by Greg Kihn
The snake demon stopped. It looked at the ceiling and straightened its neck. The room became silent, as if a blanket of snow had been thrown over it. The whir of the camera was audible, and Landis was glad to hear it. That meant that he was still in business. Chet, shaken and pale, continued to stand by his post.
Then, without foreshadowing, the snake began to dematerialize. Devila’s features returned. The coils fell away, and Landis got the distinct impression that the snake was being drawn by something; that something far off had diverted its attention and it was no longer interested in what was happening in this little room.
He got one last look at the face of the thing before Devila reemerged from under its diabolical embrace. It was a look that Landis would never forget. Half-woman, half-demon, it seemed neither. It made eye contact with him just before it faded, and the chill that coursed down Landis’s back caused his whole body to shudder uncontrollably.
Then it was gone, and Devila was lying on the floor.
Albert Beaumond was ready to be purified. It had taken him his entire life to reach this point. The time was now upon him, and he looked up into the gathering raindrops with a mystical zeal that transfigured him. The power cable flashed, sparks danced into the wind, and the sound crackled.
He took a deep breath, centered himself, and took one last look at the world around him. Intuitively he knew that the serpent was coming. He knew that it was loose, no longer a prisoner of the circle of flame. There was no time left.
He did this for Thora as much as for himself. He could not bear another possession. His sanity hung by a thread, but in that second of complete and utter surrender, as he reached out, he was as sane and clearheaded as any man had ever been.
His fingers moved toward the flashing cable end. He smiled with contentment.
The wind blew it just out of his reach. It swung out over the concrete riverbed like a sparkler on a string. Albert felt a hissing behind him. The back of his neck crackled with tension. The serpent was back!
He was too late!
Albert cried out in desperation. He could feel the power sweeping into him, invading his brain. The raping of his soul had begun again and the terrible certainty that this time it was for good. The end had begun for Albert Beaumond just as a new era was unfolding. The irony made him weep spontaneously.
The wind blew the flashing end back toward him and Albert, driven as he had never been in his life, reached out and grasped it.
Cleanse me, he prayed.
Cleanse me and destroy this parasite!
The power, thousands of volts of pure, clean electricity, jumped through his body in the blink of an eye. Albert had no time to scream. The pain was nil.
It all happened so fast that he had no time to react physically in any way. Only his soul knew what had happened. He prayed to God, the same God he had denied all his life. Just like the atheist in a crashing plane, he prayed.
Albert no longer disbelieved. He had proven the existence of God by proving the existence of the devil.
Cleanse me.
Purify me.
His body, frozen by the massive amount of current running through it, clung to the live end of the power line. Flesh began to fry almost immediately. Smoke curled away from the palms of his hands, where the skin was in contact with the juice.
Albert convulsed. He jerked spasmodically, his body dancing to the tune of unimaginable electric power. He lost contact with the beam and began to fall. His hands tore away from the power line, leaving the skin of his palms behind, where it adhered to cook further in the unrelenting current. He was dead long before he hit the concrete drainage ditch.
The serpent fell with him.
Trapped in Albert’s body as it died, the serpent cursed and writhed.
Cleanse me.
He lay in the cement creek bed facing upward, his mouth and eyes open. Rain began to fall on his face, the droplets growing in size and number.
17
Jonathon Luboff looked dead on camera. His skin was pasty white, and the dark circles under his eyes were impossible to hide. Even with liberal amounts of theatrical makeup, the old man looked worse than the mock-up cadavers Buzzy had created for the movie.
His eyes, however, were downright frightening. They held the camera like two burning orbs, hypnotic and unfathomable. You either stared into them and were sucked down, or you looked away. There was no middle ground.
Landis had managed to keep Luboff off drugs for the two days they were shooting in Landis’s house. Not completely off drugs, of course, but just this side of dreamsville. Luboff never nodded out on the set, and that, to many who knew him, was an accomplishment.
Tad Kingston struggled. His lines were always kept short. In any given scene, he was never allowed more than a few sentences of dialogue. Even then, he often needed cue cards. Luboff helped him when he could, but Tad was thick as a brick.
In the end, Landis resorted to intimidation to keep both his stars in line. At the pace he worked, if you didn’t know your lines, you wound up looking like a fool. Landis simply left mistakes in, unless they were monumental, and the actor had to endure watching himself immortalized on the big screen that way. It could be embarrassing.
If you looked bad in a Landis Woodley production, nobody would hire you. Ever. Just the fact that you worked with Woodley would have been the kiss of death to most, and that alone could keep you out of the mainstream for life. It happened more than once.
Many an actor, desperate for money, had accepted the Woodley “one-way ticket to Palookaville” (as Buzzy called it). For his two stars, Jonathon Luboff and Tad Kingston, it didn’t matter. They were both going nowhere fast. One a dying shooting star, on its last crash through the atmosphere, destined to burn out long before it hit the ground, and the other a cheap skyrocket, hopelessly trying to compete with real celestial bodies.
“All right!” Landis barked through his bullhorn. “Shut up! Everybody, shut up! Now, here’s what we’re gonna do. First, we’re gonna reshoot scene forty-seven. Kingston, learn your lines, you nutski! You fuck this up one more time and you’re off the picture, got it? Okay, second, we get the pickup shots we need here, reaction shots from Jonathon, uhm … the monster sequence, front and back, then we tear down and get ready for scenes sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, and, uhm … twenty four. While we’re changing the lights over, the cast can grab a sandwich. Grips, lights, camera, script, and makeup don’t get to eat yet. Any questions? Okay, let’s go, we’re running behind here. We’ve got to pick up the pace!”
There was grumbling, but nobody dared speak out. After all, this was Landis’s movie; he was in charge. He was unorthodox and unpleasant, but every person there needed the work. Landis specialized in hiring people who, for one reason or another, didn’t fit anywhere else. If he pushed them too hard, it was tough luck. How else could you make a feature-length movie in six days?
Assistant cameraman and key grip Bob Avelene, Chet’s right-hand man, tapped Landis’s shoulder. Landis looked up from his clipboard, the frown permanently fixed on his face. “Yeah?”
“Mr. Woodley,” the young man said, obviously nervous, “Chet says he needs a sandwich. He said he’s tired and hungry; he said you’d know what he meant.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know,” Landis answered impatiently. “Here, give him this.” He placed a small packet of white pills in Bob’s hand without a change of facial expression. “That’s the cure for tired and hungry.”
The kid looked at the pills, a little shocked, and nodded. “Yes, sir,” he mumbled, and went shuffling back to where Chet was repositioning his camera.
Landis often handed out Benzedrine to his crew in an effort to make a deadline. The bennies filled two needs—you worked faster and longer, and you didn’t eat. To Landis, that was money in the bank.
His mind kept returning to the incredible scene he and Chet had witnessed and filmed the night before. He mulled his options. The piece of film was spectacular, no question about that. He�
�d removed it from the camera and placed it in the locked storage cabinet in the projection room. It was in there among his master copies and important prints. As the day’s shoot progressed he couldn’t help but think about how he was going to handle it.
It would be a spectacular centerpiece for a movie, that much was a lock. But what kind? The documentary idea hung with him all day. Devila’s Mysteries from the Grave had a nice ring to it. He could shoot a bunch of fake cinema vérité stuff, maybe a couple of cheap effects, a séance, a haunted house, a graveyard, the usual crap.
The thought occurred to him that he could use a lot of his own footage, stuff he had in the can. Cannibalizing his own work would save a ton of money, and who would care? The Great Romano could do his shtick. He could always trot out the old guillotine again. The money-making potential gave him a thrill every time he considered it.
Of course, with a scene like that, it would also make a hell of a horror movie. He could build a film around it, bang out a story, have Neil turn out a script in twelve hours. Devila had star potential. Maybe put her and Luboff together …
Landis decided to keep the same crew and sets he had for Cadaver and just shoot an extra day or two on the Devila project. It was a natural. Two movies for the price of one! That was the Woodley way!
His script girl, the ubiquitous Becky Sears (who would work for next to nothing to be close to Tad Kingston), had been trying to raise Devila on the phone all day. Landis knew she was home because he’d driven her home himself at five in the morning.
The poor girl was a wreck. Whatever it was that took possession of her last night had taken a heavy toll. There wasn’t enough functioning gray matter left in her brain to order a cheeseburger. Exhausted and traumatized as she was, he had to walk her to the door like a drunk. He carried her in, unlocked her door, and tucked her in bed. She kept mumbling about the tuning forks. Landis had wrapped them up and stashed them along with the film in his storage cabinet.
“It’s all right, I’ve got ’em locked up. They’re safe.”
She started to rise from her bed, panic in her eyes, and Landis pushed her back down.
“Hey,” he said, “I told you they were all right. You can have them back anytime you want, but I think they should stay locked away in a safe place for now.”
She fell back onto the pillow and moaned.
Jesus, he thought, what did she go through? Something like that could drive a person stark raving mad.
All because of a couple of odd tuning forks.
The damn things were evil. Landis remembered the feeling when he touched them. The tingle of current and mild electric shocks made his skin crawl.
It made him wonder.
Radiation? The fuckin’ atomic bomb is everywhere. There are tests in Nevada all the time. Jesus, could these things be radioactive?
He hated to handle them and treated them as if they were radioactive. He’d wished for asbestos gloves when he actually had to make contact with them, wrapping them quickly and shoving them in the back of the safe.
They gave him the creeps, but they were worth a fortune. God knows where she got them.
Landis lay in bed as the sun crept over the hills and wondered about the answer to that question. Where did she get them?
Rain had begun to fall in Southern California. It started innocently enough, a few showers, then the storm hit with full force. To the parched hillsides and canyons, the rain meant the end of a yearlong drought that had dried out every living thing within two hundred miles. The bone-dry soil drank it up like a sponge. The runoff was minimal at first.
But, after two days of steady downpour, the ground reached the saturation point, and water began to fill the gullies and culverts. For the first time in over a year, the Los Angeles River flowed. It sluiced like an obedient serpent through the labyrinth of man-made spillways, staying well within the prearranged concrete shores.
The sewer system quickly attained its maximum flow and began to back up. A flash flood warning was issued for Los Angeles County and hundreds of tiny, normally dry creeks and streambeds overflowed their banks and began to cause problems. Every watercourse was at its highest stage.
Then came the mud slides. The TV news was full of images of homes skating down hills, of landscaping gone mad, of whole embankments avalanching down onto unsuspecting neighborhoods.
The storm dominated the headlines. The city was a mess.
Albert Beaumond’s body began to move. Carried by the water, its odyssey began beneath the electric tower and carried it through miles of waterway, into the heart of LA.
“Goddamn it, Becky! Keep tryin’! If she doesn’t answer, then go over there. Either way, I want to talk to Devila today!”
Landis Woodley’s voice shook the room, his booming, authoritative baritone intimidated everyone within range. Becky Sears winced. She’d been trying the phone number that he’d given her for Devila all day. So far there had been no response.
Landis, although completely involved with his production, was concerned. He began to imagine all sorts of horrible things. At five in the afternoon, exactly twelve hours after he’d taken Devila home, he sent Becky Sears to find her.
The filming was behind schedule, as usual, and Landis was driving his crew like a team of Alaskan sled dogs. Part of Woodley’s problem was that he compiled a production schedule that was completely unrealistic and called for superhuman efforts to maintain. He expected to get his full twenty or more shots a day, regardless of circumstances. That allowed for most every shot to be completed in one take, and that wasn’t commensurate with his talent pool. Luboff seemed to flow with it well enough, but he was a veteran actor with hundreds of movies behind him. Just about everyone else had a problem. None of them had worked that hard for that long.
Except Landis Woodley.
It was the only way he could make money. Cadaver was shaping up to be his masterpiece. He already had a commitment for exhibition from a distributor with a chain of drive-ins across the South and that almost assured him of a winner.
Landis and his crew worked through the night, taking a short break for hamburgers at eleven-thirty. Landis, Buzzy, Jonathon, Neil, Tad, and Chet gathered in the kitchen for a much-needed break. Chet read the paper and sipped his coffee. Becky Sears had returned hours ago with the report that no one was home at Devila’s apartment and that the two old ladies across the hall said that she had left late in the afternoon.
“Strange thing about it,” said Becky, “was that the old ladies said that someone else had been around looking for her too, a young woman.”
Landis raised an eyebrow. “A young woman? Probably a fan.”
Becky shook her head, her dog-ears wagging. “I don’t think so. They said she was looking for her father. Apparently, Devila had been out with the guy. What do you think?”
Landis shrugged. “How the hell should I know? All I can tell you is, I want her found.”
Chet looked up from his newspaper and smiled.
“What are you smilin’ about?” Landis sneered.
“I know where she is,” Chet said coolly.
Landis leveled his gaze at Chet, but the canny cameraman deflected it like a slow housefly. Landis waited for Chet to speak, and, when he didn’t, he walked over to where the cinematographer was sitting. Chet ignored him, reading his paper. Landis stood over him and glared.
Chet looked up in mock surprise. “Yeah?”
“You said you knew where Devila is,” Landis growled.
“Yep.”
“So, where is she?”
“It’s Saturday night, ain’t it?”
Landis and Buzzy looked at each other.
“Your brain cells are startin’ to go, you know that, Landis? You better lay off the weed,” Chet said with a smile. He liked yanking the boss man’s chain.
“In case you don’t remember, our girl has a horror movie to host every week about this time. Tonight it’s Mark of the Vampire, one of my all-time favorites. You got a TV?”
/> Landis slapped his forehead. “Shit! How could I be so stupid! Let’s go into the living room.”
The huge wooden cabinet black-and-white Motorola took a full two minutes to warm up. Its tubes crackled and the speaker hummed. Everyone who had been in the kitchen was now gathered around the TV Landis squatted, fine-tuning the sensitive set until he had a watchable picture. Then he stepped away and stared. The sound faded in with a sizzle of static a few seconds before the picture.
“—brings you the 1935 Tod Browning classic, Mark of the Vampire, with Bela Lugosi and Carol Borland. And now, your hostess of horror, the divine Devila!”
The screen went from gray to gray. Landis realized that he was watching a graveyard scene. The set was smoky, a graveyard, cheap cardboard gravestones. The camera panned in on a pale-looking Devila, leaning against a fake crypt. The crypt moved slightly, destroying what little sense of realism there was, as she put her weight on it.
Landis squinted. She didn’t look good. Even with the indistinct picture on his TV, it was evident that Devila was not well. The circles around her eyes were not hidden by makeup, her face seemed somehow hollow, gaunt. Electric “snow” fell across the screen, the picture hiccuped, rolling upward, sending Landis scrambling for the horizontal hold dial.
That thing last night really took its toll on her, Landis thought. She looks like hell. I’m gonna have to spruce her up a bit before we can shoot the rest of her scenes for the documentary. Her dress seemed to hang off of her like a mannequin. She didn’t move.
There had been a few moments of silence since the announcer had spoken. The camera came in for a medium close-up, framing her from the waist up. Her eyes stared off into space. Her face was expressionless.
“She looks like shit,” Buzzy said behind him, but Landis was deep in thought.
The silence continued.
That’s rare for TV, Landis thought. Something’s wrong here. These guys edit as tight as a gnat’s asshole; they must be having cows in the control room. Maybe she forgot her cue.
The camera stayed with Devila, staring at her with an unblinking eye. The uncomfortable silence stretched farther. Landis felt inexplicably nervous, a prickle of sweat crossed his brow.