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  FADE TO BLACK

  Sensitive Eric Binford strikes back at life the only way he knows how—he reenacts in character his favorite and most terrifying movie murders.

  A SHATTERING THRILLER OF UNSPEAKABLE HORROR!

  THE CELLULOID KILLER

  If Eric were to have cast his life with a free hand, he would have been James Cagney, and Marilyn Monroe would have been his wife. They would have had a nice place out in the mountains somewhere, near one of the old studio lots. They would have amused themselves by going down to the lot, donning costumes, and making up new characters to play. They wouldn’t have had any kids. Just each other.

  But Eric wasn’t in a position to run his life like a producer. He was only a dreamer, one among thousands of troubled souls languishing in the outskirts of Hollywood, who found life a pale imitation of the movies, lacking sufficient drama, short on snappy dialogue, poorly directed and ineptly cast. He felt that any life that went on outside of the movies was an out-take, spoiled footage best left ignored on the floor of the editing room. And so his room reeked of the cinema, a carefully controlled environment, down to the special Velcro clips he’d placed along the side windows to hold strips of cloth over the edge of the shades, preventing sunlight from creeping into his domain.

  In his room and in the movie theatre were the only places where Eric felt he truly belonged, where he was among real friends and family. The movies had raised him, taught him all he knew.

  Just like Peter Sellers in Being There.

  Almost.

  A SHATTERING PSYCHOLOGICAL DRAMA

  FADE TO BLACK

  Copyright © 1980 by Fade to Black Venture

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  An original Pinnacle Books edition, published for the first time anywhere.

  First printing, December 1980

  ISBN: 0-523-41409-9

  Printed in the United States of America

  PINNACLE BOOKS, INC.

  2029 Century Park East

  Los Angeles, California 90067

  For still a different M.M.

  CHAPTER • 1

  It was dark out, the last black of night before dawn.

  The neighborhood slumbered peacefully.

  A battered pickup rolled down Market Street, in the heart of Venice, and pulled to a stop beside the corner curbstone. The truck idled while the driver climbed out, took a slow sip from his Thermos, then walked around to the back of the truck. The bed was weighted down with Sunday papers. He dropped the tailgate and grunted as he yanked out the bundle closest to him and dropped it on the curb.

  Up in his room, above the muted whispers on his portable Sony, twenty-six-year-old Eric Binfold heard the sweet slap of bundle on concrete. It was music to his ears. He smiled to himself and tilted back his fedora. During the next commercial, he bounded downstairs in his stocking feet and out the front door. He paused on the porch, taking a deep breath of the fog-filled morning air. He wore a second-hand shirt and a third-hand blazer, but no pants. Pale, spindly legs poked through his patterned pair of boxer shorts.

  No one was out, so he made his way down the ivy-laden steps to the sidewalk. He gingerly unknotted the bundle and pulled out the top paper, then tied the string back. Timmy wouldn’t be by to start his deliveries for another hour. He’d count the bundle and know Eric had already helped himself.

  The Sunday paper was thick, and had to be bound on its own with another string. As he headed slowly back up the steps, Eric rolled the paper and slid off the loop of string.

  A lariat.

  “Round ’em up, Hoppy,” he told himself, eyeing the doorknob like Hopalong Cassidy about to lasso an archvillain. He tossed the string. It fell short of the knob and dropped onto the raised rubber knobs of the welcome mat. He left it and went inside.

  It was an older house, close to either side of a golden anniversary, rundown in ways but graced with the architectural equivalent of character lines, evoking a sense of personality devoid in the newer tract homes and apartment complexes slowly taking over the neighborhood.

  The kitchen was cramped, doubling as a dining room. Eric sat at the edge of the table, supporting the paper on his lap as he sorted through sections until he found the television magazine. He set the magazine aside and neatly stacked the paper back together. He carried it stealthily out through the living room to the half-opened bedroom door by the staircase. He peered inside.

  Aunt Stella hadn’t bothered to let herself out of the wheelchair again. She slept sitting, her head cocked to one side on her arms as she leaned forward on the makeshift vanity filling one corner of the room. The large mirror was bordered with clear incandescent bulbs, half of them on and bathing her in a pale yellow glow. Toiletries cluttered the tabletop around her. Rising above pinkie-sized bottles of perfume and bulbous atomizers was a half-empty bottle of beet juice. A filled glass rested near the woman’s elbow, the liquid red like blood.

  Eric strode silently into the room and set the paper at the edge of his aunt’s neatly made bed. Midnight, two light eyes set amidst a ball of black fur, mewed anxiously from her resting place between the cleavage of two pillows.

  “Shhhhhhh,” Eric whispered, leaning over the bed and stroking the kitten until its whine subsided to a contented, almost mechanical purr, barely audible above Aunt Stella’s rustled breathing.

  Eric paused to look at her again. She seemed so vulnerable, with an innocent, pathetic look on her dozing face; the pouting lower lip, age showing through her makeup as certainly as the dark roots betraying the origins of her blonde hair. It was hard to imagine the nagging crone that lurked beneath the tranquil façade.

  Eric left the room before pity could set in, stopping long enough to hold his breath and pick up the plastic dishpan filled with clumped kitty litter next to the vanity. He wasn’t sure which smelled worse, the litter or the perfume.

  Under Midnight’s scrutinous supervision, Eric dumped out the contents of the pan into the trash and relined it with a fresh layer of Johnny Cat before returning it to Aunt Stella’s room. Before Eric was out of the room, Midnight hopped into the pan and broke in the new turf.

  Eric took the TV magazine off the kitchen table and yawned as he softly trudged back up the stairs, flipping through the first pages to the letter section. Most of the write-ins were trivia questions, and Eric placed his thumb over the answers as he quizzed himself.

  “Aw, come on,” he said, disappointed. “This stuff is strictly kindergarten. ‘Who played the Warren Beatty part in the original Heaven Can Wait?’ Sheesh!”

  He decided he’d have to write in again himself; give them a question that would really trip them up. He’d already done that twice before, and gotten back postcards explaining regretably that they didn’t know the answer. Each time, he’d written back, providing the solution and offering his services as a regular columnist. “Ask Eric.” It had a great ring to it, he thought. A hell of a ring. He’d have his picture there, too. Or, better yet, they’d rotate a series of pictures, each one with him doing his imitation of a different star, as a bonus for buffs. They’d write in and say, “Hey, Eric, ’fess up now. You were doing Bogie in last week’s issue, right?”

  The paper had never responded to his offer, though. He’d gone into their offices a few times but had never been able to get past the receptionist. Some people can’t appreciate talent, he told himself. Someday they would, though. Someday those same people would look up to Eric Binford, grovel for his attention, and he’d laugh at them, tell them, “I’m sorry, but I really don’t have time for you.” Real snide and smuglike, the same way they handed it out.

  Someday.

  Erie had been the type of child a parent would punish by sending him an
ywhere but his room.

  Eric had had the same room all his life, and it showed. Bit by bit, he had transformed it into not only an extension, but the source of his imagination. It was, in a way, as if he had somehow managed to turn the small screen of his television set into a doorway, providing passage for dwarfed figures to emerge from the confines of bombarding electrons into the real world. Eric’s room was a swollen testament to the movies, a cramped collection of memorabilia purchased with a lifetime of allowances and part-time wages. There was the suit of armor from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which he had spent two hours getting into the day he had bought it, only to find it was too small for him. Aunt Stella had had to call for help to get him out of the costume. He had a plaster replica of the Maltese Falcon purchased through a fan club; a Hopalong Cassidy mask and one of the many outfits William Boyd had gone through while starring in the sixty-six Cassidy movies filmed between 1935 and 1948; a cigar-store Indian from an Old West set. There were so many items that he had forgotten some of their origins and even lost track of others once they were covered over by new acquisitions.

  And, of course, there were pictures. One-sheets, the poster-sized advertisements posted in theatre windows, featuring his favorite movies; black-and-white glossies, some autographed; life-sized cardboard likenesses of favorite stars used in lobbies to generate anticipation for coming attractions. They covered the walls, overlapping one another.

  On the miniature screen of Eric’s Sony, stony-faced Marines were standing at attention beneath a waving flag while the “Star Spangled Banner” played over the cookie-sized speaker. It was that nether time between the late, late show and the early, early movie, when the airwaves were given over to test patterns, preachers, and the crackling gray fuzz of dead air.

  It was only fifteen minutes before Public Enemy came on. Public Enemy. James Cagney. Four stars. A fave.

  To kill time, Eric turned to the information channel, where a camera incessantly panned back and forth across an overgrown dashboard of gauges and panels providing viewers with everything from the weather to the time in Tokyo, all against a background of classical music.

  While the music softly played, Eric went over to his night table and filled his antique silver fountain pen with black ink. He went through his desk drawers and took out a candy bar from its place of concealment beneath his Argyle socks. Taking the pen and candy bar back to bed, he plopped down on the rumpled covers and prepared to block out his viewing schedule for the upcoming week. He unwrapped the Snickers bar and bit off one end, chomping happily in anticipation of a much-needed sugar rush. He mumbled out loud to himself as he went through the TV Guide, mostly to keep himself awake. He had to stay up. He couldn’t let Cagney down.

  He skimmed the separate columns of the magazine, his trained eye stopping on each movie and scanning the titles for something worth watching.

  “. . . To Have and Have Not. Bogart and Bacall. Boy, they were magic in that one . . . Hmmmmm, it’s Cagney week, three P.M. every day, Channel Nine. That’s perfect . . . If I can just get the old bag to turn off the tape machine. Jesus . . .” Eric had a Betamax hitched up to the large console downstairs, for use in building up his film library.

  Eric laughed as he came to an unrated film. “Planet Nine from Outer Space. That was the worse. Worse director, Jesus, what a turkey . . . oh, I can skip that one . . . The big ape again. Tuesday at five, old King Kong. I’ve already got that one . . . Dracula’s Daughter, one-fifteen. Oh, I can’t make that one. The Big Sleep’s on at the same time. Chandler and Hawks. What a combination that was . . . They don’t make these kinds of movies any more. I gotta see it again. I mean, Bogart in that bookstore. God . . . Reefer Madness on Fifty-two. Horrible. Seen that twice. I think that’s enough of that one . . .”

  He still couldn’t figure out why it was that most stations only played the good movies late at night or early in the afternoon. Three times last week he’d been up until three in the morning, making sure he’d catch a couple of classics. It didn’t make any sense. There was so much trash on prime time. What the hell was wrong with people, anyway?

  Eric circled the films he would be able to watch with a solid line. With a broken line, he marked off those he’d have to appeal to Aunt Stella to tape. He tried to keep those to a minimum. The way she ranted, you’d think he was asking her to produce the damn things, not just snap a few switches.

  He suddenly brightened. “That’s the one! 99 River Street, with John Payne. I should tape that one . . .” It was an obscure gem. Payne as a cabbie caught up in a diamond heist. Good stuff for a B-thriller. Top-notch atmosphere, too, Eric thought. The kind of setting he had in mind for his own film, the one he’d been tinkering with for years. He’d get around to finishing it one of these days.

  Evelyn Keyes was in 99 River Street, too, Eric recalled, making her perennial bid to rise from the long-cast shadow of being Scarlett O’Hara’s younger sister. It had worked some, after all, Eric figured. Got her a role in The Seven Year Itch, even if it was just second-fiddling Marilyn.

  Marilyn.

  Eric smiled at the thought of her. He closed his eyes to remember her in The Seven Year Itch, cavorting sensually through dream sequences with Tom Ewell.

  Marilyn.

  He lay back a moment and stared up at the ceiling. She looked back at him from a life-sized poster, basking in the neon glow of the colored lights around her.

  Of all the stars lording over Eric’s room, Marilyn Monroe was the most widely represented. From her walk-ons in Dangerous Years and Ladies of the Chorus to her dubious swan song in The Misfits, Marilyn’s image adorned the room, world and mind of Eric Binford.

  The first time he’d met her was in an old issue of Life magazine. June, 1962. He’d just been a kid then, at the curious stage when a magazine found hidden behind a clothes hamper was a treasure trove of forbidden fruit. Marilyn had been on the cover, smiling vibrantly, looking away from the camera. Her hair had been disheveled, and she had stood at the edge of a swimming pool, her body well-hidden behind a large, gray bathrobe. She had looked the way Aunt Stella strived to look, and succeeded in every way Aunt Stella failed. Eric had locked himself in the bathroom and looked through the pictures of Marilyn, seeing things he wasn’t supposed to look at, according to his aunt. There were shots taken from film footage of what was supposed to have been Marilyn’s next picture. A night scene, with her skinny dipping.

  Eric’s imagination had been set afire, and when, less than two months later, Life came out with a second cover story commemorating the career that had led to Marilyn’s untimely death, the obsession had been set into motion. Over the years he had begun to track down old magazine articles, watch for her movies on television, and seek out any other clue to be found about this love of his life who had died days before he had learned of her existence.

  His first job had been as an usher at the Fox Venice theatre, less than a mile from his home. He had volunteered to work for free his first week, when they were featuring a Marilyn Monroe film festival. His first day on the job, he had sat down with the crowd and stared mesmerized through the first showing of Niagara, her first major dramatic role. He had watched the rest of the festival as a paying customer, having been fired before he was even on the payroll.

  His passion for Marilyn had soon branched out into a love for all movies, good or bad. He had developed his own set of idols, the foremost being James Cagney. Jimmy. He was tough. He was cool. Never took any shit. Like John Wayne, only more Eric’s size. Cagney was greater than Wayne, Eric thought, because it took more guts to be tough when you were just a little guy.

  If Eric were to cast his life with a free hand, he would have been James Cagney, and Marilyn Monroe would have been his wife. They would have had a nice place out in the mountains somewhere, near one of the old studio lots. They would have amused themselves by going down to the lot, donning costumes, and making up new characters to play. They wouldn’t have had any kids. Just each other.

>   But Eric wasn’t in a position to run his life like a top-rank producer. He was only a dreamer, one among thousands of troubled souls languishing in the outskirts of Hollywood who found life a pale imitation of the movies, lacking sufficient drama, short on snappy dialogue, poorly directed, and ineptly cast. He felt that any life that went on outside of the movies was an out-take, spoiled footage best left ignored on the floor of the editing room. And so his room reeked of the cinema, a carefully controlled environment, down to the special Velcro clips he’d placed along the side windows to hold strips of cloth over the edge of the shades, preventing sunlight from creeping into his domain.

  In his room and in the movie theatre were the only places where Eric felt he truly belonged, where he was among real friends and family. The movies had raised him, taught him all he knew.

  Just like Peter Sellers in Being There.

  Almost.

  CHAPTER • 2

  It was dawn when Aunt Stella awoke, disoriented long enough to jerk back from the vanity and knock over the glass near her elbow. She shrieked as the beet juice raced along the table top, soaking into the facial puffs and cascading over the edge onto the bathrobe draped across her immobile legs.

  “Eric!” she cried out. “Eric!”

  Receiving no answer, she fumed to herself as she cleaned off the table and poured herself another glass of the tepid juice, downing it greedily like a happy-hour alcoholic.

  Some of her makeup had come off on her bathrobe where she had propped her face on her arms while she slept. She looked at herself in the mirror, rubbing arthritic fingers across the smeared streaks of her left cheek.

  “Stella, you need a facial,” she told herself, calming down.

  Her wheelchair was motorized, with a control box mounted at the front end of the right armrest. She wrapped a pudgy palm over the round knob of the gearshift and powered herself back from the table and across the room to her closet.