Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

“With a name like Castle, you’d think you’d be ready-set for a themed name for your movie theater.”

“You’d think that, but no, it was always the Granfalloon. Maybe that’s why it never did very well, or maybe it’s because Castle built it at the tail end of the era of big movie palaces, when multiplexes were already taking over. It never made it as a first-run theater; Castle mostly ended up showing revival stuff. I’ve got a flyer in my office advertising a showing of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

“But you’re not interested in the usual revival stuff,” I say, kind of cutting her off, but not really, just jumping her forward to where I know she was headed anyway.

“No,” she bites her lip in that way she always has, the way she did when she talked dirty, to delay what she’s going to say, to build up suspense a little. “There were always stories, from the day the theater opened its doors. They said that Castle screened… rarer things, for a more select clientele during the off hours.”

“Stag films?”

But she shakes her head, “No, at least, not in most versions. Early experimental movies, in some tellings, more sinister stuff in others. They say he had a sort of club, spiritualists or theosophists or something. That they screened movies by Muybridge and Mills, Bartlett and Whitcomb and Duplante.”

I don’t know any of those names besides Muybridge—Constance forgetting that I’m not one of her students and never really was—but I’m beginning to guess why I was actually invited here.

We met in my one and only film class, but it isn’t as bad as it sounds. She was still just a TA then, and we didn’t start dating until after I was out of the class anyway. If what we were doing then could really be called dating. I think we went to one movie and then some drinks and then, as we would jokingly put it later, we fell into bed together. And I guess if you can fall in that easily, then you shouldn’t be too surprised when it’s easy to fall back out. That’s what I’m thinking as we pull up in front of her house, which is just as much nicer than my apartment as I had imagined it would be, though my imagination hadn’t conjured up the suspiciously nondescript van parked in the driveway.

“Are you an electrician during the summer months?” I ask, gesturing toward the van, and she just laughs.

“If it looks like I am, then that’s probably a good thing.”

I don’t ask what she means, because I’m pretty sure I’m already putting it together, and my suspicions only get more and more confirmed when—after we sit around the island in her kitchen making small talk and eating Chinese delivered by a college kid who’s as white as I am—some of her students start showing up at her front door, the same ones she reminded about their extra credit earlier.

There’s four of them, all dressed normally when they arrive, but all carrying gray coveralls, and it isn’t long before they’ve zipped them over their street clothes and are standing in Constance’s kitchen like mechanics up to no good. The kitchen’s got big patio doors, and by now it has gotten dark outside, turning them into mirrors that throw our reflections back at us, albeit hollow-eyed and flanked on every side by darkness. Even Constance—who has changed into pants by now—hauls out a matching pair of coveralls and pulls them on. Only I don’t get a pair. I’m guessing I won’t need one.

It says something about our relationship now—and maybe even more about our relationship then—that she never actually tells me what she wants me to do, never asks me if I’m going to go. It’s just assumed. When everyone piles into the van and I see that the back is full of bolt cutters and pry bars, I’m not surprised, just mad in that weird, distant, echoing way that I thought I had left behind years ago but that I guess Constance is still capable of bringing out in me after all this time, like so many other things.

The Granfalloon, when we reach it, looks almost like any other old movie theater, except that it sits alone in a wasteland of vacant lots and rented chain-link fence. The cab actually carried me by it on my way from the airport, but I didn’t know what it was. Just an old building, faded and tired, waiting to be torn down, like everything around it already was. At night, though, it looks a little more ominous, or maybe that’s just my dawning knowledge of our mission here.

The outside walls are painted purple, a color that I imagine was rich once but has faded with the sun like an old car’s dashboard. Constance says that from the air it looks like the Pentagon, but with no empty space in the middle. Just the theater’s five screens, all facing outward, like a wagon train circled for protection in an old western.

There’s an unassuming car parked outside the gate of the chain-link fence when we pull up, the engine running. A guy with the look of hired security leans on the hood. He seems nervous, but like he’s trying to make that nervousness resemble irritation instead. Constance leaves the van running and gets out to talk to him for maybe a minute, maybe less, and then hands him something from the pocket of her coveralls. Something that I assume is the rest of a payoff; after all, you don’t take bolt cutters and pry bars to someplace you’re really allowed to be. “Just lock it behind you when you leave,” the guy says to her retreating back, loud enough that I can hear him in the passenger seat of the van. It sounds an awful lot like, “And remember, I was never here.”

As we pull through the gate, Constance starts to talk. Though it’s directed at the kids in the back, I think it’s for my benefit, because they all seem to know already. She says that the theater’s been closed for more than a decade, ever since Dr. Frederick Castle just up and disappeared one day. His wife apparently did the usual hoop-jumping to file a missing person’s report, all that jazz, and when he’d been gone long enough she declared him dead in absentia . She’d never really been a movie person—that was all him—so when he was gone she let the place close, but kept the taxes faithfully paid and the bulldozers at bay, fending off several attempts at “urban renewal” over the intervening years.

“A month ago, she finally kicked off as well,” Constance says over her shoulder as we come to a stop in front of the theater’s gilded front doors, “and with nothing left to stop them, the city is coming next week to knock the place down.”

The word is that when the Granfalloon was shuttered, Castle’s wife wouldn’t let anyone come in to mess with anything, insisting that her husband might come back any day, even after she’d had him declared dead. Which means that if there was anything of value here when Castle disappeared—those secret films he supposedly screened, for example—it would still be here, unless somebody else had already beaten us to it. I’m guessing that’s the story Constance has fed her star pupils about why we’re here.

They cut the lock on the chain holding the front doors shut, and it slithers to the ground like a heavy, dead snake. Once we’re on the other side, our flashlights come on, making cones of light, illuminating clouds of dust that roll in the air like fog, kicked up by our footsteps. I’ve never been here before, but still the lobby looks familiar, recalling dim memories of other small movie theaters from when I was little. The same tacky carpet and concession stand. While the others discuss their plans, I shine my light along the posters in their frames that line the wall. There’s one for Son of Frankenstein , another for The Mummy’s Ghost .