Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

The others head upstairs, to where the projection booths would be, and where the film would be stored, if there’s any film left. Before she leaves, Constance lays her hand on my shoulder. “You know what you’re looking for?” she asks, and I just nod, happy to see the pride and excitement in her smile, hating myself for how happy I am.

I wrote my dissertation on occult structures. Rooms—and in some cases whole buildings—designed to serve some kind of supernatural or metaphysical purpose. Ghost traps, psychomanteums, séance rooms. It’s not as weird as it sounds, not really. When you think about it, after all, what’s a church? A building built for communicating with god, right?

I think some of Constance’s excitement about this is bleeding into me, or maybe I’m just excited on my own, it’s hard to tell amidst the clamor of nerves and adrenaline and, yes, let’s be honest, horniness. Still, I make myself take it slow, walking first around the perimeter hallways ringing the five auditoriums. What I’m doing is a kind of archaeology, and like any other archaeology, it’s easy to get over-excited, go too fast, and spoil it somehow. I count the black-painted doors as I pass them; it helps get my breathing under control. One, two, three, four, five. When I’m back in front of the first door, I take a deep breath, and step inside.

The auditorium is as black as the inside of a satin bag, the beam of my flashlight creating a glowing tube in the murky gloom, much as the projector must have done when the theater was still running. The walls are painted midnight blue, with little asterisks of silver and gold and white that wink where my light touches them. I think they’re meant to represent stars, but they’re weirdly abstracted, as if drawn by a child playing with crayons. The seats on either side of me are red, velvety, and so are the rotting curtains that frame the big ghostly screen. The place reminds me more of the auditorium in my old high school than any modern movie theater.

The mood of the place is infecting me, working its way under my skin, and I half-expect to see something in every seat my light sweeps across, but there’s nothing between me and the screen, which, as my eyes adjust, seems faintly luminous itself, as if it has absorbed all the light that poured into it over the years, and is still spilling some little bit back out. I walk up to it and raise my hand, pressing it against the fabric, reaching for the secret chamber that is waiting for me on the other side.

I’ve heard of stuff like this before. Not a psychomanteum in the truer sense, but more like one in reverse. A room built not for seeing or conversing, but for receiving. There’s a photo that makes its rounds in my field of what is supposed to have been a Nazi experiment, mediums arrayed around a table as if in a séance, with oversized headphones clapped over their ears. In West Virginia one time, I actually got to go inside a trailer where all the walls in one room had been stacked with TVs, one on top of the other, all facing in and all tuned to different channels. I remember that the place smelled like rotting garbage and old cat litter, even though I never saw a cat.

Something like that is what I’m expecting on the other side of the big X we cut in the screen with a carpet knife. I’ve rounded up Constance and her students, and she’s standing there in the semi-darkness, her eyes so bright they’re practically glowing, her smile so big it’s impossible for it not to be at least a little infectious. The others seem excited, restless, constantly moving around. And so much younger than they seemed when I was standing in front of a room full of them earlier today. Was I that young, when Constance and I first got involved? I must have been, but it doesn’t seem possible.

“Wouldn’t there normally be speakers behind the screen?” one of the students asks, I think her name is Erin.

Constance nods, looking around. “They’re in the walls here,” she says. I gather that they had some luck upstairs—an old Constantin Orlok picture in the original uncut Spanish version, a handful of one-reel experimental films by one Elizabeth Cairns—but I can tell that, for Constance, this is and always has been the real objective. Why she invited me back into her life. I almost offer to let her go first through the dark aperture, but I’m the expert here, so I’m the first one into the place on the other side.

I’m expecting a step down, but there isn’t one. The floor of the chamber has been raised, so it’s the exact same dimensions as the backside of the screens that compose its walls. It’s also totally empty except for the chair—big and thick and bolted to the floor—and the skeleton that occupies it.

More like a mummy, really. An ossified husk in the shape of a man, the skin turned to parchment and drawn up around gaping sockets of eyes and nose and mouth. Its clothes are those of a Vincent Price villain, complete with velvet smoking jacket and cravat, appearing untouched by time.

But it isn’t the skeleton that stops me in my tracks, that makes me almost drop my light. While I didn’t necessarily expect to find a dead man in the room, I’m not exactly surprised, either. Frederick Castle, of course, gone mysteriously missing all those years ago.

No, it’s not the skeleton itself, it’s something else, something about the skeleton, some intangible thing that makes it difficult to look at, that pushes my eyes off it. It’s that feeling you get when you’ve been staring at television static for far too long, so that you’ve started to replace the visual white noise with a thousand flies crawling over one-another.

I try to look at the corpse, but can’t do it. I know what it looks like; when I’m not trying to look directly at it, I can pull up an image, clear and sure in my mind’s eye. Those ridiculous clothes, those black cavities staring out at me, darker and deeper than the darkness of the room, like a black cat in a dark hallway. But as soon as I try to look I just can’t .

A noise fills my head, like a million voices talking at once, and my eyes fill with the motion that comes from staring into pitch darkness for so long that your imagination peppers it with moving shapes, and the next thing I know I’m looking away again, at the walls or at the floor or at anything except for that body in that chair.

That’s how I see the secret door, the one that would have let him in and out, bricked up now from the other side. I imagine his wife finding him here, seeing just what I’ve seen and turning away, as I’ve had to turn away, and bricking him up here and leaving the theater to stand as a tomb for him because she doesn’t know what else to do. I imagine the nights that he sat here—how many?—when the auditoriums on the other side of the screens were full of people, the images flashing at twenty-four frames a second on the walls around him. What was it he expected to harness here? Adoration? The awe and wonder of the audience directed up at the screens?

I imagine his frustration, night after night, waiting for something, anything, and feeling nothing, until, finally, he felt the heart attack or embolism or stroke that killed him and then, only then, when he was no longer a man but only a shell, an empty vessel, only then to be filled with this mad buzzing emptiness that still radiates off him in waves that fill my head with noise and push my eyes away.

One by one the others file in behind me, see what I’ve seen, avert their eyes as I have. Constance even reverts briefly to Catholicism and crosses herself. No one is comfortable speaking, just quiet curses and half-articulated sounds in the dark, everything muted and bracketed by the radioactive emptiness that pours constantly from the corpse in the chair.