Slippin' Into Darkness

by Norman Partridge

  Morning routine, part B: while the coffee brewed, check the video decks in the basement.

  Eight VCRs—lights glowing, digital clocks flashing—greeted Shutterbug as he descended the stairs. Each unit was manufactured by RCA. Just like his father, Shutterbug believed in buying American.

  He hit the rewind button on a remote. The machines went to work. A few moments later he ejected the tapes and set them on a bench. He would label them later. He had hoped to turn out some serious product last night, but that hadn’t happened. Tonight he’d have to get busy. His distributor in San Francisco was breathing down his neck.

  Maybe he would stop off at Blockbuster and rent a couple machines—he enjoyed doing that because Blockbuster refused to rent X-rated movies, and it was a kick to turn out his product on their equipment. But Shutterbug decided against it. Not because he didn’t want to spend the money, but because the quality of his tapes would suffer—Blockbuster’s machines didn’t hold a candle to his own.

  Shutterbug believed in quality control. It was the single principle that set him apart from his competitors. Most of the other guys who operated on the fringes of the erotica industry were just cheapjack jokers. They didn’t have the talent to do straight fuck movies, so they did the dangerous stuff because it was their only ticket to the big bucks. With Shutterbug it was different. Sure, he was in it for the money. But there was that old familiar thrill, too, the one that came from ignoring the rules.

  He broke open a new brick of blank tapes, peeled the plastic wrappers, and fed the hungry duping decks. Cued up the master tape. Sent the mechanical beasts to work with the press of a single button.

  Talk about your easy money. But even as he thought it, he knew it wasn’t true. This was just one end of the deal. The other end, that was the tough part. He turned from the dingy metal table and the metal shelves stacked with VCRs and photographic chemicals that never seemed to make the short trip to his shop, and he stared at the other end of the room.

  The plush carpet started halfway across the cement floor. Red carpet, and a bed covered with black silk sheets, because white skin looked magnificent against black sheets. Nice rattan furniture for an exotic look. An open picture window on the false wall that stood a few feet short of the cement wall of the basement, which was covered with a mural-sized photo that pictured a beach scene on the isle of Maui.

  That was Shutterbug’s set, at least the one he was using now. He had previously used an Aspen ski chalet scene and a New York penthouse scene. He had even built a prison set for some teenybopper-in-the-pen stuff early on in his career.

  Now it was Maui, and it was almost real. The bed, the window, the beach. The air would be warm and the sand would be soft and the trades would be gentle.

  Shutterbug grinned. He needed a vacation.

  He glanced at the VCR and monitor, saw the black wires spreading out from the master machine like the tentacles of a big octopus, saw his latest teeny-bopper protégé on the octopus’s black face. Shelly Desmond was wearing one of April Destino’s cheerleading sweaters and nothing else. She was playing with herself. Dressed in the sweater, wearing just a touch of makeup, she looked just right, almost as good as one of the teen queens mounted on his bedroom wall.

  The cheerleader’s sweater had been a good deal. It added that little touch of authenticity that his customers appreciated. Fifty bucks in April Destino’s hand, and the sweater was his. He was only sorry that with April dead he wouldn’t have a chance to add some of her other cheerleading outfits to Shelly’s wardrobe.

  Damn. Shutterbug stared at the teendream, at the VCRs, and he thought about the money stowed in the upstairs closet. He had almost told those four idiots about his operation; he’d almost started bragging. Christ, that would have been a mistake. Tell some mouths like that, and before he knew it the FBI would be pounding on his door.

  Four idiot jocks. Shutterbug was glad that he had outgrown such morons.

  He had come a long, long way.

  From doing what others wanted to doing things his own way.

  From Todd Gould’s basement to his own.

  From 16mm to the age of video.

  With the last thought, Shutterbug’s grin faded and was replaced by a thin frown. He hurried upstairs. Frantically, he searched the house. He opened the front door and checked the porch, the driveway, even the bushes.

  Where was the 16mm projector?

  And, more importantly, where was the little loop of film?

  * * *

  Shutterbug tapped his shirt pocket. Jesus. There it was. Right there. Laughing, he fished the plastic reel from his pocket, and a shard of film whipped against his wrist.

  The laughter died in his throat. He shouldn’t be looking at the film itself. He should be looking at the white leader. Hurriedly, he unspooled a coil of 16mm and held it up to the light.

  He saw Griz Cody leaning over April. But that wasn’t the beginning of the film. He pinched the first frame of film and let the reel drop. It slipped free of the film and rolled across the floor. The film unspooled in a straight line, a line that was less than five feet long.

  Shutterbug swore. He’d made the mistake of an amateur. All that damn beer and cocaine had muddled his thoughts. They hadn’t watched the whole movie. The film had broken when Griz Cody tossed the projector. Not realizing that the film was split into two parts on two reels, Shutterbug had grabbed only one. He had less than five feet of a fifty foot film. The rest was on the collection reel.

  Shutterbug paced. In the living room, he stepped over the turntable that Griz Cody had destroyed. He stepped on the white scratch left on the pine floor by the stereo needle and reversed direction. The heavy aroma of fresh-brewed coffee in the kitchen did not cheer him, and the buttery smell of warmed croissant wafting from the oven did not stir his hunger.

  He remembered the drive-in. Standing there in front of all those people. Seeing through his eyelids. Seeing through their flesh.

  No. That was the nightmare. Get it straight.

  Okay. They watched the movie. Griz tossed the projector. And he picked up one of two reels. He didn’t pick up the broken projector itself, but maybe someone else did. And then after that…after that—

  they visited the cemetery. Right. That wasn’t part of the dream. They visited the cemetery—

  and found a hole in the goddamn ground! An empty grave! It was April’s grave, and someone had stolen her body. Shutterbug wanted to hide from that, but the memory came flooding back, bringing with it a horror which frightened him in a way that no mere nightmare ever could.

  He had stared into an empty grave. April’s corpse was gone. But someone had grabbed him, a man…a man who was—

  —dead?

  No. Not dead. This wasn’t a dream.

  Bleeding, then. A man who was injured, perhaps on the brink of death….

  Jesus. It really had happened. It hadn’t been part of his crazy nightmare.

  But the projector, and the reel that held the rest of the movie.

  Maybe they were in Griz Cody’s truck.

  And maybe they weren’t. Maybe they were still at the drive-in, lying there on a gravel mound like so much junk.

  Or maybe they were at the cemetery. Lying next to an open grave.

  Lying next to the body of a dead man.

  * * *

  Shutterbug sat in his Jaguar, staring at the fuchsia-colored police tape twisting and flexing in the warm morning breeze. The projector wasn’t here. There was nothing here but a hole in the ground and a sea of tombstones. He could see that, even from the car. But even if the film had been here, it certainly wouldn’t still be here in the wake of a police search.

  So, the projector wasn’t at the cemetery, and Griz Cody wasn’t answering his telephone. Maybe…hopefully…Griz had the film. But if Griz didn’t have the film, and the police didn’t have it, it was most likely at the drive-in, which was conveniently located just across the road.

  Shutterbug keyed the old Jaguar’s engine. He c
ould have driven a brand-new Testarossa, but he didn’t. He could have lived in a big city, but he didn’t. He could have lived an entirely different life, but that too was something he hadn’t done.

  He had no time to spare for regrets. He pulled from the well-maintained cemetery drive onto the pitted road that separated Skyview Memorial Lawn from the old drive-in. He made the sharp turn onto the gravel road that Griz Cody had followed the night before. Ahead, the chain-link gate stood open, the top section of the right gate hanging unhinged and ready to collapse.

  Cody’s truck had done a thorough job.

  Shutterbug drove into shadow. Tall pines overhung the road, their branches scraping the car doors. Shutterbug glanced at the rearview to make sure that no one had followed him.

  No one behind him.

  Branches whispered against Jaguar fenders. He saw himself in the mirror for the first time since getting out of bed, saw the red scratches scoring his butterscotch skin. The window of the car was rolled down just an inch, and the sour, licorice smell of skunk cabbage and the dry scent of dead pine filled his nostrils. He suddenly remembered the ghost that had sent him screaming into a tangle of dead pines.

  April Destino’s ghost.

  No. The ghost…the trees had been in his dream.

  But there were scratches on his face.

  It was just another part of the dream. That was all. Nothing more.

  Forget it, he told himself. Just get through this, and worry about the rest of it later.

  Gravel spit from under the Jaguar’s wheels. Shutterbug advanced through the gate and made a quick left. The Jaguar climbed the first gravel hump and passed the first line of leaning, speakerless poles.

  A gold-and-white police car was parked beneath the huge screen. The contrast made the car look small, but not at all insignificant.

  Shutterbug’s foot mashed the brake pedal. The policeman stood near the trunk of his cruiser. Dark blue clothes and mirrored sunglasses.

  And there, at the cop’s feet, lay the projector.

  The cop was staring at it.

  Shutterbug slammed the gearshift into reverse. He backed up, stirring a hail of gravel and a thin cloud of dust. The cop looked his way. Couldn’t possibly see him, but had to see the car, the license plate….

  No, the cop couldn’t have seen that. Not from such a distance. Not with the morning sunlight filtering through the dead trees behind the Jaguar. Not with the dust rising.

  A heavier cloud mushroomed behind the Jaguar as Shutterbug shifted into second and passed through the drive-in gates.

  Pine boughs whipped the Jaguar.

  9:45 A.M.

  The dust cloud hung in the wake of the Jaguar, a severed shadow drifting slowly toward the dead pines.

  Steve watched it go. He hadn’t meant to come to the old drive-in. Leaving the cemetery, he had only wanted to find a quiet place where he could think things through. He had seen the pines from the other side of the road. They had reminded him of the trees in his dream, of the meadow where Homer Price romped with the girl who had once painted his portrait.

  Those memories drew him to this lonely place. He drove up the gravel road and found the gates to the abandoned drive-in standing open. After checking the bashed gates and the broken chain that had secured them—stray paint chips on the gates and a sprinkling of broken glass on the ground told him that the gates had been damaged by a blue vehicle which lost a headlight in the process—he investigated the drive-in grounds.

  Near the playground, he found several crushed beer cans. Most of the cans contained a final swallow of Bud Dry. Someone had visited the drive-in as recently as last night. In addition to the beer cans, Steve found a broken 16mm projector and a spool of film. He raised the film to the light, and he didn’t need to see more than a few frames to know that he was looking at April Destino’s nightmare.

  Right there. In his hands. On film.

  April’s nightmare.

  Steve shivered, recalling his initial shock, the reel still gripped in his hand. The film ensnared his fingers, a series of coils that were as dark and slick the scales of a Black Mamba. But he didn’t concentrate on that image. Instead, he watched the morning breeze worry the dust cloud that looked so much like a Jaguar’s severed shadow, forcing it against the dead pines. The cloud was speared by a thousand rust needles, and then it was gone.

  The needles remained, blanketing the trees, thrusting at the blue sky above. Whispering coos spilled from the shadows, and Steve recognized the music of doves.

  He looped the film onto the reel. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Doves were nesting in the tree just as they nested in his dream. Across the road Homer Price ran wild in a dark Hansel and Gretel forest. He wasn’t supposed to be here, standing alone with a nightmare in his hands.

  He was supposed to be with April, with the doves, and Homer Price, in dreams.

  * * *

  The last time they talked, Steve didn’t even realize that April was saying goodbye.

  “We should have been the all-American couple,” she said, “but other people got in our way.”

  He tried to apologize for the hundredth time. “I might have changed that. I never believed the things they said about you, but I couldn’t bring myself do anything about it. I was afraid that I might make things worse, but I was just plain afraid, too. Bat and Derwin and Griz, even Todd, they were king shit back then. I was scared to go up against them alone. But we could have stood up to them together. When you quit school, I should have gone after you. I should have done something to let you know how I felt. But I didn’t. I guess, deep down, I was more afraid of you than I was of them.”

  “Maybe it would have worked,” she said. “But maybe it would have made things worse. Facing them…. I just don’t know. I couldn’t give them another shot at me. The knives were out. I was terrified. It was my word against theirs. They were good boys from good families.” She smiled. “Except for Derwin, that is, but everyone thought he was some Horatio Alger character, the way those sportswriters wrote about him in the newspaper. I was the poor girl who’d gotten a little too big-headed for my own good, the girl following in the footsteps of a divorced mother, if you believed the stories. A little too ambitious and a little too certain about my future. Everyone wanted to believe that I was really what those guys tried to make me. Just because I got wasted at that party. Just because I did that, they were willing to buy the rest of it. I wasn’t a good girl anymore.” She ruffled the stack of tabloids lying on the table, smiling wryly. “It’s all very American—we love to build people up, and we love to tear them down. There were lots of people in that school who enjoyed tearing me down.”

  Tears welled in April’s eyes, like rain on a slate sky. “That was the worst thing. It was bad enough, the things people said, the way they spread the lies once word got out. Bad enough that I was too scared to talk to anyone.” She wiped her tears. “But I couldn’t get away from that night. I was stuck in that nightmare. Every night I’d wake up in a cold sweat, sure that I was sleeping on a pool table instead of in my own bed. Every night I’d see the faces of those assholes. And some nights, when it was really bad, I’d wake up and find welts on my body. It was so bad…you understand, my nightmare was so bad and so real that I was pinching myself, doing that asshole’s dirty work for him.

  “And I couldn’t escape it. I’d set my alarm clock, wake up every hour and set it again so I wouldn’t sink into a deep sleep. But it didn’t work. Sooner or later I always slept. And sooner or later I always found my way into the nightmare. I didn’t know anyone who could help me find my way out. After a while, I figured out why—it was because everyone thought I belonged there. Even my own mother…the way she looked at me…I knew she believed it, too.” She shook her head, refusing to cry anymore. “Like I’d ever done anything to any of them. Some of those people will have to settle up.”

  “Who? What are you going to do, April?”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll handle it.” The iron
caste melted from her eyes as she turned to the soft light that spilled through the trailer window. “Things haven’t worked out for us. We’ve learned some things. With the Halcion, you’ve learned how to find your dream, and I’ve learned how to hide from my nightmare. But there are things we haven’t learned. I haven’t learned how to enter your dream and find that girl I used to be, and you haven’t learned how to enter my nightmare and put an end to it. Maybe we can’t learn those things. Maybe it’s impossible.”

  Steve reached across the bed and took April’s hand. His heart was literally heavy; it pumped guilt instead of blood. April believed in psychic phenomenon. She had read somewhere about people sharing dreams. Something about people who were tuned in to the same psychic frequency gaining the ability to enter each other’s dreams. She was convinced that she shared such a bond with him. He wanted to believe in it more than anything else. He wanted to enter her nightmare and save her from her demons, but he’d never found a way.

  And he knew, deep down, that his damned mechanical brain was to blame for his failure. It was missing a little something. A component called faith.

  If only he could find some faith. He rubbed her hands—cold hands, warm heart—and he looked into her eyes and saw the dream April hiding there.

  “We’ll find a way,” he said.

  But she didn’t smile. “And if we do, what will happen then? You’ll have her. That seventeen-year-old who shares your dreams. You won’t want me anymore. I might not even exist. That scares me more than anything else.”

  “But you’ll have your Six Million Dollar Man,” Steve said. “Your knight in shining armor. What will you need with a guy like me?”

  That made April laugh. “It’s never as easy as it should be, is it?”

  They made love. Steve closed his eyes and tried to imagine his dream, but he couldn’t quite get there. He felt guilty, even looking for it.