I started to reassure him but just then old Mr. and Mrs. Collins came shuffling out into the lobby. They both have rheumatism and so are usually the last to leave the building before we close the doors. Sometimes, when their twinges are worse than usual, they complain a bit about draughts, or it might be smoke or someone crunching popcorn too loudly, but I don’t mind. My business is built upon people feeling as comfortable, and relaxed in the theatre as if they were at home, and the regulars are entitled to have their say about things.
“Good-night, Jim,” Mrs. Collins said. She hesitated, obviously with something on her mind, then came a little closer to me. “Have you started selling seaweed?”
“Seaweed?” I blinked. “Mrs. Collins, it’s years since I have even seen a piece of seaweed. Do people actually go around buying and selling it?”
“The edible kind they do. And if you’re going to start selling that smelly stuff in the kiosk Harry and me aren’t coming back. We can just as easy go to the Tivoli on Fourth Street, you know. Dulse you call the kind you eat.”
“Don’t worry,” I said seriously. “As long as I’m running this theatre not one piece of dulse will ever cross the threshold.” I held the door open while they hobbled through, then I turned back to Hastings but he had disappeared back up into his den. By that time the place was empty except for staff so I went into the auditorium for a final look around. There’s a sad, musty atmosphere in a movie house after everybody has gone home, but this time something extra had been added. I sniffed deeply, then shook my head. Who, I thought, would be crazy enough to bring seaweed to the movies?
That was the first Wednesday night to go slightly off key, C. J. Garvey’s night—but it wasn’t till the following one that I began to get an uneasy feeling there was something queer going on in my theatre.
It was another rainy evening and a pretty good crowd had come in to see Island Love and the main feature, The Fighting Fitzgeralds. I was standing in my favourite spot, a niche in the rear wall where I can see all of the auditorium and watch the screen at the same time, when one of the dim-outs which annoyed Hastings so much occurred. It happened near the end of the show when another of my favourite bit players, Stanley T. Mason, was on the screen. Mason never became a ‘star’ bit player—which is what I call that handful of lesser actors whose names always crop up when people who think they know a lot about old movies start to chew the fat—but he turned in quite a few gem-like performances in ‘B’ features, usually as something like an English remittance man exiled in the States. He was lecturing one of the Fighting Fitzgeralds on the value of good breeding, in his superbly reedy British accent, when the picture faded to near blackness for a good three seconds. Some of the audience were starting to get restive when the screen flickered and brightened to its former intensity. I breathed a sigh of relief and relaxed—complete shutdowns are bad for business, more because of the loss of audience confidence than the issue of a houseful of complimentary tickets.
Just then it came back. The seaweed smell, I mean. I sniffed it incredulously for a minute, then walked down the centre aisle and used my flash to see if I could catch some health food crank flagrante delicto. Everything seemed normal enough, so I went back out to the lobby to think things over. The smell seemed to cling in my nostrils, an odour of … not seaweed, I suddenly realised, but of the sea itself. At that moment the main feature ended and the crowd began to pour out, those in the vanguard blinking suspiciously at the real world outside as if something might have changed during their absence in another dimension. I stood to one side and was; bidding the regulars good-night when Porter Hastings came clattering down the projection room stairs.
“It happened again,” he said grimly.
“I know.” I nodded, keeping my gaze on the departing patrons, picking out the faces I’d known for years–Mr. and Mrs. Carberry, old Sam Keers who was so regular that he even came in the day of his wife’s funeral, short-sighted Jack Dubois who always sat in the front row, Stanley T. Mason …
“What are you going to do about it?” Hastings demanded.
“I don’t know, Port. That’s your side of …’ My voice faded away. Stanley T. Mason! I had just seen one of the actors in The Fighting Fitzgeralds walking out of my theatre from a showing of his own film.
“We can talk technicalities in the morning,” I said, moving away. “There’s somebody over there I want to see.”
“Hold on, Jim.” Hastings grabbed my arm. “This is serious. There might be a fire risk, because …’
“Later!” I broke away and shouldered through the crowd to the door, but it was too late. Mason had disappeared into the breezy darkness of the street. I went back inside to where Hastings was waiting with a hurt look on his face.
“Sorry,” I said, trying to put my thoughts in order, ‘but there’s something weird going on here, Port.” I reminded him about having seen C. J. Garvey the previous Wednesday, and was telling him about Stanley T. Mason when a fresh thought struck me. “And I’ll tell you something else. He was wearing the same clothes as in the film—one of those tweed overcoats with the big herringbone pattern you don’t see any more.”
Hastings looked unimpressed, as usual. “It’s a television stunt or something. Hidden camera, old-time actors forgotten by the millions they used to entertain. What’s worrying me is this smell of ozone around the place.”
“Ozone?”
“Yeah—allotropic oxygen. You get it floating around after there’s been a massive electrical discharge. That’s why …’
“That’s the stuff you smell at the seaside?”
“So I’m told. I’m worried about a short circuit, Jim. That power has got to be going somewhere.”
“We’ll get it sorted out somehow,” I assured him absent-mindedly. My brain was slowly getting into gear and had just come up with another brand new thought, one which gave me an inexplicable cold feeling under my belt. It’s easier to spot people when they are going into a movie house, because they enter in ones and twos. I had been in the lobby both Wednesday nights when the place was filling up, and I could swear that neither Garvey nor Mason had gone into my theatre.
But I had seen them coming out!
On the way back to my apartment that night I stopped in at Ed’s Bar for a couple of relaxers, and the first person I saw was big Bill Simpson, a reporter on the Springtown Star. I know him pretty well because when he does movie reviews for the paper he calls in at my office and borrows the promotional hand-outs. As far as I know, he never actually attends any of the films he writes about unless they happen to be science fiction or horror.
“Have a drink, Jim,” he called from his stool at the bar. “What are you looking so worried about, anyway?”
I let him buy me a Bourbon, then I bought a couple, and in between I told what had been going on. “Porter Hastings thinks somebody’s working on a television programme about has-been actors. What do you think?”
Simpson shook his head solemnly. “It’s perfectly obvious to me what’s happening, and I’m afraid it’s rather more sinister than somebody taking a candid camera movie.”
“So what is it?”
“It’s all part of a pattern, Jim. Remember that big meteorite which came down near Leesburg last month? At least, they said it was a meteorite—although nobody ever found a crater.”
“I remember it,” I said, beginning to suspect that Simpson was putting me on.