Ghostlight

by Sonia Gensler

  He shook his head. “That’s just gore. Have you ever watched a ghost movie?”

  “Definitely not. Mom hates ghost stories, and Grandma only watches Little House on the Prairie and old stuff like that.”

  “Yeah, you definitely have some catching up to do.” When I started to protest, he lifted a hand. “The good news is that I’ll do the work with you right here. It’ll be a good review for me, and I bet we’ll get all sorts of ideas for our own story.”

  “Um, I didn’t come here to sign up for summer school.”

  “I promise you’ll like this, Avery.”

  I rolled my eyes. But doing that made me think of Blake and how he never wanted to do anything fun anymore.

  “All right, then. Bring on the ghost movies.”

  Julian smiled. “We’ll start with a classic.”

  Julian kept a warehouse’s worth of movies on his external hard drive, so we watched on the jumbo monitor with the lights off and curtains closed. His dad insisted the door stay open, but even then not much light came from the hallway. Julian reclined in his leather chair with his feet propped up on a box, and I sat on the bed because he told me to. Blake’s bed was a jumble of covers and smelled like feet, but Julian’s was smooth and tucked in, and all I smelled was clean cotton.

  I worried at first because I had a strict policy about black-and-white movies. It mostly involved never watching them. In old movies, everybody talked in funny, false-sounding voices, and the story moved about as fast as molasses. I’d tried many times to watch It’s a Wonderful Life at Christmas—Mom really loved it—but I always fell asleep in the first twenty minutes. And that was on a couch, not a comfy bed like Julian’s.

  This movie was different.

  It started with an old-fashioned voice-over in which a man told the story of a very bad house and the people who’d died in it. Years later, a group of strangers arrived at the house to study paranormal activity. Everything seemed fine in the light of day, but when they went to bed…that’s when the creepy stuff started happening. Strange poundings and crying noises echoed through the halls at night. Doorknobs rattled and the doors themselves seemed to breathe in and out.

  At one point I had to ask Julian to pause it. I said I needed a bathroom break, but really, I just had to get away from that crazy house for a second. It was getting too real. I needed to see sunlight coming through the bathroom window and to hear Julian’s dad puttering downstairs in the kitchen.

  When the movie was over, my shoulders finally relaxed. It was a relief to turn the lights on, to stretch and yawn.

  Julian studied me. “Were you scared?”

  “Yeah…I guess.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I just was.”

  He sighed. “If you’re going to be serious about filmmaking, you need to figure out why it was scary.”

  I thought so long and hard that the silence rang in my ears and my armpits turned sweaty.

  “Was it the violence that scared you?” he prompted.

  I snorted. “There wasn’t any. No blood, anyway.”

  “Was it the ghost?”

  “Well, yeah!”

  “Was it the way the ghost looked?”

  I started to say yes, but stopped. We’d heard horrible thumps and cries. We saw what seemed to be the ghost turning the doorknob and pressing against the door itself. But I didn’t know what the ghost looked like.

  “We never actually saw it,” I said.

  “So why was the movie scary?”

  “Because I didn’t know what the ghost was. It seemed dangerous, but I didn’t know what it would do. I was just…dreading it the whole time.”

  Julian nodded. “Psychological horror. The unknown is much scarier than a vampire, or a werewolf, or a man in a sheet yelling ‘boo.’ ”

  “I’d never be scared by a man in a sheet.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  We watched the movie again, but this time it was easier because I knew what to expect. In fact, the scary bits were almost fun because I could study how they scared me.

  The coolest thing was when Julian paused the movie to explain camera angles. He showed me how a low angle, where the camera is placed below the subject, makes that person or thing seem powerful and intimidating. The director of this movie used low angles a lot, like when the characters first saw the house and it stood dark and gloomy above them. High angles made people or things look insignificant. When the characters were frightened in this movie, they were shown from high angles. It made them look small and powerless. And when the camera tilted or shook? That helped you feel a character’s loss of control or fear.

  “I always thought the most important thing was the acting. I never realized how much work the camera actually does in telling the story.” I shook my head in wonder. “How do you know all this stuff?”

  “I did a camp last summer. One of the tracks was filmmaking, and the teacher was totally into classic horror films. I guess I got a little obsessed.”

  “Julian, who’s going to star in our movie?”

  “We are, of course. And maybe my sister. Do you think your brother would be interested?”

  “I seriously doubt it.” It was time to move the subject as far from Blake as possible, so I pointed toward the computer. “I just wondered if our movie would be about grown-ups or kids. I mean—will you have us playing grown-ups?”

  “No way. Things have to feel real. If we had funding, we could hire actors, but our characters need to be kids because we basically have no budget.” His eyes brightened. “That’s another good thing about psychological horror. If you never show the ghost, you don’t need a huge budget for special effects.”

  “Hadn’t thought of that.”

  “And it’s better anyway. My film teacher said that creepy monsters jumping out at you from the screen might make you scream, but it’s the things you don’t see that really get under your skin.”

  A knock came at the door, and I swear my body rose about a foot off the bed. But it was only Julian’s dad poking his head in. He held a cell phone in his hand.

  “Avery May, your grandma just called. She says it’s time to get ready for supper.”

  I glanced at my watch. “I’ve been here for almost five hours. How did that happen?”

  Mr. Wayne just smiled. “Better get a move on.”

  —

  That night when Mom called, my brain was bursting with everything I’d seen and learned at Hollyhock Cottage. I’d been thinking a lot about that haunted-house movie, and part of me really wanted to talk to Mom about it. But if I did, I’d have to explain how Julian and I were making a ghost movie of our own. And since she wouldn’t even let me watch a ghost movie, I was pretty sure she wouldn’t be happy about us making one.

  “You sound kind of far away tonight, Avery,” she said.

  “I’m just tired, I guess.”

  “Are you and Blake running around all day like always?”

  “Me and who?”

  There was a pause. “Avery?”

  “I barely speak to Blake anymore, Mom.”

  “But I thought you had a royal wedding to arrange for Kingdom. Princess…what was her name?”

  “Etheline. She was supposed to marry the Lord of the North Countries, but Blake thinks he’s too old to play anymore. He says he’s starting high school. Kingdom is little kid stuff. I got in big trouble with Grandma for cussing at him, but he was asking for it.”

  “Oh, Avery, I wish you’d get a handle on that temper of yours. Next time he makes you mad, count to five in your head before you talk back to him. Will you try that, please?”

  I couldn’t think of any time in my life when counting had calmed me down, but if I said that Mom would think I was sassing her. “Yes, ma’am.”

  She took a breath. “And anyway, Grandma says you’ve made a new friend already. One of her summer tenants?”

  “It’s just Julian. We’re making a film together.”

  “How ambitio
us.”

  She was using that “playing along” tone that always irked me, especially because I was almost sure she’d just held the phone away from her mouth to yawn.

  “Actually, we’re making a film about the Hilliard farm.”

  “That sounds interesting.”

  Sometimes she’d be on her computer at the same time she was talking to me, checking work email, and I’d only get half of her attention.

  “Yeah, we’re flying in actors from Hollywood,” I said. “Julian is a famous teen director.”

  “Uh-huh…”

  Now I knew she wasn’t listening. “Tomorrow we start filming the nude scenes.”

  “Right.”

  “Mom! I just said we were filming nude scenes. Are you on the computer or something?”

  “Oh, honey, I’m sorry.” She cleared her throat. “My brain’s a bit scrambled after the long day. I’ve been putting in extra hours at work, trying to get ahead on some of these cases so I won’t be distracted when I fly out there to see you.”

  “You’re always distracted.”

  “I’m trying to get on top of all this, honey. I really am.”

  “I know,” I whispered.

  It took Julian a little while to come to the door Tuesday morning, and this time no sweet smells of baking greeted me in the hallway. Instead I heard the guitar strumming in the living room.

  “Dad is finally composing, so he’ll leave us alone,” Julian whispered, waving me toward the stairs.

  “Can we stand here and listen for a bit?”

  “No time to waste. We’ve got two more movies to watch before filming starts.”

  “But I’ve never heard anyone write a song before.”

  Julian frowned. “What do you want to be, Avery? A groupie or a filmmaker?”

  “Geez, I was just curious.”

  Once we’d settled ourselves in his room—Julian stiff and serious in his leather chair and me perched on the bed—he leaned forward. “I’ve decided our film should be black and white.”

  For some reason I thought of those old cameras you saw in movies, the kind you had to wind as you filmed. I couldn’t really see Julian doing that. “You mean on actual black-and-white film?”

  “I wish. I don’t even know how to use a camera with actual film. I learned on a digital camera, and that’s what we’ll be using. We can change it to black and white afterwards. I have all sorts of cool filters we can use in postproduction.”

  Julian had queued up the movie as he was talking, and this one was about a lady who was taking care of two little children in a beautiful mansion long ago. The creepy music during the opening credits probably should have clued me in, but it was still strange to see that sweet little boy and girl turn weird on her. And when the ghosts started to peek through windows and appear on the towers? The hair lifted on the back of my neck. But I didn’t let it get to me. Not really. Things that would have made me shut my eyes only a few days ago didn’t bother me so much now, and I think it was because I was studying the movie.

  Here’s what I noticed: this movie had a lot more close-ups than the last one. In the other movie, the shots were so wide that you saw a lot of the house—the furniture and wallpaper and stuff—and the character would be a small, helpless thing at the center of the screen. That made sense to me, because in that movie the house was the bad guy, and the characters were in its clutches. In this movie, a character’s face would fill the entire screen. It was almost claustrophobic, and I was proud of myself for thinking of that word when I explained my thoughts to Julian.

  “That’s a good way to describe it,” he said. “The shots are so tight it’s like there’s no room to breathe. But how does it fit the story? Is there anything about her that makes you feel kind of, um…”

  “Kind of what?” I asked.

  “Smothered?”

  His face was a little strange when he asked that—almost like he was trying not to flinch or something. I got the sense that he’d clam right up if I asked him about it, so I took a moment to ponder the question.

  “I think the close-ups are important because…well, we see everything from her point of view. She’s the first one who decides there are ghosts. She’s the one who decides the little boy is bad. By the end, it’s almost like she made the whole thing up.”

  Julian smiled. “Good work, Avery. You’ve picked up film analysis quicker than I thought you might.” He turned to pull something out of a box on his desk. “I’m loaning you my tablet. I added the last ghost film for you to watch tonight—that way we can get to the filming faster.”

  I took the tablet and tried to imagine watching a spooky movie in the attic with the air conditioner wheezing and the shadows reaching for me.

  “And, Avery?” Julian said. “Try to get that key soon. Tomorrow we’ll find some cool stuff at the cemetery, and then it’s on to Hilliard House.”

  —

  Later that evening, after I’d said good night to Grandma, I set up Julian’s tablet at the end of my bed. He’d showed me where to find the ghost movie and how to play it, but first I wanted to see what else he had. It was pretty nosy of me, but I figured he wouldn’t give me the tablet if there was something super private on it.

  He had the usual Internet and social networking apps, but since it was a Wi-Fi tablet, there was no point in opening those. His photos and videos were recent ones of the farm and Hilliard House. Nothing from before I met him except for a five-second clip filmed in a noisy school lunchroom titled “Bullied3.” It was just a shaky view of kids sitting at a table, so I figured it was something old he’d forgotten to delete.

  The only other thing that caught my eye was an app called “Media Vault,” which I recognized because Blake had installed it on his phone once. That had only lasted a day, though. The instant Mom saw it she forced him to take it off, because it was for hiding photos and videos you didn’t want anyone else to see. Knowing Blake, he’d probably put his own selfies in there or something sad like that. What would Julian hide? When I clicked the app, it prompted me for a password, just as I’d expected. I didn’t bother to type anything—I was already yawning my head off, so there was no way I’d crack Julian’s code tonight.

  Since there was nothing else to snoop through, I turned the air conditioner down and opened the movie Julian had told me to watch. The opening credits dragged on for about a hundred years, and I had to turn the volume down because the music was loud and dramatic in that “HARK, A SCARY MOVIE!” way.

  Finally the story started with a man and a woman finding a beautiful old house on a cliff that faced the sea. They talked really fast in that old-fashioned, prissy style that annoyed me about black-and-white movies. I’d been worried this one would be too creepy for me to watch alone in the attic, but it was so old-timey that it didn’t get under my skin at all. When the man and woman turned out to be brother and sister—and bought the house so they could live there together—I gave up and crawled under the covers.

  My second-to-last thought before I fell asleep was that Blake would have found the whole brother-and-sister thing hilarious. My last thought was that he would never know because there was no way I was going to tell him about it.

  The next day Julian and I took the gravel road down to the blacktopped highway that led to Clearview Cemetery. The sky was bright blue and a light breeze carried the scent of freshly mown grass. I waited quietly as Julian took in the flowers on the headstones and the tall trees that leaned forward to make a curtain around the graves.

  “Huh,” he said. “It’s like a park. Only with dead people.” He turned to me. “Is your dad’s grave here?”

  My stomach convulsed. He’d caught me off guard again. “Um, no.”

  “Why not?”

  Why, why, why? The answers came so easy to me back home, but here…somehow it was harder to lie. “Because he wasn’t from around here.”

  That much was true.

  Julian nodded. “I know you don’t like talking about him. I just wanted to p
ay my respects if his grave was here.”

  The tightness in my shoulders eased up. Sometimes he talked like he was a lot older—maybe it was all those old movies he watched—but that was the most gentlemanly thing I’d heard him say. Heck, it was the most gentlemanly thing I’d heard anyone say.

  I grinned. “Are you hungry? Because I worked all morning in the garden and now I’m starving. Plus, I want to show you something.”

  A wooden fence lay on the eastern edge of the cemetery, and on the other side was a wooded area. Within those woods was a grove of dwarf blue spruce trees. When we were younger, Blake and I decided the grove was a magical place. A forest within a forest, blue within green. It was quiet and cool there, the perfect spot for spinning tales about Kingdom during the hottest part of the day.

  I climbed over the fence and looked back at Julian. “Coming?”

  “Will I be trespassing again?”

  “The land across the fence belongs to Mr. Shepherd, but he’s never shot at us or anything.”

  Julian froze and looked around, as if expecting a crazy rifleman to appear from the tree line.

  “It’s safe, I promise.” As soon as he was on my side of the fence, I led him to the circle of plump spruce trees. Then I handed him a sandwich and water bottle from my knapsack. “This is the secret grove. Cool, huh?”

  “Do you and your brother come here a lot?”

  “We used to.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Not anymore?”

  “He’s changed,” I said flatly. “Actually, more like mutated.”

  “Into…?”

  “A jerk.”

  Julian twisted the cap off his water and took a swig. “I was an only child for a long time. I always wanted a brother. Then Lily came along.”

  I couldn’t read his face. “Did you love her or hate her?”

  “I didn’t feel anything at first. All babies do is cry and drool and stink. One time Dad made me change her dirty diaper, and I threw up.”

  “Gross!”

  “When she finally started using the potty, and when we could actually talk to each other, I liked her better.” He took the sandwich out of the baggie and sniffed it. “Is this ham and Swiss?”