herself attractive and feminine but who seemed to have endeavoured to make herself anything but. Her hair was drastically pulled back from her forehead in a ponytail, her clothes did nothing to enhance her figure, and there was nothing graceful or pretty in her demeanour or stance. He thought of the quiet perfection of Helen by comparison and had to quickly dismiss it from his mind. He reminded himself of his abiding belief that all women should be respected and accorded good manners at all times.
He took off his flat cap. “Mrs Drinkwater?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t know me …”
“Yeah, I do.”
His eyebrows lifted. “Oh?” Was she a fan of Hammer films, then, like her son?
“Of course I do. I’ve seen you on the telly.”
Fool. He’d been the BBC’s Sherlock Holmes over a number of televised adventures alongside Nigel Stock as Dr Watson. Naturally she recognized him. His portrayal of the great detective, after all, had been widely acclaimed.
“Morecambe and Wise,” the woman said.
Oh dear, he thought. How the mighty are fallen. Serve him right. The Greeks had a word for it: hubris. The sin of pride.
“You live round here,” she said.
“That’s quite correct. My name’s Peter Cushing.”
He extended a hand, which the woman saw fit to ignore.
“I know.”
“May I come in, please? It’s about your son Carl.”
“What about Carl? What’s he done now? I’ll kill him.”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing, Mrs Drinkwater. Nothing wrong.” He showed her the copy of Movie Monsters which he’d tucked under his arm. “I found this library book of his and I’m returning it, you see.”
She took the book off him and looked at it but didn’t move or speak, even to say thank you.
He said again, equally politely: “May I come in?”
More from being taken unawares than hospitality, the woman stepped back to allow him to enter. He cleaned his shoes on the mat while she walked back into the room with the television on, without asking him to follow her. Though his own manners were faultless, he refused to judge others on their inadequacy in that area. It was often down to their upbringing, he believed, and that could not be their own fault. We are all products of our pasts: none more so than he himself. Some said he was stuck in it. Another, unwanted, era.
But he merely believed politeness and courtesy between human beings was a thing to be valued, in any era. Treasured, actually.
The ironing board was out and she was making her way through a pile of washing, which she resumed, clearly not about to interrupt her workload on his account. She did not offer him a cup of tea or coffee and did not turn down the TV, but simply carried on where she’d left off, halfway through a man’s shirt, tan with a white collar, Cliff Richard’s variety show the activity’s accompaniment. The ceiling was textured with Artex swirls, the fireplace with its marbleeffect surround boarded up with a sheet of unpainted hardboard, and a patio door led to a garden enclosed by fencing panels.
He saw a recent edition of the Radio Times lying on the arm of the sofa, its cover announcing the introduction of a new villain into the Doctor Who pantheon. Dear old Roger Delgado looking as if he’d stepped straight from a Hammer film with his widow’s peak and black goatee. He thought of Jon Pertwee’s dandyish Doctor compared to his own “mad professor” saving the Earth from the invading hoards of soulless Daleks. He thought how easy it was to save the world, and how hard, in life, to save …
“Why d’you want to talk about him?”
“It was Carl who chose to talk to me, in fact. May I?” He noted she seemed confused by the question, so sat himself on the sofa anyway, his voice having to compete with Cliff Richard’s. “It was curious, very curious indeed. You see, he approached me earlier today confidently believing I was actually Doctor Van Helsing, the character I played in the Dracula films for Hammer several years ago.” He chuckled. “Many years ago, actually. How time flies …” He noticed a stack of books on the cushion next to him: The Second Hammer Horror Films Omnibus with Christopher Lee on its orange cover offering his bare chest to a victim, The Fifth and Seventh Pan Book of Horror Stories, the Arrow paperback editions of Dracula and The Lair of the White Worm. “I see he’s a fan …”
“Monster mad. I wish he wasn’t. Not healthy if you ask me. None of it.”
He smiled. “Dear lady, that’s my bread and butter you’re talking about. For my sins.”
She didn’t match his smile and still didn’t turn down the television.
He loosened his scarf. The gas-effect electric fire was cranked up and the skin on his neck was beginning to prickle.
“Carl loves you very much, Mrs Drinkwater.” He chose his words carefully. “He cares an awful lot about what happens to you. The more he was talking to me, it was very clear he felt you were in danger. And he was in danger too. Very much so.”
She grunted, straightening her back then slamming down the iron and running it back and forth up th
e sleeve. “He’s got an active imagination. Always did, always will. Got his bloody father to thank for that. Telling the kid those stories of his – ghosts, goblins, monsters – scaring him, keeping him awake. What do you expect?”
“I don’t think stories hurt people, Mrs Drinkwater. Not really hurt.”
“How do you know?” She set the iron on end with a thump. Rearranged the garment roughly. “Have you got children?”
“No. Sadly.” He and Helen had not been blessed in that way.
“Then you haven’t sat up with them crying and hugging you. Over stories. Or anything else for that matter, have you?”
“That’s very true.”
“So you don’t know anything about it, do you?”
“No, I don’t. You’re quite right. But …” He gazed down at the carpet and noticed he was still, rather ridiculously, wearing his bicycle clips. He reached down and took them off, idly playing with them as he talked, as if they were a cat’s cradle or a magic trick. “But what he said concerns me. I’m sorry. You must understand, surely? Children don’t say things without reason.”
“Don’t they? Kids can be cruel. You lead a sheltered life, you do. Kids can get at you in ways you wouldn’t even dream of. If they think you deserve it.”
“Can they?”
The iron hissed. “You should hear what I get in the ear every day. Dad this, Dad that.”
“He idolizes his father.”
“Yeah, the father who sneaked him into the cinema to see that Dracula you’re so proud of when he was eight years old. Oh yeah. Bought a ticket, pushed the bar of the emergency exit, let him in. Like the teddy boys or mods do. To an X film. His son. Don’t tell me that helped any problems he had in school or anywhere else, because it didn’t. He was scared to death of the world before that and, you know what? It made him more scared. That’s why he’s playing silly buggers.”
Peter Cushing rubbed his eyes. Dare he ask the question? He was compelled to. He had come here. He would never forgive himself if he didn’t.
“Do excuse me for asking this, but has your boyfriend ever … ever raised his hand to Carl? Hurt him in any way?”
“No.” The woman cut into his last word. “Les loves that boy.”
Loves.
“How long have you known him?”
“Long enough.” She stiffened. “Why?”
He loves that boy.
“As I say … Carl seemed, well, I have to be honest, Mrs Drinkwater … troubled.”
“Well there’s nothing troubling him in this house, I tell you that for nothing. It’s all in his bloody mind.” The shirt flicked to and fro, the iron hitting it repeatedly like a weapon of violence. She turned her body to face him, hand on hip. “Why do you make those horrible films anyway? Eh?”
“To be truthful I hate the term ‘horror film’. Car crashes and the concentration camps and what’s happening in Northern Ireland, that’s horror. I think of the fantasies I star in as fairy tales or medieval mystery plays for a new generation. If you take the ‘O’ from Good and add a ‘D’ to Evil, you get God and the Devil – two of the greatest antagonists in the whole of history. And Van Helsing is important because he shows us Good triumphs. After all, Shakespeare used horrific images in Titus Andronicus, and mankind’s belief in the supernatural in Macbeth, and nobody belittles the fellow for that. I think the best so-called ‘horror’ shows us our worst fears in symbolic form and tries to tell us in dramatic terms how we can overcome them.”
“Yeah, well.” Her face, turning back to the ironing board, betrayed an ill-concealed sneer. “I didn’t pass enough exams to understand all that. We didn’t have books in our house. My dad was too busy working.”
He sighed. “Mrs Drinkwater, I’m quite sure you don’t want this discussion and neither do I. Please just put my mind at rest, that’s all I ask. Truly. Just talk to Carl. Listen to him.”
“You’ve listened to him. Do you believe him?”
“My dear, I’m just an actor. It’s his mother he should talk to.”
“Or a psychiatrist.”
“If that’s what you genuinely think.”
“It’s no business of yours what I think.”
“You’re quite right, of course.” He stood up, putting his bicycle clips in his pocket. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have come, but please believe me when I say I did so only out of concern for Carl. I apologize profusely if I’ve upset you. That wasn’t my intention at all.”
“You haven’t upset me,” she said.
“I’m sorry for disturbing you. I’ll see myself out.”
He thought the conversation was over, but he’d barely reached the door to the hall before she said behind his back: “Why don’t you make nice, decent films, eh?”
He turned back with sadness, both at the slight and his own ineffectiveness. He knew she felt accused and belittled by his very presence, undermined by his unwanted interference and presumptions and posh voice and good manners and wanted to attack it, all of it.
“Don’t you think I’ve got enough problems with him, without this … ? Without him talking to strangers … ? Talking rubbish … ?”
His blue eyes shone at her.
“I can’t believe he’s saying what he’s saying, honest to God. He’s got no business to.”
Her cheeks were flushed now, voice quavering on the edge of losing control. “I swear, Les is good as gold with that kid. Better than his real dad, by a mile. You want to know who really hurt him? If you want to know the truth, his father did. He did that by buggering off. And there isn’t a day goes by I don’t see that in my son’s eyes, so don’t come here accusing me or anybody else when the real person isn’t here anymore.” He could see she fought away demons, the worst kind – and tears.
Instinctively, he walked over and took her hands in his. “I beseech you, my dear. Talk to your son.”
Appalled, she backed away from him.
“I don’t need to talk to my son.”
She reached the wall and couldn’t back away any further. His face was close to hers and he looked deeply into her eyes, his own vision misty, almost unable to get out the words he must.
“My dear, dear girl. I’ve lost someone I loved. Please don’t do the same.”
She snatched away her hands as if the touch of him was infectious.
“How fucking dare you!” She shoved him in the chest. Then shoved him again. “Get out of here.” He staggered backwards, feeling it inside the drum of his old, brittle ribs. “Get out of my fucking house! Get out!”
Gasping for breath and words, he stumbled to the front door as she berated him with her screams and obscenities and later remembered nothing of getting to his bicycle or getting from Rayham Road to Seaway Cottages except that he had to stop a number of times to wipe the tears from his eyes and by the time he got indoors a thin film of ice had formed covering his cheeks.
A film played in the darkened theatre of his brain. A Hammer film, but not their usual fare. Not set in Eastern Europe in the 19th century, but in Canada in the present, even though it was filmed at Bray. The opening shot of darling Felix Aylmer, who’d played his father in The Mummy, ogling two young girls through binoculars. A vile creation. A “dirty old man” in common parlance – hideously inadequate euphemism that it was.
“He made us play that silly game …”
Square-jawed Patrick Allen as the father. “If he touched her, I’ll kill the swine!” Gwen Watford, an actress who always appeared to be on the verge of tears. “You expect me to be objective when a man has corrupted my daughter?”
Corrupted. Precisely.
He knew many films where the house outside town harboured inconceivable evil, and had starred in quite a few where the villagers marched up to it demanding justice or revenge, but in this picture fear has the upper hand. The family is powerful. The hero, weak. The community knows how old Mr Olderberry “can’t keep his eyes off children”, but the townsfolk choose to keep their heads firmly in the sand. Even the police t
hink it must be the girls’ own fault.
The child’s own fault.
The very concept was odious. As odious as the sight of gummy old Felix pursuing the girls through the woods, staggering like Boris Karloff after the one in pigtails, stepping over the overturned bicycle. Wordlessly pulling the rowing boat containing the two children back to shore by its slimy rope …
A girl sat up in the tree and it didn’t seem at all peculiar but it worried him. It was an oak tree, old and sturdy, with deeply wrinkled bark. The little girl didn’t seem distressed but she did seem determined, a strong-willed little soul. She wore a frilled collar like a Victorian child and he thought she was clutching a toy or teddy bear but couldn’t make it out clearly through the leaves and branches. “Come down,” he called to her. He looked around but there was no one else about. Only him. So it was down to him to do something. “Come down.” But the girl wouldn’t come down. She just looked down at him, frowning seriously. “Come down. Please,” he begged. But still she didn’t move. A man came along. A man he didn’t know. The man said to him: “What are you doing?” He couldn’t answer. He got confused, he didn’t know why, but before he could answer anyway, the man stepped closer and went on: “You know exactly what you’re doing don’t you? Don’t you?” Rage and aggression built up in the man’s face and his tightly pursed mouth extended to became a vicious-looking yellow beak. And this beak and another beak were prodding and poking at a boy’s short trousers, snatching and tearing out gouts of underwear. The underwear was made of paper. Newspaper. And somehow he was upset that what was written was important, the words were important.
He woke to the sound of seagulls snagging and swooping above his roof.
At the best of times, he despaired at their racket. And these were not the best of times. Now the noise was no less than purgatory. As a child in Surrey he’d thought they were angels, but now he held no illusions about the species. The creatures were the very icon of an English seaside town, but they were relentless and without mercy. He’d once seen a large speckled gull going for a toddler’s bag of chips, almost taking off its fingers, leaving it bawling and terrified in its mother’s embrace. They were motivated by only selfish need and gratification, thought only of their own bellies and their own desires. It seemed almost symbolic that we never ate sea birds, knowing almost instinctively that their insides would be disgusting, inedible, rank, rancid, foul. It seemed to Cushing that their screeching was both a bombastic call to arms and a cry of pain.
Best New Horror, Volume 25 Page 43