“I had a choice to make, and I made it,” Alice said. “Emily is better off without this thing running around, trust me.”
“Emily would have been better off
here
,” Isaac said, his voice now serious and authoritative.
“Maybe if you had told me you could bring her out from the start, we would have come up with a better plan. Why the fuck didn’t you tell me you could just open a portal like that? What did you get from keeping that secret?”
“They knew we were coming. I don’t know how, but they knew. How do you know they wouldn’t have learned of our plan if I had said something to you?”
“I don’t, but if I had known you could open a portal into the Reflection on your own I would have asked you to send me in there and I would have brought her out myself!”
“What makes you think you would survive in there?”
“I’ve already
been
in there, Isaac—or have you forgotten?”
He hadn’t forgotten. Alice could taste it in his aura, could feel it in the air, the sudden cloudburst of cold within his stomach. Her mind took her briefly back to a time when she had been a captive of the Reflection, but she willed herself back into the moment. A trip down memory lane wasn’t something she or anyone else needed, and it certainly wasn’t what Emily needed. Emily needed Alice and Isaac to be focused, and to figure out how the hell they were going to get her out now that their way in had been sealed.
But Isaac had a different thought. “Alice,” Isaac said.
Alice turned to him. “What?”
“This is probably the time for us to start talking about… about how familiar this is all starting to seem.”
“Familiar? Familiar
how
?”
“You’re smarter than that. I shouldn’t have to spell it out.”
“I want you to spell it out so that I can dismiss the notion of it. What’s happening here is not the same thing that happened to me before. It just isn’t.”
“You can’t deny there are similarities.”
“Maybe there are, but what you’re suggesting is crazy. That happened less than two years ago, and I dealt with it for good. It’s not happening now.”
Alice had said the words, but she didn’t believe them. Not in her heart. This truly
was
starting to sound all too familiar. Emily’s jaunt into the Reflection, the reappearance of a woman made of shadow who possessed some kind of magic unavailable to regular ghosts, and the way Alice’s body was reacting—particularly the pain in her back.
He cut me up.
“Fine,” Isaac said, “If you’re unwilling to believe the same thing that happened to you could be happening to Emily, then we should leave before we make things worse for her.”
“We can’t leave. Emily’s still trapped here, and we’ve taken one of them out. We can find the other one, the woman, and take her out too.”
“I don’t think it’s that simple.”
“What do you mean it’s not that simple? If she’s blocked us from using our power in here, then we’ll use it outside. What’s the trouble?”
“This thing, the shadow woman, she was able to counter my spell and dissolve it. I have never encountered a spirit with that kind of power, or that kind of knowledge about magic.”
“What are you saying?”
“You know as well as I do there are more things than just ghosts in the Reflection. I would need to study this more, but it’s possible—”
“We don’t have time for you to put thought into this, Isaac. For all we know the shadow woman’s gotten Emily again and we’re already too late. We need to act. We need to spread out and find out where this woman is hiding, and then root her out and catch her.”
Alice bent down to stuff the Polaroid into her backpack. A strange bout of dizziness struck her as soon as she came back up and her legs buckled, but she righted herself. It wasn’t enough to stop Isaac from noticing. Even in the dim light, where the only available illumination was coming from a flashlight, she could see the worry on his face. Capturing the big man had taken more out of her than she had expected, and she had already been weak to begin with, but she couldn’t let something like hunger stand in the way of Emily’s rescue.
“Are you alright?” Isaac asked.
Alice nodded. “I’m fine,” she said. “Just a little dizzy.”
“Fine, then let’s get out of here before things get any worse.”
“We can’t leave,” she said, asserting her position again. “If we abandon her now, there’s no telling what’ll happen to her.”
“And if we don’t leave there’s no telling what’ll happen to you. To us.”
I know what’ll happen to me,
she thought
.
She was playing with fire, but what choice did she have? Emily was still lost in the Reflection, and Alice was flying blind now. They had put the big bad thug out of commission, but it wasn’t enough. Alice wouldn’t be able to rest until Emily was safe and firmly in the realm where she belonged.
“I don’t think this thing wants to kill Emily,” Isaac said. “I think it needs her for something, and that means she’ll be kept alive.”
“That’s not making me feel better about leaving.”
“Maybe not, but it means we have time, time enough to formulate a plan of attack. This spirit is powerful and clever. We need to be smarter than it, and you look like you need to rest.”
“I don’t need a—”
The entire auditorium came alive with light and sound.
Alice spun around in a circle, for a moment believing the lights had come back on and that the theater was filled with people, but she was looking in the wrong direction. The light and sound weren’t coming from the seats—it was all coming from the screen and the speakers, a cacophony of hissing and gargling almost painful to listen to.
She turned again and angled her head up. The picture on the big-screen was blurry and out of focus; a strange, roiling landscape of writhing darkness pockmarked by glistening points of coppery light. It looked almost like a black ocean on which old brass ships were sailing—a living, breathing ocean with waves which swelled and dipped, sighed and hissed. A mesmerizing dance of darkness, as elegant as it was disturbing.
Alice circled around to the stairs to get a better look at the screen, and watched as the picture began to take focus. What had once looked like a dark ocean, now looked more like a mass of shadow gently swishing and swashing into itself. But this ocean was no ocean at all. Three impossibly tall, but perfectly distinct, humanoid entities made of shadow began to rise from the mass of darkness. Alice could hear, among the hissing, the steady drip-drop of water and the whoosh of an ill wind.
Isaac wanted to speak, but didn’t know what to say. Alice, likewise, remained quiet and watched the three entities stand, stare out of the screen, and slowly begin to sway. The air in front of the big screen began to shiver, like heat distortion. The footage was jerky, but watchable. When Alice walked to the left, the creatures hissed, and the picture jiggled.
Alice felt the pinch of panic grip the back of her throat.
On a hunch, she moved to the right, and the figures on the screen followed her with their heads. She realized then with cold dread that this was no ordinary movie. It was as if a lump of ice had been dropped into her stomach, and she would have stood rooted to the spot had she not been determined to find Emily. Up above she saw the beam of the projector, hazy and smoky, and trailed it to a spot of flickering light in the wall.
The projection room was where she needed to go.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Trapdoor
Though it seemed to Alice, as she recalled the last twenty minutes of her life, that the world had been chaotic and full of sound, light, and action, the truth was that the Cinema Royale had been—and remained—as quiet and empty as a tomb. It was as if the entire building had gone back to sleep, especially once they had left the auditorium and the whirring, rattling, and hissing within. She could hear her own breathing in the lobby, Isaac’s too. They were short, rapid breaths fueled by adrenaline and a healthy dose of fear, the kind of fear that kicks in when the antelope senses the approach of a lion—not a debilitating panic, but one that sharpens the instincts and puts the animal on high-alert.
With her backpack slung over her shoulder and her old Polaroid Instant Camera raised to eye level, Alice looked more like a low-budget, crack-pot paranormal investigator than a bounty hunter. Part of her job required a fair amount of investigation, sure, but she usually went into a case knowing exactly what she was up against. The uncertainty here, and the fact she had to work with anyone besides herself—
Isaac of all people
—was what had initially put her on edge, and what kept her on edge now as she ascended the half-spiral staircase to the next floor.
Never mind the gloom and the cold.
Isaac trailed closely behind with his right arm raised and ready to use if necessary, and the flashlight firmly gripped in his left. “Can you see anything through your camera?” he asked.
“No,” she said, lowering the camera, “I can’t see anything, not when I’m trying to look into the other side.”
It was as if Trapper had the lens cap on, even though it wasn’t that kind of camera. Normally her field of vision would open up when she looked through her camera, but now all was dark. She had also become aware, during the last couple of minutes, that the throbbing in her back had intensified. At first it hadn’t been more than a passive inconvenience, but as time went on, the throb had gone from
this is inconvenient
, to
okay, I can’t ignore this,
to,
I don’t think I can walk another step.
She glanced at her own hand and flexed, but she could barely make her fist close into a ball. Her body was weakening fast, and this meant time was running out.
“Will you be able to use the camera if we need it?” Isaac asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t often take shots without being able to see what I’m looking at.”
Alice reached the next floor landing, and her feet creaked on the wooden floorboards beneath them. Ahead of her was a red door, to the right a narrow corridor led to the balcony overlooking the main auditorium. Beyond the red door she heard the rattling, whirring sound of a projector in operation.
Isaac arrived at the red door and tried the knob ahead of Alice. It croaked open, and immediately Isaac brought the beam of light to bear on the projector. It droned and churned on— independent, alone, and of its own volition. Its big, mechanical shape with the many protrusions and cables cast a sinister shadow on the wall beyond, like that of a hungry animal.
A lion
, Alice thought.
Why do lions keep coming to mind?
They pushed inside, and the beam of the flashlight jumped this way and that. First to the projector, then to the nearby table upon which sat a number of open film reel cases, and then to the tiny tinted window through which you could see the auditorium and the movie playing on the big screen. It hadn’t changed. Three shadowed figures stood in a dark cave, dimly lit, with water gently dripping somewhere. As Alice stared, she got the impression the three figures were moving, walking. No, more like gliding.
The familiar sensation she had felt the first time she entered this room came back instantaneously. Alice’s attention was pulled to the back of the room where a door lay hidden inside a wall plastered over with posters of old movies, some which she had seen, others she didn’t think anyone would ever be able to see because they had come out of circulation decades ago. Earlier, the door had excited and repulsed her. The same feelings, like buzzing bees in her chest, remained now.
“There’s no one here,” Isaac said, “No one to turn this on.”
“Does that surprise you?” she asked as she approached the door.
“I’m not sure what I was expecting. It looks like the film inside the machine was once in this film reel case. It doesn’t have a name on it, though. No marker of any kind.”
“Could be a student movie,” Alice said when she reached the door in the back of the room. She pulled it open, but the darkness in here was even greater than it was in the projection room. The projector was emitting light in rapid, machine-gun bursts. But this room was dark as pitch and as cold as an ice-box. Alice rubbed her arm with her free hand. “Could you give me some light?” she asked.
Isaac approached and shone the flashlight over Alice’s shoulder. Her shadow extended into the room before her, stretching grotesquely along the floor and wall. There were shelves in here, racks upon which round, steel cases sat.
Movie reels
. Noir, sci-fi, horror—they were all here. But there were more film reels too, in boxes tucked beneath the racks and shelves.
Alice pulled one out and handled a number of them. Each had a label on it citing the name of the movie, the date it was released, and the genre. Her skin wasn’t just tingling now, it was buzzing with electricity and everything she touched had a kind of rubbery texture as a result. When she pulled the box out further, it caught on a small protrusion rising up from the floor. Isaac shone the light on it, and she saw it was a catch for a trapdoor. Her fingers closed unconsciously around the small, black latch.