SUSAN TAYLOR - THE BALLAD OF JIMMY S:A TALE OF TERROR AND WOE TOLD IN FIVE DRAMATIC PARTS

Susan Taylor, an Oklahoma native, is a survivor of the Borderlands Short Story/Novel Boot Camp and has Bachelor degrees in both English and Psychology from the University of Massachusetts-Lowell as well as an MBA from Saint Leo University. She has been the editor and associate editor for several horror and humor webzines as well as a copyeditor for over ten years.

​The Ballad of Jimmy S:
A Tale of Terror and Woe Told in Five Dramatic Parts

 Part One: Exposition
One
 
Jimmy S measured each and every step with a full foot length between the heel of his front foot and toe of his back.
He measured the steps using his size ten and a half feet that had worn the same brand of Marcoliani cashmere/silk blend socks and wing-tipped shoes—Alfred Sargents with a lace closure for easy on and off, a suede and fabric lining to ensure no blistering, and a lightly cushioned insole that massaged his feet with every step he took—since he could remember. Since anyone who knew Jimmy S could remember. He had pairs in every color they were offered in: antique chestnut, black, burgandy, and even a white pair purchased during an ill-fated shopping trip in the eighties.
To this day, he still looked in his wardrobe and wondered what had come over him.
He'd thought time and again what lengths he would go if he had to find another supplier, if, God forbid, they went out of business, and he had to find a new wing-tipped shoe altogether. To him, nightmares were made of this; it gave him shivers and woke him up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night.
Those size ten and a half feet were attached to legs—with a thirty-two inch inseam—that wore the same style of dress pants—Givenchy—for as long as he did his wingtips. Attached to those legs were a forty-inch torso, and attached to that torso were thirty-eight inch arms, which wore the same white pinpoint cotton shirt—never striped or pastel—, vest, and jacket. On top of the torso sat a head—shaved close to the skin and brushed forward in a style that most men who were in a balding way favored—that was still somewhat delightful to look at. The head held amber-colored eyes, a largish nose, and a full set of lips. While the individual features might have looked average at best if they were put on anyone else, his English-Spanish ancestry as a whole had an unnerving effect on the populace of womenfolk. At around fifty, his skin sagged slightly, but not enough to give his face too much character, definitely not enough to make anyone conclude he had been afflicted by the palsy. His body was rounder than it had been in his thirties, and even up until his mid-forties, but still managed to give women all over the world something to think about as they watched him on their television screens.
The only change he ever allowed in his choice of clothing was that of neckties and hats. He'd wear a regular tie and fedora, depending on the occasion, and bow tie and Homburg—Jimmy S had never even once considered a Bowler, or the silly Porkpie, or even worse, the Cowboy hat—if he was feeling particularly plucky and felt like a cosmopolitan man of action, a man of international intrigue. However, he'd never sink as low as opting for anything he deemed ordinary, such as being caught in public in a turtleneck, or coordinating with a paisley necktie, or the sporting of any pastel whatsoever.
Pastels were entirely off-limits.
He'd only wear coats if the weather deemed appropriate, and sometimes he'd bundle up in an unbelievable amount of layers to ward off anything Mother Nature threw his way. Growing up in the Northeast had caused this undeniable habit. He'd sometimes wear the minimum black wool coat, but most oftentimes he'd bulk up underneath it with more, including a coat that was once his father's as well as a leather motorcycle jacket that was given to him by a paramour.
(It goes without saying here that he was just as quirky in the bedroom as he was in his routines. That's what the women in his life—most notably his second wife Sofia the Spaniard—would have one believe if they were to tell about his odd yet awe-inspiring sexual proclivities over a cappuccino.)
Sometimes he used his ebony-shafted walking stick with the solid 14K gold cap that was encrusted with Swarovski elements, sometimes not, which was always paired with his winter attire.
People who had contact with him in the small village where he lived during his time off from filming on a daily basis couldn't help but notice his peculiarities such as the walking stick in bad weather and the vest-less linen summer suit in warmer weather when he came back to the village. Most people kept their distance from Jimmy S, and they knew just enough about the inner workings of the situation to avoid pointing out any of these oddities. Along with being an eccentric, he was also a rather well-known actor working under the pseudonym of James Steele, who starred in McGuff and Friend and who had entranced millions in his devilish, yet satirical, characterization of his Golden Globe, Emmy–winning television alter ego.

 
Two
 
On one morning the second day back from filming the ninth season of McGuff and Friend, when the rhododendrons and azaleas bloomed in jewel-toned hues of magenta and lilac, and the air crisp with spring and rain, Jimmy S took the weather into serious consideration when choosing his attire for the day. Some may have called him fussy, or fastidious, or even persnickety, but he considered himself simply a man of good taste and vigilance.
Firstly, he checked the weather on television, after turning it from Channel Four I-Team news that played a clip about a gas main that had exploded in downtown Manhattan. He watched for a moment, feeling stimulated and compelled to watch more. Hairs prickled all over his body. However, he had other matters to attend to and found the Weather Channel in HD after a few more clicks. From the nightstand, he took a bottle of prescription painkillers from the drawer, noted he had only a handful left, and washed down a few with a crystal glass of lukewarm water that tasted awkward and stale. The painting of Our Lady of Perpetual Help on the far wall looked down at him like he’d just picked his nose and made a meal of it.
He missed Buenos Aires and Catalina something terrible, but he had to get his old routine back in hand. His head still throbbed and the injured area above his ear still tender to the touch. For the time being, what happened in Buenos Aires had to be forgotten, the hows and whys of it all, but the conspicuous scar above his right ear begged to differ.
Waiting for the pills to settle in his stomach, he watched for a moment and listened until he heard the information he needed. He then went down the back stairs and stuck his head out the servants' entrance in back of his family’s stately manor to double check it, and then out the front door to triple check. Before opening the door, he cocked an ear and listened for his father, hoping to avoid the old man.
After all his checking, he decided it was a regular suit kind of day. Small sprinkles of rain fell from the sky—he found it was the same weather at the front door as it was at the back—but it was nothing his Mario Talarico black canopy umbrella with a hand-sewn leather handle couldn't manage.
He had a schedule to keep, however, and he dressed with both care and haste. His television role had recessed for the summer, and it excited him to resume his springtime routine in the village where he had lived since he was an infant. He set the Fedora firmly on his head, tilted to the right ever so slightly to cover the distressing scar where hair refused to grow.
An echoey knock resounded on the great oaken door in the main foyer. Jimmy S looked around for a servant of any type to beat him to the punch, but none came running like his father paid them to do. The knock continued and Jimmy S swore it grew louder and louder, and when it finally reached a deafening crescendo, he reached for the door knob. The noise came to an abrupt halt.
He pulled the door open with some effort, raised his other arm up in a sweeping gesture with his umbrella held out and bent down into a slight bow, and said, “I beg you, do come in!”
A light chilly breeze ruffled the fabric of the umbrella and his person, but nary a person stood before him.
Another hallucination?
He didn’t think so. Perhaps it had been a servant knocking about somewhere else in the grand estate. Instead of standing alone like an imbecile in the great foyer, he shook off the feeling of foreboding and went about his day.

Three
 
As Jimmy S turned to leave, he felt a pair of hawkish eyes burning into the back of his neck. Stevie Sr, his lifelong antagonizer and father, stood in the library doorway—William Blake’s painting A Vision of the Last Judgement just behind him—with his eyes fixed on his eldest son.
Jimmy S recoiled slightly as he met him. His father, Stephen Charles Anthony Stanhope, known to his closest relations as ‘Stevie Sr,’ was imposing and stately as his home. Jimmy S knew there was an active volcano just underneath the surface, lava skipping about under the skin and through his veins, preparing to erupt at any moment given the precise atmosphere.
“We must put something to bed, boy.” A hint of a the Queen’s English still existed after many years still, and the subtext in his words caused Jimmy S to tremble ever so slightly.
“What would that be?” Jimmy S said, guilt-ridden of what he didn’t know and terrified of the same.
“Rumor has it that you’ve been quite a handful on the set of McGuff and Friend.”
“What do you mean?” Jimmy S said and shrank back. “Who told you that?”
“No one of any consequence, mind you. It’s rumored about that you’ve seen Stevie Jr.”
Jimmy S couldn’t, for the life of him, meet his father’s eyes.
“Well, what do you have to say about it?”
Swallowing, Jimmy S raised himself up, with some help from his umbrella, to look his father in the eye. Without any prompting, he raised a hand to rub the healing wound on the side of his head as he gibbered on uncontrollably about what had happened on set.
“Yes, I’ve seen him, Father. I saw him once on a street corner in London, and I’ve seen him several other places around the world. I hate to admit this fact but I’ve seen him here and there for years. A few weeks ago, when we were shooting my last scene in the season, I saw him standing below in a crowd of people. I took a step toward him, but I only realized a moment too late that I had walked off the platform. I woke up in the hospital the next day, but I don’t remember much of my stay at the Hospital Británico de Buenos Aires.”
“Fifteen feet to the concrete below, was it? It’s impossible that you’ve seen your brother. However—” Stevie Sr looked down at the newly waxed parquet floor. “—we must put this matter to rest before it gets worse. You’re not well and you haven’t been for some time. Do not think for a moment I haven’t noticed.”
“No, I haven’t been feeling well.” Jimmy S hated admitting this to his father, who would no doubt hold it over his head until the end of time. However, it was remarkable that his father never once mentioned Jimmy S’s sinful transgressions or the grave disappointment the heavenly father must’ve felt. In all the thirty-two hours he’d been home, he’d made sure to avoid this elderly man and his legendary tirades at all costs.
“Do not worry. I shall take care of it.” His father turned and squeaked away to his study.
“I’m sure you will,” Jimmy S said, the whisper barely leaving his lips, and he turned to leave the manor, umbrella in hand, feeling the day would not be as auspicious as he had planned.

 
Four
 
After leaving that dismal tête-à-tête with his father and shaking off that damnable feeling of apprehension, his first order of business would be to walk with purpose—men of his pedigree never traipsed or strolled or sauntered—two blocks to the east, which was almost a quarter of a mile, or five hundred steps approximately, plus the two lane road he would have to cross at Wilcox and Paxton, which he would take four steps across. The road down was as grueling on the shins as the climb back was on the calves. On the corner of Wilcox and Geary sat Danny Fox’s Pub & Kitchen, which was aptly named after the old fox Danny, who had come from the old country when he was but a wee lad.
Danny’s musical brogue held him enraptured every single time. Jimmy S loved the stories the bartender enthralled him with every time he stopped in for a Classic High Ball made with his favorite whiskey and just a smidgen of ginger ale. This particular drink seemed to be the favorite in Japan when they had filmed an unsatisfying episode of McGuff and Friend, where he’d had been forced to have several lengthy conversations with the writers about quality. Conversely, on an especially trying day in his neighborhood, or when his father was being especially peevish, Jimmy S would instead order a Macallan M—the 1824 series Danny kept squirreled away especially for him—on the rocks—and drink it in a few practiced, if not dramatic, gulps. He’d then order another with a snap of his fingers, and maybe he would say, “Barkeep, another” even before he had set the glass down on a paper coaster that might or might not depict a quote, a joke, or an advertisement.
Even before the finish of raisin and sultana flavors took over his palate.
On that crisp spring day, Jimmy S found himself in the exact place he knew he’d find himself on a crisp spring day: Danny Fox’s Pub & Kitchen on the corner of Wilcox and Geary. The pub sat diagonally located from the Mitchell B&B. The bed and breakfast proudly displayed a “Washington Slept Here” sign in the foyer and was the home of the best pancake breakfast this side of the Hudson.
By the time he reached the pub, the drizzle had cleared and a light fog had settled over the low-lying areas of the village. Jimmy S grimaced, knowing that if the fog didn’t clear when he walked back to the estate; it would impede his progress significantly. He would have to watch out for more than just the length and number of his strides.

 
Five
 
The complexities of Jimmy S's behavior started around the time he was fifteen. This devolvement could’ve began earlier and blamed on pubescent hormones in his preteen years, but in reality, could be nailed down to one solitary, isolated event: his mother had cast the stereotype of wayward fathers aside when she went out for cigarettes and never came back. The only memories of her available to Jimmy S during his entire adulthood were of the lit Nat Sherman cigarette that hung from the corner of a scarlet, Chanel-lipsticked mouth, a tumbler of bourbon on the rocks, and a brunette bouffant that had outlived its time and had fallen out of favor with women her age. When he thought about his Latina mother, Alejandra, all he could picture was high dark hair, curlicue smoke tendrils framing her smooth caramel-colored face with deep-set burnished eyes, and her reclining body on the chaise lounge in the darkened, fashionable drawing room. He remembered what she had always called him: mi corazón, meaning ‘my heart’ in Spanish.
His father, Stevie Sr, once a strong patriarch and the family’s anchor, suffered a nervous breakdown a couple of years later, both from the stress of his wife walking out on him (she had allegedly landed in the French Rivera) as well as the brandys he threw back like ice water on a hot summer day. (Jimmy S was certain the secret of Stevie Sr’s successful longevity was staying completely and utterly pickled.) Not to mention Stevie Sr’s newest hobby was collecting sacrosanct art. Soon afterwards, Jimmy S found himself responsible for his younger brother, his junior by one year, Stevie Jr, to whom he was quite close.
On a summer day during the solstice when the sun had poured down its sweet honey and dried up the roadways and flora in the village after a drenching downpour, the final nail in the coffin of Jimmy S's life was driven in on the eve of his nineteenth birthday when Stevie Jr hanged himself in the bathroom with a cheap extension cord he’d no doubt pilfered from the servants’ quarters. Jimmy S found his brother with a puffy, bruised face, eyeballs bulging, and a swollen tongue protruding from a tooth hole that would never, ever take another breath of God’s pure, sweet oxygen. After finding, or rather stumbling into, his brother's body, Jimmy S sat next to the porcelain tub with his brother for an immeasurable amount of time, while Stevie's bestockinged feet brushed against his shoulder and reminded him from time to time of the unspeakable horror as it twirled and whirled from the cord hanging from the light fixture.
Not that Jimmy S had noticed in his woe and terror, deep and unfathomable as it was.
Finally after many minutes—probably many hours—Jimmy S cut the extension cord from around Stevie Jr's neck with Stevie Sr's straight razor he’d procured from a bathroom in the north wing and let his brother's body fall to the floor in an unceremonious plop, which would've hurt like the dickens had Stevie Jr been alive to feel it. Once the ambulance crew had arrived—it was still unclear who had called them in the first place—they'd found Jimmy S sitting on the simple but elegant white Egyptian cotton bath mat from Nordstrom’s with his head reclining on a teak spa seat, reciting lines from the off-Broadway production of Naughty Marietta.
Two police officers visited the estate of Stevie Sr that disastrous day. Constable Leonard Rickey wore a uniform of the most unbecoming polyester blend, and Detective Caroline Saunders, who had to be the most unfeminine, homely woman Jimmy S had ever noticed, wore a pantsuit that should have gone out with the morning’s trash. The two members of the village’s constabulary had ruled Stevie Jr’s death a suicide. However, in the years that followed, Jimmy S’s time on McGuff and Friend—where he played a quintessential, aging CIA operative foremost, a lover of women secondly, and a true Renaissance man all the way around—allowed him to character act in such a way that this expertise told him that it had not been a suicide at all, that his younger brother had been murdered.
“This man killed hisself,” echoed throughout the upstairs hall when the medical examiner got a load of Stevie Jr’s rigid corpse.
In the quantitative sense, Jimmy S begged to differ.
He had seen Stevie Jr from time to time afterwards whether it on a busy street corner in London or on the last remaining set of McGuff and Friend before it happened. He’d asked around to cast mates, grips, and negligible persons on the set if anyone had seen Stevie Jr, but all of them developed worrisome looks, whispering amongst themselves when they thought he couldn’t hear, and cut a wide berth around Jimmy S during the remainder of the shoot. He could just imagine their snickerings when he took that illogical step off a platform right before Bobby, his stunt double, could take over the scene.
After his mother left and Stevie Jr committed his final act, his father spiraled downward into a delicate emotional state. With a father who had been going on and on about things with a newfound religious fervor and a brother who was no longer drifting through the land of the living and blowing through his trust fund like a prairie wind, Jimmy S fell victim to circumstance. Peculiar behavior began to show itself in many aspects of his life, but most noticeably in his personality and routines.
At first, he amused himself with disorders such as anal retentiveness and narcissism, but finally settled on obsessive-compulsive disorder because that ailment described him best. He felt he was too nice to be narcissistic and too untidy to be anal retentive; OCD for him, however, was more than a passing fancy, but less than a full-blown obsession. He very nearly could be compared with his mustachioed co-star Billy Underwood who played the role of Connor Friend. He didn't wash his hands many times a day like Billy did while imagining billions upon billions of germs procreating in their own sexual dance on his skin. Nor did he do any of the other things that frequented OCD, like repetitive thinking, ritualized eating, or honing in and focusing solely on the Catholic-themed statuary and paintings present all over his father's home. No, he didn't measure his words or numbers as he wrote them on paper like Billy did. Nor did his OCD take a turn for the worst; his disorder was passably manageable unlike Billy’s had become when they were both up simultaneously for the Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series in the Drama category.
Be that as it may, and regardless of their individual diagnoses, both Jimmy S and Billy Underwood sank into a level of depression and haunting OCD rarely seen by those who weren’t permitted to bask in the limelight of celebrity after twenty-six-year-old Josey Yarborough had won the award for her amateurish and soppy portrayal of a teenager in Diaries of a Runaway.
High definition television had done nothing for her crows’ feet and aging pores.
Unlike his co-star Billy Underwood who washed his hands and slathered on hand sanitizer with fervor so devout it would put a flagellating Benedictine monk to shame, Jimmy S measured strides, counted them, made them his life’s work. Steps, strides, they were all the same. The strides never wavered and stayed the same length, roughly two and a half feet, but it did stop him on occasion from frequenting certain shops and places along his way. It also caused some problems in both his instep and ankle, deformities that could've been easily remedied had Jimmy S agreed to orthopedic inserts; but a man of esteemed taste and sophistication such as he could never agree to Dr Scholl's in his expensive wingtips with the premium leather uppers.

 
Six
 
The bell tinkled as he strode into Danny Fox’s Pub & Kitchen, shaking off the peculiar cold that had settled into his body as soon as he crossed the threshold. The pills made him woozy and he swore he might have hallucinated a time or two—especially when Stevie Jr had visited him in the hospital and he’d been trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey— when the worst of the headaches affected him after that dreadful, on-set accident when he fell right onto his head. He chose to ignore the cold instead. He took his customary four steps to his favorite barstool, two stools over from the left and seven from the right.
Except this day, a stranger sat there.
Jimmy S’s demeanor changed from bright and jovial to dark and chaotic in the time it took him to blink his eyes in disbelief.
Danny Fox waved him down toward the other end. “Ah, Jimmy S, what can I do ya for?” the bartender said in a hard-to-detect Irish brogue. Danny’s bright face smiled at Jimmy S from behind the bar, and after a flurry of movement, Danny set a sparkling tumbler and the white polishing cloth down on the bar and leaned forward. His shoulders hunched forward, and Jimmy S caught a vague whiff of uneasiness rolling off the man. “Weren’t expectin’ the likes of you for at least a fortnight.”
Jimmy S smiled at Danny’s use of the word ‘fortnight’ that held such distinct and dramatic flair.
A man after his own heart.
His mood lightened a bit.
Even so, Jimmy S felt his limbs sizzle, as if the world as he knew it had slipped sideways and tumbled into the ether because this strange man had the absolute audacity to sit on his stool.
In his pub.
In his town.
Attempting to ignore that fact, Jimmy S replied, “I’m conspicuously unemployed for the next six months. We wrapped up the last episode early and finished the season. Vacation started early for me, Danny boy. Today I believe I’ll have a Classic Highball in celebration.”
“Sure thing, Jimmy S. Ninth or tenth season?”
“Ninth.”
“Can you give me a hint at the goings on? I’ve been reading about it online. And how are you? Heard you took a nasty fall. Are they going to kill you off?” Concern flashed across the man’s features.
Jimmy S flinched. “I’m sorry I can’t tell you that that, Danny Fox. You know the rules. You must watch like everyone else.” He raised his arm and waved his hand in the air, something akin to jazz hands, but not quite. More like a polite brush off. He removed his black Borsalino fedora and laid it gently on the barstool to the left of him, effectively stopping anyone from sitting there in the nearest future. “And on a side note, I’m in tip-top shape. My head only aches now and again.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t break something like a leg or a foot.”
Jimmy S nodded, thankful for that.
“Jimmy S have you met Steven here?” Danny motioned to the stranger that took up residence in his spot. Curiously, Danny looked from Jimmy S to the stranger and back again, worry turning down his mouth and creasing his forehead.
Jimmy S eyeballed the stranger who sat on his stool through a sideways glare. Without bothering to turn his head, he said, “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”
“Steven here is on sabbatical from his day job, but hasn’t yet yielded to the temptation of telling me the reason of his travels to our small village,” Danny said. He set a paper coaster down in front of Jimmy S and set his drink down gently along with an additional napkin and a fresh bowl of pretzels.
The man called Steven scooted down toward Jimmy S and left one barstool between them, the customary distance in a quiet pub, close enough for delightful conversation yet far enough away to keep boorishness at bay.
“Yes?” Jimmy S asked. “I have a dreadful feeling you would like to begin a conversation with me.” He looked down at his drink and felt like he should sip rather than gulp it. Something emanated from the man called Steven, whether it was just bad feelings or weird mogambo, Jimmy S couldn’t be sure. One thing he could be sure of though was that he wholeheartedly, at that very moment and for reasons unexplained, wished he had his mojo gris-gris—made by the Louisianan hoodoo man in the French Quarter, who he’d met on location for an episode the first television series he ever starred in, Life with Edward and Anita St. James—in his watch pocket that he’d carried since Dr. Lenoir “Boogie Boy” Hehe had given it to him.
He’d hoped, upon his arrival at home the day before, he’d unintentionally stuck it in the top drawer of his priceless antique credenza from the French Renaissance period where he kept artifacts and mementos and trinkets from his days on the show as well as other goodies that were important enough to keep but unimportant enough to forget, but he knew he’d inadvertently left it behind in Buenos Aires, presumably at the hospital where a nurse had stripped him of all his personal effects. It wasn’t the good luck he needed at this very moment from the mojo gris-gris either.
“Strange weather you’re having,” the man called Steven said.
“Is it?” Jimmy S said, knowing full well the fog rolling in was strange. Again, Jimmy S looked at the man from the corner of his eye and found he could size the hazy man up collectively by doing so. He blinked a few times to clear his vision and laughed to himself how very cliché it was to come across a stranger in a pub! In fact, McGuff and Friend had covered that very thing in the Season One, Episode Nine!
The man called Steven was purely nondescript. Copper-colored eyes, blondish-brown hair that circled a balding top, average nose and lips, a face that refused recollection. He looked to be about Jimmy S’s age, but since the man called Steven was so ordinary, Jimmy S had a difficult time pinpointing the man’s age. He could be thirty or fifty for all Jimmy S could tell. Like Jimmy S, he wore no wedding ring, not even an indentation or tan line proclaiming a recent relationship effort. The man called Steven was of average stature and even wore the most unremarkable, if truth be told, embarrassing and ill-fitting suit Jimmy had ever seen save for the hobos on the streets of San Francisco, a city that was proud of its vagrant population. These San Franciscan hobos would dig used cigarettes from public ashtrays and disgustedly re-smoke them...the same hobos who partook in deviant mating rituals in the alleyways behind neighborhood CVSs.
Jimmy winced at the mere thought of the repugnant behavior from the San Franciscan hobos and looked at the man called Steven, who could very well be a hobo in Jimmy S’s estimation.
Except for Danny Fox telling him this Steven fellow worked in the film industry.
Dressed in brown?
Indeed!
If this man called himself an actor, then Jimmy S was an average, ordinary man who was not the focus of public attention at all, but was a poultry salesman at a farmer’s market working among the commoners!
“No, sir, it is not.” Jimmy S couldn’t help himself. He felt he must be rude to this fellow in order to stave off any more conversation, but Jimmy S soon found the man would not be thwarted by Jimmy S’s bad-mannered words alone.
It would probably depend on corrective, divisive action.
“Would you be interested in hearing why I’m staying in your village? You look like a man in need of a story.” The man’s tone neither held interest nor boredom and he spoke in a slight monotone, a story that Jimmy felt not too particularly keen on hearing. “I can promise you, Jimmy S, it’s a story you’ve never heard the likes of before.”
“Do I? What is it you think you can tell me?” Jimmy S jerked a rude thumb to the bartender, who in Jimmy S’s estimation was keeping his ear out toward their discussion, hungry for juicy morsels. The man kept him waiting, however. Jimmy S felt anger surge through him at the thought, and made himself take a few deep breaths so that he would not act in any way untoward in respect to this newcomer. Instead, he focused on twirling the platinum ring—on his index finger of his right hand—with the flawless two-carat solitaire diamond in the center that his first wife, Wendy the Brit, had designed for him to give him on their first and only wedding anniversary paid for in its entirety with his American Express Black.
Jimmy S looked up at Danny, who refused to meet his eye. Uneasiness crept along each vertebra in Jimmy S’s spine and coiled around his throat like a boa constrictor, restricting words like “Posh!” and “Tish!” and “Bloody hell!” that were left like orphans on the tip of his tongue.
So much for a pithy retort.
The man called Steven signaled to Danny he was ready for another and added, “Get Jimmy S another of whatever it is he’s having.”
The men enjoyed a companionable silence while Danny went about making the two men’s drinks.
“Have you noticed anything different lately?” Steven said.
Jimmy S thought back to that unfortunate step off the platform in Buenos Aires and felt the throb of the scar on his head. “I make it a habit to notice the smaller things in life. What some men choose to ignore, I choose to notice,” Jimmy S said as Danny set fresh drinks in front of the men. Jimmy S thought on the man’s statement for a moment, yet couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
“The fog’s starting to roll in, so I’m going to take this as my cue to leave. I apologize that I don’t have time tell you my tale, Jimmy S,” the man said and stood from his barstool. “I’m going to make a run for it. However, you should hurry. You might just find your way home.”
The man just smiled a strange smile at Jimmy S, one side of his mouth going up into a devilish grin, the other side, however, remained mobile. He got up and left so quickly Jimmy S doubted for a mere moment that the man had ever been there in the first place.
“I don’t know about him, Jimmy S,” Danny said. “He was odd, that one, but he’s right. It’s a regular Scottish haar.”
“Haar?”
“That’s what my Scottish mum called them. A haar is a thick, wet sea fog.”
Jimmy S nodded and turned in his barstool to look out the large plate glass window at the New England haar that dampened Jimmy S’s spirits. “I cannot put my finger on it, but something is definitely off with that man, but it reminds me of a strange story.”
“’Course it does, Jimmy S.”
“My old philosophy professor, Dr Julius Dearbourne, I believe was his name, once walked into a classroom where I sat waiting for his arrival. When he reached the podium, he just stared at us agog. It felt like a literal eternity, but in reality it was only a minute or two, and then he turned and walked out of the room. Nary a word from his lips the entire time.”
Danny nodded and waited for Jimmy S to continue. Jimmy S swirled the last remaining liquor in his glass and studied it for a moment.
“At first, the students thought it was a great day. Two minutes and done. I began to collect my belongings when something strange and terrible happened.”
“Do continue, Jimmy S.”
“Seconds later, he appeared in front of us and began to lecture. Yet it wasn’t a lecture exactly. In that painstakingly long hour, Dr Dearbourne talked about himself, reliving his life one painful minute at a time. Never made eye contact with any of us except for the back wall. He was so enamored with that wall that I had to turn around a few times to look at who he was talking to, but there was never anyone there.
“The students first became amazed and enraptured by all the terrible deeds he described, but then horror settled in.” Jimmy S chuckled, took a sip, and crunched on an ice cube. “No one had any idea what was going on, but let me tell you, it scared me deep down to my soul. I was so shaken by the professor’s diatribe that I never thought I would recover. I wondered if I had swirled down into the abyss and was just a victim of a serious hallucination. I asked myself over the coming days if I was on the brink of psychosis. Extraordinary thing though, a haar, as you called it blew in from the coast that day—” Jimmy S paused a minute and continued. “We found out a week later that poor Dr Dearbourne had been the victim of a heart attack and his body had been found. Dr Dearbourne’s cats had made a meal of the poor old bugger.”
Danny sat the towel and glass he’d been polishing down on the bar. A worrying expression crossed his Celtic features and stared at the man in front of him.
“And no one missed him for an entire week?”
“Apparently not.” Jimmy S thought back to the time of his formal college education when he and Stevie Jr went to Harvard. Jimmy S had waited a couple of years, spending quality time honing his acting skills in off-Broadway productions, before his brother graduated from Brillantmont in Switzerland, where Stevie Jr spent most of his time building homes for Habitat for Humanity, nursing blisters and fighting calluses, and phoning his brother how someone of his esteem had fallen off the proverbial moneyed wagon. Then Jimmy S thought of poor Dr Dearbourne, lying prone on his kitchen floor, surrounded by famished felines and gnawed to the bone in some places, metacarpals and metatarsals gone.
Lying dead when his students thought him alive.
His thoughts moved back to his brother, for approximately five seconds, give or take a few, Jimmy S missed Stevie Jr something terrible, and as misbegotten and tragic the event of Stevie Jr’s death was, it simply seemed surreal. When he awoke from sleep in the mornings, he felt the unjust demise was a passing dream, but then the thought of his brother hanging haplessly from a cheap extension cord would bring Jimmy S to his legendary knees.
After several minutes Danny interrupted Jimmy S’s reverie. “That’s an odd story, Jimmy S. I’ve heard of people dyin’ and then people see them afterwards. Like their ghosts show up for a last hoorah.”
Jimmy S nodded.
“Did you notice anything odd about Steven, Jimmy S?”
“He reminded me of someone. He was anything if vaguely familiar.” When Jimmy S thought of the man’s face, a flicker of recognition, and just when he grasped who Steven reminded him of, it was lost in a flash. The foggy expanse outside had no doubt brought a hazy, dreamlike quality into the pub, and Jimmy S was lured into its exotic yet dubious quality for the time being.
After a long moment, Danny nodded, looking down somewhat, but Jimmy S could feel Danny’s eyes on him.
“He could’ve been a dead ringer for you, Jimmy S.”
“Surely not, sir!” Jimmy S felt a cold chill settle over his bones, and he laughed despite himself. He felt his nose dripping and reached for a napkin.
“What’s so funny?”
Jimmy S wiped his nose and he saw a bright red smear of blood in sharp contrast to the white napkin.
As he held the napkin to his nostril, he spoke in a somewhat nasal tone, “Remember Janet Alderwick?” Jimmy S referred to his ever sardonic co-star who played his supervisor on McGuff and Friend.
“Your co-star who plays Hilary in the show?”
“Yes, that’s the one. I once bled all over her during a romantic scene. Nosebleed. We always had a rough go of it even on a good day, and I was astounded. Absolutely astounded, I tell you, that the writers wrote a romantic scene for the two of us. All I can say is that her lawyer found that a nosebleed was not an actionable offense and not cause for a lawsuit.”
The two men laughed.
“I think the fog is a signal that it’s time to return home, Danny my boy.”
“It was good seeing you, Jimmy S. Be careful out there. The fog has a way of helping people lose their way.”
“You too, my friend, and thank you,” Jimmy S pulled his Bottega Veneta leather two-fold wallet out of his inside suit pocket and laid it on the bar. He checked the napkin and saw there was a great decrease in blood. “I think it’s stopped.” He walked around the bar and threw the bloody wad into the garbage can, not even dreaming this might be a sanitation hazard. He grabbed the wallet from the bar and slid his American Express Black to Danny, a worrying expression deepening as he picked up the card and ran the tab. Jimmy S couldn’t help but notice the entirety of Steven’s drinks had remained untouched.
After Jimmy S signed the slip with a flick of the pen, he stowed the card in his jacket pocket without putting it back into his wallet. He took his hat from the barstool and set it on his head. He stood, tipped the fedora to Danny, and took the prerequisite steps to the door, stepped over the threshold into the dense, foggy air that seemed to settle on the sidewalks and streets in the village. Only the spooky tops of the trees were showing, as if they were submerged beneath an ocean of velvety cotton. Jimmy S hoped it would clear before he reached the estate.
Looking down, without taking the initial step two-and-a-half foot step, he realized he could see neither his black wingtips nor his upper thighs, nor anything below his shoulders. He took a step and walked blindly toward the next corner, counting all the while—which, if truth be told, saved him from miscalculating and falling headlong into the sidewalk—and wishing to God he’d brought, at the very least his genuine buffalo horn derby cane for weather-related occasions such as this one.

 
Part Two: Rising Action
Seven
 
At the corner of Wilcox and Paxton, he looked from side to side, as if it made any difference to him because that damnable fog bank had settled on the village like a fantastical specter. Menacing as it was, Jimmy S strode across the street and silently executed a prayer to the heavens that no conveyance should come his way and plow him over in the street like a peasant.
How would the paparazzi cover that degree of humiliation? He could see the headline on TMZ now: “James Steele, Star of McGuff and Friend, Exits Stage Left by Means of ‘85 Toyota Corolla.”
He grimaced and dared not think of it, and instead took the required strides to his house on the hill. His calf muscles screamed in agony from their lack of exercise and his mind screamed in bewilderment when he replayed his conversation, or lack thereof, with the man called Steven. His mind jumbled and tumbled and could make neither heads nor tails of the time spent at Danny Fox’s Pub & Kitchen. Then it dawned on him, clear as the sparkle of dewdrops on blades of grass during a spectacular sunrise.
He looked across the street in the mist and saw Steven, or Stevie Jr rather—really only his hand, shoulders, and head—standing there, all drab and unremarkable and lumpy in his brown suit. Stevie Jr waved slightly and began up the hill. Jimmy S watched his disembodied head of his brother bobble up the fog-laden walk for as long as he could. He snapped out of his trance, foolishly wondered if a ghost could or should have a stylist, and began following him.
Oddly enough, he felt the fog swirl around him, almost caressing him, and for a few moments he felt as though the vapor could be alive. He laughed at himself and his unreasonable nitwittery. A tendril of fog reached up and stroked him on the cheek and he swatted it away, which was impossible since it was fog and it had no substance. He was taken aback for a moment, but instead of fretting over the mist and the possibility it was copping a feel, he had more urgent matters to attend.
“Stevie Jr!” Jimmy S yelled, pointing at the fellow with his umbrella. “Stop!” He had no idea why exactly that he wanted the apparition to stop or what he would actually say if Stevie Jr had. He took two uncounted steps toward the man, and in his haste and distraction—and more notably the fog—he tripped on the curb and landed flat on his face.
When he finally awoke from his unconscious state lying prone in the middle of the road, he looked up, bleary-eyed and bleeding. Blind as a bat in the nefarious fogbank that had settled on the village, Jimmy S felt around for his trusty umbrella. Once he got himself upright, he perceived the man he knew as Stevie Jr, a much loved brother who’d lost the fight with an extension cord and the will to live on that fateful day so long ago, had disappeared into the darkness and deceit of the fog-addled cobbled lane.

 
Eight
 
Buenos Aires, the capital and largest city in Argentina, was by far Jimmy S’s favorite place to visit, to wander around in Palermo—a veritable melting pot of sorts and the home of brilliant culinary masters and the most fantastical art in all Bohemia—and stroll through the Botanical Gardens and the Latin American Art Museum of Buenos Aires. If he had the time, he would wander alone the down the footpaths through La Recoleta Cemetery for some much needed solace and introspection. If he was feeling especially antsy and libidinous, he might take an evening stroll at the water’s edge in the trendy, urban area of Puerto Madero.
On one particular occasion, he strolled along the water with his arm entwined with a beguiling enchantrix at least twenty years his junior named Catalina Dominguez, who thought of him as a dilettante and told him so time and again. (They’d shared so many bottles of Catena Zapata Nicolas Bordeaux that he didn’t bother with counting steps, but despite that, deep down in his subconscious, he’d counted a total of two-hundred-and-fifty-six.) Catalina had been the most enchanting creature he’d met during his nine years filming McGuff and Friend all over the world, even after considering the magical entrancement of Zendaya the Zimbabwean princess.
During that extraordinary night with Catalina—one for the record books—Jimmy S experienced a night like no other, which included witty repartee and a great appreciation for her general wantonness. With that being said, the following day his accident had been one of many accidents or happenings on the set. Nothing that day had gone normally, whether it was the inhabitants of neighboring buildings complaining about the constant explosions during that day’s taping; not enough extras had shown up for the last scene; or Billy Underwood accidentally knocking the intrepid Janet on her hateful ass and slathering himself with antibacterial afterward. (It was unclear if Janet had contacted her lawyer of this terrible yet uproarious mishap, but she seemed more offended by Billy’s need to decontaminate himself after touching her than being physically accosted.) Not to mention Jimmy S’s sighting of his long-dead brother—looking as young he had on the day of his death—dressed not unlike he had been in Danny Fox’s Pub. When Jimmy S saw his younger brother standing below next to a murder of grips, he was momentarily stupefied and took a step toward him, which ultimately caused the unsightly head wound and the ride to the hospital in the public ambulancia. There wasn’t much about it that Jimmy S could remember, including the week he spent convalescing in a private room. To make matters worse, Jimmy S recalled that Stevie Jr had been standing over his bed a time or two. For that he was certain, even in his drug-addled brain.
It wasn’t embarrassing enough that all the news outlets in the States had snatched up the story like the unlimited jumbo shrimp deal at the local Sizzler. The writers of McGuff and Friend rewrote the scene before to reflect Jimmy S’s real life accident as Season Nine’s wickedly effective cliffhanger, one that would undoubtedly garner attention at Jimmy S’s expense.
Did someone push McGuff off the platform? Did he live or die? Well, dear couch potatoes, you won’t know until Season 10!

 
Nine
 
With the phantasmagoria of the previous hour a mere memory, Jimmy S stumbled into his dressing room without bothering to turn on the light. He held a handkerchief to his re-bloodied nostril and hoped to God the pain would subside. And his mucked up palms from feeling his way to his house! Dear God, what if there was bruising? What if he had two black eyes?
He stepped out of his sodden trousers on the way to the casual dress section of his wardrobe. While standing in the large closet in his soggy silk boxers, he inspected his roughed up hands and his knee, which was as bloody as his nose, and decided it was bad enough to bother a servant for ointment and a Band-Aid. He pulled out what he thought were a pair of Loro Piana cashmere lounge pants from the shelf, but instead, he’d pulled out a pair of skinny jeans from the Gap.
He gasped in horror as he put the offending garment back on the shelf, far, far in the back. He was convinced, at the time when a borrowed pair had been given to him on the set of McGuff and Friend, that he’d fallen into a bourgeoisie stupor when he’d agreed to wear them. If he hadn’t, he would’ve faced certain ridicule after he’d torn a hole in the back of his trousers when he misjudged the staging area’s steps and tumbled unmercifully down, his posterior taking the brunt of the fall. Billy Underwood had come to his rescue, pulled him behind a door, and slapped a pair of jeans into his hand.
“Wear these until you can get to your dressing room,” Billy Underwood had said and pulled out a bottle of hand sanitizer. In Jimmy S’s shock and mortification, he’d agreed, but after watching Billy slather on the disinfecting gel, he couldn’t help but wonder exactly whose jeans Billy had given him. After pulling on the stiff fabricked garment that was at least two sizes too small and too skinny in the calf area, he’d hurried along to his dressing room half-zipped as quickly as his size ten-and-a-half feet and bruised rear end could take him.
Pulling the correct pair of lounge pants down from the shelf, he limped out of the wardrobe into the main part of his bedroom. He trod along the French Aubusson rug that had undoubtedly been in their family for generations, before plopping unceremoniously down on the down comforter and bronze-colored King Chani Lei duvet that he’d chosen for himself as a parting gift after his untimely divorce from his fourth wife, Renate the German, several years before. Large throw pillows were precisely placed along the headboard, including European shams in gray and linen and throw pillows made from the finest silk.
He realized a bit belatedly that it was probably almost tea time and his father would be expecting him shortly. He glanced up at the Howard Miller Windsor Cherry clock on the wall and saw that he’d either forgotten to wind it again, or he’d missed tea completely and most likely part of dinner.
How could that be?
He’d left for the village at eleven o’clock precisely and stayed no more than an hour at the pub. The clock showed ten-thirty. He watched the brass pendulum swing to and fro in a hypnotic beat, knowing he was sure to have wound the clock that morning. He reached over on the nightstand and retrieved his wristwatch and saw that it reflected the same time as the clock on the wall. Cold washed over him as he sat benumbed on the bed wondering what could have happened to the last five or six hours of his life.
Reaching for the prescription bottle, he rattled a few out of the brown bottle. A sense of déjà vu settled over him. After seeing he only had a handful left, he made a note to call in his medicine the next morning. He dreaded the thought of visiting the pharmacy and wondered if he could have a servant pick up his medication. He didn’t think so; he would have to show a valid ID for the quote-unquote ‘controlled substance.’ He mentally calculated how many steps it would take to get him there, and realized he would have to circle the block three times in order to make it perfectly and exactly to the front door of the still-independent Mulroney Pharmacy, one of the few stores CVS hadn’t squeezed out of business like a python squeezing the entrails out of a hapless tribesperson.
The silken sheets felt like heaven to his sore, pitiful body, and sinking further into the pillow top mattress, he let the angel bedding ensconce his every crevice. Even though the bed swaddled him as if he was a newborn, Jimmy S could not be curtailed. He slid his feet in a pair of slippers and ran the length of the hall, down the south twin of the wide marble staircase, and into the foyer, past the marble statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who seemed to be glowering at him, even though her head was bowed, her eyes were shut, and her hands were held up in everlasting prayer. He had hated that goddamn statue since he was in short pants and looked up at the Blessed Virgin Mary in icy disdain, but felt guilty at once for perverting her true intent.
A chill seeped into his bones and he shuddered. Had the bucolic mansion ever seemed this cold to him before? Had Mary ever seemed so un-virginal and out-and-out bitchy? Goose pimples popped up all over his body and the air buzzed electric.
He stumbled through the great arched double doors made of forged iron and carved oak that had once been on an English castle that had been laid to waste—by  Irish malcontents no doubt—and found himself under the spacious porte-cochère.
Stevie Jr stood alone, starting at Jimmy S from the driveway. The haar blanketed around him, and again, Stevie Jr was only a ghostly head. For long moments, the two, one with his feet planted firmly on the ground and the other an ethereal creature that floated just above the surface, stared at each other until a noise from somewhere inside the manor brought Jimmy S back.
“Jimmy S, is that you making such a racket?”
Jimmy S whipped his head around to the sound of the raspy voice coming from the direction of the sitting room. The familiar plunk of his father’s walking stick came soon after. He turned back but Stevie Jr was nowhere in sight.
“Yes, Father.”
His father reached him in the foyer after many seconds of shuffling. The tall, hawkish man towered over Jimmy S. Stevie Sr had dressed in his dutiful evening attire of a dark suit, no doubt from Ermenegildo Zegna, a white pinpoint, heavily starched dress shirt, and his emerald green Forzieri ascot that he only wore on the most exceptional of occasions. Jimmy S snuck a peek at his father’s Alessandro Démesure alligator leather oxfords, but knew this wasn’t Thanksgiving or Christmas. Not his Gucci or his everyday Testoni’s, but his Démesure’s.
“You’re expected in the salon. We’ve been waiting for you for nearly an hour, and I was just looking for a servant to fetch you.”
“We?”
“Yes, we.”
Jean-Luc, his father’s prized, crotch-sniffing standard poodle, came to stand next to the old man. His father made a palsied hand gesture and Jean-Luc the Impolite sat next to him.
His father noted Jimmy S’s appearance at once. “Why aren’t you dressed? And what in God’s name happened to you, boy?” The old man focused keenly on Jimmy S’s swollen nose and blackening eyes.
Jimmy S bristled and shriveled at his father’s words, the pain of his ghastly trauma forgotten, whether from the pills or his father’s scorn he didn’t know. In that one millisecond, he was transformed from super-celebrity-Emmy–winning status to a six-year-old child who was caught drinking out of the commode. The only other person who could make him feel so flustered and bungled was Luna the Italian, his third wife and a harpy, the worst among the lot.
A servant, her name was Soledad, or Simona, or Saturnina, came running up with a note in her hand. She handed the slightly crumpled paper to Jimmy S, bowed slightly, and said in broken English, “There was la llamada...a call for you this la tarde...this afternoon while you were out.”
Jimmy S beamed at the sweet lady, thankful for all his time on set in Spain and Argentina. “Your English is flourishing. Well done.”
She gave him a small smile at his praise and backed away from him.
He looked down at the note and felt his father’s glowering stare, feeling the weight of it and all the disheartening years of Stevie Sr’s distaste in his becoming an actor—not just any actor, mind you. His father’s ultimate dream had been for his sons to be part of the idle riche and to enjoy all the fruits the lifestyle promised. He also knew the besmirching frown sent a clear message to Jimmy S to discontinue cavorting with the help.
“Do go get dressed, Jimmy S. We can’t wait all day.” Stevie Sr turned on his heel and his cane plunked and plonked his way back to the sitting room, Jean-Luc trotting happily after his master.
“Yes, sir,” Jimmy S said to his father’s backside without having the chance to read the note, all the while wondering why his father demanded he meet him in the parlor. The note in his hand would remain unread until he could reconvene in his quarters upstairs and be alone with his thoughts on what turned out to be quite a tumultuous day.

 
Part Three: Falling Action
Ten
 
When Jimmy S entered his room, he walked straight to his laptop computer situated at the desk in the far corner. The desk sat in front of the great windows that offered a view of the front lawns. He rarely used the computer, only sending an email here and there; he had no real need for cell phones and the like.
He sat down and turned the foreign instrument on, waiting for it to ‘boot up.’ After a few minutes, he brought up his browser and typed in ‘Legendary Star James Steele Accident,” and waited for Google to work its infinite magic.
The first thing he saw was a photo of him on the side of the page with a Wikipedia article, stating that he was an American actor, his birthday, height, and a list of his previous spouses. Also listed were articles and interviews written over the past ten years, including his lurid affair with a makeup artist on the set of McGuff and Friend. One People article in particular caught his eye: “The Most Unusual Man on Television.” He clicked on it and realized it was article written a few years back where the author wrote about his various peculiarities, even going as far as using some of his more famous quotes against him. After perusing the article for several moments, he felt violated and hit the back arrow out of pure irritation.
After several clicks and rewriting his initial Google search, he finally came upon the infamous YouTube video of his accident. He watched the wide screen shot while the video buffered. He enlarged it so he could see it more clearly, but he didn’t want to see the fall really, wanted more to see the people standing below.
And as sure as the sun was in the sky, his younger brother, Stevie Jr, in his drab brown ensemble, watched Jimmy S take that notorious step off the platform.

 
Eleven
 
When Jimmy S finally made it to the sitting room with carefully applied concealer to hide his earlier accident, he walked toward the group, his feet landing on the beautiful Clark Sickle-Leaf carpet from the William A. Clark collection that his father bought anonymously at an auction for tens of millions while on a weekend excursion in Washington DC. His father never told him how much he’d spent on the floor covering, because he’d never been one to buy and tell, and more importantly, only the Philistines of the world would engage in that sort of boorish behavior. However, the brilliant red hues and the craftsmanship always left him somewhat agog, and he wished he had something like that to marvel on while in his own living area.
What he wasn’t agog with was the enormous pale blonde woman dressed in sorcerer’s garments sitting at the head of a small oak table that had been brought in and placed in the center of the room. The Nordic Amazonian wore a burgundy velvet dress with long bell sleeves and a crown of sorts, something one might see at a Medieval Faire, and had long, dark fingernails and an overly painted face. She reminded him somewhat of wife two-point-five, Ingrid the Swede, who he divorced a number of days after marrying. Several other carved chairs were placed around the table where he found Billy, Janet, and Norman.
What in the blue hell were his co-stars and producer doing in his home? At almost midnight, no less?
But that blessed note took over his thoughts.
Meet me at 3 am at Wuthering Heights, was all it said. An unpleasant pit formed in Jimmy S’s stomach as he thought about the long-forgotten staircase and the long ago smell that had assaulted his senses.

Twelve
 
The idea to bring McGuff and Friend to life had been the brainchild of producer Norman O’Loughlin, the producer of a long string of award-winning TV shows since the early 1980s such as HAZMAT, Collapse of the Empire, and HBO’s Sex Warriors. McGuff and Friend had been under serious consideration of the major network television executives for quite some time before it finally got off the ground. Jimmy S, Billy, and Janet had all been part of a new series pilot, which was called Friend and McGuff but never aired, although some say that clips could be found on YouTube and other questionable places online.
Fast forward a few years later when the trio met up again for a re-filming of the pilot, much to Jimmy S’s chagrin. Jimmy S wanted to take the role, and knew that for someone of his stature, he had to make it appear he was a hard sell. Honestly, phone calls from his agent were few and far between, and sometimes, when the mood hit him, he felt as if he had become an imposter. Movie and television roles were going to much younger actors, such as Josey Yarborough, Adrian Atkins, and Carmen Rubio. Jimmy S kept up the pretense, however, involving many back and forths from his agent and lavish gift baskets from Norman for Jimmy S to even consider going back to work for him. Jimmy S, a somewhat prominent and notable actor at the time, had been promised the moon and stars, and Norman did not fail to deliver.
McGuff and Friend had the ability to be one of the longest-running shows on television, perhaps even surpassing the Law & Order franchise. During his stint on the show, Jimmy S had taken two Golden Globes home for Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series-Drama and four Emmys for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series, beating Billy Underwood out for the coveted spot, respectively.
Except once, but Jimmy S had a legitimate explanation for that calamity.
The show itself won an outstanding number of Emmys and Golden Globes as well, beating out the likes of Game of Thrones and whatever Netflix decided to throw at them. McGuff and Friend was, in one word, a success.
At the present moment, Jimmy S couldn’t help feel that his time had run out on the show. It was something he did not care to admit to himself, but undoubtedly, there it was. He had no idea what the writers had in store for him in Season Ten, and his accident might have just been Norman’s justification to force him into early series’ retirement with all the pomp and none of the circumstance. Of course, Norman would whitewash it for the world, and according to the annals of television history, Jimmy S would do nothing else but fade away into Prime Time obscurity.

 
Thirteen
 
Jimmy S took a step toward the group, unsure of what to do next, and he could hear the patriarch of the family dawdling behind him, the plunk and plonk of his cane echoing off the hardwood floors. He took a seat next to Billy Underwood, who slightly backed away from him, while taking the hand sanitizer off the table and slathering a big wad of the smelly alcholic stuff all over his reddened hands.
“Don’t worry, Billy, I’m not about to touch you.”
Billy didn’t say anything to Jimmy S and even refused to meet his eyes.
Janet sighed in pretentious boredom. She, like Billy, refused to look at him.
Never missing a chance to make her uncomfortable and stick a toe into the pool of her never-ending civil suits, Jimmy S said, “Janet, my you’re looking lovely this evening. How are the kids? Alice and Toby, was it? And how is that dear husband of yours?”
Janet looked over at him, sighed again, and never being one for small talk, said, “It’s Tory, Tor-ree, and just so you know, they’re fine. We’re all just fine.” She looked up at Stevie Sr, who still stood behind Jimmy S, and said, “Can we get this show on the road or what?”
Jimmy S swallowed hard at the impending sit down he knew his father would undoubtedly see that Janet received, but no harsh words of censure came from the old man’s lips.
“Norman, how are you?” Jimmy S said, looking over at his long-time friend and producer, who always looked like an unmade bed to Jimmy S.
“I’m fine, Jimmy S.”
Not one to ignore the proverbial elephant in the room, Jimmy S asked, “Have you decided if you’re going to kill me off next season? Is that why you’re all here? You’ve all no doubt noticed a decline in my mental state and this is your version of an intervention?”
“Nothing of the sort, Jimmy S,” Norman said, and like Billy and Janet, refused to meet his eye. “Your father invited us all here for something else entirely.”
“My father?” Jimmy S said, stunned into a momentary silence. Then he turned on the only stranger in the room, the pasty woman who sat directly across the table from him. “And who might you be?”
“I’m Madame Evanora DuBois, owner and operator of the Spiritualist Church of the tristate area. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Jimmy S.”
“The pleasure is all mine, Ms DuBois,” Jimmy S said. To his father he said, “Are we going to participate in a séance?” Jimmy S was dumbfounded. His father, who purported to be a religious zealot and had a painting of Caravaggio’s Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence—undoubtedly his pièce de résistance—hanging above his bed, had put together this little occultist shindig in Jimmy S’s honor. He was literally shocked into quietude that his father hadn’t called the parish priest from St Michael the Archangel in to exorcise the demons from both this mansion and Jimmy S’s person.
“Please call me Madame Evanora.” She smiled at everyone. “Well, then, shall we all take a seat and get this ‘show on the road’?” Madame Evanora said, a pointed reminder that there was only one person who had not yet taken a seat at the table. “Do sit down.” She motioned for Stevie Sr to sit.
Jimmy S cocked his head and noticed the awkwardness that emanated from his father’s demeanor. Stevie Sr was always comfortable in almost any highborn social situation, and for some reason, this small thing bothered Jimmy S.
“Before we get started, I must tell you there is a $50 cost per person. I only accept cash. On arriving here, I noticed a few ATMs conveniently located in the village. Unfortunately, due to a few issues, I cannot take checks or credit cards at this time. ” Madame Evanora smiled. “Also, there are a few things I have to go over before we get started.”
Stevie Sr cleared his throat. Everyone looked up at him. “I don’t believe I’ll be partaking in tonight’s venture. I have other matters to attend. Madame Evanora, I trust you’ll do what I asked.”
Before anyone could reply, Stevie Sr turned on his well-heeled foot and kerplonked out of the door toward his study, undoubtedly to enjoy a cigar, a glass of brandy, and a prayer to the Almighty.
“Very well,” Madame Evanora said and continued. “I have created a very safe space for all of you tonight. I’ve lit candles and have placed crystals in targeted areas in the room to enhance our experience and create a psychically-charged atmosphere. I had to do this to facilitate communication between loved ones who have crossed over. I believe the human spirit lives on after death and will do so in a variety of ways.”
“Will we be using a Ouija board?” Billy asked, reaching for the sanitizer again.
“No,” Madame Evanora answered, eyeing the Purell bottle. “We will have to join hands, though, and I will be acting as a spiritual conduit.”
Billy took in a lungful of air and let out a harsh breath, pulling his hand away from the bottle.
Jimmy S reached over and patted Billy’s disinfected hand. “If I can partake in this alleged séance, so can you. You can dunk yourself in a vat of bleach when this is over with.”
Billy snorted and jerked his hand away. “I will for you.” He leaned in closer to Jimmy S. “Just so you know, you owe me a bottle of Macallan M from your private stash.”
Jimmy S nodded. Billy, with the puffy eyes and reddened face, was at the point in his life that any scotch would do.
“I want the 1824 bottle,” Billy said.
Of course he did.
Madame Evanora cleared her throat. “I ask that you turn off all cellular and electronic devices. Please note that I will ask you to leave if you participate in sarcastic commentary, rude remarks, or abusive language. I cannot allow any video or audio recordings since the privacy in this circle must be well guarded. It’s not every day I meet famous people.” She smiled. “We will open up the séance with a prayer for protection, and welcome those who have crossed over to visit us. All I ask is that you’re receptive to the frequencies we’ll receive from the Other Side. Please join hands.”
Everyone, even the recalcitrant Billy, joined hands.
“We have come together today to contact the Spirit World, especially to contact the younger brother of James Steele.”
Jimmy S cringed at Ms DuBois’ use of his screen name. He swore he heard a light snicker from Janet’s direction. He looked at her and grimaced. He hated the name his agent picked out for him so many years ago, a name in direct opposition of his given name.
The medium continued. “We ask that Stevie Jr join us during this time and would like to contact us through a series of raps on the table. Stevie Jr, are you with us today?”
Jimmy S glanced around the table and felt Billy’s hand tremble slightly. On the other side of him, Norman, however, remained as stoic as ever, his eyes fixed on Madame Evanora. Behind the medium, Jimmy S watched as a younger, pre-death Stevie Jr came into view, slowly at first and soon his transparent figure became solid.
“I am here, Madame Evanora!” the specter pronounced, standing behind the medium dressed in his unspectacular brown attire.
No one noticed the spirit in the corner by the large glass case.
No one except for Jimmy S.
“I sense another presence in the room.” Madame Evanora scrunched up her face as if she smelled something bad. “It hovers but does not approach.”
“Stevie Jr is here.” Jimmy S’s words faltered a bit when he realized this was the closest he’d come to his brother since his dead body had dangled in the bathroom, not counting that day in the pub.
Madame Evanora looked around nervously, craning the head that sat on a lanky neck this way and that. “He’s here?” Her voice grew in pitch and volume. “Here in this room? Where? Where is he?!”
“He’s standing right behind you, Ms DuBois,” Jimmy S said.
“Madame Evanora, if you will, Jimmy S,” Madame Evanora said, the ‘S’ sounding like a snake hissing.
“Alright, Madame Evanora. My long dead brother, Stevie Jr, who looks just like he did during his time at Brillantmont, is standing right behind you. He’s studying the contents of glass case holding my father’s religious relics, and he seems particularly taken by The Holy Foreskin.”
“I’m not looking at The Holy Foreskin, Jimmy S. Jesus,” Stevie Jr said, swiping a hand through his preternatural hair. “But I am bored with these shenanigans.” His arm swept out in front of him as he referred to the table of Jimmy S’s co-workers. Stevie Jr looked pointedly at Jimmy S. “Nonetheless, I do need to speak with you.”
Jimmy S chuckled. “You sent the note,” he said to the empty corner.
“Indeed.”
“Did the spirit speak to you?” Madame Evanora said unequivocally.
“Why yes he did, as a matter of fact. He said this, and I quote, ‘I’m not looking at The Holy Foreskin, Jimmy S. Jesus’.”

 
Part Four: Falling Action
Fourteen
 
Stevie Sr’s simple religious bearings took a southward turn around the time Alejandra left them, and shortly thereafter, he had fallen into quite a despair. Soon after, more than just the Blessed Mother statue started appearing all over the estate, from paintings to religious trinkets added to every corner in every room. With that being said, Jimmy S knew rooms upon rooms remained undiscovered in the mansion, and many of them his father had refused his children’s entry. Jimmy S and Stevie Jr had known all along that a secret passageway existed behind one particular set of bookshelves in the library on the far east wall. The lever, they’d found in their teens purely by happenstance, had been hidden as a replica copy of Wuthering Heights.
Fittingly no doubt, Jimmy S had always thought.
Stevie Jr had grabbed the book from the shelf because he needed to read it for a literature class for that semester’s classes. As soon as the bookshelf slid back, a short hallway came into view, startling the boys. Just beyond that, they saw a dark staircase. Jimmy S had no idea, however, what would be uncovered if they’d made it to the bottom of the stairs. They’d only made it a few feet inside when the sour, dank, and unidentifiable hit them square in the olfactory system, and never being one to question a terrible, rotten smell, Jimmy S went back out the way he came in and left the passageway forever forgotten.
Jimmy S never felt the same kinship to religiosity that his father did, and felt as if it were an imposed addiction on the masses. Stevie Sr’s new lifestyle granted him the most intense of pleasures, such as transcendence, absolution, and most importantly, superiority, which led to a compulsion that Jimmy S neither understood nor wanted for himself. It was when Stevie Jr took the plunge off the teak spa stool into nirvana that Stevie Sr’s love for religion categorically spiraled out of control. Jimmy S couldn’t swear to it, but he wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised had he found out that his father practicing self-repentance with a small bullwhip, even though a Pope had condemned the practice in the Middle Ages. Stevie Sr began collecting more and more mementos, some theologically transcendental and some unequivocally disconcerting, and it had no doubt drained the family’s coffers, to be sure. During that time, Stevie Sr talked non-stop about sin, his religious fervor becoming a committable offense as he surrounded himself with numerous pieces of sanctimonious memorabilia.
Stevie Sr also began searching for religious paintings and had to have paid a pretty penny for some of the more famous, albeit stolen ones.
The duplicitousness was utterly lost on Stevie Sr, however.
Was Stevie Sr also not aware that Jimmy S knew he carried a Saint Benedict medal on his person at all times? And that the Corpus and Cross crucifix, supposedly at the Getty Museum in a secured storage area, sat on Stevie Sr’s French Louis XVI nightstand?
In fact, the theft of Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence, one of the most expensive missing paintings of all time—estimated loss totaling around twenty million dollars—was covered in Season Five Episode Four of McGuff and Friend.
Wouldn’t Norman have gotten a kick out of it if the crime-fighting duo had actually found it hanging over Stevie Sr’s bed?
After some time, the acquisition of religious art had gone mostly ignored or forgotten by Jimmy S. However, he began seriously enquiring about his father’s emotional state, specifically when Stevie Sr began procuring distressing relics such as The Holy Foreskin. Why Jesus was circumcised had to have been one of the biggest theological questions of the Middle Ages, but Jimmy S was fine not living with it under the same roof. Many Biblical scholars believed the Holy Circumcision was actual proof that Jesus’s penis had committed one of the greatest sins against creation by its mere existence, and his father believed this minor detail also proved that all of humanity was infallible, especially so, if the Holy Penis discussed in the Gospel of Luke, attested to that fact.

 
Fifteen
 
Stevie Jr, with metaphysical authority and otherworldly chutzpah, materialized in front of the group of witless onlookers.
There was a series of reactions ranging from “oooohhhs” to “what the hells.” Jimmy S ignored the grand entrance made by his little brother’s ghost and remained in his natural state of snooty boredom.
Madame Evanora shook herself and reined in her emotions. “I command you, specter of the night, to leave this home immediately! I vanquish you!”
“Is she for real?” Stevie Jr asked his brother.
“Yes, I believe she is,” Jimmy S said, and to Madame Evanora, “Why would you want to vanquish him?”
Madame Evanora interrupted them. “Yes, spirit of the underworld, I am for real!” The spiritualist sighed. “Jimmy S, your father asked me to exorcise the spirit.”
“Why on earth would he do that?”
“I suppose he has his reasons,” Madame Evanora said. “Now, Ecce crucis signum, fugiant phantasma cuncta! The spirit world awaits you! You will be safer there than here! Ecce crucis signum, fugiant phantasma cuncta! Ecce crucis signum, fugiant phantasma cuncta!”
Jimmy S caught a slight movement to his right. Janet, who had sat there all evening feigning ennui, went stock still, let go of his hand, and passed out cold, her head making a horrible thumping noise on the floor below. On the other side of Billy, Norman let out a horrified screech and ran to Janet, knocking the chair over backward in the process. He rolled her over and cradled her to him. Jimmy S raised an interested eyebrow.
His attention moved away from the intrigue when Billy hoisted himself out of the chair and said, “Jimmy S, wonderful to see you again. Glad to see you’re on the mend, but I need to go. Got an early phone call in the morning. Don’t forget that bottle of Macallan, you bastard. Don’t get up, I’ll show myself out.” In a flash, Billy and his bottle of antiseptic lotion were gone. After a few milliseconds, Jimmy S heard the distant sound of a motor coming to life and then distinct sound of a smoky burnout on the driveway.
At the same time, Janet came back to her senses, swaddled in Norman’s arms. She realized where she was and who was holding her and pushed him away out of embarrassment.
“Janet, let’s get you to your feet. I’ll see to it that you make it home,” Norman said and removed his arms from her curvy body.
She nodded timorously and held a hand out to him. He helped her up from where she was sprawled and pulled her tiered floral Gucci skirt down from where it had ridden up past her knees, incidentally showing off a rather unladylike tattoo on her thigh.
“Good luck to you, Jimmy S,” Norman said as he retreated. With Janet hanging onto Norman’s arm for dear life, the pair quickly sprinted out the door and away from the premises.
Madame Evanora stood, glancing again at the specter in the corner. “I’ll bill you,” she said, blowing out the candles and collecting her belongings before making a hasty retreat herself.
“Well that was what I would call a soirée,” Jimmy S said to his transparent brother.
“Indeed.”
“Now, what was it that you so desperately wanted to show me in the library? Taking into account your flair for the dramatic, three a.m. was merely a placeholder? Who knew Father would be up to something such as this,” Jimmy S said, checking his Audemars Piguet Royal Oak timepiece. “Shall we sit here and wait, or shall we get this over with?”
“We can go now, Jimmy S,” Stevie Jr said. “Father should be down there now.”
“What’s does this have to do with Father?” Jimmy S said.
Sadness furrowed Stevie Jr’s brow. “You’ll see when the time is right.”

 
Sixteen
 
“Today, when we were having a drink at the pub, why did you introduce yourself as an actor?” Jimmy S said as he followed Stevie Jr toward the library. Speaking to a brother who had been dead for twenty odd years hadn’t been as terrifying of an experience as he had once thought it would.
“I only said it because firstly, you wouldn’t recognize me, and I didn’t want you to, and secondly, you would be more eager to talk to me since it would be common ground.”
“I see,” Jimmy S said, mulling over his brother’s words. “Why didn’t you just come to me?”
“In all seriousness, I couldn’t stop in unannounced. You would have been so horror-stricken you’d have browned your pants for sure, dear brother.”
“I’d have done no such thing!” Jimmy S said. “You’ve shown yourself to me over the past two decades. Other than ‘browning my pants’ as you so eloquently put it, what else stopped you from approaching me?”
“You stopped me, Jimmy S.”
Jimmy S stopped midstride. “How on earth did I accomplish that? And how is it you’re here now?”
“That execrable mojo gris-gris bag that you unswervingly carried on your person, Jimmy S. I couldn’t get more than twenty feet from you. You left it in Buenos Aires, and now it’s a play toy for the nurse’s son.”
Jimmy S resumed walking, wondering if he could charge the nurse with theft, and entered the library, one of his favorite places in the mansion. Over the past couple of centuries, his family had become collectors of over fifty thousand books and manuscripts, most of the newer acquisitions obviously religious in nature. Row after row of tomes, arranged not by the Dewey Decimal system but by convenience, the library held a vast array of treasures that led Jimmy S on a quest for knowledge in his youth. He read every book John Steinbeck had ever written and even spent curious hours with Shakespeare, who scared him with Titus Andronicus and the atrocious violence it revealed. He even read some of the priceless first editions his father had acquired at auction, books locked away in glass cases, such as The Canterbury Tales, the St. Cuthbert Gospel, and the Bay Psalm Book, a religious book that was printed two decades after settlers had landed on Plymouth Rock. He never touched his father’s copy of The Gutenberg Bible--one of the finished copies still in perfect condition—because he had a vague but unsettling idea of what would happen to him if he had left a greasy thumbprint on it. He spent hours upon hours in this massive room, sometimes cozying himself up in a comfortable leather chair next to the blazing fire in the stone hearth at the far end. Or sometimes he would find a quiet place in the attached conservatory to settle into one of the chaise lounges that sat next to the waterfall his mother had installed before her untimely disappearance.
“I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you, too, Jimmy S.”
“You stiffed me on the drinks today.”
Stevie Jr let out a belly laugh. “Sorry about that. Since I’ve been living as a spirit the last few years, I still haven’t mastered the whole ‘moving objects around’ bit. I’ve tried and tried and still can’t quite get it.”
Jimmy S chuckled. “I’m sure you will in another fifty years.”
“I don’t plan on being here for that long.”
At his words, Jimmy S. felt immediate loss. He’d missed this comradery desperately. Since Stevie Jr’s death, he’d felt a part of him left that day with his brother’s body.
“Would you like to do the honors, or shall I?” Jimmy S said with theatrical flair and motioned toward the fake cover of Wuthering Heights.
“Go to it, brother.”
Jimmy S took a deep breath, reached out for the book, and pulled it toward himself. The Beidermeier bookshelf as well as a chunk of wall scraped backward a few feet and swung to the right. With a flood of cool air, a dank, moldy smell accosted Jimmy S’s nostrils. He reached up and covered the lower half of his face with his shirt sleeve.
“Dear God, it’s as bad as I recall.”
“I can almost smell it, too,” Stevie Jr said, noting the look on Jimmy S’s face. “I remember it well.”
The dark staircase loomed before them. Jimmy S felt a flutter of fear. He had no idea how many steps it would take to reach the bottom, but he throttled the feeling and began what would probably be considered an ‘ill-fated journey’ to the manor’s nether regions. Once Jimmy S started down it, his eyes adjusted and he could see a dim light toward what he assumed was the bottom. Even though he couldn’t see his brother in the hazy lighting, he could feel his presence just behind him.
With each careful step down the down stairwell, Jimmy S’s nervousness grew. Even though he’d given up smoking in the nineties, there wasn’t much at the moment he wouldn’t do for either a Gran Habano No 5 ‘El Gigante’ cigar, to taste its sweet smoke in his mouth and to absorb the calming nicotine into his system, or even a Native Spirit. Hell, he would’ve given his pinky finger for a Maverick.
“We’re almost there.”
Jimmy S nodded and the pit of dread that already sat in his stomach quadrupled in size.
After a few more steps, the staircase opened into what looked like an amphitheater turned dungeon complete with a medieval mosh pit. On the far side a room that had to span the length of the house above and then some, his father sat on a carved wooden throne draped in the finest red silk, not unlike those at the Vatican. Directly in front of him sat three smaller carved armchairs, but could only see the contents of two chairs since the third faced away from him. Even in the dark room, Jimmy could make out that they were strapped down, their arms held down by ropes. He squinted and hoped for better eyesight, but all he could see was one had dark stringy hair and the other had shorter blondish hair, and both wore the shabbiest of clothing.
“Jimmy S, stop a moment. I have to warn you of what’s ahead. Once you see, you can’t go back.”
“What do you mean? Warn me of what?” Chills dazzled up and down Jimmy S’s spine.
They slowed to a standstill on the outer perimeter. Jimmy S could almost feel Stevie Jr’s hand on his forearm, propelling him to a stop.
“You need to prepare yourself.”
“Well, if I don’t know what in the bloody hell you’re talking about, how do you expect me to prepare for it?”
“I can’t. It’s something you must see for yourself.” Stevie Jr blew out a ghostly breath. “Oh dear, I think the bastard sees us. I’m sorry Jimmy S, but this is where I shall make my exit.”
“Why of all the cowardly—”
Jimmy S turned back to his father when he heard a booming voice. “What are you up to, Jimmy S? Come forward.”
A sickening throb began in his gut and worked its way toward his extremities. His bowels loosened, and Jimmy S realized his brother might have been correct in his previous assumption. Instead, he plowed ahead and faced his tormentor head on with all the pizzazz and bravado McGuff would’ve have shown, especially during Season Eight, Episode Fourteen when McGuff rescued Friend from Talibanian forces in the world’s nether regions.
As he walked nearer to the raised platform where his father sat, Jimmy S’s eyes wandered to the figures sitting there. He squelched revulsion when his mind realized who the poor wretches were who sat in his father’s grotesque tribunal. What made it even worse was he noticed the third chair sat empty, which left quite a lot to Jimmy S’s imagination.

 
Part Five: Denouement
Seventeen
 
Sitting in seventeenth century carved oak Wainscot armchairs, the corpses of his mother and brother sat there like monstrous caricatures of their former selves. His mother, once a beautiful woman full of dazzle and the very definition of haute couture, had met her fate at the hands of her deranged husband. The other figure, Jimmy S realized was his brother. Now he knew the truth: Stevie Jr had not committed suicide. He had been murdered like he originally thought.
“Oh Stevie Jr. No. And Mother?” Jimmy S said. “What have you done!?” His raised voice echoed throughout the room.
His father only stared at him. The deepest of chills shuddered through Jimmy S’s body, and ice, frozen and sharpened into little spears, ran through his veins.
Jimmy S ran to the dead and saw at once that his mother’s mummified head twisted upward and sightless caverns stared up at Stevie Sr. He looked to the other and saw an extension cord, once white and complete and now discolored with wires showing through, was undeniably still twisted around his brother’s neck. Both bodies were tied with leather straps to their respective chairs.
“Oh Mother! Stevie Jr!” he said and bent down on one knee. With tears in his eyes, he turned and glared at his father. “How could you do this to them? What did they ever do to you that would cause you to kill them?” By the time he bit out the last word, tears had begun to stream down his cheeks. Through blurry eyes, he saw the silhouette of Stevie Jr standing off the side and was surprised he still remained in the room. “Can’t you do anything?” he said to his brother.
The visage of Stevie Jr floated deftly toward him and laid a ghostly hand on his shoulder. “What would you expect me to do? Both mother and I have been dead for years, but her soul has already passed over. Mine, however, is stuck here for the time being.”
“We must bring both of you back. There’s got to be a way. Please...please help me.”
“I’m sorry, but there’s nothing anyone or anything can do. Jimmy S, I’m not in the habit of necromancy.” The ghost of Stevie Jr looked down and refused to meet Jimmy S’s eye.
“Enough!” Stevie Sr said and stood. “I’ll not have you blathering about like you’re daft. Talking to the air? Jimmy S, you’ve always been barking mad, but your mother was full of sin, a harlot, a vixen. An adulterer! She was not welcome in my world or any other world. She had to be put to death. Your brother was of the same ilk. Every time I turned around, he was in one scrape or another, spending considerable amounts of money on women and the drink. The only respectable thing he did in his miserable life was work on homes for Habitat for Humanity, and even about that, he complained unceasingly.
“You, on the other hand, were somewhat more respectable, but I still considered doing to you the same as I had your mother and brother. However, after your off-Broadway stint in Naughty Marietta and then starring in a handful of television shows, you were thrust in the limelight. Your disappearance would not have gone unnoticed.”
“How did you get Stevie Jr’s body here?” He’d wanted to ask that question for some time. The last time he saw his brother’s body was not at his closed-casket funeral but being zipped into a black body bag and taken away by the coroner.
“There’s a price for everything.”
As Jimmy S looked at his family in horror and the fates they ultimately succumbed to, he grew terrified in that moment and knew that only he or this malicious old devil would make it out of the dungeon alive.

 
Eighteen
 
In meteorological terms, a Scottish haar is defined as a cold sea fog. Most of the time it occurs on the coasts of England or Scotland during the spring and summer months, when the warm air flows over a cold wintry sea. In New England, the word ‘fog’ was used as a more general term to describe weather occurrence that was caused by water droplets suspended in the air to the point of near saturation. As beautiful as it was, everyone who lived in those parts knew it was deadly force when it came in as it had.
On this day, however, the mist that rolled over the village that day was neither a haar nor a regular fog. The thick, dense miasma traveled upward toward the manor, almost predatory in nature, and it sniffed the cobblestone road and turned this way and that in its hunt. Only low-pitched sounds made it through its density, and all other noises ceased in their late night cackle.
Since time was of the essence, the fog hurried up the driveway, flowing across the lawn, and laid in its wake a fabric of exquisite quicksilver. Once under the porte-cochère, it worked its way around a door and found a tiny sliver of light in which to slither through to the other side. As it made its way in, it journeyed through the grand foyer and down the hall toward the other rooms. It prodded and searched the library and stayed a moment, looking quite at peace there, but it had to keep to its agenda. It toured the old man’s study, where the faint scent of brandy, the cloying stink of cigars, and putrid stench of self-importance caused the fog to leave as quickly as it came.
Toward the kitchens in the back of the mansion, it found the entrance it pursued. A twin shelf to the one in the library, encased with artifacts and relics of a time long past, was not as it seemed. The fog hovered in the air and found the gap it needed. It flowed into the hallway behind the shelf, shuffled past the stone walls, and navigated down the long, winding staircase into the darkness below, never once acknowledging the odor of the passageway and what awaited it in the dungeon.
Once it arrived, it hovered behind the man that had caused so much pain, the man who was the catalyst in its eventual deconstruction and untimely expiration. After a moment or two, it saw the figures before it: two men, two corpses, and a spirit. The fog slowly took the form of a woman, and as it turned from apparition to hominid, her conscious awareness turned from corporeal to cerebral, from spiritual to human.
She was single-minded in the extreme and burning newfound feelings.
She could not control it.
Only one feeling, warring with and ultimately defeating all others, remained.
Vengeance.

 
Nineteen
Jimmy S tore his eyes away from the remains of his loved ones and looked back up at his father, torn by the shocking realization that he had been next on his father’s chopping block and a consequential victim of his deviltry.
Relief, sweet and welcomed, flooded through him when he recognized that if he hadn’t become one of the most distinguishable men in television, he would’ve have found himself in Chair Number Three.
Probably with an ax to the head or worse.
That respite from reality was short-lived because his father stood and said, “Now is the time to make things right. Mr O’Loughlin hinted tonight that Season Nine was to be your last season on that laughable television series. Your greatest sin? You have become quite taken with yourself and now you must pay. With your death on screen, no one will notice your disappearance. They will think you went into seclusion out of embarrassment.”
“You’ve really thought this through, haven’t you?” Jimmy S said, alarm rising in his voice. He knew at that moment that his father’s cruelty knew no bounds.
“I have. I have been biding my time to bring God’s wrath and judgement down on you for your sins and crimes against this family. You’ve become nothing but a harlequin and a parasite and a ne’er-do-well. Why you must insist on staying with me during your hiatuses has me perplexed. With your ill-gotten gains and notoriety, could you not find yourself another acceptable place to live?” Stevie Sr said. His fervor grew with each syllable. “And I’ve tried to rid this world of Stevie Jr’s spirt. I’ve no doubt he has been trying to warn you of what was to come, and tonight was my last attempt to rid myself of his malingering essence.”
Behind Stevie Sr, Jimmy S noticed a fog began filling the doorway behind the imposing throne. The nebula of vapor grew and undulated and shifted until it became the figure of a woman dressed in white. Alejandra, his mother, floated toward Jimmy S to stand in front of Stevie Sr, and instead of a smile, her countenance wore the look of a warrior. Deep frown lines etched her forehead and her nostrils flared.
She pointed at Stevie Sr and her voice boomed. “YOU!”
Jimmy S started, gooseflesh prickling his skin, and noticed his father withered to a man half his size in mere milliseconds.
“Alejandra, how?” He wheezed and fell back into his seat.
“How? You do not need to know how. You only need to know death.”
If it were even possible, Stevie Sr shrank deeper into his chair and cowered at his accuser.
“Now you will know the same death as you once inflicted upon me. Upon our son.”
In the center of the room, a small spot in the floor opened up. Jimmy S watched as it grew and grew and reminded him of an old-fashioned well, except without a safety enclosure. Water sprang up from the depths and an eerie red light flared underneath. The angry water undulated and spilled out onto the floor. Jimmy S slowly backed away from the spectacle, not really worrying that this certain death was meant for him, but he did not want to get caught in his mother’s crosshairs, even if it was purely by chance. Even Stevie Jr stood well enough away at a safe distance.
Alejandra, with her ghostly hands, grabbed Stevie Sr by the collar and dragged his seemingly boneless body toward the chasm.
“Remember when you held me under the water in the bath? I thought you were being so loving and thoughtful by running it for me. The last thing I remember about my life here on earth was a mouthful of rose-scented water. You drowned me, husband, and now it’s your turn to feel the same.”
“Please, God, no...I beg of you, Alejandra. Stop this madness,” Stevie Sr said, some of the fight coming back into his body, knowing his death would be swift and certain.
Jimmy S could not tear his eyes away from the spectacle. A man who he feared much of his natural life was thrown into the water, and under Alejandra’s control, he was as helpless as an infant. She threw Stevie Sr into the water and held him under. Seconds turned into minutes as Stevie Sr clawed at her ethereal arms unable to get a firm hold. Jimmy S watched as his father’s arms grew limp and his lifeless body sank to the depths. Alejandra stood at the edge of the well and watched as it closed, and soon the scarlet light dimmed from view, a signal that her work on earth had been completed.
As he looked around, Jimmy S noticed the water that had spilled over the edge had dried up as if had never existed. The stone slabs that made up the floor soaked it up as if it were a sponge.  He looked up at his mother, and when he did, her face changed into a glowing orb of light. Stevie Jr met her, and with that, both of them disappeared, leaving Jimmy S alone in the darkness with nothing but the corpses to keep him company.

 
Twenty
 
After the hateful night full of betrayal, vengeance, and his father’s eventual death at the hands of his mother, Jimmy S knew he wouldn’t sleep for at least two weeks. He regretted that he was in the house alone; his father had discharged all the servants for the day before the séance.
He knew he should call the police about the two corpses in the hidden dungeon. He wished he had Stevie Jr to talk to about it, or his mother, but both of the spirits had disappeared once his father had been dispatched and sent through the gates of Hell. In addition to the bodies, he had no idea how he was going to explain his father’s disappearance.
After debating it somewhat, he decided to call the police and knew that he would make the news and have to be forced to reconcile with another outrageous article from TMZ. Worse, he dreaded having to talk to that Detective Saunders again and look at another one of her atrocious pantsuits, one of nightmares and polyester.
Once the police arrived, they had detained him in his father’s study, of all horrible places, and he was forced to choke on the smells that haunted the room. His mind kept replaying the scene over and over, and it had been terrifying, to say the least. It wasn’t of any use that Detective Saunders asked him the same detestable questions over and over until he felt like losing his mind and perhaps eventually his freedom. Thankfully, the police had left at just before sunset and had removed the bodies of his mother and brother, and as he watched the coroner remove the black bags, Jimmy S felt the recurring sense of immense and immediate loss.
He tried to find safety and comfort in this home, and after the ruthless interrogation and the police leaving it so that he and his father were ‘persons of interest,’ he staggered around and wondered what to do first. He knew sleep would not come, but nowhere in the vast estate felt safe and would not for a very long time.
Finally, he made his way to his living quarters, experiencing pains and throbs throughout his body with each of the thirty-two steps to his room. His nose and cheek ached where he’d faceplanted on the concrete at Wilcox and Paxton. The Buenos Airian scar on his head thumped. He undressed and climbed into bed, and once situated between the velveteen sheets, he reached into his nightstand, shook the remaining pills out of the bottle, and swallowed them without water. Each lump of medication took its time heading down his throat, and once they were settled in his stomach, he reached over to turn out the lamp but thought better of it.
Jimmy S tossed and turned for a while, his final exit might be a long time coming. He thought about what he needed to do with his family’s estate, but realized this was neither the time nor the place to worry about such matters.
He knew one thing for certain.
He would never spend another night here in this abominable place, and upon that last thought, he finally fell into a deathful sleep, dreaming of nothing but peace and quiet.

 
Epilogue
 
Two small boys walked away from the stately manor, hand in hand, down the darkened stone-paved driveway and along the carefully manicured shrubbery. Even though they were dressed in short-sleeved shirts and short pants, the boys were not troubled by the damp chilly air. Their bare feet made no sound in the quiet night. The fog parted with each step they took, creating a passageway of sorts that led to a pinprick of light across the courtyard. The eldest stopped for a moment and turned back to the only lit window in the home. A glimmer of sadness crossed his features, but the younger of the two tugged at his hand to continue their path across the lawn. The eldest stayed put and refused to move another foot.
As the light grew in front of them, it ignited into a breathtaking white-yellow radiance. Just inside, the boys saw recognizable figures of people gathering, and the fog gathered itself and formed into a woman with dark brown hair and russet eyes.
Together, the children said Mama.
I’ve come to fetch you, my darling, she said to the youngest child.
The woman’s white gown moved back and forth by an inexplicable breeze and flowed around her legs and her feet. She moved toward the boys and took the youngest lovingly by the hand, and motioned for the other to go back to the house.
You still have time, my son. Remember that I love you and will be back again, she said.
But I want to go with you.
Go back to the house, mi corazón. You have a full life ahead of you and it has some remarkable things in store. Don’t worry. We’ll see you when your time is right.
The eldest boy faded from view as he protested, being pulled back toward that light in the second story of the mansion. The woman led her youngest boy away as the fog rolled in behind them and the light within slowly fell away into the darkness.
 
The End