Hell Train (2 page)

‘Oh come now, my dear fellow, you’re being too modest. We spent years scraping by with the most frightful monsters. We’ve always been bailed out by clever sets and lighting. We reuse absolutely everything, make no secret of it. Roy Ashton, our make-up man, has pulled us through by the skin of our teeth, although I felt he never really got
The Gorgon
right. All those silly rubber snakes bobbing about. A shame, because I thought it was a terribly good script. Then we have the benefit of James Bernard’s marvellous music.’

‘And actors who can lift the flattest dialogue,’ Shane said, adding hastily, ‘not that the dialogue—’

Carreras raised a hand. ‘I know, dialogue is sometimes our weak point. It rather lacks poetry, I feel. Freddie would shoot scripts without any dialogue in them at all if he could. I’m sure he thinks it just gets in the way. That’s why he’s so marvellous with suspense. There’s no-one to touch him when it comes to constructing a tense sequence. But I’m the first to admit that he has a bit of a tin ear when it comes to conversation. And we’ve another problem.’

‘What’s that?’

Carreras exhaled smoke and studied the ceiling. ‘Come now, you’re an insider, I’m sure you’ve heard things.’

‘Well, I did hear you’ve kind of become victims of your own success. Spawning imitators and the suchlike.’

‘God, yes. So you probably know about our biggest rival, Amicus.’

‘Didn’t they do
Dr Terror’s House Of Horrors
a couple of years back?’

‘Yes, and they had quite a success with it. Terribly flat, some of the stories, awfully hammy acting, but an appealing idea. We rather foolishly loaned them some of our brightest stars. Milton Subotsky has some very fixed ideas about how such films should work. He makes them very cheaply.’

‘Right, the portmanteau thing.’

‘Purely an economic expedient, I assure you. If you shoot four or five stories of about fifteen or twenty minutes each and link them together with a wraparound segment, you don’t need your stars to attend the entire shoot, just the portion in which they appear. Very easy to schedule, and of course you can pay most of them cash in hand at the end of the week. But you know—’ He made a sour face, ‘handing out grubby fivers in an envelope and gluing the resulting footage together in the editing suite, that’s not at all our style. We like to think we’re several cuts above that. Then there’s Tony Tenser’s little company, Tigon. Using our business model but shooting on real locations to save a bob or two. Some of his stuff is quite good. We’re having to look to our backs a bit more than we used to.’

‘But you still lead the pack.’

‘Yes, but for how much longer? The truth of the matter is, we’ve run out of monsters. Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy, Dr Jekyll, the Phantom Of The Opera, the Wolfman—well, that one never really flew in my opinion, although Ollie Reed was terribly good in
Curse Of The Werewolf
—but you can’t keep doing them forever. I do feel we’re rather stuck in a rut.’

‘Surely there are other Victorian horror classics that haven’t been filmed?’

‘Yes, but this is 1966. Nobody wants to see films based on the kind of books their grandparents used to read. The Beatles have changed the playing field somewhat. Milton has this idea that a teenaged horror film would make money—he’s touting around some dreadful treatment involving an undead pop group—but we’re committed to a more polished product. What do you think of our films?’

‘I guess I’ve always thought of them as fables. They have a kind of graceful quality.’

‘Exactly so. Have you ever read proper fairy tales? I mean Hans Anderson, Grimm and the suchlike. They’re incredibly gruesome, birds plucking out eyeballs, girls cutting off their toes to fit slippers. The only reason why John Trevelyan allows us to get away with so much Kensington Gore is because we bring a bit of class to the proceedings. And of course we’re usually careful not to set the stories in England. It takes the edge off all the nastiness if you set your tale somewhere on the other side of Europe, where most cinemagoers have never been.’

‘Why don’t you take something from your rivals and add new monsters? Do it in the style you’ve become famous for.’

‘Easy to say, dear chap, rather harder to pull off I fear.’

‘It’s something I’ve been thinking about tackling for a while now.’

Carreras removed the cigar from his mouth and examined the end to make sure that it was still aglow. ‘Really? What do you think, then? Is this sort of thing up your street? It takes a certain kind of mind to come up with it. Would you be up for the job?’

‘You mean write a script? Would I? Hell, yes.’

‘Nice to hear a bit of keenness around here. We’re a close-knit band, but it can get a tad oppressive at times. In each other’s pockets, as it were. There’s one snag, though.’

‘What’s that?’

‘We have a couple of projects in development and two films set to go between winter and spring, but Peter and Chris like to be at home for Christmas, so we tend to shut down around then. Which leaves us with nothing right now.’

‘I’m not working on anything in particular at the moment,’ said Shane. ‘I could start immediately.’

Carreras checked the production calendar on his desk. ‘Well, it’s Monday now, so if we said Friday?’

Shane was puzzled. ‘For what?’

‘The finished script.’

‘Five days?’
Four and a half if you count this morning,
he thought, panicked.

‘Then we could get it off to Freddie and the cast over the weekend, get some feedback—we’d have to submit it to John at Soho Square in advance of shooting, just to make sure we don’t waste any time covering sequences that have to be cut out, although you might like to include a few extra-gruesome scenes for him to get his scissors around—let him think he’s guarding the nation’s morals. Then we take it over to the artists in Wardour Street to see what they can come up with in the way of marketing. We like to get the posters sorted out first, just to get everyone on the same page. Often our artists will come up with something quite outrageous that ends up in the film. Oh, and there are the Americans to keep happy, but if they like the idea they’ll give us approval over the phone.’

‘But what about the budget?’ Shane asked, slightly appalled by the casual air of the entire enterprise.

‘That’s already fixed. You don’t have to worry about stuff like that. You just have to write the bloody thing, and then we’ll tell you the bits we can’t do.’ Carreras sucked noisily on his cigar. ‘Listen, you don’t have to decide right now, leave it half an hour or so. Have another cup of tea. I’m sure Miss Winters can rustle you up some biscuits, or Mrs Thompson runs a jolly good canteen if you’d prefer something more substantial after your drive.’

‘I’m staying with my sister and her family, I don’t really have a place to work.’

‘Well, there are some decent pubs in the area, a couple of lovely places over at Shepperton, the King’s Head and the Red Lion. All the writers use them. You could stay in any one you fancy, so long as it’s not more than ten pounds a night. And I think we can spare you an office.’ He strode to the door and opened it. ‘Miss Winters, can we accommodate Mr Carter somewhere?’

Emma Winters had repainted her lips and loosened her auburn hair. He suddenly saw that she was modelling herself on the starlets covering her office walls. Perhaps she dreamed of auditioning for the company one day. Her legs were a little thick, but there was something dramatic about her eyes. She suddenly shot him a stern look. He wondered if she could read his mind. ‘What do you need, Mr Carter?’ she asked.

Shane thought for a moment. ‘Well, access to research materials.’

‘We’ve a decent library, and of course you could take the screening room if you’d like to reacquaint yourself with some of our past pictures,’ she offered. ‘There’s a spare office next door, and I’m sure we have an old Imperial lying around. That is, you do type?’

‘Of course.’

‘Because some of our writers prefer longhand and it makes things so much more difficult.’

Shane felt as though he had slipped through the looking glass into a land where films were made on nothing more than polite handshakes and good intentions. He turned to Carreras, who was glowing, thoroughly pleased with himself. ‘Is there any particular subject you had in mind?’ he asked.

Carreras thought for a moment. ‘Well, it should have all of the Hammer trademarks, I suppose,’ he said. ‘An exotic setting, young lovers, fearsome creatures, a dire warning, rituals and curses, and dreadful consequences. Supernatural apparitions are always good—they give the lighting boys a chance to show off. We like rules; don’t go up to the castle at night, that sort of thing. There’d have to be something for Christopher. He’s terribly tall and grave, doesn’t really handle comedy roles, but he has a wonderful presence. He’s a terribly good baritone, but we’ve never found the right singing role for him. The rest is mostly atmosphere, and we can supply that by the bucketful. You know the kind of stuff, swirling fog, upturned caskets, villagers lost in the woods, fainting ladies in low-cut corsetry. Plenty of blood of course, although you’ll have to run those parts by me. I have a pretty good idea of what will get through.’

‘Did you have any thoughts on the subject matter?’

‘Well, Peter and I were talking about that the other day, and we rather liked the idea of a train,’ said Carreras finally. ‘Think you can manage that?’

‘I’ll start today,’ said Shane.

‘T
HE LIBRARY,
’
SAID
Emma, pushing open a wide oak door on the ground floor to reveal a room rather like a gentleman’s club, panelled and lined with bookcases, with a pair of red leather wingbacked chairs arranged before an immense fireplace.

‘It looks like the spot where Jonathan Harker first met Count Dracula,’ said Shane, amazed.

‘Oh, it probably was,’ said Emma vaguely. ‘I’ll have the typewriter brought down to you, and we’ll get you some new ribbons. Please call me if you need anything. Anything at all.’

She gave him a secret smile—was she flirting?—and quietly closed the door behind her.

Shane pulled up the library steps and checked the bookshelves. They were remarkably well stocked. Some of the more arcane volumes on witchcraft and devil worship might come in useful. He reached up higher. Wedged above one stack of hardbacks were several board games: Ludo, Monopoly and something called ‘Hell Train.’

He carefully disentangled the battered box and took it to the table.

CHAPTER TWO

THE GAME

S
HE WAS AT
home by herself and had grown dangerously bored.

Her mother had gone to the bakery, and had probably stayed to talk with Mrs Malik. Whenever the pair got together they gossiped for the best part of an hour. She had no idea what her mother talked about; recipes, husbands, the new priest with the sea-coloured eyes who had taken over St Peter’s. Her father was at work in the foundry, doing whatever it was that the men did there. He would not be back until after dark. He was never home until late, and when he came in he smelled of iron filings, fire and sweat.

Which left her alone, looking out of the window at the torrenting rain. She had brushed and braided her blonde hair into plaits, and had played Pelmanism with a deck of cards, but the Queen Of Spades was missing from the pack and spoiled the game. Her mother had a jigsaw that showed a colourful painting of London Town, but too many of the pieces were missing.

She looked around the overstuffed sitting room. The air was still and dead, hardly ever disturbed. On the dresser was her sister’s death-book, its open pages tilted upright. She had died of tuberculosis at the age of five, and for the final photographs her little corpse had been dressed in her best clothes and sat among the family who loved her. There was her mother’s music box, with its stiff-jointed ballerina that came to life at the turn of a key, spinning around to the sound of the
Emperor Waltz
. There was a puzzle book, but most of the puzzles had been completed long ago, even though the answers had been printed in pencil and repeatedly rubbed out.

She remembered there were other games in the attic, old ones that belonged to her poor mad grandfather, and despite the fact that she wasn’t supposed to go up there, she recalled that her parents kept the brass key on top of the kitchen dresser. It was difficult to reach, so she dragged over a chair and climbed upon it, standing on tiptoe until her fingers could close over it. She would only take a little look, then replace the key so that her mother would never know.

The house was tall and gabled, with a long, narrow attic full of cobwebby wonders. There was no light up here, but she knew where everything was. Behind the crimson dressmaker’s dummy and the butterfly net, next to the two old armchairs, reversed on top of each other like a giant clam, she found the games: four colourful cardboard boxes covered in plaster dust.

The first was a compendium of the games boys liked, blow-football, snakes and ladders, draughts and jacks. Nothing of interest there for her.

The second was a box of magic tricks with a cover that depicted a moustachioed man pulling a white rabbit from a shiny top hat, but its instructions had long been lost, and besides, most of the magic tricks required weeks of practice before they could be performed.

The third was something called ‘Strategic Invasion,’ and appeared to involve arranging armies across a map of Russia—what a boring idea for a game!

But the last—and by far the largest—box was the most promising. For a start, the lid was tied down with a length of twine, and a card was attached that read: DO NOT OPEN.

She carefully carried it down to her bedroom, lowered herself onto the rag-rug and studied the lid. The painting showed a Victorian train with a cowcatcher and a roaring Devil’s face and red horns, and billows of fire coming out around it like angry breath. The elaborate script beneath the picture read: ‘Dare You Board The
Hell Train
?’

It seemed odd that she had never noticed the box before. Solemnly arranging herself before the game, she slipped off the twine, removed the lid and took out the playing board. Carefully unfolding it, she laid it flat and began to remove the pieces from their containers.