Midnight Special (11 page)

The crowd exploded with laughter.

Matt wheeled around and faced the little man with his mummified, dried-apple face.

“How do I stop it?” Matt asked.

“You can’t. It’s begun. You have to see it through to the end.”

“There must be some other way.”

“No. No, no, no. You have to see it all. Till the end credits. That’s the way it works.”

Matt wanted to throttle the little man, to chop him to pieces, to do anything he could to save Gina. But would killing this sinful dwarf do anything to achieve that? He took a deep breath and tried to control himself. He had to find out what was going on before he acted.

“Who are you?” he asked with a semblance of calm.

“Zander Taman.”

The name jarred Matt’s memory. “Zander Taman? Warren Worley’s boyfriend? The one who killed all those people in 1998?”

“No! I didn’t! They killed each other! I came up here to hide!”

Matt took a closer look at his face. It looked like one of those shrunken heads he used to see advertised in the back of comic books. He wanted to squeeze it and see if it crumbled. He controlled himself.

“Where have you been all this time?” Matt asked.

Zander took a look around the tiny room and said, “Here.”

Matt stared at him in disbelief. “You’ve been in this room for fourteen years?”

“Is that all? It feels longer than that.”

“You’ve never left?”

“Oh, I leave sometimes. When the film leaves. I go with the film.”

“What do you mean?”

The little man sighed and repeated himself, as if he were talking to an idiot. “I accompany the film to other venues. And watch it unspool. I’m the projectionist. I show it and move on.”

Matt paced the tiny room, refusing to look at the screen. He could hear the screams of the woman on the sound track. The zombie had her.

“I thought you were going to let me out,” Zander went on. “I thought you were my replacement.”

“Replacement?”

“The movie must be shown. The demon must be fed.”

“Mr. Dark?”

The imp shrugged. “He’s known by many names. He comes in many guises. You’re one of his windows into this world. So am I. But he wants more. That’s what the movie’s all about.”

Matt picked Zander up—he weighed nothing, as if he were made of dust—and slammed him against the wall.

“Tell me! Are you the reason those people went crazy? Did you drive them to it?”

The little man shrieked. “No! It’s the movie that drives them to it! I’m just the projectionist!”

“Tell me how to stop this! Tell me how to save Gina!”

Zander shook his desiccated head. “I don’t know any Gina, but whoever she is, she’s dead now. And she was just a distraction anyway. To get you up here.”

Matt let Zander go and he slid to the floor, getting tangled in the mass of unspooled film. He heard screams from the theater. They weren’t fun screams. They weren’t roller-coaster screams. They were real screams.

“It’s begun,” Zander said.

Matt hefted his ax and ran to the door. He stopped.

The doorway was gone.

He spun around. Looking for the door he had broken down, looking for the way out. He just saw four walls around him and no exit.

“You see?” the gnome said. “You are my replacement. You’re the new projectionist.”

Matt pounded the walls, looking for a way out.

“Relax and watch the movie,” Zander said. “You’re going to be watching it for a long time.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Barnabas was getting kind of bored. The movie had been going on for twenty minutes, and nada. Bupkes. Zero. No attacks. No smell of decay coming from the audience—although, with the overwhelming scent of eighty years’ worth of stale Jujubes and old hand jobs, it might have been masked.

If he could turn around and watch the screen, time would pass a little more quickly. But he didn’t want to chance missing a signal.

At the back of the house, Matt the Cowboy stuck his head in again, this time holding an iPhone to his ear. Taking personal calls on the job? He’d have to talk with that boy.

Barnabas gave him a bored thumbs-up, but he wasn’t sure if Matt saw it or not, what with the way he turned on his heels and booked it out of there. As the door swung shut, he could see Matt grab his ax and head up the stairs. Right on schedule.

He considered following Matt and talking with him, but that would mean leaving his post. And theirs not to reason why, he quoted in his mind (because he was more well-read in the classics than he let on), theirs but to do and…

A tall man with gray hair in a gray suit got up and started walking up the aisle toward the exit. Was he leaving? Was he going to the bathroom? Was he going to kill somebody?

Inquiring minds want to know
,
thought Barnabas. It was his job to check it out. His duty and all that.

Barnabas sprinted up the aisle, glad to be moving. This standing like a Beefeater at Buckingham Palace was getting old.

Pushing his way through the swinging doors to the lobby, he was surprised to see Eva behind the concession stand, selling the man some popcorn.

“What are you doing here, Evangeline?” Barnabas asked, ignoring the tall man at the counter.

“Just doing my job, boss,” Eva answered.

“I think you’re worried about me; that’s what I think. I’m touched.”

“Maybe it’s not you I’m worried about. Did you ever think of that?”

Barnabas glanced upstairs. “The lumberjack? I didn’t know you could be swayed by a nice pair of pecs. I’m a little disappointed in you.”

She pumped the Golden Flavoring all over the popcorn. “Hey, the heart wants what it wants.”

The tall man, whose gray hair hung wildly about his head, stuck his hand out, waiting for the change. Barnabas could see, on his wrist, the rotting sores of infection. Without missing a beat, Barnabas swooped down and grabbed his samurai sword from behind the concession stand.

The tall man saw him move, though. He reacted with a swiftness that startled Eva. He grabbed her arm and yanked her over the glass counter, pressing her body close to his, using it as a shield.

When Barnabas came up with the sword, he was confronted with Eva’s startled expression over the tall man’s arm wrapped around her throat.

“Well played,” Barnabas said to the tall man.

The tall man just grunted. He glanced back at the theater.

“You want to get back there, don’t you?” Barnabas said to him. “That’s where the people are. That’s where the action is. OK. Fine. But you’ll have to go through me first.” He hefted the sword the way he’d seen it done in a thousand movies. It felt good. It felt real.

But instead of rushing him and obligingly impaling himself on the sword, the tall man thrust Eva forward toward the point of the blade. Barnabas pulled it aside just in time and she stumbled into him, knocking him off his feet.

Eva sprang up just as the tall man leaped over the counter and pulled the popcorn machine over, making it crash across the doorway into the theater, effectively blocking that way out. She dodged around and ran up the stairs. The tall man brushed stray popcorn kernels off his suit, looked at Barnabas lying on the floor, then turned and made his way up the stairs. After Eva.

Barnabas got to his feet and started to chase after him. But then he heard screams coming from inside the theater. Finally. It was happening!

Barnabas rushed for the door that wasn’t barricaded by the popcorn maker. He flung it open.

And revealed bedlam.

There were at least three “infected” people. One was picking up a young man and slamming him down onto a seat, breaking his back. Another had a young woman down in the aisle and was digging at her face, peeling it off bit by bit. The third had chased a man up the side of the wall. The man was hanging from the balcony. He lost his grip and tumbled down into the seats.

On the screen, the zombies were on the attack too. Ripping off faces. Breaking backs. Mirroring what was happening in the theater. Or was it the other way around?

It was all melding into one great scene of horror, and the red eyes of the harpy in the ceiling were spitting fire.

Barnabas was thrilled.

He raised his sword, and as the people ran madly up the aisle to escape, he was ready.

To stop them.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The four walls seemed to close in on Matt. The more he circled them, the more they seemed like his whole world. And the little window that looked out onto the screen drew his focus no matter how much he tried to look away.

The woman on screen who was Gina-but-not-Gina lay unconscious on the bathroom floor. The zombie bent over her and sniffed at her. He lifted her up in his arms and began to carry her away, in the time-honored way that every monster from the Mummy to the Creature from the Black Lagoon had carried away damsels to their lairs. What did they plan to do to them when they got them there? The movies never said. The hero always came to the rescue before the monster’s desires could be fulfilled.

In this case the hero was a continent away, locked in a tiny room, watching the monster rape and devour the girl. Forever.

Matt closed his eyes.

He could still see the movie, as if it was projected on the inside of his eyelids. He literally couldn’t look away.

“It’s inside you now,” Zander said. “By the time this screening is over, you will be the movie. And I will be free.”

Matt looked at Zander, fading away in the shadows of the projection booth. He could still see the movie out of the corner of his eye. It would always be there.

“Free?” Matt asked him.

“Free to die,” Zander said, his voice full of wistful desire.

Eva ran.

She ran from the madness she heard erupting down in the theater. She ran from the footsteps of the tall man on the stairs behind her. She ran from the insanity that seemed to ooze from the walls around her.

“Girl!” the tall man called out; an order, a demand, an ultimatum.

She ran to the office door and flung it open. Flint was there, lying chained to the wall, dead, with staring eyes that seemed to cry out to her.

She backed out of the doorway and into the tall man’s arms.

He seized her, pulling her to him, squeezing the life out of her.

Eva twisted around in his grasp and kissed him.

The tall man hesitated, as if recalling something from his life before the movie, a desire more primal than the desire to kill.

That hesitation was all Eva needed. She reached her hand to his face and dug her black fingernails into his left eye. He screamed, a blast like a foghorn from deep in his soul.

She pushed him away and ran down the hall.

His footsteps faltered; then she could hear them chasing after her.

She turned the corner and saw the door to the projection booth. It had been busted down and was lying in pieces on the floor, so it would afford her no protection. But it was the only way open to her.

She sprinted into the projection booth hoping against hope that Matt would be there.

With his ax.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Matt had no idea how long he’d been watching the film. It might have been minutes. It might have been hours.

It might have been years.

His life before the movie was becoming an indistinct memory. Images of childhood and Janey and snow and killing flashed across his mind, but he couldn’t tell if they were real memories or memories from the movie he was watching.

The movie he’d always been watching.

“Matt?” Eva screamed.

She was screaming from a long way off. As if she was in another theater at a multiplex. He wished she’d stop. She was interfering with his enjoyment of the film.

She slapped him across the face.

He grabbed Eva’s wrist and twisted it. “Shut up and let me watch the movie!” he shouted.

Then it all came back to him. Eva was standing in front of him. Behind her was the open doorway, the broken-down door lying across the threshold, the tall man standing outside, his eye socket bloody, his mouth open in a silent scream.

Matt grabbed his ax and swung it toward the tall man, who darted away into the shadows of the hall.

“Get out!” Zander was shrieking to Eva. “Get out and leave us alone!”

Matt staggered for moment, his feet stumbling amid the tangle of film that wrapped around his legs like the tentacles of an octopus.

His eyes focused on Eva.

“Your lighter,” he said.

Eva looked at him, confused and frightened. “What?”

“Take your lighter. And set fire to this fucking film.”

“What film?”

He blinked and looked at the floor. There was no film coiled around his feet.

He looked around. Zander was nowhere to be seen.

And the projector was there, whirring away, all in one piece, showing the film. As if he had never attacked it with his ax.

He shook his head. Too many questions.

But only one answer.

“Take the film out of the projector,” Matt said to Eva, calmly.

“What?”

“Do it. Rip it out.”

She went to the projector and turned it off. A great cry rose from the theater.

Grabbing the film, she yanked it from the projector. Matt took the reel, unwound the film into a huge pile in the middle of the floor, and used Eva’s lighter to set it aflame.