Then she opens her mouth. I can tell she’s screaming, hard and long, but no sound comes out. Instead, a stream of white smoke pours out of her mouth. It rises and thickens, obscuring her features, swallowing the frame until there’s nothing but swirling white.
I wait, staring, nerves singing. Just when I’ve decided the video must have glitched, something moves in the mist.
An animal. A long jawbone, opening wide. A snap of teeth, and the screen goes dark.
I exhale for a long time. “Fuck, dude.”
Jasper smiles for the first time all weekend, shy and pleased. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I mean, how did you even—those effects were unreal.”
The smile turns young and eager, the way it only does when he talks about film. “First I tried renting a fog machine, but it looked like ass. Dry ice was better, but in the end I just had to wait for actual mist. Making it come out of Joy’s mouth like that was basically just trial and error—”
“No, I meant the thing at the end.”
Jasper’s smile fades. “What thing at the end?”
“The . . .” I don’t know what to call it. I thought it was an animal, but the shape doesn’t make sense in my memory. The neck was long and doe-like, but there were so many teeth, and the eyes were so far apart.
“Were you even paying attention?” Jasper takes the phone out of my hands, shoulders slouched again. “Christ, it was only like a minute and a half long.”
“Yes I was—”
But he’s already striding back to the truck.
We drive back in silence. I break it only once, to ask if we should stop for pizza rolls in Drakesboro. He shrugs with the perfect, insolent nihilism of teenagerhood, and I very seriously consider dumping the last of my Sprite down his shirt.
Later that night, Jasper makes a vending machine run and leaves his phone lying on the bedside table. I snatch it, tapping through folders until I find a file named “scream_FINAL_ACTUAL FINAL DRAFT.mov.” I watch it on a loop, endlessly repeating. I don’t see the animal again.
On Monday I approach Starling House more warily than I have in a while. I hold my breath when I knock, braced for some sort of excruciating scene of confession or accusation, but Arthur merely opens the door, gives me an unusually arctic “Good morning,” and turns around without once meeting my eyes. I exhale at his back, unsure whether I’m relieved or annoyed.
I listen for his steps all day, hoping for a chance to stash his keys back in his desk drawer, but he remains locked in the attic like the mad wife in a Gothic novel. I don’t see him again until evening, when he withdraws an envelope from his back pocket and hesitates. He rubs his thumb along the edge and says, abruptly, “I’m sorry. If I frightened you.”
It should have frightened me—smashing windows is classically beastly behavior, of the kind that only men are allowed to indulge in—but all I felt at the time was an aching, echoing sadness, like grief. I had worried later whether he washed the dirt out of his cuts properly, which strikes me now as a pretty bad sign for Team I’m Just In It for the Money.
Today his left hand is a wad of gauze tied several inches up his wrist in a clumsy knot. I clear my throat. “I’m pretty good at that stuff, if you want help changing the bandages.”
Arthur looks down at his own hand, then at mine, and visibly shudders. “No. God.” Then, as if he’d prepared a script and refuses to be derailed from it, he says stiffly, “If you would like to end our arrangement, I understand. It’s not like there’s much left to clean, is there.” Apparently his question marks are still lost at sea, all souls feared lost.
I search his face for regret or hope, not knowing which I’d rather see, but he’s doing his best gargoyle impression, his eyes fixed stonily on the wallpaper. “Guess not,” I say, and he nods twice, very quickly, in the manner of a man who has received a poor diagnosis at the doctor’s office and refuses to have a single public emotion about it. He reaches the envelope at me, blindly, and it slips from his fingers to the floor.
Both of us stare at it for a charged moment before I pick it up and fold it carefully into my pocket. “But there’s the window trim to paint.” My voice is profoundly bland. “And I was planning to rent a power washer for the front steps. They’re pretty gross, honestly.” The overhead light gives a defensive flicker.
His eyes meet mine for the first time all day, a brief, striking look that reminds me for no reason at all of the scrape of a match against stone. He nods a third time. “Well. The vines need trimming. While you’re at it.”