Hellbound Hearts Read Online Free

wasn’t sure whether to step inside or not. After a moment, a heavyset man in an islands shirt appeared from a door toward the rear of the house. “JRosen101?” he called to Jack without bothering to come to the front door.
    Jack nodded. “Jack,” he clarified, stepping inside.
    â€œWalter,” the guy said. Thirty, maybe older. Hard to tell because the fat of his face kept it wrinkle free. “Come on.” He sounded a little put out, as if Jack was late or something, keeping people waiting.
    The room at the back was tiny but had been set up as a minitheater with four easy chairs facing a small free-standing screen. Jack was surprised to see an honest-to-God movie projector behind the chairs—he’d expected to be watching a DVD-R at best—but it was too small for 16mm and too ancient for Super 8.
    â€œStandard eight?” Jack asked, kind of delighted.
    Walter shook his head as he gestured for Jack to take one of the chairs. “Nine point five,” he said.
    â€œYou’re kidding,” Jack said. He’d
heard
of 9.5mm—a home format introduced in the early twenties by Pathé but essentially crushed by Kodak’s 8mm just before World War II—but had never seen either films or hardware. Carducci claimed to have a 9.5 print of Hitchcock’s
Blackmail
buried somewhere in his storage space, but then, Carducci claimed to have pretty much
everything
buried somewhere.
    Another man came into the room. The Stan to Walter’s Ollie, hewas five-five and rail thin and sported a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses. Jack wondered if he’d already been in the house, or maybe had a key to the front door.
    â€œHey, Lenny,” Walter said without enthusiasm and glancing at his watch. Jack waited for an introduction that didn’t come.
    â€œI’m Jack,” he said as Lenny sat down.
    â€œI know,” Lenny said. “Did you bring it?”
    Jack drew the Mylar-housed still from the computer bag he’d brought—it had been either that or a Trader Joe’s tote, nobody had briefcases anymore—and Lenny took a cursory glance at it.
    â€œVery nice,” he said and then, half-turning to Walter, who was threading up an oversized reel into the projector, “The one Forry had? You think?”
    â€œProbably,” Walter said, dimming the lights from a remote.
    â€œStolen,” Lenny said.
    â€œHe was so
trusting
.
    â€ “Hey,” Jack said. “I got this at—”
    â€œNo, no, no,” Lenny said, interrupting him. “Nobody’s accusing
you
. I mean, you
paid
for it, right?”
    â€œYes, I did,” Jack said, refraining from saying how little it had cost him.
    â€œThen it’s yours,” Lenny said in an annoyingly kind tone. Like Jack needed
his
fucking blessing.
    Walter had sat down. “It’s starting,” he said, which was Walter for Stop talking.
    The print was of the later cut, as Walter—he assumed it had been Walter—had told him when he’d replied to Jack’s reply and e-mailed him the address. Interestingly, though, the main title card—the one that actually said
The Cabinet of Doctor Coppelius
—was in a font that didn’t quite match the cards before and after it, which lent some credence to the idea that the film had once been called something else.
    The dupe was a little washed-out—the blacks not really black and the actors’ faces occasionally slipping into an unpleasant featurelessness against too bright backgrounds—but was otherwise in remarkably good shape.
    The movie itself was worryingly slow paced, even for Jack—and he was a guy who could sit through the flattest Monogram six-reeler without checking his watch even once—and the acting was as alternately amateurish and histrionic as the website critique had suggested. Jack had begun to worry that, as was depressingly often the case, the mystery and intrigue