Night Movies Page 3

  “Zanni,” the old man told him, “people believe came from the development of individual archetypal commedia dell’arte characters. And the term was used for those characters for centuries. But I’ve read extensively on the subject – it’s my job, you know – and I have seen it written in a number of reputable sources that the term zanni was used by theater people long before that. Theater people are a tribe unto themselves, with a culture and a language, a history and a mythology. And their myth has it that the earliest theater people used the word to describe a race of beings employed by priests and powerful men to relay messages from the gods that kept the people obedient to them. These beings, who took the forms of painted people, black and white, couldn’t talk but could sway minds and affect bodies simply with gestures of the hands, with facial expressions and body language. Apparently they could be violent, blood-thirsty things without the priest’s spells to control them. But their movement was magic, and they had so refined an ability that they could make something meaningful, something substantial from the nothing of air around them – “

  “I see,” Seth said. Sweat poured down the back of his t-shirt and his vision twinkled with light and shadow. He wanted to jump off the edge of the stage and run for the doors, but he didn’t think he could make it without passing out. He squinted at the old man, who chatted on merrily about the history of theater and its bizarre legends.

  “That kid cult tried to bring them across. Supposedly they tried to open the way for things that are waiting for the door to swing wide enough open. Things old and infinitely terrible. But they were just a bunch of silly kids, right? What do they know about things like that? Did you know they had all died wearing Venetian masquerade masks?” Jerry offered him that smile again, and Seth’s stomach lurched.

  “I have to go,” he said suddenly, and stumbled forward. He hopped off the stage and for one horrifying moment, he thought his knees would give out under him. He imagined collapsing right there amid the broken seats and being talked right into the ground by this old man and his stories.

  His legs held firm, however, and as he jogged to the lobby doors, he could hear the startled tone of the man’s words, though not the words themselves. He broke through the first set of doors and willed his legs to get him to the front doors.

  As soon as he spilled out into sunlight, the awful ache in his head dissipated and the grip of nausea on his stomach loosened. It wasn’t until he was safely behind the wheel of his car, still panting as he pulled out of the theater parking lot, that it occurred to him the old man had called him Seth twice, even though Seth had never offered his name.

  * * * * *

  The mime grew bolder. It was done flirting with Seth, done offering quick glimpses and then pulling away. It stood beneath his window and mimicked climbing a ladder, slipping in a window, and cutting Seth’s throat as he slept. It sat on the hood of his car with its gloves at an imaginary wheel as it gleefully guided its noncar over human-sized speed bumps. Once, it wound back and pitched an imaginary rock through Seth’s window. That the glass broke and shattered inward with no obvious projectile Seth could find suggested the crossing of a line.

  He couldn’t sleep at night anymore. Not that the mime wasn’t quiet, he thought with a grim smile, but he knew it was out there, skulking around the house, acting out pantomimed scenarios that all ended with some terrible death for Seth. Once he tried sleeping pills and the dreams about Carl ripped him screaming into wakefulness.

  Seth wasn’t sure why the mime didn’t try to kill him outright, why it seemed content to keep a certain distance and torture him. He assumed it would have killed him outright if it could have, and since it hadn’t, maybe it needed to work up the energy to make its gestures mean something. He preferred to believe that than the alternative, which was that the mime was just a sadist asshole. Either way, Seth knew he was on borrowed time.

  He looked for books on theater lore. He scoured the Internet. If there was a spell to reign in the mime or make it go back to wherever it came from – behind that door beneath the stage, or wherever – he couldn’t find it. He even tried talking to some of the local theater people, though in that pursuit, he met with little success. By then, he was rumpled and unshaven, with long shadows on his cheeks and dark eye sockets, asking about theater legends of killer mime monsters. The theater people all knew, dammit, they knew but they either avoided him or became outright hostile when he asked. Seth guessed didn’t want to turn the mime’s attention on themselves. He supposed he couldn’t blame them.

  And of course, the historical society said there was not, nor had there ever been, a Jerry Carterhouse in their employment. Seth had kind of been expecting that. The lady at the historical society front desk did seem to remember a man named Jerry somehow in connection with the murder/suicides that took place in the old theater in the ‘70s, but he’d been an old man even then....

  Three weeks of fruitlessness culminated in a solution so simple that Seth cried with relief. He took the five-gallon container of gasoline from his garage and a box of kitchen matches, made his furtive way through the streets of town at three that morning, and set fire to the Dionysus Theater. He watched a good portion of it burn before going home and getting the first really deep and peaceful night’s sleep he’d had in a month.

  The next couple of weeks were gloriously mime-free. Seth shaved and showered, and some color returned to his cheeks. He smiled, even laughed at a joke someone made at work. When he came home, he played X-box and drank beer, his apartment building once more his personal fortress of solitude.

  So it came as a punch to the gut, a heart-sinking, bone jarring shock, when leaving the local bar one Saturday night, he saw the mime leaning against an invisible hood of an invisible car parked right next to his.

  Seth ran, guided by sheer panic. The mime ran, too, though the pounding of its feet down the alley where Seth had blindly fled made no echo. Seth was trapped. It couldn’t have been a more disastrous avenue to take if the mime had influenced the choice itself. Seth clawed at the brick wall in front of him, then turned to the chain link fence to his left. He jumped on it, digging his fingers in the metal lattice, and tried to hoist himself up. Something grabbed him that lacked the substance of real fingers and easily yanked him down. He fell, banging his head against the bar’s dumpster. Bottles rattled inside and the sickening smell of fermenting beer slid down his throat, making him gag.

  The mime approached him slowly, a stealthy predator closing in.

  For the first time, Seth saw the mime up close. Its face was a luminous and opalescent white, an effect Seth knew wasn’t possible with mere grease paint. Black swallowed the eyes, dripping darkness down the cheeks in long, narrow teardrops. The thin eyebrows arched into a glare that made the inky depths below them somehow well up with malice. The black-lined lips were compressed and rotting; when they parted, Seth could see rows and rows of tiny, sharp, ivory teeth lining every visible space – inner cheeks, jaws, roof and floor of the mouth, countless serrated points going back into the Stygian depths of its throat. It wore a white shirt with narrow black stripes, black pants, black shoes, and white gloves. In the dark, it was hard to make out what, exactly, the dark splatters were that stained the shirt and the fingers of the gloves, but he thought they might be tinged red.

  In its facial expressions, Seth found he could read ages, even eons of power and struggle, of obedience and rebellion, of bloodshed and death. As the mime stood over him, its body language spoke of fire, of burned bridges and doorways closed, of infinite and merciless time. He didn’t understand all of what he saw, but he understood enough to know what the fire had done to the mime, both inside and out. It was a bitter satisfaction.

  It raised its hands up in a gesture of lifting an ax, and it was pure instinct and not reason that caused Seth to throw a protective arm over his head. If there was something in the space between those gloves, something deadly hoisted above its head, Seth couldn’t see it. But when the mime brought its arms down
in a swinging motion, Seth screamed. There was a heavy thunk which Seth only barely heard above the blood pounding in his ears, and this was immediately followed by a biting pain in his forearm so intense that for a moment, the world went nearly as white as his attacker’s face. The mime raised its arms again, pulling free whatever had caused the pain, and Seth could see blood – his blood – pouring from the gaping maw that had formed in his forearm.

  The mime brought its invisible ax down again, and this time, Seth closed his eyes.

  NO SONGS FOR THE STARS

  

  THE SMALL MAN, SHIVERING AND cuffed to his chair in Sulpher City Police Department’s interrogation room 6, seemed to fit the profile the agent from the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit had given them. He was of slightly above-average intelligence but possessed some learning disabilities that had flown under the radar of teachers at school. For the last twelve years of his twenty-seven on this planet, he had been in and out of mental institutions and jailed for vagrancy. From his bedside night table drawer, the police had confiscated, among other things, a number of orange-bottled meds he had been refusing to take. Diagnoses from therapists and psychiatrists varied, but their notes on his disorganized thinking validated the profile, and “schizotypal PD” seemed to be a consistent conclusion.

  His hatred for the children was evident from the crime scene photos, and from the way he growled under his breath when the interrogating officers mentioned any of the eleven victims by name. And he seemed to fare no better with adults. Lt. Gina Maldonado could see it in the way he looked at her from beneath that shag of dirty blond hair – like he was hungry for her and repulsed by her at the same time. She didn’t shiver in front of the guys, but it bothered her in the death-still blue hours of late night for weeks after.

  He bore the scars on his arms, face, and neck of severe physical abuse inflicted when he was a child himself; he flinched when anyone tried to touch him. Perhaps he resented what he saw as children’s helplessness. Perhaps it was something more. His few sparse statements about the hateful, sinful sexthings implied by others’ proposals that he get out and develop a social life suggested there might have been sexual abuse in his past as well.

  The man lived with an aging, overprotective grandmother who had sat in the bullpen two days ago to give her statement, with her small, neat purse in her lap and her cheap shoes tapping impatiently. The residence was on 7th Avenue, which, as the profile had suggested, lay more or less in the center of the four-mile circumference of crime scenes – walking distance, since he had no driver’s license. He’d had the time to stalk during work hours because he had no job, and once her bedtime rolled around, the elderly, ornery grandmother forgot he existed, so his nights were free to kill. Owen had always been essentially alone. No friends, no lovers. No one to notice what he was carving up in the basement beneath the house.

  His childhood was a cornucopia of dysfunctions ripe for raising a serial killer. His mother, Sheila, had gotten pregnant at fourteen. She’d kept on with the drugs for the first few months of her pregnancy, but threats of homelessness made by the grandmother made her clean up at least for a while. Still, she resented the boy – maybe even hated him. She went back to drugs when he was six or seven and when she was high, she hurt him badly. His father, Donnie, had come home from jail when he was eleven. The old man smacked him around for a few years – nothing like the cutting his mom had done, but bad enough. Donnie had done the boy a favor, though, the night he took Sheila out for a ride in his new car. The morning after, police found a smoking wreck against a highway underpass out by Nilhollow Woods. The crumpled passenger side of the car had forced Shelia’s charred body into some terribly unnatural angles. When social workers told the boy, then fourteen, reports indicate he had smiled and mumbled something about the devil taking his momma back to hell. Other than streaks of blood trailing from the driver’s seat to a puddle, sticky with coagulation and mixed with the local flora, located some several hundred yards off-road into underbrush, no trace of Donnie had ever been found. Even that old shrew of a grandmother counted it as one of life’s few blessings – good riddance to the piece of shit who had knocked up her daughter, had gotten her killed, and thus left an old woman responsible for an unwell boy.

  Now, some twenty years later, all evidence pointed to Owen Nelson Offrey being guilty of murder, but looking at him, the assembly of detectives had trouble imagining that pathetic, scruffy little man having the strength or, frankly, the balls to commit the crimes he had. Mutilation, cannibalism.... Those skinny arms and those almost feminine hands, wrapped so tightly around him that his knuckles were white as he gripped his elbows, didn’t seem strong enough. The plain but boyish face looked genuinely scared.

  Still, he had empty eyes which sometimes filled with things from inside his head – things only he could see, things he had done when he was alone with his victims, glimpses of a world he believed was real and alive and dangerously thrilling.

  Sometimes, he just looked haggard and exhausted.

  In the interrogation room, when Lt. Joe Campion asked him in his smoky voice, “Did you kill those little kids?” Owen replied by shaking his head and muttering beneath his breath.

  When Joe showed him a school picture of the first girl, Molly Mitchell, and another of Gloria Framingham and asked, “Do you recognize her? Or her?” the young man inhaled sharply, turned his head and growled. He mumbled something about stars.

  Joe said, “We need you to tell us about the girls, Owen.”

  Owen shook his head and said, “No songs for the stars.”

  “The shrink said his medication should be in his system by now,” Hank McNaulty, the psychiatrist, said to Joe’s commanding officer in the observation room outside. They were watching through the room’s two-way mirror. “He’s as lucid, I suppose, as he’s going to get.”

  With an exasperated glance at the glass that eerily suggested he’d heard the psychiatrist on the other side, Owen said, “Check the wall. No Songs for the Stars. That’s what the wall said. That, and so much more. It told me all about those things, hiding and pretending. It gave me the cloak of night.”

  “What? What wall? The wall told you to kill?”

  Owen shook his head. “The apartment. The building. All of it, a conduit, maybe – a stopover or a destination for travelers. Their writing all over the walls is full of arcane knowledge and unspilled secrets. And you can’t help reading...and hearing. Understanding.”

  “Did this apartment tell you why you should butcher innocent children?”

  Owen paused, unperturbed. “Is that what they look like to you?”

  Gina shuddered. The man across the table from her honestly frightened her.

  When no one answered, Owen started fidgeting and muttered that he was tired.

  * * * * *

  Owen wouldn’t – or couldn’t give an address, so the CO told one of the uniforms to get a list of apartment buildings in a ten-block radius. It would be a long list – Sulpher City’s overcrowding problem made apartments a swinging door for a constant flow of tenants – but it would be a place to start. The uniform nodded and moved off in a hurry. The CO sent another to look through the items confiscated from Owen’s grandmother’s house.

  Inside the interrogation room, when asked how he could have done the things he’d done to the bodies, Owen answered, “I needed to. It’s written on the walls. They tell you everything – how to kill them, how to dispose of them so they can’t come back – ”

  None of these answers surprised McNaulty the psychiatrist, Joe, Gina, or those in the observation room. Guys like Owen never gave an answer anyone could use to sleep better at night. Sometimes they gave no answer at all, but even when they did, it never satisfactorily explained the hows and whys. All that was in the history, the profile, the medical records – Owen was a damaged person from a deranged environment, neglected just enough to develop perversions in solitude and then later, protected just enough to foster that false sense of inviolability
.

  His confession was no more than garden-variety delusion of a disorganized serial murderer. Still, the detectives and uniformed officers who were gathered to observe the interrogation that night were affected by what they heard. They wondered about the world on their respective ways home that night. The wind cut a little deeper as they pulled their coats tighter to themselves. Shadows outside their own homes and apartments seemed a little longer and darker. They slept restlessly, and several spouses, if asked, would have reported their mates talking, shivering, even crying in their sleep.

  * * * * *

  During the third hour into Owen’s medicated state, Joe led the interrogation, with Gina assisting. Owen had waived his right to a lawyer, something his grandmother had vowed quite loudly and angrily to amend as she left the station. McNaulty now sat in to observe and to take any notes that might help later with the case or with the finding of the remaining bodies. Occasionally, he interjected a question which, from his experience, often helped to side-step the conversational road blocks that Owen’s mental state threw up.

  Joe, who had been getting nowhere with his line of questioning about the children, tried another approach. “Tell us about the apartment, Owen.”

  Owen looked up. “You mean the Pantheon? You want me to tell you about No Songs for the Stars?”

  Gina scribbled the name down on her pad of paper. When Joe nodded, Owen’s whole posture changed from slouching dejection to anxious excitement. He leaned in closer to the trio opposite him, resting his elbows on the table so he could gesture with his cuffed hands.

  “Do – do you want me to start from the beginning?”

  “That would be best,” Gina replied.

  Owen nodded vigorously, his face flooded with relief that yes, yes, finally they were going to listen, to really listen to what he had to say.