‘No,’ said Martin. ‘It’s more than that. It’s like mass hysteria.’
He looked around at the weeping, distraught audience. Their wet cheeks glistened in the half darkness. Some of them were covering their faces with their hands and sobbing as if they were totally distraught.
At last Martin began to understand why Boofuls had allowed hardly anybody to see the completed picture, and why he had insisted on its being premiered simultaneously throughout the world. It wasn’t just a brilliant and captivating musical. It was a hymn to human tragedy. In a particularly subtle and convincing way, it dramatized not hope and faith and human optimism, like most musicals, but utter despair. It highlighted the inevitability of death and the uselessness of life. The only way to true fulfillment was never to be born at all.
Martin also began to understand why Mrs Alicia Crossley had felt it necessary to slaughter Boofuls before he had been able to finish the original version of
Sweet Chariot
. In some extraordinary mesmerizing way,
Sweet Chariot
was capable of drawing its audiences into a whirlpool of helpless emotion, like drowning moths being sucked down a drain, and Martin began to be desperately afraid of what was going to happen next.
‘Come on,’ he told Ramone. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’
‘I want to see the end,’ Ramone protested.
‘Out!’ Martin snapped at him, and grabbed hold of his sleeve.
Ramone struggled and argued, but then one of the ushers shone a torch at him and said, ‘Out of there, please, sir. You’re disturbing other folks’ enjoyment.’
At last, still grumbling, Ramone allowed himself to be escorted out to the lobby.
‘That movie is like some kind of drug, almost,’ Martin told him. ‘Can’t you feel what it’s done to your emotions? It’s washed you and spun you and hung you out to dry! God knows what’s going to happen to the rest of that audience.’
Ramone took two or three deep breaths, then stared at Martin as if he had never seen him before. ‘That was terrible,’ he said, and he sounded genuinely shaken. ‘I feel like I have a hangover. Man, I felt so
miserable
.’
‘That, I think, is the whole idea,’ said Martin. ‘But Boofuls and that lady friend of his weren’t going to stick around and get miserable with the rest of us.’
‘They left?’
‘A couple of minutes ago.’
‘So where do you think they went?’
Martin said, ‘I have a very good idea. But first I want to go home. I have a feeling that it’s time we went looking for Emilio.’
They were only halfway across the lobby when they heard a high, agonized screaming sound: so high at first that it didn’t sound human. They stopped and stared at each other; then they turned back toward the movie-theater doors. There was another scream; and then another; and then a terrifying howl and a noise like wooden buckets being knocked together.
One of the ushers, white-faced, said, ‘Is that the sound track, or what?’
But then Martin went up to the swing doors and tried to push them open and there was a heavy collision of bodies on the other side, and more screaming, and he couldn’t push them more than an inch or two.
‘Man – what the hell’s happening?’ gasped Ramone.
A cop came running through the lobby, followed by two more. Martin said, ‘I can’t get the doors open, it seems like there’s a whole lot of people pushing against them on the other side.’
The cops pushed with him, but there was a dead weight behind the doors which they couldn’t budge. The screaming inside the theater grew louder, and there was more thumping and scrabbling and knocking.
‘Upstairs!’ shouted one of the cops. ‘Jack – you take the side!’
The first cop bounded up the stairs to the theater balcony. Martin and Ramone followed him, panting with fear and effort. The noise inside the building was almost unbearable. It sounded like hell itself. There were no intelligible cries for help: only a muffled, brutish moaning, and endless screaming, and that terrible hollow knocking. The cop reached the doors to the balcony and instinctively drew his gun. Then he kicked the doors open and dodged to one side. Well – for Christ’s sake, who knew
what
mayhem was going on in there. A fire, a riot, a sniper. It could be anything. Already Martin could hear police sirens warbling in the street outside.
There was a second’s pause. Then the cop yelled out, ‘
Freeze! Police!
’ But it was only fear that had made him shout. The woman who suddenly appeared in the open doorway was no threat to anybody.
Martin whispered, ‘Oh, God. He’s done it.’
Ramone crossed himself and shook his head, but couldn’t speak.
The woman was blond, and might have been pretty when she first arrived at the premiere. But now it was impossible to tell. Her face was smashed as if it had been hit with a hammer. Her hair was stuck up with blood like a cockatoo’s crest; one of her eyes was gone. Her white jawbone protruded through the raw flesh of her cheek, a mush of broken bone, and Martin could even see a gold tooth. She had been wearing a green silk evening dress and a white mink stole. The dress had been torn down to her waist at the front, baring her breasts, and the mink stole was nothing more than a bloodstained rope.
She swayed for a moment and made a crunching, bleating noise for somebody to help her; but as she staggered forward, Martin saw that her right arm had been torn off at the elbow, literally torn off, leaving a dangling loop of bloody muscle, and that the woman was bleeding to death right in front of them. She collapsed and slid down the side of the door, leaving a wide smear of blood.
‘Ambulance!’ the cop shouted out. ‘For God’s sake, get an ambulance!’
‘Ramone,’ said Martin tensely; and stepped past the fallen woman while the cop yanked off her bloodstained panty hose so he could improvise a tourniquet. The woman’s smashed-up face was pressed close to the carpet. She didn’t even murmur. Martin felt bile surge up inside his throat, but he had to swallow it down.
Ramone peered into the darkness of the theater. The screaming and the moaning had subsided a little now; but they could still hear tearing noises, and there was still an occasional drawn-out shriek of agony.
‘You don’t
have
to go in there,’ Ramone told Martin, serious-faced.
‘Yes, I do,’ said Martin. ‘I started all this. I let Boofuls loose.’
‘Man, it wasn’t your doing,’ Ramone replied. ‘There was Satan in that mirror and Satan would have found a way of getting out of there one day, no matter who bought it. If anybody let him out, Emilio did.’
Martin hesitated, and swallowed once more, and then said, ‘I still have to go see what’s happened.’
The cop shouted, ‘Medics! Where the hell are those medics?’ and then to Martin, ‘You can’t go in there, mister. I don’t want any more casualties than we got already.’
Martin ignored him and stepped through the half-open doors into the semidarkness of the theater balcony. Followed closely by Ramone, he walked along the back row of seats and then stood looking down at the whole interior of the theater.
The movie had finished, the screen was silvery blank, and the theater was suddenly silent. A battlefield after a battle. Hundreds of people were strewn across the seats, and almost all of them were dead. The smell of flesh and blood and opened-up human bodies was so sweet and hot and pungent that Martin had to press his hand over his nose and mouth.
Gradually, the theater lights brightened, and police and paramedics appeared at the various entrances around the auditorium. They stood, like Martin and Ramone, in silence. There was nothing else they could do. Mann’s Chinese Theater had been full to capacity this evening with nearly one thousand five hundred of Hollywood’s glitterati, and now they were all torn to pieces.
‘I wouldn’t have believed it,’ Ramone whispered. ‘If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it.’
Martin cast his eyes around the theater. A director from 20th Century-Fox Television with whom he had once had lunch at the Fine Affair lay sprawled just in front of him, his mouth wide open, his shirtfront crimson with blood. His head was a mass of blood and bruises. His wife lay beside him, almost naked, her hair torn from her scalp, one of her legs twisted underneath her.
A world-famous cinematographer, who two years ago had won an Oscar for his vivid scenes of death and destruction in Vietnam, stood half propped, armless, like a grisly Venus de Milo, against a tangle of bodies.
In every aisle, bodies in evening dress lay heaped, and blood soaked in dark tides into the carpet. The stench was intolerable – bile and blood and partially digested dinners. And everywhere, in every direction, there were heaps of jewelry, furs, silk, and glistening heaps of soft intestines. A massacre, in black-tie.
‘What did they
do
?’ Ramone asked hoarsely. ‘What happened to them?’
‘They clawed themselves to pieces, that’s all,’ said Martin. His voice in the huge auditorium sounded small and flat. ‘They went mad with grief. Mad with despair. Mad with whatever, I don’t know. You saw how upset they were, all that crying. They’ve been trampling on each other, strangling each other, tearing each other’s arms off. And all that knocking, they were hitting their heads against the seats and the walls.’
Ramone said, ‘I can’t take any more of this, man. I never ever seen
one
dead person before, except for my grandmother. I can’t take any more.’
It was then, however, that the movie screen flickered and came to life. A faint faded image of Boofuls, triumphant. Martin turned to face it and stared at it as if Boofuls were speaking to him personally.
And he said this: ‘
And He was asking him
, “
What is your name?” And he said to Him, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” Now there was a big herd of swine feeding there on the mountainside. And they entreated Him, saying, “Send us into the swine that we may enter them.” And coming out, the unclean spirits entered the swine; and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the sea, about two thousand of them; and they were drowned in the sea
.’
Boofuls slowly smiled; and then laughed; that high-pitched laugh that to Martin was now so familiar. Then his face faded from the screen and he was gone.
They jogged all the way back to Franklin Avenue, stripping off their tuxedos and their vests at the corner of La Brea, and throwing them into the dust. They said nothing. They were too shocked, too breathless, and they knew that if they didn’t hurry they could be too late. Lightning danced in the distance, over the San Gabriel Mountains; and thunder bellowed all across the Los Angeles basin, as if madmen were shouting at each other from different rooms of an echoing old house.
When they reached Martin’s house they found Mr Capelli waiting for them at the front door. ‘I heard on television, some kind of disaster. Everybody killed. I thought maybe you got killed, too, and then what was I going to do?’
Martin tugged the front of his shirt out of his waistband and bent forward so that he could wipe the sweat from his face on it. ‘I guess we were lucky. But first, listen, we have to get Emilio back.’
Mr Capelli clutched his arm. ‘You can’t! What are you doing? You heard what Boofuls said. He could die if we try to get him out.’
‘Believe me,’ said Martin, ‘if we don’t try to get him out, he’s going to have to stay there forever. I don’t think that Boofuls ever had the slightest intention of letting him out.’
‘But he said, if we tried to get Emilio out, he could die!’
‘Unh-hunh, suddenly, I don’t think so,’ said Martin. He felt shocked and off-balance; but at the same time he felt a strong certainty that he understood now what Boofuls was up to; and how Boofuls had deceived them all. Boofuls was utterly unscrupulous, because he was the son of evil incarnate, and not a single word that Boofuls had ever told them had been anything but self-serving trickery. He had prevented them from rescuing Emilio partly by real occult power and partly by bluff. At least, that was what Martin now believed.
And even if Boofuls had been telling the truth – even if Emilio really would be in mortal danger if they tried to rescue him out of the mirror – what in the end was the life of one small boy, when one hundred forty-four thousand had already been massacred?
They went upstairs to Martin’s apartment. Through the open door on Mr Capelli’s landing they could hear Tom Brokaw saying, ‘– a worldwide disaster – latest counts indicate that as many as one hundred thousand people may have died – not only here but in London, Paris, Stockholm, Bonn, and Madrid –’
Martin reached the top of the stairs and opened the door of his apartment. Mr Capelli lifted up one hand as if he were waving to him from a great distance. ‘Martin – he’s just a boy, think about that.’
Martin said, ‘That’s why we have to get him back, Mr Capelli. He’s just a boy, yes. But he’s an innocent boy. He’s the boy that Boofuls traded places with so that he could organize all of this killing. Boofuls is the son of the devil, Mr Capelli; the actual son of Satan. But you remember what Father Quinlan said: “
Only the child can destroy the parent
.” And do you know what that means to me? It means that Emilio is capable of wasting the devil. In fact, he could be the only person who can.’
‘I just want him back,’ said Mr Capelli with considerable dignity, his back as straight as if he were wearing a corset.