ONE
It was the size of the house that got Harry every time she saw it. Of course she'd seen houses that size before, in Certain Neighborhoods around Chicago, giant houses whose sheer enormity should have relegated them to the suburbs. This city house wasn't a McMansion, though-one of those classless boxes, bulging oversized dwellings for those who wanted to display their money, or at least their debt.
It was decidedly not new, not the province of some futures broker or investment banker. It had the same gray stone face as her own two-flat apartment building-a fifteen-minute bus ride and half a world away, economically speaking-but it was twice the size. The house covered two lots, with a third lot for a side yard. As an apartment dweller she didn't often contemplate property taxes, but just the fact of those three lots made queasy multi-digit numbers dance before her eyes.The building was three stories plus a basement level. The windows were tall on the lowest story, less so on the second one, and downright tiny on the topmost, giving the overall effect of slowly closing eyes if you glanced from the bottom to the top.
Other than the oddly sized windows there were no particular architectural flourishes save two. At the northeast corner of the roof a sculpture protruded like a Notre Dame gargoyle-a horse's head and neck carved in stone, the horse's lips pulled back, its eyes wild. All around the horse, stone flames rose, waiting to burn. Harry thought she'd grimace, too, if she was trapped in fire for all eternity.
In addition to the frantic stallion, there was a name carved in an arc above the door-BRIGHT HORSES.
The entire property was surrounded by a ten-foot-high black iron fence. The only two entry points were the gate in front of her and the sliding gate in front of the garage in the back.
Harry reached toward the call box so she could be buzzed in, but paused as she heard her phone chirp in her pocket. She pulled it out and saw a text from her son, Gabe.
FORGOT MY CHEM REPORT! IT'S ON MY DESK? followed by a praying hands emoji.
Already at work, she texted back, and tacked on the woman shrugging and holding her hands up.
She only worked three days a week, so if Gabe had tried on a different day she might have hopped the bus and brought his report to him. Maybe. Part of her thought he needed to learn the consequences of not thinking ahead and putting the report in his bag the night before. The other part of her wanted to cut him some slack, given that it was his freshman year and the first time the kids were back at school post-pandemic, even if it was only three days a week.
She was grateful that it was only two days off in-person schooling, as her unemployed spring (furloughed from her server job, never to return) coupled with overseeing remote learning for a thirteen-year-old with ADHD had resulted in screaming, emotional breakdowns for both of them. Having Gabe's learning monitored by qualified teachers was a profound relief.
Harry watched the reply bubbles churn on her screen until Gabe's answer popped up. A sad face emoji, followed by a shrugging boy.
Noise crackled from the call box and a deep baritone voice emitted from it. "Are you going to stand there all day, or perhaps you'd like to work?"
Harry glanced up at the camera perched on the top corner of the fence. The preponderance of cameras in and around the house always left her feeling uneasy, even though she understood the necessity of them. There were a few too many, in Harry's opinion, though she was careful to keep that opinion to herself.
"Sorry, Mr. Castillo," she said, and the gate buzzed.
Harry pushed the gate open and hurried up the walk as Javier Castillo opened the front door, watching her approach.
"We'll start in the blue room today," he said as she jogged up the steps.
"No problem," she said, pausing in the doorway. She pulled her slippers-plain gray terry cloth scuffs, bought expressly for and used only at the Castillo residence-out of her backpack, placed them on the floor in the entryway and toed out of her sneakers one by one, sliding each foot into a slipper without ever touching the ground.
Harry picked up her sneakers and carried them inside, placing them on the special shelf to the left of the doorway. No outside dirt, damp or germs touched the floors in Bright Horses.
The shelf that housed her sneakers was something like a preschooler's cubby, with a space for shoes at the bottom, hooks for bags and coats in the center, and a top shelf for hats and other items. Harry pulled off her black windbreaker and hung it on a hook. She slid her cell phone into her backpack as Mr. Castillo watched. There was a strict no-phone policy inside the house. Violation of this rule was grounds for immediate dismissal, though she was allowed to go outside during her lunch break to check messages.
Mr. Castillo held out the box of latex gloves stored on a side table behind the door. Harry pulled on the gloves, wincing a little as she did. She hated the feeling of pulling on the gloves, the way the material seemed to grab and yank at her skin. Once the gloves were actually on she didn't mind them as much, although she still liked the moment at the end of the day when she was allowed to peel them off and let her skin breathe again.
Harry adjusted her medical mask-Mr. Castillo never allowed her to remove it inside the house except in the kitchen when eating or drinking-so that all that was visible were her faded blue eyes and the bit of her forehead that showed when she pulled her pin-straight blond hair into a ponytail. She followed him down the hallway and up the stairs to the second floor.
The entry to the house was deliberately neutral-the plain gray carpet and faded wallpaper practically screamed, There's nothing to see here! But upon leaving the downstairs hall and passing into any other room the true nature of Bright Horses was revealed.
It started on the stairway, after the first few steps, when the stairs curved to the left, out of sight from anyone standing in the entryway. A large framed poster of a voluptuous blonde in a red dress hung on the wall there. A snarling cat, blood dripping from its mouth, curled over her right shoulder, and over her left were the words SHE WAS MARKED WITH THE CURSE OF THOSE WHO SLINK AND COURT AND KILL BY NIGHT! Above her head the words CAT PEOPLE floated over a clock whose hands showed midnight.
Harry always smiled at this poster, as Cat People was one of her favorite films, though Mr. Castillo had hastened to point out that the poster wasn't an original print. Most of the posters that lined the wall along the stairs were contemporary copies, though there were a few genuine articles-the original U.K. quad poster for Hammer's The Curse of Frankenstein, the lurid red French theatrical poster for Eyes Without a Face, a U.S. lobby poster for An American Werewolf in London.
It was slow going to the top of the stairs, as Mr. Castillo always got out of breath halfway up and had to stop. Harry didn't remark on this, or offer any help. She'd made the mistake of offering assistance once, saying she would fetch a glass of water.
"I'm fine," Mr. Castillo snapped. "I'm just fat."
Harry attributed his breathlessness to lack of regular exercise rather than size-she knew plenty of heavier people who had no trouble with stairs because they ran or lifted weights on the regular, and plenty of thin people who tired after walking half a block. But she hadn't said this.
She hadn't said anything unnecessary or even vaguely personal, because it had been her first day. She was grateful to have work again, and desperately averse to jeopardizing her new source of income.
Even now, more than a month later, she never said anything that might be construed as personal. She was too much in awe of him, in awe of this person who'd let her into his home.
Javier Castillo had brown hair going gray, brown eyes behind steel-rimmed spectacles, was on the shorter side (though not as short as Harry, who had reached five feet at age thirteen and never grown again) and overall had the completely nondescript appearance of any random person on the block. He was the sort who would never attract attention unless you knew who he was, would never be whispered about if he went to the grocery store-which he never did. He never went anywhere if he could help it.
Because of this, very few people in his neighborhood realized one of the world's greatest living horror directors lived among them: Javier Castillo, director and writer of fifteen films, most of them visually groundbreaking, genre-defying masterpieces. His film The Monster had won the Oscar for Best Picture five years earlier and swept most of the other major categories along the way, including Director and Original Screenplay. The world had waited breathlessly for the announcement of his next project.
Then a shocking, unthinkable incident happened, and Castillo withdrew into his California home, and there was no mention of potential new movies while the paparazzi stood outside his house with their cameras ready for any sign of life within.
After one too many wildfires came too close to his residence he decided to move, somewhat incongruously, to Chicago. He packed up his legendary and possibly priceless collection of movie props and memorabilia and brought them to a cold Midwestern city where the last major urban burning was decidedly in the distant past.
If it wasn't for those California wildfires Harry would still be collecting unemployment, frantically responding to job ads with a horde of other desperate people, never hearing back, wondering how long Gabe would believe her tight smile followed by, "Everything's going to be fine."
But instead there was this miracle, this miracle of a strange and reclusive director who needed someone to help him clean his collection of weird stuff three days a week, and so Harry climbed up the stairs and listened to Javier Castillo huff and puff.
The second floor was essentially one big room divided by a load-bearing archway. The stairs curved up to the southwest corner of this room and stopped there. The stair to the third floor was on the northeast corner, which always made Harry think of a Clue board, with its seemingly random staircases scattered all around. There was a black railing running along from the southeast corner of the room to the top of the stairs to keep people from falling straight down the first-floor stairwell.
The bucket of cleaning supplies was ready at the top of the stairs. Harry and Mr. Castillo each took a long-handled duster. Mr. Castillo went to the far end of the room while Harry started on the closest figure.
The blue room wasn't entirely blue. The carpet was blue-and Harry really thought he ought to get rid of the carpet; it collected dust and it was such a difficult room to vacuum. The wallpaper had blue flowers patterned on it, blue flowers that made Harry think of Agatha Christie's story "The Blue Geranium."
Except that's not quite right, Harry thought. In "The Blue Geranium" the color of the flower on the wall changed to blue because of a chemical in the air-proof of poison.
Nobody was in danger of poisoning in Bright Horses. Nobody lived there except Mr. Castillo-and his props, of course, and some of those were so lifelike that Harry sometimes thought they really were watching her, just out of the corner of her eye. When she'd turn, the figures would be still and glassy-eyed, the artificial pupils staring off into the middle distance, never having focused on her or anything else at all.
Harry loved most of the films that the props came from, but despite this the blue room, in particular, gave her a creepy-crawly itch on the back of her neck. She didn't know why. She knew the props were make-believe, knew they were just elements of the movie magic that she loved so much. But the feeling still persisted-a feeling of something not quite right.
All the various members of the collection were posed on skeleton-like frames, so that the overall result was a museum diorama grouped according to some internal catalog system of Mr. Castillo's devising.
Harry dusted a Xenomorph puppet from Alien. The creature's jaw extended from the head as if it was about to bite. Harry liked the Alien movies. She was a fan of most of the source material for the props littered around Bright Horses. But she'd discovered, to her surprise, that she didn't like the pieces separated from their performers, didn't see the appeal of latex and foam rubber without animation. Devoid of both life and context, the costumes were nothing but shed snakeskin, a pantomime of their original intent.
Harry moved from the Xenomorph to a figure that had been featured in one of Mr. Castillo's films, a kind of half-goat/half-demon hybrid. In the film, A Messenger from Hell, the creature, Sten, had acted as a sort of sinister guardian to the main character, Flora. It was one of Harry's favorite movies, a transcendently beautiful piece of art that was also deeply grotesque-in other words, a Castillo film.
But the first time she was confronted with the mask and costume she found herself deeply, viscerally repulsed, barely able to look at it and unable to explain why.
As Harry fluttered the duster over the face she caught, as she always did, the faint odor of sweat and talcum powder. She'd thought, on the first occasion, that this was simply the scent of the actor who'd worn the mask, lingering inside the rubber. But then she realized that was absurd, that all these pieces were specially cleaned and treated before Mr. Castillo displayed them. Of course it didn't still smell like the actor.
Still, every time Harry dusted the sharp distended chin, the high cheekbones, the pointed ears, the curling horns, she was certain that the fanged mouth would curl up in a terrible smile, that the icy blue eyes would shift in her direction a moment before long-fingered hands grasped her shoulders. And every time she felt this way she shook off her unease, recognizing it as irrational. She loved the character in the movie, and a costume and mask were just that-empty props. They were nothing to be frightened of. ...
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