‘What? Is that you, Cass? Are they after you? The fuz—’
‘THE VIDEO – IT’S ONLY THE VIDEO!’
She looked down at me, confused.
Perhaps this wasn’t the best time to explain how politically incorrect her terms of reference were, either?
‘THE VIDEO, MRS BRIDGES!’
She turned and vanished, and the sound abruptly ceased, only to be replaced a few moments later by her reedy soprano warbling along to The Sound Of Music.
‘I am sixteen, going on seventeen …’
Yeah, right. Sixteen going on seventy-nine.
The room throbbed with a strange beat, and greenish light pulsated as the familiar figure of her neighbour swiftly aged before her eyes, adolescent to elderly woman in seconds, before crumbling to dust with a soft sigh …
Not that I wanted Mrs Bridges to turn to dust, because I was quite fond of the noisy old bat, and she was knitting me a nice, big warm cobweb to wear on those chillier Crypt-ogram occasions.
‘Oh, it’s only you, Cass!’ Chrissie Fowkes said, peeping out of her front door like a timid albino gerbil. ‘I thought I heard shouting.’
‘You did, but I’ve stopped now.’
‘Oh?’ she said doubtfully, then came out a bit further, clutching her tightly and squarely packaged baby. It was making noises like a kettle slowly coming to the boil.
‘How’s my little Birdie?’
‘She never seems to stop screaming, and now she’s got this really peculiar rash. Do you want to see it?’
‘No, I think I’ll pass on that one, thanks.’
‘Do you think she’s possessed?’ she asked fearfully.
‘No more than other children,’ I reassured her, and then left quickly before she could show me the rash, or Birdsong demonstrate her lung capacity.
If Birdie hadn’t put me off the urge to procreate, nothing would.
4
Lover, Come Back to Me
I picked up the new horror novel by Cass Leigh, Nocturnally Yours, out of a spirit of curiosity. Then I couldn’t put it down. I couldn’t keep any food down for three days either …
Exposé Magazine:
‘On the Shelf’ with Lisa-Mona Bevore
As I drove through the twisty dark lanes to deliver the Crypt-ogram, Clive the rubber vampire bat dangling from the sun visor, my twisty dark mind began to take over, rudely elbowing my real-life problems into the bottom drawer.
This often happens, since I was a creature of the night. All my best writing was done in the graveyard shift between about midnight and four in the morning, that spooky time when nothing seemed quite real. You could punch your fist through the reality around you then, and it would give like Cellophane, which I suppose pretty well sums up what I did.
Strangely enough, it’d always annoyed the hell out of Max to wake up in the night and find me hammering the keys in the back room, but he forgot that I had to write to eat. (Unless you count his occasional hamper contributions, but I found all those tasty little goodies much too rich for my taste.)
Besides, I was a writer: ergo, I wrote. And if my most creative time was in the middle of the night, so be it.
The way I slid in and out between the two parallel universes of my life and fiction without conscious volition, the one adding substance to the shadows of the other, unnerved him.
‘Where are you, Cassy?’ he would often say, which was about as much a conversation stopper as: ‘What are you thinking about?’
‘Chapter Sixteen of Lover, Come Back to Me’ is still giving me problems, Clive,’ I said, as he bobbed and flapped against the windscreen. ‘It just isn’t chilling enough. Listen to this:
Keturah returned to the grave again and again each night, to fling herself like a penitent across the freshly mounded pall of earth that separated her from her lover, hot tears searing down through the cold clay.
She yearned to feel his presence there with her, for that illusion of comfort was all she could hope for now that the old woman’s childish resurrection mumbo-jumbo had failed her, as she had known in her heart it would.
But she had done what she’d promised Sylvanus in his last throes: she’d tried every possible means to call him back to her and all had been fruitless.
Perhaps it was her fault, for not truly believing it could happen? Or deeply dreading that if it did work, what came back would be some horrible travesty of her lover …
‘The dead don’t come back, Sylvanus,’ she whispered, too blinded by tears to see the pale fingers clawing out of the earth towards her, like new shoots to the sun.
She was about to find just how wrong she was.
‘But what, exactly, is coming back, Clive?’
I wasn’t sure, and my publisher’s deadline was approaching faster than that grisly set of suppurating fingers.
The only way I’d ever get it finished was to pay a little graveyard visit later that night after the pub shut and scare myself into the next chapter. If I was very lucky the conditions would be right for that strange, low, smoky mist to hang about at tombstone level like an old horror movie: sometimes it did.
First, though, there was the little matter of the singing telegram to deliver – if the thread of country lane I was currently driving along was really the one I thought it was, that is?
It was, and with relief I turned into a marginally wider road and pulled up outside a brightly lit pub with a full car park.
I hooked Clive’s elastic over my arm, checked my greenish pallor in the mirror, and added another layer of crimson lipstick. Then I took a deep breath and issued forth to sing for my supper.
I shouldn’t have bothered.
That was absolutely the last Crypt-ogram I’d do, because the money could never be enough to compensate me for what I’d just gone through!
Even supply teaching would be preferable.
I mean, I knew it was a stag night, but no one warned me that the said stags would be huge, burly, drunken rugby players, all of whom wanted me to bite them, at the very least.
One of them even kept trying to stick his finger in my mouth to test the sharpness of my fangs, until I bit him. (Fangs for the Memory?)
I was lucky to escape with little more than shredded drapery, though I feared my bat would never have been the same again, even had I stopped long enough to retrieve him. (Poor Clive: although I knew his body was hollow, I hadn’t realized quite how stretchy it was. Sort of symbolic of the whole thing really – a hollow mockery.)
I beat them to my little black Mini with inches to spare. It was unlocked as usual – you’d have to be desperate to steal it – but as soon as I was in it I slammed down the door locks.
I was just in time: they streamed around the car, baying, then lifted it up bodily only to set it down again sideways in the road facing the hedge.
It took me something like a sixteen-point turn to get free, weaving between huge, drunken bodies while they leered through the windows and banged on the roof. But at least that was better than them banging me, which seemed to be what they assumed came with the package.
I tell you, it was seriously scary.
‘Come back and strip!’ they howled, among other more unrepeatable things. ‘Call yourself a Strippagram?’
Well no, actually I didn’t. And Micheline Brown, the unfortunate fiancée of one of these louts, had hired me to sing the ‘Monster Mash’, nothing more.
She might have warned me: though when I came to think about it, on the phone she’d sounded like the sort of girl who could sort even this lot out, so she had probably assumed I could, too.
I drove off at speed in the wrong direction, and promptly got lost in the small lanes trying to get back to Westery.
It took me ages, and I stopped for a tearful interlude in the first lay-by I came to, though whether the tears were from humiliation, fear, frustration, or the Max situation, I really couldn’t say: maybe all of them.
After some time I wiped my face with a wad of tissues, and decided that what
I needed was a drink and something solid in the food line, which was fortunate since Something Solid in the Food Line was the only sort of catering the King’s Arms did. Not for them the nouvelle cuisine offerings of a teaspoon of cat vomit decorated with a trickle of vivid sauce and two leaves. (And while I am forever seeing pubs called the King’s Head, or King’s Arms, where is the rest of him? Why no King’s Leg, or King’s Torso, or even King’s Knob?)
It wasn’t by any means the first time I’d appeared in the pub in full vampire gear, eliciting no more attention than when I’d appeared at more or less fortnightly intervals with a suave, increasingly silver-haired lover.
Mind you, I’d have taken out my fangs had they not by now been well and truly rammed down on to the adhesive gum by having those grubby masculine fingers testing the points for sharpness – and I think I bit down pretty hard, too, which wouldn’t have helped. I’d have to work them loose later.
It was quiet in the back room, although the rattle of the slot machine and a low moaning from the juke box gave evidence of the regulars in the bar. Or it could be the moaning of the regulars and the rattling of the juke box, as something uncoiled itself from a nest of old Elvis 45s and started to slither—I shook the image firmly away and looked around.
It being Friday, the vicar was sitting at his usual table, where he holds an impromptu counselling clinic for all-comers, while imbibing dry sherry and putting the parish magazine together.
‘Evening, Charles,’ I said, and he glanced up with a preoccupied smile.
‘Cass, my dear,’ he said absently. ‘Terrible, terrible stuff!’
I didn’t take it personally. Poor Charles was something of a poet, and found the reams of religious verse that flowed in by every post almost too bad to bear. But he stoically read them, and even printed one or two in every edition.
Seeing he was absorbed I carried on over to the corner where Orla was sitting in Marilyn Monroe mode.
Well, I say sitting, but actually she was slumped in a heap, shoes kicked off, with her gold dress looking a little the worse for wear.
‘Hi, Orla,’ I said, and she opened mascaraed eyelashes and looked at me. ‘You look like I feel. Bad one?’
‘You’re not kidding.’
‘Where’s Jason? He said he’d be here.’
She indicated the limp figure propping up the bar like a wonky gremlin bookend. ‘Celebrating selling that hideous screen he’s had in the shop for years – to my American guest, too.’
‘Did he? No wonder he’s celebrating, then. Well, I need to eat, and boy do I need a drink! Do you want anything?’
‘Large dark rum and Coke. Chicken and chips.’
‘OK.’
Jason had looked right out of it, but as I approached he straightened slowly upright and smiled at me, his brown eyes lighting up: ‘Cass? Thought you were a figment of my overheated imagination.’
‘Drunken imagination,’ I corrected, leaning past him to order food. ‘Are you going to get something to eat and come and sit down? Or just carry on drinking until you slide down the bar like last time?’
‘You’ve got your teeth in,’ he said sapiently.
‘I know. I’d better have curry, it’ll be easier to eat.’
‘And you’ve losht … lost your bat.’
‘I’m just grateful that’s all I lost,’ I said darkly. When I carried the drinks over to Orla he followed me. (It sometimes seemed to me that he may be the reincarnation of an Irish wolfhound, except that they are the most equable of dogs and Jason had a quick temper.)
Orla was looking a little more alert. ‘How was the stag night?’ she asked me.
‘I was thinking maybe supply teaching is safer.’
‘That bad?’
‘Rugby players. I was lucky to escape relatively unscathed, except for the mental scars, and poor Clive is a goner.’
‘Clive?’ she asked, puzzled.
‘My vampire bat.’
‘Oh? Well, he’s made of rubber, isn’t he? He’ll probably bounce back.’
‘I don’t think so, and I don’t intend going back to find out. How did yours go?’
‘Birthday party. They were drunk and persistent – made me sing “Happy Birthday” three times, with lots of pouting, so I’m all pouted out. But please, Cass, don’t stop doing the Crypt-ograms. You’re one of my most popular acts.’
‘What do you mean, “one of”? You’ve only got four including yourself.’
‘Yes, but I’m still building the business. And I promise not to send you on any more stag nights,’ she wheedled.
‘’Cept mine,’ slurred Jason, who had been sitting sleepily staring down into his glass looking deceptively cuddly, though actually those sudden bursts of bad temper were probably what had finally driven Tanya away. Who wants to live with a volcano?
‘Jason looks like Alice’s dormouse,’ Orla observed critically.
‘More like a Wookie.’
‘Are you getting married, Jason?’ she asked.
‘When Cass says the word.’
‘The word is no,’ I said automatically. ‘And not only are you not divorced, Jason, you know you don’t really want to marry me.’
‘Come on, Cass!’ he said, smiling at me. ‘Marry me, live with me – whatever you want!’
He really is rather attractive in a large, loose-limbed, craggy way.
‘Why waste any more of your life waiting for an old man, when you could be sharing it with me?’
‘He’s not an old man,’ I objected automatically, though Max was certainly no spring chicken. He was a whole decade older than Jason and me, and our dewy bloom of youth had long since evaporated.
Somehow this didn’t seem the right moment to tell them that my lover was Suddenly Single but hadn’t bothered to inform me of the fact, though it might have explained just why I found it balm to my wounded feelings to have Jason looking at me that night as though I was everything he’d ever wanted for Christmas.
Perhaps I might even have given him just a bit of encouragement … unconsciously, of course, for my feelings for him were really more of the sisterly variety.
And after a couple of drinks I certainly began to wonder just why I was being faithful to someone who was, as Orla often pointed out, unfaithful. Who had made promises he hadn’t kept, and hidden me in a sort of limbo for half my life (and just about all my reproductive life).
Could there be that many eggs left in the basket at forty-four and counting? How many of the little lions had climbed off and ambled away, yawning? For we are born with all the eggs we’ll ever have, and no one had ever gone to work on my Year of the Lion cache. I’d be even older by the time Max came back and we got married – if he came back and we did finally get married – and it might be too late even then.
Too late.
Also to be taken into the reckoning was Max’s performance in bed, which had declined over the last few years to the disheartening point where I thought the sight of his golf clubs excited him more than I did. This was not likely to help.
I was starting to feel really dismal, not to mention a teeny touch of the bitter and twisted. I may even have been muttering under my breath like a malevolent hag. It was the perfect mood for my graveyard shift, though, so wrapping warmly in my purple velvet cloak I set off.
That night, for some reason, Orla and Jason were both twitchy about letting me go off on my own, even though I did this sort of thing all the time and was not at all afraid. I had to be quite firm about needing to be alone.
After all, nothing living would harm me in Westery, and the dead couldn’t.
I left the Batmobile outside my cottage in Graveyard Lane, resisting the urge to go in and check for phone messages, which wasn’t really a huge temptation when you lived in the central one in a row of three, like the filling in a dubious sandwich.
On one side of me Mrs Bridges had her TV switched on full-volume between the hours of 7 a.m. and midnight, sending me subliminal messages through the party wall that I didn
’t want to hear; and on the other side, of course, lived the Fowkeses with their possessed baby, Birdsong.
They call her Birdie, which might be all right for a tiny tot, but could be a bit sick-making when she’s adult, I fear.
Shots from number one and squalling from number three slowly faded behind me as I strode down the lane, warmly wrapped against the chilly breeze in my cape with its quilted mauve satin lining.
I was not at all nervous of the living, for the road to the graveyard was a dead end and so not much frequented at night, and since Westery was a very small place, what youths there were preferred the dubious nightspots of the nearest large town. I’d always felt perfectly safe walking the lanes in the middle of the night, waiting for the chill awareness of the undead to strike, as it always did.
Orla thought I was going to fall prey to some mad rapist cruising the lanes looking for a victim, but I didn’t think they cruised the lanes looking for extremely pissed-off vampires.
Down the high-hedged lane the small and isolated graveyard sat in its very own Foggy Hollow, giving it on the right night that classically spooky effect. But unfortunately that night was clear and crisp and even, and I didn’t even need my little torch once I was out of the lane because the moon was werewolf full. The metal gate groaned under my hand, and the gravestones all cast dark, hunched shadows.
I paced about the gravelled paths for a while … the gravel beneath her feet grated like broken teeth … under the inscrutable gaze of angels, and accompanied by the sobbing, guilty shade of Keturah, distraught at having failed her lover, Sylvanus.
She hadn’t truly believed black magic could bring him back, nor deep down had she wanted it to, for she’d been mortally afraid of what form her dead lover would take. No wonder, then, that she cast herself on to the freshly dug earth of his grave in a frenzy of guilt and remorse!
And her lover, Sylvanus? How would he be feeling? (Apart from dead.)
If he did manage to come back in some form without her help, wouldn’t he be seriously cheesed-off with Keturah for failing him? Especially, perhaps, if he had been called back by another, whose yearning for him was greater than hers?
A Good Heart is Hard to Find Page 5
