Run Time

by Catherine Ryan Howard

Genres: Psychological Thrillers; Horror; Mystery; Suspense

Synopsis

Lights

Feeling her stardom fading, struggling soap-actress Adele Rafferty is ready to give up on her dreams when she gets a last-minute offer to play the lead in upcoming horror film Final Draft. Could this be her big break? Will she have redemption for what happened the last time she was on a film set? Adele doesn’t think twice before signing the dotted line.

Camera

Adele quickly makes her way to set, deep into the isolated and wintry woods of West Cork, Ireland, miles away from civilization and cell service.

Action

When real life on set starts to somehow mirror the sinister events portrayed in the script, Adele fears the real horror lies off the page. Isolated and unsure who in the crew she can trust, is there anywhere or any time left to run?

Release date: August 16, 2022

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing

Print pages: 417

Sample

The road is narrow, the edges of it crumbling, as if losing its battle to hold the tree line back.

Donal is tense behind the wheel. Grip tight, back ramrod straight, eyes fixed on the road surface illuminated by the beam of the headlights. The rental is a seven-seater Volvo that gave him pause when he saw it at first and made him sweat nervously when he found he had to step up into it. He’s only ever driven his own succession of secondhand Nissan Micras, and only around and between cities on smooth, well-lit streets. This car is far bigger and more powerful, and this road is basically a boreen with ambition.

Underneath the wheels, he feels the surface start to gently rise. It’s cutting through dense, gloomy forest, steadily thickening with darkness on either side of the car. Donal knows this is because it’s after six on an overcast, late-January evening, but it feels like it’s because the forest is absorbing the light, sucking it in, swallowing it up whole.

Feeding on it.

“It’s so creepy out here,” he says.

Steve, sitting in the passenger seat, snorts and says, “That’s, like, the whole idea?” in a tone that adds a silent you idiot onto the sentence’s end.

A heat flares across Donal’s face.

He’s already downsized his goals from Do such an amazing job that you and Steve Dade cement a years-long professional partnership that will culminate in you both on stage at the

Dolby Theatre holding a pair of little gold men to Don’t get fired before shooting starts. Donal has never held an assistant director position before. Not even close unless you counted the word assistant. His most recent job was glorified receptionist-slash-dogsbody at a casting agency. Getting a gig as Steve Dade’s AD on this was an incredibly lucky break, and Donal cannot blow it.

The problem is that he’s intensely aware of that and has been a ball of acute anxiety ever since he reported to set. He can only hope that when shooting starts tomorrow, he’ll be better at his job than he’s been at making conversation.

“This is such a waste of time,” Steve says. “They’re probably not even there.”

“We can leave a note.”

“Can’t we just leave a note anyway?”

“Joanne asked that we speak to them,” Donal says, “as a courtesy. That you do.”

Joanne is the owner of Cedarwood House, their set, and also this other, smaller property, Cedarwood Lodge. Steve had refused to spend the money to book out the lodge as well, so here they are, driving to warn the Airbnb-ers who did book it this weekend about the shoot.

Steve groans like a teenager who’s just been ordered to go do his homework.

“What are they even doing out here?”

“Mini break,” Donal says. “A last-minute booking.”

“Who books a house in a place like this in January? Wait.” Steve twists in his seat to look back down the road. “Did you miss the turn? She said the gates were a mile apart. We should have—There!”

This exclamation coincides with him jutting an arm across Donal’s face to point at something on the driver’s side, obstructing Donal’s view and making him slam a foot on the brake in panic.

The car screeches and shudders to a violent stop that jerks both men forward against their seat belts before shoving them back against them again.

“Dude,” Steve says. “What the fuck?”

Donal mumbles an apology even though it was clearly Steve’s fault, then looks for what Steve was pointing at.

The right headlight has found a wooden sign, hand-painted and peeling, nailed to a tree trunk at the edge of the road: cedarwood lodge, above a black arrow. In the gloom beyond, Donal can just about make out that the arrow is pointing to a pair of wrought iron gates hung between two stone pillars. One stands open, inviting them to turn onto what looks like a dirt track through the

trees that immediately disappears into a dense, inky blackness.

“Cedarwood,” Steve scoffs. “Where did they get the name? Aren’t these—what are Christmas trees?”

“Firs,” Donal answers. “And maybe they’re U2 fans.” He turns to find Steve looking at him blankly. “That’s where Bono grew up. Cedarwood Road. In Glasnevin. They have a song about it. On Songs of Innocence.”

The blankness is morphing into bemusement, so Donal clears his throat and looks back at the gates, hoping the gloom in the car will hide his blushing cheeks. He just should stop talking to Steve entirely. Become mute. Stop the stupidity that is apparently intent on constantly leaking out of his mouth in the presence of this man.

“Go on, then,” Steve says, pointing. “Let’s go.”

Donal eyes the narrow entrance. “I should hop out and open the second gate, shouldn’t I?”

“Don’t be daft. You’ve loads of room.”

“Are you sure? I don’t think—”

“It’s not a bloody bus you’re driving.”

It’s not a bus, no, but the gap made by the single open gate does not look as wide as the vehicle Donal actually is driving.

He bites his lip to stop himself from saying this out loud and lowers his window in the futile hope that this will somehow help him see in this dark. He swaps the brake for the accelerator and begins to turn the wheel, his grip slipping a little on a surface made moist by his own sweat. Tentatively, he noses the car through the gap inch by inch, barely breathing, braced for the horror sound of a scrape.

Once he sees the rear of the vehicle has cleared the second, closed gate, he lets his muscles relax with warm relief and, accidentally, breathes a sigh of one too.

“All right, Granny,” Steve says.

It is indeed a dirt track beyond the gates, narrower than the road they’ve just left and dotted with unexpected mounds and water-filled potholes. The chassis bounces over and into every one, while Donal winces in time. Every cent on this shoot counts—because there’s so few of them—so of course they opted for the cheapest insurance cover on the car, the policy that probably says if you do any damage at all, you’ll have to pay for it out of your own pocket.

“This is so pointless,” Steve says. “They’re not even going to hear anything. Not all the way out here.”

And

then, as if on cue, they hear something: a high-pitched, otherworldly, testicle-retracting shriek. Loud and getting louder, because whatever is making it is heading right for them.

A set of glowing red brake lights appear on the track up ahead. Except they’re not brake lights, because they can’t be, because they’re too high up off the ground.

Not lights, but eyes. Glowing red, in the middle of two enormous wings.

On something that’s flying.

At high speed.

Directly at them.

At the windshield.

The shrieking takes on a kind of raw, guttural sound that reminds Donal of the demons that get exorcised from dead-eyed, white-haired children in the kind of seventies horror movies he doesn’t have the stomach to watch. He jams on the brakes just as he hears Steve say, “What the—” and then the shrieking reaches a fever pitch that makes Donal’s eardrums thrum with pain, and then there’s yelling too, and then a whooshing sound, as the . . . the thing, this huge, black, feathered thing with a pair of glowing red eyes swoops past them and over the car and disappears into the night.

Silence.

Utter silence. As if, all around them, the dark is holding its breath.

Donal is holding his, has been holding his for way too long to be healthy, and now he starts gasping and coughing and trying to swallow down lungfuls of air, while also trying not to do this because he’s pretty sure he just made a fool of himself and nearly crashed the car and almost wet his pants because of an owl.

An owl.

Who, flying directly into their headlights, looked surprisingly large and like he—she?—had red eyes.

“What,” Steve says, “The fuck. Was that?”

“An owl.” Donal thinks he’s redeeming himself by saying this. Yes, he reacted like it was some kind of monster coming at them, but now he’s realized the error of his ways and can offer an informed explanation. “Barn owls make those kinds of weird screeching noises. That’s one of the explanations for banshees, actually. Owls and foxes. Foxes, especially, at this time of year. They’re mating calls, but they sound human. Well, humanlike. That’s what people were actually hear—”

“Foxes don’t fly,” Steve snaps, “and that was way too big to be an owl. Did you not see the size of it?”

“Yeah, but it’s just a perspective thing. It looked bigger because it was flying right at us.”

“Or because it was bigger. That thing was as big as a man. The wingspan must have been, what? Five meters across?”

Donal would’ve gone with more like one, but he doesn’t say this.

“Hey,” Steve says then, “did you ever hear of the Mothman?”

A chill travels down Donal’s spine and into his bladder because, unfortunately, he has. The Mothman was a ghoulish, winged creature, larger than a man, with black feathers and burning red eyes, who was said to stalk the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. If you saw him, it meant that some kind of awful tragedy was about to happen, or that you were watching a generally mediocre but occasionally terrifying movie starring Richard Gere.

Donal had first seen The Mothman Prophecies as an impressionable eleven-year-old thanks to an irresponsible babysitter (his older brother) and for years had been convinced that its most disturbing sequence involved the Mothman walking on his wings, like a pterodactyl. But rewatching it (just once) as an adult, he’d discovered there was no such scene.

It must have come from one of the many nightmares he’d had in the weeks after his first viewing.

“Because it looked just like that,” Steve is saying. “The red eyes, the massive wingspan, the swooping down onto the road . . .”

“It was just an owl.”

Donal is telling Steve this, but he’s also telling himself.

“Like hell it was,” Steve mutters. “But hey, did we pick the right place to make a horror movie or what?”

Final Draft is due to start shooting in twenty-four hours, on a secluded set, in the dead of winter. This first week will be all night shoots, in a week that Met Éireann promises will be plagued by violent storms and freezing temperatures. Donal hasn’t yet mastered talking to the director, let alone helping him achieve his vision and doing everything that an AD should do, which is basically holding the whole show together. If something goes wrong, the blame will almost certainly land squarely at his feet.

And Mothmen, banshees . . .

They didn’t come to tell you that everything was going to work out just great, don’t worry, all 

good.

It was just an owl, Donal says silently, before releasing the brake and taking them onward down the dirt track.

The track twists and turns through the trees, hiding the house until the very last moment. It’s a small, square red-brick bungalow sitting in a puddle of gravel that crunches under the wheels as Donal pulls up, parallel to the muddy Ford Fiesta already parked there. Smoke billows from the chimney, but only one of the windows—the nearest one to them, to the left of the front door—suggests there’s a light on inside. When the headlights disappear, the window transforms into a rectangle of buttery yellow glow.

“Looks like a gatekeeper’s lodge,” Donal says. “Only it’s a bit too far from the gate to do any keeping.”

Steve snorts. “Looks like a shithole to me.”

They get out, their breath clouding in the freezing air. The surrounding trees block what little is left of the daylight. The only way to know there is any is to look straight up, between the trees, into the patch of the blue-gray sky directly above their heads. In a few minutes’ time, it will be completely dark.

It’s deathly quiet. As they make their way to the lodge’s door, the only sound is the crunch of gravel underfoot, and then Steve’s firm double knock on it seems to ricochet off the trees, dangerously loud.

“They won’t be expecting anyone,” Donal whispers. “Not out here. So let’s just hope no one has a gun.”

“Or is a screenwriter.”

“Or worse, thinks they’re one.”

Steve makes a humph noise that Donal chooses to interpret as a lazy laugh because, bloody hell, he needs the win.

They hear a rustling noise from inside and then the door, creaking open—just a few inches, enough to reveal a rusting door chain pulled taut and, beyond it, half the face of a man eyeing them coldly.

“Hey there,” Steve says, holding up a hand to signal that they come in peace. “Joanne asked us to call round—the owner?”

The only eyebrow they can see rises in question.

“

My name is Steve Dade.” Steve pauses here to, Donal presumes, allow the man the opportunity to say something like, “Wow! Really? You’re Steve Dade?” When it doesn’t happen, he pushes on. “I’m directing a movie that we’re shooting down at the main house—”

The door abruptly slams shut.

Steve is muttering a, “What the . . . ?” when the door chain rattles and the door reopens, wide enough now to reveal the whole of the man.

“Sorry,” the man says. “Say again?”

The man is a little older than Steve, Donal would guess, so late thirties, early forties, but not trying as hard as Steve to look like he hasn’t had to start ticking the next box along on the form. He’s wearing jeans and an old T-shirt, and his feet are in thick woolen socks, the kind you wear inside hiking boots. Strong jaw, bright blue eyes. He’s holding a stemless wine glass, half-filled with red, and something smells good in the air that’s wafting out into the night from the space behind him.

They’ve interrupted his dinner, Donal thinks.

“We’re shooting a feature,” Steve says, “down at the main house.” He points into the woods, pointlessly; the main house is at least a mile away through the trees, so there’s nothing to see. “A horror movie. Starting tomorrow evening. So if you hear any strange noises . . . We’ll mostly be shooting at night, you see, and there’s going to be a bit of screaming. You shouldn’t hear anything from here, but just in case you do, we wanted to give you a heads-up. So you don’t, you know, think someone’s getting murdered and call the Gardaí.” Steve laughs here. The man does not. “We’ve, ah, spoken to them too, so they should know to tell you anyway. The lads in the station in Durrus, I mean. But Joanne insisted we—”

“We wanted to tell you ourselves,” Donal interrupts, before Steve can suggest they’re only here because they were forced to come, or casually deploy any more phrases like shooting a feature, or refer to members of An Garda Síochána as the lads another time. “And to give you this, just in case.” He hands over one of his business cards.

It’s a very simple affair: plain white, the thinnest paper stock, Arial in black. All it says is cross cut films above his name, email address, and mobile phone number. Donal made them himself, on the inkjet in the production office, just this morning, because Steve said printing professional ones was an unnecessary cost.

“This is Donal,” Steve says. “My assistant.”

Assistant director, Donal corrects silently. His official credit, but not one Steve has thus far acknowledged

in real life.

But then, everyone is wearing many hats on this project. Donal is also, effectively, the line producer and production manager. He’s his own assistant and an assistant to Steve—who is directing and producing—as well as acting as the assistant director. Assistant is probably just the easiest catch-all thing to call him, really, when you think about it. That’s all it is.

Donal hopes that’s all it is.

The man is frowning at the business card.

“Don’t worry,” Donal says quickly. “At this distance, with the trees, it’s very unlikely you’ll hear anything.”

The man opens his mouth to respond—to argue, Donal worries, and he’d be right to because if they’re not going to hear anything, why are he and Steve here to warn them not to call the Gardaí if they do?—but before he can, a new hand appears from behind the door.

This one has delicate fingers, pale skin, and tapered nails painted in a high-gloss red. It curls around the edge of the door and pulls it open wider, revealing a second occupant: a woman in a bathrobe. Her long, dark hair is dripping wet.

She takes the business card out of the man’s hands and asks Steve, “What did you say your name was?”

“This is ridiculous,” the man says to her, snatching it back. Then he turns and disappears into the gloom beyond the door.

A moment later, an internal door slams like a thunderclap.

The air swirls and shifts, infused with a new tension. Steve clears his throat and looks off to his left, into the black of the forest, which Donal instinctively knows, after just a few hours in this man’s presence, is a signal that his boss is done with this situation and now it’s up to him to extricate them from it.

“Don’t mind him,” the woman says, managing to pull her eyes off Steve long enough to roll them. “He’s been in a mood since we got here. Says he was told something about a sea view and of course he just cannot allow for the fact that maybe he looked at a few places and got two of them mixed up. He wants to move to somewhere else, but pickings are pretty slim around here. I guess it’s the time of year.” She sighs. Eyes back to Steve. “Did you say you were the director?”

Donal thinks he recognizes the tone, the accompanying expression on the woman’s face. This conversation is about to go one of three ways. One: she’ll ask Steve a bunch of stupid questions, starting with the classic, “I’ve always wondered . . . what does a director actually do?” Two: she’ll

pitch an idea she’s convinced would make a great film that in reality barely amounts to an anecdote. Three: she’ll say she’s always dreamed of being, or is, or thinks she could be, an actor.

Steve knows this too, because he says a curt, “Yep,” and then, without leaving a pause, “Anyway, we should be getting back.”

“Sorry to disturb your evening,” Donal says. Steve is already turning to go, collecting Donal at his elbow, turning him around too, just as Donal adds an excruciatingly cheerful, “Have a good night!”

They crunch their way across the gravel, back to the car. The woman stays standing in the open doorway, watching them, until Donal revs the engine and starts reversing. Only then does she turn and go back inside.

“I think we should make as much noise as we possibly can,” Steve mutters. “Make sure they leave.”