Elsinore Canyon

by J. M.

  “No way, Daddy. That’s why I moved out of the dorms.”

  “As long as you keep a balance in your life. A little attention to your own pleasures at least shows that you respect yourself. That way, you’ll get the respect of others.”

  “Of course I get my pleasures, Daddy. Wasting life is a sin.”

  “I’m glad you know yourself so well. Really, all you need when you deal with others is to be yourself. If you can manage that, it’ll keep you honest.” This was an old saw of Polly’s, usually phrased as “Be true to yourself, and then you can’t be false to anyone.” It was odd, because the way he lived, you’d think he was a huge fan of deceit. But I suppose he needed the truthfulness of others the same way thieves need honest workers. Who else would they steal from?

  Laurie realized as she stood with her father and Phil in the terminal that Phil had endured the entire trip without a word. “Remember,” she murmured to him as she hugged him good-bye.

  “Remember?” Polly echoed as he and Phil got back into his van. “Remember what? My birthday isn’t until October.”

  Phil answered reluctantly. “It’s Dana. Laurie thinks I should drop her.”

  Several ideas fell together in Polly’s mind, and his brow darkened. “That’s a good thought. I’ve noticed you two are spending a lot of time together.”

  Phil half nodded.

  “Well, I don’t like it. Claudia is looking for excuses to fire people. The further you stay from all the Hamlets, the better. Especially the boss’s daughter.”

  Phil smiled playfully. “As far as I know, Dad, you’re my boss.”

  “That’s right. I give you everything you have. You don’t owe Dana a thing.”

  Phil’s cufflink got loose again.

  “Do you hear me, Phil?”

  “I’ve only given her the same things she’s given me. She promised me the same things I promised her.”

  “Hah. Whatever she’s given you is fish bait. What things?”

  “Do I have to do this again?” Phil pleaded. “Why does everyone think Dana’s insincere? And why does everyone think I’m a pike?”

  “What have you and Dana ‘promised’ each other?”

  “Nothing you could object to.”

  “Said the object. Young girls break promises. They’re in love with words of love, but they don’t mean them. They stare up at you through those fluffy eyelashes and talk about some rosy future that never happens; they run away the minute you start to make it possible. Are you sulking there? I’m telling you this for your own good. If I had had someone to talk to me like this, I could have been spared a lot of grief when I was young.”

  It went on like that all the way back up the coast, Polly grumbling about Mr. Hamlet’s infatuation with his new wife and how it was ruining everything. Phil could only puzzle at the inscrutable, insectlike politics of adult romance and adult occupations. Dana was so passionate and pure. She clung to him after her mother died. He felt so full and fine when he comforted her—more than comforted her. Melded with her. Engulfed her. “You are not alone, Dana. I am yours. I will let you love me.”

  But Polly knew only two things: he needed to reestablish his footing with the Hamlets, and Phil’s behavior wasn’t helping. It was the perfect time, he decided, for Phil to visit Laurie in Alaska.

  The perfect time indeed. Phil would be on a plane two days later, just as the mosquitoes had descended on Laurie’s neighborhood and her soul had been crushed and every nerve in her body sliced and seared.

  She had returned to Anchorage to find Clark Jeffords in bed with two other girls.

  DON’T GO, DANA

  Noise, out there somewhere. Shooting?

  BANG BANG.

  I turned sideways in bed. Gugh.

  BANG BANG BANG. “Horst!” It was Dana’s voice outside my room.

  I pushed myself up and looked at a clock: it was just after one in the morning. “Dana?” I called foggily.

  “Horst! Get up!”

  “I’m. Up.” I switched on a light, shuffled my clothes on, and transferred into my chair. I opened the door to the odd duo of Dana, in her black dress and dark cloak, and a rumpled, blinking Marcellus dressed for a walk in the cold. “What?” I said. “Did it come back?”

  “We’re going to the adobe now,” Dana announced. “We’re getting ahead of this prank if that’s what it is.” I rolled around and picked up shoes and sweaters while she rambled on. “We were expected during the day, we show up at night. Day or night should all be the same to a ghost if that’s what it is. No point waiting another twelve hours to get this thing done if that’s what we’re doing. You’re not tired, are you?” she asked me.

  “Naw.” I finished getting dressed. The three of us went down the hall and out a side door.

  Dana drew her cloak across her chest as we stepped into the moist, dark air. “Freaky weird time either way.” She looked like a ghost herself as the three of us got into carts and rolled down the path.

  The rhythmic booming of the surf blended with our movements. A slow stop, a fluid, three-person clutch by the door, Marcellus’s expressionless face and his fingers flying over the keypad, our entry into the adobe, one by one. We spread out silently. The broken vase, the toppled table, and the books still lay scattered. Marcellus tiptoed around and switched on every light and lamp in the room. “We don’t have to wait for it in the dark.”

  Dana wiggled herself onto a high table. Her cloak spilled down and around her in heavy folds. She looked at me and Marcellus nervously. “No one’s been in here since this afternoon?”

  Marcellus pulled a digital device out of his pocket and tapped in code. “Nope.” He set it on the arm of the leather club chair he’d picked the last time. “I’m gonna get ready.” He sat down, the cushion whooshed. The sound of the ocean was softer with the door closed, like a memory or a dream. We looked at each other, tired and expectant, Horst in his chair, me in mine, and Dana on the table’s edge. Three pairs of eyes tracing triangles in the tense air.

  Dana drew in a slow breath. “Does anyone feel anything?”

  It happened. My wheelchair was drifting in blackness.

  “Oh God.” It was Dana’s voice, husky with terror.

  “Dana!” I said.

  “I’m here,” she panted. “I can’t see.”

  Black soup. Voices only.

  “This is it,” came Marcellus’s voice. Breathing hard.

  “What, is it here?” I said. I rolled this way and that, trying to see.

  “What are you?” croaked Dana’s voice.

  “What?” I said.

  “You don’t see?”

  I spun in my chair, and there it was. Mrs. Hamlet, as large as life, standing or floating somewhere in the room. “That’s it.”

  “Mom?” came Dana’s terrified voice. “Is that you?”

  Huh, huh, huh—one of us, or all three of us, were puffing. Once again, the thing stared in sad, desperate longing. It held our eyes that way for a full minute until it turned and moved slowly through the blackness. To the stairs? It paused—I could swear it hadn’t done that before. With its eyes fixed—on Dana, I thought—it raised its hand, palm inward, and crooked its finger, beckoning. Its eyes gleamed, tiny beacons signaling across a dark and treacherous sea.

  “What the hell,” came Marcellus’s voice.

  “You see that?” I said.

  “What!” Dana called.

  “What it’s doing. It didn’t do that before.”

  “She wants me to go,” Dana said softly. “She’s looking straight at me.”

  “Don’t!”

  “Don’t go, Dana.”

  “She wants me to!”

  “What if she wants you to jump off the damn roof!” Marcellus said.

  As if on cue, the roof door swung up and the weird light lashed down and bubbled over the steps. The ghost seemed to shudder in its effluvium, and beckoned again. Its hand curled and uncurled softly like a white anemone.

  I wheeled toward the sou
nd of Dana’s voice, plunged my hands into the syrupy blackness, seized nothing, wheeled some more. I knew where I was now, but—I rolled to the table where Dana had been sitting, reached out, and caught her. Clammy bare legs that were kicking away from me, also corduroy pants, a down jacket, that blanket of a cloak, big shoes swinging, too many limbs, too much torso—Marcellus had had the same idea as me. The three of us were rolling and thrashing. “Marcellus!” I shouted.

  He grunted back. “She’s not going, she can’t go.”

  Dana yelled. “I’m going to her, you bastards! Why did you bring me here?”

  I had one half of her firm, wriggling body pinned, Marcellus the other. The ghost put one foot on the bottom step and gestured again for Dana to follow.

  “I’m going to it!” Dana screamed. “I don’t care what happens to me!”

  “AAAAAAAAH!” yelled Marcellus. Dana’s arm flung free.

  “I’ll bite your arteries!” she raged. Christ—she’d bitten him.

  “Talk to her in here!” I said. “You don’t have to go out.” I was scuffling with Dana alone now, her body torqueing and the notches of her spine against my hand, her hair—I couldn’t bring myself to drag her by her hair.

  “Don’t make me hurt you, Horst!”

  “Let her go,” came Marcellus’s voice from somewhere farther off. “We’ll follow her.” I let go of her—her arms, back, legs, feet, brushed through my hands and I found myself clutching her empty cloak on the floor. Bumping and scraping sounds, and then Dana stumbling into the chill-colored light, her knees knocking each other, her arms flailing for balance in her wide black sleeves, and her frightened eyes surrounded by the tangled gold of her hair. The ghost was on its way up. Dana peered at it as if possessed, and followed as it climbed steadily, up, to the roof. The thing went out the door, Dana went out the door, her ankles and soles floating away, and the door swung shut with a BANG. The room was light again.

  Marcellus and I leapfrogged up the steps. He rammed the door with the stick used for pushing it open, but it might have been nailed shut for all it would move. He reached up and shook the handle. Frozen. Blood all over the place from his bitten hand. He banged on the door itself. Not a sliver would it move. “Shit. Dana! DANA!”

  “Hack it open!” I said. “Burn it!”

  He clambered over me, down the rest of the steps to the fireplace, and flung the poker up to me. “Work the handle,” he said. For an eternity of several minutes, we swung, dug, pried, and drove at the door and the handle without budging it or making a dent. And then, as if our efforts had no force whatsoever and the door a will of its own, it swung open slowly; we scrambled out. Over the sounds of the night came Dana’s shrieks. “I am coming for you, you bitch!” She was crouched at the very edge of the roof, leaning over the ocean, wailing, clawing the air.

  THE TRUTH IS SCARY

  Back in the adobe, she hunched over her gut as she sat between me and Marcellus. Her white face turned up to the roof door. “It was real,” she whimpered. She sounded as if the discovery was a burden, not a relief.

  “What did it say?” said Marcellus.

  She opened her mouth, then froze. “Promise you won’t tell anyone else. Both of you.”

  “Of course I won’t.” “We won’t.”

  “Okay. It—”

  The damn room went black again and a voice—a whisper magnified a thousand times—seared the air. “DO NOT TELL.” The bitch hurt my ears.

  “God damn,” Marcellus groaned.

  “Dana.” My voice floating, disconnected. “Do you hear it?”

  “DO NOT TELL.” God damn it, turn it down.

  “She means it,” I said.

  “Who does?” said Marcellus.

  “The ghost—Mrs. Hamlet!”

  “Who’s she talking to?”

  The blackness faded. Or didn’t. I sat in growing horror as the walls and corners peeled into view. The blackness wasn’t going in a blink this time. It was—how could it be? It was pulling away from the outer edges of the room, gathering in on itself. Fingers and sheets of darkness rolled inward, across the carpet, the furniture, into itself, to form a small cloud, that finally condensed on the floor in the shape of something like a pile of clothes. Then I realized: that was Dana. She was balled up on the floor, covered by that black thing, that layer of horror. I yelled crazily and I was about to spring on her when the blackness lifted. It was a smoking cloud floating over her face. She huddled on the floor and looked up, her mouth wide with fear. Rage made me tingle. Why had I led her to that hellish thing? I was the guilty one. I had swam in a pool of terror that afternoon and then brought Dana down here to drown in it. “GO!” I shouted at the thing. It collapsed into a speck, and—pop—it was gone. I wheeled raggedly to grab hold of Dana.

  “It’s all right,” she panted as she pushed my hands away. “She deserves it. She deserves a hearing. I’m only scared because the truth is scary.” She dragged some damp strands off her forehead. “I know it’s strange, Horst, but you’ve always been fair with strangers. Just be fair with this one.” Still on the floor, she looked towards the roof again with wondering eyes. “They didn’t teach us everything in Catholic school.”

  “DO NOT TELL.”

  Dana staggered up. “All right!” One second, two, three, four, five. No more voices. “It’s all right.” She looked at me and Marcellus, weaving on her feet. “Never mind.”

  “Never mind what?” said Marcellus.

  “Whatever I was about to tell you. Which was nothing.” She reached down for her cloak, and toppled onto it as if she was drunk. She burst into cold laughter. “Things have been hard for me lately, guys!”

  I tried to wrap her up. “Are you hurt, baby?”

  “Dig it, Horst!” she laughed. “Me not talking to you for six weeks, how fucked is that? But I really was that ashamed, I was trying to figure out what I did wrong.”

  “You haven’t done anything to me.”

  “Then I’m desolated. I’m desolated if you didn’t miss me or feel betrayed.”

  “I missed you.”

  “I felt so undeserving. And now that all that time has passed and I realize I was so wrong—” She finished with another snort of crazy laughter.

  “What?” said Marcellus.

  “Things are about to get ten times worse.”

  I stretched my hands out to help her off the floor. “Dana—”

  “I’m telling you so you’ll know. Don’t raise any alarms about me. No straitjackets, no exorcisms. There’s so much that’s so wrong, and I’ve got to work out my own way to fix it.” Her voice hardened. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to swallow their happy pills.” She bunched up her cloak, took my hands, and got back to her feet with a shaky breath. “Let’s go.”

  It was all she would say. My heart was a spadeful of cold mud when I left for Santa Barbara at sunrise. I felt I was abandoning her. What had I done, bringing her to that thing? What had we all seen and heard, what had taken hold of Dana, what could more of those horrid visitations do to her? I was ready to fly to her the minute she called, to do anything she asked. But she didn’t call, she didn’t ask. Was I one of the “happy pills” she wouldn’t swallow? Had that blackness seduced her in some way, had she discovered some orgiastic hatred that she preferred to my friendship? Over the next month, all I could do was watch helplessly from a distance, loathing the thing we’d seen in the adobe, punching the refresh button on my computer over and over while hoping for news from her hand, and wanting to drive my fist through my monitor over the shit I read and heard.

  DARK WATER

  Item: Local heiress Dana Hamlet ambushed Robert Pattinson last night on his way out of The Licorice Club in Hollywood. Waving some eggs that she pulled out of her purse, she yelled at the startled hottie, “Have my baby, have my baby!” Bouncers held her off and got spattered with farm-fresh yolks for their efforts. We’re baffled about the whole thing too, since Pattinson is way too slim-hipped for the task.

  Item: Do
n’t tell the Admissions Committee at Stanford, but incoming frosh Dana Hamlet is at it again. After a clash with club security outside The Licorice last week, she punked the citizens of Beverly Hills by running around the greens in a polar bear costume while carrying a toy seal splattered with red paint. Our informants say the hairess dodged from tree to tree, making growling noises until cops persuaded her to take her head off. Unfortunately the furry white version may be better than the one attached to her shoulders.

  Item: When in doubt, wear black. When in a lot of doubt, wear a hijab? Was a certain wacky trendsetter simply making a fashion statement when she appeared in front of the Islamic Center in Los Angeles last Friday? The mystery fashionista paraded up and down during the sacred afternoon prayer covered in something like a black bed sheet, with signs attached to the head reading “FRONT” and “BACK.” Mosque-goers took issue, and one bearded male threw a Coke can at either the FRONT or the BACK. Says a witness, “She then walked over to where the can had fallen and bowed to it. Then, someone unwrapped her.” At that point, she ran away and tried to get lost among the pedestrians in the streets nearby. Not an easy thing for Dana Hamlet.

  And there was more. She showed up at a Minority Women in Media fundraiser wearing a t-shirt that said “Free Clitoridectomies on Demand!” She bought billboard space on Wilshire and Normandie and put up ads in Korean and English saying “Gooks abort girls.” She scattered flyers at Catholic churches showing a picture of a man with a clerical collar pulling a little kid’s pants down. A caption said, “Birth control is bad. The Church needs your kids.” That got Mr. Hamlet a fine for littering and a candid shot on Perez Hilton complete with white drizzle. She walked one street holding a sign with a medical diagram of a woman’s pelvis with “Government Property” stamped on it. She walked another street holding a sign with a giant photo of Ashton Kutcher hugging a fan girl. A speech balloon going into his mouth said, “Fuck women.” The girl’s speech balloon said, “Yes, please.” That got her arrested on a public indecency charge. She pled guilty and Mr. Hamlet got away with another fine, but she told a reporter she was sorry she missed the chance to buy the judge a BJ in lieu of the fine. Gossip writers asked her for interviews—and she gave them. “Are you prejudiced against African Americans?” “No, it’s just Charlize Theron I hate.” “Who’s the most overrated celebrity?” “I am.” “Why should anyone listen to you?” “Because they read your crappy blog.” “What would you say to young people?” “Words.”