Most of the seats were still in place, but the red plush was faded and threadbare and smelled powerfully of mildew. The screen was a huge white rectangle upon which Rock Hudson had once clinched with Doris Day, across which – Charlton Heston had once matched chariots with Stephen Boyd. It had to be at least forty feet long and twenty feet high; from where Johnny stood, it looked the size of a drive-in screen.
There was a stage area in front of the screen-a kind of architectural holdover, Johnny assumed, since vaudeville must have been dead by the time this place was built. Had – it ever been used? He supposed so; for political speeches, or high school graduations, maybe for the final round of the Cowshit County Spelling Bee. Whatever purposes it had served in the past, surely none of the people who had attended those quaint country ceremonies could have pre-dicted this stage’s final function.
He glanced around, a little worried about Billingsley now, and saw the old man coming down the short, narrow corridor which led from the bathrooms to the backstage area, where the rest of them were clustered. Old fella ‘s got a bottle stashed, he went back for a quick snort, that’s all, Johnny thought, but he couldn’t smell fresh booze on the old guy when he brushed past, and that was a smell he never missed now that he had quit drinking himself.
They followed Billingsley out onto the stage, the group of people Johnny was coming to think of (and not entirely without affection) as The Collie Entragian Survival Society, their feet clumping and echoing, their shadows long and pallid in the orchestra sidelights.
Billingsley had turned these on from a box in the electrical closet by the stage-left entrance. Above the tatty red plush seats, the weak light petered out in a hurry and there was only dark-ness ascending to some unseen height. Above that-and on all sides as well the desert wind howled. It was a sound that cooled Johnny’s blood.. . but he could not deny the fact that there was also something strangely attractive about it.. . although what that attraction might be, he didn’t know.
Oh, don’t lie. You know. Billingsley and his friends knew as well, that’s why they came here. God made you to hear that sound, and a room like this is a natural amplifier for it.
You can hear it even better when you sit in the front of the screen with your old pals, throwing legendary shadows and drinking to the past. That sound says quit-ting is okay, that quitting is in fact the only choice that makes any sense. That sound is about the lure of emptiness and the pleasures of zero.
In the middle of the dusty stage and in front of the curtainless screen was a living room easy chairs, sofas, standing lamps, a coffee-table, even a TV. The furniture stood on a big piece of carpet. It was a little like a display in the Home Living section of a department store, but what Johnny kept coming back to was the idea that if Eugene Ionesco had ever written an episode of The Twilight Zone, the set would probably have looked a lot like this. Dominating the decor was a fumed-oak bar. Johnny ran a hand over it as Billingsley snapped on the standing lamps, one after- the other. The electrical cords, Johnny saw, ran through small slits in the lower part of the screen. The edges of these rips had then been mended with electrical tape to keep them from widening.
Billingsley nodded at the bar. “That come from the old Circle Ranch. Part of the Clayton Loving auction, it was Buzz Hansen n me teamed together and knocked it down for seventeen bucks. Can you b’lieve it?”
“Frankly, no,” Johnny said, trying to imagine what an item like this might go for in one of those precious little shops down inSoHo . He opened the double doors and saw the bar was fully stocked. Good stuff, too. Not primo but good. He closed the doors again in a hurry. The bottles inside called to him in a way the bottle of Beam he’d taken out of the Owl’s had not.
Ralph Carver sat down in a wing-chair and looked out over the empty seats with the dazed hopefulness of a man who dares to think he may be dreaming after all. David went over to the television. “Do you get anything on this-oh, I see.” He had spotted the VCR underneath. He squatted down to look at the cassettes stacked on top of it “Son-” Billingsley began, then gave up.
David shuffled through the boxes quickly-Sex-Starved Co-eds, Dirty Debutantes, Cockpit Honeys, Part 3-and then put them back. “You guys watch these?”
Billingsley shrugged. He looked both tired and embarrassed. “We’re too old to rodeo, son. Someday maybe you’ll understand.”
“Hey, it’s your business,” David said, standing up. ‘I was just asking.”
“Steve, look at this,” Cynthia said. She stepped back raised her arms over her head, crossed them at the wrists and wiggled them. A huge dark shape flapped lazily on the screen, which was dingy with several decades’ worth of accumulated dust. “A crow. Not bad, huh?”
He grinned, stepped next to her, and placed his hands together out in front of him with one finger jutting down.
“An elephant!” Cynthia laughed. “Too cool!”
David laughed with her. It was an easy sound, cheerful and free. His father turned his head toward it and smiled himself.
“Not bad for a kid fromLubbock !” Cynthia said.
“Better watch that, unless you want me to start in calling you cookie again.”
She stuck her tongue out, eyes closed, fingers twiddling in her ears, reminding Johnny so strongly of Terry that he laughed out loud. The sound startled, almost frightened him. He supposed that, somewhere between Entragian and sundown, he had pretty much decided that he would never laugh again . . . not at the funny stuff, anyway.
Mary Jackson, who had been walking around the onstage living room and looking at everything, now glanced up at Steve’s elephant. “I can make theNew York City skyline,” she announced.
“My ass!” Cynthia said, although she looked intrigued by the concept.
“Let’s see!” David said. He was looking up at the screen as expectantly as a kid waiting for the start of the newest Ace Ventura movie.
“Okay,” Mary said, and raised her hands with the fin-gers pointing up. “Now, let’s see. . . give me a second.
I learned this in summer camp, and that was a long time ago- “What the fuck are you people doing?”
The strident voice startled Johnny badly, and he wasn’t the only one. Mary gave a little scream. The city skyline which had begun to form on the old movie screen went out of focus and disappeared.
Audrey Wyler was standing halfway between the stage- left entrance and the living-room grouping, her face pale, her eyes wide and hot. Her shadow loomed on the screen behind her, making its own image, all unknown to its creator: Batman’s cloak.
“You guys’re as insane as he is, you must be. He’s out there somewhere, looking for us. Right now.
Don’t you remember the car you heard, Steve? That was him, coming back! But you stand here . . . with the lights on … playing party-games!”
“The lights wouldn’t show from the outside even if we had all of them on,” Billingsley said. He was looking at Audrey in a way that was both thoughtful and intense as if, Johnny thought, he had the idea he’d seen her some where before. Possibly in Dirty Debutantes. “It’s a movie theater, remember. Pretty much soundproof and light proof. That’s what we liked about it, my gang.”
“But he’ll come looking. And if he looks long enough and hard enough, he’ll find us.
When you’re in Desperation, there aren’t that many places to hide.”
“Let him,” Ralph Carver said hollowly, and raised the Ruger .44. “He killed my little girl and took my wife away. I saw what he’s like as much as you did, lady. So let him come. I got some Express Mail for him.”
Audrey looked at him uncertainly for a moment. He looked back at her with dead eyes.
She glanced at Mary found nothing there to interest her, and looked at Billngsley again.
“He could sneak up. A place like this must have half a dozen ways in. Maybe more.”
“Yup, and every one locked except for the ladies’-room window,” Billingsley said. “I went back there just now and set up a line of beer-bottles on the window ledge inside. If he opens the window, it’ll swing in, hit the bottles, knock em over, smash em on the floor. We’ll hear him, ma’am, and when he walks out here we’ll fill him so full of lead you could cut im up and use em for sinkers. He was looking at her closely as he uttered this grandiosity, eyes alternating between her face, which was okay and her legs, which were, in John Edward Marinville’s humble opinion, pretty fooking spectacular.