Norman Partridge - Slippin' into Darkness

And now that girl was dead. April Destino was gone from this vale of tears. Shutterbug had read about it in the paper. OD’d, or a suicide, or something.

But tonight he’d seen her ghost.

A shiver of excitement sizzled the length of Shutterbug’s spine. He smiled, amazed that he was actually old enough for nostalgia. He hadn’t watched that loop of film in quite a while. He used video these days, but he still had the 16mm equipment around. The old Bell amp; Howell projector was in a closet upstairs. The screen was in the basement. And the film itself, where the hell was it?

Shutterbug grinned. Amazing. He had a hard-on, and Shelly hadn’t even touched him.

Amazing. He’d take care of Shelly, just the way he wanted to. Do her right there on the pool table. Then he’d get rid of her, make a little popcorn, and have a retrospective of the early works of Marvis Hanks, Junior. That’s exactly what he would do.

He ran a finger along a stack of CDs until he found the one he was looking for. Some good old seventies whitebread music, the kind they used to play on KFRC. Forgotten names like K.C. amp; the Sunshine Band, England Dan and John Ford Coley, and Janis Ian.

The CD rack whirred open at the touch of a button. He studied the selections listed on the silver face of the disc. “I’d Really Love to See You Tonight.” That’s what he’d play, just for the irony.

Something thumped against the bay window.

The CD box slipped from Marvis’s fingers, cracked against the floor.

Outside, someone laughed.

Marvis glanced at the closed drapes. Stared at Shelly

Her eyes were as big as saucers. “I didn’t tell anyone,” she said. “No one knows that I’m here… Not my parents. Not my boyfriend. I… I did just like you said, Marvis. I didn’t tell- “

All he had to do was twist his head. Shelly grabbed her little backpack, unzipped the bottom compartment, pulled out a top and a pair of shorts, all the time moving across the room and into the kitchen.

Shelly was moving fast, but Marvis was moving way too slow.

Again, something thumped against the window. Again, someone laughed.

Marvis turned off the television. He summoned his courage and opened the drapes.

The slamming sound startled him, and he glanced toward the kitchen. The door to the side patio didn’t catch, swung open again.

Shelly was gone.

Had someone come in the side door and snatched her? Or had she been so frightened that she ran off? Did she know something?

Had she told someone? Had she sold him out?

Time would tell. It was very quiet. Marvis stood before the window, waiting for some answers. The front lawn was a sloping slab of blackness in the still night. His Jaguar sat in the driveway, a sleek silhouette. He framed the shot through the wood-bordered pane of the Anderson window without consciously knowing he was doing it. Second nature, and natural as could be-a picture, a rectangle of glass, and a wooden frame. The light behind him was just strong enough so that his reflection was visible on the glass in the foreground, the ghost vision of the living room sharper than the world outside.

And then it was there-in the background on the other side of the nearly opaque window, on the lawn of slate-a man’s silhouette.

Someone was out there. Someone who laughed.

Marvis couldn’t see eyes, but he knew the stranger was watching him.

Some things you didn’t have to see clearly to know what they were.

No still photo, this. No frozen frame. This figure moved, but Marvis couldn’t. He stood rooted in front of the expensive window, watching the dark man advance through his reflection.

Suddenly, Marvis’s reflection became a black hole as deep and empty as the missing face of April Louise Destino in that old photo.

A ghost’s face flew at Marvis from out of the blackness, coming fast. Coming so very fast.

But this face was not a black shadow. It was dead white.

White as a negative image of the black hole that had replaced April Destino’s face in the old photograph.

White as a negative image of an eight ball.

The ghost thumped against the window and fell away.

Marvis staggered backward, gasping.

Now there were other figures on the lawn. Four dark silhouettes. Ghosts sailed above their unseen faces, trailing ectoplasm through spidery branches.

The night opened and another ghost flew toward the window.

Thumped against the pane.

Marvis blinked.

Impossible.

Impossible! It thumped against the pane!

The ghost was nothing but a roll of toilet paper!

Outside, laughter broke the silence. The sharp sound, still familiar after all these years, touched Marvis in a secret place that even the saddest songs of his youth couldn’t reach. He hadn’t been this frightened in a long, long time. Fear was peeling his confidence layer by layer, like the skin of an onion, searching for the nervous kid that was still locked in his heart.

Four ghosts from the past stood on his front lawn. Above their heads, hanging from the limbs of fruitless mulberries planted by Shutterbug’s father, toilet-paper streamers danced on the warm April breeze.

Tonight the star of Shutterbug’s first 16mm short lay six feet under, and he knew with sickening certainty that this visit had something to do with her death. “Hey, Shutterbug, wanna go to the movies?” Once more, fugitive laughter chain-sawed Shutterbug’s confidence. These idiots were going to get him into trouble. Real trouble. Raising hell in the middle of the night. Talking about movies. Screaming about movies so everyone was sure to hear-

“C’mon, Shutterbug. We ain’t got no projector. We ain’t even got no movie. We knew your ass has got ’em both.”

“And popcorn! I bet you’ve got some gooood popcorn in there, too, and some goddamn real butter! C’mon, Shutterbug! Let’s go to the drive-in!”

“Yeah! Let’s go to the drive-in! Let’s have a world-fucking premiere!”

“C’mon, ’bug. We already got the beer!” Drunken cheers followed the last comment. Shutterbug’s fingers were frozen on the drape cord. Porch lights flared across the street. First at the Hamners’. Then at the Irbys’. Finally, at Mrs. Prater’s.

“Lights! Camera! Action!” came the cry from the front yard.

An empty bottle shattered on the cement driveway, just short of Shutterbug’s prized Jaguar. Shutterbug backed away from the window and bumped into the pool table. The cold brass frame was like dry ice on his palms. He turned quickly and caught the eight ball just as it was about to drop into the side pocket. He squeezed it, and it was so cold and so perfectly round and smooth in his hand that he had to drop it before he surrendered to the temptation to throw it through the window, at the men outside.

Anger had eclipsed his fear. And suddenly he was standing in the kitchen, hovering over the telephone without even remembering the trip from the living room. Jesus, he was frazzled. 911. That’s what he needed to do. Just dial it. Let someone else handle this. The cops. People like his father would know how to handle-

The doorbell chimed. Once. Twice. And then did nothing but chime.

“Ding dong the bitch is dead! C’mon! Let’s celebrate! Open up, Shutterbug!”

No, he couldn’t call the cops. They might want to enter the house. Once inside, they had the right to look around, didn’t they? That could spell disaster. And besides, Shutterbug’s uninvited visitors were drunk. They might tell the cops about the old 16mm loop. Or worse, they might make real trouble-insult the cops, force them to bust some ass or make some arrests. Shutterbug shook his head. He couldn’t let that happen. If he did, the idiots on the front lawn would be ticked at him for real.