Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales

by Orrin Grey

  In a trance, the Frankenstein monster follows the Phantomites across the black desert filled with the strange, unearthly plants. They pass an odd lizard with bulging eyes and only two webbed feet that drags itself off a rock and disappears as they approach, and another time a bunch of things that look like purple spiders but with all their legs shoved to the back scuttle out of the path in front of them. Through the air, odd things like round bats with four wings flap, and everything is some color that animals aren’t on earth, like the drawings that younger kids sometimes color at school.

  After walking for a while, the Phantomites and Frankenstein’s monster reach a building. It looks like it was once someplace grand; a palace or something, with a wall around it, and a huge dome. But it has fallen into disrepair, and now vines grow up it that sprout bright flowers in colors you’d have to dig through your crayon box to name. As you watch, the flowers open and close, like mouths.

  Inside, the dome is cracked open, so that the black sky shows through on the other side, and there are lots more Phantomites, some of them bigger than others, their robot suits almost as large as the Frankenstein monster himself. In the background you can see hundreds more, painted so they don’t move, all gathered around to watch, like in a colosseum in old gladiator movies. In the middle of the building there is a hole in the ground, and above that a huge mechanical thing with four screens on it, like giant TVs.

  The Phantomites get out of the way as Frankenstein’s monster walks forward, following the glowing ball until it passes over the pit, and you leap up to say something, even though you know he can’t hear you, as Frankenstein’s monster steps over the lip of the pit and then he’s falling, falling, falling.

  He hits the bottom like a dropped toy and for a moment lies in a heap before slowly rising, shaking his head. You can tell from the way he moves that he’s no longer in a trance, and you creep closer to the TV, wondering what the Phantomites want with him, and what he’s going to find down in this hole, but then, all of a sudden, the picture cuts to a commercial.

  You get up to refill your cereal, and when you get back Baron von Werewolf is back on the TV. He’s saying something about the next sequence of the movie, how it’s pretty scary, so you may want to close your eyes through some parts of it. He says that there was once a “spider pit” sequence in the original King Kong, but that it got cut out of the movie for being too scary, and how he’s pretty sure some of what you’ll see in the next part of the movie is actually left over from that.

  Then he says, smiling just a little, “Well, we warned you,” and the movie starts back up.

  When it does, it seems like maybe something has been missed, because it’s not quite where it was before. Frankenstein’s monster is already up, and he’s in a different part of the cave, one where it’s all lit in purples and greens, and big glowing crystals stick up out of the ground and out of the walls. He’s also being surrounded, gradually, by all sorts of weird creatures.

  There’s a thing that looks like a tick, but instead of legs it has tentacles; there are giant skeletal crabs, and spiders with big bent legs, and others, huge and hairy, that are just shadows in the background. All of them are moving at once, converging on Frankenstein’s monster. From behind him a shadow rises up, a big worm thing with arms and bulging eyes that glow. It grapples with the Frankenstein monster and manages to wrestle him to the ground as the other creatures close in.

  The scene shifts, and you’re seeing the Phantomites up above, watching all this on the four big TVs suspended over the pit. The thing on the bottom of the TVs is projecting a beam of light down into the pit, and you guess maybe recording what’s going on or something, so that they’re watching it, just like you are. But you’re rooting for the Frankenstein monster, while you’re pretty sure they’re not.

  On the TV screens, you can see Frankenstein’s monster struggle back to his feet, raising the wriggling worm thing up into the air and bringing it down onto his knee, like you’ve seen wrestlers do. The worm twitches a few times, and then is still, the light going out of its buggy eyes.

  After that the other creatures sort of draw back, and the Frankenstein monster starts to make his clompy way across the floor of the cave. The various monsters get out of his way, scuttling back into holes and stuff, but then suddenly it becomes clear that maybe it’s not him they’re avoiding, as something else comes out of a really big hole in the side of the cavern. At first all you can see are its eyes, which come on like Christmas lights, glowing bright blue. But then the rest of it follows. A big lizardy thing, somewhere between a brontosaurus and an alligator, but where the other lizards you’ve seen so far on the Phantom Planet only had two legs, this one has six, and a long snaky tail. The eyes pop out of its head like those plastic bubbles that toys come out of quarter machines in, and its snout is long and toothy.

  It charges the Frankenstein monster, its mouth open wide to bite, and latches onto his forearm. They wrestle around for a bit, with first the dragon—for so you immediately think of it—and then the Frankenstein monster getting the upper hand. At one point he wrestles its body to the ground and sits astride it, pounding on its head with his huge fist while it lashes its tail and continues to bite him.

  Finally, the dragon rears up onto its back two pairs of legs and rams the Frankenstein monster with its head and its front feet, knocking him to the ground, where he lays still and doesn’t move. You slide forward again, closer to the TV, your cereal forgotten. You know that this can’t be where the Frankenstein monster dies, that would be a terrible movie, just as you know that he is bound to die, because the monster always dies, no matter how much you want him to live.

  The dragon stomps around the body twice, waving its head and roaring, and then it starts to move away, back into the dark cave, when you see the hand of the monster twitch. With a sudden movement, he grabs the dragon’s tail, and the next thing you know the Frankenstein monster is on his feet, hauling the dragon back toward him hand-over-hand, like he’s playing tug-of-war.

  When the dragon gets close enough it circles back around to bite again, but the Frankenstein monster punches it on the head and then grabs it in a headlock, dragging it backward until you hear the snap of its neck and it lies still, at the monster’s feet. Not content to let it make a comeback like he did, the Frankenstein monster brings his foot down on its neck and keeps pushing until it goes all the way through.

  The film seems to skip a bit here, and suddenly the Frankenstein monster is climbing the wall of the cavern, presumably climbing out of the pit and up to where the Phantomites are waiting. And you’re eager to see him get to them, to see him smash them up for tricking him into the pit. But he doesn’t make it all the way up, not yet. Instead, he finds a ledge, and on it a smaller tunnel, which he goes through.

  On the other side, the tunnel opens out, and you see maybe the weirdest thing you’ve seen in the movie so far, which is saying something. The room that Frankenstein’s monster comes into is filled with machines that don’t seem to make a whole lot of sense. Lots of big pipes, lots of glass cylinders filled with colored liquids that bubble and rise and fall. And at all of the machines are mushroom people.

  Baron von Werewolf once showed you a movie called Attack of the Mushroom People, and the mushroom people in it looked almost just like these, although, like everything else in Frankenstein Against the Phantom Planet, these are more brightly colored and seem to glow faintly. They stand at every machine, making a constant sort of murmuring, purring noise—like the tribbles in that one episode of Star Trek—and operating levers and turning knobs.

  When the Frankenstein monster walks into the room, the closest mushroom people start to run away, or waddle away, since that’s about all they can do, but then the weird little collars they wear around what would be their necks if they were regular people light up and they stop suddenly, and then trudge back to their places at the machines. The light-up collars remind you of the ball that hypnotized Frankenstein’s monster, and you real
ize that the fungus—you learned that word in school—people are slaves to the Phantomites above, and you can tell that the Frankenstein monster realizes it, too. Given what you know about the story of Frankenstein, you don’t think that the monster will take very kindly to things being slaves.

  You don’t seem to be wrong, either, as the film jumps again and in the next scene the Frankenstein monster is above ground, inside the huge dome from before, smashing Phantomites. They fire bolts of lightning at him from things that look like glass balls on top of pyramids, but they hardly slow him down. Then, he knocks down the wall of the dome, and from the outside you can see the model building falling apart, no doubt crushing the Phantomites.

  The big fight comes when the Phantomites send a huge version of themselves—one with bigger pincer arms than the others, and an enormous translucent brain inside a glass shell—to fight the Frankenstein monster. The two grapple, and it looks like the Frankenstein monster is done for, as the other Phantomites crowd in and distract him by zapping him with the tuning forks on the end of sticks that they had earlier. But then the fungus people come streaming up out from the underground somewhere, and they start to fight the smaller Phantomites, freeing up the Frankenstein monster to concentrate on the big one.

  He manages to tear off one of its pincer arms, and then he uses it to crack the glass dome that encases the actual Phantomite brain thingy. After that, he pushes the whole thing over into the same pit that the Phantomites tricked him into earlier. You don’t see what happens to it when it falls, but you know that it can’t be very good.

  The movie ends abruptly, with Frankenstein’s monster sitting on a big throne, like he was at the beginning. This time, though, there are no chains, and he’s surrounded not by an angry mob but by the fungus people, their mushroom heads all bowed. As the screen fades out, it is replaced one last time by titles:

  FRANKENSTEIN, KING OF THE PHANTOM PLANET

  After that there’s a commercial, and when Baron von Werewolf comes back on he’s smiling, but he also seems nervous, his good eye glancing around a lot rather than looking right at the camera, and therefore at you. The book is lying on the desk now, and he’s pacing in front of it. Not for effect, like he sometimes does, but just pacing, like someone waiting to be called into the principal’s office.

  “What did you think of that, kids?” he asks, again seeming to force his smile. “I know that it’s a little shorter than some of the other things we’ve seen on here, and I’ve got more in store for you, so don’t change the channel…”

  He’s probably going to say more, you figure he is, but instead he stops his pacing. He’s not looking at the camera, but he’s also not looking at what’s behind him, where the camera is pointing. You are, though. It seems like the library has gotten darker, without you really noticing, and most of that dark seems to be gathered in one corner, the corner directly opposite the camera.

  In fact, that corner has gotten so dark that you can’t see it anymore. The painted stones of the castle wall are gone, and the candles in the nearest candelabra have started to dim, their flames suddenly burning blue. Baron von Werewolf still isn’t looking in that direction, he’s staring off the screen, his arm half-raised, and you can see his breath in the air all of a sudden, like when you go outside on a very cold day.

  The shadow in the corner is getting darker yet, thicker, and it seems like it’s getting more solid, somehow. At the edges, it looks almost tattered, like instead of a shadow it’s a bunch of dark cloth, or black spider webs. Somewhere up high in the dark, too high for a person’s head, unless they were standing on a ladder, you notice that there are two eyes. Or maybe they’re not eyes, though it’s the first thing you think to call them, because of how they’re spaced apart. They don’t really look like eyes, though. They look like metal, or maybe like glass, with something moving on the other side of them. It’s one of the neatest effects you ever saw.

  “No,” Baron von Werewolf says, very quietly, still not looking into the shadow that’s getting thicker by the minute. “Please. Not in front of the kids?”

  The shadow reaches out an arm, a sleeve of darkness with just the echo of fingers jutting from the cuff, and then the picture is gone, replaced by a piercing whine and a bunch of colored bars, like when they test the Emergency Broadcast System.

  You stare at the colored bars for a while, and then they’re replaced by a commercial, and then the news, which never shows at this time on Saturday afternoon. Finally, you turn the TV off.

  You’re worried about Baron von Werewolf at first, but then you remember that it’s just a show, like your mom is always saying. What you saw had to be a special effect, like the stop motion in the Frankenstein movie. They wouldn’t have put it on TV otherwise, right? So instead of worrying, you go outside, under the bright blue September sky, with just a handful of clouds overhead. Under your feet the yard is full of dead leaves and the branches of the tree are already almost bare.

  You know that the movies are fake, but you also know that they teach you something real. Just as real as the things your mom tells you, or the things you learn in school. How to look past what’s actually there and see instead what might be. That’s what you’re thinking about, as you look up at the sky.

  You learned about space in school, too. How just because you can’t see it when it’s daytime, doesn’t mean that it isn’t there. You know that just beyond the blue, blue sky, stars and phantom planets are tumbling through the dark, so you stand there in the yard, looking up, past what you can see, and try to imagine what might be waiting on the other side.

  for Willis O’Brien and James Whale,

  and for all the horror hosts everywhere

  past, present, and (hopefully) future.

  Author’s Notes: Creating a horror host named Baron von Werewolf is something that I’ve been talking about doing for years. I think the name probably comes from me misremembering the title of the old anthology horror comic series Baron Weirwulf’s Haunted Library.

  The structure of using a horror host as a framing device for a story that then actually becomes the crux of the story’s climax is probably borrowed from the Tom Noonan portions of the 2005 Ti West film The Roost, while the details are provided by my own memories of watching monster movies on Saturday mornings as a kid.

  What about the movie that Baron von Werewolf is presenting? Frankenstein Against the Phantom Planet is inspired by my favorite movie that never got made, Willis O’Brien’s proposed King Kong vs. Frankenstein. When Ross Lockhart invited me to submit something for his Frankenstein-themed anthology Eternal Frankenstein, I was struck by the daunting notion of trying to tell a Frankenstein story that hadn’t been told a million times before. So instead of going to the Mary Shelley novel or the great James Whale film as my source material, I looked up the sketches Willis O’Brien had done to try to sell King Kong vs. Frankenstein. That giant homunculus became my version of Frankenstein’s creation, and because I had no budgetary limitations, I transposed him into a purely stop-motion world of monsters and weirdness of the kind I would have loved to see O’Brien or his protégé Ray Harryhausen turned loose in.

  The Cult

  of Headless Men

  Kirby Marsh pulled up in a devil-red Alfa Romeo Spider because he was Kirby Goddamn Marsh, that’s why. That the car was on loan from an actor friend who kept a place in London due to the fact that Kirby was, presently, as his British acquaintances would put it, skint, was beside the point.

  For now, his creditors were an ocean away and, if Angela did her job and kept those lovely lips of hers buttoned, they wouldn’t have any idea that Kirby had decided to accept an invitation from an old friend to spend a few weeks in England.

  The house he pulled up in front of was the kind of place that would normally have been a matte painting in one of his pictures—the British ancestral manor, through and through, with a hexagonal tower to one side of the broad front door, and a fountain in the middle of the drive peopled by the usual malforme
d fish, like decorations from the corners of old maps. “Here there be monsters,” he said to himself as he stepped out of the Spider and onto the gravel drive.

  He had seen houses just like this in some of his competitors’ films—the ones that were coming out of the British Isles today, from companies like Hammer and their ilk now that the all-but-official ban on horror films in Britain had been lifted following the war. Yes indeed, if he was going to try to horn in on the growing market for British shockers, this certainly seemed the house to do it in. Hopefully his old friend was on the same page. And if he wasn’t, well, Kirby hadn’t made almost forty movies in ten years by not being persuasive.

  As if summoned by Kirby’s cogitations, Sir Joseph Drake, as of his father’s death a few months prior now the Eighth—or was it Ninth?—Lord Whitley, stepped out of the front doors of Whitley Manor, which, Kirby had to admit, somewhat spoiled the illusion. Not that Drake wasn’t a fine specimen of English aristocracy. He didn’t seem to have aged a day in the, what, eleven, twelve years it had been since they last met. His hair was still dark and full, and he had grown out a beard, practically a Van Dyke, immaculately kept.

  Drake’s suit was undoubtedly more expensive than Kirby’s, who had gone as natty as he felt comfortable, trying to look less the Ugly American, though his shirt collar was still a bright paisley and he eschewed the tie that Drake was sporting. In one glance, Kirby had cast his old friend as a dashing, charismatic warlock, though from Kirby’s recollections, Drake was actually as congenial as you’d like, and meek as a kitten in most situations.