As visitor and escort neared their terminus, the music changed abruptly: Electric guitars and amplifiers were replaced with the sweet strains of violins and the low mellow murmur of a cello. The dancers ceased gyrating and began to waltz, decorously and at arm’s length. Valentino had spent so much of his rest time lately in dreams that if it weren’t for the urgency of his errand he’d have suspected the entire affair was the distorted fancy of an overworked mind and a hyperactive imagination.
Jason Stickley broke out of a small group to greet him. The boy wore his high silk hat accessorized from the scrapyard, frock coat, padlock and chain. “How do you feel about reinforcements?” He turned a palm toward the group—young men all, so far as Valentino could determine behind the metalwork, stiff collars, machinists’ goggles, waistcoats, and gentlemen’s headgear circa 1890, with a hefty helping of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. Shy grins and gestures of welcome came with clanking accompaniment.
The archivist seized Jason’s arm and turned him aside. “I didn’t give you permission to tell anyone.”
“You didn’t say I couldn’t.” The intern sounded hurt.
“I’d be less conspicuous driving a wagon loaded with pots and pans.”
“Oh, we’ll dump the paraphernalia. We re not stupid.”
“You’re all barely old enough to vote. I can’t be responsible for putting you in jeopardy. I’ll go alone.”
“Too late, Mr. Valentino. I know where you’re going, remember. Anyway, we’re old enough to join the army and fight a war.”
“I start basic training next month,” said one of the others who’d overheard.
“I figure this makes me older.” Another smacked his palm with a heavy brass knob fixed to a stout walking stick.
“I can’t fit you all in my car.” He realized the weakness of the argument even as he raised it.
“Pat’s got his dad’s Hummer,” Jason said. “We can all fit in it with room to spare.”
“Me, too.” Tin Woman’s valley girl accent sounded like the real thing.
“No women.’’ This came in chorus from the group of young men.
She stuck out a tongue that looked blood-red against silver skin. “That Victorian male chauvinist B.S. won’t work even here. See, I’m armed.” A hobnailed hand dove into her lace décolletage and came up with a steel whistle on a chain around her neck. She blew it. The shrill sound slashed across the chamber music, turning heads their way briefly from the dance floor.
“We’re going whether you say yes or no,” Jason said. “We’re not freaks. When someone’s in trouble, we help.”
Valentino took his fingers out of his ears. “Just don’t blow that thing unless you absolutely have to. If these guys hear a police whistle, they’ll shoot first and ask questions never.’’
“So we re all in?” Jason’s grin was almost too broad for his narrow face.
“God help me, but I can’t fight the mob and all of you at the same time.”
“Way to go, Joy Stick!” said the boy with the bludgeon.
“Joy Stick?”
The intern flushed. “Jason Stickley, you know? We all have nicknames.”
“I’m Link.”
“Wilde Thing. With an e.”
“Pat Pend.”
“I’m Whiz. Short for Whistler’s Daughter.” The girl raised her whistle to her lips again. Valentino’s hand shot out and grasped it. She colored under the undercoat and dropped it back between her breasts.
He looked at his strap watch. They had less than twenty minutes to go fifty blocks. “You have to follow all my orders to the letter. If you don’t agree, I’ll call the cops right now and rat you all out as underage guests at a party where alcohol is served.” He showed them his cell.
“There’s no—” someone started.
“He knows about the keg from before,” Jason interrupted. “He’s hip for an old dude.”
“‘Hip’?” Link, the youth in basic training, furrowed his brow under a deerstalker cap with a brass steam pressure gauge cemented to the crown.
“Properly informed.” Whiz’s upper-class Brit clashed with her Moon Zappa.
Valentino let out the sigh of a ninety-year-old man. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
The partyers divested themselves of chains, bells, and everything else likely to make noise and climbed into the boxy vehicle parked not far from the compact. Valentino leaned his head through the open window on the passenger’s side and asked Jason if he had his phone. Joy Stick showed him his punked-up cell.
“I’ll call you just before I go in and leave it on. That way you’ll hear what’s going on inside. What’s your number?”
“I don’t know if I have that many minutes.”
“I’ll pay for the extra.”
“I didn’t mean that.” His tone was plaintive. “It’s prepaid. It cuts off when my time runs out.”
Whiz, sprawled across three laps in the backseat, said, “This is why we like Victoriana.”
“Here.” Pat Pend, behind the wheel, excavated an unadorned model from a waistcoat pocket and handed it to Jason. He gave the number to Valentino, who punched it into the memory.
“If things turn sour, call the police,” he said.
“What if they take away your phone?” asked Jason.
“Wait fifteen minutes, then call the police.”
“Fifteen minutes is a long time.”
“It’s just right if everything goes smoothly. Any less is risky. It wouldn’t be smart to startle them with sirens just when we’re making the exchange.”
“There wouldn’t have to be sirens. We outnumber these guys three to one.”
Valentino pushed his face close to the boy’s. “Do not go in, understand? No matter what. These men are killers. They’re what the police are for. When things go wrong, nobody calls the Steampunks.”
“You did.”
A chorus of agreement came from the other seats.
And I pray I don’t regret it. Aloud he said, “You know where this place is in case we get separated?”
Jason’s teeth glistened in the light from a streetlamp. “I’d be one lousy film student if I didn’t.”
Valentino decided, if he survived the night, to ask his department head to appoint this boy—this young man—to a salaried position. Anyone who could make him smile under those circumstances was worth keeping around.
**
CHAPTER
21
THE HOLLYWOOD WAX Museum was one of Valentino’s favorite haunts, a place to go and revisit the giants of his Movie Channel youth in 3-D—the real thing, without a cumbersome pair of glasses coming in between. The white stucco building with its electric marquee-type sign was an ancient institution by local standards: Its oldest figures from the silent age had modeled for the sculptors in person. When the season sagged beneath ponderous special effects and actors with crow’s-feet playing horny high school students, the archivist would bring a sack lunch and dine with Francis X. Bushman, Blanche Sweet, and Rin Tin Tin.
But at that hour, with the sign switched off and Hollywood Boulevard as deserted as any street ever got in a major metropolitan area (he’d heard stories of coyotes slinking down from the hills and prowling the Walk of Fame), the museum appeared anything but friendly, a mortuary reflecting the smog-muted starlight from its pale front. A box that had once held a Magic Chef electric range slouched on the corner, providing sleeping quarters for one or more of the L.A. homeless, modern-day Bedouins who folded their tents and stole away come the dawn. Whatever they witnessed during the night vanished with them.
The Hummer had turned off a block short of the address, as arranged, and Valentino had his choice of parking spaces. He pulled up directly in front of the arched entrance so he and Lorna could make their escape as quickly as possible. Or so he prayed.
He remembered to call Pat Pend’s number, and after a quick exchange with Jason, left the line open and slid the p
hone into the slash pocket of his Windbreaker. Despite the delays he’d reached his destination with four minutes to spare, thanks to the thinness of the traffic. Gripping the wheel in both hands, he took a deep breath, held it a moment, and expelled it with a rush. Then he tipped up the door handle and got out.
The front door opened without resistance. He shook his head. Security personnel the world over were underpaid. He hoped that whatever amount Grundage had slipped the person responsible was worth the loss of his job if it got back to his superiors.
No alarm had gone off when he pulled at the door, and when he stepped inside, the motion sensors mounted high on the walls regarded him without interest. They would have been disarmed, most likely by the same person who’d left the door unlocked. Surveillance cameras attached to the ceiling had ceased their relentless oscillation, their red lights dark.
A shudder racked his shoulders. A wax museum is an eerie enough place by daylight, but at night, with the bare minimum of lights left on to discourage intruders, this one may as well have been excavated from the dust of centuries, and he the first man to enter it, and to lay eyes upon freshly interred remnants from the age of superstition and black magic. The deserted ticket counter, the garlands of theater ropes arranged to control visitor traffic during peak periods, the racks of free brochures promoting other local tourist attractions, all took on a grim aspect when shadows skulked about the extremities. A bright banner strung high overhead across the lobby advertising the current featured exhibit in honor of the Halloween season (HIGH STAKES: THE VAMPIRE IN FILM FROM NOSFERATU THROUGH TWILIGHT) writhed like a venomous serpent in the air stirred by his entrance.
Valentino had never enjoyed being frightened, even in fun. It was one thing to be scared out of one’s wits in a crowded theater, where the experience was shared, quite another to walk home down an empty street or climb a dark flight of stairs alone and with one’s imagination filled with grisly images. He had never seen a horror movie made since the original 1968 Night of the Living Dead more than once, and after his first experience with The Exorcist, he had sworn off every chiller that followed. He’d never seen anything in the Wes Craven canon or that of any of his imitators and, based on what he’d witnessed in trailers, doubted that he was any poorer for the decision. He preferred to snuggle up with Henry Hull’s werewolf of London, Frankenstein’s Monster from Karloff through Glenn Strange, and anyone who played Count Dracula until Hammer Films got carried away and started buying its Max Factor blood by the barrel. In those earlier films the hero always won, defeating the mad scientist and winning the heart of the heroine, and the ghoul thoroughly destroyed, at least until the cameras began rolling on the sequel. But even these pleasant memories became sinister when only the sound of his own breathing and the beating of his heart were present.
He’d thought to bring along a flashlight, which became essential as he passed along the first public corridor beyond sight of the front windows and saw only pitch blackness at the end. He switched it on and poked the beam about. The faces of long-dead movie stars seemed to stir in the unsteady shaft, their expressions to change from earnest to malevolent as shadows crawled. Ghosts disturbed in the middle of the night were never friendly.
Although he hadn’t been told where to go in the building, he didn’t wander, nor did he call for guidance. For one thing, he was afraid his throat wouldn’t work, as happened in bad dreams when he tried to cry out; for another, he didn’t want to take the chance of being overheard by some strolling insomniac outside and prompting a call to the police. Too late, he thought of the unlocked door and the possibility of an officer on his rounds discovering it and going in to investigate, but no power on earth could persuade him to retrace his steps. He couldn’t afford to squander whatever courage he had left turning back around and re-entering that corridor.
It struck him odd that a law-abiding citizen should spend as much time worrying about the police as a common felon engaged in his work. Was it a kind of madness? The hoarders’ obsession that he alone could be trusted to protect something of value from destruction? Or had he spent too many thousands of hours in artificially darkened rooms watching melodramatic characters conducting themselves as no sane person would in the real world? Both explanations indicated an unsound mind.
He did not wander. He knew where the meeting place was.
The way led him past Indiana Jones and Mr. Chips, How Green Was My Valley and Star Wars. Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara fled the burning of Atlanta (with the bulbs in the electric flames switched off), Easy Riders Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda bent over their choppers, James Dean looked sullen, Marlene Dietrich straddled a wooden chair in black lingerie and top hat. The figures were exquisite likenesses rendered in minute and lifelike detail, unlike the bland-faced mannequins one saw in roadside attractions got up in iconic costumes to suggest the originals; here, Garbo’s silken lashes appeared poised to flutter, Bogart’s scarred lip to curl away from his often-imitated snarl, Mel Gibson’s brow to wrinkle and his head to twitch. The artisans responsible had been brought in from all over the world, and if their commissions were reflected in the admission price, they were well worth it. As a matter of fact, Valentino found $8.95 more than reasonable for an experience that would last far longer than most movies that cost ten dollars to see and took ten minutes to forget. The place was a permanent fixture in a landscape constantly in flux, like Grauman’s Chinese Theater and the two-story-tall wooden letters sprawled across the hills that had given the community its name, along with a culture and an attitude that for better or worse was known throughout the globe.
He came around Johnny Weissmuller in his loincloth wrestling a giant gorilla and descended the broad flight of steps that led to the Chamber of Horrors.
Here all the lights were on. The place was below street level and there were no windows to betray activity inside. He snapped off the flashlight and slid it into the briefcase containing the two reels of film in their cans.
“It’s alive! Alive! Alive!”
The maniacal cry echoed around the block-and-plaster walls, startling Valentino, who nearly dropped the case. Belatedly he recognized the voice of Colin Clive from the Frankenstein soundtrack. The fragment was followed a moment later by a bestial howl, then the somber voice of Maria Ouspenskaya in her Slavic gypsy accent: “Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolf-bane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.” Then came brash Robert Armstrong: “It wasn’t the planes. It was beauty killed the beast.”
Someone knew he was there. Whoever it was had activated the sound system that piped memorable lines from classic horror movies into the chamber. Claude Rains had just begun his curtain speech about meddling in things man should leave alone when he was cut off. A flat, nasty chuckle reached the newcomer’s ears as if the man responsible was standing next to him. Pudge Pollard laughed the way he spoke.
He was aware suddenly of movement among the figures in a tableau he’d just passed, a stirring in the corner of his eye and a rustle of clothing. He turned that way, and his blood slid to his heels as Boris Karloff shrugged loose of his rotted wrappings and stepped from his sarcophagus. It was the set of the tomb from the opening scene of The Mummy, the 1932 original, and Im-ho-tep was coming to life after three thousand years just as he had in the film.
It was an illusion, caused by frayed nerves and the atmospheric lighting. The man was emerging from behind the coffin, not from inside, and he wore a contemporary sportcoat a size too large for him, presumably to conceal his gun when it was in its holster. It was in his hand, and although Valentino had never seen the man before and didn’t recognize his sunken cheeks and prison pallor, he knew the moment he spoke that he was Dickey Wirtz, Pollard’s wheezy-voiced confederate.
“Gave you the willies, huh? Same stunt I used to scare the pants off my ninety-year-old grandmother.”
Wirtz stepped down from the platform. “You’re the movie nut. You know what’s next
.”
Valentino set the briefcase on the floor and stood with his arms out from his sides while the man patted him down with one hand, holding the gun pointed at him but out of easy reach. The hand went inside his slash pocket and came out with the cell phone. Wirtz saw it was turned on with the line open, frowned, and put it to his ear. “Hello?”
Valentino read on his face the moment Jason hung up. There was no mistaking that voice for the archivist’s. The sickly pale face grew dark. The hand holding the gun swept up so quickly Valentino had no time to brace himself. A white light burst in the side of his head. He stumbled, but caught his balance. Something warm and wet trickled down from his temple. The jagged gunsight had broken the skin.
“Pudge said no cops!”
Alive! Page 18