Shelby stood at the top of a rickety set of stairs that may well have been up to the task of bringing Colton Matthews to a lower level, but Shelby took one look at them and feared for his immediate safety. But far more distressing than that was the fact that from the moment he’d once again entered the house he felt as though it were trying to push him back outside. And standing at the top of the stairs to the old mansion’s basement that feeling was more intense than anything he’d felt since taking this job. Maybe since forever. He’d wrestled with a lot of intense feelings in recent months, and this was eclipsing them all. It was as if all of the air between him and whatever Colton was doing had become solidified. He simply could not move through the open door.
“I don’t think I can go down there,”
Mack would never say these words aloud, but he loved Shelby Alexander, and he immediately knew his friend was not talking about a questionable flight of stairs. He grabbed Shelby’s sleeve and turned him so that they were facing one another.
“Alright, fuck, man! Fuck! I’ve known you a long time, and I’ve seen you work your way through a lot of shit, and I’ve seen you figure it out. Every time. Every goddamn time, Shel. Now I get that this place gives you the creeps or the heebie-jeebies or whatever the fuck, but you need to listen to me: I am not afraid of this house. I am however horrified by the way you’re acting. You don’t seem the same kind of wrecked that you were that day in the cabin,” Mack said, referring to the not completely diagnosed “spell” that Shelby had suffered before his eyes, “but you are bordering on useless right now you’re so affected by this place. It’s a house, Shelby. It was built by men, just like me and you.”
Shelby managed a chuckling scoff.
“Alright, like you. Just because I never really learned which end of the hammer you hold. But you know what I mean. It’s wood and plaster and lead pipes that are probably poisoning the water. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with you.”
“I haven’t had any water here, and that takes months, moron. I haven’t eaten any paint chips either, before you even ask.”
Mack sensed Shelby was regaining his composure, as evidenced by the insult. He offered a slight smile in response.
“Alright then. Now Tom and Gagne are down there waiting for us.”
Even as he spoke, Mack looked down the stairs and saw Andre Gagne looking expectantly up to them.
“Are you seriously going to allow either of them to think even for an instant that they are braver than the great Shelby Alexander?” When his friend hesitated, Mack added, “Do you want Mr. Screechy to call you a pussy?”
Shelby now looked down the stairs as well. But where before his eyes only saw the space filled with a dark, ominous, ethereal mist, he now saw the little Frenchman looking at him. Gagne shrugged his shoulders.
“Not even for an instant,” Shelby said.
The first stair groaned, complaining under his weight, but Shelby continued, find the stairs were just a tiny bit sturdier than they looked. Mack, tread down them lightly behind Shelby. His friend had a good forty pounds on him, and the stairs held him. When several of them creaked, it occurred to him that the big monkey may have weakened them, but he soon stood at their base as the last member of the quartet.
“Where?” Shelby asked, again struggling a bit. Mack heard the strain in his voice.
Man, this place is screwing with his head, he thought.
Tom Cook pointed to the far end of a cobweb laden hallway which terminated in what looked to be a very heavy wooden door, reinforced with studded iron strapping. A single, uncovered incandescent light bulb hung from a very out of code length of wire. It was swinging, as if an unseen hand had pushed it.
“What’s in there?” Shelby asked.
“Ah! So much of zee shame!” Gagne exclaimed, holding his downcast forehead in his hand.
“Huh?” Shelby asked, not feeling quite well enough for anything more eloquent.
“I have walked every one of the inches of this house,” he said, “including zees perfectly despicable hallway, in which we have just yesterday already filmed several minutes of zee stock footage.” He pointed to an iPad he was carrying. “But until today, zees very day, never have I seen that door.”
For a moment Shelby just stared at him. Mack thought that his friend was once again mentally paralyzed, as he’d been at the door to the basement. He thought he should say something to deflect the attention from the big guy, but just as he was about to make a bad joke about how stupid people in horror films were, Shelby spoke.
“You pointed to your tablet when you were talking about the footage you got down here. Why?”
Tom reached, holding his hand toward his boss.
“All of the raw footage can be accessed on there,” he said as Gagne, still hanging his head in shame with a degree of drama that was, frankly, poorly directed, handed him the device.
Tom quickly tapped the screen a few times then handed it to Shelby.
“Just tap the big arrow.”
“I know how to play a video, Tom. Fuck!”
Mack leaned toward the assistant director and stage whispered, “He only talks to you like that when he likes you. You’re in, kid.”
Tom smiled weakly but turned his attention to the iPad and which Shelby had just begun the fifteen second clip.
It began at the top of the stairs. The camera was handheld, intentionally shaky as in some noted “found footage” horror pictures. Shelby watched as the camera proceeded down the stairs then let out a confused hum.
“Hmmm. Can I make it full screen?”
“I assumed you’d know how, Shelby. Fuck!” Tom said. His voice was still almost pathologically high, but he was grinning as he spoke.
“I like you, kid,” Shelby said, “but don’t push your luck.”
Tom touched the upper corner of the video and it expanded to fill the tablet. Shelby played it again.
Again, he said, “Hmmm.”
“What, Shel?” Mack asked.
“Look as the camera turns and shoots down the hallway.”
Mack watched as the view turned and the hallway was indeed seen, the familiar light at the end, swinging in the clip much as it was now. But its swaying rays did not illuminate an imposing door beneath it. Where their eyes saw the heavy portal now, the film showed only a rough stone wall, exactly like the rest of the musty cellar.
“Andre, I think you can set your shame aside. Now, I don’t know shit about making movies, but I know that a lot gets done with computers now, so my gut should tell me that you altered that back wall after filming this. But you didn’t, did you?”
“No, Mr. Shelbeeeee. As Tom has said zees footage, it is all in zee raw. None of zee enhancements. None of zee manipulation.”
“Well, I think we can all agree, then,” Shelby said, handing the tablet back to the little director, “that the door ... that door…” he pointed down the hallway, “wasn’t here yesterday.”
Colton Matthews knew sweat. Any human who consumed as much alcohol as he knew all about sweat. The way his body would do everything it could to push the poison he insisted upon pouring in right back out. That’s why he often smelled like a distillery. Barfing, sweating, whatever it took. More often than he could count, for longer than he cared to recall.
But what he was doing now was something else again.
Although Gagne had ended shooting for the day three hours earlier, Colton was still dressed in his period costume, and it was currently as wet as if he’d worn it into a swimming pool.
Even in his discomfort, Colton felt a strange connection with the clothes. There were no mirrors in this room, but he knew without seeing himself that in the costume and with the mustache he’d cultivated, he was Michael Parré.
Except that he wasn’t.
There were many things that Colton Matthews was. A drunk. A cokehead. An actor of some talent, if not reliability. A philanderer, or so said three ex-wives. Perhaps the most selfish man who ever lived.
But he was not, well … whatever it is that Michael Parré was.
Colton had read Parré’s story many years before, a book by some woman whose name escaped him now, and he had thought it would make a compelling movie. As Colton’s career had progressed he’d begun to think about bigger challenges than standing in front of the lens, and he began to think about telling the murderer’s story. He dug deeper into the news articles from the period, and of the folklore that had grown up around the “Serenity Murder House.”
It would not be unfair to say that Colton Matthews became obsessed with Michael Parré. He bought the house, for God’s sake!
Not long after the sale of the house was final and Colton, alone with his cellphone’s flashlight showing him the way down the stairs, had found the hallway, with one lit bulb swinging at the end of it. It confused him, because he’d been told the utilities would not be connected until the next day. At the time he’d just assumed he remembered the date wrong.
In any case he’d seen the door at the end, and had felt himself almost pulled toward it.
As he’d been tonight. It was the first time he’d let himself answer the tug since the production had started in earnest. That first visit had been brief but it had changed him.
If he’d been asked to describe what had happened those first few minutes he’d spent in this place, he’d have failed spectacularly. Colton was skilled at interpreting the words of others, but he was no writer. He was not the one telling stories around the campfire.
So he could not have said that the moment he had pulled the door back, a door he’d expected to struggle with, but which in fact swung open almost of its own accord, that he had taken the first step of preparation.
Any actor hoping to work more than once knew that preparation for a role was essential, but this was not that. This was him, Colton—or more accurately Colton’s body—being prepared. Even a writer of great skill would have blanched a bit before writing the story of just exactly what he was being prepared for.
Colton, himself, had no idea.
At least not that first day.
But then he’d stuck his arm in a toilet. He’d seen his own cock in the mirror and had reached for it.
And then the door to his trailer had been ripped open with such force that it banged against the outside wall, leaving a dent and causing Colton to start. He was not excited about the thought of Gagne coming back once more to call him to the reading … and finding him like that.
But an instant later he realized that Gagne catching him with his meat in his hand would have been far better.
Instead he saw himself.
No.
Not himself. He knew who it was. He’d seen the faded photographs.
And yes, he could see himself in the face that snarled at him with absolute hatred. But this was not Colton Matthews in costume.
This was Michael Parré.
No.
Not Michael Parré. Colton had read everything he could find about the murderer. And although the exact details were never ascertained, all sources agreed that he was killed by a detective from the east. So there was no way Michael Parré could be looking at him the way a bear looks at a hunter who got too close to her cub.
But it also could be no other. Colton realized, to his further horror, as if the man being there at all were not enough, that he could see through the form, clearly making out Larissa Jewel’s trailer across from his. Matthews also noticed there seemed to be almost a copper-red shimmer around the edges of him.
He’d held his arm up to protect himself, but the thing had lunged at him.
Since that moment he had only sporadic memories. His time on the set was a blur, but it was the times between that really scared him. The seven, eight, nine-hour stints of blackness. No memories, but also no unaccounted-for cuts or bruises. No tales of missing children from the countryside.
But what had gone on? He had no clue.
Such was the case again. He remembered Andre calling cut and thanking everyone for a successful day, then he recalled sitting for a moment as everyone filed off the set. He was about to walk out to the trailer, but he passed the basement door.
The next thing he remembered was Tom and Andre banging on the door, calling to him, as he stood in this room, with its obvious implements of torture displayed everywhere. Bloodstains a century and a half old still stained almost every surface of the place. The men had been telling him to release whoever he was holding, whatever that meant.
There was a new pounding on the door, much more forceful than earlier when the directors were saying such odd things to him.
“What?” Colton called, his voice hoarse, as if he’d been screaming. None of the scenes they’d shot that day had required him to do so.
“Colton, it’s Shelby Alexander. Are you alright?”
Shit. Colton was still confused and mortified by his earlier encounter with Alexander.
“Yeah.”
“Andre said you told him you had someone in there with you and you were going to kill them. Kinda hoping that hasn’t happened.”
No wonder Andre had been asking him such odd questions before. What had given them that idea? Wait. Shelby said he’d told them himself.
Parré, Colton thought.
He still felt like he was expelling sweat in a full-body geyser fashion, but he stood up from the bench on which he’d been leaning and walked to the door. He pushed open slowly and peered out. Alexander was gazing back in, looking far less horrifying than Colton expected.
“Just us chickens in here,” he said sheepishly.
“Oh mon Dieu!” Andre gasped from behind Shelby. “Chickens, Colton? This eez too much! It eez an abomination …”
“It’s just an expression, Andre,” Shelby said over his shoulder. “Colton, come on out.”
Matthews opened the door just far enough to slide through, then pushed it shut from the outside.
“Jesus, you stink,” said Mack as the actor turned and faced the others.
“It’s … it’s been a long day. I just want to go to my trailer and take a shower and go to bed.” Colton pushed past them and shuffled down the hall. They watched for a minute then followed him.
Shelby went last, wanting everyone else safely out of the basement before he tested the stairs once more. As he waited for Tom, who’d walked directed ahead of him, he looked back down the hallway.
When they’d been standing by the door, Shelby had taken note that the light never stopped its slight swaying. He’d felt no breeze, and had someone pushed on it before they’d come downstairs it would have stopped swinging by now.
But as he looked back at the door, a door that he’d almost painted with the contents of his stomach so violent was his reaction to it and the room it hid, he saw the light stop swinging. Not gradually as one would expect, but suddenly as if the same unseen hand that had set it in motion now stilled it.
Then Shelby saw the door fade before his eyes until there were again only stones, held together by dirty mortar laid down more than two hundred years before.
And then he saw the light blink out.
The integrity of the stairs was not on his mind as he flew up them and slammed the basement door shut behind him.
He was beginning to sweat almost as badly as Colton had been.
“And so,” said Andre as he watched Colton exit the mansion through the elaborate front door, “he eez, how you say? The boy who cried zee murder-wolf. He eez … eez … what eez the word, Tom?”
“A pain in the ass? Insane? Eccentric?” Tom offered.
“Eccentric, oui! Eccentric. Prone to zee dramatic. An actor, after all. Perhaps next time he pulls zees stunt, Andre will know better.”
Shelby was struggling to put together these seeming inconceivable pieces of a puzzle he was really starting to hate. He was struggling to not pass out as well, so he didn’t have much energy to divert to thinking things through in detail.
But even in his diminished state, he knew that they could not consider any threat Colton made to be empty. This was beyond eccentricity. This was bordering upon madness.
Or, Shelby thought as the sweat on the back of his neck was suddenly touched by a breeze, perhaps the one that should have been swinging the light downstairs, and I could punch myself for thinking this … something even worse than just batshit crazy.