Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts

by Orrin Grey

  “I left my guns in the room,” she was saying as she tried to right herself.

  “Go,” I said. “I’ll be fine.” Which I think I said because, that’s what you say, right? I obviously wasn’t going to be fine. But Marla listened, maybe because she wasn’t fine either, and started to move away from the table, lurching to the sideboard. I heard the crash of a tray as a server tried to stop her—or maybe to help her—but either way she was still in good enough shape to resist that much, at least.

  I stood up myself, not sure which way to run or jump, flicking my gaze around the table from one person to another. I lighted on Lenora, who was standing as well. I caught her eyes, maybe to see if she was in on this, whatever this was, to try to search out whether she would help. I saw something I hadn’t noticed before, something that couldn’t have been there before, because it’s not the kind of thing you can overlook. Each of her eyes had two pupils. No, not just pupils, irises. Two of them, just touching each other, like planets in orbit. “What the fuck?” I managed to inquire, before something hit me really hard in the back of the head, and we had a scene change, just like in a movie.

  ***

  It would have been a good transition, too. Iris out on Lenora with the freaky eyes, iris in on me waking up in Marla’s bed, staring up at the painting on the wall that was Lenora’s spitting image. See, Sean Pilodi at the Village Voice, I could so direct my way out of a dark room if you sent me a map and a flashlight. I struggled to sit up and felt dizzy and nauseous, like my mouth was filled with cotton. I believe I repeated the query that had gotten me hit on the head in the first place.

  “You’ll be fine,” Marla said from somewhere across the room, unconsciously echoing the last thing I’d told her. “I checked your head, you probably don’t even have a concussion. I shot that bitch whatsername, Mason, but I just got her in the shoulder. I doubt she’s dead. Probably won’t have much of a batting arm anymore, though.”

  I tried to look around, wishing I had a Coke or something, even a belt of something harder would have been fine right then, anything to take the edge off the throbbing in my head, clear the taste of fabric out of my mouth. Marla was standing a couple of paces away from the door to the room, which had a bureau pushed in front of it. Her gun was in her hand, and she was leaning on a high-backed chair. The arm that held the gun out in front of her was shaking.

  “What the hell is happening?” I asked, my tongue still thick and numb.

  “They drugged us,” Marla said. “Who the fuck does that in real life?”

  “In the wine,” I said, which yeah, of course it was, but give me a break, I’d just been hit on the head.

  “I made myself throw up, got the guns, came back down for you. They had you down on the floor and you were bleeding, Mason was holding some kind of curtain rod or something, I don’t even know what. The servants were carrying the others away. They were wearing masks, golden masks. I think I killed one of them, I don’t know. I definitely shot Mason, got you up, got you away from there. They’d taken your phone, tablet too, and my phone, all gone. Good thing I hid the guns before I left the room, or they’d be gone, too. I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to stay upright.” Even as she said it she fell into the chair, her gun still pointed at the door. “The other gun’s on the floor next to the bed.”

  I followed where she was pointing, and there was the other Glock, as promised. I picked it up, though I hadn’t shot a gun in years, didn’t even know how to hold one, except what I’d seen in the movies. It felt awkward in my hand, heavy and unbalanced.

  “This was a great idea,” Marla said sleepily, her head lolling against the back of the chair she now sat in, her gun still pointed at the door. “I’m so glad you invited me.”

  Marla’s eyes drifted closed, but a knock on the door pulled them back open, snapped her gun arm back up. I tried to raise my gun, too, looking at her to try to mimic how she held it. It wasn’t a banging on the other side of the door, it was a simple knock, casual, courteous. The maid service, checking to see if we were ready for our linens to be changed. I heard a voice from the hall outside that I recognized as Ms. Mason’s, but the professional niceties had been stripped from it. It was taunting now, sing-song. “Kirby Marsh,” it turned my name into a schoolyard chant. “Come out, come out. We promise not to play so rough.”

  Marla had, I guess, been listening, because she squeezed the trigger abruptly, put a bullet into the door. It startled me enough that I almost fired the gun in my hand, which probably would have put a bullet in the wall or the floor. “Not very nice,” that sing-song voice came from outside again. “No way for a guest to behave.”

  “Not very neighborly?” I shouted back, and Marla shot me a warning glare, or as much of one as she could manage. I guess my bullshit attempt at bravado saved me from, well, at best another blow on the head, because Marla’s angry glance turned into a look of shock, and her gun arm swung around. I thought for a second that she was going to shoot me, which didn’t make any sense, but nothing else that night made a lot of sense, so why the hell not? Maybe people with double-irises could do mind control. I’d have put that in a movie.

  Whatever I thought, my brain locked gears somewhere between “drop to the floor” and “turn around,” so I did something like a pirouette and tweaked my knee, turning my right leg to jelly underneath me and spilling me into a heap on the carpet. Which fortunately put me out of the way of Marla’s bullet, and still gave me a good enough window to see what she was shooting at. Something had come out of the wall, the painting above the bed swung open like a door, and just like that we were back in an old dark house movie, with me as the canary, and whatever the fuck was now crouched on the bed playing the role of the cat.

  Whatever it was, it wore a golden mask, like something from an Aztec Mummy movie. Its body was human shaped, but the limbs no longer looked human. Its legs bent wrong, its arms were segmented, made up of overlapping plates that terminated in black talons. The only thing that gave its origins away were the shredded remains of pleated slacks and tuxedo shirt that still clung to it.

  Marla’s bullet caught it high in the chest, sent it off the far side of the bed. Even as the report rang out, the banging from outside began again, not politely this time, loud and insistent and big, the sound of a rhino throwing itself against the door. The bureau shook and shifted back a fraction of an inch.

  “Shit,” Marla said, as the thing behind the bed stood up again. “Go. Just go. Get the fuck out of here.”

  It is moments like those, or so movies would have me believe, that separate heroes from cowards. I’m sad to say that I’m still pretty thoroughly in that latter category, and it didn’t take much more than Marla’s shouted exhortations to make me run. My eyes shot between the door to the bathroom—bolted still from this side—and the gaping hole in the wall behind the painting. I chose the secret passage, hoping that there weren’t reinforcements waiting just on the other side.

  As I stepped into the space between the walls, I felt the talons of the creature in the golden mask lock around my ankle. Marla’s gun went off again, and the hand let go, and I was running through the dark. I heard more gunfire behind me, the sound of splintering wood, and other noises that I couldn’t identify, that I didn’t want to identify.

  There was nothing in the secret passage but dust and cobwebs, and I ran without thinking too much about where I was going. There were windows in our rooms, so that meant that the only way out would be to the right, so that’s the way I went. It was dark, except for shafts of light that seemed to come from nowhere, to illuminate nothing. After a few feet I had to crawl, and then the passage sloped downward, and there were winding stairs made out of stone that I felt my way along with shaking feet, and I wondered what the hell kind of house this was, anyway.

  Behind me I couldn’t hear anything anymore, just my own panicked breathing echoing off the walls around me. Then the passage I was in stopped, dead-ended in darkness, and I beat myself agai
nst the wall and—I shit you not—it turned. The wall turned, and the floor turned, and on the other side it was a bookcase, I could see the edges where it had joined the rest, and I was riding a turning bookcase around into a big room filled with other bookcases and any goddamned minute now Scooby and the gang were going to show up and pull off Old Man Withers’ mask and make this whole fucking fiasco make any damn sense.

  My first thought was that the room on the other side of the bookcase was a library—witness all the books on the walls—but no, it was something else. A study, I guess you’d call it, or a den. Bookshelves along the walls, complete with one of those rolling ladders that I would have probably tried to hitch a ride on in less distressing circumstances, a big desk in the middle of the room, a globe on the floor. The room was dark, but there was a lamp on the desk, an antique Tiffany in heavy brass that cast just enough amber-colored light to illuminate the outlines of the place. By its glow, I could see two doors, one near the desk, one at the far end of the room. The one near the desk was closest, so I went that way.

  I never even considered staying in the room. I was going to get out, get some kind of help. Somewhere in the house there’d be a phone, or I’d find my way to the front door. The valet probably still had the keys to the Lexus, but I’d walk to Mexico City if it came to that, and I’d try out my lackluster Spanish vocabulary on finding the local policía and, I didn’t know, doing something that made any sense. I’d worry about that when I got there.

  The door near the desk opened onto a much brighter room, one lit all over with dozens of candles. Candles on tall sconces, candles in elaborate candelabras, candles piled at the foot of the bizarre altar that dominated the room. The candles were every color—vivid blues and greens and purples—and they were just about the only color in a room dominated by blacks and reds. The statue above the altar seemed like it should be made of onyx, something that would swallow up the light or throw it back, but instead it was hewn out of some porous stone, something that didn’t seem to interact with the light at all. I thought maybe it was some native carving, but it looked more Balinese than Mexican, its tusks reminding me of the mouth of the wannabe Saturn in Orlok’s painting, and I didn’t have time to look at it long anyway, because my eyes were drawn, inexorably, as in a painting, to the centerpiece of the room, the object around which all the candles were clustered, toward which they threw their light.

  Compared to everything else I’d already seen that night, it was so predictable, so prosaic, that it almost wasn’t frightening. Just a coffin, like other coffins I’d seen before, like the coffin Dad had lain in as they lowered him into the ground. The top part of it was open, as for a viewing, and around it were strewn white flowers. The corpse inside was dressed in an old-fashioned suit, and even without the hat he was familiar, his features had stared down at me from the portrait in my room, from the wax figure in the museum. His skin even held its odd submarine hue of greens and blues, as if in death he’d been transformed into a cartoon grotesque. I knew it was Constantin Orlok, though I’d never seen a picture of the man, not even on his Wikipedia page. I knew it as surely as if there’d been a little gold plaque below his coffin, spelling it out for me.

  For several seconds, or maybe a minute, I just stood there in the candlelight, in the shadow of some unknown altar, in the company of a dead man who still felt more familiar than much of anything else I’d encountered in his house. I don’t know how long I would have stayed, if nothing else had changed. Maybe that would have been where I stopped, the end of me. Maybe I wouldn’t have had the strength to keep going. Maybe I would have sunk down on the floor, my back to the only door into that room, and stayed until something came for me. Until the stone monster that towered over the altar stepped down to take me. Until the candles all burned out and all I had left was darkness. I don’t know, because before any of that could happen, the corpse of Constantin Orlok sat up.

  He didn’t sit up like a man sits up, especially an old man, as old as he would have to have been. There was no groaning, no hands on the side of the coffin for leverage, no turning onto his side. He sat up straight, his waist bending at a right angle, like half a Max Schreck in Nosferatu. It was enough, it was too much, and I didn’t wait to see what would happen next. I went back out the door I had come in, back through the room filled with books, and out the door I hadn’t tried, the door that, I found, let me back into the wax museum, through the curtains behind the two statues of Orlok and the girl who claimed to be his great-niece.

  Walking past them wasn’t fun, and I tried not to glance over my shoulders as I did, to see if their gazes would follow me. I was distracted anyway, my attention caught by another figure in the room, one that wasn’t sculpted from wax. At the far end of the hall, barely illuminated by the lights that shone upon the Frankenstein monster, was a familiar shape, one that made my heart leap into my throat, even though I didn’t know his name. The heavyset man at the dinner table, the one who’d looked uncomfortable in his tuxedo. He was standing with his back to me, his face toward the door, and he still looked uncomfortable, in fact he looked to be in pain, but he was alive and he was conscious, and maybe that meant that he’d escaped from them, as well. With two of us on the job, getting away seemed much more reasonable. Even if he was injured, at least I wasn’t alone.

  I said something as I walked toward him, “hey” or “hello” or something equally banal, given the circumstances, and he tried to move away from me, maybe thinking that I was one of them, and I saw that he dragged one of his legs, and I thought, yes, he must be injured after all. That was okay, though, we could help each other, and I redoubled my pace, jogging to reach him before he reached the door, though he didn’t seem like he was trying for it, so much as he was just shrinking away from me. I put out my hand and grabbed his sleeve, said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t know your name,” and I was about to say more when he turned around.

  I saw his face first, the ruined mask that it had become, the features stretched out of shape, pulled so they no longer fit. The right side sagged down, as though he’d suffered a stroke, only much, much worse. The holes in his face no longer lined up with his eyes, with his nose. Now they just looked beyond into darkness, like a mask hanging in a closet. A sound came out of the vicinity of his mouth, a groan like an ancient drawbridge, the sound that a man in a movie would make if the villain had cut out his character’s tongue. That’s when I looked down at my own hand, at the sleeve I held. It was ragged at the end, and at first I’d thought that he’d torn his tuxedo, but no, the tuxedo was fine, it was flesh that hung in scraps from the end of his sleeve, flesh where the single chitinous black pincer had torn through his hand to leave the fingers flapping in its wake. That pincer snipped at the air now, not directed at me, but feebly, pleadingly. The sound came from his mouth again, and I stumbled away, felt the glass of one of the display cases against my back.

  There was no place to go, I realized then. No place to run. The horror in front of me, the horrors I’d left behind, it was an endless parade. I would never escape them. I could leave the house, I could leave the country, but they would never be gone. Even if I survived, I would carry them with me. Though I’m sure they were still burning in the chapel I had left behind, at that moment a gust of wind blew out all the candles in my mind, and darkness closed over me, warm and welcoming.

  ***

  I woke for the second time that night, this time slumped in a chair in the room full of books that I had just left. I wasn’t alone. I could feel other presences behind me, even without turning my head, and in the chair behind the desk across from me sat Constantin Orlok. Or rather, his corpse. It was obvious that he was dead, though his hands moved, and he looked at me. It wasn’t like a man moving, like a man looking at me. It was a puppet that sat across from me, though I couldn’t see what was pulling its strings.

  His skin was still that pale blue-green-gray, like something floating in an aquarium, and all of his hair was white as snow. He was dressed just as h
e had been in the coffin, but his eyelids were open now, and what stared out at me from his sockets weren’t eyes—double-irised or otherwise—but just a burning orange light, like the eyes of a pumpkin. That’s actually what he reminded me of, besides a puppet; a pumpkin, hollowed out and grinning, but alive with some dancing flame inside him.

  “You know why you’re here?” he asked, and for anyone who ever read “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” his voice was Valdemar’s. Whatever you imagined Valdemar’s voice to be, that sound “such as it would be madness in me to attempt describing” and to which “no similar sounds have ever jarred upon the ear of humanity.” That was the voice that issued from Orlok’s jaws, a voice at once harsh and grating, gelatinous and glutinous, and coming from a great distance and yet distinct and clear and easily understood.

  The hideous manikin didn’t continue speaking, and so I realized that he had directed the question at me, and that he expected an answer. “Because ‘all debts will be paid,’ is that right?” I said, managing to summon enough reserves of courage from someplace foolhardy and already broken inside of myself to answer without my voice cracking too badly.

  The corpse laughed, and however awful the sound of his speaking had been, his laughter was worse. I won’t even bother trying to describe it, lest I jump right over Poe and launch into the exuberantly purple histrionics of which Lovecraft is frequently accused. “Do you know what happened to my films?” Orlok asked me, thumping his gray fist on the desk. “I’ve read the reviews, you know, those few that there were. The speculations. That I had nothing left to say, nothing left to add to the world of cinema. Ha!”