We felt our way toward the stairs to the lobby. The small emergency bulbs that lined the sides of the floor had come on, turning the carpet dark as blood. When I got to the photograph, I stopped. Even in the near dark, those eyes taunted: Look at me, Kevin. I see into your heart. I know you. I took the last four steps in a leap, my heart pounding.
Outside, lightning crackled in the dark sky as heavy rain pounded the Cinegore’s nearly empty parking lot. As we followed Dani’s flashlight beam, John-O fell in behind us like a hyperactive puppy. “Hey, what happened to the movie? It was just getting good. It’s weird, but I was actually starting to feel like I was part of it.”
“Wow. Cool story, bro.” I brushed past him, pulled open the door of the theater, and yelled in, “Sorry, folks. There’s been a power surge. We’ll have the movie up and running in just a few minutes. Thanks for your patience.” I readied myself for the usual litany of complaints, but it was mostly strange moaning, and I hoped I wouldn’t have to break up a heavy make-out session in the back row.
“It was kinda spooky,” John-O continued. “I thought I saw—”
“Dude, we gotta fix the lights. Back in five,” I said.
Dani and I opened the door behind the concessions stand and trundled down the steps to the rank, damp basement. There was no AC down there, and the summer heat had baked into the walls, giving the room the high warmth of a kitchen after a full day’s work. It was a sharp contrast to the frigid temps upstairs, but it wasn’t unpleasant.
“Where’s the fuse box?” Dani’s flashlight bounced around the cinder block walls in George Romero circles of light.
“On the right,” I said. “Higher.”
She raised the beam, and I pried open the metal cover. I toggled the master switch until I heard the familiar glurg-kachunk of the generator wheezing back to life, along with the muffled slur of bad movie dialogue as I Walk This Earth got back up to speed. Above our heads, long fluorescent tubes blinked like children startled awake and then, all at once, they caught, and a sickly bluish glare flooded the basement. I knew we should go back up, but I wanted more alone time with Dani.
“Wow.” I walked deeper into the basement. “This is like an episode of Hoarders: Horror Show Edition.”
Metal shelves stuffed with crumbling Fangoria magazines lined one wall. A six-foot-tall swamp monster replica rotted in a forgotten corner behind stacks of busted theater seats. On the floor was a box of dusty promotional giveaways—red-eyed rubber rats and fake-guillotine cigar cutters. Dani leafed through water-stained, foam board–mounted placards for movies in Glorious Technicolor! “Satan’s Nuns. The Diabolical Mr. Lamphrey,” she read. “The Five Fingers of Dr. Killing Time.”
“Check this one.” I pulled out a 1970s-era poster of a leisure-suited vampire karate chopping the necks of two drug dealers. Behind him, a werewolf angled his hairy torso out the window of a gold Cadillac, his giant canine teeth bared like he meant drug dealer–eating business. I read the tagline aloud as if I were a movie announcer: “‘Dr. Drac and Mr. Wolf: They’re here to put a bite on crime.’ Okay, seriously. How is this even a horror movie?”
“It’s Dracula and the Wolfman. Doesn’t get more old school than that,” Dani said and shoulder-checked me, and I swear I felt it everywhere at once.
I grinned like a doofus. “No. Huh-uh. This is an abomination. It’s, like, Law and Order: Transylvania. The Wolfman has a gun. By all the horror gods, how is that possible? He doesn’t even have thumbs!”
Dani laughed, and I’m not gonna lie, I just wanted to keep telling jokes so I could hear her laugh more.
“Nice swag.” Dani picked up a realistic-looking bow-and-arrow set, a special giveaway from Robin Hood: Prince of Darkness. “You could do some damage with this. Seriously, they let kids have these?” She pressed the arrow against the bow’s string, aiming it playfully at my heart.
I put up my hands. “Careful with that.”
“Don’t worry.” Dani lowered it again. “I only took one semester of archery. My biggest score was impaling Coach Pelson in the ass.”
“Whoa, that was you? You could be in the inevitable remake of Hippolyta Rises from the Grave, Pinewood Studios, 1966.”
Dani perched carefully on top of a replica tombstone. “You really love these old movies, don’t you?”
“Yeah. True horror is based in all that deeply human stuff—sorrow, fear, doubt, anxiety. Desire.” I swallowed awkwardly. “But the new movies? Five minutes in, somebody’s getting cut up by a chain saw or sewn into a skin suit. There are no emotional stakes. It’s completely impersonal, like Internet porn.”
Shit. Why did I say “porn”?
“Did I ever tell you that my parents’ first date was a horror movie?” Dani said, and I shook my head. “Yeah. My grandmother is mad Catholic, and she wouldn’t let my mom go on a date without my aunt Yoli tagging along. My dad said that Yoli screamed so much the manager made her wait it out in the lobby. And then my dad was all, ‘Middle fingers, we out!’ He slipped through the fire door with my mom and they went dancing in a club down the street. So, in a weird way, I owe my existence to a horror movie.” She smiled at me, and my heart started playing a punk beat.
“Wow. Cool,” I barely managed. The heat was starting to catch up to me. I wiped a thin layer of sweat from the back of my neck.
Dani looked me right in the eyes again. “UT has a great film school, you know. You wouldn’t be that far from Deadwood. No—wait! Don’t make that face! I’m serious.”
“Yeah, yeah…”
“Kevin!” She wasn’t smiling anymore. “What are you afraid of? For real.”
For real? Spiders. People leaving me. Not being good enough. Rejection. Too much responsibility. Being buried alive by an escaped psychopath. Losing out on a chance to date the coolest girl I knew. Turning out like my dad. The list was endless. But mostly I was afraid of a future so terrifying in its unformed vastness that it pressed in on me with its bullying fists until I was afraid to take a real breath. I was afraid of being left behind while Dani and Dave spun toward that future. But admitting my fear only felt like giving it more power over me.
“I fear nothing,” I said in a fake German accent. “For I am Van Hotsprings, killer of vampire sperm at precisely one hundred and four degrees.”
Dani’s mouth settled into a sideways squiggle of disappointment. “Mm-m-m. Okay. Well, whatever. Let’s go up,” she said, flat, and hopped off the headstone.
Fuck. In my head, a new movie, Night of the Living Dumbass, played:
INT. Basement. Bad, bad, night.
The zombie horde attacks Kevin but stops when they realize that killing him is redundant. Cut. Roll credits. Fin.
When we got back upstairs, the lights were only operating at half power. The AC was still blasting, though. The sudden cold of it made me shiver. John-O had his DemonVision glasses on. He’d propped open the door with his foot and was watching the movie through the crack.
“John-O,” I said. He didn’t respond. “Yo, Earth to John. Did you set the popcorn maker for a fresh batch? John?”
I snapped my fingers near his ears. Finally, I yanked the glasses off his nose, and he blinked a few times. “Oh. Hey. When did you get here?”
“Son, haven’t your mother and I warned you about the dangers of marijuana?” I said. John-O still seemed dazed. “Seriously. You okay, dude?”
“Yeah. I think so. It’s so weird. I was watching the movie and, I don’t know, for a minute there, it felt like I was actually inside of it.”
“O-o-k-a-ay.” Dani loaded fresh GMO-infected kernels into the popcorn hopper. With the bow slung over her shoulder and the arrow sticking up out of the back of her pants, she looked completely badass.
“The thing is, I wanted to be there. I didn’t want to leave,” John-O continued. “And then I thought I saw these creatures outside the window of the old mansion.”
“Yeah, John-O. That’s because it’s a horror movie.” I left him to join Dani behind the counter. I didn’t have
anything to do, really; I just wanted to be close to her. To look busy, I pushed the ice around in the big silver bin, breaking up the chunks with the scooper and wishing I could rewind this rapidly devolving night.
“No. That’s not it.” John-O sounded pissed. “The next thing I knew, those things were inside the mansion. And somebody was calling my name. He told me the creatures needed permission to come out. He asked me to grant them permission.”
Dani looked concerned. “What did you say?”
“I said…” John-O twitched as if he were shaking off imaginary bugs. His voice deepened, like puberty on time lapse. “I said sure. Come on in.”
John-O started to go really wrong then. His blue eyes went bright red, and the flesh of his face warped as if burned by acid. His whole body jerked as he lurched toward the concessions stand.
“Holy shit,” Dani whispered, backing away.
John-O kept coming.
I leaped in front of Dani, lobbing boxes of Milk Duds like candy grenades. “Get back, freshman demon!”
The corner of one box caught John-O in the eye. Yowling, he yanked on the box, taking his eye with it.
“Dammit! I’ve got no service!” Beside me, Dani swished her cell above her head as if she could catch a connection in the air. “You piece of shit, Verizon!”
Two more demons pushed through the doors. One of them wore Bryan Jenks’s John Deere baseball cap, and if I had been afraid of that asshole before, I was pants-soilingly frightened now. His mouth was huge and round, with sharp nubbins of teeth. Demon-faced Bryan Jenks pushed the screeching John-O to the floor and bit into his neck, nearly severing his waxwork-like head.
“Go, go, go!” I pushed Dani ahead of me toward the projection room. We were up the stairs and through the door in record time.
“Don’t watch the movie!” I shouted, knocking Dave off his stool.
“What the hell?” Dave looked up, dazed. “Hey, it was just getting good. I felt like I was actually in the movie…”
“I think you were,” I said, trying desperately to catch my breath and not pass out. “That thing about the movie being cursed? Not bullshit. I think it steals your soul and turns you into some kind of demon-zomboid thing.”
Dani nodded, wide-eyed. “Truth. It got John-O. His face turned into fondue right in front of us! And then Bryan Jerks came out and started eating him!”
Through the window, the darkened theater still flashed black-and-white. Dave balled and flexed his fingers. It was the self-soother his therapist parents had taught him for whenever his OCD kicked in. “Kevin. Dani. You guys are seriously starting to freak me the fuck out.”
Shrieks erupted from the theater like an all-the-souls-in-hell karaoke party.
“We have to get out of here. Now,” I said.
“But what if it’s turning into a total demon-zombie prom down there?” Dani asked.
“Plan A: we make a run for the back exit, then book it down the road to Taco Bell for help.”
“What’s plan B?” Kevin asked.
I’d seen hundreds of horror movies. The tropes and clichés, the zillions of ways people acted dumb or cocky and got killed? I knew them all. I felt smug and safe, thinking I’d never be that dumb. Now I knew: Some things you couldn’t plan for; you just had to react in the moment and hope it was enough.
“We’ll figure that out.” I turned to Dani. “Walk behind me. If, you know, something happens, if one of those things gets me, just run.” When she started to protest, I explained, “Your dad’s already been through enough. And you’ve got a scholarship.”
“What about you?”
I shrugged. “Who would miss me?”
Dani let out a gasp. Then she pursed her lips. “You’re a fucking moron, okay?” She grabbed my hand, and if I hadn’t been about to pass out from fear, I would’ve been the happiest dude alive.
Slowly, I opened the projection room door. It was clear. We crept down the stairs, listening to the hammering of rain on the roof. That’s when I noticed the photo on the wall. Scratsche was gone. Was it a trick of the light? I wanted to ask Dani and Dave if they saw it, too, but Dani whispered urgently, “Kevin, c’mon!”
At the bottom of the steps, we stopped short. Four of the undead paced in front of the back doors, snapping at each other.
“What. The. Total. Fuck,” Dave whispered, his panic evident. “Shit. What’s plan B?”
“Front doors. Keep low.” I crept along the wall. When we came around by the concessions stand I put up my hand and jerked my head to the spot in front of the I Walk This Earth poster, where two crouching demons were still munching down on John-O’s destroyed body. “Just keep walking,” I said, gently squeezing Dani’s hand. “Don’t attract attention.”
I kept my eyes on the doors. Rain swept past sideways in metal-colored sheets. Fifteen feet. Ten. Five. Zero. Carefully, I pressed the handles, trying not to make any noise. They wouldn’t budge.
“Stop fucking around, Kevin,” Dave whispered.
“I’m not!”
A gargling shriek like a dying air-raid siren sounded behind us. The demons who’d been blocking the back exits had arrived. Their huge mouths opened, giving us a front-row view of the pulsing membranes of their anaconda-large throats. It was scarier than any special effect, and it was one hundred percent real. The John-O eaters stumbled away from his corpse and reached their clawlike fingers toward us.
“Dude. You’re the manager. Tell them to get out. Show’s over. Go home.”
“Dave. You are seriously losing it,” Dani growled.
“No. I lost it. It’s totally lost. I’m trying not to shit myself here.”
“Follow me.” I ran for the concessions stand. The demons surrounded us, curious, but I couldn’t count on that holding for long. “Grab anything you can use as a weapon.”
“Like what?” Dave screamed.
“I don’t know! I’ve never had to kick demon ass before, okay? Improvise!”
Dani threw scoopfuls of ice. Dave started flinging plates of nacho chips. I looked around. Popcorn salt shaker. Soda cups. Napkin holders. Soft pretzels. Butter vats. Butter vats …
“Hey! Help with this.” I grabbed two dish towels to block the heat and removed the metal bedpan-looking thing that blessed the stale kernels with rancid oil.
Dave stared at me like I’d gone mental. “What are you going to do with that? Wait for their cholesterol to catch up with them?”
“Remember when we saw Aliens from Planet 11 Ate My Brain?” I said, loosening the top. “Remember how they finally killed the alien freaks?”
“The aliens couldn’t take the heat. They melted ’em.” Dani ran over to help me with the vat.
The thing formerly known as Bryan Jenks jumped onto the counter in a crouch, ready to strike.
“Hey, Bryan! You want butter with that?” I shouted, just like I was the hero in an action movie. Together, Dani and I threw the bubbling vat of yellow yuck. Bryan screamed and thrashed as the hot oil blistered his skin into ribbons, and even though Bryan was a total douche bag I’d often wanted to finish off with a series of cool-looking karate moves I didn’t actually know, I felt sick watching him suffer, demon or not.
Dave let loose with a slightly crazy laugh. “‘Hey, you want butter with that?’ Dude, that was so fly.” He tried to high-five me.
I let his hand hang out in space. “Not now.”
“Nggzzzzraaahsss!” Creature Bryan screeched.
Dave’s voice was choked with fear. “I think you pissed it off.”
I grabbed both Dave’s and Dani’s hands. “Plan C: theater, on three. One. Two—”
With a warrior’s cry, Dave took off running, dragging us behind him into the theater. We slammed our bodies against the doors. Dani grabbed the broom resting against the back wall, snapped it over her knee, and jammed the broken stick through the big gold door handles.
I shoved Dave. “I said on three, dumbass!”
“I couldn’t take it anymore. Those things look
like frozen beef jerky. And they smell,” Dave panted. He kicked at an empty soda cup. “This is a bad way to die, man. God damn it, I had tickets for Comic-Con.”
This wasn’t how tonight was supposed to go. I was supposed to ask Dani for a date. She was, hopefully, going to say yes. And now we were making a last stand in the Cinegore against a horde of soul-stealing, flesh-eating demons escaped from a cursed movie. The doors began to crack as the demon-zombies thumped against them. Soon, they’d break through the flimsy broom lock.
“This is for real, Kevin. Think,” I said. All those horror movies in my head, and now, when it counted, I couldn’t come up with a way out of this mess. And that’s when the crazy idea hit me.
“Hey!” I shouted at the movie. “Hey, over here! Pay attention.”
“What are you doing?” Dani touched my arm, and I wished it were a different night so I could just enjoy the lightness of her fingers.
“I’m not going down without a fight,” I promised her. I yelled up at the screen again. “I know you can hear me. Look. At. Me!”
Natalia Marcova glanced in my direction. She’d been dead for five decades, but her image lived on, burning brightly, a beautiful, preserved fossil.
“I saw that! Yes! Over here,” I said, waving my arms.
She gave me a little wave. “Hello.”
“Help us. Please,” I said. “You’ve seen this happen before—isn’t that what you said, Jimmy?”
“Gee. I guess I did.” He raked a hand through his wavy, 1960s, swoon-worthy hair. “I kinda got caught up in the emotion of the moment, y’know? I’m method.”
“Why should we help you brats? You don’t even know how to dress properly,” Alastair Findlay-Cushing said from the sofa, nursing his tumbler of liquor.
“Because we’re the future,” I said. “In every movie, somebody has to live on to tell the story. Or else … or else there’s no point.”
“Not necessarily,” Jimmy Reynolds said. “What about Sunset Boulevard? It’s narrated by a dead man.”
“Thanks for the spoilers, ghost of John-O,” Dave whispered irritably.
“Gee, honey. I want to tell you,” Natalia purred, her native Brooklyn accent shining through. “But if I do, he’ll send me to the bad place.”