Sunless Cinema [COMPLETE]

II: Just Down The Hall

Teddy woke on the ground with his face dangerously close to the Moviola. Though he was groggy, the thought flashed in his mind: what if he had fallen into it, rather than next to it? What if his eyes had been in that thing? His eyes would be gone and...

And where was Lemoine? 

The plan had been simple. Ralph didn't write it down (he was sure that Teddy would mess up somehow and lose the paper), but he stressed each part multiple times: 

1. Find a mark. 

2. Figure out where they are going to be so that we can easily take them from there. 

3. Relocate them to Sunless Cinema in Julcester, Florida. 

4. Deliver the ransom notes (one to the press and the other to someone who would be able to pay the money). 

5. Complete the exchange of the hostage for the money. 

Even Teddy (as stupid as he was) was able to remember it after such repetition. 

The first part was the hardest. Ralph originally wanted to go with a businessman from downtown, but he eventually decided on Lemoine after a tip from an old friend that she would be visiting her father's vacation home near Daytona Beach. Her proximity and the fact that her father, Hershel Hardy (a prominent textile mogul), was a billionaire were the two main factors. 

Taking her was easy. At the time, Teddy couldn't believe their luck. He may have hated what he was doing (it soured his stomach), but he couldn't help but think that maybe he was finally taking to this whole "criminal life" thing. It certainly paid the bills. Looking back on it, though, it was almost as if Lemoine wanted them to take her... 

And maybe she did. 

God, Ralph is going to kill him (if Lemoine doesn't do it first).  

Groggily, he took himself back through whatever happened before he was knocked out. He wipes a bit of drool and carpet fibers from his mouth as he remembered. 

This wasn't good. Ralph was going to be pissed and, on top of that, he had let something truly monstrous on the loose. As he looked around the room and eyed the slightly-ajar door, he knew that she had left. From the sounds of squelching and screaming just down the hall, he knew she was still there. 

God, was she eating someone? Teddy felt terrified and sick; he had to figure out whether or not it was true. 

Teddy's head was still bleeding when he stood. The whole world seemed to spin. He steadied himself on the chair Lemoine once sat in. There was black gunk on it-- why was there black gunk on it? 

There was another scream from down the hall-- pleading this time, terrified-- and Teddy jumped. The room was still rotating and the shock and fear weren't helping. He took a moment, with his hand still on the chair, to collect himself. 

Teddy crept down the hall. He had enough presence of mind, despite the brightness of the building, to take his pistol out of his pocket. Ralph got it for him; Teddy knew for a fact that he didn't want to know where it came from. 

The warm August sun came through the gigantic floor-to-ceiling windows on his left; to his right, there were closed doors and darkness. He followed a trail of peach-and-black sludge like a thin, swirling creek on the tile until he came to the other editing room. The door was slightly ajar and the sludge was more concentrated; it came from the gap under the door like unattended bathwater. Holding his breath (and his gun), he nudged the door open.

Teddy immediately wanted to close his eyes. The gruesome scene before him-- like something ripped from the pages of a pulp detective novel-- was more than he wanted to see. It was more than he wanted to think about. 

The walls were covered with black-and-peach rivers of gunk, sprayed arcs of blood, and chunks of viscera. He was no doctor, but he was sure that the people in the room (two men sitting on a vinyl camelback sofa and one that seemed to be using a Moviola to edit something) were all dead. 

The most gruesome of the three was the editor. He was slumped over backward onto the table. His ribcage was cracked open, with bones protruding out of his skin and the odd pockets of greasy yellow fat like rocks in the shattered earth. He was a bouquet of death: his intestines were everywhere; his liver torn to shreds like it had been grated; his lips were ringed with black and blood, puckered in a permanent kiss of death; and his heart was ripped from his chest and thrown at the wall. Teddy couldn't be sure, but he thought he saw it beating. 

Whether it was or not, it was covered in the same black and pink sludge as everything else, from the piles of ruined film to the torn-out throat of one of the men on the couch. The other was slumped gracelessly over one of the scrolled armrests. 

She had been here recently, then. Teddy knew enough about dead bodies (he had been around them more often than he would have liked to think about) to know that these were fresh, just like the overwhelming smells of brine, apples, and human waste. 

Trying his hardest to keep the morning's oatmeal down (the lumps of it are rising in his throat), he backed out of the doorway and continued following the path Lemoine left in her wake. He clamped a hand over his mouth, swallowed, and made his way toward the soundstage.