Night on Terror Island Read Online Free PDF Page B

the film they were showing,
Cabiria
. Several people were posed proudly on the steps at the entrance.
    Closest to the camera stood a man in a top hat, tail coat and those weird black shoes with white toecaps on them. He wore white gloves and was leaning on a walking stick. He had a thick, black moustache that made him look like a walrus and he was smiling at the camera and lifting his free hand in a gesture that seemed to say,
Behold, my cinema!
This, Kip decided, must have been the Señor Ravelli that Mr Lazarus had mentioned. Other people stood a polite distance behind him: several men wearing military-style uniforms with flat-peaked caps and epaulettes on their shoulders, and a younger man, dressed in a fancy waistcoat and striped trousers. He was gazing proudly at the camera, hands on hips, a half-smile on his face. Kip gasped because there was no mistaking who it was. He was looking at a much younger version of Mr Lazarus.
    Kip leafed through the rest of the papers but found nothing else he was able to read. So he got Google up on the computer and typed Il Fantoccini into the search box. Up came a series of articles but none of them seemed to have anything to do with a cinema of that name.
    He decided to try another tack and typed in
Cabiria
. The first hit revealed that it was a silent movie, directed by somebody called Giovanni Pastrone, released in …’ Kip stared at the screen and had to check another couple of sites to make sure there had been no mistake. They all agreed on the release date. 1914. Kip found the photograph and looked at it again. Though the cinema was undoubtedly old-fashioned, in the picture it looked brand spanking new, freshly painted and clean as a whistle. He looked again at the young man in the waistcoat. It
was
Mr Lazarus, he was sure of that, not his father or his grandfather. But if this really was the cinema’s opening day and the film it was showing was fresh on release, then that made Mr Lazarus … Kip counted in his head, not really wanting to believe.
    Assuming he was in his teens in the photograph, that would make him way over a hundred years old. While Kip could accept that he was pretty elderly and might actually be some years older than he looked, this was pushing it a bit.
    He remembered Mr Lazarus saying something about equipment that was being delivered to the cinema this morning, so he logged off the computer and went back upstairs to get dressed, dragging on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. He glanced into Dad’s room but he was still snoring soundly, the covers pulled up around his head. He checked Rose’s room and she too was out for the count, her eyes closed, her golden hair fanned out on the pillow around her. She looked cute when she was like this, but Kip wasn’t fooled for a moment. Any minute now she’d be up, demanding that he play with her and her collection of Barbie dolls.
    He went downstairs again, grabbed his jacket and keys and walked quickly to the Paramount, just in time to see a large van driving away.
    The foyer was deserted, so Kip made his way up to the projection room. The door was open and there were noises from within, the gentle clinking of metal against metal. Kip could see that Mr Lazarus was busy setting up an elaborate piece of equipment alongside the projector. He had taken his leather coat off and was wearing a richly-embroidered waistcoat, very like the one he had been wearing in the old photograph. The equipment was like nothing that Kip had ever seen before and seemed to consist of a round wooden platform set on a couple of metal rails. As Kip watched, Mr Lazarus slid the platform backwards and forward, occasionally squirting a drop of oil from an old-fashioned canister onto the tracks. He never turned his head to look, but when he spoke it was evident that he knew who he was talking to.
    ‘Well, don’t just stand there, boy, come along inside.’
    Kip stepped sheepishly into the room.
    ‘Er … hi,’ he said. ‘I remembered you were