Horror Show

by Greg Kihn

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  Horror Show

  Greg Kihn

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY WONDERFUL

  PARENTS,

  STANLEY AND JANE KIHN.

  PROLOGUE

  The kid thought he heard something.

  Something was coming up the basement stairs.

  Heavy footsteps, ascending slowly, too slowly to be anything good. A squish, along with the creaking of the tired wooden treads. A squish?

  The old man mumbled and gripped his chest, but the kid felt his panic rising with each step of the bad thing, patiently making its way up from below.

  The fear was a numb blanket that wrapped him so tightly he couldn’t move. His arms, his legs, the back of his neck, all tingled to the point of pain. He could hardly breathe.

  Even for a kid who usually enjoyed being scared, paid good money for it, it was overwhelming.

  The bad thing arrived at the top of the stairs, paused, and turned the doorknob. Time was running out.

  “It’s locked!” cried the old man.

  “Sweet Jesus, it’s locked,” the kid repeated. His voice sounded strange to him, alien and constricted, as if he were hearing a poor recording of himself played back at the wrong speed.

  The kid wanted to run but couldn’t move his feet. Instead, he stood facing the door, scared to death of what was trying to break through from the other side. He waited, feet rooted to the cheap linoleum, listening to the wild pounding of his heart, yet, despite his terror, he thought, I’ve got to see it.

  “It” pushed against the door. Man and boy heard the frame groan, then bark and snap with the weight of the bad thing pushing it beyond its limit.

  The kid’s mind raced, frantically searching for explanations. The rules were twisted, he tried to make himself believe, that’s all. Hell, he’d always suspected it anyway. That’s what a lifetime fascination with having the shit scared out of you did to a guy. It desensitized you to the point where you were ready to believe anything. Even this.

  But this was real, not a movie or a novel. Or a dream. It was actually happening—something evil, something not natural stalking them.

  Let it come, I want to see, he thought, trying to bolster his courage.

  But fear is like a drug, and, as with any drug, there are two things to consider: addictions and overdoses. For aficionados of horror, paralyzing fear is delicious. Except …

  The physical manifestation of that fear stood on the other side of the door! All the crazy dreams that had been causing the kid sleepless nights since adolescence were suddenly real. It was just as he’d always suspected. There were monsters.

  Even at the movies, when he covered his eyes because he was too afraid to see something that he knew would haunt his dreams for years to come, he always peeked. He had to.

  Let me see. I want to see it.

  The doorjamb split, the dry wood cracking into a jagged gash. Paint chips and splinters exploded from the point of separation. The molding around the door popped, and the gates of hell opened.

  The old man might have been screaming, but the kid couldn’t hear it. He was vaguely aware of a roaring ocean in his ears.

  This is it, he thought. This is totally it. Time to run. Time to take off like a jet. Time to—

  He waited just another second.

  Got to see what this is all about.

  NOW

  1

  A house is like an old box in an attic, hidden for decades. Then some unsuspecting party comes along and—

  —opens it.

  Landis Woodley’s house was like that. Like a museum full of memories and memorabilia, a place that kept.

  It was also a house that didn’t want to be found. Clint Stockbern discovered it only after weeks of research and legwork. No easy task.

  The damn place had no number. Clint knew the old man had ripped the number down in 1964 to throw off the IRS agents. They found him, of course. They always do.

  A faded “No Solicitors” sign hung askew next to a doorbell from which the button had been removed, but that didn’t slow Clint down. He’d expected obstacles like that. If the stories were true, Landis Woodley would be a man of few charms. He’d left a list of enemies almost as long as his list of creditors.

  He hated the United States Postal Service and refused to empty his mailbox for months on end. The route man had given up with the junk mail. The only stuff he ever got now was official: bills, collection notices, tax liens, legal crap. Never a letter. So it was easy for all of Clint’s hand-addressed envelopes to go unopened. They ended up with the rest of the correspondence, in the fireplace.

  Landis didn’t go out much. He had a feebleminded gardener’s son named Emil, who worked for him and lived on the property.

  Clint had been combing the Hollywood Hills for days looking for Landis Woodley’s home. He worked the area behind Beachwood Canyon, cruising through the ostentatious show-houses built in the 1920s. From concrete European castles to Masonite antebellum Southern mansions, the film industry had brought some rather strange fetishes from the back lots to the construction sights. Most of the places looked like movie sets.

  Clint’s rusty VW bug labored up and down the winding canyon roads while Clint craned his neck to read the addresses. He was twenty-two years old and almost handsome behind the faded acne scars and styleless glasses. He had a determined, earnest face, and most people liked him. Clint passed unnoticed through the neighborhood, patiently driving the search grid he’d plotted the night before.

  He eventually found the house with the help of old newspaper clippings about the wild parties that used to go on there. He learned that actress Vivian Loring, a neighbor of Woodley’s, used to complain about the noise. Locating her house was not difficult, and from there he fanned out until he found the Woodley estate. The old man had miraculously kept his address out of the paper for years.

  Landis Woodley’s house tried to blend into a hill at the end of a tricky cul-de-sac. You couldn’t actually see it from the road although you did get a glimpse of tile roof. Clint had to walk down a flight of mossy steps to get to the huge front door.

  Constructed of rough gray stucco, the place looked as though it hadn’t been painted in decades. The only visible windows were as small and grimy as portholes on a tramp steamer.

  Clint knocked for at least fifteen minutes and was about to give up when a mailbox slot—sized view window screeched open, and a pair of bloodshot eyes appeared.

  “What do you want?”

  “Mr. Woodley?”

  “Go away!”

  “Mr. Landis Woodley?”

  “No Woodley here!”

  “I have a proposition for you.”

  The four-inch-square wrought-iron window closed with the scream of chalk on a chalkboard.

  Shut out, Clint stepped back, away from the massive gray edifice that jutted from the withered hillside. He’d expected that, too. The guy was a pro, after all. The king of the recluses. Clint used the opportunity to check out the big building from a different angle.

  It rose above him like an amusement park ride, a cracked and forlorn stucco structure largely hidden by untended trees and tangled shrubbery. LA shimmered in the background.

  He walked down a narrow, overgrown sidewalk along the side and calibrated the size of the building. It stood three levels high and appeared to be in worse condition when viewed from the side. Dead vines clung to rotting trellises and pointed into the slate-gray sky. The stucco walls were veined with cracks and discolored by a dry, black moss.

  The house had been tastelessly refurbished in the early sixties. Sliding doors, wooden decks, a cheesy birdbath,
and some terribly inappropriate landscaping had been added, all of it now in a state of advanced decay, and the combination of old and cheap was disorienting.

  Clint heard a door open on one of the two decks above him. He heard the old man cough, then hock a brownish loogie over the side. It would have dropped into the near-dead, yellow-brown shrubs that grew out of the hill a hundred feet below the property, but the wind blew it back toward the house, under the deck. Much to Clint’s consternation, it sailed in his direction and landed with an unhealthy splat at his feet. He winced.

  Clint considered going back to the front door and knocking again, but he knew that would be a waste of time. He crept, catlike, looking for an alternative entrance.

  Some plank steps led up to the first of the two decks. Calculating from the hang time on the loogie, Clint fixed Landis’s position to be on the upper deck, at least two stories above.

  He put a foot on the first step and tested his weight on the wood. It creaked and bent in protest at his 150-pound body.

  “Who’s that?” a phlegmy voice called.

  Clint froze.

  “Who the fuck’s down there?”

  He considered trying to sneak off, but knew his chances of getting inside would not improve with that strategy. Better to confront the problem directly.

  He was still choosing his words when the old man shouted, “Stop right there! I’m warning you, whoever you are, I’ve got a gun, and I’ll blow your goddamn head off if you take one more step!”

  “It’s me, Mr. Woodley, Clint Stockbern. I was just at the front door.”

  “What the hell do you want?”

  “I want to talk to you, that’s all.”

  There was a pause, then Clint heard another extended bout of coughing.

  The cough trailed into his words. “No talk, go home.”

  Clint worked his way to the edge of the steps, hooked his arm on the railing, and swung out over the hill. Looking up, he could see the unshaven, dour visage of Landis Woodley.

  “Sir? If I could just have a few minutes of your time. I work for Monster Magazine, and I’d like to interview you.”

  The answer came back disappointingly fast, “I don’t do interviews.”

  “I understand that, sir. The press hasn’t exactly been kind to you over the years. I can relate to your attitude.”

  Landis cleared his throat. Clint got the distinct feeling he was loading up for another loogie. “Speak English, punk!”

  “I have a check for five hundred dollars here in my pocket. That’s what my publication is willing to offer you for a three-hour interview.”

  Silence.

  He must be considering the offer, thought Clint. I’m home free.

  “You’re not a cop?”

  “No, sir.”

  “IRS? Process server?”

  “No, sir.”

  More coughing. Clint saw a blue plume of dense cigar smoke billow and rise above him. A match fluttered in the wind.

  Clint waited. He was prepared to wait all day. He’d been pursuing this story for too long to give up now. At least, now, his offer was on the table.

  “Not enough,” came the brusque reply.

  What? Where was this old shit coming from? Five hundred dollars was damn good money, nearly twice the going rate for this type of thing.

  “All right, six hundred, that’s as high as I can go. I’ll put in the extra hundred from my own money.”

  Clint hated to use his own meager resources, but a story was a story, and he’d already invested too much time in this one.

  “My editor, Ms. Bachman, wants this story, sir, and I’m prepared to—”

  “Wait a second. Roberta Bachman?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Roberta Louise Bachman from Melrose Avenue?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  “You know her?” Clint smiled, squinting up at the old man, trying to be pleasant.

  “Yeah, I knew her many years ago, 1957 or ’58. She sent you over here to interview me?”

  Clint was perplexed. Why hadn’t she mentioned that when she approved the story? “Yes, sir,” he replied. “Then you’ll do the interview?” he added hopefully.

  “I didn’t say that,” Woodley snapped.

  “I wish you’d reconsider. There are lots of your fans out there who would love to hear what you have to say.”

  The old man snorted. “Right. What are you smokin’, kid? Nobody gives a fuck about me. I haven’t made a film in over thirty years.”

  “Nevertheless, there are people who remember.”

  The old man spit again, this time in another direction, away from Clint. “Just how the hell do you expect to interview people by sneaking around their houses? You’re a prowler, for Christ sake. You coulda got your head blown off! I should call the cops.”

  “Sir, with all due respect, I’ve sent several letters outlining my proposal.”

  The old man coughed again; more smoke billowed. Clint’s neck began to hurt. He’d been staring straight up at Woodley, getting an unpleasant, distorted view of the jowly, downturned mouth and oversize nose. From where Clint stood, Woodley appeared to be all nasal hairs and eyebrows.

  It was not a position from which he liked to negotiate. However, a level playing field was not a Landis Woodley characteristic. Clint got the distinct feeling that he’d been manipulated since he’d knocked on the front door.

  He craned his neck back up and saw a glass of amber fluid in the old man’s hand. Drinking? Before noon? Yeah, that fit the profile.

  Woodley hadn’t responded to Clint’s comment about the letters. He seemed to be looking off into the sulfurous distance, deep in thought.

  “She’d be about, what, fifty-five, sixty years old now?”

  “Huh?”

  “Still pretty? Still a redhead?”

  Clint realized that Woodley was talking about his boss. That surprised him. He’d never thought of her as anything but an unyielding authority figure. With the vast age difference between them, he’d never been objective enough to wonder if she’d ever been considered attractive.

  “Yeah, still red.”

  “She’s your boss?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You poor son of a bitch. I’ll bet she’s tough as nails.”

  “You got that right.”

  Landis Woodley, unconcerned about the passage of time, let some more of it pass. Clint noticed that the old man didn’t seem to care about “flow” and “dialogue” when he spoke. He probably liked those big chunks of silence in his conversations, Clint realized. It put people off.

  While he waited for Woodley to speak, Clint wondered if the old man had had the hots for Bachman back in the fifties. It presented one hell of a mental picture, and he stifled a laugh.

  “Cash,” the old man said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s got to be cash.”

  “I have a check from my magazine,” Clint stammered.

  “No checks, cash.” Woodley was as blunt as an old sword. He had a marvelous voice, and he used it to great advantage. Clint, with his community college degree in journalism and two years on the job, was no match.

  He thought about it. The old man gave him all the time he needed.

  “Yeah, I can do cash, if you insist, but I’d rather not.”

  Shit, Clint thought. I’ll have to go down to the ATM for my hundred, back to the office, then over to the publication’s bank to cash their check. He glanced at his watch. With traffic it’s a couple of hours. Damn. Half the day wasted, then I have to drive all the way back here.

  Woodley spit again. “Well, I’d rather not waste my time talkin’ to you.”

  Clint watched the gob sail past him. “Okay, I’ll get the cash.”

  “Go get it now. I’ll be here.”

  “But—”

  “Take it or leave it.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  The old man went back inside. Clint heard th
e door close.

  “Thanks a lot, you old turd.”

  Clint Stockbern had grown up with monsters and parlayed his knowledge of all things creepy into a job writing for his favorite publication, Monster Magazine.

  As a youth, he’d built plastic models of the Wolf Man, Frankenstein, and Dracula. The walls of his room were adorned with lurid movie posters and lobby cards, the stranger the better. Creatures carrying half-clad women were his specialty.

  A robot holding a woman in a skintight space suit, a werewolf carrying a blond bombshell back into the swamp, a look of utter depravity on his face—these were the things Clint cherished. The inference was always the same. These monsters were going to do it with the women.

  Those horrible claws were going to caress her breasts, those fangs were going to … It didn’t matter. He loved the come-on, the promise of mystery. The movies were never as good as the posters, of course. Usually the scene depicted never occurred in the film. His imagination always created a better story than the one up on the screen, anyway.

  In the end he was usually disappointed.

  He graduated from posters to other, more advanced items of memorabilia. At a shop in Burbank he bought props, old scripts, and pictures of his favorites.

  He studied journalism in junior college and took his share of film courses. His beloved creatures were never far behind. When he applied to Monster Magazine, he had no idea that he’d be hired just six weeks later, and sent out on one great assignment after another. He’d done profiles on all his favorite filmmakers: Tod Browning, Ray Harryhausen, William Castle, Roger Corman, and more.

  The enthusiasm of writers like Clint kept the magazine afloat.

  The Landis Woodley story was Clint’s idea. Roberta gave him her blessing and sent him on his way. She never said anything about having actually known the old man.

  Later that day Clint stood at the front door of Woodley’s house. This time his response came much quicker. Once again the view window opened, once again the bloodshot eyes.

  “Yeah?” the old man growled.

  He’s not making this easy, Clint thought. He can’t have forgotten already, it’s only been a few hours.