Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

The young man’s blond hair was held by a beaded leather headband. Leech had a glimpse of an earnest schoolboy in East Berlin, poring over Karl May’s books about Winnetou the Warrior and Old Shatterhand, vowing that he would be a blood brother to the Apache in the West of the Teuton Soul.

Constant did a tight turn, calculated to show off, and drove off the track, bumping onto an irregular slope, pitting gears against gravity. Charlie kicked Sadie the chauffeuse, who did her best to follow.

Leech looked back. Atop the slope, ‘Squeaky’ stood forlorn, hair stringy, faded dress above her scabby knees.

“You will respect the way Charlie has this place ordered,” said Constant. “He is the Cat That Has Got the Cream.”

The buggies roared down through a culvert, overleaping obstacles. One of the girls thumped her nose against the roll-bar. Her blood spotted Leech’s scarf. He took it off and pressed the spots to his tongue.

Images fizzed. Blood on a wall. Words in the blood.

HEALTER SKELTER

He shook the images from his mind.

Emerging from the culvert, the buggies burst into a clearing and circled, scattering a knot of people who’d been conferring, raising a ruckus in a corral of horses which neighed in panic, spitting up dirt and dust.

Leech saw two men locked in a wrestling hold, the bloated quarter-century-on sequel to the Wolf Man pushed against a wooden fence by a filled-out remnant of Riff of the Jets. Riff wore biker denims and orange-lensed glasses. He had a chain wrapped around the neck of the sagging lycanthrope.

The buggies halted, engines droning down and sputtering.

* * *

A man in a cowboy hat angrily shouted “Cut, cut, cut!”

Another man, in a black shirt and eyeshade, insisted “No, no, no, Al, we can use it, keep shooting. We can work round it. Film is money.”

Al, the director, swatted the insister with his hat.

“Here on the Ranch, they make the motion pictures,” said Constant.

Leech had guessed as much. A posse of stuntmen had been chasing outlaws all over this country since the Silents. Every rock had been filmed so often that the stone soul was stripped away.

Hoppy and Gene and Rinty and Rex were gone. Trigger was stuffed and mounted. The lights had come up and the audience fled home to the goggle box. The only Westerns that got shot these days were skin-flicks in chaps or slo-mo massacres, another sign of impending apocalypse.

But Riff and the Wolf Man were still working. Just.

The film company looked at the Beach Buggy Korps, warily hostile. Leech realised this was the latest of a campaign of skirmishes.

“What’s this all about, Charlie?” demanded the director. “We’ve told you to keep away from the set. Sam even goddamn paid you.”

Al pulled the insister, Sam, into a grip and pointed his head at Charlie.

Charlie ignored the fuss, quite enjoying it.

A kid who’d been holding up a big hoop with white fabric stretched across it felt an ache in his arms and let the reflector sag. A European-looking man operating a big old Mickey Mouse-eared camera swivelled his lens across the scene, snatching footage.

Riff took a fat hand-rolled cigarette from his top pocket, and flipped a Zippo. He sucked in smoke, held it for a wine-bibber’s moment of relish, and exhaled, then nodded his satisfaction to himself.

“Tana leaves, Junior?” said Riff, offering the joint to his wrestling partner.

The Wolf Man didn’t need dope to be out of it.

Here he was, Junior: Lennie Talbot, Kharis the Caveman, Count Alucard—the Son of the Phantom. His baggy eyes were still looking for the rabbits, as he wondered what had happened to the 1940s. Where were Boris and Bela and Bud and Lou? While Joni Mitchell sang about getting back to the garden, Junior fumbled about sets like this, desperate for readmission to the Inner Sanctum.

“Who the Holy Hades is this clown?” Al thumbed at Leech.

Leech looked across the set at Junior. Bloated belly barely cinched by the single button of a stained blue shirt, grey ruff of whiskers, chilli stains on his jeans, yak-hair clumps stuck to his cheeks and forehead, he was up well past the Late, Late Show.

The Wolf Man looked at Leech in terror.

Sometimes, dumb animals have very good instincts.

“This is Mr. Fish,” Charlie told Al. “He’s from England.”

“Like the Beatles,” said one of the girls.

Charlie thought about that. “Yeah,” he said, “like the Beatles. Being for the benefit of Mr. Fish...”

Leech got out of the buggy.

Everyone was looking at him. The kerfuffle quieted, except for the turning of the camera.

Al noticed and made a cut-throat gesture. The cameraman stopped turning.

“Hell of a waste,” spat the director.

* * *

In front of the ranch-house were three more dune buggies, out of commission. A sunburned boy, naked but for cut-off denims and a sombrero, worked on the vehicles. A couple more girls sat around, occasionally passing the boy the wrong spanner from a box of tools.

“When will you have Units Three, Four and One combat-ready, Tex?”

Tex shrugged at Charlie.

“Be lucky to Frankenstein together one working bug from these heaps of shit, Chuck.”