Elaine Lennon is a film historian. She is the author of ChinaTowne: The Screenplays of Robert Towne and is widely published in international film journals. She has a background in television production and film financing and was a lecturer for a decade in film studies and screenwriting at the School of Media, Dublin Institute of Technology.
Ornament
By Elaine Lennon
The Fountain Blue was the hottest roadhouse in the Midlands, as famed for its eclectic steak-based menu cooked in the lively restaurant as the country and Irish stars who played its cathedral stage every weekend.
What nobody knew was this clubby confluence of food and music and good times was built on a ley line which yielded that rather alien feeling of supreme well-being that flooded the customers’ senses when they entered its portals. It supplied an energy source that also attracted a curious element in the clientele, a powerful force that bore strange after effects that can’t quite be enumerated or qualified or even named.
Nowadays it lies in ruins, with tumbleweed blowing about and grass growing through the broken window panes. It closed overnight, just a year after its opening in 1976. Nobody knew why but there were rumours of a meat truck, a fight and a mysterious conflagration. People who were there found they could remember entering and nothing else, not even how they made it out alive or how they got home in the aftermath. They couldn’t even recall the band playing that evening.
Birds no longer congregate on the phone lines draped outside forming a downward cradle onto the overgrown roadside. Sometimes Nature recognises there are vacuums that shouldn’t be filled.
*
It was a Saturday like most Saturdays. The road was busy, the sun was high and there was a steady stream of customers in and out of the building.
The lorry pulled into the car park. The hood ornament was the first thing anyone noticed – a crucifix wrapped in a bear claw. It never shook no matter how many bumps it encountered on the asphalt. It was discreet but distinctive, an upright and apparently solid chunk of silver, a valuable item for anyone in the know.
Bear crumpled the Yorkie wrapper in his fist and put it in the ashtray.
His CB crackled.
“Alright there, Big Bear?”
He held the handpiece and pressed the button.
“Okay, Rubber Duck, just pulling in now.”
He manoeuvred the cattle truck off the main road into the parking lot in front of The Fountain Blue with its cathedral spire rising from the more conventional stacked stone base with windows sloping at an angle out toward the late afternoon sunlight. He rounded the building and parked close to the kitchen door at the back where a wall bisected the yard, shielding rows of trashcans and boilers from public view.
He squinted through his blue-tinted shades. He adjusted the crucifix hanging from his rearview mirror along with a cardboard air freshener and furry dice.
Bear had just got his feet on the gravel when Kezzy came out the back door with a cigarette behind his ear and a look that said he already didn’t like the answer to whatever he was about to ask.
“You come in here looking like a convention of angels,” said Kezzy.
Bear didn’t look at him right away. He was checking the seals on the truck, running a hand along the latch, feeling the vibration under the steel. The truck felt alive, like it always did at this stage of the run.
“Don’t go turning into Sinatra on me now,” said Bear. “I’m not here to sing.”
“Who are you?” Kezzy said.
Bear finally looked at him. “I’m just a solitary man with a job to do.”
“Just not the one we know you’re paid to do.”
Bear smiled, thin. “What do you think you know?”
Kezzy shrugged. “I think I know when someone parks a cattle truck next to a kitchen door instead of the loading bay. I think I know when meat don’t smell like meat. And I think I know when something in the walk-in starts humming like it’s got a pulse.”
Bear nodded, like he’d expected that. “That’s a lot of rib eye right there,” he said.
Kezzy stared at him. “You don’t joke about food.”
“I don’t joke at all,” said Bear.
Inside the truck something thumped. Not loud, but firm. Measured. Like someone knocking from the inside who knew exactly how thick the walls were.
The ley line under the Fountain Blue shifted, just a hair. Nobody noticed except the people who’d been noticing things their whole lives without talking about them. A waitress dropped a tray. A fiddler missed a note. A man at the bar felt like he’d just remembered a bad dream from childhood.
Kezzy took the cigarette out of his ear and lit it. “So this is where we’re at.”
“This is where we’re at,” Bear said.
“You gonna tell me what’s in the truck?”
Bear didn’t answer right away. He reached into the cab and took down the crucifix draped on the mirror. He slipped it over his neck.
“You ever hear about ley lines?” he said.
“I did a catering course, not a geography degree.”
Bear nodded. “Fair enough.”
Another knock. Louder this time. Someone inside laughed. You could hear it through the metal if you knew how to listen.
Kezzy said, “I have an idea.”
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Usually means it’s a good one.”
“You gonna tell me before or after it gets me killed?”
“Part-time firefighters,” Kezzy said.
Bear blinked. “What?”
“That’s what we are now,” Kezzy said. “Part-time firefighters.”
From inside the Fountain Blue, a scream cut through the music. Then another. Blood-curdling screams, the kind that start high and end low, like something being pulled apart.
Bear said, “That’s not good.”
“Fire brigade?” Kezzy said.
“They won’t help.”
“Then it’s us.”
The truck door bulged. A seam split.
Bear swore. “They’re early.”
Inside the truck, pale hands forced through the gap. Fingers like knives. Eyes glowing red in the dark. One of them said something in a language Bear hadn’t heard since one horrible night in Vietnam.
Kezzy backed up, grabbed a meat hook off the wall. “Diameter,” he said, like he was thinking out loud.
“What?”
“Diameter. Circumference. Gradient. Quadrant. You cut wrong, you ruin the whole thing.”
“That’s a hell of a time to talk shop.”
The truck door came off its hinges.
They poured out. Tall, thin, dressed like they’d robbed a funeral home. They smelled like iron and old stone. One of them landed wrong and laughed about it.
Bear pulled a flare from his pocket and struck it on the bumper. Light filled the yard. The ley line surged. The vampires hissed like they’d been slapped.
“You had one job,” one of them said to Bear. “Drive.”
“I am driving,” Bear said. “This is just a stop.”
Inside, the band stopped playing. The lights flickered. Someone yelled for the manager. Someone else yelled for God.
Kezzy swung the meat hook and caught one of them under the jaw. It went down hard, smoke pouring out of its mouth.
Kezzy said, “That felt personal.”
Bear tackled another, slammed it into the wall. The boilers rattled. Trashcans went over. The vampires moved fast, but Bear moved like someone who’d been doing this longer than them.
“You didn’t tell me it’d be this many,” Bear said.
“They told me there’d be food,” one of them said.
Flames licked up the side of the building. Someone inside had knocked over a candle. Or something else. The spire caught first, like it was waiting for it.
Flames shot up from the centre of the spire, forming a billowing fire in the night sky.
The ley line snapped.
That’s when things went wrong in a way nobody could later explain.
Time bent. Sound flattened. People inside stopped screaming and just stared. The vampires slowed, like they were underwater. Bear felt old all at once. Kezzy felt calm, which scared him worse.
One of the vampires said, “This place is wrong.”
Kezzy said, “You don’t say.”
They fought through smoke and heat. Bear used the crucifix like a club. Kezzy used knives meant for fish. A vampire went through the kitchen window and landed in the parking lot, steaming.
Fire engines arrived but didn’t get close. The men who got out looked at the building and decided to wait. Part-time firefighters, all of them, suddenly remembering appointments elsewhere.
At some point the vampires stopped coming. Either they burned or they ran or they found something worse than Bear waiting for them in the dark.
The roof collapsed. The spire folded in on itself like a bad idea.
Later, much later, Bear and Kezzy sat on the kerb.
They looked through the smoking malefic ruins of God knows what. They’d been through something.
Bear offered a cigarette. Kezzy took it.
They each smoked like it was a post-coital relaxant. The glow on their nicotine tips had a pleasing roseate light that illuminated their blackened faces.
Kezzy said, “You ever think about doing something else?”
“All the time,” Bear said.
“You ever do it?”
“No.”
Kezzy nodded. “Figures.”
Sirens wailed in the distance. The ley line went quiet. Birds flew off and didn’t come back.
Bear stood up. “I gotta go.”
Kezzy said, “You coming back?”
Bear shook his head. “This place is done.”
Kezzy watched him walk to the truck, the one that wasn’t really a cattle truck anymore.
Nobody is ever who you think they are.
The Galway Review 