Ancient Images (13 page)

    "In this film Karloff plays a member of the English aristocracy whose land is haunted by his ancestors until Lugosi sees them off with some mumbo-jumbo. Hardly the kind of film a loyal Englishman would want to make, and would he need to import the 'orror boys if it was any good? I am reminded of the words of Mrs. Lindsey, the respected American journalist, in
Log of the Good Ship Life:
'To take a child to see one of these Karloff and Bela Lugosi horrors is to outrage its nervous system and perhaps warp it for life. No child should ever be allowed to see one of them.' If our censor should be so ill-advised as to grant this film the new Horrorific certificate, I think we English can be trusted to treat it with the contempt it deserves. Back to your lairs, bugbears! We English subsist on more wholesome fare."

    "You ought to meet the staff of
Gorehound,"
Sandy murmured. She hadn't realized that the outcry against horror films in the thirties had been so vicious. Karloff and Lugosi would be remembered long after the writer was forgotten, she thought, especially since he hadn't signed the article. She turned idly to the contents page, and felt her jaw drop. The writer's name was there in the table of contents, beneath the title of the article. His name was Leonard Stilwell.

    

    

    In the night Sandy was awakened by the feeling that someone was outside her door. Perhaps it was one of the salesmen, she thought drowsily, or one of the staff trying to hear if Sandy had company. At least the door had a strong lock and chain. Sandy lay waiting for whoever was out there to make a sound, until sleep began to edit her awareness. Just as sleep took over, she thought she heard a sound as if a body had lain down in the corridor, settling against the lower panels of the door.

    It must have been a dream, she told herself next morning, but it felt as if it was still beyond the door. She eased back the bolt, inched the door open as far as the length of the chain and peered around the edge. One of the salesmen who had accosted her was emerging from his room on the opposite side of the corridor. He stared at her and sniffed disapprovingly, so hard that his upper lip pouted. Apart from him and a smell of greasy breakfasts, the corridor was empty. A staleness about the smell made Sandy inclined to skip breakfast, except that avoiding the staff and the other guests would seem an admission of guilt. She closed the door and had a bath.

    The stale smell must have been in the corridor outside her room, but the breakfast was greasy enough. Gristly bacon was embedded in the white of the lukewarm egg. A sliced loaf of Staff o' Life bread was the most wholesome item on the table. She made do with bread and jam, and left the crowded watchful smoky room as soon as she had gulped two cups of instant coffee.

    She ducked under the telephone's helmet, and had hardly dialed when the receiver was snatched up. "Who's there?" demanded a voice almost as shrill as the pips.

    It sounded anything but promising, but at least she would have tried. "Mr. Eames?"

    "Is this the woman who called me last evening?"

    "I'm afraid so," Sandy mouthed, and said, "Yes, it is."

    "All right, let's get it over with. I've a lecture to prepare. How long will you be?"

    "I'll come now," Sandy said, so surprised that she wondered if he had mistaken her for someone else. "I can be there in half an hour."

    "That's as long as I can see you for, and less if you're late," he snapped, and rang off.

    The receptionist looked away quickly from watching. "Yes, it's another man," Sandy said, and went upstairs to pack. She noticed that the lower panels on the outside of her door looked scratched, which seemed typical of the shabbiness of the hotel. By the time she was out of the building, having waited for a remark that never quite escaped the receptionist's lips, she had forgotten the marks on the door.

    Cambridge was crowded. Students and gowned dons spilled off the thick pavements or queued outside coffee shops. Cyclists came flocking out of Jesus Lane, and Sandy missed her exit from the one-way system. She had to creep past Great St. Mary's Church, outside which the striped awnings of a market had sprung up. This time around she was able to find Christ's Pieces, where tennis players darted and leaped in cages of wire netting. She parked opposite the green and climbed out of the car, kneading the back of her neck.

    A breeze wandered across Christ's Pieces, strewing a jingle of bicycle bells. The taut metronomic beat of tennis balls on rackets stumbled and regained its rhythm. Beyond the trees on the green the town looked petrified in the act of stretching spiny yellow pinnacles toward the sun that had scoured the sky. A clock began to chime, and then another, and they sent her running to the nearby side street where Eames lived.

    At first she thought he was the proprietor of a secondhand bookshop, who sidled swiftly out between two shelves of folios to ask what he could do for her. When she mentioned Eames he fluttered his long fingers at her and jerked his head at the dim ceiling, flourishing the tassel on the cap he wore. "Up there. Door next to my window. If he's gone out don't bother telling me. I've had all the rows with him I'm having over taking messages for him."

    She'd walked past Eames' door, whose grimy number was almost indistinguishable from the wood. She rang the bell and heard a distant rattle that made her think of a worn-out clockwork toy. After a minute or so she leaned on the button in case Eames was hard of hearing, and a window slammed open above her. "Just rein yourself back," Eames cried. "Shall I break my neck for you? Is that your idea of an interview?"

    The window slammed so hard that Sandy expected glass to splinter, and then there was a prolonged silence. She hadn't heard him on the stairs when the door wavered open, and he peered up at her. His head, which was almost bald and spotted with age, didn't reach her shoulder. His face made her think of a fruit squeezed colorless and dry; his white lips were puckered into an O that seemed disapproving. "Come up if you've anything to say," he snapped. "I won't be canvassed on my doorstep."

    The edges of the carpet on the narrow stairs were turned up against the walls. Eames hoisted himself upward using the banister, planting both slippered feet on each step. At the top he beckoned her with a gesture that looked as if he were trying to dislodge an object stuck to his skinny forefinger.

    As soon as she stepped through the skewed doorway he said like a challenge, "Well, here I am."

    She wondered if he also meant the low room, the two worn armchairs draped with clothes, the window that overlooked a similar window across the street, the vintage typewriter exhibiting a page on which a single I was typed, the neat pile-of typescripts beside it on the stout oaken desk. Sandy pointed to the typescripts. "Is one of those your script for Giles Spence's last film?"

    "That film, that film! Do you think that twaddle is the only thing I ever wrote?"

    "No, of course not," Sandy said and trailed off, at a loss.

    "But it's all you know of me, isn't it? You should do a bit of homework before you start using up my time." He sucked in his wrinkled cheeks and sounded grudgingly forgiving. "I suppose when I was your age there were several great writers whose work I didn't know. The older I become, the more I regret having penned that last scenario for Spence."

    "Did you ever see the film?"

    "I did not, and I know nobody who did. I'm surprised so many of you are after it now."

    "How many?"

    "You and before you, your friend whose trail you said you were following. How many should I mean?"

    "Just the two of us, I'm sure," Sandy said, now that she was. "But there's quite a lot of interest in the film. Weren't you at all proud of your work on it at the time?"

    "At that age? Far too much so. I congratulated myself on my professionalism. Perhaps you don't know that Spence originally wanted me to write about a tower that was so high it brought the dead back down from heaven like a kind of aerial? Then he hired that Hungarian and I had to change the script to explain his accent, and then Spence went away somewhere halfway through the film and decided that there should be more of a conflict between the two stars. He became quite impassioned about rendering the aristocrat more unsympathetic, I remember. And after all that, not only was the film taken out of circulation but I've borne the stigma ever since. Nobody would hire me to write anything but horrors, nobody would stage my plays, and now it turns out that your generation ignores everything else I wrote."

    "Have you any idea who took possession of the film?"

    "Someone with a lot of money and a grudge against us, I imagine. What does it matter now?"

    "If I could find out who, it might be worth my trying to persuade them to release the film."

    "I'd stay well clear of anyone who has the power to make something they don't like disappear." Unexpectedly he laughed, a birdlike chattering. "Still, I've almost been wiped from the face of the earth, haven't I? If you find your film then at least the public will be able to judge, and perhaps I may be invited to talk about it and my body of work."

    "I'll do my best to see you are," she said, hearing the appeal he was too proud to acknowledge. She indicated the typescripts, intending to cheer him up further. "Have any of these been published?"

    "Haven't been and aren't likely to be."

    "Oh dear." She suppressed a giggle at herself for getting her approach so wrong. "What would you want the public to appreciate about your work? Did Spence ask you to make any other changes?"

    He turned away so abruptly that she was afraid he found her single-mindedness insulting. He brushed past her to the desk and sat down with his back to her. He grabbed the edge of the desk with one hand to keep his balance while he groped in his hip pocket and produced a key with which he unlocked the desk drawer. "You can sift these for yourself."

    When he didn't reach in the drawer, Sandy stepped forward. Lying at the bottom of the drawer were a few brownish pages torn raggedly from a notebook. In the shadow of the drawer the penciled scribble on the topmost page looked too faded to decipher. "Take them if you want them," Eames urged her. "They're the notes Spence gave me. They won't bite."

    He hadn't opened the drawer very wide. As Sandy reached in, she had the irrational notion that he meant to close the drawer on her wrist like a trap. She touched something cold and small that made her think of uneven teeth until she realized they were paper clips. She lifted the pages out by one corner. "Will you help me read them?"

    "Didn't I begin by telling you I'm busy?" He flapped his hand at the pages. "Take them with you. You can read them if you put your mind to it. I had to."

    Sandy shaded her eyes and leaned close to the gray writing. "Does this say 'biblical parallels'?"

    "I believe it does," Eames said with another of his unexpected laughs. "You'll have less trouble with them than I had. He had too many ideas too late, it seems to me. Some of this stuff I didn't even try to incorporate."

    "You'd have liked to stay closer to the story the film was based on."

    "No, just to know at the outset what was expected of me. That story was nothing special. Have you not read it? I found the book for tenpence recently, below in the shop." He fumbled under the suit draped over a chair and produced a book. "My sometime friend downstairs seemed glad to be rid of it. You may have it."

    The pages hung out of the binding, which was so shabby that she couldn't make out the title or even what color the boards had once been. "It's very kind of you," Sandy said. "Did you show this to Graham Nolan?"

    "I hadn't found it then, nor the notes. Don't forget those."

    Sandy picked up the ragged pages and thought she heard the doorbell stir. The restless clatter must have been a bird on the roof, for Eames didn't respond to it. She slipped the pages inside the book and realized that he was smiling at her. "Do you know," he said, "I'm quite glad I changed my mind and let you come. It must have been a relief for me to talk. I certainly feel better."

    "I hope it helps you with your lecture."

    "I'm sure it will. I'll be more encouraging. These aren't mine, you should know," he said, patting the pile of manuscripts. "They're from the writers' group I have to lecture to, thanks to the bookman downstairs. Who knows, there may just be one among them I can guide into the career I should have had."

    He watched her make room for the book in her handbag and snap the clasp. "Are you bound for the coast now?" he said.

    "Not that I'm aware of. Should I be?"

    "Didn't you say you aimed to talk to anyone connected with the film? Tommy Hoddle is in Cromer, in a show at the end of the pier. I heard him being interviewed on their local station on the wireless."

    "Tommy Hoddle…" She remembered the name from Graham's list.

    "The comic relief. He and Billy Bingo used to play two timorous policemen. I quite enjoyed writing their scenes. Billy died some years ago, but Tommy's still performing a solo version of their stage routine. It must be the only life he knows."

    "You wouldn't know if Graham met him?"

    "I believe he already had when he came to see me."

    In that case she ought to meet him, however unlikely he sounded as the owner of a copy of the film. She could drive east to Cromer now and still be in time for her next appointment, in Birmingham tomorrow. "Thanks for all your help," she said to Eames. "I'll be thinking what I can do to keep your name alive."

    He grinned down at her, his false teeth glinting in the dimness at the top of the stairs, as she closed the outer door. She was pleased that she'd cheered him up. The sunlight felt like a smile on her face as she hurried to her car. She thought she might have some fun at the end of the pier.