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Midnight Quatermass 33: A pitch, some planes and a hole in the ground

Yep, I skipped a week. November 5th, man. What a shit-show.

Watching the results come in made it difficult to think of much else so eventually I just wrote the day off and then the next. And the next. And then I said fuck this.

I’m always happier starting something new so I threw an idea on to the page and kicked it around to see if it had legs. By the weekend I had a decent, if overlong, pitch idea and most of the spec script already playing in my head. I got as much of that down as I could and then went back to trim back the initial pitch document and then bounced that off a couple of people whose opinion I trust to see if the thing was worth a punt. Turns out it was.

So now it’s sat in LA. Haven’t pitched a feature in the longest time and this one is a little tricky as its wrapped up in IP I don’t have the rights to, but its with the right people so now I can forget it and move on to the next thing.

I think ultimately that’s how you destroy monsters like Trump. They can’t create anything. This particular shower of fuckwits aren’t even competent at destroying things, but they revel in neglect and hurt so it’s bad enough. All we can do is create stuff around and against them.

It’s not much, but it’s enough to keep going.

I was contemplating a new desktop machine after years of working solely on the iPad Pro. I’m on my second and while it’s given me a few headaches over the years until very recently I’d always found workarounds for the couple of things that iOS insists on making tricky that would be relatively easy on a full laptop or desktop. And then I started a new project last month that wouldn’t quit begging me to stop being stubborn and just get a goddamn iMac already.

I mean have you seen how pretty those things are?

My finger was hovering over the BUY button when the new Mac Mini dropped. I’ve had them in the past and used two to do nothing but host my media library via Plex for a while. Nice little machines, but not a patch on the real Macs I’ve had over the years, so I was surprised to see just how well the new ones compared to the iMac I was considering and just how cheap the little bastard was in comparison.

Had to give one of the little squirts a home. So now I’m a few days into using the new Mini and I’m having to unlearn a few things after using only iOS for so long. Plus I keep having to remind myself how to do the simplest of tasks, but so far so sweet.

And so so small…

I also distracted myself with a double bill of Korean flights-in-peril movies. I love a good plane picture and only knew a little of the real story behind HIJACK 1971 (2024). It’s a decent enough period piece, but quickly forgotten in the wake of EMERGENCY DECLARATION (2021). Featuring heavy hitters Song Kang-ho and Lee Byung-hun I’ve seen it compared to TRAIN TO BUSAN (2016) and while its not that, it is great at amping up the tension as a plague carrying aircraft tries to find a safe haven without crashing or being shot out of the sky while a dogged cop on the ground runs down a possible cure. Fun stuff and the kind of thing Americans remake badly.

You’d think giving myself a whole extra week would mean I wouldn’t be rushing this out again around midnight, but here we are.

I’ll pick up one of the To Be Continueds next week and maybe by then I’ll have got used to this new keyboard. Until then.. story-time.

Drake’s Well

“So where’d you get the money for a place like this, anyway?”

Drake put the hammer down and looked at the idiot that Samuels had recommended.

They’d been out here since 8am when the guy had turned up late. It was just after noon now and while Drake was sweating through a thin t-shirt, this guy, still wearing a flannel shirt, had actually complained about the chill in the early September air.

He looked back over the idiot’s shoulder and calculated how much new fence had gone up today and then compared it to where he’d got by himself the previous day when he’d been working alone. He was a good six feet shy of where he’d broke for lunch yesterday.

Having the idiot help had actually slowed the pace.

“When did Samuels say he was back?” Drake asked, ignoring the question.

“Friday. Late afternoon, Friday. He’s got some split-tail down near the border I do believe.”

Drake looked at the hammer and thought about using it on Samuels sometime late afternoon on Friday.

They broke for lunch.

~

“What kind of a name is Cockaigne for a place anyway? Drugs, right? That how you got the cash? Samuels said you paid cash. This close to the border… take my advice and change the name. You don’t want to advertise what you do to the Feds.”

He pronounced Cockaigne as cocaine as most people did. Drake didn’t mind. The name amused him and that was enough. What didn’t amuse him was Samuels’ loose jaw. He thought about the hammer again as he put his sandwich together.

“It’s a medieval fairy tale. A place of leisure far away from the grim realities of life. A place to relax. A place to retire. It has nothing to do with cocaine or drugs. And neither do I.”

The idiot spoke as he chewed. Probably one of the few times he could multitask.

“Retired? From what? You don’t look much older than I am and I have about $7 to my name. If I didn’t I wouldn’t be taking day work for what you’re paying.”

This fucking guy.

“It’s a fair wage. Plus a place to sleep until the work is finished. And your meals. It’s a good deal.”

He raised his hands in mock surrender.

“I ain’t complaining, bud.”

Drake almost laughed out loud. Complain was all the idiot had done since he got here. Mostly about Mexicans.

“So where did you get the money for a place like this?”

~

Drake robbed banks. Past tense.

He knew a lot of guys in the same line who had tried to go straight or at least retire with a decent stake, but he didn’t know a single person who had pulled it off. Dead, doing time or back to work - either because the money had dried up or was lost in a bad investment. Or they simply just missed the life.

He knew if he carried on that would be his path too. So when the last job had unexpectedly left him as the last man standing and with a quarter of a million dollars on the blood soaked seats of a souped-up Volkswagen he’d thought fuck it and retired on the spot.

He spent a year circling places along the border just in case the past caught up with him before eventually settling on a small town called Parkville. Here he met a realtor called Samuels who found him a plot of land with no neighbours and a dilapidated farmhouse called the Jaw Bone.

He then spent a year working on the structure itself to make it habitable doing all the work himself. He was in no rush. Once the house was done he started on the outbuildings and the patch of land, but not before he hung the sign.

Locals told him the place was called Jawbone because that was all that was found of the original stakeholder after a raid by Comanches back in 1823. Drake wanted something a little less grim when he took possession of the place almost nine months ago at the beginning of ’72 and Cockaigne appealed to the whimsical part of him that had been tucked away for the years he’d been a professional heister.

He’d first read the name his third year in prison. He’d started his stretch an almost illiterate 22-year-old, but walked out the gates, some seven years later and change, after reading every book in the modest prison library and even expanding its inventory after spending the last three years as its librarian.

There had been five men with him on the bus the morning of his arrival. Three had died in prison and one was killed three days after his release. Only he and a man named Reynolds had thrived inside, albeit for very different reasons. He figured he’d be dead himself if it wasn’t for the original librarian, an old bird called Harris, who had taken the gangly idiot that he was back then under his wing and force fed him book after book until one stuck.

It was The Three Musketeers that grabbed him and refused to let go and he hadn’t looked back since. Day one in this new place was spent building bookshelves and the first book to go up on the wall was the same dog-eared copy that he’d kept in his cell, still stamped on the first page with faded red ink that read Huntsville Correctional Unit, Texas.

“This is your first step on a better path, one free of crime,” the Warden had said as they walked to the gates. He’d thanked the man, the stolen book tucked inside his waistband. Three days later he was reading it a hundred miles away, lying low after his first professional bank robbery.

~

That afternoon he worked on the fence himself and set the idiot loose on the overgrown ridge that circled the property. It meant that the fence went back up on schedule and that he was out of earshot of the guy’s bullshit. After lunch he’d turned from Mexicans to ‘Injuns’ as the real reason the country was going to hell in a hand basket. He was still muttering to himself as he dragged the gardening gear away.

Drake wasn’t sure who was the biggest fucking idiot. The racist fuck currently blunting his shears on the ridge, Samuels for vouching for the moron or himself for allowing the realtor to talk him into taking the guy on.

The truth was that he didn’t need help and was in no rush at all, but he had looked forward to the company. Right up until the guy had opened his mouth and the third word that fell out was ‘wetbacks’.

The way he’d worked the jobs before his retirement meant he always worked with a different crew. Men like himself, but with slightly different skill sets. He didn’t come up with the jobs himself, but he knew guns. How to handle them, hot to shoot them and most importantly how to procure them and dispose of them afterwards. He also had an eye for detail so when he was brought on board and the plan was laid out he could usually find a way to simplify or tweak it to make it more efficient. Maybe make the job a little faster or better still see a way they could reduce the manpower. Less hands on board meant a bigger split so after a while his reputation was solid enough as a gunsmith and blueprinter that he stopped looking for work and let the crews find him.

Which had all gone smoothly until Ince.

It was an ugly name for an ugly town. Hardly a town really. The mine was the draw and the shacks that had sprung up to support it eventually spawned a few businesses that lived off the miners. Families eventually arrived and then a school and a church and finally the bank. By the late sixties it was a small name that hardly registered on local maps, but had spawned a private police force of a single prowl car and two part-time officers.

No one on the crew liked working towns this small.

Everyone in Ince knew everyone else and four strangers were going to get noticed. In the end it fell to Rawlins, the man who had come up with the plan to relieve the small bank of its monthly pile, to take a room at the small boarding house and be the only one of them out on a limb. Rawlins didn’t mind being recognised. He had hit a big score just a month earlier, but had killed a night watchman in the process and left his prints behind. The money from that score was going to take him to Canada, but the cash from the Ince job would pay for a stop off in Niagara where a plastic surgeon was waiting to carve him a new face.

His old face would get one last play as a travelling salesman, the perfect cover for casing the town. The only problem would be if someone was dumb enough to actually try and buy something from him, but he was confident that nearly the entire population of Ince was illiterate and wouldn’t know a Classic Set of Encyclopaedia Americana if you beat them around the head with it.

The driver was a younger guy named Nico. He’d come up building race cars back east and stumbled into a profession that allowed him to drive fast and paid better than the local circuits. He’d built up the two cars they were going to use himself. One, a green Ford Gran Torino stood out like a sore thumb which was the point of the initial getaway car. Once the State Police were obsessed with finding the fast flashy vehicle seen peeling away from the bank they wouldn’t notice the beat-up VW that was the secondary getaway car.

At least it looked like a Volkswagen, but under the hood was an engine that could outrun anything the State Police sent after them. A little extra precaution that everyone agreed was a good move. The third man, a walking ape named Malone, was the muscle. If anyone got out of line he would be doing the putting down.

Drake provided the guns, but no one wanted to actually use them on a simple job like this one. He’d gone for two Smith & Wesson snub-nosed .32s and a pair of old but reliable British STEN-guns that made far too much noise to actually use, but were the best visual deterrent you could pull out from under a jacket.

No one wanted to have a machine gun in their face.

But Malone was more important than the guns on this one. Breaking fingers and noses was way quieter in the small confine of a small town bank and way more effective. He also provided the masks.

The fucking masks.

~

When night fell Drake dished out the stew he’d prepared earlier that evening and left it on the porch with a pile of bread for the idiot as if he was feeding a dog. He wasn’t going to waste his evening on small talk about how ‘abolishing slavery was the biggest mistake the country had ever made’ or ‘how far ahead we’d be if only we’d nuked the Chinese as well as the Japs’.

The smallest of the two rear buildings were almost finished. The roof still needed some work, but it’d be a month or so before the temperature dropped enough to make it uncomfortable. Besides which he got the impression that the idiot had been sleeping rough before taking on the job here so four walls and an almost-roof was a decent enough upgrade.

His obligation for the evening fulfilled he retired to the large lounge he had created around the old fireplace and picked up his place in Tristram Shandy with a smile. He’d only been reading for twenty minutes or so when the idiot’s voice pulled him right out of the 18th century.

“Jesus, it’s like a fucking library in here. Don’t you got a TV?”

He mentally added the task of fixing a lock to the back door to the list of things still to do and turned to find the idiot struggling to read the spines of his collection.

“Hey! I’ve seen this one. Boris Karloff, right?”

He was holding an old edition of Marry Shelley’s Frankenstein that he’d had shipped over from London and was pointing at the cover with a shit-eating grin. Drake thought of two things.

The hammer he’d left out on the porch and the fucking masks.

~

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding”, said Rawlins as Malone handed each of them a green rubber mask.

“What? You said get masks. I got masks.”

Nico was already wearing his and his voice, slightly muffled, sounded jovial enough.

“I like them.”

Drake looked at his own bright green Boris Karloff mask as Rawlins continued to bitch.

“Frankenstein?”

Drake thought about correcting him, but didn’t want to be that guy. He figured the mask would do once he widened the eye holes a little so he could see who the fuck he was pointing the STEN at.

Rawlins complained about the masks for the rest of the evening, but the job was happening the next day so he was stuck with Malone’s choice. No one was crazy about wearing a mask at all, but even the small bank of Ince had splashed out on rudimentary security features. One was a silent alarm that rang only in the tiny police station - three small box rooms and a smaller cell - a block away and a still camera that triggered itself every now and again from high up on the rear wall giving a clear crisp B& W image of the small bank interior, its staff and customers.

Rawlins didn’t want to wear his, but while it wasn’t a deal breaker if he was identified a few hours after the robbery by one of the locals who had seen him carrying his case in and out of Mrs. Capshaw’s boarding house, it would be a pain in the ass to have his description go out over the wire while they were still heading for the state line.

Once over it the cops there wouldn’t be rushing to get involved in a small robbery off their turf, but the locals would be very keen on catching them before they got that far.

It was Drake that twisted his arm.

“Just wear the fucking thing.”

The fact that he’d just finished cleaning one of the STENS and was holding it as he barked had helped to get the message across.

“Fine,” Rawlins had said. “I’ll wear a fucking mask.”

And he did.

The next morning Drake and Malone had slipped theirs on as they opened the door to the police station and braced Officer Laurel. They had no idea what their real names were, but this one was rake thin and his partner wasn’t so the names had stuck. They’d timed it just a few minutes before shift change. Officer Hardy clocked on as Laurel walked out, but today he walked in to find the other half of the Ince Police Force hogtied and gagged on the floor in front of his desk and then felt the blunt end of Malone’s STEN in his ribs.

Drake and Malone pulled the masks off as they left, locking the law inside their own station with their own keys.

Five minutes later they walked up to the bank just as the green Gran Torino stopped outside. Rawlins followed them inside with two large suitcases and his own mask in hand.

It was only after Malone and Drake had the three staff and three customers on the floor that they had turned to see Rawlins didn’t look anything like Karloff’s creature.

He was instead wearing a Bill Shatner mask.

Malone didn’t care enough to react, but Drake shook his head as the Captain of the USS Enterprise started loading the cases with stacks of cash, ignoring the coins and any papers that had been been in the now empty safe. Malone started emptying the cash draws as Drake looked at his watch.

“Three minutes,” he announced.

“Anything else?” Rawlins asked moving his .32 across the cowed staff.

The question had been directed towards Drake, but it was the terrified looking brunette who answered.

“They want the surplus!”

An older man wearing tweed visibly moaned out loud and Drake grinned under the mask.

“Sure, he said. “Where’s the surplus?”

Small town bank like this wasn’t supposed to carry more than a single month’s cash at any given time, but it turned out the manager had been looking to lower overheads and instead of paying a private security company to swing by once a month he’d made a little arrangement that they came only every two and sometimes three. This meant that from time to time the place had too much ready cash to fit in the small safe, but the manager had procured a very hardy filing cabinet to keep the surplus in.

Drake hoped he’d kept a receipt for the thing as he popped the lock and was amused to find the extra money was already packed up and ready to go like it had been waiting for him to come along. There was one bag marked INCE TRUSTEE BANK in each of the four drawers.

Rawlins turned his back on the staff and customers and let out a little whoop of joy watching Drake as their take instantly doubled.

Two minutes later the alarm was ringing above the heads of Officers Laurel and Hardy who could do not a thing about it and Drake and the crew were already burning rubber out of town.

The plan was to make sure they were seen heading east towards the interstate before back tracking to drop Rawlins at the gas station where they had parked the VW. Two days earlier Malone had worked on his tan digging a hole big enough to bury the Gran Tarino. By the time Rawlins and the VW arrived the getaway car would be gone and they could trundle on past all the red and blue flashing black and whites the state had to offer as they took the scenic route west.

Which would have been great if Billy Capshaw and Captain James T fucking Kirk had not conspired to fuck them in the ass.

~

The next morning the idiot was worse than ever. No matter what task well away from Drake he was given he found an excuse to circle back. He bitched about women getting the vote and how not killing retards at birth was holding this once great nation back and by 11am Drake had had enough and had decided to give him a full days pay in exchange for him going as far away from Cockaigne as possible.

But then the idiot mentioned a ‘crazy little bitch’ who had ‘thought she was better than him and well he showed her didn’t he…’ and for the first time in two days Drake listened closely to what the idiot had to say.

When he finished Drake got them both a beer, the first since he’d hired the guy, and announced a change of plan.

“We’re gonna dig a well.”

“Whatever you say, boss,” said the idiot with his usual shit-eating grin.

~

Two cops had Rawlins’ description come in over the radio just as they sat down with their gas station coffee. They were still sipping it when Rawlins walked past them with a six-pack of beer headed to the beat up VCW parked at the rear.

The cop behind the wheel unclasped his holster at the same time his older partner started shaking his head and said, “Wait.”

They had one of the bastards, but the flash had said he was one of four. The older cop got on the radio and gave the details of the VW as it pulled away and headed west.

Rawlins was feeling pretty good all things considered. They hadn’t stopped to count the haul, but with the surplus he figured they’d made double what they planned at the very least. The only thing that still annoyed him was Malone and those stupid fucking masks. Of all the fucking ones to choose he had to go for that one. Figures.

Rawlins had seen the Karloff movie when he way too young. The black and white creature reappeared in Glorious Technicolor every night for the following month as he woke in bed screaming and crying at the memory of the lumbering dead thing. Even now as a full grown man who prided himself on being scared of very little he got a shiver anytime he thought of that fucking stupid movie.

And then Malone had brought not one but four of the fucking things for them to wear

It was too late to convince the others to ditch theirs and too late to find replacements, but on the walk back to the boarding house he’d already ditched his own in the first trash can he’d seen. He had every intention of wearing a bandanna and to hell with it until he left his room for the evening meal to find the landlady’s son, Billy, had left his shit all over the staircase again. His mom, Mrs. Capshaw, screamed at him every evening to move the toys that were one day going to kill one of her guests if they weren’t careful.

But it wasn’t a metal toy car or rogue roller skate that killed Rawlins. Instead it was the discarded Star Trek mask that he grabbed on his way down to supper.

The mask had cost Billy a month’s pocket money and he knew the one thing his mother was right about was his inability to remember to pick up after himself. He’d lost a lot of toys that way and had no intention of losing the mask. So even before he put it on for the first time he took one of his mother’s work pens and in big bold black letters wrote his name on the label that tucked out of the rear of Bill Shatner’s shiny nylon hair.

And it was his name, BILLY CAPSHAW, that was clear as day to the staff and customers, as they watched Kirk whoop it up and leave the bank. Once Officers Laurel & Hardy were freed one of them hightailed it to the Capshaw boarding house for a detailed description of their latest boarder which was out over the wire a few moments later.

By the time Nico was reversing the gran Torino into a hole never to see the light of day again, the description of Rawlins was already overtaking them.

~

Mary Jane Talbot was all anyone in Parkville was talking about that first week that Drake had started working on the house. She was fifteen and had gone missing a month earlier. No one ever saw her again and no body was ever found. Some thought she had simply run off, but those who knew the family said it would be completely out of character and the general consensus was that she’d run into someone who had meant her harm.

Now Drake knew for a fact that that someone was the same idiot that Samuels had recommended and right now was actually working for the first time since they’d met.

They’d spent the entire day taking turns digging the well. When the other man had declared the hole was deep enough and they still hadn’t struck water Drake told him to keep on digging a little while longer.

“This isn’t that kind of well.”

Now that they were both worn out and sat next to the hole that had gone down around sixteen feet the idiot asked again just what kind of well it was.

“Well,” explained Drake, “the idea of Cockaigne is that it’s a fabliau so I don’t think a wishing-well would be too out of place here.”

The idiot found the part of this he understood incredibly funny and guffawed so much he had to lay on his back.

“You had me digging that deep for a wishing well? Mister, you have more damn money than sense.”

He wheezed on for a moment before sitting upright again.

“Don’t tell me you believe in nonsense like that.”

Drake got back to his feet.

“Not only do I believe in it, Charlie Fish, I can prove it to you.”

Charlie Fish, the idiot and child-murderer, looked up at him.

“And how the hell do you intend to do that?”

“With the two hundred or so thousand dollars I have back in the house.”

~

The final tally was just over a quarter of a million. That meant over 62 thousand each. Far more than they’d envisaged so spirits were high as the VW came down the dirt road towards them. Their smiles dropped as Rawlins got out of the car with a wave and three State Police cruisers suddenly burst over the hill behind him.

Nico instinctively made for the drivers side of the VW carrying two suitcases of cash. Rawlins himself was stood looking back at the police cars with growing dismay that hadn’t yet evolved to action. Drake was already over the hood of the VW and aiming for the passenger side when Malone opened up with his STEN. Once in the seat he tossed his single case of cash in back and leaned out the window with his own gun shouting at Rawlins and Malone to get the fuck in as the kid put the car in gear.

The lead police car swerved sideways with a shattered windscreen and the ones behind it slowed a little at the sight of Malone stood in front of them like he was on Omaha beach. The second car, however, responded in kind and suddenly the air was full of lead. Malone got off another clip before a single bullet hit him just above the right eye and that was that.

Rawlins hadn’t even got his own gun clear of his holster before he was hit three times in the chest.

The VW was tearing away from the two dead men as its rear was raked with gunfire, shattering the back window. The third cop car had brought a machine-gun of their own, but the rounds missed the tyres and once Nico found solid ground the hidden engine did its thing and started outpacing the pursuit.

Sticking to the backroads, but with no clear idea of where they were heading the kid still managed to get them over the state line before he keeled over with a groan. Drake grabbed the wheel and pushing down with his own foot past the kid’s he managed to get the car off the road and in the shade of a batch of sycamores. That’s where the cops found Nico the next day.

But they never did find Drake. Or the money.

~

Only a small fraction of the score had gone on the property. A chunk before that on new papers and a decent ID and a package of cash to Nico’s folks. He was the only one that Drake had worked with previously and he’d spoken of the small farm they were struggling to maintain. He hoped the money would help with that.

Living expenses out here were minimal, but he did treat himself to a couple of first editions to help fill the new shelves, but that still left him with more money than he needed, secured in two hold-alls secreted in a compartment he’d built himself that sat snugly at the rear of the old fireplace not far from where Johnathan Rivers’ jawbone had been found 149 years earlier.

“The hell you say,” said the child-murderer.

Drake thought of the work involved in killing him with the hammer or one of the guns he had secured around the place and then the mess to clean up and the grave to be dug and he was tired just thinking of it.

“I’ll prove to you that what we just finished is an honest-to-god wishing well and if you’re not satisfied then you walk a way with all the cash you can carry.

The shit eating grin was back.

“This I gotta hear. Go ahead, but I warn you that I’m a hard man to convince.”

Sensing a trick, but having no idea where it was coming from he watched Drake start kicking around loose stones from the soil they’d piled near the well. He wasn’t sure if this feller actually had any money in the house, but he’d allow him his little parlour trick and then tonight he’d put a knife in his ribs and check the house over himself. He’d be the third person he’d killed since Mary Jane Talbot and by now he thought nothing of the deed at all.

Drake found the exact kind of pebble he was looking for and dropped it in the well. He then closed his eyes, crossed his fingers and moved his lips, saying something silently to himself.

He then opened his eyes and peered down into the well.

“Well good god goddamn!” he said in wonder with a smile on his face.

The idiot rushed forward to look.

“What is it? What did you wish for?”

He stopped and peered down into the deep dark hole.

“I wished to make the earth a marginally better place than it was just a few seconds ago,” said Drake.

And with that he kicked the moron so hard that he was actually lifted off the ground before tipping over the edge of the well and falling the full sixteen feet to the bottom where he broke both legs, his pelvis and one wrist.

The fall knocked the idiot unconscious so it was dark, even darker sixteen feet down, when he woke in pain and started screaming.

Drake would have been the only person to hear him, but he was lost in the streets of Paris with d'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis by then and all he could hear was the distant clash of swords.

One last pic for those asking about Cooper. His training has started - squeezy cheese FTW - but this is what happens when you introduce something to protect the sofa from his claws.

He’s pretty smart for such a doofus.

Hang in there. See you next week.

Mike