Scott Nicholson Library Vol 3 Page 37

  Minerva tugged her earlobe again to indicate “Sounds like.”

  “Choice,” Tim said.

  “Rejoice,” Crystal said.

  “Moist,” Bone said.

  Minerva shrugged in defeat and went to the desk, where Crystal’s computer was in “sleep” mode. She touched the keyboard to activate the screen, and then her gnarled fingers pecked at the keyboard.

  Tim strained to read the letters over her shoulder. “S-T-O-P ....”

  “We got that part, twerp,” Bone said, drifting over to the computer and reading the second word aloud. “Royce. ‘Stop Royce.’”

  “Royce,” Crystal said.

  Uh-oh. I forgot that Crystal had sipped the Dempsey Kool-Aid. If she gets Royce on the brain just when I need her most, it’s going to be a long Halloween.

  “Halloween,” Crystal barked, as if reading Bone’s mind.

  “I know you don’t like to consort with the dead,” Bone said to Minerva, “but do you have a spell to erase bad movies?”

  Bone wasn’t sure how much her secret contamination of Minerva’s medicine cabinet would become a problem. She’d been instructed to disrupt the witchwoman’s abilities, not enhance them. That whole “using your power for the forces of good” thing had barely crossed her mind.

  Minerva returned to the keyboard, clacking out a series of words. Tim read aloud, relieved to have a useful purpose during his stint as a talking head.

  “‘Royce ...not ...dead.’ We know that. He was never born, so technically he’s not a ghost.”

  Minerva nodded with enthusiasm, though her eyes scrunched as if she expected her audience to make the next leap of logic. Giving up, she turned her palms up and made juggling motions.

  Bone snapped her fingers. “Out of balance.”

  “Like they taught us in science,” Tim said. “Energy can’t be created or destroyed, it only changes form.”

  “I don’t remember that,” Bone said.

  “You probably skipped that day,” Crystal said, returning from her Royce reverie.

  “No,” Tim said. “She was reading ‘Teen’ because it had a hunky spread of the Jonas Brothers. Totally zoned out.”

  They all looked at Tim in astonishment. Bone wondered how closely he’d been watching her during the sixth grade, when he’d obviously had a mad crush on her.

  Tim blushed and wriggled as if trying to squirt free of the Orifice. “I was jealous. I wanted to crack those hunky heads together like coconuts.”

  “Okay,” Crystal said. “Let’s worry about the stalker crush later. For now, we need to figure out how to get the genie back in the bottle.”

  “I think you need to get the cork out first,” Bone said, nodding at Tim.

  “You’re cute when you’re funny,” Tim said, with as much sarcasm as he could muster for a ghost stuck in a trailer wall. Then his eyes went wide. “Hey, something brushed up against my foot!”

  Minerva tapped on the keys again, and this time Bone did the honors. “‘Gathering ...forces ...must ...hurrt’?”

  Minerva backspaced and corrected to “hurry.”

  “All right, people,” Crystal said, heading for the door. “You heard the woman.”

  “Right behind you,” Tim said.

  As Crystal and Minerva headed for the bathroom and the cabinets of polluted potions, Bone lingered a moment.

  “The Jonas Brothers?” she said. “They were so yesterday.”

  “Boy bands come and boy bands go, but ghosts last forever.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “Date me and you’ll never be sorry.”

  She sighed. “Tim . . .”

  His cancer-ridden features were so solemn and sweet, she didn’t have the heart to shoot him down. She went to the spot on the wall, kissed the fingertips of her right hand, and pressed them to his clammy cheek. His eyes lit up with a distant, decadent fire.

  “We’ll talk,” she said.

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  That’s what I’m afraid of.

  Before leaving the room, she couldn’t resist one final “Hang in there.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “Cut,” Dempsey yelled.

  The shoot was going poorly, and kids were already showing up in the kitchen, getting noisy. Pettigrew was just a little too wooden, and he had a tendency to interject a “Royce” in random places while delivering his lines. Outfitting him as Frankenstein’s Monster hadn’t helped the situation.

  Dempsey wondered if the brainwashing had been a bit too effective, and whether Pettigrew’s skull had been scrubbed so clean he couldn’t even hack it as a Hollywood actor, which required a mental capacity only slightly above that of the average sea slug or the average Tom Cruise.

  Cindy was adequate, even if she was trying a little too hard to be the next Paris Hilton. The slut-Goth regalia she wore made for good eye candy. The studded leather collar was a nice complement to the plastic bolts glued to Pettigrew’s neck. Her mesh tights, knee-high, black-leather boots, and diaphanous dark blouse could make her the subject of a million Google image searches, which would help market the movie.

  But first he had to finish the movie. The footage was a mess, but Dempsey believed he could save it in the edit. The important thing was to get enough filmed so he could have room to patch mistakes.

  “Ouija board,” Dempsey ordered.

  The conjuring board lay flat on Cindy’s bed, amid blankets rumpled just enough to suggest the two teens had been making out. Pettigrew and Cindy sat together, and Cindy put her ring-littered fingers over the planchette. The letters of the alphabet were listed in two rows across the middle of the board, with a “Yes” in the upper right corner and “No” in the upper left.

  “Ask it something,” Dempsey said, peering through the camera’s viewfinder.

  Pettigrew leaned until his pale-green face was inches from the board. “Anybody there?”

  “Cut,” Dempsey yelled, resting the camera on his hip. “Point to the letters with the planchette. Like in the script.”

  “Like this,” Cindy said. She guided both her and Pettigrew’s hands to the letter A.

  “Yeah, except do the R first,” Dempsey said, aiming the camera again and zooming into the letters of the board. “Okay, Snake, roll sound.”

  Snake was operating the boom, a long pole that had a microphone on the end, one of his many duties as one-man crew. The microphone was encased in a cylinder that resembled a swollen gray bratwurst. He dipped the pole so that the bratwurst dangled just out of the frame, headphones clamped around his greasy head.

  Dempsey filmed while the planchette slid toward the R, then the O. Apparently Cindy had remembered the script.

  And remembered the name of the game, which is Royce.

  “Snake, cue the fog,” he ordered.

  Snake, who’d been watching the scene as if it were a movie, apparently had forgotten he was the entire crew. Dempsey stomped his foot, which caused the camera to wiggle, and Snake leapt to action, triggering the dry ice machine and billowing a low fog around the doorway.

  According to the script, Royce would walk in the room as if magically summoned by the board.

  “It’s moving on its own,” Pettigrew said.

  “You can’t say that,” Cindy said. “It’s not in the script.”

  “Serious.”

  “Just point it to the Y,” Dempsey said, as Snake hissed out another roiling tuft of fake fog. “If I have to yell ‘Cut’ one more time, I’m going to do it with a machete.”

  The planchette skated over the letter Y and pointed to the “No” in the corner above it.

  “Did you do that?” Cindy asked Pettigrew.

  The planchette scooted back and settled once again with its tip nudging the “No.”

  “I’ll take that as a ‘no,’” Cindy said.

  “Come on,” Dempsey said. “Move it to the Y and let’s get on with it. We’ve got the big crowd scene coming up.”

  Pettigrew took his hands from the ro
lling pointer. When he pouted, the fake stitches in his face smeared a little. “I didn’t move it. Something was pushing my hand.”

  Cindy let go of the planchette as well. When she did, it scooted to the “No,” and as she squealed and scooted off the bed in fright, the planchette skittered over the cardboard like a bug, nudging out the letters R-O-Y-C-E.

  Dempsey had it all on film, from the Frankenstein Monster’s vacant dismay to Cindy Slut-Goth’s naked panic.

  Royce stepped into the room, his white T-shirt straining over his pecs, blue jeans tight enough to cut off the oxygen to his shins. “Somebody call?”

  Dempsey seethed inside. Royce was supposed to say, “I am the messenger of darkness,” just the way Dempsey had written it. But he was more concerned about the mysterious, misbehaving planchette. He sensed the agent’s hand on the course of events, an executive producer who wanted to be in the loop.

  As he lifted the camera to film Royce’s reaction, it jerked in his hands. Thinking Snake had inadvertently bumped him, he grumbled in disgust and framed the shot again. “Take two,” he yelled.

  But Royce continued his slow strut through the fog, heading for the side of bed where Cindy was cowering. “Hey, sweetheart, good to see you.”

  ”R-Royce,” she said, in a giddy tone.

  “Royce,” Pettigrew said, in a vacant tone.

  “Royce,” Dempsey said, in a scolding tone.

  “That’s me,” Royce said, clearly reveling in the attention.

  “Pettigrew,” someone said from the door. Dempsey sighed and rested the camera on his shoulder.

  It was the chick from the video store, the one who dug French. Her hair was unkempt and her eyes scrunched to angry slits. She was in witch’s costume, complete with crooked pointy hat, black skirt, and a huge purple wart on one cheek.

  What was her name? Kristy? Bristol? And has nobody ever heard the phrase “Quiet on the set”?

  He had to get The Halloweening in the can tonight. The agent might pull the plug and Dempsey would be left hustling 60-second spots on YouTube or building iPhone apps, waiting for lightning to strike a second time. Trouble was, he’d already bartered his only soul, and he didn’t expect a sequel was in the cards.

  “She’s not in this scene, is she?” Snake asked.

  “I am now,” the witch answered.

  “Crystal?” Pettigrew said, stirring from his Royce-induced daze.

  “You didn’t kiss her, did you?” Crystal said.

  “Who?”

  Crystal pointed at Cindy, who was hugging the grinning Royce. “Her.”

  “No, we were just in bed together—”

  “In bed together?”

  “It’s not like it sounds,” he said.

  “It never is,” Crystal said. “You’re a …you’re a—monster.”

  “Be cool, Crystal baby,” Royce said. “I won’t tell him I was in your trailer the other night.”

  Cindy gave Royce a shove on the shoulder, face pinched in jealousy. “You were with her? How could you?”

  “Easy breezy, chicky wicky.” Royce smiled as if life was an unreality show and he was the Simon Cowell of the bunch.

  Dempsey gave up any hope of getting the scene under control, so he starting filming the scene. If the movie deal fell through, maybe he could come back with a romantic comedy.

  Double love triangles with a twist—one of the guys is dead!

  As he zoomed out so that the two couples were captured in a wide view, he noticed the glistening mist on the wall, as if the fake fog were made of real water and had left dewy drops on the surface of the Sheetrock. The drops rapidly congealed into festering pustules of orange and dark red.

  “Whoa, cool effect,” Snake said. “Looks like pizza barf.”

  Dempsey stomped his foot. The agent had already jumped the shark on the script, and now it appeared he was taking over the set design, too.

  Dempsey knew where this was heading. His original vision would be tossed in the garbage can, the agent would pull a Hitler on the project, and, when it flopped, Dempsey would get all the blame.

  Talk about development hell ....

  “What’s that maggot mess?” Pettigrew said, pointing.

  “It’s the third Orifice,” Crystal said.

  “Do what?” Pettigrew said.

  “Like a subway to the stars,” Crystal said. “No time to explain.”

  “Gross,” Cindy said, puckering her lips in disgust.

  “Here comes my entourage,” Royce said. “Hangers-on, publicists, groupies, hairdressers, that kind of thing. They’ll be here any minute now.”

  Someone tapped Dempsey on the shoulder. He spun, nearly tripping over the tiny deck chair with “Director” stenciled on the back.

  Somebody had cranked up the stereo downstairs, booming a Lady Gaga beat. The fog grew thicker and reached waist high. The bed jerked and shook, tossing the Ouija board into the gray, murky mist.

  “It’s the Underlings,” Crystal said to someone behind Dempsey.

  Dempsey spun again, and the microphone cable wrapped around his shins.

  The fog solidified, becoming a shape and blocking his camera view. And there she stood.

  “Bonnie?” said Pettigrew and Cindy in unison.

  “In the flesh,” she said.

  “A ghost?” Cindy shrieked.

  “Dude, I am out of here,” Snake said, dropping the boom pole and lurching through the fog and out the door.

  “Get back here,” Dempsey said. “It’s a horror movie!”

  Cindy screamed again and followed him out, her chains jingling. Dempsey tried to chase after them, but his feet were tangled. As he fell, he had the presence of mind to toss the camera on the bed, where it bounced and kept filming. The teens were all yammering at once as he braced for impact, grateful that Cindy’s room was carpeted in shag.

  Still, the landing knocked the wind from him. His face was inches from the dark space beneath Cindy’s bed, and something was moving under there.

  Lots of somethings.

  Please let it be cats. Or rats.

  Or even nice, normal snakes.

  “Nearly midnight,” Crystal said.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Cindy Summerhill’s room was an odd place for the apocalypse to begin, but Crystal supposed enough sin had deposited itself there over the years.

  The queen-sized bed was upscale maple, with a plush duvet and café cinnamon bedspread that looked too smooth to have been rumpled by a serious make-out session. The curtains, drawn tight against the darkness beyond, were a cozy cottage white, and Cindy’s Teddy bear collection was arrayed neatly on a corner shelf, accented with cheerleading trophies and smiling family photos. Most horrifying was the cute little Tweety Bird clock and those adorable feathered stubs that were rapidly ticking toward twelve o’clock.

  The insufferably normal decor made the oozing Orifice on the wall above the bed all the more obscene. Crystal could hear the slithering, clicking scurry of unwholesome creatures amid its wet morass.

  Spooge, Lurken, and Underlings. Momma was right, dang it. She’ll never let me live it down, assuming I live at all.

  But Momma was back at the trailer, messing with recipes, trying to free Tim from the second Orifice. Crystal didn’t want to think about the Orifice in the video store. She only hoped Fatback Bob had closed up early for Halloween.

  “Your move,” Bone said to Royce.

  He shook his hips a la Elvis Presley and flashed a cocky, crooked grin. “How’s that?”

  “You have to go back, Royce,” Bone said, eyes lit by a green fury.

  “I’m not going nowhere but the top,” Royce said.

  “Uh, guys, there’s something under the bed,” Dempsey shouted from the floor, invisible in the mist, thumping the floor as he tried to untangle himself.

  “It’s only a movie,” Crystal said. “Think of it as a milieu. Or cinema verite. Or some other French crap.”

  “Cool getting Bonnie a part,” Pettigrew said.
“But don’t you think it’s a little trailer-trashy to have someone play your dead best friend?”

  “I’m not that dead,” Bone said.

  “I’m serious,” Dempsey said, voice rising to a frantic pitch. “Looks like dust bunnies with fangs.”

  “Okay, okay,” Royce said, pointing at Bone like a Wild West gunslinger. “Looks like we got a problem here. It’s my movie and you come barging in wanting a piece of the action.”

  “You promised—”

  “That was over there and this is here.”

  “Whoa,” Dempsey said. “Good line. Is the film rolling?”

  “What are you doing with her, then?” Bone said to Royce, picking up a cheesecake photo of Cindy from her dresser.

  “And what were you doing with her?” Crystal asked Pettigrew.

  “This ain’t in the script,” Pettigrew said. “Gooey stuff on the wall, some actress pretending to be Bonnie—”

  Crystal stomped on his foot. “Answer the question.”

  “I ain’t done nothing yet,” Pettigrew said.

  “You kissed her in the script.”

  “That was a movie kiss. Ask Dempsey. It wasn’t even any good. Tasted like pennies.”

  “What are you grinning about?” Bone asked Royce.

  “You chicks crack me up. Worried about kissing at a time like this.”

  “Ouch!” Dempsey squeaked, still obscured by the thickening mist. “One of them bit me.”

  “Is it time?” Bone said.

  “Now or never.” Crystal grabbed the boom pole where Snake had leaned it against the wall. The gray, sausage-shaped casing at the end had a surprising amount of weight to it. The casing appeared to be fine wire mesh to protect the microphone but still allow the passage of sound.

  She swung the long pole at Royce, but the end got caught in the curtain. As she yanked, the curtain fell away, and half a dozen faces were pressed against the glass, all wearing masks or make-up.

  The party. Crystal had nearly forgot that Cindy’s crowd would be showing up.

  Pettigrew had climbed onto the bed and was peering into the Orifice. He sniffed at it and wrinkled his nose. Crystal knew from past experience the Orifice smelled like sulfur, stump water, possum dookie, and ashes, but Pettigrew appeared to be impressed. “Man, this looks real, whatever it is.”