Candle in the Attic Window
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
I had an uncle: very rich.
He died without a child, which Is how I got the whole estate.
I’ll tell the truth.
It’s pretty great.
Oh, sure, the wind just howls at night And branches sway and block the light And sometimes, just before a storm, When air is cool and earth is warm,
A mist will rise upon the moor And drift and slither to my door And then I think I hear a knock – Some nights, I lose my breath in shock –
I see a glow upon the terrace – But then remember: I’m an heiress!
No stupid noise is too much hassle To occupy this gorgeous castle.
And yes, okay, the nights are long And, I’ll admit, the wind is strong, And sometimes, from a distant hill There comes a howl that sends a chill
From skin to bone to nerve to spine.
(Don’t worry, though! I’m doing fine.
It’s only drafty, just a bit, And hard to keep a candle lit.)
I’ll kill the mice within the wall And stop that clanking down the hall And figure out who’s screaming when The windows shiver in the den –
A little plumbing and, with luck, The seeping pipes will come unstuck.
I’ll fix the electricity.
I’ll make this manse a home; you’ll see.
And then my friends will finally visit!
This place isn’t creepy, is it?
Except the mist upon the moor ...
A knock!
Hold on.
I’ll get the door.
???
Amanda C. Davis likes her houses haunted and her moors thick with mist. Her horror stories have appeared in Shock Totem, Triangulation: End of the Rainbow, and Necrotic Tissue, among others. Find out more about her, or read more of her work, at http://www.amandacdavis.com.
The Seventh Picture
By Orrin Grey
An exterior shot of the mansion through the windshield of a van, pulling up the curving drive. The camera turns until it’s looking through the passenger-side window, keeping the fa?ade of the building in view. It looms up, big and dark in front of a lowering grey sky. The kind of fake-Spanish, fake-Gothic mansion that you only find in Hollywood.
The van stops; the camera shakes and jostles as everyone gets out. In a finished film, there would be a cut here, but instead, there’s just a tangle of voices and thumps, blurred shots of elbows and knees and the back of a girl’s head.
A girl’s voice, maybe belonging to that same head, says, “So, we’re here?”
The camera stabilizes, the front door of the house in focus now. “This is it,” the cameraman’s voice says, startlingly close in your ear. “This is where it all happened.”
Zach Gordon, Director
It was an unexpected coup, getting to use the house. They say no one’s been there in years, but if you’ve ever seen one of Zenda’s films, it’ll probably look familiar to you. Most of them were shot there. The front stairs are the ones that the Red Death comes down in The Crimson Masque. There’s a hallway that shows up three times in The Phantom Hand, standing in for three different hallways. And, of course, the exterior and the entryway show up as the house in The Enterprise of Death.
They tell me that all those rooms are still intact. Still just the way Zenda left them. The only rooms that the fire got were the ones in the back.
The crew goes into the mansion, followed by the camera. The film here is dull from shadows and the interior is black as a tomb, only bits of ambient light coming in through holes in windows and broken skylights. It’s next to impossible to see anything, just dim figures jostling in front of the camera, until Caleb York starts setting up portable lights, filling the entryway with a glow that momentarily blinds, then chases back the darkness.
The rest of the crew appear in the light. Danielle Monroe is probably the girl who spoke earlier, the one whose head was briefly in-frame. She stands now, staring up at the domed ceiling of the entryway made semi-famous by countless mid-afternoon cable showings of The Enterprise of Death. Off to the side stands Alexia Cole, her once-black hair now shot with grey streaks, though the colour doesn’t come through on the camera. Her hair just looks dingy in the semi-darkness. Finally, Thom Dorn, big and jockish, stands and examines the huge round table that dominates the centre of the entryway.
“It’s a prop,” Danielle says. “It’s the table where they have the séance in The Dancing Skull.”
“It’s not a prop,” the cameraman’s voice says again. He must be Zach Gordon, the Director. He walks the camera over to get a better shot of the table and his fist appears to rap on it, to demonstrate its solidity. “They moved it out for Enterprise of Death, but the table sat here all the time. When Zenda had parties here, this is the table they sat around. It was the one in The Dancing Skull, too. Like everything else in this house. Zenda used what he had.”
Danielle Monroe, The Dark of the Matinee Blog
Arnold Zenda produced and directed only six movies during his lifetime, five of them with Victor Prince. Prince was born ‘Norman Thompson’, but he legally changed his name, probably at Zenda’s urging, in an attempt to brand himself as a sort of poor-man’s Vincent Price.