Free Swan Song by Robert McCammon Page A

o’clock! Emiliano pleaded. He checked his wristwatch. In a few minutes, The Face of Death, Part Four would be ending, and Willy, the old drunk of a projectionist, would be changing the reels upstairs for Mondo Bizarro, which showed bondage scenes and such. Maybe the guy would leave when the picture changed. Emiliano sat on his stool and continued reading his Conan comic book, trying to shut off the bad memories that had been stirred up by the laughter from within.
    The red curtains moved. Emiliano hunched his shoulders as if about to be beaten. Then the curtains parted, and the man who liked movies emerged into the dingy lobby. He’s leaving! Emiliano almost grinned, his gaze glued to the comic book. He’s goin’ out the door!
    But the man who liked movies said in a soft, almost childlike voice, “I’d like a large Coke and a tub of buttered popcorn, please.”
    Emiliano’s stomach clenched. Without letting himself look into the man’s face, he got off his stool, drew the Coke into a cup from the dispenser, got the popcorn and splashed butter into it.
    “More butter, please,” the man who liked movies requested.
    Emiliano gave the popcorn another drool of butter and slid it and the Coke across the counter. “Three bucks,” he said. A five dollar bill was pushed toward him. “Keep the change,” the man said, and this time his voice had a Southern accent. Startled, Emiliano looked up.
    The man who liked movies stood about six four and was wearing a yellow T-shirt and green khaki trousers. Under thick black eyebrows, his eyes were hypnotically green against the amber hue of his flesh. Emiliano had already figured him to be South American as soon as he’d walked in, maybe with some Indian blood in him, too. The man’s hair was black and wavy, cut close to the skull. He stared fixedly at Emiliano. “I want to see the movie again,” he said quietly, and his voice carried what might’ve been a Brazilian accent again.
    “Uh… Mondo Bizarro’s about to come on in a coupla minutes. Projection guy’s prob’ly got the first reel on-”
    “No,” the man who liked movies said, and he smiled slightly. “I want to see that movie again. Right now.”
    “Yeah. Well, listen. I mean… I don’t make the decisions here, right? Y’know? I just work behind the counter. I don’t have any say-so about-” And then the man reached out and touched Emiliano’s face with cold, butter-smeared fingers, and Emiliano’s jaw seized up as if it had frozen solid.
    The world seemed to spin around him for a second, and his bones were a cage of ice. Then he blinked and his whole body trembled, and he was standing behind the counter and the man who liked movies was gone. Damn! he thought. Bastard touched me! He grabbed a paper napkin and wiped his face where the fingers had been, but he could still feel the chill they’d left. The five dollar bill remained on the countertop. He put it in his pocket and came out from behind the counter, and he peeked through the curtains into the theater.
    On the screen, in glorious and gory color, were blackened corpses being pulled from the wreckage of cars by firemen. The narrator was saying, “Face of Death will pull no punches. Everything you see will be real. If you are in any way squeamish, you should now be on your way out…”
    The man who liked movies was sitting in the front row. Emiliano could see the outline of his head against the screen. The laughter began, and as Emiliano backpedaled away from the curtains he looked dumbly at his wristwatch and realized that almost twenty minutes of his life was a black hole. He went through a door and up a flight of stairs to the projection booth, where Willy sat sprawled on a couch reading Hustler.
    “Hey!” Emiliano said. “What’s goin’ on, man? How come you showin’ that shit again?”
    Willy stared at him for a moment over the edge of the magazine. “You lost your marbles, kid?” he inquired. “You and your friend just come up here