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.