The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

THE GRANFALLOON ^{ORRIN GREY}

I can feel their eyes on me. I’m perspiring, a trickle of sweat itching its way between my breasts, and my face and ears are flushed and hot, like they always are whenever I have to talk in front of anyone. I rub my palms against my slacks, catch myself doing it and stop, guiltily. I’m supposed to be the grownup here, the expert, the pro from Dover. I look out over their heads, their faces, trying not to focus on any one of them, until I catch the eyes of Constance—Professor Fisher now, I guess—behind her black horn rims. She smiles at me, the same look that I’m sure she gives her students when they’re giving a report in front of the class and faltering as badly as I am. I try to smile back.

“Who here has ever stood in front of the mirror, staring at your reflection, waiting for it to do something? To wink at you, maybe, or smile when you don’t? To reach out a hand, or tell you a secret? Even the least imaginative among us sometimes studies our reflection in the hopes that we’ll finally see what other people see when they look at us.” That’s how I start.

I don’t understand why I’m talking to Constance’s class, not really. It’s not like my area of expertise really overlaps with their subject, not beyond the most basic levels, where just about everything overlaps with just about everything else. No, strike that, I know exactly why I’m here. I’m here because Constance asked me to be, and even though it’s been years, and I don’t know what she hopes to gain, I still can’t say no to her, not any more now than I could then.

My mouth goes dry, my tongue thick. There’s a bottle of water on the desk beside me, and I pick it up, unscrew the cap and take a drink, my taste buds crying out for something stronger, even though I haven’t had anything stronger in nineteen months, unless you count the Coke that I drink way too much of these days.

I tell them about how ancient people believed that what we see in the mirror was not just light bouncing an image of ourselves back into our eyes, but rather our souls, our other selves. I tell them that’s why vampires don’t reflect in mirrors, which gets a scattered chuckle, at least, which lets me take a breath that I didn’t even know I was holding. I ask if anyone has ever been in a house where the mirrors were covered after someone had died, and only two people raise their hands, but still, they’re paying attention, that’s something. I talk about how dead souls could get trapped in mirrors, about fetches and doppelgangers.

It all seems to be going okay, so I let myself relax a little, feel the heat starting to leave my ears, the half-an-alprazolam I dry-swallowed just before walking into the room finally starting to take effect. I walk in front of the desk—Constance’s desk, I think as I lean back, feel the edge of it bite into the back of my legs, just below my ass—and then I tell them about psychomanteums.

“Since before we had mirrors, we’ve been using our reflections to scry. To see events that are far away, in the past or the future. To communicate with god, or the devil, with the dead, or just with our Jungian secret selves. A psychomanteum is sort of the ultimate expression of that.”

I force myself to inhale again, to exhale, my breath hot and raspy in my throat, so I take another swallow from the bottle of water that I’m surprised to see is already more than half empty, but I suddenly realize that my bladder is not. “In its most basic form it could be as simple as a mirror turned to reflect only darkness, or two mirrors facing one another. You’ve all been in an elevator or a bathroom or a hotel lobby where you got to see the effect that can produce, right? Like an infinite hallway, stretching in both directions. Maybe you’ve even had the sense that you can almost look around one of those corners, or like something else is waiting there to look at you, as soon as you turn your back. Now imagine that same effect in a dark room, with nothing in your line of sight but the mirror, and no illumination but candlelight. You’re beginning to get the idea of a psychomanteum.”

Are they actually paying attention now? Sitting up a little straighter, their eyes a little brighter? I lean away from the desk, forward into the crowd, warming to my topic as I’m imagining that they are too, thinking, for the first time since I walked into the room, that maybe Constance isn’t just devising some obscure means of torturing me, that she knows what she’s doing after all.

“Some people took them farther. Not just two mirrors, but entire mirrored rooms, where every wall was a reflective surface, a thousand hallways leading off into infinity, a thousand portals to… well, you name it. Like that room at the end of Enter the Dragon, and who knows, maybe that’s what Han kept that room around for. They were popular among the Victorians, during the heyday of spiritualism, but every now and then a new one turns up, even today.”

When I’m finished talking, they don’t clap or anything—I’m in a classroom, not a conference—but Constance comes down to the front of the room and thanks me for coming, asks me to wait a moment once class is over, as if I would leave, and then addresses her students. She says some stuff about them being grateful for me being there, and I smile and dip my head without even really thinking about it, and then she calls out a handful of them by name, reminds them of some sort of extra credit project that’s happening after school. I consider slipping out to pee, but the urge is no longer as strong now that their attention is off me.

Then they’re all gone in a clatter of shoes and a squealing of chairs being pushed back from desks, of backpacks being slung over shoulders and voices receding down the hallway, until the last student out closes the door and Constance and I are alone in the room that a few minutes ago felt so big and now suddenly feels too small. She smiles at me, that same reassuring smile, and this close I can see how brown her eyes are. One of my hairs has come loose from my ponytail, and she reaches up and tucks it back behind my ear, but I can see that she doesn’t mean anything by it, that it’s just old habits dying hard.

“Thanks for coming, Mads,” she says, in a way that ends with a comma, not a period. It was always Mads with her, never Madeline or even Maddy. I try to smile back, but all my anxiety has washed me out now, and being so close to her is hard, so I think it looks more like a grimace. I want to touch her hand, her face—old habits, like I said.

“Somehow I get the feeling that I’m here to do more than give a film studies class a lesson on psychomanteums,” I say, feeling like it comes out harsh when I want it to be cool.

Her hand, which has been sort of hovering between us, falls back to her side, then clasps the other in front of her skirt. She looks down at the floor, then back up at me, and her brown eyes have gotten harder, brighter, in the second they were turned away. “Have you ever heard of the Granfalloon?”

She tells me about it on the way to her house. Somewhere over the years she’s traded her old Volkswagen—and I don’t know how many other cars in-between—for a Mini. One of those long ones, what’re they called? Country something? This is the second time I’ve been in it; she picked me up from the hotel before class. She also offered to give me a ride from the airport, but I opted to take a cab, just like I opted to stay in a hotel instead of the proffered guest room at her place, which didn’t seem like a great idea. The hotel was themed rustic—faux log cabin, taxidermied animals in the lobby, a copy of a John Constable painting above the bed—and there was a bar with nobody in it, which was probably also not a great thing for me, but so far so good.

“Did you ever read Vonnegut?” she asks me, and I shake my head.

“I never got into him in high school, and if you don’t get into him in high school then it’s too late.”

“Me neither,” she says, “but I saw the George Hill version of Slaughterhouse-Five back in film school. Anyway, the word Granfalloon apparently comes from Vonnegut and means ‘a proud and meaningless association of individuals.’”

“Weird name for a movie theater,” I tell her, looking out the window, watching the houses pass by, thinking how much nicer this neighborhood is than mine, how much nicer her house is going to be than my little apartment.

“Frederick Castle was a weird guy,” she replies. “Technically Doctor Frederick Castle, but not a real doctor, he got his PhD in parapsychology from a mail-order course. His money came from his wife, Vera Warner, whose father was a condiment tycoon, back when you could still be called a tycoon of things like condiments.”

“With a name like Castle, you’d think you’d be ready-set for a themed name for your movie theater.”

“You’d think that, but no, it was always the Granfalloon. Maybe that’s why it never did very well, or maybe it’s because Castle built it at the tail end of the era of big movie palaces, when multiplexes were already taking over. It never made it as a first-run theater; Castle mostly ended up showing revival stuff. I’ve got a flyer in my office advertising a showing of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

“But you’re not interested in the usual revival stuff,” I say, kind of cutting her off, but not really, just jumping her forward to where I know she was headed anyway.

“No,” she bites her lip in that way she always has, the way she did when she talked dirty, to delay what she’s going to say, to build up suspense a little. “There were always stories, from the day the theater opened its doors. They said that Castle screened… rarer things, for a more select clientele during the off hours.”

“Stag films?”

But she shakes her head, “No, at least, not in most versions. Early experimental movies, in some tellings, more sinister stuff in others. They say he had a sort of club, spiritualists or theosophists or something. That they screened movies by Muybridge and Mills, Bartlett and Whitcomb and Duplante.”

I don’t know any of those names besides Muybridge—Constance forgetting that I’m not one of her students and never really was—but I’m beginning to guess why I was actually invited here.

We met in my one and only film class, but it isn’t as bad as it sounds. She was still just a TA then, and we didn’t start dating until after I was out of the class anyway. If what we were doing then could really be called dating. I think we went to one movie and then some drinks and then, as we would jokingly put it later, we fell into bed together. And I guess if you can fall in that easily, then you shouldn’t be too surprised when it’s easy to fall back out. That’s what I’m thinking as we pull up in front of her house, which is just as much nicer than my apartment as I had imagined it would be, though my imagination hadn’t conjured up the suspiciously nondescript van parked in the driveway.

“Are you an electrician during the summer months?” I ask, gesturing toward the van, and she just laughs.

“If it looks like I am, then that’s probably a good thing.”

I don’t ask what she means, because I’m pretty sure I’m already putting it together, and my suspicions only get more and more confirmed when—after we sit around the island in her kitchen making small talk and eating Chinese delivered by a college kid who’s as white as I am—some of her students start showing up at her front door, the same ones she reminded about their extra credit earlier.

There’s four of them, all dressed normally when they arrive, but all carrying gray coveralls, and it isn’t long before they’ve zipped them over their street clothes and are standing in Constance’s kitchen like mechanics up to no good. The kitchen’s got big patio doors, and by now it has gotten dark outside, turning them into mirrors that throw our reflections back at us, albeit hollow-eyed and flanked on every side by darkness. Even Constance—who has changed into pants by now—hauls out a matching pair of coveralls and pulls them on. Only I don’t get a pair. I’m guessing I won’t need one.

It says something about our relationship now—and maybe even more about our relationship then—that she never actually tells me what she wants me to do, never asks me if I’m going to go. It’s just assumed. When everyone piles into the van and I see that the back is full of bolt cutters and pry bars, I’m not surprised, just mad in that weird, distant, echoing way that I thought I had left behind years ago but that I guess Constance is still capable of bringing out in me after all this time, like so many other things.

The Granfalloon, when we reach it, looks almost like any other old movie theater, except that it sits alone in a wasteland of vacant lots and rented chain-link fence. The cab actually carried me by it on my way from the airport, but I didn’t know what it was. Just an old building, faded and tired, waiting to be torn down, like everything around it already was. At night, though, it looks a little more ominous, or maybe that’s just my dawning knowledge of our mission here.

The outside walls are painted purple, a color that I imagine was rich once but has faded with the sun like an old car’s dashboard. Constance says that from the air it looks like the Pentagon, but with no empty space in the middle. Just the theater’s five screens, all facing outward, like a wagon train circled for protection in an old western.

There’s an unassuming car parked outside the gate of the chain-link fence when we pull up, the engine running. A guy with the look of hired security leans on the hood. He seems nervous, but like he’s trying to make that nervousness resemble irritation instead. Constance leaves the van running and gets out to talk to him for maybe a minute, maybe less, and then hands him something from the pocket of her coveralls. Something that I assume is the rest of a payoff; after all, you don’t take bolt cutters and pry bars to someplace you’re really allowed to be. “Just lock it behind you when you leave,” the guy says to her retreating back, loud enough that I can hear him in the passenger seat of the van. It sounds an awful lot like, “And remember, I was never here.”

As we pull through the gate, Constance starts to talk. Though it’s directed at the kids in the back, I think it’s for my benefit, because they all seem to know already. She says that the theater’s been closed for more than a decade, ever since Dr. Frederick Castle just up and disappeared one day. His wife apparently did the usual hoop-jumping to file a missing person’s report, all that jazz, and when he’d been gone long enough she declared him dead in absentia. She’d never really been a movie person—that was all him—so when he was gone she let the place close, but kept the taxes faithfully paid and the bulldozers at bay, fending off several attempts at “urban renewal” over the intervening years.

“A month ago, she finally kicked off as well,” Constance says over her shoulder as we come to a stop in front of the theater’s gilded front doors, “and with nothing left to stop them, the city is coming next week to knock the place down.”

The word is that when the Granfalloon was shuttered, Castle’s wife wouldn’t let anyone come in to mess with anything, insisting that her husband might come back any day, even after she’d had him declared dead. Which means that if there was anything of value here when Castle disappeared—those secret films he supposedly screened, for example—it would still be here, unless somebody else had already beaten us to it. I’m guessing that’s the story Constance has fed her star pupils about why we’re here.

They cut the lock on the chain holding the front doors shut, and it slithers to the ground like a heavy, dead snake. Once we’re on the other side, our flashlights come on, making cones of light, illuminating clouds of dust that roll in the air like fog, kicked up by our footsteps. I’ve never been here before, but still the lobby looks familiar, recalling dim memories of other small movie theaters from when I was little. The same tacky carpet and concession stand. While the others discuss their plans, I shine my light along the posters in their frames that line the wall. There’s one for Son of Frankenstein, another for The Mummy’s Ghost.

The others head upstairs, to where the projection booths would be, and where the film would be stored, if there’s any film left. Before she leaves, Constance lays her hand on my shoulder. “You know what you’re looking for?” she asks, and I just nod, happy to see the pride and excitement in her smile, hating myself for how happy I am.

I wrote my dissertation on occult structures. Rooms—and in some cases whole buildings—designed to serve some kind of supernatural or metaphysical purpose. Ghost traps, psychomanteums, séance rooms. It’s not as weird as it sounds, not really. When you think about it, after all, what’s a church? A building built for communicating with god, right?

I think some of Constance’s excitement about this is bleeding into me, or maybe I’m just excited on my own, it’s hard to tell amidst the clamor of nerves and adrenaline and, yes, let’s be honest, horniness. Still, I make myself take it slow, walking first around the perimeter hallways ringing the five auditoriums. What I’m doing is a kind of archaeology, and like any other archaeology, it’s easy to get over-excited, go too fast, and spoil it somehow. I count the black-painted doors as I pass them; it helps get my breathing under control. One, two, three, four, five. When I’m back in front of the first door, I take a deep breath, and step inside.

The auditorium is as black as the inside of a satin bag, the beam of my flashlight creating a glowing tube in the murky gloom, much as the projector must have done when the theater was still running. The walls are painted midnight blue, with little asterisks of silver and gold and white that wink where my light touches them. I think they’re meant to represent stars, but they’re weirdly abstracted, as if drawn by a child playing with crayons. The seats on either side of me are red, velvety, and so are the rotting curtains that frame the big ghostly screen. The place reminds me more of the auditorium in my old high school than any modern movie theater.

The mood of the place is infecting me, working its way under my skin, and I half-expect to see something in every seat my light sweeps across, but there’s nothing between me and the screen, which, as my eyes adjust, seems faintly luminous itself, as if it has absorbed all the light that poured into it over the years, and is still spilling some little bit back out. I walk up to it and raise my hand, pressing it against the fabric, reaching for the secret chamber that is waiting for me on the other side.

I’ve heard of stuff like this before. Not a psychomanteum in the truer sense, but more like one in reverse. A room built not for seeing or conversing, but for receiving. There’s a photo that makes its rounds in my field of what is supposed to have been a Nazi experiment, mediums arrayed around a table as if in a séance, with oversized headphones clapped over their ears. In West Virginia one time, I actually got to go inside a trailer where all the walls in one room had been stacked with TVs, one on top of the other, all facing in and all tuned to different channels. I remember that the place smelled like rotting garbage and old cat litter, even though I never saw a cat.

Something like that is what I’m expecting on the other side of the big X we cut in the screen with a carpet knife. I’ve rounded up Constance and her students, and she’s standing there in the semi-darkness, her eyes so bright they’re practically glowing, her smile so big it’s impossible for it not to be at least a little infectious. The others seem excited, restless, constantly moving around. And so much younger than they seemed when I was standing in front of a room full of them earlier today. Was I that young, when Constance and I first got involved? I must have been, but it doesn’t seem possible.

“Wouldn’t there normally be speakers behind the screen?” one of the students asks, I think her name is Erin.

Constance nods, looking around. “They’re in the walls here,” she says. I gather that they had some luck upstairs—an old Constantin Orlok picture in the original uncut Spanish version, a handful of one-reel experimental films by one Elizabeth Cairns—but I can tell that, for Constance, this is and always has been the real objective. Why she invited me back into her life. I almost offer to let her go first through the dark aperture, but I’m the expert here, so I’m the first one into the place on the other side.

I’m expecting a step down, but there isn’t one. The floor of the chamber has been raised, so it’s the exact same dimensions as the backside of the screens that compose its walls. It’s also totally empty except for the chair—big and thick and bolted to the floor—and the skeleton that occupies it.

More like a mummy, really. An ossified husk in the shape of a man, the skin turned to parchment and drawn up around gaping sockets of eyes and nose and mouth. Its clothes are those of a Vincent Price villain, complete with velvet smoking jacket and cravat, appearing untouched by time.

But it isn’t the skeleton that stops me in my tracks, that makes me almost drop my light. While I didn’t necessarily expect to find a dead man in the room, I’m not exactly surprised, either. Frederick Castle, of course, gone mysteriously missing all those years ago.

No, it’s not the skeleton itself, it’s something else, something about the skeleton, some intangible thing that makes it difficult to look at, that pushes my eyes off it. It’s that feeling you get when you’ve been staring at television static for far too long, so that you’ve started to replace the visual white noise with a thousand flies crawling over one-another.

I try to look at the corpse, but can’t do it. I know what it looks like; when I’m not trying to look directly at it, I can pull up an image, clear and sure in my mind’s eye. Those ridiculous clothes, those black cavities staring out at me, darker and deeper than the darkness of the room, like a black cat in a dark hallway. But as soon as I try to look I just can’t.

A noise fills my head, like a million voices talking at once, and my eyes fill with the motion that comes from staring into pitch darkness for so long that your imagination peppers it with moving shapes, and the next thing I know I’m looking away again, at the walls or at the floor or at anything except for that body in that chair.

That’s how I see the secret door, the one that would have let him in and out, bricked up now from the other side. I imagine his wife finding him here, seeing just what I’ve seen and turning away, as I’ve had to turn away, and bricking him up here and leaving the theater to stand as a tomb for him because she doesn’t know what else to do. I imagine the nights that he sat here—how many?—when the auditoriums on the other side of the screens were full of people, the images flashing at twenty-four frames a second on the walls around him. What was it he expected to harness here? Adoration? The awe and wonder of the audience directed up at the screens?

I imagine his frustration, night after night, waiting for something, anything, and feeling nothing, until, finally, he felt the heart attack or embolism or stroke that killed him and then, only then, when he was no longer a man but only a shell, an empty vessel, only then to be filled with this mad buzzing emptiness that still radiates off him in waves that fill my head with noise and push my eyes away.

One by one the others file in behind me, see what I’ve seen, avert their eyes as I have. Constance even reverts briefly to Catholicism and crosses herself. No one is comfortable speaking, just quiet curses and half-articulated sounds in the dark, everything muted and bracketed by the radioactive emptiness that pours constantly from the corpse in the chair.

We don’t really talk about what we’ve found. The van ride back to Constance’s house is mostly silent, with each sentence spoken seeming to crack the air like a gunshot. The others get in their cars and leave, and Constance offers me a drink, then catches herself, shakes her head, smiles, apologizes.

At the door to my hotel room, Constance offers to come inside. Her hand touches mine, and I want her to, every part of me aches for her to, but I don’t think it’s a good idea, maybe an even worse idea now than before, so I shake my head. She leans forward and kisses me on the cheek before she goes, and I resist turning my head to place my lips in the path of hers. When she’s gone, I sit on the bed and think about that empty bar down in the hotel lobby. I look at the phone and think about calling my sponsor, but I haven’t talked to him in months, and I don’t want to admit how tempted I am now, and I sure as shit don’t want to tell him why.

So I take a shower instead, turning the water up as hot as I can stand it, baking my skin red. Every time I close my eyes under the spray, I see that room, behind those screens. My nerves are still alive and tingling, woken by the adrenaline of the night and by so much time spent in such close proximity to Constance, so I lay on the bed and masturbate furiously and frustratingly. I swallow another alprazolam and turn on the TV, turning the volume way down, letting its insensate light and noise beat against me until I finally fall asleep.

In my dream, I’m sitting in the secret chamber of the Granfalloon, with the flickering walls alive around me. All five screens are identical, and I know they’re identical, even though I can really only see the three that are before me. Every screen is showing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but everything looks wrong from this side, sinister and backward, the eyes and mouths just black spots like holes burned in the screen, like the gaping sockets of Castle’s corpse, staring out at nothing.

I wake with a start, my hand reaching out of its own accord to grope for the remote and turn off the TV. I pull on some sweatpants and a loose t-shirt and stand at the door for way too long, my palm pressed against its cool surface, talking myself out of walking barefoot down to that bar, or to the liquor store down the street that my brain marked without my permission when the cab first carried me here. I press my head against the door, close my eyes, but that doesn’t help, because behind my eyes I see those seven fucking dwarfs, marching along the wrong way, their eyes black and pitiless.

I open my own eyes, dig around in my bag until I locate a dollar bill, and walk down the hall to the Coke machine. The drinking may come later, but I’ll be damned if it’s going to be tonight.

I don’t see Constance again before I leave town. She offers via text to take me to meet my flight, but I tell her I’ll take a cab. On the way to the airport, I have the cab take me by the Granfalloon. In the daytime it looks less imposing, just a squat purple building alone among the vacant lots, waiting for the bulldozers to come and make way for a parking garage or a Starbucks.

The airport terminal is full of TVs, and I find myself unable to look at them for more than a few seconds. Every time I do, I see those black sockets, feel that terrible buzzing nothingness coming off the thing that was once Castle’s corpse, and I can’t help but wonder if that’s truly what flows out of us when we sit down in the dark and surrender ourselves to the images on the screen.