Chapter 8 #2
“He’s pickin’ up the table and chuckin’ around chairs,” Gwen said. “You catch a flying chair in the head, I figure the concussion
would be real enough to suit you.”
The table clunks down onto the floor, and the revelers at the séance whoop and sit. Most of them whoop, anyway. The man in the sunglasses flinches as if he has borne witness to a gruesome act of violence.
Behind them, on the bookshelf, something is happening to the reel-to-reel tape recorder. One of the chunky buttons goes thud
and the reels stop moving. Another button clunks down. The reels scream in reverse. Thunk! goes another button. The reels
stop. A final button bangs down and the recorder begins to play.
Voices rise from the tape recording, the guests at the séance singing a snippet of Queen:
Ba-a-a-a-a-a-ad mistakes!
The stop button thuds. The reels whine backward, stop. Play again.
Ba-a-a-a-a-a-A-A-Aad miIstaAkes!
Thump, whir, again.
Ba-a-a-a-a-a-a-A-A-A-A-W-W-d miISSstaAAkes!
It’s playing the same snippet, again and again, a little slower each time. Their shared harmony has become a single, deep,
slurring voice:
BA-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-AW-AW-AW-AWW-D MII-I-ISTAAA-AAA-AKES.
The reels whir and thud and play.
I’VE COME THROUGH
wheeeeee vvvvvvvvv
THUD.
I’VE.
COME.
THROOOOOUGH.
The tape begins to play backward, at high speed, producing a sound like the tittering voice of a hysteric. As the reels spin,
a new sound begins to rise. It sounds like laughter . . . sick, demented laughter. Or maybe sobbing. On the screen, the Black
man looks over his shoulder, removing his sunglasses at last. The tape comes off one of the reels completely and then the
machine abruptly reverses direction and begins to spew threads of black tape into the air.
The Black man recoils and looks away—looks toward the camera—and his eyes are covered in scribbles, a mess of weird quivering
lines sketched right onto the picture, and he opens his mouth to say
“Fuck. THIS!” Donna shouted and leapt to her feet. She struck the light switch with the palm of her hand. The lights came on in the library . . . and then the bulb in the sconce directly above her exploded with a white flash.
Donna screamed. Van toppled backward and would’ve dropped to the floor if Allie hadn’t reached to steady him. Arthur wasn’t
sure if he shouted too. He had an idea his voice got caught in his throat. Gwen jumped into his lap, striking him with a hard
curve of round hip, then quickly slid back into her seat. Only Llewellyn seemed unsurprised, looking mildly around, eyebrows
raised in a good-humored sort of way. And like that, the film ended. The reels kept spinning, but one of them was empty, the
tail end of the film slap-slap-slapping free.
Llewellyn clapped his hands to his knees and rocked forward out of his chair to stand. He gave the wall sconce a long, musing
look. The lightbulb hadn’t just blown. It was blackened and cracked, a silky trickle of white smoke spilling in a ribbon from
the split in the glass.
“Oh, Elwood, that was very rude,” Llewellyn said, and slipped out of the room.
For a few moments all of them were silent, while Colin rethreaded the spent reel and began to rewind the film.
“The last time I watched this,” Colin said, “a bird flew into the window and killed itself. Llewellyn says a little Elwood
is stuck on the film: he almost always says hi before it’s over.”
Donna glared at him. “That wasn’t real. If it was real, it would be all over CNN. Those black lines over the guy’s eyes? Someone scratched that right on the celluloid.
I’ve never seen anything so fake.”
Colin popped the reel off the camera and held it out to her. “You’re welcome to look over the film yourself to see if anyone
tampered with it.”
She didn’t take it. “I mean, I believe it’s something, okay?
I believe it’s psyops. Isn’t that what you said Llewellyn was into?
I believe it was filmed to make, I don’t know—foreign powers believe the US government was going to enlist an army of ghosts.
Let a copy of the film loose behind the Iron Curtain so Moscow can shit their pants over America’s arsenal of weaponized poltergeists. ”
“Moscow was quite a bit ahead of us, I’m afraid,” Llewellyn said, returning to the room with a fresh lightbulb for the sconce.
“They had been inventing ghosts since the fifties. They called it the Goblin Scheme, and they gave it up in 1965, after Andreev,
their lead researcher, stuck a screwdriver into his ear and lobotomized himself. His wife said he was trying to stop ‘the
little whisperer.’ The problem with inviting the unnatural into your life is it might decide to stay. Can I pour any of you
a Scotch? Nothing complements a taste of the occult like a swallow of single-malt.”
“That’s a yes,” said Van. “Actually, I think it’s a hell, yes.”
“Mr. Wren, can I ask about something at the end of the film?”
“Yes, Gwen?”
“The man in the sunglasses. The one who had scribbles over his eyes. He died . . . didn’t he?” When she said it, Arthur realized
he had known too, at the first sight of those black squiggles, that the big Black man in the turtleneck was a goner. They
had all known.
“George Lane. Three weeks after we shot that film. He hit a fawn on his way into base. It came right through his windshield
and kicked his head in.” Llewellyn began to hand around glasses of Scotch. “Elwood went quiet after that.” He gestured at
the wall sconce. “Though sometimes he rolls over and murmurs in his sleep.”
Arthur had his first-ever swallow of whiskey. It tasted like a mouthful of dragon’s flame.