Eleven

Max told Mariel to take the day off. After she left muttering and making the sign of the cross, he had his house to himself again. Without Lady Susan's volumetric presence, however, his home felt empty.

"Time to buy a story," he mumbled.

One last thing to do before he could rest. He'd now been awake longer than his chronic insomnia had ever pushed him. His trembling body practically wept with hot flashes. He'd started to see double.

Max poured a fresh mug of coffee and sipped it at his home office desk. From a filing cabinet drawer, he dug out the Twilight Zone issue where he'd read Munsch's story, "If Wishes Were Horses." The title was the first part of the Scottish nursery rhyme If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. If wishes came true, even the poorest wretches would have everything they wanted.

"But they do come true," Max muttered. He was living proof.

Dialing the number for The Twilight Zone, he hoped his luck would hold. The receptionist put him through to the editor. The editor refused to divulge Frederick Munsch's contact information but would reach out to the author on his behalf.

Dropping the phone back on its cradle, Max reopened the magazine and checked the man's bio. No photo. He imagined a shifty-eyed bearded introvert smoking a pipe in a tweed jacket. Aside from discovering that Munsch's stories had been published in The Twilight Zone, Asimov's Science Fiction, and the New Yorker, he learned the man resided in the village of Big Bear Lake. A remote town in a forested wilderness about a hundred miles east of Los Angeles.

Max didn't have a phone book for San Bernardino County, so he dialed PacBell's directory assistance.

Munsch wasn't listed. He sighed and hung up again.

Nothing left now but to wait and hope the man reached out to him.

In the kitchen, he discovered a box of steel-cut oatmeal that Mariel had bought and set out for him like another nagging warning about his mortality. As an act of small mercy, she'd removed and disposed of all traces of the Milk-Bone and Chuck Wagon. He ignored the oatmeal to wolf down a Snickers from his secret stash under the sink. He chased it down with a glass of wholesome milk.

This done, he went upstairs to brush his teeth and enjoy a long hot shower. While giving himself a thorough scrub, he revisited the story he wanted to tell in his new movie, which he was already retitling.

Make a Wish Upon a Grave. Sticks and Stones. Soul Survivor.

Scratch all that. He'd call it If Wishes Could Kill.

In the remote town of Lonely Pines, a crying little girl trails her daddy while he prospects with a metal detector. A hobby of his, searching for little pieces of history left behind by the gold rush that built the town long ago.

"Everyone is mean," says the girl, whose name is Penny. "Everyone is so unfair to me." But he is not listening, his own way of being mean. He has found something. Digging, his muddy hand resurrects an old amulet.

Daddy smiles at the prize find.

She says, "Can I make a wish? It's for wishing." He answers, "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride." Penny does anyway. She makes a wish. She wishes for all the meanies to leave her alone.

Daddy drops the detector and starts marching back home.

The girl runs after him but fails to keep up. When she reaches the town, she sees everyone banging out of their front doors. They walk stiffly with eager smiles toward the lake, as if drawn by music they alone can hear.

Penny races to the shore in time to see her father disappear into the water. While her closest friends scream and pull at their family's arms and legs in a futile effort to stop them, she watches the entire town march into the lake.

Years later, the girl is all grown up and living in a city. She has a dead-end job and a relationship with a man who does not love her. When the man breaks her heart, Penny says, "I wish you'd leave me alone forever." And he does, straight into traffic. But it does not stop there. Soon, an epidemic of suicides plagues her neighborhood.

Her old wish appears to have caught up to her.

Then one of her old friends reaches out. A fellow survivor of the day Penny's town died. He is getting the old gang back together for a trip to the lake. They all saw their families and neighbors drown, and they all went through the foster care system. Now they are adults who want closure. Penny is reluctant at first. Plagued by strange memories, she feels somehow responsible for what happened. But the suicides go on, dozens, and she knows she must take action.

So, at last she agrees, and the band of survivors returns to their lakeside town to find it in ruins, the earth itself poisoned. Picking through their old homes, they catch up on each other's lives, resolving and expanding ancient alliances, feuds, and romantic interests. As for Penny, she has a different, very important mission. She needs to recover the amulet and make a new wish.

Time, however, is running out.

One by one, her friends start dying. Again, it might be her fault.

Even if it read more literary than sensational, the short story was built on a solid premise. For screen adaptation, it offered a complete emotional arc and limited shooting locations. Aside from the drowning town scene, the story required a small, intimate cast—

Max gasped as the temperature plummeted. He'd been in the shower too long and drained the hot water supply. Rinsing his hair, he yanked the taps closed and dried himself off in the foggy bathroom. Feeling a bit more human, Max returned to his bedroom to dress in his silk pajamas and bathrobe that still retained the suggestion of Sally Priest's pleasantly female scent.

His bed now tempted him in a louder voice than the camera's. Any other day, he'd resist it; as a dedicated insomniac, he found sleep uncomfortably similar to dying, waking up a painful resurrection. If his insomnia had a voice, it would repeat an endless mantra, Just one more thing, but even it had hit the wall.

Max had hoped to wrap up a deal with Frederick Munsch before crashing, but fate had other plans. The world had faded to a confusing blur.

He needed the man's story. Of course, he could simply try to steal the idea in the tradition of all great artists, changing things around enough that it'd hold up in court. But that wasn't how Max did business. Even if his morals sometimes fluctuated around what was best for his movies, he'd always been ethical.

Sunlight streamed through the bedroom's open blinds in sheets of blinding liquid fire, more of Mariel's subversive handiwork. Max didn't have the energy to fight it. Collapsing onto the bed, he hugged a pillow over his head.

He thought, I have to figure out how to show an entire town drowning in a lake on the cheap.

Then he passed out.

Max awoke in the dark with a pounding headache. A glance at his alarm clock told him it was precisely 3:00 AM. The witching hour of folklore when demons, ghosts, and witches became most active. When the veil between the normal and the supernatural turned leaky and threadbare.

A warm glow flickered past the blinds. Still groggy, he slithered off the bed with a groan and peeked outside.

Under a bright, pregnant moon, the neighborhood stood silent and empty. Not a single window illuminated nor even a lone car prowling the road. The kind of silence that one couldn't help but notice. Silence that took on a tangible psychic volume that suddenly turned deafening.

In the distance, an orange light glowed with an eerie pulse, as if alive. It came from the nearby school. Someone had lit a bonfire in the playground.

The strangeness of it drew him out into the night to investigate. The warm air smelled like ash. The darkness blanketing the neighborhood thickened like a bad omen. It seemed to eat the light. Something ominous was out here, he could feel it.

Some vast ancient thing, watching him.

The same presence he'd felt when he first picked up Arthur Golden's camera.

Padding down the road on slippered feet, monogrammed bathrobe flapping around his pajamaed legs, Max understood he'd committed perhaps the worst sin in modern horror cinema: curiosity.

As he came closer, he spotted figures capering about the fire. Shrieks that may have been laughter or screams broke the silence. The darkness surrounding the streetlights and flames became ethereal with a thickening pall of smoke, like a fog. Crossing the lawn, he felt the intense heat on his face.

A man stood in front of the fire. He turned and flashed a bright smile under the fins of a lawn dart protruding from his eye.

"Maximillian! You came."

Raphael wore the same leather jacket, old gray tee, blue jeans, and boots he'd had on when he died. Max gaped at him before gazing in wide-eyed terror at the bodies writhing in the fire.

Stiff, charred shapes rose from the hellish flames.

"Am I dreaming?" He rubbed his eyes. "I'm dreaming, right?"

Shedding sparks, the smoking apparitions wandered off into the night.

"No. Yeah. Something like that. Think of it as astral travel."

"Astral…?"

"Your consciousness is here. Your body is not, though it'll probably end up following you if you didn't tie it down." The man shrugged.

"Then who are these people?"

Raphael chuckled. "Come on, man. Don't be insulting."

Max stared at the dart fins sprouting from his eye socket. "Does that hurt?"

"Yeah, but, you know…"

He waited. "I honestly don't know."

"It's better than nothing."

"Damn. I'm sorry, Raph."

"The dead see things different, man. We all got to go sometime, am I right? Anyway, I died doing what I loved. Remember when I told you I always wanted to make a practical effect of a dude with an arrow sticking out of his eye?" He tapped the fins and chuckled again. "Top this, Tom Savini."

"It deserved an Oscar," Max said. "You're missed."

"I doubt it. I never let people get close to me. Something you and me had in common. All that shit from 'Nam I carried around." He sighed. "To be honest, I had no idea how good I had it. It's funny how you only learn life's biggest lessons when it's too late to use them."

Another man shambled over. Or what remained of one. His legs labored to balance a torso wobbling on a broken spine, broken arms waving in zigzags.

"I'm gonna go see what my girls are up to," he said.

"Okay, Dave," said Raphael.

"Catch you later."

He turned to Max to stage-whisper, "Now, that deserves an Oscar."

"Is that the…?" Sickened, Max watched the broken man lurch away.

"That's him," Raphael said.

"So these people really are the camera's victims."

"You are correct," a prim voice cut in.

The corpse sashayed over to Max and gazed up into his face from a jarring sideways angle. It was Helga Frost, blond hair matted with drying blood, head lolling on a snapped neck around her right shoulder.

Even in this morbid state, she was beautiful.

"Raphael informed me that you are the camera's new master," she added in her clipped native German accent. "You should know what is happening here. We are trapped. Alive and not alive. Unable to feel anything except the numb shock of our final moment, we roam and observe the living."

Helga tilted her body and rolled her eyes so she could look up at the sky, a whole other disconcerting effect. "And when the full moon rises, we are reborn together to do it again." Blinking, she pivoted to quickly survey the scenery. "Hmm. This is far more pleasant than North Hollywood."

Max said, "Is there anything I can do for you?"

"Obviously." The sideways eyes bored into his. "You can destroy the camera."

Behind her, a rust-red shape bolted past in an alarming blur.

"Or don't," Raphael said with high cheer. "Do you want to bet it all there's something after this, Helga? Heaven or nirvana or whatever? Bet your very existence? We may not be alive, but at least we exist."

"I have been here fifteen years," she deadpanned.

"I imagine it gets dull after that long." The special makeup effects artist pointed at the squirming pile of ash at the center of the still-blazing bonfire. "Probably no fun at all for those poor slobs."

"You have no idea. We do not eat. We do not sleep." Her eyes burned like embers from the grisly pyre. "We watch. That is all we do. We watch you all the time. The living are our movies. And you are so very boring."

Raphael glanced at Max, the dart in his eye giving him the unnerving illusion of winking. "Like I said, it's better than nothing, right? Sometimes, you just flip the channels and watch whatever's on."

Max didn't trust the man's easy grin. In fact, he was a little afraid of his old friend. Raphael didn't seem like himself anymore. Dying had changed him more than physically transforming him into a ghost. It had drained his personality by sucking all the enjoyment of life out of him.

The rusty shape zipped past again.

"All these years, I begged Arthur to destroy the camera and set us free," Helga told Max. "He refused. So stupid. In love with a spirit. He tried to make it kill him so he could join us. It wouldn't. He took his own life to remove the choice."

Rust blurred past once more.

"Okay," Max said in alarm. "What is that?"

"Oh, that's Lady Susan," Raphael said. "You don't have to fear us, man, but steer clear of her for a while. She smells the camera on you. And she's pissed."

"She—wait. You can hurt me?"

The man splayed his large hands. "Oh, I could shred you. I could rip your arms off and slap you into hamburger with them, stick them up your—"

"I get the picture," Max said, taking a step backward.

"But why would I do that? That'd be crazy!" The man chuckled. "I like it that you're here. It'll be nice to see a friendly face every full moon. We can hang out."

"Yeah." Max swallowed hard. "Hanging out is wonderful."

"Destroy the machine," Helga hissed. "Free us from this hell."

Max said, "I won't use it anymore. I promise. In fact, I buried it."

Though even now, even here, he missed it, as if the little black hole inside him had turned instead into its own ring of fire.

"Yeah, sure, okay, or," Raphael went on, grinning, "you can dig it right back up and realize its purpose. Go all the way. You know you want to. All those gorgeous ladies in your movies. Kill 'em all, man. Starting with Ashlee Gibson."

Max goggled at him. "You want me to kill people?"

"Haunting houses is boss, but do you know what's super boss? Having more friendly faces around, people to hang with. Anyway, how else are you gonna make that perfect movie you were going on about?"

Max shook his head. "I can't do it. I mean, I let Arthur Golden make me use it once, but all I ended up doing was killing poor Susan. And you."

Helga and Raphael exchanged a glance.

"Arthur spoke to you?" she asked.

"Yes. He talked to me from the camera."

"You have a conflicted soul," she said. "Like Arthur. A man at war with himself. His heart and need pointed in opposite ways."

"What do you mean?"

Raphael snorted. "She's trying to say you were talking to yourself, brother."

"But—"

"The camera doesn't talk, man. It just is. Arthur's gone. And you're cuckoo."

"He's here. Something is, anyway." Max gestured toward the black sky. "I can feel it, all around us."

"That is not Arthur," Helga said.

"It's what he summoned," Raphael filled in. "We don't know its name. We just know it's there. It's old. We call it the Beast. We watch the living. It watches us. Honestly, we simply ignore it."

Max gazed up at the dark sky and shivered. "Okay."

"Hey. Norman Bates. Look at me. You didn't kill me, man. I'm right here. The only real murder would be destroying the camera like ol' Helga here wants. If you destroy the camera, you'll put an end to us all."

"Mercy killing," she said.

Max felt sick. "I can't use it again, Raph. I'm sorry."

"Hey." Raphael's face became a ghoulish, lifeless mask. "You owe me. I died so you could learn what the camera can do. Don't tell me that's the end of it. You already went this far. Why not go a little further and see what happens?"

Max screamed.

Pain crunched through his bones. His leg buckled, and he went down hard. Still screaming, he gaped at his Pomeranian with her jaws clamped around his ankle.

Snarling ropey strands of drool, Lady Susan wagged her head in a fury.

"This is not helpful, pup," Helga scolded. "We were discussing—"

"Wait," Max howled as the dog dragged him toward the squirming pile of charred flesh at the bonfire's center. "What are you doing? No, no, bad girl—!"

"Bring me Ashlee," Raphael said. "Or next time, it might be me hurting you."

Max went flying into the roasting flames.

And awoke to find himself caged behind bars.