Ancient Images Read online

  "It's for Wally. A woman for Wally," the man yelled, and he and several others chortled. What sounded like a giant door slid back and let out another male voice, this one high and stumbling higher. "Er who, er who, er who's there?"

  Sandy knew there must be smothered mirth behind him. "Mr. Trantom?" she said as gently as the hubbub would allow. "Did you know Graham Nolan, by any chance?"

  "Graham er, oh yes. Who?"

  "I believe you may have been some help to him."

  "I hope," Trantom said, and turned wary. "I mean to say, I don't know. Who says?"

  "I'm a friend of Graham's. Sandy Allan. He used to show me the films he found."

  "Did you see the horror film?"

  His lurch into enthusiasm was as sudden as his wariness had been. "No, but he told me about it," Sandy said, "and I'm looking for it now."

  "You're a friend of his from where he worked, aren't you?"

  So Trantom had read about her. "This has nothing to do with where we worked, this is for him and me."

  "So what's it got to do with me? I can't talk long, I've left a car up in the air."

  "I thought you might be able to give me a lead, but I take it-was

  "No, wait. I should meet you, and there's someone else who'd want to. Can you tonight?"

  "If you're free, I am."

  "I'm free all right," he said with a nervous giggle, and gave her an address in Chiswick as one of his workmates whistled meaningfully. "About eight," Trantom said, and rang off.

  Chiswick was on the same side of the river as her flat, but distant as half of the Northern line added to half of the District. Driving tonight would give her more freedom and more control, and less time to be distracted. As she waited for the train at Marble Arch, she thought she saw a workman in the dark between the token lamps in the tunnel beyond the platform. It must be something else entirely, for even if any workman was that thin, he wouldn't keep so still.

  The cats' grave was untouched. All the same, she didn't like to leave it so unprotected while she searched for the film. A broken flagstone from the garden path was leaning against the house. She dragged it to the flower bed, where it landed with a moist thud which, she told herself quickly, didn't remind her of anything. It was like a horror film, she preferred to think, some film in which they laid weights on the earth to make sure the dead couldn't rise. "Nobody can touch you," she whispered.

  She played a Billie Holliday album while she made herself coffee. When the music and the coffee were finished she sat in the window seat, the sunlit window warm against her back, and set about calling the numbers she'd listed. The first was for Harry Manners, less than an hour's drive away. His phone rang twice, and a voice boomed "Aye?"

  "Harry Manners?"

  "Present."

  "You're the actor?"

  "So long as I'm out of my casket I am, and then I'll hope for a curtain call. To what do I owe the pleasure of hearing such a sweet young voice?"

  "I'm trying to locate a film you appeared in," Sandy said, and held her breath.

  "Do you say so? Well, you brighten my day. I must be entitled to a few more performances as long as I'm still remembered. Are you here in Hatfield? Will you dine with me?"

  "I'm busy in London tonight, I'm afraid."

  "Lunch tomorrow? Tell me which picture it is and I'll sort out whatever I have."

  "The one with Karloff and Lugosi."

  "Ah, those old troupers. What was the name of it? Tower of Fear? By all means come. I've something that will interest you."

  He gave her directions to where he lived and made her promise not to let him down. His eagerness was infectious, and she made two more calls that proved encouraging. An antiques dealer in Newark said that his uncle had been a film cameraman before the second world war, and that though he was walking by the canal just now he would probably be pleased to talk to her. The retirement home in Birmingham where the stuntman lived had had its phone repaired, and the receptionist expected that Leslie Tomlinson would talk. At last, Sandy thought, a day when things began to go right for her. Even the Toyota started first time, though she hadn't driven for weeks.

  ***

  She drove with the windows down, to feel the breath of the reddening sky on her face, and came off the urban motorway near Gunnersbury Park. Walter Trantom lived in a box of flats on Chiswick High Road. Its dozens of identical rectangular panes appeared to be emitting the blurred roar she'd heard when she had spoken to him-the roar of the motorway beyond. As she locked the car, two youths with Dobermans strutted by, jerking their thighs at the air. A green light's worth of cars sped past in the direction of the airport, and their individual notes were swallowed by the monotonous roar of the landscape.

  Sandy stepped over trodden chips and hamburger cartons in the entrance to the flats, and rang the bell for Trantom. The intercom mumbled at her, its words almost indistinguishable because of the remains of a cheeseburger that had been stuffed into the grille. "Sandy Allan," she said, having poked the answer button gingerly with one fingernail, and peered at the entrance hall through safety glass smeared with ketchup. The man who plodded down the unlit concrete stairs was almost at the glass before she saw his face.

  Even allowing for the way telephones shrank voices, he hadn't sounded nearly so large. He was at least a head taller than Sandy, and twice as broad. He wore faded green check trousers and a frayed purple cardigan, spectacles poking out of the torn breast pocket. He opened a crack between the door and the frame and lowered his balding head toward it, blinking fiercely. "Who, er who did you say?" he demanded.

  She could see pimples under the stripes of mousy hair. "Sandy Allan. We said eight o'clock."

  "It's only five to," he said inaccurately, glancing at his wristwatch. It had string in place of a strap. He dragged his cuff down as if he'd exposed too much of himself to her, and widened his eyes to stop them blinking. "How about some proof?"

  When she turned her digital watch toward him, he snorted like a horse. "Not the time. Who you are."

  She dug her credit card wallet out of her handbag and nourished it at him, staff identification card uppermost. "All right," he said with unexpected relish, and led her upstairs, trailing a smell of the motor oil that blackened his fingernails.

  He lived one floor up. As he knocked on his door, a dull fat sound, a dog snarled and clawed at the inside of the door across the corridor. A woman with rubber bands dangling from her undecidedly colored hair, and eyes bruised by lack of sleep, answered Trantom's knock. She gave Sandy a disinterested stare and trudged back into the kitchen, a cramped room which smelled saturated with Brussels sprouts. Despite her apathy, her presence seemed welcome when Sandy heard another woman screaming in the next room.

  Trantom struggled along his corridor, past a bicycle and a coatstand whose fractured upright was bandaged with insulating tape, and emitted a sound somewhere between a warning cough and a roar. The screams were drowned out by a disco beat, and a man said loudly "That disemboweling was a load of tripe."

  "This is good, look, where they gouge her eyes out," a younger man said.

  Trantom opened the door noisily and sidled around it, jerking his head to indicate that he wasn't by himself, not noticing that Sandy had already ventured after him. Two men were sitting in armchairs that looked carved of cork, facing a television and videorecorder. The teenager wore jeans and a T-shirt printed with the slogan I WANT YOUR BODY (COS I'M A CANNIBAL); the man in his thirties might have been a businessman, dressed as he was in a dark suit and waistcoat, white shirt and black tie. "It's all there," he said to Trantom. "Here's where the one with the big tits gets them chopped off."

  Trantom jerked his head again, and noticed Sandy as the others did. The teenager craned to see her, his T-shirt flapping about his undernourished torso. "That's her, is it?" he said.

  Trantom stepped forward as if her nearness were forcing him into the room, and she followed him. "I'm Sandy Allan."

  "What do you reckon to this, then?" the man in the
suit challenged her, pointing one gleaming shoe at the screen. All she could see was what looked like a tin of pale red paint that had just been opened to the accompaniment of the disco beat and screams: sharper details had been lost between transfers from a foreign tape. "It does nothing for me," she said.

  "You'd censor it then, would you?"

  "I can't imagine being given the option."

  "But if your lot bought it," the teenager said, brandishing his knuckly face on its wiry neck at her and narrowing his bloodshot eyes, "you'd cut it, no question."

  "No question that it would ever be bought."

  "If the films you buy aren't that bad, why the fuck cut them?"

  Wearied by the way the conversation was progressing, Sandy turned to Trantom. "May I sit down? Then you can introduce me to your friends."

  The floor was cluttered with piles of magazines and videocassettes. Sound-track albums were strewn across a red two-seater couch. Trantom gathered up the records clumsily, splaying his fingers almost as wide as the breadth of the covers, and dumped them beneath a shelf of plastic monsters. As Sandy sat down he dropped himself beside her, seesawing the couch. "They write for my magazine," he said, his voice even higher with pride. "That's John in the T-shirt that writes our video reviews, and this is Andrew Minihin. You must have heard of him."

  When she shook her head and smiled Minihin grunted, Trantom sniggered incredulously, John's thighs began to vibrate as if he were preparing to run laps of the cluttered room. "You move. A paper wanted all his books banned," John insisted, and listed them: "The Flaying. The Slobbering. It Crawls Up Y. It Crawls Back Up Y. Entrails that they wouldn't let him call Puke and Die, that was the best yet."

  "I've seen them around."

  "Wondered how anyone could buy such crap, did you?" Minihin said.

  The three men grinned at her as if they were watching a trap. She imagined them as three witches with Halloween hats, and felt more in control. "Not that I remember."

  "I used to, because crap is what it is," Minihin said with a klaxon laugh. "It's what you have to write to compete with films like this one here. If millions of silly bastards want to read it I'd be even stupider than they are if I didn't give it to them. Maybe some of them will grow out of it. I'm getting fan mail from ten-year-old kids."

  "Watch out, you'll have her wanting to cut your books," John said.

  Sandy lost her temper just enough to give her voice an edge. "Do you believe everything you read in the papers? Can't you see that Stilwell wrote that about me because I dared to suggest he was wrong about the film my friend was looking for? I don't cut films, I assemble them, and I'd be a born-again archivist as far as this film is concerned. Except if everyone I approach is going to believe what Stilwell said about me I may as well not bother. Would you like to turn that down? I'm not used to having to talk over someone screaming."

  Trantom groped down the side of the couch until he found the remote control. The zombie dentist on the screen continued his work in silence, and Trantom muttered, "What do you think, boys?"

  "The paper could be after her like the other one went after Andrew. They don't like anyone who stands for horror."

  Minihin shrugged as if the question mattered as little as anything else. "All right," Trantom said, "we trust you. We'll help."

  "You'll tell me what you told Graham."

  "We didn't tell him anything. He'd heard of my magazine and thought we'd know collectors who might have a copy of the film. I mean we'll help you look."

  His enthusiasm was so great that it carried him past his stammering. "That's kind of you, but I really only wanted to find out if you had a lead," Sandy said.

  "He keeps his wife on one. What's your problem?" Minihin demanded. "Don't you want to be associated with us?"

  "You haven't seen the magazine," Trantom said, and grabbed one from a pile behind the couch.

  It was a stapled bunch of duplicated typed pages called Gorehound. She thought someone had spilled coffee on it, until she realized that the stain was meant to illustrate the title. "I should have thought the film I'm looking for wouldn't do much for you after the kind of thing you watch."

  "Some films were pretty good even then," John disagreed. "Lugosi bursts a blind man's eardrums in Dark Eyes of London, and that was before the war."

  "And before that, in The Raven, he cripples Karloff's face," Trantom added eagerly, "and locks him in a room full of mirrors."

  "And in The Black Cat he starts ripping his skin off," Minihin offered.

  "If your film was banned it must be good," Trantom said. "If it's horror we're interested. We can never get enough."

  "No fucker tells us what to do."

  Sandy wasn't sure if Minihin was talking about censorship or her. She found their enthusiasm more disturbing than their suspicion of her had been. It made the room seem smaller and hotter, and raw as the silenced carnage on the screen. "So you can't tell me anything about the film itself."

  "It've upset someone," John suggested.

  "Told them something they didn't want to know," Minihin said.

  It was clear that they were only speculating. "If there's any way you can help I'll let you know," Sandy said, and pushed herself off the couch. "But the people I need to meet may be as wary as you were, and they'll also be considerably older."

  The men stared at her, red-eyed from the film, from its reflection or from the way it quickened their blood. All three were between her and the door. Someone exploded on the screen, and red splashed the walls and furniture and the faces of the men, which seemed to swell like sponges. "Turn up the sound," John said. "They're pulling her tongue out."

  "Tongue my arse," Minihin disagreed. "That's her liver."

  John clasped his knees to stop them jerking and gasped, "Turn it up, quick, turn it up."

  Trantom rummaged on the floor for the control, and Sandy sidled past him. She was almost at the door when Minihin sprang to his feet and came after her, one pudgy hand outstretched. He was reaching to turn out the light so that they could see the image more clearly. They and the furniture appeared to be leaping to catch spurts of red from the screen. As Sandy slipped past the coatstand and the bicycle, the woman with the bruised eyes looked out of a bedroom next to the kitchen, a baby mouthing at her breast, which was covered with scratches. The television screamed, and the woman winked heavily at Sandy. "If it wasn't her it might be us."

  Trantom blundered along the corridor, shouldering the coatstand against the wall, as Sandy unchained the outer door. The dog in the flat opposite was snarling and whining. Someone must have hit it to make it sound so nervous. Sandy stepped onto linoleum the color of mud between glistening tiled walls, and Trantom wobbled after her. "What's that?" he stammered as if he had been about to ask her something else. "Did you bring someone with you?"

  Sandy peered along the corridor. She didn't think she'd glimpsed a shadow dodging out of sight around the bend of the bare gray stairs, but he made her feel as if she had. "Of course not," she said.

  "Got to be careful." He stepped back clumsily, almost tripping over his ragged doormat. "Never know who might come snooping around after my films."

  "If you were a gentleman you'd see me to my car," she said, and gazed at him until it drew him into the open. He rushed at the stairs so recklessly she was afraid for him. He was stooping, butting the air as if to warn anyone who might get in his way. As she followed him, the smell of sweat and motor oil met her on the stairs.

  He flung the street door open and blundered out, fists clenched. The street was deserted for hundreds of yards. Something that smelled of stale food scuttled behind him in the dark-a hamburger carton, which Sandy kicked aside as she made for her car. "I'll let you know if I trace the film," she said, and he took refuge in the building at once. As she turned the car she thought that he or one of his companions had darted out of the building to beckon to her. It must have been the shadow of a lamppost, a shadow that dropped to the ground as her headlights veered away. It had been
too thin even for Trantom's undernourished friend.

  ***

  When Sandy came off the urban motorway she found she was driving for the sake of driving, to give herself a chance to think. It didn't work. She stopped the car outside Regent's Park, by the zoo. Above the park the edges of clouds were raw, but the light wasn't sufficient to show her what kind of animal was prowling beyond the railings. She stared at the cover of Gorehound, and then she drove to a phone box. She needed to talk.

  Roger answered halfway through the first ring. "You're at your desk," she guessed.

  "Sure am. Is this Sandy Allan? How are you today?"

  "I'm… various things, such as sorry if I interrupted you."

  "I'll be through with this paragraph in quarter of an hour. Why don't you come over? That is, if you've nothing-was

  "Nothing I can think of."

  "God, I'm predictable, right? I'll try and make myself more random while I'm waiting. If I'm not here I'll be around the corner buying wine."

  "Yes, let's celebrate," Sandy said as she got into her car. She felt lightheaded with too many emotions all at once. She sat with the window down, breathing the night air that smelled of flowers and wild animals, for a few minutes before she drove off.

  Crowds swarmed around the glow of the stations at Euston and St. Pancras and King's Cross. The five-way intersection at the Angel was a tangled knot of streetlamps and unlit side streets. Sandy sped through the knot into Upper Street, and parked outside the arch that led to Roger's. When she slammed the car door the sound scuttled over the cobblestones. She hurried through the arch to the door opposite the path darkened by shrubs. Before she could ring his doorbell, she was blinded.

  Roger had glanced out between his curtains. The desk lamp was pointing straight at her face. His footsteps beyond the blur that had wiped out most of her vision sounded more distant than the stealthy restlessness behind her, which must be twigs scraping the edges of the path. As soon as she heard him open the door she walked blindly in. "Sure, come in," he said in her ear, and then, "Sandy, what's wrong?"