Overkill

Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, the Phantom of the opera, the Werewolf, the Hunchback---they all showed up at Billy bob's first---and last---Fright Night

The phones were ringing and the lines were forming. From his second-floor film studio window, Billy Bob Rizzo viewed the mob of extras below, laughed out loud, clapped his hands and spun about to slap a telephone receiver to each ear, talking across them to his secretary, whose voice sounded as frazzled as her hair.

"Ms. Greene, get me Makeup. Hello, Arnie? Get over here with those costumes. Bye. Willy? How's the set coming? Nail it! You got three hours! Ms. Greene, what's that in your hand?"

"The portable phone."

"Throw it!"

"God, I wish I could." She handed it to him and was half out the door when he cried, "Get me Publicity!" The door shut.

"Where was I? Oh yeah." He discovered the portable phone in his hand. "Speak!"

"Billy Bob," a woman's voice said, "this is your lover."

"Which one?" he said. "Hey, I know. The Bride of Frankenstein?"

"Do I get the job?"

"Did you try out for it?"

"If that weekend in Ensenada was a tryout, yeah. Am I hired?"

"Hired, cookie."

"Don't you know my name?"

"When it comes to me, I'll call."

"Billy Bob, you son of a bitch."

"Now, that's a name!" He hung up.

"Publicity," said a voice at the (continued on page 138)Overkill(continued from page 96) door. Ms. Greene was half in, half out. Billy Bob seized the phone on his right, silence. Phone on his left, a voice.

"Napoleon!" said Billy Bob. "I didn't know you were back from Moscow."

"Tijuana is no nun's retreat," said the voice, falsetto with hysteria. "How can Publicity work while I'm gone if you don't stay in touch? Have you seen the battalions of bums and tramps around the Bastille?"

"I just threw 'em some cake. You gonna help me size 'em up? We need two monsters, two Phantoms, three Draculas, four Hunchbacks-----"

"I know, I know. You going to review the troops?"

"I'm already there!"

Tossing the phone to Ms. Greene as he ran, he heard her cry, "Sol's on the line, says he's cut the funds for your London After Midnight ride!"

They had put the people, once "homeless" but now extras, behind the studio front office from which Billy Bob Rizzo now burst.

He squinted through the noonday heat at a squad of Quasimodos to the left, 12 of the Baron's monsters, various sizes, to the right, and a mixed crowd of Transylvanian Counts and Paris Opera Phantoms between.

My God, he thought, they're awful without makeup! and started his march on the horror battalion when a tiny man in a checkered suit, just short of being a midget, yanked his elbow. He looked down at Kennisaw Mort, film critic for Daily Variety, whose reviews, like his name, were one half narcosis, the rest catalepsy. He had killed enough films and actors to fill Forest Lawn's mausoleums.

Now he clung to Billy Bob's elbow as Billy Bob plowed through the hot dust of a typical Valley noon.

"Say," said Kennisaw Mort, nodding ahead, "you're not really going to hire ginks to wander around your Fright Night Theme Mall are you, to get in the way of people coming in and out of your Midnight Château, yes?"

"You got it." Billy Bob nodded yet another lineup to one side. "Those are the starters. Weather's so hot out here we need substitutes to take over every hour or so, give the monsters a rest."

Kennisaw Mort stared and whistled. "Damn me eyes. Hey, yeah. There's your number one Dracula, there's Frankenstein's honorary son, and ain't that the Werewolf from your back lot in London?"

And it was true. The wandering actors, made up as lost souls in ancient films, stood perspiring, stepping forward when called by a man with a bullhorn, to display their neck bites, their midnight pelts, their ravenous razor teeth, their bulbous or cadaverous brows.

The newcomers gazed upon the old hands, disbelieving, then amused.

"Come on, Mort, help me pick the fresh recruits!" said Billy Bob, marching him by squad after squad, pointing, nodding, stopping to tilt his head and narrow his eyes, nod and move on.

"You, and you. Yes, you. And you. And you there, yes! God, look at this guy, Mort, been dead a week! Step out! Sign in. You, ma'am, Lord, if you're not Dracula's daughter! Congratulations! And you, sir. And that short one, put stilts on him!"

"There's just one thing," Kennisaw Mort piped in his midget's piccolo voice. "Your original geeks lurking around Frightful Acres, they're not frightful."

"What do you mean?" Billy Bob nodded another extra to head for Costume. "Explain!"

"I mean," squealed the little man, rocking back and forth on his clumsy legs, "your vampire runs around pretending to bite tourist ladies' necks, your Phantom of the Opera tears off his mask and grabs some other dame. The Karloff monster walks like he has leg cramps."

"Is that what you're going to put in your crummy preshow review?" Billy Bob glanced down at the mite.

"I already did," Kennisaw Mort shrilled, handing him this morning's rag. "I was here yesterday for your rehearsals of all the sideshow movie freaks. A laugh riot."

"It was supposed to be!" Billy Bob glared down at the little man.

"Yeah, but the original novels, the screenplays, the films, they weren't laugh riots. They were simple, direct, they had one element of terror in them, one scene that was so scary you remembered it forever. Take Karloff in The Mummy. You never saw the dead mummy walk out of the tomb, huh? Only a long strip of linen trailing in the dust! Lugosi! You ever see his Count, 1931, actually kill anyone? Hell, no."

"That was then, this is now." Billy Bob bulldozed this flea out of the way and stormed down a line of finalists.

"Yeah." The little guy moved up to falsetto. "But there's no scare, no fright, no-----"

"Disney." Billy Bob mopped his brow. "Disney has Goofy, Mickey, Donald and Grumpy in jumpsuits on Main Street and-----"

"They're supposed to be funny!" the tiny man cried, grabbing his brow as if, like Rumpelstiltskin, he might tear himself in pieces. "The way you go at it, the more these guys are out in the sun, the less terror. And anyway, they don't behave scary. Next thing you know you'll have Jesus here, banging folks with his cross!"

"Now, that," Billy Bob turned, "is blasphemy!"

"No." The little guy stood his ground in the middle of a hot Halloween afternoon. "This is blasphemy, they are blasphemous, you are the blasphemer!"

Billy Bob shoved him aside, grabbed the bullhorn from his assistant and cried, "Ok, everyone go to Costume and Makeup. Reassemble in two hours on the Phantom stage. Go!"

"Yeah," piped Kennisaw Mort, sprawled in the dust. "Send in the clowns."

•

Late afternoon. Twilight. The backlot hilltop of the Magical Film Center Arena. Dracula's Transylvania Castle, part Frankenstein's Tower of Power, with adjuncts of Notre Dame's gargoyles and the Werewolf's country graves.

Overture. A thousand people in the arena leaned forward, eager for panics, for dark joys, ready for all that destroys.

Billy Bob in the light-and-sound booth pressed his face to the glass, chortling.

"Look it!" he cried. "Ms. Greene, you get a gander at this?"

"I'm gandering." Ms. Greene was half out the door.

"Don't run to the ladies' now, we're ready to begin."

She shut the door. "Begin," she said.

"Ok, Roy. Sound." A wind rose. "Music." Someone played an organ. "Lights! Now!"

Shadows scurried up the sides of the Transylvania Castle walls, Baron Frankenstein's laboratory pulled lightning from the sky to strike a great organ where, bull's-eye, stricken, the Phantom spun, flung his mask in the air and wisecracked while the Baron's monster fell downstairs after a Bride more (continued on page 152)Overkill(continued from page 138) Brigitte Bardot than Elsa Lanchester, even as the Werewolf, shot by a game warden, was skinned of his pelt and draped over a Model A's fender to the hilarious shouts and cries of a stunned audience yanked this way, pulled that, by shadows and slapsticks. The Hunchback, free of his gargoyles, shrieked as the opera chandelier crashed on his hump. Dracula, banged full in the face by a child's leaden bouquet, wandered toothless, showing his gums to more hoots and guffaws.

All standing at last in a Radio City Music Hall Rockettes line with Phantom, Monster, Wolf, Quasimodo, Vampire, kicking the air and ricocheting off a papier-mâché cliff into Channel Five's News at 10 news.

The fax in Billy Bob's office jittered and jumped. The first line up was: Mort Kennisaw.

The second and last was: Overkill.

Billy Bob called the newspaper office. A piccolo voice sounded.

"Mort, you bastard, is that the whole review?"

"No," shrilled the tiny voice, "there's more."

"Read it!"

"Overkill.' How you like it so far?"

"Go on."

"Here's the rest. 'Overkill. Overkill. Overkill. Overkill. Overkill. Overkill. Overkill. Over-----'"

"I get the idea," said Billy Bob. "Is that all?"

"No. Lemme see. Twenty. Forty. Mebbe 65 'overkills' in a nice cluster. Put 'em in a winepress and the brew would kill thousands. Oh, yeah, there's P.S. 'P.S. Red-hot off my Ouija Board Internet: Mary Shelley, Victor Hugo, Gaston Leroux and Bram Stoker, $10 million lawsuit naming Billy Bob Rizzo Literary Enemy Numero Uno!' Billy Bob, you still there? Billy?"

Click.

Billy Bob sat staring at the dead-on-arrival phone.

It rang. He grabbed and choked it. "Bastard!"

"Bitch, I think."

"Ms. Greene. Where in hell are you?"

"In a wreck, by the Main Gate. There's a riot here wanting to get in."

"My God, it's Halloween! First crowd's gone home for tricks and treats. Second crowd's got their tricks done early and came here!" He froze. "There's gotta be a second show!"

"Dracula's gone."

"What?!"

"Frankenstein's monster left."

"Left?"

"Hunchback's vanished."

"Can't be!"

"The Werewolf-----"

"Hasn't showed up?"

"On top of which . . . no Phantom, no Opera."

"Good grief!"

"Yeah. Did they all disappear, you ask?"

"I'm asking!"

"Some didn't show! The Hunchback was last seen on the 1--5 to Frisco. The guy who plays Dracula is hiding out with a wife who doesn't want him. The rest. . . disappeared. You got an answer?"

"No," Billy Bob exhaled. "No." A long pause. "Turn the mob away."

"They'll want their money------"

"Pay it, my God," Billy Bob whispered. "Pay it."

"Wait! I'll tell the box office." She turned away and shouted. Lifting his binoculars he watched the ticket line break away and disperse.

"You still there?" Ms. Greene said.

"Not all of me. What happened?"

"You saw! My God, Billy Bob, that crowd ran from the show so fast, so mad!

We're lucky they didn't bomb the Castle and burn the Mill. The Phantom was hated most. One kid threw his Butterfinger up at the chandelier."

"Now that's hatred."

"Another thing." She took a deep breath and let it out. "Some of the cops down here don't think that the actors just left town. Maybe some of them were grabbed."

"No! Hating a show, wanting your money back's one thing, kidnapping's another. Have they-----?"

"Found some bodies?"

"I didn't mean-----"

"No bodies found."

"Damn, damn, damn."

Billy Bob swerved his binoculars. The crowd was almost gone. He shifted focus to Forest Lawn graveyard a few miles away. There were the marble hills, the mausoleums and the Boy David, cold naked in twilight.

"Boss?" Ms. Greene said from a long way off.

"Go home, grab a cold shower and make yourself a hot toddy."

"Back tomorrow, on with the show?"

"Allhallows? The Day of the Dead? You got to be kidding."

"Goodnight, B.B."

"Goodbye. No," he said, "so long."

Click. And he was alone.

Down by the box office gate the lights were going out, the stragglers were in their cars. On the streets beyond he could make out a few tiny bedsheet ghosts with their lantern pumpkins. He thought he heard laughter. He turned off the lights and stepped out into an abandoned studio.

The soundstages were locked, the alleys empty, the sets o a dozen cities pulling back in the dark. Not a night watchman in sight. He would be the watchman, then, on a final circuit, drink some hip-flask booze, walking, go home, turn in early, not answer the door, no tricks, no treats.

He checked a street in Baghdad, turned right at Paris, left at London, and a final turn brought him out on the stone porch of the old 1923 set of Notre Dame. He gazed up at the empty towers and the gargoyles worn almost to beauty by a half century of wind and rain, and tried the front door. Locked. No sanctuary, he thought, and rattled the door, and stopped because-----

He heard something.

From an avenue to his right, the faintest stir of sad voices, melancholy voices, voices in a funeral.

From a boulevard on his left, a drifting echo of feet skimming the cobblestones like a fall of autumn leaves.

From an alley straight on, a trembling rise and fall of shadows that rose and fell.

"Hello?"

There was no response.

He did not think to run, there was no reason to.

Yet as the shadows and drifts of leaves and soft voices came nearer and nearer, he felt needles of ice stab his fingers, invade his wrists, snake cold rivulets along his elbows and shoulders, to breathe winter on his neck. His teeth ached as if he had bitten snow.

What-----" he started to say.

From within the shadows came a sound as if someone had thrown a bucket of water high. There was a sizzle. A streetlight burned out.

Then, a tinkle of broken glass. Another light vanished.

The shadows, the autumn leaves, the whispers trembled on the rim of the marble porch of Notre Dame.

"It's late." He tried a laugh. "Must get home...."

He gestured as if to move them away.

No shadow moved. The darkness echoed the beat of his own heart.

"What're you doing here?" He squinted in and around the shapes. "Stash your costumes in Wardrobe. Crowd's gone. There's no second show. Halloween is over."

He stopped, dropped his arm, and smiled.

"Well, not quite over," he said. "Still, take off that makeup. Bad for the complexion. I-----"

He reached to touch one shadow-face and seized his hand back to stare at his fingers and sniff.

"No makeup," he said.

The shadow nodded.

Billy Bob jerked his head, swerving his gaze.

"Hey! Who are you? Who do you pretend to be?"

A whisper rose and fell. "Not pretend." Whisper.

A shadow with a terrible curvature of shoulder moved. A tall, very tall shadow joined him. A dark thing crawled on the marble with blazing eyes.

"Trick-or-treaters?" said Billy Bob.

The darkness shook as the half-seen faces moved from left to right: no.

"You've come to see---me?"

The shadows nodded.

"Why?" Billy Bob gasped.

For answer, the shadows turned their unseen gaze to fix on the Transylvania Castle on the hill, the laboratory fortress and the graveyard and the wolf forest, and on to that organ with its chandelier forever poised above its keys, and then back down along the 1923 Notre Dame facade past the stone beasts and the 12 apostles to find Billy Bob Rizzo. A great mournful wintry lamentation issued from their massed darkness. It was a lament for things that were lost and would never come again, things now dead and buried deep.

Billy Bob shuddered, fell back to rattle the cathedral door.

"What now?" he whispered.

The shadows melted forward a step, a step, and yet another. The pale faces lifted in the dark. The dim mouths murmured.

One word repeated again and again in the night.

"Overkill," they whispered.

The Baron's monster fell downstairs after a Bride more Brigitte Bardot than Elsa Lanchester.

"The Hunchback was last seen on the 1--5 to Frisco. Dracula is hiding out with a wife who doesn't want him."