by JL Bryan
“You’re safe now,” Benny said, though he had a questioning look that seemed directed at me.
“I heard some strange sounds, too,” I said. “Like footsteps. But I didn’t see anyone.”
“She sounded nice at first,” Daisy said. “Then she got less nice.”
“Did she speak to you, Daisy?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“What did she say?”
“She said, ‘oh little girl, dear girl, come see me,’” Daisy said. “But her voice got scary, and then I saw her, and she was too scary, Daddy!”
“Maybe y’all should head home,” I told Benny, nodding at the screen tower. “Stacey and I will check out the house right away.”
“We will?” Stacey asked. “I mean, yeah. Obviously. Of course.” She cast a doubtful look toward the shadowy lawn behind the stand.
“Yeah, good. Good luck with it,” Benny said. “Come on, Daisy. Can you pedal?”
Daisy nodded, wiping her eyes. He set her down, and the two of them bicycled away.
“What on Earth happened at the farmhouse?” Stacey asked, and I filled her in while walking to the van.
“Too bad we didn’t have the cameras up and running for the night,” I said as I strapped on my utility belt with the nice hefty flashlight I’d been missing earlier. “Maybe we’ll catch something later.”
“You think it was the same entity who made the knocking sounds last night?”
“It sounded similar to me. The obvious guess would be that it’s Ruby Jackson, the sickly mother-in-law who used her cane to summon younger relatives. Daisy’s description of a scary old lady would fit that, too.”
“Okay, well, let’s go have a look at the scary dead old lady.” Stacey sighed and followed me across the lawn. We carried fresh batteries in our backpacks for the gear we’d already set up in the house, plus an extra night vision camera and tripod.
The gate resisted my first attempt to open it, like the hinges had stuck, but it finally relented and swung inward, admitting us into the darkness.
“Whoa, aliens,” Stacey said, pointing to the glowing green Frisbee.
“Grouches aren’t aliens. We’ll grab it on the way out.” I looked up at the roofline where Daisy and I had heard the footsteps. There was nothing moving up there now, as far as I could tell.
We stepped through the doorway onto the creaking floorboards of the house, dodging spindly trees and spiderwebs on our way to the loose, wobbly staircase inside.
Again, we took it one at a time to reduce the risk of the stairs collapsing beneath us. I went up first, then waited at the top for Stacey.
The door to the roof stood wide open, but fortunately the entity in the house hadn’t damaged our gear.
While Stacey changed out camera and microphone batteries, I had another look at the bedroom of Stanley Preston’s mother-in-law, Ruby Jackson. The cane still hung on the closet doorknob. I looked at all the overlapping dimples in the floor next to the bed, thinking of what Leah had told me about her grandmother banging the floorboards for attention. I thought I could detect the cloying, flowery perfume odor again.
“Got the batteries in.” Stacey arrived with the extra night vision camera. “Where do you want it, boss?”
“Ruby Jackson died in the 1950s, but this room still smells like her perfume,” I said.
“Well, there’s some on the dresser, right?” Stacey nodded at glass bottles arranged next to a framed, faded black-and-white farm photo. Everything lay under a thick layer of dust.
“It’s like she remained a major presence in the house long after she died.” I rummaged around. In a nightstand, I found dozens of medicine bottles, their labels faded, and an odd-looking device with a large rubber bulb at one end and a clear plastic tube and nozzle at the other. I took snapshots with my phone.
“You think she’s the one you heard walking around earlier?” Stacey asked.
“It all fits. Let’s set the camera in the hallway, looking into this room.”
The house made my skin crawl like I was covered in bugs. I was eager to finish our work and leave. We set up the camera quickly and hurried down the stairs, again taking turns lest it fall apart under our combined weight and motion.
After hurrying out the front door, I breathed easier once we departed the shadow of the house and closed the gate behind us.
Next, we switched out batteries on our other gear, which included an unpleasant visit to the tomb-like sunken projection house in the middle of the parking lot, with its damp floor and walls and the crumbling ruins of the 1950s fire-hazard projector. We hurried, standing back-to-back down there so nothing could come shambling up behind either one of us.
I returned to the van to check that our monitors were receiving everything well. Stacey went to the concession stand to start the movie.
The big movie screen lit up with colorful, cartoony letters surrounding by equally colorful and cartoony stars: Welcome to our Drive-in! This gave way to more text: Coming Attractions! Both of these looked generic, like they’d been made for the use of any drive-in rather than this particular one.
I turned on the van’s radio in time to hear “…will be coming soon to this theater!” in a nasal, old-time Walter Winchell kind of radio personality voice.
I settled into the driver’s seat to watch.
The screen went dark, and a tense soundtrack began to play, piano in an eerie minor key.
On the screen, a pleasant-looking suburban house appeared, and the view zoomed in slowly over the neatly trimmed lawn and hedges to the front door.
“It looks like any other home, but this house has a secret,” a voice said, a sinister Vincent Price-ish voice replacing the honking Walter Winchell-esque one.
The view jumped abruptly into an interior hallway. The house looked pleasantly well-appointed on the inside, too, as the viewpoint moved past open doors, peering into a living room, kitchen, and bedrooms, all neatly kept, perfectly mid-1960s suburban middle class, neither showy nor shabby.
The door at the end of the hall, though, looked completely out of place, not so pleasant and innocent, certainly out of place in this world of Tupperware parties and PTA socials. The door was inexplicably lashed together from mismatched boards, scrap wood, and metal bolts, and it was the only door in the house that was closed.
“A certain sort of evil lurks down below,” the Vincent Price guy continued in his overdone spooky tone.
The door rattled like something was trying to get out.
There was a close-up of a woman screaming.
“Coming soon to this very theater,” the voice resumed. “A chilling tale of unspeakable terror, The Body in the Basement!”
A face appeared in the window beside me, and I gasped, jerking away from it. By the time I grabbed my flashlight, I realized it was Stacey, smiling and waving.
“Don’t sneak up on me,” I said, lowering the window.
“What did you think of it?”
“It was a pretty mean prank to sneak up after that house back there.”
“No, I mean The Body in the Basement! Can you believe they have it?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I never want to see that movie.”
“But they have the whole movie here! Not just the trailer. Jacob’s going to do a freak-flip when he hears we can watch it on thirty-five-mil at a drive-in. With the whole Mazzanti murder-movie angle, you can’t find the movie anywhere these days, like Hollywood decided to completely memory-hole it.”
“That looked pretty bad for a supposedly famous filmmaker.”
“Well, that’s the thing. His later stuff is just so bad. It’s his early movies that some people considered genius. There were a couple of guys back in film school who said he was better than Fellini, but I think they were trying to be edgy or iconoclastic or just trolling people.
“Point is, when Mazzanti was young he made some very different, visionary films that were considered brilliant. The Heart of Man—that’s about a priest who follows the devil thr
ough an eighteenth-century Venetian carnival, and the devil takes different shapes. An aristocrat, a beautiful dancer, a street criminal. An artist. At least, most people say it’s the devil. It’s kind of nonlinear and open to interpretation. But when you watch it, you get very drawn in, even if you’re not sure what you just experienced when it was over. Then there’s Stanzas for Regina, which is about an elderly woman remembering her life in hallucinogenic flashbacks. I think. That one was even harder to follow, honestly, yet also considered brilliant.
“But that was the early 1950s. By the late 1960s, Mazzanti was making, well, stuff like The Body in the Basement.” Stacey nodded at the big screen, where the horror movie trailer had thankfully passed. The opening credits of Pocketful of Aces now played, but there was no action on the screen yet, just a series of title cards while jazz crackled on the soundtrack.
“I wonder why his later work changed so much,” I said.
“Drugs!” Stacey said. “And alcohol. Way too much of both, and I guess they chewed up his brain. He went in for that side of Hollywood, the parties and reckless living. Just like Adaire Fontaine and Chance Chadwick. You know what they say, live fast and die young. And in his case, murder people along the way.”
“How did Antonio Mazzanti die, again?”
“Also drugs,” Stacey said. “Heroin overdose. He was living in a cheap Skid Row hotel by then, and they found him dead on the floor.”
“You’ve really dug into the research on this case.”
“Yeah, movie star biographies are more interesting than a typical stack of county tax records, believe it or not. Shh, we’re missing it.”
The movie unfolded, a grim noir film about gangsters and gambling. Chance Chadwick played a handsome devilish rogue of a poker player, in town for the big game—it wasn’t clear what town, but it looked like a big industrial city like Detroit. Adaire Fontaine was the girlfriend of the city’s most powerful mob boss, who hosted the big illegal poker tournament.
As it turned out, Chadwick’s character was secretly out for personal revenge against the mob boss, who’d killed his brother. The real plan was to rob the mob boss blind, and Chadwick had to seduce Adaire Fontaine into the plot, along with other conspirators.
Adaire stole every moment she was onscreen. Her eyes, huge and beautiful and hypnotic, had no doubt entranced audiences regardless of whether they cared about the clunky heist-caper plot.
Stacey and I took turns watching the monitors in the back of the van. Hopefully, the movie would stir up some local spirits, bring them out of hiding, especially if this was the last movie that had played at the drive-in before it closed.
I looked at each haunted hotspot in turn, watching for movement—the projection house, the farmhouse, the tower’s third floor. Nothing stirred.
During one of my turns in the back, I heard Stacey shout from up front, “That was it!”
“What?” I scrambled up to look out the windshield, then both windows.
“The movie!” She pointed to the screen, and I looked up to see Chance Chadwick and Adaire Fontaine in a passionate embrace, a neon BAR & LOUNGE sign glowing behind them.
“Yeah, I figured they would end up together,” I said.
“This isn’t the end. Anyway, I think they just said that dialogue we recorded the other night and tried to figure out. You didn’t hear?”
“I wasn’t listening, sorry. Can we rewind…?” The word was barely out of my mouth before I knew how ridiculous it sounded. We couldn’t just back up the video with the touch of a button. Someone would have to go up in the projection booth and do it manually. And by “someone,” I meant Stacey.
“I can go stop the movie and roll it back,” she offered, as if reading my mind.
“When you do, make a digital recording as the movie plays again, so we’ll have a copy that we can rewind and replay easily.”
“Ooh, good idea. Back in a flash. Or probably not a flash, because this could take a while. I can’t rush with that fragile old film. I’m surprised it hasn’t broken yet.” Stacey hopped out and headed toward the concession stand.
I stayed in the van and continued watching Pocketful of Aces on the big screen. The movie had tastefully cut away from the Chadwick/Fontaine love scene, jumping ahead to the big mob boss sitting around with his assistant mobsters in a smoky room, explaining their plan to rob all the players at the big poker game. Everybody was plotting against everybody in this movie. Adaire sauntered in, serving drinks, delivering flirtatious lines as she learned their scheme.
Later, she walked down a grim alley in the dark city, a long raincoat buttoned over her black dress, her eyes large and her facial expression complex, tension and fear boiling under a cool surface. Rain spattered her as she walked. It fell slowly at first, then rose to a torrent as she approached the cheap hotel where she would meet Chance Chadwick to pass him the information, the storm perhaps reflecting her character’s hidden inner turmoil and the growing dangers of their ever more risky plot against the murderous mobsters. The camera lingered on her face and her walk through the rain for almost a full minute, as if knowing the audience would drink up the stunning visual of her. Bluesy jazz played counterpoint to the rain and thunder.
Lightning flashed, and the screen went completely dark.
I was startled for a moment, before realizing Stacey had shut down the movie. I’d been drawn in, forgetting the real world around me.
In the darkness and quiet, each passing second reminded me of how isolated and alone I was out there. I kept my eyes on the sunken projection house not far away, waiting to see if the parking lot phantom would emerge to stalk me.
Focused on that tomb-like structure, I glimpsed a flicker of white at the edge of my vision.
I looked up and scanned the parking lot, trying to figure out what I’d just seen and where it had gone, but I couldn’t spot it.
After disabling the van’s dome light, I eased open the door and stepped out as quietly as I could.
A sort of electricity seemed to hang in the air, though no storm was expected that night. Wind rushed through the high trees surrounding the drive-in, the oceanic rushing of leaves like a thousand voices whispering above me.
Then I saw it again, the pale white shape crossing the parking lot, in the direction of the concession stand, as well as the lawn and the farmhouse beyond. I had the impression of a female, perhaps wearing a white hood or veil.
If it had been more solid, I might have thought it was Callie home from work, dressed her in chef’s whites. But the figure was wispy and indistinct, barely there at all.
My heart pounded and my adrenaline surged, the way it does in the presence of the supernatural, but I forced myself to remain still, rooted to the spot as I watched, for fear of running off the entity. Perhaps we’d been wrong, and the parking lot phantom was a woman, not Stan Preston at all.
It moved soundlessly across the blacktop, floating like a strand of silk on the wind toward the concession stand, where every light was out except for a single interior one, illuminating the big clear cube of the popcorn machine with a buttery yellow glow.
The pale figure vanished before reaching even the weak square of light cast from inside.
I hurried into the concession stand and looked toward the game room. If the entity had continued on the same path after turning invisible, it would be in there.
The double doors to the game room were closed tight. Had they been that way before? Maybe Benny had closed them for the night before I’d returned with his daughter crying in my arms.
I touched a doorknob, cautious as a firefighter testing for heat, but I was checking for cold. And I found it. The doorknob was chilly to the touch, as if it were winter inside the game room.
There was a good chance the entity was still in there.
I took a breath, trying to steel my nerves for whatever unknown thing waited within, and slowly turned the knob and eased open the door.
The game room was cold and dim, illuminated only by the wea
k light spilling over my shoulder from the popcorn machine area behind me.
I slipped inside, touching my holstered flashlight but resisting the temptation to draw it.
Something was in the room with me. I couldn’t see it, but I felt it, watching me but lurking out of my sight, staying invisible. I shivered, both from the cold and from that awful sense of not being alone in the room.
Instead of my flashlight, I drew a small voice recorder from my belt. I forced myself to speak against the instinctive fear of the supernatural that tried to close up my throat, that whispered in the back of my mind that I should panic and run away. Even after years of paranormal investigations, I had to fight the basic fear that most people, as well as most animals, feel in the presence of the restless dead.
“Hello?” I said, trying to sound casual and not let my voice tremble. “Is someone here?” It was almost like the opening gambit of a Ouija board session. “If there’s someone here, I’m listening. My name is Ellie. I am here to help you. We can help you move on from here. Would you like that?”
No response. At least it didn’t attack—no cold claws ripping into my back, no invisible hands shoving me against the wall. Not yet.
“Is your name… Ruby Jackson? Was that you walking around in the old house?” No answer. “Did you speak to that little girl?”
Nothing. I went fishing with another name.
“Are you Nancy Preston? Ruby’s daughter? Stanley’s wife? Are you still here, haunting your old home after all these years?” I walked in a long, slow circle around the room, not sure exactly where the entity was located. Maybe it was spread out, diffused throughout the room rather than in a particular place.
“Please tell me your name,” I said. “Say anything you like. I’m listening. Do you have a message for the living? A story that needs to be told? Or maybe you suffered an injustice? Or a tragedy?” I was continuing to fish, hoping for a bite.
The first sound was small—a brief metallic rattling.
It sounded again, louder, and one of the metal rods of the foosball table shuddered.
