And if a double decker bus…

Midnight Quatermass 17: Old friends, The Night Bride and something to snack on.

I’ve been friends with Steve Kilpatrick for nearly 40 years. He was a year above me in school, the cool kid in the leather jacket, and a friend of a friend. We knew each other to nod to and I was friends with his sister (Hi, Laura!) and that was that until I bought my first Iron Maiden album and the world changed around me.

Our school was… not good. Slightly infamous locally as the only school that buses wouldn’t go to after the majority of the kids joined forces to try and tip a double decker on its side causing the poor driver to eject. People tell me this impossible, but regardless, I remember clearly watching as around fifty kids would push the bus as far as it would go one side so that the fifty-odd kids on the other side could use the momentum to push it back, tipping it a little further each time. At this point you may think that these kids were missing an important element regarding where the bus would land if they achieved their goal. Let me just point to the twenty or so kids INSIDE the bus on its upper deck rushing from side to side to help.

I haven’t checked, but I’m pretty sure that place didn’t produce any rocket scientists.

When I recount stories from there they are less Grange Hill and more Pinochet regime. It was an interesting place to claw an education from, but never the less it introduced me to Jane Austen and Homer and changed the course of my life.

The other thing that saved me was music. There were various factions in my school as any other other, but let me simplify it for you. There were the metal kids and then everyone else. Being ostracised because you didn’t like The Smiths was never going to be a bad thing though and having long hair worked like idiot repellant at least some of the time. Bob Seger knew the score back in ‘71

Yeah, most times you can't hear 'em talk / Other times you can / All the same old clichés / Is it woman, is it man?

I’m not saying our music was better, but here is the wisdom Morrissey was offering on the other side of the playground:

Some girls are bigger than others /Some girls' mothers are bigger than other girls' mothers

Actually, no I am saying that. If you like The Smiths you’re a fucking idiot.

Getting into metal and punk rock affected my world view just as much as literature and film did. Plus finding my gang at an early age helped remind me that there was more to life than throwing rocks at cars which was the favourite pastime of my peers.

I hadn’t known Steve long before we were in a band together. By sixth form I’d swapped the bass I could never play properly to become the vocalist for IRON HELL. You’ll probably remember our anthem WE’RE GOING TO EAT YOU! Buy me a drink and I’ll even sing it for you. But then girls got in the way of my musical career so no Grammy for me and by the time my gap year was done I knew I wasn’t staying in the north. There was a course down in Twickenham where you got to study The Castle of Otranto in the grounds of the actual Castle of Otranto so off I fucked.

I lost touch with Steve for around 18 years.

One day I got an email from him. He’d found me by searching for my name and ‘writer’ as he was confident that’s what I would be doing with my life, bless him. A short time later we we’re grabbing a coffee and the years fell away to nothing. We’ve been firm friends again ever since. Oddly he’d seen my name pop up in The Guardian a few years earlier, but figured it couldn’t be me because the coincidence was just too weird. There was a new novel out by Michael Moorcock and to promote it he wrote the first chapter of a baton-story that was then opened up to readers to complete. Steve wrote a chapter which was published and then the baton was passed on to someone else. One of those someones was me. Small fucking world.

Steve is a seriously good musician. He always was. I’d be trying to remember which string did what on the bass while Steve would listen to a guitar solo once and then play it back flawlessly. I was not surprised to learn he was now a PhD, a respected lecturer in music, a composer, a sound engineer and the lead guitarist in a metal band. He’d travelled and lived overseas and was married to a kick-ass Californian and hung out with NIN and GnR and boy did he surpass the expectations that hellhole of a school had for us.

There was another kid we knew who hung out on the periphery of our group despite not being quite as into a 15 minute guitar solo as we were. He was the funniest kid I knew and an artist. I don’t mean he was good at art I mean he was a fucking artist. You could tell this because the art teacher at the school hated him and told him he should stop. To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw:

‘Those who cunt, do; those who suck, (sometimes) teach’.

By the time we got to sixth form it was a choice between going to a lecture on Archimedes' screw or sitting in the refectory watching Dave do a routine involving a pipe and an otter. Dave won every time. I was happy to learn that Steve and Dave were still good friends and not long later the three of us were reunited. Dave has since been working with me on projects from Slingers all the way up to this panel for a book coming soon:

And wonderfully we’ve also been able to collaborate with Steve as often as we can. One of my favourite early projects turned out to be one of my first pieces of sequential comic book work. We all learned a lot from putting it together and gosh did that little story have legs. Steve is also a talented writer (bastard) and had written a story called The Night Bride. Looking for something to play with together I adapted it as a short comic and Dave did everything else. You can read it here. Steve then went on to adapt the fucker into an honest-to-god opera and invited me to write the libretto.

So now I’m also a librettist and fuck you St. Thomas More RC High School, you nun-infested gladiatorial pit of despair.

The Night Bride premiered in fucking Vienna in 2012 to great acclaim and I guess without working on that I never would have had the nerve to tackle a theatre piece so it lead directly to my Howl’s Moving Castle adaption in London. And it’s still alive and slaying with its next performance towards the end of August over in France. They love a bit of decapitation, the French.

So to quote the best who ever did it:

The three of us have been pushing that piano up those stairs ever since.

Obviously I’m contractually obliged to say you can follow Steve and Dave here and here as they actually do know where the fucking bodies are buried.

~

If you do pop over to my website to read The Night Bride feel free to have a look around. It’s not up to date and if this was 1996 it would have those little animated UNDER CONSTRUCTION gifs and possibly an embedded midi of ‘Danger Zone’ by Kenny Loggins. It does have a blogroll though. Let me know if I should be adding you to it. Anyway. Let’s crack on.

Story time.

An Airport Story

The detectives crossed the arrivals area, one yawning, one chugging coffee.

Heathrow was never quiet, not really, but at this time of night the flow was a little easier.

‘Check in with security?’

This was Briggs. Bad Cop to her Indifferent Cop.

‘Let’s check out the room first.’

This was probably bullshit and they both knew it. People disappeared at airports all the time. Cars were often left in long term parking for months before they got a call. People running away from something or towards someone. And the fact they often didn’t pop up going through passport control was simply because they never intended to leave from the airport they drove the car to. False trails. Professional criminals. People with more than one passport. There were more ways out of the country than in and most of them weren’t legal, but in all honesty they weren’t deemed a priority if they were heading in the right direction.   

None of which was their problem until today exactly an hour before the end of shift when the new Super dropped the file on their desk and told them to look into it.

Slater, three years from retirement, didn’t give a fuck, but read the file regardless to take her mind off Briggs’ mix tape. If he played another Morrissey song she was going  turn the wheel into oncoming traffic.

She watched the CCTV footage on her phone. The last glimpse, apparently, of five people, completely unrelated to each other, who in a single month got as far as Heathrow and then fell off the face of the planet.

Took her a moment to spot it.

Two of them were obscured in the crowds and it wasn’t clear exactly where they went only that they never reappeared. TV shows and movies lead the public to believe that CCTV was crystal clear high definition and covered every nook and cranny despite the reality of a news story asking for witnesses that then nine times out of ten throws up a pixelated face that could be Leonardo DiCaprio or the back of Simon Cowell’s knee.

The first two were at least in the same part of the airport on the north side of arrivals. The other three were on the south side and two of them, ‘Fuck me’ she thought, had entered the same room. They were coming from different directions and were picked up on two different cameras, but there it was. She rewound and rewatched the footage of the partial sign that one was heading for. Just a purple blur. But in the last video it was clear enough for her to make out the lettering.

Multi-Faith Prayer Room

~

‘Fuck,’ said Briggs as the door refused to open.

They both stared at it for a moment and then she spotted the laminated card dotted with filthy blu-tack leaning face down on the floor. She picked it up and gave it to Briggs.

Temporarily closed. Sorry for any inconvenience.

‘There was a leak,’ said a gruff man’s voice behind them.

They turned to meet a guy around the same age as Slater chewing on a sausage bap. He had a Heathrow lanyard around his neck.

‘Something soaked all the carpets. We had complaints. Take’s them forever to fix non essential services here. You can try the temp one though.’

‘Temp one?’

‘Yeah. Used to be a storage room, but they cleared it out and threw in a couple of bibles and a prayer mat. It’s over on the north side of Arrivals.’

Bingo.

~

She double checked the videos as they walked over. Of course they’d been sent through in the wrong order. Three people missing on the south side and then two more on the north side after the prayer room had relocated. What were the odds?

‘Does it say anything about their religions?’

Briggs skimmed through the notes shaking his head.

‘Nope. But I can hazard a guess from the names.’

‘Please don’t. Text Becky and ask her to run it down.’

And then they were there. The purple sign was a little askew, but securely fastened at least.

Welcome to Terminal Five Multi Faith Prayer Room

The central logo was a kneeling figure surrounded by various symbols of world religions.

They went inside.

~

Mr Sausage Bap was right about it being a storage room. It was in dire need of a lick of paint and the carpet here was threadbare, but dry. One half was completely plain with a selection of prayer mats, rolled and unrolled scattered about. The other half had an old office desk which seemed to serve as a makeshift altar of sorts. There was a Billy-bookshelf that looked ready to collapse under the weight of the few dogeared books it held. And that was it.

Apart for the short old man smiling at them from the back of the room.

‘Excuse us,’ said Slater. ‘We can come back later.’

The old man raised his hand and the smile deepened. He seemed to be mostly parchment and veins but the eyes sunk back into his skull were crystal clear and blue.

‘No need. We were finished here and just taking a pause in the relative peace and quiet before we make a move back into humanity.’

We? And then she realised the tall white shape behind the old man was another person. She wasn’t sure what she thought it was at first. A years-old sheet left over from the last time the room had been painted or some neglected something that had been stored in here and forgotten…

Which was ridiculous because now she could see it was obviously a woman. Tall and stunning from the briefest glimpse before she turned back to the wall.

‘We’ll get out of your way,’ said the old man.

She couldn’t quite place the accent. Scandinavian perhaps. Tinged with something else. East European maybe.

‘No need. I think we’ve seen all we need to see. Let’s go, Briggs.’

‘One sec,’ said Briggs and handed her one of the print outs of the fuzzy CCTV footage.

His finger was placed next to the not very high definition image of two people. One short and crooked, dressed in black, and one tall and delicate, dressed head to toe in white.

Good catch. Not like Briggs at all. Must have been the caffeine.

‘Actually, do you mind if I ask if you use the airport frequently?’ she said showing the old man her warrant card.

He held the card for a second as he peered at it and she noticed how cold his hands were as she took it back.

‘Oh my. Has something happened?’ he asked.

‘Just routine,’ she said with a smile. ‘So you’ve used the prayer facilities before?’

The image of them was almost a month old.

‘Oh yes,’ his eyes sparkled. ‘It’s so convenient.’

Briggs’ phone buzzed.

‘Becky,’ he said, and stepped outside leaving her alone with the old man and the woman.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen any of these people before?’ she asked as she passed him a sheet with their passport photos printed on.

He studied them for a moment shaking his head before passing them to his companion. Slater noticed how long and delicate her nails were as she took the sheet and for a moment she swore she saw a blood red tongue lick her lips as she looked at the photocopied faces.

And then another shake of the head as she turned away again, letting the paper drop to the floor. The old man bent slowly to retrieve it, but Slater beat him to it.

‘My apologies. She is not yet accustomed to… being here. She did not mean to appear rude.’

‘That’s quite alright,’ said the detective as she tucked the paper away and turned to leave.

The thing that resembled a woman moved and turned so quickly it seemed impossible that she made no noise. But centuries of hunting in stealth, in complete silence, meant her prey never knew what was happening to them.

Slater’s hand was on the door handle.

‘Do you mind me asking if you yourself are religious, detective?’

The lower part of the tall thing’s face was opening. A thin red line that ran down from the jaw and started to separate the neck. Again it made no sound even as the tissue started to part and glisten to reveal the teeth hidden there.

‘I was raised Roman Catholic,’ said the detective.

The old man’s eyes gleamed as his companion reared up even taller behind the police officer. The thing’s arms and white cloak were now revealed to be one and the same. The material was veined and stretched outwards like a shroud as the split sprang open impossibly wide to reveal the horrific maw as it prepared to feed.

‘But that’s exactly why I’m now an atheist.’

And with that Detective Laura Slater saved her own life.

The thing stepped back in disgust. The maw closing even quicker than it had opened, It’s wings, if that’s what they were, folded back in the same moment it turned away and retook it’s position facing the wall.

‘Oh what a shame,’ said the old man.

She turned to look at them. Fucking odd. She’d mention them to security just in case. Pair of characters like that wouldn’t have gone unnoticed.

‘I’ll survive. Thanks again!’ she said with a smile and left the room.

~

Briggs was putting his phone away as she closed the door behind her.

‘Any luck?’

‘Catholic, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and a fucking Buddhist! Whole bloody smorgasbord.’

‘Fine. Well, fuck it. Let’s pick it up tomorrow. I’m beat.’

She started walking and realised he wasn’t following.

‘Right behind you. Left my notebook in there. Won’t be a tick.’

Shrugging she walked away.

She never saw him again.

Briggs entered the room with a smile.

He wasn’t going to pass on a chance to give his number to someone that fucking stunning.

He’d use the old ‘Just in case you think of anything that may help with our enquiries… call me anytime. Day or night’ with the emphasis on night.

With a bit of luck he’d have something to confess to Father Cronin after mass this week.

FIN