Horror Show (23 page)

The thing did not seem interested in any of them and made no threatening advances. Landis, his mind racing with the intoxication of fear, had time to consider the magnitude of the developed film.

He glanced at Chet.
Good man
, he thought.
He's rolling and he'll keep rolling until I tell him to stop. Good. That's the way to go. We'll ride this thing out and in the end have some of the most incredible celluloid footage ever exposed to light
.

He considered what he would ultimately do with it. He could always build a movie around it, that was no problem. Then, he began to see it as a documentary,
Devila's Mysteries from the Grave
. Whatever. The exposed film would be dynamite, and he knew it. Devila had been right.

He looked at her now, the snake head twisting grotesquely on the long neck, black tongue blinking in and out of her mouth, and wondered what would happen. Is this the kind of thing people recovered from?

Landis was fascinated.

He stayed away from the thing as it circumnavigated the room. At one point it passed precariously close to the camera tripod, and Chet nearly fell back, taking the camera with him. José gained enough confidence to jump to his feet and run screaming from the room. Landis kept moving, rotating away from the creature, staying a fixed distance from it as it prowled the room.

Albert's estimation that the
climb up the high-tension structure would be a spiritual journey was not wrong. The flashbacks to his childhood that had begun to pull at his memory when he was on the ground continued. They grew stronger and more poignant as he gained altitude.

Memories dominated his already-reeling brain. He no longer had to concentrate on not thinking about the demon, the quest upward, or his own fate. He was overwhelmed by a flood of emotional recollections. Each one seemed to leave a different imprint on his heart; each one seemed important, indispensable. Each one seemed to aim him, focus him, give him pause for inspiration. He knew what he was doing was right and every passing chapter of his life, replayed now on the cinematic panorama of his soul, reinforced that understanding.

Albert was undergoing a massive spiritual catharsis. Canonized by each level he traversed, his inner voices were fairly shouting and singing the changes through.

It was as if every event in his life, every thought and theism, had been nothing but a preamble to this moment. He shook, sometimes with tears, sometimes with laughter, as he climbed. Forgetting the height and the dangers above and below, Albert gained his wisdom one ladder rung at a time. He pushed on, higher, and eventually forgot who he was.

The sparking cable was almost parallel with him now, and ten feet out to his left. To reach it, he would have to shinny out across a narrow beam, a hundred feet above the ground. Albert did not consider the risk, and, without thinking, he stepped out onto the beam. He squatted and flexed his knees so he could reach down and grip the beam with his hands if he lost balance, and began to edge, crablike, away from the support girder.

The surface of the beam was wet and slick with an oily grit. It was six inches wide, hardly width enough to keep his balance under the best of conditions. He moved sideways, sliding one foot along at a time, inching his body laterally on the narrow beam. It was difficult and uncomfortable. He moved slowly out over the open space with the wind at his back.

Albert's feet slipped several times as he went, but after a moment of panic, he was able to retain his footing and continue.

The wind sang through the lattice of beams and girders, blowing his hair into his face, but he dared not wipe it away. To take one hand away from the task at hand would be foolhardy and dangerous. He fought against his natural inclinations and fears. He fought against them every inch of the way, with a tenacity he would have thought impossible a few short days ago.

The cable spit with a violence that almost knocked Albert off the beam. It crackled and sparked as the wind blew it wildly into the tangle of wires. The smell of burned insulation was stronger. The beam he walked on tingled slightly. Albert realized that some of the current that pulsed through the severed cable must be leaking onto the support beam beneath him. He shook it off and continued.

This is it
, he thought.
The end is in sight. Just keep cool and all will be fine. Just a few more feet and I'll be there
.

Albert glanced down. The ground spun crazily below him as the terrible symptoms of vertigo played with his mind. He steadied himself on the beam, occasionally squatting lower and touching it with his hands. His palm pressed against the cold grit and he felt the tingle of electricity, like ants, invading his skin. The great power of the electricity in such close proximity seemed to throb through him. The electromagnetic field he was now within caused the hair on his head to stand up.

Don't look down
, he told himself.
Just keep going
. His front heel slipped, and he fought to maintain control. For a moment he thought he was going to fall, and fright exploded in his chest with a flurry of heartbeats. He slipped and the beam came up and hit him squarely between the legs. Pain sent stars across his eyes. He gritted his teeth and endured it. He wrapped himself around the beam tightly, using both arms and legs. He was now curled around it like a giant tree sloth.

He realized he was crying. His breath came in gulps. He was losing it.

Carefully, he raised himself back up to a standing position. The muscles in his thighs began to spasm involuntarily, but he clenched his teeth and kept going.

The snake demon stopped
. It looked at the ceiling and straightened its neck. The room became silent, as if a blanket of snow had been thrown over it. The whir of the camera was audible, and Landis was glad to hear it. That meant that he was still in business. Chet, shaken and pale, continued to stand by his post.

Then, without foreshadowing, the snake began to dematerialize. Devila's features returned. The coils fell away, and Landis got the distinct impression that the snake was being drawn by something; that something far off had diverted its attention and it was no longer interested in what was happening in this little room.

He got one last look at the face of the thing before Devila reemerged from under its diabolical embrace. It was a look that Landis would never forget. Half-woman, half-demon, it seemed neither. It made eye contact with him just before it faded, and the chill that coursed down Landis's back caused his whole body to shudder uncontrollably.

Then it was gone, and Devila was lying on the floor.

Albert Beaumond was ready
to be purified. It had taken him his entire life to reach this point. The time was now upon him, and he looked up into the gathering raindrops with a mystical zeal that transfigured him. The power cable flashed, sparks danced into the wind, and the sound crackled.

He took a deep breath, centered himself, and took one last look at the world around him. Intuitively he knew that the serpent was coming. He knew that it was loose, no longer a prisoner of the circle of flame. There was no time left.

He did this for Thora as much as for himself. He could not bear another possession. His sanity hung by a thread, but in that second of complete and utter surrender, as he reached out, he was as sane and clearheaded as any man had ever been.

His fingers moved toward the flashing cable end. He smiled with contentment.

The wind blew it just out of his reach. It swung out over the concrete riverbed like a sparkler on a string. Albert felt a hissing behind him. The back of his neck crackled with tension. The serpent was back!

He was too late!

Albert cried out in desperation. He could feel the power sweeping into him, invading his brain. The raping of his soul had begun again and the terrible certainty that this time it was for good. The end had begun for Albert Beaumond just as a new era was unfolding. The irony made him weep spontaneously.

The wind blew the flashing end back toward him and Albert, driven as he had never been in his life, reached out and grasped it.

Cleanse me
, he prayed.

Cleanse me and destroy this parasite!

The power, thousands of
volts of pure, clean electricity, jumped through his body in the blink of an eye. Albert had no time to scream. The pain was nil.

It all happened so fast that he had no time to react physically in any way. Only his soul knew what had happened. He prayed to God, the same God he had denied all his life. Just like the atheist in a crashing plane, he prayed.

Albert no longer disbelieved. He had proven the existence of God by proving the existence of the devil.

Cleanse me
.

Purify me
.

His body, frozen by the massive amount of current running through it, clung to the live end of the power line. Flesh began to fry almost immediately. Smoke curled away from the palms of his hands, where the skin was in contact with the juice.

Albert convulsed. He jerked spasmodically, his body dancing to the tune of unimaginable electric power. He lost contact with the beam and began to fall. His hands tore away from the power line, leaving the skin of his palms behind, where it adhered to cook further in the unrelenting current. He was dead long before he hit the concrete drainage ditch.

The serpent fell with him.

Trapped in Albert's body as it died, the serpent cursed and writhed.

Cleanse me
.

He lay in the
cement creek bed facing upward, his mouth and eyes open. Rain began to fall on his face, the droplets growing in size and number.

17

Jonathon Luboff looked dead on camera. His skin was pasty white, and the dark circles under his eyes were impossible to hide. Even with liberal amounts of theatrical makeup, the old man looked worse than the mock-up cadavers Buzzy had created for the movie.

His eyes, however, were downright frightening. They held the camera like two burning orbs, hypnotic and unfathomable. You either stared into them and were sucked down, or you looked away. There was no middle ground.

Landis had managed to keep Luboff off drugs for the two days they were shooting in Landis's house. Not completely off drugs, of course, but just this side of dreamsville. Luboff never nodded out on the set, and that, to many who knew him, was an accomplishment.

Tad Kingston struggled. His lines were always kept short. In any given scene, he was never allowed more than a few sentences of dialogue. Even then, he often needed cue cards. Luboff helped him when he could, but Tad was thick as a brick.

In the end, Landis resorted to intimidation to keep both his stars in line. At the pace he worked, if you didn't know your lines, you wound up looking like a fool. Landis simply left mistakes in, unless they were monumental, and the actor had to endure watching himself immortalized on the big screen that way. It could be embarrassing.

If you looked bad in a Landis Woodley production,
nobody
would hire you. Ever. Just the fact that you worked with Woodley would have been the kiss of death to most, and that alone could keep you out of the mainstream for life. It happened more than once.

Many an actor, desperate for money, had accepted the Woodley “one-way ticket to Palookaville” (as Buzzy called it). For his two stars, Jonathon Luboff and Tad Kingston, it didn't matter. They were both going nowhere fast. One a dying shooting star, on its last crash through the atmosphere, destined to burn out long before it hit the ground, and the other a cheap skyrocket, hopelessly trying to compete with real celestial bodies.

“All right!” Landis barked through his bullhorn. “Shut up! Everybody, shut up! Now, here's what we're gonna do. First, we're gonna reshoot scene forty-seven. Kingston, learn your lines, you nutski! You fuck this up one more time and you're off the picture, got it? Okay, second, we get the pickup shots we need here, reaction shots from Jonathon, uhm … the monster sequence, front and back, then we tear down and get ready for scenes sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, and, uhm … twenty four. While we're changing the lights over, the cast can grab a sandwich. Grips, lights, camera, script, and makeup don't get to eat yet. Any questions? Okay, let's go, we're running behind here. We've got to pick up the pace!”

There was grumbling, but nobody dared speak out. After all, this was Landis's movie; he was in charge. He was unorthodox and unpleasant, but every person there needed the work. Landis specialized in hiring people who, for one reason or another, didn't fit anywhere else. If he pushed them too hard, it was tough luck. How else could you make a feature-length movie in six days?

Assistant cameraman and key grip Bob Avelene, Chet's right-hand man, tapped Landis's shoulder. Landis looked up from his clipboard, the frown permanently fixed on his face. “Yeah?”

“Mr. Woodley,” the young man said, obviously nervous, “Chet says he needs a sandwich. He said he's tired and hungry; he said you'd know what he meant.”

“Yeah, yeah. I know,” Landis answered impatiently. “Here, give him this.” He placed a small packet of white pills in Bob's hand without a change of facial expression. “That's the cure for tired and hungry.”

The kid looked at the pills, a little shocked, and nodded. “Yes, sir,” he mumbled, and went shuffling back to where Chet was repositioning his camera.

Landis often handed out Benzedrine to his crew in an effort to make a deadline. The bennies filled two needs—you worked faster and longer, and you didn't eat. To Landis, that was money in the bank.

His mind kept returning to the incredible scene he and Chet had witnessed and filmed the night before. He mulled his options. The piece of film was spectacular, no question about that. He'd removed it from the camera and placed it in the locked storage cabinet in the projection room. It was in there among his master copies and important prints. As the day's shoot progressed he couldn't help but think about how he was going to handle it.