Chapter 4
Ike, Erwin, and the rest of the production team ran around to the front of the house. By the time they arrived a construction van was speeding down the drive, kicking up a cloud of dust and dirt in its wake.
“What the fuck happened here?” Ike demanded, climbing up onto the porch.
He was met there by the head carpenter, a short, dark-haired man named Luis who had worked for the brothers on their last six features and had done most of the renovations on Ike’s home in Palm Springs.
“One of the men had an accident,” Luis answered, pointing to the hole in the floorboards of the porch. There was blood spattered nearby, and plenty of broken pieces of wood splayed about, some of the nails jutting out from them tipped with blood.
Erwin picked up a few jagged boards and began playing with them, first acting as if they were knives, and then closely examining the way they’d broken, as if he were working out some new effect in his mind.
“Where is he now?” Ike wanted to know.
“A few of my men took him to the hospital.”
Ike wondered what this was going to do to the insurance policy he’d taken out on the production. “How many went with him?”
Luis shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. “Two or three, I’m not sure. They left in a hurry.”
Ike looked down the drive and saw that the van was gone from view. He knew that this was where he was supposed to ask if the guy was hurt badly, if he was going to be all right, but that wasn’t the foremost thing on his mind. “With one man in the hospital and two gone with him to hold his hand, who’s going to finish the work on this damn house?”
Luis’s head bowed ever so slightly. “Don’t worry, Mr. Gowan, it’ll get done, even if we have to work straight through the night.”
Ike nodded. “I’ve got a twelve-man special effects team coming in three days and I can’t afford to have them waiting for the paint to dry, you understand me?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Gowan. Everything will be ready.”
Ike stood there in front of Luis wanting to bully the man further, but realizing there was nothing to be gained from it. Luis was a good carpenter, and was able to get a lot out of his men for what they were being paid. He was also good at bending to Ike’s will, and letting Ike have the last word. Ike liked that, but every once in a while he wished Luis would give him some lip, talk back, or complain about the money and materials or whatever, just so Ike could throw his weight around and act the way a big Hollywood producer was supposed to act.
“All right, then,” Ike said at last. “You all get back to work now.”
“Yes, sir,” Luis said.
Ike turned for the production trailer and saw that several of the men had been watching him talk to Luis.
“What are you standing around for?” he bellowed. “Get back to work!” He clapped his hands. “Let’s go!”
In moments, everyone had made themselves busy.
And the air was filled with the sound of power tools and pounding hammers.
A smile crept across Ike’s face.
It was good to be the guy in charge.
* * * *
The production trailer was ten years old and twenty feet long. It was just large enough inside to fit twelve chairs around an eight-foot table, and still have enough room for a second four-foot table to hold a couple of coffee machines and a few trays of cookies and donuts.
“Is this the best you could do?” Ike asked as he stepped into the trailer and took a seat at the head of the table.
“Best I could do with the money you budgeted for trailers,” answered location manager William Olsen.
Ike nodded knowingly.
Since they were holding back a good portion of their budget for the feature film, they had to cut costs somewhere and the network wouldn’t be pleased if most of the money they’d invested didn’t end up on the screen. So, they’d had to cut costs elsewhere and fancy trailers had been high up on the list of things they could do without.
Erwin took the chair at the opposite end of the table from his brother, still fiddling with two broken pieces of wood and marveling at the way the bent nails could be dragged over the skin of his forearm without breaking the flesh.
Ike noticed his brother’s activity. “Erwin, what are you doing?”
Erwin looked up. “Oh, well… if I drag the nail this way with the point trailing away, it doesn’t hurt me. But if we film it like that, then play it backward, it would look as if the nail is about to rip open the skin.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So the audience would be cringing waiting for the nail to go in and for blood to come out, but of course it never would.”
Ike thought it over. “Maybe we could use it for a distraction before a jump.”
“You mean like just before a wolf breaking through a window,” Erwin said, excitement in his voice.
“Yeah, something like that.” Ike nodded.
As the brothers had been talking, the trailer filled up with the key members of the production crew including the lighting and sound directors, director of photography, assistant directors, production manager, and William Olsen’s assistant. Most of the people present wouldn’t be called upon at this meeting, but it was good to have them around so they could begin to get a feel for what needed to be done, and to get an idea about how the Gowan brothers wanted these things to be done.
When they were all settled in, Ike sat up and said, “Good morning, everyone.”
The rest of the table responded.
Ike quickly dispensed with the pleasantries and focused his gaze on Olsen. “Bill,” he said, “Erwin and I aren’t here for more than half an hour and we’ve already got a man in the hospital. What kind of death-trap money pit did you stick us with?”
The heads of everyone sitting around the table turned in the direction of the shaggy-haired Australian.
“The price we’re paying is a bit higher than we’d usually pay for something in such bad condition, but it’s not my fault the owner of this place reads the trades. I didn’t tell him who I was, but he was able to piece it together.”
“Couldn’t you lie to him?”
Olsen smiled. “I did lie to him… But really, no one has shown any interest in the property for twenty years, and then some guy’s asking to rent the place for three months. What would you think if you were him?”
“I’d think you were crazy,” Erwin said from the other end of the table.
“Exactly, or I’m with some production.”
“Did he try and bleed you?” Ike asked.
“Of course he did, but he had no idea what productions normally pay… and I convinced him that when we were done, the place would be worth double what it’s worth now.”
“And he believed you?”
Olsen just smiled, and his smile seemed to be infectious, slowly spreading to everyone else in the room.
Ike couldn’t let Olsen think he’d done something great, even if he had. “It’s still more than we budgeted.”
“Maybe, but two percent over budget for the location is still a bargain. Haunted houses don’t come cheap these days, especially one with, uh… real ghosts inside them.”
Erwin was suddenly interested in what was going on. “Is this place really haunted?”
Olsen shrugged. “I don’t believe in any of it myself, but there seems to be a few stories about ghosts wandering around over the years, inside the house and on the grounds.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, there’s a bit of back story to the house, too. Even a write-up in this old book about haunted houses.”
“Okay, let’s hear it.”
Olsen reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of reading glasses. After sliding them on, he opened up a thin hardcover book with a faded red cover and worn spine and held the book up to his face. There was some gold lettering on the front and spine, but much of it had been rubbed off over the years. He’d marked the page he needed with a bit of yellow ribbon, which was probably part of the book. He cracked opened the book, pulled aside the ribbon, and began to read the entry.
THE SHIELDS HOUSE, Kettleman City, California.
The two-story five-bedroom Victorian house is situated some ten miles east of Kettleman City, a small town about 100 miles northwest of Los Angeles, east of Interstate 5.
Deserted now, the house was once the home of Reginald Shields, owner of a turn-of-the-century sawmill located on the southern shores of Tulare Lake. When Reginald died in 1937, his youngest son, Marcus, took over the house, going into debt to buy out the other siblings so he could own the house outright. The sawmill went bankrupt in 1948 and just twelve months later Marcus Shields was penniless. However, he managed to keep up payments on the estate for two more years by farming the land around the house, and by picking up travelers and wanderers roaming Interstate 5 and taking them to his home to kill them. Afterwards, he would sell the personal belongings of his victims on the many regular trips he made to cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco.
State Police became suspicious of Shields when citizens of Kettleman City began to wonder how he’d been able to prosper when so many of his crops had failed. Although not officially suspected of any crime, Shields panicked when sheriffs’ deputies asked him to visit their office the next time he was in Kettleman City, and hanged himself the night before he was scheduled to meet with the police.
The Shields house is reported to be haunted by the ghosts of Shields and possibly of his victims. Several families lived in the house throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, but none for longer than two years. The house was vacated when an infestation of rats made it uninhabitable in the spring of 1970.
Olsen closed the book and looked around the table. Ike was silent for several moments. “That’s it? That’s all you’ve got on this house?”
Olsen shrugged. “What do you mean, ‘That’s all’? It’s actually got some history to it, and we’re lucky to have it.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really. You didn’t exactly give me an easy task, you know. I had to find a place we could have the run of for two months and an owner who didn’t care if we knocked out a few walls, or broke a few windows. I had to find it in less than two weeks, within a couple hours’ drive from Los Angeles, and I had to get it all for a song.” Olsen paused to take a deep breath. “And after all that, oh, wouldn’t it be nice if it was actually haunted, too?”
Ike smiled. Olsen could be pushed around, but every once in a while he pushed back, just enough to let you know he’d reached his limit. When he did that Ike could be certain that Olsen had done the best he could under the circumstances and there was no point in badgering the man further.
“Okay, so we’re lucky to have this place.” Ike sighed. “It’s just that the story… I mean it’s interesting and all, but it just sounds so…”
“Boring!” Erwin offered from the other end of the table, throwing the word out like a catcall.
Ike nodded. “Yeah, that’s it, boring.”
“You’ll get no argument from me on that account,” Olsen said, raising his hands—one of them holding the book—as if he were being robbed at gunpoint. “This whole thing is written up like an encyclopedia. But it proves that the place does have a ghost story attached to it and that’s all you need if you’ve got a decent writer to work it.”
“Yes-s,” Ike said slowly, then snapped, “Where’s Dunbar?”
Everyone’s attention moved two people to the left of Olsen where Carl Dunbar, a young, slightly chubby, bespectacled writer from Los Angeles with two horror novels and a few television writing credits to his name, sat idly twirling a pencil through his fingers.
“Who, me?” he said, seemingly uncertain of himself.
“Yeah, you,” Ike echoed. “Let me hear the spin you’ve put on this lame-oh ghost story.”
“Yeah, okay.” Dunbar sat up in his chair, opened a tan file folder, and leafed through a few typed pages. He cleared his throat once, then began to read.
THE SHIELDS HOUSE, Kettleman City, California.
Unassuming.
Charming.
Grand.
These are the first thoughts that might run through someone’s mind after gazing upon the empty house situated just 100 miles northwest of Los Angeles. Set in a rural valley, it looks like the stuff of an American fable, where rock-solid families were born and raised and took their rightful place in the generational strength that has made this country great.
On closer inspection, however, it is obvious that the house is run-down; a broken and shattered shell of a home, holding no warmth, no comfort. Indeed, it looks to be full of dread, a home of untolled terrors.
But while it has taken years for the structure to take on this appearance, the home is actually closer now to its real character than at any time in its history. For no matter how new the house had once been, how freshly painted and scrubbed, it had always been a scarred, broken place… where evil lived under the facade waiting for its chance to rise, to break out and take its rightful place in the annals of those houses which hellish monsters call home.
Dunbar paused a moment to take a look around.
No one said a word.
He continued.
In 1937 an unassuming son of a lumber magnate named Marcus Shields took possession of the house after his father, Reginald, died in an industrial accident, which at the time was noted to have occurred under “mysterious circumstances.” Shields paid off his siblings in order to have the house to himself, then spent several unremarkable years managing the family business. A hardworking yet unexceptional businessman, Shields eventually ran the sawmill into the ground, declaring bankruptcy in 1948. He managed to live off savings and investments for another twelve months, but once again failed in the business world when his investments went sour and his land proved barren.
A millionaire all his life, he was penniless by the summer of 1950.
But rather than mark the end of Marcus Shields’s life, his business failings and financial losses only served as a transition point upon which he changed careers decades before such midlife shifts became fashionable.
Almost overnight he gave up being a man of business, and became instead a man whose only business was death.
In short, he became a serial killer.
And at last Marcus Shields had found something he was good at.
Someone snickered.
Posing as a kind of bumbling local resident, Shields gave rides to travelers he met on the interstate, then offered them overnight accommodation in his large and empty home.
But at night the inside of the empty home became filled with the anguished cries and screams of his tortured victims.
A teenage boy on the road in search of a job…
A woman on her way to the city to work for an uncle…
A young father searching for work and money to send to his starving wife and children…
All of them begging Shields for death.
And he granted their wishes, but only after he was done with them, exercising every manner of sexual deviancy upon their bodies. And when he was done with them, he’d dispose of the bodies in countless heinous ways, from burning them in bonfires to feeding them to his dog. But while Marcus Shields kidnapped, tortured, and killed secretly and existed in anonymity, there were always eyes upon him, watching.
And the suspicions grew about the man who lived alone, and the terror sounds that could sometimes be heard on the cool night air. And the questions began to be asked.
How was it that a man could survive, indeed prosper, with no crops to harvest, and no job to speak of?
And what of the screams?
The sheriff wanted to know, and it was only a matter of time before what was left of the cracked facade of Shields’s insane world came crashing down around him. But he could not allow that, could not face his shame, and so he took the coward’s way out, taking his own life on the eve of his capture, damning himself to remain in the house—a soul tortured for all eternity by his very victims’ insatiable need for vengeance.
And today, the evil continues to unravel, day after night, night after day, as the ghosts of Shields and his victims walk the halls in search of…
Fresh blood.
Revenge.
And a queen whose scream will be music to their ears.
Dunbar put down the papers he’d been reading from.
The trailer was absolutely silent. A few people seemed to be holding their breath.
Ike smiled.
At the other end of the table, Erwin was grinning ear to ear.
Then, after a few more moments of silence, Ike began to laugh.
“I—I can change it if you like,” stammered Dunbar. “There’s a few spots I’m not really happy with and I can rework it if you think it needs something, I don’t know… different—”
“No!” Ike cried.
Dunbar looked startled.
“Olsen, where’d you get this guy?”
“Stephen King was busy,” Olsen deadpanned.
Nervous laughter percolated around the table.
Dunbar looked crushed. Defeated. If he had circulated among any type of Hollywood crowd he would probably have heard a dozen different stories about working for the Gowan brothers, few of them pleasant, and all of them seasoned with bitterness. Working for Ike Gowan was like sticking your head into a meat grinder. And if the production succeeded, it would be the Gowans who’d take the credit, but if it failed, the blame would all be firmly placed on the shoulders of the cast and crew.
“I’ll rework it,” Dunbar said, pushing his chair away from the table as if he wanted to leave the meeting early.
“Don’t change a thing,” Ike shouted. “The network censors might not like it, but we’ll worry about that later. Right now it’s perfect, I love it!”
“Really?” Dunbar’s face was a mix of relief and disbelief. The sag had gone from his shoulders and he looked a half foot taller.
“Yeah, really.” Ike looked up at the trailer’s ceiling as if there were some film being projected there that only Ike could see. “We’ll print the copy up big and use a few words and phrases in the montage that opens the show. Yeah, maybe with someone like Lance Henrickson doing the voice-over… What do you think, Erwin?”
“It’s got sex, it’s got violence, and a dog who eats human flesh,” Erwin said with a shrug. “What’s not to like?”