This fictional story is based on the life of Dwight Frye, the Hollywood actor who played Renfield in the 1931 original Dracula movie with Bela Lugosi, various roles in Frankenstein and the Bride of Frankenstein and numerous others with Boris Karloff, as well as the movie The Vampire Bat. This story takes place after his roles started to dry up. He did work in a Lockheed aircraft plant during World War II and the plant actually was hidden as detailed in this story. Dwight Frye died of a heart attack while riding on a bus to Hollywood when he was 44 years old.

Dwight was so exhausted, he didn’t know what was real and what was in the movies anymore. He wished his life now was a movie or a dream and he would wake up. He gazed out of his window and saw GI’s walking by on the sidewalk with their arms around pretty girls who had lines drawn down the back of their legs since no stockings were available because of the war.
            Dwight looked down at Ren, his scrawny black cat who had been given to him by a famous director twelve years ago when he had played Renfield, his most famous role in the movie Dracula. No one cared anymore about horror movies; real life for most of the world was horrible enough with Hitler in Europe and Hirohito in Japan. Dwight worked steadily throughout the 1930s playing lunatics, gangsters, madmen and hunchbacks. All anyone wanted to see these days were war movies with handsome heroes and beautiful heroines. Dwight was not the handsome hero type; he had been a character actor, eventually being pigeonholed into horror roles. During the 1930s this was great, but not anymore.
            “Maybe I can play Hitler when this is all over,” he said to Ren. Ren didn’t respond.
            “Or, Hirohito,” he mugged to the cat pulling his rubbery face into a downward frown. At this, Ren jumped off the chair and ran into the bedroom of the somewhat shabby apartment.
            Dwight went into the bedroom and changed into his overalls to get ready for work at Lockheed Martin where he worked as a tool designer. He was happy to contribute to the war effort; he was too old to go to war. But he missed his old life and the downward financial slide that had happened. He once had a nice small bungalow in Hollywood, but as roles had dried up, he ended up moving into this rundown apartment on Main Street in Burbank.
            Dwight grabbed his lunch pail and walked to the bus stop to catch the 10 pm to Lockheed. It was amazing what was going on at the plant. It made Dwight wish he had been in the technical side of film production. They were using people from all of the big studios: MGM, 20th Century Fox, Paramount and Universal. All of the parking lots were painted green; chicken wire and canvas camouflaged the plant making it look like a residential area with burlap houses with real clotheslines and rubber cars. Air ducts from the plant were transformed into fire hydrants. Dwight heard they were creating fake trees using spray painted chicken feathers for leaves. Off in the distance away from the plant were decoy planes made from old scraps of whatever was available. They had even burned the grass to make fake runways for the fake planes. Lockheed had a rotation schedule for workers during the day where they went out to the neighborhood and moved the cars, walked around, and took down laundry so the enemy would not know this was the location of the plant. Dwight thought it was amazing.
            He walked through the door of one of the burlap houses down a complex system of underground walkways to get to the breakroom to stash his lunch pail before he went to his station. He took the key he wore on a chain around his neck and clicked open the padlock. He gasped. The entire small locker was filled with dead bugs at least an inch thick.
            Some of the old timers at the plant knew who Dwight once was. When he had started over a year ago back in July 1942 during his first week, someone had found a giant cockroach and put it in a glass jar with some holes poked in the top that had a sign on it that said, “Eat me.” Dwight had laughed it off and since then no one said anything about it.
            The shift boss’s office was next to the locker room, so Dwight went over and knocked on the door.
            “Come in.” Smitty was sitting at a battered desk smoking a cigar and pouring over some ledgers. The call for airplanes had increased and Smitty was trying to manage a 15% increase in production for the night shift.
            “Mr. Smith, can I show you something?”
            Smitty got up from the desk, all three hundred pounds of him. He dwarfed Dwight’s small frame that had gotten smaller as rations had impacted the availability of food. Dwight was a picky eater.
            “What?” Smitty said, clamping the cigar between his big blunt teeth. He followed Dwight into the breakroom and Dwight pointed.
            “What the hell!” said Smitty. “Who put those damn bugs in my plant?”
            “Not me,” said Dwight. “I had it padlocked and I keep the only key around my neck.”
            Smitty peered closely into the locker and all of a sudden, a palmetto bug came to life and jumped out at him. Smitty jumped back ten feet and glared at Dwight. “Is this some kinda joke?”
            “No,” said Dwight nervously. “You know why someone did this…”
            Smitty looked at him blankly. “Because you bug people?”
            “No,” said Dwight. “Because I was Renfield.”
            “Oh, yeah, right,” said Smitty. “I never seen that movie anyway—hated horror. I forgot you used to be an actor.”
            Dwight didn’t like to push his prior fame in other people’s faces, but it definitely came up. Acting was the only thing on his resume.
            Dwight sighed as he thought about Smitty’s words, “used to be.”
            “How could anyone get in my locker? “ he asked.
            Smitty thought about it a minute. “There might be a master key around here somewhere since it’s a company lock. Why don’t you buy your own lock? That’ll fix the problem.” Smitty tramped back into his office and slammed the door.
            Dwight rolled the eyes that critics had once said were the most expressive in the whole movie industry. Not anymore, Dwight surmised. He got a brush and pan and swept out all the bugs from his locker. He opened the lid of the metal garbage can and dumped the bugs in the trash. He grabbed some bleach from the cupboard wiped out his locker.
            Dwight was fifteen minutes late getting to his station.
            “Where’ve you been Dwight?” Sam seemed disgruntled. “It’s been a long day.”
            “Sorry Sam,” Dwight said. “I had some business with Smitty.”
            “Hollywood hack,” Sam mumbled so Dwight could not hear.
            It was business as usual all night. At three a.m. Dwight took a break. He could smell cigarettes halfway down the hall from the break room. Jack and Mitch were in there smoking up a storm.
            “Evenin’ Dwight,” they said simultaneously.
            “Any of you know of anyone that has master keys to the locker padlocks?” Dwight said.
            “Nope,” said Mitch. “Why?”
            Dwight told them what had happened. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
            The two men followed him into the locker room and Dwight went to the garbage can and opened the lid. There was plenty of trash in there, in fact it was the same trash that had been in there when Dwight had dumped all of the bugs, but the bugs were not there. Dwight started pawing through the garbage.
            “Good one Dwight,” said Mitch as he and Jack stubbed out their cigarettes and returned to their stations.

            The next afternoon, Dwight set an alarm so he would wake up by four so he could buy a new lock. He left his locker empty and open last night. He got to Bailey’s hardware ten minutes before they closed.
            “I need a padlock no one can get into,” said Dwight.
            “What for?” asked the clerk.
            “My work locker. People at work have been messing around in my locker,” he said.
            “It’s a damn shame that people can’t respect each other’s property these days,” said the clerk. “Everyone is suffering to help us win this war.”
            Dwight just let the clerk think what he might. It was better than explaining the truth—that he had been Renfield and bugs had been put in his locker. Obviously, the clerk didn’t recognize him.
            The clerk turned around and pulled off a heavy padlock from the display behind him. “I recommend one of these combination locks. Thousands of possible combinations.”
            “I’ll take it,” said Dwight.
            “Let me help you set it,” said the clerk. “Give me four numbers that mean nothing to you at all.”
            That night as soon as Dwight got to work, he put the new padlock on his locker. He selected a number he couldn’t even remember for the combination; he wrote it on a scrap of paper at the hardware store and when he got home, he stuck the scrap between two business cards he had glued together on three sides. He put the card in his wallet which was always on his person. He wouldn’t open the locker if anyone else was in the room. The next morning about 6 a.m., he checked his locker. There was nothing there but the empty lunch pail he had put in there in the middle of the night.

            The next night was Dwight’s last shift and he would then get some days off. He went into to the locker room to drop off his wet rain coat. Before opening his locker, he peered over his shoulder to make sure no one else was in there. There was nothing in the locker but a flyer advertising a fall company picnic in a few weeks; someone had pushed through the slot.
            Two a.m. was break time and Dwight decided to go outside and get some fresh air. Since the plant was camouflaged, Dwight never knew what the weather was like, so he decided to go to his locker and grab his raincoat just in case.
He was whistling as he went into the locker room. He had fixed those jokers with the new combination lock. He didn’t even hesitate as he opened up his locker. He grabbed his coat and in the wet puddle beneath his jacket was a bedraggled rat. He jumped back. The rat looked like it had been run over and maggots were crawling over its wet fur. Dwight heard a step behind him.
            “Hey Dwight,” said Smitty chomping on his ever present cigar. “ I see you got that locker problem taken care of. Smitty was looking right into his locker and was acting like the rat wasn’t there.
            “Yesss Mr. Smith,” Dwight choked out.
            Smitty moved closer and leaned down until he was right above the rat. “Looks like you got all of them bugs out of there.” He stomped back to his office with his stogy clamped in his teeth.
            Dwight slumped to the floor and put his head in his hands. Were they playing a terrible joke on him? Was Smitty part of it? No, Smitty didn’t socialize with anyone. Finally, he composed himself and grabbed an old rag from the cupboard and wrapped the rat in it. He dug to the bottom of the garbage and placed the rat there and went to his station.
            “Hey Dwight, you’re early. Making up for yesterday?” said Sam at their shared station. Dwight didn’t say anything.
            “You feelin’ alright? You look a little pale.”
            “Fine, fine,” said Dwight. “I’ll take over.”
            All that night Dwight couldn’t think about anything but the rat. By the time his shift was over at 11 a.m., he actually did feel sick. He went home to bed, but struggled falling asleep. He thought for the hundredth time in the last year that he wished he had taken out some of the starlets who were interested in him when he had a small part of the Maltese Falcon. He shunned all the offers because he figured the starlets were a lot more interested in Bogie than in him. Then thirty-nine seemed young; he had his whole life ahead of him in Hollywood. But the war took all that away. Most of his roles from ‘41 on were uncredited walk-on roles. He wished he had something other than a cat to come home to. The last time he did a real film was in ‘42 right before he started at the plant; another hunchback role, Dead Men Walk the Earth. He was the foil for the evil twin who was trying to kill his saintly brother. Now his life was empty; his friends were off fighting. He was a 4F—not fit for military service in WWI and now he was too old for WW II.
            Dwight slept through the day and into the night and he dreamed. He dreamt that he was actually eating bugs and small animals just like Renfield. When he had played the part, the bugs were black licorice, but these were real bugs; he could feel them crunching in his teeth. He knew that he shouldn’t be eating them, but he couldn’t stop himself. He started to laugh crazily, just as he had when he played Renfield. He was no longer Dwight; he was Renfield. He laughed and laughed until he threw himself in a lake and tried to drown himself. As the water closed over his head and he couldn’t breathe, he gasped and sat up in bed. It was quiet and the street lamp shone into his apartment window. He got up and peered out the window and saw a bat. It gazed at him with beady red eyes. He closed the curtain and turned on a light and the radio. He went back to the window, but the bat was still there.
            “I am soft like a kitten,” it mouthed at him.
            These were the very words Dwight had uttered himself in the movie The Evil Bat where he played another lunatic role. It was impossible.
            Dwight paced the floor and an hour later he looked out the window and now he could hear what the bat was saying, the same words over and over. Dwight started to scream and ran out into the hall babbling for help. Mrs. Hudson, who was ninety if she was a day, popped out of her apartment; she was deaf and she’d even heard Dwight. Mr. Franks, a burly man of about sixty grabbed Dwight, who was slight, by the shoulders and shook him.
            “The bat,” Dwight blubbered.
            “What bat?” said Mr. Franks.
            “He’s outside my window. He won’t go away. He’s talking to me!”
            Mr. Franks led Dwight back into his apartment and Mrs. Hudson followed.
            “Which window?”
            “The front one,” Dwight blubbered, drooling and crying.
            Mrs. Hudson pushed back the curtains as far as they could go.
            Dwight started to scream and point. “There it is!”
            Mr. Franks and Mrs. Hudson looked at one another. There was nothing there. Mr. Franks closed the windows and they tried to calm Dwight down. By this time, Dwight was laughing hysterically just like he had done in his dream.
            One of the other neighbors must have called the police. Two officers ran up the steps and into Dwight’s apartment. They tried to get Dwight to calm down, but had no luck. Finally, they handcuffed him and took him out to their car. One of the officers came back and used the phone in the hall. Thirty minutes later, an ambulance from Rancho Los Amigos, the closest insane asylum, pulled up out front and the attendants put Dwight in a strait jacket.

            Dwight was having nightmares again. He was running. Gangsters with Tommy guns trying to kill him even though he tried to tell them he was one of them. He tripped and fell in the street and the head gangster stood over him pointing his gun at his head. He looked just like the actor Elisha Cook. As he pulled the trigger, Dwight startled awake, but he was very groggy. He tried to wipe the sweat off his face, but he couldn’t move his hands or his feet. A strange man who had obviously soiled himself wearing ripped white pajamas popped his head right in front of Dwight’s. He looked and smelled feral.
            “Welcome to Los Amigos,” the man continued to sing loudly as he danced around the ward.
            Dwight no longer felt groggy. Los Amigos was the insane asylum. One of his fellow actors had told him about it after he went out there doing research for a role. It was a terrible place.
            Dwight had to come up with a good lie fast and get out of here, or he might never get out.
            “Maxy stop that infernal racket,” said a nurse as she came into the ward.
            “He’s awake, awake, awake,” said Maxy.
            “What am I doing here?” Dwight said to the nurse. He knew he had to act totally lucid. He decided to use the somewhat posh voice he had used on stage at the beginning of his career.
            “You were ill sir. You were hallucinating, do you remember?”
            Dwight decided he had to play dumb. “What was I hallucinating about?”
            “I don’t think we need to discuss this topic. We cannot feed into your hallucinations.”
            “But, I was sick. I felt sick when I came home from work last night. It was last night wasn’t it?”
            “No sir; this is your second day here. You were given something to calm you down.”
            “I had a fever. That must’ve been it. I don’t remember anything.” Dwight lied to her. He remembered everything…the bat mouthing his own words back at him through the window.
            The nurse looked at his chart. “You did have a temperature of 100 when you came in. Let’s check it now.” She shoved a thermometer in his mouth.
            “Normal,” she declared a few minutes later.
            “It’s a mistake,” Dwight said. “I’m an actor.”
            ‘Your neighbors told the police you were a tool designer at Lockheed.”
            “I am,” Dwight said. “But, I was an actor. Have you seen Dracula with Bela Lugosi? I was Renfield. I’ve been in most of the Frankenstein movies after the first. I was a mad scientist in the Frankenstein Walks Again.
            “Are these more delusions sir?”
            “No, no. I was a gangster in The Maltese Falcon. I know Bogie.”
            As Dwight was saying this, a man in a white coat came up to his bed. He peered closely at Dwight.
            ‘You know, he’s right,” said Dr. Rosenfield. “He looks the same, just older.” He whispered in the nurse’s ear “He’s always had those crazy eyes.”
            “I assure you I’m perfectly fine. I had a fever. I sometimes do hallucinate if I have a bad fever. No one checked it for hours.” Dwight said.
            “I am Dr. Rosenfield. I’m going to loosen those restraints.”
            Dwight sat up in the bed and massaged his number wrists and ankles. Dr. Rosenberg asked him questions, who was he, what day was it, who was president, etc. etc. Dwight calmly answered all of them, but inside his heart was pounding.
            “I would like you to stay at least overnight,” said Dr. Rosenberg.
            “Alright doctor. My shift quota has increased 15% for the war effort. I am due back at work tomorrow night and I’d really like to make it.”
            Dwight was able to hold himself together and came home the next morning. He had barely walked in the door when someone knocked. He opened the door and Mrs. Hudson was standing there with a baseball bat by her side.
            “Mrs. Hudson,” Dwight said. “You’ve nothing to be frightened of. It was just a fever and I was hallucinating. It’s happened to me before.”
            Mrs. Hudson looked at him closely and handed him a piece of paper. “A call came from you today. It’s about an acting job. They want you to call back. “ She looked down at the bat sheepishly. “I was just going to give this to the kids out in the street,” she lied.
            Dwight ran to the phone and called back and made arrangements to go see Henry King the director the next afternoon after work.

            Dwight was ecstatic over his meeting. He was going to be playing a supporting role in a new film about a U.S. President! Lockheed and the studio had agreed to coordinate to free up time for him to do this. Dwight was so excited, he almost forgot about the bat. But as soon as it turned dark, he peered out of his window looking for it, but it wasn’t there. He was relieved; he thought maybe it had been a fever after all. He slept well and woke up around 4 a.m. to go to the bathroom. He tried to stand up and then realized he couldn’t. He took his right arm and touched his lower back; it hurt. He could feel the edge of what seemed like a huge lump right above where he could reach. He swung his arm around to the left. He was bent down so far, he was basically looking at the floor. It was a hump. He hurriedly unbuttoned his pajama top with shaky fingers and threw it to the floor. He limped with an unwieldy gait over in front of the full length mirror. He bent his head to look at his back.
            It was a hump. He was a hunchback! He could see and feel the curvature of his vertebrae. What had happened to him? He had to be dreaming; he played a hunchback twice. He tried to force himself to wake up. He went over to the radio and turned it on low to cover the noise he planned to make just in case. He was never going back to Los Amigos. He smashed the alarm clock into the mirror. He fell down on the floor beside his bed pinching himself as hard as he could, but he couldn’t wake up. He crawled over to the outside wall of his apartment banged his head on the wall until he passed out.

            Dwight felt something hard beneath him; he was on his stomach on the floor of his apartment. He tried to lift his head, but it hurt and he was dizzy. Then he remembered—the hump! He quickly moved his hand to his back. There was nothing there and he was as relieved as he had ever been. He sat up and realized he only had his pajama bottoms on. He looked at his feet and there was the top lying on the floor, buttons strewn out all over the floor like white pennies. He looked up and saw his mirror was smashed. Dwight put his head on his knees once again and wept for hours.

            Dwight pulled himself together enough to work the next four nights at Lockheed. There were no additional surprises in his locker and no one seemed to know about his visit to Los Amigos. It was one time he was glad most of his friends were off fighting in the war and he had only acquaintances at work who almost seemed to resent him. After this run of shifts, he was going to get off Saturday morning and then take the afternoon bus to Hollywood to start rehearsing and filming his new role. He hadn’t been this happy for several years. He decided to try and stay up all day to pack and to read the draft script that had been sent to him in the mail. Sometime around dinnertime, he fell asleep on the couch with the script on his lap.
            When he woke up, it was dark and he was stiff from sleeping on the lumpy horsehair couch that had been Mrs. Hudson’s when she had married back in the 1800’s. Light was streaming in through his bedroom window and the curtains were open. Dwight never left them open anymore; he was afraid he’d see the bat. He looked out and there it was, flapping at his window, its red hypnotic eyes boring into his brain.
            “I am soft like a kitten Dwight.” it purred. Now he could hear it again even though the window wasn’t open. “You’ll never get rid of me. Live by the sword, die by the sword Dwight.”
            What did the bat mean? Had be played so many roles as lunatics and horror characters, he was destined to become one?
            “Look at me Dwight,” the bat said. Dwight tried to force himself to keep his eyes shut, but he felt compelled somehow. He stared into the bat’s eyes.

            Dwight woke up the next morning and knew he had to get the things that had been happening out of his mind. He would catch the bus and get to Hollywood and everything would be alright again. He got to the station at 4 pm and was told by the clerk that there had been a delay due to mechanical issues. By the time Dwight got on the bus, it was already dark. He selected a seat by himself at the very back of the bus, discouraged he had gotten such a late start. The town was dark except for a few streetlights here and there so enemy fighters couldn’t find targets to bomb.
            Dwight sighed. This part could result in another, and another, and he could leave Lockheed. He gazed out the window and there it was…the bat again. It was flapping wildly to keep up with the bus. It’s teeth were exposed like it was smiling at him. Dwight closed his eyes and looked away and was shocked. There was someone sitting next to him. No one had been there before. The person turned and grinned at him. Dwight saw himself, an evil twin just like in Dead Men Walk the Earth. He turned back out the window, panicking now and the bat was grinning and hitting the window; a crack began to form in the window. He tried to get past the Evil Dwight to get to the aisle, but Evil Dwight grabbed him tightly around his chest.
“The pain,” said Dwight out loud. “Oh God, the pain.”
            The people on the bus nearest to him turned around and saw the man sitting by himself in the back of the bus stand up, writhing in agony. He dropped to the floor. The other passengers screamed for the bus driver to stop.
            “I’m a nurse,” said one of the passengers who ran back to Dwight who was lying in the aisle at the back of the bus. She felt for his pulse. There wasn’t one. Dwight Fry was dead.

            A few nights later, Jack and Mitch were out smoking next to one of the fake burlap houses outside the Lockheed plant on break.
            “Heard about Dwight?” said Mitch.
            “Yeah, rumor was he had taken an involuntary trip to Los Amigos before,” said Jack. “Boy, I feel really bad. I hope I wasn’t the cause of what happened.”
            “Whaddaya talking about?” said Mitch.
            Jack acted like he didn’t want to tell.
            “Ya opened it up, so spill it,” said Mitch.
            “Well,” said Jack. “I heard him going on again one night about how he was in the movies. He always seemed to me like maybe he thought he was too good to be working here. So, I jimmied the lock on President’s secretary’s office one night, got the master locker key, and put a pile of bugs in there to show him.”
            Mitch looked at Jack funny. “When was this?”
            “Sunday two weeks ago,” said Jack. “I snuck back in and dumped the trash and put the old trash back in there so there was nothing there when we went in there to check with him.”
            Mitch looked a little ill.
            “What is it?” said Jack.
“Me and my friend Joe were having a beer and he had told me about this man who had been in horror films that had been in for a padlock. He recognized him. I was tired of Dwight, so I conned him into giving me the padlock combination. There are big rats in the field behind my house that my neighbors trap. I went back there and got a nice ripe one out of a trap and put it in Dwight’s locker for a laugh.”
            Both the men looked at each other and vowed never to speak of it again.
            As they walked back to the plant, they didn’t see the bat with the huge red eyes flying behind them, or the hunchback that looked a lot like Dwight that came limping around the corner of the burlap house where they had been standing.

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Colleen is the web editor and a print editor at Flora Fiction. She is a multi-modal writer who writes poetry, creative non-fiction and fiction, in particular, horror. Happy Halloween and don’t let any bats get you!