Whitstable

The hospital, the car park, the very sight of the building itself inevitably brought back memories of Helen, and he was ready for that. Mercifully, she hadn’t passed away there, but during her long illness visits were all too frequent, and each time accompanied by a sense of immense dread, of what might be discovered, of what one, this time, might be told. He was surprised, then, that no such feelings asserted themselves. On the contrary, he felt calm, in fact unusually so. Plainly there was a world of difference between visiting the love of your life and—this.

Naturally Wake had questioned why he wanted to do it, and Cushing wondered how many other questions the policeman kept to himself, and for how long he would continue to do so. But in reply to the man’s enquiries—clearly worried at a widower seeing a dead body so recently after the death of his wife—he could only reply honestly that he felt nothing.

“Peter, these places are cold and clinical. They breathe death.”

“I assure you, dear boy. I’m perfectly fine.”

As they walked along the antiseptic-smelling corridor Wake explained that the sister’s expression ‘Rose Cottage’ was the euphemism often used by nursing staff when talking about the hospital mortuary. As they approached it Cushing thought of the roses he tended in his own garden, round his own front door. The roses Helen loved. He pictured himself snipping one off and handing it to her, as he did, on many an occasion. How she’d invariably reward him with a kiss on the cheek.

They’d done their best to take the curse off the viewing room, of course, but it was still a hospital room badly playing the part of a Chapel of Rest. They almost needn’t have bothered. As the door opened it had the feel of a shrunken and poverty-stricken church hall. The floor was the same slightly-peeling linoleum as the corridor, the walls insalubrious teak, with cheap beading intended to simulate panelling, and curtains on one wall a deep navy blue, the only colour.

He’d had it explained to him that the post-mortem had been done and the body was now being stored there—presumably in one of those pull-out fridges—until the undertakers collected it. He removed his hat and stepped closer to the bed, bier, table, whatever it was called. He was all too aware that the actions he was going through were normally the province of the close family, even though Wake had told him Carl’s mother had no desire to see the body of her boyfriend. Accordingly, in spite of all he knew about the dead man, he felt he should behave with respect.

At a nod from Wake, who remained at the door, the assistant moved forward and folded down the white sheet covering the face so that the head and shoulders were exposed. Cushing noticed the clean, fastidiously manicured hands before the man stood back.

In death, they say, we are all equal, he thought.

He looked down and saw that a white linen cravat was tucked round the corpse’s neck. He reached over and touched its rim with his fingertips. The attendant took a step forward and was about to speak, but Wake raised his hand. The man stepped back.

Tugged down, the elastic of the linen cravat revealed a livid scar running round the circumference of Gledhill’s neck, the twine stitches, heavy and harsh, still abundantly visible. Frankenstein stitches. Holes dug deep with thick needles like fish hooks into dead, unfeeling flesh.

“Impact would have killed him outright,” Wake said. “The front of the car was like a concertina. Steering column went straight through his chest. No chance.”

Cushing pictured himself as General Spielsdorf again, holding the stake over Carmilla’s heart and shoving it down with every ounce of his strength. Blood pumping up, filling the cavity as her wild eyes stared in perplexed fury.

“Cigarette?”

Cushing shook his head. Wake lit one of his own and blew smoke. It drifted in front of Gledhill’s cadaver like the mist in Karnstein castle graveyard.

“As if that wasn’t enough, he was decapitated too. The force of the crash sent him right into the windscreen. They found his head thirty yards down the hard shoulder. Apparently it’s not uncommon. Tell you what. I’d never be a motorway cop for all the tea in China.”

Cushing saw himself lifting up the body of Ingrid Pitt by the hair. The silvery flash of his sword as it sliced through her throat.

“They’ve done a decent job.”

He wasn’t sure what the Inspector meant.

“After a real old mess like that. I mean, he looks at peace.”

“Yes,” Cushing said, gazing back at the figure on the bed and readjusting the white cravat to its former position. “I think he does.”

He didn’t know if it was the effect of chemicals used by the pathologist or the fluorescent lighting, but the man seemed years younger, as if, absurdly, all the sins had been lifted off him. His skin unblemished, his hair neatly combed as if by an insistent mother. He wondered what was strange and then realised that, for some mysterious reason, his beard had been shaved off. He seemed, in fact, for all the world, strangely like a child.

Cushing looked at the crucifix on the wall opposite—the room’s only concession to decoration—and found himself, in an almost imperceptible gesture, making the sign of the cross over his own heart as he turned away.

As he reached the door he heard Wake’s voice behind him.

“Have you got what you want?”

“Mm?”

He turned back. The assistant was covering Gledhill’s face with the sheet, and Wake was standing beside him, ash gathering on his cigarette as he sucked it.

“For your research? I presume that’s why you wanted to see the body.”

“Yes.” Cushing tweaked the front of his trilby between thumb and forefinger before placing it on his head. “Yes, I have.”

On the way home many thoughts went through his mind, but the one he was left with as he opened the front door was that, earlier, that morning, as his hand had picked up the receiver, he had wanted it to be Joycie at the other end of the line. Much as he feared talking to her, it was a fear he had to face—no, wanted to face, and that evening after a supper of Heinz tomato soup he decided to take matters into his own hands, and ring her himself. He was absolutely sure it was what Helen would want him to do. No, what she would expect of him. Because it was right.

No sooner had he said her name, “Joycie”, than they both wept.

Without hesitation he asked her to come back. Equally without hesitation, she agreed.

“I’m so sorry if I’ve been rude or inconsiderate…”

“No, sir. You’ve never been that. Never.” He could hear her blowing her nose in a tissue. Soon he found himself doing the same.

“What a pair we are,” he said. “Dear oh dear. I shall have to get more Kleenex tomorrow, shan’t I? I think I need to order a truck-load.”

She laughed, but it was tinged with the same kind of enfeebled anguish as his own. He wondered, as he often did, if he would hear his own laughter, proper laughter, that is, ever again.

“You see, Joycie, everywhere I see reminders of her. I can’t help it. This room. Every room. Every street I walk. Every person I meet. It’s simply unbearable, you see…”

“I know, sir.”

“Do you forgive me?” he said.

And, before she could form an answer, they wept again, till the tissues ran out.

Facing the sea he heard the tick-tick-tick of the wheels of a pushbike approaching. His was an old black Triumph from Herbert’s Cycles tending towards rust, with a shopping basket at the front, tethered to a bollard like an old and recalcitrant mare. The other, soon leaning against it, was one of these Raleigh ‘Chopper’ things (not hard to deduce as the word was emblazoned loudly on the frame) in virulent orange, with handlebars that swept up and back and an L-shaped reclining saddle like something out of Easy Rider.

The boy, sitting next to him and finishing a sherbet fountain through a glistening shoot of liquorice, said nothing for a while in the accompaniment of sea birds, then, when seemed remotely fitting, pronounced that the vehicle on display was a Mark 1 and had ten speeds. Cushing pointed with a crooked finger and said there was no attachment for a lamp, and the boy said he knew, and they were made like that. He said it was called a Chopper, which Cushing already knew but pretended he didn’t and repeated the word, for all the world as if the emblazonment had been invisible. But the object was new and gleaming and admirable, and dispensing some wisdom since he could, he advised the boy to look after it. Possibly the boy looked at the scuffed, worn, weary Triumph and thought that was like an elephant telling a gazelle to lose weight. But he’d been brought up by his mother not to cheek his elders, not that that worried him a great deal when it was called for, but on this occasion he chose to hold his tongue and nodded, meaning he would look after it. Of course he would. He wanted it to look new and gleaming forever.

When the sherbet was finished the boy walked to the rubbish bin and dropped it in. When he sat back down he chewed the remains of the liquorice the way a yokel might chew a straw, moving it from one side of his mouth to the other along slightly-blackened lips.

“You look younger.”

Cushing had almost forgotten he’d shaved for the first time in weeks. He rubbed his chin. Dr Terror’s salt and pepper was gone.

“I have a painting in the attic.”

“What does that mean?”

“Never mind. You’ll find out when you’re a bit older.”

The boy frowned. “I hate it when grown-ups say that.”

“So do I. Very much so. I’m sorry.”

He looked at the boy and beckoned him closer. He took out a handkerchief and rolled it round his index finger. “Spit on it.” Without considering the consequence, the boy did, trustingly, and Cushing used it to rub the liquorice stains from his lips while the boy’s face scrunched up, an echo, the old man thought, of the infant he once was.

“How’s your mum?” He folded the handkerchief away.

The reply was a shrug. “She cried a bit. She cried a lot, actually. I didn’t.” A show of resilience, sometimes stronger in the young. The show of it, anyway. “But I felt sorry for her. She’s my mum.”

“Naturally.”

Cushing did not enquire further. Out at sea beyond the Isle of Sheppey, a cloud of gannets hovered halo-like over a fishing vessel.

“They say it was an accident,” the boy said presently, with a secretive excitement in his voice. “But it wasn’t an accident, was it? It was you.”

“It doesn’t matter. It happened. He’s gone now. It’s over.”

“I know you can’t say because it’s secret, but it was you, wasn’t it? Acting on my instructions as a Vampire Hunter? I knew you would. I knew you wouldn’t let me down.”

Cushing tugged on his white cotton glove and pulled down each finger in turn, then lit a cigarette and smoked it, eyes slitting.

“How do you feel now? That’s the important thing.”

The boy wondered about that as if he hadn’t wondered about it until that very moment.

“You know what? It’s funny. It’s really weird. I feel a bit sad. I feel a bit like it’s my fault because I asked you to. I know he was evil and that. I know that, and I know he deserved it and everything. I don’t know…”

“It wasn’t your fault, Carl.” Would he ever truly believe that? “Look at me, Carl. Please.” The boy faced the old man’s pale blue, unblinking eyes and the old man took his hand. “When they choose people as a victim, it’s not the victim’s fault. It’s their fault. You’ve got to remember that.” Peter Cushing knew that now more than ever he needed to keep a steady gaze. “I’m the world expert, remember?”

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, contemplating 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.

He would be a monster hunter.

He would be Van Helsing for all who needed him, and all who loved him.