The Ghost Sequences

Exhalation #10

It’s not a snufffilm, at least not the traditional kind. The single MiniDV cassette was recovered from the glove box of a crashed beige Ford Taurus. The car had passed through a metal guardrail and flipped at least once on its way down the incline on the other side. No body was found. The license plate had been removed, the VIN sanded away, no identifying information left behind.

The handwritten label on the cassette reads Exhalation #10. The film it contains is fifty-eight minutes long; fifty-eight minutes of a woman’s last breaths, and her death finally at the 56:19 mark.

Henry watches the whole thing.

The padded envelope the tape arrived in bears Paul’s handwriting, as does the tape’s label—a copy of the original, safely tucked away in an evidence locker. It’s no more than a half-hour drive between them; Paul could have delivered the tape in person, but Henry understands why he would not. Even knowing this tape is not the original, even touching it only to slip it into a machine for playback, Henry feels his fingers coated with an invisible residue of filth.

Expensive equipment surrounds him—sound-mixing boards, multiple screens and devices for playback, machines for converting from one format to another. Paul warned him about the tape over the phone, and still Henry wasn’t prepared.

During the entire fifty-eight minutes of play time, the woman’s body slumps against a concrete wall, barely conscious. She’s starved, one arm chained above her head to a thick pipe. The light is dim, the shadows thick. The angle of her head, lolled against her shoulder, hides her face. The camera watches for fifty-eight minutes, capturing faint, involuntary movements—her body too weak for anything else—until her breathing stops.

Henry looks it up: on average, it takes a person ten days to die without food or water. The number ten on the label implies there are nine other tapes, an hour recorded every day. Or are there other tapes capturing every possible moment to ensure her death ended up on film?

“Just listen,” Paul had told him. “Maybe you’ll hear something we missed.”

Henry’s ears are golden. That’s what his Sound Design professor at NYU said back in Henry’s college days. As a kid, Henry’s older brother, Lionel, had called it a superpower. By whatever name, what it means is that as Henry watches the tape, he can’t help hearing every hitch, every rasp. Every time the woman’s breath wants to stop, and every time her autonomic system forces one more gasp of air into her lungs.

He never would have agreed to watch the tape if he hadn’t been a little bit drunk and a little bit in love, which he’s been more or less since the day he met Paul in film school. Paul, whose eye for framing, for details, for the perfect shot is the equivalent of Henry’s golden ear. Paul, whose cop father was shot in the line of duty three months short of graduation, causing him to abandon his own moviemaking dreams and follow in his footsteps by becoming a cop as well.

Henry has always known better than to chase after straight boys, what he knows intellectually and logically has never been a defense against Paul. So when Paul called at his wit’s end and asked him to just listen to the tape, please, Henry agreed.

After fifty-six minutes and nineteen seconds, the woman dies. After another minute and forty-one seconds, the tape ends. Henry shuts down the screen and stops just short of pulling the plug from the wall.

“Jesus Christ, Paul, what did I just watch?”

A half-empty bottle sits at Henry’s elbow in his bedroom, his phone pressed to his ear. He locked the door of the editing suite behind him, but the movie continues, crawling beneath his skin.

“I know. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t ask if…I didn’t know what else to do.”

Henry catches the faint sound of Paul running his fingers through his hair, static hushing down the line. Or, at least, he imagines he hears the sound. Even after all this time he’s not always sure if what he thinks he hears is just in his head, or whether he really does have a “superpower.”

After watching the video of the dying woman, he’s even less sure. He watched the whole thing and didn’t hear anything to help Paul. But he can’t shake the feeling there is something there—a sound trapped on the edge of hearing, one he hasn’t heard yet. A sound that’s just waiting for Henry to watch the video again, which is the last thing in the world he wants to do.

“I’m sorry,” Paul says again. “It’s just…It’s like I hit a brick wall. I have no goddamn idea where this woman died, who she is, or who killed her. I couldn’t see anything on the tape, and you can hear things no one else can hear. You can tell which goddamn road a car is on just by the sound of the tires.”

In Paul’s voice—just barely ragged—is his fear, his frustration. His anger. Not at Henry, but at the world for allowing a woman to die that way. The ghost of the woman’s breath lingers in the whorls of Henry’s ears. Do the shadows, carving the woman up into distinct segments, stain Paul’s eyelids like bruises every time he blinks?

“I’ll try,” Henry says, because what else is there to say? Because it’s Paul. He will listen to the tape a hundred times if he has to. He’ll listen for the sounds that aren’t there—something in the cadence of the woman’s breathing, the whirr of an air duct he didn’t notice the first time, something that will give her location away.

“Thank you.” Paul’s words are weary, frayed, and Henry knows it won’t be a stray bullet for him, like the one that took his father. It’ll be a broken heart.

The drug overdoses, the traffic accidents, the little boy running into the street after his ball, the old man freezing to death in an alleyway with nowhere else to go. They will erode Paul, like water wearing down stone, until there’s nothing left.

Closer than Paul’s sorrow is the clink of glass on glass as Henry pours another drink. The bottle’s rim skips against the glass. Ice shifts with a sigh. He pictures Paul sitting on the edge of his bed, and it occurs to him too late that he didn’t bother to look at the clock before he called. He listens for Maddy in the background pretending to be asleep, rolling away and grinding her teeth in frustration at yet another of duty’s late-night calls.

Henry likes Maddy. He loves her, even. If Paul had to marry a woman, he’s glad Maddy was the one. From the first time Paul introduced them, Henry could see the places Paul and Maddy fit, the way their bodies gravitated to one another—hips bumping as they moved through the kitchen preparing dinner, fingers touching as they passed plates. They made sense in all the ways Paul and Henry did not, even though their own friendship had been instant, cemented when Paul came across Henry drunkenly trying to break into an ex-boyfriend’s apartment to get his camera back, and offered to boost him through the window.

At the end of that first dinner with Maddy, Henry had sat on the deck with her, finishing the last of the wine while Paul washed dishes.

“Does he know?” Maddy had asked.

Her gaze went to the kitchen window, a square of yellow light framing Paul at the sink. There was no jealousy in her voice, only sympathetic understanding.

“I don’t know.”

“I won’t tell if you don’t.” Maddy reached over and squeezed Henry’s hand, and from that moment, their relationship had been set, loving the same man, lamenting his choice of career.

Henry wants to tell Paul to wrap himself around Maddy, take comfort in the shape of her, and forget about the woman, but he knows Paul too well.

“I’ll call you if I hear anything,” Henry says.

“Henry?” Paul says as Henry moves to hang up.

“Yeah?”

“Are you still working on the—”

“The movie? Yeah. Still.”

His movie. Their movie. The one they started together at NYU, back when they had dreams, back before Paul’s father died. The one Henry is now making, failing to make, alone.

“Good. That’s good,” Paul says. “You’ll have to show it to me someday.”

“Yeah. Sure.” Henry rubs his forehead. “Get some sleep, okay?”

Henry hangs up. In the space behind his eyes, a woman breathes and breathes and breathes until she doesn’t breathe anymore.

Sweat soaks thirteen-year-old Henry’s sheets, sticking the T-shirt and boxer shorts he sleeps in against his skin. His mother left the windows open, but there’s no breeze, only the oppressive heat they drove through to get to the rental cabin. His brother snores in the bunk above him, one hand dangling over the side.

The noise comes out of nowhere, starting as a hum, building to a scream, slamming into Henry full force. Henry claps his hands to his ears. Animal instinct sends him rabbiting from the bed. His legs tangle in the sheets, and he crashes to the floor. The sound is still there, tied to the heat, the weight and thickness of the air birthed in horrible sound.

“Henry?” Lionel’s voice is sleep muffled above him.

Henry barely hears it over the other sound, rising in pitch, inserting itself between his bones and his skin. There’s another sound tucked inside it, too, worse still. A broken sound full of distress and pain.

Footsteps. His mother’s and father’s voices join his brother’s. Hands pry his hands from his ears.

“Can’t you hear it?” Henry’s voice comes in a panicked whine, his breath in hitching gulps.

“Henry.” His mother shakes him, and his eyes snap into focus.

“It’s just cicadas. See?” His father points to the window.

A single insect body clings to the screen. Lionel trots over and flicks the insect away before pulling the window closed.

“What’s wrong with him?” Lionel asks.

Even with the window shut, the noise remains, filling every corner of the room.

“Can’t you hear?” Henry’s hands creep toward his ears again.

His mother gets him a glass of water. His father and brother watch him with wary eyes. They don’t hear it. They hear the cicadas’ song, but not the broken, stuttering sound that digs and scrapes at Henry’s bones. No one hears it except for him.

Later, Henry learns that the sound is the cicadas’ distress call, the noise they make when they’re threatened or in pain. And over the course of the two weeks at the lake, Henry learns his hearing is different from the rest of his family’s, possibly from almost everyone else he knows. There are tones, nuances, threads of sound that are lost to others. It’s as though he’s developed an extra sense, and he hates it.

Lionel, however, turns it into a game, dragging Henry around to various parts of the lake, asking him what he hears, getting Henry to challenge him to see if he can hear it, too. Henry’s big brother grins, amazed at every sound Henry describes—birds murmuring in distant trees, small animals in the burrows, dropped fishing lines, an aluminum rowboat tapping against a dock all the way across the lake.

Henry almost allows himself to relax, to have fun, until on one of their excursions he hears the crying girl.

Henry and Lionel are deep enough in the woods surrounding the lake that the dense, midsummer foliage screens them from the road, the water, and the other cottages. Henry scans the tree trunks, looking for shed cicada shells. The sound comes, like it did the first night, out of nowhere—a ticking, struggling sound like hitching breath. Except this time it’s not hidden in cicada song but stark and alone, somewhere between mechanical and organic, full of pain.

Henry freezes, cold despite the sweat-slick summer air. Lionel is almost out of sight between the trees before he notices Henry is no longer with him.

“What’s wrong?” Lionel trots back, touching Henry’s arm.

Henry flinches. He’s sharply aware of his own breath. His chest is too tight. Underneath the insect sound there is something else—distinctly human, horribly afraid. He tries to speak, and the only sound that emerges is an extended exhalation, a “hhhhhhhh” that goes on and on.

Lionel’s repeated questions fade. Henry stumbles away from his brother, half-blinded by stinging eyes, catching tree trunks for support. He follows the sound, its insistence a knife-sharp tug at his core. He needs to find the source of the sound. He needs….

Henry crashes to his knees, nearly falling into a hole opened up in the ground. The edges are ragged and soft, the forest floor swallowing itself in greedy mouthfuls. There’s a caught breath of alarm from below him, wet with tears, weak with exhaustion, fading.

“There’s someone down there,” Henry pants, the words coming out between clenched teeth, his whole body shuddering. He’s doubled over now, arms wrapped around his middle, where the sound burrows inside him.

“What—” Lionel starts, but then he looks, seeing what Henry sees.

The girl is barely visible. The tree canopy blocks direct sunlight, and the hole is deep enough that the child is a mere smudge at the bottom.

“Get…” Henry’s voice breaks. Tears stream on his cheeks. “Mom. Dad. Get help.”

Lionel sprints away, and despite the pain, Henry stretches out flat on his stomach. Leaves crackle, branches poke at him. Things crawl through the earth underneath him, worms and beetles and blind moles further undermining its integrity, impossible things he shouldn’t be able to hear. He stretches his arm as far as he can, pressing his cheek against the ground. He doesn’t expect the girl to be able to reach him, but he hopes his presence might comfort her.

“It’s okay.” His shoulder feels like it will pop out of its socket. “I’m not going to leave you.”

From the dark of the earth, the girl sniffles. Henry stretches further still, imagining small fingers reaching back for him.

“It’s okay,” he says again, terrified the girl will die before rescue comes. Terrified it will be his fault, his failure, if she does. “Just hold on, okay? Hold on.”

The second time, Henry listens to the tape with his eyes closed. It scarcely matters. He still sees the woman, slumped and taking her last shallow breaths, but inside the theater of his mind she is so much worse. She’s carved up by shadow, her skin blotched as though already rotting from within. At any moment she will raise her head and glare at Henry, his powerlessness, his voyeurism.

He stretches after any glimmer of identifying sound, wondering if his unwanted superpower has finally chosen this moment to abandon him. Then, all at once, the sound is there, sharp as a physical blow.

A faint burr, rising from nothing to a scream. The cicada song he can’t help but hear as a herald of doom. It knocks the breath from his lungs, bringing in its place the heat of summer days, air heavy and close and pressed against the window screens. He shoves his chair back from the desk so hard he almost topples, and stares, wide-eyed. The image on the screen doesn’t change. After a moment, he forces himself to hit rewind. Play.

Ragged breath, stuttering and catching. There’s no hint of insect song. Even though Henry knows exactly when the rise and fall of the woman’s chest will cease, he holds his own breath. Every time her breath falters, he finds himself wishing the painful sound would just stop. It’s a horrible thought, but he can’t help it, his own lungs screaming as he waits, waits, waits to hear whether she will breathe again.

Then, a sound so faint yet so distinct Henry both can’t believe he missed it and isn’t certain it’s really there. He reverses the tape again, afraid the sound will vanish. Sweat prickles, sour and hot in his armpits. He barely hears the woman breathing this time, his strange powers of hearing focused on the almost-imperceptible sound of a train.

A primal response of exaltation—Henry wants to shout and punch the air in triumph. And at the same time, the woman on the screen is still dying, has been dead for days, weeks, months, even, and there’s nothing he can do. Henry forces himself to listen one last time, just to be sure. The train is more distinct this time, the lonely howl of approaching a crossing. Goose bumps break out across Henry’s skin. His body wants to tremble, and he clenches his teeth as though he’s freezing cold.

He must have imagined the cicadas, even though the noise felt so real, a visceral sensation crawling beneath his skin. The train, though, the train is real. He can isolate the sound, play it for Paul. It’s an actual clue.

He thinks of the summer at the lake when he was thirteen years old, Lionel snoring in the bunk above him. That first terrible night where it seemed as though all the cicadas in the trees around the lake had found their way into the room. Then, later, how their song had led him to the almost-buried girl.

Henry reaches for the phone.

“I’m going to send a sound file your way,” he says when Paul answers. “It’s something. I don’t know if it’s enough.”

“What is it?” Water runs in the background, accompanied by the clatter of Paul doing dishes. Henry imagines the phone balanced precariously between Paul’s ear and shoulder, the lines of concern bracketing his mouth and crowded between his eyes.

“A train. It sounds like it’s coming up to a crossing.”

“That’s brilliant.” For a moment there’s genuine elation in Paul’s voice, the same sense of victory Henry felt moments ago. And just as quickly, the weight settles back in. “It might give us a radius to search, based on where the car was found, and assuming the killer was somewhat local to that area.”

There’s a grimness to Paul’s voice, a hint of distraction as though he’s already half forgotten Henry is on the other end of the phone, his thoughts churning.

“Thank you,” Paul says after a moment, coming back to himself.

The water stops, but Henry pictures Paul still standing at the sink, hands dripping, looking lost.

“I should—” Paul starts, and Henry says, “Wait.”

He takes a breath. He knows what he’s about to ask is unreasonable, but he needs to see. Without the safety and filter of a camera and a video screen in the way.

“When you go looking, I want to go with you.”

“Henry, I—”

“I know,” Henry interrupts. His left hand clenches and unclenches until he consciously forces himself to relax. “I know, but you probably weren’t supposed to send me the tape, either.”

Henry waits. He doesn’t say please. Paul takes a breath, wants to say no. But Henry is already in this, Paul invited him in, and he’s determined to see it through.

“Fine. I’ll call you, okay?”

They hang up, and Henry returns to his computer to isolate the clip and send it to Paul. Once that’s done, Henry opens up another file, the one containing the jumble of clips he shot with Paul at NYU. Back when they had big dreams. Back before Paul’s father died. Back before fifty-eight minutes of a woman breathing out her last in an unknown room.

Henry chooses a clip at random and lets it play. A young man sits in the back seat of a car, leaning his head against the window. He’s traveling across the country, from a small town to a big city. The same journey Henry himself had taken, though he’d only crossed a state. There are other clips following a boy who grew up in the city, in his father’s too-big shadow, but both boys’ heads are full of dreams. Two halves of the same story, trying to find a way to fit together into a whole. Except now, the film will always be unfinished, missing its other half.

Even though he knows he will never finish the movie without Paul, Henry still thinks about the sounds that should accompany the clip. It’s an exercise he engages in from time to time, torturing himself, unwilling to let the movie go. Here, he would put the hum of tires, but heard through the bones of the young man’s skull, an echo chamber created where his forehead meets the glass.

The perfect soundscape would also evoke fields cropped to stubble, the smell of dust and baking tar and asphalt. It would convey nerves as the boy leaves behind everything he’s ever known for bright lights and subway systems. Most importantly, it would also put the audience in the boy’s shoes as he dreams of kissing another boy without worrying about being seen by someone he knows, without his parents’ disappointment and the judgment of neighbors’ faces around him in church every Sunday.

Henry watches the reflections slide by on-screen—telephone poles and clouds seen at a strange angle. His own drive was full of wind-and-road hum broken by his parents’ attempts at conversation, trying to patch things already torn between them. Henry had gotten good at filtering by then, shutting out things he didn’t want to hear. Maybe he should have given his parents a chance, but love offered on the condition of pretending to be someone else didn’t interest him then, and it doesn’t interest him now.

Between one frame and the next, the image on the screen jumps, and Henry jumps with it. Trees, jagged things like cracks in the sky, replace the cloud and telephone pole reflections. The car window itself is gone, and the camera looks up at the whip-thin branches from a low angle.

Then the image snaps back into place just as Henry slaps the pause button. He knows what he and Paul shot. He has watched the clips countless times, and everything about the trees cracking their way across the sky is wrong, wrong, wrong.

When the phone rings, Henry almost jumps out of his skin. He knocks the phone off the desk reaching for it, leaving him sounding weirdly out of breath when he finally brings it to his ear.

“I’ll pick you up tomorrow around ten,” Paul says. “I have an idea.”

“Okay.” Henry lets out a shaky breath.

His pulse judders, refusing to calm. He needs a drink and a shower. Then maybe a whole pot of coffee, because the last thing he wants to do is sleep. When he blinks, he sees thin black branches crisscrossing the sky, and he hears the rising whine of cicada song.

There is a legend that says cicadas were humans once. They sang so beautifully that the Muses enchanted them to sing long past the point when they would normally grow tired, so they could provide entertainment throughout the night while the gods feasted.

But the enchantment worked too well. The singers stopped eating. They stopped sleeping. They forgot how to do anything except sing.

They starved to death, and even then the enchantment held. They kept singing, unaware they’d died. Their bodies rotted, and their song went on, until one of the Muses took pity on them and fashioned them new bodies with chitinous shells and wings. Bodies with the illusion of immortality that could live for years underground, buried as if dead but wake again.

Cicadas are intimately acquainted with pain, because they know what it is to die a slow death as a spectacle for someone else’s pleasure. But they do not die when they are buried. They merely dream, and listen to other buried things, things that perhaps should not have been buried at all. They remember what they hear. When they wake, they are ready to tell the secrets they know. When they wake, they sing.

Paul drives, Henry in the passenger seat beside him, a bag of powdered donuts between them, and two steaming cups of coffee in the cup holders.

“Isn’t that playing a bit to stereotype?” Henry points. Paul grins, brushing powdered sugar from his jeans.

“So sue me. They’re delicious.” He helps himself to another. Henry’s stomach is too tight for food, but he keeps sipping his coffee, even though his nerves are already singing.

Paul mapped out a widening radius from where the car with the MiniDV in the glove box was found, circling the nearby railroad crossings. It isn’t much, but it’s something. They’re out here hoping that whoever killed the woman crashed his car on the way back to his home, which might be the place he killed the woman. Maybe they’ll find her body there, or maybe he was on the way back from burying her somewhere else. Maybe they’ll find him. Henry is both prepared and unprepared for this scenario.

Right now, he’s not letting himself think that far ahead. He’s focusing on the plan, tenuous as it is, driving around to likely locations where he will listen. Henry feels like a television psychic, which is to say a total fraud. He wants to enjoy the relative silence of the car, the tick of the turn signal, the engine revving up and down. He wants to enjoy spending time with Paul, catching up, just old friends. He doesn’t want to be thinking of snuff films and ghosts, and on top of that there’s a nervous ache in his chest that keeps him conscious of every time he glances at Paul, wondering if his gaze lingers too long.

Trees border the road. It’s early fall, and most are denuded of their leaves. Henry peers between the trunks, looking for deer. The sound, when it comes, is every bit as unexpected and violent as the last time. A reverberating hum, rising to a scream—cicada song, but with another noise tucked inside it this time, one he remembers from when he was a child.

That hitching, broken sound. Like gears in a machine struggling to catch. Like a baby’s cry. A wounded animal. Henry jerks, his body instinctively trying to flee. His head strikes the window and pain blooms in his forehead above his right eye.

“Are you—”

Concern tinges Paul’s voice, but Henry barely hears it. The sound has hooks beneath his skin, wanting to drag him in among the trees.

“Turn here.” Henry bites the words out through the pain, the song filling him up until there’s no space left for breath.

Paul looks at him askance but flicks the turn signal, putting them on a road that quickly gives way to gravel and dust. The trees grow closer here, their branches whip-thin, the same ones he saw in the corrupted clip of their film.

“Pull over.”

Henry’s breath comes easier now, the pain fading to a dull ache like a bruise. The cicada song forms an undercurrent, less urgent but not completely gone. Paul kills the engine. His expression is full of concern. Henry wants to thank him for his trust, but whatever waits for them in the woods is no cause for either of them to be thankful.

He climbs out of the car, buries his hands in his pockets, and walks. Leaves crunch as Paul trots behind him. Nervous energy suffuses the air between. Henry hears the questions Paul wants to ask, held trapped behind his teeth. It’s nothing Henry can explain, so he keeps walking, head down.

When Henry stops, it’s so sudden Paul almost trips. Tree branches cross the sky in the exact configuration Henry saw in the film, only the angle is wrong. Henry should be seeing them from lower down. From the height of a child.

The burr of cicadas grows louder, the steady drone rising to an ecstatic yell. Henry forces himself to keep his eyes on the trees, turning to walk backward. He pictures a girl being led through the trees, a man’s hand clamped on her upper arm. Her death waits for her among the trees, and so does a camera on a tripod.

Henry is thirteen years old again, listening to the crying girl, lost and frightened and in pain. The hours after her discovery blur in his mind, though certain moments stand out sharp as splinters beneath his skin. The scent of leaf rot and dirt, his cheek pressed to the forest floor. His parents lifting him bodily out of the way as the rescue crew arrived, and Henry scrabbling at the earth, refusing to let go, terrified of leaving the girl alone.

He remembers seeing the girl’s face for the first time but not what she looked like. In his mind, her features are as blurred and indistinct as they were at the bottom of the hole—eyes and mouth dark wounds opened in her pale skin.

There were endless questions from his parents, from the rescue crew—how had he found the girl, did he see her fall, was it an accident, did someone hurt her? They called Henry a hero, and he wanted none of it. He remembers burying himself under the blankets on the bottom bunk in the cabin, wishing he could stay there for years like a cicada, only emerging with everyone long gone.

Now, as then, the insect song times itself to the blood pounding like a headache in Henry’s skull. He’s sharply aware of Paul watching him, eyes wide, as Henry stops and turns around.

The shack is half-hidden in the trees, scarcely bigger than a garden shed. There’s a catch in Paul’s breath, and Henry glances over to see Paul’s hand go to his service revolver.

The door isn’t locked, but it sticks, warped with weather and clogged with leaves. Henry holds his breath, expecting a stench, expecting a horror movie jump scare, but there’s nothing inside but more dead leaves and a pile of filthy rags. A small wooden mallet rests up against one wall.

Paul uses a flashlight to sweep the room, even though they can see every corner from the door. A seam in the floor catches the light, and once Paul points it out, Henry can’t unsee it. Paul kneels, prying up boards with a kind of frantic energy, using the edge of a penknife.

“It’s another tape.” Paul straightens. There’s dirt under his nails.

“He killed more than one person.” Henry swallows against a sour taste at the back of his throat. He knew, the moment he saw the corrupted bit of film, the moment he heard the cicadas scream, but he’d wanted desperately to be wrong.

Paul holds the tape in a handkerchief, turning it so Henry can see the handwritten label—Exsanguination.

“I brought my camcorder. It’s in the car.” Henry feels the beginning of tremors, starting in the soles of his feet and working their way up his spine. Adrenaline. Animal fear. Some intuition made him pack film equipment before leaving the house, and Henry loathes that part of himself now.

Back in the car, Paul runs the heater, even though there’s barely a chill in the air. Sweat builds inside Henry’s sweatshirt as he fumbles with the tape, wearing the cotton gloves Paul gave him to preserve fingerprints. He flips the camcorder’s small screen so they can both see, but hesitates a moment before hitting play, as if that could change the outcome. Henry knows all movies are ghost stories, frozen slices of time, endlessly replayed. Whatever will happen has already happened. The only thing he and Paul can do is witness it.

Static shoots across the screen, then the image steadies. The girl can’t be more than ten years old. Her hair is very long and hangs over her shoulder in a braid. She stands in the center of the shack, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. Dim light comes through a single grimy window. She shivers.

A man in a bulky jacket and ski mask steps into frame. He picks up the mallet leaned against the wall in the shed, now in a plastic evidence bag in the back of Paul’s car, and he methodically breaks every one of the girl’s fingers.

The image cuts, then the man and girl are outside. The camera sits on a tripod, watching as the man leads the girl to the spot framed by two stubby trees. The girl is barefoot. She sobs, a sound of pure exhaustion that reminds Henry of the little girl in the hole. This girl’s ankles are tied. Her hands free, but useless, her fingers all wrong angles, pulped and shattered.

The man unbraids the girl’s hair. He employs the same care he used breaking her fingers. Once it’s unbound, it hangs well past the middle of her back. The man lifts and winds strands of it into the spindly branches of the trees growing behind her, creating a wild halo of knots and snarls and twigs.

The girl cannot flee when the man pulls out a knife. She thrashes, a panicked, trapped animal, but the knots of her hair hold her fast. He cuts. Long slashes cover her exposed thighs, her knees, her calves, her arms.

How long does it take a person to bleed to death? Henry and Paul are about to find out.

After what seems like an eternity, long after the girl has stopped struggling, the man steps out of frame. The camera watches as the trees bow, the girl slumps. Branches crack, freeing strands of her hair, but far too late.

Henry gets the door open just as bile and black coffee hits the back of his throat. He heaves and spits until his stomach is empty. Paul places a hand on his back, the only point of warmth in a world gone freezing cold. Henry leans back into the car, and Paul puts his arms around Henry, holding him until the shaking stops.

“I’m sorry,” Paul says. “I shouldn’t have dragged you into this.”

The expression on Paul’s face when he says it is a blow to Henry’s freshly emptied gut. The pain in Paul’s eyes is real, yes, but what accompanies it isn’t quite regret. Instead, guilt underlies the pain, and Paul’s gaze shifts away.

In that moment, Henry knows that Paul wouldn’t change a thing if he could. He would still ask Henry to watch the tape, no matter how many times the scenario replayed. This death, among every other he’s witnessed, is too big to hold alone. He needs to share the burden with someone, and that someone couldn’t be Maddy. Because that kind of death spreads like rot, corrupting everything it touches, like it corrupted Henry and Paul’s film, their past, their shared dream. Henry understands.

If Paul shared that pain with Maddy, it would become the only thing he would see anytime he looked at her, and the only thing he could do to save himself would be to let her go. And Maddy isn’t someone Paul is willing to let go.

“I’m sorry,” Paul says again.

“Me too.” Henry reaches for the passenger-side door and pulls it closed. He can’t look at Paul. His face aches, like a headache in every part of his skull at once. Paul shifts the car into drive.

“Are you…” Paul’s words fall into the silence after they’ve been driving for a few moments, but he stops, as if realizing the inappropriateness of what he was about to say.

Henry hears the words anyway. “Are you seeing anyone now?” Bitterness rises to the back of his throat, even though his stomach is empty. Paul could have asked the question any time during the drive, if he really wanted to know, if the question was genuine curiosity and not born of guilt. Paul asked Henry to share his burden, and now it hurts him to think that Henry might have to carry it alone in turn. Henry hears the words even when Paul doesn’t say them, his golden ear catching sounds no one else ever would.

“I hope you find someone,” Paul says finally as he pulls back onto the road. “You shouldn’t be alone. No one should.”

Henry knows what Paul is saying; he should find someone to share his burden, too. Henry can’t imagine someone loving him enough to take on that kind of pain; he can’t imagine ever wanting someone to. He knows what that kind of love feels like from the other side.

The heater makes a struggling, wheezing sound, and Paul switches it off, rolling his window down. Air roars through the cabin, and cold sweat dries on Henry’s skin. If it weren’t for Henry’s golden ear, the wind would swallow Paul’s next words whole.

“I’m sorry it couldn’t be me.”

It’s a good two days before Henry brings himself to check the other clips he shot with Paul. The rot has spread to every single one of them. There’s an open barn door looking out onto a barren field, rising up to block the buildings of Manhattan, a water stain on a ceiling spreading to cover the boy’s face as he gets his first glimpse of the city, a crack of light under a closet door instead of the flickering gap between subway trains. Each new image is a hole punched in an already fragile structure, unwinding it even more.

Henry understands what the scenes are now, after watching Exsanguination. They are films made by ghosts, the last image each of the killer’s victims saw before they died. What he doesn’t understand is why he is seeing them. Is it because he had the misfortune to hear what shouldn’t have been there for him to hear? The cicadas, linking him to the woman whose last sight was of trees through a grimy window. Her death linking him to the deaths of the other ghosts.

Henry shakes himself, thinking of his and Paul’s drive home from their aborted attempt to find answers. Awkward silence reigned until Henry stood outside the car, looking in through the driver’s window at Paul. Then their fragmentary sentences had jumbled on top of each other.

“You don’t have to—” from Paul.

And, “Next time you go—” from Henry.

Standing there, trying not to shiver, Henry had extracted a promise.

“Call me before you go looking. I mean it. I’m coming with you.” He almost said, whether you like it or not, but Henry knows it isn’t a matter of like; it’s a matter of need. He saw the gratitude in Paul’s eyes and his self-loathing underneath it, hating the fact that he should need to ask Henry to do this thing, that he should be too cowardly to refuse and demand Henry stay home. One way or another, they will both see this through to the end.

Henry doesn’t tell Paul about the images corrupting their film. But he watches them again, obsessively, alone, until each is imprinted on his eyelids. His dreams are full of doorways and trees and slivers of light. At the end of the week, Paul finally calls, his voice weary and strained.

“Tomorrow afternoon,” Paul says.

Henry barely lets him get the words out before saying, “I’ll be ready.”

They drive away from the city. Henry’s stomach is heavy with dread and the sense of déjà vu. He clenches his jaw, already braced for the sound of cicadas, and speaks without looking Paul’s way.

“We’re looking for a house with a barn.”

From the corner of his eye, Henry sees Paul half turn to him, a question and confusion giving a troubled look to his eyes. But he doesn’t ask out loud, and Henry doesn’t explain. They drive in relative silence until they reach the first railroad crossing on Paul’s map, intending to circle outward from there.

It takes Henry some time to realize that the sound he’s been bracing for has been there all along, a susurrus underlying the tire hum and road noise, a constant ache at the base of his skull. How long has he been listening to the cicadas? How long have they been driving?

Fragments of conversation reach him. He realizes Paul has been asking questions, and he’s been answering them, but he has no sense of the words coming from his mouth, or even any idea what they’re talking about. Suddenly the noise in his head spikes and with it, the pain. Henry grinds his teeth so hard he swears his molars will crack.

“Here.” The word has the same ticking, struggling quality as the cicada’s distress call.

Henry is thirteen years old again, wanting to clap his hands over his ears, wanting to crawl away from the sound.

“What—”

“Turn here.” Henry barks the words, harsh, and Paul obeys, the car fishtailing as Paul slews them onto a long, narrow drive. The drive rises, and when they crest the hill, Henry catches sight of a farmhouse. Paul stops the car. From this vantage point, Henry can just make out the roof of a barn where the land dips down again.

Henry is first out of the car, placing one hand against the hood to steady himself. He closes his eyes, and listens. He’s queasy, breathing shallowly, but there, as if simply waiting for him to arrive, the mournful, unspooling call of a train sounds in the distance.

“You hear it, too, right?” Henry opens his eyes, finally turning to Paul.

Paul inclines his head, the barest of motions. He looks shaken in a way Henry has never seen before.

“This is the place.” Henry opens his eyes, moving toward the front door.

A sagging porch wraps around the house on two sides. To the right, straggly trees stretch toward the sky. Without having to look, Henry knows there is a basement window looking up at those trees.

Paul draws his service revolver. The sound of him knocking is the loudest thing Henry has ever heard. When there’s no answer, Paul tries the knob. It isn’t locked. Paul leads and Henry follows, stepping into the gloom of an unlit hallway. The stench hits Henry immediately, and he pulls his shirt up over his nose.

Stairs lead up to the left. Rooms open from the entryway on either side, filled with sheet-covered furniture and windows sealed over with plywood boards. Paul climbs the stairs, and again, Henry follows. Up here, the scent is worse. There are brownish smears on the wall, as if someone reached out a bloody hand to steady themselves and left the blood to dry.

At the top of the stairs and to the left is a door bearing a full bloody handprint. It hangs partially open, and Paul nudges it open the rest of the way. Henry’s view is over Paul’s shoulder, not even fully stepped into the room, and even that is too much.

The corpse on the bed is partially decomposed, lying on rumpled sheets nearly black with filth. There are no flies, the body is too far gone for that, but Henry hears them anyway, the ghostly echo of their buzz. But just because the flies are gone doesn’t mean there aren’t other scavengers. A beetle crawls over the man’s foot.

Henry bolts down the stairs before he realizes it, back in the kitchen where unwashed dishes pile on the countertops, with more in the sink. Garbage fills the bin by the door. The air here smells sour, but after the room upstairs, it’s almost a relief.

Henry thinks of the wrecked car, and imagines the killer somehow pulling himself from the wreck, somehow managing to make it back home, only to die here, bleeding out the way the girl in the woods did. He wants to feel satisfaction for the strange twist of justice, but there’s only sickness, and beneath that, a hollow still needing to be filled.

Henry turns toward the basement door. It seems to glare back at him until he makes himself cross the room and open it. Wooden steps, the kind built with boards that leave gaps of darkness between, lead down.

He finds a light switch, but he doesn’t bother. Light filters in from the high basement window. It matches the light on the tape where the woman breathed and died and so it is enough.

Beneath the window, a pipe rises from the unfinished floor. There’s a tripod aimed at the pipe, a camera sitting on the tripod, the compartment where the tape was ejected standing open. At the base of the pipe, there are marks on the floor. When Henry bends close to see, they resolve into words. Find me.

Henry’s breath emerges in a whine. For once, his ears fail him. He doesn’t hear Paul descending the stairs until Paul is beside him, touching his shoulder. Henry can’t bring himself to look up. He can’t even bring himself to stand. He stays crouched where he is, swaying slightly. When he does finally look up, it isn’t at Paul, it’s at the window. On the other side of the dirty glass, stark, black branches crisscross the gray sky. Henry looks at them for a very long time. And he breathes.

There are twelve more tapes. They arrive in a padded envelope, each one labeled like the originals, copies written in Paul’s hand—Exhalation 1–9, Contusion, Asphyxiation, and Delirium. Henry didn’t ask, but Paul knew he would need to see them. Even so, it’s several weeks before Henry can bring himself to watch.

In Asphyxiation, a man hangs from the rafters of the barn, slowly strangling to death under his own weight. In Contusion, a little boy is beaten within in an inch of his life and locked in a dark closet, only the faintest sliver of light showing underneath the door. In Delirium, an old man is strapped to a bed, injected with a syringe, and left to scream out his life with only the water spot on the ceiling for company.

Paul informs Henry by email that four bodies were unearthed on the property—the old man, the young boy, the hanged man, and the girl. But not the woman. Paul informs Henry that the search is ongoing, her body may have been dumped in the woods somewhere, buried or unburied. It may even have been on the way back that the killer crashed and crawled free of the wreck, leaving the tape behind.

What made her special? Or is she special at all? Perhaps the killer was afraid of burying yet another body so close to his home. Maybe he was planning to dig up the others and move them, too, but he never got the chance. Or maybe, just maybe, he woke in the middle of the night to an insistent cicada’s scream and tried to get the woman’s corpse as far away as he could. As if that would ever make them stop.

Henry watches the clips one last time, the ones he and Paul shot, the ones corrupted with ghosts. The frames are back to normal, only the footage he and Paul shot of city streets and subway rides—no stark trees, no water-stained ceiling. Henry sees those things nonetheless. He will see them every time he looks at the film. The only thing he can do to save himself is let them go.

After he watches the clips for the last time, he deletes every last one.

When Henry finally makes his movie, his great masterpiece, it’s no longer about a boy leaving the country for the city and finding his true home and meeting a boy from the city who grew up in his father’s shadow. The city no longer belongs to the boy Henry used to be, and the boy who grew up in his father’s shadow never belonged to him at all.

Before he begins work on the movie, Henry moves to a city on the other coast, one smelling of the sea. The trees rising up against the sky there are straight and singular; their branches do not fracture and crack across the sky. That fact goes a little way toward easing his sleep, though he still dreams.

While working on the movie that is no longer about a boy, Henry meets a very sweet assistant director of photography who smiles in a way Henry can’t help but return. Soon, Henry finds himself smiling constantly.

Even though the movie Henry makes isn’t the one he thought he would make when he first dreamed of neon and subways and fame, it earns him an Oscar nomination. He is in love with the assistant director of photography, and he is loved in turn. He is happy in the city smelling of the sea, as happy as he can be. The love he has with the assistant director of photography—whose eye is good, but not quite golden—isn’t the kind of love that would willingly take the burden of death and pain from Henry’s shoulders. For that, Henry is grateful. He would crack under the weight of that kind of love, and besides, half his burden already belongs to the man he willingly took it from years ago.

At first, Maddy sends a card every Christmas, and Henry and Paul exchange emails on their respective birthdays. But Henry knew, even on the day he packed up the last of his belongings to drive to the other coast, when he said see you later to Paul, he was really saying goodbye. Paul chose, and Henry consented to his choice. Maybe Paul’s relationship with Maddy could have survived the weight of his pain, but sharing his burden with Maddy wasn’t a risk Paul was willing to take.

Henry is the one to drop their email chain, “forgetting” to reply to Paul’s wishes of happy birthday. When Paul’s birthday rolls around, Henry “forgets” again. It’s a mercy—not for him, but for their friendship. Henry can’t bear to watch something else die slowly, rotting from within, struggling for one last breath to stay alive. Perhaps it isn’t fair, but Henry imagines he hears Paul’s sigh of relief across the miles, imagines the lines of tension in his shoulders finally slackening as he lets the last bit of the burden of the woman’s death go.

For his part, Henry holds on tighter than before. The movie that earns him his Oscar nomination is about a woman, one who is a stranger, yet one he knows intimately. He saw her at her weakest. He watched her die. The words scratched in the floor where the woman breathed her last, find me, are also written on Henry’s heart.

He cannot find the woman physically, so he transforms the words into a plea to find her, who she was in life or who she might have been. Henry imagines the best life he can for her, and he puts it on film. It is the only gift he can give her; it isn’t enough.

When Henry wins his Oscar, his husband, the assistant director of photography, is beside him, bursting with pride. They both climb the stage, along with the rest of the crew. The score from their film plays as they arrange themselves around the microphone. Henry tries not to clench his jaw. A thread winds through the music, so faint no one else would ever hear—the faint burr of rising insect song.

Paradoxically, it is making the movie he never expected to make that finally allows Henry to understand the movie he tried to make years ago. Even though he destroyed the clips, that first movie still exists in his mind. He dreams it, asleep and waking. In the theater of his mind, it is constantly interrupted by windows seen at the wrong angle, water stains, and slivers of light, and scored entirely by insect screams.

The movie that doesn’t exist isn’t a coming-of-age story. It isn’t a story about friendship. It’s a love story, just not the traditional kind.

Because what else could watching so many hours of death be? How else to explain letting those frames of death corrupt his film, reach its roots back to the place where their friendship began and swallow it whole? What other name is there for Henry’s lost hours of sleep, and the knowledge that he wouldn’t say no, even if Paul asked for his help again. Even now. When Henry would still, always, say yes every time.

Every time Henry looks back on the film in his mind, all he sees is pain, the burden he willingly took from Paul so he wouldn’t have to carry it alone. Even so, Henry will never let it go. The movie doesn’t exist, he destroyed every last frame, but it will always own a piece of Henry’s heart. And so will the man he made it for.