The people who had hung out in this part of the build-ing had been far less neatness—minded than Billingsley and his crew. They had smashed their bottles in the cor-ners instead of collecting them, and instead of fantasy fish or smoke-breathing horses, the walls were decorated with broad Magic Marker pictographs. One of these, as primi-tive as any cave-drawing, showed a horned and mis-shapen child hanging from a gigantic breast. Beneath it was scrawled a little couplet: LITTLE BITTY BABY SMITTY, I SEEN YOU BITE YOUR MOMMY’ S TITTY. Paper trash-fast—food sacks, candy wrappers, potato-chip bags, empty cigarette packs and condom envelopes-had drifted along both sides of the hail. A used rubber hung from the knob of the door marked MANAGER, pasted there in its own long-dried fluids like a dead snail.
The door to the manager’s office was on her right. Across from it was one marked JANITOR. Up ahead on the left was another door, this one unmarked, and then an arch with a word written on it in ancient black paint half flaked away. Even her eyes couldn’t make out what the word was, at least from this distance, but a step or two closer and it came clear: BALCONY. The archway had been boarded up, but at some point the boards had been pulled away and heaped to either side of it. Hanging from the top of the arch was a mostly deflated sex-doll with blond Arnel hair, a red-ringed hole of a mouth, and a bald rudi-mentary vagina. There was a noose around its neck, the coils dark with age.
Also around its neck, hanging against the doll’s sagging plastic bosom, was a hand—lettered sign which looked as if it might have been made by a hard-working first-grader.
It was decorated with a red-eyed skull and crossbones at the top. DONT COME OUT HERE, it said. REDY TO FALL DOWN. IM SERIAS. Across from the balcony was an alcove which had once probably held a snackbar. At the far end of the hall were more steps go-ing up into darkness. To the projectionist’s booth, she assumed.
Audrey went to the door marked MANAGER, grasped the knob, and leaned her brow against the wood. Outside, the wind moaned like a dying thing.
“David.” she asked gently. She paused, listened. “David, do you hear me. It’s Audrey, David. Audrey Wyler. I want to help you.”
No answer. She opened the door and saw an empty room with an ancient poster for Bonnie and Clyde on the wall and a torn mattress on the floor. In the same Magic Marker, someone had written I’M A MIDNIGHT CREEPER, ALL-DAY SLEEPER below the poster.
She tried the janitor’s cubby next. It wasn’t much bigger than a closet and completely empty. The unmarked door gave on a room that had probably once been a supply closet.
Her nose (keener now, like her eyesight) picked up the aroma of long-ago popcorn. There were a lot of dead flies and a fair scattering of mouseshit, but nothing else.
She went to the archway, swept aside the dangling dolly with her forearm, and peered out. She couldn’t see the stage from back here, just the top half of the screen. The skinny girl was still yelling for David, but the others were silent. That might not mean anything, but she didn’t like not knowing where they were.
Audrey decided that the sign around the dolly’s neck was probably a true warning. The seats had been taken out, making it easy to see the way the balcony floor heaved and twisted; it made her think of a poem she’d read in college, something about a painted ship on a painted ocean. If the brat wasn’t out on the balcony, he was somewhere else.
Somewhere close. He couldn’t have gone far. And he wasn’t on the balcony, that much was for sure. With the seats gone, there was nowhere to hide, not so much as a drape or a velvet swag on the wall.
Audrey dropped the arm which had been holding the half-deflated doll aside. It swung back and forth, the noose around its neck making a slow rubbing sound. Its blank eyes stared at Audrey. Its hole of a mouth, a mouth with only one purpose, seemed to leer at her, to laugh at her. Look at what you’re doing, Frieda Fuckdolly seemed to be saying.
You were going to become the most highly paid woman geologist in the country, own your own con-sulting firm by the time you were thirty-five, maybe win the Nobel Prize by the time you were fifty… weren’t those the dreams. The Devonian Era scholar, the summa cum laude whose paper on tectonic plates was published in Geology Review, is chasing after little boys in crum-bling old movie theaters. And no ordinary little boy, either. He’s special, the way you always assumed you were special. And if you do find him, Aud, what then. He’s strong.
She grabbed the hangman’s noose and yanked hard, snapping the old rope and pulling out a pretty country-fair bunch of Arnel hair at the same time. The doll landed face-down at Audrey’s feet, and she drop-kicked it onto the balcony. It floated high, then settled. Not stronger than Tak, she thought. I don’t care what he is, he’s not stronger than Tak. Not stronger than the can tahs, either. It’s our town, now. Never mind the past and the dreams of the past; this is the present, and it’s sweet. Sweet to kill, to take, to own. Sweet to rule, even in the desert. The boy is just a boy. The others are only food. Tak is here now, and he speaks with the voice of the older age; with the voice of the unformed.
She looked up the hail toward the stairs. She nodded, her right hand slipping into the pocket of her dress to touch the things that were there, to fondle them against her thigh.
He was in the projection booth. There was a big padlock hanging on the door which led into the basement, so where else could he be.
“Him en tow,” she whispered, starting forward. Her eyes were wide, the fingers of her right hand moving ceaselessly in the pocket of her dress. From beneath them came small, stony clicking sounds.
3 The kids who partied hearty upstairs in The American West until the fire escape fell down had been slobs, but they had mostly used the hail and the manager’s office for their revels; the other rooms were relatively untouched, and the projectionist’s little suite-the booth, the office cubicle, the closet-sized toilet-stall-was almost exactly as it had been on the day in 1979 when five ciga-rette-smoking men from Nevada Sunlite Entertainment had come in, dismantled the carbon-filament projectors, and taken them to Reno, where they still languished, in a warehouse filled with similar equipment, like fallen idols.
David was on his knees, head down, eyes closed, hands pressed together in front of his chin. The dusty linoleum beneath him was lighter than that which surrounded him.
Straight ahead was a second lighter rectangle. It was here that the old projectors-clattery, baking-hot dinosaurs that raised the temperature in this room as high as a hun-dred and twenty on some summer nights-had stood. To his left were the cut-outs through which they had shone their swords of light and projected their larger-than-life shadows: Gregory Peck and Kirk Douglas, Sophia Loren and Jayne Mansfield, a young Paul Newman hustling pool, an old but still vital Bette Davis torturing her wheel-chair-bound sister.
Dusty coils of film lay here and there on the floor like dead snakes. There were old stills and posters on the walls. One of the latter showed Marilyn Monroe standing on a subway grating and trying to hold down her flaring skirt. Beneath a hand-drawn arrow pointing at her panties, some wit had printed Carefully insert Shaft A in Slot B, making sure tool is seated firmly & cannot slip out. There was an odd, decayed smell in here, not quite mildew, not quite dry-rot, either. It smelled curdled, like something that had gone spectacularly bad before finally drying up.
David didn’t notice the smell any more than he heard Audrey softly calling his name from the hall which ran past the balcony. He had come here when the others had run to Billingsley-even Audrey had gone as far as stage—left at first, perhaps to make sure they were all going down the hall-because he had been nearly overwhelmed by a need to pray.