Seeing Red, page 14
The insulation on the cooler's motor held out until Friday night, for the benefit of the overflow audience. The years of humid dampness and coppery, wet decay had been inexorable. The engine sparked and shorted out, fuses blew, and as the blades spun down a second time, the theatre filled up with acrid electrical smoke, from the vents.
Gray smoke wafted dreamily around near the ceiling as the exits were flung open. A few moved toward the fresher air, but most kept stubbornly to their prize seats, waiting.
In the darkness of the booth, the projectionist had concluded that a melted hunk of old film might be jamming the film gate, and was leaning over to inspect it when the lights went out. Sitting in the dark, he groped out for his Cinzano ashtray and butted his Camel as a precaution against mishaps in the dark.
It did not do any good.
When the cardboard film bin later puffed into flames, the projectionist had temporarily abandoned the booth in search of a flashlight. The preview strips quickly blackened, curled, and finally ignited, snaking fire up to the low ceiling of the booth. The egg cartons blossomed a dry orange. The wooden shelves became fat kindling as the roomful of celluloid and plastic flared and caused weird patterns of light to coruscate through the painted glass. It took less than thirty seconds for the people sitting in front of the booth to notice it, dismiss it, and finally check again to verify.
The projectionist raced back. When he yanked open the door, the heat blew him flatly on his ass. People were already panicking toward exits; Clay rose from his seat and saw.
The bearded kid had already scurried to the pizzeria to trip the local fire alarm. Nobody helped the projectionist. The sudden chaos of the entire scene remained as a snapshot image in Clay's mind as he rapidly located a fire extinguisher, tore it from its wall mount, and hurried to the booth. A crackerbox window blew outward and fire licked out of the opening, charring the wall and lighting up the auditorium.
Lightly dazed, the projectionist was up and had one foot wedged over the threshold of the booth entrance, but the sheer heat buffeted him back as he exhausted his own tiny CO2 canister. He yelled back into the fire; something unintelligible, then he stepped hack, fire-blind and nose to nose with Clay, shouting for him to get out quick.
Clay haltingly approached the gaping doorway and nozzled his larger extinguisher into the conflagrant oven. A better inferno could not have been precipitated if the Monster himself had tipped an ancient oil lamp into dry straw. Clay's effort reduced the doorway to smoke and sizzle, and he stepped up in order to get a better aim on the first projector, which was swathed in flames. He took another excruciating step inside.
The Monster, having tried his misunderstood best, always got immolated by the final reel. Friday night's screening of Psycho keynoted the close of the horror classics festival at J.A. Bijou's. Clay understood as he moved closer to the flaming equipment and films. It would not hurt much.
Above the booth, a termite-ridden beam exploded into hot splinters and smashed down, through the ceiling of the booth, showering barbecue sparks and splitting the tiny room open like a peach crate. It was a support beam, huge, weighty, and as old as the brownstone, and it impacted heavily, crushing the barstool, collapsing the metal film racks, and wiping out the doorway of the booth.
It was a perfect, in-character finish, complemented by the welling sound of approaching sirens.
One of the health-food places threatened a lawsuit after the fire marshal had done his war dance—J.A. Bijou's had been unsafe all along, etcetera. Negligence, they claimed.
The festival package of films was gone, gone to scorched shipment cans and puddles of ugly black plasma. When the projection booth had died, so did they, even though they were being stored at the theater manager's house for safekeeping. They had been, after all, perfect prints, and the door locks at J.A. Bijou's had not yet been updated against a particular kind of desperate collector.
Now the new sprinkler and air-conditioning systems were in. The new projection booth was painted and inspected; the new equipment, spotless and smelling of lubricant. J. A. Bijou's insurance, plus the quick upsurge in income, sparked financial backing sufficient to cause its rebirth in time for the following semester at the university.
With the new goods in place and all tempers balmed, the projectionist's somewhat passionate tale of an unidentified customer supposed to have died in the blaze was quickly forgotten or attributed to his excited state during the crisis. He steadfastly insisted that he had witnessed a death and maintained his original story without deviation despite the fact that no corpse or suggestion of a corpse had ever been uncovered in the wreckage. No one had turned up, tearfully seeking dead relatives.
But no one could explain about the films, either. And from opening night onward, none of the J.A. Bijou staffers bothered to consider why, on full-house nights (weekends, for the college crowd), the ticket count always came up two seats short. Nor could they give a solid, rational reason explaining why J.A. Bijou's was the sole theatre—in the universe, apparently -that featured peculiar, never-before-seen cinema gems regularly. The phone voices still had no answers.
The bearded kid suggested that J.A. Bijou's had a guardian spirit.
Clay relished the cool anonymity of the darkened theatre. As always, the crowds were friendly, but unintroduced. The film bond held them together satisfactorily without commitment. He had been cussing/discussing the so-called auteur theory with a trio of engineering majors seated behind him when the house lights dimmed. You never learned their names.
The first feature was The Man Who Would Be King, staring Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable. Clay had not decided what the second feature would be, yet.
Marissa returned, with the popcorn, as the trailers commenced.
VISITATION
Angus Bond checked into the Hermitage alone, under an assumed name. He had been recognized in consort with too many fanatics to risk a traveling companion, though having Nicholas along would have been comforting. Nicholas was dead.
"Room 713," said the deskman, handing over a bronze key. "One of our suites, mister . . . ah, Orion, yes. Heh." The man's smile looked like a mortician's joke on a corpse, and Angus restrained himself from looking to see if the natty, three-piece clerk's suit was split up the back. The deskman was no zombie.
Close, Angus thought as he hefted his bags. But no.
The Hermitage was as Gothically overstated as Angus had expected it to be. Nothing he saw really surprised him—the ornamental iron gargoyles guarding the lobby doors, the unsettling, Bosch-like grotesques hanging in gilt frames beneath low-wattage display lamps, the Marie Antoinette chandeliers, their hexagonal prisms suggesting the imprisonment of lost souls like dragonflies stuck in amber. None of it moved Angus one way or the other. It was all rather standard haunted house crap; occult chintz to get a rise out of the turistas.
The wine-red carpeting absorbed his footfalls (greedily, he thought). The Hermitage seemed to be the place. At the door to 713, Angus held his key to the feeble light. He knew how to tilt it so the embossed metal threw down the shadow impression of a death's-head.
Satisfied, he unlocked the door and moved his baggage inside, in order that he might unpack and await the coming of the monsters.
The knock on the door jolted him to instant wariness. Angus took a bite out of a hard roll and left it behind on the leather-topped table with the sausage and cheese he had brought.
It was the zombie clerk, carrying a tarnished salver bearing a brilliantly white calling card, face down. Angus noted that the clerk seemed to smell like the sachets tucked into wardrobes by grandmothers to fend off mildew. The stark whiteness of the card cast deathly shadows on the man's pale features. It seemed to light up the hallway much more efficiently than the guttering yellow bulbs in the brass sconces.
"A gentleman to see you, sir," he said, with all the verve of a ventriloquist's dummy.
Angus picked up the card. It bore two words:
IMPERATIVE.
BRAY.
The clerk stood fast. When Angus realized why, he decided to test the water a little.
"Just a minute." He hurried off to fumble briefly through the depths of his greatcoat. There was the telltale clink of change, and he returned to the door with a silver dollar. Instead of placing it on the salver, he contrived to drop it, apparently accidentally, so that the clerk caught it, smoothly interrupting its fall with his free hand. He wore dusty butler's gloves that were going threadbare at the fingertips. He weighed the coin in the palm of his hand.
The air in the draftless hallway seemed to darken and roil thickly, like cream in hot coffee, for just a second. The clerk's features darkened, too, making his eyes appear to glow, the way a light bulb flares just before it burns out. He sucked a quick gulp of air, as though dizzied by an abrupt stab of nausea. His features fought to remain whole, shifting like lard in a skillet, and Angus heard a distant, mad wail. It all took less than a second.
The clerk let the tip slide from the palm of his hand to rattle in the bowl of the metal dish. The queasy, death-rictus smile split across his face again, and he said, "Thank you. Sir."
He left. Angus closed his door and nodded to himself in affirmation.
The stranger was swaddled in fog-dampened tweeds, and crowned with a road-weary homburg that had seen better days a few decades earlier. The initial impression left by the bearing of the man was that he was very old—not withered, or incapacitated in the way of those who wore years gracelessly, but old in the sense of worldly experience. An old man. Angus felt a stab of kinship here, deep in the midst of hazardous and alien territory.
"You are Angus Bond?" said the old man, arching a snow-white eyebrow. "I am Turquine Bray."
"Nicholas Bray's father?" said Angus, ignoring that no one at the Hermitage knew his real name. The stranger had obviously just arrived.
"Grandfather. Paternal. His father was a null spiritual quantity, neither evil, nor good, like most in the world. He lived out his merchant's life and desired nothing but material things. He led a life of tawdriness and despair; but for seeding Nicholas, no residue of his passage, save the grief he caused others, endures. His fate was a well-deserved insignificance. Nicholas superseded him. Blotted him out. Nicholas once told me you were his closest friend."
The words bit Angus lightly, and the way Bray pulled off his glove advised that the late Nicholas had not dispensed his friendship or loyalty frivolously. The two men shook hands in the dank lobby of the Hermitage, the understanding already shared by them in no need of further words concerning Nicholas.
"I cannot say I am pleased to meet you at last, sir, under such circumstances," said Bray. "But I am relieved. Shall we walk outside? The atmosphere in here could make a vulture's eyes water . . . as it is no doubt intended to do."
The basilisk gaze of the clerk tracked them until they passed through the cataracted glass of the lobby's imposing double doors. Outside, the slate gray bulk of the Hermitage's castellated architecture monitored them dispassionately. It diminished behind them as they walked into the dense southern Kentucky woodland that made up the grounds.
"Gloomy," said Bray. "All this place needs is a tarn."
"Notice how the foliage grows together in tangles?" said Angus. "It meshes, with no nutritional support from the earth. The soil is nearly pure alkaline; I checked it. The stuff grows, and yet is dead. It laces together to keep out the sunlight—see? It's always overcast here."
"The appointments of that hotel are certainly Grand Guignol-ish. Like a Hollywood set for a horror film."
"Rather like the supposed 'ambience' one gains by patronizing a more expensive restaurant," said Angus. "I suspect you hit it on the head when you mentioned 'atmosphere.' That seems to be the purpose of all this theatrical embroidery—supernatural furniture. Atmosphere."
"Hm." Bray stepped laboriously over a rotting tree trunk. "Sinister chic."
The iron-colored mud stole dark footprints from them as they walked, their breath condensing whitely in the late January chill. Frost still rimed the dead vegetation, even in late afternoon. Angus was glad he had trotted out his muffler. If Poe could have seen this place, he mused, he would have been scared into a writing diet of musical comedy.
"Have you a room?" said Angus, after both men had stood in contemplative silence for a moment.
"I wanted to assure myself of your presence here, first."
"You followed me, then?" said Angus. "For whatever purpose? You certainly know of Nicholas' death already."
"I need you, Mr. Bond, to tell me the manner in which he died."
Angus sighed with resignation. "Mr. Bray," he said in a tone often rehearsed, "do you know just who I am?"
Bray's steely, chrome-colored eyes shot up to meet with Angus' watery blue ones, and he smiled a cursory smile. "You are Angus Gwyllm Orion Bond. Until roughly two years ago your profession was that of occult debunker—exposer of supernatural hoaxes. Absolute bane of fraudulent mediums, scamming astrologers, warlocks who were more con-men than sorcerers, and all the pop salesmen of lizard's tooth and owlet's wing. Until two years ago."
Bray's breath plumed out as he spoke. His speech was almost a recitation; Angus was impressed with the research.
"Two years ago, you vanished from the considerable media time and space you commanded. You evaporated from the airwaves, the talk shows. Rumor had you seeking the counsel of spiritualists and dabbling in magic yourself. Though you wound up debunking yourself, your books and other franchised items sold better than ever. I presume you've been supporting your now-private life with royalties?"
"Something like that."
"It was at precisely that time that you met up with my grandson. Nicholas was the antithesis of his father—a fantastic intellect and capacity for change. You know how he died."
"It ties together. The change in my life. Nick's death. I'm not sure you'd—"
"I am prepared for the outrageous, Mr. Bond. But I'm only interested in the truth. If the truth is merely outrageous, fire away."
"Nicholas came to my estate one night. He was frantic, pounding on the door, sweating, panicked. He couldn't tell me why. He had just moved into his new home at the time—do you recall it?"
"It was next to your estate. The Spilsbury mansion. Where all those actors were slaughtered by the religious cultists in the rnid-1960s."
"Yes" said Angus. "Of course, by the time Nick moved in, that was ancient history. That place's allotted fifteen minutes of pop fame had been used up years before."
Bray smiled again.
"He was unnerved. When a horse 'smells' a tornado, it gets skittish; the closest Nicholas could speculate was that the house 'felt wrong,' and skittish was the word to describe him. I returned with him, to sit and drink by the fireplace. About forty-five minutes later . . . "Angus regretted his dramatic tone. But what occurred had been bloody dramatic.
"It was the first time I ever witnessed an interface," he said simply. "Mr. Bray, are you aware how supernatural agencies function physically? What enables the paranormal to coexist with the normal universe—yours and mine?"
"Assuming its reality," said Bray, "I'd speculate that it would be like an alternate dimension."
"Good. But not a physical dimension, not like a parallel world just staggered out of sync with our own. The supernatural is a matter of power potentials. It accumulates, in degrees, like a nuclear pile approaching critical mass. When there's too much, it blows off steam, venting into the real world, our world, becoming a temporary reality, sometimes only for a second or two."
"Accumulates? Like dust?" Bray said incredulously. "How?"
"It happens every time someone knocks on wood. Or crosses their fingers for luck, or says gesundheit. Every time one avoids walking under a ladder or lighting three on a match. Every time someone makes a joke about ghosts and doesn't disbelieve what he's saying one hundred percent; every time somebody uses a superstitious expression as a reflex cliché—let the sandman come and take you away; don't let the boogeymnan get you. Every time some idiot in a church mentions the Devil. Any time anyone seriously considers any of millions of minor-league bad-luck totems. It compounds itself exactly like dust, Mr. Bray—each of those things is a conscious, willful act that requires a minute portion of physical energy in some way. The paranormal energy simultaneously prompted by such action remains unperceived, but it is there, and it stacks up, one imperceptible degree at a time. Just like dust. And when you get an extra infusion of high potency metaphysical force—"
"Like that Jim Jones thing?" said Bray. "Or the Spilsbury murders?"
"Precisely. You boost the backlog of power that much more. Whenever it reaches its own critical mass, it discharges into our reality. The house that Nicholas had moved into was a metaphysical stress point; it was still weak, thanks to the Spilsbury thing. A break point that had not completely healed."
"And during this—this interface, all that accumulated power blew through into my grandson's living room?" Bray shook his head. "I find that difficult to believe."
"Too outrageous?" said Angus, stopping suddenly.
Bray's expression dissolved to neutral. "Go on."
"That night, the 'weakness' was not only at the juncture point of that house, but elsewhere. Temporally, it was a 'weak' time period. Nick was in an agitated fear state—a 'weak,' receptive mental condition. But this phenomenon has no regular characteristic save that of overload—you can't count on it venting itself at any regular time, or place, or under any regular conditions. It vented somewhere else that night, and because of the weakened conditions we caught a squirt of it—bam! Two or three seconds; a drop of water from a flood. The flood went somewhere else."
