by Phoef Sutton
He’d seen no sign of decay or putrefaction in any of them, but they had come in so fast and they had so many neck tattoos that he couldn’t be sure. Most of them looked rather pale and sickly, but Barnabas assured Matt that was because they spent hours in front of video monitors, watching old movies and playing video games.
Barnabas greeted them in the lobby with a box that he made them drop their cell phones and iPads into. No phone calls or texting in the New Fairfax. After the Rialto incident, everyone laughed and obliged. If Barnabas had asked for their underwear, they’d probably have given that up too.
These patrons were, according to Barnabas, the voice of the future. The New Cinema. All were coming to pay homage to Barnabas Yancey and to Dinner at the Brooklyn Morgue. So once they were settled and the picture started to roll, they laughed at all the horrific parts of the film they were supposed to scream at and they talked through the rest, commenting, wisecracking, and acting generally superior to a movie they professed to admire. Matt didn’t understand it at all.
He opened the lobby doors and looked out onto the street. He figured four people could walk abreast through these double doors. There must have been close to fifty people in the theater. How could he get them all out in an emergency?
Fortunately the balcony was closed, but still…
He checked behind the concession stand. The Staff was there, waiting. He thought, for the hundredth time, what an ill-conceived plan this was.
Poking his head back in the house, he caught a glimpse of Barnabas standing by the screen giving him the “all clear” sign. It was a quarter after midnight and nothing had happened yet.
Matt glanced at the screen. Italy was doing a pretty piss-poor job of doubling for New York now. What was supposed to be Greenwich Village looked an awful lot like Rome.
A jump cut and now they were in LA, but it was supposed to be Brooklyn. The film was obviously cobbled together from bits and pieces of half-made projects, all done on a shoestring in many locations around the world and then put through a Cuisinart and called a movie. There was something endearing about it, in spite of all that, or maybe because of all that. Something about the sheer effort that went into making the picture made you root for it to succeed. Matt supposed that was one of the things Barnabas loved about this kind of cinema. The people making it didn’t have the advantages of the motion-picture-making machine behind them. They were like salmon swimming upstream, fighting all the forces of nature that tried to stop them from making some movie, any movie. And somehow they got it done.
Now, on the screen, another woman with big hair (brunette this time) was walking down a somehow familiar-looking street. The music that accompanied her was a childlike theme played on electric organ and chimes, accompanied by whispering female voices, which were totally cliché and totally effective in bringing the hair up on the back of Matt’s head.
That street that looked familiar, Matt realized, was Fairfax Avenue, the street they were on, although thirty years or more in the past. The woman walked by Eddie’s Deli, just next door. The woman walked up to the New Fairfax Cinema.
The crowd went wild with cheers as the woman opened the door and walked in.
“Hey, Matt.”
Matt turned and saw Eva standing in the doorway.
“What are you doing here?” Matt asked her.
“It’s my job,” she said, moving behind the concession stand. “I sell popcorn and soda. It isn’t a movie without popcorn and soda.”
She started to move behind the concession stand. Matt blocked her way.
“You can’t be here,” he said simply.
“Look, I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ve been through it this far and I intend to see it through to the end. You can’t leave a story unfinished.”
“This isn’t a goddamned story. This is reality.”
“It’s a movie, Matt. Keep telling yourself it’s only a movie.” She moved around him and started pouring kernels in the machine.
He darted back to check the screen again, and the audience.
They were getting restless, but he couldn’t tell if it was because the movie was slow or because Mr. Dark was making his presence felt. Barnabas was next to the screen, giving Matt a bored “OK” sign.
What if nothing happened? What if they went through the whole screening without an incident and everybody just went home? Matt had to quell the feeling of disappointment in his gut.
Disappointment? Was he looking forward to mayhem and chaos? Had he become that used to violence? How much of Mr. Dark was already inside him?
He shook the thought from his head and checked the screen again.
Now they were in some small town. The zombie man from the opening scene was shambling down a street at night, looking for fresh meat. There were birch trees in the background, so Matt knew they were back on the East Coast. The houses reminded him of Harrisonburg. He felt a pang of homesickness.
Then the pang turned to wonder.
The zombie was walking up to Gina’s house.
It was painted differently, but it was the same damn house. The same damn bluestone pillars. A woman sat on the same damn veranda on the same damn porch swing, her legs dangling idly, drinking sweet tea in the moonlight.
The woman got up and went inside. The shot was wide and dark and he couldn’t get a good look at her. She was dressed in the kind of flowing white negligee worn only by potential victims in horror movies, and from what he could see, she could have been Gina’s sister.
Not that she looked just like her. Her hair was bigger; her makeup was thicker. But the attitude, the swing of her hips. She was like a younger, prettier actress playing Gina.
The camera held on the porch. Then a point-of-view shot walked up to the house and the weird, weeping, childlike music swelled.
Matt turned to Eva. “Can I have your phone?”
Eva fished her iPhone out of her pocket and handed it to him. He snatched it from her, dialed. It rang repeatedly. He stepped outside into the street, remembering that it was after three in the morning in Harrisonburg and hoping Gina would forgive him.
The phone on the other end picked up and a groggy voice answered. “Hello?”
“Gina. It’s Matt.”
“Matt, are you OK?”
“I’m OK. How are you?”
“Sleeping, Matt. It’s the middle of the night. Even where you are.”
“I just…I just had to call.”
“That’s nice.”
“Are you alone?”
“Matt Cahill, are you checking up on me?”
“I don’t mind if you’re not. I was just wondering.”
“You can mind a little bit.” There was a smile in her voice. “But, as a matter of fact, I am alone. Want to try some phone sex? I’ve never done it, but it might be fun.”
Matt’s blood ran cold.
“Gina, what is that music you’re listening to?”
“What music? Is this part of the phone sex? Because if so, you’ll have to cue me in. I’m new at this.”
The chimes. The electric organ. The whispering female voices. Were they really all coming through the telephone?
He moved the receiver from his ear and listened. Only the sounds of the city at night came to him. He swallowed.
Putting the phone back to his ear, he heard the music throb and swell, like an incessant heartbeat.
“You know, I do hear something,” Gina said. “Must be the neighbors.”
Matt pushed through the double doors and rushed through the lobby to the theater.
On the screen, the camera was prowling outside the house, being the eyes of the killer. It moved to the bedroom window and peered in through the curtains. The woman was in bed, talking on a princess telephone, all innocent and unaware.
“Gina, listen to me,” Matt said into the phone. “Hang up. Call the police. Barricade yourself in the bathroom.”
“What? This is pretty weird, Matt.”
“Do it!”
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nbsp; All at once, the camera burst through the window on the screen, shattering the glass, and the woman in the movie turned in close-up and screamed.
On the phone, Gina’s scream was less theatrical but more genuine.
The line went dead.
Matt tore into the lobby, grabbed his ax from beside the door, and ran up the stairs.
“Where are you going?” Eva asked.
Matt didn’t answer. He was twenty-five hundred miles away from Gina. The only thing he could think of to do was to get into that projection booth.
And stop this movie.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Matt ran to the projection booth and tried the door. It was locked. He raised the ax and sent it crashing down into the lock. It splintered easily. Like a knife through butter. Or a guillotine through a neck.
As he kicked the wreckage of the door aside, Matt’s broad shoulders burst through into the room.
He blinked in the semidarkness.
“Have you come to free me?” a quavering voice asked.
Matt’s eyes adjusted to the dark. The projector was whirring like some ancient device of torture in the darkened room. Beside it sat a small, gnomelike creature, wrinkled beyond imagining, bones bursting through its withered flesh, looking up at him with an attitude of supplication.
“Can I leave now?” the thing asked him.
Matt brushed the gnome aside and raised the ax above the projector.
“It won’t stop it,” the creature said, its voice a croak.
Matt ignored him. He wasn’t about to listen to some gremlin while Gina’s life was at stake. He glanced through the tiny window in front of the projector, following the beam of light to the screen. The woman in the movie had barricaded herself in the bathroom. The door splintered and the blade of an ax forced its way through. The woman screamed.
Stanley Kubrick must have seen this picture, way back when.
Matt turned and brought his ax down on the projector. It exploded in a hail of sparks and flying metal. He chopped at it again and again until it lay, like a smoking, steam-punk nightmare, at his feet. The film unfurled from its reel like a snake, getting tangled and torn and twisted and finally coming to rest on the floor with an audible hiss.
He rested, breathing heavily, satisfied. Through the corner of his eye, Matt could see that the little man had his arm raised and was pointing out the little window. He looked.
The movie was still showing.
With no beam of light being projected from the booth, the image was still flickering on the screen. The woman was peeking through the hole in the door—a corkscrew came through the other side, puncturing her eyeball and yanking it out.
The crowd exploded with laughter.
Matt wheeled around and faced the little man with his mummified, dried-apple face.
“How do I stop it?” Matt asked.
“You can’t. It’s begun. You have to see it through to the end.”
“There must be some other way.”
“No. No, no, no. You have to see it all. Till the end credits. That’s the way it works.”
Matt wanted to throttle the little man, to chop him to pieces, to do anything he could to save Gina. But would killing this sinful dwarf do anything to achieve that? He took a deep breath and tried to control himself. He had to find out what was going on before he acted.
“Who are you?” he asked with a semblance of calm.
“Zander Taman.”
The name jarred Matt’s memory. “Zander Taman? Warren Worley’s boyfriend? The one who killed all those people in 1998?”
“No! I didn’t! They killed each other! I came up here to hide!”
Matt took a closer look at his face. It looked like one of those shrunken heads he used to see advertised in the back of comic books. He wanted to squeeze it and see if it crumbled. He controlled himself.
“Where have you been all this time?” Matt asked.
Zander took a look around the tiny room and said, “Here.”
Matt stared at him in disbelief. “You’ve been in this room for fourteen years?”
“Is that all? It feels longer than that.”
“You’ve never left?”
“Oh, I leave sometimes. When the film leaves. I go with the film.”
“What do you mean?”
The little man sighed and repeated himself, as if he were talking to an idiot. “I accompany the film to other venues. And watch it unspool. I’m the projectionist. I show it and move on.”
Matt paced the tiny room, refusing to look at the screen. He could hear the screams of the woman on the sound track. The zombie had her.
“I thought you were going to let me out,” Zander went on. “I thought you were my replacement.”
“Replacement?”
“The movie must be shown. The demon must be fed.”
“Mr. Dark?”
The imp shrugged. “He’s known by many names. He comes in many guises. You’re one of his windows into this world. So am I. But he wants more. That’s what the movie’s all about.”
Matt picked Zander up—he weighed nothing, as if he were made of dust—and slammed him against the wall.
“Tell me! Are you the reason those people went crazy? Did you drive them to it?”
The little man shrieked. “No! It’s the movie that drives them to it! I’m just the projectionist!”
“Tell me how to stop this! Tell me how to save Gina!”
Zander shook his desiccated head. “I don’t know any Gina, but whoever she is, she’s dead now. And she was just a distraction anyway. To get you up here.”
Matt let Zander go and he slid to the floor, getting tangled in the mass of unspooled film. He heard screams from the theater. They weren’t fun screams. They weren’t roller-coaster screams. They were real screams.
“It’s begun,” Zander said.
Matt hefted his ax and ran to the door. He stopped.
The doorway was gone.
He spun around. Looking for the door he had broken down, looking for the way out. He just saw four walls around him and no exit.
“You see?” the gnome said. “You are my replacement. You’re the new projectionist.”
Matt pounded the walls, looking for a way out.
“Relax and watch the movie,” Zander said. “You’re going to be watching it for a long time.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Barnabas was getting kind of bored. The movie had been going on for twenty minutes, and nada. Bupkes. Zero. No attacks. No smell of decay coming from the audience—although, with the overwhelming scent of eighty years’ worth of stale Jujubes and old hand jobs, it might have been masked.
If he could turn around and watch the screen, time would pass a little more quickly. But he didn’t want to chance missing a signal.
At the back of the house, Matt the Cowboy stuck his head in again, this time holding an iPhone to his ear. Taking personal calls on the job? He’d have to talk with that boy.
Barnabas gave him a bored thumbs-up, but he wasn’t sure if Matt saw it or not, what with the way he turned on his heels and booked it out of there. As the door swung shut, he could see Matt grab his ax and head up the stairs. Right on schedule.
He considered following Matt and talking with him, but that would mean leaving his post. And theirs not to reason why, he quoted in his mind (because he was more well-read in the classics than he let on), theirs but to do and…
A tall man with gray hair in a gray suit got up and started walking up the aisle toward the exit. Was he leaving? Was he going to the bathroom? Was he going to kill somebody?
Inquiring minds want to know, thought Barnabas. It was his job to check it out. His duty and all that.
Barnabas sprinted up the aisle, glad to be moving. This standing like a Beefeater at Buckingham Palace was getting old.
Pushing his way through the swinging doors to the lobby, he was surprised to see Eva behind the concession stand, selling the man some popcorn.
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��What are you doing here, Evangeline?” Barnabas asked, ignoring the tall man at the counter.
“Just doing my job, boss,” Eva answered.
“I think you’re worried about me; that’s what I think. I’m touched.”
“Maybe it’s not you I’m worried about. Did you ever think of that?”
Barnabas glanced upstairs. “The lumberjack? I didn’t know you could be swayed by a nice pair of pecs. I’m a little disappointed in you.”
She pumped the Golden Flavoring all over the popcorn. “Hey, the heart wants what it wants.”
The tall man, whose gray hair hung wildly about his head, stuck his hand out, waiting for the change. Barnabas could see, on his wrist, the rotting sores of infection. Without missing a beat, Barnabas swooped down and grabbed his samurai sword from behind the concession stand.
The tall man saw him move, though. He reacted with a swiftness that startled Eva. He grabbed her arm and yanked her over the glass counter, pressing her body close to his, using it as a shield.
When Barnabas came up with the sword, he was confronted with Eva’s startled expression over the tall man’s arm wrapped around her throat.
“Well played,” Barnabas said to the tall man.
The tall man just grunted. He glanced back at the theater.
“You want to get back there, don’t you?” Barnabas said to him. “That’s where the people are. That’s where the action is. OK. Fine. But you’ll have to go through me first.” He hefted the sword the way he’d seen it done in a thousand movies. It felt good. It felt real.
But instead of rushing him and obligingly impaling himself on the sword, the tall man thrust Eva forward toward the point of the blade. Barnabas pulled it aside just in time and she stumbled into him, knocking him off his feet.
Eva sprang up just as the tall man leaped over the counter and pulled the popcorn machine over, making it crash across the doorway into the theater, effectively blocking that way out. She dodged around and ran up the stairs. The tall man brushed stray popcorn kernels off his suit, looked at Barnabas lying on the floor, then turned and made his way up the stairs. After Eva.
Barnabas got to his feet and started to chase after him. But then he heard screams coming from inside the theater. Finally. It was happening!