Hellplex
Written and copyrighted by: Keith Helinski, 2011.
What goes through any usher’s head when they are sweeping popcorn in a vacant movie theater? Hmmm…hell do I know!? I just know what goes through mine. And right now, what am I thinking, other than the pile of shit I have to sweep up? Perhaps I can side sweep the kernels under the seat? The managers never notice (or at least, never bring it up to me). A few of the ushers hate me because of what I do. Side sweeping. I mean, you aren’t exactly cleaning it up, are you? But who cares?!?! This is a run-down crap theater no one goes to anyway. Showcase lost its prime a long time ago. Titanic was the last of its prime. Since the Forum opened up in ’99, no one gives a shit about this theater. I am surprised it’s even open. I mean, it’s been what, over ten years since the Forum raped Showcase’s biz, and Showcase is still open. What the hell?
Ok, this theater is almost cleaned. Got to cup the theater, then I’m outta here. Got to see what’s playing next?
Kevin pulls the usher list from his white shirt pocket behind his blue blazer. The Dilemma is next, [theater 3]. Kevin picks up the popcorn bags and cups, walks out of theater 14, and drops it off in the trash. He heads straight through one hallway, hangs a left, then right, and then heads to the main empty lobby. He passes the Pic-N-Mix with its stale candy. He sees a few people at the concession stand.
Dead for a Friday night.
He passes theater 10, and heads straight to lobby B. The empty vacant concession stand is dead center. He hangs a right toward theater 3. He enters it. The blue and white carpet is covered with popcorn. The entire carpet, from the entrance of the theater up to the front row of the screen is a river of popcorn. The crunch-crunch can be heard as he walks on top of it. He starts sweeping.
I really hate my job! I‘ve been here since ’99. I should’ve been promoted by now. Hell, I should have been coordinator a long time ago!
He notices some of the green seats are covered with pop. He looks up and sees the stained wall. He used to throw cups full of pop at the speakers when he first started out. He was once suspended for such behavior. This was one of the theaters he targeted. A patron must have thrown a cup at the wall too for the pop to be on the seats. Or a customer could have spilled it all over the seat. He does not care about it in any case. His attitude shifted over the years, and has gotten lazier and lazier. He even sits in empty theaters sometimes, and watches bits and pieces of movies on the clock. Perhaps it is the thrill of getting caught eventually. Or perhaps he just does not care.
He looks back down and starts sweeping the carpet again. He then drags his dustpan up and down, catching the flood of popcorn. As his back is toward the theater entrance, he hears shuffling from the booth upstairs.
What the hell?
He turns around and looks up. No one can be seen in the booth. The booth is dim and hard to tell whether someone is in there or not. The theater still runs on 35-mm projectors. The Forum is all digital, which adds even more frustrations out of the business Showcase is not getting. The only reason why this particular Showcase is opened at all is because the office upstairs in the booth is the only district office in the area.
Kevin turns back around and shrugs. He looks down at the carpet, and knows he has a lot more popcorn to pick up. He walks out of the theater, dumps his popcorn-filled dustpan in the trash, and heads back in the theater. He drags his dustpan on the carpet, as he sees the blue and white more visible. All of the sudden, a loud thump is heard in the booth. He immediately looks back. Once again, nothing. Then he notices the lights start to flicker through the window. The house light then turns on. It is actually brighter than normal. Kevin shuts his eyes as it starts to blind him like he just looked straight into a flashlight. The house lights turn off. He then unclips the radio off his belt loop.
Is anyone messing with the lights in theater 3?
No response. Static.
Hello? Anyone? I’m in theater 3, and the lights keep turning on and off.
The same nothing response. He clips the radio back on his belt loop. He shrugs, and then goes back to his business. He hears shuffling from the booth, but ignores it. All he wants is to get this theater cleaned; his shift done, and get out of here. He has worked seven days straight, and is running on E.
He has been at the theater for eleven years (started at the multiplex when he was 15). He gets bottom-of-the-barrel health insurance, barely reaches the weekly 40-hours, and is struggling like crazy. His dream of being a theater manager never really paid off. They still dick him around, playing him like a yo-yo. And he never motivated himself to look for other work.
I really hate my job.
All of the sudden, the projector starts playing a movie with the ad projector still on. But it is not The Dilemma the theater is playing (despite that is what the marquee outside the theater says). It is Jurassic Park with no sound. It is at the scene where the T-Rex stomps on the yellow Explorer.
What the hell?
He looks back at the glassed-booth upstairs, and still sees no one. He then looks back at the theater screen. He walks mid-way through the theater, and then turns around. He tries to focus his eyes into the booth. He still sees nothing. He looks back at the screen. Jurassic Park is no longer on the screen. Instead, Halloween: H20. It is at the scene where Michael stalks Laurie in the school hallway. Kevin whips out his I-Phone, and goes through the apps on it. He clicks on a little ghost figure, and pulls out the Ghost Radar app. The radar is supposed to show if there are any ghosts in the area. The line that goes in circles speeds up, but there does not appear to be any dots on the screen. Green dots indicate if there are ghosts nearby.
Kevin does not really believe in that kind of stuff, but it was a free app and he had that, “what the hell,” attitude. His belief-meter changed one weekend with his friends. Legend had it, a girl got ran over on a busy street across from the school’s soccer field. Every midnight, a faint image of the girl appears walking across the street, and then repeats the road kill imagery. After reading that on Google, Kevin and his friends decided to pile in his car and go out to this school around midnight. They parked in a subdivision neighborhood close-by, and walked to the school. They waited, anxiously wanting to see a ghost of some kind. Kevin sort of mocked the whole thing, and kept on making jokes. His friends warned him not to joke about it. It was evident his friends got into it more than he did. One friend had a tape recorder, and documented the event (but nothing came about the recording other than Kevin’s obnoxious loud voice). By midnight, no faint image of a little girl walked across the street. No graphic road kill. No ghosts appeared at all. The green dots did appear on the radar, but who can take a Ghost Radar on an I-Phone (or IPOD, for that matter) serious when it had various ads for other apps on top of the radar? His friends got into the whole Ghost Hunters and Ghost Adventures thing. He, on the other hand, enjoyed that kind of stuff on an entertainment level, but never once believed in it on a real-life level. He felt the same about UFOs, big-foot, and the loch-ness monster. As they walked back to the car, he sort of mocked the entire ‘event.’ On his Ghost Radar, it also picks up words ghosts might say. Most of the time, it is not coherent. But at that moment when he mocked the ‘little girl,’ the time they wasted at the school, and the whole ghost nonsense, the radar interrupted his mockery and blurted DICK in an HAL 9000 tone. Every one stopped walking, looked at each other with big bug-eyes, and freaked out. Kevin especially got freaked out. He went to bed that night, dreaming of that little girl and the car that ended her life. Ever since then, though he has not been completely co
veted into the belief of the supernatural, he has not mocked it either.
He continues to look at the radar, and still sees nothing. His head then turns back to the white celluloid screen. But what he sees is not white. He sees yet another spliced movie. This time, it is Titanic as the ship goes down. He does not sense the irony of what he sees and his situation unfolding. Instead, he freaks out. He unclips the radio off his belt loop and talks into it.
Hello? Anyone upstairs? Anyone at all? Hello? What the hell is going on? Different movie scenes are playing in theater 3. Hello? Anyone?
With each thing he says; he pauses for a second to hear some kind of response. Someone. Something. Anyone. Anything. But static is the only thing he hears from the radio. The same kind of static that can be heard when a channel on TV turns to scrambled-snow. He tries to focus all his attention up in the booth. He walks back toward the entrance, unfolds one of the green seats and stands on top of it, trying to look through the glass window. The window is up high, so he can not really see on the same level he is at. He only sees it from a low point of view, like a child trying to look up on a counter top. He hears shuffling, but does not see anyone. He does not even see any shadow of any kind. He looks back at the screen, and now sees Batman Returns. It is the tail end of the movie where Penguin falls to his death.
These are all movies I’ve seen here before I worked here. Why am I seeing them now?
Kevin gets off the seat, and walks out of the theater. He walks into the theater next door. He sees The Lion King on the screen, with the scene where Simba approaches his dead father. He walks out of that theater, and heads to theater 1. A hovering spaceship blasts the White House in Independence Day ignites the screen. The sound is completely loud as the White House explodes. Kevin walks out of the theater and stops dead center where he is. He closes his eyes, re-opens them. He is unsure where he is at, and is unsure if he is seeing exactly what he is seeing. He then looks at the theater he once was at. Instead of Little Fockers on the marquee, where it is supposed to be, he sees something different.
Smokey and the Bandit?
He then looks back at what he is puzzling over. The vacant circular concession stand is fully stocked. The popper is popping popcorn. The fountain pop has syrup. The candy case is filled with various candies. All the candy has nostalgic 1970s packaging on them. The prices were dropped down considerably. There are people in the stand, all with 1970s hairstyles. The box office to the right has two people in it. The mini-marquee sign at the box office reads SHOWCASE 1*2*3*4*5. The movies include Smokey and the Bandit, The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, Fantastic Animation Festival, Macarthur, and Star Wars.
The long line suggests Star Wars is the top seller at the moment. The lobby is filled with people. The bell-bottoms, KISS/Aerosmith iron-on jersey shirts are worn among the teens. Grown men, embarrassing themselves with leisure suit.
Kevin is clueless where he is. He has seen pictures of Showcase’s heyday, but there is no logical way this is happening. He runs down the hall to the main lobby. His jaw drops completely. The art gallery that stopped in the late 90s appears on the wall, further away from the small hallway for theater 9 and 10. He walks over to the small hallway, and hangs a right to the usher room. He opens the door, gets inside, and takes a few seconds to gather himself. The usher room is his only fortress in the entire theater. He had a lot of good times there. His first kiss was in that room.
He was crushing on a girl that worked with him, and had the guts to finally ask her out on a date. She said no. The look of disappointment showed on his face, and she felt bad. Without much thought, she took his hand, and ‘ushered’ him into the usher room (which is really a custodial closet where brooms/dust pans/ladders/cleaning supplies/and letters for the theater marquees are stored). There they were, to their own private enjoyment. She closes her eyes, and lays one on him. He closes his eyes, and his heart paces mile a minute. He then had an instant…
What the hell?
Kevin looks straight ahead. Chicken-scratch graffiti underneath T-Scott on the wall caught his attention. He looks closer at it and reads it out loud as if he is reading it in a classroom, WELCOME TO HELLPLEX.
What the hell is going on here?
He then hears commotion from theater 10 (right next door to the usher room). He gets out of the room and walks into the theater. He stares straight at the screen, and is baffled with what he sees. Another shocking bombshell drops on him. He plops down to the first folded seat he sees. On the screen are spliced moments in his life. His life he never had. His life as a motion picture, edited for the good of entertainment. The theater is packed. Everyone laughs at the wrong parts, and is silent at the right parts. His job at the Forum. His job at Big Boys. His job at Walt Disney World. He is seen cleaning toilets. Everyone laughs hysterically. He is seen washing dishes. Laughter invades the entire auditorium. Another scene where he is stocking shelves at Meijer. On cue, everyone laughs out loud. The list goes on. For an added bonus, his failed relationships and flings over the years are mixed in with all the other moments of Kevin’s life. Everything he never had, or never did, was exploited for all to see. And everyone is enjoying it as if it was a Seth Rogen comedy masterpiece. He closes his eyes, and as if time just instantly stopped, the theater gone quiet. He opened his eyes, and everyone was gone. Nothing was on the screen. It had a calm-vibe in the theater, aside from Kevin’s heart. He got up. The lights were still dark as if there was a movie playing. All of the sudden, a light source can be seen from the booth. He looks up, and the entire window is glowing of light from the booth. As he looks up, the house lights turn on. As the house lights turn on, the ceiling tiles from every which-way start falling down around Kevin. The tiles shatter as they drop to the ground and seats.
Kevin walks out of the theater, out of the hallway, and runs to the door leading upstairs. He opens the door, and walks the spiral stairs to the break room/booth. He walks slowly in the break room, eyeing who was in there. A couch to the far right against the wall was filled with a few people. People he has not seen in years. Al, Marcus, Sam, Long. Everyone took a glance, and then went back to counting tickets. Kevin had a look like he just saw a ghost. He then walks back to the door that leads to the projector booth. He has no key for the door, and it is normally locked. But out of shits and giggles, he extends his hand and touches the knob. He turns it, thinking it would not turn but to his surprise, it turns clockwise. He pulls the knob and the door opens, like an ‘Open Sesame’ magically applies. He walks slowly into the projector booth.
The 35-mm projectors were not there, as he would normally see them. In its place, digital projectors with a computer hard drive controlling what the projector projects. Kevin’s confused and freaked-out look expands even more. He heads left all the way to the offices. No one appears to be in the office (or booth, for that matter). He heads back. As he slowly walks back to the doorway he came out of, the lights of the booth turn off completely. It is pitch black up in the booth. He runs, slips, and falls. He lies there; taking the few extra moments to reconsider everything that he was experiencing.
Am I dreaming? Is this really happening? I’ve had dreams of Showcase before. You work here long enough, dreams and reality start to blend together like days/weeks/months/years, like that Inception movie! Seriously though, what the hell is going on?
He hears a noise, a noise he is all too familiar with. The noise of 35-mm projector. The clickety-click of 35-mm film moving with every single frame per second. Without even thinking about it, he whips out his phone and pulls the Ghost Radar app up. The moving circular line rotates fast, and a green dot appears right where he is. His leg tenses up; his nerves invade his entire body. His rapid eye movement looks around at all angles.
Hello?
He hears faint breathing right above him. All of the sudden, the lights turn on. The 35-mm projectors appear at the right spots. He looks around and sees no one. He breathes a sigh of relief, gets up, and continues his path toward the doorway. He pushes the door open, walks through the doorway, and closes it behind him. He then leans against the door, shutting his eyes.
I’ve got to get out of this hellhole.
He then hears shuffling from the break-room to the right. He follows the noise. The couch is not there any more. Neither are the people that were sitting in it. The entire break room is vacant and empty. The lockers are gone. The female locker room to the left and the male locker room to the right look the same with no distinct difference. He walks toward where the couch is, and then stops.
What the hell?
On the wall across from where the couch is a painting of the little girl he dreamt about. The little girl that ended up being road kill. He walks toward the painting, and touches it. As he does that, the light turns off. He then yells at the top of his lungs.
WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE?
Shuffling can be heard in the female locker room. He tries to look toward where the noise is, but there is no such luck with how dark it is. The light comes on; he sees what caused the noise and his heart races mile a minute. He steps back toward the stairs, loses his balance, and falls ass-first down the stairs. What he saw in the locker room started to approach him. It was a faint image of a little girl. The road kill girl. But she was not the same as he dreamt about, or what the picture looked like. Instead, she looked exactly like what any person would look like if they got ran over by a moving vehicle. She was all kinds of messed up, certainly would not be competing for Toddlers & Tiaras anytime soon.
Her face…her stomach…oh…never mind.
His feet thought before his brain did as he got up, went out the door, and through the lobby. He ran passed two older women fighting in front of the concession stand because one cut in front of the other. He was out of the building by the time the one lady fell on her ass and the other lady was dragging her by the hair. Popcorn flew everywhere. But Kevin did not see all of that because he ran out of the building as if it caught on fire or something. His back is toward the entrance of the theater. He catches his breath, and sits down on the pavement for a few moments. He looks back at the theater through the lobby windows. He sees no ghosts following him. No road kill girl on the pursuit. He breathes a big sigh of relief. He puts his hand in his pocket as if he was going to get his phone and does not feel it.
Hell. I must have dropped it.
And indeed, he did. He held it in his hand, up until he had a scare of a lifetime. He takes a big deep breath, gets his keys to his ’93 Camaro out of his pocket, and stands up. Before he plans on leaving for the day, the strange-strange day, he wants to look at the theater one last time. Perhaps this is a perfect moment to quit. It was a dead-end job anyhow. Kevin did not grasp the irony of that thought.
He turns around, as he planned on doing. But what he instantly saw was not exactly what he planned on seeing. Instead of a run-down old white building with a SHOWCASE sign on top, movie paintings on the window doors overlooking a ghetto movie theater lobby, he saw wreckage. He saw the aftermath of de-construction. The window doors were still there. A Scooby-Doo painting resides on one of the windows to the far left. Through the windows, the lobby’s ceiling is completely caved down. He looks up to the sign. It does not read SHOWCASE. It reads HELLPLEX.
He opens the door, and walks through ground zero. The site was unrecognizable, even though he knew where everything was. He walked through the lobby, passing the concession stand where he saw two women fight over something-trivial just moments ago. The walls where paintings used to hang were gutted. To the right were the hallways that housed theaters 11-15, none of it was there at all. He then walked back to the main lobby and headed toward theaters 1-8. Instead of being inside of a building, there was a wall to the left and to the right. The ceiling was the night sky. A good part of the building was completely torn apart. There was no booth, any upstairs, or any projectors of any kind. He walked into an area where it used to be a theater, theater 7 to be exact. Instead of a theater, it was an open area with a wall overlooking this open area. The wall is what used to be celluloid screen a lighted projector beamed on.
I am in hell.
Kevin is not too far off from the truth. Shuffling can be heard behind him. He turns around and sees the road kill little girl. But she is not faint, clear, or anything Casper-like. She is of flesh and blood (so to speak). It is like a moment out of a Stephen King novel. She extends her hand. She is holding Kevin’s phone. Kevin takes it from her.
Am I dead?
The little girl does not say anything. She just nods her head yes in agreement.
Am I in hell?
She does not move her mouth at all. She nods her head no.
So where am I? Why am I dead?
She points to the phone he is holding. He looks at it. He sees the Ghost Radar app. He then looks up to the little girl. The road kill girl is not present at all. He looks back down to his phone. No green dots. But words are blurted out in a computerized tone.
2012. END-WORLD. DEAD. DIMENSION. BLACK. HOLE.
Kevin understands now as he looks at the wreckage. His memory is a little faint, but it is coming back to him like an old photo album. He lived in Florida. He was working outside when end-times emerged. It was December 21st, 2012. A typical ordinary day. The media news overly talked about this day like it was Y2K all over again. And to their surprise, nothing happened. But it was the day after; all hell broke loose. No one predicted it, not even the Mayans. A black hole erupted close by the planet, sucking everything in its path. Many scientists believe Earth was created by the Big Bang. Many religious people believe the Big Daddy in the sky created everything. But no one predicted or had an answer to how everything ends. They thought they did. But they were all deceived. December 22nd, 2012 started like any other day, much like the day prior. Everyone went to work, school; his or her daily routine went on without a hitch. No warning. No media news coverage. No warm up. No start time. No previews before the main feature. No opening act. One second: normality. The next second: nothingness. No deep exhales before gasping. No bloody murder screaming. Absolute dead silence. If it took God seven days to create everything, it took nothingness seconds to destroy it all.
One would say rapture was unleashed. But it was rapture with a twist. No heaven. No hell. A parallel universe of the hellish kind. Every human being was reliving their memories, with alternate starts and various endings. People that were happily married for 50 years divorced each other after three years of marriage. People that got divorced within three years stayed happily married for 50 years. People’s first job became their career. People’s flings became their spouses. People’s spouses became their flings. Everything was reversed and shuffled. Everyone was part of one giant IPOD shuffle. It was a never-ending Twilight Zone episode with no Rod Serling to introduce it.
Kevin stands there at the wreckage of a movie theater that got closed down in 2004 and got demolished the year after. He closes his eyes. Reopens his eyes. He is standing on top of a ladder putting a banner up. He is confused with the wheres and whens. Just a second ago, he was in the middle of total multiplex-wreckage. Now he is on top of a ten-foot ladder, putting up a banner for a new movie release. He loses his balance, and falls off the ladder from the top. As he falls to his doom, the ladder comes down with him. The second gravity took hold of him; he was no longer falling toward the ground. He was standing in front of a water fountain in lobby C with a bucket of water. He dumps the water into the water fountain so he does not have to carry the heavy bucket anymore. Once again, he
is confused. He closes his eyes again. Reopens them. He is standing in the middle of theater 14. His left hand is holding a dustpan. His right hand is holding a broom. A black broom. A pile of popcorn awaits his dustpan. He starts sweeping without much thought. Then a thought comes up, should he side-sweep? After all, no one expects high standards at the dump that is Hellplex.
K.H.; January 28/29, 2011.
Author’s Note
The experts in writing would always say, story ideas come from increments of other ideas, blended together to make one kick ass mix drink! Hellplex is no exception. I got inspired after reading Stephen King’s 1408.