Dark siren, p.1
Dark Siren, page 1
Contents
TITLE PAGE
Copyright
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Prologue
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Author's Note
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DARK SIREN
An Ashwood Novel
Half-Lich Series, Book 1
By Lee Dignam & Katerina Martinez
DARK SIREN
An Ashwood Novel
Half-Lich Series, Book 1
Copyright © 2016 by Lee Dignam & Katerina Martinez. All rights reserved. Cover uses images © 2016 Shutterstock.
Published by Supernal Publishing
Cover Art by Rebecca Frank Art
Editing by Stacia Williams
Visit: www.ashwoodchronicles.com
***
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, events or locales is purely coincidental.
Reproduction in whole or in part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited. I greatly appreciate you taking the time to read my work. Please consider leaving a review wherever you bought the book, or tell your friends about this serial to help spread the word!
Thank you for supporting my work.
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Prologue
On a windy night in October, long after the last patrons of the Cinema Royale had shuffled out of its front doors for the last time, something happened to Emily Page which would change the trajectory of her existence forever.
Maggie Davenport, owner and manager of the Cinema Royale, had taken off as soon as the end credits to The Big Sleep rolled. Freddie, her son and the Royale’s line manager, followed like a babe, closely and obediently, leaving Emily and the only other working employee—Nathan Wyatt—to clean up and close the theater.
This wasn’t a particularly odd thing to happen, that the care of the entire theater should be left to two employees. There was no love left for this place, no love for the old girl, as Bogart might have said. This much Emily had been sure of for a while. The theater had been going downhill for as long as she had been in its employ, manning the ticket booth and lending a hand to clean up when the once-grand doors closed for the night. Someone was always off sick or had to babysit, and the theater didn’t have much in the way of employees to begin with. There hadn’t been a full crew in over twenty years.
It didn’t help that moviegoers on this side of town were, at the best of times, as messy as over privileged children with way too many toys. At the worst of times, Emily had found things in the space between rows she wouldn’t touch with a dead man’s hand. Tonight, however, the theater was spotless. Everyone, it seemed, had taken a moment and gone slightly out of their way after the movie ended to throw their garbage in the trash, like mourners at a funeral dropping flowers on top of a casket.
“Lost something in there?” Nate asked.
“Look at this, Nate,” she said, tilting the waste basket toward him.
“Isn’t that where trash usually goes?”
“In a normal movie theater, sure, but it’s like the people who come here don’t know how to be tidy.”
“Not tonight,” he said, scratching his chin in agreement. “Maybe they’re paying respects?”
“Maybe if people did that more often we wouldn’t be closing tomorrow.”
“Easy night, then. Guess this means you’re free?”
Emily sighed and said “Nate…”
“I know,” he said, his arms going up in a gesture of surrender, “Can’t blame a guy for trying… again.”
“I’m sorry, okay?”
“Don’t be. I know what you’re going through. I just thought you may have wanted some company.”
She came up to him, placed her hand on his shoulder, and smiled. He was easy on the eyes, tall, and liked to wear blazers over his t-shirts. A little on the skinny side he might have been, but he was also full of personality and he had his head screwed on straight. In other words, Nate was exactly the kind of guy her mom had always wanted her to meet; a nice boy with ambition and a good head on his shoulders. Maybe if she had met him two years ago, her parents would think better of her taste in men. But she hadn’t met him. Instead she had met Jason, and had made one of the worst mistakes of her life.
“Tell you what,” he said, and he handed her a ring of keys, isolating one key in particular. “This one’s the key to the projection room.”
“Okay?”
“Take it. It’s yours.”
“Get out of town,” she said, eyes wide. “You’re not seriously going to let me go up there.”
“Why not? Tonight was our last screening anyway.”
Emily carefully plucked the key ring out of Nate’s hand and stared at the one marked ‘Projection Rm’ like it was some kind of alien artifact. The manager had put out strict instructions barring any and all staff from entering the Projection Room—anyone except for Nate. The film-maker she wasn’t had always wanted to lay eyes on the projector upstairs. Nate had told her it was an old 35 millimeter player, a rare beauty, but no matter how hard she tried, Nate had always been a stickler for the rules.
She narrowed her eyes, pursed her lips, and said “Wait a second… is this some kind of ploy? Are you bribing me?”
“What?” he said, “Me? No. I swear. I mean, I would never—”
“Relax! It was a joke.” She couldn’t help but smile at the way his face flushed bright red, or at his sudden nervous scramble for words.
“A bad joke.”
“Whatever. Anyway, I shouldn’t go in there,” she said, but her feet were already carrying her up the long line of stairs leading out of the auditorium. “What if I break something?”
Nate kept the pace with her and shrugged. “I don’t think anyone’s going to care. Do you think whoever buys this place will keep any of that machinery?”
“You’re probably right,” she said when they got to the top of the stairs, “But just in case, I’d like it if you came with me.”
“Me?” he asked, “I’m giving you a free pass to dig into that room so you can fondle all the old film reels we keep instore and you want supervision?”
“Not supervision… company.”
Nate checked his watch. “I don’t—”
“Before you act like you don’t have the time,” she said, interrupting him, “Allow me take you back to the moment when you asked me out. Unless you’ve made plans with someone telepathically in the last couple of minutes, you don’t have anywhere to be right now.”
A grin spread across his face. “Yeah,” he said, “You got me.”
Emily matched his expression, but her stomach went cold with regret. “If you would rather leave, I’ll understand,” she said, backpedaling out of the commitment she had wrangled him into.
“No, it’s okay. I’ll stay. You’re right, I don’t have anywhere I need to be, so…”
“So it’s off to the projection room we go!”
Emily turned, pushed past the creaky double doors, and started up the half-spiral stairs with the wobbly handrail.
Along a patchy, burgundy colored wall, old movie posters hung in veneration of the great classics and cult flicks the Royale often played. This wasn’t a place for superheroes or girls in love with vampires. The Royale had hosted many film festivals in its time; horror, noir, sci-fi. Some old spaghetti westerns had made it onto its giant screen, too. But novelties wear off after a while, and as the Royale stubbornly, and with righteous zeal, clung to the fading glory of old film, with time it started to look like the Royale would become a martyr for its cause.
The floor beneath Emily’s foot creaked as the last step gave way to wooden floorboards. She stood before the red door labelled ‘Projector’, staring at it as if it were a portal to a different world. Then she glanced a look at Nate, almost as if seeking permission. Nate nodded. She unlocked the door and stepped inside with a held breath, her skin alight with excitement.
This wasn’t a large room, nor was it a very well ventilated room judging by the wall of heat she seemed to have penetrated, but it was full of cozy charm and smelled of old cinema. Hollywood, baby; this is where the magic happens, ch’yeah.
“So this is where you work,” she said to Nate, who had walked in behind her.
“Yep. This is where the magic happens.”
Emily, stunned for a moment at their random telepathic moment, shook the weirdness off and cocked an eyebrow at him. “Really?”
“Sorr y, that was lame.”
“Little bit,” she said, omitting what she had thought only seconds before.
“This, uh, this is the projector,” Nate said, wading through the awkwardness. “Pretty cool, huh?”
“I’ve never seen one up close,” she said, eyeing the mammoth machine which seemed to fill the room.
This beast of metal squares and circles looked like some kind of mechanical monster. At one point the black paint job would have been pristine and shiny, but time leaves its mark on everything. The knobs and buttons were faded, some metallic parts were brown with rust, and its cable connectors looked like they had seen better days. This was the wild cat of projectors; a feral animal that cared for nothing and no one except for its own survival.
Emily let her fingers lightly brush the metal casing. The projector had to be at least thirty years old, maybe older. It was like touching something out of time. How many people had cared for this machine, how many movie reels had it eaten, and how many more would it eat after tonight?
None, probably.
“I can’t believe you get to play with this thing every night,” she said.
“It’s alright. Maintaining it is tough, though.”
“I bet,” she said, separating from the projector and exhaling her excitement. “You wanna show me the closet with all the old movies?”
“Sure, it’s right here.”
Nate crossed the tiny projection room and stuck one of the keys from his key ring into the lock on a door so heavily covered in posters of old movies you would have thought it was a wall. He pulled the door open, tugged on a string overhead, and a single bulb buzzed to life, its dim orange light revealing shelves and boxes filled with round metal cases.
The skin on Emily’s arms tensed as she entered the room. It was cold in here, too cold considering how warm it had been in the other room. The metal film cases were almost icy to the touch. Each had a label stuck to the front, and they were arranged according to genre. The first rack she rifled through was Noir. Tomorrow is Another Day, 1951, Odds against Tomorrow, 1959, and The Maltese Falcon, 1941, were among the film reels in the dust-covered rack.
“It’s amazing that we have these,” Emily said.
“Yeah. The cinema’s owner changes hands but the movies those owners buy… don’t. They belong to the Royale, so they stay here.”
“Holy shit, we have the original Haunting? Why have we never played this?”
Nate shrugged. “I’ve never been asked to play it, I guess. Maggie has the movie list so she knows it’s there, but you know she isn’t a big horror fan.”
“So what? People like horror, especially old horror. That’s the kind of movie I would have made.”
Emily turned around again to squat next to some of the other boxes on the floor. She grabbed a box marked Sci-Fi, but when she tugged on it the box got stuck against a catch in the floor. The catch, Emily saw, was connected to the frame of a trapdoor, and was fastened shut with a padlock.
“Where does that trapdoor go?” Emily asked.
“That?” Nate said. “I’m… not sure.” He checked the ring of keys for a potentially matching label, but couldn’t find one.
“Let me try,” Emily said, and she picked a key out at random and tried it. Nothing. She tried again with a different key, and nothing. The keys on the ring were all too big—except one. When Emily tried that one, the lock gave way. She handed the keys and the lock back to Nate, opened the trapdoor, and looked inside. There were boxes in there, and more film reel cases, too. When she pulled on one of the closed boxes and brought it into the light, the label across the top read ‘Unsorted’. Someone had also drawn strange symbols into the underside of the trap door, but Emily hadn’t noticed those.
“Holy shit,” she said. “How is it that you have a whole mess of boxes in here that you haven’t gone through?”
“I don’t come here unless I have to. I’ve never really had a good feeling about this place, you know?”
“For real? That’s your excuse? It’s pretty lame.”
“Whatever, you don’t have to believe me. I don’t feel comfortable in here most of the time, is all I’m saying.”
She dipped her hand into the box, grabbed one of the film reels, and shuddered as if she had been dipped in cold water.
“Emily?” Nate said. “You okay?”
“Jesus,” she said, “Sorry, this one’s just ice cold. Feel.” She stood bolt-upright with a film case in her hand and offered it to Nate.
Nate took it. Nodded. “Yeah, I don’t know what’s on any of them. None of these have labels.”
Emily stood with the film reel in her hand.
“Hey, where are you going with that?” Nate asked.
“I’m going to play it.”
“What? No way.”
“Why not?” she asked as she set the film reel down on the table closest to the projector. She was struggling with the lid, trying to pry it open with her fingers. God that thing was cold.
“We shouldn’t… it doesn’t feel right,” Nate said, closing the trapdoor and fastening the lock. Neither of them had noticed the odd markings on the underside.
“Look, no one’s here,” Emily said, “The cinema is going bust, and we’re going to lose all this cool stuff. Why don’t we put the movie on, see what it is, and just… give the old girl another run before the person who buys this place puts her down?”
Nate considered it, his eyes moving from Emily, to the projector, then back to Emily. “If we get caught, we’re in some serious shit.”
He hadn’t said no. “Help me get this open, will you?” she asked, smiling brightly.
The lid came off easily enough with Nate’s help, and inside the case sat a pristine metal film reel untouched by dust and untarnished by the passage of time. It was like a relic retrieved from the sealed tomb of some old king.
Emily removed the film and, without touching the dangling negative strip, brought the reel to the projector. In a few moments, Nate had installed the reel and fed the negative into the conveyor with a kind of art she was only too eager to watch. One could study film all one wanted, but pictures and descriptions could never excite the soul as much as the real thing did.
“That’s it,” Nate said. “Good to go.”
Emily’s skin tingled with anticipation. She shuddered again and took a deep breath.
“You okay?” Nate asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said, though she didn’t believe it. Her stomach felt unsettled, her senses were unusually alert, and her hackles were up. The feeling which had, earlier, been excitement, was now inexplicably sailing into different, darker territory. “We can watch from up here, right?”
Nate pointed at a pair of tinted windows on either side of the projector. She approached one of them, noticed the cobweb and spider on the top right corner of the window, and peered out of it. Below, the theater was quiet and dark, empty, and serene. From here she could control the lights, so she dimmed them as Nate fired the old machine up. It made a whirring sound, followed by a rattling sound, and then the projector seemed to cough before settling into a steady rhythm of motion and sound.
In the auditorium below the screen was lit up and glowing, clearly receiving light from the projector, but nothing was happening.
Nate came up beside Emily and squeezed in. “Give it a moment,” he said, “Most of these old movies have a couple of seconds of blank tape.”
But the blank tape seemed to go on for a minute, two minutes, and after a while Emily started to wonder whether there was anything on the reel at all… when something moved. It was a subtle shift of light, but enough to lend some illumination to the picture. It soon became clear what they were watching wasn’t nothing, but something. Whoever was holding the camera was filming in near total darkness, and almost complete silence.
Almost.
They heard footfalls, soft and echoed, as if from inside a cave. The slow, steady drip drop of water accompanied them. Soon, the camera operator’s breathing became ragged. It seemed as though he was walking uphill, in the dark, toward a glimmering point of light somewhere in the distance. Speaking as the filmmaker she wasn’t, Emily thought it was a simple shot as far as shots go. But the tension was so thick it was causing her heart to pump harder and faster in her chest with every footstep, every exhalation, and every drip drop.
