Ellery Queen’s Anthology. Volume 12, 1967

Bryce Walton The Greatest Monster of Them All

A bloodcurdling background, as old as silent movies and as new as the latest double feature on Broadway or Hollywood Boulevard — but much more important, a memorable character study...

Hal Ballew produced a movie for the growing teenage audience for less than fifty grand and it made a profit of over a million. It was called I Was a High School Ghoul.

I had just finished the second script for Ballew, tentatively entitled I Was a Juvenile Delinquent Vampire, and was celebrating by also finishing off a fifth of bourbon when Ballew called me into his private office.

He had rented an old abandoned studio off Sunset, near Gower, and set up some offices in what had once served in a silent movie as a cathedral. The offices consisted of beaverboard partitions that, from above, resembled a maze built for the confusion of rats. Ballew was raising hell over the phone with his bookie. He resembled a Walt Disney version of a snarling, pseudohuman chipmunk. He eyed me suspiciously because he had heard rumors that I once scripted a serious movie that had nearly copped an Oscar.

“Get over to the graveyard set. Morty wants some dialogue for a new ending we put on that lousy script of yours.”

I opened the door to leave. He snarled at me. I turned. “Yes, sir,” I said.

He eyed my bourbon bottle. “You a rummy?”

“No.”

“You been lushed up ever since I hired you, Logan. Just wondered if it was a habit.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“I don’t like rummies,” he said flatly.

I left and wandered about through the ruins of an old French chateau, and a wrecked World War I airplane with Jean Harlow written on it. I stumbled around among walls eaten out by termites and ancient props that crumbled to powdery puffballs at a touch. A king-size black widow spider crawled up the side of a stagecoach. Piles of assorted, half-formed rubble lay everywhere, as if a bomb had fallen on a miniature of the world and mixed everything up.

I found the set where the graveyard sequence was being shot. It was crawling with sleazy horrors. A dim stream of charcoal gray filtered down through a broken skylight; dry ice sent writhing vapors curling away among cardboard tombstones; moldy coffins were ripped open, and there were piles of freshly-turned graveyard dirt. In the background was a gibbet with a dummy dangling by its neck.

Lunchtime had stopped production. A prize assortment of teenage ghouls and vampires lounged around cracking jokes, drinking cokes, eating hamburgers, and listening to rock and roll on portable radios. Starlets were resting languidly after having been horrified by teenage monsters; their flimsy garments hung in shreds and their young bodies were still splattered with gore.

Morty Lenton, the director, was sitting on a rotten coffin taking notes from a racing sheet. He was surrounded by bleached bones, and at his feet lay a decapitated body that was so obviously false it was embarrassing.

“Hal sent me over to do some dialogue,” I said.

Morty, about fifty-five, a little bald man with pale skin, and dressed in tight jeans and a dirty T-shirt, said, “Yeah,” without looking up. “Write it then.”

“What about,” I asked.

He seemed irritated. “Ballew wants to use some old geezer he saw wandering around the set this morning. Some extra. In the last scene we use him. If it works out, then you’re to write a plant scene for the beginning. It’ll change the story a little, but the middle can stay as is.”

I got out my notebook. “Shoot,” I said.

“It’s the climactic scene in the graveyard when all these teenagers who have been made into vampires are coming out of their coffins en masse to bleed every adult in town. Now the girl — Logan, do you remember your own script?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Lara Lee’s the girl, and she’s being chased through the graveyard by these teenage vampires. She falls near the moldy coffin by the gibbet where her boy friend has just been hanged for not becoming a vampire along with the gang. Something comes up out of the coffin. It’s an old, a very old, vampire. A real horror. And though she can hardly recognize him, it turns out to be the high school principal. Now, get this story change, Logan. He’s the big-wheel vampire, imported from Transylvania or some place. He’s the fiend who changed all the kids into vampires. We want a good scene, a close-up, with this old roué vampire worrying the girl’s throat while the other teenager vampires howl, bay, and scream and try to get at her. They turn into bats, wolves, rats, and like that.”

“Then what happens?” I said.

“Hell, you’re the writer!”

“All right,” I said. “When do you shoot it?”

“Right after lunch,” he said.

Right after lunch I gave him the scene.

He yelled. “Okay, Lara Lee. You, Count Dracula of Central High, over here you two.”

There were too many Lara Lees around for any one of them to stand out. But Dracula gave me quite a start as he shuffled forward with the caution of an old man on unfamiliar terrain. He had the gaunt, bone-ridged face of a dead-white mummy, slick hair coming down to a point in the middle of his forehead, upshooting brows, pointed ears, and evil lips that curled a bright red, as if they were just colored by fresh young blood.

“Go over this fast,” Morty said, handing them their scripts.

Dracula nodded, glanced over the script once, then handed it back. I watched the dignified flourish of his musty cape, fascinated as vapors writhed up around him.

“Don’t you approve of it?” Morty asked solemnly, winking at me.

“It is quite satisfactory, my dear Lenton,” Dracula said — his thick accent sounded Hungarian.

“Well, then, learn it.”

“I have already done so,” Dracula said. “I can still memorize an entire script in one reading. As you perhaps know, I have had quite a few years of experience.”

Morty shrugged and rolled his eyes at the skylight. “Okay, grandpa, okay.”

Dracula strode with fluttering cape to his coffin beneath the gibbet and assumed a realistically dignified pose. Lara Lee was sprawled out by a portable radio and a blond teenage ghoul with a crewcut and holding a snaky wig in his hand began to cue her lines.

Then I realized why Dracula was so impressive. He was genuine. Everything else was phony, cheap, artificial. But Dracula actually looked like a vampire. It wasn’t merely the skilled and highly artistic make-up — it was his bearing, his confidence, his dignity. It was, in a word, his sincerity. He was a real actor of the old school. And then I remembered who he was. Although I had been around Smogville for some time, he had been here long before me.

“Why,” I said, “that’s Ernst Von Kroft!”

“Yup,” Morty said. I poured another slug of bourbon into his Dixie cup. “That’s Von Kroft, all right.” He chuckled. “The greatest Monster of them all.”

“He was top box office in horror stuff once,” I said. “Where’s he been?”

Morty laughed, loudly. “That’s obvious. He’s been dead. Now he’s back from the grave.”

Von Kroft glanced our way and I was sure he had heard Morty’s comment. Again I was embarrassed. I had been embarrassed a great deal lately, usually whenever I sobered up long enough to realize the kind of stuff I was writing.

Morty jumped up. “All right,” he yelled. “Into your sacred earth, Dracula. Lara Lee, strip down to the barest shred of decency.”

“Don’t rush me,” Lara Lee giggled, and she started ripping her clothes down to the desired shred of barest decency. That was the trouble with all of it: she should have looked ravished, but she only looked bored.

Von Kroft did not look bored. He lowered himself into his coffin with such eerie conviction that it chilled me through and through. A white hand slithered over the coffin’s rim and writhed like a hungry crab...

Two hours later the scene was finished, and it was the worst yet — too nauseating even to be amusing. Perhaps the worst thing about it was the utter blasé contempt — no, not even contempt — the utter glibness of what had been put on film.

Except Von Kroft. He was superb. He played his scene with a skill and feeling I had forgotten existed in the theater. He was completely involved in the part. When Lara Lee forgot important lines, Von Kroft filled in with an extemporaneous monologue that topped anything I could have dreamed up — even when I was really trying.

Then everyone made for the exits and their sports cars — the teenagers with their ghoulish masks. Morty with his racing form, and the bored technicians. Only Von Kroft and I were left in the graveyard.

He didn’t know I was there. He sat on a papier-maché rock for some time, then got up stiffly and shuffled toward the exit. Suddenly he bent over, caught his breath, and put his hand over his heart. A dusty prop teetered and almost fell as he leaned on it.

He looked up as I touched his shoulder and asked if he was all right. All I could see of the person under all that make-up were his eyes and they were moist with a sort of controlled gratitude.

“The truth is that I haven’t donned make-up for some time and it has been somewhat of a strain.”

I poured what remained of my bourbon into a Dixie cup and he downed it gratefully. “Thank you, friend—”

“Fred Logan,” I said.

“Ah, you were the writer.”

I didn’t say anything more about that, and he never mentioned it again.

“You feel like driving home?” I asked.

“I have nothing to drive home at the moment. I’ll walk. I live a few blocks away — over on North Gower.”

“I’ll give you a lift,” I said. “You got anything to drink at your place?”

His hand trembled and his voice choked with emotion. “I believe I can scare up something, Mr. Logan, I do not often have guests these days.”

“I’ll pick up something on the way,” I said. “Hell, we ought to celebrate. That was a great performance you gave today, Mr. Von Kroft. Ballew intends doing a series of these things and he’ll have plenty of work for you.”

“Yes,” he said as we drove through the poisonous smog and turned off Sunset and down Gower between rows of ratty palm trees. “A celebration certainly is in order. It’s coming back now.”

“What’s coming back?”

“The cycle of horror movies,” Von Kroft said softly. “It’s coming back, and I’ve been waiting a long time.”

His thin lips were tight.

He lived in an ancient rooming house that the Hollywood Freeway had passed by. It was an odd, suspended sort of neighborhood, preserved in dusty timelessness. Above it were the Hollywood Hills rich with pastel houses and odd-shaped swimming pools; below it was Hollywood Boulevard. And Von Kroft’s rooming house just sat there, and no one seemed to care any more. It was really very old, with cupolas and a bell tower, and surrounded by untended masses of rosebushes, wisteria, and untrimmed palm trees whose branches hung dry and brown, like dead grass skirts.

Von Kroft had a closet-sized room on the second floor. As the chintz curtain blew to the side I saw the smoggy dust of the vacant lot next door. I’m not usually bothered by heat, but coming up the stairs had given me a stifled feeling and now I sat on the unmade bed conscious of my energy oozing out through every pore.

Von Kroft had, with some difficulty, got out of his make-up, and the remains of it now lay scattered in tatters and tufts about the room. He was somewhere down the hall washing. I kept seeing the face and body exposed as his make-up and costume came away. Physically, he was in poor condition. He was quite an old man, and I knew his heart was bad. His face had been a dead-gray, and a line of blue rimmed his fleshless lips.

I had to admit to myself that I had become interested in Von Kroft. I had to admit also that I didn’t want to go to my own apartment and sit there alone, faced with the bourbon bottle and the necessity of starting a third phony horror pic for Ballew. Another day or so and I Was a Juvenile Delinquent Vampire would be finished, and soon it would be playing all over the country — my great contribution to cinematic history. Meanwhile, I was expected to be working on another masterpiece of the silver screen.

Von Kroft returned. Scrawny in his tattered bathrobe of faded silk, he still possessed an unbelievable dignity. From somewhere he had got a tray of ice cubes and a lime. He prepared highballs and we sat sipping cool drinks while I watched some of the dangerous tension ebb out of him.

He was one of those who make handsome old men. He had a sharp angular profile. And even before he showed me his albums, and collections of old showbills, pictures, newspaper notices, and programs, I knew that he must have been a very handsome fellow.

“Yes,” he told me later, “I was quite the matinee idol in Hungary when I was young. Here, I wasn’t the type somehow. I had to do character work, but then I always preferred character work.”

Later he dragged an old trunk from under the bed. It was decorated with faded labels. I began to forget where I was. That room seemed to be at the edge — on the boundary between night and day...

I learned that he was from the Caucasus, a poor but experienced actor with a Continental flavor. He had foreseen a great artistic future for films, so he had come to Hollywood where he hung around for years doing minor character bits and appearing in little theaters along Sunset and Santa Monica Boulevards. It was one of those unexplainable things — a fine talent that simply didn’t get the right combination of breaks.

And then, invisible but electric under a hundred pounds of makeup, Von Kroft played his first Monster role. He insisted on doing all his own make-up work, and had literally spent weeks in preparation. He made a probing study of the Monster — did a real character breakdown of a shattered soul hiding in a Monster’s body. The resulting fame astonished everyone. It wasn’t the make-up, although that was hideously effective. His impact derived from the depth of character, from the genuine pathos he had given to a grotesque which had not been intended originally as anything but a prop to show off the virginal white body of a posturing starlet.

Well, the starlet was soon forgotten. But Von Kroft became world-famous as a Monster. He helped launch and he played the outstanding part in a cycle of Gothic horror movies. Anthologies of horror tales appeared, edited by Von Kroft. Masks of his horrendous faces appeared in drug store windows, and on millions of kids at Halloween. There was no sort of dark demonic force of the human soul that was not startlingly brought to life by Von Kroft’s genius — mummies, ape-men, ghouls, ghosts, vampires, science-fiction nightmares, hunchbacks, werewolves...

Others have since attempted such personifications of horror, but never with Von Kroft’s success. He gave personality, reality of character, conviction, to what are usually considered merely symbols to inspire false gibbering.

But inevitably the cycle died away. Von Kroft’s option was dropped years ago. He became destitute, subsisted for long periods almost entirely on dried fruit and crackers. He would sit by the telephone day and night, waiting for that call from Central Casting. His agent went out of business. His acquaintances died or retired into limbo. But not Von Kroft. He was sustained by the positive conviction that horror movies some day would return.

So he waited. And he waited a long time.

He knew in his heart that he was a fine actor — an actor first, and a Monster second. That he should have been discarded because of a temporary lack of desire for Monsters seemed to him a cruel injustice. But slowly he began to realize that his fame, his identity, had rested on his having been a Monster, not a human being, not an actor — and that he could hope to make a comeback only as a Monster. So he continued to wait, faithful to his cause, patient in his faith.

He watched Variety. When he saw that Ballew was scheduling a series of horror films, he immediately applied for work, but I realized now how difficult it had been for him to get a job. Ballew wanted teenagers, but somehow Von Kroft had slipped through. Perhaps on some unconscious level that would have been incomprehensible to Ballew, that worthy had been impressed by the genuineness of Von Kroft’s being...

Once he took me walking into the Hollywood Hills where he showed me the castle for which he had once paid a hundred thousand dollars. It had a dreamlike look in the moonlight. At the height of his fame that castle had been a show-place for tourists. Pure Gothic with all the props — burning incense, somber velvet drapes, black cats, two Negro servants in the regalia of sorcerers’ apprentices, a priceless collection of authentic horror stuff, including a library stocked with rare books on black magic, witchcraft, and dark legends.

We sat up there on a wall looking at the lights of Hollywood.

“What caused the cycle to end,” I asked.

“What started it,” he asked me. “Who can really say? The need for horror, it comes and goes. But it stopped with the last World War. Perhaps it was impossible to play at horror when the world itself became one flaming Walpurgis Eve. But now people begin to forget. Now it’s coming back. The real horror has been forgotten, and the myth returns.”

We walked along the wide wall, and he showed me dungeon doors imported from the Balkans, drawbridges with rusted chains, and he told me that inside there had once been genuine torture implements from the Spanish inquisition.

“I didn’t do it for publicity, or for show,” he said. “Although my publicity agent used it for that purpose. I considered it part of my artistic responsibility.”

I had talked to Ballew about Von Kroft.

“Write him in then. Go see I Was a Juvenile Delinquent Vampire, and set up a part for him. He was sensational enough, but anybody could do it. You see the movie yet?”

The picture had been released the previous week.

“I haven’t got around to it yet,” I said.

“Well, get around to it tonight, Logan! Take notes. Everything that sets the teenagers stomping and howling, do a scene just like it in this one, and in all the rest of them. Get it, Logan?”

I nodded. But when I went to tell Von Kroft the good news he wasn’t home. The landlady eyed me distrustfully and said Von Kroft hadn’t been home for two days. She was worried about him. So was I. Ballew was working late at nights on the third opus for which I had written a few scenes. He would shoot the scenes as I wrote them and he was going to produce this one in twelve days. I had to get Von Kroft over there. He needed the money — until I Was a Juvenile Delinquent Vampire, he had been starving.

I left a message for him that I would be back around nine thirty or ten, and went to the movies.

I had a few shots at the corner bar before I went in. When I came out I needed quite a few more. If the picture was phony, the audience made up almost entirely of bored, frustrated teenagers looking for any kind of kick, was even more so. The girls screamed dutifully and clutched at responding boy friends, but they weren’t any more scared of all that cheap pretense than I was, sitting there bathed in hot embarrassment and crawling self-contempt.

They laughed themselves into a frenzy. They really had a ball. No one could blame them because certainly the picture had never been designed to arouse the deeper esthetic feelings. But I began to realize the cleverness of Ballew who knew precisely what he was doing. He had given the movie the appearance — at least, to the grossly indiscriminating — of having been seriously intended. This presented the teenagers with a chance to ridicule it, to laugh even louder at the more horrifying scenes. Ballew had produced a movie that allowed the teenagers to have their blood and drink it too.

The climax of the movie turned the audience into a bedlam of histerical laughter. Von Kroft’s closeup scene as he worried Lara Lee’s throat was the funniest, as well as the most hideous, sequence in the picture. It brought the house down.

You would have to be sensitively aware of Von Kroft’s genius even to notice it amid all those melodramatic histrionics. Lighting, direction, sets — everything had been deliberately designed to make Von Kroft a grotesque comic.

“Oh you bloody gramp...”

“You old sucker, you!”

“Hey, old stuff, where’d you lose your choppers?”

“Man oh man, what awful teeth you ain’t got no more, grandpa.”

“What’s he need with teeth? He gums chicks to death.”

It was devastating...

The landlady looked at me suspiciously through the moonlight.

“He’s back. What’d you do to Mr. Von Kroft?”

“Something the matter?”

“He was all right until he met up with you, mister.”

“Is he sick?”

“He just came in. He always has tea with me of an evening, but tonight he ran up the stairs without even speaking to me. With his heart, he can’t run up stairs. He looked bad, but when I went up to his room he wouldn’t say anything or even open the door.”

I ran up the stairs and rapped on his door. The upstairs hall was musty and dimly lighted. I could hear the paper flowers rattling in a slight breeze. But Von Kroft didn’t respond to my knock. At the thought that he might be dead a lonely fear came over me. I realized that, until I met Von Kroft, I had been falling into a pit of defeat and despair, and that from this indomitable old man I had drawn new hope.

“Ernst,” I called out. “It’s me, Logan. Let me in.”

I heard movement, then heavy breathing. The door finally opened and I went in. There was no light in the room except that of the full moon through the open window. At first I didn’t see Von Kroft.

Suddenly he sprang with a chuckling snarl from the shadows of the corner and crouched in front of me. Then he straightened up and his hideously made-up face turned down like that of a tragic clown.

“Did you see the movie, Ernst?”

He nodded, then sat on the bed. “I saw it yesterday.” He bent over, his hairy fists were clenched and I heard a terrible suppressed sobbing in him. At last he lay down on the bed, his eyes closed, and gradually his breathing became quieter.

I poured him a drink and held him up in a sitting position.

“Try to forget it,” I said lamely.

“They laughed,” he said. “They did it deliberately, didn’t they?”

I nodded.

“But why? Why?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess they just don’t care any more.”

“That close-up, Fred. It was deliberately done that way. The lighting. They deliberately highlighted my mouth so that — my teeth—”

“I know,” I said.

“They could have hidden it. I didn’t have the money to get new teeth. I covered it up with acting — if they hadn’t deliberately made me a clown.”

“I know, I saw it.”

“Count Dracula — with no teeth,” He tried to laugh. He pushed me away and stood up. “Even an acting genius could not sustain the illusion of the walking dead — without teeth.”

I put my hand on his shoulder. “You’ve got to forget Ballew and his picture, Ernst. Listen, I’ve still got some connections in this damned town if I want to use them. I can get you a decent part—”

He turned and looked at me. “I waited for the cycle to come back. I waited a long time. I almost couldn’t wait that long.” He sighed.

He went over to the bureau and switched on a small bulb over the mirror. His shadow suddenly lunged up the wall and across the ceiling.

“But I’m too old to last very much longer, Fred. And now this thing Ballew did to me, it’s all over the country. Ernst Von Kroft, the greatest monster of them all—”

He slammed his hand on top of the bureau. “Could you forget it, Fred?”

I poured myself a shot of bourbon.

Not so long ago I would have said, what the hell difference did it make? But I couldn’t say that now. Ballew had canceled out Von Kroft’s entire lifetime as an artist, buried him as a grotesque buffoon.

He walked over to me and now I could see that his face had changed. His jaws were filled out. Then he snapped his teeth together.

“Cheap set of dentures,” he said, turning back to the mirror. “I bought them with what Ballew paid me. I do not believe I appear to be quite so amusing now.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think you’re amusing at all.”

“You think I’m indulging in self-pity?”

“No.”

He poured a glass half full of bourbon and drank it down, then poured again.

“Take it easy,” I said.

“An excellent vascillator,” he said. “Good for old blood vessels and constricting passageways of life.”

He bent toward the mirror and snapped his new dentures together.

I was pretty loaded by the time he dragged the theatrical trunk from under the bed and opened it. It smelled oddly of moth balls, dust, greasepaint, and powder. A display of jars, boxes, wax, wigs, whiskers, fangs, claws, clubfeet, hairy hands, eyeballs, appeared, until the room resembled a disordered window in a waxworks.

He was almost enthusiastic as he worked without benefit of mirror. The make-up kit was on the chair and he squatted on his heels in the moonlight by the open trunk and started first on his face. Wax, wigs, whiskers, fangs, claws, clubfeet followed, hairy hands, a gnarled hunch to strap on his back, a patch over his eye, another glass eye set in the plastiflesh high up on his head. He didn’t appear to confine himself to one role, but plucked many out of his memory, combining bits and pieces with fantastic skill.

When he finally stood up I could hear his quick breaths.

“What’s the idea?” I asked.

“I used to live the part,” he said. He went to the window. The full moon rose slowly behind the silhouettes of blue-black palms and turned the dryness of the vacant lot into a pool of glass.

“I can feel the moonlight burning coldly in my skin and it strangely warms the blood.”

He turned and looked at me. “Only a silver bullet can kill them, Fred, and they stay young forever.”

Then with amazing swiftness for an old man he jerked the door open and was out in the hall.

“Ernst,” I yelled. I went down the hall and down the stairs after him. Once he looked back up at me as he ran, one red-veined eyeball seeming to weep and laugh. Then he was moving in the gait of a loping half-beast as his hairy knuckles brushed the floor.

From the porch I called to him again, but he didn’t stop. I heard him howl. I staggered after him across the vacant lot. Once he halted and peered down the street, while his head shifted from side to side and his arms hung loosely. Then he ran on and I lost sight of him half a block from the studio where Ballew was shooting the third picture.

Ballew wasn’t in his office. A night watchman just going on duty said everybody had knocked off until morning, but that Ballew was out on the set somewhere with Morty.

Yes, he’d just let Von Kroft in. He was over there somewhere, the guard said, pointing toward the shadowy pile of props and rotting sets. “He said he’d left something on the set and come back to get it.”

Then we heard a scream from somewhere among the shadowy sound stages. The guard stared and swallowed. “That sounded kinda real, didn’t it?”

“It did,” I said. “You’d better call the cops.”

This time I was lost even longer than before. I was loaded, and it was dark. I crawled around in what turned out to be the remains of an old windjammer, and the deck was so rotten I fell through it. The hold was swarming with rats. I kicked my way out through the side, and ended up wandering around through papier-mache caverns.

I finally came to the graveyard set, the same one we had used for I Was a Juvenile Delinquent Vampire. I found Morty in the bottom of a grave — he was moaning with a broken jaw. His skin looked blue under the floodlight and his T-shirt was ripped open. He tried to say something but no words dribbled out — just sounds. Then he pointed feebly toward the gibbet.

Sirens screamed as I went over there. The dummy was swaying a little, turning slowly, but there was no wind.

I found Von Kroft under the gibbet. His whiskers and false eyes were gone. The strap had torn loose and his hump had fallen through his torn shirt. A false foot and a hairy, six-fingered glove lay a few feet away. He sat there, staring up into the glaring floodlight as if it were a full moon, and his dentures shone in a frozen smile. I was glad that he was dead.

I’ve often wondered if he knew what really happened, or if he thought this was his last horror movie — a real one, with no laughs.

The cops arrived and I pointed up to where Ballew was hanging as a replacement for the dummy. They cut him down. They asked me questions, and I told them all I knew.

“What a horrible damned thing,” one of the cops said as a flashbulb went off, then another.

“I don’t think so,” I said, or that’s what I recall saying, though I don’t know if I really did say it. “Von Kroft believed the cycle was coming back, but I don’t think it ever will.”

I guess I was thinking about what someone had said once — about the final horror being the realization that there is no horror. The real thing isn’t funny — it isn’t funny at all — and I guess everybody needs a laugh these days.