Midnight Projectionist at Starlight Drive-In

• Chapter 1 The Last Shift
• Chapter 2 Welcome to Starlight
• Chapter 3 The Projection Booth
• Chapter 4 Flickering Shadows
• Chapter 5 Screen Four
• Chapter 6 Missing Reels
• Chapter 7 The Midnight Feature
• Chapter 8 Static in the Dark
• Chapter 9 A Familiar Face
• Chapter 10 The Concession Stand
• Chapter 11 Celluloid Blood
• Chapter 12 Whispers on the Intercom
• Chapter 13 The Manager's Secret
• Chapter 14 Locked Gates
• Chapter 15 The Editing Room
• Chapter 16 On the Cutting Floor
• Chapter 17 Next on the Bill
• Chapter 18 Burned Film
• Chapter 19 Trapped in the Beam
• Chapter 20 The Final Reel
• Chapter 21 Running Out of Tape
• Chapter 22 Behind the Screen
• Chapter 23 Projector's Fury
• Chapter 24 Dawn at the Drive-In
• Chapter 25 Ashes and Silver
• Chapter 26 Credits Roll

The digital projectors at the Metroplex Eight did not hum. They whirred, a thin, anxious sound like a desktop computer trying to render a spreadsheet that was too large for its memory. Leo Vance stood in the narrow walkway behind Booth Four, watching the little green status light on the Christie Solaria blink in steady, indifferent intervals. There was no heat radiating from the housing, no smell of ozone or scorched dust, and certainly no rhythmic clatter of a Maltese cross intermittent movement pulling thirty-five-millimeter celluloid through a gate at twenty-four frames per second.

It was just a beige metal box eating a hard drive.

Leo reached into his back pocket, pulled out a yellow grease pencil, and tapped it against his thigh. He had carried that pencil for six years, ever since he had lied about his age to get a part-time gig threading platters at a second-run house in the next county over. Tonight, he had no use for it. Tonight, he was officially obsolete.

He looked down at the cardboard box sitting by his boots. Inside were a brass splicing block, two rolls of Mylar tape, a pair of cotton editing gloves that had gone gray at the fingertips, and a half-empty bottle of film cleaner that smelled faintly of almonds and brain damage. That was the sum total of his professional life.

The heavy fire door at the end of the catwalk banged open, and Greg leaned in. Greg was twenty-nine, wore a clip-on tie with a tiny silver popcorn bucket embroidered on the front, and took his job as Assistant General Manager with the solemnity of a heart surgeon.

"You're still here, Vance?" Greg asked, checking his watch. "Your shift ended ten minutes ago. Corporate's watching the overtime."

"Just packing up my museum pieces, Greg," Leo said, dropping the grease pencil into the cardboard box. "Wouldn't want to leave any dangerous analog technology lying around. Someone might trip over it."

Greg didn't smile. He rarely smiled unless a regional supervisor was in the building, and even then, it looked like he was trying to pass a kidney stone. "Yeah, well. The techs from Minneapolis are coming in Tuesday to pull the last of the old Simplexes out of the storage bay. You're sure you don't want to transfer to concessions? I can put you on the closing register. Twelve-fifty an hour, plus all the fountain soda you can drink."

"I'm good," Leo said, picking up the box. "I don't think my spirit could survive the nacho cheese dispenser."

"Suit yourself." Greg stepped aside to let him pass, holding the door with one scuffed dress shoe. "Your final check's in the safe. Swing by the office on your way out. And Vance?"

Leo paused in the doorway. "Yeah?"

"Leave your vest. We're short on mediums."

Leo didn't argue. He set the box down on the floor, unbuttoned the maroon polyester vest with the Metroplex logo stitched over the heart, and handed it over. Underneath, he was wearing a faded black T-shirt with a torn collar. He felt lighter immediately.

Downstairs, the lobby was empty except for a teenager in a matching maroon vest who was half-heartedly pushing a dust mop around the arcade machines. The air smelled of artificial butter and stale sugar, a combination that had soaked so deep into Leo's pores over the last three years that he suspected he would still smell like a concession stand when he was eighty.

He stopped by the manager's office, signed the termination paperwork—technically a "restructuring separation," according to the bold print at the top of the page—and pocketed the envelope containing his last two weeks of pay. It wasn't enough to cover next month's rent, let alone the transmission work his Honda Civic had been begging for since August.

Outside, the October air was damp and sharp, carrying the scent of wet asphalt and dying leaves. Leo walked across the vast, mostly empty parking lot toward his car. A few streetlights buzzed overhead, casting pools of sickly yellow light over the oil stains. He tossed the cardboard box onto the passenger seat, climbed in, and turned the key. The Civic coughed twice, rattled like a coffee can full of bolts, and finally settled into a rough idle.

He didn't go straight home. His apartment was a studio above a dry cleaner's, and the thought of sitting there staring at the water stain on his ceiling while doing math on the back of an envelope wasn't appealing. Instead, he drove three miles down Route 9 to the Silver Spoon Diner, a chrome-and-linoleum box that stayed open twenty-four hours a day mostly for truckers, third-shift nurses, and people who had nowhere else to be.

Leo took a booth in the back, ordered a black coffee and a plate of hash browns, and pulled a folded sheet of paper from his jacket pocket.

He had found it three days ago, pinned to the corkboard at the laundromat near his apartment. Most of the board was covered in flyers for lost cats, guitar lessons, and amateur drywallers, but this one had caught his eye because it was typed on heavy, cream-colored cardstock—the kind of paper nobody used anymore—and pinned up with a single brass thumbtack.

WANTED: MIDNIGHT PROJECTIONIST. Starlight Drive-In. 35mm experience required. Must be reliable, discreet, and comfortable working alone. Cash paid nightly. Apply in person after dusk, or call for gate code.

At the bottom, a phone number had been written in neat, cramped black ink.

Leo stared at the paper while the waitress, a woman named Brenda whose hair was the exact color of a copper penny, set his coffee down.

"Rough night?" she asked, nodding toward the cardboard box he'd brought in with him and set on the vinyl bench.

"Got laid off," Leo said. "Replaced by a hard drive."

"Happens to the best of us," Brenda said, already turning back toward the counter. "Wait till they figure out how to make a robot pour coffee. Then I'm really screwed."

Leo took a sip of the coffee. It was bitter and hot enough to strip paint, which was exactly what he needed. He looked back down at the flyer.

Everyone in town knew about the Starlight Drive-In, mostly because it was impossible to miss if you drove out toward the county line. It had been built in the late sixties, back when people still packed their kids into station wagons in their pajamas to watch double features under the stars. In its prime, it had boasted four massive screens, a playground, and a neon marquee that could be seen from the interstate.

Then the multiplexes arrived, and the Starlight slowly withered. By the time Leo was in high school, three of the four screens were supposedly closed, their speakers rusted off the poles and their asphalt lots sprouting dandelions and sumac. Only Screen One still operated on weekends during the summer, playing cheap B-movies and twenty-year-old blockbusters to a handful of nostalgic locals and teenagers looking for a dark place to park.

At least, that was the story. Leo hadn't actually been out there in years. He'd assumed the whole place was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, waiting for a developer to buy the land and turn it into a strip mall.

Which made the flyer strange. Who needed a midnight projectionist at a half-abandoned drive-in in the middle of October? The season was supposed to be over. Nobody sat in their car with the windows rolled down when it was forty-five degrees outside.

Still, cash paid nightly. And 35mm experience required.

Leo reached into his pocket, pulled out his phone, and dialed the number at the bottom of the card.

It rang once. Twice. Three times. Just as he was about to hang up, the line clicked.

"Starlight," a man's voice said. It was dry, raspy, and sounded like it hadn't been used much that day.

"Uh, hi," Leo said, sitting up a little straighter. "I'm calling about the flyer. For the projectionist job?"

There was a long pause on the other end. In the background, Leo could hear the faint, rhythmic ticking of a clock, or maybe a radiator knocking.

"You know how to thread a Century JJ?" the voice asked.

"Yeah," Leo said, surprised. "I learned on a Century. Used to run a pair of them at the Bijou before they tore it down. Changeovers, platter systems, carbon arc, xenon—I've done it all."

Another pause. "We don't use platters here. Reel-to-reel. Twenty-minute changeovers. You have to watch for the cue marks."

"I know what cue marks look like," Leo said. "Cigarette burns in the upper right corner. Two of them. Motor cue, then changeover."

"Good." The man sounded marginally more interested. "What's your name?"

"Leo Vance."

"You got a car, Leo?"

"Yeah. Mostly."

"Come out tonight. Ask for Arthur at the main booth. If you're not a complete idiot, you can start tomorrow."

"Wait—tonight?" Leo glanced at his watch. It was 11:45 PM. "Isn't the show already over?"

"The regular show is," Arthur said. "We have a late crowd. Just come out. Take the old county road past the gravel pit. The gate'll be unlocked."

The line went dead.

Leo stared at his phone for a second, then tossed a five-dollar bill onto the table to cover the coffee and his untouched hash browns. He grabbed his cardboard box, pushed through the diner's glass door, and walked back out to the Civic.

He told himself he was just going to look. If the place was a dump, or if Arthur turned out to be some kind of lunatic living in a rusted-out trailer, Leo could just turn around and go home. He didn't owe anybody anything.

He pulled out onto Route 9 and headed north, away from the strip malls and the streetlights. Within ten minutes, the town gave way to scrub pine, empty fields, and long stretches of dark highway where his headlights were the only thing moving. He turned onto the old county road, just past the flooded gravel pit, and followed it as it wound through a stand of thick oaks.

The road was narrow and poorly paved, full of frost heaves that made the Civic's suspension groan. Just as Leo was beginning to think he'd missed the turn, the trees parted.

Ahead of him, rising out of the mist that clung to the low ground, was the marquee of the Starlight Drive-In.

Half the neon tubes were dead. The word STAR glowed in a steady, buzzing pink, while LIGHT flickered erratically, dying out completely for a few seconds before snapping back to life. Underneath, on the plastic letterboard, someone had spelled out NOW SHOWING: PRIVATE SCREENING.

The iron gates were swung wide open, just like Arthur had said.

Leo slowed down, his tires crunching over loose gravel as he pulled through the entrance. The ticket booth was dark, its glass windows covered in a thick layer of dust and dead moths. Beyond it, the vast asphalt lot stretched out into the gloom, bordered by a high wooden fence that was sagging in several places.

He could see the massive white rectangles of the screens rising against the night sky. Screen One was closest to the road, its surface weathered and gray. Behind it, further back in the weeds, stood Screens Two, Three, and Four, looking like the bleached ribs of some giant, forgotten animal.

There wasn't a single car in the lot.

Leo frowned, glancing at the clock on his dashboard. 12:10 AM. So much for a late crowd.

He pulled up beside the central concession building—a low, flat-roofed concrete structure with the projection booth perched on top like a watchtower—and killed the engine. The silence that rushed in to fill the space was absolute. No traffic, no crickets, no wind. Just the faint, metallic ticking of his cooling engine.

Leo grabbed his flashlight from the glove box, stepped out of the car, and locked the doors out of habit.

"Hello?" he called out. His voice sounded small and flat against the empty asphalt.

A light clicked on in the upper window of the projection booth. A silhouette appeared behind the glass, looking down at him. A moment later, a heavy metal door at the side of the concession building creaked open, and a man stepped out onto the concrete apron.

He was older—maybe sixty, maybe seventy, it was hard to tell in the dim light—wearing a stained canvas jacket and a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. He held a lit cigarette between two yellowed fingers.

"Leo Vance?" the man asked.

"Yeah," Leo said, walking toward him. "Arthur?"

"That's me." Arthur took a long drag on his cigarette, then flicked it onto the gravel, grinding it out with the heel of his boot. "You're late."

"You didn't give me a time," Leo pointed out.

"Midnight's midnight." Arthur turned and gestured toward the open door. "Come on. Let's see if you actually know which end of a reel goes on the spindle."

Leo followed him inside. The air in the stairwell was cold and smelled strongly of damp concrete, old popcorn oil, and something else—something sharp and chemical that made the back of Leo's throat itch. He couldn't quite place it. It wasn't film cleaner. It was closer to bleach, or maybe formaldehyde.

They climbed the narrow, steep stairs to the projection booth.

When Arthur pushed the door open, Leo stopped in his tracks.

The booth was huge—much larger than the cramped cubicles at the Metroplex—and it was packed wall-to-wall with vintage equipment. Four massive Century JJ 35mm projectors stood in a row, their cast-iron bodies painted a dull, industrial green. Each one was aimed at a different porthole in the front wall, corresponding to the four screens outside.

"Jesus," Leo breathed, stepping inside. "I haven't seen a setup like this since I was a kid. Do all four of these still run?"

"They run," Arthur said, walking over to a battered metal desk in the corner. "Though we mostly just use One and Four these days. Two and Three have some alignment issues I haven't bothered to fix."

Leo walked down the line, running his fingers lightly over the cold metal housing of the nearest projector. It was clean—immaculately clean, in fact. No dust, no grease buildup, no stray bits of spliced tape littering the floor. Whoever had been taking care of these machines had treated them with a kind of obsessive reverence.

"Where's the previous guy?" Leo asked, turning back to Arthur. "Did he quit?"

Arthur didn't look up from the ledger he was writing in. "He moved on."

"To another theater?"

"Something like that." Arthur closed the ledger with a soft snap and finally looked at Leo. His eyes behind the thick glasses were pale and watery, and he didn't blink nearly as often as a normal person should. "The job's simple, Leo. You get here at eleven-thirty. You check the reels I leave for you on the bench. You thread them up, you run them at midnight sharp, and you don't leave until the last frame clears the gate. When you're done, you lock up, take your envelope from the desk, and go home."

"Run them for who?" Leo asked, gesturing toward the dark portholes. "There's nobody out there."

Arthur's mouth twitched into something that wasn't quite a smile. "That's not your concern. You're a projectionist, not an usher. Your job is to keep the light on the screen. Can you do that?"

Leo hesitated. The whole thing was weird. The empty lot, the smell in the stairwell, the way Arthur talked like he was guarding a state secret. Everything in Leo's gut told him to thank the old man for his time, walk back down the stairs, and drive home.

Then he thought about his rent check. He thought about Greg's clip-on tie and the nacho cheese dispenser.

"Two hundred a night?" Leo asked.

"Cash," Arthur said. "Every morning before you leave."

Leo looked back at the row of Century projectors. They were beautiful, in a heavy, brutalist sort of way. Real machines, built to last a hundred years.

"I can do that," Leo said.

"Good." Arthur reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a heavy brass key on a piece of frayed twine, and tossed it onto the desk. "That's the gate key and the booth key. Don't lose it. I don't keep spares."

Leo picked up the key. It was surprisingly warm from Arthur's pocket.

"When do I start?"

"Tomorrow night. Eleven-thirty." Arthur walked past him toward the door, pausing with his hand on the knob. "One rule, Leo. Non-negotiable."

"What's that?"

"You stay in the booth. Once the projectors are rolling, you don't go downstairs, and you don't go out into the lot. If you hear something, or if you think you see someone near the fence, you ignore it. You watch the cue marks, you make your changeovers, and you mind your own business. Understood?"

"Understood," Leo said, though he had no idea what he was agreeing to.

Arthur nodded once, stepped out onto the landing, and pulled the door shut behind him. Leo heard his heavy footsteps descending the stairs, followed by the metallic clang of the exterior door.

A moment later, the headlights of an old pickup truck flared to life in the gravel lot below, swept across the dark face of Screen One, and disappeared down the county road.

Leo stood alone in the silent booth, the brass key heavy in his palm. Outside, through the thick glass of the porthole, the Starlight Drive-In waited in the dark.

The drive back to town felt longer than the drive out. Leo kept his high beams on until he hit the state highway, watching the scrub pines and drainage ditches slide past in the pale wash of his headlights. His Honda Civic had developed a new rattle somewhere behind the glove box, a dry, rhythmic clicking that sounded remarkably like a film reel running out of leader. He turned the radio up to drown it out, settling on an AM station that played classic country through a thick blanket of static.

By the time he climbed the narrow wooden stairs to his apartment above Chen’s Dry Cleaners, it was nearly two in the morning. The building smelled of perchloroethylene and damp wool, a scent that usually gave him a headache but tonight just felt familiar. He dropped his cardboard box of tools by the door, tossed the brass key onto the kitchen counter, and didn’t bother taking off his jeans before collapsing onto the futon.

He slept until noon, waking up with a stiff neck and a mouth that tasted like burnt coffee. Sunlight was filtering through the yellowed blinds, casting thin stripes across the scarred linoleum floor. For a few seconds, he stared at the water stain on the ceiling—it looked vaguely like the state of Florida—and tried to remember if he had dreamed the whole thing.

Then he rolled over and saw the brass key glinting on the counter.

Leo got up, stretched until his spine popped, and put a kettle on the stove. While the water boiled, he opened his laptop and checked his bank account. The number staring back at him was grim: three hundred and forty-two dollars, with rent due in six days. Even with the final check from the Metroplex, he’d be eating ramen and peanut butter until Thanksgiving unless he found something else.

Two hundred a night. Cash.

He poured boiling water over a scoop of instant coffee, stirred it with a butter knife, and leaned against the counter. There was no catch that could possibly be worse than working at the Metroplex had been, at least not on paper. Sure, Arthur was a little strange, and the smell in that stairwell had been enough to curl his nose hairs, but old theaters were always weird. The Bijou had a resident ghost, according to the ushers, though Leo had always suspected it was just a raccoon living in the ductwork.

He spent the afternoon running errands. He stopped at the bank to deposit his final paycheck, then drove over to Miller’s Hardware on Main Street to buy a heavy-duty flashlight and a pack of D-cell batteries. The little plastic penlight he kept in his glove box wasn't going to cut it out there in the woods.

The clerk at Miller’s was a guy in his fifties named Walt who wore a faded Cubs cap and moved at the speed of a glacier. He rang up the flashlight, squinting at Leo over his bifocals.

"Going camping?" Walt asked, dropping the batteries into a brown paper bag.

"Night shift," Leo said, handing over a twenty. "Out at the Starlight."

Walt’s fingers paused on the cash register drawer. "The drive-in? Out past the gravel pit?"

"That's the one."

"Huh." Walt counted out Leo’s change, his expression shifting into something between amusement and mild concern. "Didn't know they were still hiring. Thought old man Arthur just kept the place open as a tax write-off. Or maybe to keep the county from condemning it."

"They're doing some late-season screenings," Leo said, pocketing his change. "Private stuff."

"Private," Walt repeated, nodding slowly. "Right. Well, you watch yourself out there, kid. That road gets slick when the frost hits, and there ain't a streetlight for four miles. Plus, the deer are thick as fleas this time of year."

"I'll keep my eyes open."

"You do that," Walt said, already turning back to a rack of plumbing fittings.

Leo drove back to his apartment, packed a canvas messenger bag with his new flashlight, a thermos, a ham sandwich on stale rye bread, and a paperback novel he’d been trying to finish since July. He didn't know how long the "late crowd" movies ran, or if he’d have time to read between changeovers, but he’d learned early on that a bored projectionist was a careless projectionist.

At ten-thirty, he loaded his cardboard box of tools back into the passenger seat of the Civic and headed north.

The night was colder than the one before, a sharp wind whipping across the open fields and shaking the dry cornstalks along the shoulder of Route 9. When he turned onto the old county road, the trees closed in around him like a tunnel. His headlights caught the reflective eyes of a opossum scurrying across the asphalt, and a few hundred yards later, the flooded gravel pit gleamed like a sheet of black glass to his left.

He reached the Starlight Drive-In at 11:22 PM.

Tonight, the heavy iron gates were pulled shut and secured with a thick galvanized chain. Above them, the marquee buzzed in the dark. STAR glowed a steady, electric pink, while LIGHT sputtered and died every few seconds, plunging the entrance into shadow before snapping back to life. The plastic letters still read NOW SHOWING: PRIVATE SCREENING.

Leo put the Civic in park, left the headlights on, and stepped out into the biting wind. He fished the brass key out of his pocket, walked up to the gate, and fitted it into the heavy padlock. The mechanism was stiff with rust, requiring a firm twist before it popped open with a loud clack that echoed across the empty lot.

He unwound the chain, pushed one side of the iron gate open—the hinges shrieked like a stepped-on cat—and drove through. Remembering Arthur's instructions, he got back out and pulled the gate shut behind him, looping the chain back through the bars without locking it, just in case.

The lot was as empty as it had been the night before. No cars, no people, no sign of life. Just the four massive white screens rising out of the weeds like monuments to a dead religion.

Leo drove slowly across the cracked asphalt toward the central concession building. As he rounded the corner of the low concrete structure, he hit the brakes.

A light was on inside the concession stand.

Through the grimy plate-glass windows, Leo could see the pale glow of fluorescent tubes reflecting off stainless steel counters. Parked beside the building, just a few feet from the metal door to the projection booth, was a beat-up, primer-gray Ford Focus with a missing hubcap.

Leo pulled up next to the Focus, killed his engine, and grabbed his messenger bag and the cardboard box. He locked the Civic—a habit that felt slightly ridiculous out here in the middle of nowhere—and walked over to the concession stand's glass door.

It was unlocked. A small brass bell jingled overhead as he pushed it open.

The air inside was warm and smelled aggressively of artificial butter, bleach, and cheap tobacco. A young guy in his mid-twenties was standing behind the long Formica counter, wiping down the glass front of a popcorn machine with a damp rag. He wore a faded gray hoodie with the sleeves pushed up, revealing a pair of pale, wiry forearms, and a backwards baseball cap.

He looked up as the bell rang, his eyes widening slightly before settling into a look of tired resignation.

"You must be the new guy," he said. His voice was raspy, like he’d been yelling at a concert, or maybe he just smoked too much.

"Leo," he said, stepping up to the counter and setting his cardboard box down on a sticky patch of Formica. "You?"

"Denny." He tossed the rag into a plastic bucket and leaned his elbows on the counter. "Arthur told me he hired somebody. Didn't think you'd actually show up, to be honest. Most guys take one look at the road out here and decide they'd rather flip burgers in town."

"I have a strong tolerance for bad neighborhoods," Leo said, glancing around the room.

It was a time capsule. The menu board above the counter still listed prices in faded plastic letters—popcorn for two dollars, hot dogs for a dollar-fifty, sodas for a buck. A row of glass jars held dusty boxes of Jujubes and Milk Duds that looked like they’d been sitting there since the Carter administration. Yet the floor was spotless, freshly mopped, and the stainless steel counters gleamed under the buzzing fluorescent lights.

"So," Leo said, looking back at Denny. "Are we expecting a rush tonight? Because the lot looks a little thin."

Denny let out a short, humorless bark of a laugh. "Yeah, don't hold your breath. I've been working here three months, and I've never sold a single bag of popcorn. Don't even turn the kettle on."

"Then why are you wiping it down?"

"Because Arthur pays me twelve bucks an hour to keep the place looking like it's open," Denny said, shrugging. "I mop the floors, I wipe the glass, I empty the trash cans—even though there's never anything in 'em—and I stay out of the way. Easiest gig I ever had, honestly. Beats working the night shift at the Shell station."

Leo frowned, resting his hand on the edge of his cardboard box. "Look, man, I don't want to sound like a cop, but what's the deal with this place? Arthur said there was a late crowd. If nobody's buying popcorn, and there aren't any cars in the lot, who am I projecting for?"

Denny reached into the pocket of his hoodie, pulled out a crumpled pack of Mavericks, and tapped one out. He didn't light it, just rolled it between his fingers.

"You're asking the wrong guy," Denny said quietly. "I don't go up to the booth, and I don't go out into the lot after midnight. Arthur’s got rules, and he pays in cash, so I don't ask questions. You shouldn't either."

"What happened to the last projectionist?" Leo asked. "Arthur said he 'moved on.'"

Denny’s eyes flicked toward the back door—the one that led to the stairwell—and then back to Leo. "Miller? Yeah, he worked here about six weeks. Quiet guy. Older. Kept to himself. One night I came in to mop, and his car was gone, his stuff was gone, and Arthur told me he’d taken a job down in Florida."

"Nothing weird about that," Leo said, though it didn't feel entirely true.

"Except Miller didn't have a car," Denny said flatly. "His wife used to drop him off at eleven-fifteen and pick him up at four in the morning. That night, she showed up at four, sat in the lot for twenty minutes honking her horn, and Arthur had to go out and tell her he'd already caught a ride with a buddy."

Leo felt a cold prickle at the base of his neck. He looked down at the sticky counter, then back at Denny. "And she bought that?"

"I don't know what she bought," Denny said, sticking the unlit cigarette behind his ear. "All I know is I didn't see her again, and Arthur had a flyer up at the laundromat the next afternoon. Look, Leo, you seem like an alright guy. Just do what the old man says. Stay in the booth, run the reels, take your envelope, and go home. Don't go poking around."

"I'm just here to thread film," Leo said, trying to sound more confident than he felt. "Nothing else."

"Good," Denny said, picking up his mop handle. "Because if you're smart, you'll keep it that way."

Leo glanced at his watch. 11:40 PM. He had twenty minutes to get upstairs, inspect whatever reels Arthur had left for him, and get the first projector threaded before midnight.

"Nice meeting you, Denny," Leo said, picking up his cardboard box and slinging the messenger bag over his shoulder.

"Yeah. Have a good shift, man." Denny didn't look up as he dunked the mop back into the gray water. "And hey—if you hear the intercom buzz, don't answer it. The wiring's shot. Just makes a bunch of static."

Leo nodded, pushed back out through the glass door into the cold night air, and walked around the side of the building to the heavy metal door. He unlocked it with the brass key, stepped inside, and pulled it shut behind him.

The stairwell was just as cold as it had been the night before, and that same sharp, chemical smell—like bleach mixed with something sweet and rotting—hung heavy in the stagnant air. Leo clicked on his new flashlight, the bright beam cutting through the gloom, and began the steep climb up to the projection booth.