Shelby Alexander was trying to remember the last time he’d felt this uncomfortable. He and Mack were sitting by the fireplace, drinking whiskey. They were not talking. In fact, the closest thing to communication managed was occasionally lifting the glass to look at the crackling fire through the amber liquid in them.
They were silent because Kay and Carly were sitting at the kitchen table with their own whiskey, and they were doing plenty of talking.
“So, Colton Matthews remembered you?” Kay was asking.
“Yeah,” Carly said. “It was wild. Although when I think back about it now, I’m guessing he’d probably rather have forgotten.”
Shelby had been cleared of any wrong doing in Colton Matthews death. When Mack had called 9-1-1 the police arrived before the EMTs, but only by a moment.
In those few moments they quickly pieced together that Matthews had kidnapped Carly and texted Shelby to boast about it. Shelby had arrived in time to stop Matthews from using the knife that had been sitting next to his nearly headless body.
Shelby had looked at his phone after everything had calmed down and he finally saw the text. It made him wish he could kill Matthews again.
“It’s probably not the first time you had to wash someone else’s blood out of your hair, hanging out with that delinquent.”
Mack winced as they heard that and Shelby could only shake his head.
“Don’t even get me started,” Carly said, chuckling.
“Too late!” Kay said, bursting into laugher herself.
Mack leaned toward Shelby.
“A man lost his life, for God’s sake. Listen to them.”
For almost a full minute the women’s laughter continued, and then Katherine said, “Oh, Carly, I wish you were staying longer. It’s been two weeks since all this happened. When’s your next line coming out?”
“Two weeks,” Mack repeated in a whisper. “Every night those two.”
Shelby finally spoke. “At least they’re talking about Carly …” he paused when the women grew quiet for a minute. When they resumed he matched Mack’s volume “… about Carly leaving”
“The funny thing is,” Carly answered, clearly feeling the drink, “the longer I’ve stayed in this stupid, too small town that was the place I dreamed about running away from for most of my life … it’s feeling a lot more like home than anything else. And I’m at the stage of my career where I don’t need to be jammed in the middle of all the bustle to get things done. I can work from anywhere.”
“Going for a walk,” Shelby said loudly, as he set down the whiskey and walked to the peg holding his coat. Mack jumped up and followed.
“Be careful you two!” Kay scolded.
Shelby, who had found the past two weeks unsettling in just about every way imaginable, but the thought of these two women being in the same town on a permanent basis was the most alarming thing yet, and he needed some cold Michigan air in his lungs.
“We will be very careful,” Mack said, closing the door behind him as he finished pulling his coat the rest of the way on as he stepped off Shelby’s porch.
“Shel, what the hell are you going to do if Carly stays.”
Shelby didn’t answer. The wind had picked up, and it brought him back to that night. Carly was much better and passing off the things she’d seen on her own imagination and the lump on the back of her head. Shelby had seen, heard, and felt far too much to throw a blanket over it and ignore the lump underneath.
There were the misty figures, the ineffectiveness of the bullets on the woman. The wooden thing in the wall—which the detectives eventually determined was some sort of box. The remains of some very old mementos were found mixed in among the other debris, including a tuft of a baby’s hair.
There had been the occurrences at the second unit site, all unexplainable other than as the work of the demon spirit of Parré. Well, all except the park rangers who turned out to the two of the Ellis clan trying to shake down the studio.
But by far the part that had messed with him the most had been the house itself. No one would ever be able to tell him that house wasn’t alive. Nor could they convince him he hadn’t witness it’s death.
He had been connected to the place. It was not a pleasant linkage, even when he’d gone there in school.
“And then the first ever gerbil president of the United States blasted into space on a rocket made of baby gherkins.”
Shelby turned to look at him.
“What?”
“Oh, you’ve remembered I’m here. That’ s great. I’ve been talking to you for five minutes while you’ve been staring at that snow covered bush. For the last time, Shel, you don’t have heat vision. If you did every skirt within thousand miles would have been incinerated by now.”
Shelby stared at his friend blankly.
“What the hell?”
“Wow. You were miles away.”
Shelby turned at looked back at the cabin. He could see the women through the window, alternately laughing it up and leaning in together conspiratorially, as if their conversation was too secret to speak at normal volume, even in an otherwise empty house.
“Maybe not far enough.”
Mack looked in the same direction as his friend and got the implication of the statement.
“It really should be that tough, Shel. Carly made her decision to move on. Whether she’s living in Serenity or not, she’s still moved on. You gave a pretty convincing argument for the wisdom of her doing that if you recall.”
Shelby returned his gaze to the bush, still intact thanks to Shelby’s aforementioned lack of superpowers.
“Funny you should say that.”
“What does that mean.”
“Since the House, I’m finding there are spots in my memory that have gone all blank. Probably just a temporary thing.”
“I have to believe you’re aware of how much you’ve been creeping me out about that place. I’m so glad that Gagne had been able to use a body double for the last to scenes with Parré and had been able to wrap up the location shoot. He was not alone in being ready to leave the actual Murder House behind him.”
“Ended the job a little prematurely.”
“Yeah. That will happen when the head of security removes the head of the star.”
“Collateral damage?” Shelby offered weakly. He heard the lie in his own voice. He’d fired at the—whatever the old woman had been. He couldn’t forget her mention of Salem. Is that was this was? Witchcraft?
Shelby thought it felt bigger that witchcraft.
“Anyway, yeah. Memory lapses, and I feel … changed.”
Mack seemed to hesitate for a second, then he shook his head.
“No, Shel. Enough. It was just a house. It was just a job. Did weird shit happen? Yeah. Was it different from the weird shit you generally drag me into? Oh, hell yeah. But in the end it was just shit, Shel. And that you wipe off your feet before going inside, you get me?”
He’d had enough of this job on day one, but he was not the sort of guy to run out on a friend, and Shelby had seemed … okay. At least at first. But shit had gone south on the express train. And now he just wanted to drink and remind Shelby that he was with Katherine Graham now, and damn lucky he was that this was still the case. She’d been opposed to Shelby going back to any kind of work, which he’d done anyway, and certainly anything dangerous, which this had definitely turned out to be.
But then he heard Carly’s laugh and looked in the window to see her arching her back to allow her to really belt it out. He saw the way her sweater accented her flawless form. And he knew his friend was going to have some soul searching to do.
On the ledger, it seemed to Mack, Katherine’s page had a few more entries in the positive column. She was just as beautiful. Mack had always appreciated a woman with less angles and more curves, and though Carly had her share of sexy switchbacks, he still had to give the nod to Kay. Carly was smart. Kay was brilliant.
But as he saw the two women lean forward again, he saw the way the scented candle that Kay had lit on the table between them flickered across Carly’s face as she rested her chin on her hand.
“Soul searching,” he said aloud.
“Jesus, Mack. What the hell? Are you going all beat poet on me or something? You keep talking in disjointed gibberish.”
Mack tried to snap his fingers like the crowd at a poetry reading, but it was too cold, and his fingers complained.
“Listen, if we’re going for a walk we should start it, because standing on your porch isn’t getting the blood pumping enough to keep me from freezing up.”
Shelby, leaning on a snowy rail, stared at the bush.
“I feel like you’ve got things under control with that bush, so if we’re not walking, I’m going home. I can feel crystals forming on my nuts.”
Shelby stood straight.
“Go ahead Mack. I’m gonna be good for shit.” He started an elaborate pantomime consisting of pointing toward the laughing women, then toward his head, then his whole body (Whatever the hell that means, Mack thought), and finally in the general direction of town.
Mack looked at his oldest friend on the planet and shook his head again.
“Alright, man. Call me in the morning. Maybe we can go hunting.”
“You mean go sit in a tree with guns and drink beer?” Shelby asked, a hint of smile crossing his face.
“Potayto, potahto.”
“Just don’t call me when you get home. We’re out here so Kay can’t tell you that you have to.”
“It’s moved to ‘standing order’ status, man. If you walk back in alone and I don’t call when I get home, you’re not the only one who’s going to be on Katherine Graham’s shit list.”
“Who says I’m on her shit list.”
“You’re alive, and you’re Shelby Alexander. You’re on everybody’s shit list.”
Mack gave Shelby a parting swat on the bicep and jogged to his four-wheel drive.
Shelby watched him pull down to the road and turn toward his place, then looked beyond his driveway and saw the slight glow from the town making a bright spot on the full-sky steely winter clouds above the tree line.
Shelby liked living far enough outside of Serenity for the privacy it afforded, but he also knew that if he sat on the roof of the cabin he was high enough to see Parré Hill and even at this late hour, he could make out the silhouette of the Murder House.
Suddenly that felt particularly important to him. He walked off of the porch, around to the back of the cabin, where he saw the ladder leaning against it, with another on the roof leading up to the chimney. He’d swept it out a week before starting the working on the movie but hadn’t gotten around to pulling down the ladders.
Without really thinking it through, because he’d have to factor in snow and alcohol and tiredness—and would have had to veto the notion—he began climbing the snowy rungs. When he reached the top he grabbed the second one, hooked over the peak of the cabin. He started up that one, his foot slipping twice, before he made it to the top of the cabin.
He sat, holding to the ladder as an anchor, and looked toward Serenity.
Most of the town was still hidden behind the miles-wide barrier of trees that he so loved. But just above the tallest of them he could see the house. It was even more dramatically outlined than usual, as a bright nearly full moon was positioned almost perfectly behind it.
“Fuck you,” Shelby said to it. “I’m glad you’re dead.” He wasn’t talking to Colton Matthews, or Michael Parré, or anyone. He was talking to the house.
“I don’t know how you got into me. I don’t know why you picked me. But I know I killed you, and I’m fucking glad.”
Just then Shelby remembered that he’d tucked his hunting flask in his pocket earlier that night and he pulled it out, taking another look at the house as he took a drink.
“I killed you,” he said again as he slid the flask back into his Eddie Bauer vest. He turned and carefully descended. He’d head inside and fake a headache and just go to bed. He had a lot to figure out. It occurred to him then what Mack had meant when he’d said, “soul searching.”
Even as he circled back to the front on the warm cabin, on that distant hill, the house sat, still, and cold.
But at the moment Shelby Alexander closed his front door, a light appeared behind him.
A light in the highest window of the murder house.
FINIS