Horror Show (24 page)

It would be a spectacular centerpiece for a movie, that much was a lock. But what kind? The documentary idea hung with him all day.
Devila's Mysteries from the Grave
had a nice ring to it. He could shoot a bunch of fake cinema vérité stuff, maybe a couple of cheap effects, a séance, a haunted house, a graveyard, the usual crap.

The thought occurred to him that he could use a lot of his own footage, stuff he had in the can. Cannibalizing his own work would save a ton of money, and who would care? The Great Romano could do his shtick. He could always trot out the old guillotine again. The money-making potential gave him a thrill every time he considered it.

Of course, with a scene like that, it would also make a hell of a horror movie. He could build a film around it, bang out a story, have Neil turn out a script in twelve hours. Devila had star potential. Maybe put her and Luboff together …

Landis decided to keep the same crew and sets he had for
Cadaver
and just shoot an extra day or two on the Devila project. It was a natural. Two movies for the price of one! That was the Woodley way!

His script girl, the ubiquitous Becky Sears (who would work for next to nothing to be close to Tad Kingston), had been trying to raise Devila on the phone all day. Landis knew she was home because he'd driven her home himself at five in the morning.

The poor girl was a wreck. Whatever it was that took possession of her last night had taken a heavy toll. There wasn't enough functioning gray matter left in her brain to order a cheeseburger. Exhausted and traumatized as she was, he had to walk her to the door like a drunk. He carried her in, unlocked her door, and tucked her in bed. She kept mumbling about the tuning forks. Landis had wrapped them up and stashed them along with the film in his storage cabinet.

“It's all right, I've got 'em locked up. They're safe.”

She started to rise from her bed, panic in her eyes, and Landis pushed her back down.

“Hey,” he said, “I told you they were all right. You can have them back anytime you want, but I think they should stay locked away in a safe place for now.”

She fell back onto the pillow and moaned.

Jesus
, he thought,
what did she go through
? Something like that could drive a person stark raving mad.

All because of a couple of odd tuning forks.

The damn things were evil. Landis remembered the feeling when he touched them. The tingle of current and mild electric shocks made his skin crawl.

It made him wonder.

Radiation? The fuckin' atomic bomb is everywhere. There are tests in Nevada all the time. Jesus, could these things be radioactive
?

He hated to handle them and treated them as if they were radioactive. He'd wished for asbestos gloves when he actually had to make contact with them, wrapping them quickly and shoving them in the back of the safe.

They gave him the creeps, but they were worth a fortune. God knows where she got them.

Landis lay in bed as the sun crept over the hills and wondered about the answer to that question. Where
did
she get them?

Rain had begun to
fall in Southern California. It started innocently enough, a few showers, then the storm hit with full force. To the parched hillsides and canyons, the rain meant the end of a yearlong drought that had dried out every living thing within two hundred miles. The bone-dry soil drank it up like a sponge. The runoff was minimal at first.

But, after two days of steady downpour, the ground reached the saturation point, and water began to fill the gullies and culverts. For the first time in over a year, the Los Angeles River flowed. It sluiced like an obedient serpent through the labyrinth of man-made spillways, staying well within the prearranged concrete shores.

The sewer system quickly attained its maximum flow and began to back up. A flash flood warning was issued for Los Angeles County and hundreds of tiny, normally dry creeks and streambeds overflowed their banks and began to cause problems. Every watercourse was at its highest stage.

Then came the mud slides. The TV news was full of images of homes skating down hills, of landscaping gone mad, of whole embankments avalanching down onto unsuspecting neighborhoods.

The storm dominated the headlines. The city was a mess.

Albert Beaumond's body began
to move. Carried by the water, its odyssey began beneath the electric tower and carried it through miles of waterway, into the heart of LA.

“
Goddamn it, Becky! Keep
tryin'! If she doesn't answer, then go over there. Either way, I want to talk to Devila
today!
”

Landis Woodley's voice shook the room, his booming, authoritative baritone intimidated everyone within range. Becky Sears winced. She'd been trying the phone number that he'd given her for Devila all day. So far there had been no response.

Landis, although completely involved with his production, was concerned. He began to imagine all sorts of horrible things. At five in the afternoon, exactly twelve hours after he'd taken Devila home, he sent Becky Sears to find her.

The filming was behind schedule, as usual, and Landis was driving his crew like a team of Alaskan sled dogs. Part of Woodley's problem was that he compiled a production schedule that was completely unrealistic and called for superhuman efforts to maintain. He expected to get his full twenty or more shots a day, regardless of circumstances. That allowed for most every shot to be completed in one take, and that wasn't commensurate with his talent pool. Luboff seemed to flow with it well enough, but he was a veteran actor with hundreds of movies behind him. Just about everyone else had a problem. None of them had worked that hard for that long.

Except Landis Woodley.

It was the only way he could make money.
Cadaver
was shaping up to be his masterpiece. He already had a commitment for exhibition from a distributor with a chain of drive-ins across the South and that almost assured him of a winner.

Landis and his crew worked through the night, taking a short break for hamburgers at eleven-thirty. Landis, Buzzy, Jonathon, Neil, Tad, and Chet gathered in the kitchen for a much-needed break. Chet read the paper and sipped his coffee. Becky Sears had returned hours ago with the report that no one was home at Devila's apartment and that the two old ladies across the hall said that she had left late in the afternoon.

“Strange thing about it,” said Becky, “was that the old ladies said that someone else had been around looking for her too, a young woman.”

Landis raised an eyebrow. “A young woman? Probably a fan.”

Becky shook her head, her dog-ears wagging. “I don't think so. They said she was looking for her father. Apparently, Devila had been out with the guy. What do you think?”

Landis shrugged. “How the hell should I know? All I can tell you is, I want her found.”

Chet looked up from his newspaper and smiled.

“What are you smilin' about?” Landis sneered.

“I know where she is,” Chet said coolly.

Landis leveled his gaze at Chet, but the canny cameraman deflected it like a slow housefly. Landis waited for Chet to speak, and, when he didn't, he walked over to where the cinematographer was sitting. Chet ignored him, reading his paper. Landis stood over him and glared.

Chet looked up in mock surprise. “Yeah?”

“You said you knew where Devila is,” Landis growled.

“Yep.”

“So, where is she?”

“It's Saturday night, ain't it?”

Landis and Buzzy looked at each other.

“Your brain cells are startin' to go, you know that, Landis? You better lay off the weed,” Chet said with a smile. He liked yanking the boss man's chain.

“In case you don't remember, our girl has a horror movie to host every week about this time. Tonight it's
Mark of the Vampire
, one of my all-time favorites. You got a TV?”

Landis slapped his forehead. “Shit! How could I be so stupid! Let's go into the living room.”

The huge wooden cabinet black-and-white Motorola took a full two minutes to warm up. Its tubes crackled and the speaker hummed. Everyone who had been in the kitchen was now gathered around the TV Landis squatted, fine-tuning the sensitive set until he had a watchable picture. Then he stepped away and stared. The sound faded in with a sizzle of static a few seconds before the picture.

“—brings you the 1935 Tod Browning classic,
Mark of the Vampire,
with Bela Lugosi and Carol Borland. And now, your hostess of horror, the divine Devila!”

The screen went from gray to gray. Landis realized that he was watching a graveyard scene. The set was smoky, a graveyard, cheap cardboard gravestones. The camera panned in on a pale-looking Devila, leaning against a fake crypt. The crypt moved slightly, destroying what little sense of realism there was, as she put her weight on it.

Landis squinted. She didn't look good. Even with the indistinct picture on his TV, it was evident that Devila was not well. The circles around her eyes were not hidden by makeup, her face seemed somehow hollow, gaunt. Electric “snow” fell across the screen, the picture hiccuped, rolling upward, sending Landis scrambling for the horizontal hold dial.

That thing last night really took its toll on her
, Landis thought.
She looks like hell. I'm gonna have to spruce her up a bit before we can shoot the rest of her scenes for the documentary
. Her dress seemed to hang off of her like a mannequin. She didn't move.

There had been a few moments of silence since the announcer had spoken. The camera came in for a medium close-up, framing her from the waist up. Her eyes stared off into space. Her face was expressionless.

“She looks like shit,” Buzzy said behind him, but Landis was deep in thought.

The silence continued.

That's rare for TV
, Landis thought.
Something's wrong here. These guys edit as tight as a gnat's asshole; they must be having cows in the control room. Maybe she forgot her cue
.

The camera stayed with Devila, staring at her with an unblinking eye. The uncomfortable silence stretched farther. Landis felt inexplicably nervous, a prickle of sweat crossed his brow.

Then, in slow motion, she brought her hand up. Landis wondered if this was planned. Still no words had passed her lips, and no change of expression flickered across her unnaturally vacuous face.

What the hell is she doing? She's gonna lose her job for this
, he thought.

When her hand came into the frame, Landis saw the gun and gasped. He couldn't see what kind of gun it was, but it looked real.

She brought the gun to her head, and, in front of thousands of viewers, blew her brains out. The screen went blank, then was replaced by a test pattern.

18

The cloudburst conditions continued for several days. LA was the wettest it had been in fifteen years. The body of Albert Beaumond continued its sewer journey. It washed down the Los Angeles River, got hung up on some debris and stuck in a drainage pipe, and wound up wedged in the elbow of a culvert in North Hollywood. It stayed there with the muddy storm water cascading over it for twenty-four hours, becoming horribly bloated and waterlogged.

When the weather broke and the water level went back down, Albert was left high and dry beneath an underpass near the construction site for a new apartment building. There he stayed until two kids, playing nearby, discovered him. They later told police that they were alerted by the smell. They knew something dead was down there in the culvert, maybe a dog or a raccoon. Never in their wildest dreams did they ever expect to come across an honest-to-God human corpse.

The homicide squad made an appearance, inspected the scene, and made the announcement that this unidentified body had died of misadventure. His body, officially a “John Doe” case, was picked up by the coroner's wagon and packed off to the morgue.

The medical examiner made special mention of the advance state of putrefaction that had taken place because of the exposure to water. Most curious were the wounds: first-degree burns around the hands, especially the palms, where skin had been removed, a plethora of broken bones, including a massive skull fracture, multiple abrasions, and water damage. The medical examiner noted a lack of lividity, just a tinge around the buttocks, indicating that the person was dead prior to receiving the wounds, and was moved shortly after death, probably by the storm runoff. A quick, cursory examination by the medical examiner at the request of the police to determine if foul play might be involved, turned up nothing.

“John Doe” was taken to the morgue. Pending identification, he would be stored there until buried.

Thora Beaumond called Lt
. Garth Prease at the North Hollywood Precinct missing persons department every day. When the forty-eight-hour waiting period was up, and her father had not returned, Prease went to work.

Albert Beaumond was declared officially missing, his description went out to all the appropriate agencies, and a search was instituted. Thora was not pleased that the police had waited to start looking for her father, and it only alienated her further from the authorities.

Dr. Segwick did what he could, which was very little except prescribe vitamins and sedatives. Thora had the support of family friends and a few distant relatives who had not yet disowned the part of the family sired by Albert. “A bad seed,” he was called by most people who knew about his activities, “a misguided soul,” by others. The members of his congregation, Satanic though they might be, were all sympathetic to Thora and offered their help, both financial and spiritual.

In short, she was not lacking for human attention and sustenance. Certain “mystical” friends of her father even conducted a series of séances and psychic readings, trying to contact the missing man, but they turned up nothing. After four days, it was hard for Thora not to assume the worst. She read it in the faces of those around her, and, try as she might, she could not tune it out.