EPISODE TWENTY-ONE
1387 Words
TWENTY-ONE
Joanne clipped the reel into is position on the right-hand sprocket, and carefully passed the film through the pathway of the editing machine until it emerged out of the other side. She slipped the end around the empty reel, turned it a couple of times with her finger to start it off, then set her eyes to the eyepiece and pressed the start button.
It was all over in fifteen seconds. Joanne Burton sat back, horrified. Her body shook with revulsion.
After a moment she put her hand gingerly on the spool, forcing herself to touch it as though it would harm her. She released it from the holding clip and carefully placed the offensive film into a metal carrying case.
Reaching the door, Joanne snapped off the light and took a step out into the dark shop. She pulled up in alarm. Still with the images of the film in her mind, Joanne caught her breath at the sight of the towering shape of a man dimly outlined in the weak light coming from the red prescription sign.
“Who’s there?”
She panicked, dragging a pile of technical books off a shelf as her wildly clawing hand tried to re-find the light switch.
“Please, who are you?”
She was sobbing as the light flooded the room. Joanne slammed her back to the wall and, chest heaving, looked fearfully back through the doorway into the shop, expecting any moment to see the man appear out of the gloom into the shaft silence.
Absolute silence, followed.
It must have been three minutes before she moved, but it seemed like ten. Finally, she edges out into the dark shop, lungs full of air to expel in a scream the moments hands reached out for her.
It came as soon as she saw the shape, only to end in a choke as she recognized the silhouette. The tall cardboard cut-out of a man used in a drug company advertising display had been moved from its corner into more prominence presumably by Theresa Green, her sales assistant.
Nevertheless, Joanne still only moved with cautious, frightened little steps until she became positive that nothing changed; she was in fact alone.
She gave out a sigh of relief and sat for a moment in the customers’ chair, her legs still trembling. Once she became calm, she opened the door and went out, closing and locking it behind her. It was freezing cold. Joanne put her foot on the first step of the metal staircase that led to a flat, and her heavy coat. She stopped. Upstairs the windows were dark, and forbidding.
Despite the cold, Joanne made up her mind and without hesitation set off for the hospital at a steady trot, slipping and slithering on the icy pavement. It would normally have taken under five minutes. It was a quarter of an hour before she arrived at the side gate to the pathology laboratory and scurried up the path.
*
Breathlessly Joanne bust in on us assembled in the office just as they sat in the silence following my despairing, “All right. So, what we got? Because there is something out there, and it's scaring the f**k out of me."
We all looked at the normally serene Joanne in amazement. Her hair was wild and speckled with crystals of ice, her face white with two vivid red patched. Chest heaving, she leant against the wall.
First to my feet. I crossed to her in large, concerned strides, putting my arm around her shoulders, and leading her further into the warmth of the room.
“What is it? Are you all, right?”
Joanne could only nod for the moment. She held up the film case, gulped, “Here you are.”
I took it, still looking anxiously at her.
“Is it any good?”
Joanne calmed down and with a strange look she told me, “You’d better see for yourself.”
I looked down at the case and felt an icy shiver in my spine as Walton got up and started to wheel the Medical Society projector out from its corner.
The doctor gestured to the end wall.
“Can you drop the screen?”
Gingerly I placed the film case down on the table and crossed to the bank of switches inset in the wall beside the blackboard. I flicked down the one marked ‘screen’.
From its roll near the ceiling, the white painted canvas descended, accompanied by a whirring from the electric motor.
Roome and Allum stood up and pulled their chairs around to face the screen.
Roome leaned over Joanne.
“It’s particularly good of you to go to all this trouble, but we need all the help we can get. Do you think it will tell us anything?”
Joanne looked down at her hands, the fingers relentlessly winding and unwinding her handkerchief. She spoke with some difficulty.
“I don’t know – really. The camera was not in focus, and all the photos were blurred and over-exposed, white, white. I wouldn’t like to say…”
I turned back, my eyes finding hers. Uneasily I recognized something I had never seen in them before. I frowned. The woman before me was unlike the Joanne Burton I had known since I arrived on the island.
Walton tinkered with the projector and to everyone’s relief, worked in the film, while I watched Joanne sit huddled in silence, looking, and talking to no one.
Walton straightened up.
“Right then, that should do it. Will someone please turn the off the lights.”
Nobody moved, so I made for the switches. The last thing I saw as the room plunged into absolute blackness, was Joanne, half-turned in her seat, as though she was about to leave.
What followed was horrific, made all the obscener by the presence of the mortal remains in the next from of the person dying on the screen before us.
At first an explosion of pure blinding whiteness as the powerful beam of light passed unhindered through the clear frames of the lead-in film.
Sudden flashed of numerals, laterally inverted, jumped crazily in descending order and then disappeared.
If Joanne had not moaned, we would not have noticed that the actual film was running, it was so white and featureless.
As Joanne, teeth biting into the side of her left hand tensed up, she did not realize that her cry of horror alerted all of us.
Suddenly, we could all see that the whiteness was not smooth and featureless as before. Instead, something faint moved, and disappeared. It moved again and became recognizable. The outline was a man’s head and shoulders, turning, the arms jerking up defensively, for what there was no sign.
Roome leaned forward, as though the few inches gained would make all the difference. I moved up from back of the room, my eyes fixated on the screen. Walton held one side of the frames of his spectacles, pulling them forward of his nose to perfect the definition.
Allum looked puzzled.
And then it happened.
From the side of the screen a strange broken line appeared, like the jagged sign of high voltage electricity, or lightning.
It moved in strange jerky movements further into the middle, the outline of a man exploding in out, shrinking away into the bottom left-hand corner of the screen.
The jagged outline disappeared, returned, and then grew large. Swiftly another line extended down from the top, then another. Like some awful quick sketch impression, the lines flashed in and with a rush formed a shape.
For one brief nightmarish moment we watched as tall-pointed outline, inset with two round eyes, burnt blazing holes of spoiled yellow film, lunged down after the hapless victim.
In the last few moments, the figure of a man sagged down below the bottom of the picture, the other shape swelling and filling the screen. Jets of fluid shop up intermittently like a faulty fountain.
“Blood.”
Joanne’s tight voice cut across the room.
“Isn’t it, Doctor Walton?”
“Yes. Both carotid arteries were severed. He was a healthy and fit soldier. It would have pumped nearly six feet into the air.”
The projector continued to whir in the eerie dreadful silence.
ken.
- Writer
