Beastie Boys plays over the store’s speakers. Ruddy, as he was affectionately called by the group of seven, stops them with an upturned palm.
“Now look, I need you boys to leave Franklin alone. He’s been bitching about you guys, and he’s a good customer of mine. You leave him alone or I’m not gonna let you’s hang out here anymore, alright?”
The boys murmur curse words, threatening to fuck Ruddy up and telling him to call the cops. Ruddy is unphased.
“I mean it, stop fucking with Franklin, and I’m not kidding around, here, I mean it,” he says as he presses the button that disengages the electronic lock to the door leading to the hall. The boys pass through, and Ruddy hears the glass bottles clanking around in their backpacks. He shakes his head and smiles to himself, the sons he always wanted but could never find a woman to provide him with. If they didn’t drink and smoke inside the theater, they’d be doing it outside on the streets, he tells himself. He’s doing them a favor by keeping them safe.
A credit card slot that charges ten dollars disengages the lock on two doors at the end of the hall simultaneously. One door leads to a theater that plays heterosexual pornography, the other to one that screens homosexual pornography. The audience of either theater hears the doors unlock whenever anyone swipes a card, no matter their destination. The gay theater is much more popular, Marv knows this because over the course of his tenure drinking at the theater, he constantly hears the door unlock but it rarely ever opens. The straight theater remains his and his friend’s domain, for the most part, aside from the pesky creep Franklin, always bumming cigarettes and trying to get the boys to give him some liquor. As they enter the theater, the boys berate Franklin.
“Frankie! Fuck you doin,” says Trev.
“Lemme get some glue, Frankie,” says Ib.
“Frank get the fuck outta my seat,” says Doran.
“Hey, didn’t Eddy tell you? He told me he was gonna tell you, you boys can’t push me around no more,” says Franklin, getting up from his seat to relocate to the back of the theater. There are globs of toluene in his beard and his words are slurred. Marv takes a seat and plants his backpack on the filthy floor, rifling through it for a small bottle of Fireball he purchased specifically for Franklin. He didn’t know Ruddy was going to red light the boys’ aggression towards Franklin, but he felt badly about last time. He turns around in his seat and reaches across the empty row behind him to offer Franklin the bottle.
“Sorry about the whole thing with the basketball, Frank,” Marv says.
Franklin eyes the bottle suspiciously for a split second before standing up and reaching over the rows between him and Marv to snatch the bottle. Before sitting he verifies that the cap is sealed before opening it up and guzzling it. Disappointed at the situation’s bathos, Marv turns around to look at the screen. A slight, pixie-ish red headed woman is being pounded by a large black guy on screen.
“Hey, look, it’s Doran and Kathy,” Anthony says.
“Shut the fuck up, she was strawberry blonde, motherfucker, strawberry blonde,” Doran says.
“That bitch was a straight firecrotch,” Anthony says in response.
Ruddy is watching the scene unfold on his laptop. He frequently watches the boys, living vicariously through the in-theater security camera, and had seen the scene with the basketball unfold last week in real time. He contemplated banning them from coming back but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He liked them too much, especially the brown-haired boy who he saw give Franklin the bottle. What was that kid’s name, Mark? Morg? He couldn’t remember. He decided to change up tonight’s movie, offer the boys a little culture, and changed the queue, sliding The Kiss of Count Clovis, a personal favorite of his, to play next.
In the theater, Behind Closed Back Doors ends and the theater is engulfed in a new darkness. Franklin snores loudly and Anthony throws an empty can at him.
“Take it easy, man, or Ruddy’s gonna kick us the fuck out again,” Marv says.
“I’m just wakin’ his ass up, it’s rude as hell to be snoring like that,” Anthony says.
The screen turns back on, and several production companies flash slowly across the screen. Immediately aware that the movie will not be a porno, several of the boys loudly question what the fuck is about to play. Beer cans snap open and Ib lights a cigarette. Marv looks at the screen with a perplexed sense of interest. The eerie piano of Franz Liszt’s “Totentanz” casted a silence over the boys. They sipped beer silently and watched the screen.
A nude woman flees into the daylight outside of a cavern, her bloodcurdling scream overpowering the piano and orchestral effects of Totentanz. A pale creature, vaguely human, completely bald with pointed ears and fangs that prevent his mouth from closing all the way, attempts to follow her but shrieks at the sight of the morning light. The whites of his eyes turn pink and almost boil out of his head before he recoils, cursing in an ancient language as he retreats to the shadows of his cave.
The collective moaning of the count’s hostages and slaves were music to the count’s frustrated ears. Infuriated by his escapee, he comforts himself in his mind: she’s gone mad. All the horrors and dope that he subjected her to, she would never be taken seriously by the humans. The humans that he had hidden so well from, that had driven his race to near extinction over the three hundred plus years he had seen his lifetime. She probably wouldn’t even survive the descent down the mountain.
The count’s eyes were sensitive to light, but he still kept torches at far intervals to provide light not only for his human slaves but for his primary servant, Harmander.
“My apologies, master,” Harmander slurs. The count had removed his ears when Harmander was a teenager. The count roars at him, the vibrations throb at Harmander’s temples and earholes like a massive wave crashing against his head. Harmander withdraws and whimpers. The count speaks, and subtitles flash across the screen to translate his incomprehensible and guttural language: “Bring Maude and my physick. To my chambers.” Harmander reads his master’s lips and scurries into the darkness to execute the order.
“What the fuck is this shit,” Ib says, blowing cigarette smoke out with his words. Marv is glued to the screen. Ruddy watches the boys watching his favorite movie, and wonders what they’re saying. There is no audio on the camera feed he watches on his laptop.
The count reclines in his personal quarters, fluffing a pillow with his hands, laying his long hairless head upon it, folding his long arachnodactylic fingers across his chest as he waits. His breath whistles against his long teeth, it was louder at night, and his whistling snore kept those that slept with him from any sort of sleep on top of the drug-addled madness and horror that they endured inside his chambers. Harmander opens the door and pushes Maude into his quarters. Maude had endured this routine many times, and in the darkness couldn’t quite see where he was at or detect any of his movements. One moment he is on his bed, the next he is behind her pushing her towards it, and within seconds she falls into his open arms. He rubs the polypricked side of her neck with his fingertips, a sensation that was both wet and dry but always warm, before Harmander plunges the cold metal of a syringe inside her. Maude’s bloodstream accepted the count’s physick, an opiate preparation, which Harmander was too afraid to inform the count was running low. She feels it within seconds, and is calmed, despite the count’s inhuman grip that her mind could not come to terms with when sober. She felt no pain as he suckles on her neck through several tiny holes the longest of his jagged teeth penetrated. She lies with him in bed, the count high on her drug laced blood, herself high from the drug and his bite. The screen wipes, and the nude woman who had escaped the count is discovered by a mail coach. The shotgun rider of the coach drapes a cloak over the shivering woman’s body, as the woman tries to describe the horror she had fled from.
“Vampir,” the shotgun rider says, standing up from comforting the woman on the ground and resting his shotgun across his shoulders. He looks up to the mountains before the screen cuts to a close up. A long scar between his eyebrows bisects his face.
“Max Lurman,” Franklin says, wide eyed and pointing at the screen.
“Shut the fuck up, Frank,” Doran says. Marv turns around to Franklin.
“Who’s that?”
“Max fucking Lurman? Only the greatest German actor in the 70s,” Frank says seriously, “you boys are some real dumbasses if you don’t know who Max Lurman is.”
“We’re trying to watch the movie, Frank, fucking can it, alright?” says Trev.
“Lemme get a beer,” Frank says. Marv digs one out and debates shaking it up before deciding not to. He turns around and tosses Franklin the beer. Franklin’s reactions are slowed by the toluene and he misses the beer. It hits the floor and pops open, hissing beer onto the floor. He snatches it up and greedily sucks on the hole.
“Beer vampire,” says Marv, turning back to the screen and lighting a cigarette. Franklin kills and crumples the can.
“Lemme get a smoke, too.”
“Fuck yourself, Frankie.”
“C’mon, you’re supposed to be the nice one.”
“Give him a cig, Marv, for Christ’s sake, I’m missing the movie.”
Marv sighs and tosses a cig blindly over his back. Franklin gets up and grabs it. He has his own lighter.
The door to the porn store chimes as a couple walks in. Ruddy’s eyes flick from this laptop screen to the couple, visibly drunk, most likely tourists from out of town. “Welcome, how can I help you folks?”
“My good sir,” the man says with a bright smile as his date giggles, “we wanted to check out the theater tonight, if that can be arranged.”
“It most certainly can. We have a special presentation playin’ right now, but it’s almost halfway through, after that we have Trailer Park Nymphos set to play at, oh, around say, 2am perhaps.”
The man beams. “Very good. How do we do this, exactly?”
“Through this door,” Ruddy says as he presses the button to unlock it. “There’s a hall. Choose a theater: one’s marked Gay, the other’s marked Straight. Whichever your inclination, swipe your card twice, once for each of you, and the doors will open up. We have a packed house in both theaters, so please be mindful of the other audience members.”
“Oh, we will be,” the man says with a wink. Ruddy’s face straightens up.
“Now look, I mean it, no funny business back there, or I’ll have to kick you’s out. Understand?”
The man flashes a gesture, index and thumb together and the three remaining digits splayed out in the air. “Loud and clear, hoss,” he says as he enters the hallway. Ruddy detected trouble.
“Exit the theater through the red door on your way out,” he says.
On screen, Max Lurman is back in town, and is going over a map with the escaped woman. She’s clothed now, and impossibly beautiful.
“Sheena Picante,” Frank says, recognizing her now that she’s been cleaned up. “She was a beaut, eh?” Nobody responds to him. Marv is entranced by the sadness in her eyes, it looks so real.
Max Lurman taps the map twice, he knows the approximate location of the count’s lair. He rolls it up and begins procuring supplies. The door to the theater clicks. Marv is surprised when it opens and a drunken couple stumbles in. The light from the hall behind the man illuminates the theater, and he is able to see the boys, drinking beer, passing around a bottle of cognac, and smoking cigarettes. His smile widens. “My kinda joint.” The woman squints her eyes at the boys, immediately sobered by the scene.
“Luke, they’re kids,” she whispers. Luke shrugs and enters the theater.
“Got a cig?” Frank asks them.
“I’m sorry, I don’t smoke,” Luke says, taking a seat away from everyone and pulling a small flask bottle out of his pocket. His girlfriend sits down but doesn’t ease back into the back of the seat; she’s disgusted and repulsed by the condition of the theater and its occupants.
“Luke, I think we should leave,” she says, nudging his foot with her own.
“C’mon, Dais, this is a good scene,” Luke says with an amused smile, pointing with his flask at the screen. Max Lurman is scowling at a pack of wolves in the mountain as he levels his shotgun at the foremost of their pack. She shakes her head.
“I’m not doing this. No. Nothing about this is right,” she says. She stands up. “I’m leaving, with or without you.”
“Sit down, would you? We’re trying to watch this,” Frank yells.
“Yeah, come on, bitch, sit down or leave, take your pick already,” Anthony says.
Daisy looks at Luke and pitches her forehead down towards him. “Really?”
“Alright, alright, Jesus,” he says, taking a swig and standing up. “If you weren’t a kid, I’d beat your fucking ass, buddy,” he says to Anthony.
“Yeah you wish, faggot.”
“Come on, babe, fuck this shit hole,” Luke says, grabbing Daisy by her arm. She smacks his hand off of her and storms out through the red door. “Great job, assholes.” Doran flicks half of a lit cigarette at him and he rushes out, torn between fear of the kids and of losing Daisy. She’s outside in the alley, her flip phone opened and pressed against her face.
“Dais, what the fuck, who are you on the phone with?”
“…and they’re kids, kids, and there’s some type of bum in there with them, and they’re drinking and God knows what else…. Yes, that’s right, Samson’s Theater.”
“Are you kidding me? The cops? This is Atlantic City!”
“It was terrifying in there. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yes, my name is Daisy Metzger, and my phone number is…”
“Dais!”
Ruddy has switched the camera feed on his laptop to the alley camera. He sighs, knowing the police will be by soon. He flips a switch behind him, one of many on a large bank. The lights in the theater snap on. He pauses the movie as the last of the wolves is leaping at Max Lurman.
“What the fuck?”
“What’s going on, movie’s not even over! I paid to be in here,” Frank is yelling as he stands up. “Now look what you kids did!”
The door latch clicks and Ruddy steps into the theater. In the bright fluorescent lighting he can see the devastation of his theater, the blown out seats, beer cans, cigarette butts, flattened tubes of toluene.
“Show’s over, I need everyone out.”
Everyone grumbles, cursing, but no one moves.
“Cops are coming, vamanos, vamanos, everyone out, I mean it, out, now!”
The boys start gathering their things, Franklin makes a hasty exit.
“What was the name of that movie, Ruds? That shit ruled,” Marv said.
Ruddy looks at Marv and sighs. He knows he can never have the boys in his theater again. “The Kiss of Count Clovis, from 1978. Please, boys, I need you guys gone, or my ass is gonna be in some deep shit.”
They don’t argue. Some of the boys crack open fresh beers on their way out, several tell him how lowly they think of him. Marv pats him on the shoulder as he passes by. “See you next week sometime, Ruddy.”
Ruddy sits down in the ruined theater. The cops would be here soon and he had to get back out to the store to greet them. He looks at the screen. Max Lurman and his fake scar, with a wolf about to snap at his face in a near miss. He wonders how they were able to shoot that scene back in the late 70s. He feels deeply saddened that the boys wouldn’t be able to finish the movie, and hopes maybe the one boy, the nice one, his favorite, would look it up. A lonely tear slides down his face before he stands up and braces himself for the police.
— William Dustice is a construction worker, English student, and writer from South Jersey. His work has been published in APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL.