“You can say that again,” I say. The air carries a faint, sweet scent, like cinnamon. It shouldn’t be here, just like we shouldn’t be here. I stiffen. “We’re almost there.”
The town’s main street—which seemed so important once upon a time, and now seems little better than an afterthought—is lit up like daylight compared to everything around it. There are streetlights here, six of them, two in front of the gas station and the other four scattered the length of the two-block stretch that constitutes the shopping district. There are a few cars. Most of the shop owners live above their livelihoods. The vet’s still here, and so is the doctor, although the names on the signs have changed; it’s good to see that the Hollow is still doing well enough to keep those simple luxuries. I hate to think about the people who might have been my neighbors having to drive hours just to have their dogs vaccinated or their appendixes prodded.
The theater is dark, nestled in the stretch between two streetlights, so the shadows can take everything but the box-and-angle shape of it. It squats like a spider, like a predator considering the rest of the street, and I shudder. It seems like it must have always been like this, like the theater can’t have changed this much while I was gone, and yet it doesn’t fit my memories of the place. I was happy here. I know that much. I was happy.
“Are you ready?” asks Brenda.
We have no plan. We have no preparation. She’s a corn witch with no field and I’m a ghost in a place where every piece of glass might be resonant enough to hold me, and we have no chance if Danny has joined forces with someone stronger than we are.
“I guess I have to be,” I say.
Brenda pulls up to the sidewalk and stops the truck. She retrieves her guitar from the back as she walks toward the theater, and I follow, a ghost in blue jeans and sneakers, into whatever happens next.
11: Popcorn Dreams on a Silver Screen
The theater door is locked. I glance to Brenda, who nods. I take a breath, and let go. The color rushes out of the world like the tide rushing back out to sea, and I don’t need to look at myself to know that I’m insubstantial, half-there, like the memory I’ve been since the day I died.
Passing through the door is like moving through cobwebs. It has more resistance but less pull than the corn: while it may resent my intrusion, it does not strive to keep me here. In short order I am inside the lobby, surrounded by the shadows of the monochrome reality I’ve cast myself into. It’s dark here. I can still see: ghost eyes are well suited to the dark. Let Brenda wait a moment more. She’ll understand once I open the door.
Old posters cling to the lobby walls, pinned like butterflies behind dusty glass. Their preservative prisons haven’t protected them completely. They’re tattered and peeling at the edges, and none of them is more recent than the late nineties. That’s when this place closed its doors. I can’t smell anything, but I’m sure the air is thick with decay, and I know that some of the dark patches on the walls are mold, eating through the wallpaper, which must have been infused with butter after so many years sharing the lobby with the popcorn machine. The stairs to the projectionist’s booth are still roped off, and I see no clean spots on the fake brass hooks to indicate that anyone has moved the rope in decades. Danny and his witch are on this floor.
There’s nothing more to see here, and I don’t want to risk wisping around the theater; if the witch spotted me without Brenda to intervene, it would be a quick one-two-three from there to the inside of a mirror. My feet hit the ground as I solidify, and the room goes dark, giving me a moment of absolute terror as I wait for the noise to trigger some attack from one of the silent doors around me.
Nothing comes. I force myself to relax, step forward, and unlock the theater door, opening it so Brenda can slip inside. She brings light with her, pale gold, like corn silk. It doesn’t emanate from her body or anything like that; it doesn’t seem to have a source at all. It’s just there, buttery and warm as morning sunlight, slowly growing to illuminate everything around us.
Now that there’s color in the world, I can see that the patches on the walls are definitely mold, and that mushrooms are growing through the floor in the corners, making this cavern of cinematic wonders more like something from a horror show. Brenda looks around, and her eyes are sad.
“Must’ve been nice when it was new” is all she says. She doesn’t keep her voice down. I shoot her a startled look, and she smiles, holding up a hand to indicate the cloud of light around us. I can see specks of dust dancing in it, like chaff coming off the fields. “Light costs. I’m trading sound. You can hear me, but no one outside the glow can.”
“That sounds less like a payment and more like another advantage.”