Best British Horror 2014 Page 34

I should have just stuck to my arc, to my own story, been satisfied with what I had. Now I’m trapped in this dead end.

  Down at the bottom of this chunk of words.

  It doesn’t even end properly. It fades to white.

  It just stops.

  The Magician Kelso Dennett

  STEPHEN VOLK

  All tricks, all illusions, funnel down to a few basic misdirections, at the end of the day. The majority of it is the patter, the spiel, the storytelling. The gift of the gab. Taking someone on a journey, but a journey that goes somewhere they don’t expect, in a way they didn’t expect it.

  I was born in Seagate and I’ve lived here all my life. It’s strange that people flock here for holidays, or used to, and used to have smiles on their faces and happiness in their hearts at the thought of going somewhere different. To me Seagate was never different, never fun-loving or exotic in any way, never a place to get away from it all and have a good time. It was simply my home. I suppose at times I’ve envied the little families I saw inside the ice-cream parlour on the sea front, or sitting with their fish and chips in newspaper on the benches facing the sea. But to be honest, most of the time I thought they were stupid for thinking this place was in any way special just because there were sticks of rock with its name going down the middle. It certainly wasn’t special to me. It was a dump.

  The fun fair I remember being seedy ever since my childhood is derelict now, segregated by a massive chain-link fence and guard dogs, its name – Wonderland – nothing but a sick joke. The only people who have ‘fun’ there are the pill-heads and drug dealers whose scooters whine around the Esplanade from mini-roundabout to mini-roundabout touting their wares. Up on Cliffe Road, a whole run of grand Victorian-era hotels lie abandoned, semi-restored by property developers who inevitably ran out of cash.

  Sometimes you see a light on inside one at night time and wonder if it’s a solitary owner living under a bare light bulb eating beans on toast, or a bunch of junkie squatters shoving needles in their veins. This is the image of the resort now, not candy floss and deck chairs, but inflatable li-los flapping in a bitter wind outside beach-side shops that get more money from selling lottery tickets.

  When they announced a big, new, posh art gallery was going to be built at the old fish market near the harbour, a lot of London people argued it would bring much-needed prosperity to the town. Predictably, the locals didn’t want it. In fact they gathered hundreds of signatures on a petition about the loss of a car park where old ladies came in coaches to buy cups of tea and go home again. But that was typical. Seagaters have no interest in the outside world. They just want to keep all the things that made a crappy 1950s seaside resort crappy, even though it’s dying on its feet.

  Anyway, the art gallery happened, with a bistro-style café offering Mediterranean stuffed peppers and risottos of the day. Meanwhile the most artistic thing you were likely to see two streets away on the High Street was a wino coughing his guts up outside an amusement arcade or pound shop.

  Sorry for not having a rose-tinted view of the great British seaside town, but I’m not the Tourist Information Centre. I live here. And I’ve spent all my life listening to people telling me I’m lucky – I’m not.

  I guess when I heard that Kelso Dennett was coming, I thought that might change.

  And it did.

  I work in a hotel, though don’t have any professional qualifications. When my grandmother died, my dad had enough money to give up teaching, which he hated, and invest in a hotel, the White Hill – two AA stars, fuck knows how – on one of the narrow streets off Quayne Square leading steeply down to the sea. That’s where I was born and that’s my day job, setting the tables for breakfast and dinner. Serving hard, crusty rolls with watery, microwaved soup so hot it gives you mouth blisters. My father’s made a profession of being pleased with himself. What he has to be smug about I have no idea.

  What is he? The owner of a shitty hotel in a shitty little town, and there he is, sounding the gong to call people down for dinner like it’s the Ritz? What a loser. Still, he’s happy running his little empire, and I’ve seen that gleam in his eye when he tells people he’s fully booked. It’s power, that’s all that is. It’s pathetic, but in the present economic meltdown, in this armpit of the universe, there’s precious little to give you any feeling of power over anything.

  The power to change. To make things better. It’s always seemed almost impossible. Yet there was one person in the world who was regularly telling us that anything was possible. That ‘the impossible’ was just a mindset to be overcome.

  And suddenly, according to The Advertiser, he was coming to Seagate – to perform his most outrageous stunt ever.

  Everyone knew that Kelso Dennett was a Seagate boy. Or, more accurately, from The Links – which, I remember from my childhood was the ‘rough part’ of town, which was synonymous with the poor part. You didn’t want to mix with boys from the Links, my mum used to say. They were always kids who used to smoke in the street, and that said it all. To her mind, anyway.

  It was also well known that the TV star’s return to his home town was being touted as something of a gesture of thanks to the residents. Though the fact he said he was looking forward to it either meant he had lived in blissful ignorance of how much the place had gone tits-up (to put it mildly), or that the sentiment was complete PR bullshit to get the locals on side. After all, he had a reputation as a master manipulator. He was hardly going to rubbish the place. He was too much of a canny operator for that. He wouldn’t have done it in Seagate if there wasn’t something in it for him. As everyone who watched his television shows knew, there was always more than meets the eye. That was the attraction. That, and the prospect of real physical or mental harm.

  Within days of the official announcement, the production company took out ads looking for runners. No prior experience necessary, but good local knowledge a bonus. I reckoned I was in with a chance, and my dad could find a temporary replacement or get stuffed, so I applied and got an interview. The form I had to fill in was about thirty pages long.

  ‘Nick Ambler.’ My name.

  ‘28.’ My age.

  ‘Single.’ My status.

  The girl with the razor-sharp marmalade fringe asked if I had a relationship.

  ‘Sort of. A girlfriend. But only sort of.’ She asked her name and I said Cyd, spelt that way. ‘After Cyd Charisse. The dancer? Singing in the Rain and shit?’

  She nodded in a vacant, prosperous kind of way and see-sawed her expensive roll-point pen as she asked the all-important question about local knowledge.

  ‘I have that.’ I shrugged. ‘I’ve lived here all my life.’

  ‘Then you’re perfect.’ She brightened, nodding again. ‘Nice town.’

  I thought, ‘You haven’t lived here.’

  She showed a lot of teeth but was pleasant enough, though the guy next to her, black guy – I mean really black, like ink – didn’t say a word. But they must’ve liked me, because later, in The Bear, I got a text saying I’d got it.

  The teaser ads were already going out between programmes, so it was no secret this was going to be a Kelso Dennett Special, as they called them now. This one, leaving very little to the imagination, and full of succinct, if dubious, promise, was called Buried Alive. (No prizes for guessing its central premise.)

  The magician was planning to be buried in a wooden coffin six feet under on the beach at Seagate – his most daring stunt to date – with no means of escape or communication, and no access to food or drink for the entire period. He would be sealed in the casket and that would be it, until they dug him up forty days and forty nights later.

  As soon as they’d heard about it, certain corners of the media were, predictably, incendiary with outrage. It was shocking, yes. Audacious, yes. Mad, yes. But, frankly, you’d hardly expect anything less. Pushing boundaries – not only physical boundaries,
but boundaries of what was acceptable as popular entertainment – was his stock-in-trade. ‘Going too far’ had rapidly become his business model.

  Previous ‘specials’, which had involved apparent decapitation, invisibility, and even a poltergeist haunting, always caused controversy. It was almost part of the Kelso Dennett ‘brand’ – but now there was a new element, the element not just of jeopardy, or of harm, but of death.

  From the moment it was announced there was a great deal of conjecture as to whether what he was attempting to do, and survive, was even medically possible. Was consummate showman Kelso Dennett really simply tarting up weary old illusions in new clothes (always the accusation), or genuinely (as he claimed in this case) forcing his physiological and psychological endurance to the absolute limit? It was, of course, impossible to tell.

  Certainly, as a TV-viewer, it was always hard to know exactly what methods he was using to achieve his mindboggling effects. You definitely couldn’t trust what he said he was doing. His sometimes wild, irrelevant gestures or pseudoscientific preambles may be just that – irrelevant. And just because he said he wasn’t using stooges, did that really mean he wasn’t? His previous compulsive extravaganzas had relied on not just trickery but the use of techniques such as hypnosis and suggestibility – or did they? The paranormal waffle might just be window dressing for a gag no more complex than Chase the Lady or Tommy Cooper’s bottle/glass routine.

  Was the poor guy who thought he’d been in a time machine, or the couple who were convinced a serial killer was hunting them down, actually in on the joke all along? You always sensed that your eyes, and ears, were on the wrong thing – which was exactly where Kelso Dennett wanted them.

  My job was to keep an eye on the assembled crowds standing at the rail on the Promenade – to keep them at bay. ‘At bay’ is probably too strong a phrase. But I had a Hi-Viz vest and a walkie-talkie which kept me in direct contact with the Third Assistant Director in case some of the locals wanted to get a closer look at the set before the team wanted them to. I watched them setting up a white tent on the beach above the high-tide mark. The crew were busy in their various capacities, but I had little idea what most of them did. There seemed to be a lot of quilted windbreakers, a lot of pointing, a lot of coffee in polystyrene cups, and a lot of talk.

  The production company, for their own convenience, were putting me up in the hotel where they were based. I told my dad my shifts would be weird so wouldn’t be back to lay breakfast or wait at tables for dinner, and I squared it with Cyd I might not be around much too. In view of what happened, that was just as well, on my part. You might even think it was forward planning. It wasn’t. I wasn’t planning anything. All I was planning was earning some money.

  I watched them digging the grave with a JCB. It wasn’t like digging into soil, and the sand was dry, but eventually they managed to get a fairly good, rectangular hole without the walls crumbling or it filling with water. For some reason the police were in attendance, and so were the fire brigade. Possibly to do with Health and Safety. Probably to do with just seeing themselves on TV. We were going live at 10pm and everything was stressed to the hilt.

  On the far side of the beach I saw somebody talking to the man who did the donkey rides. Whether they were asking him to get into shot or get out of shot I couldn’t tell. In the end he just stood there.

  The crane shot went up beside me so that the crowd, which had now increased to several hundreds if not thousands on the Promenade and down the length of the pier, could see a high angle view of themselves on the big screens erected on the beach.

  A second camera panned along the route of a hearse down the High Street. Security men parted the throng to allow it to drive down a slipway to a flat bed of concrete normally kept clear for use by the lifeboat crew and ambulances. Five undertakers got out and I was surprised to see that they weren’t actors but the family firm that had operated in town for as long as I could remember – adding a macabre dimension of authenticity. Four acted as pallbearers, sliding a pale teak coffin from the back, hoisting it to their shoulders and following the fifth with complete solemnity towards the grave.

  The dignity of the enactment seemed to make people forget they were watching an entertainment programme, and the strangely reverential silence that fell continued as the undertakers lowered the coffin onto a rustling purple tarpaulin laid flat beside the grave, then stood aside with their heads bowed. The sense of anticipation was electric.

  Similarly followed by street cameras, a black Mercedes with tinted windows glided through town and descended the slipway. A chauffeur opened the back door and Kelso Dennett stepped out – fashionably mixed-race, distinctive shaved head. Small. Tiny. I hadn’t seen him in the flesh before, but it was weird. I’ve heard people famous from TV have a presence when you meet them in real life, a kind of vivid familiarity because we feel we know them, we’re intimate with them, I don’t know, or maybe it was the make-up or the lighting – but he seemed to glow. His skin seemed literally golden against the black zippered tracksuit one of the tabloids later said gave the proceedings a ‘dark Olympics’ vibe. Anyway, the crowd went mental. If I didn’t have a job to do, I think I might’ve gone mental too.

  Calmly taking a microphone from a production assistant, he thanked everyone for coming and said in a high, surprisingly boyish voice he’d do his utmost to reward them for their faith and their patience. He faltered a little, very slightly giving away his nerves (unless that was part of the act), finishing by saying he got ‘succour and strength from their love and their prayers.’ He almost made it sound like a prayer itself.

  Then, according to the voice-over, he was off into the graveside Winnebago ‘to mentally prepare for the greatest challenge of his magical career.’

  While he did, and while forensic experts from the Navy and RAF examined the coffin inside and out, a pre-prepared VT about the Victorian fear of premature burial played to the gathered fans, with an obligatory nod to Edgar Allan Poe. It quoted from a hundred-year-old article in the British Medical Journal about human hibernation, in which it was said Russian peasants in the Pskov Governance survived famine ‘since time immemorial’ by sleeping for half the year in a condition they called lotska, while James Braid (father of hypnotherapy) wrote in his 1850 book Observations of Trance that he had seen, in the presence of the English Governor Sir Claude Wade, an Indian fakir buried alive for several months before being exhumed in full health and consciousness. More recent findings came from a 1998 paper in Physiology which described a yogi going into a state of ‘deep bodily rest and lowered metabolism’ with ‘no ill effects of tachycardia or hyperpnea’ for ten hours. Another study, on a sixty-year-old adept named Satyamurti, recorded that he emerged from confinement in a sealed underground pit after eight days in a state of ‘Samadhi’ or deep meditation, during which time electrocardiogram results showed his heart rate fell below the ‘measurably sensitivity of the recording instruments.’

  Kelso Dennett, in ten-foot-high close-up, then gave chapter and verse on the techniques perfected by such mystics and gurus to cut down their bodily activity to the frighteningly bare minimum. The essence of hatha yoga, he said, is the maximization of physical health as the necessary basis for self-realisation – the purification and strengthening of the body as the means to effectively channel powerful but subtle forces (prana) – in this case, to slow the processes down to an extremely low rate, and so achieve a state of physiological suspension. ‘But this terminology and classification is multi-layered and elusive – not easily open to standard observation and measurement. The concepts are far from being embraced into mainstream biology and science. Some might say that makes them primitive or superstitious, but turning it the other way round, maybe science has got a lot to learn.’ A tiny light reflected in his dark irises. ‘My hope is to replicate these physical states – to hover on the very brink between life and death – and test them to the ultimate limit of what is humanly pos
sible. I have prepared for this event, not just for months, but for years. Perhaps even my whole life. Now I believe I am ready to successfully attempt it. But do the experts?’

  As we were about to be told, clearly not.

  The medical professionals interviewed were unanimous that the enterprise was foolhardy to the point of insane recklessness. As if to confirm this, we saw footage of Kelso Dennett training for long periods in a sensory deprivation tank – but only for as long as eleven days, after which he sounded the alarm and was lifted out, gasping, dripping, shielding his eyes from the camera light. This time there would be no alarm button. No microphone. Nothing. For forty days.

  The coffin having been pronounced tamper-free, a disembodied voice asked the crowd to remain absolutely quiet when the star emerged from the trailer so as not to disturb his intense level of concentration. The murmuring drained to a complete hush. He emerged barefoot and stripped to the waist, distinctive sleeve of tattoos up his left arm, pentagram on his right shoulder, astrological symbols inked all over his back, pure muscle, but wiry, a runner’s physique, wearing only a pair of black lycra shorts.

  A woman wearing a fur coat, tight jeans, thigh-length boots and shades threw her arms round him, and he kissed her. I saw she didn’t want to let go of his hand. It looked as though she genuinely didn’t want him to go through with it. She seemed upset but trying to control it. He hugged her and held her by the shoulders for a moment and looked into her eyes and she obediently backed away, tucking lariats of blonde hair behind her ears.

  Everyone knew who she was. His wife, Annabelle Fox – most famous from a fish fingers commercial when she was five years old. Not done much since, other than date famous boyfriends, rock stars or actors, from what I could tell.

  We waited patiently in the freezing wind as the supervising medical team fitted him up to their biofeedback machines, attaching electrodes wired to their contraptions, the EEG and ECG. Immediately flickering wavy lines appeared on the big screens and we could hear the magician’s amplified heartbeat coming from the gigantic speakers. We were told it was forty beats per minute. A normal basal heart rate is between sixty and a hundred. Under sixty is called bradycardia and can be dangerous, but it’s not unusual for an athlete to show a normal rate as low as forty – and Kelso Dennett was certainly as fit as an athlete.