It’s 3:00 a.m., and Steve and I have watched The Thing, Pet Sematary, and The Vanishing—a movie that has invigorated our bloodlust due to its lack of gore. Our comments are giddy from the soda running through our system. Empty cans form a pyramid in the middle of the floor. We talk along with the lines and cover our ears at the tense parts because the surprising sounds still make us jump.
We’ve done this before.
We agree that Evil Dead is going to be the next movie we watch. Most of our marathons eventually lead to this movie. Steve crawls to the VCR to switch out the tapes. We still watch VHS because nothing has ever been scary in high definition. While he fumbles with the ancient machine, the overbearing silence gives birth to creatures lurking in the dark corners.
Finally, the movie fires up and the creatures scatter, leaving only shadows.
“Do you think we could ever get a girl to do a naked scene?” Steve asks. I’m thinking the same thing. Steve likes movies as much as I do, but he likes to talk about sex more than anyone I know. It may be the only remarkable thing about him. He has that single-minded characteristic reserved for stock characters. He’d be the first to die in a teen slasher flick. He’ll make me sit through any boring movie if it has the slightest prospect of boobs. Sometimes our horror marathons turn into soft-core marathons.
“Probably not,” I say. “How do you ask a girl to do that?”
“Ally will do anything for you. Just say it’s for your movie.”
This is his roundabout method of asking me to get Ally naked in front of the camera. It’s a feat I’ve thought about many times. Ally lives across the street from me. I can see into her house from my bedroom.
On the screen, a girl in panties ventures off into the dark woods.
Steve has a point. On more than one occasion, I’ve compromised Ally’s integrity for the sake of our movies. I’ve dunked her in lakes, made her roll around on graves, and covered her with so much fake blood that she developed a unique method of washing it out of her hair. I think it has something to do with caustic chemicals.
“I don’t think that Ally would do it,” I say. “And what other girls do we know?”
“There’s a girl in my um, math class—” He pauses to watch the girl in the movie get raped by a tree. “She seems like she would. She’s got huge boobs.” He cups his hands out in front of him like he’s twisting radio dials. He adds, “We should steal that for our movie,” referring to tree-rape.
“Yeah.” I crack open another soda. The caffeine pushes my eyes slightly, makes them bulge. I forget about the girl with the huge boobs to watch a deadite get chopped into pieces. Bodily dismemberment. “We should steal that too.”
On the screen, someone says “We can’t bury Shelly. She’s a friend of ours.”
I look behind me to see if Brian’s hiding in one of the dark corners with the other creatures.
***
The sound of a phone wakes me. The red, disembodied digits of a clock read a little past 5:00 a.m. My skull feels whip-cracked, like a concentration of sugar has settled right on the top of my brain. My eyes adjust to the darkness and I make out Steve’s figure standing in the corner. His back is to me. He holds his family’s cordless phone down by his side. He sways to a dream rhythm, out of step with the frantic ringing.
“Steve, you’re sleepwalking.” My voice sounds weak. Louder, I say, “Answer the phone.”
He faces me with a clumsy, three-point turn. He holds the phone out to me.
“It’s for you.”
I jump from the couch. The urge to shake him awake overwhelms me. I try to remember the consequence that happens when you wake a sleepwalker. Death. I’m certain.
I take the phone out of Steve’s hand. He wanders back over to his couch and lies motionless. The grid of buttons lights with each ring. My family’s name scrolls across the display. I answer the phone.
“Hello?”
It’s my mom’s voice, distant and flat. She speaks through a wall of high-pitched static. “You need to come home now.”
“Do you know what time it is?”
“Please come home.”
The static pitches upward so high that I have to hold the phone away from my ear. It cuts out in rapid succession, only this time the pattern really does sound like Get out of my house.
“Mom, are you there?”
The static ends. The line goes dead. Steve’s snoring is the only sound. I scamper to find my shoes in the darkness and leave without even tying them.
The neighborhood’s Halloween decorations strive to give me one last scare before dawn breaks. Skeletons hanging from trees shake in the wind, their bones sound like wind chimes. An inflatable sock, twenty feet high, collapses and reanimates from a machine blowing spurts of air through it. There’s nothing celebratory about this dance. I run faster.
The door to my house is locked. All my momentum becomes focused in my shoulder, which slams against the newly-installed deadbolt. The graying morning flashes red. I reel from the pain and nearly fall down the stairs. Inside, my dog barks. The window from my parents’ room lights up, and I see a figure cross it. Muffled footsteps trample down the stairs. The lock disengages and the door opens a crack. My dad’s bloodshot eyes fill the space. He sees me and opens the door wide. He holds an aluminum bat at his side.
“Jesus. You scared us.”
“Scared you?” I rub my shoulder. A dull ache has planted itself deep in my muscle.
A hand slithers around my dad’s arm and my mom appears behind him.
“What are you doing home so early?” she asks.
“Didn’t you call me?” I shake myself. “No, you called me. At Steve’s. You told me to come home.”
“We’ve been asleep,” Dad says.
“Come in,” Mom says. “Maybe it was a nightmare.”
The adrenaline wears off. My eyes feel heavy. Dad puts his arm around me, and I let him guide me to the couch. I’m almost sleepwalking myself by the time we get there. Before I fall into unconsciousness, I think it’s strange that “nightmare” was the word my mom used.