Midnight Special (6 page)

“Well, I didn’t expect Cowboy to go all Ninja Assassin on him.”

“Somebody want to tell me what’s going on?” Matt demanded.

“Just having a little fun, Cowboy,” Barnabas said, offering Matt his hand. “What’s the point of owning a haunted bathroom if you can’t have a little fun?”

“I think he broke my nose!” Flint was having trouble standing, slipping on the wet tile floor. Matt kept watching him. Flint seemed harmless now, but the evil was in him and it was only a matter of time before it turned to action. Matt promised himself he’d be there when it did.

Eva helped Flint steady himself. “Flint, why do you let him talk you into these things?”

“Because he thinks I’ll help get his movie made,” Barnabas said with a laugh. “That’s why everybody does everything with me!”

“That’s not true, Barney,” Flint sputtered.

“Of course it is!” Barnabas’s laugh was getting a little vicious. “I’m like the king with his court!” His eyes settled on Matt. “And you’re the wandering knight errant, am I right?”

Matt thought about socking him in the jaw. He didn’t think about socking people in the jaw very often, not unless they were rotting and evil and preying on the weak and helpless. Barnabas wasn’t rotting at all. Evil and preying? Maybe so.

But the fact of the matter was, Matt needed Barnabas right now. And Matt needed to keep a watchful eye on Flint.

Matt took Barnabas’s hand and shook it, squeezing a bit more than he had to.

“Yow!” Barnabas laughed again. Did he laugh at everything? “Quite a grip you got there, Cowboy!”

“I’m not a cowboy,” Matt said. He had to get out of this crowded bathroom.

Matt walked back into the lobby, then into the theater. What he saw there made him catch his breath.

The theater was beautiful. An old movie palace of the kind they don’t build anymore. The decor was a mix of Spanish baroque and Egyptian. It twirled and curled all around, from the balcony to the two box seats that framed the stage. A flamboyant, overelaborate, rococo bas-relief framed the red velvet curtain that covered the screen. And above that, peering over all, like a vulture waiting for game, was the bust of a harpy—half woman, half eagle—eyes red and glowing in the semidarkness.

Beauty and evil. The place dripped of both.

“You know, I’m not used to people walking away from me.”

Matt turned and saw Barnabas standing in the doorway.

“Unless you’re a studio executive at a party. They can’t get away from me fast enough.”

Barnabas was hovering around forty, with bushy hair surrounding a fast-receding hairline, and black sideburns growing down his face, as if in reaction to it. Matt thought hip people usually shaved their heads once they started to go bald. He decided Barnabas was reacting against that. The really hip thing was to not be hip.

“Well, I’m not a studio executive,” Matt said. “I’m not a cowboy either.”

“OK. What are you? A lumberjack?”

Matt nodded. That was close enough.

“Whoever you are, you fight like a son of a bitch. I mean, you don’t know tae kwon do and Krav Maga or anything. You just
throw punches
. My God, I haven’t seen fighting like that since Howard Hawks.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“Ordinarily I’d toss you out of here for saying a thing like that. But something tells me…” He paused to consider. “So tell me, what movie do you want to make? You have two minutes.”

“I don’t want to make a movie.”

“C’mon. Everyone wants to make a movie.”

“Not me.”

“Then what do you want from me?”

“I want to stop you from showing
Dinner at the Brooklyn Morgue
tomorrow night.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Barnabas sucked on the straw sticking out of a Big Gulp and sat down on the desk in the dingy office. He wore a hoodie. He was about five years too old to pull off a hoodie.

“What’s it to you, Matthew?” Barnabas asked, hunching over expectantly. Flint and Eva were in the tiny, cramped office too, hanging out by the doorway. Matt was given center stage in an expensive office chair that looked very out of place in the shabby surroundings.

“What?” Matt asked.

“C’mon, I gave you a Big Gulp, I let you sit in my genuine Herman Miller chair. Speak up now.”

Matt felt rankled. “I’m not a performing monkey.”

Barnabas looked offended. “What does that mean, ‘I’m not a performing monkey’? They don’t even use performing monkeys in the movies anymore. It’s all CGI.” His bark of a laugh echoed against the walls. “Now, what’s it to you whether I show
Morgue
tomorrow night?”

“You know as well as I do. That movie’s cursed.”

“I know that tomorrow night is the thirteenth anniversary of the last time it was screened here. I know we’re gonna have a big party to celebrate. I know it’s gonna put asses in seats!”

“I don’t believe you care about how many asses you have in how many seats. This theater is just a hobby for you, isn’t it?”

Barnabas grinned at Eva. Then he glanced over at a pair of manacles on a pair of chains that were mounted on the wall. “We won’t talk about my hobbies, OK? This is my
calling
, if you must know. This theater is why I’m alive.”

“What about making movies?”

“That’s what I do for a living. What do you do for a living, Matt? There aren’t a lot of forests to chop down in LA.”

“I do a little of this, a little of that.”

Barnabas smiled. “You want to work here, Cowboy? We could use a janitor. You already showed me that you know your way around with a mop!” That barking laugh again. It was getting past annoying.

Matt looked at Flint. The rotting of his face held steady. It was waiting.

“I hope I didn’t hurt you too bad, Flint,” Matt lied.

“You just surprised me,” Flint muttered.

“Hear that,” Barnabas laughed. “
You
surprised
him
!” Barnabas threw an old piece of popcorn at Flint. “You were the one wearing the Skeletor mask, Flint! You were supposed to surprise the fuck out of him!”

Matt looked at Eva leaning on the doorjamb, looking bored. “Were you in on the fun?”

She looked at him blandly. “Do I look like I’d pull a stunt like that?” She pulled a cigarette from a pack of smokes that had an Indian on the wrapper and let it dangle from her lips.

“I don’t know,” Matt said.

“No, she’d never do that,” Barnabas said. “She’s innocent as the new-fallen snow. We saw you heading for the bathroom and figured she was going to do one of her tours. We thought we’d see what happens. Figured you’d be scared, it would be a laugh.” His eyes drifted to Eva. “Maybe even figured
she’d
be scared. Get a rise out of her for once.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, Barney.” She dug an old Zippo lighter out of her pants pocket and proceeded to light up.

“No smoking in the theater, Eva.”

“Fuck you.” She blew a cloud of smoke at Barnabas. But she did snuff the cigarette out on the wall.
She might be rebellious,
Matt thought,
but she still does what he says.

Barnabas turned back to Matt. “Anyway, I never thought you’d turn our little prank into a—what do you call it?—donnybrook.”

Matt locked eyes with Barnabas. “Then why didn’t you wear the mask, Mr. Yancey? If it was such an innocent gag?”

Barnabas looked right back at him. “Because you never know what’ll happen.”

“Then that’s what I think about the screening tomorrow night. You never know what’ll happen.”

“Oh, I know what’ll happen. That story Eva told you, it was the truth. I expect Mr. Zander Taman will come back from the grave and slaughter everyone there.”

Matt watched him. Barnabas wasn’t laughing. “That’s not a joke.”

“Damn right it’s not. It’s the climax of the screenplay I’m writing. When Mr. Dark comes shambling in with his rotting entrails dragging behind him to reenact his crime.”

“Why do you call him ‘Mr. Dark’?” Matt asked, trying to keep his voice steady.

“
Taman
is the Croatian word for ‘dark.’ That’s one thing all the crimes have in common. The word
dark
was written at the scenes, in all different languages. Don’t you think that’s significant, Dead Man?”

Matt started. “You know who I am?”

“Sure. I read all about you. Matt Cahill. It’s a pretty memorable name. Sort of like Marshal Dillon and John Wayne all rolled into one.” Barnabas gave his barking laugh. “The one guy I know who really has a tale worth telling, and he doesn’t want to make a movie! Incredible!”

Matt stood up. “I’ll take that job you offered me, Mr. Yancey.”

“Good. But please, Mr. Yancey is the guy who fucked my mother. I’m Barney.” He leaped off the table, reminding Matt of a little boy with ADHD. Grabbing a mop from a corner, he handed it to Matt. “Pay special attention to the back row. That’s where the masturbators sit. I know. Been there, done that.” And then there was that barking laugh again.

Flint checked the time on his cell phone. “We better go, Barnabas.”

“Oh, right. You coming to the picture, Eva?”

Eva shrugged. “I’ve seen it.”

“So have I. A million times. But not in this setting. Setting is everything.” His gaze landed on Matt as if he’d forgotten all about him. “You wanna come?”

“Where?”

“We’re going to a screening of
Night of the Living Dead
. In a cemetery.”

“Been there,” said Matt. “Done that.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

It didn’t surprise Matt that he was sitting in the back of a hearse. A hearse that was retrofitted with leather seats (where the coffins used to be) and pimped out with a primo sound system, which was currently blasting Bernard Herrmann’s score for
Twisted Nerve
for everybody on Melrose Avenue to hear.

No, it didn’t surprise Matt that Barnabas had a hearse. Everything Barnabas did was about making an impact, saying “Look at me! Aren’t I weird?” It must have been exhausting to be Barnabas Yancey.

Flint was behind the steering wheel. Matt was behind him in the backseat, where he could just glimpse the squirming maggots in his eye if he leaned forward. They hadn’t spread any. Flint seemed to be maintaining himself. For now.

That was one of the reasons Matt had agreed to go with them to the movie. The other was that he sensed that there was more to Barnabas’s insistence on holding the screening tomorrow night than sheer mischievousness. Barnabas knew more about Mr. Dark than he let on. Matt wanted to stay near Barnabas and see what made him tick.

But that didn’t explain why Eva changed her mind and decided to come along. Or why she was sitting so near to him, drumming her black fingernails on his thigh. Hadn’t Matt made his lack of interest clear?

He had asked to drop by his hotel room on the way and pick up his duffel bag, his ax waiting inside it. Why he wanted it close to him, he wasn’t sure. He was just used to having it there, and in the small towns and on the back roads he usually frequented, no one questioned a man carrying a large duffel slung over his shoulder. In a big city it made him stand out like a homeless person.

Which was what he was, he supposed.

He missed Harrisonburg. He’d picked up the room phone in his hotel and called Gina, but all he’d got was her voice mail. He hadn’t left a message. He was never sure what to say on those things. “How are you?” “I’m here.” “I miss you.” It all seemed so forced.

So here he was, driving in a cherry red hearse toward the Hollywood Forever Cemetery to see a zombie movie, with a girl with bleached blond hair and a pierced eyebrow who wanted to fuck him, and a forty-year-old teenager who was now playing Wanda Jackson’s “Riot in Cell Block #9” at full volume, as the hearse vibrated with bass, motoring down the street.

Matt decided he didn’t like LA.

After he’d been to New York a few months back, he’d thought all big cities would be the same. But whereas New York crushed you down by the sheer weight of the buildings or the cacophonous noise of the traffic, Los Angeles was all spread out and nondescript and anonymous. It was as if a small Western town had grown and grown, like the Blob, and was threatening to eat up the entire country if it wasn’t stopped.

Matt could see no pedestrians on the sidewalk, just empty nail salons and auto repair shops. Then all at once there was a throng of people, all twentysomething (or people on either side of their twenties who wished they were twentysomething), lined up outside the gates of an old cemetery, which sprang up out of nowhere between a transmission/muffler shop and a Chinese restaurant.

Flint steered the hearse into the crowd, easing his way through the gates. The mob parted with well-rehearsed ease, and they drove into the cemetery. Barnabas rolled down his window and waved to the multitude—they all waved back with the respect and devotion of a congregation for its pastor.

Matt took a closer look at the crowd and his heart skipped a beat.

They were all rotting and covered with running sores.

It took him a second to realize that they were wearing makeup. This was a costume event. Everyone was made up as zombies.

Great
,
thought Matt. Now it would be hard to tell the fake ghouls from the real ones. But Matt figured, after all he’d been through, he’d be up for the job.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The cemetery was huge. Behind white walls, secreted from the city that pulsed all around it, the cemetery lay like a sleeping giant. Acres of tombstones and marble statues. Palm trees, looking to Matt like alien fingers scratching at the night sky, towered overhead among the clouds and fingered the stars.

It wasn’t a modern cemetery. It didn’t have concrete slabs flush with the ground to make it easier to mow the lawn. No, this was an old-fashioned, full-on
graveyard
, filled with monuments and mausoleums and statues of weeping angels. It looked for all the world like a cemetery movie set. It was even lit like a film—low arcs of light filtered through the headstones, more to provide atmosphere than to add illumination. The only word Matt could think of to fit this place was a word from his childhood, a word he hadn’t used in years—it was
spooky
. Like a Halloween haunted house spooky. Like funhouse spooky.