Creed Read online

  Creed had almost yelped with delight when he scanned the locale and spied the grey mausoleum set on a low hillock not two hundred yards away. A perfect vantage point, provided some thoughtless bugger hadn’t locked its barred door.

  Again he was in luck for, although rust made the handle difficult to turn, the door wasn’t locked. Why should it be? No one inside was going anywhere.

  The horror-movie groan from the rarely used hinges was a little unsettling, and the unwholesome dank smell of the chamber itself hardly warmed the spirit, but Creed felt pleased with himself. He set up camp and began his vigil.

  Four hours later it was all over, with nothing special to show. Decent enough crowd shots, a few close-ups of the faded and jaded, but nothing to set the juices flowing. Well, you couldn’t win ’em all; in fact, the aces were rare. Always another day, though, another dollar. New opportunities were always around the next corner. Be ready, be there.

  Had Creed been as philosophical as this about his work he wouldn’t have screamed an expletive and kicked the coffin on the lowest tier. Stone and mould scraped off, leaving a scar as white as bone. Rather than apologize for the offence, Creed kicked the coffin again.

  He turned back to the camera and tripod, one big toe no longer numbed by the cold but throbbing from the blow. Taking a last puff from the cigarette, he tossed it into a corner. His hand went to the small screw holding the Nikon to the tripod platform . . . and there it froze.

  Not all the mourners had left yet, although even the diggers had finished their shovelling and wandered off. Someone was standing in the shadow of a tree.

  Creed’s eyes narrowed for better definition before he remembered he had the means of magnification at hand. He bent to the viewfinder and carefully altered the camera’s angle.

  Black shoes, dark trousers, grey raincoat – that’s all our photographer could see through the lens. He tilted the Nikon further, but the lurker’s head and shoulders were partly obscured by low foliage.

  Now why was he hanging around after everyone else had left? And why was he hiding? – at least he seemed to be hiding. Was he a gatecrasher? Security would have been tight that morning and funeral liggers unwelcome. But then he himself had got in easily enough. Maybe he was just a hack covering the story.

  Movement. The man was coming forward, ducking beneath the low branch. Grey gaberdine coat, scarf up around his face. Now he was pulling the scarf away. Christ, what a face! He was either very old, or had had a lot of worry. Certainly he was well past his sell-by date. He was looking around, making sure the coast was clear, strands of hair lying rigidly flat over his scalp as if welded there.

  Creed exposed a single frame, then immediately wondered why. This guy was never going to be the shot: he was either an interloper, a journo, an acquaintance, or possibly an old flame of the deceased. Whatever, no way did he look or act like a celeb.

  Creed straightened and watched the man stop before the freshly sealed grave. A pause for three or four seconds, then the man slowly walked around until he was facing the mausoleum once more. After which he repeated the circuit, this time going the other way, and all the time staring down solemnly at the swelling of earth as if expecting it to move.

  He started the return trip, clockwise this time, but came to a halt with his back towards the hidden photographer. His shoulders began to shake, gently at first, a mild quivering; that quivering became a juddering, then a spasmodic twitching of his whole upper body.

  The old boy’s really upset, mused Creed, reaching for another loose cigarette. He fished one out – he’d had plenty of time that morning to build a batch of them – and stuck it between his lips. He lit up and the lighter lingered near his face when cracked laughter drifted up the incline into the tomb.

  Creed stared down at the grey-coated figure in surprise. He wasn’t bawling at all – the crazy was laughing! Creed capped the lighter: he was frowning, but his mouth curled its own smile. He shook his head slowly, wondering what old Lil had done to this one for her demise to cause such glee. Could be he was a relative or friend of one of her exes. Or maybe just someone she’d done wrong. Shame he wasn’t familiar; a known face chortling over Lily Neverless’ dead body would fetch a decent price.

  No matter, it was something to finish up the roll with. Creed dragged smoke before stooping to the camera. Too close – head and shoulders only; he revolved the lens, pulling back as much as possible. Better. Right, you bugger, turn a little so we can see your mug.

  The happy mourner ignored the request.

  Creed shot film anyway. The shutter release refused on the third squeeze and he clicked his tongue in annoyance. He flicked ash on to the dusty floor and casually reached for the other camera resting on a coffin lid, his eyes never leaving the mystery figure outside. Before his hand touched the spare Nikon, something happened that startled him.

  The man sank to his knees and began scraping at the hump of soft earth.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Creed whispered as the man bent to his task. Unbelievable! The photographer’s hand instinctively grasped the camera and he moved around the tripod for a clearer view. He quickly raised the Nikon and zoomed in; this time, because of the less powerful lens, the whole of the burrower was in the frame. First shot: good. Second shot: more of the same. Third shot: also. Fourth shot – the subject had stopped digging.

  It was difficult to tell from that angle, but Creed thought the man was unbuttoning his raincoat. He was. He opened it out. He was taking something from an inside pocket. Hunching over again, he was—

  Creed’s eyes gleamed, and he muttered an oath. If only the crazy had been facing him . . .

  What was he up to? Fumbling at his clothes again. He – oh no, he wouldn’t. Creed raised the camera again. Shit, what a great shot it would have been if only the man had been facing the other way. Unusable, of course, no newspaper would use it. No British newspaper anyway. But certain European journals might love to have a picture of someone pissing on the great Lily Neverless’ grave.

  Wait a minute, that wasn’t it . . . Oh no, not that. No one would do that in broad daylight, let alone in a graveyard! That was obscene! Creed almost grinned. That was bloody disgusting!

  He raised the camera to eye-level again.

  The man’s head was bowed as though he were keen to witness his own self-abuse, and both shoulders were moving rhythmically. A two-hander. Creed allowed himself the grin. ‘Who’s a big boy then?’ he whispered. He took a picture, then another. But not another.

  Pretty boring, he told himself. Even a full-frontal would have been. Sick, but ultimately boring. Now if the man had had a female partner down there, and they were copulating on the grave, well that would be both interesting and saleable (although even the more salacious of the tabloids would have to do some heavy obscuring on the chosen print). Shame the pervert was a loner . . .

  The man was becoming more agitated. And oddly (well, more oddly) he appeared to be talking as he beat. Wait, not talking: praying. Or maybe chanting. The words wafting up the rise seemed to have some cadence to them, like a monotone litany, a meaningless bunch of words that could be heard in churches on any Sunday. If this was some obscure religious sect’s idea of a funeral ceremony, Creed wondered what a baptism would be like. Or a marriage. Could be the guy just liked music while he worked.

  Creed began to hum ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’, his voice a low tuneless rumble rather than an aria to the other man’s oratorio. But he quickly stopped – Creed, not the man down at the grave-side.

  This time the photographer’s frown was intense, his eyes almost squared in concentration. Something else was happening by Lily Neverless’ final resting place. The grass was waving.

  The grass was waving? Creed grimaced. Stupid! There’s a breeze out there, that’s all. The grass was blowing in the wind. The sicko was still enjoying himself – wait, the breeze couldn’t disturb the earth!

  Creed blinked. The ground couldn’t move like that, it couldn’t ripple . . . unless someo
ne underneath didn’t want to be there.

  He squeezed his eyes tight, then opened them again.

  At least the fresh mound of earth was still once more. Lily was obviously oblivious to the crazyman’s incantations, invocations, whatever his bloody dirging was meant to be. It was the earth around the grave that was moving, the grass beside the mound that was dancing.

  Yet the earth’s movement was subtle, almost indiscernible, hardly a movement at all if you stared hard, really hard, the motion caught only in soft focus, in the periphery; but the grass was swaying, no illusion there, although a slight wind could be causing that, except the blades were shifting in different directions, one patch leaning into its neighbour, that neighbour fighting back, tangling with its bedfellow. None of it was logical.

  The man’s exertions were becoming wooden in their intensity, as if reaching their peak. His voice was still not loud, but somehow its resonance had increased.

  Creed levelled the camera. The rippling ground could never be captured on a still and even if the definition was ultra-sharp, the grass would only reproduce as a confused mess; yet he felt compelled to get some record of this weird event, if only to prove to himself later that he hadn’t been hallucinating (what a straight photograph would establish he wasn’t quite sure, but it might be better than nothing at all).

  He first focused on the area before the kneeling man, the ground that appeared to be agitated; then he aimed for the back of the man’s head, using the thin tramlines of hair as a focusing point. That wasn’t as easy, for the head refused to rest. The man was fast reaching gratification.

  Creed’s index finger tightened on the shutter release. He had to steady both hands, for they had suddenly trembled – not from any sexual excitement in himself, rather because unease had gripped him, a sensation that was not quite fear but closely akin to it. Incomprehension was the largest part of that unease.

  The top of the man’s skull offered itself to the camera as his neck arched backwards. Creed’s finger began to press firmly. He held his breath. He kept his elbows tight against his ribs. He pressed down all the way and the shutter clicked . . .

  . . . as the man looked over his shoulder directly at him . . . Creed’s own head jerked away from the camera as though a wasp had flown into the lens. He stared back at the man . . .

  . . . whose mouth gaped, whose etched face darkened to red, whose whole body seemed to solidify.

  For one brief but infinite second, photographer and crazy watched each other.

  And in that brief but infinite second, Creed felt that the inside of his skull had been scoured, that whatever layers of consciousness protected the mind’s inner core had been scraped away to leave it raw and bleeding.

  He staggered away in shock, tripping over the camera stand behind him, falling to the floor with it, one elbow cracking hard against stone, the tripod clattering loudly in the hollowness of the tomb.

  Creed grunted at the pain from his arm and rolled protectively against one of the tiers. He quickly turned and searched the shadows for the camera that had fallen with the tripod, the one he had been using instinctively clutched to his chest. He rose to his knees, bewildered by what had occurred, and drew the thin metal legs of the tripod towards him. The second Nikon, the one fitted with the telephoto lens, looked okay, but it would require closer inspection to see if it had been damaged; it had gone down with a smack, or had that been his elbow?

  Creed hadn’t forgotten the man outside; he just hadn’t been the highest on his list of priorities. Now the photographer remembered those piercing, those scraping, eyes.

  He hauled himself up, his right arm numbed from wrist to shoulder, and tottered towards the light, determined to brazen it out. After all, it was the sicko who had been caught in a compromising situation.

  Nevertheless, Creed looked through the bars of the old door with some trepidation. But there was no one outside. The crazyman had gone. There was nothing out there now but the ornate, stone billboards of the dead.

  3

  So, that’s for starters.

  The burial of a famous but ancient actress, a madman (we think, so far) committing an act of gross indecency at her graveside, and our hero, Joe Creed, doing what he does best: thieving; stealing moments of other people’s lives.

  A mild enough beginning.

  Creed trudged through the cemetery hugging stepladder, tripod and camera bag, constantly glancing over his shoulder, this way and that, half expecting to discover the sicko peeping at him from behind a tree or headstone.

  There was a peculiar coldness at the back of his neck, the kind you get when you hear a truly creepy story based on truth, or when that odd noise downstairs wakes you in the hush of night. Being a natural pragmatist, Creed endeavoured to shrug off the sensation; that didn’t work, though, for his disquiet had a lot to do with a feeling of being observed.

  The dead love to tease, he told himself. You’ll be fine when you’re back among the living and the half-living. Anyway, it’s not every day you see a loony jerking off over a corpse. Maybe the degenerate was a life-long admirer and this was the closest he could get to screwing the old bag. Better than a signed photo, at least.

  But all that activity around the grave. Distraught grass, heaving earth. Maybe old Lil was getting her rocks off, too.

  He shuddered, his dark humour not really working. Creed was certain he had seen the disturbances; however, the rational side of his nature, weighed down by the already mentioned pragmatism, not to mention his natural cynicism, convinced him otherwise. Everyone has these moments, fuck-wit, he argued, times when things get unreal, when chemicals in the brain slosh around and create their own reality. Déjà vu was one of the effects, wasn’t it? Or some people might just faint away, while others might see pink elephants coming out of the walls (how much had he drunk over the past few weeks? he asked himself).

  Yeah, sure, he’d suffered a mental aberration – if that was the correct term for it – for a moment or two back there. Hell, he’d had an early start to the day, not like him at all. The old system hadn’t coped too well, that was it. Nothing serious, nothing weighty. A good breakfast-cum-lunch, a couple of stiffeners, and the universe would be right again.

  He continued to glance over his shoulder.

  Reaching the perimeter wall at last – and with some relief – Creed used the stepladder to scale its moderate heights. He sat astride the uneven brickwork and pulled the equipment up after him. With the ladder still dangling halfway, he paused and looked back across the gentle-sloping acres. That moment of eye-contact between himself and the crazy was still vivid in his mind: the scouring – no, the sandblasting – sensation, followed by the raw, aching emptiness was still present, although now mellowed. And there had been no cleansing, no catharsis, following the invasion, only the dullness of afterpain. Creed shivered before his own scepticism galloped to the rescue like the Fighting 7th; it was the man’s sheer grotesqueness which had turned him over, nothing more than that. So many lines and wrinkles, squalling around his sallow flesh like maelstroms charted on a weather map, the sunken cheeks, the staring, over-bright (the lustre of lust?) eyes, the thin black hair that seemed embedded in the scalp rather than growing upon it – Lily’s visitor was enough to give anyone a bad turn.

  Creed wondered if he were still out there, watching. Or had he been as shocked, albeit in a different way, as had Creed himself, and fled the scene? The dirty devil deserved to be embarrassed. Shit, he deserved to be shot!

  Creed hauled up the ladder the rest of the way, cheered a little by his own indignation, then clambered down the other side of the wall, glad to be out of the cemetery.

  He packed away his gear in the back of his poor man’s Land-Rover, climbed into the driving seat, lit another cigarette, and headed back to the city.

  First stop was Blackfriars where he dropped off three rolls of film at one of the few remaining daily newspapers close to the once (in)famous street of shame, Fleet Street. To protect the not-so-innoce
nt we’ll call the tabloid The Daily Dispatch (although The Daily Rumour, Gup, or Gospel might be as appropriate). Creed wasn’t a staff photographer, but he was on a loose kind of retainer, which meant his choicest snaps were exclusive to this particular journal and its Sunday sister (not forgetting colour supp.). Two of the rolls he handed in covered last night’s work, the third part of that morning’s. He chatted briefly with the picture editor and picked up two assignments for the day, the first at the Old Vic where yet another biography on the late Olivier was being launched, and the other that evening at Hamiltons, Mayfair, where Benson & Hedges were presenting their annual Gold Awards to the advertising industry. Boring stuff, but you never knew: someone might disgrace him– or herself.

  Next he went along to see the resident gossip page columnist, Antony Blythe, a dapper, bald-headed prat (in Creed’s considered opinion) who treated his team of four researchers with equal amounts of scathing contempt and gushing endearments. Today appeared to be a ‘contempt’ day – the youngest team member, her name Prunella, had apparently mislaid recent clippings of a well-known rock singer’s divorce celebrations – so Creed felt little inclination to linger. He didn’t feel up to bad-hearted banter with Blythe that morning; you see, the paparazzi were generally considered the lowest of the low by this particular scribe (‘hypocrisy’ is a Pickwickian word to some journalists – imaginary, therefore meaningless). Joseph Creed was considered to be lower than the lowest of the low by Blythe.