The Legend of Skie Cross Theatre

9 P.M.

The Cinema

A few dead leaves swirled in front of the twenty-foot screen. Had anyone bothered to climb the low wall enclosing the theatre, they would have seen dry cornrows waving, far as the eye could see.

"Mom, this movie is lame."

"Honey, please."

"I'm serious Mom. Look," Ricky Thomas pointed over his lawn chair at the empty outdoor theatre. "There's nobody else here."

Ricky's mother sighed a world-weary sigh. The kind of sigh that lived and died in the same breath, crushed under its own weight.

"Look babe. If you don't want to watch the movie, why don't you... I don't know. Explore the lot?"

"Fine." Ricky stood up from his striped lawn chair and looked around the empty parking lot.

There is a legend among the patrons of the weary drive-in theatre.

Madison Thomas shifted in her lawnchair as Charlie Chaplin choked on a piece of fruit.

Passed down from watcher to watcher over lawn chairs, picnic baskets and lukewarm beer.

"Ricky?"

The legend began in 1982, ten years after the opening of Sky Cinema, formerly Skie Cross Theatre.

At first, it started off small. Rumours of broken, bloody cornstalks. Wolf sightings among the fields. Dug-up rabbit holes wide enough to hold a full-grown man. Small things, easily overlooked.

"Shit. Ricky? Shit. This isn't funny, Ricky."

But the rumours never went away. In fact, they grew. Of heart-wrenching screams erupting from bare soil. Furrows crisscrosessing entire fields, with farmhouses at their center. Dogs baying at thin air; if it weren't for the dogs, no one would have known the truth. The nature of the monster hiding among them.

More accuratly, beneath them.

"Is that you? No." Then, "Oh my God. Stay back!"

It dug a network of tunnels beneath the fields. Back and forth and back and forth. Inching closer and closer to the townhouses and farms. One tunnel led straight beneath the lot in Sky Cinema. It was the straw that turned the rumour mill into a full-fledged investigation.

Police swarmed the area. They stayed for weeks, making phone calls, writing on official-looking clipboards. Dogs roamed the tunnels with alongside groups of armed men.

Nobody found any trace of the thing responsible. No DNA, no sightings. Even the screams stopped, for the most part. The police chalked those up to stress and Friday Horror Nights at the Cinema. Business slowed. 'Thanks to the police', the owner would complain. 'Blue-capped hokeys'. But he was wrong.

On full moons, women disappeared from the theatre. Not men or children. Just women.

It happened infrequently enough that the events were never officially linked. But the legend of the Thing Beneath survived. It was both myth and warning.

To avoid the Cinema, especially at night.

To those too curious for their own good, patrons of the theatre left the only clue they had. Truly, it wasn't anything more than conjecture, and the desire to understand.

The Cinema's name. Sky Cinema, formerly Skie Cross Cinema.

Skie.

Eski.