FEMME (a horror short story)
A tour guide who makes up salacious rumors about a recently-deceased estate owner finds herself on the tour of a lifetime when her tour goes off script.
FEMME by Carlyn Greenwald
Evermore is nothing without death.
History would beg to differ. It would say that people cared about Gina Hastings’s Holmby Hills estate long before death joined the party—that the house had magic built into it as far back as the first plank of Spanish wood was placed in the spires of the two-story princess tower. That the bougainvillea wrapped itself around the outside of the home to protect Gina from the paparazzi that climbed over the wrought iron fences for decades. They would say that the house was charmed, that it spoke to Gina, and that there was just something special between them.
“Welcome to Evermore. I bought the Evermore Estate in 1950, ten years before the premiere of my masterpiece, the film Femme, an Oscar darling. Evermore was the first home I ever owned on my own. With house managers coming and going throughout the next two decades, I faced a sobering reality: it wasn’t enough to have the money to buy a lavish estate, I had to sustain the income needed to maintain such a property. And that would not be easy.”
Gina Hastings’s introductory recording sounds from a little, yellow device that would look more at home hanging around a child’s neck than an adult’s. But I listen as I sit in the office built into one of the three studies in Evermore Estate. The one with the least windows, the most faded wooden floor, and desks and chairs that were pulled from the garage. Only one piece of décor graces the walls—a black and white photograph of Gina Hastings with an arm around her best friend Carla, both decked out in classic Hollywood elegance, out in the estate’s garden. But I’m focusing on the audio right now. It’s the one business decision this place made that I always thought was smart—having Gina narrate the audio tour. It makes people feel welcomed in as guests, makes it seem like she really cares about the dry facts someone wrote for her to recite.
It helps that she’s got a hot voice, the kind with deep tones that trail like a jazz song. Documentary narrator voice, Disney villain voice, porn star voice. Gina Hastings is beautiful, sure, what actress who made it as a teen in the 40s isn’t? But I know it was her voice that made her.
Right now, though, it makes me want to go to sleep.
November sun bleeds through the slats in the shades, but I might as well be doused in every spotlight in Hollywood, it’s so bright in my hungover brain. I’ve tried to be chipper after rejections, but this last one was too much. As soon as I got off the phone with my agent, I stepped outside and took the first pills I could get my hands on, drowning them in the nearly-empty bottle of whiskey I had in my kitchen.
I came to this town young, thinking I had all the time in the world. But the casting directors started saying those dreadful words when I lose out on auditions—you’re getting a little too old. I never thought it would happen at twenty-five, but it’s become a pattern I can’t ignore.
And when you’re too old in Hollywood, there’s nowhere to go but the dark corners.
My advanced age may prohibit me from playing Waitress #2, but not from attending the sleazy parties in Laurel Canyon. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky and some gross old man will want to put me in a movie after a drunken fuck in the host’s guestroom. If that never happens, the drugs will at least make the end a soft landing. Maybe they’ll take me before my rent that I can’t pay in two months is due and they throw me out on the streets.
I’ve tried every substance manufactured for a good time and nothing dulls the edge of my failure here. Just as no amount of ibuprofen will stave off the headache currently pounding between my ears.
“After numerous discussions with my team at the end of the 70s, I ultimately made the decision to open my estate up to the public.”
Ten minutes until my next tour. All I can feel is a twisting ball of nausea, some mix of the hangover and taking those painkillers on an empty stomach. The nerves have shot my appetite for weeks now. All I want to do is sink into this stained office chair until the tour starts, but if Robb catches me off my game, that last audition won’t be the worst thing to happen to me this week. I open my compact to check my shoddy makeup—
—and yank my finger back, a smear of blood left behind on a jagged crack in the mirror. Right. I threw it against the wall after getting the news about the audition last night. Muttering words that would make Gina Hastings’s fans clutch their pearls, I search for the dusty, first aid kit I was told exists. I ball my fingertip into my fist, containing the bright red in this dangerously beige room as best I can.
“I never considered it a real option. I wouldn’t have attempted it if not for Oliver’s encouragement in the years leading up to his tragic passing. I remember thinking: ‘what would possibly interest people about my house?’”
A question I ask myself every day that I have been working here for the last two years. Something I ask myself right now as I rifle through this useless fucking office full of empty drawers. The blood seeps from between my knuckles like I’m squeezing a package of strawberry jelly. For a moment, I consider if it’d help to try to lick it away, but the thought turns my already sensitive stomach.
Robb walks in right then. “What the hell happened to you?”
Robb’s in his late fifties and is supposedly best friends with one of Gina Hastings’s former managers. Something where he met Gina several times. He has like five photos of him and Gina on a bulletin board in this office, so despite him saying he was so close to Gina, I assume that line-up represents every thirty-second interaction he’s ever had with the woman. Me? I never met Gina. A fact Robb likes to remind me of, on average, every third shift.
I hold up my bloody hand in faux innocence. “Compact cut me.”
Robb watches as a trickle of my blood runs down the meat of my palm and slithers down my arm into the crook of my elbow. “You need to get a grip, Jamie. I know you think this job is a joke, but it’s not. There are dozens of Gina Hastings fans lined up to take this position.”
I don’t have any doubt that there actually are dozens of Gina Hastings fans ready to take my place. Key word: dozens. Groups of twelve among the 3.2 million people who live in Los Angeles as of the year of our lord 1988.
Still, there only needs to be one for me to lose this job.
“I’m not messing around,” I say. “I—”
“You’re the most complained about of all our tour guides. Our sales have gone up by two hundred percent since Gina passed away last year. It should be the easiest job in the world to take bereaved fans around her last home and share some of her life and legacy with them. Yet you can’t even do that.”
“I’m not—”
A glob of blood breaks free from my arm and drops onto the wood.
“I won’t disrespect Gina’s legacy by having a lackluster guide in her home. She will rest easy knowing the members of this staff are trustworthy stewards of her legacy. Do I make myself clear?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. He jerks his body over to one of the desk drawers, removes a first aid kit, and slams it onto the nearest desk. “Keep it interesting. And clean that up. These floors are over one hundred years old.”
Once Robb leaves, I take the first aid kit and duck into the employee bathroom. I clean and bandage my hand, eyes on the decor. The bottom half of the walls and the shower are lined in pale-pink tiles, the upper half made up of flamingo print wallpaper. The design looks amazing in photographs, but gives me vertigo if I stare at it too long. There’s a chip in the golden mirror above my head, a flaw that I can’t imagine the perfect Gina Hastings or a control freak like Robb allowing. I run my finger along it, little golden flecks transferring to my skin.
It’s unbelievable. I live my miserable little life here while the legendary woman who bought these outrageous pink tiles rots in a garden in the backyard.
When I return to the office, I don’t clean up the stain on the office floor. The house can have my blood. It isn’t the first it’s taken.
Interesting, Robb said.
Yeah, sure, I’ll give an interesting tour. No problem.
