Deeper into Darkness Read online

  He released the machine. It fell dark. He picked the electric screwdriver up from the floor, and spun the screws out of the glass cover over the playfield. The machine wouldn’t stay on without having his hands on the flippers or plunger, so he couldn’t just start a ball with the glass open and tap down the playing cards. But he could sure as hell improve his odds.

  He grabbed a napkin from the bar and wadded it into a ball. He reached in and shoved it down into the hole between the bottom flippers. He stuffed other napkins in the side gates. He’d only need one ball to turn back his clock.

  He lowered the glass back into place. He rubbed his hands together, and then blew on them. The air conditioning clicked on and the vent swept cold air across the back of his neck. He winced. He wasn’t going all the way upstairs just to get a sweater. The deliveryman had left his hoodie behind. Dixon put it on and popped the hood up over his bare neck.

  He touched the flipper controls with both hands. The machine blinked to life. Lucky Ace gave him his knowing smile. The counter reset to zero. Dong, dong, ding! A ball popped up against the plunger. Dixon pulled it back and fired.

  Shooting fish in a barrel never felt so good. Dixon literally couldn’t miss. Ricochets and rebounds sent the ball spinning across the playing field in a dizzying, non-stop journey. Bells dinged like angelic machine gun fire. A lightning storm of lights flashed. Playing cards dropped, EXTRA PLAY went ruby. The fire of youth flowed back through Dixon’s veins.

  The cards reset and Dixon knocked them down, two, three more times. His exhilaration surged with each victory, his arms grew stronger, his legs less tired. His reflexes sharpened and even without the cheating napkins, he rarely flubbed a rebound. The score counter never stopped moving.

  Ace, six, four, jack. Bam! The cards popped down, and then jumped back up again. Dixon practically danced behind the machine as he fired one flipper and then the other. Dreams of his future empire, and the pliant girls who would populate it, flashed before his eyes. And the girls would be even more pliant this time. Instead of alcohol and pot to lubricate the process, he’d employ the big timesavers of roofies and crystal meth.

  The ball hung in an extended score-spinning dance between two pop bumpers. Dixon caught a quick glimpse of himself in the backglass. The hood shadowed much of his face, but his smile shone though, white and straight, like it used to be, just across Lucky Ace’s neck.

  The door flew open. Dixon spun around at the intrusion. The machine went dead as his hands left its sides.

  Harris, the night shift security, entered, fury in his eyes. Harris had been in the NFL for four years before landing this job, and hadn’t lost a degree of his ability to intimidate. The shoulders of his suit coat barely cleared the doorframe.

  “What the hell are you doing in here?” he bellowed.

  “Who do you think you’re talking to?” Dixon chopped the last word short. His voice was high, reedy, unfamiliar.

  Harris grabbed Dixon at the shoulders. His meaty hands practically crushed Dixon’s slender joints. Harris lifted Dixon off the floor and shook him.

  “Kid, I don’t know how you got past three levels of security, but it’s gonna be the biggest mistake you ever made. Who’s here with you?”

  “No one, you idiot. It’s me, Stewart Dixon. What’s wrong with you?”

  Even as he said it, Dixon knew the question was backwards. There wasn’t something wrong with Harris. There was something wrong with him. The narrow shoulders, the high voice, the loose fit of his clothes. What had this machine done to him?

  “Playing smart ass, huh?” Harris said.

  He dropped Dixon to the floor and then grabbed him at the collar hard enough to make him choke.

  “I ought to call the cops, but I don’t need to play a game of Twenty Questions about how you got this far into the building on my watch. Stevens is itching for an excuse to can my ass.”

  Dixon choked out a protest. Harris swung him away from the pinball machine, and dragged him, back-first, through the Playpen door.

  As he passed through the threshold, the light behind the card player’s eyes flashed once, and old Lucky Ace winked him goodbye.

  ♦♦♦

  Harris pushed the button to roll open the mansion’s front gate. It slid left with a clatter of the drive chain. He dropped his death grip on Dixon’s collar. Dixon wheezed in relief.

  “Not only are you fired,” Dixon gasped, “but I’m going to sue you—”

  Harris swung an underhand punch up into Dixon’s breadbasket. Dixon’s lungs compressed. He dropped to the ground. He sucked in one jagged breath just in time for Harris to give him a savage kick that sent him up in the air and rolling out the main gate. He thumped to a stop where the driveway met Foothill Road.

  “Catch you in here again, kid, and you’ll get worse than that, and a ride with Beverly Hills’ finest. Now crawl back under whatever rock you came from.”

  Dixon flipped on his back against the gutter. The gate ground closed and Harris walked away. Dixon stared up at a blurry night sky. Something inside him felt swollen, damaged. He vowed to ruin that prick guard’s life for good.

  Then he wondered how. He had no ID with him. He looked at his hairless arms, felt his smooth cheeks. He hooked his thumb in his belt loop, and pulled away his loose waistband. Not a hair between his legs. He was a boy. The damn machine had rewound him just a little too far. How was he ever going to explain this?

  He reasoned that he could use his fingerprints, his DNA. Then he realized that neither of those were on file anywhere, having never had a brush with the law, or a passport.

  A white Camry pulled to a stop on Foothill Road. A woman in her fifties exited the passenger door. She ran to Dixon’s side.

  “Oh, my God! Are you all right?”

  Dixon coughed and wiped his mouth. No blood. That was probably good news. He nodded that he was okay.

  The woman’s black hair had a marginal dye job and was cut too short for Dixon’s taste. Her mom jeans and simple, long-sleeved T-shirt screamed that she was at least one kid’s grandmother. Shock and compassion filled her eyes.

  Excellent, he thought. However he was going to get this sorted out, he wasn’t going to get it done out here on the street.

  “What happened to you?” she asked as she knelt beside him.

  “A couple of kids jumped me, took everything I had.”

  “You poor boy. Why don’t we give you a ride home?”

  Dixon stood slowly. The beating made him feel as old as he’d been a few hours ago.

  “Thanks, ma’am.” If this lady could get him down to Marina Del Rey, he could board his yacht, and start to sort things out.

  The woman opened the door for him. With a low moan, he settled into the cheap cloth back seat. Another auburn-haired woman about the same age sat behind the wheel. She eyed Dixon from the rearview mirror. The Good Samaritan got in. The driver’s eyes flicked away from the mirror, and the Camry pulled away from the curb. The rear doors locked.

  “Thanks, ladies,” Dixon said. “My name is—“

  “We know your name, Dix,” the passenger said, voice hard as steel. “Don’t you know ours?”

  A chill ran up Dixon’s spine. This situation suddenly felt catastrophically wrong.

  “Should I?”

  The passenger turned around in her seat. Her face looked vaguely familiar, but not at this age. Something about her eyes…

  “I’m Kara Hill, this is my sister, Britney.”

  She pulled up the sleeve of her shirt and exposed an irregular trail of small circular scars up her inner forearm.

  “When we were fifteen and sixteen, the three of us and a pack of cigarettes played a very painful game.”

  Dixon’s stomach dropped to the ground. Kara and Brit. Fresh off the bus from Asswipe, Oklahoma. They spent a few months at the mansion in a drug-induced haze before he kicked their spent, scrawny asses to the curb.

  “Look, ladies, I don’t know what you are talking about. I was walking
home from school, two kids jumped me—“

  “Stuff it, Dix. We sent you the Lucky Ace.”

  Dixon abandoned his pretense. “You?”

  “Well, not just us. We had a lot of help, a sorority of victims, victims of you. It takes a pretty big coven to cast a spell as powerful as the one we put on that pinball machine. Not to mention how long it took us to find the specific stupid model you always talked about.”

  “You did this to me?”

  “No, jackass, you did that to you. That’s the beauty of it. We cast a good spell to reverse the aging process. We might have made the acceleration rate a bit steep after the first extra play, but we’ll draw no repercussions for using dark magic. We knew with your greed and physical deterioration, you’d hit it like a pig to a trough.

  “But we were nice enough to put in a limit. We stopped you at age twelve, instead of letting you send yourself back to wearing diapers. Or at your age, were you already wearing them again?”

  Dixon bristled at the taunt. His dick might not have been sexually able on its own, but it still pissed fine.

  The car passed out of the tonier residential areas and swung south on Western, deeper into Los Angeles.

  “We were out here waiting for the cops to arrive. We figured your security would have them arrest a kid who broke into the Rhapsody Mansion. We were going to follow you to the station and bail you out. But scraping you off the street after getting the shit kicked out of you was a lot more rewarding.”

  Kara laughed without mirth. Britney sent another silent, burning stare back via the rearview mirror.

  They turned left off Western. The neighborhood around them began a slow deterioration. An increase in graffiti, a decrease in working streetlights. Furtive young men tried to keep to the shadows near street corners.

  “Look, Kara,” Dixon said. He assumed his sleaze-tinged version of charm. “Your visit here was a long time ago. It was a different age. We were all young, just having fun—”

  “Fun?” Kara practically spat out the word. “You call defiling, damaging and abandoning girls fun, you sick bastard?”

  Dixon gripped the front seat back in frustration.

  “Well, the joke’s on you and your pack of psycho witches,” Dixon said. “Because I’m young again, and rich, and this time around, it’ll be no holds barred.”

  “Oh, you’re young, all right. And you’re going to stay that way. You’ll be twelve years old forever. You might die of something else, but it won’t be old age.”

  A look of horror crossed Dixon’s face. Kara’s lit up.

  “Yes, you just got it. You’ll never see puberty, never be sexually capable, for the rest of what we hope will be a long and wonderful life.”

  The car slowed for a curve. Dixon grabbed the handle and yanked. The locked door didn’t yield. He pounded the unlock button to no effect. Sweat peppered his forehead.

  Kara pointed the barrel of a pistol into the back seat.

  “But we didn’t want you to go through life unloved,” she said. “We’re not evil witches.”

  The car rolled to a stop. The door locks popped. Dixon grabbed for the handle, but the door opened before he could pull it.

  A ponytailed Mexican man stuck his broad face into the car. A star tattoo adorned the skin above his right cheekbone. Three tattooed tears ran down from his left eye. He smiled and revealed two gold incisors.

  Dixon’s heart stopped. Everyone with any connection to the skin industry had heard of Benito “Big Dog” Estevez, the king of catering to pedophiles. Kara jammed the pistol barrel into Dixon’s side to hold him in place.

  “Hey, boy,” Big Dog said. His breath smelled like cigarettes and cheap booze. His skin shined like a snake’s. “I got a line of new friends waiting for you inside already. You gonna be very popular.”

  This story was inspired by a trip to the Pinball Hall of Fame, a big warehouse in Las Vegas filled with working pinball machines the owners actually let you play. The story was supposed to have a happy ending, but one thing led to another and…

  Ω

  My Soul Is in the Theater

  Each evening, the stage at the Barclay Theatre overflowed with life. The actors that trod upon its boards and the resounding applause of the audience infused it with vitality. But this morning, without that energy, the silent building slept away its idle hours.

  Jackson Breen had the theater to himself. He stood center stage, tall and angular, sporting the goatee grown for his lead role. He wore blue jeans and a black t-shirt, an anachronism among the nineteenth- century furnishings on the set of Orchids in Bloom. His black leather jacket lay across the couch. With the curtains drawn and the stage lights down, he could see the thousands of orchestra section seats, the hundreds more on the balcony. Empty, they looked so strange. The play had sold out every performance.

  Jackson breathed in the invigorating, unique smell of a theater stage. Along with the usual aromas of makeup, sweat and burning gels, the Barclay carried the veteran scent of age. The fragrance of dried wood and musty curtains reminded each actor that others had walked these boards for over a century. It was a welcome change from Jackson’s usual Hollywood movie set, now mostly sterile rooms wallpapered in green to accommodate special effects.

  He took a seat in the overstuffed leather chair his character favored throughout the play. Enthroned on it each night, he felt the power of the patriarch he played flow through him. But now, in the dim light, out of costume, without an audience, he was just a man in a chair, no different from perching in a dentist’s waiting room.

  Something moved in the shadows at the stage’s far end. He tensed. Even he wasn’t supposed to be here at this early hour. He stood with the hope that his six foot height might add a level of intimidation. It wasn’t necessary.

  Kelly Connor stepped out from the wings. She wore a tight-fitting set of pants and a V-neck blue t-shirt under an open camel’s hair trench coat. Tall and rail-thin, she had the perfect build for the play’s period costumes. She looked quite contemporary with her short wedged blonde hair, so different from her appearance each night in a black wig with a bun. She grinned at Jackson like a kid caught swiping cookies.

  “I thought the only person I’d run into before noon would be a janitor,” she said. “You haven’t picked that up as a second job, have you?”

  “Couldn’t,” Jackson said. “I only work Equity gigs.”

  She took a seat in the Queen Anne chair across from Jackson, the same chair she occupied for half the play. She looked beautiful, as always, but perhaps because they were both out of character, she didn’t send that tingle up Jackson’s spine like she did during their scenes together didn’t charge the electricity that powered the depth of his performance.

  “So what brings you to the Barclay so early in the morning?” he asked.

  “Gratitude,” she sighed. “Wonder. Bewilderment. All of the above.” She gave her head a slow shake. “The show is just the hit I need.”

  Six months ago, conventional wisdom had declared Kelly’s Broadway career dead. A disastrous combination of drug abuse, slurred performances and diva behavior had earned her a pink slip from the prophetically titled The End of Miracles. Months of West Coast rehab declared her clean, but she was still a risk. She jumped at the chance to play opposite Jackson on Orchids in Bloom.

  “You have been magnificent,” Jackson said. “You deserve every note of praise the critics sing.”

  “Part of that is your responsibility,” she said. “From the first rehearsal, your performance has brought out the best in mine.”

  “I feel the same way,” he said. This wasn’t the usual mutual admiration society ego stroke all actors offered each other. Jackson had made films with Oscar winning actresses. He’d never felt a connection with a leading lady like when the curtain rose at the Barclay each night.

  “I’d been away from a live audience for years, doing movies and TV,” he continued. “I can admit now that the prospect of theater kind of scared me. Every
scene suddenly had just one take. No one could save me in the editing room. Working without a net, so to speak.”

  He swept his arm out across the sea of open seats.

  “But it’s amazing,” he said. “I’d forgotten the energy of the audience, what it does for my performance. I think my soul is in the theater after all.”

  They both sat for a moment lost in their own parallel thoughts.

  “I was third choice,” Kelly said.

  “Come again?”

  “Two others turned down Orchids in Bloom before they offered it to me,” she said. “They loved the part but wouldn’t work in the Barclay.”

  “Superstitious fools.”

  “You don’t believe the stories?”

  “Oh,” Jackson said. “I believe that Emma Moore and Billy Faustino committed suicide on stage here in 1890 when their play closed to the world’s worst reviews. The tragic lover’s tale is almost too much to believe, but I’ve seen the old newspaper headlines.

  “Do I believe the silly stories about haunted spirits stalking the backstage? Nonsense. I haven’t seen anything supernatural transpire and neither has anyone else. What I do believe in is the Barclay’s string of successes. The list of careers made and remade at this venue is as long as my arm. That’s the kind of mojo I buy into.”

  “So instead you think the theater is magic?”

  “Well, no. I think that the audience was predisposed to see excellence based on the theater’s history of hits. I think that positive energy brings out a great performance. And I say our results validate that theory.”

  “Who am I to argue?” she said, tossing her hands in the air. “Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s the play, maybe it’s the stage, maybe it’s the alignment of the stars. All I know is that I hope it lasts several hundred performances.”

  ♦♦♦

  That night, Jackson and Kelly stood in the wings and waited for their entrance cue. Jackson wore the heavy layers of velvet and starch that guaranteed a hot night under the spotlights. Kelly was coiffed and corseted into the personification of a Gilded Age matriarch, down to the matching parasol.