Still

by Charlee Jacob

  He kept sneaking out with Curtis, running the two blocks down to the campus corner shops, darkness sucking away the proof of their footfalls and lapping at their clothes. They always sang the same lyrics from Last House on the Left, their anthem now. “‘And the road leads to nowhere…and the castle stays the same…’”

  They kept slinking in through the back door because someone always opened it up if you knocked. Peter continued hoping for something amazing to convince him that evil was this repulsive ingredient burrowed deep within the gut, to be unraveled of its power when strewn across the killing floor. Or it was a runic configuration among the wrinkles in the curd of the brain, to be undone as it got dashed against an already stained wall. Or it might be a manifestation in the sex organs, and this was why that stuff had to always be covered up or closed, whether it be Satan’s throbbing dick or Pandora’s pulsating box.

  One Monday, Curtis said, “Saturday’s a double feature.”

  “Starting at midnight? We won’t get back before maybe three-thirty or four. Doubles the chances we’ll get caught.”

  “That wouldn’t be the buck-buck of a chicken, would it?”

  “I got your chicken right here.”

  Hell, it might turn out to be the moment Peter would be rewarded for his faithfulness. So they arranged the sleep-over. Listened to the buzz about the upcoming double. They heard good things—great things. Presagements of doom from the grownup sentinels of clean underpants and Sunday school thou-shalt-nots. They were both particularly excited. Peter promised himself that if these two weren’t as shocking as advertised, he’d retire from frights, shave any hairs he might have begun to sprout from his armpits and groin (negligible as that was), and join a Sesame Street cult.

  Curtis leaned forward, clutching his belly with his upper lip curled and trembling. He hadn’t touched the dinner his mother served. Peter guessed it was just because Curtis had psyched himself up for the double terrors later. But then he slowed them down, not able to run as fast as he usually did. He kept stopping, hunkering over to grasp his knees, then putting a hand to the stitch in his side. Peter was afraid they’d show up late and miss most of the start of the first movie. Then as they reached the alley, Curtis paused to throw up by a Dumpster.

  “You’re really sick,” Peter told him, concerned. “Sure you don’t want to just go home? You can lean on me, man.”

  “Naw, we’re here already,” Curtis replied, forcing a smile that chattered its teeth. He wiped his eyes and mouth. “It’s just that slop the lunchroom tried to tell us was meatloaf. You were smart to pass it up for the mac and cheese. Besides, I heard one of these movies got made right here in the state, down by Austin. We got to see it. It’s our patriotic duty. And the road leads to nowhere…”

  Peter grinned. “…and the castle stays the same.”

  Almost ten-years-old, shadows were still chilly on their skins from the darkness outside in the alley, their hair damp against their skulls. Some of the teenagers in the theater knew the kids because they’d all been attending the midnight horrors for a while now. The soft knock would come at the door beside the screen and a few would announce, “Hey, there’s Abbott And Costello Meet…” and finish it with whatever the name of the movie was. Abbott And Costello Meet The Creeping Flesh. Or Abbott And Costello Meet Schlock.

  When Peter rapped at the door, they heard a few voices within say, “Hey, there’s Abbott And Costello Meet Torso And The Texas Chainsaw Massacre!”

  Torso wasn’t that great…apart from the nekkid orgies. Well, the killer sawing off arms and legs was so-so. Peter wondered if a kid his age was even suppose to know the nuances of a word like ‘psychosexual’. He’d seen better. He’d also seen worse.

  But then… Oh, then… Almost two in the morning and he’d never known the buzz of a chainsaw could sound so much like music (heavy metal, of course). And the shrieks and the gore and the limbs like trees being felled in Texas hills. Guy in a leather apron whose face he never got to see but who wore another face over it, like some Aztec god striding the sacrificial slaughterhouse. Babbling, slavering idiot-psychos amuck on a landscape of supernumerary outrages. Relentless blood-blasphemies on a cosmic scale to wrench the universe inside-out. Peter clutched the edges of his seat until his knuckles were popped a stark-bone white.

  Curtis had been moaning softly. He’d been rocking back and forth. Finally he stood up, wobbling. He headed for the aisle, little body bent into a question mark.

  Peter hissed, “Curtissssss, where you going?”

  “To the bathroom,” the other boy replied weakly.

  “Man, you can’t. You’ll get caught…”

  “I’ve got to. No soda cup’s gonna hold this.”

  “Shit! Want me to go with you?”

  “No. Maybe they’ll think I’m here with my folks and not think twice. I’ll be back…”

  Except Curtis didn’t come back. And Peter forgot all about him as the movie cranked to full blow-by-blow mind-fucking carnage until he was certain he must have stopped breathing for at least twenty minutes. His heart beat so fast and hard he expected it to burst like a bicycle tire with too much air pumped into it. Couples nearby were so freaked out and turned on they started kissing and groping each other. A few rednecks let out rebel yells of encouragement to the inbred killers onscreen. Peter gasped, choked and grinned until, at the end as the lone teenaged girl climbed into the back of the pickup truck and thus escaped the grisly fate of her friends, he truly believed he’d just hit puberty. And there couldn’t be anything else remaining that he needed to learn about the cruel world.

  Now was when he and Curtis usually went back out the door beside the screen. So he realized his friend hadn’t returned. How long had he been gone? A good half the movie. (Although both halves were great.)

  He stood up. Should he go out that exit door? Maybe Curtis had been caught yet hadn’t ratted that there was a second underaged kid at the movie. The management telephoned the Halprins and they’d come for Curtis. But Mr. and Mrs. Halprin would surely have revealed that Curtis couldn’t be there alone. Yet no one had come searching the dark aisles to scare up Pete.

  Was Curtis still in the bathroom, hunched over a toilet? He would never have decided to go back home without Peter. It wasn’t logical that he’d been caught without folks hunting for his companion. So he must be in the john.

  Peter headed for the lobby, trying to will himself to look taller, older. The film had aged him, but could he make that hard-won wisdom show?

  Commotion in the lobby. People gathered around, shaking heads or craning necks to see, chattering a mile a minute.

  “…found him in the bathroom.”

  “…think his appendix burst.”

  “…get out of the way.”

  Peter pushed through the crowd in time to get a glimpse of a stretcher being carried to a waiting ambulance. Mr. and Mrs. Halprin were there, visibly shaken. An understatement as Curtis’s mother began getting hysterical. But she did it eerily, without uttering any noise at all, only her hands moving and her face twitching with a phantom madness.

  Had something happened to his friend?

  Peter was now sick to his stomach. He saw his parents in the parking lot, getting out of the car. He was in for it.

  Was it Curtis on the gurney? Why was a sheet over his face?

  ««—»»

  Peter didn’t see another horror movie for nine years. (Not by his own choice.) On some level, he knew Curtis died because of a ruptured appendix, fatally aggravated by the run to the theater. But deep in his subconscious he couldn’t get over the feeling that the movie killed his friend. And in that childish id came the associated notion that this was an awesome power. On level with storms as the cruel whims of nature. On par with the justice of arbitrary gods.

  — | — | —

  CHAPTER 14

  “The eye with which Mr. Marksman now regarded the picture was certainly the eye of a barbarian…”

  —Wilkie Collins


  Hide and Seek

  Dunkel Friedhof cried, “Und you didn’t zee anudder horror movie var nine years?”

  The older man ran a photography and movie memorabilia shop which specialized in the graphically rare and unusual, so he was understandably empathetic with how traumatic this must have been for Peter. Dunkel had been born and raised in Germany. He was a slight fellow, tall but delicate. Talking to him always made Peter think of what Arnold Schwarzenegger might have been if he’d never worked out to be the post-Nazi Superman.

  “Not until college,” Peter explained, picking up his wine glass and swirling the dark red contents. (He never really grasped why you were supposed to do this. Something about aerating the liquid for better bouquet and flavor. Probably just made you look cool, an evil magician trying to turn the wine away from a substance too like water and into something closer to blood.) “It was 1983 by then. I lived in a dorm where the unpopular nerds—like me—who didn’t have dates for Saturday night rented movies and sat up until dawn, or went en masse to the local scream screen. Just imagine, if I hadn’t gotten a scholarship and was able to effectively run away from home, I’d have been forced to attend the local university while still living with my parents. I might never have seen another fright flick. I would’ve been emotionally repressed until, by now, I’d be butchering teenaged hookers on the Sunset Strip…”

  Here he shuddered, both genuinely and for effect.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “some went for sci-fi and some went for horror. At my initial dorm party, a kid from Redgranite, Wisconsin brought in the first horror movie I’d seen since Texas Chainsaw. If I had to choose to wait all that time, I guess this might’ve been the one to wait for.”

  The German put his elbows on the table, near a plate of Mongolian barbecue—this restaurant’s specialty—and leaned forward in anticipation. “Zo, vhat vas id?”

  Diane just rolled her eyes, having heard this story ten thousand times. But she wouldn’t permit herself to be a bad sport, not on her husband’s birthday. She managed a small sigh and a brave smile. Trying to listen to the heavily-accented German always gave her a headache. Mostly she tried politely to tune him out.

  She found it odd that a man who’d supposedly been living in the U.S. for thirty years hadn’t finer-tuned his English better. He was a walking and (especially) talking caricature. She’d always believed that anyone who expected to live in a country foreign to them ought to learn to converse in a manner that made them understandable to the citizens of that country. There were colleges holding night courses for that sort of thing. Why didn’t Friedhof go? Surely it would be better for his business with the public. And he wouldn’t be so irritating.

  Pete grinned. “Evil Dead.”

  “Ya! A gut vun var a comink-awt pardy,” Dunk (Peter’s nickname for him) agreed, nodding his head.

  “Well, most of these had just been released for rental from the 1982 movies. As you know, 1982 was kind of a banner year for horror films. Especially for somebody who’d been chained in the Republican dungeon since before his balls dropped…oh, sorry, sweetheart,” Peter apologized, blushing. Had he forgotten she was present? He reached out and patted her hand, which felt very cold. “This and what followed in ’83, which my fellow dorm geeks tramped out on Saturday nights to see, easily brought me back on the road to the cloister of all true horror cognoscenti.”

  “John Carpender’s Duh Ding,” Dunk said. “Nighdmare Ahn Elm Shtreet, duh original und ahnly really gut vun awf duh whole zeeries.”

  “Tenebrae,” Peter added.

  Dunkel screwed up his face to recall another. “Shockink Asia.” Then he snapped his fingers. “Creepshow. Und Don’t Go Indo Duh Voods Alone.”

  Peter smiled. “Basket Case. Videodrome. Nightmares in a Damaged Brain.”

  “Duh Beazt Vittin. Und Duh Boogers.”

  “Actually, Dunk, I think that was The Boogens.”

  “Ah, ya. Ahkay, how z’bout Duh Living Dead Girl? Und Halloween Drei, Season awf duh Vitch?” Dunkel suggested.

  Unabashedly, the two men sang out, “Six more days to Halloween, Halloween, Halloween! Six More Days to Halloween! Silver Shamrock!”

  Only when Dunk sang it, it came out ‘Halloveen’ every time.

  Patrons in the restaurant turned around, frowning at the interruption of their quiet repasts with less-than acceptable chatter.

  It became Diane’s turn to redden with embarrassment. Peter knew she rued the day, three years ago, he’d come upon this guy’s shop, STAUB’S STILLS AND SHOWCASES, in North Hollywood while trying to find an alternate route around a major traffic accident on the Ventura Freeway. Apparently Friedhof was that week paying homage to Lucio Fulci, the Italian director (Maestro of Maggot Mayhem) of such chunkblowing ‘Spaghetti Nightmares’ as Zombie, Zombie 2, Zombie 3, House by the Cemetery, and The Beyond. The front display window was so red, Pete couldn’t haven driven past it and failed to notice even if he’d had his eyes shut (driving with his eyes shut—there was a carnage scene in waiting). Body parts and cannibalism and brainpan-blitz, oh my. Through the doorway, a soundtrack oozed and shrieked at turns. Lots of squishy dead-gut-fart noises and pelvic bone-crunchings and nipples pimple-squeezed until they splatted. Zombies with unresolved issues harranguing these folks who didn’t care for crawly things that went slurp.

  A small group of people picketed outside.

  There’s enough evil

  in the world.

  WHY SHOW THIS?

  Carrying large cardboard protests of that sort.

  Peter parked, got out, walked toward the door. A lady thrust her sign into his face, forcing him to see it inches from his nose.

  She shouted, “There’s enough evil in the world. Why show this?” As if he were an inbred, reading-challenged redneck.

  He gave her the most (cross-eyed) charming, disarming smile he could deliver, and replied, “Because this is so atrocious it makes what’s real easier to live with.”

  “That doesn’t make it right,” she argued with so much passion that spittle flew from her lips and her pupils clouded over.

  “Yes, it does,” Peter answered nicely enough. “For me, it does.”

  He went around her. Entered the shop. Found demonic fairyland.

  A small television set on the counter showed Fulci’s The City of the Living Dead. It had just started. A priest had committed suicide in a Dunwich graveyard. Sandra, the psychiatrist’s lovely patient, was saying, “The language is risqué, but the overall message couldn’t be more puritanical.”

  (Wasn’t it though?)

  Mess with things you shouldn’t and you end up a mess.

  He’d huffed and perched his hands on his hips, putting on an uptight, anal-retentive expression. He demanded to know in his best-remembered Texas twang, “What in the Sam Hain’s going on here?”

  And this Aryan man with cold blue eyes and obviously dyed black hair (covering what must be very gray, considering the many wrinkles in his face—combo age/California sun/smoking) had responded, recognizing a kindred soul, “Wie gehts. Zolizitations und regurgitations.”

  He’d ended up staying longer than he’d planned because Peter got into talking with the owner.

  “I vas dventy-five und tourink duh shtates. I came vit a freund. Vee vent do New Yawrk, Vashinkton D.C., Adlantic Zity, Dallas, L.A. I loved Hollyvood und dezided do open my ahwn shtore. Tod vent back und is a Munich rep vit duh E.U.”

  Funny thing (sheesh, not ha-ha) about his name. Friedhof was the German word for cemetery. His father had been a gravedigger and apparently the occupation went back generations. During World War 2 the old man had been employed to dig mass graves at Auschwitz, for those who weren’t incinerated. He’d escaped but then been captured and tried for war crimes in 1949. At his trial, he’d claimed, “I vas chust doink my chob. I ahm no Nazi. Corpzes haff alvays been duh vamily bizness.”

  He was one of the lucky few not to be sent to prison or to be hanged. But his wife went into labor, right there in the cour
troom, as movie footage of the atrocities at Auschwitz were shown. She died giving birth to a son, delivered on the spot by another accused Nazi, a death camp doctor. Dad named the boy, risen from her dead loins, Dunkel: the word for Darkness.

  “I guess corpzes are shtill duh vamily bizness,” Dunk admitted, gesturing to the Fulci exhibit…and to stacks of horror videos and old Victorian tintypes of dead babies. “But I do nawd dig dem as my anzeztors did. I chust dig dem. Dig?”

  Peter’d grinned. “Dig.”

  Now Dunk was probably what Pete’d call his best friend. All the best things he had in his collection had come from STAUB’S.

  An entire film strip, carefully preserved out of the crumbled original, from the 1914 Dr. Zanikoff’s Experiences in Grafting. An over-the-top scene of bestiality no one had even known existed in Georges Mélie’s 1896 theatre release of The Devil in a Convent. Everything from Peter’s pink horror period, Japanese post-punk ’til you spunk. Nikkatsu’s White Skin in the Dark. Giichi Nishihara’s Grotesque Perverted Slaughter and, naturally, Hisayasu Sato’s Guinea Pig—1 & 2. The entire Faces of Death series. Cheesy Herschell Gordon Lewis epics-Le chopped livers-made-for-twenty seven cents-and-all-the-cherry-koolade-you-could-spew. Perverse yet brilliant shots deleted from Dario Argento’s Suspiria and ones cut from the Romero Dead movies. Coffee table gore: Mario Bava’s Twitch of the Dead Nerve, Lamberto Bava’s Demoni, Peter Walker’s House of the Whipcord, Jacopetti and Prosperi’s Africa Addio. Early Sam Raimi, early David Cronenberg, even a bit of eclectic David Lean. (No posters of Freddy, Michael or Jason were scotchtaped to the walls of Peter’s sanctum. Nothing of Scream in all its bedeviled dishwater. —Here’s a hint, asshole. If you giggled during the movie, it wasn’t scary.—Although he did have a framed print from House of a 1000 Corpses there, signed by Rob Zombie whom he daily burned incense to in gratitude.) Even subculture innovations like The Freak From Suckweasel Mountain.