The Living Dead 2

Arlene Schabowski of the Undead by Mark McLaughlin & Kyra M. Schon

Mark McLaughlin’s fiction, poetry, and articles have appeared in hundreds of magazines and anthologies, including Cemetery Dance, Midnight Premiere, and The Year’s Best Horror Stories. His most recent story collections are Raising Demons for Fun and Profit and Twisted Tales for Sick Puppies. His first novel, Monster Behind the Wheel (coauthored with Michael McCarty), was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award. His next book will be Vampires & Sex Kittens, a collection of essays.

Kyra M. Schon is the actress who played Karen Cooper, the trowel-wielding zombie girl in the basement in the original Night of the Living Dead. Since 1985, she has made her living teaching pottery and sculpture, and she also sells unique zombie memorabilia through her website, www.ghoulnextdoor.com.

In 1939, audiences at The Wizard of Oz were dazzled to see a black-and-white movie burst out into full Technicolor, when Dorothy departs gray Kansas and arrives in the magical land of Oz, and black-and-white has been battling it out with color ever since. In the 1998 film Pleasantville, twins are transported into a black-and-white 1950s-era sitcom, and as they slowly liberate the town from its oppressive staidness, residents who have broken the mold become fully colorized. In the recent video game The Saboteur, the hero moves through black-and-white cityscapes in World War II-era occupied France attempting to disrupt Nazi plans-if he’s successful, color is restored to liberated areas.

In the world of zombies, of course, the most epic confrontation of black-and-white versus color is the showdown between George Romero’s original 1968 black-and-white classic Night of the Living Dead and the 1990 full-color remake directed by makeup man Tom Savini. Devotees of the original will emphasize its classic status and the haunting quality of its stark black-and-white look, whereas advocates for the remake will point to its sophisticated makeup effects and stronger female characters.

Like zombies themselves, the debate just keeps on going, relentless. Our next story also features a clash between black-and-white and color. Child stars often seem to grow up to lead troubled lives, but seldom as troubled as this.

Really? Right now?

Okay.

Let me tell you about a nice lady, who lives not too far from here. She was in the movie. And still is, in a way.

Her name is Lorraine Tyler…and also Arlene Schabowski. Lorraine is in her early forties, though you couldn’t tell by looking at her. She has long, wavy blonde hair. Arlene is nine years old, and she has long, wavy blonde hair, too. Most people would agree that she looks quite dead.

Lorraine played Arlene, all those years ago. Lorraine stopped, but Arlene kept right on playing.

After the zombies swarmed the building, Arlene devoured most of her parents…they were hers, so she certainly deserved the best parts…and then simply wandered off into the night. And the night was filled with shambling, ravenous corpses, feasting upon the flesh of the living. But the undead knew she was one of them, so she was safe from their hunger. Her body held no warmth, no nourishing spark of life to entice the other zombies. That was the last the viewers ever saw of her.

But she needed food, for she was… and still is… always hungry. Deliriously hungry. For there is a deep black coldness within her that constantly needs filling. Sometimes, right after she has eaten, she actually feels alive again. Perhaps even better than alive. She felt that way after she ate her parents, and she wanted to feel it again. So she wandered through the woods, through the darkness, until she came to another farmhouse.

Now at this point, one might ask, “They never showed what happened to the little girl after she wandered off. Didn’t the police get her when they came and shot all the zombies’ brains out?”

Obviously not.

One might also wonder: “Fear-Farm of the Undead was only a movie, wasn’t it?”

Well, yes and no.

Lorraine Tyler’s father was one of the producers and stars of the movie, which was made on a shoe-string budget. The money her family put into that movie back then wouldn’t even buy a decent new car these days. Her father, mother and some of their friends wanted to make a movie, so they pooled their resources, found a few more investors and did it. And Lorraine got to play a little girl who gets bitten, turns into a zombie and eats her parents.

Lorraine went on to become a school teacher with a cool website selling Fear-Farm memorabilia. Teachers get time off during the summer, so she started going to conventions, meeting fans, doing a lot more to promote her memorabilia sideline. She did that for years. Made good money, too. Last year she made enough to buy a nice little vacation in Mexico.

People still watch that movie all the time. Still think about it. Fear-Farm of the Undead has spawned hundreds of knock-off versions, most of them released direct-to-video. And Lorraine has watched every one of them. Because she is also Arlene Schabowski, and wants to know what other zombies are doing.

Somewhere out there, it is always night, and a little dead girl who is also a living school teacher is always hungry.

Anyway. Back to that other farmhouse.

Arlene could hear cows mooing in the distance. The sound made her hungry. She crept up to the house and looked in the window, into a quaint, tidy living room, with knickknacks on little cherrywood tables and furniture draped with lace doilies. An old woman was sitting at her desk, reading some papers. She had long white hair and wore a dark gray housecoat. Of course, everything in that world is black and white or shades of gray, just like in the movie. The old woman must not have turned on the radio or the TV that day or night… she looked so peaceful, it was clear she had no idea what was going on.

The little dead girl went to the front door and knocked. The old woman called out, as cheery as can be, “Who is it?”

Now, none of the other zombies in that movie were able to talk. All they ever did was grunt and roar and squeal. But Arlene was able to think really hard and call upon the abilities of her other self, Lorraine. And she managed to rasp out the three-word phrase from the movie for which she is best known. She also says a four-word phrase early in the movie, but most folks don’t remember that. No, they only remember what she says just before she turns into a zombie: “Help me, Mommy.”

“Mommy? I’m nobody’s mommy!” the old woman cried. “Who’s out there? Is this some kind of a joke?” So saying, she threw open the door. “My God! Little girl, are you hurt? There’s blood all over you!”

Arlene held out her arms, just like she did before she killed her movie-mommy, who was played by her real-life mother. Again, she said, “Help me, Mommy.”

“Of course I’ll help you, you poor thing.” The old woman knelt before her. She must have had something wrong with her knees, because she winced with pain. “So tell me, who did this to you? Who?”

Her next few words were lost in a thick gurgle of black blood, because by then Arlene had her little teeth embedded in the old woman’s throat. And even though the dear old thing was past her prime, she was still full of warm, delicious, intoxicating life.

Arlene ate her fill and by the time she was done, that sweet old woman looked like a car-wreck victim, sans safety belt. Arlene turned and strayed into the night. She didn’t wait around to watch the old woman’s gnawed carcass scramble back to hungry life.

Mind you, while all that was going on, poor, confused Lorraine was hiding in some bushes in the school playground, screaming and wondering why all these bad things were going on in her head. The other kids thought she had gone nuts. Her parents and the teachers talked about it later, and based on what she’d told them, they decided she had an overactive imagination. They told her not to let the bad images scare her… they were make-believe, so they couldn’t hurt her. It was all in her head, they said, and in a way it was. Hers was a sort of Reality Surplus Disorder. It’s hard to concentrate when you’ve got another personality playing in your mind.

My best guess is all the movie’s fans created that personality, that black-and-white world of death… all those watchers in the dark, thinking about that movie, those zombies, and of course, poor little Arlene Schabowski. All that feverish brain energy. What is reality, anyway? A mental collective, that’s all. The result of multiple minds, mulling over enthralling stories. I’m sure that somewhere, out there, Moby Dick is still swimming and the House of Usher is still falling. I’m sure Dorothy is still wandering down the Yellow Brick Road, having new adventures, fighting more witches and flying monkeys. And I’m sure she’s still a tiny young thing, just as Arlene Schabowski is still a tiny dead thing.

But let us return to Arlene. She walked down a gravel lane until she came to the highway. Car lights were heading toward her. She held out her bloodstained, skinny arms and waited. The driver would stop. Of course they would. She was just a little girl.

So she waited. And the driver stopped-a fat, middle-aged man with a bulbous nose and horn-rimmed glasses.

“Was there an accident?” He ran up to her, crouched and thrust his fat face near hers.

“Help me, Mommy,” she said.

“You poor thing,” he said in a low, sad voice. “What the hell happened to you?”

Another one who thought she was simply a poor thing. She smiled, leaned forward and bit off his nose-it was too large and juicy a target to resist.

He screamed, so she bit off his lower lip, which made him scream that much louder.

She gnawed and gnawed until he was too cold for her to stomach. Then she began shambling down the road. And because that entire movie took place at night, the daylight never came. She wandered an eternal night of fields and rural back roads and farmhouses, feasting on innocent country folks who only wanted to help her.

And Lorraine… She endured Arlene’s adventures in her head, and finally even got used to them. A person can get used to anything, really. Folks who live near airports soon learn to ignore the roar of planes coming and going. Lorraine grew into a tall, willowy lady. Always slender. Having a zombie in your head is enough to spoil anyone’s appetite. There were plenty of times when she would sit down to dinner, and Arlene would suddenly go on a rampage in her mind. Little zombie-girl would rip apart a couple farmers, tear out their guts and gobble them down, and suddenly that plate of lasagna would seem like a hideous, visceral thing. But Lorraine wouldn’t scream over it…wouldn’t even bat an eyelash. She’d just push the plate away.

As I mentioned, Lorraine eventually became a school teacher. Because a part of her was still a little girl, she liked being around children. She lived in a big nice apartment building, surrounded by families-all the kids there thought she was great. Some of the people in her building had seen her movie, and they were always telling their friends that their neighbor was a movie star. Sometimes folks who had seen the movie would call her Arlene. She’d smile to be polite, but she didn’t like it. “Hey, Arlene-‘Help me, Mommy!’” was the favorite greeting of the fat guy who lived six doors down. She’d always try to take a different route to avoid him if she saw him coming.

Eventually she started dating the school’s janitor, and all of her friends made fun of her for that, joking that the lovers were probably always sneaking off to the boiler room or some such place. The janitor, whose name was Kurt, was a good-looking man, only in his mid-thirties and in fine physical shape. And truth to tell, the two did sneak off together sometimes. To Kurt’s office. His door had a fancy title-Environmental Control Specialist-but it still meant janitor.

Once while she was in his office, Lorraine saw a key hanging from a little nail on the wall behind his desk. The key had a scrap of paper taped to it. The word ATTIC was written on that scrap in blue ballpoint ink. She waited until Kurt’s back was turned, and she took that key.

Even while she was reaching for it, she wasn’t sure why she was taking it. She just knew she had to have it. After school, she stayed behind, waited until everyone was gone and then went up to the attic. It was all storage up there, and the things that had been packed away up there so long ago were now all but forgotten.

Remember where little Arlene ate her parents? In the attic. That’s where the movie-family went to hide from the zombies. The movie-attic had a bed in it, where Arlene used to sleep. She says her four-word line while she’s in that bed. The school attic had a broken cot among its various odds and ends. Obsolete school books, tennis shoes, sacks of that pinkish, pulpy stuff to sprinkle on barf to soak it up and make the smell go away. Lorraine strolled among rows of dusty boxes and stayed up there for about an hour, looking at spider webs and old papers and outdated globes. She realized then that this was the first time she’d been in an attic-any attic at all-since the filming of that movie. Her parents had always lived in apartments. Her dorm room in college had been on the ground floor. A life without attics. She now felt oddly at home-but was it a good home?

When she came down from the attic, left the building and went to her car, the world around her seemed different somehow.

A little less…colorful.

A moment later, Arlene Schabowski saw red in her night-world for the first time. Usually the blood of her victims was shiny black. But she looked down at the hitchhiker she had just torn to bits and saw red, red everywhere. Then she saw that her dress was stained not merely with various splotches of gray, but horrible gouts of rotted filth and gore-red, yellow, brown, green, a veritable rainbow of decay. It made her smile.

A few days later, Kurt was completely confused by Lorraine’s birthday gift to him. “Rainy,” he said, for that is what he called her, “this tie…don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great. And silk, it must have cost plenty. But purple? I don’t know if I’m the purple type…”

“Oh,” she said quite softly. “Is it purple? I thought it was some kind of dark silver. Are you sure it’s purple?”

Lorraine sometimes would bring a book to school to read in the attic, after hours. In the days to come, her students became more and more confused by some of the things she said-especially during art class. Whenever one of them did a drawing, she would ask things like, “What color is that horse?” Or, “That’s a very pretty mermaid-which crayon did you use for the hair?”

Arlene began to notice green leaves among the gray when car headlights hit them just right, and some of the towns she meandered through were bigger than the little country burgs she usually came across. One even had a supermarket. She would hide in the bushes bordering the parking lot and watch the front of the supermarket. Watch all the people rushing in and out. It made her hungry. Sometimes one of the shoppers would hear something rustling in the bushes and go see what it was, worrying that it might be a lost child. They were right to worry.

Lorraine found that the drive back to her house seemed a little shorter every week. And there were fewer cars on the road. Not as many buildings behind the sidewalks. Fewer kids in the school, but more birds in the light blue sky. There was still a bit of color in her world, but not much. The changes were all huge yet gradual. Kurt usually wore a nice polo shirt and jeans to work. It didn’t even surprise her when he started wearing coveralls, or when his voice started to take on a rural twang. He even took to calling her “Honey.”

Arlene just kept on wandering-she was so good at it. Wandering and eating, eating and wandering, always keeping to the shadows, which was getting harder, since there were so many streetlights around. But she was finding more homeless people, so at least she had been eating regularly. No more fields-she was in the suburbs now, and the skies were starting to lighten. Night was slowly giving way to a light blue morning.

You see what was happening, don’t you? They were starting to meet in the middle. Why do you suppose that was happening? Maybe it was because Lorraine was spending so much time up in that attic. I suspect attics have strange powers. They come to points at the top, like pyramids. They’re rather intriguing, aren’t they? And bear in mind, zombie movies were becoming more modern-perhaps the imaginations that had pulled Arlene into existence were pulling her into the present day.

Lorraine was getting pulled, too, but in a different way. Into something…but what? One morning she thought she saw a tractor drive past the school. Later that day, she knew she heard cows mooing in the distance. She broke off her relationship with Kurt. He was becoming more and more rural, like some of the extras in Fear-Farm of the Undead. He was growing too much hair and losing too many teeth. That wasn’t the kind of boyfriend she wanted and this certainly wasn’t the life she wanted to lead. She didn’t like it. No, not one little bit.

Especially when she found herself chewing on what was left of the Algebra teacher, late at night up in the school attic. She couldn’t even remember what she had done to get him up there. Not that it mattered. There were shreds of flesh under her nails, and her belly was swollen with food.

She wasn’t sure if what she had done would turn the skinny old teacher into a zombie, but better safe than sorry. She went down to Kurt’s supply closet, grabbed a hammer, and used it to cave in the old man’s gnawed head.

And then she waited.

Pretty soon she heard the tappity-tap, tappity-tap, tappity-tap of little-girl heels coming up the stairs to the attic. And then…

That’s when you walked in, Arlene.

You walked in and said the four-word phrase that you said in the first half of that movie, in the scene when your mother was putting you to bed: “Tell me a story.” Most people don’t remember you said that. But you did, in that sweet, soft, cheery voice. Though that’s not what your voice sounds like now. You sound like a record that’s slowly melting as it plays.

So. Did you like my story, Arlene? It was all about you-and me, too. But I said “Lorraine” instead of “I” because… Well, I don’t really feel like me anymore. But I’m not you.

I don’t know who I am, where I am or even what I am.

Hmmm…?

No, I’m not your mommy, and I’m afraid I can’t help you.

But who knows. Maybe pounding your head open with this hammer will help me.