“Should we call the police?”
Mom shakes her head. “I imagine they’re pretty busy.”
“Probably for the best,” Dad agrees.
Mom wrings some water out of the ruined sheets, and absently begins untying the knots. “It’s a kindness, really. Our lives will be easier without him.”
And maybe I didn’t make it to Budget House. Maybe storm winds blew stronger than I expected, and the wet rope was too slippery. I fell, and cracked my head on the sidewalk.
Upstairs, my parents laugh as they get reacquainted.
#
“Quite an imagination,” my mom says. She laughs, but it’s the kind of laugh she might make in the principal’s office—when she’s cornered, making excuses for me.
A pause. I’m halfway down the hallway from my room, and strain to listen. My dad doesn’t say anything, and I’m worried he’s left already. Gone to stay in a hotel, or even hopped the next flight to Cleveland.
“I understand,” Mom says, in response to nothing.
As I turn from the hallway to enter the kitchen, I nearly slip on the rainwater that dripped off me earlier. I catch myself by grabbing the door frame.
“Oh, here he is now.” Mom offers me the receiver to our wall-mounted telephone. Dad’s back in his lean-spot against the counter. “Someone wants to speak with you, Brendan.”
I cross the room and take the receiver. Mom has a know-it-all expression, and Dad looks a little confused. They don’t grant me any privacy by leaving the room.
I offer a tentative greeting, then pull the cord as far as it will reach, standing near the door frame with my back to my parents.
“Is this Brendan?”
The voice sounds like the spirit in my dreams, a raspy whisper from a pile of bones.
“I almost ran you off the road the other day. My daughter told me about you.”
“She did?” I notice an open phone directory on the kitchen table, next to Mom’s legal pad.
“Not as much as I’ve heard just now from your mother, but yes.”
I wonder how long they’ve been talking. While Dad was with me, Mom must have dialed every Preston in the small-town phone book. Hello. Do you have a daughter named Melissa? There’s something I need you to know.
“I’m not the person you think I am,” Mrs. Preston says. “My daughter either, for that matter.” Not a spirit. It is more like the voice of a witch. With a matter-of-fact statement, she hopes to dispel every significant memory from my recent life.
Then I hear a hand muffle over the connected receiver, and she shouts an abbreviated version of her daughter’s name. “Mel! Mel! Phone!”
My parents watch as I wait for Melissa to pick up on her end. Mom, at least, does me the courtesy of not taking notes—but I know she’s considering how she might present my issues to the school psychiatrist.
In Melissa’s home, I expect she’s similarly under a parent’s watchful eye. Either that, or her mother stays on the extension in a different room. Neither of us can speak freely.
“I didn’t know my mom would call your house,” I say.
“A surprise to me, too.” Perhaps “surprise” is a code word. It stands for We’re busted, or I warned you this would happen.
“Is there something I’m supposed to do? I’ll apologize to your mother, if that will help.”
“Too late for that.”
Silence. I feel my parents’ gaze on my back, and I want to slink out of the kitchen where they can’t hear me.
“I’m not sure what my mom thinks,” I tell her. “But my dad…” I slip to a paranoid’s whisper, certain I’m overheard. “My dad thinks I’m crazy. He thinks I invented you, and the house you live in.”
“Didn’t you?”
My mom and dad are finally in the same room again and they have no thoughts for each other. They’re too busy watching for any sign that my mind is breaking down. I wish I really had climbed out my window when I had the chance. I wish they’d been relieved that I was gone.
I think of them laughing, of Melissa laughing now and her mother also, and I can’t help but join them.
“What’s so funny, Brendan?”
“You,” I say, then adopt a more serious tone. “The whole situation. It’s unbelievable. I can see that now.”
I sense a collective sigh of relief from my parents. He’s coming back to his senses, they are thinking. Dad is proud that he’s here: his visit cured me of my delusions.
Melissa doesn’t respond. I hear a crackle on the line, which is perhaps her witch-mother on the other extension, exhaling the final breath of her world-altering incantation.
#
If I sleep at all that night, I won’t dream.
The dreams are over. I’m the victim of a Twilight Zone ending—the character who realizes he’s been trapped in his own imagination, and he’s not happy to have the veil lifted from his eyes.
In this ending, I’ve never actually visited Melissa’s perfectly ordinary house. I took some blurry photographs of nothing, convinced myself they framed elements from a long-ago movie. I made my own crude storybook page, stained it and burned the edges to make it look old. Oddly, this is the ending my parents seem to prefer.
The artifacts, sent to my dad, are tucked in the back of my mom’s legal pad. For her, they’re evidence of my unstable mind. Temporary insanity, your honor—oh God, let’s hope it’s only temporary—brought on my separation from his father and, I’ll take some blame here, from the frequent moves from town to town brought on by changes in my job. We haven’t had a steady home. No anchor for my boy to grab onto, and he’s gone adrift.
Those items were my only physical proof. I’m afraid if I’m permitted to examine them again, I’ll notice flaws in my own handiwork.
My only other proof is in my experiences. But memories are meaningless, if I can be persuaded to doubt them.
Earlier, I’d felt guilty about stealing that single, incomplete storyboard page. Now, I wish I had stolen more souvenirs from Budget House. I want to rise from my bed and search my room, where I should have hidden a plastic heart in the back of a dresser drawer; a silver-painted translator gun behind my clothes hamper; the Lake Monster’s eye staring from the top shelf of my closet.
All smuggled from the movie studio on different days. Why not? My friendships never lasted very long, so I shouldn’t have expected things with Melissa to be any different. Besides that, she was a fickle gatekeeper to her father’s treasures.
If I’d stolen them, at least I’d now have proof I could put my hands on.
Instead I try to sleep, grasping at empty air.
#
The next day at school, Melissa does not walk at lunch, and I cannot find her.
In Art class, she ignores me, buried in a drawing exercise: mindless shading of cubes and cones and spheres. The abstract shapes add up to nothing.
“Trouble with the weird girl, huh?”
Geoff’s snide remark in English brings me back to reality. High school is not about movies and fantasy worlds. It’s about teenagers being cruel to each other.
I’ve participated in that cruelty. I’m as bad as the rest of them.
“None of your business.” I stare at my blank page of notes, and imagine a fresh infection eating away at his healthy eye. If people still remember what they wrote on his Get-Well cards a few years back, there’d be no need to put much effort into new ones. Just add a word: “Sorry about the loss of your ^other eye!”
After writing a particularly spiteful phrase, I cross it out. Then I write the titles of some of my favorite movies, and cross them out also.
In the seat beside me, Geoff probably imagines that I repeatedly write and deface Melissa Preston’s name.
#
“Wait!”
Melissa moves so quickly along the road to her house. I’ll never catch her if she doesn’t stop.
I’d hesitated after she left the bus, not quite sure I was going to follow. Geoff and his buddies watched, anx
ious to add a new chapter to the school’s gossip epic.
Finally, just before the bus pulled away, I had jumped from my seat and hustled to the front exit.
“Wait!”
I pause to catch my breath, leaning over with my hands resting on my knees. Far ahead, Melissa stops but does not turn around.
I straighten up, then jog to close the distance between us.
“You can’t come to my house.” She still doesn’t turn around, even though I’m right behind her.
“Fine,” I say. “But can we talk for a minute?”
“About what?”
We stand on this nearly deserted road. She looks like the vanishing hitchhiker of urban legend—the strange girl picked up by a good Samaritan, and delivered “home” to an address that turns out to be a cemetery. When Melissa turns around, her face will be a living skull.
“I’m really sorry.”
“About what?” she repeats.
Melissa turns. No skull, but no emotions either. She hasn’t been crying, doesn’t seem to be angry. I can’t read her.
Maybe I never could.
“I got yelled at last night,” she says. “It’s why I tried to warn you.”
“I never thought my mom would call like that.”
“Well, she did.”
“When I talked to your mom, she was nice to me.”
Silence.
I was hoping Melissa would say something about her father, about the movie studio behind her home. She needed to contradict my weird waking nightmare, where such wonders existed solely in my imagination.
“She told me she wasn’t the person I thought she was,” I say. “Do you know what your mother meant by that?”
“Think about it.”
Not really an answer. The only interpretation I can come up with is that she’s not really the widow of Bud Preston. My daughter’s not who you think she is, either. Meaning, Melissa’s not the director’s daughter? I try to recall the precise wordings of our conversations—had Melissa volunteered that she and Bud Preston were related, or was it something she let me assume as fact? Perhaps this was all an absurd case of wish fulfillment.
Except my memories were too real. I’d visited Budget House on multiple occasions, uncovering new areas of the studio wherever Melissa permitted me to explore. The sets matched the movies I could recite from memory; their appearance matched the rare behind-the-scenes pictures in my magazines. But my experiences with Budget House weren’t simply summoned by a desperate imagination. I’d lived there, for a time. I’d spent part of my life in a haunted house.
If Melissa lets me follow her down the road to the DEAD END sign then along the car-worn path leading off to the right, Budget House will not have disappeared in last evening’s fog. The studio will be attached behind, a strange warehouse of memorabilia with special significance to me.
To me.
Always such an absurd coincidence that the exact films I loved would somehow originate from a town I moved to. Since I wanted to believe in the idea so badly, I never questioned it.
My memories are real, but they might not be authentic. I imagine an even more elaborate hoax: A facsimile studio built onto the back of a house in an extended Candid Camera gimmick. They’ve been filming me all this time.
Melissa, who’s always been so hard to read—she’s been in on the joke, always on the verge of busting out with laughter.
The well-groomed host can come out from between two trees where he’s been hiding. His camera crew will follow. We gave you your wish, for a little while. As payment, sign this release form and we’ll feature you in the next episode. Look this way and smile. Show everyone what an idiot you are!
It’s The Ambush of Humiliation I always feared from my peers—writ large, broadcast to the nation.
“None of it was real.” I intend my words to sound like an accusation, but they fall flat.
“Sure it’s real,” Melissa says, “but not as simple as you think. There are a lot of feelings you haven’t considered.”
She still avoids Bud Preston’s name, and any mention of the studio behind her house. I can’t tolerate the ambiguity any longer. “Your father…”
“I’m glad you like my father’s movies, Brendan. It’s sweet how you’ve brought me closer to him. But for my mother, those films bring back a lot of memories. We had fun digging around in the studio—but we were also digging through my mother’s past. She said we invaded her privacy.”
Her mention of the studio puts me back on solid ground, which is a huge relief. But she’s right that I hadn’t considered her mother’s feelings. The movies brought me such joy: I couldn’t imagine any negative associations they might have for someone (as I saw it) lucky enough to be married to my favorite director.
“He wasn’t a nice person,” Melissa says. “You can enjoy his movies as much as you want, but that’s the truth.”
I don’t understand. Melissa had talked about these movies with me, let me go on and on about how wonderful they are, never contradicting me. Sure, she’d previously hinted at some conflicts between her parents, but she’d been too young when her father passed away. All she knew about him had been filtered through her mother, who would be telling a biased version of events. “How can you be so sure?”
“You idolize him. Maybe I can explain it best with reference to his movies. The script you saw in his office, for The Withered Hag? Well, my mother starred in school plays, and she was really beautiful when they got married. She always had dreams of becoming an actress, and never understood why my father never cast her in one of his films.
“This script, he said he had a part for her, a starring role. My mother’s beauty had apparently faded too quickly over the years, and the script was my father’s mean-spirited way of pointing it out. The title says it all. The witch in the script has my mother’s name. The male lead keeps seeing a hideous withered hag on their property; in the end, he realizes it’s his wife’s true form. ‘Your beauty,’ he says to her as she withers into old age before his eyes. ‘Bring it back. Oh God, bring it back!’”
Melissa waits for the significance to sink in. “Can you imagine what my mother thought when she read that script? And there’s another unfilmed script, too, called The Wailing Infant. It’s about a disappointing child that ruins the lives of her parents, and becomes a horrible crawling monster. Obviously, that’s me. He wrote a spiteful movie about me, when I was just a baby.”
The usual arguments come to mind. They’re scripts. They’re fiction. Writers often base characters and events on real life, changing them to suit the type of story. In horror fiction, that means making everything unpleasant. “That’s not how he thought of you,” I say. “Not really.”
“Maybe not. But that script is all I have. My feelings about him aren’t the same as yours.”
If she’d loan me the two scripts, I could help her locate a more charitable interpretation of the wife and infant characters. But I don’t dare ask: she’d think I was only interested in reading the rare scripts, rather than trying to help a friend.
I couldn’t blame her if that’s what she thought.
“Brendan, what happened to those pictures you took of me?”
“Oh, they’re at my apartment.” Partly true, since I thought I’d seen their corners sticking out of my mom’s legal pad.
“I’d like them back,” she says. “Along with that paper you took from my father’s office. That’s all you took, isn’t it?”
“One page, and I only borrowed it.” Even to my ears, the excuse sounds weak. I figure my mom’s not the only one who can decode the word borrowed.
“If you’d asked, I’d have given it to you.” She corrects herself: “If you’d asked then, I would have.”
Another apology would be meaningless. I try to convince her I had a good reason, at least: “I wanted something to send to my dad, to show him I was telling the truth about Budget House. He still doesn’t believe me.”
“Why does that matter? I shared
these things with you. It was our connection.”
She speaks in the past tense. We are in the last reel. The final parting.
“I don’t know,” I say. “He’s my dad. He’s been so far away. I wanted to bring him closer.”
“Yes, bring him closer.”
As Melissa said earlier, there were a lot of feelings I hadn’t considered.
#
The Return to Budget House
This weekend, I’m compelled to star in a sequel: The Return to Budget House. It won’t be like the sequels that movies offer, but more like the ones we get in life—instead of a bigger budget, more action and special effects, we get illness, decay, and disappointment.
#
My dad is still in town. While I’m at school during the day, he works from his hotel room. He uses the hotel phone to consult about his latest marketing project for dishwasher soap or sugar cereal or some useless kitchen gadget.
Evenings are reserved for me.
It seemed important to spend time with my son, is his euphemistic way of putting it.
He’s been watching me. Hoping for signs of typical teenage angst, rather than drug use, severe depression or other mental illness.
It’s horrible to have him and Mom “worried about me” again.
Still, I can’t summon the cheerfulness his visit should have inspired.
“How about a movie?” Dad suggests. “I can drive us to the Anniston 6. Or we can watch one of those old tapes on the VCR. The low budget ones you like.”
We like, he used to say. “They’re the wrong format,” I tell him. “They don’t play in our machine.”
“Oh.”
“Besides, they remind me too much of my friend Melissa.”
“You broke up with your girlfriend.”
“She was never my girlfriend,” I say, and the corrective is so loud I’ve probably convinced him she was.
It’s a catch-all explanation for why I’d be so moody, I guess. Since he won’t believe anything else.
Life in a Haunted House Page 14
