by Kim Newman
Nina took her hand again, and tugged her away from the open door. 'Has everyone gone?' she asked.
'I think so.'
'Should we find someone to say goodbye to?'
Anne turned away from the party room. 'Let's not bother. Let's go.'
'Amelia usually pays. A hundred pounds. Sometimes more, if you've been…'
'We'll bill her later, okay?'
'Okay.'
They got their coats. Nina wanted to keep holding hands, and hurried the sleeves over her arms so they would not be out of contact for long. It was a bit embarrassing but Anne was glad of it.
The instrument panel looked complicated, but all the switches were neatly marked. The monitor showed the street outside in snowy black and white. There was no one about. Anne flipped the switch that opened the front gate, and the ironwork brushed the bottom of the video image.
'There,' she said. 'Easy.'
Nina opened the front door by hand and stepped outside, pulling Anne after her…
It was very dark, and Anne felt something slap into her face and stay there. She lifted it aside - it felt like a heavy curtain - and still could not see anything. Nina's grip tightened. The door had shut behind them.
'Anne, where are we?'
She did not know.
In her coat pocket, she had a pen with a little light in it, for taking notes in theatres and other dark places. She felt for it, and brought it out.
The glowworm lit up both their faces. Nina was frightened again. There were mobile shadows above her nose and eyebrows. They were in a large wardrobe. The curtain had been a crinoline, hanging from one of two rails that ran just above their heads.
'This…'
'… doesn't make sense, I know.'
There was no handle on this side of the door. Anne tried to get her fingers into the jamb, but could not. It appeared to have locked itself.
'We'll suffocate,' said Nina.
'I don't think so.' Anne pushed aside an armload of dresses, finding only another rank of old clothes. 'I don't think this is a regular closet. It's deep. More like a passage…'
'There's a way out?'
'At the other end. Right.'
On Anne's side, there were women's clothes - elaborate ball gowns with mock jewels sewn into the bodices and rustling, puffy sleeves and skirts. Nina faced a succession of sombre gentleman's wear - black evening suits, heavy overcoats. A few brass and silver buttons gleamed in the minimal light.
There was not much space. They could not go side by side. Anne took the lead, and dragged Nina. The girl's hand was cold now, although it was quite stuffy in the passage. It was not an easy progress. The clothes had not been disturbed for a long time and were as thick and tangled as jungle foliage. There would be untold vermin nesting in the folds of material.
Anne would have had good use for a machete.
A few of the wooden hangers had rusted wire hooks which bent and broke as they passed. Bundles fell down, stirring up dust. Nina had a coughing fit. The fallen clothes were as difficult to wade through as thick mud.
They must have penetrated twenty feet into the passage, and there was still no hint of an end within reach.
Anne felt the wind knocked out of her. She had blundered into a suit that was much more solid than most. She staggered back, and had to be steadied by Nina. A dark, hanging shape blocked the way. Holding up her light, Anne saw a cavernous opera cape with a Mephistophelean magician's tailcoat hanging inside it. And inside both was a large corpse.
Nina had a minor convulsion. Anne's hand felt crushed.
'Anders!'
It was, but, for all his weight, he looked hollow. Anne touched his dead white face, and felt nothing that had been alive.
'No,' she said, 'it's a sculpture. I've seen them before. Look, it's supposed to be Anders grown old…'
The hair was white, the neck muscles flabby. The face was minutely wrinkled, the flesh beneath semi-liquid.
'Let's go on.'
Nina was hesitant.
'You don't have to touch it.'
They ducked, and squeezed past. There were others. Some were unrecognisably altered or mutilated, but most were obvious caricatures of people Anne had seen at the party. Not only were they made to look lifeless and tormented, but they were crammed into mouldering fancy dress costumes. Toby Farrar wore the braided tunic of a Hussar, and even had a jaunty helmet perched on his head. Jeane Russell was an unsuitably voluptuous fairy queen with gossamer wings and golden spangles on her bare, withered arms. Derek Douane was got up as a Dickensian urchin, with a broken neck and a dirty face. Daeve was a knobbly-kneed schoolgirl in a navy blue pinafore, with red spot freckles on his cheeks and straw-coloured ropes attached to his beret.
It was hot in the thin corridor, and the hanging husks made going forwards practically impossible. The two girls paused, grimy and breathless, in the middle of the sick display. Nina tugged Anne back, towards the way they had come from.
'We can't give up now,' Anne said. 'Try to ignore these things. They're not real.'
'There's a thing in here with us.'
'What?'
'A thing.'
Anne listened, but there was no noise at all.
'It's an animal,' said Nina.
A tiger?
'I don't think so,' said Anne. 'Let's go on. It can't be much longer. We must be nearly there.'
They struggled a little further. Baz Something dangled absurdly, in the ballooning pants, curly-toed slippers, tiny waistcoat and bulbous turban of an Arabian Nights eunuch. His paunch bulged over a sash. At the end of the line was the computer salesman, dressed up as the Queen of Hearts. His death was supposed to have been messy, and there was a lot of realistic blood all over his costume. In the centre of his chest, where there was a heart motif on his tunic, there was a ragged hole disclosing his real heart, which looked to have been squeezed by an iron fist.
Nina screamed, horribly loud in the confined space.
'One of them touched me,' she said. 'Touched my hair.'
She tried to put her arms around Anne, but could not. A body got in the way. Anne banged her elbow on a solid wood wall.
'They're just statues.'
Anne pulled Nina along. They left the bodies behind them. The passage was wider now, with room for four racks. There were enough costumes here to keep the Paris Opera going for five successive seasons. But it was easier to move forwards.
'They're after us. They're not dead.'
Nina was whining. Anne wanted to slap her. She was at the end of her patience. None of this was helping.
Her light was carried forwards. It picked out a face, and they stopped. Nina's hand-grip was painful again. The face smiled.
'Good evening, Anne.'
It was Skinner. He looked more like Hugh Farnham now. There was some scarring on his cheek. Anne thought it was growing as she stared at it. She had nothing to say.
'I knew your sister, you know.' The bastard did not even look evil. 'Intimately.'
She could not look away from him. He smiled blandly again, without much enthusiasm. He was as tired as she felt.
'Skinner, what the fuck are you playing at?'
'Playing?'
She remembered it was not a game any more.
'Playing? That's for imbeciles like Amelia Dorf. You and me, Anne, we don't play games.'
'Yeah, right.'
Nina yanked her arm hard, pulling Anne's shoulder painfully. She turned away from Skinner. The other girl had plunged behind a curtain of fur coats. Anne was pulled into the clothes and lost her balance. Then she was down, and Nina was on top of her. The pen-light rolled away. Nina let go of her hand. Anne felt fingers in her throat, squeezing hard. She reached for Nina's hands, and grabbed what she hoped were her little fingers. She bent the fingers back. There was a squeal, and she was released.
Anne tried to get up, pulling on a coat, but Nina was still pinning her to the floor. There was still some light. Looking up at Nina, Anne saw a dead face. Just li
ke the other effigies.
The scuffle at the Club Des Esseintes aside, she had not been in a fight since elementary school. The trick with the little fingers was the only thing she remembered from a piece she had once written on self-defence courses for women. She was no good at this. She rolled from side to side, trying to get the Nina Thing off her chest.
She got hold of a fallen ulster and stuffed it into Nina's face. It wrapped around her head. The Nina Thing tore at it, but Anne was released. She pushed the girl hard, and heard her fall over.
The struggle had been silent. Neither girl had grunted or sworn. There had only been a few sharp yelps of pain. Skinner might not even have been there.
Skinner?
Free of Nina, Anne got her head down and charged. She did not connect with Skinner as she had expected, and fell down. She scrambled along on leftover momentum, using her hands and knees more than her feet.
It was dark, and the passage was narrower now. She brushed the walls with both shoulders, and even banged her head when she tried to stand up.
There was something behind her, coming after her, coming to get her. The Nina Thing. And it was not alone. The others, the guests, were there too, in a pack. They were not alive, but they were not dead enough either.
She considered lying down on the floor, covered with fallen dresses, and waited for their touch on her neck. But she could not make herself give up. She kept on.
She kept on until she ran into a wall of loose boards. They fell apart, wood splintering, nails wrenching, and she burst out of the side of a building.
She stumbled and fell, her palms striking wet, dirty concrete. She felt cold night air on her face.
ENTR'ACTE
ONE
IN HIS DREAM, Cameron Nielson Jr saw life as a motion picture, unspooling steadily in the white-hot gaze of the bulb, the past piling up like celluloid string on the projection booth floor. CAMERON NIELSON in The Cameron Nielson Story. A Cameron Nielson Film. From the Cradle to the Grave with CAMERON NIELSON. 'It'll run and run,' Cameron Nielson.
His early years had been mainly montage. The young composer practises his scales while waiting for a big break. The young composer at odds with his family, who want him to follow a less daring course. The young composer working late into the night, notes flowing from his stylo. Women, leaving. Landlords knocking on doors, demanding money. Dishes piling up in a sink. Fingers in close-up, struggling with a recalcitrant piano. Electrical equipment accumulating around the traditional musical instrument. The reflection of a soldering iron in protective goggles as the musical weapons are forged.
Variety headlines spin out of the papier mache mist and chart the rise of a career. Fatherly, distinguished men scoffing at the hero's genius in smoke-filled clubs, plotting his comeuppance, but ultimately being swept away by the rollercoaster force of his obsessive talent. Early successes are built upon, as different audiences are superimposed, each clapping a little louder than the last, a crescendo rising. The young composer called out of his electronic cocoon after a performance and taking his bows with the other musicians, a rare grin on his sweating face. A devoted woman, her face a blur, clapping from the wings.
And throughout it all the music, first heard as an eerie sketch inside the hero's head, skeletally indistinct and bone china fragile. Then, as the young composer experiments at his consoles and keyboards, taking on some meat, becoming stronger, deeper. Finally, in a triumphant climax, bursting forth strong and unforgettable, exploding from his mind into reality, in THX sound, blasting at the acoustics of every concert hall in the world.
Then, amid the frenzy of music and applause, a clinch with the devoted woman and a fade to a painless old age. The composer, with talcum powder-white hair and a young face, dying content in his bed, surrounded by adoring and grieving children, his music living on. Under the end title, a pan across a series of busts in some Elysian hall of music. Palestrina. Bach. Beethoven. Mozart. Brahms. Wagner. Mahler. Stravinsky. Schoenberg. Stockhausen. CAMERON NIELSON. The End, in curlicue letters. A CAMERON NIELSON PRODUCTION.
'Cam?'
'Uh?' He jumped a little as Alexia slipped the boutonniere into the lapel of his tailcoat.
'You were dreaming,' she said.
He concentrated. He was calm. Before a concert, some people went to pieces, chain-smoking, hands trembling, shaking whisky out of the bottle. Cameron Nielson Jr became the still centre of a hurricane, as collected and single-minded as a great neurosurgeon before an operation.
'I'm sorry. I have to carry the whole piece in my head.'
Alexia smiled. His boutonniere matched her corsage. She had been his personal assistant throughout the preparation for the performance of the Telernachus Symphony, and they had slept together, three times. He was beginning to find the sex interesting, and had already started to wonder whether he should try to make her position permanent. The English girl was efficient and brought him just the right touch of warmth. He knew that he could be an ice-cube at times - God knows, Beethoven, Mozart and Wagner had not been easy to live with either - and Alexia took the chill off him.
She patted his lapel, straightening the flower, and kissed him like a little girl.
She was very English. His father had married an English girl, after divorcing Cameron's mother. The Nielsons were all drawn to this country. Perhaps it was a genetic thing. In all likelihood, Anne would settle for an Englishman. And Judi…
He drove his family out of his head, and let the music flood back. As a boy, he had been certain that he was adopted, or that his mother had taken a lover. Once, well after her marriage to his father was over, he had even asked her, but she just laughed at him. He remembered the red-cheeked embarrassment, and his subsequent determination never to let it show again. For a while, he had even resisted his name, scratching out the Jr on any documents with his full name on them, and signing himself C. Eugene Nielson. Now, that seemed cowardly. He simply had to stake his claim and fight for it, making sure by his works that everybody knew who Cameron Nielson really was. The brilliant young composer, not the burned-out playwright.
'Not long now.'
'No.'
'Nervous?'
Alexia did not know him well, he realised. 'Of course not. It's too late for that.'
Performing this piece was as complicated as launching a space shuttle, involving synchronised computer systems, traditional orchestral instruments, African drums and as many technicians as trained musicians. Cameron was not merely the composer and conductor, but a theremin soloist and the director of operations. There were human elements involved, and that would give the piece an immediacy, but so much of it was pre-programmed, with tapes played and sounds conjured by infallible computers, that most of the work was already done. The performance itself was important, but it was almost of academic interest. Telemachus was already a thoroughly achieved work. Presenting it to the public was like unveiling a finished sculpture.
'Then why are you whistling?'
He realised he had been, and clamped his lips. It was a habit he had had as a child. A bad habit. His nanny had scolded him over and over, but he had never been able to stop. She conjured up a bogeyman, Mr Whistle, who pulled out the voices of little boys who whistled, leaving them only with their whistles. That had been before Dr Spock. He had been terrified, but still unable to stop. He had dreamed about Mr Whistle, picturing him as a child-sized man in a Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit, with floppy velvet bows and knickerbockers, his head a white eggshape, featureless but for a shark's gash of a mouth. He knew that he still whistled sometimes, but the bogeyman could not scare him any more.
'It's an old thing with me, Alexia, I'm sorry.'
'Don't be,' she said, smiling. 'I think it's cute.'
'Cute? That's not an English expression.'
The girl stepped back, away from him. 'Obviously I'm being polluted by an American.'
There were good luck cards on the dressing room table, from tutors, colleagues, a few friends. There was nothing from Dad, o
f course, nor Anne. He could not expect their interest. But there was a note, heart-stoppingly cheerful in its brevity, from Judi. It must have been mailed a few days ago, with a second class stamp. It had stopped him dead, for a moment.
'Here's another one,' Alexia said, producing a square envelope, 'delivered by hand. Sorry it's a bit bent.'
He slit it open with his finger, and glanced at it.
'Best wishes for your career,' it read, 'from…' Mr Scribble?
'Mr… I can't make this out, Lex. What do you think?'
'Begins with a W,' she laughed. 'Looks like Whistle.'
Before he could stop himself, a piercing howl was forced through his teeth.
'Sounds like Whistle too.'
He suffered a flashback, an out-of-place reel from an old dark house horror movie, or maybe a nightmare being offered for psychoanalysis to Ingrid Bergman. The young composer wanders through a haunted mansion, trying to exorcise the spirits of his tyrannical father and castrating sisters. Molten watches tumble oat of wardrobes, cellos sprout spider-legs and scuttle musically in the shadows, faceless conductors lash out with scorpion-tailed batons. All very symbolic, with theremins on the soundtrack. And also in the house is the Monster. Mr Whistle, obscene drool leaking onto his embroidered vest.
He dispelled the images, and hugged the girl almost desperately.
'That was a surprise,' she said. 'I knew you weren't the composing machine they say you are.'
They? Who were they? Who had been talking?
'I'm sorry,' he said, embarrassed.
'It's all right. This is a big night. You have a right to be nervous. What with your father, and your sister. No one could blame you.'
Was she already making excuses? Did she know something about the performance he did not?
He let her go, and walked to the mirror. As always he wore the traditional evening dothes. He liked the reference to the classical tradition. His white tie was perfectly tied. his shirt-front stiff with starch and studded properly.