Paul Levine - The Road to Hell

“ Mom!”

He could still see Gayle Gardner Macklin, but her image was fading.

“ Mom, don’t leave me. Please!”

Trembling, Kristin said, “Scott, you know your mother drowned in that car.”

“ No! She’s here now.”

“ Honey, you spoke at her funeral and bawled your eyes out.”

Scott propped one hand on the conference table and struggled to his feet. He brushed past his wife without even seeing her.

“ The judge should never have allowed you to handle the case,” Kristin said. “I knew something weird would happen.”

His legs felt rubbery as he staggered out, leaving behind his trial bag, the pleadings, the exhibits. His wife.

“ Scott, where are you going?”

She sniffed the air. “Did you start smoking again?”

No answer. He was gone.

A moment later, Kristin dropped into a chair. She examined a coffee cup on the table. Inside, a half-smoked cigarette. The tip still glowing.

French. Just like her bitch mother-in-law used to smoke. Before she went straight to hell. A shudder went through Kristin, and she crushed the cigarette into the bottom of the cup. From the doorway, she heard a melodious voice.

“ Kristin, dear. You look just darling in your workout gear.”

She spun around in her chair.

Omigod.

“ Last time we met, you were au naturel and grunting like a sow in heat.”

Kristin steadied herself against the fear. Her words came in forced breaths. “What have you become? What do you want?”

“ At long last, I am my true self. And all I want is justice.”

Paralyzed, Kristin watched as Scott, wearing a woman’s grey wig, his cheeks rouged and lips glossed, raised a handgun and pointed it at her chest.

Marvin Beazle slipped off his tinted shades, tugged at his ponytail and studied the emaciated writer sitting across from him. Skin the texture of paraffin. Stained trousers, moth-eaten frock coat, and a silk cravat dangling like an tattered curtain.

“ Love the Johnny Depp look,” Beazle said. “But why the long face?”

The writer stared back with rheumy eyes. “Like absinthe with its cork askew, I do not travel well.”

A scarecrow in a wool coat, Beazle thought. One of those writers who could use a tanning salon, a tailor, and some Zoloft. “Okay if I call you Eddie? Or do you prefer Al?”

“ I prefer Edgar. Or Mr. Poe.” The writer wheezed an unhealthy cough. “But if you insist, you may call me Eddie. I have never stood on ceremony.”

“ My man!” Beazle beamed, a tiger dreaming of tasting a lamb.

They were in the executive offices of Diablo Pictures on Sunset Boulevard, and Beazle had a rights deal to close. In his experience — and he’d been doing this forever — writers were worms. Drowning in doubt, strangling on self-loathing. A little money, a little flattery, and most scribblers would sell their souls along with their scripts.

Beazle vaulted from his ergonomically correct swivel chair and pointed toward the floor-to-ceiling window. “What do you see out there, Eddie?”

The writer squinted into the afternoon sun. “Houses on a precipitous hillside. A hideous white sign. ‘Hollywood.’ As if the inhabitants need assistance recalling their whereabouts.”

That snooty East Coast attitude, Beazle thought. Like Baltimore is the Garden of Eden. “It can all be yours, Eddie.”

“ All of what, sir?”

“ Okay, not my digs on Mulholland. But a big chunk of this burg is yours for the taking.”

Beazle peeled off his black silk Armani suitcoat and tossed it onto his leather sofa. He plopped back into his chair and swung his five-hundred dollar Matteo sneakers onto the desk. The sneakers — alligator hide dyed red and gold — made Beazle recognizable to everyone who counted, especially the maitre d’s of Prime, Maestro’s, and The Grill, where he ate his steaks bloody.

“ Gotta hand it to you, Eddie. You’re a helluva wordmeister.”

“ So you have read my story?”

“‘ The Pit and the Pendulum.’ Devoured it. The coverage, I mean. Not the whole story.” Beazle picked up three-page synopsis and skimmed through it: “Condemned prisoner wakes up in a dungeon. Nearly tumbles into a deep pit. Falls asleep, wakes up strapped to a board, a pendulum above his head with a razor-sharp scythe, swinging lower and lower.” Beazle looked up from the document, sniffed the air. “I smell franchise, Eddie.”

“ I beg your pardon.”

“ Slasher flicks keep on trucking. Sequels, prequels, spinoffs.”

“ Slasher? What a macabre word.”

Beazle returned his gaze to the document. “Then you throw in some moving walls for a second act complication, and finally the guy’s rescued by the French army. A little deus ex machina, but we can fix that. Our reader — a top film student who happens to be my niece — says you’ve got a bold voice and a literary style. Don’t worry about that ‘literary’ part. We can fix that, too.”

“ I am not certain I take your meaning.”

“ Forget it. Let’s talk money, Eddie. How much you making now?”

“ The Southern Literary Review pays me fifty dollars a month. Occasionally, there is extra remuneration. I was paid ten dollars for ‘The Raven.’”

Like a fisherman with a woolly bugger, Beazle baited the hook. “Diablo Pictures wants to option your story, Eddie. A quarter million bucks for one year against a cool million pick-up price.”

“ The devil you say!”

“ I shit you not, Eddie. Plus three points of the net, which of course is zilch, seeing how ‘Gone With the Wind” still hasn’t turned a profit. But you’ll get the usual boilerplate regarding sequels and merchandising.”

“ Merchandising?”

“ If McDonald’s wants to license the ‘Pit Burger,’ you get some dough. If Gillette markets the ‘Double Bladed Pendulum,’ you get a slice of the pie. Assuming we don’t change the title.”

“ Is this really happening, Mr. Beazle, or is this some phantasm of my imagination?”

“ It’s real, pal. You’re talking to the guy who greenlit three of the top ten grossing pictures of all time. Adjusted for inflation, of course. And here’s the foam on the latte. We want you, Eddie Poe, to write the script. In fact, we insist. Half a mill for a first draft, a re-write and a polish. Whadaya say?”

“ I fear I might swoon.”

“ As long as you don’t piss yourself. Fitzgerald did, right in that chair.”

The writer’s forehead beaded with sweat. Either it was the excitement or the heavy wool coat on an August day.

“ You look a little dry, Eddie. You want something to drink?”

“ Laudanum, perchance?”

“ What a kidder! Okay, let’s do some business.” Beazle pulled out a thick sheath of papers stapled to luxurious blue backing. “All I need is your signature, and it’s a done deal. Check’s already written. A quarter mill up front.”

He brandished the check, waving it like a pennant in a breeze. Handing a pen to the writer, Beazle said, “Before you know it, Eddie, you’ll be sitting in a director’s chair with your name on it, eating craft service omelettes, and banging the script girl.”

The writer searched for an inkwell before figuring out that the pen had its own supply. His hand poised over the contract, he said, “What did you mean a moment ago? About changing the title.”

“ The jury’s still out, Eddie. But we may have to lose ‘Pendulum.’ It’s three syllables.”

“ And that presents a conundrum?”

“ Titles need punch. There. Will. Be. Blood. Get it? Too bad ‘Saw’ is already taken.”

“ But the pendulum is essential to the predicament. The scimitar swings ever closer, magnifying the horror.”