Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 101, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 610 & 611, March 1993

Fire is something we were all trained to look out for, and my first thought was that a member of the public might be trapped in the maze. I rushed in, calling for the attendant to turn on the house lights. I did not know the tomb very well and I could not waste time running around in the dark searching for a fire extinguisher.

I found Mummy on his back, his costume slashed and his feet smouldering. Smoke and shock had caused an asthma attack. He was in a bad way.

I put the fire out immediately. But it was difficult to get his head-piece off. I had to free my own hands first. My King Kong costume is not designed for dainty work and I wear huge furry gauntlets. We were in a confined space and Mummy is a big man, but I managed at last. His lips were turning mauve.

An asthmatic finds it difficult to breathe lying down. I should have propped him up straightaway. But his costume was stiff and bulky. Luckily an attendant arrived and together we managed to pull apart the intricate system of Velcro and zips that held it together.

Mummy was not badly hurt. His feet were scorched and that was about all. But I could not help thinking about what it must have been like for him trapped in his own tomb, imprisoned in his winding sheet.

The costume had been the provocation. Apparently the boys had wanted to unwrap Mummy. They had become angry and violent when they found they couldn’t.

As I say, what we all felt most keenly was the humiliation. Nosferatu put it best. “It’s the role reversal,” he said. “They aren’t supposed to frighten us. We’re supposed to frighten them.”

That made me think. “But it’s all an illusion,” I said.

“That’s right, K. K.,” said Nosferatu. “It’s all in their minds that we can frighten them, so they give us the power to frighten them. Once they stop playing their parts we can’t play ours, and shebang! — it’s all over.”

It was a conversation I kept remembering in the days that followed. A local newspaper got hold of Mummy’s story and from that time on our public seemed to change.

For one thing, there weren’t so many little kiddies. I suppose the parents and grandparents were afraid of exposing them to hooligans. And there were definitely more hooligans. Incident followed incident. Charley, the Fly, had his wings torn off. Godzilla’s tail was hacked to pieces with carpet knives. A gang of youths tried to electrocute the Bride of Frankenstein. We were being persecuted.

How strange, I thought. Because when you go back to most of the original stories, we monsters only became monstrous to defend ourselves against human persecution. King Kong is a good example. Kong was only trying to defend the tiny creature he loved and that’s why a lot of people leave the movie feeling sorry for him. This is because King Kong is not a horror film. It is a romance. Not many people understand that. But they feel it. And it was always an important aspect of my characterisation to combine King Kong’s raw power with tenderness. It wasn’t difficult: I think I’ve mentioned already that I love little kiddies.

No one could call Cherry the motherly type, but even she missed the children. “I don’t know, K.,” she said. “If I’ve got to be laughed at, I’d rather it was the little ones than these spotty jerks. They just don’t know how to have a good time without hurting someone.”

How right she was. Again, it happened in the evening. They came, five of them, just as my last visitors were leaving. They had hair so short you could see the tattoos on their skulls, and their trousers were tucked into army boots.

They ran in, beating down the rhododendrons with their sticks, yelling, “Where’s the freaking monkey?”

I stayed where I was on the climbing frame. I hoped my little family would escape quietly and go for help. But they stood there transfixed. There were three small children, I remember, all under seven. Their mother was with them, and the old man was probably her father. Very sweet, they had been, taking pictures of me holding the smallest child with the two older ones on either side. I didn’t want them to come to any harm.

Fortunately the hooligans hardly noticed them. They clubbed the base of the climbing frame with their sticks. They tried to shake me off.

“Hoo-hoo-hoo!” they screamed. “Come down and we’ll give you some nuts.” I didn’t move. They could shake that frame all night and it wouldn’t budge.

“We’ll give it some nuts all right,” they said. “If it won’t get down and fight like a monkey, we’ll drag it down.”

They swarmed up my frame. They swung on my ropes. I went from level to level to avoid them. If only the family had gone for help — if only the hooligans had been stupid — I might have got away with it.

But it only takes one with a bit of intelligence to organise the other four into a dangerous unit. He was small. He was neat. He had clear blue eyes that blazed with excitement. He was one of those lads who love a challenge. My agility on the climbing frame was a challenge. It became a competition he wanted to win.