Final Cuts

by Final Cuts- New Tales of Hollywood Horror

  At some point—possibly last night, possibly weeks ago—his father took him into the black wall. From staring at himself in the bathroom mirror, he was standing on the landing facing the wall Dad had argued would look cool if it were black, until Mom gave in and agreed to painting it a glossy color the hardware store labeled Midnight but Dean and Judy together named Shiny Emo, which their father had not found nearly as amusing as the two of them had. It must have been late, hours after Mom and Judy had gone to bed, the lights out, the house quiet in the way peculiar to the deep hours of the night, when the sun was hours gone and hours to return. Dean couldn’t remember descending the stairs from the second floor, nor could he recall how his dad had come to be standing behind him, his hand—the one with the ring—resting on Dean’s shoulder. Despite the lack of light, the wall dimly reflected the two of them, a parody of a father-son portrait. The air in the hall was thin, difficult to breathe. Dad pushed him forward, toward his mirror self, and while the pressure he exerted was minimal, Dean couldn’t resist it. He was certain his father intended to crush his face against the wall, but when the tip of his nose touched its surface, the wall yielded, admitting him into something like a sheet of liquid—not water, a more viscous substance. His pulse surged with panic at not being able to breathe, but he was unable to fight his father’s steady press. The substance enveloped him—them, as Dad followed Dean into it. He couldn’t breathe, but this was suddenly less important than it had been the moment prior, rendered so by the immense sensation of stillness surrounding him. His father had brought him inside a vast space, an area whose parameters were boundless—impossible, yes, except here they were walking through syrupy blackness he couldn’t draw into his lungs but was able to survive within, anyway. Dad’s hand did not move from his shoulder, the ring on it giving off a cold, flickering light that did little beyond hurting Dean’s eyes. In the distance to either side of them, Dean had the impression of enormous shapes, what might have been the ruins of great buildings (although there was a curvature to what he could make out of their designs suggesting gigantic beasts, behemoths and leviathans, dragons, crouched in either watchfulness or death). Gradually, he and his father came to a place more open. The light from the ring leapt over a block of unfinished stone directly in front of them, its rough top a table for a quartet of plain metal goblets arranged at the four points of the compass (or of a diamond, Dean supposed). Dad spoke, his words warped by their dark surroundings; Dean picked out something that was either “you” or “use” or maybe “choose”; another that might have been “goblet” or “gullet” or even “swallow.” The indication was clear. Dean reached out and lifted the vessel on the right. Its surface was warm, as if someone had been holding it moments before. When he grasped it, the cup was dully empty, but as he raised it to his lips, it filled with black liquid, the air condensing inside it. Dad murmured encouragement. Why am I doing this? Dean thought, but tasted the cup’s contents anyway. It had the flavor of nothing, not even the mineral tinge of their tap water.

  Overhead, a huge shape swam through the darkness. Dean jumped, almost dropped the goblet (which, he understood, would not have been a good thing). “Steady,” his father said, or, “Ready.” Dean returned the cup to its place as the shape continued past them and turned in their direction with a lazy slowness. What Dean could distinguish of it in the flashes of his father’s ring reminded him of a shark, one the size of a city bus, a gaping mouth full of teeth like butcher knives at one end of a dim body streamlined as a torpedo. Dad said, “Erzsébet,” or, “There’s a bed,” or “There’s the bet,” the syllables full of reverence. The shark (except it wasn’t a shark, it was something a shark would flee as fast as its fins would allow it, it was something that would devour any predator foolish enough to confront it) moved from side to side, allowing each of its huge black eyes to sweep over Dean, then, with a flick of its tail, was on him.

  He isn’t sure what happened next. The (not) shark slammed into and through him, the force of the blow stunning him. He had the impression of being hurled out of his body, which he saw at the other end of a long tunnel, staggering backward at the impact tearing the blood from it all at once, the blood hanging wetly in the air in a dark column before splattering to the ground. Agony so extreme he had nothing to compare it with yanked him back into himself, together with the surrounding darkness, which rushed through his skin, seeking and flooding his arteries and veins, the chambers of the heart yet to stop beating. Emptied, insubstantial, he was lifted and carried along behind the shape that had stripped him of his blood, an empty paper cup swept up by the slipstream of a tractor trailer. In almost no time, he traversed a great distance, a roaring in his ears, his father flying beside him, arms against his sides, a mad grin on his face. Dad shouted, but Dean couldn’t hear what he was saying. They were moving faster and faster—

  —and he was floating in front of the black wall, hovering in the stairwell, rotating slowly in the darkness, almost close enough to the chandelier to reach out and brush his fingers against its candle-shaped bulbs. While still aware of pain, tremendous pain, astonishing pain, the highways and byways of his nervous system burning white phosphorous hot, he knew this conflagration was holding him aloft, the fire lifting the hot air balloon. On the stairs beneath him, his father was standing, gazing up at him with an expression of lunatic joy. “Little shark,” he said, rising into the air like Peter Pan, like Superman, “let’s go for a swim.”

  It was as if the pair of them were sharks, the rooms in the house a series of pools he might swim between with no difficulty. From the stairwell, he and Dad dove into and through the wall separating them from the kitchen, skimming the surface of the counter, the sink, shooting down the hallway to the living room, circling it, soaring to the vaulted ceiling and dipping to the floor, racing back along the hall and through the kitchen to the dining room, where they slid over the dining room table and up, through the ceiling to Judy’s room, where she lay sleeping against Auggie the dog, who snarled in his dreams as Dean and his dad passed out to the upstairs hall and into his parents’ room, where his mom was lying flat on her back in the queen-size bed, her open eyes darting from corner to corner of the ceiling, as if she was aware of but unable to see Dean and his father darting around above her. Although his agony was unchanged, Dean was exhilarated, a child playing the best game ever, the corners of his mouth pulled into the widest smile ever. Dad turned his face to him and it dilated, his features opening into a cavern fringed with fangs, while the rest of his body lost definition, blurred into black smoke. The transformation did nothing to blunt the inky joy suffusing Dean; it seemed only another part of their marvelous game, a scene from Beetlejuice. From the depths of the maw, his father’s voice said, “Now you.”

  Now him, and how to think about what followed? The dark delight circulating through him spilled out of his smile, raising his teeth to sharp points as it flowed over them, streaming along the length of his body, smoothing its contours to a shape sleek and dynamic. “Little shark,” indeed, except he was no longer little, and he was not a shark, he was kin to the thing (Erzsébet) which had separated him from his blood. In his new form, he was aware of the blood pounding through his mother’s terrified body in a way he never had been before—in a way he’d never been aware of his own blood. He could hear the ka-THUD ka-THUD ka-THUD of her heart, the whoooosh of the blood streaming in her arteries; he could smell the fluting copper odor of it under the skin it lit with faint radiance; he was aware of Judy’s pulse counting its slower beat across the hall; the wealth of sensations causing the pain he had been able to accommodate while flitting around the house to crescendo, to overwhelm him, to rage through him in incandescent madness. His mind was a white inferno. If only he could get to the blood, to all the blood, it would dim the pain, if only he could taste it—

  (No)

  Dean

  (blood soaking the pillows)

  is

  (bloo
d drenching the blankets)

  in

  (blood spattering the walls)

  the car with his dad,

  (who is that screaming?)

  huddled in the back seat, dressed in his sweats, a fine layer of soil

  (soil?)

  sprinkled over him. He’s listening to the turn signal making its tic-tic-tic sound as Dad steers onto 27 toward Sharon. His hair is clotted with dirt and something else, something wet-going-to-tacky. His jaw aches, and a flat, metal taste clings to his teeth, his tongue. Nausea threatens the top of his throat. He swallows, succeeds in croaking, “Where are we going?” without vomiting.

  “Visiting,” his father says. He drives with one hand on the wheel, the ring perched atop his finger shining with dull light.

  (a pool of blood at the base of the black wall)

  (who was screaming?)

  (Mom? Judy?)

  from: Michael Harket

  to: Gaetan Cornichon

  date: January 18, 2019 5:05 AM

  subject: The Shark Approaches

  Wow. That was some fucked-up shit. Probably not the best thing to read in my current mental state, but all the same, I’m glad I did. I think. So much for concerns about using your family in your writing, I suppose. If I didn’t know you and them, I would be worried. Hell, I’d be panicking. I did think the piece was unusually direct for you, as far as the supernatural elements go. It’s cool to see you trying new things, though, like the megalodon-kaiju-whatever the fuck. Makes me wonder what role Elizabeth Bathory is supposed to be playing in all this. I mean, the story’s about the Dracula Ring, right?

  Have to say, if Porter wasn’t thrilled with his inclusion in Split Rock, I can’t imagine he’s going to be any happier with this.

  from: Gaetan Cornichon

  to: Michael Harket

  date: January 18, 2019 11:36 PM

  subject: Re: The Shark Approaches

  Porter’s a good boy. No need to worry about him. As for Erszébet, she’s the harbinger. The ring draws her. Dracula is—he’s a disposition, you could say. I think. It’s complicated. Or I don’t understand it.

  What about the research, Renfield? Anything new and juicy?

  from: Gaetan Cornichon

  to: Michael Harket

  date: February 2, 2019 10:01 PM

  subject: Yoo Hoo

  Haven’t heard from you in a couple of weeks. Everything okay? Renfield? Hello?

  from: Michael Harket

  to: Gaetan Cornichon

  date: February 3, 2019 5:50 AM

  subject: Blood in the Corn

  I’m sorry not to have been in touch (almost added “Master,” but I’m resisting taking the joke so far, because I’m afraid it isn’t a joke, or not one I should be laughing at). The rabbit hole has become a warren I cannot escape. This particular chamber (to extend the metaphor) has—there are strange things about it, especially in light of the stories you’ve sent me. Or maybe not, and it’s a case of I’ve been staring at the monitor screen too long. I don’t know. My head is awfully fuzzy, lately. I’m not well.

  It turns out, Lugosi himself drafted a script related to the Dracula Ring. I’m not clear exactly when, but it was during the long slump at the end of his career, around the time he was working with Ed Wood. He wrote to John Carradine, tried to convince him to star in it with him. Carradine expressed mild interest, but he was already committed to working on The Ten Commandments. After Lugosi’s death, the screenplay passed out of Carradine’s hands and eventually wound up in Dino De Laurentiis’s possession. This was around 1961. De Laurentiis contacted Lucio Fulci, who was better known at this point for his comedies, if you can believe it. Fulci was intrigued, and worked with De Laurentiis to tweak the script. He hired a pair of comedic actors, Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia, to play the leads, which was a gamble. These guys were the Italian equivalent of Laurel and Hardy. But Fulci saw something in the pair he thought would help the film to succeed, a certain gravitas in Franchi, and a melancholy to Ingrassia. As for the actors, they were willing to give the material a try. If nothing else, it was a paycheck.

  Fulci completed principal photography on what would be released as Sangue nel Grano (Blood in the Corn) in a few weeks. He filmed in black and white, with a minimal musical soundtrack. It’s a short movie, about seventy minutes, which you can find a not terrible copy of on YouTube. The story is set in the US, Oklahoma during the dust bowl. (Lugosi’s original setting.) There wasn’t money to shoot in America, so most of it was filmed on a sound stage, although there are a couple of exterior scenes where the Italian countryside is meant to stand in for Oklahoma (which, as you can guess, it doesn’t). There’s a farmer, played by Ingrassia, whose farm is on the brink of failure, its cornfields shriveling and dying. His wife, son, and daughter know the end is in sight. Every day, they watch vehicles passing by on the road on one edge of their property, cars full of families like them, trucks whose flatbeds are jammed with whatever could be taken from the houses they’ve left, mattresses, headboards, dressers, tables, chairs, trunks, suitcases, and other more exotic objects, an upright piano, a chandelier, a framed painting. Some nights, a car or truck or two will stop at the farm, ask if they can rest the night there. Mom welcomes everyone. The sister looks worried as her mother takes more from the dwindling supplies on the pantry shelves. The brother makes resentful remarks, which earn him a rebuke from his mother, and then a slap when he won’t stop complaining. Dad doesn’t say much, just stares at the horizon and broods.

  (From the moment the camera settled on him, something about Ingrassia bothered me. I’m not sure how long it took me to realize his striking resemblance to you, at least in this role. The instant I noticed this, I saw his wife as Leslie, his kids as Porter and Rosemary. I’m not sure exactly how to put this, but I have the sense none of these similarities is as intense as I perceive it to be, though I don’t know what this means.)

  Anyway, one night, a car turns up the driveway. It’s long, black, with tinted windows, not the type of thing the family’s been used to seeing. Its hood ornament is the figure a woman wrapped in robes streaming out behind her. I’m not much on cars, but I did some digging (research about the research) and identified the vehicle as a 1931 Duesenberg Model J. Very pricey; I’m not sure how Fulci afforded it for the movie. The man driving the car, Franchi, is in a bad way. He’s dressed in typical vampire finery, but his tuxedo is dirty, his shirt collar open, the button missing. No cape. His hair is a mess, his cheeks sunken, his eyes hollow. He’s wearing the Dracula Ring, though, and he moves with regal elegance. Franchi was a gifted physical actor, and it’s something to watch him: he invests his performance with a mix of grace, frailty, and occasionally anger. While his character is never named (even in the credits, he’s listed as “The Visitor”), it’s pretty clear he’s Dracula, on the run from an unspecified catastrophe in the Ozarks, an appealingly odd detail. He asks for shelter for the night, and while Dad is clearly suspicious, Mom agrees.

  There’s a dinner scene during which The Visitor joins the family at the table but refuses to partake of the soup and bread set before him, his explanation a rare condition making his dietary needs rather…unique (“unica”), a word Franchi pronounces with all the emphasis Lugosi gave to wine in the Browning film. The Visitor asks the father about the farm. “Isn’t it obvious?” Dad says. The farm is already dead. All of them are dead, too. Here the son breaks in. Things wouldn’t be so bad, he declares, if they didn’t have to share what they earned with the sweat of their brows with every tramp who knocks on their door. Mom reproaches him, but The Visitor raises his hand (the one with the ring on it), tells her not to criticize the boy. It is right, he says, for a man to take pride in his work, in what his hands have wrought from the earth. What claim should any of these travelers, these Gypsies, have on the farm’s yield? Junior’s eating t
his up, but Dad brings everything to a crashing halt when he says the only yield of these acres is dust, and he does not begrudge any man his share of it.

  As the brother and sister clear the plates from the table, The Visitor says he has a favor to ask of Dad. He needs a place to house his car for a few days, possibly a week. The vehicle requires repairs, which he can make, but he must obtain the part from a mechanic in Oklahoma City. Is he asking for a ride? Dad says. No, The Visitor says, only for a berth in the barn behind the house. If the father can accommodate him, he is prepared to recompense him handily. Perhaps they could take a walk outside, examine the barn together?

  Dad agrees, and the two of them exit, The Visitor kissing Mom’s hand on the way out. Some time later, Dad returns. There’s a distracted expression on his face, the collar of his shirt is a mess, and he’s wearing the Dracula Ring on his right middle finger. Mom notices. Dad says it was a down payment for agreeing to keep the car. What happened to the man? Mom says. He left, Dad says. Walked off into the corn. Said he was going to meet someone.

  The next day, Dad is in a much better mood, so much so Mom and the kids exchange suspicious glances. When a family turns its truck up the driveway later on, searching for a place to rest for the night, Dad welcomes them warmly, invites the six of them to join him and his wife and children for supper. The newcomers are grateful, and spend the meal bemoaning the loss of their farm, the generally terrible state of the economy, of everything. Dad nods in agreement, all the while rubbing the ring with the thumb of his left hand.