Arlene ate her fill and by the time she was done, that sweet old woman looked like a car-wreck victim, sans safety belt. Arlene turned and strayed into the night. She didn’t wait around to watch the old woman’s gnawed carcass scramble back to hungry life.
Mind you, while all that was going on, poor, confused Lorraine was hiding in some bushes in the school playground, screaming and wondering why all these bad things were going on in her head. The other kids thought she had gone nuts. Her parents and the teachers talked about it later, and based on what she’d told them, they decided she had an overactive imagination. They told her not to let the bad images scare her… they were make-believe, so they couldn’t hurt her. It was all in her head, they said, and in a way it was. Hers was a sort of Reality Surplus Disorder. It’s hard to concentrate when you’ve got another personality playing in your mind.
My best guess is all the movie’s fans created that personality, that black-and-white world of death… all those watchers in the dark, thinking about that movie, those zombies, and of course, poor little Arlene Schabowski. All that feverish brain energy. What is reality, anyway? A mental collective, that’s all. The result of multiple minds, mulling over enthralling stories. I’m sure that somewhere, out there, Moby Dick is still swimming and the House of Usher is still falling. I’m sure Dorothy is still wandering down the Yellow Brick Road, having new adventures, fighting more witches and flying monkeys. And I’m sure she’s still a tiny young thing, just as Arlene Schabowski is still a tiny dead thing.
But let us return to Arlene. She walked down a gravel lane until she came to the highway. Car lights were heading toward her. She held out her bloodstained, skinny arms and waited. The driver would stop. Of course they would. She was just a little girl.
So she waited. And the driver stopped—a fat, middle-aged man with a bulbous nose and horn-rimmed glasses.
“Was there an accident?” He ran up to her, crouched and thrust his fat face near hers.
“Help me, Mommy,” she said.
“You poor thing,” he said in a low, sad voice. “What the hell happened to you?”
Another one who thought she was simply a poor thing. She smiled, leaned forward and bit off his nose—it was too large and juicy a target to resist.
He screamed, so she bit off his lower lip, which made him scream that much louder.
She gnawed and gnawed until he was too cold for her to stomach. Then she began shambling down the road. And because that entire movie took place at night, the daylight never came. She wandered an eternal night of fields and rural back roads and farmhouses, feasting on innocent country folks who only wanted to help her.
And Lorraine… She endured Arlene’s adventures in her head, and finally even got used to them. A person can get used to anything, really. Folks who live near airports soon learn to ignore the roar of planes coming and going. Lorraine grew into a tall, willowy lady. Always slender. Having a zombie in your head is enough to spoil anyone’s appetite. There were plenty of times when she would sit down to dinner, and Arlene would suddenly go on a rampage in her mind. Little zombie-girl would rip apart a couple farmers, tear out their guts and gobble them down, and suddenly that plate of lasagna would seem like a hideous, visceral thing. But Lorraine wouldn’t scream over it…wouldn’t even bat an eyelash. She’d just push the plate away.
As I mentioned, Lorraine eventually became a school teacher. Because a part of her was still a little girl, she liked being around children. She lived in a big nice apartment building, surrounded by families—all the kids there thought she was great. Some of the people in her building had seen her movie, and they were always telling their friends that their neighbor was a movie star. Sometimes folks who had seen the movie would call her Arlene. She’d smile to be polite, but she didn’t like it. “Hey, Arlene—‘Help me, Mommy!’” was the favorite greeting of the fat guy who lived six doors down. She’d always try to take a different route to avoid him if she saw him coming.
Eventually she started dating the school’s janitor, and all of her friends made fun of her for that, joking that the lovers were probably always sneaking off to the boiler room or some such place. The janitor, whose name was Kurt, was a good-looking man, only in his mid-thirties and in fine physical shape. And truth to tell, the two did sneak off together sometimes. To Kurt’s office. His door had a fancy title—Environmental Control Specialist—but it still meant janitor.
Once while she was in his office, Lorraine saw a key hanging from a little nail on the wall behind his desk. The key had a scrap of paper taped to it. The word ATTIC was written on that scrap in blue ballpoint ink. She waited until Kurt’s back was turned, and she took that key.