by Clive Barker
The dust storm suddenly thickened. Wayne was still on the floor, splattered with blood from a smashed nose and a broken lip. The sand was already obscuring him, a curtain drawn across the shame of his defeat.
“Get up,” Ricky demanded, trying to capitalize on the situation before the opportunity was lost entirely.
Wayne seemed to grin as the storm covered him.
“Well boy,” he leered, rubbing his chin, “we’ll make a man of you yet...”
Then his body was eroded by the driving dust, and momentarily something else was there in its place, a form Ricky could make no real sense of. A shape that was and was not Wayne, which deteriorated rapidly towards inhumanity.
The dust was already a furious bombardment, filling ears and eyes. Ricky stumbled away from the scene of the fight, choking, and miraculously he found a wall, a door, and before he could make sense of where he was the roaring storm had spat him out into the silence of the Movie Palace.
There, though he’d promised himself to butch it up since he’d grown a moustache, he gave a small cry that would not have shamed Fay Wray, and collapsed.
In the foyer Lindi Lee was telling Birdy why she didn’t like films very much.
“I mean, Dean likes cowboy movies. I don’t really like any of that stuff. I guess I shouldn’t say that to you—”
“No, that’s O.K.”
“—But I mean you must really love movies, I guess. ‘Cause you work here.”
“I like some movies. Not everything.”
“Oh.” She seemed surprised. A lot of things seemed to surprise her. “I like wildlife movies, you know.”
“Yes...”
“You know? Animals... and stuff.”
“Yes ...” Birdy remembered her guess about Lindi Lee, that she wasn’t much of a conversationalist. Got it in one.
“I wonder what’s keeping them?” said Lindi.
The lifetime Ricky had been living in the duststorm had lasted no more than two minutes in real time. But then in the movies time was elastic.
“I’ll go look,” Birdy ventured.
“He’s probably left without me,” Lindi said again.
“We’ll find out.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t fret,” said Birdy, lightly putting her hand on the girl’s thin arm as she passed. “I’m sure everything’s O.K.”
She disappeared through the swing doors into the cinema, leaving Lindi Lee alone in the foyer. Lindi sighed. Dean wasn’t the first boy who’d run out on her, just because she wouldn’t produce the goods. Lindi had her own ideas about when and how she’d go all the way with a boy; this wasn’t the time and Dean wasn’t the boy. He was too slick, too shifty, and his hair smelt of diesel oil. If he had run out on her, she wasn’t going to weep buckets over the loss. As her mother always said, there were plenty more fish in the sea.
She was staring at the poster for next week’s attraction when she heard a thump behind her, and there was a piebald rabbit, a fat, dozy sweetheart of a thing, sitting in the middle of the foyer staring up at her.
“Hello,” she said to the rabbit.
The rabbit licked itself adorably.
Lindi Lee loved animals; she loved True Life Adventure Movies in which creatures were filmed in their native habitat to tunes from Rossini, and scorpions did squaredances while mating, and every bear-cub was lovingly called a little scamp. She lapped up that stuff. But most of all she loved rabbits.
The rabbit took a couple of hops towards her. She knelt to stroke it. It was warm and its eyes were round and pink. It hopped past her up the stairs.
“Oh I don’t think you should go up there,” she said.
For one thing it was dark at the top of the stairs. For another there was a sign that read “Private. Staff only” on the wall. But the rabbit seemed determined, and the clever mite kept well ahead of her as she followed it up the stairs.
At the top it was pitch black, and the rabbit had gone.
Something else was sitting there in the rabbit’s place, its eyes burning bright.
With Lindi Lee illusions could be simple. No need to seduce her into a complete fiction like the boy, this one was already dreaming. Easy meat.
“Hello,” Lindi Lee said, scared a little by the presence ahead of her. She looked into the dark, trying to sort out some outline, a hint of face. But there was none. Not even a breath.
She took one step back down the stairs but it reached for her suddenly, and caught her before she toppled, silencing her quickly, intimately.
This one might not have much passion to steal, but it sensed another use here. The tender body was still budding: the orifices unused to invasions. It took Lindi up the few remaining stairs and sealed her away for future investigation.
“Ricky? Oh God, Ricky!”
Birdy knelt beside Ricky’s body and shook him. At least he was still breathing, that was something, and though at first sight there seemed to be a great deal of blood, in fact the wound was merely a nick in his ear.
She shook him again, more roughly, but there was no response. After a frantic search she found his pulse: it was strong and regular. Obviously he’d been attacked by somebody, possibly Lindi Lee’s absent boyfriend. In which case, where was he? Still in the john perhaps, armed and dangerous. There was no way she was going to be damn fool enough to -step in there and have a look, she’d seen that routine too many times. Woman in Peril: standard stuff. The darkened room, the stalking beast. Well, instead of walking bang into that cliché she was going to do what she silently exhorted heroines to do time and again: defy her curiosity and call the cops.
Leaving Ricky where he lay, she walked up the aisle, and back into the foyer.
It was empty. Lindi Lee had either given up on her boyfriend altogether, or found somebody else on the street outside to take her home. Whichever, she’d closed the front door behind her as she left, leaving only a hint of Johnson’s Baby Powder on the air behind her. O.K., that certainly made things easier, Birdy thought, as she stepped into the Ticket Office to dial the cops. She was rather pleased to think that the girl had found the common sense to give up on her lousy date.
She picked up the receiver, and immediately somebody spoke.
“Hello there,” said the voice, nasal and ingratiating, “it’s a little late at night to be using the phone, isn’t it?”
It wasn’t the operator, she was sure. She hadn’t even punched a number.
Besides, it sounded like Peter Lorre.
“Who is this?”
“Don’t you recognize me?”
“I want to speak to the police.”
“I’d like to oblige, really I would.”
“Get off the line, will you? This is an emergency! I need the police.”
“I heard you first time,” the whine went on.
“Who are you?”
“You already played that line.”
“There’s somebody hurt in here. Will you please—”
“Poor Rick.”
He knew his name. Poor Rick, he said, as though he was a loving friend.
She felt the sweat begin in her brow: felt it sprout out of her pores. He knew Ricky’s name.
“Poor, poor Rick,” the voice said again. “Still I’m sure we’ll have a happy ending. Aren’t you?”
“This is a matter of life and death,” Birdy insisted, impressed by how controlled she felt sure she was sounding.
“I know,” said Lorre. “Isn’t it exciting?”
“Damn you! Get off this phone! Or so help me—”
“So help you what? What can a fat girl like you hope to do in a situation like this, except blubber?”
“You fucking creep.”
“My pleasure.”
“Do I know you?”
“Yes and no,” the tone of the voice was wavering.
“You’re a friend of Ricky’s, is that it?” One of the dope fiends he used to hang out with. Kind of idiot game they’d get up to. All right, you’ve had your stupid l
ittle joke,” she said, “now get off the line before you do some serious harm.”
“You’re harassed,” the voice said, softening. “I understand ...” it was changing magically, sliding up an octave, “you’re trying to help the man you love ...” Its tone was feminine now, the accent altering, the slime becoming a purr. And suddenly it was Garbo.
“Poor Richard,” she said to Birdy. “He’s tried so hard, hasn’t he?” She was gentle as a lamb.
Birdy was speechless: the impersonation was as faultless as that of Lorre, as female as the first had been male.
“All right, I’m impressed,” said Birdy, “now let me speak to the cops.”
“Wouldn’t this be a fine and lovely night to go out walking, Birdy? Just we two girls together.”
“You know my name.”
“Of course I know your name. I’m very close to you.”
“What do you mean, close to me?”
The reply was throaty laughter, Garbo’s lovely laughter.
Birdy couldn’t take it any more. The trick was too clever; she could feel herself succumbing to the impersonation, as though she were speaking to the star herself.
“No,” she said down the phone, “you don’t convince me, you hear?” Then her temper snapped. She yelled: “You’re a fake!” into the mouthpiece of the phone so loudly she felt the receiver tremble, and then slammed it down. She opened the Office and went to the outer door. Lindi Lee had not simply slammed the door behind her. It was locked and bolted from the inside.
“Shit,” Birdy said quietly.
Suddenly the foyer seemed smaller than she’d previously thought it, and so did her reserve of cool. She mentally slapped herself across the face, the standard response for a heroine verging on hysteria. Think this through, she instructed herself. One: the door was locked. Lindi Lee hadn’t done it, Ricky couldn’t have done it, she certainly hadn’t done it. Which implied—
Two: There was a weirdo in here. Maybe the same he, she or it that was on the phone. Which implied—
Three: He, she or it must have access to another line, somewhere in the building. The only one she knew of was upstairs, in the storeroom. But there was no way she was going up there. For reasons see Heroine in Peril. Which implied—
Four: She had to open this door with Ricky’s keys.
Right, there was the imperative: get the keys from Ricky.
She stepped back into the cinema. For some reason the houselights were jumpy, or was that just panic in her optic nerve? No, they were flickering slightly; the whole interior seemed to be fluctuating, as though it were breathing.
Ignore it: fetch the keys.
She raced down the aisle, aware, as she always was when she ran, that her breasts were doing a jig, her buttocks too. A right sight I look, she thought for anyone with the eyes to see. Ricky was moaning in his faint. Birdy looked for the keys, but his belt had disappeared.
“Ricky ...” she said close to his face. The moans multiplied.
“Ricky, can you hear me? It’s Birdy, Rick. Birdy.”
“Birdy?”
“We’re locked in, Ricky. Where are the keys?”
“... keys?”
“You’re not wearing your belt, Ricky,” she spoke slowly, as if to an idiot, “where-are-your-keys?”
The jigsaw Ricky was doing in his aching head was suddenly solved, and he sat up.
“Boy!” he said.
“What boy?”
“In the john. Dead in the john.”
“Dead? Oh Christ. Dead? Are you sure?”
Ricky was in some sort of trance, it seemed. He didn’t look at her, he just stared into middle-distance, seeing something she couldn’t.
“Where are the keys?” she asked again. “Ricky. It’s important. Concentrate.”
“Keys?”
She wanted to slap him now, but his face was already bloody and it seemed sadistic.
“On the floor,” he said after a time.
“In the john? On the floor in the john?”
Ricky nodded. The movement of his head seemed to dislodge some terrible thoughts: suddenly he looked as though he was going to cry.
“It’s all going to be all right,” said Birdy.
Ricky’s hands had found his face, and he was feeling his features, a ritual of reassurance.
“Am I here?” he inquired quietly. Birdy didn’t hear him, she was steeling herself for the john. She had to go in there, no doubt about that, body or no body. Get in, fetch the keys, get out again. Do it now.
She stepped through the door. It occurred to her as she did so that she’d never been in a men’s toilet before, and she sincerely hoped this would be the first and only occassion.
The toilet was almost in darkness. The light was flickering in the same fitful way as the lights in the cinema, but at a lower level. She stood at the door, letting her eyes accommodate the gloom, and scanned the place.
The toilet was empty. There was no boy on the floor, dead or alive.
The keys were there though. Ricky’s belt was lying in the gutter of the urinal. She fished it out, the oppressive smell of the disinfectant block making her sinuses ache. Disengaging the keys from their ring she stepped out of the toilet into the comparative freshness of the cinema. And it was all over, simple as that.
Ricky had hoisted himself on to one of the seats, and was slumped in it, looking sicker and sorrier for himself than ever. He looked up as he heard Birdy emerge.
“I’ve got the keys,” she said.
He grunted: God, he looked ill, she thought. Some of her sympathy had evaporated however. He was obviously having hallucinations, and they probably had chemical origins. It was his own damn fault.
“There’s no boy in there, Ricky.”
“What?”
“There’s no body in the john; nobody at all. What are you on anyhow?”
Ricky looked down at his shaking hands.
“I’m not on anything. Honestly.”
“Damn stupid,” she said. She half-suspected that he’d set her up for this somehow, except that practical jokes weren’t his style. Ricky was quite a puritan in his way: that had been one of his attractions.
“Do you need a doctor?”
He shook his head sulkily.
“Are you sure?”
“I said no,” he snapped.
“O.K., I offered.” She was already marching up the rake of the aisle, muttering something under her breath. At the foyer door she stopped and called across to him.
“I think we’ve got an intruder. There was somebody on the extension line. Do you want to stand watch by the front door while I fetch a cop?”
“In a minute.”
Ricky sat in the flickering light and examined his sanity. If Birdy said the boy wasn’t in there, then presumably she was telling the truth. The best way to verify that was to see for himself. Then he’d be certain he’d suffered a minor reality crisis brought on by some bad dope, and he’d go home, lay his head down to sleep and wake tomorrow afternoon healed. Except that he didn’t want to put his head in that evil-smelling room. Suppose she was wrong, and she was the one having the crisis? Weren’t there such things as hallucinations of normality?
Shakily, he hauled himself up, crossed the aisle and pushed open the door. It was murky inside, but he could see enough to know that there were no sandstorms, or dead boys, no gun-toting cowboys, nor even a solitary tumbleweed. It’s quite a thing, he thought, this mind of mine. To have created an alternative world so eerily well. It was a wonderful trick. Pity it couldn’t be turned to better use than scaring him shitless. You win some, you lose some.
And then he saw the blood. On the tiles. A smear of blood that hadn’t come from his nicked ear, there was too much of it. Ha! He didn’t imagine it at all. There was blood, heel marks, every sign that what he thought he’d seen, he’d seen. But Jesus in Heaven, which was worse? To see, or not to see? Wouldn’t it have been better to be wrong, and just a little spaced-out tonight, than right, and in the
hands of a power that could literally change the world?
Ricky stared at the trail of blood, and followed it across the floor of the toilet to the cubicle on the left of his vision. Its door was closed: it had been open before. The murderer, whoever he was, had put the boy in there, Ricky knew it without looking.
“O.K.,” he said, “now I’ve got you.”
He pushed on the door. It swung open and there was the boy, propped up on the toilet seat, legs spread, arms hanging.
His eyes had been scooped out of his head. Not neatly: no surgeon’s job. They’d been wrenched out, leaving a trail of mechanics down his cheek.
Ricky put his hand over his mouth and told himself he wasn’t going to throw up. His stomach churned, but obeyed, and he ran to the toilet door as though any moment the body was going to get up and demand its ticket-money back.
“Birdy ... Birdy ...”
The fat bitch had been wrong, all wrong. There was death here, and worse.
Ricky flung himself out of the john into the body of the cinema.
The wall lights were fairly dancing behind their Deco shades, guttering like candles on the verge of extinction. Darkness would be too much; he’d lose his mind.
There was, it occurred to him, something familiar about the way the lights flickered, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He stood in the aisle for a moment, hopelessly lost.
Then the voice came; and though he guessed it was death this time, he looked up.
“Hello Ricky,” she was saying as she came along Row E towards him. Not Birdy. No, Birdy never wore a white gossamer dress, never had bruisefull lips, or hair so fine, or eyes so sweetly promising. It was Monroe who was walking towards him, the blasted rose of America.
“Aren’t you going to say hello?” she gently chided.
“... er...”
“Ricky. Ricky. Ricky. After all this time.”
All this time? What did she mean: all this time?
“Who are you?”
She smiled radiantly at him.
“As if you didn’t know.”
“You’re not Marilyn. Marilyn’s dead.”