Lunar Park

Rapidly my father’s face was illuminated in the skull.

And then another face replaced it.

Clayton’s.

I was stunned into rigidity.

My panting could not be heard above the meters or the cameras.

The skeleton-thing was now standing at the bottom of the staircase.

It was making the clicking noises with its teeth.

Within the skull were eyeballs.

Suddenly, it launched itself toward us.

Miller and I quickly backed away and when we did, the thing stopped.

It began raising its arms, extending them upward.

The arms were so long that finger bones scraped the ceiling.

I was moaning.

What were we waiting for? I didn’t understand what we were waiting for it to do.

My father’s face flashed on again, followed by Clayton’s.

As the faces rapidly interchanged, sharing the skull, the resemblance between the two men could not be questioned.

It was the face of a father being replaced by the face of a son.

It kept clicking its teeth, as if chewing something invisible.

Its fingers started trailing across the ceiling as it moved toward us.

When it started lowering its arms, both Miller and I noticed something.

It was carrying a scalpel.

As it lunged toward us I braced myself, my eyes locked open.

“I hear you,” I whispered. “I hear you.”

And then the lights in the house flickered for a moment.

When the house was suddenly reborn with light the thing stopped and tilted its head before swirling into a cyclone of ash.

Sam and Dale watched this from the top of the stairs.

The moment the house burst into light they raced toward us.

Miller was asking me, “Did you turn off the fuse box?”

“Yes, yes.”

Miller breathed in. “There are two spirits at work here—”

At the moment Miller said this, the door to my office—visible from where we now stood—flew off its hinges with such force that it sailed across the room and dented a wall.

(I did not see this because I was staring at the ash that had sprayed across the generator. The writer described it to me later on the plane.)

The ceiling above us suddenly cracked open in a long, jagged strip, dusting our hair with plaster.

(I don’t remember seeing this but the writer insisted I had. The writer said, You were gaping.)

Paint began to peel and curl in waves off the walls.

No one knew where to look.

And as I watched this in a dream, I saw that underneath the paint was the green-striped wallpaper that had covered the walls of the house in Sherman Oaks.

When I whispered to myself the words “I hear you” the house was again plunged into darkness.

Outside, I stood on the lawn, dazed, muttering to myself.

Outside, Dale and Sam were pacing the sidewalk excitedly, talking into cell phones, recounting what they had seen to the rest of Miller’s staff.

Outside, Miller tried to explain a situation to me.

It involved a ghost who wanted to tell me something.

It involved a demon who did not want this information imparted to me.

There were actually two forces opposing each other within the house.

It was fairly simple. Yet what Miller defined as “simple” did not apply to anything in my life.

But I didn’t believe in my life anymore, so I was forced to accept this as if it was standard.

Outside, on the lawn, Miller was chain-smoking.

Miller tried explaining things but you wouldn’t listen.

You just said, “Get rid of it.”

You were standing in one place.

You weren’t aware of anything.

You didn’t admit that the words you’d whispered made the thing dissolve into ash.

You were thinking that you would come back later in the afternoon.

You were thinking of burning the house down.

“The house will need to be fumigated,” Miller was saying.

It would need to be fumigated because the spirits could enter any living thing in the house—and this included any animal or insect life—in order to continue their existence.

After the fumigation it would take twenty-four hours to set up the equipment required to cleanse the house. The entire process should take less than two days.

But what was happening after the fumigation? Had I missed something? Did any of us still exist? What world had I moved to? What was occupying my mind?

“What will happen after the fumigation,” Miller said, lighting another Newport, “is an exorcism.”

I had started making a plan.

“Mr. Ellis, I’m curious about something.”

I did not know that my plan was coinciding with Miller’s.

“Was your father cremated?”

I was going to travel, and I nodded my answer.

“Where are your father’s ashes?”

I was going to fly across the country.

“Did you spread them according to his wishes?”

I was shaking my head silently, because I understood what Miller was saying.

“What were you supposed to do with them?”

I was going to reorganize myself.

“Mr. Ellis? Are you here with us?”

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 8

28. Los Angeles

A security guard at the gate checked my name before I drove up the winding road that led to a house the size of a hotel and made entirely from glass at the top of Bel Air. After a valet took my rental car, I stepped into a party where an old girlfriend who was wearing fake eyelashes and had married a billionaire called out, “Hey, gorgeous!” when I entered the room, and we talked about old times and movie people and what she was doing with her life (“I rock” was all I could ascertain), and since guests seemed to be avoiding me because of my battered face I just moved on until I was standing in a library filled with leather-bound scripts and golden retriever puppies were stumbling around everywhere and I found an issue of next week’s National Enquirer in a bathroom and there was a framed poster in the eldest son’s room of two words in huge red block lettering (GET READY) and there was the actress who had costarred in the movie that Keanu Reeves and Jayne made back in 1992 and we had what I felt was an inappropriate, if innocuous, conversation since we had never met (“Jayne left the set for a couple of days to be with you. Someone in your family had died, right?” “Yeah, my dad”) and then Sarah’s father—the record executive—showed up and seemed shocked to see me (I wasn’t