which foundered in swarming waters, now tilting and creaking and shivering, with the smell of salt coming up through the boards and more pictures, white as cream, dark as ink, blinking across the screen as the theater lifted like a bellows and sank down exhaling like a bellows, and me sunk with it.
Just then, the organ exploded.
It was like that moment a few hours ago when the great unseen steamliner had plunged to strike the pier.
The theater careened, heaved up, and fell as if on a roller-coastal tide.
The organ shouted and brayed and ricocheted a Bach prelude so that dust flew off the ancient chandeliers, the curtains stirred restlessly like funeral gowns, and myself behind the screen reaching out to hold on to something but terrified that something might touch back.
Above me, the pale images ached and gibbered their mouths and the Phantom strode down the stairs at the Paris Opera in his white-skull mask and plumed hat, even as Shape-shade, a moment before, must have strode down the dark aisle to rattle and chime the brass rings holding the short curtain around the organ, and seat himself like Destiny and Doom to spider the keys and shut his eyes and gape his mouth to let Bach out.
Afraid to look behind, I stared out past the thirty-foot phantoms at an audience unseen, riveted in place, shuddering with music, drawn by terrible images, lifted and then jolted down by the night tide under the theater deck.
Among all those pale faces, fixing their eyes upon the flickering past, was he there? The mourner on the train, the pacer along the canal rim, the leaver of three-in-the-morning rains, was that his face over here, or that one over there? Colorless moons trembling in the dark, a cluster of souls in front, another back halfway, fifty, sixty people, dreadful suspects on yet another fog excursion rushing to collide with nightmare and sink with no sound, only the great suck of the sea going back for reinforcements.w Among all these night travelers, which was he, I wondered, and what could I shout to panic him up the aisles, with me in wild pursuit?
The giant skull smiled from the screen, the lovers fled to the Opera roof, the Phantom pursued to unfurl his cape and overhear their fearful love-talk and grin; the organ shrieked, the theater bucked and heaved with heavy waters celebrating sea burials should the planks gape and drop us down through.
My eyes raced from dimly upturned face to face, and up, up, to the little window of the projectionist's booth, where a section of brow and a maniac eye peered down at the delicious dooms painted on the screen in geysers of light and dark.
Poe's raven eye.
Or rather, Shrank!
Tarot card reader, psychologist, phrenologist, numerologist, and.
Film projectionist.
Someone had to run the film while Shapeshade clawed the organ inparoxysms of delight. Most nights, the old man ran from ticket booth to projection room to organ, bouncing off each like a manic boy disguised as rambling man.
But now…?
Who else for a late night menu of hunchbacks, striding skeletons, and hairy paws snatching moon-pearls from a sleeping woman's neck?
Shrank.
The organ music peaked. The phantom vanished. A new clip, from Jekyll and Hyde, 1920, jittered across the screen.
I leaped down off the stage and ran up the aisle, among all the fiends and murderers.
The Poe eye in the projectionist's window was gone.
By the time I reached the projection booth, it was empty. The film unspooled itself in the firefly machine. Jekyll, on his way to becoming Hyde, slid down the lightbeams to strike a hairball on the screen.
The music stopped.
Downstairs, on the way out, I found an exhausted but happy Shapeshade back in the ticket booth, selling seats to the fog.
I thrust my hands in to grab his and squeeze.
'No bad rice for you, huh?'
'What!' cried Shapeshade, complimented but not knowing why.
'You'll live forever,' I said.
'What do you know that God doesn't?' asked Shapeshade. 'Come back later.
One in the morning, Veidt in Caligari. Two, Chancy in Laugh Clown Laugh.
Three, The Gorilla. Four, The Bat. Who could ask for more?'
'Not me, Mr. Shapeshade.'
I moved off into the mist.
'You're not depressed?' he yelled after.
'I don't think so.'
'If you got to think about it, you're not!'
Full night had arrived.w I saw that Modesti's Cafe had closed early, or forever, I didn't know which. I couldn't ask questions there about William Smith and celebratory haircuts and dinners.
The pier was dark. Only a single light shone in A. L. Shrank's tarot card shack window. I blinked. Scared, the damn light went out.
'Bad rice?' said Crumley, on the phone. But his voice was bright, hearing that it was me. 'What kind of talk is that?'
'Crumley,' I said, swallowing hard, 'I got another name to add to our list.'
'What list?'
'Along with the canary lady…'
'That's not our list, it's yours…'
'Shrank,' I said.
'What!'
'A. L. Shrank, the Venice pier psychologist…'
'…Tarot card reader, weirdo librarian, amateur numerologist, Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse?'
'You know him?'
'Kid, I know everyone up, down, above, in, and under the pier, every weight lifter kicking sand, every dead bum on the night beach resurrected by the smell of seventy-nine-cent muscatel comes the dawn. A. L. Shrank, that measly dwarf? No way.'
'Don't hang up! I can see it in his face. He's asking for it. He's next. I wrote a story last year, in Dime Detective, about two trains in a station, going opposite ways, stopped at a siding for a minute. One man looks across at another man, they trade stares, and the one man realizes he should never have looked across, because the man on the other train is a murderer. The murderer looks back and smiles. That's all. Smiles. And my hero realizes that he himself is doomed. He looks away, trying to save himself. But the other man, the killer, keeps staring. And when my hero looks up again, the train window across the way is empty. He realizes that the killer has gone to get off the train. A minute later, the killer appears on my hero's train, in his car,walks down the aisle, and sits in a seat right behind my hero. Panic, huh?
Panic.'
'Great idea, but it don't happen that way,' said Crumley.
'More often than you think. A friend of mine drove a Rolls-Royce across country last year. On the way, he was almost run off the road six times, through Oklahoma and Kansas and Missouri and Illinois, by men who resented that expensive car. If they had succeeded, it would have been murder and no one the wiser.'
