Watching the zombie flick, Board found Chaney’s gore effects inventive and fairly realistic, but the most ghastly scenes of horror were the result of the use of actual cadavers. Hence, the XX rating. For the past couple of years, humans had been acquiring a taste for some of the entertainments (though the Guests protested that they be referred to as such) that the Guests themselves enjoyed. More graphic, shocking action and horror films were available to the public, but since these were by no means to the tastes of all, such motion pictures were designated by a rating system according to the intensity of the images. A film rated X contained strong imagery, XX stronger, while XXX warned of extremely graphic scenes, perhaps even some brief nudity. Personally, Mandible’s would not screen XXX films. Few of the larger, more reputable movie palaces did, though out of curiosity, Board had seen several XXX movies in small, one-screen theaters. He had had to walk out of one of those movies, in which a sideshow performer had bitten into the belly of a living German Shepherd puppy.
Board wondered how desperate had been the drunks or addicts, or how hungry the homeless people, or how sadly disturbed the insane people, who in Night of the Undead had been hired to play zombies and rend with their teeth the flesh of real cadavers. It was the most sickening display Board had yet seen in an XX movie, and yet he watched, transfixed, as if he were dreaming. He had seen movies in which a shirtless cowboy was walking along, and then in a close-up of his chest (actually a cadaver’s), an arrow or a tomahawk or rifle slug had thudded into the flesh. Cut back to the face of the actual living actor, screaming in pain with fake blood spattered on his neck. He had seen one thriller where a woman undressing, down to her bra and slip, was approached from behind by a maniac with an axe (not an Assassin; the movies never portrayed the murderers as Assassins). When the axe crunched into her spine, it was actually a close-up of a corpse in the same bra. Sometimes actors were even chosen specifically to match up closely with the cadaver on hand. These bodies were usually those of indigents, though some people were willing their bodies to the movie studios as a way to achieve a kind of posthumous celebrity; pseudo immortality.
In this movie, the arms reaching through a partially boarded window were living arms until an axe was swung, at which point the limbs of cadavers were hacked off. Two corpses, representing a young couple, were set on fire and Board watched them burn. He could almost smell the meat…recalled the stink of men frying while being electrocuted in Old Sparky…
He had seen one film where a gangster tossed a traitorous underling off the top of a tall building. The camera had been set up to catch the body splatting to the street. It was, of course, best if the cadavers had not been embalmed or even had their blood drained, if they were fresh. The one that was thrown off the roof burst like a water balloon.
Board left the nighted movie, the subterranean feel of the movie palace, to squint at the agonizing brightness of the street, his headache worse than ever, the heat lying on his skin like quicklime. He felt sickened. But he had also found the movie involving and well made, so he felt confused. He felt guilty. It was like more masochism.
-3-
When Board got back to his apartment building, carrying a sack of soft drinks and the makings for sandwiches (not sure if Louise would be staying with him tonight), he found a white 1926 Hudson Limousine sitting out front at the curb. He glanced at it as he passed, and saw a passenger seated behind the driver lean out and gesture to him. “John Board?”
A little wary, for no particular reason (had the movie made him jumpy?), Board only took a single step closer to the beautiful vehicle. The sun off its surface spiked his eyes. “Yeah?”
“Hi.” The passenger held his hand out the window to be shaken. “I’m Anthony Pugnale. I work for Dominic Coltello, of Dreamland Pictures?”
Board had heard of them, of course. A smaller, newer studio. Grade C stars. XX ratings. They made mainly cops and robbers flicks, and probably would have made more action movies, top-heavy with propaganda, about the Iraq War had the war lasted longer. Board shook Pugnale’s hand. “Nice to meet you.”
“How’d you like to take a ride over to the studio right now, John? Mr. Coltello’s heard about you, and thinks he could give you some work at his studio if you’re not contracted to Paramount.”
“I’m not. Not exclusively.” Shading his eyes with his hand, Board squinted in at Pugnale, cleared his throat, and looked behind him at his apartment door. When he looked back to Pugnale, he had decided. “Sure. Okay. Just let me run in with my groceries.”
“Great.” Pugnale gave a handsome grin; he could be a movie star himself. “We’ll be right here.”
The main reason Board knew about Dreamland Studios was because of their unique head offices, just beyond the main gates. Atop the flat roof of this building was a dome-shaped insect which dwarfed the one that had recently blocked traffic in downtown L.H.. It resembled nothing so much as a titanic black beetle fringed with countless small legs, and with no apparent head. Board wondered if it was pinned down somehow, or if it had simply been trained—or incapacitated/decapitated—so as to remain still (despite the rhythmic undulations of its cilia). “Was that thing caught or grown?” he asked Pugnale once they were inside the iron gates.
“Grown. The Guests are devising living structures for us. They’d be more than shelters; we could interact with them. They could do all kinds of things for us.”
Outside the front doors to the main office the two men passed a group of men made up as Iraqis in white robes splashed with blood. One of them, smoking a cigarette, gave Board a friendly nod.
There was an elevator in the main lobby, where a pretty young woman behind the reception desk gave Board a flirty smile, as if part of a conspiracy to charm him. They rode this to its top floor, and when Pugnale rolled the folding barred door aside, Board saw that the top floor was the inside of that gigantic arthropod. Its body must be largely hollowed out inside, its inner walls of chitin forming a rotunda, and its translucent wings forming a vast skylight. At a desk seemingly made from plates of the same black exoskeleton, set in the very center of this living (undead? thought Board) room, sat a man with thinning, graying hair, dressed in an expensive black suit. The man rose to shake Board’s hand when Pugnale brought him near.
“Mr. Board, a pleasure. Please sit down. I’m Dom Coltello, head of Dreamland Pictures.”
“I’m honored.” Board sat.
“Would you care for a coffee?” Coltello waved a hand at a bar up against one of the concave walls. “Something stronger?”
“No thanks…I don’t drink anymore.”
“No? Is that a personal choice, or because of Prohibition?”
“Both, I guess.”
Pugnale took a seat in a chair upholstered in bright red leather, like the one Board had settled into. “I told John, here, that you’d seen his work in Street of Forgotten Men, and had it in mind to hire him, Dom.”
“Exactly, John,” said Coltello, clasping his hands on his red velvet blotter and leaning across his desk earnestly. “I’m always looking for new talent here at Dreamland, and I’ll be frank…I’m especially interested in you because of your background before you came out here to Los Huesos.”
Dominic Coltello was a Medium. He had a tumor-like growth on the back of his head, low near his nape. Board had seen few Mediums up close since the last time he had seen Warden File, at Max Pen, several years ago on the day of his release. Coltello’s parasite was smaller than the warden’s, and if it possessed a head or any legs, they were entirely buried within the studio chief’s skull. The lump was also overgrown with neatly slicked graying hair. As File had predicted, the Guests’ parasites were becoming smaller and smaller. Some day soon, one would never know if one were talking to a Medium or not.
“My background?” Board asked, not without a twinge of dread.
“Yes.” Coltello smiled awkwardly. “Your work with the Metacrapus, Pennsylvania police force…”
“Metacarpus,” Board corrected him po
litely.
“What did I say?”
“Crapus. Metacrapus.”
Coltello and Pugnale laughed, and Board chuckled uneasily himself. Coltello went on, “Anyway, your work as a police photographer, and later as a photographic witness at the executions in Maxillae Penitentiary…”
“You heard about that?” Board cut in, a little distressed.
Coltello smiled apologetically. “No need to be ashamed, John. I have contacts. I certainly don’t hold your prison term against you. I heard you were a cooperative, model prisoner.”
“Well, Mr. Coltello, if you’re looking for more cinematographers, why are you interested in my background, which doesn’t involve cinematography?”
“Because it involves photography, which is much the same thing, you know that. And…because of the things you used to photograph. The subject matter of your photographs. You have experience with that. You…wouldn’t be so shocked, so uncomfortable, seeing it again…would you?”
Board almost stood up there and then. “Yes, sir, I would. I would be uncomfortable seeing it again.”
Pugnale looked from Board to his boss uneasily. Coltello made a pained face and motioned for Board to remain seated. “John, hear me out here, please. I’m willing to pay you a very handsome sum of money to do this work for us.”
“What work?” Board sighed. “XX stuff? Close-ups of a shotgun blast to the back of a skull? Filming a body tossed out of an airplane? Sideshow geeks playing zombies munching on a cadaver’s ass?”
“Not XX films.” Coltello, clasping his hands again, sat back in his own red leather seat. “XXX films, John.”
“XXX films,” he echoed. But for several beats it just didn’t sink in, then he remembered the few, only a merciful few, XXX movies he had seen himself. That geek who chomped into the belly of a kicking, yelping puppy. And there was one film told from the camera’s point of view, about a psychopath who murdered women in public parks. The special effects had been very convincing. Board was sure that the partly dismembered victim hanging from a hook in the killer’s basement was a real cadaver. But the most disturbing scene in that picture had been when the killer clubbed one woman to death in a prolonged sequence, and tore at her blouse until one breast became shockingly exposed. Even now, Board was not convinced that that particular scene had been faked. The contact of the blows had looked too real, the skin opening up over the woman’s eyebrow and jetting blood, with no cutaways to a cadaver…the damaging blows falling one after another, again with no edits, until there were more wounds than even Lon Chaney at his best could make mysteriously appear. Of course such an act—a murder in the course of a motion picture, a murder performed purely for entertainment—would be illegal. Punishable by execution, surely. If it could be proven it had been an actual murder. If the body were not disposed of. If the person wielding the hammer had been seen as anything more than an arm. If the Guests, thought Board, didn’t enjoy these films even more than their human audiences did.
“Are you asking me…to film people being killed?” Board asked. “To film murders? For movies?”
“John.” Coltello rose from his chair and wandered to the farther end of his office, where the inner surfaces of the wings curved down almost low enough for him to reach up and touch their quartz-like material. “I’ve heard how you killed an Assassin named Michael O’Tool in self-defense. And how, in prison, you indirectly caused the death of a second Assassin, Pablo Linterna…”
“And?” Board said.
“I thought, here is a man who is worldly. Who is toughened by life, and strong. A man who must have no delusions, who will not shy away from hard work…”
“What hard work, Mr. Coltello?”
From across the room, Coltello faced him, looking grim. But it was Pugnale who answered Board, in a soft voice, leaning close. “We want you to not just film an XXX movie, John, but to play the lead. Don’t worry—you’ll be behind the camera, a small hand-held camera we’ll give you, and…”
Board stood up so fast he almost lost his balance, and grasped the studded backrest of his chair to catch himself. “You want me to kill people? Kill them myself, for your fucking movies?”
“John…” Pugnale stood up too, appearing close to a panic. Coltello was not joining in. He stood distant, only watching now.
“No, listen, you have the wrong man! Even if I just filmed such a thing it would be sick and illegal…but to ask me to kill people myself…are you insane? How did you ever think I would do such a thing?”
“Your background, John! Sure you worked for the cops…but you killed a man. You have blood on your hands. You went to jail. You befriended some gang, apparently, and they killed another man for your benefit. You filmed dozens of men cooking in their own skins! But you’re talking like a virgin schoolboy, here.”
“I killed a guy who opened me up like a fish! And I didn’t ask for that other man to be killed.” Board moved closer to the elevator cage. “And I only filmed those men in the chair so I could get out of that hell hole.” A low humming distracted him from his words. Not a humming, but a buzzing. He realized that the insect they were inside of was becoming agitated, or excited, by the discord within its shell…
“John—we can give you a ton of money!” Pugnale blurted. “Yes, we want some…extra special footage. But most of it will be faked. Just effects. We can…”
“You’re Assassins yourselves,” Board muttered, in an awed kind of revelation. “Aren’t you?”
In the early years, it seemed even the police couldn’t determine how Assassins were recruited by the Guests. Whether it was directly, as the Mediums were contacted, or if they had leaders. This latter had proved to be the case. Now, some of the names of the largest, most powerful Assassin leaders were known to the press, the American public, though the police usually had a hard time gathering enough evidence to link them to the crimes committed by the men they enlisted. It was the price one paid for playing the game of Assassin, that the Guests would not protect them from the law. Their efforts to elude the law made the drama so much richer. But that didn’t mean there weren’t corrupt policemen and judges, paid to shield them. Back in Metacarpus, it was now well known that a man named Joseph Martello was the head of one of the country’s largest Assassin families. In Board’s childhood home of Coccyx, Illinois—formerly known as Chicago—the head of the most powerful army of psychopathic Assassins was Scarface Al Capone. Both Martello and Capone were said to be Mediums.
“John, John, John.” Dom Coltello finally resumed speaking, and returned to join the other two men. “You’re getting too worked up here.” He spread his hands like the most reasonable of men. “I can see we made a terrible mistake, and I apologize for wasting your time.”
“Maybe we can offer him some more conventional work, Dom,” Pugnale put in. He patted Board on the shoulder. Board could see Pugnale was trying to placate him, lest he go out in the streets shouting at the top of his lungs about the terrible acts it had been assumed he’d be willing to consider.
“No, no,” Coltello said, “we’ve upset John enough for one day. Again, accept my apologies, John. Take John home, Tony. But take him out to lunch, first…”
“That won’t be necessary,” Board murmured. He was trying to remember if that other XXX film he had recalled, with an approach so similar to the one Coltello had proposed, had been a Dreamland film as well. And why not ask that cinematographer to play the “lead” again? Unless he’d be captured by the police. Unless he’d been uncooperative, and Dreamland Pictures had…terminated his contract.
“Very well, John…as you wish. You take care, and all best to you.”
They entered the elevator, which lowered them out of the insect’s belly. Board felt like Jonah coughed out onto the waves, when at last he and Pugnale stepped out into the blaze of the sun. By now, Board’s headache was nearly crippling. That buzzing inside Coltello’s office still seemed to ring in his ears.
Pugnale returned him to the spot where they had me
t, and as Board disembarked, the handsome man leaned out the limousine’s window and said, “John…sorry this didn’t work out. I apologize for misjudging you. But you understand, of course, that it would be in both of our best interests if you didn’t talk to anyone about this meeting of ours.”
Board nodded. “Yes. I understand perfectly. You don’t need to threaten me.”
“John, hey, I’m not threatening! I’m just saying…”
“Thanks anyway.” Board turned his back on the man, and headed to the front door of his apartment building. He didn’t hear the limousine start behind him, but when he peeked out from his window at the street below, it was gone.
-4-
Board found it hard to sleep that night. It was hot, so he had his windows open, but from the Los Huesos hills came a loud and constant trilling, metallic cicada-like sirens. It was the mutant bugs that dwelt in the scrub. Sometimes locals shot at them, but for the most part they were afraid to harm the creatures, thinking that the Guests might object even though the animals were not directly instruments of the Guests. Mostly they were left free to roam the hills and through people’s yards like sacred cows.
Louise had not come to him tonight.
He got up from bed, went to the window, stared out at the distant glowing letters that spelled BONELAND, rippled across the hills like a bioluminescent caterpillar.
Could Coltello really have thought that he would join his ranks as an Assassin? And film his crimes, besides? After knowing he had once worked for the police and cooperated with a prison warden? Or did they recruit from policemen themselves, for all he knew? Coltello was just so fearless, Board figured, that he could risk trying to recruit a man off the street like himself, a man he didn’t truly know much about. Coltello didn’t fear the authorities. And he didn’t fear John Board.
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