“Chair and daughter.” Reggie gave Maita a thumbs-up as he backed out of the room. “And some fresh chips,” he added as he stepped out of sight.
Maita played with her necklace while she thought about how the scene would play out. Building the film in her head like this was one of her more favorite activities. It let her leave her other worries behind for a while and left her feeling in control.
The smaller chair would allow Erik to crash through the window and land on the floor, then they could move the bounce closer to Kayla for close-ups. She could run right, out of the bounce light and into the dark. Easy.
She shook her head. Overall, she considered Reggie to be an excellent assistant director, and he knew how to cast breakaway plastic windows and other props. But there was a back door in his skull that his brain fell out of whenever he was around overly pretty girls like Kayla.
With a loud sigh Maita shoved her hands into the front pocket of her thin gray hoodie and flopped down on the comfy loveseat. She closed her eyes and sank into a mental picture of the room around her.
Innocent-ish girl here on the sofa, horrifying monster creeping up behind. She’s preoccupied with her magazine, doesn’t see him until it’s too late. He crashes through the window there …
Maita shrieked. Her phone started vibrating in her back pocket.
She answered it. “Holy crap,” Maita said, her breath ragged. “You just about scared me to death.”
“Like mother, like daughter,” Artemia replied. “Think I have a career in movies?”
With a wide grin, Maita stretched sideways on the sofa and folded her legs up in front of her. Artemia, just fifteen-years-old, was a tonic to her mother. Maita felt her stress dissolving, leaving her back and shoulders warm.
She loved that kid.
“Whatcha need?” Maita asked.
“I don’t know,” Artemia said. “You said you wanted to talk to me about something important. Oh shit, I’m sorry. I’m not supposed to call when you’re shooting. Did I mess everything up?”
“Oh, no, not at all.” Maita breathed in deep, and sent her tension out on the exhale. “We’re on a break. Oh, hey, I sent Reg to the apartment to pick up the living room chair. If you want to come back with him, you can meet Erik …”
Maita held the phone away from her face until Artemia stopped squealing.
“Done now?”
“Done,” Artemia answered, not done at all. “Thank you, Mom. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you! I’m sorry I said your job was stupid and that L.A. sucked and you didn’t know anyone worth a crap and I hated all your movies. This is the best thing ever!”
“What did you say about my movies?” Maita asked, one brow raised.
“Ooh, do you think he still hangs out with Jennifer and Rudy and all the others?” Artemia asked, ignoring her mother’s question.
“I don’t think so,” Maita said. “I think he pretty much keeps to himself these days … since the thing with the lawn mower. But, hey, I did need to tell you, I’m going out of town for the weekend. With your grandmother.”
Artemia calmed like a match dropped into a pond.
“The grandmother you invited here and won’t let me see?” she asked.
“That’s the one,” Maita said. Some of the tension returned to her shoulders and her grin faded away. “We have some … stuff to work out. Easier for us to talk alone. Away from distractions. Always was.”
“I imagine a secret granddaughter would be distracting.” Artemia sounded calm, but what kid would not want to meet her grandmother? “Can I at least know why I’m not allowed to see her?”
“It’s mostly for your protection,” Maita said. “Your grandmother can be kinda mean. And, if I’m being honest, it just makes everything easier. If I tell her now, then I have to deal with her being angry because I didn’t tell her before, and then that will be all she and I will talk about, and the whole thing will be for nothing.”
“I don’t think I need protection from a seventy-year-old woman,” Artemia said. “There’s no way she’s meaner than my algebra teacher, and you make me see her every day.” She blew a dramatic sigh through the phone. “But I’m sure I can find something to do while you’re gone. I just got a new book about these aliens that inject their eyes into your eyes and make you see things that aren’t there, so you go around killing everyone because you think they’re giant lizards and stuff.”
“Do the infected people think they’re killing people in lizard costumes, or CG lizards?” Maita asked. “CG lizards are way more expensive.”
“It’s a book, Mom. Not a movie.” Another sigh. “They’re totally costume-lizards.”
Mother and daughter laughed, said goodbye, and hung up.
Artemia embodied all the best parts of Maita. Fearless and strong, intelligent and trusting. Those parts that Maita would most want to live on after she was gone.
If Maita was being especially self-serving, it was almost like being immortal.
Her faint smile vanished as Maita considered her own mother. Paranoid concern jumped to the front of her brain, pushing out more reasoned thoughts.
Did Lidia know where they were shooting? Was it a good idea for Maita to ask Artemia to come back with Reggie? If her mother discovered Artemia, all of Maita’s planning would come crashing down like …
A scream came from within the house.
Kayla.
Again.
Kayla shrieked every time she saw Erik’s face. Good for the film, but crazy-making for everyone else. Maita was pretty sure Erik hated her for it.
Maita frowned and pushed herself off of the loveseat. She walked into the hallway and looked left into the empty kitchen. No one was making dinner. Craft Services must have gone to the all-night grocery.
Reggie better bring enough chips for everyone.
Up ahead, Reggie’s mother’s dining room glowed a dim yellow. Using the AD’s mom’s house to shoot saved a ton on sets, but made lighting and blocking a continual hassle. There were always trade-offs.
“Kayla? Everything okay?” Maita walked around the dark wood table and chairs and put her hands on her hips. The single hanging lamp with its goldenrod shade lit the center of the table well enough, but left the walls and their framed photos of family members at sports or school events in shadow. She peered closer.
Teenaged Reggie looked like a dork.
Dark bedrooms lay ahead, and Maita turned right again, toward the front door. Where was everyone? She stopped just before stepping through the archway and took in the scene.
The windowed door stood at the end of a small foyer; to the left sat a metal canister with a colorful Norman Rockwell print on it, holding several folded umbrellas. Against the door itself lay Kayla, face turned into the wood, a hole in her back still oozing blood down her spine and into her cut-offs. Above her a thin puncture in the door allowed a sliver of bluish light from the streetlamp into the tiny space.
The hole was perhaps three inches high, and a quarter-inch wide. Big enough for a strong man looking in the door’s window to shove an ancient sword through the door and the girl on the other side.
Maita’s cellphone found its way into her hand, and 9-1-1 was already ringing by the time she consciously acknowledged it.
“9-1-1, what’s your emergency?” The voice sounded older, female, and efficient.
“Oh, um … I’m sorry. Crap. You know what, I meant to call 4-1-1 and I forgot which one was which.”
Maita watched the blood pool beneath Kayla’s body.
“Name, please.”
“Maita Lamiana.”
“Thank you. Phone number where you can be reached?”
Maita gave the woman her cell phone number. She knew how this process worked. It had been in her last movie.
There was a pause on the other end.
“Are you sure everything is all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine.” Maita smiled to give her voice a lift. “I’m just a dummy. Good night.”
&n
bsp; After she hung up, Maita stood with her phone in her hand and waited. Things were going to happen faster than she’d planned, but she couldn’t rush it.
This was her shot.
The phone rang and Maita answered it. She assured the 9-1-1 operator a second time that all was well, thumbed the off switch, and replaced the phone in her pocket.
Not the plan, but she would adapt. It was the theme of her whole life.
Crap! Reggie and Artemia would be back with the chair in fifteen minutes. She couldn’t even call Artemia back now without risking her daughter’s safety further. Having a time limit wasn’t part of the plan either. She needed to move.
Maita carefully hauled Kayla’s cooling corpse away from the door. She stood straight and pulled on the doorknob. Tall bushes to either side of the door made a sort of darkened hallway into the front yard. To the right lay Erik, his oversized muscular form torn open from his neck down to his navel.
Blood dripped from everything.
While sorry for the big man, Maita wasn’t surprised. As a potential threat, Erik would have been among the first to go. The stink of a freshly ruptured digestive system wafted up and into Maita’s face.
“Oh, boy. You do not smell good,” Maita said. She placed one hand over her nose.
She knew horror and fright were the appropriate emotional reactions here, but her immediate needs overrode those feelings. She could be terrified later.
This kind of thing had always been a possibility.
On a hunch, Maita pulled aside the branches from the left-hand hedge and spotted the falcata in the dirt and leaves. She snatched it up and returned to the house. It wasn’t likely to help—Maita knew her horror movies—but it made her feel better anyway.
Almost a foot of the rusty blade glinted red with smeared Kayla.
A frightening crash shuddered through the house and a deep voice, like a mountain sliding off the world, shrieked, “All dead, all dead. No more friends, my little mija.”
If this were one of Maita’s own movies, the rest of the crew would be scattered around the house in gruesome displays for her to find while the horrifying monster chased her down. Better to go ahead and jump to the end.
“I guess we’re not waiting until Saturday to have our talk?” As soon as the question left Maita’s lips, the grinding crash began again at high speed, tearing down walls and furniture alike in its haste to get to Maita. The house shook as if ready to pitch itself to the ground, and clouds of shattered plaster billowed out from the kitchen.
Maita fled into a shadowy bedroom, taking just enough time to open the slatted closet door a half-inch before rolling beneath the bed.
Clothes covered the floor and obscured her vision but did nothing to disguise her mother’s flowery perfume when the gigantic clawed feet, covered in scales like stone, scraped into the room. The creature’s throaty chuckle vibrated along the base of Maita’s spine, and its claws click-clacked on hardwood flooring as it moved toward the closet door.
The perfume’s odor shifted from too-sweet flowers to rotted urine, and Maita grimaced against it. Worse, now that the stench was in her nose, she couldn’t recall it ever smelling any different. Every memory of her childhood home was drenched in that stink.
Seems about right, she thought.
The creature that had been her mother smashed at the closet doors above Maita’s line of vision, bringing whitewashed wooden slats and a considerable amount of drywall bouncing to the floor. At the same time, Maita slashed out with the falcata. The blade dragged clothes and tumbling slats in a low arc before cutting into Lidia’s hind … paw?
A rough scream sliced through the room and the bed flew away from Maita into the far wall, crashing into the dark. Before Maita could draw a breath, a taloned hand grabbed the front of her hoodie. It clawed at her chest and lifted her into the air.
Then Maita screamed, too.
“What the ever-loving Christhole?” A gruff woman’s voice shouted from the dining room.
Maita jerked sideways and shifted her torso inside the hoodie so she could see the doorway of the bedroom. The Craft Services Director, her short, stiff hair dark against the swinging golden ceiling lamp behind her, stood there with a full paper grocery bag in each arm.
Lidia shoved Maita into the ceiling and cackled like exploding glass in a wildfire.
Craft-Lady—Maita couldn’t have recalled her name now if there were a gun to her head—dropped the bags at the same time Lidia dropped Maita. As she hit the ground, Maita crawled toward the door, but jumped sideways when the muscular woman slipped an enormous revolver out of a back-holster and raised it.
The first BOOM illuminated Craft-Lady’s faded denim pants and white cotton shirt. Her eyes, wide with fright, reflected the muzzle-flash.
“Center mass,” Craft-Lady shouted.
The second BOOM lit up the four-legged monster that scraped the ceiling. Fangs protruded from a human face with a thin white scar on one cheek, and dark green scales hissed against the floor and walls. A whipping, serpentine tail struck long gouges in the walls where it hit.
“Headshot.”
Maita closed her eyes after that.
BOOM.
“Shoulder.”
BOOM.
“Center mass.”
BOOM.
“Gut shot.”
When Craft-Lady screamed, Maita opened her eyes.
Lidia’s tail wrapped around Craft-Lady’s throat and then through her back, curling out of the center of the woman’s chest. With a flex and several audible pops, the Director of Craft Services’ head fell to the ground.
Maita grabbed the revolver.
The creature rushed out of the dark, grabbed Maita by one foot, dragged her from the bedroom, and flung her with a bang onto the dining room table. Maita’s vision swam, and the lamp hanging above the table swung in uneven circles, haphazardly spotlighting teenaged Reggie’s baseball games and outdoor church services.
The ankle-drag. A staple of horror movies everywhere. Maita should have been ready for that.
“Now we will have our talk, eh, mija?”
The voice ground her mother and the monster together, all the more frightening because of its familiarity. Maita pushed herself up and sat straight-backed, looking her mother in the face.
“You killed my father,” Maita said, her words a husky rasp. “You burned the house down with him in it.”
“He discovered what I am,” the monster answered. “He could have ruined our lives.”
“What the crap?” Maita asked, her anger batting down her fear. “How have you not ruined my life?”
The creature placed its scaly hands between its very-human breasts and managed to look offended. “You have a blessed life. Blessed by the same gods who cursed me. Blessed because of me. You want to be a lawyer; you are a lawyer. You want to make movies; you make movies. All of this comes from me.”
“I wanted to make another movie, but you killed all my crew.” She fought against the grief that threatened to well up within her. There would be time for that later. “So, thanks for that blessing.”
“You are so cutting with your words.” Lidia’s tail flicked, slicing a wide gouge in the wall behind her. The breeze from it sent the smells of gypsum dust and old urine throughout the room.
“It is hard to believe you are even my daughter.” Powder from destroyed drywall coated Lidia, sticking in clumps to the blood where Maita had injured her foot with the falcata.
“Because I’m not horrible? Because I’m not like you?” Maita’s anger gave her the courage to say the things she’d been thinking for decades. “Well, I’m not you, and I never will be. You’re toxic, and even when you were just a mother, you murdered our family.”
“But, mija, you are me.” Lidia whispered.
“I heard your argument with Dad that night,” Maita said. “I heard him call you Lamia—the monster. I guess you want to try and deny that now, too?”
“I am a good person,” Lidia answered.
At that, Maita burst out with a small, half-hysterical laugh.
“This answers so much about my childhood.” Maita shook her head and felt the heavy weight of Craft-Lady’s gun in her lap.
Oxford. They used to call the woman Oxford. That couldn’t have been her real name though.
Not relevant. Monster now.
“You have Googled Lamia on your computers, I am sure,” Lidia said. The scales at her throat shuddered, producing a weird trilling noise. “You know what was done to me, by Zeus and his bitch-wife? You know I am cursed to grieve for eternity for all of my children?”
“I did my research.” Maita did not say how long she had planned for this day. “How many of your children have you murdered to get this far, Mom?”
Lidia waved a long-taloned hand. “I don’t know. Hundreds? Thousands? I just don’t want you to think I won’t be sad after I kill you.”
Confronted by this creature, Maita could not help but be curious. It was still her mother. She took control of her breathing and centered herself.
Her mom would never kill anyone while there was an opportunity to talk about herself.
“As comforting as that thought is,” Maita said, “how exactly does this work? You just take over my body when you die? Do I follow along inside? Do I … go to heaven?”
“There is a little ceremony.” Lidia clicked her claws. “Then I eat your soul and take your body. I never would have waited so long except you ran away from home like a selfish brat. I never raised such a thoughtless girl.”
“Do you only take daughters? I never read anything about a male Lamia.”
“I have had to take a son or two when accidents happen.” She frowned and a thin whip of a tongue flickered out and vanished. “I do not like the way they smell.”
“I only hope when you eat my soul and possess my corpse that you can smell yourself the way I do.” Maita wrinkled her nose. “All that stuff about wanting me to concentrate on law instead of movies—that was just so you could have a fortune ready and live off of my money.”
“I have always planned for your future,” Lidia said.
“You know, I only invited you to California so I could kill you.” Maita checked the chamber of the revolver to be sure. One more bullet.
Monsters, Movies & Mayhem Page 9