by JL Bryan
The apparition in front of me seemed to fade a little. The giant version of him on the screen deteriorated, a corpse dressed in a formal black-on-black suit, maybe the one Mazzanti had been buried in.
“Accept the truth,” I continued, since this self-awareness approach seemed to be working. “Accept that you—”
Mazzanti’s ghost moved fast, like a momentarily flicker of film, or maybe a jump cut. He was suddenly right in front of Jacob, strangling him as he’d strangled Adaire. I don’t know why he didn’t attack me first; maybe he felt Jacob was a bigger threat because he was psychic. Or because he was a man. I kind of resented that.
“Stacey, light up Jacob!” I shouted, while reaching for my flashlight.
Something grabbed my wrist and stopped me. It was invisible, but I could feel it—ice-cold, smooth, soft but strong enough to bind me.
Silk.
I felt it at my throat, too, like a silky serpent had slithered under my shirt and coiled its way up to my neck to strangle me.
I couldn’t breathe.
Stacey cut the digital camera, but only for a moment.
Benny had told us that the digital camera cast about forty-five thousand lumens of light. That was a tremendous amount, far more than the three thousand thrown by the extremely bright tactical flashlights Stacey and I carried. With an output like that, the projector could be used as a small ghost cannon, helping to temporarily run off negative entities if things got too hairy.
Stacey switched it over to a beam of white light, roughly the brightness of an exploding sun, and blasted it on Jacob and the entity assailing him.
Jacob winced in pain and clenched his eyes shut. The light seemed bright enough to blind someone from behind, after shining through the middle of their skull.
Mazzanti howled as the light burned through him, reducing him to a cloud of dark spots floating like black spores in a sea of light. He released Jacob, who staggered away gasping for air.
I would have liked to stagger away gasping for air myself, but the silk bonds around my arm and neck prevented that. The Silk Strangler still had me caught.
With my free hand, I frantically grabbed at my neck, scraping my skin with my fingernails, but it was no use against the supernatural restraint.
The scarves snapped taut and pulled me down, smacking me hard against the drive-in’s blacktop. Then they hauled me forward across the rough surface.
I could see them, long silk scarves like ropes around my limbs and my neck, dragging me toward the little half-door into the sunken projection house. The door was open, the space inside waiting for me like the mouth of a hungry grave.
My cold silk bonds dragged me inside, and I fell fast and hard to the dirt-encrusted brick floor.
The little door above slammed shut, blocking out the white light and trapping me in the darkness alone.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I could see nothing, but as it turned out, I wasn’t alone in there, after all.
Alone would have been better.
Hands touched me—cold, clammy hands, and too many of them. I felt like Sarah falling down the well of hands in Labyrinth, getting grabbed all over.
“She’s here,” a female voice rasped.
“She’s so warm,” said another, her voice creaky and dry.
“Okay, ladies, get off me,” I said. Though the silk was still coiled around my throat, it wasn’t choking me at the moment, now that it had stopped dragging me across the ground.
Silk scarves at my wrists prevented me from reaching for my flashlight or holy-music defenses—even if I could, it would have been wise to hold off. We’d provoked these spirits deliberately to learn about them, so chasing them away, as Stacey had done with the projector to protect Jacob against Mazzanti, was a last resort.
The dead ladies did not get off me or move away. It was a small space down there, but they could have allowed me a little more room. Their cold skin smelled like mud and gone-over meat.
A red glow flared above me, illuminating the face of Chance Chadwick like a fire-hued spotlight on a stage. The tobacco smell mingled with the smell of death and decay. He blew out smoke and looked me over like I was an item on a store shelf and he was trying to determine my value.
In the glow, I caught glimpses of the women flanking me, holding me in place, and what I saw made me glad I couldn’t see much. They were like dead bodies risen from the earth after a lot of time. They looked drained, while he looked healthy and almost alive. He’d been feeding on these ghosts, controlling them; long silk scarves bound them, too.
“Stanley Preston,” I said. “You’re the Silk Strangler? You murdered Portia Reynolds and Grace LeRoux?”
The women stirred and groaned at the sound of their own names.
“Snap your traps,” he barked at them. Then to me, he said, “They call me Chance.”
“Who calls you that? These ghosts? Because your name is Stan Preston. Your disguise doesn’t fool me. You wanted to be Chance Chadwick, but you…” I thought of what Adaire’s ghost had said. “Ultimately, Stanley, you just didn’t have the chops.”
His face glowed red with rage, his teeth chomping on his cigar. The pits of his pockmark scars began to appear on his face, as if his makeup was wearing off, melted by his anger.
I tried to get up, but the ghosts of Portia and Grace held me down.
“I don’t understand,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady and strong while horrible things held me captive. Showing fear could give him power over me. Then again, standing up to him could invite a violent attack. “I saw Mazzanti re-enact his murder of Adaire Fontaine outside. How did you get mixed up with him? Why is he here, at your theater?”
“You ask a lot of questions for a dame,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m the captain of this riverboat,” he said. “I’m the ringmaster of this circus. Don’t let anybody tell you different.”
“Huh.” His insistence, out of nowhere, that he was the one in charge gave me the idea that he was defensive about that for some reason. “I thought you just worked here. Antonio Mazzanti, he’s the famous Hollywood director, the genius. Everyone says so. Surely he’s the one in charge. Who are you to be running a theater?”
He looked furious, but he didn’t attack, not just yet. I could feel it coming, though. “This is my show. I pick the actors and the performances. He directs… but only when I tell him to direct.”
“And when does the show finally end? When does the last curtain fall, so you can all go home?”
Preston—and it was definitely Preston now, his face scarred, pitted and not so strikingly handsome in general, his fedora and suit ratty instead of finely tailored, more Sears catalog than Rodeo Drive—took a long, glowing pull on his cigar. This lit up the room a bit, like a temporarily flaring candle, and I saw in more detail the emaciated, dirt-covered forms of the actresses who held me, their arms and legs like sticks, their faces sunken and cadaverous, as if he’d worked them to the bone in their afterlife.
I held back a scream, only because of long practice and experience.
“The show never ends,” Preston answered at last. “The show must go on.”
“Forever? Nothing lasts forever, Stanley.”
That triggered him. He glared with sudden fury, casting fiery light and twisting shadows all around.
“I was old when death came for me,” he said. “I knew it was coming. I had time to prepare. To plan. When I died, I did not wish to go to heaven or hell. I wished only to go to the movies, forever.”
“You died of hypothermia in the middle of the parking lot watching Pocketful of Aces on the big screen.”
He smiled. “My favorite film. We act it out again and again, Adaire and I, and the others. Adaire is headstrong. It’s fortunate we have a director capable of wrangling her. Like all beautiful and talented women, she is difficult, but worth it, for the sake of the picture. But things have grown busier lately. Our audience is growing. I’ll be expanding our li
ttle troupe.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “Expanding it how?”
“I’d like a new girl. These are so… used up.” He gestured at Portia and Grace. “I don’t need another grand, volatile beauty like Adaire, either. One of those is enough for any ensemble. I need a supporting actress, a dull plain-Jane type.” He looked me over. “Like you.”
The actress ghosts stirred and hissed like serpents, their bony grasps on me growing more aggressive and clawlike.
“Not her,” one said.
“She’s nothing,” the other rasped.
“Uh, no, thanks,” I said. “I don’t think your lady friends are happy with that idea, either.”
“Actresses are jealous sorts. An actress will never welcome the new girl, because it makes her the old girl. I’m also thinking of adding a child to the troupe, for greater variety. Have you seen the little blonde one running around the theater of late? So spirited. So pretty. I could make her a star.”
This brought more angry hisses from the rotten actresses. Preston smiled, basking in their suffering like it warmed him.
My guts, already roiling in a storm of fear, turned ice-cold at what he said. He wasn’t just talking about killing me and forcing me to play in his theater of souls. He wanted Daisy, too. And no doubt more to follow, if he wasn’t removed from this place. It seemed that Ruby, as bad as she was, wasn’t even the biggest threat to the family here.
“Leave her alone,” I said, my voice so cold I might have already been a member of his undead troupe.
“Did that touch a nerve?” He smiled. “Good. We can use that. Bring all your passion to your performance. We need refreshing. My girls are so drained and have so little left to offer. They can barely perform even the smallest roles anymore. And they’ve gone so ugly over the years.”
The actresses snapped and hissed, but at least loosened their grip on me in their fury at his taunting and insults, which seemed to be a constant part of their relationship. Silk scarves had coiled over their mouths, preventing them from speaking. They were prisoners here, as much as I was.
“I refuse,” I said.
“As did these two,” Preston replied. “But I can be very persuasive.”
The silk around my neck constricted.
The scarves binding me, as well as Portia and Grace, all originated under the sleeves of his worn-down suit coat. He had us leashed like dogs.
I looked up toward the small door above, cloaked in darkness now. Maybe Antonio Mazzanti was keeping Jacob and Stacey busy, because they sure weren’t showing up to rescue me. Or maybe they were outside the door, unable to open it, and Preston’s control of this little reality down here was so absolute that he could block out everything from the outside world, creating his own little bubble where he was a king, or even a petty would-be god, insisting that all things bend to his will.
He was powering this little paranormal fiefdom with the ghosts of the murdered actresses. And now that people were coming to his drive-in again, he was planning to murder more, increasing his power, and presumably the scale of productions he could mount. They might become more than faint glimmers on the big screen late at night.
He had to be stopped.
The silk tightened again.
“Wait,” I said, because that’s certainly one thing you want to communicate when someone is preparing to murder you. Every precious second becomes another steppingstone toward possible survival. “Preston, I thought your favorite movie was The Heart of Man. Antonio Mazzanti’s masterpiece? You played it in your projector until it was almost falling apart. The film’s probably already broken out there tonight.”
I was fishing, but I sensed some sort of conflict between the ghosts of Preston and Mazzanti, as if Preston felt the need to prove himself against the famous director. Also, he’d surely watched Heart of Man to death for one reason or other.
My fishing hook must have caught on something, because Preston’s ghost glowed a fiery red, and anger twisted his features. His pockmarks expanded to deep canyons and holes in his flesh, exposing him to the bone, exaggerations of what they’d been in life.
“He is nothing!” Preston shouted. The dead actresses gasped and pulled away from me toward the walls of the little half-underground room, as if worried they’d be caught in his wrath. Portia’s gasp was quite familiar to me after I’d heard it dozens of times in The Body in the Basement.
“I thought he was brilliant,” I said. “He was a genius, and you were just a failed actor, who became the owner of a failed theater. Your marriage sounds like a failure, too—you ended up living in the screen tower, while your wife stayed in the farmhouse. Is there anything in life at which you didn’t fail?”
Preston barely looked human anymore; he was smoldering, his face pure hatred.
“He was no genius,” Preston said. “I watched it again and again, searching for the genius, and it wasn’t there. He’s a charlatan. She is the true talent, and that’s why he wanted her for his own. He had no right to take her from me. And what I could have been—if only I hadn’t been trapped here—”
“You were never trapped,” I said. “You were just a coward.”
He glowered at me. The actresses huddled against the walls, making themselves as small as possible. I was trying to work my hands down toward my utility belt, but the silk still bound them in place.
Then the red glow receded, and Preston shifted back into Chance Chadwick form—cool, calm, collected, the standard character type played by Chadwick, commanding every situation with a combination of street smarts, fast talk, and charming of any relevant ladies.
“You think you’re a real smart cookie,” he said, in Chadwick’s voice. “Truth is, your head’s full of nothing but crumbs. I got genius inside of me, too. Life dealt me a bum hand, but death’s been good to me. You’ll see. Sit back and watch the show, plain Jane.”
He turned the ancient projector toward me, away from the closed porthole through which it once projected movies onto the screen outside.
The ancient reels turned slowly, rattling. No film had been loaded into the projector, but that didn’t seem to matter to him.
The projector lens glowed, not a bright white light, but a deep infernal red, the hue of Preston’s cigar, like the eye of a demonic beast, staring into me.
Pointed directly at my face, the red light burned into my eyes. Closing my eyelids didn’t help much at all.
The hellish light filled my skull… and then the movie began.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The movie was black and white, and it unfolded all around me like a dream.
A young Stanley Preston stood at the front window of the farmhouse’s front bedroom, in its full posh Hollywood Regency glory, sparkling and glittering. The window looked out onto the section of roof where he would one day put a bench and a drive-in speaker. Cows and goats roamed where the parking lot and screen tower would be.
“Life had knocked me down a few times, but I had moxie,” his voice narrated, from somewhere inside my head, an arrangement I disliked immediately and immensely. “I had visions for the future, but someone stood in my way.”
The young Preston left his bedroom and walked down the hall, past his stepkids’ rooms, to the partially ajar door at the back of the house. The voices of his wife and small stepchildren rose from the kitchen below; he ignored them.
Smoking a cigar, he peered into the bedroom with its rough-hewn but solid furniture and the narrow iron frame bed where his mother-in-law slept.
“She was stuck in the old ways, while I was getting a jump on the future. Maybe I got cheated of my chances as an actor, but now I’d make the world’s greatest theater, and I’d be a big shot in a whole new way. If only I could make her understand. But I couldn’t. She was the enemy.
“I hatched a plan, but I wasn’t sure if I had the stones to carry it out. She was sick already, bad sick, but she could have hung on a few more weeks, months, who knows? All I knew was, if I wanted my theater open by s
ummer, I needed her dead by January. I waited until the day after Christmas, out of consideration for my wife. No reason she should lose her mother just before Christmas. That would toss a real gloomer on the whole holiday.”
The young Preston stood trembling in the doorway, plainly consumed by fear, puffing his cigar in a fast, nervous way.
“I didn’t think I could. But then I remembered—I’m an actor. I don’t have to be brave. I just have to pretend. Play a character with nerves of steel, nerves I didn’t have.”
As I watched, young Preston morphed into Chance Chadwick, confident and fearless, a sardonic look in his eyes, like he was above everything around him.
“I thought of Ramblin’ Jim Scarsdale from Pocketful of Aces, the gambler so confident he could walk through a viper pit of crime bosses and crooks, double-crossing them all without breaking a sweat, and wisecracking along the way to really let you know he was in charge. Chance Chadwick, there was a man’s man. And on his arm—the world’s greatest beauty and talent, my old flame, Adaire Fontaine, playing Beretta Wagner, the moll who falls for him. Playing it beautifully, like she did everything. I could see myself as Chance Chadwick. I’d always been a big fan.”
In his Chance Chadwick guise, the young Preston stepped into the room where Ruby slept.
“When she woke up coughing in the middle of the night, and first thing in the morning, she needed that medicine.” While his voice spoke in my head, he opened the drawer in her nightstand and removed the nebulizer used to pump medicine to her lungs. Then he took the walking cane from beside her bed.
He hid the nebulizer in her closet, then shut the closet door and hung the cane on the doorknob.
Then he retreated to the doorway, checked his watch, and casually puffed his cigar, watching.
Ruby stirred, gagging, sounding like her lungs were brimming with fluid. Hacking and wheezing, she reached for her nightstand drawer and opened it.
Preston, as Chadwick, watched with a look of wry humor as she rummaged desperately through the medicine bottles for the nebulizer that wasn’t there.
