Mister October - Volume Two

by Edited by Christopher Golden

  If he told Lucinda about the catfish gal, every man, woman and child in Flyjar would be lined up on the dock playing everything from a banjo to a Jew’s harp trying to muscle in on his gig. The way Hop saw it, there was no call for him to ruin a good thing before he had to.

  Once there weren’t any more goodies coming his way from Lit’l Fishie, as he called her, he planned to take his Folgers can full of antique coins and gunnysack of gold doorknobs and head off to the big city—say Jackson or Greenville. Hell, he might even go as far as Biloxi—maybe even New Orleans! He didn’t really care where he ended up, just as long as it was some place where the women were prettier and younger than those in Flyjar, and you could buy beer on Sundays.

  Judging from how Lit’l Fishie was behaving during his more recent serenades, something told him it wouldn’t be long before things dried up on her end, so to speak. She kept swinging back and forth between acting skittish—disappearing every time a bullfrog croaked—and making kiss-kiss noises with that saddlebag mouth of hers. Hop might not know much, but he sure as hell knew women, and Lit’l Fishie was showing all the signs of a sugar mama running short on cash.

  As he set out for Steamboat Bend that day, Hop decided it was going to be his last serenade for the catfish gal—and his final day as a citizen of Flyjar. Now that he’d found his fortune, it was time for him to strike out into the world and collect his fame.

  * * *

  Hop scanned the sky, frowning at the approaching clouds. It had rained off and on since sunrise, and there were puddles all along the rutted cow path that lead to Steamboat Bend. As much as he disliked tramping through the mud, going out on foul-weather days meant he didn’t have to worry about anyone snooping around.

  Tightening his grip on his guitar strap, Hop hurried down the levee embankment and onto the deserted dock’s wooden surface. He sat down on the end of the pier, as he always did, dangling his legs over the open water, and began to play See My Grave Is Kept Clean.

  Normally Lit’l Fishie broke surface about fifty yards away the moment he started to play, then would move in until she was staring up at him like a snake-tranced bird. Hop knew that look all too well. He saw it all the time in the eyes of the women whenever he played at the juke joints. He knew that if he said the word, Lit’l Fishie would roll in cornmeal and gladly throw herself in a red-hot frying pan for him.

  He had finished with Blind Lemon and started into Leadbelly, but the catfish gal had yet to put in an appearance. Hop frowned. Maybe she couldn’t hear him. He didn’t really know where she lived, exactly, but he was under the impression she didn’t stray that far from the Bend. He changed from Leadbelly to Son House, on the offhand chance that she didn’t care for Cotton Fields.

  When Lit’l Fishie still didn’t show herself, Hop’s frown deepened even further. It was time to pull out the stops. He began to play one of her favorites: Up Jumped the Devil.

  There was a bubbling sound directly below where he was sitting. Hop smiled knowingly at the shape lurking just below the murky water lapping against the pylons. Robert Johnson worked like a charm on women—whether they was two-legged or had gills.

  “Why you so shy all of a sudden, darlin’?” he called out. “Why don’t you show me that sweet, fishy face of yours?”

  The bubbles at the end of the pier grew more intense, as if the water was boiling. Hop scowled and leaned forward, staring down between his dangling feet at the muddy water below.

  “Lit’l Fishie—is that you?”

  There was less than a heartbeat between the moment the thing with bumpy skin leapt from the water and when its powerful jaws snapped shut on Hop’s legs. He was only able to scream just the once—a high, almost womanly shriek—before he was yanked, guitar and all, into the river. The last thing Hop saw, before the silty waters of the Mississippi claimed him, was the catfish gal watching him drown, with a sorrowful expression on her bruised face.

  * * *

  When Hop Armstrong went out fishing and never came back, most folks in Flyjar were of the opinion he’d found himself a new girlfriend and left Lucinda for greener pastures. There was a smaller group, however, that was of the opinion the handsome ne’er- do-well had gotten drunk and fallen through the dilapidated dock into the river below. In any case, no one really gave a good god damn what had happened to him, and after a couple of weeks there were other things to talk about down at the barber shop.

  Three months after Hop disappeared, Sammy Herkimer snagged his line on something underneath the pier at Steamboat Bend. At first he thought it was just caught on some waterlogged reeds, but when he reeled it back in, he found Hop’s git-box hanging off the other end.

  The guitar that had charmed so many ladies out of their drawers and their life’s savings was now dripping slime, its neck splintered and body badly chewed up. Sammy shook his head as he freed the mangled instrument, but he really wasn’t surprised by what he’d found. Back when he’d told Hop about the catfish gals, he’d forgot to mention they weren’t the only strange critters that called Steamboat Bend home.

  One thing about them gator boys: they sure are jealous.

  ILLIMITABLE DOMINION

  By Kim Newman

  Okay, you could say it was my fault.

  I’m the one. Me, Walter Paisley, agent to stars without stars on Hollywood Boulevard. I said ‘spare a thought for Eddy’ and the Poe Plague got started….

  It’s 1959 and you know the montage. Cars have shark-fins. Juke-boxes blare The Platters and Frankie Lyman. Ike’s a back number, but JFK hasn’t yet broken big. The commies have put Sputnik in orbit, starting a war of the satellites. Coffee houses are full of beards and bad poetry. Boomba the Chimp, my biggest client, has a kiddie series cancelled out from under him. Every TV channel is showing some Western, but my pitches for The Cherokee Chimp, The Monkey Marshal of Mesa City and Boomba Goes West fall on stony ground. The only network I have an ‘in’ with is DuMont, which shows how low the Paisley Agency has sunk since the heyday of Jungle Jillian and Her Gorilla Guerrillas (with Boomba as the platoon’s comedy relief mascot) and The Champ, the Chimp and the Imp (a washed-up boxer is friends with a cigar-smoking chimpanzee and a leprechaun).

  American International Pictures is a fancy name for James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff sharing an office. They call themselves a studio, but you can’t find an AIP backlot. They rent abandoned aircraft hangars for soundstages and shoot as much as possible out of doors and without permits. At the end of the fifties, AIP are cranking out thirty-forty pictures a year, double features shoved into ozoners and grindhouses catering to the Clearasil crowd. They peddle twofers on low-budget juvenile delinquency (Reform School Girl with Runaway Daughters!), affordable science fiction (Terror From the Year 5,000 with The Brain Eaters!), inexpensive chart music (Rock All Night with The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow!), cheapskate creatures (I Was a Teenage Werewolf with The Undead!), frugal combat (Suicide Battalion with Paratroop Command) or cut-price exotica (She-Gods of Shark Reef with Teenage Cave Man!). When Jim and Sam try for epic, they hope a marquee-filling title—The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent—distracts the hot-rodders from sub-minimal production values and a ninety-cent sea serpent filmed in choppy bathwater.

  The AIP racket is that Jim thinks up a title—say, The Beast With a Million Eyes or The Cool and the Crazy—and commissions lurid ad art which he buries in hard-sell slogans. He shows ads to exhibitors, who chip in modest production coin. Then a producer is put on the project. Said producer gets a writer in over the weekend and forces out a script by shoving peanuts through the bars. Someone has to direct the picture and be in it, but so long as a teenage doll in a tight sweater screams on the poster—at a monster, a switchblade or a guitar-player—no one thinks too much about them. Sam puts fine-print into contracts which make sure no one sees profit participation and puff cigars at trade gatherings.

  Roger Corman is only one of a corral of producers—Bert I. Gordon and Alex Gordon are ot
hers—on AIP’s string, but he’s youngest, busiest, and cheapest. After, to his mind, wasting half his budget hiring a director named Wyott Ordung on a 1954 masterpiece called The Monster from the Ocean Floor, Roger trims the budgets by directing most of his films himself. He seldom does a worse job than Wyott Ordung. Five critics in France and two in England say Roger is more interesting than Cukor or Zinnemann—though unaccountably It Conquered the World misses out on a Best Picture nomination. Then again, Mike Todd wins for Around the World in 80 Days. I’d rather watch Lee Van Cleef blowtorch a snarling turnip from Venus at 68 minutes than David Niven smarm over two hundred smug cameo players in far-flung locations for three or four hours. You don’t have to be a contributor to Cayenne du Cinéma or Sight & Sound to agree.

  After sixty-seventy films inside four years, it gets so Roger can knock ‘em off over a weekend. No kidding. Little Shop of Horrors is made in three days because it’s raining and Roger can’t play tennis. He tackles every subject, within certain Jim-and-Sam-imposed limits. He shoots movies about juvenile delinquent girls, gunslinger girls, reincarnated witch girls, beatnik girls, escaped convict girls, cave girls, Viking girls, monster girls, Apache girls, rock and roll girls, girls eaten by plants, carnival girls, sorority girls, last girls on earth, pearl-diver girls and gangster girls. Somehow, he skips jungle girls, else maybe Boomba would land an AIP contract.

  The thing is everybody—except Sam, who chortles over the ledgers without ever seeing the pictures—gets bored with the production line. Another week, and it’s Blood of Dracula plus High School Hellcats, ho hum. I don’t know when Roger gets time to dream, but dream he does—of bigger things. Jim thinks of bigger posters, or at least different-shaped posters. In the fifties, the enemy is television, but AIP product looks like television—small and square and black and white and blurry, with no one you’ve ever heard of wandering around Bronson Cavern. Drive-in screens are the shape of windshields. The typical AIP just lights up a middle slice. Even with Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Amazing Colossal Man, and The She-Creature triple-billed, kids are restless. Where’s the breathtaking CinemaScope, glorious Technicolor and stereoscopic sound? 3-D has come and gone, and neither Odorama nor William Castle’s butt-buzzers are goosing the box office.

  Jim or Roger get a notion to lump together the budgets and shooting schedules of two regular AIP pictures and throw their all into one eighty-five minute superproduction. Together, they browbeat Sam into opening the cobwebbed cheque book. This time, Mike Todd—well, not Mike Todd, since he’s dead, but some imaginary composite big-shot producer—will have to watch out come Oscar season. So, what to make?

  In England, they start doing horror pictures in color, with talented actors in starched collars and proper sets. Buckets of blood and girls in low-cut nightgowns are included, so it’s not like there’s art going on. Every other AIP quickie has a monster in it, so the company reckon they’re expert at fright fare. There’s your answer. Roger will make a classy—but not too-classy—horror. Jim can get Vinnie Price to star. He’d been in that butt-buzzing William Castle film for Columbia and a 3-D House of Wax for Warners, and is therefore a horror ‘name,’ but his career is stalled with TV guest spots on debatably rigged quiz programs or as fairly fruity actors touring Tombstone on Western shows. After Brando, well-spoken, dinner-jacketed eyebrow-archers like him are out of A pictures. What Jim and Roger don’t have is a clue as to what their full-color, widescreen spooktacular should be about. They just know Revenge of the Crab Monsters or The Day After the World Ended won’t cut it.

  Enter Walter Paisley, with a Signet paperback of Tales of Mystery and Imagination. No, it isn’t altruism—it’s all about the client.

  Boomba’s out of work and eating his weight in bananas every single day. Bonzo and Cheetah have a lock on working with Dutch Reagan and Tarzan, so my star is unfairly shut out of the town’s few chimp-friendly franchises unless he’s willing to do dangerous vine-swinging, crocodile-dodging stunts those precious primates want to duck out of. Therefore, I’m obliged to scare up properties suitable as vehicles for a pot-bellied chimpanzee. I ponder a remake of King Kong, with a chimp instead of a gorilla, but RKO won’t listen. I pitch a biopic of Major Sam, America’s monkey astronaut, but that goddamn Russian dog gets all the column inches.

  In desperation, I ask an intern who once had a few weeks of college about famous, out-of-copyright stories with monkeys in ‘em, and get pointed at ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’. Okay, so, strictly, the killer in that yarn is an orang-utan not a chimpanzee—but every film version casts a guy in a ratty gorilla suit, so Boomba is hardly wider of the author’s original intent. I know of AIP’s horror quandary, and a light-bulb goes on over my head. I dress Boomba up in a fancy suit and cravat and beret for the Parisian look and teach him to wave a cardboard cutthroat razor. I march the chimp into Jim and Sam’s office just as Jim and Roger are looking glumly at a sketch artist holding up a blank board which ought to be covered with lurid artwork boosting their break-out film.

  Tragically, Boomba compromises his employment prospects by crapping his velvet britches and grabbing for Sam’s foot-long cigar, but my Poe paperback falls onto the desk and Roger snatches it up. He once read some of the stories, and thinks he particularly liked ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’ Sam objects. The kids who go to AIP pictures have to study Poe in school and will therefore naturally hate him. But Jim remembers Universal squeezed out a couple of Poe pictures and racked up fair returns back in the Boris and Bela days. Then, Sam—who gives every appearance of actually having read ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’—says you can’t make a horror movie without a monster and there’s no monster in the story. ‘The house,’ says Roger, eyes shining, ‘the house is the monster!’ Jim and Sam look at each other, thinking this over. Boomba is forgotten, chewing the cigar. Then, management buys Roger’s line. The house is the monster.

  Important issues get settled. Is there a part for Price? Yes, there’s someone in the falling house called Roderick Usher. Is there a girl? Roderick has a sister called Madeline. Paging through the paperback, they discover Poe doesn’t say Madeline isn’t a teenager in a tight sweater. I suggest the thin plot of the eighteen-page story would be improved if a killer chimp escaped from the Rue Morgue and broke into the House of Usher to terrorise the family. No one listens.

  Jim and Roger run with ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’ They happily read out paragraphs in Vinnie Price accents. The sketch-artist covers his board with a falling house, Vinnie lifting a terrified eyebrow, a buried-alive babe in a tight shroud, coffins, crypts, skeletons, an atomic explosion (which gets rubbed out quickly), and slogans ripped from Poe prose. ‘He buried her alive... to save his soul!’ ‘I heard her first feeble movements in the coffin ... we had put her living in the tomb!’ ‘Edgar Allan Poe's overwhelming tale of EVIL and TORMENT!’

  I see my slice of the deal vanishing along with Sam’s cigar. Eddy is dead and long out of copyright, so there’s no end for him. This cheers Sam up, since he’d been all-a-tremble at the prospect of having to buy rights to some horror book from some unwashed writer.

  So, just when it would take a steam-train to stop AIP making The Fall of the House of Usher, I mention I am the agent for the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore and can easily secure permission—for a nominal fee—for the use of the author’s name, which they have registered as a trade-mark. For a few moments, the room is quiet and no one believes me. Sam is sceptical, but I tell him the reason Poe’s middle-name is so often misspelled is to evade dues payable to the EAPSoB. He mulls it over. He swallows it, because it makes sense to him. He’s ready to argue for going with ‘Edgar Allen Poe’s House of Asher’ as a title before Jim and Roger shout him down. Sam doesn’t care about critics, but little slivers of Jim and Roger do, so they’re ready to strike a deal on the spot. I have a pre-prepared contract, which needs crossings-out as it’s for a monkey as actor rather than an august body as trademark-leaser, but will still do.

  As so
on as I’m out of the office, I found the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore and start paperwork on trademark registration. It turns out I’m not even the first in the racket. Edgar Rice Burroughs and Mark Twain, or their heirs, have beaten me to it. The deal may not be 100% kosher, but AIP’s cheque clears. Probably, they just want to shut me up, since I’m theoretically responsible for bringing them the property. Hey, it’s my drugstore paperback. They offer me an ‘associate producer’ credit, but forget to include it on the film. Maybe it’s lost in the five minutes of swirling multi-colored liquids tacked on after the house has burned down and tumbled into the tarn. But, from then on, I’m part of the Poe package.

  The Fall of the House of Usher—or The House of Usher, as it is called on the posters to save on lettering—is made in a comparatively leisurely fifteen days. Vinnie shaves his moustache, under protest as if he were Cesar Romero, and wears a white wig, which he likes enough to model in his off-hours along Sunset Strip. There are only three other people in the speaking cast, so the star gets first bite of all the scenery available for chewing. On set, Vinnie objects to the line ‘the house lives, the house breathes!’ Roger tells him ‘the house is the monster’, and Vinnie sells it with eyeball-rolling, velvet-tongued ham. In my capacity as ‘ass. prod.’, I have Boomba pose for a portrait as a degenerate Usher ancestor. Floyd, the camera genius, doesn’t get a good shot of it so you can’t see the chimp’s cameo in the picture.

  This is how it plays. In some earlier century (no one’s sure which), a brooding youth with a Brando sneer and a Fabian haircut travels through burned-out wasteland to a painted-on-glass mansion where Vinnie twitches at the slightest sound and rolls his eyeballs as if they were marbles. He has extra-sensitive senses, which are a perpetual torment to him, and looks severely pained whenever anyone drops a fork or lights a lamp. Our hero is searching for his missing girlfriend, Vinnie’s sister. She flits about, showing cleavage, then faints and is buried alive in the basement. Girl claws her way out of crypt, irritated, and scratches out Vinnie’s eyes as if he were making a play for her date at the record hop. A candle falls over and the House of Usher catches light like Atlanta in Gone With the Wind—indeed, some of the burning building stock footage might be offcuts from David O. Selznick’s day. Vinnie and girl get crushed and/or burned. Our hero makes it out unscorched and broods some more—presumably his agent has just told him how much he’s getting paid and he’s resolved to quit acting and become a producer so he can wave the foot-long cigars someday. A caption runs ‘“and the deep and dark tarn closed silently over the fragments of the House of Usher”—Poe.’ Just to make sure you know, Eddy’s name pops up several more times during the swirly credits.