Page 107: The Mafiosi using his grandma’s old crucifix to repel Satan himself is not going to fly. Either use a more powerful religious artifact or excise this scene entirely.
General: Demons don’t use swear words like “Jesus” or “Goddamn.” Remove any instance where these words appear.
Everything else looks fine. Please fix these issues and resubmit for approval.
Salazar flopped the script unceremoniously onto the “done” pile next to his desk, snuck a glance at his watch, and let out a long, beleaguered sigh. I wasn’t even three in the afternoon yet. Two more hours of reading this crap before he could go home for the weekend. He reluctantly slid his hooves off the desk and reached for another script.
“Please,” he muttered under his breath. “Please, just this once let it be a rom-com or something—”
Salazar heard the door to his office creak open and immediately jumped to his feet.
“Yes, hello?” he blurted out quickly. Anything to distract him for another couple minutes before he got back reading—he glanced down at the title page—Zombie Cannibal Strippers from Hell Part IV: The Strippening. Ugh …
There was a young woman half-hiding behind his office door, sheepishly peeking out from behind it. She was wearing a beat-up backpack covered in patches with various indie band logos, and barely looked a day over twenty.
“Um, h-h-hello,” she stammered. “Is this the studio’s Hell Liaison Office?”
Salazar’s expression fell. He glared at her for a moment, then silently gestured up towards the large, curved horns sticking out of his forehead. As if the bright red skin wasn’t already a giveaway.
“R-right,” the woman said, slipping into the office and closing the door softly behind her. “I understand this isn’t really my job, but I need help with something … supernatural, for lack of a better word, and I didn’t really know who else to—”
“Fame or youth?” Salazar said flatly.
The woman stopped and blinked several times. “What?”
“Kid, please. I’ve been working in Hollywood since before your grandpa was eating solid food. Someone in this town wants a favor from a demon, it’s either gonna be fame or youth.”
“I don’t want either of those things!” the woman said. “Well, I mean, yeah, they’d be nice—but that’s not what I’m here for!”
“Well, that’s good,” Salazar muttered, lowering himself back down into his chair. “’Cause I can’t do any of that crap.”
The woman suddenly turned pale. “You can’t?”
“No! Of course not! What do you think I—” Salazar’s eyes narrowed. “Do you even know what the Hell Liaison Office does?”
She didn’t answer, but her eyes drifted to the side and she bit her lip. Salazar lowered his face into his hand and sighed.
“A lot of low-budget horror movies want to use actual demons in their production in order to save on special effects costs,” he grumbled. “Hell is amenable to this, but naturally, we require approval of any and all scripts that are intended for business with us. That’s my job. I read three or four awful screenplays a day and determine if there’s anything in there that’ll piss off Satan. If there isn’t, I give the go-ahead to use our services. I’m a bureaucrat, kid.” He smiled thinly. “Soul-sucking in its own way, but not how I think you’re looking for.”
“Oh,” the woman said, glancing down at the floor dejectedly. As her posture went slack, it looked like her entire body was beginning to deflate. “Okay …”
She slowly turned around and started shuffling back towards the office door, but stopped when she heard Salazar clear his throat.
“Uh, hold on a sec, kid,” he said, glancing down momentarily at the script he’d have to get back to reading as soon as she left, then back up at her. “Just because I can’t help you, doesn’t mean I don’t know someone who can. Why don’t you sit down and tell me what your problem is anyway?”
She suddenly brightened again, just a little. “Oh, okay!” She scurried over to the moth-eaten old armchair adjacent to Salazar’s desk. “Well, um, I—”
“Start with a name, kid.”
“Oh, right! My name is Andi Springfield, my uncle got me a job as a PA on one of his movies, so this is the first time I’ve ever worked on an actual film set—”
“Wait,” Salazar said. “You mean your uncle is Robert Springfield? The director?”
Andi blushed and sunk down a little into her seat. “Yeah …”
Salazar rolled his eyes and threw his hands up into the air. “I’ve been trying to get that guy to return my calls for weeks!” he said. “Do you know how many strings I had to pull to get the exorcism scene in his last flick to work right—ugh, anyway, not your problem. Continue.”
Andi gulped. “Um, so, my uncle’s been trying to cast his latest movie,” she said, “and he’s just been holding audition after audition, and he keeps saying none of the guys who come in are right for the lead, none of them have ‘the look’ he’s looking for.”
Salazar had one of his elbows propped up on his desk, and was resting his chin in his hand. “Okay,” he mumbled.
“But he keeps describing the kind of actor he’s looking for,” Andi continued. “Someone with Gene Cullen’s eyes, he said. But with Alan Fineworth’s hair. And Jack Grayson’s chin, and Don Garcia’s physique, and, well … the list went on. And I just … this is my first gig, and I really wanted to do a good job, I really wanted to make my uncle happy …”
“Okay,” Salazar said slowly. “So what happened?”
Andi hesitated for a moment, then reached around, unzipped her backpack, pulled out a pickle jar, and leaned forward to set it on Salazar’s desk. There weren’t any pickles left in the jar, but it wasn’t quite empty. As the contents stopped bobbing and sloshing around, Salazar could make out two milky white orbs floating in the brine.
His gaze abruptly locked onto the girl in front of him. “Andi,” he said sharply. “What are those?”
She gulped again, and gave him a nervous smile before softly murmuring, “… Gene Cullen’s eyes …”
Salazar was on his feet, and his hands were flat on his desk as he leaned over and glared down at Andi.
“What did you do, girl?” he hissed as she tried to sink deeper and deeper into her chair. “What in Creation’s name did you do?”
Andi pulled open the back door on the rented film truck and then stepped aside, gesturing for Salazar to take her place and peek inside. Deep down, he knew he didn’t particularly want to, but he’d already followed her out to the parking lot (and it was still an hour and change until he could clock out for the weekend) so there was no point in chickening out now. He took a deep breath, leaned into the back of the truck, and saw … more or less what he’d been expecting to see. He couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or not.
The back of the truck contained a partially constructed human being lying on the type of gurney that one might find in the back of an ambulance. The body was crossed back and forth with lines of thick, black stitching, and the various parts of it had different skin tones. The right arm and right leg looked like they came from the same person, but the left arm didn’t match, and the body didn’t have a left leg at all yet. The right leg had a foot, but neither of the arms had hands. And the body didn’t have a head, which was probably why Andi was still carrying its eyes around in her backpack.
Salazar just stood behind the truck and stared at the body for a couple seconds. Then he turned his head to the side and stared at Andi. Then back at the body. Then back at Andi.
“You did this?” he finally said, pointing weakly at the body.
Andi just nodded.
“All on your own?”
She nodded again.
Salazar went back to staring at the body. He hadn’t blinked once since the back door had been opened. “I don’t know if I should be horrified or impressed,” he finally muttered.
Andi shrugged. “I mean, so far, everything has been constructed
from bodies that were already dead,” she said. “I’ve got a couple friends in med school, and one or two who are studying to be coroners. Between them all, I’ve got a pretty good selection to choose from. Just sneak into a morgue when nobody’s looking, hack off the bits that I like. Don’t even have to take the whole body.” She looked pensive for a moment and stroked her chin. “I’ve only had to dig up one actual grave so far …”
“But those eyes,” Salazar mumbled, gesturing vaguely towards her backpack. “Gene Cullen is still alive.”
Andi blushed.
“Yeaahhh,” she said, letting the word out slowly and carefully. “That’s why I was putting off the head for last. The rest of the body’s not going to be on-screen much, you know, so it’s okay for the parts to be a little more generic. Any number of bodybuilders would be able to give him the right physique. But Uncle Robert was very specific about whose facial features he wanted, and most of those guys are still alive—”
“Wait,” Salazar said. “Does your ‘Uncle Robert’ know that you’re doing this?”
Andi’s blush deepened, until she was almost the same color as Salazar.
“I wanted to surprise him,” she said quietly.
“Crap,” Salazar muttered. “I was hoping I could blackmail the bastard.” He shook his head. “Anyway, you were saying?”
“Oh. Well, um, I was still a little queasy about, you know, taking parts from living people, but then Gene Cullen came to do a cameo in the movie I was PAing for, and I knew this was probably the only chance I’d get, so I snuck back to his trailer after the shoot, and, um …”
“… gouged his eyes out,” Salazar murmured, still staring at the body. Then, abruptly, his gaze turned to her again. “How did you do that, anyway? It looked like you got ’em out real cleanly, without any damage.”
She met his gaze and stared back at him, dead serious. “I am very good with a spork.”
“Right …” Salazar muttered, taking a subtle half step back from her. “So what’s the game plan now that you’re walking around with Gene Cullen’s peepers sloshing around in your backpack?”
Andi shrugged again.
“Work on getting the rest of the head,” she said. “And hope I can finish before Gene Cullen notices.”
“Before he notices that his eyes are missing?”
“He was very drunk the last time I saw him,” Andi muttered.
For an eternal couple of seconds, neither of them spoke. Salazar took in a long, deep breath through his nose, and let it out slowly through his mouth.
“Okay,” he finally said. “So you’ve gotten yourself into a mess of trouble that could come back to bite you in the ass in … any number of ways, honestly. What is it, exactly, that you need demon help for? Are you in too deep and trying to get out of this, or do you need help collecting the last couple body parts, or what?”
“Oh, no, I think I’ve got that covered,” Andi said. “But when I was about halfway through constructing him, I realized had no way of bringing him to life once I’d completed him.”
“Ah,” Salazar said. “Yeah, that could be a problem.”
“I mean, I could try getting him struck by lightning,” she mused, “but I have no idea how to make that happen, and even if I could, I don’t even know if that would work or not.”
“It wouldn’t,” Salazar muttered nonchalantly.
“Right,” Andi said. “So I was kinda hoping a demon might be able to use black magic to animate him, or ‘give him the spark’ or whatever. Even just have another demon possess the body and walk around in it for a couple hours—”
“Hold on,” Salazar said. “Yes, one of us could do that, in theory—in fact, I might even know a guy—but it would have to be worth our while. What kind of movie is your uncle making here, anyway?”
Andi clenched her teeth and hugged herself a little as her entire posture tightened.
“You’re not going to like it,” she said, just barely over a whisper.
“Try me,” Salazar said evenly. Andi gulped.
“It’s, um, it’s kind of a side project he’s been doing lately,” she said, conspicuously avoiding eye contact with him. “My uncle, um … he’s just partnered up with this company that produces faith-based entertainment …”
Salazar immediately doubled over and burst out laughing, so loud and raucous that Andi scurried over and slammed the back of the truck shut in case he brought them any unwanted attention. He was going for a good thirty seconds before the demonic chortles finally settled down into light, gasping chuckles, and finally into silence as he had to catch his breath.
“Oh my gosh,” he finally said, wiping a tear out of his eye. “This is unbelievable.”
“Yeah, I know,” Andi muttered, staring dejectedly at the ground. “Guess I’m kinda out of luck.”
“Are you kidding?” Salazar said. “Of course I can get a demon to help you with this! Can probably even get ’em to do it pro bono, so you don’t have to sell your soul!”
“Wait?” Andi said. “Really?”
“Yeah!” he paused for a second. “I mean, you just mutilated a dude in his sleep and stole his eyes, so you’re probably going to Hell anyway, but it won’t be because of me.”
“Right, right …” Andi muttered. “But why would demons want to help a Christian movie get made?”
“Are you kidding?” Salazar said again. “Nothing makes the Big Guy Upstairs look more ridiculous than those flicks. Satan has a whole collection of them in his condo, and sometimes he does public screenings of them in Hell just for laughs!” Salazar chuckled a little more, then cleared his throat and straightened his tie a little. “Anyway,” he said, “I’m gonna go call my people, see what I can get lined up for you.” He put his hands together and pointed at her with both index fingers. “You just work on finishing your little arts and crafts project in there. I don’t want to rush you or anything, but we should probably get this done before your guy starts to smell.”
“Right!” Andi said enthusiastically, running off into the parking lot. Just before she was out of earshot, she called back over her shoulder, “I’ll come by your office on Monday to touch base.”
Salazar nodded, smiled, and gave her a little wave, then discreetly checked his watch. Mission accomplished: it was five o’clock on the dot.
“Sal?” said the demon Griswold, his head perking up as Salazar approached. “Sal, is that you?”
Salazar smiled and held his arms open as Griswold got up and jogged over to him. Griswold was a warrior-class demon, meaning he was significantly larger than Salazar—about eight feet tall, with the muscular build of a gorilla—and had olive-green skin, along with curling, ram-like horns on either side of his head. Like most warrior-class demons, he also wore little more than an old, tattered loincloth, since it was a lot harder for someone of his stature to find a sharp three-piece suit that fit him as well as Salazar’s.
“Griswold, my man!” Salazar said as the demon physically picked him up and pulled him into a crushing hug.
“Man, I haven’t seen you in forever!” Griswold bellowed as he set Salazar back on the ground.
“Aw, c’mon,” Salazar said. “It can’t have been more than a century or two. But what did I tell you? Was I able to get you into the movies, or what?”
Griswold rolled his eyes.
“Yeah, but look at this!” he said, waving his script pages in Salazar’s face. “Demon Number 4? I’m a glorified extra, man!” He tossed his script pages into the air, and folded his arms, pouting as they rained down around his head. “There’s a rumor goin’ around about this new movie version of The Tempest—you know how Hollywood goes on this Shakespeare kick every couple years—and I know I got the acting chops to play Caliban, but it’s so hard to get people to notice you, you know? Especially in this town …”
“Hey,” Salazar said, putting a hand on Griswold’s shoulder (which required him to get on his tippy toes). “I’ve got some pull in this town. As long as people want to u
se real demons in their movies, I’m the ass they’ve gotta kiss. I can ask around, see who’s producing this thing, see if I can’t make a couple ‘suggestions’ regarding casting.”
Griswold’s fanged grin spread ear to ear. “Aw, you’d really do that, Sal? That’d be great!”
“Of course, buddy!” Salazar said. “But if I’m gonna do this for you, I might need you to do me a favor first—”
“Coming through!” a human crewman shouted as he barged through, carrying an authentic Hell battle-spear—one of the many other props and services supplied by Salazar’s department. Salazar saw it moments before it was going to happen, but there was nothing he could do to stop it: as the crewman rushed through the set, his foot caught on a loose cable and he stumbled forward, losing his grip for a moment and juggling the spear in the air in front of him for a second before catching it again and regaining his footing.
“Hey!” Salazar shouted. “Be careful with those things!” He jogged over and grabbed the spear out of the crewman’s hand. “This spear was designed to take out an angel! You know what it takes to kill a non-corporeal being? If this thing sticks you, there’s no afterlife—that’s it, you’re just gone.”
“Nah, don’t worry,” Griswold said as he lumbered over, took the spear away from Salazar, and pushed the palm of his hand harmlessly down against the tip of the spear for effect. “These are the old, beat-up ones that have been in battle a few too many millennia.” He smiled, and tossed the spear back to the original human crewman, who had to catch it with both arms. “They know what kinda idiots humans are. They don’t hand these puppies out unless the point is so dull it couldn’t cut through cheese.”
“That’s a comfort … I guess,” Salazar muttered, watching the crewman slink away.
“Besides, you shouldn’t just grab a prop out of a crew guy’s hand like that,” Griswold said. “They got rules about these things on set. I spent ten thousand years burning in the Lake of Fire, but even I ain’t gonna screw with IATSE.” He shook his head and sighed. “So, anyway … what was this favor you wanted?”
Monsters, Movies & Mayhem Page 15