Last Night at the Starlight Drive-In

• Chapter 1 The Final Showtime
• Chapter 2 Dusk at Screen One
• Chapter 3 Popcorn and Panic
• Chapter 4 Speaker Box Whispering
• Chapter 5 The Shadow in the Projection Booth
• Chapter 6 Intermission Cuts Short
• Chapter 7 Double Feature, Double Trouble
• Chapter 8 Bleeding Out in the Back Row
• Chapter 9 Static on the Airwaves
• Chapter 10 The Concession Stand Massacre
• Chapter 11 Left Behind in the Dark
• Chapter 12 Midnight Reel
• Chapter 13 The Man Behind the Leather Mask
• Chapter 14 Trunk Space
• Chapter 15 Slashed Tires and Severed Ties
• Chapter 16 Screen Two Goes Dark
• Chapter 17 Playground Terror
• Chapter 18 Blood on the Silver Screen
• Chapter 19 Marquee of Madness
• Chapter 20 The Manager's Secret Office
• Chapter 21 The Final Feature Begins
• Chapter 22 No Exit at the Ticket Booth
• Chapter 23 Running the Projector Red
• Chapter 24 The Last Girl Standing
• Chapter 25 Burning Down the Starlight
• Chapter 26 The Morning After the Credits Roll

The marquee on Route 9 had three missing letters, leaving the announcement to read like an obscure curse: LAST N GHT AT THE ST RLIGHT. Below it, in mismatched red plastic lettering that leaned drunkenly against the oxidized yellow plastic tracks, the bill promised CARNIVAL OF SOULS, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, and THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE. It was the kind of programming that had kept the Starlight Drive-In afloat during the dog days of late August, back when the air hung thick enough to drink and the cicadas provided the percussion for cheap teenage romance.

Tonight, however, was the end of the line. The property had been sold to a commercial developer out of Columbus who planned to level the grading, rip out the steel speaker posts, and erect a sprawling strip mall anchored by a discount pharmacy and an auto-parts warehouse.

Wyatt Miller adjusted the collar of his faded paper-thin uniform shirt, which had once been bright teal but had washed out to the color of pond scum over three seasons of heavy use. He stood beside the entrance booth, leaning his hip against the painted cinderblock structure that smelled permanently of spilled vinegar, wasp nests, and automotive exhaust. The sun was an orange ember sinking through the smoggy tops of the scrub pine forest flanking the western perimeter of the lot. Heat radiated upward from the pitted asphalt, penetrating the thin soles of his work boots with steady, rhythmic thrumming.

"Look at this line," Wyatt said, tossing a rusted heavy-duty staple remover into the palm of his other hand and catching it. "You’d think we were giving away gold ingots instead of stale Red Vines and forty-year-old celluloid."

Inside the cramped ticket box, Chloe Davis didn't look up from her ledger. She had a thick yellow pencil tucked behind an ear, pinning back a strand of chestnut hair, while her fingers flew across the mechanical keys of the receipt punch. The box fan sitting on the shelf behind her hummed violently, oscillating through a forty-five-degree arc that moved hot air around without cooling an inch of skin.

"They're not here for the movies, Wyatt, and you know it," Chloe said, tearing off a strip of blue tickets and sliding them through the brass-trimmed wicket to a driver in an idling Chevy Nova. "They’re here to buy a memory for seven bucks a carload. Half of these people haven't set foot in this lot since their parents brought them here in station wagons to fall asleep in their pajamas. Sentimentality brings out the vultures."

"Ten dollars a carload tonight," Wyatt corrected mildly. "Mr. Vance upped the gate rate this morning. Said if they want nostalgia, they can pay the surcharge on it. He’s in the back office right now counting the bank deposit slips like Scrooge McDuck."

The Nova revved its engine, backfiring sharply like a firecracker before rolling past the booth, its tires crunching heavily over the gravel verge where the blacktop had crumbled away years ago. Wyatt waved the driver toward the center lane with a lazy flick of an orange plastic baton. The car settled into Row 4, angling upward against the inclined earthen mound designed to tilt windshields toward the massive expanse of Screen One.

Screen One rose sixty feet into the dusk, a corrugated steel colossus supported by a lattice of black-painted timber telephone poles and cross-bracing that squeaked whenever the wind off the valley kicked up past twenty knots. It had weathered hailstorms, the 1974 tornado outbreak, and three decades of paint touch-ups that left it looking like the hull of a decommissioned battleship. Across the forty-acre property, Screens Two and Three stood at opposing angles, smaller and more decrepit, forming a rough triangle of rusted outdoor cinema.

"Did Vance tell you who’s staying to lock up?" Chloe asked, pausing to wipe her brow with the back of her forearm. A dark smudge of ink from the ticket roll streaked across her temple, but Wyatt didn't mention it. She was already irritable enough after four hours of continuous change-making.

"You, me, Kenny up in the booth, and Toby on the grounds," Wyatt replied. "Vance said he’s clearing out the cash safe by eleven, before the midnight feature starts. Said he had an appointment with the escrow officer in the morning and didn't want to get caught in the rush when the crowd dumps out at three a.m."

Chloe snorted, her lip curling with practiced cynicism. "Of course he is. Leave the dirty work to the minimum-wage grunts. Who cares if there are two hundred drunks left on the property after the last reel runs? Let Wyatt and Chloe sweep up the broken bottles and used condoms while he sleeps on a bed of developer checks."

"Hey, don't leave out Toby," Wyatt grinned, though there wasn't much humor in it. "Toby's got the heavy-duty rake. He lives for this."

As if summoned by his name, a figure emerged from behind the low concrete perimeter wall near the trash dumpsters. Toby was twenty years older than the rest of the seasonal crew, a stocky man with broad, slightly stooped shoulders and a gait that favored his left knee. He wore stained canvas coveralls regardless of the temperature, his face shielded by a grease-darkened ball cap advertising an extinct brand of tractor oil. In one gloved hand he carried an aluminum trash-grabber; in the other, a five-gallon bucket half full of flattened soda cans and beer bottles.

Toby stopped ten paces from the ticket booth, looking past Wyatt toward the steady queue of headlights stretching out along Route 9. His pale, rheumy eyes squinted against the remaining sunlight.

"The south fence is down again," Toby said. His voice was like dry leaves being dragged across concrete. "By the creek bed. Somebody cut the chain link with bolt cutters. Big hole. Big enough to drive a pickup through if they didn't care about their paint."

Wyatt sighed, setting his flashlight down on the wooden ledge of the booth window. "Probably the high school kids from town trying to sneak in without paying the tenner. They do it every Friday."

"Not kids," Toby said flatly. He didn't elaborate. He just stood there, letting the heavy summer air settle between them until the silence grew awkward.

"Did you patch it?" Chloe asked, leaning toward the mesh screen.

"Tied it off with baling wire," Toby muttered, shifting the bucket to his other hand. The aluminum cans clattered softly inside. "Won't hold a man who wants in. Just keeps the weeds from blowing across the lane. Lot’s too full tonight. Too many shadows between the ramps."

"It's just the final night rush, Toby," Wyatt said gently, knowing the older man's tendency toward sour moods when the drive-in got loud. "By four in the morning, the gates are locked forever. You won't have to pick up another cup."

Toby stared at Wyatt for a long moment, his jaw working slowly as if chewing on a bit of gristle. "Things end bad," he said simply. Then he turned his back and limped away toward the service shed behind the concession stand, disappearing into the long shadows cast by Screen Two.

"He's cheerful as ever," Chloe murmured, checking her wristwatch. "Seven-fifteen. Sunset’s at seven-forty. When's Kenny supposed to fire up the lamp for the trailer reel?"

"He's probably already up there sweating through his undershirt," Wyatt said, glancing toward the projection booth.

The projection building was a low, squat bunker of reinforced concrete positioned squarely in the center of the three fields, like the hub of a giant wagon wheel. Small, square port windows peered out from its upper perimeter, facing each screen. From where Wyatt stood, he could see the faint orange glow of a test lamp flickering behind the glass of Port One. Kenny was a purist about carbon-arc lamps; he refused to run the modernized xenon conversions Vance had tried to install on the cheap six years ago, claiming the light was too cold, too clinical. Kenny liked the hiss, the ozone smell, and the heat that made the booth feel like an engine room on a tramp steamer.

A horn blared three cars back in the entry queue—an impatient, rhythmic blast that shattered the twilight calm. Wyatt stepped back onto the asphalt lane, raising his baton.

"Keep it moving, folks," he called out, though nobody rolled down their windows to listen.

The cars were packed with local kids, families with lawn chairs tied to the roofs of station wagons, and older couples who sat silently behind their steering wheels, staring ahead at the white monolith of the screen like worshippers awaiting an omen. There was a restless, feral energy in the air—the peculiar mood that accompanies the destruction of an old landmark. When people know a place is dying, they treat it differently. They throw their garbage on the ground with less hesitation; they peel rubber on the ramps; they carve their initials into the cedar picnic tables with pocketknives because there are no consequences left to fear.

Wyatt guided an ancient Buick LeSabre toward Row 6, signaling for the driver to ease up onto the incline. As the front tires crested the hump, the Buick’s headlights swept across the grass berm, briefly illuminating the line of cast-iron speaker poles.

Half of them were empty, their heavy silver speakers long since ripped away by souvenir hunters over the preceding weeks. The remaining units hung from their rubber-coated wires, dented and corroded with verdigris. Vance had long ago switched the primary audio to an unlicensed low-power FM transmitter that bled over three different frequencies, but the old speakers remained like rows of miniature tombstones marching across the terraces.

As the Buick’s engine died, Wyatt noticed something odd near the tree line that bordered the eastern edge of Screen One's field.

The woods there were dense with sumac, wild blackberry, and dead ash trees killed off by beetles years ago. It was a dark, tangled border where the drive-in's perimeter floodlights failed to reach, leaving an irregular band of pitch blackness between the last row of cars and the forest.

Something stood there, just beyond the reach of the LeSabre’s fading running lights.

Wyatt paused, his thumb resting on the cold metal toggle of his heavy-duty flashlight. At first, he thought it was one of the decorative fiberglass mascots Vance had bought at an auction in the seventies—a faded figure of a cinema usher that had spent fifteen years rotting behind the tool shed. But the proportions were wrong. It was too tall, too wide in the shoulders, and it was entirely stationary.

He clicked the flashlight on. The beam was yellowed, the D-cell batteries already growing weak from a week of evening shifts. The light cut through the haze of exhaust and dust, sweeping across the tall weeds of the drainage ditch.

There was nothing there. Just the knotty trunk of a dead hickory tree draped in wild grapevines, its twisted bark resembling the rough contour of a heavy coat.

Wyatt let out a short, self-deprecating breath and switched the beam off. "Seeing things, Miller," he muttered to himself. "Get through the triple bill, collect the final check, and go home."

He walked back toward the concession building to grab a cup of industrial-grade coffee before the first feature began.

The concession stand sat directly beneath the projection booth, a single-story brick structure with large plate-glass windows facing the main lot. The neon sign over the double doors—depicting a dancing hot dog jumping into an open bun—buzzed with a dry, angry rattle that sounded like a rattlesnake caught in a screen door. Inside, the air was saturated with the smell of scorched coconut oil, fake butter flavoring, and the damp, metallic tang of the swamp cooler mounted in the ceiling.

Behind the stainless steel counter, Mindy was violently slamming the lever of the chili dispenser, trying to coax the last viscous brown ladles into a paper boat of nachos. She was seventeen, with bleached blonde hair pulled into a messy ponytail held together by a pink scrunchie, and she looked ready to kill anyone who asked for extra jalapeños.

"Vance didn't order more napkins," Mindy snapped before Wyatt could even say hello. She wiped a streak of yellow cheese from the rim of the counter with a dirty bar towel. "He told me to cut the paper towels from the men's room into quarters if we run out. Can you believe that cheap bastard? It’s our last night and people are paying ten bucks to wipe their fingers on brown industrial paper."

"He's consistent, you have to give him that," Wyatt said, reaching over the counter to grab an empty wax-paper cup. He walked over to the ancient coffee urn that had been dripping into a glass pot since four that afternoon. The liquid inside was the color of used crankcase oil. "Has he come out of the office?"

"Not since six," Mindy said, gesturing with her chin toward the padlocked door at the rear of the hallway, near the restrooms. "He’s got the radio turned up loud back there. Listening to the ball game or some talk show. Won't answer when you knock. I had to kick the door just to get the change drawer for the register."

Wyatt poured the coffee, watching the steam rise into the hot, fluorescent-lit air. "He wants to avoid the crowd. A lot of the old-timers from the county board are here tonight. The ones who tried to get the place historical landmark status. They aren't too happy with him."

"Good," Mindy said, tossing her towel into an open plastic bin. "I hope they key his Cadillac on the way out. He owes me twenty-two dollars for the overtime I worked during the Fourth of July marathon. Said he’d balance it on this paycheck, but I looked at the stub on the desk. Not a dime."

From outside, a sharp, low-frequency hum began to vibrate through the floorboards. The sound climbed through the register until it reached a steady sixty-cycle drone.

"Kenny’s powering up the carbons," Wyatt said, glancing at the ceiling. The heavy timber rafters groaned slightly under the weight of the twin Simplex projectors directly overhead. "Showtime in ten minutes."

"Go tell him to stop burning his old rags up there," Mindy grumbled, smoothing down her apron. "Smells like grease and hair every time he opens the booth vents. Makes the popcorn taste like an engine bay."

Wyatt stepped back through the double doors into the cooling evening air. The sky had turned from bruised violet to deep charcoal. The three massive screens loomed over the crowded fields like white blank slates waiting for instructions. Across the property, nearly four hundred vehicles were now parked, their metallic roofs reflecting the dim violet twilight. People were milling about between the rows: young fathers carrying toddlers on their shoulders, groups of teenagers huddled between car doors sharing clandestine cans of beer wrapped in brown paper sacks, and solitary older men sitting on folding lawn chairs in the beds of their pickups, their faces illuminated only by the glow of their cigarettes.

Wyatt walked around the exterior staircase that clung to the side of the projection building. The wooden steps were weathered gray, with non-slip grit tape peeling from the edges. He climbed slowly, his boots thumping rhythmically on the risers.

At the top landing, the heavy steel door to the projection booth stood slightly ajar—unusual for Kenny, who guarded his domain with the territorial paranoia of an old dog. Usually, the door was bolted from the inside, requiring a specific three-knock code before the latch would click open.

Wyatt pushed the door with the flat of his hand. It swung inward with a high, unoiled shriek that was swallowed immediately by the loud, rhythmic clatter of the projector mechanism inside.

"Kenny?" Wyatt called out, stepping over the raised metal threshold.

The booth was long, narrow, and stiflingly hot. The heat here was different from the muggy summer air outside; it was a dry, baking heat produced by the carbon arcs, smelling sharply of scorched copper, ozone, and machine oil.

Two massive gray Simplex projectors stood like artillery pieces facing the small rectangular ports in the wall. The take-up reels, four feet in diameter, spun with a steady, hypnotic flutter, feeding celluloid down through the sprockets and gate before winding it onto the bottom platters.

A single green-shaded banker’s lamp hung over the rewind bench in the corner, casting long, sharp shadows across the concrete floor. Film cans were stacked three deep against the walls, labeled in faded black marker: CARNIVAL - REEL 1, CARNIVAL - REEL 2, TRAILERS - AUGUST.

"Kenny, you got the audio gain set right on Screen One?" Wyatt asked, walking between the two projectors. "People down in Row 3 were complaining the FM signal’s bleeding into the local church broadcast again."

There was no answer.

The projector continued its mechanical chatter—tick-tick-tick-tick-tick—driving the film through the light gate. On the wall opposite the machines, the small rectangular monitor window showed the flickering image being thrown across the field: a scratchy, black-and-white countdown leader, the numbers five, four, three ticking backward against a spinning clock hand.

Wyatt rounded the housing of the second projector.

Kenny wasn't at the controls. He wasn't at the splicing bench, either.

The small, greasy stool where the projectionist usually spent eighteen hours a day was knocked on its side, one of its steel legs bent slightly outward as if it had been struck with tremendous force. Near the base of the stool, a mug of black coffee lay shattered on the concrete, the dark liquid pooling between the cracks and soaking into a scatter of unused film leader.

"Kenny?" Wyatt’s voice dropped an octave, the casual tone evaporating.

He stepped toward the back corner of the booth, where a narrow partition separated the projection room from a small storage alcove containing spare carbon rods, drive belts, and the high-voltage breaker panels for the entire facility.

The air in the alcove felt thicker, colder despite the proximity of the projector housing.

Wyatt looked down.

On the concrete floor, smeared across the dusty gray paint, was a single, broad drag mark. It started near the fallen stool and disappeared into the darkened crawlspace beneath the breaker boxes—a narrow utility opening that led into the ceiling plenum above the concession stand.

Something dripped.

It was a slow, heavy sound, distinct from the chatter of the projector.

Plip.

Plip.

Wyatt looked up toward the ceiling rafters. The darkness above the bare bulb was thick with cobwebs and insulation batting.

Between two two-by-fours, a heavy canvas tool bag was wedged securely. Hanging down from the side of the joist, swaying gently in the hot exhaust air pumped out by the lamp housing, was a pair of heavy leather work gloves. They were stiff with old grease, but the fingertips were wet, glistening dark and viscous under the yellow light of the single bulb.

Before Wyatt could reach for his flashlight, the sound of the drive-in's horn blew from down below—a single, long, celebratory blare from some impatient customer out on the lot, signaling that the countdown had reached zero.

On the screen outside, the stark black-and-white opening frame of Carnival of Souls flared to life, casting sixty feet of ghostly white light across the field, washing out the shadows and painting the four hundred waiting cars in the cold, flickering illumination of the dead.

The shrill organ score of the opening credits reverberated down from the speaker poles, tinny and thin against the wide expanse of the valley. From the elevated wooden catwalk outside the projection room, the sea of parked cars looked like rows of beetles pinned beneath glass. Blue exhaust fumes rose in pale sheets, drifting through the bright cone of the projection beam and turning the white light into a milky, shimmering tunnel that sliced through the twilight.

Wyatt stood frozen on the landing, his fingers gripping the splintered 2x4 railing so hard his knuckles had gone bloodless. Inside the booth behind him, the Simplex chattered away with mechanical indifference, slapping each foot of film against the sprockets in perfect, cold rhythm. The smell of scorched oil remained sharp, but underneath it lay something heavier—a coppery, cloying stench that reminded him of gutting catfish on the creek bank when the heat made the water go sour.

"Kenny?" Wyatt called again toward the interior gloom, his voice cracking slightly before finding its footing.

No sound came back except the clacking shuttle and the dry hiss of the carbon exhaust vent. Wyatt stepped backward, easing his way toward the stairs rather than pushing deeper into the narrow alcove behind the breaker panels. He had three years of track running behind him and five years of working odd jobs for Vance, but nothing in his handbook covered dark stains trailing into ceiling vents. The sane thing, the only practical thing, was to get Vance. Vance had the master keys, Vance had the landline that hooked directly into the county sheriff’s dispatch, and Vance carried a snub-nosed .38 revolver in the bottom drawer of his walnut desk.

Wyatt took the wooden stairs three at a time, his boots slapping the treads in a ragged tempo. The summer air struck his face like a wet blanket as he hit the asphalt flat behind the concession stand.

Down on the lot, the crowd was settling into its rhythm. Laughter drifted from the open bed of a Ford pickup where three girls in halter tops shared a thermos of mixed liquor. Across the lane, a father was wrestling a stubborn lawn chair into place on the roof of his wood-paneled station wagon, shouting good-natured curses as his young son hopped around the fender with a bag of cotton candy. In the half-light, everything looked entirely normal, wrapped in the cheap romance of an Ohio summer evening. It was impossible to square that placid, suburban postcard with the overturned stool and the wet work gloves hanging twenty feet overhead.

Wyatt jogged around the corner of the cinderblock building, sidestepping a pair of teenagers leaning against the brickwork who were locked in an intense, clumsy embrace. He pushed through the side service door into the narrow hallway that divided the public restrooms from the back offices.

The hallway was cooler than the outside lot, chilled by an ancient window unit that rattled violently in its frame, vibrating the framed vintage one-sheets hanging along the wall. The door to the manager’s office sat at the end of the corridor, heavy solid-core oak painted dark brown, with a brass plate that read M. VANCE - GENERAL MANAGER.

Wyatt stepped up and rapped sharply on the wood. "Mr. Vance? You in there?"

Through the door came the low, tinny squawk of an AM radio tuned to a sports broadcast—the distant crack of a bat, followed by the drone of a commentator describing a groundout to short.

"Mr. Vance, it's Wyatt. Something's wrong up in the booth. Kenny’s not at his post, and there's... there's a mess up by the platters."

The radio droned on. No footsteps approached. No chair scraped across the linoleum.

Wyatt reached down and tried the round brass knob. It turned smoothly in his hand. The latch clicked back, and the door swung inward by an inch.

That wasn't right. Vance never left the door unlocked, not on a normal Tuesday night, and certainly not on a night when four thousand dollars in small bills were stacked in canvas bags waiting for the morning deposit. Vance was a man who checked his padlock twice before walking twenty feet to use the urinal.

"Mr. Vance?"

Wyatt pushed the door open the rest of the way.

The office was cast in deep shadow, illuminated only by the pale street light filtering through the metal security bars on the small exterior window. The air conditioning unit in the wall was off, leaving the room stuffy and dead. The smell of cheap cigar tobacco, which had infused the curtains and ceiling tiles over forty years of management, hung motionless in the room.

The wooden desk in the center of the office was swept clear. A metal cash box sat open on the blotter, its spring-loaded green trays completely empty. Beside it lay a ring of heavy brass keys, an overturned mug of ice water, and a stack of uncounted ticket stubs pinned under a glass paperweight.

The radio—a wood-veneered transistor unit from the late sixties—sat on top of a low metal filing cabinet behind the chair. The announcer’s voice buzzed through the small paper cone: "...two balls, one strike to Henderson. Bottom of the seventh, tie ballgame here at County Stadium..."

The high-backed leather swivel chair was turned away from the desk, facing the corner of the room. A gray suit jacket was draped over the back of it, and a pair of polished black wingtip shoes protruded from the footrest area, pointing stiffly upward toward the plaster ceiling.

"Mr. Vance?" Wyatt stepped across the threshold, his throat dry.

He moved around the corner of the desk, reaching out a hand toward the arm of the chair. The leather felt cool and cracked beneath his fingers. He pulled the chair toward him, spinning it on its iron caster.

The chair swung smoothly around.

The seat was empty.

The wingtip shoes were there, neatly arranged on the carpeted floorboard, and the trousers of Vance's polyester suit were draped across the cushion, carefully arranged as if someone had dressed an invisible mannequin. Above the collar of the pressed white dress shirt, resting directly on the padded headrest where a man’s head should have been, sat a bowling pin from the abandoned six-lane alley down on Route 9, its white plastic chipped and stained with dirty oil. On its smooth surface, someone had used a black grease pencil to draw a crude, grinning face with hollow circles for eyes.

Wyatt jumped back, his shoulder slamming hard against the metal doorframe. The breath caught in his chest like a knot of dry pine needles.

The radio continued its commentary: "...swing and a miss, strike two. The shadows are getting long across the infield now..."

This wasn't Kenny pulling an elaborate prank to mark the closing night. Kenny was fifty-eight years old, had bad knees from thirty years on naval destroyers, and spent his free time reading trade catalogs for antique film equipment. Kenny didn't drag heavy bowling pins around, and he certainly didn't leave four thousand dollars of company money unsecured on a desktop.

Wyatt backed out of the office into the hallway, pulling the door shut behind him. The brass knob rattled as the latch caught.

He needed Chloe. Chloe had a level head, a car that ran, and didn't panic when things went sideways. They needed to shut the gates, pull the master breaker on the whole damn lot, and call the state troopers from the payphone outside the fence.

He moved quickly through the corridor, bursting out into the concession lobby.

The lobby was packed with thirty or forty people waiting for refreshments. The smell of hot grease was overpowering now, mingling with the sugary steam of blue raspberry syrup from the slush machine. Mindy was red-faced, shouting order numbers over the din of the crowd, while two teenage boys in Starlight paper hats frantically loaded hot dogs onto the roller grill.

"Where’s Chloe?" Wyatt shouted over the noise, leaning over the counter near the register.

Mindy didn't look at him, her hands flying as she capped two large sodas with plastic lids. "She went out to Screen One with a flashlight about ten minutes ago. Some drunk backed an El Camino into one of the perimeter speakers and tore the post right out of the dirt. She took Toby to go assess the damage before Vance has an aneurysm."

"Did she come through here?"

"No, she went out the back exit by the dumpsters," Mindy said, thrusting the sodas toward a man in a denim vest. "Wyatt, grab a box of large cups from the dry storage, will you? We’re almost down to the sleeves."

"Not now," Wyatt said, turning on his heel and heading for the glass front doors.

"Wyatt! I'm serious! If we run out of cups, people are going to start throwing things!"

He ignored her, pushing through the heavy aluminum-framed doors out into the cool draft of the gravel apron.

Outside, the darkness had fully descended. Screen One dominated the eastern horizon, forty feet of luminous black-and-white photography washing over the rows of vehicles. On the screen, a ghostly figure in a white dress wandered through an abandoned pavilion while eerie pipe organ music rolled from the few functional speakers scattered across the ramps.

Wyatt unclipped his heavy D-cell flashlight from his belt, flicking the thumb switch. The pale beam leaped across the blacktop, catching dust motes and cigarette smoke drifting between the cars.

He made his way along the service road that skirted the outer edge of Screen One’s field. To his left were the terraced rows of cars, their engines ticking quietly as they cooled, windshields reflecting the pale gray glow of the movie. Inside the vehicles, faces were turned upward in rapt attention; shadows leaned across front seats, heads rested on shoulders, and beer cans clinked in the gloom. Nobody was looking at the service lane. To the paying patrons, the rest of the world had ceased to exist outside the frame of the screen and the boundaries of their front seats.

To Wyatt’s right lay the perimeter ditch, a ten-foot band of overgrown sawgrass, chicory, and wild brambles that separated the drive-in property from the deep pine woods. The chain-link fence ran through the center of the ditch, its top rail bent and sagging under decades of falling limbs.

"Chloe?" he called out, keeping his voice below a shout so as not to draw complaints from the cars in the back row. "Chloe! Toby!"

The beam of his flashlight swept the grass.

Fifty yards ahead, near the far corner of the screen where the massive timber support braces met the earth, a light was blinking. It was a pale, rhythmic flash, low to the ground, almost completely obscured by the weeds.

Wyatt broke into a jog, his boots crunching over the loose gravel of the access road.

The air was cooler out here by the tree line, smelling sharply of damp earth and pine needles. The sound of the movie faded slightly, replaced by the persistent, mechanical chorus of the cicadas in the canopy above.

He reached the corner of the screen tower.

The structure was colossal up close. The main uprights were heavy utility poles, creosote-soaked and black, anchored into six-foot concrete piers sunk into the dirt. A labyrinth of diagonal cross-braces created a hollow, cathedral-like space behind the flat metal face of the screen. It was an area strictly off-limits to patrons, a dumping ground for rusted machinery, empty cable spools, and old wooden pallets.

The light he had seen was lying in the tall grass at the base of the eastern pier.

It was Toby’s two-way radio. The red LED indicator on top of the black plastic housing was blinking steadily, indicating a low battery or an open channel. A faint crackle of white noise hissed through its small speaker.

Wyatt crouched down and picked it up. The plastic was cool to the touch, but along the belt clip ran a sticky smear that smelled unmistakably of motor oil and vinegar—the sour, industrial solvent Toby used to clean the speaker components.

Beside the radio lay Toby’s aluminum trash-grabber. The handle had been bent completely double, the light metal creased as though it had been struck against something hard and unyielding.

"Toby?" Wyatt stood up, shining his flashlight into the cavernous darkness beneath the screen’s wooden superstructure.

The light beam cut through decades of accumulated spiderwebs, illuminating the massive cross-bracing that climbed fifty feet into the night sky. In the hollow behind the corrugated panels, the audio from the movie boomed with a strange, reverberating echo, the metal sheets acting like a giant sounding board.

Clank.

The sound came from above.

Wyatt froze, sweeping the flashlight upward. The beam traveled along the massive vertical timber, picking out rusted iron climbing rungs that had been driven into the wood to allow maintenance crews to service the aviation warning lights on top of the screen.

Ten feet up, the wood was clear.

Twenty feet up, a pair of worn canvas work boots dangled into the empty air, swinging with a faint, hypnotic pendulum motion.

Wyatt’s breath caught in his throat. He brought the beam directly onto the boots, then climbed higher with the light.

It was Toby.

The groundskeeper was suspended from one of the diagonal timber braces by a length of heavy half-inch steel cable—the same braided guy-wire used to anchor the speaker poles against the wind. The cable had been looped twice around his neck and cinched tight to an iron bolt on the cross-beam. His head hung forward, chin pressed deep into his chest, his grease-stained ball cap knocked askew so that only the white crown of his head was visible. His arms hung limp at his sides, the heavy leather work gloves hanging loose from his wrists.

Below his dangling feet, the weeds were flattened, trampled down in a wide circle that smelled of freshly turned dirt and crushed mint.

Wyatt felt the blood drain from his face, a cold, heavy numbness washing down from his scalp to his fingertips. His legs felt like lead weights. For five seconds, maybe ten, his brain simply refused to process the information. People didn't hang from the screen braces at the Starlight. Old men didn't die twenty feet in the air while a four-dollar horror movie played to four hundred cars fifty yards away. It was an impossible, grotesque intrusion into the mundane reality of his summer job.

Then, from the darkness further back in the hollow behind the screen, came the sound of steel scraping on stone.

It was a slow, deliberate sound—the tip of an iron tool being dragged along the face of a concrete foundation block.

Skrrr-chick.

Skrrr-chick.

Wyatt didn't yell. The instinct for survival, primal and ancient, clamped down on his vocal cords like a vice. He lowered the beam of the flashlight toward the sound, but his hands were shaking so violently that the yellow circle danced wildly across the weeds and timber struts.

Between two rusted fuel drums thirty paces away, something shifted.

The figure stepped out into the faint back-scatter of light from the projection beam overhead.

It was broad, taller than any of the locals Wyatt knew, wearing a heavy, grease-stiffened shop coat that hung down past its knees like a butcher’s apron. Its face was completely obscured by a piece of curved, sun-faded fiberglass—the front shell of an old drive-in speaker casing, with two jagged holes gouged through the metal grill where the eyes should be. Behind those dark apertures, nothing was visible except the blackness of the night.

In its right hand, hanging loosely beside its thigh, the figure held a thirty-six-inch pair of industrial compound bolt cutters, the heavy drop-forged jaws glistening with fresh scratches where they had bitten through chain link.

The figure didn't run. It didn't make a sound. It simply tilted its head slightly to the left, the pale fiberglass mask catching the gray reflection of the movie above, and took a single, heavy step forward. The sole of its boot crushed an empty motor oil bottle with a loud, plastic crunch.

Wyatt didn't wait to see a second step.

He turned on his heel and sprinted back out of the timber superstructure, his boots tearing into the dirt as he rounded the corner of Screen One. The cold summer wind hit him, carrying the scent of buttery popcorn and car exhaust, but it brought no relief.

Behind him, the pipe organ on the soundtrack reached a crescendo, a wild, shrieking chord that tore through the night, masking whatever sounds pursued him through the weeds.