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CHAPTER 9

Seven hundred miles to the southwest, in the cafeteria at Gateway Film Laboratory of St. Louis, Francis Dolarhyde was waiting for a hamburger. The entrées offered in the steam table were filmed over. He stood beside the cash register and sipped coffee from a paper cup.

A redhaired young woman wearing a laboratory smock came into the cafeteria and studied the candy machine. She looked at Francis Dolarhyde’s back several times and pursed her lips. Finally she walked over to him and said, “Mr. D.?” Dolarhyde turned. He always wore red goggles outside the darkroom. She kept her eyes on the nosepiece of the goggles.

“Will you sit down with me a minute? I want to tell you some thing.”

“What can you tell me, Eileen?”

“That I’m really sorry. Bob was just really drunk and, you know, clowning around. He didn’t mean anything. Please come sit down. Just for a minute. Will you do that?” “Mmmmhmmm.” Dolarhyde never said “yes,” as he had trouble with the sibilant /s/.

They sat. She twisted a napkin in her hands.

“Everybody was having a good time at the party and we were glad you came by,” she said. “Real glad, and surprised, too. You know how Bob is, he does voices all the time - he ought to be on the radio. He did two or three accents, telling jokes and all - he can talk just like a Negro. When he did that other voice, he didn’t mean to make you feel bad. He was too drunk to know who was there.” “They were all laughing and then they . . . didn’t laugh.” Dolar?hyde never said “stopped” because of the fricative /s/.

“That’s when Bob realized what he had done.”

“He went on, though.”

“I know it,” she said, managing to look from her napkin to his goggles without lingering on the way. “I got on his case about it, too. He said he didn’t mean anything, he just saw he was into it and tried to keep up the joke. You saw how red his face got.” “He invited me to . . . perform a duet with him.”

“He hugged you and tried to put his arm around you. He wanted you to laugh it off, Mr. D.”

“I’ve laughed it off, Eileen.”

“Bob feels terrible.”

“Well, I don’t want him to feel terrible. I don’t want that. Tell him for me. And it won’t make it any different here at the plant. Golly, if I had talent like Bob I’d make jo . . . a joke all the time.” Dolarhyde avoided plurals whenever he could. “We’ll all get to?gether before long and he’ll know how I feel.” “Good, Mr. D. You know he’s really, under all the fun, he’s a sen?sitive guy.”

“I’ll bet. Tender, I imagine.” Dolarhyde’s voice was muffled by his hand. When seated, he always pressed the knuckle of his forefinger under his nose.

“Pardon?”

“I think you’re good for him, Eileen.”

“I think so, I really do. He’s not drinking but just on weekends. He just starts to relax and his wife calls the house. He makes faces while I talk to her, but I can tell he’s upset after. A woman knows.” She tapped Dolarhyde on the wrist and, despite the goggles, saw the touch register in his eyes. “Take it easy, Mr. D. I’m glad we had this talk.” “I am too, Eileen.”

Dolarhyde watched her walk away. She had a suck mark on the back of her knee. He thought, correctly, that Eileen did not appreci?ate him. No one did, actually.

The great darkroom was cool and smelled of chemicals. Francis Dolarhyde checked the developer in the A tank. Hundreds of feet of homemovie film from all over the country moved through the tank hourly. Temperature and freshness of the chemicals were critical. This was his responsibility, along with all the other operations until the film had passed through the dryer. Many times a day he lifted samples of film from the tank and checked them frame by frame.

The darkroom was quiet. Dolarhyde discouraged chatter among his assistants and communicated with them largely in gestures.

When the evening shift ended, he remained alone in the darkroom to develop, dry, and splice some film of his own.

Dolarhyde got home about ten P.M. He lived alone in a big house his grandparents had left him. It stood at the end of a gravel drive that runs through an apple orchard north of St. Charles, Missouri, across the Missouri River from St. Louis. The orchard’s absentee owner did not take care of it. Dead and twisted trees stood among the green ones. Now, in late July, the smell of rotting apples hung over the orchard. There were many bees in the daytime. The nearest neighbor was a halfmile away.

Dolarhyde always made an inspection tour of the house as soon as he got home; there had been an abortive burglary attempt some years before. He flicked on the lights in each room and looked around. A visitor would not think he lived alone. His grandparents’ clothes still hung in the closets, his grandmother’s brushes were on her dresser with combings of hair in them. Her teeth were in a glass on the bedside table. The water had long since evaporated. His grandmother had been dead for ten years.

(The funeral director had asked him, “Mr. Dolarhyde, wouldn’t you like to bring me your grandmother’s teeth?” He replied, “Just drop the lid.”)

Satisfied that he was alone in the house, Dolarhyde went upstairs, took a long shower, and washed his hair.

He put on a kimono of a synthetic material that felt like silk and lay down on his narrow bed in the room he had occupied since child?hood. His grandmother’s hair dryer had a plastic cap and hose. He put on the cap and, while he dried, he thumbed through a new highfashion magazine. The hatred and brutishness in some of the photo?graphs were remarkable.

He began to feel excited. He swiveled the metal shade of his read?ing lamp to light a print on the wall at the foot of the bed. It was William Blake’s The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun.

The picture had stunned him the first time he saw it. Never before had he seen anything that approached his graphic thought. He felt that Blake must have peeked in his ear and seen the Red Dragon. For weeks Dolarhyde had worried that his thoughts might glow out his ears, might be visible in the darkroom, might fog the film. He put cotton balls in his ears. Then, fearing that cotton was too flam?mable, he tried steel wool. That made his ears bleed. Finally he cut small pieces of asbestos cloth from an ironingboard cover and rolled them into little pills that would fit in his ears.

The Red Dragon was all he had for a long time. It was not all he had now. He felt the beginnings of an erection.

He had wanted to go through this slowly, but now he could not wait.

Dolarhyde closed the heavy draperies over windows in the down?stairs parlor. He set up his screen and projector. His grandfather had put a LaZBoy recliner in the parlor, over his grandmother’s objec?tions. (She had put a doily on the headrest.) Now Dolarhyde was glad. It was very comfortable. He draped a towel over the arm of the chair.

He turned out the lamps. Lying back in the dark room, he might have been anywhere. Over the ceiling fixture he had a good light ma?chine which rotated, making varicolored dots of light crawl over the walls, the floor, his skin. He might have been reclining on the acceler?ation couch of a space vehicle, in a glass bubble out among the stars. When he closed his eyes he thought he could feel the points of light move over him, and when he opened them, those might be the lights of cities above or beneath him. There was no more down or up. The light machine turned faster as it got warm, and the dots swarmed over him, flowed over furniture in angular streams, fell in meteor showers down the walls. He might have been a comet plunging through the Crab Nebula.

There was one place shielded from the light. He had placed a piece of cardboard near the machine, and it cast a shadow over the movie screen.

Sometimes, in the future, he would smoke first to heighten the effect, but he did not need it now, this time.

He thumbed the drop switch at his side to start the projector. A white rectangle sprang on the screen, grayed and streaked as the leader moved past the lens, and then the gray Scotty perked up his ears and ran to the kitchen door, shivering and wagging his stump of a tail. A cut to the Scotty ranning beside a curb, turning to snap at his side as he ran.

Now Mrs. Leeds came into the kitchen carrying groceries. She laughed and touched her hair. The children came in behind her.

A cut to a badly lit shot in Dolarhyde’s own bedroom upstairs. He is standing nude before the print of The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun. He is wearing “combat glasses,” the closefitting wraparound plastic glasses favored by hockey players. He has an erection, which he improves with his hand.

The focus blurs as he approaches the camera with stylized move?ments, hand reaching to change the focus as his face fills the frame. The picture quivers and sharpens suddenly to a closeup of his mouth, his disfigured upper lip rolled back, tongue out through the teeth, one rolling eye still in the frame. The mouth fills the screen, writhing lips pulled back from jagged teeth and darkness as his mouth engulfs the lens.

The difficulty of the next part was evident.

A bouncing blur in a harsh movie light became a bed and Charles Leeds thrashing, Mrs. Leeds sitting up, shielding her eyes, turning to Leeds and putting her hands on him, rolling toward the edge of the bed, legs tangled in the covers, traying to rise. The camera jerked toward the ceiling, molding whipping across the screen like a stave, and then the picture steadied, Mrs. Leeds back down on the mat?tress, a dark spot on her nightdress spreading and Leeds, hands to his neck and eyes wild rising. The screen went black for five beats, then the tic of a splice.

The camera was steady now, on a tripod. They were all dead now. Arranged. Two children seated against the wall facing the bed, one seated across the corner from them facing the camera. Mr. and Mrs. Leeds in bed with the covers over them. Mr. Leeds propped up against the headboard, the sheet covering the rope around his chest and his head lolled to the side.

Dolarhyde came into the picture from the left with the stylized movements of a Balinese dancer. Bloodsmeared and naked except for his glasses and gloves, he mugged and capered among the dead. He approached the far side of the bed, Mrs. Leeds’s side, took the corner of the covers, whipped them off the bed and held the pose as though he had executed a veronica.

Now, watching in the parlor of his grandparents’ house, Dolarhyde was covered with a sheen of sweat. His thick tongue ran out con?stantly, the scar on his upper lip wet and shiny and he moaned as he stimulated himself.

Even at the height of his pleasure he was sorry to see that in the film’s ensuing scene he lost all his grace and elegance of motion, rooting piglike with his bottom turned carelessly to the camera. There were no dramatic pauses, no sense of pace or climax, just brut?ish frenzy.

It was wonderful anyway. Watching the film was wonderful. But not as wonderful as the acts themselves.

Two major flaws, Dolarhyde felt, were that the film did not actu?ally show the deaths of the Leedses and that his own performance was poor toward the end. He seemed to lose all his values. That was not how the Red Dragon would do it.

Well. He had many films to make and, with experience, he hoped he could maintain some aesthetic distance, even in the most inti?mate moments.

He must bear down. This was his life’s work, a magnificent thing. It would live forever.

He must press on soon. He must select his fellow performers. Al?ready he had copied several films of Fourth of July family outings. The end of summer always brought a rush of business at the film-?processing plant as vacation movies came in. Thanksgiving would bring another rush.

Families were mailing their applications to him every day.