“Fade out...Fade out...” Geraldine whispered, rocking the young boy in her arms, wiping the icy shards from his brow, waiting for the dawn to stain the sky, the sun’s warmth to back-light the clothed skeleton hanging puppet-like in the forest canopy, a duo of crows making a breakfast of Marcus Rand’s remains before they would turn into papery black flakes to be taken by the wind.

  She couldn’t remember how she got down the stone staircase of the bell tower, or through the flames caused by her toppled candle setting the altar cloth alight, or past the vampire nuns, if they were there, or across the courtyard...it was as if the journey didn’t really exist, but somehow she carried the boy off into the snow-topped Bavarian mountains.

  Pausing for breath on the next outcrop, she caught ashes in her hand. They drifted like black snowflakes. The child began to catch them, playfully. Geraldine smiled and looked back across the valley at the burning nunnery they’d left behind. The conflagration that always purifies in the last scene. You could depend on it.

  She took the little boy’s hand in hers and walked away through the forest as the orchestral music rose with the lush prospect of hope, and felt the familiarity of that blood-red Old English lettering covering the scene, and herself, with the last, inevitable, five words...

  The End.

  A Pitchfork Production.

  Her eyes were fixed on the screen in the dark, pupils moving with rapt attention, though there was nothing to see. No film was being played.

  “She’s been sitting there for hours,” Dave said to the policemen when they arrived at the Cameo in response to his 999 call. “Not said a word.”

  The two constables entered the auditorium warily, backlit by the spill of light from the subterranean passage, while Dave remained too afraid to step inside. One of them picked up the pale blue scarf decorated with seagulls. The other bent down in front of Geraldine, lifting up the notebook at her feet, and closed it. He moved the flat of his hand in front of her eyes but she didn’t blink, staring through him as if he wasn’t there. He looked down. Her own hands lay in her lap, palms upwards, covered in dried blood. But she was smiling.

  The two men in suits stood at the bay window overlooking the well-tended grounds, proud of their domain and contented after a surprisingly satisfying lunch. One that necessitated an unbuttoning of the waistcoat in one case, and a brandy to aid digestion in the other.

  “Complete mental breakdown, yes,” said the one with long ear lobes, swilling the golden liquor around its balloon. “We keep her fed and watered, of course. The nurses chat to her. Try to get through.”

  “Any luck?” The other man’s chin ran into his chest without the necessity of a neck.

  “Shut off, totally. Retreated to a safe place, internally, one imagines, poor thing.” He pulled a face as the brandy hit his stomach. “Perhaps she’s safer there. Safer than she felt in the real world, anyway. Most we can do sometimes is keep them safe from that.”

  “That?”

  “Reality.” Almost absentmindedly, he turned to his friend, away from the sight of the woman on the bench in the garden. “What time’s your train?”

  Geraldine liked that bench. It was her favourite, people left her alone there, and she’d become a creature of habit. She didn’t know the names of all the plants that faced her but she knew them like old friends and liked to look at their changing colours, the shades that changed constantly. Pastels one day. Technicolor the next.

  “We open on a night sky, slowly pulling back to frame it through the window of a bedroom. We’re in the bedroom of a beautiful young woman, writhing in a fitful sleep.”

  “Writhing?” Geraldine said, frowning. “Not sure about writhing...”

  “She can’t sleep,” pleaded the young man in the “Jimi Hendrix” Afghan waistcoat sitting beside her. “She’s an insomniac. But we can’t tell if it’s intense terror or intense pleasure on her face. It’ll all be very tastefully done, I promise.”

  “I know your ‘tastefully done.’” Geraldine stood up.

  Marcus did the same. “Would I lie to you?”

  “Yes, of course you would.” She hooked her arm around his elbow. “You always do. It’s your job.”

  “Of course it’s my job. Anyway, listen...” They walked along the path, side by side. At a leisurely pace. “It’s going to be beautiful. The camera is vertically over the bed. Suddenly the sheets are whipped away. We see she’s pregnant—”

  “What’s she wearing?”

  “It’s not relevant what she’s wearing.”

  “It’s relevant to me.”

  “What’s relevant is she gets sliced open.”

  Geraldine grunted. “And there’s blood, I take it.”

  “Mmm...Some blood.”

  “No blood.”

  “Mmm...A little blood.”

  “How much blood is a little blood?”

  “A soupçon, I swear.”

  In the car park, the psychiatrist closed the door of the Rover after the specialist, his old school friend, had climbed inside. They had said their goodbyes, and as the engine purred, he looked back at the garden, dotted as it was with patients in bathrobes and nurses in starched white uniforms. Shielding his eyes from the brightness of the sun, he watched Geraldine Copper, his patient these eighteen months, walking along the path in the direction of the summerhouse. Her head moving animatedly, as if in conversation—but quite, quite alone.

  INTERVIEW THE FOURTH:

  THE SQUEAMISH

  AGAIN, THE HISSING sound of steel-sliding-upon-steel, the crossed blades of the Blythewood logo.

  The final image of Geraldine walking along, talking to no one, stuck with me as I scribbled my final notes and lifted a hand to Mayer. Without a word, Mayer nodded from his projection booth window, pointed to the paperback he’d set on the seat behind me to pick up on my way out, and raised his own hand to wave. It was the warmest gesture I’d seen from him.

  Closing the Moleskine and sliding my pen into my breast pocket, my fingers brushed against the enamel pin—the Blythewood crest, now just an adornment—and I momentarily considered removing it, putting it in my pocket, too, but thought better of it. Best to keep it in plain sight, if only for Blythewood himself.

  As I made my way back to the dining area, I could hear the BBC newsreaders anew. The volume was up, and I could almost make out their words, but not quite. As I entered the room, the smell of coffee was a temptation in and of itself. Blythewood was quite intently watching his laptop display—there seemed this time to be additional windows open on his screen, charting financial graphs, inset alongside the streaming BBC broadcast—then he glanced over to me. He was smiling, and it wasn’t for my benefit.

  “You’ll forgive my keeping this on this time,” he said. “I’m following the referendum vote, but you’ve still got my full attention, I assure you.”

  “Seems to be making you happy,” I noted, “what’s—?”

  “Never mind for now,” he curtly replied. “We’ll all know soon enough.”

  Turning the volume down but not off, Blythewood placed the laptop in view on an adjoining table he’d placed alongside our own.

  “Out of the way, but not out of my view,” he asserted. “I’ll only interrupt our conversation to turn it up if and when it’s essential.”

  Tapping the volume key to bring it down out of being a distraction, Blythewood turned his attention to me, as he had off-and-on throughout the day. Glancing down to the pin still on my chest, he smiled; I was suddenly very glad I’d elected to keep it on and in view.

  “Keep that in place, young fellow—and ah, it’s just after eleven,” he said. “We’ll be done before midnight. I hope Mayer was a gracious host. Now that the screening set is complete, I’ve asked him to leave a further gift of some of our paper in your own room—you know, posters, stills, press materials and such.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” I said, and I thanked him. He wagged his finger, sternly.

  “Not for publication, though,” he insisted, “nor your classrooms. Those are for your eyes only, and I’d best not see them pop up on auction sites or anything. I’d hate to have to be cross with you for any reason, any infraction.”

  “No, no,” I assured him. “I’m very thankful, I’ll keep all this to myself, I promise.”

  “So, what did you think?” he asked.

  “Well, I can see why you said this was a personal film for you,” I said. “I’m surprised you made it, though. Frankly, I can’t think of such a full-on assault on censorship at that point in time from any other—”

  Blythewood waved his hand, almost impatiently.

  “Yes, yes, quite right, and you can see now why I had to wait until Trevelyan was out of the picture completely at the BBFC,” he said, “as well as that damnable woman who’d been plaguing us. I carried a grudge about her, she was a constant pain for all of us who were making horrors. Never forgave her for mucking about with our last reel of DEVIL’S CIRCUS, and after that—” He threw up his hands. “I carry grudges, always have. As with our entire family, we’d carry them for aeons. ‘Why let a bad thing go?’ Louis would say.”

  “I see what you mean now by ‘settling scores’—”

  “Do you?” Blythewood purred. “Do you think so?”

  Blythewood glanced back over at his laptop, smirking. He was suddenly looking rather smug, like a bully, as he redirected his gaze at me and leaned in my direction, as if coiled to spring.

  “You have no idea. Not as yet, anyway, but you will—you will.”

  Recomposing himself, Blythewood added, “Yes, well, I had been quite fond of Michael, though we’d never worked together.”

  I was wary now, measuring my every word; “Reeves, you mean?”

  “Yes, obviously—of course. Trevelyan never would have allowed it, after Michael’s suicide, nor would he have allowed anything to tarnish his own precious censorship legacy,” Blythewood said. “Once Stephen Murphy was installed as the new director of the BBFC, I thought, ‘right, here’s our chance.’ We put up some smokescreens. Marcus, of course, our horror movie director character, didn’t look or behave in the least like Reeves, especially once we cast Oliver Reed in the role. Ollie had a galvanizing stature and gravitas at that time. Given Ollie’s then-recent work with Ken36—WOMEN IN LOVE, THE DEVILS—his sort of being Ken’s screen alter-ego, it seemed a natural to make Ollie our Marcus. Ollie was a bit of a brute by then, built like a brick factory, hardly the long-haired willowy types Wicking and Reeves and Weeks and Armstrong and their hippie lot were,37 or our own director who ended up on THE SQUEAMISH, young fellow name of Robert Alquist. Same lot, he fit right in with them. I thought Murphy would see right through that, and I feared Murphy wouldn’t go for it, but I guess he had his own axes to grind after Trevelyan’s departure, and his own grudge against that bloody woman.”

  “Why do you think Murphy let you proceed?” I ventured.

  “Maybe he was enjoying what we were up to, vicariously,” Blythewood said. “Maybe he didn’t know or recall anything about all that had gone down between Reeves and Trevelyan. I couldn’t really say. I know he didn’t see us as any sort of threat any longer, what with the likes of LAST TANGO IN PARIS and THE EXORCIST in their faces. It was ’73, big changes. Domestic horrors were no longer what they were. Hammer was just about giving up the ghost, Freddie and son38 were trying to do something or other with Tyburn, whatever we were doing at the scrappy fringes of the industry was considered a joke. Hardcore sex features were right ’round the corner. What did the ‘X’ even mean any longer? As I mentioned earlier, I’d submitted the script for THE SQUEAMISH at the same time as the bovver boys screenplays. Murphy scrapped those—‘under no circumstances,’ he wrote me—and let us carry on with the horror project, just as I’d hoped. Funny, I seem to recall they screened our final edit of THE SQUEAMISH a week after they’d refused THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE a cert. We were a lark, a laugh, by compare. And of course, no one had sussed out yet what we were really up to, nor would they.”

  “What,” I risked, “were you up to?”

  That damned grin again, followed by an enigmatic co-conspiratorial wink. “Soon enough, lad, soon enough. Did you notice the box?”

  “Yes, though it was harder to spot this time around,” I replied. “A lot of—action going on around it.”

  “Quite right,” Blythewood nodded. “And blood spattering all about. So, you spotted it, and could you see inside?”

  “Two gems, I think.”

  “With one left to go afterwards,” Blythewood whispered. “Buried the penultimate one with that coffin, in the park, right in full view onscreen this time. Planted a tree over it after we shot that sequence, with another of Louis’s little ceremonials. It grows there still.”

  Blythewood glanced back over at his laptop, squinting for a second at something onscreen in the scroll feed below the newsreader. Then, his eyes, his attention, back to me.

  “So—”

  “So. Questions? Answers?”

  For the final time, here are my transcribed notes of our conversation. We were almost done.

  I’d wanted to make THE SQUEAMISH in late 1969, 1970. Tail end of the PSYCHO wake, just after TWISTED NERVE had been a boxoffice hit with some controversy, but it was too soon, and Trevelyan and all were still in place. Louis also told me he needed more time for his pet projects, so we lollygagged a bit. “Wrong time, too soon,” Louis said, for his own reasons, so we waited a few. The psycho-thrillers never really went out of circulation, and when we were doing ours Hammer was still cranking out the Sangster stuff with Judy, Joan, Mia, and Rita,39 and I very much saw THE SQUEAMISH as one of those, really. If I could have landed Rita to play Geraldine, I might have well done so; she had the Liverpool background, the appropriately uptight persona. Mia we’d have never sought or gotten, her being a big Hollywood star, well out of reach.

  In the meanwhile, finished up FEAR NONE NUN and that was a hit, especially in the rest of Europe and the overseas markets. They couldn’t get enough of those twisted nun movies after THE DEVILS.

  So, right, THE SQUEAMISH. Lucked out with casting, best team we’d ever had, or would have. I really wanted to work with Freddie Jones for this one, but it didn’t work out. Can’t be unhappy about the cast we landed, though, can we? Anna Massey was magnificent as our censor-lady, Geraldine, and of course Anna had the mileage, PEEPING TOM, and she’d just done FRENZY with Hitchcock, she was brilliant. Funny, you watch telly mysteries now like Midsomer Murders, and they cast Anna, and then you know she’s the one done it, don’t you?

  We needed a name, and we needed someone extraordinary to play our enfant terrible firebrand director of edgy horror films, so I went after Oliver Reed. He was a bit too old, some argued, and of course everyone cautioned me about his drinking and his temperament, but I couldn’t picture anyone else as Marcus Rand, especially since Marcus eventually becomes our ghost, our Peter Quint,40 if you think about it. Ollie had that kind of screen presence, so I didn’t fret about his age one whit. Wanted that kind of authority, in fact.

  We landed Ollie quite easily, thanks to a suggestion from a couple family members, including Sir Carol Reed. Ollie was his nephew, you know. It happened like this. Two members of my estate agent circles knew Ollie, and came back with stories about a two-day-long bender they’d taken with Ollie and other friends that led to a list of favorite pub monikers they’d wished they could frequent. As you can imagine, it was a raucous list, but that gave me the hook I needed. I found a pub in walking distance of one of our primary filming locations, and struck a deal with the landlord for a month, to begin a fortnight before we started production. The proposition was: the pub would be Ollie’s to manage for the duration of the shoot, four weeks, under the condition he was sober as a judge every day of the shoot, and he kept the rest of the cast and crew on the straight-and-narrow during the filming as well. After hours, they could do as they wished. I had one of my woodworkers carve a proper pub sign to be temporarily hung outside, “The Wolf-in-Lamb’s-Skin Bladder,” with a stylized relief carving, like an old woodcut illustration, of a wolf wearing a sheep’s wool, standing and relieving itself up against a stump.

  We somehow managed to blindfold Ollie and lead him astray until we had him at the pub doorway. I placed the mock-lease into his hands and told him he could “look now!” He found it highly amusing at first, but immediately evidenced great pride in the fact he now “owned” his own pub. By God, he was as easy to work with as anyone I’ve ever had the good fortune to collaborate with, and better yet, Ollie kept the rest in line. He did so with grace and humor, as well, and we had no fuss or bother. Afterwards, he thanked me time and time again, but I’d made him vow to never reveal the nature of our deal—no talking about it on talk shows, he had to keep it out of his autobiography—despite the fact we ceremoniously gifted him the hand-carved sign, of course. Ollie was as good as his word on that to the bitter end. I understand he moved to Cork towards the end of his days, called his favorite Churchtown watering hole “Grumpy’s.” I wish we’d thought of that, but that wasn’t on the list we had, and he did quite love that carving of the wolf taking a piss. Kept him from taking the piss out of us while we were making our movie, so huzzahs all around.

  The rest of the cast was splendid too. Alfred Marks as Harry, he was a perfect foil for Ollie to play off of, and there they were with Patrick Troughton, Reginald Marsh, and then Patrick Allen as Wilhelm. Funny to see how the lookers, like Yutte Stensgaard, got on with the old-timers. She came across as just a flitty model, a bird, in her scenes playing herself, an actress, but once she was pretending to be Sister Ingrid in the Dracula movie playing off old Mother Ursula—Catherine Lacey, who’d been round six blocks and looked it—she was really good, I thought, as if Catherine pulled something out of her nobody else ever had. But my favorites were the two who played Geraldine’s Mum and Dad, Dora Bryan and Patrick Troughton, they and Anna really “sold” you on their situations in life, heartbreaking, really. What was funny, too, is Patrick and Dora stayed in character and played off one another any time they were on set together, they kept us all in stitches.