THE BLACK ALBUM: A Hollywood Horror Story (21 page)

Loveless opened his mouth, not
sure what answer, if any, he had for her, when he was interrupted by Lizzy’s
disconcerting little girl giggle. “Marshmallows go good with campfires. You
know that?” The teenager frowned slightly as she looked deep into the fire.
“You just have to be sure not to burn your mouth. And you can’t listen when
they say things to you. Crackle and pop. Marshmallows always say things to you.
They say bad things when they think you’re not listening.”

Loveless ended up sleeping on the
floor in front of the fireplace atop a sleeping bag, under two thick blankets.
The fire hadn’t yet gone out. As the starter log had burned down, it had
ignited the fat wood log Loveless had thrown on top. Now the log no longer spun
flames. It merely glowed orange as it smoldered, becoming less dense with each
ash that flew off it. Charlotte fell asleep on the big, soft couch curled up
around her daughter. They were covered in the down comforter the filmmaker had
tucked them in with.

It was the slight scraping that
first woke the filmmaker up. He looked around groggily, then remembered where
he was. Snow was still falling outside the window, engulfing the walls and
windows of the cabin home. Loveless marveled. They were truly being snowed-in.
He absently felt for the gun in his belt, then stiffened when he realized it
wasn’t there. The filmmaker sat up. From where he was he could see that
Charlotte, still asleep, was alone on the couch. Loveless grabbed the shotgun
that lay next to him and stood up. Lizzy was sitting at the dining area table.
The candles she had lit illuminated her and the Ouija board that sat in front
of her. It was the Hell board. The one the filmmaker had found in the ruins.
The one with Mathaluh painted across its face and the accompanying bloodshot
eyeball planchette. Lizzy’s two hands rested on the planchette.

“Lizzy- Lizzy, do you have my
gun?” Loveless said as calmly as possible as he made his way slowly towards
her, like a police officer inching forward while trying to talk a suicidal
citizen down off a ledge.

The planchette jerked suddenly,
taking Lizzy’s hands with it, making the filmmaker jump.

“No,”
Lizzy said decidedly with a
girlish giggle as the planchette rested on the word no. In her mind, the
filmmaker could tell, she was merely playing a board game.

Loveless felt something wet under
his feet. Over his shoulder, he could hear Charlotte starting to stir. He
wanted to get to Lizzy before her mother woke up and became alarmed. The
filmmaker didn’t want the girl to become rattled.

“Do you know where my gun is?”

Instantly the hands jerked across
the board with the planchette again.
“Yes,”
Lizzy giggled, nodding her
head diligently. She was having fun playing the game.

“J.D.” Charlotte’s voice drifted
over lazily. “Where’s Lizzy?”

Loveless was almost to the table.
He couldn’t see the gun. Charlotte climbed off the couch. She looked in the
direction the filmmaker was looking and saw her daughter. “Lizzy?”

“Jeremy wanted you to know. You
have it all wrong. He’s not a demon at all.”

“Lizzy, what are you talking
about, baby?”

“Lizzy, please tell me where my
gun is.”

Charlotte’s face paled at the
thought of her acid-tripping teenage daughter with a firearm.

The teenage girl nodded past
Loveless, to the balcony door.
“He has it.”

At that moment, the filmmaker
felt another wet puddle through his socks. This time he realized what they
were: footprints. Footprints that had carried in with them snow and ice. From
outside. Loveless turned and raised the shotgun as he barked at Charlotte,
“Take your daughter, go into the bedroom and lock the door.”

“But-”

“Go!”

Charlotte grabbed her daughter
and dragged her into the bedroom. Loveless felt relief as he heard the click of
the lock. He followed the tiny puddles to the balcony door. The filmmaker
couldn’t see anything but white snow and black sky on the other side of the
glass. He braced himself and threw the balcony door open. Wind and snow snarled
and whipped at Loveless as it poured into the living room. The filmmaker pushed
against the wind as he stepped out onto the large balcony.

Donovan stood at the far end,
completely naked, hands behind him. A frosty bottle of tequila rested on the
railing next to him. The bottle was half empty. How long Donovan had been
standing there, Loveless couldn’t be sure. But the snow was up to the man’s
kneecaps. His skin was a blistered red, icicles forming on his body. The man
had to already have frostbite by this point. Donovan shivered. His eyes were
rolled back in his head. Upon sensing Loveless' presence, his eyelids flickered
and his eyes returned, looking mournfully at the filmmaker. Donovan’s teeth
chattered when he spoke. “You should have seen it, J.D. The road to Big Bear.
The highway was impassable. All the cars, trucks nearly covered over in snow.
People frozen to death in their cars, like popsicles. Their faces- just masks
of fucken horror. All you could see left of some vehicles were the snowboards
and skies sticking up out of their sunroofs, on their ski racks, like god damn
tombstones. I’d have been there with them if rangers in tractors hadn’t pulled
me out.” Tears running down his face were frozen by the time they hit his
jawline.

“Donovan, come inside before you
freeze to death, man.”

“NO!” The blood-curdling screech
came from the man whose throat was nearly frozen solid. “It’s all your fault,
J.D. You just had to make this movie. The only reason I’m here now, the only
reason I’m alive, is ‘cause he wanted you to see. He wanted you to feel it. He
wanted you to bear witness, be responsible, be held accountable. He saved me
because he wanted you to watch.”

Loveless had a queasy feeling in
the pit of his stomach. “Watch what?”

Donovan was full on sobbing now.
“He just wanted you to see- this.” The fledgling producer drew the gun from
behind his back, put it to his temple and pulled the trigger in one deft
motion. "Martini shot."

Loveless jolted with the sound of
the gun blast that echoed throughout the forest as the exit wound on the other
side of Donovan’s head geysered blood and the man fell back, flipped over the balcony
railing and disappeared out of sight.

The howling in the hills began
suddenly, filling the woods, traveling closer, becoming louder, echoing
throughout the filmmaker’s skull. It was a full ten seconds before Loveless
could make himself move. He shuffled through the snow, across the deck. When he
could force himself to peer over the railing, he saw a swarm of coyotes
starting to devour what was left of Donovan.

“GET AWAY FROM HIM!”

The coyotes didn’t leave until
the filmmaker fired a shotgun blast into the ravenous pack. They scattered into
the shadows, their eyes shining out of this darkness, waiting to see if
Loveless would leave so they could return. Their hot meal was left undone,
getting cold.

The filmmaker sank down to his
knees, resting his forehead against the side of the still warm shotgun. Out the
corner of his eye, he could see the neighbor Dorothy on her balcony. Loveless,
blood in his throat, screamed, “CALL 911!”

Dorothy ran inside the house.
Loveless looked up and saw Charlotte standing in the balcony doorway. She was
looking at the blood pattern in the snow.
A cherry slushy.
“Wha-”

“Donovan,” was all the filmmaker
could say. He was now covered in snow himself.

Charlotte ran to the balcony
railing and looked over. If it had been a scene Loveless was directing, the
woman’s air-piercing, blood-curdling, night-shattering scream would have been
the exact same punctuation he would have put on it.
Cut and scene.

The snow continued to fall,
covering everything and everyone. A white blanket for a cruel world, erasing
the evidence of its own indiscriminating savagery. A bandaid for a bloody
stump. The world bled white.

White.

All white.

Chapter
Seven

I
Will Burn With You

Loveless stood in the Red Rock
Casino parking lot and watched Beauregard Freidkin, all his questions finally
answered, drive away. The dingy white van pulled off leaving a trail of gray
exhaust fumes billowing in its wake. In direct contrast to the mountains, the
desert night air was hot and dry, the landscape flat, the velvet sky full of
dead stars that looked very much alive. It felt good to the filmmaker to have
unburdened his soul as they say, to have confessed his sins. Loveless had spent
so long burying and trying to forget these memories, the past three odd months.
He had quit the editing of the movie nearly three weeks after arriving in
Vegas. Trouble had followed him down off the mountain and found his friend as
well. Tim Spring, his college buddy who edited commercial spots for a number of
casinos, began experiencing a string of bad luck upon Loveless’ arrival. Tim
accidentally erased a hard drive with the master copy of a commercial he had
just finished editing for a major casino, along with all the raw footage for
the project. Strangely enough, all the back-ups were gone as well. Then his
fiancée of three years, a woman who had been healthy her whole life, suddenly
became extremely ill, finally being diagnosed with a strain of an African
disease not seen in half a century, despite the fact she had never been outside
the continental United States. They had been planning their June wedding. His
fiancée wouldn’t live to see June. Loveless finally abandoned editing “The
Black Album” altogether the day his friend’s Prius was sideswiped by a tractor
trailer. Tim had survived, but had to wear a body cast for eight months and a
nasty scar down the side of his face for the rest of his life.

That was it for Loveless. Like
any hapless pug from palookaville who was on the ropes and about to go down for
the count, he knew when to throw in the towel. It was just too much. The
filmmaker boxed up the movie, put it in storage, rented a cheap room by the
week and began drinking heavily while working on a crime action screenplay he
was hired to write by one of his regular indie producers who commissioned him
from time to time. Actually, the writing of the crime script was what had been
keeping Loveless going, functioning. The filmmaker always enjoyed the concept
of making a deadline and receiving a payday. The problem was he had finished the
screenplay, sent if off and been compensated for it two days before the Freak
King paid him a visit.

Now there was nothing left to do.

After talking to Freaky, the
ghost memories were once more alive and well, swirling to the surface of his
cerebral cortex, reanimating, circulating, resurrecting.
‘We want more life,
fuckah,’
these phantoms seemed to be saying. Loveless no longer had the
will to fight them. He was dogged tired. The worse part was he was going out as
a failure.

I made such a damn good movie. A
truly scary movie
,’
Loveless thought quietly.
‘The scariest movie no one will ever see.

The filmmaker drove to the seedy
part of town one more time that night. This time he went to a shitty little
pawn shop he had heard of, a pawn shop of questionable ethics where few
questions, if any, were asked. Which is what Loveless counted on. Without
benefit of paperwork or ID, he bought a cheap black dented and scratched snub
nose .38 - what they used to call in his neighborhood in Brooklyn a
Saturday
night special.
The shop owner, a hell of a guy, very generously threw in a
box of ammo for free. Next Loveless hit an all night liquor store and bought a
fifth of whiskey. Then he drove into the desert.

Loveless had always wondered what
it was that had coursed through Donovan’s mind right before the bullet coursed
through his mind. Was he possessed, just a graveyard marionette in the hands of
the Devil’s manipulations, or just truly scared to death? The filmmaker wanted
the answer. He needed it. And for that answer, Loveless was now willing to
gamble everything. He was in the right city for it.

Loveless pulled off a long lonely
road and drove a mile into the desert. He got out, sat on the hood of his truck
and drank liberally of the whiskey. When he couldn’t stomach anymore. He lined
the bottle up, walked a distance away, then turned and fired at the bottle. He
hit it on his second shot, satisfying two concerns: 1) that he could hit the
side of a barn. 2) that the cheap revolver actually worked.

It was time.

Loveless made a toasty little
fire. It sizzled and popped as he tossed all the hard-drives with all the
footage for the movie onto the flames. He added the Hell board and all the
other stuff from the band’s crate as well. The filmmaker watched everything
spark and melt. A piece of him melted with the hard-drives.

“Good riddance.” When everything
was good and gone, he snuffed out the fire with handfuls of dirt.

Next, Loveless opened the barrel
of the gun and put a bullet in every other chamber. Three bullets. Three empty
chambers. A fifty-fifty chance. The filmmaker spun the chamber like a roulette
wheel, put the gun to his head, trembling finger on the trigger. “I surrender
myself to a higher power." If the only luck he had left was bad, then
Loveless preferred to go there and then rather than drawing it out over the
course of one long lonely miserable lifetime. His finger began to squeeze the
trigger. Right before he pulled it, Loveless blurted out something purely
spontaneous, something he didn’t know he was going to say until he said it,
“I
love you, Charlotte.” He pulled the trigger as he squeezed his eyes shut and
clenched his teeth.

Ten seconds later, the filmmaker
opened his eyes. His brain matter was still in his head. He was still alive.
However, not ten feet in front of him sat a rather large and sullen bobcat. It
was staring directly at the filmmaker. For a second, Loveless was unsure if it
was going to attack or not. The filmmaker didn’t know what to do, then he
looked into its eyes. Was this a sign? Six seconds went by this way, animal and
man gazing into the orbs of the other, then the bobcat yawned, turned and
walked into midnight. Had this been an emissary of the dark side sent to give
the filmmaker an eleventh hour reprieve? Were they, whoever they were,
satisfied that he had no intention of finishing the film? Like the vampire of
legend, his movie would never see the light of day. Had the curse finally been
broken? It must have, the filmmaker thought. A cursed man would have surely
died. The next thing he thought of was the last words that he had uttered
before pulling the trigger.
‘I love you, Charlotte.’
And Loveless did.
He did love Charlotte. The only woman he had known who didn’t care whether he
was rich or poor. The only woman who had supported his dreams and inspired him
to go on. It was easy to make love to a pretty woman. But to wake up next to
her the following morning and want to spend not just that morning, but the rest
of the day with her, was something else all together. That was how he felt about
Charlotte. Loveless had never told the woman he loved her. And, in return,
Charlotte had never whispered those powerful intimate words to him, whether she
felt them or not. He regretted not having said the words. He regretted not
having been brave enough to risk having his heart broken.

Suddenly, the filmmaker heard a
weird sound echoing throughout black desert. The sound was laughter. It took
him several more moments to realize it was his own laughter.

Beauregard Freidkin jolted back
to reality in the unkept university dorm room that was his domicile, to the
sound of Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell.” It was his ring tone. The shock jock
journalist had had just enough time to get back from Vegas, wolf down some
frozen burritos, two cervasas, do a bong hit and fall into the sack. Beauregard
was fatigued from his journey. He had a meeting with the school radio station
director the next day to discuss the format and content of his radio show,
which would be debuting in a couple of weeks on campus radio.

“Hello?” Beauregard said
groggily, squinting at the cell phone display trying to make sense of the time.
It was 3:37 AM.

“Where is she?” It was Loveless.

The journalist recognized the
voice instantly. He sat up.
This review was not quite over
.

“Loveless, that you?”

“Where’s Charlotte Rae? You said
you interviewed her? You have an address on her?

“Yeah. Hold on a second. Lemme
find my notes.” The journalist fumbled around for a moment before finding his
agenda book. He rattled off the Los Angeles address to the filmmaker. “Are you
alright, J.D.?”

“Gotta go. I’ve got a long drive
ahead of me,” was all Loveless said. Then he added, “Thanks, Beauregard. Good
luck on the radio show.”

Beauregard was going to say
something, but Loveless had already hung up. The journalist decided that the
tenor he had detected in the filmmaker’s voice was optimism. He laid back in
bed in the dark, phone on his chest. After several minutes, a smile spread
across the Freak King’s face. Beauregard fell asleep smiling. That night, for
once, he didn’t have a single nightmare.

It was early on the Three Street
Promenade in Santa Monica, Los Angeles. The sea air from the nearby Pacific
sent a gentle breeze wafting down sunny blocks. Here it was almost always blue
skies and sunshine. It was April and spring was in the air. Charlotte lived on
Fifth Street next to the Whole Foods. Like any creature of habit, she would
wake up every morning jonesing for Starbucks. The mother would drive her
daughter to school and hit the coffee shop on the way back to her sister’s
apartment, which had recently become her apartment. Charlotte’s sister Rita had
met an architect who swept her off her feet. Rita moved in with him and became
pregnant and engaged in that order. The couple were currently figuring out the
logistics of planning a wedding and a birth, hopefully in that order. So,
Charlotte took over her sister’s lease.

The woman, wearing designer sweat
pants, hoodie, hood up, and sunglasses, stepped into the Starbucks. She was not
a morning person. Charlotte usually had her coffee while surfing the Internet,
before getting down to work. Her work consisted mostly of phone calls.

“I’ll have a-”

“Venti vanilla mocha with whip
cream,” a voice from behind finished the order for her.

Charlotte spun around to find
J.D. Loveless standing behind her. Although elated to see him and relieved to
find that he was safe - the filmmaker had not returned her phone calls after
the first couple of weeks of being out in Vegas - the woman weighed whether she
should be pissed off or not. Charlotte chose the middle ground with a guarded,
“What happened to you?”

“Did you have any
events
here in Los Angeles?” Loveless asked concerned.

Charlotte realized the filmmaker
wanted to know if she still wore the chain of bad luck around her pretty little
neck like an albatross. “Not a thing. Everything has been normal. Lizzy’s even
adjusted to her new school and has some really nice friends this time around.”

“Good.” Loveless was relieved to
hear that. He stopped staying in contact with the woman because he felt that by
continuing to do so, the stench of the curse would continue to cling to both of
them.

“What about you?”

When Loveless didn’t immediately
answer and looked away with a fragmented smile, Charlotte realized the
filmmaker hadn’t fared as well. “Things didn't go well in Vegas. It didn’t
stop, until I stopped.”

“So you didn’t finish the movie?”

“No,” Loveless said feeling like
a complete and utter loser. “It’s toast.”

It was Charlotte who surprised
him. “Good. Some things are just not meant to be. We woke something up messing
around with things we weren’t supposed to.”

“I guess.” Loveless shuffled his
feet uncomfortably. “How have you been?”

“If you’re asking me if I’m
seeing anyone, the answer is no. What about you?” Charlotte was as direct as
ever.

“Me? No.”

“Good. What are your plans?”

“Keep writing. Maybe I’ll even
write a book someday.”

“I mean today. Right now. I’m
going back to my place. You can join me if you want. I was going to work for a
couple of hours, then hit the beach before I have to pick Lizzy up from school.
Catch some rays.” The beach was beautiful, covered in warm weather and
sunbathers. “How ‘bout it? You wanna burn with me?”

“Absolutely.”

They exited the Starbuck hand in
hand.

If this had been a movie, at that
moment the camera would have pulled out as the happy couple walked down the
boulevard, as the music swelled, and the credits ran. But it wasn’t a movie,
merely two people’s lives. Two people who had been through a real life horror
story and lived to tell about it.