Candle in the Attic Window

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  The conversation rises and falls, allowing bits and pieces to be distinguished. They’re talking about Zenda, about how each of them heard of him and what brought each of them to this house. Danielle is trying to explain her blog to Alexia, who has never seen it. “Old movies just seem to capture weirdness better than new ones,” Danielle says loudly, warming to her subject. “Back when there were smaller crews, when things were made by hand. Weirdness slipped in that way, infiltrated, got in through the cracks and the crappy special effects. When you watch an old, weird movie, you feel like you’re watching something real, but also something not real, too. Like something from a dream, or an alternate universe. A universe where the sky’s a painted backdrop and fake trees grow up out of the fake ground.”

  There’s laughter and Danielle seems a bit embarrassed by her vehemence. More drinking follows, more talking, but nothing of substance. Eventually, they all agree to get some sleep on the cots they’ve brought with them. One by one, the lights are dimmed or extinguished and then, in the dark, someone turns off the camera.

  •

  Alexia Cole, Former Actress

  I never wanted to go back to that house. Zach said I was the only actor who’d ever been in one of Zenda’s movies that they could track down, but I don’t know. I don’t know who else was in them, or if they’re dead, or in hiding, or working, or retired. I don’t know if Zach and his company even tried to track anyone else down. I don’t much care.

  I was the little girl who gets kidnapped in Gothic!, Zenda’s first movie. I was 13 at the time. After that, I was in a few other movies, always little parts: someone’s daughter, someone’s niece, a girl someone talked to in a flower shop. I was in some commercials as I got older, and then I got a recurring part in one of those murder mystery TV shows. Evenings at Sullivan’s, I don’t know if you’ll remember it. I wasn’t a main character or anything. I was a waitress at the titular bar where the amateur detectives got together to solve the crimes. That’s it. My hair was always in a braid down my back. Anyone who recognizes me at all these days usually recognizes me from that.

  After my mom died, I quit the business. She was always the one who’d wanted me to be an actress. I bought a partial share in a restaurant up in Seattle and I never looked back. That sounds good, doesn’t it, that I never looked back? But of course I did, or I wouldn’t be here.

  I’m not honestly sure why I agreed to do this documentary. Nostalgia? I don’t think so. The paycheck they offered me for it was a pretty big incentive. Easy money for spending a weekend in Zenda’s old house, dredging up the past.

  I’d forgotten about the nightmares. They started back up the night after I agreed to the job. I used to have them all the time after filming Gothic! They’d have been enough to make me quit right then, if it hadn’t been for my mom. But I can’t ever remember them after I wake up. Just that there’s a white hand. That’s it. You’d think I’d been in that stupid Phantom Hand movie, instead of Gothic! But, truth be told, I never even saw it. I never saw any of Zenda’s movies, not even my own, and I don’t care to.

  •

  The camera comes back on to darkness. There’s nothing to see, but there are sounds. Movement, people talking. “Did you hear that?” a voice says, close by.

  “Someone screamed?”

  “Is everyone here?”

  A light comes on, from somewhere off to the side of the frame, blinding.

  “Where’s Alexia?” Danielle says. “What happened to Alexia?”

  “Maybe she went to the bathroom?”

  The camera is lifted up and carried along as the group moves, at first in different directions and then en masse toward the staircase. There they find Alexia, standing at the bottom, staring up. She looks strangely white in the dark, as though her clothes got lighter since she went to sleep. She’s staring up into the shadows at the top of the stairs and doesn’t seem to notice them approach, until Thom puts his hand on her shoulder. She jerks away, turns to stare at him with big, dark eyes.

  “Hell with this,” she says, after a long, silent moment. “Hell with this!” Danielle tries to approach her, but Alexia pulls away. “No. I’m leaving. I’ll call a fucking cab. You guys can take it up with my lawyer how much of that money I don’t collect. I’m gone.”

  She walks away, headed toward the front door. Danielle disappears off camera, following her. The camera stays, swiveling up to peer into the darkness where Alexia was staring. “What happened?” Thom’s voice asks quietly. “What did she see?”

  •

  Thom Dorn, Documentary Crew

  Before we got started, I sat down and watched all of Zenda’s movies over one weekend. In order. I don’t know what I was expecting. Some kind of connection, maybe? Some overarching something that you wouldn’t have noticed normally? Some indication of the mystery that was coming?

  I got nada. Zilch. They’re just a bunch of crappy old movies. There’re some good bits and mostly, they’re harmless. Just boring. But man, it’s disappointing, y’know? Whenever a movie gets lost, or disappears, or never gets finished, you always want it to be something special. A masterpiece. Something magic. And chances are, this thing, this King in Yellow, chances are it was just going to be another boring old horror movie, destined for an eternity of afternoon cable.

  Maybe not getting made was the best thing that could’ve happened to it.

  •

  The camera goes off after Thom’s question and when it comes back on, Danielle is in the middle of talking, saying that they should stay with Alexia until the cab comes.

  “You can,” Zach says. From his voice, you can tell he’s the one holding the camera again. “We need to see what she saw.”

  They’re at the top of the stairs, standing at the beginning of some upstairs hallway. Maybe the one that recurs in The Phantom Hand, it’s hard to tell. Thom and Caleb are holding lights.

  “What’d she say?” Caleb asks.

  “I don’t know. She just said she was leaving, that she hated this place, had always hated this place, never should have come back. Something about a dream she had when she was a little kid, something about a white hand.”

  “Sounds like she had a bad dream now,” Zach says. He’s walking down the hallway as he talks, away from the stairs, taking the camera with him.

  “Bad dreams don’t make you call a cab in the middle of the night,” Danielle replies.

  “Maybe it was really bad,” Thom offers, his voice, like Danielle’s, coming from somewhere outside the camera’s field of vision now.

  Their lights splash off the dusty walls, off the wainscoting and the hall tables crowned with statues that throw off misshapen shadows. At the far end, where the hall turns a sharp corner, there’s a black space, a door. “Was that there before?” Caleb’s voice asks.

  “No,” Danielle says softly, her voice barely audible.

  “It’s a secret door,” Thom says. “Maybe that’s what Alexia found.”

  The camera draws nearer to it and as it does, the door becomes more obvious, a piece of the wall, well-disguised, that opens outward, now partially ajar where before it was hidden. There’s a brief, hushed debate and then Thom’s hand appears on the edge of the door, swings it open. As he does, a weight shifts inside and everyone stumbles back, the camera bobbing madly, as a body tumbles out onto the floor.

  •

  Zach Gordon, Director

  Nothing was ever recovered from the fire, from the house. No one ever found any film, so it was assumed that it was destroyed in the fire. No one ever found any bodies, but since Zenda and Prince and that actress, Wray, never showed up again, they were assumed to have been killed. Everything about the fire, about the movie, is assumed, guessed, reconstructed from a lack of contrary evidence. Everything.

  How can you hear about that and not want to solve it, want to look into it, want to try to shed some light, whatever light you can, on what must have happened there that night? What secrets must be buried in that old house?

>   •

  The corpse is a horror, although the camera doesn’t linger on it. What you get are glimpses, impressions. Something disfigured, waxy, melted. Hideous scars long ago ossified, preserved in the space behind the wall. It’s dressed in a suit that’s decades out of date and holds a fire axe clutched like a baby to its chest.

  There are exclamations from the crew, curses. “What are we going to do?” “Who is it?” “Is it Zenda?” “What happened?” “Should we call the police?” The voices are loud, sharp, hard to pin down, but none of them belongs to Zach.

  Zach is still holding the camera and it has very little time for the corpse. It swings up, peering into the small, dark, hidden space behind the wall. It’s tiny, barely the size of a closet, and there’s a bench in there where the corpse was perched. On the bench is a canister of film and the camera approaches it for a closeup on the handwritten label, which reads, in small, tight script: THE KING IN YELLOW.

  Cut to: the camera is being held by shaky hands, maybe still Zach’s, maybe not, while someone – it’s impossible to tell who – feeds a reel of film into a projector. The camera shifts and, for a moment, the screening room in Zenda’s mansion comes into focus. Like most of the rest of the house, it’s festooned in dust and cobwebs. There shouldn’t be any electricity, but it looks like the house lights are on and dim, and when the camera swings back, the projector is whirring to life.

  Cut to: the camera lies on its side in the aisle of the screening room, abandoned. The whir of the old projector can be heard from somewhere and a flickering, silvery radiance lights up the shot from the right-hand side of the frame. The only things visible from this angle are the legs of the screening room chairs and, beyond them, the feet of some of the documentary crew.

  The film they’re screening has no music and the dialogue is so muted as to be mostly inaudible, just a distant murmur, like an incantation in another language.

  Gradually, the light shifts from silver to pale gold. Then other sounds join the whir of the projector and the muttering from the screen. First, small noises, breaths and gasps from the audience. A sound like someone crying, quietly. Then bursts of dangerous laughter. Then the first scream.

  There’s a commotion, a sound like a lot of people moving at once, and something strikes the camera, sends it spinning. When it comes to rest, it’s pointed straight into the bloodied face and staring eyes of Alexia Cole.

  The camera comes back on. A mass exodus is occurring toward the front door of the house. Everything is a jumble; the camera shakes and jostles in someone’s hand, revealing the phantom shapes of running people and dark shadows all around. It’s impossible to tell who is where, if the crew is all there, if anyone else is.

  “Shut the camera off,” someone is saying. “Shut the goddamn camera off!”

  There’s a scuffle and the camera dips sickeningly for a moment as though the arm that holds it has suddenly gone limp. Then, abruptly, silence. All movement stops. The camera swings slowly back up.

  Ahead is the front door, with light behind it, though it’s still night outside. In the doorway is a figure. At first, it’s impossible to make out; it could be anyone. Some member of the crew separated from the throng. Anyone.

  Then, though the light doesn’t seem to change and the figure doesn’t move, it somehow becomes clearer. As though the camera’s eye is adjusting to the light.

  The figure revealed is tall and thin, wearing a yellow cloak. Something radiates out from its head, like a halo in an old painting, like a child’s drawing of the sun. Where its face should be is a pallid mask.

  A voice from behind the camera says a word that sounds like “prince”, and then another voice, very clearly, whispers, “No.” That second voice is so close and clear that it must be the cameraman, or someone just over the cameraman’s shoulder.

  No one else speaks as the figure raises its bony hand to its face and begins to peel back the mask.

  Static.

  •

  The camera containing this video footage was found in the front drive of Arnold Zenda’s mansion on May 14, 2009. Nothing was left of the house itself but a smoldering ruin. No one from the documentary crew was ever heard from again.

  Investigators were unable to determine the source of the blaze, and nothing that could be positively identified as human remains was found in the ashes of the house.

  The film has been edited to include excerpts from interviews that were shot separately and that, we believe, give context to certain events contained herein, but none of the original footage has been modified or excised in any way.

  •••

  Orrin Grey was born on the night before Halloween, and he’s been in love with monsters and the macabre ever since. Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings, his first collection of supernatural stories, is coming soon from Evileye Books. You can find him online at http://www.orringrey.com.

  Housebound

  By Don D’Ammassa

  I believe that ten days have now passed since I became trapped in my own house, but it might be as few as eight or as many as eleven. I am uncertain because there are periods during which none of the rooms I enter have outside windows and all the clocks have disappeared. I sleep when I’m weary, without knowing if it is day or night, perhaps in a bed, perhaps in a chair. The rooms are not always recognizable. I chanced to enter my study the other day, but it wasn’t my study, not exactly, although it had some of my things in it.

  I found this spiral notebook today, so I have decided to keep a record of my experiences, before I completely lose the gift of language. Where to start is a problem. Perhaps with my name, while I still remember it. I was christened ‘Arthur Wade Wellstone’. I attended an assortment of colleges, my curricula designed by my father to prepare me to succeed him at the helm of Wellstone, Inc. It is entirely possible that I loved my parents, but during these past few days, my memories of them have faded. I remember remembering them, but I can no longer actually visualize what they looked like.

  The first time I noticed a change in the house was on the second anniversary of their death, which may or may not be coincidental.

  I had just returned from a two-week business trip to Europe. I’d been away from the house before, but this was the first prolonged trip since I’d moved back home. I was tired and irritable and somewhat preoccupied when I arrived. Jonas let me in and offered his services, but I dismissed him rather brusquely, intending to go directly to bed. I had chosen not to move to the master bedroom and my feet knew the way to my own quarters so well that there was no need for me to think about where I was going.

  Not, that is, until I realized that I didn’t know where I was.

  My house is very large. There are a total of 20 rooms arranged on two levels, with the servants’ quarters in a separate building. There were perhaps twelve rooms that I used regularly, but the rest – guest bedrooms, my father’s office and others – were locked up. My first reaction was to assume that I’d made a wrong turn.

  It would have been a reasonable explanation, except that none of the rooms had a red door, as did this one. It was locked, or perhaps the door was just stuck in the jamb. In any case, my impulse to look inside came to nothing.

  I turned back the way I had come, or, at least, the way I thought I had come. Nothing looked familiar here, either, and it seemed to take much longer than usual to reach the staircase. I was halfway down, intending to interrogate Jonas about the altered door, but decided to wait until morning. This time, I arrived in my room without incident.

  The following morning, I went looking for the red door but without success. I concluded that either I’d been so fatigued that my senses had played tricks on me, or that I’d dreamed the entire incident.

  For the next several days, I was unusually busy. Situations change rapidly within such a diversified entity as Wellstone, Inc. My father had been an excellent negotiator and had impressed on me the importance of personally involving myself with every aspect of the company’s operation. Th
ere were dossiers in my office containing the personnel files on all of my key people, as well as expensive-but-occasionally-revealing reports prepared by a private investigator.

  During this time, I experienced brief periods of disorientation, both at home and elsewhere, which I attributed to fatigue. Father had always been impatient and irritable when I failed to match his seemingly limitless energy and I could almost feel his disapproval of my weakness. These episodes always passed quickly and I simply told myself that I needed to make time for a brief vacation.

  The accident at the Verona plant came at the worst possible time. News of the explosion dominated CNN. The horrible loss of life and associated bad publicity were particularly humiliating because this scenario had been raised by one of my subordinates. The plant was situated in a densely populated residential area, maximizing the potential loss of life in the event of a catastrophic failure.

  After spending more than two weeks dealing with the press, local officials and survivors, I returned exhausted and depressed. My nerves were scraped raw and I dismissed Jonas rather curtly, preferring seclusion to servile attendance. My mind was numb, and I drank two brandies for supper and went to bed early.

  Some time later, I found myself awake, mouth dry and stomach rumbling. I drank a glass of water then decided to find something to eat. The house was dark and silent, a scattering of night lights providing adequate-but-not-abundant illumination. At the foot of the main staircase, I turned left, or at least, I believed I had, but I was distracted and moved more from habit than conscious effort.