The Vampire Walk

 

The Vampire Walk

Summer of 1981 the year we all left school and went our separate ways, a memorable summer for many reasons, lots of good music, end of school parties- a time when we entered what we thought to be the world of Sex and Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll, - the ‘big wide world’ our folks had always gone on about.

Our last year of school had been spent getting used to both worlds, sitting in the school common room in our free periods listening to the latest stuff on Radio 1, a varied mix in those days: Motorhead’s ‘Ace of Spades’, would thunder out one minute, the next being replaced by the romance of stuff like Dire Straits ’Romeo and Juliet’ ,  followed by the infectious happiness of ‘Happy Birthday’ by the Altered Images. We drank coffee, came in with hangovers, beer breath masked by Polos, we smoked in school too. Remember when smoking was the cool thing to do?

In the words of the song, to cop the cliché, we learned more from a three-minute record than we ever did at school.

By the way, the radio could not have been better; we were all selective in our musical tastes, back in the days of record collections, back in the day, when memories were made.

1981 was when everything started. When I say everything, I do not mean everything per se; I mean the business of the Vampire Walk in Victoria Park. Almost 40 years later, the park looks vastly different, trees I remember as saplings  caged in 'chicken wire' which we hung our jackets on when playing football, have thickened round the middle, as I have myself. I often wonder what happened to my old friends from those times, or at least the ones who survived, what paths their lives have taken, whether they were affected by the events of 1981, whether they just got on with their lives, whatever, my story is as follows:

At the time, I only had eyes for Karen Robertson, although I had no idea how to do anything about it. Karen seemed to have eyes only for the sporty guys in our year and I was anything but sporty.  I was thickset, long haired and wore specs almost as thick as Coke bottles. I did not think I stood much of a chance with her in a boyfriend /girlfriend way. She could be a pal though.

Karen was as they said back then, 'glamorous', and she  really made me laugh. She seemed a nice person, was good at sports and really gifted at English and Art. I was relatively shy and regularly took a beamer or got tongue tied when she as much as spoke to me. I sat in most nights listening to my records and reading books, as well as Sounds and NME. I wanted to be a writer and made up my own horror and sci –fi stories, I suppose my folks were right when they had called me a dreamer, but I did not care. I had acquired a typewriter at a jumble sale, a metallic green Ambassador which was in relatively good order. This was, I believed, my first step on the road to literary fame! Who knows, maybe Karen would notice me, too!

On one of the last days of school Andy Delaney, my best mate of the time, had suggested that everyone in the Common Room, eight of us, go down to the Victoria Park for the rest of the morning.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, and what could the teachers do if we were caught skiving anyway?

We left the school and made our way to the park, the girls with quarter bottles of vodka stashed in their bags, guys with some cans of Tennant’s lager and packs of Marlboro cigarettes.

Kirsten Hay, Jill Matthews, Sally Turner, Chrissie Sutherland, and Karen were the girls. Andy and Henry Howden were the guys, and of course me, Jamie Watson. I was really surprised when Chrissie came along. She was the 'golden girl' of school. She was Head Girl and had won colours for hockey and swimming; she got 8 straight A’s in her O’Grades and was expected to do as well in the Highers.  Maybe she was just being nice coming along, as Karen was her friend.

Kirsten and Jill were the most drunk in the place, they had been swigging neat vodka from quarter bottles. Sally, Chrissie, and Karen were trying to keep a sensible head as they intended going to back to school in the afternoon, they evidently had a class.

Andy, the would-be storyteller of the group suggested that we tell horror stories as we sat drinking and smoking  in the park .Firstly, Jill and Kirsten giggled their way through a bawdy tale , oiled by vodka, which I will not recount to you .Karen told her tale, in earnest tones , about a ghost who roamed the corridors of the older part of the school , his black gown flapping as he flew along  doing his haunting;  this ghost who was believed to be that of a former head teacher who committed suicide 100 years before our time. I applauded this and almost believed it; ok the fact that it was Karen’s did sway my opinion, just a wee bit.

I gave them my Stephen King –based-in- Aberdeen bit, which was totally unoriginal in its content, but featured a vampire stalking the corridors of the school in guise of a teacher, kind of like Salem’s Lot meets Aberdeen Grammar.

Andy, however, chilled us to the bone.

Living near the park, we had often heard local rumours of flashers, but his tales of the Vampire Walk were what grabbed our attention.

His story was about teenagers going missing in our city, most of who had been last seen at the Victoria Park or in the adjacent area. My mind was working overtime, I remembered that a guy in our year had gone missing and there were rumours in the school that he had been found outside the park one winter morning by a postman. Apparently, he had appeared to be asleep, his neck bearing what looked like bite marks. The postie had been interviewed by a local journalist, who being an avid fan of horror videos, was keen to add some Dracula type colour to his report saying that the postie had later seen a large bat flapping beneath the streetlamp by the park’s entrance.

I remembered my folks telling me not to go near the park after dark when I was in my early teens, but had never really questioned why, maybe this was the reason, if it was not just a story.

I remembered seeing a slogan scrawled on a garage door in marker pen about the same time.

 

Vicky Park, Vicky Park

Don’t go down there after dark!

 

Some budding graffiti artist had also sprayed a rough sketch of a cloaked vampire, like Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing in the horror movies next to the words of warning.

Being a would-be writer, I had often been told that I had an enquiring mind and simply had to know more about the Vampire Walk, whether fact or fiction. What made it even more intriguing for me was the fact that Lord Byron, famous former pupil of our school had evidently been one of the first people to write about vampires, so it was quite fitting that a so- called Vampire Walk would be located near the school.

We had all told our tales and time was getting on, the girls who had been drinking lurched in the direction of the park’s gate and Andy and I walked towards the site of the Vampire Walk, which lay on the North side of the place.

I asked Andy where he got the idea from; obviously, it was based on fact.

Well, obviously to me anyway.

Andy told me that his great uncle Adam, who evidently had been a writer of supernatural stories in the early part of this century, had written of the ‘Victoria Vampire’, a notorious figure in the Rosemount area of Aberdeen in the 1890’s.

'We have an old book of his at home, its falling to pieces, but must be worth a fortune', he had said, his family never allowed Andy to lend the book to friends, due to its deemed value to them.

I had no reason to dispute what Andy had said, I trusted what he said, and it certainly made for a good story.

I did not go back to school that afternoon; my folks would be out so I knew I would have the house to myself to play records to my heart’s content – at volume 10. Maybe I would try to add to my latest story, one about a car which was haunted by the spirit of its long dead owner, a murderer, was not working, so maybe a couple of hours in the afternoon would help, now that exams were over, I had time on my hands. Time enough to get the latest story licked into shape.

I went into my bedroom, took Motorhead’s ‘Bomber’ album from its sleeve, placed it the blue vinyl album on the turntable and turned up the volume enjoying the surging guitar intro to ‘Dead Men Tell No Tales ‘and lay on my bed looking up at the rock stars from the posters on the wall. I could play my music this loud until Mum came home from work.

That Thursday night, they found Chrissie in Vicky Park, dead or more accurately, ’un-dead’.

There was an announcement at the school assembly the following morning that Christine Sutherland had been found dead. One of the form teachers told us all that she had been one of the school’s most promising pupils whose young life had been cruelly snatched away from her before it had really started. The headmaster told of her plans to study Medicine and of her conditional acceptances at several universities, her boundless enthusiasm for sports of all kinds and her all-round popularity, and how she would be sadly missed by all the staff she was taught by and her friends and colleagues. The funeral itself was to be on Monday of next week. The school would close at 1pm as a mark of respect to Chrissie and to allow pupils to attend the funeral.

We all sleepwalked through that Friday as if the whole thing was a nightmare, we would all wake from when the first rays of morning light came through. Our attempts at carrying on as normal were in vain, at school and at home; I was monosyllabic when Mum and Dad attempted conversation at the kitchen table that evening. I just wanted to go to my room and shut out the world. Apart from my granddad’s death a couple of years before, I had no real experience of death, the fact that she had been one of my peer group at school hit home in a big way.

I lay on my bed that evening, unable to sleep; I switched on the radio to hear Tommy Vance on the “Friday Rock Show”. My favorite show, which usually ended my Friday evenings; tonight, he featured tracks from the new album by Rush, one of my favorite bands, ‘Permanent Waves’, which saw the band going in a more complex direction with keyboards and synthesizers, it sounded good to me at that time. He ran through some new bands who were in session tonight, none of whom made much of an impression. He ended the show with “a rock classic” ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper ‘by Blue Oyster Cult, which gave me goose pimples on my arms given Chrissie’s death. The lyrics said something about “the curtain flew, and he appeared”, just as I noticed my bedroom curtains flapping in the wind; this was accompanied by a tapping at the window.

I reckoned the stories of a couple of days before had got to me. My imagination was running riot as I envisaged a vampire version of Chrissie tapping at the window to get in, going “Jamie, let me in!”  Hopefully that wouldn't happen. This time, it was just a pigeon perched on the sill pecking at its own reflection.

I shut the window and drew the curtains, lay on my bed, thinking about the funeral and Chrissie.

Monday came along and the funeral hit home the full sadness of Chrissie’s death. An alleged attack in the park by person or persons unknown, and all the tears of her family, school friends, colleagues, and teachers, and still no culprit caught, a killer was still at large. The funeral was incredibly sad, I think even sadder than my grandad’s a year before. I managed to handle the church service alright, but the burial was different, Karen passed out at the graveside when the minister was going on about Chrissie’s body being committed to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, like a repetitive poem.  I was not particularly religious, but this haunted me a bit afterwards, - earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…resounded in my head for a few days after.

 

By Jamie Watson

Edited by Jenny Watson

March 2044

 

 

The Cave- Dougal’s Hotel, Aberdeen -circa mid-1980s

You might remember me. I was the one who sat at the bar trying to appear enigmatic, which I suppose we all did back then. I was always pissed out of my head and would sit there rambling on about Jim Morrison still being alive and writing poetry under a pseudonym. “He’s bald and has this massive beard that goes down to his waist, like a bohemian Santa Claus…….” This spiel would tail off into incoherence; you might recall that if you remember me.

I had round glasses like John Lennon and wore my hair tied back, admittedly I wore black, but leathers and not the uniform of the Goth, that most of the regulars favoured. Black Clothes, frills and frock coats white faces and a preoccupation with death, blood red lipstick, on the girls and some of the guys. It was a bit like in Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice, that is the book rather than the film, which had not yet been made.

This was in about 1984/85 when Goths were all the rage and ‘The Cave’ was the place to be. If you remember the Cave, you were not there, a bit like when folk say the same thing about the 60’s. ‘The Cave’ was a hotel function suite, which at night, with the lights down, became a magnet for the city’s lowlife and spoiled kids dressing up. The stage was illuminated for bands and the DJ’s console, but the place was otherwise in darkness.

Despite what I said earlier, I was there, and I remember most of it, though some of those nights remain fogged by alcohol. The night of the ‘murder’ was not; it stands out, head and shoulders above the others.

On that night, everything seemed to go wrong: there were several fights on the dance floor, someone pulled the cistern from the wall in the Gents, so when it was flushed, water spewed all over the floor. Accordingly, the place was swimming in piss and the carpets were stickier than usual.

It is probably a cliché to say it, but there was a tension in the air. The Goths sat there trying to look decadent, flicking through novels by Albert Camus, and William Burroughs, books they thought subversive, and drinking from pints of cider and blackcurrant as if last orders were soon, the habitués of the underbelly of 80’s decadence, seen through a fug of fag smoke and pints of snakebite.

The air was thick with the smell of dope as well as puke as punks pogoed to the Sex Pistols. Various Siouxsie clones floated by nicking pints from tables. There was a brief commotion at the bar where a few glasses and people went flying. The bouncers ran through, spoiling for a fight as always. A guy lay on the ground, blood coursing from his neck. He was dressed in the obligatory black and his make-up was enhanced dramatically by the crimson tide that was finding its way across his wasted face. He held a crucifix, a talisman which could not be pried from his hand by the paramedics. The telltale bite marks were on his throat, two pin pricks in pallid flesh.

The Cops came; it was a murder they said, in the flat tones of TV actors. I knew better. The music was turned off and the lights turned up. The next few days were full of headlines and deadlines. The Police line of inquiry had flat lined when the body of the guy disappeared from the mortuary, they could not charge anyone with murder of someone who is “undead”, could they?

 

Interlude #1 is a story /possible factual account from circa 1985

Based on a rambling, possibly drunken anecdote recounted to me by a guy called Mark P in the Prince of Wales Bar, sometime in 2009, he thrust a crumpled ball of paper at me which turned out to  be a scribbled down version of this  anecdote, which Jenny has kindly transcribed

(From the Jamie Watson Vampire Archive)