Life in a Haunted House

by Norman Prentiss

  “Nothing good ever comes from lies,” she says, but she stops there instead of pulling out the full lecture / training module.

  I get a bit of leeway, now that they realize I’m not crazy.

  “You should have seen the wild chase he led me on—to that girl’s house, then to an old folk’s home the next town over.” Dad grabs my shirt then does a wicked impersonation of the wheelchair guy: “What have you taken from my room?”

  He says “I’ll explain later” to Mom, but I’m guessing this will be a long-running joke, just for me and Dad.

  “I felt like such a sucker for letting Brendan sneak me into Evergreen,” Dad continues. “I’m planning to drag us out as soon as possible, but the kid’s been so…agitated…and I’m kind of stuck playing along. Then we go into that room, and man, it’s him. It’s the Twisted Face.”

  Now I understand that frozen expression my dad had in Hendricks’ room. I thought it was skepticism about me, unease about the whole barge-into-a-nursing-home scenario. I see it on his face now: at least initially, he’d been as starstruck as I’d been. My dad definitely had not forgotten his affection for those old Budget Studios movies.

  “There couldn’t be two people in the world who look like that. He’s an older guy, but the shape of his head—that hadn’t changed at all. It’s unforgettable.” Dad worked up a bit of excitement now, waving his hands as if sculpting Hendricks’ head in the air above the kitchen table. “I’d never had to read that kind of face before. You have to look closely to figure out if someone’s being honest, and probably not a lot of people have the nerve to stare down the Twisted Face. I did, though, and I knew he was lying to Brendan.”

  Dad presses his hands to his own face to shift his eyes out of alignment, to mash his lips to one side. “Not sure what the giveaway was—a rapid blink or a twitch of the jaw, or a tremor in his voice. He tried to make himself cry, too. An actor’s cry, since he could barely manage a single tear.”

  I’m so grateful Dad’s story vindicates me, but ask why he didn’t stick up for me at the time.

  “We had to race out of there,” Dad explains to me and Mom. “The guy went all out, slapping the bed and ready to scream for a nurse. We weren’t supposed to be in his room to begin with, so could have really gotten into trouble. And in the car on the way home, the whole time, I kept remembering how wrong I’d been to doubt our son. I was totally speechless.”

  “That part’s hard to believe,” Mom says.

  For a moment, I feel like she’s connecting with Dad, too. She was attentive and smiling as he spoke, and managed a good-natured joke at the end. I entertain the notion that my parents actually could reunite. We could go back to the old days, be a family again.

  Just as quickly, I dismiss the thought. Dad’s leaving in an hour. We should enjoy this moment while it lasts.

  “I wish…”

  “What is it, honey?” Mom says to me.

  “I wish I could smooth things out with Melissa.”

  Maybe that’s also too much to ask for.

  “Give her some time,” Mom says. “Now that you’re being honest with me—”

  —and I sense this will be another long-standing family joke: I failed at telling Dad the truth, yet succeeded so well with lying to Mom—

  “—you could invite Melissa here for dinner. Things will be different if your friendship is out in the open, once the pressure of secrecy is gone.”

  “You might be right, Mom. I don’t know why I didn’t confide in you sooner.”

  #

  The Director

  Tonight I am a director. At my command the monsters take over Graysonville.

  The door bursts open, interrupting the tedium of Camen’s English class. The Lake Monster stands in the doorframe, brackish water dripping off its scale-covered body and onto the floor. All the students scream.

  This Lake Monster is especially terrifying. Instead of a simple mask and hands, with the rest of the actor covered by everyday clothes, the makeup department has spared no expense. Thick tentacles undulate in place of arms, with lamprey mouths hungry at the center of each awful suction pad. The Monster’s eyes blink realistically at the ends of animated stalks as they search the room for potential food.

  The mouth on the Monster’s face opens like the jaws of a shark, revealing several rows of large teeth. Mr. Camen tries unsuccessfully to push first-row Denny toward the creature, but it rejects the offer in favor of a larger meal. Tentacles python-wrap around the teacher’s waist, jaws widen, and a dreadful amber ichor drips over Camen’s head, paralyzing him. And with a loud crunch of bones, the Lake Monster begins to feed.

  Panicked students race outside the classroom, pushing into each other, nearly slipping on a wet trail of slime in the doorway.

  The closest exit leads to the playground, and the perimeter Melissa and I used to walk at lunch. As students rush outdoors, their screams rise in the open air.

  A strange hum drowns them out. The sound is like a tremendous airplane engine, mixed with the hint of wailing, torturous music. Almost as one, the students glance upward.

  A shadow arcs over the sun, and the schoolyard drops into darkness. Above them hovers, not a tin-foil flying saucer, but an uprooted alien city—buildings of impossible geometric shapes, connected with long transparent tubes.

  As the city-ship moves closer, figures become visible within the transparent tubes. These living beings are not friendly humanoid visitors. Their thorn-covered bodies undulate in a sickening ambulation. Above the engine’s thrum, the voice of an alien crowd transmits through a monstrous amplifier. Nothing could translate the clicks from these creatures’ sharp mouths, but the general sense conveys a universally recognizable emotion: cruelty.

  The city-ship descends, and the schoolyard is not large enough to contain it. Groups of students flee in different directions. Many of them are crushed, but the school building itself slows the craft’s descent along one edge, allowing a select few to escape harm. For the moment.

  Red-hot blasts of rocket exhaust shoot from the craft’s underside, baking the school building’s brick and glass and cinderblock, cooking crushed mounds of flesh and bone and clothing.

  We follow the dozen students who escaped the alien attack, as they emerge at the front of the crumbling, burning school. A lone orange bus awaits, and they pile inside and beg the driver to transport them to safety.

  - Where’s that?

  - Anywhere but here. Please hurry!

  The bus speeds away. In the retreating horizon, several more city-ships appear in the sky.

  One student wonders aloud if her family is safe. A senior boy suggests that the driver take them to the city square.

  - It’s where everyone will meet. We can figure out how to fight back against this deadly alien threat.

  As the bus heads down a flat stretch of road with guard rails on either side, a heavy dead tree suddenly falls across the path and blocks their passage forward. The driver shifts into reverse, and the wheels grind loudly, but the bus stays still.

  - Why aren’t we moving?

  - We’re caught on something. Branches tangled in the front axle, maybe?

  A thick dead limb flails across the front windows, animated by the fruitless spinning of the vehicle’s tires. The branches wriggle like grasping fingers.

  - Oh God, look! Look! There’s a face in the tree!

  - I don’t see it…

  - Right there, halfway up the trunk. See the nose and mouth? The closed eyes? Like a sleeping giant.

  The eyes open.

  Branches scratch at windows all around the bus…

  #

  Meanwhile, in the next town over, the Twisted Face strains against the straps of a custom-designed straightjacket. Local officials have charged him with multiple homicides, and they’ve placed him in a mental institution. His unconventional body is more flexible than his captors realize. The fabric of his restraints begin to loosen, just enough.

  He plans revenge against the nu
rse, first, then the supervising doctor. Into town, he will find the arresting officer, the incompetent public defender, then the corrupt judge. They have called him a monster, and he will live up to their label.

  The straps strain and release, strain and release, and with a pop, a misshapen shoulder dislocates from its socket. The straightjacket falls to the padded floor, and the Twisted Face smiles a grim smile.

  #

  This first exhilarating dream was not, as I think on it now, an example of vengeful wish fulfillment. Certainly my schoolmates were almost all killed, but there was nothing malicious in each imagined act. In monster movies, the mayhem is part of the fun. The traffic cop who gets chomped between the jaws of a rampaging Rhedosaurus is far more memorable in 20 seconds of screen time than the bland scientist heroes in every scene who eventually save humanity.

  The threat makes life interesting. Monster movies exist to allow teenagers to surrender to the cathartic glee of campground dismemberments, alien invasions, or demonic transformations.

  I wrote, produced, and directed the best film my subconscious mind could conjure. The entire town became my movie studio, with each location hosting a spectacular, full-color scene—backed by an orchestral music score, with complex makeup for the various monsters, intricate model work for the spacecraft, amazing pyrotechnic effects as the school exploded and burned.

  It is the kind of movie I wish Melissa and I could have made together: a big-budget tribute to her father.

  Due to its horror and science fiction elements, this film would easily attract a cult following. But it would also achieve the elusive popular and critical success Bud Preston was never able to accomplish.

  Because the monsters would seem so real.

  #

  The Warlock

  Later that night, I become a warlock.

  Sleep studies reveal that we experience an average of three to five dreams each night, as we slip into different phases of REM sleep. Dreams can vary in duration, from the span of a movie trailer to that of a full-length feature. The dreamer’s perception of time might be so distorted that one of those 2-minute dreams can seem endless, covering a wide range of locations and time frames.

  We dream many dreams, but only recall a select few upon waking.

  It’s especially rare that our waking selves recall two distinct dreams from the same night.

  That night my mind is incredibly active, agitated by my visit with my dad to Budget House, the property’s key features buried beneath paint or mutilated; anxious throughout a risky and apparently fruitless encounter with a duplicitous Thomas Hendricks; later surprised and overwhelmed with relief at my dad’s restored faith in me; followed by a bittersweet ending to our too-brief family reunion.

  The flurry of mixed emotions heighten my subconscious imagination to a fever pitch. Add to this concoction all the excitement over several weeks of discoveries at Budget House; and my sometimes happy, but often tense relationship with Melissa—who I’d grown to resent as a miserly gatekeeper, allowing only limited, monitored access to the memorabilia of her father’s films. Evidence suggests she helped her mother to vandalize those treasures; now she planned to keep the doors of Budget House closed to me forever.

  These intense emotions swirl through my dreams, first like a mind-enhancing drug that inspired a good-natured Technicolor violence. Later the emotions become the ingredients of a magical poison, dragging my subconscious down into a malicious phase.

  Although I’m able to convince myself the Technicolor dream wasn’t wish-fulfillment, I don’t have the same certainty about the second one:

  #

  It’s dark. I wake in a room with no windows.

  My delicate fingers touch the wall beside my bed. I feel for a curled corner of paper, affixed there with Scotch tape.

  Although I cannot see the poster, I know it depicts a field of flowers.

  A cone of jelly wafts a sickly artificial fragrance from the end table. Instead of freshening the room, it stifles me. I taste its chemicals at the back of my throat; it feels like the cone has been jammed there while I slept. The jelly slithers, resisting my attempts to swallow it.

  I’m suffocating. I need fresh air.

  I sit up in bed and tear at the poster, ripping it from the bottom as if lifting a sash. There’s got to be a window behind it.

  Nothing. I scratch at the wall with my fingernails, beat it with the heels of my palms, with no success.

  I gag and cough, and feel a ripple at the back of my throat. A thick phlegm lurches up then sits heavy atop my tongue, and a sour chemical ichor wriggles centipede legs over my taste buds. I spit it out, and it lands somewhere on the bed. Although I can’t bear the thought of my fingers pressing into that vile jelly, I brush blindly at the bedspread hoping to knock the substance onto the floor.

  My airway’s clear, but I still feel sick in this dark, stale room.

  The other poster depicts a mountain. As my eyes adjust, I can almost make out a familiar snow-capped peak, white wisps of clouds above.

  Like a child tearing into a Christmas present, I grab the edge of the poster and rip straight across.

  Again, nothing but bare wall beneath. Then a gust of mountain air blasts through, refreshingly cool. I breathe deep, grateful for the reprieve, until the air continues cold. My teeth chatter, and I hug my exposed arms close to my chest as I shiver uncontrollably.

  I’m near the top of the mountain, exhausted from my climb and numb from the cold, and the air at this altitude becomes thinner and thinner. My head grows light, and I feel ready to pass out.

  My fists bash out again, hitting a snow-covered rock face, pounding against painted drywall, creating a bigger opening for the swirl of arctic-temperature air, flecks of paint and snow and plaster falling, a cold burn stinging my face, and I’ve swallowed a handful of needles.

  And it opens. The wall finally opens like a window.

  I climb through it.

  #

  I am thinking of a boy from my school named Brendan. I thought we were friends, but he wanted the wrong things from me. He was interested only in a father I never knew, and in digging through souvenirs of movies better left forgotten.

  I know everyone thinks of me as “the weird girl.” I never expected a romantic relationship with him.

  But I shared some of my family’s secrets, brought him closer to those movies that he, for some inexplicable reason, seemed to value so much. I simply wanted him to see me as a friend.

  I don’t think he saw me at all.

  Now that I’ve rejected him, his anger and disappointment—all his unrealistic, dashed hopes—grow so strong that they exert a supernatural influence.

  Brendan tried to suffocate me in my own bed, then turned my room into an icy wasteland.

  He dreams, and he sees through my eyes.

  He enjoys my suffering.

  And now, as I fall through the wall of my bedroom, keep falling until I land smack against hard concrete, he does something even worse.

  #

  I’m curled in the fetal position on a landing near the top of the Stone Stairway. Pain radiates from my left leg. When I reach to touch it, I feel a jagged piece of exposed bone, ripped through the blood-soaked fabric of my pajamas.

  I’m certain that I broke even more bones in the fall, and that some of them have pierced internal organs.

  That is not the most awful thing.

  The awful thing is that…

  #

  …Brendan is making me see the world as he does.

  The Stone Stairway is beautiful. It shimmers with the magical chiaroscuro of classic black-and-white films. Velvet shadows are both ominous and inviting. Gray tones pulse with an inner light, suggesting a wide spectrum of elusive fogged-over colors.

  Here, a spiderweb in the corner is beautiful. The texture of a concrete rock flickers in torchlight like a living thing. And the shadow-dark shine of my own blood pools away from my leg and stomach then drips down a cement stair in lovely languid m
otion.

  Beside me and below stretches the vast expanse of my father’s movie studio—like him, unjustly neglected. I feel, now, the importance of those artificial, partitioned rooms, each containing a wealth of treasured artifacts from his brief, glorious days as a writer and director. I long to see these wondrous sets and props again, to offer the appreciation that’s due to them. But the studio is dark and distant, and my leg is broken.

  The real pain comes not from my shattered leg, a punctured lung or kidney. It comes from the realization that I’ve dishonored my father’s legacy for so long.

  My God, this is what Brendan tried to show me.

  And I drove him away.

  #

  The fallen girl tugs at her wounded leg, then gives up. It is too painful for her to move.

  A low moan echoes in the cavernous stairway. We might think it is the girl, bewailing her plight.

  No. She turns her head and looks to the top of the staircase, indicating the source of that anguished cry.

  A dozen steps above her, a white translucent figure holds a flickering kerosene lantern. The spirit has the shape of a beautiful woman, but a gust of wind ripples through her thin flowing robe. Her facial features ripple, too, as if her skin is made of cobwebs.

  Another low moan, then a question. “Where,” the spirit asks. “Where is the one I love the most?”

  The prostrate girl waves an arm at the airy spirit. “I’m here, Mother. Save me!”

  In response, the spirit descends the staircase. Her gossamer feet barely disturb the ground with each step. Closer to the girl. Closer.

  “Help me up.” The girl is still unable to stand, but she stretches both arms toward her mother’s ghostly shape. The spirit’s shining form steps onto the landing and glides toward her.

  As she hugs the spirit’s legs, her arms pass through. A sticky coating covers her arms, and soft cobwebs transform into long strands of thick gray hair, oily and unwashed.