SOMEONE’S SHAKING ME.
“Huh.” My face is pressed into the floor, my body twisted. My left hand is heavy and numb because I fell asleep with it bent backward under my waist. I roll over onto my back. My vision gyrates, and I see two masked faces staring down at me. One is a bloody ghoul with a meat cleaver splitting it down the middle, and the other is an evil-looking ghost doll with empty marble eyes and a stitched-up mouth.
I can’t even scream. I just don’t have the strength.
“It’s us,” one of them says.
Hayley and Jude remove their masks. “Boo!” says Jude.
“Are they all out of me?” I croak.
“Are what out?” says Hayley.
“Uh.” I look around. “Never mind.” I rub my eyes. “What time is it?”
“It’s Friday morning,” says Hayley. “Crepuscular Dusk.”
“Yes!” says Jude, a little too loudly. “Everyone’s running around trying on costumes and making special requests with the creature effects department for the costume ball tonight!”
I pick myself off the floor and put my throbbing head between my knees. Oren never got to the treatment. I’m still clutching the folder with sweaty hands.
“Are you okay?” says Hayley. “You ransacked your dad’s office.”
“Oren spiked my tea.” I grab my head. “I’ve been tripping my ass off.”
“Oh no,” says Hayley. “How bad was it?”
I try to stand up but I’m still too dizzy. “Really bad. But I’m okay now.”
“Let’s get you out of here.” Hayley nudges Jude, and they both gently lift me up under my arms and help me out of the office. When we get back to my room, I collapse into my bed. Hayley hands me a glass of water and asks me what I want to be.
“Like, when I grow up?”
“Tonight. We’re all dressing up. I can ask the costume department for whatever. How about the devil? Seems like a good one for you.” She frowns. “What are you doing with that folder?”
I grip it tighter but don’t answer. I’m too woozy.
She looks at me, concerned. “You should eat. I’ll bring something up.” She turns and rushes out of the room.
I lie there for a few moments, on my back, just trying to stabilize. Jude has his thumbs inside the waistband of his gym shorts. “Are you about to strip and start boxing? Because I don’t think I can look at your dick right now.”
“Nah,” he says. But he was totally about to. “Are you okay?”
I slide out of bed and swing open the curtains. It’s overcast out. My dad’s grave is undisturbed; dried-up wreaths and dead flowers still surround it. So, yeah, that’s what I wanted to see, and now I feel better. I look over at Jude. “Go punch some shit. I need some fresh air anyway.”
“You sure?”
“Totally.” I put on a windbreaker, head outside, and make my way across the west lawn. I’m not tired or hungry or anything. I just want to walk.
The cool air feels good on my face as my mind settles. I walk till I reach Peabody Lake, where they filmed The Lovers of Dust and Shadow. There’s a rocky beach here, deserted, part of the Moldavia estate proper. I sit on a cold, slimy rock.
I open the folder.
There’s no treatment inside for a sequel to Zombie Children. Oren must have burned it before I had a chance to save it.
Everything else inside the folder is in a kind of malicious order.
First, there’s a stack of letters tied with baker’s twine, dated about ten years ago—right after my mom was committed. In these letters, my mom talks plainly about her fears of aliens invading and harvesting Earth’s resources.
Underneath this stack is a treatment my dad wrote for a 2008 Moldavia film called Invasion of the Immortal Wasps, where he seems to weave some of my mom’s delusions into this dumbass plot involving insect larvae and malevolent aliens from a distant star. That movie did pretty well. A lot of squeezers love it. Not sure why it’s in the discarded treatments folder.
It gets worse.
There’s another stack of letters. About two years later, when she was most likely on antipsychotics, my mom wrote to my dad—in a fairly clearheaded way—begging to see me. My dad wrote her back, refusing, and reinforcing her delusions that I was a product of alien rape.
In response, she began writing back, fleshing out these delusions, inspiring a film called The Red Ferrets about a lonely suburban mom who gets impregnated by an alien tennis instructor. The treatment for it is in the folder as well, although this film never got made. My dad, clearly out of ideas, broken, and not knowing how to grieve for my mom, was feeding off her delusions as some twisted way of coping. I’ll bet he felt this kept them connected—purposely addling her mind, exacerbating her mental turmoil.
There is a letter from Kingside Park Hospital—an administrator warning my dad to stop writing her, that he was interfering with her treatment. All his letters were returned by the hospital, which is why they’re in the folder. The rest of his letters—and there are a good half dozen or so—are unopened, still in their envelopes, sent back by the hospital. They had obviously stopped giving them to my mom.
In her final letter to my dad, dated less than a year ago, my mother writes, pretty lucidly, that she forgives my dad for “fathering a boy within the same walls as our two sons.” Once again, she requests to see me. “My heart still breaks for young Dario and what I did to him. Please, Lucien!”
I was emancipated by then. My father could have forwarded the request to Keenan. My mom obviously didn’t know where I was.
I don’t know if my dad was punishing me or punishing my mom. Or both. My mom and I have something in common I never realized—we both incurred Lucien’s wrath for the same reason. We left Moldavia. We abandoned him.
I sit on the rock clenching and unclenching my hands until I hear someone behind me. I turn around. It’s Hayley, crunching through the sand and beach grass, wearing a black cashmere cardigan. She sits beside me.
Hayley was close to my dad—he meant a great deal to her. And so did my mom. Hayley knows there are plenty of dark shadows lurking behind Moldavia’s walls, but I decide not to tell her what I found in the folder. Instead, I ask her something else: “There was an old letter my mom wrote to my dad. She said she forgave him for fathering a boy within the same walls as her two sons.”
Hayley looks out at the lake. “My mom lost a baby here.”
I look at her. “What? When?”
“While we were shooting Zombie Children. So your mom may have gotten confused about all that stuff.”
“My mom was gone by then.”
“She and your dad kept in touch, though.”
I think about Aida sobbing, my dad whispering in her ear while we were filming that climactic scene. I never knew what that was all about.
I thought Valerie was playing the part.
I want Aida to do this.
Why?
Stop asking questions. Focus. This is the Curdling. . . .
Holy shit. My dad did the same thing to Aida that he did to me, and my mom, and probably everyone he ever worked with. He used people’s pain in service to his movies, in his forever quest to spelunk out of the underground, into a wider spotlight. He was shameless.
“Why did . . . that upset . . . why would that have confused my mom?”
She shakes her head. “It was my dad’s baby, if that’s what you’re asking me.”
“It is.”
“Lucien never went that far, Dario.”
I snort. “I’ll leave an extra rose on his grave.”
“But it’s possible your mother wasn’t sure if he had.”
Is it possible Hayley might want to protect me from the truth so much she’d lie to me? Or maybe I’m just being paranoid.
I watch a seagull dive down and glide along the water, skimming the surface in a focused, brutal way. Something’s being hunted. There’s always something being hunted.
“Did my dad visit my mom much at the hospital?” I ask.
“He used to. Not so much anymore. Lately, it’s just been me. But your dad wasn’t really well enough.”
I open the file folder. I take out all the letters and papers and envelopes, and I tear everything into small pieces. Then I cast all the pieces into the lake. Hayley watches me but says nothing.
“Ancient shit between my mom and dad no one needs to read,” I say quietly.
“She asks about you.”
My heart skips a beat. “Oh?”
But I guess that’s no surprise, given everything I just found out.
Hayley lays her head on my shoulder. “Every time I visit. She always asks me where you are.”
I hug myself against a cool breeze. “I’m glad you told me.”
“I’m glad I told you, too,” she says, softly.
We sit for a few minutes, looking out at the lake. A couple pieces of the torn letters float back and get caught behind a rock.
When I wake from a nap I don’t remember taking, I hear crickets outside. Moonlight leaks through my window.
I eat a bowl of potato-chervil soup, which was sitting on a covered silver tray by my bed. As it gets later, I hear people shouting and laughing, running down the halls. It’s not midnight yet, but the costume ball has already started.
I put on this cheesy devil costume Hayley left for me—hooded, salsa-red pajamas with little horns and a tail. Jude decides he doesn’t need a costume—he just puts on his Mexican wrestler outfit, mask and all, since he feels more comfortable in that.
I was never really allowed to stay up for the costume balls, so I remember only glimpses. One time I peeked inside and saw this purple-lit extravaganza: mirror balls and champagne glasses, and sequins and glitter and gilded masks sparkling in this fevered way. I tried to run inside, but someone picked me up and carried me off while the music echoed through the castle until it was only a distant thumping.
Crepuscular Dusk is really just everyone pretending Halloween comes once a month. Some people take it really seriously, spending all their downtime designing costumes, consulting with the special effects wizards upstairs; there’s no formal competition, but people treat it like one, and there have been some legendary costumes.
Kat Trenton, one of Moldavia’s costume designers, once wore a long coat made out of dozens of coiling, battery-powered snakes. Henry Ashe, our resident still photographer, once went as a three-headed rabid bat with three sets of glowing eyes and foaming mouths. And Samantha Childress once went as a fairy godmother in a gown made out of silverware, with a magic wand that shot real sparks.
The Karloff ballroom isn’t as big as the grand ballroom in the Carpenter Wing, but it’s cozier. Two sets of French doors are swung open, looking out over the east lawn. Someone turned on the spotlights buried in the grass, so the grounds are aglow with rainbow colors reflecting off the glass doors. The ballroom was designed to merge the interior of the castle with the landscaping outside. There are Tiffany lamps, red-leather booths with candy-green-apple-colored tables that match the marble floors, lots of giant ferns everywhere, and leafy vines crawling up the stone walls.
A makeshift DJ booth has been set up in the back of the ballroom. I can’t tell who’s at the decks, but so far I’ve heard at least three separate remixes of “Monster Mash,” which, while maddening, matches the general theme of tonight’s ball. People have gone all out as usual, but there’s something inherently classical about people’s costumes this time. Of course, this is the first ball since my dad died, so everyone seems to be paying tribute to his “creature of the night” B-movie legacy.
I love seeing the drooling werewolves, the mummies, the vampires, the zombies, the witches, and various different takes on Frankenstein monsters. The makeup and costuming are top-of-the-line. The mirror ball spins specks of toxic yellows and greens. People are tearing up the shimmering dance floor.
Jude and I sit at one of the leather booths; immediately a waiter appears, dressed as some sort of wraith. “What can I get you boys? Great costumes!”
“Thanks, man. Do I know you?”
“I’m Will. I’m a production designer. You’re Dario!”
“I am.”
“I volunteered to wait tables for the ball. Tonight’s menu is all unhealthy, amazingly delicious comfort food. Buffalo wings, chicken fingers, pigs in blankets, deep-dish pizza bites, devils on horseback. Anything, really. What can I get you?”
“What are devils on horseback?” Jude asks.
Apparently those are bacon-wrapped dates filled with blue cheese, so yeah, we just order everything. Jude orders a beer. I order a dry martini, Bond style.
The music takes a soulful swerve into some Otis Redding, and I nod in appreciation. In the booth next to ours the ghosts of two mountain explorers frozen to death (complete with icicles glued onto fake beards!) canoodle over some frothy cocktails and a plate of cheese fries. Jude takes off his luchador mask and lounges back in the booth, crossing one leg over the other. He gives me a euphoric look, and instantly I know what he’s going to say because he looks more chill than I’ve ever seen him: “I’ve never felt so comfortable just being me.”
I laugh. “This place is the Island of Misfit Toys.”
“If I hadn’t met you all those years ago, I just don’t know.”
“What don’t you know?”
“Where I’d be now. You took me here and it turned out to be the one place in the world that I belong.”
Of course Jude fits in here. He wears all his freakishness on his freaky sleeves. That’s why I’ve trusted him the most in my life—he can’t get more weird or damaged, it’s just not possible. There’s still stuff I don’t know about him, but I know how far down the slope he can slide. I know the contents of his heart.
“I got to know some of the electrician dudes,” he says. “They’re called juicers!”
“I know.”
“They came upstairs and were boxing with me.” His smile fades a little. He looks into his lap. “I’m sorry. I know you’ve had a rougher time. You seem kind of upset.”
I wave away his concerns. “I’m okay. I’m glad you’re making friends. I’m sorry I haven’t been around as much.” I keep getting caught up in Moldavia chaos, and I feel like I’m being a shit friend to him. “We should just have fun tonight.”
The waiter returns with our drinks and steaming platters of food, and we just dig in. Jude holds up his beer. “Cheers.” We clink glasses. “This place is a beautiful nightmare, man. You gonna get out there or what?” Jude looks toward the dance floor.
I look around at all the monsters and ghosts dancing around. What a weird optimism they represent: that a part of us—our souls, our decaying bodies, our vaporous imprints—could go on. It’s hilarious, in a way. Is everything we do here just giving hope to people’s fear of obliteration? Is that what horror really is?
Jude laughs, pointing at a booth of blood-spattered vampires eating nachos.
“Listen,” I tell Jude, “Moldavia is a drug. Just know that. People can get trapped here. This place is kind of messed up.”
He shrugs. “But so is life, right?”
“Yeah, but this isn’t real life,” I say. “Look around.”
He does, and giggles at everything he sees.
“That girl loves you,” he says, turning back to me.
My heart leaps into my throat. “Hayley?” I ask, stupidly.
He nods, chewing on a chicken wing.
It’s weird hearing this from Jude. I’ve gotten pretty clear about my own feelings, but I never assumed anything on Hayley’s end. It’s not something you can just ask. I guess it takes someone looking in from the outside to see the truth of things.
“Stuff happens for a reason,” says Jude. “Maybe there’s a reason you had to come back here.”
“Because of Hayley?”
He takes a swig of beer. “Yeah, but maybe you need to heal some of these wounds from your childhood . . . in order to move freely to the next level of adulthood.”
I roll my eyes. “My life isn’t a Freudian video game, Jude.”
His expression is serious. “Not everyone gets that opportunity. I was too young, too weak, too little, and then it was too late.”
I just stare at him.
“I couldn’t stop him from hurting her,” he says. “And he’d hurt her over and over and over again.” He points at me. “I know you know what it’s like to be helpless. But I wish I could go back in time. As a bigger, stronger me . . . be home on that day . . . when he hurt her so bad she was never going to be right again.”
His eyes are empty and cold. I put my hand on his arm. “Jude?”
“It’s okay,” he whispers. “I know where he lives now.”
“That’s not the answer. You have to promise me . . .”
He looks at me, his lips trembling a little. “Promise you what, man? You’re gonna tell me you don’t understand revenge? Wanting to make shit right?”
I just press my hand down harder into his. “You have to promise me.”
He pulls away and sits back, splaying his hands innocently.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?” I say.
He shakes his head. “Nah, man. But I see the way Hayley looks at you. I’ll be lucky if someone ever looks at me like that.”
“Yeah, but—”
He kicks me under the table. “Speaking of.”
She materializes out of the flashing, feverish haze: a fairy princess with gold-spangled wings, her face all glittery, hair wild and teased. She has on blue-black eyeliner and blood-orange lipstick. “I’m a fallen fairy,” she explains. “Literally.” She hoists up her gown, licks her index finger, and tends to a bleeding knee. “I tripped in these heels.”
“Are you benched for the night?” I ask her.
She looks at the dance floor. “Fuck no. I’m dancing.”
We all hit the dance floor. Jude accuses Hayley of being nerd porn, and Hayley accuses Jude of being a luchador heartbreaker. I wrap my arms around Hayley’s waist but Hayley pushes me away and wraps her arms around Jude, sticking her tongue out at me. Fine, let her tease me. I kind of like that.
The dance floor parts in the middle. Oren, confined to his antique wheelchair, cuts a path through the revelers. He’s dressed as Dr. Everett Von Scott from Rocky Horror, plaid quilt thrown over his legs, fake mustache, striped tie, spectacles and all.
“Hello, hello!” he says. “I don’t want to disrupt!” he cries, doing just that. “I don’t want to steal away attention!” he yells, doing just that. “I just wanted to make a brief appearance to say hello.” He spots me and comes to a halt because I’m standing right there, glowering at him. “And how are you, dear brother? How was your night?”
I bite my lip. “Very restful. Thankfully that tea you gave me was so weak.”
Oren studies my face. “Oh?”
“Just like you: Watered down. Flavorless. Ineffectual. A little bitter.” I give him a tight smile. “So how was your night?”
“My knife?”
“Your night,” I say, hitting that last consonant.
He rolls his neck around, luxuriously. “I had a wonderful night to myself. I listened to some French Freakbeat and read some illuminating poems by Anne Sexton. The pressure is off me, Dar. I’ve never felt so free.”
“Good to hear. Hopefully you’ll heal soon? The kitchen could use some help mincing vegetables.”
Oren rolls over my foot totally on purpose as he makes his way across the floor.
“Ow!” I scream, holding up my hooved foot.
“Whoops, sorry!” He waves a hand over his shoulder as he barrels across the room, greeting various people, so everyone gets a turn to pour on the sympathy and shower him with attention while he brushes it all away, pretending he couldn’t care less.
The lights come up halfway. The music is turned down.
Someone wheels in a TV on a rolling stand. Mistress Moonshadow appears on the screen, flashing a well-lipsticked leer. Everyone gathers around. She’s filming her monthly web series live from the castle. These are always taped in tandem with the costume ball and streamed on Moldavia’s official website, followed by an old Moldavia flick. The whole thing is done for all the fanboys, made to drum up interest in the studio and its back catalog. Moldavia fans wait with anxious anticipation for these vlogs, or any glimpse, however brief, inside the castle walls.
Mistress Moonshadow shows plenty of cleavage in her leather vamp outfit. Her cherry-red wig, streaked with silver, flows behind her as she reclines against a velvet couch, surrounded by flaming candelabras, old wooden coffins, and lots of spider webbing strung all over everything. There are old-fashioned spooky sound effects in the background: creaking doors, cackling, heavy chimes on an organ.
Jude looks like he’s in a trance. “Who is that?” he says.
“Mistress Moonshadow.”
“Take me to her,” he says, without blinking.
“Good evening!” Mistress Moonshadow purrs. “Live from Moldavia, I am Mistress Moonshadow! The halls of Moldavia once again wail with a thousand restless spirits! It’s another Crepuscular Dusk!” There’s a thunderclap, and the camera zooms in and out. “A kiss for my fellow Spine Tinglers, currently dancing the night away in the ballroom of the Karloff Wing, paying their deepest respects to the creepy crawlies of the underworld and to our dear departed master visionary, Moldavia’s founding father, Lucien Heyward. Scream all night, guys. Elsewhere in the castle, filming is nearly complete on our next feature, No Chance in Hell, which stars me. Look for it soon!”
“I think I’m in love,” says Jude.
“We continue our series of underappreciated Moldavia mystery thrillers from the mid-eighties with tonight’s selection, Life Buoy!, wherein the H.M.S. Mayfair returns to port with all its passengers murdered except one—Daisy Barrington, the mistress of billionaire playboy Lance Boom. Starring Spine Tingler favorites Hefford Scott, Marjorie Jaropie, myself as Muriel Marcato, and Lorenzo Mayberry as Lance, this is the film that critic Daniel Gable described as ‘a smear on the very concept of logic itself as it courses through any form of reality that sanity could accept.’”
The movie plays silently as the lights go down again and the music continues.
I spot Gavin across the room wearing his signature oversize funeral suit, serving food to a table of caped sorcerers. He does everything neatly and super-formally, as always, and when he’s done, he swings the tray to his side, begins to glide off, but then spots me staring at him and stops. For a moment, we just stare at each other.
I forgive you for fathering a boy within the same walls as our two sons. . . .
And then Gavin does the strangest thing: he drops the tray on a nearby table, turns, and begins to run.
“Excuse me!” I say, shouldering my way through the crowd. “Excuse me, please!” I step on a foot or two as I push my way through the crowd, my stupid forked tail getting in everyone’s way as I try to keep up with Gavin, who is so fast. They literally start playing “Keep On Running” by the Spencer Davis Group. “Excuse me, sorry!” I knock into a fellow demon and spill his beer. “Sorry!”
I run out of the ballroom. I see Gavin turning the corner at the end of the cavernous black-and-white, marble-floored hallway, lined with gleaming knights in armor, each of them standing in a recessed alcove, pinpointed lights from above.
People call this hallway, which connects all the main rooms of the Karloff Wing, Medieval Row. Some of these knights were used as actual costumes in one of Moldavia’s biggest flops that went on to have a roaring second life on DVD and late-night cable, Dr. Jekyll and the Knights Templar in Hawaii, which was unreal. My favorite thing about that movie was a review by Jamie Renquist, writing for Gore & Gristle, in which he stated: “It is possible Dr. Jekyll and the Knights Templar in Hawaii was entirely written, produced, and directed by a possessed bottle of tequila.”
I find Gavin in the hunting room. The room has dark wood-paneled walls, mounted deer heads (I don’t think they’re real; my dad loved animals), everything draped with tartan blankets. If I was a Scottish recluse who liked aged cheese, silk pajamas, and Agatha Christie, this is where I’d go to get drunk and die. I sit next to Gavin on the sofa. He’s fingering an empty crystal tumbler, looking down at the floor.
“Why did you run away from me?” I ask, panting.
“I didn’t want to get in trouble.”
“What are you talking about?”
He shakes his leg. “I stole something. I thought you found out.”
“What did you steal?”
Gavin reaches inside his jacket and removes something dark, square, and leathery. He hands it over without looking at me.
“Oh, my journal!”
“I swiped it from your closet. I figured you found out it was me. I’m sorry.”
I look at the cover of my old, sad journal and laugh a little. The last thing I want to do is crack open this stupid thing. I am so done thinking about and reliving that period of my life. “Did you find the pen, by any chance?”
He shakes his head.
I hand the journal back to Gavin. “Here. Keep it safe for me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. But why did you take it? And why do you keep it on you? That’s so weird.”
“Because I wanted to know all about you.”
“Me? Why?”
“Because you’re the one everyone talks about around here. I didn’t remember you from when I was little.”
“You’ve been here that long?”
“Yes. You played Alastair, the best Moldavia character ever. I love that movie so much. You’re my hero.”
I’m too confused by this statement, and everything he’s saying, to be disturbed that a kid loved a movie I starred in where I chowed down on a dying woman’s fetus. “I’m your hero?”
“You’re such a good actor, and you stood up to him and you left.”
I never saw myself as a role model to anyone. My tormented face is what you see staring at you when there are no better horror options on whatever streaming service you’re currently frustrated with.
“It sucks you weren’t treated well,” says Gavin. “Your dad was nice to me. He took care of me. It made me sad when I read what it was like for you growing up here.”
Apparently, he read my journal like it was a novel—the kind where you start to really care about the main character. I sit back and sigh. “You know, it isn’t nice to read people’s journals . . . and invade people’s privacy like that. It’s a little stalker-y.”
“I didn’t know how else to get to know you. I’m just an intern, and you’re Dario Heyward. I’m lonely sometimes. I found this by accident. I wanted to read what it was like for you. You wrote some really good stories. And cool stuff about making Zombie Children.”
“How old are you, Gavin?”
“I’m eleven.”
I do the math in my head. He was born about a year before my mom was committed. A lot of people who came through Moldavia had major issues—financial problems, addiction problems, whatever. Maybe my dad took care of him because his mom was unable to. Of course, there’s another reason my dad would feel responsible for him. . . .
“Who’s your mom?”
“She worked here. But she left.”
“Why did she leave?”
“She was sick,” he replies. “But it’s okay.” He smiles, shakily, and it occurs to me I’ve never seen him smile before. “She’s getting better; she’s coming back for me.”
“That’s great! Who’s your dad?”
He peers at his refracted reflection in the tumbler. “I didn’t know him,” he says in a somber tone. “He left before I was born.”
I nod and wait for more. But he doesn’t say anything else.
I’m not getting the whole story here, but I can’t make this into an interrogation. He’s just a sad, lonely kid. I pat him on the knee and stand up.
I’m glad my dad took care of Gavin. Hell, by the end of the night some chambermaid I never saw before is probably going to crawl out of a piano bench to tell me how kind and loving my dad was to her as a child. My dad seems to have lavished affection on pretty much everyone except me. And I guess Oren. But at some point, I have to move on from feeling slighted.
I turn to Gavin. “You shouldn’t feel alone here. That’s never a good thing. If you ever feel that way, come find me. And we can talk it out. Yeah?”
He nods. “Yeah. Thanks.”
I feel like that’s a good, solid beat to stroll out of the room on, so that’s what I do. I walk out of there feeling like a goddamn hero.
Maybe half the kids in this castle were actually fathered by my dad. Jesus, maybe? Or maybe Gavin is just a type A kleptomaniac stalker. Right now, I’d rather just not know. I’m learning sometimes that’s the best choice you can make around here.
The costume ball is still in full swing. They’re playing a lot of danceable, Goth-inflected post-punk. Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Echo and the Bunnymen. It got really crowded, and the costumes more profane (hello, sexy zombie nurse). I don’t see Jude or Hayley anywhere, so I settle in a corner booth by myself.
Something about talking to Gavin and seeing that old journal really opened the hornets’ nest, because that buzzing begins to kick up a real fury in my ears. I sink back into the booth, drinking cocktails, as everyone comes over to say something nice to me.
That’s right, I’m the Big Kahuna here now, and people want to kiss up, make a good impression. Some kid comes over to me to tell me how cool I am, how thrilled he is to be here. I recognize him as one of the scruffy dudes on the props crew who was laughing at Oren when he was on the roof. Maybe he was the one who told him to jump.
He’s like: It’s so good to officially meet you, man. My name’s Addison.
I’m like: Now that we’ve met, Addison, go pack your bags, you’re out of here.
I enjoy watching his face fall and his eyes go wide. It gives me a visceral thrill.
Addison asks if I’m serious. I say I am, I explain why, and then I tell him to get out of my face. He backs away, destroyed, vanishing into the manic crowd.
Oren is still my brother—even if he’s a total disaster of a human being.
I get up, find a bloodstained hockey mask someone discarded, and put it on my face. I barrel into the center of the dance floor and start thrashing around, dancing wildly by myself, getting lost in the lights and the music and the smoke and my fellow freaks jumping all around me. I untie my hair and let it fall over my shoulders.
A lady dressed as a mermaid announces the sun is coming up. Somehow, the entire night went by. I’m a drunken, sweaty mess. I follow the crowds staggering out of the ballroom onto the east lawn. The magenta sun is rising over the hills, breaking through the layer of morning mist hovering over the dewy grass. And all these intoxicated monsters come stumbling out of the castle, into the rising sun. It’s like some circle of hell ejected us out of its sordid depths. I laugh. It’s beautiful.
And so is Hayley. She’s coming toward me. Her costume is still perfectly intact after this whole night. Of course it is. “Hi there,” I say. “Where have you been?”
She shrugs mischievously. We watch the sunrise together for a moment.
“Where’s Jude?” I say. Hayley points over to my right. Jude and Mistress Moonshadow are holding each other. Jude’s head is on her shoulder, his eyes closed. They’re dancing in the grass to music that isn’t playing anymore, the sun fraying the outline of their bodies; they look radioactive. I wasn’t expecting this. But it’s Jude. I should have known it wouldn’t take him long.
Hayley and I look at each other, smiling.
We sneak back to her room. We kiss, both of us leaning against her wall. Everything feels charged in a new way, because we’re not totally ourselves, we’re lost in our costumes. The sunrise cuts around the edges of Hayley’s window shades. Dust motes float in the rosy beams, which illuminate all the framed photographs of Hugo and Aida, like they’re waking from hibernation. Then it’s like they’re staring at me. I pull away from her. “What’s up?” she says, adjusting her fairy wing.
“It’s just . . .” The room is slanting and readjusting itself around me. I’m suddenly feeling how much I drank. “It’s been a really long twenty-four hours.”
Hayley follows my eyes to one of the photos on a bookshelf. She reaches around me and flips the frame facedown.
“How did your parents meet?” I ask her.
She smiles. “My dad went to Ireland on a documentary film crew when he was right out of college. My mom accidentally served him two pints of Guinness at a pub he went to in Limerick.” She laughs to herself. “Literally, in County Limerick. It was a rough place at the time, actually. They called it Stab City.”
“I thought your mom was from Dublin.”
“Originally. But she was studying there. She was in art school. My dad drank both pints, and asked my mom on a date. I think that second one gave him the courage. The rest is history, I guess—although my mom finished school, I know that. I don’t remember how they wound up here. They told me . . . it’s funny . . .” She shakes her head. “The things you forget.”
“I like that story.” I take her hands. “I do think I came back here for you, Hay. There were several reasons. Obviously. But that was a big one.”
She squeezes my hand and sighs. She looks a little stricken by my admission.
I brush her hands against my cheek. “You know I may not have . . . forever.”
“Don’t say that,” she says. “You have a future to—”
“I don’t know if I do.”
“You do.” She gives me a firm look.
I take a lock of her hair and curl it around my finger. “I think I should see my mom.” Hayley opens her mouth a little, like she’s about to say something, but doesn’t. “I just think it’s time.”
“Yeah, of course,” she says quietly.
“I know you loved my dad,” I say, “but he wasn’t . . .” I’m trying not to say too much, but I had a lot to drink tonight and my tongue is kind of loose.
“I know about the letters,” she says.
I clap a hand over my eyes. I have no idea what to say to that.
“Oren found them when he was going through your dad’s papers after he died,” she says. “Both of us collected everything we found that we thought was relevant. I don’t think either one of us knew how to bring this up to you, or if we even should.”
“Oren led me to them.”
Hayley rolls her eyes. “Of course he did.”
We’re both quiet for a moment.
“Your dad did bad things,” says Hayley. “No question.”
“Then why did you love him so much?”
“I hated him too at times. Don’t think I didn’t.” Her eyes briefly flash a fire I’ve never seen in her before. “But I was able to look past a lot of that. I saw so much pain in him. You know this place, Dario . . . it works in perverse ways. Lucien became a father to me. I needed that.”
“Or did he need that?”
“I needed that,” she repeats.
I offer her a strained, wobbly smile.
“I think you should see your mom,” she says, hesitating a bit. “If you’re ready. Because I’ll tell you something—she really doesn’t have forever.”
“What do you mean?”
She takes a breath. “Talk to your brother about all that, okay?”
I pinch my upper lip. “Okay.”
She looks at one of the overturned picture frames. “After my mom died, I left Moldavia for a little bit.”
This catches me by surprise. “You did?”
She folds her arms. “What? Did you think I was some sort of enchanted princess who could never leave the castle?”
“No, I—”
“I took a little trip to Ireland . . . to pay tribute to my parents. Dublin. And I toured the Irish countryside. I found the bar where my mom worked, where they met. It was cathartic for me. It was like I finally got to say good-bye to them.”
I really can’t picture Hayley anywhere else but here, which is ridiculous.
“It was amazing,” she says. “I’ve always been interested in Irish literature, and medieval architecture . . . all the different kinds of architecture there.”
“I’m glad you got to go.”
“I met someone,” she says, her eyes sharpening.
That knocks the wind out of me. “The person you were . . . FaceTiming with?”
“He’s a grad student at Trinity. Law.”
“He’s older.”
Hayley shrugs. “A little.”
“And you guys have been keeping in touch and all that?”
“It’s not . . .” Hayley runs her hands up and down her arms. “It’s not anything. We’re just friends. Obviously. He’s there. I’m here.”
“You care about him, though.”
“I barely know him.” But the conflicted dreaminess in her eyes suggests something more. And, hey, it’s not like she doesn’t have a right to be happy.
“So what are you going to do?” I say.
“About what? I came back here and everything was falling apart. The bookkeeping, the schedules . . . Franklin can’t do it all on his own. This place needs me.”
I rub my stomach. “I’m not feeling so great.”
“You don’t look great.”
In her bathroom, I splash water on my face. I look at my strained, sallow reflection. I don’t recognize the person looking back at me. It’s like I’ve aged five years since I’ve been here. I think about Hayley going to Dublin, meeting some guy. Hayley wasn’t going to be confined to this castle, waiting for me. I’m such a dumbass for even feeling jealous. Overcome with a sudden, maddening thirst, I drink out of the faucet, slurping, soaking my chest. I wipe my mouth with the sleeve of my costume.
When I stumble back into Hayley’s room, she’s still in her costume, asleep on the floor, leaning against the foot of the bed. Her wings are folded and collapsed around her, the edges ignited by the sunrise suffusing the room. She looks like a little girl again, spun back into the past.
I make my way to the door, but I’m unsteady on my feet and slam into the side of her desk, knocking over a stack of papers. Buried under countless loose script pages and old call sheets and a few more books on architecture (which make more sense now) is something I definitely wish I hadn’t seen.
A GED diploma, and a bunch of college applications.
Most of the applications are dated over a year ago, and they’re only half completed. Obviously, never mailed. I flip through Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Oberlin, Amherst, Princeton, NYU. The most recent one is for Trinity.
“Oh God,” I whisper, cringing, as my stomach lurches.
I’ve been such an idiot. When I left Moldavia, I never realized I was whisking away someone else’s dreams with me. Someone else’s future had to be sacrificed to fill the gap I left. And it was Hayley’s. Oren was never going anywhere. I stole that from her.
Hayley always considered a future outside these gates.
Maybe she didn’t even want me to come back here, so the studio could be sold, and she could finally make her escape. I never thought about that. But she cares about this place. It’s everything to her. Otherwise, she would never have returned. She wouldn’t work this hard. I have to save the studio—for her, for everyone here.
I spend a full minute just kneeling over the mess of her unsent college applications, imagining this life she never got to have, squeezing my fists into my eyes.
Then I stumble downstairs and outside.
More people are gathering on the east lawn, hesitant to bid farewell to another Crepuscular Dusk. Two sylphs in diaphanous gowns come up beside me, linking my arms. The dawn hangs over us, heavy and humid.
The sun is up now, revealing all of us for what we really are.
And it’s fucking blinding.