Midnight Special (10 page)

“How are we going to stop it?”

“That’s up to you. At the first sign of—well, you know the signs—you get them out of here. Through those doors.” He pointed to the double doors that led to the street. “I don’t care if there’s panic, as long as they run. And when they’re out…”

Here Barnabas paused and pulled something from the shadows, behind the Coke dispenser. A long, curved staff, taller than both of them. It looked like it belonged to some ancient shepherd, the kind who saw the angels from on high.

“You bar the door with this. It will keep him in here. Forever.”

“What is it?”

“The Staff of Truth. It took me forever to track it down. I found it in an old castle near the village of Schwartzhoff in Austria. Supposedly it belonged to one of the shepherds at Bethlehem. I don’t know about that. But legend has it, it traps all evil.”

“Legend has it?” Matt was not convinced.

“Mr. Dark was trapped there once before, between World War One and Two. The time of peace. We can do it again.”

The story sounded oddly familiar to Matt, but he still couldn’t believe it.

“You got innocent people coming here tonight,” Matt said. “I’m not going to stake their lives on that thing.”

Barnabas smiled. “Then I’ll have to show you how it works.” He turned and walked up the narrow stairs to the office. Matt followed.

Flint was barely more than a skeleton now. Still, he gnashed his teeth and dove for them, the chains holding him back by his bony ankles.

“Hey, Flint!” Barnabas was mocking him. “I brought you a present.” He handed the Staff to Matt. “Here. Show it to him.”

Matt hesitated. Barnabas went back behind the desk and waited. Flint cocked his skull, questioning. Matt thrust the Staff forward.

Flint reacted like he’d received an electric shock. Sparks flew from the chain around his legs and he convulsed, his one eye blazing in his skull.

He died.

Matt lowered the Staff slowly.

Smoke drifted off Flint’s lifeless body.

Barnabas walked up to Matt and took the Staff from him. “See? That’s why I kept him around. To demonstrate. That’s what it does to the weak. But to the Master, it creates an impenetrable barrier. He’ll be trapped in here forever.”

“Or as long as this theater stands.”

“I have money. This theater will be here as long as I live. And I’m just guessing, but I think, and I’m not boasting here, that I’m immortal. Don’t you think?”

Matt remembered that Barnabas was crazy. But the Staff worked. And crazy might be exactly what was needed here.

“So what’s next?” Matt asked.

“The show!” Barnabas started singing again, “
Tonight, what heights we’ll hit! On with the show, this is it
!”

Matt recognized it. It was the Bugs Bunny theme. He just hoped he wasn’t playing Elmer Fudd.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

FADE IN:


Times Square, when it was fun.


People and cars passing by. Theater marquees offering porn and martial arts movies. A blonde with masses of hair and real breasts bouncing under her blouse walks down the street. A man follows her with unbelievably bright red blood dripping out of his mouth and gray and blue circles under his eyes. Prog rock booms from the sound track.


The man grabs the woman. She screams, but no one seems to notice. He pulls her into an alley.


He eats her.


Now that’s the way to start a movie.

Matt walked back into the lobby just as the opening credits started rolling. The theater was nearly full. Mostly young men with the requisite soul patches and hats and young women with the requisite tattoos and piercings. A few days ago they would have looked avant-garde to Matt. Now he realized this was the new mainstream.

He’d seen no sign of decay or putrefaction in any of them, but they had come in so fast and they had so many neck tattoos that he couldn’t be sure. Most of them looked rather pale and sickly, but Barnabas assured Matt that was because they spent hours in front of video monitors, watching old movies and playing video games.

Barnabas greeted them in the lobby with a box that he made them drop their cell phones and iPads into. No phone calls or texting in the New Fairfax. After the Rialto incident, everyone laughed and obliged. If Barnabas had asked for their underwear, they’d probably have given that up too.

These patrons were, according to Barnabas, the voice of the future. The New Cinema. All were coming to pay homage to Barnabas Yancey and to
Dinner at the Brooklyn Morgue
. So once they were settled and the picture started to roll, they laughed at all the horrific parts of the film they were supposed to scream at and they talked through the rest, commenting, wisecracking, and acting generally superior to a movie they professed to admire. Matt didn’t understand it at all.

He opened the lobby doors and looked out onto the street. He figured four people could walk abreast through these double doors. There must have been close to fifty people in the theater. How could he get them all out in an emergency?

Fortunately the balcony was closed, but still…

He checked behind the concession stand. The Staff was there, waiting. He thought, for the hundredth time, what an ill-conceived plan this was.

Poking his head back in the house, he caught a glimpse of Barnabas standing by the screen giving him the “all clear” sign. It was a quarter after midnight and nothing had happened yet.

Matt glanced at the screen. Italy was doing a pretty piss-poor job of doubling for New York now. What was supposed to be Greenwich Village looked an awful lot like Rome.

A jump cut and now they were in LA, but it was supposed to be Brooklyn. The film was obviously cobbled together from bits and pieces of half-made projects, all done on a shoestring in many locations around the world and then put through a Cuisinart and called a movie. There was something endearing about it, in spite of all that, or maybe because of all that. Something about the sheer effort that went into making the picture made you root for it to succeed. Matt supposed that was one of the things Barnabas loved about this kind of cinema. The people making it didn’t have the advantages of the motion-picture-making machine behind them. They were like salmon swimming upstream, fighting all the forces of nature that tried to stop them from making some movie, any movie. And somehow they got it done.

Now, on the screen, another woman with big hair (brunette this time) was walking down a somehow familiar-looking street. The music that accompanied her was a childlike theme played on electric organ and chimes, accompanied by whispering female voices, which were totally cliché and totally effective in bringing the hair up on the back of Matt’s head.

That street that looked familiar, Matt realized, was Fairfax Avenue, the street they were on, although thirty years or more in the past. The woman walked by Eddie’s Deli, just next door. The woman walked up to the New Fairfax Cinema.

The crowd went wild with cheers as the woman opened the door and walked in.

“Hey, Matt.”

Matt turned and saw Eva standing in the doorway.

“What are you doing here?” Matt asked her.

“It’s my job,” she said, moving behind the concession stand. “I sell popcorn and soda. It isn’t a movie without popcorn and soda.”

She started to move behind the concession stand. Matt blocked her way.

“You can’t be here,” he said simply.

“Look, I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ve been through it this far and I intend to see it through to the end. You can’t leave a story unfinished.”

“This isn’t a goddamned story. This is reality.”

“It’s a movie, Matt. Keep telling yourself it’s only a movie.” She moved around him and started pouring kernels in the machine.

He darted back to check the screen again, and the audience.

They were getting restless, but he couldn’t tell if it was because the movie was slow or because Mr. Dark was making his presence felt. Barnabas was next to the screen, giving Matt a bored “OK” sign.

What if nothing happened? What if they went through the whole screening without an incident and everybody just went home? Matt had to quell the feeling of disappointment in his gut.

Disappointment? Was he looking forward to mayhem and chaos? Had he become that used to violence? How much of Mr. Dark was already inside him?

He shook the thought from his head and checked the screen again.

Now they were in some small town. The zombie man from the opening scene was shambling down a street at night, looking for fresh meat. There were birch trees in the background, so Matt knew they were back on the East Coast. The houses reminded him of Harrisonburg. He felt a pang of homesickness.

Then the pang turned to wonder.

The zombie was walking up to Gina’s house.

It was painted differently, but it was the same damn house. The same damn bluestone pillars. A woman sat on the same damn veranda on the same damn porch swing, her legs dangling idly, drinking sweet tea in the moonlight.

The woman got up and went inside. The shot was wide and dark and he couldn’t get a good look at her. She was dressed in the kind of flowing white negligee worn only by potential victims in horror movies, and from what he could see, she could have been Gina’s sister.

Not that she looked just like her. Her hair was bigger; her makeup was thicker. But the attitude, the swing of her hips. She was like a younger, prettier actress playing Gina.

The camera held on the porch. Then a point-of-view shot walked up to the house and the weird, weeping, childlike music swelled.

Matt turned to Eva. “Can I have your phone?”

Eva fished her iPhone out of her pocket and handed it to him. He snatched it from her, dialed. It rang repeatedly. He stepped outside into the street, remembering that it was after three in the morning in Harrisonburg and hoping Gina would forgive him.

The phone on the other end picked up and a groggy voice answered. “Hello?”

“Gina. It’s Matt.”

“Matt, are you OK?”

“I’m OK. How are you?”

“Sleeping, Matt. It’s the middle of the night. Even where you are.”

“I just…I just had to call.”

“That’s nice.”

“Are you alone?”

“Matt Cahill, are you checking up on me?”

“I don’t mind if you’re not. I was just wondering.”

“You can mind a little bit.” There was a smile in her voice. “But, as a matter of fact, I am alone. Want to try some phone sex? I’ve never done it, but it might be fun.”

Matt’s blood ran cold.

“Gina, what is that music you’re listening to?”

“What music? Is this part of the phone sex? Because if so, you’ll have to cue me in. I’m new at this.”

The chimes. The electric organ. The whispering female voices. Were they really all coming through the telephone?

He moved the receiver from his ear and listened. Only the sounds of the city at night came to him. He swallowed.

Putting the phone back to his ear, he heard the music throb and swell, like an incessant heartbeat.

“You know, I do hear something,” Gina said. “Must be the neighbors.”

Matt pushed through the double doors and rushed through the lobby to the theater.

On the screen, the camera was prowling outside the house, being the eyes of the killer. It moved to the bedroom window and peered in through the curtains. The woman was in bed, talking on a princess telephone, all innocent and unaware.

“Gina, listen to me,” Matt said into the phone. “Hang up. Call the police. Barricade yourself in the bathroom.”

“What? This is pretty weird, Matt.”

“Do it!”

All at once, the camera burst through the window on the screen, shattering the glass, and the woman in the movie turned in close-up and screamed.

On the phone, Gina’s scream was less theatrical but more genuine.

The line went dead.

Matt tore into the lobby, grabbed his ax from beside the door, and ran up the stairs.

“Where are you going?” Eva asked.

Matt didn’t answer. He was twenty-five hundred miles away from Gina. The only thing he could think of to do was to get into that projection booth.

And stop this movie.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Matt ran to the projection booth and tried the door. It was locked. He raised the ax and sent it crashing down into the lock. It splintered easily. Like a knife through butter. Or a guillotine through a neck.

As he kicked the wreckage of the door aside, Matt’s broad shoulders burst through into the room.

He blinked in the semidarkness.

“Have you come to free me?” a quavering voice asked.

Matt’s eyes adjusted to the dark. The projector was whirring like some ancient device of torture in the darkened room. Beside it sat a small, gnomelike creature, wrinkled beyond imagining, bones bursting through its withered flesh, looking up at him with an attitude of supplication.

“Can I leave now?” the thing asked him.

Matt brushed the gnome aside and raised the ax above the projector.

“It won’t stop it,” the creature said, its voice a croak.

Matt ignored him. He wasn’t about to listen to some gremlin while Gina’s life was at stake. He glanced through the tiny window in front of the projector, following the beam of light to the screen. The woman in the movie had barricaded herself in the bathroom. The door splintered and the blade of an ax forced its way through. The woman screamed.

Stanley Kubrick must have seen this picture, way back when.

Matt turned and brought his ax down on the projector. It exploded in a hail of sparks and flying metal. He chopped at it again and again until it lay, like a smoking, steam-punk nightmare, at his feet. The film unfurled from its reel like a snake, getting tangled and torn and twisted and finally coming to rest on the floor with an audible hiss.

He rested, breathing heavily, satisfied. Through the corner of his eye, Matt could see that the little man had his arm raised and was pointing out the little window. He looked.

The movie was still showing.

With no beam of light being projected from the booth, the image was still flickering on the screen. The woman was peeking through the hole in the door—a corkscrew came through the other side, puncturing her eyeball and yanking it out.