THE BLACK ALBUM: A Hollywood Horror Story

by Carlton Kenneth Holder

  “They’ll look for you at your place. Stay here the rest of the night. We’ll go to the station together in the morning. During the light of day. If they take you into custody, don’t say another word. I have a friend, a high powered ass-kicking attorney. I’ll have her call from Los Angeles and light a fire under their hillbilly asses.”

  Loveless looked at the woman. She was strong. He had known that about her. He just hadn’t realized how strong she was until now. “Thank you, Charlotte.”

  “Hey, we’re in this together, right?”

  They were in it together alright. But the question was, what were they into?

  The next morning, when Charlotte and Loveless went to the sheriff’s station, there seemed to be some confusion.

  “We don’t have an officer fitting that description working here. Never have,” stated a tall, barrel-chested officer with thinning blond hair, a thick mustache and an official demeanor.

  “What about one of the other stations?” Charlotte asked.

  “We don’t have an officer like that at any station on this mountain.”

  “So there’s no record of my being pulled over?” Loveless asked both perplexed and relieved.

  “No. Would be in our computer. You say this officer was driving a sheriff’s vehicle?"

  “Yes.” Loveless thought for a second. “No. I didn’t get a good look at the car. I just saw the flashing lights behind me. He turned his lights off when I stopped my car. It was dark.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you.” The officer didn’t look like he believed the filmmaker’s story much.

  Loveless was about to say something. Charlotte stepped in. “Let’s go, J.D. Thank you, officer.” The actress pulled the filmmaker away. They left the sheriff’s station quickly.

  “He definitely knew more,” Loveless said shaking his head as Charlotte drove.

  “Maybe. But it’s not like he’s going to tell you or me.”

  “Maybe we should postpone the rest of the shoot for a few weeks. Let things calm down.”

  “You joking? We have maybe five days left of shooting. Look, they were either trying to scare you or really kill you. What they did was planned out. We can’t give them time to get even more organized. Let’s finish this hell shoot, get the fuck off this bullshit mountain and never look back.”

  Loveless was staring at Charlotte blankly, his face suddenly drained of blood.

  “What?” the actress asked, trying to read the expression.

  “Can you pull over?”

  Charlotte pulled her truck over. Loveless opened the door, leaned out and got sick on the side of the road.

  A few nights later, having run out of craft service for the troops, Loveless and Charlotte made a food run to the only store still open on the mountain at that late hour. Seven Eleven. They had gotten into the habit of driving together at night, for safety's sake. Della, the large Cherokee woman, stood behind the counter with her arms folded. She looked like she was expecting them. Loveless had forgotten she worked the graveyard shift. The heavyset Native American woman studied the filmmaker and his actress as they paid for their groceries. An air of uncomfortableness settled in over the two of them.

  “How’s ole’ Jer, these days?” Della asked with just the right sardonic tone in her voice.

  “He seems fine,” Loveless replied with feigned nonchalance. Jerry, Delilah and Karen were no longer staying at his cabin home. They had found new residency in a small shack on the edge of Arrowhead a couple of weeks earlier thanks to the money they were making from the movie shoot.

  “He owes me back rent I guess I ain’t never gonna see.”

  Loveless nodded sympathetically, swiping his ATM card as fast as he could while Charlotte stood there with a smile frozen on her lovely face.

  “How’s that pretty little thing of his? She pop yet?”

  “No. But she’s due soon,” Charlotte said, disturbed by Della’s crude reference to child birth.

  “That Jerry’s a sly one. I’ll give ‘em that. Better watch out for him. He takes you in with his poor innocent me routine. But you better believe that dirty dog will bite the hand that feeds him without the slightest hesitation.” Della bagged their groceries slowly.

  “We’ll try to remember that,” the filmmaker said, trying not to sound impatient.

  As Loveless and Charlotte exited, Della’s last words followed them out the door, “Snow storm coming. Gonna be a bad one. In four, maybe five days.” The woman seemed certain even though the skies were crystal clear and there was no mention of even one drop of precipitation in any of the weather reports for the area.

  While shooting a night scene where a dejected and desperate Grace tries to take her own life rather than let the demon Jeremy possess her body, the weather turned unexpectedly cold. The wind whipped at the cast and crew harshly. Jerry was rigging the harness vest Charlotte was wearing under her clothing. A thin but extremely strong cable running down from a pulley on a thick branch of the tree overhead, and attaching to the vest would support Charlotte’s weight as she tried to hang herself. The cable, painted black, was invisible against the night. The actress would slip the noose that ran down from the tree, around her neck, giving the illusion that she was really hanging herself. In the script, the noose breaks giving Grace a second chance at life and redemption.

  “All set,” Jerry gave Loveless the thumbs up.

  “Last looks,” Collin said, the movie clapboard tucked under his arm. The make-up artist moved in and touched up Charlotte’s make-up.

  Loveless gave the actress some last minute direction. “The frayed rope will snap almost immediately, so you just have to sell being strangled for a moment.”

  “Got it,” Charlotte nodded.

  Action was called and the scene got under way. Charlotte - now in character as Grace - stood on a chair under the tree. She trembled. Tears rolled down her eyes as she put the noose around her neck. Charlotte said, “Fight the Devil,” closed her eyes as if in solemn prayer and stepped off the chair. A buckle on the vest unsnapped and the vest slid up on the actress under her clothes. Charlotte immediately started thrashing and clawing at the rope around her neck with both hands as she swung back and forth. It was Loveless who realized something was wrong and launched forward. He grabbed Charlotte, locking both hands around her hips and lifted her, taking the weight off her neck. “CUT HER DOWN! CUT HER DOWN!”

  Jerry whipped out a folding knife and sawed the rope in two. Next, he unclipped the carabiner that attached the cable to the vest. The filmmaker lowered Charlotte to the ground and pulled the rope from around her neck. He smoothed the hair out of her face, scared as hell that she was not alright. “Charlotte, Charlotte!”

  Charlotte finally caught her breath after gasping for several seconds, “I’m okay, J.D.”

  “Good thing the other buckles on the vest held,” Loveless said, still trying to figure out what had gone wrong. He looked at Jerry. “What happened?”

  “There’s no way that buckle should have come loose like that. These are the vests professional mountain climbers wear. Those buckles don’t just come loose. And even so, the noose wasn’t even tied to the tree. I just threw it over the branch,” Jerry defended himself as he shined a flashlight up at the tree branch that the rope was slung over. Another branch was right next to it.

  “Look,” Collin pointed to the branch, “The wind must have blown the rope into the crotch of those two branches, where it got snagged.”

  “A freak friggin’ accident,” Jerry said, a ghostly expression haunting his face.

  “Way too many freak accidents happening on this shoot,” Matty the cinematographer pronounced grimly.

  “Amen to that, bruddah,” Collin said.

  “Good thing the other buckles held,” Loveless repeated looking at Charlotte with a shimmer of tears in his eyes.

  “Otherwise I would have hanged for real.” Charlotte finished the sentence.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Charlotte. If I thoug
ht for even the slightest moment that there was any danger, I would have never taken the chance with you.”

  Charlotte reached up and put her hand on the filmmaker’s cheek, “I know. I know.” In true the show must go on bluster, the actress continued, “Is the shot ruined?”

  Loveless thought for a moment. “No, that’ll be the ‘master.’ The rest we’ll just cheat with tight shots: the rope getting taunt and breaking, the chair turning over, your feet dangling in the air, you laying into frame in. I’m not taking any more chances with you.”

  Charlotte heard and felt the choked emotion in Loveless’ voice and smiled faintly. She looked the filmmaker right in the eyes. “It’s okay, J.D. I’m alright.”

  Loveless, Charlotte and Lizzy were having breakfast at the diner when the filmmaker received a call on his cell. The filmmaker looked at the caller ID. His face lit up. “I gotta take this.” Loveless left the noisy din of the eatery and went outside. He looked up at the sky. Storm clouds in the far distance had begun to form.

  “Hey. How’s it going?” the filmmaker said into the phone.

  Through the diner window, Charlotte and Lizzy watched as Loveless nodded excitedly at everything that he was hearing on the phone. A moment later, he pocketed it and came back into the diner. He smiled as he plopped down into the booth next to Lizzy, across from Charlotte.

  “That distributor I was originally trying to get to put the money up for the movie is back from South Africa. He finally read the script, watched the trailer I sent over. Him and his wife want to see what we have so far. Before we show it to anyone else. They want a first look.”

  “We just have a rough assemblage with only some of Jerry’s scoring and a bunch of temp music. About six scenes are still missing,” Charlotte said concerned.

  “Six minor scenes. We’ve shot all the major sequences. Plus, I’ve been giving the editor notes. He’s been making the changes. We’re closer to a rough cut than a rough assemblage. We have the bulk of the movie, with cards standing in for what we don’t have yet (in filmmaking a card states what scene would go at a certain point of the film. For example: missing love scene). They’re distributors. They understand this. Plus, I think what we’ve got so far is damn good.”

  “When do they want to see it?

  “Today.”

  “Today? We have a shoot tonight.”

  “And we’ll be back in time. Come with me. You and Lizzy. We’ll swing by my place and pick up a hard-drive of the rough cut. The editor’s there now. The crew can start setting things up at the location, while we’re on our way back. They know what to do.”

  Charlotte glanced from Loveless to Lizzy and shrugged. “Okay.”

  Lizzy looked up at her mom, “Can we go shopping while we’re in LA?”

  Charlotte ended up dropping Lizzy off at her sister’s apartment in Santa Monica for a few hours. Charlotte’s sister Rita loved to shop and a visit from her favorite niece gave her just the right excuse. They were talking about boutiques that sold designer boots when the filmmaker and actress left.

  The distributor and his wife - who was also his partner in the company - met Loveless and Charlotte at a screening room in Burbank. Bob was tall, in his mid-fifties and looked every bit his age. His wife Shatari - a Hindu Indian woman - was petite and nearly twenty years younger. From the second they walked in, Charlotte, an astute saleswomen, knew the distributor and his wife were very interested in “The Black Album.” They were already on the hook.

  Bob confirmed it. “J.D., I’ve gotta admit, this sounds good. The trailer’s solid. Script’s excellent. If you shot what was in the script and have decent production value and performances, we should definitely have something we could sell.”

  “Wait ‘til you see the locations we’ve been shooting at in Arrowhead. They’ll blow you away,” Loveless said with equal enthusiasm.

  “Tell me you shot with the Red Camera, J.D.”

  “I shot with the Red Camera, Bob.”

  “Perfect! I’m thinking SyFy Channel, strong foreign sales. Hell, maybe even a limited theatrical here in the States. I know the guys over at Anchor Bay. Plus it’s got horror franchise written all over it, like “The Ring.” There can be a “Black Album II, III IV.” Bob looked from Loveless to Charlotte. “And this, of course, is your lovely ingenue Grace.”

  “Charlotte,” the actress corrected as she stepped forward and shook Bob’s hand firmly. “This is my wife Shatari. I met her while filming a movie in Bombay seven years ago.”

  “That sounds so exotic and romantic,” Charlotte said as she took Shatari’s hand warmly. “Wow. You have the most beautiful hair. I wish I had hair like that.” Charlotte knew from her years in sales, you always butter up the wife.

  “Thank you,” Shatari responded, blushing merrily at the flattery. The Indian woman did have a luxurious straight jet black mane that stretched all the way down to the small of her back. Charlotte's compliment melted away any remaining first meeting ice. The actress definitely knew how to prime the pump.

  “Great- Bob, Shatari,” Loveless said happily as he handed his hard-drive to the tech guy Bob had standing by. The tech hooked up the hard-drive and started up the editing system. Bob, Shatari, Loveless, and Charlotte sat down on the folding chairs provided for them in the little screening room. Seconds later, the lights went out and the big screen lit up.

  Out the corner of his eye, Loveless watched the expressions of the husband and wife distributors. They reacted in all the right places, nudging each other, nodding, whispering, smiling. Hell, they were just as excited as the filmmaker and his actress. When the movie came to the scene where Grace unearths the album from the grave, Bob whispered to Loveless, “Good production value on that cemetery. Looks real.”

  “Was real, Bob.”

  For a second Bob and his wife shared an uneasy glance. When the movie reached the crucial point where Grace played the record backwards and the unholy lyrics began to issue forth with an otherworldly echo effect, Shatari’s nose began to bleed.

  “Oh,” the Hindu woman said in mild surprise as she cupped the blood that was running out of her nose. Seconds later, it began to gush out.

  “Shatari? Shatari, are you alright?” Bob was alarmed.

  The woman was nodding as she got up and rushed out the room to a nearby restroom. Bob excused himself and went off after her. The tech pressed pause on the movie. Loveless, Charlotte and the tech sat there uncomfortably. They heard sounds of muffled arguing. Two minutes later, Bob came back into the room.

  “Her nose just won’t stop bleeding. She’s losing a lot of blood. I’m going to take her to the emergency room.”

  “Jesus! Has anything like this ever happened before?” Loveless asked as he stood up.

  “Never.” Bob seemed weirded out.

  “Is there anything we can do?” Charlotte asked with true concern.

  “No. No. We’re just gonna have to postpone seeing the rest of the movie.”

  Shatari came back into the room. She had a white towel to her nose. The towel was a sopping crimson. In her eyes was a look, a look of accusation when she looked at Loveless and Charlotte. She said something in Hindi that no one else in the room understood. The Hindu culture was very old. As old as any. They had a history with magic, the supernatural.

  “Don’t worry. We can come back. You can look at the movie later.” Loveless smiled.

  Shatari’s eyes flashed. In them was loathing and hatred. The Hindu woman tried to bury these feelings, but she couldn’t. While Loveless had missed this, the actress hadn’t. Charlotte saw the emotions. There would be no deal with these distributors. The woman was spooked and her husband was going to do whatever his trophy wife said.

  On the drive back up the mountain, with Lizzy passed out in the back seat amidst a number of shopping bags, courtesy of Auntie Rita, Loveless called the distributor, “Hi, Bob. I’m just calling to see if Shatari’s alright.”

  “Her nose finally stopped bleeding. Doctors don’t have a fucken
clue what caused it.” Bob’s voice had a haunted ring to it that fell over his words like a shadow. “But we just got home a few minutes ago and I don’t understand it at all.” The man stopped.

  “What?”

  “Our cat’s dead. Dead. I mean mangled, on our bed. And clumps of Shatari’s hair have started falling out.”

  Charlotte could overhear the conversation on the phone, the man’s terrified voice as he and Loveless made plans to meet again that would never materialize. After they said their goodbyes, Loveless hung up and looked at Charlotte, “What the fuck is going on? I love horror films. I don’t believe in them.”

  “Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Amityville Horror, The Exorcist, Hills Have Eyes, The Serpent and the Rainbow, The Mothman Prophecies.” The movie titles floated up to Loveless and Charlotte from the back seat. Lizzy was wide awake and sitting up. For a second, through the rearview mirror, she looked to the filmmaker like one of the scary prepubescent anomalies from the horror cult flick “Children of the Damned.”

  “What about them, baby?” Charlotte asked.

  “They were all based on true stories. You see, I like horror movies too.”

  “So what are you saying? That “The Black Album” is true?” Loveless asked.

  “It’s based on true events. There was a band. We know they did something to a missing girl. We know a kid killed his friends and himself after listening to their music. We know the band died mysteriously.”

  “But now you’re saying they laced their songs with real Satanic lyrics? That they really sacrificed a thirteen year old runaway? That listening to the record backwards possessed a young boy and made him kill? That the Devil really exists?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why didn’t the Devil save the band then if they had already sold their souls to him?”

  “You can’t make a deal with the Devil. He’s the father of all lies.”

  “Us actually having this discussion is insane. I don’t like this kind of talk, Lizzy.” Charlotte was getting upset.