“Too right. They do need to be protected,” the creature that was Gledhill said. “From old men talking to young boys on the beach. Boys all alone. What did you say to him, eh? That’s what the police are going to ask, don’t you think, if you go to them?” His voice fell to a foetid, yet almost romantic, whisper. “That’s what people are going to ask. What were they talking about, this old man who lives all alone? This old man who makes horrible, sadistic films about cruelty and sex and torture, someone who’s never had any children of his own, they tell me, someone who adores other peoples’ children? This old man and this innocent little boy?”
His skin prickling with the most immense distaste, Cushing refused to be intimidated, even though the nauseous combination of beer and cigarette breath in the air was quite sickening enough. “I’m quite aware he is innocent, Mr Gledhill. And I’m quite aware what you might say against me.”
“Good. And who do you think they’ll believe, eh? Me or you?”
“They’ll believe the truth.”
“Then that’s a pity. For you,” the mouth said. It wasn’t a face any more. Just an ugly, obscene mouth.
Cushing did nothing to back away. He knew that once he did that, physically and mentally, he was lost. But he was backing away in his mind like a frightened rabbit, and he feared that Gledhill could see it in the clear rock pools of his eyes. Frightened eyes.
“I should knock you into next week,” Gledhill breathed. “Just the thought of what you were doing, or trying to do, makes me want to puke, d’you know that? But I’m not someone who takes the law into their own hands. I obey the law, me. I’m a law-abiding …”
Though he wanted to cry out, Cushing stood his ground. He was resolute, even if he didn’t feel it. He felt crushed, battered, clawed, eviscerated. The truth was, he knew, if he gave into impulse and stepped away, then he was afraid that would mean running away. And what might follow that? His visitor was clearly big enough and strong enough to barge through a door held by a flimsy old man with no effort whatsoever. Yet he hadn’t. Why, the old man dared not contemplate. Sheer inability, not bravery, glued him to the spot. But how much of that could the other eyes looking back at him see?
“You need to drop this, I’m telling you,” Gledhill said. “For your own good, all right? I’m doing you a favour coming here. You don’t get it, do you?”
“Oh, I do. I ‘get it’ entirely. Thank you for clarifying any doubt in my mind.”
Cushing instantly wished he’d kept that thought to himself, but now there was no going back and he knew it.
With all his strength he shoved the door hard in the hope the latch would click and he’d turn the key in the Chubb to double-lock it before Gledhill got a chance to push from his side – but Gledhill had already pushed back, and harder. He was a builder, labourer, something – heathen, Cushing didn’t know why that word sprang to mind, but he didn’t want him in his house, he wasn’t a reader he was a destroyer of books, and people. He fell back from the door, panting, a stick man, brittle. Then he did decide to run, the only thing he could do as it flew open, banging against the wall.
He dashed to where the telephone and address book sat on the hall table and snatched up the receiver and put it to his ear, swinging around to face the man in the doorway as his finger found the dial.
To his astonishment Gledhill stopped dead, his feet seesawing on the threshold, his boots pivoted between toe and heel.
“Sorry! Sorry. Sorry. I’m really sorry, mate! I shouldn’t have talked to you like that. Shit! That, that’s the booze talking. I don’t normally get like that. I don’t normally say boo to a fucking goose, me.” The swear word pierced Cushing like a blade, deep and hard and repellent. He knew people used it, increasingly, but he hated such foul language. But now he had the measure of the man, and the difference between them, and it gaped wide. In the full glare of the hall light, scarlet sweater radiant, a bloody breast swimming in the older man’s vision, Gledhill wiped his long, shiny sluglike lower lip. “But I don’t like people making allegations against me, okay? When they’re lies. Complete lies, all right? What normal man would?”
Les loves that boy.
The low burr on the telephone line change to a single long tone and Cushing tapped the cradle to get a line.
“Please go. Immediately, please. I don’t want to continue this conversation.”
“Mate, honestly …”
“I’m not your ‘mate’, Mr Gledhill, quite frankly.”
His heart thudding in his ears, Cushing dialled with a forefinger he prayed was steady. The wheel turned anticlockwise with the return mechanism, waiting for the second “9”.
The cold had infiltrated and he felt it on his blue-lined skin as he stared at the long-haired man framed in his front doorway against the February night and the other did the same in return. Neither man dared give his adversary the satisfaction of breaking eye contact first. Gledhill hung onto the door-frame, meaty hands left and right. Passingly, Cushing thought of Christopher Lee in his big coat as the creature in Curse. But all that monstrousness on the outside, for all to see.
He dialled a second time, straight-backed, not wanting to show the stranger he was afraid, but he was afraid. Of course he was afraid. He wasn’t a young, athletic man any more, sword-fencing beside Louis Hayward or leaping across tables. Far from it. If this man chose to, cocky, powerful and threatened, he could stride right in and beat him to a pulp, or worse. There was no guarantee that a man prone to other acts, despicable acts, would be pacified by a threat of recrimination at a later date. Or a mere phone call. Criminals did not think of consequences. That was one of the things that defined them as criminals. There was nothing, literally nothing, to stop his unwelcome guest killing him, if he decided to.
For the third time he placed his index finger in the hole next to the number ‘9’ and took it round the circumference of the dial.
“All right,” Gledhill said. “All right. I’ll say this, then I’m going. There’s nothing going on here, okay? It’s as simple as that. Nothing for you to be involved in. Nothing. Okay?”
Emergency. Which service do you require?
Cushing stared. Gledhill stared back.
Emergency. Hello?
Gledhill laughed with a combination of utter sadness and utter contempt. “Jesus Christ. You’re as loopy as he is. You’re losing your fucking marbles, old man.”
Hello?
Then Gledhill left, slamming the door after him and the hall shook, or seemed to shake, like the walls of a rickety set at Bray, and Cushing did not blink and did not breathe until he was gone, and his after-image – the halo of redness – departed with him. Cut!
Hello?
“I’m most awfully sorry,” he whispered into the receiver. “I thought I had an intruder. I can see now that’s not the case.” He tried to cover the tremor he knew was in his voice, and tried to make it light and chirpy. “I’m perfectly safe. Thank you.”
Cushing hung up, re-knotted the cord of his dressing gown, hurried into the sitting room and parted the drawn curtains with his fingers, a few inches only, to see – nobody. Even the last fragment of light and colour had faded from the sky. It was now uniformly black and devoid of stars.
The dryness in Cushing’s throat gave him the sudden compulsion to breathe, which he thought a very good idea indeed but strangely an effort. It was as if he had done a tenmile run, or heavy swim. Not only was his chest still thumping like a kettledrum, he could not get air into his lungs fast enough, and lurched, quite light-headedly, needing to prop himself on the arm of a chair in case he should fall. Sweat broke on his brow. He undid the buttons at his throat but they were already undone. He opened more, but his fingers were frozen and useless, fumbling and befuddled and half-dead.
This man who makes horrible, sadistic films about cruelty and sex and torture …
Someone who’s never had any children of his own, they tell me … Someone who adores other peoples’ children …
This
old man and this innocent little boy …
Liquid surging up his gullet, he gagged and stumbled from the room to the little lavatory under the stairs, pressing his handkerchief to his mouth, but gagging nonetheless.
After he had vomited on and off for half an hour he half-sat, half-lay in the dark, drained and pathetic, too weak to move. What was the point of moving? He was clean here. He was untouched, though his fingers tingled from the bleach he had thrown liberally down the pan and the acid of it almost made him retch all over again. At least here, huddled on the cold linoleum, he could imagine the Domestos coursing through his veins, ridding him of the foul accusation that had contaminated his home. Here he could bury himself away from vile possibilities, horrid dangers, unspeakable acts and, yes, responsibility to others. What did others want of him anyway? He despaired.
What did his conscience want of him? To go to the police – with what? The fantasy of a backward child? A child with a vivid imagination, or psychiatric problems, or both? And what would that do but cause trouble, of the most horrifying nature, not least for himself? An old man talking to a young boy, he’d been accused of being by the boyfriend. The insinuation turned his stomach anew. What was wrong with that? How dare people misinterpret – but misinterpret they would: they wanted to misinterpret, that was the vile thing. Then again, what if he himself was misinterpreting? He could see it now, in a flash-forward, a dissolve: FAMOUS ACTOR UNHINGED BY GRIEF. If he stepped forward and spoke up, he’d be just as likely the one arrested. Sent to prison. Shamed. His picture all over the newspapers. If he was pathetic now, how much more pathetic would he be behind bars, or even in the witness box? But what churned in his belly more than all of that was the terrible thought that his failure to act would suit the true offender down to the ground. The creature would be free to continue his cynical, sordid depredations to his heart’s content. And that poor boy …
God …
He shut his eyes. He felt like the terrified Fordyce, the bank manager he played in Cash on Demand. Mopping perspiration from his brow. Prissy, emasculated, threatened. Affronted by the taunts of his nemesis. Goaded. His psychological flaws exposed. But that didn’t help. What could he do? He wanted, wanted so desperately for someone to tell him.
But who was there?
Aching and chilled, he clawed himself to his feet, clambered to the kitchen, poured himself lukewarm water from the tap, and drank. He needed Helen, his bedrock. Now more than ever.
He realized he felt so weak and ineffectual, not just now, but always. He remembered the spectacle of breaking down in tears in front of Laurence Olivier, thinking then, as he thought now: Am I strong enough? Am I strong enough for this?
Yes you are, Helen had reassured him. If you want to be. You’re worth ten of them, Peter. You’re strong enough for anything …
Back then, she’d nursed him through a nervous breakdown that had lasted a good six months. Dear Heaven, is that something this odious man could use against him now? His doctor’s records of psychological unbalance? He felt the terrifying possibility like another blow to his physical being. The awful likelihood of the dim past regurgitated, raked over in mere spite and venom. It would bring with it dark clouds, as it had done then.
Six months of misery it had been, for him and for Helen too, without a doubt. God only knew how she’d endured it, but she had. And he had endured it too, thanks to her, and her alone. How could it be, he’d wondered, that he, the husband, was supposed to protect her, and there she was, sacrificing everything completely selflessly so that he, this worthless actor, of all things, could pull through?
Then he could hear her voice again, even clearer this time:
Peter, you are completely unaware of your own value. I expect that’s why I love you, and so do so many of your friends and colleagues. Can you not see? You must think more of yourself, darling, as we do. You do not need the backbiting and jealousy of the court of King Olivier. Your heart is not suited to it, and I know your enormous talent will out … You just need the right opportunity to come along, and it will … You must believe that too …
Once again he remembered her love and sweetness and once again he felt devastated. He teetered to the living room and collapsed in a chair.
Through the doorway to the hall he could see the pile of unread scripts and it reminded him of the single day of shooting at Elstree, just over a month earlier, on Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, the eleventh of January, the day he’d had the phone call to tell him Helen had been rushed to Kent and Canterbury Hospital. His scenes had been hurriedly rescheduled but Helen had died of emphysema at home on the Thursday. There was no question of him returning to the production. The already filmed scenes with Valerie Leon were scrapped and the role written for him, that of the Egyptologist Professor Fuchs, given to Andrew Keir. Quatermass replacing Van Helsing. The curse of an ancient civilization: it seemed like ancient history now.
Yet clear as a bell was his memory of wandering out alone, all, all alone onto the deserted beach just after Helen had breathed her last from those accursed lungs of hers, the seagulls reeling and swooping and cackling, the gale-force wind hard in his face, the waves that crashed on the shingle sounding to him like a ghastly knell, the thoughtless pulse of the planet. And he’d sung “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”. He thought he’d gone a little mad that night.
Up above the world so high
Like a diamond in the sky …
He’d then found himself, unaware of the passage of intervening time, back at 3 Seaway Cottages, running up and down the stairs repetitively, endlessly, far beyond the point of exhaustion. To an impartial observer this might have given the appearance of madness too, but was anything but. In those moments he’d known exactly what he was doing. He’d run up, ran down, ran up again and so on in the vain hope of inducing a heart attack so that he might be reunited with her. He may have cursed God too, a little, that night under the stars. God didn’t approve of taking one’s own life, but damn God. He’d wanted to be with Helen and that was all he cared about. Then, racing up and down, up and down, he stopped dead as he realized the cruelty of it all. That, if he did commit suicide, he might find himself in purgatory, or in limbo, and separated from Helen forever. The crushing realization had hit him that that Hell would be even more unbearable than this, and he crumbled finally, spent.
Helpless, he’d found himself sitting on the stairs gasping for air, wheezing as she had wheezed, his lungs filling like bellows as he wept.
When the blazing sun is gone,
When there’s nothing he shines upon,
Then you show your little light,
Twinkle, twinkle, through the night …
But God, as they say, moves in mysterious ways. And soon afterwards he had found the letter. Heard her voice as he’d read it:
My Dear Beloved. My life has been the happiest one imaginable … Remember we will meet again when the time is right. Of that I have no doubt whatsoever. But promise me you will not pine … or, most of all, do not be hasty to leave this world …
He had shivered then at the terrible thought that he might have, stupidly, done something so contrary to her wishes. Helen wanted him to go on, and he would go on. He would do what she wanted. He would do anything for her.
Do not be hasty to leave this world …
That’s what she’d said to him. But the truth is, he thought, I didn’t have the courage then, and I don’t have it now.
Dear Peter, of course you do. Dying isn’t hard. Living without the love of your life is hard. That’s the hardest thing of all.
But now I am feeling more lost than ever … the child, the boy …
You care. That is your greatest strength. People feel it. They see it on the screen.
But this isn’t the screen. This is life.
You will know what to do. You make the right choices, Peter. Just believe in yourself. As I do, my darling. Always …
He remembered, as if being in the audience watching a scene on stage in a dr
awing-room play, his father telling him, without any note of malice or cruelty, as if it were a statement of fact like the earth revolving round the sun, that he, Peter, was forty and a failure.
Even the memory of the hurt made him take a quick, sharp breath. But he remembered also the way Helen had stood up to the old man and given him a piece of her mind. His father had never been talked to like that, and certainly not by a woman. The fellow hardly knew what had hit him. And afterwards, when the two of them were alone, what had she said to him?
You have to believe in yourself, Peter … Believe in yourself and your abilities and not be brought down by those lesser mortals who for some reason of their own want you not to succeed. God gave you an amazing gift, darling, and God wants it to soar, and so do I. Have faith in your talent. That’s all you need, Peter … Faith, and love …
The stink of bleach burned in his nostrils. It clung to the air and he knew he would not be able to rid the house of it for days. Perversely, he inhaled it deeply, as an act of defiance, determined to breathe in his own house, undaunted.
Faith and love were all he needed. Faith in himself, and the love of Helen, which he knew was immortal. That would be enough to get him through. Even this turmoil. Even this pestilence. He suddenly knew it. He was not weak. He was not pathetic.
With her courage, he could soar.
The floor of the interview room was concrete under his feet, the walls whitewashed, the single window set with bars beyond the glass. An old window. A window with tales to tell. If walls had ears, the saying goes. Indeed so, he thought. He wondered if it had once been an actual cell and how often names, jibes, scrawls, remarks, obscenities had been eradicated with a new coat of paint. As possible lives had been eradicated, set on this path or that, turned, curtailed, saved, doomed, the guilty punished, the innocent punished come to that.
There was nothing on the table in front of him but his hands, so he stood and paced with them clasped behind his back. They were still dry and cold from the walk. The sea, so often heralded as life-giving, ossified them. Made them into a mummy’s hands. Leather-like.
Best New Horror, Volume 25 Page 45