THE BLACK ALBUM: A Hollywood Horror Story (13 page)

"No." Loveless glanced
around. Lizzy and Carla were staring at him solemnly. "But something was
going on. Could it have been a kid from school? Someone who looks like your
friend-"

"Wayne," Toby added.
"No way."

"We're really getting our
money's worth outta this place," Donovan laughed. Nobody laughed with him.

"Life's full of mysteries.
We'll just let this be one more," Charlotte said politically. "We
better start shooting, if we're gonna get anything done tonight."

The kids all claimed to have seen
Wayne on the back patio. They said they ran back inside, getting separated in
the darkness. Loveless found himself wondering if that marijuana joint he
discovered had been laced with something strong and hallucinogenic. But the
filmmaker hadn't taken a hit and he definitely experienced something too. Maybe
he just got caught up in the teens' hysteria. Loveless started thinking of
movies like "Paranormal Activity" and the whole slew of TV shows now
on the air where film crews armed with video cameras explored supposedly
haunted sites at closed down mental institutions, mangy mansions, prisons,
plantations. Going in with the expectation that something was going to happen,
inevitably something freaky always
would
happen. By the end of the
episode, nothing was ever solved and people merely walked away with their own
opinions of what had been experienced. The filmmaker told himself that was all
that had happened here.

Before long though, the kids were
all joking about the experience. But there was an edge to the laughter.

The rest of the night was
productive. The kids had enough imagination to make their scenes believable.
Hitting their marks (walking to the spot that has been lit for you before
delivering your dialogue) was harder for the teenage kids. The filmmaker made a
mental note to keep their blocking simple. Lizzy was eerily convincing when she
did the nursery rhyme in an almost trance-like state, no doubt a benefit of her
marijuana high. Brent was disturbingly genuine when he said his last line as a
human boy in the movie, put the prop gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
“Fight
the Devil.”

Loveless certainly didn’t want to
endorse or romanticize teenage suicide and had debated cutting the scene from
the screenplay. But at the end of the day, it was an important scene to the
overall story and chilling as hell.

“I think they were making it up,”
Charlotte said in a low tone to Loveless and Donovan after she had dropped the
friends off and returned to the Strawberry Lodge with Lizzy, who was in the
kitchen polishing off the last of the pepperoni pizza. Charlotte continued as
they packed up their movie gear, “Kids like to get caught up in the spirit of
things. We
are
making a horror movie.”

“Who was Wayne?” Donovan inquired
earnestly.

“A boy in their grade last year.
He was a bit of a loner, troubled kid. Wayne was the one who climbed the big
rock and added the red S to Mathaluh Live.”

Loveless made a mental note:
Another death linked to Mathaluh. And not decades old. A recent death.

“Is that how he died? Falling off
those rocks?” Donovan was completely enthralled in the story.

“Yes.”

“No it isn’t.” Everyone turned
around. Lizzy stood in the living room entrance. “That’s what the police said.
But that’s not what happened at all.”

“How do you know?” Charlotte asked
her daughter with sudden dread.

“I didn’t tell you ‘cause I
didn’t want you to get scared. But I was there. At the Rock.” Lizzy held out
her hand. In it was her smart phone. On its screen was a photograph of Lizzy,
Carla, Toby, Brent, and Wayne, all laughing and making faces for the camera.
"We took this that day."

“Lizzy,” was all Charlotte could
manage, horrified at the implications.

“He said he was gonna paint an S
at the end. We thought Wayne was just fooling around. He was afraid of heights.
We all knew that. So we started teasing him about it. Me, Brent, Toby, and
Carla. We were just messing around, that's all. We dared him to do it. And he
did. After he finished painting the S, he just looked down at us, waved, smiled
like everything was alright, then dove head first off the peak. His body hit a
lot of sharp rocks on the way down. Parts of him just burst like water
balloons, exploding with blood every time he hit a rock.”

"Oh my God! AND YOU SAW
THIS?" Charlotte said losing all control. She looked at Loveless and
Donovan. "They had to have a closed casket funeral." The woman paled
at the thought of a parent having to bury their child. She turned back to her
daughter. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I was afraid." Lizzy
started to cry.

"You could have told
me."

"I knew how you'd react.
Just like you're reacting now."

"This scares me. I don't
want you hanging out at that rock anymore. I don't want you hanging out with
those kids."

"WHY? THEY'RE MY
FRIENDS!" Lizzy shouted with choked emotion. "I'm just as much to
blame. More! I started on Wayne first. Then Brent, Toby and Carla joined in
when they saw how he was acting about it. Getting all defensive and shit! We
were only just teasing. We didn't really think he was gonna do it. Then he did!
We couldn't believe it when he jumped. It wasn't real. We just stood there. We
were too scared to do anything. We thought maybe it was a trick. Until we saw
his body at the bottom, all mangled up, twisted like a doll, his arm wrapped
around his back. Head completely caved in on one side. We didn't want to get in
trouble. Wayne's dead and it's all our fault. Wayne died because of us. And now
he's back."

"Shhh. It's okay,"
Charlotte said as she rushed over to Lizzy and put her arms around her. The
girl buried her face and sobbed audibly. Charlotte led her daughter over to a
couch all the way across the large living room. Loveless could imagine how the
mother felt. It could have been her daughter dead at the bottom of those rocks.
No parent ever knew what kind of peer pressure their child experienced when
they were out with their friends. In this case, an emotionally tender child had
died trying to prove something to his friends. A few minutes later, Charlotte
came back over to Loveless and Donovan. From across the room, to Loveless, it
looked like Lizzy had fallen asleep on the couch.

The filmmaker listened to the
conversation that sparked between Charlotte and Donovan as he reviewed the
footage they had shot that night through the camera’s LED screen.

“I could see how their guilt and
this movie would conjure him up in their imaginations," Donovan stated
grimly to Charlotte.

“It wasn’t their fault,”
Charlotte said protectively.

"Nobody's saying it
is," Donovan replied defensively.

There was an uncomfortable
silence. The filmmaker decided to fill it. “What if it’s not just in their
imaginations?” Loveless stated ominously. The cryptic nature of his comment
made Charlotte and Donovan look over to the filmmaker.

"Why do you say that?"

Loveless held the camera up. He
showed Charlotte and Donovan the shot he had been looking at over and over
again on the camera monitor. As Brent did his scene, in a window in the
background a silhouette was moving back and forth.
It was the silhouette of
a teenage boy.
The filmmaker froze the camera on a frame where you could
see the boy's face. It was blurry and far away, but it could have been Wayne.

Another thing about that night
that had also freaked the filmmaker out was a casually delivered comment. Right
before they left for their homes, Lizzy looked across the room at Donovan and
Charlotte, who were laughing together, and said in a low tone to Loveless,
“They’re not blood related, you know.”

“What?”

“Kissing cousins.”

Before Loveless could say
anything Lizzy walked away.

“Come on, Mom. I wanna go home.
I’m tired.”

Lizzy’s remark haunted the
filmmaker and forced him to watch his two producing partners with a much more
discerning eye. Was Charlotte carrying on with both him and Donovan at the same
time? Throughout pre-production, Loveless had been experiencing a highly
satisfying sexual relationship with Charlotte. They were both content to leave
questions of where it was all heading until after the film was finished. It
seemed to be an unspoken mutual feeling. Neither wanted to rock a boat that could
be their ship about to come in. Still, the filmmaker didn’t want to share
Charlotte. There were periods of time when Donovan was on the mountain when he
and Charlotte were unaccounted for. Loveless felt he had no claim on the woman,
no right to demand her exclusivity or faithfulness, when they didn’t have a
defined relationship. But the possibility that she was having sex with Donovan
while also having sex with him made the filmmaker angry and disgusted. Loveless
decided he would keep an eye on them. If he thought there was something going
on, he was going to back off. After all, the movie was the important thing.
This was his career and he was damned if he was going to fuck it up for what
could just be a fling.
Stay focused, J.D.
, he told himself.

That's what Loveless told
himself, but the reality was that the paranoia he had felt so acutely regarding
the denizens of this mountain - that they were watching him and conspiring
against him - began to seep into his suspicions of Charlotte and Donovan as well.
It was massively convenient that Charlotte just happened to know a guy who had
recently inherited a bundle and was looking to invest in a risky endeavor like
a film. Why had Charlotte led him out to that altar and stone monster in the
woods? Were Lizzy and her friends part of a youth rock Satanic cult? She wore a
pendent. Brent had referred to the Devil as Lord Lucifer. Toby called Jeremy
Jared the front man eternal. Were the teens possessed as Lizzy claimed Wayne
was when he leapt to his death? The filmmaker's temporary cabin home had been
marked twice, once before he arrived with candles and once after he had arrived
with stones. Were they a curse or a blessing? Or a spell? Were they all in it
together? Was Loveless being manipulated? Or was he merely going crazy? Sex was
always a big part of the equation with devil worshippers. Was Charlotte having
sex with both Donovan and him considered normal in this world that he now found
himself in?
Forget this line of thinking, man. It'll drive you crazy
,
the filmmaker finally thought, dismissing these fears. He chased them away, but
they settled in the back of his mind, waiting to come back and haunt him in a
weak moment, like a ghost.

A week in it was starting to look
like a real movie shoot. They had a small but committed crew and cast,
including two werewolves and a zombie girl. Jerry would bring Delilah to set.
Delilah, in turn, would bring her sister Karen. So Loveless put them all to
work. For the zombie scene where the residents of Lord’s Lane return back to
life and converge on Grace’s family home, they had to cover a hillside with
fog. Since no one could understand how the mountain’s real fog worked - it came
and went on its own accord - they had to utilize canned fog that would work on
command. The filmmaker had acquired a small party fog machine from a novelty
shop down the mountain and had unrealistic expectations about using it to cover
the entire side of the hill in fog for the zombie scenes. They used the hill
that his cabin home sat on and ran extension cords daisy-chained to other
extensions cords out the house and up the hill to provide juice for the lights,
camera, and the
little fog machine that hopefully could.
For the task of
fog wrangler, Loveless tapped Jerry, who promptly showed up to work with a huge
cardboard box. Before each take, Jerry would fill the box with smoke. On
action, he would release this smoke and waft it past camera. The result was
amazing. Delilah helped out the catering lady, while Karen was sent into
make-up to become a zombie. Of course, Karen was a natural. All she had to do
was be her own scary self. Seeing her on the mountain, in make-up, in tattered
costuming, surrounded by fog, was scary on a multitude of levels. The disturbed
woman reveled in the role and just as importantly, she was having fun.

On Friday night, while the cast
was having a midnight lunch break at the cabin home, Jerry began to mess around
with the Mathaluh single. He put it on the record player. The cast listened to
it while they ate. Loveless had confided to Jerry and the others where he had
found the single and the Ouija board.

“Now, just to satisfy my own
morbid curiosity-” Jerry began turning the record backwards steadily with his
finger as he smiled mischievously with a kind of gallows humor.

“You don’t really think-” the
words became stillborn in Charlotte’s mouth as everyone heard what began to
come out of the record player speakers.

“Darkness is the natural course.
Follow us
-
unintelligible.
The burning kingdom waits. Follow us
- unintelligible.
Slay
her in the name of Satan
-” The rest was unintelligible, followed by what
sounded like a girl’s scream.

Jerry lifted his finger from the
record and looked at the ghostly expressions on everyone else’s faces as he
said, “Fuck me.”