Horror Show

by Greg Kihn

  Devila smoothed his hair, brushing it off his face, mothering him. “Like what?”

  Albert struggled to one knee and felt his head. The rubbery feeling and dizziness that had overwhelmed him earlier had begun to subside. He could almost stand.

  “Help me up,” he said in a whispery, shaken voice.

  Devila supported his arm as he worked his way to his feet and stood unsteadily. His mind still reeled at the invasion. Everything hurt; every muscle in his body had been tensed when that thing was in charge. Adrenaline had been pumping at an unbelievable rate.

  But, as spent as his body was, it was the mental strain that hurt the most. Albert could not stop thinking, reliving that awful moment when his mind and the consciousness of the demon were joined.

  He shivered involuntarily.

  During that moment of possession, when the thing entered him and gave him its brief glimpse of hell, Albert knew he had made a grave mistake. In the inky blackness that overwhelmed Albert, the background against which the thing emerged, he could sense that the demon knew exactly where it was. It knew that it was no longer deep in the jungle among ignorant, savage people. It knew that it had materialized in a modern city, teeming with sophisticated beings, electric with possibilities. It knew it finally had a host it could use to its advantage. And it was happy. It was ecstatic.

  Albert could also feel the malice in its cold heart. He could sense it measuring him and gauging the new world into which it had been, with Albert’s help, admitted.

  He could feel the pressing darkness, the timeless void from which it came, and knew in a heartbeat that it was ancient beyond man’s understanding. It had been pent-up, controlled, and frustrated for too long. Now, excited at the prospect of freedom, of seeking destiny and power in this bold new century, it rejoiced.

  Albert saw the evil of its desires and knew that misery and submission awaited him and his daughter as long as they were forced to serve this cruel master.

  For mankind, worse.

  What Albert had glimpsed, ever so briefly, was hell.

  Not the understandable, classical hell of Dante—no, this was a new hell, built on true suffering and real destruction. It was the end of nature, the rise of death and chaos, the submission of man as a race.

  In Albert, it had learned everything about our culture. It had seen man’s inhumanity to man, man’s own damnation, weakness, and greed. In that instantaneous linking of their minds, it sucked every bit of knowledge in Albert’s memory.

  So it knew exactly how to exploit all these things. The Serpent Demon had been unchanged for thousands of years. It waited and watched, as patient as the stars. While man, for all his technology and ideology, was the same slimy rock crawler he had always been. Thousands of years were just a blink. The species never changed.

  That pleased the demon.

  Albert knew that, because of him, the end was near. The fate of humanity had just slipped through his fingers. In that moment, the last few tenuous strands of Albert’s sanity snapped.

  At Landis Woodley’s mansion, the light slanted through the kitchen as the sun’s angle shifted. It cut interesting shafts through the smoke from Buzzy’s cigarette.

  “The movie’s got to have a point,” protested Neil. He’d been hunched over the typewriter with his arms folded over the roller, his head down. Now he raised it, the indentations of the keys on his forehead.

  “No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t have to have anything,” Landis snapped back. “Think about it. The point is—it has no point.”

  Neil rubbed his face. Today he was dressed in a simple black dress. “Aw shit, Landis. Speak English.”

  “Our only job is to shock the moviegoer. That’s it, just shock his ass. My philosophy of shock is that it’s got to be unexpected, okay? It doesn’t necessarily have to have a rhyme or reason; it just happens. The more unexpected it is, the higher they jump.” He leaned back, smiled, and pointed his finger at the ceiling, holding it up as if to say “number one.” It gathered the attentions of Buzzy and Neil effectively, and they stared at him, listening hard. “Shock is the total reversal of polarity in a situation,” he said.

  Buzzy shook his head. “Christ, you’re gettin’ kind of deep for me, Woody. What’s all this shit about ‘reversal of polarity’?”

  Neil swept the hair back from his face, revealing the drying, chalky layer of thick makeup that he constantly applied to hide his whiskers. As a writer, he knew what Landis was driving at, but he was genuinely surprised at the man’s artistic approach to this particular project. Landis intended for Cadaver to be his masterpiece. Usually it was wham-bam, thank you, ma’am.

  Neil always kept a paperback dictionary in his pocketbook for situations just like this. Whipping it out, he quickly flipped to the esses and found the appropriate definition for “shock.” “The dictionary says: ‘to strike with surprise, terror, horror, or disgust.’”

  Landis slapped the table, causing the coffee to jump and splatter.

  “That’s us! We’re shockers!”

  Buzzy yawned. “So what’s that got to do with us?” he asked.

  “Everything,” Landis replied, “Every goddamn thing! That’s exactly the way I feel about horror movies.”

  “Huh?” Buzzy squinted through his black eye.

  “What’s the reason for the cadavers coming to life? Is it evil scientific experiments? Black magic? Voodoo? Atomic radiation? No! There is no explanation! That’s the beauty of it! It just happens. Who cares why? The important thing is that the cadavers start moving, there is no explanation. When they start killing people, it really doesn’t matter how it got started, does it? No! It’s happening. That’s all you need to know. It’s better not to explain. Let the people draw their own conclusions. All I’m concerned with is the action, not the explanation. The truth is, there is no answer to the mystery of why the cadavers come to life … because life has no answers.”

  Buzzy rolled his eyes.

  Neil clapped his hands together and shouted, “My God, the man’s an existentialist!”

  “Right,” Landis barked. “A horror existentialist!”

  Landis beamed at them, and the entire kitchen radiated his infectious enthusiasm. For each of them, there was nothing better than making horror movies.

  “Neil,” Landis said, “I want you to get started right away on the rewrite. Make any necessary adjustments in the plot to support our new … our new attitude. Make it work, baby. Make it fuckin’ sing!”

  “What about an ending?” Neil asked.

  Landis smiled. Leaning back in his chair, he said, “Don’t need one. There is no ending. The cadavers win. No explanation, no nothing. They win, period.”

  “Bleak. Fatalistic,” Neil droned. “Horror show noir.”

  “Uh-huh,” Landis concluded. “Just like life. The only ones who win are dead.”

  The First Satanic Church was dark, its doors locked.

  Elsewhere in the house, Albert and Devila sat on a couch drinking more brandy. The sun was up now, casting its full spectrum of light upon the magic of night, killing it effectively for another twelve hours.

  The brandy warmed their throats and tranquilized their racing hearts.

  Albert wondered how he could undo the horror he had unleashed. He hated himself for performing the ceremony without proper preparation. Drunk, horny, and boastful, he’d let himself be seduced by the idea that he could control it.

  The demon didn’t take the cat. Why would it when it could have me? How many more times can I do that before the damn thing breaks free?

  Then he remembered why the village priest killed the host after the ceremony: to prevent its return to the same body.

  Certainly, he did not want to act as the host again. That had been the most painful and terrifying experience of his life.

  He had been naive and foolish to conjure the serpent. Again he cursed his brandy-swollen male ego and its sophomoric attempt to impress Devila. It was just the kind of ignorant mistake he hated in others,
a misguided, boastful bit of idiocy that could have cost him everything.

  God, he hated himself.

  Far from being some kind of theological doctrine, some intellectual argument, this foul demon was the very soul of evil. It meant to destroy or subjugate not only Albert and his daughter, but the rest of the world as well.

  Albert’s plan had been foolhardy and based on nothing but greed. Now, the force of evil would use Albert to return from a prison, millennia-old.

  Albert knew what the demon wanted. After all, it had been inside him.

  A question nagged Albert. Was this demon really Satan? Or was the universe full of such creatures? Once the door between the two worlds opened, what else would come slithering through?

  Albert had been worshiping Lucifer all his adult life. But he had never equated it with just pure evil. In fact, to Albert, the argument was that there was really no such thing as good and evil.

  Do what thou wilt shall be the extent of the law.

  There was only life and death. It was what it was.

  The Prince of Darkness exists, he thought. It’s here in this very house and it means to destroy me, and the people I love.

  Devila watched Albert.

  He was as pale as a sheet, shaking and wild-eyed. He didn’t look like a man who had just pulled off the hoax of the year. Then maybe it was all real. Her mind raced.

  My God, she thought, if demons exist, and mankind can summon them … what the hell else is out there? Albert had the power in those tuning forks.

  Devila found herself scanning the room constantly, afraid that the thing might come back.

  The forks are still in the other room, the church, he called it. God, that’s frightening. That place is about as far from a church as you could get.

  Yet, it was a place of worship. Albert Beaumond worshipped the wrong things, she decided. He was one sick puppy.

  Her eyes went back to the mirror again, locking on her face.

  And you’re a sick puppy for even being here with him. This man’s religion is evil.

  Devila’s was a much more practical theology. She worshiped money.

  She knew that if she could get her hands on those tuning forks, even for just an hour, she would be richer than her wildest dreams. And famous.

  She wanted to ask Albert, but he spoke first.

  “I’ve got to destroy those forks,” he said in a trembling voice.

  11

  Devila’s Spanish-style, white stucco apartment building was in the slums of Beverly Hills. The same three-block section of four-to-six-unit buildings would have been an upper-middle-class paradise in any other neighborhood, but in Beverly Hills it was the low-rent district. It occupied a small, ten-block strip of land just below Wilshire Boulevard, still technically Beverly Hills, but in name only. People there enjoyed the prestigious postmark, but none of the status of the exclusive neighborhood where the movie stars lived.

  Devila liked her one-bedroom apartment. It was cozy, “cute” in a California way. There were colorful Mexican tiles in the kitchen and bathroom and a nice picture window that looked out onto the quiet street. A palm tree grew in the front yard. She had her own parking place.

  Tonight she couldn’t sleep. The shock of what she had experienced at Albert’s house had begun to wear off, replaced now by a numbness, a disbelief, that made her relive it over and over again in her mind.

  The tongue of the serpent touched her a thousand times in her dreams, haunting her relentlessly until she was forced to believe.

  But Devila was a practical woman. She had fought her way up the ladder of success in one of the toughest, most competitive markets in the world. What she had seen shook her faith to the core.

  Like most people in LA, she had come from someplace else. Raised a Baptist, she had enough fire and brimstone in her to fear both death and life. She acted in high school plays, won a couple of beauty contests, and bought her bus ticket to Hollywood with money she made waiting tables in a skimpy outfit.

  She spent the next few years getting the runaround from agents, producers, and other, less interesting hustlers. She grew up fast, got tougher every day, and eventually decided that whatever she wound up doing in Hollywood, she would have to make the position herself. She began to live life on her own terms.

  She lay in her bed, staring at a movie poster for Daughter of Dracula, and remembered how she got the idea for her character. She heard that the job of “Creature Features” host had opened at a local TV station.

  She made a costume that showed off her figure, dyed her brown hair black, and auditioned. Two weeks later, the young program director, who couldn’t take his eyes off her cleavage, called to give her the job.

  I am the mistress of my own destiny, she thought.

  But how far could she take the “Devila” character? It had gone just about as far as it could in the local TV market. It was time to branch out. She was sick of showing the same stupid grade-Z movies every week, pandering to a bunch of adolescents and beatniks, and having to act the role of bimbo. It was time to move ahead.

  Into the movies.

  Fuck this crummy job. Fuck this lame TV station, fuck the ignorant fans. I want more. So I’ll have to go out and make more.

  As she lay gazing at the Daughter of Dracula poster, Devila knew what her next step would be.

  Albert Beaumond sweated. The moist sheets stuck to his body like molting skin. His nightmares scorched the inside of his head, making him wish he were anything but asleep.

  He was in the dark, but it was a darkness he could feel and smell. A musty odor seemed to curl off him, making his head swim and his eyes water. He writhed in the sticky void, slithering back and forth across the uneven floor of his lair. He was not alone.

  With him were hundreds of other, lesser entities. They squirmed against him, pushing their snouts into his flesh, burrowing, searching. For what? The sensation was appalling. The things, whatever they were, clung to him desperately.

  Then, a layer of understanding was peeled back and he knew the terrible truth.

  He was their mother.

  They were his hatchlings.

  Then another layer drew back and Albert screamed.

  They were snakes.

  Albert screamed again, but could not hear himself. He could feel his throat constrict, sense the air being pushed past his vocal cords and—

  He had no vocal cords.

  More layers peeled back. Albert was a snake himself. He writhed and curled, flexing his serpent body in a hopeless attempt to escape. The skin around his head split. It separated and cracked away from his eyes, revealing afresh, wet, new layer beneath.

  The new layer felt the cold. The old layer stretched taut, pulling beyond its limits, peeling away. The feeling was indescribable.

  Albert shuddered. He bucked and convulsed, disgusted with the sensation. The old skin repulsed him, a coat of dead flesh, as crawling and rotten as roadkill. He struggled anew, frantic to remove the itchy cocoon that enveloped him. The new skin, as soon as it was exposed, felt radiant and alive. It breathed through open, robust pores, filling his body with energy.

  Albert twisted and turned. He flexed and rubbed against the hatchlings. The old skin peeled back, halfway now. The hatchlings squirmed more violently, and he could feel great rips of skin come off.

  They began to feast on the dead skin, nibbling at it with their hungry mouths. Their forked tongues licked and tickled against the dead shell, pulling at it. Then they began to tear it away more quickly.

  They were anxious. They knew that the doorway to Albert’s world was open.

  When he realized what he was and what he was doing, he screamed again. Only this time he could hear it. He could hear it growing like a deafening siren, bouncing off the walls and echoing through the night.

  Then a hand touched him. He jumped.

  His eyes jerked open, and he looked into Thora’s face with wide, terrified eyes.

  “Daddy! Daddy, wake up!”

 
He kept screaming until the last shards of nightmare melted from his consciousness.

  He was aware of the wetness of the sheets, how they clung to him, how he’d pulled them back but in so doing only tangled himself farther.

  Thora unwrapped him gently, watching in horror as her father’s body quivered spasmodically beneath her fingers. The terror he felt was so intense that it had raised welts across his back and shoulders.

  The panic in his eyes when she switched on the lights caused her to step back. That panic burned into her memory.

  Landis Woodley’s office was in the kitchen. At one time he had a proper office on Sunset Strip, but soon found out that most of his business got done in the bar. The cost of maintaining an office was bleeding him dry; the receptionist, the furniture, the framed movie posters, it was all a colossal waste of time.

  Trying to play with the big boys was not working. When you played in their ballpark, you had to be able to swing with the checkbook in a way that made Landis nervous. He started cutting costs after the first month. The receptionist went first, then the fancy furniture, and in less than a year he was down to one phone, a card table, and some folding chairs. The next logical step was to work out of his house. The commute was only twenty feet, and the price was right.

  Now he actually enjoyed working at home, and he was absolutely convinced that he got more things done.

  Landis made a mental note to have someone clean up the place. Cartons of Chinese food and empty pizza boxes littered the counter. Dirty dishes filled the sink.

  The phone rang, next to the coffeepot. He moved some cups and a newspaper out of the way and picked it up.

  “Hello?”

  “Mr. Woodley? This is Devila,” a throaty female voice said.

  Landis smiled. Devila was one of his favorite people. “Devila, darling, how did you like the party?”

  “It was wonderful. You did an unbelievable job. People are still talking about the guillotine bit.”

  “Thanks. Nice to hear that. So, what’s on your mind?”