“Nobody dies in the movies, Ricky. You know that as well as I do. You can always thread the celluloid up again—”
—that was what the flickering reminded him of, the flicker of celluloid through the gate of a projector, one image hot on the next, the illusion of life created from a perfect sequence of little deaths.
“—and we’re there again, all talking, all singing.” She laughed: ice-in-a-glass laughter, “We never fluff our lines, never age, never lose our timing—”
“You’re not real,” said Ricky.
She looked faintly bored by the observation, as if he was being pedantic.
By now she’d come to the end of the row and was standing no more than three feet away from him. At this distance the illusion was as ravishing and as complete as ever. He suddenly wanted to take her, there, in the aisle. What the hell if she was just a fiction: fictions are fuckable if you don’t want marriage.
“I want you,” he said, surprised by his own bluntness.
“I want you,” she replied, which surprised him even more. “In fact I need you. I’m very weak.”
“Weak?”
“It’s not easy, being the center of attraction, you know. You find you need it, more and more. Need people to look at you. All the night, all the day.”
“I’m looking.”
“Am I beautiful?”
“You’re a goddess: whoever you are.”
“I’m yours: that’s who I am.”
It was a perfect answer. She was defining herself through him. I am a function of you; made for you out of you. The perfect fantasy.
“Keep looking at me; looking forever, Ricky. I need your loving looks. I can’t live without them.”
The more he stared at her the stronger her image seemed to become. The flickering had almost stopped; a calm had settled over the place.
“Do you want to touch me?”
He thought she’d never ask.
“Yes,” he said.
“Good.” She smiled coaxingly at him, and he reached to make contact. She elegantly avoided his fingertips at the last possible moment, and ran, laughing, down the aisle towards the screen. He followed, eager. She wanted a game: that was fine by him.
She’d run into a cul-de-sac. There was no way out from this end of the cinema, and judging by the come-ons she was giving him, she knew it. She turned and flattened herself against the wall, feet spread a little.
He was within a couple of yards of her when a breeze out of nowhere billowed her skirt up around her waist. She laughed, half closing her eyes, as the surf of silk rose and exposed her. She was naked underneath.
Ricky reached for her again and this time she didn’t avoid his touch. The dress billowed up a little higher and he stared, fixated, at the part of Marilyn he had never seen, the fur divide that had been the dream of millions.
There was blood there. Not much, a few fingermarks on her inner thighs. The faultless gloss of her flesh was spoiled slightly. Still he stared; and the lips parted a little as she moved her hips, and he realized the glint of wetness in her interior was not the juice of her body, but something else altogether. As her muscles moved the bloody eyes she’d buried in her body shifted, and came to rest on him.
She knew by the look on his face that she hadn’t hidden them deep enough, but where was a girl with barely a veil of cloth covering her nakedness to hide the fruits of her labor?
“You killed him,” said Ricky, still looking at the lips, and the eyes that peeked out between. The image was so engrossing, so pristine, it all but cancelled out the horror in his belly. Perversely, his disgust fed his lust instead of killing it. So what if she was a murderer: she was legend.
“Love me,” she said. “Love me forever.”
He came to her, knowing now full well that it was death to do so. But death was a relative matter, wasn’t it? Marilyn was dead in the flesh, but alive here, either in his brain, or in the buzzing matrix of the air or both; and he could be with her.
He embraced her, and she him. They kissed. It was easy. Her lips were softer than he’d imagined, and he felt something close to pain at his crotch he wanted to be in her so much.
The willow-thin arms slipped around his waist, and he was in the lap of luxury.
“You make me strong,” she said. “Looking at me that way. I need to be looked at, or I die. It’s the natural state of illusions.”
Her embrace was tightening; the arms at his back no longer seemed quite so willowlike. He struggled a little against the discomfort.
“No use,” she cooed in his ear. “You’re mine.”
He wrenched his head around to look at her grip and to his amazement the arms weren’t arms any longer, just a loop of something round his back, without hands or fingers or wrists.
“Jesus Christ!” he said.
“Look at me, boy,” she said. The words had lost their delicacy. It wasn’t Marilyn that had him in its arms any more: nothing like her. The embrace tightened again, and the breath was forced from Ricky’s body, breath the tightness of the hold prevented him from recapturing. His spine creaked under the pressure, and pain shot through his body like flares, exploding in his eyes, all colors.
“You should have got out of town,” said Marilyn, as Wayne’s face blossomed under the sweep of her perfect cheekbones. His look was contemptuous, but Ricky had only a moment to register it before that image cracked too, and something else came into focus behind this façade of famous faces. For the last time in his life, Ricky asked the question:
“Who are you?”
His captor didn’t answer. It was feeding on his fascination; even as he stared twin organs erupted out of its body like the horns of a slug, antennae perhaps, forming themselves into probes and crossing the space between its head and Ricky’s.
“I need you,” it said, its voice now neither Wayne nor Monroe, but a crude, uncultivated voice, a thug’s voice. “I’m so fucking weak; it uses me up, being in the world.”
It was mainlining on him, feeding itself, whatever it was, on his stares, once adoring—now horrified. He could feel it draining out his life through his eyes, luxuriating in the soul looks he was giving it as he perished.
He knew he must be nearly dead, because he hadn’t taken a breath in a long while. It seemed like minutes, but he couldn’t be sure.
Just as he was listening for the sound of his heart, the horns divided around his head and pressed themselves into his ears. Even in this reverie, the sensation was disgusting, and he wanted to cry out for it to stop. But the fingers were working their way into his head, bursting his eardrums, and passing on like inquisitive tapeworms through brain and skull. He was alive, even now, still staring at his tormentor, and he knew that the fingers were finding his eyeballs, and pressing on them now from behind.
His eyes bulged suddenly and broke from their housing, splashing from his sockets. Momentarily he saw the world from a different angle as his sense of sight cascaded down his cheek. There was his lip, his chin-
It was an appalling experience, and mercifully short. Then the feature Ricky’d lived for thirty-seven years snapped in mid-reel, and he slumped in the arms of fiction.
Ricky’s seduction and death had occupied less than three minutes. In that time Birdy had tried every key on Ricky’s ring, and could get none of the damn things to open the door. Had she not persisted she might have gone back into the cinema and asked for some help. But things mechanical, even locks and keys, were a challenge to her womanhood. She despised the way men felt some instinctive superiority over her sex when it came to engines, systems and logical processes, and she was damned if she was going to go whining back to Ricky to tell him she couldn’t open the damn door.
By the time she’d given up the job, so had Ricky. He was dead and gone. She swore, colorfully, at the keys, and admitted defeat. Ricky clearly had a knack with these wretched things that she’d never quite grasp. Good luck to him. All she wanted now was out of this place. It was getting claustrophobic. She didn’
t like being locked in, not knowing who was lurking around upstairs.
And now to cap it all, the lights in the foyer were on the blink, dying away flicker by flicker.
What the hell was going on in this place anyhow?
Without warning the lights went out altogether, and beyond the doors into the cinema she was sure she heard movement. A light spilled through from the other side, stronger than torchlight, twitching, colorful.
“Ricky?” she chanced into the dark. It seemed to swallow her words. Either that or she didn’t believe it was Ricky at all, and something was telling her to make her appeal, if she had to, in a whisper.
“Ricky...?”
The lips of the swing doors smacked together gently as something pressed on them from the other side.
“... is that you?”
The air was electric: static was crackling off her shoes as she walked towards the door, the hairs on her arms were rigid. The light on the other side was growing brighter with every step.
She stopped advancing, thinking better of her enquiries. It wasn’t Ricky, she knew that. Maybe it was the man or woman on the phone, some pebble-eyed lunatic who got off on stalking fat women.
She took two steps back towards the Ticket Office, her feet sparking, and reached under the counter for the Motherfucker, an iron bar which she’d kept there since she’d been trapped in the Office by three would-be thieves with shaved heads and electric drills. She’d screamed blue murder and they’d fled, but next time she swore she’d beat one (or all of them) senseless rather than be terrorized. And the Motherfucker, all three feet of it, was her chosen weapon.
Armed now, she faced the doors.
They blew open suddenly, and a roar of white noise filled her head, and a voice through the roar said:
“Here’s looking at you, kid.”
An eye, a single vast eye, was filling the doorway. The noise deafened her; the eye blinked, huge and wet and lazy, scanning the doll in front of it with the insolence of the One True God, the maker of celluloid Earth and celluloid Heaven.
Birdy was terrified, no other word for it. This wasn’t a look-behind-you thrill, there was no delicious anticipation, no pleasurable fright. It was real fear, bowel fear, unadorned and ugly as shit.
She could hear herself whimpering under the relentless gaze of the eye, her legs were weakening. Soon she’d fall on the carpet in front of the door, and that would be the end of her, surely.
Then she remembered Motherfucker. Dear Motherfucker, bless his phallic heart. She raised the bar in a two-handed grip and ran at the eye, swinging.
Before she made contact the eye closed, the light went out, and she was in darkness again, her retina burning from the sight.
In the darkness, somebody said: “Ricky’s dead.”
Just that. It was worse than the eye, worse than all the dead voices of Hollywood, because she knew somehow it was true. The cinema had become a slaughterhouse. Lindi Lee’s Dean had died as Ricky had said he had, and now Ricky was dead as well. The doors were all locked, the game was down to two. Her and it.
She made a dash for the stairs, not sure of her plan of action, but certain that remaining in the foyer was suicidal. As her foot touched the bottom stair the swing doors sighed open again behind her and something came after her, fast and flickering. It was a step or two behind her as she breathlessly mounted the stairs, cursing her bulk. Spasms of brilliant light shot by her from its body like the first igniting flashes of a Roman Candle. It was preparing another trick, she was certain of it.
She reached the top of the stairs with her admirer still on her heels. Ahead, the corridor, lit by a single greasy bulb, promised very little comfort. It ran the full length of the cinema, and there were a few storerooms off it, piled with crap: posters, 3-D spectacles, mildewed stills. In one of the storerooms there was a fire door, she was sure. But which? She’d only been up here once, and that two years ago.
“Shit. Shit. Shit,” she said. She ran to the first storeroom. The door was locked. She beat on it, protesting. It stayed locked. The next the same. The third the same. Even if she could remember which storeroom contained the escape route the doors were too heavy to break down. Given ten minutes and Motherfucker’s help she might do it. But the Eye was at her back: she didn’t have ten seconds, never mind ten minutes.
There was nothing for it but confrontation. She spun on her heel, a prayer on her lips, to face the staircase and her pursuer. The landing was empty.
She stared at the forlorn arrangement of dead bulbs and peeling paint as if to discover the invisible, but the thing wasn’t in front of her at all, it was behind. The brightness flared again at her back, and this time the Roman Candle caught, fire became light, light became image, and glories she’d almost forgotten were spilling down the corridor towards her. Unleased scenes from a thousand movies: each with its unique association. She began, for the first time, to understand the origins of this remarkable species. It was a ghost in the machine of the cinema: a son of celluloid.
“Give your soul to me,” a thousand stars said.
“I don’t believe in souls,” she replied truthfully.
“Then give me what you give to the screen, what everybody gives. Give me some love.”
That’s why all those scenes were playing, and replaying, and playing again, in front of her. They were all moments when an audience was magically united with the screen, bleeding through its eyes, looking and looking and looking. She’d done it herself, often. Seen a film and felt it move her so deeply it was almost a physical pain when the end credits rolled and the illusion was broken, because she felt she’d left something of herself behind, a part of her inner being lost up there amongst her heroes and her heroines. Maybe she had. Maybe the air carried the cargo of her desires and deposited them somewhere, intermingled with the cargo of other hearts, all gathering together in some niche, until—
Until this. This child of their collective passions: this technicolor seducer; trite, crass and utterly betwitching.
Very well, she thought, it’s one thing to understand your executioner: another thing altogether to talk it out of its professional obligations.
Even as she sorted the enigma out she was lapping up the pictures in the thing: she couldn’t help herself. Teasing glimpses of lives she’d lived, faces she’d loved. Mickey Mouse, dancing with a broom, Gish in “Broken Blossoms,” Garland (with Toto at her side) watching the twister louring over Kansas, Astaire in “Top Hat,” Welles in “Kane,” Brando and Crawford, Tracy and Hepburn—people so engraved on our hearts they need no Christian names. And so much better to be teased by these moments, to be shown only the pre-kiss melt, not the kiss itself; the slap, not the reconciliation; the shadow, not the monster; the wound, not death.
It had her in thrall, no doubt of it. She was held by her eyes as surely as if it had them out on their stalks, and chained.
“Am I beautiful?” it said.
Yes it was beautiful.
“Why don’t you give yourself to me?”
She wasn’t thinking any more, her powers of analysis had drained from her, until something appeared in the muddle of images that slapped her back into herself. “Dumbo.” The fat elephant. Her fat elephant: no more than that, the fat elephant she’d thought was her.
The spell broke. She looked away from the creature. For a moment, out of the corner of her eye, she saw something sickly and fly-blown beneath the glamour. They’d called her Dumbo as a child, all the kids on her block. She’d lived with that ridiculous grey horror for twenty years, never able to shake it off. Its fat body reminded her of her fat, its lost look of her isolation. She thought of it cradled in the trunk of its mother, condemned as a Mad Elephant, and she wanted to beat the sentimental thing senseless.
“It’s a fucking lie!” she spat at it.
“I don’t know what you mean,” it protested.
“What’s under all the pizzazz then? Something very nasty I think.”
The light began to flicker,
the parade of trailers faltering. She could see another shape, small and dark, lurking behind the curtains of light. Doubt was in it. Doubt and fear of dying. She was sure she could smell the fear off it, at ten paces.
“What are you, under there?”
She took a step towards it.
“What are you hiding? Eh?”
It found a voice. A frightened, human voice. “You’ve no business with me.”
“You tried to kill me.”
“I want to live.”
“So do I.”
It was getting dark this end of the corridor, and there was an old, bad smell here, of rot. She knew rot, and this was something animal. Only last spring, when the snow had melted, she’d found something very dead in the yard behind her apartment. Small dog, large cat, it was difficult to be sure. Something domestic that had died of cold in the sudden snows the December before. Now it was besieged with maggots: yellowish, greyish, pinkish: a pastel fly machine with a thousand moving parts.
It had around it the same stink that lingered here. Maybe that was somehow the flesh behind the fantasy.
Taking courage, her eyes still stinging with “Dumbo,” she advanced on the wavering mirage, Motherfucker raised in case the thing tried any funny business.
The boards beneath her feet were creaking, but she was too interested in her quarry to listen to their warnings. It was time she got a hold of this killer, shook it and made it spit its secret.
They’d almost gone the length of the corridor now, her advancing, it retreating. There was nowhere left for the thing to go.
Suddenly the floorboards folded up into dusty fragments under her weight and she was falling through the floor in a cloud of dust. She dropped Motherfucker as she threw out her hands to catch hold of something, but it was all worm-ridden, and crumbled in her grasp.
She fell awkwardly and landed hard on something soft. Here the smell of rot was incalculably stronger, it coaxed the stomach into the throat. She reached out her hand to right herself in the darkness, and on every side there was slime and cold. She felt as though she’d been dumped in a case of partially-gutted fish. Above her, the anxious light shone through the boards as it fell on her bed. She looked, though God knows she didn’t want to, and she was lying in the remains of a man, his body spread by his devourers over quite an area. She wanted to howl. Her instinct was to tear off her skirt and blouse, both of which were gluey with matter; but she couldn’t go naked, not in front of the son of celluloid.