“She doesn’t like me saying it but I keep thinking about my real dad, my old dad,” the boy said, prodding a discarded Wrigley’s chewing gum wrapper with his shoe. “I keep thinking perhaps he’ll get tired of his new woman in Margate and come back to us. One day, anyway. I know he said he didn’t love my mum any more, but he must have loved her once, mustn’t he? So he might love her again. You never know. How does love work anyway?”
Cushing could hear no voices, but saw a woman join the man and the toddler on the shingle. The wind tossed the woman’s blonde hair over her face and the man combed it back with his fingers and kissed her.
“It’s very complicated, as you’ll learn, my friend. Very complicated—but in the end so terribly simple.” He felt a tiny piece of grit in his eye and rubbed it with a finger. The taste of the tobacco had gone sour and he prodded the cigarette out on the sea wall.
“Do you have bad dreams any more? You see, I have to check the symptoms, just in case. Are you sleeping well?”
The boy nodded, staring at the ground.
“Good. Very good.” The old man took off his glove, white finger by white finger. Carl was still staring at the concrete in front of him. “Remember if anything feels bad, if you are hurting, or worried… Anything you want to say—anything, you can say to your mother.”
“She won’t understand,” the boy said without looking up, as a simple statement of fact. “She doesn’t understand monsters.”
The people on the beach were gone and the waves were coming in filling their footsteps. Sometimes it seemed full of footprints, criss-crossing this way and that, people, dogs, all on their little journeys, but if you waited long enough or came back the next day the people were always gone and the only consistent thing was the slope and evenness of the shore.
When Cushing put his single white glove back in his overcoat pocket he discovered something he’d forgotten. Something he’d put there before going to the Oxford to meet Gledhill. He took it out and looked at it in the palm of his hand.
Helen’s crucifix.
Opening the thin gold chain into a circle he put it round the boy’s neck and tucked the cross behind his scarf and inside his open-topped shirt. The boy did not move as the man did it, and did not move afterwards, imagining some necessity for respect or obedience in the matter, or recognising some similarity to the procedure of his mum straightening his tie, in addition daunted perhaps by the peculiarity of the tiny coldness of the crucifix against the warmth of his hairless chest.
“I want you to remember what I’m going to say to you. The love of the Lord is quite, quite infinite. In your darkest despair, though you may not think it, He is still looking over you. Never, ever forget that.”
The boy thought a moment.
“Is he looking over you?”
Cushing had not expected that question, and found himself answering, as something of a surprise:
“Yes. Yes, I believe he is.”
Then the boy appeared to remember something, something important, and dug into the pocket of his anorak. He produced a rolled-up magazine, unfurled it and thrust it in front of the man, who had to recoil slightly in order to focus his increasingly ancient eyes on it.
Claude Rains in his masked role as The Phantom of the Opera stared back at him. Garish lettering further promised the riches within: films featuring black cats, Ghidrah the three-headed monster, and Horror of Dracula—the US title of the first Hammer in the series. What he held in his hands was a lurid American film magazine called, in case of any doubt whatsoever in its remit, Famous Monsters of Filmland.
The boy reached over and flicked through until he found a double-page spread of black-and-white stills. He flattened it open and jabbed with his finger.
“Look. It’s you.”
Indeed it was.
Christopher Lee as the predatory Count, descending upon Melissa Stribling’s Mina. Baring his fangs in a mouth covered with blood. Van Helsing—himself— alongside it, dressed in a Homburg hat and fur-collared coat.
“I can’t read very well,” the boy said. “But I like the pictures. The pictures are great. Who’s Peter Cushing?”
Cushing looked at the younger man in the image before him.
“He’s a person I pretend to be sometimes.” He thumbed through the pages, touched immeasurably by the gift. “Is this for me?”
“What? No. I want it back. But I want you to sign it, because you’re famous.”
“Ah. Silly me.”
Cushing thought of the close ups they’d filmed of him so many years before, reacting to the disintegration of the vampire whilst nothing was there in front of him. He thought of Phil Leakey and Syd Pearson, make-up and special effects, labouring away on the last day of shooting to achieve the purifying effect of the dawning sun. He thought of the sun, and of the perpetual darkness he had lived in since Helen had died.
He lay the Famous Monsters magazine on the sea wall between them, took out his fountain pen from his inside pocket, shook it, and wrote Van Helsing in large sweeping letters across the page, blowing on the blue ink till it was dry.
“Brilliant.” The boy held it by his fingertips like a precious parchment and blew on it himself for good measure. “Now I’ll be able to show people I met you. When I’m an old man with children of my own.” He stood up and held out his hand.
Cushing shook it with a formality the boy clearly desired.
“Enjoy stories, Carl. Enjoy books and films. Enjoy your work. Enjoy life. Find someone to love. Cherish her…”
The boy nodded, but looked again at the signed picture in Famous Monsters as if he hadn’t quite believed it the first time. The evidence confirmed, he pressed it to his chest, zipped it up securely inside his anorak, pulled up the hood and unchained his bike.
“Carl?” Cushing said. “Sometimes you can hide the hurt and pain, but there’ll be a day you can talk about it with someone and be free. Perhaps a day when you’ll forget what it was you were frightened of, and then you’ll have conquered it, forever.”
The young face looked back, half-in, half-out of the anorak hood, and nodded. Then he took the antler-sized handlebars and walked his Chopper back in the direction of the road and shops, another imperative on his mind, another game, idea, story, journey, in that way of boys, and of life.
As he tapped another talismanic cigarette against the packet, thinking of his own journey and footsteps filling with water as the tide came in, Cushing heard the tick-tick-tick stop, as if the boy had stopped, and he had. And he heard the cawing of seagulls, his nasty neighbours--The Ubiquitous, he called them—and heard a voice, the boy’s voice, for the last time, behind him.
“Will you keep fighting monsters?”
His eyes fixed far off, where the sea met the sky, Peter Cushing had no difficulty saying:
“Always.”
He sat in the forest dressed in black buckled shoes, cross-legged, a wide-brimmed black hat resting in his lap and the white, starched collar of a Puritan a stark contrast to the abiding blackness of his cape. Over in the clearing the bonfire was being constructed for the burning of the witch. The stake was being erected by Cockney men with sizeable beer bellies wearing jeans and T-shirts. The focus puller ran his tape measure from the camera lens. Art directors scattered handfuls of ash from buckets to give the surroundings a monochrome, ‘blasted heath’ quality. And so they were all at work, all doing their jobs, a well-oiled machine, while he waited, contemplating the density of the trees and smelling the pine needles. It was March now, and soon shoots of new growth would show in the layer of mulch and dead leaves and the cycle of life would continue.