Poe's Children: The New Horror: An Anthology

by Peter Straub

  “You’ve seen her.” It wasn’t a question.

  Harry nodded. “A few months after she passed away. She told me I don’t belong here. I don’t know why she wants to scare me away when we used to get along so great. Did she tell you to go away?”

  “Why is she here?” Alec said. His voice was still hoarse, and it was a strange kind of question to ask. For a while, Harry just peered at him through his thick glasses with what seemed to be total incomprehension.

  Then he shook his head and said, “She’s unhappy. She died before the end of The Wizard and she’s still miserable about it. I understand. That was a good movie. I’d feel robbed too.”

  “Hello?” someone shouted from the lobby. “Anyone there?”

  “Just a minute,” Harry called out. He gave Alec a pained look. “My concession stand girl told me she was quitting yesterday. No notice or anything.”

  “Was it the ghost?”

  “Heck no. One of her paste-on nails fell into someone’s food so I told her not to wear them anymore. No one wants to get a fingernail in a mouthful of popcorn. She told me a lot of boys she knows come in here, and if she can’t wear her nails she wasn’t going to work for me no more so now I got to do everything myself.” He said this as he was coming around the desk. He had something in one hand, a newspaper clipping. “This will tell you about her.” And then he gave Alec a look—it wasn’t a glare exactly, but there was at least a measure of dull warning in it—and he added: “Don’t run off on me. We still have to talk.”

  He went out, Alec staring after him, wondering what that last funny look was about. He glanced down at the clipping. It was an obituary—her obituary. The paper was creased, the edges worn, the ink faded; it looked as if it had been handled often. Her name was Imogene Gilchrist, she had died at nineteen, she worked at Water Street Stationery. She was survived by her parents, Colm and Mary. Friends and family spoke of her pretty laugh, her infectious sense of humor. They talked about how she loved the movies. She saw all the movies, saw them on opening day, first show. She could recite the entire cast from almost any picture you cared to name, it was like a party trick—she even knew the names of actors who had had just one line. She was president of the drama club in high school, acted in all the plays, built sets, arranged lighting. “I always thought she’d be a movie star,” said her drama professor. “She had those looks and that laugh. All she needed was someone to point a camera at her and she would have been famous.”

  When Alec finished reading he looked around. The office was still empty. He looked back down at the obituary, rubbing the corner of the clipping between thumb and forefinger. He felt sick at the unfairness of it, and for a moment there was a pressure at the back of his eyeballs, a tingling, and he had the ridiculous idea he might start crying. He felt ill to live in a world where a nineteen-year-old girl full of laughter and life could be struck down like that, for no reason. The intensity of what he was feeling didn’t really make sense, considering he had never known her when she was alive; didn’t make sense until he thought about Ray, thought about Harry Truman’s letter to his mom, the words died with bravery, defending freedom, America is proud of him. He thought about how Ray had taken him to The Fighting Seabees, right here in this theater, and they sat together with their feet up on the seats in front of them, their shoulders touching. “Look at John Wayne,” Ray said. “They oughta have one bomber to carry him, and another one to carry his balls.” The stinging in his eyes was so intense he couldn’t stand it, and it hurt to breathe. He rubbed at his wet nose, and focused intently on crying as soundlessly as possible.

  He wiped his face with the tail of his shirt, put the obituary on Harry Parcells’s desk, looked around. He glanced at the posters, and the stacks of steel cans. There was a curl of film in the corner of the room, just eight or so frames—he wondered where it had come from—and he picked it up for a closer look. He saw a girl closing her eyes and lifting her face, in a series of little increments, to kiss the man holding her in a tight embrace; giving herself to him. Alec wanted to be kissed that way sometime. It gave him a curious thrill to be holding an actual piece of a movie. On impulse he stuck it into his pocket.

  He wandered out of the office and back onto the landing at the bottom of the stairwell. He peered into the lobby. He expected to see Harry behind the concession stand, serving a customer, but there was no one there. Alec hesitated, wondering where he might have gone. While he was thinking it over, he became aware of a gentle whirring sound coming from the top of the stairs. He looked up them, and it clicked—the projector. Harry was changing reels.

  Alec climbed the steps and entered the projection room, a dark compartment with a low ceiling. A pair of square windows looked into the theater below. The projector itself was pointed through one of them, a big machine made of brushed stainless steel, with the words VITAPHONE stamped on the case. Harry stood on the far side of it, leaning forward, peering out the same window through which the projector was casting its beam. He heard Alec at the door, shot him a brief look. Alec expected to be ordered away, but Harry said nothing, only nodded and returned to his silent watch over the theater.

  Alec made his way to the VITAPHONE, picking his way carefully through the dark. There was a window to the left of the projector that looked down into the theater. Alec stared at it for a long moment, not sure if he dared, and then put his face close to the glass and peered into the darkened room beneath.

  The theater was lit a deep midnight blue by the image on the screen: the conductor again, the orchestra in silhouette. The announcer was introducing the next piece. Alec lowered his gaze and scanned the rows of seats. It wasn’t much trouble to find where he had been sitting, an empty cluster of seats close to the back, on the right. He half-expected to see her there, slid down in her chair, face tilted up towards the ceiling and blood all down it—her eyes turned perhaps to stare up at him. The thought of seeing her filled him with both dread and a strange nervous exhilaration, and when he realized she wasn’t there, he was a little surprised by his own disappointment.

  Music began: at first the wavering skirl of violins, rising and falling in swoops, and then a series of menacing bursts from the brass section, sounds of an almost military nature. Alec’s gaze rose once more to the screen—rose and held there. He felt a chill race through him. His forearms prickled with gooseflesh. On the screen the dead were rising from their graves, an army of white and watery specters pouring out of the ground and into the night above. A square-shouldered demon, squatting on a mountain-top, beckoned them. They came to him, their ripped white shrouds fluttering around their gaunt bodies, their faces anguished, sorrowing. Alec caught his breath and held it, watched with a feeling rising in him of mingled shock and wonder.

  The demon split a crack in the mountain, opened Hell. Fires leaped, the Damned jumped and danced, and Alec knew what he was seeing was about the war. It was about his brother dead for no reason in the South Pacific, America is proud of him, it was about bodies damaged beyond repair, bodies sloshing this way and that while they rolled in the surf at the edge of a beach somewhere in the far east, getting soggy, bloating. It was about Imogene Gilchrist, who loved the movies and died with her legs spread open and her brain swelled full of blood and she was nineteen, her parents were Colm and Mary. It was about young people, young healthy bodies, punched full of holes and the life pouring out in arterial gouts, not a single dream realized, not a single ambition achieved. It was about young people who loved and were loved in return, going away, and not coming back, and the pathetic little remembrances that marked their departure, my prayers are with you today, Harry Truman, and I always thought she’d be a movie star.

  A church bell rang somewhere, a long way off. Alec looked up. It was part of the film. The dead were fading away. The churlish and square-shouldered demon covered himself with his vast black wings, hiding his face from the coming of dawn. A line of robed men moved across the land below, carrying softly glowing torches. The music moved in gent
le pulses. The sky was a cold, shimmering blue, light rising in it, the glow of sunrise spreading through the branches of birch trees and northern pine. Alec watched with a feeling in him like religious awe until it was over.

  “I liked Dumbo better,” Harry said.

  He flipped a switch on the wall, and a bare light bulb came on, filling the projection room with harsh white light. The last of the film squiggled through the VITAPHONE and came out at the other end, where it was being collected on one of the reels. The trailing end whirled around and around and went slap, slap, slap. Harry turned the projector off, looked at Alec over the top of the machine.

  “You look better. You got your color back.”

  “What did you want to talk about?” Alec remembered the vague look of warning Harry gave him when he told him not to go anywhere, and the thought occurred to him now that maybe Harry knew he had slipped in without buying a ticket, that maybe they were about to have a problem.

  But Harry said, “I’m prepared to offer you a refund or two free passes to the show of your choice. Best I can do.”

  Alec stared. It was a long time before he could reply.

  “For what?”

  “For what? To shut up about it. You know what it would do to this place if it got out about her? I got reasons to think people don’t want to pay money to sit in the dark with a chatty dead girl.”

  Alec shook his head. It surprised him that Harry thought it would keep people away, if it got out that the Rosebud was haunted. Alec had an idea it would have the opposite effect. People were happy to pay for the opportunity to experience a little terror in the dark—if they weren’t there wouldn’t be any business in horror pictures. And then he remembered what Imogene Gilchrist had said to him about Harry Parcells: he won’t run the place much longer.

  “So what do you want?” Harry asked. “You want passes?”

  Alec shook his head.

  “Refund then.”

  “No.”

  Harry froze with his hand on his wallet, flashed Alec a surprised, hostile look. “What do you want then?”

  “How about a job? You need someone to sell popcorn. I promise not to wear my paste-on nails to work.”

  Harry stared at him for a long moment without any reply, then slowly removed his hand from his back pocket.

  “Can you work weekends?” he asked.

  In October, Alec hears that Steven Greenberg is back in New Hampshire, shooting exteriors for his new movie on the grounds of Phillips Exeter Academy—something with Tom Hanks and Haley Joel Osment, a misunderstood teacher inspiring troubled kid-geniuses. Alec doesn’t need to know any more than that to know it smells like Steven might be on his way to winning another Oscar. Alec, though, preferred the earlier work, Steven’s fantasies and suspense thrillers.

  He considers driving down to have a look, wonders if he could talk his way onto the set—Oh yes, I knew Steven when he was a boy—wonders if he might even be allowed to speak with Steven himself. But he soon dismisses the idea. There must be hundreds of people in this part of New England who could claim to have known Steven back in the day, and it isn’t as if they were ever close. They only really had that one conversation, the day Steven saw her. Nothing before; nothing much after.

  So it is a surprise when one Friday afternoon close to the end of the month Alec takes a call from Steven’s personal assistant, a cheerful, efficient-sounding woman named Marcia. She wants Alec to know that Steven was hoping to see him, and if he can drop in—is Sunday morning all right?—there will be a set pass waiting for him at Main Building, on the grounds of the Academy. They’ll expect to see him around 10:00 A.M., she says in her bright chirp of a voice, before ringing off. It is not until well after the conversation has ended, that Alec realizes he has received not an invitation, but a summons.

  A goateed P.A. meets Alec at Main and walks him out to where they’re filming. Alec stands with thirty or so others, and watches from a distance, while Hanks and Osment stroll together across a green quad littered with fallen leaves, Hanks nodding pensively while Osment talks and gestures. In front of them is a dolly, with two men and their camera equipment sitting on it, and two men pulling it. Steven and a small group of others stand off to the side, Steven observing the shot on a video monitor. Alec has never been on a movie set before, and he watches the work of professional make-believe with great pleasure.

  After he has what he wants, and has talked with Hanks for a few minutes about the shot, Steven starts over towards the crowd where Alec is standing. There is a shy, searching look on his face. Then he sees Alec and opens his mouth in a gap-toothed grin, lifts one hand in a wave, looks for a moment very much the lanky boy again. He asks Alec if he wants to walk to craft services with him, for a chili dog and a soda.

  On the walk Steven seems anxious, jiggling the change in his pockets and shooting sideways looks at Alec. Alec knows he wants to talk about Imogene, but can’t figure how to broach the subject. When at last he begins to talk, it’s about his memories of the Rosebud. He talks about how he loved the place, talks about all the great pictures he saw for the first time there. Alec smiles and nods, but is secretly a little astounded at the depths of Steven’s self-deception. Steven never went back after The Birds. He didn’t see any of the movies he says he saw there.

  At last, Steven stammers, What’s going to happen to the place after you retire? Not that you should retire! I just mean—do you think you’ll run the place much longer?

  Not much longer, Alec replies—it’s the truth—but says no more. He is concerned not to degrade himself asking for a handout—although the thought is in him that this is in fact why he came. That ever since receiving Steven’s invitation to visit the set he had been fantasizing that they would talk about the Rosebud, and that Steven, who is so wealthy, and who loves movies so much, might be persuaded to throw Alec a life preserver.

  The old movie houses are national treasures, Steven says. I own a couple, believe it or not. I run them as revival joints. I’d love to do something like that with the Rosebud someday. That’s a dream of mine, you know.

  Here is his chance, the opportunity Alec was not willing to admit he was hoping for. But instead of telling him that the Rosebud is in desperate straits, sure to close, Alec changes the subject…ultimately lacks the stomach to do what must be done.

  What’s your next project? Alec asks.

  After this? I was considering a remake, Steven says, and gives him another of those shifty sideways looks from the corners of his eyes. You’d never guess what. Then, suddenly, he reaches out, touches Alec’s arm. Being back in New Hampshire has really stirred some things up for me. I had a dream about our old friend, would you believe it?

  Our old—Alec starts, then realizes who he means.

  I had a dream the place was closed. There was a chain on the front door, and boards in the windows. I dreamed I heard a girl crying inside, Steven says, and grins nervously. Isn’t that the funniest thing?

  Alec drives home with a cool sweat on his face, ill at ease. He doesn’t know why he didn’t say anything, why he couldn’t say anything; Greenberg was practically begging to give him some money. Alec thinks bitterly that he has become a very foolish and useless old man.

  At the theater there are nine messages on Alec’s machine. The first is from Lois Weisel, who Alec has not heard from in years. Her voice is brittle. She says, Hi Alec, Lois Weisel at B.U. As if he could have forgotten her. Lois saw Imogene in Midnight Cowboy. Now she teaches documentary filmmaking to graduate students. Alec knows these two things are not unconnected, just as it is no accident Steven Greenberg became what he became. Will you give me a call? I wanted to talk to you about—I just—will you call me? Then she laughs, a strange, frightened kind of laugh, and says, This is crazy. She exhales heavily. I just wanted to find out if something was happening to the Rosebud. Something bad. So—call me.

  The next message is from Dana Lewellyn who saw her in The Wild Bunch. The message after that is from Shane Leonard, who s
aw Imogene in American Graffiti. Darren Campbell, who saw her in Reservoir Dogs. Some of them talk about the dream, a dream identical to the one Steven Greenberg described, boarded-over windows, chain on the door, girl crying. Some only say they want to talk. By the time the answering machine tape has played its way to the end, Alec is sitting on the floor of his office, his hands balled into fists—an old man weeping helplessly.

  Perhaps twenty people have seen Imogene in the last twenty-five years, and nearly half of them have left messages for Alec to call. The other half will get in touch with him over the next few days, to ask about the Rosebud, to talk about their dream. Alec will speak with almost everyone living who has ever seen her, all of those Imogene felt compelled to speak to: a drama professor, the manager of a video rental store, a retired financier who in his youth wrote angry, comical film reviews for The Lansdowne Record, and others. A whole congregation of people who flocked to the Rosebud instead of church on Sundays, those whose prayers were written by Paddy Chayefsky and whose hymnals were composed by John Williams and whose intensity of faith is a call Imogene is helpless to resist. Alec himself.

  Steven’s accountant handles the fine details of the fund-raiser to save the Rosebud. The place is closed for three weeks to refurbish. New seats, state-of-the-art sound. A dozen artisans put up scaffolding and work with little paintbrushes to restore the crumbling plaster molding on the ceiling. Steven adds personnel to run the day-to-day operations. He has bought a controlling interest, and the place is really his now, although Alec has agreed to stay on to manage things for a little while.

  Lois Weisel drives up three times a week to film a documentary about the renovation, using her grad students in various capacities, as electricians, sound people, grunts. Steven wants a gala reopening to celebrate the Rosebud’s past. When Alec hears what he wants to show first—a double feature of The Wizard of Oz and The Birds—his forearms prickle with gooseflesh; but he makes no argument.