Midnight Special

by Phoef Sutton

  “No, she’d never do that,” Barnabas said. “She’s innocent as the new-fallen snow. We saw you heading for the bathroom and figured she was going to do one of her tours. We thought we’d see what happens. Figured you’d be scared, it would be a laugh.” His eyes drifted to Eva. “Maybe even figured she’d be scared. Get a rise out of her for once.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you, Barney.” She dug an old Zippo lighter out of her pants pocket and proceeded to light up.

  “No smoking in the theater, Eva.”

  “Fuck you.” She blew a cloud of smoke at Barnabas. But she did snuff the cigarette out on the wall. She might be rebellious, Matt thought, but she still does what he says.

  Barnabas turned back to Matt. “Anyway, I never thought you’d turn our little prank into a—what do you call it?—donnybrook.”

  Matt locked eyes with Barnabas. “Then why didn’t you wear the mask, Mr. Yancey? If it was such an innocent gag?”

  Barnabas looked right back at him. “Because you never know what’ll happen.”

  “Then that’s what I think about the screening tomorrow night. You never know what’ll happen.”

  “Oh, I know what’ll happen. That story Eva told you, it was the truth. I expect Mr. Zander Taman will come back from the grave and slaughter everyone there.”

  Matt watched him. Barnabas wasn’t laughing. “That’s not a joke.”

  “Damn right it’s not. It’s the climax of the screenplay I’m writing. When Mr. Dark comes shambling in with his rotting entrails dragging behind him to reenact his crime.”

  “Why do you call him ‘Mr. Dark’?” Matt asked, trying to keep his voice steady.

  “Taman is the Croatian word for ‘dark.’ That’s one thing all the crimes have in common. The word dark was written at the scenes, in all different languages. Don’t you think that’s significant, Dead Man?”

  Matt started. “You know who I am?”

  “Sure. I read all about you. Matt Cahill. It’s a pretty memorable name. Sort of like Marshal Dillon and John Wayne all rolled into one.” Barnabas gave his barking laugh. “The one guy I know who really has a tale worth telling, and he doesn’t want to make a movie! Incredible!”

  Matt stood up. “I’ll take that job you offered me, Mr. Yancey.”

  “Good. But please, Mr. Yancey is the guy who fucked my mother. I’m Barney.” He leaped off the table, reminding Matt of a little boy with ADHD. Grabbing a mop from a corner, he handed it to Matt. “Pay special attention to the back row. That’s where the masturbators sit. I know. Been there, done that.” And then there was that barking laugh again.

  Flint checked the time on his cell phone. “We better go, Barnabas.”

  “Oh, right. You coming to the picture, Eva?”

  Eva shrugged. “I’ve seen it.”

  “So have I. A million times. But not in this setting. Setting is everything.” His gaze landed on Matt as if he’d forgotten all about him. “You wanna come?”

  “Where?”

  “We’re going to a screening of Night of the Living Dead. In a cemetery.”

  “Been there,” said Matt. “Done that.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  It didn’t surprise Matt that he was sitting in the back of a hearse. A hearse that was retrofitted with leather seats (where the coffins used to be) and pimped out with a primo sound system, which was currently blasting Bernard Herrmann’s score for Twisted Nerve for everybody on Melrose Avenue to hear.

  No, it didn’t surprise Matt that Barnabas had a hearse. Everything Barnabas did was about making an impact, saying “Look at me! Aren’t I weird?” It must have been exhausting to be Barnabas Yancey.

  Flint was behind the steering wheel. Matt was behind him in the backseat, where he could just glimpse the squirming maggots in his eye if he leaned forward. They hadn’t spread any. Flint seemed to be maintaining himself. For now.

  That was one of the reasons Matt had agreed to go with them to the movie. The other was that he sensed that there was more to Barnabas’s insistence on holding the screening tomorrow night than sheer mischievousness. Barnabas knew more about Mr. Dark than he let on. Matt wanted to stay near Barnabas and see what made him tick.

  But that didn’t explain why Eva changed her mind and decided to come along. Or why she was sitting so near to him, drumming her black fingernails on his thigh. Hadn’t Matt made his lack of interest clear?

  He had asked to drop by his hotel room on the way and pick up his duffel bag, his ax waiting inside it. Why he wanted it close to him, he wasn’t sure. He was just used to having it there, and in the small towns and on the back roads he usually frequented, no one questioned a man carrying a large duffel slung over his shoulder. In a big city it made him stand out like a homeless person.

  Which was what he was, he supposed.

  He missed Harrisonburg. He’d picked up the room phone in his hotel and called Gina, but all he’d got was her voice mail. He hadn’t left a message. He was never sure what to say on those things. “How are you?” “I’m here.” “I miss you.” It all seemed so forced.

  So here he was, driving in a cherry red hearse toward the Hollywood Forever Cemetery to see a zombie movie, with a girl with bleached blond hair and a pierced eyebrow who wanted to fuck him, and a forty-year-old teenager who was now playing Wanda Jackson’s “Riot in Cell Block #9” at full volume, as the hearse vibrated with bass, motoring down the street.

  Matt decided he didn’t like LA.

  After he’d been to New York a few months back, he’d thought all big cities would be the same. But whereas New York crushed you down by the sheer weight of the buildings or the cacophonous noise of the traffic, Los Angeles was all spread out and nondescript and anonymous. It was as if a small Western town had grown and grown, like the Blob, and was threatening to eat up the entire country if it wasn’t stopped.

  Matt could see no pedestrians on the sidewalk, just empty nail salons and auto repair shops. Then all at once there was a throng of people, all twentysomething (or people on either side of their twenties who wished they were twentysomething), lined up outside the gates of an old cemetery, which sprang up out of nowhere between a transmission/muffler shop and a Chinese restaurant.

  Flint steered the hearse into the crowd, easing his way through the gates. The mob parted with well-rehearsed ease, and they drove into the cemetery. Barnabas rolled down his window and waved to the multitude—they all waved back with the respect and devotion of a congregation for its pastor.

  Matt took a closer look at the crowd and his heart skipped a beat.

  They were all rotting and covered with running sores.

  It took him a second to realize that they were wearing makeup. This was a costume event. Everyone was made up as zombies.

  Great, thought Matt. Now it would be hard to tell the fake ghouls from the real ones. But Matt figured, after all he’d been through, he’d be up for the job.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The cemetery was huge. Behind white walls, secreted from the city that pulsed all around it, the cemetery lay like a sleeping giant. Acres of tombstones and marble statues. Palm trees, looking to Matt like alien fingers scratching at the night sky, towered overhead among the clouds and fingered the stars.

  It wasn’t a modern cemetery. It didn’t have concrete slabs flush with the ground to make it easier to mow the lawn. No, this was an old-fashioned, full-on graveyard, filled with monuments and mausoleums and statues of weeping angels. It looked for all the world like a cemetery movie set. It was even lit like a film—low arcs of light filtered through the headstones, more to provide atmosphere than to add illumination. The only word Matt could think of to fit this place was a word from his childhood, a word he hadn’t used in years—it was spooky. Like a Halloween haunted house spooky. Like funhouse spooky.

  When he was a kid, he would have eaten this place up with a spoon. He wasn’t a kid anymore.

  The hearse rolled to stop.

  “Last stop!” Barnabas cackled as h
e opened the door.

  Eva spread a blanket on the ground, as if they were having a picnic in a park. The crowd, once it was let in, filled the rolling hills like a fog. Barnabas sat in among them, a part of them, but separate. Matt marveled at the way he seemed to ride above the throng, passing his hands through them like the pope in Vatican Square. They worshipped him, Matt realized, and the thought made him feel a little sick in the pit of his stomach.

  Barnabas cracked open a bottle of Craftsman beer and took a long drink from it. He leaned back on a headstone and sighed. “Isn’t it a beautiful night, Darren?”

  Matt looked around. There was no one named Darren in the immediate vicinity. Just Eva stretched out over a grave like it was a tanning bed and Flint, carrying a basket of chicken and waffles out of the hearse. The running sores in Flint’s eyes were getting worse.

  “Who’s Darren?” Matt asked.

  “Darren McGavin. You know, Kolchak, The Night Stalker.” Barnabas reached behind himself and tapped the gravestone that he was resting on. It was a tall piece of marble, and over Barnabas’s head Matt could read the name etched in it. It looked familiar.

  “He was the father in A Christmas Story, right?” Matt said.

  “OK, we’ll accept that,” Barnabas said, sounding aggrieved. “All the Hollywood luminaries are buried here. DeMille. Valentino. Douglas Fairbanks. Junior and Senior. Mel Blanc. Peter Lorre. Even Johnny Ramone. I’m going to be buried over there. If I ever die.”

  Matt took his duffel bag out and propped it up underneath himself—somehow he didn’t think it was right to use a headstone as a pillow.

  Flint put the basket down in front of Barnabas and cleared his throat. He was obviously bringing up a touchy subject. “So, Barney…did you ever get the chance to read that new draft I did on my screenplay? You’ve had it for a couple of weeks now. Do you have any notes?”

  “I said I’d get to it!” Barnabas snapped. The rudeness of his tone was palpable to Matt. Matt would never talk that way to someone who had just brought him a basket of chicken and waffles.

  “He thinks I have nothing to do but read his shitty spec screenplays,” Barnabas said, laughing to Matt, as if Matt would understand, even though Matt didn’t know what a spec screenplay was, let alone what notes were.

  “As a matter of fact, I did read it,” Barnabas went on. “It has promise, but, man, the third act still feels like I’ve wiped my ass with it a million times. It’s so predictable! You know what it reads like? A fucking Lifetime made-for-TV movie! I’d have flushed it down the toilet if it wouldn’t have stopped up the drain with its clichés!”

  Flint blinked at him. One of the maggots in his right eye popped out and jumped down his cheek as his eyelid snapped shut. “OK,” he said, “but you think it has promise, right? If I work on it, you’ll read it again?”

  “I suppose. But don’t expect me to keep wasting my time with such utter, boring, puerile bullshit, all right?”

  “Thanks.” Flint scuttled off to sit with Eva.

  Barnabas chuckled and whispered to Matt, “I didn’t actually read it, but I didn’t have to, to know it sucked.”

  Barnabas settled down and sat facing the wall of a huge mausoleum that Matt guessed was going to be the screen. It was like the drive-in movie theater Matt went to once as a kid. Except, instead of cars, everyone was sitting on graves.

  “Only in Hollywood, huh?” Barnabas said, as if echoing Matt’s thoughts.

  “It seems a little disrespectful,” Matt said, his ass squirming on Maila Nurmi’s grave. Whoever that was.

  “It would be disrespectful,” Barnabas agreed, “if these weren’t showbiz folk.” He patted the ground fondly. “They understand. The show must go on.”

  The lights around them dimmed and the evening’s entertainment began. First there was some ancient cartoon full of dancing skeletons, all done in a rubbery, bouncy style that made Matt laugh, in spite of himself.

  Then the main attraction. Matt had seen it before. It had really scared him when he was a boy.

  Nothing scared him anymore.

  So while Barbra was being chased through the black-and-white graveyard, Matt let his eyes wander over the crowd.

  Everyone was wearing makeup—cavernous eyes, sunken cheeks, skull teeth drawn over their lips—but now that he was used to it, it didn’t fool him at all.

  Flint, now, there was the real thing. The sores in his face were deepening, and Matt caught the telltale whiff of decaying flesh in the air.

  How long would it be before this one turned violent?

  All at once, Flint’s eyeball popped out of his head and drooped down his face.

  “Yuck,” Barnabas said. “I never get used to that.”

  Matt turned to Barnabas. “Get used to what?”

  “Come on.” Barnabas grinned. “You see it too. Flint’s gone all ripe.”

  Matt stared at Barnabas.

  “Cowboy, you don’t have to pretend with me, you know,” Barnabas leaned in and whispered to Matt. “We’re two of a kind.”

  “What do you mean?” Matt asked.

  “I’ve been seeing ’em rot and go bad for close to a year now.” Barnabas took a sip from his beer and added, “Ever since I died.”

  And then a shovel came swinging down at Barnabas’s head.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Where Flint had gotten the shovel from, Matt didn’t know. Perhaps it was in the back of the hearse when they drove here. Perhaps he’d picked it up from behind a tombstone, left there by some forgetful gravedigger when he was done with his day’s work. But he had it and he was aiming it at Barnabas like a hatchet.

  The shovel came down with such force that it struck a spark off Darren McGavin’s headstone. Barnabas scooted away just in time, rolling aside like a trained gymnast. Like he wasn’t surprised. Like he was expecting it.

  “You didn’t even read the damned thing!” Flint shouted and swung the shovel again, straight down at Barnabas. Barnabas skittered away, half climbing up Richard Blackwell’s tombstone, just avoiding the blow.

  “If you’d read the fucking screenplay you’d have seen that I took your last notes and improved on them!” Flint was screaming as he raised the shovel for the killing stroke.

  Matt was on his feet in an instant, his duffel in hand. He didn’t have time to pull the ax out. He just swung the whole duffel at the back of Flint’s head.

  Flint spun around, affronted. “What the fuck was that?” he asked, insulted. “We’re talking here!”

  Barnabas was on him in seconds, wrapping his arms around him from behind, pinning Flint’s arms to his sides.

  “Now!” Barnabas yelled gleefully to Matt. “Clobber him!”

  Matt was a bit taken aback by this order, but he did as he was told, clipping Flint on the jaw with the butt of his ax through the duffel.

  Flint went down.

  Barnabas looked at him, lying at his feet, and laughed. “I didn’t expect him to turn so soon.”

  “What are you talking about?” Matt asked.

  Barnabas ignored him. He was bending over the unconscious Flint, poking at his putrid eye like a little boy exploring the rotting carcass of some animal. “It’s so gross!” he said admiringly.

  The crowd was coming around them now, curious at what the ruckus was about. Barnabas waved them aside. “My friend just had a little too much beer. Everything’s under control.”

  He started lifting Flint up by the arms and gestured for Matt to grab his feet. “Come on, we’ll get him into the hearse.”

  “What for?” Matt asked, puzzled.

  “Well, we can’t just leave him here,” Barnabas said, like he was talking to a petulant child. “We’ll take him back to the theater. Get some coffee in him.”

  “You don’t understand,” Matt said. “He’s not going to get better. He’s going to wake up and try to kill you.”

  “Not if he’s cuffed to the wall.”

  Who was Matt to argue with that? Besides, he couldn’t very well
kill Flint here, in front of everybody. Better to lug him away and figure out what to do with him later.

  So he grabbed Flint’s legs and started to haul him toward the hearse.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Eva asked.

  “Not now, Eva,” Barnabas said. “Be a doll and open the back of the hearse.”

  “Fuck you, Barney. Open it yourself.”

  “Can’t you see my hands are full?”

  In retrospect, Matt wondered if Flint had ever really been unconscious or if he was just waiting for the right moment to strike. It didn’t really matter, Matt supposed. All that mattered was that at that instant Flint’s hand shot up toward Barnabas’s face and grabbed hold, nails digging into his flesh.

  Barnabas screamed a scream that sounded a little like his laugh and dropped Flint.

  Flint’s hand fell with him, scratching deep grooves into Barnabas’s face. His legs were jerked out of Matt’s grasp, and as soon as he hit the ground, Flint sprang back up, nails at the ready, reaching out for Barnabas’s throat.

  Eva screamed, and Matt looked over to where his duffel lay, left behind under Darren McGavin’s tombstone. Flint followed his gaze. Both men dived for the duffel, but Flint had the head start, so he got there first.

  Flint picked up the duffel and examined it. He didn’t seem to know what he had—he had just seen that Matt wanted it. He shook it a couple of times and smiled.

  Then he pulled out the ax.

  “What the fuck?” Barnabas said, blood dripping from his gouged face as he watched Flint weighing the ax in his hands. “What the fuck do you have an ax for?” he asked Matt.

  Because of situations like this, Matt was going to reply when Flint charged at him.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Matt didn’t like fighting.

  The more he did it, the more it became second nature to him, but he still hated it. It was brutal and ugly and it never ended well.

  Flint was big, scary, and full of fury. But he didn’t know how to fight. Matt guessed he’d never been in a fight, a real fight, other than some playground scuffle when he was a child. So even though Flint had the ax and was pumped full of adrenaline and evil, it wasn’t really a fair contest.