"You wrote all of this...?" Harlan muttered, sinking to the back of the sofa. He'd felt like a man living a nightmare before but the idea of living inside one of Funelli and Emmerson's screenplays made his skin crawl. If this was a Funelli film, they were all doomed. All of them. In Funelli films, things always ended badly for its stars.
"Funelli and I wrote this script while he was filming NASTiES," Jack explained. "The concept was Funelli, or a somewhat comically exaggerated version of Funelli, dies in a fire during an occult ritual because he's exactly what his critics have labeled him: he worships demons, he's a maniac, etcetera. Only Funelli's not really dead, he's trapped in a kind of Videolimbo, that's what we called it, where he can control video devices through the cable, basically like that Wes Craven movie with the dude sent to the electric chair."
"Shocker."
"Right, Shocker. We called ours Funelli's Back from the Dead, sort of a play on the way they always put his name in front of the title because of his popularity: Funelli's Last Stand, Funelli's Lake of the Damned, Funelli's Orgy of the Zombies. Only, as you've probably guessed, the apostrophe wasn't possessive, it's a contraction: Funelli IS Back from the Dead. You dig?"
Harlan nodded. "Yeah, I... I do dig. But don't worry, that tape monster thing already showed up at the video store."
Jack chuckled dryly. "You went to a video store. That's clever, I wish I'd thought of that. Not a good idea when you're trying to escape a dead man trapped in a videotape, but as a story point..."
"So this... everything... you've already written it?"
The writer stood, shaking his head. "No. We never finished the script," he said over his shoulder as he moved toward the bar. "See, the fire happened the night we were supposed to work on the denouement, coincidentally." He shrugged. "Or not. A big climactic set piece. Main character figures out Funelli's got his girl trapped in the studio, so he sets out to find her."
"And then?"
"And then nothing, that's all we wrote. See, Nick hated to outline, and I never outlined unless I was getting paid to outline..." Jack spilled liquor into his glass. "You see where I'm going with this."
"The future's unwritten."
"That's a tad grandiloquent," Jack said with a shrug. He swigged from the glass, and poured more. "If this were my movie, and I suppose it is, I'd say something like..." He took another swig, lowered his voice an octave, and growled, "Sounds like we gotta write ourselves a new ending." Shrugging, he added, "Or something like that."
"I think I'll take that drink," Harlan said.
"I thought you might." Jack returned to the sofa with two glasses and a smirk. Harlan took his and sipped. The alcohol scalded on the way down, and he coughed.
"Bit of a lightweight, huh? Come with me. I've got something to show you."
Harlan followed Jack up the spiral staircase to his bedroom in the loft. He stayed by the stairs while Jack opened the closet, shifted some hangered clothes aside, moved some cardboard boxes behind them, and reached up to a shelf. When Jack returned, he held a pastel turquoise suitcase. He blew dust off it, and tossed it onto the water bed. The mattress rippled as he sat beside it to open the latches. Inside was a small blue-gray typewriter.
"This here's a Smith Corona Super Sterling manual typewriter," Jack said, pitching it like a professional salesman. "Now the purists will tell you, you want a vintage typewriter, you get yourself an Underwood, the kind Hitchcock and Heinlein and Orson Welles used. But for me, it's the Smith Corona. For one thing, I don't have to punch the keys as hard. This baby's smoother than Quiet Storm."
"What's 'quiet storm'?"
"It's a type of music. Now you want my help, kid, don't interrupt me." He scowled down at the typewriter, seemingly looking for his train of thought. "The other reason I like it is, when I'm in the zone and I'm typing at 100-words a minute, I don't have time to dial back and X-out mistakes. This one self-corrects. Press a single button, it goes back and uses the correction tape to erase the previous letter. Press it again, it gets the one before that. Etcetera. Now that may not sound special to you, with your iPhone and your intelligent TV, but when I was your age this..." Lovingly, he removed the typewriter from the case and pushed the carriage return. "This was a godsend."
"I'll take your word for it."
"See, that's the problem with your generation. Always gotta shoot back with some snarky comment, always gotta be smug and look down your nose at the world. Suspend your disbelief. It's show business, baby!"
Jack's words, echoing the argument that started all of this, shamed Harlan. He muttered an apology.
Jack brushed it off. "Forget it. Now we can make this happen, Harlan. We've got little less than two and a half hours to write the third act, and I've written entire films in less. So we bring this baby to the old studio, and we hammer out an ending where you get your girl back, you and I survive, and we send Funelli back to Hell where he belongs."
With a hoarse, triumphant laugh, Jack held out a hand.
"Right on!" Harlan said, inspired by the old writer's speech to slap him five.
Jack scowled down at his palm, and made a sour face, grasping at his lower back with his free hand. "I appreciate the sentiment but I really could use a hand getting up. Waterbeds are great for a man in his twenties, not so much when he's pushing seventy-five."
Discouraged--and even more embarrassed by his potential microaggression--Harlan helped the man to his feet.
4 – The Acolytes of Azathoth
JACK NEVER OUTLINED, but he and Harlan hashed out a vague plan on the way to the old studio, the typewriter under his arm. He and Funelli had continued making video nasties while small budget auteurs like Soderberg and Tarantino, Smith and Rodriguez ushered in the New Wave of indie cinema in the early-'90s. If Funelli's career hadn't ended in the fire in 1993, he would have likely still been making B-movies today. Jack had seemed fine with retirement, with his dusty old typewriter and his lack of a television, but his eagerness to jump back into writing instead of suggesting Harlan take a walk into traffic spoke of a man who'd denied his true nature far too long.
The writer's bald head shined under the streetlamps, his shoulders slumped, his back hunched with age. Nicolo Funelli, who hadn't aged a day since 1993, had been 44 when his cowboy hat and boots were buried in an otherwise empty casket. Harlan hoped Jack's aged heart could handle whatever insanity Funelli had in store for the two of them.
"Your girl," Jack said, looking back over his shoulder. "Is she strong?"
"Strong?"
"Mentally. What I mean to say is, do you think she'll spring back from this, or will she end up in some nuthouse, blathering on and on about a 'world inside the movies'?"
Harlan thought it over. The idea had never occurred to him, but he supposed if anyone could come out of there unscathed, it was Vicky. "She's stronger than anyone I know," he said. "When my parents died, she got me back on my feet again. Got me a job, helped me settle my parents' estate. If it wasn't for her, I'd probably still be watching old movies in their basement."
"Good. That's good character motivation."
"Speaking of movies, I think we need a video camera," Harlan said, spotting the yellow sign of a pawnshop ahead. "Something to record your ending."
Jack squinted back over his shoulder, considering it briefly before shaking his head. "That's Funelli's business. I'm a writer. I don't direct."
"But if we don't record it, it's just words on paper."
"It's all just words on paper, Harlan." He swept an arm out, indicating the totality of creation. "All of this. Now you got a keen sense of story, kid, but as Hitchcock once told me, your pacing is shit. We don't have time to go hunting down a VHS camera, and I'm sure as hell not stepping into a pawnshop likely to be full of TVs and television equipment where our undead Eye-talian friend could easily get the drop on us."
"I'll go in then. This is my movie--my life," Harlan corrected himself. "Whatever. Let me take the risk."
Jack's shoulders sagged as he looke
d back at the yellow storefront windows. "All right. But don't take too long in there, kid, it's nigh on ten o'clock. I'll get started on the script in the interim." He squinted up and down the empty street. "There's a park bench. Meet me over there when you're done."
"Thank you, Jack."
The writer smiled thinly, and shrugged. "Hey, it's what I do."
The bell above the pawnshop door jingled as Harlan stepped in. Jack squinted in at him through the barred windows, and gave him an encouraging nod. Harlan returned it. He watched Jack head across the street before stepping up to the counter.
The proprietor of Jiffy Pawn--or Yiffy Pawn, Harlan wasn't sure, as the J looked somewhat like a Y--eyed him with suspicion through thick-lensed glasses. Above the man, a sign read YES! WE HAVE CLASSIC ARCAID MACHINES! An array of guns and complicated knives lay behind the counter's barred glass, holding far less potential danger than the black & white security monitor above the clerk's head.
Harlan studied it, making sure the split screen showing the store's exterior and back shelves didn't suddenly switch to Funelli and Emmerson's green-screened Videolimbo, as Jack had called it. He watched the old writer shrink in the exterior camera's view before Jack disappeared out of frame.
The proprietor scowled at Harlan. "Can I help you with something, or are you just gonna stand there gawking at my security monitor hoping something good'll come on?"
Harlan snapped out of it and focused on the clerk. The man stood framed by an X-Files THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE poster tacked-up alongside newspaper clippings about government conspiracies. A laptop lay opened on the counter to a website called Society of Skeptics, the post titled: IS THE SPHERICAL EARTH FACT, OR DISINFORMATION?
"Yes. Sorry," Harlan said, taking it all in. "I need a video camera."
"Uh-huh. Camcorder, SLR, security, or action?"
"No, uh, none of those. I'm looking for an old one."
"I see. Would that be Super-8 or Betamax?"
Harlan shook his head, feeling like Jack had written this man a flimsy bit part, the thankless role of an expendable character created to serve a small story point and then die a very messy death.
I live in a movie now, he thought. Once upon a time it would have been fun to imagine, but with his every move watched by a psychotic deceased director, all he wanted now was for the credits to roll so he could finish his popcorn and go home.
"VHS," he said. "Philips, specifically."
The proprietor blinked at him without expression, his blue-gray eyes magnified to twice their size. "Don't have a Philips. Got a piece of crap RCA handheld in the back, if that's okay. Hasn't worked in ages."
"Could you just check?"
Frowning, the clerk said, "I know my own stock."
"Fine. The RCA is fine."
The bespectacled man unlatched the counter flap and stepped out. He took a step toward the back, then turned and blinked his giant eyes. "You're gonna buy this thing, right? I'm not going all the way back there and rootin' through all that junk just to come back and hear you tell me you don't want it 'cause it's broke?"
Harlan nodded enthusiastically. "I'll buy it. If it works, great. If not..." He shrugged. "And if you can find a tripod for it, I'll buy that too."
Big eyes blinked. "All right then," the proprietor said, and headed into the shelves. His reflection grew in a convex mirror placed strategically in the high far corner, near the darkened storeroom doorway, until he stepped under it and out of view. Harlan looked up at the monitor to see the strange man pass through the door.
Anxious, he checked the time. 9:55. Just over two hours until Funelli had his way with Vicky, no matter what Harlan and Jack did to try and put a stop to it. He wasn't even sure what they were attempting would work. All he could do was trust in Jack's screenplay, and their vague outline.
The image on the screen switched to a room filled with heaps of old junk, where the proprietor seemed to be hunting, moving boxes aside. The other side showed Harlan looking slightly off and to his right. To the left of the monitor, the main camera pointing down at him buzzed, and the picture zoomed in to a tight close-up of his eyes.
A loud electronic BLAM! filled them with fear, the sound something like the blast of a Space Rager's laser. The overhead fluorescents flickered as he turned from the monitor toward the once-darkened storage room doorway, flashing now with colorful lights.
"Sir?" Harlan called out.
His gaze fell again on the sign above the counter:
YES! WE HAVE CLASSIC ARCAID MACHINES!
On the security monitor, the proprietor moved cautiously toward the lambent screens of several old arcade games in the back. The other image cut to Jack typing up his screenplay at a park bench under a streetlight. One of the city cameras had linked to the monitor somehow--whether Funelli had done it or the proprietor had hardwired it due to his evident paranoia, Harlan didn't know, but he had a bad feeling this was the scene where he'd have to make a hard choice between saving the writer, and going back in there to find the camera.
"Shit..."
Hoping Jack could take care of himself for a few more minutes, he headed down the long, narrow aisle between shelves of broken dreams and lay-a-ways, guitars, game consoles and jewelry sold for rent and drugs and destination weddings. His reflection warped in the chipped convex mirror as he passed under it looking up, watching for movement at his back. The doorway flashed red, green and blue while the machines blared chiptune music, laser blasts, explosions and revving engines.
"Hello?" Harlan called into the otherwise darkened room.
A crackly 8-bit voice sample replied with deep booming laughter: "MUHA-HAHA! MUHA-HAHA! MUHA-HAHA!"
Harlan stepped through the doorway, his skin prickling at the sound. He'd never been big on video games when he was young, but he knew a bad omen when he heard it.
"Hello-ooh!"
"MUHA-HAHA! MUHA-HAHA!"
Dust permeated the air, the shelves jam-packed with old stock. The arcade games stood against the back wall. He recognized Ninja Gaiden and Altered Beast and Cruisin' USA from his infrequent visits to the arcade with friends, the one with the built-in car seat, but the fourth game was one he'd never heard of, something called Acolytes of Azathoth. The screen flashed GAME OVER again and again above three druids who stood over a man tied to a stone slab. The repetitive laughter came from its speakers: "MUHA-HAHA!"
Harlan approached cautiously. "Sir?" The clerk's hand slumped out from the replica car seat. "Are you okay?" he called out over the noise, even though Harlan was fairly certain he wasn't.
He peered over the headrest. The racing game displayed the same image as Acolytes: GAME OVER flashing above the three dark druids and the man fastened to the round stone altar. Adrenaline burned through his veins. All of the screens showed the same image. On the pixelated altar, the victim's eyes bulged behind bottle-thick glasses. Dressed in nothing but a pair of boxer shorts, the clerk's hands and feet were tied at four points of a dripping red pentagram, his head resting on the fifth.
"MUHA-HAHA!"
Each druid held a curved blade to their chests. They arced down swiftly in tandem, one blade piercing the man's heart, the second his groin, the third his throat. The middle Acolyte carved off the clerk's head with very little effort. In the driver's seat, the real clerk jittered like a man having a seizure. He uttered a strangled groan seconds before a huge red fountain splattered the screen. Drops spattered Harlan's face and shirt. He cringed at the salty copper tang, recognizing it as blood.
The clerk's severed head dropped onto the gear shift in his lap, and rolled off onto the floor, tacky blood picking up crumbs from the dirty tiles, where it stared wide-eyed and mouth agape at Harlan. On the screens, tinted a slick red, the middle druid held up his prize by the hair, blocky pixel droplets of gore spilling on the stone altar.
Harlan tripped over his own feet and fell hard on his hands and knees, his gorge rising. Before he could choke it back, he puked on the cement floor and into the drain.
&n
bsp; "MUHA-HAHA!"
The laughter sounded closer, more human. The arcade machines had projected pixelated holograms of the three dark druids, and as Harlan crabwalked toward the door the images solidified, only their eyes visible in the shadows cast by their hoods, cackling as they raised their daggers, dripping with the pawnshop clerk's blood.
Harlan backed into something metallic and frail. It toppled with a clatter behind him. Glancing back, he found a camera already secured to a small tripod, VHSmovie stamped on its side. Rather than bask in his good luck, he snatched it with quivering hands and got to his feet. Steadying himself on the doorjamb, he took one last look at the evil druids before scurrying out into the aisles and running headlong toward the exit.
The bell dinged above the door as Harlan burst out into the street. He turned back, pausing to catch his breath. Jiffy Pawn stood empty, derelict, track lighting flickering. A gray ray of light burst from the security monitor, and the dark druids materialized behind the door.
"Oh, shit..."
The Acolytes stepped through the door. The bell dinged.
Harlan turned and ran across the street, shouting for Jack.
"Oh shit!" Jack growled, rising to his feet.
Harlan reached the sidewalk. "That's what I just said!"
"No, you don't understand, kid. Those are the Acolytes of Azathoth. They're the punks Funelli was running with on the night of the fire."
The Acolytes stood in the middle of the road. They peeled back their hoods in tandem. Despite their differences in height, all three wore Funelli's grin, his curled Dali mustache, and gleeful dark brown eyes. A chorus of voices said, "Hello, Jack. Lovely to see you."
"Can't say the feeling's mutual, Nick."
The dark druids shrugged. "You might want to scrap that draft, Jack. It's boring."
Breathing heavily, Jack looked for his pages he'd written in Harlan's absence on the bench. His shoulders further slumped when he saw them in a puddle of brown water, the ink smeared and running. "Son of a..." he grunted.
Video Nasties Page 28