In the beginning, the kids oohed and aahed. The grand vistas of a wilderness far lusher and lovelier than our own beguiled them and invited them to drop their defenses.
Darkness and evil seep into the frame oh-so-gently on teeny-tiny centipede feet. A phantom landscape coalesces, its geography peopled by silhouettes of men and beasts whose eyes burn crimson, reflecting the febrile sun sinking face-first into its grave. Then rises the black castle, perched on its hollow fang of a mountain peak. Then the prehistoric leeches, the robed supplicants, the rusted throne crouched upon a mound of rotting skulls, and the alluring woman in white, Lady Carling, doomed mistress of Baron Need.
So true to life were the painted characters, I recognized the heroine (tragic villainess?) at once. Depicted in the blush of youth, Mom was radiant and cold as the February snows. It could be reasonably assumed that Wanatabe admired her and paid homage with his artistry. It was also possible that the film’s evil glamour twisted my perceptions. According to Dad’s guide to banned films, a critic (and defrocked priest) had referred to Ardor of the Damned as the Devil’s Hand Mirror—it showed viewers what it wished them to see and thus opened them to demonic manipulation.
As the tale unspooled, I crouched in the shadows providing sound effects and musical accompaniment with empty pots and jars, a cup of nails, a bag of blocks, and Mom’s washboard. This was a story obsessed with the ideal of child sacrifices as sublime provender for Those Who Wait. Only bad children, naturally. Except, what child isn’t at least somewhat mischievous? A mischievous child is halfway to being a brat and a brat isn’t generally scribed on the good list.
Intertitle cards supplied written narration to the more baroque subtext of the narrative. I intoned the following passages as they occurred:
Troglodytes squat in the depths, blackness lit by red torches as they congregate before an altar to Old Leech. In those primordial times their rude tongues could not, would not approximate his true name, and thus exclaimed him as a glottal bleat of abject horror. They are the wiser. Old Leech is the father to all soft, crawling predators. Best to slur, and murmur, and thus deflect the depredations of his baleful attention. Those who act in his name are either damned or damnable. The latter are ever on the prowl for innocent, squalling provender. In modern times, they extend their thoughts to the surface world, seeking the soft minds of wicked men to warp and command…
And:
Baron Need’s wig fit a tad sloppily. Need stitched together scalps he’d taken from screaming rebel officers. Off-white filthy, matted, it listed when he slapped it on, high as Franklin’s kite and wroth. Always pissed in both senses of the word. Opponents feared him on the battlefield. They feared him in the ballroom. He stole the wives of his enemies and murdered the cuckolded gentlemen in duels or drowned them in ornamental punch bowls. Blood bubbling amidst blood. Ultimately, his contact with They Who Wait completed his corruption and transformed him into an engine of malevolence. He became the Eyes and Ears of Old Leech, the Mouth…
I orated the monologues of Baron Need the Blood Eater himself, a shapeshifting disciple in service of the cult of a sleeping god and lover/tormentor of Carling, the Lady in White:
When you rise upon the wind and the world flattens, purple black above the western blaze, the red gash of the universe herself, men become fleas and their whining chorus bleeds into the gelid, granular nothingness of the void. You are unable to believe, at first. Later, when the proof mounts and becomes irrefutable, you refuse to cede what your eyes behold and what your heart grasps, because the hindbrain and beating heart are ancient as blood.
Small wonder that Lady Carling (who’d presumably been sold a bill of goods regarding the baron’s true nature) and Baron Need’s arranged romance soon crashed upon the rocks:
Later, Lady Carling crawls through a tower window. She clings to a patch of ivy as the stone ledge crumbles beneath her bare feet. Her gown shimmers by the fire of a yellow moon. Wispy clouds race across the inverted oubliette of the dark sky; the hem of her gown flutters, a trailing shadow. Her eyes are large and black, the moon sunk within their center as if reflected upon pools of stony midnight water. She releases her grip and gracefully plummets, arms extended toward the indifferent gods in their heaven.
Poor, trapped Lady Carling; poor trapped Mom. Lady Carling’s chosen means of escape from a poisonous love affair was suicide (she’d soon discover her error; some unlucky folk who died in the baron’s castle rose again as thralls of the Great Dark). If there was some supernatural parallel between Ardor of the Damned and the narrative of our own material reality, Mom was no less doomed.
As the film progressed into its third act, Baron Need lamented the “death” of his mistress and the extinguishment of his own humanity:
The curse assumes manifold forms. Your fangs, your claws, your coal black pelt that does not shine under a midnight moon are no more singular than milady’s gray face and long, spoiled tongue, her talons that rend the wood and enamel of coffins. Nay, you are an asymmetrical match. Sometimes, in a flattering light, she is comely once again. In such moments you recall her as she was the night she plummeted from the walls of your stronghold. You imagine the beautiful shapes of the sons and daughters she would have given you. Instead, you gather the children of peasants and freeholders and jettison their unfinished souls into the maw of the Great Dark. You supplicate They Who Wait and the One whom They serve in hopes of a reward or release…
…and so forth until an oblique, crushingly nihilistic finale transpired, everyone was dead or worse, and the credits (written in an indecipherable text) rolled. Chilling silence filled the cottage until Constantine whimpered. A couple of the youngest joined in. Otherwise, they remained eerily quiet.
After I packed the projector and snuffed the lamps, our miserable clan had lain in the faint glow of the hearth coals. I practically heard my brothers and sisters blinking, pop-eyed, as each digested the phantasmagoric terrors he or she had witnessed. Most terrible must have been the sinking realization that the faces of the children in the film were strikingly similar to their own.
In my dreams, Baron Need and Lady Carling fled as the castle blazed against the midnight sky. The ruined couple wandered the forest until they discovered a humble cottage. The baron raised his fist to hammer upon the door. He called to its inhabitants in Dad’s voice. The door creaked open and revealed walls embedded with skulls and a dirt floor that crumbled into an abyss. A choir of children sang from the bottom of the pit amid flickers of lightning and the sullen glare of lava beds.
* * *
The next dawn, after milking Ms. Petals, I trudged into the deeper forest. This day I didn’t venture forth to gather kindling wood or to forage for our supper. I carried the boar spear at my side and glanced neither left nor right, stoic as a prison guard, or mayhap a prisoner marching for the scaffold.
The spitting image of Sir Gregory Peck slipped from a patch of shadows, agile as an eel.
Despite his startling entrance, this was scarcely a surprise. I’d previously encountered him the day after Mom and Dad departed the homestead. However, the beloved actor had died in a carriage accident several years before my birth and this semblance, or affectation, filled me with dread. Which was doubtless his aim. He meant to suggest his power over life and death, the ability to subtly distort laws of physics that lowly men presumed to be immutable.
Thus, upon our prior meeting, I’d immediately dubbed him Not-Peck, whilst nodding and behaving agreeably, rest assured. He’d claimed admiration for Mom and Dad as artists, albeit he lamented their dismal lack of parental instincts. Not-Peck was dead-on, but at least my parents hadn’t raised a fool.
When mommies and daddies are desperately unhappy, we come to them, he’d said. They’ve thrown you lambs to the wolves. All is not lost. You I may be able to save…Upon concluding that conversation, he’d presented me with Ardor of the Damned and an admonishment to handle the reels with care. Beyond
its dangerous hypnagogic properties, Ardor was virtually extinct. Two copies had survived the inquisitorial purges of outraged critics—this and K. M. Wanatabe’s personal cut. Not-Peck referred to the film as the catalyst of an alchemical process that might transform the minds and bodies of young viewers to something…palatable.
Today, the “actor” wore a silk shirt and breeches beneath a fine wolf pelt cloak. He appeared in the guise of himself during middle age when he’d chewed scenery in The Dark Omen and Cape Terror. Black hair grayed at the crown and temples; square of jaw and broad through the shoulders. A priest or a sinner; a hero or a villain, as the script required.
“Hi, kid. Where are you going with that spear?” Not-Peck rested his hands on his hips and looked me over. His rich, sonorous speaking voice lagged ever so slightly behind the movement of his lips.
“About our arrangement…,” I said.
“A deal is a deal, son. We spit on our palms and everything.”
“We did—”
“All you must do is leave the door unbarred tonight and take a powder. Why are you glancing around like a yokel? Your parents can’t bail you out. Halfway to a sunny beach in the East Indies by now, I’d wager.”
The legends were explicit—demons and devils spoke with forked tongues. Contrarily, when it came to unholy pacts, they were bound by unassailable tradition to cleave to the exact letter of the law. This creature desired the blood of my blood and required my consent to swoop upon his (its?) prey. Surely, I could gain leverage if I knew where to pry.
“How can I be certain?” I said.
“Trust me, lad, you’re in the lurch,” he said. “Go into your mother’s trunk. She doubtless removed a keepsake. Her favorite dress, a flattering hat. Items none of you would miss before it was too late.”
To my chagrin, Not-Peck’s doppelgänger had it right. I’d already tossed the chest and discovered that Mom absconded with two dresses and matching hats. A pretty fantasy suggested itself—my parents hadn’t run away. No, they’d merely paint the town red, she, dressed to kill, on his arm the way they’d done it up ages ago. Soon, they’d be stumbling home with a handful of coppers and a bag of beans, hungover from a detour into fabulous extravagance and extravagant sentimentality.
And yet, and yet…
“Mom and Dad made a bargain with you,” I said to taste the betrayal, to weigh its merit. “A bargain to leave their children alone in the wilderness.”
“Bargain, pact, call it what you will. Your parents agreed to abdicate their familial obligations. The rest is on your shoulders. In your father’s absence, you are the man of the house.”
“You didn’t say why they made their bargain.”
“Didn’t I?”
“Fortune? Fame?”
“Door Number Three,” Not-Peck said.
“To escape.” I reconsidered. “Freedom.”
“A stripling youth, yet wise as pharaoh. You’ve read the fairy tales, yes? Blueprints of a murderous truth. Oafish fathers, wicked stepmothers, unwanted kiddies—”
“She’s our real mother. I know that much.”
“She’s a woman with thwarted ambitions. Starring in a propaganda film mocking the king tends to be a career impediment. A warren of mewling brats is the icing on that dung cake. People love to fuck; they aren’t always sanguine regarding the consequences. Nine is a hell of a litter.”
Nine? Oh, our cozy abode could’ve been even cozier. Two more babes were stillborn and toddling Elmer was bitten by a tick and succumbed to fever. I’d overheard a whispered conversation with Dad; she’d enlisted the aid of an apothecary’s various herbs and elixirs to no avail—the babies kept on arriving sure as the seasons. Who needed a melodramatic affliction such as lycanthropy or vampirism? Fecundity was my parents’ curse.
He plucked a flower from the brambles, meticulously shredded the petals, and extended his tongue to lick the thorns until his flesh abraded. He didn’t bleed.
“I’m fresh out of vitreous humor,” he said upon noting my morbidly attentive expression. “We are lacking the other kinds of humors, too. That’s what I’ve been trying to explain. Your brothers and sisters can help us with that.”
“We” and “us” cued the arrival of a man and woman who emerged from the undergrowth with nary a rustle. These worthies bore the likenesses of supporting actors I’d often seen, yet couldn’t name. Lord X and Lady Y.
“Meet the fellow members of my, ah, troupe,” Not-Peck said.
“Why does he come to us armed?” Lady Y said. She wore a ballroom gown cut so low I might’ve blushed had the greediness of her gaze and the dullness of her bared teeth not taken me aback.
“Frightful pointy spear you have there,” Lord X said. Decked in a fancy suit, he, too, seemed tarnished beneath the finery and powder. Eager, the pair of them. Very eager.
“Easy, comrades, no reason to excite a delicate moment,” Not-Peck said. “The young master and I were discussing his future.” He sidled closer and rested his limp, heavy hand upon my shoulder. The breeze hissing among the leaves sounded the same as his sigh. “Last night, I knocked to remind you of our pact. Did you play the film? Did you expose their sweet, innocent consciousnesses to unalloyed horror?”
“Was there a choice?”
“Was there a choice, it asks. The path most certainly forked. You merrily skipped down the left-hand trail and here we stand, albeit your feet are cold. Again, I say, cold footed or not, uphold your end of the bargain and leave the door unbarred tonight.”
“Else one lonely day here in the desolate wood, we’ll exact our vengeance,” Lord X said, and Lady Y tittered, happy with either outcome, judging by her grin.
The air darkened as the forest canopy shivered and blocked the wan sunbeams. He became one of the silhouette characters from Ardor of the Damned; his eyes shone crimson.
I nodded and glanced away to hide my emotion.
“Now, that’s better.” His voice softened into cajoling mockery. “Tell us, compliant lad, did our little critics enjoy cruel Wanatabe’s finest effort?”
What had the actor said? When mommies and daddies are desperately unhappy, we come to them.
Predators come running when they scent helpless babes in the wood. As frigid reality seeped into my bones, I doubted that even these sly gremlins who flitted in the shadowy niches of the frontier could rectify grim fate. Mom and Dad were permanently excommunicated from the ranks of privilege and adoration. If fairy tales had taught me anything, it was that the blackest-hearted wish granters possessed limits…and that wishes generally had a nasty catch.
The canopy shifted again and the sun poured its light through a notch above us. Sunlight is the natural enemy of that which slithers in the dark. No silver, holy water, or eldritch steel proved necessary. Since primordial times, men have successfully massacred every furred, scaled, and feathered creature that walked or crawled across the earth, and we did it with nothing more than a sharpened stick. That morning in the woods was no exception.
“On second thought, I bet you’re a big, fat liar, Sir Gregory.”
Some heroes succeed by dint of cunning and treachery. Dad had taught me to deal with problems the old-fashioned way—run like hell or resort to violence. I jabbed the spear into Not-Peck’s breast just the way I’d practiced a thousand times on hay bales. He leaped backward off the spearhead, spun on his heel, and pitched headfirst into the bushes. Some vital portion of him ejected with a flatulent gush and left behind a wrinkled, empty sack not unlike the shed chrysalis of an overlarge insect. The skin smoked where sunlight touched it, and evaporated.
Lord X and Lady Y observed this turn of events with smirking distaste rather than alarm. Neither offered resistance to my shrieking onslaught; they stepped into the underbrush and vanished. As I ran pell-mell for home, the troupe’s laughter followed me through the trees in the screams of the jays.
/> So close! So close!
* * *
“Vlad?” Constantine glanced up from making mud pies as I stumbled into the clearing where our cottage hunkered. She took scant notice of my disheveled appearance. In fairness, dirt, twigs, and dead leaves were common embellishments of my work attire. I patted her head. The rest of my siblings were scattered around the yard, tormenting the chickens and one another. Their shouts of joy and malice were subdued. The resiliency of children allowed them to shuffle their nightmares to the bottom of the deck and proceed with their trivial endeavors.
Lazy Eye Larry and Doug gave me reproachful looks as I strode into the cottage. Therein, I fetched a jug of wine from the cabinet (among Dad’s few luxuries), slumped at the table, and started drinking with earnestness.
Afternoon slid sideways into evening. Flynn, old soul that he was, took over my duties and bade the others to leave me in peace. Under his instruction, they battened down the hatches, served themselves lukewarm gruel, and eventually tucked in for sleep on the heels of a long, tedious day.
Eventually I resurfaced from my sojourn in the arms of wine-soaked oblivion. As the children tossed upon their mats, I burned Ardor of the Damned in the hearth, poking the reels until they crumbled to coals, then ashes. I regretted this course of action and could not fathom why. I imagined souls were released as the loops of film charred, rising with the smoke that disappeared up the chimney. This didn’t help. My skull felt enormous and full of a howling void. A primitive part of me wanted to replay the film, to savor the dread, to luxuriate in its wanton cruelty, to gorge upon nihilism.
Oh, you’ve done it now, Not-Peck said, a dancing shadow thrown by the flames.
Final Cuts Page 16