Library

Five

Max liked the angle and the morning light falling on the lovely woman sleeping on his pastel couch. He noted it for future adaptation. He didn't have a photographic memory, but he had a solid memory for photography.

"You've got a hell of a scream, Sally Priest," he said. "It's time to rise."

Curled up in his monogrammed terry-cloth bathrobe, she let out a cute little moan. Fiery red hair poured over the pillow. Her mouth puckered around a drool spot. She had what people called an overbite. This minor flaw only distinguished her even more from the competition.

Max's Pomeranian found her interesting too. Standing with paws resting against the side of the couch, the little rusty dog eyed Sally with distrust. Then glanced at Max as if to say, Can I eat her now, Master?

"Be nice, Suse," he warned.

At last, the woman's lips moved, as if running lines in her dreams. A little blush colored her cheeks.

Her eyes flashed open, bright green and bloodshot.

"It's alive," said Max.

Sally blinked at Susan, who pushed off the couch to puff out her chest and growl. Her bleary gaze shifted to Max standing over her still wearing his tux and then swept across his living room. The rounded brass coffee table, potted palms, Lucite lamps, tropical wallpapering, and framed Patrick Nagel neon noir prints.

"What the hell is going on?" she croaked.

"Everything's okay," Max said, and offered a mug of coffee. "You passed out before I could get your address, so I let you crash here."

She slowly reached out to accept the mug.

"Tell me what you meant," he said. "About horror only being horror when it's real."

She winced. "Oh. My. God."

"What's wrong?"

"It's all coming back to me. Sometimes, I take the whole Bad Girl experiment way too far."

"I'd like to know more about what you think," Max said.

Horror is only horror if it's real.Put as simply as this, it had struck him as an epiphany. More, an epiphany that forced him to challenge his assumptions.

He'd always seen fictional horror as a way to both avoid and safely process the horrors of reality. What if its purpose instead might be to do the opposite?

Feeding his chronic insomnia, this question had kept him awake along with his haunting memories of the off-kilter premiere. In the dark, quiet hours, he could hear Jack's rowdy audience laughing in muted echoes, as if they'd been transported into his house's walls.

Sally sighed. "Mr. Maurey—"

"Call me Max."

"Max, I made a total fool out of myself in front of you and a major producer last night. I blew up my career before it's even started. I hurled on Mr. Lyman's deck. So I'm not sure what you want me to say."

"Jordan has seen it all," he assured her. "In terms of weirdness, I doubt you made a scratch. Actually, I think he found you amusing."

Brightening a little, she sat up. "Oh. Seriously?"

"One of his backers seemed quite taken with you, though. If I were you, I wouldn't answer your phone until they fly home. Unless, you know…"

He politely coughed into his fist and spread his hands. He didn't like the game and didn't play it, but he knew it existed.

"I don't do that to get ahead," she said.

"And I don't require it. Just so we're clear, my casting couch is used only for casting. And the occasional dignitary who needs to crash."

Sally threw a final suspicious glance his way.

"So let me get this straight. Last night, I got high, took off my clothes, and passed out. Then you brought me here so we could chat about horror."

He smiled, glad they were all caught up.

"Now explain what you meant," he said.

"Well, shit." Sally shrugged. "Okay, then."

Taking a moment to collect her thoughts, she offered her hand to Susan. The dog jumped back with dramatic indignance before padding forward to sniff the woman's fingers.

"Lady Susan likes you," said Max.

The Pomeranian glanced up at him. Can I eat her now, please?

He gave her a little shake of his head.

With a shudder, the dog allowed Sally to scratch her behind the ears, her suffering black eyes boring into Max's the entire time.

"She's nice," Sally said. "You have a lovely place."

"Thank you." With its bold eighties colors and gaudy materials, Max had never liked it. Flush with cash, he'd had an interior decorator put it all together and had signed off on it because he had a living room and needed stuff in it.

"Okay." The woman took her first sip of coffee and made an appreciative noise. "Horror can't be horrifying unless the audience believes it might be real, you know? But it can't only be Faces of Death, because that's just spectacle. Pure shock."

"There's no story," Max said.

"Right. Shock is not the same as drama. The same way sympathy is not empathy. That's what I think I meant when I said that last night."

"Are the two irreconcilable?"

"We do reconcile it. All the time. It's what horror movies are today. They're gross and they're creepy and they're fun."

"I mean really reconcile it. Reconcile it until they're the same thing."

"I'm not sure you'd want to. If it's too real—"

"It might not be fun," said Max. "I understand."

"And if it's not fun, very few people are going to want to sit through it."

"Does the horror in a horror film have to be fun? Cannibal Holocaust wasn't fun. It was raw and visceral."

Sally considered it. "Horror makes the rest of life more interesting. It's a foil for all the good things we take for granted. It shouldn't be an end in itself."

"I'm thinking of horror that makes you understand life as it really is. Horror is too fair. It's loaded with cop-outs."

"I'd say it has rules," she countered. "It's not about morality but safety. If you follow the rules, you won't die. The audience learns how to survive."

"But that's not real!" They were back at the beginning. "Real life isn't fair. Bad things happen to good people all the time. Horror should be unpredictable."

"Okay, but I don't think you want it to be cruel, either. Nihilism is a mega bummer." Sally thought a little more and added, "You know who does a terrific job at it is Dario Argento. His movies are like dreams. Horror is a feeling, not a genre, right? He captures it so well. The fear starts with creating discomfort, that weird sense that things are not what they seem."

Max grunted. He was after something blunter and less artsy. Watching the accident reel and talking about horror's essence with Sally had brought him to the edge of a profound truth. He just didn't know what it was yet.

For him, the question was how one might bottle the Mary's Birthday accident's real, visceral horror in a story without actually murdering actors. Was it a matter of content or technique, or maybe both?

If he could lay his hands on the film again, he'd study it like the world's most puzzling koan. He'd catalog everything he saw and felt. He'd ghoulishly examine each of its nine thousand celluloid squares until he'd determined what made it so affecting and could re-create its emotional power on demand.

The answer was close. He knew it was close because he now asked the right question.

Max glanced at his watch. Almost noon. He was running out of time.

"Finish your coffee and then get dressed. I'll drive you wherever you need to go, but I have to make a stop first in North Hollywood." He squinted at her. "How did you know Arthur Golden had died?"

"My workshop teacher is Dan Womack."

Max sucked in his breath. Womack was one of the three survivors of Mary's Birthday. Make that two, seeing as Golden was no longer alive: Womack, who'd played the picture's loving but clueless dad, and Helga Frost, who'd played his daughter Mary, the heroine.

Another stroke of serendipity. The whole thing felt like fate.

This Sally Priest was getting more interesting by the minute. He made a note to reach out to Womack at some point. Today, however, he had bigger fish.

"Dan kept in touch with Arthur over the years," she added.

"What's this Womack like?"

"Cultured, smart, and kind of a basket case."

"Did you ever meet Golden himself before he died?"

She shook her head.

Max walked over to his dining table and scooped up a newspaper. He returned to drop it on her lap. "Well, his estate sale is today."

"Oh. That's where we're going?"

"That's right. If you want to come, that is."

Sally's green eyes flashed bright and alert at the prospect of something new.

"I'm always up for everything," she said.

Behind the wheel of his sleek little black MG, Max drove them onto LA's spaghettied arteries. A Michael Jackson hit played over the radio. He had the top down, the only time he enjoyed being exposed to direct sunshine, though he wore his bucket hat with its MORT'S SPORTING GOODS logo, a personal trademark on set. Among rushing glass and steel that was one collision away from turning into its own Mary's Birthday, he glanced over at Sally.

Cured by coffee, aspirin, and youth, her hangover had departed. Her suntanned face smiled behind sunglasses and wind-thrashed hair. He'd given her an old T-shirt, which she'd fitted with last night's skirt and suspenders into an outfit.

As for Max, he'd finally changed out of his tux into his usual uniform of a black suit worn with a band tee. Today, it was Devo's turn. He imagined they made quite a picture, veteran horror director and budding scream queen. His dark crashing against but utterly dependent on her bright light.

"Sally Priest," he said. "How did you come up with that as a stage name?"

"I wanted something that sounded sweet and pure but corruptible."

He had to chuckle at that. Yes, the lady was a scream queen at heart.

Then he growled as brake lights crowded the roadway ahead like glowing demon eyes. Slowing, his MG joined the rear of a crawling parking lot, a visible reminder that wherever you hoped to go in this town, some malevolent god would try to stop you from getting there.

Sally said, "I already know where you got yours."

"Me?" he wondered, willing the traffic to either move or get out of his way. "You think I changed my name?"

Sally tilted her head to regard him over her shades. "Oh, come on." Gazing at his blank expression, she pushed them back onto the bridge of her nose. "Suit yourself. I guess it's a coincidence and you've never heard of the Grand Guignol."

But of course he had.

Modern splatter horror could trace its routes to Elizabethan revenge tragedies like Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and even further back to the Roman playwright Lucius Seneca. Its first real flowering, however, occurred at the Grand Guignol. The Theater of the Great Puppet.

From 1897, this Paris theater specialized in nihilistic horror under the command of a French playwright named Max Maurey. The sensationalistic short plays served up realistic murder, torture, sex, and cannibalism.

"He's actually a distant relation," Max said. "From what I could learn."

Sally looked impressed. "I imagine he'd be quite proud of you."

"I'm not so sure about that."

He doubted anyone laughed in the Grand Guignol.

At last, the traffic unknotted enough for him to surge ahead to his exit. He steered his roadster into a lowbrow neighborhood of stuccoed fifties dingbats. Arthur Golden, it turned out, had been down and out and living on the cheap.

Under an overhang protruding from one of these old shoebox apartment buildings, Max parked the MG and cut the engine.

"I live in a building just like this," Sally noted.

Max grunted. Seething with anticipation, he marched inside, Sally in tow.

Aside from a little daylight and a single glaring fluorescent fixture, the vestibule was shrouded in shadows deep enough to hide creatures and maniacs. The air smelled musty. Ancient wallpaper bubbled and peeled.

Dim stairs led up into gloom.

"Very moody," Sally said.

"Yeah," said Max. "It's perfect."

They mounted the creaking stairs.

"I have a relation in the business too," Sally said. "My mother, in fact. She's Maude Turner."

Max grunted again. "I don't know that name."

"You wouldn't, though if you're a fan of old movies, no doubt you've seen her somewhere. She played a townswoman in East of Eden and a drunken brunette in The Barefoot Contessa. A dancer in Houseboat. All through the fifties, she got bit parts in some of the decade's best films."

"Why didn't she stick with it?"

"By the mid-sixties, she still hadn't hit stardom and had started to age out. So she quit, married rich, and had me."

"Well. I imagine she'd be quite proud of you too."

"Ha," said Sally.

"What?"

"I'm not sure about that either. I guess I'm still working on it."

Max shrugged. "Either way, what we do is in our blood."

He stopped in front of the door marked with the right number and knocked. It creaked open to reveal a mohawked Amazon in designer eyewear.

"Welcome to the castle," she said with a husky Irish accent. "I'm Clare."

The woman stood nearly as tall as Max, taller counting the bristling red mohawk that contrasted with her business suit.

"We're here for the sale," he said.

Sally said nothing, eyeing the Amazon with fascination. The estate sale agent gazed back at her with a different kind of appetite.

"Of course you are, love," Clare said.

Max went inside and looked around at the little living room and attached kitchen. With its stained walls and air that smelled like stale cigarette smoke and industrial cleaners, the dead director's abode struck a depressing scene.

Heartbreaking, in fact. Arthur Golden had poured most of his fortune into Mary's Birthday and hadn't worked since. Haunted by the tragedy, he'd shut himself off from the world he'd once sought to terrify.

Stacked everywhere, Golden's meager possessions were on full display, marked with yellow price tags and red SOLD stickers. The detritus of a man's sad life arranged as a liquidation sale.

Everything must go, the room announced.

"You're an actor?" Clare said to Sally. "I do a bit of it myself."

While they compared notes, Max zeroed in on a pair of bookshelves filled with VHS tapes. This turned out to be Golden's personal horror collection with a side of extreme German pornography. All marked SOLD.

He didn't care. He'd come for Mary's Birthday.

Jordan had acquired a print of the accident reel. A surprise he had it in his collection at all. Contrary to the urban legends of the paranoid seventies, there was no cabal of rich perverts paying top dollar for snuff films.

The producer had nonetheless gotten his hands on it, which must have cost him a pretty penny. Enough to allow Golden to maintain his hermit lifestyle a few more years.

Which meant the original film had to be here somewhere.

Max spotted a closed door and gravitated toward it.

"I wouldn't go in there, love," Clare called to him. "They haven't yet properly scrubbed the, um, stains."

"Are there any film cans?" he asked.

"Mary's Birthday was sold," the Amazon enthused. "A collector snatched it up first thing and walked out with it."

He'd arrived too late. Glum, he picked his way through other yard sale stuff, most of which looked destined for donation or the garbage heap.

"Max," Sally said. "Check this out!"

She held a large, nasty-looking kitchen knife.

He grunted. "That's—"

Testing its point with her thumb, she plunged it into her heart. Her head dropped to the side, tongue lolling.

"Probably Mary's knife," Max finished.

Sally examined the collapsible prop. "I'm going to give it to Dan."

"It's a nice find."

"That isn't what I wanted to show you."

She'd discovered a film camera.

It rested on a bed of red velvet inside a teak trunk carved in a Gothic style, odd symbols surrounded by frolicking angels and demons.

Max recognized it as an Arriflex 35BL.

Introduced in 1972 at the Summer Olympics, the 35mm camera was terrific for its time. Small and portable, it proved versatile when one needed handheld and tight shots. The fixed butterfly reflex shutter offered a true representation of the captured image, with a footage counter modeled on an odometer.

"And it's quiet," Max lectured. "That's what the BL stands for, blimped. A lens blimp that reduces noise. The 35BL has had an enviable run. The industry used it to shoot Taxi Driver, Barry Lyndon, Apocalypse Now…"

Sally gave him an amused look. She was an acting geek, not a film geek. Still, she was enough of an overall nerd to appreciate his tech talk anyway. The same nerdiness that had made her excited to connect with this slice of genre history, however sad it looked arranged for sale.

"And Mary's Birthday," he added.

Its unblinking glass eye had witnessed the tragedy.

Max doubted anyone had ever cheered while watching it. No one thought it funny. No one munched popcorn they wouldn't be able to keep down. Perfect horror demanded one's full attention.

Inside the box, he found various lenses and accessories. And like the solution to a puzzle of one of these things is not like the others, an old blue Danish butter cookie tin rested on its red backdrop. Back in the fifties, Max's mother had used one like it to store her sewing kit.

He picked it up and gave it a quick shake, producing a satisfying rattle. His ears told him a stretch of film lay coiled within, a little mystery to explore.

"Are you a cinematographer?" Clare asked over his shoulder.

"Director," he said.

"He made the Jack the Knife series," Sally told her.

"Fucking A," said Clare. "I have a date to see the third one on Friday."

Max had stopped listening. He wrapped his hand around the pistol grip that Golden's photography director had attached to the camera.

The grip responded with a brief rippling vibration, as if it were alive.

He murmured, "Do you hear that?"

The camera seemed to hum.

A deep, pulsing bass at the edge of hearing, more felt than heard, like the Sensurround system developed to show the 1974 Earthquake movie.

Sally tilted her head. "Hear what?"

Max was certain the camera wanted to tell him something. He lifted the heavy apparatus out of the box and raised it to his ear.

The hum elevated into a flurry of enraged screams. Then they too stopped as Arthur Golden's apartment disappeared and the world turned black. The darkness almost tangible. Absolute.

Back in the real world, Sally said something, a muffled blur that cut off to silence. Max wondered if he was dead, what that meant.

Then the dark noticed his presence. It had something to show him.

A spark in the void. Max fell toward it. The spark became a fire. The fire a raging conflagration in which shadows flickered and danced.

"Max."

That's my name, he thought.

"Max."

It chose me—

A hand roughly shook him.

"Max!"

Then he was back in Golden's shabby apartment. Sally eyed him with her hands splayed to break his fall if he fainted.

"Is he okay?" Clare asked.

"Wow," said Max.

"He's an artist," Sally said, as if that explained everything.

He smiled at the camera in his hands.

"I need this," he added.

Sally cleared her throat. She pointed to the red sticker on the box.

He growled. "Damn it."

Max tightened his grip on the camera. This was the eye that bore mute witness to the Mary's Birthday tragedy and captured it in time. It spoke to him—a sleep-deprived hallucination, granted, but just the same. He had to have it.

Despite his nice house and car and housekeeper, he lived frugally. He had plenty of money. He'd contact the buyer and make an offer they couldn't refuse. He'd pay off Clare right now to look the other way. Max sized her up and wondered if he bolted how far he'd get before this Amazon tackled him.

Not far, he surmised.

As if sensing his thoughts, Clare stomped over in her combat boots to loom over the scene. Peeling off the sticker, she pressed it against her business card and handed it to Max.

"I'm an actor," she said.

Max mutely nodded his thanks at the giant with the beautiful face, linebacker shoulders, and bright red punk hairdo.

"I'll remember you, Clare." He meant it. He pocketed her card.

Completing the transaction, which included a fat tip, he and Sally hauled the entire cabinet of curiosities down the grungy stairs into the trunk of the MG.

Even there, it hummed for attention.

"What are you going to do it with it?" Sally asked.

"I'm going to make a motion picture," he said, realizing as he said it that yes, that's exactly what he'd do with it. "Something entirely new."

A grand film that would be remembered like Mary's Birthday. Now he understood his greatest work as an artist lay not in his past but in his future.

The Jack movies all had a purpose. They'd prepared him for this. He'd go to Jordan with a new concept, and this time, he'd get final cut on it. Realize his dream of becoming an auteur, controlling every aspect of production, every frame that went into the movie. A true Max Maurey production.

"Do you have an idea?"

"Not yet," he admitted. "All I have right now is inspiration. But sometimes, I feel like everything's been done."

"I have a movie pitch for you," Sally offered. "One you can't refuse."

"Oh?"

"Make the movie you're dying to see. One that scares you."

"I like it already." Max remembered his father's eyes flashing with panic as he died. The memory sent a shudder through him.

"Movies are like life, full of possibilities." She cast him a sly look. "So, are you thinking about casting Clare in it?"

"I probably should, and not only because of the favor. She really is striking."

With Golden's camera, Max felt fairly punk again himself. He regarded its acquisition as an omen from the movie gods.

Again, he felt chosen.

"I liked her too," said Sally. "She has a great energy."

He expected a catty follow-up from the actor, but she seemed genuinely happy that a woman she'd just met might get a lucky break.

You're a rare animal, Max thought.

"She's not Final Girl material, though." Then he winked.

Comments

0 Comments
Best Newest

Contents
Settings
  • T
  • T
  • T
  • T
Font

Welcome to FullEpub

Create or log into your account to access terrific novels and protect your data

Don’t Have an account?
Click above to create an account.

lf you continue, you are agreeing to the
Terms Of Use and Privacy Policy.