EVERYONE’S ADJOURNED TO THE GREAT DINING ROOM IN THE LUGOSI Wing of the castle, where pastries and other hors d’oeuvres have been set up on a black tablecloth draped over the long oak table. Silver candelabras drip wax. A fire rages in the marble fireplace, flickering moodily off the plum damask walls. There’s a commissary on the basement floor where everyone usually eats, but the main dining room is used for special occasions, like premieres or the occasional birthday party.
And now, of course, the reception for my dad’s live funeral.
I try to avoid everyone awkwardly picking at the food and murmuring condolences to me, and I find the bar toward the back of the room. I grab a bottle of Bombay Sapphire and pour a healthy amount over some ice. I drink it down fast and relish the burning in my gut. Franklin wanders by to tell me that tomorrow morning will be the official reading of the will, and everyone is hoping I’ll spend the night in the castle.
Of course, with everything else going on, I didn’t think about a will, and that there’d be an actual reading of it. But that’s what people do before they die, I guess—leave wills. I obviously won’t be mentioned in it, and everyone hoping I’ll spend the night here—when that was not my original plan, as Jude could tell anyone—seems like Moldavia already trying to exert its influence over me.
And there it is again. As a kid, I always ascribed anthropomorphic qualities to Moldavia itself and all of its inhabitants, as if they were one collective force, tugging at me. The fact that I’m doing this again, and so soon, makes me uncomfortable.
“Look, I should really get back tonight,” I tell Franklin.
“Arrangements have already been made with the orphanage,” he says. “And with your school.”
I crunch down hard on an ice cube and grind it. I like Franklin a whole lot, but what’s up with no one consulting me on spending the night here and missing school?
“I apologize,” says Franklin. “It’s one night. We’ll have you back before noon.”
I’m too drained to make this into a thing. I ask him where exactly I’ll be sleeping, and of course he tells me in my old room, and that it’s already been prepared for me. “Are you all right, Dario?”
I chug the rest of my drink down. “I mean . . . I’ve had better days?”
“Of course.”
I look for a place to put my empty glass down. Every available surface would automatically absorb me into a group conversation I do not want to have right now, and I’m getting more and more irritated that now I’m being forced to spend the night. I think part of me is afraid I won’t be able to escape. “I just wasn’t expecting to spend the night,” I say. “I didn’t bring anything.”
“We’ll take care of that,” he says. Then a caterer grabs his elbow and asks him something stupid about shrimp, and he’s off somewhere else. I take the opportunity to make a beeline out of there. I can’t deal with Oren right now, or anyone else from the Moldavia inner circle. I just want to be very alone.
I put my glass down on an end table and veer down the dark wood–paneled halls, trying to dodge the onslaught of memories, which come faster, in sneakier ways now. It’s like being slapped in the face repeatedly by an unseen force. I stop at the bottom of the red-carpeted grand staircase, in the great hall of the Corman Wing, which leads up to the master bedroom suites that once housed our immediate family and other highly ranked Moldavia staff like Franklin, Mistress Moonshadow, and Hugo and his family.
Hayley stands at the top of the staircase, ten years old, wearing a black dress. She rolls a green marble down the stairs. I watch as it slowly bounces down, like a glass planet ripped from its solar system. When it reaches the bottom, I pick it up and clasp it in my fist. She clambers down and stands in front of me. “My dad loved you,” she says.
“I loved him back,” I tell her. I want to say so much more, say just how sorry I am, but I’m feeling too much, and I can’t express it all. I don’t know how.
Aida, Hayley’s mom, sees us from the top of the staircase and hurries down. She’s so pretty, with her thick mane of strawberry-blonde hair, eyes the color of a spring garden, this sprinkle of freckles around her nose. Her slight, lilting Dublin accent always calms me. She kisses me on the forehead. “Come on, sweetie—we have to go,” she tells her daughter, taking her hand. “Dario’s dad needs him. We’ll see him later.”
Both of them look back at me over their shoulders as they walk off.
My room is barren because I never really had much—no books or toys or video games. And not to be too Oliver Twisty about it, but not much was ever really mine. I never had stuff. I didn’t have model airplanes dangling from the ceiling or rock band posters on the walls—the crap kids always have in movies. What I did have I took to Keenan House. The rest went into storage somewhere deep in the bowels of the castle.
I always liked my room, though. It’s big, yet cozy, and unchanged: same thick scarlet rug, same antique four-poster bed, and spindly lamps, props from old Moldavia movies set in haunted mansions. My worn leather armchair is still here too, in a far corner. The cathedral ceiling is a refreshing change of pace from my claustrophobic dorm room, and so is the walk-in closet, with its wide shelves and lemony light.
An armoire with little doors and drawers is the only other piece of furniture in here. Tall windows overlook the grounds; outside I can see the candles surrounding my dad’s gravesite flickering in the night. For a moment I think maybe my dad didn’t die, or isn’t dead yet, and the wind will carry his screams from below ground, begging to be dug up. I shudder that thought away fast.
A cordless phone sitting on the floor actually works. I call Keenan and get Jude on the phone. He’s out of breath. He was probably boxing. I explain the situation, that I’ll be spending the night. There’s a long silence. But then he says softly: “And how are you doing, are you okay?”
I sit on the edge of the bed and run a hand through my hair. A tough question, considering all the shades of bedlam I experienced today. “I’m surviving.”
And that’s all I say. I don’t want to get into everything. He’ll get all worked up, protective and shit, which I can’t deal with right now. Plus, I think I am holding up pretty well, all things considered. There are lots of memories here—good ones, bad ones, whatever; it doesn’t matter. Soon I’ll be putting this place behind me again.
“Make sure you get home tomorrow,” says Jude. “Call me if there’s a problem.”
“I will.” There’s a knock at my door. “Okay. I should go.”
I hang up the phone and open the door. A sweaty, nervous little kid is standing in the hall wearing a jacket and tie. “I have your kit, sir.”
I blink at him. “You have my what? Who are you?”
“I’m Gavin, I’m an intern, and Franklin wanted me to get you settled.”
“We have interns?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sir? My name is Dario.”
“I know, sir. May I?”
Gavin enters, and I follow him into my bathroom. The white-tiled walls are spotless, as is the bottle-green floor. Wow, my very own bathroom that doesn’t smell like days-old urine; honestly, this is probably what I miss most about this place.
Gavin, who can’t be more than ten or eleven years old, has opened this leather shaving kit and is placing each item on a fluffy towel beside the sink: a razor and shaving cream, a bar of soap, a tube of bath gel, a striped wooden toothbrush, a box of toothpaste, a tub of turquoise pomade, a jar of strawberry breath mints—on and on it goes. As I watch this kid arranging everything so fastidiously, I suddenly wonder if I’m supposed to tip him. “Uh. That should do it.”
He looks up at me. “Sorry about your father, sir.”
“Thank you. You don’t need to call me—”
Gavin suddenly puts two hands over his eyes and stifles a sob—literally, a goddamn sob. I take a step back, nearly tripping over the edge of the bathtub. I have no idea what’s going on. Why is this kid crying? I haven’t even cried once today.
“Uh. Are you okay?”
Hands still clapped over his face, Gavin gulps and then starts making these awful heaving sounds: huh, heh, huh, heh, heh, heh, huggghh . . .
I stand there, helpless. I’m five seconds away from walking out and just leaving him in here, when he immediately stops and composes himself. He takes his hands off his face, revealing red eyes filled with overflowing tears.
“If there’s anything else you need, sir, just let me know.”
“How would I—”
But he’s already rushed out of the bathroom. I look at all the luxe grooming products neatly laid out for me by the sink.
What the hell was that?
My bed is soft and so much higher off the ground than I’m used to. It’s strange being in it again. As my eyes get heavy, I have the oddest thought: Why does it feel like I’m somewhere far away and totally unfamiliar, instead of back home? Did this place ever feel like home to me?
Home, Hayley said on the phone. Is that what you still call it?
When I wake up, it feels like minutes later. There’s something in my room.
It takes me a moment to remember where I am and everything that’s happened: There was a funeral. My dad exploded. I’m back in my old bed.
There’s a sifting sound. I roll out of bed, but it’s too dark to see anything. It sounds like a colony of bats is clustering on the ceiling. I really, really hate bats.
I crawl toward the nearest lamp and switch it on; a single one of these things casts only a sliver of the palest light—but just enough to illuminate the outline of the actual succubus suspended from my ceiling. I’ve never screamed so loud in my life.
Every defense mechanism kicks into gear but in the most awkward way possible. I lie flat, stiff as a board, arms clamped to my sides as if trying to camouflage myself into the carpet and disguise all movement. My panicking brain has no idea what predator it’s trying to defend against. But now it’s too late.
She descends from a low-hanging cloud of rippling black smoke, covered in rainstorm-colored strips of decayed skin, her face bone white, her eyes a glaring, sulfurous yellow. Her long black hair streams behind her. When she parts her gangrenous lips, she bares demonic fangs. She hisses, and I feel her acid breath burning my face off. As I prepare to be dragged, faceless and deformed, to the underworld, I spot wires and a harness behind her and finally recognize the pretty sophisticated makeup.
It’s Elena: Mistress Moonshadow.
She lowers down until she’s only an inch away from my face.
“Oh. My. God.”
“Dario,” she purrs as I lie there, petrified. “It’s good to see you home again.”
It takes me five whole minutes of slithering around on my belly to turn on each separate lamp so I can finally see. Then I stand, shakily. “Come out from there.” I wave her out from behind the door, where’s she’s hiding, hissing, still in character, as if even these low-watt bulbs will melt her into oblivion. She peeks her head out.
“You set up a . . . fly system in here while I was asleep?” I ask.
She glides into the center of my room, right over to me, her gaze hungry and intense enough to keep my blood pumping. “It’s a basic pendulum system. I’m playing Silvana the Succubus in No Chance in Hell, which we’re finishing production on. I wanted to see how effective her getup was.”
“Uh, pretty effective. And don’t worry, I didn’t really want those ten extra years of my life.”
She flashes me a fangy grin, but it lacks its usual bite. Her outfit looks like someone’s weird destroyed shower curtain. Shine a bright light on anything around here and it’ll crumble before your eyes; I always have to remind myself of that. “I’m sorry about your father, Dario,” she says, a tremor creeping into her voice. She takes my chin in her hand, appraising. “You’re a handsome young man,” she says. “You turned out well. You look just like Lucien.”
She sits on my leather armchair, removing her wig. The sexy dark gleam is gone, turned off. Just like that. Now she just kind of looks like a sad, middle-aged Goth who’s wearing too much makeup, which she removes, mirror-free, in circular swipes with a pink cloth. It’s like she’s getting older and erasing herself at the same time. “I don’t know what to do,” she says, with a sigh. She rests the cloth against her knee. “Honestly, Dario, I’m a little afraid.”
“That doesn’t sound like you.” Her vulnerability seems so unnatural.
“Actors are superstitious creatures. I’ve only been Mistress Moonshadow through your father’s lens, through his eyes.”
“Yeah, but you created what you are.”
I remember a review of a movie Elena was in called Death Every Morning, where she played a bloodsucking femme fatale. The reviewer said she was the only actress in modern cinema “with the true and absolute ability to creep like a cat—making us rejoice in feeling equally delicious and in mortal danger at the same time.”
“Everything at Moldavia was a collaboration with Lucien,” she explains. “We’re used to being directed, told where to stand, how we’ll be lit, how we’ll live, how we’ll die—until we’re all resurrected, and do it again for the next film. Do you think we know how to function without him here, guiding us?”
That hadn’t occurred to me. With my dad gone, people might not even know how to exist here. The actors, at least, have spent their whole lives as these wacky characters. Do they even know who they are as real people anymore?
I walk around the room, turning off a few lights, because it suddenly seems too bright in here, which seems an affront to Mistress Moonshadow. Then I plop down on the floor, in the middle of the room, rubbing my lower back. “Who is going to be directing the films now that my dad is gone?”
“You should talk to your brother about that,” she replies.
I nod, picking at the carpet. “Okay. But you still managed to scare the crap out of me. I literally almost had a heart attack and died right there on the floor.”
She stands, examining her shiny long black fingernails. “That means a lot.” She sighs. “I think I’ll head to bed. Would you be a gentleman and escort me to my room?”
“It would be my pleasure.” I jump to my feet, link her arm, and lead her to the door. When I open it, I scream even louder than before.
Gavin is standing there, right outside my door, all still and intense.
I’m literally clutching my chest like an old lady. “What are you doing out here?”
“To see if you needed anything, sir.”
“Have you been standing outside my room all night?”
He looks down at his feet.
“You don’t need to stand out here,” I say. “Don’t you have your own room?”
“Down the hall, sir,” he says meekly.
“Stop calling me sir. And go to bed. I’m fine.”
“But Franklin said I should see if you needed anything.”
“He didn’t mean for you to just stand there all night! That’s creepy, dude.”
The kid looks sheepish; he really wants to please.
I frown. “Didn’t you hear me screaming?”
“Yes. But I didn’t want to bother you.”
I raise my eyebrow. “Right. Well, just go to bed,” I tell him. “Really. I’ll find you if I need you.” He still doesn’t move. “Shoo. Shoo!” I wave him away, and keep waving, until he finally retreats down the hall.
I walk Mistress Moonshadow to her suite. The front room is bathed in a peachy glow from vintage tripod movie lights standing in the corners. Everything is draped in shimmering, gunmetal-gray fabric, hanging from the ceiling like sails, and wrapped around several white mannequins scattered around the room. Pieces of black, purple, and gold costuming hang from brass hooks on the walls. I laugh a little, ’cause c’mon.
“Good night, Dario.” She blows me a kiss, followed by a mournful, deflated smile, sashaying toward the tunneling abyss of her bedroom—her lair.
As I head back to my room, I see a strip of light under Oren’s door. Not wanting to go back to bed just yet, and feeling a gnawing loneliness, I get this unexpected urge to talk to my brother. I don’t know. I feel a little bad about how I acted earlier; I’m also curious about what Mistress Moonshadow just told me. My dad wrote and directed every single one of Moldavia’s 150 or so features. I can’t imagine anyone replacing him.
What are Oren’s plans, exactly?
I knock softly. When there’s no answer, I peek inside. Oren is lying on a futon. He’s dressed in red long johns, watching Suspiria on mute while he listens to the soundtrack on vinyl through Skullcandy headphones, which are attached to a record player on the floor, next to the album’s spooky jacket. I remember Oren does this. He likes to storyboard movies in reverse. It’s his way of studying how all the shots are composed. Suspiria was directed by my namesake, Italian horror master Dario Argento.
Oren’s room is slightly bigger than mine, but it’s way more cluttered: VHS tapes and DVDs are scattered everywhere, as well as magazines and books and all these loose papers and torn-open envelopes. It’s basically the room of a shut-in who watches lots of Moldavia movies. On the walls are framed black-and-white photos of severe-looking old people in nineteenth-century immigrant garb. I’m not going to ask about the empty mayonnaise jar perched on the windowsill with a spoon sticking out of it. Oren sees me standing there and slips off his headphones.
“Dario. It’s such an odd sight to see you at my door.”
I lean against the doorframe and nod. I never really know what to say to Oren, and I always seem to realize that too late.
“Was there something you needed?” he asks.
“Um. Just wanted to say . . . nice speech about Dad.”
Oren picks at a loose thread on his shirt. “No it wasn’t.”
“It was good.”
“Thank you for saying so. But I’m no Henry the Fifth.”
“Right. Well, are you okay?”
“I’m deeply sorrowful,” says Oren, accompanying this statement with a loud moan as if to prove it. “But at least we knew this day was coming. I was emotionally prepared. Yes, there were a few hiccups, but for the most part Dad got what he wanted in the end. I’m comforted by that fact.”
It kind of says everything that Oren is comforted by how today went.
“And how are you doing, Dario?”
He does seem genuinely concerned, which makes me relax a little. I puff out my cheeks and slowly exhale a stream of air. “I . . . don’t know. Not sure.”
“Grief is a complicated process,” he says, as if reading the first sentence of a really bad self-help book.
But I don’t feel grief. I just feel numb. And that’s starting to concern me. So I guess I feel concerned? And maybe a little lost. But overall, I don’t think I’m feeling what I’m supposed to be feeling. So now I’m wondering what the hell is wrong with me.
“What’s going to happen now?” I ask, trying to stabilize my thoughts.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, now that Dad is gone, who’s going to be directing—”
“I am taking over all directing duties!” Oren says proudly, and loudly, like he’s announcing a presidential appointment.
I can’t stop my lower jaw from falling open a little. Oren. Directing. Holy shit. Who in God’s name would have approved that? But then of course I know: the same man who wished to be buried alive in his own backyard—our dear old departed dad.
It’s suddenly painfully apparent that no one bothered to think through the aftermath of the most planned “natural death” of all time.
I try to reassure myself that I have a tenuous connection to Moldavia now. None of this is really my problem. But still I imagine tentacles unfurling, and coming for me through the castle walls. If things reach a certain level of untenable chaos, this could somehow become my problem. And that scares me—the idea of getting pulled into Moldavia’s insanity like quicksand.
But I should have known Oren would step up to the plate. He hasn’t been watching and studying classic horror films his whole life for no reason.
“Did you ever direct anything before?” I ask.
“Not yet!” he says, his eyes lighting up like someone just plugged in his face. “But I’ve shadowed Dad my whole life. I’m taking over No Chance in Hell. Three scenes still left to shoot on that. Then we’re going into production on The Killer Cauliflowers.”
“The what?”
“It’s my own script.”
I furiously scratch an eyebrow. “You’re spelling Killer with a k, right?”
“I am.”
I know he isn’t. “What is it about?”
“An evil shaman puts a spell on a rival farmer, and his vegetable patch gives birth to these mutant vegetable monsters that attack all the villagers. We’re trying to hit that sweet spot of the Eastern European horror vegan market.”
“Oh. That sweet spot.”
“Dad loved the idea.”
“He did?”
“Yes. There was just a lot on the docket, and he kept pushing it back so he could focus on projects that were already in planning stages.”
I wait for more—for Oren to tell me he’s kidding, but he doesn’t.
“Are cauliflowers scary, though?” I try to phrase this in a calm, constructive, test-screening sort of tone, but my voice warbles and sounds too high. I can’t imagine our dad loving this idea at all.
Oren sits up. “You’ve seen the Pumpkinhead films?”
I gnash my teeth a little. “I know of them.”
“It’s like that.”
“I don’t think that monster was literally a pumpkin, though.” That movie is about a dad whose son gets killed by teenagers on dirt bikes. Then the dad finds a witch, and they create a horrible monster to get revenge on the teenagers. So . . .
“This is going to be an instant classic,” Oren informs me.
I nod, imagining cauliflowers, which I guess are pretty weird looking if you think about it long enough. And apparently Oren did.
Maybe this could work? Maybe Oren could pull this together? Maybe he’s really an undiscovered auteur, a latent genius? Oh man, I really want to believe all that.
“Um . . . maybe just rethink the title?” I suggest, like that’s the only issue here.
“Any ideas?”
“Haunted House Salad?”
“Oh.”
“The Creeping Crudité?”
He cocks an eyebrow. “You’re mocking me.”
“Just a little.” I’m joking because I don’t know what else to do.
Oren reaches for his headphones. “Well. It’s nice to have you back here, however briefly. How much school do you have left?” He frowns. “How does all that even work?”
“How does what work? I go to school like anybody else. Then I go home.”
“Home. To that bacteria-ridden orphanage?”
“There’s bacteria here too, Oren. Just different strains.” I rap my knuckles against the door. “Anyway. Look. I’m sorry I freaked out earlier.”
“I understand. It’s a lot. I’m sure it’s hard to be back.”
“Yeah. It is.” I hesitate; it’s not exactly uncharted territory trying to talk to Oren about the bad shit that went down here when I was a kid. But he’s never directly acknowledged it, and I’ve always wondered if he could without being dismissive. “You know I had a rough time growing up here. Right?”
Oren makes a strangled hmmph sound, like here we go again. He sticks his hand out. “I assumed. You did get emancipated. You did move to an orphanage.” He rubs his chin, glances at the TV screen, then back at me, his eyes searching, offering a hint of vulnerability, of something more. But then I see him swallow everything; his demeanor resets into his default mode with me. “You have some bad memories? Is that it? We all do.” His voice is flat, listless.
I look down, and nod. “Bad memories” doesn’t really sum it all up, but it’s clearly easier for Oren to digest, so let’s just go with that.
“Is it about Mom?” He’s fiddling with his headphones. He’s treating this conversation like I’ve paid him for therapy, and I’m his most needy patient.
Oren doesn’t like to talk about the stuff that went haywire with our family. I wish there was an easier way to connect with him. All that pain keeps us apart, but it’s also the main thing we have in common.
“For sure about Mom,” I answer. “But also making Zombie Children.”
“I was supposed to be first A.D. on that one,” says Oren. “But I got pneumonia. I was bedridden for weeks. So I wasn’t able to protect you during—”
“There were other times.”
“Other times?”
I hate when he repeats shit back to me as a question, in that light, innocent tone of his. I level my gaze at him. “When you could have protected me.”
“From Mom? Oh, I doubt—”
“After. After she left.”
He fucking knows what I’m talking about.
I step into his room. There’s a heavy pause. I run my hand down the back of my neck, trying to unknot all the muscles that are suddenly tightening up.
Oren turns his attention back to the movie and writes something down, staring at the screen, licking his lips in concentration, lightly shaking his head. “It’s just that . . . sometimes you have a tendency to whine.”
And here we go with this.
Oren loves to bait me. He has a couple of things in his repertoire, this routine he’s created just for me. One of them is mocking Keenan House, and everyone there, as decrepit thieving vagrants fighting over morsels of food in a leaking, reeking hellhole.
That dovetails into the other thing he loves to do: paint me as this selfish ingrate who left Moldavia as part of some extended tantrum. That’s convenient for him, I’m sure, because it absolves him, offsets whatever guilt he feels at being a shitty older brother, and masks the real reasons I had to get the hell out of here.
But the thing is, it works. He can really piss me off. I’ve been determined not to let him get to me since I’ve been back. “Look, man,” I say, keeping my voice steady, “I can’t keep going down this path with you where I constantly have to justify why I left, or apologize for leaving—”
“I haven’t asked you to do either—”
“When really, you should be the one apologizing to me—”
“Ohhh, is that right—”
“Yeah, it is right.” I take a breath. I unball my fists. I’m not going to take the bait. “I just don’t like this . . . defensiveness I’ve been feeling since I’ve been back.”
“Yes, well, you can’t blame others for the way you feel, Dario—”
“Partly because you think I’m this self-involved brat who just abandoned—”
He holds out his hands. “Your words.”
I let out a low whistle. I put my hands over my eyes, trying to quell the anger rising up. I hate that he still plays these games. I keep trying with him, just like I did with our dad—and it’s impossible to get anywhere.
I turn my gaze to Oren’s TV and let the movie give me a dose of escapism. It’s about a witches’ coven disguised as a ballet school. It’s filmed in bright, off-putting candy colors. I smile at that. It’s a bold choice. I like bold choices.
“Look,” says Oren, “I’m sorry you felt like you needed to escape your home. That I wasn’t there for you, that I ignored your plight. Okay? Happy now? This family has had its tragedies. I suppose we both had our own concerns and put ourselves first. That’s the Heyward way, though, isn’t it?”
I look at him. “Is that really supposed to be a fucking apology?”
“That’s what you really want from me? An apology?”
“Jesus.” I walk over to the window and squint outside. It’s so black and quiet and vast out there that the night swims in my eyes. Oren’s right. What would saying sorry even accomplish? It’s just bullshit people say so they can move on, like pressing a button or something. Forgiveness is pointless, in any case. Usually the damage is already done.
I barely know Oren, and that’s sure as hell not my fault. People with much older siblings generally don’t know them well, usually because the older sibling leaves home. Not the other way around. Everything around here is too backward to get a proper handle on. I feel like an asteroid flying through space. I can’t catch up. Moldavia and the fragments of what once was my “family” are so unknowable to me at this point, it’s like why even try.
“This was always your true home, even if you renounced it,” says Oren. “We’re still your family, even if you renounced us. You left part of yourself here. Maybe you’re just now realizing that.”
It’s statements like that that make the hives and all the itching come back.
Oren puts his headphones back on and redirects his attention to Suspiria, where a blind man is getting his throat torn out by his possessed guide dog in a German plaza.
I step away from the window and shake my head at him.
“Good night, Dario,” he says, not looking at me.
He gives me a little wave as I close the door. As I’m walking back to my room, I run into Hayley, carrying a cup of steaming tea on a saucer. She starts a little, like she forgot I was back.
“Does anyone sleep around here?”
“Apparently not you,” she says, taking a sip of tea. “Sometimes I walk the halls at night. Insomnia.”
We just stare at each other, something we keep doing. I guess we’re still not used to seeing each other all grown up.
“Wanna see something cool?” she says.
I follow her down drafty stone hallways until we reach the grand ballroom in the Carpenter Wing. The room has been cleared out and turned into a huge makeshift graveyard, with real mounds of dirt. Papier-mâché ghouls, reinforced with wires, are crawling out of ripped-open graves.
The matte paintings stacked against the walls, created by Joaquin Joseph’s production design team on the upper floors of the castle, depict toothlike gravestones protruding through miles of foggy, moonlit night. This was always the thing about living here: you never knew what room was going to be turned into what.
I used to spend time in the library of the Lugosi Wing, where old books were stacked from floor to ceiling. It was the only place I could read and be alone for a while. But one morning I walked in there and found all the bookshelves gone and the room transformed into an evil chemistry lab for Dr. Vernon Landover in The Cyberian Experiments. Glass vials were bubbling, beakers were smoking, and there were mashed-faced fetuses in jars filled with brightly colored liquids.
They needed the library because it got great afternoon light.
Hayley and I sit across from each other on the ground, in the middle of the huge dirt-filled set. The room looks so real, and the castle is so drafty anyway, it feels like we’re sitting in the middle of an actual graveyard.
I stare into my lap. “Hayley . . . I wanted to say . . . I’m so sorry.”
She blows into the cup. “About what?”
“That I didn’t go to the funeral.”
She frowns.
“Your mom. I loved Aida so much.”
Hayley’s eyes instantly get shiny. “She loved you a lot too.”
I was trying all day to bring this up and I didn’t know how. “I should have reached out.”
She nods. “It was pancreatic. We knew for a while. It wasn’t a shock.” She takes another sip of tea. “How did you hear?”
“A horror zine, I think? Online.” I hug myself as the wind whistles outside the castle walls. “I could have called, or sent flowers or something. I totally suck.”
The edges of Hayley’s curls glint in the weak bronze light. She looks contemplative. I can tell she’s holding a lot back. “You left. This place wasn’t a part of you anymore.”
Except I’m realizing, more and more, each minute I’m back, how untrue that is. It’s just been one long fight with myself pretending Moldavia didn’t matter anymore. Oren’s right: I left part of myself here. I spent two days sobbing when I heard about Aida. I missed school and everything. I should have called Hayley. But I had to continue my pathetic illusion, proving nothing. As a result, I wasn’t there for her, and I never got a chance to pay my respects to her mom.
It hurts to think how Hayley’s continued on here, without me or her own family. There must be a constant onslaught of memories, just like there are for me—except she still lives here. They’re not temporary for her.
Hayley takes a sip and gives me a little nudge. “How did things go with Oren? I saw you coming out of his room.”
I lean back on both hands. “He says he’s taking over as principal director.”
Hayley nearly chokes on her tea. “Let’s not make any assumptions. We haven’t even heard the will yet.”
“Do you know something I don’t?”
She rests the empty teacup beside her on the saucer. “Not at all. But Oren doesn’t get to just appoint himself anything.”
“You might want to tell that to Oren.”
“He’ll figure it out.”
The politics of this place confuse me. There are so many mysterious rules. I’ve barely been back, and I already feel lost in its fumes. I don’t get how Moldavia’s engine is supposed to run, with all its moving, intricate parts. But Hayley seems to know a lot more, which makes sense, I guess, since she’s been here all this time. She also seemed very in tune with what my dad was thinking about his funeral, and how he wanted “to take on death.” I can’t imagine him talking about that with just anyone. He pretty much expressed everything he thought or felt through his films.
I wonder how afraid and alone he actually felt at the end there.
Hayley catches me eyeing the locket around her throat. She reaches behind her neck to undo the clasp. “You should have this. It really belongs to you.”
“No, no, no, don’t.” I put my hand on her arm. “Just . . . what’s the story?”
“Your mom didn’t want to keep it at the hospital. There had been some thefts. She gave it to me as a gift on my sixteenth birthday.”
“Then it’s yours,” I say. “Can I . . .” I motion to the locket, and Hayley nods. I snap the face open. It’s empty: there’s no photo of me inside anymore. It’s like I got erased.
It was an ordinary cloudy afternoon when my mom told me she was leaving Moldavia. We were standing under a cherry blossom tree on the west lawn. There was a light breeze. Blossoms fell on our heads in the creamy porcelain light as they came for her with a wheelchair.
Good-bye, my peach.
We used to visit her every week, then every month, then it winnowed down to three times a year, then only on Mother’s Day. She seemed worse—less and less herself each time. I haven’t seen her in seven years, two years before I left Moldavia.
My mom is acutely psychotic, and to some degree mental illness is genetic. Oren may be old enough that he doesn’t have to worry as much about getting sick. But the risk is always there. I’m at the age when my brain could break too. I wake up every morning wondering if today’s the day I’ll start hearing voices.
“Your mom kept the photo with her,” says Hayley.
“You know about the photo?”
Hayley nods.
When I left this place, I left a hole here. I knew I would. But I never realized Hayley would take my place so easily. She belonged in my family more than I did.
Hayley could see my mother and not have the same terror of becoming her. And my dad could let himself care about Hayley without worrying he might lose her too.
I briefly make eye contact with the glassy stare of a knobby wraith peeking at us from behind a painted Styrofoam birch tree. I look at Hayley and laugh a little.
Hayley smiles at me. I rub the tops of her hands with my thumbs.
We both lean forward. Our lips brush.
I kiss her softly. She kisses me back. And then we really start kissing, deep and intense. We fall asleep holding each other, our mouths still touching, but only a little.
“Because you’re wasting our time!”
He’s given me another bloody lip—this is his thing now: he’ll beat this performance into me if it’s the last thing he’ll ever do. Alastair is decaying. Bruises and blood only make it more real.
He has a certain image of what Alastair should look like. He even has ideas about how Alastair breathes. Being emaciated is a part of that. He wants my rib cage protruding. Sometimes he’ll wake me with two fingers shoved down my throat (he always seems to know when I sneak food at night). When I start vomiting, he drags me to the toilet, holds my head over the bowl by my hair until it’s all out of me.
He senses I’m his chance to some greater respect. Maybe this is the film that won’t be forgotten, regulated to the midnight circuit, to cult status. Maybe this will be his true masterpiece, mainstream even, dare we say it, admired by his fans and peers alike.
He wants me to hate him. He’s trying to get me to hate him in that perfect way only he can pick out from the other shades of rage that trickle out of me, which he deems boring, weak, uncinematic, unauthentic, not a true facet of Alastair’s core torment.
Does he think the hate boiling inside me can be flipped off like a switch once we’re done filming? The answer is: he doesn’t really care.
This is the last Alastair scene to be filmed, but not the last one in the movie.
I have to climb a wooden ladder to the roof of the custom-built firehouse where my latest victims cower inside: the dwindling survivors of a zombie apocalypse. After I get to the roof, I’ll shimmy down the chimney like a skinny, undead, prepubescent Santa Claus, something the audience won’t see; it will only be inferred by the sound of screams, ripping flesh, the breaking of bones.
We’ve been at it for hours. He’s saying I’m not moving fast enough, my gait is wrong, my posture is off, I don’t have enough intention—we’ve done so many takes now the ladder leading four stories up is slowly coming apart. But my dad says it’ll hold for another take, or at least till I reach the top of the roof.
“But it might not, you stupid sonofabitch, and your son could break his neck!” Hugo roars at him, and my dad roars right back that the ladder will hold.
“If he climbs it one more time, you are gambling with his life.”
Truthfully, I’d rather climb the goddamn ladder than deal with the aftermath of saying no to my dad. How messed up is that?
My dad asks if we have another ladder. Hugo says that this already is the second ladder and we even have a third, but he has to fetch it from the props department, all the way back at the castle, because there’s only so much he and his crew can carry.
“Dar’s wasted enough of our time,” my father spits. “We’re losing the light! This is my magic hour. I’m going for it. Let’s go, let’s go!”
“You are going to kill your son!”
“The ladder will hold him! He weighs thirty goddamn pounds! The ladder would even hold your fat useless ass!”
“WHERE DOES THIS END, LUCIEN?”
“Picture’s up.”
“Quiet on set!”
“Take twenty-three.”
I don’t know why he does it except maybe just to save me, to literally save my dumbass life, but Hugo throws off his jacket and begins to climb the ladder.
“Christ, what’s he doing?” my dad screams. “You see, Hugo? It holds!”
Except it doesn’t.
The ladder could have just collapsed after Hugo hit the third rung, but the goddamn thing is as stubborn as my dad, so it waits till he’s all the way at the top before it splinters and comes apart into a million bits and pieces. Everyone screams and then goes quiet, in one big shocked intake of breath, as Hugo falls backward, his flailing body a shadow puppet against the copper twilight. It seems like he falls forever. . . .
And then Hugo is the one who breaks his neck.
The next day, while my dad is hugging a sobbing, inconsolable Aida, I watch from the crack of a doorway in the small storage room where I’ve been hiding and silently crying all day. His hand drops a little further, lightly squeezing her ass. She couldn’t be more diplomatic, gently removing my dad’s hand and clasping it in both of hers, a gesture that marks boundaries, yet offers forgiveness, while she mourns.
It’s such a clean move that it’s impossible to forget just how many times I’ve seen him do this shit. When my mom was still here, when I was in sight, when Hugo was in sight, when Hayley was in sight. My dad didn’t care. He was asserting his authority over his films, the studio, the castle, and all of its inhabitants.
This is my vision, he was telling us. You’re all just pawns on my chessboard.
That’s the moment when I lose it. I’m strong and lithe enough to knock him to the ground. I pound at his face until I feel his nose crunch. And when his hands defensively go to his face, I pound his stomach, his chest, his ribs, wanting only to feel more crunching and more breaking. It takes three crew members to pry me off him.
I feel disgust. Not because of what I did, or even what I was reduced to, but because there’s a part of him inside me, and I know this at twelve; I realize it so completely that all I want to do is exterminate it. So I get on my bike. And I pedal away, out the gates, as far away from the estate as I can go, and when I see the edge of that cliff coming I don’t even bother to slow down.
In the end it didn’t even matter that I was hospitalized. My dad already had what he needed. He just wanted to see if he could push me further, into something so desperate and bestial no one would ever forget my performance—or his film. Not this one. He had already gotten me there. He just didn’t know it yet.
Only the camera did.
My dad visited me in the hospital. He fell to his knees, begging my forgiveness, telling me about his hardscrabble life growing up poor in Romania, which pushed him to an almost sociopathic perfectionism in his work, a frantic will to succeed, and stave off failure, which he confessed filled him with shame. He regretted he risked so much, put me in the center of his own internal storm of madness. It was cruel and unfair of him.
Ignosce mihi, he murmured, soothing me with Latin, kissing my hands.
Actually, none of that happened. I just like to pretend it did.
Franklin, the lawyer, my dad’s trusted confidant, was the only one who visited me in the hospital. And that was because I had been there for so long without anyone claiming me, the authorities got involved, and I was assigned a social worker.
I told Franklin then and there I wanted to leave my family, leave Moldavia.
I knew I couldn’t take another day there.
Franklin was silent for a long time. Then he said: “All right, Dario. We can prove neglect. We can prove abuse.”
Franklin stood and moved to the door, hands behind his back. This was the only time I ever saw him truly weighed down by something. I saw it in the rounded slope of his shoulders, heard it in the heavy, churning silence. “Your father and I have known each other a long time. We’re well aware of each other’s flaws. We respect that about one another.” He looked at me. “Are you sure this is what you want?”
I told him it was.
So I left Moldavia at twelve, although I had to wait until I was fourteen to get legally emancipated. That had to go before a judge, but then, with Franklin’s help, it was done, and I finally wasn’t a Heyward anymore. Not that Heyward was even my dad’s real name. He legally changed it from whatever vampirish Romanian last name he was born with and never spoke of it again to anyone. Another lost tale, another apparition.
I wake up, blinking back tears. Hayley is still lying beside me. The locket glimmers around her neck. I sit up, hugging my knees. Then I feel Hayley’s hand, cool and firm, on my back. “I’m sorry,” I say, sniffling, wiping my eyes.
“Your dad died. It’s okay to be sad.”
“I was thinking about Hugo.”
Hayley rests her chin on my shoulder.
“I couldn’t get the scene right,” I say. “Your dad was just trying to protect me. . . .”
She wraps her arms around my chest and speaks softly into my ear: “Is that what you think? Is that what you’ve always thought? That it was your fault?”
I wipe my nose with the sleeve of my shirt. I have actually always thought that.
“It was an accident,” she says. “My dad was being reckless. In no way was his death ever your fault.”
This is bullshit: that she feels like she needs to console me. She was the one who lost him. I turn to her. She has a hard, determined look on her face, like this is the story she’s come to accept—Hugo was reckless—and there can’t be another version of it. But there are tears in the corners of her eyes, like paratroopers waiting for their turn to jump.
I lay the back of my hand against her face, and she presses her cheek into it.
We stay like that for a while, until she says we should probably clear out of the fake graveyard. We kiss once more. It feels so natural, like we’ve been kissing each other for years. Then we both make our escape through the predawn hush of the castle.
I shower the dirt off when I get back. There’s a caged light over my showerhead that changes colors—Argento hues, like he personally lit my bathroom with his infamous colors—an emergency red rising to a sunrise orange, and then down again to a cold underwater blue. I close my eyes and let the water pour over my head.
Even in the hot shower, I’m still trembling when I think about how it felt to kiss Hayley. Maybe she’s the real reason I came back here—to see what would happen between us after all this time. She softens everything, takes me out of my head. She gives me hope that the world can stay sweet and pure. She’s always done that for me.
Coming back here, seeing Hayley now, is like being lost in time. I think about time itself, and how Moldavia can muddle it. I think about being unable to sail freely into the future because of the past chasing us, chaining us. I think of tentacles again. Coming through the walls. Wrapping around my ankles.