Ghost Trapper 14 Midnight Movie

by JL Bryan

  “How long until this is over?” Benny asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “We won’t stop until it’s safe here.”

  “And that includes destroying the farmhouse, right?” Callie asked, smiling just a little through her visible anxiety. “I’m definitely a ‘yes’ vote on that.”

  “Burning it down would be your best bet.” I told them. “Don’t do it on your own. I know some guys at the fire department who can help.”

  Stacey and I returned to the farmhouse during broad daylight, flashlights on the whole time, climbing up into the back door since the front was blocked with the end portion of that fallen roof. The back steps had rotted away, so we had to boost ourselves up a few feet, fairly awkwardly, to get up into the doorway.

  We wasted no time in rescuing our gear and hightailing it back out of the house, with no plans to return. Ruby’s ghost didn’t show up to harass us in there, fortunately, but we could feel how the whole upper floor was less steady after she’d broken a main truss down on us.

  We spent that night back in routine observation, watching the silent, vacant theater for activity, and also reviewing some of the heaps of data already collected. This primarily confirmed what we’d observed before. Passing cold spots and occasional small orbs in the screen tower’s third floor indicated a haunting, but cameras on the first floor and in the stairwell picked up no activity.

  The farmhouse was quiet, too, especially compared to the previous night.

  Heaviest activity occurred down in the sunken projection house. Immense recurring cold spots and glimpses of shapes on the night vision reminded us that Jacob had called it the center of the haunting, though that had been prior to visiting the farmhouse.

  It stayed relatively quiet that night—no parking lot phantoms, no fully formed apparitions or psychokinetic activity, not even a ghost movie on the big screen. It was as though, after all the action of the previous night, the entities had withdrawn to their own corners to watch and wait, and perhaps to plot their next moves.

  The night had a calm-before-the-storm quality, with much tension in the air. Stacey and I did nothing to provoke or even interact with them; we had plenty of provocations in mind for the next night.

  We made it an early night by our standards, leaving at about two-thirty in the morning, our gear programmed to keep recording until sunrise.

  “Why do I feel like we’re going into some kind of battle tomorrow?” Stacey asked when she dropped me off at my apartment.

  “Maybe we are,” I said. “We have a lot to prepare.”

  She nodded. We’d discussed a plan to attempt to confront Preston and whatever spirits were with him, based on what we’d learned from our investigation. It was a strange case, requiring a less than standard approach.

  By the time we returned the next day, the feeling of tension had only grown. The sky was gloomy, and the gray clouds pressed low, crushing out some of the wide-open space feeling inside the theater.

  “The forecast said it would be clear,” Callie told us when we caught up with the family loading up overnight supplies into the camper on the back of Benny’s aged, battered Toyota Tacoma. “I’m a little worried.”

  “No worries,” Benny said with a smile that seemed almost too confident about the weather. “It’ll pass. And it won’t follow us all the way to Edisto Island.”

  “I’m super jealous. I wish I was going there,” Stacey said. “Oh! Not that hanging around your drive-in isn’t cool, too.”

  Callie smiled. “I think it’ll be good for us. A night back in nature, away from…” She swept her arm, indicating the whole drive-in theater. “Everything.”

  “Hopefully, we’ll have some things sorted out when you get back,” I said.

  We got to work, and at some point, they drove off.

  Later, as the sun sank away behind the tall pines surrounding the drive-in, Stacey and I stood in the center of the parking lot, among snaking cables, a bundle of which trailed off to the concession stand.

  “I’ve put together some Crazytown arrays of cameras for ghost hunting, but this may be the Crazytownest of them all,” Stacey said.

  “Looks like… Stonehenge,” I said. “A little smaller, though.”

  We’d set up a widely spaced array of cameras and other gear in a circle around the old projection house, placing each one several yards back from it. Hopefully, this would minimize damage if the entities turned hostile.

  We had also placed ghost traps in stampers in front of the cameras closest to the projection house’s small door. These offered candles, fairly weak ghost bait but better than nothing, inside the cylindrical traps. If a ghost charged one of the cameras—or perhaps was drawn to the cameras, if we’re talking about dead actors—it might trigger an automated trap and get caught inside. It couldn’t hurt to try.

  Even if we didn’t capture one, we’d hopefully get images or other information about the entities, helping us identify them.

  “Okay, time to test out ye olde integrated control system upstairs.” Stacey looked reluctantly up at the big second-story window of the concession stand, where the two cameras stood, the flashy new-generation digital camera and the clunkity, middle-aged thirty-five-millimeter, the drive-in’s twin engines of entertainment, retro and cutting-edge.

  The ancient ruin of the first-generation projector, abandoned long ago down in the projection house, did not factor into our plans.

  “I know Jacob told us the concession stand was the least haunted place, the happiest place, but I still don’t love the idea of going up there alone,” Stacey said.

  “Neither do I. Wait for Jacob to get here and he can stick with you.”

  “Oh, no, he needs to be down here on the front lines with you.” She set out candles on top of the projection house. With its tomblike shape, it looked like we were preparing some kind of cemetery séance.

  Headlights glowed along the circuitous driveway. Jacob had arrived.

  He parked next to Stacey’s car and walked over to our bizarre tableau, which only grew more bizarre as we lit the candles.

  “You two definitely look like you’re out here summoning the dead,” he said.

  “That’s the general idea,” I told him.

  We grabbed folding camping chairs from Stacey’s car and placed them back in the drive-in’s fourth row so we could watch the door to the projection house and the big screen at the same time.

  Then Stacey departed for her post on the upper floor of the concession stand. Jacob watched her until she was inside, then dropped into the camping chair beside me.

  “Ever seen this one?” I asked.

  “The Heart of Man? Nah. I like some old movies, but the kind where you can see the strings on the flying saucer,” Jacob said. “Not so much the high-art, avant garde stuff. Like, you know that Andy Warhol movie that’s just a single eight-hour-long shot of the Empire State Building? I could only sit through half of it. How about you? Are you a big Mazzanti fan?”

  “Nah, I prefer directors who don’t murder people.”

  “Stacey said she knew people in film school who said Mazzanti being a serial killer just added authenticity and power to his films,” Jacob said.

  “It makes it hard for me to watch them. I had to force myself to keep watching Body in the Basement.”

  “To be fair, most audiences responded the same way. Body in the Basement only has eleven percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and probably deserves worse.”

  “What about Heart of Man?” I asked.

  “I’ll check.” Jacob looked at his phone. “Eight-five percent.”

  “Do you think it’s really that good?”

  “Or film critics don’t want to look clueless by panning a film that was considered a groundbreaking work for its time. How many people are going to fact-check them by digging up this weird old movie and actually sitting through it?”

  “Good point.”

  The drive-in’s exterior lights went down—not that we’d had many on—and the enorm
ous screen glowed to life as the film began to play. The logo of a long-bankrupt movie studio appeared briefly on the screen and then disappeared, much as the studio itself had.

  With our client family gone, we’d cranked up the outdoor speakers at the concession stand to top volume so we could hear the move while we sat outside.

  The Heart of Man was… difficult to summarize. Also, nobody had mentioned it was all in Italian, with English subtitles. Visually, it was stunning—the crowds wore black capes and tricorn hats and the white, smooth-featured bauta masks that freed citizens of Venice to engage in wild pleasure-seeking activities without harm to their reputations. Palaces full of columns and statues, sumptuous gambling parlors full of masked men and women, and ornate Gothic buildings of stone that seemed to float impossibly on the water added to the film’s dreamlike quality. The music was operatic, sometimes rich and melodic, sometimes painfully discordant, as if to create confusion and disorientation.

  The story began with a young priest in a confessional, inside a gorgeous cathedral full of gold and fine art.

  A wealthy, aristocratic man entered to confess. His list of offenses grew alarmingly long and strange, reported with laughter rather than shame or any sign of guilt, in a way that clearly disturbed the inexperienced priest.

  “I have rebelled against my creator,” the man said. “I have led a third of his forces into insurrection. I have been banished. I have tempted men to all manner of sin. I have offered the cup of evil to all, and all have drunk, and my cup overflows still.”

  Then he described the priest’s own sins—a coin stolen from his grandfather, a moment when he’d spied on women bathing in a river, a time when he’d thrown a rock at a sick, limping dog. Laughing, the aristocrat left without requesting or receiving absolution.

  The priest emerged and pursued the aristocrat out of the church to the carnival-thronged streets.

  From there, the movie became a confusion of sights and sounds and strange music, masks, costumes, crowds. The plot became unclear as the priest wandered from one baroque scene to another in pursuit of the devil, who changed forms again and again, played by different actors and actresses.

  At least, I think that was the story.

  “Anything happening?” I asked Jacob in a low whisper.

  “Yes.” He nodded at the projection house. “It’s like a boiling cauldron in there. Building up to something.”

  I walked over to the eight-millimeter projector, loaded with one of Preston’s homemade Super 8 movies. We’d brought a box of them.

  The images projected silently, aside from the clatter of the little projector, right onto the brick wall of the projection house. They weren’t particularly easy to see that way, but I was more interested in getting the attention of the ghosts than in getting a clear view of Stanley’s creepy home videos.

  The first reel showed the footage of Adaire’s pink and white Beverly Hills mansion that had been taken up close, years after her murder, peering in through the wrought-iron fence at the swimming pool and gardens.

  “That’s doing it.” Jacob spoke in a hushed, serious tone and rose from his chair. “You should come over here by me.”

  “Yeah?” I started to make my way across from the little 8-millimeter projector. “Is there an entity here now?”

  He nodded, but he didn’t really have to tell me, because the night air grew cold as I passed close to the corner of the projection house on my way back to Jacob and the camping chairs. In the Georgia humidity, this brought a condensation of fog, pale clouds arising from nothing.

  The candles burning atop the projection house snuffed out as if blown by the wind, but the night was still. Like the ambient warmth in the air, the candle flames had been absorbed by an entity hungry for energy.

  The apparition formed in front of the low door to the projection house, delicate and transparent, like an image woven from spiderwebs and threads of ice.

  She was barely there at all, yet the power of her gaze captivated me from so close, her large gray eyes taking me in, her mouth showing just a hint of a sardonic smile.

  “It’s really her,” Jacob whispered, still standing over by the camping chairs, several paces away. “It’s the ghost of Adaire Fontaine.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Adaire regarded me coolly, her eyes flicking up and down as she took me in. Even as an ephemeral being who’d been deceased for decades, she had a strong presence. I felt like she was judging me, perhaps unfavorably.

  “You’ve got a lot of stones coming back here, honey,” she finally said.

  “I was hoping to hear from you again,” I said.

  “This place isn’t what it looks like to the regular stiffs, you know. He made it into something else.”

  “Who?”

  “You’re not dim, so you know without me saying.”

  “Right. We don’t want to evoke him.”

  “Honey, I have one question. Can you get me out of here or not? Like what you said in the billiards room.”

  “Oh…” I remembered my EVP session, how I’d introduced myself and offered to help her move on. And apparently she wasn’t familiar with foosball. “Right. Is that why you sent me the message? Because I actually have more questions—”

  “I’ve only got one. When’s the next train out of this lousy burgh?”

  “Do you feel stuck at this theater?” I asked.

  “It’s a prison. You think I like being trapped here, playing out the same tired routines, the same story over and over?”

  “You play the same roles over and over?” Jacob asked.

  “He makes us do it.” She pointed at the big screen. “Up there. I’ve got a reprieve tonight, since you’re showing one of his favorites. I don’t have to play Beretta Wagner from Pocketful of Aces for the ten thousandth time. And of course he always plays Ramblin’ Jim Scarsdale in place of Chance Chadwick. That’s the entire purpose of the production, so he can play Chance. He’s like Nero playing the harp in Quo Vadis, forcing everyone to praise him, only it’s like that every night here. Stanley only wishes he had Chance’s chops.”

  “Ellie, are you talking to Adaire Fontaine right now?” Stacey asked over my headset. “Am I missing Adaire Fontaine live? I am never getting over this.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, to both Stacey and Adaire. “Adaire, if you want out, the best way is to recognize that you’re dead. There is another side, and it’s always there when you’re ready to move on.”

  “It’s not so easy,” she said. “He’s got a hold on me.”

  I nodded. “Did he kill you?”

  “You know he did.”

  “There’s something else you can try.” I walked softly over to the nearest ghost trap, where candles burned inside. We’d already established that she liked feeding on candles. “This can seal you up. It’ll be a confined space for a while, but you’ll be separated from him while I deal with him. It’ll weaken him. Then I can release you wherever you like, when this is all over.”

  “The Hollywood Forever cemetery by Paramount. I always liked it there.”

  “Hollywood Forever?” I asked.

  “That’s where she’s buried!” Stacey exclaimed over my headset.

  “I’m being told you’re buried there, so it sounds ideal,” I told Adaire.

  Adaire looked at me a long moment, as if deciding whether to trust me, then started toward the glowing cylinder of the ghost trap, where she would ride in leaded glass spattered with candle wax.

  “It’s no Cadillac,” she sighed, “but any ride in the rain, I suppose—”

  Then she jerked back violently, as though she wore an invisible collar and someone had yanked hard on her leash. She made a choking sound and rose from the ground, kicking and struggling, then went limp and faded away.

  As her apparition faded, her assailant grew visible, his hand where her throat had been, as if he’d choked her and then absorbed her, one ghost controlling the other as they sometimes do.

  While she had rem
inded me of a delicate lattice of ice, somehow alluring even in death, he was a low, thick, shadowy beast, attired in layers of darkness.

  I recognized him from his picture in the newspaper interview, balding, his beard long and unkempt. His eyes were solid black circles—not his trademark sunglasses, I realized, but camera lenses, seemingly implanted in his eye sockets by some macabre act of supernatural plastic surgery. They rotated, zooming in on me.

  “You wish to interfere with the show,” he said, an Italian accent clear in his voice. “But, no. The show must go on.”

  “Antonio Mazzanti,” I said.

  “You did murder Adaire Fontaine! I knew it.” Jacob walked toward the apparition, and toward me. He must have seen the choke-grab, too, and how Mazzanti had pulled her back from the trap as she’d attempted to willingly enter it. To escape from Mazzanti’s clutches, it seemed.

  “All true art is murder.” Antonio Mazzanti gave Jacob an eerie smile.

  “Well, The Body in the Basement certainly murdered ninety minutes of my life,” Jacob said.

  Mazzanti started toward him, looking offended.

  “Stacey, now!” I said.

  The Heart of Man ended abruptly as Stacey shut down the thirty-five-millimeter projector.

  Then she turned on the digital.

  I appeared up there, a giant two-story version of myself, every pore in my skin roughly the size of a hubcap. Yikes. And I thought the undead lady in the farmhouse was scary.

  Next to me was the ghost of Antonio Mazzanti, his features blurry, his face like a bearded skull.

  Mazzanti looked up at the screen tower, perhaps noticing his movie had been cut off, or sensing something else was happening.

  He gaped at his enormous face.

  “You’re dead, Mazzanti,” I said. “It’s time to move on. Long past time. There’s nothing else you can accomplish here. Let go of your life.”