“You don’t have to—” from Paul.
And, “Next time you go—” from Henry.
Standing there, trying not to shiver, Henry had extracted a promise.
“Call me before you go looking. I mean it. I’m coming with you.” He almost said, whether you like it or not, but Henry knows it isn’t a matter of like; it’s a matter of need. He saw the gratitude in Paul’s eyes and his self-loathing underneath it, hating the fact that he should need to ask Henry to do this thing, that he should be too cowardly to refuse and demand Henry stay home. One way or another, they will both see this through to the end.
Henry doesn’t tell Paul about the images corrupting their film. But he watches them again, obsessively, alone, until each is imprinted on his eyelids. His dreams are full of doorways and trees and slivers of light. At the end of the week, Paul finally calls, his voice weary and strained.
“Tomorrow afternoon,” Paul says.
Henry barely lets him get the words out before saying, “I’ll be ready.”
* * *
They drive away from the city. Henry’s stomach is heavy with dread and the sense of déjà vu. He clenches his jaw, already braced for the sound of cicadas, and speaks without looking Paul’s way.
“We’re looking for a house with a barn.”
From the corner of his eye, Henry sees Paul half turn to him, a question and confusion giving a troubled look to his eyes. But he doesn’t ask out loud, and Henry doesn’t explain. They drive in relative silence until they reach the first railroad crossing on Paul’s map, intending to circle outward from there.
It takes Henry some time to realize that the sound he’s been bracing for has been there all along, a susurrus underlying the tire hum and road noise, a constant ache at the base of his skull. How long has he been listening to the cicadas? How long have they been driving?
Fragments of conversation reach him. He realizes Paul has been asking questions, and he’s been answering them, but he has no sense of the words coming from his mouth, or even any idea what they’re talking about. Suddenly the noise in his head spikes and with it, the pain. Henry grinds his teeth so hard he swears his molars will crack.
“Here.” The word has the same ticking, struggling quality as the cicada’s distress call.
Henry is thirteen years old again, wanting to clap his hands over his ears, wanting to crawl away from the sound.
“What—”
“Turn here.” Henry barks the words, harsh, and Paul obeys, the car fishtailing as Paul slews them onto a long, narrow drive. The drive rises, and when they crest the hill, Henry catches sight of a farmhouse. Paul stops the car. From this vantage point, Henry can just make out the roof of a barn where the land dips down again.
Henry is first out of the car, placing one hand against the hood to steady himself. He closes his eyes, and listens. He’s queasy, breathing shallowly, but there, as if simply waiting for him to arrive, the mournful, unspooling call of a train sounds in the distance.
“You hear it, too, right?” Henry opens his eyes, finally turning to Paul.
Paul inclines his head, the barest of motions. He looks shaken in a way Henry has never seen before.
“This is the place,” Henry says, moving toward the front door.
A sagging porch wraps around the house on two sides. To the right, straggly trees stretch toward the sky. Without having to look, Henry knows there is a basement window looking up at those trees.
Paul draws his service revolver. The sound of him knocking is the loudest thing Henry has ever heard. When there’s no answer, Paul tries the knob. It isn’t locked. Paul leads and Henry follows, stepping into the gloom of an unlit hallway. The stench hits Henry immediately, and he pulls his shirt up over his nose.
Stairs lead up to the left. Rooms open from the entryway on either side, filled with sheet-covered furniture and windows sealed over with plywood boards. Paul climbs the stairs, and again, Henry follows. Up here, the scent is worse. There are brownish smears on the wall, as if someone reached out a bloody hand to steady themselves and left the blood to dry.
At the top of the stairs and to the left is a door bearing a full bloody handprint. It hangs partially open, and Paul nudges it open the rest of the way. Henry’s view is over Paul’s shoulder, not even fully stepped into the room, and even that is too much.
The corpse on the bed is partially decomposed, lying on rumpled sheets nearly black with filth. There are no flies, the body is too far gone for that, but Henry hears them anyway, the ghostly echo of their buzz. But just because the flies are gone doesn’t mean there aren’t other scavengers. A beetle crawls over the man’s foot.
Henry bolts down the stairs before he realizes it, back in the kitchen where unwashed dishes pile on the countertops, with more in the sink. Garbage fills the bin by the door. The air here smells sour, but after the room upstairs, it’s almost a relief.
Henry thinks of the wrecked car, and imagines the killer somehow pulling himself from the wreck, somehow managing to make it back home, only to die here, bleeding out the way the girl in the woods did. He wants to feel satisfaction for the strange twist of justice, but there’s only sickness, and beneath that, a hollow still needing to be filled.
Henry turns toward the basement door. It seems to glare back at him until he makes himself cross the room and open it. Wooden steps, the kind built with boards that leave gaps of darkness between, lead down.
He finds a light switch, but he doesn’t bother. Light filters in from the high basement window. It matches the light on the tape where the woman breathed and died and so it is enough.
Beneath the window, a pipe rises from the unfinished floor. There’s a tripod aimed at the pipe, a camera sitting on the tripod, the compartment where the tape was ejected standing open. At the base of the pipe, there are marks on the floor. When Henry bends close to see, they resolve into words. Find me.
Henry’s breath emerges in a whine. For once, his ears fail him. He doesn’t hear Paul descending the stairs until Paul is beside him, touching his shoulder. Henry can’t bring himself to look up. He can’t even bring himself to stand. He stays crouched where he is, swaying slightly. When he does finally look up, it isn’t at Paul, it’s at the window. On the other side of the dirty glass, stark, black branches crisscross the gray sky. Henry looks at them for a very long time. And he breathes.
* * *
There are twelve more tapes. They arrive in a padded envelope, each one labeled like the originals, copies written in Paul’s hand—Exhalation 1–9, Contusion, Asphyxiation, and Delirium. Henry didn’t ask, but Paul knew he would need to see them. Even so, it’s several weeks before Henry can bring himself to watch.
In Asphyxiation, a man hangs from the rafters of the barn, slowly strangling to death under his own weight. In Contusion, a little boy is beaten within in an inch of his life and locked in a dark closet, only the faintest sliver of light showing underneath the door. In Delirium, an old man is strapped to a bed, injected with a syringe, and left to scream out his life with only the water spot on the ceiling for company.
Paul informs Henry by email that four bodies were unearthed on the property—the old man, the young boy, the hanged man, and the girl. But not the woman. Paul informs Henry that the search is ongoing, her body may have been dumped in the woods somewhere, buried or unburied. It may even have been on the way back that the killer crashed and crawled free of the wreck, leaving the tape behind.
What made her special? Or is she special at all? Perhaps the killer was afraid of burying yet another body so close to his home. Maybe he was planning to dig up the others and move them, too, but he never got the chance. Or maybe, just maybe, he woke in the middle of the night to an insistent cicada’s scream and tried to get the woman’s corpse as far away as he could. As if that would ever make them stop.
Henry watches the clips one last ti
me, the ones he and Paul shot, the ones corrupted with ghosts. The frames are back to normal, only the footage he and Paul shot of city streets and subway rides—no stark trees, no water-stained ceiling. Henry sees those things nonetheless. He will see them every time he looks at the film. The only thing he can do to save himself is let them go.
After he watches the clips for the last time, he deletes every last one.
* * *
When Henry finally makes his movie, his great masterpiece, it’s no longer about a boy leaving the country for the city and finding his true home and meeting a boy from the city who grew up in his father’s shadow. The city no longer belongs to the boy Henry used to be, and the boy who grew up in his father’s shadow never belonged to him at all.
Before he begins work on the movie, Henry moves to a city on the other coast, one smelling of the sea. The trees rising up against the sky there are straight and singular; their branches do not fracture and crack across the sky. That fact goes a little way toward easing his sleep, though he still dreams.
While working on the movie that is no longer about a boy, Henry meets a very sweet assistant director of photography who smiles in a way Henry can’t help but return. Soon, Henry finds himself smiling constantly.
Even though the movie Henry makes isn’t the one he thought he would make when he first dreamed of neon and subways and fame, it earns him an Oscar nomination. He is in love with the assistant director of photography, and he is loved in turn. He is happy in the city smelling of the sea, as happy as he can be. The love he has with the assistant director of photography—whose eye is good, but not quite golden—isn’t the kind of love that would willingly take the burden of death and pain from Henry’s shoulders. For that, Henry is grateful. He would crack under the weight of that kind of love, and besides, half his burden already belongs to the man he willingly took it from years ago.
At first, Maddy sends a card every Christmas, and Henry and Paul exchange emails on their respective birthdays. But Henry knew, even on the day he packed up the last of his belongings to drive to the other coast, when he said see you later to Paul, he was really saying goodbye. Paul chose, and Henry consented to his choice. Maybe Paul’s relationship with Maddy could have survived the weight of his pain, but sharing his burden with Maddy wasn’t a risk Paul was willing to take.
Henry is the one to drop their email chain, “forgetting” to reply to Paul’s wishes of happy birthday. When Paul’s birthday rolls around, Henry “forgets” again. It’s a mercy—not for him, but for their friendship. Henry can’t bear to watch something else die slowly, rotting from within, struggling for one last breath to stay alive. Perhaps it isn’t fair, but Henry imagines he hears Paul’s sigh of relief across the miles, imagines the lines of tension in his shoulders finally slackening as he lets the last bit of the burden of the woman’s death go.
For his part, Henry holds on tighter than before. The movie that earns him his Oscar nomination is about a woman, one who is a stranger, yet one he knows intimately. He saw her at her weakest. He watched her die. The words scratched in the floor where the woman breathed her last, find me, are also written on Henry’s heart.
He cannot find the woman physically, so he transforms the words into a plea to find her, who she was in life or who she might have been. Henry imagines the best life he can for her, and he puts it on film. It is the only gift he can give her; it isn’t enough.
When Henry wins his Oscar, his husband, the assistant director of photography, is beside him, bursting with pride. They both climb the stage, along with the rest of the crew. The score from their film plays as they arrange themselves around the microphone. Henry tries not to clench his jaw. A thread winds through the music, so faint no one else would ever hear—the faint burr of rising insect song.
Paradoxically, it is making the movie he never expected to make that finally allows Henry to understand the movie he tried to make years ago. Even though he destroyed the clips, that first movie still exists in his mind. He dreams it, asleep and waking. In the theater of his mind, it is constantly interrupted by windows seen at the wrong angle, water stains, and slivers of light, and scored entirely by insect screams.
The movie that doesn’t exist isn’t a coming-of-age story. It isn’t a story about friendship. It’s a love story, just not the traditional kind.
Because what else could watching so many hours of death be? How else to explain letting those frames of death corrupt his film, reach its roots back to the place where their friendship began and swallow it whole? What other name is there for Henry’s lost hours of sleep, and the knowledge that he wouldn’t say no, even if Paul asked for his help again. Even now. When Henry would still, always, say yes every time.
Every time Henry looks back on the film in his mind, all he sees is pain, the burden he willingly took from Paul so he wouldn’t have to carry it alone. Even so, Henry will never let it go. The movie doesn’t exist, he destroyed every last frame, but it will always own a piece of Henry’s heart. And so will the man he made it for.
SCREAM QUEEN
Nathan Ballingrud
“CAN YOU SHIFT your chair a little bit…no. Here. Let me—”
She stood while Alan adjusted the angle of her chair an inch. When she sat down again, he saw immediately that the lighting was better. He was hoping to get at least part of the interview using the natural light coming in through the picture window in her living room. It highlighted the contours of her face brilliantly. She was old—beautifully, regally old—and he wanted to play it up.
She let him angle her shoulders the way he liked; a natural pro, he thought. God bless her for that. Standing back a few feet, he gave her a quick critical appraisal.
She was seventy-two years old, she wore her hair long, and she was dressed in jeans and a red flannel shirt with the sleeves fastidiously buttoned at her wrists—too hot for Texas, Alan would have thought, but then he wasn’t on the far side of seventy. Her face resembled a weathered rock. She looked goddamn beautiful, and it was hard for him not to smile like a stricken fool. “How’s it look, Mark?”
Mark was standing behind the camera. When he didn’t answer, Alan turned to look at him. Mark was staring at the screen, giving him a thumbs-up.
“I can’t see you when my back is turned,” Alan said. “You have to speak out loud.”
“Sorry.”
Jennifer Drummond smiled, careful not to alter her position. “Are you a student, Mark?” she asked. Her voice sounded strong, and she articulated well. This was going to be so good.
“Yup. I’m in my last semester at USC.”
Alan waited for Mark to brag about the fancy new job waiting for him after graduation, but surprisingly he managed to restrain himself.
“How nice! That’s where Lionel went,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am, I know. John Carpenter, Lionel Teller, Dan O’Bannon—a lot of the old-school horror guys went there. I feel like I’m part of a tradition.”
Her smile faded a little, turning private. “Well. I didn’t know those other gentlemen. I only knew Lionel.”
Alan didn’t want this conversation to happen yet. Better to wait until they started filming. He wanted her answers spontaneous and fresh. She might look robust, but he didn’t want her telling the story once off camera and then deciding it was time for a nap. “We’ll get to all that,” he said. “I’m going to get in close for a sec, okay? I don’t want you to think I’m getting fresh.”
He loomed over her, fixing the microphone to the collar of her shirt. He half expected her to make some joke about not having been this close to a man since the Nixon Administration—she was a famous recluse—but she remained still and quiet. He caught the scent of perfume as he leaned in, and wondered if he should feel flattered.
Stupid to feel this giddy about a woman nearly twenty years his senior, but he couldn’t help it. He’d been in love with her sinc
e he first watched her movie on a VHS tape when was a kid.
Alan’s dream was making his own movies, but he was in his midfifties now, and his middle-of-the-night thoughts told him he’d missed his chance. He hadn’t given up, though. Not yet. And in the meantime he made his living hustling work like this—producing featurettes and press-kit material for feature films, both new and old, for release on disc. It was a precarious life, made more so as the advent of streaming services eroded the audience for physical copies of films, but it kept him in the business he loved. He picked up ad hoc work as a waiter or a barista to fill in the gaps. Somehow it all worked out. So far, anyway.
This one was going to strain the wallet. He and Mark had driven from Los Angeles to north Texas for this interview, hauling their equipment with them in Alan’s 2005 Camry, and the cost in time and gas was going to be more than the small sum they’d make for the finished product. They were staying in a hotel in nearby Templeton, making the fifteen-mile drive to her isolated ranch house this morning. If the interview was with anyone else, they wouldn’t have been able to justify it.
But this was Jennifer Drummond. He’d take the goddamn hit. Mark, to his credit, felt the same.
Drummond had only one film to her credit. Written and directed by Lionel Teller, and released in 1970, Blood Savage crackled across the grindhouse circuit like chain lightning, where it was received with great enthusiasm by gore hounds and lovers of sleazy exploitation, before being ushered off-screen by the next tide of cheap thrills. It should have faded into obscurity, like most films of its kind—there was no arguing its low quality made it tough to watch—but people kept talking about this one. Blood Savage had a vitality that overcame its tiny budget, its bad script, and its terrible actors. Most people credited Lionel Teller for this: somehow he tapped into the ugly zeitgeist, as the optimism and the righteousness of the flower power generation wilted under all the assassinations, the Vietnam War, the Manson cult—Teller channeled all that infected energy and poured it into this nasty little film, which spat directly into the eye of an audience that had learned to crave abuse.
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