The boy nodded and took his hand back.
“I know. No need to show off.”
Cushing trembled a smile and looked back to sea.
Periodically flicking his ash to be taken by the breeze, he gazed down between the groynes and saw a man in his twenties wearing a cheesecloth shirt and canvas loons rolled up to just under the knee and curly hair bobbing as he ran in and out of the icy surf. A dollishly small girl with a bucket and spade was laughing at him and he chased her and scooped her up in his arms, turning her upside down.
“She doesn’t like me saying it but I keep thinking about my real dad, my old dad,” the boy said, prodding a discarded Wrigley’s chewing gum wrapper with his shoe. “I keep thinking perhaps he’ll get tired of his new woman in Margate and come back to us. One day, anyway. I know he said he didn’t love my mum any more, but he must have loved her once, mustn’t he? So he might love her again. You never know. How does love work anyway?”
Cushing could hear no voices, but saw a woman join the man and the toddler on the shingle. The wind tossed the woman’s blonde hair over her face and the man combed it back with his fingers and kissed her.
“It’s very complicated, as you’ll learn, my friend. Very complicated—but in the end so terribly simple.” He felt a tiny piece of grit in his eye and rubbed it with a finger. The taste of the tobacco had gone sour and he prodded the cigarette out on the sea wall.
“Do you have bad dreams any more? You see, I have to check the symptoms, just in case. Are you sleeping well?”
The boy nodded, staring at the ground.
“Good. Very good.” The old man took off his glove, white finger by white finger. Carl was still staring at the concrete in front of him. “Remember if anything feels bad, if you are hurting, or worried… Anything you want to say—anything, you can say to your mother.”
“She won’t understand,” the boy said without looking up, as a simple statement of fact. “She doesn’t understand monsters.”
The people on the beach were gone and the waves were coming in filling their footsteps. Sometimes it seemed full of footprints, criss-crossing this way and that, people, dogs, all on their little journeys, but if you waited long enough or came back the next day the people were always gone and the only consistent thing was the slope and evenness of the shore.
When Cushing put his single white glove back in his overcoat pocket he discovered something he’d forgotten. Something he’d put there before going to the Oxford to meet Gledhill. He took it out and looked at it in the palm of his hand.
Helen’s crucifix.
Opening the thin gold chain into a circle he put it round the boy’s neck and tucked the cross behind his scarf and inside his open-topped shirt. The boy did not move as the man did it, and did not move afterwards, imagining some necessity for respect or obedience in the matter, or recognising some similarity to the procedure of his mum straightening his tie, in addition daunted perhaps by the peculiarity of the tiny coldness of the crucifix against the warmth of his hairless chest.
“I want you to remember what I’m going to say to you. The love of the Lord is quite, quite infinite. In your darkest despair, though you may not think it, He is still looking over you. Never, ever forget that.”
The boy thought a moment.
“Is he looking over you?”
Cushing had not expected that question, and found himself answering, as something of a surprise:
“Yes. Yes, I believe he is.”
Then the boy appeared to remember something, something important, and dug into the pocket of his anorak. He produced a rolled-up magazine, unfurled it and thrust it in front of the man, who had to recoil slightly in order to focus his increasingly ancient eyes on it.
Claude Rains in his masked role as The Phantom of the Opera stared back at him. Garish lettering further promised the riches within: films featuring black cats, Ghidrah the three-headed monster, and Horror of Dracula—the US title of the first Hammer in the series. What he held in his hands was a lurid American film magazine called, in case of any doubt whatsoever in its remit, Famous Monsters of Filmland.
The boy reached over and flicked through until he found a double-page spread of black-and-white stills. He flattened it open and jabbed with his finger.
“Look. It’s you.”
Indeed it was.
Christopher Lee as the predatory Count, descending upon Melissa Stribling’s Mina. Baring his fangs in a mouth covered with blood. Van Helsing—himself— alongside it, dressed in a Homburg hat and fur-collared coat.
“I can’t read very well,” the boy said. “But I like the pictures. The pictures are great. Who’s Peter Cushing?”
Cushing looked at the younger man in the image before him.
“He’s a person I pretend to be sometimes.” He thumbed through the pages, touched immeasurably by the gift. “Is this for me?”
“What? No. I want it back. But I want you to sign it, because you’re famous.”
“Ah. Silly me.”
Cushing thought of the close ups they’d filmed of him so many years before, reacting to the disintegration of the vampire whilst nothing was there in front of him. He thought of Phil Leakey and Syd Pearson, make-up and special effects, labouring away on the last day of shooting to achieve the purifying effect of the dawning sun. He thought of the sun, and of the perpetual darkness he had lived in since Helen had died.
He lay the Famous Monsters magazine on the sea wall between them, took out his fountain pen from his inside pocket, shook it, and wrote Van Helsing in large sweeping letters across the page, blowing on the blue ink till it was dry.
“Brilliant.” The boy held it by his fingertips like a precious parchment and blew on it himself for good measure. “Now I’ll be able to show people I met you. When I’m an old man with children of my own.” He stood up and held out his hand.
Cushing shook it with a formality the boy clearly desired.
“Enjoy stories, Carl. Enjoy books and films. Enjoy your work. Enjoy life. Find someone to love. Cherish her…”
The boy nodded, but looked again at the signed picture in Famous Monsters as if he hadn’t quite believed it the first time. The evidence confirmed, he pressed it to his chest, zipped it up securely inside his anorak, pulled up the hood and unchained his bike.
“Carl?” Cushing said. “Sometimes you can hide the hurt and pain, but there’ll be a day you can talk about it with someone and be free. Perhaps a day when you’ll forget what it was you were frightened of, and then you’ll have conquered it, forever.”
The young face looked back, half-in, half-out of the anorak hood, and nodded. Then he took the antler-sized handlebars and walked his Chopper back in the direction of the road and shops, another imperative on his mind, another game, idea, story, journey, in that way of boys, and of life.
As he tapped another talismanic cigarette against the packet, thinking of his own journey and footsteps filling with water as the tide came in, Cushing heard the tick-tick-tick stop, as if the boy had stopped, and he had. And he heard the cawing of seagulls, his nasty neighbours--The Ubiquitous, he called them—and heard a voice, the boy’s voice, for the last time, behind him.
“Will you keep fighting monsters?”
His eyes fixed far off, where the sea met the sky, Peter Cushing had no difficulty saying:
“Always.”
***
He sat in the forest dressed in black buckled shoes, cross-legged, a wide-brimmed black hat resting in his lap and the white, starched collar of a Puritan a stark contrast to the abiding blackness of his cape. Over in the clearing the bonfire was being constructed for the burning of the witch. The stake was being erected by Cockney men with sizeable beer bellies wearing jeans and T-shirts. The focus puller ran his tape measure from the camera lens. Art directors scattered handfuls of ash from buckets to give the surroundings a monochrome, ‘blasted heath’ quality. And so they were all at work, all doing their jobs, a well-oiled machine, while he waited, cont
emplating the density of the trees and smelling the pine needles. It was March now, and soon shoots of new growth would show in the layer of mulch and dead leaves and the cycle of life would continue.
Work was the only thing left now that made life pass in a faintly bearable fashion. As good old Sherlock Holmes said to Watson in The Sign of Four: “Work is the best antidote to sorrow”, and the only antidote he himself saw to the devastation of losing Helen was to launch himself back into a gruelling schedule of films. It was the one thing he knew he could do, after all. As she kept reminding him. It’s your gift, my darling. Use it. And the distraction of immersing oneself in other characters was an imperative, he now saw. A welcome refuge from reality.
The third assistant director brought a cup of tea, an apple and a plate of cheese from the catering truck to the chair with Peter Cushing’s name on the back.
“Bless you.”
Occasionally, very occasionally, that’s what he did feel.
Blessed.
It was a blessing, mainly, to be back working with so many familiar faces. Yes, there were new ones, young and fresh, and of course that was good and healthy too. The young ones, who hadn’t met him in person before, possibly didn’t notice or remark that he had become sombre, withdrawn, fragile behind his unerring politeness and professionalism—it was the older ones who saw that, all too well. In the make-up mirror he had never looked so terribly gaunt and perhaps they imagined, charitably, it was part of his characterization as the cold, zealous Puritan, Gustav Weil. But it was nothing to do with the dark tone of the film, everything to do with the dark pall cast over his life.
Those who knew him, really knew him, acknowledged that a part of him had died two months ago.
Yet the un-dead lived on.
Here he was at Pinewood and Black Park in the company of vampire twins and a young, dynamic Count Karnstein so seethingly bestial-looking in the shape of Damien Thomas he might well snatch the reins from Christopher Lee and become the Dracula for a new generation. The third in the trilogy, this excursion was being trumpeted loudly by the company as Peter Cushing’s return to the Hammer fold. Once more written by Tudor Gates, heavily influenced by Vincent Price’s Witchfinder General, it was the tale of a vampire-hunting posse with Peter Cushing at its head. And with top billing.
He remembered clearly the lunch a month earlier with his agent, John Redway, and the leather-jacketed young director John Hough at L’Aperitif restaurant in Brown’s Hotel, Mayfair.
“You’re returning to combat evil, Peter,” the director had said. But he wanted a darker tone. He didn’t want it to be a fairy tale like other Hammers. He wanted to reinvent the horror genre.
Cushing had said nothing as he listened, but thought the genre didn’t need reinventing. The genre was doing very well as it was, thank you very much. He did think the idea was original, however, and the director had convinced him over three courses and wine of his intention to make it as a bleak morality play, manipulating the audience’s expectation of good and evil by having them side with the vampires against the pious austerity of Gustav Weil, the twisted, God-fearing witch-hunter, uncle to the vampire twins, Frieda and Maria, played by the pretty Collinson sisters—Maltese girls whose claim to fame was being the first identical twin centrefold for Playboy, in the title role. Twins of Evil—or was it called Twins of Dracula now, the American distributor’s illogical and factually incorrect alternative?
“You see, Peter, real evil is not so easy to spot in real life,” the director had said. “In real life, evil people look like you and me. We pass them in the street.”
“Really?”
“Yes. And that’s what I want to capture with this film. The nature of true evil.”
Whether it would be a success or not Cushing couldn’t know. He would do his best. He always did. He had an inkling how this sort of film worked after all these years and that’s what he would bring to the proceedings. That’s what they were paying for. That and, of course, his name.
His name.
He remembered the conversation in the dark of the Oxford cinema.
According to the Fount of All Knowledge, Carl’s mother moved to Salisbury shortly after Gledhill died, to live with her sister and set up a shop together. He hoped for once the gossip contained some semblance of accuracy. If she sought to rebuild her life afresh, that could only be a good thing. For her, and the boy.
For himself, there were other films on the horizon. He’d told John Redway to turn nothing down. He’d read the script of Dracula: Chelsea and it was rather good. He was looking forward to playing not only Lorrimer Van Helsing in the present day, but also his grandfather, in a startling opening flashback, fighting Christopher Lee on the back of a hurtling, out of control stagecoach before impaling him with a broken cartwheel. And if that was a success there were plans for other Draculas. Another treatment by Jimmy Sangster had been commissioned that he knew of, which boded well, and he hoped Michael Carreras would grasp the reins and take Hammer into a new era.
One of the more imminent offers was a role from Milton in his latest portmanteau movie Tales from the Crypt, but he didn’t care for the part, a variation of The Monkey’s Paw. Instead he’d asked if he could play the lonely, widowed old man, Grimsdyke, who returns from the grave to exact poetic justice on his persecutor. A crucial scene would require Grimsdyke to be talking to his beloved dead wife, and he planned to ask Milton if he’d mind if he used a photograph of Helen on the set. Then he could say, as he’d wished for many a long year, that they’d finally made a film together.
As it was, her photograph was never far away. He kept one above his writing desk at home, and another beside his mirror in his dressing room or make-up truck. At home he always set a place for her at the dinner table, and not a day went by when he didn’t talk to her.
Hopefully there’d be other movies in the pipeline. They’d keep the wolf from the door and the dark thoughts at bay—ironic, given their subject matter. Not that he could see his grief becoming any less all-consuming with the passage of time. Time, as far as he could imagine, could do nothing to diminish the pain. The lines by Samuel Beckett often came to mind: “I can’t go on, I must go on, I will go on,” and he knew that the third AD would be back before too long, to say they were ready for him.
But for the next few minutes until that happened, he would rest and try to clear his mind as he always did before a take, and picked up his Boots cassette recorder from between his feet, put on the small earphones and closed his eyes. He pressed “Play”. The beauty of Elgar’s Sospiri gave way to Noel Coward singing ‘If Love were All’.
One of Helen’s favourites, and his own.
He had lost the one thing that made living real and joyful, the person who was his whole life, and without her there was no meaning or point any more. But what had others lost? Yet, they survived.
He pictured the boy on his bicycle riding away, the rolled up magazine in his pocket.
Whilst he was living, he knew, time would move inexorably onward and the attending loneliness would be beyond description, but the one thing that would keep him going was the absolute knowledge that he would be united with Helen again one day.
The spokes of the bicycle wheel turned, gathering speed, blurring.
Life must go on, yes, but in the end—after the end—life was not important, just pictures on a screen, absorbing for as long as they lasted, causing us to weep and laugh, perhaps, but when the images are gone we step out blinking into the light.
Until then he was called upon to be the champion of the forces of good. He would spear reanimated mummies through the chest. He would stare into the eyes of the Abominable Snowman. He would seek out the Gorgon. Fire silver bullets at werewolves. He would burn evil at the stake. He would brand them with crucifixes. He would halt windmills from turning. He would bring down a hammer and force a stake through their hearts and watch them disintegrate. He would hold them up by the hair and decapitate them with a single swipe.
H
e would be a monster hunter.
He would be Van Helsing for all who needed him, and all who loved him.
Afterword by Mark Morris
I’ll start, if I may, with a couple of first encounters.
I was ten or eleven years old when I saw my first proper adult horror movie. It was almost certainly a Friday night, and my parents had popped across the road to have a drink with the neighbours. They had left my younger sister and me with a phone number and strict instructions to call if anything untoward occurred. I can’t recall which of us decided to watch that night’s Appointment With Fear on ITV, but I remember the movie vividly. It was The Haunted House of Horror directed by Michael Armstrong. Made in 1970, it was a spooky old house/slasher flick set in swinging London.
And it terrified me.
After the film was over I remember lying on the settee, literally shaking with fear, unable to believe what I had just seen:
A woman hacked to bits! (In my mind’s eye for years afterwards I saw her blood-streaked hand crawling across the floor like a crippled spider towards the candle she had dropped.) A man stabbed in the groin and blood (!!) pouring out of his mouth! (What awful anatomical connection had made that happen?)
Needless to say, The Haunted House of Horror made a massive impression on me. I felt as though I’d been unceremoniously introduced to a terrible, forbidden world of degradation and madness and absolute savagery. It was a world that fascinated and repelled me in equal measure. I was hungry to see more, but at the same time I found the prospect of it gut-churningly terrifying. Looking back on that time from my present standpoint, I can still recall with absolute clarity that raw and intense dichotomy of emotions— that sense of desperately wanting to dip my toe back in to the water, and yet at the same time making myself almost sick with anxiety at the prospect of it.
Seminal though that experience might have been, however, it was, in retrospect, the second horror movie I saw (in my possibly erroneous memory this took place the following Friday) that had a more profound and enduring effect on me. That movie was The Brides of Dracula and it was my first experience of the wonder that is Hammer.
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