“I should—” Paul starts, and Henry says, “Wait.”
He takes a breath. He knows what he’s about to ask is unreasonable, but he needs to see. Without the safety and filter of a camera and a video screen in the way.
“When you go looking, I want to go with you.”
“Henry, I—”
“I know,” Henry interrupts. His left hand clenches and unclenches until he consciously forces himself to relax. “I know, but you probably weren’t supposed to send me the tape, either.”
Henry waits. He doesn’t say please. Paul takes a breath, wants to say no. But Henry is already in this, Paul invited him in, and he’s determined to see it through.
“Fine. I’ll call you, okay?”
They hang up, and Henry returns to his computer to isolate the clip and send it to Paul. Once that’s done, Henry opens up another file, the one containing the jumble of clips he shot with Paul at NYU. Back when they had big dreams. Back before Paul’s father died. Back before fifty-eight minutes of a woman breathing out her last in an unknown room.
Henry chooses a clip at random and lets it play. A young man sits in the back seat of a car, leaning his head against the window. He’s traveling across the country, from a small town to a big city. The same journey Henry himself had taken, though he’d only crossed a state. There are other clips following a boy who grew up in the city, in his father’s too-big shadow, but both boys’ heads are full of dreams. Two halves of the same story, trying to find a way to fit together into a whole. Except now the film will always be unfinished, missing its other half.
Even though he knows he will never finish the movie without Paul, Henry still thinks about the sounds that should accompany the clip. It’s an exercise he engages in from time to time, torturing himself, unwilling to let the movie go. Here, he would put the hum of tires, but heard through the bones of the young man’s skull, an echo chamber created where his forehead meets the glass.
The perfect soundscape would also evoke fields cropped to stubble, the smell of dust and baking tar and asphalt. It would convey nerves as the boy leaves behind everything he’s ever known for bright lights and subway systems. Most importantly, it would also put the audience in the boy’s shoes as he dreams of kissing another boy without worrying about being seen by someone he knows, without his parents’ disappointment and the judgment of neighbors’ faces around him in church every Sunday.
Henry watches the reflections slide by on-screen—telephone poles and clouds seen at a strange angle. His own drive was full of wind-and-road hum broken by his parents’ attempts at conversation, trying to patch things already torn between them. Henry had gotten good at filtering by then, shutting out things he didn’t want to hear. Maybe he should have given his parents a chance, but love offered on the condition of pretending to be someone else didn’t interest him then, and it doesn’t interest him now.
Between one frame and the next, the image on the screen jumps, and Henry jumps with it. Trees, jagged things like cracks in the sky, replace the cloud and telephone pole reflections. The car window itself is gone, and the camera looks up at the whip-thin branches from a low angle.
Then the image snaps back into place just as Henry slaps the pause button. He knows what he and Paul shot. He has watched the clips countless times, and everything about the trees cracking their way across the sky is wrong, wrong, wrong.
When the phone rings, Henry almost jumps out of his skin. He knocks the phone off the desk reaching for it, leaving him sounding weirdly out of breath when he finally brings it to his ear.
“I’ll pick you up tomorrow around ten,” Paul says. “I have an idea.”
“Okay.” Henry lets out a shaky breath.
His pulse judders, refusing to calm. He needs a drink and a shower. Then maybe a whole pot of coffee, because the last thing he wants to do is sleep. When he blinks, he sees thin black branches crisscrossing the sky, and he hears the rising whine of cicada song.
* * *
There is a legend that says cicadas were humans once. They sang so beautifully that the Muses enchanted them to sing long past the point when they would normally grow tired, so they could provide entertainment throughout the night while the gods feasted.
But the enchantment worked too well. The singers stopped eating. They stopped sleeping. They forgot how to do anything except sing.
They starved to death, and even then the enchantment held. They kept singing, unaware they’d died. Their bodies rotted, and their song went on, until one of the Muses took pity on them and fashioned them new bodies with chitinous shells and wings. Bodies with the illusion of immortality that could live for years underground, buried as if dead but waiting to wake again.
Cicadas are intimately acquainted with pain, because they know what it is to die a slow death as a spectacle for someone else’s pleasure. But they do not die when they are buried. They merely dream, and listen to other buried things, things that perhaps should not have been buried at all. They remember what they hear. When they wake, they are ready to tell the secrets they know. When they wake, they sing.
* * *
Paul drives, Henry in the passenger seat beside him, a bag of powdered donuts between them, and two steaming cups of coffee in the cup holders.
“Isn’t that playing a bit to stereotype?” Henry points. Paul grins, brushing powdered sugar from his jeans.
“So sue me. They’re delicious.” He helps himself to another. Henry’s stomach is too tight for food, but he keeps sipping his coffee, even though his nerves are already singing.
Paul mapped out a widening radius from where the car with the MiniDV in the glove box was found, circling the nearby railroad crossings. It isn’t much, but it’s something. They’re out here hoping that whoever killed the woman crashed his car on the way back to his home, which might be the place he killed the woman. Maybe they’ll find her body there, or maybe he was on the way back from burying her somewhere else. Maybe they’ll find him. Henry is both prepared and unprepared for this scenario.
Right now, he’s not letting himself think that far ahead. He’s focusing on the plan, tenuous as it is, driving around to likely locations where he will listen. Henry feels like a television psychic, which is to say a total fraud. He wants to enjoy the relative silence of the car, the tick of the turn signal, the engine revving up and down. He wants to enjoy spending time with Paul, catching up, just old friends. He doesn’t want to be thinking of snuff films and ghosts, and on top of that there’s a nervous ache in his chest that keeps him conscious of every time he glances at Paul, wondering if his gaze lingers too long.
Trees border the road. It’s early fall, and most are denuded of their leaves. Henry peers between the trunks, looking for deer. The sound, when it comes, is every bit as unexpected and violent as the last time. A reverberating hum, rising to a scream—cicada song, but with another noise tucked inside it this time, one he remembers from when he was a child.
That hitching, broken sound. Like gears in a machine struggling to catch. Like a baby’s cry. A wounded animal. Henry jerks, his body instinctively trying to flee. His head strikes the window and pain blooms in his forehead above his right eye.
“Are you—”
Concern tinges Paul’s voice, but Henry barely hears it. The sound has hooks beneath his skin, wanting to drag him in among the trees.
“Turn here.” Henry bites the words out through the pain, the song filling him up until there’s no space left for breath.
Paul looks at him askance but flicks the turn signal, putting them on a road that quickly gives way to gravel and dust. The trees grow closer here, their branches whip-thin, the same ones he saw in the corrupted clip of their film.
“Pull over.”
Henry’s breath comes easier now, the pain fading to a dull ache like a bruise. The cicada song forms an undercurrent, less urgent but not completel
y gone. Paul kills the engine. His expression is full of concern. Henry wants to thank him for his trust, but whatever waits for them in the woods is no cause for either of them to be thankful.
He climbs out of the car, buries his hands in his pockets, and walks. Leaves crunch as Paul trots behind him. Nervous energy suffuses the air between. Henry hears the questions Paul wants to ask, held trapped behind his teeth. It’s nothing Henry can explain, so he keeps walking, head down.
When Henry stops, it’s so sudden Paul almost trips. Tree branches cross the sky in the exact configuration Henry saw in the film, only the angle is wrong. Henry should be seeing them from lower down. From the height of a child.
The burr of cicadas grows louder, the steady drone rising to an ecstatic yell. Henry forces himself to keep his eyes on the trees, turning to walk backward. He pictures a girl being led through the trees, a man’s hand clamped on her upper arm. Her death waits for her among the trees, and so does a camera on a tripod.
Henry is thirteen years old again, listening to the crying girl, lost and frightened and in pain. The hours after her discovery blur in his mind, though certain moments stand out sharp as splinters beneath his skin. The scent of leaf rot and dirt, his cheek pressed to the forest floor. His parents lifting him bodily out of the way as the rescue crew arrived, and Henry scrabbling at the earth, refusing to let go, terrified of leaving the girl alone.
He remembers seeing the girl’s face for the first time but not what she looked like. In his mind, her features are as blurred and indistinct as they were at the bottom of the hole—eyes and mouth dark wounds opened in her pale skin.
There were endless questions from his parents, from the rescue crew—how had he found the girl, did he see her fall, was it an accident, did someone hurt her? They called Henry a hero, and he wanted none of it. He remembers burying himself under the blankets on the bottom bunk in the cabin, wishing he could stay there for years like a cicada, only emerging with everyone long gone.
Now, as then, the insect song times itself to the blood pounding like a headache in Henry’s skull. He’s sharply aware of Paul watching him, eyes wide, as Henry stops and turns around.
The shack is half-hidden in the trees, scarcely bigger than a garden shed. There’s a catch in Paul’s breath, and Henry glances over to see Paul’s hand go to his service revolver.
The door isn’t locked, but it sticks, warped with weather and clogged with leaves. Henry holds his breath, expecting a stench, expecting a horror movie jump scare, but there’s nothing inside but more dead leaves and a pile of filthy rags. A small wooden mallet rests up against one wall.
Paul uses a flashlight to sweep the room, even though they can see every corner from the door. A seam in the floor catches the light, and once Paul points it out, Henry can’t unsee it. Paul kneels, prying up boards with a kind of frantic energy, using the edge of a penknife.
“It’s another tape.” Paul straightens. There’s dirt under his nails.
“He killed more than one person.” Henry swallows against a sour taste at the back of his throat. He knew, the moment he saw the corrupted bit of film, the moment he heard the cicadas scream, but he’d wanted desperately to be wrong.
Paul holds the tape in a handkerchief, turning it so Henry can see the handwritten label—Exsanguination.
“I brought my camcorder. It’s in the car.” Henry feels the beginning of tremors, starting in the soles of his feet and working their way up his spine. Adrenaline. Animal fear. Some intuition made him pack film equipment before leaving the house, and Henry loathes that part of himself now.
Back in the car, Paul runs the heater, even though there’s barely a chill in the air. Sweat builds inside Henry’s sweatshirt as he fumbles with the tape, wearing the cotton gloves Paul gave him to preserve fingerprints. He flips the camcorder’s small screen so they can both see, but hesitates a moment before hitting play, as if that could change the outcome. Henry knows all movies are ghost stories, frozen slices of time, endlessly replayed. Whatever will happen has already happened. The only thing he and Paul can do is witness it.
Static shoots across the screen, then the image steadies. The girl can’t be more than ten years old. Her hair is very long and hangs over her shoulder in a braid. She stands in the center of the shack, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. Dim light comes through a single grimy window. She shivers.
A man in a bulky jacket and ski mask steps into frame. He picks up the mallet leaned against the wall in the shed, now in a plastic evidence bag in the back of Paul’s car, and he methodically breaks every one of the girl’s fingers.
The image cuts, then the man and girl are outside. The camera sits on a tripod, watching as the man leads the girl to the spot framed by two stubby trees. The girl is barefoot. She sobs, a sound of pure exhaustion that reminds Henry of the little girl in the hole. This girl’s ankles are tied. Her hands free, but useless, her fingers all wrong angles, pulped and shattered.
The man unbraids the girl’s hair. He employs the same care he used breaking her fingers. Once it’s unbound, it hangs well past the middle of her back. The man lifts and winds strands of it into the spindly branches of the trees growing behind her, creating a wild halo of knots and snarls and twigs.
The girl cannot flee when the man pulls out a knife. She thrashes, a panicked, trapped animal, but the knots of her hair hold her fast. He cuts. Long slashes cover her exposed thighs, her knees, her calves, her arms.
How long does it take a person to bleed to death? Henry and Paul are about to find out.
After what seems like an eternity, long after the girl has stopped struggling, the man steps out of frame. The camera watches as the trees bow, the girl slumps. Branches crack, freeing strands of her hair, but far too late.
Henry gets the door open just as bile and black coffee hits the back of his throat. He heaves and spits until his stomach is empty. Paul places a hand on his back, the only point of warmth in a world gone freezing cold. Henry leans back into the car, and Paul puts his arms around Henry, holding him until the shaking stops.
“I’m sorry,” Paul says. “I shouldn’t have dragged you into this.”
The expression on Paul’s face when he says it is a blow to Henry’s freshly emptied gut. The pain in Paul’s eyes is real, yes, but what accompanies it isn’t quite regret. Instead, guilt underlies the pain, and Paul’s gaze shifts away.
In that moment, Henry knows that Paul wouldn’t change a thing if he could. He would still ask Henry to watch the tape, no matter how many times the scenario replayed. This death, among every other he’s witnessed, is too big to hold alone. He needs to share the burden with someone, and that someone couldn’t be Maddy. Because that kind of death spreads like rot, corrupting everything it touches, like it corrupted Henry and Paul’s film, their past, their shared dream. Henry understands. If Paul shared that pain with Maddy, it would become the only thing he would see anytime he looked at her, and the only thing he could do to save himself would be to let her go. And Maddy isn’t someone Paul is willing to let go.
“I’m sorry,” Paul says again.
“Me too.” Henry reaches for the passenger-side door and pulls it closed. He can’t look at Paul. His face aches, like a headache in every part of his skull at once. Paul shifts the car into drive.
“Are you…” Paul’s words fall into the silence after they’ve been driving for a few moments, but he stops, as if realizing the inappropriateness of what he was about to say.
Henry hears the words anyway. “Are you seeing anyone now?” Bitterness rises to the back of his throat, even though his stomach is empty. Paul could have asked the question any time during the drive, if he really wanted to know, if the question was genuine curiosity and not born of guilt. Paul asked Henry to share his burden, and now it hurts him to think that Henry might have to carry it alone in turn. Henry hears the words even when Paul doesn’t say them, h
is golden ear catching sounds no one else ever would.
“I hope you find someone,” Paul says finally as he pulls back onto the road. “You shouldn’t be alone. No one should.”
Henry knows what Paul is saying; he should find someone to share his burden, too. Henry can’t imagine someone loving him enough to take on that kind of pain; he can’t imagine ever wanting someone to. He knows what that kind of love feels like from the other side.
The heater makes a struggling, wheezing sound, and Paul switches it off, rolling his window down. Air roars through the cabin, and cold sweat dries on Henry’s skin. If it weren’t for Henry’s golden ear, the wind would swallow Paul’s next words whole.
“I’m sorry it couldn’t be me.”
* * *
It’s a good two days before Henry brings himself to check the other clips he shot with Paul. The rot has spread to every single one of them. There’s an open barn door looking out onto a barren field, rising up to block the buildings of Manhattan, a water stain on a ceiling spreading to cover the boy’s face as he gets his first glimpse of the city, a crack of light under a closet door instead of the flickering gap between subway trains. Each new image is a hole punched in an already fragile structure, unwinding it even more.
Henry understands what the scenes are now, after watching Exsanguination. They are films made by ghosts, the last image each of the killer’s victims saw before they died. What he doesn’t understand is why he is seeing them. Is it because he had the misfortune to hear what shouldn’t have been there for him to hear? The cicadas, linking him to the woman whose last sight was of trees through a grimy window. Her death linking him to the deaths of the other ghosts.
Henry shakes himself, thinking of his and Paul’s drive home from their aborted attempt to find answers. Awkward silence reigned until Henry stood outside the car, looking in through the driver’s window at Paul. Then their fragmentary sentences had jumbled on top of each other.
Final Cuts Page 7
