Lost Angels

by David J. Schow

  The Twilight Zone was the one with the thing on the wing. Good warmup. Jason sank back and let the cushions of his fortress embrace him.

  The Mummy's Tomb was two Mummy movies in one; its first half consisted almost entirely of flashbacks from Kharis' debut feature, The Mummy's Hand. His entire cinematic chronology, therefore, waited for Jason within the palm of a single night, and for once Channel 13 and Midnight Frights got the order right.

  To all those who violate the tomb of Ananka, a cruel and violent death shall be their fate!

  Princess Ananka had been Kharis' girlfriend, back when he wasn't the Mummy yet. They weren't supposed to be fooling around. Then Ananka croaked from some lady disease, so Kharis swiped a tea chest full of Tana leaves that would bring her back to life. Which was ... sacrilege! So the Egyptian guys caught him and cut out his tongue before wrapping him up and burying him alive to guard Ananka's resting place for eternity. They fed him soup made out of Tana leaves to make him into an immortal sort of night watchman, and everything was cool until a bunch of guys from museums started digging everything up. Ananka began this habit of getting reincarnated as gorgeous women living in small rural towns in the USA, so after Kharis bumped off everybody related to anybody who had bothered her tomb in the first movie, he had to keep chasing her around. Usually the High Priests of Arkhon (swarthy guys wearing medallions and fezzes who knew how strong to make the Tana-leaf soup) fell in love with whatever version of Ananka was currently wandering around the woods in a nightgown. And that usually pissed Kharis off to the point where he'd smear the priest by the end of the movie. Getting shot or set on fire didn't bother Kharis much; that he could go three thousand years without going to the bathroom puzzled Jason more. And the world supply of Tana leaves had to run out eventually, even though that carved coffer always seemed full up.

  Various High Priests of Arkhon gravely maintained that if one fed Kharis too much Tana-leaf soup, he would become - ominous musical sting - "a monster such as the world has never seen." Kind of a TurboKharis.

  For that, Jason could hardly wait. He just hoped he was not distantly related to anyone who had ever seen a pyramid.

  The World War Two vintage of these films permitted Jason invaluable access to the social and courting rituals that had, no doubt, influenced how his parents had turned out. All the women were frail, shrieking things. They fainted a lot, in order to get carried around by either the Mummy or the good guys. Said good guys had pencil mustaches and black hair that gleamed like casket polish. Everybody smoked a lot; it was adult and sophisticated. Jason took mental notes, mimicking the cigarette gesticulations with a toothpick. Secure in his cordon of night, his fortress awash in silver light, he could study the behavior of adults in black and white without getting interrogated or yelled at. Or worse.

  Sometimes the heroes were foolhardy enough to try taking on the Mummy fistwise. It was the only time their oily skullcaps of hair ever got mussed. But exhibiting bravery by slugging Kharis usually won you the fainting girl ... unless you got your voicebox imploded in that bandaged vise-grip. Kharis just sort of pinched your neck shut, and you ate pavement faster than a snipped marionette. He had no reservations about choking girls, either. Or dogs. Just glurk! And dead.

  After prying potato-chip shrapnel from between his teeth, Jason theorized, holding his toothpick, mannered, between his index and middle fingers and jabbing it toward the TV's iridescent eye as though debating a crucial point with the screen. He had read about the transmutation of fossilized dinosaur bones. Maybe beneath Kharis' rags, after thirty centuries, was a skeleton of solid iron. That might account for his invulnerability, and why he did not crumble to ash whenever one of the Basil Rathbone lookalikes clouted him with a club.

  During The Mummy's Ghost, Jason gobbled up the scene in which Kharis makes the museum security guard go bye-bye forever. As the victim thrashed, he busted a huge plate-glass window. Famous Monsters had tipped Jason to the fact that Lon Chaney Jr. had accidentally gotten wounded during the filming of the scene. Jason fought not to blink, and there it was, by god: two big dots of blood on the Mummy's chin. Real blood. Real actor's blood. Unplanned bloodshed, captured on film for all time.

  Wow...

  Against tradition, Kharis, even though he was a monster, usually got the girl by the final reel. In this particular installment, Princess Ananka's reincarnation began to age into the real thing as she was being lugged away, having fainted. She grew this broad streak of white in her hair, then got all wrinkly just in time for her and Kharis to waltz into a bog and leave hardly any bubbles. The End.

  Until The Mummy's Curse, when the bog gets drained, and guess what happens.

  Jason must have drunk several quarts of tea, if what he peed out was any clue. In defiance of his stepmother's admonitions about caffeine product, he dozed off ten minutes into The Mummy's Curse but awakened in time for the crypt cave-in at the end. Once a monster got mashed, good old Universal Pictures would wrap things up so fast it made your eyeballs throb. He liked the idea of falling asleep during a Mummy marathon, then waking up to find himself still safely within the fortress and the world of Kharis, where the hard and fast operational rules handed down by the High Priests of Arkhon were constant.

  If you fell for this week's Ananka reincarnation and Kharis found out so much for your fez-wearing status, bub.

  Only on Friday nights like this did rules make any sense to Jason. These rules he could pace and comprehend. Unlike those of his parents.

  "I'd say atheist, if I didn't find the theist part so ... prejudicial. Godish."

  "You're talking to a wobbling agnostic, remember?" She tapped ash. "The conventional stuff was already superfluous for you, even redundant. That's clear. You didn't need a prefab holy writ because you already had one inside those monster magazines. You had your own communion wine and ceremonies. You had your pantheon of deities - Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, Dracula, and especially the Mummy."

  "Kharis. Who sprang full blown from the box-office receipts of Im-Ho-Tep."

  "See? You even joke about it mythologically. Don't underestimate magnetism like that. Jesus, you even had a fixed weekly time for worship."

  Oh, Kris was very good.

  "It's tough to convey how important that was, once," he said, sucking the water from a template-formed square of cocktail ice. "My generation fell into the interstice between theatricals and videotape. It was a brief span of years in the Sixties during which a kid had to depend on Midnight Frights or risk never seeing I Married a Monster from Outer Space. It's easy to get homesick for the ritual aspect of camping out Friday nights, waiting for the monster movies to commence. Faithfully."

  "One thing you never realize is how fleeting a period like that can be in your life." She tried to head him off. "But a time machine would be useless, you know. Because it would be impossible for you to warn your younger self how fragile some moments in time can be. You couldn't do anything... except maybe spoil the fun."

  "Like trying to explain to a kid the difference between an agnostic and an atheist, I suspect."

  "The nomenclature isn't really cardinal," she said. "The underlying emotions are. I think my parents sensed that. They were fairly noncommittal - or open-minded, to be fair - about their daughter's interface with belief systems. Common sense and thrift and, later, wit were more valuable. I think they were more apprehensive about what species of boy-monster I'd eventually drag into their parlor to soil the throw rugs. Turns out they were right ..." She made a face in remembrance of the day she had decided white knights were extinct. "You could arguably call it a learning experience. Vietnam was a learning experience, right?" When the flash-replay of her love life finished behind her eyes, she caught up with the question she'd asked earlier. "So, let me rephrase: Were your parents religious? Was it a problem?"

  "My brush with 'conventional' religion," he said, making quotation marks in the air with his fingertips, "was akin to a car getting sideswiped by a bus - the kind of accident where the car gets
totaled and the bus drives on with a ding in the bumper. Soon after my dad married Wicked Stepmom, she decided it would be 'spiritually' prudent to inflict me on a Christian Sunday-school class." Again the quotes, stirring trails in the smoky air. "Or vice versa. My brother, Marcus, was exempt. Why? He was older. And he, for whatever reason, attended grownup church with Wicked Stepmom, without a fight. Maybe he was doping out religions for future use. Anyway, like Mojo doin' rock 'n' roll, I found myself compelled to do the Sunday school thang."

  "Trapped like a rodent in a holy Catch-22. Looks like God really wanted your ass."

  His laugh came out crooked; more a snort. "Not for long he didn't. He'd already rounded up a kid in the class named Eric Lowrey. I sat in his vacant folding chair. He'd died of leukemia, just like my real mom. His mother was teaching the Sunday-school class, and she nailed me, mine being the new face and all. I got sniggered at for never having read the Bible. So I bit her back; I knew about Eric's death and remembered what my mom had looked like the last time I'd seen her in the hospital. I was six or seven; they had brought her out in a wheelchair and she was all blotchy. I'd had no concept of death then. By the time I was pushed into the Sunday-school class, I'd formulated some pretty definite ideas. Rules for death. And I concluded that if Mrs. Lowrey's 'god' had killed my mom, then he or she or it deserved to get run over by a bus. He or She or It spells horsh'it. And I said to her, 'You don't really believe that Eric is in some place called 'heaven' you can't really see ... do you?’"

  "Omigod."

  "Yeah. It hit the fan, no lie. Poor woman burst into tears. Bet your ass she filed a full report."

  "Oh. Oh, no." She covered her face with one hand, then peeked out between the fingers. "What happened to you?" She spoke softly. Harsh words might leave dents.

  "I didn't have to worry about attending Sunday school much after that. I got grounded for three months, two of which were June and July. I got a thorough yelling at." His words came out in a huge exhalation of smoke. "While Wicked Stepmom was bellowing and asking me just what did you think you were doing, she finally lost it and backhanded me. She wore this massive emerald ring that split my lip in three places. I stood rooted, unmoving, scared, crying my head off. I thought, goddamnit, I'm almost twelve, I'm nearly a teenager at last ... and here I am, crying. Baby. I sure didn't cry when my real mom died."

  He took a drink, aware it was melodramatic. Kris let it ride - in fact, she sipped her own, to balance, to encourage.

  "She hit you."

  "Mm. Pow. "He swatted air to demonstrate. "Having perpetrated sacrilege, I found myself playing Town Heretic. I had tampered with her religion ... so she destroyed mine. Burned it down. Funny - just like the lab going up in flames at the end of a Frankenstein movie. Conflagration bashed down monsters better than Raid on roaches. She tornadoed upstairs to my room, and tore all the pictures off the wall, dumped all my magazines into a trashcan, and set fire to it in the back yard. I'll never forget the sound of that trashcan being dragged down the stairs. Clunk, clunk, clunk; worse than blows in any beating. I watched out the window. A line had been drawn, you see; a new rule set up without warning. Now I couldn't leave my room, couldn't even go downstairs for a glass of water. Everything in the can went up in smoke while I stood there watching and doing nothing, and after it was clearly hopeless, I turned away and went into the bathroom. There was blood all over my chin. My lip was swollen and felt novocained." His fingers, remembering, sought scars where there were none.

  Kris watched him snub the half-smoked Winston. The twisted wreckage bled tendrils of gray, then gave up for good.

  "Next weekend, no monster movies," he said. "I missed The Thing and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. I tried waiting until my parents hit the sack, then sneaking into the TV room and watching with the sound and brightness knobs turned way down. Until Marcus ratted on me. Pow, again."

  "It's almost Shakespearian," she said. "Brother betrays brother. I used to try to read in the dark. When the moon was full and bright, you could. Hell on the eyes but exciting in its way, when you found out it was possible. Your mom, did she -"

  "Stepmom."

  "She didn't burn the magazine with your letter in it, did she?"

  "She only missed that one because it was in my school pack with my books. I carried it with me everywhere, feeding off it. Eventually I read it until it fell to pieces. Whenever I opened it up I was afraid she'd pounce and take it away. It never took her long to make the stairs when she suspected I was up to no good."

  "The barking dog," Kris said, with a hint of a smile.

  "What? Oh." He had passed the memory, and now it receded the way a sleeping town dwindles behind a train in the night. His mouth had become quite dry. "You know, contrary to this blather, I'm really not a nostalgia nut. It's too rosy. If I was inside the skin of that twelve year old, this moment, I wouldn't relive how great those movies seemed to me. What I'd feel again would be the terror, the impotence of what it is to be that age."

  "And Wicked Stepmom? Did you ever reach detente? That sort of thing seems to take forever when you're a kid?'

  "She eventually forgot it or found new things to be angry about. But that didn't bring back my magazines or erase what happened. In fact, she erased it; she never mentioned the incident again. She died not long after I left home. Pharyngial tumors. Her throat closed up and she died. Ironic, huh? But you're right - I did respect the Mummy. Kharis was my pal. It was Wicked Stepmom I was afraid of, Freud preserve us."

  "I knew you were a boy who loved his mummy."

  They cracked up. She had seen how this reverie might turn wet, and she wanted to yank him out of it. It worked.

  "Hey," she said. "It's nearly eleven. You have to think about leaving soon; you're working tomorrow." She held, slyly. Clearly she was not going to dash for an exit herself, just yet. Sip, puff. "I like this. We've been here for hours that have passed like minutes, talking like old buddies, with hardly any social bullshit." She toasted this sentiment with a modest nod.

  "Bullshit makes the world go 'round. It's our day-to-day coin. You'll pardon the residue? Sometimes it's difficult to shut down the alarms in your skin - the ones that order you not to try, not to get involved."

  They clinked glasses.

  Mischief had sneaked across her countenance again. "Oh - just so you'll know. I fully intend to close this evening with a kiss that deserves immortalization in a book of bests."

  He could not stop the arch of his eyebrows, nor blank the pictures her words thrust into his head. It was past the time where the will she/ won't she game retained any flavor, and she knew it. The struggle toward the easy comfort they now felt in each other's space had been long in arriving for both of them, and to cap the event with a quickie would be sordid and inappropriate; it would vindicate the predatory callousness all around them. To rush matters would be like gulping Veuve Clicquot - no savor, and certainly no latitude for appreciation.

  She had foreseen this and jumped ahead to the perfect answer. Just enough spice. He no longer wondered at her obvious administrative talents.

  Her own thought chain would never become public record, but it turned her smile into a cherished, private thing. In the smog of the lounge, her clarity dazzled. "What I'm talking about is my lips, stalking yours," she said. "Most people are lousy at osculation. You'd better not disappoint me, because I'm taking a huge chance here. And no, I'm not normally so flamboyant."

  "Blame the booze."

  "Actually, I'm a sucker for that little boy."

  "I doubt most of the yupsters here even know what osculation means." It was his conversational escape hatch, and he used it to dodge the ripe red blush her bold words had set to creeping up the collar of his Pierre Cardin shirt. "Fish-lip kisses. Yucch."

  "How about the car crash of lips, the kind that chips your teeth? I hate those. Or those wormy kisses, where the lips are ashen and cold. French-the-cadaver."

  "Hm. And then we have the Neanderthal oral rape kiss."

  "O
w. Yes. The onrushing mouthload of meat. Suddenly a tongue has invaded your face, a quarter-pounder boxing your tonsils. And it reminds you of the last time you woke up face down in your pillow and couldn't breathe, except the pillow wasn't soaked in saliva."

  They wrung out a bit more fun at the expense of amateur kissers everywhere. Somebody should start a school.

  "Not guilty on all counts" he assured her.

  "Good. I just wanted you to contemplate this forthcoming kiss for awhile. The kiss with which we shall end this evening. You were beginning to look a touch blue, kiddo?" She let her tongue-tip test her lip gloss, just a flicker, a tease that brought his dormant blush flooding to the surface. "Aha. Good sign. I did it again."

  "Evil," he said. He rode it out; there's no way to duck a sneak attack by your own metabolism. He parried. "You have to promise not to faint, though."

  He thought about the kiss a lot over the next hour or so. If this was torture, he never wanted it to end.

  After midnight it began to rain. Droplets tamped brittle leaves of pulp-paper ash into black muck, and the lingering ectoplasm of smoke was beaten down. The trashcan's sides had blued, then scorched and peeled in the hot shimmer of the fire. Its contents grew more insubstantial the wetter they got. The rain made the dross of combustion collapse upon itself. Soon there would be nothing left.

  Getting outside took Jason a lifetime. Thousands of heartbeats, pints of paranoid sweat, a triple helping of jumpy stealth, with a veneer of patience he strained against with each tic. Window to shingles to trellis, the ground a blurry dark void somewhere two stories below, the footing on the roof treacherous, yet irresistibly inviting. To not venture out, to remain uncertain for the rest of his life, would be the ultimate horror. His friend, the darkness, was with him, rendering him invisible and keeping from his eyes sights that might have kept him off the roof.

  It was cold, and he regretted having to creep out barefoot. But his stepmother might notice wet shoes the following morning, and the surface of the roof was slickly waxed. Hairy.