Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts

by Orrin Grey

  With a jerk, Orlok’s corpse stood up from his chair, and I instinctively shrank back, though he was rising only so that he could gesticulate more easily, his movements the clumsy swings of a marionette on wires. “Realism,” he said, the word spit forth like something that had curdled on his tongue. “So called. That’s what happened to my films. They didn’t have enough vapid young people, not enough unmotivated violence. No one was afraid of them anymore. That’s what he said,” and here, the corpse of Orlok gestured, and I turned my head, almost unwillingly, as though I, too, were a puppet, dancing on his strings. Before I saw what he was trying to indicate, I saw Marla in the chair next to mine, her hands and ankles bound with cuffs, her head lolling unconscious. She looked alive, but she was badly torn up, bleeding from ragged wounds, her eye and cheek swelling into a purple bruise. Then my head turned further, and I looked past her, behind our chairs, at the terrible menagerie that filled the rest of the room.

  I’ll begin where it is easiest to begin: Ms. Mason stood in the room, her hair down and spilling over the shoulders of her suit jacket in impossibly glossy golden waves, Marla’s Glock in her hand. At her side stood Lenora, still looking much as she had the last time I saw her, blissfully too far away for me to really see her eyes. Around them, though, were terrors.

  The professor’s glasses were gone, lost somewhere, and his head had blown up like a balloon until it popped out of his skin, revealing the slick, green-white flesh of a new head with pop-eyes and a toad’s mouth. Only his scarf remained, still curled round his neck. The old woman with the black-black hair, on the other hand, had seemed to shrink into herself and to darken like a nut, so that she was lost in her own shadow, only her arms and legs jutting out, growing longer and longer, even as I watched, bending like stilts and ending in hands as long-fingered and bent as tree branches. The ingénue had kept more of her original features, one half of her face still the aging beauty, but the other had begun to melt and swirl, the eye traveling down, the teeth turning to sharp points, and her arms were covered in coarse fur, her hands like the talons of a bird.

  Orlok’s gesture encompassed the thing that I had seen in the Chamber of Horrors, still wearing the remnants of both the heavyset man and his tuxedo. “The studio executive,” Orlok was saying. “Is there any more loathsome a creature? For years my films made him money—yes, even in the United States, where your grandfather chopped them up to appease the masses who were already growing too jaded, too foolish to appreciate them. Then, when I completed my masterpiece, what did he tell me? ‘No one wants movies like this anymore.’ He called it ‘quaint.’ Tell me, Phillip, how quaint does it feel now?”

  The mandibles of the thing that the man—Phillip, I guess—had become issued forth once again that tongueless pleading noise, the only response he could now muster. “When I realized that there was no one left who could appreciate my work,” Orlok continued, “I resolved that no one would have it. I rounded up all the prints of The Jaws of Cronus that I could find, and I burned them. Those were the days, of course, when film was still film, and so it burned delightfully. But long before I was a filmmaker, I was already an artist. Do you know what it means to be an artist, Mr. Marsh? Your grandfather did, though you’d be forgiven for not knowing it, as he seemed to dedicate his whole life to covering it up.”

  Orlok was pacing now behind the desk, and I tried to pull my eyes back to him, because, well, a corpse was pacing and lecturing me on the Philistine nature of the modern filmgoing public—a subject on which I was probably, in actual fact, much better versed than he—and that seemed a spectacle that demanded attention, but now that I knew they were there, it was hard for me to tear my eyes from the abominations lurking behind me, even to focus on the one in front.

  “An artist, Mr. Marsh, is not concerned with material success or approbation. An artist does what he does because he must, because of the incontrovertible dictates of the universe. Before I was anything else, I was a makeup artist, and so in my desolation, it was to my art that I once more returned. I refined my talents, in an effort to create horrors more majestic than any I had ever been able to conjure on film. Terrors that would make even those who had scoffed at me sit up and take notice. Look around yourself, Mr. Marsh. Have I succeeded?”

  He didn’t wait for my response, and instead continued his tirade. “However much scorn I may have for you, there is one way in which we are alike, or were. Our business was in illusion. I created makeup, masks that men could wear to let them play at being monsters. But makeup will never be enough, illusion will never suffice. No one is afraid of a painted monster, Mr. Marsh.”

  His voice grew quieter, more intimate, which made my stomach feel like it was trying to crawl up my throat. “So I had to go deeper. I created something more than makeup, something that could remake men as the monsters they had previously only appeared to be. You see around you the results of my handiwork. How would you judge my progress?”

  Again, he seemed disinterested in any answer I could have mustered, because he didn’t let my stuttering break his stride. “You probably thought you were being brought here because of the butchery that your grandfather performed on my films, didn’t you?”

  “It would have been my first guess,” I managed, which once more elicited that godawful laugh.

  “I didn’t care about what Kirby did to my films,” Orlok replied. “He was a weak man, obeying the dictates of his weak desires, and the inconsequential wills of his so-called audience. Do you know what your grandfather and I were to each other?”

  I shook my head. “All I knew was that he bought the rights to distribute your movies in the States,” I said.

  “We were brothers,” Orlok said, rounding the table, leaning perilously close to me, so that I could feel the cold that came off him, smell the scent that he carried, not of decay, but of damp stone and incalculable age. “Brothers in the art. Members of the Society of the Silver Key, filmmakers sworn to something more than just filling the coffers of the studios, from the days when Hollywood was still a land of its own, and not just a factory for producing advertisements to lull the masses. He was supposed to support me, but when I came to him, when I told him of my woes, do you know what he said to me?”

  I had no idea, I’d never heard anything about this secret society or anything like it, but knowing my granddad, I could guess.

  “He laughed,” Orlok said, growled, snarled. “He told me that the times were changing, and that we had to change with them. ‘If the people want skin and axe murders instead of castles and monsters, who’re we to tell them they’re wrong?’ he said. Who’re we? We’re the gatekeepers, we’re the masters. We’re the ones who shape their nightmares, not the other way around! He had forgotten his oaths, or never meant them. He had turned his back on the Society, on me, on everything. So I waited, I perfected my art, and then, when I was finally ready, I sent for those who had wronged me. I pay my debts, Mr. Marsh. Let no man ever say that I do not.”

  That Orlok had more to add to his rant I have no doubt, but he didn’t get the opportunity. As he paced before my chair, leaning in to underscore his points, suddenly a pair of legs whipped out and cracked into the backs of his knees, driving them out from under him. “You get caught monologuing,” Marla said as Orlok’s corpse crumpled to the floor in front of me, “let no man ever say that you don’t.”

  I looked over at her, my mouth, no doubt, gaping open like that fucking Seann William Scott, and she jerked her head at me as she jumped to her feet, her ankles still chained together. “The other gun’s in the alcove there,” she said, and I followed her implied trajectory and saw that the entranceway with the rotating bookshelf was open, frozen in mid-turn, and that the Glock was, indeed, lying where I’d dropped it against the back of the wall. I don’t know how long that moment lasted, with me rooted in place, gawping like a landed fish, before time un-froze and Marla was hefting the Tiffany lamp off the desk and bringing it down on Orlok’s head and Ms. Mason was shouting something I could
n’t understand and firing her gun into the back of the chair and I was running for the alcove, diving into the shadows behind the rotating bookcase, grabbing for the gun and sliding it across the floor toward Marla as the hidden door was triggered into action again, by what I don’t know, and turned closed behind me, trapping me in darkness.

  ***

  Again, I heard gunshots from the other side of the wall, and other noises that I didn’t want to contemplate and can’t begin to describe. For a moment I pounded against the wall, clawed at it, trying to find the trigger that would make the bookcase turn again, but then I realized that, even cuffed hand and foot, Marla was probably better off in there with me on this side. Or maybe my cowardice just finally caught up with my brain. Whatever the case, I stopped trying to activate the passage, and started feeling my way along the wall, moving along in the pitch darkness, trying to get away from the secret door before someone or something on the other side tripped it.

  When I had been in the passage before, the darkness hadn’t seemed so total. Maybe my panicked flight had simply blinded me to my situation—no pun intended—but now I was acutely aware of how little I could see. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a cave when they turned out the lights, but if not, then you’ve probably never been in true, total darkness. We humans are used to a little ambient light, especially in this day and age. Night lights, street lights, whatever light bleeds off our electronics and other gizmos. We never spend a moment in genuine darkness, but I did, feeling my way along that passage, and the darkness was thick, and it felt like it was getting inside of me. Crawling behind my eyes, down my throat, seeping into my joints and freezing them. Causing me to inch ahead, to flinch with each hand I put out, afraid of what I might touch.

  Though there were people and monsters and god-knows-what-else just on the other side of the wall, the darkness made it feel like I was alone, like a man lost at sea, on a deserted island.

  When I had come through before, I would have sworn that the passage I took led straight from the painting in Marla’s room to this doorway, and as I crept away from it, I had some dim hope that I would find the way back up to Marla’s room, maybe find something that would help this nightmare, if anything ever could. But I quickly realized that, though I hadn’t noticed any diverting passages on my earlier trip, I wasn’t retracing my steps. I was walking on a slope, and it was going down. I couldn’t tell you how I knew it, since the darkness was disorienting, dizzying, made me feel how I imagine an astronaut must feel, in a capsule drifting off into the far reaches of space. Somehow, though, I could tell that I was descending.

  As I went down and down, the walls under my fingers changed from wood to stone, and the stone grew cold and damp. I came to a place where the walls opened out—I could feel, somehow, that the passage I walked through had grown wider. The air here smelled like a cave, loamy and closed-up. I imagined it was what a grave would smell like, if you were inside it, and the thought did my nerves no good. I stumbled over something in the dark that rattled, and then again, and again, piles and piles of it, like dried sticks but the wrong size, and I didn’t pick them up, didn’t feel around, because I didn’t want to feel anything that I could identify, no thank you.

  Somewhere there, in the darkness below the house, in whatever catacombs existed beneath Orlok’s hellish abode, I heard a voice. No, several voices. No, that’s not right either, the same voice, but repeated over and over, the intonation different each time, the pitch, the tone. Like the voice of the same person, from different times, or from the same time and different universes. All saying the same thing. “He lied, he lied,” the whispers told me. Under my fingers I could feel that the walls were now carved with grotesques, leering gargoyle faces and niches into which I didn’t dare to reach, and I got the impression that the voices were coming from the carvings, or from the niches, or from the bones—let’s stop playing coy—at my feet, or from all of the above.

  “He lied,” the voices said, “he said the art was his, but he lied, he lied. He wanted to make men monsters and he tried, he tried, but he failed, he failed. And here is where he cast his failures, here into the dark. And in his failure he made a deal. A deal, a deal, for it loves deals. You are not his vengeance, not that, no, you are his sacrifice, yes. But he has already sacrificed more than he knows. He is a shadow, yes, an illusion, a trick. One last illusion, in a life that was nothing else.”

  I wish that I had asked those voices a question. I wish that I had asked who or what they were, why they were telling me these things. I wish that I had asked them anything, but I didn’t. I didn’t speak at all, there in the dark, I just curled up, shrank down, and cried. I want to say wept, but I didn’t even weep. Heroes weep, children cry. In that moment I was a child, afraid of the dark and everything in it, and all I could do was cry.

  I don’t know how long I stayed like that, crying in the dark, surrounded by things I couldn’t even think about, but at some point I noticed something beyond my closed eyes and the shield of my arms. A light. I opened my eyes and raised my head, and saw that I wasn’t imagining it. In the distance, somewhere above me, there was a light. I wiped my nose on the sleeve of my suit, and stifled a manic laugh at the state of myself. I stood up. I didn’t look at the gargoyle faces, I didn’t look at the dark niches between them, I didn’t look at what was scattered at my feet. I followed the light, like a will-o-the-wisp, even though I know as well as anyone where will-o-the-wisps lead.

  I walked through the dark, and I found the floor sloping upward again, and I saw where the light was coming from: the ceiling was on fire. I was up high enough now that parts of the house were wood around me again, and they were burning. The house was burning. I don’t know where it came from, at the time I assumed that it had sprung, fully formed, from the necessity for it. I had seen enough of Granddad’s movies to know that this was how it always ended, that no matter what, whether evil was punished or evil stood victorious, at the end of the day, that big, dark house was going to burn down.

  Ahead of me, a wall had fallen in, and I walked through it, past a gateway made of flames, and somehow I found myself back in the room with the altar. The coffin was still where it had stood before, and around it the candles still burned, though now the wax they burned in melted and ran as the walls around them blazed twice as brightly. Beyond the coffin, I was somehow unsurprised to see that the altar stood empty, the statue of the god or devil that had previously occupied it having now vacated its throne.

  The lid of the coffin was still half-open, but the inside was no longer empty. In it was something, a shaking, quivering mass of something. Here and there remained scraps of the clothes it had previously worn in death, but nothing of the man remained, not the white hair, not the blue-gray skin. In its place was a tumorous mountain of something like coral from which jutted eye stalks and tendrils that groped feebly at the burning air. I didn’t need the whispering voices to tell me what I was seeing, and my knowledge was confirmed when a familiar voice—though stripped now of all its grandeur—issued from somewhere in the pile. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” the thing that had once been Constantin Orlok moaned as I passed. I almost felt sorry for him.

  The room on the other side of the door was in flames as well, the books burning on their shelves, flaming pages drifting down like snowflakes. Inhuman bodies slumped against the walls, half-consumed by fire and giving off a sickening, cooked-insect odor. Ms. Mason was among them, her flesh suit finally torn open to show something with the texture of a black pipe cleaner. Of Marla there was no sign.

  Beyond the next door I was into the wax museum, where the figures were melting inside their display cases, their already-monstrous features turning to running putrescence. Here and there the glass cases lay shattered, or cracked by the heat, and I noticed that the figure of Orlok’s niece was missing from the menagerie. The flames were getting hotter now, closer, and it was getting harder to breathe. I tried to remember how to get to the front door from here, how I had g
otten here in my wanderings the first time. As I was passing the figure of the Frankenstein monster, I felt something like a heavy stick of butter touch my shoulder. I turned and saw that boiled-egg eye, watery and running with wax, staring at me. The monster reached at me through a hole in his glass enclosure, and looking back I saw that all the figures were pawing at their prisons with melting hands, or stumbling forward into puddles on the floor, and though it had been seemingly beyond my power before, as if I had been in a spell, I suddenly regained the ability to run.

  Through the next door and then the next, and I found myself in a hallway that I had never seen before, but on the other side of it was another door, and I was rushing toward it when something arrested my progress. A hand gripped my arm, my wrist. I looked back, and saw Lenora. She looked at me with those twin-irised eyes, and she drew me close, like she had something to tell me, something to whisper, or maybe like she was going to try to kiss me, and I almost laughed at the absurdity of it all, and I opened my mouth to explain to her, even in the flames and in the madness, that I didn’t swing that way, sorry, but then I saw a bead of sweat that wasn’t sweat, and I jerked at my arm and it came free with her hand still fastened around my wrist as the melting wax that made up her body began to come apart. I made some kind of noise, and tried to crawl away, to crab-walk away, but I was coughing, and my head was reeling, and I realized maybe for the first time that I was breathing smoke, had been breathing it all this time, and the hallway spun around me and there was a roaring in my ears and for what felt like the millionth time that night, everything went dark.

  ***

  The first person past tense is, as Klein once wrote, a particularly reassuring voice for a horror story. It says to you, right out of the gate, “I survived to tell the tale.” So yes, let me assure you right now, I survived. What the first person past tense doesn’t tell you is how, what survival meant, what you had to sacrifice to make it out the other side.