Midnight Special (12 page)

As they ran from the projection booth, Matt could hear Zander’s screams mingle with the sizzling sound of the film as it burned.

There was more than one way to set a person free, Matt thought.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The office was clear, except for the corpse of Flint, and that didn’t seem like such a bad thing to Eva now. Matt sat her down on the sofa and told her to wait for him. He had things to do.

People were being killed down in the theater.

Matt ran barreling down the stairs. Matt didn’t see the tall man hiding around the turn.

The tall man clotheslined him as he ran past. Matt was knocked off his feet, falling back onto the stairs, stunned. The ax flew out of his hand.

Matt reacted fast, bounding back to his feet. The tall man reacted faster, punching Matt hard in the face as he rose. Matt took the blow, then reached for the ax and found it was gone. He looked up and saw that the tall man had the ax by the grip. And was swinging it down.

He rolled aside as the ax blade chopped into the step. It bit in deep. As the tall man tried to pry it loose, Matt rolled back and grabbed the handle. The tall man wrenched it away from Matt and brought it down again.

Matt caught it by the belly of the ax handle, just inches from his face. The tall man tried to push the ax blade down into Matt’s cheek. He was strong, but Matt was stronger.

Matt yanked the ax to the side, pulling the tall man off balance. The man teetered for a second, then fell down on the stairs. Matt punched him as he fell; then he grabbed the ax with his two hands and pulled it from the tall man’s grasp.

Springing to his feet, Matt raised the ax and brought it down into the tall man’s back, severing his spine. The tall man flopped for second, then went limp. Dead.

How many had Matt killed over the past two years—including Zander?

No time for thoughts like that now. He raced down the stairs.

The lobby was chaos.

The popcorn machine was tilted and blocking one of the entrances to the theater. Arms were reaching from the theater, trying to claw their way out.

Barnabas was at the other door, trying to hold it closed, bloody sword in his hand. The pounding and scratching from the other side of the door were deafening.

At Barnabas’s feet were scattered limbs and fingers, chopped off in the fight. Looking up at Matt, Barnabas’s expression was one of mild annoyance.

“I didn’t think I’d see you again,” he said.

Matt didn’t reply. He was looking toward the popcorn machine, at the people desperately trying to get past. To escape.

“What are you doing?” he asked Barnabas.

“Get the Staff!” Barnabas ordered.

Matt realized that Barnabas was keeping everybody trapped in the theater. The sick and the well. The damned and the tormented.

“Open the door!” he screamed at Barnabas. “Let them out!”

“Just a second,” Barnabas answered, the calmness in his voice in sharp contrast to the tension of his body as he held the door fast, despite the thudding and hammering and crying from within.

“Those are innocent people!”

“Innocent? Have you read their screenplays? Seen their short films? They’re guilty of being hacks!” Barnabas laughed and checked his watch. “I guess I’ve left them in long enough.”

Barnabas stepped back and threw the door open.

A crowd of people burst out, running, getting jammed in the door and struggling, like something out of the Three Stooges. Barnabas laughed manically as he watched. Nothing like slapstick.

The mob made a mad dash for the door. One of them, his hand a skeletal claw, reached for the pink hair of a screaming woman and yanked it back, twisting the neck of his victim at an impossible angle.

Matt brought his ax down and chopped the hand off. The man whirled around in anger as the woman fell to the ground, lifeless. With his remaining hand the man reached for Matt’s face, scratching the flesh, searching for Matt’s eyes. Matt batted the hand away and found himself pinned against the concession stand. The man was climbing on top of him, biting the wrist that held the ax, pushing his whole weight on Matt’s chest. The stump of the man’s right hand, still gushing blood, was pressing into Matt’s face, while his teeth were digging into Matt’s wrist bone—Matt dropped the ax. The man reared back with glee.

Matt stopped resisting and used the weight of the man on top of him to carry them both over the concession stand.

The man flipped and crashed into the soda machine. Matt flipped over too and found himself on the sticky floor behind the cash register. His hand grabbed something—a weapon—and he picked it up. The Staff of Truth.

He brought it down on the man’s head. He didn’t spark or catch on fire. But the Staff did split his skull.

Dead.

Another one.

The Staff broke in two at the impact. Matt could see that it was made of plywood.

He looked around to see that the lobby was nearly empty. A few moaning victims lay on in the floor.

And one rotting woman trying to strangle Barnabas.

He leaped over the concession stand, picked up his ax off the floor, and hacked at the woman’s head. Her brains spilled out onto the carpet.

Another.

Barnabas was laughing like a hyena.

“That was a close one!” he said.

Matt went to the double doors that stood open to the street. He looked out and saw a mob of limping people, survivors of the massacre, heading away. Out of fifty people, maybe seven were dead.

Sirens approached from a distance. Someone must have kept a secret cell phone and called the police from the theater.

Matt closed the doors and barred them with the two pieces of the Staff of Truth. Would it keep the cops out? Matt doubted it.

He doubted it would do anything.

He doubted the shepherds of Bethlehem used plywood to make their staffs.

“What is this?” Matt demanded of Barnabas, gesturing to the Staff.

Barnabas sputtered with laughter. “It’s a prop! From an old
Twilight Zone
episode. Don’t you remember? ‘The Howling Man.’ John Carradine? H.M. Wynant?”

Matt remembered. That was why the story had seemed familiar. He’d seen that episode when he was a kid, like all the others, staying up late at night, peering at the TV set from behind the sofa, too scared to watch it full on.

“So you made it up?”

“Well, Charles Beaumont made it up. I just retold it. We call it an
homage
.”

“But up in your office. With Flint…”

“The chain was hooked up to a battery. I like to do a little electric play now and then. I just turned it up all the way and zapped him!”

“Why? Why did you do all this? Just to kill people?”

“No, no, no! You don’t understand at all!” Barnabas jumped to his feet, excited. “It’s the people that
lived
that matter. That’s why I kept them trapped in the theater just long enough to
experience
the horror! They have this night in their souls now. So when they make movies, they’ll have something to make them about! And every little film they make will have a part of Mr. Dark in them. And everyone that sees those movies, they’ll see that, they’ll be exposed to the darkness! It’ll spread like a summer blockbuster!”

“I burned the film up,” Matt said. “It will never harm anyone again.”

Barnabas shrugged. “The damage has already been done, Cowboy.”

Bang! The street doors vibrated with a sudden impact. “Open up! LAPD!”

“Oops. I just remembered. I haven’t killed Eva yet. What was I thinking?” Barnabas gripped his sword and ran for the stairs.

Matt followed him. As he ran up the stairs, he heard the front doors crashing in. The cavalry had arrived.

When Barnabas made it to the top of the stairs, he turned and faced Matt, brandishing his samurai sword like Yojimbo.

Matt stopped. “Why do you want to kill Eva?”

“Did you see her short film? She’s very good. I don’t want the competition,” Barnabas said with his barking laugh.

Matt raised his ax.

“You can’t kill me!” Barnabas said. “I can’t kill you. We’re immortal. It’s just like
Highlander
.”

Barnabas swung his sword.

Matt swung his ax.

When the sword hit the ax, it broke in two, but the ax kept going and struck Barnabas square in the chest. It plunged in, splitting his ribs and puncturing his lungs.

Barnabas looked at the wound in dull surprise. “Fuck,” he said. “I guess I was wrong.”

Matt shoved the ax the rest of the way in, and the light went out of Barnabas’s eyes.

EPILOGUE

Harrisonburg County Hospital

Gina lay, looking like she was asleep.

Which, Matt realized, she was. How long the coma would last, the doctors couldn’t say. A month? A year? A lifetime?

Her sister had found her. She had been attacked by an unknown assailant. He’d broken in through the bedroom window and broken down the bathroom door, carved out her right eye, and then left her.

Why? Nobody could say.

Matt took her hand and wept. It had been a long time since Matt had cried, and when he did, it burst out of him in long, horrendous sobs that unnerved the nurses in attendance, though they were used to all manner of tears.

After an hour, he decided to leave.

What was there to stay for?

He had come to Harrisonburg the day before, after dropping Eva off with her mother in Bakersfield, California. They had made it out of the theater by the back way, just avoiding the LAPD’s careful sweep of the structure. That was just as well. Matt didn’t feel he could explain why he’d killed three people. Or was it four?

He walked down the hospital corridor in Harrisonburg, and he was struck by how much it felt like a hospital corridor anywhere. He could have just been leaving Janey after chemo, asleep in her bed, not Gina.

As he walked down the hallway, he kept his eyes on all the doctors, waiting for one of them to pull a lollipop out of his pocket and reveal himself as Mr. Dark.

Mr. Dark, who had lured Matt to LA in order to make him the new projectionist for his dark masterpiece. Mr. Dark, who had turned Barnabas into another of his living tools. Mr. Dark, who had even twisted that stewardess on his flight into an insane harridan, just to prevent Matt from suspecting that he was walking into a trap.

But Matt had beaten him, hadn’t he? Destroyed the film, the projectionist, even Barnabas himself. He had saved most of the crowd at the theater too.

Or did he just save them only to have to hunt them down again someday, after they’d made their own films to spread Mr. Dark’s evil?

Maybe they’d be stuck in development hell. And deservedly so.

Matt sighed. Mr. Dark wasn’t there. He thought of Gina, trapped in that hospital bed, probably for the rest of her life. No, Matt hadn’t beaten Mr. Dark. This game had turned out, at best, as a draw.

In the parking lot, Matt kick-started his motorcycle and took Route 11 North. To nowhere in particular.

Twenty-five hundred miles to the west, Eva finally opened her eyes after sleeping for three days. She got out of her mother’s guest bed and ate four bowls of Cap’n Crunch cereal. Feeling fortified, she decided it was time to do something with her life.

She opened her mother’s old Mac Pro laptop and began to write a screenplay.

FADE IN:


Times Square. A WOMAN walks down the street. A MAN follows her with blood dripping out of his mouth. The man grabs the woman. He pulls her into an alley. He eats her.


Now that’s the way to start a movie
, she thought.

About the Author

Phoef Sutton was born in Washington, DC. He cut his eyeteeth as a playwright, but first made a living as a writer in TV. He worked on the classic NBC series
Cheers
for eight years, went on to write movies (
The Fan
,
Mrs. Winterbourne
), and served as consulting producer and writer for
Boston Legal
and
Terriers
. He lives in South Pasadena, California, and Vinalhaven, Maine, with his wife and two daughters.