The Mirrors Read online

  There will be sacrifice (but then again, no worthwhile calling is without it). I just have to keep in mind the end result: a future in which Champ and I would have parts to play in the real world. A future for just Champ and me (no more Huck), with our shiny gears intermeshed with those of our offspring.

  Usefulness and prosperity for all three of us.

  Only time will tell. The industrial arts school seems quite promising. The possibilities are limited only by our scores on the entrance aptitude test.

  The Last Kid Scared By Lugosi

  On February 12, 2031, Margie Dale of Clarksville, Indiana, exhumed the remains of Béla Lugosi. It was a balmy night at the cemetery in Culver City, California—so much warmer than she was used to. That helped. Gave her creaky body the stamina to hide in the shadows until the coast was clear of security guards. Gave her resilience to dig for hours with shovel and hoe. I must look like the grave robbers at the start of Frankenstein, she thought to herself. Or maybe one of the angry villagers, holding her farm implement aloft, eager to use it to strike the creature. She sighed. Good movie, that one. Better, even, than Dracula. She looked down into the dark maw of the grave and whispered to her not-yet-revealed quarry, “No offense, Béla.”

  She would have preferred to exhume Boris Karloff’s grave, but there wasn’t one. Not really. He’d had himself cremated, and his ashes were all the way in England. Ashes just wouldn’t do for her purposes. And England—yikes! The Greyhound was expensive enough. She’d also briefly considered trying this with Lon Chaney, Jr., but his body had been donated to science. So it was either Béla or no one.

  She’d chosen this night because the psychic in Louisville had told her that this is when the energy would be right. It was the one hundredth anniversary of Dracula’s release. If ever there was a time when the spirit of Lugosi would want to come back and re-inhabit his body to walk among us, this would be it. The Louisville psychic had worn slacks, a purple T-shirt, and a gazillion rings on her fingers. She’d spoken with a deep Southern accent. Margie didn’t find her at all impressive in either her appearance or speech. She wasn’t like Maleva, the gypsy fortune teller from The Wolf Man. That chick was the real deal.

  She dug and she dug until her shovel hit something hard. It took nearly an hour to bust open the vault and another half-hour to bust open the coffin. She bit her lip, swallowed a lump in her throat, and gazed at the remains of a Hollywood legend. There wasn’t as much to glance at as she’d like: poor Béla was just bones, adorned in the tuxedo and Dracula cape he’d been buried in. But even though the flesh and its ichor was long gone, their stink lingered. It was a good thing she’d gone to Home Depot beforehand and picked up a filter mask that (mostly) blocked out the stench.

  “I’ll raise you,” she promised in between dry heaves. “I’ll raise you from the grave and then you’ll be scary again.”

  That was the whole point of this resurrection: to restore Béla Lugosi to his rightful place in the pantheon of film gods. He’d been slipping into obscurity. This couldn’t be allowed to continue.

  There had been one particular evening when it all crystallized for Margie, that this was what she had to do. She’d taken the bus into Louisville to see Dracula shown on the big screen at the Palace Theater during a day-long event highlighting antique black-and-white films. It had been a poorly attended showing—open to the public but truly intended for a handful of film historians in the area who had heard of this curiosity and wanted to see it exhibited in person, in a theater of the sort that would have shown it at the time of its original release. She’d cringed in her seat when she saw hands creeping out of coffins—cringed as she had when she’d been a child and first seen those hands and those coffins on the Saturday afternoon horror show. But the scholars hadn’t had the same reaction: they’d started laughing! And they’d just kept laughing after that! Laughing at Béla’s accent when he slowly enunciated the word “evening,” laughing at the exaggerated stage-playstyle mannerisms he used when avoiding Dr. Van Helsing’s mirror. If she had been outside of the theater, listening to the commotion, she’d have thought the film was a comedy.

  The question-and-answer session afterward had been even worse. One young film student—little more than a child, really—had raised his hand and asked why Tod Browning had elected to forgo CGI. Another one had asked where Dracula’s fangs were. All the discussions had focused on what the film was missing (fangs, blood, gore) instead of what was there (restraint, chills, atmosphere). That’s when Margie had made the decision to embark on this most desperate of maneuvers. If Béla Lugosi needed to be disgusting to trigger a scare again, then she’d show the world a Disgusting Lugosi. She’d make Béla scary again. Unignorable. She would take his reanimated corpse to one of the news channels. Given that there were literally hundreds of them these days, there had to be one that would show off her grotesque miracle. And when that happened, he would be famous again.

  But when she looked at the fruits of her labor, she wondered if even this would be grisly enough. Yes, the remains were rank—that would lend Béla a certain repulsion, but all the flesh was gone. He’d have no gruesome decay to show off, no wounds, no maggots. His half-decayed cape would look cartoonish when seen draped over the bony shoulders of a skeleton. Moreover, poor Béla would only be a single zombie. Such threats had been out of vogue since the turn of the century, at least. Audiences in the thirties—the present-day thirties, that is—were only frightened when faced with an army of ghouls, rendered by the computer graphics that reminded them of the video and holography games they so enjoyed. One creature, however desiccated and uncanny, was insufficient to arouse more than—dare she think it?—pity, if not outright laughter.

  But she had not come all this way for nothing. She’d endured thirty hours on a bus for this opportunity. She’d violated laws. She’d spent a small fortune (by her standards, at least) on the potion. She wasn’t about to forgo using it. She wriggled the vial out of her pocket, took a deep breath, unscrewed the lid, and poured the contents into Lugosi’s gaping teeth. (True, he had no esophagus left with which to swallow, but where else was she to pour it?)

  Defying all laws of science, the skeleton spoke. “I vas een a nice place,” it said. “I vas asleep. I teenk I have been asleep a long time. Vhere em I now?”

  “You’re in your body, Mr. Lugosi. It’s the one hundredth anniversary of your most famous film.”

  “Lu—go—si?” the skeleton said. Then it groaned.

  “Feelm?” It shifted around in its coffin. Its skeletal fingers grazed its cape. “Dracula?”

  “Yes, of course, Dracula! I’ve brought you back on the one hundredth anniversary. So you can be remembered again.

  So you can frighten again.”

  “Pardon me, madame, I had forgotten who I vas. I had forgotten vhat it vas like to be human; forgotten, indeed, vhat a ‘human’ vas. Forgotten vhat fear vas. I have been now sleeping the sleep of the dead more years than I vas avake and among the living. Zees is who I em now. Zees is who I vunt to be. Dead … asleep … not even dreaming … at one veeth the dirt and the creatures of the dirt. Vhy must you remind me of zings past? Vhy must you call me a name I have not been called een seventy-five years?”

  Confused, Margie could only stammer. “W-what is your name now?”

  “Notheenk,” Lugosi said.

  “But, Mr. Lugosi, your fans—”

  And then it happened, the moment she’d been waiting for: he stood up in his coffin. Stood there, by the light of Margie’s flashlight, majestic. Imperial. But that sight lasted only a moment. The skeleton had stood up for only one reason. Its right hand grabbed its left leg and gave a hard tug. There was a scraping, popping noise as bone came unjoined from bone. When it had fallen, the hand did the same with ribs. With teeth. With skull. The Lugosi Skeleton was tearing itself apart.

  His voice was now marinated in anger and bitterness. “No memory. Let me sleep. I don’t vunt zees vorld. I vunt only the dark. I had forgotten who I vas. Vhy c
an you not do the same?” And there was a loud rattling as bone slammed against bone. There was a splintering. A cracking. And the rattling … oh, the terrible rattling, as something like a seizure overtook the skeleton, as it slammed itself against the bottom and sides of the coffin, bent on bodily self-destruction. It wanted nothing more than to turn itself to dust, so that it might never again have to be summoned away from an eternity of consciousness so dull and fuzzy that it was practically unconsciousness. Nothing.

  Margie huffed to replace the coffin lid, winced with back pain as she replaced the lid of the vault. They were not put back on perfectly, but good-enough had to do. Then she stood on the vault and, with as much athleticism as she could muster, half ran, half climbed up the incline of the hole she’d dug. Stinging pain lit up her knees, and when she arrived at the top she collapsed on the grass to catch her breath.

  But the rattling … oh, the slamming and rattling and cracking and splintering … the noise of a sort of suicide could still be heard. How small must the pieces of bone be now? How small would they be before Béla felt satisfied? She didn’t know. She only did what she could. Took her shovel and her hoe and filled in the hole as best she could. Even then, she felt goosebumps rise up on her arms as she heard the faint churning of bone against bone, like rocks in a tumbler.

  She felt ridiculous even going through the motions of filling in the grave. What good was it? It would fool no one. Someone—a groundskeeper, a family member—surely someone would see it had been disturbed. And then there would be questions about who did the disturbing. What if there were security cameras tucked away somewhere and she hadn’t noticed them? It would be odd, in some ways, for a cemetery to be equipped with such devices, but what if?

  On the bus ride home she was always looking over her shoulder, wary of the presence of police. There were none. When she arrived home, she used her remote to flip past each and every news channel to see if there was even the briefest mention of the disturbance at Béla’s grave site. There was none. For months afterward, she scoured the Internet, looking for signs her misdeed had been noticed; for indications of the start of an investigation. There were none.

  She felt relieved. She felt heartbroken.

  I Am Moonflower

  Sunshine isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Just ask the flowers. Ask the bees.

  There once was a gardener who only planted morning glories. He was a well-meaning, devoted old man who treated flowers as he would have treated his own children (if he’d had any). He knew that flowers were more than just stems and leaves and petals. He knew they had a soul, like you and me.

  He liked the idea of flowers that closed up their petals at sunset, so they’d never have to look at the night. He knew that flowers—like children—were afraid of the dark. He wanted to protect them. Better to have them go to sleep at sundown and only wake up in the morning. Part of him may have suspected that they were, in a sense, cheated because there was a whole half of the day they’d never get a chance to see. But if he ever did harbor that suspicion, he didn’t think about it for long.

  Now in this garden there was a bee who pollinated the flowers. Late one afternoon, while she was hard at work, a shrew invaded her hive and killed everyone it found there. Even the Queen. This bee didn’t realize the attack had occurred until she flew back toward the hive and saw the shrew devouring three of her brothers. And as she saw the manic mammal tearing apart her family, she grew fearful and bitter, and hid deep inside the petals of one of the morning glories.

  The daylight hadn’t protected anyone.

  The bee didn’t know what to do. From having lived in this garden a long time, she knew the morning glory would close around her at sunset, trapping her inside. But she also knew that if the shrew saw her fly out of the flower, it wouldn’t rest until she was dead.

  She had no place to go.

  The bee despaired—not trusting her safety to the outside world and its shrews, nor trusting her ability to survive within the petals without being crushed or suffocated. She didn’t move. The flower had no choice but to close its petals when the sun went down. In mad rage the bee flailed her stinger into her captor.

  The morning glory had never before seen a bee act like this. Before the shrew’s attack, the bee had always been so pleasant. They’d worked together, harmoniously, for the wellbeing of the garden. But after feeling the bee’s stinger in its petals, the flower knew about grief and rage. Knew alienation and panic. Knew, for the first time, betrayal of trust—as the light had failed to keep the bee safe. No longer could the morning glory endure its name, for in that name was a lie that valued the light over the darkness.

  In the very core of its soul, the morning glory wailed and cried and cursed its name, and in that curse there was magick.

  It found itself able to open its petals and embrace the night, allowing the bee to come and go as it would (and protecting itself from her stinger in the process). It found itself able to look up to the moon and knew it had become a new creation. “I am Moonflower,” it said in its soul.

  The bee found herself changed by all this, too.

  No longer was she a bee at all; she had been transformed into a lightning bug of such brilliant luminescence that the Firefly King took her as his Queen. And it is said that Her Majesty still lives, a force of nature who will not die until the Earth itself dies. Such is the gift that Mother Darkness, the Goddess of Night, has bestowed upon her out of pity for all the great suffering she endured in the daylight.

  And she loved black skies ever after.

  The Meaning

  Entry in the Encyclopedia of Obscure Video:

  Witchfinders vs. The Evil Red (Unrated)

  Year of Release: Unknown (Possibly early 1970s)

  Country of Origin: Unknown

  Introduction

  As far as anyone can tell, Witchfinders vs. The Evil Red isn’t even this unusual twelve-minute film’s real name. It has no title or credits, and has been attributed to everyone from David Cronenberg to David Lynch.

  A group of film historians estimated the year of Witchfinders’ release based on the wear and tear evident on one of the surviving prints, as well as from the testimony of various Greenwich Village residents who recall seeing it as a short (shown before midnight screenings of Jodorowsky’s El Topo). However, special effects professionals who have watched the film declare that its visual effects are state of the art, even by today’s standards. The riddle of how such a technologically advanced piece of cinema could have been made so many years ago remains a significant motivating force behind the effort to identify the creative team behind this project.

  Witchfinders vs. The Evil Red is just a name the underground film community has, apparently through consensus, given this short. If there’s one single man or woman who originated the title, the identity of that person remains lost to the annals of cinematic history.

  Plot synopsis (including spoilers):

  The film opens with a panoramic shot of a raging river of blood. Viscera float in it like seaweed. Crimson waves crash against a muddy, peninsular coastline.

  A man rises up out of the muck of this muddy shore. A man made of mud. He doesn’t so much walk as waddle. He makes an awkward march toward the river bank and takes a gander at the sanguinary tide. The soundtrack amplifies the squishy sound of mud separating from mud as his lips break away from each other to speak. He points to the river. “Sorcery!” he snarls. “Sorcery!”

  The bloodwaves begin to break against the coastline more quickly, the tide rises, and before you know it the river’s gotten to the level of the Mud Man’s knees. He makes no effort to flee. “Sorcery! Sorcery!” he repeats, as though that’s the only word he’s ever learned. Eventually, the tide rushes into his mouth. But he continues on, gargling “Sorcery!” over and over until the bloodtide has its way with his body, until his head and neck and torso and appendages lose definition from all the erosion. Near the end you hear only the faintest wheezing of a residual pocket of air in the m
ud, then the loud crash of waves swallowing the Mud Man’s body whole.

  The final shot zooms in on a section of the muddy shore several yards inland from where the river has crested. A head, made of mud, erupts from the ground, like a molehill. Neck, shoulders, and arms emerge. A new Mud Man struggles out of the muck and points to the red river. There’s a squishy sound as his lips separate from each other to scream “Sorcery!” Then the screen fades to black.

  Interpretations:

  In his essay “Witchfinders at One with the Evil Red,” American Buddhist scholar Ben Tillen suggested an interpretation founded on the Zen ideal of non-dualism. “The film is rife with images of opposites in confrontation. The individual against nature, life against death, river against coast. Ingeniously, it resolves these conflicts by revealing that they’re all illusions. The individual is nature. Life is death. The river is in the coast, and the coast in the river.”

  Schopenhauer disciple Max Maxfield, Ph.D., has instead focused on what he calls “the agony of repeated death and resurrection.” According to Maxfield, “the image of the sentient being emerging from the muck must give one pause. I found myself yelling at my television, yelling at the poor mud fellow the way Burgess Meredith yelled at that boxer, Rocky Balboa: ‘Stay down,’ I found myself yelling. ‘Stay down! Don’t rise from the muck. There’s no so-called ‘sorcery’ to be found in the blood-ocean, or—if one is brutally honest with oneself— anywhere else!’”

  But the most well-known commentary on the film comes from the YouTube video series “100 Ordinary People React to Witchfinders vs. The Evil Red”; specifically the now-infamous Video #58 (“The Woman from Kentucky”). Although YouTube removed the video due to inappropriate content, one could (as of the writing of this entry) still view it on other, more obscure websites.

  A brief summary follows below for those who have not yet watched it.