by Ed Kurtz
“That’s only because you don’t listen, dearheart. Dear, sweet Grace. You haven’t listened to me at all, not from the start.”
“I’m listening now. I’m here, Jack, and I’m listening. What was it you wanted to say?”
A small tremor worked its way up her back. She tried to shiver it out.
“Don’t you remember? The steps? The soldiers? Potemkin?”
Grace nodded vigorously, feigning comprehension she did not have.
“Yes, yes I remember.”
“What did I say? That day, Gracie. About art—the key. The secret.”
She recalled the troubling scene as clearly as though it were playing before her now; the screams, the blood, the terror. And she recalled her director’s words, too—words that puzzled her then and terrified her now.
“Darkness,” she whispered. “You said, ‘human darkness.’”
Jack Parson wiped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his topcoat and sighed loudly.
“That’s right, Grace. Gracie Baronsky. My star. You understand. Oh, thank God! You understand.”
He left the camera and walked stiffly toward her. She flinched, but he did not appear to notice as he wrapped his arms around her and squeezed her tightly.
Into her ear, he softly whispered, “What we do here tonight is the end of cinema, my lovely girl. Talkies will never top what we’re about to give them.”
Her eyes spilled over, tears falling in dark spots on his shoulder.
35
Culver City, 2013
Having watched Angel of the Abyss with three missing reels alongside Jake before my little accident, I was now finally putting the film together by way of memory added to the remaining footage glimmering on the wall before me.
Marky murmured, “Shit, man, this flick’s so old it’s silent.”
I shushed him as politely as I could and fell back in step with the nightmare beauty of Grace Baron’s Clara, a murdered woman returned from the grave to wreak vengeance on the men who wronged her. She slinked through densely fog-laden alleys in a sheer garment, her alabaster body barely concealed and her jet-black bob a stunning mess atop her scowling face. Even in rage—in death—she was astonishing. Not just her looks, but her range; even without intertitles her every thought was communicated through her eyes, through her flaring nostrils and small, dark mouth.
The world would have fallen in love with her, had it ever been given the chance.
I went through the three reels quickly. At about ten minutes apiece, they went by too quickly, and I sat in silence for several minutes absorbing them. Clara got them, of course, all the men who took her and made her their victim. And when that was done, the goat-headed beast with whom she’d made her carnal pact took her into its arms, enveloping her in its great, dark cloak, and she vanished with him in a wisp of smoke. The picture was harrowing and gorgeous, and much too sinister for its time. Even now it jarred me—me, who went through every stomach-churning 1970s Euro-horror film in my college days—even as it bewildered me with its breadth of design and the depth of Baron’s extraordinary performance. As sure as I was that Parson and his heirs had everything to do with the violence and secrecy taking hold of my life at that moment, I had no other choice but to admit the man had made a masterpiece.
So why must it be kept secret?
That question was answered by the fourth and final reel. The one that had only TEST on it.
I fed it into the projector, and in the horrible minutes that followed, I understood everything completely.
36
Hollywood, 1926
Squirming in his strong grasp, Grace sniffed and fought the cloud that seemed to envelop her senses.
“Jack,” she said, “listen to me. I have an idea.”
His fingers dug into her ribs and he shook slightly. As if weeping. She exhaled sharply and continued: “We’re going to make an astounding picture together. You and me. Like nothing anyone’s ever seen, or done. Because you’re an artist, not like these Hollywood types. You’re not one of them, Jack. You’re our Eisenstein, and you’re going to prove it to everybody.”
“I am,” he rasped. “I will.”
“But not tonight,” she said, her tone motherly. “It’s not the right time, Jack. We’ll need more crew, won’t we? To get the lights just right? To keep your mind on the direction? Why, you can’t run it all. You’re the mind, Jacky. Not some mean crewman. Let’s do it tomorrow.”
Jack groaned sorrowfully and leaned away while still grasping her at the waist. His eyes were pink, puffy. He looked devastated, sad.
“You never understood this picture at all, did you?” he asked.
“What do you mean? Of course I—”
“No one does. It’s a nightmare. Someday, Lord willing, they will see what I’ve done, and they’ll see that I closed the gap. That pictures don’t have to exist on the other side of the screen, separate from the people who see them. That the darkness in them—in all of us, Gracie, in you and me—is what binds us to art.”
He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and shuddered. The movement went from his hands into her body, and she stifled a cry.
“Only we can do this, Grace,” he said, opening his eyes and staring hard into hers. “You, and I. The artist and his subject. No one else can help us. And no one else can know.”
“Know? Know what, Jack?” She struggled and he moved to grasp her roughly by the arm. “Know what?”
37
Culver City, 2013
I said, “Oh my God.”
“What the shit, man?” Marky responded. “What the shit is this?”
I couldn’t answer him. I was choked on my own quiet sobs.
Probably I knew it all along, or at least suspected it. I’d read that she was present at the film’s abysmal premiere, but I knew now that could not have been true. Because Grace Baron was dead by then. There could be no doubt about it. I was watching her die.
Not Clara—Grace. I was watching Grace Baronsky die.
The thing was so clumsy it looked more like behind-the-scenes footage or a home movie than a scene from the brilliant production I’d just seen. The camera shook as it was positioned, already rolling, and in flashes bodies moved in the periphery of the frame. I longed for impossible sound, to hear what was happening just off camera, but it became clear soon enough.
Though the framing was off and the lighting bright and ill-designed, if indeed designed at all, once the camera was steady I watched as a man in a rumpled tuxedo dragged a struggling woman to the same cemetery set from Angel of the Abyss and threw her down, violently, upon the sacrificial tomb. Her gown was torn and her makeup streaming down her still unbelievably angelic face—Grace. Grace Baronsky from Idaho, the starlet who never was.
She lunged up, swinging at the man with an open hand, but he was quicker than she and put down her rebellion with a close-fisted punch to the jaw. Grace rocked back and the man climbed atop of her, planting a knee on her chest. He tore her gown open, right down the front, and when he moved aside again, she was exposed to the waist.
“Is this for real, bro?” Marky said, his voice uncharacteristically quiet.
I said, “It’s for real.”
Grace lolled on the fake tomb, raised her hand to her face and stretched her mouth open wide. Whether she was screaming, or crying, or making any noise at all, I couldn’t tell. I cried for her. I think maybe Marky did a little, too.
The man went off screen for a moment while she lay there, stunned. When he returned, he was pulling himself into one of the long cloaks, the costume of the sect who killed Clara in the picture. He then went back to the camera, his body filling and darkening the frame for several seconds. When the light came back, he had moved it, set it up to angle down at Grace, at her anguished face and exposed torso. He tore the gown the rest of the way down, and off. I felt awful watching—disgusting, down to the pit of my stomach—but I somehow knew I had to. I had to bear witness to this. It was eighty-seven years too late
, but it had to be me.
I wiped my eyes on the back of my hand and forced myself to keep looking. And that was when the man showed the dagger to the camera.
38
Hollywood, 1926
“Jack,” she pleaded, her voice wet and slurred with pain. “Please don’t. Please, Jack.”
“Clara doesn’t speak in this scene,” he said. “You know that. Be quiet.”
“I’m not Clara. Jack—I’m not Clara. It’s Grace. Please, it’s Grace you’re hurting. I’m real. This is all real…”
He spun around, the hood of the cloak falling from his head and his teeth grinding with anger.
“Of course it’s fucking real!” he roared. “Don’t you think I know that? Why else would I bother? Can’t you even try to imagine the impact had Eisenstein actually shot those people on the stairs? Had he actually had them slashed and stomped down? The curtain would be torn down, damn it! Art and life! Cinema and death! Human darkness, just as I’ve been saying all along. For Christ’s sake, Clara—Grace—can you see now? Can’t you finally see?”
Jack moaned and swung around to kick over an adjacent gravestone. Grace whimpered, started to rise from the tomb. Her vision blurred and her jaw throbbed, but she pushed past it, lifted her weight and tried to focus on the door leading out. It seemed miles away.
“No, Clara!” Jack shrieked.
Grace cried out and tumbled off the tomb, rolling away from the set. The cold floor of the studio slammed against her naked body, and she got to her knees, ready to leap up for the door, for escape. But he was upon her before she could move another inch, slinking his arm around her neck and dragging her back. Back to the set. Back to the tomb. To her final performance.
Fighting for breath, Jack Parson lifted her kicking from the floor and threw her down, a second time, on the tomb. She yelled out and he drove his fist into her diaphragm, knocking the wind out of her lungs in a prolonged gasp. The studio spun like a merry-go-round and she saw the glint of the blade and she knew it wasn’t a prop, it wasn’t the spring-loaded, retractable dagger the day players used to act out her demise weeks ago.
No fake knives. No more acting. After all she’d done, all she’d survived for the privilege to perform on celluloid, Grace Baron was going to die for art.
Jack snapped his head to look at the camera. The machine was still rolling, with only a few minutes left in the reel. He turned back to Grace, wheezing under him, her eyes wide and mouth set tight.
“For history,” he said, calmly. “Thank you.”
And then he raised the blade.
39
Culver City, 2013
The blood welled up, impossibly dark and thick, like oil. The dagger only sank so deep, about three-quarters of the blade, where it stopped. And the man—Parson himself, of that I was sure now—held fast to the handle, permitting the wound to pour, Grace’s life to leak out from between her breasts in what was now scratchy, flickering black and white. It spilled down her side, following the groove of her ribs, and pooled beneath her still white body on the fake tomb. And there the reel ended, leaving nothing on the warehouse wall but a bright square of light as the projector continued to turn and click, the only thing making my soft, hitching sobs inaudible.
“Turn it off,” Marky said, his voice low and grim. “Turn that thing off, man.”
“I think it happened here,” I said, half to him and half to myself.
“What’choo mean, it happened here? That murder? That’s what that was, isn’t it? A murder?”
“It was. And I think this place used to be the movie studio where that happened. The movie before, and then that. Grace Baron’s killing. It happened right here, and…Jesus. That’s what this has been about all along.”
“What, bro? What kinda shit is this, anyway?”
“That old woman was just protecting her good family name,” I said, knowing I wasn’t making any sense to him. In the far corner, the woman was no longer singing, but Duff still was. Completely oblivious to the horror Marky and I had just seen. I envied the hell out of him for that.
I dragged a deep breath into my chest, my mind racing from the moment I got the phone call from Leslie Wheeler to waking up in a Los Angeles hospital with a hole in my head, wondering if it was even remotely possible that I could explain any of it to this homeless man who trusted me enough to permit me into his safe place. Somehow it seemed I owed him some kind of explanation, if only to calm his obviously rattled nerves—but that wasn’t something either of us were much concerned about when the gunshots started.
The woman shrieked and I hit the floor, knocking the projector to the ground where it broke apart noisily. Duff shouted something I couldn’t understand and then there were rapid footsteps, followed by another pair of popping shots. Marky cried out, scrambling toward the noise.
“Marky, don’t!” I called after him.
He sped out of the back office area, just barely clearing the doorway before another report sounded and he dropped backward like a brick. His flashlight clattered to the floor and the light went out. The shooter was close enough that I could smell the cordite. My ears rang slightly from the shots, but all I could hear now were slow, deliberate steps drawing near to the doorway. As quietly as I could, I picked up the empty can from which I’d taken that awful reel of nitrate film. Rust flaked off on my fingers.
The office and warehouse were almost pitch-black; only the faintest glow emanated from the Christmas lights across the building, but it was enough to illumine the shape that appeared in the doorway and bent over Marky. I held my breath and tried to keep from shaking, scared as I was. Any second this guy was going to come in the room, and I wanted to be as focused and ready as I could.
Next thing I knew, Marky coughed. It startled me and it sounded bad. The shooter made a surprised sound and then grunted. I jumped to my feet, took two long strides toward the door, and threw the can as hard as I could at the guy. It struck him in the neck and he shouted, turning and grasping at his neck as his gun went off. The muzzle flashed brightly in the air, and I was thankful it hadn’t been pointed at Marky. Or me.
The gunman roared, “Goddamnit!” I flung myself at Marky, seized a handful of his shirt and dragged him roughly back into the office, where I slid him across the floor and up against the inside wall. My hands were tacky with his blood. I couldn’t tell where he’d been hit, but he was wheezing and moving lazily about, dazed.
“Fuckin’ bums,” the shooter yelled. “Fuckin’ shit-birds!”
Shit-bird. I’d heard one of the goons at Florence Sommer’s house say that, moments before they killed her and shot me. I guessed this guy had to be on cleanup duty—hit the warehouse, get rid of everything, kill anyone you see. Old Cora Parson must not have known the place was being used by squatters. I’d never have gotten in had they not been there, but now it seemed like my interfering with their quiet corner of L.A. had gotten most of them killed. And that really pissed me off.
I gently patted Marky on the shoulder, hoping to Christ he was going to make it through this shitstorm, and then did probably the stupidest thing of my life thus far: I rushed out of the office and lunged right for the guy with the gun. He made a noise in his throat, spinning to get the drop on me, but I threw a left-handed punch at his throat that left him sputtering for air instead. My knuckles throbbed and the way my brain was going, the pain only served to make me angrier. So I punched him again, same place, and felt his windpipe collapse like rice paper. For my trouble my right leg turned to Jell-O and I went careening toward the hard cement floor.
It was the worst violence I’d ever committed, which wasn’t saying much, me being a generally pretty peaceful guy. With his air supply cut off, the man forgot all about his gun, which he just dropped so he could claw at his throat. I couldn’t make out his face very well in the nearly nonexistent light, but the flat, dry gulping noise he made in his mouth was enough to turn my stomach. It was almost enough to make me feel bad for what I’d done too, but not quite.
Not after what he’d done to Marky and what I imagined he must have done to the other two. So when he dropped to his knees beside me, I didn’t shed any tears about lifting my left foot and kicking the son of a bitch over. I didn’t stick around to watch him suffocate to death either; I stumbled around to find his gun and Marky’s flashlight, got both, and hurried back to the office.
After screwing the flashlight back together, I switched it on and turned it at Marky. He squinted and grumbled, “Man, get that damn thing out my eyes.”
“Where are you hit?”
“My goddamn arm,” he complained. I shone the light on his right arm, which was soaked with blood, the nucleus of which was a dark hole in the bicep. “Hurts like hell, man. Shit, I never got shot before. It hurts.”
“Trust me,” I said. “I know.”
“The hell was that dude?”
“Somebody who doesn’t want that film to ever get out.”
“What about Duff? And Shawna?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “But I don’t think it’s good.”
He squeezed his eyes shut and said, “Damn.”
“Hang tight,” I told him. “I’m going to find a phone and call 911. But listen, I’m getting out of here. I just—Jesus, I just killed that guy.”
“Good,” was all he said about that.
* * *
Duff was dead, shot in the chest, but Shawna was gone. It was a gruesome sight made worse by the cheerful glow of the colorful Christmas lights. Pangs of guilt ripped through me when I found him, though I tried to convince myself it wasn’t really my fault. I didn’t exactly believe that.
