Page 100 of Devil Inside

I want to dive in. Enter the screen. I want to live within its pictures.

Within him.

Violins seep out from some unknown chasm. A symphony begins to play, creeping out from speakers we can’t see. The screen presents a black-and-white vista. A mountain.

Superimposed over its snowy peak are the words:

VISTAVISION. MOTION PICTURE. HIGH-FIDELITY.

A pair of lips manifest across the screen. A woman’s. Full, plump and painted. Such a towering mouth, so enormous, it could swallow us all. Devour everyone in this audience. It offers no smile, no warmth. Just a simple sensuality.

We want to be that behemoth of a mouth. Possess that towering flesh.

If only.

The camera slowly rises, scaling her upper lip, her nose, until settling upon her eyes. They gaze out at us, then slide to the side, then the other. What is she searching for?

Names we don’t recognize materialize across her face. Actors, perhaps. Liars, all.

The camera closes in on the woman’s right eye, until it fills the entire frame. That black-and-white eye, saturated in shades of gray, blinks, but won’t stop staring out at us.

At me.

I feel as if it can see me, gazing back from the screen. Reaching in deep. All the way to the core of this host, where I settle.

What I am.

It provokes me. Stirs me. I nearly lose my grip, lose my sense of self, slipping free from this suitable flesh. I have to tighten my grip on this skin, or I’ll lose myself completely.

Then the screen goes red.

Her eye bleeds.

It can’t be. The celluloid itself saturates, transitioning from black-and-white to vivid color—only one. Red. Red, everywhere. The entire image, skin and all, is immersed in the most brilliant hue of blood, it must be blood, look at it glow, how it shines, we are drowning now, drowning in so much blood, where does all this blood come from?

A sliver of white—a splinter—emerges from deep within this woman’s iris. The white band expands, then breaks into smaller shards.

Letters. A single word reaches out from her eye, drawing near...

VERTIGO

And yes,yes, we feel it now, feel the word rise out from the screen and enter this flesh, until we are possessed, overwhelmed by the plucking strings, the film’s opening theme spinning through our thoughts, only to find a dizzying spiral emerge from the eye, a whirlpool of white, a vortex that expands and eclipses this woman, now gone, consuming both her and ourselves, we are lost, all lost, devoured by this endless eddy of colored light.

This movie has possessed us. We feel nothing but vertigo now.

The world spins.

I knew she’d find me.

Join me.

All I had to do was cast myself out there. Call for her. My body’s still trembling from the adrenaline, shattering half a cityblock’s worth of cars. I feel like a fucking tuning fork. Everything in me resonates, bones vibrating. I must sound so loud. A church bell ringing.

What does the nun inVertigosay at the end of the movie?

I heard voices...

I walked straight here after golfing with Deak, then putt-putting through Richmond. I left half a city block of broken windows in my wake, heading right for the Byrd Theater.