The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales

by Samuels, Mark

  I was not sure that any of the Americans present understood precisely the meaning of the word “kurwa”, but the overall hostility came across clearly enough.

  “Then again maybe you’re just what I need to make my point. I like the ironic angle. An aspiring actor who’s a part of the corruption, playing the role of a character dedicated to stamping it out,” Zapolska said.

  And so that’s how I got the part.

  I wish to God I hadn’t. I had no idea what I was up against.

  They say all publicity is good publicity. Well, they lie. Sometimes drawing attention to one’s self is a bad mistake, especially with revelations that certain powers don’t want out in the open. Zapolska’s film was poison to the industry. I hitched my star to it simply for the sake of notoriety. I was more than willing to play their game once I was in a position to do so. But I was stupid. I’d crossed the line.

  Four weeks later the film Simplicissimus went into production. Zapolska had no need to worry about financing. His personal wealth was astronomical. But he had problems getting crew from the start. The project had already attracted negative comments from the trade papers, and people in the industry were warned off by a whispering campaign. Nevertheless, somehow, Zapolska got a cast and crew together. It was a combination of loyal veterans and newcomers, people that Hollywood couldn’t control.

  You probably all know those stories about Hollywood films that are cursed: The Omen, Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. Certain events portrayed in those movies subsequently took place in real life and happened to cast and crew members. People struck by lightning or decapitated. The ritual murder of Sharon Tate. Insanity indistinguishable from demonic possession. Our film wasn’t supernatural, but it still dealt with a conspiracy of silence, one that would kill in order to keep its secrets.

  Well, you won’t be surprised to learn that people started dying. At first they’d just disappear. We lost our Key Grip a week into shooting. He vanished. Just didn’t show up on day seven. No-one ever heard from him again. The Chief Hair Stylist fell off a tenth floor balcony in a condo on Playa Vista on day nine. Our 1st Assistant Camera was mown down by a hit and run driver on Santa Monica Boulevard in broad daylight. The car had mounted the sidewalk. That was on day twelve.

  Zapolska was phlegmatic.

  “I expected all this shit,” he said to me as we going over some changes to my lines in his fourteen million dollar mansion off Mulholland Drive. We were sitting out back, by the Olympic-size pool, drinking bourbon and watching the lights of downtown L.A. twinkle in the smog. He’d played a couple of rounds of golf with his neighbour Jack Nicholson earlier in the day, and said he’d taken fifteen grand off the son-of-a-bitch. So he was celebrating.

  “One of us has to go,” Zapolska said, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose, “either me or Hollywood. And it ain’t going to be me sonny boy. Not Marek Zapolska. No way.”

  I was suddenly aware of the enormity of his ego. Christ, my own was big enough. But only a Hollywood director who had been indulged in his every whim since he was a twenty-three year old prodigy, a man who had been isolated from reality for twenty years, cocooned by fabulous wealth and acclaim, could have seriously thought he could take on the whole of tinsel town and bring it down.

  “If need be, I’d gladly sacrifice the life of every bastard working on this picture in order to get it made. I don’t care if I have to assemble a cast and crew a dozen times over,” he said. And then he told me the true secret behind the Reassembly Cartel; the recondite forces behind the billionaires.

  I believed him. And I decided then and there to get out. If I’d made the decision a day earlier, it would have been made in time. But I was too late.

  Although Zapolska had no way of knowing, I was going to offer my services to the other side. I’d sell my story to the papers, tell them all that Zapolska was a fraud, get maximum publicity and get back onside with the Hollywood system.

  I drove back towards the intersection with the Valley Circle Boulevard. It was as I approached a sharp bend at sixty miles an hour that I lost control of the vehicle. I pumped the brake pedal, but nothing happened, and the next thing I knew my brand-new Ford Explorer had hit the crash barrier, flipped right over it and catapulted into the woodland decline on the other side. The last thing I remember, a split second before unconsciousness, was that the air bag on my side didn’t inflate.

  •

  Eugeniusz Kowalski had finished his tale. He didn’t bother to add that his disfigurement was the consequence of this accident.

  “So there you have it. End of my career,” he said. “Six days later and the ‘Zapolska Mystery’ was born. The butler said he’d come into Zapolska’s bedroom to bring him his breakfast on a tray as usual. But all that was left of Zapolska was a huge mass of green vomit all over the bed. No-one could explain it. But I believe that he’d puked himself inside out with disgust. Those he sought to oppose had caused him to change form. They made him turn into a symbol of all that he detested.”

  “But you haven’t explained anything at all about the secret of the so-called Reassembly Cartel,” I said.

  “You really want to know? OK, here’s what Zapolska told me.”

  Kowalski paused and took a deep breath. I noticed his hands were trembling.

  “The forces behind the Reassembly Cartel,” Kowalski said, dropping his voice to a whisper, “are all dead souls seeking to take over our world for their own purpose. They have no existence aside from electronic media; but they feed on real life. They’re broadcast ghouls from an already hideously decayed future. What people think they see in the street, at openings etc, are manufactured simulacra of humans employed by a world-wide media conspiracy to keep the truth from the masses. The actual celebrities are manufactured in the broadcast factories of the future. The reality is just the same transmissions bouncing around forever.

  “You see, this future world is a condition for the persistence of our own world. Its geography is seen in the video recordings of UHF frequencies between TV channels, consisting of immense glaciers of static, the leftover radiation from the Big Bang. The future world is being backwardly projected in time, and it is comprised of anti-matter and controlled by the dead.

  “The final goal of the Reassembly Cartel is a world of mental zombies who do nothing but mindlessly regurgitate the poisonous froth of broadcast infotainment.

  “The future is already finished. It’s over, and what we’re getting is advance notice as the nature of time itself begins to rot away.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence around the table once his final words had died away.

  Then, shockingly, Eugeniusz Kowalski got to his feet and began screaming. None of us could calm him down. There was a huge rumpus with the waiter in the hotel restaurant, and half the diners were put off their suppers.

  Kowalski was finally taken away in an ambulance.

  I heard later that he screamed himself to death in the hospital to which he’d been taken. They tried sedatives, but he didn’t, or couldn’t, stop screaming and he finally died after bursting a blood vessel in his throat.

  Like the death of a character in a cheap horror movie.

  •

  The following morning I knew that the plot for my next novel had fallen into my lap. The delusions of Eugeniusz Kowalski and Marek Zapolska would form its basis. Except that, rather than its existence being the obvious product of paranoid fantasy, the Reassembly Cartel would be revealed as actually controlling human affairs in secret and moulding reality to its own design.

  I did not mention the idea to Leszek, for I hated discussing a work in progress, especially during its formative stage, and thereby giving away any indication as to its theme. Nevertheless, given what had occurred the previous evening with Eugeniusz Kowalski, I wondered whether Leszek did not suspect my intent, when I told him over breakfast that I was now ready to commence work.

  His job done, Leszek went back to Warsaw.

  All I had to do was turn
on the television set in my room.

  At first the images were conventional enough, but the more of it I watched, steeling myself to bear talkshows, adverts, soap-operas and all manner of junk, the more I came to recognise the truth of what Eugeniusz Kowalski had claimed. It was necessary to look out for those moments when the person (or rather the dead shell) on the screen was actually trying to communicate directly with me, the viewer. Isolated phrases took on significance, and when one collated these isolated phrases, a pattern emerged.

  I discovered, after only two days of continuous viewing, without sleep, and kept awake by amphetamines, that the world of electronic signals is actually the real world and the one outside, our one, is a fake.

  •

  This is the beginning of a new age. I have been busy, working on my magnum opus. More than ever I am convinced of its significance.

  As it sets the dead sun throws long black shadows across the frozen beach.

  I am wrapped in blankets, sitting on the balcony outside my hotel room and looking out over the seafront. My breath is a ghostly vapour. The Promenade is deserted. I haven’t seen a soul of late. Everyone appears to have fled the approaching wall of icy static.

  I am a last witness to its advance. It rears up now in the middle distance like a titanic cliff-face, blotting out a swathe of the thin blue sky. And there is a deafening roaring and crashing as the electronic glacier bears down inexorably on the land, a sound like millions of television screens exploding, blown apart from within by nightmare images. I see glimpses of invading giant hordes of deformed crabs with gargoyle heads and green faces, revealing the shape we shall assume in hell. The monstrous glacier of static consumes the pier in a grainy haze, obscuring its skeletal iron structure from view.

  In my rigid right hand I clutch a pen. On my lap is a pad of paper. My fingers are numb, riddled with black frostbite, but I write on, page after page, consumed by the desire to set down in writing the images flooding into my mind. It is an effortless though frantic undertaking. Sometimes I close my fingers into a fist, digging the nails into the ball of my hand, but still clutching the pen, forcing it across the page time and time again.

  I have crossed over. I am now inside the other world. I have become one with the electric cosmos of the dead.

  There is nothing to do but write. I must write before I am consumed by outside forces. At all costs I must write. I will write anything to stay alive. To remain alive means to write.

  No one is around to recoil at the sight of what I have done to myself.

  My lips are chapped with the cold. I can barely move them. My teeth chatter in my mouth.

  I stopped feeling sensation in my feet days ago. When I unwrapped the towels wound around the lower parts of my legs, I tore away strips of green and black flesh that had adhered to the fabric. Below the knee my limbs were gangrenous. The same thing is happening to my hands, my nose, and my ears. I crawl around on my belly, like some aimless crab, moving from one sheet of paper to another, writing and writing and writing and writing, until I can finish what I have begun, and before the wall of static obliterates everything in its path.

  •

  “Joanna Wolski?” Leszek Choszcz snorted and shook his head ruefully. “At my suggestion she took herself off to that flashy northern seaside resort in the Pomerian Voivodeship. The last I saw of the woman was at a hotel dinner party at the Grand Hotel that I threw for her, and where she’d screamed her head off.”

  “So her fourth novel was not completed?” said the publisher.

  “Completed?” he replied. “Why, it wasn’t even properly begun. They found the poor woman dead in her hotel room. She’d perished of hypothermia. Forced open all the windows and fallen asleep naked on the tenth floor watching television. It was below freezing that night. As if that were not fantastic enough, apparently there was some talk of self-mutilation too. Quite, quite horrible.”

  “But what about the book? How do you know it was never begun?”

  “I saw the manuscript after her death. Wolski had numbered four hundred and fifteen sheets of blank paper. They were scattered all over the hotel room. There were only a few pages of mystical gibberish—geometrical signs—scrawled on those crumpled, empty pages. Naturally I destroyed them for the sake of her reputation.”

  The Tower

  My custom, for many weeks, just after awaking at dawn, was to walk the streets in the region around Kings Cross. They are a bewildering mixture of decay and modern renovation. A number of the buildings seem in danger of being pulled down, because they do not appear to fit the image of the brand new and commercially successful ideal the redevelopers have in mind.

  I think of the “Lighthouse” (which has no light) atop a dilapidated building on the corner of the Gray’s Inn Road, just opposite the station.

  I think of the old Eastern Goods Yard just north of the station, its sidings abandoned, the vast wooden structure now scarcely covered by the paint that has turned grey and peeled off, its bulk surrounded by a field of weeds that have broken through the pavement. It, along with Granary Square, will soon be remade, and turned into something as grotesque in appearance as an elderly woman who has become the casualty of too much plastic surgery.

  I think also of the wharves, where cargoes were offloaded from narrowboats on Regents Canal, the buildings now lost to chic design companies who produce nothing of lasting value.

  It is still possible to wander in this area and discover corpse structures: closed-down and boarded-up pubs left abandoned, the silent remains of a record shop that sold vinyl, an empty sex shop with dust obscured windows, fast food restaurants where now only hordes of vermin feed. I remember passing by all of these places when they were still active. Now they are gutted, with only decaying outward shells as reminders of their having been there at all. In a few more years even these remnants will have vanished completely—“regenerated” into yet another useless tentacle of corporate nonsense.

  As I wandered in the early morning sunlight, golden and dazzling, it seemed to me that the remains of the past were more beautiful than what was to come. The future offered no prospect but a soulless death, all the more terrifying for its not being acknowledged. The solidity of the past, the idea of permanence, was over, and it had been replaced by a new ethos of disposability and change for its own sake, under the guise of so called “progress”. But progress towards what destination?

  For no destination seemed to be in mind, only “progress” for its own sake, only an end that could not be reached, only the doing away with all that shows any sign of having reached old age. The human race now lives solely in order to try and prolong its own youth indefinitely. And that was progress?

  Those ruined and decayed remains of buildings that have been abandoned due to their commercial worthlessness have more mystery about them than any number of new glass and steel developments. They are testaments to the truth that the city is not solely the business centre its rulers would have us take pride in, but that it is an organic entity with an occult life and history of its own. For there are still ghosts in those shells, and, just as long as memory lingers and imagination is not stamped out by the profit motive, the ghosts will live on.

  And so, when morning was over, once the sun had risen higher in the sky, once the traffic had begun to swarm, and the commuters had streamed out of St Pancras, Kings Cross and Euston, to tramp the streets and take possession of the buildings like an army of occupation, once commercial activities reigned, I retreated to my garret in a squalid, horrible edifice further north, and I pursued my campaign of resistance in occupied territory: my enemies being the fearful foes who would reduce all spirit, wonder and beauty to mere semantics, madness and insignificance. I continued, against all obstacles, to resist the vengeful by refusing to recognise their dominion.

  After a while I ceased to visit the region around Kings Cross, having reached the point where I could no longer bear its transformation, and I made the district wherein I dwelt the limit of my universe.
With this act of psychogeographical withdrawal, and perhaps as a consequence of it, the Tower appeared for the first time.

  On that morning the entire city was shrouded with a deep mist, rendering existence within its confines ghostly. All other edifices became nebulous, but this one structure seemed to draw its own clarity from the degree to which others were obscured. It stood out in stark relief against the grey murky atmosphere that had descended like a pall. Naturally, I thought myself to be, at first, the victim of my own imagination. I was acutely aware of the degree to which I had become isolated from other people, and aware of the pitfalls that follow an intense degree of self-absorption. I had suffered periods of paranoia, of depression and of loneliness, but I regarded myself as nevertheless psychologically intact, since my capacity to make critical judgements with regards to my own state of mind remained clear.

  I had, of course, seen the same view innumerable times before, and it was quite familiar to me. But this time, from the profusion of the mist, there appeared this fantastic new structure, as if risen up from inconceivable depths; with one lone Tower breaking the waves and the tolling of immense bells heralding the return of an Atlantean cathedral wreathed in sea-fog.

  In design the Tower was fantastically lofty, a dizzying physical projection capable of being conceived only in the mind of an individual given over wholly to dream. It radiated an aura of antiquity, and the surface of its brickwork was thick with the grey dust of untold centuries. The titanic spire that formed its pinnacle was bewildering to the imagination, for its height surpassed any of the skyscrapers of the “triumphant” modern era. It was as if the Tower was the spectre of a structure that had been destroyed, but which had forced its way back into existence, or back into human consciousness, which—nevertheless—amounts to the same thing.