Dark Siren (2 page)

The skin on Emily’s arms tensed as she entered the room. It was cold in here, too cold considering how warm it had been in the other room. The metal film cases were almost icy to the touch. Each had a label stuck to the front, and they were arranged according to genre. The first rack she rifled through was Noir.
Tomorrow is Another Day, 1951, Odds against Tomorrow, 1959,
and
The Maltese Falcon, 1941,
were among the film reels in the dust-covered rack.

“It’s amazing that we have these,” Emily said.

“Yeah. The cinema’s owner changes hands but the movies those owners buy… don’t. They belong to the Royale, so they stay here.”

“Holy shit, we have the original
Haunting
? Why have we never played this?”

Nate shrugged. “I’ve never been asked to play it, I guess. Maggie has the movie list so she knows it’s there, but you know she isn’t a big horror fan.”

“So what? People like horror, especially old horror. That’s the kind of movie I would have made.”

Emily turned around again to squat next to some of the other boxes on the floor. She grabbed a box marked Sci-Fi, but when she tugged on it the box got stuck against a catch in the floor. The catch, Emily saw, was connected to the frame of a trapdoor, and was fastened shut with a padlock.

“Where does that trapdoor go?” Emily asked.

“That?” Nate said. “I’m… not sure.” He checked the ring of keys for a potentially matching label, but couldn’t find one.

“Let me try,” Emily said, and she picked a key out at random and tried it. Nothing. She tried again with a different key, and nothing. The keys on the ring were all too big—except one. When Emily tried that one, the lock gave way. She handed the keys and the lock back to Nate, opened the trapdoor, and looked inside. There were boxes in there, and more film reel cases, too. When she pulled on one of the closed boxes and brought it into the light, the label across the top read ‘Unsorted’. Someone had also drawn strange symbols into the underside of the trap door, but Emily hadn’t noticed those.

“Holy shit,” she said. “How is it that you have a whole mess of boxes in here that you haven’t gone through?”

“I don’t come here unless I have to. I’ve never really had a good feeling about this place, you know?”

“For real? That’s your excuse? It’s pretty lame.”

“Whatever, you don’t have to believe me. I don’t feel comfortable in here most of the time, is all I’m saying.”

She dipped her hand into the box, grabbed one of the film reels, and shuddered as if she had been dipped in cold water.

“Emily?” Nate said. “You okay?”

“Jesus,” she said, “Sorry, this one’s just ice cold. Feel.” She stood bolt-upright with a film case in her hand and offered it to Nate.

Nate took it. Nodded. “Yeah, I don’t know what’s on any of them. None of these have labels.”

Emily stood with the film reel in her hand.

“Hey, where are you going with that?” Nate asked.

“I’m going to play it.”

“What? No way.”

“Why not?” she asked as she set the film reel down on the table closest to the projector. She was struggling with the lid, trying to pry it open with her fingers.
God
that thing was cold.

“We shouldn’t… it doesn’t feel right,” Nate said, closing the trapdoor and fastening the lock. Neither of them had noticed the odd markings on the underside.

“Look, no one’s here,” Emily said, “The cinema is going bust, and we’re going to lose all this cool stuff. Why don’t we put the movie on, see what it is, and just… give the old girl another run before the person who buys this place puts her down?”

Nate considered it, his eyes moving from Emily, to the projector, then back to Emily. “If we get caught, we’re in some serious shit.”

He hadn’t said no. “Help me get this open, will you?” she asked, smiling brightly.

The lid came off easily enough with Nate’s help, and inside the case sat a pristine metal film reel untouched by dust and untarnished by the passage of time. It was like a relic retrieved from the sealed tomb of some old king.

Emily removed the film and, without touching the dangling negative strip, brought the reel to the projector. In a few moments, Nate had installed the reel and fed the negative into the conveyor with a kind of art she was only too eager to watch. One could study film all one wanted, but pictures and descriptions could never excite the soul as much as the real thing did.

“That’s it,” Nate said. “Good to go.”

Emily’s skin tingled with anticipation. She shuddered again and took a deep breath.

“You okay?” Nate asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said, though she didn’t believe it. Her stomach felt unsettled, her senses were unusually alert, and her hackles were up. The feeling which had, earlier, been excitement, was now inexplicably sailing into different, darker territory. “We can watch from up here, right?”

Nate pointed at a pair of tinted windows on either side of the projector. She approached one of them, noticed the cobweb and spider on the top right corner of the window, and peered out of it. Below, the theater was quiet and dark, empty, and serene. From here she could control the lights, so she dimmed them as Nate fired the old machine up. It made a whirring sound, followed by a rattling sound, and then the projector seemed to cough before settling into a steady rhythm of motion and sound.

In the auditorium below the screen was lit up and glowing, clearly receiving light from the projector, but nothing was happening.

Nate came up beside Emily and squeezed in. “Give it a moment,” he said, “Most of these old movies have a couple of seconds of blank tape.”

But the blank tape seemed to go on for a minute, two minutes, and after a while Emily started to wonder whether there was anything on the reel at all… when something moved. It was a subtle shift of light, but enough to lend some illumination to the picture. It soon became clear what they were watching wasn’t
nothing
, but
something
. Whoever was holding the camera was filming in near total darkness, and almost complete silence.

Almost.

They heard footfalls, soft and echoed, as if from inside a cave. The slow, steady drip drop of water accompanied them. Soon, the camera operator’s breathing became ragged. It seemed as though he was walking uphill, in the dark, toward a glimmering point of light somewhere in the distance. Speaking as the filmmaker she wasn’t, Emily thought it was a simple shot as far as shots go. But the tension was so thick it was causing her heart to pump harder and faster in her chest with every footstep, every exhalation, and every drip drop.

There was a steadily growing sense of immediacy to the scene. The person behind the camera needed to get to the point of light, but why? Was he being chased? Did the light represent freedom, or salvation? Was the filmmaker trying to show the confusion and terror felt by a person who was recently deceased, heading for the light at the end of the tunnel as darkness pressed around him? Perhaps more importantly, would he make it before the darkness consumed him?

The moments stretched by, and Emily couldn’t hear the footfalls over the sound of her own beating heart. The point of light seemed to widen until it became roughly the size of a soccer ball and illuminated the cavernous wall around it. The man picked up the pace, dashing now at full speed toward the opening, toward salvation, toward heaven.

The light from the screen had become bright enough to illuminate the auditorium in a soft, pulsing, silver glow which covered everything it touched. It took the already faded red of the seats and sucked the color out of them, making them look gray and old. But this wasn’t what had Emily’s eyes, and heart, in its grasp.

Someone was singing. Emily was sure the sound wasn’t coming from the speakers, but from someone standing nearby.

As if she had felt a wasp land on her shoulder, Emily spun around only to find that the room was empty. Nate hadn’t noticed. The soft melody was there, an almost imperceptible sound with a cricket-like quality. Whenever she looked toward where she thought the song was coming from, it sounded as if it was coming from somewhere else. But it was there.

She turned her attention back to the screen, having felt a sudden urge to find out what was happening. The cameraman had arrived at the source of the shimmering, shifting, circle of light, panting and out of breath. It sounded like he was breathing
through
something, a tube, maybe, or a mask. He put out his hand, careful yet with conviction, and winced when his fingers touched the opening as though burned. A low, rumbling growl escaped his throat, a pained sound like that of an angry lion. He tried again, this time sticking his entire fist through the opening in a powerful thrust.

He screamed as searing pain coursed through him, but the sound leveled out after a moment or so. The tear in the wall through which the light shone seemed to have stretched enough for him to fit his whole body through, and yet he couldn’t cross it. It was as if an invisible barrier were preventing him, keeping him from heaven. The man’s growl became a roar, and then the screen started to quake. This drew Emily’s attention in an instant, and she noticed the light wasn’t white anymore, but a darkening shade of red.

“Holy shit,” Nate said, uttering the first words since the strange movie started rolling. “What the hell is this?”

“I… don’t know…” Emily said. “Turn it off.”

“Off? Why?”

“Just do it, okay? Please. I don’t like it.”

Nate pressed his lips together, turned toward the projector, and began shutting it down. The movie stopped playing, the reels stopped spinning, and after a moment or so, the whirring died down until it was gone. Emily was starting to feel as if a weight had been lifted off her shoulders, and she was thankful for it. She couldn’t explain what had come over her just then, and didn’t think she would be able to explain it to Nate if he asked. But the movie needed to stop. This much she knew.

“You alright?” he asked, for the third and last time tonight.

“Yeah,” she said, “I’m fine. The movie just gave me a headache—probably all that shaking.”

“It was pretty intense.”

Emily replied with a disinterested “Yeah”, and turned toward the window again. The auditorium below was dark as pitch now without the glow of the silver screen; darkness as impenetrable and total as a cave below the surface where no light can reach. Her hand moved unconsciously toward the light controls and trembled over the dials. This hesitation was irrational and illogical, but her nerves were shot after what she had seen and heard.

With a quick hitch of breath, she yanked the dials up and the auditorium flooded with light. One of them shorted out with a loud fizzle and pop.

“Shit, sorry,” she said.

Nate shrugged. “Place isn’t ours anymore, remember?”

“I guess so,” Emily said, breathing herself into a calmed state. “I have to take out the trash.”

“I can do it if you want,” Nate said.

“No, it’s okay. You’re sweet for asking, but you can finish up here and I’ll meet you at the front.”

He nodded and went back to the machine. Emily, meanwhile, turned on the spot and headed down the stone stairs with the wobbly handrail. Her skin bristled walking through the doors to the auditorium, as if she had gone through a spider’s web—or someone had walked over her grave. Emily padded along the descending stairway, walking into the pit of the auditorium, and grabbed the rim of the waste basket when it was within reach. The basket was about as tall as her hip and made of thick plastic, but it wasn’t heavy when it was empty. She started up the stairs again, careful not to bang it on each step as she went, intending to empty the trash bag inside once she got upstairs.

That’s when the lights went out.

She would have dropped the trash if her hand had chosen to release its grip instead of clench tightly. Her heart jumped into her throat and began to thump so hard she could feel it in the back of her neck. She stood in the pressing darkness and sensed its malice. The air was so thick it almost refused to travel into her lungs despite the great heaves she was attempting to take.

“N-Nate?” she said, finally getting the word out. “Was that you?” The auditorium took her words and ate them, returning no echo to her waiting ears. “Nate, if that’s you, this isn’t funny.”

She thought, in a moment of denial, that Nate was maybe trying to be funny. If this was true, she was going to put him in the waste basket tonight. But Nate didn’t reply, and as the seconds went on, she started to believe something was terribly wrong.

A light, bright and pulsing, flickered to life and when Emily turned to look at it, she noticed the screen had suddenly turned on. Her heart started to pound, and then she heard it. The growl. It came from all around, like she was trapped in an animal enclosure and was surrounded by them. Emily realized in an instant the sound had been amplified by the surround system in the auditorium and its vaulted ceiling. The growl made her stomach turn and sent her skin alight with fear. It was as if a thousand ants were marching along her arms and neck, down her spine, her chest, over her belly and back. No. Not ants, but
spiders
; thousands of tiny spiders, each with pointy little fangs, biting her skin as they walked over it.