Castle of Horror Read online

  CASTLE OF HORROR

  by

  Barbara Hambly

  Published by Barbara Hambly at Smashwords

  Copyright 2016 Barbara Hambly

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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  Table of Contents

  Castle of Horror

  About The Author

  Castle of Horror

  “Darling—” Christine Flint – known to film-fans from Pasadena to Yokohama as the incomparable Chrysanda Flamande – rustled into her sister-in-law’s boarding-house bedroom in a firestorm of diamonds and a chinchilla coat so extravagant as to give the impression that she was being devoured by bears. “You’d be able to write another scenario this evening, wouldn’t you? Lenny’s being an absolute pill and says he won’t let you work on anything but Brooklyn Queen, like that’s the only film in Hollywood, but Danny Cross’s brother runs the best speakeasy in Reno, and he says he’ll let Tor drink and play blackjack there on the house if you’ll re-write Lost Lamb as a Western. Is there any of that gin left?”

  She opened the nearest drawer in the dressing-table that Norah had, for most of the afternoon, been using as a desk. “Mrs. Krause’s regular bootlegger isn’t due in until tomorrow and Tor’s practically climbing up the walls and swearing he’ll drive back to Los Angeles if he can’t get a drink, and he isn’t supposed to leave Nevada or else his wife’s lawyer… No, sweetheart, Mama can’t pick you up—“ This to the smallest of her three Pekinese, who was insistently licking her silk-clad ankle. “Is this whiskey, darling? All the liquor in this town smells the same… Oh, and Lost Lamb has to take place in that Castle place because Centurion Pictures has already paid the rent on it for this week and next.”

  “I thought we had Blatt’s Castle until the first.” Norah Blackstone turned from the yellow pile of foolscap – we meaning Colossus Pictures, the current employers of herself, Christine, and thirty other assorted stars, extras, electricians, wardrobe mistresses, Norah’s friend Alec Mindelbaum the cameraman, and Christine’s extra-special latest friend Tor Westlake, whose marital disentanglement (and upcoming marriage to Christine) was responsible for Brooklyn Queen being filmed in Reno rather than Hollywood. “And, no,” she added. “Since Mr. Palmer insists on changing the story every other day, it’s as much as I can do to keep up with him. I can’t possibly write the scenario of another film—”

  “They’re filming at night,” explained Christine, digging another bottle from the back of the dresser-drawer and adding both it and the putative whiskey to a champagne-glass she fetched from her suitcase. “Using the same sets as we are. It’s Bebe Jolivet, you know – the star, I mean – and she’s in Reno, too, like Tor, getting a divorce… Bebe Jolivet,” she added, seeing Norah’s puzzled face. “She’s a tremendous star in the Negro pictures – she’s married to Stan Littlejohn. The baseball player?”

  Norah shook her head. “I’ve never heard—”

  “He’s in the Negro Leagues, darling. Where have you been?” She pulled up her skirt, extracted a thin silver flask from her garter, dribbled the last thimble-full from it into her ad hoc cocktail, drank it off, and made a face. “I swear if somebody doesn’t find a decent bootlegger in this town I’m going to have to go back to cocaine.”

  “Where I have been,” said Norah, “is writing the scenarios for such epics as Hot Potato, Sparkin’ In The Dark, Week-End Wife, and King Lear… and re-writing other peoples’ scenarios for Corpus Delicti, Asking For It, and, currently, The Brooklyn Queen. And I shudder every time I contemplate the title-card that’s going to say, King Lear, by William Shakespeare with additional dialog by Norah Blackstone.”

  “Yes, but darling…” Christine flounced down onto the corner of the nearer of the room’s two beds – which was so close to Norah’s dressing-table that her knees brushed Norah’s hip – and leaned across to take her hands. The largest of Christine’s three Pekinese, Chang Ming, leaped up onto the bed beside her and immediately tried to climb into her lap, while the other two, unable to make so colossal a spring as eighteen inches, stood on their hind legs with their paws on her knees and licked adoringly at her hands, her knees, and their own flat noses.

  “I’m absolutely begging you.” Her huge dark eyes, like those of her pets, pleaded – an effect she used at least once in every one of the twenty or so films she’d been in over the course of the past four years.

  It wasn’t that Norah feared that Christine would actually go back to cocaine, a drug which pretty much every movie-star in Hollywood resorted to in the course of grueling shooting-schedules and the even-more-demanding business of keeping one’s name in the limelight by assiduous attendance at all the “hot” parties. Two months ago – in February of 1924 – after the frightful affair of the accursed Chinese necklace which had surrounded the filming of She-Devil of Babylon*, when Christine had spoken of giving up the drug, Norah had enlisted the aid of Christine’s regular cameraman Alec Mindelbaum, the woman who did Christine’s make-up, and of one or two others at Colossus Studios. Every morning after Christine had used her “pick-me-up” thereafter, they had simply squinted hard at her, taken twice as long over her make-up, tsk’d over imaginary crows’-feet and lip-lines, and had taken it in turns to whisper to her, confidentially, What ARE you doing to yourself, darling? You look ten years older! Alec in particular had shown a genius for adjusting the camera on a number of takes which had horrified her. Christine’s monumental vanity had done the rest.

  And it helped, Norah reflected, that Tor Westlake – breath-takingly handsome, stupid as a hammer, and born Theodore Whimple, with whom Christine had fallen insanely in love in March – was vain as a monkey about his own looks and eschewed the drug as well. They both still drank like fish and smoked like the dark satanic mills of Manchester – whence Norah had come, last October, to be Christine’s companion – but, reflected Norah, one thing at a time.

  “We just can’t have Tor going back to Los Angeles when he’s supposed to be living in Nevada! Marissa Sherrod— ” That was Tor’s soon-to-be-ex-fifth wife “—doesn’t want this divorce because her career is going downhill and she’s using his money to finance her next picture, and she has her lawyers watching out for him to do anything that they could use to delay it until after it’s cut. And I’m told Ritchie Cross – Danny Cross’s brother, you know… Danny’s the director of Lost Lamb… Ritchie Cross at the Goldstrike gets absolutely the best booze in Nevada, from God only knows where! You know how Tor is, darling. He has to be doing things, he has to be moving; he’s a man of excitement, and action, and passion! Being stuck in a one-horse town like Reno is driving him cuckoo! Please, darling. It’s just a little script. And it’s all written. You just have to make it take place in the Wild West instead of Paris.”

  Norah sighed. “All right. I’ll have a look at it.”

  “Darling!” Christine sprang to her feet – scattering Pekinese in all directions – and rushed to the window that looked out onto Virginia Street. “It’s all right, darlings,” she cried, leaning out and waving. “She says she’ll do it!”

  Norah, following her, saw the little gathering on the sidewalk – presumably the crew of Lost Lamb, as all of them were black and none of them except Deacon Barnes the extra looked handsome enough to be in front of the camera – as they burst into exuberant cheers.

  *

  In the final year of the war which had killed her husba
nd and impoverished her family, Norah Blackstone had had the opportunity to observe what Americans called “segregation” in action. The tall young American soldier whom Norah had met, and loved, and married in an exquisite whirlwind of passion and soul-deep delight in the spring of 1918 had explained to her – when she’d asked why only the white soldiers came to the church and social-club dances – that it wasn’t because the men of the 92nd Division didn’t like Britons or didn’t like to dance. They were mostly worried about being jumped by gangs of their white comrades-in-arms for daring to participate.

  “In the States it’s worse,” Jim Blackstone had said, walking Norah back to her parents’ house in the chilly Oxford night. “In most states it’s against the law for a colored man to marry a white woman, or vice versa. There are laws forbidding restaurants that serve whites to serve blacks. It’s worse than being a Jew, because at least nobody’s going to throw me out of my seat in the subway because of how I look.” He’d shrugged.

  “In the States, the blacks form their own communities, the way we – the Jews – have done. Since the war started here in Europe, Negroes from the south have been flooding up to Harlem in New York City. They have their own clubs, their own restaurants, their own music. Good music… They have their own newspapers and their own theaters, not cheap minstrel-shows but real theater. I’ll have to take you up there sometime,” he’d added, a little shyly, and had tightened his elbow against his side to squeeze her hand. “If you’d like to go.”

  But eight weeks later – six weeks after their marriage – Jim had died, riddled with German machine-gun bullets, in Belleau Wood, and it hadn’t been until Jim’s reprobate sister Christine had come to England to publicize one of her films that it had even occurred to Norah that she might one day view America for herself. And since coming to America – and falling in love, after nearly five years of widowhood, with the cameraman Alec Mindelbaum – Norah had observed that what Jim had told her was quite true. It was literally against the law, in pretty much the entire United States, for blacks to marry whites or for the colored to enter any restaurant, railroad car, public toilet (Well, REALLY! thought Norah, this is exactly like Uncle Sher’s descriptions of India!), nightclub, baseball diamond or theater designated as the territory of the “superior” race…

  With the result, as Jim had said, that there was a flourishing culture of colored restaurants, colored night-clubs, “race” music, Negro cinema, and – it even appeared – Negro League Baseball (“Oh, gosh, yes,” enthused Alec when she mentioned it to him later. “Next time we’re in Chicago or anywhere in the South, I’ll take you to a game. You haven’t lived ‘til you’ve seen Bullet Rogan pitch!” For all Alec’s courtesy, wit, talent, and gentleness, he was an American and Norah supposed that his passion for baseball should be forgiven for the sake of all the rest.)

  In any case, it appeared that black motion picture studios – most of which operated out of Chicago, it transpired – had the same problems that white ones did. To wit, Norah discovered when the crew of Centurion Pictures swept her and Christine (and Christine’s three Pekinese) away to the Goldstrike Ranch, where Ritchie Cross operated the speakeasy, they also had stars so desirous of shedding their spouses – Stan Littlejohn was evidently Bebe Jolivet’s third – that they would – and could – demand that their next picture be shot in Reno while they waited out the three month’s residency which were all that was required to obtain a divorce.

  “Heck, no, we can’t shoot the picture with somebody else!” sighed Danny Cross, Lost Lamb’s director, lanky and grizzled and looking not in the slightest like his extremely handsome brother, the speakeasy’s manager. “It’d sure save us trouble if we could. But audiences can’t get enough of Bebe. Even if we could manage to get somebody like Julie Mason or Florence McClain at this late date, we’d lose our shirts, and Bebe’s manager would sue us.”

  “We were lucky to get Blatt’s Castle for night shoots,” added Marty Peacock, a soft-handed, nervous little man with a Van Dyke beard. He perched on one of the several chairs on the rear porch of the Goldstrike Ranch’s “Bunkhouse Number Three” (as the speakeasy was officially known), a piece of furniture constructed entirely of cattle-horns, presumably to convince the Ranch’s wealthy patrons that they were indeed in the Wild West. “Have you been up to the Castle yet, Mrs. Blackstone? I don’t know who this Mr. Blatt was, or why anybody in his right mind would build something like that out in the middle of nowhere—”

  “He made a fortune in the Comstock,” provided Deacon Barnes, the gorgeous and good-natured muscle-man who was playing the hero of Lost Lamb and a waiter in Brooklyn Queen. “I guess he was from someplace in Germany and thought he was descended from one of their kings. The castle is supposed to be an exact copy of the one near his home-town.” He poured two glasses of champagne and brought them over to the ladies. It was eleven o’clock in the morning but, sipping hers before setting it aside, Norah was surprised to discover that Christine had been perfectly right. It actually was champagne, and quite good champagne at that.

  “Maybe it is,” retorted Christine. She drained her glass. “But I’ve seen better furniture in the Sears, Roebuck catalog,” a rather severe judgment, Norah reflected, coming from a woman seated on a chair made from moose-antlers. “And personally, I don’t see why Lenny is insisting that poor Norah re-write Brooklyn Queen so that it still takes place in England or someplace, instead of letting her re-write it as a Western like you want her to re-write Lost Lamb.”

  “Brooklyn Queen is literally about a girl who becomes a queen in Central Europe, Chris,” pointed out Deacon, who had known Christine for years. “Lost Lamb is just Romeo and Juliet about rich people and poor.”

  “Well, they have horses and cattle and things in Central Europe, don’t they?” argued Christine. “There, there, precious,” she added, as Buttercreme, the moonlight-pale Pekinese bitch, edged more deeply into the folds of her fur coat and produced a tiny soprano growl of disapproval as someone in the gambling-room behind them let out a whoop of triumph. “Don’t you worry about that nasty man. I’m sure he’s going to lose all that money in about ten minutes and shoot himself.”

  In addition to the “best speakeasy in Reno,” the Goldstrike Ranch – one of the many “dude ranches” which dotted the arid countryside around that prosperous little Nevada city – boasted a handsome lodge and a dozen luxurious “cabins” for the benefit of those men and women who could afford three months of idleness while getting shut of their spouses. From the rear porch of “Bunkhouse Number Three,” Norah could see well-kept stables, a modern swimming pool, and a number of suspiciously decorative cowboys clothed in a fashion which would have embarrassed Tom Mix. While Christine sipped champagne and stroked Buttercreme and Black Jasmine – the third of her tiny guardians – and exchanged Hollywood gossip with Deacon (“…she was not only embezzling just everything the poor woman made, but sleeping with the chauffeur that her boss was going to divorce her husband to marry…”), Norah made notes on how best to transform a tale of the French Revolution into one about the Comstock Lode, and reflected again upon the educational experience her move to America had turned out to be.

  Not entirely to Norah’s surprise, when Tor Westlake rode up, on a white horse and wearing a rhinestoned cowboy-shirt and the most extraordinary chaps Norah had ever seen, and swept Christine into his powerful arms, the second thing Christine said (after, “Oh, my darling!”) was, “Norah, darling, would you be a dear and take the dogs back to the boarding-house? I haven’t the faintest how long we’ll be here…”

  “Of course.” Norah wondered what her feckless sister-in-law was going to do when she herself married Alec and resigned her post as dog-brusher and general factotum of Christine’s disordered affairs.

  “We’ll give you a ride back to town,” offered Danny Cross, as Deacon helped Norah on with her coat. She, Christine, and the dogs had come out to the Goldstrike in Christine’s sleek yellow Packard and clearly Tor wasn’t going to transport his be
loved back to town pillion on his milk-white steed.

  But as they emerged down the back steps of the ranch-house, the men shaking hands repeatedly with Norah and thanking her for taking on the re-write (Centurion’s regular scenarist having been called unexpectedly away to deal with family illness in Atlanta), she saw – with the inevitable and always-marvelous exultation entirely out of proportion to its appearance – the familiar battered black Model T in the dusty yard in front of the main lodge, and Alec Mindelbaum leaning on its fender.

  (Like to the lark at break of day arising/ from sullen earth, sings hymns at Heaven’s gate…)

  “We finished shooting down by the river,” said the cameraman, kissing Norah and taking the leashes of the ecstatic dogs. At least Chang Ming and Black Jasmine were ecstatic. Buttercreme, whom Norah carried cradled protectively in one arm, merely licked her nose in disapproval of the entire expedition. “Tor said he was coming here, so I thought I’d drive over and see if you needed a lift back to town. I hear you’re taking on the re-write?”

  “News travels fast,” grimaced Norah. “Heaven forefend that Mr. Westlake should have to drive back to Los Angeles to get decent liquor.”

  “It’s haunted you know.” Christine – still in Tor’s protective grip – emerged onto speakeasy’s porch again. “Blatt’s Castle. Mary DeNoux—“ She named the Colossus Pictures wardrobe mistress “—got her hair done yesterday and the woman at the beauty parlor told her that Cornelius Blatt’s first wife threw herself off the tower of the castle, and his second wife hanged herself from the top of the circular staircase in the library, and both of them now chase each other screaming up and down the halls at night. And Tor says that means that it’s the perfect place to hold a séance and contact the spirits of the departed!”