Run.
Run!
“So many people don’t know this movie exists,” he says. “The genre die-hards do, sure. But not the rest of the world…this story is dying to be retold. It’ll reach a wider audience now.”
“Why?” I ask—can’t help but ask. He’s still looking through the viewfinder so I’m not sure if I should speak to his forehead or look directly into the camera.
“Because I’m ready to tell it.”
I’m not sure how to respond to this, so I just let him fill the silence.
“Ever since I saw Jessica as a kid, I worshipped that shit. I can’t even tell you how many times I watched it. But I knew, I fucking knew everything Ketchum got wrong on that film. What he should’ve done. So I started hearing this little voice in my head say: You can do better than that. You can tell that story right. And so…you know. I’m going to. I fucking will.”
The confidence. Even without the lack of eloquence. The resolute, absolute certainty.
Like he was chosen. Like he was The One.
“Why am I here?” I say it straight into the lens, imploring with the camera, hoping my words pass through its digital innards until this young man, this fanboy, sees me. Actually sees me. Sees what he is doing to me. I’m begging for him to look.
Look at me.
Not gaze, not stare, but see the human being pinned down by the lens of his camera.
See Amber. Not Jessica.
Sergio stands up straight. “I want to make a film that burns into people’s subconscious just as much as the original Don’t Tread on Jessica’s Grave did for me when I first watched it. Something they will talk about for years. Something terrifying. When I watched Jessica as a kid, I’m sorry, but it wasn’t you who I saw on-screen. I saw her. I saw the ghost of the Little Witch Girl. She spoke to me. Right to me. I—I heard her. And now I can’t stop hearing her. That’s what your movie did to me. So now I want to do that. Just that. I want to create that experience for the next little pipsqueak who sneaks into the video store. But to do it right, the way I see it in my head—I need you. I need you so I can tell this story the right way, the way it’s meant to be told…I can’t do it without you.”
I have to turn away from him. “Stop.”
“It’s true. You’ve always been horror royalty to me, Miss Pendleton.”
“Just…just call me Amber.”
Sergio steps out from behind the camera. There’s nothing separating us now. Nothing between us. He’s walking toward me. He kneels.
Takes my hand.
“You are a goddess, Amber,” he says. “You are my scream queen.”
This little boy will never see me for who I am. I’ll never be Amber to him.
All he sees is who I was. On-screen.
All he sees is Jessica.
FIVE
Sergio’s story is like any other fan’s story. It’s a story I’ve heard so many times before, from so many different film buffs exactly like him. It doesn’t change the fact that he’s very passionate about what he’s talking about. Not one bit. It’s just that his story is no different from the legion of fans who’ve shared similar tales of stumbling upon Jessica for the first time.
His story isn’t his own.
It’s hers.
I can’t help but take pity on these kids, these boys, when they tell me their story. Always so heartfelt. So impassioned. They have this burning desire, this innate need to express how much this movie meant to them as kids. How it changed their lives. Haunted their dreams.
I haunted their dreams, they all say.
But it’s not true.
Whenever I hear them say this, I always want to respond—No, no, it wasn’t me. It wasn’t me at all. It was Jessica…
Always Jessica.
She is the one on-screen. She’s the one in the movie. I was just her conduit. A ripe vessel for possession. But instead of saying this, instead of saying a goddamn thing, I simply nod and smile and listen to them. I’m all ears, boys…Listen over and over again to the same story.
The name of the video store might change…
Video Kingdom.
Hollywood Video.
Video Emporium.
The town might be different…
Minneapolis.
Winnipeg.
Richmond.
It doesn’t matter which state…
Arkansas.
North Carolina.
Nevada.
The song remains the same, as they say, no matter where I hear it. No matter who sings it. Like a cover version. A broken record.
I could tell Sergio’s story for him, if I wanted. I could tell the story, all their stories, for these boys, if I chose. I know their story by heart now.
By heart.
Sergio was seven when he first saw the VHS cover for Don’t Tread on Jessica’s Grave. Every day after school, he would ride his bike to the local video store. Video World was tucked into a topiary-bordered alcove of the Stony Point Shopping Centre, just a swift five-minute Schwinn sojourn from his front door. No bigger than a boutique, this early-’80s video store was tiny in comparison to the cancerous sprawl of the Blockbuster Video chain that would begin to metastasize its way through suburban strip malls. It would eventually put all the mom-and-pop operations like Video World out of business, but not yet.
Sergio was one of the lucky boys. He pushed through his preadolescence just before the big blue-and-yellow Blockbuster awnings started cropping up across his quiet hometown.
He had found his home away from home.
Walking into Video World after locking up his bike, he lost himself in a Shangri-La of Betamax and VHS. Every inch of wall space was lined, floor-to-ceiling, with videocassettes. Each four-by-seven-and-a-half-inch VHS cassette contained a different story, just waiting to be told, and Sergio made it his mission to watch them all. Or as many as his allowance would bear.
Hidden at the very back of the store, buried behind comedy, family, and drama sections—but before he reached the “private room” of adult films at the very, very back—there was a single row of videos that were off-limits to children such as himself.
The horror section.
This—this was where fear resided. Every kind of horror Sergio could think of—or not think of—was on display. Boys and girls weren’t allowed to rent videos from this shadowy edge of the forest. A kid like Sergio couldn’t help but feel a shift in the atmosphere upon entering the aisle, suddenly surrounded by so many R-rated movies. The carpet seemed to darken, was stained somehow. Even the air had a miasma of decrepit breath to it, thicker than the air in the children’s section. He knew he wasn’t supposed to be here. But he had to go deeper. Take just another step in. See if he could make his way past the titles that begin with the letter A.
Past the Bs.
The Cs.
He was suddenly immersed, surrounded by images of sheer terror. These horrors were captured on magnetic tape and sealed inside their own cardboard boxes, like gift-wrapped packages. The horror section presented a series of portraits as if they were on display in a gallery. A monstrosity exhibition. Evil Dead. Night of the Creeps. The Company of Wolves. The Deadly Spawn. Faces of Death. Def-Con 4. Xtro. The Stepfather. The Driller Killer. The Stuff. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I Spit on Your Grave. The Dead Pit. Black Roses. Headless Eyes. Magic. Black Christmas. He Knows You’re Alone. Cellar Dweller. Mother’s Day. The Prowler.
Too many to count.
Too many to see.
But Sergio knew he had to watch them.
Watch them all.
Video after video displayed its own package. A snapshot of a victim caught in that instant just before the axe crashes down or a zombie covered in the gory remains of its last meal.
Sergio could still describe them all.
Every last cover.
The corpse of a college coed sitting in a rocking chair, a clear plastic bag still wrapped around her head. A pair of living eyeballs slithering out from their sockets. The silhouette of a man wielding a butcher knife, inches away from his stepdaughter and her defenseless dog.
Come on, kid, each box seemed to whisper. Go ahead. I dare you. Slip a video off the shelf. Go ahead and pick any horror film and take the cassette into your hand. Rub your finger over the cardboard cover. Feel its softened edges? Feel how fuzzy and worn the corners are?
Now look at the cover…Pick one.
Take it.
See.
Sergio grabbed Don’t Tread on Jessica’s Grave.
It’s me on the box.
Me as Jessica.
Just a little girl.
A scorched ghost, complete with an intense close-up of my bare skull. A pair of milky eyes, settled into my sockets, stared right back at him. Sans eyelids. Sans flesh. Sans any space between us. I’m reaching out for him, my hand outstretched as if the spirit of the Little Witch Girl of Pilot’s Creek were a breath away from lifting off the box and grabbing him by the throat.
The tagline at the bottom read: Jessica wants to play…with you!
There was nothing left of me but the bones. My skin had burned away in the picture.
But the eyes. A pulpy wetness remained. There was a shine to them. They shimmered. How they had survived the fire while the rest of me had completely flaked away is anybody’s guess, but here they were, silently accosting this young boy. Pining for him and only him.
Yearning for him.
Sergio couldn’t tell if this incinerated girl was in pain or in a fit of horrific ecstasy, but her eyes—my eyes—continued to stare straight at him, boring their way into his psyche. They followed him through the aisle. All they did was look—look at Sergio, watching him as he dropped the cassette cover to the floor and ran crying out of the store. He thought they were alive. That the cover had come to life, possessed by the ghost of Jessica. She had come for him.
The truth was much duller than that. Thanks to a particular 3D-printing effect the studio did for the VHS cover, the glossy eyes on every cover popped out from the rest of the box. They’d spent more money on that gimmick than on the movie itself.
And it worked.
That was all it took to separate Jessica from the rest of the films on the shelf.
Boys just like Sergio had the exact same experience, all across the country. They all thought I was staring at them. That I was haunting them.
Coming for them.
Most of these horror movies drifted off into a sea of beta-obscurity, lost forever in a back catalog of forgettable movies.
Not Jessica. Somehow, the cover art remained indelibly sketched on Sergio’s subconscious. The image wrapped itself around the deeper recesses of his brain and refused to let go. For years, even to this day, the one VHS cover Sergio could never shake, could never free himself of…was mine.
Was me.
“It was like you were reaching out to me,” he said. “Like you wanted to touch me.”
Of course he wasn’t the first person to tell me this. I’d heard it so many times before. But I acted as if he were the first.
My first.
That he was the only one who’d had this personal experience with the movie.
With me.
Sergio may have been too young to actually watch the movie at the time—but he didn’t need to. The cover artwork was enough. This was the true horror: not the film, but his preadolescent mind taking that snippet of visual information from the front cover—an act of violence, a look of terror, a ghost girl—and letting his own narrative develop from there.
The cover was all it took. For him, the cover was the movie. He watched his own personalized version of Don’t Tread on Jessica’s Grave in his imagination that night, every night. He didn’t need his parents’ VHS player. He had his dreams. He couldn’t escape the made-up movie manifesting itself in his sleep. He couldn’t escape me.
So he came back.
To me.
He rode his bike back to Video World the very next day. He marched straight into the horror aisle and found me, back on the shelf, waiting for him. Staring at him. Hungering for him to play.
And then the next day.
And the next.
Always back to me. To that hungry look in my eyes.
That yearning.
He had to have me. He knew these cassettes had a plastic chip embedded within them that would set off an alarm at the front of the store. He knew he couldn’t steal the cassette. That didn’t matter.
All Sergio wanted was the cover.
All he wanted was me.
He slipped the cassette out and left it on the shelf, naked. He stuffed the softened cardboard box down his pants and waltzed right out of the store, acting perfectly normal.
He freed me. Now he had me all to himself.
Forever.
Sergio tells me all this during my screen test. He keeps talking over dinner afterward. Over drinks back at his apartment.
He tells me his story in between kisses. As he undresses me.
He tells me his story as his breath deepens, intensifies. He tells me when he finally climaxes and rolls over onto his bed.
He tells me his story as the sweat along my skin begins to cool and suddenly, I’m cold again. So cold. The story never changes. The only difference is the person who tells it.
“So,” I ask in my best Greta Garbo voice, just next to him. “Did I get the part, Mr. Director?”
SIX
My flesh is on fire. The flames are everywhere, consuming me. I’m burning, burning…I can’t shake the flames away. I’m screaming. Pleading. But I can’t hear myself. The sound of my own voice isn’t there. I’m not making any sound no matter how much I scream and scream and—
That’s when I wake up.
When I always wake.
Sergio is still fast asleep next to me. He’s curled into himself, like a puppy.
I’m still at his place. It takes me a spell to settle back into my surroundings. Realize where I am. Catch my breath. I see the posters framed on his wall. The thread count on his sheets is stupefying.
Never slept with a fan before.
He’s taken a part of me.
A keepsake.
Something he can possess forever now. Frame it, bottle it, cherish it. But I took something back, too—didn’t I? Didn’t I get Jessica again?
Don’t I get to return now?
To the woods?
Sergio had told me this would be my comeback. My triumphant return to the big screen. This remake would bring my acting career back from the dead.
But what if it should stay dead? I thought. Dead and buried…
In the ground.
I need to leave. Need to get out of here. Out of this bed.
My purse has to be around here somewhere. There’s a travel nip still in there, I think. Should be half full, at least. I had taken a swig when I had excused myself to use his bathroom earlier that night. Now for the life of me I couldn’t remember where I’d left it.
I’ve made some pretty bad judgment calls in my life, but bedding the director has never been one of them. PAs, perhaps, but never a director. Nothing like deep-sixing your job prospects before they even begin. I must really want to fuck this all up for myself.
I wander about his apartment as quietly as possible. The mission to find my purse slowly ebbs into a bit of recon. What would it hurt to look around?
I find his workspace. I know I shouldn’t do this, that I’m jeopardizing my job before I’m actually even hired, but to hell with it. I’ve already slept with the director. What’s the worst that could happen?
I can’t help myself.
I need to see.
&n
bsp; Sure enough, there I am. The VHS cover Sergio stole all those years ago as a boy. The box is framed and hung on the wall, just above his desk, like a butterfly pinned and dried inside a glass case.
Preserved.
The cardboard has been pulled apart and unfolded at the seams, laid flat and pressed down so the front and back of the cover are visible. The edges are worn down, nothing but white fuzz. The image itself has faded, washed of its color, now a muted blue.
Except for the eyes.
My embossed eyes still have a glossiness to them. I’m staring right at myself. No matter where I stand, my own eyes follow me through the room. I’m looking into that same mirror all over again, in the makeup trailer, after all these years. I never left.
Jessica wants to play…with you!
It’s time to go back and play. Back to Pilot’s Creek.
Back home.
This time I’ll be ready for her.
SEVEN
There’s cement in my chest. I can feel it filling up my lungs. I can’t breathe anymore. Everything within me hardens. Congeals. Jesus, even my blood is suddenly thickening over.
Stupid. So stupid of me. I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be in Pilot’s Creek.
In the cemetery.
At her grave.
Sergio had asked me to come with him. Escort him. Like I’m some fucking tour guide. Practically begged. He wanted to walk around the cemetery, just the two of us, as if it were all some kind of romantic leisurely stroll. We could walk through my scene together, block it out, but he just wanted me there. With him. Like I’m some kind of token. His good-luck charm.
Always acting like a boy with stars in his eyes.
This time the star is me.
Too bad that when you see the light from a star in the sky, the star itself has already died. Didn’t Sergio know that? It’s simply taken that long for the light to travel across the cosmos to reach his eyes, across billions of miles of darkness. I’m already dead.
What he’s actually laying eyes on is a ghost.
It’s just like acting, I thought, just like any other part. Come on, Amber, you can do this.
I could get on the plane. I could fly all the way across the country. Back to Bumfuck, Virginia. I could land at the nearest airstrip and hop in the car that would drive me the remaining two hours to Pilot’s Creek, the town that time had forgotten, the town that hadn’t changed at all.
The Remaking Page 14