out his life through his eyes, luxuriating in the soul-looks he was giving it as he perished.
He knew he must be nearly dead, because he hadn’t taken a breath in a long while. It seemed like minutes, but he couldn’t be sure.
Just as he was listening for the sound of his heart, the horns divided around his head and pressed themselves into his ears. Even in this reverie, the sensation was disgusting, and he wanted to cry out for it to stop. But the fingers were working their way into his head, bursting his ear-drums, and passing on like inquisitive tapeworms through brain and skull. He was alive, even now, still staring at his tormentor, and he knew that the fingers were finding his eyeballs, and pressing on them now from behind.
His eyes bulged suddenly and broke from their housing, splashing from his sockets. Momentarily he saw the world from a different angle as his sense of sight cascaded down his cheek. There was his lip, his chin –
It was an appalling experience, and mercifully short. Then the feature Ricky’d lived for thirty-seven years snapped in mid-reel, and he slumped in the arms of fiction.
Ricky’s seduction and death had occupied less than three minutes. In that time Birdy had tried every key on Ricky’s ring, and could get none of the damn things to open the door. Had she not persisted she might have gone back into the cinema and asked for some help. But things mechanical, even locks and keys, were a challenge to her womanhood. She despised the way men felt some instinctive superiority over her sex when it came to engines, systems and logical processes, and she was damned if she was going to go whining back to Ricky to tell him she couldn’t open the damn door.
By the time she’d given up the job, so had Ricky. He was dead and gone. She swore, colourfully, at the keys, and admitted defeat. Ricky clearly had a knack with these wretched things that she’d never quite grasp. Good luck to him. All she wanted now was out of this place. It was getting claustrophobic. She didn’t like being locked in, not knowing who was lurking around upstairs.
And now to cap it all, the lights in the foyer were on the blink, dying away flicker by flicker.
What the hell was going on in this place anyhow?
Without warning the lights went out altogether, and beyond the doors into the cinema she was sure she heard movement. A light spilled through from the other side, stronger than torchlight, twitching, colourful.
‘Ricky?’ she chanced into the dark. It seemed to swallow her words. Either that or she didn’t believe it was Ricky at all, and something was telling her to make her appeal, if she had to, in a whisper.
‘Ricky . . .?’
The lips of the swing-doors smacked together gently as something pressed on them from the other side.
‘. . .is that you?’
The air was electric: static was crackling off her shoes as she walked towards the door, the hairs on her arms were rigid. The light on the other side was growing brighter with every step.
She stopped advancing, thinking better of her enquiries. It wasn’t Ricky, she knew that. Maybe it was the man or woman on the phone, some pebble-eyed lunatic who got off on stalking fat women.
She took two steps back towards the Ticket Office, her feet sparking, and reached under the counter for the Motherfucker, an iron bar which she’d kept there since she’d been trapped in the Office by three would-be thieves with shaved heads and electric drills. She’d screamed blue murder and they’d fled, but next time she swore she’d beat one (or all of them) senseless rather than be terrorised. And the Motherfucker, all three feet of it, was her chosen weapon.
Armed now, she faced the doors.
They blew open suddenly, and a roar of white noise filled her head, and a voice through the roar said:
‘Here’s looking at you, kid.’
An eye, a single vast eye, was filling the doorway. The noise deafened her; the eye blinked, huge and wet and lazy, scanning the doll in front of it with the insolence of the One True God, the maker of celluloid Earth and celluloid Heaven.