What The Eyes Don't See

15 | Cinema Hall Horror

They had just enough time to grab the tickets at the box office and run into the auditorium. The movie had completed a run of two weeks already and was now on the way out. It was the middle of a busy week, and, as expected, they walked into a near-empty auditorium that was already plunged in darkness.

"What are the seat numbers?" Shanaya asked.

"Sit anywhere. What does it matter?" He indicated two seats in the corner of the third-last row. There were people in the last three rows, and a few heads were spread out in the lower rows. The third row, however, was empty. He led Shanaya to the very end of the row and sat next to her.

"I wanted to do something fun with you but didn't know it would be sudden like this!" Shanaya said.

"Well, what do I tell you? I am an impulsive guy," Anay said and hailed an usher who was on his way out and bought a tub of caramel popcorn.

"What's the movie about?" Shanaya asked.

"Who cares?" he said and they laughed.

The movie began to play. It started with a riveting opening scene with the introduction of the main character—a loser who was being dumped by his girlfriend. In the first seven minutes, it was clear that this was a typical movie where the loser would suddenly grow balls and stop a burning train or something and then prove his worth to his girlfriend. The movie wasn't expected to have the IQ level for a story more layered than that, but in that moment, Anay was moved. That loser, that miserable sod who couldn't get anything right, was he.

Around half an hour into the movie, Anay realized that Shanaya's hand was grazing his on the armrest. She was probably unaware of it, but that was suddenly all that he could think of. Who was he kidding anyway? Girls don't do anything without their knowledge. They are just not biologically equipped to be unaware of their surroundings. He looked at her and he was right. She gave him a brief look out of the corners of her eyes and then she took her hand away. He breathed hard.

"Popcorn?" he asked her, suddenly remembering he had them.

"No, they get stuck in my teeth."

"What a shame!" He sat back in his seat, tucking the overlarge popcorn bucket in the space between his legs and began to dig in. It was good that the movie was noisy—lots of cars exploding for no particular reason—and that the hall was near-empty; his ungodly crunching of the popcorn did not bother anyone.

Anay had, all of a sudden, lost all interest in the movie. Shanaya was definitely enjoying it, but he was trying hard to. He kept his arm on the armrest, hoping that she would keep hers again, but that did not happen. At one point, he began to feel drowsy. It was perhaps the sleeplessness of the past many nights that was getting to him. His eyes began to droop.

And then suddenly he looked up at the screen. But where was the screen? It was not a cinema screen. It was something dark, something ungodly. It was a kind of theater stage, and something was going on there—the preparation for a play, perhaps? Strange exaggerated characters dressed in colorful clothes flitted across the stage. They wore eerie makeup and even eerier smiles on their faces. He looked around, breathing hard, and saw that he was alone. Those horrific people on stage were performing only for him. A song was playing somewhere, a kind of a lullaby designed to put one into permanent sleep, and somehow he knew that song was only for him. His head began to churn; the people on stage blended with each other and there was a whirlpool of colors, and he felt sucked in at the vortex. He felt his life being squeezed out, whatever there was of it, and then, in a flash, it was all gone. He was alert again. The ridiculous movie was back on the screen.

He shook himself awake from that horrible nightmare. But what was that about? It was as if he had entered into some retro sepia world from the past, like he had flitted across time dimensions, and was back. He shook himself trying to ward off the vestiges of that horrible dream.