“Of course I’ll help you, you poor thing.” The old woman knelt before her. She must have had something wrong with her knees, because she winced with pain. “So tell me, who did this to you? Who?”

Her next few words were lost in a thick gurgle of black blood, because by then Arlene had her little teeth embedded in the old woman’s throat. And even though the dear old thing was past her prime, she was still full of warm, delicious, intoxicating life.

Arlene ate her fill and by the time she was done, that sweet old woman looked like a car-wreck victim, sans safety belt. Arlene turned and strayed into the night. She didn’t wait around to watch the old woman’s gnawed carcass scramble back to hungry life.

Mind you, while all that was going on, poor, confused Lorraine was hiding in some bushes in the school playground, screaming and wondering why all these bad things were going on in her head. The other kids thought she had gone nuts. Her parents and the teachers talked about it later, and based on what she’d told them, they decided she had an overactive imagination. They told her not to let the bad images scare her… they were make-believe, so they couldn’t hurt her. It was all in her head, they said, and in a way it was. Hers was a sort of Reality Surplus Disorder. It’s hard to concentrate when you’ve got another personality playing in your mind.

My best guess is all the movie’s fans created that personality, that black-and-white world of death… all those watchers in the dark, thinking about that movie, those zombies, and of course, poor little Arlene Schabowski. All that feverish brain energy. What is reality, anyway? A mental collective, that’s all. The result of multiple minds, mulling over enthralling stories. I’m sure that somewhere, out there, Moby Dick is still swimming and the House of Usher is still falling. I’m sure Dorothy is still wandering down the Yellow Brick Road, having new adventures, fighting more witches and flying monkeys. And I’m sure she’s still a tiny young thing, just as Arlene Schabowski is still a tiny dead thing.

But let us return to Arlene. She walked down a gravel lane until she came to the highway. Car lights were heading toward her. She held out her bloodstained, skinny arms and waited. The driver would stop. Of course they would. She was just a little girl.

So she waited. And the driver stopped-a fat, middle-aged man with a bulbous nose and horn-rimmed glasses.

“Was there an accident?” He ran up to her, crouched and thrust his fat face near hers.

“Help me, Mommy,” she said.

“You poor thing,” he said in a low, sad voice. “What the hell happened to you?”

Another one who thought she was simply a poor thing. She smiled, leaned forward and bit off his nose-it was too large and juicy a target to resist.

He screamed, so she bit off his lower lip, which made him scream that much louder.

She gnawed and gnawed until he was too cold for her to stomach. Then she began shambling down the road. And because that entire movie took place at night, the daylight never came. She wandered an eternal night of fields and rural back roads and farmhouses, feasting on innocent country folks who only wanted to help her.

And Lorraine… She endured Arlene’s adventures in her head, and finally even got used to them. A person can get used to anything, really. Folks who live near airports soon learn to ignore the roar of planes coming and going. Lorraine grew into a tall, willowy lady. Always slender. Having a zombie in your head is enough to spoil anyone’s appetite. There were plenty of times when she would sit down to dinner, and Arlene would suddenly go on a rampage in her mind. Little zombie-girl would rip apart a couple farmers, tear out their guts and gobble them down, and suddenly that plate of lasagna would seem like a hideous, visceral thing. But Lorraine wouldn’t scream over it…wouldn’t even bat an eyelash. She’d just push the plate away.

As I mentioned, Lorraine eventually became a school teacher. Because a part of her was still a little girl, she liked being around children. She lived in a big nice apartment building, surrounded by families-all the kids there thought she was great. Some of the people in her building had seen her movie, and they were always telling their friends that their neighbor was a movie star. Sometimes folks who had seen the movie would call her Arlene. She’d smile to be polite, but she didn’t like it. “Hey, Arlene-‘Help me, Mommy!’” was the favorite greeting of the fat guy who lived six doors down. She’d always try to take a different route to avoid him if she saw him coming.

Eventually she started dating the school’s janitor, and all of her friends made fun of her for that, joking that the lovers were probably always sneaking off to the boiler room or some such place. The janitor, whose name was Kurt, was a good-looking man, only in his mid-thirties and in fine physical shape. And truth to tell, the two did sneak off together sometimes. To Kurt’s office. His door had a fancy title-Environmental Control Specialist-but it still meant janitor.

Once while she was in his office, Lorraine saw a key hanging from a little nail on the wall behind his desk. The key had a scrap of paper taped to it. The word ATTIC was written on that scrap in blue ballpoint ink. She waited until Kurt’s back was turned, and she took that key.

Even while she was reaching for it, she wasn’t sure why she was taking it. She just knew she had to have it. After school, she stayed behind, waited until everyone was gone and then went up to the attic. It was all storage up there, and the things that had been packed away up there so long ago were now all but forgotten.

Remember where little Arlene ate her parents? In the attic. That’s where the movie-family went to hide from the zombies. The movie-attic had a bed in it, where Arlene used to sleep. She says her four-word line while she’s in that bed. The school attic had a broken cot among its various odds and ends. Obsolete school books, tennis shoes, sacks of that pinkish, pulpy stuff to sprinkle on barf to soak it up and make the smell go away. Lorraine strolled among rows of dusty boxes and stayed up there for about an hour, looking at spider webs and old papers and outdated globes. She realized then that this was the first time she’d been in an attic-any attic at all-since the filming of that movie. Her parents had always lived in apartments. Her dorm room in college had been on the ground floor. A life without attics. She now felt oddly at home-but was it a good home?

When she came down from the attic, left the building and went to her car, the world around her seemed different somehow.

A little less…colorful.

A moment later, Arlene Schabowski saw red in her night-world for the first time. Usually the blood of her victims was shiny black. But she looked down at the hitchhiker she had just torn to bits and saw red, red everywhere. Then she saw that her dress was stained not merely with various splotches of gray, but horrible gouts of rotted filth and gore-red, yellow, brown, green, a veritable rainbow of decay. It made her smile.

A few days later, Kurt was completely confused by Lorraine’s birthday gift to him. “Rainy,” he said, for that is what he called her, “this tie…don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great. And silk, it must have cost plenty. But purple? I don’t know if I’m the purple type…”

“Oh,” she said quite softly. “Is it purple? I thought it was some kind of dark silver. Are you sure it’s purple?”

Lorraine sometimes would bring a book to school to read in the attic, after hours. In the days to come, her students became more and more confused by some of the things she said-especially during art class. Whenever one of them did a drawing, she would ask things like, “What color is that horse?” Or, “That’s a very pretty mermaid-which crayon did you use for the hair?”