Binscombe Tales - The Complete Series (20 page)

A VIDEO NASTY

‘Would you like to see a video, Mr Disvan?’ asked Esther Constantine.

‘That rather depends,’ he replied. ‘What’s it about and where’s it being shown?’

‘It’s a mystery sort of video,’ said Esther’s sister Dorothy, ‘and it’s being shown at our house not two hundred yards from here.’

‘I didn’t know you had a video machine,’ said Mr Disvan with a note of surprise in his voice. ‘I wouldn’t have thought it was your sort of thing.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Esther Constantine, ‘we couldn’t be without it nowadays, could we, Dorothy? The television companies seem to put on all the best films at an hour way past our bedtime, so we record them and watch when it suits us.’

‘And it’s a film you want me to see is it?’ asked Disvan.

‘Not exactly,’ Esther answered hesitantly, as if choosing her words with great care, ‘but we’re sure you’ll find it interesting nevertheless...’

‘Well, you’ve intrigued me sufficiently, ladies, in which case I’ll accept your offer. Do you want me to come now?’

‘Yes please,’ the sisters said in unison.

‘Very well, I’ll just finish this drink and then we’ll go. Can Mr Oakley come too?’

‘Oh yes, he’d be more than welcome,’ said Esther Constantine.

‘Good. How about it, Mr Oakley? Or are you meeting one of your lady friends tonight?’

‘No, I’m not,’ I replied, ‘I’m in between “lady friends” at the moment.’

‘Is that right?’ said Disvan, surprised for the second time that evening, ‘It’s the first occasion I’ve known that to be so.’

‘Well, I’m working on the problem. A small rest is probably no bad thing.’

Mr Disvan considered my throwaway comment for a brief moment and then nodded his agreement.

‘You could be right. You’re not getting any younger, and reckless promiscuity is quite draining, I should imagine.’

If spoken by anybody else, I would have taken exception to this, but it did not seem worth crossing swords with Disvan on his unfortunate choice of vocabulary. The Constantine sisters, stereotypical elderly maiden ladies to a T, whom I might have expected to be shocked by Disvan’s description of my alleged lifestyle, had either not heard what was said or ignored it. Accordingly, in the interests of peace, I let the incident pass.

‘Thank you, ladies,’ I replied, ‘I will come and see your video. What is it about—a horror film?’

‘That’s how we’d describe it, but your judgement on the matter would be much appreciated.’

‘All of a sudden I don’t like the sound of this,’ I said to Mr Disvan,
sotto voce
.

‘Oh, come on, Mr Oakley,’ he replied at normal volume, despite my attempt at discretion, ‘where’s the danger in being a film critic and, more to the point, where’s your sense of adventure?’

‘In common with my love life, it’s enjoying the benefits of a short rest.’

Mr Disvan smiled but otherwise ignored my half-hearted protest.

‘Well, if that’s the situation, say no more, ladies, but lead on,’ he said with mock gallantry.

This they duly did and we trailed behind them, leaving the warmth and comfort of the Argyll, out into a wintry Binscombe where a mist had arisen and each street light illuminated only its immediate area, leaving pools of darkness in between. As the sisters had said, their house was mere few minutes away, but I was already chilled to the bone by the time we arrived and therefore very glad to enter in. My relief was short lived for, as in many of the older Binscombe households, only one room, the ‘living’ room as it was aptly called, was heated. The temperature difference elsewhere between inside and outside was minimal—or so it always seemed to me, child of a centrally heated upbringing.

Even so, in deference to good manners and defiance of good sense, I removed my coat as soon as I passed through the door and waited politely in the chill hallway for permission to move on to the relative comfort of the inner sanctum. I noticed that Mr Disvan, presumably the product of just such a home, did not share my urgent desire to adjourn to warmer climes.

At last we were ushered into the living room and various refreshments were procured for us. The Constantines then sat down and exchanged glances as if each was prompting the other to speak. A long silence ensued, since neither was apparently willing to take the lead, and Mr Disvan eventually had to kick-start the conversation.

‘Right then, ladies, what about this video you want our opinion on?’

Esther Constantine drained her glass of sherry and took the role of spokesperson while her sister looked on, ready to add anything she thought relevant.

‘The video,’ she said, ‘is in the machine ready to play. But first a word of explanation so that you’ll understand what we’re on about.’

‘Otherwise it won’t be clear at all,’ interposed Dorothy.

‘Quite,’ Esther continued. ‘Well, the gist of the matter is that several nights ago we wanted to see a film that was on till rather lat,e and that being so we decided to record it and watch it the next day. Nothing unusual about that you may say, and quite rightly. However, since we’re not too clever with machinery, we’ve never bothered with learning to use the timer and we just let the recording go till it runs out of tape, do you see?’

Disvan and I nodded solemnly while I wondered why we were being told all this domestic piffle.

‘Well, in that way we came not only to record the film we wanted but also the final weather forecast, the epilogue and nearly an hour of nothing after the station had closed down for the night.’

‘Or so we thought at the time,’ said Dorothy.

Esther Constantine looked at us for some reaction to her sister’s mysterious comment, but we maintained poker faces and she was thus obliged to press on.

‘Exactly. As it turned out, though, when we came to watch the film the following evening, we found that we’d recorded something else as well.’

‘Something horrible,’ Dorothy explained.

‘I presume you don’t mean the epilogue,’ said Mr Disvan.

‘No, we don’t,’ said Esther, ‘although that slice of religious mumbo-jumbo could well be described as horrible. It’s something else we’re talking about.’

‘What precisely did you record, then?’ I asked.

‘That’s what we’re hoping one of you might be able to shed some light on. What happened, you see, was that my sister and I watched the film and then started to get ready for bed—locking the house up, laying the breakfast table and that sort of thing. The television had been left on whilst we were doing all this and when we came back into the living room together we saw that... Well, something else had come onto the screen.’

‘And there shouldn’t have been anything there, because I’d heard the announcer say goodnight and the national anthem playing long beforehand,’ said Dorothy.

‘And what was it?’ asked Disvan.

‘See for yourself,’ Esther Constantine answered and, taking up the bulky TV remote control device, she simultaneously turned the television on and set the tape playing.

We caught a few brief seconds of a clergyman reading a poem by D. H. Lawrence, this presumably being the end of the much discussed epilogue, before the calming tones of a young man wished us a goodnight and urged us not to forget to switch off our sets. The swirling sounds of ‘God Save the Queen’ (impermissibly accompanied by bagpipes) followed for a mercifully brief period. The transmitter then shut down and the screen was given up to random static.

‘Now you have to wait a while,’ said Esther.

This we did, as patiently as possible, while boredom quickly set in. I pondered if I should ask for a replenishment of my glass by way of reward for this unexciting task, but it seemed inappropriate to break the silence and sense of anticipation in the room. Looking to Mr Disvan for some guidance on whether to take this whole situation at all seriously (for his acquaintance with the Constantines was of long standing), I saw that he was paying keen attention to the twitching lines on the screen. Accordingly I went along with the game and pretended to study the interference for ‘horrible’ apparitions.

At some point, after the elapse of what seemed like a very long time indeed but was probably only a quarter of an hour or so, I must have looked away for a second. A sharp intake of breath from the Constantine sisters caused my gaze to snap back to the television and I saw that something had come on to the screen.

It was a person’s head and shoulders, that much was certain, although the face was very indistinct, ‘as if only half finished’ as Mr Disvan later put it. In my more prosaic way, it looked to me very much like a man with a stocking mask over his head, filmed through a cloud of oily smoke on a camera that periodically slipped in and out of focus.

Whatever it was seemed angry, and mouthed violent words that were only occasionally audible, and then only as an incomprehensible muffled noise. For a few seconds the face or whatever it was suddenly came very close to the screen, shouting with extra vigour, and we all involuntarily shifted back in our seats. Then, just as abruptly, the vision retreated at great speed, as though propelled backwards, and receded into a dot and then invisibility. The normal empty picture, occupied by static, returned.

Esther Constantine turned the tape off with the remote control. ‘That’s it,’ she said.

‘Well, what do you think?’ asked Dorothy.

Mr Disvan considered for a while, sipping the glass of vodka he had been given.

‘Yes,’ he said at length. ‘It is rather horrible, wouldn’t you agree, Mr Oakley?’

‘Yes, I’d broadly go along with that,’ I replied.

‘Of course, we’re both obliged for your critical opinion,’ said Esther, with just the hint of irritation in her voice, ‘but we were somewhat hopeful that you might suggest some form of explanation as well.’

‘Oh, I see...’ said Mr Disvan, genuinely surprised, as far as I could tell, at this extra demand on him. ‘Well, I presume that you both discount any supernatural interpretation to what we’ve just seen...’

‘Naturally,’ said Esther, in a firm voice.

‘No, that’s not true,’ Dorothy interrupted boldly, plainly having to steel up her courage to contradict her sister. ‘For once there’s no answer to be found up there.’

She point to the serried ranks of Marxist classics, from
Das Kapital
to Marcuse’s
Eros & Civilisation
, which lined the bookcases along the wall behind us. I’d vaguely acknowledged their existence on entering the room but failed to notice the titles, assuming, in a most narrow minded way, them to be a random collection of
Golden Treasuries
and volumes about the Royal Family—the Christmas and birthday gifts of two long life-times.

I must have appeared a little puzzled, for Esther Constantine thought it necessary to explain their literary tastes.

‘My sister and I have been Party members since way back,’ she said, ‘we’ve still got our Party cards, though sometimes I wonder what for exactly. We used to be typists at
The Daily Worker
, back in the days when it was a real paper, not some milk-and-water, Social Democratic rag.’

‘That explains the ANC poster in your hall,’ I said, ‘I did wonder about that, I must admit.’

‘And now that you understand,’ prompted Mr Disvan, ‘perhaps you could suggest a rationale for what we’ve just seen. An explanation that is sufficiently in keeping with the tenets of dialectical materialism to satisfy our hosts.’

I racked my brain for something plausible to offer, but only came up with feeble theories, easily shot down in flames.

‘Intrusion from another channel?’