by Derek Milman
Dedication
FOR BRIAN, WHO ALWAYS PULLS ME TOWARD THE LIGHT.
FOR RACHEL, WHO WOULD HAVE LOVED THE STUFF ABOUT MONSTERS.
FOR MY FAMILY: MOM, DAD, JORDAN, LORIN, ISLA, AND HENRY, WHO HAVE READ
EVERYTHING I’VE WRITTEN (OR WILL ONE DAY WHEN THE TIME IS RIGHT.)
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Part I
Chapter One: Return to Moldavia
Chapter Two: Horror Is Hell on Little Boys
Chapter Three: The Two-A.M. Succubus
Chapter Four: The Last Will and Testament of Lucien Joseph Heyward
Chapter Five: No Favorites
Part II
Chapter Six: The Surface of Things
Chapter Seven: Away
Chapter Eight: The Ciller Cauliflowers
Chapter Nine: Stanhope, Alive!
Chapter Ten: Smithereens
Chapter Eleven: Blasted
Chapter Twelve: The Psychedelic Soldier
Chapter Thirteen: Crepuscular Dusk
Part III
Chapter Fourteen: Duelers
Chapter Fifteen: Good-Bye, My Peach
Chapter Sixteen: Twicking Ham Station
Chapter Seventeen: Other People’s Dreams
Chapter Eighteen: The Ballad of Alastair and Abigail
Chapter Nineteen: Scream All Night
Chapter Twenty: Rusty Blades
Chapter Twenty-One: Beautiful Nightmares
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Derek Milman
Back Ad
Copyright
About the Publisher
Part I
Chapter One
Return to Moldavia
SLIGHTLY BEFORE DINNER, KEENAN HOUSE, THE GROUP HOME WHERE I live, gets a call that my homosexual exorcism is scheduled to take place next Thursday at four.
“But I’m not homosexual. And I’m not possessed,” I say to Len, my counselor.
“You sure?” asks Len. He cracks open a PBR and takes a long, gurgling sip.
“Bet you’re both,” says my roommate, Jude, pulling on his boxing gloves.
“Actually,” says Len, belching, softly punching his gut, “I think it’s your brother calling.”
Oren. Of course.
Late-afternoon sunlight smears across the cinder-block walls through broken, yellowed blinds. I throw down my graphic novel, which I was actually half enjoying, and roll out of my sagging lower bunk with a groan. I walk down the hall and grab the phone.
“Why are you calling me?”
“’Cause I know you have lots of homo demons inside you,” says Oren, stifling one of his loud, chirpy laughs. “And I thought maybe it was time for a devil cleanse.”
“Uh-huh.” I hear projected voices in the background—like announcements on a PA or something. “Where are you?”
“Hospital.”
“What?”
“We’re burying Dad next week. Funeral is Thursday.”
“Dad died?”
“No, no.”
My dad has been slowly dying for forty years. Emphysema, hairy cell leukemia, diabetes, arthritis; it’s like he just went shopping one day for chronic diseases and never made any returns. More recently, he’s been sliding into dementia.
Thing is, this might really be it. The doctors are pretty sure. “He has two weeks max,” says Oren.
“Shit.” I bite my thumbnail—an old nervous habit instantaneously reborn. I’m suddenly terrified that my family, who I was legally emancipated from three years ago, might be planning something deeply, morbidly insane. But it’s not as bad as all that.
Just a live funeral.
“A what?” The phone slips out of my hands. I juggle it back to my ear.
“Dad’s final wish was to be buried alive,” says Oren.
“His what was what?”
Oren’s voice takes on that swoony, nostalgic glaze that always makes me want to stab him in the face with a corn holder. “Just like Veronica Bellwether in The Curse of the Mummy’s Tongue, his first film.”
I hear my eyes blinking. “Is this even legal?”
“I highly doubt it. I’ve made arrangements for you to be picked up at the orphanage at noon.” He lowers his voice. “Are they assaulting you over there, Dario? I mean, sexually.”
I know what he meant. I roll my eyes. “Only on Tuesdays.”
“Do they pilfer your valuables? Beat you with pillowcases filled with bar soap? Glue your eyes shut while you’re asleep? Ejaculate into your socks?”
I refuse to tell Oren that maybe one or two of those things has happened maybe once or twice.
“Have the other wanton orphans there ever tricked you into one of those atomic sit-ups?” He cackles. “Those are cruel.”
“I’m not going. And don’t call me again.” I hang up.
I stand there, staring at the phone. There’s a goopy brown stain on the wall above. Chocolate? Roach repellent? Something worse? I start to itch. Just hearing Oren’s voice gave me hives, dammit.
“I need the phone,” says Hal, an eighth-grade albino with ADD, standing behind me.
I clench and unclench my hands. “I need a moment. And I need Benadryl.”
I head back to my room, pop two caplets out of the foil, and swallow them down with the remains of some warm Gatorade. People say you can slap hives away, but that’s a load of crap, and trying just makes you look like an asshole.
Antihistamines always give me terrifying dreams. That night, with Jude snoring loud as ever above me, I dream I’m locked in a closet. Someone with a nail gun is shooting at me through the slatted door; I see the shadow of a hulking man outside, morphing into unnatural, demonic shapes. When I can’t dodge or duck the nails anymore, they start piercing my flesh, and I slowly transform into that dude from Hellraiser.
I wake up exhausted. I hate that.
That day, after school, I get another call. Expecting Oren again, I bark into the phone to stop calling me, but actually it’s Hayley.
“Oh,” I say, startled and a little embarrassed. “I’m so sorry. I . . .”
“It’s okay,” she says.
There’s just crackling on the line because neither of us knows what to say. The sound of her voice literally flattened me against the wall. I look cartoonish, like someone being chased by a ghost.
My body starts catching up to the barrage of emotions ballooning inside me, their colors merging into a muddy black, so all the physiological shit starts. I scratch like crazy under my chin. My eyes burn.
“I think I’m allergic to these random phone calls from home,” I tell her.
“Home,” she says with a little laugh. “Is that what you still call it?”
“That word just fell out of my mouth.”
“I haven’t talked to you in so long.”
I nod, to no one. “Almost six years, I guess.”
“How are you, Dario?”
“I’m fine. I’m not going to this thing. Oren shouldn’t have told you to call me.”
“He didn’t.”
“Oh.” Hayley calling me out of the blue makes everything seem more real and serious. I never made a purposeful, conscious choice to cut off contact with her. It was just part of the new reality I chopped open for myself when I left home. It became an unspoken rule that it was easier for both of us if we didn’t keep in touch. Hearing her voice, which hasn’t changed one bit, is like remembering a dream.
“I think you might regret it later if you weren’t there,” she adds.
I scratch at my neck. “Why?”
I have a vision of her then: a girl in a flowered dress stained by splotches of buttercups and dandelions, strawberr
y-blonde hair curled at the ends, blowing behind her in the breeze, running through a meadow on a sun-streaked day.
It’s part memory, part . . . Claritin commercial.
“I think you should say good-bye to your dad.”
I close my eyes and lean my head against the wall. “Did he even ask about me?”
After a moment: “No.”
There’s a wash of silence. For some reason I think of a battlefield, quiet and still, dying flares raining down on bloodstained grass, stamped flat.
“It’s also me being selfish,” she says. “I don’t want to be there without you. It wouldn’t feel right.”
I take the phone away from my ear and press it against my forehead for a second. She says something else, but I can’t hear her, like she’s drifting away. I put the phone back to my mouth. “Sorry. What?”
“I said: I don’t know what else to say. That’s all I’ve got.”
“This whole thing sounds insane, Hayley.”
“Are you surprised?”
My family doing something utterly insane doesn’t much surprise me, no.
“Let me know if you change your mind,” she says.
“I will.” I breathe in, filling my lungs. “Thanks for calling, Hay.”
“I feel like I had to.”
“It’s . . . good to hear your voice.”
“It’s good to hear your voice too, Dario.”
There’s a second of dead air, as if she’s waiting, or we’re both waiting for something more, before she hangs up, with a messy rattle.
I’m so startled by Hayley’s call, at first I can’t fathom what she’s really asking me to do: Go back home. Say good-bye to my dad. Forever. I never thought I’d go back there. But I was stupid to think this moment wouldn’t come. What if Hayley is right? What if I’d regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t see him again before his death?
Later, I run the idea by Jude. He’s sweating profusely, attacking a standing punching bag in a basement storeroom stacked with moldering files documenting every adoption that went awry. “So now, what? What? You want to go back there?” He whirls around to face me, spraying sweat into my eyes.
“Don’t you think I should? It’s my dad’s funeral.”
“The trick is staying away from all that shit that brings back the bad feelings.”
“Yeah. I did. For years.”
“Remember what you were like when they brought you in here? You were an uncontrollable mess.”
He’s right. I was not in a good state. I had anger issues that needed to be dealt with. Those first few months I’d cry myself to sleep every night.
“Like a rabid wolf abandoned by its pack,” he’s saying.
“I’ve put time and distance between me and that stuff.”
“You think you’ve moved on from your crappy childhood?”
“I think I’m better now, yeah. I think we might disagree on this.”
Gradually, I had moved away from the dark thoughts, the negative emotions, and embraced life here at Keenan. I don’t think it’s totally dangerous to revisit the remnants of my childhood. In fact, I think as Hayley said, I could regret not going. And that could haunt me. Getting closure might not be such a bad thing—now that I have this one last chance.
I try to explain all this to Jude.
“Fine. Go! But just for the day! That’s the rule. You come back right after.”
“Okay.”
“That’s the rule,” he repeats, all muffled, through his mouthpiece.
“Why are you wearing that mouthpiece? The punching bag won’t hit you back.”
He squints. “Don’t get sucked in, Dar. Don’t spend the night there.”
“There might be, like, hors d’oeuvres or something after the—”
“Huh? What? Just come back right after!”
Jude, oiled with foamy sweat, adopts a mock predatory crouch. He looks like a panther, disturbed in its rainforest ravine, that isn’t going to take any more shit. He can be a little controlling, but I know he means well. “When did your dad die?” he says. “You didn’t mention—”
“Uhhh . . .” I back toward the door, wanting this conversation to be over because I kind of made up my mind already. “Uh, he’s not dead yet.”
Jude’s eyes become bewildered slits. “What?”
I tell him about the live funeral like it’s something people just do on occasion.
Jude smacks his gloves together. “This is real? Like, this is fucking real?”
“Apparently.” I start scratching my neck, my arms.
“Christ, look at you.”
I regard my angry, red, mottled skin. “I know.”
“You think you’re past it all, but look at yourself.”
He may have a point. But this is just stupid: getting a rash just because someone called from home. This is childish crap that I need to get over. I have to confront them. I have to confront my past. Then there won’t be any more hives.
“This is just residual weakness,” I say, regarding my skin. “I can get stronger. I need to get stronger.”
“You are strong. You were strong when you left.”
“Even stronger.”
Jude gives me a hard look, shakes his head at me and socks the bag. “Just make sure someone there has an EpiPen.”
Oren sends a black hearse, because you know, why the hell not?
Sunglasses on, I slide down the cool leather seats, wanting to be swallowed up by the car, which smells like Windex and pine trees. After about thirty minutes of queasy twists and turns over hills and quaint covered bridges, I see the sign approaching.
Moldavia Studios.
As the ivy-covered gates swing open, I get this flashbang of anxiety, and my confidence weakens. I sit forward and open my mouth, about to tell the driver, Please, for the love of God, just turn the hell around. But we’re already through the gates, crawling up the long, winding driveway. I catch my breath again, which keeps fluttering away like a kite, as the castle looms over me, guilting me for being gone too long. The hearse lurches to a stop. I just sit there for a second. Then I open the door and step outside into the chilly, late-April air.
My father is ninety-one years old, meaning he was seventy-four when I was born. My older brother, Oren, is twenty years older than me. He probably should have become a surrogate father to me, given our weird family dynamics. But Oren has always been . . . Oren. Too consumed with the studio, and its innumerable daily needs, to deal with anything else. And slowly, as my dad began descending further into dementia, Oren became Moldavia’s de facto studio chief as well as its principal producer.
And my mother was committed to a psychiatric hospital when I was seven. So no one was really looking after me by the time I left this place. When I was twelve, I rode my bike over a small cliff. I broke my collarbone and two ribs. I was in the hospital for five days before anyone from home realized I was gone. A week later I had a lawyer. Two weeks after that, I began the process of moving into Keenan House.
Now, I make my way onto the sloping meadow of the east lawn. The grass is always a healthy, gleaming green, impeccably maintained, and seemingly never ending, as it stretches for miles. They filmed Undead Nocturne out here—four weeks of twilight shoots, chasing that thin window of cerulean light, actors twirling through the grass in gossamer rags, their herky-jerky zombie ballet restless, tragic, and hilarious all at once.
It became one of our biggest cult classics, bootleg DVDs circulating for years on eBay in the cinema geek underground. We went massively over budget on that one. Someone had to remind my dad we make B-movies here, and he’s not Bertolucci. He might disagree.
In the early days, Moldavia had distribution deals with various Hollywood studios, but as interest waned, Moldavia began distributing its own films. Film scholars and pop culture writers frequently compare the studio, and its weirdly inclusive family, to Andy Warhol’s Factory and John Waters’s Dreamlanders.
“And here’s Dario,” says Oren in his
deep, booming voice, arms extended, “the prodigal son.” He’s holding court by a long table draped in white linen, near the entrance to the lawn, where a bartender is handing out glasses of wine and champagne.
Oren rips himself away from the small, intense crowd. I’m not sure who they are. They look like a combination of random mourners and obsessed horror fans (Oren calls them “squeezers”). But that makes no sense, since outsiders aren’t allowed through the gates. Oren is holding a white-tipped cane even though he can walk just fine.
He’s wearing a dark-purple tuxedo, white shoes, and a top hat.
He takes my arms and extends them out like he’s measuring me for a suit. “Ack!” he says, doing that thing where he makes random noises. He frowns at me—my faded Fangoria T-shirt, my ripped jeans—like I’m the one who showed up dressed all wrong.
He clucks his tongue. “You didn’t have a suit, Dario?”
“You look like Mr. Peanut’s closeted uncle, so let’s not judge.”
“Come, come,” he says, pulling at me, wanting me to meet the gaggle of mourners/squeezers, all of them decked out like they’re attending a Mardi Gras party in the underworld. But my eyes are locked on Hayley. She’s coming toward me with the sweetest smile, champagne flute in her hand, auburn hair flowing in nervy, seismic curls over her shoulder. A quiver runs through my body.
“Just a sec,” I say to Oren, wriggling out of his grasp and away from the hungry crowd. I steer Hayley into a more secluded spot.
“I’m glad you came,” she says, hugging me.
“Yeah, well, I had no other plans, so.”
“I’m surprised, actually.”
I’m not sure what to say. I’m kind of surprised myself.
She lowers her head. “I wasn’t sure. About calling you. But I felt it was the right thing to do. I’m so sorry, Dario.”
“About calling?”
She takes a sip of champagne, giving me a slanted look with the glass to her lips. I never forgot her eyes are the color of bruised pears. “About your dad.”
I nod. “So this is . . . actually a real funeral, then?”
She considers this. “More a . . . send-off.”
“A send-off?”
“Yes. Gosh,” she says, reaching down to readjust her perfectly white high heel, “you really grew up.”