Tim Meyer - The Switch House

He rested, but, as the seconds ticked on, he felt no better.

Eventually, he pulled himself up. Looking through the porthole, he spotted his protégé, the kid who’d replace him in a week’s time, and the kid’s new squeeze, the saucy new girl who served up one hell of a number two combo.

His lips spread into a smile, but the emotion behind the action quickly faltered. The realization of his successor’s dim future hit him hard. His mood suddenly soured and he felt awful for Rob. In a few years, this job would be gone. What was once a pretty decent-paying job complete with benefits and union perks, would give way to part-time minimum wage work only. True projectionists were a dying breed and he was the last of his kind. Dan predicted digital hardware would replace film in two year’s time, maybe less depending on the market. Soon, any two-bit numbskull with the brave ability to press a button could start a projector. Projectionists were trending toward obsolete, like the clockmakers and switchboard operators before them, and that bent Dan’s smile, crushed his high spirits.

Dan pressed the green button. The motor buzzed to life. The rollers fed the film along. The lamphouse glowed bright, projecting images on the screen. Dan raised his vision and focused on the front of the theater. Some French words were written in white against a black background.

Dan felt a presence behind him. A figure. Standing tall in the booth, looming over him, stretching like some indefinable shape, free from the constraints of gravity and other earthly restrictions.

He turned and saw nothing. No floating shape. No dim, jellylike figure reaching for his neck. Nothing but shadows and the small cone of light looking down at his workstation.

Silly, he thought, you’re being silly.

He returned to the film. The black and white images appeared before him, changing within a few seconds of showing themselves. They were of random things. Grotesque things. Things he’d seen before, once, when he first acquired the film from some junkie ex-actor who’d stolen it from some big-wig Hollywood executive twenty years prior. He’d made it about five minutes in before having to shut the damned thing off; he wondered how long he’d last the second time around.

The feeling returned. Something behind him. Some unspeakable horror, some gangrenous creature dripping with black, vile fluids, reeking of death and disease, a limitless mouth filled with tiny white shards of teeth, motivated to destroy and defile all that made the human world good and perfect, all that made it human.

Dan turned and expected to see nothing again, much of the same; the dim light and shifty shadows the projection booth usually harbored.

But what stood before him wasn’t a trick the shadows provided. It actually resembled the horrors his brain conceived.

Only worse.

The thing was real.

After the first few minutes of random gross-out frames and still credits, the meat of the film began. Rob threw his arm around Brianne and pulled her close. The top of her head fit perfectly in the space between his cheek and shoulder, snugly, like there was no other head in the universe meant for that special place. They locked together and fixed their eyes on the screen, waiting for the story to unfold and sink its claws into them.

(The woman on screen was folding laundry. She sat on her bed, piling the squared articles on top of one another. She was crying but trying not to. Sniffling.)

The scene changed: a dead bird spattered against the dotted line on the asphalt surface, a feathery blob of bones and blood. A hammer coming down on a human hand, smashing the fingers into twisted extensions of flesh and exposed white. A woman hurling herself off the balcony of a sky-high tower and a few frames of the black, soupy puddle she’d become.

“What the hell are we watching?” Brianne whispered.

“I don’t know,” Rob said, feeling slightly disgusted, slightly amused. A cold wave crashed against his arms and legs, causing a layer of gooseflesh to sprawl over him. “Whatever it is, it’s cool as fuck, though.”

“Cool?” She pushed away from him, breaking contact. “This is sick.”

Rob turned to her. “We can go if you want.”

On screen, an army of spiders crawled over a woman’s mostly-deteriorated corpse. There was no denying the corpse was real and not a prop. Rob felt its authenticity in his bones.

Brianne seemed to weigh her options in silence, as more unspeakable acts of violence were projected before her. Scenes depicting real-life mutilation flashed between brief moments of what might have been a cohesive, coherent story had the filmmakers stuck with it.

“No,” she finally said. “But I need to pee.”

“Okay.” Rob looked around the empty theater. “If you see Dan, tell him to come join us.”

She nodded, and then took off down the aisle.

He cupped his hands over his mouth. “And bring me snacks!”

She gave him two thumbs up.

Rob reclined in his seat and focused on the picture.

(The woman moved to the window, looking out across the street. Below, townspeople bustled. As she watched, the woman said something in French and there were no subtitles to accompany her voice.)

“What the hell are you making me watch, Dan?” Rob whispered to himself.

More quick scenes: a man getting hit by a car, a tire rolling over his head, flattening his cranium, coagulated lumps of brains and blood spurting through the cracked skull and split flesh. A pack of lions tearing into a zebra, ripping huge chunks of skin and muscle away, still alive as the predators quarter the defenseless, struggling animal. An entire hallway of flyblown bodies, the surrounding walls dripping with dark fluids. A homeless clown sitting on the street corner of some busy intersection, munching on a severed hand, while several pedestrians pass by seemingly unaware of the menace’s existence.

(With her back to the camera, the woman faced the open window. The bustle of Paris faded into the background, reduced to faint white noise. She turned to the camera. The woman’s face had changed, suddenly different. She had morphed into a different woman altogether. It was…)

“What the hell?” Rob asked the empty theater, pitching himself forward.

The woman on screen was no longer the Frenchwoman.

“Help me, Robbie,” the woman said in a voice that no longer carried a French accent. It was American. It belonged to Brianne. “Help me, Robbie,” the new girl repeated. “Help me.” There were tears in her eyes, streaming down her face, running off her cheeks. But she didn’t appear sad like he thought she ought to, rather, indifferent about the situation. Maybe not even that. Maybe… happy? He swore the ends of her mouth curled, traces of a smile beginning to take shape. “They’re coming for you, Robbie. They’re coming for all of us. They can’t be stopped.”

Rob launched himself out of his seat. He stood there, eyes glued to the black and white screen.

Brianne’s body heaved as she began to sob. “They’re coming.” Her voice changed just then. Deeper. Several octaves lower. Eerily demonic. “They’re coming. We let it out, Robbie. We let it out.” The last sentence sounded like a record played backwards, low and warbled. “We let it out! We let it out! We let it out!” Her screams sounded like the howling gale of a bad storm. Her fists beat against the camera, shaking the frame. No, not the frame. Him . She was beating him. He felt the impact of her blows on his chest and shoulders.

Rob turned to run but there was only darkness behind him, an endless, lightless void. He thought about jumping into the inky lake before him, but there was a sense of threat there, a notion that this was darkness not to be trespassed, that there was no return from this place. This was a place that kept things , his intuition told him. There was no coming back.