Peter Saxon - The Torturer (Mayflower-Dell, Dec. 1966)
More film-crew-in-peril fun and games.
This time the location is the mud flats and lagoons of the Marismas in Spain, which makes a welcome change from Transylvania. The
Wonder Films team have flown out with not much idea of what they intend shooting, but you get the feeling that's about to change as they've just discovered a deserted castle with it's own satellite ghost village nearby. This seems to have been abandoned in a hurry. "They were probably running from the plague" opines one cheerless soul.
Chapter 2 is a mini-soap opera in which we learn of the convoluted relationships between the main players. Max Grant, the director, is onto his fifth marriage, this one to charm-free zone Petronella who devotes her life to making his a misery. She's rumoured to have slept with everybody, ever, not because she particularly enjoys sex, but more to further demoralise her husband.
Buggie driver #1 is Heimie. He detests Petronella, but wouldn't say no.
Gela is Max's girl Friday, secretary, general factotum. A former Miss World contestant, she is besotted with Max who hardly notices she exists. The same cannot be said for buggie driver #2, lady killer Liam O'Hagan, a self-styled Don Juan but a rapist to the rest of us. Niko Kovacs (ace lensman), "The Englishman" (screenwriter) and Francisco "Fattie" Perez (backer) are all disgruntled with their lot. Fattie consoles himself by lusting after Petronella.
So, they've decided on the Castle as their premier location, and Max and his boys have just discovered a skeleton. The only "Torturer" we've met so far is Petronella, but I've just had a double-check of the blurb, and the real one's due to introduce himself shortly.
****
Moving along at breakneck speed. Nice castle. It's got expansive dungeons, a booby-trapped staircase opening onto a pit of spikes, a sealed room containing ... well, "Castledoom" wasn't as original as I thought.
There's a portrait hanging in the banquet hall, and everybody comments on how evil the subject looks. His lookalike walks in on them, explaining that he's the old guy's "descendant", the modern-day Conde DelMorte. A likely story! Petronella is immediatly smitten, and they're soon dancing and making small talk ("Quetzalcoatl. Now his worshippers had real experience" enthuses the Count).
Come the following day, and we're already getting through crew members at an alarming rate. As he presides over the mutilation of one luckless wretch, the fiend explains:
"The infliction of torture, when carried out in the proper way, takes from the victim some of his life force and transmutes it into the Torturer." So, he's a vampire by any other name, feeding on inflicting pain as opposed to drinking blood.
Fortunately, John, "The Englishman", seems to have come across this sort of thing before (!), so it's not all doom and gloom.
But there's only 40 pages to go!
****
Mega Spoiler Alert but I can't help myself The crew now realise they're in deadly peril and make as if to leave the Castle, but their buggies have been sabotaged. Petronella is delighted and finds the Count's talk of previous sadistic murders and the sacrifice of his wife a real turn on, but "you mustn't identify too closely with a man who is dead" she admonishes old corpse-face. 20 pages to go and it's looking dicey for our heroes, so "The Englishman" has probably picked the right moment to deliver his bombshell:
"There is something that you do not know about me, Max, that very few know'
He paused, and his next words dropped dramatically into a pool of silence.
"I'm an ordained priest of God, Max Grant, a priest."That's handy!
Happily, there's a ruined chapel in the village too - funny how we didn't notice it before - so that kind of evens things up. What a terrific book!