by Kim Newman
The late, enormously prolific Charles L. Grant wrote three books – The Long Night of the Grave, The Soft Whisper of the Dead and The Dark Cry of the Moon – as tributes to the vintage Hollywood monster movies he loved, in which a mummy, a vampire and a werewolf visited Oxrun Station, the haunted small town that recurs in Charlie’s work, and bothered successive generations of the community’s leading law-enforcement family. When asked to contribute something to a book published as a tribute to Charlie, I remembered these short, sharp, fun little books and wanted to pay homage to that small section of his output. When they first came out, Charlie said he wanted to get away from the then-modish introspection of many thick novels about monsters and get back to the idea that vampires, werewolves and the like were scary bastards. This little piece is a post-script to his trilogy, using one of the few major Universal Studios monsters he left alone. Now the enormously gracious, funny, gifted and genuinely heroic Charlie is no longer with us, the story has an added melancholy. I wrote it at the age (mid-forties) when those spared tragedies in early life have to get used to the idea that people we love won’t be around forever. Like many people I know, I was starting to suffer bereavements – parents, older friends, colleagues, even some contemporaries. That’s why this story is a fond meditation on all manner of meanings of the expression ‘passing on’ as much as it is a monster yarn – though, make no mistake, the monster here is one of the worst in the pantheon. As a footnote, it took me longer to come up with a title to fit Charlie’s ‘The Adjective Noun of the Noun’ template than it did to write the story.
ONE HIT WANDA
SOUNDSCAPE: WE ARE backstage at a nostalgia pop showcase. A band – Barry and the Breadwinners – are playing their set, and going down a storm with the elderly punters. We only dimly hear music and the crowd. As the monologue continues, the noise fades down – though there’s an option of layering in ghostly pop ululations (think ‘Johnny, Remember Me’ or any other Joe Meek-produced 1960s death record).
* * *
You want to hear about the song, of course. ‘Lonely One’. The Vanity Brothers. 1964. Twenty-seven weeks in the charts. Eight at Number One. That shower on now, Barry and the Breadwinners, they never had a Number One. Not that that’s Barry. It’s his – what? – grandson, by now. There’s one original Breadwinner in the line-up. His guitar isn’t plugged in. Poor sod’s been deaf for years. From playing that set over and over. You know what they say… nostalgia in’t what it used to be. Well, it in’t. I can talk, of course. The last remaining Vanity Brother. With me, it’s not the same set. It’s the same song.
‘Lonely One… left my only one… oo-ooo-ooo-oooh…’
When it was in the charts, people didn’t get it. They didn’t understand the Lonely One was not just ditched but dead. All that echoey spook stuff in the mix, that was just fab gear dreamy. No one thought about it. Me, least of all. The song’s a ghost story, not a love story. Only after Johnny… well, let’s not get ahead of it. I’ve only one hit and only one story.
So: flashback, wavy lines. It’s the sixties. Just starting to swing.
We’re the act. The Vanity Brothers. Billy and Johnny. He was older. Funny that, now you see me a wreck and think of him as a fresh-faced lad. Britain’s answer to whoever those other Brothers were. The name is Venitt, really. William and Jonathan, our Mum called us. The album was going to be Venitt Happens. We didn’t record enough for an LP. Not enough for an EP. The B-side of ‘Lonely One’ is Johnny singing the moon-moon-moon backing track of ‘Blue Moon’ with a void where the lead ought to be. I was shacked up with some bird and didn’t get to the session. No one ever flipped the platter anyway.
‘Lonely One’ and nothing else. That’s the Vanity Brothers.
Those days, you couldn’t chuck a brick on Denmark Street without hitting a group. Most still in school or college, with matching suits and winkle-pickers. Acne cream and hair just over the collar. Most of them never even got one song. Most of them ended up in Wimpy bars or estate agents offices. Only a few made it through to this afterlife. The Sixties Spectacular Showcase, on tour, forever.
We took what gigs we could get. School dances. Church fetes. The Black Kettle Club in Soho. No one came to the Black Kettle for the music. It was for girls. On stage, taking ’em off. And offstage, turning you on… if you had a roll big enough.
There’s a girl in the story. Bet you guessed that. At least, I think she was a girl, originally. By the time Johnny and me met her, she was – you know what Eddie Cochrane said – she was ‘somethin’ else…’
In the Black Kettle, they all had stage names. Tanya Hyde. Holly Hocks. Joy Rider. Fanny Fortune. And gimmicks. Cowboy hat and gunbelt. Jodhpurs and a whip. It’s not easy taking off a pair of jodhpurs and dancing to ‘Telstar’ at the same time.
Our girl was Wanda. Wanda Lust. Get it? You got it. Good. I saw her work papers once. The name on them was something like ‘Christolodou’. She’d come from Greece, after the war. Born on some island, Lord knows where or when. Her gimmick: an eyepatch. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? But it was enough. She was short, dark, quiet. Not fun. Not funny. Stripped slowly. Took off everything but the patch. Then she’d dance, naked, stroking the ribbon the way other strippers played with their g-string. Punters went wild. I mean, all she had was out there, on display. But one eye was covered. No one yelled ‘take it off’, the way they did when the other girls fiddled with their pearly bras. But everyone wanted to see what was under the black patch. Yeah, me too. Couldn’t tell you why. At the end of her turn, she’d undo the bow on the ribbon and pull the patch away… and the light went out. We never saw… what? A blind eye? An empty socket? Tattooed eyelids? Fill in the blank.
Wanda liked the groups. Most of the girls didn’t. Most strippers liked drunk merchant bankers with fat wallets or flash Yank businessmen with expense accounts or married Members of Parliament with mews flats in Knightsbridge.
The groups were filler… to give the punters time to buy ginger ale at champagne prices before the next proper turn. The next stripper. We were on all night, though. The Black Kettle Club was class for Soho. Only live music. So, me and Johnny – and Fred, the drummer everyone forgets – kept at it. Each girl had her own selection. Joy Rider, the horsey one, cantered about to ‘Camptown Races’. The others were all obvious. ‘The Streets of Cairo’ for the Dance of the Seven Veils. ‘A Mouse Lived in a Windmill’ for the little Dutch girl.
When we started, Wanda was stripping off to ‘I’ve Got My Eye on You, Sweetie-Pie’. Didn’t work. Without the lyric, no one recognised the song. No one got the joke. She asked us to come up with something. So, Johnny wrote ‘Lonely One’. For her.
I know it says ‘Venitt Bros’ on the label, but I wasn’t there when it was written. Wanda was. One Hit Wanda. Johnny said the ghost echo idea was hers, the oo-ooo-oooh – though that’s not her voice on the single, it’s a session singer. Wanda couldn’t sing. She could barely speak. It wasn’t just her eye. She’d lost her tongue. You didn’t notice, because she knew to keep her mouth shut. And there was nothing else missing.
It must have happened in the war, they said. Which war, some of the girls asked. Wanda didn’t get along. It wasn’t that she was foreign – half the girls were Maltese. It wasn’t the missing bits. Wanda just wasn’t interested in other women. She was a man’s girl.
No, she didn’t shag Johnny. Might have gone better if she did. She didn’t shag me, either. And forget about Fred. No one shagged Fred. But she got to Johnny. Coiled around him.
So, I turn up late one day, to an afternoon rehearsal. Johnny’s playing ‘Lonely One’.
I knew that first time it was our hit. A spine-tingler. I heard money in it. Money and fame and Top of the Pops and Juke Box Jury and getting a long way out of the Black Kettle Club.
Wanda was there. In her civvy clothes. With her regular patch, not the black silk sparkly one she wore on the stage. Johnny was playing for her. She was thinking how she would move to the song.
&nb
sp; You’ve heard the story about the girl who broke up the band. This isn’t that. This is the band who broke up the girl.
Wanda had pulled the song out of Johnny, as if she’d reached into his insides, taken hold of something and just yanked. But you’ve got to be a bit of a cold-hearted bastard in this lark. Barry went through Breadwinners like biscuits, you know. Our act was The Vanity Brothers. Johnny and me.
Johnny thanked Wanda, but we never played ‘Lonely One’ for her act.
We sang it first at a clothes shop – a gig in late summer, to draw in kids and their mums who had to buy new school kit. It was a screamer, from the start. I saw – and I’m not being funny, this is what I said at the time – I saw what Hitler must have seen in the crowd at Nuremberg. Faces. Rapt. Captivated. Tears on cheeks. Girls and boys and mums. They made us sing it again. We’ve – I’ve – been singing it ever since. Even then, I saw her. Rather, the patch. A face in the crowd. I think it wasn’t Wanda, and yet it was, it must have been. All you can clock from the stage is a detail. Like an eyepatch.
The rest is in Melody Maker. Talent scout, record deal, air-play on the pirates and the Beeb, pick of the pops, number one with a bullet. A hit.
I was all for moving on. We were bought out of our contract at the Black Kettle Club, which was dangerous enough considering who owned the place. I was happy never to go back there again. With the ‘Lonely One’ dosh and clout, I didn’t need turn-downs from strippers. It was wall-to-wall birds back then, birds and booze and pills, all the things you’ve heard…
…then, well, that’s it, isn’t it? Then: nothing.
Johnny never finished another song. His muse had gone. Muses are Greek, aren’t they? Like Furies and Fates and Gorgons. He went back to the club, looking for Wanda. But she’d quit.
Whenever we played, Johnny said he saw her out there. Sometimes, like that first time, I did too. Or at least a patch. But, come on, put a crowd together and someone’s going to have one eye. Stands to reason. Doesn’t mean it’s her. Does it?
Johnny swore he saw her, playing with her patch, like she did on stage. I said it was too many pills or not enough. I told him to forget her. I was a chump. We were both chumps.
You can go a long way on one song.
When the Vanity Brothers were heading the bill, know what our act was? Go on, ‘Lonely One’. Huge response. Screams, applause, wet knickers. Encore, ‘Lonely One’ again. Couple of instrumentals. Lack of interest. Sales of choc-ices soar. Me, solo, singing ‘My Washboard Won’t Wash’, a skiffle song we wrote when we were thirteen. Boredom, hostility. ‘Lonely One’, reprise. Huge response again. ‘Lonely One’, ‘Lonely One’, ‘Lonely One’… One song, five times. And off. Sometimes they wouldn’t let us off, they’d keep us playing it until the management turned up the lights or broke out the firehoses.
One night, Johnny froze during the last encore… we always used to get the crowd to sing the ghost part then. Five, six thousand teenage girls going ‘…oo-ooo-ooo-oooh…’ It must have sounded horrible. As they wailed, Johnny was struck. He saw something out there.
Did I see her? Maybe a dark flash, leaving. I couldn’t swear to anything.
After that, well… Johnny was taken funny. You know what he said. ‘Billy, I saw underneath… I saw the other eye…’ It was said with a shudder, like something terrible. Bad pills, I thought. It used to be I could get what Johnny meant, what Johnny felt… When no one else could, I could understand. We were on the same wavelength. Brothers, you know. But I was shut out of this. He couldn’t make me understand what was going on inside him. He couldn’t make me see what he’d seen.
Now, not only could Johnny not write anything, he couldn’t sing or play anything… except ‘Lonely One’. His fingers could only make those chords, in that order. He stopped being able to talk, except in a croak. Yes, like hers. Wanda’s tongueless jabber. On stage, he was clear as a bell, so long as he sang ‘Lonely One’.
You can go a long way on one song. But only so far.
We were still at Number One when Johnny took off on his scooter. Went off a ramp that wasn’t connected to the motorway. Not killed outright. They say if he’d called for help, he might have lived… in some shape or form. You know how he finally got attention… he sang. ‘Lonely One… left my only one… oo-ooo-ooo-oooh…’ Bloke who found Johnny said he thought he heard a ghost. By the time he got to him, he was right.
The song didn’t stop with Johnny, of course.
Ah, the Breadwinners are finished. I’m up. It’s just a short set. The one song. Every night, the one song. Johnny’s gone. It’s down to me now. To be the Lonely One.
Will I see a patch out there? Probably. I usually do. One night, I reckon, I’ll see more, like Johnny. I’ll see what’s underneath. I’ll see the other eye.
Then… oo-ooo-ooo-oooh…
This is the first print publication of a story written for an audio anthology, Thirteen, edited by Scott Harrison and Neil Gardner. It was read for that release by Samuel West.
IS THERE ANYBODY THERE?
‘IS THERE A presence?’ asked Irene.
The parlour was darker and chillier than it had been moments ago. At the bottoms of the heavy curtains, tassels stirred like the fronds of a deep-sea plant. Irene Dobson – Madame Irena, to her sitters – was alert to tiny changes in a room that might preface the arrival of a visitor from beyond the veil. The fizzing and dimming of still-untrusted electric lamps, so much less impressive than the shrinking and bluing of gaslight flames she remembered from her earliest seances. A clamminess in the draught, as foglike cold rose from the carpeted floor. The minute crackle of static electricity, making hair lift and pores prickle. The tart taste of pennies in her mouth.
‘Is there a traveller from afar?’ she asked, opening her inner eye.
The planchette twitched. Miss Walter-David’s fingers withdrew in a flinch; she had felt the definite movement. Irene glanced at the no-longer-young woman in the chair beside hers, shrinking away for the moment. The fear-light in the sitter’s eyes was the beginning of true belief. To Irene, it was like a tug on a fishing line, the satisfying twinge of the hook going in. This was a familiar stage on the typical sitter’s journey from scepticism to fanaticism. This woman was wealthy; soon, Irene would taste not copper but silver, eventually gold.
Wordlessly, she encouraged Miss Walter-David to place her fingertips on the planchette again, to restore balance. Open on the round table before them was a thin sheet of wood, hinged like an oversized chessboard. Upon the board’s smoothly papered and polished surface was a circle, the letters of the alphabet picked out in curlicue. Corners were marked for YES – ‘oui’, ‘ja’ – and NO. The planchette, a pointer on marble castors, was a triangular arrowhead shape. Irene and Miss Walter-David lightly touched fingers to the lower points of the planchette, and the tip quivered.
‘Is there anybody there?’ Miss Walter-David asked.
This sitter was bereft of a fiancé, an officer who had come through the trenches but succumbed to influenza upon return to civilian life. Miss Walter-David was searching for balm to soothe her sense of hideous unfairness, and had come at last to Madame Irena’s parlour.
‘Is there –’
The planchette moved, sharply. Miss Walter-David hissed in surprise. Irene felt the presence, stronger than usual, and knew it could be tamed. She was no fraud, relying on conjuring tricks, but her understanding of the world beyond the veil was very different than that which she wished her sitters to have. All spirits could be made to do what she wished them to do. If they thought themselves grown beyond hurt, they were sorely in error. The planchette, genuinely independent of the light touches of medium and sitter, stabbed towards a corner of the board, but stopped surprisingly short.
Y
Not YES, but the Y of the circular alphabet. The spirits often used initials to express themselves, but Madame had never encountered one who neglected the convenience of the YES and NO corners. She did not let Miss Walter-David see her sur
prise.
‘Have you a name?’
Y again. Not YES. Was Y the beginning of a name: Youngman, Yoko-Hama, Ysrael?
‘What is it?’ She was almost impatient.
The planchette began a circular movement, darting at letters, using the lower tips of the planchette as well as the pointer. That also was unusual, and took an instant or two to digest.
M S T R M N D
‘Msstrrmnnd,’ said Miss Walter-David.
Irene understood. ‘Have you a message for anyone here, Master Mind?’
Y
‘For whom?’
U
‘For Ursula?’ Miss Walter-David’s Christian name was Ursula.
N U
‘U?’
‘You,’ said Miss Walter-David. ‘You.’
This was not a development Irene liked a bit.
* * *
There were two prospects in his chat room. Women, or at least they said they were. Boyd didn’t necessarily believe them. Some users thought they were clever.
Boyd was primarily MstrMnd, but had other log-in names, some male, some female, some neutral. For each ISDN line, he had a different code name and e-address, none traceable to his physical address. He lived online, really; this flat in Highgate was just a place to store the meat. There was nothing he couldn’t get by playing the Web, which responded to his touch like a harpsichord to a master’s fingers. There were always backdoors.
His major female ident was Caress, aggressively sexual; he imagined her as a porn site Cleopatra Jones, a black model with dom tendencies. He kept a more puritanical, shockable ident – SchlGrl – as back-up, to cut in when Caress became too outrageous.
These two users weren’t tricky, though. They were clear. Virgins, just the way he liked them. He guessed they were showing themselves nakedly to the room, with no deception.
IRENE D.
URSULA W-D.
Their messages typed out laboriously, appearing on his master monitor a word at a time. He initiated searches, to cough up more on their handles. His system was smart enough to come up with a birth name, a physical address, financial details and, more often than not, a .jpg image from even the most casually assumed one-use log-on name. Virgins never realised that their presences always left ripples. Boyd knew how to piggyback any one of a dozen official and unofficial trackers, and routinely pulled up information on anyone with whom he had even the most casual, wary dealings.