Dark Screams, Volume 5 Read online

  Dark Screams: Volume Five is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Hydra eBook Original

  Copyright © 2015 by Brian James Freeman and Richard Chizmar

  “Everything You’ve Always Wanted” by Mick Garris copyright © 2015 by Mick Garris

  “The Land of Sunshine” by Kealan Patrick Burke copyright © 2015 by Kealan Patrick Burke

  “Mechanical Gratitude” by Del James, copyright © 2015 by Del James

  “The One and Only” by J. Kenner copyright © 2015 by J. Kenner

  “The Playhouse” by Bentley Little copyright © 2015 by Bentley Little

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States of America by Hydra, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  HYDRA is a registered trademark and the HYDRA colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  eBook ISBN 9780804176651

  Cover design: David G. Stevenson

  Cover photograph: © Nomad Soul/Shutterstock

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Everything You’ve Always Wanted

  The Land of Sunshine

  Mechanical Gratitude

  The One and Only

  The Playhouse

  Dedication

  About the Editors

  Everything You’ve Always Wanted

  Mick Garris

  It had been a long time since I’d flown first class, and I must admit that I’d missed it. But here I was, winging across a vast, arid, flyover America, bound for the bustling metropolis that was Indianapolis, wondering which came first in the English lexicon: metropolis or Indianapolis. Surely the former. I’d have to remember to Google it when I was back within Internet range.

  I had never been to Indianapolis before, and for that matter, don’t think I know anyone who has. Is there a reason to visit there? Other than as a special guest at the annual MonsterThon convention, of course, which was the crown of thorns I wore this particular moribund weekend. Leaving L.A. before the landlord came sniffing around for his filthy lucre was always a good idea, and to have travel and accommodations paid for—and in first class, no less!—by a third party put the emphasis on the party.

  Some time ago, I had made a little independent film, one that maybe even you have heard of (let me virtually buff my fingernails on my shirt and let them gleam in the sin of pride). Taxed was one of those exceedingly rare little horror thrillers that could have happened only before the end of the twentieth century: It cost about $400,000, was filmed with an unknown cast in Florida, got picked up and released on five hundred screens by New Century Millennial, and somehow earned a box-office gross of more than $12 million (well, that’s $12 million that New Century Millennial would admit to, so I’d bet you could add at least fifty percent and be closer to the actual gross).

  Taxed was crude, I’ll admit it, but that worked for the story, which was a hillbilly horror tale of rural cannibals who excelled at human taxidermy, and it owed huge debts to Tobe Hooper, Alfred Hitchcock, and Wes Craven (the movie, not the cannibals, though I suppose they did, too). But I think it was the Shakespeare references that I had injected—and expounded on in every interview—that gave it an air of respectability in the mainstream press.

  Of course, the horror genre, particularly at that time, has always been a gutter in the eyes of the tastemakers in America. But if you can bandy about Lady Macbeth and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as well as Dalí and Gaudí, and at least have a passing knowledge of a cultural past, the pretenders of critical mass will take in your bullshit and look for Deeper Meaning and embrace your little cinematic masterpiece and give it attention. The Taxed reviews weren’t all good, but the fact that it was taken seriously enough to review at all was quite an accomplishment, so our audience went beyond the bloodthirsty gorehound Fangoria subscribers and the multiplex subbasement and into the arthouse sensibility as well. We had that rare crossover horror hit. Well, if you can call twelve million bucks a hit, and New Century Millennial did, repeatedly.

  It did even better on video.

  Of course, that was a nonunion film, ergo, though I wrote and directed this masterpiece, it was before I joined the Writers and Directors Guilds, so the distributors did not share any of that pie with me. No residuals, no profits, no guts, no glory. Well, maybe a little bit of the latter two, but not so much. Not until now, anyway, at the MonsterThon salute to the twenty-fifth anniversary of Taxed in the teeming cosmopolis of Indianapolis: a city better flown over than visited, I was soon to learn.

  But Indianapolis was still a couple hours away as I stared down at the grids of lackluster brown ranch land between cities below me. I sipped a Dewar’s as the ice clanked against my new crown, sending a jolt of freezer burn up into my jaw. My iPad had run out of juice, so I had to flip through the airline magazine to pass the time. I’d hoped the drinks would knock me out, but I just can’t sleep on a plane. Hell, I can’t sleep in a bed most of the time.

  So I was stuck in 3C, next to an enormous guy in a Sears salesman’s suit with a deviated septum and sleep apnea, snorting like a water buffalo as he jolted in and out of sleep with each trumpeting, phlegmatic blap, trying to find entertainment in a publication that is all about cramming the space between the ads with inoffensive filler.

  The cabin suddenly filled with an acrid aroma, and I looked around to see that two-ton Willy Loman had wet himself in his sleep.

  Ah, first-class luxury!

  All I could do was sit back, hold my breath, and take stock of what had brought me here.

  Taxed was a big success, and it did open a lot of doors for me. I was the flavor of the month, which was pretty exciting for a twenty-five-year-old filmmaker from the wrong coast of Florida. The film had been embraced and toasted, and doors were flung wide in welcome to me at all the studios and agencies. I pitched and schmoozed and partied and did all the things you’re supposed to do, and it worked. I signed with CAA, directed an episode of Tales from the Crypt, and made my first Hollywood studio deal with Joel Silver, which was a horror story in itself.

  The rude truth I discovered is that Hollywood hates horror, doesn’t understand it, is embarrassed by it, but likes to tell you how it’s done. So I went from this little movie made with friends and family, on a budget cobbled together by Tampa lawyers, doctors, and would-be actors’ dads and uncles to a $35 million Warners budget (in this case, you could probably lop off half of that and be closer to the truth) and international movie stars. Well, international names. You’ve heard of them, but you wouldn’t go see them in a movie just because they were in it. And the fact is, you didn’t. Now, with studio and press expectations, the tarted-up, spangly, big-budget would-be masterpiece was swept out of the Cineplex Odeon with the spilled popcorn and Jujubes before its opening week even ended.

  When Gigantic tanked—and, despite all of the studio meddling and star tantrums and ratings-board bullshit and shitty release date and stupid marketing campaign, I have only myself to blame—CAA no longer returned my calls, leaving me to guess that I’d been dropped as a client. A quarter-century later, I’ve never talked to anyone over there since. It is still only conjecture that I am no longer represented by them.

  Open doors slammed in my face, backs turned on me, and I moved from my West Hollywood condominium to a third-floor apartment in an eighty-year-old Koreatown building that was, in its heyday, architect
urally beautiful. That day, however, was decades before it was peopled by hopeful hipsters in porkpie hats cruising hallways dank with the smell of kimchi.

  So no, the answer to your unasked question is that I haven’t made a movie since. However, New Century Millennial collapsed in a mountain of lawsuits and prison time, and somehow ownership of Taxed ended up in my hands. I have made my living on it ever since, licensing it around the world for video and television. It’s been up and down, but it seems that, financially, at least, that cow’s golden teat has been milked dry, and is about to heave its final breath, to mix my metaphors.

  The wolf is at the door.

  As I stared over the mountain of unconscious salesman and through the Plexiglas window on the faint curvature of the empty planet beneath me, I realized I wouldn’t mind if the plane suddenly lost all power and plummeted into the fields of grain below. What difference would it make?

  It’s not that I have any particular death wish. I just felt empty, that every really great thing that was going to happen in my life had already taken place, that my existence had petered out anyway, that I was just wasting time and taking up space. I was broke, lonely, sitting in the stink of salesman piss on my way to a celebration of the one success I had had in my life, a grotty little gorefest notorious for its explicit gustatory cannibalism and hillbilly necrophilia. I will certainly never reach that high again.

  So it’s not that I’m angry or resentful or even particularly depressed. I just look down at the land below, and it seems to be begging to embrace my fall. I can see myself plummeting through the sky, tearing holes in clouds, and planting myself in alfalfa or corn or soybeans, or whatever the fuck they’re growing down there. The amber waves of grain sing like the Sirens of yore, coaxing me and the 777 into a free fall and the end credits to a life half lived.

  Ennui settles over me in a funk of Dewar’s and fat man pee. It’s not like I wouldn’t be screaming like a girl with everyone else onboard should the flight take a header. I’m not that somnambulant about everything, it’s just that if it were all to end right here, that would be fine with me. I would not be missed, I would not be eulogized, I would not leave a hole in the cosmos. My departure would cause nary a ripple in the Chrono-synclastic Infundibulum. At most, I’d like to think that some of the attendees in Indianapolis would ask for a refund.

  Am I afraid of dying? Sure. But not so much of death itself. Taxed was a long time ago. Who am I now? Someone with a fleeting success in my past, and a present that looks like a rapidly approaching brick wall. Maybe there’s a tunnel with a light at the end, or maybe that tunnel was just painted on the brick wall like in the Roadrunner cartoons.

  So here I am, taxiing into Indianapolis International Airport, perennially single, no one to call once they announce that we are free to do so. I grab my carry-on, and, in the cloud of Porky’s eau du urine, scurry off the plane and into, God help me, Indianapolis.

  —

  I stood waiting in the arrival lounge, and there, holding a sign, my name hand-lettered and misspelled against a MonsterThon background logo, was an eager, pudgy horror fan, barely out of his teens, cultivating a wishful goatee and a more developed vocabulary than you might expect from a kid with the face of the lead cannibal from Taxed tattooed on his flaccid biceps. Actually, that seems to be the norm more than an exception. Horror fans may be social misfits and don’t often function well in the outside world—and let’s not get into hygiene—but they seem to mostly be of an exceedingly high intellect. Even the overwhelming majority who have yet to break their virginity.

  Terry recognized me immediately, and ran up to me with puppy eagerness.

  “Can I carry that for you, Mr. Tarrington?” he asked, as he reached for the handle of my rolling carry-on.

  “That’s okay,” I answered, “I’ve got it. And call me Jack. Mr. Tarrington is my father, and he’s dead.”

  I meant it to be friendly, but Terry MonsterThon blushed crimson to the tips of his generous ears, chastened and embarrassed.

  “We’re all really excited about you coming here, Jack.” He tried to say it casually, but couldn’t get it to come out that way. “The screening is sold out!”

  Sold out! A twenty-five-year-old low-budget slasher movie sold out. That never even happened when it was in its original run. Must be a tiny convention screening room.

  “Great,” I said, pleased but doubtful. “How many seats?”

  “I’m not sure, but it’s the biggest theater in the Keystone Art.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “So are we…Jack.”

  Wow, sold out and in the local arthouse. Cool.

  I might even get laid.

  We stepped out into the frigid, melting snow and into the little Ford Fiesta with a cardboard MonsterThon placard in the windshield, and sputtered our way out of the airport, onto the highway, and bare minutes later, up to the Marriott–Sheraton–Days Inn–Ramada convention hotel.

  What was left of the last snowfall was brown and sludgy, and everything looked grim and unappealing, faceless and lacking in personality. I stepped out of Terry’s scarab of an automobile, and into a dogshit-colored puddle of slush.

  Welcome to Indiana.

  The ticket line for the convention was long, and only a tiny percentage of the attendees were in monster makeup. Some of them recognized me as I made my way to the registration desk. I was approached by wide-eyed fans with foam in the corners of their mouths, all of them bearing battered posters and VHS copies of Taxed in their grubby little mitts. But Terry, my hero, fended them off.

  “Mr. Tarrington will sign your items at the autograph tables tomorrow, so let’s let him get checked in and comfortable, okay?”

  They kept trying to just get one signature here and there, but Terry, bless him, was actually kind of stern with them, and was my cross against the culture vampires. After all, that was part of the deal. They didn’t pay me to come here, but aside from picking up travel and accommodations, I would sit at the convention booth and sign my name for money. George Romero and the like earned thousands of dollars a pop at places like this. I hoped to make enough to at least pay for room service.

  Terry got me checked in, and I was surprised and delighted to see that they actually had me in a suite on the top floor. I had done a couple of these horror conventions before, but they were much less professional and high-end than this one seemed to be. I was shuttled in and out of those like a virus; this one was rolling out the proverbial red carpet. Maybe it’s time to finally put out a Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition Blu-ray of Taxed before physical media loses all of its value. I should have thought about that a few years ago. But hell, I might even have a good time here. I usually don’t like to stay in the convention hotel, as I like to have a bit of remove from the riffraff. But the quiet hallway of the Executive Level was hushed, and the suite was, well, sweet.

  Terry gave me his mobile number, told me to call him if and when I needed him. There was a dinner with the convention celebrities (this is the only crowd on the planet that would think of me as a celebrity, but so be it) at eight o’clock, which would leave me plenty of time before the midnight opening-night gala.

  Ugh, midnight! Nobody told me about midnight. Oh, well, time to throw away the clock and abandon myself to the convention. I truly had nothing better to do. And it would prepare me for tomorrow night’s midnight screening.

  I elevatored up to the room, on a floor that, gratefully, required an executive key, discouraging the hoi polloi from polluting the upper reaches of the hotel. The room itself was much nicer than I ever expected—or deserved, for that matter—with a view of the stark, pointless highway leading into the city proper, the lights of the downtown hub well hidden from here. There was next to no traffic.

  I lay facedown on the lushly inviting pillow-top bed, and when next I opened my eyes, it was dark out, and a puddle of saliva was going sticky under my face, and the phone was trilling insistently.

  The room seemed even more grand
in the dark, as I was rudely awakened from a dream that was already mist, memories of the present slowly filling my brain like a new quart of oil.

  I picked up the phone and croaked.

  “Hi, Jack,” the relentlessly cheery voice announced. “It’s Terry. Everybody’s gathering for dinner at the lobby restaurant, and I thought you might need a wakeup call or something.”

  “Good thinking, Terry. I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

  My stomach growled as I hung up, my body welcoming a free meal. All I needed first was a shower.

  There was no traffic at all on the highway outside.

  —

  I walked out of the elevator and up to the dining room, where an eager Terry was waiting for me. “Hey, Jack, they’ve saved a place for you at the head of the table!” He’d gone beyond his shyness, and spoke entirely in exclamation marks now. He’d quickly and eagerly embraced the concept of addressing me by my first name. Terry ushered me through the restaurant to a table of a dozen or so tucked discreetly into the back of the room.

  As I approached, they all stood and applauded, giant smiles eclipsing their moon-shaped, midwestern faces. They were all varying sizes of round, shaped like fruits and vegetables: apples, pears, eggplants, even a warty decorative squash. But their expressions were guileless, welcoming, cheery, and I felt honored. And, truth be told, I did not look out of place among them, closer in physical condition to these high-carb carnivores than to the sleek greyhound bodies that peopled Los Angeles. I had put on weight in the last few years, giving up on physical fitness at around the same time I gave up on everything else. I had a two-year career, a scrapbook of monthlong failed romances, a checkbook balance way up in the double digits, a receding, graying hairline with a scalp that was starting to reflect like a mirror, a newly discovered paunch that obscured my weight on the bathroom scale, and I was about to topple the Mystical Mountain of Fifty.

  So my smile at their welcome was genuine, appreciative, even happy—which is a word I seldom use in self-reference—and when they asked me how I wanted my steak, I said medium rare, with baked and mashed potatoes. I forwent the sparkling water and sipped their wine, ate the 1950s-era neon-orange garlic bread, and had a second hot fudge sundae. I took the giant step from parsimonious to indulgent, and it felt good, dammit!