He was in the projection booth. There was a big padlock hanging on the door which led into the basement, so where else could he be?
“Him en tow,” she whispered, starting forward. Her eyes were wide, the fingers of her right hand moving ceaselessly in the pocket of her dress. From beneath them came small, stony clicking sounds.
The kids who partied hearty upstairs in The American West until the fire escape fell down had been slobs, but they had mostly used the hail and the manager’s office for their revels; the other rooms were relatively untouched, and the projectionist’s little suite-the booth, the office cubicle, the closet-sized toilet-stall-was almost exactly as it had been on the day in 1979 when five cigarette smoking men from Nevada Sunlite Entertainment had come in, dismantled the carbon-filament projectors, and taken them to Reno, where they still languished, in a warehouse filled with similar equipment, like fallen idols.
David was on his knees, head down, eyes closed, hands pressed together in front of his chin. The dusty linoleum beneath him was lighter than that which surrounded him.
Straight ahead was a second lighter rectangle. It was here that the old projectors-clattery, baking-hot dinosaurs that raised the temperature in this room as high as a hundred and twenty on some summer nights-had stood. To his left were the cut-outs through which they had shone their swords of light and projected their larger-than-life shadows: Gregory Peck and Kirk Douglas, Sophia Loren and Jayne Mansfield, a young Paul Newman hustling pool, an old but still vital Bette Davis torturing her wheel-chair-bound sister.
Dusty coils of film lay here and there on the floor like dead snakes. There were old stills and posters on the walls. One of the latter showed Marilyn Monroe standing on a subway grating and trying to hold down her flaring skirt. Beneath a hand-drawn arrow pointing at her panties, some wit had printed
Carefully insert Shaft A in Slot B, making sure tool is seated firmly & cannot slip out. There was an odd, decayed smell in here, not quite mildew, not quite dry-rot, either. It smelled curdled, like something that had gone spectacularly bad before finally drying up.
David didn’t notice the smell any more than he heard Audrey softly calling his name from the hall which ran past the balcony. He had come here when the others had run to Billingsley-even Audrey had gone as far as stage- left at first, perhaps to make sure they were all going down the hall-because he had been nearly overwhelmed by a need to pray.
He had an idea that this time it would just be a matter of getting to someplace quiet and opening the door-this time God wanted to talk to him, not the other way around. And this was a good place to do it.
Pray in your closet and not in the street, the Bible said, and David thought that was excellent advice.
Now that he had a closed door between him and the rest of them, he could open the one inside him.
He wasn’t afraid of being observed by spiders or snakes or rats; if God wanted this to be a private meeting, it would be a private meeting. The woman Steve and Cynthia had found was the real problem-she for some reason made him nervous, and he had a feeling she felt the same about him. He had wanted to get away from her, so he had slipped over the edge of the stage and run up the center aisle. He was under the sagging balcony and into the lobby before Audrey turned back from the stage-left side of the movie screen, looking for him. From the lobby he had come up to the second floor, and then had simply let some interior compass-or maybe it was Reverend Martin’s “still, small voice”-lead him up here.
He had walked across the room, barely seeing the old curls of film and the remaining posters, barely smelling the odor which might or might not have been celluloid fantasies stewed by the desert sun until they fell apart. He had stopped on this patch of linoleum, considering for a moment the large holes at the corners of the lighter rectangle shape, holes where the kingbolts which held the projector firmly in place had once gone. They reminded him (I see holes like eyes) of something, something which fluttered briefly in his mind and then was gone. False memory, real memory, intuition? All of the above? None of the above? He hadn’t known, hadn’t really cared. His priority then had been to get in touch with God, if he could. He had never needed to more than now.
Yes, Reverend Martin said calmly inside his head. And this is where your work is supposed to pay off You keep in touch with God when the cupboard’s full so you can reach out to him when it’s empty. How many times did I tell you that last winter and this spring?
A lot. He just hoped that Martin, who drank more than he should and maybe couldn’t be entirely trusted, had been telling the truth instead of just mouthing what David’s dad called “the company line.”
He hoped that with all his mind and heart.
Because there were other gods in Desperation.
He was sure of it.
He began his prayer as he always did, not aloud but in his mind, sending words out in clear, even pulses of thought: See in me, God. Be in me. And speak in me, if you mean to, if it’s your will.
As always at these times when he felt really in need of God, the front of his mind was serene, but the deeper part, where faith did constant battle with doubt, was terrified that there would be no answer. The problem was simple enough. Even now, after all his reading and praying and instruction, even after what had happened to his friend, he doubted God’s existence. Had God used him, David Carver, to save Brian Ross’s life?
Why would God do a wild and crazy thing like that? Wasn’t it more likely that what Dr. Waslewski had called a clinical miracle and what David himself had thought of as an answered prayer had actually been nothing more than a clinical coincidence?
People could make shadows that looked like animals, but they were still only shadows, minor tricks of light and projection. Wasn’t it likely that God was the same kind of thing?
Just another legendary shadow?
David closed his eyes tighter, concentrating on the mantra and trying to clear his mind.
See in me. Be in me. Speak in me if it’s your will.
And a kind of darkness came down. It was like nothing he had ever known or experienced before. He sagged side-ways against the wall between two of the projection- cutouts, eyes rolling up to whites, hands falling into his lap. A low, guttural sound came from his throat. It was followed by sleeptalk which perhaps only David’s mother could have understood.
“Shit,” he muttered. “The mummy’s after us.
Then he fell silent, leaning against the wall, a silver runner of drool almost as fine as a spider’s thread slipping from one corner of what was, essentially, still a child’s mouth.
Outside the door which he had shut in order to be alone with his God (there had once been a bolt on it, but that was long gone), approaching footsteps could now be heard.
They stopped outside the door. There was a long, listening pause, and then the knob turned. The door opened. Audrey Wyler stood there. Her eyes widened when they happened on the unconscious boy.
She came into the fuggy little room, closed the door behind her, and looked for something, anything, to tilt and prop under the knob. A board, a chair. It wouldn’t hold them off for long if they came up here, but even a thin margin might mean the difference between success and failure at this stage. But there was nothing.
“Fuck,” she whispered. She looked at the boy, realizing without much surprise that she was afraid of him. Afraid even to go near him.
Tak ah wan! The voice in her head.
“Tak ah wan!” This time out of her mouth. Assent. Both helpless and heartfelt.
She went down the two steps into the projection-booth proper and crossed, wincing at each gritting step, to where David leaned on his knees against the wall with the cut-outs in it. She kept expecting his eyes to fly open-eyes that would be filled with an electric-blue power. The right hand in her pocket squeezed the can tahs together once more, drawing strength, then-reluctantly-left them.
She dropped to her own knees in front of David, her cold and shaking fingers clasped before her. How ugly he was! And the smell coming from him was even more offensive to her. Of course she had stayed
away from him; he looked like a gorgon and stank like a stew of spoiled meat and sour milk.