THE BLACK ALBUM: A Hollywood Horror Story

by Carlton Kenneth Holder

  The house becomes even darker, all at once, and cold. When the teenager breathes out, he can see his own breath swirling out, drifting throughout, coming to life. It's as cold as a tomb. Henry's not alone. He turns and sees the little girl in the white dress who stands in the living room. She's not a day older than thirteen. She'll never be a day older than thirteen. The little girl looks lost. Her face is sad, sad for Henry. The LOST GIRL is pale, like a corpse. Or a ghost.

  "Are you lost?" Henry asks.

  "Aren't we all?" the lost girl answers. No breath leaves her mouth when she talks. In a whisper, the girl recites grim lore, "The demon Jeremy has one eve to compel or trick you into killing in his name. All Hallow's Eve. Then your soul goes to the hot place while he’s freed from the inferno- and, he wears your body. He gets to be you.”

  "None of this is real. You're not real."

  "I used to be."

  "Used to?"

  "Why'd you bring him back?" the lost girl says hopelessly through bloodless lips.

  Henry sees the bloody knife wound in her chest that wasn't there a second ago. Before Henry's eyes, the little girl's face becomes decayed, dead, eyes shriveling up, sinking into sockets. She's worm's meat.

  It's not that the lost girl disappears. It's just that she's no longer there.

  The teenage boy senses the truth of her words. Remorse fills him. "Mom, dad." He touches his face in horror at the full realization that eternal damnation waits for him. His life is over before it's truly been lived, all of it. "Trick! I've been tricked." Henry feels himself slipping from his own body. He fights this. A slight breath of humanity momentarily returns to him.

  Deep woods bathed in deeper fog. The house with the stained-glass window sits far in the background. The record, covered in plastic, sits in a freshly dug hole. Atop a small hill, Henry shovels dirt onto the flagitious object, burying it deep. Henry can feel himself slipping again, more now. His skin is electric, on fire. Henry can feel the demon Jeremy’s soul beginning to take full possession of his body, seeping in one pore at a time. But the boy has a trick of his own this All Hallow’s Eve. Henry lifts his mournful and repentant face heavenward. “Fight the Devil.”

  If he can’t have his body, no one will. The boy puts the gun to his head. He only hesitates for a second before pulling the trigger. The camera pans away. We see the muzzle flash light up the night. We hear the gunshot and its ghastly echo.

  The evil crawls back down into Hell.

  At least for another year.

  In the prologue finale, we return to the home's basement. The needle has reached the end of the record. No music is playing now, just the constant repetitive scraping of needle against empty dead vinyl. The camera drifts through with voyeuristic effect, slowly revealing a concert poster hanging on the wall. It reads MATHALUH LIVE. Below this: IN CONCERT (with play dates). Only the ‘in concert’ has been crossed out and a dripping, bloody, finger-smudged ‘s’ has been added to live. Mathaluh Lives! End of prologue. Opening credits run.

  Loveless sat back from his laptop, content with his writing. Hell, the thing was practically writing itself. There were moments when he felt as if he was only the vessel through which some outside force was working. But that was just his imagination, the filmmaker reasoned. As much as he wanted to continue writing, the child in Loveless won out. He wanted to go out and be among the costumed denizens of the night on the wickedest night of the year. Loveless convinced himself that this was research. Besides, it couldn’t be more perfect. This year Halloween fell on a Saturday.

  The filmmaker drove to the touristy part of the mountain: the Lake that was Arrowhead’s namesake. This community relied heavily on weekend and summer tourists to consume overly expensive goods and pricey meals. When you lived in Los Angeles and couldn’t get away to take a true vacation, Lake Arrowhead was a nice little weekend getaway, woodsy, rustic and romantic. You could stay at a resort style hotel or one of the many quaint bed-and-breakfasts, sail on the lake or ski the slopes. Holidays always drove the number of visiting out-of-towners up. Halloween falling on a weekend was an extra boon.

  Loveless parked and got out. The area was full of shops and restaurants. Aside from the weekenders, it was also overflowing with local kids and their parents, teenagers, and their friends. Most of the costumes were homemade, some store bought. Still, Loveless could appreciate the ingenuity of many of the outfits. Vampy vampiresses were a popular choice for female teens weaned on “Twilight” and “The Vampire Diaries.” Teenage boys reveled in zombie masks or glued on latex that looked like mottled dead flesh hanging off their pimply pubescent faces. The little kids were all worked up in their ghost, wizard, and superhero costumes as their parents chased patiently after them. The lake was where you went to show off your costume after knocking on doors around town.

  The filmmaker, wandering through this horror pageant, found himself near the end of the lake. In a dark corner there was a video game arcade. The neon sign above announced “Gary's Arcade Asylum.” The outside of the establishment was painted black with popular video game characters gracing the walls around the storefront window. Inside you could see not just the usual arcade games, but also desktop computer consoles set-up for popular online games. The arcade employees inside - all young - wore black. Heavy metal rock music blared out through the open front door. It seemed a popular youth habitat. A pack of feral looking older kids hung out in and around the place. The filmmaker noticed a number of flasks being passed about. Many were smoking as they kept lookout for the local cops. But these kids weren’t high schoolers. They looked to be anywhere from eighteen to twenty-three. The impression Loveless got was that they were the stoners and flunk-outs of the townships. They were the ones who would never escape the mountain. After a brief youth rebellion, once they began to have bills and children of their own, they would replace their fathers and their fathers’ fathers as the working class of the mountain: lumber jacks, store clerks, hotel cleaning personnel, day laborers.

  The look of this youth ran the gambit from emo through goth, punk, heavy metal to skater. As Loveless was about to leave, two older boys started arguing. This escalated into a shoving match. The tougher looking boy, who was wearing an executioner's mask and outfit, hauled off and punched the other one in the face, then as the kid covered up, the executioner pounded him several more times on his head and back for good measures. They were glancing blows, more for show than to cause real damage. The filmmaker noticed the blood dripping thick green thorn bracelet tattoo around the executioner’s right wrist, traveling up his forearm. Loveless was about to go over and break things up, when the executioner backed off. Humiliated, the beaten kid, holding his hand to his bloody nose, cursed profusely at the other boy as he retreated from the pack with a parting, “Fuck you, man!”

  When he noticed the filmmaker watching, the executioner threw a sideways glance at Loveless. The filmmaker remained expressionless. He wasn’t about to be intimidated by a dumb young punk in a stupid costume.

  Walking up a small stone stairwell to an isolated section of the parking lot, Loveless heard the sound of music. A beat-up and dented old pick-up truck was driving by with a lot of dingy furniture in its paint-chipped bed. A homely looking woman with a butch haircut, bad teeth and poor complexion was blatantly looking out the window at the filmmaker with a total lack of emotion. Nor did she look away when Loveless noticed her. Her eyes seemed to reflect the notion that she knew a secret that the filmmaker did not. From the woman’s car radio, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” was playing. It was then that Loveless remembered that the Southern hard-rock band had died in a plane crash in 1977, the exact year he had chosen for the fictional plane crash of Mathaluh, the band destined to be an urban legend. Eerie as hell coincidence, the filmmaker thought. Or maybe his mind had decided to release that interesting bit of data from forgotten memories in the purgatory of his subconscious.

  Later, as Loveless returned to his cabin home, the scene of wild youth popped back in his head as h
e sat down at the computer. He was now up to the part of the screenplay where he would introduce his heroine, the protagonist of the film. He liked the name he had come up with in his altered state while writing the disjointed first draft: Grace Lynn. Lynn was a small town name. Grace was a name for a sweet girl with a sense of spirituality.

  While watching stacks of horror movies with female leads, the filmmaker noticed that most of these women were innocent, good, god-fearing people who didn’t deserve the horror that was being bestowed on them. They were feminine, pretty and traumatized by their gory ordeal. That's the way Grace came off in the first draft of the story the filmmaker didn't remember penning.

  But a spark of creativity hit Loveless like a lightning bolt hurtled by the god of screenwriters. What if the heroine wasn’t pure or even good? What if she was like the kids who hung out at the arcade? What if Grace Lynn was wild, feral, troubled? What if she had been one of those kids who had escaped the mountain, gone off to seek her fame and fortune in Los Angeles, only to return seven years later broken and with nowhere left to go but home?

  Loveless wanted his heroine to be an anomaly to the horror genre formula. He wanted her to have a hard edge. Grace Lynn would be godless.

  With that in mind, Loveless wrote his heroine’s opening scene.

  Card over black screen: HALLOWEEN- PRESENT DAY. We follow a 1968 abyss black Chevy Nova with a silver spoiler as it climbs the mountain. Behind, the city below falls away as we gain altitude and everything becomes very very green. Concrete and cement give way to trees and grass, then dense woods. Pretty soon, the Nova is at high elevation. It turns a curve and we see clouds below.

  The small townships roll up the car's windshield like lazy dreams along with early trick-or-treaters, eager to show off their costumes while it's still daylight, running up and down the streets. Finally, the car stops at a red light. A WOMAN in shabby clothes, pushing a second-hand baby stroller, crosses the street in front of the Nova. We burn focus through the windshield and see the driver for the first time. GRACE LYNN, striking, wickedly pretty with a long straight nose and sharp jawline. She has a dark tangle of wavy brunette hair. Her eyes are so glacier blue you can see your own reflection in them. Her lips sit in a perpetual pout of dissatisfaction. A tiny diamond glitters in her nose ring, framed by earrings running all the way up her right ear. Grace Lynn unconsciously studies the woman with the stroller. The woman looks over suddenly as she passes, wearing a glazed over expression. “Oh, we've been waiting for you?"

  Grace is too surprised to respond. She thinks she misheard the woman. Maybe the woman was talking on an unseen cell phone, or to somebody else. The unsettling thing about it though was that the woman was staring straight at her. Grace shrugs off the bizarre statement from someone she doesn't know. It had to be a mistake. Another thought hits her. Grace thinks to herself that woman could have been her, if she had stayed on the mountain. But that didn't seem so bad now. Maybe the small town life she had sought so hard to escape wasn't the nightmare she imagined it was after all. Maybe it was just life. Grace had wanted an adventure and she had gotten one. But it was a black adventure, filled with bitter betrayal and raucous disappointment. Now Grace has reached a crossroads in her life. At age twenty-seven, she began to realize her dreams were not going to come true. It was the age where most people started to settle for what they had. The age where dreams died. A car honk from behind, brings her out of cold contemplation. The light's green. Grace drives out of frame.

  After seven years off the mountain, Grace Lynn has returned.

  Grace is traversing empty road in a heavily wooded area. She passes a sign that reads: RIM FOREST- POPULATION: 250. Grace turns down a more remote path. The pavement is chewed up. The trees are gnarled, sinister. She drives into a thick pale fog.

  Suddenly, the car dies. The fog dissipates.

  “What the hell? Gotta be shitting me. Piece a shit!”

  Grace looks at the eerie surroundings with more than a hint of fear on her face. She tries to start the car again several times. Nothing. She is still trying to start it when the radio comes on. Grace stares at it blankly. A radio Deejay’s deep, quiet, almost meditative voice comes through the speakers. “- and for all you listeners just tuning in here in Rim Forest and the surrounding mountain townships- happy Halloween. I’m Gary ‘The Voice from the Other Side’ Hark. The Night Ranger. And this is FM 36S classic rock.”

  Grace barely pays attention to the soothing tone as she looks around. There isn’t anything for miles except woods and impending darkness. The sun is just above the tree-line. Grace gets out of the car. She wears faded jeans and a white wife-beater without a bra. Through the thin shirt, we can make out a tattoo in the upper center of her back of a yin yang symbol. Rather than an Asian connotation, the imagery seems compellingly European. Old world. Instead of white on one side and black on the other, there is a blueish-white winged angel on one side and a reddish-white dragon style depiction of the Devil on the other. The two creatures are intertwined, as if locked in battle. No. That’s not it. It’s as if they are joined. As if one can’t exist without the other. They are the ultimate symbiotic relationship. Without yin, their would be no yang. What would God be without the Devil to define him by virtue of his mere opposing existence?

  Grace reaches through the rear window for a beat-up black leather jacket. As she removes it, we see the guitar case sitting atop travel bags and a suitcase. The woman listens to the Deejay on the radio as she slides into the jacket, lights up a cigarette and takes a swig from a silver flask.

  “When I was just a teenage boy, way back in that bygone era known as the Seventies, my favorite band was a group called Mathaluh.”

  The name Mathaluh gets Grace’s attention. She grew up on this mountain. The band members grew up on this mountain before leaving to become first famous, then infamous in death. They lived on now in urban legend alone, a cautionary tale of the dangers of dreaming big and reaching for that dream at any and all cost.

  “Tonight, in honor of the band that so stirred my soul, we’re having a commercial-free tribute. Nothing but the music of Mathaluh- from dust to dawn.”

  A Mathaluh song begins to rise from the stereo, first slowly, then gathering speed and volume. Grace grooves to the music, a natural born rocker.

  “Although they only released two albums before their untimely demise, tonight we just might be able to dig up some of their lesser known lost works. Here’s to you, Jeremy Jared, front man eternal, wherever you are.”

  Grace playfully answers the radio deejay the way people do when they know no one is listening, “That would be scattered across these mountains in a zillion pieces.”

  “MATHALUH LIVES,” booms out the radio so loudly it makes Grace jump. She stares through the driver’s side window at the radio, feeling the rush of adrenaline and fear. The woman senses the forest become eerily quiet behind her. She turns and looks. Fog is emerging out the tree-line, moving towards her like an army of pale tilted ghosts. Grace retreats back into the vehicle, rolls up the windows. Next, she tries to start the car again.

  "Please start, you piece a shit. Please start.” The car turns over on command. Grace gets the hell out of there.

  Sunset.

  We follow Grace's car as it reaches its destination: a house in the woods with a stained-glass window on the front door. It's the same house from the Prologue. Henry's house. The sight of the house after all these years has an effect on Grace Lynn. Lights are on inside. The woman is apprehensive. She doesn't know what kind of reception awaits her.

  Loveless leaned back and rubbed his eyes. He now had his badass female rocker heroine. His backstory for the woman ran deep: a complex woman whose past consisted of abusive relationships with both male and female partners and drug and alcohol abuse. A year and a half before returning to the mountain she had kicked a particularly nasty cocaine habit. The hard stuff was now out of her system and her life, except for wine, beer, Jack Daniels, and the occasional joint. After two abor
tions, a short-lived annulled marriage, a DUI and an arrest for assault (a former boyfriend thought it was a good idea to slap around Grace, who retaliated with a kitchen knife, part of a cutlery set he had bought for her birthday), her singing career had gone down in flames. Grace Lynn had the sullen angry tone of an Alanis Morissette, the raw rebellious lyrics of a British punk rocker, and the hard strumming guitar riffs of a heavy metal maven. Which meant that the woman didn’t easily fit into any definable category in a city that fit everybody into easily definable categories. If you were a director and your first hit film happened to be a slasher flick, then you were designated a horror director and all the offers you got from the studios were for monster movies. If you were a shakespearean theater trained thespian whose first big break came in a smash hit comedy, then you were a comedy actor. The music producers who liked Grace’s music had no idea what to do with her. They didn’t know how to market an original in a town full of carbon copies.