Short Story: ‘The Last Feature’

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Almost nobody sees movies at the Grand Nine. On fine summer nights, you can have the whole place to yourself.

That’s why we go there, with vodka in water bottles and joints tucked in our wallets. Zeb the manager knows us, and we buy buckets of stale popcorn to help keep the place in business. “All part of the retro experience,” we say. “How’s Peggy? Restless tonight? Does she like this one?”

Somehow we started calling the ghost Peggy, though nobody knows her name. Legend says that if you hear a cough behind you in Theater 1, don’t turn around.

Of course the Grand Nine has a ghost. It is a ghost, with its marquee trumpeting DIGITAL 3-D!, although the theater has been digital for years now. On the night Zeb tells us the story of Peggy, the marquee also reads: Hear No Bev Shudder Uninvited Social Ext Toy 3 Blood Just Go.

Waiting in the lobby for the 6:10 to let out, we pester Zeb for more info, like always: “Have you seen Peggy? How did she die, anyway?”

Zeb was a projectionist back when there were projectionists. Normally he shakes his head when we bug him about Peggy. But tonight we wear him down, and he says, “You’ll never see her — you’re too young. It’s too late.”

We’re on him like gnats, and he says, “OK. I’ll tell you.”

Five years ago, on the Grand Nine’s first fully digital weekend, Zeb entered Theater 1 with his flashlight to take a head count. He kept thinking he should be upstairs in the booth building the platters, but the platters had been retired. The new setup ran itself at the push of a button, transforming him into a grunt with a skill that no one needed.

It was the opening night of a thriller, and on the screen, a tough-outside-soft-inside female FBI profiler was interviewing a witness. Zeb counted seven people in the biggest theater. As he was about to go, he heard a soft gasp over his shoulder. “Help me.”

It sounded like a woman who was in too much pain to make herself heard. Expecting to find an elderly patron in distress, Zeb ran his flashlight over the nearest row.

A shape reared up in the aisle seat. It looked like a coat somebody had left behind, only it was moving, and then it had a head, and it turned its head, and it had a face.

Or maybe nothing turned, and a piece of darkness teemed with something and became a face. Zeb can’t say.

The face was wide and pale, with anxious dark eyes. Black hair framed it, pulled back in one of those terry-cloth bands girls used to wear.

“Help me,” the mouth whispered, sucking in air with an ugly sound.

Zeb turned off his flashlight. “What’s wrong, ma’am?”

As he spoke, he noticed the body below the face.

He turned on his heel and fled to the projection booth to calm his nerves, his breath crunched into a tiny space in his throat. I didn’t just see that.

But the thing had reached the booth before him.

He will not describe the body. Was it mangled? No. Transparent? No. Floating? No.

When pressed, the best word he finds is muddled. As if a human form had grown into the Grand Nine like a parasitic vine on a tree, embedding itself in the dingy carpets and the cinder block booth walls.

“I want to make a complaint,” the specter said, and now its voice sounded almost normal. “The movie isn’t running. There’s a blank screen down there!”

Zeb decided that if he didn’t respond, the apparition would vanish. The movie was running just fine below. The massive rotating platters had been carted away to a corner of his dusty domain, taking their flickering and clattering with them, but the silent black box that had replaced them still emitted a steady beam of light.

The ghost kept lamenting and wringing its hands until he tried to explain.

“If it’s running, then why can’t I see it?” Panic in the voice now. “Please let me watch the film.”

A compassionate instinct, too fast for his conscious mind, made Zeb turn and look directly into the shade’s eyes. They were its most human feature: alert, sensitive.

He said, “The killer’s with the heroine now. He’s running a knife around her jawline, trying to scare her.”

The shade raised a muddled fingertip toward the projector beam. “But there’s no flicker.”

“No, there’s no flicker anymore. There’s no film.”

The shade stared at him. “No film,” she said — that was when, for Zeb, the thing became a she. “How?”

Zeb wasn’t sure how to explain to a ghost about ones and zeroes crowded onto hard drives. “How long have you been here?” he asked.

And she told him her story.

The ghost remembered her last evening in the world outside the theater. A June evening, verge of the solstice, bright as the sun’s heart. Light refusing to relinquish the white pines. Wind whistling in the cattails. The limestone ledges by the lake were still cold to the touch, as if the snow had just melted.

An evening when time itself seemed to hover suspended above the earth.

She and a man had made a date to see the summer’s first would-be blockbuster, a horror film about a child who bore the number 666. “It’ll suck, but so what,” the man said. “Meet you there.”

The ghost couldn’t remember if he was a boyfriend, a husband, a fiancé, or just a friend she’d once hoped would be a boyfriend. What mattered was that he never showed.

Outside, daylight stretched to its breaking point. Inside the dark theater, she sat waiting as the trailers began and ended. The logo of the distributor. The logo of the production company.

The film began, and she knew he wouldn’t come.

She was not young anymore. That man might have been the last person who ever sat beside her at a movie. I will always be alone now, she thought, tears stinging her cheeks.

But no, she couldn’t be alone. No one at a movie ever is. Desperate for company, she turned her attention from herself to the audience — their reactions, thoughts, feelings.

As the demonic child claimed his first victim, vibrations of dread and excitement grew in the theater like ripples in long grass. She heard a swell of incredulous laughter as someone was decapitated by a runaway lawn mower. A chuckle of Oh, poor bastard for a doomed character actor. Each individual vibration built on the others till the whole room pulsed in time with the flickering from the projector above.

She realized then that people at movies only think they’re alone with the story unfolding on the screen. They don’t consciously hear the collective inhale, like a bird beating its wings at dusk, or the mass exhale as a hero narrowly escapes. Like late sleepers, they dream on, oblivious to their companions.

But she heard now. She knew she was not alone.

She heard him. The fifty-ish man sitting in the seventh seat of the thirty-first row, with well-shaven cheeks and neat cuffs, who had come here wanting to kill a woman. He had killed before, and he knew to target the ones who were already struggling with their will to live.

If she stayed, they would meet. But she couldn’t go back to her empty apartment and face the silence on the phone machine.

After the movie was over and everyone else had left, she crept to the end of the row and lay down on the floor, smelling filth, sweat, somebody’s long-discarded gum. She closed her eyes.

“Excuse me, miss?”

She sat up and looked into the polite face of the killer. “I know why you’re really here,” she said. “You weren’t watching the movie. You were waiting to meet someone like me.”

He stared at her, not pleased to have his intentions known. “Someone like you?”

“Yes,” she said, an infinite weariness creeping over her. How nice it would be to watch the movie again. “Someone who wants to stay here forever. Never to be alone.”

Then he killed her.

How? Where? How did he dispose of the remains? She didn’t remember any of that, she informed Zeb, and it didn’t matter. The killer was a pathetic waste of space, and this wasn’t his story. Only the movies mattered.

Every Friday there were new movies. Trailers. Distributor logo. Production company logo. The silence of flawless, naïve anticipation. The opening shot breaking like dawn over a virgin landscape.

She’d always preferred movies to life. When she was a child, she used to imagine her life was one, with painstaking direction and mesmerizing story arcs: Now it begins. The Story of Me, Starring Me.

When she grew up, she learned that her story was mesmerizing to no one but her, and things often happened for no reason at all.

Her dying, for instance. Her being dead. But she’d made her choice: to remain where hope never died and another movie was always starting.

Most of the week she hibernated in the walls, a mute creature in a lightless den. But every Friday night, she saw the new releases along with things no one else saw, things that happened in the audience.

No two people experienced a movie the same way, she learned. Older people often asked questions aloud; they needed the story explained and justified to them when evil triumphed. Younger people often craved something violent, profane, mean, unreasonable.

Some people wanted righteous violence to cheer for. Others wanted to feel like they were falling, falling, falling into a stranger’s arms at a wedding reception where they’d had too much champagne. The glowing screen set them free to dream awake.

The ghost only ever bothered people who disrupted the experience. Men who groped the women beside them and refused to take no for an answer — she took special pleasure in laying her cold, warning fingers on the backs of their necks. People who used their phones during the film might glimpse her reflected in their screens. Mid-film talkers shivered as they felt her breath. Only children could cause trouble in Theater 1 with impunity.

This pleasant afterlife of hers lasted for years — until tonight, when the flickering stopped. She could still see light on the screen, she told Zeb, as if an old-style reel had spooled to the end, but no movie.

And no ripples of thought and feeling from the audience — only silence, as if they’d all become ghosts, too. After all these years, she truly was alone.

Maybe she’d chosen wrong, so long ago. Maybe she should have found a way to live instead of just watching.

“I’m sorry,” Zeb said when the ghost’s story was over. His shaking fingers reached into the depths of his backpack and closed on the pack of American Spirits. “The shift to digital must have changed something.”

“You can’t bring the movies back? You can’t make them work?”

“They are working. Just not for you.”

The ghost refused to believe it. “When I was young, there were still double features. I counted movies I’d seen the way I counted states I’d visited. Three, four, five. The sixth was just a star on the horizon.”

Zeb didn’t remember the days of double features, but he wasn’t young anymore, either. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But the digital thing is permanent. At least until they close us down altogether.”

“So why are you still here?”

Why the hell was Zeb still at the Grand Nine? It was a question he tended to shove into the basement of his mind and slam the door. Over the years, routine had settled into his bones. He’d set aside a host of dreams — road tripping to California, starting a band. He looked forward to each Friday’s new releases, too, because there wasn’t much else to look forward to.

The words “Go into the light” popped into his mind, and suddenly he thought he had the solution. Maybe the ghost needed an exit sign telling her there was still somewhere else to go.

He yanked the cigs from his pack and said, “Come outside. It’s time for you to be free.”

“Well? Did she go into the light? Did you ever see her again?” we demand to know, pleading with him like the ghost must have pleaded, because we don’t want to believe we’ve been looking for her all these years in vain.

Zeb turns away and applies his attention to cleaning the Slurpee machine. “Hurry,” he says, “or you’ll miss the show.”

We file into Theater 1. After five or six trailers, the room goes black. We glug from our vodka bottles and hook our knees over the seats.

We are watching a remake of the 666 movie. Some of us gasp and yip when a bloody kill happens. Some of us hold hands.

But some of us can’t forget the ghost, and we twist around to look up at the projection booth. A shadow crosses the light — Zeb at his post? Or her?

Two of us — never mind who — tiptoe out of the theater and up the stairs to the booth. It’s a long, curving room jammed with junk, including the platters Zeb mentioned. We spot him by the Theater 1 projector, leaning over to watch the movie playing below.

He doesn’t notice us. He speaks quietly, as if to someone beside him: “The young priest is googling the quote from Revelation. Six cases of bloody graffiti match it in the past six days. He looks scared.”

We glance at each other, wondering if Zeb has lost it — or if he’s narrating the movie to Peggy. Like a storyteller by a campfire, bringing it alive with his words so she will never have to miss a thing.

And then, in silent agreement, we creep back downstairs so we won’t interrupt them.

Back in the theater, ripples of reaction build around us. One day, we suspect, we will be sick of movies. They will stop making us happy, ashamed, scared, snared, titillated, eager, suspicious, stern, provoked, silly, delighted.

One day, people will stop coming to Theater 1. The marquee will fall. We will tell our kids about this place. In the old days, people used to come together in dark rooms, and it meant something.

Someday soon, war news and thrillers and medical dramas will be streamed directly into our heads, and we will be islanded ghosts, all of us. But not yet. The ripples still spread. Do you feel it, too?

This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 5, 2024.

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