Volume 2 focuses on the Drifter’s subsequent exploits, namely his attempt to find a foothold in the highly secretive and clannish Dodge City Film Industry, ruled over by the enigmatic and possibly immortal filmmaker Blut Branson. In this excerpt, the Drifter watches one of Blut Branson’s films from within the Temple, a theater created specifically to show Branson’s works, in the style of Bayreuth for Wagner’s operas.

By this point in the Retrospective, which has a strict no reentry policy, meaning that all films must be watched in the gathering daze of those shown before, I’m losing track of the beginnings and endings, and my critical faculties are fading. It’s starting to feel like one ultra-long film, which I suspect is the Programmer’s intention.

Now I’m watching a pastoral, old-timey version of Dodge City, a little Shtetl-like, as Dodge City’s past can sometimes seem – as if the Old Country were located not overseas but deep in the Heart of America – when a Wanderer appears in Town, stealing in under milky cloud cover just before dawn, skulking among the pastures like a warlock in a Hungarian folktale: gaunt and black-cloaked, face obscured under a wide-brimmed felt hat. The camera hangs back as he takes a few preliminary turns around the pens that hold The Dodge City Farm Animals – pigs, sheep, cows, and goats by the looks of it, though I have the impression that some animals are playing others, as is often the case in Branson films, “casting is 99% of Directing” being one of Branson’s favorite phrases, if Branson on Branson is to be believed.

After pausing in what looks like contemplation for a moment, the Wanderer leans in to whisper something in one of the animals’ ears. As soon as he’s finished, the animal – a goat, by the looks of it – yawns exaggeratedly and falls over. At this point, I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be dead or sleeping.

***

Dead, as it turns out.

Over the next few days, the film reveals the method that the Slaughterer (now that we know what he is) uses: he simply strides up to one of the farm animals on those long legs of his, whispers in its ear, and stands back to watch it gently, even peacefully, keel over dead.

“What’s he whispering?” is, of course, the none-too-subtle subtext of the film at this point – the phrase itself is whispered among the townspeople, who always populate the backgrounds of Branson’s films, played by actual Dodge City citizens, naturally, though of course they appear more squalid and haunted-eyed than most actual people around here, even those culled from the Annex.

“What’s he whispering?” Indeed. I whisper the phrase in my seat during a montage in which ten or twelve animals are killed in quick succession, though, this being a Branson film, I know better than to expect a concrete answer by film’s end, which, since the films are all shown back-to-back, isn’t a moment I have especially high hopes of even being able to identify as such.

In fast montage, the slaughterer – known now as “the Harmless Slaughterer,” a phrase whose ambiguity doesn’t quite dawn on me until I reflect on it later, once the trance of the film has at long last been broken – whispers in the ears of all the farm animals of Dodge City, causing them to keel over one by one, until the entire stock of the Town has been reduced to meat, which, according to five or six interview testimonials included in this section of the film, is the sweetest, butteriest, and most delicious meat ever tasted in these parts.

“Like goat-lobster,” says an old man in overalls with an eye-patch. “Not that I’ve tried the real thing.”

***

The only problem, of course, is that once all the animals are dead, none are left to kill. At this point, to no one’s surprise but to everyone’s disappointment, the Harmless Slaughterer departs, into the same grey cloudiness he emerged from, seemingly never to return. It reminds me of those old-fashioned stories in which a false prophet emerges from the wilderness to tell a Town the End is nigh, and thus that they should go ahead and kill all their livestock and spend all their money and commit whatever Incest they’d been holding themselves back from, and then furtively departs when it turns out the End is a bit further off than initially projected.

Dodge City reverts, out of necessity, to a vegetarian diet, at least until new breeding calves and sheep can somehow be obtained. The memory of the meat produced by the Harmless Slaughterer grows in the minds of the populace, passed down through the generations in another fast montage, “to the point where” (according to the film’s narrator) “it could only be described as Manna from Heaven, so sweet and succulent that no latter-day meat could ever do it justice.”

***

Indeed, this latter-day meat – once a few scraggly specimens are culled from the nearby woods and hastily domesticated by a cabal of desperate farmers – is stringy, tough, and grey. Worst of all, the blood and fear of its death throes – carried out in a cloud of meth by frantic slaughterers in the old slaughterhouse – is so apparent in every bite that few Dodge City citizens can stomach it, ravenous though they surely are.

The people get to wishing the Harmless Slaughterer would return, which, in due time (this being a film, and thus in large part a wish fulfillment machine) he does. He strides back into Town, visibly aged though clad in the same black cloak and felt hat as before, totally impervious to the wreckage left in his wake, and gets back to work.

Or he would have, if he’d deemed any of the animals worth slaughtering. But clearly he doesn’t. “Not a single viable specimen in the lot,” he says to the camera, speaking in what, if I’m not mistaken, is Branson’s voice. “Vicious, dumb, half-feral,” he says, more to himself than to the camera now, staring at the muddy ground he’s standing on.

Thus it comes to be that he spends his days lounging by the fountain in Sacrifice Square, whittling a stick, speaking to no one. Summoned but unable to get down to work.

No one, that is, until three teenagers – two boys and a girl, cousins perhaps – creep out to where he sits and settle in beside him. For a moment, no one speaks.

The tension in the theater is heavy.

Then one of them, the girl, clears her throat and says, “Sir, we can’t help but ask … what did you whisper to those animals all those years ago? To make them taste so good?”

The Harmless Slaughterer smiles and motions for her to draw near. Clearly, he’s not going to respond except by example.

High on the fearlessness of youth, she takes him up on his offer. Brushing her hair from her ear, she takes a deep breath and presses it up to his mouth. He licks his lips and places them against her cartilage, and then begins to transmit whatever it is.

He leans back as she falls dead with a relaxed, slightly lewd smile on her face.

Entranced, unable to stop himself, one of the boys submits to the same fate, falling on top of her.

Then – this is clearly the climax of the film – the third boy leans in to listen to the Harmless Slaughterer’s message, but, instead of keeling over, he smiles, deviously I believe, and wipes his ear with his palm, as if to cleanse it of grease or oil, and kneels on top of his dead friends or cousins.

For a moment, he prays.

Then he begins to eat of their doubtlessly sweet flesh, tearing into their necks and bellies with his teeth and fingernails while the Harmless Slaughterer watches from above, neither perturbed nor impressed. The meat looks soft and supple, like slow-cooked barbecue, and I don’t mind saying that I experience a pang of hunger, here in the theater.

When he’s eaten his fill, the boy looks at the camera, motioning it in for a close-up, and says, lips covered in blood and flesh, “And this is one of the innumerable ways in which I became Blut Branson, uniquely vested, as I am, with private knowledge of God’s Will and the inner strength to utterly disobey it.”

Then, with a wink, he leans in and whispers in the Harmless Slaughterer’s ear. The film ends with the Harmless Slaughterer falling over onto the pile of partially eaten bodies while the boy who has now revealed himself as Blut Branson steals his hat and cloak and walks into the distance, vanishing into the same gloom the Harmless Slaughterer emerged from. Like the Harmless Slaughterer, he will eventually reemerge to entrance and perhaps annihilate Dodge City all over again, in his own time and in whatever manner he sees fit.

Until then, we wait for his next film to begin.

The post A Room in Dodge City Vol. 2 Excerpt: The Harmless Slaughterer appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Volume 2 focuses on the Drifter’s subsequent exploits, namely his attempt to find a foothold in the highly secretive and clannish Dodge City Film Industry, ruled over by the enigmatic and possibly immortal filmmaker Blut Branson. At this point in the story, the narrator is sleeping in Branson Mansion, the home of the aforementioned director Blut Branson, who’s been missing for some time. The narrator—an aspiring filmmaker himself—dreams up a movie, which then, through insidious means, enters the Collective Dodge City Consciousness.

I come to, spluttering in the bathwater. I want to stay in, but I feel so woozy, and so unsure of my identity, that I can tell it’s not a good idea.

So, grudgingly, I towel off, put on a robe I find hanging behind the door, and shuffle down the hall to the Master Bedroom.

In here, I pull the robe off and flop naked and still damp onto Branson’s gigantic foam mattress. It caves in to accept me, and I’m deep in a dream almost right away.

***

In the dream, I – as Blut Branson, of course – have just finished directing my first movie.

It stars a pedophile on a regimen of highly specialized psychotropic drugs. The moral premise is that pedophiles and child molesters are radically different beasts: both have the same innate, societally abhorrent urge, but one resists it with all its might, while the other gives in, either gladly or under substantial internal duress. The first category, according to the film’s drowsy narrator, “is to be commended for its efforts to deny its basic wiring,” while the second, “is to be punished to the full extent of the Law.”

The name of the male lead is George; the female lead’s called Chloe.

George, a pedophile of the type that’s determined to deny its wiring, has been prescribed a trial dose of a psychotropic drug designed to induce temporary hallucinations in which adults appear to him as children, so that he might perform the typical sex act with a consenting adult while at the same time accessing the sense of peace and inner wholeness that only sex with a child can offer him.

The plot twist comes early: Chloe — who, until now, has been unaware of her boyfriend’s practice of selectively transforming her into a little girl — accidentally ingests one of his pills, left out on the bathroom sink, believing it to be one of the anti-depressants that she has long insisted she doesn’t take but in fact always leaves out on the bathroom sink in order to take just before sex, when she needs them most.

When she returns to the bedroom and witnesses George transforming into a little boy before her eyes, she is naturally (not being a pedophile herself) shaken up. She pulls away, desperate to find her bearings in a room that’s closing in on her, fast ceasing to feel like home.

She crawls backward as her boyfriend — fully-aroused at the sight of her as a child, still under the impression that all is proceeding as usual — pursues, knocking her into a bookcase which falls on them both, rendering them unconscious for a five-minute period of ambient screen time.

***

When their consciousnesses resume, the two of them have entered an almost sweet regression into early childhood infatuation, though fraught in this case with the memory of intercourse rather than a faint, unvoiced premonition thereof.

I can tell that not only do they look like children to each other, but, thanks to their shared perspective on the other’s regression, they now feel like children as well.

Like a co-ed sleepover gone slightly off the rails, I think.

***

The middle act finds them in a state close to bliss, living in their apartment as if it belonged to a much older cousin, someone cool and grown-up and out of Town, who would be glad to guide them into the mysteries they’re just starting to long to explore, if only he or she were present.

They raid the pantry for Frosted Flakes and Swiss Miss, acting like they’re on the world’s longest snow day and nothing’s impossible.

My dreaming attention phases in and out during this section, as I’m both watching and Directing the film at the same time now. Part of me is waiting for the other shoe to drop, while part of me fears it never will or that it already has. I’m wondering if the pill she took will eventually wear off and she’ll be forced to watch George revert to being a man, like some terrible switch-out has occurred and she’s now in a situation she very much shouldn’t be in, while he goes on taking the pills so that she remains child-sized in his eyes, or if they’ll both grow addicted, endlessly re-upping their newfound perspective on one another, until one or both of them OD’s, if that’s possible in this case, or until their supply runs out, which surely one day it must.

Perhaps an excess of these pills will culminate only in a mutual regression to apparent infancy, each squinting in the dark to make the other out, like those fetuses in the brine tank from the Unholy Family premiere.

***

What actually happens comes from further out of left field, drawing me back out of myself for the third act: Chloe is so overcome with terror at the conflicted nature of her relationship with this man she sees as a boy that she becomes convinced he has killed her Father:

THE ONLY REASONABLE CONCLUSION SHE COULD’VE COME TO!!

Reads an unexpected title card in the center of the screen.

This Dead Father, the narrator informs us, is none other than the adult-George, the man she used to live with and now cannot find.

Falling into her psychic disturbance, the boy-George mimics her fear, behaving as though his mother, Chloe, is also gone, replaced by this girl-child he can’t help but lust after, despite the competing depth of his desire to wail in her arms.

The memory of their parents lingers in the apartment, growing so oppressive it forces them out into the hallway.

***

Now the climactic journey begins: they fall to roaming the massive apartment complex, charging from room to room, knocking on doors, squeaking in baby voices at the neighbors, begging to be taken in or given a clue as to the nature of their orphanhood:

ALONE AND UNLOVED!!

Reads another title card.

By this point, they’re convinced that they’re brother and sister, on the trail of a supreme mystery.

It’s a tribute to my generosity of spirit, as a Director, that I never have them turn hostile and assign blame to one another. They remain united in their search, convinced that a tragedy has befallen them both in equal measure, scouring the building from top to bottom, then spilling out into Dodge City, off the screen, which remains blank, since the dream has ended.

***

As I sleep, I hear them knock on my door, as I knew I eventually would. It’s either them, I think, or else it’s Blut and his Southeast Asian mistress.

Either way, I resign myself to my fate and open the door, saying, “Come in, come in. Why don’t you sit down for a while?”

They do, still naked on towels on the footstool I’ve set out for them, looking exhausted and shaken up. I let them sit like this for a long time, the TV silent between us, as I put the kettle on to boil, though I have no teabags or instant coffee to offer.

I wait for the boiler to click before venturing to ask what I’ve wanted to ask since they arrived, which is, “Got any more of those pills?”

I’m afraid they’re about to say, “What pills?” but instead they nod and each hands me one, from separate vials, like they’d each had their own prescription all along.

“Are you our Father?” they ask, and I realize, with the pill on my tongue, that their doses are wearing off. Soon I’ll see them as children but they’ll see me and each other as the adults that none of us wants to be.

“Not for long,” I answer, getting up and taking a new pill from each of their vials, putting one on each of their tongues like a communion wafer and taking the kettle off the boiler, pouring three mugs of hot water for us to wash them down with.

The post A Room in Dodge City Vol. 2 Excerpt: Regression Pills appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.