by JL Bryan
“Oh, just stuff,” I said lightly.
He nodded and strode off toward the concession stand.
Stacey and I fell into step several paces behind him, letting his Spidey senses lead the way.
We rounded the concession stand to the lawn beyond it. He turned to look up at the screen, where The Body pursued a silently screaming Portia Reynolds, its mud-crusted hand reaching for her. It was all soundless, since we hadn’t activated the concession stand’s outdoor speakers.
“Pretty good view from the lawn,” Jacob said. “Could be nice to stretch out here and watch the movie, maybe better than sitting in your car. But something’s not right.” He walked to the back fence, and we followed him as he trailed his fingertips from plank to plank along the weathered wood panels, making a steady bump, bump, bump.
He slowed at the gate, despite how featureless and hard it was to find on this side of the fence, especially at night. After some poking around, he pushed it open and led us through, into the realm of the gardens in the shadow of the overgrown farmhouse.
Stacey followed, taking video for our records. I released the gate gently as I joined the two of them on the other side. The latch fell into place with a clack like the lock of a prison cell door.
I really did not like that farmhouse, and now had a personal vendetta against its long-dead occupant. She wasn’t just threatening our clients’ business, she had tried to kill me, to make a ghost out of me. Then I could have been stuck haunting the old drive-in for eternity. No, thanks. Not even with Adaire Fontaine to keep me company.
“I don’t have to tell you this place is active, paranormal-wise.” Jacob led us into the dark inner space of the house, where spindly tree limbs grew in through ivy-shrouded windows.
We kept our flashlights off inside the house, relying on the trickle of moonlight from the open front door and the windows. Jacob looked among the decayed remnants of furniture and into the kitchen with its sloping floor and rusty pipes.
The sound came from upstairs, just above our heads.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Stacey and I glanced warily at each other, recognizing the banging of Ruby’s cane.
Jacob stared at the ceiling. Another triple thump sounded, dislodging dust from above that spilled down on us, not unlike the Body in the Basement scene where the teenage dancing awakens the corpse buried under the house.
“She’s moving.” Jacob followed the course of the sound to the bottom of the stairs, where he stopped and looked up.
Even before we joined him, the look on his face told me he could see her.
I saw her, too, Ruby, leaning on her cane in the shadows above, watching over the second-floor railing, her rotten features mercifully hidden in the gloom, at least for the moment. Hopefully, she wouldn’t move into the moonlight so we could see her better.
“We’re only trying to help,” Jacob said, as though already in the middle of a conversation with her. “Nobody wants—nobody—” I had the impression he was being interrupted. “Okay! But that’s not why—these are different people. You’re not listening—”
Thump, thump, thump. Her cane rapped the floor.
More dust rained down on us, along with rusty nails.
“Hey, watch it!” Stacey shouted, pulling a nail from her hair. “You hit me in the head. Now I’m going to get brain tetanus.”
“What is she saying, Jacob?” I asked.
“She wants us gone,” Jacob said. “Not just the three of us who are here in the house, but all the living, from this whole area. She wants everyone gone and the theater buildings destroyed.”
“So she’s a possible threat to the family?” I remembered what Daisy had told me about the dead woman’s voice calling her over, luring her through the gate. This infuriated me, so I edged around to look Ruby in the eyes, or at least in her shadowy face up there. “Ruby Jackson,” I said, in as commanding a tone as I could manage, “you have to move on. You don’t live here anymore. You’re dead. You’ve been dead a long time—”
The dead woman slammed her cane down three more times.
More pieces of the second floor pelted us—chunks of dry-rotted wood, more dust, more nails, leaving open holes above.
“I know it can be hard to let go of the past,” I said. “You didn’t want your daughter’s second marriage to happen. You didn’t want the theater to happen. But that’s all water under the bridge, that’s ancient history. Did Stan Preston murder you over it? That’s what we’re here to find out. We want to help you.”
“Oh,” Jacob said.
“What?” I whispered.
“When you said that name, she got very angry,” Jacob said. “Maybe we should go—”
The cane rapped three more times. Each sound was like a thunderclap, shaking the house to its foundations. The floor rumbled beneath us.
Above, a sizable support truss broke loose above and came hurtling down. Jacob pulled Stacey aside as it crashed into the floorboards where they’d been standing.
Balusters cracked and fell, shattering some of the stairs on impact. One broken baluster came spinning at me like a baseball bat thrown aside by an angry player. It sailed over me as I ducked. It went on to strike the wall behind me with a loud crack. It could easily have been my skull instead of the wall.
“Let’s go!” I shouted.
We bolted for the front door, pelted by chunks of the ceiling and pieces of the walls as Ruby’s cane thudded and thudded above. The house shuddered like it was going to shake itself apart and come crashing down around us before we could escape.
We raced out the front door.
A loud creak sounded above. A porch beam or two had given way, and now one end of the porch roof came rushing down to crush me.
I leaped toward the front steps and the gardens beyond, trying to reach the yard before I got buried in an avalanche of rotten woodwork.
Before I was clear of the porch, though, something struck me across the backs of my legs, something that felt very much like a hard cane swatted across my calves by someone with a lot of pent-up anger to express.
The impact swatted me down like a fly, knocking me to the porch stairs as the porch roof crashed down behind me.
“Ellie!” Stacey ran toward me. Jacob was standing up, brushing dirt off himself, having apparently made a similar desperate jump but with more success. “Are you okay?”
“Maybe.” I looked back. One end of the porch roof had fallen all the way down and could have squashed us as we fled out the front door. The tacked-on widow’s walk railing had come down with it, and a loose baluster had struck me across the back of the legs like a cane.
Now the porch roof blocked the door and formed a rickety, ivy-shrouded ramp up to the second-story door that had opened onto the movie-viewing area. Anyone stepping out that door now would fall a few feet before landing in the ruins of the old bench, or maybe impaling themselves on the rusty speaker pole.
I could see nothing but darkness inside the open door, but I felt like Ruby was watching us from in there, hoping she’d harmed us.
“Well, she’s no Casper,” I said.
“Casper? She’s not even Beetlejuice.” Stacey helped me up. “She’s more of a Freddy Krueger.”
“What’s your professional opinion, Jacob?”
Jacob replaced his glasses, which had flown off when he’d jumped to avoid the collapsing porch roof. “I would say there are better than even odds that this house is haunted.”
“Okay, that’s all we needed. Guess you can head home,” Stacey said.
“And miss the end of Body in the Basement? Not a chance.” He looked up at the open door that had once been a dormer window. “Ellie, after you said the name that made her angry, but before she lashed out and tried to bring the house down on our heads, I picked up a clear, burning image from her. A memory, one she clings to with a lot of fury.”
“Tell us, Mr. Weiss,” Stacey said in a newscaster tone, holding up her handheld video recorder. “What was this me
mory?”
Jacob closed his eyes. “A man is standing over her. She’s gagging, choking, trying to breathe, but can’t… she’s dying. He’s watching.”
“What does he look like?” I asked.
“Big mustache.” With his fingertips, he traced big swoops coming out on either side of his nose. “Little scars all over his cheeks. He’s wearing a coat and tie, a fedora. There’s a lot of cigar smoke in the air, which isn’t helping her breathing situation.”
“Then what?” I asked.
“That’s it,” Jacob said. “Just that image. I think it was close to her death, and she holds on to it angrily.”
“So… did he kill her?”
“That’s pretty much the idea I’m getting. She wants revenge, too. She wants to destroy him, to destroy everything he ever made… which, I think, is maybe the drive-in? Because the guy she’s obsessed with is, I think, the one haunting the tower and the projection house. It’s like they’re both dead, but their hatred lives on.”
“Aw, how sweet,” Stacey said.
“It seems like Ruby is the one stalking and frightening customers,” I said. “Maybe we should advise the clients to go ahead and tear down this house. Down to bare earth.”
“And burn it,” Jacob added. “Then have the ground where it stood blessed, and grow some plants or trees there to break down any lingering dark energy.”
“I think our clients might like that solution. I know Callie would.”
Warily, watching over our shoulders, we left through the gate and returned to the drive-in’s lawn. Though I couldn’t see her, I was sure I could feel Ruby’s rotten eyes on us as we walked away.
Chapter Twenty-Four
As Jacob hoped, we did return to the parking lot in time to catch the climax of The Body in the Basement. The formerly pleasant interior of the Portia Reynolds character’s home was now a wreck, with muddy handprints on every wall. The Body pursued Portia’s character and her boyfriend Tom, who both looked battered and muddy but so far still alive.
Jacob raced ahead to Stacey’s car to hear the audio.
By the time I climbed into the back seat, the speakers were full of shrieking and screaming. The Body had tackled Portia Reynolds to the carpet, and now we got our first actual look at The Body that wasn’t a camera point of view and a single muddy hand.
“Whoa,” Stacey said. “The Body is a woman?”
“A muddy woman,” Jacob said, in a tone so carefully neutral it made Stacey scowl a little.
She scowled because the actress playing The Body appeared to be wearing nothing but a skin-tight layer of dirt and mud, and she was wrestling Portia Reynolds on the carpet, dropping the whole movie to a new and sordid low. Portia had a butcher knife and was doing her best to stab The Body as it attacked her, but with no luck. Both women kept crying out and screaming, their legs tangled together.
“What’s the stupid boyfriend up to?” Stacey asked.
As if to answer her, the Tom character appeared on the screen, gawking uselessly at the fight. “Jeepers,” he finally said. “You’re telling me the body in the basement was… Myra Finklestein? The prettiest gal in school?”
“That’s right!” Portia Reynolds gasped, while losing her wrestling match with the dead girl.
“But, golly, how?” Tom scratched his head, as though resolving this mystery was far more important than helping his girlfriend or perhaps going crazy with fear over the knowledge that an aggressive corpse had just murdered everyone in the house.
“Because she killed me!” The Body hissed.
“That’s right! I killed her!” Portia flipped The Body/Myra Finklestein on her back and straddled her, gaining the advantage in their wrestling match, and held the butcher knife high, preparing to kill Myra. For the second time, apparently. “And my friends helped me bury her body in the basement!”
“Smokin’ heck!” Tom said. “Why would you gals go and do a thing like that?”
“For you, Tom.” Portia looked up at him, and her face and voice softened. “I knew she would steal you from me. But only if I let her live.”
“Jeezum crow, that makes you a murderer!” Tom stepped back. “I can’t go steady with a murderer!”
“Then I’ll kill you, too, Tom!” Portia released The Body and charged at Tom, knife high. Tom cringed, cornered, not a particularly tough character in general.
However, the death blow never fell. Tom opened his eyes but maintained his cringing posture.
The Body had Portia by the neck, and now dragged her down the hall, toward the open door to the dark basement. Portia struggled, screaming, but couldn’t break free.
“This is extra disturbing knowing the director actually strangled her five years later,” Stacey whispered. “No wonder they pulled this from distribution.”
Onscreen, The Body dragged Portia down into the basement, leaving a trail of muddy footprints on the carpet. The odd patchwork door slammed shut, sealing them inside together. Screams sounded from below.
Tom gaped, then turned and ran out the front door and away down the street.
The movie lingered on the open front door after he departed. Then the view slowly panned down to the basement window, where something shadowy moved, and another scream sounded.
The credits rolled.
“And now she becomes nothing but… a body in the basement,” Jacob intoned. “Man, they should have worked that in at the end. I mean it’s kind of implied, but it feels like a missed opportunity.”
“I’m just glad it’s over,” I said.
“You didn’t like it?” Jacob asked. “It had strong female characters.”
“Who were murderers and undead revenge corpses,” Stacey said.
“Yeah, but that was progressive for the time.”
“Tom Hooper got off scot-free,” Stacey said.
“What did he do wrong?” Jacob asked. “Other than cringe a lot?”
“He was clearly trying to short-term Portia’s character. Maybe he was ready to sock-hop her, but no way was he taking her to the prom.”
“I think it’s interesting that both this movie and Biker Banshee featured vengeful spirits of murdered women,” I said.
“Oh, do they have Biker Banshee here?” Jacob sounded hopeful.
“No,” I replied quickly. “But it’s a recurring trope in Antonio Mazzanti’s later movies, after Adaire Fontaine’s death. If he killed her, maybe this is his way of expressing guilt. He might have felt haunted by her ghost. He might have actually been haunted by her ghost.”
“And he’s dead now, too, so if he’s a ghost somewhere, their ghosts could be attached, right?” Stacey said. “Connected by the murder. We see that all the time. But on the flip-flop, if he didn’t kill her, he probably had lots of personal trauma about the situation.”
“True. He was close to her, she was murdered, he was suspected, and there was never any justice.”
“Sounds like a recipe for a dark, self-destructive path to me,” Stacey said.
“Which matches what I read in the article. You should read that.”
“At this point, I have to mention that all normal psychic medium consultant procedures have been tossed aside here,” Jacob said. “I’m happy to keep helping, but I know too much about your investigation to be completely objective, possibly.”
“That’s okay,” Stacey said. “We can still use your services as a bad-movie consultant. For which you will be paid in popcorn, pizza, and drive-in date nights.”
“I can live with this.”
“Come on, I need to shut down the projection booth now.” Stacey opened her door. “And from now on… I prefer not to walk around this theater at night alone, like, ever again.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Basically, here’s the deal,” I said to Callie and Benny, as they worked on the Herculean task of trying to organize the first-floor office/storage/everything area. Daisy sat beyond the closed glass door in her playroom, wearing headphones and playing a keyboard, while watch
ing a piano lesson on a tablet. “Aside from Ruby’s lifelong opposition to the drive-in’s very existence—”
“—and deathlong, too, because she has not let it go since dying,” Stacey said, “even though that’s usually a great opportunity to let go of things.”
“—anyway, aside from the need to deal with her, there’s also this little troupe, as our psychic consultant said, who appear to be bound together, willingly or unwillingly, possibly led by Stan Preston. Or it’s possible he’s not in charge, that he’s a captive of the group, we don’t know. The more complicated part of our job is flushing them out, getting them to move on. We may be able to trap one or more of them. Our first goal is just to identify them, though.”
“How are you going to flush them out?” Callie asked. She was polishing a desk while Benny looked, rather slowly, through a heap of rolled-up movie posters from a cardboard box, tossing some and keeping others. Sunlight leaked in from the lone window. We’d summarized for them everything we knew so far, including our experiences the night before.
“We’re working on a couple of ideas. It would be ideal if y’all could be elsewhere for the night while we try it out, though. Because if it works, the paranormal activity here could grow extremely intense. I’d feel safer if you were off the property altogether.”
They looked at each other nervously.
“Is it that bad?” Benny asked.
“It could be,” I said. “I know it’s a hardship to stay away from home—”
“Nah, no way,” Benny said. “It’s warm enough to camp by the beach. Maybe Hunting Island?”
“Or Edisto Island,” Callie said. “It’s quieter.”
“Oh, I love Edisto!” Stacey told them. “Have you ever been to Ossabaw? It’s completely wild, if you’re looking for that…”
After some discussion and checking the weather, Cassie and Benny decided they could indeed go camping the following night.
“Great,” I said, glad I’d been free to tune out the camping portion of the conversation. “Until then, keep the drive-in closed. Don’t show a movie on the big screen tonight, for the public or for yourselves. Leave some exterior lights on. Continue to stay away from the farmhouse, the old projection building, and the third floor.” I glanced upward, and Callie shivered.
