by Greg Kihn
Then, in slow motion, she brought her hand up. Landis wondered if this was planned. Still no words had passed her lips, and no change of expression flickered across her unnaturally vacuous face.
What the hell is she doing? She’s gonna lose her job for this, he thought.
When her hand came into the frame, Landis saw the gun and gasped. He couldn’t see what kind of gun it was, but it looked real.
She brought the gun to her head, and, in front of thousands of viewers, blew her brains out. The screen went blank, then was replaced by a test pattern.
18
The cloudburst conditions continued for several days. LA was the wettest it had been in fifteen years. The body of Albert Beaumond continued its sewer journey. It washed down the Los Angeles River, got hung up on some debris and stuck in a drainage pipe, and wound up wedged in the elbow of a culvert in North Hollywood. It stayed there with the muddy storm water cascading over it for twenty-four hours, becoming horribly bloated and waterlogged.
When the weather broke and the water level went back down, Albert was left high and dry beneath an underpass near the construction site for a new apartment building. There he stayed until two kids, playing nearby, discovered him. They later told police that they were alerted by the smell. They knew something dead was down there in the culvert, maybe a dog or a raccoon. Never in their wildest dreams did they ever expect to come across an honest-to-God human corpse.
The homicide squad made an appearance, inspected the scene, and made the announcement that this unidentified body had died of misadventure. His body, officially a “John Doe” case, was picked up by the coroner’s wagon and packed off to the morgue.
The medical examiner made special mention of the advance state of putrefaction that had taken place because of the exposure to water. Most curious were the wounds: first-degree burns around the hands, especially the palms, where skin had been removed, a plethora of broken bones, including a massive skull fracture, multiple abrasions, and water damage. The medical examiner noted a lack of lividity, just a tinge around the buttocks, indicating that the person was dead prior to receiving the wounds, and was moved shortly after death, probably by the storm runoff. A quick, cursory examination by the medical examiner at the request of the police to determine if foul play might be involved, turned up nothing.
“John Doe” was taken to the morgue. Pending identification, he would be stored there until buried.
Thora Beaumond called Lt. Garth Prease at the North Hollywood Precinct missing persons department every day. When the forty-eight-hour waiting period was up, and her father had not returned, Prease went to work.
Albert Beaumond was declared officially missing, his description went out to all the appropriate agencies, and a search was instituted. Thora was not pleased that the police had waited to start looking for her father, and it only alienated her further from the authorities.
Dr. Segwick did what he could, which was very little except prescribe vitamins and sedatives. Thora had the support of family friends and a few distant relatives who had not yet disowned the part of the family sired by Albert. “A bad seed,” he was called by most people who knew about his activities, “a misguided soul,” by others. The members of his congregation, Satanic though they might be, were all sympathetic to Thora and offered their help, both financial and spiritual.
In short, she was not lacking for human attention and sustenance. Certain “mystical” friends of her father even conducted a series of séances and psychic readings, trying to contact the missing man, but they turned up nothing. After four days, it was hard for Thora not to assume the worst. She read it in the faces of those around her, and, try as she might, she could not tune it out.
They think he’s dead, she thought. They think my father’s dead.
Her mood deteriorated as the next few days went by, every day a little more. It was deflating like a slow leak in a balloon, but she would not, could not, give up thinking he was still alive. He’s out there somewhere, she thought, wandering around in the rain. Maybe he’s got amnesia. He was so feverish when he disappeared, he could have wandered away, become disoriented, and lost himself. He probably needs me, he could be hurt, he could be sick, he could be—
—dead?
No, she didn’t want to think that.
The newspapers made a big deal out of Devila’s televised suicide. It had affected people in various ways. In the classic LA tradition, one channel showed it several times with a telephone number across the bottom of the screen to call if watching it upset you. The number was for psychiatric counseling. They made a fortune over the weekend and kicked back a healthy share to the program director at the TV station. It was capitalism in its purest form. Even Landis Woodley had to admire their chutzpah.
For his part, Landis was confused. Had the serpent caused Devila’s madness or had she been seriously depressed prior to the filming? Did she have other, secret, more debilitating personal problems that might have driven her to kill herself?
Or was she just plain crazy? And now that she was dead, what would he do with the film? And where did the cursed tuning forks belong?
As for Devila’s mental condition, Landis was of the belief that the serpent, when it possessed her body, must have driven her mad. How could it not? The thought of ever having that happen again must have been so great in her that she chose to end her life rather than to take that chance. God, he thought, it must have been horrible.
He would sit on the film. Its value would not diminish with time, and it would be in bad taste, even for Landis, to release it so soon after her death. Devila already showed signs of becoming a cult figure, and in coming years, he reasoned, her suicide could take on mythical proportions. One thing was for sure—people were going to talk about it for a long time. Besides, Landis was too wrapped up in Cadaver right then to think about anything else.
The tuning forks were another matter. Landis briefly entertained the notion of filming another possession, and wondered who he could get to act as a host. But after agonizing over it, Landis rejected the plan. He decided to return them to the rightful owner, whoever that might be, as soon as possible. They were obviously powerful and dangerous talismans, and having them in his house was unsettling. He didn’t even want to touch them. They stayed locked in the safe, along with the film.
Devila’s funeral was held in midafternoon on a smoggy, hot LA day. Landis was one of the pallbearers. It was a job he loathed but felt somehow obligated to do. Her parents came from somewhere in the Midwest. Landis could tell at a glance that they didn’t understand what had happened, and that their daughter had always been a mystery to them.
From the name she had chosen for herself, to her job as horror hostess, none of it made the least bit of sense to them. Their plain, down-to-earth Christian sensibilities could not accept any of it. She was a lost soul, a failure. They would return to Iowa or Ohio or wherever it was that they came from, and try desperately to put it out of their minds. They would pretend they had never had a daughter.
Landis offered his condolences quietly at the cemetery, and her father had looked at him with thinly veiled contempt.
“Suicide is a mortal sin!” he hissed. The look in his eyes was as sharp and accusing as anything Landis had ever seen in his life. The mother cried quietly, sniffling into her tissue, saying nothing, and the father glared, then they went back home.
Landis couldn’t get them out of his mind.
He wondered if they thought Los Angeles had been misnamed. It was not the City of Angels; far from it, it was the devil’s city. It took their little girl and poisoned her beyond recognition. For that, the citizens of LA should all die and go to hell.
No problem there, Landis thought. This town’s already got one foot in the door.
In the same newspaper that carried Devila’s obituary, another article appeared at the bottom of page forty-one, “Albert Beaumond, Satanist, missing.”
Thora was as shocked as everyone else about Devila. She wa
s even more afraid that her father’s disappearance was somehow linked to Devila’s suicide. That was a frightening thought. She called Lieutenant Prease about it the same day, describing how Devila had been a visitor in their house the night before.
He told her to let the police be the ones who worried. Two days later he called to tell her there was no link.
Rubbish, Thora thought. He was my father. I have more insight into his disappearance than all the stupid cops and psychics.
Prease had the nerve to suggest that Thora go to church with him and pray. She told him she hated church; that was the end of that. He shook his head and said his own prayer, not for the safety of Albert Beaumond, but for the salvation of his bitter daughter. He told her so, and she cried.
It was a world gone mad.
Landis and Buzzy had made all the preparations to film in the morgue for two nights. They were as excited as two kids going to that new, million-dollar amusement park down in Anaheim—Disneyland.
They’d had several meetings with the coroner and even given him a speaking part in the film. He studied his script religiously. He played a coroner. It wouldn’t be a stretch.
Everything was ready for them to begin shooting that night. They had, by arrangement, access to the three main rooms from the hours of 9:00 P.M. to 6:00 A.M.
Landis’s plan was to get rid of the coroner as soon as possible, filming him first and sending him home. It was to be another Woodley production, on schedule or bust.
They loaded in their cameras and equipment shortly after the main staff went home for the day. The coroner, his assistant, and the night watchmen were thrilled to meet the great Jonathon Luboff, and he dispensed autographs in his usual aloof, spaced-out manner.
Luboff was given the coroner’s office as his dressing room and, after smiling graciously at everyone, proceeded to lock himself in and refuse to come out. It wasn’t until Landis agreed to call his “doctor” so that Luboff might have his “medicine” after the filming was done that he cautiously opened the door a crack. Peering out, he could see that the coroner was still there, and refused to move until the man was finished and gone from the premises.
“But Jonathon, he’s in the same scene with you. You’re together in the shot. You’ll have to come out!” Landis argued. He lured the old actor to the door with a decent cigar and a shot of whiskey.
“All right, but only one take,” Luboff sneered.
Landis smiled. “No problem,” he replied cheerfully. “I don’t do second takes on location anyway.”
Luboff thought Landis was a genius. Landis thought Luboff was a pain in the ass.
After midnight, and a few false starts, things quieted down, and the shooting began to run smoothly. Landis had, as usual, an ambitious schedule of production, and tonight, for some reason, it didn’t seem all that impossible.
Chet was making every camera shot count, not wasting a single foot of film stock, and the actors were on a roll. Landis was happy, and Luboff was, so far, clean and sober.
Buzzy and his assistant, Beatnik Fred, were playing the parts of the monsters. They were demanding roles that required a lot of movement, and they were taking themselves very seriously. Buzzy was a stickler for realism.
The special effects were easy, although somewhat time-consuming. It was basically a heavy makeup job with a few latex open wounds. The white, death pallor war paint revealed the features of their faces. This in itself was not a problem. It was later, when Landis realized that he was using the same two zombies in every shot, that he voiced his concern. It was three in the morning, and everyone not essential to the production had gone home.
The crew, at this point, consisted of director Landis Woodley, cinematographer Chet Bronski, his assistant Bob Avelene, actors Jonathon Luboff and Tad Kingston, scriptwriter Neil Bugmier, gaffer Phil the gofer, and Buzzy and his assistant, Beatnik Fred.
The night watchman, a retired police officer named Charles Boone, stayed at his post by the front door. Buzzy had discovered that Charles was partial to wine, and had furnished him with a bottle of some decent California Chardonnay.
“Goes good with my peanut butter and jelly sandwich,” Charles commented after the first swallow.
“I like to keep my people happy,” Buzzy said, sharing a generous swig out of the bottle himself. “You just hang on to this, and I’ll be back from time to time to wet my whistle, okay?”
Charles nodded vigorously. These film people were all right!
They were shooting in the main room, where the drawers with the corpses in them were located.
In the scene, a cadaver was rising off the slab and trying to strangle Tad Kingston. Luboff played the part of the doctor, and Kingston, his assistant. It was a fairly straightforward scene. Landis pulled Buzzy over to the side and confided.
“Buzz, we got too much of you and Fred already. This scene is important, it’s the close-up.”
Buzzy looked at the script and said, “Yeah, I see what you mean.”
“Who else can you make up?”
Buzzy laughed. “There’s nobody, man. Besides, even if there was, like, let’s just say if I called one of the boys and woke him up and got him down here, it would take hours to get him ready. That white shit is hard to work with; it shows everything.”
“I can’t wait that long,” Landis said automatically.
“I hear ya,” Buzzy answered.
Landis pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and shook one out for Buzzy, then himself. They both lit up off of Landis’s trusty World War II–vintage Zippo lighter. The smell of lighter fluid filled the air, pungent and manly, and Landis flicked the Zippo shut with a practiced motion. He exhaled slowly through his nose, tilting his head back, and looked at the ceiling. “Shit, Buzz. I guess we’ll have to go with what we got. What do you think?” he asked.
“Gimme a second,” Buzzy replied.
Charles Boom was snoring. He didn’t know he snored. His wife complained about it from time to time, but he never gave it a second thought. A man never hears himself snore, no matter how loud it is, and Charles Boone was no exception.
Buzzy Haller could hear it from down the hall. It was a thunderous symphony of nasal honkings. He was on his way to check on the diminutive night watchman, but the wine had done its job and rendered the man dead to the world. Buzzy stuck his head around a corner to see what position he was in, and saw him hunched over his desk, the empty bottle of Chardonnay next to him. His head was cradled in his arms. Buzzy smiled.
He slipped back into the big room and pulled Landis into a corner.
“I’ve got an idea,” he whispered. “It’s a little nuts, but just go along with me on this, okay? All I want is for you to keep an open mind and hear me out.”
Landis looked at him, a question mark on his brow. “What is it?”
“Well,” Buzzy continued, “you know all the pressure we’ve been under lately, to compete with National? RKM has been down our backs to come up with something that will really scare the shit out of people, right?”
“Right. So?”
“Well, I know for a fact that they’re using real pigs’ blood in Unearthly Terror, and they used cows’ organs for the big climax scene where they rip the monster’s brain out.”
Landis looked annoyed. “What are you driving at? Come on, I’m behind schedule. I don’t have time to play twenty questions with you.”
“Don’t you see?”
“See what?”
Buzzy smiled, his teeth flashing sardonically in the fluorescent lights. He looked evil and mischievous.
“Here we are in the biggest repository of dead bodies in the state. The cameras are rolling, the lights are set up, there’s no one around. The night watchman is sleeping off a bottle of vino that I gave him. Come on, man, don’t you see it? We’ve got carte blanche! Nobody will ever know! It’s the best special effect in the world, and it’s right here under our noses!”
Landis cocked his head. “Are you saying what I think you’r
e saying?”
“It’s a guaranteed winner, Woody. A guaranteed total fuckin’ winner. We use a real corpse or two. Nobody ever finds out. I tell everybody that I’ve got a new makeup technique. We get super realism! And it doesn’t cost us a cent!”
Landis’s jaw dropped. What Buzzy was saying was insane, but true.
“Nobody would ever know,” he repeated.
Landis was still considering the last part, the part about its not costing a single cent. Buzzy was like that—he thought budget. He was a real production man. Budget first, everything else second. But this, this was crazy …
Totally out of the question …
Landis’s mind began to turn. It would be just the thing to put this movie over the top. No denying that.
It’s free.
No one would ever know.
Christ. Could he get away with it?
The more he thought about it, the more he knew it was the kind of radical, insane idea that would probably work. He thought about the close-up. It would scare the hell out of people. He thought about his crew. Would they keep their mouths shut? If something like this got out, his career would be over—wouldn’t it?
Hell, if it did somehow leak out, that would be the kind of publicity that might actually have a reverse effect, he thought. A rumor like that could double the box office. Triple it! Landis would be a legend with horror fans. It would be the most outrageous stunt in the history of cinematography.
No one would ever know.
He looked at Buzzy.
Buzzy smiled back. “I watched him open the drawer when that dickhead coroner gave us the tour, remember?” he said, his impish smile broadening further. “I think I could get these suckers open with a screwdriver and a few minutes alone. The problem, the way I see it, would be those guys,” he said, nodding toward the crew.
Landis looked over at them. They stood around smoking and talking. Not a care in the world. Landis’s mental wheels were turning.