Life in a Haunted House Read online

  “Be right back,” Melissa says. “I have to…” and she lets her voice trail off so she doesn’t have to add, “use the bathroom.”

  As Melissa leaves the room, her footsteps trailing down the hall, I wonder how long I have before she comes back. My thoughts start racing.

  Last time. This could be my last time in this house.

  The only time I’ll be alone here.

  #

  The spider model could still be in her bedroom. That spacegun-translator, and the Lake Monster’s eyeball.

  I kneel next to her bed and lift the ruffle to check beneath for the shoebox.

  Not there.

  The hutch over her desk contains only school books and supplies. I consider the vinyl accordion door of her closet, and before I can even think about it I’ve crossed the room to slide it open.

  I tell myself it’s not like my daydream after the previous visit, where I imagined returning after dark to smash a window, break into her home and steal souvenirs from my favorite films. What I’m doing now isn’t as bad as that—I’m already here, and just taking a quick look. Melissa wouldn’t mind. I’m sure she’d let me if I asked.

  Except I’m sweating. I worry that she could catch me, I have to hurry, she could catch me, and I’m half-listening for a distant flush or running water or approaching footsteps, but more of my attention focuses on the shelf above hanging clothes—only sweaters up there, no shoeboxes—then sliding a few hangers aside to check the floor—

  And if I find a movie prop, that doesn’t mean I might take it. Definitely not anything priceless, something Melissa would be upset to lose, because I don’t want to hurt her, I don’t want to mess up our friendship just as it’s getting started, especially not over something that’s so small it would fit into my pocket, or even something I could hide in my backpack, or a prop so large I’ve just gotta grab it and run from the house, not looking back, thinking Melissa’s been nice but she’s unpredictable, too, so I need to make my own luck here while I can—

  But my conscience is safe because there’s no shoebox on the closet floor, just shoes, and a pile of dirty clothes, nothing worth the risk of sorting through, time’s probably running out, better to act like a decent person, a respectable friend—

  Then it occurs to me that the file cabinet is the better place to search. So large and inappropriate in a teenager’s bedroom, since Melissa wouldn’t have files, certainly not four large drawers full, so that’s where her father’s props would be if she’s hiding them. I pull the closet shut, a heavy tug as the vinyl door almost pops out of its metal runner at the bottom, making a scrape that might be audible in the hallway, might mask the sound of Melissa’s footsteps as she returns to the bedroom, but that can’t be helped, too late for me to stop now, and I cross to the file cabinet to open the top drawer.

  It’s locked.

  I try the other three.

  Locked. Locked. And locked.

  Maybe I should pull harder on a drawer, bang it on the side and break it open. Or just hit a wall or the top of her desk, slam my fist down in a frustrated panic.

  Or maybe I should collect myself. Move to the center of the room and stand still, breathe evenly, innocently.

  Melissa stands in the bedroom doorway.

  A flush of embarrassment heats my face. She didn’t catch me, I try to convince myself, even as a tell-tale bead of nervous sweat trickles down my forehead.

  She stares at me for a moment, then steps into the room. “I’ve decided I can trust you,” Melissa says.

  #

  “I’m not supposed to go in here. My mother will have a fit if she finds out.”

  She’s taken me to a door near the end of the upstairs hallway. It seems an ordinary door, but the wood is unfinished: nobody has bothered to paint it to match the rest of the hallway. Instead of a door handle, it has a simple hook-and-eyelet latch.

  Melissa gently lifts the hook then pushes the door inward.

  A musty odor hits me: mothballs and chalk and sawdust and damp newspapers. It’s not a room beyond the door, but a cramped, dark corridor.

  “I have to go first.” Melissa practically needs to turn sideways to fit. She pats the walls as she moves forward, and although I can’t see them, I know clouds of dust form with each strike. I side-step behind her.

  My eyes adjust slightly to the dark. The makeshift passage seems to run between two normal rooms, and I judge that it’s about the same depth as Melissa’s bedroom. We’re walking up to a dead end, at the back of the house.

  “Careful,” she says. “Here it is.”

  The rustle of a chain, the click of a switch.

  #

  Ancient lands of elves and orcs and dragons never captured my imagination. And it always seemed silly to me that a world of talking animals could be entered through a bedroom wardrobe.

  Quite honestly, I never cared for theme parks either. Dad took me to Safari Land when I was ten, and that place couldn’t fool me with its jeep-on-rails “expedition through Africa”: lion statues with recorded roars; a cheetah propelled across painted sand by a blast of compressed air; a well-timed arc of water from the fixed trunk of a fiberglass elephant. I remember getting sick from spinning rides, caramel apples, and disappointment.

  Maybe I’m presenting myself as a hardened skeptic here, immune to wonders that kids typically ooo-and-ahh over. If something breaks through my cynicism, it’s got to be really amazing. Authentic.

  Or maybe it’s simply that I needed something far away from the cheering crowd, dark and forgotten. Not necessarily better, but mine.

  We all want magic of some kind.

  And that’s why I mention Middle Earth and Narnia and Wonderful-World-of-Whatever theme parks. Because the kind of magic I was supposed to associate with those places…that’s what I felt when Melissa clicked that light switch in that dark hallway at the back of her house.

  Because it wasn’t the back of her house. There was so much more.

  #

  One more analogy. An appropriate one, as will become clear:

  Consider how a movie set can trick the viewer. There’s a missing fourth wall we can see through, but we’re conditioned not to think about it. The room doesn’t have a ceiling either, because arc lights and boom microphones need easy access to the set and cast. Again, viewers don’t think about what’s outside the frame, and imagine they’re spying into a normal home with a roof above the characters’ heads.

  Melissa Preston’s house had played the same kind of trick on me. Despite the unusual entryway, I saw an ordinary house with a kitchen, a den, bedrooms and bathrooms.

  And as she led me down that corridor, the most I expected to find was a closet, a tiny side room, or the pull-down entrance to an attic.

  Because when I’d approached the front of the house, I’d never thought to look behind it.

  #

  Click.

  The end of that dark passageway opens into a large enclosed space. A tremendous, cavernous addition to the back of the house, and the reason—I finally realize—why Melissa’s bedroom has no windows facing the back yard.

  Her bedroom is an internal room.

  And the back yard is a movie studio.

  #

  She’d gone first, telling me to be careful, because there’s no protective rail on the staircase leading downward.

  The staircase. Even in the dim lighting from the passageway we leave behind, and a few lights along the way flickering on, other bulbs dead or missing, I recognize those stairs instantly. It’s the title edifice from Budget Studio’s first film, The Stone Stairway.

  “This is amazing,” I say. I’m so happy Melissa decided to show this to me.

  Unlike the illusory front doorway, the steps are a sturdy mix of stones over concrete, and retain much of their original condition. Dim lighting helps make the stairs look exactly as they did when newly-married Samantha Goodwin floats down them in a perilous sleepwalk, as ghostly whispers tempt her to stumble. And, repurposed for a l
ater film, these same steps lead from the basement laboratory of Spider House, and the mad scientist screams and races up them, pursued by several of his oversized, venomous experiments.

  “Stay close to the wall.” The roof slants down at an angle away from the staircase wall, and it’s hard for me to judge how far back the building extends from the wall. I sense, more than see a floor below.

  She leads me down, and we pass beneath a wooden archway. A spiderweb stretches between the beam and the wall, and I half expect any of the steps below might be overrun with skittering shadows. I will crush a plump hairy torso, eight twig legs splayed in a fan pattern from the heel of my shoe.

  I notice a damp earthy smell mixed with the oils of a handyman’s garage. The roof is far above us now, and the stairs continue longer than they should. “Your house is two stories,” I say.

  “Father dug through to the basement and extended it back,” Melissa tells me, and I realize why. A lower camera angle makes the staircase even more impressive.

  As we hit ground level, it seems like a dark, mostly-empty warehouse. Instead of boxes and shelving, I can make out thin partitions that separate the floor into a maze of makeshift rooms.

  “Some of these lights still work, but they get hot.” Melissa steps to a beveled light panel and flips one switch, then another. They snap loudly, with no result, but the third takes, and a blinding spotlight flashes from a grid attached to the slanted roof.

  That’s when I fully realize the wonder I’m standing in. Not just the staircase prop, but an entire film studio attached to the back of the house.

  “Everything.” I’m standing with my mouth open in disbelief. I know I look like a dumbstruck kid, but can’t help it. “Everything. Every place.”

  It’s slightly bigger than our school’s gymnasium. The ceiling stretches higher than I would have guessed, but the sets are smaller than they appear on film. The partitions I’d seen in the dark now clearly delineate different locations: an office, a bedroom, a den; a castle dining room with a long table and a fireplace mantle at one end; the interior of an antique shop; a mock storefront with a sidewalk and streetlamp, an alleyway off to the side. Everything’s in horrible disrepair, but still magnificent.

  The arc spotlight hangs over and illuminates the far end of the studio, and I decide we should explore that area first.

  I step into the office set. Two metal desks face each other in the center of the three-walled room; the closest chair tilts to the side, one of its casters missing. Like the other partitioned areas, it’s set up as a generic room, so it could be easily redecorated for use in different movies. With an obsessive fan’s knowledge of film chronology, I know the last use would have been as Ferguson’s accounting office in The Haunted Oak, but I can trace its earlier incarnation as the police station a deformed Thomas Hendricks walks through in The Twisted Face.

  I’ve imagined being Hendricks, walking into this same office to confront the Police Chief. Now I’m really here. My eyes are the camera. I’m him.

  I walk toward a door at the back. A frosted glass window holds a metal guide-slot for the occupant’s name. It’s empty, but a half-opened cardboard box sits on a lopsided table beside the door. I see broken pieces of plastic name cards inside, including GEAN and OSS and DR. I reach toward the box, ready to match pieces.

  “Don’t touch anything, okay?”

  And I’m so grateful for what she’s done, bringing me here, that I don’t protest. Besides, the place feels like a museum. Closed for more than a decade, faded and falling apart, but still a museum. There should be “Don’t Touch” signs posted all over.

  “Sorry,” she says. “It’s my mother. She doesn’t want me down here. I’m taking a big risk.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  The frosted glass makes it impossible to see through the door. Maybe there’s another set behind it, maybe there’s a wall. The door might not even open.

  My hands itch near the handle. I want to try it.

  Instead, I respect Melissa’s warning. Hands off. Simple enough, considering how much else there is to see.

  We walk from the office set into the metallic interior of a spaceship.

  I’m struck by the randomness of the floor plan, each set built as needed for a current film, placed wherever space was available, partitions moved, furniture transformed and rolled from one false room to another. If there was ever a blueprint, it was soon discarded.

  In one of my magazines, I’d read about a house in California—Winchester House I think it was called. The woman who owned it was rich and eccentric, and thought she was being haunted. Her solution was to build new rooms onto the house—with the theory that any ghosts would get so confused by the bizarre layout that they’d leave her alone. A corridor might twist back on itself; stairs led nowhere; a window overlooked an interior wall, rather than outside.

  The same chaos applies here, but with an authentic purpose: not to frustrate ghosts, but to bring them to life on celluloid.

  Or a space alien, in Budget Studios’ single attempt at science fiction. Some of the props actually are metal: an auto dashboard turned upside down, an old television screen welded in place of the steering wheel; scrap levers and switches and light panels arranged next to exposed circuit boards. Other elements are plywood sprayed with silver paint, and a similar effect had been applied to the floor tiles. A shelving unit contains trophies or weapons. On closer inspection, many of the alien artifacts are simple household items wrapped with tinfoil: a piece of foil has torn off the side of a long metal tube, and I recognize the label of an overturned can of Pringles potato chips.

  “Doesn’t look very real, does it?” Melissa thinks I’m disappointed, which couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m fascinated how this haphazard arrangement of, well, junk, still managed to look okay on film.

  “With the lights blinking and stuff, it’s better.” I wave my hand over the instrument panel, as the Visitor does to navigate his ship. Nothing happens, of course, but…

  “Can we turn it on?” I ask her.

  She shakes her head. “It doesn’t work.” Melissa breaks her own “no touch” rule, reaching forward to flip a few switches, turn a few dials. “See?”

  I know something she doesn’t. One of my back issues of Monster Project has an article on The Space Visitor, including a behind-the-scenes photo. The actor Reuben Venn stands to one side, in full costume save for the “metallic” gloves he’s removed and set beside the dash. Bud Preston kneels beneath the console, where a panel has been slid aside to reveal a network of tangled wires.

  A photo I’d looked at countless times, never dreaming one day I’d visit the same set.

  “Let me try something, okay?” I kneel in the same spot beneath the console and reach toward the wood panel.

  My hand stays suspended for a moment, to give Melissa time to stop me. She doesn’t speak.

  I press my open palm against the wood. The silver paint feels rough and sticky. The panel slides easily.

  The wires are all tangled. The rubber coating on a few of them is stripped in patches, fixed clumsily with black electrical tape. I realize that I’m sweating: as Melissa mentioned, the arc light above puts out a lot of heat. My armpits are damp. There’s sweat on my forehead and on my hands, too.

  The sweat could carry an electrical charge, if I touch an exposed wire.

  So I reach in like I’m trying to defuse a bomb.

  It’s hard for me to see under there. Melissa moves closer as if to help, and she’s actually blocking my light. The wires tighten over my arm, and I pull back carefully.

  A wire is caught on the band of my wristwatch.

  I turn my arm one way, then another, to break free. A bead of sweat falls down the side of my face, and I imagine another one drips off my fingertip onto the wires.

  “Maybe try this later…?”

  “No, I’ve almost got it.” I reach deeper, trying to find where the wires converge. I feel for the back wall, then towards the floor
. Half my arm’s in there now.

  There’s a raised rectangle, about the size of a mousetrap. It’s too dark, too many wires block my view. I trace the perimeter of the shape with my damp fingers, braced for a spring then a snap of the trap.

  I find a raised bump of plastic and realize what it is. A light switch, set in the floor instead of flush with the wall.

  I flip it.

  “Oh!” Some of the buttons Melissa pressed earlier must have toggled to “on,” waiting for the master switch to send power. The reflection of multi-colored lights flash over her face, in her glasses, in her smile.

  It takes me a minute to extricate my arm from the tangle of wires, but I manage. I stand up beside her then turn to face the spaceship’s navigation panel.

  A simple effect, but those lights manage to transform scrap metal and silver paint into something glossy and futuristic. Or, at least a mild approximation of how they looked on film, where a lens filter spread sparkles of light into twinkling stars.

  It’s easy to pretend the controls might actually work. I could forget we’re in a tiny three-walled cubicle with no ceiling, in a warehouse studio attached to the back of my new friend’s house. I wave my hand over blinking lights in that strange zigzag motion Reuben Venn applies before take-off, and the panel seems to respond. The lights grow brighter and mimic the motion of my hand; a low hum begins to surge from the panel. An alien motor revs up; the spaceship prepares to take off.

  The hum grows louder, until I feel a slight tremor beneath my feet.

  We’re moving. I glance overhead, expecting a rush of midnight sky to appear through the windowed dome of the spaceship.

  A blinding flash explodes above me, followed by a loud pop and a shower of sparks.

  The arc lamp goes out, leaving us in darkness.