THE BLACK ALBUM: A Hollywood Horror Story (7 page)

"None of this is real.
You're not real."

"I used to be."

"Used to?"

"Why'd you bring him
back?" the lost girl says hopelessly through bloodless lips.

Henry sees the bloody knife wound
in her chest that wasn't there a second ago. Before Henry's eyes, the little
girl's face becomes decayed, dead, eyes shriveling up, sinking into sockets.
She's worm's meat.

It's not that the lost girl
disappears. It's just that she's no longer there.

The teenage boy senses the truth
of her words. Remorse fills him. "Mom, dad." He touches his face in
horror at the full realization that eternal damnation waits for him. His life
is over before it's truly been lived, all of it. "Trick! I've been
tricked." Henry feels himself slipping from his own body. He fights this.
A slight breath of humanity momentarily returns to him.

Deep woods bathed in deeper fog.
The house with the stained-glass window sits far in the background. The record,
covered in plastic, sits in a freshly dug hole. Atop a small hill, Henry
shovels dirt onto the flagitious object, burying it deep. Henry can feel
himself slipping again, more now. His skin is electric, on fire. Henry can feel
the demon Jeremy’s soul beginning to take full possession of his body, seeping
in one pore at a time. But the boy has a trick of his own this All Hallow’s
Eve. Henry lifts his mournful and repentant face heavenward. “Fight the Devil.”

If he can’t have his body, no one
will. The boy puts the gun to his head. He only hesitates for a second before
pulling the trigger. The camera pans away. We see the muzzle flash light up the
night. We hear the gunshot and its ghastly echo.

The evil crawls back down into
Hell.

At least for another year.

In the prologue finale, we return
to the home's basement. The needle has reached the end of the record. No music
is playing now, just the constant repetitive scraping of needle against empty
dead vinyl. The camera drifts through with voyeuristic effect, slowly revealing
a concert poster hanging on the wall. It reads MATHALUH LIVE. Below this: IN
CONCERT (with play dates). Only the ‘in concert’ has been crossed out and a
dripping, bloody, finger-smudged ‘s’ has been added to live. Mathaluh Lives!
End of prologue. Opening credits run.

Loveless sat back from his
laptop, content with his writing. Hell, the thing was practically writing
itself. There were moments when he felt as if he was only the vessel through
which some outside force was working. But that was just his imagination, the
filmmaker reasoned. As much as he wanted to continue writing, the child in
Loveless won out. He wanted to go out and be among the costumed denizens of the
night on the wickedest night of the year. Loveless convinced himself that this
was research. Besides, it couldn’t be more perfect. This year Halloween fell on
a Saturday.

The filmmaker drove to the
touristy part of the mountain: the Lake that was Arrowhead’s namesake. This
community relied heavily on weekend and summer tourists to consume overly
expensive goods and pricey meals. When you lived in Los Angeles and couldn’t
get away to take a true vacation, Lake Arrowhead was a nice little weekend
getaway, woodsy, rustic and romantic. You could stay at a resort style hotel or
one of the many quaint bed-and-breakfasts, sail on the lake or ski the slopes.
Holidays always drove the number of visiting out-of-towners up. Halloween
falling on a weekend was an extra boon.

Loveless parked and got out. The area
was full of shops and restaurants. Aside from the weekenders, it was also
overflowing with local kids and their parents, teenagers, and their friends.
Most of the costumes were homemade, some store bought. Still, Loveless could
appreciate the ingenuity of many of the outfits. Vampy vampiresses were a
popular choice for female teens weaned on “Twilight” and “The Vampire Diaries.”
Teenage boys reveled in zombie masks
or glued on latex that looked like
mottled dead flesh hanging off their pimply pubescent faces. The little kids
were all worked up in their ghost, wizard, and superhero costumes as their
parents chased patiently after them. The lake was where you went to show off
your costume after knocking on doors around town.

The filmmaker, wandering through
this horror pageant, found himself near the end of the lake. In a dark corner
there was a video game arcade. The neon sign above announced “Gary's Arcade
Asylum.” The outside of the establishment was painted black with popular video
game characters gracing the walls around the storefront window. Inside you
could see not just the usual arcade games, but also desktop computer consoles
set-up for popular online games. The arcade employees inside - all young - wore
black. Heavy metal rock music blared out through the open front door. It seemed
a popular youth habitat. A pack of feral looking older kids hung out in and
around the place. The filmmaker noticed a number of flasks being passed about.
Many were smoking as they kept lookout for the local cops. But these kids
weren’t high schoolers. They looked to be anywhere from eighteen to
twenty-three. The impression Loveless got was that they were the stoners and
flunk-outs of the townships. They were the ones who would never escape the
mountain. After a brief youth rebellion, once they began to have bills and
children of their own, they would replace their fathers and their fathers’
fathers as the working class of the mountain: lumber jacks, store clerks, hotel
cleaning personnel, day laborers.

The look of this youth ran the
gambit from emo through goth, punk, heavy metal to skater. As Loveless was
about to leave, two older boys started arguing. This escalated into a shoving
match. The tougher looking boy, who was wearing an executioner's mask and
outfit, hauled off and punched the other one in the face, then as the kid
covered up, the executioner pounded him several more times on his head and back
for good measures. They were glancing blows, more for show than to cause real
damage. The filmmaker noticed the
blood dripping thick green thorn bracelet
tattoo around the executioner’s right wrist, traveling up his forearm. Loveless
was about to go over and break things up, when the executioner backed off.
Humiliated, the beaten kid, holding his hand to his bloody nose, cursed
profusely at the other boy as he retreated from the pack with a parting, “Fuck
you, man!”

When he noticed the filmmaker
watching, the executioner threw a sideways glance at Loveless. The filmmaker
remained expressionless. He wasn’t about to be intimidated by a dumb young punk
in a stupid costume.

Walking up a small stone
stairwell to an isolated section of the parking lot, Loveless heard the sound
of music. A beat-up and dented old pick-up truck was driving by with a lot of
dingy furniture in its paint-chipped bed. A homely looking woman with a butch
haircut, bad teeth and poor complexion was blatantly looking out the window at
the filmmaker with a total lack of emotion. Nor did she look away when Loveless
noticed her. Her eyes seemed to reflect the notion that she knew a secret that
the filmmaker did not. From the woman’s car radio, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird”
was playing. It was then that Loveless remembered that the Southern hard-rock
band had died in a plane crash in 1977, the exact year he had chosen for the
fictional plane crash of Mathaluh, the band destined to be an urban legend.
Eerie as hell coincidence, the filmmaker thought. Or maybe his mind had decided
to release that interesting bit of data from forgotten memories in the
purgatory of his subconscious.

Later, as Loveless returned to
his cabin home, the scene of wild youth popped back in his head as he sat down
at the computer. He was now up to the part of the screenplay where he would
introduce his heroine, the protagonist of the film. He liked the name he had
come up with in his altered state while writing the disjointed first draft:
Grace Lynn. Lynn was a small town name. Grace was a name for a sweet girl with
a sense of spirituality.

While watching stacks of horror
movies with female leads, the filmmaker noticed that most of these women were
innocent, good, god-fearing people who didn’t deserve the horror that was being
bestowed on them. They were feminine, pretty and traumatized by their gory
ordeal. That's the way Grace came off in the first draft of the story the
filmmaker didn't remember penning.

But a spark of creativity hit
Loveless like a lightning bolt hurtled by the god of screenwriters. What if the
heroine wasn’t pure or even good? What if she was like the kids who hung out at
the arcade? What if Grace Lynn was wild, feral, troubled? What if she had been
one of those kids who had escaped the mountain, gone off to seek her fame and
fortune in Los Angeles, only to return seven years later broken and with
nowhere left to go but home?

Loveless wanted his heroine to be
an anomaly to the horror genre formula. He wanted her to have a hard edge.
Grace Lynn would be godless.

With that in mind, Loveless wrote
his heroine’s opening scene.

Card over black screen:
HALLOWEEN- PRESENT DAY. We follow a 1968 abyss black Chevy Nova with a silver
spoiler as it climbs the mountain. Behind, the city below falls away as we gain
altitude and everything becomes very very green. Concrete and cement give way
to trees and grass, then dense woods. Pretty soon, the Nova is at high
elevation. It turns a curve and we see clouds below.

The small townships roll up the
car's windshield like lazy dreams along with early trick-or-treaters, eager to
show off their costumes while it's still daylight, running up and down the
streets. Finally, the car stops at a red light. A WOMAN in shabby clothes,
pushing a second-hand baby stroller, crosses the street in front of the Nova.
We burn focus through the windshield and see the driver for the first time.
GRACE LYNN, striking, wickedly pretty with a long straight nose and sharp
jawline. She has a dark tangle of wavy brunette hair. Her eyes are so glacier
blue you can see your own reflection in them. Her lips sit in a perpetual pout
of dissatisfaction. A tiny diamond glitters in her nose ring, framed by
earrings running all the way up her right ear. Grace Lynn unconsciously studies
the woman with the stroller. The woman looks over suddenly as she passes,
wearing a glazed over expression. “Oh, we've been waiting for you?"

Grace is too surprised to
respond. She thinks she misheard the woman. Maybe the woman was talking on an
unseen cell phone, or to somebody else. The unsettling thing about it though
was that the woman was staring straight at her. Grace shrugs off the bizarre
statement from someone she doesn't know. It had to be a mistake. Another
thought hits her. Grace thinks to herself that woman could have been her, if
she had stayed on the mountain. But that didn't seem so bad now. Maybe the
small town life she had sought so hard to escape wasn't the nightmare she
imagined it was after all. Maybe it was just life. Grace had wanted an
adventure and she had gotten one. But it was a black adventure, filled with
bitter betrayal and raucous disappointment. Now Grace has reached a crossroads
in her life. At age twenty-seven, she began to realize her dreams were not
going to come true. It was the age where most people started to settle for what
they had. The age where dreams died. A car honk from behind, brings her out of
cold contemplation. The light's green. Grace drives out of frame.

After seven years off the
mountain, Grace Lynn has returned.

Grace is traversing empty road in
a heavily wooded area. She passes a sign that reads: RIM FOREST- POPULATION:
250. Grace turns down a more remote path. The pavement is chewed up. The trees
are gnarled, sinister. She drives into a thick pale fog.

Suddenly, the car dies. The fog
dissipates.

“What the hell? Gotta be shitting
me. Piece a shit!”

Grace looks at the eerie
surroundings with more than a hint of fear on her face. She tries to start the
car again several times. Nothing. She is still trying to start it when the
radio comes on. Grace stares at it blankly. A radio Deejay’s deep, quiet,
almost meditative voice comes through the speakers. “- and for all you
listeners just tuning in here in Rim Forest and the surrounding mountain
townships- happy Halloween. I’m Gary ‘The Voice from the Other Side’ Hark. The
Night Ranger. And this is FM 36S classic rock.”

Grace barely pays attention to
the soothing tone as she looks around. There isn’t anything for miles except
woods and impending darkness. The sun is just above the tree-line. Grace gets
out of the car. She wears faded jeans and a white wife-beater without a bra.
Through the thin shirt, we can make out a tattoo in the upper center of her
back of a yin yang symbol. Rather than an Asian connotation, the imagery seems
compellingly European. Old world. Instead of white on one side and black on the
other, there is a blueish-white winged angel on one side and a reddish-white
dragon style depiction of the Devil on the other. The two creatures are
intertwined, as if locked in battle. No. That’s not it. It’s as if they are
joined. As if one can’t exist without the other. They are the ultimate
symbiotic relationship. Without yin, their would be no yang. What would God be
without the Devil to define him by virtue of his mere opposing existence?