Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales

by Orrin Grey

  I can still hear you moving around in there, really quiet, and I really wish you’d talk to me. I don’t know what that game did to you, but I’ve gotta believe we can figure it out together. So this is what I’m going to do. If you can just stay quiet in there, and just try to remember what happened, try to remember that we’re friends, and that I’m going to help you, then as soon as it gets dark again I’ll open the door and I’ll let you out. Then maybe we can figure this out, you and me. At least, I hope we can.

  Author’s Notes: As someone who publishes in a lot of Lovecraft-themed anthologies, I generally try pretty hard not to write stories that actually take place in Lovecraft’s mythos. I go out of my way not to pepper my tales with mentions of Cthulhu, students of Miskatonic University, or copies of the Necronomicon. But when I was invited to write a story for The Children of Gla’aki, a tribute specifically to Ramsey Campbell’s contribution to said mythos, edited by Brian M. Sammons and Glynn Owen Barrass, I couldn’t really see a way to avoid it, so instead I leaned in, and leaned in hard.

  I’m not sure where the idea to recast the plot of Campbell’s “The Inhabitant of the Lake” as a side-scrolling arcade game came from, besides that “Gla’aki” just sounds like something from an old space shooter. The trailer park where the two boys live and the convenience store where they play are both inspired by real places from my childhood, and we really did go up there to play Street Fighter II pretty frequently.

  Baron von Werewolf Presents: Frankenstein Against the Phantom Planet

  Baron von Werewolf comes out to a clap of thunder, like he always does, and the painted lightning bolt outside the window flickers behind him. You can tell that it’s painted, that it’s fake, but that doesn’t matter, doesn’t affect how much you believe in it.

  “I’ve got a special treat for you tonight, kids,” Baron von Werewolf says as he walks into the library, with its candelabras and its wall of books and the window overlooking the painting of a graveyard, complete with skeletal trees that claw at the cloudy sky. He always says “tonight,” even though when you watch him it’s always Saturday afternoon. You don’t know why he says “tonight;” if it really is night where he is, or if he just says it because it sounds better than “this afternoon.” It could be night where he is. You learned about time zones in school; maybe he lives a long ways away. Or maybe it’s always night wherever he is, like on the dark side of the moon.

  He walks over to the big wall of books—they’re all what your mom calls “foe leather,” in reds and greens and blues—and pulls one down. Today’s book is purple, and the camera zooms in as Baron von Werewolf strokes his long black nails along the cover, past a silver picture of a planet surrounded by stars.

  Every time you watch him, he’s dressed the same way, in a smoking jacket and cravat—you saw them in so many movies that you asked your mom what they were called—and a top hat that he always sets aside on the desk before running a long-fingered hand through his mane of wavy brown hair, hair that seems to crawl down his head to become the beard that covers much of his face. He’s got an eye patch over his right eye, something he never mentions, though you’ve occasionally noticed his hand straying to it, like maybe it itches. His other eye is a dark spot that stares out from all that hair, catching the light from the big cameras that you can’t see but that let you see him.

  You know that it’s a TV show, even though your mom, concerned, once asked you if you knew that movies weren’t real. She’d been reading something in the paper about kids and TV violence. Of course you know that it’s just a show, that the movies aren’t real. It wouldn’t make any sense otherwise. Baron von Werewolf shows you the movies, after all, talks to you about them and how they were made. You recognize actors, sometimes, from one movie to another. That couldn’t happen if the movies were real.

  But Baron von Werewolf is real. Oh, not a real werewolf, probably, and not in a real castle, you can tell that much. But he’s a real person somewhere. A person who gets dressed up and shows you monsters. That’s the only reality that matters.

  Normally, Baron von Werewolf would sit down behind the desk, open the book, and start to tell you about today’s movie, but this time he paces in front of the desk instead, his hand resting on the book, looking down at it, like your mom sometimes does when she forgets what she’s doing in the middle of cooking. “I know that you kids have all seen King Kong,” Baron von Werewolf says when he’s walked back across the length of the library. You smile and nod, even though he can’t see you. You’ve seen King Kong, and you’ve also seen King Kong vs. Godzilla, which you liked better because it was in color and had Godzilla, who is cooler than King Kong.

  “Well, King Kong has always been a favorite of mine,” Baron von Werewolf continues. He seems a little sad, and you kind of feel bad for him, which is a weird feeling to have. “It was made by a man named Willis O’Brien, and Mr. O’Brien had a dream after he finished it. He wanted to make a sequel, not the one that actually got made, but one where King Kong fought Frankenstein’s monster.”

  Now that sounds pretty cool, but also kinda dumb, because Frankenstein’s monster wouldn’t last long, would he? He’s just the size of a regular guy, while King Kong is huge. But then again, Godzilla is a lot bigger than King Kong, but they were about the same size when they fought, too…

  “He drew up a bunch of sketches and tried to get the movie studios to let him make his movie, but nobody wanted to put the money behind it.” Here, Baron von Werewolf rubs his hairy pointer finger and thumb together, making you chuckle. “His efforts to get his movie made eventually led to King Kong vs. Godzilla,” and you smile again, because you were just thinking about that. “But Willis O’Brien’s project never happened. However, that’s not the end of our story…”

  You love it when Baron von Werewolf does that, when he seems like he’s coming to the end of something, but then it turns out that it was just a…what does your mom call it…a prologue?

  “You see, Mr. O’Brien had a protégé, that is, an assistant, someone who helped him out but also learned from him, the way you kids learn from your teachers at school. Actually, he had several, and one of them was someone you kids will probably recognize—Ray Harryhausen.” You do recognize Harryhausen’s name. You’ve seen Jason and the Argonauts and 7th Voyage of Sinbad and that weird one where Sinbad fought a statue with a bunch of arms and a centaur with only one eye.

  “But Mr. Harryhausen isn’t who we’re here to talk about tonight either, kids. Instead, Mr. O’Brien had another, lesser known protégé, a young woman from Mexico City who came to Hollywood and wanted to be a stop motion animator, just like O’Brien and Harryhausen. You all remember what stop motion is, right?” You do, because Baron von Werewolf has talked about it before. He says that the movie people make it happen by repositioning tiny models over and over again. Like when you play with your action figures, but very, very slowly. Then, when they play all the pictures together really fast, it looks like the models are moving.

  “If any of you have ever seen Son of Kong,” Baron von Werewolf continues, “some people say that she worked on the cave dinosaur and the giant statue in that movie, though she’s not officially credited. Her name was Gabriela Moreno, and her only actual credit is tonight’s film, which she wrote, directed, produced, and created the special effects for. There’s some question as to how she got the financing, and there are stories that say that she turned to…unorthodox sources.”

  Baron von Werewolf seems to realize suddenly that he’s still standing, and he steps forward in front of the desk, turns more toward the camera, the book still closed in his hands, pressed between his palms. “Tonight’s movie was shot in Mexico, and released to a handful of theaters in 1967, but it disappeared from circulation almost immediately afterward, and is considered to have been lost. Some people claim that it never existed at all, but I saw it once, at a tiny theatre that was about to close down. When I decided to track the movie down, I tried to find the owner of that old theatre
, but he had disappeared, and I soon learned why. It seems that getting a copy of tonight’s film requires that you do what you kids might think of as a favor in return, and it’s got some pretty steep penalties. In spite of that, I’ve got a copy, just one copy, which I’m going to show to all of you tonight.”

  Once again, you find yourself squirming a little bit. Baron von Werewolf is acting weird, like your mom sometimes does when a stranger asks about your dad. Baron von Werewolf has always seemed real to you, but the way your teacher seems real. He’s never seemed like you, or like your mom, but today he does. “I’ve read your letters, and I know that you kids out there are the best fans that someone like me could ever have,” he says, and you smile, because you’ve written him lots of letters, with your own ideas for monster movies and drawings of what you think the posters should look like, and it’s nice to think that maybe he’s talking about you. “This is an important movie to me, kids, and I had to agree to pay a high price to get it, so I want you to give it a chance, even if you find it a little bit confusing at first, okay?”

  You smile, and nod, and scoot closer to the TV as Baron von Werewolf fades out and the movie begins…

  It opens with some words in white on a black screen, first in another language that you guess is maybe Spanish, and then underneath that in English: In Justice for Willis O’Brien.

  Those words fade out and are replaced by the title, which makes you sit up a little bit straighter and put your bowl of cereal aside, because it sounds awesome.

  FRANKENSTEIN AGAINST THE PHANTOM PLANET

  There aren’t any credits or anything like there would normally be, and the title fades out and is replaced by a picture of a big radio tower that looks kind of like the water tower on the edge of town. The radio tower is sending out little animated lightning bolts while an announcer delivers a fake news broadcast about a comet that is going to pass near earth. The picture is black and white, and the news broadcast seems to cut in and out, so you miss bits of it, but you get the gist. It’s a really big comet, and one that “doesn’t show up on normal instruments.” The announcer continues that scientists and military forces are encouraging people not to panic and to “stay in your homes, as the proximity of the comet could lead to unexpected atmospheric disturbances.”

  Then that picture fades out, too, and is gradually replaced with the inside of a courtroom. Outside the windows, you can see what is clearly a painted backdrop of New York City. You’re disappointed to see that this part is in black and white, too. You don’t normally like the black and white movies as much as the color ones, and you consider getting up and leaving, or changing the channel, but then you remember Baron von Werewolf saying how this movie was special, and how you were the best fans in the world, and you remember how it felt like he was talking right to you, so you settle back down to watch.

  The people in the courtroom all look pretty much alike, but one guy is standing up in front, facing the judge, while everyone else sits down. The judge is talking, but the camera gradually zooms in on the guy, instead. He has his arms behind his back, and his chin up, looking very brave, while the judge refers to him as “Doctor” and says how he has been found guilty of “willfully creating the monstrosity that has laid such waste to our fair city.” The judge goes on to say that the Doctor will be remitted to Devil’s Island—a name that you’ve heard before in old movies, so you know that it’s a prison—but that since his creation can “by no earthly weapon be destroyed,” other plans have “perforce” been made.

  You start to get up to get a pencil and a piece of paper so you can write down that word, “perforce,” and ask your mom what it means later, but then the scene changes again, and what it changes to stops you in your tracks. It’s a big open area, like a town square, and there are dozens of people, maybe hundreds all crowded around. In the center of the square is an enormous throne made of metal girders, and sitting on it is a giant. For just one moment it looks like a statue, but then it moves, straining against the chains that hold it down.

  Even though the judge never said the Doctor’s full name, you know who he is, just as surely as you now know what this is: the Frankenstein monster, even though it doesn’t look much like any of the costumes of the monster that you’ve seen at Halloween, or the way the monster looked in any of the old movies. It’s huge, for one thing, every bit as big as King Kong ever was, making the idea of them fighting suddenly not seem so silly. But it also doesn’t look like Boris Karloff, even under a lot of makeup. There are no bolts in its neck or stitches across its head. Even moving around it still looks like a statue, but one that hasn’t been carved very well, its skin a sort of midway point between stone and an elephant’s hide. Its shoulders slope, and its arms are long enough that they would hang down to its knees, if it were standing up instead of chained to a chair. Its struggles have the same uneven, jerky motions as King Kong and the skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts and the cyclops in Sinbad, so you know that it’s stop motion.

  Once you drag your attention away from the monster in the throne, you notice two things. The first is that there’s a comet in the painted sky in the background. It isn’t moving, because it’s just a painting, but it could also be because it’s very far away and so it doesn’t look like it’s moving. The moon and stars are constantly moving through the sky, you know that from school, but you usually can’t tell they’re moving just to look at them.

  The second thing you notice is that there is a crane or something lowering a rocket ship down over the throne where the Frankenstein monster is sitting. Bit by bit the rocket covers the monster, until he is completely hidden from view and with a metallic clank the rocket locks into place.

  The next thing you see is the rocket ship flying through space toward the comet. The comet is huge, and as the rocket ship approaches it, you can see designs on its surface that might be drawings of buildings or trees or something, like maybe someone had painted the comet over an old map. Then the rocket strikes the comet and the screen goes black.

  THE PHANTOM PLANET

  When the picture fades back in, there’s been a change, a drastic one. The movie is in color now! And not just color, but vivid, candy-bright color. It reminds you of the colors in Planet of the Vampires, which Baron von Werewolf showed you one time. Just like in Planet of the Vampires, the weird colors are part of an alien world—the comet, obviously, which must also be the Phantom Planet—a world of black dirt and strange plants where the rocket ship has crash landed. There are bright pink and purple bushes, and mushrooms that reach taller than trees and seem to be lit from inside.

  From out of the wrecked rocket comes the Frankenstein monster, and he is the only part of the movie that still seems to be in black and white. You guess maybe that’s just what color he is, all shades of gray, like stone or an elephant after all. He moves sort of like an elephant, too, like his arms and legs are heavy.

  He looks around, taking in the surface of the Phantom Planet as if maybe he’s never seen color before, either. You sort of like that idea; that earth is all in black-and-white, but that the Phantom Planet is all the colors of a box of crayons. That seems right somehow.

  As the Frankenstein monster starts to move away from the rocket ship, something else comes from off the edge of the screen. For a second you think they’re people, but they’re definitely not. Smaller than the Frankenstein monster, but still not as small as the people were in the earlier shot, they appear to be robots with four mechanical legs and little short arms that are holding long sticks with tuning forks on the ends. They don’t really have bodies, just legs and arms jutting out of a square box, and then on top of that a clear dome through which you can see their glowing brains. The way they move lets you know that they’re stop motion, too.

  They scuttle like boxy crabs onto the screen. Two of them, then three, four, until they surround the Frankenstein monster, trapping him against the wreckage of the rocket that brought him here. They make some kind of noise. Clicking, and these sounds lik
e the beep at the end of an answering machine, only shorter, as they jab at the Frankenstein monster with their long sticks. Every time one of the tuning forks touches him, there’s a little spark of blue electricity, and he draws back, seeming more startled than hurt.

  At first he just tries to back away, holding up his big arms so that the tuning forks shock his elbows and forearms instead of his torso. Finally he roars, lashing out and smashing one of the little robots apart. Bits of metal go flying everywhere, the glass dome shatters, and you see the thing that you thought was the robot’s brain crawling away, dragged by a bunch of narrow tendrils. It doesn’t get far, however, before the Frankenstein monster brings one of his big elephant feet down and smooshes it, leaving behind something that looks a lot like grape jelly.

  It seems like the Frankenstein monster is going to make short work of the alien robots—you realize that you’ve been thinking of them as Martians, which isn’t right, since they’re not on Mars, they’re on the Phantom Planet. So…Phantomites? But then more Phantomites show up, rolling out this new thing. It looks sort of like a wagon, but it has big knobby wheels, and in the middle of it is a ball with a ring around it, like a flying saucer, or like Saturn seen from the side. As the other Phantomites try to hold the Frankenstein monster off with their long sticks, the ones pushing the wagon operate a lever on it with their short pincer arms, and the ball shoots off into the air. It only goes up a little ways, and then it hovers in front of Frankenstein’s monster at about eye level, suspended on a wire that you can sometimes see against the black backdrop.

  The ball part pulses red, then blue, then green, then red again. The Frankenstein monster stops struggling and just stands there, his long arms dangling limp at his sides, and you know that the ball has hypnotized him somehow! You saw somebody hypnotize Vincent Price like that once, with a multi-colored lamp that turned.