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The Kearns Theatre closed down eight years ago, but they still came here, across all the years. It was habit, and it was still possible because what remained of the Kearns was an unlikely place where memory overruled time.
Will had called them here from far away. They almost hadn’t been able to find the place, and Liam was certain they’d never be able to again. He was also sure that Billy, despite his youth, knew it too.
The theatre was the kind of one-screen movie house that had long since gone the way of the mastodon. The three of them huddled in the lobby, watching through the windows as the sky fell in furious sheets of blinding snow. They waited for the blizzard to pass and knew it never would.
The kid watched his breath fog on the door. He was fourteen, and still captivated by the dreamy appeal of that chaotic ice-storm blasting against the glass. When he saw an uprooted mailbox cartwheel over a pick-up truck in the grip of those blustery winds, he knew better than to venture out into that arctic purgatory.
The ancient incandescent bulbs flickered, then fought back to life.
Liam’s breath hitched, and the derelict remains of the foyer seemed all at once more there. He was thirty-seven, and still haunted by the nightmare of Hill 937, that unsleeping dæmon that seemed to sneak out from behind all the most ordinary things. And when he saw the strange geometries of that ruined lobby that wasn’t really a lobby at all, he felt that steel wire tighten in the enteric abyss of his gut.
He glanced to the boy at the door. “Don’t stand there, kid,” he told Billy; “all you need is for something to come through that glass.”
“Nothing ever comes through the glass,” Billy sighed, and Liam knew it was true. But Billy crossed back to the lopsided bench near the concession stand anyway, and Liam breathed his relief. He spoke to the older man standing to his right without turning; “Not much juice left.”
A smile flickered across Will’s lips, and he suddenly looked half his age. “Not anymore.” He was sixty, and still capable of holding his own with some of the rookies running with the Department he’d left a decade ago. Yet when he saw the two people standing here in this tilting lobby, he became intensely aware of just how many of his own years were stacked up behind him like old newspapers.
Billy folded his legs under himself on the bench, leaned against the defaced wall. “First movie I ever saw in a theatre was Blue Hawaii, right here, the first week it was out.” He smiled at the memory, and suddenly looked twice his age; “Mom didn’t want me to see it. Swore up and down that Elvis was setting a bad example. And that just made me want to see it more.” He turned to the littered concession stand and seemed to see a memory. “My best friend Frank’s older brother got us in; we were buying popcorn when I saw Jenny for the first time.”
Liam flashed a broad grin at that, glanced around the rubble with a newly rediscovered fondness. “This is where I proposed to Genevieve,” he gestured to the bench that Billy occupied, “right after what was left of the 506th got back to the States. I brought her to see Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but I rigged it so that both our families would be waiting in the lobby.” He smiled at the memory, laughed once. “Mom didn’t really want me to see her – she never liked assertive girls: thought a woman should be prim. My best friend Frank was my best man.”
Will smiled at that, looked from Liam to Billy and back. “Right there was where Andrew asked my permission to marry my daughter; he and Victoria had taken Jen and me on a double-date for our anniversary.” He smiled at the memory, then stepped to the front window again. “Andy was my buddy Frank’s kid; he was like a son already. I gave him Mom’s wedding and engagement rings to make it official – the ones she’d left to me when she died, because she never had any daughters.”
He sighed, entranced by the dreamy appeal of that swirling whiteout, and watched his breath fog on the door. The bare bulbs faded, waned to a mute dusk, nearly gave up, but strained one last time and lit the foyer again. Will knew without looking that Liam and Billy were studying him; their silence was stifling, and Will answered it with his own soft and resigned words.
“Andy called last night: Vicky went into labor. My first grandchild.” A sad smile flickered, faded: “my only, so far as I know.” Then his eyes darkened as he looked through the window at the memory again. “It was snowing twice this bad. I never saw the ice under all that; then it was just blood.” He stopped, lost, then swallowed, blinked away that white light. “So much blood.”
Liam was beside him then, a hand on the man’s shoulder. Will looked to him, saw eyes that were his own. “They brought me to the same hospital where Vicky was,” Will told him. “I held on as long as I could. Long enough for her boy to be born.” A smile flared, choked with sorrow. “They named him Will.”
“Do you really have to go?” Billy asked, now at his other side. Looking up with eyes that were his own.
Will nodded, solemn and resolved. He rested a hand on the boy’s shoulder, and Billy settled his own hand on Will’s, each of them sure he was comforting the other. Just a small bit of contact so that neither would have to be alone in the end.
Then the lights surged hotly, burned themselves out, and this time there was nothing left to hold out that final darkness.
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