THERE’S NO GPS IN THE CAR, AND I DON’T WANT TO LOOK AT MY PHONE while I’m driving, but I have a really good sense of direction—thank God—so I manage to get us home okay. The guard at the gatehouse opens the gates; some baffled production designer, measuring tape in hand, lets me inside after I ring the service bell, wet and shivering. I leave Oren curled up in the back seat of my new car, parked in the driveway in front of the castle. According to the grandfather clock in the hall of the Chaney Wing, it’s only eight p.m.
Jude isn’t in our room. I stand there in the dim light, about to rip off my sopping-wet clothes, when I hear something behind me and turn around. Gavin is standing there. I didn’t hear him come in, of course, but I’ve become used to him just spawning from out of nowhere, like a slain video game character restarting from the last checkpoint. He holds a steaming cup of tea on a tray.
“Oh, hey. You can set that down on the bedside table.”
He does. Then he just stands there, swimming in his too-large suit, hands clasped behind his back. “There are warm, freshly laundered clothes in your closet.”
“Thanks, Gavin. Listen, I need to tell you something.”
“Yes?”
“There are too many secrets in this place . . . don’t you think?” He looks at me as if he wants to answer this question in the way that will please me the most but isn’t sure what that answer is. “It’s about your mom.”
“I was actually thinking about her today,” he says.
This catches me off guard. “What were you thinking?”
He smiles, which always looks unnatural on him, like some app drew it on his face. “I was thinking about her coming back. We look at each other and see how we’ve changed, tell each other everything that’s happened, and we realize nothing’s changed that much. We’re like how we were before, in a way, and it’s all going to be the same, it’s all going to be okay. . . .” His smile fades a little at the edges. “I know it’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid, man.”
“It’s not just today. I have this thought a lot. Like, every day.”
God. This kid still feels hope. I know all too well what it’s like to feel hopeless, especially at that age. I can’t take that away from him. “I just wanted to tell you . . . it’s okay to miss people. It’s okay to want them back, the way they once were,” I say.
Even though that’s not always possible. I finish the rest of the thought in my head.
“Thank you for saying that,” he says after a small pause.
I suddenly get this idea, and as soon as I get it, I realize it’s risky, because I’m being inspired by shit my mom rambled today, which is already putting me down a path well trodden by my dad. “I have this idea for a sequel to Zombie Children,” I blurt out. “Alastair and Abigail have a son. Would you want to act in the movie?”
He hesitates. “To play their son?”
“Right.”
At first, Gavin looks intrigued but then apprehensive. After another small pause, while he mulls it over, eyes on his shoes (he’s clearly read my journal entries about making Zombie Children very closely), he appears touched that I asked him.
“That would be really awesome,” he says. “Thanks for trusting me to do it.” He smiles at me. “You remembered your own idea.”
“What do you mean?”
Gavin takes my journal out of his jacket pocket.
I run a finger across my eyebrow. “Oh, you, uh, still keep it on you, okay. . . .”
He flips through it a little too quickly (like he’s memorized it) and stops on a specific page. He licks his thumb, folds the corner of the page down, and hands it to me.
“Let me know if there’s anything else you need,” he says.
“Thanks. By the way, have you seen Jude?”
“I think . . . he’s with Mistress Moonshadow.” Gavin walks to the door and stops momentarily, like there’s something else he wants to say to me, but then he walks out, head down, closing the door softly behind him.
I change into warm clothes, sip tea, and sit on the edge of my bed with the journal on my lap. I read the section of the journal Gavin marked for me. I laugh a little at my twelve-year-old handwriting.
Zombies are dumb. Why are they even hungry? The body it’s trying to feed is already dead! Has anyone ever realized that? I hate this I hate making this movie I hate my dad. It’s not fun AT ALL. He’s hitting me all the time and not letting me sleep or eat.
I think Alastair is lonely. He just wants to find someone to love him before he decays or whatever. No one ever loved him.
I told my dad it would be cool if someone like a girl sees something good in him so Alastair doesn’t eat her, but transforms her into a zombie too and they fall in love that way. I wrote this out as a story but my dad just crumpled it up and said I should concentrate on playing Alastair. I really like my idea, though!
Maybe Alastair and this girl can have a kid themselves except this kid is born NORMAL! A normal kid with zombie parents who try to take care of this kid but have to resist their zombie impulses and not eat him. They have to abandon him so he will survive and start a new race.
I close the journal. So that’s where I heard this idea before.
I commend my younger self for writing down some pretty cool ideas. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who thought they were pretty cool. My dad stole part of this idea for the ending to Zombie Children. And I never even realized it. I forgot I wrote any of this.
Missing Jude, I walk down the hall. Mistress Moonshadow’s door is ajar. I walk inside, past all the mannequins, the billowing fabric, toward her bedroom. Deep inside there’s a baroque bed engraved with skulls and vines, violet sheets, and a mahogany headboard in the shape of a giant spider. The headboard matches a bronze, spider-shaped chandelier hanging over her bed.
Jude and Mistress Moonshadow are in bed together, purple blanket thrown aside, sheets all rumpled. For a moment it looks like Jude is actually suckling from her, but then I realize he’s asleep, his head against her breast. Mistress Moonshadow calmly pulls up the sheet, covering herself. “He’s sleeping,” she says quietly, stroking Jude’s hair.
“Am not,” says Jude, muffled, into her chest.
“I’m sorry.” I don’t know exactly why I did this, needed to see them like this. But then I sort of get it. I’m jealous. I’m scared of losing Jude.
Jude lifts up his head, his hair all crazy. They’ve probably been in bed all day long. He kicks the sheet aside. “Get in,” he says, sticking his tongue out.
For a second, I almost do. But then I laugh. “I’m sorry we forgot your birthday,” I say. “Happy eighteenth, man.”
“Happy eighteenth to you too,” he says, giving me the gift of his beautifully cockeyed grin. You know that moment when you get reminded of how much you truly care about a person? It happened with Hayley. It happened, in its own way today, with my mom, and then even with Oren. Now Jude. Maybe that’s an unexpected gift of Moldavia. The flowers blooming brightly before the spiders crawl out.
I turn and quickly walk out of the room, embarrassed.
Jude represents everything I know, but I’m not ready to accept him as someone from my past just yet, although I can practically see the castle consuming him. I know people move away from each other over time, but he’s not someone I want to outgrow.
My mind is whirring with ideas for a Zombie Children sequel. I’m pretty much dead set on making this work. I need more to go on, though—more inspiration, more material.
So I make my way to my father’s office suite. I want to see if there are any other notes my dad may have cribbed from me about Alastair and Abigail, anything left over from his treatment for Zombie Children. I don’t find anything like that. But in a drawer I find something else.
All the stories I wrote out and gave to my dad.
They’ve been uncrumpled and flattened as if ironed, in a neat pile, tied with the same baker’s twine he used for my mom’s letters. He saved every single one.
I either missed this last time because I was tripping so hard, or someone purposefully left this here for me to find. It could have been anyone: Oren, Hayley, Franklin, even Gavin. Underneath the pile of pages is a reel of film.
I corral one of the camera ops to set up the film for me on a 35 mm projector. There’s a screening room—forty upholstered seats, medium-size screen, old-fashioned concession stand, popcorn maker—in the Carpenter Wing.
Alone in the theater, I watch a bunch of outtakes from The Possession of Prodigal Peter on damaged film stock. This was the movie they made right after I left, ostensibly my dad’s reaction to me leaving.
He’s working with this very young actor (probably the poor kid of a long-departed crew member), directing him (and the actress playing his mom) during the big demonic possession scene, set in the kid’s bedroom.
My dad is outwardly impatient with the kid, doing that thing where he pushes and pushes until he finally gets that exhausted despair that always seems to please him to no end—but he’s not brutal with this kid like he was with me. Someone calls cut, the actors move out of frame, and then, only for a minute, my dad walks into frame while camera and sound are still running, fastidiously adjusting the blanket on the kid’s bed.
Someone off camera says something to him that I can’t hear.
Lucien Heyward turns toward the camera. “No. He’s no Dario. No one is.”
Of course I don’t need any more materials to create a sequel and make it work. Everything I need is already a part of me, a part of my life and my experience being a kid at Moldavia.
I watch my dad sit on the edge of the bed. And then he just implodes.
He starts shaking, holding his head in his hands to cover his face. I watch him become, before my eyes, vulnerable: a grief-stricken man, racked by guilt.
The film crackles and burps, the colors bubble into a rusty sludge, and then I’m just staring at a blank white screen while the projector clicks, whirs, and flaps.
When I get back to our room, Jude is waiting for me, wearing black gym shorts and a red hoodie. He’s sitting on the floor next to a big white birthday cake with candles that have been burning for a while.
I sit across from him. We look like those two kids at the end of Sixteen Candles. Without speaking, we blow out all the candles. Jude produces two plastic forks from his pocket. We each take a couple bites of cake. It’s real good—not too sweet.
I don’t ask where he got the cake.
All of Jude’s stuff is gone from the room—packed up in his trunk. At first, I think he’s leaving Moldavia, but then I know.
“I’m going to move in with Elena,” he says.
In all the years that I’ve known him, Jude has never spent the night elsewhere. No matter whom he was sleeping with, or what he was doing, or how late he was out doing it, I’d always hear him snoring above me again before the sun came up.
“Also, I’m joining the electrical crew,” he says. “It seems like I fit in with those guys.”
I nod. “I’m glad you’re finding your place here.”
I also feel ambivalent about it. I’m responsible for Jude’s future. I brought him here. But I warned him: people get trapped. Maybe he wants to be trapped. Maybe one day he’ll leave. We’re grown-ups now. We have to make our own decisions about this stuff. “What about the Seychelles?” I ask him. “Finding the coco de mer?”
He snickers. “There’ll be time for that.”
“Your stepfather?”
He gives me a razor-sharp stare. “I’m here now, so . . .”
I nod, accepting that. “Your mother?”
“Dude, she’s long dead. I got no one else out there.” Jude studies the cake. “Dario, you’re the only family I ever had. I’ll never have a brother. You’re my brother. And you gave me an even bigger family here. And ’cause of you, I found someone.”
“’Cause of me?”
“’Cause of you. So I want your blessing about Elena.”
I laugh. “You don’t need that. You’re the heartbreaker, man! I don’t want to see anyone get hurt. It’s been less than twenty-four hours. You do realize that, right?”
Jude smiles and lays his strong, heavy palm on my shoulder. He knows.
I smear some frosting on his nose. He doesn’t wipe it away.
I’m Jude! I’m a not-so-mean, not-very-lean fighting machine! he told me, smacking his gloves together, when we first met. I remember thinking: the world can’t be that terrible if a total stranger is able to give me a smile that generous and wide.
“Do you want me to sit with you for a while?” he says, rubbing his stomach. “I can’t eat any more of this cake.”
“No, it’s okay. I have work to do.”
He taps his fingertip against one of the dead candles. “It’s cool. Go do it.”
But we sit and stare at the half-eaten cake for a few more minutes.
I go into Oren’s empty room. The demonic occult symbols are still glowing in ultraviolet on his black walls. I sit down at his typewriter. I have vague ideas and half-formed images swimming in my head about Alastair and Abigail that take place years after Zombie Children left off. I have to take these loose abstract strands of thought and coalesce all of them into something filmable.
Zombie Children of the Harvest Sun failed because it wasn’t really about anything. I mean, I guess it was, but it was mostly about my dad being indulgent, lost in his head, and trying to deal with me. And what audience would want to sit through that shit? There was no plot. But if Alastair and Abigail are really in love and have to find some way to survive, especially if, somehow, they have a kid to take care of, well, that’s a pretty compelling story.
I wind up writing an entire treatment in one sitting. I type until my fingers ache. Then I gather all the pages and take them back to my room.
I enjoy a long, hot shower. The saturated colors from the caged shower light make me want to close my eyes and dream. As the light bathes the room in sci-fi acid green, I see a distorted shadow slowly approaching the glass door of the shower. I quickly slide open the door, flooding the bathroom.
Hayley stands there, wearing a pink nightgown. She looks surprised and frazzled, like she expected to see someone else in the shower. She’s holding my typewritten pages in her hand. I grab a towel and wrap it around my waist.
“Oh my God,” she says, averting her eyes, clearly embarrassed. “I have no idea why I just walked in here like that! Why did I think that would be okay?”
I hold up my hand. “You’re good.”
“I heard you got shot! I was still asleep when it happened, and then you weren’t here, and then you were, but I couldn’t find you.”
“It’s okay, I’m okay.”
“Where were you?” she asks me, her eyes narrowed into slits.
“Nowhere.”
“Well, I came in to see if you were up, and saw these pages on your bed.” She opens her mouth to say something else, swipes some steam away, but then quickly leaves the bathroom, pressing a hand to the side of her head as she goes.
I go after her, almost slipping on the wet floor. “Wait!”
She turns around. “You have some good ideas here.”
“Really? That’s, uh, good.” I am, in fact, pretty relieved to hear that. “I didn’t expect anyone to sneak into my room in the middle of the night and read them, so . . .”
“Well, Dar, I didn’t expect anyone to snoop around my desk and rifle through my unsent college applications, so . . .”
Oh snap. Fair enough.
She’s looking at the bandage on my chest. I move toward her. Very lightly, she puts her finger on the wound. “Does it hurt?”
I shake my head. “All this time I thought you took my place here. But that’s not what happened, is it? I took your place out there.”
“That’s not what happened,” she says. “That’s just what’s in your head.”
“Then why didn’t you go to college?”
“Because those plans weren’t practical. Yes, sure, sometimes I imagine leaving, living another life. But those moments always come when I’m at my weakest.”
“You did more than imagine it, though—”
“Franklin and I are the glue that holds this place together. This is my home, and I chose it. I chose to be here.”
“Or did it choose you?”
“Of course. That too.” Hayley plops into the leather armchair, crossing her legs, paging through my outline. “But it’s not all about me. Just like you coming back here wasn’t all about you. I have to think about everyone else. I have my own legacy here now.”
“I didn’t mean to diminish your accomplishments.” Knowing Hayley and Moldavia, I’m sure they’re profound. Oren needs a lot of guidance, and my dad was on a steep decline for a while. Yet Hayley still managed to be there for my dad as he got worse, and to be there for my mom, who never got better.
She leans her cheek against her fist, her eyes flitting around the room. “Dario, we live in a castle, for God’s sake. We make ridiculous movies about monsters. We’re already living lives most people could only dream of.”
“What about your interests in architecture? In Irish literature?”
“I’m interested in both! I might pursue them one day. Just not today.”
“What about this guy you like? Seamus or Domhnall or Paddy Cloverleaf O’Malley—”
“Joe. His name is Joe.”
“Well, what about Joe?”
She stands up, straightens the pages with one neat gesture, and places them on the armrest. “Joe is a great guy,” she says. She brushes her hair back, and looks at me. “But I don’t love him.”
We just look at each other from across the room.
“I think everyone here reaches a point where they wonder if they’re going to be a part of Moldavia forever, or if they belong in the outside world,” she says. “But I have roots here. And they’re deep. I could never just walk away. My parents sacrificed so much. Part of why I stayed was for them. Part of it was for your dad. Part of it was for your mom. Part of it was for me. And maybe you.”
“Me?”
She looks toward the closet. “Our families sort of merged, didn’t they? It’s almost like we got married, but in reverse.”
I laugh at that. It’s kind of true.
“I knew you were being hurt,” she says.
I hold up my hands. She doesn’t need to go there.
“I was older than you . . . still too young to really protect you,” she says, smoothing down her gown. “But I knew enough to tell you to get out.”
I go over to her. “Hayley . . .”
She shakes her head. “And I didn’t. I was too scared. I should have told you to run.” She puts her hands over her face. “I was too scared of being alone. Of being here without you.”
My stomach drops; it’s the feeling you get when you plunge down a roller coaster. I want to find the right words, to dampen any pain she has, because it’s unfair that she’d be hurting over this. I take her hands and squeeze. “I was scared too. We were both just kids. Please tell me you don’t feel guilty about that.”
Hayley kisses my hands. “That’s not why I stayed. I wasn’t punishing myself.”
Or did she want me to live as much of my life as I could before I might lose my mind? How much of that has been in her head as well?
She loved my father as much as she could in my place. She loved my mother as much as she could for me. Did she love them because they were extensions of me, the closest she could get to me all this time? It’s crazy, the complex web of shit that pushes people down their paths in life.
“Your dad even offered to pay for my college,” says Hayley.
Of course he did. And he would never have done that for me, or Oren. My dad had this hidden side to him, revealed to only a select few—the side of him that actually cared about people. The side of him filled with regret for all the awful things he did. The grief-stricken side of him he was terrified to show the world—the side of him that could only be found in some of his films, like The Lovers of Dust and Shadow.
The sound of chirping birds has replaced the crickets. We’re communing again nocturnally, on the delicate thread that runs through the silence of the world, other people’s dreams, when everything is sleeping. It’s our thing.
When we were kids, we were bound by our helplessness, which became more and more excruciating over time. That’s gone now; but there are still traces of it—all that fear and defeat and sorrow between us, like the surging hush after a hurricane.
I want to find a different path with her.
I don’t totally mean for it to happen, but the towel comes undone and falls to my feet. Hayley looks at me, her eyes round and starry. I’m ephemeral to her, something astral. She, more than anyone, knows the transience of love, especially in this place. It’s always been whisked away from her.
She takes off her nightgown. We stand there for a moment, taking each other in.
Then, as if we’re dancers in a silent ballet, we move to the bed.
We only get hazy stripes of sleep, here and there, cutting into everything else we do: breathless, tender, and intertwined. When the final layer of night slips away, and morning light sweeps the room, I kiss every freckle on her back—like the reverse of the night sky. We talk about my ideas for the sequel. We hash shit out. We discuss the film, cocooned together in my blanket, until we hear footsteps, voices, sets and equipment being moved around downstairs: the castle waking up again.