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Zombie Theater

  A short story by Scot McAtee

  Published by Scot McAtee

  Copyright 2012 Scot McAtee

  Discover other titles by Scot McAtee:

  I Am Food

  Casket Creek

  Zombie Zero

  It was Thursday, 4:30pm. Like every afternoon, Skip McMurray was headed for the abandoned theater at the edge of town. The Regal was an Art Deco playhouse built in the Twenties but unused since the mid Nineties, when a ten screen Cineplex popped up in a strip mall on the other side of town. It was Skip’s favorite place in the world because it was his place to get away from his troubles. It was a nice contrast to the chaos that had become his life.

  The Regal was only two blocks from the town line but it was like a whole other world. The original owners had bought up the surrounding thirty acres of woods, thick second-cut swampy plains forest, with plans to develop it into a Victorian style park with The Regal with its centerpiece. They built The Regal first as a way to finance the development of the park, but history and bad management choices conspired against them. The Stock Market Crash of 1929 caused their customer base to dry up and the ensuing Great Depression drove them out of business. They held onto the land, logging it for the cash and replanting the trees, which were the ones that still stood today. Just when things got going in the right direction again, World War II came along and nearly put them out of business again.

  By the time the Fifties and Sixties came along, bringing with them a golden age of prosperity for everyone, The Regal was past its heyday. Decades of unintended neglect, coupled with the humidity from the swampy soil on which it was built, caused a certain level of rot within the structure to develop that became so engrained that by the Seventies the theater was condemned.

  The Eighties and Nineties brought a fairly successful series of attempts to save the building by a local preservationist group. They bought the property for a song, then drained the swamp. With the high humidity problem solved, they set about repairing and replacing everything that could be fixed. Even a crack in the foundation was repaired once the soil underneath the building was allowed to dry out completely. It wasn’t cheap but after nearly ten years, The Regal opened for business again.

  Opening night was a throwback to its heyday. Any customer who dressed in “Turn of the Century” outfits got in for free. No one really dressed appropriately, but zoot suits, flappers, and bowlers were everywhere. Neon and incandescent bulbs lit up the night. The smell of popcorn filled the air. Movie trailers from days gone by played on the single giant screen perched above the stage which had once accommodated vaudevillian variety shows, plays and musicals.

  “Gone with the Wind” came on after the trailers and a packed house, some of whom had never seen the iconic film, thrilled to lines they’d heard since they were children.

  It seemed as if The Regal were on course to regaining its popularity. But it was not to be. At the moment Clark Gable delivered his most famous line, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn,” a mouse crawling around in the walls chomped through an ancient electrical cable that had not been upgraded, sparking a tremendous fire that set the place ablaze. Had the fire occurred in the olden days, when humidity from the surrounding swamp made fires impossible, there would have been no problem. But because everything was now bone dry, the place had become a tinderbox.

  The Regal, built in the days before OSHA and building codes, had been grandfathered by an economic development board eager to see a rebirth in that area of town. They hoped that it would spur new development and bring much needed jobs to a static economy. In their haste, they had overlooked certain upgrades that should have been performed during the restoration.

  There were no fire exits at the front of the theater, just the exits at the back. So, when the first cries of “Fire!” rang out, people piled toward the doors. In the ensuing panic, several people were pushed to the ground and trampled to death. Several others suffered broken bones and severe smoke inhalation.

  The resulting lawsuits put the preservationist group out of business and the property once again fell into disrepair. All hopes of restoring the building yet again disappeared. The swamp returned. The forest grew thicker and dank. Timbers and concrete softened. It seemed The Regal was doomed again. It wasn’t long after that the Cineplex opened and finally killed off all desire to renovate and reopen the historic theater.

  The local Health Department condemned the property. A demolition plan was established, but it was determined that it would be too expensive to tear the place down. The Fire Department was allowed to torch it for practice but the fires wouldn’t burn long enough to make the exercise worthwhile. It was as if The Regal refused to die.

  Eventually, all plans for removing the eyesore were abandoned. The property was fenced in and the building was left to rot. That was nearly twenty years ago.

  Skip crawled through the hole in the fence that he’d been using to access the theater since he’d first come here. He stopped outside the building’s front doors long enough to survey the façade. He watched for new instances of decay and mentally noted them. Some he was able to fix, some he was not. Today, there was nothing new.

  The thick, maroon painted oaken front doors were not locked. No one cared about the place anymore. It was a nonissue. There was nothing of value to steal from the place and because no one had really been in there for a long time, no one bothered to think about what might still be contained within her walls. Had criminals known that he’d been lovingly working on restoring the ancient equipment in the projection room, they might have thought twice about robbing it. An original print of “Gone with the Wind” was still laying on the flat round plate and still threaded through the dusty projector. One day, Skip would get it working again.

  The lobby was dusty and dirty but since the firefighters had never started any fires here, the decay was all superficial. The scarlet carpet was coated in dust that gave it a blackish maroon hue. The matching scarlet wall panels, trimmed in gold painted beadwork, had faded but were still in good shape, as was the candy counter, although it was coated with prehistoric spider webs that waved at him in the light breeze that blew through the lobby. Everything was just like he’d left it yesterday.

  His eyes fell upon the surprisingly narrow stairway that led to the three levels of balcony above.

  “That’s not right,” he noted. Normally, he would have to shove his way through a multitude of spider webs to get up to the projection room. Today, though, there were no visible webs spanning the entryway.

  “Either the spiders took a day off…” he said aloud, finishing off the statement as thought, or else someone else has been here.

  Momentarily, he felt a surge of adrenaline. Or someone else is here. Someone else in my house. An intruder.

  Rationality returned. It was November First. This late in the year, the spiders were all dead. There wouldn’t be new webs because there were no spiders.

  “Whew,” he sighed, relieved.

  He checked the steps before he went up. No, he didn’t see any footprints in the dust other than his own. He was alone.

  There was a hole in the ceiling of the main theater that let in a dusky light. It would have been creepy if he hadn’t been here so many times in the past. But he almost didn’t need any light to navigate up through the balconies to the projection booth. Almost.

  He arrived at the booth’s door, excited to get inside. He’d cleaned everything in there and had been working on cleaning the smoked glass window through which the films were displayed. When the fire happened, the glass sustained just enough smoke damage to it to make it difficult to see through. It had taken a while for him to work the panel loose from its frame without causing it to fall to the theater floor fifty feet be
low, but he’d finally managed it yesterday. He hoped that with some more polishing today, he could get it clean enough to do the trick.

  The plan after that was to replace the window so no water could enter the booth, bring some batteries out here and hook them up somehow to get the projector live, and then to watch the movie. Beyond that, he had thoughts about purchasing old films from the internet— eBay was full of them— so that he could watch them as they were intended to be watched—on the silver screen.

  As he was polishing the glass with some oven cleaner from home, he had a new thought. No one wants this place. I wonder how much it would take to purchase it? Surely the owners would sell, but how could I swing it? Things haven’t been great lately.

  His parents had passed away in a car accident several months ago, during