The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales (16 page)

“
It makes no difference if you are of the right or of the left…the cult of Celebrity is in itself apolitical. In the modern world adherents of both political wings cry out for it, for no longer is knowledge power. Knowledge is only that junk which the leaders allow to be revealed to the masses through the mass media. Knowledge can only be increased depending upon the accuracy of the information to which we have access. POWER is knowledge. And power is best achieved through celebrity. Nothing else in this world is of any worth. Fame, notoriety, recognition are everything. That’s why my next film will be a satirical expose of the whole rotten system and the power behind it. It’ll be my biggest sensation since
The Evil of Science
. I’m going to call it
Simplicissimus
in honour of my favourite author Gustav Meyrink.”

Like a piranha drawn by blood in the water, I had darted through the weeds separating me from my prey, and was now close enough to Zapolska to make direct eye-contact.

“
Of course,” I said, in Polish, attracting the attention of the legendary director and all those surrounding him, “you’d need the right actor in the lead, someone who’s not been corrupted by all the bullshit and treason to self-integrity that Hollywood requires. Perhaps even a fellow countryman!”

What was required to impress Marek Zapolska, in this instance, was a little European cultural snobbery. If that’s what it took to get a part in his film, that’s the role I’d play. Not much more than a minor detail to someone who’d starred as the psychopathic 11th Earl of Worcester (“The Butcher of Virginia”) on cable TV.

“
You’re that Polish
kurwa
from the television series that portrays the British as a bunch of Nazis during the American War of Independence, aren’t you?” Zapolska shot back in English (apart from the expletive). He was known as an ardent Anglophile, having lived in London for ten years during the sixties. His father had fought and died with the RAF during the Second World War.

I was not sure that any of the Americans present understood precisely the meaning of the word “kurwa”, but the overall hostility came across clearly enough.

“
Then again maybe you’re just what I need to make my point. I like the ironic angle. An aspiring actor who’s a part of the corruption, playing the role of a character dedicated to stamping it out,” Zapolska said.

And so that’s how I got the part.

I wish to God I hadn’t. I had no idea what I was up against.

They say all publicity is good publicity. Well, they lie. Sometimes drawing attention to one’s self is a bad mistake, especially with revelations that certain powers don’t want out in the open. Zapolska’s film was poison to the industry. I hitched my star to it simply for the sake of notoriety. I was more than willing to play their game once I was in a position to do so. But I was stupid. I’d crossed the line.

Four weeks later the film
Simplicissimus
went into production. Zapolska had no need to worry about financing. His personal wealth was astronomical. But he had problems getting crew from the start. The project had already attracted negative comments from the trade papers, and people in the industry were warned off by a whispering campaign. Nevertheless, somehow, Zapolska got a cast and crew together. It was a combination of loyal veterans and newcomers, people that Hollywood couldn’t control.

You probably all know those stories about Hollywood films that are cursed:
The Omen
,
Rosemary’s Baby
and
The Exorcist
. Certain events portrayed in those movies subsequently took place in real life and happened to cast and crew members. People struck by lightning or decapitated. The ritual murder of Sharon Tate. Insanity indistinguishable from demonic possession. Our film wasn’t supernatural, but it still dealt with a conspiracy of silence, one that would kill in order to keep its secrets.

Well, you won’t be surprised to learn that people started dying. At first they’d just disappear. We lost our Key Grip a week into shooting. He vanished. Just didn’t show up on day seven. No-one ever heard from him again. The Chief Hair Stylist fell off a tenth floor balcony in a condo on Playa Vista on day nine. Our 1
^st
Assistant Camera was mown down by a hit and run driver on Santa Monica Boulevard in broad daylight. The car had mounted the sidewalk. That was on day twelve.

Zapolska was phlegmatic.

“
I expected all this shit,” he said to me as we going over some changes to my lines in his fourteen million dollar mansion off Mulholland Drive. We were sitting out back, by the Olympic-size pool, drinking bourbon and watching the lights of downtown L.A. twinkle in the smog. He’d played a couple of rounds of golf with his neighbour Jack Nicholson earlier in the day, and said he’d taken fifteen grand off the son-of-a-bitch. So he was celebrating.

“
One of us has to go,” Zapolska said, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose, “either me or Hollywood. And it ain’t going to be me sonny boy. Not Marek Zapolska. No way.”

I was suddenly aware of the enormity of his ego. Christ, my own was big enough. But only a Hollywood director who had been indulged in his every whim since he was a twenty-three year old prodigy, a man who had been isolated from reality for twenty years, cocooned by fabulous wealth and acclaim, could have seriously thought he could take on the whole of tinsel town and bring it down.

“
If need be, I’d gladly sacrifice the life of every bastard working on this picture in order to get it made. I don’t care if I have to assemble a cast and crew a dozen times over,” he said. And then he told me the true secret behind the Reassembly Cartel; the recondite forces behind the billionaires.

I believed him. And I decided then and there to get out. If I’d made the decision a day earlier, it would have been made in time. But I was too late.

Although Zapolska had no way of knowing, I was going to offer my services to the other side. I’d sell my story to the papers, tell them all that Zapolska was a fraud, get maximum publicity and get back onside with the Hollywood system.

I drove back towards the intersection with the Valley Circle Boulevard. It was as I approached a sharp bend at sixty miles an hour that I lost control of the vehicle. I pumped the brake pedal, but nothing happened, and the next thing I knew my brand-new Ford Explorer had hit the crash barrier, flipped right over it and catapulted into the woodland decline on the other side. The last thing I remember, a split second before unconsciousness, was that the air bag on my side didn’t inflate.

•

Eugeniusz Kowalski had finished his tale. He didn’t bother to add that his disfigurement was the consequence of this accident.

“
So there you have it. End of my career,” he said. “Six days later and the ‘Zapolska Mystery’ was born. The butler said he’d come into Zapolska’s bedroom to bring him his breakfast on a tray as usual. But all that was left of Zapolska was a huge mass of green vomit all over the bed. No-one could explain it. But I believe that he’d puked himself inside out with disgust. Those he sought to oppose had caused him to change form. They made him turn into a symbol of all that he detested.”

“
But you haven’t explained anything at all about the secret of the so-called Reassembly Cartel,” I said.

“
You really want to know? OK, here’s what Zapolska told me.”

Kowalski paused and took a deep breath. I noticed his hands were trembling.

“
The forces behind the Reassembly Cartel,” Kowalski said, dropping his voice to a whisper, “are all dead souls seeking to take over our world for their own purpose. They have no existence aside from electronic media; but they feed on real life. They’re broadcast ghouls from an already hideously decayed future. What people think they see in the street, at openings etc, are manufactured simulacra of humans employed by a world-wide media conspiracy to keep the truth from the masses. The actual celebrities are manufactured in the broadcast factories of the future. The reality is just the same transmissions bouncing around forever.

“
You see, this future world is a condition for the persistence of our own world. Its geography is seen in the video recordings of UHF frequencies between TV channels, consisting of immense glaciers of static, the leftover radiation from the Big Bang. The future world is being backwardly projected in time, and it is comprised of anti-matter and controlled by the dead.

“
The final goal of the Reassembly Cartel is a world of mental zombies who do nothing but mindlessly regurgitate the poisonous froth of broadcast infotainment.

“
The future is already finished. It’s over, and what we’re getting is advance notice as the nature of time itself begins to rot away.”

There was an uncomfortable silence around the table once his final words had died away.

Then, shockingly, Eugeniusz Kowalski got to his feet and began screaming. None of us could calm him down. There was a huge rumpus with the waiter in the hotel restaurant, and half the diners were put off their suppers.

Kowalski was finally taken away in an ambulance.

I heard later that he screamed himself to death in the hospital to which he’d been taken. They tried sedatives, but he didn’t, or couldn’t, stop screaming and he finally died after bursting a blood vessel in his throat.

Like the death of a character in a cheap horror movie.

•

The following morning I knew that the plot for my next novel had fallen into my lap. The delusions of Eugeniusz Kowalski and Marek Zapolska would form its basis. Except that, rather than its existence being the obvious product of paranoid fantasy, the Reassembly Cartel would be revealed as actually controlling human affairs in secret and moulding reality to its own design.

I did not mention the idea to Leszek, for I hated discussing a work in progress, especially during its formative stage, and thereby giving away any indication as to its theme. Nevertheless, given what had occurred the previous evening with Eugeniusz Kowalski, I wondered whether Leszek did not suspect my intent, when I told him over breakfast that I was now ready to commence work.

His job done, Leszek went back to Warsaw.

All I had to do was turn on the television set in my room.

At first the images were conventional enough, but the more of it I watched, steeling myself to bear talkshows, adverts, soap-operas and all manner of junk, the more I came to recognise the truth of what Eugeniusz Kowalski had claimed. It was necessary to look out for those moments when the person (or rather the dead shell) on the screen was actually trying to communicate directly with me, the viewer. Isolated phrases took on significance, and when one collated these isolated phrases, a pattern emerged.

I discovered, after only two days of continuous viewing, without sleep, and kept awake by amphetamines, that the world of electronic signals is actually the real world and the one outside,
our one
, is a fake.

•

This is the beginning of a new age. I have been busy, working on my magnum opus. More than ever I am convinced of its significance.

As it sets the dead sun throws long black shadows across the frozen beach.

I am wrapped in blankets, sitting on the balcony outside my hotel room and looking out over the seafront. My breath is a ghostly vapour. The Promenade is deserted. I haven’t seen a soul of late. Everyone appears to have fled the approaching wall of icy static.

I am a last witness to its advance. It rears up now in the middle distance like a titanic cliff-face, blotting out a swathe of the thin blue sky. And there is a deafening roaring and crashing as the electronic glacier bears down inexorably on the land, a sound like millions of television screens exploding, blown apart from within by nightmare images. I see glimpses of invading giant hordes of deformed crabs with gargoyle heads and green faces, revealing the shape we shall assume in hell. The monstrous glacier of static consumes the pier in a grainy haze, obscuring its skeletal iron structure from view.

In my rigid right hand I clutch a pen. On my lap is a pad of paper. My fingers are numb, riddled with black frostbite, but I write on, page after page, consumed by the desire to set down in writing the images flooding into my mind. It is an effortless though frantic undertaking. Sometimes I close my fingers into a fist, digging the nails into the ball of my hand, but still clutching the pen, forcing it across the page time and time again.

I have crossed over. I am now inside the other world. I have become one with the electric cosmos of the dead.

There is nothing to do but write. I must write before I am consumed by outside forces. At all costs I must write. I will write anything to stay alive. To remain alive means to write.

No one is around to recoil at the sight of what I have done to myself.

My lips are chapped with the cold. I can barely move them. My teeth chatter in my mouth.

I stopped feeling sensation in my feet days ago. When I unwrapped the towels wound around the lower parts of my legs, I tore away strips of green and black flesh that had adhered to the fabric. Below the knee my limbs were gangrenous. The same thing is happening to my hands, my nose, and my ears. I crawl around on my belly, like some aimless crab, moving from one sheet of paper to another, writing and writing and writing and writing, until I can finish what I have begun, and before the wall of static obliterates everything in its path.

•

“
Joanna Wolski?” Leszek Choszcz snorted and shook his head ruefully. “At my suggestion she took herself off to that flashy northern seaside resort in the Pomerian Voivodeship. The last I saw of the woman was at a hotel dinner party at the Grand Hotel that I threw for her, and where she’d screamed her head off.”