Sorry for being radio silent for a moment. To explain why, I need a moment to talk about Hollywood, and Los Angeles as a whole.
Imagine if you took an area of desert seven times the size of Washington, D.C., hired someone to drain the land around it of all water, and packed it with over four million people, several of whom don’t actually live there for tax reasons. Next, imagine it populated with people on the run from the law-- to be exact, run from patent law, as Edison was unwilling to let filmmakers use his camera technology to make films. Now sprinkle in a few decades of bigotry, sex crimes of every flavor, regular crimes of a few lesser flavors, and self-obsession so severe that it makes Narcissus look like Mr. Rogers, and we have modern L.A.
I may be a film student, but I have no illusions about Los Angeles. For God’s sake, the city doesn’t even have decent public transportation, something New York had figured out a century before it got anywhere near L.A.’s modern population.
So why, pray tell, have I wasted the last three weeks of my life in the City of Angels? Let me tell you why.
#
Hollywood is several things, but ‘wasteful’ is not one of them-- at least, not when it comes to props and sets. You might be familiar with trivia along the lines of the PKE Meter from Ghostbusters appearing in Suburban Commando, or how a early 2000’s Power Rangers series reused armor from Starship Troopers, or how Forbidden Planet’s Robby the Robot prop has been recycled so many times, it actually has an entry on IMDb as a distinct actor. Stanley Kubrick actually ordered all of the props and sets for 2001: A Space Odyssey destroyed specifically so they couldn’t be re-used for the inevitable sequel. Prop recycling has been common practice in Hollywood for decades.
Certain props, however, fall out of circulation, only to be found years or even decades later-- in some cases, even after the original film has been lost. What drew me to Hollywood in the middle of the holiday season was the alleged appearance of a prop from The Concordance; people who have been reading lately (I thank you for your continued patronage) will know this film has been a bugbear of mine for a while, and I’ve been trying to find an intact copy of it for almost six years. That said, props and pieces of the sets keep popping up, and this was a fairly notable one.
The Concordance is a 1912 silent film set during the 1500s, during a witch trial in central Europe. The titular Concordance is a ritual the film’s protagonist, Ysolde, is attempting to enact in order to catapult her somewhere more civilized, where she’s treated like a human being instead of like a woman in the 1500s. A central prop in the film was a ritual scythe-like dagger used by Ysolde to carry out the sacrifical murders needed to power the Concordance. Like most props up to the modern day, it was easier to just use an actual dagger than to make one out of a flexible or harmless material, and simply make edits to the film to make it appear as if a murder had taken place. But rather than steel or iron, the prop was apparently made of bronze, as the metal’s color made it look suitably ‘unnatural’ on film at the time.
The dagger has been missing since a warehouse fire in 1965, on the backlot of the relatively small RKO spin-off Breaker Motion Pictures. On December 2nd, 2022, it re-appeared in the LAPD evidence impound in their Hollywood precinct. I had no details beyond the fact that it was covered in fresh blood.
“Tristan, surely you’re not going to confess to stealing from a police station on your blog. Do you want to go to jail?” Cecily actually asked me this, but there were about half a dozen instances of “fuck” in there, including at least two “fucknugget”s and one “you fucking moron”.
There are several problems with this thesis: firstly, I did not steal anything, and the circumstances under which I acquired it were legal, for a certain value. Secondly, I am in the process of having any and all charges dismissed or pled down. Thirdly… it’s almost awards season, and with all due disrespect to the LAPD, they have more important anomalous phenomena to get driven mad by this time of year. They aren’t going to miss one potentially paranormal knife when they have to deal with meta-cocaine and celebrity doppelgangers.
I flew down to LAX and took an hour-long cab ride from there to Beverly Hills (L.A. traffic is one of the closest things to Hell an American can experience), where I met my contact; he had experience with extricating items from evidence lockup for research purposes, but he wasn't part of the Institute. Riley, who you may remember from my investigation into Money for Nothing, had agreed to do me another favor in exchange for information I had found in the last few months regarding actress Zelda Pleunick.
His house was small for Beverly Hills, but to someone who grew up in Rural Wisconsin, it was basically the Biltmore Estate, but with several more Fortnite action figures strewn about the floor by Riley’s grandchildren. “Their mom’s got ‘em visiting Universal Studios,” he explains as he pours a measure of bourbon for himself, notably not offering any to me. “And not just the theme park-- Goldblum owes me a favor.”
“Like Jeff Goldblum?” Easily the third-dumbest question I’d asked that week.
“No, Percy Goldblum. Christ, kid, don’t you have a film degree?”
“You looked into me, then?” I asked.
“I looked into your whole organization. You know how fuckin’ surprised I was to learn that the guy who runs you is Egyptian? Figured he’d be some pasty white motherfucker who looked too long at Ivo Dorakis’s Shattered and went crazy.”
That stunned me. “You know Hemaphyte art?”
“Some of the newer stuff’s harmless. There’s going to be a showing in New York next-- but you’re not here for that. You’re here about the knife.” He offered me a seat.
I nodded and sat down, scanning the area for exits, my hand on a bit of Institute tech in my pocket. I noticed we were far away from the windows, no clear lines of sight for anyone to see us talking, but also close enough that I could bolt if I really needed to. “You know,” I said, “There are some more… extreme members of the Institute that want Hollywood to go up in flames.”
“What, like the city?”
“Like the concept. They figure you’re too dangerous to be left alive.” I rolled my shoulders. “You hear about how the entire cast and crew of that Marvel film in Georgia got food poisoning a few years back?”
“Delayed production worse than the pandemic did. America’s ass went through a dozen pairs of--” he paused. “Fucking hell, that was you?”
“Not me personally, but there are people in the Institute who hate the MCU so much that Alan Moore looks like Stan Lee.” I left out the fact that it wasn’t food poisoning.
“Christ. Anyway, the knife.” He leaned back. “From what I can tell, a Jane Doe-- she's alive but refuses to talk to the cops and doesn't have ID on her-- walked into a secondhand store with her clothing all wrecked. She tried to buy all sortsa stuff with weird-lookin’ bills, obvious fakes. Thrift shop owner calls the cops after he realizes the bills are fake. She pulls the knife, police come in and cuff her.
"And the blood on the knife?"
"Fresh. No more than a couple of hours old. That gonna affect the value?"
“It’s not for me to sell. I’m here to get it and store it. Besides, this isn’t the first time I’ve encountered a bloody prop.”
“First time you’ve probably seen one used as a murder weapon, though."
I blinked. "Before I got on the plane, you said they hadn't found a body. Did that change?"
"Murder wasn't done this century." Riley sighed. “So, here’s the deal. The knife was lost in the Breaker Backlot fire back in ‘65. The blaze supposedly killed four people and cost the studio over seven million dollars in lost or damaged props. All of the people who died were workin’ on the same film-- a Bible epic, In the Beginning.”
“Genesis? Ambitious.”
“Yeah, but Hays code meant no Garden of Eden stuff-- restrictions against nudity. Vincent Marché was the director, and the first body they identified-- he just got new caps put on his teeth a week before the fire.”
“Marché… why do I know that name?”
“Probably because his brother Casmir was the closest thing to Epstein you could get in the 1960s. And Vince, shall we say, partook of his brother’s supply.”
“How do you know this?” I grimaced. “You’re… sixty-five? You wouldn’t even be in high school when this happened.”
“Sixty-four. And my family’s old Hollywood; my uncle worked as gofer on a lot of BMP’s films, and when I was getting into the industry, he gave me a list of people to stay the fuck away from. And no, you can’t see the list.” He took a drink of his bourbon. “Casmir caught a bullet in September of ‘83, and I’ve always wanted to shake hands with the son of a bitch who shot him.”
I nodded. “The second victim, then?”
“Simon Tzan.”
I blinked. “Like… Tarzan: Force of Nature Simon Tzan? Edgar Margullis’s Treasure Island Simon Tzan?”
“Yeah, everyone forgets he died in ‘65 because his last film got released in ‘72. He had polio as a kid, damage to his bones is how they managed to figure out it was him. He was meant to play Adam. He got along really well with the kid they got to play Cain. He was the third body-- you wouldn’t know him, eighteen-year-old named Sam Yanner. Got cast because he looked just enough like Tzan that he could pass as his son. Yanner is the only one who we know didn’t die in the fire.”
I blinked. “But you said he was the third body?”
“Yeah, but the fact that he had knife wounds all over his back, including one in the base of his skull, the M.E. was damn sure that he died before the fire started. Shape of the blade matched the dagger you're after.”
I winced. “At least he died quickly.”
"Small mercies." Riley shook his head. “Then we have the fourth person, the reason they were all in the prop warehouse that night. Gwen Lyons. She was meant to play Eve.” He shut his eyes, and took a sip of his drink. “The way my uncle told it… she was getting ‘uppity’ with the three of them. There was a scene where Eve confronts Cain after he murdered Abel, and Yanner ‘ad-libbed’ feeling her up.”
“Fucking Christ.”
“Yeah. She slapped him and walked off the set. Tzan tried to apologize on Yanner’s behalf, but…” He sighed. “My uncle said they decided to ‘teach her a lesson’, and the school supplies were a glass of Jack with enough benzo to kill an infant. They dragged her into the prop warehouse because it was dark, unsecured, and… there were a lot of things they could use to…” He sighed. “To hurt her.”
That statement sunk in. “And… Gwen? You said there were three bodies. What about her?”
“Never found, but it was assumed she was incinerated.”
As he raised his glass to his lips to finish off his bourbon, I said, “Bullshit.”
“Huh?”
“A fire has to be at least 1400 Fahrenheit to completely incinerate a human body.” I stood up and started pacing. “Fatal burns can be caused by temperatures as low as 180 Fahrenheit, but given the state of other props in the warehouse, the fire couldn't have been hotter than 550-- aluminum props were damaged, but they weren’t slagged. And bronze doesn’t melt until you get up to the thousands….”
Riley had a look on his face that made me wonder if he wanted to call the police, or the psych unit. “You… know a lot about fire. Should I be worried?”
I shook my head. “My dad was a firefighter. Retired after fighting a freak blaze in Douglas County back in 2015.” I sat back down, “Point is, there should have been no reason the dagger from The Concordance was lost when even the aluminum props were undamaged. And the absence of the body…” .
My eyes widen and I spring out of my seat. “God dammit. I hope I’m not right here.”
“What?”
I paced again, scratching my head. “Certain… items used to produce forbidden media can take on… odd properties. Vincenzo di Monteriggioni’s brushes can supposedly transmute oil paints into blood, the Typhon scroll constantly produces salt water, and the instruments that play the Posthumous Symphony-- I’m getting off track here.” I shook my head. “What do you actually know about The Concordance, Riley?”
“Just what you told me in your email. Witch kills people, and uses the magic to teleport somewhere where they’ll treat her decent.”
“She… doesn’t teleport, though.” I swallowed. “Ysolde’s spell… it’s alive, and it comes to the conclusion that she can never, and will never, be happy in a world where superstitious men rule. It takes her out of the 1500s… and into the middle of London on December 31st, 1910.” I’m shaking as I look at Riley. “The Concordance, among other things, was notable for being one of the first depictions of time travel in film.”
Riley gawps at me for several minutes as he processes what I just said. Then, he laughs. “You can’t be serious, kid. Time travel? That would…” He paused. “That…” he looks through texts on his phone. He gets the same nauseous look that people whose worldview has been upended tend to get in these circumstances. He pours himself another glass of bourbon, hand shaking as he types out a text.
“Riley?”
“...my contact in the Hollywood precinct, I… I asked him why they thought the bills were counterfeit.” He licked his lips. “The Doe was trying to pay with twenties and fifties, but… none of them had security features. No reflective ink, no watermarks… and none of them have dates of issue after 1963.”
We were both still for a moment. Riley hoped it wasn't real; I’m dreaded that it was. “I need to get to the Hollywood Precinct now.”
“What?” Riley snorts. “Are fucking time cops going to come to take her away?”
Riley’s lack of imagination is probably one of the main reasons he’s such a successful producer. By the time he’s poured himself another drink, I’ve ordered an Uber to take me to Hollywood. By the time he cracks the time cop joke, it’s arrived. “I’ll text you once she’s safe.”
“Safe from what?” Riley calls after me as I nearly tripped on an action figure in the front lobby. “Kid!”
#
Oscar Wilde published an essay in 1891 called The Decay of Lying. One of the main points in it is that Life imitates Art more than Art imitates Life. But things have gotten far more complex since Wilde died; in the modern day, Life imitates Art because Art rules Life.
Look around you right now. If you’re in public, how many people can you see wearing some sort of clothing with a video tv or film reference on it? If you’re on your phone, how many apps do you have installed that are some kind of microtransaction-fueled game? If you’re at your computer, can you honestly tell me that somewhere in the last two dozen Youtube videos you watched, there isn’t a clip of some show or anime, or a trailer for a video game, or some thinkpiece about how Game of Thrones Season 8 wasn’t a complete dumpster fire? When was the last time you quoted Tv Tropes in a conversation?
Life imitates Art because Art pervades Life. But there’s a line that cannot be crossed; it’s one thing if a conversation you had with your father reminds you of a novel you just finished, but it’s another if characters, locations, phenomena or items from that work starts bleeding into reality. Bad things happen.
People were gathered outside of the Hollywood Precinct; I could hear a fire alarm blaring within. The entities I described emit massive amounts of ozone; in a smog-filled hellhole like L.A, it wasn’t an unfamiliar scent, but someone probably assumed there was an electrical fire and pulled the alarm. The fire department wasn’t there yet, but I was at a loss as to how to actually get in--
And that’s when a member of the LAPD came up to me. He looked like he was a detective, badge on his belt, gun beneath his coat, and… at first, I thought the look on his face was anger at some tourist gawping at the incompetence of the LAPD, but then I realize the sheer terror in his eyes. “Are you Tristan?”
I started to bolt. He puts out his hands. “Whoah, easy. Riley called, he said that… said that you could take care of what… of what’s happening in there. Can you?”
I inspected the crowd, plan formulating in my skull. “Is there another way in?”
“Fire exit around the back.” He starts leading me there. “How the hell are you meant to help? You’re a kid.”
“I’m twenty-seven, and I’ve gotten rid of these things a few times.”
The fire exit was wide open. “Good news is that they hate the noise. Was she alive when you last saw her?”
“Yeah. I think so. But she… she wasn’t well. We found benzo in her system, and she was having trouble waking up.”
“Then there’s probably hope.” I entered the deafening precinct, light and sound threatening to overwhelm me, but beneath it all, I hear screaming from the direction of the holding cells. As I entered, I saw a trio of beings around the cell holding Ms. Jane Doe-- or, as I was now assuming, Ms. Gwen Lyons.
There are a variety of names for these entities; for the sake of simplicity, let’s call them Snowmen. They look roughly like people-- body, two arms, two legs, something vaguely head-shaped-- but they look, and sound, like they’re made of television static, or ‘snow’. There’s a constant low, crackling drone when you’re in their presence, a white noise that threatens to overtake all thoughts and leave you helpless. If they touch you, they pass right through you, but they can leave you numb for weeks, or even months, at a time; a colleague of mine ran through one in November 2019, and couldn’t feel the left side of her body until next June. And that’s if you aren’t their target.
In the modern age, they’ve become their own worst enemy. Snowmen emit massive amounts of ozone, which anyone who’s touched a lightbulb in the last century will tell you is a scent associated with electrical fires. Modern fire alarms produce a sound that the Snowmen hate, and it also blocks out their white noise. The ones that are in front of the cell look like they’re writhing in pain, until I come in.
And I swear, for the barest instant, that they recognize me. There’s something about the cadence of their white noise that changes when they see me, almost inquisitive, like ‘hey, remember me?’.
“You don’t want her,” I said. “She’s innocent. She’s here by accident.”
One of them managed to adapt to the sound, and began melting through the bars of the holding cell. Gwen screamed.
“You don’t want her!” I repeat. “I can give you what you want,” I admit, reluctantly. “Just… don’t take her. Please?”
The Snowmen leaned in close to me, their bodies of static casting a glow upon my face. “Look, you don’t even have to destroy it. I… I think I can neutralize it. Do you understand? Neutralize? Make inert? Break?”
They peeled back from me, and just stood there. I fired off a quick text to Riley, and he responded with details as to where the dagger is being kept. What I did next made me die a little inside, both as someone who’s studied The Concordance, and someone who believes in the preservation of film history.
The evidence bin was easy enough to find. The dagger was beautiful; it was cast entirely out of bronze, and it still shone in my hands as brightly as it must have when The Concordance was being made over a century ago, barring the blood across the sickle-like blade. For a moment, I can’t bring myself to do it; then I hear screaming from the holding cells, and know it has to be done.
I found what I needed in the maintenance closet-- a drill. I drilled straight through the blade in front of the Snowmen, and once it got weak enough, I snapped it in half in front of them. We’re meant to say something to the Snowmen when they leave, some sort of ritual the Institute’s head figured out back in the 90’s. I struggled with the pronunciation, they got the gist of it. “Xekínise, Eumenides.” Begone, Gracious Ones.
The Snowmen faded away. Gwen was left sitting in her cell, confused, and sobbing.
#
For legal reasons, I can’t disclose what happened to Gwen, but I can confirm that the woman in the cell was, in fact, Gwen Lyons, removed from the 1960s to the modern day. Rest assured that, for now, she is safe.
The dagger was rendered inert by my damage, as promised. The Snowmen haven’t shown up again to check up on it, at the very least, which is something that does happen. I’ve entertained the thought of getting it reforged into its proper shape, but for now, both halves are on display on the wall above my computer.
As for me… I discovered that Riley’s power over Hollywood, however vast it may be, isn’t immutable. He doesn’t know every cop, and I ended up with a pair of taser bolts in my back when I tried to get out of the station through the fire exit. I was arrested for trespassing, destruction of evidence, assisting escape, instigating a false fire alarm, and a bevy of other things.
In short: for Christmas, I have a court date. The only reason I’m writing this from my computer in Wisconsin and not from a hotel room with an ankle monitor attached to me is that the Institute has very good lawyers. Unfortunately, said lawyers have asked me to lay low until the New Year, but they said posting an update should be fine.
So, Happy 2023 everyone, and may your pursuits of knowledge not end up with you getting handcuffed.
