Scream All Night

by Derek Milman

  “Are you really sentimental?” Oren asks me, a frown slicing down his face. “Or do you just have no clue what to do now?”

  I stumble into the center of the room, blocking his trajectory toward the door. “I just want to take a look at it.”

  “Well, I think it’s a potential trigger for you, given everything you’ve said about being traumatized while playing Alastair.”

  I chop my hands through the air. “Oren—”

  “So the question is: Are you faster than me?”

  He positions his wheelchair in front of me like a Formula One racing car.

  But it’s like I’m looking at him through a kaleidoscope. I sway backward on my feet. “What’s going on? Why am I seeing two of you?”

  “Hmmm,” he says, his face spraying into tiny cubes.

  I look into my empty teacup. “Did you . . . Are there mushrooms in this tea?”

  Oh, no he didn’t.

  “Shrooms . . . ayahuasca . . . a few other choice botanicals,” he says in a low voice.

  This can’t be happening. But it is—everything is crawling.

  “You seriously put hallucinogens in my tea!”

  Oren pulls the hood over his face.

  “Who are you, the fucking Scarecrow?”

  “You only have a few days to figure out a whole new idea for a feature film, Dario! I thought I’d help provide some creative inspiration.”

  “I don’t want to hallucinate!” I shout, groping for the door.

  “Well, don’t worry, then, it should only last about twelve to fifteen hours.”

  “Oh my God.” I drop my cup on the floor and run out of the room.

  I have to get to my dad’s office. I have to find that treatment.

  Except it feels like I’m moving through syrup. I slam my shoulder against the wall, hard, as the hallway tilts to the side like a listing ship. “The walls are moving!” I yell. And they are. They’re covered with beetles, their iridescent colors spotting the walls like tiny Christmas ornaments. “Oh God, there’s going to be bugs,” I say, grasping my head. “This is going to be bug themed.”

  I stumble into my room, hoping to stabilize, but I don’t see Jude. The windows are open and the curtains are billowing out; lightning flashes rapidly, like someone fast-forwarding a thunderstorm. The room is full of bright-blue butterflies fluttering everywhere, clustered on the ceiling, flapping their wings. “Okay, that’s not so bad, that’s sort of pleasant,” I say, but out the window, in a sudden flash of lightning, I see my dad’s grave torn open—like he crawled right out of it. “Okay, I don’t like that. I don’t like that at all.”

  “What don’t you like?”

  I smell his cigar before I see him, sitting behind me in a tall, aristocratic armchair. He’s wearing the white tuxedo he was buried in; gray spiders crawl up and down his face as he puffs on his cigar. All the butterflies have turned into spiders.

  “No! Bring back the butterflies!” The room is teeming with spiders: white spotted, red striped, black, furry, all different kinds and sizes. They start dropping down on their invisible webs, shooting down my shirt, getting in my hair, into my ears.

  I start dancing around the room, shaking them off. “Where did the butterflies go?”

  As if in answer to my question, I get pummeled with a wave of nausea. I bend over and throw up a torrent of peacock-colored vomit. There’s weak, wounded flapping in the enormous puddle, and I realize I just puked hundreds of dead, mangled butterflies.

  Oh God, this is so fucked up.

  “Sit down, Dario,” says my dad, indicating another armchair across from him. I topple into the chair. My dad waves the smoke away so I can see his face. He smiles at me warmly. He’s wearing a gleaming golden crown. He comes around behind me and places the crown on my head. “You’re king of the castle now,” he says.

  “Why did you do this to us?”

  He sits back down in front of me. “Do what?” he asks, puffing on his cigar.

  “Force me to come back here. Displace Oren, who wanted this so bad.”

  “Oren is useless. You’ve seen that for yourself! You’re the only one who can lead the studio, Dario. After all, you created my favorite Moldavia character of all time.”

  My words get stuck in my throat. “Alastair was your favorite?”

  “You gave him so much humanity! You understood my vision better than anyone else ever did. You had that dark light inside you. Only you can save Moldavia.”

  “I don’t know how to save this stupid place.”

  “It’s all about Alastair. You know that.”

  “You knew I could get sick like Mom. You’re the one who first told me that! I wanted to make decisions about my own future. But you forced me back here.”

  “You made the choice,” he says, with a nonchalant shake of his head.

  The bathroom sink is in front of me all of a sudden. He’s slowly dragging me toward it as it fills up with water. I shove him off me. “Crawl back to your grave. Molder away like every other corpse, why don’t you.”

  He laughs. “I’ll never truly decay. Not in your mind. You hate me too much.”

  “You don’t matter to me anymore!” I scream.

  But I wonder how true that really is.

  I stagger out into the hall, stretched taut like taffy. Oren is at the opposite end, sitting in his antique wheelchair with spinning brass wheels, hooded and cloaked. He comes at me, rolling as fast as a bowling ball. When he gets closer, he pulls down his hood, but there’s nothing under there—just a swarm of bats.

  “No bats!” I cry.

  I pass by Hugo and Aida’s door, which is wide open; sizzling, cryogenic blue light spills out. They’re holding each other in a tormented La Bohème-ish way, frozen like a diorama in a museum. I hear Aida’s voice echoing: “Let the wounds heal. Don’t let them sink under the surface and fester inside you. . . .”

  “I tried!”

  “You broke your promise,” she calls after me. “You came back!”

  “I didn’t really have a choice,” I mutter as I run past their room, down the dark hallway, trying to get to my dad’s office, but I’m dizzy and disoriented, and I wind up in the last place where I should be right now.

  The Whale Wing.

  The creature effects department resembles a top-secret government research facility, with dissected monster creations designed by Jasper and Barbara, lying on metal slabs. There is an array of life-size Frankenstein-type creatures leaning against the walls, their gray, rotting skin stitched loosely together, eye sockets empty, oversize hands reaching out, grasping. These are Jasper and Barbara’s own versions of Frankenstein’s monster. All the classic monsters used in Moldavia movies were rebooted and rethought so Moldavia wouldn’t have copyright issues with Universal.

  There are shelves lined with quarts of UltraSlime, tubes of food coloring, Karo syrup, adhesives, fake pus, and vials of stuff that makes you look frozen, dusty, or oily.

  A gaggle of mummies stands in a corner; they’ve all been partially unbandaged, revealing desiccated corpses beneath, with crooked toothless grins. Winged, bat-like creatures with sharp incisors hang from the ceiling, the light shining through their spread, veiny, membranous wings.

  I walk through the various rooms, noting every ashen-faced witch, every Gorgon head. I pass a wall of glass eyes in upsetting colors, another wall of mounted rotting limbs, severed from God knows what. I find a room devoted to what I can only describe as experimental werewolves: giant lycanthropic creatures in midtransformation, in various stages of body hair growth, with various sets of supernatural, apex predator dental work.

  Then the lights go out.

  I sink to the floor and curl into a ball. I can hear, in the darkness, all these creatures freeing themselves from their fastenings. I hear their breathing, the stretching and creaking of malformed bodies and mutant spines. I hear their paws and claws clicking across the floors. The lights flicker on and off, serving only to show me, mockingly, that every creatur
e has now been unleashed.

  There’s a low growl, a wet panting in the darkness, right next to my ear.

  I scurry away into a hallway. At the other end, a coffin is being lowered down; my name is carved on the side. A shaft of light spills down, a sprinkling of soil from above, before the shoveling begins—that horrible thud of soil on wood.

  “Get in,” a voice says. It sounds like my mother.

  I run down more hallways, up another staircase, until I finally stumble into my dad’s old office, which is just as he left it: big oak desk, shelves of books, file cabinets, pictures on the walls—glossy black-and-white stills from classic Moldavia films. I run over to the file cabinets, but someone calls my name from the other end of the office suite. So I keep moving, deeper inside.

  The labyrinthine office is connected to his editing suite (my dad cut his own 35 mm movies on an old Moviola, only switching to Avid fairly recently, when Franklin convinced him to go digital), which is connected to a small art studio with a drafting table (my dad designed the poster art for all his movies).

  I hear water running in the bathroom, at the end of the office suite. I inch open the door. He’s sitting on the edge of the bathtub, puffing on a cigar. He looks younger than he did before, like how he looked when I was a little kid. He’s wearing a maroon silk smoking jacket. He holds out his arms.

  “My boy!” he cries. “We’re finally getting to know one another.”

  “You’re a little late.”

  The cigar smoke, the color of milk spilled on asphalt, spirals around him. “So much judgment, Dario. Don’t think for a second you don’t have some of me inside you.”

  “I’ll get an exorcism.”

  “You demonize me. I bought you that lovely train set for your eighth birthday! Why is it always the bad stuff people remember, and never the good stuff?”

  “Because the bad stuff leaves the scars.”

  He considers that, taking another puff on his cigar.

  “Plus you lit my train set on fire for the last scene of Drink the Blood, My Darling.”

  “Oh, yeah!” he says, pointing his cigar at me. “Great scene, though.”

  “I wanted to be in Zombie Children because it was the only way I could spend time with you. How could you treat me like that?”

  “Look what we created together! I gave you a slice of immortality. No one will ever forget about Alastair. Hugo was right!”

  “But I want them to forget. So I can forget.”

  He throws his head back and laughs at this.

  “Was nothing sacred to you? Not me, not Oren, not Aida, not Hugo, none of the people who lived and worked here, who gave you everything they had?”

  “Your mother was sacred to me. But she was taken from me, and then nothing was ever sacred to me again.”

  “But to hurt someone . . . just to make something you made better.”

  “Your pain was already there. You know that. I just had to strum it.”

  “I was just a kid!”

  “It was never about you, Dario. You never understood that!”

  I move toward him. “Who the hell was it about, then?”

  “We serve our fans. You had the honor of moving them, of staying in their hearts and minds forever. Everything has a price.”

  “I’d rather have just been a normal kid. You never gave me that choice.”

  He cackles again, shaking his head like I’m too self-involved and small-minded to understand him. I can’t stand the sound of his awful laughter anymore.

  I shove him backward into the bathwater, but he instantly dissolves into a burst of foaming bubbles. I’m left staring at my own startled reflection in the water, lit by specks of moonlight from the octagonal skylight over my head.

  I don’t even get the chance to drown him back.

  I run back into his office, open his file cabinets, and start pulling out papers. I find one of those accordion file folders, tied shut. On the front it says Moldavia Treatments (Discarded) written with a black Sharpie in my dad’s handwriting. I grab it. Then I get hit with another wave of nausea.

  Holding the folder to my chest, I lie flat on the floor. Everything’s getting a little less fuzzy. The heartbeat of this experience is starting to flatline.

  Still, a surgical team in green scrubs enters the office in a rush.

  “Hi!” says one of the surgeons, all cheery. “Are you winning the war?”

  “War?”

  “You’re a psychedelic soldier fighting a psychedelic war.”

  “I don’t think I’m winning. . . .”

  “Let us help,” says a nurse.

  They vivisect me with a scalpel while I lie there helpless, then remove tiny furry creatures from my body; they’re squirming—the size and shape of gerbils. They have peel-off googly eyes, the kind that are stuck on cheap toys, and they squeak and chirp as they hop out of my bleeding, torn-open chest.

  “The Goggins!” yells one of the surgeons. “Don’t let the Goggins get away!”

  “Are they all out?” I ask.

  “Almost,” says a nurse, looking down at me. But it’s Oren. I can tell it’s him behind the surgical mask. “It’s okay to close your eyes,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to watch this, either.”

  “I don’t. I don’t want to watch this. . . .”

  I close my eyes and enjoy the fireworks behind my eyelids; my short-circuiting synapses, ricocheting through my brain, as I start to fall asleep. My breathing shudders, and the whistling in my ears becomes a low moan.

  There’s no reason I can think of why I’d ever open my eyes again.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Crepuscular Dusk

  SOMEONE’S SHAKING ME.

  “Huh.” My face is pressed into the floor, my body twisted. My left hand is heavy and numb because I fell asleep with it bent backward under my waist. I roll over onto my back. My vision gyrates, and I see two masked faces staring down at me. One is a bloody ghoul with a meat cleaver splitting it down the middle, and the other is an evil-looking ghost doll with empty marble eyes and a stitched-up mouth.

  I can’t even scream. I just don’t have the strength.

  “It’s us,” one of them says.

  Hayley and Jude remove their masks. “Boo!” says Jude.

  “Are they all out of me?” I croak.

  “Are what out?” says Hayley.

  “Uh.” I look around. “Never mind.” I rub my eyes. “What time is it?”

  “It’s Friday morning,” says Hayley. “Crepuscular Dusk.”

  “Yes!” says Jude, a little too loudly. “Everyone’s running around trying on costumes and making special requests with the creature effects department for the costume ball tonight!”

  I pick myself off the floor and put my throbbing head between my knees. Oren never got to the treatment. I’m still clutching the folder with sweaty hands.

  “Are you okay?” says Hayley. “You ransacked your dad’s office.”

  “Oren spiked my tea.” I grab my head. “I’ve been tripping my ass off.”

  “Oh no,” says Hayley. “How bad was it?”

  I try to stand up but I’m still too dizzy. “Really bad. But I’m okay now.”

  “Let’s get you out of here.” Hayley nudges Jude, and they both gently lift me up under my arms and help me out of the office. When we get back to my room, I collapse into my bed. Hayley hands me a glass of water and asks me what I want to be.

  “Like, when I grow up?”

  “Tonight. We’re all dressing up. I can ask the costume department for whatever. How about the devil? Seems like a good one for you.” She frowns. “What are you doing with that folder?”

  I grip it tighter but don’t answer. I’m too woozy.

  She looks at me, concerned. “You should eat. I’ll bring something up.” She turns and rushes out of the room.

  I lie there for a few moments, on my back, just trying to stabilize. Jude has his thumbs inside the waistband of his gym shorts. “Are you about to strip and s
tart boxing? Because I don’t think I can look at your dick right now.”

  “Nah,” he says. But he was totally about to. “Are you okay?”

  I slide out of bed and swing open the curtains. It’s overcast out. My dad’s grave is undisturbed; dried-up wreaths and dead flowers still surround it. So, yeah, that’s what I wanted to see, and now I feel better. I look over at Jude. “Go punch some shit. I need some fresh air anyway.”

  “You sure?”

  “Totally.” I put on a windbreaker, head outside, and make my way across the west lawn. I’m not tired or hungry or anything. I just want to walk.

  The cool air feels good on my face as my mind settles. I walk till I reach Peabody Lake, where they filmed The Lovers of Dust and Shadow. There’s a rocky beach here, deserted, part of the Moldavia estate proper. I sit on a cold, slimy rock.

  I open the folder.

  There’s no treatment inside for a sequel to Zombie Children. Oren must have burned it before I had a chance to save it.

  Everything else inside the folder is in a kind of malicious order.

  First, there’s a stack of letters tied with baker’s twine, dated about ten years ago—right after my mom was committed. In these letters, my mom talks plainly about her fears of aliens invading and harvesting Earth’s resources.

  Underneath this stack is a treatment my dad wrote for a 2008 Moldavia film called Invasion of the Immortal Wasps, where he seems to weave some of my mom’s delusions into this dumbass plot involving insect larvae and malevolent aliens from a distant star. That movie did pretty well. A lot of squeezers love it. Not sure why it’s in the discarded treatments folder.

  It gets worse.

  There’s another stack of letters. About two years later, when she was most likely on antipsychotics, my mom wrote to my dad—in a fairly clearheaded way—begging to see me. My dad wrote her back, refusing, and reinforcing her delusions that I was a product of alien rape.

  In response, she began writing back, fleshing out these delusions, inspiring a film called The Red Ferrets about a lonely suburban mom who gets impregnated by an alien tennis instructor. The treatment for it is in the folder as well, although this film never got made. My dad, clearly out of ideas, broken, and not knowing how to grieve for my mom, was feeding off her delusions as some twisted way of coping. I’ll bet he felt this kept them connected—purposely addling her mind, exacerbating her mental turmoil.