The Monster Man of Horror House (20 page)

“Oh
here we go, he only fought in the war an’ all,” Tommy scoffed.

“No,
not that one I didn’t. But I did encounter a couple of platoons of foot
soldiers that first night when I was the beast. On both sides as it happened.
So at least my contributions to the Vietnam War were balanced.”

I
looked down, to make clear my memories of this particular incident weren’t for
public consumption, and instead went on to explain how the moon had completed
its cycle the night after I’d arrived, so that I was able to pass myself off as
a human for the next 25 days, handing myself in to the first patrol I
encountered and getting a ride back to Saigon when I’d convinced them I was a
dotty young missionary out doing the Lord’s work. Or at least I had been until my
congregation had been attacked and killed.

“NVA
or VC?” a lieutenant barely older than me asked, shoving a map in front of me so
that I could point out where all this had happened.

“I
didn’t see, they hit us so quickly,” I sobbed. “But we were ambushed around
about here,” I pointed as vaguely as I could, giving him a couple of hundred
square miles in which to go looking for someone to shoot.

“It’s
okay Padre, you hang in there. We’ll get you home, not problem. This is no
place for you. We’ll get you back to Australia, you see if we don’t.”

“Huh?”

In
Saigon, I was fed and clothed and repatriated by the British Embassy. They
fast-tracked me through the process when they found out I was the son of a VC
winner and to my amazement there were no coppers waiting for me when I landed
two days later at London airport. A couple of plain clothed inspectors did drop
by to see me after a week, so I told them I’d run off to sea after a huge row
with my father and I hadn’t even known he was dead until I’d been told in
Saigon. The inspectors bought this, hinting that they had a certain idea what
the row was about (“Went out in his car a lot at night, did he?”), but they pressed
no further and after barely twenty minutes decided to close the file and say no
more about it. “No point besmirching a man when he’s dead, no matter what he’s
done. That does no one any favours,” the senior inspector reckoned as he rose
to leave. I’d already found my father’s scrap books missing when I'd returned
to the cottage a week earlier but neither inspector ventured to mention anything
about them, so I nodded to show I understood, but that was basically that.

I
was a free man.

Free
of my dad. Free of the Strangler. Free of the police and free of suspicion. In
fact, if it hadn’t been for this murderous curse I’d brought back from the east
with me I could’ve probably led a happy and normal life.

“And
you’ve been a werewolf ever since?” Barry asked.

“That
I have. I sold the cottage in King’s Lynn and moved up to the Highlands of Scotland
into the middle of nowhere so that on full moons I could roam the mountains
without fear of bumping into anyone. But I always would. Whether they be a
camper or a botanist or a farmer or a hiker, I made a lot of kills those first
couple of years before I finally managed to get a hold of this thing. That’s
why I moved to this house, and this shitty little neighbourhood, because it was
the only place I found that had a basement in the time I was looking. So I bought
it quick and lined it with steel before the next full moon could unleash my
terror upon this world, and thankfully it has held. Since then I’ve done my
best to lead a good life and keep myself to myself and I’ve been here ever
since.”

“My
chin is
soooo
itchy,” Tommy complained,
rubbing his face until his cheeks glistened, but none of the other boys paid
him any attention. I had them in the palm of my hand and they were in no rush
to jump off. A case in point; I’d forgotten to lock the basement door behind
myself, and if they’d had a mind to Barry and Ginger could’ve made a bolt for
it and I would’ve stood no chance of catching them. But they didn’t. Instead
they just came back down the steps, retook their place on the sofa and urged me
for more.

“So,
you can’t die then?” Barry asked. “That’s what they say about werewolves, isn’t
it? That they’re immortal.”

“I
ain’t immortal young man. And frankly I’m glad of it. No, I can die and one day
I will, just like any other man,” I promised him, then thought to add, “especially
at the hands of another beast as ungodly as myself.”

Barry,
Ginger and Farny all sprang to attention. Tommy groaned at the ceiling.

“Oh
for fuck’s sake, no more, please!”

But
there was more. Much more in fact. Because the worst was yet to come for poor young
and accursed John Coal.

PART 3:

THE BLACK
SPOT

i

It was the summer of 1975. I’d been home for about ten years and had worked
hard to carve out the best life I could under the circumstances. I’d bought my
bungalow, adapted the basement, taken a hold of the monster within and had even
managed to fulfil my mother’s most ardent wish for her only son and got myself a
job –

–
as a travelling sales rep.

It
wasn’t the best job in the world, or even the most lucrative, but it got me
away from the nine-to-five and I enjoyed seeing different parts of the country.
I’m not the most sociable person as a rule, but I can talk a good game or hold
a smile for up to five minutes at a time when I’m showing a client where to
sign, so I didn’t do too badly. To be honest, it would’ve been hard to have been
crap at the job because the product more or less sold itself.

Sandpaper.
That was my main account. I went from town to town, doling out free samples to
hardware stores and workshops and demonstrating the extraordinary durability of
our sheets to anyone who had an unbuffed stick at hand.

“Up
to twenty-eight per cent longer lasting than the best high street brands,” I
used to tell them across their counters. “These sheets actually save you money if
you order in bulk.”

Load
of bollocks of course, but who can accurately remember how long a sheet of
sandpaper normally lasts? But people were happy to order a batch of the stuff
for four new pence a sheet (please allow 48 days for delivery) because sandpaper’s
just sandpaper at the end of the day and who really cares where the bloody
stuff comes from [eventually] just so long as it’s cheap enough and doesn’t
tear like a sheet of soggy bog paper the first time you run it over a splinter,
so I made a respectable living from my travels and rarely ended a week with an
empty order book or belly.

But
there was one week.

I
was in Lincolnshire somewhere and I was lost. I was trying to get to Louth, but
Lincolnshire County Council must’ve run out of money after sticking up
signposts on every street corner for Lincoln itself and poor old Louth got overlooked.
“Well, who wants to go to Louth anyway when they can come to Lincoln?” Lincolnshire
County Council probably reasoned, and with some justification, except that I
had an appointment with a new timber merchants on the Louth trading estate and
I was keen to keep it.

I
had a map with me of course, but I’d managed to lose the A16 just south of
Hundleby and was now inevitably on one of the 37,000 roads in Lincolnshire that
led to Lincoln.

“Oh
for Christ’s sake!” I grumbled, stamping on the brakes when I realised I’d
missed yet another turning.

It
was getting late, almost three o’clock in the afternoon, so I didn’t want to
double back and risk missing my appointment looking for the A16 again. So instead
I made the mistake men all over the world make when they’re lost, late and
desperate – I asked a local for directions.

He
must’ve thought it was his birthday or something because I got the complete works
– the inside knowledge, the secret short cuts and the best place to stop
for pie, chips and pint along the way. Naturally, none of it involved anything that
could even vaguely be described as a main road.

“Nah,
steer clear of them A roads, boy, not if you’re going to Louth, not from here,
like. Just cut down that turning a hundred yards back until you see a big
flintstone wall, then take the next left, as if you’re going to Skeggy, but
don’t – go left instead. You can’t miss it, there’s a pub on the corner
called The White Horse or The White House or something like that, a little
further up. I don’t know, I don’t drink no more. Gave it up in ’53 and haven’t
had a drop since. And you know what, I don’t miss it in the slightest.”

“This
is all incredibly helpful,” I told him, my knuckles turning white against my Cortina’s
steering wheel.

“So
just back there then on the left. You see it? Back there. You’ll be in Louth in
forty-five minutes, you will.”

But
I wasn’t. Of course I wasn’t. An hour later and I was still driving around in
circles looking for flintstones on the advice of Barney Rubble and wondering
how I could’ve been so stupid. And as a mark of just how lost I was, even the
signs for Lincoln disappeared after a while.

I
stopped next to a field of swaying wheat and spread my road atlas out across
the roasting bonnet of my hot car. The sticky breeze immediately attempted to
fold it back up again and hungry horse flies joined in to assault my good
humour, dive bombing the back of my neck until I was swinging punches and
screaming vengeance against the AA, my lying guide and the crew of the
Enola Gay
for dropping their payload
6,000 miles off target.

I
screwed the map back up, dumped it across my roasting backseat and stepped on
the accelerator as I was still climbing into the car.

It
was now getting on for half past four and the timber merchants were only open
until five. I couldn’t miss my appointment, not after spending the whole
afternoon touring hedgerows and lanes, no matter how green and pleasant the
surroundings were, so I kept my foot to the floor and flicked my windscreen
wipers on in case any locals crossed my path.

I
was going too fast. I knew I was going too fast, but we always think we can get
away with these things at the time – but we never can. The curve in the
road came at me faster than I came at it, but I barely had a chance to do
anything about it. Before I’d even lifted my foot from the accelerator I was
crashing over a grass embankment and watching in horror as a fence post leapt
from the ground and darted straight towards me to shatter the windscreen in my
face.

I
held up my arms to cover my eyes and felt the front of the car drop into a
ditch but the crunch I was expecting never came.

Only
silence. And darkness

And
then nothing.

ii

I don’t know how long I was out for but when I climbed from the car I could
tell it was no longer afternoon, it felt more like early evening.

I’d
come to a dead halt against the far side of an overgrown ditch and the
inconvenience aside I felt thankful for the thick foliage and mud I’d managed
to find. A little to the right and I would’ve wrapped myself around a big old
oak that didn’t look as if it could take a joke.

I
brushed myself down and counted my limbs, relieved to discover I still had two
of everything, then slipped a Rothman between my lips to take the sting out of
the fresh country air.

I’d
missed my appointment. I was only too aware of that, and now I was stuck in the
wilds on a blissfully hot evening with only a suitcase of sandpaper to see me
through till morning. It was going to be a memorable night, for sure.

No
cars passed in all the time I’d been standing on the embankment and none had
come by in all the time I’d been snoozing in the ditch either. Or if they had,
they must’ve been Darwinians. I realised my only option was to start walking
and hope to blunder into a passing tractor or a pub before nightfall but no
sooner had I taken a step than I kicked an old stone marker nestling in the
long grass bearing the name ‘Long Fenton’ and an arrow which pointed across the
road to a dirt track on the other side. It hardly sounded like a metropolis,
but at least it hadn’t read ‘Lincoln 64 miles’, which was something at least.

I
nipped across the road and started along a wooded track, scarcely believing
anyone could get a bike down here let alone a car, but this was deepest,
darkest Lincolnshire I had to remember. There were tribes in the Congo who
could’ve come here and flogged mirrors to this lot if they’d had a mind to.

The
air was clammy and the breeze barely a waft. A long hot afternoon had turned
into a long hot evening and the setting sun was perfectly framed by the arcade
of overhanging branches so that its rays followed me all the way down the dusty
trail until I encountered the first of several neat cottages nestling against a
wooded hillside. A little Norman church lay just beyond them, surrounded by three
or four dozen lichen-covered graves of long dead Lincolnites and just beyond an
adjoining stone wall the place I’m sure most of the churchyard’s residents
would’ve much rather been – a pub, ‘The Black Fox’.

I
counted amongst the other buildings on this street a village store, a community
hall and a repair shop, all of which were closed, which was a pity as I
could’ve probably sold two out of three of them some sandpaper. Instead I
settled for buying myself the first of several much-needed pints and headed
into the pub.