His directions grew more irritable as he maneuvered her toward the far edge of the town, where the architecture entered the twentieth century, and she sensed that his nervousness was increasing. Without warning he fumbled at his safety belt and sent it fleeing into the body of the car. "Slow down. We're here."
The cinema formed the rounded corner of two streets. With its strip of cataracted windows paralleling the wraparound marquee, the building made her think of a helmet too old to see out of. Beneath the marquee, at the top of three tiled steps, were three glass doors obscured by torn posters for circuses, concerts, some kind of festival. Ross knocked on the festival poster, in a rhythm that seemed to want to sound like a secret code.
An old clown with dusty hair and an ordinary mouth opened the door into the unlit foyer. "This is Miss Allan," Ross said, already retreating. "I must get back to the office."
The clown rubbed his hands on his baggy suit, through which the elbows of his shirt gleamed like bone, and came out quickly, closing the door on sounds of scraping and dragging. "He didn't tell me you would be this early. I've some work being done just at the moment. I'll turf them out as soon as I decently can. Would you like to sit in the office if I can get the kettle going?"
"Do you mind if I bring the film in with me?"
"I'd rather they didn't know about it, in case-well, in case."
His cautiousness was understandable, but his vagueness was as disconcerting as the sight of him had been, even though she could see that he was clownish with plaster dust that emphasized the wrinkles of his face. "I'd better stay in the car, then," she said.
She sat in it for a while and tried to listen to the radio, but some kind of interference made the broadcast voices decay, sink into a mass of static and then lurch at her. She spent half an hour leaning on the boot lid and watching the street as idly as she could, seeing the first children race out of a nearby school like hares started by the bell before the rest of the pupils crowded after them. Eventually she lost patience. Nothing could happen to the film so long as she kept the car in sight, she told herself. She dug in her handbag for Toby's new number, which he'd left at Metropolitan for her, and called him from a phone box outside a pet shop where a puppy kept leaping up inside the window. "How are you doing?" she said.
"Getting on with life and being loved." He sounded drowsy, as if she'd just wakened him, but happy. "And yourself?"
"Both of those, I think, and something I wanted you to know but to keep to yourself until I make it public. I've found Graham's film."
"Good for you, Sandy. I knew you would if anyone could. Thanks, love, and I mean that from Graham too."
When her change ran out she paced back and forth past houses and neighborhood shops, several hundred yards each way, feeling as though she were on a leash or in a cage. People were coming home from work and taking dogs for walks. She began to regret having lingered, though she wouldn't want to arrive at Redfield too far in advance of the convoy. As muddy shadows oozed from under the buildings and spread, two whitened men peered out of the gloom beyond the glass doors of the cinema. They stood on the steps, dusting themselves and gossiping, until a third livid man emerged from the gloom. All three drove away in a builder's van, and the man who had opened the door to Ross came out to find her.
He'd washed himself as best he could but had overlooked a line of dust at his temples, which made him appear to be wearing a wig. A few traces of plaster had lodged in cracks of his jovial face, which looked as if it had once been even plumper. "I didn't introduce myself," he said, giving her hand a soft loose shake. "I'm Bill Barclay, which sounds like something you'd say to a bank, doesn't it? Welcome to the Coliseum."
"Shall I bring the film in now?"
"Oh, please do, yes. The projectors are all set. So have I been, for weeks. I won't pretend conditions are luxurious, but I hope you'll be reasonably comfortable. I've a few seats I cleaned up for friends until I can open to the public."
"I'll be on my own, won't I?"
"Heavens yes, never fear. This is just our secret, as it was poor Norman's." He stood close to her while she unlocked the boot, and lifted the carton before she could. As he hurried stumbling toward the glass doors he said rather plaintively, "I hope you'll come and see my picture house again when it's done up."
He bumped a door open and leaned on it to let her in. Dusk was spreading down the steps beneath the marquee. She was able to see the foyer almost as soon as she smelled it, plaster dust and the turned-earth smell of old brick. Plaster had been hacked off a yard-high strip of the walls, obviously in preparation for injecting an insulating layer. A mound of broken plaster lay on the bare floorboards near the walls, surrounding a box office so dusty she couldn't see through the glass. The mound was interrupted by the double doors that led to the auditorium and by a corridor along which an open door poked a wedge of harsh light. "Come in here for a tick," Barclay said.
The open door led to his office, where an unshaded bulb glared above a desk onto which he lowered the carton, puffing and smearing his forehead with the back of his hand. He picked up a flashlight from the top of a rusty filing cabinet, and shook it hard. "That should do it," he said. "I'll show you to your seat whenever you're ready."
He was already in the corridor, beckoning her with a haste that stopped just short of rudeness. Either he was anxious to see the film or not to leave it unattended, or both. He chased his shadow into the foyer and eased the double doors open. Fallen plaster gnashed beneath them. As Sandy followed him, he swept the flashlight beam around the auditorium.
A red carpet that looked muddily sodden had been rolled back from the walls, and was heaped against the outer ends of the rows of seats. Between the carpet and the exposed bricks of the walls lay another long mound of plaster. Beneath the screen, which was flanked by two pale giants, it formed a dim border to the flashlight beam as Barclay ushered her along the central aisle to a row of seats covered with a whitish plastic sheet, which he folded back for her. He stamped on the carpet and grunted. "Didn't think the dust would reach this far, but I wasn't taking any chances. Stay here and light my way back, would you? Enjoy the film."
She spread a carpet of dimness for him as he ran up the slope to the foyer. He was eager to start the film, of course, not afraid the light would fail. The double doors clapped together clumsily, leaving her alone with a trail of grayish footprints, and she swung the flashlight beam around her. Shadows darted from behind the rolled carpet and slithered over the heap of plaster. When Barclay had shone the beam into the auditorium she'd thought at first that he intended to scare away some animal, but surely he would have told her if there were rats.
She sat back in the folding seat, which smelled of metal and dusty cloth, and sent the beam wavering over the walls that framed the blotchy screen. At that distance the light barely diluted the darkness, but she was able to distinguish that the figures on either side of the screen were flourishing sheaves of grain, which must have appealed to the architect as sufficiently Roman to go with the name of the cinema. They made Sandy uneasy-uneasy enough to glance behind her to see who was watching her. Of course it was Barclay, at the projectionist's window. He gave her a thumbs-up sign, and stepped back. He was about to start the film.
***
So she was to see the film at last. Her mouth went dry, and she found she was unexpectedly close to tears. She wished Roger and especially Graham could be here to share the film with her. The projector came to life with a whir whose echoes seemed to leap behind the mound of plaster, and Sandy switched off the flashlight and placed it between her feet. As she looked up from making sure that she knew where it was, the screen blazed. The Roman statues flexed themselves and raised their sheaves, but that was only the play of the light. For a few seconds the screen remained blank except for stains, and then an image wobbled into focus. It was a painting of a tower.
Though it didn't look much like the Redfield tower, the sight of it made her heart beat uncomfortably fast. Terse credits s
olidified out of the mist that loitered in front of the tower:
A BRITISH INTERNATIONAL PRODUCTION
KARLOFF and LUGOSI in TOWER OF FEAR
She could scarcely believe she was reading this after so much searching. She was dry-mouthed again, breathless. The names of some of the people she had interviewed appeared beneath Giles Spence's, and without further ado, to the strains of a studio orchestra's version of a Rachmaninov Dies Irae, the film began.
It was the scene Toby had described to her, Karloff gazing emotionlessly from the high tower at a man fleeing across a moonlit field. The man's flight cut a swath of darkness through the field, and so did whatever was pursuing him, converging on him. He dodged into the tower and fled up the steps; each window showed his white face staring down in panic. No doubt it was the same set of a window each time, Sandy thought, surprised that she needed to reassure herself that way, though Toby had said he too found the scene disturbing. Even admiring the skill with which the film was edited didn't let her distance herself from it as the fugitive staggered onto the top of the tower and stretched his hands beseechingly toward Karloff, who shook his head and folded his arms. The man stared in terror down the steps, backed toward the parapet and toppled over, his cry fading.
She knew what it was like to panic in a tower, she thought, and that must be why her palms were sweating. Now here was Lugosi in a coat like Sherlock Holmes's, stepping down from a train at a lonely station. A taciturn coachman with a left eye white as the moon drove him through the whispering fields to a mansion whose asymmetry made it look half-ruined in the moonlight. Karloff opened the massive front door to him, and the two actors set about upstaging each other, Karloff sinisterly unctuous, Lugosi resoundingly polite. Before long they were at the piano and singing "John Peel," surprisingly musically. "It takes more than a critic to shut them up, Leonard Stilwell," Sandy declared, and wished that saying so had made her feel less nervous.
In the village Lugosi found that nobody, not even Harry Manners between wiping tankards and drinking out of them, would discuss his brother-in-law's death except to say, like Karloff and almost in the same words, that it had been an unfortunate accident. Hoddle and Bingo, the village bobbies, reacted to him as if he were Dracula, muttering oo-er and how they hadn't oughter look at his eyes in case he got up to some sort of foreign tricks. It was his gaze that made them tell him all about the look on his brother-in-law's face and the evidence of pursuit that had ended at the tower. Sandy knew she was meant to laugh, but the sight of Tommy Hoddle's eyes frozen wide by hypnosis was too reminiscent of his last stage performance. She remembered that not all the terror in the film was faked.
Graham would have been delighted to know that here was one old film she didn't feel distanced from, but she would rather not have found that out in the middle of an empty cinema, where whenever a close-up on the screen brightened the auditorium, shadows seemed to crouch beyond the heaps of plaster. She glared at the debris and looked up as the scene changed. Karloff was alone, prowling a baronial hall she hadn't seen before. His face filled the screen, staring out with sudden unease as if he had seen something behind her. "You silly bitch," she scoffed at herself, and looked over her shoulder. The screen dimmed, shadows ducked behind the dozen or more rows of seats between her and the doors, and she turned back to the film. She wasn't quite in time to see the details of the carving above the mantelpiece in the baronial hall, but she thought she had seen it before.
The muddy blotches on the screen seemed to swell, wiping out the film, and then the second reel sharpened into focus. If the film was half over, why should that feel like a promise of relief? Nothing she had seen was a reason to feel there was someone behind her-but there was, and he was well on his way down the aisle to her before she heard the doors thump.
The mask that loomed at her shoulder, jerking closer as the light of a close-up seized it, was Bill Barclay's face, of course. "The film's a bit longer than I bargained for. I'll have to nip round the corner for a loaf for the missus when it looks as if nothing's going to happen. I should be back before the end, but if not, just wait for me in the office."
He scurried up the aisle, and she thought of calling him back. If he didn't need to be in the projection room throughout the showing, he could sit with her and watch- but why should she be so anxious to have company? In any case, he seemed to be lingering at the back of the auditorium to watch the next scene, in which Lugosi discovered that someone had fallen from the tower in very similar circumstances fifty years ago. She shivered, and was glad that she wasn't alone in the auditorium, except that when she glanced back she found that she was, so far as she could see past the projector beam. "Poor little thing," she mocked herself, and trapped the flashlight between her feet as she made herself turn to the film.
Lugosi was returning through the village to the mansion. Whenever he looked behind him he saw only shadows, but weren't they becoming increasingly solid, assuming shapes that would be better left in the dark? Graham would have admired this scene, Sandy told herself while shadows raised themselves around her as if they were peering at the film over the heap of plaster which had begun to remind her of an upheaved mound of earth. Here came Hoddle and Bingo, dodging after Lugosi like rabbits trying to be bloodhounds, until they discovered they weren't only pursuing but also pursued. They fled in opposite directions, and she remembered how Bingo was supposed to have run into something offscreen, something that had come after him.
Lugosi was leafing through a history of the tower and of the Belvedere family. It couldn't be long to the end now, she thought, and the stale smell of earth was really the smell of exposed brick. She would feel disloyal to Graham if she didn't see the film through. Lugosi shut the book and strode to find Karloff.
He found him in the baronial hall. In came Lugosi's sister and her new protector to be present at the final confrontation. Her husband was no coward, Lugosi told her, but this man-Karloff-was doubly one for having sacrificed him in his stead, knowing that someone must die on the tower. Building a tower so high had made it a focus of occult forces "that would climb to heaven," forces that demanded a sacrifice. Once it had been from every generation of the family. Only the death of the surviving member of this generation could lift the curse.
Not much of this made sense to Sandy, perhaps because her attention was held by the image carved above the mantelpiece behind Karloff. She must have known it would be there ever since she had seen it in the Redfield vault and recognized what Charlie Miles had tried to sketch for her: the face overgrown with wheat, or turning into wheat, or composed of it; the hungry face from whose eyes sprouted braids of wheat shaped like the horns of a satyr. It was the reason the Redfields had suppressed the film, but why was it making her so nervous? Every time the film showed it the shadows beyond the mound of plaster seemed to crouch forward. She glanced back, but there was no sign of Barclay in the projection box. She was alone with the film-with the image that had scarcely been seen outside the Redfield vault.
"Take the strangers who threaten this house," Karloff cried, his exhortations growing wilder as the shadows came not for Lugosi or the others but for him. He fled to the tower, his unseen pursuers tracking darkness through the field, and climbed to the parapet. With a glance down the stairway and a groan of despair, he fell-or rather, Sandy thought, Leslie Tomlinson did, injuring himself because of something that had disturbed him. The tower itself crumbled as Lugosi and the others watched.
The next shot found Lugosi on the train, wishing his sister and her beau good luck, and it felt to Sandy as if Spence had wanted to get the film over with, though that left various issues still restless. Had he been as nervous as she was now? The train steamed away, merging with the blotches of the screen as the shot faded out. The film rattled clear of the gate of the projector. The screen glared dirty white, a pack of shadows raised their heads around her, and at once the screen went dark.
Bill Barclay hadn't switched off the projector. Nobody was in the projection room, c
rouched down where she couldn't see them through the small windows. She grasped the flashlight with both hands and turned toward the window, the glare from which served only to dazzle her. She pressed the button, and then she shook the flashlight as hard as she could. It still didn't work.
She shouldn't have wasted her time with it, she was making herself feel as though something she'd relied on had left her alone in the dark. Even if she couldn't see the exit doors, she knew they were there, to the left of the lit windows. She had only to ignore the smell of earth that was actually the smell of brick, the shapes beyond the heap of plaster that was just visible as a low grayness near the dim walls. In fact, since the screen was dark, it couldn't be creating shadows, and so the shapes she thought she was glimpsing couldn't be there at all, couldn't be peering over the gray mound, ready to pounce if she moved. The restlessness on both sides of her was only an effect of the way her eyes couldn't grasp the dimness. The creaking she could hear behind her and around her as she made herself let go of the back of the seat and tiptoe up the aisle, over carpet which felt threadbare enough to trip her up, was nothing but vibration she was causing, evidence that she wasn't moving as softly as she would like. She mustn't be tempted to go faster, she might fall headlong. She felt as if the dark around her were waiting for her to break, to run for the doors so that it could leap on her. The lit windows blinded her left eye, the dark gathered itself on her right; plaster dust settled on her, making her feel as if she were being stealthily buried. She stuck out her hands and the dead flashlight, and shoved at the doors.
The left-hand door balked as if someone were holding it closed from outside, and then she felt the chunk of plaster that had lodged beneath it give way. She heard a sound like teeth grinding together. She flung the doors open and hurried into the foyer, past the box office like an upended casket, its window coated with earth. The doors thumped behind her, so irregularly that she peered through the darkness to reassure herself that nothing had followed her between them.
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