By the time dawn broke, Martin and Penny were agreed that the presence had gone - that its hold was broken. Martin was slightly anxious that it might return as soon as it could find him on his own again, but Lionel assured him that he would be more than willing to come back if Martin thought it necessary, and would be happy to spend the night alone on the premises if that were the only way to bring the presence out. The way he said it told me that he didn’t expect any such thing to occur; without quite knowing how he knew it, he was convinced that the presence had loosened its grip and lost its hold.
We had breakfast in a cafe before starting back to Cardiff. Lionel drank lots of black coffee to make sure that he was in no danger of falling asleep at the wheel, although he was no stranger to all-night vigils. In the event, we got back to the railway station without the least hint of alarm.
‘You didn’t have a wasted journey, anyhow,’ Lionel said, as I got out of the car. He was looking at my overnight bag, which was bulging with the books I’d bought at a pound apiece - a perfectly reasonable price, considering that they were only reading copies - from the parsimonious Martin.
‘Not in the least,’ I said. ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t think any of us did. Sometimes, all it takes to exorcise a presence is to fill a place with people and talk of ordinary matters. Perhaps Martin will feel more at home in the shop from now on.’
‘Let’s hope so,’ said Lionel. ‘Thanks for coming down.’
I waved goodbye as the car pulled away. I slept on the train, dreamlessly, all the way back to Reading.
When I got up to leave the train I noticed that the orange upholstery was stained with black. I knew that my jacket would have to go to the dry-cleaners and my jeans into the washing-machine, but I had every faith in the ability of modern technology to clear away the last residues of the dust. Ours is an inhospitable world for matter out of place and mind out of time.
* * * *
Lionel called me a week later to say that Martin had had no further trouble with paranormal phenomena and discomfiting presences, but that he’d decided to get rid of the shop anyway.
‘He reckons that he’s not cut out to be a bookdealer,’ Lionel informed me, sadly. ‘He says there’s a world of difference between being a reader and being a real bookman, and that he’s obviously just a reader. He thinks he might look for a little newsagent’s shop, or a pizza franchise.’
‘Good luck to him,’ I said.
‘Penny’s gone up to Scotland to investigate an old mansion. It’s only the Lowlands, she says, but it’s still more promising ground than Barry. The Scots are more firmly rooted in their native soil, she says. They’re more closely in touch with their ancestors, and they’re far too wise to doubt the nearness of the Other World.’
‘Good luck to her, too,’ I said. ‘How about you?”
‘Still skating on that thin crust called reality,’ he assured me, quoting the catch-phrase he uses in every episode of Fortean TV. ‘You won’t believe some of the stuff we’ve got lined up for the next series. Be sure to watch it, won’t you?’
‘Actually, Lionel,’ I told him, ‘I won’t believe any of it. But I’ll tune in religiously just the same.’
Brian Stableford lives in Reading, England. In 1999 he was the recipient of the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pilgrim Award for his contributions to SF scholarship; this completed his set of the four major awards available in that field. The author’s fiftieth novel (and seventy-fifth book), Year Zero, was recently published by the Welsh small press imprint Sarob Press, for whom Stableford has also translated and edited the obscure nineteenth century French Gothic parody Vampire City by Paul Feval. He has also publishedThe Fountains of Youth, the third volume in a future history series which began withInherit the EarthandArchitects of Emortality, and is set to be continued in The Cassandra Complex.About ‘The Haunted Bookshop’, Stableford says: ‘As the story itself makes clear, the idea arose from the piece I did for Stephen Jones’ Dancing With the Dark- and, of course, from watching my old friend Lionel Fanthorpe introducing Fortean TV.’
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* * * *
Starfucker
MICK GARRIS
I was the bastard son of Art and Commerce. Hollywood chewed me up and swallowed me whole, and when it had digested me, evacuated me like watery excreta from its overloaded bowels.
You’ll have to excuse the unlovely imagery; I have no reason to be bitter. Everything that happened was my own damned fault.
It wasn’t just the studio system. The independent world is almost as dire; it’s just a smaller list of talentless moneychangers who have to justify their existence. The only reason you don’t get rewritten by a list of hacks is not because of some kind of integrity inherent in the scruffy independent system; it’s because they’d rather not pay all those dogs to piddle on your papers
Well, there’s no Movie Police forcing you to lie down and spread ‘em for Hollywood. You don’t like it, go back to the night shift at Vidiots.
There are many reasons to love an industry unburdened by morality. Primary amongst them is Forgiveness. A Hit forgives us all our trespasses, in fact, rewards us for them. OneTitanic and you’re allowed to scream and rant and fire and pull guns and fuck anybody who’ll prance to the crook of your finger. And they forget all about Piranha II: The Spawning.
I had my big shot, my X-wing Fighter to Alderaan, my major studio break...and I bombed out big-time. It wasn’t big-budget, but it was high profile. The trades were filled with the saga of the film school prodigy who jumped right out of the gate and into studio features, even without a load of music video shit on his resume. And how that first-time Hollywood Helmer never even finished the movie. The studio wouldn’t even Alan Smithee the damned thing; they just flushed their investment away...and I followed it down the drain.
I learned a big lesson, and I’m ready to share it with you, free of charge.
Never work with puppies, kids or mutant babies.
My own mutant kept me underground, feeding off my bodily fluids like Bernie Brillstein before meeting its untimely end as In-Sink-Erator chum for the Studio City sewer gators. As Asta’s grue spattered the rusted porcelain of my kitchen sink, so did I. But I got over it. I even began to bathe again.
And work.
Well, when I say work, you won’t find it on my resume.
I wrote and wrote and wrote some more. And when I finished, I wrote some more. But the padlock had rusted shut. Nobody wanted to buy the stories I had to tell. Fair enough. Again, nobody’s forcing me here. I serve of my own accord. So I wrote and wrote and wrote some more.
But I never sold any of it. And I can’t blame anyone but myself. I thought that my experience had deepened me, and that my writing had matured, and reflected new reaches of insight into the human psyche. In truth, I was just jacking off.
But between then and now, Idid shoot another feature length film, though I haven’t told my new best friends at CAA. And it made a fortune, though not for me. I say film, but it was shot on MiniDV video, for a Valley company called Vivid. The San Fernando Valley is the red-rimmed sphincter of ‘Adult Entertainment’, and for a shining moment - though I hadn’t sported an erection in close to two years - I was its king. If you’ve spent way too many nights alone with your VCR and your left hand, you may be intimate with my timeless classic, Gulp! Yes, the exclamation mark is part of the title, your guarantee of artistic merit.
The two-day shoot had only one real disaster, though ‘disaster’ is a subjective term. Patty Petty had just been implanted eight days before the shoot with massive bags of mammarian come-hither, topping her slender frame with enormous globes that stretched her fine alabaster skin so tight that, during a particularly energetic (and award-winning) coupling that involved five men, two women, and one excessively randy orangutan, her breasts just split right open, dropping the silicone bags to the floor like unwanted Gerber’s from a baby’s mouth.
It was beautifully lit, and the camera wa
s in the perfect position to see it all. It may be my most memorable scene.
With an investment of eight thousand dollars - and one thousand of those crispy green boys were all mine - Gulp! has grossed close to eight million dollars. Thank God for insurance. It swept the Adult Film Awards (Best Feature shot on Video, Best External Orgasm, Most Orifi Filled, and a host of others) and almost made me wish I’d used my own name on the damned thing. Almost.
Gulp Two! was a certainty. But I left that to other hands. Been there, porked that.
* * * *
It’s funny, if not really all that amusing, how one thing leads to another in this berg. In the afterglow of Gulp!’s transcendental performance, Patty was cast as a Wise-Beyond-Her-Years Stripper, a featured role that required Tasteful Nudity in an otherwise unmemorable Artistic Endeavour known as the Untitled Independent Feature. The Sterling Stripper Story crashed and burned before the first week was in the can, but pretty, petty Patty introduced me to its producer, who had actually seen and enjoyed Words Without Voices, and he hired me to write his Magnum Opus...for the princely sum of two thousand American dollars. That was exactly double my Gulp fee, so I wrote my little telltale heart out. It was a grim, violent, Urban Drama, spattered with Red Humour and Brotherly Love. Well, our Masterwork of Renegade American Cinema stepped into mucky post-Columbine legal entanglements that kept it from even being midwifed on video.
But two years after it was collecting dust on the Payment Due shelf at the lab, Mr Producer hijacked his finest hour (and forty minutes) and managed to book it illegally into the Slamdunk Festival. For the uninitiated, Slamdunk is the scruffy alternative to Sundance and Slamdance. where loft-living men in black get their tawdry little celluloid stories that no legitimate human will have anything to do with projected onto the big screen once before being consigned to a K-mart video transfer with felt marker labels that sit with pride on the apple crate next to the dying Korean TVCR and the Tarantino collection.
Luckily, Sundance stank on ice that January. People had grown tired of the sensitive as well as the insensitive. Cinematographic ennui blanketed Park City with eleven inches of dull snow. And, with a bit of help from unnamed sources, word began to creep out about the lesbian nipple-tonguing scene in our Masterwork. It is said in the Bible of American Independent Cinema that if you blanket raw Eros in artful light and gorgeous surroundings, they will come. Give them guilt-free art-house erotica, wanking material for the intelligentsia, and the kilos to the kingdom are yours.
We played to a fall house, breaking the legal logjam, and leading to an eleven-week run at the Nuart. It’s still running midnights at the Angelika Center, even though it’s been on video for months. Sure, most of the attention went to the snotty little auteur in the backwards cap and the baggy Hilfigers, but you know, somebody writes this shit. And this time, that somebody was me, and that shit was mine.
So now I’m working again.
I mean, I’m not Kevin Williamson, but I’m doctoring a couple of Gramercy scripts at ten grand a week, sold a spec to Fox Searchlight for the low six figures, and made an overall with Bob and Harvey over at Miramax that includes directing my third script for them. If and when.
But I’ve been through this before, and if you can’t learn from experience, you are less than human, and consigned to a life as detritus. You exist to fail and provide an example to those who can learn from your mistakes.
So ... no Porsche and big house for me. I’m driving a TT, with a condo at the Marina City Club. Leave the pretensions to the backwards cap crowd. I’m letting my hair grow out brown.
There’s even been a rebound in the social world. Invitations to screenings and parties are ubiquitous, and I don’t bother to RSVP. I haven’t paid for a meal since Slamdunk. And that was a year and a half ago.
I wasn’t even going to bother with the American Cinemateque opening party, except that I’d never seen DeMille’s silent Ten Commandments before. Hell, I’d never seen any silent film before ... or any DeMille, either, for that matter. But I’d heard about the grand old Egyptian Theatre, and there was a live orchestra, and my tickets were free, but they’d have cost you a hundred bucks apiece...if you could get them. I was at a meeting at Paramount in the neighbourhood anyway, and it was better than fighting traffic to the Marina. Well, the Cinemateque completely ruined Hollywood’s first and greatest movie palace, cramming a hideously ugly high-tech architectural disaster into its beautiful shell, and I slept through the dusty old harridan of a movie.
But the party afterwards made the evening more than worthwhile.
Oh, it was littered with the usual suits and poseurs and perfect specimens at both ends of the Hollywood rectum spectrum. There were the witty and famous, the witless and gorgeous, the rich and the stitched, the sparkled and the spackled, the cream and its curdle. Milling about the cramped, crimson lobby were Golden Age Movie Star lookalikes serving drinks and the latest trendy Biblical edibles from Along Came Mary. It was mildly clever. They did, however, manage to find some pretty good doubles: a Gable and a Lombard, a magnificent Monroe, a mammarian Mansfield. There was a remarkably unhaltered Harlow sheered in a Platinum Blonde satin gown that chilled and hugged her alabaster breasts with static electricity that made her nipples point shamelessly all the way to Heaven.
It was almost enough to make me give a shit about Old Hollywood. It was fully enough to feel my first post-Asta stirrings Down There.
The tight marcel of her white-hot hair, the anachronistic, unathletic voluptuousness of her unfettered hips, the sea-bottom near translucence of her milky - no, creamy - skin enraptured me in unexpected ways. Everything old was new again. My fascination did not go unnoticed. A publicist for the Cinemateque, ever alert to the needs of Her People, smiled at my obvious rapture, sidled up to me and gripped my elbow with her manicured claw, sipping champagne from a plastic flute from the other. Her lipstick smeared the rim a muddy, dried-blood colour.
‘Pretty, isn’t she?’
Pretty. Meg Ryan is pretty. A nice day is pretty. A fucking nose is pretty. Harlow II was something way beyond that. I don’t know that they’ve even got a word yet for what she was. Really, it’s been a couple of years since I last gave a shit about sex. I mean, it was ruined for me, I thought, for good. And Madame Publicite only bittered the batter. Though her high, domed forehead was stretched tight and shiny, her telltale hands were creepy and crepey. Her thinning hair was course and wiry, her collagen lips bloated like a flounder’s, her eager eyes trapped in a look of constant surprise. She was the sexual Antichrist.
But what the Antichrist taketh away, Harlow II gave back a thousandfold. Hallelujah, I am reborn.
The publicity monster stroked the inside of my arm with her talons and released a string of intimate words in my ear in a voice I know she felt was sultry, but to me was a gaseous nicotine croak.
‘You can have her, you know,’ she exhaled, wilting the rented flowers around us. ‘Let me introduce you.’ And the Publicity Pimp, gripping me so tight I feared blood loss, led me to the Goddess.
Well, suddenly realising the woman was a professional wilted me a bit...until we were face to face. It turned out I was the proverbial man who needed no introduction. She knew who I was, had seen the Masterwork during its Nuart run, even bought the video, though it still hasn’t come out at sell-through. She even knew about Words Without Voices.
Had to be an actress. Damn it.
But who else works these Hollywood gigs? Professional servers? Beautiful People entirely uninterested in the performing arts? What the fuck did I expect? It was a disappointment, though it did nothing to fade her glory. She was magnificent, one of a kind. And the wattage from her smile could run a thirty-plex projection booth for a year and a half.
The Pimp winked and left us, with a smutty exit line that dangled huskily in the air of her wake: ‘If you need a third party, you know who to call.’ I’d rather lick Michael Jackson’s star on the Walk of Fame clean.
When the tendrils of her reeking
Giorgio finally receded and I could draw the semblance of a breath, I laughed uncomfortably. ‘Seen any good movies lately?’
Her smile never broke, even with her simple answer. ‘No.’
I was falling hard. They haven’t made a good film in years. All they make are Crybaby Movies, no real guts or glory. Tobe Hooper can’t get a studio picture set up. Gus Van Sant reshot fucking Psycho. It’s all crybaby shit or comedies that aren’t funny or send-ups. There hasn’t been a real movie in the ‘90s, and the new Millennium seems just as bleak.
Dark Terrors 5 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 49
