The Hundred-Year Matinee

The House of a Hundred Secrets

The Halcyon smelled like butter and a hundred years of secrets, and I was the only one who seemed to notice the second part.

Dad noticed the rain. He noticed the parking brake, which screamed, and the wipers, which smeared. He noticed the marquee — three stories of dead bulbs spelling HALC ON, because the Y had given up sometime around when I was born — and he said, "Well," in the voice he used when there was nothing else to say.

I kept a list in my head. I keep lists. It is the one thing about me that is reliably true.

Reasons This Is Fine:

1. We have somewhere to live.
2. It is rent-free, because Nana owns it.
3. There is a roof.

Reasons This Is Not Fine:

1. The roof is the kind that drips into a bucket. (I could hear it through the car window. Plink. Plink-plink.)
2. This is the eleventh place I have lived in eleven years, which works out to exactly one home per birthday, which is not a streak anyone brags about.
3. By Friday, the kids at Pell Harbor Middle will have learned my name and forgotten it, in that order, in under a minute. I have timed this. The record is forty seconds.

That last one didn't go on any paper. I'm careful about what I write down. Some things, once you write them, become real.

"You ready, Wren?" Dad asked, and didn't wait, which was how I knew he was tired clear down to the bone. He hadn't actually looked at me since Toledo.

The Halcyon Picture Palace had been beautiful once. You could tell the way you can tell with old people in photographs — the bones were still there under the wreck. Carved stone birds dove down the front of it. The doors were brass gone green, big as a church's, and over them, half-swallowed by ivy, a single shape was set into the stone: a bird mid-dive, beak first, wings folded back like it meant it.

A kingfisher. I didn't know that yet. I knew it later than I should have.

Nana Ada opened the door before we knocked, which meant she'd been watching for us, which she would deny.

"You're thin," she said to Dad. To me she said nothing, but she put one warm dry hand on the top of my head, just for a second, like she was checking I was the right size. Then she turned and walked into the dark, and we followed, because that is what you do with Nana. You follow, or you get left in the lobby.

The lobby ate sound. Our footsteps went up into a ceiling I couldn't see and didn't come back. Everything was red and gold and dust — a carpet worn pale down the middle where a million feet had walked to the movies and home again, a staircase that split in two and swept up both sides like the theater was offering you its arms.

"It opened in 1925," Nana said, not slowing down. "Grand as anything between Chicago and Detroit. Folks came in from three counties." She pointed up without looking. "Your grandfather loved that dome."

I looked up.

The whole ceiling was a sky. Painted blue going to gold at the edges, and across it, birds — dozens of them, a hundred maybe, every kind, painted so fine you could see the separate feathers. Herons. Swallows. Geese in a long gray V. They all flew the same direction, toward the front, toward the screen, like even the painted birds had bought a ticket.

"My husband's mother painted those," Nana said. No. She caught herself. "Not his mother. Before. A long time before." She frowned at the dome like it had interrupted her. "A woman named Rosa, the story goes."

I counted nine birds before my neck hurt. Here is the thing I noticed, because noticing the thing nobody else does is the only talent I have ever had:

They all flew one way. All of them. Except one.

Down near the curve of the dome, half in shadow, there was a single small bird painted facing the wrong direction — a stubby, bright, blue-and-orange thing, beak out, diving the opposite way from every other bird in the sky. The same shape as the one carved over the doors.

I opened my mouth to say so.

"Come on," Nana said, and the moment closed.

She showed us the auditorium next — rows and rows of velvet seats folding down into the dark, a thousand of them, the screen a tall pale ghost at the far end. She showed us the organ, and her voice changed when she did, went soft at the corners. It sat to one side of the stage, gold pipes climbing the wall behind it like a frozen waterfall.

"A Mighty Wurlitzer," she said. "It played the movies, back when movies had no sound. One man down here could make a whole orchestra. Thunder. Birdsong. A galloping horse." She touched the wood, light. "It hasn't made a sound in years. Nobody left who can wake it."

In the lobby on the way back stood a clock — a big standing one, brass face, taller than Dad. The hands had stopped. I checked. They always tell you a stopped clock is right twice a day, but this one looked permanently, deliberately wrong, frozen at thirteen minutes past nine.

"Does it need winding?" I asked. First thing I'd said inside the building.

Nana looked at the clock a long second. "It's stopped at that time as long as I've known the place," she said. "Your grandfather wouldn't have it fixed. Said the Halcyon could keep its own hours." She moved on before I could ask the obvious question, which is the kind of answer that is really a door, shut.

She saved two things for last.

The first was high overhead, where the stairs gave up and a ladder took over. "Bell's up in the tower," she said. "Bronze. Big as a bathtub. They rang it to call the town to the pictures, once upon a time. Pigeons have it now." Somewhere far above us, as if it had heard, something cooed and shuffled. "Don't go up there. The ladder's older than I am and twice as nasty."

The second thing she walked us right up to. On the stage, alone in all that empty dark, stood a thin metal pole on a stand, and at the top of it burned a single bare lightbulb. Just one. Plain as a kitchen. It threw a small warm circle on the boards and gave up the rest of the stage to shadow.

"That's the ghost light," Nana said.

I waited for the joke. There wasn't one.

"Every theater keeps one. You light it on the empty stage when everyone's gone home, so the place is never fully dark." She looked at it the way she'd looked at the organ. "Your grandfather lit it every single night for forty years. Last thing before bed. To keep the place company, he said." A breath. "I light it now."

"Company for what?" I asked.

Nana didn't answer that one either. She just reached over and squeezed my shoulder, hard, once, and her eyes were wet and she pretended they weren't, and then she went to show Dad where the leak was so they could fight about money quietly, the way grown-ups think children can't hear.

Which left me alone in the auditorium.

I sat down. Not for any reason. There was a seat at the end of a row and the little brass number screwed to it said 100, and my legs were tired from the drive, so I sat in seat one hundred in the dark, and I took out my notebook — the real one, the paper one, my list-keeper — and I clicked my pen and I wrote nothing, because for once I didn't know which list this went on.

That was when I smelled the popcorn.

Fresh. Hot. Buttered. Drifting down the dark rows like somebody three seats over had just torn open a bag — except the snack counter was dead and cold and a hundred years from its last kernel, and nobody had made popcorn in this building since before I was born.

Outside, faint through the walls, I heard a sound like dominoes. Clack. Clack-clack. Clack. The marquee letters. Rearranging themselves in the rain.

I stood up. The notebook slid off my lap and hit the floor.

And then — though I hadn't touched a single switch, though I didn't even know where the switches were — a spotlight high in the dark snapped on with a heavy electric thunk and swung down through the dust and pinned me where I stood, blind, lit up, the only bright thing in a thousand empty seats.

A voice rang out from the black of the balcony above me. A boy's voice, delighted, ringing, like he'd been waiting a very long time for an audience and could not believe his luck.

"TITLE CARD — A STRANGER ARRIVES!"

The spotlight swung up, off me, racing across the balcony rail to find the speaker —

and landed on an empty seat.

The Boy in Seat One Hundred

The spotlight quit the empty seat and slid down the aisle like it had somewhere better to be. I did not.

I was three steps up the side stairs to the balcony, gripping the brass rail so hard my knuckles ached, and the voice came again — not from the balcony now but from the dark heart of the auditorium, rows and rows of seats folded up like a thousand patient mouths.

"TITLE CARD," it announced, swelling. "OUR HEROINE — frozen with fear — but BRAVE. Bum-bum-BAAA!"

"Who said that," I said. My list-brain, the one that kept itself busy when the rest of me was busy panicking, started counting exits. Lobby door. Stage door. The little glowing EXIT sign over a curtain that probably led to a broom.

A shimmer gathered in the eighth row. It pulled itself together the way steam decides, all at once, to be a cloud — and then there was a boy sitting there, knees up, chin on his fists, watching me like I was the picture and he'd paid good money.

He was about my age. Sort of. He was gray and silver and slightly see-through, the back of the seat showing faintly through his middle, and his clothes were old — knickers, a cap shoved back, a sweater darned at one elbow by somebody who'd loved him. He glowed, just a little, the soft white of the ghost light burning alone on the stage behind me.

I did the only sensible thing.

I screamed.

It was a good scream. Eleven years of moving towns, eleven first days, eleven cafeterias — I had a lot stored up. The boy screamed too, louder, both hands flying to his cap, and for a second we just stood and sat there shrieking at each other across the dark like two kettles nobody would take off the stove.

Then he stopped. He cocked his head.

"You can hear me," he said.

"Everybody can hear me," I said. "I'm extremely loud."

"No." He floated up out of the seat — floated, his feet not bothering with the floor — and drifted closer, and I pressed back into the rail and the cold rolled off him in a wave, the kind of cold that lives in a refrigerator with the door open too long. "You can hear me. And you screamed at the right spot." His whole face opened up. "You can SEE me."

"Stay there," I said.

"TITLE CARD," he breathed. "AT LAST."

"Stay there."

He stayed. That was the start of the truce, though it took a while. I made him sit back in his row. He made me promise not to scream again because, he said, it gave him the collywobbles and he'd already died once and didn't fancy a second go from fright. I sat on the stage steps where I could watch him and the lobby door both. My grandmother was somewhere below us, banging the till, far too far away.

"All right," I said, when my heart had climbed back down out of my ears. "Rules. I want rules."

He brightened like I'd offered him candy. "She wants RULES! A girl after my own — well." He patted his chest, where a heart would be. "Rule the first. I can't leave." He drifted to the lobby doors and reached, and his hand stopped at the threshold the way mine would stop at a wall, except there was nothing there. "Bound to the building. Brick and beam and the bones of the place. I've never once stood on the sidewalk. A hundred years and I've never felt rain."

"A hundred years," I repeated.

"Give or take. I lose count around the talkies." He shrugged like it was nothing. It was not nothing. I added it to a list I was keeping behind my teeth: things he says lightly that are not light.

"Rule the second," he went on. "Not everybody sees me. Most don't. They walk right through the cold and call it a draft." He looked at me sideways, almost shy. "You looked. There's some that look — really look — and some that never do their whole lives. You've got the knack, kid. Like —" He stopped himself. Something flickered behind his eyes and went out. "Like a fella I knew."

"Rule the third," I prompted, because I did not like the way the cold had thickened.

"Ah." He grinned, and the show came back. He held up one finger and pointed it, very seriously, at the row of bulbs along the stage lip. He scrunched his whole face. For a long second nothing happened — and then one bulb flickered, weak as a tired eye, and went steady again, and he sagged against a seat like he'd lifted a car.

"That," he panted, "is the extent of my POWERS. Behold."

"That was one light blinking."

"It is very tiring to blink a light," he said with dignity. "I can fog up the glass. Nudge a reel if I lean my whole soul on it. On a good night I can make the marquee letters shuffle and the old Wurlitzer hum a bar. Small things. They cost." He floated to the brass-railed booth — a candy counter, I'd see later, with a clouded glass front — and breathed on it. His breath fogged the pane gray, and with one finger he wrote, backward so I could read it: HI.

The popcorn smell that had followed me through the whole building got stronger right then, warm and buttery and impossible, and I understood that it had been him all along. The voice in the dark. The spotlight that found the wrong seat. The smell of a packed house a hundred years gone.

"You did the popcorn," I said.

"I do the atmosphere," he corrected. "A theater's got to smell like something." He floated three rows over and dropped into a seat near the middle, dead center, and spread his arms across the ones beside it like a king on a porch. "And THIS — co-star — is seat one hundred. Mine. Best seat in the house. Don't sit in it."

"It's just a seat."

"It is the seat." He patted the armrest fondly. The little brass number, 100, caught the ghost light.

I came down off the steps. I was getting brave, or stupid; with me it's a coin toss. "Okay," I said. "Last question. How did you die?"

The popcorn smell vanished.

Everything in him went still — not ghost-still, which was its own restless shimmer, but truly still, like a film stopped on one frame. The grin slid off. He looked at the dark above the screen, at nothing, and when he spoke the orchestra was gone from his voice.

"There's a reel missing," he said quietly. "From that day. The last one. It's just — blank. Black leader running through, click, click, click, and no picture." His fingers worried the number on the armrest. "I know my name's Albie. Albie Quill. I know my dad ran the projector, up in the booth, every night of my life — he could thread a reel in the dark and never miss." A small, crooked smile. "I know my mam painted all the birds. Up there." He pointed, and I followed his hand to the dome, where in the gloom I could just make out wings — a whole painted sky of them, and one bird, off to the side, that didn't match the others. "She did the kingfisher special. I don't remember her face. I remember her standing on the scaffold with blue on her hands."

He was very small in seat one hundred.

"And that day," he said, "the last day — it's gone. There's one door I won't go near. Up in the tower. I float up those stairs and I get to it and I — can't. Something says don't." He shook himself, hard, and the show snapped back on like he'd thrown a switch. "TITLE CARD: ENOUGH GLOOM! You'll spoil my matinee. Ask me something cheerful, kid. Ask me about Pearl Lamarr. Ask me about the time a pigeon got into the organ."

I opened my mouth.

From the bottom of the stairs, my grandmother's voice came up through the building, ordinary and tired and real.

"Wren! Bed soon — and listen, some businessman called. A Mr. Vane. Coming round tomorrow to make an offer on the place."

Albie's glow went out.

Not off — down. The warm white of him dropped all at once to a cold, frightened blue, the blue of a film left running in an empty room, and he rose out of seat one hundred without meaning to, hands curling, eyes huge and fixed on the dark like he could see straight through it to something coming.

"Vane," he whispered.