by Orrin Grey
The video begins to break up here, and there’s a roaring, and then the tent is just gone, maybe, torn away, but it’s not dark, because there’s a glow coming from something. It looks like the stars, on a totally cloudless night, or like the Northern Lights, but it isn’t far away, like either of those, it’s right there, just beside her. And if you freeze the frame at the exact right spot, between the pixelization as the video breaks up, you can see something there.
It’s translucent, but not like a ghost in an old movie. More like a jellyfish or some other deep-sea creature, and it’s filled with light. It takes a lot of looking to make out the Zeuglodon suit. There’s not much of it left. The mouth has grown, and split apart, and the flippers have become more like the arms of a starfish, so that now the whole thing opens up like a flower as it reaches out for Mackenzie before the video goes black.
I talked with Mackenzie’s grandmother when I was first researching. She told me not to use the contents of Mackenzie’s final video in the book. “Some things have trouble staying at rest,” is what she said, “and it’s better for all of us if we leave them that way.”
She didn’t want me to write the book at all, wouldn’t even have let me see the video, but it was entered into evidence in the inquest, and so I was able to get a copy. You can get a lot of things when you tell people that you’re writing a book. I don’t know that we could ever get away with quoting it, though, and maybe that really is for the best. When I first talked to Mackenzie’s grandmother, I thought she was being sentimental, or otherwise unreasonable. Now I’m starting to agree with her. And even if I do write the book, do I really want to turn it into a ghost story? Probably not. And if I did, Deanna probably wouldn’t let me.
Don’t kid yourself. You’re writing a book about people who’re dead, and every book about dead people is a ghost story, some of them just don’t know it.
Author’s Notes:
This one came about as a result of a couple of different things. From the first time I heard about the bizarre true story behind the making of the Korean giant monster film Pulgasari, I knew that I was going to have to use it in something somehow. The real tale—which involves a North Korean dictator kidnapping a director and forcing him to make, among other things, a giant monster movie—is one of those “truth is stranger than fiction” kinds of situations, though it fortunately has a happier ending than my version.
The other main inspiration for “Strange Beast” came from an episode of the Nigel Kneale-scripted BBC series Beasts, which involved a guy in a rubber monster suit suffering a psychological breakdown that begins to blur his identity with that of the monster he’s playing. Put all that in a blender with my affection for kaiju films and ghost stories about the ghosts of unusual things (see “Nearly Human” in my previous collection) and you eventually get this story.
Written especially for this collection, I had originally intended “Strange Beast” to be a sort of modern epistolary tale, told through Kickstarter updates, Wikipedia entries, tweets, and other social media, but over the course of writing it, the format changed a bit, though some of those original elements remained in play. This is its first time in print.
Painted Monsters
“For you, the living, this mash was meant too…”
—Bobby “Boris” Pickett
Constantin Orlok was dead.
That’s what the invitation told me, inside its black envelope with blue interior. It came to the family house, up in the hills, where I just happened to be staying at the time because Ronnie had kicked me out of the apartment in town again. It was addressed to my dad, so I guess Orlok’s estate hadn’t gotten the memo that he’d been in the ground for a little over a year. He lived just long enough to accept Granddad’s posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award from the Producer’s Guild. I watched his speech on YouTube.
Dad looked old and a little deflated, his hair gray at the temples in a way that I’m sure he thought made him look dignified, but actually made him look like he was cosplaying a dissolute Dr. Strange. He talked about Granddad’s films as if he’d ever liked any of them, about all the big name actors and directors who’d gotten their starts working under him, or who were inspired by his lousy B-movies about giant mollusks and haunted castles. At the end of the speech, Dad talked about how proud he was to carry on his grandfather’s name, and to pass it along to me. It was the last time I saw him alive.
At the funeral, he looked less like a cosplaying Dr. Strange and more like a wax effigy of John Carradine as Dracula. All the industry gossip sites listed the cause of death as “accidental overdose,” but I knew that it was the colon cancer that did him in. Well, colon cancer and pride, with an able assist by Dr. Kendrick, who prescribed the pills. Dad had never been the kind of man who would meet the final credits surrounded by tubes and readouts, tended by nurses and dispassionate doctors who would see him in his weakness. He was the kind of man who wanted to look good in his coffin, and I guess he did, as good as a wax John Carradine ever could. At least he’d have been happy that the gossip sites were talking about him at all, for a change.
That just left me, and since Kirby Marsh II was in his grave out in Colma, I didn’t figure anyone would mind if Kirby Marsh III opened Orlok’s invitation instead. Inside the black-blue envelope was a piece of parchment paper, the message on it written by hand with a fountain pen, so that the black ink collected in tiny blotches where the writer had rested, giving the text an air of gravity. It invited my father to a party at Orlok’s mansion outside Mexico City, something like a wake, a “gathering of his peers and collaborators” for the reading of his will, just like an old dark house picture. The anonymous script ended with a promise that “all debts will be paid,” and included a notation saying that if the invitation’s intended recipient was “no longer among the living” then his heirs or assigns would be welcome in his place.
Included in the envelope was a business card for a law firm with a made-up sounding name—Mason, Sexton, & Graves—and a URL that provided a Google maps link to Orlok’s abode. Calling the RSVP number on the card rang up an automated line that knew my name before I told them, and asked me to confirm my attendance and any guests I’d be bringing along. When I hung up, I called Marla and told her to rent a car for the trip. Then, while I waited for her to show up, I distracted myself by packing so I wouldn’t have to think about why I’d been so quick to accept.
It wasn’t as if I’d known Orlok. To the best of my recollection, I’d never even met him, and if he owed Granddad any money, I couldn’t imagine him paying up, even from beyond the grave. The fact was, I accepted because I didn’t have anything better to do, no place better to go. There weren’t any projects coming down the pipe with my name on them, the City of Angels left a bad taste in my mouth, and the family mansion was nothing but a bunch of too-dark halls filled with other people’s memories. I knew that if I stayed there much longer I’d be making a dent in the wall of liquor that Dad kept behind the bar in the den, rather than just staring at it and salivating silently, but I wasn’t ready to call Ronnie and beg his forgiveness, not just yet. So while Orlok’s invitation wasn’t exactly balm in Gilead, it was at least a distraction, and I didn’t figure it could hurt.
Famous last words, right?
***
Marla pulled up out front in a silver Lexus, which was pretty nice, but I told her I’d have preferred a car with a little more personal style. “Cars with style get searched at border checkpoints,” she replied. “And I’ve got two Glocks in the trunk.”
Marla Crane had worked for my family for years. She didn’t talk a lot about what she’d done beforehand. Dad said that she’d been in private security, working for foreign dignitaries and who-knew-what-else, but Marla called everyone she’d ever worked for before us “suits,” so I couldn’t be sure. What I did know was that Marla was the toughest SOB I’d ever met, even if she wasn’t anybody’s son. I’d seen her punch out a guy who must have weighed 300 pounds if he weighed an ounce, a
nd get stabbed in the cheek with a steak knife at one of Dad’s parties. She just clamped down on the blade with her teeth, broke the guy’s thumb, and then proceeded to beat him unconscious before she pulled the knife out and let the EMT stitch her up. I shit you not. There was a little pale scar next to her lip that I’d point out whenever I told anyone the story.
I never asked where Dad found her in the first place, but after he stopped doing anything that required protection, I picked her up and took her with me anytime I went anyplace where I felt less than safe. I’ll be the first to admit it: I’m not a tough guy. I was born into my granddad’s money. I’ve got soft hands. I produce movies. If I’d ever wanted to work hard, I’d have become a director instead. Thankfully, I was also born without Dad’s overweening pride, so I don’t have anything to prove to anybody. If there’s a fight, I’m happy to hunker down and let Marla take care of it. Plus, I’ve known her for half my life. She’s kind of like having a badass big sister, and we get along.
I offered her a part in a movie one time, one of those Jason Statham-y martial arts action things that would be clogging up the video store shelves if there were any video stores anymore. She said she couldn’t act, but I told her she wouldn’t have to, just stand there looking tough, and then pretend to beat the shit out of a guy when the time came. She shook her head at me. “I don’t play at violence,” she said. “It’s what my dad taught me. If you’re going to hit someone, you hit them. If you’re going to pull a gun, you shoot it. I’ll fuck around with lots of things, but not with that. That’s not for fun.”
I threw my bags in the back seat—opting not to pop the trunk and check on her claim about Glocks—and dropped into the passenger side. Ostensibly that was Marla’s actual job title; she was my driver. Because if you introduce someone to your driver, people are okay with that. I’m a big-shot producer, right? (Never mind that I haven’t produced anything in over a year.) I’m not supposed to drive myself. Driving yourself is for commoners. But if you introduce someone to your bodyguard, well, that puts everything off on a bad foot right from the start. They think that you’re expecting something to happen, so then they expect something to happen, and everything turns to shit. So driver is what it said on Marla’s pay stubs, and I was happy to turn the driving over to her. She loved driving, and could drive the hell out of any car I’d ever seen her get behind the wheel of, whereas cars and I never really got along. There, I said it, I’m a bad American.
We pulled out of the big circle driveway headed south and I watched the house recede into the Hollywood Hills. It looked like the house from the Addams Family, and it actually had purple shingles—Granddad was nothing if not a showman—and I thought, not for the first time, how disappointed he would be if he could see us now. Not just me, and not just Dad, but all of us, all of this, everything. What a crock.
***
On the drive, Marla asked where we were going, so I told her about Constantin Orlok. “That wasn’t his real name, for starters, any more than Boris was Karloff’s. He was from Mexico originally. They say his family came from old money, Spanish aristocracy or something, conquistador stock. I don’t know when he was born, and I guess nobody else does either, because when I looked him up on IMDb, all they had were question marks. He must’ve been pretty old, though, because one of his first jobs was doing the monster makeup for the Spanish-language Frankenstein.”
“There’s a Spanish Frankenstein?”
I shook my head. “It was lost in a studio fire, but the story goes that it was shot at night after everybody else had gone home, on the same sets that James Whale used, just like the Spanish Dracula that same year. Sometimes people would claim to have a print of it, but I sure as hell never saw one. Just the occasional grainy still on some horror forum, claiming to be Orlok’s makeup job for the monster. Always the same shot, the skin cracked and flaking, like a guy caked in mud. More golem than the stuff Jack Pierce did for Karloff. What you could see of it, anyway. Most of it was in shadow, just one eye visible, peeled open like an egg. I’ll see if I can find a picture of it,” as I pulled out my phone.
“I’ll take your word for it,” Marla said. “So how did your dad know him?”
“Dad didn’t, Granddad did. Way back in his day, Orlok was a makeup man, and he was supposed to be good, like really good. Lon Chaney Senior, Man of a Thousand Faces good. What he really wanted to do was direct, but for some reason nobody ever let him behind a camera, not until after he got blacklisted.”
“Like McCarthy blacklisted?”
“Yep, though what he got blacklisted for precisely depends on who you ask. Maybe he really was a communist, maybe he was gay, but there were other stories too, that Orlok was into some kind of cult religion, or maybe some secret society. Golden Age Hollywood stuff, people practicing secret rituals in their houses in the hills. Virgin sacrficies, that kind of thing. I remember digging through Granddad’s stuff after he died and finding a particularly good bit of yellow journalism claiming that Orlok had built a chapel that was like an operating theatre, attended by the mummified corpses of dozens of rhesus monkeys.”
Marla chuckled. “Rhesus monkeys. Shit, that’s specific.”
“I know, right? That’s the kind of stuff that’ll stick with you when you’re a kid. Anyway, Hollywood was a much weirder place back then, so who knows? Whatever it was, Orlok left Hollywood in ’54 and moved back to Mexico, where he produced and directed a series of increasingly bizarre horror flicks. That’s where he and Granddad crossed paths. My understanding is that Granddad bought the rights to a bunch of Orlok’s movies for a song, chopped ’em up, dubbed and re-edited them, and showed them on late-night TV stateside. Orlok didn’t like that much, but he didn’t have any legal recourse, and from what I know there was bad blood between them until Granddad died.”
“Were his movies any good?”
“Orlok’s? I dunno. The only one I ever saw in its original form was The Clutching Hand, but Granddad’s chopped-up versions were, admittedly, pretty abysmal, so I don’t really blame the old guy for being mad. On the other hand, if it hadn’t been for Granddad, nobody would probably even know Orlok’s name today. None of his stuff ever really got wide distribution except for that, and one of them, the one Granddad never got his hands on, is supposed to still be lost.”
Marla chewed her bottom lip, thinking. “The name seems familiar.”
“Orlok? It’s also the name of the guy in Nosferatu, but yeah, there’s been kind of a revival of interest in Orlok’s stuff lately, thanks to the fact that you can get every damn thing on Blu-ray or VOD these days, and a couple of years back Rue Morgue ran a feature on him. The guy doing the writing—Gavin Somebody, or Somebody Gavin—said he’d seen the lost movie, The Jaws of Cronus, and that it was amazing and numinous and a bunch of other fancy words. Orlok’s movies all looked good, I’ll give them that. Granddad called him the ‘Mexican Mario Bava,’ and no amount of editing room butchery or bad dubbing could mess that up.”
“So if Orlok and your grandpa didn’t get along, why’d you get an invitation to his wake, or whatever this is?”
I shrugged, and slumped down lower in my seat. “No clue. Maybe it was some kind of deathbed remorse, wanting to repair broken bridges or something. Or maybe his estate wants to work a deal to get a bigger piece of the pie, and they’re trying to play nice. That Rue Morgue article got some wheels spinning, I know, and Scream Factory is in talks with the lawyers to try to put Granddad’s cuts out on Blu-ray.”
Marla considered that, and for a while the only sound was the AC, and the noise of the wind and the tires on the road. “All debts will be paid, huh?”
“That’s what the invitation said.”
She didn’t respond to that, which was just as well, because when she put it in that context, I couldn’t think of any way that could be taken that sounded good.
***
While we waited at the border crossing, I used my phone to find some clips of Orlok’s work so I could show them to Marla
. The first was from The Conqueror Worm, and would have looked right at home in a Rob Zombie video, and I wouldn’t swear to you that he hadn’t sampled the image at some point. It was a cemetery in Mexico, that much was pretty obvious, and the graves and fallen crosses were inexplicably strewn with cobwebs. Fires burned in the distance.
A sinister-looking guy in a top hat and cape, who could have been Coffin Joe if that wasn’t the wrong movie, was walking amid the graves, followed by a malformed hunchback with what looked to be particularly striking makeup, though YouTube rendered it grainy. There wasn’t any sound on the clip, so we watched in silence as they stopped at a grave. Candles were burning all around it. The hunchback laid a bag down on the ground that looked like it was maybe filled with sticks, and the guy in the top hat raised his arms. The trees at the edge of the cemetery shook, and the slab started to slide away as something with too many limbs began to crawl out.
After that, I managed to find a clip that at least claimed to be from The Jaws of Cronus, and certainly didn’t look familiar to me from any of Granddad’s cuts. Not as visually impressive as the last one, the clip just showed a dinner party in which a bunch of nicely dressed people who all looked somewhat familiar but actually weren’t—the Mexican Peter Lorre, a guy who looked exactly like Russ Tamblyn but couldn’t have been, according to IMDb—sat around discussing European politics, from the sound of things. The actors were speaking in English, even though the movie had never been dubbed, as far as I was aware.