“Freak!” The girl recoiled to the opposite end of the concessions stand. “I hope Ms. Sprague cans your ass.” Although barely older than her teenaged employees, the manager insisted on being called Ms.
“B.F.D. if she did.” Martin nodded toward the vacant lobby and chucked the popcorn cup in the trash. “This place is doomed anyway.”
The Royale’s October “Slasher Classic” Fright Fest was a bust. Serves ‘em right for playing wussy crap like the original versions of Psycho and Halloween, which had, like, what? Three drops of blood between them? As resident expert on splatter films, Martin had tried to tell Sprague to go for the Saw and Hostel movies if she wanted some real horror, but did the manager listen to him? Of course not. No wonder the owners were planning to bulldoze this firetrap and put up condos.
“Yo, Martin!” Randy called from the box office. “We got a couple green tickets here!”
Martin abruptly snapped to attention. He slapped the lid on the popper shut to hide the frying cockroach, then buttoned up his grease-spotted red vest. “Green tickets” was their code word for cute chicks.
Two girls in their late teens entered through the theater’s swinging glass doors, one in a mini-skirt and platform shoes, the other in low-rise jeans and a camisole. Martin leaned forward as they approached the concessions counter and smiled.
Charlene intercepted them. “I can help you over here.”
The two girls veered toward her to place their order. Charlene filled their fountain drinks with her right hand while waving the left back and forth to dry her nails.
Martin glared, clenching his jaw. She did that just to tick him off…and she did it a lot.
A flat, toneless voice pierced his brooding. “Popcorn. Large.”
Martin looked over and found a gaunt man with stringy black hair standing at the counter. The guy was pale even for a Goth, and his bony frame all but disappeared in the shapeless drapery of a black trench coat. He looked only twenty-something, but his hard, flat expression seemed etched by far greater experience.
Martin pulled a fresh popcorn cup from the dispenser behind him and scooped it into the mound of white kernels they’d made before the first feature. He glanced up at the guy’s reflection in the mirror mounted on the back wall of the concessions stand. “Want butter on that?”
The man stared at him with unblinking eyes, whites filigreed with bloodshot capillaries, pupils dilated to hollow blackness. His lips formed soundless words.
Junkie, Martin decided. He pumped greasy “Golden Flavored” oil onto the popcorn and passed the cup across the counter.
The dude handed him a twenty and suddenly snickered for no reason at all. “Thanks, Martin.”
That creeped him out. How did the freak know his name? Then he remembered the stupid name badge pinned to his vest. Duh.
“Good movie, Martin,” the dude went on. “George Romero. Ever see it?”
At that, Martin had to grin. “You bet I have. Wish we were showing it now.” He fished the guy’s change out of the register and jerked his head toward Charlene. “Idiots here wouldn’t know real horror if it puked on ‘em.”
The dude smiled his appreciation. “You can say that again.”
He grabbed the popcorn and wandered off without taking the change.
“This is your brain on drugs,” Martin chuckled and shoved the cash in his pocket.
A few other teenagers showed up before the start of the second feature, mostly couples hoping to make out in the darkness of the near-empty theater. As always, the moment the opening credits started to roll, Ted, the projectionist, came down to the lobby and thrust his plastic tumbler at Martin. “Half Coke, no ice.”
Martin half-filled the cup with undiluted soda, leaving plenty of room for Ted’s rum. The gangly projectionist grabbed it and headed back toward a door marked “Employees Only.”
Martin ground his teeth as he unbuttoned his vest. Damned if he was going to get stuck working in this dump like that lush. Having to live with his uptight parents and brain-dead sister was already driving Martin nuts.
Bored to the point of unconsciousness, Martin filled a cup with Coke for himself. “I’m going in to watch the movie.”
Charlene rolled her eyes. “Like you haven’t seen it a zillion times already!”
Ignoring her, he stepped out of the concessions stand and pushed through the double doors leading into the auditorium. The aroma of beer and pot smoke saturated the theater’s darkened interior. That was another advantage of the Royale: lax security.
Navigating through the shifting illumination reflected from the screen, Martin made his way down the center aisle toward the front rows. As he slouched in a seat upholstered with crushed velvet, he shared the viewpoint of little Michael Myers, staring through the eyeholes of a clown mask as the boy stalked and stabbed his older sister. Fortunately, the film was dark enough that the picture camouflaged the large tear in the Royale’s screen, a flap of fabric lolling from the hole like a lascivious tongue.
Wussy as the original Halloween was, Martin enjoyed filling in the movie with his own gory details. He pictured Mikey driving the blade right into his naked sister’s navel and nipples—with some decent makeup effects, that would be awesome.
Rob Zombie had done an okay job putting some guts into the remake, but even that kind of splatter had started to bore Martin. So cartoony and fake, he could tell the girls getting killed weren’t being hurt at all. Martin wanted to know what it really felt like to do someone like that. How do you hold someone still while you’re cutting ‘em up, anyway? What if a dead girl gets all rigor mortis on your erection while you’re still inside her? And what does a human liver taste like, with or without fava beans?
To satisfy his curiosity, Martin had been checking out some really gnarly autopsy photos online, and had gone from watching cheesy low-budget flicks about Berkowitz and Manson to poring over true-crime books about them. He fantasized about one day collecting serial-killer memorabilia like the lead singer from Korn, stuff like Gacy’s clown drawings or Bundy’s VW Bug. Man, that would be sick!
Not that Martin could bid for those kinds of trophies anytime soon, especially if he couldn’t even hold onto a slave-wage job at the Royale. He didn’t want Sprague, She-Wolf of the S.S., to catch him loafing, so he joined the crowd that left during the closing credits, before the house lights came up. As the patrons filed out the auditorium’s double doors, the manager emerged from her office in her usual pantsuit and pumps to supervise the Royale’s closing ritual. Martin pretended to tidy the concessions stand so she wouldn’t ask him to help sweep the theater.
“Go ahead and cash out, Charlene,” Sprague said. Barely out of high school herself, she’d made manager before she was twenty by having a bug up her butt the size of Missouri. “Randy, why don’t you start on clean-up?”
“You got it!” He propped open one of the theater’s double doors and wheeled a garbage can into the auditorium.
Martin saw Randy return to the lobby just a few minutes later, before Sprague had even finished counting Charlene’s register drawer. The ticket seller clutched at his stomach, his face ashen as he shuffled over to the manager.
Sprague glanced up from thumbing through a stack of fives and frowned. “What is it?”
Randy scanned the lobby, where a few audience members still lingered. The two green tickets gossiped with Charlene, while another girl waited for her boyfriend to get out of the bathroom.
Randy leaned closer, and spoke in a low, unsteady voice. “Mr. Casey is in the house.”
Martin saw Sprague blanch, and felt the hair on his own scalp prickle. “Mr. Casey is in the house” was the code signal cinema employees used to inform management of an emergency, such as a fire in the building, so the patrons wouldn’t panic and trample each other stampeding toward the exits.
Sprague hastened Randy into her office, out of earshot of any customers. Unobserved, Martin sauntered over to the open door of the auditorium and stepped inside.
<
br /> Brass lighting fixtures with fluted chimneys of frosted glass, relics of the Royale’s heyday in the ‘30s, illuminated the theatre with a dim, jaundiced glow. Once bright crimson, the carpeting along the center aisle had blackened to maroon, and soft drink stains and pancakes of dried chewing gum dotted its length. A fresh yellow splat marked the spot in the aisle where Randy had barfed.
Only one audience member remained in the cavernous auditorium. The dude slumped in an aisle seat, second row from the front, his head lolling over the edge of the backrest. It was not unusual at the Royale to find bums or druggies who’d passed out during the show. The spreading wetness under the guy’s chair might simply have been a sloshed soda or beer.
Martin halted halfway down the aisle. Beside the overturned popcorn cup at the man’s feet, white kernels had scattered over the spilled liquid and turned scarlet. A knife lay on the floor by the figure’s limp right hand, the blade drizzling redness. Martin didn’t need to see the freak’s face to know who the dude was, for he had already recognized the stringy black hair and pale skin.
◙
“Did you see him that night? I mean, see his eyes, up close.” Charlene hugged herself as if the stuffy lobby had become a mortuary freezer.
Randy shook his head. “Not until…you know. They were still open.”
“Well, you could tell he was a freak.” She shuddered. “The cops say he killed those girls they’ve been finding along I-5. He found out they were onto him, so he cut up his mom, then came here to off himself.”
Randy looked at his feet and shrugged. “Guess he did us a favor.”
“Yeah, but why did he have to come here? I’m so creeped out I didn’t even want to come to work.”
Sweeping up the flattened popcorn kernels that littered the lobby, Martin paused to grin at her. “Hey, he’s the closest thing to a celebrity we’ve had here. I think it’s cool."
She made a face. “You would.”
After the psycho committed suicide, the Royale had closed for a couple of days to allow the police to conduct their investigation. Tonight the staff had reopened the theater, and naturally the killer was all they could talk about.
“And how do you know so much about the dude, Charlene?” Martin jeered. “Been Googling everything you can about him, haven’t you? Admit it—you’re just as into the whole thing as I am.”
“Whatever.” Unable to think of a snappier comeback, she took a sudden interest in wiping down the candy case.
Martin’s grin widened. He’d never actually managed to shut her up before.
Although he’d said it to tweak her, Martin honestly did think it was cool that, after months of reading about guys like Henry Lee Lucas and Jeffrey Dahmer, he’d met an actual serial killer, face-to-face. The guy sounded like a top-notch sicko, too. The local paper gave his name as Virgil Aldon Barnett, and the cops figured that he’d murdered at least sixteen women before butchering his mom. Although the reports withheld details “out of sensitivity to our readers,” the stuff they hinted at was juicy enough: The articles mentioned that at least one victim had been decapitated and that semen samples had been recovered “from inside the body cavity” of another. Detectives and reporters speculated that self-loathing over the viciousness of his final crimes may have driven him to take his own life.
Now Martin wished he’d talked to the dude more while he’d had the chance. At the very least, he should have gotten a better look at Barnett’s body. Maybe even grabbed the guy’s knife before the cops got it. Heck, Martin would have settled for the murderer’s empty popcorn cup. That’s one souvenir you’d never find on eBay! Damn! When would he have an opportunity like that again? If only he hadn’t been so squeamish about getting close to the corpse.
Ironically, the killer’s suicide gave the Royale such notoriety in the local press that the “Slasher Classic” Fright Fest became a huge overnight success. Local teens lined up around the block to be part of the first audience in a theater where a genuine slasher bled to death. The packed house resulted in a bumper crop of trash, and Ms. Sprague asked for a “volunteer” to stay late, clean up, and secure the premises. Charlene immediately said she wouldn’t go anywhere near where the dead guy had been, while Randy peered down at the carpet, his mouth twisting, evidently hoping the manager wouldn’t notice him.
Martin gave a crooked smile. “I’ll do it.”
Everyone looked at him as if horns had sprouted from his forehead. Ordinarily Martin would never have offered to work late.
But tonight was different—it might be his only chance to see the remaining bloodstains before they cleaned everything up.
“Look, you want me to do it or not?” he snapped when no one said anything.
Ms. Sprague spread her hands to indicate the empty lobby. “Hey, it’s all yours. But I better find it clean in the morning. And don’t forget to block the doors before you go.”
Randy and Charlene punched out on the time clock and left with Sprague, who locked the Royale’s entrance behind her and took the keys. The push bars on the doors would allow Martin to exit, but once he did he’d be shut out of the building. Only a few lights remained on in the lobby for his benefit; his final duty for the evening would be to flick the switch in the circuit breaker box that would turn them off.
Relieved to be rid of the others, he popped in his earbuds and blasted Cannibal Corpse and Psycroptic into his skull while he shuffled around and bagged garbage. He worked just long enough to be sure that Sprague wouldn’t come back for something, then went through the double doors to see Virgil Aldon Barnett’s blood for himself. Martin swore that the theater still reeked of it—a rusty odor he could taste on his tongue as he drew closer to the aisle seat in the second row. Once the cops had finished their investigation, Sprague asked Randy to swab the floor with a couple gallons of bleach, but the stain beneath the chair had permeated the cement so badly that the usher could not mop it away. Sprague said she might have to call in a special crime-scene cleaning service to sanitize the place.
The ruined seat was still bolted to the floor, and Maintenance hadn’t sent anyone to remove it yet. Randy had covered the chair with a black plastic trash bag and stretched thick strips of silver duct tape across the armrests to keep people from sitting there until it could be replaced. These precautions hadn’t deterred some thrill-seeker from occupying the corpse’s seat. The duct tape dangled from its sides in curlicue tangles, and the shifting weight of the chair’s recent occupant had rent a large hole in the plastic cover.
Martin told himself that he wasn’t going to wimp out this time. He probed the open lips of the tear with quivering fingers, until he touched the velvet upholstery. The cushion was still sticky, gummed with what felt like the trail of a giant slug. Martin recoiled, cursing, and wiped his hand on his vest with prissy anxiety.
A bead of sweat dripped into his eye, and he brushed it away. It certainly wasn’t heat making him perspire. Sprague had lowered the thermostat to keep the larger audiences comfortable during the Indian summer weather. With only Martin’s body to warm the cavernous space, the theater had turned numbingly cold, yet he stood motionless in front of the forbidden aisle seat. An overwhelming urge seized him to rip off that stupid plastic bag and sit in Virgil Aldon Barnett’s place.
The fact that he wanted to cozy up to that gore—wanted it badly—tripped Martin out. He busied himself with his closing chores to keep from thinking about it. Ms. Sprague would have been astonished at how quickly he cleared up the half-empty soft drink cups and crumpled candy wrappers. He just wanted out of there.
From the utility closet in the lobby, he grabbed two L-shaped wooden blocks from a stack in the corner and returned to make a final check of the auditorium. Local homeless people often viewed the Royale as a dirt-cheap motel, so Martin gingerly checked behind the threadbare, red velvet drapes hanging on either side of the screen, searching for hidden vagrants. He didn’t know what he’d actually do if he found one, but he kept hold of the wooden blocks as pos
sible weapons, just in case. Last of all, he checked the dark niche beneath the screen.
Satisfied that only he and the cockroaches remained, Martin crossed over to the fire exit. Testing to make sure the door was firmly latched, he wedged both blocks in between the door and its push bar handle to keep anyone from using a coat hanger to open the door from the outside. Now all he had to do was get the other pair of blocks from the closet, jam them in the door handle on the front entrance, and leave this dump.
He got about halfway up the center aisle when the house lights went down.
Total darkness engulfed Martin. Not even the exit sign stayed lit.
He groaned. Randy’s little joke, no doubt. Ha-ha, very funny. Martin put his hands out at arm’s length and inched his way forward.
A circle of light flickered on in the square window of the projection booth, a cone of dancing cinema light frosting forward to the movie screen. As the soundtrack slurred up to speed, a girl’s shriek cleft the air. “Get offa me! Oh, God—”
The scream made Martin jump with its suddenness, but it didn’t frighten him. It was a horror movie, after all. He raised a hand to block the shimmering light from the projector trying to spot Ted, the alcoholic projectionist, up there in the booth. Maybe the lush had arranged his own private screening.
Martin turned to see what was showing. It definitely wasn’t either Psycho or Halloween. The picture was shot with a jerky handheld camera from a killer’s point of view. No masks here, no coy cutting to Hershey’s syrup swirling down the shower drain. Just a skinny, buck-naked teenage prostitute, pinned down in the back of a night-darkened SUV. Other than the few intelligible words Martin heard, her dialogue consisted of either pitiful yelps or guttural choking as the spidery male hand at her throat throttled her. Tears speckled the heavy eyeliner and blue eye shadow, overdone cosmetics that made the adolescent look like a kid who’d played with Mommy’s makeup kit.
The camera showed little interest in her face, choosing instead to focus on the carbon-steel hunting knife that unzipped her bare belly. Martin gawked in dumb fascination as the lens plunged into the entrails bursting through the slit midriff, winced as if he were the one nuzzling his face in the slick innards as the dying girl squirmed at her body’s violation. The theater’s iron stench thickened around him.
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