Twenty-One

Max awoke to the crackling roar of flames.

Nowas his first thought.

Please. Not again.

His ankle itched where Lady Susan had clamped on it last time with her sharp teeth. He'd hoped the grisly resurrection he'd witnessed thirty nights ago had been a mere nightmare, but no, this was happening.

He sensed the dead stirring into dismal existence.

The red glare writhed around the motel window's blinds. The alarm clock's angry numbers declared the witching hour had begun. Groaning, Max pulled the blanket over his head and cowered.

He knew what awaited him at the bonfire.

For a while, he lay shivering. The room filled with the stench of burning aviation gasoline and barbecued flesh.

The shrieks of the damned reached him soon after.

Of course, he had to see.

Pushing the blanket off him, he shrugged his bathrobe over his silk pajamas and stepped into his slippers. For the first time, Max understood why dumb teenagers in horror pictures hear a bump in the night and declare, You stay here, I'm gonna go check it out. It was always better to try to identify what hunted you than wait for it to show up.

In his case, it was more than that. Max had achieved his own wish of living in a horror movie. Whatever instinctive revulsion the dead provoked in him, he couldn't hide from it. Besides, a horror movie had conventions and rules. The protagonist accepting the invitation to play ranked near the top of the list.

Early in the day, he'd arrived at Big Bear Lake to start shooting If Wishes Could Kill's prologue and childhood flashback scenes. Arthur Golden's occult apparatus had come with him, though a camera of the normal, non-cursed variety—a Panaflex Gold II—was being used to shoot these forest and lakeside scenes. Max had no wish to accidentally kill his townsfolk extras or the actors he'd hired for these parts. Not even the annoyingly precocious children he'd cast as the younger versions of the major characters, hired as sets of twins to ensure he could film as long as he needed without breaking child labor laws.

Accompanied by a small crew, he'd roamed the woods filming establishing shots of trees, water, and sky while recording the natural soundtrack on magnetic tape. Meanwhile, trailers loaded with equipment arrived for tomorrow's intense shooting.

He had four scenes to work through for the prologue—the young Penny with her father, townsfolk bursting from their houses to march to the lake, bodies disappearing into the water, a few washed up on the shore. Then another ten scenes of the kids interacting with each other and their parents for the flashbacks. He had to do every take just right because he was never coming back.

In five days, he'd return to Los Angeles to get the rest of act one in the can, and then soon after he'd start shooting in the desert at the Salton Sea, where the real fun would begin. Weeks of fourteen-hour days playing whack-a-mole, pampering egos, and explaining his vision over and over; just thinking about it drained him. Directing, he'd started to believe, might be a young man's game.

Padding across the carpet to the window, Max pulled the motel room's blinds. Bracing for a cheap jump scare, he peered out into the firelight. Down the gentle slope in the pines fronting Big Bear Lake's stony edge, the cast and crew of Arthur Golden's doomed film rose from the flames.

This was their ritual, the infernal clock that regulated the world of the dead. Every full moon, the camera's victims awoke in pain in the fiery afterbirth of Harry Stinson's crashed Bell 47 chopper. They roamed unseen among the living until the next lunar cycle, when the process started all over again. On these nights, the camera's owner visited them long enough to witness the suffering he'd caused.

Even without his calendar, Max should have known this was coming.

Yesterday, he had hosted a read-through with the principal cast at his house. He'd kicked things off by sharing his vision to make something new and authentic, dramatic and viscerally frightening. Reading from copies of Dorothy's script bound with brass fasteners, the actors tried hard to make it sound like the real thing while holding back from going all the way. After endless haggling and editing with the writer, the final script had come in at a hundred and five pages. That equaled around an hour and forty-five minutes of screen time. By the end of the day, they'd done three read-throughs, leaving everyone exhausted.

All the while, the Arriflex 35BL shrieked where he'd hidden it in the wall safe behind a Patrick Nagel print, demanding its release louder than ever. Building up to the worlds of the living and the dead overlapping again.

Quivering in his motel room, Max flinched as a demonic howl struck the night all the way up to the bright moon's frozen stare. It turned into a jackal's harsh laughter. Remembering to breathe, he gasped, his heart still pounding.

The infernal sound had come from Lady Susan, now the ferocious predator she'd imagined herself in life. Well played, scary camera. Jump scare achieved, cheap but effective. Max had always wanted to live in a horror movie, but man, he found the real thing even more stressful than directing.

For a few minutes, he spied on the silhouettes of the dead stumbling past the bonfire's amber glow. Smoke wafted into the dark pines.

Then something big began to trudge up toward the motel.

A grotesque and humpbacked creature. Large as a horse, it swayed on four thick legs that seemed to glide across the rough ground.

Coming for him.

His bowels liquefied at the sight of it.

The thing let out a soft lowing moan. Max realized the sound had come from somewhere deep in his own throat.

Despite all the talk among the dead about the Beast that possessed the camera, he'd begun to doubt it was an actual entity. In the end, he'd decided the camera was simply bewitched to operate following occult mechanics. An otherworldly algorithm. A machine with rules. It killed whoever you loved who fell under its malevolent gaze, and then it forced you to witness their death on repeat.

He'd been wrong.

A monster lived in the camera, and it had decided to make itself known.

Max yanked the blinds shut. Crouching below the sill, he crawled to the door and put his back against it.

"Holy mother," he breathed.

Hugging his ribs, he clenched his eyes closed and willed himself to wake up. It didn't work. Then he prayed the thing wouldn't find him. That it would sniff around until it lurched somewhere else in search of easier prey.

Wishful thinking. In a horror movie, the monster always found you. The game must be played. Otherwise, there was no story.

But nothing happened.

Max opened his eyes and released the breath he'd been holding.

He chuckled. "Sometimes, my imagination—"

Pounding shook the door on its hinges.

The Beast was here. Demanding entry.

He told himself he remained safe. Arthur Golden had owned the camera for many years, and the only thing that had succeeded in killing him was a night with a bottle of whiskey and a .38 Special.

But that didn't mean anything, not really. He'd entered uncharted paranormal territory. But one thing seemed certain: He had broken an inviolable rule.

It's coming for me because of what I did to Jordan, Max thought.

He'd intentionally killed his producer for his own gain. Now he would pay for it. Another horror rule. In horror, justice stood paramount. The prohibitions against social taboos must be reinforced. You make a mistake, and dark forces punish your transgression with brutal karma. Simple Grand Guignol mechanics. The camera wasn't supposed to serve him—he was supposed to serve the camera.

The door trembled at a fresh round of pounding.

He'd grown so obsessed with his project that he'd redefined good and evil as anything that helped or hindered him. He'd thought that as long as he sacrificed people only for his movie, there was a certain morality to it.

But there existed supreme moral laws innate in humanity, laws that might even come from a supreme being, and one that stood out among the most sacred was Thou shalt not kill. Even if he wasn't doing the actual killing.

I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry—

In the movies, contrition might be demonstrated, but it never worked. He wondered how the monster would kill him, for once cursing his fertile imagination. But kill him, it would. He was screwed. The mantle of protagonist would pass on to another, someone with the moral fiber to handle the challenge and resist the camera. And then the story would go on without him.

The pounding stopped.

The silence stretched. He held his breath.

"Max," a familiar voice called out. "Are you gonna let me in or what?"