The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  “I could sit in this theater forever,” whispered someone beside him. It was a girl’s voice. “Just sit here and watch and never leave.”

  Alec didn’t know there was someone sitting beside him, and jumped to hear a voice so close. He thought – no, he knew – that when he’d sat down the seats on either side of him were empty. He turned his head.

  She was only a few years older than him, couldn’t have been more than twenty, and his first thought was that she was very close to being a fox; his heart beat a little faster to have such a girl speaking to him. He was already thinking don’t blow it. She wasn’t looking at him. She was staring up at the movie, and smiling in a way that seemed to express both admiration and a child’s dazed wonder. Alec wanted desperately to say something smooth, but his voice was trapped in his throat.

  She leaned towards him without glancing away from the screen, her left hand just touching the side of his arm on the armrest.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” she whispered. “When I get excited about a movie I want to talk. I can’t help it.”

  In the next moment Alec became aware of two things, more or less simultaneously. The first was that the girl’s hand against his arm was cold. He could feel the deadly chill of it through his sweater, a cold so palpable it startled him a little. The second thing he noticed was a single teardrop of blood on her upper lip, under her left nostril.

  “You have a nosebleed,” he said, in a voice that was too loud. He immediately wished he hadn’t said it. You only had one opportunity to impress a fox like this. He should have found something for her to wipe her nose with, and handed it to her, murmured something real Sinatra: You’re bleeding, here. He pushed his hands into his pockets, feeling for something she could wipe her nose with. He didn’t have anything.

  But she didn’t seem to have heard him, didn’t seem the slightest bit aware he had spoken. She absent-mindedly brushed the back of one hand under her nose, leaving a dark smear of blood over her upper lip . . . and Alec froze with his hands in his pockets, staring at her. It was the first he knew there was something wrong about the girl sitting next to him, something slightly off about the scene playing out between them. He drew himself up instinctively and slightly away from her without even knowing he was doing it.

  She laughed at something in the movie, her voice soft, breathless. Then she leaned towards him and whispered, “This is all wrong for kids. Harry Parcells loves this theater but he plays all the wrong movies, Harry Parcells who runs the place?”

  There was a fresh runner of blood leaking from her left nostril and blood on her lips, but by then Alec’s attention had turned to something else. They were sitting directly under the projector beam, and there were moths and other insects whirring through the blue column of light above. A white moth had landed on her face. It was crawling up her cheek. She didn’t notice, and Alec didn’t mention it to her. There wasn’t enough air in his chest to speak.

  She whispered, “He thinks just because it’s a cartoon they’ll like it. It’s funny he could be so crazy for movies and know so little about them. He won’t run the place much longer.”

  She glanced at him and smiled. She had blood staining her teeth. Alec couldn’t get up. A second moth, ivory white, landed just inside the delicate cup of her ear.

  “Your brother Ray would have loved this,” she said.

  “Get away,” Alec whispered hoarsely.

  “You belong here, Alec,” she said. “You belong here with me.”

  He moved at last, shoved himself up out of his seat. The first moth was crawling into her hair. He thought he heard himself moan, just faintly. He started to move away from her. She was staring at him. He backed a few feet down the aisle and bumped into some kid’s legs, and the kid yelped. He glanced away from her for an instant, down at a fattish boy in a striped T-shirt who was glaring back at him: Watch where you’re going, meathead.

  Alec looked at her again and now she was slumped very low in her seat. Her head rested on her left shoulder. Her legs hung lewdly open. There were thick strings of blood, dried and crusted, running from her nostrils, bracketing her thin-lipped mouth. Her eyes were rolled back in her head. In her lap was an overturned carton of popcorn.

  Alec thought he was going to scream. He didn’t scream. She was perfectly motionless. He looked from her to the kid he had almost tripped over. The fat kid glanced casually in the direction of the dead girl, showed no reaction. He turned his gaze back to Alec, his eyes questioning, one corner of his mouth turned up in a derisive sneer.

  “Sir,” said a woman, the fat kid’s mother. “Can you move, please? We’re trying to watch the movie.”

  Alec threw another look towards the dead girl, only the chair where she had been was empty, the seat folded up. He started to retreat, bumping into knees, almost falling over once, grabbing someone for support. Then suddenly the room erupted into cheers, applause. His heart throbbed. He cried out, looked wildly around. It was Mickey, up there on the screen in droopy red robes – Mickey had arrived at last.

  He backed up the aisle, swatted through the padded leather doors into the lobby. He flinched at the late-afternoon brightness, narrowed his eyes to squints. He felt dangerously sick. Then someone was holding his shoulder, turning him, walking him across the room, over to the staircase up to balcony level. Alec sat down on the bottom step, sat down hard.

  “Take a minute,” someone said. “Don’t get up. Catch your breath. Do you think you’re going to throw up?”

  Alec shook his head.

  “Because if you think you’re going to throw up, hold on till I can get you a bag. It isn’t so easy to get stains out of this carpet. Also when people smell vomit they don’t want popcorn.”

  Whoever it was lingered beside him for another moment, then without a word turned and shuffled away. He returned maybe a minute later.

  “Here. On the house. Drink it slow. The fizz will help with your stomach.”

  Alec took a wax cup sweating beads of cold water, found the straw with his mouth, sipped icy cola bubbly with carbonation. He looked up. The man standing over him was tall and slope-shouldered, with a sagging roll around the middle. His hair was cropped to a dark bristle and his eyes, behind his absurdly thick glasses, were small and pale and uneasy. He wore his slacks too high, the waistband up around his navel.

  Alec said, “There’s a dead girl in there.” He didn’t recognize his own voice.

  The color drained out of the big man’s face and he cast an unhappy glance back at the doors into the theater. “She’s never been in a matinee before. I thought only night shows, I thought – for God’s sake, it’s a kid’s movie. What’s she trying to do to me?”

  Alec opened his mouth, didn’t even know what he was going to say, something about the dead girl, but what came out instead was: “It’s not really a kid’s film.”

  The big man shot him a look of mild annoyance. “Sure it is. It’s Walt Disney.”

  Alec stared at him for a long moment, then said, “You must be Harry Parcells.”

  “Yeah. How’d you know?”

  “Lucky guesser,” Alec said. “Thanks for the Coke.”

  Alec followed Harry Parcells behind the concessions counter, through a door and out onto a landing at the bottom of some stairs. Harry opened a door to the right and let them into a small, cluttered office. The floor was crowded with steel film cans. Fading film posters covered the walls, overlapping in places: Boys Town, David Copperfield, Gone With the Wind.

  “Sorry she scared you,” Harry said, collapsing into the office chair behind his desk. “You sure you’re all right? You look kind of peaked.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Something blew out in her brain,” he said, and pointed a finger at his left temple, as if pretending to hold a gun to his head. “Four years ago. During The Wizard of Oz. The very first show. It was the most terrible thing. She used to come in all the time. She was my steadiest customer. We used to talk, kid around with each other—” His
voice wandered off, confused and distraught. He squeezed his plump hands together on the desktop in front of him, said finally, “Now she’s trying to bankrupt me.”

  “You’ve seen her.” It wasn’t a question.

  Harry nodded. “A few months after she passed away. She told me I don’t belong here. I don’t know why she wants to scare me away when we used to get along so great. Did she tell you to go away?”

  “Why is she here?” Alec said. His voice was still hoarse, and it was a strange kind of question to ask. For a while, Harry just peered at him through his thick glasses with what seemed to be total incomprehension.

  Then he shook his head and said, “She’s unhappy. She died before the end of The Wizard and she’s still miserable about it. I understand. That was a good movie. I’d feel robbed too.”

  “Hello?” someone shouted from the lobby. “Anyone there?”

  “Just a minute,” Harry called out. He gave Alec a pained look. “My concession-stand girl told me she was quitting yesterday. No notice or anything.”

  “Was it the ghost?”

  “Heck, no. One of her paste-on nails fell into someone’s food so I told her not to wear them anymore. No one wants to get a fingernail in a mouthful of popcorn. She told me a lot of boys she knows come in here and if she can’t wear her nails she wasn’t going to work for me no more so now I got to do everything myself.” He said this as he was coming around the desk. He had something in one hand, a newspaper clipping. “This will tell you about her.” And then he gave Alec a look – it wasn’t a glare exactly, but there was at least a measure of dull warning in it – and he added: “Don’t run off on me. We still have to talk.”

  He went out, Alec staring after him, wondering what that last funny look was about. He glanced down at the clipping. It was an obituary – her obituary. The paper was creased, the edges worn, the ink faded; it looked as if it had been handled often. Her name was Imogene Gilchrist, she had died at nineteen, she worked at Water Street Stationery. She was survived by her parents, Colm and Mary. Friends and family spoke of her pretty laugh, her infectious sense of humor. They talked about how she loved the movies. She saw all the movies, saw them on opening day, first show. She could recite the entire cast from almost any picture you cared to name, it was like a party trick – she even knew the names of actors who had had just one line. She was president of the drama club in high school, acted in all the plays, built sets, arranged lighting. “I always thought she’d be a movie star,” said her drama professor. “She had those looks and that laugh. All she needed was someone to point a camera at her and she would have been famous.”

  When Alec finished reading he looked around. The office was still empty. He looked back down at the obituary, rubbing the corner of the clipping between thumb and forefinger. He felt sick at the unfairness of it, and for a moment there was a pressure at the back of his eyeballs, a tingling, and he had the ridiculous idea that he might start crying. He felt ill to live in a world where a nineteen-year-old girl full of laughter and life could be struck down like that, for no reason. The intensity of what he was feeling didn’t really make sense, considering he had never known her when she was alive; didn’t make sense until he thought about Ray, thought about Harry Truman’s letter to his mom, the words died with bravery, defending freedom, America is proud of him. He thought about how Ray had taken him to The Fighting Seabees, right here in this theater, and they sat together with their feet up on the seats in front of them, their shoulders touching. “Look at John Wayne,” Ray said. “They oughta have one bomber to carry him, and another one to carry his balls.” The stinging in his eyes was so intense that he couldn’t stand it, and it hurt to breathe. He rubbed at his wet nose, and focused intently on crying as soundlessly as possible.

  He wiped his face with the tail of his shirt, put the obituary on Harry Parcells’s desk, looked around. He glanced at the posters, and the stacks of steel cans. There was a curl of film in the corner of the room, just eight or so frames – he wondered where it had come from – and he picked it up for a closer look. He saw a girl closing her eyes and lifting her face, in a series of little increments, to kiss the man holding her in a tight embrace; giving herself to him. Alec wanted to be kissed that way sometime. It gave him a curious thrill to be holding an actual piece of a movie. On impulse he stuck it into his pocket.

  He wandered out of the office and back onto the landing at the bottom of the stairwell. He peered into the lobby. He expected to see Harry behind the concession stand, serving a customer, but there was no one there. Alec hesitated, wondering where he might have gone. While he was thinking it over, he became aware of a gentle whirring sound coming from the top of the stairs. He looked up them, and it clicked – the projector. Harry was changing reels.

  Alec climbed the steps and entered the projection room, a dark compartment with a low ceiling. A pair of square windows looked into the theater below. The projector itself was pointed through one of them, a big machine made of brushed stainless steel, with the word VITAPHONE stamped on the case. Harry stood on the far side of it, leaning forward, peering out the same window through which the projector was casting its beam. He heard Alec at the door, shot him a brief look. Alec expected to be ordered away, but Harry said nothing, only nodded and returned to his silent watch over the theater.

  Alec made his way to the VITAPHONE, picking his way carefully through the dark. There was a window to the left of the projector that looked down into the theater. Alec stared at it for a long moment, not sure if he dared, and then put his face close to the glass and peered into the darkened room beneath.

  The theater was lit a deep midnight blue by the image on the screen: the conductor again, the orchestra in silhouette. The announcer was introducing the next piece. Alec lowered his gaze and scanned the rows of seats. It wasn’t much trouble to find where he had been sitting, an empty cluster of seats close to the back, on the right. He half-expected to see her there, slid down in her chair, face tilted up towards the ceiling and blood all down it – her eyes turned perhaps to stare up at him. The thought of seeing her filled him with both dread and a strange nervous exhilaration, and when he realized she wasn’t there, he was a little surprised by his own disappointment.

  Music began: at first the wavering skirl of violins, rising and falling in swoops, and then a series of menacing bursts from the brass section, sounds of an almost military nature. Alec’s gaze rose once more to the screen – rose and held there. He felt a chill race through him. His forearms prickled with gooseflesh. On the screen the dead were rising from their graves, an army of white and watery specters pouring out of the ground and into the night above. A square-shouldered demon, squatting on a mountain top, beckoned them. They came to him, their ripped white shrouds fluttering around their gaunt bodies, their faces anguished, sorrowing. Alec caught his breath and held it, watched with a feeling of mingled shock and wonder rising in him.

  The demon split a crack in the mountain, opened Hell. Fires leaped, the Damned jumped and danced, and Alec knew what he was seeing was about the war. It was about his brother dead for no reason in the South Pacific, America is proud of him, it was about bodies damaged beyond repair, bodies sloshing this way and that while they rolled in the surf at the edge of a beach somewhere in the Far East, getting soggy, bloating. It was about Imogene Gilchrist, who loved the movies and died with her legs spread open and her brain swelled full of blood and she was nineteen, her parents were Colm and Mary. It was about young people, young healthy bodies, punched full of holes and the life pouring out in arterial gouts, not a single dream realized, not a single ambition achieved. It was about young people who loved and were loved in return, going away and not coming back, and the pathetic little remembrances that marked their departure, my prayers are with you today, Harry Truman, and I always thought she’d be a movie star.

  A church bell rang somewhere, a long way off. Alec looked up. It was part of the film. The dead were fading away. The churlish and square-shouldered d
emon covered himself with his vast black wings, hiding his face from the coming of dawn. A line of robed men moved across the land below, carrying softly glowing torches. The music moved in gentle pulses. The sky was a cold, shimmering blue, light rising in it, the glow of sunrise spreading through the branches of birch trees and northern pine. Alec watched with a feeling like religious awe in him until the film was over.

  “I liked Dumbo better,” Harry said.

  He flipped a switch on the wall, and a bare light bulb came on, filling the projection room with harsh white light. The last of the film squiggled through the VITAPHONE and came out at the other end, where it was being collected on one of the reels. The trailing end whirled around and around and went slap, slap, slap. Harry turned the projector off, looked at Alec over the top of the machine.

  “You look better. You got your color back.”

  “What did you want to talk about?” Alec remembered the vague look of warning Harry had given him when he told him not to go anywhere, and the thought occurred to him now that maybe Harry knew he had slipped in without buying a ticket, that maybe they were about to have a problem.

  But Harry said, “I’m prepared to offer you a refund or two free passes to the show of your choice. Best I can do.”

  Alec stared. It was a long time before he could reply.

  “For what?”

  “For what? To shut up about it. You know what it would do to this place if it got out about her? I got reasons to think people don’t want to pay money to sit in the dark with a chatty dead girl.”

  Alec shook his head. It surprised him that Harry thought it would keep people away, if it got out that the Rosebud was haunted. Alec had an idea it would have the opposite effect. People were happy to pay for the opportunity to experience a little terror in the dark – if they weren’t there wouldn’t be any business in horror pictures. And then he remembered what Imogene Gilchrist had said to him about Harry Parcells: He won’t run the place much longer.