Final Cuts

by Final Cuts- New Tales of Hollywood Horror

  TJ: Can’t you? This was the early ’70s, no cellphones, no Internet, no GPS satellites or surveillance drones. And when I stopped the funding, Quent and Oleg lost any obligation to report production expenses to anyone, let alone involve ACTRA or the CLC. If anything, I think about how incredibly easy it would be to find a few dozen young, hungry people on the streets of Toronto, people with no families or resources, desperate dreamers who’d do anything to be in an honest-to-God movie….People who wouldn’t balk at being driven out to someplace in the Ontario backwoods, so long as they went together. Perhaps the buses were hired by Tamar’s husband, a man who’d find it a lot easier to hide a few under-the-table payments than an official production investment he’d have to claim on his tax returns. A man who’s since spent the rest of his life erasing as much record as he can of himself…and his wife.

  After all, Mr. Puget, consider how much strangeness you yourself have seen, in all the stages of your work. Your vocation, you said to me. Strangeness that others have reported, eyewitnesses with no evidence of madness, no reason to lie. Your Institute has photographs, videos, sound recordings—a veritable library of the stuff. Yet people, in general, still do not believe.

  RP: (LONG PAUSE, THEN) Look. Ectoplasm and psychic decontamination is one thing—even death, when it happens. But there’s a body. There are records. People know. You’re telling me that over forty years ago, one of Canada’s most respected filmmakers not only participated in an act of fucking mass human sacrifice to turn a retired B-list actress into some kind of pagan night goddess, but filmed it and released it? As a goddam feature-length movie?!

  TJ: Why not?

  Some secrets are far easier to keep than others, Mr. Puget. Some are so incredible people will simply laugh them off; others are terrible enough that no one wants to believe them, if given any choice at all. And some are so ghastly that by the time you are certain of them, they have already tainted you for good—drawn you in so deep you cannot betray them without being destroyed as a coconspirator, a fellow monster. Tell me you haven’t seen proof of this, not just yesterday but right now, in so very many places.

  RP: (PAUSE) That’s different.

  TJ: Of course it is.

  But as I said, this is all just inference. Filling in the gaps. Like astronomers, spotting planets not by looking for the light, but for where the light disappears. By thinking not about what’s in the film, but what’s been cut from it. And why.

  (LONG PAUSE)

  RP: The film keeps right on playing, though, right? Canadian Content regs keep it in circulation, even if it only ever shows in the middle of the night. People keep on watching it, and…nothing happens.

  TJ: Apparently.

  RP: Why?

  TJ: Maybe…you just had to be there, physically. No taint seems to have attached to her earlier films, after all, beyond a certain—very specific—sexual allure. But whatever her films did for Tamar, however the psychic attention of viewing them sustained her, I believe that stage of her…existence is over, at last. Her husband lives in her presence, alone with whatever she’s become; maybe it laps him in, keeps him forever asleep like Endymion, forever alive like Tithonus, frozen in a halo of dream. I don’t know whether or not to envy him, really. If there’s any danger left in her image, however, I think only lies whatever the viewer brings with them, while viewing it.

  RP: So…that’s why you took down the picture outside your office suite, right? Because it was of her. A portrait, a film poster, something.

  TJ: Yes. (PAUSE) She fought so hard to remain as human as she could, for as long as she could—even marrying a man for whom she felt nothing, thinking that would make them both safer. If there is anything left of who she was, I cannot think she is happy.

  RP: How would you know?

  TJ: Exactly.

  [TRANSCRIPT ENDS]

  Supplementary Correspondence

  Date: January 9, 2019

  To: drgabbott@freihoeveninst.ca; ross.puget@freihoeveninst.ca

  From: andrew.sorenaar@geography.utoronto.ca

  Re: Geolocation request

  Dear Dr. Abbott and Mr. Puget,

  Apologies for the delay in responding; most of my grad students were away for the Christmas break. I’m sorry to say that we weren’t able to find a single conclusive candidate location for the terrain images you provided—there simply wasn’t enough detail in the shots. However, based on reviewing the vegetation visible in the frames, and factoring in the information you were able to provide about likely distances from the Toronto core and accessibility to motor vehicles, we were able to isolate three possible coordinate sets—and fortunately for you, they’re all relatively close to one another, up in the Lake of the North district. With a good all-terrain vehicle you should be able to visit all three in one or two days. GPS coordinates and map routes are attached. (If you do travel out to visit these coordinates, I advise caution; these locations are all very remote and emergency assistance would be very long in coming.)

  Hoping this information is of use to you,

  Dr. Andrew Sorenaar

  University of Toronto, Faculty of Geography & Planning

  From a Note Found in the Empty House of Dr. T. Jankiewicz:

  Dear Mr. Puget, Lily, and Dr. Abbott:

  Though it perhaps goes without saying, let me nevertheless make things clear: I apologize for misleading you all. As you noted during our interview, I had removed one of the lobby cards made for The Torc’s initial screening from a display on my wall—a cut frame from the film’s climax, the ritual conducted at a “druidic altar” supposedly located just outside the rather literally named fictional small town of Night Worship, Ontario. You will no doubt recognize it as one of the geolocations Lily showed me, as part of our own final conversation.

  The fact is that even after withdrawing my money from Oleg and Quent, I made sure to continue paying certain lesser crew members to keep me informed on all aspects of The Torc’s production, including location scouting. As you will no doubt have figured out by now, the particular site where the climax was filmed is located on what Overdeere residents refer to as “the Dourvale shore,” near the location of the Sidderstane family’s original canning facility. It was chosen because of the central feature, a gigantic root mass growing up through the ruins of the cannery’s central hub, forming what appears to be a single massive altar fashioned from weathered stone and living wood. At the time the lobby-card picture was taken, the root system was covered in fungal growth of a type that Quent wasn’t able to identify.

  In the years since, I’ve tried to match the photograph to existing species, and found that it most resembles a combination of two types of jelly fungus, “black witch’s butter” and “yellow brain.” Since these are most commonly found on either the dead branches of deciduous trees or living hardwoods, you wouldn’t normally expect to find them on a living root system, even one as…exotic…as this one. Looking closer, however, you’ll see the gelatinous mass gilding the roots that spread outward from the “altar” contains sprinkled blooms of orange yellow, in distinctive fleshy outcrops. You can also see a clear layering of folded, lobed dark orange fruit-bodies underneath both types of fresh “butter,” indicating that the growth has been flourishing and dying off cyclically for some time. It’s an amazing effect, and I remember the location scout describing Quent’s clear pleasure at having discovered it. The only thing they had to do in order to “dress” it before shooting was to add candles and dishes of spirit, which were set alight to provide ambience during the climactic sequence.

  Near the end of our interview, after you had already turned off your recording equipment, I made sure to suggest that this altar must have been an improvised construction of black yarn and hastily painted Styrofoam. The geographic experts you consulted would therefore have searched
assuming it to be no longer there, which is why all three of their possible candidate sites could not fail to be wrong. By the time you read this, you will have visited them all and found nothing, while I will have gone straight to the correct site.

  I leave you the lobby card, since you evinced a clear interest in it.

  I don’t know why I assume whatever has become of Tamar might still be there. I do not know what I will find at the site, nor whether what I find will be what you might have found, had I allowed you, Lily, and your Dr. Abbott go there as planned. One way or the other, however, I believe, perhaps selfishly, that I am doing you all a favour—Lily, most specifically. I certainly know I am probably doing myself one.

  To die without seeing her again, you see, at least once…would have been—anticlimactic. To say the very least.

  I remain, yours truly,

  Tadeusz Jankiewicz, DDS

  PS: Lily, my sweet girl, I am so sorry. Please believe that I did not mean to betray your trust. It is only that my interactions with Mr. Puget reawakened an old addiction inside me, and when I saw a way to indulge it, I took it.

  I love you, child, as I loved your grandmother and mother. I will miss you, always.

  Goodbye.

  * The only Hollywood director with whom Tamar Dusk ever worked, Nicholas Ryback (born Nikolai Rybakov in Petrograd in 1922), was known for prescreening his films to small private audiences before general theatrical release, often conducting final and sometimes radical edits alone after this feedback. Blood Mirror (1953) in particular was rumoured to have had its entire final scene removed and destroyed after the studio saw it in rushes, with a replacement denouement supposedly assembled from already-cut segments. Apocryphal reports pop up from time to time of the intact original version being broadcast late at night on local television channels, but this is considered to be an urban legend.

  MANY MOUTHS TO MAKE A MEAL

  Garth Nix

  JORDAN HARPER was a fixer for the studio. Not a high-level fixer—the kind who sorted out problems with the stars, arranging abortions and sudden marriages and unexpected corpse removals and so on—because the studio he worked for didn’t have any stars. Pharos Pictures was firmly second-rate, B movies only, and the one time they did have someone with star power, Peggy Karolobian (who the world would later know as Carole Stannard) she was only there long enough for one movie and the time it took MGM’s lawyers to break her contract.

  Jordan still had to arrange abortions and sudden marriages and remove unexpected corpses, but he didn’t do it for stars. All the dirty work he managed was for middling actors, and hack directors and fringe-dwelling producers, and there was always a calculus involved. The studio didn’t swing into action to protect everyone on the payroll. How much was that person worth to Pharos Pictures? If the studio was going to be compromised, if the perpetrator was perceived to have some future value, and their sins were not too difficult to paper over, Jordan would be called in. If not…let ’em twist in the wind.

  That’s what Sol Theakston liked to say. He was the decider, as president of the studio, son-in-law and nephew of the moneymen back East who funded the whole operation. Even B movies were expensive. It was rumored Pharos was a cash-laundering operation for Theakston’s family, who were still better known as the Goldberg rum kings, since they hadn’t changed their surnames like Sol.

  But Jordan didn’t think so. He’d know if that was the case, and besides, Sol loved movies and often talked about his ambitions to build Pharos into a first-line studio. It was possible he might even do it. The pictures they’d been making had been getting better and doing better over the past few years.

  Maybe one day Jordan would be a fixer to the stars. But he knew it wasn’t going to happen soon, and definitely not the Friday morning he got a call from Mrs. Hope, Sol’s secretary, personal assistant, and passer-on of special jobs and bad news.

  “Sol wants me to check up on an extra?”

  “Apparently she’s threatening to go to the papers,” said Mrs. Hope. Her voice was old and scratchy, but everyone sounded like that over the crappy phone in the Lookout Bar, a dive with no windows on Hollywood a couple of blocks along from Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre. Jordan took his breakfast at the Lookout every morning, and made the calls that were better kept out of his office at the studio.

  Mrs. Hope was actually young, under thirty, and Jordan thought her better-looking than most of the actresses he knew. Or more interesting, anyway. She was also a lot tougher than anyone else on the lot, including the crowd of ex-cowboys and circus folk who did the stunts. Jordan had seen her slash the back of an importunate associate producer’s hand with a straight razor, so quick neither man had seen where the razor came from, or where it went, since Mrs. Hope had just kept on walking to her car as if nothing had happened.

  Jordan thought that producer was particularly stupid, not taking his cue from Sol, who always treated Mrs. Hope like she was his sister, and an older, wiser one at that.

  Jordan had noticed this, first day on the job, and always behaved accordingly.

  “Go to the papers? Do you know what she might go to the papers about, Mrs. Hope?”

  “This is from Mr. Theakston personally this morning,” said Mrs. Hope, which meant she did know but wasn’t going to discuss it without permission. “He told me Amity Truelove, real name Helga Sorenson. Apartment three, One Twenty-Six Bora Bora Gardens.”

  “Okay. I’ll go over after I sort out that business with Teddy Thorogood’s ex-husband. Shouldn’t take long.”

  “Very good, Mr. Harper. Mr. Theakston expects to see you at five, as per usual.”

  “You got it. Good morning, Mrs. Hope.”

  Jordan returned the earpiece to the wall mount, the faint sound of the operator connecting Mrs. Hope to someone else echoing out of the Bakelite receiver.

  An hour later, with only a slight graze on the knuckles of his left hand testament to the sorting out of Teddy Thorogood’s ex-husband, Jordan parked his green Model A two blocks short of his destination. It was a habit he kept to, even if it meant some extra walking. Better for reconnaissance, and for leaving no obvious clues.

  The apartment building he was heading for was anonymous, one of a dozen two-story affairs in a row along Bora Bora Gardens. A new street, half of it still dirt, half badly paved. The buildings were cheap, pink or white stucco over concrete. Some developer had made a lot of money. And had probably overextended and gone bust in the last four years.

  Jordan paused outside One Twenty-Six for a moment to readjust the .45 automatic in his shoulder holster, checking for the thousandth time that it would draw easily. It was a government-issue pistol he’d never given back after returning from France in 1919, and fourteen years later it continued to serve him well. He had an almost superstitious attachment to it, and to his other lucky piece, an 1837 five-franc silver coin that he carried everywhere. He’d seen the glint of it and bent down to pick it out of the mud at exactly the moment a shell had burst overhead, killing his friend Izzy and two other guys, four days before the Armistice. He’d copped some wounds to his back from the flying fragments of hot metal, but he would have been killed if he hadn’t bent down for the coin.

  He didn’t often need a gun, but he liked to know it was there, as it had been when Jordan had first gone up the line, all blinkered and deaf in his gas mask and the German trench-raiders had burst out of a yellow-green poison gas fog, and he’d shot them down, doing what had to be done from immediate instinct, without even thinking.

  He had a lead-weighted sap in his right trouser pocket as well, and a small folding knife in a holster sewn into his belt at the back. He hardly ever had to use them, either, but like the pistol, he thought it better to have them handy than not.

  Jordan noticed all the windows were shut tight, and the curtains closed, before he went up. That could mean anything, but it was odd, si
nce everyone else had their windows open. Apartment three was the second on the left, up one flight of stairs. He could hear the family on the right-hand side arguing about lunch, a couple of kids demanding something and their weary mother telling them to shut the fuck up. It was that kind of new neighborhood, full of people feeling worn-out before their time.

  All the other apartment windows were open because it was May, and starting to get warm. Jordan could feel it himself, the sweat building under his arms and in the small of his back. Soon he’d have to change to one of his lighter suits. In weight, that is. Nothing white or tan or anything stupidly light in color, because they stained too easily. It was a lot harder to see blood on a good dark blue or black suit.

  No one answered his knock on the door. He hammered the knocker again, a few times, a lot harder, but there was still no response.

  “Hey, Miss Sorenson!” he called. “It’s Jordan Harper, from the studio!”

  There was still no response. He rested his head against the door, pressed his ear to the timber. He couldn’t hear anything. No quiet footsteps or the sound of someone sneaking back from the door. No harsh breathing, someone huddled against it. All things he’d heard many times before.

  Jordan sighed and took a look at the keyhole. It was a three-lever ward lock, almost as useless as not having a lock at all. Jordan sighed again and took out his ring of skeleton keys, tried the one he used the most often, unlocked the door, turned the handle, and pushed it open to the extent of the safety chain.

  Someone was home. Just lying doggo.

  There was an odd smell emanating from the apartment. Jordan’s nose itched as he smelled it. It was kind of familiar, but not. It took him a moment to realize the familiar part was the stench of death, but it was overlaid with something else, something sweet and flowery. Reminiscent of the white flowers that grew on the vine out the back of his house up in the hills. He hated that vine for its pungency and its ability to regrow no matter how many times he uprooted the damn thing.