Mansion of High Ghosts

by James D. McCallister

  Or—what about a horror movie?

  Nah. Too personal.

  Billy looked askance at the stacks—reams, actually—of draft-this or version-that of his previous magnum opus, a tower to the heavens representing the same project forever teetering upon completion. Over the years spent tinkering with the script—he’d begun it in college, when he and Libby shared one precious scriptwriting class—he’d retained every scrap ever written, stacking the pages up scene after scene, sequence after sequence, act after act, all pages printed on twenty-four pound bond; Billy, feeling even his first drafts emerged so shimmering and polished, like the Florsheims and Weejuns in his shoe closet, that such pages deserved inscription only upon the finest of manuscript leaves. Billy, speculating how, one day, he feared the project would at last force its way up through the smooth, nine-foot ceiling onto the roof, reaching for the stars.

  He wondered if he’d ever be able to say he had finished.

  He wondered what finished meant.

  What time was.

  Why writing a movie mattered—a script wasn’t even a complete piece of art, not like a novel or an epic poem. It was a diagram for an actual artist, the director, to follow.

  But Billy’s script would be different. It would be complete in itself. It would be so good it would never need filming.

  The dream project, the masterwork, lengthy, yes, but chock full of excitement: a high-concept sci-fi action epic featuring such awe-inspiring set pieces as a pre-credits, 007-style teaser depicting a thrilling jailbreak from a lunar prison run by the insidious forces behind a totalitarian, solar systemwide government; an extra-thrilling opening title sequence set in the Mars colony as our heroic, desperate protagonist seeks to save a hermetically sealed-off city from a disastrous dome breach; scene after scene of political intrigue peppering the talky-by-necessity sequences of complicated exposition; a bit of the old in-out here and there between the leads to break up the rhythm; three lengthy monologues (from two different characters) fully explicating the theme(s) of the piece; extremely desperate, enormous battles between mammoth, combat-hardened armies on the dystopian home world of Earth that included a breathless hovercraft chase through the overgrown, flooded canyons of an abandoned New York, an homage to Friedkin’s The French Connection, Miller’s Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, Spielberg’s and Kubrick’s AI, Carpenter’s Escape from New York and They Live!, and most obviously the Death Star canyon run from Lucas’s Star Wars Episode 4: A New Hope: Special Edition, but also the asteroid chase from Star Wars Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back: Special edition, and of course the pod race sequence from Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace.

  Finally, a gotcha post-resolution action beat all his own—a heart-stopping, indescribably desperate climb to the top of a giant laser cannon set on overload, a hidden, forgotten weapon which must be disabled before the readouts all go red and the digital timer counts down to zero hour and everybody still lucky enough to be alive after the huge, deadly, now penultimate action sequence ends up getting smoked, too.

  Which can’t happen, not in a movie. Not a successful one. At least one of the heroes must live to experience a moment of redemption. The hero’s journey.

  In the denouement following the shatteringly heartbreaking climax, WE SEE that, on a personal level, the victory is but pyrrhic—the hero watches as the heroine makes it in time to disable the cannon, but staggering back out WE SEE that her body has been ravaged by radiation. The protagonist, crying out in pain Kirk-to-Spock through the transparent aluminum of the engine room; the heroine, sacrificing herself to save them all.

  During every rewrite, Billy, suffering a lump in the throat. I will wait for you on the other side was the current choice for the heroine’s dying line.

  I will wait for you.

  Deep breath.

  Still waiting.

  As a result of all the time and tweaking, the current draft of Untitled Science Fiction Epic, as Billy thought of his script—he’d yet to come up with a just-right title shimmering with a frisson of epicness—had now grown to a monstrous three hundred and twenty-six pages, far too long for any one feature film production to contain. A freaking doorstop.

  No—an epic. A masterpiece.

  All for her.

  For Libby.

  To make her proud. To lend meaning to her short tragic life.

  For Libby... a dedication. It had accompanied all drafts, all the way back to the first scenes in the stupid screenwriting class with her, though that dedication had been imprinted only in his heart, and never on the page.

  Except perhaps upon the letters he’d written following her rejection on the night of the Dead concert. All of which had also been rejected.

  Next, a blurring flash-frame, and she’d been dead in the car accident. Later that spring—1990, to be exact. Fourteen years—it only felt like twenty. He heard the words in the voice of DeNiro as the redneck rapist in Cape Fear, bemoaning his ‘unfair’ prison sentence.

  Was Billy crazy, or did he feel sympathy for that bad guy? How does a writer do that? The day Billy could answer that question, perhaps he’d become a real writer.

  Twitching, he gasped at a sharp pain in his chest. No—a dull, burning pain. Bothersome. Dull, burning, bothersome heart pain often led to accidents sticky and sanguineous in nature.

  And, people? All oblivious to his pain. No earthly idea. They thought he had a sweet life: brilliant mind, movie-star looks, thick luxurious hair, a fat trust fund, hung like a stallion, a master of the modern age. But no one knew the real him, as though Billy a tenth-rate Andy Kaufman, one lacking both the courage to adopt false faces as well as the innate talent to pull off the a hat-trick of manipulating the perception of reality. No one, living or dead, knew the real him. Either a curse, or else by design.

  If Billy were actually smart—and he intuited this while not knowing it, or so that’s what he pretended to tell himself—he’d take the family pecuniary largesse almost kinda-sorta at his fingertips, forget about his ridiculous ‘career’ at the middling academic backwater that was Southeastern University, and upon the occasion of the next peach-colored Carolina sunrise? Hit the road for the left coast with the latest version of the script under his arm. What, pray tell, could stop him?

  Who would have the stones to try?

  Only himself—and a ghost or two.

  A dam burst inside his head, suppressed images, a vision of an angel: Libby Meade, strolling these streets. Libby, falling in love with Billy, willing her to love him. Making it so. Before, that is, their love had been forestalled first by Devin, and then months later, by the tragedy that took her from all of them. The cool hand of death. Irrevocable. Inexorable. Both of those smart words at the same time. Maybe they meant the same. Couldn’t remember.

  So, Billy, staying here. Walking the same sidewalks year after year, seeing Libby waving to him from the pedestrian bridge or in front of the coffee shop in which they used to sit in quiet conversation, knees bumping under the table, a memory of which nagged as representative of the most intimate and legitimate contact he’d enjoyed with her. Billy, desperate to hold on; seeing Libby in the young women tanning themselves beneath the benevolent Southern sun on the Elliptical, the park-like center of the two-hundred year-old institution, a blaze of fecund youthful bodies lying supine among the towering live oaks and the buildings exuding historicity: unlike the rest of the city, the old campus at Southeastern’s core, the horseshoe of green crisscrossed by a webbing of uneven cobblestone paths, had been a fortunate survivor of Sherman’s storied and terrible march through the Confederacy. Upon its tended grasses sprawl the children of the middle class, studying, learning. Dreaming of the long life ahead. That she never got to have.

  Billy, sensing a piece of Libby in all them, returned life to her by seducing them. Making love, furious and sustained like he’d never had the chance with her. Climaxing, but never getting to the place he knew they’d have gotten. Together. And sometimes so frustrated, as he had been by a prob
lem of bothersomeness long predating the drama of Libby and Devin that, well… accidents happened.

  Such frustration threatened on this night. But it could not manifest. Could. Not. Billy, a badass Gen X master of all he surveyed, Judd Nelson pumping fist in freeze-frame against a sunset sky, would maintain control.

  Melanie, calling again from the bedroom. “Honey?”

  “Busy.”

  “Doing what?”

  Keeping his voice even and calm. His tongue felt thick, like a sick anaconda slithering along a slimy rainforest floor of peat and fungus looking for a damp hole in which to finally die in peace. “I’m working on the new project. Like I said was planning to do. Understood?” But he said that last bit so low she wouldn’t hear.

  Dainty, shuffling footfalls approached the office door. The knob, twisting.

  Locked.

  “Billy—you locked me out?”

  “It’s for your own safety.”

  “Ha-ha. Maybe I don’t want to be safe.”

  He couldn’t work with that. Sat in silence. Pretended to clatter keys on the iMac.

  “Honey—let me in. And then I’ll let you in.”

  “I’m in the middle of a freaking sentence. And then I want to get caught up on the news out of—Iraq.”

  “Since when do you watch the news?”

  A standoff.

  “Are you gonna open this door? Or not?”

  “I’ll give you what you want. But later.”

  “Promise?”

  “You can depend on me, ma’am.”

  “Gonna hold you to it.”

  “Seriously—a few more minutes, and I’ll be all caught up.”

  She demurred, finally, and he heard the bedroom door close.

  Hitting the bubbler again, the herb simmering, a tiny cauldron. A mood enhancer—maybe not the right drug, but all he dared sample.

  Billy, a man with appetites.

  A man who needed to stay in control. To manage indulgences. Doing so to avoid one of his troublesome accidents, which, when they occurred, were enormous pains in the ass to deal with and clean up without complications and rigmarole like nobody would believe.

  Melanie, no; no accidents in her future. They’d been together too long, now. They’d been seen, all over the campus and surrounding community. A couple. He might as well marry her as get out of this the good-old accidental way.

  Which sometimes happened.

  Whether Billy wanted, or not.

  And had almost happened with Libby, back in the day. The night his so-called Devin snatched her back.

  Devin Rucker—now here lay a tired, worthless, useless eater of a drunk, one from whom the world would benefit, let’s say, if a little accident or two happened to him. If not an outright act-of-malice style, premeditated murder.

  Wait—murder? Billy, incapable. Crimes of passion, now, these were different. The courts often said so. And in Devin’s case, a mercy killing.

  Or—an accident.

  An accident.

  Yeah. That’s all it was.

  This explanation for when the bothersomeness happened worked best. It had to. To believe otherwise constituted madness, and Billy Steeple, y’all, ain’t crazy. Not with all his charisma and money. In the house, yo. A golden god, who only needed a queen, one he could never have, to at last complete him. A conundrum; more than a plot point.

  Further, this was no damnable movie. This was real life. And big dick, money or not, life sucked. Not as much as when Devin’s sister called to ask a favor, mind you. Favors opened cans of worms, especially between people with history like he had with the Ruckers.

  He’d put off calling Creedence back; he’d put off properly grieving for Libby, and, to be truthful, for Devin as well, for nearly twenty years.

  No rush on regaining his sanity, or anything. Nah.

  The disappearance of the last accident, a pickup in a bar, had been investigated and reported in the media, but Billy, an angel, hadn’t been interviewed as a suspect; had skated consequences yet again.

  Better still, the murder allowed him to blow off steam, but the risk had made it a close one. His grandfather, clinging to life as it was, would disown him if the truth about Billy’s thus-far occulted series of sex murders ever came out in the press.

  One day he’d settle down with the right girl and be cured of his unbridled and murderous libido. Maybe that woman was Melanie. Nah. Not enough like Libby. None of them would ever be.

  Three

  Devin

  Devin, leaning over his balcony, squinted hard into the morning sun illuminating the Denver skyline and mountains beyond. He tasted bile like battery acid lapping at a raw uvula, tide-driven waves hurling against a craggy shoreline in sprays of what felt like napalm-soaked razorblades.

  The urge to hurl. It came in a sick gray-green wave. Again. After the violence of the earlier purging, the stomach, a tender sack under the best of circumstances, now felt as though he’d swallowed shards of pulverized glass.

  Feeling covered in glass.

  Glass returned to base elements, reduced, again, to beach sand. And, as after a day trip to the beach, the glass in his ears; in the creases around his eyes; in his navel; between his toes. A dream of sand.

  No—glass.

  Glass.

  Sunlight.

  Blood.

  The phone, buzzing in his pocket. His sister, calling from back home. Creedence—what a revoltin’ development.

  Leaning his weight against the balcony railing, Devin choked down a slug of a long, cold, early tallboy. Ragged and all but unintelligible: “Dingleberry and Ass-ociates, LLC. What can I do ya for?”

  “Do what, now?”

  “Just funning with ya, girl.”

  “That’s how you start the first conversation you’ve had with your sister in almost a year?”

  “Don’t be like that.”

  Their version of awkward, near hostile pleasantries. “How’s tricks back yonder in South Cack—oh, shit.”

  A cracking sound as the wooden railing, already splintered from a good kicking one hazy night, gave way against his weight. The flat horizon and upside-down buildings appeared upside down in his vision, the morning air kissing his face as Devin tumbled from two stories up, crashing to rest in a sitting position on the hood of a Toyota Corolla with the tallboy and phone still clutched in his bony talons.

  His sister’s voice, tinny, rang out from the phone. “Devin, what the hell’s all that racket?”

  “Fell off the balcony just now.”

  “P’shaw. It sounded like you was going to the bathroom like last time. You better not have been.”

  “Promise I wasn’t,” with a wince. Damn them slow-smoked ribs of his. Now his back would join them in a dance of pain.

  Stiff as hell, he slid down off the dented hood of the car. Maybe he was injured for real. That’d be dealt with, forthwith, in his own way. Fuck allopathic healing. He tipped back his beer, miraculous, nary a drop lost. God, watching out for him.

  This kind of crap happened to him with a fair amount of regularity. He’d been through so many close calls, the old boy had begun to believe he couldn’t die at all. The windshield of the Toyota, however, had been irrevocably starred from the dent his bony drunk ass had made. Tough break.

  Now from Devin’s sibling came an uncharacteristically forthright speech. Creedence, normally prancing around themes and narratives the way Southern families do rather than talking about them head-on, yet here, precise and explicit:

  “Now that I finally got a hold of your skinny ass, here’s the news. Mama—your mother,” as though necessary for Creedence to remind him what ‘Mama’ meant, “needs you back here.”

  “Bullcrud. Ain’t none of you needed me.”

  “That ain’t true.”

  If it weren’t true, Creedence said, I wouldn’t waste time on calling. “What you been doing with yourself, anyway?”

  Devin, cussing and smoking, thought his red-haired younger sister a nosy-assed li
ttle turd. “Ontological studies.”

  She asked for clarification. Growing up, Devin had been the bookworm who knew words and such.

  “Nothing,” he said. “So what’s this nonsense really about, girl?”

  “I don’t, and Mama doesn’t”—duddent—“deserve the way you traipse around half-lit, treating us all like dirt. We’re your dad-blamed family.”

  Grunting. “That you are. But that don’t present a new crisis.”

  “It could be a crisis.”

  “I’m the last thing any of y’all need hanging around.”

  A spell of silence. “How long’s this gonna go on?”

  Devin mumbled, “What do you think I been asking?”

  “Do what? I can’t hear you.”

  He recoiled from the telephone as though burned. Glancing up to the ceiling with exasperation. Shuffled to the fridge for a fresh dose of breakfast. “I’m touched to know I’m missed in this fine manner. Deep inside, like.” He balanced the phone on his shoulder long enough to crack the beer. His ribs hurt. His hands shook. He got it open, took a blessed slurp. “Ain’t coming home.”

  “If it’s left up to me, you can just as soon stay gone.”

  “A wish likely to come true. You must feel right blessed.”

  “But Mama, now. She says she can’t”—c’ain’t—“stand it no more.”

  “Stand what?”

  “You not coming home for birthdays and Thanksgiving and Easter. And everything in between.”

  “Yawn. Try a different reason.”

  Her tone changed. Small and grim. “There’s more: she’s sick inside. One day soon she’s going to be gone.”

  “Sick?” Devin, grinning. “You better not be shitting me.”

  “Hush your mouth.”

  “Sounds like a tragedy. But I ain’t coming.”

  “She’s dying, Devin.”

  A sharp pain in the center of his forehead. A phantom roar. A flash of light. “Who ain’t.”

  Creedence, clearing her throat and changing the subject. Devin thought she did so with casual non-urgency, at least for having delivered such heavy news. “You know I finally took and went through her check book.”