by Dale Bailey
Denny wasn’t even that lucky. He squandered his moment. He would write no talking dogs. Hollywood killed him as surely as it had killed Lugosi before him.
And me?
Ten years further on, and I’m still here. I work behind the counter at the Video Hut these days. Lou and I do what we can to steer our clientele to the films that matter most to us, but it’s the new releases and the adult videos that keep the lights on.
And I guess that’s the end—except for the matter of Denny’s ashes. They came back to me in a cardboard box the size of a shoebox. I opened it up one time, expecting, I suppose, a fine gray powder. It was coarse and granular instead, with whitish-gray fragments that could only be bone. They would have made a fine prop for a Bela Lugosi movie. Irony: it’s good for the blood, Gabriella Ghoul would have said. And with that I closed up the box again. It sat on the chest in Denny’s bedroom for several months before I drove it down to Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, where Lugosi is buried in the Dracula cape he could never seem to shrug off in life. I scattered a handful of ashes there. The rest I scattered at the base of the Hollywood sign during a midnight expedition up Mount Lee. The sign isn’t as impressive as you think it will be when you see it close up—but nothing ever is, is it?
When I was done, I thought about Peg Entwistle and I thought about Lugosi and I thought about the movies that couldn’t possibly exist back home in my apartment. But they did exist. Somewhere, in some other place than this, those movies were made. Somehow they wound up in Denny’s possession, and that’s enough to give me hope. I like to imagine that there’s a place where Peg Entwistle became a star, where Bela Lugosi became the leading man he’d aspired to become, and where my brother Denny still survives, living up to the measure of his dreams.
About the Author
Dale Bailey lives in North Carolina with his family, and has published three novels, The Fallen, House of Bones, and Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay, Jr.). His short fiction, collected in The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories, has won the International Horror Guild Award and has been twice nominated for the Nebula Award. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Dale Bailey
Art copyright © 2018 by Dadu Shin
