Excerpts from a Film (1942-1987): A Tor.com Original

By A.C. Wise

"Excerpts from a Film (1942-1987)" by A.C. Wise is a disturbing horror novelette about a young woman, who like many others, goes to Hollywood to become a star and is haunted by the murders of several other aspiring actresses. And of her influence, rippling up through the years, on the man who “discovered” her and on film itself.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Mar 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9780765395689

A.C. Wise

A.C. Wise is the author of numerous short stories in print and online, and the co-editor of the online magazine Unlikely Story.

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Silver Screen Dream Productions, August 1987

Alone in his office George Harwood watches the dailies. She’s there in the background. After so long, he almost dismisses it as a trick of his imagination, or maybe the Laphroaig at his elbow, ice warming and cracking in the glass. But no, she’s there, his Mary.

George still does things the old-fashioned way, running 16mm film through his Bell and Howell projector. He leaves space on his office wall blank, the furniture cleared to give a clean line of sight. Mary Evelyn Marshall. Sometimes Mary, sometimes Evelyn or Eve. Eva. Lillian. A myriad of names to slip into like a different dress every day.

He comes around his desk, moving closer to the images on his wall. Black and white, a recreation of another time, all high silver and sharp-edged night. The women smile with lips like coal; the men watch them through eyes like high-beams beneath their hats. A bar scene. Couples dancing in the foreground, men and women sipping cocktails in the middle ground. In the background, Mary, Evelyn, Eva, stands almost out of the frame. She isn’t watching the band or the couples, she’s watching him.

*   *   *

She’s been dead for almost forty years. A shallow grave is the best he can hope for, because the other options are her body crammed into a storm drain, rolled into a tarp alongside the highway, scattered in pieces across defunct rail ties. In the dark, in an alley, in a rain-slicked dead-end.

Or she isn’t dead at all. The truth is, he doesn’t know what happened to her, but she’s here now, blooming like a stain across his latest film. He stops the projector, pulls free a ribbon of celluloid, and holds it to the light. Not just one frame, all of them. Always in the background, smudged-hollow gaze fixed on him.

There are other dead girls, too, fitting themselves into the