"If it is who I think it is, we are going to have an all out war on our hands," Johnny said, sucking on his cigar. "And this little bloodbath sure as shit won't endear us to the mafia. But fuck them. They are the least of our problems."
Johnny walked to the conference room entrance, remembered something, and turned back to Glass.
"Oh, and one more thing. Find out where Sarah Accardo is spending her wedding night."
2.
Gary Hack was a pornographer to most and an artist to few. These assessments were wrong and right on both accounts. A label that sat rightly on the man was junkie, though he denied more than a casual arrangement with drugs.
Gary Hack had already shoved two lines of heroin up his nose before the sedan he rode in had even crossed the George Washington Bridge. It was December and Gary could feel the cold outside through his window.
“Jesus, Gary,” Mike Cooke chuckled.
Gary fought the nod and stared over at his friend. He could see his own dumb face in the lens of Mike’s sunglasses. He noted how clean-cut he was. Gary had gotten his head shaved and beard trimmed down and he looked halfway respectable. His sleepy appraisal stopped suddenly as Mike turned his attention back to the road.
Mike Cooke gripped the steering wheel with a hand and a hook. “I guess it is going to be a pretty lonely ride for me,” Mike concluded, futzing around with the radio.
Gary shook his head. “No man. I am with you,” Gary promised. “Just getting in my licks while I can, you know.”
But he nodded anyway. He was in the dark warmth for maybe twenty minutes before his imagination started fucking with him. He thought of a horror story he had read once about a man on an autopsy table. The man was alive and conscious, but he could not move or utter a sound due to a strange paralysis that gave him the appearance of death. A momentary wave of panic gripped Gary. What if he was in an accident and he found himself in a similar predicament?
He straightened up and tried to join his producer in reality. “Shit, man, sorry. I dozed.”
“That’s okay, Gary. We have a long drive,” Mike assured him. He pulled a joint from his jacket and pushed it toward Gary.
“You want to level off?” Mike asked.
Gary declined with a weak wave of his hand. The live autopsy fear was now pressed completely from his brain.
“I learned the hard way that heroin can be a jealous bitch,” Gary explained. “The introduction of any other chemical or stimulant will not be tolerated. When the heroin is inside of me, there is room for nothing else. My body is her domain while she courses through me. We are one.”
Mike sparked the joint and shamelessly took a heavy hit. He stifled a cough and exhaled slowly. Gary’s stomach turned as the strong scent of weed wormed up his nostrils.
“For God’s sake, man,” Gary muttered, feeling nausea swim in his stomach. “Open the window.”
Mike sighed and cracked his window. Cold air slapped both men around. Mike tried to do the courteous thing and send the offensive smoke through the crack. But as Gary’s body did another lap in nausea, Mike grunted and pitched the remainder of his joint away.
They were headed to Scott, New Jersey to film a brand new Johnny Stücke production. This was Gary’s third expedition into Jersey since the zombie gangbang video had hit the underground on demand venues. Stücke, the immortal patchwork giant of a man that Gary called boss, had made some friends with an in to the late night cable scene. And while Stücke was not a huge fan of soft-core, he did enjoy making money.
Johnny Stücke knew how to squeeze every nickel from an investment, so he had sent Gary out into the wilds to deliver soft and hard versions of the same film. It wasn’t difficult; it mostly required two main cameras with different angles on the carnal shenanigans.
Mike Cooke hated these road trips, but Gary didn’t mind getting out of the city on occasion. There weren’t as many Night Things on the Jersey side. New Jersey wasn’t the safest place for the bumps in the night. The only monsters that had managed to fit in without too many complications were the vamps, and they did this by sticking close to the Goth crowd. Furries fit in pretty easily out there too, but they had a tendency to get shot by silver in the Jersey woods every time the full moon rose.
But if you were a zombie, New Jersey was not a place where you wanted to shamble. Unless you enjoyed being strung up and set ablaze.
Gary could go anywhere, actually, as long as he had a drug supply that would last him the duration of his visit. And he did. The zombie gangbang video he shot had done very well. Stücke had been kind on the backend and Gary’s bills were caught up. He had even opened a savings account for his eleven year-old daughter, Holly. He got Mike to help him configure it in a way so that Gary wouldn’t be able to bust into it. His little girl may not have been that crazy about him at the moment, but he would use some of this blood money to do something productive for her.
Johnny Stücke had taken a break from producing dark monster fetish videos and the projects Gary was currently directing reminded him of the old days. It almost made the world feel normal again.
Gary had to admit it; things were going well at the moment; as well as things could be for him, anyway. The Night Things had not pursued him or his crew for the Bloody Carnivores video or the zombie gangbang. Maybe his employment by the most powerful and influential spook on the East Coast had something to do with that.
But as long as Gary lived in his own head, he would always harbor a deadly enemy and a funk was an easy pile for him to step into.
Gary was on his way to direct an all lesbian production, as doily dyke titles were easier for the late night cable audience to process. This was the type of film Gary had cut his teeth on years ago for a company called Rotten Garden Productions and an executive producer named Vance Loren. This creative marriage had produced over forty ugly babies before drugs and egos tore the union apart. Gary had heard recently that Vance Loren and Rotten Garden Productions had fallen on hard times and that they were in danger of closing shop entirely, if they hadn’t already. Johnny Stücke was actively pursuing their catalog. This pleased Gary to no end.
Johnny Stücke was dedicated to getting his fat fingers into the lucrative late night soft-core market, but he still had requested something darker as his next offering. Gary had obliged with Dark Angels, a script that centered on addiction. The screenplay was gritty and raw. Gary knew his actresses would drag it down quickly into mediocrity and camp, but still he felt that he was stretching his creativity a little more than usual.
Gary nodded off again, and he was more committed to rest this time. He mumbled an apology to Mike Cooke as the director drifted into slumber.
When he awoke, he was in a convenience store parking lot. Mike was gone; inside the store, obviously. Gary looked around and he saw thick forest. That was a healthy nap he had taken. Suddenly, he felt hot. Nausea rose in him. He rolled his window down and stuck his head out. He vomited on the side of the sedan. When it was out of him, he rested his head on the door and welcomed the cold wind on his face. He heard a chirping sound.
Gary looked to the ground and four small, strange looking goat-like creatures stared at him. They were covered in brown fur and feathers. Standing on their hind hooves, they stretched their necks up at Gary. Their curious black eyes blinked at him.
He smiled. “Hello. You guys are cute. What in the hell are you?”
The creatures looked to each other and then they turned back to Gary and they hissed and snapped at him. Frightened, Gary started to roll his window up. A large woman appeared and she loudly shooed them away. They scattered and ran toward the brush on the other side of the road.
Gary gazed up into the strict face of an elderly black woman. She hugged a grocery bag to her side.
“What were those?” Gary asked.
“Jersey devils,” the woman replied.
“Devils? As in plural?” Gary asked.
“Yes, city boy. And they are as bad as raccoons out here. The governor is
just about ready to put a hunting season on them.”
The woman looked at the mess on the sedan and at Gary’s general condition.
“Look at you,” she scowled, speaking without the benefit of her dentures. She wore an unflattering raincoat. Dingy blue slippers adorned her feet and she had her hair curled up into a straw sun hat. Gary wondered if she had a mirror in her house.
“What about me?” Gary asked, with breath that must have smelled like a skunk had died in his mouth.
“Do you love your mother, young man?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am, yes I do,” Gary said as politely as he could. He respected his elders, even the insane ones. “I just despise myself to a much larger extent.”
The woman shook her head. “Jesus loves you, fool,” she said, turning and taking her leave.
“And I have grown quite fond of him over the years myself. Thank you, ma’am,” he called after her.
The woman strolled off.
Mike opened his car door and slid into his seat. “What a hottie,” he joked, having witnessed the tail end of Gary’s altercation. “You should put her in your movie.”
“I’m sure there’s a market for it,” Gary said, taking a napkin that was peeking out of the plastic bag that Mike had in tow. He cleaned the remnants of puke from his face.
“What did she want?” Mike asked, starting the engine.
“A pack of Jersey devils attacked the car,” Gary explained. “She ran them off. Did you know those things existed?”
“Yeah, my buddy has one for a pet. He taught the thing tricks,” Mike said, digging a cold cola from the bag and handing it to Gary.
Gary twisted the top off and sucked half of the bottle down, realizing just how thirsty he was. He belched loudly and then he got his mind back on business. “How far are we from the location?” he asked.
“About twenty minutes,” Mike replied, pulling out of the lot. “We’re making excellent time.”
“I puked on the car, man,” Gary confessed, hiking his window up.
“Don’t sweat it. We’ll get a production assistant to wash the damn thing,” Mike said, steering back toward the main road.
Mike looked at the brush near the road. “This place freaks me out. I hate the forest. And the jungle. And the ocean. I hate any place where shit would eat me.”
“Deserts as well then, yeah?” Gary chimed in.
“Yeah,” Mike agreed. “Fucking snakes and scorpions. I only feel safe in the city, even with the Night Things. I know the score, there. Where I should or shouldn’t go and when. Here, I’m on their turf; playing by their rules.”
“Playing by whose rules?”
“The fucking animals, Gary. They hate us. And who could blame them, with the way mankind does things? But you know what the worst place to be in is?”
“Enlighten me.”
“The ocean,” Mike explained. “That’s like a big bowl of soup, and if you’re floating in that fucker, you’re one of the ingredients. I got eaten by a shark in a previous life during the war.”
“Which war?” Gary asked.
“Not sure,” Mike said. “I was a sailor, on some kind of boat in the ocean. We got torpedoed by the enemy. I ended up floating on a piece of salvage. Then I noticed a bunch of tiger sharks circling me. My side arm was shit; gummed up from the salt water. So I threw it at one of the fuckers.”
It took everything Gary had not to laugh out loud at the image. It was one of the most overused clichés in movies that rated up there with the overhead shot of the hero screaming a defiant no to the gods above as he cradled his dead sidekick.
“All I had was a knife,” Mike went on. “I sank it into one of them. The bastard disappeared under the dark water; took my knife with it. I was exhausted, and lost my grip. They got me. They tore me apart. I’ve dreamt of it every year since I was seventeen. The nightmare comes harder around springtime. I don’t know what that means.”
“It means we should get sushi tonight after the shoot and exact a small amount of revenge,” Gary suggested.
“Fucking A,” Mike agreed.
***
The house that was serving as their main location was located deep in the woods of Scott, NJ. Scott was a conservative little town whose residents would have surrounded the house with torches and pitchforks, had they known about the adult film being created in their municipality.
Gary felt pretty straight at this point. His growing tolerance for heroin was staggering.
Mike drove down a thin dirt road. They could finally see the two story house at the end of the gravel driveway.
“I love this house,” Mike muttered, finding a spot to park on the trail that had led the sedan there.
The house was owned by Patrick and Susan Connor, an aging hippie couple that Johnny Stücke knew. The house seemed a bit large for the Connors, who had an array of dogs but no children. Gary couldn’t argue with the tranquility of the spot, though. The land was surrounded by heavy forest and the nearest neighbor lived a mile away.
Gary didn’t know how a strong friendship had been forged between two pacifistic free spirits and a monster with ties to organized crime, but he would have paid good money to learn the details. There was a story there, he was sure.
Stücke insisted that his tamer productions be shot there. The main appeal of the house was a huge, sparse and finished basement. With a backdrop and the right lighting, the crew could pull off sets that would have cost thousands in a studio.
But even with the money Stücke paid Gary couldn’t fathom why the Connors would put up with so much abuse from a film crew.
Gary did recognize one benefit that Patrick Connor took from this. The old horn dog usually chronicled the productions with a digital camera. This was a favor for Johnny Stücke, allegedly. But it did yield some nice behind the scenes photos that could be integrated into poster and packaging art.
Gary followed Mike out of the car and they walked to the porch steps. The house looked so innocent and unassuming. All that was missing was a white picket fence. The Connors’ dogs barked loudly from their pens behind the house.
Gary knocked on the door. After a solid minute and no response, he eased it open and entered the greeting room of the house; the belly of the beast. In the kitchen, some of the crew sat at a table positioned in front of a bay window that looked out at the woods. They stuffed their faces.
The living room had become a makeshift equipment space and Gary was sure that the back bedrooms were being used as make-up stations and green rooms. The upstairs was, as always, off limits to everyone. The only house rule. Gary imagined a torture dungeon up there. He could hear the crew beneath his feet in the basement.
A portly man wearing a Who Farted? shirt set aside his camera, smiled and approached Gary and Mike. He was in his late twenties. He had adult acne and his hairline was receding very quickly. As he came closer, he extended his sweaty hand.
“I’m Barry Sengle, the DP,” he said, shaking Gary’s hand. “It is nice to finally meet you, Gary.”
“Likewise,” Gary replied.
Barry Sengle was Gary’s fourth attempt at replacing Ella Howes. Gary just couldn’t find a comfortable vibe with a new director of photography. The wet handshake and t-shirt made Gary pretty sure already that he and Barry wouldn’t be enjoying a long and fruitful working relationship. Where had Johnny Stücke dug this clown up?
Mike and Barry traded introductions and Gary knew the relationship was further doomed when Barry asked about Mike's hook.
Gary was hungry and he interrupted the conversation by tapping Mike and motioning toward the kitchen.
“Excuse us,” Mike said to Barry, as he and Gary walked over to the food.
Sitting at the table was Brittney Dire, a raven haired Scream Queen who appealed largely to the Goth, bondage and discipline crowd. She and Gary had worked together before the magic came.
“Gary,” she said, barely acknowledging the director. Her eyes grew friendlier at the sight of Mike Cooke. �
��Hey Mike, honey. How have you been?”
“Good, Brit. Real good,” Mike said, leaning over and planting a kiss on her cheek.
Brittney had been a much bigger deal some years ago, when she and Gary had both worked for Rotten Garden Productions. But she had grown a little long in the tooth, being in her late thirties. She was now consigned to bit parts. Gary figured this made her spiteful and mean.
It wasn’t Gary’s idea to cast her in these recent productions. Hell, he wouldn’t mind never seeing her fucking face again. But Johnny Stücke realized that he could capture the lingering and faithful fan base of the fading adult starlet by putting her name on the box. Gary got it, from a business perspective. But it still tasted like a shit sandwich.
Night Things: The Monster Collection Page 3