Ancient Images (10 page)

    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?"

    She didn't know where to begin. Now that she was inside she was happy to wait for her sight to return, but staying mute seemed unreasonable. She heard the door shut, and he came closer. "It's okay, don't talk if you need to be quiet," he said, and put his arms around her.

    It was her temporary sightlessness as much as her silence that made her feel she had found him at last, in a place beyond words. She hugged him and hung on as they walked leisurely down the hall. She felt surrounded by his warmth and awkward gentleness, by the smell of his skin and of a sweetish after-shave he must have dabbed on his face for her benefit. The walls beyond the patch of blindness opened out as he led her to the nearest armchair. When he placed her there and made to let go she held firmly on to him. "This won't be very comfortable," he murmured.

    "Then let's go where it will be," she said, and touched his tongue with hers. The contact blazed through her like sunlight, awakening her nerves. To her delight, he lifted her and carried her into the bedroom. However many films this might be like, she could tell he wasn't acting out any of them. Before they reached the bed she had unbuttoned his shirt, and their open mouths were pressed hungrily together.

    His face came into focus as he lowered her onto the bed. She brushed his hair back from his forehead as he pushed up her blouse and freed her breasts for his mouth to excite. She raised her hips so that he could slip her panties down for her to kick away, then she unzipped him quickly and took hold of his rearing penis. She ran her fingertips along it until he moaned, and then she dug her nails into his buttocks and pulled him into her. She felt herself widen, sucking him deeper, and thrust her tongue deeper into his mouth. His hands squeezed her breasts, passed lingeringly down her and lifted her thighs to stroke inside them. She came almost at once, and then again. The second time he cried out and came too, hugging her shoulders helplessly, throbbing inside her as if he might never stop.

    She held on to him and kissed his eyes and lips while he dwindled inside her. Eventually he lay back and pulled the duvet over them. She rested her head on his arm and gazed at him. She felt drowsy, calm, remote from the rest of the day's events, completely at home. At last he said almost apologetically, "I did get some wine, by the way."

    She smiled at his tone and kissed his cheek. "You think we ought to celebrate, do you?"

    "Sure. I mean, if you do."

    "Need you ask? Lead me to it. If I don't match you glass for glass, it's only because I'm driving."

    "You don't have to drive tonight if you don't want to."

    "Well, I don't suppose I do. And do you know, I don't suppose I will. I've nobody to go home to, after all."

    "Except your cats."

    "I'm afraid Bogart and Bacall have joined the great film show in the sky."

    "Sandy, I'm sorry. Is that what was wrong? When did it happen?"

    "Last night. They were run over. It seems much longer ago." That struck her as even sadder than their deaths, but she didn't realize she was weeping until he wiped away the tears. "I think I might like some of that wine now," she said indistinctly.