Scream for Your Lives
by R. L. Meza
The screaming brings the house lights up, stirring the audience in their seats; wide, startled eyes narrow to squint against the sudden onslaught of light and sound. A ripple of confusion passes through the theater. Three rows back from the screen, a young woman lurches up from her chair. She clutches at the shrieking red cut of her mouth, smearing lipstick down her chin. Elbows thrown wide, her fingers scrabble at her arched back, clawing at her dress as if she means to shred it, to dig her nails into the flesh and bone beneath the patterned cotton.
She’s moving toward the aisle. Those in her path shrink back, hard plastic armrests and springy cushions resisting their efforts to make way. On the big screen behind her, another theater audience is staring up at a screen of their own, frozen in black and white before the film’s climax; paused, as if the show is holding its breath with the rest of them, watching the young woman’s faltering progress. Waiting, to see what happens next. The woman trips, screams again. Her flailing arms knock a striped bag of popcorn from the lap of a nine-year-old boy, and the boy releases a panicked scream that rivals the woman’s in pitch—the kind of scream that sticks through an eardrum like a hot needle. Seated beside his younger brother, Ralph winces. The buttery smell of spilled popcorn mingles with the cloying scent of the woman’s perfume, filling his nostrils.
The woman is bent over Ralph’s armrest, grabbing at her spine with one hand; the other hand slips between Ralph’s legs to squeeze his thigh. The long lashes of her left eye wink shut. The corner of her lipsticked mouth twitches. And then she moves on, stumbling over the legs of a portly man; he reaches up to steady her, then hesitates, pudgy fingers wilting, his hand retracting—slow, too slow—as if it’s only just occurred to him that the cause of this woman’s misery could be contagious. The young woman catches him by the wrist, unleashes another bone-shivering scream, and the portly man recoils, folding the soft flesh of his neck into a series of quivering chins.
Ralph rubs at the coarse bristle of his five o’clock shadow to hide the smile spreading behind the cover of his hand. She’s good, his Peggy—always has been—but tonight she’s stealing the show. When the people in the audience go home to their dark, empty houses, they won’t be thinking about William Castle or Vincent Price; they won’t go to work the next day talking about Judith Evelyn and the parasite hugging her spine. They’ll be talking about Peggy Finch, the young woman staggering up the aisle on stiff legs, her eyes rolled up to whites.
A few brave souls follow Peggy out through the rear exit door and into the hall. For years to come, they’ll tell their friends and family about the young woman who collapsed, boneless, on the checkered tiles of the theater lobby; how the paramedics parted the ticket lines, waving everyone back as they knelt before the concession stands to transfer the woman’s limp body to a stretcher. Eyes bright, their faces shining with excitement, the brave few will tell everyone back in the theater about the ambulance waiting outside, and their audience will listen, rapt, to the sirens wailing in the distance. They’ll shake their heads at the poor girl’s predicament, exhaling shaky clouds of cigarette smoke, while their hands sneak back to finger the ridges of their spines.
She’ll be The Girl at The Tingler, and they’ll never know her name; not unless Ralph can persuade her to leave town with him, get Peggy away from her stepdad’s fists and the grimy diner—a future of long hours worked for minimum wage, a litter of kids draining the life out of her, until her eyes lose the spark of the silver screen. Given the chance, Peggy could be a star. Ralph touches the box in his jacket pocket, thinking of the ring inside. His brother, Walter, grabs him by the arm—a real death-grip—small fingers prodding the bone as Walter slides from his chair.
Then, almost as if he’s responding to Walt’s impulse to rise, Vincent Price addresses the audience through the surrounding speakers. Heads tilt to the side, listening to the strong, reassuring voice reverberating off the theater walls. Price implores them to remain in their seats, and the members of the audience obey, sinking back amid a chorus of nervous sounds. Arms sag, returning purses to the floor, shrugging out of half-donned coats. Candy wrappers crinkle. Restless fingers touch flames to cigarettes. The house lights dim. The film resumes.
Walt’s death-grip relaxes, and he sits. In a too-loud whisper, he says, “Ralph, I don’t like this. I want to go—”
From behind, someone shushes Walt with a loud hiss. Ralph raises his eyebrows and presses a finger to his lips, pointing up at the on-screen audience—their film is playing again, too, screen light flickering over their upturned faces. Walt follows the direction of Ralph’s finger and yelps. He leaps up in his chair, legs tucked beneath him, like a grasshopper poised to spring. There’s something wrong with the film. The picture shudders, flickers. A long insectile shadow skitters across the screen, propelled by a multitude of stubby legs. Prongs crown its head, large enough to grasp a man’s throat. Ralph mimics the prong shape with his hand.
Walt is perched on the edge of his seat. Ralph has been waiting for this, ever since he returned home on military leave to find his bedroom in shambles, half of his baseball cards missing, the model trucks and planes that he’d painstakingly assembled dashed to pieces. But it was the deep scratch along the side of their father’s Buick Roadmaster—Ralph’s Roadmaster, after their father returned from Korea in a box—that had sealed Walt’s fate. Ralph means to get him back, and this is only the beginning; if Ralph has his way, the kid won’t get a good night’s sleep until Ralph is long gone, living with Peggy under the California sun. Maybe Walt will piss his pants. Ralph grins.
The screen goes black, plunging the theater into darkness. From the speakers, the voice of Vincent Price booms out at the audience: “Ladies and gentlemen, please do not panic. But scream! Scream for your lives! The Tingler is loose in this theater!”
Ralph feels the hidden buzzer in his seat deliver a jolt to his backside, and he grabs the back of Walt’s neck firmly between his thumb and forefingers—pinches, hard. All around them, people are jumping up from their seats. Shrieking, screaming, hollering curses. Walt emits the terrorized squeal of a skewered pig and thrashes, sneakers kicking at the back of the seat in front of him. Ralph holds on as Walt slides to the popcorn-strewn floor, beating at the back of his neck, squealing again when his hands make contact with Ralph’s muscular forearm. The pungent odor of ammonia drowns out the smell of buttered popcorn. Ralph withdraws his hand, grimacing. Price is telling the audience to relax; their screams have paralyzed the Tingler; they’ve saved themselves. The projector flickers to life once more, and the film rolls on.
But it’s too late for Walt, Ralph realizes, seeing the dark stain spread over the crotch of his kid brother’s jeans. Walt uses the armrests to pull himself back into his seat, then covers his lap with the crumpled remains of their popcorn bag. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even look at Ralph. Walt’s eyes are fixed on the screen, glassy with fright. Tears fringe his blonde lashes, glittering in the light from the screen. Ralph slouches in his seat, feeling cheated. He expected a good laugh—he’d pulled it off perfectly, piss and all—but the sight of Walt’s trembling lower lip makes Ralph feel dirty. Low.
Ralph is leaning over to whisper an apology—some vague reassurance, issued with a punch to the arm; he’ll offer Walt his jacket to tie around his waist, so no one will see the piss stain—but a man’s voice cuts him off. Really gets his attention, too, because Ralph has seen this show three times now, and the man isn’t part of it.
And the gun raised in the man’s right hand, silhouetted against the flickering backdrop of the big screen—that’s not part of the show, either.
No ladies and gentleman, just an abrupt, simian cry: “Hey!”
The man paces the length of the front row, swinging the gun from side to side. The projector illuminates the erratic jitter-twist of his face, the beady eyes sunk into dark sockets, worming lips and nibbling teeth. His tongue darts out. His neck is jerking his head around, bird-like, looking everywhere and nowhere at once as he points the gun into the audience at random.
Someone screams. A woman leaps up from an aisle seat and turns to run. She misses a step, flying forward as if she’s been punched between the shoulders, black curls whipping back from her face. Somehow, impossibly, Ralph sees all of this before he hears the gunshot, as if he’s watching it happen from across a great distance, peeking through the narrow lens of a telescope.
The gunman is screaming, but Ralph can hardly make out the words. Ralph’s mind is racing, his heart hammering a staccato rhythm that he can feel in his skull. Instinct stampedes through his system on hooves of adrenaline, trampling coherent thought, urging him to flee the theater, make a break for it—he’s faster than the woman, surely he can get out before—
But there’s Walt to think about, cringing in the seat beside him. Ralph grabs his younger brother by the back of the belt, yanks him down to the theater floor, and motions for Walt to stay down. He presses his brother’s tear-stained face to a floor littered with wrappers and popcorn; a stump of red licorice disappears beneath Walt’s flushed cheek. Ralph claps a hand over Walt’s mouth and peers over the seatback.
“Stop that! Stop screaming!” The gunman fires a shot into the ceiling. The theater falls silent, save for the onscreen dialogue accompanying the gunman’s pacing. Back and forth, he marches across the front, yanking on the wild tangle of his beard, barking clipped phrases with the raw, violent energy of a revving chainsaw. “You can’t listen to him—to Price—he doesn’t know. It’s not just a gimmick. You don’t—you have to understand. Listen to me. This isn’t—”
The gunman rushes to the front row and drags a woman forward by the hair. She screams until she sees the gun barrel pointed in her face, and then she weeps, pleading with the man to let her go, she has children, a sick mother. The gunman pulls up the back of her dress to reveal plain cotton underwear and the smooth arch of her back. “Look at it,” the gunman says. “It’s real! The screaming, it won’t—Screaming won’t stop it!”
He pokes at the woman’s back with the barrel of the gun. “They curl up around your spine, the parasites. Tinglers. I saw you all jump—I saw it. You felt them inside you, didn’t you? Moving around? They’re still in there, and if—”
From somewhere in the audience, a man calls out: “I didn’t feel anything! I’m clean. You can let me go.”
Another voice chimes in: “I didn’t feel it, either. Please, we have families.”
The gunman throws back his head and titters—a high, girlish laugh that prompts a low moan from the audience. Ralph’s arms prickle with goosebumps. Ralph understands the gimmick, the buzzers hidden beneath some seats and not others. It’s more real that way, the Tinglers hiding in some, but not all of them. If he could just talk to the man, maybe explain—
“I didn’t feel it,” says the gunman, mimicking the members of the audience in a sing-song voice. He scowls like a petulant child, scratches his temple with the hand holding the gun. “I didn’t feel it—ME. But you? I can’t—we can’t know. I can’t just…”
The gun swings past Ralph, returning to the woman’s exposed back. He prods her spine, and she recoils. Ralph watches the gunman’s expression change from grim to startled, sees the finger on the trigger squeeze reflexively. The woman crumbles to the floor. Ralph’s ears are ringing. A dry, metallic scent lingers in the air. From the floor, Walt whimpers something about wanting his mommy. Ralph wants his mommy, too. He wonders if they’ll ever see her again; whether she’ll have to identify them later, white sheets pulled back to reveal the remains of her family; if she’ll read about it in the paper; who will take care of her, alone in that empty house. The gunman stalks up the aisle toward the rear exit door. After his weathered combat boots clomp past their row, Ralph risks another look over the seatbacks.
Beneath the distressed moans and whispered prayers, Ralph hears a distinct murmur. He recognizes the tone from his high school years: team huddles on the football field, all of them circled together with their helmets clustered at the center, chanting, stoking their adrenaline for the next play. Across the aisle, a group of teenage boys are creeping forward as a unit. Ralph wants to call out to them—tell them that this isn’t game. They look like freshmen, can’t be much older than fifteen.
The gunman reaches the door. He turns, eclipsing the small round window; warm light from the hallway wreathes his shaved head, his squared shoulders. From this new position, the man with the gun is above them. He looks out over the rows slanting down toward the big screen. The teenage boys freeze in the aisle. Probably they had planned to sneak up on the gunman from behind, were picturing their faces on the front page of the newspaper: Heroes Overpower Gunman to Save the Show.
By the time they make the decision to break, sprint down the aisle instead of up—headed for the door that opens to the outside, stage left—the gunman has fired bullets into three of them. There’s a pause, and Ralph realizes that the man is reloading, dipping his hand into bulging coat pockets. His fingers are moving fast, nimbly inserting bullets; the two remaining teenagers, racing for the exit, are sluggish by comparison.
Ralph sees the first boy hit the door at full speed and tumble through, as if he’s falling out an open window. He experiences a surge of hope, a spike of adrenaline that spurs his pounding heart. Reaching for Walt, Ralph is preparing to run for the door when the second boy pitches forward, bullets punching holes between his shoulder blades. The door swings open into the night as he slumps against it. Red blossoms across the back of his shirt, spreading. The boy sinks to his knees, smearing a swath of blood that shines black in the moonlight as he tips out the door, out of sight. The door swings closed, but does not shut. The boy’s ankle is propping the door open. Ralph searches the dark sliver of the outside world for flashing lights. He tries to listen for sirens, but the ringing in his ears, the volume of the movie still playing on the big screen, the frantic thudding of his pulse, make it impossible to hear anything clearly. Ralph can feel Walt’s lips moving against his palm. Walt is prying at the hand clamped over his mouth with one hand and groping behind his back with the other.
A pair of men rally from the back row, charging the gunman from the left. In a single, fluid movement, the gunman jerks a teenage girl up by the back of her blouse and presses the barrel of the gun to her temple. The men raise their hands in surrender, backing toward their seats. The gunman dispatches the men in quick succession. The gun fires again, and he steps over the girl’s limp form, moving down the aisle, firing at random. Hoarse from shouting, his words become increasingly difficult to understand. The final moments of the film are lost beneath the madhouse litany of his rough chainsaw voice, the deafening thunder of the gun. When he pauses to reload, no one moves. Everyone is on the floor. Hands cover eyes and mouths, applying pressure to suppress screams and prayers and whimpered pleas.
On the big screen, the credits are rolling. Ralph knows the house lights will come up soon. Any minute. The gunman continues to shift the balance from the living to the dead, pausing at every row to scan for movement, dipping a hand into the diminishing bulge of his pocket to reload. Dazed, Ralph realizes that his muscles are no longer jumping in response to the gunshots, that the sounds are muffled, like explosions heard underwater. He’s shivering, ice water in his veins. Beside him, Walt wiggles free and opens his mouth to scream. Ralph grabs him, curls an arm around his head, clamps his hand over Walt’s mouth again. Walt fights him—he’s trying to wrench Ralph’s hand away—and then he abandons the effort, crooking his arms to fumble behind his back. Walt arches his spine; his eyes bulge like billiard balls, rings of color and rolling whites. Ralph can feel the vibration of words against his palm—the heat of Walt’s breath is fogging his hand, and there’s a scrape of teeth as Walt tries to bite—but the distant wail of sirens distracts him from whatever message Walt is trying to relay.
The gunman hears the sirens, too. He cocks his head to one side and goes quiet. This new silence is worse than the shouting, Ralph thinks, searching under the seats for a glimpse of the gunman’s boots. His heavy footsteps are approaching. Ralph worms his body around until he is lying flush with Walt on the floor, positioned between his brother and the aisle. He wants to tell Walt that he’s sorry—sorry for leaving him to join the military; sorry for the stupid prank that brought them here; sorry he isn’t brave enough to charge the gunman and wrestle away his weapon—but there isn’t time. He tightens his hold over Walt’s mouth, instead, and hisses in his ear. “Play dead, Walt. You hear me? Play dead.”
Lying on his side, it takes Ralph a moment to realize that Walt isn’t nodding; his younger brother is shaking his head, whipping it back and forth, snot bubbles bursting, wet, over the back of Ralph’s hand. Liquid trickles down the slanted floor to pool against the curve of Ralph’s cheek. He longs to roll away from the rusted metal smell of it, to stand and spit and wipe away the fluid clinging to his lips, can’t pretend that it’s just somebody’s spilled Coke—it’s too warm and thick. Ralph can feel the vibration of footsteps through the floor. He cups his free hand and smears the blood across his face, then does the same with Walt, painting his ghostly complexion red from nose to forehead, mussing Walt’s hair.
From the corner of his eye, Ralph sees the gunman stop at the end of their row. Dim light from the credits plays over the sharp lines of the man’s face. The gunman wears a grimace, a twisted mask. His eyes are squinted down to slits. The dark tangle of his beard twitches. Ralph holds his breath. He presses his weight down into Walt, crushing his brother into the floor, willing him to remain quiet. Just for a little longer.
When Ralph cracks his eyelids open, the gunman is gone. The footsteps are fading toward the front row. He hears a rambling, tea-kettle voice pleading for its life. A gunshot. Scuffling, and then a heavy thunk as the exit door swings shut, cutting off the crisp night breeze, the flashing lights of sirens. The music from the speakers fades.
Ralph feels movement beneath his hand—not the one still clamped over Walt’s mouth, but the hand straining to keep his brother pressed to the floor—the hand pushing down on Walt’s spine. The taught flesh bulges and shifts under his palm, a fluid, rolling movement. He feels a ripple of stiff protrusions along the ridge of Walt’s vertebrae, and Ralph thinks of star-shaped feet, rows of undulating legs. He jerks his hand away. The instant the pressure on his back is lessened, Walt redoubles his efforts to escape Ralph’s hold. He draws his knees up to his chest and tucks in his chin, trying to buck Ralph off, to wrench the hand from his mouth.
The small hump of Walt’s back is rising above the level of the armrests. Massive prongs roll beneath the taut skin. Looking at the long, monstrous shape hugging his brother’s spine, Ralph feels a plummeting rush of fear. He almost lets go. The gun fires again—closer. With a quick sweep of the leg, Ralph drops Walt back to the floor and hugs him, tight. Ralph’s counting the seconds between shots and trying not to think about the insectile thing squirming against his stomach. He counts to five, and the gun goes off. Footsteps, pause, fire. Seven seconds. Fire. Four. Ralph can picture the man moving row-by-row, pausing to prod the prone bodies with the bloodied toe of his combat boot and squinting his eyes. Searching for signs of life.
Their parents weren’t religious folk; Ralph never learned to pray. But he figures he’ll give it a shot, hurl his frantic thoughts into the ether and hope, because hope is all he’s got left. There are men outside the theater doors, shouting. Hurled questions, blunt attempts to negotiate. Demands. Is anyone alive in there? Ralph can’t shout back. He has to stay quiet. Motionless.
The gunman steps over the portly man, pokes his substantial gut with the scuffed toe of his combat boot. The portly man’s eyelids flutter, and he moans. Hot splatter follows the sound, coating Ralph’s closed eyelids with flecks of matter. His breath is bottled deep in his lungs, locked there, an air bubble trapped within a sunken ship. Walt is flailing his arms and legs, mindless in his struggle for release. There is a scream inside him that’s desperate to claw its way out. Ralph knows—he can feel it, too.
And something else. There wasn’t a buzzer under his seat, but it’s Ralph’s third time seeing this show; he’s had the buzzer before. It feels a lot like the vibration building in the small of his back. The gunman hovers over them, taking in Walt’s flushed red face, his bulging eyes. He lowers the barrel to Walt’s forehead. Then he glances over at Ralph, watching as Ralph’s hand moves of its own accord.
Ralph reaches behind his back to pull up his jacket, fingers burrowing to untuck his shirt, to probe at the prongs tenting his skin. In response to his touch, a many-legged shape scrapes and wriggles its way up Ralph’s vertebral column, like it’s climbing a ladder, racing to beat the scream rising in Ralph’s throat. With a slight shake of his head, the gunman smiles as if they’re sharing an inside joke. Maybe they are, Ralph thinks. And then the house lights come up, and the fear swallows him whole, caught between a laugh and a scream.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
R. L. Meza is an author of horror fiction. She lives in a century-old Victorian house on the coast of northern California with her husband and the collection of strange animals they call family. Meza is currently hard at work on her first novel.
