by Adam Cesare
Sean’s mouth was agape.
“I cannot believe your legal representation did not inform you. As you inferred, Mr. Winters, I am not making much money off of your—what’s your word? Reboots?”
Sean nodded. Any other time, he might’ve been proud of that non-word.
“It was never about the money.”
The old man lifted his head so that Sean could peek beneath his hat brim. The director’s eyes were so sunken that there was only an abyss in those sockets.
“How noble,” Sean said.
“Yes, well, I suppose that’s not entirely true. I have different desires than you, Mr. Winters. How many houses do you need, exactly? Is the Hollywood Hills home not enough? Or the beach house in Maui? Why would you need an oceanfront apartment in Miami too?”
The old man had done more than his homework. Someone must’ve been feeding him information. When he found out who, he was going to—
Kill them? Like someone killed Chelsea?
Sebastian smiled at whatever face Sean made when he’d had the thought.
“When it came time for me to sign over the rights to Winterland, I asked for one simple thing. My lawyer drummed up the clause, and yours agreed to it. Weren’t you told?”
Sean had never paid much attention to legalities. It defeated the purpose of a lawyer.
The old man was laughing now, maniacal glee coming from somewhere other than his throat. His face was frozen like a mannequin’s, a twisted expression that refused to move. There was no motion there, even as the laughter boomed.
“Right here.” A bony finger dropped down the page. “Executive replacement right. This stipulates that I may interject my own input into the production if I feel the source material is being treated unfairly. This right, as it stands, belongs to us and is in accordance with your studio.”
“Who is us?”
Sebastian dropped the legal document in the dirt and turned back to the lake. “Of course, we had hoped you would do a good job. We were all very excited to see a new May Lane. We all went to see it, you know.” His words darkened. “But when we saw it ... Let’s just say you have a lot to answer for.”
Anger was boiling over, and Sean came forward with his fist raised. He had never struck a man in his thirty-nine years, but Sebastian was going to be the first. He went at the old man but screamed in horror at the sudden sight of him.
Sebastian’s body was bubbling all over, pulsing bladders cracking and breaking across long-rotted flesh. Skeletal fingers lifted his hat from his head, casting it aside as his body became a shapeless blot of dark space.
Inside of it, two pair of red eyes opened and drew closer while growls filled the air.
Sean screamed.
At the very least, his crew would hear him and come running. They’d know he was in danger and rush to help him, right?
Now the Gator Creek mutants were crawling up out of the blotted earth that used to be Sebastian’s feet. They looked nothing like his new, state-of-the-art makeup designs—just guys with unconvincing latex appliances plastered to their foreheads, suggesting a Cro-Magnon vibe.
He might’ve laughed if they didn’t have murder in their inbred eyes.
“It’s the movies.” Sebastian’s voice lingered, even though nothing remained of his body. “The movies. They need to be appreciated. Worshipped.”
Sean yelled, “The kids like them! What’s wrong with making a new movie?”
“If only you were trying to make a good one.”
The deformed Gator Creek dwellers crept closer, while the demons were growing shadows born from no tangible source.
Sean had to look up to see them now. “That’s a matter of opinion,” he cried out.
“How do you expect these vapid things to resonate with today’s audiences? They have forgotten your film in the time it takes to drive home from the theater.”
The cabin burst into a blue-tinged glow, and a horde of spirits drifted out from the otherworldly flames, encircling Sean. They passed right through him and chilled his bones while heightening his helplessness. He felt death in their passing and started to cry.
The antagonists from Sebastian’s 1972 The Legend of May Lane were Sean Winters’s personal escort to hell. They looked positively garish, blue and green optical effects that loosely resembled an upper torso and a shapeless head of a human.
From what little he had watched of that movie, they weren’t scary in the least.
But now...
“You do not try, Mr. Winters. You exploit. Cash in. And you dilute.”
The mutants lunged, lifting Sean high and hurling him across the beach, while the ghosts chattered overhead.
Sean skidded through the mud face-first and slid into Brittany’s naked corpse—what little remained of her.
Sean pushed her aside and got up, refusing to shed a single tear over the loss of a useless whore when his own extinction was imminent.
“I can fix this. Let me give you a Gator Creek that’s better than the original. We’ll make it gorier, sicker, and nastier. Give the kids a ride they’ll never forget.”
His detractors were always griping about Winterland’s “lack of balls”—he’d give them the most vile and shocking experience imaginable.
The ghosts swirled. The demons lurched. The mutants crept, licking their lips like dinner was inches away.
Sean took a step back, determined to escape.
Instead, he collided with the torn corpse of Brittany, her flesh dangling off her bones like a shredded nightgown. Jutting fangs hung down to her chin, and her eyes were milky white, devoid of all life.
He recognized the vampires from Blood Legacy and remembered thinking old Sebastian had almost made a scary movie because the damn vampires, with their vacant, white eyes, were genuinely creepy.
He wasn’t going to change the look of them at all. Maybe just a touch of CGI.
“You haven’t gotten around to destroying that one yet.” Sebastian beamed.
“I liked it.” Sean’s face was streaked with tears.
He dropped to the ground and felt warmth at his crotch, as piss soaked through the seam of his pants. “It’s just business,” he sighed.
“Business is all well and good,” Sebastian growled. “It does not mean you are free to trample on the memories of these films. They endure because people will them to endure. Go to revival screenings, buy the DVDs and action figures, dress up at conventions. They are worshipped like any deity. And you have desecrated them.”
“Why’d you give me the rights?”
“Because my friends need to be remembered.”
Sean screamed for help and was amazed to get a reply.
“I’m here, boss,” Rock called out from the trail’s exit. He stood against the trees, with the rest of the cast and crew fanned out on either side of him.
“Me too,” the mangled body of his assistant whispered in his ear.
Sean turned toward the voice, and Chelsea and her husband, both piles of bloodied bone, flashed their fangs.
Brittany pushed herself against his back. Her dangling innards squished against him as she grabbed his head with a rough tug—like a handlebar. “The night has fangs,” she purred.
And then Rock and the crew surrounded him on all sides, flashing their teeth through enthusiastic hisses.
The mutants came forward, jaws swiveling back and forth.
The looming demons stretched their claws and grew higher still. Something Sebastian had cribbed from the German Expressionists.
The ghosts whipped and whirled through Sean, splashes of ectoplasm staining his clothes while poisoning his innards.
He felt Brittany’s razor-sharp nails carving divots in his flesh as she trailed around to his front.
“Shall I take you in my mouth again, lover?” Her laugh was garbled, and saliva dripped down the length of her fangs.
“As I’m sure you can understand,” Sebastian said, “I am exercising my right as producer. And we are going to make this film
resonate.”
“It will endure,” Rock whispered from somewhere behind Sean.
Brittany assumed a familiar position and looked up with a smile that used to be seductive.
He begged her to stop, but there was only giggling while she fumbled with his belt. He struggled at first, but the two mutants stepped to his sides, locking his arms in place.
Brittany fished his flaccid member free. “Welcome to the big time, you sexy bitch,” she said, and sunk her teeth straight into it.
Brittany gnawed, and the specters, mutants, vampires, and demons closed in around him, blocking out the night sky as they ate, drank, possessed, and devoured him limb-from-limb.
Sebastian crowed his approval as the movies got their revenge.
They were going to endure.
Dead Air: Final Transmission
The morning’s rays poked through the basement window, and Danny was so tired that he wondered if it all had been a terrible dream.
But it wasn’t. The last movie finished, and Danny felt a morbid weight of responsibility to see the marathon to the end. He was disgusted by Count Mort, but they’d been through a lot together over the last ten hours.
Transitional static returned him to a familiar setting, and the camera panned slowly across the sea of bodies. It rested on the blood-streaked glass of the abandoned control booth.
“How I wish we could continue,” Count Mort said off camera. “But alas, our time is at an end.”
There was an awkward moment of silence before the man appeared. He popped the clip out of the gun and loaded another.
Danny watched, acutely aware of his own breathing, the sweat on his lower back. He wanted to look away—or not look at all—but after all this time he couldn’t.
Count Mort looked into the camera, and he might as well have been looking straight into Danny’s basement. The corners of his painted mouth flashed a tiny smirk that suggested maybe I am.
“Until next time, I bid you farewell,” Count Mort said, then looked beyond the camera. “Goodbye, Fred.”
There was a gunshot, and then several more as dark shapes streamed through the frame. The police had broken into the soundstage.
Holy crap!
The gunfire on the TV was so loud that it threatened to damage the speaker.
“You’re still up, you little shit?”
Tania was behind him, her eyes on the screen. He hadn’t heard her come down.
“Seriously, is this what you do when Mom and Dad are gone? The sun’s coming up.”
There was so much confusion. Danny tried to soak in what was going on in the studio. Did they get him?
“Ugh,” Tania said. “Turn that crap off, I’ve got a splitting headache.”
She walked past him and approached the TV controls.
“God, you always watch the worst garbage,” she said, and powered the TV down.
The image on the screen fell away, not fading like a bad dream but clicking off like a light bulb. Danny inhaled, the rush of air making him feel like he’d forgotten to breathe all night long. Normally he found Tania’s presence down here a violation of his time. But he was glad for her now.
His sister looked a little haggard in the light of dawn. Her leg warmers were lopsided, while her off-the-shoulder dress reeked of weed and liquor. Her usually perfect brown curls were split and flattened.
“What happened with Zach?” he asked, the mundane question refreshing to him.
“He’s lame is what happened. Stupid jerk thought he could sneak off with Julie and that I wouldn’t find—why am I explaining myself to you? Go upstairs, creep, or I’ll tell Mom I caught you down here jerking off. Again.”
Tania dropped onto the couch and buried her face in a pillow.
She was snoring before he could find a response.
He wanted to talk about the terrible things he’d seen tonight because he didn’t understand how a thing like that happened. A drunk sister? That he understood.
Heck, he wished he was passed-out drunk. The worst thing in her world right now was a cheating boyfriend. She could sleep, ignorant of the terrible things that he’d been unable to look away from.
Sure, there would be headlines tomorrow. Danny knew enough about the world to know that at least some of the blame would fall on the six films he’d seen tonight. Any other day that would have struck him as unfair, but after watching the whole thing, movies and interludes, there was something about him that didn’t recoil from the argument.
People were dead, and it wasn’t because of a movie monster.
He had a sick desire to click the TV back on, to check if they were broadcasting the cleanup, but instead he went upstairs and poured his sister a glass of ice water. He went back down and left it beside the couch, then touched the top of her hair, gently. She was going to wake up in a few hours and need the water.
She grumbled something and rolled toward the back cushion.
The Lurker, ruiner of movie nights, had become his secret savior. It was the first time since they were both kids that he was glad to have her around.
Something he would never say to her face.
He went upstairs and crawled into bed, thinking about Count Mort while he stared at the Phantasm poster on his ceiling. There was unexpected comfort in it. He usually hated the scene in which Mike woke up to find his bed in the middle of the graveyard and the Tall Man standing behind him; he kept the poster up only to prove he was not afraid.
He’d had nightmares about it.
Not tonight, or this morning—whatever. Danny drifted to sleep contemplating whether or not those movies he’d never heard of had been a dream or not. He’d never heard of them before and doubted he ever would again. There was something nice about that.
They were, after all, not reality.
Extra Transmissions: 4 New Stories
The first edition of All-Night Terror was an experiment we released by ourselves in 2013. It was an ebook-only release meant to entice new readers to try out the rest of our stuff. We conscripted a cover from artist and friend Lynne Hansen (huge thanks to her, who you can find at: LynneHansenDesign.com) and were off to the races.
But because neither of us has much savvy with self-publishing, ANT quickly became a “sleeper” for both of its authors, something only explored by readers who’d tangled with our various solo novels and novellas and were looking for something new.
But we thought the book was better than that, so we pulled it from the market and began plotting for its return. We got in touch with Sinister Grin Press and asked if they’d be willing to release a new and expanded edition of ANT. They said yes and that birthed the book you currently hold in your hands.
Not content with re-heating six old stories and a wraparound, we set about writing four new stories (two each) to entice people who own the old edition to give this new one a spin. And because all four didn’t quite fit into the world of Count Mort and Danny, we decided that they’d best serve as an appendix.
What follows are four never-before-published short stories, some of our very best work, we believe.
Enjoy. And thanks for taking a chance on this book. Maybe for a second time.
Adam Cesare and Matt Serafini
4/27/2016
A New Kind of Image
Paul considered Drew Struzan and Robert McGinnis to be his personal heroes.
In his opinion, they were the world’s greatest movie poster and paperback cover artists, respectively.
He wondered if either of them, at this point in their lives, had to deal with Paypal withholding funds. Probably not.
Probably they didn’t even know what Paypal was.
It was early morning, the sun not yet slanting through the blinds of his office/bedroom/entire share of the apartment, and Paul took a deep breath before tabbing over to Facebook.
Now that the gutpunch of checking his bank statements and email was through, he might as well go for the beleaguered-freelancer hat-trick and check if he had any commission queries
.
He had seven messages!
And all of them were—no doubt—garbage!
There was the “publisher” of some “trangressive new horror fiction” who was willing to pay “in the neighborhood of a hundred dollars per cover” for a new imprint that he would be “promoting like crazy on social media, so the exposure itself will be worth the effort!”
Seeing as a project like a book cover would take Paul around 20-30 work hours to bring from sketch to polished revision, a hundred bucks per cover (minus Paypal’s cut, because he doubted this publisher had enough foresight to set up a verified account) seemed totally fair.
The most depressing part of the offer was that one of Paul’s “esteemed colleagues” would no doubt jump at the opportunity. And more than likely be burned when it came payday.
The query was a hard pass. Next.
The next three messages were spam, to various degrees. One was a declaration of true love from a Swedish robot.
Paul was delayed in reading the rest of the messages by his roommate, Em, starting up the blender in their small shared kitchenette. Paul had looked up the model number and, yes: Em’s blender was more expensive than Paul’s entire illustrator suite and laptop.
Em was short for Emilio, not Emily. No lady would live with Paul.
Em was a good roommate where Paul was a shitty one. Em was considerate, punctual with rent payments, and, a couple of times, had floated Paul when he’d needed it. But that fucking blender was a jet engine.
After the second round of blending, there was silence on the other side of the wall, and Paul could continue reading his Facebook messages in peace.
Two of the remaining queries were from authors seeking covers for their self-published books. The notes read so similarly to the one from the “publisher” that it made Paul wonder if there was a template for these things somewhere.
You likely weren’t a very imaginative author if you couldn’t think of a novel reason why Paul should work for no money.