Dark Siren (7 page)

“N-no?”

“Think next time, or I swear I’ll break something.”

“I’m sorry, you weren’t downstairs and I found the door open.”

She took a series of breaths to calm herself and aimed the flashlight away from Nate’s face. “It was already unlocked. Did you leave it unlocked last time you were here?”

“I don’t know… I don’t think so.”

“Someone unlocked it, and if it wasn’t you…”

“You think someone broke in?”

“I don’t think anyone’s broken in. I think it was unlocked for me.”

“For you?”

“How much do you know about me?”

“I know you’re… different.”

She considered him, thought about telling him things he probably didn’t need—or really want—to know; like how the door to the projection room had unlocked itself. But she decided to shut her mouth. “Never mind. What’s in that room over there?”

“Room?” Nate asked, “Oh, right. That’s where we keep our movie reels and stuff.”

“Movie reels. Is that it?”

“I don’t get what you mean.”

“Is there anything else about this room that I should know?”

“Not really, except
this
is the room I was in when I last spoke with Emily.” He was pointing at the projection room floor when he spoke.

Alice turned slowly around, throwing the beam of her flashlight into the room. “We’re going to have to come back here.”

“Here? Why? Emily disappeared after she went downstairs.”

“Because there’s something about this room, about that machine. You said you thought the man who took her had come out of the projector. That doesn’t make a lot of sense, but you’re probably not entirely wrong. What I want to do, though, is try and see if I can spot Emily, and I have a feeling I’ll fare better from down there where she went before she disappeared.”

“You’re going to try and… spot her?”

Alice nodded. “You said you know I’m
different
. I think it’s time for you to see just how different I am.”

CHAPTER FIVE

The Reflection

Alice got the feeling of walking through cobwebs as she stepped through the thick doors into the auditorium. The air in here was warm, the pressure suffocating, and the darkness total. Were it not for the flashlight in her hand casting its light upon rows of seats and the long set of slightly angled stairs at her feet, she would have thought she had just entered a closet. Hard to believe the vibe of a place could change so drastically, so quickly.

“This already doesn’t feel right,” she said, more to herself than to Nate.

“It hasn’t felt right since she disappeared,” Nate said, his voice low, “It’s as if something in here has changed.”

Read my mind
, she thought. “Something did change,” Alice said, “I just don’t know what, yet.”

Alice began the slow descent of the stairs which ran from the door to the auditorium all the way to the flat level in front of the screen. Nate was leading, but only by a foot or so. That she preferred to work alone was no big secret, but having him here, the sound of his voice acting as a bulwark against the crushing darkness of the place, wasn’t entirely unpleasant.

“How can you know this stuff?” Nate asked.

“Because of what I am,” she said, answering his question after a pause.

“And what’s that?”

“I’ll let you know if I ever find out.”

“You don’t know?”

“Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Know what you are.”

“I… don’t know what you mean.”

“This girl, Jinx, she helped you find me, which means you’ve brushed shoulders with the dark before. Whether you know it or not is another story, but the fact is that you’ve been Touched by the supernatural and that means not entirely human, but more human than most. It isn’t uncommon, but I haven’t come across many like you.”

Nate paused as he considered his reply. She couldn’t see his face, but she didn’t have to. Even in the choking darkness of the theater her uncanny perceptions were at work, plucking his emotions out of the air like a radio tuned in to KPMG Radio Nate;
all Nate, all the time
.

“I’m…
touched
,” he said.

“That’s right, but don’t ask me to explain it any more than I have.”

It was a word she understood, one she had heard being passed around here and there, but she didn’t like it.
Touched
. The word sounded dirty. A more suitable word, however, may have been
violated
. A man drinks the blood of a vampire and becomes an almost mindless slave. A boy walks into a haunted house on a dare and drags something old and foul out with him when he leaves. A newborn comes squalling out of the womb of his werewolf mother; a normal life for him is one of violence and tragedy.

Those were the obvious cases, but Nate’s case wasn’t an obvious one.

“Every male in my bloodline is haunted,” Nate volunteered, “I can pre-empt what someone’s going to say, and weird stuff happens around me. It started when I was a kid. At all times of the day we would hear bumps and knocks around the house. Doors would open and close. My mom would ask me to go out and buy a jug of milk from the store, but I had already bought one on the way home, knowing she would ask. She didn’t understand what was going on, thought I was some kind of freak.”

“That sounds like PK—psychokinesis. Telepathy, too.”

“Call it what you want, but it has a name. I called it the
Top Hat Man
.”

“Don’t make me ask the question.”

“The Top Hat Man was the thing that had lived in my grandfather’s closet since he was a child, the same thing that had lived in my dad’s closet, the same thing that took up residence in mine. It would come out and screw shit up at any hour of the day.”

“A hereditary ghost. Not unheard of, but—”

“Not a ghost.”

“No? Then what was it?”

There was a long pause, and then finally Nate said, “Maybe like a ghost, but it was more like some kind of demon that had grown used to feeding on us.”

“You said it infested your closet… is it still there now?

“I think so. It doesn’t come out much anymore, but I think it’s still there.”

“Huh,” Alice said. “So then we both have closet issues. Go figure.”

“What do you have in your closet?”

Alice smiled. “Also demons.”

Their arrival at the foot of the stairs killed the conversation. Alice shone her light around, allowing it to climb the height of the silver screen before finally returning the beam to eye level. The darkness seen against the weak glow of the flashlight made the theater look bigger than it was by a factor of thousands, now. No longer was it claustrophobic; it was as if they had entered a different world and were standing at the center of a pit in front of a semi-circle of seats, hundreds of silent eyes watching them.

Alice’s skin hadn’t stopped tingling since she came down here, and the feeling had only gotten worse. The last time she had been as physically reactive to a place as she was now had been a few months ago, when she’d rooted out the angry spirits of a tugboat that had burned down at the docks. They made her feel the burns they had experienced as they died, made her hear their cries for help and shrieks of pain, and she was powerless to stop them.

“Here,” Nate said, grabbing her attention. “Emily came in here to pick up the trash. I remember her saying that.”

Alice approached the spot where Nate was standing and shone her light on the empty plastic trash can and the bag of trash nearby. “This is where it happened,” she said. “This is where she was taken.”

“Emily…” Nate said, the word catching in his throat.

At the edge of her senses, Alice registered a sound—a voice, faint and distant, and female. “Shhh,” she said, “Listen.”

“Listen to what?”

She spun around, flashlight in hand, and scanned the theater, shining her light over the nearest row of seats and working her way up. Someone was humming in the room, though she didn’t know from where. From everywhere, maybe, or from nowhere. As her hackles began to rise she started to feel as though the darkness around had condensed again, as if the building were collapsing into itself. Whatever part of her brain was responsible for processing external cues was having trouble understanding why.

“Who’s there?” Alice said into the dark. “Emily? Is that you?”

“Emily?” Nate asked, “Why would you call Emily?”

“Shut up, it’s a hunch.”

“But it doesn’t make any sense.”

Alice turned on Nate and, ignoring his objections, said, “She’s here. I know she is. I can feel her.”

“What?”

“Emily hasn’t left the theater, but she’s lost in here and she isn’t alone. Someone’s with her. Hold this.” Alice gave Nate her flashlight and he stared in stark disbelief at what she was pulling out of her backpack—Trapper, her camera.

“What the hell is that?” he asked. “Are you gonna take pictures?”

“Not important. Just shut up a second.”

“But I don’t—”

“Emily,” she said as she looked into the eye of the camera. “If you’re in here, I need you to start talking. Start moving. Start running.”

“But she isn’t—”

“I swear, if you question me again, I’m
going
to hurt you.”

Nate shut up, and Alice saw something through the camera that gave her heart cause to skip a beat or two. There was someone sitting on one of the aisle chairs about half way up the auditorium. A girl—young, pretty, and vacant. The camera enabled Alice to see in the dark, almost as if it were equipped with a night-vision sensor, and through the camera Alice could see the girl’s eyes reflected like silver orbs against the dimness.

“What does Emily look like?” Alice asked, whispering like a scientist observing a wild animal.

“About my height, dark hair, wore it in a ponytail on the night she disappeared. Why?”

It’s her,
she thought, and the cold feeling returned to her stomach. “I’m going to try something,” she said, “And if anything happens, I want you to run up those stairs, leave, and not come back.”

“Wh-what? What do you mean?”

“Promise me you’ll run.”

“Okay, okay,” he said, “I promise.”

She nodded, brought her finger to the trigger on the camera, and pressed it. The auditorium filled with blue light, and for a moment all was illuminated. Nate shielded his eyes from the brighter-than-normal flash, and Alice blinked. When she looked through the viewfinder again, Emily was gone. The camera made a whirring sound and spat a Polaroid out of the front slot. Alice took it, shook the thing once, twice, three times, and asked Nate to shine the light on it.

There was a girl in the picture alright, and it was Emily. But unlike most of the entities she had Trapped during her career, Emily’s likeness was unmoving. She was also sitting on one of the chairs, and not running or trying to hide as Alice would have thought. It was like she was watching a movie. There was something else in this picture, too, something Alice hadn’t seen through the eye of the camera.

There was a hand on Emily’s shoulder.

The hand was connected to an arm which stretched off the picture. It was thin and fragile, female maybe, skin as pale as milk. But as Alice looked at it, the hand slowly disappeared so all that was left in the frame was Emily. Unmoving Emily. Alice wondered whether her camera was broken or if her powers hadn’t worked. Why wasn’t she moving? Why hadn’t Emily been captured? After a moment or so, Emily also began to disappear from the picture, and in a couple of seconds all that remained was a still shot of a couple of empty chairs.

A sudden pressure began to build behind Alice’s eyes and she rubbed them hard.

“It was her,” Nate said, “That was Emily.”

“I know,” Alice said.

“You know? So why aren’t you doing anything?”

“Will you shut up and let me think?”

It was as if someone were pressing a pair of thick thumbs into Alice’s eyes. She shut them tightly and gritted her teeth, hoping the moment would pass, but it started to feel like her eyes were going to pop out of their sockets and explode. Before she knew it, her back was starting to feel like it was burning. She winced from the pain, but could do nothing about it.

“What’s wrong?” Nate asked.

“We have to go,” she said, gasping for breath. “It knows we’ve seen it. We need to leave.”

Alice grabbed her backpack from the floor and began to quickly walk toward, and then up, the stairs leading out of the auditorium.

“Go? What do you mean, go? Emily’s here!”

“And she’s going to stay here for a while. Unless you want to end up like her, you’ll leave with me right now. I’m not waiting for you.”

Alice made it to the top of the stairs, indulged herself in one final scan of the theater, and headed across the lobby to the exit. Taking a lungful of the outside air was like breathing ice, but it soothed the fire in her mind and in her back. Nate stepped out of the theater as she was packing her camera into her backpack. He flicked the flashlight off and began locking the door in a hurry. It seemed he had gotten the ‘
get out’
message in his own way, just like Alice had.