“Oh. I can’t. Tonight.”
“Please? It’ll be fun. And I really want to probe your mind, y’know, I’d love to talk about your method. That is, if you’re okay with that. I just really admire what you’re doing and I’d love some tips, right? One pro to another?”
“Well—”
“C’mon, please? Please please please please please?”
“Fine.”
“Great. Tell you what, I’ll come get you a few minutes after final wrap, give you some time to wipe the blood off your face, and the whole bunch of us will take the studio limo.”
“You have. A Limo?”
“Perks, man, they are awesome. Anything I want, they get. Being a star, so hard sometimes, right? So, see you later, all right?”
“Right.”
“Awesome.”
The words are there, but you’re not seeing the bigger picture, the overall tableau of this conversation. You’re not seeing the gleam in Duane’s eyes, the wetness of his lips, the restlessness of his body, legs crossing and uncrossing and shuffling, arms unsure where to put themselves. Part of this was the cocaine; tabloids had so far not cottoned on to Duane’s sizable addiction, but it couldn’t be far off, the way he was snorting back a middle-class Canadian income every day. It wouldn’t be much of a surprise or scandal — wow, a Disney television teeny-bopper doing drugs, what an absolute shocker of a coup — but this kid didn’t have anything to fall back on. He certainly didn’t have enough talent to make up for it; there was little to no chance of rehabilitation and public resurgence in Duane’s future. If he was lucky, he’d get a few more years of partying and maybe one or two more movie roles before his winsome good looks eroded and the offers dried up. If he were smart, he’d have the sense to take his winnings and retire gracefully; if he wasn’t (certainly the lottery ticket I’d play), he’d grab at any passing lifebuoy, anything to keep himself in the public eye. Skating with the Stars, Celebrity Rehab, movies on SyFy and Lifetime, anything to hold on to that one last mote of public recognition.
But even factoring in the dependency, it accounted for maybe half of Duane’s excitement. You’re not seeing the flash flood of red that filled his cheeks as he asked me to come out for drinks. Duane was in the closet, but he had his hand on the knob. And he had enough savvy to sense me out as a fellow member, and enough cunning to try to use that to his advantage.
You’re also not seeing the startlingly realistic traces of blood on my lips and chin, remarked upon by the brilliant Duane but passed over in his trepidation. Had he been slightly more observant, he might have thought to himself that all our scenes today had been mainly dialogue and close-ups, and that the rain of gore and red-dyed corn syrup inherent in the final half of Basement (working title) had already been completed two weeks previous, reshoots permitting. You’re certainly not seeing into the room behind my closed door, with its personal cooler filled with tidbits of the meatiest hors d’oeuvres available from the human body — a slice of upper arm, a hunk of buttock, two earlobes. You may be seeing the sandwich in my hand, wondering how; through trial and error, I learned I could ingest bread if it were sliced thin enough and if the filling was one hundred percent human. In this manner I was able to more fully interact with others, taking my lunch with them or snacking in full view. The impulse to bite every person on set was only getting stronger as the days multiplied into weeks. It was far easier to get through the day if I had a little something to nibble on between takes, either in sandwich form or, better, in the privacy of my (thanks to Rowan) personal dressing room.
My main supply was kept at home in my downstairs freezer. My stockpiles of Fisher and N. had long since been exhausted and disposed of, and I was now subsisting on Anonymous Hobo Number Four, numbers One, Two, and Three having been summarily excavated of every tiny nibble of sustenance I could suck out of them. (It’s surprising how little there is left of a body, how little actually has to be lugged to the curb for morning garbage pickup when you eat practically every part. I had always been a finicky eater — I didn’t enjoy chicken on the bone, I didn’t like eating with my fingers, I didn’t even like apple peel, something about the crunch — but my new appetites were not concerned with such niceties. I now ate everything possible in the human buffet, and gnawed incessantly on everything else until I had fully exhausted every possible nutritional soupçon from whomever was dinner that day. I had hid the final indigestible bits of Fisher in a garbage bag under old coffee grounds and eggshells, and filled the rest with food I wouldn’t be needing anymore in the fridge. I instructed myself to start composting in the spring, to lessen possible discovery.)
Whoever said that only in death do you appreciate life was stirring an enormous crock of shit. I wasn’t having any fun at all. Life sucked, death sucked worse.
Hobo Numero Uno was the worst. Far worse than Fisher and N., both of whom I write off as being the accidental end result of nights of confusion and/or terror. H1 was my first intentional, an authentic hunt for prey. I didn’t suppose there was an actual factual Hell in which I would burn for my acts, not anymore — I was proof that, if Hell wasn’t full, Cerberus was being more selective of late at the door — but that didn’t alter the moral conundrum surrounding the act that was cannibalism.
It was Sofa that started it, if one can possibly use an overweight feline as a scapegoat for murder.
I had finished up with N., licked the plates clean of his flavor. Initial photography wouldn’t begin for another week, and I had been working on memorizing the script and crafting a suitable background for Lester Ulysses, the confused and curiously innocent serial killer who lured millennials away from their dorm rooms and into his cellar for an evening’s worth of vivisection. The pangs had been pounding away at the foundations of my resolve for a good twenty-four hours. I found myself eyeing Sofa as she toyed with the tassels on my kitchen window curtains. She batted away at the strings, purring, content to sublimate her natural aggression and killer instincts into an amusing distraction. Maybe I needed a hobby, I thought, a diversion to keep my mind occupied. The work wasn’t enough; maybe stamp collecting? I scooped Sofa into my arms as I thought this over and placed my hand gently about her throat. She amped the volume of her purrs and went limp, exposing her belly for a satisfying scratch. I began to squeeze, and while I considered whether a forced interest in model trains was likely to keep my yearnings at bay, I throttled my cat. Only when her protestations reached a shrieking climax did I regain focus and realize that I had my teeth firmly around her neck, pressing through the soft fur and dimpling the hidden meat beneath. I wrenched my head back and snapped my fingers open. Sofa fell to the tile and sped from the room to the basement, hissing all the way.
If I didn’t eat soon, I was going to lose control. It was a constant ache, a cloudy yearning akin to that of addicts coming down and wondering where their next fix is coming from. You don’t want it, you despise it, you detest yourself for wanting it, but in the end you cave in and feel remorse for thirty seconds, then you’re satisfied, and then the craving starts anew, stronger and sharper. I didn’t even have the brief respite of sleep provided to the drug addict, sleep being something I hadn’t done for quite some time.
I needed to feed, and quick. Morality be damned; when I was perilously close to eating my cat, the ethicality of homicide could be put aside for a time.
But where? And more crucially, who? I lived in a Toronto suburb, in a predominantly lower middle-class tax bracket. People thereabouts tend to notice when their loved ones don’t come home at night. I had already experimented with animals — I had cleared the area of unlucky squirrels with some traps, I once happened across a roadkill raccoon — but while such meals eroded the pangs, they were stopgaps, like craving Black Forest cake and getting a Twinkie. And animals, unlike humans, had to be fresh; day-old animals wouldn’t cut it with my gag reflex. When it came to meat, I would accept no substitutes. To satisfy my hunger, I’d
have had to go through at least a full beagle every day, and I couldn’t see daily trips to the SPCA as not raising suspicions.
So. Hitchhikers, then. Cheap and plentiful, if you were patient.
Like fishing.
I began taking drives out of the city at night, looking for the perfect confluence of lone hitcher and lack of witnesses. I picked up H1 about an hour outside of Toronto the first night, thumbing his way southwest from the Maritimes. He was just a kid, said his name was Jamie. His story of running away from his abusive stepfather and wanting to go live with his real father in Minneapolis read a little theatrical to me, but I wasn’t in a position to judge. He needed a place to stay the night, and I offered him the guest room. He gave me a suspicious look, but I had disabled the interior light so that he couldn’t get a good look at my condition, put on clean clothes and lined my garb with dryer sheets, clean scented. We drove in the dark as I contemplated the next move. Was it late enough that people wouldn’t see us arrive? I had a connecting garage, but people might still glimpse Jamie in the streetlights as we drove down the street. Would the neighbors wonder why I was taking my car out at weird hours? Why hadn’t I simply killed him as he first sat down in the car? How did serial killers pull this off night after night? And could I use this life experience as research for Lester?
Useless questions, I knew. I could feel the throbbing of his pulse in my bones, like the heavy thump of house music. His aroma as he sat next to me fiddling with the radio played havoc with my scent receptors, suddenly alive and jumping. If it wasn’t Jamie tonight, I was going to wander next door and slay the eight-member Russo family as they slept. Or I’d cross the street and devour the nameless motorcycle enthusiast who couldn’t see the value in installing a goddamned muffler on his Harley. Or I’d eat Sofa out of hunger-induced hysteria.
We pulled into the garage, and the automatic door rumbled shut behind us. I exited the car as quickly as possible while Jamie worked at getting his pack from the back seat. Walking around to the passenger side, I opened his door, pulled a startled Jamie to his feet, and sank my teeth into his jugular. I kept my teeth tightly together, jerked my head back, and mutely groaned with ecstasy as I munched on a mouthful of his tendons and gristle and muscle and trachea.
The kid fell back against the car, snatching feebly at his throat, trying to stem the gush. I opened wide and let the bloodspray hit the back of my throat, gulping greedily, a child playing barefoot in the sprinkler. He fell, and his life ebbed out onto the concrete as he stared at me. I dipped my fingers into the pooling red and took a quick suck. I’d feel bad about this later — I’d anguish and bemoan my fate and curse the heavens — but I won’t deny that this was now my nature.
“I’m sorry,” I told him, not bothering to soften the death in my voice. “I don’t expect you to understand. This is just who I am now.” This was a line from the script, a trite bit of nonsense meant to humanize Lester to the audience, but I nailed the sincerity. I felt Jamie deserved something for his troubles, even if it was only a bit of stagecraft.
“It was either you or my cat.” That was an ad-lib.
Jamie’s eyes went blank, and I left to fetch Dad’s old ax.
The next kills were easier. I seized them as they first opened the car door and leaned in, tearing out their throats before they could let out a decent scream. In a nod to mercy, I felt that I could at least make it quick and not toy with my food. It became my signature move, a sudden lunge before they could note the plastic sheeting over the seats and floor.
Between keeping myself on a strictly regimented diet of raw earthling and having to appear in public, it was all I could do not to unleash myself on the nearest actor and feel the galvanizing zing of fresh lifeblood coursing down my gullet. The new pages of dialogue weren’t helping to ease the tension, either. The dailies were proving my statements about Duane and his cadre of he- and she-pretties correct; there was barely a shred of acting talent to be found in front of the camera aside from yours truly. I’ve never been one to brag, but I was bringing it. The director, Zed — despite constant allusions to the work of Kurosawa, Tarantino, Hitchcock, Kubrick — was a twat, practicing utter hackery, betraying his music video beginnings by emphasizing camera angles and blue lens filters over content. You direct one Beyoncé video, get nominated for one MTV award, suddenly you’re an auteur with twenty-five million dollars to fritter away. Zed was a poor leader of men, unable to corral his actors into actually trying or to encourage his cadre of set designers, lighting technicians, cameramen, and key grips into doing anything but the absolute minimum necessary to collect their pay. All told, it was a dismal set, professional journeymen biting their tongues as over-indulged starlets pretended to the glamour, preening and gossiping and demanding when they should have been, I don’t know, acting.
At least Zed understood that when I was onscreen, the feeble efforts of his main cast were drowned by my sheer presence. Death had provided me an unsettling and savage charisma I had lacked in life, leastwise in the sphere of fictional cinematic serial killers. Around me, the cast seemed to step up their game; in actuality they were simply reacting to the feral dread I instilled. I had gotten so good at tonal modulation that I could bring a woman to tears with a mere whisper of her name. My voice was a doorway to terrors long thought extinct, buried deep within the subconscious over countless generations of civilization. I was a trigger that allowed primeval fears to resurface and rattle bones and hiss curses as they pranced up and down the spines of anyone in earshot.
Accordingly, the movie was now mine front and center, and only my lack of stature kept my name from being placed above the title alongside the likes of luminaries such as Duane J. Linwood and Raven Sullivan, oldest daughter on the CBS dramedy The Diner. Zed pushed me on the backers as being the next Robert Englund, the new Kane Hodder, hell, the next Christopher Lee or Anthony Perkins. He also demanded that my role be substantially beefed up, driving the screenwriter batty as he mangled the plotline to give me more screen time yet not push the “stars” off to the side altogether. After all, they were there to get gullible paying asses in the seats. I would keep them there.
But Duane (D.J. to his friends) was becoming a wee bit of a bother. I had thus far managed to keep myself relatively apart from the rest of the cast and crew save when we were on set. I had Rowan make it part of my contract, that there be as little contact with people outside of filming, a concession to my craft that would better allow me the time and isolation to hone my preparation and work my method upon the character. I was also to be in sole charge of my own makeup, lessening the possibility that people come into direct contact with my skin. I had insisted on this after the special effects artists had made a silicone cast of my face for some grueling damage Lester took at the hands of Raven late in the film. They coated my head in goop, wrapped the mess in plaster bandages, waited until it hardened, and then cautiously cracked it open. They were pros, they wouldn’t let any normal subject come to harm, but they couldn’t know I felt my skin tug loose from its moorings at the bottom of my chin and near the cheekbones. I let them finish, praying for adhesion, and instructed Rowan to demand I be allowed to do my own makeup for the duration of the shoot.
What utter bullshit, but actors are known for such idiosyncrasies. Wanting alone time, makeup demands, eccentric catering requests; these were nowhere near the weirdest contractual obligations ever made on a film set. I could have demanded that homeless children be rounded up and served to me cold and writhing on platters of stainless steel and garnished with peppermint; it would still be more reasonable than Brando’s stipulations near the end.
Nevertheless, Duane was a problem in the making. He was a boy, barely old enough to grow sexy stubble-beard over his baby fat, yet a boy already used to getting everything he wanted, and double portions to boot. And what he wanted by the end of this evening, I was sure, was me. He could gussy it up, sheath it within the guise of a mentor/student relationshi
p, the inexperienced newcomer idolizing the wise old professional, the whole All About Eve or Showgirls thing, but Duane wasn’t smooth enough yet to hide his real intentions. Duane was a young predator testing the limits of his pack leader’s strength. This wasn’t about sex; this was a power move. Duane was thick as beef stew, but he wasn’t completely without a native cunning to better serve his own ends. He could hardly be unaware of the buzz I was getting, and it frightened him. Basement was his shot, his one great step away from family television movies and guest appearances on sitcoms into something approaching a serious career. He was the hero, I was the villain, and that was to be that. But when Fangoria came to visit, when the bloggers from Chud and Dread Central and JoBlo and Ain’t It Cool found their way on set, Duane was all but ignored. The villain always gets the attention, both on and off-screen. Ergo, as the natural order of things was in danger of being rearranged to his detriment, Duane would fall back on a tried-and-true method of career salvation; he would tempt me, romance me, hold me in thrall to his sexual prowess, and then he’d whittle my role down to nothing.
What an ass. I could have told him, even Johnny Depp fell to Freddy in the end. Kevin Bacon didn’t prove immune to Mama Voorhees and a spike through the neck, so what possible chance did an Efron-weight like Duane have? He’d be lucky to survive the night.
I should simply have gone home, claimed to have forgotten the invitation. Would have been the safer choice. But I was lonely. Sofa was only so good for companionship. On the set, only Zed talked to me off-camera, and he was an idiot. The crew mostly kept to themselves, and the rest of the cast was insufferably young and pretty. I was little more than a special effect to them, a lurching horror they screamed their lines at on-camera and ignored at all other opportunities. High school all over again. So Duane’s sudden attention, while self-serving on his part, was a chance to have meaningful if shallow interaction.
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