Ghostlight (4 page)

The next day I headed to Hollyhock Cottage right after lunch. Julian answered the door and waved me in. “Quick, let's go upstairs.”

“Jules,” said a voice from the kitchen. “Aren't you going to offer Miss Avery something to drink? A snack, maybe?”

Julian's shoulders slumped. “Dad won't leave me alone today,” he murmured. “Go on in. If we give him what he wants, maybe he'll let us work.”

The kitchen was warm and smelled like baking—sugar and vanilla. Curtis Wayne leaned on the counter near the sink, and he grinned when he saw me.

“Hey there, Avery May.”

Nobody called me that but Grandma. Not even Mom. It brought a strange pang to my chest.

“Hi, Mr. Wayne.”

“You want some iced tea? Lemonade? I made them myself.”

Julian opened the fridge. “Dad, aren't you supposed to be
composing
or something?”

I glanced toward the living room and saw the guitar standing in exactly the same spot it had stood two days ago.

“I need to unwind a bit before the muse will strike,” said Mr. Wayne. “And who's the dad here, anyway?”

I sort of wished I could freeze this moment and stare at Mr. Wayne without him knowing. It wasn't that I had a crush on him or anything. I mean, he was old. Like,
forty.
It's just…it was like looking at a cheetah in the zoo. Most dads I knew had bellies and gray hair and bags under their eyes. They were awkward around other people's kids, almost to the point of looking fearful. Most of all they just seemed weighed down by life. But here was a man about Mom's age standing in the kitchen in designer jeans, and not only did he look as sleek and relaxed as our cousin's prize-winning Racking Horse, he was baking cookies and
smiling
about it.

“What do you want, Avery?” Julian jerked his head out of the fridge. “Tea, lemonade, Michelob Ultra?”

“Very funny.” Mr. Wayne quirked an eyebrow at me. “I trust you won't tell your grandmother that Julian has taken to offering alcohol to minors.”

“I know better,” I said. “She thinks drinking liquor is a sin. Her church uses grape juice for Communion.”

Mr. Wayne nodded slowly. “I figured as much.”

“I'll just have lemonade, please.”

“Take some cookies, too.” Mr. Wayne pulled a paper plate from the cabinet and scooped a couple of sugar cookies onto it.

Once we got to his room, Julian pulled the folding chair next to his leather office chair. “Sorry about that. He's really been hovering lately.”

“He's not so bad.”

“He disappears for weeks on tour, and then he comes home and he's all clingy to make up for it. It's twice as bad here because this house is tiny and he's waiting for the muse, or whatever. He's probably baking a cake as we speak. Or making cucumber sandwiches. I bet your dad isn't like that. Am I right?”

I froze. All these years of having a prepared answer to the dad question and I completely locked up.

“Avery?”

“My dad,” I finally said, keeping my face still and sad, “is dead.”

Julian choked on a bite of cookie. “Sorry,” he said, brushing crumbs off his mouth. “I had no idea.”

“I don't like to talk about it.”

“Yeah, I get it.” He took a long swallow of lemonade and cleared his throat. “So, what did you learn about Hilliard House?”

This was one thing I liked about boys—you could always count on them to change the subject if
feelings
came up. I told him everything Grandma had said, such as when the house was built, and how the last owner outlived his wife and daughter.

Julian nodded. “An old recluse, huh? Anything else?”

Oh, and I used to visit an imaginary friend in that house.

“Not really,” was what I actually said.

“Do you know how his wife and child died? Anything interesting about that?”

“Grandma didn't say. I don't think she knows.”

“We need to do more research, but Dad took my smartphone and there's no Wi-Fi in this house.”

“Why'd he take your phone?”

Julian looked away. “Supposedly I spend too much time on the Internet. He said I had to take a break while we're here. It's lame, I know.”

“Well, you wouldn't get good reception up here anyway. Blake sure doesn't. And if you need to do research, there's a shelf of books on local history downstairs. Grandma always keeps stuff like that for tourists. But, Julian, I don't see why it matters what happened to his family. Aren't we just making up the story ourselves?”

His eyes widened. “With a setting like this, I want to use as much of the local lore as possible. It'll add authenticity to our film, and that sort of thing is great for marketing.”

“Marketing?”

“Yeah, once it's finished we could build a whole website around it, and the connection to local history might draw more traffic.”

It had never occurred to me that anyone other than us might see this film. It'd just seemed like a good summer project for friends, something to pass the time, but Julian made it sound like a business opportunity.

“If you can't find what you need in those books, we could try the library,” I said. “It's about thirty minutes away by car—I could ask Grandma to drive us.”

“Nothing in walking distance?”

“In case you hadn't noticed, everything's pretty spread out around here.”

Julian frowned. “What about that graveyard just down the road? You can learn a lot from gravestones, plus we could get some good footage for our film. Are all the Hilliards buried there?”

“Just the dead ones.” I grinned. “And Grandma won't mind us walking down there.”

“Maybe we could do that Wednesday.”

“Are we writing the script today?”

He gave me a sidelong look. “You have a lot of work to do before we start that.”

“
Work?
What kind of work?”

“I want to take advantage of the creepy qualities of Hilliard House. Have you ever watched a scary movie?”

I flinched. “Wait a minute…are
we
making a scary movie?”

Julian leaned forward in his chair. “Did something bad happen to you at that house? Other than your grandmother taking a belt to you?”

I thought of last night's dream. The hand in the window.

“All I know is that house creeps me out.”

“This is just a movie, Avery. It's no big deal. Just think of it as pretending.”

I took a breath. “Okay.”

“So…what scary movies have you watched?”

I thought for a moment. “One time Blake and I watched this old movie called
Excalibur.
It was edited for TV, but there was still a lot of blood. Like, spears poking in people's guts with blood spurting out, and crows eating the eyeballs out of a dead guy's head. It was super gross.”

He shook his head. “That's just gore. Have you ever watched a
ghost
movie?”

“Definitely not. Mom hates ghost stories, and Grandma only watches
Little House on the Prairie
and old stuff like that.”

“Yeah, you definitely have some catching up to do.” When I started to protest, he lifted a hand. “The good news is that I'll do the work with you right here. It'll be a good review for me, and I bet we'll get all sorts of ideas for our own story.”

“Um, I didn't come here to sign up for summer school.”

“I promise you'll like this, Avery.”

I rolled my eyes. But doing that made me think of Blake and how he never wanted to do anything fun anymore.

“All right, then. Bring on the ghost movies.”

Julian smiled. “We'll start with a classic.”

Julian kept a warehouse's worth of movies on his external hard drive, so we watched on the jumbo monitor with the lights off and curtains closed. His dad insisted the door stay open, but even then not much light came from the hallway. Julian reclined in his leather chair with his feet propped up on a box, and I sat on the bed because he told me to. Blake's bed was a jumble of covers and smelled like feet, but Julian's was smooth and tucked in, and all I smelled was clean cotton.

I worried at first because I had a strict policy about black-and-white movies. It mostly involved
never
watching them. In old movies, everybody talked in funny, false-sounding voices, and the story moved about as fast as molasses. I'd tried many times to watch
It's a Wonderful Life
at Christmas—Mom really loved it—but I always fell asleep in the first twenty minutes. And that was on a
couch,
not a comfy bed like Julian's.

This movie was different.

It started with an old-fashioned voice-over in which a man told the story of a very bad house and the people who'd died in it. Years later, a group of strangers arrived at the house to study paranormal activity. Everything seemed fine in the light of day, but when they went to bed…that's when the creepy stuff started happening. Strange poundings and crying noises echoed through the halls at night. Doorknobs rattled and the doors themselves seemed to breathe in and out.

At one point I had to ask Julian to pause it. I said I needed a bathroom break, but really, I just had to get away from that crazy house for a second. It was getting too real. I needed to see sunlight coming through the bathroom window and to hear Julian's dad puttering downstairs in the kitchen.

When the movie was over, my shoulders finally relaxed. It was a relief to turn the lights on, to stretch and yawn.

Julian studied me. “Were you scared?”

“Yeah…I guess.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. I just was.”

He sighed. “If you're going to be serious about filmmaking, you need to figure out
why
it was scary.”

I thought so long and hard that the silence rang in my ears and my armpits turned sweaty.

“Was it the violence that scared you?” he prompted.

I snorted. “There wasn't any. No blood, anyway.”

“Was it the ghost?”

“Well,
yeah!
”

“Was it the way the ghost looked?”

I started to say yes, but stopped. We'd heard horrible thumps and cries. We saw what seemed to be the ghost turning the doorknob and pressing against the door itself. But I didn't know what the ghost looked like.

“We never actually saw it,” I said.

“So why was the movie scary?”

“Because I didn't know what the ghost was. It seemed dangerous, but I didn't know what it would do. I was just…
dreading
it the whole time.”

Julian nodded. “Psychological horror. The unknown is much scarier than a vampire, or a werewolf, or a man in a sheet yelling ‘boo.' ”

“I'd never be scared by a man in a sheet.”

“You know what I mean.”

We watched the movie again, but this time it was easier because I knew what to expect. In fact, the scary bits were almost fun because I could study how they scared me.

The coolest thing was when Julian paused the movie to explain camera angles. He showed me how a low angle, where the camera is placed below the subject, makes that person or thing seem powerful and intimidating. The director of this movie used low angles a
lot,
like when the characters first saw the house and it stood dark and gloomy above them. High angles made people or things look insignificant. When the characters were frightened in this movie, they were shown from high angles. It made them look small and powerless. And when the camera tilted or shook? That helped you feel a character's loss of control or fear.

“I always thought the most important thing was the acting. I never realized how much work the camera actually does in telling the story.” I shook my head in wonder. “How do you know all this stuff?”

“I did a camp last summer. One of the tracks was filmmaking, and the teacher was totally into classic horror films. I guess I got a little obsessed.”

“Julian, who's going to star in our movie?”

“
We
are, of course. And maybe my sister. Do you think your brother would be interested?”

“I seriously doubt it.” It was time to move the subject as far from Blake as possible, so I pointed toward the computer. “I just wondered if our movie would be about grown-ups or kids. I mean—will you have
us
playing grown-ups?”

“No way. Things have to feel real. If we had funding, we could hire actors, but our characters need to be kids because we basically have no budget.” His eyes brightened. “That's another good thing about psychological horror. If you never show the ghost, you don't need a huge budget for special effects.”

“Hadn't thought of that.”

“And it's better anyway. My film teacher said that creepy monsters jumping out at you from the screen might make you scream, but it's the things you
don't
see that really get under your skin.”

A knock came at the door, and I swear my body rose about a foot off the bed. But it was only Julian's dad poking his head in. He held a cell phone in his hand.

“Avery May, your grandma just called. She says it's time to get ready for supper.”

I glanced at my watch. “I've been here for almost five hours. How did that happen?”

Mr. Wayne just smiled. “Better get a move on.”

That night when Mom called, my brain was bursting with everything I'd seen and learned at Hollyhock Cottage. I'd been thinking a lot about that haunted-house movie, and part of me really wanted to talk to Mom about it. But if I did, I'd have to explain how Julian and I were making a ghost movie of our own. And since she wouldn't even let me
watch
a ghost movie, I was pretty sure she wouldn't be happy about us making one.

“You sound kind of far away tonight, Avery,” she said.

“I'm just tired, I guess.”

“Are you and Blake running around all day like always?”

“Me and
who
?”

There was a pause. “Avery?”

“I barely speak to Blake anymore, Mom.”

“But I thought you had a royal wedding to arrange for Kingdom. Princess…what was her name?”

“Etheline. She was supposed to marry the Lord of the North Countries, but Blake thinks he's too old to play anymore. He says he's starting
high school.
Kingdom is
little kid stuff.
I got in big trouble with Grandma for cussing at him, but he was asking for it.”

“Oh, Avery, I wish you'd get a handle on that temper of yours. Next time he makes you mad, count to five in your head before you talk back to him. Will you try that, please?”

I couldn't think of any time in my life when
counting
had calmed me down, but if I said that Mom would think I was sassing her. “Yes, ma'am.”

She took a breath. “And anyway, Grandma says you've made a new friend already. One of her summer tenants?”

“It's just Julian. We're making a film together.”

“How ambitious.”

She was using that “playing along” tone that always irked me, especially because I was almost sure she'd just held the phone away from her mouth to yawn.

“Actually, we're making a film about the Hilliard farm.”

“That sounds interesting.”

Sometimes she'd be on her computer at the same time she was talking to me, checking work email, and I'd only get half of her attention.

“Yeah, we're flying in actors from Hollywood,” I said. “Julian is a famous teen director.”

“Uh-huh…”

Now I knew she wasn't listening. “Tomorrow we start filming the nude scenes.”

“Right.”

“Mom! I just said we were filming
nude scenes.
Are you on the computer or something?”

“Oh, honey, I'm sorry.” She cleared her throat. “My brain's a bit scrambled after the long day. I've been putting in extra hours at work, trying to get ahead on some of these cases so I won't be distracted when I fly out there to see you.”

“You're always distracted.”

“I'm trying to get on top of all this, honey. I really am.”

“I know,” I whispered.