Ellie felt the pull of those sliding metal doors on the other side of the lobby. She was meant to be in Hollywood today, standing in the lobby of the Chateau Lux, ignoring the doubts, both in her own mind and in the eyes of others.
She’d go up to Room 59. She hadn’t come this far to back out now.
“You don’t have to,” the receptionist said. Almost as if she was talking to herself. “You know? You could just walk back out the door and pretend it never happened. Klein, the meeting – just forget about it. Trust me, please trust me. This isn’t the first time that Mr. Klein has had…visitors. I walked in on the aftermath once. I had to clean it up. You’ll regret it darling. You’ll regret going up there for the rest of your life.”
Ellie smiled. “Sounds like the room’s haunted or something.”
The receptionist’s eyes skimmed the room. “This is the Chateau Lux sweetheart. Every room here is haunted. Now, you’re beautiful and I’m sure you’re very talented. You’ve got dreams, I respect that. But there are other ways to climb the mountain. There are other ways, please believe me. Now, for the last time. Do you have to go up there?”
“Yes,” Ellie said, with a nod. “I do.”
May 10th, 2008
Ten years earlier
The lights in Ellie’s bedroom were off, leaving only a gloomy, gray haze that resembled an indoors fog. She was sitting on the carpet, tucked into the corner of the room that was furthest from the door. She hugged her knees tight, listening to her parents yelling at one another in the living room.
This one had been going on forever. It had been at least an hour since Ellie heard her mother daring her father to hit her and that only ever happened when they were deep in the trenches, accusations and name-calling in the rearview mirror. Sounded like her mom wanted him to do it. Like that would make her the winner.
Ellie could envision the scene in the living room. The two of them standing toe to toe in the center of the living room, her mom sticking out her chin like a boxer taunting her opponent. Hit me, hit me. That’s the way she said it, on loop, like a taunt that questioned her dad’s manhood. Like she was luring him into a trap. Not that John Ferguson needed much persuading to use his fists on those closest to him. He didn’t do it that often, but he did it enough.
God, they were a mess.
Ellie lowered her head onto her lap, burrowing her face deeper into the sanctuary of her limbs. The Ferguson fights were the Olympic marathon of domestic arguments but maybe, Ellie thought, the old man would hit her mom once and that would be it. It’d be over. Maybe he wouldn’t hit her. Maybe he’d hit the wall, scrape his knuckles and call it a night after drowning his senses in a little more Jack Daniels.
As long as he didn’t come into her room and take it out on her. Best way to avoid that scenario, as Ellie knew well enough, was to be quiet or to be gone.
On and on it went. Muffled, angry voices. Playing ping-pong with insults.
She hadn’t heard them this angry in a long time. She didn’t even know what had sparked this fight and wondered if, after three or four hours and the occasional lull in the action, they did either. It had all started during a visit to Ellie’s grandmother’s house in Scarborough earlier that day. Ellie had been upstairs watching TV in the bedroom, sipping Diet Coke and devouring her grandmother’s homemade chocolate chip cookies, when the sound of raised voices had cut through Corpse Bride on CBC. Ellie’s heart sank. She knew right away that it was bad. But holy shit, it was bad. Her folks didn’t usually air their dirty laundry in public and that included the extended family. But they were breaking all kinds of records today. Her dad had flown off the handle, big swear words and all, right there in front of Ellie’s shocked grandmother. Family visit cut short. The drive home was every bit the shouting nightmare that Ellie had known it would be. Longest twenty minutes ever.
When the Fergusons’ Corolla finally pulled into the driveway, Ellie had walked quietly to the door, hoping not to be noticed. Once inside, she bolted upstairs to her room and locked the door.
She knew the drill.
Grab iPod, put headphones on and turn the music up real loud.
Well, by now she’d listened to more albums than she could count. Some of them more than once. Hard rock, twenty-minute eg0-stroking guitar solos shredding up all other noise in the stratosphere. Those were always good but she couldn’t sit there with her headphones on all night.
Ellie flinched at a sudden noise from the living room. Sounded like a tank slamming into the side of the house.
“That’s it!” her mom’s manically gleeful voice yelled. “Do it again you motherfucker. I dare you, do it again.”
Ellie dug her fingernails into her legs.
“Stop it.”
Sometimes she wished that one of them would just kill the other. Fuck it. Just die one of you and get it over with. The other one would go to jail and it’d be happily ever after for Ellie. It didn’t seem like a matter of if with John and Marian Ferguson, but when. Surely these two people weren’t destined to grow old and gray together and yet, as far as Ellie could recall, there’d never been a single mention of divorce. At least, not that she’d ever heard. Ellie longed for them to split up. She prayed till her voice was hoarse and begged for it. A few years ago, aged nine or ten, Ellie’s grandmother took her to visit Santa Claus at a mall in downtown Toronto. When it was Ellie’s turn to sit on Santa’s lap, he’d asked her in a big, cheery voice what she wanted for Christmas. Ellie told him she wanted a set of new parents.
She could still remember Santa’s uncomfortable laughter that day. And the look of horror on her grandmother’s face.
Her parents were glued together out of habit, addicted to both the love and hate of one another. Maybe the dread of feeling nothing, of being alone, scared them too much to even contemplate separation. What pissed Ellie off was that they never apologized to her for making her life a misery. For making her listen to their fights. She was growing up at an abnormal speed, enduring far and beyond her fair share of parental bullshit and they never said sorry. What the fuck? The day after a fight was always calm, civilized and even pleasant in the Ferguson household. That might last a while and it might even get good and there might be a little laughter here and there.
Didn’t last. Never did.
They weren’t right in the head.
John and Marian Ferguson, two good-looking, materially successful people on the outside, had faulty wiring. Ellie was sure of it. They shouldn’t have met. They shouldn’t have hooked up, let alone bred and God knows what insanity was lying dormant in Ellie’s mind and that she might pass onto her own children someday. Ellie knew for sure that her maternal grandmother had suffered mental health problems in the seventies. Nobody talked about it except when her dad, in the middle of a heated argument, would remind her mom how her family had left Ellie’s gran to rot inside a Quebec loony bin and how they’d forgotten about her. Ellie knew that when he said that, it hurt her mom more than any punch in the face.
What a mess.
Ellie glanced at her watch. 6.48pm. Time to go to Cassandra’s house. Time to go to the river.
Another hard thump from the living room.
“Fuck’s sake,” Ellie said, glaring at her bedroom door. She put a hand over her heart. It was pounding.
She was getting out for good. Another few years, that’s all she had to wait and then she’d be out that door faster than Superman and a speeding bullet combined. Didn’t matter if she wasn’t eighteen, not legally an adult and blah-blah-blah. Ellie was going south to America where she’d find work in a sleepy little town in the back end of Nowheresville where nobody asked any questions, save up enough money to go to LA and become an actor. That was the dream. Cassandra, whose home life wasn’t any better, was going with her. Cassandra wasn’t into acting as much as Ellie, but LA was an escape and she sure as hell liked the idea of getting out of Canada and staring over again. Ellie, on the other hand, loved acting. Slipping inside the skin of someone else. Checki
ng the fuck out. What’s not to like?
Just another few years. As for right now, she was going to the river.
She stood up, her joints cracking. Crossing the room on tiptoe, Ellie released the latch on the window, pulled it up and smiled for the first time in a long time as the spring breeze touched her face. It was still light outside as she slid her backside onto the ledge and pushed herself through the gap and down onto the Ferguson’s front lawn. The family lived in a three-bedroom, raised bungalow in the West Rouge neighborhood in the southeastern corner of Toronto. It wasn’t a bad place to live. West Rouge was surrounded by an abundance of natural beauty with Lake Ontario to the south and the Rouge River and Rouge National Urban Park to the east.
Ellie hurried over the grass towards the sidewalk, still hearing that muffled family argument in her ears.
Cassandra’s house wasn’t far. It took Ellie about five minutes to reach it at a swift walking pace. She stopped outside the two-story property that belonged to the Saint family and glanced at the front windows, top and bottom. She didn’t walk up the driveway and ring the doorbell. That’s not how it was done with Ellie and Cassandra. Instead, Ellie pulled out her second-hand Nokia – a pay-as-you-go plastic brick handed down from her mother, supposed to be for emergencies only.
Yeah, right.
Ellie’s thumbs went to work. She typed ‘outside now’, sent a text and hoped that Cassandra had her Blackberry Curve close by.
Ellie took cover at the side of the road, ducking under a cluster of tall bushes with thorns. She glanced at the other houses across the street, wondering what people would think if they saw her. Shit, what did they care? They’d probably seen Ellie do the same thing a hundred times before.
Three minutes later, Cassandra hurried down the driveway. Her white Nike sneakers, covered in dry dirt patches from Rouge Park, scraped off the concrete.
“What’s going on?” Cassandra asked, keeping her voice down. She was chewing on something that sounded like potato chips. “Are you alright? Are they fighting?”
Ellie nodded. “My head feels like there’s a chainsaw inside it.” She pointed to the Saint house. “You?”
“Quiet,” Cassandra said, swallowing the last of her chips. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hands and shrugged her shoulders. “Dad’s been pretty busy at work so maybe they don’t have the energy to fight. You know?”
Ellie’s eyebrow stood up. “Are you just saying that Cass?”
Cassandra hesitated. She glanced at the house before continuing. “They’re not fighting. It’s just…”
“Just what?”
Cassandra’s shoulders slumped.
“It’s my dad. He keeps saying all these horrible things to me about my weight. Really shitty things. He’ll come home, all tired and cranky, and then he starts on at me. He does it when we’re at the table, when we’re watching TV, when I’m washing the dishes. Tells me I’m getting fat and that I’ll never get a man and have kids or do anything that normal people are supposed to do. Why does he have to say that shit? Like I don’t know already.”
“Fucking asshole,” Ellie said.
“Right. If I inherited a fat gene from anyone it was from his side of the family. His mother was a fucking balloon.”
Ellie glanced at Cassandra, dressed in a loose-fit Taylor Swift t-shirt that ran down to the knees of her black denims. Her best friend was filling out a little, but she wasn’t fat. Ellie checked out her face. There were no marks, at least none that could be seen in the early evening gloom. But that didn’t mean shit. Cassandra’s old man was careful, even when he’d been drinking. He rarely hit his daughter on the face.
“So what do you want to do?” Cassandra asked, slipping her phone into her back pocket. “You wanna come in? Lay low for a while?”
Ellie shook her head. “I wanna stay outside.”
“River?”
“River.”
Cassandra stared at the house again. The drapes were pulled tight in the living room and behind that, a smothered yellow light glowed from inside the house. It looked cozy.
“It’s kinda getting late.”
“You don’t have to come,” Ellie said, taking a step backwards. “Not if you’re worried about getting shit for going out. I just can’t go back to the house, not right now. I can go to the river alone.”
“Fuck that,” Cassandra said, shaking her head. “You’re always there when it’s my turn.”
Ellie smiled. “Let’s go.”
The two girls traveled west along Rouge Hills Drive, stepping onto Lawrence Avenue. It was a twenty-five-minute walk to Rouge National Urban Park from Cassandra’s house, at least to the particular car park they usually entered through. It was a walk that Ellie and Cassandra had made side by side many times before over the years. They walked in silence this time, mostly. Save for a little small talk about homework and about the new boy in school, Jack Nicholson, who shared his name with the famous old actor and who was getting shit from some of the older kids who insisted on calling him ‘Shining’ and writing ‘Here’s Johnny!!!’ in red ink on his locker door. One of them even left a plastic toy axe in the locker.
The girls strolled through the car park at a swift pace, sensing that it was later than their usual visits. There were a few vehicles scattered around, most of them keeping their distance from one another like there was an unspoken rule at work. Ellie watched a group of five people sitting on deckchairs outside an RV. Beer cans all over the table. Rock music blasting out of the radio. Tunes were pretty good too but the girls didn’t hang around. They kept walking and eventually arrived at the solitary wooden bench, located about twenty meters away from the official starting point for the Waterfront Trail, one of many trails in Rouge Park. Some of these trails were spectacular, leading through a variety of landscapes: forests, wetlands, farmlands and meadows. And with summer rolling in, the park was only going to get busier.
Tonight at least, Ellie and Cassandra could enjoy a little quiet time.
They sat down on the bench. It was cold but dry. The river was calm and inviting in front of them, wide and shallow, basking under a blood red sky. On the opposite bank, a cluster of soft-swaying trees beckoned walkers across the bridge and onto the nine-and-a-half-kilometer trail from Rouge Beach to Frenchman’s Bay West Park. Usually there were plenty of walkers, runners and cyclists on the track. Dogwalkers were welcome too, as long as the dogs were on a leash. Ellie hung around here sometimes just so she could pet the dogs.
“So,” Cassandra said, stretching her legs out. “Was it bad tonight?”
Ellie sighed. “It was bad.”
A pause.
“You alright?”
“I will be,” Ellie said. “When I get out of here. When we get out.”
“Totally. Hey, do your think parents are fucking around? Having affairs and all with other people?”
Ellie shrugged. “I don’t think so. Why?”
“I read this magazine article last week about these car key parties. Happens in the suburbs all the time, so the magazine said. People drop their car keys into a fishbowl, you lift out the keys and make couples. The couples go upstairs and do it. You could be doing it with anyone. Sounds gross if you ask me. Makes me wanna ride the bus for the rest of my life so that I’ll never own a set of car keys.”
“What are you reading that stuff for?”
“I think my dad might be screwing someone else,” Cassandra said. “At least that’s what my mom says when they’re fighting. They were talking about some woman at his work. He denied it, of course.”
“Gross.”
“Yep.”
Ellie’s fists were clenched tight. It felt like her knuckles were about to pop through the skin. “It’ll be okay.”
Cassandra jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “LA here we come. Right?”
“You’re pointing east,” Ellie said, laughing. “That’s Greenland or Ireland over there, or something like that.”
“Oh,” Cassandra said, lowe
ring her arm and giggling. “Well in that case, you’re in charge of directions. Right?”
“Right.”
The two girls watched the sun’s slow, hypnotic descent on the horizon. They heard the rattling cry of the belted kingfisher from somewhere on the river.
Ellie sat forward. She tried to mimic the bird call and failed.
“You’re weird as shit,” Cassandra said, still giggling into the back of her hand. “Did anyone ever tell you that? That you’re a freak.”
Ellie laughed. “Yep. Isn’t that why we’re both here?”
A pause.
“Hey Ellie?”
“What?”
“You been thinking about her much lately?”
“About Nicole?”
“Yeah. Who else?”
Ellie’s eyes wandered across the river. “Of course I have. Hey, guess what Cass? I found one of her movies online, like one of the really rare ones. The Little Girl Who Lost Christmas. Made in 1943, her first leading role and she’s only like six years old in it. Have you seen it?”
“No,” Cassandra said, sitting forward and gawping at Ellie. “You found that?”
“I’ll send you the link,” Ellie said. “It’s kind of a shady website but it works. Man, she was such a cute kid. But when you watch it…oh shit.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s heartbreaking,” Ellie said. “Like for real. She’s so young and innocent in that movie, so damn cute, and you sit there watching it, knowing what’s going to happen to her eleven years later.”
Cassandra nodded.
“When it gets bad in my house,” she said, “I remember Nicole and what she went through on the night they brought her up here with her mom. It’s fucking horrible, at least if the stuff we read online is true.”
Scream Test: An unforgettable and gripping psychological thriller Page 3