Monster at The Black Heart
by Eric J. Guignard
Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:
Jack Madigan and Danny Weiner had been drinking all day at The Black Heart in Silver Lake, off Sunset Blvd. Jack owned the place, and he enjoyed bullshitting with customers. He’d been sitting at the bar like anyone else in the dim gloom by the TV, listening to Danny talk about the good old days in the ’80s, when Danny had agented Tonya Parslow from Cheerleader Scream Party and that Russian background actress from Hellmaker, even Jill Colton for a few months before she appeared in Island of Jack the Ripper.
Danny Weiner had been around the industry for over forty years. He’d never worked the A-list crowd, but he was a schmoozer and had an encyclopedic knowledge of horror flicks, and people recognized him wherever he went. He seemed content with his life, which maybe was the hardest quality to find in someone in Hollywood.
He was rambling on about the love trysts on the back lots at New World Pictures, the monsters and final girls having at it in coat closets; it’d taken twenty minutes just to recount the Jensen-Newark debacle, what with Danny’s asides and name-dropping, downing a couple Templeton Ryes, some digression into idolatry of Roger Corman, and a five-minute interlude for the washroom. All the while, Jack just sat there, nodding, listening half-heartedly while sipping his bourbon neat from a crystal tumbler, eyeing the late afternoon customers who strolled in and stumbled out and called, “Hi Jack” or “Bye Jack.” Jenna was serving today, and she’d been around as long as Danny. The entire back wall of The Black Heart was covered in actors’ glossy promo photos and headshots, all signed and framed behind glass, and Jenna’s was up there, too, from her short stint in the late ’70s, before the car crash that took away her glamor girl looks. What it couldn’t take away was the film scenes she’d stolen in her heyday.
All of this was what kept The Black Heart in business: the celebrities, the history, the morbidness. The bar had been around since the days of Edendale studios in the 1910s, and people said here was where celebrities came to die. In a way, it was as true as it was figurative. Screenwriter Clive Jones had suffered a heart attack by the old jukebox. Producer Devin Lee had overdosed on the toilet. There’d been others.
Jack leaned away, cracked his back with gusto. Straightened a coaster on the bar top. Breathed deep. Whenever he inhaled, he caught the ghosts of spilled vodka, damp leather, varnish, cigar smoke. He wouldn’t have it any other way.
Danny was in mid-story: “…So, Nelson wound up at the Blakely Awards, but he wasn’t being honored there, and his publicist drove that little T-Bird halfway to Pasadena searching for him. They had an office across the hall from Wally Edgars—”
The Black Heart’s door opened, and Jack saw the man coming in. Waved a finger at Danny to shut him off while the man shuffled to the bar’s other end, and Jenna went around to serve him.
Jack squinted. He’d always kept The Black Heart dark. But even so, it was hard not to recognize the newcomer. “Is that… that—?”
Danny turned. “Oh yeah, it’s Baby Blue. Haven’t seen him since Toastmasters at Norm’s.”
Blue wasn’t a baby, that was certain, rather upward of sixty or seventy years old. But he was the only three-eyed actor in town. The overlord from Acadian Death Mongrels, and the long-lost cousin of Rocky Dennis in Mask 2: A New Mask, and background demon and monster and shadowy hitman from a hundred other flicks.
Jack snapped his fingers. “Wasn’t he in that Twilight Zone episode, the one about the alien scout from Venus working in a roadside diner?”
Danny downed the rest of his Templeton. “C’mon, that was Barney Phillips. It wasn’t even authentic, just a prosthetic third eye.”
“Well, you know him? Baby?”
Danny shrugged. “Some. I mean, he just showed up on the back lots forty or so years ago, but naturally we’ve crossed paths.”
“Introduce me, yeah? I’d like to take his picture, add it to the wall.”
Danny made a sucking sound between his teeth. “I don’t know. He doesn’t look to be in a good mood.”
Baby Blue slammed a few bills under his fist onto the bar top, took his drink—a double whiskey by the appearance of it—and went to a small side table.
“How many people come in here, alone, and they’re not going through something?” Jack asked.
The barside TV was on, low volume, and it cast reflective shapes across Danny’s face, a flickering duality of white and black. “All right,” he said. “Get Jenna to bring me another Templeton.”
“You got it.”
The two of them walked to Baby’s table. The rest of the bar was empty by now, a quiet calm, with just the TV on, and buzz of fluorescents, and the drip of water from leaky pipes and taps.
“Baby! How you doing?” Danny asked. “Wanted to introduce you to a buddy of mine, Jack. He runs this place.”
Baby Blue barely glanced at them. “Not a good time, Danny.”
“Oh, ah… you need someone to talk to?”
Baby looked up, showed his face fully, the oily skin of it, the jaw set tight as if his teeth were grinding. All three eyes were visible: two of them fit into expected humanoid configuration, well-spaced on each side of the nose and colored a beautiful silvery shade of deep blue. The third eye was an enormous protuberance from his forehead, a shuddering orb the size of a golf ball that shifted among yellow and black and red; the pupil was a vertical slit, surrounded by tiny pulsing veins, and it leaked a trail of sticky dark fluid down Baby’s face. Looking at it made Jack feel sick.
But it was iconic, too. Baby Blue had been in more monster movies than anyone else working in Hollywood.
Baby said, “No,” and he downed his whiskey.
“Let me get you another of those,” Jack offered. He whistled at Jenna. “A round over here!”
Baby tightened his hand around the whiskey glass so that the tendons began to show on his forearm. “Like I was saying, it’s not a good time—”
Over the bar, the TV news flashed suddenly, bringing up a photo of Baby along with the barely heard voice of an anchorman, “It’s with sadness that today we must report the death of actor Baby Blue, best known for his three-eyed visage in Baby Savior and the grindhouse-hit Monster Baby Death From Afar. Baby was performing his own stunts when he fell twelve stories and was impaled on an iron spike…”
“What the fuck?” Jack demanded. “You died?”
Baby groaned, dropped his face so that his eyes were no longer visible and shook his head. “No. I mean, yes—”
“Wait,” the anchorman continued. “New reports are coming in, Baby was seen walking off from it! There must have been a mistake earlier—”
“So, you did die, but you didn’t?” Danny asked. “C’mon, Baby, what kind of nonsense is this?”
Baby’s head turned upward again, but only barely; his monstrous top eye alone glared at them both. “Anyone else in here?”
“Just us and Jenna.”
“All right,” Baby said in a voice that dropped all emotion. “I’ve got to get this off my chest. I’m three-lived, like I’m three-eyed.”
“Three-lived? What does that mean?” Jack asked.
“Like a cat?” Danny said. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“Cats have nine lives,” Baby said. “But it’s just a saying for them, anyway, an old adage. You kill a cat once, it’s dead then and there.”
“But you… you’re—”
“It’s a congenital condition. That’s all.”
“Three lives?” Jack repeated. “I don’t even understand what that means.”
“What more do I need to explain?” The whiskey glass looked likely to shatter in Baby’s tight grip. “I’ve got three lives, okay?”
“All right, Jack,” Danny said, waving a hand gently downward. “Let it go. It’s Baby’s own business.”
“No way, man, no way at all. I got to hear this. You’re telling us, that if you died right now, some gas explosion or someone shoots you in the head, you’d still live again?”
Baby deflated. His grip on the glass relaxed; he slumped. “No. Today was my second death… I already died before. It was of old age in 1942, so I’m just like everyone else now, out of chances.” He gulped back something, probably a sob because his throat wavered up and down. “And I’ve got fuckin’ cancer.”
Jack started counting the years backward, but Danny just said, “Oh Christ, is it bad?”
“The doctors say so. I’m supposed to start chemo in two weeks. It’s why I was doing my own stunts today, earning double the pay. I lied to the coordinators in order to do it, but guess they realize now I’m not as nimble as I’d claimed. Anyway, I’ve been trying to sock away as much money as possible. SAG-AFTRA only helps so much with the medical bills…”
“My mother had cancer,” Danny told him with a conciliatory pat on the shoulder. “It was a rough go, dicey for a few months. But she made it through.”
“Really?”
“Specialists got it before it went to stage four, though they had to remove a kidney.”
Jenna brought their drinks, and each of them took a glass and imbibed deeply.
Baby shared a look at them, and each of his eyes blinked appraisingly and in sequence. Left, center, right, then back again. “Hey, lock the doors would you? I don’t want anyone else walking in while I’m telling you this.”
Jack did so while Jenna took his place, hovering over three-eyed, three-lived Baby Blue.
“It’s my eye.” Baby pointed to his center eye, where the black fluid was leaking like growing tears. “It’s where the cancer is. Doctors said if the cancer gets out of the primary organ, it’ll spread into the blood. That’s when it turns to stage four, terminal. They want to remove it.”
“But your other eyes are okay?”
“Yeah.” He sighed. “I’d just become two-eyed, like everyone else.”
“And one-lived,” Jack said in awe, returning.
“Don’t remind me.”
Jenna put her hand on Baby’s shoulder. The side of her face was cadaverous in scar tissue, but she still had the high cheekbones and devil-may-care squint that had got her into Bloody Friday Blues. She said, “You’d be like everyone else, like me and Jack and Danny. Nothing wrong with that. We’re happy here.”
Baby looked at each of them, and his central eye blinked slow and turned upward. His face overall appeared disgusted at the idea. “I don’t think so. Plus, it’d be loss of my identity! No one will want to see me on-screen as only two-eyed. I’m not a thespian or anything. I don’t have the acting chops of Christian Bale or Daniel Day-Lewis… I couldn’t land a role of taking out the garbage.”
“If only I was an agent still,” Danny said very quietly, “I could help.”
“Doesn’t much matter. If I lose my eye, I’ll reinvent myself. Move up to Canada maybe. Or Denmark. Somewhere I won’t be recognized. Open an online shop. Be a nobody.”
“Hey now,” Jenna said. “Don’t call yourself a ‘nobody.’ You’ll still matter, still have purpose. You’ll always have impact on those around you.”
“You misunderstand,” Baby said. “I didn’t mean that as self-pitying. Sure, I’ll have an impact on those around me. I mean, I just realized a moment ago, it’s why I’m here with all of you.”
Danny caught Jack’s eye.
“The elephants’ graveyard,” Baby went on. “The place where celebrities die.”
“Aw, Baby, you’re not going to die here.”
“Of course I won’t. It’s strictly self-preservation.”
Jack rubbed at this chin. “What’s that now?”
“You’re celebrities, too, you know. Jack Madigan, owner of death bar, The Black Heart. Danny Weiner, Hollywood agent to scream queens. Jenna, the tragic starlet. I know, I know, maybe you’re not big names, but the way it is today, everyone’s a celebrity of something. It’ll add to the lore of this place, too, don’t you think? Keep your names immortal, at least.”
“Hold on,” Danny said. “Whatever you’re planning, think twice, okay? Don’t do anything rash.”
Baby tapped one finger on the table. “Let me put it this way, it’s like drinking: the mug gets empty, but then you fill it back up. I haven’t had to refill since the 1860s, but it’s time to fill up with three more lives. Start all over again. I’ll need my strength to fight this cancer scare.”
Jack started backing up, and Danny followed, bumping against a chair that toppled over with a heavy crash. Jenna just stood there, balking. Baby’s giant eye tracked each of them across the floor.
“It’s always been my favorite role, anyway: I’m a monster at heart. But they pigeon-holed me, these studios. I’m not just three-eyed. I’m also three-limbed.”
Baby pulled open his shirt, and Jack caught glimpse of a rapidly unfurling crimson arm with a giant lobster’s claw and a set of three spindly tubes like straws coming impossibly out from it, each angling for one of them, and he had little time to wonder at the sense of what had transpired in such a short amount of time before everything went dark.