AHMM, July-August 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "That's nice. We had some good years there. But then TV came along and changed all that. We couldn't afford the new gimmicks: Cinerama, wide-screen, 3-D with those silly eyeglasses. When I showed The Tingler they wanted me to rig buzzers under the seats to give people an extra scare. And then color TV came along. Bigger screens. Vee-cee-ars.” He said it as if the word tasted bad. “And now there's digital television, did you know that?"

  "Yes."

  "TV screens as thin as your hand and two or three meters across. Sound systems. Not speakers. Sound systems. Even the multiplex theaters are going to go under. Just wait and see if I'm not right."

  Bulwer's eyes slowly lowered to look at him.

  "Have you got a TV in your house, Chief Robideau?"

  Robideau hesitated. He didn't want to provoke the old man. “Well, yes. Everybody does these days."

  "I don't."

  "Well, you're wise. They're a darn waste of time."

  "That's right. That's just what they are. The old movie houses, they were different. They got you out of the house. Brought you downtown. They were an experience.” Bulwer's eyes glistened. “On a Saturday night the street was alive out front of the Palace. The marquee was so bright it took your breath away. Go there now, you'd think you were in a ghost town. TV is nothing but a curse."

  "No argument here,” Robideau said.

  "In the Forties, movie attendance was ninety million a week. By the end of the Fifties, forty million. Today, twenty or thirty. See where it's going?"

  "Listen,” Robideau said, “you better let me up, okay? We'll go somewhere and have a coffee, sit down and talk this out."

  "I have to leave soon,” the old man said. “I'm missing the show."

  "The show?"

  "Yes. Oddlot's getting it ready. Mother's favorite film, you know."

  "What film is that?"

  "They don't make films of that caliber anymore. All blood and gore these days. And special effects. It's like being at a circus."

  "What film?"

  "A Hitchcock film. He knew how to make movies!"

  "Which one?"

  Bulwer gazed down at him. Robideau felt like a human sacrifice at the feet of an unbalanced god. “Did you like the old Hitchcock films, Chief Robideau?"

  "Sure."

  "We had people lining up at the doors when we showed that film."

  "Which one are you talking about?"

  "Anthony Perkins should have won an Oscar. I, for one, think he was robbed."

  Bulwer's chair creaked under his weight. He closed his eyes. His hands relaxed on the cricket bat, big hands, powerful hands, liver spotted and puffy, but strong and capable hands.

  "Those were the days. Minnie Scooder there out front in the ticket booth, the Gilmore girl handling the concessions. We called her the glamour girl, did you know that? A little joke we had. And Oddlot and me up in the projection booth. I learned so much from him. How to trim the arc, how to do a changeover. You do a changeover every twenty minutes on the 35s. On the 16s, every forty-four minutes. That's how long a reel of film lasts."

  "I didn't realize that."

  "Oh yes. And Oddlot, when I told him how much Mom liked it, had the idea of reporting the movie stolen. The distributor yelled, but what could he do about it? We were going out of business. He had to chase the insurance company."

  Bulwer chortled mirthfully. Robideau got slowly to his feet.

  "Of course,” Bulwer went on, more seriously, “a reel of film doesn't last forever.” His head had tilted all the way back; it gave a curious view of him from under the chin. “It gets brittle, scratched. The sprocket holes wear. So we store our 35mm copy in the fridge behind the concession stand—keep it at forty degrees—and most of the time we use 16mm prints. You can still buy those for a few hundred dollars."

  Robideau wanted another look in the den. He began to edge in that direction.

  "Of course,” Bulwer droned on, “the movie's printed on safety film. If it was the old film, that nitrate stuff, it might have turned to powder or exploded by now. Oddlot made me remove all the old nitrate film from the Palace. He thinks it's dangerous. Starts on fire if you look at it. It even burns under water; you can't put it out."

  Robideau reached the den and slipped his key chain Mag-Lite from his pocket. There were the fish tanks. And the wicker chair. The electric heater glowing on the floor.

  "To understand what a nitrate fire can do, you should go and see Cinema Paradiso,” Bulwer droned. “Not that I've seen it. But Oddlot recommends it."

  Robideau edged forward. The large fan-back chair was pushed up hard against the wall. There was a lot of shadow here, and...

  Damn!

  Robideau had dropped the Mag-Lite. It bounced on the carpet, rolled, and lay at his feet, its tiny light directed under the chair.

  He hunkered down and groped for it. Its bisected beam revealed a pair of ankles. Ankles that looked impossibly thin. The nylon tights around them drooped loosely from skinny shanks. Below, a pair of lady's oxfords had a layer of dust on them a quarter of an inch thick.

  Taking hold of the Mag-Lite, Robideau stood back up. He felt a tingling and sickly presentiment. As he slowly raised the torch he saw a pleated skirt that seemed to have nothing under it but sticks. A pair of clenched, white-gloved hands in the lap. A once-satiny blouse between the lapels of a jacket. A tarnished pendent. The face...

  The face before him was hollowed and shrunken. The brow had an onionskin tautness. The hair, a washed-out blond, stood out from the scalp in hideous clumps. The mouth hung open, slack jawed and fleshless, revealing a bone-white section of dental bridgework in a bank of yellow and twisted teeth.

  Robideau tried to move but couldn't. His feet seemed rooted to the floor. He saw that Bulwer Onager had jumped the rails, had swung as far from the tracks of normality as it was possible to go.

  "Esta Onager,” Robideau whispered. “You ran the flower shop. You're Bulwer's mother."

  The light clicked on.

  "Noooooo!” Bulwer hollered, and the cricket bat whistled through the air. Robideau saw it coming, but it never connected because he was struck from the side and bowled over, his aching head crashing into one of the fish tanks. He had a sense of two men struggling, and suddenly Pete was hauling him to his feet.

  "Come on, Chief. You've outwore your welcome. Don't worry about those two. I gave Butts a call."

  Gripping Robideau by the shoulders, Pete rushed him quickly back through the cluttered house. A last glance showed Bulwer trying to shake off Oddlot, who was hanging onto the cricket bat with both hands. The light above the men careened crazily. The stacks of film canisters teetered and then crashed down around their legs. Coils of film and an ugly brown powder spilled out of the cans and across the floor and the heater.

  Pete and Robideau burst from the house, struggled over the garbage bags, and stumbled into the yard. There was an ominous thump at their backs, and the windows of the den blew out, scattering shards of glass across the lawn. This was followed by a burgeoning flicker, and suddenly the den was shooting flame like a fireworks display. Horrified, Robideau tried to rush back in, but Pete Melynchuk held him back.

  Police Chief Butts pulled up with his siren wailing, jumped from his car, and stalked toward them. Heavy, low-hanging, acrid smoke gushed from the shattered windows of the house.

  "Damn it, Robideau, I only asked you to talk to the guy. Now I got a murder investigation on my hands and a house on fire. What is it with you?” He squinted. “Did you know your head is bleeding?"

  The rain began to fall with such ferocity it drove Butts back into his car at a run.

  * * * *

  Oddball had been right. You couldn't put out the fire by pouring water on it. This was confirmed by none other than Chuck Lang, once a member of the End of Main volunteer fire brigade. He polished off a beer and let out a gaseous belch. “What was he thinking, storing old films there?"

  Pete and Robideau were at the table in the Netley. Wilmer and Wolvert
on were just sitting down.

  Robideau touched the bandage on his head and winced. “Oddlot made him remove the film from the theater. There must have been quite a stock of them. They found even more in the wing of the house that didn't burn. Silents and old newsreels. Even a pile of ancient Russian films that he scrounged from God knows where."

  "He should've known better,” Chuck said unsparingly. “Got rid of them. But he wouldn't part with anything, would he? Not even his poor dead mother."

  "He couldn't stand to part with food wrappers,” Pete said, as if this explained it. “Why wouldn't he keep his mother around?"

  Wilmer signaled for more beer. “I seen that young fella works at the video rental store this morning, and he told me that ever since this hit the newspapers they can't keep that Psycho movie on the shelves. They're ordering more copies from the city. Bullet would've liked that."

  "I don't think so,” Robideau said.

  "To think of him in that old theater,” Wilmer continued, “showing his mom that movie over and over again! It's like I said. OCD. Your Compression Repulsive Disorder."

  Pete rolled his eyes.

  "So Bullet killed her too?” Chuck said frowning. “His own mother?"

  "No.” Pete shook his head. “He didn't. Esta died—I think it was lung cancer got her. Smoked like a stove full of sawdust, that old gal."

  "But he kept her around,” Chuck persisted. “Kept her at the Palace. He kills the girl because he thinks she might've seen something. He kills the detective when he comes looking for the girl. As for Oddlot..."

  They thought about Oddlot.

  Had he played any part in the murders? He'd sworn to Pete he hadn't known anything about them, and Robideau believed that was probably true. On the other hand, Esta Onager had been pretty spry for a dead woman. She hadn't walked from the Palace Roxy to Bulwer's house all by herself. Or walked away from the embalming table, for that matter. And it was a fact that the Onagers had owned the funeral home before Prancing Al Evans got his hands on it, and a fact that Bulwer's pal Oddlot had done the fetch-and-carry jobs there.

  "It's amazing the things you don't notice when they're right under your nose,” Robideau said.

  Pete nodded. “You got that right."

  "Things are rarely what they seem."

  "You got that right,” Pete said.

  Copyright (c) 2007 Jas R. Petrin

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  UNTYING THE KNOT by Barry Baldwin

  Some thought that if a man shared ideas for which millions had died, it was no bad thing that he should be sent to join them.

  "Prisoner at the bar. You have been found guilty of the crime with which you are charged. Have you anything to say before sentence is passed upon you?"

  "My Lord, this is one in the eye for Joe Bernstein and Harry Goldberg. I shall die. But shall I hang? Thank you."

  It was hard to tell whose voice had been the flatter, the judge's or the defendant's. Amid the marbles and murals of the Old Bailey, police officers and journalists and court staff winked at each other. They had heard that last kind of thing from the dock before; only its details and delivery varied. But the mention of Joe Bernstein and Harry Goldberg did produce more than a fleeting impression, not weakened by the fact that no one knew who they were. They all looked, some with less sympathy than before, others with more, at the accused with an interest they had rarely felt during his trial. Like most of his kind, he was both in demeanor and as described by others—his own voice had not been heard until now—ordinary to the point of dullness. Seasoned observers recalled those rows of nonentities with funny names at Nuremberg, whose proceedings they had helped to harden in the concrete of history a few years ago. None imagined the man in front of them would be remembered beyond the day three weeks hence when the papers would report his brief encounter with the hangman at eight o'clock in the morning in Pentonville gaol.

  Some, not all, thought that if the man shared ideas for which millions had died, it was no bad thing that he should be sent to join them. The trouble was, he was not on trial for those ideas, hadn't killed for them. To die may be accounted the best thing a man ever did. Look at what Dickens wrote about Sydney Carton. This man, though, would only be on the receiving end of death as a result of having been on the giving end of it. Yet others would have done the same, including perhaps the twelve who had just legally placed the noose around his neck, and many would agree that he did not deserve to die for this particular deed.

  None of this was a concern to the judge, who was now fingering something on his desk with unfeigned concentration. He was not one of those arbiters who in certain kinds of story or propaganda enjoy passing the sentence of death, sometimes to the point of involuntary ejaculation into Saville Row—tailored dark trousers. Had there been anybody with whom to share an intimate moment, he might have mentioned that he viewed this present discharge of his duty with regret, even distaste. But only might have. He regularly defined himself in his public speeches and smoking-room conversations—between which there was not all that much difference—as an administrator of the law, an executor in two ways, if you cared for that sort of humor. His study of philosophy at Oxford had left him with a permanent distaste for Socrates and his jawing to the point where he felt a distinct sympathy for those Athenian jurymen who had dispensed the hemlock all the way back in the three hundred and ninety-ninth year before the birth of Christ.

  The judge picked up the black cap, perched it upon the wig that covered his fly's skating rink of a head, and again without inflection recited the sentence down to its hallowed conclusion: “...to be hanged by the neck until you are dead. And may God have mercy upon your soul.” After a stiff bow, stiffly acknowledged, the prisoner was stood down, taken below, and transported without fuss to the room reserved for him in Pentonville.

  There, the senior of the two warders with whom he would be playing happy families until the day of the drop laid out the rules and regulations to their new guest with matter-of-fact courtesy.

  "You're more or less going to be stuck with the two of us, so we'd best get on. I daresay we shall. There's not been any bother with our previous gentlemen. That light stays on all the time, mind, just in case. But you can have something to put over your eyes for sleeping. Otherwise, it's all quite civilized. There are games to play. One bloke, I remember, didn't know a king from a pawn when he arrived; he was beating us hollow by the time he had to leave. You can have a newspaper brought in, though that's not always a good idea. The library isn't half bad. Back in 1910, I think it was, when he was in charge of prisons, dear old Winston Churchill insisted there be some good reading. Very keen on Gibbon, he was, though he admitted that might not be ideal for short-term stays. Still, there's lots of other stuff. You are entitled to ten cigarettes a day, or half an ounce of pipe tobacco. Also a daily pint of beer, bottle of stout if you prefer. I might suggest the stout, it keeps your strength up more. You can send and receive letters and have anyone you like to visit, within reason. Talking of visitors, the governor will pop in twice a day, and the chaplain is on call whenever you want. Any questions?"

  "Do you think I stand a chance, sir?"

  "You don't have to call me that. It's up to the home secretary. There's always a chance. But I wouldn't dwell on it if I were you. Not considering who was killed."

  "Years ago,” the second warder contributed, “before the war, one chap got the word in here just as they were pinioning his arms ready to haul him away. Not that it did him much good; he keeled
over and died of a heart attack the very next day. Delayed reaction, the medical officer said."

  "Anything can happen. My advice is, let's wait and see. How old are you, son?"

  "Nineteen."

  The prisoner didn't ask why this question should have been tagged on to the admonition. That was a blessing for the warder. It was one of the personal details the hangman needed to know to do his job properly. Something about the relative muscular strength between various ages. For an unexplained bureaucratic reason, he was never given this information in advance. So, when he arrived with his assistant at four in the afternoon on the day before, as per usual, he would discreetly ask questions and watch the prisoner in the exercise yard to calculate his weight. The rope would be stretched overnight by leaving a sandbag dummy on it. Hanging a man is not so easy as it looks in one of those lynching scenes in Wild West films where they just slap a noose round the victim's neck, giddy up the horse they've sat him on, and that's that. Like the judge, the hangman took no pleasure from his job but prided himself on his professionalism. There was never going to be a repetition of 1922 and Mrs. Edith Thompson: Unable to forget what had gone on, the hangman's assistant later attempted suicide. Not to mention the way some of the Nuremberg ones had been bungled. The drop had been too short, it was more strangling than hanging; a reporter who'd been there claimed that Keitel had taken nearly half an hour to die.

  The key is the C1 and C2 vertebrae, known in the trade as the Hangman's Drops. When the spinal cord suffers a blow, these are compressed, and if proper force has been applied, fractured. The sheer force of the blow kills some nerves instantly. Then the compression causes electrical impulses traveling through nerve cells in the area to go haywire, and the overload causes many neurons to kill themselves. The dying nerve cells leak calcium, which attracts enzymes to the area that chew on the tissues. Their by-products are unstable compounds that destroy healthy cells by scavenging their oxygen. These dying cells trigger a secondary wave of destruction that sweeps from the injured area and radiates outward. Blood flow to the nervous system is slowed, immune cells flood the area and chew up damaged and healthy nerves alike. The result is gaping holes in the spinal column, and the long nerve fibers called axons that weave down the spine from the brain are stripped of their protective fatty coat of myelin, without which the nerves cannot function, and unlike the peripheral one, the central nervous system does not regenerate.