Mister October - Volume Two

by Edited by Christopher Golden

  Then, it’s not just American International.

  The plague shows up as little things in little films. Two Cavalry troopers called ‘William Wilson’ in The Great Sioux Massacre. A ‘Pink Panther’ cartoon called Dial ‘P’ for Pendulum. A premature burial in John Goldfarb, Please Come Home. Then, a descent into the maelstrom. The Red Death arrives during the revolutionary scenes of Doctor Zhivago, and the rest of the film finds Darkness and Despair descending illimitably over Omar Sharif and Julie Christie. The Agony and the Ecstasy features Charlton Heston labouring for decades over a small oval portrait of one of Roderick Usher’s ancestors. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold winds up with Richard Burton clutching a purloined letter and ranting that the orang-utan did it. Even a John Wayne-Howard Hawks Western turns on a Poe poem, El Dorado.

  The curse is complete when movie theatres book The Sound of Music as a roadshow attraction and get The Sound of Meowing. In vast, empty, decaying haunted picture palaces across the land, Julie Andrews climbs ragged mountains and pokes around a basement only to find Captain von Trapp (Vincent Price) has walled up his wife along with her noisy cat. At the end, Austria burns down.

  My senses are more painfully acute by the hour. I can not venture out by day unless the sun is completely obscured by the thickest, gloomiest cloud and after dark can tolerate only the tiniest, flickering flame of a candle. My ears are assaulted by the faintest sound. A housewife tearing open a cereal packet two blocks away reverberates within my skull like the discharge of a Gatling gun. I can bear only the most pallid of foods, and neglect my formerly-favored watering-holes to become a ghoul-like habitué of the new McDonald’s chain, where fare that tastes of naught save cardboard may be found at the expense of a few trivial cents. The touch of my secretary becomes as sandpaper upon my appallingly sensitive skin, and raises sharp pains, sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at my pores. Few in the industry return my telephone calls, which is all to the good since I can of course scarcely bear the torture of tintinnabulation … of the bells—of the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells—of the moaning and the groaning of the bells.

  Movies are only the beginning. Soon, Poe is everywhere. The house is the monster, and the house is the United States of America. The break-out TV hits of the next seasons are The Usher Family, The Man From U.L.A.L.U.M.E. and The Marie Tyler Roget Show. Vincent Price takes over from Walter Cronkite, and intones the bad news in a velvet jacket, promising ‘much of madness, and more of sin, and horror the soul of the plot’ in reports from Vietnam, Washington and the Middle East. Sonny and Cher take ‘The Colloquy of Monos and Una’ to Number One in the hit parade, followed by Procul Harem’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Poe,’ Scott McKenzie’s ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Put some Flowers on Your Grave),’ the Mamas and the Papas’ ‘Dream a Little Dream Within a Dream of You,’ the Archies’ ‘Bon-Bon’ and Dean Martin’s ‘Little Old Amontillado Drinker Me.’ Vinnie hosts American Bandstand, too, warily scanning the dancers for a skullface figure in red robes.

  A craze for floppy shirts, ink-stained fingers and pale faces seizes the surfer kids, and everyone on the strip has a pet raven or a trained ape. Beauty contests for cataleptics are all the rage, and ‘Miss Universe’ is crowned with a wreath in her coffin as she is solemnly bricked up by the judges. The Green Berets adopt a ‘conqueror worm’ cap badge. Housing developments rise up tottering on shaky ground near stagnant ponds, with pre-stressed materials to provide Usher cracks and incendiaries built into the light-fittings for more spectacular conflagrations. The most popular names for girls in 1966-7 are ‘Lenore’, ‘Annabel’, ‘Ligeia’ and ‘Madeline’.

  In a kingdom by the sea, we are haunted. In the El Dorado of Los Angeles, white fog lies thick on the boulevards. The mournful ‘nevermores’ of ravens perched on statues is answered by the strangled mewling of black cats immured in basements. And the seagulls chime in with ‘tekeli-li tekeli-li’ as if that was any help.

  During the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hang oppressively low in the heavens, I pass alone in a Cadillac convertible through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length find myself as the shades of evening draw on, within view of the melancholy House of Roger. I know not how it is—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervades my spirit. I try to shake off the fog, like the after-dream of a reveller upon maryjane, in my brain and rid my mind of the words of Poe. Yet he sits beside me, phantasmal, fiddling with the radio dial, breathing whisky and muttering in intricate rhyme schemes. I have taken the Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu, where AIP and Corman—flush with monies from the Poe pictures—have thrown up a studio in a bleak castle atop the jagged cliffs. From the road, it looks phoney as a glass shot. The scrublands all around are withered and sere, and I’m not even sure what ‘sere’ means.

  The castle seems abandoned, but I gain access through a wide crack in the walls. In the gloom, I find the others. Roger, in dark glasses with side-panels. Sam, with raven chewing on his cigar. Jim, haunted by the doppelganger who no longer claims to be his son. Vinnie, worst of us all, liquid face dribbling over his frilly shirt, eyebrows and moustache shifted inches lower by the tide of loathsome, of detestable putrescence. A few others are with the crowd—the embalmed, toothless corpse of Lorre; an ancient withered ape just recognisable as Boris Karloff; barely-breathing girls, and a teenage singer coughing blood into a handkerchief; an ignored brooding youth or two, hiding in the shadows and trying to avoid being upstaged.

  All eyes are accusingly upon me. ‘Thou art the man,’ is written plainly on everyone’s faces. I admit it to myself and to the plague-ravaged company. We have brought Poe back. Neglected and despised in life, to his mind cheated of the riches and recognition due his genius, he has been kept half-alive in the grave, plagiarised and paperbacked, bought and sold and made a joke of. No wonder we have raised an angry Eddy, a vindictive and a spiteful genius. This time, he has caught on and he will not let go, not of us and not of the world. This is the dawning of the Age of Edgar Allan, the era of Mystery and Imagination. We have ushered—ahem—it in, but we are to be its mummified, stuffed, walled-up victims, the sacrifices necessary for the foundations of even the shakiest edifice.

  I have a new horror. It seizes my brain like a vulture’s—no, a raven’s—talons. I hear the faint whisper of nails against wood, the tapping of hairy knuckles against a coffin-lid, that first gibber of fear before the awful realisation takes hold. I can hear Boomba, and know that—through my neglect—I have suffered him to be buried alive. The gibber becomes a snarling, hooting, raging, clawing shriek. The tapping, as of someone gently rapping, becomes a hammering, a clamouring, a gnawing, a pawing, a crashing, a smashing. Wood breaks, earth parts, and long-fingered, bloodied, torn-nailed, horribly semi-human hands grope for the bone handle of a straight razor.

  Jim and Sam want to know what to do, how to escape. To them, every contract has a get-out clause. Roger and Vinnie know this isn’t true.

  Without, a storm rages. The heavens rage at the sorrows of the world.

  A door opens with a creak. The attenuated shadow of a chimpanzee is cast upon the flagstones, gleaming cruel blade held high. We turn to look, our capacity for wonder and terror long since exceeded.

  Brushfires burn all around, struggling against the torrents. The crack that runs through the castle—the crack that runs through California—widens, with great shouts as of the planet itself in pain and terror. A million tons of mud is on the march, and we stand between it and the sea. The walls bend and bow like painted canvas flats. A candle falls and flames spread. A maiden screams. A burning bird streaks comet-like through the air.

  The ape’s clutch is at my throat, the razor held high. In Boomba’s glittering, baleful eye I discern cruel recognition.

  Vinnie, before the burning beams come down, has to have the last quote…

  ‘“…The screenplay is the tragedy Man, and its hero the Conqueror Worm
!”—Edgar Allan …’

  The first Poe story I can remember reading is ‘Metzengerstein,’ which was in an illustrated book of an educational nature; while writing ‘Illimitable Dominion,’ I dug out a battered Everyman paperback of Tales of Mystery and Imagination I’ve had since about 1971 to check quotes and details. I’m in the second generation of folks who were led to Eddy by the Roger Corman-Vincent Price-AIP pictures of the 1960s, starting with The Fall of the House of Usher in 1960 and—as mostly per this story—running on til Tomb of Ligeia in 1965. I think the first one I saw was The Raven, which is as atypical of the series as the gothic ‘Metzengerstein’ (a terror which is of Germany, not the soul) is of Poe’s stories. I missed the films on their original cinema releases but saw them repeatedly on television (in black and white and panned and scanned) in the early 1970s, then sought them out in theatrical revivals which revealed sumptuous colour and imaginative widescreen framing. I’ve owned all these films in successive formats—off-hair VHS, retail VHS, laserdisc and DVD—and will probably keep buying them, though no home cinema can quite replicate the experience of watching that pendulum swing from one end of a panavision frame to the other in a darkened cinema. Though much that ‘Walter Paisley’ says about the films in the story is true, I unreservedly love them all—despite repeated plots, sets and stock footage, variable supporting casts and problematic readings of the original stories. Without really meaning to, I’ve returned often to Edgar A. Poe in my work—he features as a character in my novels Route 666 (which I wrote as Jack Yeovil) and The Bloody Red Baron and the story ‘Just Like Eddy’, which I wrote as part of my private campaign to combat the persistent misspelling of his adopted middle name as ‘Allen’.

  INDEPENDENCE DAY

  By Sarah Langan

  The waiting room is shiny and bright, but the people inside it are dirty. One lady’s wearing a black garbage bag instead of clothes, and Trina can tell just by looking that a few are addicts trying to score a fix. Since socialized medicine, doctors are free. But the people who can pay for it go to private hospitals.

  Trina waits her turn with her dad, Ramesh. He won’t be seeing the doctor today. He’s never seen the doctor. He says he’s not sick, but he’s lying. He coughs all the time, and in the mornings she’s seen him spit blood and phlegm into the bathroom sink. Last month, the Committee for Ethical Media installed a television camera in their kitchen because he submitted an unapproved audio to the news opera “Environmental Health.” Instead of running it under a pseudonym like he’d wanted, the editors called the cops. Now the whole family is under house surveillance. Anybody who wants can flip to channel 9.53256 and see her lard-congealed breakfast table, and the weird foam curlers her mother keeps forgetting to take out of her hair in the morning. Her whole eighth-grade class knows that Ramesh’s pet name for her is “Giggles” and that they can’t afford fresh milk. Only one-day soured from the bodega on 78th Street. It’s humiliating, and so is he.

  While they wait, he puts his hand on the back of her neck and squeezes the skin surrounding her port like he’s trying to pull it out. He doesn’t understand, even though eighteen Patriot Day channels repeat it day-in and day-out: You can’t stop progress!

  She’s carrying the list in the pocket of her spandex jeans. Each visit, her dad makes her write down her complaints before they leave the house, and then goes over them with her. He tells her that he wants to be sure she says the right things so she doesn’t get in trouble. But the truth is, he doesn’t give crap about her. He’s just protecting his own sorry ass.

  Trina rubs her bruised cheek and glares at Ramesh. He sighs and lets go of her port. It’s a victory, but it doesn’t make her happy; it only stirs the piss and vinegar stew in her stomach.

  Ramesh got drunk last night at dinner. Her mom, Drea, accidentally took too many vitamins and nodded off at the table. Trina pretended she was a duck, and let it roll off her back. Quack, fricking quack. At least dinner was ready. Peanut butter and Fluff: the ambrosia of champions. But after a few drinks, Ramesh got the look. He started talking through his teeth like a growling dog: “They’re pushing me out. Looking over my shoulders all the time. Even the janitors. Cameras everywhere. A man can’t work like that.”

  He rubbed his temples while he talked like his thoughts were hurting him, and Trina tried to be sympathetic, but she’d heard this song before. Every time he got drunk, it was the same. Meanwhile, cameras were recording his every word, and where would they live if he got fired? Worse, what if that blood in the sink turned out to be cancer, and in a week or a month from now, he was dead?

  In the corner, the television was set to “Entertainment This Second!” Drea pretended to be interested in what Ramesh was saying, but she was looking past him, at the show.

  “Those fuckers are killing my work!” Ramesh shouted while banging his fist against the table like a gavel. Everything jumped—even his stinking vodka bottle—and then landed again. The salt shaker rolled into her lap. She was scared to call attention to herself by putting it back, so in her lap it stayed. Her little friend, salty. She and salty, against the world.

  She hated salty, all of a sudden, because his sides were all greasy with thumbprint scum. She hated her dad, for ruining dinner. She hated their crappy apartment, and the kids at school who called her pink lung. Mostly, she hated the way Ramesh shouted, because Mom was gone. Mom had checked out months ago. It was Trina he was yelling at. I can’t fix your problems. I’m thirteen years old, remember? she wanted to say.

  She didn’t say that. Too hard to explain. The salt spilled like bad luck, and she let the shaker drop from her lap, then roll under the table. “Fuck you, you fucking no good drunk,” she grumbled under her breath, only the words got away from her. They rushed from her chest, and then burst into a holler that practically echoed inside the kitchen. She spun at her mother, to make sure it wasn’t Drea who’d spoken. But Drea’s earpods were inserted. On the television, beauty queens in bathing suits wrestled in a pool of mud for the title of “hottest bitch.”

  Had she really just said fuck you to her own father? She was already blushing from shame when she felt the blow. It came while her head was turned. Her dad, a dirty fighter. Another reason to hate him. At least it was his open palm and not his fist that tore across her face and knocked her out of her chair.

  She lay stunned on the floor. From the table up above, Drea shook her head, “Don’t fight, babies. It’s beneath you,” she said, but she might have been talking to the mud-slingers.

  Trina’s face broke like glass. Her lips pulled wide, ready to explode into the worst crying jag of her life, so she squeezed her fists so tight her fingernails pierced her skin and tried to stay calm. Ramesh was kneeling next to her. He was drunk, so his long limbs wobbled until he gave up kneeling and sat down. She flinched as he ran the plastic Smirnov Bottle along her swelling cheek. It was so cold it got stuck and pulled her skin. “Let me see. Hold still,” he told her.

  “You’re a terrorist,” she sobbed. “That’s why they want to get you fired. A dirty Indian terrorist,” she said, even though she was half Indian, too.

  “Shh,” he said. “I’m sorry. That was unforgivable. I’ll never do it again.” He was still holding the bottle against her skin. He smelled like mice and formaldehyde, and though he wasn’t supposed to, he’d worn his white lab coat home from the office. It made him feel important, because he could tell people he was a doctor, too.

  Trina tried to stop crying, but she couldn’t. She pushed the bottle away and hid her face between her knees. It was dark in there, and she wanted to come out and let him hold her, but she hated him so much.

  “I’m so sorry,” Ramesh crooned. His long limbs didn’t quite fit under the table, so he was hunched like a man in a dollhouse. The air was warmer, because they were both breathing fast in a small space.

  “I mean it, I’m reporting you,” she blubbered. He didn’t answer that. Probably, he was too shocked. It was the meanest thing she could think to say. The
n she got up and locked herself in her room. She didn’t come out until morning, when it was time to go to the doctor.

  Now, a nurse holding a Styrofoam clipboard calls her name: “Trina?” She’s wearing neon orange short-shorts and a belly ring. All the smart nurses dress in tight clothes. That way they get better tips. “Trina Narayan?” she asks again.

  Her dad nods at her very slowly, like he’s trying to impart one last tacit bit of advice. He thinks he’s a genius or something, but if he’d taken a real job with the defense department when the last war started instead of staying in the toxicology lab at New York University, they’d be rich. Instead, his funding got cut, so they had to move from their pretty house in Westchester to a two-bedroom stink-hole with wall-to-wall shag carpet in Jackson Heights, Queens. Now she goes to a school where kids ignite cherry bombs in homeroom, and her only friend is semi-retarded, which is better than the rest of the kids, who are completely retarded.

  She touches her bruised cheek for courage. It still stings. “Don’t tell,” he mouths so that only she can see. He’s so scared that his eyes are bulging. A bug-eyed coward. He’s not a real man, her father.

  She smiles in a way that is not meant to reassure. Her lips are closed, tight and angry, and she silently tells him her answer. The blood drains from his face as she walks away.

  The examining room is empty. A bright light shines from the corner and she squints. Most people her age only require one visit, then tune-ups every ten years. You’re not allowed treatment more than once a month or you become a vegetable. Still, some people invent false identities and sneak. They wind-up wandering the streets and begging for food because they can’t remember their names or where they live.

  Problem is, the treatment never works on her. Every time the doctor cuts out the bad stuff, it grows back like a tumor. Her dad tells her it’ll right itself on its own, but he doesn’t know shit. First sign the bad stuff is back, Trina doesn’t gather moss. She calls the doctor. The best part is, no matter how much paperwork Ramesh fills out to cancel her appointments, he never gets it done in time. It’s fun to watch him run around, like a wind-up toy, when she knows that no matter how hard he works, he’ll never get anywhere.