It hits the projection booth door at full speed. The door buckles and flies aside. The blur spins off. Andy leaps in.
Mikey sits beside the projector, drooling and sobbing. Andy goes to look out at the screen, on which he sees a havoc of no meaning and crying people all dying of old age. He turns back and sees the power button on the projector. He reaches for it.
But as he does the music changes. He looks back and sees the words “The End” have appeared on the screen. And as is the way with old movies, they dissolve into blackness almost instantly. The lights come on automatically.
Andy stands there with his finger above the button.
* * *
The foyer turned out to be full of the corpses of very old people. Their paperwork said they were all a couple of decades younger than they looked. They had all died of old age. One of them was named Robert De Haviland, and he was dead like all the rest. The staff, apart from Andy, were suffering from the early onset of various geriatric conditions. None of them ever recovered. They spent the rest of their lives in institutions.
It was left to Andy to explain, and he could not. He didn’t try. In the end he wasn’t arrested for anything and the cinema chain couldn’t dismiss him. Many explanations were offered. Andy was often asked, but he never answered, and he never volunteered any thoughts on the subject. He remained a manager for forty years. He never married. He never had children. He lived alone. He retired when he was forced to. There was no mention of the inexplicable at his retirement dinner, where he was presented with a long service certificate and a clock. He stared at the clock as if insulted and made no speech. He went home. The world changed around him. In later years, as Canadian refugees started to arrive in Britain, he grew strangely angry, but he took it out on himself. Mostly.
Eventually, being part of a mystery was the only thing left to him, and he did start to talk, to anyone who wanted to interview him. He came up with all sorts of elaborate theories. He made a plot out of what had happened. He blamed people. He got to appear at conferences and have boxes of books sent to his door. It didn’t matter. He hated that it didn’t matter.
He started to forget who he was and how things worked. He tried to hide it. Neighbors noticed. Health visitors noticed. Every now and then he tried to mention to people that he knew the day he was going to die. Nobody paid much attention. One little girl wrote it down.
One day he was sitting on his own sofa listening to someone explain something that was making him angry. Then he was having breakfast somewhere that was not his home. He angrily asked how to get out of there. Nobody seemed to want to tell him. But it all turned out to be okay. He grew steadily more sure that today he’d be going home. And today. And today. And today.
Eventually he forgot what he’d always known: that he was going to die.
He started living his life again, in bits and pieces, all out of order. It all seemed like now to him. But there were some times when people were insisting to him that this was now and the other times were not, and some times when nobody was insisting anything.
And then there was one afternoon when it was the Gold matinee again, and he had to open the doors to let his staff in. The terrible movie played. The noise rose up. The blurs came. He went into the house of his childhood. But this time it was different, because his mum and dad were waiting.
THE ONE WE TELL BAD CHILDREN
Laird Barron
America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.
—WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS, poet
Two millennia into its decline, the empire spreads west like a bloodstain. The wilderness gives naught a whit for the depredations of callow men—it sees them coming, and grins.
—W. S. BURROWS, beggar
Beware Ardor of the Damned, for even as you watch it, it watches you.
—ANONYMOUS CRITIC
AT DUSK, someone knocked on the cottage door. A single leaden thump.
The nine of us (me and my eight younger siblings) flinched where we gathered at the table with our bowls of gruel and musty root and tuber sides. I’d lowered the oak bar before ladling supper, as one does, and shuttered the small windows tight. Weasels and bloodsucking bats infested these woods. The cottage walls were thick-hewn logs; the ceiling was made of timber, slate, and moss. Dirt was packed beneath our bare feet. We were proofed against beasts and also beastly men in that snug wilderness holdfast.
Fear will creep through any seam or notch, regardless.
The knock was particularly disquieting, as our home lay in the hinterlands. Visitors were rare and unwelcome. We didn’t have any neighbors unless you counted squirrels; rabbits; and the bones of pets, a dear deceased uncle, and possibly an ambitious census taker or two. Mom and Dad enjoyed their privacy.
Three days ago, our parents had embarked on their annual trek to the city (with Dan the mule lugging a cartload of herbs, pelts, and carved madrone staves for trade at the market), leaving me and my wee brothers and sisters to fend for ourselves as best we could. They promised to be home within a week, depending on how it went. Dad took his trusty flintlock rifle. Mom carried an antique blunderbuss. However, we kids weren’t defenseless. Great-Granddad’s boar spear leaned in the corner, in case.
Between this rib and this rib. Dad once demonstrated the proper thrusting technique with a glint in his eye that reflected the shine of the spearhead, dusky as wine, and pitted and cold. See, this crossbar keeps the blade from sliding too deep. This groove channels the blood so you can wrench the blade free and have another go. Lean into it, son, hips and back. The animal’s life will travel along the haft and into you with a killing stroke. You’ll feel the last flutter of its heart.
In better days, our loyal hounds would’ve guarded the entrance like two heads of Cerberus. Fluffy lived a long life, but he died three years ago, as did his littermate Atticus the very next winter. After they trotted off to play fetch with Hades, Dad didn’t get around to replacing them. Lean times, lean times. Herbs, pelts, and madrone staves weren’t selling fast enough to feed eleven mouths and counting.
The kids stared fearfully at the door, then turned their grubby, earnest faces to me. Dad himself often exhorted all concerned to memorize a critical rule, Never ever answer the door after sundown.
Gods save me, I couldn’t reveal to the innocents that I’d grimly anticipated the knock for hours. It was a warning of sorts; a signal to me alone. I kept calm and played the role of an attentive big brother (nearing fifteen winters, which made me eldest by four) who’d not permit any harm to befall my charges no matter the inducement.
“This is the day we die,” Little Johnny said; a coincidence or precognition. Our brothers and sisters echoed those words in a chorus, except for Lazy Eye Larry, who glared at his emptied bowl (and, simultaneously, the door).
“I will definitely murder the lot of you if you break into song,” I said to ease the tension.
“Is it a wolf?” Salamanca said. Allegedly named for the night she was conceived in the Midnight Grotto while Mom and Dad visited on a vacation. Resources were plentiful (such as friends willing to babysit) before the fourth or fifth child.
“No, Sally,” I said.
“Ms. Petals! What about Ms. Petals?”
“Not to worry, she’s safe.” Ms. Petals, our cow, was locked away with the chickens and geese. The shed’s walls were almost as thick as the cottage’s.
“Is it a bandit?” Marlon said. “I bet it’s a bandit. Ten bandits.”
“Wolves don’t knock, you idiot,” Theodora said to Salamanca.
“Neither do bandits, Teddy,” Constantine said. “A bandit would kick in the door and have our guts.”
“No,” Flynn said. “Bandits would burn the house and stab us when we ran outside. That’s how we did it in the old days.” He’d come into the world
as the last of triplets (behind Theodora and Larry); caul over his head, an ominous alignment of stars, the whole bit. While performing mind-numbing drudgery around the homestead, he regaled us with tales of a previous life wherein civilization fell into ruin and he’d roamed a postapocalyptic landscape accompanied by a vicious clockwork dog. He and the dog spent their days looting and fighting, on the run from the servitors of some black god. We humored him. It seemed best.
“I wanna be a bandit,” Marlon said under his breath, but loudly.
Doug said nothing. Like Mom, he preferred his own counsel.
I didn’t voice the obvious fact—bandits were too smart to go abroad in these woods after dark. At any rate, the knock wasn’t repeated.
“Seconds, anyone? Then we’ll have a show.”
The kids went for more tubers. They’d have gone for a second helping of dirt.
Friday was traditionally Moving Pictures Night. In our parents’ absence, the youngsters expected a magick lanthorn story. I’d spin the lanthorn to project colored lights upon a screen and lackadaisically perform a rote retelling (my impressions were awful at best, despite Mom’s occasional tutelage) of Grendel’s valiant slaughter of Beowulf and his merry men, or how Hercules met his fate at the knives of his wife and children, or the comedic demise of the Greek commandos when the Trojans (instead of lugging it home) set fire to the giant wooden horse the invaders left on the beach. Entertaining as these standbys might be, I had something far more exciting in mind.
I put on a happy face while Fluffy and Atticus curled up in the corner of my mind, growling and grumbling their spectral discontent.
* * *
Before disappearing into the hinterlands to lie low (and raise a brood of children), Mom was an actress trained by the Royal Academy of Performing Arts. Theater and cinema ran in the family blood—her great-grandmother starred for Muybridge the Crazed Photographer as a model in his groundbreaking stop-motion sequences that segued into the first moving pictures.
Mom rode the whole starlet arc further. She shared a stage with Clint Eastwood and danced with Gregory Hines at the court of King Dick. She’d even headlined a major film production, called Marion’s Regard, an “erotic” critique of King Dick’s life and rule. Therein lay the seeds of her downfall. Let us say the king was eminently displeased to be the subject of profane mockery. My parents made themselves scarce rather than entertain a date with the royal headsman.
The padlocked trunk at the foot of their bed contained several clothbound books: an abridged encyclopedia of flora and fauna, the unabridged plays of Marlowe and Webber, and a two-volume treasury of ancient mythology, from which she’d taught us to read and write. The trunk also held her favorite dresses and hats she’d retrieved upon expeditiously vacating the capital so long ago. She seldom donned any of her costumes; not even the hats during the holidays, when hat wearing is practically mandatory.
Dad, as a beardless youth, soldiered in the king’s army and received a dire, nonspecific injury while campaigning against the hostile western realms. He’d been remanded into the care of a physician who also knew something of stagecraft and motion pictures. The physician befriended my father and after the war, taught him to operate magick lanthorns and projectors.
The aforementioned magick lanthorn hung from the cottage center beam, erstwhile property of the kindly physician. Tonight, my interest lay with Dad’s projector stored under a bearskin next to Mom’s ironbound trunk. This projector was modest of size and design, and utterly utilitarian compared (so I’d been told) to the baroque monstrosities housed at the Shakespeare Theatre (those were carved from the skulls of elephants and saltwater crocodiles and prodigious men).
Dad cranked it up every Friday night, certain holidays, or when he got drunker and more sentimental than usual, and screened a film from his collection squirreled away in a recess carved into the cottage wall. He’d sealed the niche with a hefty stone I’d only recently grown strong enough to lift. Family favorites tended toward dramatic reenactments of historical events: Starry Night in Hades; Bronson the Killer; Once Upon a Time in the West Part III; Night of the Psychopomp; Red Fang; and Birth of an Empire.
He’d executed the principal photography on Mom’s (and his) last film, Marion’s Regard. A set of the reels from this feature was wrapped in sealskin and bound with a complicated knot. Dad referred to it as the Death Knot because he would instantly spot if anybody messed with his handiwork and take precipitous action. We were all too young to view anything so violent and lewd.
Even I, the eldest?
Especially you! Dad said, slamming his fists on the table.
In any event, prohibitions against screening Marion’s Regard were effectively redundant, since the projector itself was off-limits on pain of a thrashing. His admonitions notwithstanding, I’d paid close attention on Moving Pictures Night and warranted I could successfully operate the projector without undue difficulty.
The kids begged me to break the rules, since life was short and bandits might burst in at any moment. They tugged at my sleeves and entreated me with the wily skills of hardened street urchins. Marlon reasoned that surely, if we exercised caution, our parents would be none the wiser. As I feigned a wavering countenance, Theodora chimed in with her own assessment in regard to the risk of my probable punishment: I hauled enough water and chopped enough wood to indemnify myself against an overly severe beating.
He’s worth two mules was Dad’s highest compliment of my contributions around the homestead. He wasn’t free with compliments, sentimentality, or compassion.
Once, in a moment of reckless abandon, I asked Mom if Dad’s military service had embittered him. She was peeling potatoes when I blurted my query. Her flat expression didn’t change, although her peeling tempo increased dramatically. She said, Your father is more temperate than when we first married.
I shuddered to think.
Before his agonizing death, Mom’s brother, Lucio, had come to live with us. Uncle Lucio, a veteran of taproom anti-royalist pontification, complained that an unfortunate by-product of the romanticizing of the Westward Expansion was that numerous execrable plays were written to commemorate the slaughter. Worse, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood (who’d served as imperial foot soldiers in the ebbing years of the war effort) rose to fame for assuming lead roles in the productions.
Dad, quite proud of his own participation in the wars, and also a huge admirer of the actors, rolled his eyes in response to Lucio’s frequent monologues. Only Mom’s presence kept the men from coming to blows. One afternoon, while gathering wood, Uncle Lucio surprised a black bear and got mauled for his troubles. He expired after much suffering on a pallet near the hearth. Happily ever after: Dad’s jolly mood lasted a solid fortnight.
In the here and now, I cleared my throat and pretended to arrive at a weighty decision.
“Ask and ye shall receive.” I uttered a full-throated mwahahaha!
The children scattered in mock terror and made themselves comfortable on their straw mats, waiting with scarcely restrained eagerness. They’d apparently banished thoughts of nightwalkers and bandits. Even Doug and Larry were intently focused on the coming attractions.
“What are we watching?” Theodora said.
“Tonight, is the night of…Ardor of the Damned,” I said with dramatic emphasis. The children gasped. This sounded suspiciously adult and therefore forbidden. They gasped louder when I reached under my pillow (hell of a place to stash contraband, but there were limited hidey-holes in cramped quarters) and produced film reels wrapped in a hide. The hide was matted in dirt and gore. It reeked of musk, dead roots, and animal sickness. Maggots dripped from the folds of the hide as I extracted the reels, which were in comparatively pristine condition.
Point of fact: my parents didn’t own a copy of this exceedingly rare work. One might then inquire how it had fallen into my clutches. A fair question that will have to
wait. Suffice to say, agents of Fate are ever prowling, even in the wilderness.
I’d read an uneasy description of Ardor of the Damned in dad’s black guide (a manual he stashed with a cob pipe and special tobacco) to banned films. Ardor was an animated feature composed by the beloved and reviled artist K. M. Wanatabe. Wanatabe vanished after a hushed scandal at the imperial court, where he’d gone to instruct the empress’s heirs in the art of animation. Even the most diligent biographers neglected to list Ardor of the Damned in his filmography.
I stretched a beaver hide across the drying rack, flesh side up. Dad had scraped it smooth, or nearly so, with a stone blade. Veins and bruises and coagulated suet formed a constellation of subterranean stars. A satisfactory projection screen indeed. Next, I rolled the projector into position, opened a panel, and lit a diminutive lantern. Then came the reels of specially cured and coated intestine, which I painstakingly situated within their niche. A myriad of discrete, sequential images was burned into the coils of sheep gut, and by some sorcerous alchemy formed an illusion of continuous, uninterrupted motion once the machine engaged. Finally, I adjusted various widgets to my satisfaction, sealed the panel, and wound a crank. Inner gears clanked, winding a series of springs. Upon release of tension, the unwinding springs would empower the entire device. I flipped the switch. The projector’s internal mechanisms clicked and clacked. A pale ray emitted through the aperture lens and struck the screen. The ray broadened and blurred against imperfect fossil records of a mammalian life; it obscured dead flesh with the artifice of man-made light and color.
Cursive letters of the title card read: Adapted from an old, old tale we tell bad children. Permit me to attest, those responsible for this virtually unknown production were not fond of children in the slightest. Some knave also paraphrased a great philosopher: When one gazes long into the abyss, one is altered. Followed by: Youngblood is the best to sup.
Final Cuts Page 15
