Fade to Black Read online

  Midnight rose from the bed and pranced across the covers, easily clearing the distance to the wheelchair. Halfway through its purred greeting, the cat found itself swatted back into the air by the back of Aunt Stella’s hand.

  “How many times have I told you about pouncing like that, you little panther!” Stella screamed, not joking. Midnight quickly came to its feet and ran off into the kitchen.

  Given the choice of making the best or worst of her handicap, Aunt Stella had chosen the latter. As far as she was concerned, the world had played a despicable trick on her, and, by God, they would be made to pay for it. Unfortunately for Midnight and Eric, they were the only world Stella made contact with these days. She hadn’t left the house any more than a dozen times in the past few years.

  As such, her wardrobe was stocked primarily with bathrobes and housecoats. Vivid pinks and greens, a few blues, most of them simple terry cloth but a few fashioned of other material. She chose one of the pinks and took it with her into the bathroom, where she cursed her way through the complicated motions of her morning toilette.

  When she wheeled back out, her face was plain and haggard, her hair a mop of limp waves spilling over the crown of her head. She turned on her radio and tuned into her obligatory Sunday services, letting the room fill with unheard platitudes while she positioned herself before the vanity. She spent the next hour and a half reconstructing the foundation and layered touches of makeup, then worked at her hair with a brush, blow-dryer, and aerosol can filled with a combination of cosmetic glue and fluorocarbons meant to hold the assembled wreckage together.

  Braced to start another day, Aunt Stella wheeled out of her room, ignoring the paper left at the foot of her bed, and went to the hallway. Her roving chair hummed like a vacuum cleaner running on high octane.

  She and Eric had lived here on Market Street for more than twenty years. The mortgage payments were low, and there were other conveniences, foremost being the special touches that had been added to the house to accommodate Aunt Stella’s confinement to her wheelchair. Between her bedroom and the inside staircase, an elevator the size of a glorified dumbwaiter had been installed to give her easy access to the second floor and Eric’s room, much to his chagrin.

  As she rode up the elevator, Aunt Stella tightened her grip on the baton resting across her knees. She was seldom without the staff. It was of negligible use to her as a handicap aid; she employed it more as a means of dissipating nervous energy, much in the way others smoked, cracked their knuckles, or toyed with wedding rings. At various times, she would wield it like anything from a general’s riding crop to a bishop’s sceptre to a magician’s wand.

  By the time she opened the elevator door and wheeled herself into the upstairs hallway, Aunt Stella had worked herself up into another frightful mood. She knocked on the doorframe to Eric’s room and called out his name as she came in.

  He was asleep, still dressed in his clothes on top of the covers, bathed by the glowing eye of his television set.

  Aunt Stella stopped at the foot of the bed and leaned forward, supporting herself on the baton braced across her armrests. She screwed her face up, baring an insidious grin.

  “Well, look here,” she cackled, “Mister Smart fell asleep with his nose buried in the screen again. That one-eyed monster’s going to wreck his eyes, much less soften his brain!”

  Eric stirred with a groan. The fountain pen was still in his hand, draining ink into the television magazine. He set the pen aside and replaced it with a cigarette.

  “You spend all your time daydreaming and watching those silly movies,” Aunt Stella continued, belaboring the obvious.

  Eric had been all through this routine before, more times than he cared to remember. He leaned over and snapped off the television, wishing he could do the same to his aunt. He saw the crumpled candy wrapper he’d left on the bed and rolled over on it, working it into the folds of the sheets.

  Thinking he was trying to fall back asleep, Aunt Stella pulled away the cloth strips over the window frame and yanked on the drawstrings of the Venetian blinds, letting sliced light charge into the room. She maneuvered her way across the room to the stereo, snapping the FM tuner on and turning up the volume of Korngold’s Sea Witch, conducting the rousing orchestration with her baton. For the briefest second, there was a flash of contentment on her face as she absorbed herself into the music.

  “Morning,” Eric told her grudgingly, stumbling out of bed to his feet and padding across the room, taking care not to step on the mess strewn across the carpet. He felt terrible, even after patting his stomach and belching free a pocket of trapped gas. His mouth was dry and foul-tasting from smoking, and his throat was raw, parched. He coughed his way to the dresser, where he had left a can of Dr. Pepper with a few stale sips left. It pacified his throat long enough for him to take another drag on his cigarette.

  “Have you looked at yourself lately?” Aunt Stella asked him, lowering the baton. “You look like hell!”

  Eric stared at his reflection in the wall mirror, surrounded by rubber masks of creatures who looked only slightly worse off than him. He was thin and gaunt. Dark circles arched beneath his bloodshot eyes. His pale face was framed by stringy, unwashed hair the color of a used paintbrush. A hell of a sight, he had to admit. He slowly twisted his features, trying on a few favorite impressions. Cagney, Bogart, Widmark.

  “Stop making those faces,” Aunt Stella warned him. “Let me tell you something. If you don’t start listening to me and start taking care of yourself, you’ll never live to see thirty.”

  Eric let her have a few hacks of his smoker’s cough, sharp bursts like muffled gunshots fired into the top of his fist. He took off his shirt and replaced it with another just as old, then stepped into a pair of jeans.

  Aunt Stella turned away from Eric to face the wider space of his bedroom. Whenever she was ready to launch into theatrics, she would always look away, as if staring past the footlights at some unseen audience. Eric closed his eyes and shook his head.

  Not again.

  “When I took you in after your sweet mother died giving birth to you,” she began, “I had no idea you’d be such a trial.”

  Having reached her envisioned center stage, Aunt Stella stopped her wheelchair and fixed a whimsical stare into nothingness, letting her voice drop a sentimental octave.

  “Your mother was beautiful. A great talent. Hollywood was at her feet. Important men were begging to marry her. Then she met your father. That bastard!”

  Eric sat down on the floor and went about putting on his shoes. He hated this story. She knew it, and he hated her because she never let it drop.

  “That was the end of our dance team,” she said, her voice rising once more, like a slack sail suddenly filled with a gust of wind. “You know, I was a fine dancer. The best!”

  “Yeah, I know,” Eric moaned. “You’re the greatest, Aunt Stella,” he said, without conviction. “Magnificent.”

  “And you!” she shouted, pointing a finger at him, “You made me leave that party, you little bellyacher! If it weren’t for you, I’d still have my legs! . . .”

  “I . . . didn’t ask the sitter to call,” Eric insisted, his jaw trembling. “I was sick . . . I—”

  “Shut up!”

  “Jesus Christ, I was four years old—”

  “I said shut up!” she howled. Eric retreated past her toward the sanctuary of the bathroom. She wasn’t about to let him off that easily.

  “You’re worthless,” she hissed, “just like your father!”

  “Yeah, I know,” Eric said, close to tears.

  Winded, Aunt Stella turned the chair around and started back out of the bedroom. However, when she pushed forward on the gearshift, the motor stuck in gear, dragging her along.

  “Eric!” she screamed, tugging frantically at the shift knob. The chair wouldn’t stop and she found herself pinned against the dresser, the wheels still turning. A few plastic models tumbled off the dresser and onto the floor.
/>   “What the—” Eric gasped, rushing to her side.

  “Help me, Eric! Oh, stop it!”

  He came up beside her and yanked at the gearshift. Nothing happened. He reached over to the bed, pulling away his pillow and handing it to his aunt. Dragging the chair away from the dresser, he groaned through his exertion, “Hold the pillow in front of your legs!”

  She obeyed. He eased up on the wheelchair and it rolled forward again, but now Aunt Stella had the pillow to cushion the impact against the dresser.

  Bending down, Eric pulled away the panel covering the motor and quickly disconnected several wires until the motor sputtered to a halt.

  “Are you okay?” he asked her, panting as he pulled her back from the dresser again.

  “Wha . . . what happened?” Aunt Stella was stunned, somewhere between shock and hysterics. “Eric, what—”

  “I don’t know,” he said, shook up himself. “I don’t know. Aunt Stella, this thing is so old something probably just gave out.”

  “I can’t be without my chair,” she said, desperate. “I need it fixed.”

  “I’ll call someone to take a look at it tomorrow,” Eric assured her.

  “I need it today! Eric, I—”

  “It’s Sunday, Aunt Stella. There’s no one who can—”

  “You’ll have to try it yourself, then,” she insisted. “You’ve worked on this before. Eric, you have to.”

  “Okay,” Eric said drearily. “Okay, I’ll help you down to bed and see what I can do.”

  “Oh, thank you, Eric,” Aunt Stella said.

  Eric pushed her to the elevator and then into her room downstairs. He helped her into bed and handed her the paper.

  Taking the chair out into the living room, he turned on the television, changing the channel to the afternoon matinee. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, some vintage Thurber, dished up under the influence of Sam Goldwyn. Eric watched it as he worked on the wheelchair. Halfway through the movie, he snapped the set off with disgust. The storyline was too close to home, and the comedy only rubbed it in the wrong way.

  He located the broken part on the engine and found that he could fix it temporarily by wiring it together with a twist top from the box of Hefty bags in the kitchen.

  “Here it is,” Eric said, rolling the chair back into the bedroom.

  Aunt Stella looked up from her paper.

  “That fast?”

  “Yeah, well I wouldn’t trust it past a few days. You better call the guy in tomorrow.”

  “Just leave it by the bed,” she said, turning back to the society section of the paper.

  “You’re welcome,” Eric said dryly, moving the chair over.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Nothing,” he said, heading back to the doorway. He stopped and looked back. “I did a pretty good job on it for being worthless, don’t you think?”

  Aunt Stella lowered the paper onto her lap.

  “Don’t talk to me in that tone of voice, young man. What do you want, a medal?”

  “A simple thank you would do.”

  “Okay,” she said impatiently, “Thank you.”

  “That’s the way I like it, coming straight from the heart, like you really mean it.”

  “I told you I didn’t want to hear any of your sarcasm, Eric. Now leave me alone, would you? Please?”

  Eric left the room and started up the stairs. Midnight was sleeping on one, and she woke at the sound of his footsteps. The cat looked up at Eric and purred.

  “Don’t talk to me in that voice!” he warned the cat, mimicking his aunt.

  “Are you making fun of me?” Aunt Stella shouted from her bedroom.

  Eric ignored her and continued up the steps. Midnight fled at his advance.

  CHAPTER • 3

  The young blonde walked down Hollywood Boulevard, trying to pay no attention to the stares and murmurs of other pedestrians. She looked for an address on the building in front of her and compared it with that on the newspaper clipping she had snipped out of the Sunday Calendar section.

  It was the Hollywood Masonic Temple near Highland, looking more suited for other businesses than saving souls.

  She walked up the steps and pulled the large entrance door open.

  Inside there was a monstrous lobby, cavelike and echoing every nervous cough and footstep. There were two lines, one along either wall. She walked over to the one filled with women and waited. She was over an hour early, and still there were more than a dozen girls ahead of her.

  At eleven-thirty, a side door on the ground floor opened and four people walked out, two men and two women. They walked up to the desks at the head of each line and sat down, setting stacks of paper in front of them.

  The line began to move slowly forward, with each person taking one sheet and signing another before being escorted to the side room the people at the table had come from.

  When the blonde reached the table and began filling out the sheet, the man sitting before her looked up and shook his head.

  “Come on, sweetheart. Let’s not waste each other’s time, okay?”

  “But I want the part,” she said, determined.

  “You see that sign next to you?”

  “Yes,” she admitted reluctantly.

  “Do you know how to read?” The man had mastered the art of being cruel and polite in the same breath.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “What does it say?”

  “I know, but . . .”

  The man smiled. “Sweetheart, we’re looking for a Hispanic woman in her early thirties, who preferably can speak—”

  “I can dye my hair.”

  “You could dye your hair and your skin and your accent and we still couldn’t use you, so, please . . .” He gestured with his hand to wave her away.

  Heartsick, the blonde slowly walked back toward the main doors.

  The man behind the desk picked up the release form she had signed, laughing.

  “Marilyn,” he read, his voice carrying across the chamber.

  The blonde stopped and looked back expectantly.

  “Yes?”

  The man looked up at her.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart. Just talking to myself. I’ll give you a clue, though. Next time you change your name, try something more original, huh? Like Farrah.”

  The man laughed again.

  The blonde left the building. Reaching to her purse, she pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at her eyes.

  Two more girls, one Chicano and the other tanned beneath a black wig, stared at the blonde on their way up the steps.

  “Did you see her?” the blonde heard one of them whisper as they started in the door.

  “I know. It’s spooky. She looks just like her . . .”

  CHAPTER • 4

  Eric woke from his nap shortly after noon. He raided his drawer for another candy bar, then set up his projector and threaded through Little Caesar, one of the several dozen 16mm prints he’d bought over the years. He watched the film with fascination, mouthing along to the words of the Francis Faragoh script.

  The Three-Thirty Thriller on Channel Six featured Creature from the Black Lagoon. It wasn’t what Eric would objectively rate as a great film, but he sat through it anyway. There were some good underwater sequences, and Eric had a soft spot in his heart for the green-gilled monster. The creature had been the first plastic Aurora model of horror stars he had made as a kid. He couldn’t remember which birthday it had been, or even any of the other events surrounding his getting the present, but he could vividly recall the night he had put it together.

  Up in his room, he had gone into the closet and closed the door, thinking that hiding would somehow make it less easy for Aunt Stella to figure out he hadn’t gone to bed. He had cleared out a small space on the closet floor, piling up shoes and toys into piles along the walls. Taking his flashlight, he had rigged it up with tape and string so that it hung down like a lamp and lit his work area. He had followed the directions carefully
during the assembly, counting off the minutes on his Hopalong Cassidy watch as he waited for the glue to dry on each attached appendage.

  It had been close to midnight when he had finished assembling the beast, and he had begun to feel strange, oddly lightheaded. He had carefully crept out of the closet and over to his window, peeking out to see if there was a full moon. He’d never stayed up past midnight before, and he had been afraid he was going to turn into a werewolf.

  The moon had been on the wane, no more than a scythe reaping the night sky. He had gone back to the closet and closed himself in again, unwittingly inhaling the unventilated fumes of both the glue and the paints until he passed out. Fortunately, he had not closed the door tightly, and he had tumbled into his room and come to several moments later. Still, he had spent the next hour standing terrified before the bathroom mirror, waiting for blotches of hair to break out on his face and for his teeth to sprout into fangs.

  Aunt Stella always napped between five and seven, so after the movie, Eric tiptoed downstairs to the kitchen and raided the refrigerator, devouring leftover macaroni and cheese to round out the Cracker Jacks he’d eaten during the Three-Thirty Thriller. After eating, he steamed some fresh broccoli and an ear of corn to go with the baked potato he’d wrapped in foil and tossed in the oven.

  While the food was cooking, Eric sat at the table, hunched over a weather-beaten, spiral notebook. Half of its dog-eared pages were written on, in different colored inks from different times. He lit a cigarette and tilted his fedora down at an angle over one eye as he read over the last page he’d written.

  “Interior. The No-Holds Bar. Day,” he read in a voice borrowed from every hardboiled hero from Edward G. Robinson to Robert Mitchum. “Tony Alabama struts into the half-emptied hole-in-the-wall, thirsty for a drink, hungry for a taste of something besides the dust along the long road that brought him here. His eyes fall on Lucretia, a sharp-looking package sitting on a bar stool across from him, staring into her drink like she expects it to talk back to her.”