Poe - [Anthology] Read online

  We’re all drinking heavily now, and choking on the poison. TheHollywood Reporterprints an item that Jim is on the point of marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin. Variety claims Roger is trying to raise funds for a Southern Literary Magazine when he ought to be shooting a motor-racing picture in Europe. At the Brown Derby, they say Sam is never seen without a raven flapping ominously after him, croaking whole stanzas. Vinnie lands a prime-time comedy special, but it comes out as An Evening With Edgar Allan Poe. My second-best client, a rare and radiant exotic dancer whom the angels name Lenore, flies from my agency door, and I spend much time agonizing about her lost and lovely tassels.

  Still, it continues. AIP tries a war picture. It turns out to feature a brooding young commando who storms a Nazi castle in search of his missing girlfriend and finds Vinnie in a velvet SS uniform before inevitable torture, burial alive, and burning down. With his producer’s hat on, Roger sends some film students and the Nicholson kid into the desert to make a Western, and they come back with Vinnie as an accursed cattle baron, doppelganger gunslingers, and a cattle stampede flattening the ranch house in place of the fire.Rocket Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women of Blood eventually sells to television with the hammer and sickle insignia on the spacecraft blotted out. It is somehow re-edited. A brooding young astronaut lands on a haunted world where Mr. Touch-and-Go Bullet-Head (Vincent Price) rules a telepathic tribe of ululating bikini girls who are interred living within the tomb as doom-haunted dinosaurs set fire to the whole planet.

  Then, it’s not just American International.

  The plague shows up as little things in little films. Two Cavalry troopers called “William Wilson” in The Great Sioux Massacre. A “Pink Panther” cartoon called Dial ‘P’ for Pendulum. A premature burial in John Goldfarb, Please Come Home. Then, a descent into the maelstrom. The Red Death arrives during the revolutionary scenes of Doctor Zhivago, and the rest of the film finds Darkness and Despair descending illimitably over Omar Sharif and Julie Christie. The Agony and the Ecstasyfeatures Charlton Heston laboring for decades over a small oval portrait of one of Roderick Usher’s ancestors.The Spy Who Came in From the Coldwinds up with Richard Burton clutching a purloined letter and ranting that the orangutan did it. Even a John Wayne-Howard Hawks Western turns on a Poe poem, El Dorado.

  The curse is complete when movie theaters book The Sound of Musicas a roadshow attraction and getThe Sound of Meowing.In vast, empty, decaying haunted picture palaces across the land, Julie Andrews climbs ragged mountains and pokes around a basement only to find Captain von Trapp (Vincent Price) has walled up his wife along with her noisy cat. At the end, Austria burns down.

  My senses are more painfully acute by the hour. I can not venture out by day unless the sun is completely obscured by the thickest, gloomiest cloud and after dark can tolerate only the tiniest, flickering flame of a candle. My ears are assaulted by the faintest sound. A housewife tearing open a cereal packet two blocks away reverberates within my skull like the discharge of a Gatling gun. I can bear only the most pallid of foods, and neglect my formerly-favored watering-holes to become a ghoul-like habitue of the new McDonald’s chain, where fare that tastes of naught save cardboard may be found at the expense of a few trivial cents. The touch of my secretary becomes as sandpaper upon my appallingly sensitive skin, and raises sharp pains, sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at my pores. Few in the industry return my telephone calls, which is all to the good since I can of course scarcely bear the torture of tintinnabulation... of the bells—of the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells—of the moaning and the groaning of the bells.

  Movies are only the beginning. Soon, Poe is everywhere. Thehouse is the monster, and the house is the United States of America. The break-out TV hits of the next seasons areThe Usher Family, The Man From U.L.A.L. U.M.E. and The Marie Tyler Roget Show. Vincent Price takes over from Walter Cronkite, and intones the bad news in a velvet jacket, promising “much of madness, and more of sin, and horror the soul of the plot” in reports from Vietnam, Washington, and the Middle East. Sonny and Cher take “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” to Number One in the hit parade, followed by Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Poe,” Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure to Put some Flowers on Your Grave),” the Mamas and the Papas’ “Dream a Little Dream Within a Dream of You,” the Archies’ “Bon-Bon” and Dean Martin’s “Little Old Amontillado Drinker Me.” Vinnie hostsAmerican Bandstandtoo, warily scanning the dancers for a skull-faced figure in red robes.

  A craze for floppy shirts, ink-stained fingers, and pale faces seizes the surfer kids, and everyone on the strip has a pet raven or a trained ape. Beauty contests for cataleptics are all the rage, and “Miss Universe” is crowned with a wreath in her coffin as she is solemnly bricked up by the judges. The Green Berets adopt a “conqueror worm” cap badge. Housing developments rise up tottering on shaky ground near stagnant ponds, with pre-stressed materials to provide Usher cracks and incendiaries built into the light-fittings for more spectacular conflagrations. The most popular names for girls in 1966-7 are “Lenore,” “Annabel,” “Ligeia,” and “Madeline.”

  In a kingdom by the sea, we are haunted. In the El Dorado of Los Angeles, white fog lies thick on the boulevards. The mournful “nevermores” of ravens perched on statues is answered by the strangled mewling of black cats immured in basements. And the seagulls chime in with “tekeli-li, teke-li-li” as if that was any help.

  During the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hang oppressively low in the heavens, I pass alone in a Cadillac convertible through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length find myself as the shades of evening draw on, within view of the melancholy House of Roger. I know not how it is—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervades my spirit. I try to shake off the fog, like the after-dream of a reveler upon maryjane, in my brain and rid my mind of the words of Poe. Yet he sits beside me, phantasmal, fiddling with the radio dial, breathing whisky and muttering in intricate rhyme schemes. I have taken the Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu, where AIP and Corman—flush with monies from the Poe pictures—have thrown up a studio in a bleak castle atop the jagged cliffs. From the road, it looks phony as a glass shot. The scrublands all around are withered and sere, and I’m not even sure what “sere” means.

  The castle seems abandoned, but I gain access through a wide crack in the walls. In the gloom, I find the others. Roger, in dark glasses with side-panels. Sam, with raven chewing on his cigar. Jim, haunted by the doppelganger who no longer claims to be his son. Vinnie, worst of us all, liquid face dribbling over his frilly shirt, eyebrows and moustache shifted inches lower by the tide of loathsome, of detestable putrescence. A few others are with the crowd—the embalmed, toothless corpse of Lorre; an ancient withered ape just recognizable as Boris Karloff; barely-breathing girls and a teenage singer coughing blood into a handkerchief; an ignored brooding youth or two, hiding in the shadows and trying to avoid being upstaged.

  All eyes are accusingly upon me. “Thou art the man,” is written plainly on everyone’s faces. I admit it to myself, and the plague-ravaged company. We have brought Poe back. Neglected and despised in life, to his mind cheated of the riches and recognition due his genius, he has been kept half-alive in the grave, plagiarized and paperbacked, bought and sold and made a joke of. No wonder we have raised an angry Eddy, a vindictive and a spiteful genius. This time, he has caught on and he will not let go, not of us and not of the world. This is the dawning of the Age of Edgar Allan, the era of Mystery and Imagination. We haveushered—ahem—it in, but we are to be its mummified, stuffed, walled-up victims, the sacrifices necessary for the foundations of even the shakiest edifice.

  I have a new horror. It seizes my brain like a vulture’s—no, a raven’s—talons. I hear the faint whisper of nails against wood, the tapping of hairy knuckles against a coffin-lid, that first gibber of fear before the awful realization takes hol
d. I can hear Boomba, and know that—through my neglect—I have suffered him to be buried alive. The gibber becomes a snarling, hooting, raging, clawing shriek. The tapping, as of someone gently rapping, becomes a hammering, a clamoring, a gnawing, a pawing, a crashing, a smashing. Wood breaks, earth parts, and long-fingered, bloodied, torn-nailed, horribly semi-human hands grope for the bone handle of a straight razor.

  Jim and Sam want to know what to do, how to escape. To them, every contract has a get-out clause. Roger and Vinnie know this isn’t true.

  Without, a storm rages. The heavens rage at the sorrows of the world.

  A door opens with a creak. The attenuated shadow of a chimpanzee is cast upon the flagstones, gleaming cruel blade held high. We turn to look, our capacity for wonder and terror long since exceeded.

  Brushfires burn all around, struggling against the torrents. The crack that runs through the castle—the crack that runs throughCalifornia—widens, with great shouts as of the planet itself in pain and terror. A million tons of mud is on the march, and we stand between it and the sea. The walls bend and bow like painted canvas flats. A candle falls and flames spread. A maiden screams. A burning bird streaks comet-like through the air.

  The ape’s clutch is at my throat and the razor held high. In Boomba’s glittering, baleful eye I discern cruel recognition.

  Vinnie, before the burning beams come down, has to have the last quote...

  “‘... the screenplay is the tragedy Man, and its hero the Conqueror Worm!‘—Edgar Allan...”

  The first Poe story I can remember reading is “Metzengerstein,” which was in an illustrated book of an educational nature; while writing “Illimitable Domain,” I dug out a battered Everyman paperback of Tales of Mystery and Imagination I’ve had since about 1971 to check quotes and details. I’m in the second generation of folks who were led to Eddy by the Roger Corman-Vincent Price-AIP pictures of the 1960s, starting with The Fall of the House of Usher in 1960 and—as mostly per this story—running on till Tomb of Ligeia in 1965. I think the first one I saw was The Raven, which is as atypical of the series as the gothic “Metzengerstein” (a terror which is of Germany, not the soul) is of Poe’s stories. I missed the films on their original cinema releases, but saw them repeatedly on television (in black and white and panned and scanned) in the early 1970s, then sought them out in theatrical revivals which revealed sumptuous color and imaginative widescreen framing. I’ve owned all these films in successive formats—off-air VHS, retail VHS, laserdisc, and DVD—and will probably keep buying them, though no home cinema can quite replicate the experience of watching that pendulum swing from one end of a Panavision frame to the other in a darkened cinema.. Though much that “Walter Paisley” says about the films in the story is true, I unreservedly love them all—despite repeated plots, sets and stock footage, variable supporting casts and problematic readings of the original stories. Without really meaning to, I’ve returned often to Edgar A. Poe in my work—he features as a character in my novels Route 666 (which I wrote as Jack Yeovil) and The Bloody Red Baron and the story “Just Like Eddy,” which I wrote as part of my private campaign to combat the persistent misspelling of his adopted middle name as ‘Allen’.

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  Melanie Temhas written ten solo novels including her Bram Stoker award-winning debut, Prodigal, Slain in the Spirit, and The Deceiver. She has also collaborated with Nancy Holder on the novelsMaking Love and Witch-Light, and with Steve Rasnic Tem on Daughter and The Man on the Ceiling. The earlier, novella version of The Man on the Ceiling won the 2001 Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, and the World Fantasy Awards. The Tems also collaborated on the award-winning multi-media CD-ROM Imagination Box.

  Her short stories have been published in the collectionThe Ice Downstreamon E-Reads and in numerous magazines (including Colorado State Review, Black Maria, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and Cemetery Dance) and anthologies (including Snow White Blood Red, Little Deaths, Gathering the Bones, Hot Blood, andAcquainted with the Night).She has also published non-fiction articles and poetry.

  Recipient of a 2001-2002 associateship from the Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute for script development, Tem is also a playwright. Her one-act play “The Society for Lost Positives” has been produced in Denver, Salida, and Chicago, and several of her full-length plays have received staged readings.

  Tem lives in Denver with her husband, writer and editor Steve Rasnic Tem, where she works as a social worker. They have four children and four granddaughters.

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  The Pickers

  By Melanie Tem

  Wind blowing icy snow against the patio door startled her from the People magazine she’d been nearly napping over. For a fierce instant she thought it might be Matt coming home, and the realization that it never again would be Matt, here or anywhere, burned through her as if she hadn’t realized it a million times already.

  It was midnight straight up, dreary as midday or dawn. The gas logs overheated the small living room and gave the impression of embers that would never die, until you turned the knob and they vanished and then instantly the room was cold. Toni was aware of a sensation that was probably hunger, and she didn’t think she’d eaten for a while.

  She’d rolled Ryan’s crib in here, afraid tonight to let him out of her sight. He slept his usual peaceful sleep. His happy, easygoing nature hadn’t changed. He hadn’t seemed to notice what had happened to them. He wouldn’t even remember the father who’d loved him so much. Toni wanted to shake him awake and make him understand, or to curl up next to him and let his obliviousness seep into her.

  She stayed where she was on the couch. The silky purple curtains covering the patio doors looked sad and ridiculous in the fireplace light. She should have made Matt take them back to the thrift store. At least they kept her from seeing whatever was tapping. It’s just the wind.

  Under the rattle of the glass, she heard pickers in the alley going through the dumpster. Maybe one of them had come up to the building and was rapping on the door, wanting something, wanting in, a particularly scary thought since the patios faced an inside courtyard that was supposed to be private. She sat there wondering, doubting, half-dreaming about Matt.

  After a while, feeling a little stronger, she threw down the magazine and got to her feet. When the dizziness passed, she turned off the lights, crossed the room, and tugged the curtains open. Blowing snow and darkness there, nothing more.

  In the alley the pickers were laughing and singing, and Toni suddenly couldn’t stand it another minute. Here she was, trying to make an honest living at a responsible job, taking care of Ryan and everything else by herself now, struggling to get through every day and to figure out life without Matt, trying to make herself believe she really had to go on without him. The thought of human scavengers in her garbage, especially in the middle of the night in this kind of weather, making a mess for decent people to clean up, was just too much.

  Shaking, she pulled on sweats under her nightshirt, threw on a jacket of Matt’s from one of the boxes, shoved her feet into slippers, grabbed up the sack of trash waiting by the door to be taken out in the morning, and stormed out. Behind her, Ryan stirred in his sleep and made soft contented noises. Her relief at getting away from him, just for a few minutes, enraged her even more. In two steps her feet were wet, though Mart’s jacket kept her warm. Snow and tears blurred her vision.

  As she pushed through the gate into the parking lot behind the building, the commotion got louder. A truck engine idled roughly. Things banged and clattered. Their talk was no more than two or three sounds repeated over and over in some kind of primitive language, more cooing and squawking than words.

  The first time she’d personally noticed pickers, or even really believed they existed, had been six and a half hours before Mart’s accident. He’d come rushing back in while she was frantically cleaning up the baby’s second poopy diaper of the morning while at the same time trying to finish w
hat would turn out to be her last actual meal—wheat toast with jelly, she remembered, and grapefruit juice. “The pickers say they can use that old computer monitor!” he’d called to her, excited as always by anything out of the ordinary. Frazzled and resentful because she had to get to work, too, she’d yelled at him that he cared more about filthy scum like that than about his own family. He’d stopped short and stared at her for a long moment, then picked up the monitor and left without another word. Never another word.

  Since then the pickers were everywhere. In broad daylight they’d be flocking around the dumpster at work. When she took Ryan to the park they’d be picking up litter and eyeing other people’s picnic lunches. On garbage day she couldn’t get to her car without practically having to push through them, and since she’d started forcing herself little by little to throw away Mart’s stuff they’d been congregating here on other days, too.

  The thought that she shared living space with these lowlifes gave her the creeps, and it was Matt’s fault for encouraging them and then leaving her to deal with it. Whole families of them, whole clans, eating and wearing and selling and otherwise using what normal people had no more use for. Maybe it wasn’t thievery, exactly, but there was something wrong about it, and if it wasn’t illegal, it ought to be. She called the cops and Trash Removal and City Council, and they all told her there was nothing they could do. That wasn’t right.