I’d never much liked that picture. In it, Mr. Scratsche has on this shiny, sharkskin suit, the kind of thing that looked like it would go up with one match. But it wasn’t Scratsche’s questionable fashion choices that gave me the creeps; it was his eyes. They were dead-of-night black. You could look into them and see nothing but yourself staring back. Every time I passed that picture, those eyes found me, judged me. They made the hair on the back of my neck whisper dread to my insides. They made me look.
Overhead, the Gothic chandelier bulbs flickered and dimmed—a power surge, one of the Cinegore’s infamous quirks. A few seconds later, they blazed back up to full wattage. We let out a collective exhale.
“Dodged that one,” Dani said and high-fived me.
I enjoyed the momentary feel of her skin against mine, even if it was just some palm-to-palm action. Fact: When most of your nights are spent threading old horror movies through an artifact of a projector, any human contact is exciting. Which sounds kind of pathetic. That’s probably because I am a little pathetic. In life as in film, find your niche and work it.
John-O, our resident freshman, signaled urgently from outside that he was ready to release the velvet rope barrier keeping the ticket holders in line. John-O was a short spark plug of a kid with a learner’s permit and a habit of telling us the plot of every movie we’d still like to see. In an act of petty revenge for this, Dave, Dani, and I all pretended not to understand his wild gestures. We added some of our own, turning it into a dance, until finally, in frustration, John-O opened the door and yelled in, “Uh, you guys? I’m gonna let people in now, okay?”
“Do it, pumpkin! Be you!” Dave finger-gunned at John-O, who stiffened and ran over to the rope, fiddling nervously with the brass release hook. Dave sighed. “God bless freshmen.”
“Here we go. Last stand at the Cinegore,” I said as people swarmed in through the doors. “We who are about to die salute you.”
* * *
Maybe a third of the seats were filled. Even on our last night, with a supposedly haunted movie, we couldn’t draw a crowd. No wonder they were bulldozing us. Dave reminded everyone about turning off cell phones just before he snapped pics of the audience, who were, in turn, memorializing themselves and uploading it all.
Then I went into my bit. “Welcome to the last night of the Cinegore Theater, your premier vintage horror movie experience.”
“Shut up and start the movie!” Bryan Jenks called from the back row. There was a reason we called him Bryan Jerks.
I took a deep breath. “As you know, I Walk This Earth is cursed—”
“Mo-vie! Mo-vie! Mo-vie!” Bryan and his pals chanted. A couple of the hipsters tried to shut them down with an apathetic “Dude, c’mon” chorus, but that only made Bryan try harder.
“Hey, Jerks—your mother still cut the crusts off your sandwiches?” Dani was suddenly beside me, shining her usher’s flashlight right in Bryan’s eyes.
He held up a hand. “Damn, girl. Don’t blind me.”
“Don’t piss me off, and I won’t,” she said. “Got your back, vato,” she whispered in my ear. Her breath sent a shiver down my neck.
“All the people who worked on this movie died in mysterious ways,” I continued. “The lead actress, Natalia Marcova, hung herself in a cheap motel room. Teen heartthrob Jimmy Reynolds was beheaded when he crashed his car into a tree. The mileage on his odometer? Six hundred sixty-six miles.”
“Ohmigod,” a girl in the front row said, giggling nervously with her friends. The booze on their breath was eye-wateringly potent.
“Lead actor, Alistair Findlay-Cushing—”
“That was his actual name, not a stage name,” one of the local college hipsters said smugly.
Dani mouthed, “Wikipediot.”
Fighting a grin, I said, louder, “Alistair was found facedown on his bed, a pentagram scrawled on the floor, his heart nailed to the center of it.” I stopped to enjoy the audience’s squirms. “But the creepiest part? When director Rudolph Van Hesse was on his deathbed, he confessed that he’d sold his soul to the devil to make the film, and that it had the power to corrupt anyone who watched it. ‘There is evil woven into this film. A powerful darkness shines out from each frame. It must not be seen by human eyes!’”
“How can darkness ‘shine out’?” Hipster Dick said.
In my movie, he would die slowly and painfully, thanks to sentient, malevolent facial hair. I ignored him. “Van Hesse may have spent the last ten years of his life in a mental institution, but it didn’t stop him from having every print of his film destroyed … except for one copy kept under lock and key for the past fifty-five years. That single existing copy is the one you’re about to watch.”
“Ooh,” the audience said.
“So put on your special DemonVision 3-D glasses and enjoy the show. We’ll see you at the end—if you survive.”
The theater went dark, and I stumbled into Dani on the way out. “Sorry! You okay? Jeez, I’m so … sorry.”
The smell of her vanilla perfume made me want to bury my face in the crook of her neck. She quirked an eyebrow, and I realized I was still holding on to her. I sprang back. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Dani said, and pushed through the theater doors into the bright lobby. I hung behind for a second to get my shit together.
“Sorry,” I said again to the dark. But really I was just sorry I had to let go.
* * *
I met Dani halfway through our junior year, when she moved to Deadwood from San Antonio and landed in my alphabetically appointed homeroom class (A–G, Dani García, Kevin Grant). She had pink pigtails and the air of somebody from the Big City. Plus, she wore a Bikini Kill T-shirt. I was toast.
“Hey. Nice shirt,” I’d said, pointing.
“Oh my gosh,” Lana French had shouted. “Kevin just pointed to the new girl’s boobs!”
For two weeks solid, I was known as McBoobster. After that, my exchanges with Dani were on a strictly “Heyhowareyou/Wellseeyalater” basis. I’d watched from the sidelines as she cycled through short-term-parking romantic partners: Paul Peterson (he of the any-surface-can-be-skateboarded fame), Ignacio Aguilar (a strange, mostly texting-based relationship), Martha Dixon (the brief bi-curious period, documented through a variety of Hot Topic T-shirts), and the true horror show, Mike Everett, who had broken up with Dani three days before the Valentine’s dance so he could go with Talisha Graham instead, which was just wrong—like, adult-diaper-party wrong.
And then, by some spring miracle, Dani had taken a shift at the Cinegore. “Thought I’d see what all the fuss is about,” she’d said. “Besides, it beats working the fry baskets at Whataburger.”
For the past four months, we’d been toiling side by side, our Saturday nights playing out like a montage from every bad teen romance ever filmed: Wayward fingers briefly touching in the vast fields of popcorn. Heads bending in sympathy as we restocked the Raisinets. Eyes glancing while we talked smack with Dave about which Richard Matheson movie adaptation was the best: The Last Man on Earth (me), The Omega Man (Dani), or I Am Legend (Dave, who was a sucker for both Will Smith and German shepherds). When our shifts ended, we’d stagger down the road to IHOP at two a.m. for plates of spongy pancakes and endless cups of burned coffee. Sitting there with my best friend in the world and the girl I secretly loved, I would feel like a vampire, staring out through night-painted windows at the lonely semis crying down the interstate, willing the dawn to stay tucked in for just a few hours more so I could suck up all the living I could get.