by JL Bryan
Contents
Midnight Movie
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Also by J. L. Bryan
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Midnight Movie
Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper,
Book Fourteen
by
J. L. Bryan
Copyright 2021 J. L. Bryan
All rights reserved
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my wife Christina and my father-in-law John, without whom I would be a full-time parent struggling to write at odd hours.
I appreciate everyone who helped with this book, including beta reader Robert Duperre (check out his books!). Thanks also to copy editor Lori Whitwam and proofreaders Thelia Kelly, Andrea van der Westhuizen, and Barb Ferrante. Thanks to my cover artist Claudia from PhatPuppy Art, and her daughter Catie, who does the lettering on the covers.
Thanks also to the book bloggers who have supported the series, including Heather from Bewitched Bookworms; Mandy from I Read Indie; Michelle from Much Loved Books; Shirley from Creative Deeds; Lori from Contagious Reads; Kelly from Reading the Paranormal; Lili from Lili Lost in a Book; Heidi from Rainy Day Ramblings; Kelsey from Kelsey’s Cluttered Bookshelf; and Ali from My Guilty Obsession.
Most of all, thanks to the readers who have supported this series! There are more paranormal mysteries to come.
Also by J.L. Bryan:
The Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper series
Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper
Cold Shadows
The Crawling Darkness
Terminal
House of Whispers
Maze of Souls
Lullaby
The Keeper
The Tower
The Monster Museum
Fire Devil
The Necromancer’s Library
The Trailwalker
Midnight Movie
The Lodge
Urban Fantasy/Horror
The Unseen
Inferno Park
Time Travel/Dystopian
Nomad
The Jenny Pox series (supernatural/horror)
Jenny Pox
Tommy Nightmare
Alexander Death
Jenny Plague-Bringer
Chapter One
“I wish we had a convertible,” Stacey said from the passenger seat. She wore sunglasses against the bright morning daylight, her short blonde hair streaking across her face as springtime air blasted in through her open window. “This is totally convertible weather.”
“I don’t think we could transport all our gear in a convertible,” I said.
“Well, they should invent a convertible van, then. Or a convertible station wagon.”
“Sounds practical.” I nudged the accelerator down, since the road was clear and wide open. We’d just left Savannah for Highway 204, lined with tall pine trees sprouting from sandy soil, a lesser-used road ever since they built the interstate not far away.
We could’ve taken the interstate ourselves, but I’d opted for the more scenic route, passing a few farms and empty, tumbledown houses. This road ran parallel to the train tracks, heading westward and inland, away from our coastal home of Savannah.
Not far away, though. Easy commuting distance meant no grimy cheapo motels, no sleeping in the van, and no camping with Stacey, who was always too chipper about sleeping in a tent.
We were headed toward tiny Pembroke, Georgia, a little railroad town that had been a much bigger deal a century or so earlier. We didn’t have to drive all the way into town, though, because our client’s location was out on the highway.
“Wow, there it is,” Stacey said. “That really didn’t take long. I barely had any coffee.” She sipped from her pink Hydro Flask tumbler.
I slowed at the turn-off. It was a sign I’d passed countless times but barely noticed, an overgrown relic of a bygone time.
Now the overgrowth had been hacked away, the weeds mown down, and for the first time in years, its giant art deco letters were plainly visible to the highway:
NITE-LITE DRIVE-IN
Now Playing: Labyrinth
Coming Soon: Grand Re-Opening!
Est. 1955
Just in case we weren’t sure where to go, a lightbulb-studded arrow pointed the way. The bulbs weren’t lit, and likely hadn’t been in many years.
I turned off the highway and slowed to a crawl, following a long, curved driveway toward an area hidden behind a wall of high pine trees supplemented by spans of privacy fence.
“Check out that screen tower.” Stacey, a film-school graduate, shook her head in awe.
She gaped at a concrete building three stories high. The side facing the highway sloped up from the ground at a steep angle, forty-five or more degrees, all the way to the top. A huge red Coca-Cola logo was painted across it, still faintly visible after decades of sun and rain. A steel door was built into the side of the tower.
“That’s a movie screen?” I asked. “It looks like a warehouse.”
“Oh, yeah. The screen will be on the front side. I can’t wait to see it! Why are you driving so slow?”
“That’s what the signs say. Five-mile speed limit.” I eased the van around the constantly curving blacktop.
“That’s probably for when there’s, like, actual other cars here, though? The box office looks cool.”
At the ticket booth, a candy-striped arm blocked the road. The booth was freshly painted in cheerful, funky purple with bright white trim. Strings of matching pennants made the whole thing look extra festive. David Bowie stared at us from a Labyrinth poster in one of the booth’s windows.
“This place was definitely not open when I was in college, or we would have checked it out,” Stacey said, while I texted the prospective clients that we’d arrived. It really had been a quick drive. “Once we went all the way to the Jessup Drive-In, which was totally classic. I mean it’s super-authentic from the 1940s, but that was an hour away. Worth it. Nobody ever mentioned this one. I’ll have to tell everyone about it.”
“That must be Benny.” A guy bicycled toward us from the other side of the ticket booth, keeping to the shade of the trees lining one side of the road in a solid wall of vegetation.
“I like his hat,” Stacey said. The guy wore a puffy blue cap that would have looked at home on the head of a 1920s newsboy shouting the day’s headlines at 1920s pedestrians. Extra, extra, look at my hipster hat! He also wore suspenders over a Last Starfighter t-shirt. He parked his bike by the ticket stand as I lowered my window.
“Welcome to the Nite-Lite!” He sounded fairly upbeat about it, but he had a tired look about him
, as people living in haunted homes often do. He walked around the ticket arm to my driver-side window. “I’m Benny.”
“Good to meet you,” I said. We’d previously emailed. “I’m Ellie. This is Stacey Tolbert, my tech manager.”
“Hi! Great place you’ve got going here,” Stacey said.
“Thanks, we’re trying. We’re visualizing the outcome and following through.” He opened the ticket booth door and raised the arm barring the road. “You can park over in the back row by the concession stand. Meet you there.”
We cruised past signs that gave directions and advertised upcoming movies, which were actually decades-old reruns, but interesting picks like The Goonies. A sign advertised the concession stand with a purple cartoon dragon munching a slice of, supposedly, Earth’s Best Pizza!
The deserted parking area had spaces for a couple hundred cars, marked out by little speaker poles. The massive white movie screen dominated the space, nearly blinding me with reflected daylight.
“Where are the speakers?” I asked, looking at the pole beside me.
“Drive-ins use radio now. Let’s check it out.” Stacey opened her door and hopped out, eager as a kid in a toy-and-candy store on Free Toy and Candy Day. I hoped she kept it professional for the clients. I did my best to visualize that outcome, hoping she’d follow through.
Climbing out, I took a breath of fresh, grassy air. In addition to the trees that walled off the view from the highway, there was a big lawn not far away, behind the two-story concession stand.
A mural on the front of the concession stand depicted a long purple dragon woven between puffy painted letters that read Purple Pizza Eater. The dragon smiled, possibly because of the steaming pizza pies he held in each hand. His tail coiled around an overflowing box of popcorn.
“I swear I can smell that dragon painting,” Stacey said.
“You’re not wrong.” I sniffed; the air was full of rich tomato and cheese sorts of scents. My breakfast had been the private-investigator special—black coffee with a side of nothing—but now my stomach gurgled.
“Callie—my wife—is experimenting in the pizza lab today.” Our prospective client caught up to us on his bike. “Movie theaters live and die on their concession stands, so she’s a real secret weapon. A nuclear weapon.”
“Pizza lab?” Stacey asked.
“She innovates, and she likes to keep it seasonal and local. We planted an organic herb and vegetable garden for ultra-locality.” He nodded at the lawn that sprawled away behind the concession stand and ended at a high, rickety-looking fence with woods beyond it. The garden must have been beyond the fence, too, because I didn’t see any sign of it.
“You’re the owner of the drive-in, correct?” I asked, pulling out my notebook.
“I am. We are. It’s a joint effort, Callie and me. And a few of my buds who come out for big projects, like rebuilding the stage.” He pointed to the raised wooden platform in front of the shining, three-story metallic screen. “That’ll be ideal for the Rocky Horror Picture Show crowd. We can have live music while we await nightfall. Like my band. We’re the Bluegazers, exploring the space between the sounds of blues and shoegaze. I’m sax and backup vocals.”
“Right,” I said, feeling like I was writing down too many details. Benny was enthusiastic. He looked about my age, late twenties. “How long have you owned the drive-in?”
“About three months now,” Benny said. “It’s been out of business for years, obviously. Finding it was ninety-eight percent kismet. One day Callie and I were out for a drive, doing some casual photography of Georgia’s lost highways for this website I was going to make. Then, boom. We saw the marquee sign with the big arrow and had to check it out. It was fenced off, but not all that well, so we snuck inside. Not that we were talking about buying it, no way, not then. We just wanted some pictures.
“It was rundown and overgrown, but it wasn’t bad, you know? And walking around, I got obsessed with it. Bringing it back to life. I had all these ideas, like the place was really speaking to me. And boom, next thing you know, here we are.”
“And you’re already open?” Stacey asked.
“We’re soft-opened,” Benny said, still straddling his bicycle. “We turn on the lights, and if anybody shows up, great. We’re focusing on older movies. They’re cheaper to license and better suited to the nostalgia tinge on the whole drive-in experience. We’re still ironing everything out before we start advertising and drawing in crowds.” He scratched his thin beard. “Well, hopefully drawing in crowds. But I think we have the concept to make it work. And Callie’s pizza will keep them coming back. You can’t get it anywhere but here.”
“It does smell awesome,” Stacey said.
“She might guinea pig you with some samples,” Benny said.
“Yeah, twist my arm.” Stacey eased closer to the concession stand.
“Didn’t you mention you lived on the property, or nearby?” I asked.
“We do.” He pointed to the screen tower. “Behind the magic screen, like the Wizard of Oz.”
“You live in the screen tower?” Stacey gasped. “No way!”
“Ayuh,” he said, in his slight New England accent. “The owner had a private apartment in there. These old-time screen towers had plenty of room inside. Look how big this one is. One over in Claxton had a local radio station on the upper floor. Anyway, the last owner kept up the screen tower apartment better than the old farmhouse.” He nodded again at the privacy fence. “For now, Callie’s pretty much just using it as the garden shed.”
“Are the disturbances in the old house or in the screen tower?” I asked.
“Pizza! Pizza!” A small girl in a floppy sunhat burst out of the glass front door of the Purple Pizza Eater. She was around kindergarten age, five or six, wearing a tie-dyed dress. She raced toward us, past weathered picnic tables shaded by new beach umbrellas, bare feet slapping the cracked blacktop. She held one hand aloft, smeared in red sauce.
“Did you help Mommy make pizza?” Benny scooped her up off the ground.
“Try it, Daddy!” The girl attempted to cram her sauce-covered hand into his mouth, but he managed to turn away at the last second. She painted a tomato-red clown smile across his face.
“Daisy June!” A young woman pursued the girl out the front door but stopped short when she saw Stacey and me. She touched her face self-consciously and looked down at herself. Her hair was back in a kerchief, and she wore an apron splattered with ingredients and small tomato-sauce handprints. She blushed. “So I guess the detectives are here, Benny? Thanks for the heads up.”
“They’re here and entranced by the aroma of your latest creations,” Benny said. “As anyone would be.”
“Daddy, try the new flavor!” The little girl again attempted to shove sauce in his mouth, getting it up his nostril instead as he jerked away.
“Thanks, kiddo.” Benny set her on the ground and pointed to us. “Say hi to our guests.”
The girl looked at us and jumped, as if noticing us for the first time. She held up a sauce-covered hand at Stacey. “Want to taste?”
“No, thanks!” Stacey said. “I just ate breakfast off somebody’s hands a few minutes ago, so I’m all full.”
“I’m Ellie,” I said, stepping toward the blushing woman in the kerchief. She was in her twenties, too—hey, that made all of us, except for Daisy June—but came across as on the younger end, or maybe she was just shy. “You must be Callie.”
“Yeah. Hi. Sorry, I’m in the middle of a few experimental pizzas right now.” Her accent was soft and languid, definitely not New Englandish like her husband, and told me she was from somewhere in the South but not Georgia.
“A few pizzas?” Stacey looked past her toward the concession stand. “They smell great. For sure. A lot.”
“Maybe they should go inside with you,” Benny said to Callie, raising his eyebrows. I recognized that signal between parents who didn’t want to discuss their haunted house problems in front of their kids. It
makes sense because they want to protect the kids, but usually kids are the first to know something’s wrong. “They could try some of your new pizzas. Hit ’em with a taste test.”
“I’m sure they don’t want to be bothered with that,” Callie said.
“Uh, I do!” Stacey said. “I cannot emphasize this enough, in fact. I had nothing for breakfast except for some eggs and tomatoes and toast and cereal, and that was a couple hours ago.”
“Okay, sure. Come on in.” Callie turned back toward the Purple Pizza Eater, and Stacey ran ahead to hold the door open for her as she walked back inside, adjusting her green kerchief. Stacey was not kidding about wanting some pizza.
“Let’s race, Daddy!” Daisy June ran to her blue Frozen-themed bicycle. Benny jumped back onto his bicycle, and father and daughter raced each other across the deserted parking lot toward the movie screen.
Looking at the big screen and the cheerful cluster of bright little buildings centered on the concession stand and its picnic tables, I thought the drive-in theater seemed like a perfectly fun place, evoking a sort of nostalgia for a time when I hadn’t even been alive.
Looking the other way, though, I couldn’t help but have a darker feeling about the tall, rickety fence along the back of the sprawling lawn, its weathered posts like a thousand sharp teeth waiting for something to bite, the shadowy woods waiting on the other side.
I followed Stacey into the concession stand.
Chapter Two
If the faint smell of pizza had been enticing outdoors, the aroma inside could only be described as painfully delicious.
The Purple Pizza Eater’s interior continued the overall retro theme, with shiny surfaces and touches of chrome. They had painted the walls multiple hues of purple—purple stripes, purple polka dots—and decorated with vintage movie posters in brass frames dotted with tiny lightbulbs.
“Sit anywhere you like.” Callie dashed behind the long counter to a brick oven in the kitchen. A big popcorn popper trimmed in red and polished brass at one end of the counter was currently empty but exuded a ghostly odor of butter and salt that lingered in the air. The menu board was adorned with images of dancing cartoon drinks, popcorn, and ice cream cones that looked like they’d originated in advertising reels of the 1940s or 50s, freshly printed in bright colors.
