Eighteen

Max returned home to the sound of his office phone's grating ring. When he picked up, Dorothy's voice barked at him from the other end.

"Did you hear from Lyman?"

It was one thing they had in common: a loathing for small talk.

"He loved it," Max said. "He was practically raving. He's fully on board."

A lie, but that was Hollywood. Everyone lied, all the time. In its pantheon of sins, lying barely registered and could even be regarded as a virtue.

"Groovy," said Dorothy.

"Hold tight," he said. "I'll be back in touch soon."

He hung up and got to work. The keys on his electric typewriter rattled out a new treatment. Under his fingers, If Wishes Could Kill became a commercial product.

Poor Penny.

Shy, smart, and extremely beautiful though she does not know it. Just your average teen about to tangle with supernatural forces she unwittingly unleashes by playing with things best left buried.

Penny is the responsible member of an unlikely group of friends representing a cross section of today's college stereotypes now home for summer break in a small town. On a dare, she spends the night with them in a haunted house.

The local crank warned them to avoid the place, but they laughed at the old wino and his stories about the town's bloody past. What could go wrong?

Entering the derelict mansion, Penny wonders if he might be right, but she does not care. The town is full of mundane cruelty—her divorcing parents who ignore her, the man she babysits for always flirting, the mean girls in town playing cruel pranks. This is her chance to rebel.

They split up to explore the house. A cat jumps out of a cupboard to provide the early false scare. Inside, Penny discovers the amulet and makes her wish that the meanies go away and leave her alone.

After Penny rejoins her friends, they all pass around vodka and play spin the bottle. The booze emboldens Penny to kiss Michael, her long-standing crush. Despite all the randy teen fun, she greets the morning's sunlight with relief.

The next day, they go to the local restaurant for lunch. There, Penny watches in horror as one of the local mean girls chokes on a cheeseburger after giving her the stink eye. Soon, people all over town start croaking in random and gruesome ways, starting with those who wronged her in some way.

When even her friends begin to die at the hands of an implacable entity, Penny realizes this is all her fault. It is her wish, and she must find a way to reverse it.

Max spiced the tale with unlikable youth stereotypes, a nude hot tub scene, a titillating sex scene. A dumbed-down emotional hurdle to give the Final Girl the bare bones of a character arc. The killer's victims arranged in grisly tableaux in the climax. Plenty more dumb decisions plus a final shocker at the end.

To top it off, he added a visible monster that embodied the wish itself: an unkillable naked man without a face, hair, or genitals, his body painted white. Every character who dies on-screen made an offhand wish earlier in the story—I wish I could quit eating these fattening burgers, I wish Mom and Dad would shut up, I wish the baby would stop crying. The creature efficiently delivers on each in morbidly creative ways like visual one-liners, sometimes with a little pantomime routine.

The familiar, presented with a twist.

By the time Max finished, he'd laid on the tropes so thick that the story had reached the edge of satire, or at least trying way too hard. He actually kind of liked it. It would certainly be entertaining. But it didn't terrify from the balls up, and it didn't add anything new.

It wasn't horror, not how he understood it.

Inspired, he put one more cherry on top. A suggestion to do the whole thing in 3D—if the producer gave him a larger budget to play with.

"Last chance, Jordan," Max muttered while the new treatment printed.

After faxing it over to his producer's office, he placed another call to Sally Priest, the final key to his plan. Her roommate told him she'd caught a ride to the community playhouse Dan Womack rented. They were doing their show tonight.

"Hold on a second," the woman said. "You're the Max Maurey?"

"Yes."

"Like, Jack the Knife?"

"Yes, that's my picture."

"That shit is epic! I'm Monica, and I'm an actor too. I'd love it if I could have just, like, five minutes to pick your brain—"

He hung up.

"It looks like I'm going to the theater," he said.

A pleasant evening out. First, he had to retrieve his property.

In the backyard, he found the shovel in the toolshed. He crossed back to the rosebushes where he'd buried the Arriflex 35BL.

The blade entered the black soil with a satisfying thud. After carefully removing a foot of dirt, he flung the shovel aside to finish the job with his bare hands. A creepy centipede scrambled out of the cascading dirt in panicked flight; Max ignored it. His scraping at last revealed the camera case wrapped in plastic.

He unraveled it like a Christmas present. Opened the case's lid—

Arthur Golden's camera cried out with joy. Max choked back tears. With loving care, he flicked a dirt crumb off its gleaming black enamel.

"I missed you too," he said.

Womack's playhouse stood sandwiched between a pawn shop and a New Age bookstore. Max bought a ticket and entered the theater's front of house, which offered around two hundred seats on the raked main floor.

There was something about entering a live theater that felt similar to going to the movies, and both were a little like going to church. The large space, cool air, soft seating, and dim mood lighting all contributed to the atmospheric charm. But mostly, it was the raw anticipation to see a show that made you believe you were someone and somewhere else for a couple of hours.

An experience shared with total strangers as a community. The modern version of cavemen gathering around the campfire to hear stories. Some in the industry worried VHS would transfer motion pictures into the home. The boob tube, however, could never match the movie theater in terms of overall experience. And if Max was being honest, neither could match the immediacy of live theater.

Lugging his camera in its plastic case, he found a seat in the back and waited while the rest filled up with friends, family, theater addicts, and neighborhood locals. He leafed through the program until he discovered Sally's smiling headshot. She was playing the role of Shana.

A stunningly regal woman occupied the seat next to his with a sigh.

"Well, this should be stimulating." She glanced down at the gray mass at his feet. "What have you got there?"

"A film camera." He caught a whiff of lavender on her perfume.

"I thought it might be. Are you in the industry?"

"I'm a director. I'd like to cast one of the play's actors in my next picture."

She wrinkled her nose. "You're Max Maurey. Emily told me about you."

"Maude Turner, I presume. Sally mentioned you as well. It's an honor. Shouldn't you be in the front row?"

"I'd only make her nervous," said Maude. "Em tries too hard because she thinks too hard about failing. Then she imagines I'm to blame."

Max let out a surprised chuckle. He was accustomed to mothers posing as living resumes for their actor kids, not critiquing them in front of movie directors.

"I know she's talented and needs the right director," he said.

"It's not a matter of who her director is. Go make your horror picture. Once she realizes she's wasting her time, I'll be here, ready to steer her onto the right path."

"Because it's horror," he said sourly.

"No real actor would choose it as a home," said Sally's mother. "No offense, Mr. Maurey, but it shows me she lacks confidence in herself. The fact is the longer she stays in that genre, the harder it will be for her to build a career outside it."

"Why would she want to?"

"Because it's horror," she said with grating patience.

Game on, thought Max.

"Can I ask why you think horror isn't worthwhile as a genre?"

"Where do I begin?" Maude laughed. "All your slasher films do is contribute to violence."

"You mean like James Bond?"

"What do you mean?"

"There were forty-two kills in the last James Bond picture. Worse, the Bond films make killing look clean and bloodless, something that can be done without remorse. In my pictures, you see the reality of it."

Maude stared at him. "So by showing beautiful women murdered while taking a shower, you're actually doing a public service."

"Your words." This rote criticism was child's play to him. "As for the shower, of course. Sleeping, napping, having sex—those are times we're most vulnerable. It amps up the fear factor, which you kind of need for a scary picture."

"Certainly, Mr. Maurey, you'd admit people become desensitized to violence through overexposure. In particular, violence toward women, as I doubt you see many naked men getting hacked up while showering. You make the victim responsible for their violence."

"Desensitized through overexposure," Max echoed. "You mean the way watching musicals leads to Americans breaking into song as a way to cope with their problems?"

Maude shrugged. "Fine. Have it your way. It's at least outside the realm of decent taste."

And that, Max guessed, was the crux of it, despite all the intellectual posturing.

Another grave nod. "Absolutely."

The room dimmed to darkness. The room quieted.

Max added, "If you'll permit me, Mrs. Turner, I'd like to give you a live demonstration of exactly how powerful my genre can be."

The audience offered polite applause as Dan Womack took the stage in a tight black turtleneck. He stood grinning and glowing in the bright lights. This was his big night, the terminus of a lot of love and hard work.

Max decided it was time to put in a little work himself.

Shifting into the aisle, he flipped the case's worn latches and opened it. With delicate care, he hefted Arthur Golden's camera and mounted it on a tripod.

"Welcome to the Womack Workshop's presentation of Jaimie Brewer's The Heart Stop Diaries," Dan's voice boomed.

Max brought the man in frame for a medium knee shot.

"A play about how when it comes to affairs of the heart, it's dangerous to want what we should never have."

Max adjusted the focus.

"And a story that teaches us that in pursuit of our heart's desire, sometimes, sadly, our only true adversary is ourselves."

Max pressed the start switch. The camera purred in response.

"I've been blessed with a wonderful workshop class full of talented students this season, and…"

Camera speeding. Film rolling.

"And… I, uh…"

The man froze, turning pale in the hot light. In the ensuing silence, the camera's whir filled the room.

The camera loves you, baby, Max thought.

Squinting into the glare, Womack's eyes suddenly widened.

"I'm…"

Max gave him a little wave from behind the viewfinder.

"I'm very sorry," Womack stammered. "But tonight's show is canceled—"

Ducking down, the actor wheeled and dove at the curtains, which billowed around him in crimson waves. Crying out, he thrashed as if drowning, all the while emitting a high-pitched scream that sounded part terror, part frustration.

At last, he found the seam and disappeared from the stage.

You're lucky I don't.

The audience broke into confused babble. The house lights brightened. Max packed the Arriflex 35BL back into its case.

Then he grinned at Maude, feeling more powerful than Jack ever did.

"Horror deserves respect," said Max. "In a way, it's the perfect crime."

Words to live by. A fitting epithet for his gravestone. A short and sweet manifesto with which he'd soon educate Jordan. After him, all of America.

This parting message delivered, he went outside and leaned against his roadster to wait for Sally to emerge from the stage doors.

Max needed her to teach him the secret of acting.