THE MADNESS OF DR. CALIGARI

by Dennis Weiler

  Most of the time, the Corpse didn’t move unless he was being told to. And when he did, it was in character; creeping, somnambulant steps, his hands reaching out like film that had been slowed way down. But once we had the door to the sound stage open and a bird got in. The various crewmen were discussing how we were going to go about catching it, and if it was even a viable option to just let it fly around up there, when all of a sudden it dipped down and the Corpse’s hand darted out, so fast that I didn’t even see it move, but then he was holding the bird’s crushed body in his palm, dead, and handing it almost gently over to Dr. Garlic, who took it away and, I supposed at the time, threw it in the trash, though now I wonder.

  That was back at the beginning, in the first days of shooting, when the worst things that had happened were lights blowing out, sets falling down, props getting lost. Before things got really bad. Before people started to go missing, to turn up dead.

  First, some people just didn’t show up for work. Extras, carpenters, nobody who couldn’t be replaced. Then one of the lighting guys was found murdered, his body in an alley near the back lot, his head twisted almost all the way around, chunks taken out of his arms and legs, like bite marks from human teeth. I got all that from a reporter who came down to the scene and was willing to talk to me because I was there representing Corny.

  The police called it a “random slaying,” but they placed a couple of officers outside the studio for the next few days, during which nothing sensational happened. Then, after the officers had been pulled off because of a sex murder up in the hills, one of the native girls in her grass skirt went missing between takes. No body this time, just no girl. The producer grilled the other girls—pacing in front of them like a Baron accusing his staff of stealing the good silver, his voice still, strangely, never rising—while they cast their eyes down and shuffled their bare feet on the floor of the sound stage, but none of them knew what had happened to her, or if they did, they didn’t say.

  “She liked this job,” one of them told me later. “She wouldn’a jus’ left.”

  There was talk, after that, of closing the picture down, striking the sets, sending everyone home. We were already over schedule and over budget anyway, but the producer was having none of it. He exhorted us all that “the show must go on” and, when that didn’t achieve the desired effect, reminded us that we were all still under contract, and that there would be penalties if we broke it. Dr. Garlic stood beside him, his little, round shadow, the light glinting off his glasses.

  That night, Corny talked about quitting anyway, penalties be damned. “There’s something weird going on in that studio,” he said from the couch of his hotel room while I tried to type at the desk near the window. My room was in another hotel, but I usually worked in his, even though I had to come and go by the back stairs, because the view was nicer, and there was room service.

  “How would you know?” I asked. “You’ve never been to Hollywood before, and you spend most of the day drunk.”

  “Hell,” he replied, “I’m drunk now. But you don’t have to be sober—or experienced—to know when things aren’t right. You’re a smart girl, you can’t tell me that you haven’t noticed it, too.”

  He was right, of course. The whole production had been screwy from the word go. But this was my break, such as it was, and I would be damned if I was going to throw it away because the movie was jinxed, or even because of a few dead bodies, or a few disappearances. The world was a dangerous place, and there hadn’t been a moment from the day I was too big to sit on my momma’s knee that I had ever felt completely safe. I didn’t feel a whole lot less secure on a cursed sound stage than I did walking down the street any given day of the week.

  “What I know,” I told him, “is that the pay has always been steady, and you’re not exactly cranking out your next masterpiece. Besides, we’ve got another week-and-a-half of this, tops, and then we’re done.”

  “Done done,” he replied, his voice beginning what I had come to recognize as the slow slide into drink-induced slumber, “or on to the next Blackstone picture?”

  “Tell you what, we can decide that when the time comes. How’s that for a compromise?”

  But the only answer I got was the sound of Corny quietly beginning to snore.

  ***

  Of course, that wasn’t how things worked out. We were still two days behind schedule—so at least four out from wrapping production—when the next tragedy occurred. This time it was after filming had ended for the day, but not everyone had yet gone home. Corny was in The Bodega, and I was sitting at a desk near the food services table making adjustments to the day’s notes. Other people were wandering to and fro in the mostly dark sound stage, doing things that didn’t mean much to me, when suddenly a scream rang out. “Rang out,” that’s how I’d have written it, anyway. What it did more was just suddenly cut the air—like a needle driven through your eardrum—and then just as suddenly die.

  I jumped up, and the crew members who were coiling cables and moving lights stopped what they were doing and looked around, squinting into every shadowy corner of the big, flat sets. And then the director was there, stumbling out of the dark, his eyes wide and glassy, his bearded mouth hanging slack, his hands covered in blood.

  One of the crewmen hit him in the head with something that made a clank, and he went down like a sack of potatoes and didn’t get back up. He died on the way to the hospital, without ever regaining consciousness, but nobody blamed the crewman much, because in the shadows behind the set, from where the director had stumbled, they found the body of another one of the native girls, her head crushed as if in a vice, chunks of meat cut from her thigh and arm and breast.

  They did close us down then, of course, though the producer kept talking about finding another director, getting the cameras rolling again, right up until the moment he hanged himself in his house up in the hills. And that should have been the end of it, right? Killer caught, case closed. Corny should have gone back to living it up in Frisco ‘til his publisher finally cut him off, I should have gone back to ghost-writing whatever gigs I could get over the mail where nobody had to know my real name or see my complexion, or we should both have just cooled our heels and waited to see if there was ever another Blackstone movie that came our way.

  So why did I drag the both of us out into the warm Hollywood night and back to the studio, Corny trailing behind me with a flask in his hand “for courage”? Because I had something that writers are supposed to have but that Corny lacked: curiosity. Of course, he would have claimed otherwise. “I have plenty of curiosity,” he would have said, “I just have more self-preservation.” Which was maybe true.

  I went back because Corny had been right in his hotel room a few nights before. There was something very wrong going on at that studio, and while before I had been content to ignore it so long as the paycheck kept coming and one day there’d be a movie with, if not my name on it, then my dialogue on the actors’ lips, now that it was over, I needed to know what it had really been. The director was a pudgy, bearded guy with hands softer than my nana’s, and I’d have believed her capable of crushing a woman’s skull before I’d believe it of him.

  So what did it come down to? A few people knocked off who nobody cared about, another cheapie monster movie shut down, and a ready-made killer who had the added bonus of already being dead, so nobody had to do any paperwork. Everyone was satisfied, but not me, and, to his credit, Corny didn’t argue when I told him what we were going to do, or try to talk me into leaving it alone, even though he’d been ready to pull up anchor when things were a lot less hairy.

  “Who else is going to do it?” he replied, when I asked him why he agreed to come with me.

  The place was dark when we arrived, not even any police left milling around, because as far as they were concerned the case was closed, the threat over. But we weren’t the first ones there. Inside, the sound stage was much as
we had left it, the sets still up, the lights, though extinguished now, still looming on their stands. What had seemed creaky and fake while we were filming took on new potency in the dark. The foam gravestones made blocky black shadows through which we had to pick our way, the fake trees that jutted up like twisted wire formed skeletal hands that seemed to reach for us.

  We had brought flashlights, but it turned out that we didn’t need them. While the sound stage was dark, a light still burned at the far side, within the partitioned-off corner that we had called the Corpse’s dressing room. It was toward that light that we turned our steps, and by its illumination that we picked our way between jagged tombstones and over strewn-out cables.

  From inside we could hear a voice—the familiar accent of Dr. Garlic, talking to himself, or to someone who remained silent. The light spilled out from around the hastily-constructed wooden walls, beneath the makeshift room’s one door. The voice was saying, “Now we will have to move on. I had hoped that it would be longer this time—such a fine place to work, such a fine place to start again—but now we will have to go elsewhere, though maybe not far. This town, it seems so perfect for us. Its memory so short, its eyes always turned toward the lights, never looking to the shadows.”

  The door wasn’t locked. Was, in fact, ajar. Inside the room was bare, vacant, just boards painted white and not a stitch of furniture save for a table along the far wall and the long, rectangular box that was the Corpse’s coffin in the movie. The Corpse stood in the box, stiff and straight, his arms crossed over his chest, his eyes closed. Dr. Garlic stooped over the table, where he fidgeted with something, stuffing it into a black patent leather doctor’s bag.

  I could feel Corny standing over my shoulder, looking past me into the room, trying to make some sense of what we were seeing, when Dr. Garlic moved just enough for us to see what was on the table—the smear of blood, the human heart. The flask dropped from Corny’s hand and rang against the floor, and Dr. Garlic turned to follow the sound, and there he was—small, round, harmless Dr. Garlic—his mouth all smeared with blood.

  “So you returned!” he said, genuine pleasure in his voice, his grotesquely rouged mouth ticking up into a wide smile. “I was afraid that we would have to leave without saying goodbye, but no, here you are, and now we have one more job to do, don’t we, my friend?” And the Corpse opened its eyes, and it uncrossed its arms, and it took one step forward, lumbering, somnambulant, as it had always been on camera, but I remembered the speed of its hand when it snatched the bird, and I shoved the door shut, put my shoulder against it.

  “Get something,” I told Corny, without looking to see that he understood, that he was obeying. On the other side of the door I felt a sudden weight, a thud like a battering ram, like the impact of a horse. My feet slid backward an inch, two. And then Corny was back with one of the klieg lights, which he jammed against the door to make a brace.

  “Help me get a camera next,” he said, and I nodded, remembering how heavy the big cameras were. Behind us the metal pole of the light bent with a shriek.

  As we moved, I realized that Dr. Garlic was still talking, his small voice growing louder, to be sure that we could hear it from inside. “I learned much from Herr Mesmer, from Mr. Seabrook, and I taught them much, as well, but they wanted to go only so far. Mr. Seabrook, at least, he was willing to taste, but he could not bring himself to take that next step. And yet I have outlived them both, and I will outlive the both of you. Stop struggling now, and perhaps you may learn something yet, before you help me to move ahead.”

  I’m sure he said more, but we drowned it out with the screeching of metal on concrete as we pushed the camera against the door, and then another light, and then what chairs we could grab. “The film canisters,” I said, gesturing to where I knew they were kept, and Corny, bless him, went to work without me having to say anything more. They still used silver nitrate film in those days. They would later phase it out because, well, it burns. And what’s more, nitrate fires are notoriously difficult to put out.

  So when Corny and I dumped every canister of finished film around the partitioned-off room and I struck a match, what happened next was pretty predictable. The Corpse had gotten through the door by then, and was making short work of the obstacles we had placed in his way, but when the fire bloomed up, he stopped in the midst of it, as though he knew, in that moment, that he was beaten. Or maybe Dr. Garlic just did. The last thing I saw as we ran for the door of the sound stage was the Corpse making his way back into the little room.

  That would have been the end, had we been filming this, instead of living it. It took the fire department until the following morning to put out the conflagration, and by the time they had there wasn’t much left of the sound stage but cinders and twisted metal beams. The paper the next day said that no lives were lost in the blaze, however. The only body the police found in the wreckage—the bones of a seven-foot giant, lying in the charred remains of an oblong box—had been dead for a very long time.

  Is that Charles May?” The voice on the telephone was reedy, refined, elderly and somehow familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it.

  “It is.”

  “This is Daniel Vernon speaking.” Now I suspected a hoax, but to what purpose? “Your name has been suggested to me as a promising young composer. I am looking for someone to write a ballet score for me.”

  It seemed unlikely, but it might just be the real thing. Sir Daniel Vernon was, or had been the country’s foremost choreographer. He had retired as director of the British National Ballet but at seventy five was still active. There were those who saw him as a figure from the past, a “spent force” but I was more than prepared to put any such prejudices aside. The year was 1983: I was young, ambitious, and had not yet had any notable success. A few pieces of mine had been aired in the concert hall, a chamber opera was being performed by semi-amateurs, a film score had been commissioned and then never used: that was the sum of my achievements since leaving the Royal College. A jumble of conflicting emotions must have robbed me of coherent speech.

  “You seem rather tongue-tied, young man.”

  “Who recommended my name to you?”

  “Why do you want to know? I am not a museum relic, you know. I am aware of what is going on.” The defensiveness surprised me. I was still young enough to think that people as famous and distinguished as Sir Daniel must be strangers to insecurity.

  “I didn’t mean to imply—”

  “Why don’t you come round to my flat and we’ll discuss it. Come for a drink this evening, about six?” And he gave me his address in Kensington Church Street.

  I had spent the rest of the day until I was to see him in an absurd fret. What should I wear? Should I bring along some scores of mine? I had no idea what to expect. On the very stroke of six I rang the bell in a narrow doorway, announced myself through gleaming brass grille of the entry phone and was buzzed up without a word. I wore the only tie that I had in my wardrobe.

  On the second landing the door of his flat, heavy with security locks, stood ajar and just behind it in the passage stood Sir Daniel.

  I had, rather absurdly, expected someone taller, but I recognised immediately the neat, compact form of one who had been a notable dancer of character roles before he became a choreographer. He wore an expensively tailored double breasted blue suit and a bow tie that matched the silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. There was a caution about these accoutrements, a lack of flamboyance that gave the impression of neatness and fastidiousness rather than dandyism. His elderly features were similarly well-composed, his silver hair sleek. He shook my hand firmly and formally and I saw his eyes traverse my tie with the faintest hint of distaste.

  “Mr May, you come most carefully upon your hour,” he said, allowing a note of mocking approval to colour his voice. I entered a corridor whose walls were smothered in pictures, many of them photos, drawings and caricatures of Sir Daniel in earli
er incarnations. On most of them the expression was the same: self-confident, but watchful, and a little constrained. He had been a good looking as a young man, but something in his look denied him real attractiveness. He showed me into a sitting room.

  It was, as I had expected, elegant: the furniture was Georgian, apart from the main suite of a sofa and two chairs upholstered in pearl grey damask. A Bechstein grand piano occupied one corner of the room; and there were more pictures, some of them valuable. I spotted a Matisse and a Braque among lesser works, mostly framed stage and costume designs. I was aware of Sir Daniel watching me as I stared at his treasures.

  “A humble little collection, but mine own,” he said. I murmured something to reassure him that I was respectfully aware of his false modesty. It seemed to be a necessary formality.

  “And what can I offer you to drink? I usually have a glass of Bollinger at this hour. Would that suit you, or does your youthful appetite crave stronger liquor?”

  I said that the Bollinger sounded fine.

  Sir Daniel raised his voice by a fraction. “Marda, my dear!”

  Almost at once a door on the other side of the room opened and a slender woman entered. She might have been in her thirties or early forties, it was hard to tell exactly. Though evidently younger, she had the same carefully preserved look as Sir Daniel. Her cheekbones were high and her dark (possibly dyed) hair was scraped back from her forehead. She was handsome in the slightly sexless way of ex-dancers. That “ex-dancer” was a conjecture of mine, but it turned out to be true.