by Scott Thomas
Moore was standing just outside the front door, her slender form draped in a sleek silk kimono. The front was loosely tied, the edges barely concealing her breasts. She was thinner than before, less toned, muscle giving way to bone. In her right hand, a pistol dangled loosely.
“You’ve got ten minutes,” Moore announced with a stunning lack of emotion. Then she turned and marched back inside, leaving the door wide open for Sam to enter.
Ten minutes would turn out to be nearly two weeks. But, of course, neither of them knew that at the time.
Moore’s house was exactly what Sam had expected—cold, hard, purposely uncomfortable and uninviting. It was like a cinder block encased in glass, with only the breathtaking views of the city from high in the Hollywood Hills to soften the experience.
As she led him through the foyer and into the spacious living room, Sam took notice of the lack of clutter. It was nothing like his place.
I was wrong. I shouldn’t have come here. She’ll laugh me out of the house and tell me to take a flying fuck.
But Moore did not laugh. She did not even offer so much as an apology, snide or otherwise, after the near mauling in her front yard. Sam had found her standing in the foyer with a tumbler of whiskey in one hand and the gun in the other. She set the revolver on the concrete counter of a nearby credenza and wandered off into the next room.
They stood in Moore’s cavernous living room, metal shelves running the length of the light gray walls, dark oak floors beneath their feet, a grand picture window framing the smog-shrouded city beyond. Moore stopped in front of a leather chair, but she did not sit. She stared at Sam, exhausted, black bags cupping her tired eyes like crescent moons.
“What do you want, McGarver?” she asked.
Sam shuffled nervously, not sure how to begin. “Tell me about the book you’re writing.”
She gave a harsh chuckle. It sounded more exhausted than defiant. “Not a chance. You can read it with everybody else when it’s finished.”
“How long is it?”
“I don’t know,” Moore said. “It isn’t finished.”
Sam pushed back. “But how long have you been working on it?”
Moore stared at him curiously, not sure of Sam’s endgame. Then she attempted what she obviously hoped was a dismissive shrug. “All right, I’ll admit, the book’s gotten a bit . . . out of hand.”
“When’s the last time you slept?” he asked.
Moore gave a long, gruff sigh, as if her chest were filled with leaves, the air rustling them as it exited her lungs.
“You seriously flew all the way to LA to ask me how I’m sleeping?”
“You know why I’m here.”
“I was just about to get a drink,” she said. “You need a drink?”
“Moore. Please.”
She started toward the spiral staircase that led down to a walk-out basement, then stopped mid-step.
“What’s the matter?” Sam asked.
Moore shook her head, her eyes still on that staircase. “Nothing. Be right back.”
She disappeared into the depths of her home.
Carefully, quietly, Sam rose to his feet. He quickly moved down a narrow hallway lined with framed black-and-white photographs. They were all close-up shots of men and women, a somewhat disturbing mixture of sex and violence—a split bottom lip; a penis gripped in a fist, then both wrapped in barbed wire; a knife resting on a perfect triangle of matted pubic hair.
At the end of the hallway was a door. Sam reached for the knob. He carefully turned it, his heart leaping as it clicked open.
He stared into the room, and his heart sank.
Here it is. The mess.
Unlike the rest of his house, Moore’s study was a shaken jigsaw puzzle of papers and books and yellow legal pads. At the center of the storm was a desk, upon which sat a laptop computer, its screen displaying the absurdly awful image of a child staring curiously down the barrel of an assault rifle.
He found several pieces of paper still in the printer. He picked up the last two pages.
Under the bridge at Walnut Creek or in the crowded basement of the house on Sixth Street, she called him “Pretty Boy” or “Pretty Boy Tom,” but when it was just the two of them alone, she called him Tommy, and he called her Charlie. His Charlie. His one and only.
She knew he was full of shit. He was pounding plenty of strange on the side. But he always had two-day stubble that rubbed her cheek raw and a dumb eyebrow ring with a turquoise stone and that same pit-stained short-sleeved shirt that he never washed, and when he called her “Charlie,” her heart melted and her pussy did a backflip.
Today he called her “Pastor Charlie.” Her holiness. She told him it wasn’t funny. He said it wasn’t a joke. She was something greater now. Bigger and deeper and brighter than the goddamn stars. He kissed her hard with his tobacco-stained teeth and their tongues were mating snakes as they curled around each other.
“Do it, baby. He wants you to do it.”
Charlie had a hammer in her hand. A “carpenter’s hatchet” is what Buckwood called it when he’d loaned it to them. Hammer on one side, hatchet on the other.
Charlie’s nails were painted black like that door in the Rolling Stones song. She smiled. “Hey, R.T., you ready to do us that solid? Remember, you owe us, you weed-bumming bitch.”
R.T. nodded, but then again, that’s all he could do. His hands were tied at the wrist, his feet at the ankles. He was completely naked. His back was to the wall.
“Play with my cock when you do it,” he said.
Tommy said, “It’s fine, girl. I don’t mind.” And he meant it because he was a stand-up guy with a job and a car and love in his heart.
Charlie took R.T.’s sad little prick in her hand and worked it up and down.
Her black nails grazed his scrotum. His dick was on fire now. He wasn’t going to last long.
“Do it,” R.T. moaned. “Do it right when I go.” He pressed the back of his head up against the wall.
Tommy whispered, “This is gonna work, right?”
Charlie raised the half hammer in one hand, blade side down. In the other hand, she felt the first wet kiss of R.T.’s cock against her palm.
Now!
She slammed the blade down into his skull as his body shook. She couldn’t tell if it was from the shock of the blow or the ecstasy of orgasm. R.T. was a sticky, quivering mess from head to hog.
“It’s working.” Tommy slid a hand around her waist and pulled her close. “It’s working!”
The wall was opening. The first brick broke free.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Moore cried as she rushed into the room. Scotch sloshed over the rims of two tumblers as she slammed them down on the desk. She snatched the pages from Sam’s hand.
“I’m sorry, I . . .”
“You’re fucking right you’re sorry!” She shoved him, hard, and his hand hit the keyboard of her laptop. The screen woke, revealing a Microsoft Word document. Several terse paragraphs filled the upper part of the page, but the cursor blinked midway down. Just as Sam’s had. Blink. Blink. Blink. Waiting for the flood of words.
“Why did you stop?” Sam asked after a moment of silence.
“What?”
“Why did you stop?”
Moore drew in a deep breath, her heartbeat slowing, her anger subsiding.
“Because some asshole was trespassing on my property,” she said. Her tone was less than convincing.
“But what stopped you before that?”
Moore’s bottom lip trembled. Here was the truth. Here was everything she had feared for the past six months. She bit her trembling lip between her front teeth.
“McGarver, don’t do this.”
“You’ve been writing since we got back, haven’t you? Like you have to? Like something is making you write?”
A light flickered behind Moore’s dark eyes, across the surface of that broken pupil like the rainbow sheen of oil on water.
Sam thought with a sudden sense of relief, You’re not crazy. This is happening. It’s really happening!
And then relief turned to dread: You’re not crazy. This is really happening.
“Tell me what’s going on,” he said.
She wrapped her arms around herself like armor. She said nothing.
“When I would stop writing,” Sam explained, his voice soothing and honest, “I would think I was in that house again.”
Her eyes flashed up to him. He had clearly struck a nerve.
Sam continued, “I thought I was going crazy. I was forgetting to take my meds, for depression, and at first I thought maybe it was some sort of withdrawal. So I started taking them again, but it didn’t help. I even bought a carbon monoxide detector because I read that a leak could cause hallucinations. But now I know I wasn’t hallucinating, and I’m not crazy. Because it’s happening to you too.”
Moore clenched her jaw. She was fighting tears. Sam had never seen her so vulnerable.
It terrified him.
“It’s happening to you,” he repeated. “Isn’t it?”
Moore stared at him intensely. And then she gave a small nod.
Sam motioned to the blinking cursor on the computer screen. “But you stopped.”
She sighed and picked up a few papers from a stack. “It was flowing until—”
“Until you got to the part where someone tries to break through the wall. The wall that will unlock the house’s secrets.”
Her head whipped around to glare at Sam with that awful eye. He noticed for the first time that the once shaved sides of her head had grown out. Her hair was not the stylish mane it had been. Now it was starting to resemble the world’s longest mullet.
“How did you know that?”
“Because it’s exactly where I stopped,” Sam said. “In the book I’m writing. The book I’ve been writing for the past six months.”
Moore’s eyes narrowed, scrutinizing Sam.
“What’s it about?” she asked. “This book of yours?”
There in Moore’s study, in that cinder block of a house high on a hill above Hollywood, California, Sam revealed something even his publisher didn’t know. He told Moore the plot of his new novel. Not just the logline, as he usually did when asked about a new project, but the entire thing, from beginning to end, twists and turns and plot points that critics would preface with a blinking neon sign: SPOILERS AHEAD!
He told it all.
“It begins with a house. Not a Gothic mansion but a house like any other, in the middle of a small Kansas town. A family moves in. A husband, a wife, and two kids—a daughter, Alex, fifteen; and a son, Jake, ten. At first everything is just fine. Dad gets a new job. Mom joins the local PTA. But something’s off. Alex senses it at first but quickly dismisses it. Jake can’t shake it though. At night, there are sounds from the wall at the end of the third-floor hallway, just past what is apparently the only room up there, a sewing room.
“Then things start to go south. Dad has a pretty young assistant at work and he can’t stop thinking about what it would be like to fuck her, even though his family is the most important thing in his life. Not just sleep with her but fuck her, whether she liked it or not. Mom, a staunch pacifist, is starting to have terrifyingly vivid daydreams about brutally murdering the loudmouthed rich bitch mother of one of Jake’s schoolmates. And Alex, once an honor student, athlete, and all-around outgoing girl, has become reclusive, a teenage Renfield, collecting dead bugs and birds and eventually hiding something far, far worse beneath a cover of leaves in the basement.
“Jake senses the changes, not only in his family but in himself. He’s ten years old, experiencing for the first time the brutal social Darwinism that will make junior high and high school a living hell. He finds himself reveling in the cruelty he can inflict on weaker kids, relishing the cheers of the popular crowd. One day, he shoves a stick into the spokes of a classmate’s bicycle. The poor kid goes flying, breaking his leg. And as the cool kids watch, Jake reaches down to his fallen classmate and gives that fractured tibia a little twist, just to hear the bones grind together. It isn’t really the fact that Jake enjoys doing this that scares him; it’s that he knows what he’s doing is completely wrong and still he does it, as if he’s standing outside of his body and watching some other kid named Jake, a stranger with his face, carry out these sadistic acts.”
Outside, a cloud seemed to pass in front of the sun, even though the sky had been clear and blue for miles when Sam arrived. Moore shuffled her bare feet, placing one behind the other as if she meant to run away at any moment. She gripped the edges of her kimono and pulled them tight. A darkness was creeping up behind her. A coldness had invaded the house.
“So Jake begins to suspect the house,” Sam continued. “He delves into its history, first uncovering what seems like a series of random mishaps involving previous owners. And then a pattern begins to emerge. Each occupant only inhabited the house for one year before something in their lives went terribly, inexplicably wrong. One man walked a mile barefoot in the snow just to shoot his neighbor. A son locked his little sister in an abandoned refrigerator and left her to die, gasping for breath and crying for her mother. And at the beginning of this trail of death sat one incident in particular—a man was murdered by thieves and his girlfriend strung up by her neck in the tree out front.”
Sam paused here, reading the recognition on Moore’s face. “I know,” he said. “That one sounds familiar.”
Moore simply gave a nod. She was, for possibly the first time in her life, speechless.
Sam took a breath and continued. “Anyway, the more Jake researches the house, and the more he fights its influence, the louder those sounds grow behind the wall of the third-floor hall. It’s as if something is trying to get out. But he is the only one who can hear it.
“Then, while he’s in the yard, Jake makes a startling discovery. The exterior of the house seems to extend a good eight feet farther than the third-floor hallway. He gets to thinking—what if there’s a room behind that wall? So as his family falls apart around him, taken over by the evil within the house, Jake chips away at that wall, trying to gain access to the room beyond and what he hopes will be the secret to the omnipotent terror.
“And then there’s Tommy.”
“Tommy,” Moore said, the words little more than an exhaled breath.
“He knows the power that lies behind the wall. And Tommy wants it all for himself.”
It seemed as if Moore had stopped breathing. She stood frozen, paler than he had ever seen her, bloodless flesh against her pitch-black hair.
“It all comes to a head one night near the end of their first year in the house, the same night that Dad rapes and nearly murders his assistant, the same night that Mom follows that rich bitch mother home with the plan to bash her Botoxed brains in, the same night that Alex lures a classmate into the basement to show him the surprise that is now rotting beneath that mound of dried leaves. That night, Tommy—a local handyman in my story—slips into the house and breaks through the wall to peer into the absolute darkness on the other side.”
Sam’s tale came to an abrupt end. At first Moore simply stared at him, blinking, waiting for the story to continue. When it did not, she cleared her throat, readying it for the first word she would speak in a quarter of an hour.
“What does he find?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper.
“I don’t know,” Sam replied. “That’s where I hit my first bout of writer’s block since I’d started writing, like inspiration slammed on the brakes and my novel skidded to a dead stop.” He pointed to the screen of the laptop computer, tapping it where the cursor steadily blinked. “And I’m guessing that’s where you stopped too.”
Moore sucked in a trembling breath.
It’s happening to him.
For the first time in six months, there was someone she could talk to, someone who might understand what she was going through.
She looked into Sam’s ey
es and said, “I feel it too, like I’m back there. In the house. Sometimes I’m not sure I ever left.”
He reached out and touched her hand. She did not pull away.
“I know,” Sam said. “I know.”
Just tell him, Moore thought.
But I don’t know if I trust him, a second voice said. It was the voice of a younger Moore. Of a girl everyone called Theresa.
You don’t have a lot of fucking options right now, do you?
Moore swallowed hard and began to describe her novel.
Some of the character names were different, their backstories and relationships less family oriented, their horrible transformations much darker and sexually perverse, but as Moore laid out her own tale, from the discovery of the house to the moment where the bite of the hammer (or in Moore’s case, a hatchet) slams into a man’s skull in hopes of opening that third-floor wall, she realized what Sam said was true.
They were writing the exact same novel.
Perhaps even more surprising than this discovery was how Moore reacted. Even she expected herself to go off into a classic Moore temper tantrum, throwing objects and expletives wildly around the cluttered room. Instead, she gave a long, deep sigh, her shoulders drooping as every muscle in her body relaxed for the first time in almost a year.
You’re growing up, girl, she chided herself.
“I wrote nearly a million and a half words,” she said after a prolonged yet welcome silence. “Three thousand pages. I just couldn’t stop. Not to answer the door or the phone. Barely long enough to eat and piss. I even abandoned the book I’d been working on before we went to the Finch House. I was insane about that book before I went to Kill Creek, and then . . . I just didn’t care about it anymore. Only this story mattered.”
“I was up to twelve hundred pages,” Sam admitted, angry that part of him felt this wasn’t nearly enough compared to Moore’s output. “I was overwriting everything and I knew it, but as long as I was writing . . .” His voice trailed off.
“This is ridiculous,” Moore said suddenly, crossing her arms tightly over her chest, her eyes searching the room, looking for an answer that wasn’t there. “I mean, we went to Kill Creek. We were inspired by it. And now we’re writing about it, that’s all. That’s why this is happening.”