Ancient Images (34 page)

    She sat back in the folding seat, which smelled of metal and dusty cloth, and sent the beam wavering over the walls that framed the blotchy screen. At that distance the light barely diluted the darkness, but she was able to distinguish that the figures on either side of the screen were flourishing sheaves of grain, which must have appealed to the architect as sufficiently Roman to go with the name of the cinema. They made Sandy uneasy-uneasy enough to glance behind her to see who was watching her. Of course it was Barclay, at the projectionist's window. He gave her a thumbs-up sign, and stepped back. He was about to start the film.

    

    

    So she was to see the film at last. Her mouth went dry, and she found she was unexpectedly close to tears. She wished Roger and especially Graham could be here to share the film with her. The projector came to life with a whir whose echoes seemed to leap behind the mound of plaster, and Sandy switched off the flashlight and placed it between her feet. As she looked up from making sure that she knew where it was, the screen blazed. The Roman statues flexed themselves and raised their sheaves, but that was only the play of the light. For a few seconds the screen remained blank except for stains, and then an image wobbled into focus. It was a painting of a tower.

    Though it didn't look much like the Redfield tower, the sight of it made her heart beat uncomfortably fast. Terse credits solidified out of the mist that loitered in front of the tower:

    A BRITISH INTERNATIONAL PRODUCTION

    KARLOFF and LUGOSI in
TOWER OF FEAR

    She could scarcely believe she was reading this after so much searching. She was dry-mouthed again, breathless. The names of some of the people she had interviewed appeared beneath Giles Spence's, and without further ado, to the strains of a studio orchestra's version of a Rachmaninov
Dies Irae
, the film began.

    It was the scene Toby had described to her, Karloff gazing emotionlessly from the high tower at a man fleeing across a moonlit field. The man's flight cut a swath of darkness through the field, and so did whatever was pursuing him, converging on him. He dodged into the tower and fled up the steps; each window showed his white face staring down in panic. No doubt it was the same set of a window each time, Sandy thought, surprised that she needed to reassure herself that way, though Toby had said he too found the scene disturbing. Even admiring the skill with which the film was edited didn't let her distance herself from it as the fugitive staggered onto the top of the tower and stretched his hands beseechingly toward Karloff, who shook his head and folded his arms. The man stared in terror down the steps, backed toward the parapet and toppled over, his cry fading.

    She knew what it was like to panic in a tower, she thought, and that must be why her palms were sweating. Now here was Lugosi in a coat like Sherlock Holmes's, stepping down from a train at a lonely station. A taciturn coachman with a left eye white as the moon drove him through the whispering fields to a mansion whose asymmetry made it look half-ruined in the moonlight. Karloff opened the massive front door to him, and the two actors set about upstaging each other, Karloff sinisterly unctuous, Lugosi resoundingly polite. Before long they were at the piano and singing "John Peel," surprisingly musically. "It takes more than a critic to shut them up, Leonard Stilwell," Sandy declared, and wished that saying so had made her feel less nervous.

    In the village Lugosi found that nobody, not even Harry Manners between wiping tankards and drinking out of them, would discuss his brother-in-law's death except to say, like Karloff and almost in the same words, that it had been an unfortunate accident. Hoddle and Bingo, the village bobbies, reacted to him as if he were Dracula, muttering
oo-er
and how they hadn't oughter look at his eyes in case he got up to some sort of foreign tricks. It was his gaze that made them tell him all about the look on his brother-in-law's face and the evidence of pursuit that had ended at the tower. Sandy knew she was meant to laugh, but the sight of Tommy Hoddle's eyes frozen wide by hypnosis was too reminiscent of his last stage performance. She remembered that not all the terror in the film was faked.

    Graham would have been delighted to know that here was one old film she didn't feel distanced from, but she would rather not have found that out in the middle of an empty cinema, where whenever a close-up on the screen brightened the auditorium, shadows seemed to crouch beyond the heaps of plaster. She glared at the debris and looked up as the scene changed. Karloff was alone, prowling a baronial hall she hadn't seen before. His face filled the screen, staring out with sudden unease as if he had seen something behind her. "You silly bitch," she scoffed at herself, and looked over her shoulder. The screen dimmed, shadows ducked behind the dozen or more rows of seats between her and the doors, and she turned back to the film. She wasn't quite in time to see the details of the carving above the mantelpiece in the baronial hall, but she thought she had seen it before.

    The muddy blotches on the screen seemed to swell, wiping out the film, and then the second reel sharpened into focus. If the film was half over, why should that feel like a promise of relief? Nothing she had seen was a reason to feel there was someone behind her-but there was, and he was well on his way down the aisle to her before she heard the doors thump.

    The mask that loomed at her shoulder, jerking closer as the light of a close-up seized it, was Bill Barclay's face, of course. "The film's a bit longer than I bargained for. I'll have to nip round the corner for a loaf for the missus when it looks as if nothing's going to happen. I should be back before the end, but if not, just wait for me in the office."

    He scurried up the aisle, and she thought of calling him back. If he didn't need to be in the projection room throughout the showing, he could sit with her and watch- but why should she be so anxious to have company? In any case, he seemed to be lingering at the back of the auditorium to watch the next scene, in which Lugosi discovered that someone had fallen from the tower in very similar circumstances fifty years ago. She shivered, and was glad that she wasn't alone in the auditorium, except that when she glanced back she found that she was, so far as she could see past the projector beam. "Poor little thing," she mocked herself, and trapped the flashlight between her feet as she made herself turn to the film.

    Lugosi was returning through the village to the mansion. Whenever he looked behind him he saw only shadows, but weren't they becoming increasingly solid, assuming shapes that would be better left in the dark? Graham would have admired this scene, Sandy told herself while shadows raised themselves around her as if they were peering at the film over the heap of plaster which had begun to remind her of an upheaved mound of earth. Here came Hoddle and Bingo, dodging after Lugosi like rabbits trying to be bloodhounds, until they discovered they weren't only pursuing but also pursued. They fled in opposite directions, and she remembered how Bingo was supposed to have run into something offscreen, something that had come after him.

    Lugosi was leafing through a history of the tower and of the Belvedere family. It couldn't be long to the end now, she thought, and the stale smell of earth was really the smell of exposed brick. She would feel disloyal to Graham if she didn't see the film through. Lugosi shut the book and strode to find Karloff.

    He found him in the baronial hall. In came Lugosi's sister and her new protector to be present at the final confrontation. Her husband was no coward, Lugosi told her, but this man-Karloff-was doubly one for having sacrificed him in his stead, knowing that someone must die on the tower. Building a tower so high had made it a focus of occult forces "that would climb to heaven," forces that demanded a sacrifice. Once it had been from every generation of the family. Only the death of the surviving member of this generation could lift the curse.

    Not much of this made sense to Sandy, perhaps because her attention was held by the image carved above the mantelpiece behind Karloff. She must have known it would be there ever since she had seen it in the Redfield vault and recognized what Charlie Miles had tried to sketch for her: the face overgrown with wheat, or turning into wheat, or composed of it; the hungry face from whose eyes sprouted braids of wheat shaped like the horns of a satyr. It was the reason the Redfields had suppressed the film, but why was it making her so nervous? Every time the film showed it the shadows beyond the mound of plaster seemed to crouch forward. She glanced back, but there was no sign of Barclay in the projection box. She was alone with the film-with the image that had scarcely been seen outside the Redfield vault.

    "Take the strangers who threaten this house," Karloff cried, his exhortations growing wilder as the shadows came not for Lugosi or the others but for him. He fled to the tower, his unseen pursuers tracking darkness through the field, and climbed to the parapet. With a glance down the stairway and a groan of despair, he fell-or rather, Sandy thought, Leslie Tomlinson did, injuring himself because of something that had disturbed him. The tower itself crumbled as Lugosi and the others watched.

    The next shot found Lugosi on the train, wishing his sister and her beau good luck, and it felt to Sandy as if Spence had wanted to get the film over with, though that left various issues still restless. Had he been as nervous as she was now? The train steamed away, merging with the blotches of the screen as the shot faded out. The film rattled clear of the gate of the projector. The screen glared dirty white, a pack of shadows raised their heads around her, and at once the screen went dark.

    Bill Barclay hadn't switched off the projector. Nobody was in the projection room, crouched down where she couldn't see them through the small windows. She grasped the flashlight with both hands and turned toward the window, the glare from which served only to dazzle her. She pressed the button, and then she shook the flashlight as hard as she could. It still didn't work.

    She shouldn't have wasted her time with it, she was making herself feel as though something she'd relied on had left her alone in the dark. Even if she couldn't see the exit doors, she knew they were there, to the left of the lit windows. She had only to ignore the smell of earth that was actually the smell of brick, the shapes beyond the heap of plaster that was just visible as a low grayness near the dim walls. In fact, since the screen was dark, it couldn't be creating shadows, and so the shapes she thought she was glimpsing couldn't be there at all, couldn't be peering over the gray mound, ready to pounce if she moved. The restlessness on both sides of her was only an effect of the way her eyes couldn't grasp the dimness. The creaking she could hear behind her and around her as she made herself let go of the back of the seat and tiptoe up the aisle, over carpet which felt threadbare enough to trip her up, was nothing but vibration she was causing, evidence that she wasn't moving as softly as she would like. She mustn't be tempted to go faster, she might fall headlong. She felt as if the dark around her were waiting for her to break, to run for the doors so that it could leap on her. The lit windows blinded her left eye, the dark gathered itself on her right; plaster dust settled on her, making her feel as if she were being stealthily buried. She stuck out her hands and the dead flashlight, and shoved at the doors.

    The left-hand door balked as if someone were holding it closed from outside, and then she felt the chunk of plaster that had lodged beneath it give way. She heard a sound like teeth grinding together. She flung the doors open and hurried into the foyer, past the box office like an upended casket, its window coated with earth. The doors thumped behind her, so irregularly that she peered through the darkness to reassure herself that nothing had followed her between them.

    The projection room was at the far end of the corridor, past the deserted office. As she reached the room, she heard a sound like claws on metal. It was the cooling of one of a pair of projectors that occupied much of the space in the room. She smelled hot metal, and told herself hastily that it smelled nothing like blood. She hurried to the carton Barclay had brought in. She clattered open the round can that lay uppermost in it, lifted the spool off the projector, lowered it carefully into the can. She fitted the lid onto the can and closed the cardboard flaps, and straightened up, her arms laden with the carton. A blurred face rose up in the auditorium and peered at her through a window.

    It was her own face, reflected in the glass. She clutched the carton to herself and stumbled into the corridor, feeling as if her burden were dragging her forward, forcing her almost to run so as not to drop it. The dark foyer swallowed her shadow, and she staggered past the double doors, one of which was propped ajar by a fragment of plaster. She leaned on the box office sill for a moment while she took a firmer grip on the carton, and then she launched herself toward the glass doors. A shadow half as tall again as she was came to meet her, towering among the shredded posters stuck to the outside of the doors.

    It shrank to fit its head and hands around the face and hands that pressed themselves against the glass. "I can't open the door," Sandy called.

    Barclay opened it for her and insisted on carrying the film to her car. "I didn't mean you to have to deal with this all by yourself. The shop was shut and I had to go further. Was it good? Did I miss much?"

    "Nothing you should regret missing."

    He frowned rather wistfully at her; he must think she was trying to cheer him up. "Will you keep me in mind when it's going to surface? Maybe an invite?" he suggested, miming writing, and looked disappointed by her noncommittal murmur. As she drove away she saw him on the steps of his cinema, waving tentatively, and she was taken aback to find herself envying him. She was beginning to realize that managing to make her way safely out of the darkened cinema didn't feel at all like an escape.