The Film You Are About to See, page 10
Emergo!
Saturday, August 8, 1959
12:03 AM
As she and Vincent made their way back and away from the hanging skeleton prop, June spotted their friends.
“Were you able to reach anyone?”
“We did,” Lenny said.
“But they thought it was a joke!” Ingrid shouted in frustration, tossing her hands up.
“They agreed to send someone out, but it’ll be too late by then,” Stef said.
“Then we have to warn everyone.”
They returned to the lot, panting. The screen was a strange bright white. Hints of blue tinted the edges. June knew that meant that there was no film in the reel. Usually the film switch was quick, precise enough to go mostly unnoticed by the audience.
A cackling menace came over the lot speakers. “From us here at Peterson’s Pictures’ Dusk Til Dawn Spooktacular, we bring you another treat from the mischievous mastermind William Castle.”
Moviegoers talked among themselves, giddy with sugar rushes and at the delicious prospect of being scared to death.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the film you are about to see is maniacal, criminal, and murderous.”
The crowd oooed.
“You’ll venture into a morgue, witness body-snatching and the snap-quick descent of the bloody guillotine!”
A recorded scream, a woman. Another joined her. Then another.
“So, we introduce to you, The Fright Break!”
The audience cheered.
“Hurry,” June said. “Tell everyone you can.”
“Now, now,” the showman teased, “we understand some of you might be just too terrified to go on. So, we offer you the chance to leave the drive-in theatre now.”
The audience booed.
“You may leave the drive-in now,” the man said over the speakers. “Go, if you want. Now’s your chance. The reel is empty.”
A clatter came from the projector, signaling so.
“Take the coward’s corner, as Mr. Castle calls it.”
June and her friends hurried beside vehicles, hanging on windows, shouting the same warnings. “Get out of here!”
“There’s a killer!”
“Go, as fast as you can!
Dread dwelled within June as she and the gang weaved through the rows of speedsters, hot rods, and rust buckets. The creature was still out there. And it could be anyone.
“Please,” June said into a truck. “Listen to us, you have to leave.”
A math teacher June recognized from school but never had herself waved her off. “I ain’t no coward.”
He grabbed his swollen stomach as he laughed.
“Just remember to unclip the speakers from your window before pulling away. And for those of you braving the rest of the show, those who think they can survive until dawn, just look at those folks in the coward’s corner.”
No one was leaving the lot.
Vincent pounded on a closed car window nearby. “Go! Go! Go!”
He smacked the side of the vehicle like a horse out of hell, hoping to startle the driver into action. He’d only awoken a pre-teen’s angry grandpa, who gave him a pitiful grin. Sure, I’ll play along, it said.
“Please, listen to us,” Vincent urged. “Go!”
People shook their heads at them. A couple sat on the trunk of their speedster, car top down, pointed and laughed.
“Please, it isn’t safe!” Ingrid tried.
No one listened to them. To the audience, they were just part of another gimmick.
“Everyone, go!” Vincent shouted in an explosion of panic.
Hearts pounding, faces red from shouting, the group was exhausted.
“This is real!” Stef stomped. Then, hopelessly, “Why aren’t they listening to us?”
People applauded June and her friends, as if they had delivered some kind of performance.
“No takers?” the showman teased over the speakers. “Well, it’s your funeral.”
The audience laughed.
“Get back to the car,” June said.
They tore through the mud, slipping more than a few times. The audience erupted. To them, June and her friends were the fleeting cowards the showman spoke of. And if William Castle encouraged laughter, demanded screams, which he did for these kinds of gimmicks, audiences were thrilled to oblige.
Fear gripped June tight. She sensed the shock. Defeat. Loss of control. Everything the creature needed to turn a person into a killing machine.
It had already found someone. She sensed a disturbance. It scorched her to her core. And this person understood the parasite’s goals and that people would die, though they could do nothing to stop it.
She knew the feeling.
But where was it coming from?
Her eyes frantically searched over the vehicles, as she asked herself: Who was man and who was monster?
The answer was almost too terrifying to know. But as far as she could tell, she was the only one who could see it.
And there it was. Razors like little daggers dug into the back of her neck. She raised a hand to the spot, checking for blood. Nothing. The pain wasn’t her own.
The creature.
“It has someone else!” June yelled to her friends.
They looked around the lot and back to her. “Where?”
She didn’t know yet. Moments passed and the screen crackled with cigarette burn-like dots. It was the changeover cue. That detail nagged at her. The showman was done with his spiel, yet the film hadn’t been reloaded.
June awaited more theatrics, two floating skeletons this time, another gimmick at play, but none came. She looked to the cement building and the tiny window above concessions, where the projection emitted from.
The screen remained unchanged. Why haven’t they rolled the film? The projectionist had done it with precision and little disruption that night, so why the delay now?
It hit her, then.
Because he hadn’t been there to reload the film.
“It’s the projectionist,” she said. Then again, shouting to her friends, “It’s the projectionist!”
They hadn’t known what he looked like, but someone else did.
The math teacher, still believing this was all part of an interactive show, pointed to a man rushing through the lot. “There’s the projectionist now!”
The slender man in suspenders ran to the full-bellied teacher who’d pointed him out. He wrapped an arm around his neck, and with the other hand swept a utility blade used for manual film trimming across his neck. Blood jetted from the wound. The injured man instinctively brought a hand to his throat as if that could make it go away, make it make sense, or even slow the bleeding.
June felt a ring of fire around her own throat, a burning phantom pain.
Patrons screamed shrill shrieks of terror, and June was overwhelmed by their fear surging through her. This wasn’t like the wandering psychiatric patients or the flying skeleton. This was murder right before their eyes. Senseless and cruel. And it terrified them far more than any horror film ever had. Horror films didn’t go that far.
The projectionist then shoved the dull blade through his own eye, securing it in deeply by smacking his palm against it in jellied-wet squelches. Blood seeped from it fast. The man quivered, alive but incoherent, and crumpled to his knees.
For anyone who had questioned whether this was real or simply a gimmick taken too far, this was the indisputable proof. This wasn’t Percepto! Emergo! Or part of The Fright Break!
This was real. There was a monster among them!
“No!” June begged it, wincing, as if her own eye had just eaten a razor blade.
Engines roared to life. Headlights beamed over the lot. Teens leapt into truck beds, calling for the driver to “Step on it!” and “Get us the hell out of here!”
The creature fell from the man. June’s eyes zipped through the mud, just spotting it as it hurried to a woman in the convertible Chevrolet Corvair in the next space over. The creature had become even quicker than it had been when it fled from Officer Reed and into the woods.
June brought her hands to the sides of her head. Everyone’s fear was so loud. She was like a signal station receiving input from every channel all at once, different voices, commentary, and music streaming into one place. It was information overload.
Two frightened children squealed in the backseat of the Corvair as their mother reached back, wearing a devilish grin. In a swift, single motion, she snapped the younger boy’s neck.
The break came with a sickening, crackling pop. The woman sobbed as she lurched for the second boy. She hesitated, fighting her own movements. But the creature had her. And it was fast.
“Help!” The older boy cried.
The woman grabbed the boy's chin and head in her hands, and he was silenced with an identical pop as before.
June imagined that this was what an atomic attack would be like. So much death coming at you from every angle. No one is safe. Not even mothers and their children.
The woman then put her Corvair into drive and soared out of her spot, her children’s lifeless bodies bouncing around in the backseat. The speaker was still attached to her window, and it ripped from its post in an explosion of glass. Mud sprayed from beneath her tires. She didn’t make it far off the lot. Just off to the path.
Then, the woman parked her car at an angle, blocking the exit.
A big, thundering truck dwelled in a sludge of thick mud, its tires only sinking deeper. The driver beat against the steering wheel. “Come on, dammit!”
When it finally left the sloped parking spot, he sped off further than he meant, reaming his truck into the Nash Rambler ahead of it.
June spun around. She’d lost the woman in the Corvair. The creature, too.
“Get to the car!” June ordered her friends. They hurried away, though Vincent and Ingrid lingered a beat longer.
“Go!” June demanded.
Then, June saw a concession worker, the uninterested kid who’d helped her and Vincent earlier that night. He straddled a teen, a friend of Annie’s, and struck her again and again with the metal popcorn scoop. Gore flung from her as he shoved the metal into her face and scooped out flesh. Her legs kicked wildly beneath him, like she’d been electrically shocked.
Moviegoers ran around June, fumbling, and crying, panicked and trapped as cars piled into the Corvair with a jarring crunch of metal against metal.
A woman fell in the mud, only to be stomped to death by the massive truck driver. She only screamed once or twice, but the people around her couldn’t stop as they watched the behemoth of a man kill with such brutality.
As if in a noir film, a petite blonde woman dug into her purse and pointed a small-frame revolver. However, unlike in the pictures, she didn’t miss a beat. She fired and then fired again. The truck driver fell beside the woman he’d just killed, bleeding holes in his chest. The creature struggled out from beneath him, and the woman fired at the ground. It was fast, out of range, and she was out of ammo.
She clicked the trigger, checking once more. She nearly folded in half, and June felt the immense pain of the creature climbing a spine.
She ran to the woman, who raised the gun to her temple, trembling.
But she was too late. She tackled the woman to the ground just as she’d pulled the trigger. Wait a minute, June thought.
The woman pressed the trigger again and again.
Click. Click. Click.
No bullet came from its two-inch barrel.
“Help,” the woman said, just as she swung the pistol at June.
It barely missed her. Vincent had her by the arm and pulled her away just in time. But they slipped in the mud, not making it far, and she whipped the weapon at June again, this time colliding with the side of her face.
For a moment, she saw stars. Then red smoke.
And then:
Bam.
Bam.
She was back at the meeting house.
“Nancy Jackson, for your wicked crimes, I sentence you to death. Do you understand?”
It was Magistrate Cordier. The death sentence she’d heard delivered before.
And then she was back at the oak tree in the woods, but it stood towering, jutting into the sky like an accusation at God. And she watched as it shrunk, like a time lapse in reverse, over decades, centuries even, the limbs contracting and the trunk twisting in on itself as it shrunk and corkscrewed into the ground. As its sprout disappeared into the soil, the ground fell away into a deep hole. Townspeople stood around it, dancing, cheering, waving torches. And in its depths, June saw severed chicken heads under a swirling mass of crawling beetles. Then a rough-hewn casket was carried over it, horrific screams escaping from its cracks, and June watched it plummet into the hole.
“June!”
Strong hands gripped her face, shaking her.
“June, snap out of it!”
But June understood then. The creature and the woman were one in the same. Whether it knew it or not. And it wanted vengeance. It wanted chaos. Carnage.
Hysteria.
And it got it as the creature hopped from one person to the next, with horrific murder in between.
The screams across the lot were like a standing ovation.
But they hadn’t reached the finale, and June knew it wasn’t done yet. Vincent brought her to her feet, but she hadn’t quite come to. Her body crashed into the ground, and when she finally opened her eyes, she saw a paneled van mow down the blonde nurse she’d seen earlier that night. The woman disappeared under the vehicle. June turned away as it flew by.
She held her breath. She couldn’t look.
“She’s moving,” Vincent said. “June, look.”
The woman opened her eyes. Just peeking at the result of what had just happened. She’d lived.
June scrambled over to her. She searched for any injuries. Her eyes went to the blood on her uniform, and the nurse said, “It’s not mine.”
“Good,” June said. “We have to move. Can you walk?”
June, Vincent, and the nurse hurried to their car as the van turned on its wheels and into a crowd of frenzied moviegoers. Their bodies rolling beneath the wheels sounded like the tree limb Ingrid had hopped over on their way to the drive-in.
“No, it’s her!” A fifty-something woman pointed at a scrunched-face teen girl with glasses. “She’s the killer!”
“Don’t accuse my daughter,” a woman in a muddied button-up collared dress spat.
June grabbed the nurse’s hand and dragged her along as they dodged the mania.
Engines burst as vehicles continued to collide into one another.
Guns fired, and the screams never ended.
When a few drivers hopped from their vehicles and hurried into the woods, the hearse’s headlights blared to life. It screeched as it peeled from its spot and over each and every one of them who tried to leave. Heads and limbs rolled between the tires and wheel wells.
All along the treeline, beneath the projector, was mushy brains, meaty piles of blood, and splinters of jutting bones. It was perfectly showcased in the glow of the screen.
With Ingrid already inside, June dove into the Studebaker. The nurse and Vincent hurried in behind them.
Lenny sat in the driver’s seat of Vincent’s truck. Stef beside him.
Stef and Lenny unclipped their speaker and rolled up their windows. Ingrid hadn’t thought of it.
June unclipped the speaker and let it fall. She cranked her window closed as fast as she could.
“June, what’s happening?” Ingrid said, distracting June before she could tell her friend to close the window on her side. “I know you know.”
Vincent nodded. “She does.”
“You do?” the nurse asked.
June felt an aching responsibility and dread with their questions.
“June?” Ingrid tried.
June threw her hands up. “Everyone, stop. I don’t know exactly what’s happening.”
She stopped. Took a deep breath and lowered her voice. “I only know what I saw.”
They all self-soothed, rocking their bodies or hugging themselves or bouncing their knees as June began to fill them in on the two found dead in the woods, the meeting house, and the creature born in steam. The open grave and the towering oak. All of it.
Before they could get too far into it, June saw something behind Ingrid.
“Ingrid, look out!” June cried.
The creature was climbing the side of the Studebaker, heading for the crack in the window.
“Close it!” Vincent shouted.
Ingrid pressed on it with both hands, but the crank spun once, twice, and then wouldn’t give.
“Close it!” they all chanted.
“I’m trying! It sticks!”
The creature’s pincers pointed into the car and down at Ingrid’s face, clicking inches away from her nose.
Saturday, August 8, 1959
1:13 AM
June threw the passenger side door open and yanked Ingrid away just before the pincers snapped shut. The creature fell into the seat as the others bolted out and slammed the door shut behind them. The creature hurried across the front bench and crawled up the passenger side door.
Vincent and June stood facing the car with the others. They spread their arms at their sides in protective stances.
The creature wriggled, serpentine-like, up the window. Its legs skittered against the glass. June was relieved. Thankful that she’d closed her window. It’s only way out was back the way it came.
“What is that thing?” the nurse shouted.
Lenny turned the key over and over in the ignition. Vincent’s truck stalled. He tried a few more times and then the battery died. He gave up and climbed out, Stef behind him.
“We can’t leave,” Lenny said. “We have to get somewhere safe while we can.”
Ingrid had her arms crossed, hugging herself, like she was cold. “Safe? Look what’s happened.”
The Dusk Til Dawn Spooktacular wouldn’t be remembered for its gimmicks or the pictures on screen. It would be remembered in nightmares and flashbacks. In blood. And death.
Violent shrieks circled the lot. People called for their spouses and friends to no avail, some having watched helplessly as their loved ones died. Or killed. Or both.
