“Freeze!” The orb casts a brilliant spotlight on us and I shield my eyes against it.
Silver Creek’s sheriff steps out of the trees and lowers his flashlight. He approaches us, slightly crouched. A hand rests on his holstered sidearm.
“What are you up to?” He addresses the question to me, a point made by blinding me again. I struggle to find words against the distracting beam.
“N-nothing.”
“I bet,” he says. He puts the flashlight under his chin. His face becomes demonic. “Trick or treat, Shitassmotherfucker.”
“We didn’t write that,” I say.
“I really was expecting Colt. You know him? He a friend of yours?” He chuckles at his accusations.
“Please,” I protest. “We didn’t vandalize anything. We need your help—”
“What’s your name?” He cuts me off.
“Jason Nightshade, sir.” The politeness is involuntary.
“Nightshade, huh?” He rolls the name around in his mouth. A realization crosses his face; his features soften. “Oh. Nightshade.”
Greg groans and stumbles against me. The sheriff jolts out of his reverence. He shines his light on Greg and sees the wounds. A holy invocation gets caught halfway out of his mouth and never escapes. He unfastens the strap holding the gun in its holster. A far-off crow screams.
“Who did that to you?”
A twig snaps and the sheriff pulls the gun out. He sweeps the area with it. I duck as the deadly end scans above me. His unsteady hand belongs to a man who’s never had to use a gun before.
“What the fuck is going on?”
Greg’s eyes roll back, and he falls forward. The sheriff throws his arms out to catch him. I hear the awkward sound of skin slapping against the metal of his gun. Greg coughs up blood on the sheriff’s tan pants.
The sheriff forms his lips around another profanity, but the forest comes alive with rustling all around. Terror in surround sound.
Somewhere out there, laughter builds.
The trees shake with excitement at the monster they’re about to unleash. It’s the same horrible cackling that I heard that night with Ally. It’s the same laughter from the movie theater and from inside my closet door. It’s my dad’s laughter when he watches his porn.
I look at the officer. I can tell by his face: we share the same fear. And this is how I know I’ve become a man.
With mechanized strength, the sheriff hoists Greg over his shoulder and holsters his gun. “Can you run?” he asks.
We run. We jump headstones. I fall behind. The sheriff reaches back and grabs my arm. I see the prop gun that Greg knocked out of my hand, but the sheriff pulls me forward before I can pick it up. The soil beneath us shifts as an army of the undead wakes on this dreadful night, summoned by the monster at our heels. The moon’s light flickers as an airborne troop of vampires flies under it, awaiting the signal for an aerial attack. We pass through ghosts, whose bodies swirl and dissipate like food coloring in corn syrup—a horrible last line of defense.
The sheriff pulls harder. His superhuman strength carries us out of the graveyard. The hellish laughter fades behind us. We make it to his unmarked, tinted car. He opens the door and throws me and Greg in the backseat. The cushion feels good, but the darkness within is suffocating. I reach out for the door handle but find nothing. Greg’s already asleep, and his snoring is shallow and wet. He chokes on blood. Metal divides us from the front seat. I place my hand on it when the sheriff slams his door, feeling the vibration. He mouths something I can’t hear, and then fumbles to get the key in the ignition. The engine revs.
He stares at me in the rearview mirror. He looks like a child in the green light of the dashboard.
“We need to hurry,” I say. The sheriff doesn’t say anything. He flicks the headlights on and off. He tries to grasp the situation. It’s a hysteric voice that comes out of me: “What are you waiting for?”
“Nobody’s ever going to believe me,” he says.
“What?”
“Kids’ stuff,” he says. “Scary like in the movies.”
He revs again. The engine’s rpms become the sounds of mechanical suffering.
“Officer,” I say. I lower my voice and he eases off the gas to hear me. “I’ll back you up. The only thing you have to worry about right now is getting Greg to a hospital.”
My words erase some of his fear. He nods and throws the car in reverse. My seatbelt locks. Cue the heroic music in my head. He hits the gas and his car fishtails onto the road. I sink deep into the backseat. Greg’s body falls into the footwell.
My dad’s car disappears behind us. The world rushes past, blurred and mixed together.
“Um!” I say. The music in my head fades. “Maybe you don’t have to drive so fast.”
A crow falls out of the trees and bursts apart against the sheriff’s windshield. We both scream. He hits the wipers and scrapes the feathery mass off. The wipers rub blood into the new crack—a red web spreads across the windshield.
A dog runs out into the road. The sheriff swerves to avoid hitting it. I swear it’s Brock. I know then that we are not allowed to go home.
Glowing eyes in the forest leave red streaks against the darkness. The speedometer needle inches toward sixty-five mph. The sheriff jerks the car around a curve. I hit the other side of the cab and feel the opposite side lift up. Tires spin in empty air. The officer works the wheel, trying to get control of the vehicle.
Around the bend, a figure stands in the middle of the road. It’s a child. It’s a ghost. It’s my brother.
The officer hits the brakes and the force throws him against the wheel. The car spins sideways and catches an edge. By the time I realize that it wasn’t my brother but Colt Stribal, we’re in the air and the world’s upside down.
***
What does CHUD stand for? Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller. Lucio Fulci’s Zombie was actually the unofficial sequel to George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, which was called Zombi 2 in Italy. Besides zombies, the two movies have nothing in common. The same song was used in both Evil Dead and Creepshow, both of which premiered at Cannes the same year.
How many onscreen deaths in the original Friday the 13th series? 160.
How many in the Nightmare on Elm Street Series? Considerably less; in the forties.
Chocolate syrup was used for blood in black and white films, red corn syrup for color; killing needs to be sweetened. Bob Clark, the director of A Christmas Story also made Black Christmas. He died in a car accident.
Dario Argento likes to use his own hands whenever a woman is strangled on film. Many people think that the mutated baby in Eraserhead was actually a real cow fetus. The ghost in Three Men and a Baby is actually a cardboard stand up of Ted Danson. Heather O’Rourke died before Poltergeist 3 was released in theaters. The actress who played her sister in the original Poltergeist was beaten to death by her boyfriend—causing some to think that Poltergeist is a cursed franchise. Ed Gein was the inspiration for Leatherface, Norman Bates, and Buffalo Bill.
The first recorded use of the term “snuff film” was in a book about Charles Manson, alleging that he could have made one. Boris Karloff does the voice narration for the cartoon version of Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
Director John Landis has never been the same after a helicopter killed Vic Marrow on the set of the Twilight Zone movie. Ruggero Deodato was brought to trial because the deaths were so real in his Cannibal Holocaust that people thought it was a snuff film. He had to bring the actors to court to prove they were still alive. They tried to put a dog in an alien suit for Alien 3, but the result was too silly.
The word “vampire” is never used in Near Dark, a movie about vampires. There are over ninety cuts in the Psycho shower scene and it took five days to shoot; Anthony Perkins wasn’t there for any of it. A head crushing scene in The Toxic Avenger was made using a watermelon filled with corn syrup—
(Gla
ss sings past my ears and the sheriff’s neck bends at an impossible angle.)
—The actor playing Michael Myers in the first Halloween is only credited as “The Shape.” The actors in The Blair Witch Project didn’t know the legend was made up by the producers during filming. The townsfolk they interview are planted actors. Most of the terror caught on film is reportedly genuine. Most of the deaths in Faces of Death are staged. The original Dracula does not attack any males because producers thought it would be too homoerotic. Night of the Living Dead was originally titled Night of the Anubis and the zombies are never referred to as “zombies.” The vomit in Audition is actress Eihi Shiina’s real vomit.
What was the first episode of the Twilight Zone? It was called “Where is Everybody?” It involved a man who comes to a town, and he doesn’t know who he is or how he got there. There is nobody in the town, but he can’t shake the feeling of being watched. In the end, it turns out that he’s an astronaut who has been in an isolation chamber for 484 hours. The whole town was a hallucination—
***
I’m vaguely aware of the warmth surrounding my head. I put my hand in front of my face, opening and closing it. It still works. I touch my face and pull a little piece of glass out of my cheek. I run my fingers through my hair. They come back red and sticky; I wipe them on the seat above me. The car is upside down. I probe more of my body and conclude that there are no serious injuries, just the blood. The air in the cabin is stale and cold. I breathe vapor.
Greg is dead. I’m sure of it. His head looks deflated. I poke him, and his skin feels cold. I shudder.
I just touched a dead body.
The sheriff lies with his face pressed against the metal cage. Jagged pieces of bone poke through his jacket. A giant shard of glass halves his face, extending from his mouth to his ear. I can’t look anymore. I reach out for the door handle—it’s not there. I kick at the windows. Nothing. I recoil to kick again when I hear a groan from the front seat.
The sheriff’s eyes are open. His mouth opens and closes around the piece of glass embedded in it. He cries. A mournful groan leaks out of where his mouth should be. I reach out and touch the divider. He follows my finger with his.
“Sir? Are you all right?”
He cocks his head. The question sinks into the damaged side of his head where it causes him intense anguish. He claws at the divider. He bashes his head against it.
… responsible for the majority of shark attacks on humans …
He opens the small window that separates us, reaching to pull me close. His mangled fingers brush my clothes. I back away as far as I can and bat his hand away. I pull my knees up to my chin, barely out of his reach.
There is nothing human about his screams. Or are those mine?
Instinct makes the creature go for his gun. He rips it from the holster, a motion that causes him to squeeze the trigger. A crater explodes out of his kneecap. His undead roar is deafening, perhaps slowing my reaction to the realization that he’s going to fucking shoot me.
He fires again, and the bullet ptwings off the divider and through the passenger window. He reaches through the partition’s opening and puts two slugs into Greg’s dead body. The corpse shifts and ripples like congealed pudding.
I latch on to the sheriff’s arm. He wrenches back and my head slams into the metal cage. My vision brightens, but I hold tight. I hug his fist in my arms and put my feet on the divider for leverage. I pull until I’m nearly horizontal. His thrashing weakens, and the gun comes loose. His arm retreats through the hole, and I juggle the gun until I have it pointed at him. We’re both out of breath, waiting for the other to move. The monster knows he’s defeated. He makes another half-assed swipe at my shoes and misses. He puts his head down.
The door at my head opens, and a dirty hand covers my face. I taste a mixture of blood, soil, and potato chips.
Colt Stribal pulls me from the tomb.
I scramble out of his grip, away from both monsters. I put enough space between me and the wreck to catch my breath. The sheriff remains still. I sit down. The car has made a hideous scar in the brush and the tree that it hit is splintered up the middle. A faint billow of smoke floats up from the hood.
“Fucking pig.”
The greasy kid lights a cigarette. He smokes half of it in one drag. He covers one nostril and blows an efficient wad of snot at his feet. I lift the sheriff’s gun and point it at him. I try to summon anger, but the blood-loss makes me feel lukewarm.
“Hey!” I call out.
Colt doesn’t seem fazed by the weapon. He squints, and his ember flares. He tosses the finished cigarette out into the woods, which, I’m sure, is an extreme fire hazard this time of year.
“You … you fucking … killed my dog. …” It’s not as articulate as I had hoped.
“What?”
“And … you hurt my brother. …” Colt strides up to me and lowers the gun with his palm. He leans in close. He sniffs me. I look at the ground like an obedient dog. The way he does it—it’s almost gentle.
He steps back. “Who are you?” he asks.
“Jason Nightshade.”
“Jason,” he says. There’s no register, no recognition. He nods to the wreck, “I’m out of here, or they’re gonna try and put that on me. That cop and that fat fuck.” He laughs. “Two pigs in a blanket.”
His nonchalant reference to the corpses makes me throw up. Colt turns and walks back toward town.
“I’d go home if I were you,” he calls back over his shoulder. “Just forget the whole thing ever happened.”
“I have to get my dad’s car,” I say, but he’s already gone.
***
Dad’s car sits there, waiting to drive me back to safety. The weight of the keys feels comforting in my jacket pocket. My hand rests on the door handle. Just go. Just unlock the door and drive away. Pretend like you didn’t even see anything. Or you could report the crash anonymously.
I should really get that replica gun in the graveyard. Maybe someday I’ll finish that movie. My hand slides off the door handle. I flip the cylinder out of the sheriff’s gun: two bullets left. Two more than Greg had.
The cemetery welcomes me back with a cold wind. I fumble blindly through the rows of headstones, pawing in the darkness for the metal of my prop gun. I feel something hard and pick it up, examine it against the red-moon sky. It’s the finger. So that’s where it was. I toss it aside and continue to rifle through the grass.
The wind carries the sound of whispers out from the surrounding woods. I hit the back of my hand against the metal of the replica gun. With guns in both hands, I feel like a hero. I turn around and meet reflecting eyes. They hover near the ground, blinking at different intervals. The creature cackles at my foolishness to return to its lair.
The guns clatter in my shaking hands. I raise one of them and try to keep the barrel between the two floating dots. I pull the trigger. The flash is blinding. But I see it.
Or, I see the fur, the teeth, the claws. The face is boxy with a wide set of jaws that hold rows of teeth. There’s no fur around the eyes, just bone sockets to hold the milky-dead orbs. The flash sends it back on its hind legs, a blur of mangled paws with translucent claws. The skin around the mouth is pulled taut, giving the creature a terrible smile.
It smells like beer and carrion. The creature runs away, silhouetted and bounding like a fox.
Shit! Fired the replica. I shove the useless prop in the back of my jeans, and my other instrument of death infuses me with courage. I chase the creature.
I follow it up the hill, past the headstones and into the surrounding forest. Branches tear at my face as I chase the sound of crashing brush. I fall, and a rock opens up my jeans, my knee. I get up and run again. The sheriff’s revolver in my hand longs for revenge.
Owls hoot and warn me to turn back. Fuck those wise birds. I burst though a wall of shrubs into a clearing. My momentum carries me unbridled through the air. I trip on some
thing soft. I land on my face. Pain blossoms from my nose and into my forehead.
I look up and stare into Bobby Yates’s eyes. One of the missing children. I reach out for him. Again, I touch a dead body. I scramble up on my feet and realize that the softness that I tripped over was actually a human face—hollow and gaping up at me.
Bobby’s eyes sit inside his lonely head. There are body parts littered everywhere in the clearing. I even recognize some of them. They’re the animals Brock massacred and left to rot on the lawn. Some of the body parts can’t be more than a couple weeks old. And then there are some older bones.
A low growl rises behind me. It’s my turn to run. I make a break for the trees. Thumping paws are right behind me. A claw takes a piece out of my calf. Adrenaline takes care of the pain. I jump into the darkness, feeling the blood pulse from the exposed muscle scraping my sock. My arms hit branch, and I wrap fingers around it, pulling my legs up. I feel a whoosh as the creature flies under me. Its laughter becomes a metallic scream. I try to pull my body up on the branch but accidentally squeeze the trigger of the gun instead. A bullet whizzes out into the night.
One bullet left.
I drop from the branch. The pain from my missing calf crumples my leg upon impact. The monster flies past me again. My right leg gives out. I reach back and feel my pants shredded at the hamstring, plus more blood. So much blood.
I lie down. The monster’s roar softens to a growl. It doesn’t need to announce its victory. My head rushes and eyes are everywhere, laughing at me. I can’t die without a fight. I can’t give up like I gave up on my brother.
I pick a set of eyes and fire the revolver at them. I don’t hear the bang, but there’s enough flash to see the wide mouth, the rows of bloodstained teeth, the skeleton eyes. There’s enough flash to see the bullet enter the jaw.
It falls to the ground. Its legs scramble for footing. I don’t let it. Despite the pain and the blood draining from my body, I pull myself up on my feet and stand over the writhing monster.
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