The Con Season: A Novel of Survival Horror

by Adam Cesare

  When the money had stopped coming in several years ago, Toby, in a bout of delusional protectiveness, had made a big mistake. He decided that the best course of action was to tell Clarissa she’d booked several pay-or-play deals that didn’t actually exist. That way, when the fake movies fell apart she wouldn’t be suspicious as to how she could still be paying her bills.

  This information took a silent half hour of waiting for departure and then forty-five minutes of questioning to acquire. Once they were surrounded by the white noise of the plane’s engines and were able to recline their seats, Toby gave up the goods. After he’d admitted that yes all the work was gone and now the money was too, he started crying. Instead of keeping her seat and trying to console him, Clarissa took her three miniature bottles of Kettle One into the bathroom and sat for a long time.

  A little drunk and looking to spend money as a ‘fuck you’ to Toby, Clarissa purchased the use of the in-flight wifi. Her bank card wasn’t declined, so she now either had a $14.95 overdraft or there was some gas left in the tank.

  After boredom set in scanning through the same six stories—these days Deadline, Variety, and the fan blogs offered very little editorializing on the press releases they were sent from the studios—Clarissa decided that she would try and check her email accounts.

  She hadn’t logged into them in a while, that was part of Toby’s job description. Her public account, for which there was a form on her website, was a mess of mildly-concerning fan letters and penis pill spam. Her business email would be where the action was.

  Toby had set up both accounts but, with the same transparency with which he had dealt with the cashbox key, he wanted Clarissa to be able to access them. The passwords weren’t difficult to remember.

  This professional account (clarissalee.tobygivens@gmail.com) was only accessible either through direct contact with Toby, various casting director’s rolodexes, or through IMDb’s paid Pro accounts. Besides his name and a high-gloss picture of Clarissa, the email was the only information on Toby’s business card.

  Someone knocked on the bathroom door.

  “Occupied!” Clarissa yelled and then frowned into the glow of her phone screen. Why couldn’t Toby have just named the account clarissalee.manager@gmail.com?

  Once she fired Toby she was going to have to start a new account and migrate over all her contacts.

  She was going to have to change a lot of things.

  No. No thinking about that. There had to be some kind of job in here she could do for quick cash with minimal debasement.

  *

  Dear Ms. Lee (or associated representation),

  I hope that this letter finds you well. My associates and I at MTY Productions are huge fans and would like to extend the invitation for you to be Guest of Honor at our inaugural convention.

  Now, I am well aware that there are other conventions competing for your time and energy, but please allow me a moment to explain why Blood Camp Con is worthy of your attention.

  With the enthusiastic support of our creative partners (which include Keith Lumbra of Rigor Mortis Films, a leading name in extreme horror) and financial backers, we believe we have created the world’s most immersive fan experience.

  Structured more like a summer camp than a comic convention, Blood Camp Con attendees will spend the weekend living in a horror film. If that sounds off-putting, please understand that as a guest you will be living those three days in complete comfort, only required to participate in a few role-playing exercises on par in strenuousness with a walk-on cameo in a film.

  We are a boutique convention, and as such our business model has to be structured a little differently from the HorrorHounds and Weekend of Horrors of the world. The convention will not only supply you room and board for the weekend, but we will also pay your airfare and provide ground transportation.

  Since you will not be charging for autographs and photo-ops, you and the rest of the guests will be provided a royalty share based on ticket sales.

  To keep the con intimate, attendance will be capped at a hundred attendees, but don’t worry that won’t mean less profit for you. With Premiere Deluxe packages that cap in price at $8,000 and many tickets already pre-sold before the guest list has been announced: I feel confident to guarantee you will earn at least ten-thousand dollars. Possibly much more.

  And of course half of that guarantee ($5,000) can be sent as an advance in good faith.

  Please reply as soon as possible so we do not have to pursue another, lesser, Guest of Honor. The dates of the event are October 15th-17th and you would be flying into Cincinnati’s CVG.

  On a personal note, whether or not you take us up on our offer or even respond to this email, I’d like to say that your work has changed my life.

  Warmest Wishes,

  Michael Teeks

  *

  She read most of that email, but wasn’t quite sure it was saying much of anything about what the event actually was. Or maybe it was the booze.

  With the third miniature bottle of vodka inside her—well, mostly, some had dribbled down her chin—Clarissa struggled to thumb out a reply.

  Halfway through she was interrupted by another knock. She shushed whoever was knocking at the bathroom door, and continued typing her message.

  “Michael, Sounds great send the money and I’ll see you in octopus.”

  Clarissa did not catch her phone’s autocorrect for October.

  After hitting ‘send’ she opened the door to find a flight attendant hunched over. She had been listening at the folding door’s seam, and ready to knock again when Clarissa had surprised her.

  “I’m fine,” Clarissa said to the woman, a little too loud and her face hovering a little too close to the flight attendant’s. Clarissa wasn’t much of a drinker, and the invisible alcohol vapor trails she could feel curling from her mouth and nostrils as she spoke surprised her, made her feel like a drunk dragon.

  She returned to her seat, holding onto the seatbacks to fight her own internal turbulence as she navigated the aisle.

  Slipping into the seat beside Toby, Clarissa gave an unladylike yelp as the cool metal of her seatbelt buckle touched the skin above her underwear and below the end of her shirt.

  “Don’t say anything, just know that I have paid for the wifi so you can spend the rest of the flight sending emails and trying to get yourself unfired,” she said and handed her phone to Toby.

  He had the wet eyes and quivering chin of a whipped dog, but he followed her instructions and unlocked her iPhone with a click.

  Clarissa then promptly fell asleep, and upon arriving in L.A. she had forgotten all about the email she’d sent to Michael Teeks.

  Chapter Five

  Teeks looked up from his laptop to see Rory’s bare ass in front of him. The curls of Rory’s crack-hair had been pressed into a series of butterfly wings against either butt cheek.

  It was not a pretty sight.

  “What are you changing in here for?” Teeks asked, averting his eyes but still watching Rory hop into the legs of the pants in his peripheral vision, a gimp ballerina.

  “I gotta watch him, don’t I?” Rory said, tossing his head to indicate the director sitting on the couch.

  Teeks was set up at the kitchen table, his laptop and phone out in front of him, a ledger of graph paper beside those.

  “Well. A: I’m here to watch him. And, B: you didn’t need to take off your underwear to try it on, did you?”

  “I guess not,” Rory said. The big man tried to pull up both the pants and his tighty-whities simultaneously and failed, one thumb becoming unhooked and the elastic snapping. The giant man-child smiled some more at that. Rory was capable of great gaiety and great violence, sometimes within the same moment.

  Keith Lumbra sat and stared at his hands. The director was not laughing, but at least he’d stopped sweating and trembling. They had connected Keith’s ankles using two zipties, leaving his hands free to work. If the plastic ties weren’t enough of an impediment
, his left eye had swollen almost completely shut and when he exhaled through his nose the wind whistled out of three holes instead of two.

  Teeks had to hand it to Lumbra, though: once Teeks had explained what they needed done, the director had been very amenable and worked well under pressure.

  The design process for Rory’s costume had started with a brainstorming session, Rory enthusiastically throwing out choices and even providing some sketches for what he wanted it to look like.

  The problem with Rory, outside of his limited artistic skills, was that he lacked any sense of originality. All of his ideas were slight variations on stuff that had been done before. For example:

  “A football helmet, with barbwire wrapped around the face guard,” Rory said. A sports mask, really?

  “I want long black streamers on my arms, almost like wings.” Teeks couldn’t tell if Rory was ripping off Scream or Batman with that one. Or which was more embarrassing as a self-respecting horror fan.

  “A pig head that’s also a hat, so that I have two sets of eyes!” Teeks didn’t remember where he’d heard that exact one before, but he nixed the idea based on the Motel Hell associations alone.

  Teeks had said he’d take all of Rory’s suggestions under advisement. He didn’t really, though. He’d used his design and Photoshop skills to whip up something that was, in his opinion, rather original. Teeks’ design wouldn’t rely on no off-the-rack mask, no jumpsuit, no Farmer John shit. No: their slasher would be modern. Truly Satanic. A beast straight from hell.

  Teeks watched Rory try on the jacket, struggling to get the zipper started. Even from the back the metal studs and protruding bones looked cool. They would look even better at night, with the right accent lighting.

  “It fits?” Teeks asked and in response Rory lifted his arms above his head and flexed. There was the sound of stretched leather and canvas, but all of the jacket’s FX alterations stayed put. Nothing dropped off or broke. Keith Lumbra may have turned into a real baby while begging for his life, but the man could stitch a seam and cast a latex mold with the best of them, even under duress.

  “Let me try on the mask, just for a second,” Rory asked, not looking to the mask’s creator, but instead posing his question to Teeks.

  Teeks looked to Lumbra on the couch, who just shrugged. “No,” Teeks said, “He’s not finished with it yet. You’ll end up breaking it.”

  “Damn it!” Rory said, turning to address their captive collaborator now. “You best remember who gave you that.” Rory pointed at the crusty gauze taped over Lumbra’s nose. He could have meant the broken nose or the travel first aid kit that Lumbra had been allowed to use to try and patch up the trauma on his own. A skilled costume craftsman Lumbra may have been, but a doctor he clearly was not.

  Teeks’ email notification chimed and he tabbed over to check the message. It was a response to one of his guest of honor inquiries.

  He read the short email twice, feeling his mood improve each time through the short message.

  “Oh what the hell? Try on the mask, but be careful with the damn thing. We’ve got ourselves a star now.”

  Chapter Six

  There was no escaping it: these people secretly ruled the world.

  Marcus Lang wasn’t technically in the same city as the convention. He was up the highway a couple of exits. Even that far from the vendors’ hall, he was looking at two supermarket aisles stocked with plastic skulls, bloody window decals, and vinyl costume smocks that turned your kids into zombies, complete with unspooling intestines.

  It was September 2nd and the convention had followed him out onto the byways of New Jersey.

  To listen to horror fans talk about their interests, they made themselves out to be the wounded minority, a niche market that was never fully taken seriously by content creators and ostracized by the culture at large. But looking at the aisle of Halloween decorations in front of him, that us vs. them act didn’t hold much water. America loved this shit. At this point they dedicated one-sixth of the year to it.

  It was Friday night and Marcus had taken his rental car out for a spin, always eager to check out what new and exotic chain-stores the different regions of the country had to offer. Ludicrously early Halloween aisle aside, Wegmans was a pleasant supermarket to walk around.

  After-hours, most of his peers either went up to their hotel rooms or hung out around the convention, either in the bar or at the official meet-and-greet costume party. Unless Marcus was getting paid, he didn’t spend any more time with horror-people than he had to. It’s not that he didn’t like them, quite the contrary: his fans could be sweet and kind.

  But as a black man who’d grown up in a Baptist home, he was uncomfortable—on a lot of levels—around white guys with face and neck tattoos. He couldn’t help it.

  So he used these trips as opportunities to explore the strip-malls and supermarkets of suburban America. Boring? Maybe. Enjoyable? Completely and utterly.

  Marcus pushed his cart around.

  Occasionally he would pick up an item, consider buying it, only to remember that his motel room had no way to prepare whatever it was he wanted. The Wegmans had a nice bakery section, though, and he’d picked up a tray of muffins. Whatever he didn’t eat tonight he could share with his table neighbors tomorrow morning.

  Fans loved to see that kind of thing, watching two celebrities interact. I knew they had to be friends in real life! you could hear them squeal, safe with the knowledge that this was just a confirmation of what they’d already hoped and halfway believed.

  Wait, did he just mentally refer to himself as the c-word? Shit.

  Celebrities drove fancy cars, had people to answer the phone, and couldn’t walk around a Wegmans without being hassled. Marcus Lang was not a celebrity.

  Signing glossy pictures of yourself all day had a way of changing your self-image, inflating and skewing your successes. At a con, anytime he went to the bathroom there was a weird sense of time-traveling if he caught his reflection in the mirror. It was like: oh yeah, Marcus Lang got old since appearing in Guardians of Hell. For the last decade he’d been keeping his head shaved, and his mustache was now more grey than black.

  He tried not to think about it and moved on from the bakery case and inspected the different flavors of Greek yogurt on offering in the dairy section. He frowned again when he saw that there was a new, seasonal flavor on offering.

  Pumpkin yogurt? The Halloween crowd were now masters of the fucking universe.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Lang?” a voice called from behind him.

  Speak of the devil, maybe he was a celebrity. Marcus put the yogurt back on the rack, taking a half-second to mentally prepare himself before turning around.

  Instead of a kid with a black T-shirt, scraggly beard, and a wallet chain (it may sound specific, but there were so many wallet chains at these things), Marcus was surprised to find a middle-aged man, looking that age in dress pants and a sports coat. The guy had recently shaved and his teeth were white and symmetrical behind his smile. He had his hand out to Marcus.

  Marcus’s first thought was: Hollywood. The surreal nature of seeing this L.A. man standing in the fluorescent lighting of a New Jersey supermarket was almost too much to square, but Marcus took the offered hand and shook it.

  “This may sound a little creepy,” the guy said. “I had tried to call to you in the lobby but you must not have heard me, I followed you outside, and by the time I’d almost caught up you were in your car and I was near mine and well. Here we are.”

  No, not all the way Hollywood. There was an accent there being suppressed, but from where Marcus couldn’t tell.

  “You’ve been following me since the hotel?” Marcus asked.

  The man laughed. “As long as you don’t call it ‘stalking’” he said, sounding embarrassed by the whole exchange but also with an immoderate amount of confidence. It was like: yes, he knew how he looked, knew how he was dressed, and knew that the combination of those things wasn’t going to get him slapped
with a restraining order or even a polite brush-off. The guy was so smooth, he must’ve taken lessons, maybe even taught a class or two on the subject.

  “Marcus,” the guy said, giving the briefest of pauses for a Can I call you Marcus? to exist in the ellipsis, “My name’s Michael Teeks and I wanted to talk to you because your people haven’t been responding to my emails.”

  He had to try not to laugh at that. Marcus didn’t have people. He had email.

  Marcus made a comfortable living but that was more luck than anything his former agent had done for him. Betsy Kline had gotten him bit parts in nearly fifty movies from 1982-1994. One day, during an especially dismal phone call looking for more substantial work, she’d delivered upon him the no-prize title of the “handsomest character actor in history.” But, it turned out, a handful of those bit parts had been the equivalent of buying penny stocks and having them grow into Microsoft or Starbucks. Never mind the residuals: Marcus Lang was a cult figure and could now support himself with very little effort. And very little traditional acting work. No agent needed.

  “And what emails were those, Mr. Teeks?”

  Teeks didn’t correct Marcus with a Michael, please before continuing. “Our convention, Blood Camp Con, we sent an invite and then a stinger email.”

  Marcus had read those emails. To him, the three thousand dollar advance the organizers were promising sounded ridiculous. He’d received similar offers before, profit-share schemes from indie filmmakers who didn’t know the first thing about the business, startup conventions like this one that offered signing bonuses and then dissolved and cancelled the event before the checks could be cashed.