If you’ve time you’re more than welcome to call over at Simon’s. This is an autobiography with no rules. In Over At Simon’s we can leap anywhere in time in a matter of syllables never mind moments. So, hang onto your hat, here we go…
Horror moments. We’ve all had a few. This time I’m not talking about the horror moments of battlefields, mortuaries or train wrecks. I’m talking about the kind of horror that is fascinating. The kind that makes you watch programs about surgical operations, or visit the mutant gallery at Ripley’s Odditorium, or watch your favorite horror DVD by candlelight. It’s the kind of horror moment you can laugh about later, so this time at least I won’t be suggesting we head off for a midnight dig at a Transylvanian graveyard.
Whoa… already we’re off sliding back through time. Picture this: two boys of around ten years of age walking along a country road flanked by open fields. They’re pulling a reddish object on the end of a thirty-foot rope. One of the boys is me, Simon Clark, a dreamy individual, over-fond of chocolate and television, a compulsive reader, with still vague ambitions to have some career connected to monster stories. The other boy is Victor Wainright, he’s exceptionally bright and a consummate maker of catapults, spears, and dens from anything lying or growing in a hedgerow nearby. He’s also a superb shot with a bow and arrow. If we zoom in close we can pick up on their conversation: -
“What are we going to do with it when we get it back to your house?” I asked.
“I thought we were taking it to your house?” Victor replied.
“My Dad won’t let us cut it up in the garden.”
“All right. My Dad’s out so we’ll take it to ours.” That wasn’t an indication that Victor’s father would allow us to do whatever we wanted. Merely that he wasn‘t home. So, if he wasn’t there to veto our plan it was as good as an enthusiastic endorsement in our world.
But what was the plan exactly? It was a warm, sunny weekend so Victor and I were doing what we normally did. We set out with bow and arrows in the hope that somehow we’d stumble across an amazing adventure. Without consciously trying to become a Yorkshire version of Huckleberry Finn we’d done exactly that. We optimistically hunted birds and rabbits but didn’t come within a country mile of catching anything. We’d build rafts to sail down the River Went (which in reality was a modest stream). We smoked dried lettuce leaves in pipes. At least I did. When Victor tried puffing on a mellow lettuce leaf that I’d carefully dried in my parent’s airing cupboard his face had turned astounding shades of gray, yellow and green before he tottered off home while managing to declare he wouldn’t be playing out anymore today. So that left me alone to sagely puff on the curving Sherlock Holmes style pipe. There I’d sit in the garden, a dreamy ten year old, pondering what fabulous monsters the new episode of Star Trek or Doctor Who might bring, while doing the environment untold harm with my clouds of lettuce smoke.
So… there we were, roaming across fields, occasionally pausing to fire an arrow straight up into the air to see how far it would go. Then running like hell when we realized that gravity would be a stickler for the rules and bring the arrow plummeting right down at us with skull penetrating force.
But what exactly were we pulling behind us on that thirty-foot length of rope? What did we plan to cut up in Victor’s garden? Well, we’d left the fields and were walking along the side of the road when we came across a fox. It was well and truly – and stiffly – dead. It might have succumbed to old age but logic dictated it had been struck by a car. It’s eyes were part open; it’s tongue, as dry as a cheese cracker, poked from its mouth.
We were ecstatic. This’s the kind of treasure we were constantly searching for. The dead fox was a thing of miracles. We marveled over its beautiful copper colored fur. We were amazed at the length and the bushiness of its tail.
“Did you ever see a tail like that one?”
“It isn’t a tail, Simon,” he explained.
“It is!” I countered.
“No, a tail on a fox is called a brush.”
“Hey, it really looks like a brush. Have you seen how fluffy it is?”
“Simon, that’s how it got its name.”
We looked at each other, our eyes blazing with excitement.
Then I asked the obvious question, “What are we going to do with it?”
“Well, we can’t leave it here.”
“No, we shan’t.”
For two ten year olds it would be unthinkable to just gaze at the dead fox then walk away. No, to find a dead fox is like finding a bundle of cash. Firstly, it was ours. Finders’ keepers. Secondly, we had to do something with it. Something creative.
“Okay,” I told Victor. “Pick it up.”
“No, you pick it up.”
We looked at each other. We realized we’d hit a snag. We loved the beauty of the still sleek fox. We both realized that it was our property now. We knew we wouldn’t leave it there. But…
“I don’t really want to touch it, do you?”
Victor nodded in agreement. “It might have fleas.”
“It could have died of a disease.”
In reality the disease that killed it was Struck-By-A-Fast-Car-Itis. Then again it might have been on its last legs with something savagely contagious.
“Didn’t foxes spread the Black Death?” I asked. Victor was better at schoolwork than me. He knew answers.
“No, that was rats.”
“But foxes would have eaten rats with the plague and bubonic stuff inside of them.”
“Yeah… “ He took my point. “So we best not touch it with our hands.”
“But we can’t leave it here.” I had an idea. “We could sort of push it along with our feet.”
“Okay… you first.”
I put my foot against the hindquarters of the fox. Then gave it a push that would be described as tentative to say the least. The feel of its body through my shoe leather made me shiver. The fox corpse was stiff with rigor mortis. It wobbled in such a rigid way that I felt queasy. Even the tongue was stiff as a lollipop stick.
“You know,” I admitted after a couple of swallows to make sure my breakfast porridge stayed down where it should. “I don’t think I want to look at it as we move it.”
“Well, look in the other direction then when you push.”
I gave it a try. My face was screwed up like I’d munched on a lemon; I turned my head in the other direction. Passersby in cars would have seen a ten year old with a monstrously puckered face, complimented by a strange kind of Quasimodo twist to his body, while he made strange shuffling movements as he tried to propel something redly fluffy along the grass verge.
I might have managed to move the fox an inch at the most. Foxes are heavier then they look. What’s more, rigor mortis doesn’t make them any easier to push with your foot.
Victor conceded that trying to propel the corpse half a mile back home in this way wasn’t going to work. Also, we’d get funny looks from people once we managed to reach the housing estate where we lived. “Simon. We’re going to have to think of something else.”
I sighed with relief. My porridge wouldn’t have stayed down much longer if I’d tried to shoe shuffle the creature along. Even in death he seemed pretty reluctant to abandon this little patch of sun-warmed grass.
Victor, as I’ve said, is bright. He was also well prepared. Wherever we went we carried matches, bows, arrows, string, marbles, penknives, bubblegum wrappers and, for some reason on this occasion, a long length of rope. I think we had ambitions of finding a secret cave to explore, although I’ve yet to hear about the existence of a cave within miles of village where we grew up. But when you’re ten optimism is never in short supply. Victor’s intelligence connected with what we’d equipped ourselves with.
“I know,” he said with a smile of delight at solving the problem. “We’ll tie the rope around the fox’s neck. Then we’ll pull it along.”
“I don’t know.” I was still queasy. The taste of milk on the porridge had launched an assault on my gullet. “I don’t think I want to actually see the fox being pulled along.”
Victor had the answer. “That’s alright. We’ll tie the rope round the fox’s neck. Then we’ll pay out the rope. After we’ve done that, we’ll hold onto this end and pull it along behind us.”
I looked at him not fully understanding.
“That way the body will be so far away we won’t have to see it.”
“That’s brilliant.”
Victor cunningly tied a lasso with a slip not. It only took ten, fifteen… no, call it twenty minutes, to actually get the loop of rope around the fox’s stiff, dead neck. Then with the use of sticks to hold the body still Victor could pull the slipknot tight.
Great. We had a fox on the line.
The next part of the process was easy-peasy. We both got as far from the creature as the rope would allow. We both took a hold of the very end of the rope. Then walked slowly along the grass at the side of the road pulling our prize.
Perhaps my imagination was pretty much developed even then. But there was something horrific pulling a dead body on the end of a line. The vibrations running along the taught hemp communicated all kinds of disturbing images. I had luridly bright mental pictures of the way the dead fox slid through the grass. I imagined the rope crimped tight round its neck. I could envisage its dusty, staring eyes. The way its ears would scrunch under its dead head, or be snagged by twigs.
Determined not to give up our treasure we kept pulling. But we glanced at each other knowing this was a grim task. As deeply unpleasant as it was to haul dead canine flesh, it also must have looked surreal to passing motorists to witness two ten year old boys insanely taking what appeared to be a clearly dead pet dog for a walk on a thirty foot leash.
Even now I can imagine an old lady, wiping away a tear as she drives by, and sniffing, “Oh, those poor, poor boys. They can’t bring themselves to admit that their pet dog has died; they still insist on taking it walkies…”
Well, those are the kind of scenarios my boyhood imagination would have supplied. Also passing through my mind would have been mental footage of a police car stopping, and an animal loving police officer climbing out of his car to look at the pair of us in disgust before announcing, “Don’t you two know there’s a law against strangling poor defenseless animals?”
“But, sir, the fox was already dead when we found it.”
“That’s what scum like you always say. You know, your sort make me sick.” Then the handcuffs would snap on. Soon we’d be on our way to jail. See, my writer’s imagination was already ticking over nicely back then.
But no one did stop to consol us, or confront our apparent insanity, or arrest us for fox murder.
Grimly we continued towing the dead creature behind us. It hadn’t occurred to ask ourselves yet, how would we bring ourselves to skin the animal at Victor’s house if we couldn’t bring ourselves to touch it now? No, the main thing at that moment was we’d tied a line to the copper colored beast. It was ours. So we pulled it along as we walked. Okay, so we grimaced at the tugs on the line, as if the animal had come back to life and was clawing at its noose. And, good God, the thing was heavy. We panted as we hauled it along. Every so often it would hold fast (maybe it dug its undead claws into the ground?), then we’d grimace at what we had to do, but we’d both pull harder. Whatever obstruction had held the animal back gave way, then we could continue our slow progress.
“Not far now,” Victor said with a brave grin of optimism.
“It’ll be easier, too, when we can drag it on the pavement.”
And all the time as we pulled we never looked back once. To even glimpse the stiff paws waving in the air would have been too much for us. My porridge would make a bolt for the wide blue yonder. And I remembered the strange grays and greens that transformed Victor’s face when he first smoked the lettuce leaf tobacco.
So we kept looking forward, kept pulling, kept telling ourselves we’d be home soon.
Then the rope snapped tight. We stopped dead. A stick or bramble or something had snagged our fox. We pulled harder. No go. Whatever had caught the animal wasn’t releasing its grip.
“On my count of three,” Victor said. “We’ll both pull hard then it’ll come free.”
I nodded.
“One, two three… pull!”
We tugged hard. But it was jammed tight. It wouldn’t move an inch. The solution would have been to look back to see what the obstacle was, but that would mean having to set eyes on the dead fox. We were too squeamish to risk that.
So, we pulled harder while looking away from the fox.
“Got it!”
“It’s free!”
Too free. The rope came easily now. There was hardly any weight at all.
We looked at each other in horror.
“Aw God, Victor. We’ve pulled its bloody head off!”
We could have glanced back. It would have been easy to check. But what does a headless fox look like? Would the head have bounced into the road to stare accusingly at us? Just before the bus rumbles along to squish its…
Uh! No way were we going to look back at what we’d done.
“We’ve pulled the head off a real live dead fox,” I groaned. My porridge breakfast was nudging my tonsils. “What we going to do now, Victor?”
“RUN!”
We dropped the rope. We ran.
I never did look back over my shoulder as we ran back to our village, but looking back over the shoulder of memory I recall this summer’s day all too vividly. Okay, okay… the fox’s head couldn’t have snapped off. It was merely the noose slipping over the head when a bramble or whatever snagged the furry corpse. But I remember that moment of horror … that moment of pungent, nerve-searing horror when I BELIEVED the red foxy head had broken away from its neck. That’s one of those moments of horror I can chuckle about now.
If you’re interested in becoming a horror writer… or any kind of professional writer come to that… you’ll encounter plenty more of those moments of horror. Like writing away at your computer; you’ve just written the best chapter of your life, you’re so pleased with it you want to run a lap of honor round your house then… pffft. The screen freezes. The cursor’s as lifeless as that dead fox at the side of the road. Moment of horror… moment of horror… You fight to stop it happening but you know that realization’s going to hit that your computer has frozen up – has ‘performed an illegal action’ as the warning message will phrase it when it pops up on screen. Then that moment of horror becomes several moments of horror as you face reality. Those two thousand words you wrote – those brilliant words you were so pleased with – are lost for good.
Compared to events in the whole wide world these moments of horror aren’t the worse thing that can happen. You might laugh about them later (or at least be philosophical about them) but at the time… they have the horrific power to make you close your eyes and wish it wasn’t happening.
When I was promoting The Night of the Triffids I’d been asked to participate in a talk show on BBC Radio Scotland. Great, I thought. I pictured myself enjoying the scenic train ride to Edinburgh, having a good meal in the old town high on its plateau, then meeting the talk show host, plus other guests, before sitting in a comfortable studio to talk about having the chance to continue what is one of my most loved stories of all time, John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids. Ah… it didn’t turn out quite like that. When I confirmed with Radio Scotland that I’d be happy to participate they gave me directions to the studio. “It’s in the library at Doncaster.”
“Doncaster?” I was surprised. “Doncaster’s my home town?”
“Yes, we know. There’s a radio studio in the library at Doncaster. We’ll be able to patch you into our program. Just be there for eight thirty tonight.”
“Uhm, I don’t really know. The library closes at eight.”
“Don’t worry, Simon. There’ll be someone there to look after you.”
I should have remembered the ominous snagging sensations on the line when Victor and I towed the dead fox behind us.
Not wanting to be late I reached the library just after eight. It was closed. But someone was there to look after me, right? They’d promised. So I rang the bell, knocked on locked doors. All the time minutes ticked away toward that moment when the red light in a faraway Scottish studio would blaze and the talk show host would announce to his listeners, “Tonight we welcome the author Simon Clark who’s brought back the killer triffid plants that…”
Only I saw myself still standing outside the locked library doors, hammering away. Yelling “Let me in!”
No… saved. A light flickered on behind the glass doors. A man appeared. He opened the door. “Mr. Clark?”
“Yes. You know why I’m…”
“Here? Yes, Mr. Clark. You’re using the radio station to link up with Radio Scotland.”
“Thank God.”
“Pardon?”
“Oh, nothing; I was just beginning to wonder if there’d be anyone here to operate the station equipment.”
“I don’t have anything to do with that radio stuff,” he told me cheerfully. “Don’t worry. It’s all set up for. Besides, if you’ve any problems, the instructions how to use it are all written down for you.”
The radio station wasn’t set up for me. It was unmanned. It appeared to double as a broom cupboard. The instructions weren’t detailed enough. I could barely hear my interviewer on the headphones. All I caught was the word ‘Triffids’which, coupled with the rising note in his voice, I took to be a question. All I could do was talk solidly for the next few minutes in the hope that my voice made it to the Scottish transmitters to be relayed out to the tens of thousands of listeners. At one point I faintly heard a dazed “Thank you, Simon Clark.” I took that as a sign the interview was over. As quickly as I could I slipped away, convinced that the talk show host thought I was some lunatic writer who’d bellowed constantly through the interview without pausing to listen to the host’s questions. Maybe that’s a moment of mortification rather than horror. But I’ll experience a moment of horror if I’m ever asked to return to that broom cupboard studio again.
Be prepared for moments of horror if you plan to write for a living. There are plenty out there when you promote your book or just before giving a public talk. But then I enjoy giving talks once I’m over the nervy hump at the start of it. So that suggests the moment of horror is also a way of making the adrenaline flow so you perform better. Some writers will confess that they experience their moments of horror before starting a novel. The thought goes through their minds: ‘I won’t be able to write another book, I’ll get writer’s block.’ Again that fear stimulates the creative act. The emotion of horror has to be part of the creative writing process, doesn’t it? Horror is fed by imagination. If we had literally no imagination at all, like a gnat or worm, it’s impossible to envisage horrible stuff happening to us. Animals might experience revulsion and terror, but horror in the sense of anticipating something grisly that for the moment might not actually exist? Nope, that’s got to be a human ability. Hang on, I’m drifting into the realms of a horror essay here. Then again, this is Over At Simon’s, the autobiography where few rules apply.
I promised some tips on the writing business. One has been touched on here. That is promoting your work. Lots of new writers finish a novel, they manage to sell it to a publisher and think to themselves, ‘That’s it, I’ve done my work.’ The truth is the writer’s work is just starting. You must promote your new novel, especially if you are unknown to the public. My tip is open a file on your computer. When you get a moment jot down ideas about how you can promote your book. For example: mail shots to bookshops, if they have a policy of ordering from within the individual shop. The bookshop’s buyer will have titles presented to them by the publisher’s sales representatives. A brief, polite letter to the buyer at the shop will alert them that your book is on its way (time this right, by the way, check with your publisher when the reps will be ‘subbing’ the book; send the letter just a week or so before the rep’s visit). They may remember it when the sales rep makes his pitch. This might, just might, lead the shop’s buyer to ordering an extra two or three copies, or even ordering it in the first place. A moment of horror here for new writers. The shop might not even order your new book at all. Then if it doesn’t make it to the shelves, it can’t be seen by customers, therefore, it can’t be bought… more moments of horror. Add to your promotional data file potentially useful contacts in press, or radio. If a local radio jock talks about how much he/she loves stories about haunted houses, say, make a note. Then when your book comes out drop a copy in the mail to them, mentioning how much you enjoy their show, and that you listened to it while you were writing your book about: HAUNTED HOUSES! Isn’t that shameless? Flattery combined with cold cunning. Maybe. But your career as a writer depends on selling books, a happy state of affairs, which is aided by publicity. Besides, there’s nothing illegal or immoral about being a shrewd player in the bookselling game.
When your book is published work hard to promote it. Do every radio interview. If need be, pose beside your computer for local newspaper photographs. Accept offers to give talks to libraries. Give book signings. I can guarantee there will be moments of horror. You’ll be told to go to the wrong studio. The newspaper might never run your interview. No one will show up to buy a book at your signing. Microphones are bound to develop wild shrieking when you give that public talk. That first interview question you’re asked on television will make your mind go blank. Those moments of horror come with the territory. But for all the horrible experiences there will be many more wonderful ones that make you so glad you became a writer. Write off the horror moments as part of the apprenticeship. Soon you’ll sit at a table with a huge pile of books that you sign for a long, long queue of eager fans. Briefly, you’ll remember the horror moment of no-one turning up to a signing a couple of years ago, but not for long because there’s all these smiling faces; your fans have come to see you, they’re delighted that you sign a book with a personal inscription and shake your hand. Of course, you’ll be delighted too. It’s a terrific reward in its own right to meet the people who enjoyed your books. And in the majority of cases that radio talk or TV interview will go superbly and you’ll feel as if you’re walking on air when you leave the studio.
Then there are the many times you sit at your computer inventing a story in your head and relishing that surge of creative fire when your characters come alive through the medium of words.
Of course, try going back in time to when those two boys walked along a road, pulling a dead fox behind them at the end of a thirty-foot rope. And then tell the one called Simon Clark that one day he would be become a writer, and that his moment of horror, when he thought the fox’s head had snapped off, would be read by thousands from all over the world. He wouldn’t have believed you for a moment … would he?