by Orrin Grey
I woke looking up at the stars. The night sky that had looked so crushing and ominous before seemed wide as anything now, wide and big and welcoming. Nothing else mattered, except that I was looking up at the sky. The burning in my lungs, the scraped raw feeling in my throat, the aching in my joints. None of it was worth a tinker’s damn in the face of that knowledge, that there was no ceiling above me—whether burning or otherwise—that I was outside. Outside, I could face anything.
I sat up and looked over at Marla, who was sitting on a rock next to me. In the moonlight, all of her blood looked like chocolate syrup, and there was so, so much of it. “The garage burned too,” was the first thing she said to me, and I turned my head the other direction and saw it, like a campfire turned up to eleven, the mansion still blazing, all of it going up, just like in one of Granddad’s movies.
“At least it was a rental,” I said, the punch line broken by a cough. There were tears on my cheeks, though whether from relief or still left over from the smoke, I couldn’t say. I started to ask Marla how she was doing, if she was okay, but when I went to speak instead I heard a barking. Not from my throat, but from the direction of the house. Once, twice, and again. Confused, I looked at Marla, and saw her crumple to the sandy dirt. Ragged blooms had appeared in her chest, leaking chocolate syrup. I turned back as I heard a firing pin click on an empty chamber, and I saw a shadow taking shape from the dancing heat of the flames. I imagined the statue from the altar, striding about like the giant in The Jaws of Cronus, ready to reach out and pluck me from the edge of my perceived salvation and drag me back into the flames, like the ending of some conte cruel. But it wasn’t the statue. It was small and slight and dark, and it held Marla’s other Glock shining silver in the firelight, though as I watched it tossed the gun away, into the dirt.
Its eyes glowed with an unwholesome luminescence, save for the twin moons of the doubled irises, and I knew that this one wasn’t wax. “What the hell do you want?” I asked it, as it drew nearer. “What the hell is left?”
“Hell has nothing to do with it,” it said, and its voice was nothing dramatic, as Orlok’s had been. Just the voice of a girl, small and slight, though no longer demure, no longer unassuming, and I realized that there had probably never been a Lenora, that it had probably always been this. “Desperation is what I want. Desperate men make deals, and deals are what I crave. Orlok came to me with his desperation, shouted it into the darkness and I answered. What is it that you are desperate for, Kirby Marsh?”
I want to say that I spat on it, but I couldn’t. My mouth was filled with ashes.
“Your friend doesn’t have to die out here, you know,” it said. “You don’t have to die. This,” and it gestured to take in the burning house, the moonlit desert, the sheltering sky, “doesn’t have to be the last thing you see before the credits roll. There can be a trade. There can always be a trade.”
I looked down, and saw that Marla had crawled back onto her hands and knees, but I could also see that her shadow was bigger than it should have been, and it glistened in the light from the fire. The look in her eyes told me that she was out of bullets, and the rest of her told me that she was almost out of blood, out of time. She reached out and gripped my hand, and in spite of everything hers was steady, while mine shook. She looked me in the eye, and she said six magic words:
“You always were an asshole, Gorman.”
***
That’s where I should leave you. It’s the better ending, the top still spinning, MacReady and Childs sitting in the cold. It gives you ambiguity, and it gives you hope. But it’s another illusion, a false front, a mask. The ambiguity is a lie, and so is the hope.
It would make for a better ending if we had one bullet left, one last trick, but neither of us did. We were alone and we were broken and all that we had was the desert and the fathomless dark up above us. And even if there had been a bullet, a stick of dynamite, a grenade with no pin, the thing with the doubled irises wasn’t something that you can fight that way; it wasn’t something that you fight at all. It was the other sky that the sky hides behind it, the terror that lies above, and below, and in the howling gulf that is on every side of this moment.
So I made the deal, because that’s what you do when everything else is gone. And while I can’t leave you with ambiguity, and I can’t leave you with hope, I can leave you with this: I may not be my granddad, but I am his son’s son, and while I may not be an artist, I am a movie producer, and I made a better deal than Orlok did.
Author’s Notes:
The first place I ever encountered the quote that serves as the epigram for this book and gives this story its title was in Jason Zinoman’s book Shock Value. From there, I was compelled to track down the 1968 Peter Bogdanovich film Targets, which to me provided an almost perfect summary of the change in horror films from the ’60s to the ’70s, not only in what we gained in the transition, but also in what we lost. That transition, and the nostalgic longing captured in the quote, gave me not only the idea for this story, but also the central theme of this entire collection.
While most of the other stories in this collection are inspired by horror movies, or touch upon particular periods in the history of horror film, this story is intended as sort of whirlwind ride across horror’s cinematic history, thanks in part to the multi-generational family of horror producers that culminate in Kirby Marsh III. This absolutely isn’t the last time you’ll see the Marsh family show up in my stories, and in fact our protagonist’s grandfather has already appeared in something else I did; a fragment that I wrote as part of a special project for Michael Bukowski’s Yog-Blogsoth website.
“Painted Monsters” is perhaps more packed with references and inspirations than anything else I’ve ever written, and if I took the time to list them all, I’d be writing a missive as long as the story itself. This was my chance to play in a lot of my favorite sandboxes all at the same time, and as a result, I think it’s one of the most “me” things I’ve ever done. Like the majority of my stories, it owes a big debt to Mike Mignola, though this time it’s less in the content, I think, than in the style of plotting I employed. I hope that the beats of this story would feel right at home in a Hellboy comic, though Hellboy would have handled the situation very differently than poor, passive Kirby Marsh III.
AFTERWORD & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I watch a lot of movies. If you read through the rest of the book before getting here, that probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise. While I was working on assembling the manuscript for this collection, I happened to watch the 1988 Anthony Hickox film Waxwork and noticed that it was dedicated to: “Hammer, Argento, Romero, Dante, Landis, Spielberg, Wells, Carpenter, Mum and Dad, and many more…” That could easily have been the dedication for this book, if I hadn’t already settled on the one that you saw at the front.
Movies have always worked themselves into my imagination and my stories in a lot of ways, some that I’m probably not even aware of. I think a couple of early experiences with horror movies shaped my storytelling pretty profoundly. One I already talked about in the author’s notes of “The Murders on Morgue Street,” paging through books full of evocative, black-and-white stills from old monster movies and trying to imagine the movie in my head. The other is that, when I was a kid, we got a local station that showed monster movies—complete with a horror host, unless my memory is playing tricks on me—on Saturday mornings. So when other kids my age were watching cartoons, I watched Squirm and Willard and The Food of the Gods and about a jillion Godzilla movies.
When I started assembling this collection, I knew that it was going to consist almost entirely of stories that dealt with cinema, either head-on or obliquely. I already had the quote from Targets chosen as my epigram, and I knew that I wanted to take the reader through a kind of exploration of the ways that horror—especially in movies—had changed over the years. So the earliest stories in this book are inspired by silent horror films and the black-and-white monster movies of the �
��30s, while we gradually make our way through Gialli and many others before winding up in the present day, with found footage and self-awareness and the ubiquity of movies about ghosts. And then there’s the closing novelette, which is a kind of microcosm of the rest of the book, pulling in influences from every era of horror cinema into one big monster mash.
While putting the table of contents together, though, another theme appeared to me, one that I hadn’t expected. Call it “Death, and What Comes After.” Not necessarily in the form of an afterlife, per se, but in the legacies, mysteries, and regrets that are left behind when someone passes away. In virtually every story in this collection there has been a death—or, in a couple of cases, something very like a death—and the protagonists are those who remain behind, dealing with the fallout.
This wasn’t the result of any conscious decision on my part. It wasn’t even something I noticed until I had all the stories gathered in one place. But it permeates just about every story that I wrote during this period. Maybe it’s because my wife had lost someone very close to her before the earliest of these stories were written, and she lost another family member as the collection was nearing completion. Or maybe it’s because my own father, with whom I’ve never had an easy relationship, was teetering on the brink during the writing of most of these stories, and he finally passed away just after I finished the first draft of this manuscript.
I’ve never been someone who was much troubled by the thought of my own mortality, but seeing the impact of death—or its imminence—on those who remain behind left an indelible mark on me and my fiction.
***
I sold this collection to Ross Lockhart’s Word Horde imprint at the 2014 H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, which seems appropriate. When it comes time to thank people for their role in helping to usher this book into existence, he’ll have to be at the top of my list. He’s been a vocal champion of my work ever since “Black Hill” (from my previous collection) first appeared in The Book of Cthulhu 2, and not only is he the publisher for this volume, but he also previously published three of the stories contained herein.
I also need to extend my gratitude to John Langan for his introduction, and to Nick Gucker for taking on the art duties, as well as everyone who read this collection or any of these stories in manuscript form and provided feedback, blurbs, or simple enthusiasm and moral support.
Writing is often a lonely occupation, but the fact of the matter is that an inordinate number of people go into helping a book make it from conception to print. There’s no way I could ever thank everyone who deserves it, but I’d be hugely remiss not to mention a few. Thanks to Jeff Owens for giving me the job at the video store where I worked through the end of college and a little beyond, and to Tim Canton, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Paula Stiles for providing forums for me to occasionally ramble about horror movies. Thanks to Jay, Steve, Bear, Jeremy, Sean, and Jason, for not only being my friends and talking shop, but for watching more ridiculous movies with me than probably anyone else around. And thanks of course to my eternally supportive wife Grace, who may not share my affection for bad monster movies, but has seemingly infinite patience for me and my obsessions.
I’ve been extremely lucky as a writer and have gotten to work with a lot of really great people over the years, so thanks also to everyone who originally published one of the stories in this collection—or anything else I’ve ever done. Thanks to the guys at Valancourt Books, and to everybody at Privateer Press, current and past, most especially Simon, Aeryn, Mike, Matt, Darla, and Doug.
Finally, thanks to anyone and everyone who ever made a crappy monster movie—or who sat through one with me—without you guys, I’d just be sitting alone in the dark. And last of all, before those final credits roll, thanks to you, dear eternal reader. Be sure to dim the lights before the next feature starts.
Titles Available from Word Horde
Tales of Jack the Ripper
an anthology edited by Ross E. Lockhart
We Leave Together
a Dogsland novel by J. M. McDermott
The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the
Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron
an anthology edited by Ross E. Lockhart and Justin Steele
Vermilion
a novel by Molly Tanzer
Giallo Fantastique
an anthology edited by Ross E. Lockhart
Mr. Suicide
a novel by Nicole Cushing
Cthulhu Fhtagn!
an anthology edited by Ross E. Lockhart
Painted Monsters
a collection by Orrin Grey
Furnace: Stories (February 2016)
a collection by Livia Llewellyn
Ask for Word Horde books by name at your favorite bookseller.
Or order online at www.WordHorde.com
About the Author:
Orrin Grey is a skeleton who likes monsters, as well as a writer, editor, and amateur film scholar who was born on the night before Halloween. Painted Monsters is his second collection of weird stories. His writing on film has appeared in places like Strange Horizons and Clarkesworld, and he writes a regular column on vintage horror cinema for Innsmouth Free Press. You can find him online at orringrey.com.