THE BLACK ALBUM: A Hollywood Horror Story (5 page)

There was something else. There
was a haze that hung over the band, on them. No. Not a haze. A stain. Only it
wasn’t visible to the eye. It was something that could only be felt beyond the
five senses. The filmmaker could feel that somehow these men were tainted. Had
they really entered into a pact with evil? Or was that merely where fact
stopped and fiction began. Every community needed its folklores and urban
legends to serve as warnings for the young, brash, and foolhardy.

Loveless took another look and
saw something in the photograph he hadn’t noticed before. Beyond the band
members, to the left, in the background lounging in a white lawn chair was a
little blond girl. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen, in a black tank
top and faded bellbottom jeans with a flower decal on the left knee. The little
girl was smiling. Another flash of  insight struck the filmmaker:
the
runaway.
Annabelle. The little lost girl. In his mind's eye, Loveless could
envision the house all around him, as it had been: walls, furniture, musical
instruments. Only it was a thing of smoke, the pastel colors faded with time.
The band members entered horsing around, playing music, getting stoned, all
under the watchful gaze of Jeremy Jared, who the others looked to from time to
time for approval. Then the little girl entered the scene that was playing out
in the filmmaker's imagination. The band members saw her and lit up. She was
part of them, the baby sister they never had. The band mascot. It was as if
they were a family.
Like Manson’s family,
Loveless thought humorlessly
as he shook the vision out of his mind and from all around him. The wisps in
the corridors of his mind, swirled back into nothingness. Had they really taken
this lost little girl in, made her feel like a member of their family, only to
kill her because some stupid Satanic grimoire they had come across said to? It
seemed too incredible to be real. It couldn’t be. The filmmaker stood up and
pocketed the picture.

Yeah, there wasn’t much of the
home left, but there was a basement Loveless discovered when his foot went
through a rotted floor board. A second later, the entire section of floor
underneath the filmmaker collapsed and he dropped through into darkness.

Loveless found himself laying on
a cool soft dirt ground. The shaft of light falling through the gaping hole
that now existed in the floor, enveloped him like a spotlight. He wasn’t
knocked out, but he did have the wind knocked out of him. As the filmmaker
fought to catch his breath, he imagined he was in a cavern. Once air began to
reach his lungs and brain again, Loveless realized he was just in the basement.
Like many older homes in the mountains, the basement was a huge affair with
thick beams and a dirt floor. It resembled a cave more than a basement to the
filmmaker, with tiny rays of light falling in randomly through little holes
here and there throughout the house floor. The boxes that were down there were
thoroughly ransacked, most likely courtesy of the Sheriff’s department looking
for evidence of the missing girl and the band’s culpability. The young
runaway’s body had not been found to this day. The police however did assume
she was dead, most likely buried in a swallow grave in deep woods. They found a
large amount of blood on a stone altar in the forest that did match her blood
type. This was before the days of DNA matching and CSI style forensics. Still,
it was too much blood for a person to lose and still be a living, breathing
person.

The filmmaker found the storm
doors that led up out of the basement. He shoved them open and more light
spilled in. On the way out, Loveless stopped as he thought he heard a scraping
sound in the far corner of the basement. The filmmaker could make out something
way in the back where the dirt floor angled up. He had to get on his hands and
knees and crawl to it. Floor and ceiling became tight around him. Loveless had
to squeeze through the last few feet to get to it. ‘It’ was an unopened crate
marked:
band shit.
The filmmaker hauled it out and left quickly. He had
had enough of the house of Mathaluh.

On the drive back to his cabin
home from Running Springs, Loveless got turned around on the small confusing
mountain roads. He had the sense of direction of a native New Yorker. He didn’t
know northwest from southeast. He knew right and left. The filmmaker had made a
wrong turn somewhere. When he tried to backtrack, he got lost. The asphalt road
he was on quickly turned into a dirt road and there were no houses in the
vicinity. Only woods. Thick woods. Loveless almost laughed out-loud when his
car engine suddenly turned off and he found himself coasting on inertia alone.
Almost. The whole thing was just too cliché. He’d seen it a million times in a
million thrillers and horror flicks. If it had been a scene in one of his
scripts, he would have
eighty-sixed
it out of pride alone. But it wasn’t
a scene in a script. It was real life, and it was happening to him. The sun was
hovering just above the mountain now, bathing the scenery orange in what film
cinematographers affectionately called
magic hour.
Ironically enough, it
doesn’t last even close to an hour, merely a few precious minutes. Loveless
tried the car four times before he gave up, afraid he would flood the engine
altogether. The filmmaker got out and looked around. Something caught his eye.
Sunlight was reflecting off a number of small objects in the woods, drawing
Loveless to them. They were plain little white tombstone crosses sticking up
out of the ground, over sixty of them. It was some kind of bootleg hillbilly
cemetery he guessed. In his travels, the filmmaker had heard rumors of places
like this where rural mountain folk buried their dead; the dead mainly
consisted of the severely impoverished, outlaws, and meth overdoses. People
nobody came looking for. No one would visit. Without benefit of a coffin, they
were buried deep, so coyotes couldn’t dig up the bodies.

“Hey! Help! Is there anybody out
there?” Loveless called into the woods out of sheer desperation. He waited. A
few seconds later, his own voice came back to taunt him. “Hey! Help! Is there
anybody out there?” The lament had bounced around the woods before finally
echoing back in his direction. Upon hearing it, the filmmaker realized “Is
There Anybody Out There?” was the name of the second song on disc two of Pink
Floyd’s haunting and disturbing classic album “The Wall.” He was too scared
shitless to laugh about this though.

Loveless noticed something else,
creeping up out of the woods in the distance in a fluid kind of motion, coming
his way. Fog. White. Thick.
Shit!
It looked like a giant smoky hand
reaching right for him. Weirded out, the filmmaker got back in the SUV and tried
the engine again. Nothing. He smashed his fist down on the dashboard in a fit
of anger and fear. The engine started. The car radio and high beams came on at
once, even though Loveless had been using neither of them. The filmmaker
recognized the song that was playing. It was the Beatles song “Revolution 9”
from The White Album. It was a song widely rumored to have back-masking on it.
There was a moment of pure static, then the radio screeched: ‘
Turn me on,
dead man. Turn me on, dead man. TURN ME ON, DEAD MAN!’

Something clicked in Loveless'
brain. These lyrics were familiar to him. Conspiracy theory shit he had heard
long ago from a friend of his who was into some pretty creepy stuff. Dead man.
In 1969, a rumor began to spread that Beatles member Paul McCartney had died
and was replaced by a lookalike. A doppelgänger: a paranormal double. Evidence
was supposedly buried in backwards lyrics on several of the Beatles' songs. The
dead man reference was one that conspiracy theorists used to back up their claims.
On another song were the backwards lyrics,
'Paul is dead.'
This sent a
chill down the filmmaker's spine. He didn't want to think about it anymore.

Loveless turned off the radio,
started the car, backed away from the encroaching fog and got the hell out of
there. He found a main road moments later. As the filmmaker turned onto it, and
left behind the twisted pathway he had been lost on, he saw its legend
inscribed on a street sign on the corner: Lord’s Lane. Appropriate enough name
for a cemetery, even if God had nothing to do with what went on in those
backwoods. Loveless drove straight to the supermarket in Arrowhead and bought a
six pack of Stella and a bottle of Jameson Irish whiskey. By the time he got to
the store, the filmmaker had half convinced himself that he had imagined the
backwards lyrics on the radio. Perhaps he had.

For a writer, Loveless wasn’t
much of a drinker. His party days were well behind him. Now in his late
twenties, the filmmaker was a weekend indulger, a few beers, a couple of glasses
of Jameson on the rocks to pass a lazy Saturday afternoon. It was only Friday,
but after the freak show day he had had, the early snootful was in order.
Besides, he’d need liquid courage to tackle the contents of the crate he had
purloined.

The filmmaker left the six pack
and bottle at the top of the landing as he carried the crate down the staircase
with both hands. As Loveless descended the long wooden flight of steps to the
cabin home, a rung near the top splintered and gave way under him. The filmmaker
dropped the crate, which proceeded to bounce all the way down the staircase,
cracking open like an egg at the bottom, contents spilling out. Loveless
clutched wildly for the railing, managing to wrap both arms around it even
though his feet were no longer under him. The filmmaker had no doubt he would
have broken his neck if he had tumbled down the treacherous length of the
staircase. The adrenaline rush of near death washed over Loveless for the
second time since coming to the mountain. He hadn’t remembered any of the top
rungs of the staircase being rotted out, only some of the rungs near the
bottom. Or maybe he just hadn’t noticed it before. The filmmaker retrieved the
alcohol and made his way down the rest of the stairs slowly, holding onto the
railing with a firm grip.

At the bottom, he knelt to scoop
up the contents of the crate. There was sheet music, a half full journal, books
on Satanic worship, a small stack of photographs of the band members and their
friends and family and a yellow and black homemade Ouija board that had
“Mathaluh” written across the top. The planchette used to divine the Ouija
board was round with a bloodshot eyeball painted on it. Loveless froze. This
was the mother-lode. How was it that the cops had missed this? How was it that
he had found it? The filmmaker suddenly had the strange sensation that it had
found him. There was also something else. Something from the crate that he had
missed, sitting on the pathway to the cabin home. An old vinyl record in a
black record sleeve. It was a seven inch forty-five. The kind of record you
could make bootleg in any semi-professional recording studio back in the
seventies. Kids of that era used to have records like this pressed all the
time, hoping to slip them to big shot record producers as they were getting
into their big black limousines, and become discovered. Few, if any, were ever
listened to by the busy professionals. Loveless picked up the record and slid
it halfway out the sleeve. Hand written on the label was the title:
Dark Ballad.
The filmmaker tossed the record into the broken crate with the rest of the
stuff. Maybe he’d even listen to the song later. Mathaluh’s greatest un-hit.

Ever since the investigation of
the burnt remains of the band's house, Loveless felt as if he was being
followed. Watched. Even in the supermarket, he would look up from his shopping
to see townspeople stealing glances at him: beer-bellied mountain men with
thick unkept beards and graying locks under worn old baseball caps, heavyset
mountain women with greasy hair and missing teeth, old people with feeble minds
and cataract glazed eyes. They would look away when he made eye contact. It was
if they had known where he had been, what he had done. Ridiculous, Loveless
thought to himself as he paid for his libations.

Now, outside the house, he had
the feeling of being watched again. Loveless looked around. There was no one. A
few cars drove by at the top of the stairs on the main street. Most of the
houses within eyeshot had warm light glowing inside. The filmmaker couldn’t see
anyone in any of the windows. Next, he looked into the woods that creeped up
from around the back of the cabin home. There was nothing in them that he could
see. Timberland just stretched back into a dark sort of oblivion.

At the front door to the cabin
home, on the small porch, a makeshift stone shrine waited for him. All the
rocks were smooth and white. Feelings of primitiveness, tribalism came over the
filmmaker. No, that wasn’t it. The sensation he was getting was one that was
locked away in the DNA of all men. Things we had outgrown, like baying at the
moon. The shrine exuded a sense of antiquity from a time beyond modern
civilization, before science; this stretched way back to pagan beginnings and
beliefs. From a time, when villagers sacrificed goats and unfortunate virgin
girls to the blackened gods who ruthlessly ruled their existence. From a time
when Halloween wasn’t trick-or-treating, dressing up, or bobbing for apples.
This shrine harkened back to a time when All Hallows Eve - in its earliest
European incantation - consisted of pagan harvest festivals and celebrations of
the dead. This was a night when the doorway to our world was believed to be
opened to ghosts. People dressed in costumes to confuse and trick the spirits.
The church eventually transformed the context and the meaning of these holidays
as it absorbed pagan religion into Christianity.