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“Why are you helping me?” I gasped.
“I called Crumley. He said he’s hiding all day in bed. Me, being around half-ass dimwits like you clears my blood and restarts my heart. Watch that flashlight, I might fall.”
“Don’t tempt me.” I bobbed the light.
“I hate to say,” Fritz said, “but you give as good as you get. You’re my tenth bastard, out of Marie Dressler!”
We were higher now, in nosebleed territory.
We reached the top of the second balcony, Fritz raging at the altitude but happy to hear himself rage.
“Explain again,” Fritz said as we continued climbing. “Up here. Then what?”
“Then we go as far down as we’ve come up. Basement mirror names. A glass catacomb.”
“Knock,” said Fritz, at last.
I knocked and the projection room door swung inward on dim lights from two projectors, one lit and working.
I swung my flash beam along the wall and sucked air.
“What?” said Fritz.
“They’re gone!” I said. “The pictures. The walls have been stripped.”
I played my flashlight beam along the empty spaces in dismay. All the dark-room “ghosts” had indeed vanished.
“Goddamn! Jesus! Christ!” I stopped and swore. “My God, I sound like you!”
“My son, my son,” Fritz said, pleased. “Move the light!”
“Quiet.” I inched forward, holding the beam unsteadily on what sat between the projectors.
It was Constance’s father, of course, erect and cold, one hand touching a machine switch.
One projector was running full spin with a reel that looped through the projector lens and down, around, a spiral that repeated images again and again every ten seconds. The small door that could open to let the images shoot down to fill the theater screen was shut, so the images were trapped on the inside of the door, small, but if you bent close and squinted, you could see—
Sally, Dolly, Molly, Holly, Gaily, Nellie, Roby, Sally, Dolly, Molly—around about, on and on.
I studied old man Rattigan, frozen in place, and whether his grimace showed triumph or need, I could not say.
I glanced beyond to those walls now empty of Sally, Dolly, Molly, but whoever had seized them hadn’t figured that the old man, seeing his “family” snatched, had switched on this loop to save the past. Or—
My mind sank.
I heard Betty Kelly’s voice shrieking what Constance had shrieked, Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me. And Quickly recalling, How do I get it back, back, back? Get what back? Her other self?
Did someone do this to you? I thought, standing over the old dead man. Or did you do it to yourself?
The dead man’s white marble eyes were still.
I cut the projector.
All the faces still flowed on my retina, the dancing daughter, the butterfly, the Chinese vamp, the tomboy clown.
“Poor lost soul,” I whispered.
“You know him?” said Fritz.
