The White Hands and Other Weird Tales (11 page)

Kruptos, vol CLVII

I picked up another at random:

Kruptos, vol MCMIV

And another:

Kruptos, vol MMXIII

I looked at the covers of two dozen more. They were all so numbered.

Then I must have lost my mind, plunging outside into the snow and shouting up at the tower like a lunatic, while Ariel worked on indifferently and incessantly, his brain long since devoted to disentangling mysteries beyond all human comprehension.

I next remember staggering back to the house in a state
of
utter
mental
exhaustion,
the
books
only
intensifying my despair. Not all the contents of those thousands of volumes could fill the void within me. They were only doorways to further doorways without end.

And if I joined those other ghostly images in their eternal search, those beings exiled from the waking world, would I still be human or merely some pale, unworldly reflection of Ariel himself?

I sat in front of the fire, watching the flames writhe and surge up the chimney. Then a great gust of storm wind swept over the town and in its wake the flames reached out of the fireplace for me. I stumbled backwards, lost my footing on the piles of volumes and fell into a corner.

The burst of fire lashed at the innumerable
Kruptos
editions and the books went up in a flash. It spread across the room, hungrily consuming all in its path, sending blackened fragments and smoke towards the high ceiling. I came to my senses and smashed my way through the inferno to the outside.

I crawled through the snow with the flames at my back. They leapt from building to building, billowing smoke into the atmosphere.

Karnswilloch was being destroyed. Apocalypse had come to the region between dream and waking consciousness. There was a great rushing noise in my ears which blotted out everything else. I was in the very heart of the sun. The flames licked at my flesh. Light, only light existed. Ecstatic, unbearable light. And I thought of Ariel and of the ghostly exiles and I . . .

***

Two German concentration camp guards looked at the dying form of the Irish Jew at their feet. There was still a spark of life left in him for he feebly crawled a little further away from them before finally coming to a halt.
 

One of the guards replaced his smoking Luger in its holster. He smiled at his companion.

‘Did he really think he’d get to the fence and escape in broad daylight?’

‘Hans, this one’s crazy. He went mad on the train that brought him here. We’ve done him a service. At least he’s escaped going into the gas chambers with the others.’

Hans Kohler nodded at Wolfgang Ewers. He bent down to the Jewish student with the four bullets lodged in his back who was attempting to mumble something with his dying breath.

Kohler was startled by the dying man’s eyes. They were like those of an incredibly aged person, not of a young man at all. Then he noticed some papers sticking out of his pocket.

He looked at them. They were in English and he couldn’t decipher them immediately so he tucked them away in his jacket. His grasp of the language was limited but he decided it might be amusing to translate them during a spare evening.

‘Amazing. He must have smuggled in paper and a pencil. These Jews are crafty devils,’ Kohler said.

Kohler stood up again and turned the corpse over with his boot so that it stared upwards.

Ewers too saw the expression in its eyes.

Jack Wells drained his second can of ice-cold beer and waved away a fat bluebottle that had drifted lazily across his line of vision. The heat was tremendous. He couldn’t remember a summer like it, or at least not since ’76, or maybe ’47. Now, as then, the tarmac on the roads had turned sticky and the pavements were cracking. London was utterly still, exhausted by the hot air filling its streets. Only a few brave souls, and one or two mad dogs, dared to venture out.
 

He lived in an elegant house in Highgate, conveniently close to the Underground station. This impossibly hot August day he was sitting in his open front door looking down the two flights of steps that led to the pavement. He had opened all the doors and windows at dawn in the knowledge that the day would be even more uncomfortable than the sleepless night before. A few hours later he had watched as the postman staggered up the road with his heavy bag, weaving unsteadily from one house to the next, sweating and mouthing curses at the high front steps to the houses on Wells’ side of the street.

This particular morning the postman brought a letter from Ben Gibbs. Ben was Jack’s oldest friend, but Jack had taken the letter with uncertainty and did not open it immediately. The two of them had not been in contact now for well over two weeks, and for no good reason that Jack could understand Ben had holed himself up in his house at Hampstead Heath. The telephone was left unanswered, and on the couple of occasions when Jack had made the trip over to Ben’s house in the maze of stairways and courtyards off The Mount he’d failed to raise him. On the last occasion Jack had spent an hour ringing the doorbell and standing outside. There had been something obscuring the view through the letterbox, and the internal shutters had been closed over the windows. Nevertheless, Jack was sure that Ben was at home.

Jack was hurt. When they had had disagreements in the past, it had always been him who had apologised and got them to talk things over. But this time he was not even aware that they had argued! Now, as he took the letter through into his study, which was as messy as usual, with cluttered bookshelves and mounds of papers, his gaze fell upon a framed black and white photograph of the two of them. It had been taken in Paris in 1944, just after the city had been liberated from the Nazis. It showed two young men in officers’ uniforms, caps tipped rakishly on the side of their heads, cigarettes poking out from the edges of grinning mouths. Ben wore a thick scarf as well as his jacket and Jack remembered that although it had been a warm day, Ben had complained, as always, about how cold he was.

Jack sat and stared at the envelope, fearful of its contents. Yes, they had fallen out from time to time, but they had only once seriously argued. It had been back there in Paris, in those heady days immediately after the liberation when they’d sown some wild oats in the brothels of the city. Even the naturally prudish Ben had been swept up in the euphoria of the moment. It had been harmless fun, but then they had met Verna Karndess. Of course, Karndess had been a stage name; she was really Miranda Hughes. In Jack’s view visiting a few prostitutes was one thing, but Karndess, by god, was quite another. . . . Jack had been horrified when Ben announced his engagement to the actress.

It might seem strange that the unopened letter should lead his thoughts to Karndess and the events of over a half-century before, but it was rare that a day passed without him reflecting on what had happened between the three of them. It seemed that he would never be able to forget . . . his friendship with Ben was a constant reminder. . . .

***

Two weeks earlier, before the heat wave had struck, Ben Gibbs had found himself wandering near the Holloway Road. Ben remembered leaving his house in Hampstead, crossing the Heath via Parliament Hill and walking through the streets in Dartmouth Park. He walked with no particular object in view, except perhaps the discovery of some new and unfamiliar experience. He had a few empty hours to fill before visiting Jack.
 

Much of what he had seen was tawdry and mundane, and on the Hornsey Road he had stopped outside a video shop. The place was unremarkable, merely one store amongst many others on that most dismal stretch of shops and council estates. It was flanked by a kebab house and a convenience store, and above its grimy windows was an electrically lit sign announcing ‘Videos for Hire Ltd’. Strips of red plastic hung in the doorway and fluttered in the breeze.

Ben did not know quite why he ventured inside. He had felt a little tired. Although in his seventies he was still fit and much more active than Jack, who’d grown fat in the last twenty years. He entered the dim interior of the shop and looked around.

At first he had problems reading the titles. The grimy window refused to admit much sunlight, and although the shop was lit by neon strip lights, half of them were not working. Ben didn’t much like the place. He stood back from the rows of video cases displayed on the cheap, self-assembly shelves which reached up to the low ceiling, making up his mind to leave. He couldn’t see anyone behind the serving hatch at the back of the shop, so a sudden departure would not look odd. Idly he read the notice above the hatch: ‘All films £1.50 per night. Films must be returned by 10 p.m. the next day’.

Perhaps he and Jack could watch a video that night? Usually Ben fell in with Jack’s suggestions, so it would make a change. He examined the titles once again, now that his eyes had adjusted to the twilit shop. It seemed that they specialised in horror and thriller movies, and although he had little interest in such material he decided that he might find something worth watching. As he worked his way along the videos a rather bored and distracted-looking young man appeared at the hatch. He had a shaven head and looked somewhat threatening to the older man. He stared at Ben quite aggressively as he lit a cigarette, but then became engrossed in opening a parcel of videos.

Ben took down one of the empty cases from the shelves. It was a film called
Curse of the Demon
starring Dana Andrews, whom he remembered from some other films he’d seen. He replaced it and took down another. This one seemed to be an even more trashy affair entitled
Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things
. Embarrassed to be even holding it, he hastily returned it to its place on the shelf.

He had lost his enthusiasm for renting a film, at least from this shop. Ben straightened himself up and turned towards the door. As he did so he heard the young man say, in a surprised tone: ‘Verna Karndess’. This stopped Ben dead in his tracks. The young man was turning a video over in his hands.

Unsure of whether he had heard the man correctly, Ben went cautiously up to the hatch. The young man looked up and grinned at him.

‘Just arrived,’ he said proudly. ‘A bootleg copy of
Black as Darkness
. You won’t know the film: it was never released. It’s a bit like that Ealing film
Dead of Night
. Really obscure.’

‘I’ve heard of it,’ Ben said quietly.

‘Really, really obscure this one,’ the young man continued, not listening. ‘It’s got Verna Karndess in it. Y’know, like Theda Bara?’

‘Yes, I know,’ he nodded.

‘How do you know?’ he looked up, suspicious and unbelieving.

‘I was married to Verna Karndess.’

***

Once back at his Hampstead flat Ben loaded the tape into his video player. The offer of £100 had overcome the young man’s reluctance to sell the video, along with a promise that Ben would take it back and let him make a copy at some later date. Ben found himself hesitating before pushing the play button. He had never seen the film, not having attended the studio’s private (and, as it transpired, only) viewing.
 

Verna had told him later that the viewing had been a fiasco. Most of the film stock was discovered to have serious defects, and these had caused unacceptable distortions in the final images. Nobody could account for the faults: at the editing stage the film had appeared flawless. The result was that the characters ended up looking like reflections in those funfair mirrors, stretched and contorted almost beyond recognition. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the sound quality was ruined by inexplicable noises on the soundtrack. In those days they didn’t have the means to clean it up; it sounded as if a small crowd were whispering continuously in the background.

Almost immediately the screening began accusations started to fly and a fistfight broke out between the director and the producer. The former claimed that the film had been sabotaged: as well as the distortions, someone had removed whole scenes and replaced them with idiotic dream-sequences from god only knew where. These were close-ups of a mouth, whose opening and closing seemed to correspond remarkably with the errant background whispering. The producer had been infuriated by the director’s accusations—he blamed him for the film and was appalled at the avant-garde farrago that had resulted.

If someone had perpetrated a practical joke nobody was admitting to it, and no one had a satisfactory explanation of the events. The film seemed to have been cursed from the outset, and Verna was particularly appalled. She had regarded it as her opportunity to at last achieve the fame she desired so desperately. It had been designed originally as a portmanteau of ghost stories; she played the central character in the second tale, based on the story ‘The Reunion’ by the obscure Victorian authoress Lilith Blake.

The story of
Black as Darkness
has of course become a thing of movie folklore. ‘The Reunion’ concerned a ghostly murderess stalking the streets. Even before it went into production the screenwriter had problems with the adaptation of the Blake story, which he attempted to update, setting it in a rainy, pre-war Berlin ghetto. An Oxford Don, Muswell, had written to him begging him not to transpose the story onto film. The man had made the bizarre claim that Blake’s work was not fiction at all but a series of cryptic incantations, whose dissemination could lead to disturbing consequences. He advised that using Blake’s tale would result in the triumph of dark forces. Everyone at the studio had dismissed this as malicious nonsense, and it had been regarded as an unhappy coincidence that the screenwriter was found to have hanged himself only a few days after the adaptation had been delivered.

Poor Verna had been upset by the rumours surrounding the film, and had even formed the idea that there was some sort of conspiracy against her. She had always suffered from a certain amount of egocentric paranoia, even in the early days of their romance, when she had told Ben that her use of a stage name was designed to throw an old enemy off her track. But, despite her idiosyncrasies, Ben had fallen for her completely. They had been inseparable and had announced their engagement within weeks of meeting. He remembered that Jack had found their relationship amusing at first, especially as Ben was so young, only twenty, but his smile had faded once Ben broke the news of their forthcoming marriage. Verna and Jack had never really got on and Ben well knew that Jack had deep misgivings about her.

He still could not quite bring himself to play the tape. He sat staring at his television screen, wondering what it would feel like to see Verna once more. He had no photographs of her; he had destroyed them all one drunken night. He wondered if the bootleg tape would be the same as the distorted original film. Perhaps it had been restored, for with modern computer techniques he supposed anything was possible.

What would Verna think if she knew that she had achieved some sort of posthumous fame, albeit amongst a small number of film buffs? Did she know? It was possible that she was still alive.

As he sat in his chair in front of the blank television screen Ben thought of how Verna had failed to achieve her ambitions. In the 1940s, during the war and shortly afterwards, she had taken various supporting roles in provincial repertory theatres. Had it not been for her striking appearance he had secretly wondered if she would have been able to get any work at all. He could admit it now, after all this time—frankly she was an awful actress. The idea that she would have to work hard, that things would not simply fall into place for her, was outside her comprehension. And she sincerely believed that she had a god-given talent.

Still, there was no denying that she had been a remarkable-looking woman. Her figure was voluptuous and was emphasised whenever she wore the low-cut, full-length black dress she favoured. She sported ornate rings on six of her extraordinarily long fingers and there was invariably a pearl choker around her pale neck. He recalled with wonder her skin, unblemished, almost like porcelain, but then laughed when he remembered the velvet turban she often affected and which hid her curling black hair.

He wouldn’t have laughed at her back then. There was a cruel sensuality in her face; the look of a woman who found life’s usual pleasures barren. Her eyelids were fringed with thick, black lashes, which may or may not have been natural. Beneath them, like half-moons, were the most unimaginable crystal-blue eyes. They held one’s gaze hypnotically. Ben remembered how cold Verna’s fleshy lips had been when he kissed them, and how she had moved like a panther.

He pressed the play button and the screen went momentarily black. Then it flickered with white lines, the music began and the title came up:

Black as Darkness