Make Me Dead: A Vampyres of Hollywood Mystery Read online

  The rest of Angela’s booth was photos and movie memorabilia. She had some hard-to-find black and white shots of ‘my mother’ from The Twilight Zone that I must have signed back in the sixties. She had signed scripts from the movies she’d catered; props she walked off with; costumes she bought at discount; even the personalized chair backs the stars didn’t take home. She had the powder blue, 2' tall wig Adrienne Barbeau wore in Burial of the Rats, which was such an unbelievably fatuous film there’s bound to be some rabid fan who’ll salivate over it. Angela ought to do really well this weekend.

  I left her and Peter arranging her merchandise while I explored the table on her right. The vendor was an ex-stuntman who’d lost three fingers filming an ad for that rifle made for kids. He was selling laser discs, VHS tapes, pirated Japanese anime, bootleg TV shows, and DVDs of all the classics: Mothra, Bubba Ho-tep, Halloween. He had The Midnight Meat Train (Bradley Cooper before he was big enough to request Angela’s catering service), Donovan’s Brain (Nancy Reagan, pre-First Lady), The Thing From Another World (Jim Arness, pre-Gunsmoke), and John Carpenter’s The Thing (Kurt Russell, pre-Goldie Hawn). He had one bin filled with everything my studio, Anticipation, has produced, and another with just the films I’ve starred in. That was nice of him.

  Across from him was the Troma booth, where Lloyd Kaufman had hung a larger-than-life-sized cutout of the Toxic Avenger. When I bought Anticipation Studios, Lloyd was the first one I went to for advice. His company has managed to survive for forty years as one of the true independent film studios and he’s given a lot of major stars their first jobs. Kevin Costner in Sizzle Beach, U.S.A., Billy Bob Thornton in Chopper Chicks in Zombietown, and Vanna White in Graduation Day. David Boreanaz, long before he played Angel in Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, played a vampire’s victim in Macabre Pair of Shorts, and Oliver Stone made his acting debut in The Battle of Love’s Return. Lloyd’s booth was selling posters and DVDs of those and his later releases: Poultrygeist; Mutantz, Nazis and Zombies; Return to Nuke ’Em High Volume 2, and Occupy Cannes!

  I was walking across to ask the girl in the Troma booth if Lloyd was nearby, when an albino python slithered down the aisle between us. The girl in the booth let out the kind of scream I hadn’t heard since Anne gave birth to Louis XIV. (That was a scream.) Then she grabbed the Toxic Avenger cutout and hurled it at the snake like a discus. It missed by six feet, but managed to knock down an entire array of Daryl Dixon bobble-heads and assorted knives and crossbows. The bobble-head vendor chased after the rolling Dixons, cursing the Troma girl when he cut himself on an antique quarrel. Miss Troma kept screaming while the snake made its way over the remaining bobble-heads to disappear into the camping tent. There was a teen-ager in the tent, trying on costumes. He freaked, caught his Robin cape in the door flap, and pulled the entire tent down on top of him as he tried to get away. The python slid on down the aisle.

  “Ah shit, stop screamin’, y’all, he ain’t gonna hurt ya.” SuzieQ came around the corner. She was dressed in her belly dance costume, two feet of chiffon on six feet of bi-sexual Texan, looking for all the world like a blond Mata Hari. She had a small orange milk snake curled around her bicep like a bracelet, and a fat green boa resting on her shoulders like a… well… a boa. She walked over, shoved her fist in the snake’s path, and we all watched while that huge white python glided up her arm and came to rest on top of the boa. She looked like she had a 40 lb. green peppermint stick around her neck.

  “Ain’t he amazin’?! I’ll be damned if that little rascal didn’t push up the handle on his cage and come out here lookin’ for Peter. I swear he’s the smartest of the whole bunch. I shoulda named him Huey Long.”

  SuzieQ dances with snakes for a living. She names them after slimy politicians. She also wrangles them on movie sets. I’d hired her 5 years earlier to handle the snakes on Bride of the Snake God, with Bruce Campbell. We met again at Angela’s on Christmas Eve. She’s an old friend of Peter’s and the tenant in his guesthouse. Seven months ago, when Maral tried to get Peter out of my life permanently, she had SuzieQ kidnapped and used as bait to draw Peter into a deadly confrontation. Obviously that didn’t work.

  The loudspeaker came on with an announcement that the doors to the Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner ballrooms would be opening at 11 a.m.

  “I’d better get back to the stage,” I said. “Peter, would you walk me over there? Looks like Monk is still working on security. Thanks for bringing Spiro Agnew, SuzieQ. The Snake God fans are going to love doing photo-ops with him.”

  “Yep,” Suzie said, “He’s a big draw. I was going to bring Rob Ford, but he’s bigger’n all hell and I couldn’t fit his cage in with the others. But you just wait ’til they recognize Anthony Wiener from Snakes on a Train.” She flicked tongues with the errant python. “They’re really going to go nuts.”

  2. OVSANNA

  Ernst Solgar, Esq., Clan Obour, 470 years older than I am, and the only attorney I know who gives true meaning to the term bloodsucker, lives by the lawyers’ maxim, “Never ask a question you don’t know the answer to.” A maxim any good on-camera entertainment reporter should keep in mind.

  I’d taken a break from signing, gone to my suite to check on the box office numbers for Satan Gone Bad, and was walking back to my table with Monk clearing the way when a camera crew inserted itself between us. A dark haired too-good-looking-to-be-a-real-journalist shoved a microphone in my face.

  “Ms. Moore, Mac Newell from the Bill O’Reilly Show on Fox News. Do you mind answering a few questions about your new film?”

  We film producers have a few maxims, too. One is “Never pass up free publicity.” I’d list the others, but Disney would probably sue me.

  “No, go ahead, Mac. What would you like to know?”

  “What’s the overriding message the audience can take away from Satan Gone Bad? Do you think the audience identifies with Satan, can they understand what he’s going through? And is it Satan’s dilemma that prompted you to make this movie at this time in your career?”

  This guy must have trained at the pre-show for the Oscars. I pride myself on being able to field almost any interview question thrown at me, especially the ones I’ve been asked a thousand times, like “Is Tom Cruise really gay?” and “Did your mother ever sleep with Warren Beatty?” Or more recently, “Have you had sex with Gerard Butler?” But this time all I could do was stare at the guy. Fortunately Monk stepped in.

  “Excuse me, Ms. Moore, but we’ve got to get back to your table.”

  “I’m sorry, Mac, we’ll have to do this another time,” I said, as graciously as I could in the face of inanity. I turned to go.

  He wouldn’t let up. “Do you watch Bill O’Reilly, Ovsanna?”

  Never ask a question you don’t know the answer to. Lawyers’ maxim broken once.

  “No, I don’t. Ever. I was asked to be on it once, though. I hear Bill is a big fan of Vatican Vampyres.”

  “Well, do you have anything to say to him?”

  Lawyers’ maxim broken twice.

  “Not really. I can’t think of anything.” Unless you want to talk about his war record.

  Three seconds of dead air on camera before he recovered enough to try one last time.

  “Well, don’t you want to say ‘hello, Bill’?”

  I didn’t have the heart to torment him any longer. “Oh. Of course.” I waved at the camera, “Hello, Bill,” and walked away.

  The fans at my table were much more fun to talk to.

  “Oh, Ms. Moore, I just love you. I mean, I really love you. I saw Satan’s Succubus when I was about eight years old and it’s still the scariest movie I’ve ever seen. I showed it to my girlfriend. She almost ran out of the house. And you look fantastic. I mean, you don’t look any older than you did in that movie. I mean, what year was that? It must have been the late 90’s, right?”

  And so it went. This was my first convention appearance. I knew horror fans were devoted, but I hadn’t realized how devoted they were. P
eople brought all kinds of things for me to sign, including their body parts. One fellow had the entire poster for Blood on the Bayou tattooed on his back. Another woman had my name tattooed down her bicep, under Tony Danza’s face. I couldn’t even ask her to explain that one. The fans had on costumes from The Convent II, and Demons in Distress, and one guy was a walking milk carton covered with pictures of the actors from The Milk Carton Murders.

  My favorite image of the evening was a Goth twenty-something biker in black leather jeans, black Doc Martens, and a sleeveless black leather vest. His naked chest was a mural of multi-colored ink and his ears, nose, and nipples were pierced with multiple rings. His head was shaved on either side of a three-inch wide, bleached white mohawk, with the remaining hair gelled into thick triceratops’ spikes stabbing upward, ending in a foot long tail down his back. And in his arms he held an infant. A four-month-old baby boy resting his head on dad’s shoulder, while daddy patted him on the back and rocked from side to side as they waited in line.

  * * *

  Someone in one of these costumes was a schizophrenic. I caught the scent and stopped signing long enough to identify the source.

  It’s one of the talents of my species: the ability to detect odors from miles away. I think of it as a gift, unless I’m traveling through Elizabeth, New Jersey. Then, it’s a curse. But I’ve always thought it’s a shame my kind can’t let our sensory talent be known. We’d be great on the battlefield sniffing out IEDs. Of course you couldn’t trust us around a lot of bodies blown to bits. Or in the medical field, identifying cancers on patients’ breath. I’m certain if I’d convinced Van Gogh what I knew early on about his mental state— from the redolence of schizophrenia— I could have saved him his ear. Ah well.

  This time the scent was coming from a middle-aged woman dressed as an aging Laker Girl. She was wearing white knee high boots, a yellow miniskirt, and a purple hoodie, and her gray hair was pulled up in a ponytail. No, wait, I was wrong. Not a Laker Girl. Her hoodie had Sunnydale High stenciled on it. She was trying for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I couldn’t imagine why; she had a good thirty years on Sarah Michelle Geller, and at least sixty pounds. Mama Cass, maybe, but not Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

  She smelled like Vaclav Nijinsky. Like he smelled the night I saw him dance Albrecht with the Ballet Russe. That was the performance that led to his banishment from the company, after the Dowager Empress pronounced him obscene for dancing without his modesty trunks. It was years before his breakdown, but I noticed a faint odor of schizophrenia enveloping him even then. I’d recognized it from Vincent. Now the same odor was coming off this woman as she stood in line to get my autograph.

  The last place a schizophrenic needs to be is at a horror convention. Even without psychosis, it’s like a trip through the Kingdom of Yr. I couldn’t imagine what the poor woman was experiencing.

  She was red-faced and sweating, mumbling to herself. I filtered out the conversations around me and concentrated on her words.

  That’s another talent of my species; we can hear sounds from half a mile away.

  She spat out the words in a peculiar, staccato speech pattern. “I know who you are, Ovsanna Moore. I know who you are. Don’t you recognize me? They show up, they scare us, I beat them up, and they go away.”

  I didn’t recognize her, but I recognized her last line. She was quoting Buffy. With a 450-year-life span and an eidetic memory, I’ve got a lot of garbage floating around in my head. That includes dialogue from TV shows I’ve watched. I remember laughing out loud at a scene in which Buffy is deciding what to wear to a party. She holds up a trashy, tight-fitting dress and introduces herself to her mirror. “Hello, I’m a slut,” she says. Then she holds up a flower-printed, cotton housedress with a Peter Pan collar and says, “Hello, can I offer you a copy of The Watchtower?”

  But this woman wasn’t quoting the jokes. She continued muttering, spitting out the words. “I’m gonna need a weapon. I’m gonna need a big weapon. Seize the moment, ’cause tomorrow you might be dead. I know who you are. I alone will stand against the vampires.”

  I wondered which came first, her choice of costume or her belief that she was actually a vampire slayer. Which led to which?

  If we’d been alone, dealing with a madwoman who believes that my kind actually exists wouldn’t have been a problem. I could subdue her and send her off with Monk to the local loony bin. But in front of this crowd of fans who were uploading videos to YouTube non-stop, I was going to have to be a bit more creative.

  I kept an ear on her schizophrenic chatter while I autographed a vinyl of Cody Carpenter’s score to Hallowed Night. She looked harmless enough, but then so did Nicola Edgington when she begged the British police to lock her up because she feared she’d have another psychotic break. They didn’t, and she stabbed two strangers, killing one as she had killed her mother years earlier.

  The owner of the Hallowed Night LP was excited to learn Cody himself was signing in the other ballroom. He raced off to find the composer, and the psycho Buffy pushed her way farther up the line until she was standing in front of me. She had mother-of-pearl barrettes holding her ponytail in place, and a fat wooden pencil hanging from a string around her neck. A backpack completed the high school Buffy theme.

  “I can beat up a demon until the cows come home,” she spat through closed lips. “Don’t you recognize me, Ovsanna? Don’t you recognize me? I know who you are, why don’t you recognize me?” She was becoming increasingly agitated.

  I didn’t want to upset her anymore than she was. “Well, yes, I do. Of course, I do. You’re Buffy, aren’t you? Would you like an autograph? Do you have something you’d like me to sign? Maybe something in your backpack? Or would you like to pick out a photo?” I turned to get Monk’s attention. He was at the foot of the stairs leading to my table, keeping an eye on the line of fans that, by this time, was out the door and into the hall. He had his back to me.

  Before I could call his name, the woman clambered on to the table and screamed, “I know who you are, you bitch! Vampires of the world, beware!”

  And with that, she tore the pencil from her neck and lunged at me, brandishing it like Buffy’s ubiquitous stake.

  3. PETER

  I’ve been seeing actors in costumes since my mom plopped my cradle next to the tuna salads on the catering truck. Ten years ago, when I was technical advisor on L.A. Undercover, we shot at Paramount, where the commissary looked like a parliament of alien nations. And I’ve spent years moonlighting on protective details for some of the most wasted rock-and-rollers and no-talent ass clowns in L.A, not to mention Miley Cyrus. So I’m used to seeing outrageous wardrobes and outlandish costumes and even more outlandish behavior, but this was my first horror convention and I have to admit, I’ve never seen anything like it. It wasn’t even one o’clock and the place looked like a Mardi Gras float designed by George Romero.

  The tattoos alone could give Dali a run for his money. One guy’s face was completely covered in alternating black squares, like a checkerboard; he was bald, the checkerboard collided with a jagged turquoise blue lightning bolt across the back of his skull and then continued down his body where red dragons and green snake-tongued turtles battled across his chest. I guess it cut down on the need for soap— who’s going to notice any dirt with all that ink?

  I don’t know what I found more fascinating— the designs themselves or the balls it took to expose the bulbous bodies they were drawn on. Did that guy really think a tattoo of Oprah lifting weights on his gut was going to attract a female audience? And the one of the bloody tampon resting on its plastic container— who was that for? Who wanted to look at that every day?

  Since I’d met Ovsanna I’d watched her battle some of the most grotesque supernatural beasties imaginable. Six months ago I’d gone up against one by myself— a rougarou, as SuzieQ called it. A friggin’ alligator-wolfman hybrid hellbent on having me for dinner. Not one of those grotesqueries was as disturbing as some of the fans standing in Ovsan
na’s line. I’m not sure I can even do justice to describing the guy who’d shaved his head and inserted inch-long cone-shaped balls under the skin at his hairline. It looked like he was growing horns and they hadn’t broken through his scalp yet. Above those, on the crown of his skull, he’d glued four pointed silver spikes— at least, I hope they were glued. From the rest of the piercings on his face, for all I knew they could be permanently attached. I counted fifty stainless steel balls of varying sizes inserted around his eyes, in his cheeks, above and below his lips, and outlining his jaw. Most of them looked like #8 birdshot, but there were a couple of good-sized ones in the middle of his forehead, with a red devil tatted around them. His hairless eyebrows were inked in royal blue curlicues and he’d used the same color on an intricate design of someone else’s nose and mouth tattoed on his own chin and neck. Like having another face below his face. Right under his lip he’d inserted a two-inch long gemstone, an opal maybe, or turquoise, and of course he had the obligatory iron-tipped silver nose ring. Two black rings covered his nostrils, but from where I stood I couldn’t tell if they were attached and resting there or if he’d split the skin and inserted them. I was pretty sure if I got up close and looked at him in profile, I’d be staring at his septum through an inch wide circle. I really didn’t want to get that close. He’d stretched his earlobes by four inches. They grazed his shoulders, weighted down by ivory-carved monkey earlobe plugs.

  I was standing below the stage in the corner of the room opposite the entrance for Ovsanna’s line of fans. Once I got used to the bizarro crowd, I could keep an eye on her and all the people snaking through the cordoned-off area that led up the stairs to the stage and then down along the twenty-foot table where her photos were laid out. It looked like United’s security line at LAX; only there’s never been a TSA agent quite like Ovsanna.

  She was sitting behind the table closest to me. She looked fantastic. All that black hair cuddling the shoulders of a deep purple dress that clung to her body like Saran Wrap. I couldn’t see her legs behind the tablecloth, but I knew how good they looked. I also knew I’d better start concentrating on something else or I was going to need a costume myself— maybe a zombie nun’s habit to cover my growing exuberance. Monk stood behind her, scanning the crowd, and there were three people sitting next to her taking tickets and helping fans choose their favorite photo.