Ancient Images Page 5

  "It may just have come at the wrong time. There was some kind of a debate in your Houses of Parliament that I keep meaning to check out. That's me, Slow and Steady Stone, except forget the steady part, more like easily diverted. Christ, I wish I'd gone to Graham's that night when he invited me. I might have been there in time."

  "I know how you feel."

  "Not that I'd have been able to do any better than you," he said, so hastily that she leaned over the table and gave him a kiss. "Uh, thanks," he stammered.

  "That was just to let you know you needn't be afraid I won't know what you mean."

  "Well, good. Me too. I mean," he said, and gave up when she smiled at him.

  "I'll have to be heading back in a few minutes. I wanted to ask if you've any idea what the film was about."

  "According to Graham, Karloff plays an aristocrat who owns some kind of haunted land, and Lugosi comes to England after his brother-in-law has been killed on the land. Usually it's the monster which is foreign, some kind of invader-think of Dracula. Spence may have stirred up some hostility by making the monster English, especially just before the war."

  "Was that what the original story was about?"

  " 'The Lofty Place'? Maybe. I understand it's almost as rare as the movie."

  A chilly breeze nuzzled her ankles, and she stood up. "I must go."

  He accompanied her along Oxford Street and hesitated in the midst of the crowd at Oxford Circus. "Did you want to dictate Graham's notes to me or maybe bring them round to my place?"

  "Best offer I've had for weeks. How does Thursday evening sound?"

  "Great."

  "I'll call you before then," she said, and watched him down the steps into the Underground.

  ***

  When Lezli told her she looked pleased with herself, she wondered why she didn't feel calmer. It must be that she felt pursued by a pack of unanswered questions. Even walking home through Queen's Wood, Sandy felt tense, especially when she heard a child wailing in the gloom. The sound stayed ahead of her, and when she reached the house she realized she had been hearing the accountants' little girl. "Home now," the girl's mother said as she wheeled her into the hall.

  "He wasn't ill, pet," her father reassured her. "He was just an old gentleman having a lie down on the grass."

  His wink at Sandy presumably meant the man had been a tramp. She squatted by the stroller and tickled the little girl under the chin until she had to smile, then she went upstairs, thinking that she wouldn't have expected the child to be so easily upset. That was children for you, she supposed, and she had enough to ponder. Whatever the child had seen, it had nothing to do with her or with the film.

  ***

  He would feel safer once he drove through the wood. The only figures he could see in the fields around him were scarecrows, and there wasn't even a bird in the vast indifferent sky, yet he felt watched. If anyone were following him along the road, from the town or the great house beyond it, he would be able to spot them several hundred yards away. It was just his imagination that was troubling him, his damned imagination which had brought him here in the first place and which he was beginning to feel was almost more trouble than it was worth.

  He'd thought last time he had got the better of his enemies when he'd sneaked down under the chapel, but could that have done himself and his collaborators some harm? He didn't understand how, especially since today his enemies had seemed genuinely unaware of what he had been suffering. Could he have worsened his situation by coming back here by himself?

  He couldn't have brought anyone with him. However nervous and persecuted he felt, he didn't want anyone to realize what he'd done until it was out in the open, incapable of being suppressed. Nor could his feelings trap him here, he vowed, striking the horn to scare away his fears and proclaim that he was coming. Nothing but the byproducts of his imagination could be waiting in the wood to head him off. As he heeled the accelerator he felt unexpectedly brave, as though he were spurring a steed into danger.

  The shadow of the trees fell on him, a greenish shadow damp and chill as moss. Trees crowded about the road as it wound into a hollow and wormed upward again toward the sunlight. Perhaps the sun had gone behind a cloud, for the hollow seemed darker than it had earlier. As well as the dimness, a smell of earth made him feel buried until the car swung toward the promise of daylight ahead.

  As the car reached a brief straight stretch of road beyond the first curve, he looked back. Nothing was following him except the smell of turned earth, though why should that be following him? Down here it seemed ominous, perhaps because of the hint of something more unpleasant underlying it, and the shadows that dodged between the trees, just beyond the focus of his vision as he glanced at the road ahead. The way was clear. He had time for one more backward glance before the next curve, to reassure himself that the shadows were only shadows. He turned his head and saw a figure running after him on all fours along the dim road, a thin shape moving faster than the car.

  Shock wrenched his head around further, sending a blaze of pain through his neck. His feet jerked wildly on the pedals, and the car lurched faster. For a moment-for too long-he was unable to look away from his pursuer. He twisted around to see where he was going just as the car swerved across the road. As he stamped on the brake, the car smashed into a tree.

  The impact shattered the windscreen and crumpled the bonnet like tin, but he was gripping the wheel so hard in his panic that he wasn't flung out of the car. Glass showered his neck and chest. When he tried to brush away the fragments he found he couldn't use his hands, which felt like bruises swelling hugely at the ends of his broken wrists. He couldn't use them to let himself out of the vehicle before it burst into flames as he feared it was about to. He jammed one knee under the door handle and shoved, and the door fell open so quickly that he almost sprawled headlong in the undergrowth.

  He staggered alongside the car toward the road, every movement discovering new bruises and injuries that might be worse. The pain, and the shock of the crash, had almost closed his mind down. The wood seemed both darker and remote from him. All he knew was that he needed help, and the nearest place to find it was the inn he had passed on his way from the town to the wood.

  Either he'd forgotten what had caused the crash or his mind was refusing to accept it. The accident, and the way it had wrecked his body, was all he could try to cope with. When the figure reared up to meet him from behind the car, his mind was as unable to grasp it as his body was incapable of defending itself. He stood there almost passively, gazing at a face that had no right to be called one, while the long blackened fingernails reached for his throat and finished what the fragments of glass had begun.

  ***

  Sandy ate dinner with Graham's diary propped in front of her. Halfway through the Greek salad she remembered what he'd told her at her party that had filled all her rooms and almost driven out the cats. "The hunt's begun," he'd said, "and I can thank one of your profession." He'd tracked down the assistant editor of Tower of Fear. The editor's name was Norman Ross, she remembered now, and there it was on the second page of the notebook.

  He lived outside Lincoln. She took the phone to the window seat and gazed down at the dark that was climbing the trees. Bogart and Bacall prowled the far side of the room while she tried to think of her best approach. "You aren't helping," she informed them, and buttoned the number.

  The bell sounded unreal, more like a recording. A child's voice interrupted it and gabbled the number. "Who's there?"

  "May I speak to Norman Ross?"

  The receiver was dropped with a clatter. "It's a lady for Grandpa."

  What Sandy guessed was a large family greeted this with ribald encouragement, in the midst of which a man said "Never drop the phone like that." Seconds later he was at the mouthpiece. "Who's speaking, please?"

  "I'm a friend and colleague of Graham Nolan's."

  "Sorry, doesn't mean a thing."

  "This is Mr. Ross, is it?"

  "I
t is, yes," he said as if she had threatened his manhood. "What are you selling?"

  "I'm buying," she said, and wondered how much might be involved: presumably one of the film archives would pay. "I wanted to ask you about a film you worked on."

  "Which film?"

  "The one with Karloff and Lugosi."

  "That thing again?" His response was so sharp it made the microphone buzz waspishly. "Yes, I know who your friend was now. You're wasting your time, I'm afraid. My father isn't well, and in any case he wouldn't be able to help."

  Because of his irritability she had assumed he was the old man. "He did help Graham Nolan, I believe. All I want is to ask your father what he told Graham. I can't ask him, you see. He was killed."

  "That's most regrettable, but still the answer's no. I won't have my father troubled. He's nervous enough as it is."

  "I'm a film editor too. Perhaps when he's feeling better we could at least talk about his work."

  "I doubt he would want to."

  "May I give you my number in case he changes his mind?"

  "If you must," he said, and interrupted her as soon as she had said it and her name. "I wish you people would let this wretched film stay buried. Isn't there already enough horror in the world?"

  If his father had overheard that, she hoped he disagreed. "Do settle down," she pleaded with the cats. She must stop saying Graham had been killed; she had seen him jump. She tried some more early entries in the notebook, but these old folk seemed to go to bed early, and the retirement home in Birmingham was unobtainable. She felt dissatisfied, on edge. Placing the phone well out of reach, she read Umberto Eco until she was tired enough for bed.

  In the middle of the night she had to grope her way to the toilet, half asleep. She was in bed again before she realized that she had been creeping through her own rooms as if she mustn't let herself be heard. She assumed she had still been in a dream, though one that she couldn't remember. The stealthy creaking of the trees beyond her window lulled her to sleep.

  The more she knew about the people Graham had approached, the easier it ought to be for her to get something out of them. In the morning she called Roger and read him all the names. "Were you still thinking of visiting?" he said, sounding ready to be disappointed.

  "Absolutely."

  "Can you stand a takeout meal if it's with some good wine?"

  "I hope you aren't planning to get me drunk."

  "No, not at all," he said, so solemnly that she had to make sure he knew she was teasing him.

  She was still unable to raise any numbers from Graham's book. When she took the cats out they stayed together on the paths. Once she faltered, thinking that she saw a pair of eyes watching from among a knot of roots: pale eyes, empty of pupils. They were toadstools, she realized when she ventured closer. She kicked them to pieces, releasing a doughy smell.

  She thought she knew what made her feel eyed that night-not that it was worth bothering about, she told herself. Nevertheless she rose early to buy the Daily Friend, and turned past the latest diatribe against Enoch's Army to Stilwell's film review.

  "Spoofy schlock that tries to shock but turns out more yucky than yuk-yuk" was his comment on the vampire film. "Worse news is another friend of Graham Nolan's is trying to dig up the film that never was. She cuts films for Metropolitan, so I shouldn't think any film buff would let her have it even if it existed, but advertisers might think their money could be spent on more worthwhile things. As far as this column's concerned, the subject is now closed."

  She was alive to defend herself, unlike Graham. All the same, she was dismayed to notice how many people in the Underground were reading the Friend. At least nobody at Metropolitan seemed to be. The day proved too busy to let her call Stilwell or his editor, and in any case what was the use? Tracking down the film was the way to make Stilwell eat his words.

  There was research she could do on her way to Roger's. During one of her Sunday afternoon strolls around her district she'd noticed a fantasy bookshop on Holloway Road. She went straight from work.

  The shop felt like stepping back into the fifties. Bookshelves of various designs held magazines and paperbacks that grew paler toward the window. An intense young man who looked as if he'd starved himself to buy a handful of the rarities stored out of reach of the sunlight pushed past her and left her alone with the stocky Scottish proprietor. "Nearly closing," the proprietor said.

  "Do you have a Victorian ghost story called 'The Lofty Place'?"

  His lanky partner came out of a back room, and both men laughed politely. "I wish we had," the Scotsman said. "That'd buy us a few beers."

  "It's a legend," his partner said. "It only ever appeared in one book, m's the pity. Conan Doyle admired it, so did Montague Summers."

  "Who was the last one?" Sandy said.

  "A clergyman friend of Aleister Crowley's, and an anthologist." The lanky man went to the shelves and selected a fat book printed 12/6 on its yellow jacket. Among the stories cited in Summers' introduction but not included in the anthology was "The Lofty Place" by F. X. Faversham, "in which a titled British family seeks to build a God-like vantage but is punished down the generations for its hubris, and which may be favourably compared to Mr. Blackwood in its sense of landscape, and touches on the darker sources of English tradition." None of that seemed to help. "Can I leave you my number in case you find a copy?" Sandy said.

  "If you like, but we've never seen one in all our years of bookselling. Maybe the darker sources of English tradition don't like to be touched."

  She gathered the Scotsman was joking, since his partner chortled. She left her number with them and made her way along Holloway Road into Islington. Upper Street and some of the side roads were dug up, smelling of uncovered earth, but the area seemed more gentrified than ever. A Jaguar was parked at the corner of the street off which Roger lived in stables converted into flats.

  Cobblestones led under an arch and past a long communal garden. Roger's flat was halfway along, opposite a path boxed in by shrubs. She'd hardly rung the bell when he opened the door. He was struggling to unbutton the collar of his shirt, until she did it for him. "Excuse the mess," he mumbled.

  In fact the main room, which turned into a dining kitchen on the far side of a counter, was compact and almost obsessively neat. Shelves on one side of the electric fire held books; their twins held videocassettes. Two identical armchairs faced the television, which stood in front of a wall papered with posters for silent films. Roger snatched a necktie off the floor, and she realized that had been the mess. He must have been undecided how to dress for her. "You look smart," he said.

  "This is just what I wear for work," she said, slipping off her denim jacket.

  "Well, you always do."

  He was in the bedroom, hanging up his tie, moving 53

  rapidly as if he could outrun his awkwardness. "I brought some Australian wine for you to try," she said.

  "I got Californian. Once you wouldn't have drunk either, right? Now they've earned their reputations." He opened her bottle and filled their glasses. "Here's to reputations."

  "Reputations. Let's hope mine survives."

  "Any reason why it shouldn't?"

  "I can take care of myself, don't worry," she said smiling. "I meant Stilwell's little sally in the newspaper today."

  "How come? He didn't say anything about you."

  "He certainly did," Sandy said, grabbing her handbag.

  Roger frowned at the torn page and then rescued his copy of the paper from the kitchen bin, leafing gingerly through the stained pages until he found Stilwell's piece. "See, they've edited that out of the later edition. Not so many people will have read that garbage about you after all."

  "Why would it have been edited?"

  "Maybe he had second thoughts."

  "Maybe," she said, but she felt dissatisfied. Roger interrupted her speculations. "Take a look at the menu and I'll summon the feast," he said.

  Dinner arrived twenty minutes later, and th
ey moved to the far side of the counter, the only area of the flat which didn't refer in some way to the cinema. "You really care about films, don't you?" she said.

  "Don't you?"

  "Of course, when I'm working on them. But it's Graham's name I want to save more than this film."

  "I guess quite a few people would be happy if you were to save both. I know I would," he added to soften any hint of rebuke.

  "Tell me about yourself."

  "What do you want to hear? Grew up with the ambition to do something for Disney, and I got to play a mouse at Disneyland one summer while I was at UCLA. A hundred in the shade some days, and kids tromping on my feet while they had their picture taken. I could have used some Disney animation by the end of the day myself. Next year I did movie reviews for a UCLA magazine, only I got barred from the trade shows because there was one guy who always came in after the movie had begun and one time I told him the male lead's girlfriend had just been murdered, so he reviewed it as an understated suspense story. Actually, it played better that way."

  "So that was how you got into films."

  "Well, more like hung around the edge of the frame. I graduated from UCLA and then I toured Hollywood with three unfilmed scripts. Lots of lunches and some invitations to try writing something else, and nearly a couple of options. Then a friend of mine landed me a continuity job on an independent movie, and one job led to another, and that's how I got to work with Orson Welles on his last film."

  He was talking at full speed, no longer aware of the curl wagging over his forehead as enthusiasm carried him out of reach of his self-consciousness. "Which you wrote your first book about," she said.

  "I thought someone should. It isn't every day you get to watch a genius at work. And then the book did so well the publishers came to me for another, and over a particularly drunken lunch I said I'd write a book about shower scenes in the movies."

  "A whole book?"