We were given no particular reason to attribute this anomalous behaviour to the Laczko business, with respect to which he remained never less than verbose and enthusiastic. But there were rumours, as inevitably there will be, and many questions were being whispered concerning the large number of mildewed and collapsing boxes of papers which had recently been delivered to the offices—to the top floor specifically—with delivery dockets bearing the heading of a house clearance firm; and also of the nuisance phone calls King’s secretary had lately been fielding from a woman with the surname of Laczko.
King was doing his best not to give anything away. He shambled about the place as ever he had, and for the moment at least, spoke of little except the inevitable success of Yet More Tales of Horror and the Supernatural.
As he had predicted—and was fond of reminding us he had predicted—Herman Laczko’s popularity had boomed instantly following his death, and had shown no indications of abating thereafter. “A much misunderstood and undervalued icon of the British Film Industry,” the media were suddenly proclaiming him, and a lot was made of his “authenticity,” whatever that was supposed to mean. He was everywhere! His angular features adorned the covers of glossy movie mags and badly Xeroxed fanzines alike, up and down the shelves of paper shops up and down the country. His films played repeatedly on TV and at the smaller cinemas, and it was with no small satisfaction that King observed the near impossibility of obtaining official VHSs of the actor’s films after the unanticipated rush on the video publishers. If only they had been as forward thinking as he had, he told us.
But the fact remained that our book had yet to be completed.
I’d already well and truly given up on it by this point, though. I’d seen what they were planning. The book would look cheap and cobbled together. King had picked out the artwork himself almost at random from a stack of previously rejected covers we kept on top of our filing cabinets. Its contents were even more dreary and uninspired than the usual collections, consisting as they did of a few already over-anthologised and out-of-copyright ghost stories alongside reprints from other King publications for which King already owned the rights. My introduction too—if I can call it mine in the wake of such ferocious editing from King’s team—proved anodyne at best, with whatever tiny sparks of enthusiasm I had pushed myself to express having been stamped out in favour of a finished product which was frankly sub-EC Comics.
“Old man Laczko must be spinning in his grave,” McCulloch said when he read it.
“He was cremated,” I told him.
In any case, we’d been at it for fourteen days. Orders were already coming in and we were still a few days from submitting it to the printers. And meanwhile I had to somehow catch up with the other work I hadn’t been doing as a result. So I stayed late two nights in a row, without any serious expectations of getting paid overtime for the trouble.
The first was a filthy night, black as coal. Frozen drizzle clattered against the office windows like handfuls of tacks. The radiators switched off automatically at 5:30 and the temperature dropped like a stone within minutes. I wrapped myself in my coat and worked on til 6:30. Then I gathered the rest of my things and turned out the lights. It’s a cliché, I know, but how very lonely and derelict these normally familiar places seem after everyone has left them and night has dominion, how full of threat. Except of course, I had to remind myself, not everyone had yet left, and as I made my way down the stairwell, I found myself looking up at the disparate shards of light projecting out across the gloomy top landing from George King’s office door. Something appeared to be fluttering amongst them.
The next night was quieter and no less troubling for that. I worked till 6:15 and was pleased enough at how things were going to decide to call it a night. As I entered the stairwell, again I looked up to see the same curious fluttering shadows emanating from King’s office, convincing myself this time that I could make out the accompanying sounds—the scraping of feet, the scratching of fingernails on wood, and something like the clapping of wet hands. Perhaps I lingered there too long, perhaps King had heard me, because in a moment it all suddenly stopped, and I thought I heard the clattering of a door handle. I dashed on down the stairwell and out through the safety doors without looking back.
It was desperately cold outside, the kind of cold that burns through clothing in seconds. I had only just started in the direction of High Street when I became aware of a human outline set back amongst the gaping darkness of a doorway a few yards in front of me. I’m sure my heart must have stopped (Kings isn’t in a good part of town), but before my anxieties could get the better of me, in a flurry of frozen breath it spoke.
“You work for King?” A woman’s voice! An almost frightened voice.
The face, as I drew even nearer, revealed itself in only the vaguest lines and angles.
“Do I know you?” I asked.
“They aren’t his, you know,” she whined.
“I’m sorry?”
“My uncle’s papers. They don’t belong to King and he doesn’t know their power.”
“I don’t really—”
“I need them.” There was something close to despair in her voice. “You tell him that, will you? Tell him I will have them…”
She had the smell of hospitals about her. The thought that I might make a dash for it had just entered my head when the clatter of the safety doors sounded noisily behind me. I turned to see the unmistakable outline of George King hovering there against the light, his clenched fists hung like sacks of cement at his sides. No one spoke another word. When I turned around again the woman had disappeared completely into the cover of the darkness, the last wisps of her frightened frosty words already spiraling to nothing. I kept on walking. I don’t think King stopped watching me until I had reached High Street.
***
I expected repercussions. They came the following afternoon when King called me into his office. The place was a mess, even by his standards. Column after column of dilapidated cardboard boxes had been stacked against the walls. Wads of festering, foxed and tobacco-dry papers were strewn over his desk, their scrawly writings and unearthly diagrams almost faded to nothing.
The room stank, and not just of whiskey. It stank of rot. It stank of body odour and of something else, sickly sweet.
“They were Laczko’s,” he said without prompting. “All of these! These were his!”
“Wow!” I said awkwardly.
He shrugged. “Cigarette?”
“I won’t, thanks.”
This seemed to have the unintended effect of wrong-footing him. He bit into his lip and was silent for a moment. Then he all but lunged at me.
“What did she say?” he snapped.
I stammered, “The woman? Not much. I mean, she said they weren’t yours. They don’t belong to you! I really don’t know! That was it, really!”
“Jesus Christ!” he hissed. “Would she rather the newspapers had got to them first?”
This time, I shrugged.
He dropped resignedly into his chair, signaling for me to sit too. He lit a cigarette. His hands were shaking.
“Martin,” he said. “Listen. I need people like you with me. It’s important. I have all kinds of plans for Herman Laczko, you see, the rewards of which I’m happy for you to share in… I simply can’t let that mad bitch’s meddling jeopardise things. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I lied.
“She waits outside all the time, you know,” he said. “She calls the office every day. I have even seen her sleeping out there in the doorways.”
“My God! Do the police know?”
He paused for a long time, and didn’t answer.
“Would you help me, Martin?”
“Of course,” I said instantly, but quite without conviction.
“…Because it would be in all our interests.”
“Of course.”
He reached into his jacket and from it produced a small untidy roll of ten pound notes. I pretended not to notice, t
hough my stomach cramped at what might be coming next.
“You don’t need to know her name,” he told me. “But I’ll tell you this much: She’s Herman Laczko’s only living relative and she’s spent most of her life in mental institutions. She has a pierced lip and nostril, perhaps you noticed. She has a tattoo on her left eyelid—her left eyelid—all around the eyelid, with a sort of tail coming down. An Egyptian thing, you know? She has short hair, dyed black. She has black fingernails… I cannot get involved…”
He took several of the notes from the roll, which it was no longer credible to ignore. He pushed them across the desk to me, then returned the roll to his jacket, making absolutely certain I had seen it clearly.
“All I’m asking is would you be prepared to file a report—take some time off tomorrow if you like—talk to the police and let them know that this woman—that a woman of this description assaulted you in the street yesterday. Nothing serious. Whatever you tell them will be enough to get her put back where she belongs. But not this street! You were not assaulted here! A different street. Further away…”
He took a long anxious drag from his cigarette, all the while staring into me as though eager for some kind of reaction. I wondered, would he have laughed it off if I refused? Could he claim the whole thing had been a joke, or a misunderstanding?
Jesus, I thought, how the hell did I get involved in this anyway? Why did he suppose that I would do such a thing? For him?
I suppose a lot of things went through my head in that brief, wrenched moment, and every one of them told me that what I was about to do was just plain messed up… I took the money. And I wish I could tell you I did it purely out of naivety or cowardice, or out of the overwhelming desire to get away from King’s glare and out of that rotten place as quickly and easily as possible. But facts are that I was young, I was on minimum wage, and I knew that that roll of notes was more than I was ever likely to get otherwise in the employment of George King. Forgive me!
As I was leaving his office, King called to me: “In many ways you’ll be doing her the biggest favour of all.”
I tried all that night to convince myself that he was right.
***
In the morning, a wet, yellowish slush of snow covered the pavements. The sun failed to rise.
The gaudy residue of some Herman Laczko movie I’d managed to fall asleep watching still clogged my thoughts with blood of too crimson a hue and the texts of diabolical rites which I felt certain I had seen somewhere before.
I trudged the entire length of High Street twice in the freezing cold, past the Police Station, and then went home again and called in to tell work I was sick. Slightly after noon the phone rang and I ignored it. When it rang for a second time I got my coat and went out to the pub with the intention of getting plastered on my advance. I made a pretty good job of it.
By dusk, however, I was just about gone enough to start fantasising about that roll of money again. One more pint and I reckoned I was ready to go through with it.
What a state I must have looked, but I went through with it all the same. I walked straight (or more likely meandered) into the Police Station and submitted my tale of bodily assault, just as rehearsed, just as had been expected of me. I barely slurred. I barely swayed.
“…Her… left eye!” I hiccupped. And they smiled knowingly to one another and asked me to just hang on for a minute while they talked amongst themselves.
Then: “Thank you for coming in, er, Mr…”
“Thank… you.” I said. “And do you expect you will be… likely to… catch her soon?”
“Sir, I’m not really sure it’ll be necessary for us to take this any further… The body of a woman exactly fitting the description you’ve given us was found this morning in a doorway a few blocks from here. It seems she had been sleeping on the streets. She had died from exposure.”
“Oh!” And that was about all I could say.
They showed me to the door and told me to go carefully. I stood in the frozen night air with guilt and relief and anti-climax all prickling me in equal measure. And with the misguided logic of a drunk I thought how superior I would be were I to walk into King’s office and tell him he could stick that roll of money where the sun don’t shine. Then I wondered whether he’d ask me for my advance back. Damn! I’d made a pretty big dent in it already! Ah, screw it—this wasn’t about the money anyway. It was a matter of principle. He needed to be told that he couldn’t use me like this!
And in serpentine twists and turns my angry, beer-addled logic coiled out through the shimmering night ahead of me, guiding me stumbling on in the direction of King Publications.
It was late. I had no notion of the actual time. It didn’t matter. I knew he’d still be there, in his office, sat amongst his fusty bits of a dead man’s garbage, swigging whiskey from the bottle in a slough of fear and paranoia that someone was about to steal it all away from him.
On the third attempt, my frozen, drunken fingers punched in the correct security code and I pushed my way into the building. It was blisteringly cold inside. The heating must have cut out hours ago. Then perhaps it was later than I’d realised. I pressed on regardless.
And yes, there they were! Those shards of light which cut across the top landing. He was still here! And look! I could make out the flickering of his shadow too. Could that really be his shadow?
I began up the stairwell, quickly, as though for fear I might see sense at any moment, tripping over shadows between landing and mezzanine, mezzanine and landing, upwards and up towards the light. And there too was that sound again! That strange scraping, scratching, slithering noise I’d heard before. I did not concern myself.
I vaulted the last few steps and all but flung myself at the glass of George King’s office door.
And I moved not a centimetre further, and I doubted in those moments I should ever move again, frozen as I was by the petrifying chill of the weird—the absolute impossible—made flesh before my eyes.
The “thing” inside George King’s office—that “thing” which held his flabby white body suspended in the air by its will alone—which shifted uninhibited over the broken protective chalk circle on his office floor and the heaps of Herman Laczko’s mouldering papers—which rose up with monstrous bulk, black and multiform—sow-headed—goat-headed—taloned and horned—that hellish “thing” George King had summoned cast its shadow over me. And I thought I would die.
I must finally have stumbled numbly backwards, tottering, and as I did so, just as I was about at last to topple down the stairs, I caught the merest glimpse of George King’s face. He was weeping horribly, hysterically, but silently; rapt in the moment of violent death.
I wept too.
***
Herman Laczko’s Yet More Tales of Horror and the Supernatural was of course never published. Following George King’s death (the nature of which, besides heart failure, was never adequately explained) all projects were halted as the full extent of his roguery became apparent to the world. It seemed he had been fleecing his writers and employees and cooking the books for all of the company’s thirty years, and the same newspapermen whose whim it had been to practically beatify the late Herman Laczko a few weeks earlier left hardly a stone unturned in their harrying of George King’s reputation (though none amongst them seemed willing to pin any significance to the glut of incomprehensible symbols which adorned his office at the time of his death). King Publishing simply ceased to exist in a matter of days. No one would touch it. It was tainted beyond salvation.
McCulloch told me later it had been chaos. They had stripped the place clean while they were still in it; pulled it to pieces to pay off King’s debts. I missed the action, however. I was out of action.
That night George King died is at best a fever dream for me. After I left him, I shambled my way home somehow, but the fever burned on for a week, leaving me exhausted in every sense. It was years before I could focus my mind even dimly on the things I had witnessed that night, an
d only now do I feel able to relay them in detail such as this.
I’ve troubled myself not to linger too much on the scene which must have confronted the cleaners when they climbed the steps to King’s office the following morning, though I have from time to time wondered what might have happened to Herman Laczko’s papers. Yes, most probably, they were thought worthless and destroyed, and that doesn’t bother me in the slightest. But whenever I think too long on the things they must have contained I remember the assertion certain newspapers made at the time of his death as to Laczko’s “authenticity.” I wonder precisely what they were getting at. There was never much authenticity in his films. To my mind their blood was always too crimson a hue, and their monsters, in the final predictable reveal, were never other than uninspired, unconvincing and deeply anti-climactic.
CONTRIBUTORS
Thomas Allein is a lifelong California resident and current student of linguistics at UC Berkeley. Between the piles of reading and pressures of research, he somehow finds the time to write.
Retired from a career in construction management, Paul L. Bates swims distance and writes cross-genre speculative fiction with a distinctly dark edge. His work is often inspired by dreams, occasionally adhering to the oddly associative laws of the unconscious. “The Heart of the Matter” is his tribute to Joseph Conrad, should you not have guessed. His novels Imprint and Dreamer were published by Gale FiveStar. His short fiction has appeared in periodicals and anthologies including Zahir, City Slab, Withersin, Surprise: An Erotic Fiction Anthology From Racy Pages, Darker Than Noir, In the Garden of the Crow, Ruins Extraterrestrial, Surprise, and Jack-O-Spec. You can read his occasional and always insightful blog at redroom.com/member/ paul-bates.
Mark Beech lives in a singularly isolated region of the southwest of England. His writings have appeared sporadically and unexpectedly in the likes of Wormwood: Writings About Fantasy, Supernatural and Decadent Literature and the Ex Occidente anthologies Cinnabar’s Gnosis and The Master in Café Morphine: A Homage to Mikhail Bulgakov. In 2012 he will be launching Egaeus Press with a view to publishing morbid and fantastical works by other contemporary writers.
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