Whitby Vampyrrhic

  ‘Now I’m being bitchy,’ she murmured to herself, as she paused at a mirror by a studio door to adjust a lock of hair that hung down over her forehead. ‘And I’m being as vain as they are.’ Beth, an American by birth, had left the States to find work in the English film industry five years ago. She figured her American accent, and hair as golden as a Nebraskan cornfield, would win her lead roles. Also, she had served Cary Grant a cocktail in one of his Hollywood movies. That kind of gem on a résumé could get a girl decent acting parts in the old motherland. Only, the war had come along to complicate things.

  Roaming wolf-packs of German submarines made Transatlantic crossings for civilians a near impossibility, so she couldn’t return home to the US of A. Add to that, America had entered the war against Japan and Hitler’s Germany just a matter of weeks ago. And, dear God in heaven, she did want to aid the war effort. If it wasn’t for landing a role in This Midnight Realm, she would have presented herself at a munitions factory and begged to make bullets for allied soldiers. Beth told herself firmly, One thing I’m not afraid of is to get my hands dirty.

  She gazed into the mirror. Now she wanted to kick herself for lousing up this opportunity. I must have been out of my mind to accuse the director of being a gin-sodden lush. But the moment he’d opened his mouth he’d annoyed the hell out of her.

  ‘Fresh air,’ she muttered. ‘Get fresh air and plenty of it.’

  Beth headed down a long corridor. Doors off carried signs like Edward Birks, Senior Producer or Kathleen Miller, Script Supervisor. Everywhere, on the drab green walls, there were reproductions of the Cromwell-Sterling logo, a female warrior carrying a shield and a spear. She paused. She couldn’t remember if this corridor led to the exit. After all, it was her first time at this particular studio. A pair of secretaries, hugging armfuls of scripts, rushed from a door in front of her. Their red lips were the brightest slash of colour in the corridor.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she began, ‘can you tell me—’ But they vanished through another door marked Production Accountant. ‘That’s it,’ she muttered darkly. ‘I’m doomed to wonder the studios for all eternity.’

  She longed for a lungful of cold winter air. Her head felt muzzy. A pain flared behind her eyes. Great, just great, now I’m going down with flu. But the symptoms don’t occur so quickly, do they? Suddenly, the air in the corridor of a million doors – at least that’s what it seemed like – became thunderously oppressive. Pain speared her eyes. Good grief. My skull’s going to explode. She gritted her teeth. For some reason it seemed like a huge charge of energy had invaded the building. Dizzy, she placed her hand on the wall to steady herself. Lights dimmed. As there were no windows, the corridor grew so gloomy that she could barely even see those doors leading off; what’s more, the doorways became suggestive of churchyard headstones – tall oblong, shapes that breathed the words grave, tomb, cemetery and death into her ear.

  A sudden gust of air raced down the passageway. The gale came from nowhere, but its scent reminded her of the sea. Posters fluttered on the walls. The studio’s logo of the she-warrior writhed on a poster that was the size of one of those damned doors (which could have led to hell for all she knew).

  Then a figure. Beth glimpsed a man in the shadows. A burly individual who swept by her. He pushed open a pair of doors that admitted light into the corridor. Thinking the way led outdoors, she followed the man. Moments later, she found herself bathed in light. Only, it was a thin, grey light. A poor excuse for daylight really. Beth closed her eyes, kept them scrunched shut, then opened them again. She stood in a street. One paved with cobbles. Ahead of her, a line of ancient cottages. Their red-brick walls bulged, and the windows were tiny openings that resembled the eyes of reptiles. Doorways were low, stunted things, seemingly constructed to admit goblin men into their dwarfish houses. An iron plaque fixed to the front of one cottage spelt out: CHURCH STREET – BOROUGH OF WHITBY.

  ‘Ah.’ Beth rubbed her throbbing forehead. ‘Whitby. It makes sense now. They’ve built a replica of one of the streets.’ She frowned. The detail of the set was extraordinary. Dozens of houses had been built. Smoke rose from chimneys. ‘So why are we going on location, when they’ve gone to the trouble of building this?’ The authenticity took her breath away. She’d seen many a studio set. This, however, had to be the biggest, the best and the most realistic ever. A cat, a live cat, stood on a mound of lobster pots. Why, I can even smell the scents of the sea and the fish in the market.

  Drawn by the extraordinary craftsmanship of the set designers, she moved further along ‘Church Street’. She rested her palm against the wall of a cottage. The dull red-brick under her hand felt solidly real, not the papier mâché or plywood that was the usual choice of carpenters when they built a mock-up of a town. What’s more, these buildings didn’t resemble flimsy free-standing ‘flats’. They had all the substance of being rooted into the earth for the last five hundred years. Once more she asked herself why the actors and crew were being sent to Whitby, on the English coast, when they could film right here. She looked up at the ceiling of the studio, which would be around thirty feet above her head. Clouds hung there, or something that resembled clouds. Beth figured that a gauzy material had been suspended from roof beams to create the effect of natural cloud. And even as she gazed at it the light dimmed on this magnificent recreation of Whitby town. Perhaps one of the exterior doors was being slowly drawn shut?

  Now the gloom closed in. Shadows spilled from authentic-looking alleyways. Darkness crept along Church Street. It seemed as if a black mist engulfed the houses, until they became indistinct shapes that assumed the menacing aspect of hunched figures. Windows were dull eyes that watched. Just as if they expected a terrible fate to befall her. Now they were curious to what that fate would be . . . and how much she’d suffer before she died.

  Stop that, she told her rogue imagination. This flu bug, or whatever it was, was clouding her mind. Her stride became increasingly unsteady. Her eyes blurred, so the already gloomy town became even more murkily indistinct. No, not a town, she thought. This is a set made out of plywood and paper in a film studio. She pushed at the door of a cottage, expecting it to flap open in that flimsy way that is the province of studio scenery. Only, this robust slab of timbers remained locked solidly shut.

  On impulse she rapped on the door, as if challenging it to be just a copy of a cottage door that would have been cobbled together in a studio workshop. Her knuckles rapped solid oak. A moment later she heard footsteps. The owner of the house had answered her call.

  But who owns a strange, goblin cottage like that? What would they look like? Would they welcome a stranger at dusk? Not wishing to meet the denizen of such a weird little abode, she fled before the door could be opened. She rubbed her forehead. That sense of energy building inside the studio came back to her. A huge storm’s worth of charge. Something huge and violent and terrifying just about to break. Tiny, skittering objects ran across the cobbles in front of her. Rats. They had to be. Loathsome, disease-bearing rats.

  To avoid being in the rodents’ way, if they decided to rush back at her, Beth turned left into an alleyway that boasted the bizarre name of Arguments Yard. She passed through a narrow, echoing passageway to a tiny close lined with equally tiny houses. And at that moment Beth sensed eyes staring at her. Yet she didn’t see a single person.

  She moved deeper into the strangely named yard. Above front doors, house names had been chiselled into solid stone lintels: Nag’s Cottage, North Star Lodge, Twixt Heaven & Hell, Jack O’ Bones . . . Beth felt herself drawn deeper into this narrow gulf. It seemed like a huge hand pressed against the back of her neck, pushing her forward. But forward to what? Her destiny? Her one true end?

  Her eyes tried to penetrate the gloom in front of her. Now that darkness had the rich velvet intensity of red wine. The harder her gaze tried to penetrate the veil of shadow the more the optic nerves compensated by conjuring purple patterns into her field of vision. They were slow moving shapes, twistin
g, undulating . . .

  I’m going to die in here, she told herself. I’m going to die and no one will ever know.

  Her normally cool, rational nature had abandoned her. Only a primordial occult terror remained: that instinct to imagine that monsters lurk under your bed, that there are phantoms in your closet, and that the man following you along the street at midnight is a killer with a bloody knife in his hands . . . and lustful eyes focused on your softly delicate throat . . .

  Then a figure stepped out of the shadows. A young man, his face as pale as ancient bone. Beth retreated along Arguments Yard, aiming to retrace her footsteps to the exit. She reached the passageway that led to the street. The top of the passage, formed by the upper story of a house, dragged at her hair; an old, blackened timber snatched away an entire lock of blonde. Her gasp of pain must have triggered what happened next.

  Fast-moving figures erupted from the shadows of the yard. This time she didn’t see any detail, other than bright, glaring eyes. Bizarrely, they didn’t possess coloured irises, just a fierce black pupil dominated the white.

  Beth ran. She hadn’t the luxury of debating what was actually happening. Why a studio set looked so solidly real, or just who those menacing figures were. A mist had made the cobbles slick. Even in this gloom they glistened, as if they oozed their own inner moisture. Beth raced along the street. It seemed to extend forever into darkness. A derelict tavern stood at the corner; the sign over the door read Blessing on the Drowned. Such a grimly macabre name; the image that accompanied the words emphasized it: a human skull with the incoming tide lapping around it.

  Beth turned a bend; as she did so her feet slipped from under her. An agonizing pain exploded through her nerve endings as she slammed on to the ground.

  ‘Damn, that hurt!’ The words were born of frustration and fear as much as pain. Because right now she wanted to scream her distress out to the world. Then she glanced back the way she came. Light-footed figures, nothing more than silhouettes that possessed whitely staring eyes, raced towards her. Something about their eagerness spoke volumes about lust and hunger.

  In a heartbeat, she scrambled to her feet. Once more she rushed down the never-ending street. One lined with tiny shops, cottages, and strange-looking chapels from which protruded grotesque carvings of heads with bulging eyes.

  The footsteps grew louder as her pursuers closed the gap. Already, she could imagine fingers reaching out to grab her hair, then bring her to a screaming, pain-filled stop. After that . . . what then?

  All of a sudden the houses were gone. She burst through twin doors and into the grasp of a tall, rage-filled man.

  ‘Where the hell have you been? We’ve been waiting for you.’

  Her gaze locked on to the eyepatch beside the good eye. The flesh surrounding the patch had puffed outwards with a reddish inflammation.

  She panted out some words. They meant nothing to him . . . nor to her.

  ‘I recommend you catch your breath, then try again,’ Alec Reed said in his cold Scottish accent. ‘Then maybe I can let the others go for their lunch.’

  ‘Back . . .’ She turned to the doors, expecting them to burst open and admit those monstrous figures into the corridor. ‘In there . . . someone attacked me in the town.’

  ‘The town?’ His one good eye registered surprise.

  ‘Yes, on the Whitby set!’

  ‘Are you making fun of me, Miss Layne?’

  ‘No, I’m trying to tell you that I was attacked. Look at my elbow.’

  ‘You’ve got a heroic graze there, I’ll give you that. Did your assailant do that?’

  ‘They were . . . I don’t know. Demonic.’

  ‘And it was someone in there?’ Alec indicated the studio doors.

  ‘Yes, you idiot. Listen to what I’m saying.’

  ‘And in there is the Whitby set?’

  ‘Yes. The Whitby set.’ Beth could have cursed with frustration. It took the man an age to understand what she told him. ‘There’s a long road lined with cottages called Church Street. My God, that’s a hell of mock-up. That’s big budget stuff – cottages built of brick; there are chapels, a cobbled street, even an authentic smell of the sea, but why go to that trouble for a film? Where nobody can smell any . . . Wait, where are you going?’

  ‘To check for myself and find those men. Nobody roughs up my actors. I mean . . .’ He gave a grim smile. ‘You’ll vouch for the fact that it’s me, Alec Reed, who gave you a hard time.’ He strode towards the twin doors.

  ‘Wait. Get help first. There were a whole bunch of—’ The rest of her words trailed away.

  Beyond the doors, there it was. In all its glory . . . well, what would be glorious once the set was lit and dressed correctly for the camera. Beth followed Alec Reed into a decidedly modest studio. A better description than ‘modest’, however, would be ‘pokey’. The room had little in it other than a flimsy wall of hardboard, painted to look like brick. A mat of dark material had been laid out, which should pass for a road. A horse-drawn cart (without the horse) stood before the ‘wall’.

  ‘But the set for Whitby was amazing. Really, really good. So authentic.’ Beth shook her head. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d swear I’d walked into the real town.’

  ‘There’s only this set, Miss Layne. And this is for a dramatization of a Charles Dickens’ story being filmed here this week.’

  ‘There must be a door to the other set.’

  ‘There is no other set, Miss Layne. That’s why we’re filming on location in Whitby. I fought tooth and claw to do that, otherwise we’d have ended up with piffling cardboard cut-out houses, that are as authentic as this so-called London street.’

  ‘I’ve gone mad,’ Beth said with absolute clarity. ‘Mad as the March hare, because there were streets here, and cottages. Even smoke came out of the chimneys – inhale: you can still catch some of it.’

  ‘That smells like pipe tobacco to me, Miss Layne. It’s wafting in from the executives’ boardroom next door.’ His single good eye focused on her face. ‘Even though I don’t believe in your manifestation of Whitby in this very building, I do believe you’ve had a nasty experience. Your elbow looks quite sore, you know.’

  ‘I had noticed, thank you.’

  ‘You really have worked with Cary Grant?’

  ‘I served him a dry Martini in a movie. Now I wish it had needed a dozen takes. We did it in one. But I have my five seconds on-screen with the great man himself. He even smells as good as he looks. Acqua di Parma; an aftershave; it—’

  ‘You’re trembling.’

  ‘I’m also babbling about Cary Grant, aren’t I?’

  The anger left him now. ‘Come on, we’ll go somewhere quiet for a coffee.’

  ‘If you’re firing me, do it here.’

  ‘Firing you?’

  ‘For suggesting you’re a raging liquor lover.’

  ‘No. I’ve a proposition. One, I trust, that you will find as irresistible as it is fascinating.’

  He held open one of the swing doors for her. In the back of her neck blew a cold, damp breeze. What if I turn round and I can see Whitby again? If I can, that proves I’m mad, doesn’t it? Salty ocean scents, laced with odours of raw fish, crawled up her nostrils. She could almost hear the distant whisper of surf. At that moment, she knew Whitby’s Church Street would be there waiting, as cold as a tomb, if she glanced over her shoulder. Clenching her fist, and resisting the urge for that last backward look, she walked out into the corridor. She only allowed herself to breathe again when the door closed firmly behind her.

  Three

  Alec Reed ushered her into an office so flamboyantly untidy she wanted to describe it as sexy. A pair of typewriters faced each other across a large table, as if eager to fight a duel. Scripts were piled on shelves. One wall was devoted to large sheets of paper on which had been drawn the storyboard of the script. And above that, a banner proclaimed This Midnight Realm. On the table: empty cups, beer bottles, ashtrays crammed full of cigar butts. T
ellingly, a bottle of gin, half empty, stood by a typewriter. Beth could still smell that particularly distinctive spirit on Alec’s breath.

  Alec invited her to take a seat, vanished from the office for a while, then returned with two cups of coffee.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘but isn’t all this an overly elaborate way to fire me?’

  ‘Coffee’s as rare as a good night’s sleep these days, what with the air-raid sirens screaming fit to burst. Cheers.’ He sipped the coffee. The action of swallowing caused a drop of red liquid to emerge from beneath the eyepatch and roll down his cheek. He dabbed it away with a knuckle.

  Beth set her cup down on the table. ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, what?’

  ‘Fire me.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Ridiculous?’ Her anger rose.

  ‘Drink your coffee. You won’t believe how severely rationed it is now. Ships bringing it across the Atlantic are targeted by submarines. Crews drown by the hundred.’

  ‘So there’s blood in the coffee. Is that what you’re trying to say?’

  ‘Peppery, aren’t you?’

  ‘Why are you treating me like your personal enemy?’

  ‘You really could smell gin on my breath from, what? Three rows back in the screening room?’

  ‘Absolutely. Now fire me for making that crack about you being liquored up, and stop playing games. I don’t like it. What’s more, I won’t tolerate it.’

  Once more his fingertip rested on the eyepatch, as if still coming to terms with it being attached to his face.

  ‘Miss Layne. Permit me to confess what happened ten days ago. It may help you make up your mind about me. Then act according to your conscience.’

  His manner irritated her, but she nodded. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Ten days ago I sat in a café in London. There was an informal meeting, you see, with the director and location manager for the film I’d just finished scripting. We sat there with slices of cherry cake, cups of tea, and the director smoked his favourite tobacco. All profoundly normal. A waitress brought sandwiches to a young couple sitting at a table opposite. He wore a blue Royal Air Force uniform. She was a nurse. They were holding hands. I suggested to the director that wherever possible we film on the streets of Whitby and dispense with rickety cardboard sets, then . . .’ A stillness crept over him. ‘Then the café didn’t exist any more. Everyone was dead. The young sweethearts, my colleagues. The walls had vanished. Tables pulverized to splinters. There I was standing in the rubble, smoke and fire all around, and no sound whatsoever.’ He took a mouthful of coffee; as he did so, his eye alighted on the gin bottle. ‘A bomb had struck the building. Everyone died but me.’