Its windows had been facing the Pacific the first time she saw the house—a two-story wall of glass like the rest, all glittering beacons on cliffs dark with trees. The gray water below frothed into white crests, dashing and drooling between teeth-like formations along the cove.
Marta Montejo closed her eyes and tightly gripped her armrest as the Cessna was rocked by coastal gusts. It’s just the ocean, she told herself. People love the goddamn ocean. Can’t get enough of it. She bounced in her seat as they lurched downward fitfully, and a memory intruded on her silent affirmations.
Salt stinging her eyes, knees scraping rocks and shells, head pushed down by the waves like some wrathful god she was too small to fight. Little lungs running out of breath—
“I hate to be that guy, Clint,” Dane Prescott yelled from the seat beside her, “but when you said you had a private plane, I was picturing something a bit more lux. You’re Hollywood royalty, after all—TMZ said so.”
“You love being that guy,” Clint Mezzasalma called back from the cockpit, “and I haven’t won an Oscar—yet.”
“You alright there, Marta?” Dane asked in his fake Italian accent, prodding her arm.
“Viola,” she corrected him, hoping Clint would notice. Clint had insisted they call each other by their characters’ names even when they weren’t filming.
The plane was jostled by some invisible hand again, and feathers floated around the cabin as the parrot in the cage at their feet bobbed its head and shrieked.
“Viola, no!” the bird screamed.
“I see he’s memorized my lines,” Dane said. “What’s up with him anyways—is he supposed to be my understudy?”
“No, he’s clearly your stunt double.” Marta made kissy sounds at the little green dinosaur, and it cocked its head at her.
“That’s Oswald,” Clint shouted back at them. “He knows all your lines because he practically wrote the screenplay.”
“The Oswald?” Marta asked.
“The Oswald. He’s older than both of you.”
“And we’re ancient in Hollywood years,” Marta said, pouting. “I should have been born a bird, I knew it.”
2. EXT. SEQUOIA POINT AIR STRIP – DAY
On the tarmac, Marta lost her breakfast into an empty popcorn bag from the plane—such a cinematic touch, the barf bags—while Dane chatted up the minimal camera crew. They had traveled separately, in a slightly larger plane with their gear.
“Why the hell did we have to fly here?” Marta asked when she was able to.
“The winding three-hour drive from the nearest highway is even worse.” Clint fished around in his pockets and offered her a cigarette. “And it’s blocked half the time by mud slides, so I didn’t want to chance it.”
“I offered up my yacht,” Dane said, joining them. “So, don’t blame me.”
Clint handed him two suitcases. “It’d be smashed to pieces. There’s no safe harbor here; this is the heart of the Lost Coast.”
Marta took a drag of the cigarette to calm her nerves. She could feel the little wrinkles above her lips deepen with the effort, reminding her why she was here.
“We could have filmed on any vaguely rugged beach,” Dane grumbled, “and used a studio to recreate the house. You didn’t have to get all Werner Herzog about it.”
“It could only be here, and it could only be now,” Clint said cryptically. “You’ll see.”
They were filming the end of the movie first, but they would only be here for three days, thankfully, before returning to L.A.
“But why no cell phones?” Marta wrestled with the wind while trying to tie a scarf around her hair. “If you don’t post to TikTok every day, you fade into irrelevance.”
“Too late for that, dear,” Dane said, passing the suitcases off to her as if she was a valet.
3. INT. MEZZASALMA BEACH HOUSE – DAY
Marta gasped as the bunker-like, windowless entrance to the house transformed into a 180-degree view of the ocean. She kept her distance from the glass while Dane rushed to
press his face against it like a child.
“God, I miss having a view like this.” He breathed in deeply as if he could inhale it. “Mine’s been condemned, you know, after the cliff collapse in Newport Beach.”
“Everyone knows,” Marta said. That was why he needed this job. She averted her eyes from the view, only to be startled by a wall of mirrors reflecting it behind her. No escaping that endless expanse of sickly-blue. She focused on Dane instead. “Anyways, that’s what you get for owning a yacht—hardly a small carbon footprint.”
“Well, you know what they say about the size of a man’s footprint.”
“Your sense of humor hasn’t aged a day.”
Marta turned her attention to the décor of the house. It was as if a glamour spread from a 1970s issue of Architectural Digest had been preserved in aspic. A time capsule of open concept, shag carpet, stone accent walls, and dance studio mirrors, with a pillowy conversation pit in the center to pull it all together like a black hole.
On the coffee table in the conversation pit was a driftwood sculpture that reminded her of tentacles. It had been knocked over onto its side, and a fist-sized glass sphere lay unceremoniously on the floor below it.
The more she explored, the more there was something off about this place, even for the seventies. In the hallway leading to the bedrooms, she turned on a light switch and jumped as a human form in black confronted her. The pale, featureless mannequin wore black robes with an upside-down red triangle on the chest. Crudely stitched into it were the letters OTO.
“Ordo Templi Orientis,” Clint said from behind her, startling her again. “The Order of the Golden Dawn. My grandparents were always hopping from one occult interest to another, then growing bored of them. There’s an original Thoth tarot deck around here somewhere.”
Clint’s grandparents were the esteemed Italian director Eduardo Mezzasalma and the less esteemed 1940s starlet Viola Vasco. Marta and Dane would be re-creating their final weekend together at their second home here in Northern California. Their final weekend, period.
“I want to show you something,” Clint said, leading Marta behind the mirror wall in the living room, where a single painting hung. It was a portrait of a woman on a beach, standing inside a circle drawn in the sand. Her dark hair was twisted into the shape of horns, and a sheer blue veil hung from them, making her head look like a blurry, inverted triangle. A stark ray of light cut the painting in half, with her at the center. On either side were two moons in a starry sky, one waxing and one waning.
Marta was repulsed by it in a way she couldn’t explain, but she said, “It’s stunning.”
“They liked to tell people it was a Leonora Carrington,” Clint said, “but my grandmother just painted it in her style. She turned to painting when she stopped acting, but she burned most of her works as soon as she finished them.”
Marta supposed this was a special insight into the character she’d be portraying, but it only confused her further about the woman.
She followed Clint back to the living room, where the assistant director was pulling a colorful rug over a faded stain between the wet bar and the sunken sofa.
“This is where it happened?” Marta asked, hairs prickling along her arms despite her knowing the end of the script already.
“I’ve never seen a haunted conversation pit before,” Dane added, looking unsettled for a moment before cheering up with, “Can you picture the orgies they had here back in the day? I wonder if ghosts still pile in here for a go at it.”
Clint stepped into the haunted orgy pit and righted the fallen driftwood sculpture. He gently placed the glass ball on top of it and turned to smile at them. “Tomorrow, we shoot. For now, this is the perfect place to watch the sunset. Champagne or scotch?”
“Champagne or scotch?” Oswald the parrot repeated from the ornate bamboo cage he had been transferred to. Marta had forgotten about him. He’d been Eduardo’s parrot, supporting star of his only critically panned film, the 1967 trainwreck The Beach That Death Forgot. The creature must be in his sixties or seventies by now.
That night, Clint insisted Marta and Dane sleep in the guest rooms—Marta chose the one furthest from the living room—while the crew slept at the only hotel in town. The sound of sea lions kept Marta awake for hours, like dogs warning of a trespasser, so she helped herself to more scotch to drown them out.
4. INT. MEZZASALMA BEACH HOUSE – LATER
In the morning, Marta dressed in the costume that had been laid out for her and then emerged to find the crew already gathered in the living room, drinking coffee. Dane was doing tai chi facing the ocean, which looked like it was in a different place than it had been yesterday. The horizon wasn’t right, like the teeth formation in the cove had formed a smirk.
“Did I sleep through an earthquake?” Marta asked. “Why does it look like the house has moved?”
Clint laughed, and the crew joined him.
“I saw you helped yourself to the rest of the scotch,” Clint said. “That’ll do it.”
“I look ridiculous,” Marta complained to change the subject. Her costume was a shapeless white muumuu with an abstract embroidered design that drew too much attention to her crotch.
“You look ridiculous?” Dane turned around and opened his robe to reveal his own costume beneath: a white terrycloth leisure suit with bell bottoms. “I look like a giant towel for wiping up semen.”
Marta snickered, picked up a zucchini muffin from the breakfast spread on the bar, and spat the first bite into a napkin. “Do these muffins have weed in them?”
“A local delicacy,” Clint explained. “You have to understand, when my grandparents were here at the beach house, they were never not in an altered state.”
Dane snorted a line of coke off a tea tray the crew were passing around. “It’s called method acting, Viola—something you wouldn’t know about.”
“No, method acting is when young men effortlessly gain or lose thirty pounds for a role,” Marta said. “But if you can pretend to be attracted to someone older than your daughter, I guess I can try new things too.”
She needed to impress this up-and-coming director more than Dane did. He was still landing romantic lead roles, even if they were in made-for-TV movies. She finished the muffin and grabbed a second one for later.
5. EXT. SEQUOIA POINT BEACH – DAY
From high up on the wooden steps that led down the cliffside, it looked as if the receding tide had stained the black sands of the beach neon blue. Marta had never seen anything like it.
As she drew closer, it looked more like the ocean had deposited a layer of blue tinted condoms all over the sand.
“Velella velella,” Clint said, waving his arm as if casting a spell. “Also known as By-The-Wind Sailors. They live on the surface of deep waters, but they’re at the mercy of currents. Usually, they wash up in late spring and summer, so it’s early for a mass stranding like this.”
“Are they still alive?” Marta picked up one of the blue translucent disks by the rubbery “sail” protruding from it. There was a hint of movement in the tiny tentacles at its base, so she hurled it back into the waves.
Each movement she made caused a sort of shimmer in her vision, as if a giant piece of plastic wrap was a few feet in front of her, quivering in the wind. She picked up another of the jellyfish-like creatures and threw it through the shimmer into the water. And then another. Soon she was racing along the beach, grabbing them up by the handful and tossing them underhand as far as she could. They broke through the shimmering wall in front of her, but more washed to shore moments later.
“You can’t fight Mother Nature,” Dane called after her, his voice slowed down and distorted. “I’m sorry, Viola.”
Marta spun around to see that the camera was rolling, and the assistant director was struggling to hold a boom mic steady in the wind.
“You’re filming?” Marta demanded. “With ambient lighting? And no bounce boards? You can’t do that to a woman in her fifties!”
“We can’t even see your face in those shots,” Clint assured her, “and you were perfect. You did exactly what my grandmother would have done—fight the higher powers, in the face of certain death. Dane, that was some nice improv as well.”
“Did I improv?” Dane asked. “I fear I’ve had too much of the local cuisine.”
“I think we’re ready for you to get in the water.” Clint put a hand on Marta’s shoulder. “Before this fog rolls in any thicker.”
“In the water?” Marta shrugged away from him. “That’s not in the script. I would never have agreed to that.”
“You’re in the water now,” Clint said, pointing at her feet.
Marta looked down to see foam curling around her sandals, lunging at her toes. She jumped back onto the dry sand, leaving one of the sandals behind in the muck.
“Oh, don’t be dramatic,” Dane said, primping his salt-and-pepper hair. “So, you drowned and died for a minute. That was over forty years ago. And this spray tan isn’t going to survive in the fog much longer.”
Marta reluctantly accepted the script from Clint’s outstretched hand. He may be a bit of a weasel, but at least he cast someone the actual age of the woman they’d be playing, instead of having a thirty-something actress play fifty-something, the usual way. She had once been the young actress playing decades older in a film directed by Clint’s father, so this opportunity wasn’t even karmically deserved.
She had to concentrate all her attention on the script to make the letters form coherent words. “I shouldn’t have had that second green muffin. I honestly don’t remember this scene.”
“Focus,” Clint said. “What’s your motivation?”
“I’m dying.” Marta closed her eyes, listening to waves crash on the rocks farther out in the cove. “I’m dying, and I resent the path I chose. The path chosen for me.” Viola was a mysterious woman who eschewed interviews, but Marta knew the basics. Viola had stopped being cast in leading roles after birthing her only child—Clint’s father—then she had disappeared from the Hollywood scene entirely, except to smile in photos with her husband during awards season.
“Roll sound,” Clint said softly.
Marta took off the second sandal, turned around, and walked towards the angry sea, carefully avoiding the swaths of beached velellas. She stepped into the water and let out a scream.
Clint rushed to her side. “What is it?”
“It’s fucking freezing!”
“We’ve got the fireplace going back at the house, and another bottle of scotch on the bar,” Clint said, lighting a joint he’d pulled from his coat pocket and handing it to her. “This’ll be over in a flash.”
Take two. Marta walked into the water up to her ankles and seductively pulled the white muumuu over her head. Normally, worried about cellulite and spider veins, she’d insist on having a body double, but by now it was so foggy there may as well be Vaseline smeared on the camera lens. She turned to smile at Dane on the beach and threw the muumuu in his direction. Then she trudged her way through the frigid water up to her chest, while Clint followed with the camera to the water’s edge.
“What if you could live forever,” she called to Dane over the sound of waves bursting against rock, “but you had to be someone else?”
She ducked her head under the numbing water, plugged her nose, and found that she was buoyant this time as salt sloshed against her. She had to fight the ocean from pushing her up onto the beach instead of pulling her down to deeper waters. Marta pictured herself as Godzilla, plotting to storm Tokyo from his watery abode. Heavy. Dangerous.
Out of breath, she emerged from the foam, dark hair dripping, while Dane ran to her. He held her, his back to the camera, while she looked past it into the distance.
“Do you hear it, Eddie? Do you hear it calling me?”
6. EXT. SEQUOIA POINT BEACH – LATER
Warmed and dry, a little tipsy, and wrapped in a black and red poncho with fringe, Marta was glad there would be no more outdoor nudity. The fog had drifted away up the coast as the day wore on, but the air had grown colder without its murky blanket.
A little further down the beach was an archway in one of the rock formations, which she hadn’t noticed due to its west-facing direction. The hole in its center reminded her of the shape of a key—an almost rectangular opening with a larger, rounded top. This is where they would be filming that night.
As the sky grew darker, Marta saw why Clint had insisted they film here and now. The sun’s descent into the sea lined up perfectly with the keyhole in the rock, so that a fiery red path appeared against the black sands, with her in the center. She turned to look at Dane and saw that her shadow had devoured him. It split the path of light in half, stretching all the way to the cliffs.
The dark windows of vacation homes suggested they were the only ones to witness this wonder of nature—what a shame and a thrill at the same time.
How ominous she must look to the camera, silhouetted in that feverish light. She was reminded of the painting that had repelled her the day before.
“Cut!” Clint called out.
As the glowing path withered into glints of orange on the water, Marta was strangely tempted to dive in. Just to see how that liquid sunlight felt on her skin. “Up for a night swim, Eddie?”
Dane recoiled from her as if she were a random fan who had interrupted his dinner. Someone he didn’t recognize. “I’m not going to freeze my ass off if it’s not in the script, darling.”
7. INT. MEZZASALMA BEACH HOUSE – NIGHT
In the guest room’s vintage waterbed, Marta dreamt of blue velellas washing up on the beach. Each wave brought thousands more, until they had piled up higher than the cliffside. The weight of them broke the beach-house windows, and they flopped into the conversation pit, as if they had been drawn there by some unseen force.
7. INT. MEZZASALMA BEACH HOUSE – DAY
“To die and be revived,” Clint said after exhaling a mouthful of smoke, “is to become a conduit.” He passed the glass pipe to Marta. “That’s why you have such potential as an actress in the right role. Like a . . . medium channeling characters.”
Marta stared at the milky blue swirls in the blown glass, and they coiled up like jellyfish tentacles. She took another sip of champagne and passed the pipe to Dane. “I’ve probably had enough of this.”
Clint had claimed the weed grown here was different than what they were used to, and she was beginning to believe it was more than a cheesy cannatourism pitch.
“Grab me another, would you, Eddie?” Oswald the parrot said, dancing from foot to foot on his perch. He puffed up his feathers when he caught Marta watching him.
“The sun will be setting soon,” Clint announced, rising from the sunken sofa, “and tonight is the Spring Equinox. We only have one chance to get this scene right.”
“Oh, please.” Dane stood to follow him. “There’s this thing called CGI, Clint. You should google it.”
Marta climbed out of the pit and tripped over her new costume, a maxi dress embroidered with moon phases. Clint caught her and patted her on the shoulder, saying, “Almost done here.”
She braved a look past him, out the windows. In the middle of their view, where it hadn’t been the day before, was the keyhole rock formation. But so much of what she had seen in the last couple days seemed like a place found only in dreams.
The clap of a film slate in front of her face made her wonder how long she had been standing there, staring. The long wisps of cloud in the sky were now salmon pink.
“Action!”
The salmon pink was now burnt orange, and Marta was lounging in the conversation pit.
“I know about you and your little Prop Master,” she recited, swirling an ice cube in an empty rocks glass. “But it doesn’t matter anymore. Grab me another, would you, Eddie?”
She held out the glass to Dane, who looked somewhere between embarrassed and tortured. He hesitated before taking it from her and busying himself at the bar.
The sun was kissing the top of the rock formation now. As it aligned with the archway, the blazing path appeared again on the water, stretching towards them. Marta was momentarily blinded as crew members on the dark beach reflected it up to them with mirrors.
The clink of ice in a glass. The scent of peat and smoke.
The sunset glowed upside-down in the glass sphere now, on its driftwood stand. Marta pulled the vintage revolver from under her cushion, hid it behind her back, and stood. Dane stepped away from the bar, into the path of light, and she aimed the gun at him, thinking it looked like something out of an old cowboy film. “Per lunam et oceanum—”
“Viola, no!” He held up a hand, and the glass fell with an unsatisfying thud on shag carpet.
“Et omnia sidera celestia,” Marta continued, and another voice joined her. Oswald was repeating her lines, the little green menace. She continued anyways and pulled the trigger.
She was thrown backwards onto the sunken couch. Her ears rang, and her vision blurred and wavered as if she were being pulled underwater. The gun was warm in her hand, and she flung it away, trying to focus.
Dane was face-down on the throw rug, and Clint and the crew had joined in Oswald’s throaty chants. Before she could ask what the hell was going on, the ground beneath them all groaned and shifted.
The house was moving. The view in the windows shifted, like that skyscraper restaurant in San Francisco where she had once filmed a romantic dinner scene. But it kept going, until she couldn’t see the ocean anymore. She tried to scramble out of the pit, but the pillows slid beneath her, dragging her down, while the room shook.
A high whine pierced through the rumbling, and Marta screamed over it as her vision faded out again: “What is happening?”
7. INT. MEZZASALMA BEACH HOUSE – LATER
Viola gazed at the stranger reflected in the mirror wall, touching her high cheek bones and running fingers through her dark, silken hair. “Luna saeculorum, I’m exquisite.”
Clint ran to her, stopping at the edge of the conversation pit.
“You found my instructions,” she said, turning to him. “Who are you?”
“Clint Mezzasalma, your grandson.” He blushed and held out a hand to help her up. “I found what you left on the back of the painting, and I had some help from Oswald too.”
“He never could keep his mouth shut,” she said, and the parrot shrank away from her. “I see it’s finally come in handy.”
Viola stepped over Dane on her way to the bar and poured herself a drink. “What do you ask of me, Clint Mezzasalma?”
“Who better to play you, in the story of your life, than you?”
FADE OUT.
Originally published in The Rack II: More Stories Inspired by Vintage Horror Paperbacks, edited by Marissa van Uden.
