THE MADNESS OF DR. CALIGARI by Dennis Weiler

Author:Dennis Weiler [Weiler, Dennis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Xulon Press
Published: 2016-10-20T04:00:00+00:00

***

Of course, that wasn’t how things worked out. We were still two days behind schedule—so at least four out from wrapping production—when the next tragedy occurred. This time it was after filming had ended for the day, but not everyone had yet gone home. Corny was in The Bodega, and I was sitting at a desk near the food services table making adjustments to the day’s notes. Other people were wandering to and fro in the mostly dark sound stage, doing things that didn’t mean much to me, when suddenly a scream rang out. “Rang out,” that’s how I’d have written it, anyway. What it did more was just suddenly cut the air—like a needle driven through your eardrum—and then just as suddenly die.

I jumped up, and the crew members who were coiling cables and moving lights stopped what they were doing and looked around, squinting into every shadowy corner of the big, flat sets. And then the director was there, stumbling out of the dark, his eyes wide and glassy, his bearded mouth hanging slack, his hands covered in blood.

One of the crewmen hit him in the head with something that made a clank, and he went down like a sack of potatoes and didn’t get back up. He died on the way to the hospital, without ever regaining consciousness, but nobody blamed the crewman much, because in the shadows behind the set, from where the director had stumbled, they found the body of another one of the native girls, her head crushed as if in a vice, chunks of meat cut from her thigh and arm and breast.

They did close us down then, of course, though the producer kept talking about finding another director, getting the cameras rolling again, right up until the moment he hanged himself in his house up in the hills. And that should have been the end of it, right? Killer caught, case closed. Corny should have gone back to living it up in Frisco ‘til his publisher finally cut him off, I should have gone back to ghost-writing whatever gigs I could get over the mail where nobody had to know my real name or see my complexion, or we should both have just cooled our heels and waited to see if there was ever another Blackstone movie that came our way.

So why did I drag the both of us out into the warm Hollywood night and back to the studio, Corny trailing behind me with a flask in his hand “for courage”? Because I had something that writers are supposed to have but that Corny lacked: curiosity. Of course, he would have claimed otherwise. “I have plenty of curiosity,” he would have said, “I just have more self-preservation.” Which was maybe true.

I went back because Corny had been right in his hotel room a few nights before. There was something very wrong going on at that studio, and while before I had been content to ignore it so long as the paycheck

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