by Kim Newman
Don’t have that much on you?
SARAH
Well.
DECLAN
You’d still owe for the operation… even if you didn’t take the dog.
SARAH
All right. I have it.
DECLAN (harder)
I thought you might. We have a sense about these things. About when you’re desperate…
SARAH
Here. Fifty-pound notes. New.
DECLAN
Used would be better…
SARAH
Oh come on now…
DECLAN
I’m just saying, not complaining. This will be acceptable. You want a receipt?
SARAH
No.
DECLAN
I thought not. Will you want the collar and lead? That’ll be extra.
SARAH
I brought a collar and lead.
DECLAN
You usually do… Do you need any help getting them on?
SARAH
No…
Furious barking, growling…
SARAH
Yes.
DECLAN
Calm down, Dynamo. It’s only your old collar and lead. No need to raise a riot. There. All done.
Growling.
SARAH
Thank you.
DECLAN
Thank you. And good day to you.
Growling, whining, dragging – street sounds. SARAH is struggling with dog on lead.
SARAH
…it’s a beast, I tell you. They’ll wonder what I’ve been feeding Dynamo.
ROB
Good. They’ll be grateful. You’ve rejuvenated their dog. Now, I’ve been giving some thought to body disposal. Dynamo can’t stay in that bin-bag under your bed forever. The problem is pretty much the same as if you had a human corpse to get rid of, but there are ways and means…
SARAH
Give it a rest, ghoul. I’m giving Dynamo I a decent burial in the woods.
ROB
Don’t forget to pull its teeth. Dogs have dental records, too.
SARAH
That’s it. I’m shutting you off, now. Talk later.
ROB
Sarah…
Click.
SARAH
That’s enough of him. Now, Dynamo II, you and I are going to have to come to an arrangement…
Growling.
SARAH
Less of that. And more slobbering. Can you learn to slobber? And lie down. A lot.
Growling stops.
SARAH
That’s better. And you’ve stopped tugging. Learning who’s boss here, eh? Know you’re onto a good thing? Seriously, you are. Desperate Declan would have been only too happy to sell you to a pervert. Piccies of you could be posted on Debbie Does Dogs in undignified poses, I tell you. That Debbie won’t give you the treats you’ll get at the Ursin house. Well, not the kind of treats you’ll learn to appreciate.
A satisfied, smug sort of growl.
SARAH
That’s better. You know how to play along. You’re a sly one, aren’t you? Good. We like sly. We can work with sly…
Human and dog walking. Street sounds. Fade down.
More ‘How Much is That Doggie in the Window?’
Fade up. Kitchen sounds – fridge hum, etc. Pouring from bottle.
SARAH
There, Dynamo II. Fresh water. Mountain spring. Two pounds fifty a bottle. Mmmmm… delicious. Come on, drink up… you’ve lucked into the Good Life here, if only you knew it…
Slight growl of disgust.
SARAH
What do you want, Sly One? The champagne? Now, you see here, all you have to do is play along and everything will be hunky-dory. Got that? We’re in this together, doppeldog.
Noncommittal growl.
SARAH
Now, I’ve got to feed the other dumb animal in the house. Gary. You’ll be meeting him later. Just make sure you slobber on him like a good Dynamo…
Microwave ping.
SARAH
Ahhh, pizza… choice food of the pimply.
Dog barks interest.
SARAH
Not for you, Sly One. For Gary. I’ll fix you din-dins later. There’s the finest dog food known to civilisation on offer… I think Mr Ursin has it personally tinned in the Caucasus… might be human flesh in it, for all I know. Human flesh, eh? That got your ears perked up? Tinned provincial mayor? Mmmmm…
Pizza on plate being put on tray. Cutlery clatter.
SARAH
Now, you stay! We shall continue your training later…
Growl.
SARAH
Stay! I’ll be back.
Footsteps. SARAH carries tray out of kitchen (lino) upstairs (carpet). Fade up computer game sounds and GARY grunting.
GAME VOICE
You have blasted my star-cruiser, Earthling scum! You are almighty conqueror of the Crab Nebula…
GARY’s grunts take on a gloating, triumphant tone.
SARAH knocks at his door.
SARAH
Gary, here’s your pizza order. Pineapple, ham and spot cream…
GARY grunts at her, inviting. SARAH shoulders the door open…
DOG bounds upstairs and into the room…
SARAH
Sly One, no… I said stay! No…
GARY grunts surprise as DOG jumps on him.
SARAH
No, leave Gary alone… he is not a chew-toy!
DOG barks viciously. GARY grunts in fear and pain. Rending and tearing sounds. A bitten-out throat. SARAH drops tray of food. More barking and attacking. GARY grunts desperately, overwhelmed.
SARAH
No, Dynamo… don’t! Stop! Please, stop! You’re spoiling everything!
GARY stops grunting. DOG snarls and laps at leaking liquid. Then howls in nasty triumph.
SARAH
Oh, Sly One… what have you done now?
A distorted snatch of ‘How Much is That Doggie in the Window?’ Fade up…
SARAH
…yes, of course I’ve checked his pulse… Gary hasn’t got one. He has a hole in his throat you could stick your fist through…
ROB
Sarah, calm down…
SARAH
The kid is dead, Rob. The creature killed him. Doggy Dracula might look just like good old slobbery harmless dying Dynamo, but he’s a very different animal on the inside. I think he’s a canine serial killer. No wonder he ended up at Desperate Dogs. He’s done this before…
ROB
You don’t know that.
SARAH
He was too good at it not to have had practice. You don’t kill someone with a lucky bite the first time you go for them. He had to chew through flab and gristle to get to the veins.
ROB
I don’t see the problem. Dynamo killed Gary, not you!
SARAH
It’s not Dynamo! It’s sitting here, now – gloating, blood all over its mouth. Happy. Wagging its tail and looking for approval. It likes killing people, Rob.
ROB
It’s not killed you. Probably imprinted. Thinks you’re its mummy. It might have been protecting you.
SARAH
From who? Gary?
ROB
Let me think!
SARAH
You thinking got me into this. I can’t just bury Gary in the woods and buy a new teenager.
ROB
Why not?
SARAH
I don’t like it when you talk like that?
Typing.
ROB
Here, Adoption Agencies – London – older children and teenagers… not the first page of results… page five…
SARAH
I can’t believe you’re suggesting this. I’ve already brought one psychopath into this house…
ROB
Well, why stop there? Find another. Find a kid who looks like Gary and will take care of all questions the way the dog did. It’s not like the Ursins paid much attention to t
heir old son, or will notice the difference… If you could match the dog, this should be a doddle. They’ll want to go along with it, to save the fuss. And if not, the kid’ll… well, go for the throat…
SARAH
I’m not doing this. I’m not.
ROB
Look, here… recognise the address. In Enfield. Your friend Declan has another line of trade. Desperate Kids. Just who you need…
SARAH
Rob, no…
ROB
I’m just trying to help. Pony club forever…
SARAH
I’ll look at the site…
DOG barks happily.
SARAH
What are you sounding off about, Sly One? More din-dins? This next one is not for you, do you understand?
Pathetic ingratiating DOG whine.
SARAH
This will not end well, Rob…
ROB
Try to be more trusting, Sarah… It’ll all work out well. Who’s your best friend in the whole world?
SARAH
That’s a good question.
DOG barks, cheerfully.
Fade up ‘How Much is That Doggie in the Window?’
THE SNOW SCULPTURES OF XANADU
THERE HAD BEEN a private zoo here once, but now only mosquitoes thrived. In the thick, sweaty heat, they pestered Welles. During his lifetime, Charles Foster Kane had decreed Xanadu insect-free, as if the force of his unstoppable will – the power that had shaped the destinies of nations – were able to hold back the swamplands surrounding his Florida fastness. The Pleasure Dome had begun to rot while Kane still lived, as his powers ebbed and history slowly crept past him, and, with his death twenty-five years ago, the decay had begun to accelerate. The walls were breached like those of a besieged city that has finally yielded, the stinking cages of the menagerie held only dead animals, forty-foot windows were patched over with boards. Welles thought that if the place were left to nature, it would inevitably sink like the House of Usher into the giant tarn surrounding it.
A fitting set for a ghost story.
The former Boy Wonder stood outside the gates of Xanadu, the shadow of their wrought-iron K motif falling upon him, and was conscious of how much he had changed since his last visit. In 1941, with an RKO contract to make a groundbreaking documentary about the Great American, he had stolen miles of footage in Xanadu as the Kane functionaries dismantled and inventoried the fortress’s infestation-like collection. Statues, books, paintings, furniture, uncategorisable mementoes, jigsaw puzzles, phonograph records, vehicles, tapestries: all boxed or burned. Welles had felt that there was no waste as long as the process was caught on film. No gesture or moment was insignificant once processed by Gregg Toland’s camera. Of course, he could not have foreseen that all his footage would end up like Kane’s collection, listed and buried in a vault.
Up in the eaves of Xanadu, something with wings squawked, its cry like a jaguar’s snarl played backwards.
Then, Welles had been slim and promising; now, he felt fat and thwarted. Charles Foster Kane Jr, a lifelong recluse crippled in the 1916 automobile accident that took his mother’s life, had stirred the might of his inherited empire, and pressured RKO into abandoning American, just as they dissuaded News on the March from issuing its newsreel obituary. Junior, still nursing the hurt of his parents’ divorce, acted as if he wanted the memory of Kane erased, working diligently at squashing biographies with all the zeal of an Egyptian priest wiping a dissolute pharaoh out of the history books. Now, in 1965, few people remembered whether Kane had been a real person or a made-up character. His name was sometimes good for newspaper sales – as when, in 1949, it had seemed probable that an American black-marketeer found dead in a Viennese sewer was the old man’s bastard son – but mainly, he was as shadowy a concept as his ‘Rosebud’, as forgotten a heap of detritus as his Xanadu.
Down the coast, a white spurt shot up. Part of the old Kane Estate was now leased to Cape Canaveral. Junior’s passion was the sky, prompted by the cripple’s hope that even if he could not walk he could fly. Welles remembered Junior’s involvement with Howard Hughes’ ‘Spruce Goose’ during the war, and his establishment of a Kane Aviation Company in the fifties, diversifying into jet engines and prototypical rockets. Kane components would go to the moon one day, or bear the payload of man’s final war. And Kane papers and television programmes would bear the news of both events.
Welles wondered again if the summons he had received was a hoax. Xanadu seemed from the outside to be completely deserted. Sunbleached walls crumbled invisibly, and there was no sign of habitation. He looked back at the limousine, but the driver – half his face hidden by goggle-like glasses – betrayed nothing.
As young men, Kane and Welles had been much alike, the sleek and dynamic Boy Wonders of 1894 and 1940, but they had aged differently, Kane becoming a shambling, bulletheaded mammoth, shunned by the rest of the tribe, while Welles buried himself in beard, bloat and B-movies, squandering his theatrical reputation on cameo appearances and cheap magic tricks. It all started with American, the dream movie, to combine fiction and documentary in unprecedented ways. The footage had never even been edited together, but still American, the masterpiece that never was, cast its shadow over all Welles’s subsequent, tidily completed but lesser-than-expected works: The Magnificent Ambersons, Heart of Darkness, Don Quixote, The Trial. If American had been finished, things would have been different. Welles would have been greater than Ford, than Hawks, than Hitchcock. Than Eisenstein, than Murnau, than Flaherty…
Finally, the gates were opened, and a thin, smiling man in a tropical suit led Welles to the house. The driveway was apparently unending, Xanadu growing larger with each step. Welles had heard of Dr John Montague before, had read his published account of his investigation into the notoriously haunted Hill House in Connecticut. That had ended in tragedy for one of Montague’s researchers, but the scientist took care elaborately to exonerate himself in his book. Junior had commissioned the parapsychologist to look into his own family’s haunted mansion, perhaps to prescribe a rite of exorcism. Welles wondered why Junior hadn’t simply had Xanadu burned to the ground, and its ruins seeded with salt.
Montague chatted as they walked to Xanadu, mainly about magic and trickery. Welles was known as an expert, having once sawn Rita Hayworth in half and capped the trick by marrying the girl. He had hoaxed the world that the Martians were coming. Montague assumed that the master magician would recognise a trick if he saw one. Welles realised there was something lacking in Montague, a failure to understand that magic was what you could not explain. That was its beauty, its trick. Probing the works, finding the concealed mirrors and strings, was the most effective method of exorcism.
The K above the door was weathered, most of its circle fallen away, leaving only a rind between the toppermost arms of the letter. It looked like an R.
‘Rosebud,’ Welles whispered.
Rosebud had proved the most overexplored false trail in American biography. The News on the March team had never found an explanation for Kane’s last word, and neither had the would-be makers of American. Joe Mankiewicz, drunk, had suggested it was the mogul’s private nickname for the private parts of his second wife, the former street corner diva Susan Alexander. That had been as good a solution as any.
Welles saw Montague’s team in the grounds, blending in with the overgrowth like camouflage birds, prodding directional mikes and anemometers into various apertures. Montague talked about cold spots and ectoplasm and resonances. In the parapsychology texts, Xanadu had overtaken Borley Rectory, the Loren home, the Frieburg Tanz Akademie, the Overlook Hotel and the Belasco mansion as the world’s most haunted house. Although Welles realised none of the rumours and reports that had filtered back to him had ever specified exactly how Xanadu was haunted.
Some excitement was caused among the psychic researchers by the siting of a large bird flapping lazily out of the eaves of the West Wing. The thing Welles had heard earlier, it looked like
a vast, leathery bat with a horned swordfish’s head. Montague explained the creature was a living fossil, but that no one had got close enough to one to classify it. Welles remembered recreating some shots of Xanadu in miniature at RKO, reusing some of the back projection plates from King Kong. He wondered how the painted pterodactyl had migrated from Hollywood to Florida.
While Xanadu was decaying, the Kane Empire had been reshaping itself – Junior taking only a capricious interest, but capable men springing up from inside the business – and preparing for a war which, ultimately, would take it from the verge of bankruptcy to corporate heights to which Kane had never even aspired. Riding the tide of national purpose, Kane papers and magazines had reestablished themselves as essentials in any American living room. In the fifties, Kane interests diversified: while Junior reached for the sky, his corporation crept into television, stealing a march on the competition as the new medium took hold on American life. Organisation Men in grey flannel prowled the executive suites, as the name of Kane came to mean a many-headed but single-minded beast, almost independent of Junior, infiltrating America’s living rooms. Kane papers backed and then denounced Joseph McCarthy, as if the old man’s ghost were still influencing editorial policies. Kane and Korea, Kane and Nixon, Kane and Kennedy, Kane and the astronauts. The old man would have loved the second half of the century more even than he had the first.