Had it been because he wanted to help us, or was he just there already and frightened? I’d never know. I thought of poor Telly living out there in the woods all that time, only his daddy knowing he was there, and maybe keeping it secret just so folks would leave him alone, not take advantage of him because he was addleheaded.
In the end, the whole thing was one horrible experience. I remember mostly just lying in bed for two days after, nursing all the wounds in my foot from stickers and such, trying to get my strength back, weak from thinking about what almost happened to Tom.
Mama stayed by our side for the next two days, leaving us only long enough to make soup. Daddy sat up with us at night. When I awoke, frightened, thinking I was still on the swinging bridge, he would be there, and he would smile and put out his hand and touch my head, and I would lie back and sleep again.
Over a period of years, picking up a word here and there, we would learn that there had been more murders like those in our area, all the way down from Arkansas and over into Oklahoma and some of North Texas. Back then no one pinned those on one murderer. The law just didn’t think like that then. The true nature of serial killers was unknown. Had communication been better, had knowledge been better, perhaps some, or all, of what happened that time long ago might have been avoided.
And maybe not. It’s all done now, those long-ago events of nineteen thirty-one and -two.
Now, I he here, not much longer for the world, and with no desire to be here or to have my life stretched out for another moment, just lying here with this tube in my shank, waiting on mashed peas and corn and some awful thing that will pass for meat, all to be hand-fed to me, and I think of then and how I lay in bed in our little house next to the woods, and how when I awoke Daddy or Mama would be there, and how comforting it was.
So now I close my eyes with my memories of those two years, and that great and horrible mad dog summer, and I hope this time when I awake I will no longer be of this world, and Mama and Daddy, and even poor Tom, dead before her time in a car accident, will be waiting, and perhaps even Mose and the Goat Man and good old Toby.
Bentley Little
THE THEATER
In 1991 Banley Little won the Bram Stoker Award for best first novel with The Revelation, and it’s been all uphill since. Subsequent books include The Mailman, Dominion, The Ignored, and The Store, the premise of which, that chain stores are insidious agents in modern life, would sound just plain silly if it (a) weren’t so true and (b) wasn’t rendered so utterly creepy by Little’s approach.
Creepy is a good way to describe Little’s work; I detect the influences of Ramsey Campbell and the other Irrealists in his stories, a dreamlike quality underpinned with lurking dread.
“The Theater” was one of the very first stories I bought for this volume; you’re about to see why.
It was ten to nine, almost closing time, and Putnam desperately had to take a leak. He pressed his legs together, gritting his teeth. There was no one in the bookstore. The last customer had left moments before, after spending two hours and no money, and no one else had come in since. He thought for a moment, then decided to close for the night. Or, rather, his bladder decided for him. Mr. Carr would have a fit if he knew, but Putnam was sure that the old man would rather have him lock up than leave the store open while he was indisposed.
Grabbing the ring of keys from the shelf beneath the register, he hurried around the counter to the front door. He fumbled for the right key, found it, and slipped it into the slot, turning until there was an audible click. He flipped the window sign over, from “Yes We’re OPEN” to “Sorry We’re CLOSED,” then ran as quickly as he could to the bathroom at the back of the store.
He made it just in time.
It was with a welcome unhurried sense of relief that Putnam walked back out into the little utility alcove at the rear of the store. Glancing up as he finished buckling his belt, he found himself looking at the narrow wooden door directly across from the bathroom. He frowned. He’d been working at the bookstore for nearly a month now, since school had gotten out, and while he knew he had seen the door before, he had never really taken notice of it.
Something about that bothered him.
He reached out and attempted to turn the faded metal knob, but the door was locked. He rattled the knob and considered trying some of the other keys on the ring to see if one of them would open the door, but then thought he’d better ask Mr. Carr first. It was probably just a closet, but there might be a storage room for rare books or something back there, and he didn’t want to get into any trouble.
Pocketing the keys, he walked back out to the front of the store.
He asked Mr. Carr about the door the next morning, while taking inventory. He’d expected the old man to simply tell him what was back there, to explain, in the same bored, slightly condescending voice in which he explained everything else, what was in the room. He was not prepared for the reaction he received.
Fear.
Terror.
It was like something out of a movie. Mr. Carr grew visibly pale, the color draining from his cheeks and lips, and his eyes widened comically. He reached out, grabbed Putnam’s arm and squeezed, bony fingers digging painfully into muscle. “You didn’t go up there, did you?
“Up where? I just asked what was behind the door.”
Mr. Carr licked his lips. “It’s my fault. I should’ve told you before.” He loosened his grip, his hand dropping, but his voice remained frightened. “There’s a stairway behind the door. It leads up to a theater. These shops here"—he gestured toward the wall and, presumably, the boutique and dress store beyond—“used to be connected. Upstairs was a theater. The first opera theater in this part of the state, and the only one ever in this county. For a while, in the early 1900s, before the owners went bankrupt, they attracted top talent. Caruso performed here. A lot of big stars did. But there weren’t enough people around here at that time to support such a theater, and they went out of business. The building was empty for a while, then someone else bought it and divided the bottom floor into these shops. The top floor and the theater were sealed off.”
Putnam waited, expecting more, but the old man turned away, bending down to examine the stack of books at his feet. Putnam remained unmoving. He stared down at Mr. Carr’s hands as the old man picked up a dusty leatherbound volume. The book wavered in the shop owner’s trembling grasp. Why was Mr. Carr so frightened? He thought of asking, but as he gazed down at the shiny bald spot nestled in the middle of the old man’s thin white hair, he decided against it.
He knelt down to help with the inventory.
On Sundays, Putnam worked alone. Mr. Carr always did his book buying on Sunday, hitting the swap meets, estate sales and thrift shops, leaving Putnam to manage the store by himself. Like most small businesses in the older downtown area, the bookstore closed at six on this day, and Putnam was usually home in time to catch 60 Minutes.
But tonight he had other plans.
He locked up at five minutes after six, following the late departure of a college student who’d picked up used copies of several textbooks, and he flipped over the sign and shut off the lights at the front of the store before heading back to the rear alcove. He stood for a moment in front of the door, trying to see if he could discern any difference between it and the door to the bathroom, trying to see if he could pick up any negative vibrations, but there was nothing, only the slight secret childish rush of excitement that came from knowing he was about to do something forbidden.
He started trying keys.
The door opened on the fourth attempt, and Putnam turned the knob slowly, pushing in. Behind the door there was indeed a stairway, a narrow series of low wooden steps covered with a carpet of gray dust. The high walls were also wood, and from a pipe running lengthwise up the center of the sloping ceiling protruded two bare bulbs of ancient vintage. He stared into the dimness at the top of the stairs. This must have been a side entrance to the theater, he realized, the stairw
ay used by stagehands and caterers. He began walking up. There were no handrails, which made him feel a little off balance, but he steadied himself by placing his hands on the walls. He took the steps two at a time.
He paused at the top. Here, stretching away from him, was a hallway that apparently ran the length of the building and ended somewhere above the boutique or the dress shop or the jewelry store beyond. The corridor was dark, illuminated only slightly at this end by the light from the bookstore below and at the other end not at all. Within the darkness were areas of deeper darkness, and he had the distinct impression that there were doorways leading off from the corridor into other rooms. It was too dark to see, though, to tell for sure, and he hurried back downstairs, got the flashlight from under the front counter and ran back up.
At the top of the stairs, he turned on the flashlight and shone it down the corridor. There were doorways but no doors, and he walked through the one closest to him. The yellow beam of his light played over bare walls, a dusty radiator and a bricked window. At the far end of the room’s left wall was another doorway, and he strode across the hardwood floor, his footsteps echoing in the silence, and shone his light into the black opening. He saw a claw-footed bathtub, a freestanding sink and an old toilet. He stared for a moment into the bathroom, feeling vaguely uneasy, then quickly turned around and walked back through the larger room into the corridor.
He walked down the hall and into the next doorway. And the next. And the next.
This had been a theater? It looked more like a hotel. All of the rooms leading off from the hallway were bedrooms and adjacent bathrooms with identical back-to-back floor plans, each a carbon copy of the last. He continued his exploration, his disquiet increasing as he made his way down the corridor. The first few rooms he’d entered were empty, but in all of the others the furniture remained undisturbed: canopied beds, nightstands with kerosene lamps, dark wood bureaus, high-backed chairs. Each room had a radiator and a sealed window which, at one time, must have faced the street.
He stepped into the last room.
And saw, sitting in a dusty sheet-covered chair, a dead man.
He jumped, dropped the flashlight, almost screamed.
He was about to run away when he saw by the dissipated illumination of the downed flashlight that the figure in the chair was not a man at all. Nor was it dead. It had never been alive. It was a dummy: a pair of pants and a shirt stuffed with cloth, topped by a rag-covered wigmaker’s head.
He reached down and picked up the light, shining it first on the figure, then, more slowly, around the room. This was not a bedroom. It was longer and narrower, and the floor sloped visibly forward. Thick dusty red curtains framed the brick window. There were no beds here, no nightstands, only four chairs, one of which, the one hosting the dummy, faced the door, the other three facing a wall.
No, not a wall.
A stage.
Putnam took a step into the room.
This was what was left of the original theater.
Now he felt afraid. He had been expecting something grand, a huge theater with an orchestra pit and a balcony, a gigantic auditorium with filigreed columns and plush velvet-backed chairs. He had not been expecting this grimy narrow room with its lone dummy audience and its pitifully primitive munchkin stage, and the strangeness of it all cast everything in a sinister light.
You didn’t go up there, did you?
He pointed his flashlight toward the raised stage. Facing him from the platform was a tableau of small figures the size of dolls, horrid ugly things attired in garments of sackcloth and hair. He stepped closer, past the seated dummy, and focused the beam of his light on the figure nearest him. It was a nasty and horribly unnatural thing. The head, larger than the body, was made from a type of squash: a yam or pumpkin or something in between. The eyes were inset marbles, the nose whittled wood. Real teeth, human teeth, appeared to have been set in the upper and lower gums of the carved opening that was a mouth.
He felt suddenly chilled, but his flashlight moved on, to the others. The small figures each wore different expressions, different clothes, but they were all equally hideous and all seemed to be made from the same materials. They were all posed or positioned in aspects of movement, as though they had been frozen in mid-performance.
Without thinking, Putnam found himself stepping next to the stage. It was cold here, a frigid breeze blew in from somewhere, but the drop in temperature affected him only peripherally. He already felt frozen inside. He reached out and touched a tentative finger to the nearest doll. The figure was warm to his touch. And squishy.
He drew back, feeling repulsed and sickened, practically stumbling over his feet in his effort to get away from the stage. The finger with which he had touched the doll felt slightly slimy, and he held it out in front of him, as if to keep it from contaminating the rest of his body.
He made his way back toward the door, careful not to touch anything. He hated the dolls and he hated the theater. Hated them with a passion. It was a strangely irrational feeling, not one he would have expected, and not one that he stopped to analyze. He just wanted to get out of this place and get back to the bookstore. There was something wrong with what was up here, and that wrongness, which had at first frightened him, now filled him with an irrational loathing.
He hurried out of the theater and into the hallway, and by the time he reached the stairway at the far end he was running. He sprinted down the steps two at a time, and when he reached the bottom, he slammed the door behind him and with trembling fingers locked it. He wanted to wash his finger, but he did not want to stay in the bookstore any longer—not alone, not with that room upstairs—so instead of going into the bathroom he quickly turned off the rest of the lights in the store, and locked the door on his way out.
He stood for a moment in the street in front of the bookstore, sweating, breathing heavily, looking up at the long building. He had never noticed that the series of shops here were all housed within a single structure—their facades were all so different—and he never would have figured out on his own that the building contained a second story. Now that he knew, though, he could see the cleverly camouflaged sections of brick that blocked the upstairs windows. He started counting from the bookstore on, to determine which bricked window hid the theater, but gave it up instantly. He didn’t want to know.
Shivering, he hurried around the side of the building to the parking lot where he had left his car.
At home, five minutes later, he went immediately into the bathroom to wash his finger. He scrubbed his skin with Dove, then with Ajax, but the slimy feeling would not go away. He opened the medicine cabinet, took out a box of Band-Aids and used several of them to wrap up his finger, and that felt a little better.
“Putnam!” his mom called from the kitchen. “Is that you? Are you home?”
“Yeah!” he called back. “I’m home!” His voice sounded different to himself, quiet, though he was yelling.
“Get ready for dinner, then!”
He stepped into the hallway. “What are we having?”
His mom peeked her head around the corner of the kitchen. “Chicken and fried zucchini.”
Zucchini.
He blinked. In his mind, he saw his mother caressing the squash, putting a wig on top of it, carving out eyes, a nose, a mouth. He met her gaze across the hallway. His heart leaped in his chest. Was she looking at him strangely? Was that suspicion he saw behind her smile?
He looked away. This was insanity. This was crazy. Still, as his mom went back into the kitchen, he found that he was afraid to follow her, afraid he would see on the counter next to the sink one of those dolls from the theater.
He took a deep breath, trying to keep his hands from shaking. What was that theater? What were those dolls and why did their existence disturb him so? And why was it that the other figure, the dummy, did not have the same effect on him? Indeed, he found that when he thought of that seated form now, thought of those stuffed clothes in the chair, that
wigmaker’s head facing the door, he felt oddly comforted.
“Putnam! Get your sister! It’s time to eat!”
“Okay, Mom!” His voice sounded better now, louder, more normal, and he walked out to the family room where Jenny was seated on the carpet in front of the television.
Next to her on the floor was one of the squash dolls, its vegetative face framed by frizzy black hair, its overlarge mouth fixed permanently in an unnatural smile.
Putnam’s heart lurched in his chest. “What are you doing with that?” he demanded. He grabbed the doll from the floor and picked it up, squeezed it. He felt the warm slimy squishiness in his hands and instinctively dropped the figure again, stomping on it with both feet, crushing it.
Jenny stared up at him in shock, then burst into tears. “You killed her!” she cried.
He looked down at the broken form beneath his foot. It was a plastic baby girl with chubby cheeks and platinum blond hair. A mass-produced toy, nothing more.
Jenny was still crying. “Why did you kill my Dolly?”
He tried to swallow, tried to talk, but his mouth stayed open and no saliva or words would come. He hurried back down the hall and into the bathroom, barely making it to the toilet before he threw up.
He was sick the next day, really sick, not faking it, but when he called Mr. Carr to tell the old man that he wouldn’t be in, there was silence on the other end of the line.
He cleared his throat. “I’ll probably be in tomorrow, though,” he said.
Mr. Carr’s voice was quiet. “You went up there, didn’t you? You saw the theater.”
He thought of lying, thought of saying nothing, but he looked at the Band-Aids on his finger and he found himself whispering, “Yes.”
Silence again. “They can’t get down,” Mr. Carr said finally. “They can never get down.”
Putnam shook his head into the receiver, though the old man couldn’t see it. “I can’t—” he began.
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