We pause for privacy at the rusted fence at the far end of the school property. The other students don’t play near here, since if a ball goes astray over the fence, it’s lost for good. Melissa’s silent for a moment, and I know she wonders why I mentioned her to my dad. I remind her that Dad and I watched movies together growing up. “I thought he’d be excited that I knew Bud Preston’s daughter.”
“Was he?”
“He seemed more excited by the prospect that I’d have a girlfriend.” It feels weird to say this out loud. We are friends. She is a girl. It ends there. “Actually, he thinks I’m making the whole thing up.”
“I’m a figment of your imagination.” She seems amused at this idea, but also annoyed.
“Parents get things wrong,” I say. “They make assumptions. They want to shape our lives into predictable patterns.”
She looks at the ground and rubs the back of her ear as she considers what to say next. It’s a shy gesture I haven’t seen her make before.
“My mother got a good look at you,” Melissa says. “She described you perfectly. I lied and told her we’ve never met.”
This initially doesn’t seem too much of an obstacle. We can still meet after school, like we’ve been doing. I’ll be more careful to leave early, so I won’t run into her mom’s car again.
Melissa won’t hear of it. “If she finds out now, Brendan, it’ll confirm the worst of what she’s already thinking. When my mother gets suspicious, she notices things.”
I think about the spotless kitchen and living room of her house. Maybe her mother counts the cans of soda in the refrigerator, sees the inventory dwindle faster than it should. She finds a strange shoeprint in the front drive, dusts for fingerprints along the banister.
Perhaps Mrs. Preston placed a lock of her hair in the frame of the upstairs door leading to the movie studio. She checks, and the hair has fallen to the floor.
“We could meet at your house,” Melissa suggests. “Or at the mall or something.”
My expression drops before I can compose myself. I should say, You’re right. Your friendship is all that matters. I’ll do whatever’s necessary so I can spend more time with you. But my obsession with Budget House takes over, my fear of losing the Studio behind it, and I know Melissa can read the disappointment in my face.
Terrible arguments run through my mind. Arguments that downplay our friendship, and concentrate on my own hardships—moving from town-to-town, uprooted from schools, my dad moving away—rescued by those films, those strange wonderful film memorialized in her family home. She knows how important that place is to me. How could she even consider taking it away?
And I admit to myself that I’m jealous. She’s the one who got to grow up in a haunted house, instead of me. I want to yell at her, say she doesn’t fully realize how lucky she is, say how angry I am about the way she strings me along, never giving me enough time among the sets and props and archives. The studio is a museum, a precious museum, and she needs me to tell her what everything’s worth.
I want to spare her feelings, and I don’t want to come across as an opportunistic jerk. No matter what I say, though, I can’t hold back the resentment in my voice. She’s angry, too, and we’re both waving our arms excitedly as we talk.
From a distance, I’m sure it looks like we’re having a lovers’ quarrel.
#
“You’re spending a lot of time with the weird girl.”
Geoff may have called her “weird girl,” but I know he thinks of me as equally strange—the nerdy new kid with no real friends. He’s cornered me in the hall. I’m holding a red bathroom pass from English, but he’s left the class without one. Geoff blinks at me. Perhaps it’s my imagination, but I hear a faint scrape as his lid drags over the false eye, which lacks lubricating tears. The lid gets caught on the glass and it slows the lift, throwing it out of sync with the intact eye.
“New Guy has a girlfriend.”
“She’s not.”
“Whatever,” Geoff says. “Been a while since she’s had regular company.”
Behind his words I envision a trail of past friends, latched onto and then discarded. They’re still here at school, watching the two of us bitterly as we walk the perimeter of the school yard during lunch. They wonder how our relationship might develop.
“I don’t think of her that way.”
“What, as pretty?”
“No,” I respond without thinking, “I don’t.”
“Then why do you want to—”
He says something crude. A guy comment I shouldn’t dignify with a response. I hadn’t expected to run into him, and I should brush past and head back to class. As much as I don’t like Geoff, I don’t like my English teacher either, so I guess that’s why I lingered and let him draw me in. “No I don’t,” I say. “Don’t want to do that to anyone right now.”
“There’s no other reason you’d spend time with her.”
He’s worse than I’d been that first week on the bus. I hadn’t meant anything—just a careless observation about the strangeness of his eye. Now, Geoff is being cruel on purpose.
The best way to defend Melissa might be to reveal the secrets of Budget House, but they aren’t my secrets to share. Certainly not with Geoff. He’s a painfully average kid—lanky build, with wavy hair that never quite looks clean. His class comments are often clueless, but he has a reputation for being good-natured. Melissa and I decided that he gets away with things because of his eye. It reminds everyone in the school of his brief, sickly past—a time when they all rooted for him to get better. They’re still in the habit of rooting for him, even when he doesn’t deserve it.
“We see you get off at her bus stop sometimes.”
The “We” bothers me. It indicates that Geoff and his buddies talk about me and Melissa. The two of us are the subject of rumor—and in high school, rumors are never kind. The more cruel and crude they are, the better.
“I’m not her boyfriend.” It’s the same phrase I used with my dad on the phone. Geoff turns his good eye toward me, a smirk of disbelief on his face, and I almost want to punch him. Instead, I try to stoop to his crude level. It won’t matter what I say, as long as it stops the rumor. “If I were looking for a girlfriend, don’t you think I could do better?”
As soon as I say these words, I regret my awful betrayal. Melissa and I were fighting, but there’s no reason I should speak of her this way.
It’s just me and Geoff in the hallway, yet I feel like the whole school is watching. Teachers and students alike decide I’m the worst friend in the world.
Surprisingly, Geoff doesn’t react. He’s following his own thread, and doesn’t want to be distracted from his next pre-rehearsed cruelty.
“Yeah, you’re going to her house after school. Some quick action, right? Before her mom gets back from the loony bin.”
Now I definitely want to hit him. He’s only slightly taller, and my fist could easily reach his jaw. I would punch the smug grin off his face.
I should aim higher, at the false eye. If I punch hard enough, I wonder if the glass would shatter. I’d twist my fist on impact, grinding the shards into my knuckles and tearing new scars into Geoff’s scabbed-over eye socket.
“Stay away from me,” I say. I push past him and return to English class where, unfortunately, our assigned seats are directly across from each other.
#
That night, I dream of hiding in a haunted house.
I’m lying in the dark crawlspace behind the living room window. The curtains over the sofa are closed, so nobody can find me.
But I’ve grown unaccountably nervous. I’m certain I’m no longer alone.
The worst thing I can do is move. Even the slightest sound would reveal my location.
I shift to a standing position, having to twist my body awkwardly to fit in the tight space. My hands steady against the thin partition wall, and I feel it buckle slightly beneath my weight. My breaths come heavy from the exertion; each exhale seem
s as loud as a foghorn.
The breaths ripple the curtain fabric. I put my hand over my mouth.
A thin white speck glimmers where the curtains meet. The curtains aren’t precisely closed, so I press an eye to the small gap, peering into the room and beyond.
In the distance, a glowing shape descends the stone stairway. The outline appears human, but the feet make no perceptible sound.
How did I know? How did I know she was searching for me?
The spirit wears a starched white uniform. When she reaches the bottom of the staircase, she calls out.
“I know you’re here.”
By reflex, I step away from the curtain. The area is too confining: I immediately press against the back wall, nowhere else to go.
“I got a good look at you,” the spirit says. The voice is closer, but still I’ve heard no footsteps.
A sudden screech like the wail of a torture victim; the clank of chains tightened around wrists and ankles, pulling them apart.
“Got you!”
From the office far to the left, I hear a heavy desk dragged across the floor. A chair falls over.
The spirit moves closer, to a room of valuable antiques. A vase falls off a table and crashes to the floor. Books drop off shelves in a dusty heap.
Stop, I want to cry out. You don’t realize the value of what you’re destroying.
I consider surrendering. Anything to save the artifacts in the surrounding rooms.
More items fall to the ground. Glass and metal and stacks of paper.
Then silence.
“Ah ha!”
My lips tighten as I attempt to hold back a whimper. A white glow brightens and slowly begins to fill the gap between the curtains.
I hold my breath. Touching the back wall for support, I try to slide lower out of view. Four white-gloved fingers slip between the curtains. The fingers are so close that I could lean forward and bite them.
I want to sink out of view, into dark oblivion. My palms are flat against the back wall, and the partition feels flimsy, held together by a scratchy coat of peeling paint. The wall begins to buckle.
The fingers withdraw.
I watch the curtain, willing it not to open. I sense that the presence has departed.
A breath escapes my lips in an audible sigh of relief.
The wall behind me again buckles beneath my palms. The dry partition has a new texture, like starched fabric.
It breathes.
Finally the partition gives way and I fall back, landing on a pile of clothes and bones.
The bones whisper in my ear: “This house belongs to me. I’ll make you regret you ever came here.”
#
The Date
Tonight I am going on a date. Melissa has told me to bring popcorn.
Not a real date, of course, and not actually in the evening. I am meeting her at Budget House during our usual stolen time—that teenager’s twilight zone, the undefined 90 minutes between the end of school and our parents’ return from their jobs.
Melissa realizes, I guess, that she overreacted last week. There’s no reason she should be paranoid because her mother noticed me along the seldom-travelled road to their house. Teenagers are allowed to have friends—and they don’t need to gain a parent’s approval in advance.
For my part, I’m glad to have things back to normal. I’d felt strange ever since my hallway interaction with Geoff, when I’d spoken out of anger, said things I didn’t really mean.
On the school bus, Melissa stands up when we reach the intersection closest to her home. I wait a few beats, then gather my backpack.
A few seats behind me, Geoff snorts under his breath. I check the driver’s wide rearview mirror as I hustle out. Geoff is making a rude gesture with his hands, and several of his friends are laughing.
#
“We have to hurry.”
She rushes me to the house like we are late for an important meeting. The late-afternoon air is brisk, but I’m sweating beneath the layers of my sweater and jacket.
When we arrive at the porch, Melissa unlocks the front door. Without stopping at the kitchen for sodas, she takes me to the top floor, bypasses her room and heads immediately to the hook-latched door to the studio.
At the end of the entrance corridor, she picks up the battery-operated lantern from the ground where she’s purposefully left it.
Her pace barely slows on the stone stairway. She’s gotten used to these stairs, despite the lack of protective railing. I follow as quickly as I can, keeping close to the wall.
She gets about a dozen steps ahead of me, but I gain more ground as we near the bottom. I can move faster for the final stretch, since if I trip over the side I wouldn’t have as far to fall.
“The living room,” Melissa says.
Once on level ground, I can navigate easily, since the layout of the studio has become second nature to me. In my art sketchbook, I’ve drawn a floor plan of the studio, labeling each set and identifying which films were shot there. When I daydream, I think about the different locations: walking through them with Melissa in the haunted dark; sneaking there alone in my imagination, like a museum’s guard who ensures each item remains undisturbed; or like the time traveler of fantasy, visiting these same sets brightened by arc lights, freshly painted, crowded with costumed actors, cameras ready and rolling. In these latter daydreams, “Budget” Preston clarifies the mood of the scene, gives orders to the crew, and as his assistant, I help ensure these orders are followed. I’m an apprentice filmmaker, and plan to follow in his footsteps.
Melissa’s lantern is an easy beacon, and I soon meet her in the living room set.
She places the lantern on the coffee table, and there are two cans of soda marking our places.
A blanket covers the sofa, hiding the dusty, faded cushions.
To the side of the sofa, she’s positioned the wheeled cart that holds the 35mm projector. A reel of film is loaded onto the projector, which is aimed toward the facing underside of the stone stairway.
“My father never had a screening room,” she tells me. “He built this living room set in a strategic location, opposite the tallest section of the stairway.”
Melissa motions for me to sit on the sofa, and she turns a knob on the projector. It rattles to life, and a countdown of numbers appears on the opposite wall, accompanied by a series of beeps from the projector’s speaker grill.
Then the logo appears, larger than life and a bright sky blue: A Budget Studios Production.
The title comes next: The Haunted Oak.
Melissa joins me on the couch. “The tin say 73 minutes for this one. I figure we’ll have time to watch it all.”
Classical music plays behind the credits—public domain recordings, to avoid the expense of an original score and orchestra. The shadows of tree limbs darken random sections of each title card.
For the final card, the limbs form together in the silhouette of a crude face. The words read: Produced, Written and Directed by Bud “Budget” Preston.
I clap my hands, and Melissa joins me.
#
The experience is surreal. We sit on a couch in a false living room, with no ceiling or fourth wall. Instead of facing a television screen, we look across the studio floor at a giant projected image.
Although we started at 3:45 in the afternoon, the studio is as dark as a drive-in at night.
Pops or cracks occasionally obscure the dialogue from the projector speakers, but I clarify a few essential lines for Melissa. We drink our sodas, and I remember to pull the bag of store-brand popcorn from my backpack.
It really does feel like a date. It’s a full size sofa, with an empty cushion between us, but the room is private and dark. I’ve never felt closer to her.
We’re sitting in the actual location where many of the scenes were filmed. After the grandmother disappears, sinister music swells on the soundtrack. I look in her usual location: the rocking chair in the corner. Ours has a layer of dust on it; in the fi
lm, the same chair is covered with broken branches.
Melissa laughs out loud, undercutting the film’s tension.
“Their Mee-maw just died,” I say in mock outrage.
“I’m sorry.” She covers her mouth. “It’s just a bunch of twigs.”
The image cuts to bright white as the last stretch of the first reel threads through the projector. With the help of the electric lantern, Melissa sets up the next part of the movie. She moves the emptied reel onto the back arm of the projector, then attaches the second reel to the top arm and begins feeding the strip of film through the machine.
As she works, I decide I should redeem her father’s choice of subject matter. “The tree is a smart idea for a low-budget monster: no need to build a prop, since there’s a tree already in your side yard, and stray branches are easy to find. Only your dad could manage to twist an ordinary tree into something sinister.”
“If you say so.”
I gather this film isn’t one of her favorites. Understandable, since my magazines frequently cited The Haunted Oak as one of Bud Preston’s weakest efforts. Still, I wish she’d show more appreciation for the movie. At least respect what her father was able to accomplish within such a limited budget.
Melissa flips off the lantern as the film resumes. The teenage son argues with his mother, who begs him to stay home (We’re only safe if we stay together!) but he ignores her and takes the car keys (Just try to stop me!). He starts the car, and backs up without looking behind him. From inside the house, the mother hears a crash. She rushes outside, and the car trunk is dented as if it’s hit something—a telephone pole, or a tree—but there’s no such object in sight. The door is open, as if the driver fled the scene of the accident. The car seat is covered with limbs and leaves.
The next day, the entire family (what’s left of it) waits in the living room for news of the missing. A storm rages outside, with flashes of lightning visible behind the closed curtains. The mother stares at the telephone—
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