I cut my hand today. It bled. I hate the sight of blood. It's sickening. When I went in to see Dr. Fillmore, I kept my hands behind my back. Fillmore's got eyes like an eagle. I tried to forget about the blood, to forget about what was behind my back. I can block anything out of my mind if I try hard enough.
Dr. Fillmore wanted to talk about my parents again. I knew he would. He always does. If he doesn't shut up…
If he wants to talk about somebody's parents, let him talk about his own. I bet his old ma and pa were as ugly and hateful as he is. I bet they made him do nasty things when he was little. I bet he remembers every filthy detail to this very day. Every terrible, terrible detail…
When I let Fillmore see my hands, when I raised them high, his eyes went wide, and, after that, he made an odd, gurgling sound.
I don't know why Dr. Fillmore has become such a slob. After I'd been there for a while today, I noticed that his hair was damp and matted and that his clothes were all blotched with stains. It was sickening. I stood right over him and he just stared up at me, never blinking, his mouth gaping open, as if he didn't have a clue to why I was looking at him. When I glanced up, I saw that the office was in pretty foul shape, too. Right away I began to feel dirty, as if the place was rubbing off on me. I had to get out of there. So I just turned my back on the sickening mess and walked out. I went straight back the way I'd come. I didn't stop or dawdle or slow down for anything. In fact, I barely spoke to the nice doorman who took my arm when he saw me coming down the hall and insisted on escorting me back up in the elevator. I didn't say a word when he took the ax from me. My name is Lizzie.
THE SPLICER
Don D'Ammassa
In retrospect, Scott suspected that the first tampering with the film program had occurred during the Godzilla Festival.
Saturday was always science-fiction night at the Managansett Cinema, just as Fridays were reserved for horror films, Mondays for swashbucklers, and so on. Old Man Bradford couldn't afford to show first-run movies in the town's only theater, but he made up for it by sheer volume. Every show was a double feature on weeknights, triples on weekends.
The same economy was reflected in the staff. Candy Carter sold tickets from one side of her booth, candy and popcorn from the other. Scott collected the tickets at the entrance to the theater, did a brief stint as an usher, then climbed the narrow stairway to the projection booth. It was a real struggle on Friday nights, their only busy nights, when they played to a nearly full house, but generally there were less than two dozen customers, primarily teenage couples so preoccupied with each other he could have shown three hours of blank tape without their noticing anything. Scott would never have lasted three years in this job if it required any real initiative or brainpower; he operated the projector mechanically and possessed no understanding at all of the means by which celluloid images were transmitted to the screen. His boss occasionally made disapproving sounds about his shoulder-length blond hair, of which Scott was inordinately proud, but had never pressed the issue, perhaps because Scott was willing to accept such low wages.
Scott had long since stopped paying much attention to the movies, almost all of which he had seen several times before, preferring to spend the time lost in one daydream or another, usually involving the dispensation of large sums of cash or the resolution of dramatic political crises for which only Scott Barkin had the necessary personal qualities. Infrequently, there were sexual overtones, but carnal acts or nudity made him uncomfortable, on the screen or off it.
Which is probably why he noticed the girl in the torn dress during Godzilla versus the Smog Monster.
It was the third of three Godzilla movies that night, and Scott was anxious for it to end so that he could rewind the film, check to be certain the theater was empty, and lock up for the night. The smog monster had just taken to the air on its latest rampage when the camera shifted to a crowd shot, the usual aggregation of frightened figures running for whatever ineffective shelter they could find. At the forefront of the crowd, a slender Japanese woman fell to the ground, her blouse slipping from one shoulder. As she struggled to rise, someone stepped on the hem of her dress, which tore all the way to her waistline, briefly revealing a swath of white thigh before she was swallowed up by the crowd.
Scott only noticed it because even that small hint of sexuality seemed anachronistic in a Japanese monster movie of the 1970s.
A week or two later, while the original King Kong was passing across the screen, Scott was startled by the giant ape's rather revealing exploration of Fay Wray's clothing, at one point exposing a clearly naked breast for a split second. He vaguely recalled reading that some censored footage from the original print had been restored, so he just shook his head and chuckled.
It was the torrid love scene between Anne Francis and Leslie Nielsen in Forbidden Planet that finally led him to suspect that something was wrong. It was part of a double feature, opening with the classic The Thing. Margaret Sheridan had seemed somewhat lightly clad for a posting in Antarctica, and she displayed a rather fuller figure than Scott remembered, but otherwise there had been no note of incongruity in that film. But when Nielsen and Francis began clutching at one another in evident passion during the next show, Scott knew something was up.
"What the hell?" He rose from his chair and moved forward, peering out through the small window at the screen shimmering below. Nielsen had one hand closed quite obviously over a breast, while his free hand worked at the fastenings of her blouse. The ultimate revelation was only put off when Dr. Morbius, portrayed by Walter Pidgeon, put in an untimely appearance.
When the theater had emptied some time later, Scott stood staring at the coiled film. There had been no discernible reaction from the audience; could he have imagined the entire sequence?
"Hey, can I go now?"
Startled, Scott turned to see Candy standing nonchalantly in the projection-room doorway.
"Yeah, I suppose so. Everything all set downstairs?"
She nodded, chewing gum energetically. "Of course. I'll deposit the box office take on my way home. You okay? You look kind of funny?"
"Me? I'm fine. See you tomorrow." He was aware that he sounded distracted, but he couldn't help it. Absentmindedly, he followed her downstairs to the lobby.
"Okay, sure. See you." She watched him another second, then turned and left.
That's when he noticed the kid with the thick-rimmed glasses standing at one side of the lobby.
"Excuse me, mister." The kid stepped out of the shadows. Scott judged him to be barely into his teens. "Was that some special cut of Forbidden Planet or something?"
So he hadn't imagined it! But he didn't want to give anything away to this kid. Not until he had a chance to think. Scott kept his expression neutral. "What do you mean? It looked fine to me."
The boy seemed confused. "Some of that stuff wasn't in the original film. I thought maybe it was a restored version, like they did with King Kong, you know."
Scott shrugged. "I don't know, kid; I just show 'em. Sometimes we get the old ones spliced together wrong. Come on, let's go. I have to lock up."
Later that night, somewhere deep in his brain, Scott conceived the idea that this odd variant of the original film might be valuable, but try as he might, he could think of no way to take advantage of the situation. It would have to be sent back to the distributor in the morning; even if he had the facilities to copy it first, he had no idea how to make use of his discovery. The thought that he was missing a chance to make money, possibly quite a lot of money, was disturbing.