“Graham,” he said, spreading it out so it sounded like Gray-um.
“Hi,” I said.
“I got no problem with you, Graham,” he said, as though that were an issue already raised. “No problem at all. But we do got a couple rules here before you can set down and rest.”
“He said he won’t make no trouble,” Duff assured him.
“Junkies lie all the time, bro,” Marky countered. “You know that.”
I sighed and said, “I’m not a junkie and I don’t need to rest here. Marky — you’re Marky, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Marky: I’d like to be straight with you.”
“I like that,” he said.
“I’m here because this place used to be run by a man, a man who’s dead now, but his widow has caused me and my friends a lot of trouble.”
“Trouble like that bandage up on your head?”
“That and worse. I want to find this lady and put an end to it before anybody else gets hurt, and this place is the only lead I got.”
“This place used to store old movies,” Marky told me, matter-of-factly. My ears pricked up. “Still some of them old movie cans around, too. This one time a dude dumped one of ‘em on a fire and that shit blew up — no lie, just like a bomb.”
“Nitrate,” I said.
“I dunno, but we hauled his ass right on out of here, I tell you that.”
“Can you show me some of those cans?”
“Look bro, you said you wasn’t going to cause no trouble. You’re talkin’ about people getting hurt and you look like you already been worked over good. That’s against the rules, man. I told you, we got rules.”
I wished I’d only been worked over, but I kept that much to myself.
I said, “Nobody’s after me, at least not at the moment. I’m supposed to still be in the hospital, actually, and the folks who did this to me still think I’m dead, as far as I know. All I need is a little information, and I promise you it won’t break any of your rules for me to get it, if it’s here.”
He wrinkled his nose and mulled it over. While he was thinking, the woman passed a bottle up to him and he took a long pull. Then, without a word or even looking me in the eye, he passed the bottle to me. Its contents were radioactive green and the label read MD 20/20—KIWI–LEMON. It felt like a moment of truth, or a test of courage, or something. I didn’t want to offend my gracious host, so I took a belt and gagged the stuff down. I coughed hard after that and Marky took the bottle back, laughing his ass off.
“Shit, bro,” he said, “you didn’t have to drink it.”
Now the woman and Duff joined in on the hilarity and, once my retching coughs were under control, I chuckled a little too.
“Come on,” Marky said then. “Lemme show you something.”
32
“Give me a minute.”
Grace waited in the doorway while Jack went into the darkness of the studio, his footsteps echoing loudly throughout the shadowed stages. A few moments later she heard a metallic crunch and a row of lights hanging from the rafters burned on.
“And God said,” Jack boomed from the opposite end of the broad space, his arms outstretched.
Grace walked in, her heels clacking a different tempo from the director’s shoes, and paused between the city street and the cemetery. The rafter lights illumined the fake gravestones like sunlight after a storm, streaming through the dissipating clouds.
Only the sacrificial tomb evaded the light, masked by the length of her own shadow.
33
Some of the titles on the decaying labels I recognized. A few I didn’t. Part of me was looking for Convention City, despite the urgency of the situation. Mostly I just wanted to see if there was anything among the three towers of dusty silver cans that would lead me where I needed to go.
The reels were stacked as far away from where Marky and his cohorts resided as possible and, like their little area on the other side of the warehouse, they had built walls around them. Unlike the particleboard from their apartment, however, these walls were wooden and cut into odd shapes, and blanketed with dust.
“After that film blowed up the way it did, I didn’t wanna be any too close,” he explained.
I gritted my teeth, hating to think what that guy might have destroyed. Some years earlier I’d read a story about a conservative church group in Florida who bought an old, defunct drive-in and held a nice little Nazi burning party in the parking lot when they found a closet full of films. I raged about that for weeks.
“Why didn’t you just get rid of them?” I asked him.
“One of these days I’ll find somebody wants to buy ‘em, I figure. You interested?”
I squinted in the low glow of his flashlight at an almost illegible label that read What Has To Be Done.
“Well,” I stalled. “Possibly.”
I set What Has To Be Done aside and kept sifting through the stacks. Just when I finished the second and started in on the third, Marky said, “There’s an old office, too. Way over there, on the street side. Kind of a dressing room and office, I guess. Big mirror in it, all broke up.”
“I’ll want to see that,” I started, when I saw I was holding a missing reel from Angel of the Abyss in my hand. The hand shook and my heartbeat quickened. I went through the next few reels in a hurry, and two more were from Angel. Another just had TEST written on the label, the ink so faded it was almost gone. Screen test? I wondered. I planned on finding out.
“Looks like you found you something good,” Marky said. “I saved ‘em, though. They mine, man.”
“Please tell me there’s a projector in here someplace.”
“What’s that?”
“The thing you feed the film through, to show it up on a screen.”
“Oh, right, right. Like at the movie theater.”
I clutched one of the Angel reels to my chest like it was my own baby and widened my eyes, awaiting a response.
“Yeah,” he said at last. “Yeah, there’s one of them. Back in that office. Or dressing room. Or whatever the hell it’s supposed to be.”
“God, I hope it works,” I moaned, and in my shaken state I brushed up against one of the diving walls, nearly knocking it over. Marky rushed forward to right it, and between the two of us we kicked up quite a dust cloud. Once again I was coughing my lungs up in front of this man, who didn’t seem fazed by it at all. And when the glare of his flashlight settled upon the oddly shaped platform, my heart almost stopped dead.
That first reel, the third, that I saw when Leslie Wheeler emailed me the video of it, had been playing and replaying in my mind ever since I first got into this mess. Even when I was unconscious in the hospital, I saw Grace Baron emerging from the fog on that crazy, avant garde street lined with painted backdrops of bricked façades and shop fronts.
There was no doubt in my mind that I was standing two feet from one of those backdrops now, a piece of Angel of the Abyss.
“Jesus,” I gasped.
“You wanta see that project-a-thing or what?” Marky barked.
I swallowed hard and gathered up all four of the reels I wanted.
“Yeah…yes. Lead the way, Marky.”
“Them damn things best not blow my head off.”
I grunted to signify that I’d heard him, but my attention was focused on the oldest damn film projector I’d ever put my hands on.