Singled Out (6 page)

5) You can’t eat a literary reputation.

6) I enjoy it.

Against:

1) While we’re all peddling our own versions of reality, mine is blacker than most. You don’t get literary kudos for horror unless your name’s Mary Shelley or Bram Stoker.

2) I’ll always be just the Sister of the more famous Jane and her pared-down poetry.

Conclusion:

I feel strongly that I have to write these things. Maybe I’ll never get on the Booker short list, but with a bit of luck I could be laughing all the way to the bank, even if I’m never quite in the Stephen King league.

My roots are in the graveyard, so let Jane make with the harp in the rarefied atmosphere above.

Draping a nylon cobweb over one black velvet-shrouded shoulder (think early Kate Bush on a bad day) I snarled at my image in the mirror, which is more than most vampires can do, and went out to deliver a Ghastly Greeting.

As Orla is fond of saying, Song Language’s motto is ‘We serve you right.’

*   *   *

As I stepped out of my front door all girded up to sing for my supper, Mrs Bridges upstairs’ window flew open and she leaned out perilously far, her loose grey hair dangling like a dingy unravelled bellrope.

‘The fuzzy-wuzzies are coming!’ she screeched.

Shouts and rhythmic thumping noises came from the room behind her.

I cupped my hands to my mouth and screamed: ‘MRS BRIDGES, TURN
ZULU
OFF!’

‘What? Is that you, Cass? Are they after you? The fuz—’

‘THE VIDEO – IT’S ONLY THE VIDEO!’

She looked down at me, confused.

Perhaps this wasn’t the best time to explain how politically incorrect her terms of reference were, either?

‘THE VIDEO. MRS BRIDGES!’

She turned and vanished, and the sound abruptly ceased, only to be replaced a few moments later by her reedy soprano warbling along to
The Sound Of Music.

‘I am sixteen, going on seventeen…’

Yeah, right. Sixteen going on seventy-nine.

The room throbbed with a strange beat, and greenish light pulsated as the familiar figure of her neighbour swiftly aged before her eyes, adolescent to elderly woman in seconds, before crumbling to dust with a soft sigh …

Not that I want Mrs Bridges to turn to dust, because I am quite fond of the noisy old bat, and she is knitting me a nice, big warm cobweb to wear on those chillier Crypt-ogram occasions.

‘Oh, it’s only you, Cass!’ Chrissie Fowkes said, peeping out of her front door like a timid albino gerbil. ‘I thought I heard shouting.’

‘You did, but I’ve stopped now.’

‘Oh?’ she said doubtfully, then came out a bit further, clutching her tightly and squarely packaged baby. It was making noises like a kettle slowly coming to the boil.

‘How’s my little Birdie?’

‘She never seems to stop screaming, and now she’s got this really peculiar rash. Do you want to see it?’

‘No, I think I’ll pass on that one, thanks.’

‘Do you think she’s possessed?’ she asked fearfully.

‘No more than other children,’ I reassured her, and then left quickly before she could show me the rash, or Birdsong demonstrate her lung capacity.

If Birdie hasn’t put me off the urge to procreate, nothing will.

Chapter 4: Lover, Come Back To Me

I picked up the new horror novel by Cass Leigh,
Nocturnally Yours,
out of a spirit of curiosity. Then I couldn’t put it down. I couldn’t keep any food down for three days either …

Expose Magazine:
‘On The Shelf’ with Lisa-Mona Bevore

As I drove through the twisty dark lanes to deliver the Cryptogram, Clive the rubber vampire bat dangling from the sun visor, my twisty dark mind began to take over, rudely elbowing my real-life problems into the bottom drawer.

This often happens, since I’m a creature of the night. All my best writing is done in the graveyard shift between about midnight and four in the morning, that spooky time when nothing seems quite real. You could punch your fist through the reality around you then, and it would give like cellophane, which I suppose pretty well sums up what I do.

Strangely enough, it’s always annoyed the hell out of Max to wake up in the night and find me hammering the keys in the back room, but he forgets that I have to write to eat. (Unless you count his occasional hamper contributions, but I find all those tasty little goodies much too rich for my taste.)

Besides, I am a writer: ergo, I write. And if my most creative time is in the middle of the night, so be it.

The way I slide in and out between the two parallel universes of my life and fiction without conscious volition, the one adding substance to the shadows of the other, unnerved him.

‘Where are you, Cassy?’ he would often say, which is about as much a conversation stopper as: ‘What are you thinking about?’

‘Chapter Sixteen of
Lover, Come Back To Me
’ is still giving me problems, Clive,’ I said, as he bobbed and flapped against the windscreen. ‘It just isn’t
chilling
enough. Listen to this:

Keturah returned to the grave again and again each night, to fling herself like a penitent across the freshly mounded pall of earth that separated her from her lover, hot tears searing down through the cold clay.

She yearned to feel his presence there with her, for that illusion of comfort was all she could hope for now that the old woman’s childish resurrection mumbo-jumbo had failed her, as she had known in her heart it would.

But she had done what she’d promised Sylvanus in his last throes: she’d tried every possible means to call him back to her and all had been fruitless.

Perhaps it was her fault, for not truly believing it could happen? Or deeply dreading that if it
did
work, what came back would be some horrible travesty of her lover …

‘The dead don’t come back, Sylvanus,’ she whispered, too blinded by tears to see the pale fingers clawing out of the earth towards her, like new shoots to the sun.

She was about to find just how wrong she was.

‘But
what,
exactly, is coming back, Clive?’

I wasn’t sure, and my publisher’s deadline was approaching faster than that grisly set of suppurating fingers.

The only way I’d ever get it finished was to pay a little graveyard visit later tonight after the pub shut and
scare
myself into the next chapter. If I was very lucky the conditions would be right for that strange, low, smoky mist to hang about at tombstone level like an old horror movie: sometimes it did.

First, though, there was the little matter of the singing telegram to deliver – if the thread of country lane I was currently driving along was really the one I thought it was, that is?

It was, and with relief I turned into a marginally wider road and pulled up outside a brightly lit pub with a full car park.

I hooked Clive’s elastic over my arm, checked my greenish pallor in the mirror, and added another layer of crimson lipstick. Then I took a deep breath and issued forth to sing for my supper.

*   *   *

I shouldn’t have bothered.

That is absolutely the last Crypt-ogram I do, because the money could never be enough to compensate me for what I’ve just gone through!

Even
supply teaching
would be preferable.

I mean, I knew it was a stag night, but no one warned me that the said stags would be huge, burly, drunken rugby players, all of whom wanted me to bite them at the very
least.

One of them even kept trying to stick his finger in my mouth to test the sharpness of my fangs, until I bit him. (Fangs for the Memory?)

I was lucky to escape with little more than shredded drapery, though I fear my bat would never have been the same again, even had I stopped long enough to retrieve him. (Poor Clive: although I knew his body was hollow, I hadn’t realised quite how stretchy it was. Sort of symbolic of the whole thing really – a hollow mockery.)

I beat them to my little black Mini with inches to spare. It was unlocked as usual – you’d have to be desperate to steal it – but as soon as I was in it I slammed down the door locks.

I was just in time: they streamed around the car, baying, then lifted it up bodily only to set it down again sideways in the road facing the hedge.

It took me something like a sixteen-point turn to get free, weaving between huge, drunken bodies while they leered through the windows and banged on the roof But at least that was better than them banging
me,
which seemed to be what they assumed came with the package.

I tell you, it was seriously scary.

‘Come back and strip!’ they howled, among other more unrepeatable things. ‘Call yourself a Strippagram?’

Well no, actually I don’t. And Micheline Brown, the unfortunate fiancée of one of these louts, had hired me to sing ‘The Monster Mash’, nothing more.

She might have warned me: though now I came to think about it, on the phone she’d sounded like the sort of girl who could sort even this lot out, so she had probably assumed I could, too.

I drove off at speed in the wrong direction, and promptly got lost in the small lanes trying to get back to Westery.

It took me ages, and I stopped for a tearful interlude in the first lay-by I came to, though whether the tears were from humiliation, fear, frustration, or the Max situation, I really couldn’t say: maybe all of them.

After some time I wiped my face with a wad of tissues, and decided that what I needed was a drink and something solid in the food line, which was fortunate since Something Solid In The Food Line is the only sort of catering the King’s Arms does. Not for them the nouvelle cuisine offerings of a teaspoon of cat vomit decorated with a trickle of vivid sauce and two leaves. (And while I am
forever
seeing pubs called the King’s Head, or King’s Arms, where is the rest of him? Why no King’s Leg, or King’s Torso, or even King’s Knob?)

It wasn’t by any means the first time I’d appeared in the pub in full vampire gear, eliciting no more attention than when I’d appeared at more or less fortnightly intervals with a suave, increasingly silver-haired lover.

Mind you, I’d have taken out my fangs had they not by now been well and truly rammed down on to the adhesive gum by having those grubby masculine fingers testing the points for sharpness – and I think I bit down pretty hard, too, which wouldn’t have helped. I’d have to work them loose later.

It was quiet in the back room, although the rattle of the slot machine and a low moaning from the juke box gave evidence of the regulars in the bar. Or it could be the moaning of the regulars and the rattling of the juke box, as
something uncoiled itself from a nest of old Elvis 45s and started to slither—

I shook the image firmly away and looked around.

It being Friday, the vicar was sitting at his usual table, where he holds an impromptu counselling clinic for all comers, while imbibing, dry sherry and putting the parish magazine together.

‘’Evening, Charles,’ I said, and he glanced up with a preoccupied smile.

‘Cass, my dear,’ he said absently. ‘Terrible, terrible stuff!’

I didn’t take it personally. Poor Charles is something of a poet, and finds the reams of religious verse that flow in by every post almost too bad to bear. But he stoically reads them, and even prints one or two in every edition.

Seeing he was absorbed I carried on over to the corner where Orla was sitting in Marilyn Monroe mode.

Well, I say sitting, but actually she was slumped in a heap, shoes kicked off, with her gold dress looking a little the worse for wear.

‘Hi, Orla,’ I said, and she opened mascared eyelashes and looked at me. ‘You look like I feel. Bad one?’

‘You’re not kidding.’

‘Where’s Jason? He said he’d be here.’

She indicated the limp figure propping up the bar like a wonky gremlin bookend. ‘Celebrating selling that hideous screen he’s had in the shop for years – to my American guest, too.’

‘Did he? No wonder he’s celebrating, then. Well, I need to eat, and boy do I need a drink! Do you want anything?’

‘Large dark rum and coke. Chicken and chips.’

‘OK.’

Jason had looked right out of it, but as I approached he straightened slowly upright and smiled at me, his brown eyes lighting up: ‘Cass? Thought you were a figment of my over-heated imagination.’

‘Drunken imagination,’ I corrected, leaning past him to order food. ‘Are you going to get something to eat and come and sit down? Or just carry on drinking until you slide down the bar like last time?’

‘You’ve got your teeth in,’ he said sapiently.

‘I know. I’d better have curry, it’ll be easier to eat.’

‘And you’ve losht …
lost
your bat.’

‘I’m just grateful that’s all I lost,’ I said darkly. When I carried the drinks over to Orla he followed me. (It sometimes seems to me that he may be the reincarnation of an Irish wolfhound, except that they are the most equable of dogs and Jason has a quick temper.)

Orla was looking a little more alert. ‘How was the stag night?’ she asked me.

‘I was thinking maybe supply teaching is safer.’

‘That bad?’

‘Rugby players. I was lucky to escape relatively unscathed, except for the mental scars, and poor Clive is a goner.’

‘Clive?’ she asked, puzzled.

‘My vampire bat.’

‘Oh? Well, he’s made of rubber, isn’t he? He’ll probably bounce back.’

‘I don’t think so, and I don’t intend going back to find out. How did yours go?’

‘Birthday party. They were drunk and persistent – made me sing “Happy Birthday” three times, with lots of pouting, so I’m all pouted out. But please, Cass, don’t stop doing the Crypt-ograms. You’re one of my most popular acts.’

‘What do you mean, “one of”? You’ve only got four including yourself.’

‘Yes, but I’m still building the business. And I promise not to send you on any more stag nights,’ she wheedled.