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PRAY FOR AGATHA, BURNING IN HELL
The title of the e-mail from
Wiggles Nusbaum was ninety percent exclamation marks, so Bryan thought London
After Midnight must have been discovered, or Wiggles had scored a DVD of The
Day The Clown Cried.
Wiggles Nusbaum (almost
certainly not his real name, but Bryan knew no other) was a video-forum friend
who was obsessed with hard-to-find films.
Wiggles was obsessive; he’d sit through some obscure Norwegian version
of Heidi if it was hard to get.
Anything that had him writing like a sorority girl it was likely a big
effing deal, and thanks to the video underground's relentless barrel-scraping
there just weren't that many big effing deals left.
With his adrenal glands already
kicking in, Bryan opened the email. It read:
DUDE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Whatever you thought you were doing
Thursday...
...CANCEL
IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Then there was a link to a
website. Anticipation growing, Bryan
clicked, and it took him to the bulletin board of a small college in Tennessee,
and a post which read:
THE BELLWORTH COLLEGE FILM CLUB
PRESENTS
Thursday Oct. 22
A midnite
showing of
Pray For Agatha,
Burning In Hell (1971, Color)
Reiger Hall Rm
464 (Auditorium)
Admission Free
But Donations Welcome
"No fucking way,"
Bryan said, sending it to the printer.
He dreaded taking the road trip, but he didn't have much choice. Pray For Agatha, Burning In Hell was
one of those films like The Strange Flesh Of Rosemary Blythe, having a
reputation as one of the scariest films ever made even though almost no one had
seen it and almost nothing was known about it.
It was so hard to track down that there were more rumors of people who'd
seen it than there were about the film itself.
It was easier to find people who'd seen Bigfoot, and they were as often
liars. How had some small-college film
club in Tennessee turned up a copy of a film Bryan only half-believed actually
existed?
He did internet searches for
more info but there was nothing about anybody having turned up a print. That should have been an
earthquake-magnitude event in the horror community, but there was nothing. Wiggles had a radar for that kind of thing
but how had he even spotted the notice?
Did the film club even know what they had on their hands? The posting was so low-key it was almost
comical, like they were just trotting Night of the Living Dead or Carnival
of Souls out for another drag through the projector instead of fucking Pray
For Agatha, Burning In Hell!
Bryan e-mailed Wiggles with a
dozen questions. He thought Wiggles
lived in Portland, but felt certain he'd be flying to Tennessee for this. Provided it was even true. It had to be some kind of mistake.
Bryan had phobias about
traveling alone, but he had to go to this; he almost wished it wasn't
laid in front of him like this because now he'd have to do it, and he didn't
relish the effort. He'd have to miss
two days of work, and wasn't likely to find anyone who'd want to make the trip
with him. He Google-mapped the drive
and printed out maps of Bellworth's campus and even tried to find a floor plan
of Reiger Hall to help him find the auditorium, but there wasn't one.
There was a good bit of other information
online about Reiger Hall, though. And it
was so creepy he forgot about Pray For Agatha for a while.
Reiger, a biology building, was
one of the few old buildings left over from a previous university that had
stood were Bellworth was standing now, and before that it had been a children's
boarding school that had burned in the 1840's and was rebuilt from the gutted
shell. Eighteen children had died in
that fire and many people still thought it should've been pulled down after
that. When they were doing some
renovations in the early 1960's they'd found the mummified, flattened corpse of
a child wedged between a couple of walls, smoke-cured and pressed like a flower
in a book by building shifts. The walls
had squeezed it so flat it was reportedly translucent in spots, like cloudy
amber, and rather than bury it they'd archived it somewhere as a medical
curiosity. Ghost-hunter sites had made
a lot of trips to Reiger and reported all kinds of craziness. Though still in use, the building was
supposedly semi-derelict, always damp and cold and with a basement so
perpetually flooded that they'd just sealed it off. Students claimed there were still anatomical
specimens housed in Reiger, and that a few students had been expelled (and
institutionalized) for making love to one they'd called "Dear Abby"
-- Abby Cadaver -- which they'd claimed "seduced" them.
Bryan supposed that was why they
were showing horror movies there; what
better place? Even if the movie proved
to be the disappointment that forbidden fruit often is, experiencing Reiger
Hall might be worth the trip in and of itself.
Bryan printed out all the info,
intending to include some of it as backstory when he reviewed Pray For
Agatha, Burning In Hell on the film forum.
He'd make a whole narrative of it, because it would certainly be one of
the most widely-read posts in the history of that forum. Horror film buffs obsessed about that movie
the way penitents obsessed over the second coming of Christ.
He checked his e-mail
again. Nothing from Wiggles.
* * *
Two days later, Thursday the
22nd, there was still no reply from Wiggles.
The film club post was still up;
Bryan had been certain that they'd print some retraction, but no. Bryan still felt certain that there was some
kind of mistake. He'd get there and find
out some joker had stuck a Pray For Agatha label on some old
strawberry-vinegar reels of Don't Look In The Basement or Lady
Frankenstein or some other common thing, or retitled some other movie. He was always hearing about how many movies
on the Asian video market were named Voodoo Black Exorcist when none of
them were the real deal. Even when they
had a more-precious rarity like The
Spider's Labyrinth they'd title it Voodoo Black Exorcist.
He'd arranged leave time from
work, though, so he was going, fiasco or not.
Whatever it was, he'd get a good story out of it.
The drive from Alabama was long
and tense, most of it through nowhere-country where if you saw a house at all
you had to wonder what the people in it did for a living. October was already stripping the flesh off
the trees, and the sky looked like dust, crawling overhead, thick and the color
of disappointment. The day had a chill
to it; winter had its teeth in the last of autumn and was gnawing, the warmth
and color bleeding out of the world, dead leaves giving way to the
skeletal. Driving through the lonely
back country he could see it fading, feel the cold they were in for teasing
like a playful uncle you're not comfortable being left alone with.
Watching the world outside the
car windows, he felt even more certain that there was no way he was going to
see Pray For Agatha, Burning In Hell.
All the portents were wrong.
Doom, doom. Damn Wiggles for even sending me here.
He got to Oneda, the town where
Bellworth College was situated, right after nightfall. Knowing his limitations, he'd given himself
plenty of time to get lost. Several
times he'd thought he was on the wrong road but he somehow found the place
anyway, by lucky mistake more than skill.
Oneda was the least collegey-looking of any college town he'd ever been
in, some swept-into-a-corner place, shabby and dead and small, with a weird
scent to it like an old house. He
wondered what they'd study in a half-abandoned river town that offered nothing
that wasn't bleak and cold. It was far
more October here than in the town he'd left.
It was probably October here even in the middle of summer, he thought,
and wondered how students didn't get bored out of their minds. It looked like any other grimy nothing town,
only more so, with lots of empty storefronts.
Half the town was for rent and the other half was starving to
bones. Where were the people?
Bryan stopped at a motel to make
sure he had a room for the night; he didn't want to try driving back to Alabama
in the small hours, especially after seeing a film as notorious as this was
supposed to be. Once that was settled,
he went to a Chinese buffet for dinner.
It was a chain he liked in his town, but this one was cruddy and the
food tasted stale and reheated, and there were fat flies buzzing around. Only three other customers sat in the whole
place, an old couple who looked like they were going to a Halloween party as
the couple from American Gothic, and a morbidly obese guy who had
something disgustingly wrong with one of his eyes; it was bugged out and looked
off in a wrong direction, slowly weeping like it was being shoved out by the
slow emergence of something growing within.
His bristly scalp had wrinkles so deep they looked like they'd
hurt. Bryan wanted to take a picture of
him for the eventual blog post and label it “One of the mutants of Oneda,” but
knew that would be unkind.
For the first time he didn't
make a return pass through the buffet and went back to the motel to kill a few
hours. He'd taken the cheapest place he
could find and it looked like nothing had been upgraded since the 70's, but
that only added to the atmosphere for the film he was there to see. He checked carefully for bedbugs, but the
place seemed clean enough, though worn.
Some bored somebody had taken a knife to the plastic chair in his room,
whittling its edges into saw blades.
The television gave him the last
fifteen minutes of some old horror movie on a local station, and he couldn't
recognize it, which was amazing since he thought he'd seen everything. It was crude and obviously 1970's vintage,
and in it some guy with severe sideburns and sunglasses broke into a house and
killed a hippie and his girlfriend using a hatchet. In the next scene there was a shot of hands
baiting a lobster trap with bits of meat, presumably from the murdered couple,
then tossing it into the sea as the credits started rolling and inappropriately
"beautiful" music played on the soundtrack. Bryan tried to catch a few cast members'
names to look up on IMDB but the station cut the credits off to show some loud
used car commercial with a guy dressed as a chicken, hopefully for
Halloween. Bryan waited for the
station's call letters but they never showed them, instead going into an old
episode of Mannix.
Bryan re-read some of the
information he'd printed out about Pray For Agatha, Burning In Hell, but
it was scant. The longest review was
from a non-horror film preservation site, from a list titled Lost?, and
it didn't have much to offer.
Pray For Agatha, Burning In Hell (1971, Color,
dir: Paul Reed (deceased) - copyright status undetermined, alternate titles
unknown.)
A demonic possession film that predates The Exorcist
(film, not book, although production was finished before the book was
published), this should have been boosted by the excitement that surrounded
Blatty's book, but inept distribution condemned this one to scattered drive-ins
and a few four-wall engagements. Rather
than an innocent young girl, the demon's victim here is an old woman whose
possession is initially blamed on encroaching senility. Instead of being tied to a bed, Agatha is
free to roam and commits various blasphemous atrocities which are remarkably
gory for the time period, and the whole film reportedly has the kind of septic,
more-than-you-bargained-for feel of such films as Maniac or Last
House on Dead End Street, combined with the dreamy early-70's atmosphere
found in Let's Scare Jessica To Death and Messiah of Evil. Claimed by the few who've seen it as perhaps
the most terrifying film they've ever seen and of having definite artistic
merit, as well as a "unique atmosphere." No doubt the distributors of horror
obscurities on DVD would love to track down a print of this one, but so far, no
luck.
Finally, Bryan decided it was
reasonable to set out to find Reiger Hall.
He'd be early, most likely, but gave himself plenty of time-margin for
getting lost. He imagined a small
campus, but he took nothing for granted.
Slouched outside the motel, near
Bryan's car, was a potato man. He wore a
large, long brown coat of no particular shape, muddy-looking like a giant
potato, and his face was like looking into a sack of them -- potato chin,
potato nose, potato cheeks and brows, all with a layer of dusty dirt and
specks, and growths that might be eyes sprouting. Bryan wondered if it could be
acromegaly, but then some people are
just ugly and it's not a disease. Bryan
was alarmed but nodded hello. The man,
apparently a vagrant, didn't respond.
His behavior, too, was potato-like.
As he drove onto campus, he was
glad he'd left early; it was a larger campus than expected, and sprawled and
disorganized, and -- he was surprised -- badly lit. With the fear of bad press from rapes, most
college campuses were lit up like Christmas trees, but not Bellworth College,
where the slogan seemed to be "Get Raped, Who Gives A Shit?" Worried about forgetting where he left his
car, Bryan picked out the most distinctive building he could find -- the
library -- and parked next to it. The
library had a clock tower, which was unusual, but the hands had fallen off the
clock, which made it odd that its face still had spotlights beaming on it. That they maintained, while the
parking lot was like the bottom of a coal mine.
Consulting his campus map, he
saw he'd have a pretty good hike to Reiger Hall, which was situated through a
wooded area near no roads. Unusual, but
it was considered a relic. It was the
official biology building but he wasn't sure Bellworth had much of a biology
program.
There were a few students on
campus at this hour and they all looked a little scary, acting drunk, stumbling
through the corridors of night after some party that had gotten way out of
hand. A crazy-eyed white guy with a
shaved head met him on the sidewalk, openly smoking a very loud-smelling joint. He glared at Bryan with frosty eyes, dragged
hard on the joint, blasted the smoke at him with a loud "Ha-HAH!" and
then kept walking. Bryan thought of
asking for directions to Reiger but decided he wasn't a good guy to ask.
A couple were sitting on a bench
in front of a grimy statue of some college founder.
The guy's face was buried in the girl's neck, his hand down the front of
her pants, digging. She stared at Bryan
with a wide-mouthed-and-sleepy-eyed smile and waggled come-here fingers at him,
then witchy-laughed when he kept walking.
Stoned out of her mind, Bryan thought, wishing he'd snapped a picture
with his phone but not about to go back.
Buildings hulked around him in
the dark. Occasionally there were
lighted windows and he wondered what was going on in those rooms. He stopped under a working lampost (one of
the few; someone had gone on a breaking spree recently, and glass was still
scattered under them) and studied his map, trying to figure out where he
was. Things didn't seem to match up,
though. He felt sure he was going in the
right direction but was lost just the same.
He tried stopping a girl to ask
directions but she walked past him, ignoring him completely. He didn't blame her, a lone girl on this
sleazy dark campus. He stopped a guy
under one of the lights, a bald guy with a large, shiny, plastic-looking head
with a few clipped hairs on it; it looked like something manufactured but
dusty. The guy listened to him with a
stare as he explained what he was looking for, but then stood there, offering
no response but a slight smile. Bryan
finally rushed away from him, unnerved.
Behind him the guy still stood, smirking at nothing.
The clouded moon was high, like
a coin dropped in muddy water, offering muted light. He saw a short, squat figure ahead of him and
thought about trying to ask for directions again, but it ducked behind a
tree. The tree's limbs clawed at the
sky, its trunk warty and swollen with fungus;
there was a sour smell of disease there, possibly from the fungus,
possibly from whoever was hiding behind the trunk. Bryan didn't like someone he didn't know
playing hide-and-seek with him in the dark, but heard them giggling, so low it
was an impression as much as a sound. He
hurried past.
Who needs a horror movie with
a campus like this? he thought. He'd
already had a trip through the funhouse, and this movie better be legit and it
better live up to the hype, because he was going to already have nightmares
just from getting to it. And even if he
turned back now he wasn't sure he'd be able to find his car again; the layout
of the campus made no sense. He looked
back, trying to find the library's clock tower but there was nothing; maybe
they'd turned off the spotlights and it was lost in the darkness, or maybe he'd
already wandered too far away. Maybe he
wasn't even looking in the right direction.
Nothing behind him looked familiar, though he'd certainly passed it all. Mostly there was just a vast blackness, night
wrapped in night.
He wandered the sidewalk for
another ten minutes or so, feeling time creeping up on him; it was good he'd
left so early, but would even that be early enough for this labyrinth?
He entered a copse of trees and
was swallowed by darkness, barely able to make out the lighter stripe of sidewalk
in the gloom. Glass from a shattered
streetlamp crunched under his feet and he cursed whoever had thrown the
rocks. Off to the right he sensed more
than saw a presence, a shape sitting on a bench, maybe a person, maybe
not. Experimentally he said,
"Hello?"
"Hi?" said a whispery
voice. Female, equally cautious, maybe
mocking.
"I wonder if you can help
me," he said.
"I don't know," said
the voice. Dry, husky.
"Um... I'm trying to get to
a movie a film club's supposed to be showing.
Can you help me find Reiger Hall?"
"Reiger? Yes, I'm from Reiger." The shape stood up and joined him and they
walked through the darkness.
"Is it far?"
"No, it's close. Just over this way. You probably would have found it if you kept
walking."
"I don't know, I've been
looking all over. I can't make sense out
of this campus."
She laughed quietly. "I know what you mean. It was designed by a crazy man, I
think."
They stepped into the light and
the girl alarmed him, she was so thin, a final-stage something, not a thing
that should be walking. Surely she was
anorexic, in need of someone's help. Her
hair was dark and lank and her face was all gloomy dark eyes, remarkably large,
black like there was nothing but pupil, gleaming wet like oil. Still, she was the first helpful person he'd
met here. "I appreciate this, I've
been fumbling around. I came up here
from Alabama and really have no idea where I am at this point. I asked a few people for help but they've
all been... I don't know, I guess they've been partying."
She laughed, quietly again,
everything about her was quiet. She
seemed barely there. "People are
strange here."
"Yeah, I'll say," he
laughed.
"No offense taken,"
she said, with a sly little smile that gave her a different face, an oddly
attractive one.
"Certainly none
intended," he laughed. "You've
been very kind. My name's Bryan, by the
way."
"Abigail," she said,
then pointed. "There's Reiger. See the big ugly building?"
He followed the line of her
near-fleshless hand and yes, there it was, he recognized it from the website,
although it looked much worse in the dark, a looming derelict, ominous in the
night. Surely no one was still allowed
in that monstrosity! But he did see dim
lights in some upper windows.
"Wow! What a wreck. They let people in there? Is that really where they show movies?"
"Oh yeah, they do
that," Abigail said. "Have
fun." She turned and passed back
into the darkness, fading.
"Thank you! Hey, would you like to come to the film with
me?" She was creepy, but better
than no company at all.
"Seen it!" she said,
then laughed and was gone, back into the night.
He was alone again, faced with the madness of going into... that. That thing.
"It's Pray For Agatha,
Burning In Hell," he reminded himself under his breath. "Or it fucking well better
be." It wouldn't even start for
nearly an hour and it was already the scariest movie he'd ever seen. Admission free, hell. It wasn't money, but he was paying.
He climbed worn steps to a heavy
black door and stepped inside. The place
was dim, half the lights out and others flickering and fizzling, and Bryan got
the feeling he wasn't supposed to be in here.
Surely this wasn't a functioning building in a college that was still
open for business. No maintenance crew
would ever allow the lighting to reach such a state, and no janitors the amount
of litter. The end of the hall was
completely black, punctuated by one lighted window in a door near the end, so tiny it made the
hallway seem to stretch for miles.
Looking down that dark hallway
he wondered if he should go on at all.
He wasn't in the right place, and he might get arrested for even being
in this building. The whole internet
posting must have been a prank, bait laid out to lure some film geeks into a
place they shouldn't be.
But he heard the ceiling
creaking from footsteps above. Someone was here. He had a printout of the bulletin board
posting in his coat, he could show it to a security guard if he got caught
here. He was innocent, invited by the
guilty.
He wandered down the hall,
squinting in the dimness, wishing he had a flashlight. On a column near a door labeled
"STAIRWAY" was taped a piece of paper with "MOVIE,
MIDNITE!" scrawled on it, with an arrow pointing up around the word
"AUDITORIUM, RM 464." Beside
it was drawn a winking smiley face and a disembodied hand holding a bunch of
balloons. That made little sense, but
it said "movie" at least, which gave him a little confidence. He went into the stairwell.
The light there was flickering
like crazy, and Bryan remembered what he'd read about the basement of Reiger
being flooded and sealed off. Maybe that
was why the power was shorting out? The
whole thing seemed ridiculously dangerous.
There was a rusty smell to the place, probably due to the bricked-up
basement below, swampy and iron like breathing through a bloody nose. As he mounted the stairs he could hear
twangs and creaks echoing up the well like the whole place was tuning up.
Someone crazy for clowns had
done a lot of painting in the stairwell, covering the walls from the second
story on up. Their enthusiasm was not
matched by their skill; the proportions
were all wrong. Here was a hand bigger
than its torso, a smile that stretched beyond the border of the face and hung
in the air, an extra eye, crazy acid-pleasing colors, clowns far more of
madness than of glee. They hurt Bryan's
head and the stairs were so dark he could only make out the suggestions of more
in the corners, furtive, skulking clowns in the dark. Reiger had once been a children's school
until the fire in the 1840s (he remembered the body found between the walls,
flattened like one of these horrible clowns) and he wondered if these paintings
were some twisted tribute to them. He'd
like to count them and compare it to the number of dead children. Eighteen, hadn't it been? There seemed more clowns than that. And daisies.
Someone had certainly had a thing for those, too. On the way back out he'd be sure to take
pictures of all this madness, because otherwise no one would believe it.
There was a lot of litter on the
stairs. A shred of an old essay cover
bore the scrawl "Why Man Will Never Land On The Moon." It had gotten a B+. Surely it was a joke, planted there.
What a funhouse, all caked with
age. The building felt starved, and he
had the sense of being digested as he moved through it. It was a horrible feeling, the night
squeezing and absorbing him, making him a part of all this lunacy. And the stairs made him nauseous; they seemed hung slightly off kilter,
disturbing his inner ear, the creation of a psychotic architect with a grudge
against the human race. If you even
tried to describe it you'd end up babbling, and he wondered how he'd type it up
for the blog. Grime clung in every crack
like the folds in some workman's unwashed hands, waiting to clap shut on
him. The stairwell echoed like
fingernails inside a coffin. God, did
the stairs ever end? Up and up and up,
stairway to heaven. How high up could
the fourth floor be? He passed the door
to the third and it was chained shut and padlocked, the window in the door
showing lights out. Someone was there,
though; he could hear them through the door, yelling far down the hall. Jesus.
The building was almost worn
out, but by what awful people? Who would
ever work here? What kind of minds could
be grown in this environment?
Mushrooms. They would clot up and
sour like forgotten milk.
There was a window to the
outside and Bryan rested next to it for a moment, taking in the campus in the
moonlight. It looked like one big crime
scene, some foul gutter too long untended.
He'd never hated any place so much.
Somewhere in this building were other people and he wasn't sure he
wanted to meet them because he was an idiot for even visiting here, so what
must they be? Maybe this dim,
flickering lighting suited them, maybe they appreciated the clowns on the wall. Worse, maybe they painted them. An artist colony, a clown-cult, infesting
this rancid shell, gone mad expressing loonietoon creative impulses better off
repressed. Hang their works in a museum
and then turn out the lights so they could be enjoyed properly.
Above him the stairs went
completely dark. He gripped the bannister
and kept climbing, determined. He'd been
through all of this, he'd see his damned movie, yes he would, and then he'd
never stop bragging.
The stairs seemed to go much
higher than the building, but he finally reached the fourth floor. Its door was marked by a lit window, cracked
chickenwire glass. He pushed it open. A guy was sitting at a chair with an
attached desk beside the door and looked up at him. "Hi," Bryan said. "Are you with the film club?"
The guy laughed. "Nope!"
"Oh, I thought maybe you
were doing tickets or something. They're
showing a movie here, right?"
The guy shrugged. "Could be. They do that sometime. Some weirdoes show them. Crazy shit." He shook his head, laughing, like showing
movies was an absurdity unfathomable.
Bryan checked his watch. Almost half an hour before midnight. Time to kill. He noticed a tattoo on the guy's forearm,
really beautiful art, a gorgeous girl with long hair flowing over her, hiding
nudity. It was a relief to see good art
after all the clowns crowding the stairwell.
"I like your tattoo. That's
some great art," Bryan said.
The guy grinned wider. "Thanks.
Saved up a long time for that. I
just want somebody to be there when I die, y'know?"
Bryan hoped he wasn't making the
face he felt he might be making.
"Yeah, I guess."
"Be my luck to die 'cuz I
get my arm chopped off!" the guy said, then barked a laugh too loud for
the building.
"Well, that'd suck,"
Bryan said, forcing a companionable chuckle.
"Tell me about it! You know how it is, though, girls always
leave ya."
"Well, I hope not that
one."
"That's the
idea." He tapped his arm. "She's trapped in there. Like me."
"Um... the auditorium is
on this floor, right? It's room
four-sixty-four, I figured that meant fourth floor."
"Oh yeah, it's off down the
hall there." He waved a hand. "Probably where they're showing your
movie, huh?"
"Supposed to be. Well, thanks, huh?"
"No problem." The guy sat grinning at him. Feeling awkward, like he hadn't sufficiently
closed the conversation, Bryan headed down the hall.
Off to the right was a door
whose pebbled glass window read DISSECTION LAB.
The lights were off in there but there was crazy giggling coming from
behind the door, like drunks doing something naughty. Bryan got a chill and turned to look back at
the tattooed guy at the desk. He was
still turned in his seat, staring at Bryan with a wide smile.
"Shit," Bryan
whispered and kept walking. The lights
were dimmed by fixtures stuffed full of old moth corpses, light filtered yellow
through dusty death. The floor was
arithmetic made of limbs of roaches, mingled with hair, very unseemly for a
building full of biology labs.
Here he was, in a building with
a history of mass child-death, mummification, necrophilia, to watch one of the
scariest films ever made. None of it
felt real yet he wasn't dreaming. And
there were madmen laughing in the rooms where they kept the cadavers, and
running around screaming on closed-off dark floors. The guy at the desk was probably still
grinning at his back, and if he turned he'd see it. Why not?
Laugh at me, wanting to watch a scary midnight movie when so much worse
was going on, a joke I’m not in on.
He found the auditorium to his
left, a small one but impressive, angling downward perhaps a bit too steeply,
so all the seats had a good view of the stage, which was so small he doubted
they used it for plays. Lectures, more
likely. Being a biology building it may
have seen a dissection or two. Ol' Abby
Cadaver. The room was chilly enough to
keep the dead happy.
The film club had hung an old
bedsheet up for a screen, nailed to a board at the bottom to make sure it hung
flat. A film club without access to a
real screen? A piece of cardboard
(slashed from an old FedEx box, Bryan noticed -- the rest of the box had been
thrown into a corner) was propped on an easel, and someone had smeared it in
what looked convincingly like blood, spelling out "PRAY FOR AGATHA BURNING
IN HELL!" above a smudged pentagram, and a smaller word,
"Damnit!" Well, that was a
good sign, ha ha, Bryan thought.
Midnight was approaching and the
only other person in the auditorium was one guy sitting in the back corner
across the room, in a spot so dim Bryan could hardly make him out. He was hunched up in his seat, and Bryan
thought of the potato man he'd seen back at the motel. They grew them in the dark here. Couldn't be him, though. The shape twitched, apparently aware it was
being looked at and not liking it. It
made a noise like the greeting of someone so drunk the consonants wouldn't
stick to his tongue and all that was left were the vowels, this big slurry of
sound like you'd taken something away from a halfwit. "Aaaa oo eeee!" A chill crawled through Bryan and settled in
his chest.
"Here for the
movie?" Bryan asked, just to
acknowledge the attempt at communication.
The guy gathered himself in his
seat with an angry snuffle, and Bryan waved and turned back around in his seat,
thinking why should the night start being normal now? He was already writing his blog post in
his head, deciding he'd use artistic license to turn that guy into something
put together by the drunks in the anatomy lab.
Why not? It was Halloween, after
all. The review of Pray For Agatha
could turn out to be the shortest (and least frightening) part of his post.
Provided they ever actually
showed it, that was. The time crept up
past midnight. Another guy, thin and
tall and with a weird waxy smile on his face, dressed too formally, came in and
Bryan thought maybe he was from the film club but he took a seat on the other
side of the room and sat straight and stiff, still smiling like something wrong
with his face was forcing him to do it.
Bryan glanced over at him a few times and the guy never moved. If he hadn't seen him come in he'd think he
was a propped-up mannequin. The shape in
the back corner fidgeted as if itchy.
It was twelve-fifteen and Bryan
wondered if the film club as just waiting to see if some stragglers were going
to show up, or if something was wrong.
It'd be his luck if the last print of Pray For Agatha in
existence got eaten by the projector. This
isn't going to happen, Bryan thought.
All this creepy shit and then no movie.
Then, sometime around 12:30 the
lights suddenly snapped out.
Approximately a minute later the screen lit up with a loud
crackle like a strong wind catching wet canvas. Green scratch-lines raced over a black
background and the warped chords of an acoustic guitar started, and adrenalin
surged through Bryan, jolting him alert.
This was it.
The scratches continued in the
dark as the most morbid blues song he'd ever heard started crackling on the
soundtrack, hideously bent chords shoving each other aside to escape busted
speakers. He wondered if the condition
of the soundtrack was warping the music or if the guy playing was just that
evil with talent. Screech and thunk,
like something coming up from the ground.
The screen slowly lit up to show
a fat black spider on a web gleaming in the sun. It brightened, then gradually darkened, and
the lines in the web melded perfectly into the wrinkles around an eye where the
spider had been. It was a hell of a
shot and Bryan already knew he was looking at art. In the lower left corner under the eye red
words faded in, PRAY FOR AGATHA BURNING IN HELL, as the soundtrack grew louder,
louder, louder, a harsh sound between an ambulance siren and the buzzing of
flies. Too loud, it alarmed him.
The print had gone slightly pink
and vinegar-splotched and was full of scratches and jumps but it was still
sharp, showing an old woman -- presumably Agatha -- with a dead stare and wild
white hair trudging through a forest at what looked like early morning. In the surrounding woods Bryan could see
smoking figures writhing in the brush, more suggested than seen. A close-up showed her bare feet stepping
through the mud. The camera lingered on
the footprints long enough to show him the mud was full of teeth and hair. Charred feathers hung in the weeds.
The blues song tumbled along,
the most ominous music he'd ever heard, and the camera focused on Agatha's
face. He didn't feel like he was looking
at an actress, but some terminal patient stolen from a hospice and
exploited. Her stare was senile,
senseless, flesh swollen and loose on her face, wobbling with each step like it
might drop off. If she wasn't sick then
she was already dead and being animated.
Nothing had really happened yet and Bryan already felt like he was
watching something he shouldn't.
He noticed no other credits were
following the title. The 70's were
weird, so maybe they were saving them all for the end. It made the whole thing look even more like
some kind of snuff product, cheap porno-film sleaziness, but already
undoubtedly more artistic than the usual.
Bryan was staring, trying to absorb every detail, every second, knowing
he might never get to see this thing again.
On the soundtrack vocals joined the guitar but they were inarticulate,
chuckling, drunken raspy mumbles, too creepy to stand.
Agatha trudged along through the
foggy woods. She was clutching a package
wrapped in rags. A swirling shot showed
a tall tower rising above the trees, an abandoned chapel in the mist. The camera pointed up and turned
dizzily. An establishing shot over
Agatha's shoulder showed the tower again in the distance, and the camera zoomed
on a window at its peak.
Then there was a shot of an old
black man grinning in the darkness, plucking at a guitar. Its wood was scarred and scorched, and his
teeth were silver and so, it appeared, were his eyes. He bent the strings and the sound was cold,
severe, deep as a train moving through the three-a.m. distance, chords
throbbing like draining blood. He
mumbled and nodded, voice like the stirring of dried leaves. Roaches scurried in and out of his guitar as
he plucked it. In close-up he laughed
and a couple of roaches rushed out of his mouth.
Jesus, Bryan
thought. No special effect, the guy'd
just held some live roaches in his mouth.
How they'd made his eyes silver was harder to guess, unless he was
eyeless and they'd tucked a couple of pinballs in the sockets.
This, Bryan knew, was the
devil. They ddin't need to use any cheap
horns or makeup to make this man look demonic.
He was a crossroads Satan, calling his servant through the woods.
Agatha trudged along. The package she was carrying squirmed.
Bryan already felt full of dread
and the film was only three or four minutes old.
There was a sudden cut to a man
and woman in an office, both dressed in 1970's polyester. The guy's hair was longish and he had a silly
mustache, and the woman's hair was straight, long, and blonde. Her pants suit looked like it was made out of
motel-room curtains. "You're sure
she's nowhere?" he asked.
"Nowhere in the
hospital," the woman said.
"We've looked everywhere."
The man shook his head. "I don't see how she could have gotten
anywhere. She's terminal. I'd have bet she couldn't even climb out of
bed. And even if she could walk around,
her mind is gone. She hasn't done
anything in the past couple of weeks except giggle."
The woman shuddered,
remembering.
"She couldn't have found
her way out of the hospital," the man's voice continued on the soundtrack
as the camera prowled the halls of a hospital.
It showed little details, surgical implements, doors with numbers, a few
smeared blood drops on white tiles. A
maternity ward. It panned over babies and settled meaningfully on an empty crib
before cutting back to Agatha walking along.
“I don’t know how she could even find the door to her room, the state
her mind is in. She wasn’t even here
when she was here. She’s nowhere.”
Nowhere, nowhere echoed on the soundtrack, over a close-up. Agatha’s dead eyes and a thin wet smile. Her mouth moved with muttering. The blues chords were gone and there were
only early morning birds and late-night insect sounds giving way to each
other. The film jumped and scratches
obliterated the picture for second, like the print had been attacked by a
cat. A clot of dust caught in the corner
of the screen, then sped away.
Agatha reached the ruined
chapel. More pale shapes writhed at the
edges of the frame, and more burnt feathers drifted through low-hanging tree
limbs that tore at her hair. A close-up
showed a live mouse tangled in it, and Agatha looked directly into the camera,
eyes feverish. She smiled and Bryan
squirmed in his seat and gasped as the camera held the shot too long. He felt stupid, but this film was getting to
him already.
There were more shots of rooms
in the hospital, nurses searching, one running and screaming soundlessly, then
back to Agatha walking into the chapel.
It was cluttered with dead leaves, and a close-up showed Agatha's muddy
feet stepping on shards of stained glass and leaving smears of blood in their
wake. Flashes of the hospital intercut
with the chapel.
The film crackled harshly and jumped
and Agatha was on a stairwell. A few
more seconds missing and she was higher.
The stairwell wound upward, dimly lit.
There was graffiti on the walls.
The film popped and jumped, threatening to derail.
Crickets and roaches scrambled
away from Agatha's bleeding feet on the stairs as she climbed. Worms and larvae fell from her, twisting on
the stairs as she passed.
More shots of her walking and
Bryan looked at the stuff painted on the walls.
Crazy stuff, words that made no sense, letters backwards, in impossible
order.
He saw daisies on the wall in
the background, then a clown. Its hand
was bigger than its torso and its smile hung past the borders of its face.
Bryan frowned. He wished this was a DVD so he could back it
up and make sure he'd seen what he thought he saw.
Was there some cult built around
this film, so people had copied images from it on the stairwell of Reiger Hall?
He glanced around the
auditorium. The stiff guy was still
sitting motionless, and it was too dark to tell if the one in the back corner
was there at all. Another couple of
people had joined them since the film started, he saw, but the room was too
dark to make out anything about them, just presences in the seats. He wished he knew someone here.
Agatha climbed further past more
clowns painted on the walls. There was a
quick shot of Agatha's blankly smiling face and then a flash of a face with
seven eyes, all moving. It looked real
and Bryan wished he could get a better look at it but it was gone in the dark.
Agatha reached the summit of the
tower and set the writhing bundle down, then fumbled in her gown, laughing
soundlessly. A few blues chords came
back. She pulled out an ugly-looking
little knife and there was a shot out the tower window of the misty woods, full
of furtive movements. Agatha's hands,
like gloves pulled over bones, trembled as they opened the bundle's cloth and
the soundtrack screamed an amplified hiss as it opened, but the film cut
to Agatha's eyes, looking down, before the contents were shown. She stared down, trembling, doing something
with her hands as the hiss got even louder, malevolence made audible.
Then the film was out on a
sunlit street and for the next ten minutes or so it followed a young woman
through a city. She went into an office
where she and a man behind the desk discussed a murder her grandmother Agatha
had been involved in. The girl argued
that her grandmother couldn't possibly have chopped someone up with a hatchet
when she didn't have enough mental capacity left to even make her own lunch. Besides, she’d always been a kind, sweet
woman, she couldn’t have done such a thing even if she were physically able. The man told her Agatha needed to be
institutionalized anyway, so exonerating her would make little difference to
her fate... but her bloody fingerprints were found all over the scene and bite
marks on the body matched her teeth and the victim's blood was on her clothes,
her arms were covered with scratches and bruises, and one of his eyes and some of his teeth had
been found in her pocket. But her
grandmother was a frail old woman, the girl argued, there was no way she'd be
able to do to human anatomy what had been done to the dead man. Surely someone had framed her. The man suggested that, if so, whoever had
done the framing did such a good job that the must've found a way to use her
body to do the killing. A song full of
laughing played after he said that.
The girl, looking upset, drove
around some more and went into an old bookshop and talked to a creepy old man
who told her that sometimes when a mind stops using a body it leaves space for
another to move in, take over. Demons
and spirits, he said, were desperate to get into our world, and they'd find any
body not sufficiently occupied and swarm into it, like people rushing into a
building to escape the rain. “You are
not looking for your grandmother,” he said.
“Your grandmother is gone. You
are looking for a hoarde.”
Then there was a shot of Agatha
laughing in the dark, demented and squealing, blood around her mouth, chewing. She crawled off into a shadow and the film
was darkness and hissing laughter for longer than Bryan was comfortable with
enduring.
Back to the girl, who was
driving into a sunset, listening to radio reports of crimes, civil unrest, and
the war in Vietnam. Around her the town
grew dark. Bryan was impressed with the
cinematography and composition, showing the sunset, the long shadows, dusk
coming down, lights in houses coming on.
Even without music on the soundtrack the sense of building dread was
clear and strong. When night fell even
worse things would happen.
The camera prowled through the
woods, emerged into a back yard, and headed for the lights of a house.
Back to another scene with the
young woman in a kitchen, preparing dinner.
There was a knock at the door.
She answered and it was the police, reporting that her grandmother had
escaped from the hospital and had stolen a baby. The young woman was very upset and promised
to alert them immediately if she heard from her grandmother, and said she
didn't see how any of this was possible, her grandmother was frail to the point
of dying.
The inside of a dimly-lit
house. Flickering TV light, a television
laugh track was going in the background.
There was blood all over the floor.
A child's hand stuck past the edge of the screen. Bloody.
The camera drew close, showing white hairs tangled in the fingers. The TV audience laughed.
The camera followed a giggling
Agatha down the hallway. In one hand was
a knife, in the other a hammer. A shot
of her face showed a bloody grin, her eyes moving independently of each other. The screen faded into different colors, 70's
psychedelic effects, urgent whispering on the soundtrack, things Bryan could
almost make out but not quite. She went
into a bedroom where a couple already lay dead in a blood-soaked bed. There was a shot of the man's bloody, staring
face. She fitted the claw end of the
hammer into his mouth, and the film cut away to a shot of a police car driving
down a dark street, sirens and lights going, the red lights superimposed over
blood pouring over a pillowcase as the siren grew too loud and warped.
Bryan couldn't believe this film
had gone unseen. He planned to find the
president of the film club, find out who owned the print, and work out some
kind of DVD release. He had little
knowledge of how to go about such a thing, but even with the film in
less-than-perfect shape, someone could make a fortune off of this. It had an atmosphere he'd never encountered
before, and it was working on him. It
had been a long time since a film had actually scared him; this one was doing it. He felt half-here, half-not, trapped in a
dream.
He glanced around the room. Everyone else was gone, except the guy with
the rigored smile, who was now sitting in a different seat, still unmoving,
like a prop. Bryan frowned; he hadn't
heard any movement. And why had the guy
changed seats? He still couldn't see
into the back corner to see if the first guy was still there. He supposed the film's vibe was too intense
for the others. It was almost too
intense for him.
There was a blurred shot of what
looked like a bunch of raw meat, and Agatha, her eyes and teeth gone silver,
suddenly vomiting live mice. He wasn't
sure how they did the special effect but it was particularly repulsive. The director -- Paul Reed, wasn't it? -- must have had some severe issues mixed in
with his genius. Bryan had never seen a
film with a feel like this one. It was
overwhelming, immersive.
Psychedelic lights swirled.
Agatha's body, swollen, burst
open and spilled larvae from within, a maggot bloom, and she stumbled through
the house, spilling them. They writhed
everywhere. A shot of a white wall veined
with blood splatter cut to a close-up of her bloodshot eye, blank with
madness. Flashes of bodies undulating in
a forest, some smoking. One looked
exactly like the potato man who'd been outside the motel, exactly, and Bryan
was confused. Had some film cultist
planned that, too, like the clowns in the stairwell? Early trick-or-treating as The Potato Man?
Agatha's point of view,
hallucination. Dark neighborhood, the
camera prowling through it on a tilt.
Colors flashed. Lights strobed
over wide eyes, bared teeth. The soundtrack
hissed, laughed, squealed, forward, backward.
Bryan felt cold, dizzy, manipulated.
There was a scene with the
police discussing where "the senile old bitch" could possibly
be. "I'm almost afraid to find that
baby. Jesus," one of them
said. Then the police radio reported a
human arm found in the street in Meadowbrook neighborhood. The police, faces grim, turned on their
lights.
A dimly lit scene of some place
where reflections coming off of water swam marbled upon slimy walls and the
slow slosh of Agatha -- just a black shape in a deeper blackness -- wading
through water. Some flooded Hell, Bryan
supposed, one of the circles. Roaches
scuttled in masses through what little light there was, and the water-light
showed the walls were practically living.
God, how had they filmed
this? There was no CGI back
then. They'd asked a lot of this
actress.
Agatha was climbing stairs
again. Crazy things were painted on the
walls, clowns and smiles and daisies, and Bryan stared at them, trying to make
them out and memorize them. He'd take
another look at the graffiti in Reiger Hall's stairwell on the way out, while
he took pictures with his phone. Someone
had definitely been inspired by this film, and maybe some time ago, because the
graffiti in Reiger's stairwell looked old.
Had Paul Reed gone to this college?
Maybe that's why they had a print of the film when no one else did.
Or had it been filmed in
Reiger's stairwell, perhaps? It looked
familiar.
Bryan felt things crawling on
him and he jumped and swatted at himself.
He felt wet little globs, like cold lumps of fat. He couldn't see what they were in the dark,
but he felt sick at their touch. He
looked around the auditorium, and the waxy smiling guy was still there but now
he had his back to the screen.
"What the fuck?" Bryan
whispered.
He looked back to the screen and
got a glimpse of what looked like his own face.
He sat back down and stared,
feeling something had gone very wrong.
The screen was flickering, dim flashes of a room, and a man sitting in
it. He couldn't make out the man's face
but stared at it, blood singing in his ears.
Flashes of light showed him features he'd seen in the mirror.
Am I asleep? Bryan
thought. I must be dreaming. I should leave. I can't.
More things were crawling on
him and he tried to brush them away. The
soundtrack played the laughing song again.
Something was coming through the
darkness on the screen behind the man, becoming gradually visible in the
darkness like a corpse rising from the bed of a muddy river. Terror seized Bryan like a cold fist and
squeezed so he couldn’t move.
He smelled her before she
appeared on the screen, soured like something clogging an old drain, swampy
reek of ferment and bloat, rusty and wet from the basement, and he was choking
on the stench before he felt her nails in his neck and the film went black and
ripped with a great crackle it bubbled and melted and the squirming was all
over and everything was bright then black and then he wasn't there to see it.
Pray for Bryan, burning in Hell.
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