Mark headed to the car. “Come on, man. We need to talk.”
* * *
They skipped Paco’s and headed straight for the bar, a dingy little hole called the Canteen. The place was dark, cool, and empty, the bartender a threadbare soul who seemed stunned by the way they manifested into his world from the glare of daylight. They ordered a couple burgers and some beers. He served them and retreated into a shadowy recess.
They hadn’t talked much in the car. Alan was fit to burst, but Mark was clearly troubled by something and put him off with a brusque “I need to think.” Now that they were settled in and had a few sips of beer in them, he loosened up. “I think she needs help, man.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she’s not well.”
The irritation Alan had felt back at the house bubbled back up. “Come on. You have nothing to base that on.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“You don’t know her story. She’s been living in this godforsaken town for half a century, she’s probably grateful for the attention. She’s feeding the legend.”
Mark shook his head. “I don’t know, man. I think that’s wishful thinking.”
Alan took a pull from his beer. “You shouldn’t make judgments about the person you’re interviewing until you’ve let them speak their mind, and even then you should probably try to refrain. We need to remain objective.”
“Oh, here we go.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“You talk to me like I’m a child. You do it all the time. I don’t need a lecture on what to think. And don’t talk to me about being objective.”
“You are a child!” He tried to say it like he was kidding, but he didn’t sell it very well.
“Look, this woman was taken advantage of,” Mark said. “She was forced to attend these stupid rituals by some alpha-male douchebag, made to perform this fucked-up scene in the nude, which she admitted made her uncomfortable—surrounded by God knows how many of them lighting their fucking candles and doing their stupid devil chants!—and she ended up becoming the wet dream of half the maladjusted teenage boys across America. And she was probably mentally ill already. Undiagnosed and untreated. And now here she is, thinking she has some actual demon roosting in her head. And we’re putting her on camera. Exploiting her all over again. No wonder she ran away.”
Alan stared at his plate, reeling from this little speech. “I’m surprised to hear you say that,” he said. “If that’s what you think, what are you even doing here? You seemed thrilled about it on the way out.”
Mark pushed his empty mug away and called for another one. “I’m doing this because I love horror movies. Just like you. And because it’s going to be great material, and that’s what we’re here to get. You know, Alan: professionalism. That doesn’t mean I have to pretend I don’t know what we’re really doing.”
The bartender put another beer in front of Mark.
“That’s the last one,” Alan said. “We’re not done today.”
“You’re a piece of work,” Mark said, turning to face him. “You just have to make your little power plays. Christ, I’ll be glad to move on from this.”
There it was. Alan knew Mark wouldn’t be able to resist throwing his new gig in his face. A few more months and he’d be on set with a big studio production, making some real money. Not hustling anymore. Making the leap Alan never could manage. A young man with a future.
They’d been working on and off as a team for two years. They’d developed a good rapport. Mark had listened to Alan talk about the movie he was going to make someday, how he was going to get the funding, the strings he would pull to get some surprise stunt casting. “I’ve been in this business for a while,” Alan had said, often. “I’m owed a lot of favors.” He’d promised Mark he’d give him a job, too; they’d climb up the ladder together. Mark had always been encouraging.
And then Mark got the call. A USC buddy had done all right for herself, landed a good job at Lucasfilm, and when a position opened up in her department, she called in her old friend.
He knew he shouldn’t take out his frustrations on Mark. It wasn’t the kid’s fault Alan had somehow managed to waste the best working years of his own life. Alan should be happy for the guy.
But he felt like a goddamned idiot. He felt ashamed of his whole life.
“Well,” he said. “You’ll be out of here soon enough. Then you can go suck Hollywood’s big dick.”
“Okay, I’m done.” Mark stood, leaving his beer unfinished. He threw down a few bills. “Hey, bartender, you got cabs in this town?”
The bartender nodded.
“Call me one, please.” To Alan, he said, “I’ll meet you back at her place.”
“Fine.”
Mark walked out the door, and Alan finished his lunch, taking his time about it. She’d asked for a few hours, and he was enjoying the cool and the quiet. He only hoped the dumb kid didn’t wake her when he got back to the house.
Finished, he pushed his plate away and ordered another beer. He went over the argument in his mind, searching for justifications and weaknesses. He already regretted shitting on Mark’s opportunity—the kid was good at his job, and he deserved it—but then he considered that little speech about taking advantage of Jennifer and got angry all over again. Who was Mark to decide she was crazy? Why not clever and playful? The self-righteous prick.
Glancing up, he was surprised to find the bartender standing right there, staring at him. “Um…you need me to pay my tab or something? Are you closing already?”
“No, no.” The guy seemed nervous. Alan couldn’t get a read on his age. Late forties? Early sixties? He seemed gray and indistinct; his whole presence was like an apology. “I was wondering if you fellas were here for Miss Drummond.”
Hang on now. “What makes you say that?”
“Well, it ain’t hard to figure out. You were talking kind of loud.”
“I guess that’s fair. Okay, yeah, we’re here to interview her. You know she was in the movies, right?”
The knowledge seemed to surprise the bartender. “No, I did not.”
“Yeah, man. She’s a big deal.” He smiled, feeling a little buzzed. He picked up his mug and offered an imaginary toast to him. “At least, to the discerning cinephile, she is.”
“Well, isn’t that something. I was hoping you all were here ’cause she was starting up her service again, but I guess that’s not it.”
Alan, about to drain his beer and fashion his exit, paused. He kept smiling, but it was a curious smile now. “What’s your name, man?”
“Tom.”
“Tom, how about another one of these? I want to hear about this service.”
“I guess I probably better not talk about it.”
“Why not?”
He seemed to take the question seriously and mulled it over for a minute. “Miss Drummond is a private person. That’s probably pretty clear to you, since you had to come all this way to find her. It’s not my place to tell her story. Not anyone’s, really.” He put a little emphasis on the last, making it clear what he thought of Alan’s purpose here.
“Look. Tom. I don’t know Miss Drummond very well personally, but I’ve been an admirer my whole life. I would not do anything to put her in a bad light. Just the reverse, actually. You heard my colleague. He thinks she’s mentally unsound. Do you think so?”
“No I do not.”
“Neither do I. I want the world to fall back in love with her. If she was holding church services or something along those lines, it could go a long way to helping me make that happen.”
Tom ruminated. It was clear to Alan that he didn’t do much of anything before giving it considerable thought. He supposed that was a virtue, but it made him impatient.
“She deserves that,” the barte
nder said. “She deserves to be loved.”
“We’re on the same page, Tom. How about that beer?”
Pouring another draft, Tom said, “She used to hold it up at her house. This was a whole lot of years ago. I was just a kid myself.” He produced an old ghost of a grin. “Not too young to fall in love, though.”
“But this was like a church service, right?”
“I guess you could call it that.” He became cautious again, as though he’d startled himself with his little flare of enthusiasm. “I don’t really remember the specifics.”
“What do you remember?”
“This was way back in the seventies. Like I say, I was young. She was in the same house she’s at now. I don’t remember how she came to be there, but I know she was a fairly recent addition to the scenery. My dad kept on calling them ‘the city slickers,’ even when they’d been here for years.”
“Wait. ‘Them’?”
“Her and her boyfriend.”
Alan sat up, tried to clear his head. “She had a boyfriend? What was his name?”
“Can’t remember his last name, but his first name was Lionel. I remember ’cause it was the same name as the model trains. You remember those?”
“Lionel Teller?”
“Maybe.”
“Holy shit.” He rubbed his eyes. “So he was here with her. And he was what, hosting these services with her? What were they like?”
Tom’s memory turned out to be ill-defined. He had a roundabout way of speaking, once he got going, so it took longer than it should have for Alan to get an impressionistic notion of these “services.” It seemed everyone in town attended them, and there was little rhyme or reason dictating when they were held. From time to time an urge would come into their heads, and they’d go. Little Tom’s parents would take his hands into theirs, and together they’d walk with others from Templeton in a loose procession to the Drummond house. People congregated outside until she and Teller came out.
“I remember she had a silver light, real powerful but not really shining beyond her own skin. Almost too bright to look at. But I couldn’t not look. None of us could bear to look at anything else. Sometimes it was Miss Drummond in the middle of the light, sometimes it was something else.”
“Something else?”
“Something holy. Something with a lot of limbs and a lot of faces. Its head spun like a carousel, showing them all to us. Or showing us to them.”
He couldn’t remember what would occur next. He believed it was possible that nothing happened at all, that the observance was the whole point; each side watching the other, the very act of looking fulfilling some unarticulated need.
After each service, Tom said, there were one or two fewer people making the walk home. No one wondered too much what happened to the missing people, not even later, when the services stopped. It was sort of understood that they were gone, and it was natural that they should be.
“You weren’t scared?”
Tom thought about it. “ ‘Scared’ seems like too easy a word for what it was. We loved her, and as anyone who’s lived a while knows, love and fear aren’t strangers to each other. We felt like she was ours. She belonged to us, whatever that meant.”
It meant quite a lot, it turned out. Lionel Teller became the object of some jealousy from people in town. Each time they were sent home—“or maybe ‘released’ is a better word,” Tom said—Teller retreated into the house with her. His exposure to that magnificent light, and to the presence inside it, was ongoing. Why did he deserve it, and not they?
Well, that all stopped, eventually.
“What do you mean? What happened?”
“Somebody killed him.”
“Killed Lionel Teller? How?”
“Hard, that’s how. A mob of folks tore him to pieces.”
“…What year was this?”
“Seventy-five, seventy-six? Difficult to say for sure.”
“Jesus Christ. How is it possible this has never gotten out? Doesn’t anybody from this town ever gossip? Ever go online, even?”
Tom shrugged. He slid him another beer; Alan realized with some surprise that he’d downed three or four. There was no window in the bar to measure the sunlight. He checked his phone: he was late.
“It’s just not something we think about, I guess.”
“Do you know how crazy that sounds?”
Tom wasn’t pleased by the question. “You weren’t here for it. You don’t understand. Hell, I wouldn’t have thought of it at all if you two hadn’t come into town and started shouting at each other.”
Alan had to go. He stood, felt his head swim. He didn’t want to leave this guy on a bad note, though. Fuck the featurette; he was definitely going to come back here and make a documentary. Lionel Teller murdered! This was what was going to save him. What a godsend. But what would it do to her? Was he really prepared to throw her to the wolves? He paid his bill and left a generous tip. His brain scrambled to process what he’d heard, to figure out how he was going to proceed. Maybe Mark was right: maybe she was crazy, and it was contagious. Maybe everybody in this town was batshit.
His scalp prickled. He’d seen enough horror movies to know what was supposed to come next. He imagined the people of Templeton arrayed outside the bar, staring at the door with dead eyes, waiting for him to come out. “I’m curious,” he said. “If no one’s said anything all these years, why now? Why are you telling me? Makes me kind of nervous.”
Tom didn’t smile. He said, “Nobody’s set foot in that house since that Lionel son of a bitch got hisself killed. And she’s been quiet as the grave since then. If she’s invited you fellas in, I figure she’s getting ready to start back up again. I miss it. I miss her. I still dream about her, and that silver light.” He paused. “Tell you the truth? I’m not worried about you telling anybody. Nobody who sees that light ever chooses to leave this place.”
Alan had nothing to say to that. He nodded noncommittally and headed out the door, where the late afternoon was still warm and the parking lot was empty of angry townsfolk, where his car waited right where he’d left it and started easily when he turned his key. He turned onto the road and drove the fifteen miles toward Jennifer Drummond’s house, the sky a gorgeous rose hue above him.
It was the magic hour.
* * *
He drove slowly. He was closer to drunk than he liked, and he was already very late; he didn’t want to compound his problems by getting pulled over by a Texas cop. By the time he pulled up to the ranch house, daylight had receded to a ghostly echo in the sky. Night with all its distant stars loomed behind it. Getting out of his car, he paused to stare up into it. He rarely left LA anymore, and when he did, it was usually for another metropolis like New York or Toronto, so it had been a long time since he’d been intimidated by the sky. Like any student of the genre, he knew the decreed reaction to this kind of display: a feeling of smallness, of inconsequence. But as he progressed further into middle age, he no longer needed an empty sky to feel cosmic horror; the deep, formless awareness of a wasted life engulfed him every night. It was the impetus for many two a.m. breakdowns. He always felt afraid.
Light shone from the living room window, warm and welcoming. He crunched a few Altoids to mask the smell of beer and climbed the steps, bracing himself for Mark’s withering look. He rapped once on the door and then walked in. “Sorry I’m late. I was interviewing some of the local wildlife.”
He was struck by a sudden gust of rot stench, a rolling wave of it, which made his eyes water. Involuntarily he brought his hand over his mouth. It passed in seconds, replaced by the scent of sandalwood incense. He noticed a stick of it smoking in a corner.
Jennifer Drummond was sitting in the same chair she’d used for the interview. Mark sat across from her, in the chair Alan had used. Alan paused. The room was gravid with moment, as though he
’d intruded upon some delicate transaction. Jennifer looked at him and smiled in a way that seemed wounded and hesitant. Mark lowered his head and wiped a hand over his eyes.
“Uh, is everything okay?”
“Who were you talking to?” Jennifer asked.
“The bartender at the Canteen. Tom. I lost track of time.”
“Alan,” Mark said. “I think we need to go.”
Jennifer looked startled. “Nonsense.”
“Yeah, really. It’s late. We can come back and finish in the morning.” Saying this, he looked up at Alan. His eyes were red and swollen. He’d been crying.
“Mark? What the hell happened?”
Jennifer put a hand on Mark’s wrist. He flinched. “Mark thinks I’m crazy,” she said.
“Goddamn it.”
“That’s not how I put it,” Mark said.
“He was trying to protect me.” She looked away from Alan and back at Mark. “But you were being presumptuous. Weren’t you, Mark.”
He nodded, his face lowered. Alan could see the backs of his ears turn red. Mark was trying to hold back tears. He felt deeply unsettled. Something was badly wrong. “Miss Drummond—Jennifer—I think Mark is right. It is late, and he looks like he might be feeling sick. It’s probably best to come back and finish in the morning.”
She ignored him. “Go sit on the couch, Mark.”
Mark did what he was told, avoiding Alan’s eyes as he brushed past him. Jennifer gestured to the vacated chair. Alan remained standing. “What’s going on here?”
“I had to show him,” she said. “I didn’t like his insinuations.”
Alan sought for something to say, some way of defending Mark without risking her trust. There wasn’t any. Instead he just stared at Mark, who sat on the couch like some chastened little boy, struggling to keep his composure.
“What did you show him?”
For a moment she seemed to be on the verge of tears herself. “I didn’t want to.” Her hands were clutched tightly in her lap, knuckles white with tension. Then she closed her eyes and he could see a resolve settle over her like a garment. When she spoke again, all trace of weakness was gone: “I won’t be told who I am anymore.”
Final Cuts Page 10
