This was her Chest of Haunts; her very own personal Alcatraz, specially made to hold the most dangerous and psychotic ghosts and human souls around. Speaking specifically, though, the Chest wasn’t exactly hers—Alice couldn’t claim to have captured every one of these entities herself. Like ‘Trapper’, her camera, the chest had wound up on her doorstep one day, like a goodwill donation.
There had been a single yellow post-it note in the shape of a speech-bubble slapped onto the chest. “Now it’s your turn,” the note had said. At first Alice had thought someone had made a mistake, but the timing was right. After what she had gone through only months before, that this chest had appeared at her doorstep was almost…
correct
.
She let the envelope fall into the chest and closed it, but felt something touch her leg before she could lock it.
“Hey Elvira,” she said to her tabby cat, named after the legend herself. The cat meowed loudly, almost obnoxiously, brushed its tail against Alice’s calf, and then walked toward her empty bowl of food. “How’s it going, kitty?” Alice asked as she stroked her back.
The cat settled near her bowl and started grooming herself while Alice swung around into the kitchen and grabbed a big bag of dry cat food. After filling Elvira’s bowl, she sat on a nearby stool checking emails on her phone, when her head suddenly began to pulse. It wasn’t like she had been hit over the head with a mallet, but more like her temples had been put under a vice which had been timed to squeeze and release at certain intervals.
Alice set the phone down on the counter and stood, but the world began to spin, and then her heart started to race. She staggered across the room, fell to her knees, and clutched her head and chest. For a moment she remained entirely still, physically unable to move or almost too scared to— most likely a little of both. The moment would pass, she knew it would pass eventually, but it hadn’t yet and a slight fear was beginning to pinch her throat.
She slowly turned her head and stared at the Chest of Haunts, sitting quietly in the open closet. None of the black envelopes in the chest contained what she required except the one she had just placed inside. The soul trapped within the Polaroid was fresh, still burning with emotion, and ripe—the reddest apple on the tree, succulent and full. But it was a
poltergeist
, the worst kind of apple.
The pain came again, this time harder and more intense. It was like needles were being pushed into her brain and spine. She looked at her hands and watched as her skin began to take on a blue tone; not like a pallor, but almost like a glow from the inside. As she watched, a droplet of blood from her nose fell on her forearm with a crimson splat. Closing her eyes, she manifested a portion of her own psychic energy to create a mental ward between herself and the pain. It helped, but only a little. Maybe if she fed…
Alice reached for the counter and hoisted herself up, but her grip slipped and she fell back on her ass. She groaned, turned on her belly, wiped her nose with the back of her hand, then hoisted herself up with a hard shove. She was shaky, her legs weak, but she walked over to the chest and opened it. The envelope was there, staring up at her like a piece of meat on a grill. Her urge was to eat, to satisfy the craving by devouring the soul in the picture, but she didn’t want to eat
this
. There was no telling what an entity so full of anger and malice could do to her psyche if she consumed it. This is why she kept them hidden, why she locked them away instead of eating them.
With a grunt and as much willpower as she could muster, she forced the chest shut, found the padlock, and fastened it. She did the same to the closet door, slamming it shut and locking it up. The sharp pain she had felt a moment ago was now only a dull throb. She knew this part would not last, but she also knew she needed to feed—and she would need to feed soon. The poltergeist would not offer any sustenance once it had entered dormancy, a process which could take six hours or six days.
Being hungry was better than being groggy, lazy, and possibly angry, though.
Alice turned her back to the closet door and something smashed into it from the inside. She spun around, her heart pulsing in her throat and her hands clenched into tight fists. There was another loud thumb, and this time she felt herself take a cautious step away. Her bag and Trapper were nearby, and she knew she could get to them in only a few seconds, but she doubted she would need to use the camera right now.
A moment of inactivity passed, and Alice allowed herself a chance to breathe. “That’s right,” she said to the closet door, “You can get mad all you want, but you’re never coming out of there again. I gave you a chance and you blew it, so shut the hell up.”
Alice grabbed her backpack, zipped it shut, and headed for the front door. She glanced another look around her apartment, saw her cat licking its lips, and decided it was probably a bad idea for her to leave her cat in charge of security, but she had little choice. With any luck she would be back in a couple of hours to make sure all was well with the new prisoner on the block, and then settle in to catch up on some TV.
But nothing would be well the next time she came home.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Projection Room
The Cinema Royale had just reared its head from within the tangle of twisting streets, and Alice’s senses were already on high alert. Streetlights buzzed overhead, some of them jittering and flickering like they were going to go out. A group of stray dogs were rooting through trash cans lined up along an alley. At the end of the street, two men stood by the corner, their voices low, their hands obscured. They quieted as Alice passed by, and she could feel their eyes on her, examining her, leering at her, maybe even undressing her.
She took one final bite out of the burger she had bought at the stand a few streets down and tossed the paper wrapping in the trash. The Royale stood to her right, tall and grand—or at least it had been once. The Cinema Royale had been the kind of place where all the big shots went back in the forties, fifties and sixties. This was old Hollywood. It was Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Jean Renoir. It was Lucio Fulci, Wes Craven, and John Carpenter. It was everything modern cinema wasn’t.
Fond memories of sneaking out of school one afternoon and skipping math class to watch Freddy Krueger kill young Johnny Depp crashed over her in a wave of nostalgia. It wasn’t just the movies they showed that struck her; it was the charm of the place. Sure, the paint was chipping off in places, some of the fixtures were being held up with duct tape, and you could easily inhale more dust in a single hour than you would have cared for, but this just gave the theater some character, a kind of rough-around-the-edges quality.
As she approached the front door, she noticed Nate wasn’t there. She waited for a moment, scanning left and then right, feeling the cold wind bite her nose and chin, then she tried the front door. It was unlocked. When she pulled the door gave way with a groan and opened to reveal pitch black darkness beyond it.
“Nate?” she said into the dark. “You in here? Nate?”
No sounds came back, not even the echo of her own voice. She stood, waiting, staring at the darkness in the hopes it would clear, that her eyes would adjust, but they didn’t. When she’d had enough of the darkness, she pulled a mini-flashlight out of her pocket and flicked it on. The beam penetrated the dark and shone a spot of light wherever her hand was pointing. Dust motes danced like tiny fireflies, each vying for a moment in the spotlight.
“Nate?” she said, but again no one replied.
Alice shone the flashlight this way and that. She could see the ticket booth from here, the faded old posters on the wall, and the shop. Then she heard something—a sigh, a soft, almost melodious ‘
aaaahh’
. She turned to look at the street, believing the sound to have come from behind, but the street was full of its own kinds of sounds—hissing tires, barking dogs, and distant sirens. She may have heard the tail end of a song on someone’s sound system, but didn’t think it likely.
Maybe it was Nate who had made the noise. He wasn’t standing out here and the door hadn’t been forced or broken, so he may have gone inside to… well, she couldn’t think of why he would have gone in on his own, but maybe he had a reason. Alice sighed too, now. This was why she didn’t work with people. People went off and did things on their own, people left her in the dark, and she didn’t like not knowing what was going on.
She pulled the door open in a silent arc. Light from the outside cut a rectangle across the floor, even if this didn’t do much to illuminate the lobby. Alice took a step inside, then another, and another, and before she knew it she was running her fingers over the ticket booth counter, well inside the mouth of the lobby.
“Nate?” she said again.
Nothing.
When he didn’t reply, she decided he definitely wasn’t in here. If he was, he would have heard her by now, wouldn’t he? Unless he was in the auditorium or… upstairs.
As Alice spotted the half-spiral stairs coiling upward, leading to the first floor, her skin tightened over her bones. She knew her body was an antenna for the supernatural, that she could pick things up no human could, and that her body often reacted to the presence of the otherworldly by way of goosebumps. Maybe this meant there was something supernatural at work in here, but then this building
was
pretty old, and probably housed plenty of ghosts—both real and metaphorical.
She approached the stairs and made the climb one step at a time, keeping her back to the wall and the flashlight aimed at the ground so as to keep a close eye on where she was going. Alice continued to climb until she reached the first floor and the stone beneath her feet became wood. There was a closed red door in front of her, the color of blood against the yellow light of her flashlight. She tried the knob, but the door didn’t open. Locked. Alice looked around. There were only two places to go from here—up toward the upper balcony overseeing the auditorium, or back the way she had come.
She had decided to go check out the stalls when the red door made a
click
sound.
Alice swallowed, stared at the red door, and reached for the knob. She turned it, pushed, and the door gave way a couple of inches. The room beyond it was cold, like a meat-locker, but it also smelled vaguely of vanilla. She didn’t think this smell had come up from the snack shop, either. It had come from inside the room. It must have. Probably from an automatic air-freshener.
This was the projection room. Alice saw the mammoth machine propped up against the wall, looking over the auditorium like a robotic sniper in a bell tower. Her flashlight sailed over the metal casing, wires, and panels. The thing created a monstrous shadow on the other side of the room—a beast of many tentacles and protrusions with an unspeakable name and a desire to eat, like something out of a Lovecraft novel.
But besides the projector, a table, and a couple of chairs, the room was threadbare.
She tried the light switch, but the place had no power. Not a single light was illuminated in the building. She wondered, absently, why no one had fixed them, then she remembered the staff had cleared out a couple of nights ago. Nate had said as much. The Cinema Royale had officially closed its doors, so why would anyone come back to fix the lights?
Besides, only Nate knew they were out because he had been here when they blew.
“Emily?” she asked, closely scanning for any signs of movement. She was expecting
some
movement—a quick shadow, a flicker of light, a faint mist—but nothing was happening. Either the spirits weren’t interested in showing themselves, or they couldn’t. This was fine. They could stay hidden all they wanted, so long as they stayed out of her way. What she was more interested in was the sound she had heard once and not again. It had come from inside—
her head
—the building, of this she was sure now, but she couldn’t say what had made it.
As Alice approached the other side of the projection room, she noticed a door embedded into the far wall. The door was well hidden, masked behind a series of posters so tightly pressed together you wouldn’t know there was a door there unless you were looking for it. But something about this door… repulsed and enticed her. It pushed her away as much as it drew her close. Or was it the other way around?
Still, she approached. The pull to find out about this door, or about the room beyond it, was so innately powerful that it had a physical effect on her. When you knew as much about the world as Alice did, few things were exciting. But she could feel her heart beginning to race within her chest. A nervous cold had descended into her stomach and settled there, seemingly causing time itself to slow, so each of her actions felt drawn out and lethargic.
A soft whisper—another melodious sigh—touched her ears. Alice jumped, spun around with her flashlight aimed high, and her heart beating hard in her throat. Nate was standing by the door to the projection room, shielding his eyes from the beam of light with his forearm. Unless he had decided to sigh in high C, it hadn’t been he who made that sound.
“Alice?” he said, “What are you doing up here?”
Alice crossed the room with intent, stepped up to Nate—who backed away from her—and said “Do you know what happens to idiots that sneak up on someone like me?”