And then he saw the blood. On the tiles. A smear of blood that hadn't come from his nicked ear, there was too much of it. Ha! He didn't imagine it at all. There was blood, heel marks, every sign that what he thought he'd seen, he'd seen. But Jesus in Heaven, which was worse? To see, or not to see? Wouldn't it have been better to be wrong, and just a little spaced-out tonight, than right, and in the hands of a power that could literally change the world?

Ricky stared at the trail of blood, and followed it across the floor of the toilet to the cubicle on the left of his vision. Its door was closed: it had been open before. The murderer, whoever he was, had put the boy in there, Ricky knew it without looking.

'OK,' he said, 'now I've got you.'

He pushed on the door. It swung open and there was the boy, propped up on the toilet seat, legs spread, arms hanging.

His eyes had been scooped out of his head. Not neatly: no surgeon's job. They'd been wrenched out, leaving a trail of mechanics down his cheek.

Ricky put his hand over his mouth and told himself he wasn't going to throw up. His stomach churned, but obeyed, and he ran to the toilet door as though any moment the body was going to get up and demand its ticket-money back.

'Birdy ... Birdy

The fat bitch had been wrong, all wrong. There was death here, and worse.

Ricky flung himself out of the John into the body of the cinema.

The wall-lights were fairly dancing behind their Deco shades, guttering like candles on the verge of extinction. Darkness would be too much; he'd lose his mind.

There was, it occurred to him, something familiar about the way the lights flickered, something he couldn't quite put his finger on. He stood in the aisle for a moment, hopelessly lost.

Then the voice came; and though he guessed it was death this time, he looked up.

'Hello Ricky,' she was saying as she came along Row E towards him. Not Birdy. No, Birdy never wore a white gossamer dress, never had bruise-full lips, or hair so fine, or eyes so sweetly promising. It was Monroe who was walking towards him, the blasted rose of America. 'Aren't you going to say hello?' she gently chided.

' ... er ...'

'Ricky. Ricky. Ricky. After all this time.'

All this time? What did she mean: all this time?

'Who are you?'

She smiled radiantly at him.

'As if you didn't know.'

'You're not Marilyn. Marilyn's dead.'

'Nobody dies in the movies, Ricky. You know that as well as I do. You can always thread the celluloid up again - '

- that was what the flickering reminded him of, the flicker of celluloid through the gate of a projector, one image hot on the next, the illusion of life created from a perfect sequence of little deaths.

' - and we're there again, all-talking, all-singing.' She laughed: ice-in-a-glass laughter, 'We never fluff our lines, never age, never lose our timing - '

'You're not real,' said Ricky.

She looked faintly bored by the observation, as if he was being pedantic. By now she’d come to the end of the row and was standing no more than three feet away from him. At this distance the illusion was as ravishing and as complete as ever. He suddenly wanted to take her, there, in the aisle. What the hell if she was just a fiction: fictions are fuckable if you don't want marriage.

'I want you,' he said, surprised by his own bluntness.

'I want you,' she replied, which surprised him even more. 'In fact I need you. I'm very weak.'

'Weak?'

'It's not easy, being the centre of attraction, you know. You find you need it, more and more. Need people to look at you. All the night, all the day.'

'I'm looking.'

'Am I beautiful?'

'You're a goddess: whoever you are.'

'I'm yours: that's who I am.'

It was a perfect answer. She was defining herself through him. I am a function of you; made for you out of you. The perfect fantasy.

'Keep looking at me; looking forever, Ricky. I need your loving looks. I can't live without them.'

The more he stared at her the stronger her image seemed to become. The flickering had almost stopped; a calm had settled over the place.

'Do you want to touch me?'

He thought she'd never ask.

'Yes,' he said.

'Good.' She smiled coaxingly at him, and he reached to make contact. She elegantly avoided his fingertips at the last possible moment, and ran, laughing, down the aisle towards the screen. He followed, eager. She wanted a game: that was fine by him.

She'd run into a cul-de-sac. There was no way out from this end of the cinema, and judging by the come-ons she was giving him, she knew it. She turned and flattened herself against the wall, feet spread a little.

He was within a couple of yards of her when a breeze out of nowhere billowed her skirt up around her waist. She laughed, half-closing her eyes, as the surf of silk rose and exposed her. She was naked underneath.

Ricky reached for her again and this time she didn't avoid his touch. The dress billowed up a little higher and he stared, fixated, at the part of Marilyn he had never seen, the fur divide that had been the dream of millions.

There was blood there. Not much, a few fingermarks on her inner thighs. The faultless gloss of her flesh was spoiled slightly. Still he stared; and the lips parted a little as she moved her hips, and he realised the glint of wetness in her interior was not the juice of her body, but something else altogether. As her muscles moved the bloody eyes she'd buried in her body shifted, and came to rest on him.

She knew by the look on his face that she hadn't hidden them deep enough, but where was a girl with barely a veil of cloth covering her nakedness to hide the fruits of her labour?

'You killed him,' said Ricky, still looking at the lips, and the eyes that peeked out between. The image was so engrossing, so pristine, it all but cancelled out the horror in his belly. Perversely, his disgust fed his lust instead of killing it. So what if she was a murderer: she was legend.

'Love me," she said. 'Love me forever.'

He came to her, knowing now full well that it was death to do so. But death was a relative matter, wasn't it? Marilyn was dead in the flesh, but alive here, either in his brain, or in the buzzing matrix of the air or both; and he could be with her.

He embraced her, and she him. They kissed. It was easy. Her lips were softer than he'd imagined, and he felt something close to pain at his crotch he wanted to be in her so much.

The willow-thin arms slipped around his waist, and he was in the lap of luxury.

'You make me strong,' she said. 'Looking at me that way. I need to be looked at, or I die. It's the natural state of illusions.'

Her embrace was tightening; the arms at his back no longer seemed quite so willow-like. He struggled a little against the discomfort.

'No use,' she cooed in his ear. 'You're mine.'

He wrenched his head around to look at her grip and to his amazement the arms weren't arms any longer, just a loop of something round his back, without hands or fingers or wrists.

'Jesus Christ!' he said.

'Look at me, boy,' she said. The words had lost their delicacy. It wasn't Marilyn that had him in its arms any more: nothing like her. The embrace tightened again, and the breath was forced from Ricky's body, breath the tightness of the hold prevented him from recapturing. His spine creaked under the pressure, and pain shot through his body like flares, exploding in his eyes, all colours.

'You should have got out of town,' said Marilyn, as Wayne's face blossomed under the sweep of her perfect cheek-bones. His look was contemptuous, but Ricky had only a moment to register it before that image cracked too, and something else came into focus behind this facade of famous faces. For the last time in his life, Ricky asked the question: