“He’s a petty thief, a kind of cat burglar — he escaped from the Southshire County Gaol a few weeks ago,” began Tarrant.
“What!” cried the Headmaster. “Do you really mean there is such a man as Miss Phipps describes loose on the premises?”
The men were glaring at each other when suddenly all four of them hurled themselves from the room. Shouts and a high yell in an unfamiliar Cockney voice seemed to indicate that something exciting was taking place outside. The two women ran to the front door.
The trunk compartment of the police car stood open; half in, half out, a chubby, balding little man with the beginning of a fluffy beard, clad in a pair of tight black Victorian trousers and a frogged velvet smoking jacket, was just having handcuffs clasped on him by the sergeant, who had removed a watch from the thief s wrist to facilitate the operation.
“But what about poor Crawford?” cried Mrs. Brooke. “Has that little brute hurt him?”
“No, no, lady,” said the little man earnestly. “I ain’t ’urt ’im. Never no violence from Slippery Sim. Just knocked ’im out and left ’im in that inner cave — ’e’ll be as right as ram when the tide goes down. Shouldn’t wonder if ’e ain’t hollerin’ out there right now. I didn’t do no ’arm to your baby neither — just give ’im back ’is rattle. I didn’t wanter stay in your highfalutin’ College, I can tell you. I’ll be glad to see the back of it, and that’s the truth, lady.”
“Allow me to congratulate you, Miss Phipps,” said the Headmaster, shaking her hand warmly, “on an admirable piece of ratiocination.”
“Elementary, my dear Doctor,” said Miss Phipps, smiling brightly.
Bryce Walton
The Greatest Monster of Them All
A bloodcurdling background, as old as silent movies and as new as the latest double feature on Broadway or Hollywood Boulevard — but much more important, a memorable character study...
Hal Ballew produced a movie for the growing teenage audience for less than fifty grand and it made a profit of over a million. It was called I Was a High School Ghoul.
I had just finished the second script for Ballew, tentatively entitled I Was a Juvenile Delinquent Vampire, and was celebrating by also finishing off a fifth of bourbon when Ballew called me into his private office.
He had rented an old abandoned studio off Sunset, near Gower, and set up some offices in what had once served in a silent movie as a cathedral. The offices consisted of beaverboard partitions that, from above, resembled a maze built for the confusion of rats. Ballew was raising hell over the phone with his bookie. He resembled a Walt Disney version of a snarling, pseudohuman chipmunk. He eyed me suspiciously because he had heard rumors that I once scripted a serious movie that had nearly copped an Oscar.
“Get over to the graveyard set. Morty wants some dialogue for a new ending we put on that lousy script of yours.”
I opened the door to leave. He snarled at me. I turned. “Yes, sir,” I said.
He eyed my bourbon bottle. “You a rummy?”
“No.”
“You been lushed up ever since I hired you, Logan. Just wondered if it was a habit.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“I don’t like rummies,” he said flatly.
I left and wandered about through the ruins of an old French chateau, and a wrecked World War I airplane with Jean Harlow written on it. I stumbled around among walls eaten out by termites and ancient props that crumbled to powdery puffballs at a touch. A king-size black widow spider crawled up the side of a stagecoach. Piles of assorted, half-formed rubble lay everywhere, as if a bomb had fallen on a miniature of the world and mixed everything up.
I found the set where the graveyard sequence was being shot. It was crawling with sleazy horrors. A dim stream of charcoal gray filtered down through a broken skylight; dry ice sent writhing vapors curling away among cardboard tombstones; moldy coffins were ripped open, and there were piles of freshly-turned graveyard dirt. In the background was a gibbet with a dummy dangling by its neck.
Lunchtime had stopped production. A prize assortment of teenage ghouls and vampires lounged around cracking jokes, drinking cokes, eating hamburgers, and listening to rock and roll on portable radios. Starlets were resting languidly after having been horrified by teenage monsters; their flimsy garments hung in shreds and their young bodies were still splattered with gore.
Morty Lenton, the director, was sitting on a rotten coffin taking notes from a racing sheet. He was surrounded by bleached bones, and at his feet lay a decapitated body that was so obviously false it was embarrassing.
“Hal sent me over to do some dialogue,” I said.
Morty, about fifty-five, a little bald man with pale skin, and dressed in tight jeans and a dirty T-shirt, said, “Yeah,” without looking up. “Write it then.”
“What about,” I asked.
He seemed irritated. “Ballew wants to use some old geezer he saw wandering around the set this morning. Some extra. In the last scene we use him. If it works out, then you’re to write a plant scene for the beginning. It’ll change the story a little, but the middle can stay as is.”
I got out my notebook. “Shoot,” I said.
“It’s the climactic scene in the graveyard when all these teenagers who have been made into vampires are coming out of their coffins en masse to bleed every adult in town. Now the girl — Logan, do you remember your own script?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Lara Lee’s the girl, and she’s being chased through the graveyard by these teenage vampires. She falls near the moldy coffin by the gibbet where her boy friend has just been hanged for not becoming a vampire along with the gang. Something comes up out of the coffin. It’s an old, a very old, vampire. A real horror. And though she can hardly recognize him, it turns out to be the high school principal. Now, get this story change, Logan. He’s the big-wheel vampire, imported from Transylvania or some place. He’s the fiend who changed all the kids into vampires. We want a good scene, a close-up, with this old roué vampire worrying the girl’s throat while the other teenager vampires howl, bay, and scream and try to get at her. They turn into bats, wolves, rats, and like that.”
“Then what happens?” I said.
“Hell, you’re the writer!”
“All right,” I said. “When do you shoot it?”
“Right after lunch,” he said.
Right after lunch I gave him the scene.
He yelled. “Okay, Lara Lee. You, Count Dracula of Central High, over here you two.”
There were too many Lara Lees around for any one of them to stand out. But Dracula gave me quite a start as he shuffled forward with the caution of an old man on unfamiliar terrain. He had the gaunt, bone-ridged face of a dead-white mummy, slick hair coming down to a point in the middle of his forehead, upshooting brows, pointed ears, and evil lips that curled a bright red, as if they were just colored by fresh young blood.
“Go over this fast,” Morty said, handing them their scripts.
Dracula nodded, glanced over the script once, then handed it back. I watched the dignified flourish of his musty cape, fascinated as vapors writhed up around him.
“Don’t you approve of it?” Morty asked solemnly, winking at me.
“It is quite satisfactory, my dear Lenton,” Dracula said — his thick accent sounded Hungarian.
“Well, then, learn it.”
“I have already done so,” Dracula said. “I can still memorize an entire script in one reading. As you perhaps know, I have had quite a few years of experience.”
Morty shrugged and rolled his eyes at the skylight. “Okay, grandpa, okay.”