Horror Show (28 page)

“Camera?”

“Speed!”

“Sound?”

“Rolling.”

“Annnnd ACTION!”

Tad forced himself into the frame, moving stiffly. Luboff loomed behind him, the essence of pain. His face seemed to steal every scene he was in, whether he wanted to or not. It was just that everyone else looked so ordinary next to him. Tad Kingston bent over the corpse.

“Doctor, I—”

The corpse reached up and began to strangle Tad. Its dead hands pushed against his neck drunkenly, not actually closing around it, just pushing into it. The thumbs were pulled back, away from the fingers, so as to give the illusion of grasping. The touch of the cadaver was like fish.

It wasn't in the script.

It moved against him like an eel he had the traumatic misfortune to handle once when he was a child. The memory flashed in Tad's mind automatically, rushing in like an uninvited guest at a private party. His father had taken him fishing at the age of ten. In a tidal pool, trapped by the falling tide, a large, black eel swam desperately back and forth. Tad's father, in one of Tad's most vivid memories, went into the pool and clubbed the eel to death with a piece of driftwood. After the eel was dead, Tad's father made him pick it up and carry it back to the car. “What's the problem? It's already dead,” he told him. Tad cried and cried to no avail. It felt like the most foul thing in the world, a seagoing worm.

That's what the touch of Johnny D. was like.

Tad's reaction was off the scale.

“Oh my God!” he screamed and stumbled back into Luboff, who deftly stepped aside, letting the young actor fall to the tile floor.

Landis thought Tad screamed like a woman. It was convincing, though.

The corpse had moved too soon; it wasn't going according to plan. Tad had been taken completely by surprise, and his fright was as real and deep as the realization of death. He wasn't acting. In fact, he'd forgotten all about the movie and everything else. To him there were only those hands on his neck, and the memory of the eel.

He nearly knocked the frail figure of Jonathon Luboff over, but the old man stood his ground miraculously. In front of a camera, he was a tower of strength. His spindly, discolored legs, scarred by years of injections, held like wire sculpture. Tad Kingston fell past him, brushing by as he crashed to the floor.

Kingston's face was ashen. “It moved …” he stammered. “That thing's alive.”

From behind the corpse, Buzzy Haller was smiling. He'd jumped the gun a few seconds just to see what kind of reaction he would get from Kingston. It was worth it. Knowing that Landis would want only one take, and knowing that Tad would be scared shitless, he'd made the decision to go beyond what they had planned.

It was part of the magic. Not only would they get real death on film; they would get real fear, too. The horror in Tad's face was miles past his acting ability. It was true terror, and it transcended the movie. What Buzzy was doing was revolutionary, first with the corpse, and now with Tad. In a few short moments, he had taken this simple horror movie to the edge, then pushed it over.

Technique into passion, art into substance.

Real fear
.

Landis let the camera roll; knowing Buzzy as he did, he suspected his partner's motives and sensed his gamble. It was a stunning bit of cinematography. Luboff watched it all and felt the heat of the moment like a heart attack. It was beautiful to him. To assure the whelp's performance like that was brilliant.

Buzzy pulled back the corpse's arms and let him swagger. Tad groveled at his feet shamefully, too lost in his own nightmare to worry about anyone else's.

The wires attached to Buzzy's wrists hurt. They cut into him and inhibited his circulation, but it was the only way to get realistic corpse movement. The wires cut into the Johnny's wrists too, but they were soft and cold, and in no time they were down to the bone. Without bleeding it was hard to tell how deep a cut was. Johnny's wrists were nearly severed by the end of the scene.

Buzzy didn't notice. Johnny D. never complained. His face was unchanged.

Tad Kingston was huddled on the floor sobbing for a good sixty seconds before Landis yelled, “Cut!”

People snapped out of their trance. Then, a funny thing happened. They applauded.

It wasn't for Johnny D. they applauded, or Tad, or Luboff. It was for the moment. It was for the magic. It was for the triumph. Landis and Buzzy had pulled off, within the shabby confines of their lurid little movie, a golden moment in cinematic history.

The sound of their hands clapping ricocheted off the brittle walls like gunshots.

It was a scene for the ages.

However, for all its
gruesome intensity, the scene that most horror aficionados remember in
Cadaver
was not the Kingston/corpse interaction, but a scene that came a few minutes later. It resulted from another Buzzy Haller gamble.

Landis Woodley wanted a close-up of Johnny D. It was a pivotal shot, one that would establish Johnny's credentials and would be used several times. Johnny's face was so hideous that no special lighting was required to make it any more frightening. It sold itself. The only problem was the eyes. They were closed.

Landis wanted them open. A corpse with closed eyes didn't seem quite right. In the medium and long shots it wasn't a problem. They were sunken and distorted and pushed so far back into the skull that they seemed to disappear. In the close-up he wanted them open.

Buzzy told Landis that he thought he could get them to open by pulling back the skin along the top of the scalp.

“It'll look like he's opening them himself, man. It should be incredible,” Buzzy crowed. They were both riding so high from the previous shots with Johnny D. that they felt they could do anything.

“I gotta warn ya,” Landis told Chet as he prepared the camera angle. “I don't know what to expect under there. The damn things are probably rotten and runny as poached eggs. It could be pretty disgusting. Whatever you do, just keep rolling till I yell. Got it?”

“Got it,” Chet acknowledged.

“Let's rock.”

The camera whirred, the lens screwed in, bringing the viewer's eye close, close, closer to Johnny's haunted face. Everyone held his breath. At Landis's signal, Buzzy yanked back on the scalp and the eyes jerked open, first one, then the other. The right one had stuck for a split second, glued down by some dried putrescence. It popped open a heartbeat later.

Chet gasped. Through his camera lens he got the worst of it.

Worms. Hundreds of worms. Surprised by the light, they wriggled out of the sockets, squirming insanely. Somebody screamed. Chet kept the camera on it just as he was told, and its unblinking eye recorded it all faithfully. He stared, astonished at the grotesque mass of writhing hell, and tried to keep from vomiting. The supreme effort it took to keep his stomach down was second only to his dogged determination to keep the shot in focus.

Everyone else looked away.

It was as if the brains inside the dead man's head had come alive and were trying to crawl through the holes.

21

“Okay, that's a wrap!” shouted Landis Woodley at 4:30
A.M
. “Let's pack it up, people! I want everybody back here tonight no later than five.”

The LA County Morgue morning shift was coming in, eyeing Landis and his crowd as they broke down their equipment and loaded it back into their truck. Buzzy had been careful to put everything back exactly the way he'd found it, especially Johnny D.

No one noticed anything amiss. To the coroner, they were a model crew.

Landis was bleary-eyed when he came out of the dark building into the daylight. It had been a very long night. The light hurt his eyes, and he immediately donned his sunglasses. He was smoking his umpteenth cigarette as he walked through the parking lot.

An ambulance, bearing the day's first customer, pulled up. The paramedics took their time unloading a gurney with a sheet-covered figure on it. Landis watched the leisurely pace of the workers.
The time to rush is over now
, he thought.
This guy is no longer on the razor's edge, he's just another stiff checking into Hotel Hell. Looks like business as usual
.

Landis flicked his cigarette across the parking lot and yawned. Buzzy rolled down the window of his car and waved at Landis. Landis walked toward him, a thin smile on his lips.

“Hell of a night,” he said.

Buzzy nodded. “We made horror-movie history, man. I think we really got something special in there last night.”

“I can't believe we actually did it.”

“Yeah, and it's all immortalized on film.” Buzzy started his engine.

Landis looked at the sky. “Looks like the rain is over; it's gonna be fresh and clear for a change.”

Buzzy put the car in gear. “Won't last. See ya later.”

That night, to no
one's surprise, Johnny D. made his triumphant encore. Buzzy and Chet joked about it, and Landis could tell that the horror of their actions was gone; it was almost normal now. Even Tad seemed less uptight, as long as he didn't have to touch a corpse.

All in all, things seemed more reasonable and less strained the second time around. The crew felt easier around Johnny D., and hardly flinched when he was hauled out of cold storage for his reprise.

They even used a few of Johnny's buddies. Buzzy was now an expert at corpse choreography, and seemed to have a real rapport with them. The other cadavers were just plain dead folk; nothing special, they were used as background mostly. None of them had the unchained charisma of Johnny D. Landis was beginning to feel that Johnny was the actual star of the movie.

Try as he might, Landis could never repeat the intensity of the Tad Kingston surprise-reaction shot, or the utter repulsion of the worm shot.

They wrapped up the last few scenes and went home ahead of schedule. A miracle. Landis was in heaven. His little production had worked out smoothly and showed every sign of being a success.

Landis took the exposed film stock to Fairfax Film Labs for immediate development. On the way he had to stop and see Sol Kravitz to get the cash for the processing, because Fairfax wouldn't take a Landis Woodley check.

He couldn't wait to start editing because he knew he'd see it again on the film splicer—that stark terror and hungry weirdness that permeated the footage they'd shot at the morgue. He knew it would be there in black and white, waiting for him.

He'd created magic.

After sleeping all day
, Buzzy Haller drove to Don's Liquors and picked up a bottle of Chardonnay, a pack of cigarettes, and a half pint of Seagram's. The sun was sinking low in the western sky, just beginning to touch the tops of the hills behind Sunset Strip. The palm trees were silhouetted vividly against a fleeting orange universe.

Buzzy sat in his car in the parking lot and cracked open the Seagram's. He brought it to his lips. It tasted wonderful going down, and he finished the swig in one long, smooth swallow. The burn in his throat felt good.

Lighting a cigarette from his new pack of Luckies, he sat back in the seat of his '48 Dodge Roadster and switched on the radio. The old gray car had a metal visor in the front that hung out over the windshield and cut the glare. He smoked while waiting for the radio to warm up. It came to life a minute later and throbbed with the deep voice only vacuum tubes can achieve, a kind of basso profundo that gently rattled the loose panels in his door.

Buzzy's car radio didn't have reverb, like some of the other models, but it kicked ass.

He scanned the dial, looking for some of that high-octane, new music that was sweeping the nation, that crazy rock and roll.

Buzzy was a jazz man, mostly. He was much too hip for the hillbilly cats who had recently invaded the airwaves. Yet, when he was alone, and no one could see him enjoying himself, he curiously tuned into the rock station. Some of the stuff, the hot rhythm and blues, was a jazz spin-off anyway. It was okay to dig people like Ray Charles and Fats Domino.

It was just that wild teenage stuff that was uncool. People like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Ricky Nelson were beneath him … unless he was alone. Then it was all right to tap his foot.

He zeroed in on disc jockey Art Laboe's show just in time to hear the second half of “Suzie Q” by Dale Hawkins. Leaning back in the roomy seat, he casually let the smoke drift out the open window and sang along. He liked the song; it was about a girl he thought he once knew.

Abruptly he thought of Roberta.
She was suck a Goody Two-shoes. Cute, though. Nice butt, too. Too bad things turned out the way they did
. He almost felt a pang of guilt when he remembered the way she'd cried at the party.

God, I'm scum
, he thought.
That's why I don't get any chicks anymore, because I'm pond scum. What girl wants pond scum
?

He visualized Roberta's smile.

That's what I like about her
, he thought,
her smile, and the fact that she's a nice girl. That's what Woody digs too
—
the nice girl scene. Who wouldn't? Chicks like that are hard to find
.

I got dibs on her anyway 'cause I found her first. Not too many nice girls in this town anymore. My mom would have liked her. Maybe if I apologized
…

Thinking of his mother caused Buzzy to squirm in his seat. It was impossible to think of Mother and not recall the same scene every time. He wondered why he couldn't remember anything else, just that one grotesque moment. He tried to shove it out of his mind but it persisted. He was only five years old.

Mother in her bathrobe, dead on the bathroom floor, the water running in the tub. Turn off the water and kneel down beside her. Alone for two days. Afraid to close her eyes
.

Buzzy shivered and rolled his head.

Fuck this
. He took another hard swallow of Seagram's and turned up the music. Thinking about Mother hurt, and he hated to hurt.