The old cinema on Clontarf Road closes for good.
Its marquee still glows faintly, a relic of the
1980s when the district buzzed with pubs, GAA
clubs, and the hum of early modernisation. A
young woman, Eileen, moves into the flat above
the shuttered building. She’s a painter, known
for her bleak, surreal works.
She begins sketching the cinema at night, drawn
to its cracked windows and the way the
streetlamps cast long, shifting shadows. The
walls of her flat grow thick with charcoal, but
the images are not her own. They show a boy in a
green jersey, standing alone in the dark.
One evening, she finds a faded ticket stub in
the floorboard. It’s from a 1983 screening of
The Wicker Man. The date is wrong—no such film
played that year. She traces the address on the
stub to a nowderelict church hall. Inside, she
finds a dusty altar covered in blue light.
The blue light is not from any bulb. It pulses,
slow and rhythmic, like a heartbeat. When she
touches it, the room fills with whispers. A man
appears, older than the cinema itself. He says
nothing, only gestures to the painting she left
on the table. It shows the same boy, now older,
standing in the same place.
She realises the paintings are not her work.
They are records of a bargain made in 1983: a
child’s life for a decade of artistic vision.
The man is the price collector. He offers Eileen
a choice—continue the cycle or lose everything
she has created.
She refuses. The blue light flares, and the
paintings burn. The cinema collapses overnight.
The streetlamps die. Eileen’s work vanishes from
galleries. She is left with nothing but the
memory of the boy and the silence of the empty
road.
The last frame of her final painting shows the
boy smiling, his eyes gone black. The film reel
in the church hall plays endlessly, no longer
visible to anyone but her.
