The Road to Burden: Chapter 3

We’re in a small, old theater with dusty blue seats that are surprisingly comfortable. At the front of the room are thick velvet curtains, mostly obscuring an old screen ripped up the center. It probably hasn’t been used in at least a decade, maybe more.

Krista jumps up to the narrow stage and takes a bow before launching into our favorite Jack Nicholson lines.

“Wendy? Darling? Light of my life. I'm not gonna hurt ya. You didn't let me finish my sentence. I said, I'm not gonna hurt ya.”

I jump up and run to the stage, playing a frightened Wendy.

“...I'm just going to bash your brains in!”

“NO!” I scream dramatically, pretending to dodge Krista’s bat.

Suddenly, Krista stops, a frown replacing her maniacal smile.

“What was that?” she asks, and I look around, confused.

“What was what?”

“I heard something. A clicking noise. Shhh.”

Silence. Nothing.

“Krista, if you’re trying to scare me, it’s not working.”

She stares at me, and her face grows hard. “I’m not lying.”

“I never said you were.”

“It sounds like you were accusing me of—”

And then it happens: a whoosh of air tickles the back of my neck. I turn my head and watch the red curtains as they draw open, revealing a dark screen.

Krista and I gape. It’s quiet now, silent; neither of us know what to say. What do you say when magic curtains open by themselves?

Click. Click. Click.

“There,” Krista shrieks. “Did you hear that?”

And then a crackling noise like a record player starting up. Ray had one from the 1960s; it’s how I know that sound and I don’t like it. The ugly pop-pop-crack reminds me of The Who. Ray only played The Who on his mahogany record player from the 60s — he bought it from his neighbor when he was a kid — and oh, god, there’s that song again, the one about the eyes. No one knows what it's like / to be the bad man / to be the sad man / behind blue eyes.

Ray’s eyes are gray. Colorless. Like a black and white movie or television show, rigid like Citizen Kane or creepy like Twilight Zone or oh, I know, scary like an Alfred Hitchcock classic. Psycho.

But Ray is worse than that; worse than the psycho in Psycho. Psychos maybe aren’t evil, at least not really, because they’re insane. Ray’s mental faculties are perfectly intact, his marbles all lined up neatly in rows, each pattern identical and facing the same direction. No, Ray’s not crazy.

Ray is evil.

Suddenly, the screen lights up and there’s a still lake and the sound of tubas playing an ominous song. The scene cuts to a mountainous landscape, and then the Torrance family is driving in their little car along the winding road leading to the Overlook Hotel, the rip in the screen distorting the image.

Based upon the novel by Stephen King, I think, and the words roll across the sky. The car drives on, up and around the mountainside, until we see a shot of the Overlook Hotel. A woman wails on the soundtrack.

Krista’s screaming, matching the woman with her own sounds. I slap my hand over her mouth. “If someone is here, we need to be quiet,” I whisper, and her scream dies behind my hand.

The hairs on the back of my neck prickle as the weight of this thought drops like an anchor. Someone is here. Someone is playing the movie.

I look up at the projection booth and gasp, covering my mouth in shock. Krista makes a noise like Eeep.

There’s a shadow standing in the window.

The first thing I notice is the size of the thing: the silhouette is gaunt, skeletal somehow, but unseemly in length, as though a taffy puller hooked it from both ends and yanked, stretched it taut until it was looming, and now it looms over us, waving strangely with long, thin fingers.

And it’s waving. Waving at us, down below on the stage, only something feels wrong about how the shadow is moving — so strange, like it never learned how to gesture, how to say hello, how to be human.

The pinky jerks left, and then the ring and middle and index followed by the thumb, one finger after the other, like a band of marchers in line at a parade. Pinky-ring-middle-index-thumb off to the right, march, march. Left one-two-three-four-five, right one-two-three-four-five.

Hello, I think numbly, and then, in spite of myself, my own hand waves back.