Horror Show (7 page)

He looked down at his list of calls. The numbers blurred. He ran his finger down the list and stopped at only the most important names.
Damn
, he thought,
I need a secretary for all this shit. It's too much work
.

He had already forgotten about calling Becky Sears. Tad Kingston and his pimply adolescent problems didn't rate very high on his list. The kid would just have to learn to take care of his own butt.

Buzzy Haller entered the room and gave him the thumbs-up sign.

“Ready to go, boss,” he said.

“Beautiful,” Woodley said through his teeth.

“How about a drink before we change?”

They drifted into the living room, where a full wet bar waited for customers. Landis automatically prepared two vodka martinis, very dry, no olives. He handed one to Buzzy.

“I gotta tell ya, Woody,” Buzzy said honestly, “there's nothing like an icy see-through.”

Landis held his glass up and said, “Here's to old H.P Lovecraft.”

“Who?”

Landis smiled. “Just a guy.”

Buzzy took a sip and made a smacking sound with his lips. “Ahh, perfect. You always get just the right ratio of vodka to vermouth.”

They drank as Buzzy scanned the guest list. He tapped the paper and said, “We're gonna scare the livin' shit out of these people tonight.”

Landis nodded. “You think we'll get into trouble? I mean, this is some pretty heavy stuff.”

Buzzy raised his glass and winked. “Aw, who cares? It's worth it to shake these assholes up a little.”

4

Albert Beaumond was haunted. He didn't know how, but he did know why. As the world's leading Satanist and leader of the First Satanic Church of America, he'd been doing research on the nature of the devil in different cultures when something unexpected happened. He overturned one rock too many.

He stood on the sidewalk in front of the fledgling Los Angeles International Airport and squinted into the hazy sunshine.

Albert was a tall, distinguished man in his late forties, always well dressed, with a European flair. He wore a neatly trimmed goatee and kept his silver-streaked brown hair combed straight back. He cut a handsome, striking figure.

His daughter was late. She was always late. For a college student at UCLA she didn't seem to have much of a mind for punctuality. Didn't they require her to go to her classes on time?

He smiled when he thought about the way her mother had been when they first met in San Francisco twenty-two years ago. Albert studied anthropology with a minor in botany at the University of California in Berkeley. Thora's mother was a botany student as well. Now
that
woman had been a stickler about being on time. She chided him endlessly about being late on their first date. He learned his lesson and was seldom late after that. When she died ten years later, he was late for the funeral.

Thora took after Albert.

Over the years he'd adjusted to the point where he expected it, even planned for it.

Except today it was a nuisance. His plane had arrived a few minutes early, he'd cleared customs in record time, and now he was anxious to get home.

In his suitcase were artifacts that could change the way western civilization thought about God forever. He shifted it from one hand to another, not wanting to put it down even for a second for fear that something might happen to it.

He need not have worried. The battered brown leather bag looked sufficiently scruffy not to attract the least attention from the usual airport thieves. Even if it were stolen, the artifacts he prized above all else were nothing anyone would know the value of—anyone but a trained anthropologist, that is.

To Albert, it was a miracle. The two twenty-inch silver alloy pieces, hand-polished and odd in appearance, had amazing powers. They were tucked away in his bag, wrapped in towels and tied with a piece of rawhide. The customs inspector didn't even bother opening them. He just waved Albert through the turnstile with a yawn and a look of bored indifference.

Albert fished a cigarette out of his breast pocket and lit it with a flick from his monogrammed Zippo lighter. It always worked on the first try. He trusted that lighter like he trusted nothing else in this godless world.

Godless? Well, maybe not, thought Albert. Now that he'd seen it with his own eyes, he couldn't say for sure what omnipotent beings ruled our festering universe. He knew about one for sure. The devil was real.

Every culture has a religion, and every religion has a devil, or so it seemed to Albert when he began his scholarly quest to catalog and investigate every reference.

It turned into an enormous job that kept him busy for years, but Albert had a mission. He wanted to establish the face of Satan around the world. He wanted to compare and understand what characteristics stayed the same from culture to culture. Maybe, among those statistics a pattern would emerge, a common thread of belief in the Prince of Darkness that Albert could use to conjure him up.

So far his best efforts seemed to fall on deaf ears. Like the monk who prayed for years in vain and never saw the slightest sign that his lifetime of prayers had been answered, or even heard by an indifferent God, Albert had been trying to raise the devil without success. He reasoned that a universal approach might work. After all, there was really no such thing as good and evil, just man's interpretation of it.

A scientific approach was called for.

It was the modern way, and in 1957, modern was the name of the game.

People everywhere were searching for new ways to do things. Albert saw himself as a pioneer. He was, after all, the first person to establish the only openly Satanic church in America, a bold move in any era.

In his research, he'd found no fewer than 1,665 references to Satan, spanning hundreds of cultures.

There were many similarities, too. Belief in Hell, eternal damnation, demons, demonic possession, sin, and evil incarnate seemed to be universal concepts.

For Albert Beaumond, it was vindication. He felt a breakthrough was just around the corner. His ultimate goal, of course, was to conjure the Prince of Darkness, to be the first in modern times to commune with him. His search went on for years.

“Do what thou wilt shall be the extent of the law,” he said, muttering his favorite Aleister Crowley quotation.

In South America, in
the high country of Peru, on the misty plains beyond Machu Picchu, he found something truly staggering, truly magical. There, cut off from the outside world, lived a tribe of Indians who worshipped a demon they could summon whenever they wanted through the use of an ingenious device.

His liaison to the local scientific community, a smarmy little man named Carlos from the Anthropology Department at the University of Lima, had mentioned it to him in his hotel room in Ecuador. He had arrived there en route to Peru to study some quaint local human sacrificial customs among the native population. The Ecuadorians were less than enthusiastic when he approached them to photograph their rituals.

He then prepared to travel to Peru and explore the mountainous regions there. In addition to his anthropological pursuits, Albert planned to study the native flora, taking specimens of the numerous unknown and uncatalogued species along the way. Albert's encyclopedic knowledge of flowering plants, especially the narcotic and hallucinogenic varieties, had proved valuable. In the past, he'd sold the rights to several of his discoveries to pharmacological companies, offsetting the cost of his expeditions.

Albert's hotel room sweltered in the oppressive tropical heat. Humidity so intense that it made the wallpaper peel debilitated him. He was reduced to sitting on the rattan chair beneath the ceiling fan and drinking whatever chilled beverages he could procure. Today it was beer, tepid and barely cooler than room temperature. He offered one to Carlos, who greedily accepted and paced the room as he drank.

The ceiling fan turned agonizingly slowly, stirring only the faintest breeze, imperceptible but for the slight cooling of the sweat on his brow.

“It is a Stone Age tribe, Dr. Beaumond,” Carlos said hopefully. Albert had passed himself off as a doctor of anthropology from USC, referring to himself as “Doctor” Beaumond. No one asked to see any verification, and so far no one had bothered to check his background.

Albert Beaumond certainly looked like a professor. His goatee, close-cropped to fetishistic proportions, gave him an intellectual, and slightly evil, persona. The overall effect was convincing. And then there was Albert's natural intelligence and upper-class background. Carlos had no reason to doubt his authenticity.

Albert had loosened his tie and removed his lightweight summer jacket. His white suit was wrinkled and moist, soiled here and there by the general dirtiness of the country.

White, though reflective of heat, was an impractical color for clothes here. His shirt stuck to his back, defined in geographic detail by the sweat-stained suspenders that hung from his shoulders. As he leaned forward, the pattern of rattan was branded lightly on his back. Albert had been uncomfortable every minute he'd been here. How could these people live like this?

Carlos didn't seem to mind the heat. He swigged down the warm beer and talked excitedly. Albert could smell Carlos's body scent; it lathered the air with an odor of oniony sweat. He wondered why these people didn't use colognes.

The air barely stirred. Albert mopped at his brow with a dirty white handkerchief. He watched the research assistant pace.

For his part, Albert thought Carlos boorish and common. The little man seemed only interested in the payment that Albert had mentioned for reliable information that might add to his research.

“A tribe so ancient that no one knows how long they have been there. The ruins near their village date back to pre-Inca times.”

Albert seemed mildly interested until he learned of their methodology, then he was intrigued. He would spend much money and many days searching for the tribe to see with his own eyes if Carlos had reported the truth.

This tribe believed that all things, all emotions, and all spirits were born of vibrations. They worshiped the vibrations and had kept a detailed account of every spirit they had conjured over the centuries and what vibration contacted it.

It was the combination of vibrations that did the trick.

They did it through the use of long metallic vibrating devices that resembled tuning forks.

As the fork was struck and resonated, then combined with another vacillation wave coming from a second fork, it summoned forth an entity that was sympathetic to that frequency. Different combinations produced different results. Certain frequencies oscillated between themselves, canceling each other out. Their discord made new vibrations, and those rang with unknown dissonance. The effect built on itself.

Two certain forks, Albert was told, two mysterious antiquities from the dawn of man, had the miraculous power that, once struck, together, made contact with … the other side.

The other side of what? Albert wondered.

Carlos said it was a demon who came forth in the form of a serpent. A Snake God.

To Albert, of course, that entity represented something else entirely. The face of Satan. It appeared in their drawings as a serpent, complete with horns, forked tongue, and a tail. Familiar turf for Albert.

“Will this information be worth money to you?” asked Carlos. “I have gone to great expense to contact a man who can help us, a medicine man. He can help us locate the tuning forks.”

Albert fanned himself with his notebook. Carlos grinned like a successful thief. To Albert, the entire experience of being in the room with Carlos had become unpleasant, but now, with this new information, Albert was revived.

“Yes, Carlos. I think it could be worth something.”

Carlos caught his breath. “How much?” he asked.

“We'll see, we'll see,” said Albert.

“I think,” said Carlos, “that I can persuade this man to do business with us. For a price.”

Albert immediately set forth
on an expedition to the high plateaus to find the sacred tuning forks and unlock their secrets. Carlos arranged for a translator/guide to accompany them.

For weeks they climbed and searched, enduring hardships of every description to reach the hidden village.

Albert gathered plant specimens as he went, amazed at the dizzying number of varieties. He discovered a giant flower that greatly resembled the
Papaver somniferum
, or opium poppy. The seedpods had grown to twice their normal size. Albert named the new discovery
Papaver somniferum gigantus Beaumond
, and collected as many pods as he could fit in his specimen bag.

This discovery alone could pay for the expedition, he thought.

When at last Albert discovered the backward, isolated Stone Age tribe, he went about trying to obtain the tuning forks.

Like most twentieth-century men, Albert grossly underestimated the power of the spirit world and blindly called forth the power of evil as if he were placing a long-distance phone call.

That's when his problems really started.

It began the first
night he was in the tribal village. The high priest, whom he had made an instant effort to patronize, invited him to watch as he used the summoning devices to conjure up the Snake God.

The tuning forks were not kept hidden. In fact, they were kept in a hut in the center of the village, in the open, where everyone in the village could see them. No one, not even the enemies of the tribe, dared touch them except the high priest. Fear could be one hell of a deterrent, Albert decided.

The living conditions within the village were deplorable, yet the hut that housed the tuning forks stayed clean and well maintained.

The sacred objects seemed to be the center of village life.

Albert got his first look at the tuning forks as the sun faded over the ridge behind the village. It illuminated the square in front of the hut with golden twilight.