Bailey, who’s on guard at the reception desk, would push his alarm button and every cop in the area would appear,” he said. Colin Bailey had worked for his father for the full twenty years he’d owned the studio—which was most of Alistair’s life. He was like a fixture, dedicated to the studio. And during lockdown, he was fierce.
She moved closer to him. “I realize we can’t go in by the front but we can sneak in because you have a key and the pass code to get there through the tunnel door. And Colin Bailey would never see us, because you know right where the cameras are so we can avoid them.”
Almost involuntarily he felt his left pocket. He did have the keys. But he’d told her the truth. Colin Bailey would report Alistair to his father without blinking an eye.
She shimmied up against him, her body pressed to his in just the right way to elicit an immediate response. Her perfect breasts—albeit made that way with some saline enhancement—were firm against his chest and her groin pushed against his.
He forgot his father completely. He also forgot the danger—and the fact that he was being used.
“All right,” he said. Now his voice was flat-out hoarse. “We’ll go by the tunnel.”
She smiled. She rose up on her toes and brought her lips to his and did things with her tongue that nearly made him climax on the spot. Then she stepped back. “That was a little promise of things to come!”
He nodded. He couldn’t speak.
He turned around. On the screen, Dianna Breen was screaming. She was being chased by the Egyptian robe-clad murderer, who was forcing her deeper and deeper into the museum.
Alistair stumbled through the audience chairs to the back. He entered the old lobby, where wine and beer were sold, along with various forms of high-end movie snack food. To the far left of the lobby were a few offices and conference rooms, and at the back of his father’s favorite little meeting room was a door, nominally hidden by a movie poster.
“Oooh, this is like a high-tech spy adventure!” she said.
“There’s nothing high-tech about it,” he said as guilt clashed with the near-desperate desire she elicited. “It’s a movie poster covering a door.”
She was pressed to his back. Desire won out over guilt.
Alistair swept the canvas poster to the side, dug in his pocket and twisted the key in the lock, fumbling for a moment as he did so.
There were auxiliary lights set into the steps that led down to the tunnel; on the days that the small museum was open, before and after movies were screened, the stairway and the landing would be ablaze with light. But tonight, no one was expected.
“Be careful,” he warned Jenny.
“Of course!” she said.
Alistair walked slowly down the steps, ever aware of her sweet-smelling presence behind him. He reached the landing. He’d never been here before when there was no illumination except the emergency lighting. It changed the entire appearance of the place.
The museum’s first scene was from The Maltese Falcon. Humphrey Bogart sat at his desk while femme fatale Mary Astor leaned toward him and a creepy Peter Lorre hovered off to the side. They were all caught in shadow, and even Bogie looked dangerous, ready to strangle Mary Astor. Across from that tableau, Orson Welles as the title character in Citizen Kane stood by the breakfast table, angry after ignoring Ruth Warrick, who played his first wife. The old mannequins, created in the mid-50s by the previous owner’s special-effects studio, had been works of love, and in the dim red light and shadows, Alistair could almost believe that Orson Welles was about to speak angrily, his patience finally snapping him from the ennui of his marriage. Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake were together next, in a scene from The Glass Key, and then there were Dana Andrews, Vincent Price and Gene Tierney in Laura. The hall was long, and the exhibits were plentiful. A slim wooden barrier separated the walkway from the exhibits, and visitors could push buttons, which would let them hear the audio from the scene they were witnessing, along with information about the actors, producers, writers and directors. That night, to Alistair, all the characters looked as if they could speak without benefit of electronics.
Bogie made another appearance, with Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca; he was saying goodbye in front of the plane that would take her away. Bogie gripped Ingrid by the shoulders, and the emotion between them—and the greater good of the war effort, the sacrifice required—seemed palpable.
Toward the end of the hallway, Alistair stopped.
The scene was taken from the movie he had been watching that night, Sam Stone and the Curious Case of the Egyptian Museum.
There was hard-boiled Sam Stone, played by the ill-fated Jon de la Torre, arriving just a little too late in the fictional museum’s “Hall of the Pharaohs.” And there was the empty sarcophagus, and nearby, the man clad in the robes, his hands around the throat of femme fatale Dianna Breen, played by the equally ill-fated Audrey Grant. Snakes—Egyptian cobras—abounded on the floor, and Sam would have to make his way through them if he was to have any chance of saving Dianna.
Alistair stared at the scene and blinked; he could have sworn he saw one of the snakes move.
“Hey,” Jenny said, pushing against his back.
“What?” Alistair asked, distracted. He kept staring at the tableau.
“The door is open. The door to the studio is open!” she told him, speaking softly.
He turned to look down to the end of the hallway. The door into the basement of the special-effects studio stood ajar. He frowned; it should have been locked. His father and upper-level management were adamant about the rules when it came to lockdown.
He glanced at Jenny. For a moment she seemed to look like every femme fatale who had ever graced a movie screen. There was something wrong here. He was being played, he thought, really played. Perhaps punked. There could be cameras somewhere that he didn’t know about and other people ready to break into laughter. Yes, he was a fool, ready to do anything for a woman’s touch. And, as in so many film noir scenarios, the woman was luring him to his doom. At least that was how it felt in his fearful and overheated imagination.
But there was something else about the night, the way the tableau seemed alive. Something that sent a chill raking his bones.
He warned Jenny with a glance that he was wise to the situation.
But when he started through the door to the studio he heard Jenny scream.
When he turned around, he was so stunned that at first his jaw just dropped.
The robed killer—the evil priest, Amun Mopat—had come down from the Sam Stone tableau. The thing seemed to have no face. There was only blackness where a face should have been. He, it, stood behind Jenny, and seemed to be staring at him, but it had no eyes….
“Hey!” He wanted to scream. The sound came out like a croak.
An act. It had to be part of an act.
A hand appeared, brandishing a long knife.
It was a special-effects studio, for God’s sake! Someone was playing a game, he told himself, maybe even at his father’s request. Maybe his dad had suspected him of doing something like this,
