Night Movies Read online

  Carl shrugged. “What was I supposed to say to Lucy, that I wanted to go because I was afraid of invisible dust particles? Or a slow drowning in the wrongness of the place?”

  Seth found that to be the most disturbing thing Carl had said yet, the notion of a slow drowning in the theater. Maybe it was because Carl was not superstitious, nor was he prone to belief or influence in the supernatural. In fact, he was a little hard-headed and not particularly imaginative or generally very eloquent. The notion that the place had affected him so deeply – so much so as to believe some theatrical character was stalking him – made Seth anxious.

  “So anyway, Lucy and I heard this thud, and I half expected the lights to come on, and for there to be some shadowy silhouette sitting out there in one of those moldy seats, like in the horror movies. But it wasn’t the lights. It was the trap door.” Seth gestured at the bartender to bring him a third beer. “I looked over her shoulder and I saw a gaping black hole in the center of the stage. She didn’t want to turn around, didn’t want to look – I guess even the Queen of Kink has limits – but I had to see. I mean, I had to, Seth. Something inside made me go over to the hole and look down, and I saw steps. So...I went down. There wasn’t much down there – just old moth-eaten costumes and dried-up stage make-up, some bizarre props like books, weird sculptures, daggers, candles, that sort of thing. And there was a door. It was locked and now... now I’m glad it was. God, I can only imagine what might be behind it.

  “Anyway, the door had a symbol painted on it in red. Some circle with a bunch of squiggly lines. And...I guess I traced the lines, the whole shape of the thing, with my finger. I don’t know why I did it. It was just one of those things you find yourself doing without really thinking about it...or that you realize you’re doing while you were thinking of a bunch of nothing-things you can’t remember.” He shook his head, but Seth didn’t think Carl really heard how strange he sounded.

  “When I came back up, Lucy was gone. Her purse was gone, too. I guess she got freaked out and bolted. So, I took off, too. Truth be told, standing on that stage, alone, with that wrongness gathering all around me and those dark, empty seats out there...I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. And that night, as I was unlocking my front door, I happened to glance up and that’s when I first saw it – the mime. It was standing across the street, leaning at this impossible angle with its elbow propped up like it was waiting to order a drink at a bar. And it was just watching me. Smiling at me.”

  “A mime.” Seth gulped his beer and suppressed a shudder. He had to admit, as weird as the story was, he could tell Carl meant every word of it. The genuine fear was interlaced through every word.

  “Yeah. A mime. It started following me after that. At night, mostly – in the beginning, I think it was always at night. I’d go to get a quart of milk and some bread and it would be in the alley next to the Quick Check, watching me from the shadows, pretending to lean against an invisible wall. I’d pull into a gas station to fill up my tank, and it would be in the back seat of the car at the other pump, just waving silently, making faces at me. I’d be coming home from work or heading back to my car from Lucy’s, and it would be on the street. Hell, I’d get up in the middle of the night to take a leak, and I’d swear, behind the shower curtain or in a closet, I could feel it. It...It’s always there. Watching. Gesturing.”

  “Gesturing?”

  “Yeah, like...hand gestures, mostly.”

  “So this guy is flipping you the bird. What else?”

  “No, not like that. Just shut up and listen, will you?”

  Seth shrugged and gulped his beer, waiting for his friend to continue, although the whole conversation was making him uncomfortable.

  Carl took another deep breath, then said, “The gestures are threats. Threatening. It’s made a slicing motion like it was telling me it was going to cut my throat, or like it was cocking and pointing a gun at me. Sometimes it makes more complex hand gestures...like it’s tracing the same symbol over and over, the symbol from that theater. And it makes like it’s opening an invisible door, just a crack. Seth, I think...uh, I think it’s found a way into the house.”

  He read Seth’s confusion and sighed. “Look, I don’t know how to explain it any better than I have. It’s a feeling, as strong as the feeling in the theater. In fact, now that I think about it, it’s like I’m standing at the edge of a cliff and something’s all around me, waiting for a chance to shove me and I can’t stop it. I’m just going to keep standing there until my legs can’t hold me and I fall or I blink for a second and something gives me a push.... I don’t know if it’s the mime’s facial expressions or gestures or the dreams I’ve been having, but it’s going to kill me. I know it. And I don’t know how to stop it. I just....” Carl’s expression changed suddenly; his face paled and he seemed to be struggling with a lump in his throat. “I just wanted someone to know, you know, what really happened. That I think the door beneath the stage opened, just a little, and whatever came out – that’s what did me in. I don’t get the feeling I have much time left.”

  Seth sat for a few seconds in silence, taking in everything that Carl had told him. It sounded absurd, of course, all the talk about mimes and haunted theaters and doors. It had to be the disquieted ramblings of stress or alcohol or maybe even drugs – Carl could be adventurous. He seemed so coherent, though, however wild the components of the story were. And he seemed so serious, so earnestly scared. Seth had no idea what to say, and he told Carl so.

  Carl searched his expression for something; Seth wasn’t sure if he found what he was looking for, but a moment later, he pulled several bills from his wallet and slapped them down next to his empty beer bottle. Then he grabbed his keys.

  “There’s nothing to say,” Carl told him. “Not now, anyway.” And Carl headed for the door.

  * * * * *

  Two days later, Carl was dead. Seth found out from Lucy on his way home from work. Her voice was too loud, garbled by tears, and what little Seth could make out made him feel cold all over beneath his skin. An accident – he’d fallen down his stairs, she’d said, or at least he thought she’d said that. He got off the phone with her quickly, a numbness spreading like cotton in his ears, inside his head, wrapping around his hands, his chest.

  Like standing on the edge of a cliff, he thought, and something’s waiting for a chance to shove him.

  When Seth called the police later that evening, he asked for Rob Kiers. He knew Kiers through mutual friends and had partied with him on a few occasions. Kiers told him more than he probably should have, given the open nature of the death investigation, but Carl had been their friend, and Seth wanted to know.

  The police were pretty sure it was a straight-up accidental death case. Although they were still waiting on a toxicology report, the EMTs picked up a strong remnant smell of beer when they arrived. The lights in the house were off and the police had found a sneaker at the top of the stairway. It was the damned strangest twist of a body they’d ever seen, though – a one-in-a-million kind of fall that suggested more the quirky unpredictability of nature than a planned or even impassioned act. There were no signs of struggle nor could the police find any indication of anyone else having been in the house but Carl. The expression on his face, though....

  His carpool buddy, Rick, had found him the following morning when Carl wouldn’t answer the phone or the door. Grabbing the spare key under the mat, Rick had let himself in to find a tangled mess of blood and protruding bone at the bottom of the staircase.

  Seth thought about mentioning the mime. He could imagine some floating white face, eyes black as pits, white gloves half-hidden in shadow until just a second before the pantomimed push that sent Carl tumbling to his death. Instead, he hung up the phone.

  It had been an accident. A terrible, freakish accident, but only that. He kept telling himself that in hopes that it would keep the nausea at bay. It was a losing battle, though.

  Kiers had told him there was one other thing t
hat had struck the police odd. Near the body, spattered in Carl’s blood as if the impact had thrown it from his face, was a white masquerade mask.

  * * * * *

  It took at least a week of stomach-turning indecision before Seth finally committed to breaking into the Dionysus Theater. It wasn’t fear of legal consequences that he worried about. If anyone bothered to phone in a trespassing and if police even went to the effort of showing up, they’d probably only shoo him out of the place and send him on his way. In fact, it wouldn’t have surprised Seth much if the police turned a blind eye to vandalism or even arson of the old place. Good riddance to years of bad taste in the townsfolk’s mouths.

  What really bothered Seth deep down, just about at the edge of admitted thought, was the superstitious idea that Carl’s death was connected to his visit to the theater. It sounded crazy, at least as crazy as Carl’s story about the mime, but sometimes the mind can not be dissuaded from the kinds of connections, the kind of sure belief, that extend back through childhood and into primal notions about the unexplained. It didn’t matter that there was no logical proof to verify the superstition about the Dionysus; there wasn’t any logical proof to refute it, either.

  If Carl’s intrusion on the theater and whatever had been content to settle with the dust of the place had been the cause of his death, then what would Seth discover there – or worse, what would discover him?

  On a whim, Seth tried the big gilded front doors and was surprised to find they opened easily. Dust motes twirled in the rays of the late afternoon sun that he had let in, and as he stepped inside, he got the impression of a giant blinking sleep from its eyes, awakening in those dying shafts of light. What he didn’t feel was the sensation Carl had described, that slow drowning, that accidental stumbling into a room of poisoned air. Instead, he felt the utter emptiness of the lobby and the cool quiet shadows as a kind of vacuum, a void which sucked at his own heat and breath. It was not particularly threatening, but it made him shiver, and he decided a cursory search was probably all he could tolerate of the place.

  He wasn’t sure exactly what he was looking for – something, he supposed, to confirm to himself that the things Carl told him weren’t and couldn’t be true. He thought Carl believed what he’d told Seth, but that didn’t mean Carl was in possession of some absurdly terrible truth. It didn’t mean that a mime really had stalked Carl and pushed him to his death down a flight of stairs.

  Seth needed to discount it all, if not to process the loss of his friend, then to even out the anxious ripples in his own life this past week. His apartment building had become less of a sanctuary and somehow less familiar to him. Instead he felt nettled, even somewhat threatened, by the indifferent and unprotective walls. Shadow-shapes and muted colors had begun to take on sinister import. Surely the white roundness that he’d caught from the corner of his eye as the hallway elevator doors closed it from view was a hood, a balloon, a baseball cap tilted down over a face. And the reflection of something he’d caught behind him in the blank TV screen once or twice, black smears in a pallid face just above his shoulder, were definitely tricks of light. They were gone when he shifted in his seat or turned sharply to look behind him. Nothing ever stood up under direct scrutiny. But it had been wreaking havoc on his peace of mind all the same.

  He’d begun to have bad dreams, too – dreams of Carl in corpse-white face paint, his head lolling from the unnatural angle of his neck. He would gesture to Seth, and the broken bones of his arms would grind and jut out of his skin in grotesque trailing of his movements. Carl never spoke in the dreams but he didn’t have to. The gestures he made suggested terrible, inexorable things.

  Seth couldn’t shake the idea that the mime had seen him with Carl, and now that one plaything was done, it had moved onto a new one.

  As he stood in the lobby of the Dionysus Theater, he glanced around. He imagined the ticket booth once had a man behind the counter as old and dusty as it was. The crumbling velvet ropes, a means of shepherding crowds through the lobby to the theater doors, now dangled like braided snakes with lesions of torn fabric from their scuffed metal poles. He made his way across the lobby to the posters on the walls, aware of how the faded, threadbare carpet still shushed the sound of his footsteps.

  Seth could see what Carl had meant about the posters. The pale white curves of flesh of the women in the burlesque posters was somehow both sexual and cadaverous, their made-up faces beautiful and terrible, their smiles ghastly. Their costumes seemed ill-fitted and somehow torturous. They held odd poses, brandished odd props. No one in the posters smiled. The eyes, though – there was a range of expression in the eyes, and all of them put Seth ill at ease: anger, licentiousness, predatory hunger, madness....

  They were not as unsettling, though, as the poster advertising the commedia dell’arte-style production of The Cry of the Star Children. A cast of nearly naked pre-teen children wearing white and gold masks stood in front of a door. Seth couldn’t see much about the door except that it was open a little. Whatever lay beyond it was shrouded in darkness. The posters for the other controversial productions also featured masked performers in period costumes and promised a theater experience that would alter the very fabric of the viewer’s existence.

  A slow drowning in the wrongness of the place, Carl had said. There was certainly something almost overwhelming about getting lost in those posters, the way the faces wouldn’t break eye contact, the way the posed limbs bent in all the wrong ways, making mazes of lines that shouldn’t be....

  Seth shook his head and turned away from the lobby posters and toward the wide set of double doors in the center of the back wall. He assumed the doors led to the theater itself, and braced himself to open them. They swung open at the slightest pressure of his touch on silent hinges.

  He found the inside of the theater pretty much as Carl had described it – half of the plush seats had been removed, the rest left to decay. The heavy folds of drapery that once formed the stage curtains hung in tatters. The place had lost its gilded shine, maybe, but little of its presence. From its cavernous size and clearly once-impressive, expensive construction and decoration, Seth could see why Carl had perhaps felt awed by the room. And the stage, too, was as described – polished to a high shine even in the dim and filtered light from...Seth looked around. He could see no windows, but could imagine there were holes in the roof.

  He made his way down to the stage and hoisted himself up onto it, standing for a long time with his back to the mostly empty gloom behind him. His attention was fixed on the floor of center stage.

  There was no hole or even a trap door. Seth let go of a relieved breath; if there was no hole, no trap door, then there was no occult bullshit, and no mime. Whatever craziness had gotten into Carl’s head had ricocheted around for a while, even bounced off Seth, but in the end, it was all just –

  A sound from the wings off-stage made him look up and for just a second, he thought he saw a painted black smile in a white face before whatever it was receded behind the folds of the curtain. He took a few steps in that direction when a voice spoke to him from the sea of black beyond the stage.

  “Quite impressive, isn’t it?”

  Seth felt a hot-cold flash of worry spread through all his limbs at once. He turned to the sound of the voice. A small, elderly man with a neat comb-over of white hair, metal-rimmed glasses, and a polishing cloth in his hands stepped into one of the sourceless shafts of light at the edge of the stage. He smiled, then resumed polishing a small bronze figurine.

  “I’m Jerry. Jerry Carterhouse. I work for the historical society.”

  “I – I’m sorry, I didn’t mean – “

  Jerry held up a hand and offered a forgiving grin. “Don’t worry about it. Truth be told, I think it’s kind of neat that people are still interested in the old place.” He gazed up and around the old theater with obvious admiration. “This was such a beautiful place once. Regal. Oh, you should have seen it. We had celebrities here, heads of state, sport
s stars, artists, playwrights – you name it. We even had a president once.” He winked at Seth.

  “I can imagine,” Seth said hesitantly, unsure whether to leave.

  “So, are you interested in something in particular? A show, perhaps? A famous Dionysian actress?”

  “A, uh...a trap door,” Seth blurted. He pointed to center stage. “Was there ever a trap door there, something that led downstairs, underneath the theater?”

  Jerry gave a mild shrug of the shoulders. “Can’t say as I ever remember seeing one. The stage was rebuilt in ‘49, but I don’t think the old one had any kind of trap door, either. I don’t recall any of the plays performed here ever needing one. Why?”

  Confused, Seth looked from the old man to the stage and back. “No reason.”

  “Did you know,” Jerry asked with that same amused smile, “that this was the only theater in America to perform all six plays in the La Folie de la Lune series? That was before my time, though. I heard they packed the house!”

  “I didn’t know that,” Seth answered politely.

  “Oh yes. This theater had all the greats. The King in Yellow – the whole play, performed right here. The Cry of the Star Children was doing its first run in American when I came on. Then there was Athalie, Le Barbier de Seville, even Spring Awakening. And this theater in particular was known for its utmost dedication to upholding the traditional artistry of commedia dell’arte. Oh, the costumes, the masks, the zanni characters....”

  “What about mimes?” It was another question that Seth found himself asking before he even felt ready to speak.

  The old man’s eyes glittered with excitement. “Only the purest forms of mime in this theater, Seth, my boy. I believe the kids nowadays call it ‘old school,’ but the fine motor skills involved, the delicate art of hand gesturing and facial expressions to move people, to instruct them, to make them feel the full spectrum of emotions, to know secret great and terrible truths....”

  “Sounds fascinating,” Seth replied. He was beginning to feel hot, as if he were under stage lights and his head ached. He thought he had an idea of what Carl had felt here and he wanted to leave.