A medical facility.
#
As I mentioned before, in the small town of Graysonville, a lot of the stores double up: video store and tanning salon, music rental and pawn shop.
The same was true the next town over. Add another combined business to the list: Evergreen HealthCare and Senior Community. The building wasn’t really a hospital, but it housed a few doctor’s offices. One wing was a retirement community, and also included rehab nurses to help people of any age learn to speak again after a stroke, or walk again after a car accident.
In the wing with the doctor’s offices, one section was closed off behind a mesh gate. I knew about it, because other kids made a standard joke if you said or did something stupid: You’ll end up living in the crazy side of Evergreen.
Not a place for the criminally insane—those folks would go upstate to a heavily guarded facility. This area housed people who weren’t a danger to others, but might be to themselves. Recovering alcohol or drug addicts. People with a benign mental illness or limitation, unable to function in society.
In the crazy side of Evergreen, although the residents were harmless, they weren’t allowed to leave.
But they could have visitors.
#
We approach a circular Information Desk, and Melissa gives her name to the seated attendant.
“He’s expecting us,” she says.
The woman adjusts her bifocals, staring at each of us in turn, then down at a clipboard. She’s a thin red-headed woman, about fifty years old and wearing a lot of makeup that does nothing to soften her expression. “He doesn’t get many visitors.”
“I called ahead.”
“Uh-huh.” She flips the clipboard around and sets it on the raised countertop. “Sign here. Both of you.”
There’s no name listed on the indicated row: just a room number. Melissa signs and writes the date and time, and I add my signature beneath hers.
“You’ll have to leave your backpacks.”
We pass them over the counter. The attendant attaches a numbered clothespin to each, then gives us a cardboard tag as a receipt.
“Now use this marker and write your name on these labels.” As we fill them out, peel off the backing and stick them to our shirts, the woman recites a list of prohibited items. “No food or drink. No sharp objects, including pens or pencils. No metal. No money. No outside medications.”
I hand her my wallet.
“Turn your pockets inside out, son. Let me see.”
I comply, even though she doesn’t make the same demands of Melissa.
“Now, remember you’re speaking to a person, no matter what’s wrong with him. If he asks for something, just tell him you’re not allowed. If he says the doctors and nurses are mean to him, even that they’re trying to poison him or smother him at night, just nod your head and change the subject. They all say things like that, to gain your sympathy. He’ll also tell you he wants to go home. You can remind him that he is home. He should be used to that by now.”
She aims the lecture mostly at me, so I gather Melissa’s heard it all before. I wonder how many other times she has been here.
Melissa still hasn’t revealed the identity of the resident we’ve come to visit. I can make only one guess, though it seems impossible.
At different schools, if teachers found out what kinds of movies I liked, they’d tell me those trashy horror stories would warp my mind. My mom sometimes offered a gentler version of the same notion, and recently my dad had followed suit. Maybe you should spend less time with those films, Brendan, now that you’re older. Make more friends, play sports, that kind of thing.
Apparently they’re worried I spend too much time in a fantasy world.
Well, what about the adult who devoted his life to making these kinds of movies? Wasn’t it more likely that he’d be the one to lose touch with reality? With each creative effort, Bud Preston built a world where supernatural horrors could walk among us. Perhaps the challenges of each production chipped away at his sanity—until the films became real, and life was the illusion.
We didn’t visit her father’s grave, because there is no grave.
His death was merely a cover story, intended to save his family from embarrassment. Better to pretend to the public that this maker of monster movies has died, than to reveal that he’d driven himself insane.
He’s here, living in the crazy side of Evergreen. Melissa is taking me to meet her father.
#
Such was the scenario that unspooled in my imagination as we stepped off the bus and went through sliding glass doors to enter the Evergreen facility.
Can you blame me? Melissa promised me a big surprise, and I imagined the biggest surprise of all. The kind of unexpected twist that makes a movie so memorable.
But instead of going to the left, past the doctor’s offices and to the infamous gated wing, we go toward the nursing home section of the facility.
We are allowed to carry our backpacks. We don’t need to sign in at a security desk.
Melissa leads the way down a corridor, past a small cafeteria. Opposite, a group of elderly residents congregate in a lounge area. A few of them stare glassily ahead at nothing, as still as the potted plants next to their wheelchairs. Several at a small table play a card game, and one woman angles her cards away from us as if we’d try to peek at them as we walked past.
We follow a sterile hallway lined with closed doors. Some of the doors have elaborate nametags and decorations: a needlepoint welcome sign, or pictures of grandchildren in heart-shaped frames. The door we approach is bare, but it’s been left ajar.
I still grasp at the impossible hope that the resident will be Melissa’s father. Even if he’s older, and less sound of mind, he would retain some vague recollections of his filmmaking days. I could jog his memory, listing titles and reciting long passages of dialogue, and he’d know how much I loved his movies.
We step into the room. It’s bright, and there’s a standing wooden cupboard beside the entrance, and a half-size dresser with a television on top, but there are no flowers or picture frames or decorations. A floor curtain obscures most of the bed against the back wall, save for the lump of the resident’s blanketed feet.
Melissa pulls part of the curtain aside. The resident lies with his back to us. “Knock, knock,” Melissa says, and the man struggles to move.
An arm stretches from beneath the blanket, and the man turns his head on the pillow.
I wish Melissa had done more to prepare me.
Not her father in the bed.
A monster.
#
“My friend’s name is Brendan. He knows a lot about you.”
An arm reaches forward, but the hand at the end of the sleeve looks like a rotten eggplant, the purpled fingers bruised and swollen together into a horribly inflated lump. “My glasses,” a scratchy voice says, and the arm swings to indicate an end table.
“Brendan, why don’t you help him put them on?” Melissa takes the glasses from the table and offers them to me.
Imagine a normal pair of glasses that’s been run over by a car and then fed through a meat grinder, and you’d come close to the bent and battered frame I now hold. It seems a miracle that the lenses are still intact. The nose bridge is bent at a right angle, so the eyeholes are strangely uneven. An extra bar extends from beside each lens, hinged to the metal arms that would attach to a person’s ears. Like the rest of this device, the metal arms are uneven and misshapen.
Custom-made to fit a monstrous, misshapen head.
Melissa steps back, and I’m supposed to bring the glasses close to that terrifying face. Purple, like the hand, and with skin the texture of a deflated basketball. A swelling beneath the man’s jaw twists his lips out of shape, and a devil’s horn juts from his forehead. His nose is a puffy, bruised plum, and his uneven eyes are nearly buried beneath dark folds of swollen flesh.
I try to judge where the lenses should fit. I lean closer, guiding the metal arms of the frame towards
the odd protrusions that I hope are ears on either side of the man’s head. They glisten like large wet lumps of grape chewing gum.
I must have hesitated, because I feel a soft squishy pressure against my elbow—the eggplant hand, guiding me forward.
It’s so hard to look at him. I’m close enough that I see blood vessels near the surface of his rough skin, gray and red discolorations, a few brown moles with tiny sprigs of hair. I close my eyes even as I’m pressing the glasses into his face.
When I open my eyes, I’m startled afresh. The crooked mangled frames look comically incongruous, as if I’d put glasses on a shoe or on a pumpkin.
“Thank you, young man.” The voice is similarly incongruous, a mockery of a refined gentleman’s diction, emerging from a jutting mouth with lips that pucker towards the ceiling. Then his voice deepens to a bitter rasp: “You think it must be awful to be me. Everywhere I look, I see people recoil in horror. You’d never trade places with me.”
#
I’d recognized him almost immediately, of course—although he was older now, and the disease had progressed. The distortions of acromegaly seemed even more dramatic in person and in bright light, compared to how they appear onscreen. Nonetheless, it was undoubtedly Thomas Hendricks, the actor who played the title character of The Twisted Face.
My nervousness, I’d attribute to the unease anyone would feel in the presence of dramatic and unfamiliar illness.
That, and being starstruck.
When he quoted those lines from the film, all my nervousness vanished.
“It’s really you,” I sputtered. “Oh, such an honor to meet you Mr. Hendricks. Twisted Face is my favorite film.”
“Call me Tommy.” He’s dressed in a pajama top, with a blanket pulled to the middle of his chest. The shape beneath the blanket suggests two different body types: a slender man on his left half, and an obese man on the right.
I wish I’d brought the Instamatic, so I could have my picture taken with him.
Without thinking, I reach out and shake his hand. The skin is softer than I expect, and my fingers almost sink into it. If I squeeze too hard, it might burst like a giant blister.
“You,” I say in mock accusation to Melissa, who is smiling wider than I’ve ever seen her. Back to Hendricks: “She wouldn’t tell me who I was coming to visit.”
My smile must mirror hers, with an added touch of goofy fan-boy. I recite one of the Police Chief’s lines, and Hendricks supplies his character’s response.
“Tell me what it was like to make the film,” I say next.
“How much is it worth to you?” He adjusts his voice slightly, to match the mask-muffled shopkeeper in The Crooked Frame.
I decide not to play the customer in that film—failing the shopkeeper’s test of his honesty, and gaining a haunted camera as punishment. “Any price you ask,” I say. “I’d love to hear about it.”
“Well, those days are long past. A lifetime ago.”
He tells me some details he can recall, mostly confirming what I’d read in movie magazines. They completed The Twisted Face in five days with a small cast and crew. Bud Preston handwrote script changes and distributed new pages each morning. Set construction would occur between takes, or late at night after the actors went home.
As Hendricks talks, I quickly adjust to his appearance, almost forgetting the deformities. Even though the information he conveys isn’t new to me, it feels special hearing it from someone who lived through it.
Still, I long to hear a fresh detail. Something personal. “What did you think about the movie?”
“Well, Bud worked everybody pretty hard.” He looks at Melissa now, as if seeking permission to discuss her father. “The hard work was worthwhile. I knew we were making a unique film.”
#
“How was your visit?”
Mom is relaxing with the newspaper, but I see she also has a stack of folders on the sofa cushion next to her. Even when she’s not at work, she still thinks about it.
I do my best to act cool, even though I’m still glowing after the meeting Melissa arranged with Thomas Hendricks. “It wasn’t what I expected.”
“How so?”
I shrug out of my jacket and start to lay it across the back of the armchair, but Mom shoots me a cold glance. I go and hang it up in the hall closet, then come back to continue the conversation.
“I was hoping we’d go to a prison or somewhere cool, but our group ended up at a nursing home.” I plop down in the armchair, which came with the apartment: it’s a boxy wooden frame with ugly green-brown cushions, but it’s surprisingly comfortable. “I thought I’d be awkward around old people, but it was okay.”
“You never used to do extra credit assignments. I’m proud of you.”
“Geoff was in my group. He wanted to go.”
It sounded plausible that I’d do unnecessary schoolwork to keep my mythical friend happy. I’d gotten good at these kinds of stories: mixing in some truth, changing the names. There actually was an extra credit assignment, but it was a set of algebra problems instead of a Social Studies project. Further down the line, “Geoff” and I would have a falling out, so Mom would never have to meet him.
“I still need to write the journal entry. That’s how we get full credit.”
Mom nods. “Best to do that while everything’s still fresh in your mind.” She’s set the newspaper section down to talk, an illusion of giving me her full attention, but now she acts like she’s just noticed the work folders beside her. “Listen, Brendan. I waited here because I wanted to be home when you got back. But I have some work I could do at the Base. Would you be all right for a couple hours? Maybe have a Swanson or a frozen pizza?”
“Sure. Like I said, I have school stuff to finish.” On other occasions, I might have sulked to make Mom feel a bit guilty for working on Saturday. Such moments were like currency for a teenager, later exchanged for reluctant permissions: I can stay out late on a school night, because you’re never home anyway! Not too logical, but it doesn’t need to be.
Except I’d already stolen a break earlier today, visiting (I could barely believe it!) Thomas Hendricks in Evergreen. Since I’d lied about it, Mom actually got credit in the Guilt Bank instead of me.
#
“I wasn’t expecting you,” My dad sounds a little distracted. I imagine he’s holding the phone receiver between his chin and shoulder. keeping both hands free to fix a broken shelf or replace light bulbs in a ceiling fixture.
“Mom went into work, so I thought I’d call.”
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah. More than okay.”
“Good.”
“Did you get the pictures I sent?”
“Uh huh.” I hear a metallic clatter in the background. “They’re a bit blurry, aren’t they?”
“Not all of them. There’s two outside. Anything look familiar?”
“That girl? Never met her, but it’s hard to judge, with her making a face like that.”
“Not her, Dad. The tree. The face in the tree.”
“There’s no face in the tree.”
“Look again.”
A sigh. A shuffling of papers. “I got it. Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“There’s a face in the bark. Don’t you recognize it?”
“Let me guess. Jesus? Elvis?”
“You’re not even looking at it.”
“I’m holding the picture right here, Brendan.” Another rustle of paper near the phone. “All trees look like this.”
“No, they don’t. That one’s from the movie, The Haunted Oak.”
“Hmmm.” A pause to humor me. Maybe turning the picture sideways, then back. “A little similar, I guess.”
“Not a ‘little similar.’ It’s the same tree. The exact one they used in the movie.”
“Now Brendan…”
“And the other pictures, too. I know they’re blurry—”
“…don’t know why you’re so worked up…”
“…over a tree.”
My dad talks over me, and since we’re on the phone I have to guess at his expression. Probably that sympathetic downward look whenever my feelings were hurt about a broken toy or spilled cereal, but mixed with the skeptical one he’d used at Mom when they argued and he didn’t figure she had a right to be angry. Since we’ve been apart for a while, it’s hard for me to picture him accurately. That’s the kind of relationship I have with my dad now, unfortunately: conversations spread out over weeks, illustrated with images that may no longer be accurate.
The story of my meeting with Thomas Hendricks might get a better reaction, but I’m afraid he’ll once again decide not to believe me. I’m even worried, in the back of my mind, that he’ll say he doesn’t know who Thomas Hendricks is, or will deny that The Twisted Face is one of our favorite movies.
In the background, I hear a different voice. Radio or television, I assume, but it seemed like it asked my dad a question.
“I’ll just be a minute more,” he says, not to me. There’s a hollow bang of wood, then a metallic chime.
“Alicia’s here,” my dad explains. “We’re fixing dinner.”
Who’s Alicia?
“You haven’t mentioned her before,” I say.
“Just a friend.” He whispers, like he doesn’t want this Alicia person to hear. Obviously, she thinks of herself as more than a friend. Not enough more for his son to know about, however.
Then, in his normal voice Dad says: “Call me again on Thursday, like usual.”
I say “Okay” instead of goodbye, then I hang up the phone.
#
That evening after dinner, I write another segment of my script. I’ve changed how I envision it, slightly, since the Pawn Shop recently added an old Super 8 camera to their Electronics shelf, and I’m saving up money to buy it. Instead of my impossible idea of a full length feature, maybe I could actually manage to make a short film: ten minutes or so, with title cards to represent minimal dialogue—since the Super 8 doesn’t have sound capabilities.
Life in a Haunted House Page 10