by Robin Ince
He envied Phil his name. He had one himself, surely? There were things people called him, of course. ‘Loser’, ‘twat’ and ‘nerk’ – they pierced the fug that sat thickly on his sense of self, thicker than the stink of outed innards. ‘My face,’ he thought, ‘I’ll try my own,’ and looked out for a mirror.
Beneath the crimson scattered layer of Phil, the room was bland, like some he’d seen on low-grade work trips, when he had worked at whatever he’d once done. Wardrobe, bed, desk, chair, no mirror, no telly, no kettle, no window, a door. A door.
He spent minutes kicking at the door, twisting at the sticky handle, denting it and clawing at the frame. This violence felt familiar and correct, though ineffective. He was locked in, which struck him as unfair. There was no en suite, which might excuse the urine pooled around Phil’s face. ‘I was watering the plant,’ he mitigated, weakly, then, in sudden furious defiance, growled ‘Hung for a sheep . . .’ and shat into a corner. He wiped himself on a pair of blood-stained pyjamas that, too late – another shard – he realised were his.
He balked. He glanced back to the wardrobe. He’d hung his jeans on hangers, his shirts were tatty-cuffed, but clean. He may have wiped new stripes on to his jimjams, but he couldn’t have done these other things, this bloody, murderous mess. At last, he felt clear-headed, a rush of certainty, responsibility, and took the opportunity to think.
He stood, one sock short of naked, breathed deeply and began. He would attempt to be forensic, standing like the redhead on a TV show he’d watched because a woman he liked had liked it. No, no good. The posture felt empty, unconvincing, not enough. He hated mysteries, twists, red herrings, cul-de-sacs, untruths. Give him the facts, the murderer up front, like – oh, at last – a larger piece of him was going to poke through all this fudge. He raised his fists toward the ceiling, waiting for his identity to crash back into him with a thunderbolt. ‘COLUMBO!’ he bellowed, and waited. But, no, that was it, an old man’s name, not his. The memory guttered out of him with a growl. ‘Just one more thing.’
He scuffed about through matted carpet, nudging grim bits with his toes. It seemed, perhaps, this was his fault. If so, he hadn’t been himself. He’d seen such ugliness before, on sleepless sofa nights, unfolding on his meagre screen. Reason flooded him.
He checked his body for bites, signs of contagion. He sniffed and peeked beneath the door for a whiff of glowing mist. His flesh, where clean, was pink and lively. He wasn’t craving brains. There was just one dead man in the room and it was not him.
He ran his tongue along his teeth, top and bottom. He found no fangs, though the ridges felt unfamiliar, cracked and coarsened. Phil had been chewed and ravaged by tooth and nail. No full moon in here, though, and those pyjamas had been discarded intact, not torn free in transformation. They had been worn, so he’d not been born from Phil full-sized, nor burst out of his chest, a rubber puppet. He scoured for signs of ritual: no pentacles, candles, or bloody scrawls. No book of human skin, no Japanese videotape, no puzzle box.
Frantically, he rolled his eyes back into his skull and looked for something squatting on his soul. He lumbered blindly about the room, backed into a corner, bent his limbs beyond their wishes and tried to levitate, crawl backwards up the wall. He slagged off God and priests and their mothers, but without conviction and the voice remained his own. His ankles hurt and he never left the ground.
What, then? He felt his back for switches, strafed his scalp for wires and antennae, for hints of remote control. He tore off his borrowed sock to reveal his hidden serial number, which was not there. Finally, with a shrug, he bent himself over the small desk and pushed a thumb and forefinger into his anus. ‘Batteries?’ he muttered glumly, but there were none. He was, as he’d feared, human.
If this was done by him, as him, a human man, he would have had good reason. There was a bed. Was this a sexual encounter gone awry? ‘Am I a prostitute?’ he mused. ‘Was Phil a John gone wrong?’ But the name badge, suit and room suggested ‘conference’, the pyjamas, even clean, said ‘practical’ and ‘modest’ not ‘do me now’. He felt no enmity towards the corpse, he hadn’t been provoked. There was just a sneaking sense of having done what was expected. An act of obedience, out of his hands. This must be his job.
He felt just like a soldier, or what he felt they must feel like. Righteous, confident, by any means necessary. But could those means include snapped ribs arrayed along a radiator? Kidneys strung up on a coat hook? It seemed so inefficient. Unless it was required. Yes, a little flair. They must have asked for an atrocity.
If this was work, the payments must be handsome. Special skills like this did not come cheap, but he couldn’t recall the last time he’d been paid. Would there be payslips or a sack of cash? Direct debit, that must be it. He never opened brown envelopes – another glint of self – a pile of post for him somewhere, in a hall, on a shitty shelf beneath a thermostat turned low even in winter.
He had been skint and this was his first day, tasked to commit an atrocity which he’d performed to the best of his ability, beyond their expectations. But, if he was asked to do this again, he’d struggle to match it. If this was his first day, he’d peaked. Perhaps he should have done less to more people? Saved himself, kept a few things up his sleeve? Any further abomination would require the indulgence of passions he was sure he didn’t possess. Another glimmer of self – he was a moral person, he’d banged on a van once, having chanced upon a courthouse, a paedo in the van, someone had said – he hated paedos, of that he was sure. Shy of bills, out of work and harsh on kiddy fiddlers. Facts leaked back in.
A new job, then, his first in years. That seemed right. There had – he thought, no, knew – been a website, an interview, an offer, a sandwich, a blacked-out minibus. They’d taken his phone, his wallet, checked his pulse. He’d joked about Official Secrets and Phil had not quite laughed. It all felt fun and sinister and purposeful. He’d help them out, impress them, be worthwhile. Phil’s hand was near his face, a droplet dripped from glass onto his tongue. Yes, that had happened.
He’d known what Phil had wanted, what this was, even when Phil had turned and run towards the door. A test. They’d tested him and he had passed with colours flying. Red, mainly, and some brown. ‘Thanks Phil,’ he said to the ruined man. Then wept.
He heard the door creak open and a puff of air and something sharp hit him in the buttock. He turned, face slack with instant grogginess and, through jellied vision, watched two men approach, a suited brute with a little pistol and a red-faced man in a white coat. They wouldn’t tell him off, he’d been so keen to please. They must be here to congratulate him. His eyes were heavy and wouldn’t give the wink he wanted, so he simply crawled into Phil’s cavity and drifted off, all warm inside.
‘We should’ve come in while he was in the wardrobe,’ said the big man as he picked a pipette from the floor and sniffed it gingerly. ‘What the fuck are you trialling this time?’
‘You don’t need to know.’
‘Well, it’s carnage. Looks like you’re on to a winner.’
The red-faced man checked his clipboard. ‘Nah, he had the placebo’ – he crouched and tugged the dart from the subject’s arse – ‘some people just need an excuse.’
‘Yeah, true. Right, give me two minutes and block the camera. I’m gonna kick the fucker’s head in. See how he likes it.’
Red-face tutted.
‘Phil was a mate,’ excused the brute, then raised his heel above the sleeping man’s smile and grinned.
Filthy Night
charlie higson
‘Filthy night.’
‘Isn’t it? Did you find your way here all right?’
‘I never find my way anywhere, old chum,’ said Hastings in a pronounced manner, and he waved a hand vaguely over his shoulder.
Mark saw a large black limousine parked in the street, looking out of place amongst the wrecks and tarted-up boy rac
er hatchbacks belonging to his neighbours. He could see the vague shape of the driver – a large bald head on a solid body – sitting immobile at the wheel, staring straight ahead. The wind picked up again and threw some sleet horizontally down the street between the small houses. Hastings shivered theatrically.
‘You’d better come in,’ said Mark.
He stepped back and held the door open as Hastings came in off the front step, a dark bluster of flapping coat, like some great wet animal entering the tiny hallway. He was all Mark could have hoped for, a hundred times larger than life. He threw off his coat and thrust it at Mark, revealing a three-piece, purple, velvet suit and orange shirt. A wide silk tie decorated with mystic symbols, and Hastings’ trademark wide-brimmed hat topped off the ensemble. The hat he’d first worn in The Vampire Hunters and which he’d sported ever since, particularly memorably on his infamous drunken interview with Michael Parkinson.
‘I’m loving the hat,’ said Mark, so glad he’d worn it tonight. ‘I wonder how many you’ve owned over the years?’
‘It is the same lid, my lad,’ said Hastings, looming over Mark and dripping water onto him from the hat’s black brim. ‘The self-same titfer. My old companion. It’s been through the wars with me. If this hat could talk, what a story it could tell.’
Mark kept schtum. What a story Hastings could tell. Best not to contradict him. Mark was pushing his luck as it was. Inviting him here. And the hat . . . ? Mark had watched the Parkinson interview on YouTube enough times to know that his couldn’t possibly be the same one. The interview had concluded with Hastings attempting to eat his hat. Whilst he hadn’t managed to down the whole thing, he had managed to tear half the brim off before Parkinson had brought the interview to a swift conclusion.
Hastings’ attention had been caught by a framed poster on the wall. For his 1968 film Lunatic. He tapped the glass.
‘All I remember of this particular catastrophe was working with the gorgeous Carla Devine,’ he said. ‘Or Carol Dawson, as her greengrocer father christened her.’
It was unreal, hearing that deep, dark, velvety voice, shot through with its deliciously sinister undertones, booming out here in Mark’s hallway, rattling the light fittings. The voice that had made him a fortune. A fortune that he’d lost several times over as the demons he’d either portrayed, or battled against, in so many films, had seemed to possess him for real and send him mad with drink and drugs.
‘By God,’ he went on. ‘Carla was a vision, with knockers like she’d been torpedoed in the back. She had a TV series at the time, some nonsense about telepathic spies . . .’
‘The Specials,’ said Mark.
‘The Specials, that’s it! Special needs I suppose you’d call it now.’
‘It was a pretty popular show,’ said Mark. ‘I’ve got all five of the Fontana Christopher Longman novelisations upstairs.’
‘I’ll bet they’re whippet shit,’ said Hastings and he roared with laughter. ‘You know, I said to Carla one day after filming, ‘Carol,’ I said. I always called her Carol. She hated it. ‘Carol, when are you going to give me a part in your godforsaken TV series?’ ‘Hastie,’ she replied, ‘you’ve already bloody filmed it!’ And I had, the year before. I’d been so drunk I’d completely forgotten.’
‘‘‘The Russian Affair”,’ said Mark. ‘Third episode, second series.’
‘I’ll take your word for it. I’ll bet I was the only good thing in it.’ He tapped the poster again. ‘Like this bloody film. Which is saying something. My performance was beyond salvation, but compared to everyone else I was Marlon Brando, David Garrick and Sir Laurence bloody Olivier all rolled in to one. Not that Larry was as good as he thought. The great poof.’
Hastings was right. Lunatic wasn’t the best film in the world. Mark had only put the poster up in the hallway that afternoon to please the great man. He’d carefully taken down his signed poster of George Romero’s Martin to make way for it. In Lunatic, Hastings had played the director of a mental hospital. The other actors, including Carla Devine, were wooden and looked uncomfortable. But Hastings had approached his part with his usual reckless gusto. His performance had been hammy and uneven and in some scenes entirely inappropriate, but still contained one or two moments of uncalled-for genius, including a look of horror in the final scene that was so intense and raw that it looked like he was actually staring into the abyss.
Which he probably had been, trapped as he was in his own private hell of intoxication and chaos. A hell he had only recently climbed out of. He’d sobered up long enough to write an autobiography that was so funny and hair-raising and candid and acid-tongued that it had become an unexpected bestseller. Was he on the way to making another fortune? Well, he certainly wouldn’t be wealthy yet. It would take a while for the money to roll in. Mark wondered who was paying for the car and driver. His publishers, probably. They had him traipsing up and down the country, publicising his book at every bookshop, literary festival, fantasy convention and local radio station they could get him on to. So far it had gone fine, Hastings had even made a barnstorming appearance on Alan Carr’s show, but Mark wondered, indeed feared, how long it would be before the great man slipped off the wagon again and disgraced himself in public, possibly for the last time.
Mark had told Maria repeatedly not to offer him a drink and they had hidden everything alcoholic in the house, including the mouthwash. They’d also cleared out all the medicines from the bathroom cabinet. A small nagging part of Mark missed the drunken outrages and out-of-control rants of Hastings at his peak, however. In the late eighties and nineties he’d popped up on every outrageous youth programme there was, and had always delivered. At what terrible cost to his soul, though?
Mark would have dearly loved a personal performance from the man, one of his insane spiralling confections of bluster and bile. There was no doubting that he was very slightly less interesting when he was sober. But – for God’s sake! – here he was. In Mark’s house. The greatest British horror movie star of the last fifty years.
‘I can’t believe you’re actually here,’ he said. ‘No one will believe me. Until . . .’ He pulled his phone from his trouser pocket and laughed.
Hastings glared at the thing with a cold fisheye.
‘Those wretched torture implements!’ he wailed. ‘Those infernal devices. They steal your soul.’
‘What about when you were making your films?’ said Mark.
‘Don’t speak of it as if it was all in the past, you louse. I am still making films. I am busier than ever.’
‘Of course,’ said Mark. ‘I didn’t mean, you know, I was only going to say that when you’re shooting films, does that mean they’re stealing your soul thirty-two times a second?’
‘One hundred times a second!’ thundered Hastings. ‘A thousand times! A million! My soul has been wrenched from my poor body ever since I first trod the boards as a callow – yet surprisingly accomplished, everyone will tell you so, I got rave reviews even then – youth. That’s what this acting business is, lad. It’s my body, my soul, being feasted on by those silent staring hordes in the cinemas, in the theatres, on the sofas at home, stupefied with drink and cheap food. And now, on their computers. Without paying a penny. O brave new world! But luckily, my boy, I have a big soul. There’s plenty to go around. It is my gift to the world. My gift of giving. Giving of myself.’
‘Well, thank you for giving yourself to me for one evening,’ said Mark. ‘I never thought when I collared you at Darkfest that you’d ever say yes. And when you did say yes I never thought you’d actually show up.’
‘My fans have kept me alive,’ said Hastings. ‘Now, where is your lovely young wife?’
Mark had been lucky enough to interview Hastings at Darkfest in Leeds two weeks previously. Maria had come with him, dressed as Vampirella. She took her cosplay seriously. Had had the costume – a sort of bright red bathing suit slashed up the middle
– specially made. Hadn’t been cheap. Same with the wig.
‘I trust she’s here,’ said Hastings, moving down the hallway. ‘Your child bride? The bride of the beast.’
Mark blushed, giggled.
‘Does that make me the beast?’ he asked and Hastings spun round, pinned him to the wall with a great blast of hearty and delighted laughter.
‘You are the beast, indeed!’ he cried out, his voice unbelievably loud in the cramped space. ‘The beast in his lair. Cronos the soul sucker. I have met a legion of you, the autograph hunters, the memorabilia collectors, the watchers of lost DVDs whose titles I have long forgotten, all clutching at my coats. Tearing at my soul.’
He winked at Mark, and Mark wasn’t sure if he’d been insulted or not.
‘You are my minions,’ Hastings went on. ‘You are parasites that swarm over me, each one taking tiny, tiny bites. Now – take me to your wife!’
Maria was in the living room. Looking very different without the jet-black wig, skimpy outfit and thigh-high boots. Mark saw Hastings stop and do a double take, reassuring himself that this was the same person.
‘You are in disguise!’ he bellowed. ‘But you don’t fool me. You are the succubus, the daughter of darkness.’
‘I’m just plain Maria Wallace,’ she said and held out her hand towards him. ‘And my dad’s a product manager for an industrial glue company. Great to see you again.’
He ignored her proffered hand and scooped her up for a double kiss, continental style, one smacker on each cheek. Maria put up with it and kept a polite smile fixed to her face. She worked for the council organising parking permits. Tonight she was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and had short, brown hair.
Hastings took in the room. The fish tank. The big TV. The shelves of DVDs and old VHS tapes. The poster for Pan’s Labyrinth, signed by del Toro, screwed to the wall. The Spaniel, Doodles, in his basket, eyeing Hastings up and pretending not to be interested.
