Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts

by Orrin Grey

  The clip opened with a heavyset gentleman channeling his very best Charles Laughton in mid-sentence, but it ended up with a dapper guy in a mustache talking about Hitler. “He was a small man,” dapper mustache guy said, standing up. There was a painting on the wall behind him, but only the corner of it was in the frame, and the picture quality was too poor to really make it out. “Small and afraid. He must have felt that he was surrounded at all times by giants, and so he must always be shouting, lest they crush him.”

  “Who the hell uploads these things?” Marla asked, returning her attention to the road as the long line of cars ahead of us crept its way forward.

  I was intrigued, though, and I pulled up the Wikipedia entry for The Jaws of Cronus, which I’d never bothered to look up before because, of all Orlok’s movies, it was the one that didn’t have anything to do with me. Skimming the plot synopsis, it appeared to involve a bunch of seemingly unrelated people gathering in a creaky old house, ostensibly for a dinner party hosted by “Colonel Ambrose,” but actually for their own host of motives, most of them involving a rare painting Ambrose had smuggled out of France during World War II, which maybe explained why they were talking about Hitler.

  Of course, something else also stalked those halls, something giant and unseen, and maybe related to the painting, somehow. The plot synopsis was pretty vague and a little confusing, though obviously written by a fan, comparing the movie favorably to Malpertuis. The only place it got into any real meat was in the last paragraph, when it talked about the movie’s final scenes: In the last moments, a hand, huge and malformed and steaming, as though freshly shaped, reaches impossibly through the open door to take the life of Ambrose, and carry him off to some unknown fate. Its bulk fills the entire doorway, only hinting at the terrible scale of the body to which it must belong. Sounded pretty striking, I had to admit.

  Most of the rest of the entry was occupied with talking about the painting that gave the movie its title and acted as the film’s McGuffin. It had been painted by Orlok himself, though that fact was tagged with a notation saying “citation needed,” a variation on Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Children.” But the painting, like the film, was supposed to have been lost after production. I clicked on the blue link of Orlok’s name and skimmed down through his entry, looking for a summation, an ending. All I found was that The Jaws of Cronus had been his last film. After making it he had retired, and lived out the rest of his life in seclusion. Whoever had last updated the article didn’t even seem to know that he was dead.

  ***

  We spent the night at a Holiday Inn just a couple of hours into Mexico, in a nice suite with two beds. The next morning we drove all day again, with me dozing in the passenger seat until Marla punched me in the shoulder and pointed out the windshield at what I could only conjecture was Orlok’s mansion. With the setting sun behind it turning the sky to a welter of purples and oranges, it looked like a matte painting from one of Granddad’s Gothic pictures, the ones with jutting castles on wave-bitten coasts and fog-shrouded moors. I knew from the map that the ocean couldn’t be too far away, but where we were all I could see was high desert. The landscape reminded me of Bronson Canyon, but this was bigger, wider, with no reminders, as there were in Griffith Park, of a metropolis waiting not far away.

  The sky looked big, but not open or inviting, as the sky is supposed to look. I was reminded of a quote that I’d read somewhere, something that I couldn’t quite remember, about there being another sky behind the sky, pushing it down on the earth. Or maybe I was thinking of Paul Bowles, “The sky hides the night behind it, and shelters the people beneath from the horror that lies above.” They made a movie of that, didn’t they? With John Malkovich?

  Only I didn’t feel very sheltered in that moment. I felt like the horror that lay above was right there, pressing down, as if the stars that were just coming out in the purple gloaming were bits of broken glass set in a ceiling that was slowly lowering, like that bed canopy in the Vincent Price flick. The setting sun made the shadows of even the stunted scrub brush that dotted the hillsides tall and long, and everything about the scene seemed calculated to direct the eye toward Orlok’s mansion, a skull in the center of a still life.

  “GPS says this is the place,” Marla informed me, tapping the screen on the dash. “House of Seven Hundred Gables.”

  The house was suitably grand and dark, the windows all ablaze but looking small indeed against the deepening shadow of the manor. It made the family house back in the Hollywood Hills seem modest by comparison. Though Orlok’s abode wasn’t as grandly decorated, it made up the difference in sheer size and scope, and in the austerity of its surroundings, which lent it a grandeur that Granddad’s ambitions could never have matched.

  The road we were on appeared not to be a road at all but simply the drive of the great house, snaking back in the rear view long beyond where it disappeared from sight. The drive curved around a dry fountain carved with bestial fish of the sort often seen in the corners of old maps. An ancient man stood in the center, holding an arm aloft from which the hand had long since been broken, so it was impossible to fathom what he had once been presenting to the gods, whether as a sacrifice or to mock them it was impossible to tell from the blind expression on his stone face.

  A valet in red livery waited to take our car. Presumably to an old coach house that had been converted into a garage, but maybe to a vast chasm with an Aztec pyramic, a la From Dusk ’til Dawn, who could say? Marla tossed him the keys and insisted on carrying her own bag, but I let them take mine, and we were shown into the house of Orlok. Cue the ominous music.

  ***

  Walking through the big front doors of Orlok’s mansion, I had an unusual urge: to edit Wikipedia. I felt, suddenly, that I had some information I could offer that would make their entries on Orlok and The Jaws of Cronus more complete. For example, the section on the semi-famous “lost” painting from that film mentioned that it was a variation on “Saturn Devouring his Children,” but it didn’t say that in place of Goya’s bestial but human-featured Saturn, Orlok’s version boasted a craggy, blackened giant, its eyeless head a moon-like mass of craters, each of them leaking some kind of smoky light, beneath which a tusked, multi-part mouth yawned wide. Were I updating the entry, I would have described the painting as “Goya by way of Frazetta by way of Wayne Barlowe,” the background a cloudy riot of purples and blues a hundred times more garish than anything Goya ever committed to canvas.

  Of course, the person writing the Wikipedia entry may never even have seen the film in its entirety, and even if they had, the movie was in black and white, so they would have had no way of knowing about the color palette. Only someone who had walked through Orlok’s front doors could have told them that, because the painting itself was hanging in the foyer of his mansion, given pride of place between the two staircases that carried wine-dark carpets and grotesquely cavorting carvings up to the second floor, so that it was the first thing I saw when I walked in. Without thinking too much about propriety, I snapped a picture with my phone. That shit was going up on Instagram.

  The second thing I saw was that Marla and I were hilariously underdressed, though I took some solace in being underdressed on purpose. While I wasn’t my grandfather, I was his son’s son, and I had a certain amount of image to maintain, so while I’d brought along a suit and a bow tie for dinner, I walked in the door wearing a Star of Hollywood shirt, in a color that my wardrobe guy had called “neon coral,” crawling with cartoonish black tarantulas. Which, ironically, cost more than the suit I’d be changing into.

  Everyone else was dressed for a dinner party or was obviously a servant—no livery in here, nor even coats-and-tails and French maid outfits like a spy film, but instead razor-pleated slacks, tuxedo shirts, and black bow ties for men and women alike—and I didn’t get five feet into the door before I was shaking someone’s hand. A woman, blond hair gathered up into a bun and also spilling down the back of her head, some kind of complicated up-d
o held in place with an amber comb, something meant to appear unassuming at a glance but grow more complex the longer you looked at it. She was wearing glasses with dark rims and a skirt-suit combo in a color somewhere between blue and slate. She looked a little bit like a sexy librarian in a porno flick, but with more class. Someone you could imagine standing at the head of a board meeting. I wasn’t at all surprised when she introduced herself as Ms. Mason, there on behalf of the conglomerate of lawyers who represented Orlok’s estate. She knew who I was without my having to say, of course. People with the kind of money that Orlok obviously had don’t hire lawyers—even posthumously—who don’t do their homework thoroughly.

  Once I’d been adequately glad-handed, Marla and I were passed off to one of the servers—a girl, I noticed, just enough to wonder if they were trying to manage me, and just how thoroughly they’d done their homework—who led us up to our rooms. We’d been given separate ones, tactfully, with an adjoining bathroom between them, the floor of it done up in black-and-white hexagonal tiles. The rooms were sumptuous, almost overly so, more like something from Legend of Hell House than any of the less subtle films that Granddad made. No erotic sculptures to cast suggestive shadows, though, or much in the way of ornamentation at all, save for a portrait in each room, obviously painted by the same hand that had executed the masterpiece downstairs. The one in my room was of an old man dressed in old-fashioned clothes—waistcoat and top hat, his hands folded on a cane—while the one in Marla’s room showed a girl with dark hair and eyes, her skin smooth as a porcelain doll, her dress as archaic as the old man’s. Both were done in a similar palette to the painting below, the flesh of the figures given an odd submarine hue of greens and blues.

  Like the painting from The Jaws of Cronus they weren’t exactly subtle, but they did have an unusual quality, what the hacks in my business sometimes called “a certain something.” There was definitely something about them. And yes, I’d even give it to the guy from the Rue Morgue article, something numinous.

  ***

  Since we had one bathroom to split, I showered first while Marla lay on her bed and screwed around on my tablet. Then, while she showered, I made a couple of edits to Wikipedia and looked up a tutorial video on how to tie a bow tie, since that’s something I do maybe twice a year, and then went and wandered the halls of the mansion until dinner. Which, sure, was probably asking for trouble, but I figured there were enough servants around that somebody would collect me if I went anywhere I wasn’t supposed to.

  I didn’t really have a destination in mind, but still I managed, after several dim hallways that would have been right at home in one of Granddad’s Gothic pictures, to find the museum. I don’t know what else you’d call it. The room was huge, bigger than any other room I’d yet seen in the mansion. I’d gone down some back set of stairs, and was now returned to the ground floor, but the ceilings of this room sailed high enough that they must have had galleys on the second floor, unilluminated windows that I could see from where I stood, hallways from which unseen observers could look down on me.

  The room itself was lit by lights set into the floor, shining up on huge glass display cases that held bodies. Or, rather, the wax figures of bodies. I recognized the nearest one immediately, the Frankenstein monster with the peeled-egg eye whose picture Marla had passed on seeing. Only this was no low-res scan of a photo from an old monster magazine, this was the real deal, bigger than life. I could walk all the way around, see that the other eye wasn’t a peeled egg but was instead a square slit chiseled into his granite face, like an aperture in a castle wall. I pulled out my phone to snap a picture.

  Past the Frankenstein monster were other figures, some I recognized, more that I didn’t. There was the top hat man I’d seen prowling the cemetery, looking much more menacing here than he had in a grainy YouTube video. At his feet was a plaque that said “COFFIN MAN.” Beyond him was a giant, eight feet tall if he was an inch, looking a bit like if Rondo Hatton had gotten into some of that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle ooze. The displays continued to the back of the room, littered with figures that stirred half-remembered recollections from catching Granddad’s mangled versions of Orlok’s films, and others that stirred no memories whatsoever. All of them were sculpted with uncanny realism, work that any wax museum would be proud of, and I was aware even as I walked from one to the next in the velvet hush that I had stepped out of one tired old horror cliché and into another.

  At the back of the room were two figures that differed from the rest. They were familiar too, but from someplace much more recent than my dim memories of late-night TV. A man on one side of the hall, top hat and waistcoat, a girl on the other, slight and dark of eye. The figures even retained the weird submarine coloring and undercurrents of offness from the portraits in our rooms.

  I don’t know how long I’d been staring when I heard the noise behind me. Not the quiet shushing of footsteps on the carpet, but a soft voice, sussurant, issuing forth a timid, “Hello?”

  I turned, probably guiltily, and was faced with the dizzying sensation that I hadn’t turned at all, that I was still staring ahead, up at the wax figure of the pale, dim girl. The illusion persisted only for a moment before it was broken by a host of factors: The girl before me was shorter—no, not shorter, just not up on a raised platform—and her clothes were more modern, subdued and stylish, suitable for a dinner party. Beyond that, she could have stepped down from the dais, and I resisted the urge to check behind me, to make sure that the wax figure was still where it belonged.

  “Are you Kirby Marsh?” she asked. Normally that was how I introduced myself, not bothering with the III, though this time something about the circumstances and the place gave me an irrational itch to add it in. I nodded, and she introduced herself as Orlok’s great-niece, saying that her name was Lenora, to which I mentally replied, “Of course it is.” Out loud I said something polite, and reached out to shake the hand she offered, though she held it like she expected me to kiss it, maybe, as if she had, in fact, stepped out of some bygone era. Her skin was cold but not moist, like a statue, like stone.

  “They’re serving dinner, if you’ll follow me,” she said, and I followed, and I didn’t ask her what this was all about, because really, I was beyond asking what this was all about. I had driven across half a continent; I was on this ride to the end.

  ***

  In spite of how many people had been in the house when I walked in the front door, there were only eight place settings at dinner, counting the ones for Marla and myself. I hadn’t honestly been sure whether they’d seat Marla with the rest of the guests, since she was technically “the help,” but I guess when I RSVP’d her as my plus one, that was good enough for them.

  Orlok’s great-niece sat at the head of the table, while Ms. Mason took the foot. I was to Lenora’s left, with Marla next to me, and next to her an aging ingénue who had given up trying to hide that first part. Making up the other side of the table were the kinds of people I would have imagined at this sort of thing, a heavyset man who looked uncomfortable in his tux and, next to him, an older woman with hair that was still as black as a starless night, next to that someone who could have passed as a college professor, wire glasses and a scarf around his neck giving him an air of sophistication that all the suits and tuxes in the world couldn’t lend the rest of us. Marla had cleaned up sharply in a simple black dress that fit close, but that she could still move in, if the need arose.

  Dinner came out in courses, and I spent my time tuning out conversation and fighting down the urge to spout some kind of non sequitur about Hitler. If there were introductions, I’d missed them, so I entertained myself by trying to guess who the other guests were, which is a lot harder in real life than it is in the movies, where you have cameras and sound cues to help you out. Knowing that Orlok had been into movies, I imagined that the rotund gentleman and the raven-haired lady were probably with the studio, while the professorial gentleman had the air of a writer or, god help us all, a critic.


  Wine came around, and I asked the server, “Amontillado?” To which he gave me a blank stare, but I held my hand over the top of my glass, anyway. The server flashed a look of concern at Ms. Mason, and a crease of irritation marred her forehead—maybe they didn’t like teetotalers here?—but she nodded, and the server took the bottle away. It’s not easy being on the wagon at a dinner party, but I’d faced harsher crowds back in LA.

  The ex-ingénue was saying something to Ms. Mason and the professorial man across from her, something that caught my attention, about masks. I gathered that she’d been in a horror movie when she was younger, some kind of slasher nonsense from the sound of it, and I cast my mind across the millions of knife-wielding maniacs I’d seen on-screen, trying to mentally smooth the wrinkles from her face and match it to a shrieking victim. “Movies like this Scream thing make it out like it all made so much sense,” she was saying. “You see a killer in a mask and you run away. But the thing is, in those first movies, nobody ever saw the killer, not until they were getting killed too. Nobody knew to be afraid.”

  Pretty salient commentary for a washed-up actress. I resolved to pay more attention, but her words were starting to slur, and she was slumping to the side somewhat. Maybe she’d somehow had too much to drink already? Had dinner been going on that long? I put out my hand, even though I’d need to reach across Marla to steady the actress, if it came to that, and said, “Are you all right?” but she was already sliding out of my reach, falling to the other side of her chair. I looked around for help, but the people on the other side of the table were sliding down as well. Ms. Mason was standing up, and so was Marla, but Marla’s hand was on the back of her chair for stability. The wine glass in front of her was mostly empty.