And I knew that those things we find most beautiful are made so by the brief span of their lives.
He had me sing for him that night, as most nights. Not so different from my very first night here, only now I did not retire to my own room once the song’s last breath was loosed. Julius lay down first, the lights off throughout the villa, the room bathed in a soft glow of candles on which our bed seemed to float like a raft.
I climbed onto the bed, knelt just behind him, the top of his head barely aligned between my parted knees. We had grown to favor the lullabies this way, because I could look down and see the full effect my voice was having on his body, and Julius could, in turn, gaze up to see me rising above him, like an angel, or a gargoyle.
I kept my fists closed, as I had for the past few minutes. And had I known when Francesca died that I would be singing Julius his final lullaby in a few nights? I must have. I only now wish I had sung one to her as she lay dying, something to carry with her into that blackest night.
I would not let her down now, for she too had loved Julius, as if the mother of an ancient son, a son handed down through generations of mothers.
A son she had finally entrusted to his lover.
“Make it beautiful,” Julius whispered from below me, gray eyes sad and trusting in the candles’ glow. “And make it mourn the lost.”
“Yes,” I whispered, and emptied my right hand long enough to stroke the silken blond hair away from his forehead. The back of my hand caught a tear as it fell – but then why not mourn for myself? We would both be making sacrifices this night.
Then I sang, sang as I never before had, every note balanced on the edge of heartbreak. Long, slow, sustained notes of infinite sadness, Cherubini’s Requiem in C Minor. It was music to mourn the passing of anything, everything, from a friend to an age. All things end, for all things must, the beautiful most of all.
And when the requiem was finished, I opened my hands, gripped their contents with trembling fingers. I bowed my head, deeply, so that I could kiss Julius on unsuspecting lips.
“I love you,” I told him, so that he might, in years to come, think of it as the last thing he heard.
And then I plunged the nails into his ears, one through each eardrum, weeping but secure in the knowledge it was the only way. He screamed, he convulsed, but I held tight to those steel shafts, worked them like swabs, so that there could be nothing left of any membrane to grow back together. Only when I felt that deafness was assured, permanent, did I pull them free, hurling them across the room. Only I could hear the chime they made against the wall.
Julius was doubled in agony, his body perfect in the yellow-orange glow, and I looked, looked enough to last me a lifetime; I would never again see him any younger than he was this night. When would it begin, his descent into years that could never be turned back? When would I look upon him and see age needling its lines into his flesh, like scrimshaw carved into fine old ivory?
I did not know. But I would be there.
I fell beside him, my hand upon his hard shoulder while I spilled apologies he could never hear, and he pushed me away. I retreated to the edge of that vast bed, curled onto my side – and was Francesca watching from somewhere, proud?
After a time, Julius draped himself over my bare back; I felt the slow drip of his blood along my spine. Soon, our breathing fell into sync, and I looked to the years ahead with a fear that he might come to hate me, if he didn’t already. I imagined Julius strangling me in my sleep, as even now his hand reached over and around me, fingers lingering upon my lips before loosely clenching over my throat. But he bore no harder, as if all he wanted was to hold onto the one dear thing he would forever be denied.
I knew the feeling.
I had lost my audience of one.
But if I could not be heard, there was always love to fall back on, and tonight, at least, love seemed surer by far.
KIM NEWMAN
Out of the Night, When the Full Moon is Bright . . .
KIM NEWMAN is a freelance writer, film critic and broadcaster. His non-fiction books include Nightmare Movies and Wild West Movies, and the Bram Stoker Award-winning Horror: 100 Best Books (edited with Stephen Jones). He is also the author of such critically acclaimed novels as The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, The Quorum, Anno Dracula (for which he was recently presented with Nancy Collins’ International Horror Critic’s Guild Award) and its sequel, The Bloody Red Baron. His short fiction has been published widely in magazines and anthologies, and a number of tales have been collected in The Original Dr Shade & Other Stories and Famous Monsters.
“I suppose that, having tackled the problem of ‘What’s Wrong with Britain?’ in Anno Dracula and The Quorum, I was having a stab at ‘What’s Wrong with America’ in this story,” explains the author. “Whatever it is, in both cases, it’s been wrong for centuries and, to my mind, it’s not getting any better.
“It surprises me that the so-called splatterpunk extreme fringe of horror concentrates so heavily on me-first issues, exploring the psychological and physical abuses heaped on individuals, while so rarely tackling anything that might be called political or social. Then again, those writers bleating about child abuse or dismemberment are mostly American and probably need the comfort of the little picture. If you open your mind to it, it must be impossible not to be driven mad by America . . .”
Oppression – by its very nature – creates the power that crushes it. A champion arises – a champion of the oppressed.
The Mark of Zorro (1920)
I
“STUEY,” OFFICER GARCIA began, “how about this for high concept?”
The idea bulb above his cop cap practically turned the inside of the windscreen into a silver-black mirror.
“These two cops in East LA, man . . .”
García grinned at Officer Scotchman, who kept eyes on the street, hands on the wheel.
“. . . and they’re really werewolves . . .”
The hispanic officer half-turned in the patrol car’s front passenger seat. Neck-twisting, he looked back at Stuart with glittering, amused steel eyes.
“. . . and the title of the cho is . . .”
The cruiser eased over a speed-bump, unsettling Stuart’s jet-lagged stomach.
“Prowl Car.”
Maybe it wasn’t a speed-bump. Maybe it was something lying in the road.
García snickered at his high concept, repeating his projected title like a mantra. Stuart shrugged in the shadow of the rear compartment, blackly invisible to the cops up front. Scotchman’s face, impassive in reflection, slid up the windscreen as they cruised under one of the rare functioning streetlights.
When García first introduced the other cop, Stuart assumed his name was Scotch, man. He sussed Scotchman thought his movie crazy partner was a prick.
“How d’ya like it, Stuey? Think it’ll play in Peoria?”
Stuart shrugged again. Last night, García had come up with a dozen movie ideas. Cop movies.
“Take it to New Frontier, man,” García insisted. “Prowl Car, man. Will be the werewolf cop movie. Be boffo boxo. Can write it together. Like a collaboration, man. Split credit.”
García’s eyes rolled like the comedy Chicano he pretended to be when he wasn’t beating someone. He howled at the moon. It was nearly full tonight, a sliver away from a perfect circle.
The cop had a Cheech Marín moustache, but was skinnier in the body than the straighter half of Cheech and Chong. He had overdeveloped forearms like Popeye’s. He would look proportioned if his torso were Schwarzeneggered out by kevlar body armour.
“Werewolf cho, man. Everybody loves el hombre lobo. Specially when he wrestle with El Santo. Those were great chos, man. Scotchman, you get yours when the moon is full and bright?”
Scotchman’s eyes swivelled to one side and back again. Reflection cut in half by shadow, his eyes shone in the dark upper half of his face. He looked like Batman.
Or Zorro.
His hair was gathered at the bac
k of his head into a Steven Seagal ponytail which seemed to pull his face flat into lizard-like impassivity. The officer worked at being scary. He had the kind of hardness and smarts they called “onstreet” this year.
This was the second night of Stuart’s week ridealong with García and Scotchman. The LAPD had good relations with New Frontier; Ray Calme, the so-called studio head, had been able to arrange this tour of duty with no hassle.
There was the usual jaw-drop when the Brit writer turned out to be black, but it passed. Most cops he’d met so far were black, latino or Asian. The city had just appointed its first Japanese-American Police Chief, Yasujiro Ryu. Whites, actual anglo Angelinos, were a minority, barricaded in secure enclaves, hiding behind “Armed Response” signs on their lawns.
They passed through dark streets. Stuart had the impression of people scurrying away from the cruiser’s path. Every building was tattooed, each block with its own style of graffiti. The overlapping scrawls were an endless layering of tag upon tag. Some called it art, but the coloured chaos looked to him like a canvas signed so many times there was no room for a painting.
He was supposed to pick up background for the Shadowstalk script. The book (Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture) was set in a North London council estate, but the movie (the cho, García would say) was relocating to Anybarrio, USA. He was now learning what an American hellhole looked like from the inside. He’d have been happy enough to spend a long weekend with tapes of Boyz N the Hood, South Central and a couple of PBS social problem documentaries, then make it all up. It was more or less how he had done the novel.
Scotchman slowed the cruiser as he turned a corner off Van Ness Avenue. Kids in highly-coloured windbreakers stood outside a barricaded liquor store, conversing with what looked like sign language. Even through armoured glass, Stuart heard savage scratchrap rhythms from boomboxes. García craned to clock faces, but Scotchman looked without seeming to look. The white cop had a billion dollar brain for mug shots and rap sheets.
Scotchman shook his eyes without moving his head. No one worth busting. The kids were black or somewhere thereabouts, and they all wore badges even Stuart could identify as gang colours. Back in Britain, he’d heard of the Crips and Bloods, but they were Old Hat, long split into other factions, superseded by newer waves of ethnicity and criminality. Last night’s lecture on the nomenclature and uniforms of Los Angeles gangs had been about as intricate and dull as an account of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Stuart knew he should be writing another novel, not traipsing around the Big Car Park (which was what LA looked like from the air when he first saw it) with a cowboy film company trying to wring some sort of commercial movie out of Shadowstalk (Soon To Be A Minor Video Release).
This year, black writers were onstreet; even a company as low down on the Hollywood food chain as New Frontier needed to buy one. Black and Brit was a whole new spin; Ray Calme was congratulating himself on having hooked a live one in Stuart Finn.
Raymond Chandler, one of Stuart’s idols, said: “If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood. If they had been any better, I should not have come.”
The roof was suddenly thumped. The interior of the patrol car rang like a bell.
“Bee-bee, man,” García laughed. “Onstreet shot. Feel up there, Stuey.”
Stuart ran his hand over the roof. It was armour-plate covered with thinning and holed foam rubber.
“Can you find a bump?”
Stuart couldn’t.
“What was that?” he asked.
“A steel ball-bearing,” Scotchman said. “Kids fire them from pistolgrip catapults like miniature crossbows. They’re for hunting birds. You can punch through a crash helmet if you aim at the visor. Go through a skull like a walnut through wet ricepaper.”
“Fockin’ kids, man,” García said, tolerantly.
“Someone shot the car?”
“Don’t call it a shot unless there’s a dent. No time for paperwork.”
Neither of the cops seemed to care about the attack. Stuart was sure a London copper would mind very much if someone propelled a steel missile at him with killing force. This was a different culture; he had to keep notes until he knew it well enough to translate Shadowstalk into its language.
Scotchman scoped out the roofs of the single-storey buildings lining the street. The Catapult Kid was up there, somewhere. It might not be worth filing a report, but the cop was certainly filing a grudge. One night, he’d get his payback.
Thanks to jetlag, Stuart was perfectly adapted to the ridealong life. He was awake at night and sleepy in the day, just like the cops. Only he felt lousy about it.
“You got Projects back in England, man?” García asked.
Projects? Oh yes, housing estates. Council houses.
“We have Projects.”
“Like in your book?”
“Yeah.”
“Onstreet book, man.”
When he found out his ridealong was a writer, García read Shadowstalk. Stuart, interviewed to death on publication, didn’t have anything more to say about the novel, but García kept bringing it up.
“Must be heavy, man. What you say the name of that Project was, Bridgwater Farm?”
“Broadwater Farm.”
“Yeah, heavy.”
“Certainly is.”
Actually, Stuart had spent about four afternoons in his life trudging around Broadwater Farm, visiting his uncles with Mum and Dad. In Autumn, the place was boring rather than threatening. Kids made fun of his school uniform, but that was it. No guns, no knives, no ball-bearings. He had noticed all the concrete litter bins had had fires lit in them and been rained out, leaving streaks of sooty sludge. He’d used that in Shadowstalk.
“You like that, Scotchman? They got a barrio in Britain. Drive-bys, man. Gangstas, zonk houses, riots. Whole enchilada. It’s in Stuey’s book. Should read it, man.”
Scotchman, who only read rap sheets and law enforcement magazines, made no answer.
Shadowstalk was about killings on a North London Estate, and the young black policeman (a convenient author’s stand-in, as everybody rightly said) who realizes the murderer isn’t just a psycho but the voodoo incarnation of all the social misery abroad in the land. It wasn’t exactly a thriller, more a portrait of life in the dead end of the twentieth-century United Kingdom. Ray Calme saw it as about a younger (i.e., cheaper) Wesley Snipes or Denzel Washington tracking down and totaling a bad-ass monster motherfucker. It could certainly be read that way, Stuart admitted, but he hoped to keep some content in the screenplay.
“Where Stuey comes from is just as onstreet as the Jungle, man,” García said. “Only with a different accent.”
Stuart didn’t mention that his Dad was a doctor in Bath, and that he’d been a day boy at a private school. There were plenty of blacks and Asians at Sexey’s (yes, that was the real name, by Damballah); members of Royal Families or the sons of coup-elevated Third World army officers.
No one could say it hadn’t been tough, though. He always wished he had gone to an inner city Comprehensive. At least, then, he might not now be a twenty-three-year-old virgin.
“Real riots in Britain, man. They kill cops just like here. Stuey, in the last LA riots, me and Scotchman got cut off in the Jungle. Crowd turned the car over, started kicking in the windows . . .”
He tapped the reinforced glass with his knuckles.
“. . . only they couldn’t crack it. Tried to get in the gas tank to fry us up, only it’s got a bullet-proof combination lock. The end, they just got bored and went away. Scotchman, though, he remember the faces.”
Stuart was a member of the Charlie Aziz Group, founded in memory of a Pakistani killed in police custody. They were still trying to get some lads, who had been fitted up for assaulting police officers, out of prison. He signed petitions and wrote letters to his MP but deplored direct action. When one of the CAG was suspected of throwing a petrol bomb at a police station, he person
ally made the resolution calling for his immediate expulsion and censure.
“We ran into some of those cholos from the riot. Scotchman, he make them strip naked and walk down a corridor, whistling the Andy Griffith Show theme while me and other officers beat on them with rubber flashlights, man. Was real payback.”
Stuart had heard similar stories about London police, who apparently made you whistle Dixon of Dock Green. That was a weird international police tradition.
“The Jungle out there, man,” García said, proudly. “We’re the beasts. We’re the kings of the Jungle. Gotta be, to survive. Put that in your screenplay, man. Give the cop guy claws that cut like razors and a roar that chills the blood of evildoers. Like us.”
If he couldn’t write for the movies, García would like to act in them. He said he became a cop because the first thing he could remember on TV was Erik Estrada in CHIPS. That was culture for you. For Stuart, it was Fawlty Towers repeats.
The patrol car had its route marked out, but Scotchman put his own random spin on the detail. He had explained that it was important in the jungle not to be predictable, so he superimposed his own course. They started out and finished up where they were supposed to be and hit certain points along the way, but there were any number of deviations he made sure to work into the schedule. Scotchman called it a skedule, of course.
They were covering the LA grid, taking as many cross-streets as possible. Names which sounded exotic in Bath (Sepulveda, Pico, Figueroa) had turned out to be nondescript thoroughfares stretching for miles, for all the world like Surbiton High Street with more palm trees and fewer pedestrians. This route was away from those names, threading from Downtown to the South-East, through the bitterly-contested territory called the Jungle. The neighbourhoods were mainly Chicano, most blacks having been driven out. A wave of Koreans was coming, García said. Stuart wondered where the people who were driven out went.
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