THE BLACK ALBUM: A Hollywood Horror Story (14 page)

“Did everyone just hear what I
heard?” Matty said. “That shit about a burning kingdom?”

"That's way better than the
lyrics I thought up," Loveless stated in amazement. "What was that
about
slayer
?"

 “No. It was
slay her
in
the name of Satan,” Collin added.

“Was that a girl’s scream?”
Charlotte said. The actress looked ill.

“You don’t think they recorded
the sacrifice of the runaway girl- ” Loveless thought out-loud cryptically.

“Maybe we’re just hearing what we
want to hear. A lot of it was gibberish,” Charlotte said, trying to be the
voice of reason.

“No fucking way,” Jerry fired
back, shaking his head. “We all heard the same thing.”

“I don’t know what it means, but
I think I recognized some of the gibberish. It actually wasn't gibberish. It
was Sumerian. The oldest recorded civilization in history. Sumerian was the
religious ceremonial language spoken in ancient Babylonia,” Collin said.
Everyone looked at him. “What? I was an anthropology major in college.”

As everyone ran out of something
to say all at once, the room fell into an uncomfortable silence. Until it was
broken.

"Do you hear that? Out in
the woods." Delilah said as she looked out through the glass of the
balcony doors.

"Hear what?"

"The quiet," Karen
answered for her sister. "Have you ever known the woods to be that quiet?"

Loveless was already opening the
door and stepping out onto the balcony. Karen and Delilah were right. It was
completely still in the hills and forest. Suddenly, the filmmaker felt
nauseous. He didn't want the crew and cast to see his sudden sick-to-his-stomach
expression, especially not Charlotte. He suppressed a retch, went back inside
and closed the door.

“Cheap overblown theatrics to
sell records. I thought the back-masking in "Stairway" was much
scarier and more original," Loveless said, dismissing the lyrics offhand.
"Let’s get back to work." For some reason, the movie “The Ring”
popped into the filmmaker’s head.

'
You watched
it.
Seven
days, then you die!'

He had a bad feeling in the pit
of his stomach.
We listened to it. Were we all going to die?
Loveless
thought fleetingly. The filmmaker needed to sit down. He collapsed onto the
couch. Charlotte looked at him. "You alright?"

Loveless was about to reassure
her when he thought he saw something dancing on the ceiling. A bat, hanging
upside down. Suddenly, it fell free and swooped down, right at the filmmaker.
He ducked, covering up as it whistled past his head. He heard a crash and
looked over at the fireplace. The bat was now burning alive in the blaze. It
didn't even try to escape.

"Jesus Christ," Jerry
exclaimed.

The odor of burning bat made
everyone cover their noses. Collin opened the balcony door to let fresh air in.

"Just what the fuck was
that?" Charlotte said, unable to take her eyes off the smoldering bat.

At that moment, Loveless wished
to hell they could go back in time and not have listened to the backwards
lyrics. Judging by the hollow expressions of most of the other cast and crew
members, they did too. But they had and it was too late to do anything about
it.

Things seemed to change after
that night.

One day, while the filmmaker was
in his bedroom working on the shot-list for the next day’s filming, he heard a
knock on the door. It couldn’t have been Charlotte. She was down the mountain
on a shopping day with her daughter. Loveless opened the door to find Karen
standing there in a towel and nothing else. During the shoot, Jerry, Delilah,
and Karen ended up practically living at the filmmaker’s cabin home. They were
having
‘injun’
trouble with their landlord and the less time they spent
there the better. Or at least that’s how they explained it to Loveless. Delilah
was further along and soon the couple would have to think about the baby they
were going to be bringing into the world. Charlotte, in typical maternal
fashion, decided they should stay at the filmmaker’s place, at least until they
sorted out their problems with Della. The actress did not want a pregnant woman
stressed.
‘It isn’t good for the baby,’
Charlotte exclaimed. Loveless
didn’t mind them staying at his place. He was in directing mode. In his eyes,
making a film was like going to war. It was more convenient to have his
soldiers close to the home front. He could plot out the upcoming special
effects with Jerry and also go over music.

“You have a hanger?” Karen said,
her towel clinging damply to her from a recent shower. For a troubled woman,
she wasn’t ugly. She had sharp, striking features. The kind of features that
made certain women seem hard and turned other women into high fashion models.
Her body was thin. Loveless had found out that Jerry, Delilah, and Karen were
practically destitute. The money they were making from the movie was a godsend
for them. The only flaw you could find with Karen’s appearance were her
breasts. You could see it through her clothes. The woman must have never worn a
bra in her entire life. Her breasts hung down like a tribeswoman out of a
National Geographic magazine photo. Still, she was definitely fuck-able.

Loveless wondered if the hanger
was for her towel, since she didn’t have anything else with her. “Sure.” The
filmmaker went to the closet. He could sense Karen right behind him. Loveless
turned around. Karen was right in his face, intimately close.

“They’re gonna kill you for what
you’re doing,” Karen said in a low and seductive voice, almost as if saying
‘I
love you,’
then dropped her towel, revealing her naked body to the
filmmaker. Loveless froze in complete shock. Karen took his hands and put them
on her breasts. The sensation of this made her head roll back, her eyes rolling
back in her head. Loveless felt momentarily guilty, then an image of Charlotte
in bed with Donovan popped in his mind. He squeezed Karen’s breasts hard.

“I shouldn’t be doing this.” The
filmmaker tried to retract his hands, but Karen held them tightly in place.

“Fuck me!”

“I shouldn’t be doing this,”
Loveless repeated.

“Fuck me hard,” Karen said, then
added,
“For him.”

“For who?” The filmmaker asked in
a tiny voice, not sure he wanted to know the answer.

“Lord Satan.” Karen let go of the
filmmaker’s hands and backed away from him. She climbed onto his bed, lay back
and spread her legs wide open. Her wet pubic hair sparkled in the sunlight that
spilled in through the bedroom window. “Fuck me for Lucifer.”

Something deep inside Loveless
told him not to have sex with this woman. His rational mind spoke up,
She’s
troubled.
This didn’t keep him from becoming hard. He was harder than he
had remembered being since he was a virginal teen. It was so hard it hurt. So
hard that it cried out for relief. Relief between Karen’s legs.

“What the hell’s happening to
me?” The filmmaker said out loud. He backed away.

Karen looked at him as she cocked
her head and listened. She could see now that Loveless was not going to
succumb. Her face took on a whole new quality. It was a mask of pure evil as
she spat,
“Fuck me like Satan’s gonna fuck you.”
A second later, Karen
flipped out, going into convulsions, flopping around like a fish. It was an
epileptic seizure of some sort. For a micro-second, the filmmaker thought of
the immortal scene in “The Exorcist” where a possessed Linda Blair hovers above
her bed screaming,
‘Make this stop, Momma. Make this stop!’
Then
Loveless launched forward and held the woman down so she wouldn’t hurt herself.
Abject fear extinguished his desire. After about a minute, Karen’s body stopped
spasming. She looked around disoriented, before realizing Loveless was on top
of her and that she was naked.

“I- what’s going on?” Karen
seemed to have no idea of the things she had done. The things she had said.

Loveless rolled off of the woman
and the bed, “You had some kind of seizure. Are you okay?”

Karen climbed off the bed and
wrapped herself once again in the towel. “I- I’m fine. It happens. I've had
epilepsy since I was little. But I haven't had a seizure since they put me on
new meds over two years ago."

"Scared the hell out of
me." Loveless wasn't going to mention Satan if she wasn't. In his heart,
he believed she didn't remember a thing.

"I’m okay. Thank you.” The
woman wandered out of the filmmaker’s room in a bewildered state. Loveless was
no less bewildered than the woman.

Later that night, when Charlotte
had returned to the mountain, Loveless practically attacked her. It was a
savage night of ravenous love making. After the spent actress had fallen
asleep, the filmmaker, still wide awake, wandered out onto his balcony,
wondering once more,
What the hell is happening to me?
He saw the
neighbor he had never met on the far away balcony of the next home, in the
dark, smoking a cigarette. The neighbor was again aware of Loveless. She - he
was sure it was a she - waved at him and went inside. When she had sparked up a
smoke, the filmmaker had also seen that she was a blond. A few minutes in the
cold night air and Loveless returned to bed and the warm naked form of Charlotte.

Like Jerry, Collin also did
double duty on the movie set. Because of his lithe Goth appearance, from early
on Loveless intended on using him as
Zombie Number One.
He could have
easily done the role without make-up, but when the make-up artist had finished
with him, Collin was truly terrifying. Mottled skin hung off his rotted fleshy
corpse face. He had the stiff, lumbering zombie walk down pat. When he and
zombie Karen appeared in a scene together, it was a match made in Hell.

Working on the side of the
mountain was slow going. It was covered in mud and half the time, while moving
lights and cords, you had to practically crawl hands and knees through it.
Matty, the DP, kept his composure, standing nearly knee deep in mud, checking
his equipment and preparing for another shot like a big game hunter waiting for
the next charging rhino.

On a particularly cold and dreary
night, Loveless talked Collin into letting him bury him alive. Donovan wasn’t
there. Charlotte was. She sometimes had trouble with the envelope the filmmaker
was constantly pushing. Her maternal instinct - for seemingly all mankind -
kicked in from time to time. Charlotte raised some concerns about what they
were about to do. Burying a human being alive was something that only a bunch
of people standing around on a film set wouldn't think was strange. But,
despite her concern, Loveless absolutely had to have the scene where a zombie
comes bursting up out of the grave. Zombie number one would be the demon
Jeremy's first emissary to rise from the graves of Lord's Lane and position
himself outside Grace's home, soon followed by a small army of other recently
risen corpses, cutting off the humans inside from the outside world and leaving
them virtually no hope of escape. Loveless didn’t want to cheat the scene with
quick cuts or a funky angle. The filmmaker wanted the scene in one shot, full
frame, dead on and in slow motion. For that, everything had to be perfect.
Collin performed spectacularly and they got the shot on the first take. After
Loveless yelled cut, Collin keeled over in stages. Apparently he had inhaled
prematurely and breathed in a sizable dose of dirt. For a few moments it looked
like they were going to have to take him to the emergency room. But Charlotte
flushed his nostrils over and over again with saline. Collin vomited out the
rest.

Three days later, Gavin, a local
who had been playing the role of a zombie in “The Black Album,” didn’t show up
for work. When Jerry and Collin went to his trailer park home to check on him,
they found the door unlocked. Gavin was in his living room on the couch. He
looked ever bit the zombie, only he wasn’t in make-up. Gavin was dead, the
apartment littered with bottles of beer and Jack Daniels. In the dead man’s
hands, resting on his lap was a photograph of him at ten years old, as a
Catholic school altar boy. The official coroner’s report listed it as:
Death
by misadventure. Accidental alcohol poisoning.

At the time, everyone was
saddened by the man’s death. But it was still too early. Too little had happened.
No one thought to connect it to the movie shoot.

So the show went on.

Another night, while running
power to the movie lights on the hill from the house, they kept blowing the
house's power. Jerry and Collin took turns turning it back on at the circuit
box. The lights went out again in the middle of a shot. But this time Loveless
looked around and noticed that all the lights for miles around were out. The
entire neighborhood and area was experiencing a blackout.

“Holy shit! We blew the entire
friggin' power grid,” Jerry whistled in amazement.

It was Matty who understood the
ramifications first, “Quick, get all this equipment off the hill. NOW! Con
Edison is going to be here soon.”

A mad dash ensued in which crew
personnel and actor alike, raced to break down the lights and equipment and get
it all into the cabin home. As the last piece of equipment was brought into the
house, a huge Con Edison truck appeared on the street at the top of the stairs.
It had so many spinning colorful lights on it, for a second it looked like a
grounded UFO.