Two things happened last night. I lost two hours of my life and I watched a young man get torn apart by a song.
Uncle Teddy made me drive on our trip to see the “doomed boy” Marshall Abner despite the fact we had two of his bodyguards with us. Their names were Perry and Max, though Teddy refused to call them by any names other than Heckle and Jeckle. When I had told him that I didn’t get the reference, he acted offended and made me watch an hour of old cartoons centered around a pair of crows (“magpies,” he corrected) that seemed to just be giant assholes (“whimsically aggressive towards authority,” he opined). I still didn’t get the joke, but at least Teddy was mollified enough by my penance to get into the car so we could go.
It was a four-hour drive, but I wasn’t complaining. One thing we agreed on is that taking a plane was a bad idea at the moment. As Teddy said, “I don’t care for the idea of being stuck in a metal tube at 30,000 feet with a pissed off practitioner of harmful hoodooery.”
The first few minutes in the car, Teddy was fairly upbeat and chipper, explaining to Perry and Max about Heckle and Jeckle and how they need to aspire to the cartoon birds’ levels of perceptions of human nature and intuitive intelligence if they were going to do their job well. In the weeks since staying with him, I had seen Perry and Max standing guard at the house or trailing me when I went out at least five different times. They had likely known Teddy longer than I had, yet he was talking to them like they had never met.
That he knew all of that, knew more about these men than they probably knew about themselves, wasn’t really in question. For all his foolishness and practiced assholery, my uncle was very clever and extremely perceptive. So he was either fucking with them because he was bored and wanted to irritate me, or he was putting off answering the question I had asked as soon as we had gotten into the car. I gave him a couple more minutes of extolling the virtues of cartoons as morality tales before I interrupted.
“No seriously. What is The Hungry Blade?”
He turned back around in his seat, his face falling into a more serious expression. “Yes, we need to talk about it before we get there. Might as well get it out of the way. Have you ever heard of a passion play?”
I glanced over at him. “You mean like the Mel Gibson Jesus movie?”
He rolled his eyes. “Yes, I suppose. The idea of a passion play is not that different than what The Hungry Blade originated from. Much like passion plays attempt to detail the last days of Jesus’ life, the basis for The Hungry Blade was originally an attempt to detail Lucifer’s fall from Heaven and the formation of infernal Hell.”
I raised my hand to stop him. “Okay. A couple of questions. First, it sounds like you’re saying the evil movie Marshall saw was based on something else. Second, you’re making a point of saying ‘infernal’ Hell. Is that because its not run by the demons any more since the Hunter took over?”
He looked at me sourly. “I was getting to all that, and now you’ve ruined the dramatic tension I was building, but I guess it’s better for you to ask questions as they come to you. I forget how new you are to all this. Okay, so I make the distinction of infernal Hell for two reasons. The first you’ve already guessed, which is that our buddy the Hunter has taken it over now, and as you saw during your time there, the demons that are left don’t have the best time of it, even by Hell standards.”
The second reason is that Hell existed, kind of, before Lucifer and his angels were sent there. You have to understand, you can’t really apply concepts like time and space to places like Hell. There are some things that have always existed, and that includes the Seven Realms, of which Hell is one. But there was a long time before the war in Heaven happened, before Lucifer and his crew were cast out, that Hell was something different. It was controlled by and full of something else.
No, I don’t know what. Not really. But it’s said that when Lucifer was falling, whatever had occupied Hell before was pushed further out. Outside the Seven Realms and further away from our world and others like it. Maybe it’s bullshit, but I’ve seen and learned enough to think it’s not. Anyway, that’s a story for another day. Today the story is about Lucifer and His Version of Hell: The Movie.
But as you so astutely interrupted, it didn’t start out as a movie. It actually began as an ancient play of sorts. The only known copy of it was found in 1882 by British soldiers during their occupation of India. Supposedly it pried out of the dead hands of some Calcutta death cult they were clearing out, and while the soldiers had no idea what it said, they knew it looked old enough and important enough to steal.
It made its way back to Europe, where it was examined and studied by several “experts” on the black market. It was written in Tamil, one of the oldest written languages in the world, and it was estimated to be nearly 4,000 years old. It didn’t take long for one of the wealthier occult groups to scoop it up. After several years of study, they asked one of their members for help. He was heavily involved in the developing field of motion picture technology, and they wanted the manuscript turned into a movie.
I don’t know the person’s name, but I assume he was German, given the film’s name. Die hungrige Klinge, or “The Hungry Blade*, was made around 1888. It was only about ten minutes long back then, and while it was cutting edge at the time, it was very limited. There was no sound, and the sparse narration and dialog were on cards scattered between scenes of the movie. There were a few unique features about the film, however.
First, the director had taken the time to film each page of the original Tamil manuscript and splice those images into the movie. Just a frame here and there, so you’d never notice unless you slowed it down. Second, according to most accounts, the first time it was shown to the occultists that had the manuscript, a handful of them immediately went violently insane and a couple more started changing into…something not fun…within a week or two. This was an exciting development for those that weren’t dead by the end of the month, because it meant the film had real power that transcended even the original document.
You have to bear in mind that these people…these kinds of people…they’re not risk-adverse. The worse something is, the more dangerous it appears to be, the more they want it. They always assume they can control it, leverage it, hold it over someone’s head. They think that just because they aren’t dead yet, or in Hell yet, or whatever, that they’re somehow special. Smarter and better than the rest.
So they waited a few weeks, then watched it again. This time, a few more went crazy or transformed, and the survivors convinced themselves they were not only safe, but were gaining new and powerful insights into the hidden worlds they wanted to tap into and ultimately master. Some of that was understandable, because they realized on the second viewing that the movie was changing too. It was longer and had new scenes, including some that incorporated their old, departed cult friends. But it also showed more of Hell, and to these people, any shred of forbidden knowledge is power. Unfortunately for them, it was almost like they were getting old radio signals from the moon or seeing light from a star that burned out a million years ago.
Because bear in mind, this is a group of overfed European nobility and merchants that are infernal occultists—or devil worshippers if you prefer the term—at a time when Lucifer has already been dead for hundreds of years by our world’s clock. These fat fucks just didn’t get the memo.
So on they go. The third viewing cuts the remaining number from twelve members down to five, one of which is the original director. The movie is now almost an hour long and is clearly growing more powerful with every viewing. The ones that are left, while not transforming into monsters per se, become even more evil and twisted than they were before and find it harder and harder to think about anything other than the film.
Whether the movie made them stop there or they decided to quit pushing their luck, I don’t know. But apparently they took a break from showing it for a few years to build back up their numbers. And when they decided to show it again, they went public with it.
On July 10, 1893, there was a massive fire at the World’s Fair in Chicago. Officially, sixteen people died in it, and it immediately became national news at the time. Unofficially, over fifty people died and another twenty were permanently institutionalized. That was the first public showing of the film.
Since then, the group has grown and shrank over the years, always keeping to the shadows. I think the risk of exposure at the fair incident scared them a bit, and the rumor is that now they only show the movie once a year. Only members of their group are allowed to watch it except for a single outsider—usually a lone projectionist or usher—who they leave alive to carry the tale out into the world.
Because they don’t really want the movie to be a total secret, of course. They want it to be a legend. Gossip among those looking for something “extreme” or “really fucked up” will eventually lead some to track down the group. They’ll think they’ve cracked the case, beaten the mystery, found a door into a secret world. And they’ll demand their reward, to see the movie the following year.
And they’ll get to see it, of course, in whatever form it might be at that time. And they’ll die or go crazy. Or they won’t--until the next year or three years after that. Because aside from the film’s caretakers—who may or may not be those original surviving members, depending on who you believe—everyone goes in the end. Movie’s gotta eat and all that.
So that’s what I know about The Hungry Blade. That’s why I say this kid we’re going to see is totally fucked.
I was gripping the steering wheel tightly, my stomach churning. For all that I’d seen since first entering my uncle’s life, I realized this was the first time I was knowingly heading toward danger. In everything up to this point, I was just trying to do what I thought was best to survive. But this…I could tell Teddy was spooked, and he had lost any sense of humor about Marshall Abner’s fate when he mentioned it this time around. For the first time in awhile, I found myself questioning what I was doing all this for. Was I really any different than the idiots intentionally watching that movie?
When I turned to look at him, I saw that Uncle Teddy was studying me. He gave me a thin smile and nodded.
“That worry you have now? Those misgivings? That’s called common sense. This is a dangerous world you’re in now, and while I can try to keep you safe from my enemies, if we’re going to go chase down things like this, you need to know how bad it can get. I can’t promise we’ll win against the people I know, much less something like this. So if you want out, I get it. Drop me off and I’ll have another car come pick me up to go talk to the Abner boy.” His face looked tired and worried, and he wouldn’t meet my eyes. I knew he was being sincere, but I could also tell he was scared to go by himself.
“Why don’t we both just go home then? Why risk it, especially if he’s a lost cause?”
He shook his head. “I’ve spent too long helping evil in this world. Turning a blind eye is no better. This is the first new information I’ve heard about the movie in years, and if I can stop it, I’m going to.” He looked back at me. “But you aren’t like me. You’re a good person. There’s no reason for you to get drug into my bullshit quest for redemption.”
I tried to smile. “I’m a little freaked out yeah, but I’m not going anywhere. If you needed my help before, I know you need it against a spoopy movie like this.”
Uncle Teddy quickly brightened. “You raise a good point, Cora. Like they say, spoopiness loves company.”
It took five tries knocking at Marshall Abner’s door before he answered it, and even though he was largely covered in multiple blankets, the smell of putrescent decay hit me hard enough that I had to fight hard to swallow back the bile rising in my throat. Marshall had a small oval slit uncovered that showed his eyes and nose, and even from that glimpse, it was clear he was very sick or dying. He stared blankly ahead, and when Teddy introduced us, he just shuffled back out of the way as a form of silent invitation.
The apartment we entered was drastically different than the building it was in. The outer hall was well-lit and clean, with fresh paint and nice carpet. The interior of Marshall’s apartment looked much like Marshall himself—with one foot into Hell and the other on a banana peel.
He had followed us into the living room before lurching past to sit down in a recliner that looked to be half-consumed by something akin to black mold. Before his body and blankets obscured it, I thought I saw things moving on the surface of the stained chair. There was no way I was sitting down in there.
Teddy was snapping his fingers with a loud crack. “Mr. Abner…Marshall…I know this is hard for you. I know it’s hard to focus. But can you talk to us? Can you tell us more about what you saw or might know? Any detail would be…”
The blankets fell away as the sound started—a soft, insidious song that seemed to be boring into the center of me. Marshall’s face was all that was left of the old him apparently, as the rest was a fleshy ruin filled with sores and strange limbs that flailed around in various stages of decay. I tried to scream, and one of those limbs shot forward into my mouth, burning my tongue with an acrid film that seemed to coat its skin.
My last memory before everything changed was that the Marshall-thing seemed to be falling apart as the song emanated from it, as though the vibration of it was tearing him apart atom by atom. I watched him fall into a bloody disarray that matched the chaos in my head and the black static in my heart.
Then I was in a theater. I remember only a few seconds of it, but I recognized the place. It was a theater in my hometown, the Picture Palace. I remember thinking that was impossible because it had gotten torn down when I was a teenager, but then the screen lit up and I saw the movie was starting.
“Wake up, Cora. God, wake up, please.”
I opened my eyes to Uncle Teddy’s worried face looming over me. In the distance I could see the dark blue of the evening sky behind the imposing figures of Heckle and Jeckle. Confusedly, I sat up a little and looked around. We were on the sidewalk outside of Marshall’s apartment. My eyes went wide as I remembered what had happened.
“Did you see that? Did Marshall…”
Teddy took the air out of me with a tight hug. When he pulled back, he was smiling coldly. “Turn out to be a weird hellbeast with no sense of personal boundaries? Yes. Did you see a theater too?”
I nodded again, my stomach going cold. “I think somehow he…it…it showed me the movie. In my head. I don’t remember much, but I think that’s what happened.”
His expression turned hard. “I think you’re right. I’m starting to wonder if this whole thing wasn’t a trap for us from the start, but either way, it doesn’t change anything.”
“But what’re we going to do?” I could hear my voice shaking, but I didn’t care. “Are we going to turn into things like he was? I can’t let that happen…I can’t listen to that song again…”
Teddy froze as he stared at me. “Song? What song?”
“The song that was coming from him. The thing that tore him apart.” I gave a shudder. “Please, I don’t want to think about it anymore.”
He hugged me again briefly and nodded. “I understand. We’ll deal with that later. For now let’s take care of the movie.”
I stood up slowly, my legs feeling wobbly but good enough to stay upright. “How are we going to take care of it?”
He grinned, his eyes glittering darkly at me. “We’re going to find it and destroy it, along with any dumb motherfucker that gets in our way.”
---
Credits
Comments