by Phoef Sutton
As he entered the Shenandoah Valley, the bright leaves of summer rolling over the Appalachian Mountains like a green vision of peace, Matt nearly let his guard down. As he rode into Harrisonburg, a sleepy college town nestled in the heart of the valley, he was prepared for any and all attacks from the Dark Side.
None came.
He had run out of money in the middle of breakfast at the C & E Diner, so he told the waitress that she could (a) have him arrested for vagrancy or (b) let him do odd jobs around the restaurant to pay off his bill.
Four months later, he was still working there. Cleaning up, doing dishes, busing tables. Living in the one-room apartment out back. Spending long nights playing checkers with the owner of the diner, a forty-year-old widow with a wicked sense of humor and a glorious, zaftig body. They fell into bed together as they played checkers and watched TV shows on her laptop. Just easy, with a laugh and a sigh.
There was no hunger about Gina, no tragedy lurking in her past. True, she missed her husband, dead in a car accident these four years, but she didn’t pine for him. She lived a healthy, bright, sunny life. She liked fucking like she liked hot fudge sundaes and watching Jeopardy. Because it was fun to do and it passed the time.
Matt had never had a fuck buddy before. It felt a little awkward, like he should be bringing her flowers or candy and talking about the future. But once when he came to her house with a single flower, she just laughed and said he didn’t have to do that. All she really wanted was to have somebody to watch Jeopardy and play with. And he realized that was enough for now.
It was after a particularly strenuous bout with Gina that he’d gone to her laptop to visit AOL and see what the weather would be like for a picnic they were planning tomorrow. Nothing big, just a few sandwiches and a visit to an abandoned quarry for some skinny-dipping. It was unseasonably warm that week, but still early enough in the year that they would probably be alone—no need to subject others to their non-college-age nudity. They thought they looked pretty good when they were alone, but why compare themselves to actual youth?
When Gina saw Matt read the news item on AOL, she knew he had seen something that bothered him, but how could Matt explain it to her? There was nothing in his experience with Gina that could prepare her for this wild, insane story. His time with Gina had been totally and completely ordinary. How could Mr. Dark fit into this context?
So he’d said nothing, but from then on his mind was a thousand miles away, and even when he was fucking her (he was much better at that since he’d died), his thoughts were on evil and what it was planning for him next.
Finally he’d told her. Not the whole story, no. Just about Mr. Dark and the way he spread an evil that only Matt could see. Just enough so that she’d think he was crazy.
Except she didn’t think he was crazy. She listened and nodded and said, “Let’s see what we can find.”
And so they researched ax murders on the Internet, which was awfully easy for Gina but would have been impossible for Matt, whom Gina lovingly called a Luddite. Matt was afraid to ask what that meant.
There had been only six ax murders reported this year in the United States. Matt laughed at that statistic—he had beaten that record and then some—and Gina gave him an odd look. Matt said he often laughed when he was nervous and made a mental note to keep his insane thoughts to himself.
Of those six, only one caught Matt’s attention. Six months ago in Austin, Texas, a husband and wife had gotten into an argument after going to see a film at a local repertory house called the Alamo. The argument had escalated to the point where the wife had gone into the garage and grabbed an ax. When the police arrived, they found the husband split in two and the wife dead from drinking Drano. And on the wall was one word written in blood—“Dark.”
The article in the Austin Daily Herald was pretty sketchy, but the Austin Chronicle had one more piece of information. The movie they’d gone to see before all the madness happened was an old seventies horror movie called Dinner at the Brooklyn Morgue. The title was a memorable one. It was the same movie that was showing at the theater in New Orleans where the projectionist had gone berserk the month before.
Then Gina Googled Dinner at the Brooklyn Morgue, and whatever semblance of normalcy Matt’s life had gained over the past four months was gone.
CHAPTER SIX
Eva Quiller used to get claustrophobic in the ticket booth. That was three years ago, when she was just getting started at the New Fairfax Cinema and all she could see were the three walls around her and the window onto the street.
That was before she came to think of the box office window as a movie screen and the people who came to buy tickets as characters in a film. There was the fat, middle-aged man, looking to find love. There were the hipsters in their stupid hats with their soul patches, whiling away the time before they became rich and famous movie directors. There were the older hippies, who’d given up on dreams of fame and just enjoyed the show. There were the young female geeks, tattooed and pierced, trying to be cool, trying to find love, trying to find fame or just acceptance. Eva supposed she was one of those. But there was one difference between her and nearly everyone else here.
They all hoped they’d get to meet Barnabas Yancey one day. Eva was sick of the sight of him.
Barnabas Yancey was the wunderkind of the new cinema. He had made a splash ten years ago with a low-budget crime drama called Crush that had made him the darling of critics and indie-film buffs who had been looking for a new love since Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith had become too hip to be cool. Since then he had made a film a year ranging from postmodern spaghetti westerns (Once upon a Time in New Mexico) to gangster epics (A Handful of Smoke). They didn’t all make money—in fact, most of them had flopped—appealing largely to graduate film students who could understand his references to other movies. But he kept working and he kept making deals with studios that felt assured that one day his “buzz” would turn into boffo box office.
Barnabas hadn’t gone to film school. He hadn’t even gone to college. In actual fact, his first name wasn’t even Barnabas; it was Norman. He’d taken the name in honor of Barnabas Collins, the lead vampire from Dark Shadows. That was another of the obscure but knowing references that made the film geeks love him so much.
He (like Tarantino before him) had gotten his education in a video store. He’d worked as a clerk (shades of Kevin Smith) in a family owned store in Los Feliz and scraped together enough money to make that first film dealing drugs and (according to legend spread by Barnabas himself) selling blow jobs on Santa Monica Boulevard. That first film exploded like a supernova on the Internet and at the Sundance Film Festival (through canny marketing by Simon Einstein, the legendary producer who snapped up the distribution rights) and became a modest but very noisy hit.
Barnabas never looked back. He spent his days partying with all manner of drugs and all manner of women (ranging from porn stars to pop stars) and his nights writing new screenplays. When he wasn’t directing on the set, he was either in rehab or in relapse. He even went into a coma for three days and came out of it with an idea for a movie, Zzzzzz, entirely about a man in a coma.
It reportedly netted less money than any film he’d made thus far.
But if there was one thing Barnabas loved (and it may have been the only thing), it was movies. Not films. Movies. The kind of Grindhouse cinema that people didn’t make anymore because everybody was too smart and too self-aware. Movies that were made in the seventies, on a shoestring, by people with no real knowledge of what they were doing other than wanting to make movies and make a buck. Movies like Dinner at the Brooklyn Morgue.
So for his fortieth birthday (how can a wunderkind be that old?), he bought himself a present: the New Fairfax Cinema, down the street from Eddie’s Deli and just across from Larchmont High School. The old, ornate movie theater was opened in the thirties, a minor movie palace in the Zoetrope chain. It had gone through many incarnations since then, from silent movie revival hou
se to Pussycat Adults Only Showcase, and was shut down in the midnineties after “the incident.” The less said about that, the better.
In the aftermath of that, it was designated for the wrecking ball. That’s when Barnabas stepped in.
He bought it, refurbished it, and dedicated it to the showing of Grindhouse cinema. It was the one altruistic gesture Barnabas Yancey ever made. He programmed it himself and even showed up sometimes (you never knew when), so that movie buffs and wannabe filmmakers made a pilgrimage to it every evening. They hoped to catch a glimpse, or better yet catch the ear or some other body part, of Barnabas Yancey in person.
In the end, he bought other run-down theaters across the country, always anonymously, and brought them back from extinction. It was his saving grace.
But Eva Quiller had had enough of Barnabas Yancey, in person or otherwise. At twenty-two, she was just old enough to still be desirable as a babe-film-groupie-slash-movie-geek. She’d shown up at the Fairfax about three years ago with a tenuous introduction to Barnabas (her mother had gone to high school with him) and a low-cut Top Cat T-shirt. The introduction had gone better than she expected. She was offered a job in Barnabas’s theater and a place in his “harem.”
She’d made a short film, of course, and Barnabas had told her it was “full of promise.” But she could never figure out how to start a real movie, so she just became one of his hangers-on. In the intervening years, she had seen every film Jack Hill and Jean Rollin made and taken part in every type of kinky sex act imaginable. The end result? Movies still fascinated her, sex bored her, and Barnabas Yancey revolted her.
Live and learn.
“Are you selling tickets?”
Eva was jolted out of her reverie by an actual customer. This surprised her, both because it was a bit early for walk-ups and because the movie they were showing tonight was Zzzzzz. Even Yancey’s die-hard fans had trouble sitting through that one.
“Yeah,” she said.
The man in front of the window didn’t fit any of her stereotypes of Fairfax Cinema customers. He wasn’t a hipster or an aging hippy. He was in his thirties but wasn’t trying to look any younger. He was muscular, but it wasn’t the kind of muscular you got from working out in a gym; it looked like the kind of muscular you got from doing really hard work. He wore a trucker cap, but it wasn’t the kind that Ashton Kutcher wore ironically—Eva guessed that this man might have actually seen the inside of a truck sometime.
She was intrigued.
“One, please,” the man said.
“All right,” Eva sighed. “But I gotta ask you, do you really want to see this movie?”
“No,” the man replied.
“Then why do you want a ticket?” she asked.
“Because I want to see the ladies’ room,” Matt Cahill said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Matt hadn’t set foot in a movie theater since Janey had died, not until last weekend. He’d never really liked going to the movies, never really liked the feeling of wasting time in the dark when he could be outside, doing things. Living.
But Janey had loved movies, loved the act of going to them whether they were good, bad, or indifferent. She loved buying popcorn and snuggling down into the seat, loved watching previews and staying till the last of the end credits rolled. So he loved going to the movies too. And after she died he never went again. Everything about it, from the darkness to the smell of old candy, was another reminder of her.
He could skip that.
So when, last week, he stepped across the threshold of the Telegraph Hill Cinema in Charlottesville, Virginia, he might have felt all those feelings rushing back.
The fact that he didn’t have that flood of emotion had more to do with the condition of the theater than with any resolution of Matt Cahill’s mourning process.
The Telegraph Hill Cinema had burned to the ground three days before. During a midnight show. All twenty-five members of the audience, along with the projectionist and the guy who worked behind the concession counter, had been killed.
The scene was left open and deserted. Matt supposed that in some big city there might have been crime scene tape cordoning it off, but Charlottesville, although not a small town, was definitely not a big city. When a fire breaks out in a town like Charlottesville, the volunteer fire department comes to put it out, not to investigate. So no one even thought of arson. They just clucked their tongues at the tragedy of it all and never gave a thought as to how the fire started.
Matt wouldn’t have given a thought to it, either. If the midnight show at the Telegraph Hill Cinema hadn’t been Dinner at the Brooklyn Morgue.
So he’d borrowed Gina’s car and taken the hour drive over Afton Mountain to Charlottesville. He didn’t know what he’d find. But he knew he’d find something. Mr. Dark would make sure of that.
And he wasn’t disappointed.
When he drove back to Harrisonburg, he found Gina sitting on the porch of her bluestone house, waiting for him. Veranda, he corrected himself. He had to remember he was in the South now.
“Did you find anything?” she asked.
He didn’t answer, but the way he slumped down next to her on the bench told her that he had.
“So what are you going to do?” She handed him a Pabst and snuggled up to him.
“It’s having another showing this weekend,” he said, dropping an arm over her shoulder.
“Where?”
“Los Angeles. At the New Fairfax.”
They sipped beers in the moonlight. She nodded. “That’s where it started, isn’t it?”
“Yep.”
“You’d like to be there?”
He shrugged. “Three days. I can’t get there in time.”
“You could fly.”
“I can’t afford it.”
“I’ll give you the money.”
He turned to look at her.
“Why?” he asked her.
“Because it matters to you.”
“You don’t even know what’s going on. Not the whole story.”
“You’ll tell me in time.”
He shook his head. “I can’t. I can’t take money from you.”
“Sure you can. I got frequent flier miles. I’ll never use them.”
He kissed her long and fondly. “Why don’t you just think I’m crazy?”
She smiled. “Because you don’t fuck like a crazy man.”
He could have made a better first impression, Matt thought. Rather than just asking a total stranger if he could see the ladies’ room. It made him sound like a pervert.
The young woman behind the glass didn’t take it that way, though. She considered, pursed her pierced lip, and said, “Just a second.”
A minute later, the painted doors at the front of the theater were opening and the same girl, with the platinum blond hair, fingernail polish, and Bela Lugosi tattoos, beckoned him inside.
“I have a reason—,” Matt started to say.
“I know,” she cut him off. “You want to see where the murders happened.”
She led him past the ornate stairs, past the concession stand with its ageless supply of Junior Mints and Good & Plenty. They walked past the open box office door, where she’d hung the sign that read “Be back in a minute, what’s it to you?,” straight to a door that said WOMEN in angry block letters.
He paused in front of it. She asked him like she didn’t really care, just to pass the time, “You don’t look like the typical murder freak we get here. And, I’m sorry, but you don’t look like you’re writing a book or screenplay. Why do you want to see it?”
“I don’t want to. I have to.”
She nodded. “Intriguing.” And opened the door.
Matt had never been in a ladies’ bathroom before. The first thing that struck him, aside from the lack of urinals, was how much like a men’s room it was. Just two stalls and a sink. Somehow he thought there would be more mystery to it. Another dream shattered, he thought with a laugh.
“That’s t
he mirror,” the young woman said. “Of course, it isn’t the same mirror. But we don’t tell people that.” She turned the water on in the sink. “That’s the same sink, though. Where he clung while he was stabbed.”
She had no traces of corruption on her face or her body. Matt was glad about that.
“What are you, a relative?” she asked him. “We’ve never had a relative.”
“No,” Matt answered. “I’m not a relative.”
“But you know the story, don’t you? How if you turn off the lights and look in the mirror and say his name ten times, his face appears in the mirror.”
“Like Bloody Mary?”
“Who’s that?”
“It’s an old urban legend. They told it in my high school. It doesn’t work.”
The girl shrugged. “This doesn’t either. I must have said ‘Warren Worley’ a hundred times in here. Nada.”
She switched off the lights and moved toward him. “But you know what does work? If you fuck in here. Then he shows up every time.” She was on him in a second, kissing, grabbing at his pants.
He backed off. “What are you doing?” He’d liked this odd girl up until now. He didn’t want his opinion of her to decline.
She giggled. “What do you think?”
“But why?”
She stopped. His eyes were adjusting to the dim light and he could see the look of consideration cross her face. “Nobody ever asked me that before. Because I want to, I guess. So do you.” She was rubbing his erection in his pants, and he couldn’t very well deny it was there.
He grabbed her hand. “I’m not used to having sex with girls when I don’t even know their names.”
“Eva Quiller. I don’t want to know your name.” She was kissing him again.
“No,” he said firmly.
She slumped. “Really.” She didn’t sound hurt so much as confused.
“It’s not that you’re not attractive,” he felt the need to explain. “It’s just that I have someone.” Did he? Did he really feel that way about Gina? Or was he talking about Janey?
