Agents of Dreamland(9)
The creatures speak in a language that sounds like the buzzing of bees.
Back at the black tower, the villain wields an enormous spyglass and confides in his prisoner, revealing to her the recent discovery of a planet orbiting much nearer to the sun, a paradise of blues and greens, which he intends to conquer and enslave with a deadly heat ray. Then, he tells her, they will travel together through the aether to rule over this new domain as its rightful king and queen. Just how this trip will be accomplished is never fully explained, but the method of conveyance is clearly nothing so mundane as a rocket ship.
“Only our minds,” says the alchemist, “need leave this sphere and make the long, cold journey through the dark. These bodies we wear are no more, my love, than tattered garments we’ve outgrown. In the new world we’ll have new forms, new bodies.”
Two surgeons are summoned, stooped men who look more like vultures, and the white-haired woman is sedated with a drop of some narcotic tincture. The surgeons then strap a bizarre metal cap over her head, preparing to cut open the skull and remove the brain. Meanwhile, our hero, who has managed against all odds to wrest the sword from the claws of the flying crustaceans, battles the dragon thing that guards the tower gates.
The maiden. The mad scientist. The champion.
Three crisply drawn archetypes.
Think of them as tarot cards.
Think of the film as a reading.
According to the Los Angeles Times and various other newspapers and tabloids, the actress who played the heroine in The Star Maiden died a mere five weeks after production wrapped, having sustained massive brain injuries in an automobile accident. The irony hasn’t been lost on the morbid sort of movie buff who catalogs so-called cursed films. While the fact of her death is well documented, there are rumors that she’d become paranoid and left behind a diary with a very peculiar final entry, several pages that rambled on about nightly visits by “tall men in black suits” who came to the windows and watched her when they thought she was sleeping. They spoke in “buzzes and clicks,” she’s supposed to have written.
The actor who played the alchemist, he died the next year of a morphine overdose, after his homosexual love affair with a much younger screenwriter became common knowledge among his peers. He appears to have had connections to a number of hermetical and theosophical societies and to have corresponded during the last three years of his life with Aleister Crowley and other occultists.
As for the hero of the tale, he left acting in 1936 and moved to New Mexico, where he wrote a pair of science-fiction novels, Starlost and Sunfall, neither of which was ever published and both of which amounted to little more than barely coherent theories about life on Venus and Mars, a secret Martian base beneath the desert, and the role he believed aliens to have had in the emergence of Communism and the October Revolution. He was found dead in 1946, long after The Star Maiden was all but forgotten, the last print believed to have been destroyed in a Burbank theater fire.
And there was the cameraman who is said to have hanged himself during filming.
And the makeup artist who might have died a few hours after the premiere.
And the strangers said by some, including the director, to have haunted the set, men in dark suits who come off sounding an awful lot like the actress’s Peeping Toms.
Make of this what you will or make of it nothing at all.
Ten minutes from THE END, the eight-year-old boy loses his struggle, slipping from half awake to fast asleep. It’ll be twenty-six years and then some before he learns how it all played out, whether the maiden was rescued and the villain defeated. Twenty-six years before he’s known to those few who know him as “the Signalman” and he’s shown how the film thinly disguised as fiction a nightmare that unfolded on a remote Vermont farm in 1927. How it foreshadowed still other more ominous events in the decades after its release. One day, it will lead him, however indirectly, to a run-down diner in Winslow, Arizona.
The best foreshadowing never seems like foreshadowing.
5. Last of the Hobo Kings (Shining Road) (July 10, 2015)
BENEATH A SKY OF brutal blue, Engine 69 drags its silver snake, rattling and swaying and clanking along the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. It pulled out of Flagstaff fifteen minutes ago, rolling west across the Colorado Plateau. In his sleeper car, the Signalman sits with his back turned to the engine, looking east, the way they’ve come. He doesn’t like that vacant shade of blue hanging above the afternoon, and so he keeps his eyes on the green-brown patchwork of scrub and ponderosa pine. Snowcapped Mount Elden is growing small in the train’s wake and the Flagstaff skyline has been entirely lost to view. Only a hazy veil of smog remains to mark its place. Immacolata’s briefcase sits at his feet. Thanks to the fresh bottle of Scotch he picked up before boarding the Southwest Chief, he already has enough of a buzz that the night before is beginning to lose its edge. He’s thinking maybe he’ll even catch a little shut-eye before L.A., now that he’s finished writing out his report. Sure thing. A few more shots, and sleep won’t be so hard at all.
But then there’s a knock at the door to his compartment, four sharp raps, and at first he figures it’s just one of the attendants, because who the hell else would it be. An attendant, or maybe another passenger who’s mistaken the Signalman’s sleeper for their own. But when he draws back the blue privacy curtain, the face of the man standing in the corridor is all too f*cking familiar. And right now, maybe it’s not the very last face he wants to see, but it’s certainly high on the list. He briefly allows himself to entertain the fantasy that he won’t open the door, that he’ll pretend not to recognize the ferrety eyes and crooked nose, the thin lips and jutting chin. You got the wrong man, bub. So just keep moving. Louse up some other poor slob’s day.