Witching Hour Theatre

by Jonathan Janz

  He’d emerge from the Starlight unscathed and, he thought, with a great story to tell Nichole. Certain details would be omitted, of course, but it would still be entertaining. Maybe he could break the ice with it tomorrow night, an amusing anecdote about a horror movie fanatic who got more than he bargained for at an all-night triple bill.

  Wilson smiled uneasily.

  Now all he needed was a shot of courage. And even if he didn’t have it, he could pretend.

  Moving down the only aisle in the theater, he kept to the centermost point, eyes scanning right to left, left to right, before and after every step he took.

  So help me, he thought, if that freak’s face pokes out of the shadows I’ll stomp it into pink pulp.

  He took another step and peered down the row to his right. He swiveled his head and surveyed the row to his left.

  Nothing.

  Though he tried to suppress the memory, the long white face grew clearer and clearer in his mind’s eye. Was it just the proximity of the blank eyes and the unnatural length of the face that had frightened him, or had there been something more?

  He recalled the emotionless manner in which the man had stared even after Wilson screamed and climbed awkwardly away. Now that Larry examined it, he realized it was the lack of a reaction that was so troubling. The childhood memories he had of someone scaring him by leaping out of a hiding place or sneaking up on him to seize him from behind always ended with the frightener bunched up and quaking with laughter. Wilson was infuriated with people who tried to scare him, and, ironically, his anger seemed to fuel their mirth.

  Yet the man had shown no emotion as Larry clambered away. None at all.

  He took another step and cursed the Starlight management for locking the back door on Friday nights. Not only was it a fire hazard, it was also a damned nuisance. Had that door been open he’d already be on his way home to his apartment and his warm safe bed.

  A sibilant sound from the screen startled him. Turning, he saw Evan Treadwell staring down a long dark corridor at the veiled temptress. Wilson’s mouth worked, though no sound filtered through. The white figure, lit from behind by a spectral glow, beckoned to Evan Treadwell, yet it was not the woman in the veil that frightened Larry.

  What frightened him was the tall gaunt figure which stood atop the exit tunnel, his wraithlike body painted black by the dark images spewing out of the projector. The dark figure extended a cadaverous arm and pointed at him.

  In terror, Larry spun away and fled up the aisle.

  He glanced from side to side thinking he’d discover the corpses of those who’d sat behind him, for that was what would happen in a horror film. Yet he saw no one. The people who were there earlier had vanished. Only an occasional popcorn tub or half-drunk soda cup signified there had been other life in the theater at all that night.

  Larry cast a terrified glance over his shoulder as he neared the double doors and with a little cry discovered the man had vacated his perch. The freak could be anywhere, Wilson realized. The man could be sprinting up the aisle at this very moment.

  Wilson lunged for the double doors. Just before he hit their smooth surfaces, he worried the tall man might have somehow locked them, but they gave easily as he shoved through and stumbled into the hallway. Ignoring the stitch in his side and the burning in his chest, he hustled toward the bright glow of the lobby. The overhead lights warmed him as he slowed to a jog and glanced expectantly at the concession stand. Its signs were illuminated, yet no one stood behind the counter.

  Thinking Nichole might be on her knees restocking the shelves behind the counter, Larry strode up, threw his chest on the glass surface and peered over the edge.

  Nothing.

  It was then that he turned and beheld the steel gate, the one that stretched from floor to ceiling, the one they wheeled out and locked against the walls on each side of the foyer after the last patrons exited the theater.

  But the last patron, he fumed, was still in the bloody building.

  They’d locked him in!

  He hurried over to the gate, grasped the solid steel accordion bars, and rattled them to see if they’d give.

  They held fast.

  Dammit!

  Was it possible they’d forgotten he was still inside? Surely they hadn’t. Surely Nichole would have prevented the old ticket-taker from fastening the gate to the walls had she seen him wheeling it out.

  But what if Nichole had gotten off work early tonight?

  And what if the tall man were preparing to attack him from the darkness of the corridor behind him?

  Gasping, Wilson whirled and stared down the hallway.

  No one was there.

  He heard nothing but the muted roar of the movie.

  And something else. He screwed up his eyes and listened hard. The other sound, the one mixing with the violins screeching out the score to Veil of the White Temptress, was coming from behind him.

  Which was impossible.

  Wilson crept up the hallway toward Theater Number One, the newer half of the Starlight. It was ordinarily cordoned off during Witching Hour Theatre.

  So why did he hear voices coming from inside?

  He glanced to his left and considered bellowing through the bars to catch the attention of a passerby out in the street, yet he knew that was silly. The ticket booth and the thick glass front doors were fifty feet from where he stood, and it was pitch black outside. And it was only—he checked—4: 19 in the morning. No one would be passing by the cinema this early.

  The sounds emanating from Theater One grew louder.

  Wilson moved that way and stepped over a red velvet rope. The hallway was darker than the lobby, but there was enough light spilling into the corridor to see by. He approached the door cautiously, and letting his fingers close over the silver handle, pressed an ear to the door and listened.

  Music was playing in the theater; music, he realized, that he’d heard before. And recently.

  He yanked open the door and beheld Death Mountain playing on the screen. The movie had just begun; the girl in the tight tank top was straddling her boyfriend. Wilson stepped into the cavernous room and looked around.

  The theater was empty.

  He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Was the projectionist such a fan of the film that he was watching the wretched thing again? Were there two projectionists on duty tonight? Larry was certain one person could go from booth to booth, changing the reels at the appropriate moments, but it was probably nicer working with a partner.

  As he scanned the empty rows, a vertiginous familiarity gripped him. Longface could explode through the doors behind him at any moment. The freak was somewhere in the Starlight Cinema, and if Larry went all the way to the bottom of the aisle, he might find himself right back where he started from. Trapped in a tunnel exit by a padlocked door.

  Without knowing why, he drifted down the dark aisle anyway. It was as if the allure of the flickering images was too great to resist.

  Then, a new thought occurred to him. What if the back exit of this theater had been left unlocked? Might they have forgotten that one? It was worth investigating.

  The scene in the forest was very dark, so there was little light to see by. But he was determined now to investigate this new escape route, and he’d almost made it to the bottom of the aisle. Larry felt the floor level out under him; he strode to the exit under the screen. He pushed and though the door moved forward a bit, it swung back shut.

  Wilson swallowed. It was almost as if someone on the other side of the door had pushed back.

  Could Longface have somehow beaten him to this exit?

  Trembling, he nudged the door and though it gave just a little, it again refused to open. Frantic now, feeling that at any moment the long pale face would materialize in the air behind him, Larry slammed into the door and felt whatever had been pushing against it give way.

  The darkness of the tunnel made it difficult to see. He strained his eyes but could only make out faint shap
es, confusing shadows that swam and flowed into one another. Not even an Exit sign glowed in the stygian tunnel. Had someone disabled it?

  The theater behind him lit up. As Larry’s eyes adjusted to the new, brighter glow, he realized the first scene of Death Mountain had ended, that the boy and the girl had been decapitated.

  And in the pale illumination glaring off the screen above him, he saw what it was that had blocked the door.

  A headless body. Wilson discerned the plaid shirt and remembered the square-jawed cop from earlier. The corpse lay on its side, the gore-streaked shirt looking to Wilson like an oil rag some careless mechanic had discarded.

  Larry was dimly aware of his own heartbeat, jittering in his chest like a crazed maraca. The policeman had been beheaded. And not a half hour earlier, Wilson had been speaking with the man.

  Larry stood numbly, his mind refusing to process what he was seeing.

  Then a tide of questions assailed his mind as he stared down at the decapitated cop. Had the three boys been so angry that they’d killed this man for bringing a stop to their childish antics? How could this have happened without someone else noticing?

  What were the other shapes in the dark corridor?

  Bodies, he now saw with a violent surge of dread. Headless bodies littered the shadowy corridor. Wilson spotted the body of the girl in the blue sweater. He saw the yellow soccer shirt the boy with the spiky blond hair had worn, stained crimson now around the collar, where his head had been torn from his body.

  His stomach fluttering, Wilson identified the body of the Goth girl who’d sat in front of him. His heart ached as he tried to remember what her face had looked like. He stepped toward the poor murdered girl and felt his foot skid in some viscous substance which he knew was blood, and he looked down and realized it was everywhere, of course it was, for that’s what headless bodies did, they bled. The floor under him felt very much like the floor of any other theater after a full day of movies, the cola and the popcorn and the spilled candy gelling together in a thick gooey mess.

  Only this substance had been pumped out of ragged, jetting necks.

  Wondering faintly where the victims’ heads were, a horrible truth slammed into him, taking his breath away.

  This was no movie.

  The things below him, lying ruined in the wet darkness of the tunnel, were the bloodied remains of human beings, people he had seen, even spoken to earlier that night. Jesus, he thought. Oh my Jesus Christ.

  Sick and dazed, he receded through the door and allowed it to ease closed. He swayed a little on his feet and tried to escape the images of the bodies, the headless bodies heaped like refuse in a small theater hallway, the blood congealing around them like maple syrup.

  His eyes rose to the screen and beheld the black hound of hell protecting Damien, son of the devil, barking and snapping at Gregory Peck.

  Somehow, the projectionist had switched reels on him. But this hardly mattered. Because as he turned to stare up at the projection room, something in the front row caught his gaze.

  The heads of the bodies in the corridor had been placed in the front row of theater seats. They were lined up neatly, and their eyes were open, staring sightlessly up at the screen.

  Then Wilson was besieged by other macabre details.

  The killer had placed a small popcorn bucket on the policeman’s head like a merry yellow cap. One of the college boys had Dots crammed up his nostrils. The girl who’d worn the pink shirt had a mouth stuffed so full of popcorn that the corners of her lips were split open.

  Wilson whimpered. His mind raced. It was a twisted, pagan ritual he was witnessing, these faces staring up at the screen, seeing nothing, their arteries draining into the theater seats, the crimson fabric blackening as it absorbed the sacrificial blood.

  Larry counted twelve heads. He recognized the policeman, the older man with his neat white hair, the three boys and the couple they’d harassed, the three girls who’d sat in front of him. Tears crawled down Wilson’s trembling cheeks. He tried but failed to look away, to look at anything but the terrible staring eyes.

  The other faces weren’t as familiar. He assumed they were the other moviegoers who’d stayed for the third feature. His gaze fell on the decapitated head of the kindly old cashier.

  The cold tide of a new terror washed over him, dousing his senses. He took a step forward and studied the faces more closely, praying one of them wasn’t Nichole Patterson’s. One of the women’s heads was in a state worse than the rest. Whatever Longface had used to murder his victims, he’d done a messier job on her. Larry discovered with something like sorrow that the woman with the ruined face had short dark hair. There were deep slashes in her face that made identification difficult. Not wanting to, but needing to be sure, Larry approached the head and bent to peer into its eyes.

  They were blue.

  It wasn’t Nichole.

  Exhaling pent-up breath, he felt an enormous weight lift from him, then experienced a surge of guilt for feeling relieved. He felt terrible for the woman with the short dark hair, but the grim truth of it was he’d rather the victim be her than Nichole Patterson.

  Next to the badly butchered face of the woman was the cop. Larry remembered how strong and authoritative the cop had been when protecting the white-haired man. Wanting to preserve some of the policeman’s dignity, he lifted the popcorn bucket off his head, then wished he hadn’t. There was a gash in the middle of the cop’s skull that looked very, very deep. Wilson looked away but not before he glimpsed the policeman’s brain. So that was what happened, he mused. This man and his wife had put up a fight and Longface had butchered them for their resistance. He hoped the cop at least got a couple of good licks in before he succumbed.

  Wilson came back to himself, realized he’d been standing there like a conductor before this macabre, disembodied orchestra for more than a minute. Where was Longface? The sickness and pity he felt for the twelve victims transformed into a need for self-preservation. This, he realized as he peered down at the staring heads, could soon be him.

  As Gregory Peck and David Warner fled from the black dogs in the graveyard on the screen behind him, Wilson became aware of a brightness emanating from the back of the theater. His eyes climbed slowly up and over the seats, up the back wall, into the flickering projection booth. The overhead light in the booth was on now.

  Two faces leered down at him. Longface and his opposite. The second man was mountainous and had a head like a big bleached pumpkin. In the light from the booth Wilson could see he was at least as tall as Longface and had dark strands of hair plastered against his white pumpkin’s skull. For one crazy moment, Larry recalled of the Lance Henrikson film Pumpkinhead. Despite its off-putting title, it was one of Wilson’s favorites, and why the hell was he thinking about this now, when his meek existence was about to come to a gory, unceremonious end?

  The men were pointing at him, and even though he couldn’t hear their voices above the eerie choral chants and growling dogs of The Omen, he could see by the way they bounced and pointed that they were laughing at him. Then, Pumpkinhead barked something at Longface, who disappeared.

  Larry tensed. He knew the freak was coming for him. The bodies in the corridor had so unnerved Wilson that he’d not tried the exit there, and that was the only escape route left.

  Yet his body would not move. He was immobilized as surely as the severed heads on the seats before him.

  The door swung open.

  And now Longface was striding down the aisle and Larry could see how tall he was, six-and-a-half feet or more, and that he carried an axe, and that the axe was coated with blood.

  Wilson’s mind raced. The axe reminded him of the first feature, the weapon that had killed the teenagers. Larry’s eyes lowered to the policeman’s head, the angry red gash of a wound staring at him through a messy thatch of clotted hair. Just like one of the victims in Death Mountain.

  Longface was almost upon him, and Larry could see his gaze was normal now and knew t
he man had only rolled back his eyes that way to mimic the woman he’d seen in the third feature, the succubus in the white veil.

  Longface was raising the axe and preparing to lop off Larry’s head so the freak could add number thirteen to his front row collection.

  The freak swung the axe and as the blood-black blade cleaved the air, Wilson’s trance fractured and without thinking he dove forward onto a front row seat. The axe whistled over his head, and Longface stumbled with the force of his swing. Larry made to climb back to his feet, but his heels were slipping on the painted concrete under the chair because the run-off from the heads had trickled down there and pooled like a molasses retention pond.

  Wilson twisted and fell, his pants sopping into wetness, and an object landed in his lap. He saw with horror it was the head of the Goth girl. His hands closed on her temples and for a moment he stared into the sad, dark eyes of the girl and then Longface was looming over him and chopping down at him. Wilson rolled to his left and felt the concrete become carpet, and the carpet squished sickly under him. The axe head slammed itself on the concrete surface he’d just vacated. Sparks flew and blood splurted sideways from the axe head and Larry heard Longface squeal in frustration.

  The freak stood erect and glowered at him. They faced each other below the movie screen on which Gregory Peck and David Warner were scrambling over a black-spiked iron fence. The spike punctured Peck’s arm as the hell hounds jumped and snapped at his heels. Wilson stared at the freak who was trying to kill him and wondered how he’d managed to stay alive this long.

  Longface’s eyes crawled down Larry’s body and paused on his right hand. Wilson followed his gaze and realized with a little jolt that he still grasped the Goth girl’s head by her black hair. His gaze returned to Longface, whose dark eyes locked with his, and under those eyes he discovered a ghastly grin rippling into shape and above Longface in the projection room he spotted the huge figure of Pumpkinhead, arms crossed, a diabolical foreman supervising his death factory from above.

  Wilson’s eyes flashed back to Longface just in time to see the axe speeding toward him, and the freak was bringing it in lower this time, at waist level, so it would catch him in the ribs and embed itself in his left lung. Raising his arms above the whooshing blade, Wilson sucked his stomach in and performed a little backward hop, but the corner of the blade’s tip sliced through the skin of his torso just below his nipples. Longface swung so hard he flung himself off balance, and as he tried to straighten up Wilson stepped forward and swung the Goth girl’s head as hard as he could in a violent uppercut. Larry experienced a surge of vicious glee as the base of the girl’s skull connected with Longface’s thin underjaw. Larry heard a click as the man’s teeth banged together and a cracking sound as the freak’s head snapped back. As Longface’s head returned to its normal position, Wilson saw the man’s eyes were glazing over. His thin tower of a body retreated clumsily and then he was tumbling over the front row of chairs, his long wraith legs scissoring at the ceiling and then disappearing between the first and second rows.