Meanwhile, my mind was on overdrive. Something was wrong here. His name was Creighton? There went my house of cards of a theory. The movie hero, Larry Talbot, had been played by the son of the Hunchback and the Man of a Thousand faces, Lon Chaney. I was now comforting Lon Chaney Jr., CinSim.
I’d now met both father and son CinSims, both famed for playing multiple roles, multiple monster roles. I should be bringing these events to a conclusion, but the scenario and cast were just getting more confused.
And who the hell was the ghastly, ghostly soprano still commanding the upper reaches of the Gehenna Hotel?
I had no trouble persuading Sansouci to leave the troubled man in the woods to his own devices.
“What a wimp,” Sansouci declared when we neared the main concourse. “I got ‘bit’ for eternity too and you don’t see me moaning around about it.”
“You’re not the angsty protagonist of a movie classic.”
He snorted derision.
“Scoff all you like, but Lon Chaney Jr. knew what his father knew, that a likable monster under the mask is much more intriguing than an evil being through and through. Cicereau would be more fully rounded if he’d actually regretted having his daughter killed.”
“No sell,” Sansouci said of his boss. “You can handle these schizophrenic CinSim shape-shifters?”
“I’ll have to. Give me the printouts you made for me. Lon Chaney Sr. mistook me for his movie leading lady. Most CinSims are leased in a single role, but this pair were known for metamorphosing. Maybe I can convince Larry Talbot I’m his love interest.”
“You’d do all this for Cicereau?”
“Heck, no.” I snatched the folding papers Sansouci produced from his inner jean jacket pocket. “I’ll do it for getting these helplessly entangled CinSims’ house in order. Whatever’s gone wrong has to do with the actors’ private lives. You’d better leave me to it.”
I stood there and listened after Sansouci left. The voice was still singing, although familiarity bred dismissal. It was becoming just more casino background music. Yet, Larry Talbot had been right. She’d been singing a lullaby while we’d talked in the ersatz woods, Brahms’s famous one, in fact, and it had almost put Larry Talbot to sleep.
Suddenly, I had a plan.
I headed back to the theater area. It was “dark” now, even during daylight, since only two evening shows played there. I knew my way around theaters, and had almost been an indentured attraction here, so I raced down the empty aisles and up the steps at the side of the stage, then into the dark and curtained wings at stage right.
Large light-board and special-effects layouts filled the area. Matching installments were set up at the back of the “house.” I wanted under, not up, so I scrabbled around in the dark until I found a set of narrow, steep steps down to the subbasement.
Before I descended, I turned on the pinpoint light and punched the button on one of two dozen labeled sound and visual effects: lightning, thunder, parade … there! Just what I needed. Wedding processional.
Sansouci was right. I was making the ultimate sacrifice to pursue this case.
Glad for my flat-heeled shoes, I backed down the ladderlike steps into the dark. Above, I heard the house above fill with the thrilling notes of “Here Comes the Bride,” aka Wagner’s operatic Bridal Chorus from
The music was ponderous, slow, churchy organ music. I’d never expected to waltz down the aisle to this famous, formal organ music, but it was crazy appropriate for the past and the present I needed to meld into one big postmortem family reunion to end the haunting of the Gehenna and put restless human spirits and silver-screen stars to bed in Lullaby Land. I hoped it would conjure the most famous monster of all.
And, with the vibrations of that thunderous march shaking the stone roots of the subbasement, I stopped and listened for the thin soprano trill that never stopped.
Yes! Faint, but still discernible.
I stepped forward to the march’s beat, clasped my hands at my demure Audrey Hepburn waist, and mouthed the words “Here comes the bride, all dressed and wide.” Well, those were the lyrics we had used at Our Lady of the Lake Convent School.
“Beautiful,” a thrumming male voice added to the cacophony.
A face from a nightmare leapt in front of me. “You? You, girl. You sing like a chorus of angels emerging from one throat. I’ll teach you, shape you, make you even more magnificent.”
I simpered at the grotesque face with the eyes circled in black paint and the blackened and ragged teeth. I couldn’t sing, but I could hear, and I mouthed along with the distant siren, while the Phantom of the Opera closed his lids over those mad, blasted eyes and swayed to the song echoing above.… “Think of Me,” as it is sung at the Las Vegas Venetian Resort Hotel Casino performance of
Finally, the female phantom of the Gehenna finished a long, sustained phrase, and … stopped.
The automatic organ melody had died even earlier.
I stood alone in the darkened silence with the Phantom of the Opera, 1927-style, Lon Chaney’s greatest transformation.
“My love. My Christine,” the Phantom said, words Chaney had mouthed on the 1925 silent-film screen. He’d never uttered an audible word until his last film in 1930, and, dying, this son of deaf-mutes had not been able to speak at all. “Only you can sing my soul to rest.”
Yes, that was true. To accomplish that, I had to lead him on a merry chase.
Up the stairs I sprang on my brand-new leopard-skin rose-toed flats, feeling the CinSim clutch at my ragged taffeta hem.
Onto the stage and up the aisles to the bright artificial light of the concourse I flew like Cinderella eluding her Prince. Tourists paused to observe and
Larry Talbot, now fully furred and fanged, rose from the underbrush, growling, determined to stop my pursuer.
I stepped aside like a bit player trying to save her acting wardrobe as monster met monster.
The Phantom ruled his understage world, but he was an emotional and intellectual monster.
The Wolf Man bared his fangs and his wild, white-eyed look and pounced on the disfigured maniac opera buff.
I couldn’t have the Immortality Mob’s property tearing each other gray limb from black limb, so I jumped between them.
“You want to save me, noble suitors,” I cried in what for me was close to a swooning soprano, “do not destroy each other. I love you both.”
Well, there. I’d introduced a logical impossibility into the plot of every film either “man” had ever acted in.
In confusion, Lon Chaney Jr. morphed into his Mummy persona.
“Oh, Karis,” I said, pressing a restraining hand on his blood-smudged chest wrappings. “He is but an old man, a figure of fun, not a rival.”
At which, Lon Chaney Sr. obligingly changed into one of his demented clown personas.
This is when I discovered that the female love interest is the queen of the board, the key to every plot of every originally cheesy melodramatic script these film legends had appeared in. She was lovely, she was engaged, she was a swooning wimp, and they ached to own her love, but always lost out to a fine, stalwart, handsome, ordinary human man.
In some ways, the life and loves of Lon Chaney and his son Creighton, who would resurface as Lon Chaney Jr., much to his embarrassment and shame, were as much at stake here as any misunderstood film monster’s fate.
I was getting a lot of melodrama whiplash keeping these legendary actors and their roles apart when a
