“That so?”
“Yes, sir. I was about to snap a silverback coyote when you drove up.” Loveless didn’t know if such a thing as a silverback coyote existed, but he was improvising.
“What’s your name?”
“Loveless. J.D. Loveless.”
“That your real name?”
“Unless you know something my father doesn’t know.”
“You see anyone else out here?”
“No, sir,” the filmmaker lied.
“You been drinking tonight, Mr. Loveless?”
“No, sir,” Loveless replied truthfully. He bought the kids beer. He wasn’t prepared to drink with them.
One of the deputies crushed a beer can with his foot, “Wildlife, huh?”
“Yes, sir.”
The officers seemed to dismiss the filmmaker. As they searched for signs of this wildlife, Loveless got the hell out of there.
A few days later - not finding much more on the Internet other than an obituary for Jeremy Jared and no mention of the band - the filmmaker went down to the library in Arrowhead to fill in the blanks. Loveless scanned through the archives of the local newspapers. All he found were a few vague stories. One was about a missing runaway girl named Annabelle Kersey, described by a friend of the family as a little lost girl. Another was about a house that burned down, killing all of the residents. The victim's names were listed. One was Jeremy Jared. There was also an address for the house.
J.D. Loveless arrived at the house in the woods of Running Springs, a hilly area with not much else around. It took him awhile to find the two story structure since it wasn’t really a structure anymore. None of the walls were still standing. This was the site of something that had happened decades ago. The single frame beam that was still standing served more as its tombstone. On the beam, however, hung a fresh wreath. Loveless read the simple note pinned to the wreath, "We still love you." After all this time, Mathaluh still lived, at least in the hearts and minds of certain denizens of this mountain. The filmmaker found himself wishing there was a name on the note, that there was someone living and breathing he could track down. Someone who had been around back then and had known, someone who knew if they were devil-worshippers or not.
The place was fire-gutted. The remnants of the couch and the little furniture that did remain were massively water-stained from the local fire departments efforts to put out the blaze. It had obviously been too late to save the home and occupants by the time authorities arrived. The entire fire fighting effort must have gone to keeping the inferno from spreading to the woods. Shreds of yellow police caution tape still flapped around here and there in the breeze. Only in a rural area like this, with so much forest land for building homes, would an eye-sore like this go undisturbed for over three decades. The filmmaker stood in the middle of the debris field, taking it all in. He noticed something. At his feet was an old water-stained photograph, the edges burnt. He stooped and peeled it off the scorched wood floor it was stuck to. Loveless was amazed it had survived the elements and time. It was a picture of five defiant looking young men. Five members who could not be tamed. They were standing in front of a house. This house.
This is it? This is all that's left? A lousy picture. Well, this was a total waste of time, Loveless thought as he sat down on the couch studying the photo. Physical contact with the couch seemed to trigger something. A connection. The filmmaker looked closer at the picture. The men in the picture were a typical expression of youth in the 1970's. Their hair was long, but shorter than their predecessors, the drug loving hippies of the sixties. It was chin length, rather than shoulder long. You could see that the young men were full of bluster, bravado and arrogance. Their hands were on their hips or folded across their chests. These were, by all local accounts, talented musicians who, at that moment in time, had their whole lives ahead of them. The members of Mathaluh fully expected to be stars, ruling the music world. Rock gods. But there was one who stood out even among these large personas. One who stood in the forefront. One who looked directly into the camera as the photo had been snapped. He was the obvious leader of the group, king of the would-be gods. He was a slim man with long brown hair, a gaze like blue ice and a thin vacant smile. Instinctively, the filmmaker knew this was Jeremy Jared, lead singer and the face of Mathaluh. What was it that the little boy Toby had said at the Rock a few nights earlier? Front man eternal.
There was something else. There was a haze that hung over the band, on them. No. Not a haze. A stain. Only it wasn’t visible to the eye. It was something that could only be felt beyond the five senses. The filmmaker could feel that somehow these men were tainted. Had they really entered into a pact with evil? Or was that merely where fact stopped and fiction began. Every community needed its folklores and urban legends to serve as warnings for the young, brash, and foolhardy.
Loveless took another look and saw something in the photograph he hadn’t noticed before. Beyond the band members, to the left, in the background lounging in a white lawn chair was a little blond girl. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen, in a black tank top and faded bellbottom jeans with a flower decal on the left knee. The little girl was smiling. Another flash of insight struck the filmmaker: the runaway. Annabelle. The little lost girl. In his mind's eye, Loveless could envision the house all around him, as it had been: walls, furniture, musical instruments. Only it was a thing of smoke, the pastel colors faded with time. The band members entered horsing around, playing music, getting stoned, all under the watchful gaze of Jeremy Jared, who the others looked to from time to time for approval. Then the little girl entered the scene that was playing out in the filmmaker's imagination. The band members saw her and lit up. She was part of them, the baby sister they never had. The band mascot. It was as if they were a family. Like Manson’s family, Loveless thought humorlessly as he shook the vision out of his mind and from all around him. The wisps in the corridors of his mind, swirled back into nothingness. Had they really taken this lost little girl in, made her feel like a member of their family, only to kill her because some stupid Satanic grimoire they had come across said to? It seemed too incredible to be real. It couldn’t be. The filmmaker stood up and pocketed the picture.
Yeah, there wasn’t much of the home left, but there was a basement Loveless discovered when his foot went through a rotted floor board. A second later, the entire section of floor underneath the filmmaker collapsed and he dropped through into darkness.
Loveless found himself laying on a cool soft dirt ground. The shaft of light falling through the gaping hole that now existed in the floor, enveloped him like a spotlight. He wasn’t knocked out, but he did have the wind knocked out of him. As the filmmaker fought to catch his breath, he imagined he was in a cavern. Once air began to reach his lungs and brain again, Loveless realized he was just in the basement. Like many older homes in the mountains, the basement was a huge affair with thick beams and a dirt floor. It resembled a cave more than a basement to the filmmaker, with tiny rays of light falling in randomly through little holes here and there throughout the house floor. The boxes that were down there were thoroughly ransacked, most likely courtesy of the Sheriff’s department looking for evidence of the missing girl and the band’s culpability. The young runaway’s body had not been found to this day. The police however did assume she was dead, most likely buried in a swallow grave in deep woods. They found a large amount of blood on a stone altar in the forest that did match her blood type. This was before the days of DNA matching and CSI style forensics. Still, it was too much blood for a person to lose and still be a living, breathing person.
The filmmaker found the storm doors that led up out of the basement. He shoved them open and more light spilled in. On the way out, Loveless stopped as he thought he heard a scraping sound in the far corner of the basement. The filmmaker could make out something way in the back where the dirt floor angled up. He had to get on his hands and knees and crawl to it. Floor and ceiling became tight around him. Loveless had to sque
eze through the last few feet to get to it. ‘It’ was an unopened crate marked: band shit. The filmmaker hauled it out and left quickly. He had had enough of the house of Mathaluh.
On the drive back to his cabin home from Running Springs, Loveless got turned around on the small confusing mountain roads. He had the sense of direction of a native New Yorker. He didn’t know northwest from southeast. He knew right and left. The filmmaker had made a wrong turn somewhere. When he tried to backtrack, he got lost. The asphalt road he was on quickly turned into a dirt road and there were no houses in the vicinity. Only woods. Thick woods. Loveless almost laughed out-loud when his car engine suddenly turned off and he found himself coasting on inertia alone. Almost. The whole thing was just too cliché. He’d seen it a million times in a million thrillers and horror flicks. If it had been a scene in one of his scripts, he would have eighty-sixed it out of pride alone. But it wasn’t a scene in a script. It was real life, and it was happening to him. The sun was hovering just above the mountain now, bathing the scenery orange in what film cinematographers affectionately called magic hour. Ironically enough, it doesn’t last even close to an hour, merely a few precious minutes. Loveless tried the car four times before he gave up, afraid he would flood the engine altogether. The filmmaker got out and looked around. Something caught his eye. Sunlight was reflecting off a number of small objects in the woods, drawing Loveless to them. They were plain little white tombstone crosses sticking up out of the ground, over sixty of them. It was some kind of bootleg hillbilly cemetery he guessed. In his travels, the filmmaker had heard rumors of places like this where rural mountain folk buried their dead; the dead mainly consisted of the severely impoverished, outlaws, and meth overdoses. People nobody came looking for. No one would visit. Without benefit of a coffin, they were buried deep, so coyotes couldn’t dig up the bodies.
“Hey! Help! Is there anybody out there?” Loveless called into the woods out of sheer desperation. He waited. A few seconds later, his own voice came back to taunt him. “Hey! Help! Is there anybody out there?” The lament had bounced around the woods before finally echoing back in his direction. Upon hearing it, the filmmaker realized “Is There Anybody Out There?” was the name of the second song on disc two of Pink Floyd’s haunting and disturbing classic album “The Wall.” He was too scared shitless to laugh about this though.
Loveless noticed something else, creeping up out of the woods in the distance in a fluid kind of motion, coming his way. Fog. White. Thick. Shit! It looked like a giant smoky hand reaching right for him. Weirded out, the filmmaker got back in the SUV and tried the engine again. Nothing. He smashed his fist down on the dashboard in a fit of anger and fear. The engine started. The car radio and high beams came on at once, even though Loveless had been using neither of them. The filmmaker recognized the song that was playing. It was the Beatles song “Revolution 9” from The White Album. It was a song widely rumored to have back-masking on it. There was a moment of pure static, then the radio screeched: ‘Turn me on, dead man. Turn me on, dead man. TURN ME ON, DEAD MAN!’
Something clicked in Loveless' brain. These lyrics were familiar to him. Conspiracy theory shit he had heard long ago from a friend of his who was into some pretty creepy stuff. Dead man. In 1969, a rumor began to spread that Beatles member Paul McCartney had died and was replaced by a lookalike. A doppelgänger: a paranormal double. Evidence was supposedly buried in backwards lyrics on several of the Beatles' songs. The dead man reference was one that conspiracy theorists used to back up their claims. On another song were the backwards lyrics, 'Paul is dead.' This sent a chill down the filmmaker's spine. He didn't want to think about it anymore.
Loveless turned off the radio, started the car, backed away from the encroaching fog and got the hell out of there. He found a main road moments later. As the filmmaker turned onto it, and left behind the twisted pathway he had been lost on, he saw its legend inscribed on a street sign on the corner: Lord’s Lane. Appropriate enough name for a cemetery, even if God had nothing to do with what went on in those backwoods. Loveless drove straight to the supermarket in Arrowhead and bought a six pack of Stella and a bottle of Jameson Irish whiskey. By the time he got to the store, the filmmaker had half convinced himself that he had imagined the backwards lyrics on the radio. Perhaps he had.
For a writer, Loveless wasn’t much of a drinker. His party days were well behind him. Now in his late twenties, the filmmaker was a weekend indulger, a few beers, a couple of glasses of Jameson on the rocks to pass a lazy Saturday afternoon. It was only Friday, but after the freak show day he had had, the early snootful was in order. Besides, he’d need liquid courage to tackle the contents of the crate he had purloined.
The filmmaker left the six pack and bottle at the top of the landing as he carried the crate down the staircase with both hands. As Loveless descended the long wooden flight of steps to the cabin home, a rung near the top splintered and gave way under him. The filmmaker dropped the crate, which proceeded to bounce all the way down the staircase, cracking open like an egg at the bottom, contents spilling out. Loveless clutched wildly for the railing, managing to wrap both arms around it even though his feet were no longer under him. The filmmaker had no doubt he would have broken his neck if he had tumbled down the treacherous length of the staircase. The adrenaline rush of near death washed over Loveless for the second time since coming to the mountain. He hadn’t remembered any of the top rungs of the staircase being rotted out, only some of the rungs near the bottom. Or maybe he just hadn’t noticed it before. The filmmaker retrieved the alcohol and made his way down the rest of the stairs slowly, holding onto the railing with a firm grip.
At the bottom, he knelt to scoop up the contents of the crate. There was sheet music, a half full journal, books on Satanic worship, a small stack of photographs of the band members and their friends and family and a yellow and black homemade Ouija board that had “Mathaluh” written across the top. The planchette used to divine the Ouija board was round with a bloodshot eyeball painted on it. Loveless froze. This was the mother-lode. How was it that the cops had missed this? How was it that he had found it? The filmmaker suddenly had the strange sensation that it had found him. There was also something else. Something from the crate that he had missed, sitting on the pathway to the cabin home. An old vinyl record in a black record sleeve. It was a seven inch forty-five. The kind of record you could make bootleg in any semi-professional recording studio back in the seventies. Kids of that era used to have records like this pressed all the time, hoping to slip them to big shot record producers as they were getting into their big black limousines, and become discovered. Few, if any, were ever listened to by the busy professionals. Loveless picked up the record and slid it halfway out the sleeve. Hand written on the label was the title: Dark Ballad. The filmmaker tossed the record into the broken crate with the rest of the stuff. Maybe he’d even listen to the song later. Mathaluh’s greatest un-hit.
Ever since the investigation of the burnt remains of the band's house, Loveless felt as if he was being followed. Watched. Even in the supermarket, he would look up from his shopping to see townspeople stealing glances at him: beer-bellied mountain men with thick unkept beards and graying locks under worn old baseball caps, heavyset mountain women with greasy hair and missing teeth, old people with feeble minds and cataract glazed eyes. They would look away when he made eye contact. It was if they had known where he had been, what he had done. Ridiculous, Loveless thought to himself as he paid for his libations.
Now, outside the house, he had the feeling of being watched again. Loveless looked around. There was no one. A few cars drove by at the top of the stairs on the main street. Most of the houses within eyeshot had warm light glowing inside. The filmmaker couldn’t see anyone in any of the windows. Next, he looked into the woods that creeped up from around the back of the cabin home. There was nothing in them that he could see. Timberland just stretched back into a dark sort of oblivion.
At the front door to the cabi
n home, on the small porch, a makeshift stone shrine waited for him. All the rocks were smooth and white. Feelings of primitiveness, tribalism came over the filmmaker. No, that wasn’t it. The sensation he was getting was one that was locked away in the DNA of all men. Things we had outgrown, like baying at the moon. The shrine exuded a sense of antiquity from a time beyond modern civilization, before science; this stretched way back to pagan beginnings and beliefs. From a time, when villagers sacrificed goats and unfortunate virgin girls to the blackened gods who ruthlessly ruled their existence. From a time when Halloween wasn’t trick-or-treating, dressing up, or bobbing for apples. This shrine harkened back to a time when All Hallows Eve - in its earliest European incantation - consisted of pagan harvest festivals and celebrations of the dead. This was a night when the doorway to our world was believed to be opened to ghosts. People dressed in costumes to confuse and trick the spirits. The church eventually transformed the context and the meaning of these holidays as it absorbed pagan religion into Christianity.
“What crap is this?”
This wasn’t the work of evil druids, the filmmaker thought as he shook off the other feelings. Probably just Brent and some of the other local kids having fun at his expense. Ha Ha! Loveless kicked the stones away and entered the house. Suddenly, he didn’t feel very good.
With a stiff drink in hand and beer as a chaser, the filmmaker sat on the couch in front of the roaring blaze in the fireplace and opened a new document on his laptop in the screenwriting program. What would this movie be called? And then it came to him in a flash of inspiration that always seemed to operate independent of conscious thought. The Black Album. Seemingly in response, coyotes began to howl outside his window. Loveless got up, went out onto the balcony and looked out into the forest that was his backyard. A full moon sat high and clear in a night sky full of stars. He couldn’t see the predatory dogs, but he could hear them, hear the direction they were baying from. This howling began to amplify as more coyotes showed up. There had to be at least thirty of them up on the hill now. An animalistic choir. Intimidated, the filmmaker went back inside quietly, hoping they didn’t hear him. On a whim, Loveless went down into the playroom below and searched through the closet. Something had caught his attention the other day when he was down there. Something that he now had reason to find. In the very back of the closet was an old record player. Why not? Loveless thought as he hauled it upstairs.
THE BLACK ALBUM: A Hollywood Horror Story Page 5