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Alem
The opening shot of Under the House lingers from the rim of the tree line for more than two percent of its running time. Lens glare winks pink-yellow, dust motes swell into globules, and beyond the meadow of chest-high grasses, shadows lose their corners in the lowering dusk. It is a fine, if incongruous, tone of introduction.
The four men, believing the film to be incomplete, came to finish it. They stood at this first vantage, taking in the old colonial while the white pines rustled at their backs, squirrels barking up in the branches. Somewhere out near Cord Lake loons answered in the voices of young wolves. The two dogs perked their ears at the calls, then went back to nosing the ground, an uncharted land flush with new scents, wandering into the grass until Cheung and Mayne ordered them back.
The house looked as though it had once shrugged and then gone to sleep, and in that sleep it especially struck Alem as familiar. And not simply from the film. It was the taste of the air, the way the frame of sky shifted when a sporadic wind caught the treetops. It felt like a place he was going to visit, which didn’t make sense, because of course they were here. Why else? Familiar or no, from the end of its overgrown meadow, the windows of the house didn’t stare back with any dumb avidity. They didn’t resemble eyes at all. Alem found the effect more muted than Lecomte had filmed it, even as he felt the too-perfect anticipation of the curls of old paint peeling from the walls against his palm.
While the others had lost count of their viewings, Alem had been an Under the House virgin until the past week. He couldn’t believe such a cult classic, however unorthodox, had slipped his radar for so long, and he was still processing what he’d seen. What he was seeing now. A reconciliation of the two. He only knew for certain that the house looked tired, as anything abandoned in the woods would, particularly when seen through no more than the lenses of his contacts.
They were all exhausted; 1,100 miles north to New Hampshire without stopping for a hotel, and Alem in particular wasn’t much of a car sleeper.
“Not all that creepy,” Harlan said from beside him.
“But see the ring in the grass?” Cheung pointed out into the meadow yard.
“Yeah,” Harlan replied. “Hard to miss. Hasn’t even grown over much.”
“You expect it to be?” Cheung said. “Number one, it was burned there. And number two, the Lecomtites keep it landscaped according to the third scene.”
“There’s no such thing as Lecomtites,” Mayne said. “You need a legacy before you can have any ‘-ites’.”
Cheung laughed and moved forward into the grass. He was the tallest—Harlan seemed to call him Yao Ming a lot—and the stalks parted around his waist. His golden retriever, Baily, trotted into the fray beside him. Mayne’s dog, a border collie, broke his vigil and followed. Apparently Mayne named all his rescues Foster and tried to get their eventual adopters to let it stick.
Alem knew maybe three pieces of trivia about each of these guys. Not much of it helped him form any picture aside from the ubiquitous horror nerd. A term he had lately grown to flaunt himself, but somehow these men didn’t wear it well. They were a shade too lumberjacky, however beardless. But they were serious, if nothing else. He’d only heard of the October Film Haunt blog this past winter, and meeting Cheung and Harlan at a con in Atlanta had led him, gradually, into the group.
Mayne stepped forward, too, but didn’t enter the meadow. The ring was twenty or so feet across, like a crop circle in shorthand. The grass within it reached taller than it did without, in vague monument to something. Cheung was swallowed up by it as he passed through the ring’s circumference. He gave a whoop and the others saw his fists peek out in victory.
Alem swiped his lips with the back of a hand. It crossed his mind to leave, already, not even five steps out of the woods. This was his first film haunt. He’d done ghost meetups before, almost since the day he moved to the States. He even spent the night in the small morgue of an abandoned children’s asylum once. For an hour he’d tried to sleep on a morgue tray, canned inside the old refrigerated cabinet, until the close dark made him kick the door open. Dust, a sore back, and a story to embellish with Beth, who’d made him shower twice before she let him touch her.
He wasn’t sure how this felt different, if it was the possibility of lurking “Lecomtites” or the sense of next-level he got from these three guys. The house itself—he’d tapped into enough of the film’s vibe to know he’d rather not go into that basement. And he knew the genre, naturally, and knew not to judge a haunted house by its cover. It hit him that he was acting the cliché, the proverbial disbelief cut with a stirring of unease. He had to smile at himself a little.
One of the dogs yelped a single time, and the grass swayed inside the circle. Mayne ran into the meadow, but Foster had already rocketed away from the group. Alem watched the vague path left in the wake of the dog’s panic, toward the house, just like it had happened with the stray dog in the film. Mayne called after the collie again as it disappeared around the back. The grass stilled and Cheung stepped back through the ring.
Alem’s unease grew two shades darker. Dogs couldn’t reenact scenes. They couldn’t be taught to do that, could they? Harlan turned to him and said, “You coming?” Alem put some thought into it—the image of that dark hole at the end of the film both too curious and too atavistic in his mind—before nodding.
The four of them, with Baily in tow, approached the house in near silence but for the lab’s faint whimpering. The last few crickets sang out from the woods, and a single squirrel carried on with its determined chatter. Even looming before them, the house was still just a structure, the slow sloughing of gray paint, the white posts grown weary under the sagging porch. Four steps led up to overturned rocking chairs and a heavy mahogany door, above which was nailed a small board with the words Beloved Mouth etched across the plain wood. Each glanced at the plaque and turned away as though he hadn’t seen it. Alem found this a curious reaction even as he did the same himself. He placed a hand against the wall. His skin hummed for an instant, and a strip of paint broke off in his palm.
“I should go look for Foster,” Mayne said, and the others nearly jumped.
“Foster will find us inside,” Cheung said, smiling, “if it’s like the movie.”
“If it’s like the what?” Mayne shook his head. “Come on, man. And the dog in the film wasn’t even one of their dogs. It was just there.”
“Oh, so you do think it’s real?” Cheung said, but Mayne didn’t reply.
Harlan had told Alem, before they pulled up Under the House on YouTube the weekend before, that though Mayne was the biggest geek in the group, Cheung was their believer. Cheung thought that Lecomte wasn’t a filmmaker at all, that the movie was just a document of an initiation. Into a cult? Maybe, or just a great puzzle.
Mayne stared up at Cheung for a minute, some fresh tension that hadn’t been there earlier, then turned to the door and pushed it open. Dust sifted out into the failing light. They stepped inside.
“The kitchen’s where your dog will be,” Cheung said. “Stay close, Baily.” At some point he’d taken his bag from Harlan, but made no move to remove the small camera. Filming had been a point of contention the entire drive up here, and they’d crossed the New Hampshire line before they all started to admit to the appeal of finishing the film. “Lecomte did the living room first, then dining room and kitchen. We’ve seen all that.”
“You mean where the basement door is,” Alem said. There might have been a headache imminent—he had the faint sense of double vision in his memory. Cheung was right, after all—he’d seen this on a laptop screen already.
Cheung ignored him and walked off. The others followed him through the first two rooms, the former containing only a mold-haunted couch that would soon disintegrate into the filthy floor. A long table with a single chair dominated the latter. Dust everywhere. Several thin black cables lay on the floor of the dining room, naked without anything to connect to. There was a small hole at the base of the wall. Alem stooped to see a modem lined with five green eyes, one of which was blinking at him.
“Guys,” he said, “there’s a—a modem in the wall. It’s on.”
“A modem?” Cheung said. “Like there’s internet here? And to think we didn’t even bring our phones.” He smiled, silently referencing an October Film Haunt rule.
“But who the hell has this place wired for lights, much less Netflix?” Mayne dragged a palm across the table, and his hand came away furry with dust.
No one had an answer except to try the few light switches they could find. Nothing worked except that hidden modem. After a moment it occurred to Alem that something else was missing: the detritus of the bored or the homeless. No used condoms, no beer cans, no makeshift blanket beds anywhere in the house so far, much less a mattress. Signs of occupancy contradicted signs of complete isolation.
Then the kitchen, and the blank dog.
• • •
“Under Under the House,” by Charles Mayne
Posted on www.filmhaunt.com, September 2015
There is no sound apart from ambient background in Under the House until sixteen minutes in, when dark has grown full. Only the creak of doors and floorboards can be heard during the pass through the ground floor, and when the crew finds the dog by the basement door, even then they don’t say a word, presumably struck silent. You realize you haven’t heard so much as a human breath yet. Not until the film abruptly cuts to outside in the meadow. A healthy campfire fills the frame, a crosshatch of broken limbs billowing smoke. Knots pop. Far away, loons cry their flutelike calls. Then the camera swings higher, past the silhouettes of treetops, to show the smoke-blurred stars, and someone—fans argue whether it’s Lecomte—muses into them. It is the only extensive piece of dialogue in the film.
“Some of those stars have hung in the firmament longer than my father did. Swollen things. I can remember one night, the pockmarked moon, riper and younger then. My father had already fallen out of the sky, and soon I would plant him. The world was deeply cold and quiet and I was naked, hugging myself as my bare feet slipped on the surface of the frozen lake. Through those trees there. The third or fourth time I fell my cheekbone cracked against the ice, and I lay shivering, feeling my face go numb even as it puffed up in black pain. Under me the ice was opaque, dusted white, and would not reflect the stars.
“And my father walked beside me, heavy warm boots crunching the scrim of snow, a blanket draped over his arm. Telling me how the stars ate boys like me. His great mouth moved toward my face. Thus began the depth of my education. Trees came and gathered shoulder to shoulder. They walled the lake in tight, and I dwindled to almost a grain in the bowl they made. I only feel large, now, inside this dead grass.”
For some reason, the other crew members laugh at this. The camera lowers, to expose them around the fire, and the yellow shaking stalks of grass around the men. Somehow it all isn’t swept into a roar of flame. In the seven years since Under the House surfaced online, this segment has probably been the most discussed outside the titular scene. The nearby lake is glimpsed later, but the fire in the meadow is the only significant part of the film staged outdoors, and it is considered the pivot point.
The blond man stares across the fire at the camera—or at Lecomte, who is never seen in the film—and says, “De cette façon, tous nos père ont la meme yeux.”
They all shift then and gaze toward the camera. No one speaks for the next eleven minutes, they just stare out of your screen at you, and the fire pops and stands swaying in the foreground. A single loon cries once in all that wilderness of silence.
At last the longhaired man looks down into his lap and begins to weep. “Jesus,” he says, “is that French, Humley? What’s that mean? No way you speak French, do you?” Soon Humley and the balding man, too, are weeping. Bewildered, not knowing why. The camera, presumably held by Lecomte, takes it all in, tripod-stoic and still.
Then the dog, the stray brindled pit bull mix, steps into the frame, the wooden crown and thick ropes of drool hanging from its mouth. Static rains across the screen. Then Humley unfolds himself and staggers off into the night, screaming. Things devolve from there.
• • •
Harlan
Foster had been by the basement door, after all, and Harlan wasn’t sure what freaked him out more, the slack-faced vacancy of the collie or the mirroring of the film. They found the dog shivering, a puddle of urine spreading in three branches around his front paws. Mayne patted his knees and called Foster to him, but the dog just stared ahead, a line of pasty foam around his mouth. Harlan found himself drawn to the basement door, afraid he might start drooling himself. Finally they gave up and left Mayne with the dog, his voice becoming more and more desperate. They went back outside and entered the ring in the grass, where at some point they started arguing about whether or not to build a fire. Surely this whole place would kindle in seconds if they did. Underneath, Harlan thought, they were debating whether Lecomte was some kind of black magician.
“There wasn’t a fire last time,” he said. The first traces of steam plumed out with the words.
“Last time?” Alem waved a hand in front of Harlan’s face. “We watched the movie just the other day, dude. Campfire burning.”
Cheung, the still-unused camera in its bag hanging from his shoulder, swore at the other two when he was outvoted. He refused to acknowledge the swath of dry woods surrounding them, and grass as brittle as newspaper waiting to carry fire into the trees.
So they settled down on the cold earth, the old fire bones between them. A loon called out from much closer than the lake. Cheung played with his lighter, like a reminder to the rest of them, and Baily wouldn’t wander more than a foot from his side and preferred to crawl up into his lap when he’d let her.
At one point Cheung looked up at the sky and began to quote the bit about the lake from the film, but was quickly told to stop. Silence fell as they waited for the crown.
• • •
“Under Under the House,” by Charles Mayne
Posted on www.filmhaunt.com, September 2015
The thing is, Under the House is a short film. It’s only forty-two minutes long. When one considers that over a quarter of those minutes are given to that interminable fire-lit silence directed at the viewer, it’s clear the film is trying very hard to avoid being a straightforward production. When a character says, “In this way, all our fathers have the same eyes” in beautiful, flowing French he supposedly doesn’t know, those eyes can hardly be directed toward Hollywood. Or even film school.
Online comment threads still intermittently fume over whether there was supposed to be more to it than that. If Under the House in fact is a film. The characters are not given an introduction, much less the skeletons of character arcs. The lack of dialogue is even more troubling when one considers there is no discernible story for conversation to push forward. Some say it possibly was intended to have the structure of a typical ninety-minute running time and is therefore unfinished, while others—most—fiercely deny this.
These others point to blatant discrepancies in the film as proof of a complete, edited, deliberate product. Particularly the final thirteen minutes and their jumble of disturbing, nightmarish images. For example, when Humley (the only one other than Lecomte identified in any way) lurches to his feet before fleeing, it seems he is wearing the wooden crown. The static and warping of the video make it a difficult task, but the distinct long tapers of the crown can be seen above his head if the film is paused at the right moment. But clearly the crown is still clenched in the mouth of the unnamed dog, which has just entered the frame. The red sneakers that are seen descending the cellar stairs near the end are identical to the ones the balding man (referred to as variations of “Bald” in discussion of the film) has on, and yet “Bald” is already in the cellar with the others, turning toward the stairs. How to explain those shoes, and how to explain the newcomers at all, for that matter? The film certainly does not. Elsewhere, starting with the appearance of the crown, the faces of the members of the group are at times smudged or blurred in a rudimentary fashion—whether through software trickery or something more sinister is yet another line of contention. It is hard to find any thread of reason in those last minutes.
Compounding all of this is its truncated ending, which has further ensured that no one can come to an agreement on the whole of it as fiction or documentary. Each side has a reasonable argument. One can take its constituent elements aside and easily claim it’s all made up with the aid of effects, sure. But snip The Blair Witch Project at the right moment—say, forty-two minutes in—and it might easily be construed as a documentation of A Thing That Happened.
It’s hard to guess what Lecomte had in mind, or what the environment had in mind for him. Under the House is the only thing he ever made, at least as Lecomte. As outré as it is, there is nothing remotely like a filmography out there attached to that surname. Today an internet search will take you through dead ends of fake Twitter handles and message streams. The video simply showed up on a subreddit thread one day in 2008, four million YouTube hits and a few urban legends ago.
But this would all seem to lead back to the same question: Why does this film exist? And almost as importantly, why was it edited in such a way and uploaded to the world with only one word of introduction—“real”—alongside the name “lecomte”? The user account in question offers no clues of any kind. If for the sake of obfuscation, to cause seven years of bickering, then Lecomte (presumably) has found great success. It is dismissed as amateurish avant-garde pap by so many, but a resilient number of fans find the film to be utterly disregarding of labels. It only wants to infect the way one thinks about horror movies. Or, some have suggested, it simply wants to infect the way one thinks.
Lecomte’s role in the film’s production is unclear, really. It is not known when he is present, when he is manning the camera, and when he is “off set.” It’s possible that Lecomte shot the entire film himself, and the other three are seen just often enough to support this assumption, though several scenes of “imminent peril” clash with others in which Lecomte (again, presumably, because he is never seen) is eerily calm. Few of the shots have the almost prerequisite found-footage tremor. Whoever held that camera was a stout-hearted fellow. The one indication that Lecomte had any involvement other than as an avatar uploading the file is simply that “Bald” looks at the camera before they go down to the cellar and mumbles, “Whatever. It’s your deal, Lecomte.”
So through the mire of questions, the October Film Haunt intends to find the house and go under it. There are a couple of vague boasts in message boards—such as that of a small ghost-hunting group based in Vermont, now defunct, judging from their website—that claim the house has been found, but to the best of the online world’s knowledge, no one has ever confirmed this. But we believe we’ve spotted a clue, so the game’s afoot . . .
• • •
Mayne
Once they knew where the house was, the thought of going ate at them. Cheung would joke that they should change the name to the August Film Haunt, then the September Film Haunt. But tradition held them. They took a road trip once a year and camped out at the location or basis of a famous horror film, preferably one with some dark rumor attached, and this year the choice was unanimous.
Cheung had figured out where it was using an obscured, rotted sign he’d spotted nailed to a tree near the end of the film. Neither Mayne nor Harlan had ever noticed it before, and only after Cheung sharpened the image a few times on his computer did the sign look like it might read CORD LAKE, and a couple of weeks later he had the house, the lake and the woods, deep in northern New Hampshire, pulled up on Google Earth.
As writers, their goal was inspiration, vibe absorption. They’d never used cameras (until this trip, though Cheung’s handheld was still in its case) because they didn’t like to rely on the visual of film. The power of words! Cheung came up with the chain story idea in 2011, at the mausoleum purported to be where the weird coda of the original Blood in Your Things was shot. A dry, prosaic aura had greeted them there, but the story they’d cobbled together hadn’t been half bad. One or two thousand words each, third-person POV, past tense for the appropriate detachment, then pass it on to the next writer. Fresh perspectives. The three of them got hooked on the format. Afterward, each was allowed to take his chunk of the story and mine it for other work, but the past two years they’d published as one on the October Film Haunt blog. The fictionalized journalism angle had a good audience with fellow movie geeks.
The key was to stick to the proscribed POV. To think of it as the guy who just won’t let go of the camera even when the world is crumbling around him or zombies are lurking nearby. Thus Harlan vanished some other time, and all of this happened to some other person with his name. Mayne was keeping the third-person/past intact even though he realized he was going meta, breaking out of the construct through the description of the process. But he was sticking with it because he found himself jumping at every shadow, sitting in an upstairs bedroom of this fucked-up house, Cheung and Alem sleeping, or pretending to, against the opposite wall. Baily had left the room several minutes ago to explore the house, and Mayne had been too nervous to call her back.
Harlan’s disappearance hadn’t been as skin-crawling as Humley’s. When Mayne joined the others, leading a hobbling Foster, still looking years older and hollowed out, by the collar, Harlan jumped to his feet, dropped the journal in the ashes of the old fire, and announced he had to piss. He stared at the border collie for a long moment before walking toward the trees, away from the house to the west. Mayne leaned forward and checked Foster’s mouth to be sure, but they could already see the wooden crown wasn’t there. Instead he found two pale wooden splinters on the dog’s tongue.
In the film, after Humley runs into the trees and the campfire spreads into a perfect ring of flames, after the men blur and elongate beyond the screen, the rest of the crew can be seen in the distance, going back into the house. Mayne, Cheung, and Alem went back, too, but only after they had the good grace to shout Harlan’s name for half an hour into the dark. When the cold drove them inside, they stood at the staircase, a naked thing with its banister torn away, and looked around. Baily filled the entire house with a long, undulating howl. That decided them, and up they went.
Mayne had an idea where Harlan might be. They all did. The thought of it made his stomach hurt, even with the horror-movie hope that Harlan was playing a doozy of a practical joke on them.
So far everything had been the four of them deliberately following the sequence of the film, observing, tapping into something that hadn’t been present at the three other film haunts Mayne had been a part of. The wooden crown had yet to turn up. Mayne was thankful—of all the movies and art pieces he’d watched in his life, all the books, it was the one thing that had ever given him nightmares. The thought of it pulled and pushed in his head. But perhaps more importantly, and more immediate, there had been no faces at the window. He sat on top of his sleeping bag, the Coleman lantern hissing beside him, and tried not to look at that window, keeping it in the corner of his eye.
“As long as there’s no crown,” he whispered.
Foster, however, sat staring right at the window. Mayne had only known the dog for three weeks, but it wasn’t the same Foster that had jumped into Alem’s Jetta wagon three days ago and started licking Baily’s mouth. That Foster had been three years old but thought he was still a puppy. Now he seemed elderly, full of a calm and weary resignation. Catatonic, or close to it, not answering to his name or anything else, no matter how Mayne pitched his voice or scratched the magic spot on Foster’s rump. He just stared at the window, waiting for faces that hadn’t looked in yet.
“Was it something in that grass, boy?” Mayne put his hand on the dog’s back, then leaned over and buried his face in the thick black fur. It smelled like the forest. He wrapped him in his arms and squeezed. “If I give you your own name,” he said, “will you come back?”
A rope of drool reached from Foster’s jaw to the floor. It pooled there.
“I’ll call you Moon. Your breed does best with kids, families. That’s what I was going to find for you. But you’ll stay with me, and every night I can say ‘Goodnight, Moon.’ Yeah? Sound okay, boy? Is that a silly name?”
The dog could have been carved out of wood.
• • •
Cheung
The silence of the house seemed to have layers. Cheung woke from his half-sleep and sat up, listening. Beneath Mayne’s crying and wet sniffling, as he tried to bring his dog back from whatever piece of the ether he’d gone to. Beneath Alem’s soft, girlish snores. Cheung felt as though the house had slowly inhaled before their arrival and had been on the verge of whispering to him ever since.
He hardly cared about the film haunt anymore. The blog and the novel he’d never started. He felt that Lecomte was here in this house. Perhaps under it, yes, or even of the house. It wouldn’t be the first time that trope had raised its head. But there was almost a smell in the air, a taste. The house was full of almosts and a familiar dread he’d never known before.
Baily had left the room. He almost got up to go look for her. He knew he should, but his bones were too heavy. That other half of sleep came upon him now. For a moment something seemed to peer at him from just beyond the doorway, but it was nothing. He settled back into his sleeping bag.
[a word or name here has been scratched out with heavy strokes]
• • •
Lecomte
I learned what they call themselves this time. I wanted to help the telling.
“Cheung” and “Alem” woke to “Mayne” crashing to the floor, shrieking, kicking himself backward across the floor.
“What? What is it?” Alem struggled his way out of his sleeping bag.
Mayne pointed at the window, pointed again, his hand stabbing at the air. “Faces! Looking in. From the video!”
The window, all twelve panes of it, was empty. Cheung went to Mayne, tried to lift him to his feet. “Calm down, man. There’s nothing there.”
Foster hobbled over to the far corner of the room. The hot tang of urine filled the room and the dog collapsed onto the puddle. Cheung went to the window and looked up, saw an arm, splayed fingers, disappearing over the edge of the roof. Or, not disappearing, but being slowly withdrawn now that it had been seen. He looked down and there was “Harlan,” pacing back and forth by the tree line, holding something pressed to his chest, obscured in the dark.
Alem came up beside him. “Do you see any—it’s Harlan!”
But Cheung didn’t hear him. His forehead pressed against the cold glass as he studied what Harlan was carrying. “He’s got Baily. What the fuck is he doing with her?”
Harlan looked up at them, stood frozen for a moment, then dropped the dog to the ground. She didn’t move. She looked rumpled, somehow, like a pile of laundry. Cheung smacked a palm against the window, turned to leave the room. Alem caught his arm and pulled him back. “Look.”
I watched them from the doorway. Below, through other eyes, I saw Harlan wrap his arms around the trunk of a spruce and scurry up into its branches, spider-quick. Mayne had now joined them at the window. “We need to leave,” he said, his words panicked and short of breath, “I’m not staying here, guys. We have to go now, go call the police, something.”
He went on like that, devolving into a stream of nonsense, but Cheung just stared down at the lump of yellow that was Baily. Waiting for her to move.
When she didn’t, they left the room, not seeing what had withdrawn into the greater shadows of the hallway. Downstairs and outside together, their lungs hitching in our northern chill. Between their leaving the window and rounding the corner of the house, the dog had either been removed or revived. She was gone from them.
Alem looked up into the tree Harlan had climbed. Cheung knelt and traced his fingers around where Baily had lain. Their tips were smeared with blood.
The three of them shouted for Harlan. Cheung soon stopped and shouted for Baily instead. The top of the tree shook, twenty feet or so off the ground, but neither the man nor the dog returned to them.
“This is. This is . . . ” Alem didn’t know what to say. He clearly wanted to get to his car and leave, but that meant forty-five minutes through the darkness of the trees. All the light they had brought with them, and no comfort to go with it.
“This is messed up, is what it is,” Mayne said. “You do realize that one of us has just climbed a tree in the middle of the night.” His voice was wavering again, hitting panic notes.
Perhaps the other two imagined their mates, keeping their beds warm far away in their homes. Surely they sifted through what they remembered of the final minutes of Under the House, down in the cellar.
But Cheung said, “We’re staying and we’re going under this house.” He looked at each of them. “Why? Because Harlan does happen to be our friend, in case you’ve forgotten. And there’s something real here. You guys feel it. The film is real. We’re getting something amazing out of this shit.”
“That’s exactly why I want to leave, man,” Alem said, and the conversation dried up there, as if this were all nothing but their small talk.
They shouted up at Harlan some more, but the branches stilled and the night grew quiet again. Finally something came crashing down toward them, striking Alem’s shoulder and rolling away into the wild grass. He went over and nudged the crown with his foot. In the film it is a beautiful jaundiced orange in the firelight, but here under the moon it breathed with a subtler, regal silver. It was made from wood, taken from any one of these trees, rough-hewn, unfinished and thin. Alem imagined his fingertips against the rough grain, tracing the three long tapers that rose over the head of the wearer. His scalp began to itch and tighten, loosen, tighten again.
He reached down from a great height, his hand at the last instant knocked aside by Mayne’s boot, which stomped on the crown in a dry splitting snap. Our eyes closed against the sound, and I sighed with loss. Alem had fallen onto his side and was looking up into Mayne’s face. “Hell, no, not that thing,” the latter said, panting, shaking his head side to side. “No way, man.”
Alem turned his head away in a sudden, bitter disappointment, and saw the window above filling up. Two figures stood looking down at them from the same bedroom they had minutes ago vacated. The window glass was warped from this angle, or else the two peering faces were smudged into dark blurs. I smiled up at these faces. I smiled out at my new friends, but still they did not see. So I left them, to return their book to its place.
• • •
Harlan
Morning. The others said to write my part, about what I did. They don’t see someone else has been writing, too. Light is gray, coming strained by the woods through the window in bars on the scarred floorboards. Dust in the light. On the wall the black dog’s skin hangs on a hook. It sags like a coat and I giggle. The blood on the floor beneath it has already dried. I don’t think the others even noticed when they rose. They only asked where I had been and I did not answer.
Came out of the tree in the night. Back to the house and slept next to Mayne until the dog’s skin came off. Pen sticks to the sap on my hand, smeared all red. Sap runs thick this time of year. All night, figures standing in our doorway without faces.
I’m supposed to say for someone’s father: here in New Hampshire is a pretty place, forests and old homes the trees took. The others don’t know I’m supposed to. Thetford. Thetford is the place. So look for the sign in the forest.
Pictures in my head won’t come out for the paper. Close my eyes and see I have shrunk to a very small point and the walls are paper tunnels and dripping slow honey. There is a light impossible enough to hold everything inside it. We must crawl to it. The way we get there is through the honeyed tunnels. Into eyes that yawn open into mouths. After, I think the mouths might go on to the stars and the black they hold between them, until all we know about our world and every world and all our thoughts are just a blood clot in something’s veins.
I open my eyes to go under the house. The others are speaking down at the bottom of the stairs, but all I hear is a hum. I stop writing now. These pictures stay in my head. I will have to show them.
• • •
Alem
Alem took the film haunt journal from Harlan and started to flip back to skim his entry, so he’d know where to pick up. But there was something in Harlan’s eyes, an indistinctness to his face, and for the briefest instant he could have sworn Harlan was wearing the crown, his head tilted nearly onto his shoulder. Instead he turned to a blank page and recorded his entry, with difficulty willing himself not to write, This feels like the part where we’re all going to die here. And of course he realized he’d written it anyway.
Cheung still hadn’t mentioned Baily to Harlan, but it was there on his face. In the air around them, any minute now. That one of them could kill a dog and spend half the night up a tree and not have any questions to answer the next morning—it spoke volumes of how freaked out everyone was.
“Okay, we can leave now,” Alem said, giving up on pretense. Everything he said now approached a higher octave, and he paced a tight oval in the foyer, between the staircase and the front door, still writing in the journal. He remembered something Mayne had told him during the long drive up: You are the cameraman who won’t put the damned thing down when everything is going to hell around you.
“Foster’s dead, isn’t he?” Mayne said. It felt like he was asking the empty, dim house as much as his three friends. “Isn’t he?”
“I’m not leaving until I find Baily,” Cheung said, and the thin wall of tension broke. He shoved Harlan against a wall, close to shouting down into his face. “What did you do with her?”
Harlan looked away and smiled. The smile belonged on the face of a child, knowing and wistful and cold. Knowing, for a moment later they all heard a scratching from the rear of the house, nails on wood, and a pitiful whimper.
“Foster?” Mayne called down the short hallway.
“Foster’s a coat hanging from a hook,” Harlan sputtered, still smiling, still pressed against the wall by Cheung’s forearm on his neck. “Didn’t you see? You never see.”
“No, that’s Baily,” Cheung said, leaning in close to Harlan’s face. “You put her in the basement, asshole, great.” And he let him go. Harlan slumped to the floor, coughing and rubbing his neck.
“Cheung, come on,” Mayne said. “Let her up and let’s go.”
A yelp and a sound of something falling down stairs. Cheung ran toward the kitchen. Harlan crawled over to Cheung’s bag and pulled the small blocky camera out. He grinned up at the others. “For pictures.”
“A thousand words,” Mayne said. The pen snapped in Alem’s hand then, cutting his palm just below the index finger. Ink bled onto the paper and sought the crevice between pages. He held onto the stub of pen, scratched out the remaining words, as if they were his last.
• • •
“Under Under the House,” by Charles Mayne
Posted on www.filmhaunt.com, September 2015
Following the several minutes of acid trip imagery that come after the fire and the crown—bizarre video flaws such as doubling and reshaping; a figure wearing the dog’s skin climbing on top of a sleeping man; eighty leisurely, jarringly sunny seconds of first-person POV passing through the woods as the lake glitters through branches ahead; things crawling along the walls outside the house—the film abruptly rights itself, relatively speaking, and the morning begins with a linear calm. The crewmembers gather at the basement door, the camera pointed at the floor and three sets of legs. After a few moments you realize you have noted the red Nikes the bald man is wearing. The bald man speaks to Lecomte in resignation, and the four of them descend the stairs.
And with all the speculation and picking-apart of Under the House’s ending, its dread and tension and Lynchian obliqueness, more than anything else it’s that sound that haunts us. What is it? Was it added to the footage later? It’s an easy thing to hope not. There’s so much about the film that feels authentic, one expects its creepiness to remain well earned. There are still a few dozen YouTube videos out there, from half-attempts at speculation to parodies in which the figures coming down the stairs after the crew members are revealed to be bright-colored clowns with party favors in their mouths. Or, as is the case with several from 2010, soccer players blowing plastic vuvuzela horns.
At first it is only a cellar, earthen and surprisingly small. In the weak yellow light of the camera, an irregular hole appears in the far wall, at floor level, with a large stone disc propped beside it. The hole is initially in the frame only in passing, yet is palpably clear as the destination. Because surely naming the film Under the House does not refer to this nondescript square cellar with nothing more than a dirt floor and pale brick walls.
“There were other things here before,” Humley says. He seems shaken and nervy. No one answers him, and the viewer is left to assume they have come down here at some other, undocumented time.
The door opens above them with a faint creak. The camera turns to the stairs as the sound begins. Though others disagree, as though the nature of the sound depends on its hearer, I can only describe it as a great hum run backward through a tape deck, littered with clicks and dirty filters, but somehow more wet-sounding. Folded inside the world. The swelling chant of a beehive, breathed deep in a forgotten room through cheap speakers. And at the same time nothing like these things.
The tread of feet on the stairs, then the shoes themselves—brown boots, bare feet, black sneakers, and those vivid red shoes with the white Nike swooshes. Then the legs descend into the frame, and the hum grows fuller and more distorted. There’s a burst of moaning, movement. The camera rushes across the cellar and dips down shaking into that black hole. The film goes on in that blackness for more than a minute before the video cuts off, but you know it has already ended because the hum is gone.
Only the one question remains.
• • •
Camera
The screen is gray and striped with shivering bands as it descends the staircase into dimness and sweeps around to show the close cellar. Cheung is visible by the near wall, crouched over something. Yellow whiteness flares in the bottom left corner and the cellar comes into sharper relief.
“Cheung?” Mayne’s voice says, off-camera. “She okay?”
Alem moves into the frame holding a lantern. His other hand reaches out and touches Cheung, who stands up and walks toward the center of the dirt floor. The camera lingers on the dog for several seconds. She is not okay. Only by moving the camera closer is it apparent that Baily is still breathing, in shallow pulses along her rib cage, the fur matted red. Her eyes are rolled up to the whites.
“The other one’s a coat,” Harlan says, and the screen moves with the rhythm of his laughter.
“There’s the hole,” someone says, and the view shifts to show the cavity in the brick wall, a thick slab of stone leaning beside it. At this point the audio flattens and is swallowed by a new sound. A shrieking low hum, as if many rusted doors are slowly opening, that is felt in the fabric of the video.
“Jesus God,” a voice shouts. The camera, which has begun to move toward the hole, turns again. Four figures are coming down the stairs, and as Mayne, Cheung, and Alem run toward and then past Harlan, the figures reach the cellar floor. The lantern has been left at the foot of the stairs, and in its wash of light four blurred smudges look across at the screen. Slowly, as though the lens is correcting its focus, the smudges diminish to reveal Mayne, Cheung, Alem, and Harlan, the head of each tilted far toward the left shoulder. Their mouths are open, emitting or inhaling the deep squelching sound.
Harlan—the one holding the camera—giggles and says, “Hi.”
The four men don’t respond. The new Alem knocks the lantern over, gently, and the cellar clicks into darkness.
“The way we get there is through the tunnels,” the first Harlan says. Something is muttered, a shuffle and scrape close to the microphone. The camera comes alive with night vision, Harlan’s shoes glowing with an alien green. He laughs again as the screen lifts to show the four doppelgängers moving rapidly toward Harlan. “Okay, the pictures are in here!” He turns and scrambles into the hole in the wall, green phosphorescence trailing back like blacklit algae in the sudden movement.
The screen rolls and tumbles for a moment, then straightens itself. The sound of stone grinding on stone is heard, as perhaps the disc is rolled over the hole in the cellar above. A large chamber spreads out on the screen, fuzzy and fluorescent in the night vision, its walls expanding away from the camera. The impression is something of a resuscitated lung filling with air. Beneath Harlan’s feet the surface of the floor sinks and flexes, suggesting some form of organic material.
It is difficult to ascertain this new environment. Vaguely spheroid, the chamber resembles both a honeycomb and a catacomb. There are wet sounds and noises of things sliding. The camera moves forward and stumbles to the floor. Harlan’s leg has sunk into a hole that stretches perhaps four feet across. It is one of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of holes that line the chamber. He lifts the leg and his bare foot brings ropes of thick liquid with it. “Probably looks green to you, huh?” he says. “It’s kind of orange, really. Like a golden orange in the morning. I think it’s honey, just like I wrote before.”
The camera moves with caution now and pans across the sides of the chamber. Many of the holes, or slots, are occupied. A face peers out of one on the right side, openmouthed and covered in what looks like mint jelly. The camera makes its way to him. Mayne is struggling weakly, and after a moment it’s clear he is trying to turn himself around in the shaft.
“You don’t look so good, Mr. Charlie Mayne.” Harlan’s voice is full of a trembling excitement. “You ready to see the pictures? You ready to go into the mouth? It goes far and maybe all the way to forever. Alem!” Harlan tracks to the left and finds another figure, which is also turning itself feet first to crawl into the tunnel. “There’s . . . ” Harlan pauses, scanning across the chamber, revealing several faces peeping out of holes along the wall. “There’s a lot of people here. There’s Longhair from the movie! Can I have your autograph?” A fit of wild giggles ends in wet coughing.
On the screen, a bald man and a man with long ropes of green-gleaming hair can be seen craning their necks, sniffing at the air, then withdrawing into privacy. Dozens of other figures, several women among them, do the same. Many extend their bodies out of the holes to the waist, exposing elongated torsos and arms, before retracting them.
“Cheung! Hey, Cheung!” Harlan yells. “I’m looking for Cheung, guys. Wait, there’s those famous long legs, Yao Ming! See his shoes over there?” Harlan’s arm reaches into the frame and points. “Never mind. He’s gone now. I want to see, too.”
The camera falls to the floor, and threaded with a shimmering green, Harlan is seen hoisting himself up into a vacant hole. He pauses to smear a substance over his face, looks down at the camera with a grin, and crawls forward. A great moist thrum fills the chamber, unlike the sound in the cellar above, heavier and with more motion. A ripple runs through the chamber wall, a powerful slow furrow, and the screen displays more than an hour of the mouth of Harlan’s tunnel, until the camera is picked up and the screen goes black.
There is a pinkish blur of light. A face stares down into the screen, then a hand appears and covers the lens. A room appears in murky daylight when the hand is removed a moment later, and the face is clearer. Its skin is a grayish orange, hairless. Its eyes extend the width of the face and around the temples. The nose and mouth are not visible.
The figure sets the camera down on a table, facing a large gray laptop computer and an empty chair. It is a dining room, with no curtains over the two windows in frame. The figure sits in the chair and connects a thin cable to the computer, then reaches toward the camera with the cord’s other end. The screen shifts an inch or so then steadies. The figure opens a thick leatherbound book and drapes one strangely long arm across the table, so that its hand can write.
Two minutes and fourteen seconds into this writing, the figure pauses and looks up, beyond the camera. It smiles, and its mouth appears when it does so, along what would have been considered its jawline a moment before. The room brightens rapidly, as though the entire house is filling with light. It is a white light, blooming and pushing rather than merely intensifying, and is followed by a deep tremble and groaning. Plaster sifts in curtains, dusting the seated figure with more white, and the camera fills with flickering digital snow. The long eyes squeeze closed, perhaps in the savoring of something, and the video is lost in light.
• • •
Lecomte
Oh, these eyes. All my Father’s eyes.
He is hungry for coming stars. Strings of them like pearls in His belly. Ever since He fell from the stars and we planted Him in the earth to grow. To find out what He would be in His bloom. I sit and I finish the book the children brought, and find pleasure in my film bringing interest into their lives. The lives of many others. But Father is so nearly ripe now, to His brim. It cannot be long for our emergence into open air.
I shall sign my name, here, and I shall send some final lovely images to satisfy all their curiosities. If Father is not full, He will wait for this larger meal. And all the old stars will come back for Him with all the old black strung between them.
Bring me my Father’s eyes, children.
Oh, but this movement and this light. This light that comes from Father’s mouth! Is He now?
—M. Lecomte