THE BLACK ALBUM: A Hollywood Horror Story by Carlton Kenneth Holder Page B

pack of feral looking older kids hung out in and
around the place. The filmmaker noticed a number of flasks being passed about.
Many were smoking as they kept lookout for the local cops. But these kids
weren’t high schoolers. They looked to be anywhere from eighteen to
twenty-three. The impression Loveless got was that they were the stoners and
flunk-outs of the townships. They were the ones who would never escape the
mountain. After a brief youth rebellion, once they began to have bills and
children of their own, they would replace their fathers and their fathers’
fathers as the working class of the mountain: lumber jacks, store clerks, hotel
cleaning personnel, day laborers.
    The look of this youth ran the
gambit from emo through goth, punk, heavy metal to skater. As Loveless was
about to leave, two older boys started arguing. This escalated into a shoving
match. The tougher looking boy, who was wearing an executioner's mask and
outfit, hauled off and punched the other one in the face, then as the kid
covered up, the executioner pounded him several more times on his head and back
for good measures. They were glancing blows, more for show than to cause real
damage. The filmmaker noticed the blood dripping thick green thorn bracelet tattoo around the executioner’s right wrist, traveling up his forearm. Loveless
was about to go over and break things up, when the executioner backed off.
Humiliated, the beaten kid, holding his hand to his bloody nose, cursed
profusely at the other boy as he retreated from the pack with a parting, “Fuck
you, man!”
    When he noticed the filmmaker
watching, the executioner threw a sideways glance at Loveless. The filmmaker
remained expressionless. He wasn’t about to be intimidated by a dumb young punk
in a stupid costume.
     
    Walking up a small stone
stairwell to an isolated section of the parking lot, Loveless heard the sound
of music. A beat-up and dented old pick-up truck was driving by with a lot of
dingy furniture in its paint-chipped bed. A homely looking woman with a butch
haircut, bad teeth and poor complexion was blatantly looking out the window at
the filmmaker with a total lack of emotion. Nor did she look away when Loveless
noticed her. Her eyes seemed to reflect the notion that she knew a secret that
the filmmaker did not. From the woman’s car radio, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird”
was playing. It was then that Loveless remembered that the Southern hard-rock
band had died in a plane crash in 1977, the exact year he had chosen for the
fictional plane crash of Mathaluh, the band destined to be an urban legend.
Eerie as hell coincidence, the filmmaker thought. Or maybe his mind had decided
to release that interesting bit of data from forgotten memories in the
purgatory of his subconscious.
     
    Later, as Loveless returned to
his cabin home, the scene of wild youth popped back in his head as he sat down
at the computer. He was now up to the part of the screenplay where he would
introduce his heroine, the protagonist of the film. He liked the name he had
come up with in his altered state while writing the disjointed first draft:
Grace Lynn. Lynn was a small town name. Grace was a name for a sweet girl with
a sense of spirituality.
    While watching stacks of horror
movies with female leads, the filmmaker noticed that most of these women were
innocent, good, god-fearing people who didn’t deserve the horror that was being
bestowed on them. They were feminine, pretty and traumatized by their gory
ordeal. That's the way Grace came off in the first draft of the story the
filmmaker didn't remember penning.
    But a spark of creativity hit
Loveless like a lightning bolt hurtled by the god of screenwriters. What if the
heroine wasn’t pure or even good? What if she was like the kids who hung out at
the arcade? What if Grace Lynn was wild, feral, troubled? What if she had been
one of those kids who had escaped the mountain, gone off to seek her fame and
fortune in Los Angeles, only to