Candle in the Attic Window(4)
“I don’t know. She just said she was leaving, that she hated this place, had always hated this place, never should have come back. Something about a dream she had when she was a little kid, something about a white hand.”
“Sounds like she had a bad dream now,” Zach says. He’s walking down the hallway as he talks, away from the stairs, taking the camera with him.
“Bad dreams don’t make you call a cab in the middle of the night,” Danielle replies.
“Maybe it was really bad,” Thom offers, his voice, like Danielle’s, coming from somewhere outside the camera’s field of vision now.
Their lights splash off the dusty walls, off the wainscoting and the hall tables crowned with statues that throw off misshapen shadows. At the far end, where the hall turns a sharp corner, there’s a black space, a door. “Was that there before?” Caleb’s voice asks.
“No,” Danielle says softly, her voice barely audible.
“It’s a secret door,” Thom says. “Maybe that’s what Alexia found.”
The camera draws nearer to it and as it does, the door becomes more obvious, a piece of the wall, well-disguised, that opens outward, now partially ajar where before it was hidden. There’s a brief, hushed debate and then Thom’s hand appears on the edge of the door, swings it open. As he does, a weight shifts inside and everyone stumbles back, the camera bobbing madly, as a body tumbles out onto the floor.
Zach Gordon, Director
Nothing was ever recovered from the fire, from the house. No one ever found any film, so it was assumed that it was destroyed in the fire. No one ever found any bodies, but since Zenda and Prince and that actress, Wray, never showed up again, they were assumed to have been killed. Everything about the fire, about the movie, is assumed, guessed, reconstructed from a lack of contrary evidence. Everything.
How can you hear about that and not want to solve it, want to look into it, want to try to shed some light, whatever light you can, on what must have happened there that night? What secrets must be buried in that old house?
The corpse is a horror, although the camera doesn’t linger on it. What you get are glimpses, impressions. Something disfigured, waxy, melted. Hideous scars long ago ossified, preserved in the space behind the wall. It’s dressed in a suit that’s decades out of date and holds a fire axe clutched like a baby to its chest.
There are exclamations from the crew, curses. “What are we going to do?” “Who is it?” “Is it Zenda?” “What happened?” “Should we call the police?” The voices are loud, sharp, hard to pin down, but none of them belongs to Zach.
Zach is still holding the camera and it has very little time for the corpse. It swings up, peering into the small, dark, hidden space behind the wall. It’s tiny, barely the size of a closet, and there’s a bench in there where the corpse was perched. On the bench is a canister of film and the camera approaches it for a closeup on the handwritten label, which reads, in small, tight script: THE KING IN YELLOW.
Cut to: the camera is being held by shaky hands, maybe still Zach’s, maybe not, while someone – it’s impossible to tell who – feeds a reel of film into a projector. The camera shifts and, for a moment, the screening room in Zenda’s mansion comes into focus. Like most of the rest of the house, it’s festooned in dust and cobwebs. There shouldn’t be any electricity, but it looks like the house lights are on and dim, and when the camera swings back, the projector is whirring to life.
Cut to: the camera lies on its side in the aisle of the screening room, abandoned. The whir of the old projector can be heard from somewhere and a flickering, silvery radiance lights up the shot from the right-hand side of the frame. The only things visible from this angle are the legs of the screening room chairs and, beyond them, the feet of some of the documentary crew.
The film they’re screening has no music and the dialogue is so muted as to be mostly inaudible, just a distant murmur, like an incantation in another language.
Gradually, the light shifts from silver to pale gold. Then other sounds join the whir of the projector and the muttering from the screen. First, small noises, breaths and gasps from the audience. A sound like someone crying, quietly. Then bursts of dangerous laughter. Then the first scream.
There’s a commotion, a sound like a lot of people moving at once, and something strikes the camera, sends it spinning. When it comes to rest, it’s pointed straight into the bloodied face and staring eyes of Alexia Cole.
The camera comes back on. A mass exodus is occurring toward the front door of the house. Everything is a jumble; the camera shakes and jostles in someone’s hand, revealing the phantom shapes of running people and dark shadows all around. It’s impossible to tell who is where, if the crew is all there, if anyone else is.
“Shut the camera off,” someone is saying. “Shut the goddamn camera off!”
There’s a scuffle and the camera dips sickeningly for a moment as though the arm that holds it has suddenly gone limp. Then, abruptly, silence. All movement stops. The camera swings slowly back up.
Ahead is the front door, with light behind it, though it’s still night outside. In the doorway is a figure. At first, it’s impossible to make out; it could be anyone. Some member of the crew separated from the throng. Anyone.
Then, though the light doesn’t seem to change and the figure doesn’t move, it somehow becomes clearer. As though the camera’s eye is adjusting to the light.