Why would she think of me in this way? We’d become close friends, shared some really good times these past weeks. Even if our friendship’s over now, I’ll always be grateful for my brief times in Budget House.
I’m upset with Melissa, sure, but I’d never seriously consider harming her.
Then it hits me.
We have grown close. She became my anchor after my mom’s job uprooted me, once again, and dropped me into an unfamiliar town. Melissa was my escape from the tedium of my uninteresting peers at school. And instead of simply reading behind-the-scenes articles in movie magazines, I actually got to visit the marvelous place where my favorite films were made. Melissa Preston shared that experience with me.
I’d been focusing too much on my own bond with the movies, and the bond they’d formed between me and my dad. The bond with Melissa was important, too.
A shared connection. A mental link.
When I dreamed that I was a warlock, what if I’d actually cast a spell?
There was no other way to make sense of how she reacted right now. Melissa saw what I dreamed last night.
That dream that began as if through her eyes, but was entirely controlled by the worst part of my subconscious: I woke her in a darkened bedroom, filled her with a suffocating panic until she broke through the wall and into a nightmare. I smashed her body onto a cement staircase, then conjured a spectre of her mother’s youthful self to glide past, ignoring her. In the studio I became a grave robber, digging up pieces of her father. As a dark sorcerer, I tore her mother’s spectre into shreds. Then, after causing her father’s unnatural resurrection, I burned his reanimated corpse.
After I plundered Budget Studios for petty souvenirs, Melissa begged me for help. My subconscious had conjured a weighty dilemma: choose to save the movie souvenirs, or my injured friend. In a clear parallel to real life, I lost them both.
I dreamt I killed my best friend out of spite. Then I ran away as Budget House burned to the ground.
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” I tell her now. “I was upset and frustrated. Please believe that I didn’t mean it.”
Melissa doesn’t ask me to clarify what I’m apologizing for. She knows. She has to know.
I want her to yell at me now. To say only a sick mind could imagine the awful things I’d dreamed about.
Melissa doesn’t say anything. She still can’t look me in the eyes, but I hope, at least, that she’s not afraid of me anymore.
She’s standing there at the intersection and the access road to her house, and she turns her head to the left, ear tilted slightly as if straining to hear something. Maybe her home calls to her, as Budget House sometimes called to me.
I don’t hear anything now, and I’m far enough back in the road that I can’t see the house in the distance.
Budget House didn’t actually burn down, as it had at the end of my dream, but it might as well have. I know I’ll never visit it again.
#
The Lost Reel
Can two people live in a small town and barely see each other? Well, our high school was pretty big, with more than 300 students. Even though Melissa and I had some classes together, it was easy enough to keep our distance. We stayed apart the same way the school’s couples did after they broke up—though we were never really a couple. Not in any honest sense, at least.
Our policy of mutual avoidance became even easier after Mom’s job predictably transferred her to work with a new company. I spent a few months of my Junior year in Altoona, Pennsylvania. I graduated from Webster Groves High in St. Louis.
Then off to college—my entry point to other lives in other cities and states.
Adult life fell into a typical pattern for someone frequently uprooted as a teenager. I was in a series of short-term relationships, but never settled down. My longest stint was a rented house shared with a guy named Charles and two orange tabby cats. Charles liked reading and going to restaurants, but he never cared much for movies, which was a sore spot with me.
To make money, I collect and sell film memorabilia, travelling to horror and sci-fi conventions with one-sheets and rare magazines and autographed actor photos for fans to purchase, and offering big-ticket items through a catalog I print semi-monthly and mail to a carefully targeted list. These days I do the catalog mostly out of nostalgia—90% of my sales happen via the Internet. I’ve actually made a decent living this way. Much more than I might have expected.
I’ve always remembered those magical weeks in Budget House. My collector contacts knew about my interest in Budget Studios, and I kept my ear to the ground about any sales of props or other memorabilia from Bud Preston’s films. I followed a few promising leads over the years, but they never amounted to anything authentic.
I assumed the items Mrs. Preston boxed up found their way to a specialized collector who hid them away for some reason. The same impulse, I guess, that makes a rich snob buy a famous painting simply to hang it over his fireplace.
Then one day an online friend wrote to tell me Bud Preston’s widow had died. Melissa’s mother. I sent flowers to the funeral.
A few days later, I wrote a long letter to Melissa. I asked her forgiveness, taking all the blame for what went wrong between us. I told her about my life now, mostly alone, moving from town to town. My own parents had passed away within two years of each other—too soon, but it always seems that way, doesn’t it? I wished her much strength in her time of grief, and expressed a sincere hope that her life was full and happy.
On one level, it might have seemed like I had an angle—that I was attempting to soften her up to allow the deal that eventually happened. That’s not the case. I was just trying to fix something awful from my past.
A past I could never really let go of.
I heard a rumor that an opportunistic collector travelled to Graysonville to purchase any memorabilia from the surviving heir. Melissa shut the door in his face, but not before saying, “Of course I still have those things. They all stay with the house—and the house isn’t on the market.”
Then one night the phone rang, and Melissa Preston’s name showed up in the Caller ID screen. I was almost afraid to answer it.
What was it—thirty years? Her voice hadn’t changed a bit. She thanked me for the flowers, and the note. Then she said, “You didn’t need to apologize, Brendan. We weren’t good people then, either of us. Parents mess us up, or we do it ourselves. Who knows?”
“I think you’re letting me off too easy.” I almost laughed then, from relief—a weight of guilt suddenly lifted.
“What I do know,” she said, “is that you love this house. Budget House belongs to you.”
She’d decided to sell it to me.
#
Melissa opens the front doors and invites me inside. I’m walking into a film. It’s a Hollywood ending that glosses over the emotional tensions sustained throughout the film.
Even though I spent very little physical time here, I thought of it as the house where I grew up.
The haunted house, with the movie studio attached to the back.
I know I don’t deserve it. I shouldn’t be rewarded for my callous behavior as a teen. But sometimes life gives you a break you don’t deserve.
“Oh, and I found something interesting,” Melissa says. She’s aged better than I have, with a slight bit of gray in long hair that hangs loose to her shoulders. Her clothing is similar to what she wore when I knew her—out of place on a high school student, but well-suited to the mature woman in front of me.
We step into the living room, where I notice a large vase of flowers on the coffee table, surrounded by sympathy cards. I ask if Melissa returned home to care for her mother, or if she’s remained here in Graysonville all along, but she offers only a vague answer. Next I attempt some small talk, and again she’s evasive.
I get the sense that, in her view, I don’t have the right to ask if there’s “someone special” in her life right now.
She’s invited me here for a bus
iness transaction, nothing more.
Melissa reaches beneath the TV stand and retrieves a flat metal canister. She hands it to me. Along the edge, a piece of masking tape with black magic marker identifies the contents as “THE INVISIBLE THREAT.” I pry off the cover to find a 16mm reel inside.
“It’s the film my father was working on before he died. Incomplete, of course.”
The reel’s only half full, so I judge it’s about 15-20 minutes running time. I’m speechless. Such an incredible, priceless find: a Lost Reel from a Budget Studios Production.
“That would come with the house, too,” Melissa says. “Though you’re free to screen it now, if you like.”
She still knows me well enough that I don’t need to voice my eager answer.
Melissa takes me upstairs to the strange hallway entrance to her father’s movie studio. At the top of the stairs, she flips a switch and instead of the faint emergency lights along the stone stairway, the arc lights flash on in rapid sequence. For the first time, I see the whole studio in full illumination. This is how it would have looked back in the day, when Bud Preston made movies here.
We walk together down the stairs and into the studio. I pass the different sets, last seen so long ago they now seem like images from almost-forgotten dreams.
Our destination is the Living Room set, where the giant limb smashed through the window frame in The Haunted Oak. Melissa has prepared the projector as she had for me once before, aimed at the broad side of the stone stairway.
“I’ll dim the lights for you on my way out,” Melissa says. “We’ll talk more about the sale when you’re done here.”
“Don’t you want to watch it with—?”
“I already tested it, to make sure the projector works.” Again, evasive. Maybe it would be too much of a reminder of the previous time at this strange indoor drive-in. Our “date” that wasn’t a date.
“Oh, there’s also this.” Melissa reaches into the pocket of her sweater, and pulls out a single key. “It unlocks my father’s office, with the other equipment, and the archives: scripts and sketches and business records.”
She hands it to me. I say “Thank you,” but there’s no way I can fully express my gratitude. Maybe I don’t have to. Melissa knows. More than any person possibly could, she knows how much this means to me.
As she walks away, I place the reel onto the projector and carefully thread the film through the machine. Across the expanse of the studio, Melissa flips switches on the light panel at the bottom of the stairs. The arc lights slowly dim, but the emergency lights along the stone stairway remain on.
Melissa walks up these stairs to return to the ordinary portion of the house. Soon to be my house, though I can hardly believe it. I watch her ascend, and she pauses at the top to turn and wave down at me. I wave back, though she can’t really see me in the theater-darkened studio.
With almost unbearable anticipation, I turn on the projector and start the reel.
It’s a very rough cut, out-of-sequence and with missing segments, but I at least get the idea of what Bud Preston was trying to accomplish. His final film idea was a stroke of low-budget genius. The Invisible Threat was the ultimate way to save money: with an invisible monster, there’s no need to spend a single dime on the costume.
To be honest, it’s the kind of film, had Bud Preston finished and released it, that would have been extremely unpopular with reviewers. They’d probably label it his worst movie.
It is wonderful.
#
Today I am a Caretaker.
I live in the haunted house of my adolescence, among the movie sets that haunted my childhood and have always stayed with me.
I don’t want to be one of those rich guys who buys a Picasso or Rembrandt, then hides it away from the general public. I love Bud Preston’s films too much to keep all of this to myself.
At the same time, I don’t want just anybody coming into this home. Every visitor needs to be someone who truly appreciates these films as much as I do.
Well, almost as much.
People from my mailing list write with requests, or I see postings on blogs or message boards. I usually get a good idea of who seems a good candidate to visit.
And I send them the whole story to read. If they’re willing to come to Graysonville after that, I’m happy for a while to shift roles from Caretaker to Tour Guide.
As I am for you now. We’ll head upstairs. I think you’ll be very pleased with what I’ve done to the studio. It’s still a work in process, but I’ve restored several of the sets to their original glory. I’ve also rearranged the archives, selecting key pieces to display outside the relevant location—the original script for The Dungeon of Count Verlock, for example, open to a page with Bud Preston’s extensive notes, set on a pedestal outside the actual set the script refers to.
And yes, I’ll screen for you that reel of The Invisible Threat. Like all Bud Preston’s films, I never get tired of seeing it.
Here’s the entrance to the studio. Go ahead and lift the latch. Let’s go inside.
# # #
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
NORMAN PRENTISS is the author of ODD ADVENTURES WITH YOUR OTHER FATHER (A Kindle Scout Selection), and he won a 2010 Bram Stoker Award for his first book, INVISIBLE FENCES. He also won a 2009 Stoker for his short story, "In the Porches of My Ears," published in POSTSCRIPTS 18. Other publications include THE BOOK OF BABY NAMES, THE FLESHLESS MAN, FOUR LEGS IN THE MORNING, THE HALLOWEEN CHILDREN (written with Brian James Freeman), and THE NARRATOR (written with Michael McBride), with story appearances in BLACK STATIC, DARK SCREAMS, BLOOD LITE 3, BEST HORROR OF THE YEAR, THE YEAR'S BEST DARK FANTASY AND HORROR, and in four editions of the SHIVERS anthology series. His poetry has appeared in WRITER ONLINE, SOUTHERN POETRY REVIEW, Baltimore's CITY PAPER, and A SEA OF ALONE: POEMS FOR ALFRED HITCHCOCK.
#
Visit him online at www.normanprentiss.com.
#
For news about other publications, including free and discounted eBooks, please sign up for the Norman Prentiss Newsletter at his website, or follow this link: http://eepurl.com/b__8W1
#
ALSO AVAILABLE:
Be sure to collect all the tie-in stories
from the world of
Life in a Haunted House!
The Dungeon of Count Verlock (LIFE IN A HAUNTED HOUSE Tie-In #1)
This previously unpublished story, an anonymous “novelization” of a movie written and directed by Bud “Budget” Preston, was originally scheduled to appear in issue 101 of MONSTER PROJECT magazine. I uncovered the story as I was researching my forthcoming novel, LIFE IN A HAUNTED HOUSE, which fictionalizes elements of Preston's life and filmography.
“The Dungeon of Count Verlock” recreates the strange dialogue and haunting low-budget images of Preston's only vampire film, in a self-contained, 9,000 word story.
The Lake Monster ((LIFE IN A HAUNTED HOUSE Tie-In #2)
Another previously unpublished “novelization” of a movie written and directed by Bud “Budget” Preston, originally scheduled to appear in issue 102 of MONSTER PROJECT magazine. “The Lake Monster” recreates the strange dialogue and surreal images of Preston's Black Lagoon-style monster film, in a self-contained, 9,000 word story.
The Space Visitor (LIFE IN A HAUNTED HOUSE Tie-In #3)
Another previously unpublished “novelization” of a movie written and directed by Bud “Budget” Preston, originally scheduled to appear in issue 103 of MONSTER PROJECT magazine. “The Space Visitor” recreates the strange dialogue and surreal low-budget images of Preston's only science-fiction film, in a self-contained, 9,000 word story.
For Lynne Hansen, with thanks for the friendship and fantastic covers!
Special Acknowledgments to early readers and encouragers: Jim Gernert, Brian James Freeman, Douglas Clegg, Andi Rawson, Kimberly Yerina, MommaCat, Blu Gilliand, Robert Mingee, The Behrg, and whoever is reading this onscreen right now!
This Digital Edition Copyrigh
t © 2017 by Norman Prentiss
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Norman Prentiss
P.O. Box 1355
Baltimore, MD 21203
www.normanprentiss.com
The characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any similarity to real persons, living or dead,
is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Cover Design © 2017 by Lynne Hansen Design
Life in a Haunted House Page 18