Scream All Night

by Derek Milman

  “I cannot believe this!” says Oren, slapping the table. “My father wants some moody, restless teenager to take over our studio?”

  “Some moody, restless teenager?” I’ve sunk way down in my chair, hands pressed against my knees, as if to hide from what’s happening.

  “Well, you know,” says Oren, waving me away.

  “I’m still your brother, you dick.”

  Franklin explains that a will is one of the most ironclad legal documents, and contesting it is a lengthy and complicated process.

  “I know that!” Oren yells, standing. He walks over to the pool table and leans over it like he might puke onto the eight ball. “Typical,” he barks into the table.

  “All right, take it easy,” says Hayley.

  “What are your plans?” says Oren, pushing himself off the table, barreling toward me. “Do you intend to depose me as principal director and producer? Or are you going to refuse his request and let the studio, our family legacy, crumble to nothing?”

  For a second I can’t even speak. I just hem and haw. “I . . . have no plans,” I finally manage to croak. “I just found this out like you did! Clearly!”

  “We employ more than one hundred personnel,” says Oren. “What will happen to them now?”

  “It’s not like we’re paying them anymore,” says Hayley.

  I frown. “What? What does that mean?”

  “Dad was running this place into the ground,” says Oren. “We haven’t had the money to keep any salaried positions here for over a year now. People work for room and board. And regular meals.”

  “How come?”

  “Dad wasn’t of sound mind,” says Oren. “At least not toward the end. We still needed to respect his wishes regarding his burial, Dario.”

  I turn to Franklin. “Are you being paid?”

  “Your father paid me a small stipend, which was generous of him,” he says. “That will be ending now.”

  “Then why do people stay here?” I ask, incredulous.

  “Don’t you get it?” Oren snaps. “They have nowhere else to go. Once people come through these gates, very few come out again.”

  He’s right. This is a house full of misfits, everyone unmoored from the world outside these gates. They don’t belong out there. They live in a constantly moving dream world of imagined horrors, spurts of gore, skulking monsters—creatures more aberrant than themselves. After all, it takes true misfits to make believable monsters.

  I scratch my arms. I’m breaking out in hives again. This goddamn place.

  Providing for my mom and Hayley was the right thing to do. My dad must have been guided by some measure of regret or kindness I never knew he was capable of. Making no provisions at all for the rest of the Moldavia family, to safeguard their jobs or lives here, seems cruel at first, but maybe my dad wanted them to be free. And taking the studio away from Oren shows my dad was probably thinking very clearly when he wrote his will. Oren is too scatter-brained to change a light bulb, let alone lead a failing movie studio back to solvency. But giving the studio to me—not even Hayley or Franklin—feels petulant and mean.

  Oren and I look at each other across the table. I feel my dad’s hand from beyond the grave—pitting us against each other.

  “The time frame is absurd,” Oren sputters, looking away from me with revulsion. “Dad never intended for this to work. This was a game to him. One last game. I gave my life to Moldavia.”

  “We all did,” says Hayley.

  “You’re nineteen!” Oren bellows. “You did not. Give. Up. Your. Life.”

  And with that, he swings open the door, bends his body backward like a human slingshot, and flings himself out of the room, slamming the door behind him, rattling a few of the crystal skulls in his wake.

  “Well,” says Franklin, gathering his papers.

  “What are your plans?” Hayley asks me, softly.

  I shrug, sitting back in my seat, feeling like I just got punched in the gut. I didn’t want to come back here. I didn’t want this.

  “It’s your future,” Franklin tells me. “It’s up to you to decide what that is.”

  “What were you going to do after you graduate?” Hayley asks me.

  “I thought about maybe getting a summer job or something.” I wanted to help out at this little indie bookstore I like. I kept picturing myself restocking Cormac McCarthy books while the summer sun set outside, people spooning ice cream out of pink paper cups asking me to recommend good beach reads. It was a really nice, silly fantasy that actually made me feel pretty calm whenever I imagined it.

  “And after the summer?” says Franklin.

  Hayley frowns at me. “Dario. Did you have a plan for after the summer?”

  I cough into my fist. “Well, I sort of got into Harvard.”

  The two of them just stare at me. Everything is suddenly so quiet.

  I applied on a whim. I did no research. I only applied to Harvard . . . because it was Harvard. I never thought I’d actually get in. I never gave much thought to college at all.

  “You sort of got in?” says Hayley. “What does that mean?”

  “No, I did. I got in.” I shake my knees a little. “Free tuition.” I should have known I had a real shot. I have a perfect GPA. My test scores were through the roof. They loved my essay about growing up at Moldavia and then at Keenan.

  “Well, I’m not surprised at all!” says Franklin. “You’re a brilliant boy.”

  “That’s amazing,” says Hayley, looking totally startled. “Congratulations.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” says Franklin.

  I bury my head in my hands. “Because I’m not sure I’m going!”

  “Lord, why?” says Franklin.

  “I mean, I feel so lucky . . . about everything. But I don’t know if college or academia is for me—classes and homework and tests and essays. I don’t know.”

  And that’s the thing. I’ve been living in some kind of institutional setting for most of my life. I want to be free for a while, be a real adult, travel and see the world. I accepted their offer because of the May deadline, but I’m still not sure it’s the right choice for me. I can’t go just because I got in. That can’t be the only reason.

  I didn’t want to bring this up earlier because everyone will say exactly that: I got in, so now I have to go. Jude says that. I don’t want that kind of pressure. And my fantasies about working in the bookstore have started to morph into something more long-term. “I’ve been thinking it might be nice to live a quiet life somewhere secluded and peaceful and work with my hands,” I tell them. “I even thought about going to automotive school and maybe getting a job in a small town as a mechanic.”

  “You’re going to Harvard,” says Franklin, standing, giving me a firm squeeze on the shoulder as he leaves the room. “Or I’ll break your arm.”

  “Yeah.” I smile at Hayley. “I figured he’d say that. That’s what everyone says.”

  “Harvard is a huge opportunity,” she says. Her eyes are flicking around rapidly, like she’s imagining the same opportunity for herself.

  “I know.”

  “Work with your hands?” she says, with a half smile.

  I shrug.

  “Dar,” she says, leaning across the table, “you wouldn’t have applied there—Harvard—if some part of you didn’t want to go. And have that experience.”

  “I wanted to have something . . . just in case.”

  “So Harvard was the backup?”

  I rub at a spot on my shirtsleeve.

  Hayley taps her fingers lightly on the table. I know she’s proud of me, but I also sense something closing off inside her, a half-open gate shuttering down again.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,” I say.

  She looks at me. “Your dad would have wanted you to go.”

  “Seems like he wanted me to run the studio.”

  “Had he known,” she replies.

  My dad must have known I’d have some sort of pla
n after Keenan. I mean, I wasn’t going to play the ukulele in a bus station. Forcing me back here, and having me be solely responsible for the fate of the studio, would be disrupting any plans I’d made for my own future. I want to think good, happy thoughts about this little decision. But it feels like revenge. “Did you know . . . what he was doing with his will?” I ask Hayley.

  She shakes her head. “Honestly. This is all news to me.”

  “You should be studio chief.”

  Hayley dismisses that idea with her eyes. “I never told your dad any of this,” she says, “but I started thinking about my own future when he got sick. When I knew the end was near.”

  “Away from Moldavia?”

  She nods. “It might be cool to move to a big city, go to school myself. . . .” She gazes out the window. “But it just never felt like a real option.”

  “Do you feel trapped here?”

  She smiles to herself, and looks down at her hands. “I rose up the ranks. I helped make Moldavia what it is today. I’m part of its story now. But I lost a lot—and not just both my parents. Moldavia is like a child; it takes all your attention. It’s always moving. It murders any other plans you might have entertained. Things can get pretty lonely here too, despite how it seems.”

  I got out before Moldavia—and all its tentacles—started strangling my life, cutting off circulation to any other kind of future I may have wanted for myself. Before I got in too deep. Listening to her—this is the first time, in a while, when I feel relief, not just guilt, about leaving. But I also feel bad for Hayley. That she didn’t get that choice.

  “You need to do what’s right for you,” says Hayley. “You can’t start worrying about everyone else’s futures, and Moldavia itself, before you consider your own future, and what you want to do with your life.” Hayley sits back and folds her hands on her lap. “And maybe I need to as well,” she adds, softly.

  “Then what happens to everyone here? What happens to the studio?”

  “You heard the will. We sell to Rusty Blade.”

  “But this is our legacy. Oren would be destroyed.”

  “He’d get over it.”

  “He’ll say I’m being selfish.”

  “Sometimes you need to be selfish,” says Hayley.

  Before I head back to Keenan, Hayley and I go for a walk. We don’t say much. My mind is in total turmoil. But it feels great having Hayley by my side.

  It’s still early morning. Dark clouds are moving in, casting their shade over the grounds. We walk across the south lawn as it gets darker and darker. We reach a certain spot where I remember one night the amber moon swung over a cluster of tents spread out on the black grass, all of them lit from inside.

  I stop walking. “The Curdling,” I say to Hayley, with a little laugh.

  The Curdling is a Moldavia trademark. Every Moldavia movie has it: a shocking, gross-out “scream scene,” usually near the end. It comes from bloodcurdling, and it always divides audiences. Some think the Curdling goes too far, while others, the true die-hard Moldavia fanatics, hoot with terrified appreciation. The Curdling in Zombie Children of the Harvest Sun was the penultimate scene in the movie, which we shot way ahead of schedule, on a night when we were supposed to film something else.

  “When I left Moldavia,” I tell her, “I wasn’t prepared for the fact that people would know me already—from that movie, you know? It was weird.”

  “You were a little celebrity?”

  I laugh. “A cult one. Do you ever think about making that movie?”

  “Not so much anymore. I remember the ending, though.”

  “Holding a knife to my throat?”

  She takes my hand in hers, which sends a charge through my body.

  “Yeah,” she says. “I always wondered what came next.”

  I stare out at the lawn as more ominous clouds roll in and blot out the sky.

  My dad pulls me into one of the tents, where the cameras huddle close over Aida, who lies on a blanket, dressed like a country peasant. Her eyes are wild, and she’s crying. I’ve never seen anyone cry like that before. Every time her anguish softens a bit, my dad whispers into her ear, her face goes scarlet again, and she clamps a hand over her mouth, tears pouring out of her eyes. My dad slyly directs the dolly grip and camera op to move in, framing her in a tight close-up. Then he whispers, “CUT.”

  I didn’t even realize they were rolling. I have no idea what’s going on.

  “I thought Valerie was playing the part,” I say, standing stock-still, staring down at Aida, feeling uneasy.

  “I want Aida to do this,” my dad says.

  “Why?”

  “Stop asking questions,” he says. “Focus. This is the Curdling.”

  They paint my mouth and chin with sticky globs of fake blood. My dad tells me I have to pretend to chew on Aida’s throat. She’s playing Lara, a farmer’s wife, who along with her daughter, Abigail (played by Hayley, waiting in an adjacent tent), are the only two survivors of the zombie apocalypse. Alastair’s last living victims.

  “You’ll just be tickling her,” says my dad, seeing the uncertainty on my face, before the cameras roll again. He calls, “ACTION.” I go at her throat, kissing and licking her. I make it sound real and gross, lots of slurping and fake chewing sounds, while Aida continues to sob. But I can’t imagine why she would be so upset by this, and now it’s upsetting me. But then it gets even stranger.

  “I want Alastair to find this giant hunk of candy!” my dad bellows, standing behind the camera, next to Jip, “and I want him to devour it like it’s the last piece of candy on earth. He wants to make Lara jealous that he has this candy, and he’s gonna eat it while she dies. You understand? It’s the last piece of candy he’ll ever have.”

  I nod. But what they hand me looks nothing like candy any kid, living or undead, would ever want to eat: this hunk of rubbery red gelatin; oval shaped, smeared with grape and strawberry jam to make it more palatable.

  I crouch in a corner, in the shadows, where they set my mark. The camera glides in on the dolly track, real close, and they film me gnawing on this cold, hard log of Jell-O. I make smacking sounds with my lips while keeping my eyes on Aida, off-camera, who’s crying hard every time my dad whispers in her ear. And all I can think is: what’s she crying about? It’s just some stupid Jell-O.

  Of course, editing tied it all together. I was too young to know what the scene was really about at the time. In the actual movie, we see Alastair tear out Lara’s throat, but she doesn’t die right away.

  And she’s pregnant.

  And he’s still hungry. . . .

  So in the movie, there’s a cut to someone else’s long, yellowed, curling, gross-ass fingernails tearing open a prosthetic silicone womb filled with fake blood and guts (some of it made out of pasta) and a Jell-O fetus, made by the creature effects department.

  The movie cuts back to me devouring Lara’s unborn baby, while she screams in a wrenching close-up: the last thing she sees before she dies. That’s what I was really eating. I never knew it. Kind of horrible, yeah, but it was silly. The whole movie was.

  In the final scene, I discover Abigail hiding under a table in another room of the farmhouse. The scene was filmed in super-tight closeups; that’s why they set up all the tents. They already struck down most of the sets, having filmed the wider shots weeks earlier. I drag her out of her hiding spot and lie on top of her, pinning her down.

  I’m about to go for her throat, but I stop. Her beauty stops me, and in that moment we see the last shred of humanity left in Alastair, which is what makes him so tragic, that there’s still part of a human soul inside him—enough of one to be stopped cold by a young girl’s beauty. This is the scene in the movie that gained its cult following. This is the scene in the movie that made it hard for fans to forget about Alastair.

  Abigail reveals a large kitchen knife that she was holding behind her back. She holds it to my throat with trembling hands. But she can’t kill me. I see beauty in her and
she sees innocence in me. So even though I’m probably going to kill her in a moment, she can’t bring herself to kill me first. We just stare at each other, Hayley and I.

  And that’s how the movie ends.

  Chapter Five

  No Favorites

  THE HEARSE DROPS ME BACK AT KEENAN HOUSE LATER THAT MORNING. After a pretty dull school day, I’m back in the basement rec room full of sticky tables, hard plastic chairs, wonky shelving holding worn-out board games, and thin slits of window from above, helping Oscar, a fifth grader, with his math homework when Jude charges in. “Yo, Dar!”

  I look up. “Hey. Let me finish up with Oscar.”

  Jude sticks out his tongue. “Oscar, bah! i Déjanos solos, tenemos que hablar!”

  “¡Necesito ayuda con esto!” the boy shouts.

  Jude growls. “Later, eh? ¡Haz tu propio trabajo!”

  “¡Esta mierda es difícil!” Oscar rolls his eyes, sulkily picks up his homework, and leaves the room, but not before flipping off Jude. Jude stamps, pretends to lunge at him, and the kid flees with a little yelp.

  “He has a test Monday.”

  “The Common Core can suck me,” says Jude. “What happened at Moldavia?”

  I only tell him about the reading of the will. He immediately goes into his Godfather thing. “They’re not pulling you back in.”

  “I didn’t say I was going back.”

  “Harvard.” He points at me. “You have a responsibility to all of us.”

  I throw up my hands. “All of you? What about what I want, man?”

  Jude starts boxing the air. “Not everyone gets to go to Harvard. I’ll be lucky if I don’t spend my life in jail.”

  “Don’t talk like that. Don’t be a moron.”

  An Irish-Italian amateur pugilist with Mommy issues, Jude’s dream is to be the welterweight champion of the world. He walks around Keenan House wearing only silver gym shorts, black high-top Everlast boxing shoes, and cherry-red boxing gloves. His nose has been broken nine times. It literally looks like someone stuck a potato in the center of his face, but that hasn’t stopped him from sleeping with every female our age or older who’s come through these doors, including a few key staff members—or so he claims.