by JL Bryan
He hobbled over to her, no spring chicken himself, and looked down at her.
She died gazing up at Stan Preston in helpless horror, just as her mother had.
“I closed the drive-in after that,” he said. “It was nearly dead, anyway. The crowds had stopped coming. I put my special movies away, since there was no one left to watch them.” He dropped the reels into the black coffin stored on the third floor of the screen tower and nailed the lid shut.
Then he stood in the parking lot again. In a rapid time-lapse, he aged before my eyes while weeds grew up through the drive-in blacktop, paint peeled, and the surrounding trees grew taller and taller, walling the place in ever more completely.
A thin, feeble, stooped version of Stanley Preston stood alone, watching Pocketful of Aces, wearing a moth-nibbled suit and fedora that had been out of fashion for decades. It wasn’t nearly enough to protect against the freezing night. Snow fell softly, piling up on the empty parking lot, collecting on the brim of his hat, while Preston spent the last moments of his life, by choice, completely absorbed in the movies.
Soft piano music arose, as though Preston’s death were the truly tragic scene of the whole piece.
Then the scene faded to black.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
It was almost a relief to find myself back on the dirt floor of the projection house. The projector was off, but an unpleasant afterimage of its infernal glow suffused the inside of my head.
Preston watched me through the burning red end of his cigar.
“Was that… supposed to make me sympathetic to you somehow?” I asked.
“You see the struggles I’ve had,” he replied. “That’s just the backstory. Now you’ll be part of my next act.”
Someone pounded at the small door in the darkness overhead. Hopefully, one of my friends.
“Stacey?” I started toward the door, but of course the silk bindings held me in place.
“You won’t be leaving that way, plain Jane.” Preston pulled tight on the scarves.
“Okay,” I whispered, because he was making it harder to breathe. “How about this way?”
Then I charged right at him.
His dead eyes widened in surprise.
The scarves binding me weren’t actually real objects, of course. They were symbolic projections from his psyche, focusing his use of psychokinetic energy.
However, he didn’t necessarily know that, and so they would behave like scarves.
Pulling away from him, trying to reach the door, meant drawing them taut and tighter around me.
Running toward him, on the other hand, made them go slack.
Preston gave me a startled look and flickered aside.
I bolted past him, raised one of the plates covering the projector portholes at the front, and screamed “Jacob! Stacey!” at the top of my lungs.
“Ellie!” Stacey dashed into view from around the corner. “Are you okay down there? What happened? We can’t get the door open. Could be psychokinetically sealed. Jacob went to go look for a crowbar or something—”
“The cane!” I shouted. “The cane!”
She looked at me quizzically, but before I could say more, Preston regained mastery of his scarves and of the situation generally. The scarves snapped me back and away from the porthole, ripping me off my feet and smacking me bodily into the dirty brick floor. Again.
“Don’t try to be cute, plain Jane,” Preston said, standing over me. “I’m afraid ‘cute’ just isn’t believable, coming from you.”
“Ugh,” I said, not so much in response to him, but because I’d realized that “The cane! The cane!” was exactly what Adaire Fontaine’s character had exclaimed when the floodwater swept across the sugarcane fields, drowning the crop and bankrupting her family. I hoped Stacey hadn’t misunderstood and thought I was making a Legend of the South reference, perhaps signaling her to go spool that movie again.
“Look who’s talking about not being cute. With your hideous face.” I stood and started for the portholes again, but he pulled the scarves tight. We’d pretty well switched places. I stood in his usual spot by the projector and portholes, and he stood closer to the door where I’d crashed in. After forcing me to watch his slanted and self-serving biopic, he was now blocking the only way out.
“I am more than my ugly face,” he said.
“Good. Glad you’re feeling less insecure these days.” I moved toward him, which again slackened my bonds a little. I reached into my jacket and brought out the bulky item I’d stashed there.
“I guess this was considered portable in your day.” I held up his Super 8 camera and looked at him through the viewfinder. “You remember this, I’m sure. You must be very attached to it. You used it to stalk Portia Reynolds, and to record her death. And the death of Grace LeRoux. Why did you record their deaths?”
“It… just seemed like the right thing to do. The right way to capture them at the moment of death. I thought, if I could capture that, perhaps I’d see something deep and true, and I’d have it on film.”
“They say certain cultures won’t let you take pictures of them, because pictures steal a piece of your soul,” I told him. “My boss mentioned it. I tried to learn more, but there’s not much out there. Yet this myth persists, that somewhere people believe photographs can take your spirit. I can’t find an example of any sort of traditional culture that actually believes it. So why does this story persist so strongly? At first, I thought maybe it was a way of looking down on people who don’t understand technology. You know, look at those simple primitive people, they don’t know anything.
“Then I realized something else—you know who believes that myth? We do. You and I, Stanley. The modern people, the picture-takers. We’re the ones who believe it, and we’re just projecting our belief on nameless, non-specific primitive people. We put pictures of people we care about or admire up in our homes, as a form of remembrance or reverence. We make sure to take pictures of our most significant moments, to enshrine them as permanent images.
“And you, Stanley, you believe it more than most… the movies, the images, they’re more sacred to you than real life. They always were.” I started recording him with his own stalker/murder camera. “If each picture takes even a small sliver of your soul, and this camera takes eighteen pictures per second for three minutes… well, that gets to be quite a lot of slivers, Stanley. Thirty-six hundred frames on a spool.”
He seemed puzzled as I advanced on him, recording.
But he was fading, though it was almost too subtle to see, as though the camera were only slicing away a tissue-thin layer at a time. He wasn’t going fast enough.
“Your tank must be getting low by now, Stanley,” I said, easing closer. “You’ve fed on poor Portia and Grace down to the bone. I know how this works. Ghosts only have so much energy. You’ve figured out you need to feed on the living. But we’re not going to allow that. Portia, Grace, do you have anything to say to Stanley in his new, weakened state?”
The two emaciated actresses flanked him, their silken bonds slack while he focused on me. They seemed suddenly aware of just how slack their bonds had gone.
They leaped on him from both sides, biting and clawing, tearing into him like starving cannibals.
I kept recording, hoping his murder camera would continue to drain him. It had been a longshot, inspired by my conversation with Calvin, by my research into sympathetic magic, but it seemed to help a little. Perhaps one really could capture a soul with a camera, if the soul was camera-obsessed enough.
Stanley staged a comeback, angrily flinging the actresses to either side, slamming their bony bodies into the muddy brick walls. The scarves coiled and tightened around them again, and even more scarves slithered out like he had a whole nest of them up the sleeves of his suit coat. These wrapped around and around the actresses, binding them more tightly than ever.
He had reasserted control over them, but not without a cost to himself. He was panting, tired, flickering as I c
ontinued to film him.
“Stop that!” he snapped at me, realizing that I was indeed draining him somehow. He smacked the camera from my hand and shoved me back against the wall. His face loomed close, like he meant to bite me.
Then Stacey appeared again at the porthole.
“I got it, Ellie!” she shouted. “What do I do with it?”
“Give it to me.” I reached out a hand and accepted Ruby’s cane as Stacey passed it through the porthole. It was solid, smooth, polished. Heavy.
I didn’t have a lot of room to swing, but I brought the curved head down with as much force as I could summon.
It smashed into the side of the old projector. There was an audible crack. Several corroded components tumbled loose and fell to the floor.
“What?” Preston drew back, looking with plain horror at what I’d done. “You can’t—”
I swung the cane sideways, shattering the projector’s lens. I hit the antique machine again and again.
“You can’t!”
“Your sob story was a big help.” I kept beating the projector, bashing it and breaking it with the cane. “I thought you might have murdered your mother-in-law. But that’s not exactly right. She died from her illness. And when you eventually did become a murderer, she began haunting you. She didn’t want you living in her house with her daughter anymore. She preferred you living out at the screen tower.
“You may have some power over Portia, and Grace, and Antonio Mazzanti, because you killed them all with your hands. Ghosts can work that way sometimes, unfortunately. The trauma of death, the connection that’s created in that moment, can go on and on. It’s certainly not fair to the victim.
“But you didn’t kill Ruby, so you can’t control her. You can’t even stop her from haunting the parking lot… running off the customers you’re so desperate to prey on. She wants the drive-in to stay closed, because she knows re-opening will make you stronger and more powerful.”
With a final lunge, I rammed the head of the cane into the side of the projector hard enough to knock it loose from its support pedestal. It toppled over and smashed into the floor, its metallic mass striking the brick with an echoing boom.
Preston let out a pained howl at the projector’s destruction.
In the drive-in’s earliest years, he’d worked down here in the dark, constantly changing reels, making sure the audience had a smooth, unbroken movie experience. Here, he’d been at the center of the process, creating the experience for the moviegoers by hand. No wonder it had been the place most heavily imbued with his psychic energy, the place his ghost had chosen for its lair.
He charged me, but the actresses were digging into him again with their sharp, broken nails and their biting teeth, slowing him down.
I raised the cane, then slammed the end of it into the ground. Once, twice, three times.
Preston hesitated… then made a gasping, gurgling sound and dropped to his knees.
Ruby stood behind him, her hand buried in his back, treating him to the experience of her advanced disease, as she’d done for me. Now I understood, though, that she was driving customers away from the drive-in to protect them from her son-in-law and his predatory plans, like those he had for Daisy.
With the Super 8, I resumed filming him. He was much diminished when the camera reached the end of its spool. He looked like one of his captive actresses, cadaverous and weak, shivering on the floor as they stood over him. The Super 8 camera was ice cold in my fingers.
Another figure arrived, and I recognized her from her pictures. Nancy, his wife, once a hard-partying young widow with small children and a big farm. She wore a golden taffeta cocktail dress, her hair recently permed, a girl of the 1950s out for a good time. She’d died in her early seventies, but apparently chose not to wear that form as a ghost. She looked healthy and alive, hardly a ghost at all.
“Stanley,” she said.
Preston looked up from the floor, then lurched forward to kneel at her feet.
“My love,” he moaned.
“No,” Nancy said. “Your love was for yourself, and your world of illusions, your desire to be a star. Perhaps you loved her—the woman whose posters you hung everywhere—but only because she reminded you of your time on the stage, the foolish time in your youth when you believed you would be famous, that the world would know your name.
“In life, I saw you through a glass darkly, and myself, too. We were both chasing glamour. Illusions. But now I see clearly. You only wanted to use me. I know what happened with you and my mother, how you watched her die. Do you know why you failed as an actor, Stanley?”
“Because I didn’t have the chops,” he gasped.
“You lack heart, Stanley. Heart and soul. You had nothing to bring to the stage, no truth to express through performance. You’re empty, Stanley. Truth is, there’s almost nothing to you at all.”
He gaped at her. And indeed, he’d been reduced to nearly nothing, a faint apparition, exposed as what his wife of more than forty years knew he truly was—a low, miserable thing with almost no soul at all.
Then he was gone.
I looked among the apparitions there, four women Preston had either killed outright, or to whose deaths he’d significantly contributed.
I felt like I should say something to them, but before I could think of anything, a loud crack like a gunshot made me jump. The dead didn’t respond, not jumpy at all. Show-offs.
The half-door ripped away from its hinges as Jacob finally succeeded in prying it open. He flung the door away, put aside a hammer and crowbar, and reached out a hand for me. The glow of the film projector from the concession stand could have been a shaft of sunlight falling into that dark place. I was glad to see it, but I hesitated.
Nancy and her mother Ruby had already gone, their business concluded, without a word to me. I found this a touch rude, considering Ruby had literally thrown a porch roof at me. An apology would have been nice, but at least she didn’t attack me this time. I had to settle for what I could get.
Portia Reynolds and Grace LeRoux remained down there, shivering and looking lost, as if seeing sunlight for the first time after years in a dungeon.
“You can take off the scarves,” I told them. They did, sliding the silks from around their necks and arms, then dropping them to the dirt-covered floor, where they turned into nothing at all.
“That’s the way out.” I pointed. “After you, Portia and Grace.” Hopefully, adding their names would help.
Jacob, probably seeing all of this clearly, moved aside from the doorway, leaving their pathway to the open air wide open.
Sharing an uncertain look, they started toward the open door together.
They faded before they reached it, the open door signifying their chance to move on, to leave this world for the other side.
Unlike them, I had to climb the loose rungs in the wall, so I accepted Jacob’s hand to get me up through the weird door and back on solid ground.
I stood, brushing off dirt.
“Ellie!” Stacey started to reach out and hug me, then realized I was coated in floor filth and switched to sympathetically patting my back instead. “I was so afraid for you.”
“Thanks for the getting the cane.” I looked around. “What happened to Mazzanti and Adaire?”
“We aren’t a hundred percent sure about that, because Mazzanti disappeared by the time I ran down here to check on Jacob. But since Heart of Man is playing on the big screen… and the thirty-five-mil was switched off when I left… I’m guessing we can find the ghost of Mazzanti up in the projection booth, playing his old hits.”
I looked from the screen tower, where there was some odd scene involving a goat in a museum and a woman strumming a harp, over to the concession stand, where the square of the projected movie glowed on the glass window upstairs.
I sighed. “We’d better go deal with him.”
“We’ve got your back,” Stacey said. “Let’s do it.”
I dropped the abnormally cold S
uper 8 camera into a ghost trap and sealed it. Then, reluctantly, having already taken repeated full-body poundings, I started toward the concession stand to see about the other murderer haunting this theater.
Chapter Thirty
“I’m going in first,” Jacob said, opening the employees-only door to the stairwell.
“You don’t have to be a macho man,” Stacey told him. “This isn’t a Village People concert.”
“I’m the lead investigator, I go first,” I said, but they both argued against that immediately.
“You’re totally battered, Ellie,” Stacy said. “You should stay down here and drink a slushie. Maybe hold it against your bruises.”
“I’m going first because I’m the psychic,” Jacob said.
“And I’m second. Let’s go.” Stacey shoved him into the stairwell, ending the argument.
Reluctantly, I went up last, my flashlight drawn and ready.
Jacob stood at the closed door to the projection booth on the second floor, listening. After a moment, he nodded and opened it.
A shadowy figure stood by the projector, its back to us, facing the big screen as if watching The Heart of Man out on the big screen. The audio was playing in the room, too, but it was in Italian and so didn’t clarify the plot for me.
My eyes weren’t on the movie, anyway.
The figure turned to face us, pale and ghostly, her apparition as delicate as woven threads of ice.
She didn’t wear her Pocketful of Aces dress anymore, but a long traveling coat, gloves, and a striped head scarf and oversized sunglasses, like she hoped to travel anonymously.
She removed the sunglasses, taking us in with the large gray eyes that had entranced so many audiences from so many screens.
“Hoooooly cow, it really is Adaire Fontaine!” Stacey said. “Oh, my gosh. I am such a big fan, seriously. All your movies, so great. Amazing performances. You got robbed on that Oscar. I wish you hadn’t died so young, though.”
