The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (43 page)

The A2 nods at Will.

Pilar points the camera at him.

He's been thinking about how to play this. “I'm Will Gald,” he says. “You probably recognize me from previous naked film roles such as the guy rolling around on a hotel room floor clutching his genitals and bleeding profusely.”

He smiles his most lovely smile. “I just happened to be in the area.”

“We persuaded him to stay for a bite,” Meggie says.

“They've hidden my clothes,” Will says. “Admittedly, I haven't been trying that hard to find them. I mean, what's the worst thing that can happen when you get naked on camera?”

Irene says, “Meggie, one of the things that's been most important about
Who's There?
right from the beginning is that we've all had something happen to us that we can't explain away. We're all believers. I've been meaning to ask, does Will here have a ghost story?”

“I don't—” the demon lover says. Then pauses. Looks at ­Meggie.

“I do,” he says. “But surely Meggie's already told it.”

“I have,” Meggie says. “But I've never heard you tell it.”

Oh, there are stories the demon lover could tell.

He says, “I'm here to please.”

“Fantastic,” Irene says. “As you know, every episode we make time for a ghost story or two. Tonight we even have a campfire.” She hesitates. “And of course as our viewers also know, we're still waiting for Juliet Adeyemi to turn up. She left just before lunch to run errands. We're not worried yet, but we'll all be a lot happier when she's with us again.”

Meggie says, “Juliet, if you've met a nice boy and gone off to ride the teacups at Disney World, so help me, I'm going to ask for all the details. Now. Shall we, Irene?”

All around them, people have been clearing away plates of half-eaten barbecue, assembling in a half circle around the campfire. Any minute now they'll be singing “Kumbaya.” They sit on their little towels. Irene and Meggie take their place in front of the fire. They clasp hands.

The demon lover moves a little farther away, into darkness. He is not interested in séances or ghosts. Here is the line of the shore. Sharp things underfoot. Someone joins him. Ray. Of course.

It is worse, somehow, to be naked in the dark. The world is so big and he is not. Ray is young and he is not. He is pretty sure that the videographer Pilar will sleep with him; Meggie will not.

“I know you,” the demon lover says to Ray. “I've met you before. Well, not you, the previous you. Yous. You never last.
We
never last. She moves on. You disappear.”

Ray says nothing. Looks out at the lake.

“I
was
you,” the demon lover says.

Ray says, “And now? Who are you?”

“You charge by the hour?” the demon lover says. “Why follow me around? I don't seem to have my wallet on me.”

“Meggie's busy,” Ray says. “And I'm curious about you. What you think you're doing here.”

“I came for Meggie,” the demon lover says. “We're friends. An old friend can come to see an old friend. Some other time I'll see her again and you won't be around. I'll always be around. But you, you're just some guy who got lucky because you look like me.”

Ray says, “I love her.”

“Sucks, doesn't it?” the demon lover says. He goes back to the fire and the naked people waiting for other naked people. Thinks about the story he is meant to tell.

The séance has not been a success. Irene the medium keeps saying that she senses something. Someone is trying to say something.

The dead are here, but also not here. They're afraid. That's why they won't come. Something is keeping them away. There is something wrong here.

“Do you feel it?” she says to Meggie, to the others.

Meggie says, “I feel something. Something is here.”

The demon lover extends himself outward into the night. Lets himself believe for a moment that life goes on. Is something here? There is a smell, the metallic stink of muck farms. There is an oppressiveness to the air. Is there malice here? An ill wish?

Meggie says, “No one has ever solved the mystery of what happened here. But perhaps whatever happened to them is still present. Irene, could it have some hold on their spirits, whatever is left of them, even in death?”

Irene says, “I don't know. Something is wrong here. Something is here. I don't know.”

But
Who's There?
picks up nothing of interest on their equipment, their air ion counter or their barometer, their EMF detector or EVP detector, their wind chimes or thermal imaging scopes. No one is there.

And so at last it's time for ghost stories.

There's one about the men's room at a trendy Santa Monica restaurant. The demon lover has been there. Had the fries with truffle-oil mayonnaise. Never encountered the ghost. He's not somebody who sees ghosts, and he's fine with that. Never really liked truffle-oil mayonnaise, either. The thing in the bungalow with Meggie wasn't a ghost. It was drugs, the pressure they were under, the unbearable scrutiny; a
folie à deux;
the tax on their happiness.

Someone tells the old story about Basil Rathbone and the dinner guest who brings along his dogs. Upon departure, the man and his dogs are killed in a car crash just outside Rathbone's house. Rathbone sees. Is paralyzed with shock and grief. As he stands there, his phone rings—when he picks up, an operator says, “Pardon me, Mr. Rathbone, but there is a woman on the line who says she must speak to you.”

The woman, who is a medium, says that she has a message for him. She says she hopes he will understand the meaning.

“Traveling very fast. No time to say goodbye. There are no dogs here.”

And now it's the demon lover's turn. He says, “A long time ago when Meggie and I were together, we bought a bungalow in Venice Beach. We weren't there very much. We were everywhere else. On junkets. At festivals. We had no furniture. Just a mattress. No dishes. When we were home we ate out of take-out containers.

“But we were happy.” He lets that linger. Meggie watches. Listens. Ray stands beside her. No space between them.

It's not much fun, telling a ghost story while you're naked. Telling the parts of the ghost story that you're supposed to tell. Not telling other parts. While the woman you love stands there with the person you used to be.

“It was a good year. Maybe the best year of my life. Maybe the hardest year, too. We were young and we were stupid and people wanted things from us and we did things we shouldn't have done. Fill in the blanks however you want. We threw parties. We spent money like water. And we loved each other. Right, Meggie?”

Meggie nods.

He says, “But I should get to the ghost. I don't really believe that it was a ghost, but I don't not believe it was a ghost, either. I've never spent much time thinking about it, really. But the more time we spent in that bungalow, the worse things got.”

Irene says, “Can you describe it for us? What happened?”

The demon lover says, “It was a feeling that someone was watching us. That they were somewhere very far away, but they were getting closer. That very soon they would be there with us. It was worse at night. We had bad dreams. Some nights we both woke up screaming.”

Irene says, “What were the dreams about?”

He says, “Not much. Just that it was finally there in the room with us. Eventually it was always there. Eventually whatever it was was in the bed with us. We'd wake up on opposite sides of the mattress because it was there in between us.”

Irene says, “What did you do?”

He says, “When one of us was alone in the bed it wasn't there. It was there when it was the two of us. Then it would be the three of us. So we got a room at the Chateau Marmont. Only it turned out it was there, too. The very first night it was there, too.”

Irene says, “Did you try to talk to it?”

He says, “Meggie did. I didn't. Meggie thought it was real. I thought we needed therapy. I thought whatever it was, we were doing it. So we tried therapy. That was a bust. So eventually—” He shrugs.

“Eventually what?” Irene says.

“I moved out,” Meggie says.

“She moved out,” he says.

The demon lover wonders if Ray knows the other part of the story, if Meggie has told him that. Of course she hasn't. Meggie isn't dumb. It's the two of them and the demon lover thinks, as he's thought many times before, that this is what will always hold them together. Not the experience of filming a movie together, of falling in love at the exact same moment that all those other people fell in love with them, that sympathetic magic made up of story and effort, repetition and editing and craft and other people's desire.

The thing that happened is the thing they can never tell anyone else. It belongs to them. No one else.

“And after that there wasn't any ghost,” he concludes. “Meggie took a break from Hollywood, went to India. I went to AA meetings.”

It's gotten colder. The fire has gotten lower. You could, perhaps, imagine that there is a supernatural explanation for these things, but that would be wishful thinking. The missing girl, Juliet, has not returned. The ghost-hunting equipment does not record any presence.

Meggie finds the demon lover with Pilar. She says, “Can we talk?”

“What about?” he says.

Pilar says, “I'll go get another beer. Want one, Meggie?”

Meggie shakes her head and Pilar wanders off, her hand brushing against the demon lover's hip as she goes. Flesh against flesh. He turns just a little so he's facing away from the firelight.

“It's about the premiere for next season,” Meggie says. “I want to shoot it in Venice Beach, in our old bungalow.”

The demon lover feels something rush over him. Pour into his ears, flood down his throat. He can't think of what to say. He has been thinking about Ray while he flirts with Pilar. He's been wondering what would happen if he asked Meggie about Ray. Really, they've never talked about this. This thing that she does.

“I'd like you to be in the episode, too, of course,” Meggie says.

He says, “I don't think that's a good idea. I think it's a terrible idea, actually.”

“It's something I've always wanted to do,” Meggie says. “I think it would be good for both of us.”

“Something something closure,” he says. “Yeah, yeah. Something something exposure something possible jail term. Are you
insane?
”

“Look,” Meggie says. “I've already talked to the woman who lives there now. She's never experienced anything. Will, I need to do this.”

“Of course she hasn't experienced anything,” the demon lover says. “It wasn't the house that was haunted.”

His blood is spiky with adrenaline. He looks around to see if anyone is watching. Of course they are. But everyone is far away enough that the conversation is almost private. He's surprised Meggie didn't spring this on him on camera. Think of the drama. The conflict. The ratings.

“You believe in this stuff,” he says finally. Trying to find what will persuade her. “So why won't you leave it alone? You know what happened. We know what happened. You know what the story is. Why the fuck do you need to know more?” He's whispering now.

“Because every time we're together she's here with us,” Meggie says. “Didn't you know that? She's here now. Don't you feel her?”

Hair stands up on his legs, his arms, the back of his neck. His mouth is dry, his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. “No,” he says. “I don't.”

Meggie says, “You know I would be careful, Will. I would never do anything to hurt you. And it doesn't work like that, anyway.” She leans in close, says very quietly, “It isn't about us. This is for me. I just want to talk to her. I just want her to go away.”

(1992) They acquire the trappings of a life, he and Meggie. They buy dishes and midcentury modern furniture and lamps. They acquire friends who are in the business, and throw parties. On occasion things happen at their parties. For example, there is the girl. She arrives with someone. They never find out who. She is about as pretty as you would expect a girl at one of their parties to be, which is to say that she is really very pretty.

After all this time, the demon lover doesn't really remember what she looked like. There were a lot of girls and a lot of parties and that was another country.

She had long black hair. Big eyes.

He and Meggie are both wasted. And the girl is into both of them and eventually it's the three of them, everyone else is gone, there's a party going on somewhere else, they stay, she stays, and everyone else leaves. They drink and there's music and they dance. Then the girl is kissing Meggie and he is kissing the girl and they're in the bedroom. It's a lot of fun. They do pretty much everything you can do with three people in a bed. And at some point the girl is between them and everyone is having a good time, they're having fun, and then the girl says to them,
Bite me.

Come on, bite me.

He bites her shoulder and she says,
No, really bite me. Bite harder. I want you to really bite me. Bite me, please.
And suddenly he and Meggie are looking at each other and it isn't fun anymore. This isn't what they're into.

He gets off as quickly as he can, because he's almost there anyway. And the girl is still begging, still asking for something they can't give her, because it isn't real and vampires aren't real and it's a distasteful situation and so Meggie asks the girl to leave. She does and they don't talk about it. They just go to sleep. And they wake up just a little bit later because she's snuck back into the house, they find out later that she's broken a window, and she's slashed her wrists. She's holding out her bloody wrists and she's saying,
Please, here's my blood, please drink it. I want you to drink my blood. Please.