by A. C. Wise
Behind his eyelids, the imagined movie changes. It’s Lily with contusions around her throat, Mary with flowers on her grave. George’s eyes snap open. Violets aren’t bruises. Death isn’t lovely, but he’s trying to blur the line again, sugar around a bitter pill so the audience will swallow it whole.
He scans the corners of his office, half expecting to find Mary there, or Lily. He can’t tell whether he’s disappointed to find himself utterly alone.
After the baby—he paid to take care of it—Lily went home, back to Kansas, or Texas, or wherever the hell she was from. Bloody Rose was a critical success, but she didn’t even stick around for the preview. Audiences ate it up, and it left him sick, as sick as he knows Blue Violet Girls will make him feel, but he can’t stop.
Every time he watched Bloody Rose, he kept looking for things that weren’t there, flickers of movement shivering across the screen. He wants Mary to haunt him. He wants it so badly it hurts. If he could just see her again, maybe he could make it okay. Maybe she would forgive him.
George reaches for his drink and finds it empty. He takes a swig straight from the bottle rolling around at the bottom of his desk drawer instead. Almost empty, too. He lets the bottle fall, and it clunks uselessly to the floor.
Mary Evelyn has been gone for almost twenty years, but how can he be sure she’s dead? There’s a headstone in Mountain View Cemetery, the same place Elizabeth Short is buried, but there’s nothing underneath. No body, only a film that cuts off before the end, a film he burned. Some days he knows beyond a doubt what he saw. Other days, the line is blurred; there’s room for death to be clean and beautiful again.
He has to know. George stands, holding onto the edge of his desk. He fumbles open the drawer opposite from the one with the bottle, then goes to his knees to dig beneath layers of paper. Good old George, he never throws anything away unless it’s a living, breathing girl.
He pulls the film canister free and hugs it to his chest. A séance. He’ll call Mary, Evelyn, Eve back from the dead with the ashes of her last film. He’ll fall on his knees and beg her to forgive him. It’ll be like it was always meant to be, Mary at his side, his ingénue, his star.
He looks around his office for something. What? What does he need to conduct a séance? George’s mouth is dry, the back of his throat fuzzed and aching. He needs another drink, is what he needs. He needs witnesses. An audience. His party.
He makes his way to the door, clutching the film canister under one arm. The sky is dark, but lights burn all along Hollywood Boulevard, smearing in his unsteady vision. The night is crisp, clear, a breeze ruffling his hair and tugging his clothes. He considers walking all the way home, but his feet won’t agree on a direction. He calls a car, slumping into the backseat and holding tight to Mary Evelyn’s remains.
George dozes; he must have, though he doesn’t remember falling asleep. He comes to himself as someone presses a drink into his hand. Everything is lit like the inside of a silver screen, a movie seen the wrong way around.
Panic slams him for a brief moment, but no, the canister is still tucked under his arm. A bright, beautiful girl swirls past him, dropping a kiss on his cheek as she heads toward his pool. She’s wearing stiletto heels. She doesn’t bother to take them off before she dives into the water, splashing with all the other bright, beautiful nymphs.
George doesn’t recognize anyone. Did he invite them? He downs the drink in his hand, and comes up coughing and sputtering. Champagne.
Empty bottles are scattered on tables and chairs. Some even float in the water. Broken glass crunches under George’s feet. He’s kicked over a thin-stemmed flute, and crushed it.
“Swell party, George,” someone says.
Bare feet. He’s worried she’ll cut herself on the glass, but she’s already gone, a shooting star off to drown herself.
“It’s not a party,” he says, or tries to say. “It’s a wake.”
The garden is dark. The only light is from the pool’s depths, leaving the swimmers shadows lit from below. They all seem to be girls, they always are, dying to be discovered, desperate to be made. But in the half light they might as well be sharks or mermaids, selkies or sirens, or something more terrible by far.
George watches them glide in the dark, liquid motion. Is Lillian among them? Mary, Eva, Evelyn, Eve? No. She’s dead: he has the proof in his hands. He pries opens the canister. The world tilts and he tilts with it, emptying the ashes of the film—Mary’s film—into the water. He’s keeping his promise to make her a star, just not in the way he originally intended. He watched the film, and it infected him. Every movie he’s made since then, whether he means it to or not, contains a piece of this one. Now he’s spreading it even farther. The starlets swimming beneath him, he’s infecting them, too. Mary Evelyn is not just one star, she is all of them.
“Time to come home,” he says.
He sways, perilously close to falling in, but he keeps his balance. Or something pushes him back. He isn’t wanted here. He isn’t needed. This sacred communion is between Mary and the girls. Her ashes swirl through the impossibly blue water, and all the pretty little wannabes swim in the ghost of her, soaking her through their skin.
George desperately wants to join them. He wants to throw himself into the water. He wants to drown. What the hell has he done? The empty film canister slips from his fingers to the ground. George follows, his legs folding beneath him. He puts his face in his hands and weeps beside the pool while all around him fey starlets, nightmares, and unreal creatures, swim.
*
Hollywood Hills, March 1947
I’ve been reading a lot lately. On set, there are long stretches with nothing to do except smoke and drink and wait. So I’ve been reading history and religion, mythology and astronomy, weather patterns and agriculture. It’s all connected. Everything.
I was on to something with Elizabeth, and why her ghost is clearer than the rest. The cameras made it so, all those pictures of her plastered everywhere. The image becomes the thing, and the image gets passed on and on, and she’s resurrected over and over again.
It’s like sympathetic magic. A black goat is sent out into the desert carrying the sins of the entire village; communion wine and wafers become the blood and body of a man nailed to a cross; the chief of a tribe consumes the flesh of his enemy to gain their power. Symbols have power.
The man killing his way across America, that’s a kind of magic too. One killing begets more killings, copycats spreading outward from a single gruesome death. How do you stop something like that?
I stop it by becoming a symbol, too. A woman dies up on screen, and she stands for all women everywhere. A woman who already has other women folded up inside her, ghosts stitched onto her skin. The film gets passed on, the image endures, and no one can ever forget those ghosts or pretend not to see them ever again.
*
Silver Screen Productions, December 1972
George switches on the projector. Drawn shades darken the room as he watches the rough cut of Lady in Green. He’s made a ghost story this time. A story about a man haunted by the death of his lover, a married woman killed in a car crash on the way back to her husband, even though they both knew he was no good for her.
He’s trying again.
Flickering against the blank space on his office wall, rain slicks the LA streets. Windshield wipers sling it out of the way, but it isn’t enough. His lady in green strains forward to see, but she’s crying. This is the scene where she dies. In the next scene, she returns as a ghost, a phantom hitchhiker causing drivers to veer off the road and have crashes of their own.
George holds his breath, leaning forward like the actress. He peers through the same rain she does, straining to see, heart beating hard, the electricity of the movie set storm telling him something terrible is about to happen. A shape appears in the road, and George’s heart nearly stops. A glitch in the film, a splice cutting in a later scene where the ghost causes a crash. But, no. The sweep of headlight
s illuminates the figure through the pouring rain. Mary Evelyn.
Mary. Eva. Lillian. Eve. The lady in green slams on the brakes. The car slews. She takes her hands off the wheel, throws her arms across her face. Shattered glass flies everywhere; metal and his leading lady both scream. Through it all, Mary Evelyn continues staring directly at him.
George is halfway to reaching for the phone on his desk, calling down to his director, his AP, someone, anyone to find out if—oh god—he’s killed his leading lady. His hand hangs in the air, not touching the phone. He sets it back on his desk, and lets out a shaky breath.
They never shot that scene, not that way. The lady in green dies and becomes a ghost, not vice versa. Time does not fold in this film. His lady in green is not her own haunting. George was there when they shot the scene, just as he has been on set every single day, hovering over the director’s shoulder, peering through the camera lens, judging every shot as it is set up and framed. The scene playing out on his office wall is impossible; it isn’t real.
He rises, tripping over the edge of the carpet as he reaches for the projector. Instead of hitting the stop button, the whole thing goes over and George with it, tangling and crashing to the ground. The projector jams, devouring celluloid even as he tries to pull it free. Faint wisps of acrid smoke sting his nostrils.
The film is burned in half, edges bubbled and crisped, the entire car crash scene gone, so he can never know for sure. This is what he wanted, isn’t it? This is what he tried to do seven years ago. But no. That can’t be right. Mary Evelyn is waiting for him at home. Or he hasn’t met her yet.
He tries to cram the burned halves back into the projector, but his hands shake too badly. Defeated, George holds the ends of the film in either hand. They’ll have to reshoot. No one will know the difference except for him.
But the difference will be an important one. Mary Evelyn won’t be there next time. She was never there. He let her slip through his fingers, and there’s no getting her back again.
*
Harwood Estate, May 1942
“Do you really think you can make me a star?” She props herself on one elbow, looking down at him.
Her curls are mussed, her lipstick chewed off, leaving her mouth mostly clean. Pure, he thinks. Bruised. Only faintly stained. The thoughts drift through his post-pleasure haze, teetering on the edge of sleep. Lovely. She still smells of salt spray and beach air. When he closes his eyes, he sees her through the camera lens, waving, her lips shaping words he can’t hear.
“Of course I can. It’s what I do.” He lights a cigarette. It takes him two tries. He lights one for her too.
There’s a glint in her eyes, something hungry as she watches him. She shouldn’t be here, he thinks. This is all wrong. She flops back against the pillow, hair spread in a halo around her.
“My name isn’t really Lillian,” she says.
“Hm?”
Sleep tries to tug him down. He wants to sink into it, into a place where he doesn’t have to think or feel anything but this warm, sated glow.
“It’s Mary,” she says. “But I go by Evelyn because Mary was my mother’s name.”
“Was?” Something in her tone snags at him, pulls him upward and now it’s his turn to prop himself on one elbow to look at her.
“She died. I found out yesterday. An accident. She fell down the stairs.” Mary, Evelyn, Lillian, whatever her name is blows a stream of smoke toward the ceiling.
Then the girl in his bed stubs out her cigarette and stands, pulling the bedclothes with her and leaving him exposed. She holds the sheet against her body, draping her like an ancient Roman goddess. She looks straight at him, fixing him so he can’t help feeling everything he’s seen up until now has been a lie. A performance. The camera never switched off for her.
“I suppose that’s what happens, isn’t it?” Her eyes are hard.
He doesn’t know what to say. There’s no air left in the room. He can only stare at her, at the line of her mouth. Hungry. Burning. He’s touched her, been inside her, but he doesn’t know a thing about her. The sickly sweet taste of spun sugar melts on his tongue, tinged with salt from the sea. He turns away, swinging his legs over the side of the bed.
“I’ll call a car to take you home.”
“Yes,” she says, and the chill of her voice sends ice up his spine. “I imagine you’ll do.”
*
Hollywood Hills, December 1947
This is it, make or break time. By the end of the week, I’ll be a star, burning brighter than any other light in the sky. I haven’t slept, not since I left the Christmas Eve party at George’s. I’ve been up, smoking.
Elizabeth sat with me. She was at George’s party, too. All the dead girls were. They floated in the pool. They stood at guests’ elbows while they drank champagne. They watched everything, and no one saw them but me.
We shared cigarettes and watched the sunrise, me and Liz. Eliza. Beth. Betty. We all have a dozen names here, a dozen skins we can wear over our own when we want to hide, when it gets to be too much, when we’re tired.
Sometime around 4 a.m., the sky got perfectly blue. A blue I’ve never seen before. Like velvet, like a bruise before it starts to heal. Like the shadows at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, or my mother’s favorite dress, the one my daddy bought her to say he was sorry. The dress he buried her in, at least that’s what I heard.
The color matched Eliza’s skin exactly.
I bought a gun. It’s easier to do than I imagined. I have knives in my kitchen, the kind people use to debone things. Stockings can be used as garrotes in a pinch. Any number of objects in my apartment can inflict blunt force trauma. There are so many ways to die in Hollywood, so many ways to die no matter where you are, as long as you’re a girl.
I should be afraid, but I’m not.
I have a camera I stole from George. The raw footage will be delivered to his office tomorrow. He was my first, the first one to see me and put me up on the big screen. It seems only fitting that he should be my messenger as well. He’ll be my ground zero, the point of impact spreading out ripples of ghosts around the world. I have to believe he’ll hold up his end of the deal. How could he refuse a death this sensational, after all?
I’m not afraid. After he’s seen my film, it’ll be up to him whether he keeps his promise from the day we met, whether he makes me a star.
*
Silver Screen Dream Productions, December 1947
It’s the day after Christmas. George stares at the package sitting in the center of his desk, wrapped in brown paper, bearing his name and no return address. The shape of it is clear—a canister for a film reel.
It’s barely 10 a.m., but he pours himself a measure of scotch, neat, and swallows hard against the sour taste in his throat. The projector is already set up, aimed at the wall. He threads the film, kills the light, and seats himself to watch ghosts come to life just for him.
A man lies on a bed in a tiny apartment. He looks a lot like George. He looks hungry, and more than a little drunk. He’s poorer, more rundown, rougher around the edges, but the longer George watches the more he thinks they could be twins. Pitch perfect casting.
The scenery is spot on, too. He’s never seen Mary Evelyn’s apartment, but he’s certain he’s looking at it now. The sheets on the bed are silk, or a reasonable approximation. There’s a lamp on the bedside table with a beaded shade. Brass bedposts, draped in lengths of scarves and stockings. The way they hang implies violence. Everything in the room is fraught; tension fairly crackles across his skin.
The base of that lamp could crush someone’s skull. Those stockings could so easily be wrapped around someone’s throat. Where are these thoughts coming from? He isn’t a violent person, but he can’t help picturing it, running the film ahead to its inevitable end. There’s a straight razor on the bedside table. The drawer beneath it is ever so slightly open, and inside, George is certain he sees a gun.
A woman steps into the frame. Her back is to t
he camera, but her shape is achingly familiar. George’s breath catches. The woman lets her sheer dressing gown fall; it might be the very same one from The White Canary Sings, the first time Mary Evelyn was up on the silver screen.
George leans forward. For just a moment, a heartbeat, a frame, there’s someone else in the room. Where shadows pool in the corner behind the beaded lamp there’s a woman with bruise-colored eyes. Her smile is too wide, extending all the way across her cheeks, bleeding off the edge of her skin.
The film jitters. A splice stitched badly in, and there is the woman lying splayed in the park, her body cut right in two, torso here and legs over there, her intestines coiled beneath her. Sickness rises in George’s throat, nearly choking him.
Cut, back to the bedroom. The space all around the bed is crowded with ghosts, cramming every available inch and not taking up any room.
Cut. Railway tracks, and a woman’s body beaten to a bloody pulp.
Cut, and the man on the bed shifts in anticipation.
The cuts begin to blur, one scene, one location bleeding into another until he can’t tell what is happening where.
A small dark space, the mouth of a storm drain clotted with rotten leaves. Grainy. Dim. A shape, indistinct. He can barely see. He doesn’t want to see. An arm bent at a terrible angle. A thigh, a knee, a body folded up like fetal origami and shoved into the concrete opening.
How is Mary doing this? Why? Why can’t he look away?
Splice. George wants to reach through the image flickering on the wall and shake the man on the bed by the shoulders, tell him to run. The woman’s reflection hangs, caught like a glint in the man’s eye as she moves closer to the bed. George thinks of an old wives’ tale he heard once, where the last image a person sees is printed onto their retina at the moment of death, like a photograph.
