by JL Bryan
I texted Stacey a link to the image of Portia and Grace’s apartment building.
Up in the driver’s seat, Stacey’s phone buzzed. She gasped like Portia in the movie and whirled around to look at me.
“I knew it! He was stalking her! Which means—”
“Are y’all texting each other? Really?” Jacob asked. “That’s not allowed at movie theaters.”
“Drive-in rules are much looser,” Stacey argued.
“Could you two keep it down up there? Some of us are trying to watch a movie,” I said.
“Very funny.” Stacey shook her head and looked back at the big screen.
The movie was bad, but at least the pace was quick. Before we knew it, the Friday night party was in full swing. Portia and a couple of school gals in bright dresses with matching headbands showed off a repertoire of top 60s dance moves—the swim, the hitchhiker, the mashed potato—along with three fine-looking fellas in high school letter jackets and pomaded hair. Things were starting to get wild.
The camera panned down to the floor… then passed below it, to show the trusses of the basement ceiling bouncing and shifting as the groovy teens twisted and twirled and bopped. Dust spilled and cascaded down to land with a dry rattle on a row of widely spaced boards, which barely covered a sunken pit in the basement’s dirt floor.
One board slid abruptly to the side. It was startling, even though I should have expected it.
Dirt-coated fingers reached up from below.
Back upstairs, the teen shindig continued.
Then the music ended abruptly, and the lights went out.
“Hey, what gives?” asked the girl called Agnes, stepping back from her dance partner. “Are you fellas trying to pull a fast one?”
“Oh, foo! The radio’s gone out, as have the lights!” proclaimed Portia Reynolds, though the room hadn’t darkened much, if at all.
“It’s bound to be an electrical problem,” one of the letter-jacketed footballers was bright enough to figure out. “Where’s your fuse box?”
“It’s down in the basement,” Portia Reynolds said. “But I never go there. It’s ever so frightening. I wish we had no basement, but we have one, and it’s frightening.”
“I’m not frightened of some loopy basement!” the footballer proclaimed. “Why, my pop’s an electrical man. I can fix it up lickety-split. Where’s your flashlight?”
“I wouldn’t know. I suppose my father must have one in his toolbox. Oh, I’m ever so frightened!”
“Don’t be frightened.” The handsome Tom Hooper embraced her. “We’ll keep you safe. We’re football players, after all. Nobody tussles with us.”
“Oh, will you, Tom? Will you really?” She returned the embrace, with much batting of her eyelashes.
The electrician’s boy, armed with only a flashlight, reached the end of the hall and approached the basement door, made of patchwork, decaying wood that blatantly didn’t belong in this otherwise peppy suburban home. It looked like it had been transplanted from a rickety old barn, maybe even a rickety old slaughterhouse.
The teenage boy—well, the actor was easily thirty—eased open the door and looked into the basement below. Now that he was alone, his brave front wilted.
“Say,” he called over his shoulder. “Say, Mickey! You want to give me a hand?”
The third footballer strolled up, looking cocky, until it was his turn to gaze down into the basement. The camera angle on this was from deep inside the basement, looking up the sagging wooden stairs toward the two boys in the doorway.
“What’s the big idea?” asked the one called Mickey. “I thought you said your pops was an electrical man.”
“He is. It’s not the fixing I need help with, see, it’s holding the flashlight. I need both hands to work.”
“Shucks,” Mickey said. “Well, it’s a sorry thing to ask a fella to do, that’s all I’ll say.” But he followed the other guy down the stairs into the basement.
The camera lingered on the basement door, which gradually pulled shut of its own accord, sealing them inside.
“Well, they’re dead,” Jacob commented.
“I think they’ll be fine,” Stacey replied. “After all, his pop’s an electrical man, see?”
“I wonder what’s down in the basement,” I said. “What if it’s a body?”
“Seems like a reach to me.” Jacob scratched his chin thoughtfully. “What gives you the idea there could be a body in the basement?”
On the screen, handsome quarterback Tom Hooper struck a match and used it to light a candle that Portia Reynolds held in a decorative candlestick. She trembled and sighed as Tom touched his flame to her wick. They stood alone in the dining room, the other girls elsewhere in the darkened house.
“Oh, thank you, Tom,” Portia said, watching her flame grow.
“Look here,” Tom said, as he continued to light her candles, “I know this is a heck of a time to ask, but—aw, for Pete’s sake, you’re a swell gal, and well, what do you think about going steady? As in you and me?”
“Oh, Tom!” Portia gasped. “Do you mean it?”
“Would a fella ever lie about a thing like that?”
“Of course not, Tom. Not a nice fella like you.”
“I am a nice fella,” he said. “You can bank on it, honest.”
“I’m just going to say it,” Stacey piped up. “I don’t think Tom’s really looking for a long-term relationship at all. I think he’s into Myra Finklestein.”
“But the Portia Reynolds character is too naive to see it,” Jacob added. “She only sees what she wants to see.”
On the screen, a long, almost wolf-like pained howl sounded from the basement, like one of the football guys had gotten seriously hurt down there. The two other girls, having joined Portia and Tom in the candlelit dining room, grabbed each other, screaming, while Portia grabbed on to Tom.
“I’d best go check on the fellas.” Tom took a candlestick and started off, but Portia grabbed him and hauled him back to her, in a way that seemed fairly unsafe to do when the guy was holding a burning candle.
“Yes, Tom,” Portia said. “My answer is yes. I will go steady with you.”
He looked at her, and then they embraced and kissed long and hard, in a way that seemed awkward and forced between the actors. The two girls in the background seemed unsure what to do during the scene.
“Oh, Tom,” she sighed, as he pulled away to join the other guys in the basement. “Don’t get hurt down there.”
“I’ll be fine, my little bunny-tail,” Tom said. “It’s just a basement.”
“That’s what you think,” Jacob whispered.
So quarterback Tom Hooper journeyed down into the basement alone, his path lit only by his candle, the stairs creaking beneath him. There was no handrail at all. That basement was not up to code.
“Fellas?” Tom asked, descending into the concrete-and-dirt land beneath the house. “Mickey? You there?”
“You’re a dead man, Tom,” Jacob said.
“He is not!” Stacey argued. “He’ll be fine.”
“He’s thrown his last touchdown pass,” Jacob said.
“He has not! There’s hope for Tom. I believe in him.”
Soon, Tom called for Portia to come to the basement door.
“Look at this,” he told her, pointing to the obvious pit in the dirt floor that had been loosely covered with boards. A few of those boards had now been thrown aside. “It’s like something came up through the ground. Now there’s a hole in the floor.”
“Tom, what are you saying?” Portia gasped from the basement door.
“Well, see for yourself. It’s your basement, after all.”
She came down the stairs, and they looked into the pit together.
“It looks like something was buried here,” Tom said.
“There’s nothing buried there now,” Portia said. “How do you suppose it became unburied, Tom?”
“It’s about the size of a… well, I don’t want to
say it…”
“A body?” she gasped.
“I didn’t want to say it. But why would there be a body in your basement?”
“Shucks, I for sure couldn’t tell ya. We only just moved here over the summer. Tom, where’s Mickey? And his best pal Ricky?”
“It seems they’ve gone missing.”
“Missing!”
“It’s a goof, I’m telling ya,” Tom said. “Those two guys are always off goofing around together. They get into all kinds of tomfoolery. Betcha they’re in a closet somewhere, just waiting to bust out and give us a scare.”
I checked my phone to see how much longer until the movie ended. It was going to be awhile.
So far, nothing had emerged from the sunken projection house to harass us, which would almost have been a nice distraction from the film at that point.
On the screen, the movie characters continued to get separated and attacked. We didn’t see the assailant, but instead watched those scenes through the assailant’s eyes. All we saw was a dirt-encrusted hand, turning doorknobs, walking down halls, grabbing people when they were alone.
Agnes, the delinquent friend who’d encouraged the presence of boys at the party, was killed while sneaking a bottle from the parents’ liquor cabinet.
The other girl, who’d gone upstairs to take a bath in a leap of logic understood only to horror-film makers, was found dead on a bed, muddy handprints all over her white bathrobe.
Portia screamed at each dead body they found. Soon it was just her and Tom, following muddy footprints down the hall to the closed basement door.
“Don’t go in there!” Stacey said. “Get out of the house!”
“They’re so dead,” Jacob said.
“No! There will be a happy ending!” Stacey insisted.
“There’s somebody in the basement,” Portia Reynolds said onscreen.
“Which is a good reason to leave the house. How stupid can you be?” Stacey asked, but Tom just nodded, opened the basement door, and led the way down. Portia stuck close behind him.
The movie was actually getting to me at this point, and I was scared of what they would find in the basement. Partly, this was because the director, perhaps facing budget limits, had kept whatever inevitably cheesy monster costume they were using mostly off-screen, other than the muddy hand, giving it a bit of a Jaws or Evil Dead approach.
Also, I have encountered many genuinely evil and terrifying things in basements, so my sympathies for characters walking into them ran high, and my fears about such situations deep. My hand instinctively went to my flashlight as I watched the characters onscreen descend into the basement. I expected something awful to leap out at them from beneath the basement stairs or the dark pit in the floor.
“Mickey?” Portia whispered, stepping ever closer to the pit, her ankle within grabbing distance of anything that might lurk within. “Is anyone here? Anyone at all?”
Something shifted inside the car.
Stacey and Jacob didn’t seem to notice it, but I did. The night had gone darker somehow, like a large shadow had been cast across the back of the car.
I turned and looked out the rear window.
There was only darkness, aside from the glow of the projector on the concession stand’s second floor.
“Hey, Stacey?” I said. “Didn’t we leave a light on at the concession stand?”
“Shh, it’s getting good,” Stacey whispered.
I looked from the blacked-out concession stand to the tomb-like projection house nearby. As far as I could see, nothing had emerged from there, but I couldn’t see much.
Then I heard it, right behind me.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
I stiffened, feeling my blood almost curdle at the sound of it. Before I turned, before I looked, I thought I could almost recognize the sound, the cadence of the three taps.
They came again, apparently too soft for anyone to hear but me, with the movie blasting over the SUV’s sound system, or maybe it was an auditory apparition meant for me alone.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Feeling queasy, I forced myself to turn and look out the side window, trying to prepare myself mentally for whatever awful thing awaited outside the glass.
I failed to prepare myself adequately.
Right outside, rapping the crook of her cane against the window, stood a woman who was undeniably dead.
Ghosts can appear all kinds of ways. Sometimes, like with Stan Preston, it was a matter of personal wish fulfillment. He’d always wanted and tried to look like Chance Chadwick. Other times, they make themselves look larger and more imposing than they did in life. Sometimes they attempt to fool you by pretending to be something they are not.
Sometimes, though… they look like they crawled out of the grave, and this was definitely one of those. Clumps of wiry hair clung to her skull. Her eye sockets were empty, just as poor Daisy had described them. I could see the hollow where her nose had been, her empty eyes, and her teeth through a hole in the side of her face. She wore a double strand of pearls, which clinked against exposed collarbones. The remnants of a stiff, high-necked dress clung to her deteriorated body.
“Ruby Jackson,” I said to the windowpane between us, my breath frosting it up despite the previously warm spring night outside.
I rolled down the window, removing the barrier. She was close, as close to me as Stanley Preston’s apparition in the tower had been, but more frightening. I could smell her cloying perfume, barely covering the underlying scent of deep decay.
As I opened the window, a voice in my head spoke to me the way Stacey had to the movie characters just before they went down into the basement—why expose myself to greater risk?
But I guess, like Portia’s character, and like Tom Hooper, I just had to know.
“Ruby,” I said. “Are you the one who’s been scaring people in the parking lot? You never wanted the drive-in built. You never wanted your daughter to marry Stan Preston—”
Ruby’s decayed hand lunged at me through the open window, in much the same way The Body’s dirty, decayed hand had grabbed and killed the victims on the big screen.
My lungs felt painful and heavy, packed with some thick, sticky fluid that threatened to drown me. I tried to draw a breath and failed, which kicked off some serious panic.
Ruby Jackson, Preston’s disapproving mother-in-law, had emphysema, among other health problems, and now she was attacking me with her memory of it.
I tried to call out for help, but that flooded-lung condition fought against me.
Ruby watched my struggles with no sign of mercy.
Finally, I managed to loosen my flashlight and blast it at her, searing the apparition with bright light.
“Hey!” Jacob and Stacey called out in protest, but at least they finally turned to see what was going on in the back seat. Apparently, Jacob’s psychic abilities ended where his absorption into a bad movie began. He’d told me before that he sometimes resorts to playing death metal, tuned to a low volume, to blot out the voices of the dead that he can hear late at night. He doesn’t particularly like the music, it was just what worked.
Jacob charged toward me now, leaping between the front seats.
“Begone! I cast thee out!” Jacob bellowed, like a bouncer at the Renaissance Fair.
Stacey skipped through channels on her car radio, away from the drive-in’s 89.3 FM broadcast, skimming until she reached a local gospel station. Then she blasted her Escape’s sound system at full volume from every speaker, like we’d all just teleported into the middle of a rousing church service.
I continued blasting Ruby Jackson’s ghost with light, but Preston’s late mother-in-law showed no sign of retreating, or even of letting me catch my breath. Jacob continued to rebuke the spirit, shouting at it.
Stacey leaped out of the car and circled around outside, illuminating the ghost with a tactical light in each hand, until she was behind Ruby. Blinding white saturated the ghost from all directions. No shadows, no darkness.
Under the intense glare, Ruby looked more desiccated than ever, the white light shining through a thousand cracks and holes in her body, her skull visible through the remnants of her skin, her pearls gleaming like polished bone.
She finally trembled, though, withering under the onslaught, and after a moment she was gone—no dramatic exit, not so much as a good-bye.
I took a deep breath at last. Stacey opened the door where the horrifying entity had stood and wrapped her arms around me as she made sure I was still alive.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Well, that would certainly chase away customers,” Jacob said.
We stood outside the van, in a loose circle so we could watch for anything sneaking up on us. I kept my eye on the concession stand in the distance, where the yellow interior light had sputtered back to life above the popcorn machine.
“Are we now thinking Ruby Jackson, the mother-in-law, is the parking lot phantom?” Stacey asked.
“It makes sense. The entity certainly looked like her pictures in the farmhouse,” I said.
“Except a little more rotten,” Stacey said.
“Gross, but true. And she had the cane, obviously. She never wanted Preston in her family, never wanted the drive-in built. She had to die before he could do it, that’s how much she opposed it.”
“Should I be hearing this?” Jacob asked.
“It’s fine. We’re pretty clear on who that entity was. If you want to show off your psychic range, see if you can sniff out her lair,” I told him.
“So I'm a bloodhound now?”
“Aw, bloodhounds are cute,” Stacey said. She touched Jacob’s cheek. “With their flappy, mushy faces. Go sniff out the evil mother-in-law ghost.”
“Are we sure she’s evil?” Jacob asked.
“She literally just tried to kill Ellie, so yeah, I’m putting her in column ‘E’ for evil. That doesn’t mean the other ghosts here are nice. They’re probably all evil in different and deadly ways. That would be our luck,” Stacey said.
Jacob took a breath and turned slowly around, like he was trying to pick up a radio signal using a weak antenna. “I didn’t sense her in the screen tower, or down in the projection house, or the concession stand…” He looked at the Purple Pizza Eater and narrowed his eyes. “Wait. What’s behind there?”