“They’re sirens, sonny. ’Bout the meanest creatures on this side of the hemisphere.”
“And you’re their what?”
The barkeep squinted. “I’m their contact. I’m their caretaker of sorts.”
The shadowy corners of Siren’s End began to move.
The barkeep hung his head. “I’m their slave.” He lifted his shirt to reveal a dozen of tiny bite marks, pockets of missing meat. “They’re so damn hungry.”
Means turned his attention to the moving parts of the room. Shadows closed in until the glow of the lantern reached their figures. They shrank back into the shadows.
“Light keeps them away most days,” he said, covering his exposed belly fat with his shirt. “They won’t kill me, though. Just feed off me when they want a little snack.”
“Because you feed them much larger meals.” Means gritted his teeth. “Men. Entire fleets of men.”
“It keeps me alive.” The barkeeper shook his finger at him. “You’d do the same in my position.”
“This town? This island?”
“Ate their way through it in a few months.” He sighed deeply. “Soon, there won’t be any ships left in the Queen’s Navy.”
“What then?”
The barkeep shrugged. “The homeland. All of Europe.”
“We have to stop them.”
The shadows hissed.
The barkeep chuckled, an almost-silent vocalization. “There ain’t no stopping them. They’re determined.” He continued to shake his finger at him like a parent dishing out a good scolding. “Men like you created things like that. Remember this. You fathered these beasts.”
His memory recalled Isabella, not the beautiful creature she was but the wretched monster she’d become. “I couldn’t have… I only wanted to love. Her love.”
The barkeep scoffed. “Love… is a two-sided coin, my pathetic friend. Can’t have unity without the other half present.”
“You don’t know me,” Means told him, as it became increasingly difficult to breathe. Spotting the creatures in the darkened corners, his heart raced. They were waiting, biding their time.
“Enough of this meandering. You’ve made your choice, captain. You’ve doomed your ship, your men, all in the name of love, or your misguided views on the subject.”
“Who are you to judge me?”
Leaning closer to the lantern on the bar, he shrugged. “No one. Just a man. Remember? Most dangerous devil there is.” He smiled and then blew out the small flame that had kept the entire establishment aglow.
In the darkness appeared several pairs of eyes, too many to count. They were a radiant turquoise, bright like the Caribbean seas he’d explored when he was younger. The ovals were drawn to him. They sped forth at once, and quick, and when they arrived there was pain.
Means screamed the only thing that mattered, his lost love’s name—“Isabella!”—as the creatures dug into him, drank his sanguine nectar, and separated his muscle from the bone with their hungry mouths.
APERTURE
Placing the film against the aperture plate, the old projectionist grumbled, to himself, words of indignation. He snapped the gate over the film, adjusted the framing, and then turned to face the control station positioned directly beneath the porthole. Looking out across the theater, over the Friday night crowd and toward the screen, he pushed the glowing green button in the center of the panel. The motor kicked on, drowning out the distant noise of anxious moviegoers and the collective hum of the other nine projectors. The platter system spun with life, all three in sync with one another, feeding the rollers seven reels worth of footage. The projectionist stepped away from his work, folded his arms across his doughy chest, and looked to his company, his new apprentice, the preppy-looking youngster whose face had been taken over by utter confusion.
“Um,” the kid said, his eyes darting back and forth. “That was great and all, but I have no idea what you just did.”
“Weren’t you paying attention, numb nuts?” the hermit asked, wiping his dirty, oily hands off on a shop towel. Once he deemed them clean enough, he stroked his gray-streaked beard, combing loose the speckles of leftover Doritos. Shooting the kid a steely gaze, the projectionist moved away from the machine, seemingly satisfied with the way the print was running. “I just threaded the fuckin’ thing for ya. Pay attention next time.”
Rob Garland wanted to take the timid approach. He thought about keeping hush, really thought about it, but he only had a week to learn everything the old hermit knew about being a projectionist. Instead of remaining quiet, he cleared his throat.
“I learn better when I do.” He kept still in fear that sudden movement would cause the hermit to start chucking empty reels at his head.
“You’ll do. You’ll do plenty. Patience is a virtue. Doesn’t your generation know any-goddamn-thing?” He didn’t allow a response, which was fine because Rob knew the question was rhetorical. “Goddamn millennials. We’re talking about threading a projector here, not splitting atoms. Come here. I want to show you the building station.”
Rob followed the man over to the secluded area of the booth that consisted of a work bench with two circular disks angled outward, jutting pegs in the center where the reels were commonly placed. Compiling five to six reels into one massive print looked complicated—Rob had seen it done before—and he wasn’t sure if he’d “get it” in only five days. No, it wasn’t splitting atoms, but it might as well have been.
The projectionist pointed to the splicer sitting on the bench. “See that? That’s your best friend. That’s what we use to splice the frames together. Get it?”
“Uhhhh… sure.”
“Good. I’ll show you how to build a print on Wednesday when the new movies come in. In the meantime, we can splice together some trailers for practice.” He nodded in the direction of the cage on the far end of the booth. “Let me show you where we keep some supplies.”
“Yes, sir.”
Before he took his next step, the old man shifted his gaze back to Rob, his eyes barely visible between his lids. “You call me sir one more damn time and Imma splice your chode off, cock boy. Got it?”
Snickering, Rob nodded.
“Now call me Dan, my fuckin’ name, or suffer the fuckin’ consequences.”
“Yes, Dan.”
Rob followed Dan to the cage, a small corner of the booth sectioned off by raw wood framing and chicken wire. Dan popped open the gate and led Rob inside. The cage was trashed with what Rob considered junk. There were Christmas decorations and old projector parts, cardboard boxes filled with rolled-up movie posters dating back to the eighties and dozens of empty reels. Rob also noticed several unopened canisters tucked away in the corner. There was some crap, various marketing materials that never made their way downstairs, cardboard displays and paper handouts, covering the orange and silver canisters, but he spotted them anyway.
“Okay,” Dan said, kicking a path to the far wall. “Here’s where we keep the trailers. We got a ton of old ones we keep for training thumbsuckers such as yourself. Here’s one for Pulp Fiction.” He snatched the small hockey puck-looking disc off the shelf and held it to the light as if he’d discovered a blood diamond beneath the African soil. “You like Tarantino, kid?”
“He’s all right,” Rob replied, his eyes drawn to the corner and the canisters. “I mean, I like everything he’s done, even though Jackie Brown was kinda boring.”
Dan blew an irked breath between his lips and said, “Well, you’re fuckin’ boring” quietly, so Rob couldn’t hear. But Rob did hear and only laughed at the crusty old bastard. “Nonsense,” he barked, and continued to grumble on about kids and respect, and did so in near silence. “Anyway, have your pick. There are all types of trailers up here. Knock yourself out. I might take Pulp Fiction with me. Consider it my retirement gift from this piece-of-shit, no-one-gives-a-fuck-about-you place they call The Orchid 10.”