Life in a Haunted House Read online

  Then a medium shot of the store as the customer turns to leave, bumping against a coat rack, dodging a child’s wooden toy. The bell rings as he exits the shop, and the title card appears onscreen:

  The Crooked Frame

  #

  In an interview published in Monster Project, Bud Preston explains the origin of the movie’s plot. “If you go to film school—which I didn’t, I’m self-taught—you learn that anytime the image is unbalanced, it means you’re at a crisis point in the story. If the angle is framed too high, or too low, that indicates a power struggle between characters. If the shot’s got a crooked angle, it means the rules have changed: for a moment, the world is bizarre and out of whack.

  “I decided to apply that commonplace film technique, and make it literally true. The haunted camera in The Crooked Frame can only take distorted pictures. And those pictures change the world for our main character, played by Alan Darnell. At first it’s something simple: a houseplant photographed at an odd angle soon withers away. Later, the changes get more serious. For example, a photographed highway might twist, causing an accident. And what might happen, I wondered, if our hero used that camera to snap a picture of himself in the mirror?”

  A still photo of the film’s masked shopkeeper accompanies the article. In typical genre magazine fashion, the caption gets the facts wrong. As if the editors don’t care, or they deliberately distort the truth to insult Preston and his films:

  “Wearing a grotesque mask, director Bud Preston appears briefly in his own movie, a la Hitchcock. However, most would agree that Preston has a long way to go before he can approach the accomplishments of filmdom’s Master of Suspense.”

  #

  The pawn shop I visit after school is nothing like the seedy, mysterious stores depicted in gangster and horror movies. It’s bright and spacious. Items are neatly organized, with prices visible in large handwritten tags.

  Many stores in this small town serve a dual purpose. The video rental shop is called “Sun and Show,” because they have a tanning booth in a back room. Paula’s Shoe Store also serves as the local newsstand. And the corner pawn shop, capitalizing on its proximity to the high school, stocks sheet music and rents musical instruments to students in band class.

  I pass a wall of guitars and a shelf of flutes and clarinets and trumpets in black, velvet-lined cases. There’s a middle section labeled “Appliances” at the end of the aisle, and an arrow pointing to the opposite side, “Electronics.”

  The electronics are mostly televisions and car radios, but I also see a laser disc player and a fairly new small-screen TV/VCR combo unit. A small selection of cameras occupies half a shelf. There are more expensive ones up front, beneath a glass countertop, but these are closer to my price range.

  The cheapest one has an index card attached, with the notation: “Takes Polaroid 300 instant film cartridges.” The bulky camera has an ugly sloping front and a mouth at the bottom that spits out the photo—blank at first, but you wave it in the air as it dries and the image slowly blurs then fades into view.

  It’s just what I need. I take it with me to the back counter, where a thin elderly woman sits at the cash register.

  I hand her the camera while I get my money ready. “Guaranteed, right?”

  “Ten days,” she tells me. “Keep your receipt.”

  She takes my cash, then begins writing in a notepad. I talk while she works: “Honestly I wasn’t planning on buying anything. I was walking by, noticed your store, and simply felt compelled to step inside.”

  She stops, probably wondering if I’m taking recreational drugs. Her head tilts to the side and her eyes squint as if she examines me through the uneven slits of an oversized plaster mask. She tears off a yellow carbon slip and hands it to me. “You want a bag?”

  “No thanks.” I stuff the camera into my backpack.

  Then I’m off to Diamond’s Pharmacy and Sporting Goods, to buy a film cartridge.

  #

  The Photographer

  Today, I’m a photographer. I’ve combined two flashlight beams as my lighting rig, placed them carefully on a nearby shelf and aimed them at my subject. The beams illuminates only one side, which I hope will add a mysterious tone to the finished image.

  “Stay perfectly still.” I’m talking to my hands as much as I am to Melissa. Any slight tremor will add too much blur to the photograph.

  The camera shutter clicks once, then again a second later.

  A small motor whirrs, and a white square rolls out the front slot. The undeveloped photo hangs at the end of the camera until I pull it free.

  “Let me have it.” Melissa sets aside the movie prop she’s been posing with, and takes the photo paper from me. She waves it in the air, the sound of bat wings, then pauses to look at the image. “I can’t make anything out.”

  “Give it time.”

  Another flap of wings. Pause. Repeat. She holds the photo in the crossbeam of the flashlights. “I don’t think it’s very good. You can’t even tell it’s me.”

  “Let me check.” I move closer to examine the instant photograph. Melissa is mostly in shadow, barely recognizable. The spider prop has caught more of the light, as I intended, but overall the picture’s not clear enough.

  Not good as evidence.

  “Let’s try again.” I suggest she stand to the side, so her face catches more of the light. That way, she’s also blocking less of the shelf behind her: part of the antique shop set from The Crooked Frame, transformed for a later Budget Studios production into a Tarot Reader’s séance room with occult curios on the shelf.

  I touch her shoulders to help her pivot to the right position, then step back and look through the viewfinder. “Lift it up a little bit,” I say, putting my hands beneath hers and raising them to display the spider prop at the best angle. Her skin feels warm, and I realize it’s the first time I’ve touched her. A photographer’s touch, though, precise and workmanlike. “Good. Now hold that pose.”

  “Cheese,” she says.

  A click as the shutter opens, a pause for the camera sensor to absorb enough light, then it clicks shut.

  The motor whirs, and another tongue of photo paper rolls out the camera’s mouth.

  A flap of bat wings in the dark cave of the abandoned movie studio.

  “At least you can tell it’s me this time,” Melissa says after the photo develops. “The light’s just not good enough in here.”

  “Maybe we can try the overhead lights again.”

  She shakes her head in the negative, and I know not to push her further. After I busted the arc light, it was hard enough to get her to agree I could visit the studio again.

  “I have an idea,” she says.

  #

  It’s taken me almost two weeks to reach this point.

  Each day at school, my backpack had been heavy with my newly purchased Kodak Instamatic, along with a high-beam flashlight I borrowed from our apartment building’s maintenance closet.

  All in the hopes Melissa would invite me to return to her house.

  We spend a little more time together at school now, but with an unspoken distance. Since we are both sketchbook misfits in Art, basically recognized as loners, we’re already a topic for teasing or snide remarks. Being linked together wouldn’t make us stronger: instead, we’d be twice the target.

  The biggest change was that I started walking with her at lunch as she followed the perimeter of the school grounds. We barely speak during these times. Sometimes I keep pace with her; sometimes I fall behind. Observers might assume we are two people who had the same idea of getting exercise, and occasionally crossed each other’s orbit.

  As the bell rings to signal the end of lunch, we might exchange a few quick phrases.

  Last Friday, I hinted about the weekend. I had nothing to do. We’d have a lot more free time to talk or (bringing this in as if the idea just occurred to me) maybe explore the movie studio. What do you say?

  She said no, without volunteering a reason
. We went separate ways to different classes.

  As the memory grew distant, I started to worry that I’d invented the whole place—in that active, sad imagination my dad attributed to me. Melissa lives in an ordinary house, with windows that open onto a regular back yard.

  Perhaps Melissa simply didn’t want a lengthy weekend visit. It would be much easier to meet in that limited afterschool span between 3:30 and about 5, when we’ve escaped the scrutiny of teachers and (worse!) our peers, and before either of our mothers have returned home from work.

  When I mentioned that possibility—stressing that I couldn’t stay long, needed to get home for dinner—I got a Maybe Later. My next attempt I got a Maybe Tomorrow, which near the end of the week became Maybe Today, if the weather gets better.

  It had rained during lunch, and we were forced to spend our break indoors. In Social Studies at 2:00, I looked out the window to see sunlight streaming through thinning clouds.

  After school, we follow the old pattern. Separate seats on the bus, and I exit at her stop. A long walk down the quiet road to her house, approaching the painted “mansion” entryway, which Melissa unlocks for us. Sodas in the kitchen (“Do try not to wreck the place this time, Brendan”), then some small talk in her room (the math test coming up; a production of Our Town neither of us wish to audition for; the odd spectacle of Ryan and Amy, a clingy couple who seem to rely on each other’s limited intelligence, to the point where we’ve dubbed them “One-Brain”).

  Melissa controls the agenda. She knows I want to visit the studio, but doesn’t mention the possibility. As we talk, I deliberately avoid checking my watch—even as I realize time is running short.

  I start to feel like a fraud. I’m joking with Melissa like a friend, but I’m also the guy who previously searched through this very room, half-planning to steal any souvenir that wasn’t nailed down. I’m a ruthless, obsessed fan of her father’s films. Melissa can see right through me. She’s going to throw me out of her house.

  Instead, Melissa stands and goes to the file cabinet. She unlocks the top drawer with a small key, reaches inside and pulls out a red plastic flashlight.

  “I brought one, too,” I say, taking it from my backpack.

  I push aside my doubts and self-reproach and eagerly follow Melissa to the end of the upstairs hallway, to the unfinished door with the eyelet latch. She clicks on her flashlight, and I do the same as we make our way along the musty, tight corridor.

  In The Stone Stairway, Samantha Goodwin searches for her husband, who seems to have been swallowed up by the strange house they’ve visited to escape a rainstorm. A bookshelf slides aside, and she discovers a secret passageway that leads to a hidden room. The Death Room.

  Previously, Melissa and I had walked through this corridor in darkness. This time, my flashlight illuminates a repeating pattern in the peeling wallpaper: small ovals, with circles in the center. Like eyes.

  In the movie, if you watch carefully, two of them blink.

  At the end of the corridor, Melissa pulls a thin chain that triggers the intermittent set of lights along the staircase that leads down into the studio. In the earliest film, iron wrought torches were spaced along the descent; in Spider House these became light fixtures, and occasional archways were added to adorn the path to Count Verlock’s basement coffin.

  Melissa pauses at the foot of the stairway, next to the podium that controls the overhead arc lamps. I’m hoping she’s gotten over her fright from our previous visit. We’d see so much better with one of the spotlights.

  She walks past the podium, toward the dark studio sets.

  Melissa leads me past several partitioned areas, until we reach a set that simulates a family living room. A sofa stretches beneath a curtained pair of windows. I point my flashlight at the cushion where Marion Ferguson sits in The Haunted Oak. A coil spring emerges from torn fabric, and a thick layer of dust dulls the blue material into gray.

  A crash of glass, and a large tree limb breaks through the curtains above the sofa, loose branches wriggling like fingers that grasp at Mrs. Ferguson’s screaming face.

  I tell Melissa I want to show her something, test a theory. We cross the 60s shag rug and slide between the coffee table and the sofa.

  “Let me hold your flashlight a second.” I concentrate both beams on the curtains behind the sofa. “Pull one of them aside.”

  She agrees, since I’m letting her move things around instead of charging forward myself. She reaches above the sofa.

  In movies, when a hand moves slowly toward a closed curtain, a tremulous violin might play on the soundtrack, or an urgent discordant tapping of piano keys.

  Wouldn’t it be awful if a homeless person had broken in here? Or maybe an escaped patient from the facility in nearby Gadsden. He’s been here for years, hiding behind partitions, living in a lunatic world of shadows and false rooms. He heard us visit weeks ago, and has waited ever since for these two unsuspecting teenagers to return. The man is hungry, and cruel.

  Melissa grips one of the curtains, tugs it aside.

  A square hole in the partition wall, with a small crawlspace behind. No glass. “Proves my theory,” I say, waving the flashlights over the empty space. “When the tree limb crashes into the house, they kept the curtains closed on purpose. You hear glass shatter, but your dad avoided the cost of a broken window. He was smart.”

  Melissa nods. She leans over the couch, placing her hands on the lower ridge of the hole so she can peer inside.

  I wonder about the sturdiness of the false wall. The ridge might not support her weight, and she could tumble through to the space behind. Into a storage area, with loose nails and screws and razor blades. And fragments of shattered light bulbs, to produce dramatic sound effects in that long ago film.

  The vagrant huddles down there, tiny lacerations on his face and along his arms. He has wedged shards of glass deep beneath his fingernails, extending them into claws.

  “Let’s look at another location,” I say, returning Melissa’s flashlight. Other than the false window, the living room is a fairly unimaginative set. The antique store from The Crooked Frame has occupied my mind recently, and that elaborate interior set is adjacent.

  As we step into the set with our flashlights, we are burglars breaking into a shop after hours. The floor is crowded with the end tables and vases and knickknacks that the customer nearly trips over in the film. In one area the shelving has been pushed aside to make room for two chairs and circular table draped with a purple, gold-fringed cloth. A crystal ball sits in the center of the table.

  “An antique store, later used as a séance room.” I move to the back wall of the set, where a top shelf still contains a set of books, a teapot, and a plastic heart. “The camera’s missing. Good thing I brought my own.”

  I reach into my backpack and pull out the Instamatic.

  “Find something,” I tell Melissa. “Find something cool to hold up, and I’ll take your picture.”

  #

  “I have an idea,” she says after my two failed attempts at photography. “There’s another prop we can use. One with better lighting.”

  She points to the staircase, its weak intermittent lights visible against the back wall of the house. I tell her I like the idea, but we’d have the same problem. “The lights are spaced too far apart. Still won’t be strong enough to give us a good exposure.”

  “Up the stairs, then outside.”

  Immediately, I realize she’s right. The front entryway will be the perfect backdrop for a photograph. I would have thought of it to begin with, if I hadn’t wanted so badly to visit the studio again, to see more of the sets and props I’d only glimpsed during my previous visit.

  We cross the studio floor, ascend the stone stairway into the corridor of watching eyes. Through the house and out the front door.

  Instead of stopping at the entryway, Melissa walks to the side of the house. I’m holding the camera and want to take a quick photo of the front doors, but she’s fast-walking
and I have to hustle to keep up. We turn the corner, and I get my first glimpse of how far back the property stretches. The studio warehouse is like a metal mountain that has grown out of the ground behind the house. The walls are aluminum siding reinforced with steel girders. No windows, but with ventilation slits lined around the middle section. The slant roof is metal also, with more evidence of rust and weather-fading than the support walls.

  A metal mountain? No, it is more like a spaceship turned on its side, half of it buried in the earth where it crashed behind the house. Imagine the terrifying noise, the incredible shaking of the ground that would have wakened residents in the middle of the night. What would it be like to open your curtains and see the windows blocked over by the undercarriage of an alien craft?

  A perfect subject for a photograph, though I’d have to step far back to get more of it in the frame. I survey the surrounding field…

  And notice what Melissa has taken me to see.

  “It’s the one from the poster I gave you,” she says.

  A tree can bear its age better than most living things, certainly better than man-made objects. Melissa stands beside the massive tree I recognize from The Haunted Oak. Fall leaves litter the base of its trunk, with clusters of orange and red and yellow still hanging from overhead limbs. These colors soften the monstrosity I recall from the film, its bare limbs scratching at winter clouds, crosshatching the nighttime moon. But the hideous shape is still there, partly up the trunk: a knot or burl that twists humanoid features into the bark, approximating a distorted and screaming face.

  In Bud Preston’s film, a witch once hanged from a limb of this tree, and in her dying breaths she cursed the owners of the property and their descendants. As midnight wind whistles through bare branches, a modern-day family hears something like an ancient whisper. Family members and friends gradually disappear; instead of a dead body, broken tree limbs appear beneath the open door of teenage son’s car, or fill the rocking chair where the missing grandmother usually sat. New voices join the tree’s ancient whisper.