by Rysa Walker
“I’ll know,” Daisy says. “There could be another Hitchcock in here. We’re at two hours and nineteen, with the cartoons. I could splice in a few more scenes.”
“Suit yourself,” he says. “This is your shindig. I don’t care which clips you show. I’m going to run home for a bit. Get some food, maybe a shower. Keep an eye on that kid, okay? Don’t let him do anything dangerous.”
Daisy glances through the window that looks out over the auditorium. Chase Rey is pushing a broom through the aisles, a job that the contractors who refinished the seats should have done before they packed up and headed back to Knoxville last week. He and Julie showed up at the Hart shortly after Daisy arrived. Julie asked to borrow her cell phone, hoping that she might be able to get through to Martha Yarn’s family in Viola City, but Daisy’s phone was as useless as Julie’s and Tucker’s.
“I really, really hate having to go back on the promise to help out,” she told Daisy. “But someone needs to tell them, and it should be me. Would it be okay if Chase takes my place?”
At first, Daisy was a little annoyed, since Julie’s offer to help seemed to have morphed into Daisy helping her by watching Chase. But she instantly realized how totally unfair that was, both to Julie and to Chase. They’d been at the scene of two separate tragedies today.
She told Julie of course it would be okay. And Chase turned out to be a surprisingly good worker. Definitely better than the one band member who showed up for fifteen minutes and left without even saying goodbye. She just walked around the corner and disappeared, probably sneaking out through one of the side doors. It was as if she’d never shown up at all.
In fact, it was eerily like that. Daisy could remember that someone came, but she couldn’t remember who the girl was now that she was gone. And Haddonwood High is tiny. Everyone knows everyone. She knew the girl. But now her face is blurred in Daisy’s memory, almost as if the girl was one of those faceless, formless students in Martha Yarn’s class photos.
The thought is unsettling, and she shivers. She feels a sudden need for some sort of human contact, so she taps on the intercom. “Hey, Chase! Meet me in the lobby when you finish that, okay? We’ll start the popcorn machine.”
Chase begins to turn toward her, and for a moment, she’s terrified that his face, too, will be blurred and featureless. But it’s not.
“Sure,” he says, smiling up at her in the booth. “I just have two more rows.”
“It looks really good!” And it does. It’s amazing how much better the auditorium looks without a layer of sawdust on the floor, not to mention with new seats, a new screen, and a new curtain.
She still has a hard time believing that the theater is reopening. Only a few months ago, she’d walked past the shuttered doors with Dani and MB, saying how it would be cool to see old movies in the theater.
Dani had rolled her eyes. “As compared to watching any movie I want when I want on my iPad? Yeah, right.”
“It’s not the same,” Daisy had argued. “You don’t get the group experience. It’s different. You know that—you get twice as scared when we go see something at the theater. It’s like you can smell everyone else’s fear.”
Marybeth had snorted. “And their cheap cologne, and bad breath, and popcorn farts. Bleh.”
It was one of the few times that MB and Dani had ever agreed on anything, so Daisy had dropped the subject. Clearly, they’d thought she was crazy. Martha Yarn had understood what she meant, though. Of course, Martha had killed herself a few hours after sharing that thought with Daisy, so maybe that wasn’t the best example to use in defense of her sanity.
The next time Daisy had walked past the Hart after that conversation with Dani and MB, the marquee was no longer blank. It read:
REOPENING SOON
YOUR FAVORITE CLASSIC FILMS
And directly below that:
PART-TIME HELP WANTED
The door had been partially open. When Daisy looked inside, Trent was on his knees, happily stripping up the ancient carpet. And when she left the building ten minutes later, she had a job. The next day, she was right there with him, ripping up carpet and getting the place ready for the renovation crew that was due to arrive the following week.
Her dad had been proud and also a little worried, cautioning Daisy that she’d have to keep her grades up if she wanted to work. Dani was horrified at first, clearly scared that she’d be expected to get a job, too. But then her view shifted, probably because she realized her dad would never allow it given her subterranean GPA. A job meant more money in Daisy’s pocket, and Dani had always considered Daisy’s pocket a natural extension of her own. Daisy didn’t mind sharing. She hadn’t taken the job for the money. When she’d stepped through the door that afternoon, it had felt almost like…destiny. Like she had pulled this place out of mothballs through the sheer force of her imagination. That sounds a little crazy, even to her. But it also sounds right.
She selects another case of film reels from the box, wondering again how Jill Hart came by this collection, and whether Trent had really gotten permission to show them in public like he told her. Most of the movies are still under copyright, and she has the vague sense that even though the previous owner left this collection to Trent, he was probably breaking quite a few laws by showing them and charging admission. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that there will be anyone from the FBI or the Motion Picture Copyright Association or whatever in the audience. This is Haddonwood. They’ll be lucky if they manage to pull in anyone from outside the city limits.
Daisy flips open the case and finds that the mystery prize is Double Indemnity. Trent’s benefactor seemed to have had a thing for film noir, as well as horror. Daisy is less familiar with that genre, but it might be good for another film festival later on down the line.
The writing is faded on many of the canisters in the box. A few don’t even have labels. She’d been surprised to learn a few weeks back that the films weren’t on a single reel. In fact, most of them were five or six reels long. Trent had shown her how to load the film and watch for the cue to switch from the first to the second projector. Then, you’d set up the other machine and chill for a few minutes until it’s time to switch over again.
From what she’s read online, virtually everything in this booth is obsolete. Theaters are digital now, with the movies loaded onto a server. Even at the large multiplexes, someone just hits a couple of buttons, and all of the shows, including trailers, are set up for the week. On the one hand, that would be a lot easier. But now that she’s gotten the hang of it, she likes the rhythm of threading the film and waiting for just the right moment to switch over when the cue pops up on the screen.
What Daisy has enjoyed most, however, is the splicer. A Guillotine splicer, to be precise, which she thinks is an appropriately eerie name for a tool used to create a Halloween scream reel. At first, it felt wrong, almost sacrilegious, to cut chunks out of the films, but Trent said that if you were careful to make the cuts precisely, the splicing wouldn’t really affect the movies because you could just splice the clipped section back in.
Daisy had originally planned to just pick the two scariest films in the box and be done with it. But the goal of this sneak preview was really to draw attention to coming attractions, so once Trent showed her the neat little splicing gadget, she decided it might serve their purpose better to create a scream reel with some of the scariest moments from the entire library that Jill Hart had left behind. That had taken far longer than the first option, and she’d felt a little bad about logging all of the extra hours. Even though Trent hadn’t actually complained, she’d done most of her research on her own time at home, watching YouTube clips and Netflix versions to decide which bits to use and where to use them. Then she’d pulled out the Guillotine the next day to slice, dice, and splice together the actual film for her horror movie mixtape.
She puts Double Indemnity in a separate stack that includes a couple of Bogart films and hauls out a second case of reels. This o
ne doesn’t have a label at all—just numbers. Curious, she loads the reel in the canister marked 1 and turns on the projector. It makes a flip-flip-flip sound and then opens in the middle of a scene with a convertible driving along a winding road. Apparently, it’s not the first reel after all. Daisy recognizes the movie as soon as the shot zooms in on the driver—a blonde woman in a fur coat. A bird cage lies on the seat next to her.
It is another Hitchcock movie. Not one of the minor films, either. It’s one of her favorites, in fact. But she won’t be showing this one tonight. While she hasn’t actually seen Tucker’s crow nemesis, he said it played a role in Barb Starrett’s breakdown, in addition to slashing his forehead and crapping all over his car. Showing a clip from The Birds would be in exceptionally poor taste.
She rummages through the remaining boxes and finds a few additional B movies and one Hammer classic, but nothing that she thinks would be worth the twenty minutes or so it would take to find the right frames and patch them in. So she removes The Birds from the projector and sets up the two cartoons—one Porky Pig with ghosts and one Bugs Bunny with a mad doctor. Then she stacks the reels that she’s spliced together nearby so that she’ll have everything ready to roll once the audience arrives.
Or maybe if the audience arrives. The foot traffic on Main Street seems really light, especially for Halloween. Maybe it’s just this flu, or maybe word has gotten around about the suicides. That’s bound to put a damper on the evening’s activities. In a small town like Haddonwood, most people will know one if not both of the victims. Heck, half the town is probably related to one of them.
Chase is already in the lobby when she gets downstairs. He looks a little pale, but that’s partly due to the dust he’s been sweeping.
“I bagged up some of the bigger pieces,” he says. “The rest of it I just pushed out the back door. Hope that’s okay.”
“That’s perfect. It’s sawdust. It comes from trees. Don’t see how anyone could call that littering.”
He gives her a brief smile, and she fights the urge to ask if he’s okay. Julie asked him that question twice before she left, and Daisy had noticed Chase’s mouth twitch the tiniest bit with annoyance. It’s been a hell of a day for him, but she remembers how tired she got of hearing that same damned question over and over after her mom died. Even knowing that everyone meant well, it was tiresome. You want to scream of course I’m not okay, you fucking moron, but that’s not the polite answer, and you know they mean well, so you just nod.
Instead of asking the dreaded question, Daisy tells him to pour himself a soda. “And then I’ll show you how to work this beast.” She pats the side of the popper. “We’ll get you all trained, and then maybe Trent will hire you in a few years.”
Chase has acted very mature over the past hour. Once he has a cup in hand, though, he does something that definitely marks him as still very much a kid—he tops off the crushed ice with a mixture of three different types of soda.
He’s quiet for a moment, just drinking his soda concoction as he watches her measure out the oil and pour it into the machine. Then he says, “You were at Miss Martha’s house earlier today, right?”
She nods.
The boy falls silent again, and she gets the sense that he’s sizing her up. Deciding whether to trust her. Finally, he blurts out a question. “Did you see anything weird?”
Now it’s Daisy who is sizing him up. “Weird…how?”
When he doesn’t respond, she takes the plunge. “Yes. The fridge magnets. They didn’t want to stay put. Martha had me throw them in the trash.”
“They didn’t stay in the trash,” he says. “And there are a lot more of them now. What about the TV? Did it…talk to you?”
“No. The TV wasn’t even on.” She pours in the popcorn and flips the metal switch.
“It wasn’t on when I was there either, and it still talked to me. Like, directly to me. By name.” His voice takes on a panicky note. “I know that sounds like I’m crazy, but something really strange is going on. Miss Martha had a plate of cookies on the table with my name and Julie’s. Even though there’s no way she could have known we were coming. Plus…”
He stops, and Daisy can tell that there’s something he’s decided not to trust her with. Which isn’t surprising, really. He’s tagged along with Ben to a few school functions, but she’s just another one of his older brother’s friends. It’s not like he knows her all that well.
“Chase, you’re not going crazy,” she says, hoping to reassure him. “Or at least if you are, you’re not alone.”
Daisy has just begun telling him about the school pictures with their odd, featureless faces when Tucker shoves through the front door. His eyes are wide as he looks from her to Chase.
“Tucker? What’s wrong?”
He doesn’t answer but crosses over to the section of the counter where Chase is standing. “You were there this morning. Tell me. What happened at the library?”
The question strikes Daisy as a bit callous. Why on earth would Tucker want the kid to relive that?
Chase seems surprised, too, but he answers. “There was this bird. And Ms. Starrett was talking crazy, stuff about twins and pumpkins and scarecrows. She was asking Julie to pray for”—he stops, biting at his lip—“to pray for the bird, I guess? Then she grabbed your gun and shot herself.”
Tucker leans down, resting his elbows on the counter, and rubs his face. He looks miserable, and any annoyance Daisy felt at the harsh tone he used with Chase evaporates.
“What happened?” she asks. “Did someone else die?”
He gives a shaky laugh. “No. Kind of the opposite, really. Barb Starrett just walked into the bakery, very much alive. No bullet wounds. Not even a scratch.”
“That’s not…” Daisy shakes her head. “I was going to say that’s not possible, but this day has kind of moved the bar on that. Did she seem…normal?”
“Yes. Totally normal. Way more normal than she did at the library…although there’s still that whole rhyming thing. But Sandra Lovett and Old Man—” He glances at Chase and then says, “Principal Snyder were doing that, too. Or it felt like they were. It’s been a long day, though. I could just be imagining that part.”
Chase shakes his head. “I heard it, too. At the library, I mean. And one of my teachers was doing it earlier today right before—” He stops abruptly.
“Before what?” Daisy prods gently, both because Chase has been through a lot and because he seems like the type of kid who might fold in on himself, retracting into his shell like a tortoise if pushed too hard. He appears to be on the brink of doing exactly that for a moment, as he looks back and forth between Daisy and Tucker.
“Before everything at school went black,” he eventually says. “They all disappeared. I’ve seen a few kids blink out now and then, and a whole lot of duplicates, but this was the first time that everything was erased. It was scary, but it didn’t last long.”
Daisy exchanges a look with Tucker. “And you’re sure you didn’t just…”
“I didn’t pass out,” Chase says. “I’m certain. I know it sounds weird, but not any weirder than Tucker seeing Ms. Starrett walking around after her brains were…” He pulls in a ragged breath, and Daisy can tell he’s fighting back tears.
“You’re right, Chase. Tucker and I have both seen stranger things than that today. We believe you. I don’t know about Tucker, but I’m still not convinced this isn’t in our heads. Maybe we’ve been drugged or…something. At first, I thought it was Miss Martha’s cookies, but—” She stops suddenly, looking at Tucker with wide eyes. “Is your car outside?”
“Yeah. Just down the block. Why?”
“Come on,” she says. “Both of you. If Barb Starrett just walked into the bakery…”
Tucker finishes the thought, already heading for the door. “Maybe Martha is still alive.”
As they pass Viola’s Best Bakery, Tucker slows the car down and nods toward the large plate-glass window. Principal Snyder is sitt
ing at one of the tables, eating his dinner. Behind him, near the counter, a short plump woman with her hair pulled back into a gray bun is chatting with Sandra Lovett.
Even from the side and from this distance, the woman is obviously Barb Starrett.
“I don’t think Miss Martha is alive, though,” Chase says from the backseat.
“Why not?” Daisy asks.
Chase just shakes his head and continues to stare out the window. Daisy is tempted to press the point, but she doesn’t believe they’ll get any more out of him. And they’ll know soon enough anyway.
Police tape is still across the entrance when they arrive at Martha’s house. The lights are out, too.
“Looks like you were right,” Tucker tells Chase. “I need to see if Hank ever made it around to pick up the body. You two wait here.”
Daisy and Chase say no at the same time.
Tucker raises an eyebrow and taps his chest. “This is a police uniform,” he says with exaggerated patience. “That yellow ribbon is police tape indicating that only police can enter. Last time I checked neither of you”—he forks two fingers and points at them—“were police.”
“That’s true,” Daisy says. “But we are clearly not in a world where normal rules apply. What if something happens, something you can’t explain? Don’t you wish someone else had been with you at the Pinewood last night?”
“Someone was,” Tucker mutters. “Even if he doesn’t remember it.”
“I mean someone who…”
“Someone who can see the truth,” Chase says. “Someone like us.”
Daisy nods, although an annoying voice in her head suggests that the more logical alternative might be someone who is equally crazy.
“What were you saying about the Pinewood?” Chase asks.
“We’ll explain later,” Daisy says and then looks back at Tucker. “If you go inside, I’m going with you. And I’m not leaving Chase alone, so…”
Tucker just stares at them for a moment and then sighs. “Fine. But we’re not going inside, then. We’ll go around to the kitchen door and look in through the window.”