The Best new Horror 4

by Stephen Jones

  He has edited the anthologies Black Wine, Night Visions 5 and the worldwide bestseller, Prime Evil. He is currently working on a follow-up to that volume, and is writing a biography of Clive Barker. For relaxation, he watches countless obscure horror videos, admitting to a special fondness for such Italian auteurs as Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci.

  In recent years, Winter has also turned his considerable talents to writing fiction, with great success, as the following story (which draws extensively upon his knowledge of European zombie movies) proves . . .

  When I started using dynamite, I believed in many things . . . Finally, I believe only in dynamite.

  Sergio Leone, Giu la testa

  IT’S SIX A.M. DO YOU KNOW

  WHERE YOUR BRAINS ARE?

  YOU ARE NOT THE KIND OF ZOMBIE who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. You are not a zombie at all; not yet. But here you are, and you cannot say that the videotape is entirely unfamiliar, although it is a copy of a copy and the details are fuzzy. You are at an after hours club near SoHo watching a frantic young gentleman named Bob as the grooved and swiftly spinning point of a power drill chews its way through the left side of his skull. The film is known alternatively as City of the Living Dead and The Gates of Hell, and you’re not certain whether this version is missing anything or not. All might come clear if you could actually hear the soundtrack. Then again, it might not. The one the other night was in Swedish or Danish or Dutch, and a small voice inside you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is a result of too much of this stuff already. The night has turned on that imperceptible pivot where two A.M. changes to six A.M. Somewhere back there you could have cut your losses, but you rode past that moment on a comet trail of bulletblown heads and gobbled intestines and now you are trying to hang onto the rush. Your brain at this moment is somewhere else, spread in grey-smeared stains on the pavement or coughed up in bright patterns against a concrete wall. There is a hole at the top of your skull wider than the path that could be corkscrewed by a power drill, and it hungers to be filled. It needs to be fed. It needs more blood.

  THE DEPARTMENT OF

  VICTUAL FALSIFICATION

  Morning arrives on schedule. You sleepwalk through the subway stations from Canal Street to Union Square, then switch to the Number 6 Local on the Lexington Avenue Line. You come up from the Thirty-third Street exit blinking. Waiting for a light at Thirty-second, you scope the headline of the Daily News: STILL DEAD. There is a blurred photograph of something that looks vaguely like a hospital room. You think about those four unmoving bodies, locked somewhere inside the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. You think about your mother. You think about Miranda. But the light has changed. You’re late for work again and you’ve worn out the line about the delays at the checkpoints. There is no time for new lies.

  Your boss, Tony Kettle, runs the Department of Victual Falsification like a pocket calculator, and lately your twos and twos have not added up to fours. If Kettledrum had his way, you would have been subtracted from the staff long ago, but the magazine has been shorthanded since Black Wednesday and sooner or later you manage to get your work done. And let’s face it, you know splatter films better than almost anyone left alive.

  The offices of the magazine cover a single floor. Once there were several journals published here, from sci-fi to soft porn to professional wrestling. Now there is only the magazine, a subtenant called Engel Enterprises, and quiet desperation. You navigate the water-stained carpet to the Department of Victual Falsification. Directly across the hall is Tony’s office, and you stagger past with the hope that he’s not there.

  “Good morning, gorehounds,” you say as you enter the department. There are six desks, but only three of them are occupied. Brooks is reading the back of his cigarette package: Camel Lights. Elaine shakes her head and puts her blue pencil through line after line of typescript. Stan, who has been bowdlerizing an old Jess Franco retrospective for weeks, shuffles a stack of stills and whistles an Oingo Boingo tune. J. Peter and Olivia are dead.

  What once was your desk is now a prop stand for a mad maze of paper. An autographed photo of David Warbeck is pinned to the wall, and looks out over old issues of Film Comment, Video Watchdog, Ecco, Eyeball, the Daily News. Here are the curled and coffee-stained manuscripts, and there the rows of reference volumes, from Gray’s Anatomy to Hardy’s Encyclopedia of Horror Film. Somewhere in the shuffle are two lonely pages of printout, the copy you managed to eke out yesterday from the press kit for John Woo’s latest bullet ballet, smuggled through Customs between the pages of a Bible.

  Atop it all is a pink message slip with today’s date: Ruggero Deodato called. Don’t forget about tonight. “And hey,” Brooks says, finally lighting up a cigarette. “We had another visit from the Brain Police.” You are given a look that is meant to be serious and significant.

  You have spent the last five years of your life presenting images of horror, full color and in closeup, to a readership—perhaps you should say viewership—of what you suspected were mostly lonely, adolescent and alienated males who loved these kinds of films. The bloodier the better. Special effects—the tearing of latex flesh, the splash of stage crimson, the eating of rubber entrails—were the magazine’s focus, and in better days, after a particularly vivid drunk that followed a screening of the latest Night of the Living Dead ripoff, you and J. Peter and Tony came to call yourself the Department of Victual Falsification.

  That was then, and this is now. The dead came back, not for a night, but for forever. Your mother. Black Wednesday. Miranda. Cannibals in the streets. The bonfires in Union Square. Law and order. Congressional hearings. Peace, complete with special ID cards and checkpoints and military censors.

  You remember, just before the Gulf War, reading newspaper articles about high school students who paged through magazines that were to be sent to the troops in Saudi Arabia, coloring over bras and bare chests, skirts that were too short, cigarettes caught up in dangling hands. You thought that this was supremely funny. Now each month you do something much the same. The magazine publishes the latest additions to the lists, recounts the seizures from the shelves of the warehouses and rental stores. At first the banished titles were the inevitable ones, the old Xs and the newer NC-17s and, of course, anything to do with the living dead. In recent months the lists have expanded into the Rs and a few of the PG-13s.

  You are detectives of the dying commodity called horror, and there are fewer places where the magazine is sold, and fewer things that you can say, and fewer photos for you to run and, of course, there are fewer people left alive, fewer still who care.

  THE FUTILITY OF FICTION

  You see yourself as the kind of zombie who would appreciate a quiet night at home with a good book. You watch tv instead. Tonight there is the Local News, followed by the National News, and then, of course, the game shows begin and will continue on until the Local News, followed by the National News, and then, of course, the game shows again. There are 106 other channels on your television set, but all of them are awash in a sea of speckled grey and have been for nearly a year.

  The path that awaits you is clear. You reach into the back of your bookcase, behind the wall of unread Literary Guild Alternate Selections, to slip out tonight’s first videotape, a pristine copy, recorded on TDK Pro High Grade at SP, of the Japanese LaserDisc of Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust. You waited months for your dealer to get this one, and now you wait patiently for the first real moment of truth, that glimpse of the tribesmen as they tear off and eat the flesh of their prey. Although you tell yourself that this is what you want, that this is really what you want, this is not what you get. There is a cornfield on your forty-inch television monitor. It is late summer, nearly the harvest, and there in the tall stalks is Miranda, walking with racehorse grace in her bleached jeans and turtleneck sweater, hair in golden braids and face shining with the sun.

  You turn your back on the monitor and you listen. For some time after Miranda died
, you knocked on the door of the apartment before you entered. You would turn the key slowly in the lock and then pause here in the living room in the hope that you would hear her in the bedroom, that she had returned, that she was waiting for you, that none of this had happened, that none of this was real.

  The video plays on. “How could you explain what a movie is?” A voice calls to you from the screen: “They’re all dead, aren’t they?” You look back and the cannibals at last are feasting. You watch, and you wish. Nothing seems to be what you want to do until you consider horror. A random sampling of the titles hidden at the back of the bookcase induces a delicious expectancy: Anthropophagus. Eaten Alive. Trap Them and Kill Them. Little wonder that the Gore Commission should have found so many of these films so wanting. The covers of the video boxes are themselves a kind of foreplay, wet and bright with colors, most of them red. Make Them Die Slowly. Here the label reads: “Banned in 31 countries.” Make that 32. You know so much about these motion pictures, about the stories that they have to tell. You feel that if only they had given you the camera back then in the eighties, back when such things could be, you could have given shape to this uncertain passion that nightly inhabits your gut.

  You have always wanted to make films. Getting the job at the magazine was only the first step toward cinematic celebrity. You never stopped thinking of yourself as a writer and director of horror films, biding his time in the Department of Victual Falsification. But between the job and the life there wasn’t much time for the screenplays or even the short experimental films. That first, and only, Christmas, Miranda had given you the videocamera. For a few weeks afterward, you would shoot Miranda as she walked around the apartment, Miranda with shampoo in her hair, Miranda and the new kitten, Miranda at the stove, Miranda at the fireplace, Miranda and Miranda and Miranda. Then, what with the zombies and everything, life started getting more interesting and complicated. You worked for the magazine and you had once met George A. Romero and you had your collection of videos, so chic now that the lists were out and the tapes were gone from the rental shelves. People were happy to meet you and to invite you to their parties. Then things got worse, and then came Black Wednesday and the bodies in the streets and the soldiers and the fires in Union Square.

  You pull your videocamera from its hiding place beneath the floorboards of the closet and set it up on its tripod. You have no blank videotape, of course. You take the cassette from the VCR and push it into the camera. You decide to start immediately with the film you have in mind. You aim the camera at the far wall of the apartment, bare and white. The autofocus blurs, then holds. Through the viewfinder you see exactly what you want. You press the start button. You tape nothing.

  A TOMB WITH A VIEW

  You dream about the Still Dead. You sneak down the corridors of the Center for Disease Control. Nobody can see you. A door with a plaque reading C’est La Mort opens into the Department of Victual Falsification. Miranda is spreadeagled across the top of your desk, her wrists and ankles bound with strips of celluloid, the censored seconds from the first reel of Deodato’s Inferno in diretta. Around her in white hospital beds, like the four points on a compass, are the Still Dead. You approach and discover that she isn’t moving. You touch her. She is cold. Quiet. One of them. Still dead. But then she opens her eyes and looks at you. You make a sound like a scream but it is the telephone ringing. The receiver is hot and wet in your hand.

  “I’m sick.” You expect the caller to be Elaine or, worse yet, the Kettledrum himself. Ta-dum, ta-dee, ta . . .

  “I knew that from the day I met you.” The voice is unmistakable. In his prime he made the covers of New York and Interview and Spy. Now no one cares; but you never know, perhaps they will again. Sunlight is in your eyes. The clock says ten. You listen to Jay’s latest proposition. A duplication center somewhere in the Bronx. Edit onto one-inch tape, copies to VHS. Sales in back rooms, some bars, the private clubs, on the street. Money to be made. Fame. And most important, screen credits. “Your name in lights.”

  In this new world there is no longer a place for dreams. Yet you have no doubt that he can do these things. It is the catch that troubles you, but only for a moment. You know you can be had. Jay says ciao and he’s gone.

  You’re not dressed and out of the apartment until eleven. The uptown train pulls away just as you make the platform. Clutched beneath your elbow, the Daily News is screaming: BRIDGE BLOWN. This time it was the George Washington. You wonder whether the dead are being kept out, or the living kept in. Now if you want to get to New Jersey, you swim. The Still Dead are buried on page five. No new developments: “Still Dead.” The CDC will issue another statement on Sunday. Billy Graham will lead a candlelight prayer vigil. The President has expressed cautious optimism.

  It’s eleven-thirty when you reach Park Avenue South, eleven-forty by the time you get a cup of coffee and an elevator. Kettledrum is waiting, and he holds his glasses in his hand. A bad sign. You consider saying something. An excuse, an apology. Just offering a smile. It is all a joke. The glasses start to twirl. You know you are in trouble.

  Tony does not waste words. The magazine has had visitors again. The military censor took a hard look at the new issue and found not one, but two, discussions of the contents of listed videos in your article on Umberto Lenzi.

  “What about the First Amendment?” Tony looks at you. You look at Tony. Tony is the first to laugh. You decide to nod your head and join in when you see the photo in Tony’s hands. Black and white and red all over. It’s Miranda. Her legs are spread wide, left hand fondling the rope of raw intestine that dangles provocatively between them, dripping wet blots of blood onto the headless body on the floor. You look again and it is not Miranda. Of course not. It is some actress from a splatter film, and this is a publicity photo. A still. Still life.

  LES YEUX SANS VISAGE

  You met her in one of those midwestern towns where the sunsets were gold and not impaled by tall buildings. You had gone from NYU Film School to waiting for jobs to waiting tables at the Salvador Deli, and when the magazine asked, you answered. Soon after you had written the expected fanboy froth about Troma and Incarnate and the rest of the local scene, you were sent into the heartland to write the set report on the latest annual installment in the film life of a hockey-masked hooligan. At night you would stand around for hours while thirty-year-olds trying to act like teenagers were taped up with rubber tubes that would, for the few seconds of a take, spout out a mixture of Karo Syrup and melted chocolate that looked something like blood. In the mornings you would sleep and then, in the afternoons, write a few pandering paragraphs of the usual nonsense before taking a walk around the town, the reporter from the big city, and stop by the Rexall and the Kroger and the Payless Shoe Store and on the third day, after boredom had set in soundly, you found her in a place called Kenny’s. You remember that she was drinking a Nehi, leaning easily against a wall, one bluejeaned leg crossed over the other. She was wearing black Keds. Her eyes were closed and she was listening to a song on the jukebox, something by Public Image Limited, the two of them so out of place there in Hicksville that you thought you had walked into a dream. You wanted to shoot her, just to shoot her right then and there, and you wished that you had a camera. You told her she should be in movies, and of course this is what she wanted to hear.

  Within the week she had moved in with you. She talked about the day your movie would go into production. All your plans were aimed at Hollywood. She wanted to live in the Malibu and you wished to join the film life of El Lay. You watched videocassettes of Lang and Franju, Bava and Pasolini, and bullshitted her with beginning film theory until you both had enough to drink and then you went to bed. It wasn’t long before you decided you would marry her.

  You returned to New York with the question of what Miranda was going to do. She had talked about college, talked about modeling, talked about children. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. People were always telling Miranda that she should be in movies. At dinner
s you would talk about directors and their actress wives: Bardot and Vadim, Russell and Roeg, Rossellini and Lynch. About how only you could direct her. About how only you could show the world Miranda. And then, of course, she died.

  STILL DEAD

  No one is kind. Their jobs are on the line. You have been inclined of late to underestimate the value of the dollar. Now you wonder what you would do if the magazine were gone.

  You wander down the hall to the archives and browse through back issues. That first appearance of the magazine, way back in 1979, wore Godzilla on the cover and promised a photo preview of Alien. It seems like a century ago. No one in this country had heard of Deodato or Lenzi or Fulci; certainly no one cared. You flip through the years, and the bright-blooded covers, and you wonder at everything that has changed.

  Later you find an empty office and make the call. You take a deep breath and dial the number of Jay’s loft. You don’t recognize the voice at the other end. “Tell him I’ll do it.” The voice asks you to identify yourself. “Tell him that Dario Argento called, and that he’ll do it.” The voice says that she has no idea what you are talking about, but that if you would leave your number, Jay would call right back. You hang up the phone and wonder whether it could have been traced. In your mind are images of men in blue suits with badges.

  You escape the building without incident. It is a cold, snowy morning. Fall or winter. Miranda died in October. They called it Black Wednesday, but the day was bright and clear. There were leaves on the ground the morning she died, a blanket of green and gold that turned wet and red by noon and then grey with ash by night. It was midafternoon before the National Guardsmen had secured the apartment building. It was two weeks until the barricades were complete and the city was safe again. Each morning you would awaken to the smell of Miranda on your pillow, and then the other smell, the smell of the corpses burning in the midnight heaps at Union Square.