“Someone?”
“Me,” Charlotte said, her face hovering in front of his.
Loveless pushed Charlotte up against the altar, slid his arms around her waist and kissed her softly on the lips. Her skin was like fire. From the way she reacted, his was too. The mother wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back. Hard. The filmmaker felt her tongue in his mouth. Moments later, they were full on making out. Although a chilly autumn day, beads of sweat were forming on their foreheads and necks. In between long deep kisses, they would each steal quick glances at the devil above the altar. Each time they did, their desire became wilder, more uncontrollable. Suddenly, Charlotte shoved the filmmaker away. Without taking her eyes off of Loveless, she lifted herself up onto the altar behind her. The filmmaker couldn’t help but notice the minute blood stains on the stone slab that time and the elements hadn’t washed away. He didn't care. Laying back, Charlotte rested on her elbows, “Well?”
Without a moment’s hesitation, the filmmaker climbed up on top of the altar and Charlotte. They kissed violently. Every time Loveless closed his eyes, he saw flashes of the statue surrounded by a black sky, floating on a lake of fire. For a fraction of a second, he wondered if the woman he was savaging, saw this too. It looked like a rape scene. Only you couldn't tell who was violating who.
"Burn in me."
"What?"
"Burn in me!"
Charlotte rolled over on top of the filmmaker and unbuckled her pants, whipped off her shirt, undid her bra. Her breast were small. They drooped just enough to let you know they were real. The erect nipples were scarlet pink. As Loveless, reached up for them, Charlotte undid his pants and slid him into her. Seconds later, she was writhing wildly on top of him.
“Shouldn’t I- use protection?”
Charlotte just shook her head and rode him harder, writhing, grabbing her hair, reaching up and running her hands over the statue’s face. Moments later, she climaxed violently and collapsed on top of Loveless moaning loudly.
As she lay on top of him, the filmmaker looked up and caught sight of the demon statue. Loveless could swear its eerie grin seemed bigger now. He closed his eyes. More flashes. Another wave of lust came over him like possession. Loveless rolled Charlotte off of him, sat up, turned her over and entered the young mother from behind. She was on her knees now. The filmmaker couldn’t take his eyes off the statue. He had hold of Charlotte’s hips and was driving himself into her as hard as he could, thrusting as she bucked. Loveless could see her hands grip the rusted shackle rings tightly, in pain, but he couldn’t stop himself. Minutes later, he came, resting his trembling face against her back as they rolled over onto their sides, little tremors still making their way through him.
The two of them lay there, chests heaving from exertion. Charlotte had a sudden attack of embarrassment. She rolled over and hid her face in the filmmaker’s chest.
“I always act without thinking. I mean, I thought about making love to you. I wanted to, but maybe I shouldn’t have been so impulsive. It’s just, here it felt- ”
“Right.” Loveless finished for her.
Charlotte lifted her head and looked at the filmmaker, “Tell me the truth. Did I just mess things up with you and I working together?”
“Of course not.”
Something came into the filmmaker's line of vision in the distance. It took a moment for his mind to register that it was a person. Loveless was looking directly at a dark figure standing in the forest just beyond the clearing. The filmmaker jolted up. “HOLY SHIT!”
“What?”
“I just saw someone over there by that tree,” Loveless pointed to the spot, but the figure was gone.
Charlotte sat up quickly and started throwing her clothes on, “Oh great. One of Lizzy’s friends catches us out here doing the wild thing- it’ll be all over town. We better pray they didn’t have a cell with a video camera. That shit’ll end up on YouTube. Probably go viral.”
“I don’t think it was a kid.” Loveless was getting dressed, still scanning for the figure.
“Kids are the only one’s who come out here.”
“What about Satanic cults?” the filmmaker asked, this time with deadly earnestness.
“You serious, J.D.? That stuff’s just urban legend.”
Loveless looked at the woman, “You sure about that, Charlotte?”
Charlotte didn’t look sure of anything anymore. She just looked scared. “Let’s just get out of here. Okay?”
They found Donovan in a deck chair out on the balcony, kicking back. He looked up at Loveless and Charlotte and stated simply, “This script rocks. I’m in, if you can answer one question. Can you still make the movie for seventy-five thousand?”
“We’ll have to get our elbows a little dirtier than I’d like, but we can make that work if we have to.” Especially, the filmmaker thought, because he had no other offers.
The next day, Loveless and Donovan hammered out a deal memo in which Charlotte was upped to a co-producer for accepting a percentage of the movie profits in lieu of a paycheck. The three of them then opened an account for the movie, which Donovan placed twenty thousand into. Outside the bank, he shook hands with Loveless.
“That should get you started with development. I’ll put another thirty-five in before the end of next week. I’m headed to Big Bear. Catch you two on the way back, pardnahs.”
“I’ll start to crunch numbers and hammer out a tight budget.”
“Use Charlotte. She’s sharp and can help you get things cheap and free.”
Charlotte beamed as her cousin hugged her and climbed into his Beamer.
“Cheap and free is my motto,” she chirped.
Loveless and Charlotte watched Donovan drive merrily away. She smiled at the filmmaker, who didn’t realize he was frowning. “What’s the matter?” Charlotte asked.
“What?”
“You’re frowning?”
“Oh, sorry. I guess I should be happy. I met you, which has been an absolute blast, and your cousin is putting up the money for the movie-”
“But?”
“But I’m just a struggling filmmaker. With one hundred thousand, I would have been able to pay myself enough to live on while working on this project. It’s gonna be a sixteen hour a day gig for me, all the way through editing. I've already done most of the prep work. So, if you figure another week for pre-production, twenty-one days for the actual shoot and two months for post-production, that’s roughly the next three months of my life. Yet I’m gonna have to cut my payday in half now.”
“I see what you’re saying.”
“To make matters worse, I haven’t had my mail delivered since I’ve been up here. I filled out a ‘change of address’ before I left LA. But I can’t even find my mailbox at the house. A producer I worked for in Europe was supposed to send me the balance of the money he owed me by now and I should have gotten some pretty healthy foreign levy checks from the Writers Guild for some past projects I wrote.”
Charlotte giggled, “Didn’t anyone tell you? The mail isn’t delivered to homes in Lake Arrowhead. Everyone who lives there automatically has a box at the post office.”
“The post office?”
“Yeah. The one right behind you.”
“Let’s go.”
The filmmaker’s mood changed considerably after he found not only two decent sized foreign levy checks, but also a check from the producer, postmarked from Antwerp, Belgium. The producer was as shady as they come. But he loved Loveless’ writing and always came to him to write his next movie. As a result, the filmmaker was the only one in town the producer hadn’t screwed over.
“I may not be rich - yet - but, this money’ll float me for at least six months. I’d like to take you and Lizzy to dinner tonight. Some place nice. That German steak house, maybe.”
“Long as you’re buying. That place is a bit pricey.”
“I’m buying.” Loveless was beaming. The town had inspired him. This woman was good luck to him
and more. What ate away at the filmmaker were all the strange things that had happened to him since being here, the near death experiences, the loss of time, the wild sexual feelings that randomly came over him. What the hell was that out there in the woods? Loveless thought. The love-making was passionate, but it was also savage. He and Charlotte had been totally out of control, like animals, fixated on that ugly statue that seemed to watch them fornicate with grim satisfaction. And who was the figure in the woods? Which brought something else back up. Something the filmmaker kept dismissing, but which kept creeping back into his thoughts: the feeling of being watched. And not just that, but the feeling of being manipulated, maneuvered. These questions ate naggingly away at Loveless. He was finally getting what he wanted, to make a movie. But at what price?
The crewing up and casting process went smoothly. Loveless bounced his ideas off Charlotte and she helped fine tune them from an intelligent business perspective. They thought out everything from equipment rental on down to catering. The filmmaker had a director of photography in Los Angeles he was dead set on using. Matty. The kid was talented and just as importantly, fast. Many low budget productions stalled and went over budget because of a slow DP. Having someone who could light scenes fast and well was ultra important. Loveless would tell Matty what he wanted and walk away. Twenty minutes later, he would return and have it exactly the way he envisioned it.
In terms of actors, the filmmaker would make do with mostly local talent. But there were three key supporting acting roles that Loveless wanted cast out of Los Angeles. He felt he wasn’t going to find true professionals who could pull off these performances here on the mountain. So, after an audition trip to LA, Loveless and Charlotte cast the roles of Russell, their male love interest, the demon Jeremy and Grace's sister Katie. With the DP, that made altogether four people they were going to have to lodge in Arrowhead. Charlotte found a cheap house with four bedrooms and two full bathrooms for rent short-term, solving that problem.
Next, the filmmaker needed a music composer to score the movie. He wanted someone located on the mountain, so he didn’t have to run back and forth to LA to go over music for scenes. Loveless didn’t want to have to do this by phone or internet either. He wanted a flesh and blood person in front of him. So Loveless placed an ad in the classified section of one of the mountain newspapers, somewhat dubious of the response he would get. There were three submissions. Two were from music students in college down in San Bernardino. Loveless immediately rejected those. The third was from a man living in Rim Forest. Jerry. The gist of his reply was that in addition to being a music composer, Jerry also fancied himself a bit of an electrician and movie special effects guy. The filmmaker enlisted Charlotte and together they went to the man’s house.
They had to take a dirt road to get to the house which was a large, dumpy two story affair in the middle of dense woods. Inside it was full of all kinds of junk, some of it very bizarre in nature. There were framed photographs of sideshow freaks circa the 1920s. Other stuff looked like movie memorabilia from very old films. Then there were the old toys: dolls, action figures, hobby models of Frankenstein, the wolf-man, Dracula. The models were meticulously painted. There were also antique clothes that looked like something out of a thrift store, including a moth-eared tuxedo on a mannequin. The people who lived there were obviously pack-rats. The house was dark and cold with a staircase that led up into pitch black. Loveless heard creaking sounds in the ceiling every once in awhile, which led him to believe there was someone else upstairs.
Jerry was forty-three - or so he said - and had just about all of his teeth replaced with dentures, which he was quick to take out and show you. He had olive skin and greasy jet black wavy hair that made him look like an immigrant from the old country; Romania, Estonia or some such place would have been a safe bet. Patches of this thick black hair stuck out from under Jerry's sleeves and shirt collar. Jerry boasted about having done nearly everything imaginable in his younger years, including, at one time, having been a great escape artist. He had framed photos to support a number of these claims. In one picture, a man was jumping out of an airplane in a strait-jacket. Loveless couldn't really tell if it was Jerry or not.
"Yass, that's me. I've pretty much done it all, seen it all," Jerry declared with an eager-to-please smile. It was obvious he wanted a job on the filmmaker's movie.
"Hi, everybody." A young woman projecting shy excitement, entered the room wearing a long black sweater over a pale yellow dress. She was pretty and petite with short naturally blond hair. The young woman said she was twenty-one years old, although she looked younger. She was also six months pregnant. The young woman giggled a lot when she talked, had poor grammar and lingered on her words as if she thoroughly enjoyed speaking them. With her look and drawl, she could have been straight off the Appalachian mountains.
This was Jerry's wife Delilah.
"J.D., Charlotte- this is the missus, Delilah."
Loveless and Charlotte greeted Delilah politely. When the filmmaker shook hands with the young woman, the sweater slid back on her arm far enough for him to see the fine blond coat of hair covering her wrist.
"I just loved your script so much," Delilah confided jubilantly. Loveless had emailed the script to Jerry yesterday after speaking to him briefly on the phone.
"You read it?" Loveless asked. He was always interested in what people thought of his work.
"Of course. Actually, my baby Jerry here read it to me. "The Black Album." What a damn good name. And the demon Jeremy, he was so sexy cool. Wouldn't you say so, babe?"
"Absolutely, baby," Jerry replied grinning. Loveless got the impression Jerry would say and do anything Delilah asked for when she said it in her baby tone.
Something in one of Delilah's large sweater pockets moved abruptly. Loveless looked at Charlotte with a ready for anything smile glued to his face. He could tell Charlotte was already unnerved. They were in Ed Gein country out here. The filmmaker wouldn't have been surprised if lil Delilah and ole' Jerry whipped out machetes, skinned both him and Charlotte alive and danced around wearing their skins. Instead, Delilah pulled a tiny black kitten out of her sweater pocket and held it up to her face with both hands.
"This is my other baby: Shade," Delilah drawled. The young woman then giggled mischievously and bit her lower lip as if she was about to do something naughty. "Wanna see something?"
Loveless looked over to Charlotte again. He could see it in her eyes. Charlotte was internally freaking the fuck out. The actress closed her eyes when Delilah stuck the kitten's head in her mouth. The filmmaker was too macabrely fascinated to blink. He tensed, waiting for the hillbilly woman to bite the animal's head off. After a terse beat, Delilah giggled and pulled the kitten's head out of her mouth. The animal, obviously used to the sideshow performance, licked her. The young woman kissed Shade on its head and put the kitten back in her pocket.
Surprisingly, it was Jerry who broke the spell of insanity that at the moment was all pervasive. "I have some thoughts for the music of the Black Album." The man, who always seemed to operative with a theatrical flourish, went to the corner and whipped a black sheet off a bulky object. Underneath was a work station with a fire engine red desktop computer sitting on it.
Having never seen a computer that looked like a maraschino cherry, Loveless blinked twice. "Wooh."
"Built this little baby myself, "Jerry said boastfully as he fired his little baby up. Lights began to flash across the computer. Next to it was a second monitor, a music keyboard, and other equipment for composing music. "Did you have any thoughts concerning the music score?"
"Well, I feel that one thing pretty much all horror films today are missing that scary movies of the past had, is a recognizable musical theme score. I mean, you can be anywhere, a bathroom, an elevator- when you hear the score from John Carpenter's "Halloween" or the movie "The Exorcist," you immediately know where it's from."
"I hear ya. Have anything in mind you want me to use as reference or in
spiration?"
"Yeah. There was this TV movie. It originally aired back in the seventies. I caught it one night when they were rerunning it years later. Scared the hell outta me! It was the first movie at the time to portray the vampire realistically, as if he really existed in a modern world. It was called "The Nightstalker."
"I know what you're talking about. It was about Carl Kolchak, this reporter who chased stories about the occult, monsters, UFOs. The movie was so popular, they made it into a TV series. Chris Carter even said it was his inspiration for "The X-Files." In addition to his many fine accomplishments, Jerry was obviously a fanboy.
"Exactly. It had this theme music. Started slow and then just took off. Was very scary."
"Yeah. Hearing it in my head. I know what you're talking about." Jerry sat down in front of his keyboard. After a few dial adjustments, the man began playing the theme music.
"That's it, Jerry!"
"Okay. So if I use that as an example of what you want, I can come up with something like this." After a couple of false starts, Jerry began playing some of the most alluring, terrifying, and surprisingly beautiful music the filmmaker had ever heard. He even used a combination of keys to create what sounded like wailing ghosts. What the hell was this man doing on the mountain? He had a most singular talent.
Loveless caught the expression on Charlotte's face. She loved it too. It was perfect. Jerry was totally in sync with the filmmaker's vision musically. Scoring the scenes once they were shot and assembled would be child's play with somebody like this in editing with him.
"Why is it I’ve never seen you or Delilah in town, either Crestline or Arrowhead before? At the supermarket, in the diner, getting gas? I’ve seen just about everybody on this mountain at least once,” Charlotte inquired.
Jerry lowered his eyes. A faint, resigned smile touched his lips as if he was about to make a sad confession. He looked at Delilah for strength, then said, “Delilah and I don’t get out much because of our medical condition.”
THE BLACK ALBUM: A Hollywood Horror Story Page 10