Horror Show (15 page)

Neil ran his hands through his hair. “It's halfway through at this point. I think you're free to kill him off if you want.”

Landis smiled. “No, I want him to live. Look, Neil, there's two reasons for it. One is I'm paying that chump Kingston enough money where he should be in every fuckin' scene, and two is if he dies halfway through, the teenagers will be turned off. Believe it or not, Tad draws the kids into the theaters. If the word gets out that he dies halfway through, the door goes down.”

Neil stared at the page in his hands. “You can't be serious. I wrote this scene exactly the way you asked me to. Kingston dies, the sheriff gets suspicious and comes after the doctor. It's a crucial plot point. How else is the sheriff gonna start investigating the doctor?” Exasperation colored his voice. On certain words he sounded almost whiny. Landis let him finish and waved his hand in the air, as if shooing away a fly.

“Nope, that's not gonna work. We'll have to change it.”

“But—”

“No buts. Change it!”

Neil looked dejected, as if he'd been chastised by the teacher in front of the whole class. Landis caught his look and said, “Let me explain something to you, Neil. You never kill the hero, and in this movie, Tad's the hero. It turns people off. Now, if you heard me say that, it must have been a misunderstanding, because I never, ever kill the hero. It gives people hope, it makes them feel good about themselves, at least for the first seventy minutes.”

Neil laughed. “This is a movie about cadavers! Dead bodies! It's not
Rebel Without A Cause
, and that's Tad Kingston up there on the screen, not James Dean. Nobody's gonna give a shit if he dies!”

Landis looked at Neil, his eyebrow cocked. “Not true to a teenager. You judge an actor by his hair, and I know for a fact that Tad's hair is better than James Dean's. I've surveyed it!” Landis paused, then frowned. “Why are you arguing with me? That's not like you, Neil!”

“This script has got my name on it too, you know.”

Landis raised his voice, “Hey! I don't give a fuck if it's Ernest Hemingway's name. This is
my
movie, and what I say goes!”

Neil became quiet. His head bowed slightly and he let the page drop from his fingers. Landis put his hand on Neil's shoulder and said, “What's the problem, Neil?”

Neil looked at Landis. “I don't know,” he mumbled. “It's Buzzy and Luboff. They're so … so screwed up, and they're trying to take us down with them. It makes me mad, I guess. I want this movie to make it. Then I see those two doing their best to fuck everything up, and it makes me mad that you just let it happen.”

Landis leaned back and scratched his head. He had a precious expression on his face, one that Neil had never seen before. Bemused, a little beatific around the edges.

“Cool it, Neil. I know what I'm doing. This movie is going to be just fine. As far as the goon squad goes”—he hooked his thumb back in the direction of the sliding doors—“let me deal with them, and you just worry about the rewrites.”

Neil shook his head. “I don't know—”

“You're a damn good writer, Neil! But, nobody will hire you 'cause you dress like a woman. But I did, didn't I? The way you dress don't mean shit to me. You're fast and you're affordable—notice I didn't say ‘cheap'—and I value your work.

“You could clean up in this town, but you're a goddamn fruitcake! Was that a conscious decision?” He paused, not expecting an answer, then forged ahead, “You could get a crew cut, wear a gray suit, loss butt, and wind up working for Walt Disney if you wanted.

“I'm the only one who hires you the way you are, fishnet stockings and all.” He grinned; Neil did too. “Now, Buzzy is the same way, except he's an asshole, and Luboff's a junkie. What can I do about it? Each one contributes what they can, in their own way. I try to give them all a chance. Can you dig that?”

Neil nodded, “Yeah, I can dig it.”

“Okay, then, let's get to work. I have a million changes I want to make in this script, starting with Tad not getting killed.”

Behind them, the sound of the sliding door opening caught their attention. Buzzy reentered the house.

Neil turned around just in time to see Buzzy walk into the kitchen. He tensed, preparing himself for another fight. Buzzy walked toward him, a hangdog expression still dripping off his face.

Neil started to speak, “If you're here to—”

Buzzy cut him off. “I'm here to apologize, man.”

Nobody spoke for a moment. Buzzy stood there, his hair askew. The black eye looked painful.

Buzzy's voice rumbled. The vocal cords, burned by booze and cigarettes, were rough, texturing the words as he spoke. “I'm sorry, it was the booze talkin'. I've been a jerk …”

Landis laughed. “You can say that again.”

Buzzy shot him a look, and in that moment Landis could see the terrible pain in the man's eyes. Buzzy coughed and looked away.

“Don't agree so fast, okay? Christ, it's hard enough without having you guys up my butt. I just want to apologize to both of you. It's been pretty rough around here for me lately, and I shouldn't take it out on you.”

Neil and Landis looked at each other.

“Besides, for a guy dressed as a girl, you pack quite a punch,” Buzzy finished.

Neil smiled and put his hand out. Buzzy shook it tightly, and the two men hugged.

“Sit down, Buzz,” Landis said, “I want you to hear this, too. I'm making some major changes in the script.”

Buzzy pulled up a chair and sat down.

“I've been doing some thinking about this,” Landis continued. “This movie is a parable of my life, of all our lives, when you think about it.” He looked at the other two. “You follow me?”

Neil shook his head, so did Buzzy. “Explain.”

“Well, it's like this,” Landis began.

10

The room felt cold, even though the candles created tiny dots of heat. Albert Beaumond lay on the hardwood floor holding his head.

“Are you all right, Albert?” Devila knelt over him and asked.

Albert shook his head. A trickle of blood oozed from the side of his mouth. He coughed, spraying pink. “What? What happened?”

Devila helped Albert into a sitting position. “You were … I'm not sure how to say it, you were possessed. That thing you summoned covered you, its head became your head, its body became your body.”

His eyes were glazed, unfocused. “What's that smell?” Albert sniffed the air.

“Snake spit, I think. Jesus, I can't put it into words … it was horrible. The most horrible thing I've ever seen.”

Albert's head rolled. Devila touched his brow and found it burning. “You saw it?”

“Saw it? Jesus, yes. It hovered in the air for a minute, I can't describe it, it was horrible. Then it came down over you and … and it
became
you. Albert, I'm scared. That thing was evil. You shouldn't be fooling around with something like that. I could sense the power of it. God, it was like a bad dream.” She looked into his glassy, frightened eyes and put her hand on his shoulder. “Never again, okay? Never again.”

Albert coughed again, shook his head, took a few deep breaths, and said, “It took over my body.”

Devila nodded vigorously. “It licked me with its disgusting, slimy tongue. I thought it was going to kill me. Were you aware of anything?”

“I didn't feel a thing, physically, except a shock when it came in and went out. Mentally, though, I feel like I've been raped. I sensed it taking over my body, it shared its mind with me. I could feel it in there like a goddamn parasite. Jesus, it was unbelievable. I wasn't in control of
me
anymore—
it
was. I was powerless inside my own body.”

He looked at her again and his face clouded over. The wrinkles on his brow were as deep and crooked as cracks in a sidewalk. “I shared my brain with it,” he said with a shudder, “and I could read its thoughts for a split second before it stopped me. I got the feeling that it didn't want me to see inside there.

“Once it knew I was able to read its consciousness, it closed that part of my brain off like a light switch. But in that one split second, Jesus Christ, it revealed a lot to me.”

Devila smoothed his hair, brushing it off his face, mothering him. “Like what?”

Albert struggled to one knee and felt his head. The rubbery feeling and dizziness that had overwhelmed him earlier had begun to subside. He could almost stand.

“Help me up,” he said in a whispery, shaken voice.

Devila supported his arm as he worked his way to his feet and stood unsteadily. His mind still reeled at the invasion. Everything hurt; every muscle in his body had been tensed when that thing was in charge. Adrenaline had been pumping at an unbelievable rate.

But, as spent as his body was, it was the mental strain that hurt the most. Albert could not stop thinking, reliving that awful moment when his mind and the consciousness of the demon were joined.

He shivered involuntarily.

During that moment of possession, when the thing entered him and gave him its brief glimpse of hell, Albert knew he had made a grave mistake. In the inky blackness that overwhelmed Albert, the background against which the thing emerged, he could sense that the demon knew exactly where it was. It knew that it was no longer deep in the jungle among ignorant, savage people. It knew that it had materialized in a modern city, teeming with sophisticated beings, electric with possibilities. It knew it finally had a host it could use to its advantage. And it was happy. It was ecstatic.

Albert could also feel the malice in its cold heart. He could sense it measuring him and gauging the new world into which it had been, with Albert's help, admitted.

He could feel the pressing darkness, the timeless void from which it came, and knew in a heartbeat that it was ancient beyond man's understanding. It had been pent-up, controlled, and frustrated for too long. Now, excited at the prospect of freedom, of seeking destiny and power in this bold new century, it rejoiced.

Albert saw the evil of its desires and knew that misery and submission awaited him and his daughter as long as they were forced to serve this cruel master.

For mankind, worse.

What Albert had glimpsed, ever so briefly, was hell.

Not the understandable, classical hell of Dante—no, this was a new hell, built on true suffering and real destruction. It was the end of nature, the rise of death and chaos, the submission of man as a race.

In Albert, it had learned everything about our culture. It had seen man's inhumanity to man, man's own damnation, weakness, and greed. In that instantaneous linking of their minds, it sucked every bit of knowledge in Albert's memory.

So it knew exactly how to exploit all these things. The Serpent Demon had been unchanged for thousands of years. It waited and watched, as patient as the stars. While man, for all his technology and ideology, was the same slimy rock crawler he had always been. Thousands of years were just a blink. The species never changed.

That pleased the demon.

Albert knew that, because of him, the end was near. The fate of humanity had just slipped through his fingers. In that moment, the last few tenuous strands of Albert's sanity snapped.

At Landis Woodley's mansion
, the light slanted through the kitchen as the sun's angle shifted. It cut interesting shafts through the smoke from Buzzy's cigarette.

“The movie's got to have a point,” protested Neil. He'd been hunched over the typewriter with his arms folded over the roller, his head down. Now he raised it, the indentations of the keys on his forehead.

“No, it doesn't. It doesn't have to have anything,” Landis snapped back. “Think about it. The point is—it has no point.”

Neil rubbed his face. Today he was dressed in a simple black dress. “Aw shit, Landis. Speak English.”

“Our only job is to shock the moviegoer. That's it, just shock his ass. My philosophy of shock is that it's got to be unexpected, okay? It doesn't necessarily have to have a rhyme or reason; it just happens. The more unexpected it is, the higher they jump.” He leaned back, smiled, and pointed his finger at the ceiling, holding it up as if to say “number one.” It gathered the attentions of Buzzy and Neil effectively, and they stared at him, listening hard. “Shock is the total reversal of polarity in a situation,” he said.

Buzzy shook his head. “Christ, you're gettin' kind of deep for me, Woody. What's all this shit about ‘reversal of polarity'?”

Neil swept the hair back from his face, revealing the drying, chalky layer of thick makeup that he constantly applied to hide his whiskers. As a writer, he knew what Landis was driving at, but he was genuinely surprised at the man's artistic approach to this particular project. Landis intended for
Cadaver
to be his masterpiece. Usually it was wham-bam, thank you, ma'am.

Neil always kept a paperback dictionary in his pocketbook for situations just like this. Whipping it out, he quickly flipped to the esses and found the appropriate definition for “shock.” “The dictionary says: ‘to strike with surprise, terror, horror, or disgust.'”

Landis slapped the table, causing the coffee to jump and splatter.

“That's us! We're shockers!”

Buzzy yawned. “So what's that got to do with us?” he asked.

“Everything,” Landis replied, “Every goddamn thing! That's exactly the way I feel about horror movies.”

“Huh?” Buzzy squinted through his black eye.

“What's the reason for the cadavers coming to life? Is it evil scientific experiments? Black magic? Voodoo? Atomic radiation? No! There is no explanation! That's the beauty of it! It just happens. Who cares why? The important thing is that the cadavers start moving, there is no explanation. When they start killing people, it really doesn't matter how it got started, does it? No! It's happening. That's all you need to know. It's better not to explain. Let the people draw their own conclusions. All I'm concerned with is the action, not the explanation. The truth is, there is no answer to the mystery of why the cadavers come to life … because life has no answers.”