Midnight Special Read online

  THE DEAD MAN:

  THE MIDNIGHT SPECIAL

  Lee Goldberg & William Rabkin

  THE DEAD MAN:

  THE MIDNIGHT SPECIAL

  By Phoef Sutton

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2012 Phoef Sutton

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  eISBN: 9781611095067

  Editor’s Note

  If you haven’t read The Dead Man #4: The Dead Woman yet, be forewarned that this book contains a spoiler.

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  For twenty whole minutes, right up until the time Jenna Liefer’s head was split open by the fire ax that had hung in the corner of the projection booth in the Rialto Cinema in New Orleans for forty years, she was texting her friend Penny Zirkle about what a piece-of-shit movie she was seeing.

  Jenna had been dragged there by her current boyfriend, a fellow sophomore at Tulane named Kyle Moynihan, who didn’t know it, but he was skating on thin ice with Jenna even before he had taken her to this dingy movie theater to see this picture, which Jenna described in her third text to Penny as “a boring turd of a waste of time.” Really, if it weren’t for Kyle’s expertise at cunnilingus, she’d have shown him the door weeks ago. But he ate pussy just fine, so she’d put up with his “film school” bullshit up till now. But this was really pushing it.

  The “film” was some seventies piece of crap that looked like it was filmed through Saran Wrap that had been used to wipe somebody’s ass, called either Dead Meat or Dead Men Tell No Tales or Dinner at the Brooklyn Morgue, depending upon which print you were watching. As far as Jenna was concerned, a movie that couldn’t make up its mind about its own title wasn’t worth the time it took to watch. But Kyle insisted that the picture’s Italian director, Giuseppe Somebody-or-Other, was a real auteur, which, as far as Jenna could tell, meant somebody who made the same movie over and over. So the movie was Italian, even though the beginning was supposed to be set in New York and it had been shot in Italy and Los Angeles.

  After that, the characters (if you could call them that) went to the Amazon for some reason and got attacked by zombies that weren’t nearly as cool as the ones in Zombieland or The Walking Dead. However, when she pointed that out to Kyle (in a whisper, for God’s sake) he shushed her and told her not to talk in the movies. Kyle had a thing about that, for some reason.

  So she started texting Penny and she sent some really funny ones about the lead actor, who, Jenna said, looked like a refugee from some seventies porno, not that Jenna had ever seen a seventies porno. She’d just sent another one about the bad dubbing, which made everybody sound like the Ghost Host at the Haunted Mansion in Disney World when a creepy old man tapped her on the shoulder.

  “We don’t allow that in here,” he said.

  Jenna looked at him blankly.

  “What you’re doing,” he went on. “We don’t allow it.”

  “Texting?” Jenna couldn’t believe this.

  “It disturbs the other patrons.”

  She looked around the half-empty theater. “I have it on ‘silent.’”

  “Nevertheless. The light. The glow. It interferes with the enjoyment of the film.”

  Jenna was fed up. “Your talking is interfering with my enjoyment of the ‘film.’ Not that this ‘film’ is very enjoyable.”

  The old man stared at her with naked hate. “Turn it off.”

  “No,” Jenna said, turning back to her iPhone and texting Penny about this asshole. “It’s a free country.”

  The old man looked at her for a while, then went away. Jenna felt good that she’d stood her ground. She even texted Penny about it.

  The old man, whose name was Bo Gustavson, went back to the projection booth and thought it over. The booth was tiny, as was the norm when the theater was built in the 1930s. There used to be two projectors crammed into the room. Entire films would be delivered to the theater on reels of fifteen minutes each, and the projectionist would run the first reel on one machine and make a changeover—a switch to the second reel on the other machine. When done properly, a changeover was seamless and the audience never knew it happened.

  Since the 1980s, though, they’d made do with one projector, the film spliced into one continuous horizontal disc, so all the projectionist had to do was start it up and sit in the dark till it was over. Sit in the dark and watch the movie. Sit in the dark and watch the audience. Sit in the dark and watch that bitch’s cell phone light up like a beacon, flashing on and off, ruining the picture for everyone.

  At fifty-five, Bo didn’t think of himself as an old man, though everyone else did. A child of Swedish immigrants, he’d begun as the projectionist at the Rialto in 1979, when he was a junior at Tulane University himself, dreaming of being a filmmaker, watching the classics thread their way through the little window onto the big screen like projections of his future achievements. Back then the Rialto was a rep house, showing two double features of everything from Bogie and Bacall to Preston Sturges to François Truffaut to Jean Renoir to Satyajit Ray to everything in between.

  He watched them all and somehow along the way never got his degree and never made that short film that was going to catapult him to the level of the next Scorsese or Coppola. He just kept firing up the lamp, dimming the houselights, and working the projector. He worked it, even though the Rialto was sold to a second-rate movie chain in the mideighties and stopped showing the classics, replacing them with second runs of The Karate Kid Part II and The Golden Child.

  Then the multiplexes started to open on Airline Drive and the business just dried up. For a time, the Rialto was renamed the Jack Box and showed gay porn for a select clientele who, although they didn’t watch the movies much, at least were quiet and attentive to what they did do.

  The vice squad shut the place down around 1998, and it sat empty for ten years while local preservationists fought with land developers over who could gut the place for the most money. There was talk of it becoming everything from a bookstore to a music venue to a parking lot.

  Bo, in the meantime, got work at the Regency Fourteen out by Route 10, where he learned how to work a digital projector and even showed Ice Age 3 in 3-D. He hated it. He hated that he could show fourteen films at once, hated that the film no longer ran through sprockets, hated that he didn’t get to light the lamp and
start the magic.

  But most of all, he hated the audience. Hated the way they talked through the movies as if they were in their own living rooms. Hated the way they crinkled their food packages. Hated the way they talked on their goddamn cell phones. Hated the way they brought their babies in to see everything from The Dark Knight to Black Swan and let them cry their heads off while Heath Ledger stuck a pencil in a henchman’s eye or Mila Kunis went down on Natalie Portman.

  So when he heard that an unnamed philanthropist had purchased the Rialto and promised to return it to its former glory, Bo was first in line to get his old job back. Since there were so few people around who knew how to work an honest-to-God projector, he got the job easily.

  The Rialto was back, showing old movies, three double features a week, the way God intended.

  Only one thing hadn’t gone back to the way it was. The audience. They weren’t the kind of people who sat attentively through The Lady Vanishes and laughed respectfully at Duck Soup. They were a new breed of audience that laughed and made jokes at the screen instead of with it. Even the movies they watched were different—instead of White Heat, they wanted The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; instead of Bogart, they wanted Rudy Ray Moore. They wanted films they could feel superior to and sneer at, like Robot Monster and Plan 9 from Outer Space.

  They wanted Dinner at the Brooklyn Morgue. They wanted it so much that the only existing print of this lousy seventies “masterpiece” was delivered to the Rialto by an agent of the unknown philanthropist who now owned the theater. The agent was a wizened “little person” (a “dwarf”? a “midget”? Bo didn’t know which way was the less politically correct to refer to him) who now sat, sleeping, in the projection booth next to Gustavson, apparently charged with not letting this “gem of cinema history” out of his sight. So the small audience turnout could admire this “cult classic” and chortle and wisecrack and enjoy it in the requisite ironic manner.

  And text their friends about it. Bo watched that blue glow go on and off there in row eight. The zombies were eating guts on the screen, and all he could see was that blue glow. The other patrons didn’t seem to notice it, but to Bo it came to represent all the wisecracking audiences, all the disrespectful houses, all the broken dreams and lonely nights of his miserable existence. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the lens of the projector and he thought he saw, instead of his face, the image of one of those zombies, those half-rotting corpses that were chasing the young virgins through the city streets on the screen in front of him. A trick of the light, he thought, as he moved past the sleeping dwarf and crossed to the fire ax that had sat undisturbed for nearly four decades behind a pane of glass on which were stenciled the words IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS.

  Texting in a movie theater. If that didn’t constitute an emergency, what did?

  When Kyle Moynihan accepted his Oscar for Best Director at the 2024 Academy Awards ceremony, he recalled that night in the Rialto in 2012 when he’d heard the sound of breaking glass, didn’t think anything of it, and then was startled by a voice coming down the aisle, saying, “I warned you about that.” He didn’t mention that he’d been annoyed by Jenna Liefer’s texting too; didn’t mention that he’d decided to dump her, even if she did have the sweetest-tasting pussy in New Orleans. He just went on to say that he saw the man lift his arms and swing them down, burying an ax in Jenna Liefer’s brain.

  Bo didn’t give Kyle a thought at the time. He just wrenched the ax from Jenna’s skull, walked up to the screen, apologized to the audience for the interruption, wrote a single word in blood across the screen, and proceeded to disembowel himself with the ax.

  Kyle, in his speech at the Academy Awards all those years later, would dedicate his Oscar to Jenna Liefer, although he secretly thought she’d have called his film a boring piece of shit. And, for once, she would have been right.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Matt Cahill had flown on an airplane only once before. That was eight years ago when he and Janey were feeling the first rush of love and they just weren’t thinking straight about budgets or time or anything else. They blew their savings on a flight to Vegas and then didn’t gamble or see any shows, just spent the whole time in their hotel room making love, which they could have done back home in Deerpark, except for the room service.

  Now Matt was flying a lot farther and the flight seemed a lot longer since he didn’t have Janey to flirt with and talk to in the seat next to him. In the seat next to him, instead, there was an eighty-year-old woman who “didn’t mind meeting strangers” and who asked Matt all about his life story. Matt made up a nice one about being a corporate headhunter with three kids and two ex-wives, which was a comfortable tale for him to tell, since it was as far from the truth as possible. Except, Matt reflected after a while, for the headhunter part. That was oddly accurate.

  And where was Janey now? She was six feet under in the pine box he’d fashioned for her himself, moldering away to dust. At least, he hoped she was dust by now. He flashed on the image of her grinning skull, then shoved that away, replacing it in his mind with her lovely, living face, smiling at him in the morning light. That was better.

  Lately Matt had been almost feeling relieved that she was dead and gone and not part of the world as he was seeing it. Of course, it occurred to him that maybe he was dead too. That this existence he’d been living for the past year was a special hell, fashioned just for him. That the clown-faced figure he seemed to see at irregular intervals was his special demon, individually designed to torment only him. He found that an oddly comforting thought since he figured it meant that the other people he’d seen slaughtered and maimed all around him for the past year and nine months were just illusions, phantoms, shadows; props in the play that was Matt Cahill’s Personal Inferno.

  That was why he guessed it wasn’t true—anything that seemed to comfort him these days turned out to be an illusion.

  This theory applied equally well to other thoughts that came to him in the night when he couldn’t sleep, when he was looking for a way out. This one came from a Twilight Zone rerun he had seen when he was a kid, about a guy who was being hanged, who escaped and had all sorts of adventures, but in the end the noose snapped tight around his neck and everything that had happened to him had just been a dream while he was falling to the end of the rope. So he thought maybe he was still under the forty feet of snow and the avalanche had just covered him and he was dying and all this was just a fart in his mind as it gave out.

  He liked that idea better, if only because it made more sense—and it meant it was going to end soon. It certainly made more sense than the reality—that Matt Cahill had been frozen and buried for three months, then had come back to life and was able to see evil when it manifested itself. See evil in the form of rotting flesh on those about to commit violent, horrendous atrocities. See evil where no one else could.

  That was sheer nonsense. So in the early hours of the morning, it seemed far more likely to him that it was just the fantasy of a dying man. Why he couldn’t be fantasizing about winning the lottery or being a rock star, he didn’t know. Why he couldn’t be fantasizing about Janey being back in his arms and never wasting away from cancer, he didn’t know, either. He felt certain only that, eventually, the lack of oxygen and the freezing cold would get to him and he would give up the fucking ghost. It couldn’t happen soon enough.

  Matt tried to shift in his seat and found that, given the room allotted him by Virgin America, he couldn’t. At least he had an aisle seat, but that meant that half his ass was clear out in the aisle and was bumped into whenever the stewardess brought the refreshment cart out—which had been only once on the five-hour flight. The only time he’d had the undivided attention of a flight attendant (he remembered this once not to think of her as a “stewardess”) was when the attendant assigned to his part of the plane (who looked like she might have been Miss September in the 1975 issue of Playboy) had asked him, in an accusatory tone, if he had what it took to operate the exit
door in case of emergency. When he’d answered in the affirmative, she grunted her doubts and walked on. Matt had vague recollections of a time when attractive stewardesses gave customers fluffy pillows and asked them suggestively if they needed anything else, but those memories were just from movies he’d seen on the late show when he was kid, and he doubted if there was ever anyone like that in reality.

  And this was reality, he sadly reflected, because his throat wouldn’t be this parched if he was packed in powdery snow up on Mammoth Peaks. He reached up to press the “call” button and waited. Glancing over the seats at the passengers, something he could do rather well since he was more than six feet tall in his stocking feet (which was all he was wearing since his feet had begun to swell over Ohio and he’d slipped his shoes off), he noticed that a surprising number of them were wearing hats. Various colors and designs of porkpie hats, worn, he noted, by young men and women of the millennial generation who sensed that hats were cool but didn’t know enough to take them off inside.

  Kids today.

  A leathery hand reached over Matt’s head and turned off the “call flight attendant” light.

  “Yes?” the flight attendant asked sharply. She was hardly the “coffee, tea, or me?” type. Indeterminately forty- or fifty-five, she looked like she’d spent far too much time in the sun, back when spending time in the sun was the thing to do. Her voice croaked like she’d disabled a few bathroom smoke detectors in her day, and she wore her stewardess blouse low cut, exposing what used to be her cleavage—a memory of past glories. Her expression said passengers were a lesser form of existence and the airlines would run much smoother without them.

  But it wasn’t her rudeness that arrested Matt’s attention. It was her cleavage and the bare, exposed, and rotting bones that peeked out through her shirt at Matt, like a come-hither glance from a skeleton.

  It was happening again. At forty thousand feet somewhere over Albuquerque.