After the Ape - Stephen Volk"The notion of 'what happened next?' following a classic monster movie - probably the biggest and best - was an intriguing one to me," says Stephen Volk, "and not only the initial considerations of public health issues."Somehow kicking this off and shadowing its development was reading somewhere that King Kong was Hitler's favourite film. Why?"Anyway the ape is not the monster in this tale. Far from it." The Nonesuch - Brian Lumley Brian Lumley reveals "readers who attended the KeoghCons in Torquay, Devon, will immediately recognize the only slightly disguised location in which this story is set... two previous tales in this sequence ('The Thin People' and 'Stilts') were narrated first-person by the protagonist, an unfortunate fellow who, where weird or unconventional collisions are concerned, appears to be accident prone - in spades! And being a recovering alcoholic hasn't much helped his case, because pink elephants just don't compare with the creatures he's wont to bump into."The earlier tales are alluded to, but briefly, which barely interferes with the pace of the current story. As to why I wrote this one: it's simply that I have a fondness for trilogies, let alone outré encounters . . ."
Release date:
July 26, 2012
Publisher:
Little, Brown Book Group
Print pages:
160
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STEPHEN VOLK IS THE creator/writer of ITV’s award-winning paranormal drama series Afterlife and the notorious, some say legendary, BBC-TV “Hallowe’en hoax” Ghostwatch.
His other credits as screenwriter include Gothic, directed by Ken Russell, The Guardian, directed by William Friedkin, and Octane. He also won a BAFTA Award for The Deadness of Dad, an acclaimed short film starring Rhys Ifans. His latest feature script, The Awakening, is now in production starring Rebecca Hall, Dominic West and Imelda Staunton.
Volk’s first short-story collection, Dark Corners, featured the story “31/10”, which was nominated for both a British Fantasy Award and a Bram Stoker Award, and was reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Twentieth Annual Collection. More recently, he has been nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award for his novella Vardøger. He is also a regular columnist for the British horror and dark fantasy magazine Black Static.
“The notion of ‘what happened next?’ following a classic monster movie – probably the biggest and best – was an intriguing one to me,” says the author, “and not only the initial considerations of public health issues.
“Somehow kicking this off and shadowing its development was reading somewhere that King Kong was Hitler’s favourite film. Why?
“Anyway the ape is not the monster in this tale. Far from it.”
IT WAS DIFFICULT for her to function with any kind of normality. Not when her lover was lying below, crisscrossed by ropes like Gulliver, people hacking out the insides of his body like whalers from Nantucket.
She’d taken to having her first cigarette while still horizontal, sucking in her already sunken cheeks, drifting into the penumbra of being fully awake. The morning newspaper was always lying outside the door but she didn’t read it any more. Always full of stuff she didn’t want to hear. Stuff that made her feel angry and sickened. Him. Herself. The lies. The legend. The jungle. What did they know about the jungle? They hadn’t been there. None of them had.
In time the salty soreness of her tears compelled her to sit up in the cold of the hotel room, icy shoulders trembling, tiny arms frozen and white.
Doll eyes stared from the mirror. She hadn’t set foot outside for how many days now? How many weeks?
She didn’t care: the room was safe. She was untouchable there, alone with her menagerie of thoughts and memories. Sometimes she wondered if she left or was made to leave those thoughts and memories might remain, like ghosts, her misbegotten soul haunting the building while her physical body was wheeled away on a gurney, nothing left of her but a soft-focus studio publicity shot and an obit in Variety. Somehow she knew how the headline would go.
What did they know? They knew shit.
That was the Bowery girl talking. That’s what she was, after all, down to her raggedy-ass bones. And none of the glamour and pearls and platinum curls of Hollywood could cover that up for her in the end. Once a bum, always a bum.
She unscrewed the cap from the bourbon.
(Poppa’s favourite)
Prohibition. Joke. There were ways. The tumbler told her it hated to be half full.
The numb, plummeting wash of it brought up an acid reflux that hauled her monstrous hangover with it, dispelling any faint illusion her head was clear. Still, she was grateful for a taste of oblivion. Oblivion was her prime concern, of late. Any other concern – eating, sleeping, dressing – fell poor second. What could you do, when the hangover felt like it would kill you? Keep drinking. Truth is, she barely even tasted it any more.
On her wrist a gift from a producer who had a taste in watching instead of doing said eleven forty-five. Hell. Not that she’d missed anything – just that so much of the goddamn day loomed ahead of her. These days she despised being awake, because being awake meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering.
Twig fingers tweaked at the drapes. She knew sunlight was going to be painful on skeleton skin, but managed to let a gap of a few inches illuminate the scrunched-up sheets, the full ash trays, the dirty glasses, the scattered shoes, the half-hung clothes, the latest Paris fashion fur coat strewn on the floor – where it would lie forever if she had her way.
Fur.
Those insensitive bastards at the studio.
Fur.
Last time she listened to the radio it was saying they were giving tours of him now. Taking folks on tours inside him, now. She pictured his chest cavity lit by strings of lamps like Jewel Cave in Custer, South Dakota she remembered visiting as a frightened, inexpressive, barefoot child. She knew they’d take out her insides too, if they could. The birds of prey of the Herald and Times, the graveyard worms and rats in raincoats with Underwoods where their morals should be.
The Story: it was all about getting the Story.
And the Story was her.
And sometimes in the darkness of night and nicotine with the shakes and spiders (Giant! Huge!) it was oh so appealing sometimes to say “Here I am you sons of bitches, do with me what you will – here I am, chained, naked, shrieking – and then it’ll be over and I’ll have peace.”
But this wasn’t just about her. It was about the special thing that she and her lover had found and lost in a heartbeat, a great heartbeat like a jungle drum, and it was that they wanted to stamp all over with their dirty thoughts and bad jokes and fabrications, and she wouldn’t let them. It was too precious. Too rare. Too wonderful. Too strange. Too romantic. Too scary. She wouldn’t let them abuse it and she wouldn’t let them have it to do with as they pleased. It belonged to her. It was all she had left. That and the feeling as she slumbered that once again her lover’s giant fingers were closing warmly around her body and she was safe again. It was the one thing, the giant thing they could never, ever destroy. Not with airplanes. Not with anything.
She heard the beeping of taxi cabs from the street far below. The traffic was moving. The traffic always moved.
She wanted to open the window but she daren’t. The streets of Manhattan still ran sweet with blood. The oceanic stench of decay – a graveyard up-ended, said the radio – hung heavy in the air, and even as the lumberjacks and slaughter-men changed shifts day in, day out, nothing could be done to diminish it. It was a brave tourist indeed among the throng of sightseers from every state in the Union who wouldn’t hold their nose or cover their lower face with a handkerchief when viewing the colossal remains. This Wonder of the World. This hairy Behemoth. This Goliath slain by David.
Goose bumps rose on her arms.
She picked up her dressing gown embossed with the hotel’s elaborate crest and wrapped it around her shoulders. It gave her the warmth of a surrogate embrace. The bourbon – telling her, don’t be shy – gave her another.
It didn’t improve on the first. Instead made her feel sour and queasy, . . .
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