The Hanging Hill

32

Wilbur Kimble moved swiftly for an eighty-year-old man.

He draped the crumpled bedsheet against the far wall, propping it up on one side with the tip of a spear, hooking the other end over the antler of a moose head. Both pieces were props from shows done long ago, now stored in the dank basement.

When the children came down here, which Kimble knew they would, because children always did whatever you told them not to do, this sheet would be the first thing they would see.

Actually, what they would see were the wispy images projected on it, a moving picture show that would scare them silly. Children always ran screaming when they encountered the “ghosts” Kimble arranged to have haunting the basement. Usually they cried. Sometimes they had “accidents.” Mostly they quit the show and went home.

“Good riddance,” he muttered. “This theater is no place for children.”

Of course, he himself had never seen a ghost. He just made sure all the kids did.

He pushed apart the dusty costumes hanging on a rolling wardrobe rack and stepped through the opening to where he had set up the antique movie projector, a relic from the days when the Hanging Hill had been a movie theater back in the 1940s.

“Ran those children out, too,” Kimble said, remembering fondly. He had once terrified an entire “Kiddy Matinee” by projecting his spook show on the velvet curtain just before the cartoons started. The popcorn flew that day. Wasn’t a dry seat in the house. The theater almost went out of business, which would have been wonderful, might’ve been torn down for a parking lot.

But some artsy folks with too much time and money decided they wanted to do musicals on the grand old stage and Wilbur Kimble was forced to stay on the job.

He made certain the film sprockets were lined up properly. This was rare footage from the 1930s and needed to be handled very, very carefully. The old celluloid was stiff and brittle.

Kimble flicked up the switch to test out his illusion. The rickety machine chattered to life. The dusty sheet he was using as a movie screen swayed in the slight breeze moving through the basement, and that made the film clip seem all the more like an eerie apparition.

“Clara,” the janitor muttered as he watched the ghostly images dance across the sheet: a young girl and boy, dressed up in matching sailor suits.

They tap-danced.

Then they juggled.

First balls, then bowling pins.