An old man on a flight from Southern to Northern California tells the stranger sitting beside him about the famous movie villain that had lived next door to him when he was a boy. An actor once well known for playing pitiless vampires and raving mad scientists, but who in real life had been gentle, caring and kind. And while his fame hasn’t endured the way Lon Chaney's or Bela Lugosi’s have, at the time even the movie critics who panned the low budget films he was in would concede that this startlingly ugly man brought a rare sensitivity to the roles he specialized in. As if he knew these monsters’ private pain.
Then the teller’s story takes a weird left turn. A theory about the actor’s supposed suicide which---as preposterous as it might all sound---would be nice to believe. Saying that rather than having drowned himself on that drizzly spring day in 1941 Max Grosz may have found his way to a second chance at life, and a different kind of movie stardom that would win the hearts of a nation...
ALCHEMY AND ESSENCE
Laika Pupkino ~ 2011 (& 2020)
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This story is 191 words long.
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