THE BLACK ALBUM: A Hollywood Horror Story

by Carlton Kenneth Holder

  "Thank God." Charlotte ran over and hugged Carla with genuine motherly anxiety.

  "It was him," Carla confirmed to her peers.

  "I know," Lizzy said quietly.

  "No fucken way," Brent spat.

  "Watch your mouth, Brent," Loveless interjected. Charlotte let the kids talk anyway they wanted around her, but he thought it was disrespectful.

  "He's mad. That's why he's back," Toby said. "See that look on his face?"

  "Trippy. You kids really think you saw a ghost?" Donovan, removed from the horror Loveless had experienced, was enjoying the teenage drama.

  "Something scared them," Charlotte spoke up for the children.

  "Imaginations run wild," Donovan reiterated his feelings.

  Charlotte noticed that Loveless had stayed out of the debate up to this point. She looked at him, "Well, J.D. Did you see anything?"

  "No." Loveless glanced around. Lizzy and Carla were staring at him solemnly. "But something was going on. Could it have been a kid from school? Someone who looks like your friend-"

  "Wayne," Toby added. "No way."

  "We're really getting our money's worth outta this place," Donovan laughed. Nobody laughed with him.

  "Life's full of mysteries. We'll just let this be one more," Charlotte said politically. "We better start shooting, if we're gonna get anything done tonight."

  The kids all claimed to have seen Wayne on the back patio. They said they ran back inside, getting separated in the darkness. Loveless found himself wondering if that marijuana joint he discovered had been laced with something strong and hallucinogenic. But the filmmaker hadn't taken a hit and he definitely experienced something too. Maybe he just got caught up in the teens' hysteria. Loveless started thinking of movies like "Paranormal Activity" and the whole slew of TV shows now on the air where film crews armed with video cameras explored supposedly haunted sites at closed down mental institutions, mangy mansions, prisons, plantations. Going in with the expectation that something was going to happen, inevitably something freaky always would happen. By the end of the episode, nothing was ever solved and people merely walked away with their own opinions of what had been experienced. The filmmaker told himself that was all that had happened here.

  Before long though, the kids were all joking about the experience. But there was an edge to the laughter.

  The rest of the night was productive. The kids had enough imagination to make their scenes believable. Hitting their marks (walking to the spot that has been lit for you before delivering your dialogue) was harder for the teenage kids. The filmmaker made a mental note to keep their blocking simple. Lizzy was eerily convincing when she did the nursery rhyme in an almost trance-like state, no doubt a benefit of her marijuana high. Brent was disturbingly genuine when he said his last line as a human boy in the movie, put the prop gun to his head and pulled the trigger. “Fight the Devil.”

  Loveless certainly didn’t want to endorse or romanticize teenage suicide and had debated cutting the scene from the screenplay. But at the end of the day, it was an important scene to the overall story and chilling as hell.

  “I think they were making it up,” Charlotte said in a low tone to Loveless and Donovan after she had dropped the friends off and returned to the Strawberry Lodge with Lizzy, who was in the kitchen polishing off the last of the pepperoni pizza. Charlotte continued as they packed up their movie gear, “Kids like to get caught up in the spirit of things. We are making a horror movie.”

  “Who was Wayne?” Donovan inquired earnestly.

  “A boy in their grade last year. He was a bit of a loner, troubled kid. Wayne was the one who climbed the big rock and added the red S to Mathaluh Live.”

  Loveless made a mental note: Another death linked to Mathaluh. And not decades old. A recent death.

  “Is that how he died? Falling off those rocks?” Donovan was completely enthralled in the story.

  “Yes.”

  “No it isn’t.” Everyone turned around. Lizzy stood in the living room entrance. “That’s what the police said. But that’s not what happened at all.”

  “How do you know?” Charlotte asked her daughter with sudden dread.

  “I didn’t tell you ‘cause I didn’t want you to get scared. But I was there. At the Rock.” Lizzy held out her hand. In it was her smart phone. On its screen was a photograph of Lizzy, Carla, Toby, Brent, and Wayne, all laughing and making faces for the camera. "We took this that day."

  “Lizzy,” was all Charlotte could manage, horrified at the implications.

  “He said he was gonna paint an S at the end. We thought Wayne was just fooling around. He was afraid of heights. We all knew that. So we started teasing him about it. Me, Brent, Toby, and Carla. We were just messing around, that's all. We dared him to do it. And he did. After he finished painting the S, he just looked down at us, waved, smiled like everything was alright, then dove head first off the peak. His body hit a lot of sharp rocks on the way down. Parts of him just burst like water balloons, exploding with blood every time he hit a rock.”

  "Oh my God! AND YOU SAW THIS?" Charlotte said losing all control. She looked at Loveless and Donovan. "They had to have a closed casket funeral." The woman paled at the thought of a parent having to bury their child. She turned back to her daughter. "Why didn't you tell me?"

  "I was afraid." Lizzy started to cry.

  "You could have told me."

  "I knew how you'd react. Just like you're reacting now."

  "This scares me. I don't want you hanging out at that rock anymore. I don't want you hanging out with those kids."

  "WHY? THEY'RE MY FRIENDS!" Lizzy shouted with choked emotion. "I'm just as much to blame. More! I started on Wayne first. Then Brent, Toby and Carla joined in when they saw how he was acting about it. Getting all defensive and shit! We were only just teasing. We didn't really think he was gonna do it. Then he did! We couldn't believe it when he jumped. It wasn't real. We just stood there. We were too scared to do anything. We thought maybe it was a trick. Until we saw his body at the bottom, all mangled up, twisted like a doll, his arm wrapped around his back. Head completely caved in on one side. We didn't want to get in trouble. Wayne's dead and it's all our fault. Wayne died because of us. And now he's back."

  "Shhh. It's okay," Charlotte said as she rushed over to Lizzy and put her arms around her. The girl buried her face and sobbed audibly. Charlotte led her daughter over to a couch all the way across the large living room. Loveless could imagine how the mother felt. It could have been her daughter dead at the bottom of those rocks. No parent ever knew what kind of peer pressure their child experienced when they were out with their friends. In this case, an emotionally tender child had died trying to prove something to his friends. A few minutes later, Charlotte came back over to Loveless and Donovan. From across the room, to Loveless, it looked like Lizzy had fallen asleep on the couch.

  The filmmaker listened to the conversation that sparked between Charlotte and Donovan as he reviewed the footage they had shot that night through the camera’s LED screen.

  “I could see how their guilt and this movie would conjure him up in their imaginations," Donovan stated grimly to Charlotte.

  “It wasn’t their fault,” Charlotte said protectively.

  "Nobody's saying it is," Donovan replied defensively.

  There was an uncomfortable silence. The filmmaker decided to fill it. “What if it’s not just in their imaginations?” Loveless stated ominously. The cryptic nature of his comment made Charlotte and Donovan look over to the filmmaker.

  "Why do you say that?"

  Loveless held the camera up. He showed Charlotte and Donovan the shot he had been looking at over and over again on the camera monitor. As Brent did his scene, in a window in the background a silhouette was moving back and forth. It was the silhouette of a teenage boy. The filmmaker froze the camera on a frame where you could see the boy's face. It was blurry and far away, but it could have been Wayne.

  Another thing about that
night that had also freaked the filmmaker out was a casually delivered comment. Right before they left for their homes, Lizzy looked across the room at Donovan and Charlotte, who were laughing together, and said in a low tone to Loveless, “They’re not blood related, you know.”

  “What?”

  “Kissing cousins.”

  Before Loveless could say anything Lizzy walked away.

  “Come on, Mom. I wanna go home. I’m tired.”

  Lizzy’s remark haunted the filmmaker and forced him to watch his two producing partners with a much more discerning eye. Was Charlotte carrying on with both him and Donovan at the same time? Throughout pre-production, Loveless had been experiencing a highly satisfying sexual relationship with Charlotte. They were both content to leave questions of where it was all heading until after the film was finished. It seemed to be an unspoken mutual feeling. Neither wanted to rock a boat that could be their ship about to come in. Still, the filmmaker didn’t want to share Charlotte. There were periods of time when Donovan was on the mountain when he and Charlotte were unaccounted for. Loveless felt he had no claim on the woman, no right to demand her exclusivity or faithfulness, when they didn’t have a defined relationship. But the possibility that she was having sex with Donovan while also having sex with him made the filmmaker angry and disgusted. Loveless decided he would keep an eye on them. If he thought there was something going on, he was going to back off. After all, the movie was the important thing. This was his career and he was damned if he was going to fuck it up for what could just be a fling. Stay focused, J.D., he told himself.

  That's what Loveless told himself, but the reality was that the paranoia he had felt so acutely regarding the denizens of this mountain - that they were watching him and conspiring against him - began to seep into his suspicions of Charlotte and Donovan as well. It was massively convenient that Charlotte just happened to know a guy who had recently inherited a bundle and was looking to invest in a risky endeavor like a film. Why had Charlotte led him out to that altar and stone monster in the woods? Were Lizzy and her friends part of a youth rock Satanic cult? She wore a pendent. Brent had referred to the Devil as Lord Lucifer. Toby called Jeremy Jared the front man eternal. Were the teens possessed as Lizzy claimed Wayne was when he leapt to his death? The filmmaker's temporary cabin home had been marked twice, once before he arrived with candles and once after he had arrived with stones. Were they a curse or a blessing? Or a spell? Were they all in it together? Was Loveless being manipulated? Or was he merely going crazy? Sex was always a big part of the equation with devil worshippers. Was Charlotte having sex with both Donovan and him considered normal in this world that he now found himself in? Forget this line of thinking, man. It'll drive you crazy, the filmmaker finally thought, dismissing these fears. He chased them away, but they settled in the back of his mind, waiting to come back and haunt him in a weak moment, like a ghost.

  A week in it was starting to look like a real movie shoot. They had a small but committed crew and cast, including two werewolves and a zombie girl. Jerry would bring Delilah to set. Delilah, in turn, would bring her sister Karen. So Loveless put them all to work. For the zombie scene where the residents of Lord’s Lane return back to life and converge on Grace’s family home, they had to cover a hillside with fog. Since no one could understand how the mountain’s real fog worked - it came and went on its own accord - they had to utilize canned fog that would work on command. The filmmaker had acquired a small party fog machine from a novelty shop down the mountain and had unrealistic expectations about using it to cover the entire side of the hill in fog for the zombie scenes. They used the hill that his cabin home sat on and ran extension cords daisy-chained to other extensions cords out the house and up the hill to provide juice for the lights, camera, and the little fog machine that hopefully could. For the task of fog wrangler, Loveless tapped Jerry, who promptly showed up to work with a huge cardboard box. Before each take, Jerry would fill the box with smoke. On action, he would release this smoke and waft it past camera. The result was amazing. Delilah helped out the catering lady, while Karen was sent into make-up to become a zombie. Of course, Karen was a natural. All she had to do was be her own scary self. Seeing her on the mountain, in make-up, in tattered costuming, surrounded by fog, was scary on a multitude of levels. The disturbed woman reveled in the role and just as importantly, she was having fun.

  On Friday night, while the cast was having a midnight lunch break at the cabin home, Jerry began to mess around with the Mathaluh single. He put it on the record player. The cast listened to it while they ate. Loveless had confided to Jerry and the others where he had found the single and the Ouija board.

  “Now, just to satisfy my own morbid curiosity-” Jerry began turning the record backwards steadily with his finger as he smiled mischievously with a kind of gallows humor.

  “You don’t really think-” the words became stillborn in Charlotte’s mouth as everyone heard what began to come out of the record player speakers.

  “Darkness is the natural course. Follow us- unintelligible. The burning kingdom waits. Follow us- unintelligible. Slay her in the name of Satan-” The rest was unintelligible, followed by what sounded like a girl’s scream.

  Jerry lifted his finger from the record and looked at the ghostly expressions on everyone else’s faces as he said, “Fuck me.”

  “Did everyone just hear what I heard?” Matty said. “That shit about a burning kingdom?”

  "That's way better than the lyrics I thought up," Loveless stated in amazement. "What was that about slayer?"

  “No. It was slay her in the name of Satan,” Collin added.

  “Was that a girl’s scream?” Charlotte said. The actress looked ill.

  “You don’t think they recorded the sacrifice of the runaway girl- ” Loveless thought out-loud cryptically.

  “Maybe we’re just hearing what we want to hear. A lot of it was gibberish,” Charlotte said, trying to be the voice of reason.

  “No fucking way,” Jerry fired back, shaking his head. “We all heard the same thing.”

  “I don’t know what it means, but I think I recognized some of the gibberish. It actually wasn't gibberish. It was Sumerian. The oldest recorded civilization in history. Sumerian was the religious ceremonial language spoken in ancient Babylonia,” Collin said. Everyone looked at him. “What? I was an anthropology major in college.”

  As everyone ran out of something to say all at once, the room fell into an uncomfortable silence. Until it was broken.

  "Do you hear that? Out in the woods." Delilah said as she looked out through the glass of the balcony doors.

  "Hear what?"

  "The quiet," Karen answered for her sister. "Have you ever known the woods to be that quiet?"

  Loveless was already opening the door and stepping out onto the balcony. Karen and Delilah were right. It was completely still in the hills and forest. Suddenly, the filmmaker felt nauseous. He didn't want the crew and cast to see his sudden sick-to-his-stomach expression, especially not Charlotte. He suppressed a retch, went back inside and closed the door.

  “Cheap overblown theatrics to sell records. I thought the back-masking in "Stairway" was much scarier and more original," Loveless said, dismissing the lyrics offhand. "Let’s get back to work." For some reason, the movie “The Ring” popped into the filmmaker’s head.

  'You watched it. Seven days, then you die!'

  He had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. We listened to it. Were we all going to die? Loveless thought fleetingly. The filmmaker needed to sit down. He collapsed onto the couch. Charlotte looked at him. "You alright?"

  Loveless was about to reassure her when he thought he saw something dancing on the ceiling. A bat, hanging upside down. Suddenly, it fell free and swooped down, right at the filmmaker. He ducked, covering up as it whistled past his head. He heard a crash and looked over at the fireplace. The bat was now burning alive in the blaze. It didn't even try to escape.

  "Jesus Christ,"
Jerry exclaimed.

  The odor of burning bat made everyone cover their noses. Collin opened the balcony door to let fresh air in.

  "Just what the fuck was that?" Charlotte said, unable to take her eyes off the smoldering bat.

  At that moment, Loveless wished to hell they could go back in time and not have listened to the backwards lyrics. Judging by the hollow expressions of most of the other cast and crew members, they did too. But they had and it was too late to do anything about it.

  Things seemed to change after that night.

  One day, while the filmmaker was in his bedroom working on the shot-list for the next day’s filming, he heard a knock on the door. It couldn’t have been Charlotte. She was down the mountain on a shopping day with her daughter. Loveless opened the door to find Karen standing there in a towel and nothing else. During the shoot, Jerry, Delilah, and Karen ended up practically living at the filmmaker’s cabin home. They were having ‘injun’ trouble with their landlord and the less time they spent there the better. Or at least that’s how they explained it to Loveless. Delilah was further along and soon the couple would have to think about the baby they were going to be bringing into the world. Charlotte, in typical maternal fashion, decided they should stay at the filmmaker’s place, at least until they sorted out their problems with Della. The actress did not want a pregnant woman stressed. ‘It isn’t good for the baby,’ Charlotte exclaimed. Loveless didn’t mind them staying at his place. He was in directing mode. In his eyes, making a film was like going to war. It was more convenient to have his soldiers close to the home front. He could plot out the upcoming special effects with Jerry and also go over music.

  “You have a hanger?” Karen said, her towel clinging damply to her from a recent shower. For a troubled woman, she wasn’t ugly. She had sharp, striking features. The kind of features that made certain women seem hard and turned other women into high fashion models. Her body was thin. Loveless had found out that Jerry, Delilah, and Karen were practically destitute. The money they were making from the movie was a godsend for them. The only flaw you could find with Karen’s appearance were her breasts. You could see it through her clothes. The woman must have never worn a bra in her entire life. Her breasts hung down like a tribeswoman out of a National Geographic magazine photo. Still, she was definitely fuck-able.