Angel of the Abyss

by Ed Kurtz

  “Parson, John. This lists him on the board for a company called Monumental Pictures in Culver City. Think it could be the same person?”

  Monumental was the name of the production company behind Angel of the Abyss. It went under before my parents were born, but it certainly wasn’t unheard of to resurrect old names for new uses. Then again, I had no idea how long Parson had been dead, or if this second iteration of Monumental was still a going concern.

  I said, “That’s John, all right.”

  “I’m afraid all this has is that and the web address. MonumentalPictures.net. This is a pretty old book, though—at least eight years, I think. I’d say visit the site and hopefully it will have all the info you need.”

  She gave me a caring look, her eyes unable to stay away from my bandages for too long.

  “Thank you so much for your help,” I said to her. To the other little shit, I said nothing at all.

  I left and found a pharmacy where I bought some gauze and other items to redress my head. I also bought a cotton beanie to cover most of it up. From there I took my bounty to the nearest copy center, which in the post-Internet café age were just about the only places other than libraries where you could find a computer for public use. I paid for an hour but I only needed five minutes.

  The website was so old it had frames and clip art, but there was an address and a phone number. I copied them down and rushed back to my motel room, where I dialed the number before the door slammed shut behind me. Out of order.

  But I still had an address.

  The next half hour I spent carefully unwrapping my mummified head to redress before I went back out again. It was the first time I’d seen the wound, and it was horrific. My right eye was still swollen shut and the entry point was black and crusted. There was some kind of cotton or cloth stint lodged in the tiny hole, but I didn’t go prodding at it to find out more. I developed a fear of exposing it too long and, after wiping my half-shaved head down with some antiseptic wipes, wrapped it quickly and cinched it with metal teeth. Then the beanie went on and I looked less like a horror creature and more like a derelict who lost a battle with a baseball bat in some back alley.

  I couldn’t decide which was worse.

  * * *

  West of the 405 and not too far from the Mar Vista projects there stood on South Slauson a large gray obelisk of a warehouse. There was no signage to identify its purpose, no windows on the street-facing side. The place could have been used for anything, or nothing at all. Either seemed equally dangerous to me. There was no telling who was in a place like that and what they were doing there. Possibly something perfectly innocuous and above-board, but given the way my little working vacation to L.A. had turned out so far, I wasn’t interested in putting any money on that.

  Not that I had much in the way of money—once again I’d charged my taxi ride out there, forty bucks. It was a miracle my credit card company hadn’t cut me off yet, decided the damn thing was stolen. As things stood, I was going to be looking at one hell of a bill, assuming I lived long enough to be shocked by it.

  I stood on the sidewalk as the cab drove off, listening to the city and the dull roar of the 405, and tried to imagine whether the junior Parson did anything remotely related to moviemaking in this place, once upon a time. I had my doubts. Monumental Pictures folded in the year between the disastrous premiere of Angel of the Abyss and Grace Baron’s official “death.” I didn’t know exactly when John Parson decided to resurrect the name, nor why, but it seemed a good bet to me whatever it was, it was something his widow was willing to kill just about anybody to conceal.

  At the front door I found a small button, presumably a doorbell. I didn’t touch it, but I tried the handle. Locked. From there I walked around the side, past a rickety-looking ladder leading up to the roof, and around to the back. There was an empty parking lot back there, the macadam cracked to hell and the cracks filled with tall weeds and crabgrass. The back of the warehouse sported two steel doors just like the one in front and a loading dock situated atop a broad concrete slab. I tried both back doors with the same result.

  I was just about to start weighing the pros and cons of trying that ladder when the left side door crunched open and a hairy face poked out. I jumped a little, startled.

  The face, almost all beard, said, “Jinx, that you?”

  The temptation to run popped into my head, but then I remembered that running was off the menu for me for the foreseeable future. Instead, I said, “No, sorry.”

  “You need to sleep here, man? It’s cool. It’s safe.”

  The door opened the rest of the way and a thin, pale man stepped out. His long hair was brown and gray, matted like his beard. He didn’t seem particularly dirty, but he was clearly homeless. He looked at me with watery blue eyes that said he could tell I was in dire straits, that he knew a lot about that.

  I said, “I kinda…just wanted to look around, actually.”

  “No trouble?” He seemed skeptical. I couldn’t blame him.

  “No trouble,” I agreed.

  He bit his thumbnail and traded glances with me and whatever was behind the door. While he thought it over, I decided to introduce myself.

  “My name’s Graham. I’ve been looking for somebody, and I think maybe she’s been here. Maybe not for a while.” I didn’t know if I meant Helen or Cora Parson. Or both. It didn’t really seem to make a difference.

  “I been squatting here off and on about a year,” the man told me. “A couple guys a little longer. I guess the place shut down ‘round 2000. S’what I hear, anyway.”

  “What was it before that?”

  “I dunno. Marky would know. You should ask him.”

  “Is he here?”

  “Marky’s always here.”

  The guy pressed the door all the way to the wall and stepped aside to let me by. As I passed him, he squinted one eye and reminded me: “No trouble, man.”

  I showed him my palms and smiled, and I walked into the dark, musty space.

  There were no fires burning in barrels as I might have expected, and in fact most of the open area was completely dark and vacant, apart from rows of empty metal shelves and cardboard boxes here and there. The residents—the squatters—were concentrated in a smaller space walled off with particleboard and strung with multicolored Christmas lights. The man, my friend, went toward it and motioned for me to follow. The guy seemed a lot more the hippie type than the murderer type, so I followed and tried not to think about the Manson family.

  Seated on a surprisingly decent-looking love seat were a man and woman, both in their thirties or early forties. She was black and he was Hispanic. Both were smoking cigarettes, or what I assumed to be cigarettes. When my guide approached, the man sat up straight.

  “Who’s that, Duff—Jinx?”

  “Nah, it ain’t Jinx. This guy’s called Graham.”

  Now both of them perked up as I emerged from the shadows behind Duff. The man, who I gathered was Marky, stood up to assess me. I smiled stupidly at him.

  “Graham,” he said, spreading it out so it sounded like Gray-um.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “I got no problem with you, Graham,” he said, as though that were an issue already raised. “No problem at all. But we do got a couple rules here before you can set down and rest.”

  “He said he won’t make no trouble,” Duff assured him.

  “Junkies lie all the time, bro,” Marky countered. “You know that.”

  I sighed and said, “I’m not a junkie and I don’t need to rest here. Marky—you’re Marky, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Marky: I’d like to be straight with you.”

  “I like that,” he said.

  “I’m here because this place used to be run by a man, a man who’s dead now, but his widow has caused me and my friends a lot of trouble.”

  “Trouble like that bandage up on your head?”

  “That and worse. I want to find this lady and put an end t
o it before anybody else gets hurt, and this place is the only lead I got.”

  “This place used to store old movies,” Marky told me, matter-of-factly. My ears pricked up. “Still some of them old movie cans around, too. This one time a dude dumped one of ‘em on a fire and that shit blew up—no lie, just like a bomb.”

  “Nitrate,” I said.

  “I dunno, but we hauled his ass right on out of here, I tell you that.”

  “Can you show me some of those cans?”

  “Look bro, you said you wasn’t going to cause no trouble. You’re talkin’ about people getting hurt and you look like you already been worked over good. That’s against the rules, man. I told you, we got rules.”

  I wished I’d only been worked over, but I kept that much to myself.

  I said, “Nobody’s after me, at least not at the moment. I’m supposed to still be in the hospital, actually, and the folks who did this to me still think I’m dead, as far as I know. All I need is a little information, and I promise you it won’t break any of your rules for me to get it, if it’s here.”

  He wrinkled his nose and mulled it over. While he was thinking, the woman passed a bottle up to him and he took a long pull. Then, without a word or even looking me in the eye, he passed the bottle to me. Its contents were radioactive green and the label read MD 20/20—KIWI-LEMON. It felt like a moment of truth, or a test of courage, or something. I didn’t want to offend my gracious host, so I took a belt and gagged the stuff down. I coughed hard after that and Marky took the bottle back, laughing his ass off.

  “Shit, bro,” he said, “you didn’t have to drink it.”

  Now the woman and Duff joined in on the hilarity and, once my retching coughs were under control, I chuckled a little too.

  “Come on,” Marky said then. “Lemme show you something.”

  32

  Hollywood, 1926

  “Give me a minute.”

  Grace waited in the doorway while Jack went into the darkness of the studio, his footsteps echoing loudly throughout the shadowed stages. A few moments later she heard a metallic crunch and a row of lights hanging from the rafters burned on.

  “And God said,” Jack boomed from the opposite end of the broad space, his arms outstretched.

  Grace walked in, her heels clacking a different tempo from the director’s shoes, and paused between the city street and the cemetery. The rafter lights illumined the fake gravestones like sunlight after a storm, streaming through the dissipating clouds.

  Only the sacrificial tomb evaded the light, masked by the length of her own shadow.

  33

  Culver City, 2013

  Some of the titles on the decaying labels I recognized. A few I didn’t. Part of me was looking for Convention City, despite the urgency of the situation. Mostly I just wanted to see if there was anything among the three towers of dusty silver cans that would lead me where I needed to go.

  The reels were stacked as far away from where Marky and his cohorts resided as possible and, like their little area on the other side of the warehouse, they had built walls around them. Unlike the particleboard from their apartment, however, these walls were wooden and cut into odd shapes, and blanketed with dust.

  “After that film blowed up the way it did, I didn’t wanna be any too close,” he explained.

  I gritted my teeth, hating to think what that guy might have destroyed. Some years earlier I’d read a story about a conservative church group in Florida who bought an old, defunct drive-in and held a nice little Nazi burning party in the parking lot when they found a closet full of films. I raged about that for weeks.

  “Why didn’t you just get rid of them?” I asked him.

  “One of these days I’ll find somebody wants to buy ‘em, I figure. You interested?”

  I squinted in the low glow of his flashlight at an almost illegible label that read What Has To Be Done.

  “Well,” I stalled. “Possibly.”

  I set What Has To Be Done aside and kept sifting through the stacks. Just when I finished the second and started in on the third, Marky said, “There’s an old office, too. Way over there, on the street side. Kind of a dressing room and office, I guess. Big mirror in it, all broke up.”

  “I’ll want to see that,” I started, when I saw I was holding a missing reel from Angel of the Abyss in my hand. The hand shook and my heartbeat quickened. I went through the next few reels in a hurry, and two more were from Angel. Another just had TEST written on the label, the ink so faded it was almost gone. Screen test? I wondered. I planned on finding out.

  “Looks like you found you something good,” Marky said. “I saved ‘em, though. They mine, man.”

  “Please tell me there’s a projector in here someplace.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The thing you feed the film through, to show it up on a screen.”

  “Oh, right, right. Like at the movie theater.”

  I clutched one of the Angel reels to my chest like it was my own baby and widened my eyes, awaiting a response.

  “Yeah,” he said at last. “Yeah, there’s one of them. Back in that office. Or dressing room. Or whatever the hell it’s supposed to be.”

  “God, I hope it works,” I moaned, and in my shaken state I brushed up against one of the diving walls, nearly knocking it over. Marky rushed forward to right it, and between the two of us we kicked up quite a dust cloud. Once again I was coughing my lungs up in front of this man, who didn’t seem fazed by it at all. And when the glare of his flashlight settled upon the oddly shaped platform, my heart almost stopped dead.

  That first reel, the third, that I saw when Leslie Wheeler emailed me the video of it, had been playing and replaying in my mind ever since I first got into this mess. Even when I was unconscious in the hospital, I saw Grace Baron emerging from the fog on that crazy, avant garde street lined with painted backdrops of bricked façades and shop fronts.

  There was no doubt in my mind that I was standing two feet from one of those backdrops now, a piece of Angel of the Abyss.

  “Jesus,” I gasped.

  “You wanta see that project-a-thing or what?” Marky barked.

  I swallowed hard and gathered up all four of the reels I wanted.

  “Yeah…yes. Lead the way, Marky.”

  * * *

  “Them damn things best not blow my head off.”

  I grunted to signify that I’d heard him, but my attention was focused on the oldest damn film projector I’d ever put my hands on.

  It was a twenties model Zenith safety projector, in astonishingly good shape. The lamp house was brown with rust but there was a relatively new bulb in it; the diffuser and lens were either restored or just remarkably well looked after. I snaked the cord up from the floor, covered in woven cloth as they were in those days, and sighed with relief to find the plug was suitable to a modern outlet.

  “You’ve got some power,” I said to Marky. “To get those Christmas lights going. Is the whole place wired?”

  “I guess I could run the extension cord over,” he said. “We juicing off the city, actually.”

  I nodded and he ran over to start pulling up the cord. When he came back, I gently fit the plug into the cord’s outlet and held my breath as I switched the antique on. And glory hallelujah, the damn thing worked.

  Marky said, “Don’t make ‘em like they used to.”

  “You got that right.”

  About everything, I thought, feeling sentimental for a past I never knew. Common pitfall in my profession.

  Duff and the woman got to singing back in their corner of the warehouse, drunk as lords on that foul green stuff, and though Marky’s eyes shot that way he stayed with me. He kept the flash on my hands while I fed the first of the reels into the sprockets. Once it was ready, I turned the machine to face the dirty gray wall and started the show.

  34

  Hollywood, 1926

  Hugging herself, Grace turned her gaze from the faux tombstones to Jack and forced herself
to smile. The liberally flowing booze from the premiere was starting to wear off as she started to question why she agreed to come to the studio in the first place.

  “What’s doing, Jack?” she asked with a small, artificial laugh.

  He laughed back and went directly to the camera, which he heaved up by its wooden tripod. Grace narrowed her eyes, watching him carefully as he carried the equipment over to where she stood.

  “Don’t tell me you’re this overworked,” she half-jested. “Surely the next scene can wait till morning.”

  “No,” he said. “Not this one.”

  His smile and laughter had faded. Now he set to arranging the camera, peering through the viewfinder at the cemetery, muttering quietly to himself.

  “Jack?”

  “Just a minute. Say—would you stand beside the tomb? Just to the left.”

  “What was it you wanted to talk about, Jack?”

  “Just to the left of it,” he repeated. “I’ll need to set the lights.”

  “Come off that,” Grace said with as much force as she could muster. “We’re not really going to film anything—at this hour? Alone, and without Saul?”

  “We worked a week without Saul.”

  “He was ill. He’s back now.”

  “We don’t need him,” Jack hissed. “Who’s making this picture, anyway? Jack Parson and Grace Baron, that’s who. All that tubby Jew does is interfere. And this—this—is something he could never wrap his dry little mind around, anyhow. No sirree.”

  She stepped back, away from him, and rubbed her bare arms despite the muggy warmth of the studio.

  “You’re frightening me, Jack.”

  His grin returned and he paused for a moment, shaking his head. He then looked up at her, his face in shadow behind the rafter lights.