Dark Companions (40 page)

Still, he’d given up finally
[unlike this turgid prose, its greying author grumbles],
and she was alone on the sixth floor with Steve—alone in the otherwise untenanted building except for the caretaker, wherever he was. Ranks of cabinets like bookcases divided the long room down the middle; they were stuffed with blue Inland Revenue files. Beneath a fluttering fluorescent tube protruding files drowsed, jerked awake
[much like the author as he transcribes this].
Smells of dust and old paper drifted about the room, which was growing oppressively hot. Through the steamy window above an unquenchable radiator, Elaine could just make out the frame where the top section of the fire escape should be.

“There goes our Red,” Steve remarked. “Into somebody’s bed rather than under it, from what I hear.” She smiled a little timidly across the stretch of desks at him and lit a cigarette for confidence. Being alone with Steve and his risqué joke made her feel queasy and nervous, an odd sensation like the start of an adventure, but at least the length of the office separated them. She began to compare a tax return with last year’s.

“You can understand these union men, especially round here,” Steve said. Perhaps he’d taken her shyness for disagreement. “The trouble is, it’s never the employers they hurt most, always the public”
[or the long-suffering reader who has to trudge through this mire of dialogue].

He reminded her of her father: fair, but not too fair. Was Mr Williams a genuine Red?
[Was their author a genuine bore?]
Certainly he’d opposed the move to the building long after the rest of the union had accepted it, very temporarily. Of course his father had lost his job when the mines were shut down, but need that mean employers were always wrong?

Steve was gazing at her, blank-faced again. “Are you feeling exploited again?”

Mr Williams had called her the employers’ weapon against solidarity. “No, certainly not.” She wished Steve would let her be quiet for a while; she would chat when she felt more at ease. “I’m feeling hot,” she said.

“Yes, it is a bit much.” He stood up, mopping his forehead theatrically. “I’ll go and sort out Mr Tuttle,” he said. “Maybe he can do something about this bloody awful first draft we’re stuck in…”

Well, you get the idea, probably more than you want. For the record, the story came to me when the light failed in the lift at Radio Merseyside, where I then worked as a film reviewer. Some years ago Guillermo del Toro rang me, enthusiastically proposing to film “Down There” as his contribution to an anthology movie. The project was set up—it would have been something like the
Twilight Zone
film, I believe—but alas, the production company decided not to back it after all. Such is Hollywood.

“Heading Home” was written on 14 January 1974 and, I suspect, little altered in the rewrite. It was the fourth of six such tales I wrote that month, having heard from Kirby McCauley that Marvel Comics planned to resurrect horror comics, short filler stories and all. They needed tales about 1800 words long on traditional themes, and the idea seems to have fired up my imagination. Marvel would abort the proposition, but my offerings all found good homes. Later “Heading Home” was reprinted in
Read
, a classroom magazine aimed at grades 6 to 10. Among the suggestions for classroom work was this one, apparently provided by a Junior High School Middle School Assembly: “Presumably, the narrator will have his head back on, but it will be held in place only by the regrown nerves and the thread. That’s pretty wobbly. Continue the story, telling what happens next.” And they call us horror writers warped!

“The Proxy” started life as “The Bed beyond the Window” on 28 April 1977 but adopted the present title on the first of May, and was finished one day later. I hope it doesn’t show senility is creeping up on me because I’ve absolutely no idea where the idea for the story came from. David Lloyd adapted it with style for the
A1
comic.

I spent a couple of days researching the locations of “The Depths” (though the diary suggests it was “an excuse for a day off, really.” Certainly I met our old friends Stan and Marge Nuttall, veterans of the Liverpool Science Fiction Group, for a drink in the Crown. Marge is heard to sing on the first page that she’s glad she’s Bugs Bunny, which she had already done in
The Face That Must Die
. This wasn’t a lapse of memory on my part; I’d simply despaired of seeing that book published, given the responses of various editors to its oppressive grimness. I plunged into “The Depths” on 28 July 1978 and surfaced from the first draft on the sixth of August. Again, I can’t trace the idea to its source, which may be somewhere in my many notebooks and a quest for someone else to make. I once claimed that the tale was written out of dissatisfaction with my handling of a similar theme in
The Nameless
, but “The Depths” precedes that novel by a year—so much for the chronology in my cranium. I don’t think horror fiction has to be a holiday from morality, as Angela Carter once declared it was, and perhaps that’s why I keep writing about scapegoats and the rejection of responsibility.

In early July 1977 we had a contingent from Carolina to stay in our little house in Tuebrook—the Wellmans and the Wagners (Karl and Barbara), I believe, and David Drake. I had “Out of Copyright” in mind and asked Dave for a likely Latin phrase, which I used in the tale. When he got back to Chapel Hill he airmailed me his revised thoughts, but too late—I’d written “Out of Copyright” in three days, starting on 10 July. His off-the-cuff response still seems fine to me, but don’t blame Dave for my use of it.

“The Invocation” owes its inspiration to
The Godfather
. Perhaps it was partly because I knew of Coppola’s roots in horror (specifically the film he made for Roger Corman,
Dementia 13
, which was hacked to bits by the British censor at the time) that I thought the Hollywood mogul would find worse than a horse’s head when he peeled back the sheets. What I anticipated happens to Ted in my tale. I saw the film at its first Liverpool showing in August 1972, but didn’t start the story until 5 September 1975, completing it on the 12
^th
. When the story was reprinted in
Dark Voices 2
, a copy-editor presumably assuming ignorance on my part changed Mrs Dame’s citation of
Finian’s Wake
to
Finnegan’s Wake
. Sometimes I’m tempted to provide footnotes to make absolutely certain I can’t be misunderstood, like so.

“The Little Voice” was apparently to be called “The Playmate” when I made notes for it in early April 1976. I set about writing it on the 30
^th
and finished it on 9 May. Where did it come from? I have no idea—perhaps just a train of thought that made me scribble notes. By now I carried notebooks with me everywhere I went, though previously I’d made life harder for myself by writing notes in the diary ledger. Charlie Grant bought “The Little Voice” for his
Shadows
anthology series but suggested I should prune it a little. I believe I rid it of about two thousand words, and that’s the published version.

“Drawing In” was written over the last three days of May 1977. At a guess the idea came out of cracks in the walls of our Tuebrook house, waving its spindly legs as it emerged. I don’t mean I actually saw this happen, despite having taken several acid trips in the preceding couple of years. Strangely enough, I’d dreamed in August 1973 of dropping acid, a year before I ever did. That diary entry records a “genuine sense of growing intensity and muted panic” and notes “powerful images which I constructed in the dream and which remained: a silent avalanche of clouds; walking between amber buildings like banks of sand at sunset”. Incidentally, elsewhere I’ve said that “Through the Walls” was written as a kind of preamble to venturing on my first trip, but in fact it was written just a few days after that experience.

A trip I took in the Cotswolds in May 1975 gave me the seeds of “The Pattern”, and so did my impression some days later of the Freshfield coast near Liverpool, which may have echoed the trip. The diary entry describes “green symmetry everywhere, the more complex the more minutely you look: glimpses of larger mandalas” and “a sense that there may be an enormous pattern (only one? or many?)” The next day (the last of May) saw the start of the tale, completed on 6 June. Halfway through I changed the title from “The Screamer”. In retrospect I think that the lyricism of the story had to give way to or at least include horror because otherwise its pattern would have struck me as incomplete. In any case lyricism needn’t be inimical to horror: see the work of Poppy Z. Brite or Caitlín Kiernan, for instance, or Robert Dunbar, not to mention the father of lyrical horror, Ray Bradbury (too often overlooked as a key writer in my field). Recently I was surprised to learn that Steve Mosby, an excellent writer whose novels are packaged as crime fiction but can certainly be claimed for horror, was fond of the tale—perhaps there’s even an echo of it in his brilliant novel
Black Flowers
. Previously Doc Brite chose it as his favourite horror story for an anthology of such favourites.

“The Show Goes On” started out as “The Usher” on 24 May 1978. By the 27
^th
it had the title it bears now, and the next day it was done. The cinema was based on the Hippodrome in Liverpool, converted from a variety theatre (the Royal Hippodrome) in 1929. A maze of dressing-rooms survived behind the cinema screen, and one night I got lost among them while searching for an exit. Eventually I came to a pair of double doors, and as I made to push them apart I seemed to glimpse a large dim room beyond, full of figures that rose or tottered to their feet to await me. Perhaps they were homeless, but the light reminded me of waking from a nightmare in an ill-lit childhood bedroom, and I made haste to find another way out. Need anyone ask why I write as I do?
 

“The Puppets” returns to the failed relationship that’s at the heart of “Napier Court”. One crucial disagreement with Rosemary (the real girl) was over horror fiction, which she didn’t care for, not least mine. Dentistry represents or at least is substituted for it in this tale, and the village pageant is an objective correlative for a spectacle Rosemary coaxed out of me, perhaps because she thought it was remote from horror. At a performance in Hoylake of Debussy’s
Prélude de l’Après-Midi d’un Faune
she was one of the orchestral flautists (not the soloist) and persuaded me to read Mallarmé’s poem as a preamble, in French and then in English, to the hapless audience. When at last I’d struggled through the original in an accent worthy of Inspector Clouseau I looked up to see the mayor of Hoylake on the front row, clutching his head in his hands. Afterwards, having fortified himself with at least one glass of wine, he described my performance as a tour de force. His accent was better than mine had been. Still, I don’t waste material if I can avoid doing so, and a decade later the memory was nothing but fun. According to my diary the writing of the tale (then known as “Curtain Call”) was pretty hesitant, stretching from 29 June 1978 to 8 July. On one day, admittedly with a hangover, I wrote just a single paragraph.

I started “Calling Card” on 24 November 1978 and completed it two days later. At that stage it was called “First Foot”, a reference to a common New Year’s Eve tradition in Britain. It was written in response to a request from the local newspaper for a two-thousand-word ghost story set on Merseyside during the festive season. Alas, the commissioning editor found it too gruesome—presumably he didn’t know the kind of thing I wrote. Lin Carter was made of sterner stuff and bought it for
Weird Tales
, but told me on the train from New York to a World Fantasy Convention in Providence that the title wouldn’t mean much to his audience. A few minutes later I gave him the title it bears now. Alas, the anthology series died before he could use it, but by a splendid irony a new editor at the local paper asked me for a Christmas tale five years after the original request, and this time the paper published the tale with no changes (except for entitling it “The Calling Card”).

Even more than “The Pattern”, “Above the World” owes much to LSD, especially once the tale climbs to the heights—specifically, the last acid trip I ever took (in July 1976, up Bleaberry Fell near Keswick) before a nightmare flashback some months later put me off the drug. The following June I researched Knox’s ascent to the Bishop of Barf, and the story was written in three days, starting on 18 July. Alas, the Swan Hotel has been turned into apartments. A nearby hotel that closed recently was called Barf House. I wonder if some folk may have found the name ominous, and perhaps a question on the hotel’s web site—“Why Barf?”—didn’t help.

“Baby” began on 29 November 1974 and drew to a close on 4 December, which is pretty well all I know. The entry for the 25
^th
notes “some rather nightmarish pram images” but doesn’t specify them—I’m guessing that an everyday sight set them off in my head, as frequently happens. I suspect it may have been the swollen faceless plastic head, and has the bag of washing in a pram from “Napier Court” found a new lease of grisly life? For some reason I didn’t identify the location by name, but “Baby” is set around Granby Street in Liverpool; in those days finding Chinese vegetables and Indian spices in a grocer’s was worthy of remark. The following year I returned to the area in
The Doll Who Ate His Mother
.

I recall even less about the genesis of “In the Bag”. The ledger shows only that the first draft was begun on 20 November 1974 and completed two days later. No doubt the sense of random unreasonable severity came from my schooldays, though the headmaster isn’t based on anyone specific. “Conversion” was written on 18 January 1974, but the other EC tale—“Call First”—took all of two days, starting on the 8
^th
. In both cases, as with “Heading Home”, I wrote copious notes at speed and incorporated nearly all of them.