Orrin Grey
I want you to act like this is all a movie. That’ll make it easier.
If it was a movie, it would open with darkness. No credits, no titles, just a black screen that you stare into waiting for something to appear, waiting for the darkness to resolve into a picture. Instead, there’s a voice reciting familiar words: “911, what is your emergency?”
Then another voice; a woman, crying, terrified: “There’s a man in my house. He’s in my bedroom.”
“Are you in a safe place?”
“Now he’s in the living room. He’s in whatever room I go into. He’s standing in the corner, pointing at me. He’s talking, but I can’t hear what he’s saying.”
At this point, you’d get the titles.
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It wasn’t the first 911 call. No one knows what the first one was. There’s no way to separate it out from the others, even if anyone had wanted to. There’s no way to draw the line and say, “This is the first real one. All the ones before this were just hoaxes, crazy people, misunderstandings.” And then there’s the question, of course, about how many of the ones before were crazy people, hoaxes? How long had it been going on, before we even knew?
And once it started, it took everyone so long to figure it out, because how do you figure something like that out? What do you do with that call, the one that played there in the dark, when the police and the EMTs arrive and find the woman crammed under her couch somehow, huddled up there like a frightened cat, dead from shock, the phone still gripped to her ear, the house otherwise deserted? What do you do with the call from a college kid who says that his fiancée went into the closet and never came out? When you look in the closet and find that it’s maybe two feet square, just enough room for some clothes and the vacuum cleaner and no place for a person to go? You dismiss them at first, of course. You take the kid into custody, notify the woman’s next of kin. But after a while, there are too many. After a while, people are no longer calling 911. After a while, the phones don’t work anymore, and when you pick them up all you hear is voices, hundreds of them piled atop one another, all whispering your name.
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If this was a movie, we’d have to have some kind of song playing over the opening credits, right? Something at once unexpected and appropriate. Not Johnny Cash, because Zach Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake beat us to that punch, and besides, “The Man Comes Around” isn’t quite right. So let’s go just one step to the side, and get Nick Cave and company singing Dylan’s “Death Is Not the End.”
And while the music plays, there’d be snippets of footage in the background. Stuff from security cameras, blurry cell phone videos, clips of news shows. You’d see hands coming out of a shadow where a light was just shining, showing an empty corner. You’d see a window filling with bloody handprints. You’d see a girl, being pulled into what looks like a solid wall, sliding up it, into the ceiling. Someone is running, holding the camera. The door is just a few feet away, and they look behind themselves, turning the camera with their gaze, and there’s nothing behind them to be afraid of, but as they turn back the door is gone, bricked up in those few half-seconds, and then you hear a scream, and the camera goes to static.
Yeah, that’s the opening credits.
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The trick, when you’re trying to compress any story into a couple of hours, is how to handle the exposition so it’s not so clumsy. We’d want to avoid a text crawl or an opening narrator, because those are old-fashioned; reserved, nowadays, for more epic films, or things that purport to be “based on a true story.” And while we want verisimilitude here, we also want to distance you from what’s happening. That’s kind of the point. Hence the song, right?
If this was an indie film, or something from overseas, we’d probably not give you any exposition at all right away. You’d just get dropped into the middle of the action, and you wouldn’t have any idea what was going on. Just like in real life. Nobody knew what was happening. Most people died without ever knowing, they explained it whatever way they had to, or no way at all. There were street-corner preachers and politicians alike saying that it was God’s judgment, there were cults that sprang up in the last days. There were people who were trying to give it some kind of scientific explanation– hallucinogens and black holes – even as the walls were bleeding and doorknobs were disappearing under the sweaty grasps of desperate hands. Outside my window, someone had spray-painted across the side of an office building, “Now ’tis the very witching hour of night, when churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out contagion.” It seemed as good an explanation as any, at the time.
The studios wouldn’t stand for that, though, so your protagonist would be someone who worked at the facility. Or maybe someone who was married to someone who worked at the facility. Someone like me.
(I’m lying to myself, of course. If Hollywood had the purse strings, we wouldn’t be married, we’d be dating. And 15 years younger. And our genders would be flipped, so that I was the one working at the facility and she was the one at home, tapping out movie reviews on her laptop in the kitchen window. We probably also wouldn’t be in Montreal, but hey, maybe. They’re filming more and more movies in Toronto these days, or they were, back when they were still filming movies.)
Maybe she’d tell me about the project in the evenings, over plates of spaghetti, like she really did. Or maybe she’d keep it all secret from me, but I’d read some notes or something, after the whole thing started. One way or the other, I’d discover how they found the machine in a bricked-up basement underneath an abandoned insane asylum. (The studios would love that!) They thought it was some kind of computer, maybe one of the first computers ever built. Not really a computer at all as we know them today, but something more like a difference engine, like the ones Turing worked on. All brass and levers and numbered keys, like a cross between some kind of ancient cash register and a pipe organ. All the project was ever supposed to do was to see what this thing did, what it was. This was going to be a big break in the history of computing, but, instead, it was the end of the history of anything.
They knew that something was wrong the minute they started the machine. There wasn’t some slow build-up, it all happened at once. When they turned it on, there was a wave of poltergeist activity that swept out from the machine throughout the entire lab, across the river, and through all of Montreal. Every table and chair in the lab was shoved against the wall farthest from the machine. In the lunchroom a few floors up, chairs and tables overturned, plates slid off shelves to smash on the floor. Silverware magnetized. Every electronic device in the building shut down, and the entire city suffered a massive power failure.
In our apartment, all the doors slammed shut simultaneously, and the handful of VHS tapes that I still had in a box under the entertainment centre all melted.
Things went to shit from there.
Following on the heels of the poltergeist activity, so close behind it that no one in the lab had even reacted, the ectoplasm began to materialize out of the valves of the machine, flowing down the sides, forming a sort of barrier around it, something that shimmered and moved almost like water. Nobody in the lab had any idea what it was then, of course, but the first one who touched it died instantly. His hair turned white, he fell to the floor choking and slapping at his chest. By the time anyone else got to him, he’d ossified, and there were hundreds of spiders crawling out of his mouth and nose.
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In the movie version, the machine would have been the heart of everything. Its destruction would have been the end of the film, the salvation of mankind. That makes for a better ending, sends the folks in Peoria home happy. In real life, though, the machine was just the key that turned the lock. Once the door was open, there was no closing it.
They did manage to destroy the machine, eventually, and when they did, they found a corpse in the middle of it. The mummified body, hooked to thousands of copper wires, of a woman named Katrina Something, the rest of the name illegible, a powerful physical medium, born 1899, died 1916. We only know any of that because there was a plaque on the inside of her abstract coffin that told us.
By then, the handful of people who were left from the facility had figured out sort of what the machine did. Or, at least, what it had done. By then, almost everyone had kind of figured it out. Everyone knew, at least, what was happening, even if a lot of them didn’t give it a name. Some did, though. The Internet, when it still worked, came to our rescue, prepared to turn anything, even the end of the world, into a kind of meme. They called it the Ghost Apocalypse.
It’s funny, in a way, because we had all been culturally preparing for the dead to come kill us for years by then. We just expected it to be their bodies, not their restless spirits. We had zombie apocalypse survival guides, and over on the U.S. side of things the CDC supposedly had a disaster plan for a zombie outbreak. Nobody had a plan for ghosts, and they proved a lot harder to deal with than zombies because, frankly, nobody knew how they worked. You couldn’t lay them to rest or settle their unfinished business, destroy the fetters that bound them to this mortal plane. They were pouring through now, this was their world. And you certainly couldn’t just shoot them in the head. Sometimes they already didn’t have a head. Sometimes they were just a voice, or a shape, or a cold draft, or the elevator door suddenly closing on you no matter what you did, and then the rest of the elevator dropping 27 stories to the underground parking garage, killing everyone on board.
We only had one movie that predicted this. Well, two if you count the remake. It was Kairo in Japan in 2001, Pulse in the U.S. in 2006, during the height of the J-horror boom, starring that girl from Veronica Mars and that guy from Lost. Well-known prognosticators of the end of the world.
(Did Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters 2 predict a kind of ghost apocalypse, albeit one staved off, twice-over, by a more Hollywood-friendly happy ending? Maybe a little bit.)
It was from Pulse that we got the idea that saved those few of us who got saved long enough to see what a world was like populated mainly by the dead. Some kid figured it out, disseminated it on Reddit and everywhere else. After most of the power went down, people started spreading the news with hand-lettered flyers written on red paper.
It wasn’t just red tape, like in the movie, though that was a great touch, guys. It was red anything. Something about the colour red kept them out. Some people speculated it was a spectrum thing, that ghosts were some kind of light or energy themselves, and that the red spectrum disrupted them somehow. Others thought that red was the colour of life, of blood and the heart and human passion. That maybe it reminded ghosts of mortality, or that it protected those who still pulsed with living blood and heat. People brave enough to do research in the big, abandoned, spooky libraries full of books that floated off the shelves or opened themselves up to thematically relevant passages turned up records of Victorian-era “ghost traps” that were just red-painted rooms, or even containers with red interiors, designed to cage spooks.
Whatever the proof of it, it seemed to work, and so those of us who survived did so by painting the insides of everything red. Red walls, red floors, red ceilings. Painting over windows. When paint wasn’t at hand, we used red paper, red markers, even red ballpoint pens, though those didn’t work so well, it turned out.
From inside our red rooms we sent out parties dressed in red clothes to try to bring back food, fresh water, more paint. Most of them didn’t return.
That’s not a very good Hollywood ending, is it? All of us sitting in our red rooms, waiting to get picked off one by one and join the ranks of our oppressors? What they don’t tell you about surviving the apocalypse is that it’s really not worth it. Everyone you care about is probably dead, there’s nothing fun left to do, and not a whole lot to live for. With the zombie apocalypse or whatever, at least you’d have some hope, however naïve. You could imagine a cure being found, or the zombies eventually all just rotting, if only you could outlast them. What are you supposed to do when the dead really do come back, though, and not just their carcasses? What’s the endgame on that? They’re not going to rot, get bored, go away. They’re not going to sleep, or die again. There’s nothing left to do, except delay the point at which they get you, a line of hopeless desperation that stretches out forever into the horizon, like a hallway in a Kubrick film.
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I’m not going to tell you how Georgiana died. That was her name, though everyone just called her Georgie, me included. If this was a movie, you’d see it. If this was a movie, and I was the protagonist, I would have seen it. It would have been dramatic, would have happened at some climactic moment. I would have been there, inches away from saving her, clutching at her hand as her fingers were pulled from mine, one by one. But this isn’t a movie, and that’s not how it happened.
I’m not going to tell you how she died, because I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Am I even sure that she’s dead? Well, I’m pretty sure. One of her co-workers told me she was gone. Those were his words, “Georgie’s gone,” just before he himself was gone, pulled around a corner and just gone, the hallway empty for 100 feet in both directions.
I didn’t give up on her, even then. I went out looking, after the first of the red rooms got put up. In my red clothes, red hood pulled up, I went searching like I was on my way to grandmother’s house. And maybe I finally found her, or she found me. I don’t really know, not for sure, not anymore.
I won’t tell you how she died, but I will tell you this. One last bit, and maybe it’ll make for a better ending. I still go outside to smoke. How crazy is that, right? But I don’t see any reason to quit anymore, and sometimes it’s worth maybe being dragged down into a storm drain, or disappearing into the street, or just suddenly turning white and weeping blood. Sometimes I just want to be outside again, and there’s no death horrible enough to make staying in that goddamned closed-up red room worth it for even one more minute.
On nights like that, I go out behind the building where we’ve been staying – it used to be a hospital, we painted up an entire wing – and I smoke a cigarette while I look out over the river. And lately, every time, I see Georgie there, standing on the edge of the water. I know that it’s her, even though I can’t really see her face. I’d know her in a crowd, by now, from the way she stands, the way her hair falls. I’ve seen her against the back of my eyelids every day since she was gone, and I’d know her backward, blindfolded. I know that it’s her, and I know what she wants. Not to drag me away, not like the others, not yet. Give her time, maybe. For now, though, she just wants me to follow her. To go willingly into that good night. To grind out my cigarette and walk down into the freezing water of the St. Lawrence. And I know, as surely as I know any of this, that one night soon, I will.
Roll credits.