Rob Zombie - Lords of Salem

“Really?” said Francis. “You don’t think she’ll find it interesting?”

“No,” she said. “Honestly, I don’t.”

Francis sighed. He pushed the phone book closed, slid it off his lap and onto the couch. “All right,” he said.

For a moment she just stood there, looking down at him, and then her expression softened and she came over to him. She moved the phone book over on the couch, snuggled in beside him.

“Maybe we should have a date night,” she said.

“I thought date night was Friday,” he said. He spoke as if slightly hurt, like he hadn’t gotten a memo that he should have been sent.

“Yes,” she said slowly, “usually we do go out on Friday, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t go out other days, too. I was kind of hoping that we could have a date night tonight and you could take me out.”

“Um, sure,” said Francis, still half distracted. “But isn’t it a little late at night to be heading out on a date?”

“Well,” she said, “you could take me to the midnight screening of Frankenstein versus the Witchfinder .”

He stiffened a little. “Please tell me you’re not serious,” he said.

“Oh, I’m serious, my friend. Besides, you have free passes, right?”

He didn’t answer, just hung his head.

“Wait a minute,” she said, pulling back a little and folding her arms across her chest. “You didn’t pick up the free passes?”

“It was just,” he said, “with the way things went, I just couldn’t. I meant to go back and get them, but…”

“Francis,” she said sternly. “You promised.”

“I know but—”

“Well we’re going,” she said. “Your treat.”

Francis thought for a moment. “All right,” he said reluctantly. “ Frankenstein versus the Witchfinder it is.”

Chapter Forty-one

One moment she was sitting on the bed, unable to move, staring up at the ceiling, and the next thing she knew she was wandering through the streets of Salem with no idea of how she’d gotten from one place to the other. It was strange. Suddenly there she was, walking through a seedy-looking industrial neighborhood that felt both familiar and unfamiliar, moving through a cloud of steam coming out of a vent. There on the side of the wall had been plastered a poster with that same symbol that had been on the box of that fucking record. The Lords Are Coming , the poster said.

She stumbled a little, kept walking, not sure what else to do until she figured out where exactly she was and how to get home. The windows on one side of the alley had been boarded up, some of the boards torn away, and the wall had been tagged. There was also, a little ways down, another poster. This one showed a terrified girl in torn clothes running through an open field, screaming, glancing back over her shoulder. Behind her was Frankenstein’s monster, its arms stiffly extended. Frankenstein versus the Witchfinder read the top of the poster, in words that looked like they were dripping blood.

Who would post promotional posters here? she wondered. Kind of a waste, right?

And then suddenly she realized that she knew this place after all, knew it all too well. Her steps slowed, stopped entirely. For a moment she stood there, on the verge of turning around and going back, but then, almost against her will, she began moving forward again.

She approached a brown metal door in the side of a brick wall. Here she was. For a moment she stared at it. I could still turn around , she told herself. I could turn on my heel and walk back to my life and still be okay.

But she knew it was too late for that.

She knocked softly on the door. She waited a moment and when it didn’t open she knocked harder, pounding this time. Abruptly the door opened a crack and Heidi saw a man’s pale and unshaven face, his bloodshot, angry eyes. He looked her up and down, suddenly recognized her.

“Ah, Heidi,” he said. “Returned to the fold I see.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” she said.

“And yet here you are,” he said. “How serious are you? Needle serious?”

She shook her head. “I just need something to make me feel better.”

He nodded and grinned, showing a set of carefully filed teeth. “I know what you need. Have any love for me?”

She reached into her pocket, pulled out a carefully folded bill, pushed it through the crack in the door. She saw the man’s three-fingered hand take hold of it and pull it in, and then the door closed.

She stood alone in the alley, shivering. She told herself again that she could leave anytime she wanted, but it hadn’t been true the first time she’d said it and was even less true now. She thrust her hands deep into her pockets and tried not to think.

A moment later the door slid open and his hand shot out. She put hers forward and he shook it, leaving a tiny packet in her palm when he released his grip. Then the door closed and she walked away.

On the way home she passed through Leppin Park, deserted at this hour. She was surprised to see the monument there: a bronze statue of Samantha Stevens from Bewitched riding a broom across a crescent moon. Wow , she thought. Start the day looking at memorials to witches and end it looking at bad sculpture of a TV sitcom witch. Only in Salem.

She reached out and touched the statue’s smiling face. The bronze was very cold, almost too cold to touch. For a moment, she had the impression of cold bleeding into her from the statue, running up her arm and wriggling its way deep into her bones. She held her hand steady a moment, cupping the face, and then slowly made her way home.

Chapter Forty-two

Francis grumbled a bit getting dressed, but finally gave in to the movie, beginning to enjoy himself. Alice was right—there was no reason that Heidi would want to know about what he’d discovered. It would just make her nervous, most likely. He had a hard time remembering sometimes that not everybody in the world was interested in knowledge for its own sake.

Despite his grumblings going out the door, Alice knew that it was a bit for show, so she let him do it, let him keep it up until they were almost to the theater and then she told him sternly he had to behave. But that was fine with him. He was having a great time, and even if he would be exhausted tomorrow from having gone to a midnight show, that’d be just fine.

He tried, at the ticket booth, just to have one more chance to be indignant. When it was his turn, he said, “I believe there are two complimentary tickets in my name, Francis Matthias.” He felt Alice’s hand tighten on his arm and he was getting ready for the ticket seller to tell him that he was sorry there were no tickets waiting for him when the man handed them over. He took them, a little surprised, and handed them on to a smiling Alice.

“Look at that,” she said. “You’d gone ahead and arranged the tickets all along.”

Had he? Maybe he had on his way out, or maybe he’d said something in passing at the beginning. He didn’t remember. But since the tickets were free, Alice insisted on getting popcorn. The theater was pretty full, but there were two seats together right in the back, where they liked to sit because of his vision, and she snuggled up against his arm when the movie started.

So a good night. Or was anyway, until the movie started. It wasn’t even an old B-movie, though it had been made to look that way. But he could tell it wasn’t—the fashions were just a little off, modernized, and the hairstyles were definitely not right. He’d seen enough of the old Hammer films with Alice to know what a B-movie looked like, and clearly this guy had, too. It was, he had to admit, as smart or smarter than most of the Hammer films, and, if you could relax into it, as enjoyable, too. It was cheesy, a little bit, but there was something else there. The guy who played the Witchfinder was great, and he played it almost like the sheriff in an old Western. Or he seemed at first like the hero from a Western, and gradually he seemed to be more and more like a villain, and then he began to seem like the Devil himself. The monster went back and forth, too, between being sympathetic and being totally over the top and relentless, and that made it very hard to know what to think about it—which turned out to be good and to hold his interest. It reminded him of his feelings about the witch trials—were they evil men or were they just terribly confused men trying to do their best? One moment you saw the monster identifying with others, trying to make sense of what it meant to be human, and the next he’d torn a child’s head off, just like that, without a second thought. He’d winced when that had happened, and Alice had tightened up, too, but what ran through most of the audience was incredulous and slightly nervous laughter. “Outrageous, dude!” called out one guy a few rows in front of him. Maybe he was too old for this, he thought for a moment, grumpily.