Story Excerpts

Midnight Movie
by James Van Pelt

The Creep bought a ticket for the Friday night midnight movie five minutes before the trailers started. Long beige trench coat. Beige fedora. Dark pants and shoes. He wore the hat low and covered his eyes with black-rimmed sunglasses. How he could see through them at midnight was beyond me, and since he’d been coming for the last year, when I checked the theater on the half hour, he still wore them. The Creep is not his name. We don’t know who he is, but Louise started calling him that the first time he came in, and the tag stuck. I’m glad to see him though, after last week’s murder.

No concession stand for The Creep. He strode down the hallway to the theater with his hands in his pockets.

Eloise, the cashier, said, “I’ll bet he drives a van filled with candy for little kids.”

I pushed the sweeper under her stool. It’s amazing how many tiny, dandruffy scraps accumulate from tearing the tickets. “He makes eclectic choices in movies. Porky’s last week. Napoleon this week. I thought I was the only one in town who liked black-and-white French films from the twenties.”

Eloise shrugged. “Subtitles are an acquired taste.” She scooted around on her stool. “I can’t get my son to watch an old film to save his life. No black and white. No subtitles. Anything before 2000 is a waste for him.”

“Not even Star Wars. That’s ’77.”

“He says the special effects are ‘execrable.’ What sort of twelve year old am I raising?”

I’d met her son a of couple weeks ago when she invited me to dinner at her house. He was bookish, snooty, and full of himself. Could be I was seeing his worst side. No kid likes the man who’s replacing Dad, even if the dad was doing ten to twenty for armed robbery and used to beat Mom. We were very proper in the house. After he went to bed, Louise and I snuck to my car and made out for an hour. Dating in your middle age!

We sold sixty-five tickets to Napoleon, way more than normal for this kind of flick. Probably a bunch of ghouls in there. The macabre attracts a certain sort, like if there’s a bad accident on the highway. Most are afraid they’ll see something awful, although they slow down. A few hope to see blood. The ghouls.

High school and college kids came in groups. Some couples. A film buff with a notepad. An old film like this, small chance people try to record it with their phones or more sophisticated cameras. Confrontations in the theater with a patron who has set up a tripod to steal the movie are never pleasant. They get noisy and ugly, like their ten-dollar ticket gave them free access to appropriate someone else’s creative effort. It’s easier to call a cop, but management doesn’t like me to do that, and the cops have better things to do with their time. Tonight, though, a cop was with us. Well, a detective. I wanted to comp him the ticket, but he insisted on paying .

The Midnight Movie has its own worries: pot and alcohol mostly (the morning after we showed Reefer Madness, the theater smelled like a bad night at a rave), coitus (why teenagers can’t use their empty houses from three to five every weekday afternoon while their parents are at work is a puzzle), and last week, murder.

“That’s the last of them,” said Louise. She slid the cover over the ticket port and latched it down. “I’ll prep for tomorrow.”

I found the body, of course. The guy sat near the front. I turned on the lights, but he didn’t move. “Excuse me, sir. The movie is over.” Drunk, stoned, or asleep, I figured. When I walked in the row behind him, though, and shook his shoulder, I knew.

The detective showed me the murder weapon later: an eighteen-inch long, narrow metal rod, needle sharp on one end. On the other, a flat plate the size of my hand, welded so the arrangement looked like a giant tack.

“This is tailor made for killing in a theater,” the detective said. “It takes strength to stab through the seat and the victim. With this, our murderer gets it started in the chair, then throws his hip into it. His body weight does the work. I’ll bet several of your patrons witnessed the killing and didn’t realize it. No stabbing motion. He stood, leaned into the thrust, and this guy was a deader.”

Anybody could have brought the weapon hidden in a coat.

It was likely that the killing happened when the film ended. The credits were rolling with the houselights down. Our killer stood, like other people might have started doing, and then made his fatal lunge.

I watched the security tape several times. It rained last Friday, so many customers wore hats obscuring their faces. We only have one camera, and that’s pointed at the ticket counter. Everyone who paid showed up there, including The Creep, distinct in his fedora. My security camera is old, the light at night is bad, and making an identification from the tape would be nearly impossible. No credit cards to track folks down since we’re a cash-only operation.

I slipped into the theater, back row. The black-and-white film flickered on the screen. Shaky, handheld camera shots, weird dream sequences, overlays, and tight close-ups mark Napoleon. No dialogue, of course, just the orchestral soundtrack. Nobody sat in the murder row, which we’d roped off. I thought about unbolting the death seat, but decided the empty space would be more disturbing.

The Creep sat close to the back. The rest of the audience spread themselves evenly. Theater six is one of our two small screens, holding two-hundred and forty. Lots of empty seats lit only by the 1920s movie.

I set up Napoleon on the 35mm. You see the flicker if you pay attention, and in the music’s quiet times, hear the old machine clicking in the projection booth. The detective also sat near the back, on the other side from The Creep. I love movies, but tonight I focused on the people. The detective must believe the killer might return. What would the detective look for? Would folks sitting by themselves be the likely suspects? Fifteen people sat alone. Most of the time singletons put an empty chair between them and someone else. The Creep was alone, for example, as was the detective, and myself. The guy who’d been killed last week was by himself.

In the back row, no one could get behind me. I thought about that. Of course, in the back row, no one could see me either. The killer could walk up, kill me, and no one would be he wiser. It made me mad. The theater is where I relaxed. It’s my ocean shore, my leafy forest, my safe place, and he took that from me.

Theaters smell of popcorn. There’s no way around that, but what’s under that smell tells you a lot about the place. I kept a clean house. I smelled plush cleaner we used on the chairs every week, and the lavender spray we hit the restrooms with—someone always smokes in them no matter what the signs say. There was a whiff of bleach too that I’d used under the murder chair, or maybe I imagined it.

The papers covered the murder. Jackson Beck was the dead guy. Father of two. A soccer coach. Owned three gas stations. Middle class. No enemies they could find. He went to the movie because his wife took the kids to visit their grandma. As far as authorities could tell, he was a random victim. Anyone in my theater could have died.

On the screen, Napoleon dreamed. There’s European maps, lines of attack, marching soldiers. He’s going to win the world. What if the killer had already struck? One of those motionless heads sitting in front of me could be pinned upright in the chair, heart stilled. I, at least, could check. I unslung my flashlight. It has a long red cone at the light end to mute it. Normally I shine it down the rows, checking for bottles.

Everyone was still alive. The detective nodded as I passed. When I headed to the theater’s rear, The Creep put something into his coat. It was a tiny gesture. Hardly noticeable, but he looked sneaky. I opened the door into the hallway, then closed it without leaving. Quietly, with my light off, I took a seat behind The Creep. What was he hiding . . . ?

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Copyright © 2024. Midnight Movie by James Van Pelt