Horror Show (8 page)

The high priest removed the forks from their leather pouches and held them over his head for all to genuflect.

The people of the village became very excited at their unveiling, and, although Albert could not know what they were saying, he sensed their fear and reverence.

The people bowed down with their foreheads to the ground. They chanted and prayed, whispering like leaves in the wind.

Albert stepped forward and examined the two objects with the appraising eyes of a scientist.

The sun exploded off the polished metal surfaces with the intensity and brilliance of fire. They were, without a doubt, the most curious antiquities he had ever seen. They resembled two tuning forks, the type used by musicians. One was slightly larger than the other, the bigger of the two being about two feet in length. The other appeared to be a scaled-down version of the first, about fifteen inches in length.

Both forks were of the same design, a matched set of two U-shaped silver bars, roughly one inch in diameter, bent in the middle. The two prongs ran parallel, separated by an inch of space. At the top of the elbow there was a perforation through which a leather strap had been threaded. The tuning fork was thus hung so that it might vibrate freely.

At the four ends were unusual designs that caught Albert's attention. There, sculpted intricately by hands of talent, were four snake heads, accurate in every detail. The heads all seemed to be the same. They were all baring fangs.

These tuning forks appeared to be constructed in a manner inconsistent with the level of skill of the locals. Albert felt sure that they were the work of some older, more advanced culture.

The surface of the silver had been meticulously polished. It wasn't perfect, as a machined modern piece would have been, but it looked damn close. The tolerances were obviously hand-wrought.

The striker was an animal's cloven hoof.

After the sun had set, the priest selected a man from the village, and, against the victim's will, he was dragged forward and tied to a stake set firmly in the ground. This, only after much protesting and lamenting, was met with cautious resignation by the rest of the villagers.

The unfortunate man's fate appeared sealed, and no amount of argument would change it.

A ring of wood and dried shrubbery was placed around both the man and Albert's party and lit with a torch of burning pitch. All those involved in or witnessing the ceremony were within the circle of flame.

In the center stood the tied figure. The flickering light of the fire played across the man's terrified face. He screamed and pleaded in an unintelligible tongue, his limbs straining valiantly against the rough fiber of the rope to the point where it cut into his skin and blood began to ooze.

The priest stepped forward and marked the victim's forehead with ashes.

Albert's native translator began to shake and seemed mortally afraid of what was about to transpire. He became reluctant to translate the words of the high priest, reluctant to be a party to the damnation of this poor creature's soul.

The victim howled and fought the bonds that restrained him.

Albert had to shout at his translator to continue. Within the ring of fire, the priest, his assistant, the translator, and Albert stood facing the center. The bound man continued to struggle.

The high priest said a few words, chanted what Albert believed to be the name of the demon, then struck the larger metal fork with the cloven hoof striker.

It made an unbelievable sound, a low vibration that seemed to rattle Albert's very soul. The ominous tone filled the night. The insects stopped singing. The sound grew until the vibration became painful to hear.

The priest then struck the second fork, and its vibration joined the first, oscillating in and out of the sympathetic harmonics of the two wildly dissonant notes. The combination began to have a strange effect on Albert. Intoxicating and hypnotic, it insinuated its way through his eardrums and into his brain, canceling out all else.

With an effect like rolling thunder, Albert felt his internal organs vibrate. He felt as if he were standing next to railroad tracks while a train rumbled past.

He blinked, trying to hold back a steady flow of tears that began involuntarily to stream down his face. Looking around, he could see that every man in the circle was crying.

The tuning forks hummed with a sustained tone that defied the laws of physics.

His eyes were drawn to a shimmering cloud, hovering a few feet above the tied man's head.

The head of a huge, glistening, horned snake materialized, coming into focus before Albert's incredulous eyes. It wavered for a moment, then snapped onto the body of the bound man with a terrible finality, wrapping its wet coils around the hapless native and crushing him like a piece of meat. The coils flexed, then tightened. Albert listened for the sound of bones snapping, but the only snapping he heard was the crackle of the fire as it sputtered around them.

A terrible metamorphosis then took place.

The sinuous body of the snake began to blend into the body of the man, melding into his shape and taking on the characteristics of a human form. The blue-green scales melted into arms, legs, a torso. The form of a human emerged from the coils of the reptile as if being sculpted from living tissue by a master artisan.

Albert wiped his weeping eyes as the snake-man was born before him, the skin reptilian, iridescent, but with a form suggesting humanity. It was a grotesque melding of the two entities that Albert now beheld, half—snake demon, half-man. The body of a human, the head of a snake. It twisted and pivoted on its slender neck, watching the people and the fire.

A forked tongue flickered the air around it; the lidless eyes seemed to rotate as it studied the scene.

What Albert watched was impossible.

The snake head looked at Albert. Its whiplike tongue danced in his direction. Albert stood transfixed as, one by one, the ropes snapped and the changeling stepped away from the tree.

The priest remained rooted to the ground, but the others present, including Albert and the translator, faded back, away from the center and closer to the wall of fire. The flame barrier held them, just as the coils of the serpent had held the sacrifice. They were trapped. The snake creature stepped nearer, its tongue darting in and out, and Albert could smell a fetid, unpleasant odor coming from it.

The priest cried out something, and the translator, shocked from his terror by the urgency in the priest's voice, interpreted and shouted at Albert.

“Stay within the circle of flames!”

Albert's back was now hot, the hair on the back of his head began to singe as he pressed closer to the fire. He wanted to run, to jump through the wall of flame and take his chances, but he did not.

He realized the terrible beauty of what he saw, the heart-stopping monstrosity of it. Without a doubt, without an ounce of uncertainty, he knew he was looking at the face of Satan.

When, after almost an
hour, the serpent dematerialized and the fires burned down, the tribesmen lowered the dazed victim from the stake. He began to weep, and after a short time became hysterical. They dragged him before the priest, who at first comforted the man, then unceremoniously put him to death. “To prevent the demon's return into the same body,” he explained to Albert through the interpreter.

“Does the host body have to be human?” Albert asked, concerned for the victims. “Could it be an animal?”

The priest nodded as the question was translated. “Yes, it can be any living thing, but only man can bring the full power of the demon.”

That night, as Albert lay in his sleeping bag, his mind raced. The incredible event he'd witnessed had left him shaken but also exhilarated.

He schemed to get his hands on the tuning forks. He thought about offering to buy them, but quickly rejected the idea. The concept of money meant nothing to these people. He considered various scenarios to trick the priest and the villagers, but dismissed each one.

All the while the tuning forks tempted him, unguarded in the center of the village.

He came to the conclusion that he would have to steal them.

Albert abhorred violence, and he rejected any thought of using force to take them. He had a rifle, but that would not be effective against the entire village if they turned on him.

He decided that the best approach would be to purloin the tuning forks under cover of night and make his escape. The only problem was the natives, who, better suited to the jungle than he, would quickly overtake him in a chase.

So Albert devised a plan.

He noticed that the villagers all drew their water from a single well.

Albert prepared a narcotic extract of
Papaver somniferum gigantus Beaumond
and surreptitiously poisoned the well.

Over the course of the next twenty-four hours, he successfully drugged the entire village. When the natives were all asleep, he put the tuning forks in his pack and left the plateau.

Knowing that the villagers would sleep for days, he nevertheless hastened his retreat through the jungle.

Albert opened his eyes
as the blaring of an automobile horn awakened him from his daytime nightmare.

He looked up to see an attractive teenage girl driving a green-and-white Pontiac Star Chief convertible. She had the top down, and her blond ponytail bobbed in the breeze.

His daughter had arrived.

He smiled and waved when she called his name.

“Oh Daddy, would you please hurry up! I'm late!”

“That doesn't surprise me,” he said as he slung his bag into the backseat.

“Welcome home,” she chirped.

“It's good to be home, Thora,” he replied.

“A woman's been calling for you.”

Albert looked bemused. “A woman?”

“Yeah, she said it's really important that you call her as soon as you get in.”

The car pulled away, cutting into the traffic like a speedboat. Albert leaned over and kissed his daughter on the cheek before the inertial force pinned him back into the vinyl seat.

“Does she have a name?” he wanted to know, genuinely curious.

“Yeah, get this,” she said as the Pontiac careened into a turn. “It's that late night horror show host on Channel Two, the one who looks like a sexy ghoul!”

“Devila?”

“Uh-huh. Isn't that exciting? She's a big star!”

Albert knew about Devila. He'd seen her many times on television, hosting a plethora of dreadful movies while she vamped for the cameras. He liked her look—pale skin and clingy black dress, with a witchy silver streak in her long, straight, midnight hair. But he had never met the woman.

She was very big with the beatniks and the teenagers in Los Angeles. Albert Beaumond wondered what the connection could be.

A horn blasted as his daughter swerved in front of another car.

“Why would she call me?”

Thora weaved in and out of traffic with the brazen skill of a New York City taxi driver. Albert hung on for dear life, having forgotten how aggressive his daughter could be behind the wheel. “She wants to take you to a Halloween party.”

Albert laughed. “That's absurd.”

“Oh Daddy, you are the most handsome, available bachelor in town, you know,” she gushed.

“I rather doubt that,” he replied, flattered by her assessment. “But, seriously, why me?”

“Well,” said Thora proudly, a flash of smile splitting her face, “she said that you're the scariest, sexiest man in Los Angeles, and that she's the scariest, sexiest woman. She said everybody's afraid of you, and that you'd be the perfect date for this party she's going to tonight.”

5

Darkness fell around the Landis Woodley fun house like a lead curtain, further sealing it off from the world of sanity and reason.

Even though the clock showed eight o'clock on Halloween night, no trick-or-treaters came to the door. Not that Landis cared. If any costumed children ever did find the uninviting gray stucco building, down from the road and visible only from certain angles, he would have ignored them. Landis hated to answer the door.

He had once thought of having a doorbell made that played back a tape recording of a dog barking and an angry voice shouting, “Go away! We don't want you here!”

He had Buzzy Haller go so far as to actually tape the warning, but he never got around to doing the wiring. Buzzy was much too important to Landis to waste his time working on small projects like that. Buzzy made the productions run. He was the monster maker, and, as Landis insisted, without a monster, you don't have a movie.

Landis stood upstairs in his bedroom, putting the finishing touches on his undertaker's black tux, when he heard the front door slam.

“Buzz?” he shouted.

“Yeah!” came the reply.

“Come on up!”

He heard the thumps of Buzzy Haller coming up the stairs, two at a time.

“You'll never guess who's comin' to the party, man!” he gushed as he entered the room.

Landis straightened his bow tie and cussed at his clumsiness. He ignored Buzzy, who continued talking.

“Neal Cassidy! He's the cat who's the hero of the Jack Kerouac book,
On the Road
, you know, the one that just came out?”

Landis finished with his tie and turned stiffly to face Buzzy.

Buzzy whistled. “Nice monkey suit.”

“Thanks,” came the terse reply.

Landis looked at Buzzy, saw the scruffy blue jeans, cutoff gray sweatshirt, and fake goatee. “Don't tell me, the beat generation!”

“That's right, Woody. That's my costume this year. I'm a beatnik!”

Landis winced.

“Complete with reefers!” Buzzy concluded, and pulled out an envelope with half a dozen rolled joints in it. He flashed it open and showed Landis.

“You're incredible, Buzz. Where'd you get them?” Landis asked after taking a good look.

“Some cats I know from San Francisco just blew into town. That's where I met Cassidy. The man's a legend!
On the Road
is the Bible of the beats, man, and it's all about him!”