Midnight Special

by Phoef Sutton

“OK,” she said and moved to the light switch.

  “Wait. Don’t turn the light on yet.”

  She turned to him, smiling. “Change your mind?”

  “No. Tell me the story.”

  She pouted. “Don’t you know it?”

  “I know parts of it. I want to hear it all.”

  “All right,” she said, gesturing to a stall. “Have a seat and I’ll begin.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “I don’t like to begin at the beginning. That’s so mainstream. I’ll start in the middle, at the beginning of last year, then flash back to 1999. Kind of like Pulp Fiction. Or Citizen Kane. I’m sure you’ll be able to follow. Audiences are so much smarter than Hollywood thinks.

  “OK, Richard Vollin was this film preservationist, and he was going through the film vaults in some place in Argentina and found a complete print of a lost film. Now, I don’t know if you know much about lost films, but if you do, you probably think about silent flicks like Metropolis or London after Midnight. But relatively new films get lost too. Especially if they’re what you call ‘orphan films,’ films without a studio or distributor to back them up. They just get shown once and then fade away.

  “That was this film. Made in New York, Rome, LA, and the Philippines, produced by a mix of Italian, Spanish, and German money, it was barely released in this country in 1974, then sank into obscurity. Its reputation rested on two things. Its title was memorable. And it was cursed.

  “It hadn’t been shown for twenty years, except for one time in the midnineties (we’ll get to that), and Richard hadn’t heard about the curse, only knew that there was some urban legend about it and that it was supposed to be good. True, he would rather have found something monumental, like The Cat Creeps or outtakes from The Magnificent Ambersons, but this wasn’t a bad find. So Vollin came home with a complete print of Dinner at the Brooklyn Morgue aka Dead Meat, and he immediately contacted Grindhouse Films, a low-budget releasing company owned by one Barnabas Yancey. He started sending just the one print around, booking it in rep houses throughout the country. Just a tryout in six or seven theaters, to see if there was enough interest to put the picture out on home video. But that’s quite a major release for a film that nobody ever heard of.

  “The first death occurred six weeks after the film was discovered. Richard Vollin was found hanging from a rope in his bedroom. The fact that he was dressed in leather, was wearing a red ball gag, and had a nine-inch dildo rammed up his ass made it look less like suicide and more like a sexual adventure gone awry. The odd detail of the word ‘Sombre’ written in feces on the wall opposite him was dismissed as part of the ‘scene.’ Vollin couldn’t have written it himself, not in the position he was in, so there must have been somebody else there. But the police didn’t worry about that too much. Rent boys tend to make themselves scarce when things go that wrong.

  “Morgue was shown one time in New York at the Film Forum and once in Boston at the Brattle Theatre. Nothing happened after those screenings—nothing we know of. But when it screened in Washington, DC, things got interesting. That was a group of college kids from Maryland who drove in to see it at a midnight special, and on the way back their car drove off the Wilson Bridge into the Potomac River and they all drowned. Nothing weird about that. Shit happens. They say some word was written on the inside of the roof, scratched in the fabric, but they said that later, after the story had started to gain traction, so nobody believes that.

  “Then when Morgue screened in Portland, Oregon, a month later, a member of the audience went home and offed himself with a shotgun. The blast missed him mostly, just took off his jaw and went through the wall of his apartment, killing an eighty-five-year-old woman who lived next door. He crawled across to his kitchenette and poured Drano down his throat to finish the job. Took just enough time to write ‘Dunkel’ on the wall before he died.

  “In San Francisco things kicked up a notch. On their way home from a midnight screening of the picture, two girls were raped and murdered. Their bodies were found tied up, naked in an alley, with the word ‘Oscuro’ carved into their flesh.

  “Then in Austin, a wife took her husband out with an ax, after writing the word ‘Dark’ on the living room wall.

  “Up until then, no one had made the connection between the movie and the killings. They happened in different cities with different police forces and none of them happened in the theater or had anything really to do with the screenings.

  “All that changed after New Orleans. You read about that, didn’t you? The projectionist took an ax and split open the head of some bimbo who was texting during the picture. (She got off easy, if you ask me.) And before he committed hara-kiri with the ax, the projectionist wrote—you guessed it—a single nonsense word on the screen.

  “Even before the theater in Charlottesville, Virginia, burned to the ground, the Internet was buzzing with rumors. People there made the connection, even if the police and press didn’t. Dinner at the Brooklyn Morgue was a cursed movie.

  “It didn’t take much searching on Bing to find out about that single screening in 1974 at that drive-in in Reseda, California, when an off-duty cop climbed to the top of the outdoor screen and started taking potshots at the cars. Fifteen people were killed, not to mention the two that died in a car crash in the mad scramble to get out.

  “And that was why the movie was locked away and never shown again, except for that one screening in 1999, which I’ll get to now.

  “Oh, I forgot, when the SWAT team took him out, they found the off-duty cop, all naked, on top of the screen with his head blown off. And on his chest, written in gunpowder, was the word ‘Scuro.’

  “Which is Italian for ‘dark.’ That was the same word, different languages, that was found written at the scene of all or most of the crimes.

  “Dark. For Mr. Dark.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Matt stared in shock. “Mr. Dark.” It was so strange to hear someone else pronounce that name.

  “Who’s Mr. Dark?” he asked, trying to keep the trembling out of his voice.

  “Oh, just a character. In Barnabas’s new script.”

  Matt hadn’t heard of Barnabas until last week, when he had learned all Eva was telling him from the Internet. But the way Eva said the name, it was as if she assumed everyone had heard it; she spoke it with the kind of emphasis reserved for kings and potentates.

  “See, he’s going to make a movie. All about this flick and what happened at the screening in ninety-eight.”

  His eyes had fully adjusted to the dark. “What happened in ninety-eight?”

  “No one really knows. There were no survivors. See, back then this place was pretty run-down. Everybody was buying DVDs or videotapes or whatever, and no one wanted to go to repertory houses to see movies they could see in their own living rooms. The theater was barely hanging on, mostly because the vintage clothing store next door was doing OK and the same gay couple owned both of them. Warren Worley and his boyfriend, Zander Taman. Apparently they were a happy couple. Just two middle-aged dudes trying to get through life.

  “They didn’t show many Grindhouse movies. Mostly silent flicks and foreign films. Classics. They were old-fashioned ‘cinema’ types. But somehow or another they got hold of a copy of Morgue and decided to schedule it for a midnight special on Friday. Only five people showed up.

  “It wasn’t until seven o’clock the next night, when the Saturday evening crowd (if you can call it that) arrived, that people found out what had happened. It was pretty gruesome. There were dismembered parts of the audience all over the front row. Somebody had taken an ax to them and done them up real good.

  “But it was in here, in the ladies’ room, that the real—what do you call it—carnage took place. Every inch of the place was just covered in blood. There was a body hanging from that light fixture. He was strung up by his own intestines, looped around his throat in kind of a makeshift noose. It took the police a couple of days to identify him because his face was cut c
lean off, from to ear to ear, from forehead to chin.

  “Anyway, they did identify him after a while, from dental records or DNA or something. Warren Worley. Zander Taman was never found!”

  She said that last part with special emphasis, like it was the punch line to a joke or the twist ending to a tale, and was gratified by the look of shock on Matt’s face, figuring she’d delivered the story rather well.

  But Matt wasn’t listening to her at all by then. He was distracted by the ghastly face in the mirror behind her.

  A face like a skull.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Matt didn’t move.

  The face, horrible grin and all, was just hovering behind Eva’s back, like a vision, in the mirror.

  OK, thought Matt, maybe it’s a ghost. That would be a change of pace. If it is a ghost, it can’t hurt anybody, right? If it’s not a ghost, then it’s really somebody reflected in the mirror. And if it’s somebody in the mirror, then he’s standing right behind me.

  Matt pivoted around, his forearm raised to block the blow as it came crashing down. It was a wooden pole—a broomstick or a mop handle. The pole smacked Matt on the arm with enough force to stun him. But he knew to absorb the blow and stand his ground. He twisted his wrist to grab the pole and yanked it toward the floor, out of the assailant’s hands.

  The stranger lost his balance for a second, then came back upright. In the dim light, his smiling skull face stood out like a glow-in-the-dark Halloween mask. Which was probably what it was. Matt shot his fist out toward the bottom of the mask, straight at the stranger’s throat. He’d learned not to mess around when it came to a fight but to move in for the quick kill.

  The skull-man grabbed for his throat and fell back into a stall. Matt was on him in a second, picking his head up and slamming it down into the toilet, ripping the mask off, then plunging the man’s head into the bowl. Water splashed as the man struggled, but Matt was relentless, holding him down while he flopped around like fish on the hook, punching him in the face when he came up for air.

  The lights came flaring on, accompanied by the raucous, barking laughter of a new arrival. “Whoa, whoa!” the man said, once he caught his breath from the hilarity of it all. “Slow down there, Cowboy!”

  Matt stopped and looked up, his hands dripping with toilet water and blood, wondering who this maniac was who found assault and battery so amusing.

  “I’m Barnabas Yancey,” the man said, as if that explained everything. As if it always explained everything. “You shoulda seen your face!”

  “This was a joke?” Matt asked, not quite believing it.

  “It was until you went at him like John Wayne in The Quiet Man!” Barnabas was laughing again.

  Matt wasn’t laughing. Especially when he let go of the skull-man, who lifted himself from the toilet bowl and rested his head on the seat. Matt could see his face then. It was a pleasant enough face, under the circumstances. The face of a twentysomething boy with sideburns and a goatee. His right eye was bruising up, but that wasn’t what caught Matt’s attention.

  What Matt focused on were the maggots crawling out of the empty socket where the man’s left eye had been.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Get your head off the toilet bowl, Flint!” Barnabas laughed as if this were the funniest thing that had ever been said. The man with the maggots in his eye stumbled to his feet and leaned against the stall.

  Eva spoke up. “Barnabas, goddammit! When are you gonna learn? You coulda gotten Flint killed!”

  “Well, I didn’t expect Cowboy to go all Ninja Assassin on him.”

  “Somebody want to tell me what’s going on?” Matt demanded.

  “Just having a little fun, Cowboy,” Barnabas said, offering Matt his hand. “What’s the point of owning a haunted bathroom if you can’t have a little fun?”

  “I think he broke my nose!” Flint was having trouble standing, slipping on the wet tile floor. Matt kept watching him. Flint seemed harmless now, but the evil was in him and it was only a matter of time before it turned to action. Matt promised himself he’d be there when it did.

  Eva helped Flint steady himself. “Flint, why do you let him talk you into these things?”

  “Because he thinks I’ll help get his movie made,” Barnabas said with a laugh. “That’s why everybody does everything with me!”

  “That’s not true, Barney,” Flint sputtered.

  “Of course it is!” Barnabas’s laugh was getting a little vicious. “I’m like the king with his court!” His eyes settled on Matt. “And you’re the wandering knight errant, am I right?”

  Matt thought about socking him in the jaw. He didn’t think about socking people in the jaw very often, not unless they were rotting and evil and preying on the weak and helpless. Barnabas wasn’t rotting at all. Evil and preying? Maybe so.

  But the fact of the matter was, Matt needed Barnabas right now. And Matt needed to keep a watchful eye on Flint.

  Matt took Barnabas’s hand and shook it, squeezing a bit more than he had to.

  “Yow!” Barnabas laughed again. Did he laugh at everything? “Quite a grip you got there, Cowboy!”

  “I’m not a cowboy,” Matt said. He had to get out of this crowded bathroom.

  Matt walked back into the lobby, then into the theater. What he saw there made him catch his breath.

  The theater was beautiful. An old movie palace of the kind they don’t build anymore. The decor was a mix of Spanish baroque and Egyptian. It twirled and curled all around, from the balcony to the two box seats that framed the stage. A flamboyant, overelaborate, rococo bas-relief framed the red velvet curtain that covered the screen. And above that, peering over all, like a vulture waiting for game, was the bust of a harpy—half woman, half eagle—eyes red and glowing in the semidarkness.

  Beauty and evil. The place dripped of both.

  “You know, I’m not used to people walking away from me.”

  Matt turned and saw Barnabas standing in the doorway.

  “Unless you’re a studio executive at a party. They can’t get away from me fast enough.”

  Barnabas was hovering around forty, with bushy hair surrounding a fast-receding hairline, and black sideburns growing down his face, as if in reaction to it. Matt thought hip people usually shaved their heads once they started to go bald. He decided Barnabas was reacting against that. The really hip thing was to not be hip.

  “Well, I’m not a studio executive,” Matt said. “I’m not a cowboy either.”

  “OK. What are you? A lumberjack?”

  Matt nodded. That was close enough.

  “Whoever you are, you fight like a son of a bitch. I mean, you don’t know tae kwon do and Krav Maga or anything. You just throw punches. My God, I haven’t seen fighting like that since Howard Hawks.”

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  “Ordinarily I’d toss you out of here for saying a thing like that. But something tells me…” He paused to consider. “So tell me, what movie do you want to make? You have two minutes.”

  “I don’t want to make a movie.”

  “C’mon. Everyone wants to make a movie.”

  “Not me.”

  “Then what do you want from me?”

  “I want to stop you from showing Dinner at the Brooklyn Morgue tomorrow night.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Barnabas sucked on the straw sticking out of a Big Gulp and sat down on the desk in the dingy office. He wore a hoodie. He was about five years too old to pull off a hoodie.

  “What’s it to you, Matthew?” Barnabas asked, hunching over expectantly. Flint and Eva were in the tiny, cramped office too, hanging out by the doorway. Matt was given center stage in an expensive office chair that looked very out of place in the shabby surroundings.

  “What?” Matt asked.

  “C’mon, I gave you a Big Gulp, I let you sit in my genuine Herman Miller chair. Speak up now.”

  Matt felt rankled. “I’m not a performing monkey.”

 
; Barnabas looked offended. “What does that mean, ‘I’m not a performing monkey’? They don’t even use performing monkeys in the movies anymore. It’s all CGI.” His bark of a laugh echoed against the walls. “Now, what’s it to you whether I show Morgue tomorrow night?”

  “You know as well as I do. That movie’s cursed.”

  “I know that tomorrow night is the thirteenth anniversary of the last time it was screened here. I know we’re gonna have a big party to celebrate. I know it’s gonna put asses in seats!”

  “I don’t believe you care about how many asses you have in how many seats. This theater is just a hobby for you, isn’t it?”

  Barnabas grinned at Eva. Then he glanced over at a pair of manacles on a pair of chains that were mounted on the wall. “We won’t talk about my hobbies, OK? This is my calling, if you must know. This theater is why I’m alive.”

  “What about making movies?”

  “That’s what I do for a living. What do you do for a living, Matt? There aren’t a lot of forests to chop down in LA.”

  “I do a little of this, a little of that.”

  Barnabas smiled. “You want to work here, Cowboy? We could use a janitor. You already showed me that you know your way around with a mop!” That barking laugh again. It was getting past annoying.

  Matt looked at Flint. The rotting of his face held steady. It was waiting.

  “I hope I didn’t hurt you too bad, Flint,” Matt lied.

  “You just surprised me,” Flint muttered.

  “Hear that,” Barnabas laughed. “You surprised him!” Barnabas threw an old piece of popcorn at Flint. “You were the one wearing the Skeletor mask, Flint! You were supposed to surprise the fuck out of him!”

  Matt looked at Eva leaning on the doorjamb, looking bored. “Were you in on the fun?”

  She looked at him blandly. “Do I look like I’d pull a stunt like that?” She pulled a cigarette from a pack of smokes that had an Indian on the wrapper and let it dangle from her lips.

  “I don’t know,” Matt said.